In my parents’ room it is evident Mom has been sleeping on top of the covers, as there is a slight depression in the comforter on her side, and a blanket kicked down to the bottom of the bed. Medicine bottles and his inhaler still sit on Dad’s night table, and a book: To Kill a Mockingbird. I pick it up, and the bookmark is one of my school photos, from the second or third grade. He has just gotten to the part where Scout is stumbling through the woods dressed up like a ham. Had. He had just gotten to the part. I can’t read any more of the words, can’t make my way through to where it all works out in the end, so I put the picture back, put the book down.
I pull open my mom’s slip drawer, from where I used to nick the goods to play dress-up, before the tomboy in me kicked in and took hold. I find a stack of letterss tied up with a shoestring. The two oldest ones are postmarked 1948 and ’49, from Fargo. They look like they have never been opened. Others are from Mick: from Missoula, from basic, from Vietnam. I will save those for later, for when there is enough time, space, beer, whatever. A few are from my father, not stamped or addressed; simply, I imagine, handed over or left on the table or her pillow. They say he loves her. Mick. Me. They say clearly this is the life we were meant for, after all was said and done. It was just a matter of getting here. And staying.
One letter is from my father to me. It begins, “Dearest Wanderer.” It talks about the animals. About my mother. About rain. It is in an envelope with my name on it, but no address. Another, quite a long one from my mom, mailed to an old address in San Francisco, is marked “Return to Sender” by an unknown hand. I try to think back to where I was then. Figure she missed me by six months or so. Around the middle of the worst years. This one I open to read. She was trying to tell me something. A few somethings. One, she didn’t know what M-O-T-H-E-R stood for. I want to tell her she’s not alone. But I also want to tell her I think she’s wrong. She knew. She just didn’t know she did. Two, Mick is my half brother. I don’t know where to go to begin to process the actual words, the pronouncement. The thing is, I knew. I don’t know what good any more processing would do now. Or ever. Because it doesn’t matter.
I wonder why she never sent the letter again after I resurfaced. A change of heart, I suppose. Or she forgot about it. Or maybe it was never really meant for me. I put it back. I wonder if all homes are so full of surprises. I want there to be someone here to ask, Where have I been all your life? But there are letters from me as well, so I was somewhere. I was real.
A stack of postcards from Slim. “Dear Miss Rose,” they say, “Thank you for the birthday card. Thank you for the check.” The handwriting on the most recent ones is an adult’s. I wonder when she stopped. I wonder if.
I look out the window of my parents’ room. It faces away from the road to pure, open, absolute nothingness. I think I see my mother in the distance, tacking across what used to be a wheat field, a small one, compared with what surrounds us. But it was enough. I remember her kneading dough; I remember bread straight out of the oven. I decide to make some — tomorrow, maybe — though I have not tried since I lived with the Cajun shape-shifter; tried the patently impossible trick of making him happy, a very, very long time ago on a hill in San Francisco, from where I could almost see the bay.
My room is the same, though the paint around the windows is peeling some, and the fish seem in places to have lost their way. My stuffed rabbit is still on the bed. Both eyes are missing, and still just the one ear. If I didn’t know what it was supposed to be, it would take some doing to figure it out. A few remnants of my kid life hang from hooks in the closet: a nearly disintegrated pair of overalls, a red scarf, a beaded belt. Ancient T-shirts lie crumpled on the floor like a pile of sleeping kittens.
Mick’s motorcycle jacket hangs from the door handle. I wonder why Mom would put it here, and then I remember: she didn’t; I did. Spirited it out of his room just before he went away. He would have taken it, but I had it too well hidden. He knew it was me, but I wasn’t giving it up. He left anyway. Without it. I pick it up and press my face to it. It smells old. It smells like Mick. It smells like when I was a little kid, just learning how to cuss, and everything, everything, was right with the world. I put it on and go for a ride.
16. The Given World
The school has been shut down now for decades, though I guess sometimes they still use it for stuff like meetings or bake sales, so it doesn’t feel completely abandoned. The solstice is two months past, the days noticeably shorter now. It is late afternoon, maybe five, and the sun is a few degrees farther south than it would have been when I came back here. This century is only a few years, now, from becoming a collective memory.
The fence around the playground is still standing in most places, though the equipment is largely useless. I have taken off my boots and Mick’s jacket and am dribbling a ball down the court, barely managing to avoid the most gaping craters in the asphalt. The first shots I miss by miles, but I keep getting closer, so I keep trying. Something else I never told Darrell (something far less critical, but still) was that I had played a fair game of basketball in school too, but had given it up for volleyball, a game I could play when I was high on mescaline and could watch the trails crisscross the net like shooting stars.
Darrell is watching me from the other side of the fence, hands grasping the metal bar at the top. We rode here together after I found him parked at the foot of our driveway, leaning against his truck, bouncing this basketball off the hard-packed dirt.
“You are one sneaky Indian,” I said, because I couldn’t think of one single other thing to say.
He said, “That’s redundant,” and threw me the ball. “Let’s see what you got.”
I threw it back. “Okay, let’s. Get on.” It would be a little while before I could put more words together. I didn’t have to ask for time.
What I’ve got isn’t much, but once he comes around the fence to join me, it looks like we’re a little more evenly matched than we once were, since his one leg seems to want to buckle if he doesn’t plant it just right. He’s still almost impenetrable, though, and there’s no way I can shoot over him, especially not once he gets those long arms up in the air. All I can do is try to get around him somehow, and to my basket before he has a chance to catch me. Even when I do, I miss most of my shots. And there’s no point in even trying to block him. He can shoot pretty much from midcourt, without really looking. But he’s getting tired, and the limp is getting worse, so I take the ball, go up to the school, and sit on the steps. He follows, sits by me.
“Come here often?”
Like we’re in a bar, and probably a whole lot younger. And totally different people.
“Not too.”
We’re both winded. We breathe in tandem, empty our lungs slowly.
I ask if he saw the obituary. He says yes, but he was afraid to come all the way in.
“Afraid?”
“Something like that. Nervous, maybe.” He shrugs. “Does it matter?”
“Nope.”
He says he’s sorry about my dad, and I say it’s okay, and that I am not any more prepared to process death than I have ever been, so I will be going at it slowly. We can talk about something else. Pretty much anything.