At some point, I realize that I’m dreaming. I move through darkness to a precipice where falling water splits into ribbons of warblers and starlings and I land in a sunlit tangle of legs and sheet and hair. The last of the water slides back through the loose seams of sleep. I am in a room with a door in the corner. I am in a bed next to a table with a lamp. There is also a pad of paper and a pencil, if I remembered to leave them. I take them up and scribble fast and light, holding the pad to my face. Asleep under waterfall, Dad called on phone I answered but he wouldn’t speak. I kept saying, “Dad? Are you there?” Could hear him breathing. Asked if he had talked to the doctor. Apologized for not calling more regularly. After an eternity, he said, “That’s so sad.” Not sure what he was referring to and couldn’t tell if he was being serious or sarcastic. I stop struggling to hold the pad and pencil up to my face. They fall to my stomach and I turn toward the strong desert light. Through the screen by my bed, I see a small rabbit eating grass. The grass is long and dry, and she is looking at me sideways the way rabbits do. I take my phone and text my brother, who sleeps in the next room. We agreed; today was the day and we’d get an early start: “Are you up?” “Yup. Meet outside in ten?” “Sounds good.”
*
The day Trump was elected my mother drove her car into a ditch. This was our first real sign that we had lost control of the situation. We knew we could no longer sit back and wait, let things follow their natural course; we had to do something. Snow had come early to Santa Fe and in addition to the roads being white her claim was that this particular road, the one she had been driving on, had just ended. That’s what she said, “It just ended!” She was adamant about this, there had simply ceased to be a road in front of her. She said there were no signs and, “It was very dangerous, that whole section of road is under construction, you know.” It wasn’t. This kind of confabulation, as the doctors called it, was supposedly one of the symptoms that marked Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome. But for my brothers and me, it was hard to see it as a new symptom, fabrication was something she specialized in, the only difference now was that she was no longer very good at it. It would be easier to let these small disasters go, help her find a way to chuckle at them, if she didn’t get so fired up when anyone questioned her version of the truth. “They should be sued for not having it properly marked. In fact, I might call the police.” For some reason, she had become very fond of saying she might call the police.
*
Linus and I slip around the side of the house and into the car. He puts the key in the ignition and turns. We hear the dull sputter of a half-push by the engine and then, nothing. He reaches for the radio. “Shit. I got this stupid radio off a friend, I have to pop it out every time I get out of the car, or it drains the battery.” I think Linus currently has five cars and as always, each one has its own issues. There was the time he drove from Massachusetts to Montreal in January in the Volvo with the broken heater. Or the red Volkswagen Rabbit, where the driver’s side door was held closed with a length of rope and some duct tape, the passenger door was the only way in and out. “Hang on.” He gets out of the car and starts to push it backwards. It is moving slowly so I open my door and step out into the pace of backwards pushing. We hit a tiny incline and it starts to roll on its own. At this, he jumps in and puts the car in gear. I jump in too and when he turns the key in the ignition, the car starts. He puts it in first, and off we go. “What crazy magic was that?” I ask. “I just had to pop the clutch,” he says. This crafty maneuver, as he explains it, boils down to tricking the car into thinking that it’s in gear. He smiles. These little moments please him. I think he hates that his life is held together with duct tape and rope, so magic counts for a lot.
*
Growing up, we knew not to question her stories. We were accustomed to being told exactly what we were to say to this or that person when they asked why we were late or why our mother hadn’t come to a parent/teacher meeting or why we had been absent from school. On first glance, you might wonder why she bothered with these lies, as the truth would have done just as well. But it was as if she saw these occasions of having to explain herself as opportunities to stick it to someone. As in, “Screw them for wanting to know our private business.” For instance, I once missed a day of school and the simple real reason was that I’d missed the bus and my stepfather had taken the car to work so she didn’t have a vehicle to drive me the five miles to school. But rather than say, “I’m sorry” or “It won’t happen again,” she said, indignantly, that I had gone to work with my father because parents are the real educators of children and perhaps the school should consider adding a ‘bring your child to work’ day to the school calendar, as children certainly learn much more from their own parents! I suppose that was part of her genius. She could turn a question around 180 degrees and refashion it into an accusation—repositioning the finger of blame—before they knew what hit them, they were apologizing to her.
*
The road is shiny from the sun. Pinon and sage line the streets. Linus’s arm is hanging out the window and the Rolling Stones pipe from the battery-draining sound system. “Can you see why I want to live here? Every day is like this!” I smile at him and at the sun and the pale sage poking though pink clay. I can see why. On the narrow concrete island, a haggard woman is selling newspapers. Linus gestures toward her. “I remember once walking somewhere with Hugh and we stopped to get a paper from one of those people and as we walked away, Hugh said, “Schizophrenic, but managing nicely.” We both laugh. Hugh always said things like that. Once at dinner, someone said something innocuous like, ‘How was your day?’ and he slammed his fist down on the table and said, “Why do Anglo-Saxons have to be so goddamned happy all the time?” He let it land for just long enough and then began laughing. Or once we were out to dinner and he told us that the couple across the restaurant was separating and that this dinner was a last-ditch effort to get back together, but that the woman would soon get up and leave. And sure enough, a few minutes later, the woman left. Another one that sticks with me, “Be careful with babies-born-by-Caesarean near an open window; they may have the impulse to jump.”
*
Anger insists on being absolute. It’s a forest fire and the trees are memories. You want to say, “No! Not that one, I like that one!” But it doesn’t care. It doesn’t discriminate. Fresh saplings, stately oaks – up they go, smoke billowing into the empty sky. The only way to preserve is to isolate, this calls for large swaths of bare ground. Hotshots are firefighters who fight fires on the ground. They do this by cutting line with a chainsaw. The line is a clear strip all the way around the fire. When the fire gets to it, it has nothing to burn. In nature, containment is the trick; you’ve got to outsmart the fire. Sometimes though, if a fire is assisted by wind, or if it’s in the nature of a particular fire it will jump the line. Or—and according to Jack this is the worst—an animal on fire will run out of the flames, jump the line, and run into the untouched part of the woods. In so doing of course, the little guy has brought the fire to the rest of the forest. Any average person, if they saw those furry little creatures—in flames and running for their lives—would pity them. But firefighters curse those miniature escaped villains; acres and acres of land scorched to a crisp because of a bunny. Jack was a hotshot first, then a smokejumper and then, when he was hit by a drunk driver and his back was broken, he quit jumping from planes. Now he’s a paramedic.
*
Hugh told us that babies can see the birth experience and what they see is a ‘light at the end of the tunnel.’ His (or maybe someone else’s) theory was that when we die and see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel it is, quite simply, us remembering our first trauma: being born. We moved out west when Hugh had finally had it with treating rich divorcees from Wellesley; he wanted to work for Indian Health Services on the Navajo reservation. His own psychiatrist, and good friend, was Dr. James Hillman. They were part of those Robert Bly men’s groups in the eighties. So, when Hugh was diagnosed with cancer, it was natural that he should take a spiritual approach. He credited sweat lodges and peyote ceremonies with keeping him alive for the extra six years. At that last peyote ceremony when we were all there, he said he thought the cancer had gotten inside of him when he was born, because he was a twin and his brother had died in childbirth. When he was in the hospital dying, he asked to be brought back up to Truchas, he wanted to die in the mountains. His best friends, Leon and Jethro, came from the reservation. And for the entire three days it took for Hugh to die, Leon and Jethro circled the house chanting and drumming, blessing the Four Directions and preparing the way for his journey.
*
One time, she came to visit me at Carnegie-Mellon, to see me as Bernarda in The House of Bernarda Alba. She came with us, the whole cast, to Bar One in Squirrel Hill afterwards. The next day, all of my friends were coming up to me, pulling me aside in class, “You have the coolest mom ever. You’re so lucky!” And I did feel lucky. She was young and beautiful and able to talk about all the stuff we were talking about. She was charming and artistic and could win people over like magic. But even just thinking about it I can feel the anger creeping in to steal away that version of the memory and replace it with its own version: she dominated the conversation, she was drinking and never once suggested we go home, knowing I had class at 8:30 a.m., a full day, and another show that night. No, rather she was the one who kept ordering another and another, this is what my friends thought was so cool, she could out-party us. I feel the fire entering the untouched part of the forest, descending into the deep wood. Just when the flames were almost contained, the little beast has jumped the line and this pristine memory begins burning before my eyes. I know that it will take down anything in its vicinity. I vow to contain the damage. I look at her sitting on the couch with her coffee and resolve to stop thinking about anything before this year.
*
My phone buzzes with a text. It’s Jack. “changed my flight – arriving tomorrow – will email details.” A newspaper is stuffed into the space between the passenger seat and the gear shift. I pull it out. The Santa Fe New Mexican lists local bands playing in the plaza, poets and drummers who’ll be in town and art exhibits not to miss. I notice that Gary Snyder was speaking at the opening of the New Mexico History Museum’s exhibit Voices of Counterculture in the Southwest. May 14th; I missed it by two weeks. Linus says Snyder lives somewhere between Cordova and Truchas. We pass the Santuario de Chimayo, a famous Catholic pilgrimage destination. At Easter, you see loads of people walking along the side of the highway, many carrying huge crosses on their backs. Linus slows down over the cattle guard and we come to the turn up through Cordova. There is an odd jumble of signs giving every variety of direction, one in particular jumps out: John 3:16. For God so loved the world that he gave up his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life. There are no fewer than six little crosses at this turn that leads up to Truchas. I wonder if Gary Snyder would have done a men’s group meeting with Robert Bly. I wonder what men do at men’s group meetings.
*
The engine hums against the tiny plane window. I rest my hand around the empty plastic cup, it’s one lone cube jostling around with the turbulence. I look out into the night. I remember an old Drama teacher explaining, when an irresistible force comes up against an immovable object, you have dramatic tension. A rivulet of water crawls down the window, determined. The doctor, when I was finally able to reach him, had explained that we couldn’t force her to go into rehab, that she had to go in voluntarily and that even if we got her as far as the door, she could leave at any time. And as far as taking her license away, he could do it if we really wanted him to, but it would have a negative effect on his relationship with her. He said he would cancel the prescriptions for Ativan and Valium. About this he was apologetic. He said he had no idea she was drinking so much, or he wouldn’t have prescribed either. Kai has become like a broken record on the subject of not thinking about it, telling me that I can’t let this take over my life. “You can’t keep going out there. Your kids need you here—and present. Just try to think about something else.” I swirl the ice cube in the cup. I set it down. I pull the Skymall catalogue from the seat-pocket in front of me.
*
The empty road unspools before us like a string of prayer beads. Once, Hugh and I drove from Wellesley to Amherst, to hear Dr. Hillman give a lecture. We went in the light blue Mercedes with the plates that said MD; Hugh drove 90 miles an hour down the Mass Pike and smiled at me with a twinkle in his eye. “What’s the point of having Doctor’s plates, if you don’t speed?” Hillman spoke for two hours. I’d never been so energized by words; I could have sat for ten hours. We dull our lives by the way we conceive them … In sleep I am thoroughly immersed in the dream. Only on waking do I reverse this fact and believe the dream is in me. At night the dream has me, but in the morning, I say, “I had a dream.” This was what I wanted my whole life to be: words and books that spoke the truth. After that, Hugh arranged that Linus would begin to see Thomas Moore, a Jungian psychotherapist that Hillman had recommended. Linus was put on medication and saw Dr. Moore diligently every week. During this time, I hardly recognized my brother. He was communicative and friendly and, dare I say, organized. His room was clean! But then Dr. Moore wrote a best-selling book called Care of the Soul and dropped all his patients to write a second book, and a third, and Linus was left high and dry.
*
It’s hard to be angry with her as she is now, 90 lbs at most, with her unwashed hair, the little black spots under her fingernails and toenails, the nosebleeds … this is what those in the know call ‘end stage alcoholism.’ She has lost any possibility of choice. She’s in the kitchen making coffee, one of the few things she still does in the kitchen, but her Bodum doesn’t work anymore. Grains pass the filter easily and it makes the coffee sandy. She refuses to get a new one. So, she plunges the coffee and then holds a little strainer over her cup, pouring the coffee through to catch the grinds. I took her to Walmart yesterday to get a silverware tray, a dish rack, housecleaning products, shampoo and conditioner. She said it really wasn’t necessary but, having just discovered that she hasn’t showered in four months, I insisted. She reluctantly accommodated me, and we went. We stood in the kitchenware aisle and perused silverware trays. I picked up a nice bamboo tray that was $16.95. “What about this one?” She took it from my hands, turning it over and back again, and then, catching sight of the price tag, twisted up her face as if she’d just read that it was made of recycled body parts. “Sixteen ninety-five?” She put it back and reached for a tiny white plastic tray on the top shelf. It was $2.95. She handed it to me. “This one is fine.”
*
Elaine Hart’s gallery has an OPEN sign on it, so we pull in and park. On the small gallery door, underneath the OPEN sign, is a note that says: tap on the back door of the house and holler nicely, so we do. Elaine hollers back from the bedroom for us to come in, so we do. From where we stand in the small entry, we can see her sitting on the edge of the bed. She gets herself up slowly. It’s a strange sensation to be standing in this house that was once ours, so many years ago when things were good … when things were the best they would be. I call out that it’s Ariana and Linus Wolfe, Nina Wolfe’s kids. “Ariana Wolfe? How interesting. Ariana and Linus Wolfe. How interesting.” She hobbles out of the bedroom. A little overweight, two hip replacements. From the neck up she’s vibrant and funny and has this way of asking a question and then watching you with a little smile, you can almost hear her reconstructing a version of your story that she’ll recount later in gossip to Margaret or Philemon. We tell her about Mom’s drinking and the new boyfriend and what a disaster he is, and how she’s ruining her friendships by accusing people of taking things from her. She gives a long sigh, and says, “Ah, Nina. She’s always worked from a place of scarcity.”
*
Mostly it’s the way Elaine says, “Ah, Nina.” Sinking on the Nina and invisibly shaking her head. It’s not the first time we’ve heard this kind of sigh, the kind of intonation that lets you know she’s notorious. All of the neighbours know, her recycling bin is always chock full of bottles, other dog owners at the park give her a wide berth, at the Whole Foods where she shops it’s clear the checkout people know her, and people who used to be her friends don’t call anymore. When her old friends talk to us, it’s with sympathy. Elaine’s expressing exactly that at that moment, “Margaret was up here just last week and we talked about Nina for half an hour at least and about you kids and just how you’re managing …” Elaine’s good at leading phrases like that; sentences that hover somewhere between a question and a statement. She isn’t asking anything, but you’re definitely meant to respond. I say, “Well we’re open to advice if you have any.” Back at ya, Elaine. She loves it. “Well, I suppose there’s nothing really that you can do, is there?” I love this kind of conversation. It’s the pleasure of sharing the exchange, a back-and-forth that is in stark contrast to Mom’s monologues that invade your territory with no sense of boundaries or fair play.
*
To invite the Gods into one’s house became the most dangerous thing one could do. She stands before me as if she is about to turn and go into the kitchen, that sort of midway stance she does. She lifts her hands and gestures before the words come. “But … I’m sorry, I don’t want to sound … whose baby is that?” “It’s Chloe, Mom. Jack’s daughter.” “Jack? You mean my son, Jack?” “Yeah, that’s right.” “Jack, the firefighter? Who has all the girlfriends?” I would have to remember to tell him that one—if he ever decided to come back in the house. I could use a little help fielding these waves of distance. Again, she lifts her hands before she speaks, like someone who is trying to get directions straight. As in, “So after I take the left … I’m going to make a right? … or do I stay straight?” I bounce Chloe on my hip to cover the shaking that’s coming over my body. “Well, I don’t mean to sound — I don’t know what you’d call it, but I think it’s a little rude of him to not tell me that he had a baby.” “But he did, Mom.” I’m not quite sure how to lead her back onto solid ground with sensitivity. “Remember? We went out to visit them in California?” “I was in California?” “Yup. In May, when she was about six weeks old, we went out to visit them.” “And you were there?” “Yup. We were visiting Jack and Addie.” “And Jack lives with Addie?” “Mm-hmm.” What the fuck?
*
Elaine can tell we need a break from the subject, so when I ask her what she’s up to, she takes the opportunity to tell us about the memoir she’s writing about her years in Truchas. “You just wouldn’t believe the characters you meet up here.” As she speaks, I look to the window at the end of the table where Linus is sitting. Hugh’s temporary hospital bed had been set up just there. That exact spot. We decide to leave the car at Elaine’s and walk down back. My foot lands soft on the pressed clay, the heat rising as we enter further into the past. Linus is a few paces behind, as is his way. A long-haired gray cat runs out of the acacia and trots along with us. It’s her house now and she will show us the way. Once our feet are moving, we begin to recognize things. The lone black tree in the long yellow grass off to our left always reminded me of the U2 Joshua Tree record. Blackfoot daisy hangs over the arroyo beneath a sign marked ‘Coyote Crossing’. I wonder if Linus has the same memory at the sight of that sign. His old girlfriend Rosa had seen a coyote in the peyote ceremony for Hugh. According to her, it walked in, circled the fire, and left. Rosa was the girl we all hoped Linus would marry. He broke up with her for no real reason and when he realized his mistake and tried to get her back, it was too late. She had met someone from her own culture, and they were to be married. Her parents were happy.
*
What’s he doing out there? He said he would be five minutes! She keeps on, “And is Jack coming out to visit too?” “He ishere mom, that’s how Chloe got here. We all arrived this morning. He’s just outside, talking on the phone, he’ll be in in a second.” “Oh, I see.” I can feel her coming back onto the path. I can see it in her face. She comes over and does a scrunch-y face at Chloe, taking Chloe’s tiny pink fingers into her own thinning bird hand. “Hi little sweetie, little …” “Chloe.” “Little smoochie Chloe.” Finally, the screen door closes, and Jack comes back in, tucking his cell phone into his back pocket, “Hey,” he says. He looks at Mom and Chloe and smiles at the pretty picture they make. “I was just explaining to Mom who Chloe is,” I say, ruthlessly. He looks at me, “What?” Mom stops making baby faces to Chloe and looks up again, confused. “Well, I just—I don’t know why you would have a baby and not tell me about it,” up she starts again. I watch his face fall. Later, when we find her toiletry bag, he’ll explain to me what benzodiazepines are. Jesus Christ. He reads off the bottles: Lorazepam, Diazepam, Zoloft … Hammer, Eraser, Black Ice, Broken bottle, Snake eating rat, Battle cry to empty field, River with no dam, Sentence with no period. Finally, he stops.
*
The sky is a dramatic mix of greys. When cumulus clouds grow vertically, they’re becoming thunderclouds. This is due to the heat from the ground pushing the cloud upwards. Mountains are your best bet for seeing this in action. The heat nestles in the valleys and its only escape is up. When a cloud gets that anvil shape and starts to tilt from the weight of the rain, darkening on the bottom, you can be sure it’s about to come crashing down. It has become cumulonimbus. This is why lightning and thunder happen late in the day, it takes a while for this heat to gather and push up into the sky. Lightning has been a favorite subject for many photographers of the Southwest. Though he preferred his landscapes without lightening, even Ansel Adams, master of perfect grey, did his share of lightning photographs. We round the curve that leads over the arroyo and I take a photo of the ‘Coyote Crossing’ sign. Water trickles through massive corrugated metal pipes. Linus and I find the grave. I stand quietly and Linus crouches down and plays with the cat. There is a simple bar on two supports that marks it. I turn to face the way Hugh would be facing. The mountains have a large anvil-shaped cloud hanging between them. It is one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen. It will rain before nightfall.
Sabrina Reeves is a writer and creator of original theatre. She co-founded the performance collective Bluemouth Inc., with whom she has written and performed twelve original works and toured the world. Wanting to shift her writing from drama to prose, she recently completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Concordia University in Montreal and has just finished turning her thesis into a novel.
