All Rivers Flow to the Sea (13 page)

Ivy and I had an accident. It was dusk in the Adirondacks, and the light blue truck came sliding and sliding. Can Ivy see her life at all anymore, somewhere way down deep inside her brain, her brain that’s a line on a machine now? Can she remember that night in the haymow? All those nights in the haymow, all those nights when we were little, and then not so little, and we were growing up, and we were teenagers, and Joey turned into Joe and Rosie turned into Rose and Tommy turned into Tom, and Ivy stayed Ivy. Ivy began as Ivy and remains as Ivy.

Joe Miller turned to her that night and said, “What would you do if you weren’t afraid, Ivy?”

And she jumped. A swoosh above our heads — we were all sitting on hay bales in the darkness — and she was up and away.

Through the paneless window she swung, and she disappeared, and there was no sound. She was gone. And we were up and running, out of the barn, down around the hill: “Ivy? Ivy! Ivy!” There she was, there on the rocks where she had fallen, the long flat rocks that surrounded the springhouse where the cool water comes bubbling out of the ground. The rocks that broke her arm and her ankle. We ran, and wove our arms together, and picked her up and carried her to the house, and into the car we went, and down to Utica, the hospital, the fluorescence, the white casts for the rest of the summer.

“Screw it,” Ivy said. “It was worth it.”

Joe didn’t say he was sorry, sorry he goaded her, sorry he dared her. And she didn’t ask him to.

My sister’s heart is working, pumping and pumping and pumping. When that truck came sliding into us, were her hands on the steering wheel trying to steer away from the truck, steer anywhere, over a guardrail into a tree, anywhere to get away from the truck that wouldn’t stop coming? Were her hands on the windshield, trying to push the truck away from her?

I don’t know. My own eyes were closed.

The only thing I know for sure was that in the end, her arm came out and smashed against my chest. Like mothers do with their babies. My sister was trying to keep me safe.

“Did you?” she said to me in the lucid interval, that brief span of time before the hemorrhage spread too far and shut her down. “Did you?”

Did I what, Ivy? Sister, tell me.

I’m in the green chair with my Pompeii book. William T. is behind me, reading about the bird of the day, which is the hermit thrush, the only brown thrush likely in cold weather. When the hermit thrush is alarmed, it flicks its wings and raises and lowers its tail. Its call note? A nasal
vreeeee.

“Imagine it,” I pretend-read. “All those ordinary people, living their ordinary lives. Maybe the baby had just gone to sleep in his basket of rushes in the corner.”

“Jesus,” William T. says. “We’re back to Moses again?”

“The baby is asleep in his basket of rushes, and his mother stands at the clay oven baking the bread for lunch,” I pretend-read. “His father is at the marketplace selling homemade wine.”

Angel peeks in and sees that all is well — Rose in the green chair with the book, William T. in the blue chair with his hermit thrush — and waves from the door as she lets it close again.

“And then, perhaps, there came the sound,” I pretend-read. “There might well have been a sound. Would it have been the sound of ash filling the air? Did it make a sound like the beating of wings?”

The sounds I most love: hail, rattling on the deck or pounding the hood of the truck; snow, the softness of it when I wake up on a winter night and feel the world around me muffled; rain, in spring or summer when it drums on the roof and lulls me into sleep; crickets chirping or bullfrogs down at the pond, croaking their way through a soft summer night.

And my sister’s voice.
It’s happening again, isn’t it, Rosie? Come on — let’s walk.

Volcanic ash. Would it have a sound?

“You look up from checking the bread, which is almost finished baking,” I pretend-read. “You know that something is wrong. Your first instinct is to look in the corner and make sure the baby is all right. The baby is all right. The baby is sleeping. But still, something is wrong. You can sense it.”

“That Pompeii book is strange,” William T. says. “It’s not written like a typical history book.”

Was the baby in the rush basket scooped up by his mother when the ash first began to flutter down? Did his mother tilt her head and listen to a faraway sound that she didn’t understand? Did the baby wake? Did he begin to cry? Did his mother try to soothe him as she hurried from the house?

Or maybe there was no time. Maybe it all happened so fast that there was only a single moment of confusion — she looked at the oven where the bread was baking; she looked at the bed, which was still unmade; she found herself running to the corner where the baby lay sleeping in his rush basket — and then it was all over.

Ivy has the hair she’s always wanted now. Long and soft, softer than she could have imagined.

“It’s finer than baby hair,” Angel said. “It’s a marvel of hair. Look at it.”

She held up a strand. Light from the window behind her poured in and illuminated my sister’s hair. Who would have known that each individual strand could contain within it so many colors, could glisten in the rays of the sun as if it were made of the sun itself?

“‘Before going on to Chapter Six,’” I say, “‘make sure you can answer these questions. What is the hand signal for a stop? A right turn? If two drivers enter an intersection from opposite directions at the same time, one going straight, the other turning left, which must yield the right of way? If you enter an intersection to make a left turn but oncoming traffic prevents you from making the turn right away, what should you do? If you reach an uncontrolled intersection at the same time as a driver on your right and both of you are going to go straight, who has the right of way? What must you do if you are entering a road from a driveway? You are facing a green light, but traffic on the other side of the intersection would keep you from going all the way through the intersection. May you enter the intersection? Does a vehicle about to enter a traffic circle or rotary have the right of way over vehicles already in the circle?’”

“Jesus H. Christ,” William T. says. “The hell if I know the answer to half those questions.”

“See?” I say. “That’s what I’ve been telling you. It’s not that easy.”

Then I hear the sound of my mother’s voice.

“Ivy?”

She carries a big cardboard box. Her cranes, her hundreds and hundreds of cranes. There she stands, at the foot of Ivy’s bed. The ventilator:
wishhh, wishhh, wishhh.

“Connie,” William T. says. “Connie.”

She looks over at him. There’s a look in her eyes. The box of cranes looks so heavy, cradled in her arms like that. She looks at William T. and her head begins to shake.
No,
her head says.
No.

“Connie.”

William T. gets up from the blue chair. He takes the big box of cranes from my mother and sets it on the floor. Then he picks up the hairbrush from the nightstand, Ivy’s hairbrush, and puts it into my mother’s hand. He folds her hand around it, as if she’s a toddler and he is her parent, trying to show her how to hold a spoon.

“Here you go,” he says. “Sit down now. Younger, give your mother a seat, will you?”

I stand up and William T. guides my mother into the green chair.

“There you go,” he says. “Brush now. Brush her hair.”

He puts his hand over my mother’s hand and guides her hand to Ivy’s head, and down he brushes, down they brush, down the brush glides over my sister’s hair. My mother’s other hand comes hesitating up and follows the path of the brush. After a while Angel is there, turning Ivy’s chart around and around in her hands.

“Angel,” William T. says, “I’d like you to meet Connie.”

“Nice to meet you, Connie.”

“She’s the mother. Elder and Younger’s mother.”

“Of course she is,” Angel agrees.

We all stand there, watching my mother brush Ivy’s hair. One hand strokes the brush through Ivy’s hair, and the other hand follows in the path of the brush, smoothing and smoothing. It’s a rhythm, and my mother falls into it. Strands fly up in the air to meet the brush.

The night of the accident, my mother stood in the hallway with the doctors and the nurses around her. She was the lone tree in the middle of supplicant trees. Her hands covered her ears. Her eyes were closed. “I cannot lose my daughter,” she said. She kept on saying it. “I cannot lose my daughter.”

“Too late,” the young doctor said. “Your daughter is already dead. In every meaningful way, your daughter is already gone.”

“You don’t know,” my mother said. “You don’t know! You have no fucking idea of what my daughter will or will not be able to do!”

The young doctor shook his head. He was angry; he was impatient with my mother.
Crazy woman,
he was thinking — I could tell.

“You! Don’t! Know!” my mother said. She started pushing at him, at his white coat, his chest. “You have No! Fucking! Idea!”

And the doctor turned and walked away down the hall and disappeared.

Later, William T. held my mother against his truck. He and Crystal and Spooner and Tom had brought us home from the hospital. Tom and I stood on the porch, and the three of them stood around my mother there in the chill March air, closed ranks around her, and William T.’s arms circled themselves around my mother and she leaned into his arms, and her head was on his shoulder, and his arms were wrapped around her. Tom and I watched from the porch. My mother leaned against William T., and William T.’s arms were wrapped around her, and William T. and Crystal leaned against each other, and of the three of them, none either moved or spoke until my mother’s shoulders started to shake and I knew she was crying.

“It’s okay,” William T. whispered to her. “It’s okay.”

My mother’s shoulders aren’t narrow, but her rib cage is the narrowest of rib cages. Turn her sideways and there is not much there. Ivy too. When they stood together, their bodies were the same, Ivy’s smaller, but the bones were put together in precisely the same way. When Ivy walked, I could feel my mother walking.

William T.’s hands came up and touched my mother’s hair. She didn’t move.

The hand that was touching my mother’s hair began to stroke her hair. Down it went, from the crown of her head to where her hair brushed against her shoulders. And up again, and down. Smoothing, and stroking, and smoothing, and stroking. Never changing its rhythm. William T.’s eyes gazed at Crystal, who was crying silently, and his hand moved as if it were its own self, as if it knew what to do independent of any thought, as if it were stroking my mother’s hair out of instinct alone:
Yes. This is what must be done.

My mother couldn’t lose her daughter. She couldn’t say the words that would let them disconnect the ventilator from Ivy’s body, let Ivy’s body gradually cease to take in air, let her heart gradually stop its squeezing, its squeezing, its squeezing.

“So she’s not brain-dead?” she said.

The young doctor looked away.

“She tried to take a breath, so that means she’s not brain-dead, right?”

He looked away, kept looking away, shook his head.

“Not officially,” is what he finally said. “Not legally.”

My mother keeps brushing Ivy’s hair, and then she puts the brush down. She pulls Ivy’s hair to one side and plaits it. Unplaits it. Strokes her fingers through its long softness. Finger-combs it. Bends her cheek to the long strands and breathes in. Breathes out. She turns to me and William T.

“I wish I had let her go right in the beginning,” she whispers. “I wish that I had let her go.”

The day comes when I am sitting in the green chair by my sister’s bed. No more Pompeii. No more baby in his rush basket, baby who will never wake up. Goodbye, baby. Goodbye, mother who couldn’t save him.

I read from the driver’s manual. Getting ready for my road test, three days hence.

“It’s time, Younger,” William T. says. “You can’t just sit in that goddamned chair reading from that manual forever.”

“That’s a quarter.”

He ignores me. Maybe he thinks I’m old enough now that curses will not adversely affect my growth. Maybe he figures I’m tall enough now to be safe.

“There comes a time, Younger,” he says, “when the book must be put aside, and the pedal put to the metal. And that time, by God, has come.”

He turns in his blue chair and points his index finger out the window, at the gray thread of pavement winding its way beyond the Rosewood Convalescent Home driveway.

“Road ho!” he says, and turns to Ivy in her bed. “What do you think, Elder? Is it time that Younger got off her butt and into the driver’s seat?”

Ivy says nothing.
Wishhh, wishhh, wishhh.
My sister, beautiful sister with the softest hair in the world, sister whose hair was never so soft when she was alive.

And what I never wanted to happen has just happened. I thought the words
when she was alive.

I didn’t mean it, Ivy! Ivy, I didn’t mean it! Ivy, I am not letting you go!

She doesn’t open her eyes and look at me and say,
I know you didn’t mean it.