Any Bitter Thing

ANY
Bitter
THING

Also by Monica Wood

Secret Language
My Only Story
Ernie’s Ark: Stories

ANY
Bitter
THING

A NOVEL

MONICA WOOD

Copyright © 2005 by Monica Wood. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without
written permission from the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

eISBN:
978-0-8118-7068-9

Book and cover design by Jay Peter Salvas

Chronicle Books
LLC
680 Second Street
San Francisco, California 94107

www.chroniclebooks.com

in loving memory of Father Bob

The full soul tramples upon the honeycomb,
but to the hungry soul, any bitter thing tastes sweet.
—Proverbs 27:7

INVITATORY

ONE

Despite its abrupt arrival, my accident felt anticipated after the fact, like a long-delayed package arriving as a
thwup
on the doorstep.
Finally
, I thought, as I spun through the air and thudded back to earth, delivered.

I tell this with the authority of memory.

I’m wearing dark clothes on a moonless night. A moonless night in late March, a night scrimmed with the fine, soft rain that falls in spring, the road’s muddy shoulder too slick to run upon, the wet, bare asphalt making for better purchase. Through the misty dark, a carload of joyriding teenagers makes its oblivious way toward me.

My breathing settles, the road turns, my running shoes slop against the pavement. Then: hit and run. A brief flight through the murk. A bone-rattle landing.

I hear a girl scream, then the scream of the car—a stolen Neon that will be pulled over within the hour. The jig is up for the fourteen-year-old from New York City,
AWOL
from a
wilderness-experience program in Maine, showing off for her hick boyfriend and his three sidekicks. She tells the cop she thought she hit a deer. She tells her parents she thought she hit a deer. She tells the judge she thought she hit a deer.

Eventually, I guess, she thought she hit a deer.

I land directly on the yellow line—lined up neatly, head to toe—and rattle loose. The road feels forgiving and cool. Something breaks inside me, not only bones. I am thirty years old, with a husband and a good job and a best friend and students who need me and a hole in my life that I fall straight through.

Impossibly, I hear it all. The fading trail of the escaping Neon. The silence of my body laid upon the yellow stripe, waiting not to be revived but resurrected. Prone, waiting, in the middle of the road. The panicked engine sound weakens with distance, and I wait.

Another rumbling, logy and low, the geriatric throat-clearing of a Buick Skylark, another set of headlights coming around the bend. The brakes are bad—a long, anguished whinny. Some spitting gravel. A car door hitching open, the sound of boots quivering across the road.

Goddammit! Jesus on a stick! Of all the! Of all the!

Hard running, the ping of a cell phone, a few frantic directives, the car door hitching open again, and he’s back. Stay with her, they’ve instructed him, but he doesn’t.

Before he takes off, he moves me to the filthy shoulder, struggling under my negligible weight, great clogged breaths gurgling out.
Goddammit! Of all the Jeezly! Of all the Christly!
He lays me down. Hand on my cheek. Not an unkind hand. Also not the type you hope for when you are moments from dying.
His breath on my face arrives as an airy, whitish sifting, like an hourglass being cracked open and left to drain. It is a moment of confusing intimacy.

Then, he bolts.

Sorry sorry sorry!

Boot heels flinting on asphalt. Car door, again. A consumptive stutter as the Skylark pulls away, and away.

Now I hear everything: a branch leafing out. A sleeping bird.

The gate opens. Back I go.

TWO

My parents were among the passengers on Flight 286, Boston to Las Vegas, when the jet tottered in a wind shear, killing all on board. This is the first fact of my life. I was two and a half years old, staying at the rectory in the care of my uncle, Father Mike, my mother’s only sibling. It was Father Mike who had paid for their trip, the honeymoon they always wanted. The news arrived as a blur of activity, side-of-the-eye glimpses of chairs being whisked aside to make room for the hastening friends.

My uncle’s poor shaved face, damp and pink, pleats with grief. He melts into that vinyl chair in his office off the front hall, two of his cats draped over the desk like outsized paperweights. His face drops into the well of his hands. He knows my step, and says to me, “Men cry sometimes, Lizzy. Is that all right?” I nod, aware of the straight hem of my hair brushing my chin. He can’t see me but I think he can. “Yes?” I ask him, granting permission.

It is possible I’ve attached these images to the wrong day in my desire to remember something of my parents, if only the reverberation caused by news of their death. The human craving
is for story, not truth. Memory, I believe, embraces its errors, until what is, and what is remembered, become one.

Father Mike did nothing to dispel the widely accepted notion that I had nowhere else to go. I can’t imagine what he must have been thinking, filing requests and petitions, the paperwork strewn over our supper table among plates of leftover spaghetti and a cat nosing up from a chair. There was a meeting with some priests from surrounding parishes, and a call to the bishop, and finally a trip to the Chancery Office in Portland. It’s a comforting notion, all these lonely, childless men blessing my two-year-old head. Finally they let him have me, though by the time official permission arrived, my red coat with the gold buttons had landed in its permanent spot on the coat rack in the hall.