Nearer Than The Sky Read online

  My mother says it didn’t happen this way at all. She says that she was inside the Nova, buckling Lily into her car seat. Finding my lost Crissy doll. She says she would never have left me alone in the parking lot. But I remember the click of her heels, the pinkish orange aspirin melting in the rain. And when she tells the story her way, her words taste like asphalt. Like aspirin. Like anything but the truth.

  My mother has never been able to take the blame. Not then and not later. The way she tells the story, she’s the one who kept me from turning into a blackened version of my former self. The way she tells it, she saved my life. In her version of this story, of every story, she’s always the hero.

  In those days, there were no words to describe the nature of my mother’s tales. No diagnosis for her tendency toward fiction. No names for women who make accidents happen to their children, no terms for imaginary heroes. And so we listened to my mother’s stories in silence and tried to believe. That she brought my brother, Benny, back to life when he stopped breathing in his crib. That she saved me from the lightning. That Lily’s illness was real instead of something Ma put inside of her. We listened in silence and waited for the words that might explain.

  I understand lightning. I know the cold taste of light, the inevitable paralysis of its touch. I know how deceiving an empty sky can be, and I understand the consequences of thunder. But sometimes, I still dream the gentle thrill of electricity, and stand in open fields during storms with my arms raised. Because illumination of this intensity is apt to show you something you might not see otherwise. In the white cold light moments of a storm, you’re bound to get at least a glimpse of the truth.

  Peter and I were naked and intertwined when the phone started ringing. Because before the shuddering afterglow, while muscles and bones, tongues and lips and hips still rang metallic and taut, my mother’s blood was filling with poison. When the soft skin of his back yielded to my sharp fingers and all of him quickened, her own quicksilver, arsenic dance had already begun, and with this crescendo came her crescendo of lead. I didn’t pick up the receiver. But after, while he slumbered, I shuddered still. That moment was over, but my mother’s poison lullaby was just beginning, and some part of me knew. The phone started ringing again.

  It was Lily who called. It was always Lily who called, her whispers as deceptively sweet as Nutrasweet, leaving me with a bitter aftertaste and a slight headache.

  “Ma’s sick,” she said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “They don’t know. It’s real bad. She called an ambulance.”

  Despite the fear in her voice, ambulance sirens (the harmony of high-pitched squeals and the sonorous chords of fear and accident) were not unfamiliar sounds to either of us.

  “Where is she?”

  “Down here. At St. Joseph’s.”

  “Why is she in Phoenix?” I asked. My mother lived more than two hours north of Phoenix, in the mountains.

  “They transferred her, Indie. It’s real bad this time,” and then sweetly, “Can you come home?”

  “Is she going to be okay?”

  “She’s filled with poison. It’s in her blood,” she said softly. I imagined Lily winding herself up in the phone cord, the blue light of the TV shining through her transparent nightgown. Her baby, Violet, raspy-breathed inside the rented oxygen tent in the living room. “They can’t figure it out. Maybe lead poisoning. The blood tests haven’t come back yet.”

  I tightened my grip on the phone. “I spent six hundred dollars on an airplane ticket the last time, and there was nothing wrong with her.”

  “I really think you need to come home this time,” she said, twirling me inside a cotton candy swirl. “I’ll pay.”

  When I hung up the phone, I watched Peter’s chest rise and fall. He sleeps so deeply sometimes that his silence wakes me up, and I’ll press my ear against his chest to make sure that he’s still alive. Tonight, he was smiling. Sometimes he even laughs in his sleep. I envy his dreams. I curled against him, pressing my body against his until there were no spaces between us, until his skin became my skin. Until the cadence of my breaths matched his.

  This had happened so many times now, I wasn’t worried about falling asleep again. Another frantic call from Lily wouldn’t keep me awake all night. I grew up in the village where the little boy cried “Wolf !” I was a local. I knew these streets like I knew my own name, and Lily knew them too. After she hung up the phone she would return to the couch where she’d been sleeping since Violet got sick. She would toss and turn, of course, each rumble of her daughter’s chest waking her. But Ma would not enter her mind again until morning, until after the rituals of coffee and bacon and newspapers and her husband’s kiss good-bye. Only then would she begin to wonder if the Wolf was really hiding under our mother’s bed or if Ma had made him up. Fabricated him like so many school projects, out of chicken wire and papier-mâché.

  I didn’t want to go back to Arizona now. It was autumn, and the woods around our house were on fire. I had asked Peter not to rake the fallen leaves around the cabin, enjoying the way the rust and gold and purple carpeted the yard and driveway. The sky had been bright and blue and cold lately; the heat of the summer had finally relented.

  This summer had been particularly hot and difficult to endure. I lost my job in April, and without it, I hadn’t known what to do with my time. I’d been writing for the local paper for almost ten years. I wasn’t a good reporter, I knew this, but I had loved my job. I didn’t even mind that I usually got assigned to the dullest stories. Dog shows and 100th birthday parties. Big fish and ballet recitals. I never thought the paper would let me go, but when they lost their lease on the building, they had to pick someone, and I guess I was the logical choice. I missed the cool blue office, the whirr of electric fans and the clicking of typewriter keys. I missed driving to one town or another for a story, the windows of the truck rolled down and the radio turned up. I missed the interviews conducted on porches, and later transcribing the stories about UFO sightings or the new school principal’s recipe for potato salad. Summer days are long in Echo Hollow. And even longer without anything to do.

  So when the air began to turn cold, and the first bloom of red appeared in the maple tree in front of the house, I felt a certain sense of purposefulness. It was as if that red signified that the stagnant heat of summer had finally broken, and that in its place was something brighter. I had felt so optimistic that Peter was even able to convince me to come to work with him at his café. He promised he’d teach me how to make muffins, how to busy my hands and my mind. For a month now, I had been waking up with him at two o’clock in the morning. We had to be there to start baking at three, and we live deep in the woods, an hour’s drive from town. I had been learning how to navigate in the darkness of early morning, how not to be afraid. The stillness of this hour surprised me, when the only sounds were wet leaves crushing beneath our feet and our screen door closing. I loved the way our headlights were the only lights on the interstate at that time of night. It felt like we were alone in the world, as if no one existed anymore but us.

  Even in town there is a certain peace at this hour. We would park on the empty street in front of the restaurant and sit for a few minutes before going inside. Sometimes Peter would put his arm over the back of my seat, and look at the small brick building, at the new awning: THE SWAN SONG CAFÉ & THEATRE, painted in white block letters. After ten years of working for other people, Peter finally had his own restaurant. In all the time we’d known each other, I’d never seen him so happy. And in these half-light moments before dawn, I felt happy too. Like we were sharing something. Of course, then the spell was inevitably broken by the reality that muffins and bread needed to be made, that the industrial-size dishwasher in the kitchen was probably on the fritz again, that morning would come if we waited too long inside the truck. But for a little while, anyway, the world belonged to us.

  He had taught me my way around the basement bakery, how to maneuver the giant silv
er bowls and long wooden spoons. How much batter would make the perfect muffin. The intricacies of sugar and flour and why butter is so important. He made the bread and rolls, which were much more complicated than my muffins. Part science and part philosophy. There was as much to be learned in this basement bakery as there was at the university, I supposed.

  After the loaves of bread were in the oven, Peter would leave me to make the muffins and go upstairs to start the coffee and unwrap the salads in the deli case. Joe, the cook, would get there at seven to start making lunch. And two of the girls from the college would be in to open up shop at eight.

  I was still learning, and my muffins were completely unpredictable. Sometimes they came out hard and small, burned at the edges. Other times the batter grew so high that the muffins looked like small mountains but were still sticky and wet inside. My favorite part of the day was after the muffins were made, when I carried the heavy trays, stacked four or five high, up the stairs. I used thick white dish towels to protect my hands from the hot pans, and the steam from the muffins made the hair around my face curl. Joe and Peter and whoever was working the counter that day would all gather around one of the tables, and we would break open the wild blueberry or banana and chocolate chip muffins before the onslaught of customers. We used a plastic spatula for the butter and Peter poured everyone coffee. No one ever complained about my baking.

  We were usually interrupted by some impatient businessman or other regular who felt somehow entitled, peering through the locked door, asking to be let in. Peter never turned them away, though. He always went to the door and smiled, unlocking it and opening the floodgates.

  After the morning rush, Peter and I would go up to the theater he had just built on the second floor of the building. He had dreamed about this ever since he opened up the restaurant a year ago. Here he could run his favorite movies, all day long, every day. Most of the multiplexes were on the outskirts of town, and none of them showed the obscure foreign and art films or the quirky movies that Peter loved. He also let people bring their food and drink from the café into the theater. It made for a longer clean-up time after each show, but it also made people feel like they were at home. Or like they were breaking rules.

  The brick walls kept everyone cool in the summer and warm when autumn came. Some of the seats were from the college, sold when they renovated their auditorium. Others were just chairs we found at garage sales that weren’t too beaten up. Sometimes, Peter and I would sit in the back and watch movies all afternoon, leaving only for the lunch rush or to use the restroom. With the smell of yeast and a dusting of flour in my hair, I could forget for a while that I’d lost my job. That all the work I’d done for the past ten years had resulted in nothing.

  I lay on my back and looked up through the skylight at the starless sky. Peter rolled over and put his arm across my chest. I had come here, to Maine, almost fifteen years ago for college. It had seemed the natural thing to do, because it was so much like my childhood home in Mountainview yet somehow strangely and safely different. The thick woods of Ponderosa pines became the white labyrinth of birches here. The snow looked the same, but the cold was deeper. It resided less on your skin and more in your bones. There were similarities, but there were great differences, particularly in the skies. Here, in Maine, the clouds protect the stars at night. They are only fuzzy spots of light in the distance. In the mountains of northern Arizona, they are exposed. Vulnerable and bright. You could reach up into a blue-black night like this and steal them.

  I laid my head against Peter’s chest and fell asleep, forgetting my mother for a while. But when the alarm started buzzing at 2:00, it was thoughts of her that pulled me into the world.

  Peter’s hand shot out and turned the alarm off as soon as it first buzzed. He moved slowly out of bed, and I watched him pull on his jeans and a T-shirt. He was so quiet, his waking a familiar dance; each movement was refined and perfected so as to be completely noiseless.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “You startled me,” he said and sat down next to me on the bed. “You’re taking the day off today, aren’t you?”

  “Lily called while you were sleeping,” I said.

  Peter raised one of his eyebrows despite himself. He knew these streets too. We had been together for fourteen years now, since we were nineteen years old. The midnight phone calls failed to even wake him anymore.

  “Ma’s in Phoenix this time,” I said.

  “Phoenix?”

  “They transferred her down. Lily says there’s poison in her blood or something. She wants me to come home,” I said.

  He nodded.

  I sat up and waited for Peter to respond, to lay his head on my lap and say, Don’t go. That way I wouldn’t have a real decision to make. If he needed me then I wouldn’t have to leave. But he only turned away from the window and bent down to kiss my forehead, gently touching my naked breast with his hand.

  “It’s okay, you know.” He smiled. “If you need to go.”

  I nodded and waited for his words begging me to stay. Jealous or selfish or needy words. But he would be fine here alone. I could leave for a month and nothing about these mornings would change except that he wouldn’t have to wait for me to wash the sleepy seeds from my eyes or find a clean pair of jeans. He could return to his usual morning routine, the one he’d had when I was still at the paper. I waited for him to ask me to stay, to say that he really needed me at the Swan, but instead he only put his long, thin fingers into my hair and made circles on my scalp, making me drowsy and weak. When Peter’s father brings us lobsters, Peter does the same thing to them. He turns them upside down and rubs their heads gently until they are anesthetized, hypnotized. Only then does he drop their limp bodies into the boiling water.

  “I’ll give it a few days,” I said. “We’ll see how she is in a couple of days.”

  I closed my eyes while he finished getting ready. He came back in and kissed me softly. “Go back to sleep,” he said. His wool jacket was scratchy against my skin and smelled like pine. It was as much a part of these woods as the trees were, as we were becoming.

  After Peter left, I put on a pair of his flannel pajamas and wool socks. Even in October, the early mornings here are wintery. He had turned on the small reading lamp next to the couch, and the living room felt warm. I opened up the door on the woodstove to add another log to the fire, but he had already taken care of it. I stood up, brushed the ashes off my knees, and sat down on the couch, pulling the quilt Peter’s mom had made for us last Christmas around my shoulders.

  All summer I had sat like this, reading the want ads, trying to figure out what to do. I didn’t know anybody else who didn’t have to go to work every day. Even our friends who had started having babies worked. And having decided a long time ago not to have children, my sense of being adrift and without purpose was compounded by all this free time. Carefree. There was not a thing in this world that needed me. Peter certainly didn’t need me doting on him. Our cat, Jessica, was also independent, needing only a bowl of water and food, a spot of sunlight on the floor to survive.

  At first, I tried planting things. But I was overzealous, impatient. The ground hadn’t even thawed yet before I started poking holes and planting seeds. A hard frost in late May killed even those few little green shoots I had managed to coax from the soil. I thought about art and music. Bought equipment to make stained glass, thought I might be able to sell my work at the artists’ gallery in town. But I could never choose from the sheets and sheets of colors. I was too overwhelmed by the possibilities. I bought a guitar at a pawn shop in Portland. It came with a slide and a stack of Mel Bay sheet music for beginners. I sat on our back porch while Peter was at work and strummed “Au Clair de la Lune” until my fingers ached, until the neighbors’ dogs down the road started to howl. Finally, Peter built a study for me, and suggested that I try to write again. Stories or something. Become a freelance writer. But in that beautiful attic room, surrounded by my favorite books, an old red oriental
rug beneath my feet, every word I wrote sounded like a tired newspaper article.

  OCTOBER 9, 1999. INDIE STACKS ONE CORD OF WOOD, SPLINTERS AND BLISTERS RESULT. Backwoods, Maine. Indie Brown, showing remarkable grace wielding an ax, split and stacked an entire cord of wood this sunny afternoon. A gentle breeze and a blazing autumn backdrop made the scene both poignant and picturesque to passersby. Chuck Moony arrived upon completion of the task with steaks for the barbecue and a potato salad from Shaw’s. Peter arrived soon after. Dinner was cooked on the hibachi and served on a makeshift table made of unsplit logs and a piece of plywood from the garage. Religion was discussed, and all came to the conclusion that God must reside in these autumn leaves.

  Peter built this house when we were twenty-three years old. He picked this spot of land because of autumn. He chose this place because of its semblance to fire. He drove me here from our little apartment in town and made me stand in the exact center of the four square acres he had purchased. “Listen,” he said. “You can hear the leaves turning.”

  Two days later, Lily still hadn’t called back and I thought that it had passed. That the Wolf had returned to the woods of my mother’s imagination.

  After we turned off the whirring projector and swept behind the seats, covered the salads and bundled the day-old bread and muffins for the women’s shelter, Peter and I sat at one of the tables in the empty café.

  Joe slung his backpack over his shoulder and turned off the lights in the kitchen.

  “You guys want to go get a beer?” he asked. “It’s still happy hour at Finnegan’s.”

  “No thanks.” Peter smiled. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  Joe shrugged and went outside where his bike was locked to a parking meter. He lives almost as far out of town as we do, but he makes the trek by bicycle from April, when the snow starts to melt, until late October or November, when snow starts to fall. Joe is a funny character. He’s as thin as an adolescent boy. He wears thick glasses, and his clothes never seem to fit quite right. He likes heavy metal music, but he reads Russian novels. Sometimes in the mornings he insists on AC/DC instead of the public radio station. We have known Joe as long as we’ve known each other. We all met that first summer after freshman year at The Birches, where Peter made ice sculptures and I waited tables. Joe had gone to a culinary school somewhere in Vermont and wound up at The Birches as an apprentice. That was the summer that Peter had his accident and we fell in love.