No One is Here Except All of Us (12 page)

The stranger left the others with the banker’s family, where the low ceiling pressed their grief back down each time it drifted for a moment. Igor had fallen asleep on the floor by the fire. Peace was a distant thing, but the truth of what happened had also fallen far away. His dreams were dim and chaotic. Ravens, wind, closed doors.

Kayla and Hersh were worried about whatever it was they were going to see—nothing, probably. The absence of their daughter. The places, hundreds of them, thousands, where I was not. The crooks of the trees, the trunks of the trees, the tall grass, the tall grass, the tall grass, the shelves where the chickens nested, their warm round forms atop a bed of possible kin, willing and warming them into existence, all empty of me.

“Maybe the Golem has her,” Hersh said. “What’s that story again?”

“I don’t think we’ve written it yet,” our stranger told him. “How should it go?”

“Well,” he began, “the monster is made of mud and bugs and sticks. The monster is born out of the earth itself.” He paused. “Is that a good start?”

“That’s a very good start,” our stranger assured him.

“Okay. So the monster is born out of the mud and he lives peacefully on worms and fish and small rodents.”

“I don’t think he lives peacefully at all,” said Kayla. “I think he terrorizes the villagers and chews on their toes and steals their potatoes right out from under their knives. I think he falls in love with all the daughters and takes them away to live in the mud with him.” She looked up at her husband, terror renewed. “Oh, dear! He’s stolen Lena!”

My parents sped up, shined their lights on any dark thing. The row of lanterns along the riverbank bobbed. They dipped close to the water, scanned the bushes. Webs of branches came into relief in the light, then faded back into the darkness.

I unearthed myself, sat cobbled with mud, my complete arms around my complete knees, watching someone come to me. I had traced their approach, the giveaway of their lights making a line through the fields. I knew I would be found, would be washed, would be taken to bed. I knew I would be scolded and loved.

When the chain of lights came close, when the voices with
Lena
in them were in my ears, I stood up. I was myself, but crusted over and thicker. Rougher. My hair was one solid brown mass, my eyebrows and my eyelashes.

“Another stranger,” the stranger whispered to herself. It was as if she were discovering herself on the shore, rescuing her own cold body from the water.

Hersh and Kayla came to the mudded person, ready to demand their daughter back. They saw my eyes and reached out together, scraped my arm and watched the brown crust fall off. Their lamps lit up their faces from below, making them look like masks, their cheekbones sunken, their chins jutting out.

The stranger recognized me, which meant she was still alone. She was still the only stranger. She turned her back to us so we would not see her face twist up.

“It’s you,” Hersh said.

“It’s me,” I answered.

“What were you doing?” Kayla wanted to know. Her voice was smoke, dissipating. The thing she was sure of—tragedy—disappeared.

“I was here. I am here.”

“Why did you leave me?” Kayla whimpered.

“I didn’t,” I said. “I just came to do the laundry and stayed on awhile.”

Kayla draped a still-wet bedsheet over me, saying, “It’s indecent. You’re not a child anymore.” They began to lead me home, but paused when the stranger did not follow. “Hey,” Kayla said, “we found her. Time to go home. Everything is fine.” The stranger, her back still turned to us, waved us away. “I’ll come back soon,” she said quietly. “I’m going to . . . stand here for a while.”

“Thank you for finding me,” I told her, not wanting to leave her alone.

“Thank you for finding me, too,” she answered. There was a little rain, which was so light we could not feel it falling. Hersh and Kayla had our clean laundry slung over their arms, and I, coated in mud, followed behind. I felt like a flower bulb they had just dug up, hopeful that they might plant me in the garden, where, after the long, frozen stillness of winter, a spray of irises might emerge as if from nowhere.

THE BOOK OF HOPE, LOST AND GAINED

W
e gathered under the swinging branches of a cottonwood at the northern edge of the village in the middle of the cemetery, where the road, grown over with hungry vines, once led out and away. Igor stood with his brothers and sisters while his parents were shoulder to shoulder. His mother had not spoken to him since the baby’s death. She would not meet his eye. That morning, his father had said, “She will forgive you someday,” and Igor had said, “Forgive me for what?” His father had shrugged his shoulders, as if his were not the weight that had ended the fragile life. “Forgive me for what?” Igor had asked again.

“For seeing her like that. For being disgusted by her.”

“Disgusted?”

The rain was heavier that day but we were dry under the tree, all the water falling in a ring around us. We remembered in great detail the four days when the baby had been alive. Igor asked our stranger to explain what had happened and she said, “He was conceived in a different world—he was not meant for this one.” She blessed his cold body and washed him off with river water carried here in a flowerpot. We each took a turn putting our fingers on his forehead, wishing him a safe journey and thanking him for visiting us here. But more than anything else, we stood in silence, because death lived with us too now and always would. The sweet months were over when no one had ever left us.

And was it true that he came from another world? Was it true that his death was right? Or was this the first curse, the first shining ring in a chain? We offered our sadness to the banker and his wife and the eleven siblings—who stood together in a group just failing to add up to a complete dozen—but we did so from a few feet away. We did so with our hands hidden in our pockets. We did so without once kissing any of them on the cheek or offering our own clean handkerchiefs for their miserable eyes. We each threw handfuls of dirt into the baby’s hole, and placed small pebbles on his gravestone, which read simply, The First Birth, The First Death.

Later, Kayla polished
her wooden spoons. She kept looking into them, waiting for the moment when her rag had worked enough circles for a mirror to appear in the birch. I was transfixed by her hopeless determination. Kayla always felt the electricity of her own belief crackle and spark so ferociously that she was sure she could light the world. At the door, three questioning knocks. Kayla lined her wooden spoons, ungleaming, on the table. It was the banker, dressed in black. Kayla stood in the doorway, blocking the entrance while she offered him tea, a sweet and her condolences for his tragic loss.

“Can I?” he said, motioning inside.

“Oh, certainly, yes of course, certainly, yes,” Kayla said while she stood in his way. The banker took a step and forced her to move. “I cannot imagine,” she told him. “None of us can imagine.” He shook his wet hat out on the floor. She eyed the water like something contaminated.

“That’s not what I’m here about,” he said. “I know there is talk of a curse and maybe it’s true. I’m here about your daughter.”

“My daughter?”

I looked at both of them. “Me?” I asked.

“I have settled on the story,” he said. “Are you ready? May I sit?”

“Okay,” Kayla told him. “Certainly. I’m sorry, yes. We like stories.” The banker arranged himself in the chair slowly, crossing and uncrossing his feet, folding his hands on his lap.

“Once upon a time, there was a quiet village at the edge of a river,” the banker started. His voice was measured and low. “For a long time, the village was innocent and nothing very bad had happened there. But then, a baby was crushed by the weight of his father’s love. Crushed. And the people in the village understood that sadness waited for them ahead.”

The banker picked one of Kayla’s wooden spoons, stirred an invisible pot. “But there was a beautiful young girl. The Girl Who Retold the Story. No matter how afraid the others were, she could tell the next chapter of the story, and they were always safe in it.”

He had been watching; I had been seen.

“Now, once upon the same time there was a young man who needed to find a new home, and a new family. He was a little bit greedy with his parents and asked to have a hand in everything, but he would grow out of that. He wanted to change and he wanted to marry. He had waited patiently for the perfect, magical wife who could cancel out any family curse. Who could turn the story into something happy. When the boy’s father came to the girl and asked for her help, she gave it.”

He paused, watched me, a silent girl sitting across the table from him. I looked at my hands, which were utterly ordinary, as was everything else. Somehow, other people kept seeing something they thought could save them, when all I saw was dry skin, chipped nails. I felt like a vessel, the container itself meaningless, yet into it people kept pouring ashes, tears, blood, and calling me holy. As much as I wanted to explain the mistake, I knew they would brush me aside. A person who wants to believe lives in a world full of proof.

“We need to not have any more dead babies in our house again. Never. We need to not be the bringers of the first curse in the world. And my wife needs Igor to move along. The only one who can ensure those things is Lena.”

“My daughter is the best girl in the village, is that what you’re saying? Because she was raised so well? Because she has such an outstanding mother?” The banker didn’t have a chance to agree before she said, “It’s a good arrangement. When?”

“Right away. He’s ready. She’s ready?”

“She could be ready.”

“Wait, how old am I?” I asked.

“Old,” Kayla told me, and she shook the banker’s hand.

In the evening,
while we all three forked beets into our mouths, Kayla said, “Exciting news. Lena’s getting married.” Hersh opened his mouth and he left it open. His long face was the side of a cliff with a gaping cave in the middle. I half expected leather bat wings to begin flapping out. When he looked at me, I shook my head. I had nothing.

“You are making this up,” he said, knowing that he had made no agreement with any father of a son.

“Nope.”

“We can’t lose her,” he said.

“We have to lose her, it’s our only chance.”

“How did this happen? You didn’t even ask me?”

Kayla shook her head and chewed her food. I tried to pay attention to the warm slide of a potato down my throat. I felt like a weed in the river, having no say which direction it was pulled. My throat closed up, my heart closed up, my fists closed up.

“There was this nice story about how our daughter is some kind of sage, and how she is the only person who can turn a sad story into a happy one. The whole point is that the banker doesn’t want any more bad luck. No more dead babies, right? Plus, there aren’t very many worthy boys around, and plus, Lena is a woman now.”

Kayla smiled then and squinched her eyes shut. When she spoke again, her voice was higher. “I get to be the mother of the bride.” She laughed, the last word stretched out into a long whine. “I get to plan a whole wedding!”

Hersh poured a glass of vodka from the dusty bottle he kept hidden behind the special occasion teacups, went outside and sat down on the ground and called God’s name. Hersh said he hoped God was paying attention and not throwing curses and blessings around just to keep busy. “Look, can you just do what is right?” It was what he always asked for. Kayla, watching from the window, swore she saw God roll his eyes and take a big gulp of Hersh’s drink.

“You have to ask him for something in particular,” she said to her husband through the open pane. She had always complained that Hersh did not know how to pray right. There were plenty of worthwhile requests: to come upon a store of gold coins, a fat cow, a spring in the forest that washed the years away. Why did Hersh always have to be so abstract, so trusting?

“I want him to do what’s right,” he told her.

“You have to tell the man what you need. Don’t give him some whatever-you-think-is-best crap,” Kayla scolded. “He’s busy, he needs you to do the research for him and recommend a course of action. Tell him your daughter ought to be blessed and that even if the boy is cursed could they at least even out? And could there be many new grandbabies very quickly?”

“If he is God, he knows more than I do.”

“Apparently he makes mistakes. That innocent baby. Oops,” she said.

“I’m going to get
married
?” I interrupted from the chair where I had been frozen.

“What happy news!” Kayla exclaimed.

“Now?”

“Soon.”

“How
old
am I?” I asked for the second time.

“You have grown a lot,” Kayla said. “You’re even older than when you asked that earlier.”

Cold air swooped inside when Hersh opened the door, and disappeared just as quickly when he closed it. He stood over me. He put his hands on my head and came in close to whisper, “Everyone knows you’ll be okay—it’s me missing you that I’m worried about.”

And for the second time in my life, I prepared to be passed on. The feeling I had was of hovering above my own life. As if I were the shed skin of an insect, and the body I used to hold had simply walked out. Even the word
marriage
sounded gravelly in my mouth. Mangled, half chewed. I understood nothing. But there were my hands, my fingers, and thank goodness for them, because they remembered, as always, how to do the next task. I went to my room and began to go through my things, fold and flatten, shake and stack, as if this small preparation would be enough. That was how my hands and I prayed that night. I touched everything in the room so that in the end my dirty fingerprints were on all of it. Proof that time had passed, evidence of my existence. I took out the note from my first mother to my old sister.
This is how I love you
, it said to her again, and again she was not there to see it. I am here, I prayed. I am real.

Igor fainted
the
moment he saw me enter the room. His eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed, not onto the hard floor of his kitchen where we stood, not into the sharp corner of the table, but precisely and theatrically, into the arms of his mother. She looked at him, shock wrinkling her nose, trying to figure out how she came to be holding her grown son. He shuddered for a moment and then his eyelids opened to the world around him. Igor’s mouth widened into a gawky smile when he saw that I was still there—not dreamed but flesh—and he stood straight up, brushed his hands over his clean, pressed wool pants. To him, I looked like an exactly right young lady.

Sweat burst from the foreheads of his parents, but not from Igor’s. He weakened in all the right places, and got strong in all the right places as well. This was the story he had been told his whole life. The story of becoming a man in his own town with a nice girl. There would be little Igors soon, and the butcher would sell him nice cuts of meat, and the baker would sell him the best loaves of bread, and his wife would be capable in the kitchen (and in the bedroom, praise God who art good to me, amen). Igor was being offered a door leading out of the tragic house where no one looked him in the eye anymore. His new life appeared just like that, detailed and populated, at his feet. He had done nothing other than come downstairs in the morning wearing the clothes his father had laid out, and there it was: his future, blessed, alive and, most important, now.

The wedding was planned for a week hence, and everyone helped clean the barn for the big event. “What happens at a wedding?” the greengrocer asked while he washed windows.

“Two people turn into one,” his wife said. “Sometimes it’s a loss and sometimes it’s a gain.”

“In your case?” he asked. She shrugged and he pinched her on the back of the hand.

“A wedding can be whatever we want,” the stranger said. “Any ideas?”

“We should light candles,” the baker’s wife said.

“We should throw soft things,” two of the banker’s youngest daughters suggested. “We should dance.”

“We should break something,” Perl suggested.

“Break something?” the stranger asked.

“Yes. Because brokenness is the truth of life.” People squinted at her, drawing away. “It’s not a bad thing,” she said, defending herself. “There are more pieces to share.”

“Should we read our prayers?” the stranger wondered. Like a lullaby, this quieted us. Long before we could hear the words, we were comforted by them. The jeweler, who appeared at all times near the stranger like an attendant, a maid-in-waiting, made it official by handing her a book and pen to record the decree.

Some people brushed the sheep and some people culled dirty feathers from the hens. Some people hung garlands of flowers on rusted nails, and some took turns climbing our tallest ladder in order to clean the cobwebs and cement the tiles of our first complete constellation up on the ceiling: the Constellation of Hope, Lost and Gained, which had three stars—the star of Lena, the star of Igor and the star of the dead baby, all in a line.

The villagers put on the nicest clothes they had and men slapped their faces with alcohol and felt cleaner because of it. Everyone carried their own chairs from their own houses and set them up in rows. The barn smelled of earth and dust, of waiting. The low chatter of anticipation hovered like fog. Would today be beautiful and joyous? Would nothing disrupt the union we were trying, like magicians, to summon from thin air?

The villagers placed gifts on a table near the horses. They talked about the beauty of this, the first marriage in the new world and the joys it would bring. They talked about the first baby, which was also the first death, and decided that our stranger was right—he had not been able to live because he was conceived before the world began. What was he supposed to do? He was the last breath of the old world, and now we were truly free. The next baby would be the real first baby.

In the sunken eyes of the banker’s wife, Perl saw the bruises of loss; a mother, pecked at by a flock of justifications for her son’s death. Perl went to her, said, “It never goes away. You will always hurt.” The banker’s wife wanted to scream in the face of this woman who had come to further salt her tears. But then she looked at Perl and saw she too had a swollen heart. Waterlogged, soaked, engorged with loss and love.