Read Nearer Than the Sky Online

Authors: T. Greenwood

Tags: #Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #Family Life, #Psychological, #General

Nearer Than the Sky (3 page)

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.
O
CTOBER
9, 1999. I
NDIE
S
TACKS
O
NE
C
ORD
OF
W
OOD
, S
PLINTERS
AND
B
LISTERS
R
ESULT
. 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.
“You okay?” Peter asked, rubbing his thumb across the back of my hand.
I nodded.
Joe tapped on the glass and waved before he started to pedal away. We waved back, and Peter squeezed both of my hands, leaning forward to whisper in my ear.
“You wanna watch a movie?”
This was something we usually reserved for special occasions, for anniversaries and birthdays. It was exactly what I needed; Peter always knew.
“What about Julia?” I asked.
“She’s downstairs doing the money. It’ll be at least a half hour before she’s done.”
He took my hand and led me through the doors and up the stairs again to the theater. He still has a small limp, even after all these years, but I love the way it makes him move slowly, with care. I can see in his walk the old man he will become.
While he readied the projector, I took off my dress and folded it neatly, unrolled my socks and untied my shoes. I sat on the floor in front of the screen with my knees up under my chin. When the lights began to flicker across my body, I closed my eyes and waited until I felt his hands on my shoulders. Until I tasted his words, as familiar and comforting as a wood fire in winter. The soundless film made ghosts across his chest, across the scars that ran along his naked legs. Even hair and muscles could not disguise the old wounds, but the black-and-white pictures could. I think that’s why he loves this place. Our bodies only a screen, a moving canvas.
After, I lay with my head across his thighs, my bad ear pressed against him.
“Are you happy?” he asked. He always asks this after. To make sure.
I nodded, lifting my head to look at the pictures moving across his face.
 
After I slipped my dress back on and tied the laces on my tennis shoes, as we were walking up the dark theater aisle, Julia opened the door tentatively and peered into the darkness at us. I felt my face turning pink.
“Indie, your sister’s on the phone. She says it’s an emergency.”
Peter squeezed my hand. We followed her down the stairs into the café. I went into Peter’s office and closed the door. The phone was resting on his desk, and I thought,
I could leave you there, Lily. I could leave you and Ma on the other end of the line. I could never answer the phone again. What would you do then?
The phone was cold against my ear. And I wondered for a moment, before Lily knew that I was there, if it might be over.
“Indie?”
I nodded my head silently, waiting.
“I think you should come home now,” she said.
“Is she . . .”
“They put her in the psych ward last night. They say she’s become a danger to herself,” she said, her voice shaking.
I almost laughed. A danger to
herself.
“What are you talking about? I thought you said it was lead poisoning or something. Can’t they just treat her for it?”
“It’s complicated.”
“You mean the treatment?”
Lily’s breath was quivering. I imagined her pale and fragile on the other end of the line. A gust of wind could make her whole body tremble.
“Lily?”
“They say she’s been doing it to herself.”
“What?”
“They said that she’s been poisoning herself.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“The doctors said that it’s nothing environmental, that it’s
her.
That it’s intentional. They found rat poison in the tests. And other chemicals, things you don’t just eat or breathe by accident.”
“What does
she
say?” I asked.
“She says they’re full of shit. But she’s really out of it.”
I tried to imagine my mother in a psychiatric ward of a hospital, but when I closed my eyes, I only saw Jack Nicholson in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
My mother didn’t fit into this picture, except maybe as Nurse Ratchet, in a starched white uniform, her graying blond hair coming loose from the tight braid she usually wore.
“Last night she started talking to Benny.”
I felt as though my heart had become detached from all of my veins and muscles and was floating upward, pulsating in my chest, my throat, my head.
“What do you mean?” I asked, knowing exactly what she meant.
“They called to ask me who Benny was. They told me she was talking to him. Like he was in the room with her,” Lily said. I could hear the pain of this catch in her throat.
“How long is she going to be there?”
“I don’t know. They want to send her back up north once she’s stabilized physically. They want to get her set up with a psychiatrist in Mountainview, to get her on medication, into counseling. But she can’t go up there alone. Somebody has to go with her.”
“What am
I
supposed to do?” I asked.
“
I
can’t go with her. I need to be here with Violet.” She sighed heavily, the weight of a thousand worlds on her shoulders. “I can’t do this by myself. I need your help.”
Anger welled up, and my dislodged heart found its way to my hands, which throbbed as I squeezed the phone. “Lily, it’s not as easy as that. I’m all the way in Maine, for Chrissakes—”
“—and our mother is talking to our dead brother. Not to mention that she’s been drinking rat poison with her tea and swallowing eyedroppers of Draino
for Chrissakes,”
Lily hissed.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll bring her home, but I’m not staying.”
“Soon?”
“It’s just because of Benny,” I said.“I want to hear what she has to say about Benny.”
At home, Peter made tea for me and grabbed a beer for himself. We put on mittens and sweaters and sat outside watching the sun melt through the leaves that still clung to the trees. The end of autumn is precarious. A simple storm could rip the colors from the trees, leaving the dull branches exposed.
We’d made a harvest dummy and carved jack-o-lanterns that shared the porch with us. We didn’t get trick-or-treaters, but Peter had insisted on a punch bowl filled with candy.
I sat on the step below Peter, holding my mug with both hands, and he wrapped his legs against my sides to keep me warm. The loons that live at the pond up the road had left already. All summer they had called out to each other desperately in prehistoric voices. It was quiet without them.
“What are you thinking?”
I shrugged. There’s no way to explain some things to Peter. No way to articulate the twisting feeling my nerves get every time I am suddenly and involuntarily connected again with my past. My childhood is like an amputee’s phantom limb. It’s not something someone intact can understand.
“Will you come with me?” I asked and immediately wished I hadn’t. I felt his legs stiffen against my sides.
“Ind,” he said. “I would, but the restaurant . . .”
“Forget it,” I said. “It’s fine. I know.”
“If you need me to, I suppose I could have Joe watch the place for a few days.”
“I
said
it’s fine.” I turned to look at him.
He lowered his head and kissed my hair. “I’m sorry.”
I nodded and suddenly felt guilty. Peter was afraid of flying. It was almost cruel to request this of him. Besides, I didn’t really want him to come, didn’t even know why I’d asked.
After Peter went to bed, I crawled up the ladder that pulls down from the ceiling in our bedroom and sat at my desk. I picked up the fountain pen that he gave me for my birthday and opened the sketch pad I’d been using to write things down in. The light from the shed shone through the window onto the open pages.
O
CTOBER
31, 1999. L
OCAL
W
OMAN
A
TTEMPTS
S
UICIDE
BY
P
OISON
, S
URVIVES
. Phoenix, Arizona.
Judy Brown is in the hospital tonight after an apparent suicide attempt by ingestion of poison. Detectives found a “virtual arsenal” of poisonous substances in the cabinets of the woman’s Mountainview home. Mrs. Brown survived the nearly lethal dose and rests tonight in the psychiatric ward of St. Joseph’s in Phoenix. Mrs. Brown is the mother of three children: Miranda Brown, Lily Hughes, and Benjamin Brown, deceased. It is reported that Mrs. Brown was heard speaking to her dead son last night. She was seen, perhaps, staring into the orange glow of the hospital parking lot muttering excuses.

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