Pedro aspirated her lung, but it still became more and more difficult for her to breathe. I decided we should really clean her room. Mercedes stayed with her in the living room while Mirna and Belen and I swept and dusted, washed the walls and windows and floors. I moved her bed so that it lay horizontally beneath the window; now she could see the sky. Belen put clean ironed sheets and soft blankets on the bed and we carried her back in. She leaned back on her pillow, the springtime sun full on her face.
“El sol,” Sally said. “I can feel it.”
I sat against the other wall and watched her look out her window. Airplane. Birds. Jet trail. Sunset!
Much later I kissed her good night and went to my little room. The humidifier on her oxygen tank bubbled like a fountain. I waited to hear the breathing that meant she slept. Her mattress creaked. She gasped, and then moaned, breathing heavily. I listened and waited and then I heard the clink clink of curtain rings above her bed.
“Sally? Salamander, what are you doing?”
“I’m looking at the sky!”
Near her I looked out my own little window.
“Oye, sister…”
“Yes,” I said.
“I can hear you. You are crying for me!”
* * *
It has been seven years since you died. Of course what I’ll say next is that time has flown by. I got old. All of a sudden, de repente. I walk with difficulty. I even drool. I leave the door unlocked in case I die in my sleep, but it’s more likely I’ll go endlessly on until I get put away someplace. I am already dotty. I parked my car around the corner because there was someone in my usual spot. Later when I saw the empty spot I wondered where I had gone. It’s not so strange that I talk to my cat but I feel silly because he is totally deaf.
But there’s never enough time. “Real time,” like the prisoners I used to teach would say, explaining how it just seemed that they had all the time in the world. The time wasn’t ever theirs.
I teach in a pretty, fresa, mountain town now. The same Rocky Mountains Daddy used to mine, but a far cry from Butte or Coeur d’Alene. I’m lucky though. I have good friends here. I live in the foothills where deer walk dainty and modest past my window. I saw skunks mating in the moonlight; their jagged cries were like oriental instruments.
I miss my sons and their families. I see them maybe once a year and that’s always great, but I’m no longer really a part of their lives. Or of your children’s either. Although Mercedes and Enrique came here to get married!
So many others have gone. I used to think it was funny when someone said, “I lost my husband.” But that is how it feels. Someone is missing. Paul, Aunt Chata, Buddy. I understand how people believe in ghosts or have séances to call the dead. I go for months without thinking of anyone but the living, and then Buddy will come with a joke, or there you vividly are, evoked by a tango or an agua de sandia. If only you could speak to me. You’re as bad as my deaf cat.
You last arrived a few days after the blizzard. Ice and snow still covered the ground, but we had a fluke of a warm day. Squirrels and magpies were chattering and sparrows and finches sang on the bare trees. I opened all the doors and curtains. I drank tea at the kitchen table feeling the sun on my back. Wasps came out of the nest on the front porch, floated sleepily through my house, buzzing in drowsy circles all around the kitchen. Just at this time the smoke alarm battery went dead, so it began to chirp like a summer cricket. The sun touched the teapot and the flour jar, the silver vase of stock.
A lazy illumination, like a Mexican afternoon in your room. I could see the sun in your face.
Homing
I have never seen the crows leave the tree in the morning but every evening about a half an hour before dark, they start flying in from all over town. There may be regular herders who swoop around in the sky for blocks calling for the others to come home, or perhaps each one circles around gathering stragglers before it pops into the tree. I’ve watched enough, you’d think I could tell by now. But I only see crows, dozens of crows, flying in from every direction from far away and five or six circling like over O’Hare, calling calling, and then in a split second suddenly it is silent and no crows are to be seen. The tree looks like an ordinary maple tree. No way you’d know there were so many birds in there.
I happened to be on my front porch when I first saw them. I had been downtown and was on my portable oxygen tank, sitting on the porch swing to look at the evening light. Usually I sit out on the back porch where my regular hose reaches. Sometimes I watch the news at that time or fix dinner. What I mean is I could easily have no idea that that particular maple tree is filled with crows at sundown.
Do they all leave together then for still another tree to sleep in, higher up on Mount Sanitas? Maybe, because I’m up early, sitting at the window facing the foothills, and I have never seen them come out of the tree. I see deer though, going up into the hills of Mount Sanitas and Dakota Ridge, and the rising sun glowing pink against the rocks. If there is snow and it is very cold, there is alpenglow, when the ice crystals turn the color of the morning into stained glass pink, neon coral.
Of course it is winter now. The tree is bare and there are no crows. I’m just thinking about the crows. It’s hard for me to walk so the few blocks uphill would be too much for me. I could drive, I suppose, like Buster Keaton having his chauffeur drive him across the street. But I think it would be too dark then to see the birds inside the tree.
I don’t know why I even brought this up. Magpies flash now blue, green against the snow. They have a similar bossy shriek. Of course I could get a book or call somebody and find out about the nesting habits of crows. But what bothers me is that I only accidentally noticed them. What else have I missed? How many times in my life have I been, so to speak, on the back porch, not the front porch? What would have been said to me that I failed to hear? What love might there have been that I didn’t feel?
These are pointless questions. The only reason I have lived so long is that I let go of my past. Shut the door on grief on regret on remorse. If I let them in, just one self-indulgent crack, whap, the door will fling open gales of pain ripping through my heart blinding my eyes with shame breaking cups and bottles knocking down jars shattering windows stumbling bloody on spilled sugar and broken glass terrified gagging until with a final shudder and sob I shut the heavy door. Pick up the pieces one more time.
Maybe this is not so dangerous a thing to do, to let the past in with the preface “What if?” What if I had spoken with Paul before he left? What if I had asked for help? What if I had married H? Sitting here, looking out the window toward the tree where now there are no branches or crows, the answers to each “what if” are strangely reassuring. They could not have happened, this what if, that what if. Everything good or bad that has occurred in my life has been predictable and inevitable, especially the choices and actions that have made sure I am now utterly alone.
But what if I were to go way back, to before we moved to South America? What if Dr. Mock had said I couldn’t leave Arizona for a year, that I needed extensive therapy and adjustments to my brace, possibly surgery for my scoliosis? I would have joined my family the following year. What if I had lived with the Wilsons in Patagonia, went weekly to the orthopedist’s in Tucson, reading Emma or Jane Eyre on the hot bus ride?
The Wilsons had five children, all of them old enough to work at the General Store or the Sweet Shop the Wilsons owned. I worked before and after school at the Sweet Shop with Dot, and shared the attic room with her. Dot was seventeen, the oldest child. Woman, really. She looked like a woman in the movies the way she put on pancake makeup and blotted her lipstick, blew smoke out of her nose. We slept together on the hay mattress covered with old quilts. I learned not to bother her, to lie quiet, thrilled by her smells. She tamed her curly red hair with Wildroot oil, smeared Noxzema on her face at night, and always put Tweed on her wrists and behind her ears. She smelled of cigarettes and sweat and Mum deodorant and what I later would learn was sex. We both smelled like old grease because we cooked hamburgers and fries at the Sweet Shop until it closed at ten. We walked home across the main street and the train tracks quickly past the Frontier saloon and down the street to her folks’ house. The Wilson house was the prettiest in town. A big two-story white house with a picket fence and a garden and a lawn. Most of the houses in Patagonia were small and ugly. Transient mining town houses painted that weird train station mining camp butterscotch brown. Most of the people worked up the mountain at the Trench and Flux mines where my father had been superintendent. Now he was an ore buyer in Chile, Peru, and Bolivia. He hadn’t wanted to go, didn’t want to leave the mines, working down in the mines. My mother had convinced him to go, everybody had. It was a big opportunity and we would be very rich.