Above Us Only Sky (26 page)

I am ready to go home now, hungry for the coast of North Carolina. Before I left, pelicans were perched on my dock, their pouches like double chins. Translucent green frogs clung to the sliding glass door, their hearts visible beneath moist skin. It's a miraculous thing to see. My home is my solace. I know that Daina and Stasys feel the same way about Palanga. Oma and I have made plans: next year, we're going back to Germany and then to Lithuania to see Stasys, Daina, and Audra. Probably Veronica and Freddie will want to go. Probably the Old Man will be with us in spirit.

30

Prudence

A
t night, the moon is bigger than it has any right to be. Over the phone, Daina and I compare notes. We think the Old Man is inflating it for our sake. We think he's shooting stars across the sky. I dream of him in the dense pine forests of Lithuania, taming bears and slaying beasts out of reach in this life. His loony-gooney mother is perched on his shoulder, coming and going, her face to the wind.

It's July 2005, a month since the Old Man's funeral. There's a full moon tonight reflected off the water. The sky is a silky magenta, like skies I remember from my youth. I'm sorting through the Old Man's record collection. Oma asked me to look through the records for what I might like. Right now, I'm listening to a violin recording, a sonata written by Johann Sebastian Bach. So far, I really like it, but I wish I knew more about classical music. I move my hand like a maestro, how I remember the Old Man gliding his cigar through the air.

The man who resembled Wheaton at the Old Man's funeral is standing at my screened door, blotting out the light.

I'm barefoot in jeans and a cruddy T-shirt.

Over the sonata, I can't hear him, but I see him. He's wearing a white oxford and jeans. He's appeared out of nowhere. What's he doing here? His curls are familiar, as are his eyes, like sappy pines. He's smiling, his head tilted to the right, his knuckle on the wooden doorframe. I turn down the record player.

Wheaton Jones is standing on my front porch. There's a confidence in his stance that's unfamiliar, but there's no mistaking him. Not now. Even though we're staring at each other, he knocks. I rub my hands down the front of my jeans and walk to let him in. I feel light-headed and strange. As I draw closer to the door, I stop. For all I know, Wheaton Jones is dead and buried. How would I know otherwise? He disappeared on me.

I'm moving in slow motion. He's on one side of the screen and I'm on the other. The wind clacks the latched door between us.

Slipping my hands into my pockets, I wait for him to say something. I rock heel to toe.

Instead of speaking, he reaches for something in his back pocket. It's a yellow pocket edition, some kind of book. He licks one finger and turns from one page to another. He's fumbling, but then he stops and presses a page to the screen. “It's a picture of your scars,” he says.

I move in closer to get a good look. I haven't seen the book, the picture . . . I always thought there'd be wings. Wheaton shows me the cover.
Sparnas, Wings, L. Blasczkiewicz.
I have no words.

He says, “I'm sorry about the Old Man.”

I point to the record player on the counter. The thick black album is still turning but the music is barely discernible. Gertrude, my resident egret, flies past. I always thought there'd be wings. I don't know what to say, what to do.

He says, “I see them in the photograph—the wings.” His eyes are the same as I remember.

“Where did you get the book? Where have you been?” I'm angry. “You disappeared.” Confused.

He says, “It's a very long story. I want to tell you.”

“You ran away.”

“I want to tell you. I need to explain.”

I'm nervous, sweating, tucking my hair behind my ears. I don't know that I want to hear what he has to say. I don't know that I can listen. I rub my left big toe across the top of my right foot. “Were you at the Old Man's funeral?”

“I was there,” he says.

“You didn't say anything.”

“I was scared.”

“What if I don't want to hear what you have to say?”

“I would understand.”

“Five syllables.”

He presses his right palm to the screen. In his left hand is the book of photographs. I match my left palm to his right. Behind him, I can see the moonlight trailing like liquid silver across the water. I lean into the screen. Wheaton's candy curls look and smell how I remember, and I want to dip my fingers there, keep them there, still them there, stop counting years since I've last seen him. Stop missing him. What did the Old Man ask me?
What number of years will make you happy, Prudence?
I slip one finger beneath the latch.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers—

That perches in the soul—

And sings the tune without the words—

And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—

And sore must be the storm—

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm—

I've heard it in the chillest land—

And on the strangest Sea—

Yet—never—in Extremity,

It asked a crumb—of me.

—EMILY DICKINSON

Sources—

Of Inspiration and Otherwise

We all know how babies are born, but not so much novels. I started this book with one image in my head: a teenage girl climbing onto a bus with cardboard and faux-feather wings in her arms. I imagined her awkwardness looking for a place to sit. I wrote fifty pages. I knew that she was born with wings, but I knew little else. Then slowly, as she (Prudence) came to fruition, so did the Old Man, her Lithuanian grandfather.

I wasn't sure what I was doing or where the story was going, but once I trusted the characters to speak, the story began to unfold. Eventually, I understood how this novel was born.

When I was pregnant with my son in November of 2004, Valys Zilius, a Lithuanian-born professor of linguistics and Russian languages and literature, passed away. I had known him as an adolescent and I admired him very much. I would listen to his stories of Lithuanian exile and eventual refuge in the United States. He was a man unable to “go home.”

Then, in January of 2005, when I was seven months pregnant, my surrogate grandmother Ingeburg Rosemarie Kischel McGarrity (Mac, as I knew her) left this world. She was born in Berlin, Germany, and lived there as a nursing student during World War II. For most of her life, she too was a refugee in the United States. She was my mother's best friend, and I very much looked forward to her being a great-­grandmother to my soon-to-be-born son. Her death came as a terrible shock.

Just as my son was about to enter this world, a beloved exiled generation was leaving it. And then, as a new mother, I was afraid for my child, haunted by the realities of war and oppression. At the same time, I started rescuing injured birds. Not on purpose or anything. They just kept finding me. I remember driving one across town to a special veterinarian, telling it to “hold on,” and even though it died right there beside me, I couldn't believe it. I carried the fledging into the vet and needed confirmation. I bawled. All of the sudden, my character Prudence was an ornithologist. What else would she be? She was a girl born with wings.

In November 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mac was able to return and visit her former home, her family, and friends in what had been East Germany. In the early 1990s, Valys was able to return to Klaipeda, Lithuania, a city ravaged by Soviet industrialization. His former home, as he told me, was one dull high-rise apartment building after another to house as many workers as possible. Mac and Valys were seeing their homelands after five decades. I wondered, “Can anyone go ‘home' again?”

“What does ‘home' actually mean?” Mac and Valys planted a seed in me to tell this story. This is a fictitious imagined story, but a story inspired by many things, including family, nature, history, and the human longing—with or without wings—to find Home.

Other sources include
Lithuania in Retrospect and Prospect
by Jonas Å liupas;
The Soviet Story
, a film by Edvins Snore;
Ukrainian Minstrels
by Natalie Kononenko;
Odyssey of Hope
by Joseph Kazickas with Valdas Bartasevicius;
DPs, Europe's Displaced Persons, 1941–1951
by Mark Wyman;
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania
, DK Eyewitness Travel, 2011; “Lithuanians by the Laptev Sea: The Siberian Memoirs of Dalia Grinkeviči
Å«
t
ė
,” translated by Laima Sruoginyt
ė
, from
Litanus: Lithuanian Quarterly Journal of Arts and Sciences
36, no. 4.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to my family: Christopher Robin, Danny Stone, Peter Young, Rosemary Young, and Desiree Davis. I am especially indebted to my husband and son, without whom I couldn't do what I do. Because of your love and support, I know that I can always come home.

For a myriad of wonderments, including sources of research and much-needed emotional support, thank you to Sara Jo and Charles Arthur, James Zilius, Kim Lavach, Alisa Esposito Lucash, Amy Simmons Larson, Loretta Sanders, Vicki S. Bray, Gemma Driver, Dr. Carl, and Susan O. A special thank-you to Rebecca Joines Schinsky, who read
three
versions of this novel. I am deeply grateful and indebted. Thank you to my editor, Sarah Knight, for believing in me and for taking me with her. Thank you to Michelle Brower, the most wonderful, cupcake-loving, fiercest agent out there.

Thank you to the city of Richmond, Virginia, for supporting my first novel,
The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors
, with such fervor and warmth. Thank you to the Outer Banks of North Carolina for being kind and welcoming and small and beautiful. And to the birds, to all of them, the chickadees perched outside my door, the ospreys flying overhead, and the egrets wading in the marsh. I love it here.