Each and All by John Kuti
Chapter 14
After the upsetting exchange between Tom, Megan and Amanda that had divided them in anger on their racial lines, Eugene had everyone who came to visit him each day, read from a book of poems called, The Black Rhymes of History, that was edited by the poet Sawyer Strickland.
It was a heartrending anthology of poems written by people who had seen and suffered some of the greatest inhumanity the world had ever known. It went from one ethnic slaughter to another great war, to another ethnic slaughter, to one more, and again one more war, recording each outbreak of overwhelming brutality as it was witnessed in poems from some of the most sensitive hearts the century had torn apart like tissue. The poems sang the songs of the red and the black blood of millions. Turks killed Armenians. Germans killed Jews and the racially imperfect and impure. Americans instantly incinerated two Japanese cities to prove to the Russians that they could and they would. And before then, and after then, ideologically pure Russians and Chinese, Vietnamese and Cambodians killed all their impure bourgeoisie. White people slaughtered Indians. White people slaughtered blacks. Hindus killed Muslims and were killed in return. And successions of dictators all over the world slaughtered each and all of the dissenting voices that rose against them, and innocent ones too that would never speak; again just to prove that they would and they could. The Black Rhymes of History couldn’t speak of all those who came later without a poet to bear witness to the suffering; the Kurds, Congolese and Timorese, the Rwandans, Croats, Serbs and Kosovar Albanians who were all too different and dangerous to be allowed to just live in peace where they were. It just went on and on, and eternally on, so it seemed that the most impossible dream of the century was the old Jewish cry of the heart to the conscience, ‘Never Again!’
Eugene wanted his children to know the price of one person condemning another for their difference. He wanted them to read what it felt like to be treated like they were just the road kills of history. He wanted them to remember they weren’t so much different. He wanted them to remember that suffering could never be avenged. It was the one last formal lesson he would give his children until the day that he died.
Every year Eugene and Sharon, with the advice of their children, would find a great teacher, a great doer, a great thinker, a great artist to come to the farm so their children would know what a real passion for life was about, passion that didn’t just come from their parents or from their own lives.
However many thousands of dollars it took, that week with a great passionate person was the highlight of the year for the children in their school, and often was, as well, for the other grown members of the family who came to listen and learn. Eugene had always said that a week with a great teacher was worth a year with a good one, and there wasn’t one of his children who didn’t know it was true. Over the years, Marshall McLuhan, Alan Bloom, Kim Ontdaatje, Wynton Marsallis, Christopher Lasch and Bernice Reagon were some of the teachers who had come to the farm before Sawyer Strickland, and had stood with the Van Fleet family for a group portrait when their week together was done.
The summer before, it was Sawyer who had brought her collection of the best poetry of humanity’s horrors, the most heart searing poems of people who had seen and felt and recorded the pain of the branding iron of evil that human beings mindlessly inflicted on one another. The poet and the book had made an indelible impression on everyone in the family. Eugene’s daughter Christa, the poet, who loved Sawyer’s book of poems, Snow Geese Rising, was the one who lobbied for her to come. For weeks she would read the beautiful fragments of Snow Geese to anyone who would listen. And when she came, Christa became very close to the poet, the two almost inseparable for the week she was there. And when Sawyer left, the experience seemed to trip Christa over the grass blade edges of her emotional balance. Sawyer and her books seemed to be more than Christa’s heart could bear. As she had said at the time, when she had said goodbye to her soul friend, she needed to start living her metaphors. And she did that. And what she did terrified and shocked everyone who loved her.
When she was arrested in the Quinte Mall a short time later, naked from the waist down, smearing the menstrual blood from her body on windows and tables and even the angry, surprised face of the policeman who came to arrest her, she had calmly explained that she was putting the color of life back in the world. ‘Shame!’, was written in her own blood on The Body Shop plate glass window.
If Christa felt the horror and pain of humanity too deeply, too personally as too much a part of herself, Eugene’s other children didn’t yet feel it enough to forgive it, or to understand it, or to share in their part of the suffering of their humanity. What no one knew was that Eugene was most appalled by the fact that only Tom, Megan and Amanda had spoken when the topic became personal. Having to read the poems of heartbreak was Eugene’s response to that. He made them read the lines and lyrics of the limits of pain. It also put his own suffering in perspective, if they chose to see it.
Only Laura and Sharon understood what he was doing. The cold compress of collective guilt didn’t make Tom or Amanda or Megan feel any better about what they had said about the suffering and guilt of native and white peoples in Canada. They didn’t talk about it, but they could feel the way they were divided on racial lines in the unspoken self-consciousness about who they really were. They had had the courage to speak, but not the courage to understand or forgive.
Tom kept it to himself, although he would have liked to talk with Megan, to share once again their common ancestral suffering. Tom was not used to having someone of his own race to talk to, and Megan wanted to talk to him, but was afraid it would look like she was trying to trash Amanda.
Amanda and Megan, when they finally lifted the compress of guilt, both chose to speak with their mothers, two white women, two native women, who only knew one culture. Amanda told her mother that she couldn’t understand Tom’s total identification with his own race.
“He only met his birth mother after he was almost grown up. The only thing he knows about his race is what he’s learned from books and a few visits. The only thing that isn’t white about him is the color of his skin. I don’t understand how he can make such a big deal about it. It almost feels like it’s a racist thing for him to be judging himself by the color of his skin.” Amanda said nervously.
Laura agreed with her. She told her daughter that her own friendship with Ann Marie had never involved any consideration of race because Ann Marie had grown up the way Tom had, with white adoptive parents.
“And I don’t understand how he thinks he’s going to go back to his people with all kinds of money and make a farm like this. He’s just being another part of white society forcing his idea of culture on native people because he thinks he knows what’s best for them.” Amanda continued.
“Have you asked him about that?” Laura replied.
“How do I dare? It’s kind of the big dream of his life.”
“You’re going to have to do it. If it’s more than a dream, you have to ask. If you two are serious, you have no real choice.” Laura said soberly.
“I know. I know. The thing that really makes me mad is that if all he sees is the color of a person’s skin; then he’s going to start liking Megan’s and not mine. Except for their skin, neither one of them is anymore an aboriginal than I am. It’s just too weird.”
When Megan and Ann Marie talked before sleep in the quiet loft of their cabin, they saw the same truth from its other face. Megan explained to her mother what Tom had told her about cowbirds.
“You know those little black birds with brown heads.” Megan asked her mother, and she could tell from her mother’s silence that she didn’t know what birds she meant.
“Tom says that cowbirds lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, little warblers and things, so the warblers hatch the eggs and raise the babies. Sometimes the real warbler’s babies starve because the parents are feeding the cowbird chick because it’s b
It was an enormous question and Ann Marie did not know where to begin because, as it was for her daughter, the difference of her skin color and heritage was undeniable, but it was also true that neither of them had any idea of what it was to be a native person.
“I don’t know if Tom’s right. Everybody says people are people, so it doesn’t matter what color your skin is or what culture your ancestors had, but part of what Tom says is true because, unlike warblers, people see the color of your skin and guess your heritage and they don’t treat you like the warblers, too many people just see another cowbird, even if they don’t mind cowbirds.” Ann Marie replied.
“I know. Everybody always looked at me so different. How did you stand it? They must of done the same thing to you. Is that why you always had boyfriends who weren’t white? Is that why my own father wasn’t white? Were you just a cowbird looking for another cowbird?” Megan pressed her mother.
“I dated white boys in high school and college and when I was growing up, and back then some boys thought it was cool to be with an aboriginal chick. And that was the problem; I didn’t like being chosen for my race anymore than I liked being rejected for it. The really neat thing about cowbirds and warblers is that warbler parents can’t see they’re raising cowbird chicks. If white people were like warblers, it would make the whole world a lot better place.”
“You think Grandma and Grandpa were different?” Megan asked about her mother’s adoptive parents.
“No. They really were like warblers, all they could see was they loved us.” Ann Marie replied tenderly.
“And look at the Van Fleets, this is the only place that I’ve ever been in my life where nobody cares about skin color.”
“Tom cares.” Ann Marie replied.” It’s really a hard question. Is being proud of your heritage kind of reverse racism? Would you want Tom to prefer you to Amanda just because you have the same colored skin?”
“I wouldn’t care if it was because I had better tits.” Megan said bitingly.
“Well, you do.” her mother replied, and they both smiled and laughed quietly in the dark.
The rule in the cabins was that there would be no music, not because music wasn’t appreciated, but because the cabins were too close, and everyone playing their own music would have made an unbearable noise. Both Megan and the Ann Marie were surprised that the hardest thing about adapting to the little cabin was learning to live without music. Like most modern people, silence was dead air; silence was dead space; silence was too much like death. Mother and daughter became co-conspirators when Megan borrowed a battery CD player from the music room so the two of them could play music softly late at night. Music connected loose ends between mother and daughter and bound the language of time and rhythm in each of them, so that the time they shared belonged to them individually, but also belonged to them together. Sad songs, happy songs, old ones and new ones, borrowed and blue ones, anger and pain, love and loss and heartache floated in the endless river of stars that were the notes of musical constellations playing in the dark. The other thing that caused the biggest change in their relationship was sleeping together on separate mattresses in the cabin loft. Sleeping on separate mattresses so close they could hear each other breathing, they found a simple intimacy in their proximity that they had never known before. Mother and daughter side-by-side, waking and seeing each other’s still bodies, hearing each other’s slow breathing had a dark intimacy they could barely recall, but could feel. And the best thing of all was the time before sleep when they could lie silently thinking or choose to speak about the day, or to choose to share the thoughts and feelings moving between them in the darkness, the way it had moved between mothers and daughters through the first two million years of humanity.
“Do you think that Tom’s the one who’s going to love me for my real self?” Megan had asked Ann Marie after they had been listening to some beautiful old torch songs.
“I hope so.” her mother replied.
“Sharon’s really ingenious about stuff like that. I never thought it’d be possible to be so happy to give someone back 10,000 bucks.”
“It’s an ingenious bet.” Ann Marie agreed.
“Really.”
Ann Marie and Megan chose very different places to go for the solitary hour everyone on the farm had between four and five. Ann Marie chose a little sheltered spot in the sand dunes where the sun spread its late afternoon glow. Ann Marie went with a blanket and lay on the warm sand and just watched the white clouds, the blue sky, as she listened to the high notes of the returning summer birds singing everywhere around her. Megan went to darkness. She went to keep Tundra company and feed him strips of meat she brought every day. For the whole hour, she’d stand near him, and it was from Megan that he learned to trust, most of all. He would climb on her arm, spreading his wings and jumping to her with his one good leg. The trust the wounded white bird gave her quickly came to mean more to Megan than the trust of anyone she had ever known, even her friend Alan.
When Ian came that weekend, Tranh invited all the Toronto refugees to come up to the Van Fleet lumber camp to see it and also, most especially, to see the final days of his private sugaring off operation where he made the maple syrup for the whole family for the whole year. Tranh’s maple syrup was spectacular.
Alan had stayed in Toronto working with Wayne and Charles in the antiques store. There was so much to do, going over every piece that had come from Bridget Brown’s hayloft. Each piece had to be cleaned and examined and identified. Each piece had to be given a tentative value, if possible. The beauty and the craftsmanship of each piece, as well as his having been a part of their recovery, made Alan excited and anxious to help in any way he could with the incredible treasures of the past that his hands cleaned and polished.
On the hour’s drive to the lumber camp Tom reported on the email message he had received that morning from Kosovo from his doctor friend Charles. Charles was on the run with two hundred people in the mountains and they were suffering terribly from the cold and the lack of food. A twenty pound sack of sugar cubes was all they had left to eat. Children and old people had to be warmed between younger bodies to stave off hypothermia. They had out run the guns but not their suffering, which only grew deeper with every mile. The short sentences telling their condition left the imagination alone and overwhelmed in the great, black room of horror. Charles never explained how he got his message through, or questioned how the personal misery and suffering of so many people could flash around the world and yet no help would come. As Tom read Charles’ message, he did not know it would be the last one he would receive. He did not know his friend was already dead. He did not know that only six people would survive the attack on the small defenseless band of people running for their lives. As Tom read the message from the back seat of the luxurious car, he had no idea that his dear friend was as cold as the earth in the sun, in the mountains.
As Tom read the message, the explosive cry of human cruelty drowned out the whimpers of old men and old women, the young and the frail, mothers and fathers and grandparents, generations that had come to one point and one place where all suffering was the same, in the sun, in the mountains.
As Tom read Charles’ message, countless others crossed the planet for everyone and anyone to read, stories of rape camps and executions, neighbor against neighbor when the silent screams of distant humanity were drowned in the little sounds of a baby’s death rattle.
Tom apologized after he hea
A big log building with a galvanized roof sat in the center of a huge clearing and the scream of a saw blade turning logs to timber sheared the silence into regular planks of time. The clearing in the forest surrounded by the budding trees and high, lacy cedars was set among gentle, ancient granite hills, and the blond stacks of new lumber, piled everywhere, seemed strange and angular and small among them. The only movement in the clearing was a single man running a fork lift, stacking the boards coming down the conveyor belt onto the iron forks of his machine. Tom said a hello that no one could hear in the scream of the steel in the wood. The others passed and waved but drew no response as the man worked steadily at his task. Tom gave everyone the cook’s tour of the mill, and all the city people were surprised at how few people it took to operate it. One man ran the huge band saw that cut the logs, like hard squealing butter, into squares that quickly turned into planks that the man stacked at the loading gate. Wood jingled on metal rollers, planks fell like long slices of bread. The sweet smell of sawdust was overpowering and so intense it almost forced its way to the back of the nostrils.
Laura stole Sharon’s line about raw oats.
“It smells like sperm.” she whispered in Ann Marie’s ear.
The two women laughed in pantomime when their laughter was swallowed in the scream of a new made board.
Tom pointed to where the slab wood waste went out of the building and down to where it was cut into forteen-inch lengths. The great piles would be stacked on palettes and covered to dry until fall when they would be suitable for firewood. He pointed out the huge pile of branches that had been hauled from the bush and were waiting to be fed into the chipping machine that filled the dump truck that went to the farm to fill the hopper car of the locomotive to supply the heat and electricity for the farm. The only thing they left in the forest was the evergreen needles of the smallest branches, and they would replenish the earth.
As they walked from the clearing, down the rough road leading into the forest, the song of the saw blade cut time as it receded behind the little tour, the sound of their steps in the dried leaves from the previous fall, rising with the soft warmth of the earth. As they walked, the Toronto expats were all surprised to find themselves in the same cathedral-like majesty and order of a managed Van Fleet forest. Trees were cut so others could grow fast and full so that, as the forest aged, it became great pillars of green in the blue sky. Among the enormous white pines, sugar maples predominated and a network of white plastic lines threaded their way among them, weaving off towards bound groups of drums sitting on palettes, drums slowly filling with sap flowing from the lines. As the group walked, their voices felt close in the grand scale of the decades of the trees. Red pine and White Oak and Spruce trees were dotted among the Maples and had their branches trimmed high as they had grown, so that the sky shone out on the horizon like a perfect band of blue that seemed to be supporting the canopy of the trees. The track through the trees went through old glacial drumlins and old granite domes rising through the lush moss and old leaves. Everyone except Tom felt the warmth and sweetness of spring as they walked, everyone having forgotten the sober ride and the heartbreaking message. Ian, who had longed all week to be with his family once more, was vigorously happy, leading the way with Tom, who listened patiently as Ian and went on about the glories of the day and the wonders of the big machines they left behind.
A mourning cloak butterfly with deep embroidered purple wings danced beside him, and then danced away to greet Laura and Ann Marie, as they fell further behind the men. The women didn’t talk. They listened to Ian’s voice moving ahead of them. And both of them recalled, and neither of them mentioned, the walks they used to share in Mt. Pleasant Cemetery supporting each other in the trials of urban life. After all the years of shared sympathy for all the devil in the details of their lives, the reference lines between them had been so absolutely altered by the circumstances that had brought them to the farm, that it was frustratingly difficult for the old friends to know how to speak to each other.
Amanda and Megan trailed far behind their mothers as the walk lengthened. They had little to say to each other, both of them wishing they had somehow been able to fall in beside Tom, both of them wishing that Ian hadn’t taken over all of Tom’s attention with his enthusiasm for their new experience. Ian always loved talking to tour guides. It was strange for Amanda and Megan to know and understand the enormous competitive nature of their relationship and their feelings for Tom, yet it was also undeniable that that competitive feeling was moderated by the consideration and civility they both came to honestly feel for one another. They couldn’t be friends, but they couldn’t help but like one another. And so they said nothing. They both walked and listened to their footsteps, watching their mothers ahead of them, and both of them laughed when Ian started to sing, ‘We’ll Sing in the Sunshine’, all by himself. Amanda and Megan and Tom were just another emotional triangle on the farm, like Laura and Sharon and Eugene; like Laura and Ann Marie and Ian, and even like the one between Sharon and Laura and Ian. That wasn’t to mention the triangles that existed between Eugene and Sharon and the Toronto parents and the Toronto children. It was almost like it took three people to make one relationship to satisfy everyone in it, and make a person realize that there was more to the heart than one person could know or provide. So much was unspoken and so much went on in the connections between the three groups of two, marching through the spring with the mourning cloak butterfly’s purple lovely dance joining them in the moment, passing them by like a dream.
Tom and Ian stopped by a little stone amphitheater bleeding deep green billows of moss that covered almost every part of it. Ian couldn’t let it pass by unappreciated, insisting that they wait for the others. When the group had re-assembled, Ian looked at all the sober faces and it shocked him and challenged him. He became their song and dance man, the dancing irresistible fool for love.
“Now here is a stage.” he said and everyone looked at the beautiful green theater. No one reacted.
Ian then became Albert Petersen from the musical comedy Bye Bye Birdie as he launched into his animated rendition of ‘Put on a Happy Face’, singing and dancing around them in the most absurd choreography he could improvise. Faces cracked. Bodies relaxed as everyone gave in to his silliness as he assembled them together, pulling up corners of mouths into bigger smiles, standing them side-by-side like a choir, and finally insisting that they join the next chorus. He was irresistible, spreading sunshine all over the place. Everyone sang as he conducted them and he took his little digital camera from his pocket and took a portrait that showed Tom and the Toronto singers happy and at ease, singing like they were without a care in the world. Framed by the depth and the delicacy of the dark green living moss, it was a picture every one of them would treasure for years and years to come. Tom came out of the portrait group for the last chorus and made Ian take his place in the choir and took the second picture, the second real image of the day that had all the feelings and connections all of them shared, in jo
The group gathered in front of a long, low wood building that looked like a greenhouse built into a little Valley. Smoke was pouring from the chimney that came from its center and steam poured from every window and door. The smell of maple syrup hung in the air all around them and it was so strange to smell something they all knew only at a breakfast table there in the middle of open nature. It made the smell seem strange and out of place and almost artificial. Tom called into the dark doorway of the sugar shack and Tranh emerged in a moment, dressed in white coveralls, looking very much like a scientist rather than someone who was working hard in the bush. His face was covered in the sweet steam he was creating. He saw the looks on their faces, and it made him smile as he greeted everyone, before he led them down into the darkness.
It took a moment for everyone’s eyes to adjust, the steam pouring out at every window, making the world outside look like a foggy day instead of the blazing blue day that it was. Tranh showed them the wood fire he tended beneath a huge stainless-steel boiler and explained how it took forty gallons of clear sap to make one gallon of syrup. The boiler held four hundred gallons and would leave ten gallons of amber maple sweetness when the water had finally boiled away. Attending the fire was crucial because, if it got too hot, the sugar would caramelize and the syrup would turn dark brown instead of the beautiful transparent yellow it was supposed to be. Tranh’s scientific precision and focus and determination produced absolutely the most perfect product possible, and it took most of three weeks before he had bottled the fifty gallons of syrup he made every year. The financial genius that made the family millions of dollars was most proud of the simple reaction of his family and friends for his making the clearest, the lightest, most delicious maple syrup it was possible to possess. Trahn slept in the woods the entire time the sap was running and two thousands gallons of clear sap were reduced to a gold that could only be truly valued on the tongue. Megan asked him why he had to do his work inside a stifling hot building and Tranh explained how the things that came through the wind, the things that fell from the trees would contaminate the boiling liquid.
“It’s amazing the detritus that you never notice falling all around you.” he explained gently.
Then he explained the evaporation process and his particular refinements to it with obvious pleasure and pride. Then he led the group up through the blazing light falling in from the door to the butterscotch light filling the trees all around them. They were all covered in a beautiful transparent sweat when they looked at each other outside.
“So how’s the sap running?” Ian asked Tranh, trying to sound technical.
“Incredible.” Tranh replied, “Warm days, cold nights.”
“I know the feeling.” Ian replied and smiled into Laura’s eyes.
“You’re such a sap.” Laura replied to his unspoken accusation.
Tranh surprised everyone by asking if they would like to stay to lunch. The idea that lunch could be supplied for six guests in the middle of nowhere was surprising indeed, but everyone quickly accepted and so Tranh slipped out to his coveralls and led them off into the woods to the raging stream exploding as it turned around a huge flat rock. That was where Tranh left the big cooler that was brought to him every day he was in the woods. This day, there was a second cooler big enough to hold enough food to feed six guests. It was obviously a place where many other people had come to sit and look down into the swirling water. Tranh had made benches from logs on three sides of the huge stone, where everyone was glad to finally sit down.
From beside a tree, Tranh took a rough looking folding table that obviously stayed where it was all year long, and he opened it and began to prepare the meal, as everyone watched in anticipation as he opened plastic containers of salads and fried chicken and fruit. The smells rode over the swirling cool water smell rising from the stream, and the roar was incredible and made voices have to rise as the pastoral calm shuddered with the power of spring released from winter. The force that through the green fuse drove all of life was exploding all around them as they sat there waiting for what was to come. The little group sat and talked in good spirits, Ian’s silliness still tugging at all of them like helium balloons. When Amanda told the story of the little choir in the mossy amphitheater, Ian offered to lead the newly formed choir in an encore. No one was game, and he berated them all for their lack of bravura, their lack of appreciation for a perfect venue.
No one cared. Everyone wanted to eat. The cold chicken and the old cheddar cheese sang with flavor in the sun. The sumac tea had a strange distant sweetness that poured from the big thermos like the distant sweetness of the hepatica flowers pushing thorough the leaves there beside them. Every flavor of life seemed more intense when it was carried back to nature. Over the meal, everyone could see the weight in Tom’s eyes. It was so apparent that Tranh finally asked if he was feeling all right. It was then Tom told him about the email message from Charles and he described to Tranh the conditions they were in and that they only had a bag of sugar cubes left to feed two hundred people. Tom was terrified for the lives of those two hundred people and his friend. Those who heard the story, once again felt stripped of the pleasure of the moment. For Tom as well, the food and the security and the good feeling they enjoyed that was now an inextricable part of his life, stung like a paper cut, so small and so painful. Tom began to cry and the two young women sitting on either side of him each took one of his hands when they saw it, and Megan rested her head on his chest to try to make him feel better.
Tranh watched the little triangle of pain and comfort and, after a long silence in which he looked truly stricken; he began to describe an experience he had never described since it had happened. He described the circumstances of losing his parents and family and being lost at sea, thrown to his immanent death by Thai Pirates who had boarded the little boat running with a few dozen people from Vietnam to Hong Kong. He told how this family had had a good life before the Communist victory in South Vietnam and how his father was an army colonel who had been executed, and how his family had lost everything and were homeless in Saigon. The only thing of value they had were three raw sapphires his father had procured and hidden in case the family would one day need to escape. It took three years of fear and re-education and starvation so severe that two of his sisters had died before his grandmother and mother could make the arrangements to be on the little boat that would take them to safety and freedom.
“After a week at sea, we would have been very happy for a bag of sugar cubes.” Tranh continued, “In the waves on that little boat, on an empty stomach, being repeatedly sick made me just want to die. There is a kind of dry heaves that I imagine only starving people can know. It had rained and so we were no longer dying of thirst, just hunger. And then the Pirates came and took the girls from the boat to be sold as prostitutes, and then they made everyone strip naked and forced us all into the water while they searched the boat for whatever valuables they could find. They took my little nine-year old sister and I watched them sail away after they lit the boat on fire, and we watched it burn, and I could have drowned then like everyone, just as I finally wished. But I didn’t. When the ship went down, a few bits of wreckage floated on the water, and there was another boy about my own age who helped me swim to a round piece of wood, and the two of us lay across it and held each other’s hands to keep from slipping off into the water. We were there like that for three days in the sun, and we were on fire with the pain burning our bodies like napalm, and our eyes were swollen from the salt spray and our tongues swelled so they were blue and enormous and we looked at each other like we were looking at monsters from nightmares.”
“Finally, when we were both deciding we should let go and give up, and we wanted to do that, our fingers were so locked
“I don’t remember when the boat came or how we were saved, but when I woke up I was lying on clean white sheets for the first time in my life, on a bunk on a British destroyer. I was in the infirmary, my back covered in bandages, and I had to lay there for days until we arrived in Hong Kong and I was taken to a hospital at a refugee camp. The Captain came to visit me and told me that my friend had died; he was dead when they forced our fingers apart. I was very sad, almost as sad as I was for having lost my whole family; and he told me that I was the bravest boy he had ever met and that he admired my incredible determination to live. I did not feel very brave or determined, or that my will to live was truly wonderful. It didn’t feel wonderful then. The next day the Captain came and stood in the doorway and he said that he had a surprise for me, and when I looked, I thought it was a ghost, because he produced, from behind his back, my little sister. That moment of happiness was the most intense moment of pain I’ve ever felt in my life.”
“The Pirates had thrown all the girls they’d taken into the water when they were intercepted by a British patrol boat the day after they had burned our boat, and my little sister was the only one that was saved after they threw all their captives in the water to run away. They machine-gunned them all before they left. I learned all this from my sister who first came and kissed me, and we were together again until the refugee camp in Hong Kong where she got the flu three weeks later and died.”
Everyone was crying, or trying not to do so, when Tranh finished the story.
“So Tom, there’s no way to measure how much suffering it takes before people succumb. Those people in the mountains have each other and they have Charles. They have that chance.” Tranh added soberly.
Tom nodded and said he hoped so, but he couldn’t help being so afraid. Now Amanda also had her head on his shoulder and she was crying like Megan was.
“There is no knowing where life can lead.” Tranh replied, “When I was lying on the South China Sea looking up the stars, how could I possibly imagine that one day I’d be living in Canada looking through a telescope at those same stars, trying to find an asteroid that might be coming to destroy all of humanity.” Tranh added.
In the tears and the sorrow of old pain resurrected, they all felt light and alive and renewed, just like spring. It was so strange. The force that blasted the roots of trees and destroyed worlds and personal histories and ordinary families was there among them, and they were dumb to tell what anyone could do to stop it, yet it made them all feel so alive. Sometimes life changes like an iceberg suddenly shifting and turning, rolling over on itself, the invisible loss beneath it shifting its balance completely. And then there was stillness. That was the human stillness on the stone above the stream in that emotional moment. Looking at Tranh sitting there, reeking of maple syrup, how was it possible to imagine that he had known some of the bitterest moments of the endless, hard rain of horror that had scoured the twentieth century. If evil was remarkable only in it’s banality, goodness and courage was remarkable for its simple ordinary human face. It was a simple goodness there in every face gathered above the stream, and it was so ordinary and obvious that none of them saw it.
Tom spent the next week frantically trying to get some news of his friend Charles. Doctors Without Borders only knew that he was missing. The message to Tom was the only one they had from him in the last weeks. The rest of his free time, Tom spent on the Internet trying to find his friend through refugee agencies and Web sites devoted to the refugees streaming out of Kosovo. After weeks of failure, he suspected what everyone was afraid to say, that his friend was dead. He was dead of course, and very much like the countless millions of innocents the century had buried with earth moving machines, he just disappeared. It would be a month before the memorial service in the little town near the farm would end Tom’s search. He even buried his thankfulness there, when he held Charles’ mother in his arms, the day they all said goodbye. It was then that Tom realized how devastatingly hollow funerals were without the last remains of life and love. The heart, as always, cried out for something tangible to touch.
It was such a contrast, the way spring had taken over the farm that month with sweet new life. The spring bulbs had pushed through the bare earth and all the little gardens around the farmhouse were alive with daffodils and elegant tulips, sky blue patches of scilla and white snowdrops and narcissus. The grass in the meadow turned green, as did the woodland moss, and then yellow coins of dandelion flowers scattered their treasure through the pastures.
The small summer birds came into the trees while they searched for nesting material and ate the insects that exploded in the millions from the earth. In the spring heat, clouds of black tiny bugs shimmered and swayed like undulating dancers. At dawn and dusk, the sound of them swarming within the trees was an electric hum that never varied in pitch or intensity so that it almost disappeared from awareness. For Laura, the warmth of the spring that opened her days and filled the air with life was a warmth she felt spreading in her flesh like the rising rounds of a chorus of a distant choir. Her writing was also getting stronger and more confident and warmer every day, the cold fear and self doubt inside her giving way to the young certain strength of the stories she was telling. Her real confidence as a writer began with the story of the boy who played violin in the bowels of hell.
Each week or two she produced another story from her quiet afternoons alone. She began to love taking her day’s work to show Eugene. Without realizing it at first, she started to answer the questions he left her the first day George had brought her to visit him at the farm.
‘Tell me about your daughter.’ was the first question she began to answer.
After they were finished working each evening, after she had shown him her work from the day, and after he left her occasional questions about the story they were working on, Laura would sit back against the pillows raised beside Eugene, and she would look at the computer screen as she talked, as if it was his mouth or his face. She disappeared into the blank screen of her past.
She described the history and the feelings of her relationship with her daughter, and Eugene said almost nothing in reply. Her answer to his question was a long, beautiful soliloquy about the pleasure and guilt and jealousy and pain and sorrow and the unexpressed beauty of what she felt about being Amanda’s mother.
Occasionally the computer screen would say something that showed he was listening with a passionate interest because of a single word or one sentence that captured the essence of just what she was saying. He mostly sat and listened as she talked about her daughter, and she couldn’t believe that there was so much to remember and so much to say. She would never have imagined that her heart and her memory were so deep, so full; so rich. Laura suspected Eugene loved Amanda, and it was something she couldn’t even begin to understand because they had no past, no history, no shared pleasure or pain, hope or disappointment. And strangely, the closer she came to her feelings for her own daughter, the closer she felt to Eugene.
She talked. He listened, and the long monologue made her feel close to them both and connected to each through the other, in a way that was impossible to describe. His confidence and his optimism were like Amanda’s, only his had a history and passion that was like a rock she could feel beneath her. Eugene made things seem possible. He sometimes made them even feel inevitable. Mother and daughter, it was the first personal theme she’d chosen to reveal her heart.
As Laura recalled her own youth as the golden girl of the golden girl, she suddenly realized that she’d married a stronger and sweeter version of her own father. Her father was the good doctor with the alcohol problem, born to serve the whole world, especially his wife and daughter in all their many moods. Sitting next to Eugene, talking about Amanda, Laura started to understand the triangle of her, Eugene and Ian. She didn’t understand how it was, or what it was, o
It was springtime for Laura. It was fresh and yellow as the tender pastel fog of the leaves filling the bare trees. If made her feel so young, with bells to be rung and songs to be sung. She came to life every day, silently working over her computer screen and the frail blue letters, and quietly talking about them and her life beside the dying love who had somehow given her access to her life through them. During the time she was talking about Amanda, Laura didn’t tell Eugene how she remembered her own parents had responded to him with such mixed feelings.
Her mother’s eyes had lit up at the sight of Eugene’s young body but recoiled when she learned of his dream of becoming an auto mechanic. Laura remembered what her mother had said to her about Eugene, “You’re going to be someone, he’s not.” The irony made her laugh. Her father had liked Eugene’s intelligence and sincerity, but he deferred to his wife’s ambitions for their daughter, being polite and reserved in his welcome the few times Eugene came to dinner. Laura wished that they had both lived long enough to see what he had done with his life. It made her success look so dry and pale in comparison.
From the book they were creating, from the depth of his understanding of the innocence of the young, to the enormous network of human beings who had come to the farm and been changed, taking away some of the inexhaustible treasure of Eugene’s optimism and confidence, they would’ve been so surprised at what an unambitious boy who only wanted to use his hands to make a living, had done with them. She also realized the blindness of her own innocence that had never understood the depth there was in Eugene. She had once thought her mother was right. When they were young, their depth was completely useless and invisible to both of them. Yet it was there. The depth of the heart was invisible to youth because youth had no way to test it. It was invisible to adults because personal depth was like a foundation quickly buried below grade. The depth of the heart was invisible for very different reasons, but it was almost always invisible until it faced the enormous price it always paid when it was uncovered by love.
As Laura talked about Amanda and remembered, she started to see past the battle of wills, past her own fears and guilt, into the rooms that survived from her youth and Amanda’s childhood. She and Amanda were very different indeed. Her daughter already had far less need of the approval of others, so much less than Laura still carried inside herself. Laura knew that whatever happened in her life, she would always feel that need and desire for honest approval of hard won success. The only place she felt that need was suspended was lying next to the dying, silent man who always cared about her regardless of what she had done. The book she was writing was ironically her greatest attempt at success, and it was happening in the one place success didn’t matter at all. From her safe spot beside Eugene, she spoke of her daughter in ways she had never let her heart open before, even to herself. As she spoke, her voice cut the outlines of her own emotions, her own life with her daughter, like a chisel blade cuts a wood block. The images of both, appearing in opposite relief, were what the words cut away and kept. Writing the stories of Arthur and Laura Lee, the feelings of imaginary people had sharpened the blade of language in Laura so she could cut fast and deep into the hardest grain of her heart. She was amazed that it felt so easy. She realized and remembered the loneliness and the distance that an only child feels growing up with two successful professional parents, and she realized the suffering in her daughter’s lonely childhood, the suffering that only appeared to be there in the last year before they had come to the farm.
In her young life, Amanda had never seemed to need to fight for her identity; she suffered invisibly, found a best friend in school to feel some personal intimacy, and moved from books to music to fill the endless hours her parents chose not to be at home. Laura had always wanted to be Amanda’s friend, but she didn’t really ever have the time, and time was the one thing a friend was never denied. Laura finally got it when she gave it. She told Eugene how it was Ian who made Amanda who she was, who gave her the time and attention she didn’t have to spare.
“They are both funny and kind, unlike me.” Laura confessed, “To think that I used to be jealous of how she would scream with pleasure when they wrestled on the floor. I used to sit there wishing that just once he would wrestle me to the ground and make me laugh until I cried, like he did with Amanda. And you know the weirdest thing of all, watching them wrestle used to make me wish he’d someday wrestle me down and make love to me until I screamed. I don’t know why am telling you that.”
When Laura looked up at the monitor and saw what Eugene had written she was shocked.
“Do you remember the time I did that to you?” Laura blushed. She hadn’t remembered.
For Megan, adapting to the farm was so easy that she couldn’t believe that a person could be so normal, so quickly, so completely. None of the other children seemed to know her history. No one seemed to want to pry. The Van Fleet children were used to foster families and they all knew, from their own experience, that asking questions about the past could open ugly cans of worms. Megan’s old anger subsided in the hard work, finding herself in a place, for the first time in her life, where image and attitude wasn’t everything. Every moment was so focused on the task to hand so that glory and credit and image seemed to be almost irrelevant. Megan’s feelings for Tom, her emotional longing, the erotic dreams that were her own delicious secret, seemed to still her need to resist and rebel. For the first time in her life she had a purpose. Her purpose was to make Tom love her. She knew that for once, the offer of pleasure and her body wouldn’t be anywhere nearly enough to win him. And Amanda’s presence, in almost every social moment, cut off any direct attention she could give him to try to make him want her. With Amanda always there, it would be impossible to feed his ego without it being noticed. She was denied the two ways she had to make him want her.
In the month that he spent on the Internet looking for news about his friend Charles, Tom was almost out of touch with the social life on the farm because he spent so many of his free hours searching the world of refugees and war crimes. It was then that Megan had the idea to use the computer in the farmhouse to send him an email message asking him to renew their Internet friendship.
“I need an ally like your brothers and sisters. I need to find someone to talk to who understands me, and I’m not saying there’s anything wrong about it, but Amanda is always there when I see you, and I just can’t say the kind of stuff I want to when she’s there.” she wrote in her first message.
Tom had answered immediately that he would be glad to be her ally, even though it wouldn’t be a formal thing like it was with his sister, whose sole ally he was supposed to be. Instinctively, Megan had found Tom’s weakness; he couldn’t resist someone who needed to be loved. He knew she wanted him to like her, perhaps even love her, but he thought he could keep such feelings safe and platonic, the Puritan ideals he’d always used to keep himself free of emotional complications working as they always had before. Tom didn’t realize that keeping himself safe from emotional complications was impossible if the emotions were real. He was innocent enough not to know how complications wove their way between hopes and feelings the way cobwebs could gather unnoticed in the corners of rooms. Without knowing it, Tom would let Megan touch him intimately and distantly, raising the kind of lust only idealists know, the strange burning lust that can come from feeling someone stroking your cool shining armor.
Megan poured her heart out to Tom once again, talking about everything they shared: their race, its loneliness, her common history with his birth mother, the way they had both grown-up brown in a lily white world. She thanked him for the strength in his hands when he touched her and for the way he was leading her back to their roots, two cowbirds in a flock of warblers. Megan really fell in love with Tom as they wrote to each o
“I thought I could love a junkie. How crazy is that? If I’d never met you, I’d never know how it feels to be around someone who’s really a man. I never knew that I really wanted someone strong. I don’t have a great history, I know. My mother was always attracted to weak men. The only men she ever brought home were such losers. I used to hate her boyfriends almost as much as she hated mine. Too weird, eh?”
When Megan, Amanda and Tom were together, Megan was all sweetness and light towards Amanda, especially when she realized that Tom was again keeping their Internet correspondence completely secret and private. It was then she knew that he felt it was, in fact, illicit. And that made it especially thrilling. At night, Megan would talk to her mother about the things she was saying to Tom. And in the course of their discussions, trying to understand how to win someone with such pure, impossible ideals, mother and daughter came around to discussing their mutual attraction to bad boys.
“I think there’s something inside most women that’s excited by men who won’t follow the rules. Maybe it’s because women depend on the rules too much, have always needed them to survive. It’s only been my generation and yours where being a bad girl didn’t get you run out of town, or worse. Men always had the choice of being bad. Women did it if they had no other choice. What made you want to be a bad girl?” Ann Marie asked her daughter.
“All the boys want bad girls now. “Megan replied to her mother.
“So what makes you want someone like Tom?”
“It’s weird. He’s so fucking gorgeous. He’s the only boy I ever knew who made being good not some wussy kind of shit. He makes me almost think I could do it, be strong, you know?” Ann Marie did know. It was the way she felt around Ian. If he hadn’t been her best friend’s husband, she would’ve had serious intentions. It was a new insight about her feelings for Ian, but it was there. Then the question from her daughter hit her right between the eyes
“Did you ever know anybody like that, somebody that made you want to be strong?” Megan asked from under her warm covers. “Was my dad another bad boy?”
“When he drank too much. But he had a gentle side and I think I was the only one that he’d let see it. He was really smart and mostly quiet until he drank and then he either became the sexiest man I’ve ever known or one of the biggest assholes.”
“What did he do for living?” Megan pursued softly.
“He was a lawyer. He worked on aboriginal land claims.”
“So why didn’t you make it with him? Did he hit you?”
“Just once. He was the one who dumped me. He said that I was too middle-class. He grew up poor. He said he liked ordinary people. He said I was only interested in sex and having fun.” Ann Marie admitted, and her daughter could hear the hurt still resonating in her voice.
“Like me.” Megan replied, “Until I came here, I didn’t know there was anything else.”
“I knew.” Ann Marie replied, “I knew when you came into my life.” There was a big pregnant silence.
“It must have made you sick to see me fucking up so bad.” Megan finally replied.
“Well, you can imagine. I’m trained to help people with emotional problems and I’ve never been able to do a damn thing for either one of us.” Ann Marie admitted, honestly.
“I never wanted your help. I never wanted to be good. I just wanted you’d to prove that you loved me. Funny, eh?”
“So how do I prove it?” Ann Marie asked nervously.
“I guess you have, coming here, believing I can actually get a good boy to love me.”
“Wow!” Ann Marie replied, and it almost took her breath away to hear her daughter say what she did.
“Why do you think my dad never came around to see me?”
“Probably because he doesn’t know you exist.”
“Wow.” Megan breathed, stunned at how much she didn’t know and had never asked, never even wanted to ask. She didn’t know what to think about her old secret bitterness then. She didn’t know if it was something she should pass on to her mother or take on herself for always being afraid to ask, to hear the words that would say her father didn’t want her. It took a long time before mother and daughter could sleep after they had talked that night.
Around the same time, one morning in late April, when the spring bulbs were at their most glorious, Sharon looked up from where she was massaging Eugene’s heavy limbs and saw Laura and Amanda weeding the flowerbed just outside the sunroom window. It was now common for Laura to join Amanda for an hour in the afternoon so the two of them could work together.
It was when Amanda left for a short time, and Laura looked up and the two women looked into each other’s eyes that the glass wall between them nearly shattered. There was such a thick stew of feelings reduced in each of their hearts, burning the two floating points of the triangle floating in the feelings they had for each other, that were impossible to measure or describe. Eugene lay there unmoved. Wonder and compassion, fear and its challenge, affection and pity were still so warm and fresh inside the two women. They were such strange rivals, each had an advantage the other couldn’t match, and they both had the recollection of love’s innocence that had quickly boiled away in both of their lives. As Sharon touched Eugene and felt his dead weight in her hands, she saw the look in his eyes and she never knew whether he guessed what she was thinking or if he somehow knew she was looking at Laura but, when Sharon finally turned to look at the computer screen, she saw the last message he had left her.
“She can’t even imagine being as beautiful as you are.” he had written and it made Sharon want to cry for the first time in a long time, and when she looked back to the garden at her rival, there were two tears in her eyes, and she was proud of them and wished that she could have told Laura what Eugene had just written to her. They were words she would always treasure for as long as she lived, and yet, and yet...
‘What is it that you can imagine her being? How beautiful?’ Sharon thought to herself, and a part of her was always sorry she never said it out loud, and a part of her was always glad that she didn’t. The dormant desire and doubt in her flesh had lost all its nerves. Sharon was shaking.
Later that day, in the yellow warm spring day, Laura sat on her willow by the water and remembered the look that had passed between her and Sharon that morning, and it made her feel the detachment that also existed in desire, the connections that were never completed, the things that would always be unsaid and undone. The stronger she felt, the more fragile life seemed. The more she understood, the less she expected that anyone would really understand who she was. For the first time in her life, in the frenzy of spring exploding around her, Laura felt how rare and lovely it was to know stillness and peace.
That evening the pastels of orange and amber, alizarin, turquoise and gray deepened and flooded the high clouds overhead. The water flattened the colors in strange sweeping patterns that somehow flooded the breathless blue water that reached to the horizon and rose up to the sky. Nothing moved. Nothing stayed the same. Everything changed and it was impossible to see it happening. From where Laura sat, out past the horizon, an invisible lake boat was the only sign of humanity, its deep propeller turns moving like a heartbeat that worked hard to reach distant, invisible shores. Woom. Wo
In the week before Mother’s Day, Rosie had asked Laura if she would like to come to visit his own home and have dinner and see his greenhouse where his roses were already blooming in the depths of an artificial summer. He had intended the invitation to be for Ian and Amanda and Tom as well, but Laura misunderstood and thought the invitation was less formal, less inclusive, and just meant for her.
“I should be finished the story I’m working on today. So tomorrow would be perfect. I can’t imagine that Eugene would mind a day off from helping me with my book. I’d love to come to dinner.” Laura had answered, and Rosie had looked a little surprised at her enthusiasm but told her that the next day would be fine. And so it was that her first evening meal away from the farm was with the man who was the quiet, practical backbone of the entire little family empire. Ambrose Bryant Van Fleet never said very much when he was working, and so Laura was interested in whether there was more to him, the way there seemed to be more to all the Van Fleets than met the eye. She wouldn’t be disappointed.
Rosie gave her directions, and she left early the next afternoon so that she could go for a drive, and pick up some wine, and perhaps find an antique store in some little town where she could buy a nice present as thanks for her invitation. Her expenses at the farm were literally nothing, a fact that was almost embarrassing when Amanda brought her her weekly paycheck. So she decided to splurge and take the best bottle of wine she could find, and pick something special to try to personally thank just one of the members of the family who seemed to have everything. Laura, for whom shopping used to be a great recreation, had strangely and surprisingly lost interest in acquiring things. The desire for things had fallen away from her, and while she was shopping in the little antique stores in Picton, the kind of antique stores she used to love, she realized her own connections to things was falling away the way the nerves that were connecting Eugene to his muscles were falling way. Without things, how would a person know they had a life? How could a person live without their material connections? Her things were in Toronto and belonged to another place and time. ‘Why was it always like Lou Gehrig’s disease?’ she thought, as she picked up a Bull’s Eye glass pitcher and, for some reason, she thought about Ian and sex and realized she was also losing all the feeling between her legs. Since the ice races, she and Ian hadn’t made love, and she hadn’t missed it at all. ‘The less you screw, the less you want to.’ she thought to herself. She wasn’t the Laura she knew. She was falling in love with two men at the same time, all over again, and she was stunned to know that such a thing was possible without feeling any sexual desire. Old feelings had become new feelings, for her husband and her first love. And there was no way to express it. Like life. Like goddamn life! The two words were moving inside Laura like an enormous crack in the foundation of her being.
Laura found Rosie’s house where it had been built ten years before. Laura was surprised that it was very modern in design, glass and cement, in overlapping layers that flowed to the edge of the high escarpment looking over Picton Bay a hundred feet below. The view was spectacular, the Bay and its inlets looking more like Japanese Islands than something that was a part of one of the Great Lakes. Countless shades of green in unfolding spring leaves filled the many peninsulas over the sapphire blue water, sapphire water below an indigo sky.
A little stream wound its way and disappeared into one of the rooms in the house. The house was in fact built as a tribute, an homage to Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Falling Water. Laura would learn the house was jokingly called Running Water, the stream actually moving through the house until it emerged and spread over the limestone cliff, a dark shining stain falling forever, because a coffer damn controlled the spring flood. Along the entire south side of the house was a greenhouse designed as part of the architecture of the building, cedar pillars between huge plate glass sheets angled to maximize the sun.
When Laura parked by the side entrance of the house, she barely had time to think about what she was seeing or how she had never expected to find a Van Fleet living in modern house, before Rosie came out of the door to greet her. He was carrying two full glasses of white wine.
“Well here’s a greeting, you don’t get every day.” Laura said as she took her glass and leaned in to kiss Rosie on the cheek. “I needed this.”
“The liquor laws are a little looser here than the farm. I thought you might enjoy something for the palette while I gave you a little tour for all your other senses. I thought you might like to see my pride and joys.” he said as his eyes pointed to the greenhouse.
“I was hoping to see your flowers. Is it all roses?” she asked, as she followed him.
The overwhelming perfume that fell from the door of the greenhouse was like walking into a convention of hundreds of invisible, rich old ladies. It almost knocked a person down. Through it, then into it, Laura followed Rosie into the tapestry of countless blossoms and emerald foliage. Pruned to perfection, each rose came out of a square wooden pot, each trained to a trellis of bamboo that rose to the full twelve-foot height of the greenhouse. Every blossom seemed perfect, and every color incredible. And, because Rosie’s obsession was climbing roses; that was all there was in the greenhouse.
“You came at the best time.” he said, with pride. “Our spring in here begins in the snow.”
“This is spectacular. Do Van Fleet roses also have to aspire so high? “ Laura teased and Rosie laughed as she toasted his pride and joys. “To Rosie’s incredible flowers.”
He told her they appreciated the toast and went on to explain his mission was to grow an ever blooming, floriferous, cold-hardy, pungently fragrant, disease resistant climbing rose.
“I want to grow the greatest red climber anyone has ever created.” he said proudly while Laura was looking all around her at the most promising hybrids that Rosie had kept of the hundreds he had bred. And it was true, almost every rose was some incredible variation on shades of red.
He took her to the one corner of the greenhouse and introduced her to the rose he said began his passion. It was called, Guinee and had been created in 1937. He picked one of the dense blood black, full-blown roses and gave it to her, and when she smelled it, he smiled. He knew it was like smelling incredible red wine with overlaid fragrances of raspberries and musk.
“There is a part of her in every rose in this room.” he told her.
The genetic history of each rose bush was printed on a laminated card, a family tree for each one fixed to its pot.
Rosie explained how roses were hybridized, the pollen from one forming seeds on another. The seeds were then raised to see what the new variety would become, but it wasn’t too long into the lecture before Rosie could see that he had lost Laura to the smell of the one single flower in her hand. She couldn’t have done anything better to please him than to completely forget everything he was saying, to forget he was even talking.
Inside the house, Laura’s wine glass was re-filled as she greeted the children who she knew from when they came to the farm to go to school each weekday. Mick was seven, Elaine was six.
Unlike all of the Van Fleet children, the grandchildren just thought Laura was another person at the farm. They went off to play before dinner.
Laura was surprised when Rosie’s ex-wife came into the room and greeted her. Just recently, Laura had learned that Rosie and Connie were divorced. Every time she had seen them at the farm with their children, they had seemed like a happy couple. It seemed the Van Fleets were even able to make divorces so amicable that it was hard to not
“When we decided we couldn’t be married anymore, we also decided it would be a whole lot easier on the kids if we had separate bedrooms instead of separate houses.”
“Amazing!” Laura replied, “So how do you tell that you’re divorced?”
“No sex.” Rosie replied.
“So, how do you tell that you’re divorced?” Laura replied, and everyone laughed.
Laura asked for a house tour and her confusion only got deeper as she toured the beautiful rooms with the incredible modern furniture built in honey colored oak. There was a spare modern simplicity and elegance that she couldn’t imagine in the home of a workingman. The most impressive room Laura saw was the dining room where the stream ran through the house, running over a bed of polished stones sunk in cement, and it looked as real as any stream in nature. Moss grew on the stones that rose out of the water and little minnows ran in the crystal currents.
After the tour, they sat and talked in the living room behind the solid glass wall that felt like it was almost hanging over the cliff. As they had walked through the house, Laura had realized that she was watching two people who obviously, completely enjoyed each other’s company. Rosie and Connie were easier with each other than she and Ian had ever been. And they were divorced. It gave her a chill. As they sat and talked and drank a fine white Beaujolais, Laura was more and more fascinated by the relationship of a couple who seemed so compatible, so obviously in love. She tried to imagine the irreconcilable differences that made them divorce and still let them live together like it had never happened.
Before dinner, they had had enough wine for Rosie to ask Laura to stay overnight and use their guest room so they could enjoy the fine wine that would come with the dinner. Without much reluctance, Laura accepted. It was almost like going back to one of the sweet parts of her old life. Laura always loved dinner parties. Laura wondered if Rosie had known she was deciding whether to stop drinking because she was absolutely terrified of being in a car without feeling she was in complete control. Spinning wheels spun the threads of terror she could feel living inside her.
The lovely dinner by the stream progressed with Laura’s intoxication. It felt so good to relax into it and let go. The children were polite and sweet and were gone to bed in soft cotton pajamas right after dessert. They kissed their parents and shook Laura’s hand with all the sincerity their own soft tiny grasp could deliver. Laura was touched. Baby faces and beautiful translucent brown skin, clear crystal eyes were so lovely to Laura. It made her sentimental in the warm glow of the wine, and she remembered Amanda when she was in pajamas. She didn’t understand how the Van Fleets could get children to be so socially self-conscious and confident at the same time. Amanda had been like that. She couldn’t understand how that happened either. When she asked the question, Rosie’s opinion was that it was because they went to school in the same class with children of all ages.
“I think it’s obvious that when kids are at different stages of development in the same class, they have to learn to be patient and to see each other as individuals and respect each other for what they can do.” Rosie said seriously.
“That may be true, but I don’t think it’s healthy that those children all belong to the same family.” Connie replied.
Laura could see by the intensity in their eyes that this was a serious topic for both of them.
Connie went on to explain that the home schooling at the farm was one of the two issues she and Rosie couldn’t resolve.
“We finally had to compromise or fight one another for custody, and I didn’t want to try to go up against the Van Fleet money and power, so the kids are going to go to the family school until they’re eleven and then they’re going to go to school here in town.” Connie explained into the cold stillness in Rosie’s eyes.
“What do you have against the family school? It seems like an incredible school. I can’t believe what a difference it’s made in Amanda.” Laura said to Connie.
“You see, I wouldn’t have had a chance. Everybody thinks everything on the farm is so perfect. And everyone thinks that I must be crazy because I’m the only one who sees it. It’s not real. The farm’s not real. It doesn’t prepare anybody for real life. You have any idea how hard it is to fit in to the rest of the world when all you know is that farm?” Connie replied passionately.
Rosie answered his wife with cold logic. “There isn’t anyone who’s left the farm that had trouble fitting in to the world, except Christa and she was losing control two years before she decided she had to go.”
“You know what I mean. You know the Van Fleets always succeed, they have all the resources to go anywhere and do anything and be totally in control of whatever happens. You know very well that what I mean about not fitting into the world is that growing up on the farm makes the rest of the world seem small and unreal and unworthy. Van Fleets are only happy when they come home. It’s like the world is a prison and the only time Van Fleets are free is when they drive down that lane way.” Connie had turned her attention to Laura, “I’ll bet it’s already happened to you and Amanda. Can you imagine yourself going back to the world? And, just the fact that question makes sense is the best proof of just what I’m saying.”
Laura knew exactly what Connie was saying. It was a feeling she had had from the moment she first drove down that farm lane way. She had been nervous, feeling that Connie was right, but she couldn’t for the life of her understand what was wrong with what the farm was doing to her and Amanda.
“I know exactly what you’re saying.” Laura agreed, “It’s always made me nervous. I think I’ve probably already lost Amanda to the farm. Tom was just the reason she needed to be sucked into the spell. But, how can you turn your back on something so rich and so wonderful and so personally satisfying?”
“I think your question implies the answer.” Rosie answered her, “For me and my children and for so many others, it’s the experience that made life satisfying and mean something. When you’re at the farm, you’re connected to people and you feel their connections to you. Where else is life like that? What’s wrong with that? The reason people feel they belong at the farm is because they feel part of something bigger than they are. What’s wrong with that?”
“That’s just what people feel in a cult.” Connie spoke to Laura. “Rosie hates it, but I call the farm the good Jonestown. If it wasn’t for the poison Cool-aid; there wouldn’t be much difference. And Sharon has just too much power and control over people’s lives for it to be healthy. I don’t want my children growing up knowing somebody that powerful is making decisions about their lives.”
“That’s ridiculous! My mother is so open and understanding that it makes the rest of us look like bigots.”
“Rosie can’t stand that anybody thinks St. Sharon isn’t perfect.” Connie replied acidly.
Rosie thought he saw that Laura was getting uncomfortable with the level of emotional intensity between him and his ex wife and so he apologized and told Connie it’d probably be better if they didn’t re-fight their old battle once again. Surprisingly, Connie agreed and they seemed to both back down from their unassailable walls. Laura, however, as nervous as the emotional intensity made her, had wanted to pursue the discussion. It was something that was at the heart of her own life, and was probably the most crucial issue she had to face in deciding to come to live at the farm.
“I don’t know what to say or what to do.” Laura confessed, It’s like each of you represents the two sides of the problem I really need to resolve myself. What am I supposed to do? I’ve never seen my family so happy and fulfilled. I’ve never been so happy and fulfilled. I’ve learned and felt more i
Now it was Rosie and Connie’s turn to look nervous and frightened by the turn in the conversation. It was the question they both had left unresolved, the question they had simply moved into separate bedrooms. Laura’s own wine induced passion was like an undertow that pulled them both back into the cold ocean of anger and fear.
“For me the bottom-line is the farm means more to Rosie than his own family.” Connie said coldly.
“You really mean that you resent that the farm means more to me than your opinion of it.” Rosie shot back. He was furious.
“Ya, that’s right. You were married to me, not your mother. This is your home, not that farm. You’ll just never break away.”
Laura was embarrassed but excited by the argument. In the cold silence of anger, Laura quietly asked a terrible question.
“I wonder if I’m going to lose my husband and my daughter to the farm, whether it will mean more to them then I do?”
“You see! I’m not crazy!” Connie spat at Rosie.
“You’re not crazy. You’re just wrong. You’re both wrong. The farm doesn’t separate people; it connects them. Have you ever been closer as a family than you have since you came to the farm?” Rosie asked Laura.
“No. No, not at all. I don’t know why I feel like I’m losing them. It’s crazy. I just don’t understand it.”
“There is no answer.” Connie said, at last. “I guess we’re the last people that can help you. Most people don’t even realize it’s a problem. What are you going to do when you have to move away?”
“I don’t know. I wish I did. If Tom and Amanda are really something permanent, the decision will be a whole lot easier. I don’t know what we’ll do without the farm.” Laura replied, sounding almost broken hearted.
.”And when my dad dies, it with be even harder for you to feel you belong at there.” Rosie added gently.
It wasn’t an easy thing to face. Eugene’s death was a impending loss that took every bit of denial Laura was a capable of mustering. The look in Laura’s eyes and the frozen expression on her face made both Connie and Rosie realize that Eugene’s death wasn’t a subject Laura could talk about. Connie, deftly, changed the subject or at least shifted it.
“The other thing that Rosie and I have never been able to reconcile about the farm was how much people had to give up to be a part of it. Rosie is one of my best examples. He has a degree in genetics. Can you imagine the incredible things happening in genetics right now? Can you imagine the things that are there to discover? He spends his life trying to grow the best climbing rose in his spare time. It seems like severe under achieving to me. It seems to me he could be doing a lot more with his life than running a lumber yard.” The words were said in a soft almost wistful voice. The look of admiration she directed to Rosie was more a compliment than criticism and the exact opposite of what her words were saying.
“I like my work. I love my roses. I love my life.” Rosie replied with finality.
“That’s what everybody says that’s part of a cult. But I won’t go on. You’ve chosen what you want to do with your life. I’m sorry that I can’t help thinking you could do so much more.” Connie said to him, and turned and smiled at Laura. “I’m so glad you came. It’s so great to have somebody who at least understands my side of things. Thank you.”
“I understand only too well.” Laura answered, “And I understand exactly how you feel Rosie. I wish one of us or all of us could find an answer.”
“If you figure one out, you have to promise to let us know.” Connie replied.
“Maybe I’ll ask Sharon.” Laura replied and they all laughed.
“Maybe you should ask my dad?” Rosie said when the laughter stopped.
“I could. I thought about it, but I’m just too scared of what he would say.”
Laura was surprised that Rosie nodded in understanding and that Connie knew exactly what she was saying as well.
Laura felt like a great weight lifted from her heart, being able to share her deepest problem with two people who understood exactly what she was feeling. It was a feeling she knew she wouldn’t ever be able to face with Ian. The farm had him enthralled even more than it had Amanda. Rosie apologized for the argument over the dinner table and Laura said that he shouldn’t feel that way.
“It was great to hear two married people arguing again. Ian and I used to fight all the time. Since we came to the farm, nothing. No fights; no make up sex. We live in the Sunshine. We laugh every day. God, how I miss those fights.”
They went back to the living room and soft candlelight was all the illumination in the room. Beyond the glass wall was the black bay, and the moonlight lying flat on the water, and the clusters of lights that were the houses beside the black shorelines. It looked very much like the view from where Laura used to park with Eugene long ago, the same place she had parked with George Marshall the night of the high school reunion when the moments began that led to her place in the soft chair were she sat. The wine kept flowing and the conversation got lighter and Laura felt like a smart, tipsy middle-class lady again, not someone pretending to be a part of the capitalist Walden that was the farm. The conversation shifted to Rosie’s brothers and sisters and Laura learned about his sister Christa’s nervous breakdown, of her bi-polar mood disorder that had begun long ago when she was just fourteen years old. She was a poet and so sensitive to pain that she couldn’t seem to bear any suffering in the world and couldn’t help but take it to her heart. The matter-of-fact killing that was part of raising animals for food was most often more than she could bear. When it came to human suffering, she was often inconsolable. She wasn’t allowed to even watch the nightly news. It was after Eugene’s diagnosis that she seems to get worse. It was only the last summer, after her meeting the poet Sawyer Strickland that she seemed to lose her ability to control her own actions.
Rosie left out the fact that Christa also seemed to be sexually promiscuous since she was in her early teens, and didn’t seem to discriminate between anyone, old men or young boys, or even girls and women. Connie wasn’t shy about filling Laura in, and explained to her about Christa’s sexual promiscuity. “She always said that sex was the best thing she had to give. She always said it was too underrated.” Connie said in obvious wonder.
“Underrated as a curse.” Laura replied. “Ninety percent of the stupid things people do in their lives would never happen if it wasn’t for sex.”
“That may be just a little low.” Rosie replied, and they all laughed.
“She’s really a stunning woman. “ Laura added, and both her hosts nodded to the obvious fact.
They talked until late, when the phone rang and interrupted them. Rosie thought it might be someone checking on Laura. He was right. He brought her the cell phone with shock on his face, and then Laura heard Amanda crying uncontrollably on the other end of the phone. It seemed that Laura and Rosie had both forgotten to tell anyone that she was going to dinner, and when the car was gone and she was not back before dark, Amanda was irrationally certain that her mother had been in a car accident again. No one had thought to ask Eugene, who was the only person who knew Laura wouldn’t be writing with him that night. The fear and the panic pouring out of Amanda through her tears frightened her mother. She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t understand the hysterical reaction to her being missing. She wasn’t used to explaining where she was going and when she was going to be
“You could have phoned. Don’t you think I have a right to know if you’re going to be home. Don’t you realize how much I was going to worry? Don’t you care about what I’d think had happened? And I’m going to have to sleep alone in that cabin. I’m going to have to sleep with no one else there. I can’t sleep alone!”
Laura apologized again and again for her inconsideration, and slowly Amanda stopped crying. When Laura suggested that she get Tom to come and stay with her, the silence at the farm was like the silence in the walk-in cooler in the kitchen when the door closed in the cold.
“I think maybe I’ll ask Ann Marie if I can sleep next-door tonight.” Amanda replied at last.
“That’s a good idea.” Laura agreed and told Amanda that she’d be home in the morning.
Amanda then whispered to her mother that she loved her, and Laura fought back strange tears when she whispered it back.
Rosie and Connie had watched uncomfortably as Laura had tried to calm her hysterical daughter. Amanda always seemed so strong, and to know she could panic so quickly, so easily, gave them all serious pause.
“It’s interesting that when you were saying goodbye to Amanda, you said you would be home in the morning. Does the farm really feel like home?” Rosie asked softly.
“My God, I did. I’ll take it as a warning.” she said, and Connie laughed.
But, as Laura thought about it, she knew her words were more than a figure of speech. Rosie was right. He had won his argument.
When she got back to the farm after breakfast, Laura was surprised to see Sharon waiting for her on the porch.
“Come sit for a minute.” Sharon asked, and Laura did that, wondering what was going on.
“So what did you think of Connie?” Sharon said, curiously.
“I liked her.” Laura replied.
“Did she talk about the good Jonestown?”
It was obviously a wound that Laura saw was easily opened. Her having had dinner with Rosie and Connie seemed to have stung Sharon. Her face was as hard as Laura had ever seen it.
“She did talk about the good Jonestown.” Laura answered, “Her and Rosie seem to have gotten past it.”
“If you call getting divorced getting past it.” Sharon shot back. “Nobody understands her. I think she’s obsessed. What does she want from us, to abandon our lives, to sell the farm? The good Jonestown! It’s insulting. She’s ripped Rosie apart, and for what? So her kids can go to public school?”
“Sharon, you’re still really mad at her. It’s okay. They worked it out. It doesn’t seem that you have.” Laura answered, honestly.
“It’s true, I can’t get over it. She’s my son’s wife and it hurts so much to know how she feels about our lives. It’s so unfair. I suppose she went on about I’m the cult leader. Every community is a cult for god’s sake. That’s what a community is; individuals getting their value from the things they share with the other members of the group. That’s what a family is. What are you, if you don’t belong to something bigger than yourself?”
It was amazing to Laura to see Sharon so angry and hurt after what must have been a very long argument with Connie. Laura was surprise that she actually wanted to reassure Sharon of her loyalty, and so she told her what Amanda had said about the farm.
“Amanda says she didn’t think anyone really ever leaves the farm.”
Sharon smiled, reassured, as Laura realized the irony of what she was saying.
The next Saturday was the day they let Tundra free. The McCalls, Ann Marie, Megan and Tom gathered in the granary stall.
For three weeks, Tundra had been catching mice that Megan had caught in little live traps in the barn. It was amazing how quickly the little life within the granary stall was over once it was free on the floor below the big white bird. A little scream and a rustle of soft wings and the sound of tiny bones breaking and another life was over, vanished, unmourned. It had only taken Megan a few days before she completely lost any sentimental feelings for the mice in the similar detachment of surgeons and soldiers and artists and torturers, all those who had to face death and suffering and not feel the suffering of those they touched. For predators that had to kill to survive, death could sometimes be delivered with a merciful and painless speed when life or death were the exclusive choices. Death was just the closing of a single yellow talon.
Megan had spent her hour of solitude every day with Tundra, talking to him about her feelings, telling him the things she wouldn’t and couldn’t tell anyone in else in the world. The day of Tundra’s freedom was a loss Megan couldn’t even begin to describe. When he flew free her heart would once again be in the solitary granary cage of her deepest loneliness.
When they took the beautiful bird, tethered to Tom’s wrist, out of the granary, Megan stayed behind, explaining that she just couldn’t bear to see him go. And when the silence fell when the sound of the movement on the wooden floors vanished, uncontrollable sobs exploded in Megan’s chest. It was so bad that she could barely catch her breath. She had never cried so hard in her life. Tundra was being given his life; Megan felt the loss like it was death. What was part of her was gone forever. Where beauty had been was now an empty wooden box. It was a death for Megan. It was death’s dislocation. Knowing he was free and going to the arctic where he belonged was just no consolation to her loss. The only small distant thought that consoled her was that maybe, just maybe the white beautiful wings would bring him back and she would be there to see him with Tom the next year.
Outside, everyone stroked the soft feathers and said goodbye and the tears in Amanda’s eyes made everyone cry except Ann Marie. It was goodbye. She knew it was never to look in those eyes again. It was never to have a hand on cool beautiful feathers. It was never to know something so free and beautiful again. From death to life, Tundra had been saved, and his freedom was nevertheless a clotting, collective pain; one treasured life flying eventually to a distant anonymous death.
Over the days and weeks to come, Megan and Amanda and even Laura, who had all cared for Tundra, knew what it was like to have a beautiful quiet presence vanish and have a time and place that once mattered become just an empty wooden bin where only Megan returned every day with her suffering. Loss could have a place as well as a time. Loss also had a familiarity connected to ordinary things that a person could only see when something or someone that mattered was gone. Part of a day could vanish with something or someone you loved and it was a part of a day that could never be recovered. When Tom lifted his arm into the air, Tundra rose and flew straight away from them, his head turning back all the way around, the beautiful gold bands of his eyes, breathtaking. It was over. He was gone. There was no way to know if he would ever really come back.
Tom went back into the barn to tell Megan about Tundra’s release and found her, still crying, her head leaned against the wooden wall beside where Tundra had perched. When she turned to look at Tom, the tears that had calmed came back in the dry heave of a sob, and she waited for him to come to her, and he did that, and he took her in his arms and held her close and he could feel the sobs behind her breasts pressing into him. And when she looked at him and their brown eyes locked into their hearts, they couldn’t stop. They kissed. Their senses reeled with what they were doing, and then Tom broke the kiss, and he just held her head to his chest, and she could hear his heart beating so fast, running away. And then desire turned to denial in a strange, silent calm when Tom realized that Megan was no longer crying. He took her hand and led her out of the wooden room but he let her hand go before they went out of the barn door.
The next day was Mother’s Day and it was, of course, one of the sweetest celebrations that happened at the farm. Over the Sunday dinner, each of the Van Fleet children heard Sharon read what they’d written on the Mother’s Day card they’
Amanda had made her mother a card. It was just the simple impression of her own lips pressed to folded watercolor paper. Underneath she had written, ‘I will never be able to tell you how much I love you, but I do.’
Megan had also made her mother a card that surprised Ann Marie by what it said. ‘To my mom, Without you, I’m nothing!’. Love, Megan.
Each of the Toronto mothers also received a present with their card.
Tom had taken both daughters into the Walnut Woods, with the lime green leaves unfolding high above. They walked for an hour with their heads down looking in the leaves, moving them with a stick, looking for the present for their mothers. It took an hour, and their eyes had to adjust to looking among the leaves, but eventually it was Megan who found two little brown silk packets encrusted with bits of dried leaf. They were the cocoons of two Luna moths. They took them home and place them each in a cardboard box with dried twigs leaning across between the sides, wire mesh folded down over the top.
Both mothers and both daughters were aware of the metaphor, the Caterpillar turned into the lovely creature that would soon fly. But none of them had seen it, as Tom had done many times. The Van Fleet children had often seen the huge green Caterpillars that fed on the poison leaves of the Walnut trees. They knew firsthand what metamorphosis really was. And it was Megan and Amanda who checked every day for the month until the beautiful green Saturnalia moths finally emerged.
That night, before the coffee house singing was anywhere near being done, Laura whispered into Ian’s ear while they were dancing that she was feeling really hot.
“We could sit for a while. If you want, we could go outside? “he said, considerately.
“I’m feeling a different kind of hot.” she whispered, and she looked at him with dancing eyes.
“Then I think we should blow this pop stand.” he said with a grin, and Laura took his hand and led him out of the coffee house and they walked in the moonlight down the lane toward the cabin.
The warm spring night was delicious and quiet and no birds sang.
When they got to the right turn to the cabin, Laura said she wanted to go down to the beach.
All Ian said was, “Wow!”
They walked along the beach with the diamond flakes of the stars spread over the black water, the greasy slab of moonlight flowing almost to their feet.
When they got to Laura’s willow, she patted the flat trunk and Ian jumped up and sat in front of her. The dead silence, the black beauty and the romantic moment was so lovely that Laura ran her hand sensuously over Ian’s thigh. She moved her hand higher and closer and with the gentlest touch she slowly made him aroused. It had been such a longtime. Such a long time! She could hear his breath, and then the little groan he always made.
“My man.” she whispered.
“My lady.” he replied.
They both laughed softly. And then her fingers slid open his zipper and then she moved her fingers and firmly released him to the moonlight. She looked up and, in the moonlight, she was beautiful, and she looked so young and lovely as she took him inside her warm mouth. He groaned much louder than he usually did. They were still connected. An old desire could even rekindle in the cool air, in the cool wetness of his hard, soft desire. After a long delicious two minutes, she took his hand and had him jump down to the sand and she undid his belt and slid down his slacks and undressed him and got him to lie down and lie back. She stood over him and undressed completely as she moved over him and moved down to join him and take him inside her as she made love to him, and she hadn’t been kidding, she was hot. She was so passionate, so vocal, in such a sexual frenzy that she didn’t see the question in his black eyes. ‘Where had all this come from?’
It was all so new and spontaneous, and in a way so different an experience, with old levers of their coupling completely unmoved, and new ones discovered after all those years. It somehow felt so alive, it literally took their breaths away. It felt so different, that sex actually felt young and new again. And they felt they actually belonged to one another. It was so tender, the moment belonging to the very place where they lay, to the darkness, to the distant stars, to the rising moon, and to the enfolding farm. And when they came, they came together, and it was shamelessly loud in the absolute silence where even the water edges didn’t lap at the sand with its wet tongue. It was like an excruciatingly beautiful cramp letting go, and Laura fell forward with her breasts on his chest, and her hair was like a thin halo around her face as Ian watched the moonlight stream through it and she was surrounded by the infinite canopy of stars. While they dressed, Ian pointed to the place in the sand where she had cast his body: his buttocks and elbows and heels between her knees and toes and hands, a dark shadow embedded in the pliable earth.
“We certainly made an impression.” Ian said, teasing her.
“You certainly did.” a strange male voice replied right beside them and they both jumped in surprise and shock. The voice had traveled across the smooth bay from where the first sailboat of the year was anchored in the shadows of Haystack Island.
“My pleasure.” Ian replied in a normal voice.
“That’s clear.” the normal male voice answered, but the McCalls felt violated by the intrusion into their privacy. The funny moment had spoiled the intimate moment they had shared.
Ian and Laura didn’t say very much as they walked back to the cabin, holding hands like teenagers, but the voice had taken something away, something that should have been theirs alone.
Ian told Laura that Sharon should rent out that spot by the Willow so poor rich city couples could come for the best sex they’d ever had in their lives. He couldn’t remember a happier moment between them than before the strange voice had spoken.
“Middle-aged crazy.” was all Laura said. She didn’t want to talk.
And neither one of them would have believed for a moment, if they could have seen the future, that that was the last time they would make love for many months.
The next afternoon there was great excitement because Tom had asked that the whole family gather at the beach at precisely four o clock. He had left the farm after lunch, all alone, and it was all very mysterious. When the whole family and all the interested visitors gathered at the beach, they could soon see a strange craft suddenly come around the point of the bay. As it got closer and everyone could make out the details of the very strange looking boat, everyone was shocked by what they were seeing.
As it swiftly approached, it looked like some wild fortress from a bad movie about future warrior societies. It was long and thin and encased in redwood planks, its slatted sides going from one end of the boat to the other. It was like a boat designed by twelve year old boy discovering power and aggression. People were either laughing or talking or completely aghast as the boat came towards the beach, and everyone could see Tom at the wheel, and he didn’t slow down one bit as the boat drove itself into the sand right next to Laura’s horizontal black willow.
Everyone had walked along the beach to where they could see the boat was going to land and they could see Tom sitting at the steering wheel, his eyes absolutely alive with excitement. And when the boat was grounded for a moment and everyone had gathered around like a choir, suddenly the dark sides began to fall from the hydraulic chains that supported them, and the boat opened like a wooden flower, and they were all looking at the most beautiful, long, sleek house boat anyone had ever seen. It was Bauhaus at sea. While everyone was transfixed by the boat, Ian and Laura couldn’t help noticing the impression they made in the sand the night before tha
The redwood walls descended along the two sides of Tom’s boat made eight-foot wide porches that made the long boat seem suddenly wide and secure. The roof was a shed roof of black shining photo-electric cells that supplied the power for the boat. The walls were glass and steel and, underneath its redwood exoskeleton, the ugly old war boat was actually a beautiful Ultra-modern home. Tom came out where everyone was gathered and he told everyone to wait while he put up the iron porch railings that were folded down against the floor. They clicked into place with modern precision and when Tom came back to greet his first visitors, he manually unfolded a gangplank so everyone could come aboard.
When every one of the Van Fleet children turned eighteen, they were allowed to design their first home, and it was understood that the family would pay and help in any way it could to make it so that the house had no debt of any kind. Eugene had taken the wisdom of his father and his father’s father in his determination that his children would never owe any part of their future to a bank. Tom had been very secretive about his house plans and only Eugene and Sharon, who wrote the checks, knew that Tom had commissioned a barge to be built in a Port Dalhousie dry dock, which was then sent to Belleville where it had been outfitted as a modern apartment.
Tom led the tour through the house with obvious pride and excitement, Amanda and Megan following close behind, there eyes dancing in harmony to his. It was obvious in the detail of the design that Tom spent many hours planning his boat house. The living room and kitchen took a little less than half of the space; the rest was also open but could be divided into separate bedrooms as he demonstrated the use of two sets of Walnut pocket doors that were slabs of shimmering polished beauty. A Murphy bed folded out of the wall in the master bedroom and a down-filled sofa folded out into a bed at the back of the boat where it looked out the patio door to the horizon. When the sleeping places were folded away, it left a wonderful clear open space that was perfect for a party.
Tom showed the small bathroom that had walls made entirely of solid Walnut panels. There was a granite floor with matching fixtures. The shower was also glass and granite. The big bathroom window was a floor to ceiling opalescent glass landscape of green earth and brown trees and blue skies and white clouds. The whole houseboat was shimmering in light inside. It was all breathtakingly beautiful and would have been at home in the richest sections of the most exclusive marinas in the world. As everyone gathered at the far end of the boat, Tom explained what he said was the real genius of his house.
“I had it made six inches shorter and six inches narrower than the big containers that go on ships all over the world. For a few thousand bucks, I can just have my house pushed into a container and put on a truck and taken anywhere in North America or I can have it put on a boat in Montreal and shipped any place in the world. When it gets there, all I have to do is have it winched out at a boat launch and pushed in the water and I’m home. What do you think?” he said to everyone and everyone applauded, but the answer came most enthusiastically from Megan and Amanda. This was one hell of a romantic dream. Tom was looking straight in the eyes of two very star struck dreamers. They were imagining this would be their house with him.
The house was a great success, and Tom had planned a party to celebrate, and so he produced, from the refrigerator and cupboards, drinks and cheeses and snacks, and he pushed buttons on a black remote control and music came on, and it was Amanda singing, ‘There’s a Place For Us.’ Amanda actually groaned from the sensual pleasure of his house and his gesture to her. Megan was green with envy.
Ian and Laura and Ann Marie and Megan were enthralled with the house. It was a middle class architectural wet dream. Ian couldn’t believe that this was the house rustic Tom had created. The Toronto families were so jealous; they couldn’t even begin to hide it. When Ian asked Tom where he got the idea for his house, Tom told him that he wanted to build a house that could take with him when he moved to British Columbia to be with his people.
“I want to be able to put this down and feel like I’m home. The problem was simple; to make a portable house I could take with me. The barge idea came because I wanted it to be strong enough to take ocean waves.” Tom explained.
“What do you think native people will think of your house?” Amanda asked shyly.
“I don’t know. I hope they love it like I do.” Tom replied, cutting off any negative thoughts about his house.
Ian told him that if he wanted to rent it until then, he knew many people who would be thrilled to do so, and pay enormous amounts of money to take it up the Saint Lawrence.
Tom explained the inboard motor had enough power to take it anywhere at considerable speed for its size and weight.
“You can take it through the locks and go all the way to Lake Superior, or down the Mississippi, to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico, if you want.”
“There’s a business here.” Sharon said. Eugene, in his wheelchair, in his eyes, was obviously incredibly proud of his son.
Before the party was over, Amanda asked Tom if he was going to move into his new house and he told her that he was thinking that maybe she and Laura would like to move into it for the summer.
“You could live in the style to which you’re accustomed.” he teased, but she could see in his eyes that he was also absolutely serious.
When she went to ask Laura what she thought about moving into the boat house, Amanda was first surprised, and then absolutely delighted that Laura loved the idea. Ian, who had been standing beside her, actually shouted for joy when Laura agreed to do it. Amanda lifted right onto her toes in delight when her mother agreed, and when she looked back and saw Megan, who was still standing with Tom, she looked like someone had hit her from behind.
Finally Tom gathered everyone outside and produced a bottle of Dom Perignon and asked his mother to Christen the boat with the hundred and fifty dollar bottle of champagne. He whispered in her ear as she took the bottle, and she then bopped it against the steel side as she said the words, “I Christen you, The Friendly Cove.” The bottle bounced back like an ax from an ironwood tree. Everyone laughed and she put her shoulders into the next swing, and the black bottle smashed, and white sparkling foam spread away over the deck. Amanda quickly bent down to pick up the glass. Megan didn’t move. The party went on until everyone finally went back to the house and Ian reluctantly headed back to Toronto.
The next day it rained and Laura and Ann Marie got quite wet moving things from the cabin to the boathouse. Ann Marie soon mentioned the dissolving sand impressions and wanted the details of the previous night’s passion, and Laura simply told her it was spectacular, and then told the story of Ian saying they made quite an impression, and the voice from the invisible boat answering him. They really laughed.
The two old friends had a good time moving up two centuries. Ann Marie admitted to being very jealous. The idea of a microwave oven and electric lights, a toaster and a coffee machine and a shower so close at hand, all with an incredible stereo was really something to envy.
“It sure will be nice for you to be a modern lady again.” Ann Marie pointed out.” I’m not much of a one for manual labor, myself. If it wasn’t for Megan, I’d be out of here, like that.”
“You haven’t looked very happy since you got here.” Laura agreed, “It must be terrible to have to give up your work.”
“I can’t believe how much I miss all those neurotics, all those crazy dysfunctional lives. And coming here means really having to give up all hope of getting laid. You don’t want to lend me Ian for a little walk along the beach?”
“No. Not this week.”
“That’s what I thought” Ann Marie
It was that week that Laura decided to answer another of Eugene’s first questions. She would tell him about her husband. And of course that led to her life, to marriage, parenthood and work, work, work. She had no idea of what she was beginning.
“I think I’ve always were been reluctant to talk about Ian because, in the ways that matter, I don’t compare very well. Ian’s soft, I’m hard. He’s funny; I’m serious. He’s organized; I’m a mess… well, spontaneous. He’s a great father, I’m well, not that great at motherhood.” she began, and each day, in the little time they had, she went on talking, knowing there was so much to say that was so hard to explain because it went so deep into what she was and who he wasn’t, what she’d done with her life and what she hadn’t lived up to. She tried to be clear and honest.
“We fit like opposites, mostly. Where he’s strong, I’m weak. Where he’s weak, I’m strong.”
Laura was surprised when words came on the monitor and Eugene replied, ‘Like you and me.’
“No. Not like you and me. You have to stop bringing up old times, if you want me to do this.” she chided him.
‘I wasn’t talking about old times.’ Eugene replied.
“Yes you are.” she said emphatically, and then told him that he was going to have to shut up and listen.
Eugene typed OK with his eyes.
“I think for me and Ian, like a lot of professional people, love is this kind of contract where emotions get traded for logistical support. Romance gets to be like a really nice restaurant you can only afford to visit a few times a year. We’re too busy, too engaged, too ambitious, too greedy, too realistic or just too shallow to try to believe that romance can really survive day to day. Still, sex has always been good, on and off. It’s all we can really stand of romance.”
She sounded wistful.
“Sex is like fast food. Romance is going around being hungry for recipes you see in glossy gourmet magazines. I think Ian still dreams of those glossy romantic dinners, I really don’t. I guess I never have.”
So ended her preamble, her address to the judge and jury of one.
What followed that night, and many nights to come, was the confusing, circumstantial, contradictory evidence of the consequences of living with unrealized expectations and feelings. Amanda was exhibit A for the defense and also for the prosecution, the best evidence of how they succeeded and how they had failed, why they should be proud of their life choices and why they should be ashamed of themselves for having done so much less than they could have with her and for her.
Laura knew Amanda was the beautiful daughter that the two of them, especially her, had been too busy to appreciate or know. Amanda constantly affirmed and destroyed any romantic ideas that either of them had about marriage, children and parenting, and yet she was the most precious things either of them had ever held in their lives. She had bonded them together and torn them apart. She was their living, breathing personal contradiction.
“If it hadn’t been for Amanda, we wouldn’t be so close, but our lives would be so much easier and the walls between us that we built because of her, are ones that I don’t know we’ll ever take down. He’s been a good father but not a great father like he should have been, like you’ve been. And I’ve been a disaster at being a mother, and I don’t know if he’ll really ever forgive me for that. It’s like you bring home a beautiful puppy and it’s so much fun and then you just get busy and leave it home all the time, and somehow it grows up to be Lassie. I don’t understand how we did it.”
‘Lassie loves you.’ Eugene replied.
“Which almost makes it worse.” Laura answered.
That night and the next night, Laura rolled back through the years of her marriage as she remembered and told Eugene things she had never told anyone, even Ann Marie, or even her own too busy self in the long years with Ian. Her modern marriage had been years of territorial pissing contests to mark the personal territories of their psyches that neither of them had any real interest in taking from one another. Then there was all the ways and times and places they had to learn the personal, individual considerations of life, and to learn to change when changing was nonnegotiable, and be prepared to live with what the other person was when they were unable to change at all. It all came back to her. First it was all the negative things, all the guilt and anxieties, all the things that were said that shouldn’t have been said, all the things that one should have apologized for doing, all the things that were truly beautiful and sweet that were mostly left unacknowledged and untold in the strange muffled kind of spite only married people know.
Then Laura described the way they would fight and, by that time she finished describing their battles, she felt a nostalgia that was truly palpable. She described the wit and the stubbornness, the word play and the petty absurdity that was day-to-day conflict in marriage. She wondered, out loud, if she’d ever have that back. Since the farm, they didn’t seem to know how to fight anymore. And she didn’t, for the life of her, know or understand why that should be or why she missed it. Eugene said he missed the fighting too. Laura was shocked that he had had battles with the Perfect Lady Sharon, but didn’t dare ask what they fought over.
Then Laura went on and told about the centerpiece of a modern professional relationship; work, work, work. They were the good times. It was because of work that they needed mutual support for their professional egos. And work was life. That was when you really needed someone to be there for you. She told Eugene the truth.
“You know, work’s strangely addictive, the way sex is when you’re young. It’s such an irony that we began as flower children wanting sex, music and cheap drugs, and ended up addicted to work like our parents. All anybody talks about is having enough money to travel or have a tremendous cottage, and all anybody does is work. And all it is is moving money and egos back and forth, as fast as you can, and they move faster and faster all the time. Every moment seems so crucial, but when you look at it from here, it’s all such a waste of time. How can people get so involved in such an empty life? But it is such a rush.”
Seeing the city from the farm looked so frantic and so sad, everybody desperate to have enough to prove that they really were somebody. But, she missed it. She’d realized the book she was working on was just the same, it was going to prove she really was somebody. The difference was that she was really going to believe it, if she succeeded. Writing a really beautiful book was important. It really would make her someone. The brass ring would be hers.
As her nightly soliloquy proceeded, Laura lay back on the pillow beside Eugene and just talked, and she felt herself open like Tom’s boat, letting down its dark porches. She sat back and got comfortable and let herself look back over her life as she told Eugene stories of ordinary moments and beautiful experiences, disappointments and frustrations. Like the wall of photos in the Van Fleet dining room, Laura showed him the album of her heart, and even showed him the most candid pictures and told him about them. And the more she talked, the more she trusted him. And it was strange that once she was finally worn out, talked out, she felt warm and alive and excited by her life.
Laura talked about her work: the stories, and the characters, lunches and laughing, the transience of everything; friends and projects that came t
“People come and go, in rooms, talking of market share and phone calls from mothers, and diets, and the real people that matter. Chasing attention, not giving or getting enough of it, it all disappears like dew and hangs around like heavy fog. Who’s hot, who’s not, the sweat pouring down from your morning workout so you can keep looking good, or at least younger by ten years, if you’re lucky. Begging the choosers to want what you have, trying to fluff a sagging career so it looks like it’s maybe going to last. Actors and authors, publishers and reviewers, always trying to crack the A list and stay there. You know what it’s like to have someone with real power just smile at you? You know what it’s like to dream about them taking your calls, and the rush when they call you?”
“It’s sweet people and pricks in a life-boat full of money. It’s trying to get your hands on one of the oars. You have any idea of the rush in getting someone to really have a chance to grab the brass ring of the week? And you do it all so you can go first-class to St. Bart’s or Rio, to curving beaches and sensual food and rooms with lush views where sex is part of the gross national product. You do it all for dirty weekends away where you might meet someone cool and connected in Nantucket, or Paris, or Rome. You live for three days, tasting food that smells sweeter than money, sleeping in beds with sheets as cool as an attitude. It’s easy come and easy go and all so easy when you have the money to go and really indulge yourself. It’s the diamond life, as hard and alive with facets of fire as anything you can imagine. The city sure ain’t the farm.” Laura told Eugene everything, just like it was and would be, her hour with him vanishing in her memories.
Eugene listened, only occasionally asking a question to make her go on. He was her perfect listener, and only when he was dead would she realize the opposite was also true. It was as she was talking about her family and her life that Laura finally let herself quietly admit to herself that she loved the dying man beside her. It was all so bittersweet. The one question she didn’t answer was the one that went to the core of her being. ‘Tell me about you.’ Eugene had asked, and she had known when she had read the question that he meant something very different than telling him about her life. She had told him her feelings about all the things that had happened, she didn’t dare to even begin to attempt the ultimate question. Who was she, after all?
She had always believed that question belonged to fools and philosophers, and not to her. But there was something about Eugene asking her the worst of all simple questions that made her know that the question was one he believed she could answer, and she knew because he loved her, that he believed that the answer wouldn’t disappoint either one of them. To Laura, it was the absurd irony of love, people actually believed they could communicate what they were, and that it mattered. And there she was, going on and on. When she kissed Eugene goodnight each evening, she felt a fluttering cloud of sulfur butterflies inside her when she looked into his eyes, but she couldn’t bring herself to say what she felt. She wanted very much to tell him she loved him. But she didn’t do that, in words.
It was the following week that the bleeding heart of Europe flowed on to the farm. Refugees from Kosovo had come to the air base at Trenton, a half an hour away, and Tom had been among the first ones there, looking for someone who might have any news of his doctor friend Charles. When he came back, he was still stunned in the shock wave of the little ripple of chaos that had eddied into an army barracks from half a world away; he was overwhelmed, meeting the real people and faces from the teeming camps made real by television cameras on the Albanian border. He didn’t know what to do. His mother did. Sharon was on the phone and found out that the refugees needed clothes and toys, most of all. The army supplied everything else behind secure wire fences. Three quarters of the clothes in the big walk-in closet were packed in boxes and in the Cube van and were at the air base within hours. Toys were a problem. The Van Fleet children rarely had any commercial toys. Sharon had to get out her checkbook and delivered the toys and clothes with Tom and Ann Marie. The other thing they said they needed desperately were psychologists who could help the latest traumatized victims of Europe’s old recurring nightmare.
At the air base, they took the clothes and toys and turned the truck around and told them they would call Ann Marie when they had set up a system for counseling the refugees. The psychologists they needed didn’t have logistical support to do their work. Having enough translators would take time. It was in the chaos of command decisions that Sharon drove her wedge of determination over the phone lines and found the person who was responsible that moment, and got five families released to her care. They were coming to the farm to live in the cabins that were used by the foster families. The last problem the military had was that they weren’t equipped to decide who would be released to Sharon’s responsibility. Ann Marie was Sharon’s answer to that. She was the one who was trained to make such decisions, a psychologist would know such criteria, at least that was what she said to the Captain at the other end of the line. Ann Marie was stunned by what Sharon was telling her she had to do.
“What does anyone know about choosing the best candidates to release from a refugee environment? What were the criteria for their needs? How do you pick from so many in similar circumstances? How many do I interview? Do I pick the worst or the best cases? Am I supposed to do psychological triage?” Ann Marie pleaded with Sharon when she was told what she was going to have to do.
“When the question’s too hard to answer, I think it’s best to just go with your instincts.” Sharon had answered, but Ann Marie was still wide-eyed with fear.
For the week that the military was releasing refugees into community care, five families; twenty two people, were chosen by Ann Marie, using her terrified, guilt ridden instincts. It was like choosing puppies at the pound; the eyes that looks most desperate and needy and wanted to come with you where the eyes that she answered. She had, in fact, learned the priorities of desperation from her own life. Ironically, Ann Marie’s doctoral thesis had been, ‘Immigrant families, the crossroads of culture.’ She had learned that the crossroads were necessity and survival, what had been and what had once mattered were sometimes necessarily abandoned on the path that led far from the horizon of fear. She had discovered how hard immigrants tried to preserve their culture. In Canada, unlike most places, it was expected and understood that who you had been was a big part of who you might be. That sometimes lasted three or four generations, even long after the original language was gone. The quote that Ann Marie had used to begin her thesis was from the Grapes of Wrath. ‘If we lose our memories, how will we know who we are?’ was how Ma Joad had put it.
Now Ann Marie had to deal with people whose memories were of hatred and oppression that completely denied their humanity. Refugees were immigrants for whom bitter nostalgia was hard to swallow, and a staple, unavoidable diet. It was almost more than Ann Marie could bear. She didn’t understand how human beings could lose everything they ever had, every place, every thing, every memory of hope, and seem so normal.
Within the week, Ann Marie was in the deep end of the psyche, the place where human reason just barely held. And yet people, ordinary people had a resilience that astounded her.
The one criterion she had used when selecting her families was that someone in the family had to at least speak broken English. The challenge she faced with her families was so much greater than what she knew from her practice, the personal urban anxieties and emotional intractability of people whose problems usually were that they had too many choices and too many unrealized expectati
Ann Marie knew that she had no answers for these people who wanted, more than anything, to understand why people, often their friends and their neighbors, could have treated them as they had. Ann Marie didn’t know how to explain how good people, when given permission to do it, would become entirely evil. Ann Marie only knew what she always knew when people suffered. They wanted to tell someone. They wanted someone to understand how they had suffered and what they had lost. Ann Marie became the witness of the witnesses, and witnessing changed her. Strangely, in the midst of such horror and pain, she no longer felt depressed. Purpose had come to the farm for Ann Marie with the wounds of six hundred years of hatred. She listened and waited and came to know and treasure each one of the ordinary faces and admire the courage behind the extraordinary pain in their eyes.
Confused, shocked, heart sick, brutalized, desperate, lost people had come, reluctantly, to trust Anne Marie who didn’t even begin to try to make sense of where they were and why. The hard, unspoken questions would come more slowly after the world was no longer too terrible and real and too close at hand. Ann Marie was the one who could not look away. The families in the cabins around her were like the aftermath of the car wreck in the middle of a fast, unending highway.
The week after the refugees came, while everyone slept, Eugene’s breathing seized in his throat and he was coughing and drowning on his own saliva, and finally, finally, the monitor attached to him realized he was dying and screamed in the room and screamed beside Sharon’s bed where she was sleeping. Sharon ran through the house and when she got to her husband, she grabbed him and threw him over the end of the bed so that he was hanging from his waist and she pounded on his back to clear his airway of saliva. It helped, but the coughing continued, and then with a strength she had no idea she had, she lifted Eugene like a feather and lay him back on his pillow and fumbled with the air suction device she had only used, in pure panic, once before. She had been trained to use it so Eugene wouldn’t have to be in the hospital, and she was surprised her hands didn’t tremble as she slipped the plastic tube into Eugene’s throat and cleared his airway. She had saved his life once more. He lay there limp, looking like he was dead, except for his exhausted eyes moving slowly and his chest moving in the regular rhythm of the respirator.
The news had spread like a fire alarm through the house and all Eugene’s children flooded the room and the doorway, as no one dared speak the one pounding, unspoken question. ‘Is he going to die?’ While Sharon had been frantically pounding on Eugene’s back, his mother had come into the room and stared in her typical confusion as Martha took her hand to try to console her.
“You leave my boy alone!” Eugene’s mother barked.
Martha consoled her, explaining that Sharon was helping Eugene.
“Who is she? She should leave my boy alone. You shouldn’t talk with your mouth full,” she told Martha, as she brushed off her hand, and then turned and walked out of the room. Eugene’s mother rarely spoke from her dementia any longer. Even her determination to work at household tasks could only accommodate simple, repetitive things. Her mind was gone long before Eugene’s.
While a terrified family lay awake for the rest of the night, Laura slept silently in the houseboat, on the pull out sofa in the smaller of the bedrooms. She went to sleep that night looking at the stars over Haystack Island while Amanda slept as usual in the master bedroom, while the moon set once more in the West. In the days since she had moved to the house boat, Laura felt life moving around her in the beautiful chaos of spring: long lines of three and four hundred Canada geese called as they passed high overhead, wild geese, brother geese wondering where the heart would rest. Ducks came in flocks of hundreds to bob on the waves; Old Squaw and Golden Eyes, Mergansers and Mallards.
The songbirds sang and danced in the trees on the shore, and the tree swallows came in the hundreds, sweeping over the water and the willows. The Orioles sang with the warblers, the grackles clicked against the Red Wings cries as clouds of black insects gathered above the trees and shimmered like dancers swaying slowly to the warm hum their hundreds of thousands made for themselves.
The shore birds paired up and called to Laura when they passed overhead. As the Canada geese passed her, they spoke to her as they went back and forth to Haystack Island, and on still nights she could hear Bullfrogs chant and the geese talking occasionally. The blossoms of spring bulbs passed and fruit trees filled with bees and blossoms, white plum and cherry and fat apple pink. The orchard was always on the wind. Lilacs bloomed on the breeze in the dooryard as well, and the grasses became perfume. The place where she had made love with Ian was just another soft wave in the sand. Clear crystal waves slapped time to pink sunrises and red sunsets and it was all inescapable and sweet. A pair of Canada geese brought eleven newly hatched goslings the size of baby’s fists to show Laura what they had done. And over the next month she saw the goslings grow until their down was turning to feathers, and then one day all the geese in the air and on the water disappeared to molt on Haystack Island, and the next time she saw the eleven babies again they looked, sounded and moved just like their parents, except they were one half the size.
Then there was the stillness: still water, still air, after the songbirds slept.
Laura slept as she had never slept before, and when she woke by the water she felt the fresh, cool peace inside her releasing the cold grip of the dead hand she had held in the snow.
Arthur and Laura Lee had been the invisible saviors of her mind.
When she found out that Eugene had nearly died in the night, Laura was stunned. When she saw him lying asleep, looking so frail and so small, her heart constricted to keep from breaking as she stared at his hands lying limply beside him. There were only two stories left to write and she realized that she might have to do them herself. She realized she might not be able to try to answer the question of who she was. Life was always errors of ommision. Eugene was too weak to work for the next three days and for Laura, the sudden knowledge that she might lose him, that he might never see their book completed, drew all the energy from her imagination. As he often had when she left after breakfast, David followed her to the door and he didn’t cry or make a fuss but just watched her go.
The morning after Eugene had his crisis, Laura asked Sharon if David could go with her to the boathouse for the day. She would make his lunch; there were drinks available. He might enjoy the new setting. Of all the people in the world, David was the one person she needed that morning. He would be there and never ask anything.
It was difficult to tell when David enjoyed anything. His constant exploration sometimes seemed to slowdown, especially when he was with Laura. As she tried to work at her laptop computer, sitting and watching the slow rolling waves go by running yellow ribbons along the bottom ridges of sand, Laura tried to think about how she could even begin to tell Eugene who she was. Until she thought about what Arthur and Laura Lee would have thought about her, she didn’t even know where to begin. When she did, she began to understand; and she realized she had to begin seeing herself when she was a girl, when she would have perhaps welcomed Arthur and Laura Lee into her dreams. Before the brightness, before the beauty, before there was sex or ambition, outside of her class, outside of her family, inside of her heart, she tried to remember what it felt like to be who she was. The interesting thing was that she realized that she was looking for a fictional character, someone who existed only in her imagination, someone who was only as real as the characters she had stored in Random Access Memory, an imaginary character based on someone that had once lived and breathed. While she sat thinking, David
When it was time to go to the farmhouse for dinner, David did not want to go. He sat down on the dark porch and refused to stand, even when Laura tried to lift him. He didn’t squirm and he didn’t protest, but he wouldn’t be moved. Laura tried treats and talking sweetly and even going off along the beach by herself leaving him alone, but he wouldn’t move. He sat watching her until she came back, and Laura could see the relief in his eyes when she reached down and picked him up. Carrying an eight-year old boy half a mile was back-breaking, but there was no other way to get him to come with her, and although she stopped a number of times to try to take his hand and get him to walk with her, he sat down where he was, seemingly determined not to go back to his home.
Over dinner there was a serious discussion about what to do about David’s strange reaction. He never before seemed to care where he was. The difficult thing would be deciding what to do if he acted out when Laura left. David never acted out. If he did do that, no one knew if it would be a good thing or a bad thing. Sharon did not want to give in if he insisted on going with Laura, even when everyone said that it was a wonderful thing and that perhaps bonding with Laura was something that should be encouraged.
“That’s not fair to Laura, or David.” Sharon insisted, “What will happen if he bonds and then she goes away?”
No one had an answer for that until Laura spoke.
“Maybe it’s not so bad. If he bonds with me, he may bond with someone else. Maybe this is a developmental thing.”
Ann Marie said there was no telling, but it certainly was an encouraging sign. As a behaviorist, she always believed in rewarding appropriate behavior, but no one knew if his attachment to Laura was appropriate or not.
“We’re all going to lose someone we love.” Amanda said softly, replying to Sharon. It won’t be any easier for us than it will be for David. You can’t stop loving somebody because you’re going to lose them.” Tom and Megan each looked like they had been slapped.
Everyone knew Amanda was talking about Eugene and everyone in the room, except Amanda, knew the experience of losing someone they loved, and sometimes being the loved one lost. The discussion died until the practical reality appeared. After Laura said goodnight to Eugene, David wouldn’t be distracted or leave her side when she went to the door to leave for the evening. David stood pressed to the glass door when it was closed behind Laura, and when she was less than ten feet away he put his fist through the glass pane of the French door and cut the artery in his wrist. His hand on the other side of the door reached out for Laura as Sharon seized his arm, and slowly tried to pull his bleeding arm away from the large shard of glass still buried in his flesh, impaling him in the door. He didn’t cry or flinch as the blood poured on the floor and all over his mother. Laura came running back screaming. When David’s arm was free, Laura rushed through the door and held him while Sharon squeezed his arm and ordered someone to go for the first aid kit. Everyone could see the deep, ugly opening in David’s soft skin that went from his wrist nearly to his elbow.
For the second time in the day, there was a total emergency as a tourniquet was tied on David’s arm while Laura held him and stroked his head, and there was blood all over her and all over David, and it was like the feeling in the snow bank where time screamed to be released from its place of terror. No matter what they did, David didn’t cry, he just settled himself in Laura’s lap as if she was still sitting at the houseboat on the lounge chair. The artery was pouring blood when they released the tourniquet, and it was in the heart pounding slow motion of crisis that they got David to the nearest car and Tom and Amanda drove while Sharon and Laura sat in the back seat with David.
As Tom drove faster and faster, Laura’s head began to spin like it was filled with dandelion parachutes and her breathing started to get faster and faster, and Sharon saw it and told her to put her head between her knees, and she did that as Tom asked his mother if he should slowdown, Sharon told him to keep going, that Laura would be fine. Amanda got out of her seat belt and turned around and reached over the seat and tried to touch her mother, to stroke her shoulders and neck, telling her she was going to be fine and how Tom was driving very carefully even though he was going so fast. It was then that Laura passed out, and as her spine uncoiled she fell to the side striking her head on the passenger window. Amanda screamed for Tom to stop, but Sharon ordered him to keep going.
“She’s just fainted. She’ll be fine. It’s probably the best thing that could have happened.” Sharon said into Amanda’s desperate eyes.
At the hospital Laura and David were separated in the emergency room, David wheeled in to a team who worked on him until the surgeon finally came and sutured his artery and the huge gash on his arm. They wouldn’t let Sharon stay while they worked, and when she came back to the emergency waiting room, Laura was sitting awake beside Amanda, still looking confused and weak and dizzy. Amanda was holding an ice pack at the back of Laura’s neck as its sweat poured down the back of her shirt.
It was over an hour before they could see David. They had only used a sedative and a local anesthetic to do the surgery and so he was awake. It was one of the few times Sharon had ever seen David look frightened. He reached out his arms to Laura who went to him and took his undamaged hand and then bent down and kissed him. David didn’t pay any attention when Sharon came and stroked his head or when Tom and Amanda waved at him from the foot of the bed. David would have to stay, at least overnight, so his wound could be cleaned and monitored. Sharon looked uncomfortable when Laura told her that she would stay with David until the next morning so he would settle into his new environment.
Sharon knew she had to get back to the farm if she could. The Kosovar refugees were coming that afternoon, so she agreed and thanked Laura for her compassion. Still, leaving David wasn’t easy. He had chosen a mother, and both of them knew it, as Laura watched him close his eyes and Sharon silently waved goodbye and left Laura alone with innocence asleep.
They were in a familiar room in the same hospital were she had once come in to be cleaned and stitched from the glass embedded in her flesh. She had once again been the cause of an innocent boy’s suffering. She lay beside him for the rest of the day while he slept in sedated sleep. Before she slept, Tom and Amanda brought her a change of clothes.
The Kosovar refugees were already at the farm when Sharon returned with Tom and Amanda. Rosie had given a tour and then taken them down to the cabins with Ann Marie and Megan where there was confusion and reluctance about what was happening. It seemed that having seen the beautiful modern house, the refugees couldn’t understand why they were taken to these cabins without electricity or indoor plumbing.
“Are we to be your surfs?” one had asked, and Rosie and Sharon tried to reassure them it was not so.
Sharon tried to explain how the cabins were meant to build self reliance and they looked at her like she was insane when the translation was made.
“You live like Kings and we must live like animals. This is not how we live. We are not farmers. We come from a city.” the spokesperson replied.
Another man spoke of the cars he had seen on the short tour that Rosie had given the refugees.
“Why you have so many cars for such few people?”
“They belong to our children who no longer live at home.” Sharon answered.
“You have so many cars, you no need?”
As the short conversation went on, translations were made and people were shaking their heads in disbelief at what was happening and what they were being told. Finally, Sharon apologized for the accommodations and for the first time in her life she was actually embarrassed about asking people to live in simple cabins. The apology seemed to make a difference and someone said in translation that it
That night the refugees were served dinner in the coffee house and then the Van Fleet children sang, and then the Kosovars picked up some of the instruments and sang as well, and the tension seemed to ebb. The only problem was the outrage among the refugee men when they asked for wine and Sharon told them there would be no alcohol allowed on the farm, except at dinner. The only reason this was grudgingly accepted was because the refugees had no money to purchase their own and so, as beggars, they couldn’t choose what they thought was their right. Sharon was completely surprised that no matter how great the injustice a person suffered, it was the details and perceptions of injustice that were hardest to take. Sharon hated being seen as the oppressor.
The next day, Amanda drove almost too slowly so she could accommodate her mother’s fear, after they picked her and David up at the hospital, and she actually drove all the way down the lane to the beach because Laura just wanted to find her bed and sleep. It was just accepted that David would stay with her. Until Ian came that weekend, David slept beside her, at peace. The first day, Laura even cooked the two of them regular meals and she was surprised that Sharon never questioned the new arrangements. After the first day, David seemed to understand he would be staying with Laura at the boat house and he no longer resisted going back to the farmhouse. He would follow Laura wherever she went, up to the farmhouse, anywhere; everywhere.
Over the next three weeks, the refugees turned the farm up side down. Two of the men who seemed to be in charge, made it clear they wouldn’t allow the others to work in the fields or anywhere else. They were refugees, not free labor. When told they would be paid twenty dollars an hour the two leaders said it would be considered. They were willing to let women and children work but the two men would receive and administer the money. This wasn’t acceptable to Sharon, which immediately brought an impasse of violent voices. No one protested even as the resentment grew as the two leaders of the twenty broke every rule in the place. In spite of having no driver’s licenses, they took cars without permission. In spite of being told not to do it, they took wine from the wine cellar and drank in the cabins. When Rosie put a lock on the wine cellar door, it was ripped away the next night. The next day he installed the motion detector alarm that finally ended the raids. When the last intruder was caught, he denied any responsibility because of all that his people had suffered.
“We need wine. We need everything. You need nothing.” he had shouted and how could anyone argue with him.
The most difficult thing for Sharon was to explain to the foster families who had expected to come that summer that their places had been taken by refugees. People were crying on the other end of the phone telling Sharon how hard it would be without the money and the personal support the farm gave them. Sharon couldn’t help feeling even more frustrated by the irony of it all. Never had the farm felt so strange and foreign as when the refugees came to stay. The peace and quiet Laura knew at the beach was gone with the new people. The black lines of cormorants sliding above the water no longer came. The Geese made detours around.
Children were constantly coming onto the houseboat, and even David found it difficult. Children didn’t understand that David didn’t know how to play. He hated being handled. They constantly tried to engage him. All day long, as Laura tried to work, children would scream and run back and forth into the cold water. All day long they came for sweets Laura didn’t have.
Tom and Amanda could no longer find a place to walk and stop and kiss and be close, in private. Finally, there seemed to be only one place left for them to find peace and privacy and Tom took Amanda into his tree house in the old Apple tree and it was there, with the fading apple blossoms falling around them, that they first undressed one another. It was cool and slow and Tom was trembling and Amanda touched him and made him lie back, and it was all such timeless pleasure, pleasure she had no idea was in her power to give. When he made her lie back to receive, she was silent until his lips found her breast and when she moaned it wasn’t to tell him to stop. The heart longs for the one who longs for the pleasure in giving pleasure.
“Oh, my God.” she groaned.
Tom stopped immediately, afraid she was afraid, and he could see it was true for a very different reason, and then he realized how close they had come, how close he had come to releasing his control. If she hadn’t spoken, he would have made love to her and not stopped and the consequences of that rang in his head like the iron clapper of a bell. All he could think of was that he hadn’t even thought he might need protection.
“We can’t get naked again.” he whispered, “Do you know how close we came?
She knew. She nodded. She wished it wasn’t so because she wanted to make love with him and it didn’t matter to her if she got pregnant or he broke his pre-marital vows. She wanted to give him her body and her heart completely. Her heart was ready but her body still was just too afraid. She would have done it, but with such mixed feelings. She could still feel her rapist’s hands on her thighs.
Because the refugees had nothing but free time, Ann Marie spent most of every day talking with them. She realized how terror was a collective thing. It was rumors and rumors of rumors. It was atrocities in dreams and imaginations that just grew with time and unprotected sleep. It was the dislocation from everything familiar that made everything strange and terribly possible. It was anger at an enemy that was invisible. It was being afraid of people who meant no harm. It was having lost the past. It was having no future. It was clinging to anything familiar, even hate.
“They took baby and smash head on the clothes line pole.
“In the next village they rape women in front of children and take turns and then kill them like dogs.”
“They make some pay money for each hand, each arm, each finger and if couldn’t pay, they cut off.”
“They put gun barrel at old persons head with one or two bullets and spin, and sometimes it go off and somebody have brains all over their own walls.”
“They burn your house and shoot you down when you try to run out.”
Not one of the people Ann Marie talked to had actually seen such things. They had seen the burned houses and the dead bodies; one family had seen babies and old people with bullets in them. They knew their nightmares were real. They knew what it was to be hated and slaughtered for being who they were, even at second hand. It was only a week before people began to come to Ann Marie to tell her more and ask her what was to become of them. Ann Marie became the listener they needed, the listener who seemed to understand. When they asked her what she had suffered because of her own race, she told them it was nothing compared to what they had known, and it was absolutely true. Yet, it somehow was enough to make her accepted, almost as one of the group.
Megan hated the refugees. They were frightened and frightening, different and strange. Their eyes were like people she knew in the Vancouver streets but, except for the two leaders, they were like sheep. They didn’t begin to understand how style and attitude were all that a victim had. And she couldn’t believe the irony of the fact that the thing she resented most was that they didn’t work. She resented all the extra demands they put on Tom and everyone else. She wished they had never come.
The next crisis came when the refugee’s spokesman asked Ann Marie to convey their desire to move their mattresses from the cabins to the coffee house. Ann Marie agreed to pass on the request, even after she had to quell the anger that erupted when she said that Sharon would probably not agree. Sharon didn’t agree and the Van Fleets could barely eat their lunch when Ann Marie voiced the request. There were those who were reluctant to deny the refugees anything because of what they had suffered. There were those who said that their suffering didn’t entitle them to take over the farm. There were those who said that there must be some way to compromise. There were those who said that compromise worked two ways. How much was enou
It was almost immediately clear that the level of resentment on both sides was only going to get worse. The two spokesmen who spoke English and wanted to control the money for the refugees complained that their people were being treated like children. When Sharon replied and tried to explain to them the rationale behind living in the cabins and eating communal meals and having each person paid a separate wage, she didn’t believe the translation was fair because of the resentment and anger she could see in the faces as they listened to the translation of their spokesman. When Sharon finally insisted on individual comments and questions from the silent refugees, she was disappointed that the discussion almost immediately deteriorated into arguing over specific incidents. When Tom finally said that it was the behavior of the two spokesmen that caused most of the anger, the two men exploded into Albanian, arms waving angrily as they spoke to their people, and it was obvious that what they told them was absolutely inflammatory. People were actually shouting in Albanian at Tom. Amanda and Megan were afraid. When Sharon tried to suggest that they try another meeting another time with a translator she would find, it was the last insult the two leaders would accept. Whatever it was they said to their people, the anger left the faces and it was replaced by fear and contempt. Sharon asked Ann Marie what she should do and Ann Marie was paralyzed.
All the good intentions in the world had not been able to respond to the anger and distrust and the manipulation of two leaders content on securing their own power. As Sharon sat in the cold silence, she realized how important it was for everyone to accept that the leader represented everyone equally. How was that possible with two different groups? As always, it would only be the use of power that would get two groups with different needs and agendas to accept the authority of any decision. Sharon couldn’t believe that they were replaying the war in the Balkans right there in her own home. Both sides were sure they were absolutely innocent of blame. It was the leaders who argued. It was the followers who were inflamed and suffered the consequences of the clash of authority. The refugees accepted what their leaders said, just as her family accepted what she said and believed. It was all so heartbreaking.
The Van family and the refugees sat at separate tables and individuals would look over now and then and glances would focus into a held gaze, or eyes would be quickly averted. Fear and anger moved back and forth, hands closed, arms folded as bodies became visibly hard. It was the rigor of resentment. It was the resentment that could become hate. Finally, Sharon said that she would try to accommodate any problems the refugees might have, but ultimately all the decisions were hers. She would listen to complaints but they would have to accept her decisions, no matter how they felt. Those with the land and the money made the rules. Sharon hated the fact that it was true for her too. Her words were translated and the look of contempt directed at her was palpable as the refugees got up from where they were and the left the meeting in silent anger. The silence was broken when one of the people walking by Sharon said, “You like Serb.”
That night, while Sharon did Eugene’s physiotherapy, she told him how her she felt and she actually admitted that she wished she had never asked the refugees to come to the farm. Sometimes it was just too hard to be grateful for every experience.
“You think we really are the good Jonestown?” she finally asked him, and his eyes reflected her pain so well that she finally actually broke down and cried.
The next day Sharon got her wish. The two Kosovar spokesmen came to the house in the morning and demanded that they be allowed to go back to the air base. They were used to the military. They missed their own people and the own customs. They missed indoor plumbing. They missed not being treated with respect as people who had suffered one of the great crimes against humanity. Sharon didn’t argue or disagree. She said she was very sorry but got on the phone and felt very ashamed as she found the person who would listen to her request that the refugees come back to the air base. The only thing that shocked her was how easy it was and that the policy of placing refugees in the community had been completely reversed. She wasn’t told why. She didn’t ask. Two days later the refugees had gone back to Trenton.
For Ann Marie, it was like the bottom fell of her world. When the refugees arrived she had some social purpose, something to do where what she was trained to do actually mattered. The sense of detachment she needed to do her work was, as always, a solid center for her life, and the sense of engagement in new problems gave her the novelty she craved in most moments of her life. For Ann Marie her work had a perfect balance, one that didn’t exist in any other kind of social relationship. When the refugees went away, she went back to doing manual tasks. The only good thing about it was all the time she got to spend with Megan. She thought she didn’t show it and didn’t say anything to anyone, but she felt herself slipping back into the useless depression that came with the feeling that she just didn’t belong at the farm. Laura saw her friend was suffering and it only took one simple questions to solve the problem, after Ann Marie admitted to missing the Kosovar refugees.
“I thought they were looking for trauma counselors. Why don’t you drive to the base and volunteer?” Laura asked Ann Marie.
“They were supposed to call. I’m really supposed to be here connecting with Megan. Maybe I can ask Sharon what she thinks.”
Ann Marie was surprised at how easily and eagerly Sharon agreed that it was a good idea for her to see if they needed her at the air base. Sharon had not got over her feelings of failure. It was the first social problem she ever met in her life that completely defeated her. It was the first time the farm had failed anyone, or so she thought. Sharon cut through the bureaucracy, as only she could do, and within the hour Ann Marie was on her way for an interview at the air base. Her heart nearly sang as she drove and felt free, felt like she had reclaimed her life.
Laura was relieved that the refugees were gone. She hadn’t been involved in any of the arguments or the resentful discussions and all of the guilty gossip. It was actually a surprise to her when she woke up and they were gone. Peace returned to the beautiful bay, and the warm summer days and the cool nights on the water all belonged to Laura, little David and to her tired Amanda when she came home late every night from restoring her car.
Laura was undergoing a transformation she imagined she could actually feel in the cells of her body. The less she connected to the busy life on the farm, the happier and safer she felt. The summer warmth flooded her skin and the bright colors arrived blazing in the morning sun over the Eastern horizon. Her skin tingled in the black night, black like the moments she remembered long ago in a movie theater when all the lights went down. In the yellow sun, a shining graphite pair of rare black terns did that all day, turning and turning back and forth along the bay, touching the water with their beaks, squeaking like plastic toys as they passed, resting, so tiny, on the traveler stone out in the water while doves in the misty morning said,’ I do. We do.’ The stars were always incredible. Clouds rarely came by. Time moved as she had never felt it before. It felt almost like it moved inside her like a man. In the second week in June fireflies came down near the water and flashed by the black cottonwood silhouettes of the row of trees that guarded the back of the beach. The same blue and yellow colors, the fireflies streaked like huge shooting stars or flared like nova exploding, tiny fires in the infinite void. Walking back from her evening meeting with Eugene, thousands of fireflies exploded above the hay field that led to the
David asleep, Amanda asleep, Laura sat and felt the night take her to itself. In all the emotional intensity of the farm, in all the emotional depth of her own work, standing on the emotional precipice of her feelings for Eugene, Laura felt happy for the first time in her life. For the first time in her life, every moment was exactly enough. She only let one worry into her thoughts. But there was no last story. She didn’t know, and Eugene wouldn’t tell her, what had happened to Arthur and Laura Lee. Sometimes when David would lie on her lap, Laura would talk to him like she talked to Eugene. It was the same safe harbor of acceptance. She would tell him about the story she was working on. She would tell him where her heart was afraid to go. She would tell him things she knew were beyond her own understanding. She would tell him things she wouldn’t even have told Eugene. And one soft summer evening she even answered the last question she would never answer for Eugene. She tried to tell him who she was. She told him what she knew of images of herself and the images others had made from that. For Laura, what she was was once real, but she had somehow, somehow inevitably, turned who she was into fiction.
“It doesn’t matter because it’s impossible to live a life where you’re just living a dream, even when your dreams seem so real.”
Truth was in the spaces between dreams. Modern life was lucid dreaming that could only be controlled for a moment.
Memory and reality were like carbon paper; hard to find, and messy. Who she was wasn’t who she’d become. What she recalled of herself was just too black and white. Looking for the original Laura was like looking for an author from another time. It was like looking in life’s countless mirrors and always seeing herself for the first time. She was everything she had ever hoped to become and she was everything she feared she might be. For Laura, finding herself was like looking for Laura Lee. In her distant, childish longing to sing her life, she had just grown more silent, even to herself. With David, she broke her silence at last.
“David, you’re like my little soul, moving between things that are beyond you, moving between places you don’t understand. David, you love to hear me say your name like I love hearing mine and, like me, something inside will always be unknown. David, you’re so lovely and so empty of feelings, I don’t know why you want to be with me. It’s like we’re birds of a feather, little black terns going back and forth forever and forever. It’s almost funny that we belong with each other where it’s just sand and sky and water and no people. David, it’s you that’s real, I’m just a bad actor who never really learned how to listen and spent her whole life telling people what they wanted to hear. I’m the lady that needs people to see who she is. I’m still the lady that can tell the secrets no one ever admits. I’m the lady that loves the hunger in men’s eyes and I’m the lady who doesn’t believe in happy endings.”
Like a child swept away by a swollen river and buried in clay and wet sand, who she was was gone and lost forever, even as her memory of who she was was undone, like long, wet hair.
When Ian came on weekends, he was as happy as he’d ever been in his life. Alan stayed in the city to work in Wayne’s store, but he made evenings interesting in ways that Ian couldn’t have imagined. They talked. They listened to music. They ran every morning and watched entertainment news. They went shopping for nothing and through every art gallery they could find. Alan even worked with Ian on a junior version of the Queer Agents of Karma. He even took Alan to work with him on, ‘Bring Your Kid to Work Day’.
On weekends, Ian was usually covered in grease, working with Amanda underneath her Riviera. The frame had been sand blasted and primed, the exhaust and the radiator and all the brakes and lines had been replaced so that the faded chassis was soon going to come down over the rebuilt engine once more. Ian would’ve never imagined, in a million years, that some of his best moments with his daughter would come with the two of them and an open Chilton’s manual for a Buick Riviera.
Ian saw the mystifying change in his wife. Her blue eyes were clear and her body language had slowed so much he barely recognized her when she was walking at a distance. She moved the way she once moved in high school, but Ian didn’t know that. Only Eugene saw that change. Laura started to believe there might actually be a second act in a modern, professional life, although she had no idea of what it was.
Ian and Laura’s sex life had been put aside when David adopted Laura and came to live in the boat house. Although he slept on a roll out cot most nights, sometimes Ian would wake to find David’s small body curled up at his feet with his arm draped over Laura’s legs.
Until the summer solstice, it would have been hard for any of the McCalls to believe their lives weren’t moving into a new future that was better than they could have ever dreamed. Where it would be was a mystery, but what it would be felt real. The McCalls each had beautiful, new dreams of the future. But beautiful dreams could end with a blow from reality that could feel like a fist into the muscles of the diaphragm that left you gasping desperately for air.
It all began in the small black hours of one morning when Tom awoke to the lips that were tracing his naked body. Then he felt soft hands caressing the arch of his foot and felt lips move to his erection and he told Amanda that they should stop. But he didn’t move and he didn’t protest as the sensations built inside him and he could feel Amanda’s silken body, naked and sweet, as he had come out of his sleep. In the room no one else had entered since he had come to the farm, Tom savored another moment of pleasure, and the moment became moments in the black room and he felt pleasures he didn’t know he could feel, and he felt her soft, hard body move over him and he was inside her before he could even imagine protesting. Her breasts pressed down against him and he felt her lips on his mouth and he felt their full softness in their passion, in their swollen intensity and then knew, he knew, and his heart nearly exploded because he suddenly realized he was making love with Megan.
It was a victimless rape. It was betrayal. It was something he would never have done, and his pounding heart was split in the passion and the love he could feel consuming every part of him, like a fire. Megan moved over him with all her sexual experience and all the newness of love she could convey, and it was like no experience she had ever known. In the dark, in his room, in his own bed, it was her warm voice that reached into his heart as she groaned and took his body completely, and he began to move with her, responding to her love with all the intensity of their unspoken feelings, with all the wet connection of their passion, with all of their history thrashing together on his single bed. When Tom exploded inside her, their fingers were buried in each other’s hair; their bodies were slick with summer sweat, so cool and so hot at the same time. Megan wouldn’t let him go and it was only a brief moment before Tom saw her vague silhouette throw back and stifle a squeal as if she was an animal dying. Tom wanted to move from under her. He was thunder struck with what they had done. But she leaned forward and crushed her soft body to him and he felt her lips moving over his face, tracing his eyelids, brushing his cheek bones, caressing his lips with her tongue. Tom couldn’t feel anything except that he was imprisoned beneath her, that she had taken his innocence and he had given it completely, and all he could think about was what Amanda would do when she knew. He felt absolutely sick at heart. He knew his own best ideals were a lie.
He reached up to roll Megan on to the bed beside him and he could feel her hands reaching for him tenderly, and he had to take them in his own and hold them still, and he didn’t know what to say to her, to be angry or grateful that she’d exposed his own weakness, to be angry or grateful that she made him feel that such love and such passion could be combined. He couldn’t deny it to himself anymore. In all the electronic messages and connections, she had open
“Could you tell me you love me, just this one time. I need to hear you say it. Please.” she whispered.
Tom didn’t say anything.
“I don’t care if you can’t say it. You said it with your body.” Megan replied to the silence. Tom let go of Megan’s hands and when she touched him, she could feel his hard body harden. Tears still running down her cheeks, she got up and dressed, scrabbling for her clothes in the dark. Tom turned on the bed light and watched her dress and all his desire for the beauty of her lovely young body dissolved in her tears and his lack of them. She wouldn’t look at him, couldn’t look at him. The most beautiful passion she could have imagined, when love was a part of every cell of her body, was now just a paralyzed moment before she finally got out of his room.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen.” Tom said softly. It made Megan angry but she held it inside.
“Like the song, I made you feel like you were the only man. You loved it. Where was Amanda inside you when you were inside me? This is real.” she replied.
“I know it is. Too much is too real.” he answered, “We can’t do this again.” he replied sounding completely unsure it was true.
“That’s crazy. I don’t care if you feel guilty. I know what just happened.” Megan answered and stopped and looked at him lying naked and on the bed, and it was that last sight of his body that stopped her anger as she remembered his incredible touch. She tried to force a smile. She couldn’t.
“At least I got your cherry.” she said. She had stopped crying and her lips moved to the silent words as she told him she loved him and then she quietly opened the bedroom door and left him to a sleepless night of guilt and beautiful memories.
Before dawn, Tom was sitting beside his sleeping father, listening to the respirator, feeling ashamed, feeling like a branch stripped of its leaves. The computer came to life and Eugene asked Tom if he was okay. Tom told Eugene all the things he had been thinking before Eugene opened his eyes.
“You know how you once told me you should want to touch a woman’s heart as much as her body; and how I should believe that was how she felt too? What if those feelings happen for two people at the same time? I don’t know how to control my feelings. I don’t know how to control my own thoughts anymore. I can’t even control my own body. I just made love with Megan and it was everything you said it should be. But I love Amanda. I wish it was her, but it wouldn’t have been like that. I don’t know what to do.” Tom confessed.
“You’ll have to choose.” Eugene answered.
“I don’t know how. Amanda will probably hate me.”
“Because she loves you.”
“I don’t know what I’d do if she had done what I just did. How can she forgive me when I wouldn’t do it for her? She’s never going to trust me and I don’t blame her. I’ll probably lose them both if I don’t do something now.”
“Probably.” Eugene answered honestly.
“I’m going to go away for a few days and try to figure this out. Could you tell Mom?”
“O.K.”
“Love sure ain’t easy.” Tom said as he got up, and then he was stunned with the last thing his father said to him.
“Maybe you should think about me and Laura and your mother.
Tom’s heart felt like his father had hit it with a hammer. Inside an old wheel spun another one, and the centrifugal force almost took his breath away.
Tom didn’t say anything as he kissed his father’s sunken face and looked into his wide blue eyes before he turned and left him alone thinking about himself and Laura and Sharon and his son’s beautiful triangle tumbling into a circle in a spiral, a wheel within a wheel with it’s constantly changing endings turning to beginnings.
In the morning, the first thing Megan did before she even heard the news Tom was gone, was find Sharon and count out the ten, thousand dollars bills. In a strange way she was ironically paying for her own broken heart. It was almost as if both of them could feel the sound of the big three bladed propeller driving the huge Laker of love through their lives.
Megan told Sharon she had found someone who loved her for herself.
“It’s my mom.” Megan lied, and started to cry as she fell into Sharon’s arms and wept like she had when she had gone back to the cabin and told her mother everything.
When Sharon told the family at breakfast that Tom would be away for a few days without making any explanation, all the young children wanted to know where he had gone, but Sharon put them off firmly and clearly. It was all very strange and mysterious.
It was the first that Amanda heard that he was leaving and the unspoken questions directed to her by the children made her uncomfortable in their implications. When she looked across and saw Megan wouldn’t look in her eyes, she felt the slice of fear like a razor.
If Tom left without telling her anything, if his mother could not say where he’d gone, he was either planning something secret or running from his emotions. Amanda knew enough about men to know that when they ran, they were usually running from their heart. Megan’s nervous eyes were all she needed to guess which one it was. Amanda’s head felt like it was filling with cold oil. She felt dizzy and light headed and sick to her stomach, but she just sat there trying to make herself eat. After breakfast, she went to Megan who was standing with her mother and asked Megan if she knew anything about where Tom had gone. Megan honestly admitted she had no idea.
“Did you fuck him?” Amanda asked breathlessly.
There was an interminable second before she replied.
“You’ve had your chance. I took mine. So what?”
Shock. Rage. Reality. Amanda wanted to hit her for her cold reply and she was ashamed that the first thought in her mind was that Megan wouldn’t have had a chance with Tom, if it wasn’t for the color of her skin. Amanda turned and walked away without saying a word, and it was only when she was outside and saw her mother walking back to the beach with David that she broke into a run to catch up to her, and Laura heard her daughter running and stopped, and she could see something terrible had happened.
“Tom fucked Megan. How could he do that?” she said to her mother, holding back her tears.
Laura reached to touch Amanda’s neck and kissed her forehead, tenderly. Amanda stood back, not wanting affection to touch her cold body.
“It’s not my fault that I wasn’t ready. It was always him who made me stop, anyway. I would’ve done it, if he really wanted to. It was his idea to be so pure and perfect.”
“This isn’t your fault.” Laura said tenderly.
“Like it wasn’t your fault when you screwed around on Daddy?”
Shock. Sorrow. Regret.
“That was my fault, not your father’s. If you’re going to start blaming, you better be able to tell who’s innocent. Tom did this to you. He made you believe you were the only one. That’s not somethin
“So what am I supposed to do?” Amanda pleaded.
“You have to wait and see if what you thought you have together is real.” her mother answered, “Why don’t you come to the boat house and spend the day. We can talk. You can get mad. You can scream, if you want to.”
“No. I want to work. I don’t want to sit and wallow in the pain.” Amanda replied, “The worst part is that whatever I’m doing will remind me of him.”
“That would be true, no matter where you were or what you were doing.” Laura told her honestly.
“I know. Thank you. You can be really strong, you know? Thank you.”
Amanda’s broken heart was written all over her face as she tightened her lips and Laura kissed her again before Amanda walked away looking like she had lost her last friend. By the time she was back to the farmhouse her posture was straight, and from a distance, it didn’t look like anything had happened at all. Laura’s heart broke in harmony with her daughter’s as she had stood and watched her go.
Amanda asked Sharon if she could do some job by herself that day, and even though that didn’t happen very often, Sharon told her she could do some garden weeding or she could muck out the chicken pens in the barn. She chose the chicken pens. It felt most fitting.
Until lunch, Amanda breathed the acid bitterness from the end of the pitch fork, from crap she heaved in a wheel barrow that she took to the manure pile outside the barn. She decided that she wasn’t going to cry until she knew it was over and he was really lost. She tried to stay away from the recurring thought that if it wasn’t her fault, the fault was with the rapist monster in a prison an hour away. Amanda worked right through lunch.
Helpless. Helpless. Helpless.
When the private hour finally came, Amanda went to her root cellar and welcomed the darkness as she had never welcome darkness before. In the pure pitch of the empty void that enclosed her, she sat and felt she was somehow both alive and dead. The longer she sat, the more the root cellar felt like a tomb and, like Juliet, like Eugene, she didn’t seem to be afraid of death. Time became the smell of the few vegetables that were left there. Time stopped moving like the smell of the earth. All she had was what she felt, and what she felt was so cold she actually started to shiver. It was only after time moved into her imagination, to Tom and Megan together, that life began to feel real once again. Shock gave way to throbbing pain. Pain gave way to envy. It was like her mind became a movie projector in the black room, and she saw the two of them making love, and she couldn’t help imagining the images of the body she knew so well, and the feel of his lips and his hands, and she saw them moving on Megan and saw how Megan would’ve been so incredibly responsive as she had never been able to be. It was like watching a beautiful pornographic movie in her mind projected on her heart, and as she watched, she put herself were Megan had been, responding the way Megan must have responded, feeling his mouth and his hands and his whole naked body moving and touching her, wanting to excite her, making her feel his love inside her. Amanda began to feel the desire in her heart and she could feel it spreading through her whole body. She touched her lips with her fingers and felt how they were swollen and then she touched her breast through her shirt and felt her nipples were hardened and she slid her hands and snapped open the cutoff blue jeans she was wearing and slid her fingers under and into herself and she felt so excited, it was as if she had become the woman in the movie as Tom made love of her. And then he was inside her in her imagination and she was responding in her imagination to the images and the feelings that were so real that she was touching herself with the intimacy she knew and believed Tom felt for her alone. In the black room, Amanda could hear her own moaning and it sounded to her just like it would have if Tom was there and they were making love and she was responding and responding and responding, and then, and then she imagined him coming inside her and she was suddenly inside him. She could feel that her heart was inside him pounding, and she came with an orgasm that shook her body like leaves on a branch, struck by a wind, so sudden and strong, she felt like her heart was about to be ripped away.
That night, through the Walnut panels, Amanda’s voice spoke her mother.
“What do I do, if he comes back and wants me to forgive him?”
Laura didn’t know how to answer. “Ask your father.” she said, and Amanda could barely hear her voice.
At two the morning Ian’s phone rang and it was Amanda whispering into her mother’s cell phone, whispering so she wouldn’t wake her mother, the mother she didn’t know wasn’t asleep.
“You know when mom slept with that man? Tom’s done that to me with Megan.” Amanda began, right to the point.
Two hearts broke together as she told him what happened and he listened so quietly, so patiently and Amanda could just hear in the silence that his heart was breaking for her and it made her love him so much.
“What should I do?” she finally asked, and after a long silence, he spoke,
“If you can’t forgive, you’ll lose everything. The only time to quit loving is when there is nothing left. How much is left between you and Tom?”
That was the million-dollar question. Amanda knew the answer immediately. Everything was left except his perfection. She knew him in her soul, and she knew their absolute connection. What she didn’t know was how long it would take for his fall to stop hurting. She didn’t know if he could forgive himself. He wasn’t like her mother.
Talking to her father who had been there and done that, she knew she would forgive Tom.
It was amazing to Amanda to know a person could learn to live at ease with fear and pain as she waited for Tom to come back. The first time she smiled was when she thought to herself that he would be really proud that she was so strong. He had really made her prove it. Amanda’s broken heart became invisible, and no one except the two mothers and the two fathers knew what had happened.
Amanda and Megan passed one another and ate meals at the same table, and it seemed there was an unspoken understanding that there would be no blame or self justification expressed. There was just the cold metal taste of betrayal and guilt. It wasn’t hate, but fear in Megan and Amanda’s eyes that passed between them when their glances crossed and were held and were gone. Amanda and Megan both just tried to stay out of each other’s way.
Tom stayed away. Amanda waited.
Tom stayed away. Megan waited.
The second day he was away Amanda went for a walk after dinner to the Walnut forest. He had once told her that it was the place that held the moment that she’d become part of his heart. It was their sacred, silent place. It was the place where her imagination first saw herself married and knew the first moment when her unknowable future had begun. In the wind in the soft pines and the empty walnut trees, sitting on a stone by the old black pool; no frog-splash, no rings disappearing, no eyes surfacing to see her as she began to sing. It was the song she had planned to sing for him on his birthday in September.
In this world of ordinary people, extraordinary people, there was him. In this world of over-rated pleasure and underrated treasure, there was him. In this world where too many people play at love and hardly any stay in love, there was Tom.
“I’d live to love. I’d love to live with you beside me. This role so new, I’ll muddle through with you to guide me.” she sang so beautifully.
It was all still true. It was all so sad and beautiful. Love was a mansion with such beautiful rooms, even if you had to live in your room all by yourself; even if you had to leave that mansion behind forever.
More than ever she was glad there was Tom.
It was after four o clock on the third day since he left that Tom drove down the lane of the farm.
He knew exactly where Amanda and Megan would be in their hour of solitude.
The heavy door to the root cellar burst open the blackness and Amanda’s eyes were in pain at the si
“Could you please come with me? I have to talk to you and Megan.” he asked her, and fear and sincerity and hope were mixed in his face. Amanda agreed, simply nodding her head.
Tom left her standing at the turn to the barn when he went to get Megan.
He opened the door into the granary and turned on the light and found her where she had tended Tundra not long before. He opened the wire gate and when Megan saw him she threw herself into his arms, and he felt her lips on his neck, before he stood her away and told her Amanda was waiting and that he wanted to talk to both of them. In the half-light he could see the terror in Megan’s eyes.
Amanda and Megan both looked like nervous children waiting in the principal’s office.
“Let’s walk down to the beach. We can sit down and talk.” Tom said, “But before we go, I want you both to know how sorry I am that I hurt you. Don’t say anything now. There are some things I have to say before you say anything.” he said, resolutely. They both agreed with dry voices.
At the beach, they turned and walked away, in the opposite direction from the houseboat, until they found a small place in the dunes in the afternoon shadows, Tom sat across from the two women who loved him.
“When I left, I was just going to drive and think about what had happened. Amanda, I can tell that you know something happened between me and Megan. We made love.”
He could see in her eyes that she knew that too.
“People in love don’t make love to someone else. I always believed that was totally true. And I still think it is when it’s just two people in love. I was never willing to admit to myself that both of you love me. And I’ve never been willing to admit to myself that I loved both of you. I just never imagined it could be that way, but it is, I know it is, I can’t help it, but it’s true.”
This wasn’t what either one of them wanted or expected to hear. They had sat and waited like he was a jury of one about to condemn one of them, and they both were stunned that the verdict was that they were both not guilty; they were both innocent of all charges.
Tom continued explaining how he finally realized that he couldn’t come up with an answer for what to do and how to take responsibility for his feelings and actions, and so he became more and more confused until he finally just wished he had someone to talk to that would understand. He knew his father and mother would tell him the truth, but they would ultimately accept anything he decided. He wanted someone who was wise, someone who would tell him what to do.
“I kept wishing I had an elder to talk to and ask advice, and then I remembered Miss Brown and how much she cares about Amanda and I thought that she was probably the only person I knew who could help me. I don’t know why I thought so, but I was totally right. When I told her what had happened and how I felt and tried to explain to her that I really wanted both of you to love me, she didn’t think that was so crazy. Then she asked me the one question I had to answer. She said it was perfectly understandable that I loved two people and wanted to have them love me in return. She then asked me if I thought it was possible to share my whole life with two people. That was the question.” Everyone knew the answer to that. It was obvious that Tom knew he would have to choose.
“So who is it?” Megan asked coldly.
“I don’t know. I can’t decide that. If I loved one of you more, it would be easy. I’d just apologize for hurting whoever it was, and life would go on. But I can’t choose. I don’t know how to choose between love and love.
“You have to.” Amanda said firmly.
“I know. That’s what Miss Brown said too. I know it’s true and when I asked her how I could possibly decide, she told me that the best thing I could do was just stand back and wait. She said time makes every decision, and if I gave myself time, I’d know.”
Amanda felt betrayed. His absolute love was anything but. still, it was undeniable that it was more than she could ever imagine, more than she’d ever find with anyone else. She would wait.
Megan felt incredible hope. She had come between two perfect loves, between two loves that were ideal in everything but the flesh. She had made Tom feel love’s ideal in his body and it was enough to give her almost an equal chance. She wanted to kiss him. But she would wait.
“I don’t know how you’ll both feel about this, but I think when we’re alone it should be the three of us. And I guess, until I can decide my whole life, I don’t think I should be touching either of you.”
“So we have to act like we’re brother and sisters?” Megan asked.” Too weird!”
Amanda looked guilty but almost relieved. Megan looked like she was being unfairly handicapped. She didn’t like it, but at least she had a chance. She was no longer playing the game in secret.
The story of Tom’s two girlfriends amazed everyone and everyone was even more shocked at the next coffee house Saturday when Tom and Megan and Amanda were there together without the faces of love’s triumph or loss. Amazingly, it was as if nothing had happened except the three of them sat together with their parents and had fun. Amanda didn’t sing any torch songs as she had imagined she might. Past midnight, she and Tom actually pulled Megan to this stage and the three of them sang, ‘Love Is a Bore.’ and everyone laughed. The trio could only smile.
From her room that night Amanda sang a traditional ballad as Ian and Laura listened and loved her. It was Tom’s song.
There is a boat
And it sails the sea
It’s weighted deep
As deep can be.
But not as deep
As this love I’m in.
I know not if
I sink or swim.
So build me a boat
That will carry two
And both shall row,
My love and I.
My love and I.
My love and I.
Everything was the same and everything had changed. Love at a distance, out on the water was lonely, so lonely for Tom and Amanda and Megan