Back at home, Helen was barely recognizable to her children. Gone was the lean woman with the weak half smile who acquiesced and habitually shrugged. In her place was a woman who meant business. A woman who’d had enough, except to drink. A woman who kept a coffee mug of Cabernet behind the toaster and couldn’t be bothered by lipstick and knock-knock jokes; this new Helen needed comfortable shoes and chutzpah and charts taped to the fridge. There was no time for self-pity or vanity. There was too much to do. Casseroles and committees, appointments and disappointments, but above all else: divorce. Helen 45 had no time for anything other than everything that had to be done. Services for this person over here and that person over there, and things to mail and repair and wash and return.
Helen 45, fueled by thick coffee and sacrificial drive, never stopped to consider who she had become, until one day, at a shopping mall, a woman at a kiosk pulled Helen over to a mirror. She pressed both of her hands to Helen’s cheeks and pushed her face up to the glass. “I am guessing,” the woman said, “that you do not recognize this person.” Helen was furious, but she could only look at who-she-now-was for so long before the anger turned to grief. Right there in the mall, an inch from the reflection of her limp hair and plain face, Helen began to weep. “I’ll give you this cream,” the woman said. “Rub it all over and you will be like you once were.”
Helen complied. She bought the cream and she drank her wine and she told her friends what the woman had said. Helen’s friends agreed. They went out and bought Helen things to wear that Helen had never worn before. Things that laced and snapped and lifted. Things that suggested she could still provide the pleasure she had under the birches, the power she had signed over on the cul-de-sac. Helen’s friends dressed her like their empty lives depended on it. They poured champagne down her throat. They reminded her of all the things she did for everyone other than herself, then they took her across town and propped her in a bar, a saloon really, and told her to do something for herself for once. Helen didn’t know what this meant. Did it mean quilting? Container gardening? Giving this stranger here or that one over there, the one with the melting daiquiri, some portion of her flesh to knead or need? Did it actually mean doing something for someone else? The more she drank, Helen began to think this was the case. So, she moved six barstools down and threw four shots back and, forty minutes later, ended up giving a man with sad eyes and soft shoes twenty minutes of her time in a Microtel. This transaction required Helen not to exchange pleasure or power, but to deal in the currency of purpose.
“Tell me I mean something,” the man said.
From beneath him, Helen whispered. “You mean something.”
“Say it again,” the man said.
But Helen would not. With each empty thrust, she could feel something inside her womb already growing. By the time the man lit a cigarette and called her a cab, the dot of an “i” had turned into a peppercorn. The next morning it was a raspberry. Helen could feel it clinging to her insides like a burr to a sock. She sensed the fourth version of herself would not put up with the things this version had.
Helen’s children and friends were mortified that she’d let herself get pregnant—at her advanced age and on a one-night stand, of all things. But Helen found something rebellious in it. Some sort of unexpected joy. She went out and bought gypsy dresses and drank herbal tea and burned incense in the house. She read books on palm reading and chakras. She sold all the jewelry Bill had given her and used it to buy a plot of land stitched with hackberry trees. “We’ll build a cabin,” she told the children, who were nearly grown now. “We’ll buy goats.” But the children wanted nothing to do with a log house or bearded animals or her—much less a bastard sibling—so Helen spent her days alone in rubber boots and a coat meant for a man, walking the fields she’d paid for in diamonds, learning how to smile like she had on that day under the birches.
Inside Helen, the fourth version of herself grew quickly at first, but then slowed toward the end. At eight months, her stomach was little more than the size of a small melon, the sort that might feed a single child. A midwife helped her birth herself at home, in a tub filled with hot water and parsley, and after two pushes that felt more like sneezes, Helen 79 emerged small and bony, but strong and hale, covered in rumpled skin as smooth as suede. Her hair was as white and wiry as a horse’s tail. Her eyes were both kind and mean. And once Helen 45 saw Helen 79, she approved and moved on, dying right there in the tub with a final relieved exhalation.
Helen 79 and the midwife buried Helen 45 in the backyard. They marked the grave with a coffee cup filled with wine and daisies. They talked about martyrdom and devotion, the male ego and face cream. Then Helen 79 paid the midwife in tarot cards before hitching a ride to her hackberry woods where, for twelve years, she lived alone and happy in a silver trailer with seersucker curtains.
Helen 79 let herself do as she pleased. She let thrift-store dishes pile in the small sink. She let her snowy hair grow to the backs of her knees. She let herself make things that made no sense: leaves glued to rocks, twigs stuck into the ground in serpentine shapes, moss tucked into her pillowcase where she could hear it grow. She ate dandelion greens and wild onions and fiddlehead ferns. She sometimes wandered into town with chartreuse-stained teeth and bought oatmeal and salt and cigars and tabloids and scotch. She smiled at people and they stared back. Sometimes she saw her ex and his third 29. He looked through her the same way the wind had once moved through her. Sometimes, she invited her children to visit. They would stand in her trailer, appalled. Her son would encourage her to sell the land for condominiums. Her daughter would wash and stack the cheap dishes, crying the whole time. On her children’s final visit, they took Helen 79 to a doctor who asked her to do arithmetic, to say the alphabet backwards, to name silly things, like the capital of Finland and which actress starred in Casablanca and what animal veal came from. In the end, the doctor determined Helen 79 wasn’t senile, just weird, and as a thank-you Helen kissed him on the mouth, long and hard, while her children buried their faces in their hands.
A day eventually came when Helen 79 knew the end was near. Her heart hurt, then it didn’t. It hurt, then it didn’t. Her heartbeat became one of pain, not-pain, and she began to prepare her goodbye. She gathered her belongings in little piles. Two for her children, four for her friends. An anklet here, a poem there, some dried apricots, a little dropper bottle of her old tears, a rose peeled like an artichoke, an old goat’s tooth, and one emerald the size of a testicle they could all stab each other over.
In this process, Helen came across an old jar. It was the one she’d bought at the shopping mall. Inside, she found a mound of yellowed cream, which she dabbed under her eyes and across her cheekbones. As she did this, she could hear the woman say, “You will be like you once were.” Helen used it all, scraping it from the jar, over her wrinkled lips and loose neck, across her melting breasts and abdomen. Then she went out into the hackberry trees and clutched at her aching heart and waited to die. But the ache only moved from her heart to her chest. And from her chest to her abdomen. And lower still until Helen gasped and realized there might be a fifth version of herself.
“How old?” she asked the trees. “What for and why?”
The trees had nothing to say and Helen didn’t either, and as she stood to hug a hackberry and give the only push she was capable of, her last self fell from her—an oily, blind, she-wolf puppy no larger than a moccasin. She collapsed next to it on the leaves and let it wind its way to the hem of her dress. She had no energy to stop it from writhing up her leg, over her wrinkled belly, and onto her dry breast. Helen yelped at the wolf’s needle teeth. She saw Dustin, her two children, her brother, her parents. She felt Bill behind her, the sad-eyed man above her. Then she looked down and saw herself below.