The Driest Season Page 5

  “That is fine,” Helen said. “You think things are messier than they are. You’re digging for something that doesn’t exist. You’re wasting your time.”

  Cielle wanted to tell her that their father had killed himself and their mother was a liar, but she couldn’t say it. It wouldn’t come out.

  For dinner they ate the lasagna that Mrs. Mack had brought by that afternoon. Then their mother rose, having only eaten half of what was on her plate.

  “I’m going to take a bath and go to sleep so I can put on a good face tomorrow,” she said. “Get some rest.” She walked toward the stairs. The ceiling lamp hanging above the table felt like a spotlight to Cielle, too bright, all on her.

  Her grandmother rose to clear the table.

  “People are meeting at the lake tonight,” Helen said. “Want to go? Get out of here?”

  “I don’t know,” Cielle said. “I’m tired.”

  “I found some of dad’s homemade beer,” she said. “It’s in the cellar.”

  “I hate the cellar.”

  “Well, I’ll get it from the cellar.”

  Cielle looked up at the ceiling, at the light, and squinted. She loved her sister, but sometimes didn’t know if she liked her. She wished they saw the world the same way. She wanted an ally and an unbreakable bond but she didn’t have that with Helen, and there was nothing she could do to change it.

  “What else would you do? Sit here alone while everyone sleeps?” Helen stood and put her hands on her hips. “Clean the dishes and get your jacket. I’ll get the beer. We’ll drive to the lake, see our friends, and try to think about something else.”

  “Go ahead, girls. Go be with your friends,” her grandmother said.

  Helen drove. There was still daylight at the edges of the trees through the woods. The sky was a light blue ring fading to dark, a color that always made Cielle think of a metal rim and about what was at the edge of the earth. It made her think about how big the world was, how much of it she’d never seen, and about all the other people living their lives at that exact same moment. She wondered how many other girls had just lost their father, and were looking at that very same piece of sky.

  “You smell like jasmine,” Cielle said.

  “Trudy gave me a small bottle for graduation, she bought it in Chicago.” Trudy was Helen’s best friend. Her father was a surgeon at the hospital in Richland Center, and their family was wealthy. Aside from their house in Boaz, they had a house on Green Lake and an apartment in Chicago. Helen got to spend time with them in both of those places. Trudy was going to Wellesley in the fall.

  “It’s nice,” Cielle said.

  “Here.” Helen held out her wrist. “Rub.”

  Cielle rubbed her wrist against Helen’s. Now she smelled like jasmine too: fresh, clean, like springtime, like something exotic.

  “What did you give Trudy?”

  “I made her an abstract painting. It looks like red barns in cornfields. Some Wisconsin for her to take to Massachusetts.”

  Helen was a wonderful painter, but Cielle knew she’d always keep painting as a hobby and never as something serious to pursue. Helen was practical and had a plan. She wanted to marry someone successful and have a family. She wanted to live in Chicago and have a lake house. She wanted to wear cashmere sweaters in the winter and silk in the summer.

  “Are you excited to go to college?” Cielle asked.

  “I can’t wait. I get to start all over. You can come visit,” she said. “We can eat whatever we want, go to a fraternity party or to see a band, and swim in Lake Mendota.”

  “Maybe you’ll still be there when I come for college.”

  “Maybe,” Helen said. “But you’re smarter than I am, and you have your violin.”

  Helen drove slowly, as she always did. Their windows were down and the soft night air blew their hair around as they passed fields and barns and homes with their warm yellow lights on inside. Signs of life.

  “Who knows?” Cielle said. “Who knows what will happen?”

  They turned down a dirt road through tall stands of pine and oak trees toward the lake. After two miles, there was an opening, and then the beach and a bonfire. There were close to fifteen people sitting and standing around the fire. As the girls pulled in, heads turned and some people waved.

  Helen parked a good distance from them. Before she got out of the truck, she touched Cielle’s arm. “Let’s have a good time tonight,” she said. “Like we’re the girls we were before all this. Don’t get serious and sad and make everyone uncomfortable.”

  Cielle opened her mouth to speak, then nodded okay. If that’s what Helen wanted, she would try, but this was where she and Helen were different. Helen saw feelings as weakness, and Cielle did not. Cielle knew they couldn’t be those girls they were before all this. Cielle knew she could fake her old self, smile and pretend she was at ease and that all was okay in the world, and so she would, to make Helen happy, and to make their friends feel comfortable. But why should she have to? She knew no one expected that, except Helen, who had always been a good faker.

  Helen grabbed the beer from the flatbed. Cielle carried a wool blanket and limped behind Helen, only putting pressure on her left heel. Her toes felt like sad, smashed things in her shoe. As they got closer, fewer voices spoke and more people turned.

  Trudy came out of the crowd, tears in her eyes, her arms held wide. She didn’t say a word, but hugged Helen, and then waved Cielle toward her and hugged them both. After Trudy, their friends all approached with hugs and condolences, and Helen and Cielle let them. When it was over, they all sat on the sand around the fire. The small moment of acknowledgment passed.

  Helen opened her bottle of beer and held it up. “Here’s to new beginnings,” she said. Everyone raised a bottle. Cielle raised hers too, even though she wasn’t sure what for. She didn’t get a new beginning. She envied Helen’s escape, where she could start over. She could already see Helen placing their father’s death someplace else, someplace manageable, where she wouldn’t have to look too closely or grieve too long. Cielle thought that if she were Helen she might do the same, and would be counting the days until leaving Boaz.

  Darren Olsen came out of the shadows from the other side of the fire and sat next to Cielle. Blood rose in her face. He pulled his knees against his chest and held them with his arms. He had hair the color of polished chestnuts. “Cielle,” he said, looking at the fire. “I’m sorry about your father. How are you?”

  “Our pig stepped on my toes today.”

  “Anything break?”

  “Helen doesn’t think so, but they’re bruised and feel smashed.”

  “I’ve never broken a bone. My parents think it’s a miracle.”

  “Maybe you’re magic,” Cielle said. “Or a superhero.”

  “That would be nice. Unbreakable Man.”

  “Miracle Magical Mending Man.”

  “If only.” He picked up a stick and dragged it through the sand in circle and diamond shapes, and then picked at the rocks in the dirt and threw them at the fire. “Before we moved to Boaz, my older brother died,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You miss them real bad, and then a little less, but it never leaves you. It becomes a new kind of hurt.” His eyes were back on the fire. “Next week’s the county fair, if you want to go Friday.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I like the fair. Friday’s good.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Good.”

  She felt comforted having him there; he felt like the promise of change.

  “Thanks for coming to the viewing today,” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “Your mother’s pretty. I hadn’t ever seen her before today.”

  “My mother . . .” he said, but didn’t finish his thought. He put his foot in the middle of the stick he held, broke it in half, and threw both pieces into the fire.

  Trudy stood at the edge of the lake with her toe in the water. “Anyone want to swim?” she asked.

>   Cielle thought a swim might cool the throbbing of her foot.

  “I’ll go in,” Cielle said, and stood. She and Trudy stripped to their bras and underpants. She didn’t care. Cielle looked back and Darren sat on the sand looking their way. She wondered if he liked her body, if he thought she was pretty, and she hoped he did. Trudy wrapped her arm around Cielle’s waist as they waded into the water. “He has his eyes on you,” she said. “On those long skinny Jacobson legs.”

  When the water was up to their breasts Trudy said, “Now you can float,” and she let go and swam away.

  The lake was still and dark. Small bugs hovered above the water and then there was a dent of movement, a small break in the water, of life underneath coming up for air. All of this, Cielle thought, all that is rising to the surface, it feels like things blooming in the dark.

  Cielle dipped below to wet her face and hair, and then lifted and floated on her back. Her ears were underwater and everything was thick with silence. She floated, weightless, and twirled herself in a circle. The last light faded from purple twilight to dark. A few stars blinked above like coins flashing in the sun. She learned in physics class that year that starlight shone down onto earth long after a star had died, and that everything and everyone was part of a star. She imagined stardust inside of her, glittering flecks of the universe, outer space swimming inside her heart and lungs and eyes. Herself and the universe expanding into nothing into something, spinning and converging, small threads pulling and connecting everything and everyone that lived and had ever lived.

  She looked upside down back toward the beach. Helen stripped to her underwear and waded into the water. Around the fire there was a circle of dense and soft light; there was the smell of woodsmoke, and the popping of embers that floated up into the night. Beyond was blackness without definition.

  The water rippled gently as Helen breast-stroked toward her, and then Cielle felt a tug on her hand, and she lifted her head and treaded water upright. Helen was inches away, her face and hair slick and shiny in the dark.

  “Everyone keeps talking about it and I don’t want to talk about it,” Helen said.

  “Then stay out here. I’m not talking.”

  “Now they’ll just talk about us.”

  “Let them talk.” Cielle took water into her mouth and spit it fountainlike at Helen’s face. “Float on your back and look at the stars. We’re all made from stardust. Think about that.”

  “Mr. Bead, tenth-grade physics.”

  “We’re just a small insignificant dot swirling around in the enormous universe.”

  “But nothing feels insignificant.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  The water was warm and smooth, but Cielle’s foot caught pockets of cold here and there and her flesh shivered. Those cold pockets felt like secret spaces where things got lost. They felt like quiet, empty, vast spaces, like the sky above and the water below, that sucked light and bent time. Cielle thought of the mysteries among the living—death, how the earth spun and stayed in place, the largeness of the universe, the smallness of a firefly, the miracle of life itself and that she even had a mind to think these things and ponder how the earth was held in space, and bodies of water were held in the earth—worlds in worlds and no one knew much of anything about any of them, not really.

  “Make a wish on a star, Cielle. Make it a good one,” Helen said.

  Cielle turned and floated on her back again, and Helen did the same. Cielle straightened out her arms as if flying and she moved in the water so that the crown of her head touched Helen’s. She floated, connected to her sister, weightless, darkness below and darkness above, save the distant glimmer of the stars’ long-gone light reaching them. She wished for peaceful sleep-filled nights, to accept what was and would be, for unconditional love, and for no one else to leave her.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE BURIAL AT FIVE POINTS Cemetery was at ten the next morning. They kept it private and small. Clouds scudded overhead in the strong breeze and whipped Cielle’s hair into her eyes. Tree limbs and debris from the tornado littered the cemetery. A green mailbox was on the side of the road just outside the cemetery gates, and on it was painted OLSEN, III—it was Darren Olsen’s address, and the house was two miles away.

  Prayers and the eulogy were conducted. We are always at the edge of a loss, the preacher said. Try to find acceptance in your heart, and that will lead to peace. The cemetery was on the top of a hill, at the highest point in Boaz. Cielle saw farms and roads and hills beyond other hills. There were small lakes that looked like dark holes in the earth. In the winter, those lakes were wide-open white spaces sprinkled with ice-fishers and skaters. She wanted to know where you could look and find acceptance. She’d been praying for it. We are tested by loss. Learn from this. From your loss come to know yourselves and your lives, know what’s important; learn not what you want but what you need. She touched the dress pocket where she carried her father’s unread note. She wanted to know and didn’t want to know what it said. What if his reason for wanting to die wasn’t good enough? What if he didn’t give a reason? What if she had more questions, and now there was no one left to answer them? There was an empty space and no one who could tell her anything that made sense.

  We believe that in death, life is changed, not ended; that our life moves forward into a new fullness we can barely imagine. The Apostle Paul wrote about the change that happens to the body: we are not swallowed up by death. Our mortal body is swallowed up by life. We pass not into nothingness but into a new fullness.

  Her mother did not cry. She seemed too tired, too angry to cry, and Cielle thought she deserved to be both tired and angry. Mr. Mitchell and Bodie stood on the other side of the coffin, with their arms crossed over their chests, their eyes and heads down. Mrs. Mitchell sat in their car, parked just outside the cemetery gates. She said she could never watch a burial. Cielle made out her white tissue lifting up to her eyes and nose. She wondered if it was worth risking love and closeness for heartbreak and ruin. Maybe being alone was the best option; that way no one could lie to her, stop loving her, or leave her again.

  There are things we cannot figure out or really understand in this life. But Lee knows now, or is beginning to know, as he comes into that eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, into the fullest presence and embrace of knowing and being known. It is this hope, this assurance, that can help us make our peace, in time, with Lee’s having journeyed on now, beyond our sight, hearing, touch.

  The coffin was lowered into the ground. Her mother, grandmother, sister, Mr. Mitchell, Bodie, and Cielle each shoveled dirt on it, and her mother put a white rose on top of the dirt. Her grandmother wept. Cielle and Helen held hands. Her mother stood at the edge of the grave as she used to stand on the edge of the porch watching him go as he drove off into town. Now she stood and watched him go once and for all. Cielle’s chest cramped and her foot ached, and tears and noise came out of her and she couldn’t stop it. He was never ever coming back.

  Cielle approached the Mitchells’ car and stood by the window until Mrs. Mitchell looked at her. She had bags under her eyes and a red nose. She looked down into her lap, shut her eyes, and ran her thumb over the top of her hand. Mr. Mitchell and Bodie came up behind Cielle.

  “Cielle,” Mr. Mitchell said. “You’re welcome to come ride Ginger. You’re welcome anytime.”

  Cielle looked at her mother standing by their truck, and she nodded yes.

  “Okay,” Cielle said.

  Bodie hugged and kissed Helen.

  “I want to go home to nap,” her grandmother said.

  “We’ll drive you,” Mr. Mitchell said.

  Her grandmother rode in the back seat of the Mitchells’ Oldsmobile. The car pulled away slowly, and her grandmother remained still and upright as they dipped down the hill toward the farm.

  Cielle carefully walked over to the Olsens’ mailbox on the side of the road, her foot still sore and aching. She bent down and looked inside. There were letter
s addressed in fancy cursive from Madison, Milwaukee, Ripon, and one from Minneapolis. There was an electric bill, a small package addressed to Mr. Olsen from New York City, and even a letter addressed to Darren in small, neat handwriting from Washington, D.C.

  “Mom, we should take the Olsens’ mailbox back to their house,” Cielle said. “They have a lot of mail in there.”

  “Yes, Mom, because Darren might be home,” Helen said.

  Cielle pinched Helen’s arm.

  “Stop it,” Helen said.

  “You stop it,” Cielle said.

  “Cut it out,” her mother said. “Let’s hope their house is still standing and that everyone’s all right.” They loaded the mailbox onto the flatbed, and drove down County Road KK.

  “It’s okay to like somebody,” Helen said.

  “Be quiet,” Cielle said.

  Cielle imagined the Olsen house split apart, wooden boards scattered across the lawn, lamps and quilts in the road, a chair in a tree. If their mailbox ended up on the top of the town’s hill, where might they be? The Olsens had been diary farmers, until Old Mr. Olsen bought up land after the crash. Then they had money. Darren’s family moved to Chicago for years, where Mrs. Olsen went to school to become a psychologist. Then they moved back, renovated their house, and bought a new Cadillac. She’d never seen the inside of the house; her family weren’t close friends of the Olsens. Even though she and Darren flirted and liked each other, they’d never officially gone on a date.

  They coasted into the valley, where trees thinned out and gave way to fields. Green to yellow-brown. A jagged line cut through the edge of the Olsens’ cornfield as if a truck had rammed through at full speed for hundreds of yards. The ground was churned into a deep dark furrow.

  “That’s where the funnel ran.” Cielle pointed.

  Helen leaned forward. “Oh, my God.”

  It was hard to say where the funnel started. There was a fresh hole in the ground by the road where the mailbox had been sucked out and flung away. The car turned onto the Olsens’ driveway. Cielle’s heart rushed. The house came into view, intact and white as a bone, with the hanging baskets of lobelia, the delicate purple flowers untouched and dangling perfectly from the porch.