I saw what he saw, my mother’s yellow dress, me standing in the door. I smelled his cigarettes. He said, The cherry trees, they break your heart.
I drove up that road through the reservation, my mother’s laughter floating through the open windows of the truck. She made me dizzy, all that dancing — I felt myself pulled forward, twirled, pushed back, hard.
The lights of the steeple still burned. I was Noelle, the same kind of woman, a girl who couldn’t stand up by herself. I wanted to weep for my father. I wanted not to be drunk when I got home, not to smell of boy’s sweat, sulfur and crushed lilacs, mud. I wanted to stop feeling hair between my fingers, to stop feeling hands slipping under my clothes.
The dogs on the roof growled. All the white plaster deer surged toward the road. Wind on my face blew cold.
Past the Church of the Good Shepherd, a hundred pairs of eyes watched from the woods, all the living deer hidden between trees along this road. I practiced lies to tell when I got home. I thought, My mother and I, we’re blood and bone. I saw how every lie would be undone. I watched a dark man wrap his arms around my pale mother and spin her into a funnel of smoke.
Then he was there, that very man, rising up in a swirl of dust at the side of the road — a vision, a ghost, weaving in front of me. Then he was real, a body in dark clothes.
There was no time for a drunken girl to stop.
No time to lift my heavy foot from the gas.
I saw his body fly, then fall.
I saw the thickness of it, as if for a moment the whole night gathered in one place to become that man, my mother’s lover. A door opened at the back of a bar in Paradise. His body filled that space, so black even the stars went out.
I am a woman now, remembering. I am a woman drinking whiskey in a cold car, watching the lights in my father’s house. I am a woman who wants to open his door in time, to find her father there and tell.
Twenty-one years since I met Vincent Blew on that road, twenty-one years, and I swear, even now, when I touch my bare skin, when I smell lilacs, I can feel him, how warm he was, how his skin became my shadow, how I wear it still.
He was just another drunken Indian trying to find his way home. After he met me, he hid his body in the tall grass all night and the next day. Almost dusk before he was found. There was time for a smashed headlight to be reassembled. Time for a dented fender to be pounded out and dabbed with fresh green paint. Time for a girl to sober up. Time for lies to be retold. Here, behind my father’s cottage, I can feel the body of the truck, that fender, the edges of the paint, how it chipped and peeled, how the cracks filled with rust.
I waited for two men in boots and mirrored glasses to come for me, to take me to a room, close the door, to ask me questions in voices too low for my father to hear, to urge and probe, to promise no one would hurt me if I simply told the truth.
Imagine: No hurt.
But no one asked.
And no one told.
I wanted them to come. I thought their questions would feel like love, that relentless desire to know.
I waited for them.
I’m waiting now.
I know the man on the road that night was not my mother’s lover. He was Vincent Blew. He was mine alone.
He lies down beside me in my narrow bed. I think it is the bed my father built. The smell of pine breaks my heart. He touches me in my sleep, traces the cage of my ribs. He says, You remind me of somebody. He wets one finger and carves a line down the center of my body, throat to crotch. He says, This is the line only I can cross. He lays his head in the hollow of my pelvis. He says, Yes, I remember you, every bone.
He was behind me now, already lost.
I didn’t decide anything. I just drove. My hands were wet. Blood poured from my nose. I’d struck the steering wheel. I was hurt, but too numb to know. Then I was sobbing in my father’s arms. He was saying, Ada, stop.
Finally I choked it out.
I said, I hit something on the road.
And he said, A deer?
This lie came so easily.
All I had to do was nod.
He wrapped me in a wool blanket. Still I shivered, quick spasms, a coldness I’d never known, like falling through the ice of a pond and lying on the bottom, watching the water close above you, freeze hard. He washed the blood from my face with a warm cloth. His tenderness killed me, the way he was so careful, the way he looked at the bruises and the blood but not at me. Every gesture promised I’d never have to tell. He said, You’ll have black eyes, but I don’t think your nose is broken. These words — he meant to comfort me — precious nose — as if my own face, the way it looked, could matter now.
He said he had to check the truck. He took his flashlight, hobbled out. I couldn’t stand it, the waiting — even those minutes. I thought, My whole future, the rest of my life, like this, impossibly long.
I moved to the window to watch. I tried to light a cigarette, but the match kept hissing out. I saw the beam moving over the fender and grille, my father’s hand touching the truck. I imagined what he felt — a man’s hair and bones. I believed he’d come back inside and sit beside me, both of us so still. If he touched me, I’d break and tell.
But when he came inside, he didn’t sit, didn’t ask what, only where. I could have lied again, named a place between these orchards and Bigfork, that safe road, but I believed my father was offering me a chance, this last one. I thought the truth might save us even now. I described the place exactly, the curve, the line of trees, the funnel of dust. But I did not say one thing, did not tell him, Look for a man in the grass.
He said, You sleep now. He said, Don’t answer the phone.
I had this crazy hope. I’d heard stories of men who slammed into trees, men so drunk their bodies went limp as their cars were crushed. Some walked away. Some sailed off bridges but bobbed to the surface face up. I remembered the man’s grace when we collided, the strange elegance of his limbs as he flew.
I believed in my father, those hands holding blossoms in spring, those fingers touching the fender, my face — those hands wringing the rag, my blood, into the sink. I believed in small miracles, Niles flying into the pond hours ago, Yellow Dog wading out.
I imagined my crippled father helping the dazed man stumble to the truck, driving him to the hospital for x-rays or just taking him home. I thought my father had gone back alone so that he could lift the burden of my crime from me and carry it himself, to teach me suffering and sacrifice, the mercy of his God.
Even if the police came, they’d blame the Indian himself. He’d reel, still drunk, while my father, my good father, stood sober as a nun.
For almost an hour I told myself these lies. Confession would be a private thing, to my father, no one else. He would decide my penance. I would lie down on any floor. I would ask the Holy Mother to show me how I might atone. I would forgive the priest his ignorance when wine turned to blood in my mouth.
I thought of the cherries my father found after the hail, the bowl of them he brought back to the cottage — I thought of this small miracle, that any had been left whole. We ate them without speaking, as if they were the only food. I saw my father on his knees again, the highway. He gathered all the pieces. Glass and stone became the body of a man. My father’s fingers pressed the neck and found the pulse. I knew I couldn’t live through fifteen minutes if what I believed was not so.