A Sense of the Infinite (23 page)
Read A Sense of the Infinite Online
Authors: Hilary T. Smith
THE WEEKEND OF MY GRADUATION,
Pauline drove down from Maple Bay. I came home from my last day of school to find her and Mom at the kitchen table with a pot of tea. When I walked in, they looked at me strangely. I said hello, and Pauline gave me a hug.
“How are you, sweetie?” she said.
While she asked me about school, Mom got up from the table and went into the kitchen to refill the teapot. As she walked out, I caught a glimpse of her face. It was filled with an emotion I couldn’t name. Something huge. My chest tightened.
Mom stayed in the kitchen for much longer than it takes to fill a kettle with water.
As I chatted with Pauline, I strained my ears for any sound.
I couldn’t hear the tap, or the whistle that means boiling. I wondered what Mom was doing. If she was just standing there in the kitchen. If she was frozen by the sink as I’d caught her sometimes, when I was younger, wringing a dishrag as if she was trying to strangle it. Minutes passed and still the kitchen was silent.
Then from the backyard came the sound of chopping wood.
I looked Pauline in the eye. “What happened?”
“Scott called.”
“What?”
“He wanted to apologize. And ask if he could give her some money. Make some gesture. That sort of thing.”
My face went hot. Suddenly, my visit to Baxterville didn’t seem so heroic after all. The angry letter he had almost certainly read. I had imagined him begging for forgiveness, but now I wasn’t so sure that was a good idea. An apology didn’t seem worth the completely intrusive horror of having to hear the sound of his voice on the phone.
“Is she okay?” I said, but before Pauline could answer I was already running outside.
MOM WAS BY THE WOODPILE, HER
flannel shirt hot with sweat. When I came outside, she threw down the ax and gathered me so fiercely into her arms it seemed that both our bodies would have to break before either of us would let go.
ON THE DAY I GRADUATED FROM
E. O. James, the scabby black peach trees were covered in a pink snow of blossoms. The puddles at the bottom of our driveway were warm as soup. Mom and Pauline sat in the kitchen talking while I brushed my hair and brushed my teeth and wriggled my feet into the dress shoes that Nan had taken me to buy at the mall the day before.
Graduation was a joke. Mr. Beek gave a funny speech that mentioned each graduate by name, even the ones he had never actually talked to in the four years we were here. They flashed our freshman-year photos on a projector screen. Mine showed a wide-eyed girl in glasses. Noe’s showed a baby-faced kid in
a Winnie the Pooh sweater. Over the past few months, our friendship had become a mystery to me, but when I looked at those pictures, I remembered who I had been when I needed Noe the most, and who she had been when she needed me. Maybe none of us can tell what we’re becoming until we become it, like seedlings instinctively groping for certain nutrients without knowing why.
After the graduation ceremony, everyone spilled outside, where next year’s Senior Leaders had set up refreshment tables with cake and coffee and sparkling apple juice. From the place where I was standing with Mom and Pauline and Ava and my uncle Dylan, I saw Noe turning a cartwheel on the grass, keys falling out of her pockets as her legs arced through the sky.
Something in my heart broke, then. I put down my cake plate and ran to her. We didn’t talk, but turned cartwheels on the soccer field, mortarboards falling off, hands staining green from the grass.
When I thought of the girl in my freshman-year picture, I couldn’t imagine her leaving Noe to do it alone.
MOM ASKED ME WHAT I WANTED
for a graduation present. “It can’t be too extravagant,” she added, as if I would ever dream of asking for something like a new car or a new computer or a trip to Mexico.
“I want you to take me canoeing,” I said.
WE DROVE UP TOGETHER THE WEEK
before the fall semester started. We packed matches and knives, string and sunscreen, oats and coffee. Uncle Dylan dug Mom’s old canoe out from the back of his garage and we spent a weekend rubbing the paddles with linseed oil and patching a small leak in the stern. On the drive up, the tip of the canoe poked out over the front of the truck, pointing like an arrow toward the north. Trees rippled on either side of the road, lush and green in their summer fullness.
When we put into the water at Maple Bay, the canoe leaped forward with a speed and power that astounded me. Soon the docks melted away behind us, and the families paddling around
the bay in their bright yellow rental canoes, and we entered a silence unlike any I’d experienced before. In the silence was a whirring warbling dripping of paddles, musical greens and blues. I was almost afraid to look behind me in case Mom had vanished, in case the woods had reabsorbed her, greedily embraced her in their twigs and mosses.
I wondered if I would always feel her that way, as a strength propelling me, a guiding silence in my canoe. I saw them, then, the ghosts quietly slipping out from under us. I could feel mine leave me, a weightlessness. I cut my paddle into the water and felt the wilderness rush toward me, and the wilderness inside me tremble and flower, rushing, rushing toward it.
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Photo by Gabriel Jacobs
HILARY T. SMITH
lives in Portland, Oregon, where she studies North Indian classical music and works on native plant restoration. She is also the author of
Wild Awake.
Find out more at
www.hilarytsmith.com
.
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