The Best American Essays 2015 (6 page)

This is a great question, an excellent insurance plan choice, I mean. I think it's in the Affordable Care Act somewhere. Take it from us, who know about the emptiness of loss and are still cruising along here feeling lucky and not yet entirely alone.

KENDRA ATLEEWORK

FROM
Hayden's Ferry Review

W
HEN IT RAINED
in Swall Meadows, Elizabeth and I took to the street. The best rains fell at night in the autumn, out of clouds resting on the side of Wheeler Crest, fat and freezing. They rolled down the mountain, swallowing my house and the surrounding blue spruce, the skeletons of silver poplars, peaks bristled by evergreens. By November snow had reached the ridge, and the air was tangible, flavored with frost and the slow death of plants and birds. In the evenings came the smell of smoke, the metallic ping of my father's ax against knotty wood.

The street that leads from my house to Elizabeth's, gravelly and tilting to the south, is lined with dusty pines and mailboxes. Swall Meadows is high desert. The few deciduous trees that survive the dry summers lose their leaves and spend winter growing naked, branches freezing and snapping off, one by one.

Water comes to our region three times a year. First are hot summer thunderstorms that draw steam from the mesas in the valley below. Next is autumn rain, gentle, resigned to an approaching freeze, hardened almost to ice but falling softly, melting into skin or the knit of a sweatshirt. Finally there is winter, when a flat plane of snow, sharpened by nights of wind, crusts over the mountainside and around the dead willow groves that encircle Swall Meadows.

Autumn I remember best, when Elizabeth and I were sixteen. It was then that we walked. Each night when the rain fell we crept out Elizabeth's ragged screen door. Swall Meadows has no streetlights, and we could see no more than twenty feet ahead. When the clouds settled they blocked out my house, higher up the flank of Wheeler Crest. Headlights never appeared. In the nearest town, thirty minutes from home, was a two-screen movie theater, two coffee shops, the high school. But that was all very far away. If the neighbors looked out their windows on those autumn nights, they would have seen two tall girls, walking slowly.

When I was a child, before I knew Elizabeth, the house where she would someday move with her father, Russell, was a bad place. The man who lived there owned a white wolf that battered its body against the screen door. The man left suddenly without explanation, and Elizabeth and Russell took his place, fleeing an eviction in the town. For a few years Elizabeth and I had been reading
Calvin and Hobbes
comics together behind our choir folders and hiding in the locker room during PE. When she moved to Swall Meadows, isolation made us the focal point of each other's lives.

For Russell, the move made sense. Rent was cheap in Swall, and he was still able to work as a cabinetmaker for new apartment complexes in town. The neighborhood placed him four hours from the nearest city. In Sparks, Nevada, Russell could gamble and visit the Wild Horse Resort, the corners of his suitcase lined stealthily with condoms—we found them accidentally, snooping in the hotel room, when he let us come along on one of his trips.

Elizabeth's house was small and flat and always dirty. Outside, white Christmas lights shone year round, illuminating a plastic baby skeleton that hung from a tree in the front yard, a relic from a past Halloween. Inside, Russell decorated with mirrors, antique paintings, old army knives—one designed for killing, curved in such a way that suction would not trap it in the body, meaning it could be removed and plunged in again and again. Most of the light fixtures were broken and without bulbs. The kitchen floor left bare feet tacky with food scraps and dirt tracked in by Sara, the German shepherd. The windows were always closed, and the furniture and carpet took on the smell of steak and sawdust. I spent most of my time in this house.

During the autumn when we were sixteen, the neighbors who drove Elizabeth and me to and from school turned up the heaters in their Hondas. The Hydes tried to make us talk. The O'Brians, who owned a sailboat in San Diego, listened to classic rock on KRHV and left us to stare out the windows at the bitterbrush and the frozen surface of Crowley Lake.

On each November day, the neighbors dropped us at our respective houses after school. Both were on Mountain View Drive, hers slightly south, mine higher up against the incline of Wheeler Crest. For a few hours I would sit on the floor in front of the neglected fireplace, waiting for Elizabeth's text message.

sleepover bears?

I could picture Russell bent over his workbench in the garage, his hands cold, scraping a knuckle. When the sun fell behind the mountain and the light dropped, he would amble inside for his first bottle of wine, Elizabeth waiting in the kitchen doorway.

“How was school?” Russell would ask, rinsing a dirty glass.

“Fine.”

“Sleepover bears again?”

Russell called me “Kendra Bear.” Elizabeth was “Boo Boo Bear.” He could not acknowledge that his daughter was a woman, who had sex with men and kept her life a secret. Her mother lived in Palm Springs, makeup tattooed on her face, and Elizabeth hated both of them more deeply than a child can hate.

It took ten minutes to reach Elizabeth's door if I ran down Mountain View Drive as fast as I could. The thinning soles of my Converse slid on pavement that had been sloughing into dirt for decades. My nose turned pink and my eyes watered from the cold, my black sweatshirt too thin for autumn. Pressed into the flank of the mountain, Swall Meadows sits in chilly, sharp-shadowed light once the sun sets. For a few hours after evening comes to our neighborhood, the valley below still glows golden.

We spent most nights on the floor of Elizabeth's living room. I had a bed at my house, but my room was dark and empty in those days, haunted, I knew, by a specter named Victor and his little sister, who turned off my lamp without warning. Each evening Elizabeth and I stoked the fire heavily before falling asleep. Inevitably it died, and we woke, shivering under holey baby blankets dotted with wood chips tracked around by the guinea pig, Hitler. He lived wild under the stove, and he had his name because Elizabeth loved terrible things.

That autumn Elizabeth almost never came to my house. When she did she left her Converse (matching mine) in the mudroom while we sat on my mother's bed. My mother asked polite questions, thoughtful questions. But Elizabeth was uncomfortable and I was uncomfortable for her. I looked at the two most important women in my life, and I knew I could only be with them apart.

On November 17 my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I gave my junior anatomy class a presentation on the disease, and I got a good grade. Metastatic cholangiocarcinoma (pronounced as naturally as my name) attacks the bile ducts of the liver, beginning as an autoimmune disease which, in 10 percent of cases, changes. It turns from preparing your three children for the inevitability of your liver transplant to the inevitability of your very near death. It turns from buying rubber livers that grow when put in water, and making jokes about motorcycle riders without helmets (won't they make good donors for Mom), and it turns metastatic. Metastatic means the cancer has already spread to the lymph nodes by the time you take your family to the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, to eat Thanksgiving dinner at a twenty-four-hour diner. The specialists cry when they give you your prognosis, because what goes to the lymph nodes spreads to the rest of the body, and what you get is a tumor on the abdomen that makes you look five months pregnant, according to my mother, and still I can't look at babies. Life expectancy upon diagnosis is three months. My mother lived for four.

The months passed and Elizabeth learned these facts with me. But she was sixteen and she didn't know what to do about them. She knew enough to defend me from our Spanish class, when it was over and the teacher asked her, “What do we say to Kendra?”

She told them to leave me alone. That they should not mention God, or his plan. She understood enough to attend the memorial at the United Methodist Church. I sat in the first pew with my family, next to my crying, balding cousin who had removed his bandanna in public for the first time; I watched Elizabeth come in late with Russell, picking through the legs of the congregation, looking for a seat, and I felt a kind of comfort. But this was as involved as Elizabeth could become.

And so we spent our time together beneath the low ceiling of her house, and Russell flipped cauliflower in a wrought-iron pan.

Russell wore work boots and jeans with small holes nicked in the denim, and he left dishes gray with lard on the counter for days. He was a wonderful cook. Whenever I stepped into the warm, dirty kitchen, Russell poked me in my skinny ribs and asked, “What does Kendra Bear want for dinner?”

We ate with Russell on the stained living-room couch. Spinach salad and stir-fried shrimp, garlic pasta.
The Count of Monte Cristo
,
Six Feet Under
, or
Lord of the Rings
played on the television. For a while it was
Pirates of the Caribbean
, over and over. Russell tossed his boots into the hall and stretched his feet in their yellowed socks beneath the coffee table.

“Boo Boo Bear, pour me another glass of wine.”

Eventually the bottle of Cabernet was empty and the black woodstove began choking smoke into the living room. We waited for Russell to fall asleep, and once he was drowsing, Brie and cracker crumbs smeared into his work sweatshirt, we tiptoed past him.

In half-sleep, Russell's face was slack. His cheeks sagged, and the rolls of his neck were gray and unshaven. In the dark hall there was a picture of Russell at twenty, handsome and thin in high-waisted jeans. He was standing in a barn, hand resting on a horse's back, a saddle at his feet. Russell-thirty-years-before stared into the camera with a half-smile, and his face was like Elizabeth's—curly black eyelashes, small nose, mouth like a rosebud. That night, as he sputtered and snorted in the smoky living room, I looked at the picture and did not understand.

By late autumn of the year I was sixteen, my mother weighed eighty pounds. For long months she grew thinner; her pain intensified. I carried her, one arm behind her back and the other under her knees, and I could feel her spine through blue pajamas dotted with tiny roses. I placed her on an overturned bucket in the shower, so she could sit beneath the spray. Her ankles were bone under loosening skin. I helped her to the bed she shared with my father and held a squirt bottle to her mouth so she could drink. I kissed the sweat on her forehead.

She told me,
“Te amo.”

A few months before, she was beautiful—you could still see it in flashes. Her hair was thick and blondish, and her body was round in some places and slender in others. Her hands, always cold, held pens and typed and cooked scrambled eggs. Her eyes were blue and her heels were narrow. She looked a lot like me.

Elizabeth's roof felt very low on those autumn nights, as the rain hit the sheet metal and the clouds heaved over the mountaintop, moving south. We crept down the hall to Russell's bathroom, the darkest room in the house, which we were both afraid to enter alone. It was windowless, a huge mirror reflecting the jumble of the closet. The shower was a cavern walled in dark stone. When I spent the night I washed my hair, nervous beneath a torrent of hot well water, watchful of shadows blurred by the slimy plastic curtain. I dried myself, the dark mouth of the shower gaping behind me in the mirror.

Our fear of this bathroom began early that autumn. Elizabeth called me one evening, when October had yellowed the aspens outside her window.

“There was a little girl in the shower.”

I was sitting in my bedroom when she called, back to my locked door, staring at the floor-length black curtains I bought at Kmart for ten dollars.

“I saw her in the mirror.” Elizabeth relied on sharp and sometimes cruel humor. She was not dramatic and she was never publicly afraid or weak. “Her throat was slit. She was looking at me.”

“Did you tell Russell?”

“He'll say I'm dropping acid.” I pictured her in her room alone, listening to her father's bed creak on the other side of the wall. “Do you believe me?”

I did. I never saw the little dead girl, even though sometimes I wanted to; I would gaze into the mirror until the darkness of the shower distorted.

“Jesus fuck. I'm never going back in there alone.”

I promised she wouldn't have to.

Thus began the showers with the door cracked, at six o'clock before school, whispering, one rocking on the shaggy carpet while the other washed quickly. We chose our clothes—red pistols on a black tank top, a pewter belt buckle in the shape of a skull—and waited for whatever neighbor had been saddled with driving us over black ice, between mountain ranges, through the gorge.

Every morning in my house, my brother and sister fought as they ate cereal and gathered little bags of trail mix for lunch, then waited in the mudroom to be picked up. Sometimes my father was awake. Other times he was with my mother. Once she woke with a red rash covering her back, but most mornings she slept late, against the rasp of the oxygen tank.

Elizabeth and I had a memory of Halloween, a few weeks before my mother made the long drive to the city for tests, when we only suspected something was wrong. On a clear cold night before much snow had gathered, we put on costumes and ran beneath sharp autumn stars between my house and hers. And because it was Halloween, and my mother had thrown a party for the few kids of Swall Meadows, this time we weren't strange.

We sang while we ran from house to house, down Mountain View Drive, on the scavenger hunt my mother had planned. We searched for items she printed on lists—toenail clippings from the neighbors, hair from my black cat Helena, an apple from the orchard. And from Elizabeth's house, the last stop on the hunt, a piece of kibble from Sara's bowl.