Obsidian Novella

Prologue

I'm looking back, now, to a time that's becoming increasingly unclear as my existence continues. I'm looking back, calling it back, because I am, presently, where I've spent most of my life, counting the days behind me as past, and viewing the days ahead as future. But for that season when Shannon came, the days weren't like that at all. They were, instead, more like one long day, maybe, or perhaps like a time more angular than aligned, shaped, not flat, with points and dimensions that severed chronometry and its perception. It's hard for me to recall the time of Shannon with the same mechanics with which I remember the whole rest of my life: one event stacked on top of the other like a pyramid, pointing towards something real, like the sky.

Jay first told me about Shannon when we were on the bus to Oaxaca. We sat in the back, with rows of empty seats between us and the five or six passengers up front. It was in Oaxaca we agreed to get married, and it was on the way there Jay told me, for the first time, about Shannon.
I can't remember much else besides the nagging that crept up over me. It wasn't even then that they'd been lovers, it was already something more. Jay's past girlfriends, his entire life in general, meant nothing to me then. Neither of us ever once stopped to think. If we had, well I don't know, but it probably would have changed everything, our thinking.
But Jay told me about Shannon when we were on that bus, because we were going to agree to getting married, and waiting, even one afternoon more, would have been lying, on Jay's part, a chosen deception, considering all that came to be. He told me about Shannon and I was aware, dozing on that bus, of the shift, a barely discernable shift in my perception, and as it settled in I let it, feeling the dull gnawing in the place where I set it. It settled and I moved to accommodate it. Jay said he loved her and then she died, and that she was older, and he perhaps too young, but too old, at the same time, for his birthday age. He said it happened a long time ago and it was past. He told me his present and his future were marked by that past and that no one could change it. Then he was quiet and while I waited I felt the shift, and felt it settle. And then Jay smiled, and while the bus rocked into Oaxaca we weaved ourselves together more tightly.
We agreed to marriage for the solemnity of the ceremony. The bus ride to Oaxaca was the first time I acknowledged whatever shift occurred and what it provoked. But choosing marriage was definitely a result of that, and later, when the events of my living were altered, I was forced to recognize further the consequences of that moment's admission. I tried resisting. It never did work. Instead I dreamed of Oaxaca at nighttime, dreamed of the bus ride through the mountains, and during the daytimes I kept one arm held close to my stomach where everything had settled, and, with the other, rubbed my thumb against my fingers.


Obsidian
Laura Davis
Chapter 1



I left my mother's house with certain beliefs. One of these was that I could have everything I wanted, my way. I don't recall failing at anything, while growing up, because if I did, I transposed it somehow, into a win. It's how my mother taught me, that stuff about where there's a closed door there's an open window, and I believed her, like I always did. Even after my father died, she continued in her way of "accentuating the positive," as she called it. "Meg," she'd remind me, serious despite her humor, "life is just a chair of bowlies."
When I had those times when math wouldn't stick in my mind, or when I was the very last kid on my whole entire block to figure out how to keep a bike up and rolling, my mom would tell me that it was only a matter of time. "There's simply no way," she told me, "that you will not learn long division, if given enough time and tenderness." She spoiled me, my mother, with her unyielding faith in me.
I was safe at home. Even after my father suddenly died, my mother protected me. She let me miss my daddy unrestrained. All I remember is her holding me, hour after hour. I never detected a twinge of impatience. Not that I expected that then. I was being rocked and soothed, and settled easily into my mother's lap, where the things she said were true were confirmed. I healed. I got up one day and went outside to play.
Later, though, I thought about my mother and how she allowed me that time, and others too, because missing him came over me now and then, and when I looked back I was able to realize, being an adult myself, how excusable it could have been for her to have not been able to find the energy to love me that wholeheartedly. But my mother had the ability to not let sobbing or pouting or pillow punching change her love for me. She let me ride out the bad times.
I left home to discover that there was a good chance no one would ever care for me the same way my mother had. I encountered a blankness on the faces of my college professors whom I sought out for further explanation or attention. Even in some small classes they didn't know my name. Friends around me seemed to treat acquaintances with a casualness I found painful, a shoulder shrug to a breakup or roommate's departure. I got a little scared. I was prepared for nothing like that.
But I'd left my mother's house with certain beliefs and in the face of such coolness and carelessness I trudged ahead and waited, determined to find the open window.


Jay and I spent the night together within a few hours after meeting for the first time. It was my idea. Jay objected slightly, only because, as he explained frantically in response to my raised eyebrows, he wanted our relationship to last.
"Last?" I asked him. "What a funny thing to worry about now."
He said it first. He brought it up. Saying that, about lasting, talking about the future when to me he was just some really cute guy I'd happened to meet on a quick and impulsive trip to Mexico. It wasn't my plan, my intention. I was two weeks past graduation after spending a month of summer making up incompletes, and I wasn't thinking, at all, about what I was going to do with my life. I was fed up and tired, of deadlines and examinations, letter grades and unrealistic expectations. I was twenty two years old and ready to drift for awhile. I was dangling.
So when Jay said that, about lasting, I thought at the time it was kind of weird, a complication, that maybe he was really just trying to stall, that he didn't like me much to start with, and I sucked in my breath and held it, worried that I'd been too enterprising, too soon.
But then he ducked his head, grinning, and I suspected shyness more than anything else. "Did I embarrass you?" I asked.
He shook his head, no. "That's not it," he said, "really it's not. I don't know why I said that at all, because I wouldn't mind, um, sleeping with you, I mean, not sleeping, but well, you know."
"Sure," I answered. "Whatever."
"Shoot, now I've made you mad," Jay said, but like a question.
"No," I told him. "You haven't made me mad." There was an awkward silence during which I realized he was serious and sincere and I felt my face flush hot, feeling loud and flip in contrast, and just when I thought it would break me, Jay said, "hey, let's try this again." He pedaled me home on his bike.

It took a long time. It took all night for Jay and me to find a place to stop, to get to a point where we could stop and look each other in the eyes without starting all over again. It took all night and into the morning. We made love and Jay put on records of saxophones playing. We said we loved each other. It was too soon to be saying such things. We did it anyway.
We never stopped to think. Thinking would have changed everything. We recognized in each other things similar, things we'd been holding inside. Between Jay and me were things we'd been keeping to ourselves.



I never say goodbye. Not even to my father when he died. It had happened so quickly, a heart attack. They told my mother at work and she came to my school and got me, and it was like a dream, everything moving slow, grotesquely so, and my math teacher, Mrs. Henry, walked over to my desk and I knew by her face something was wrong. Over my shoulder I saw my mother standing in the doorway of the classroom with Mrs. Lindsey, the principal, beside her. Everybody watched me leave and I felt important, but crazy too, down deep, knowing it was something bad that was going to hurt for a long time. It was my mother who suggested to not say goodbye. "You don't have to, Meg," she told me, "say anything you don't want to. It's your feeling, only yours. No one can tell you how to feel." And then she told me that she wasn't ready yet, either, to say goodbye, she still felt like he was gone away on a trip and would be coming back home soon.
And so we stood side by side, and I felt stronger with this agreement between us, that we were in this together, my mother and I, and it made me valuable, and special.
We visited the cemetery every night for that first month or so, my mother took some time from work although I returned to school three days later. I don't know what she did all day, being home from work, but a friend or two was always with her, cooking for us and ironing my school clothes. We stood at his grave and held hands, and she cried, and so, of course, did I, and I always knew when it was time to leave because my mother would pull me in close to her, anchoring me under her arm, and hug me hard. Then we went home.
Her name is Calinda, my mother, though her nicknames are many. My dad had called her Callie, my grandmother raised her as Lou. After my father died, within a couple of years, more and more of my mother's friends came by our house on a regular basis, until finally, I grew to expect them there, almost like we all lived together.
"Calgal," Sharon called her, tall and pretty Sharon, so glamorous in my eyes, long fingers, long nails, long cigarettes. "Calgal, you've done a hell of a job on that kid," she'd say, or something like that, winking at me, making me feel older and included. "You giving that old church school trouble?" she'd always ask.
I'd shake my head no. Of course not.
"Well, why not?" she'd say, and my mother would interrupt, "now Sharon, it's all Megan's doing, her accomplishments. She's the kind of child you only have to sit back and watch her go. Has nothing to do with me."
They went way back as they said, Sharon and Calinda, to college where my mother studied hard for nursing and Sharon became a CPA. "We were working women before it was a big thing," Sharon told me. "Never any magazines on the stands talking about combining work and family, you just did, is all. Everybody worked, isn't that right, Calinda? All this career women's stuff, heck, it's nothing new."
I loved them all, Calinda's friends. Louise, who described herself as huge and hilarious, with her popular bridal shop although she herself had never been married. Marion, six kids and an antique store, and Betty, a dental hygienist. I'd never known weak women.
But I'd worried about myself for awhile, switching majors in college and getting incompletes. The girls around me there weren't like the ones I grew up with, my mother's friends and my own from school. We were a pack, a team, and you didn't have to necessarily like everybody but you had to get along. I didn't always. I was bossy. But that was just a personality thing that disappeared on the basketball court or in choir or biology lab. We had pride and wanted to do well, so we kept our differences separate.
It took me a long time to make friends at college. During the last half of my junior year, I'd finally found people to love. The first year was the worst, I hardly tried at all. I didn't know what to make of so many different kinds of people in one place. The university catalog said the enrollment was nearly 20,000, and those first couple of weeks it seemed like all of them were there at once, milling around, laughing and talking, calling out to each other. My high school had been tiny, only 150 of us total, and I had friends, still, from grade school, we'd all grown up together.
So, the first year was hard and the second not a whole lot better, but then after that, it improved. I did what I was used to, finally, just did what I'd always done, formed a substitute family when there wasn't a real one available, finding fathers for myself in my track and basketball coaches, biology teacher and band director. And I'd also been encouraged by my mother to find others to compliment her raising of me, women who could hike and camp and swim, contrasting my mother's changing interests as she approached retirement age.
Calling my friends family was something I knew how to do. It had its complications with loyalty and commitment, especially during the holidays, but on the other hand it provided the opportunity to engage in relationships that suggested something deeper, relying on mutual interest instead of obligation.
But still, I missed it, my old life. My old friends, Cathy and Tanya and Jessica, and Calinda and hers, I never stopped feeling a little bit sad all the time, it finally just became ingrained in me and I accepted it as part of who I was, and as a result, something changed. I became a little more serious, skeptical. On bad days I was a cynic, but there weren't too many of those. But I'd have to admit that no one ever quite measured up to the people I had come from. And unfortunately, I guess, it was because I was doing the measuring.



The first thing Jay told me was that he was a painter, and that it defined him, painting, because it had to do with a way of seeing and it was seeing, Jay told me, that had come to be vital to him, a bridge between what he once was willing to settle on as a way of living, and what he had scraped out of himself and used as a medium, to begin another way.
His seriousness didn't upset me because it was delivered with a kind of tenderness, spoken softly, deliberately, and I realized the sincerity and the patience. This is what I first saw.
Then Jay told me that he was a long way from home and that there were mountains in his home place and that he needed to be returning. He spoke of the mountains as we stretched blue colored sheets across the bed, sun-dried and stiff, while yellow light shot through the westside window making Jay's black hair gleam red. I abandoned caution. The colors made me. I stepped into Jay's view of the mountains, standing next to him in the place where he stood, looking northward, towards his home.
The first morning after, a truck full of chickens had screeched and rumbled past, early dawn, awakening us from our shallow sleep. At the window, feathers tumbled, brown and white: the pillow that Jay shook a case on was filled with them, sticking through the muslin, bright white against the sharp line Jay's hair cut across his shoulders.



Every single person I knew or ever had known was going to love Jay, was going to approve, would give a blessing. I talked to my dad a few times during that first week with Jay. Ever since he'd left me in the first place I'd had conversations with him, and each and every time I shut my eyes and tilted my head skyward, even though, at twenty two, I understood better the notion of death and that there was no exact location where the dead were. Nonetheless, I maintained my early childhood ritual of speaking to him prayer-like.
He said he undoubtedly agreed that Jay was certainly special. "Yes," he said, "the two of you are going to have a good life together."
I told him first like I always did, giving him that privilege since he couldn't be around in body. Everyone else had to wait until later to be told, until Jay and I had gone to Oaxaca and returned and had agreed to getting married. But each step I took in between that time I could often hear the sounds of approval from friends and family. "Oh, Meg," they said. "What a great adventure."
I remember this now, after forgetting it for awhile, after leaving one place for another, and after burning bridges as they call it, after being allowed for so long grace and self-teaching, I found it traded for another way, where approval was granted through forceful obligation, and reluctantly at that, but ultimately, altogether effective.
But that day and for some ahead, it was only Jay and I and the colors, his initial hesitation and the speaking of the mountains, and as for me, settling on my desire and finding it to be true and then, within days, choosing Jay as a long-time friend and realizing, too, he'd chosen me just as assuredly. And that's how it all got started.

Obsidian
Laura Davis
Chapter 2


Sarah and I met at school. She was a music education major and I was in the music literature class to fulfill an arts and letters requirement. I sought her out, initially, in a large and crowded lecture hall, because she had participated in the class discussion. Most of my friends were science majors, or math, and the humanities part of the university seemed hopelessly inaccessible to us.
Sarah was eager to help me. I remember how she seemed to make an assumption right away that we'd be friends. I didn't think so at first. Not for any particular reason, I guess, I just didn't think we'd be the type for each other, or something. And later, I would also remember the first conversation we ever had, naturally, because of how it became to be true.
We'd both arrived to class early to study for an exam, and that's when I walked over and sat by her, and asked her if she'd ever want to study together, since she seemed to know so much about what she was doing. She said she didn't mind at all, she'd love to help me study, but instead, we got to talking. I don't even know what it was we said, what prompted her to tell me that I should marry one of her brothers. I do remember laughing and saying, "well, maybe you think so, but marriage is totally out for me. At least for now, I mean. That's pretty wild. I have friends who would die laughing hearing you say that."
It struck me that way. Getting married. But she was serious and not offended by my laughing at all. "I know what I'm talking about, Meg."
So, I asked her, "well, then, which one? Which one of your brothers do you think it should be?"
"Jay," she answered. "Definitely Jay."
I was joking when I asked, not knowing anything about her, her brothers, any of that. It's just that she'd been so persistent and sincere, kind of weird actually, almost like she was having some kind of premonition or something. So I asked her which one to break the awkwardness, maybe, and then we studied, or talked about other things, and that was it, for then.

Things changed. As college graduation approached, my friends and I were getting anxious. The first glimpse of change hit hard. Everybody started pairing up. And the first time I saw it, when one of our friends stopped calling us back, when he was suddenly completely busy with someone who commanded his entire gaze, I was crushed. I couldn't understand why he had to leave, why he couldn't still be friends with us, why he didn't just bring her with him, into our circle, and we would all make room. But he didn't. I thought he had made a mistake, and then I wondered if he'd lied to us all along, hadn't really wanted us as family as much as he'd said, but then it happened again, not that much later, someone else left us, our group. For someone we didn't even know. And then I started to realize it wasn't a fault or a weakness, but instead, a way of life.
I had no plans for marriage, none. I would have hung out with someone regularly, and I had, and in the back of my mind someplace was the idea that maybe living together might be okay, but maybe not, too, I needed so much time to myself. So marrying Jay was completely unexpected, I had no idea where it came from and it threw me, too, although not at the time, but later, when I got a chance to think. but while I was doing it, agreeing, I refused to let it bother me, the fact that I had adamant plans for myself and that getting married was far off course. Once I met Jay, I lost all my common sense.
I was supposed to go to grad school. That was the plan. but I'd missed the application dates. Most of them were in February, smack right in the middle of winter term, and it had always been my worst one, winter, if I got homesick that's when it happened, after Christmas, after being home. So I'd decided to work for a year. I liked my job at the university bookstore and since I was sick of being broke anyway, it seemed to me that things would work out okay.
I had three incompletes summer term. Just papers to turn in, and I got really diligent and worked on finishing them up, and that's when I met Sarah again, that summer. Everybody was gone. It was over. Sarah was one of the few people I recognized on campus.

It was Sarah's idea to go to Mexico. We'd driven from Oregon because she wanted to see her brother. He'd been gone a long time. She'd asked me to go along for the fun of it, because we were friends. She'd been nervous about the trip, scared to see Jay. Some things had happened in their family, all of which she had never completely explained to me, but something had happened that had sent Jay away and he had never been back. It had been four years. Sarah had decided to try and find out what was keeping him.
It's hard to explain what happened, how it went. I didn't understand things then the way that I do now, I didn't know Sarah that well to start with, didn't realize the intensity of her feelings towards reuniting with Jay, what that meant to her, her family. I was on a lark.
Sarah called Jay and they talked on the phone for a real long time. I lounged in the sun by the swimming pool at the place where we'd taken a room. I could hear Sarah's voice but not the words she said, I wasn't that interested in what she was saying. After she hung up, she said we could go meet Jay in a park where he was playing with a band he was in, and after that we'd all go to dinner. She seemed quiet, distant really, and I asked her if something was wrong, had it all gone okay, and she said, fine, it'd just been a long time was all, and that Jay had been so surprised to hear she was in Mexico, that he hadn't had all that much to say.
I saw him playing. That's how it was. Seeing him, noticing him that first time, forced me to my feet from the grass where we'd been sitting. I was stunned, I guess, a bit melodramatic I knew even then, but I was too astounded to entirely process all I was feeling. I did, at least, recognize the dizziness and heart thumping as yearning, and I maneuvered clumsily around dogs and kids and dozing couples to get a better view.
I watched him play, his shoulders and arms moving, urging the congas into rhythm. I stared, knowing right then that I wanted to learn about him. The samba crescendoed, the musicians sweating in the sun, and pounding out rhythms, Jay felt my gaze and glancing up, he smiled. I returned a smile that hurt my face.
When the band took a break, Jay jumped off the platform and looked at me and smiled again and started walking towards me. I got flustered then, and everything got clammy and started thumping harder, and during Jay's last steps towards me I twisted my hair furiously. Eyes locked with his, I grinned like a lunatic.
I've never been able to remember what we said, and either has Jay, but there wasn't a whole lot said to remember anyway. Once we came face to face Jay would meet my eyes and I'd look down, and likewise, the intensity was so immediate we didn't know what to do with ourselves, and I remember we laughed at the awkwardness, and then Jay touched me, touched my arm, and I looked down and bit my lip, overcome.
And then Sarah tackled Jay from behind like a linebacker, grabbed him around his neck and jumped on his back, yelling, laughing and crying. I thought I saw Jay wince, but I'll never know that for sure.
It was pretty incredible seeing Sarah so happy, she clung to Jay telling him all the news, catching him up on things. I could tell Jay cared about her a great deal, too, and that he had missed everybody, his family, a pack of siblings whose names I couldn't keep straight. After quite a few beers, the conversation got kind of overwhelming for me and I kicked back and watched Jay slyly through half-closed eyes. Despite his attention towards his sister, I could feel, just feel Jay's interest in me, everything was sharpened, being far from home in a romantic tavern, surrounded by people dancing and singing in Spanish. When he touched my leg under the table, I almost started crying, I was aching for him all of a sudden, crazy with wanting him.
We danced, and then Sarah and Jay danced, and we all danced and started getting pretty wild, and then Jay and I just kept dancing, not letting go, not breaking away between songs, and when he kissed me, I was hooked, I wasn't going to ever give him up.
When we thought about her, Sarah, she'd probably already been gone a long time but we hadn't noticed. The place was packed with people and it took us awhile to look everywhere and conclude she really wasn't there. When we went to the hotel to find her, I found my things, my clothes and camera and backpack, drowning in the pool. And a note from Sarah. "Screw you, Meg," it read. She was gone.
Obsidian
Laura Davis
Chapter 3



The first time I came face to face with death was when Charlotte died. Saved Wilbur, laid all those darling eggs, then poof, she was gone. I kept that one inside at first, didn't let on how sad I was about Charlotte; I cried in private at night in my bedroom.
The second time was during the same school year, when the same teacher, Mr. Dresman, read us another book after lunch hour, one about the elephants in the zoo in Japan, that had to be put to sleep by the zookeepers since they were afraid the elephants might get loose and trample people once America dropped the bomb.
That one floored me. I couldn't be consoled. When I realized what was going to happen as Mr. Dresman was reading the ending, I let out a wail so loud that later Mrs. Lindsey said she heard it in the principal's office.
My mother had a long talk with Mr. Dresman and relayed to me that the story might have been a bit inappropriate for second graders, and the injustice of the situation galled me more, once I realized I probably should never have been exposed to such a tale in the first place.
But on the other hand, my mother explained, death was a natural part of life, and that began a series of conversations about death and dying that took place at our dinner table for several weeks to come. My father told me how hard the war had been, how unjust, and spent hours trying to help me understand why America got involved at all, and how his own personal feelings had been extremely conflicting all throughout. "But in the end," he explained, "I did what I thought was right, I fought for what I believed in, even though today, as I've become older, I've reconsidered and can't say for sure whether I would make the same decision again. Probably not, actually," he concluded, and I felt older after we talked and vowed to follow my father in working for peace and justice.
And then he died. And by that time I'd forgotten completely about Charlotte and the elephants anyway, and wouldn't remember that particular lesson from my dad until years later, in high school. And it's probably just as well. Because my father's death was nothing like a story in grade school. His death cut me deep and I had no plans of ever completely recovering. I considered it an entirely personal decision to choose if and when I'd heal that wound.
One part of grieving for me, was regret, and even a child understands that, and I did, I regretted all the mean things I'd said to him, which were abundant, and the lies I told and the toys I purposely ruined when I'd been mad, and eventually my regret grew into something nearly real, it hovered close to me everywhere I went and I began at some point, to be deeply cocooned in guilt.
I bit my nails until they bled, the skin around them too, and pulled strands of hair out of my head one by one, relishing the pain. My mother noticed immediately. She made arrangements for us to "go to someone we could talk to." We did. It didn't take long for me to realize that regret was my enemy, pure and simple, and it could eventually hurt me, and that was exactly what my father wouldn't have wanted.
But that first year with Jay I would choose regret again, not right away, but later I chose it, because I walked away from Sarah in Mexico, one we realized she'd actually left and gone all the way back home alone, I walked away from Sarah and all her troubles.
We hadn't been able to believe it at first. Jay helped me pull my things from the pool. I thought Sarah was still around someplace or that she'd taken another room, but at the desk they said she'd checked out. I was embarrassed and frightened. I didn't know what to say to Jay, here we'd just met, I didn't even know him well enough to rely on him. As the dancing and beer wore off I started to panic.
"She's got to be somewhere," I told Jay. "It would be too nuts to leave for good, without me, how could she be this mad? There isn't even any reason."
"Sounds about right to me," Jay said.
"Yeah, well, she's been jazzed about seeing you, I don't know what to think because I don't even know her that well, really, you know? She talks about you, about all of you, this was a whim on my part. I'm sorry about it."
"Hey, Meg," Jay said gently. "You're taking this too far. She really had no business coming down here to start with, and not asking me? There's a whole lot more to this than you know. It's complicated, hard to explain. And I don't even want to right now. Let's get something to eat and take things from there."
But we never did get around to eating, because as we were walking, Jay took my hand, and it started up all over again, the longing for him, and that's when I suggested we go to bed together and then Jay hesitated and brought up everything about wanting our relationship to last and I thought he was putting me off, that he didn't really like me all that much to begin with, and then we got past it and rode to his house on his bike.
I felt guilty a couple of times. When I had the chance to think about it I felt bad that things hadn't turned out the way she'd planned them. The reunion with her brother, hoping everything would turn out, "four years," she'd told me. "That's how long he's been gone. And if everything goes right I'll be the one that will bring him back home."


When I'd met up with Sarah again that summer, we found ourselves with more in common than I'd thought. She'd had a rough start at school just like I had, finding it hard to fit into a niche. She came from the eastern side of the state, rural and isolated, and the city scared her. It was that jittery side to her that evoked my sympathy.
Then she'd needed a place to live. She was subletting from a sublet, the kinds of arrangements we all made around campus, but the owners had returned sooner than she'd thought. She'd showed up at my place, anxious, trying to pretend she hadn't been crying, and I was concerned that she could let such a minor problem upset her so much. I invited her to stay with me while my roommates were gone and I remember Sarah saying she would, as if it were her idea in the first place, only if I would agree that it was only temporary. "Good friends shouldn't live together," I remember her telling me, and I thought at the time that she was making assumptions about my feelings, but I let it slide. For awhile she read the papers, looking for a place, but at some point she stopped. It never mattered to me much, one way or the other, and Sarah was there to stay.
She'd had it so rough. Her stories collided hard with my sensibility, my idea of justice. I listened and grew angrier. There were family problems that she never really made clear, but mostly, it seemed to me then, the small town she'd lived in had treated them badly, discriminating against the large Catholic family that they were.
She told me she'd never had the courage to admit to anyone what her life at home had been like. She refused to talk about it. Being away at school had offered her the chance to be somebody new. She said she felt like a fake in her classes, always waiting for somebody to expose her for what she really was. "Once," she confessed, "there was some kid in this one class that was from my town, and I left. I mean, I had to drop the class. Even though I needed it, I couldn't bear being around someone who knew me."
I could see it, the shame, it drained the color from her complexion and made her twist her hands funny in her lap. She kept her face down, wouldn't look at anybody when they were talking to her. She made everything a joke, made fun of people - what they wore or said, and I thought it was sad that she couldn't tell she hurt people's feelings and that's why they never stayed around very long.


Sarah had told me that once when she was little she'd ridden her bike down to the Powder river, just blocks from her house, but a forbidden place to play, her mother had made perfectly clear. She rode her bike down and onto the concrete bridge and when she paused to peer over she'd seen the kitten scrambling in the current, struggling to swim and breathe, and she'd dropped her bike, she says she remembers it clattering, the sounds of something breaking, and barged down the embankment to save the cat.
Slipping over rocks through waist-high water, Sarah grabbed for the cat but slipped, instead, and fell, landing on it, the kitten. It drowned. She took it home in hopes that it would help deter her punishment, but her mother, busy, spanked her anyway and again, later, she got another one, when her father came home and heard.
I went with Sarah for her abortion. She shook all the way home from the drugs and trauma. She repeatedly claimed she felt no remorse. I understood. I agreed she was too young for motherhood and she couldn't name the father, anyway. It was a toss-up between Robert and Justin, neither of whom had impressed me when I'd met them; Robert was married and arrogant and Justin was sullen and sarcastic.
I helped her to bed. Drifting in and out of sleep, hurting, she told me the story about the cat.

Robert had knocked so loudly on the door that I bumped my head on the freezer part of the refrigerator, startled. "Jesus, you scared me," I complained.
"Here's her two hundred bucks," he said, shoving the cash in my hands.
"Whose?"
He stared, eyes squinted, surly, then turned and left.

Cathy had come to see me. She brought some of Tanya's work with her, photographs taken while Tanya studied at Evergreen. Cathy was at Portland State, engaged to Lance, and she'd come to visit, keeping up our schedule of taking turns every few weeks. We'd had the greatest time, all day at the Saturday market, eating and buying stuff for her new apartment and eating more and drinking beer late into the evening.
We came up the stairs to my place, loud and excited, and then Cathy dropped her purse and it clattered down over the rail to the parking lot below and we had to go all the way back down and get it and come back up. Getting the key in the door took forever but finally it opened up. Later we would agree, that with all that noise, Sarah and Robert couldn't have helped but hear us, but whichever, they didn't cover themselves up before we burst through the door.


Sarah. By the time I met her so many things were already in place, I believe now, that I wasn't going to be able to change any of what happened. I see it her way from time to time and when I do I know her grief. But Sarah had a role to play also. All of us, and most of all Shannon, wanted to change those things, those split-second decisions that changed our lives in ways we were forever forced to exist by.
Seeing it from Sarah's point of view I notice how easily everything could have stopped right then, that last summer of mine before I started getting down to the real living I was supposed to do. I can't even say, necessarily, that meeting Jay and marrying him was the only and exact way things needed to go. There's a lot of paths and all that. I can retrace my steps and find how it all led so neatly and exactly to the road I ended up upon. And I have, traced them. Back to when I didn't get those papers turned in on time that kept me on campus in the first place. But then I have to go back before that, to why I chose those classes or why I chose that school and, eventually, it only leads to why I was ever born. I don't bother with tracing anymore.
Loving Jay was important. I didn't plan to but once it happened I refused to say goodbye. But by the time I loved Jay, a whole world of connections had been made, reaching far outside our recognition of what had occurred between us. Jay and I tried to keep love the point of our being together. It seemed right to do that. And simple. Jay and I made love appear to be the most simple endeavor.
Buried so deeply it would have been presumed unliving, Sarah kept what she couldn't find the courage to name or ever understand. She told me later that she so detached herself from this thing that it felt like something completely and absolutely separate from her. Even late at night, when she dared to examine it, she said she could never really bring herself to do much more than lightly graze the surface of what she eventually came to despise.
Upstairs in the house we had quite unexpectantly found ourselves sharing, I pounded the keyboard, compiling prosimian research into a presentable thesis. When I wasn't doing that I was selling books and backpacks and when I got off work I spent every minute on the phone trading gossip.
We would have said, Sarah and I, that we saw things similarly, and even, often, just the same. In my retracing I usually ask myself why we missed that, especially me, I've asked myself how I let it pass me. Or why she refused to speak. There is no answer, now. But if that could have been, I'd have understood Sarah completely. It's what I knew and believed in, that forming a substitute family.
I spent the last summer upstairs on the phone and typing. Towards the middle I met Jay and married him and thought I knew what I was talking about when I talked of love. Sarah spent that summer downstairs, quietly and purposefully planning her love around me. Not that long ago, when I saw her for what she claimed, as always, was to be the last and final time, Sarah said she would never in her life be able to understand why I never figured it out, that in fact I must have and ignored her. Her realization was what caused her, she claimed, to never love anyone again, despite her marriage, her child, her life she lives not far these days, from mine.
All I could ever tell Sarah, believing it had some truth and credibility, was that I never knew I'd have to choose, that it would come down to choosing. It didn't for me. But with all the things we had in common between us it was there where we were different. Sarah saw it for what she claims it is: my love for Jay eliminated her love for me. This truth, her view, won't flinch. My own, refusing anything so final, lingered, circling for anything, any other thing at all, except that.
I circled for a very long time. It was only when I came to accept that everything that happened, between Jay and me and Sarah and me and between Jay and Shannon too, never really did have anything to do with only love at all, that all the long months of Sarah's grief had a meaning. I didn't believe choosing was true. Sarah did. I believed the world was big enough to contain us all, somehow, as long as nobody quit. Sarah didn't think so. Then came the struggle. Sarah fought as if her life depended on it. Maybe it did. I held out a long time. I never thought I'd give up. But eventually, I had to. She won.


I wouldn't have walked away. It went against everything. But lots of things led up to it, and it was, like so many other times in my life, a quick and impulsive decision. But I'd been lucky with those, they'd been the best of my life.
I'd called Cathy, the only person I called before we actually did it, the official part in San Diego, and when I told her first, since she was my oldest and best friend, that I had met this great guy Jay and was actually going to marry him, she'd said, "Jay, the brother of that weird roommate you had? The one that was fucking when we came through the door? God, Meg, wake up. Quit buying into her sob stories. She's a fake, she's using you, Megan, and anybody could see that."
And then she apologized, and I believed her because she was Cathy after all, but I suddenly saw Sarah in a different way, through Cathy's eyes. And I thought, then, that maybe she was pretty pitiful, maybe she had been manipulating me. And I would come back to that later, that even though it went against what I believed in, I chose it anyway, chose to see Cathy's version of Sarah. It was the one Jay held, too, and even though I held out the longest, eventually even Sarah convinced me that I'd been a fool.


Jay hadn't been home since Shannon's funeral, not once, hadn't even left Mexico since he'd first arrived there. He'd written, he says, letters that never blamed anyone for anything, letters that held the information he knew his mother needed for the reassurance that he was okay. Jay says he refused to think about it, about his leaving, about whether or not it was the right or wrong thing to do, because as he saw it, there was no specific right or wrong in his family, the two had merged and crossed each other so many times it was impossible to draw the line.
Everything changed in Oaxaca. It was inside of me, I'd felt it, that shifting, and that's how I found myself, I guess, traveling by train from the south headed north, and making a sharp turn at Portland, then miles down the Columbia river gorge. And then they were in front of us, the Blue mountains, right there in Pendleton, and I didn't exactly know it then, but I was going home.
I expected from Jay and from meeting Jay's family, something much different, I admit, than what I found to be, and I had to realize, though it took me a long, sad time, that the chair of bowlies works fine when everybody involved believes it, but there's another view, also, since reality isn't universal, and on that train, and during that tail-end of summer when Jay told me stories, when we began to merge our visions together into one we could call our own, I didn't know at first how to see it that way, the world in another light, almost like the glint off steel in the sun, making you want to shield your eyes.

I'd left my mother's house. I just never knew it would be so final.


Obsidian
Laura Davis
Chapter 4



My first glance around Baker City blinded me. The sunlight ricocheted off aluminum. I squinted. The glare stabbed through my eyelids. I shaded my eyes with my hands, forcing the light to subside, and peered at the row of short, ugly buildings bordering the train tracks. Mostly they were concrete with metal roofs, but the one closest was wood, old wood, blackened, smoldering in the hot sun.
The train pulled away screaming and smoking, as soon as our feet touched the ground. No goodbyes, good luck! no fanfare. It sent plumes of dust into the air, blowing, then shifting down on our heads and shoulders. Our bags lay in a heap where the conductor had dropped them and Jay struggled to tighten a loose strap on my backpack. The hot dust was starting to burn through my tennis shoes. Sweat gathered beneath my t-shirt and underneath my hair.
When I think about it now, it's kind of funny, the way things felt right then. We'd been on the train for days, I'd followed our route on the map, and it had been days and nights of fascination, all those California towns and trees, the Oregon valleys and mountains. And then the abrupt halt, the sun and all that dust, and I forgot to look around me. I saw those buildings and looked down, and stayed that way, and missed the Blue mountains completely, right behind my back. It's kind of funny, but it's also kind of sad, and I wondered for awhile if that was a prelude of sorts, the beginning of how I was to be, watching my step instead of trusting the landscape.
But we made it. Home. "Just a short walk," Jay said, straightening up. He looked in front of him to the row of buildings I'd first seen, utility buildings of some sort and a Splash-and-Dash carwash. He shook his head. "This might be a long shot," he added, for the hundredth time in two weeks.
But saying that didn't really match his mood, because Jay was excited about going home, about bringing me with him, about showing me where he came from and the things that had helped form who he was. He was full of promises, and premonitions of how meaningful our lives together were going to be. "Meg," he'd told me on the train, "it's so simple and I always thought it would be so hard, loving somebody, having them love me."
There hadn't been anything hard. No hitches, no surprises, anxiety. Maybe there should have been. Maybe somebody should have stopped to think. But we hadn't made promises and had premonitions about anything outside of ourselves, our love for each other that seemed entirely true, we thought only of ourselves, and the view that thinking afforded us, and what we saw was something we agreed would matter immensely. It wasn't about working out, for how long or short, it had nothing to do with thinking about the tomorrows in any practical kind of sense, it only had to do with making that initial connection, and having it plainly proven for the truth we believed it held.
Jay and I gathered our things out of the dust by the tracks and walked the short distance to his growing-up place. The hot afternoon air was sweet, a mixture of the thin mountain breeze and the quiet of neighborhood contentment. Jay returned home, bringing someone he'd chosen to love and who, in turn, had returned that same decision. We were as strong as two people could be, a team, not affected, it seemed, by anything outside of our vision. And Jay's family was appropriately impressed. They were waiting.


It wasn't as bad as he thought it would be, at least in my opinion. It took days for Jay to completely understand how he did feel, but in the meantime, that first time, I thought everything went really well. His mom didn't cry, at least not hysterically. They both hugged him for a long time, taking turns, his dad thumping him on the back, and they hugged me too. A younger sister of Jay's was there visiting, Aimee, along with her toddler son Beewee, and lots of other names were exchanged, names of all the nieces and nephews of Jay's who'd been born while he was gone. By evening, under the golden bug light on the porch, the names started getting hazy, especially since none of them were real, but were acquired: Roopie, Big Bop, Beewee, Spark and Cantaloupe. I figured I would somehow get them all straight though I felt overwhelmed by all the new information.
Jay didn't seem concerned, or impressed, I guess I'd call it, as though the names and dates of the family's past affairs, were something he'd never really felt left out of. And with the names, and hugging and the eventual dinner that took hours to eat, arriving one or two plates at a time, the evening turned into night and the phone began to ring. Each phone call demanded Jay's temporary disappearance and upon his return he'd say who it was and in a chorus his family voiced their enthusiasm for each reunion. I found myself amazed and relieved that everyone seemed so happy for Jay, so welcoming. I kept recalling the story of the prodigal son, and even though I couldn't exactly remember the ending, I assumed it had all worked out fine.
We never left the front porch. Beewee thumped on the rocking horse. Every time he did it, someone accommodated him, praising him for his efforts. "Beewee, baby, weebee bird, ride your pony, good boy!" He'd thump three or four times and wait, and thump again, louder, if no one had noticed. He smiled so big it looked like it hurt his face.
The talk and laughter and ringing phone was like a plane of sound. Then Jay's dad went inside. I could see his silhouette in the window, and then Aimee went. And then Jay's mom wanted him to look at something in the yard and I was left alone on the porch with Beewee. He thumped his horse. He looked at me, seemingly delirious with exhaustion and wet pants, his eyes burning. "Beewee, wee bee, good, good GOOD boy," he drooled, "GOOD, GOOD, GOOD!" I looked at him and knew there was no way I could properly respond. And when I tried, my voice came out sounding tired and old, surprising me, too dry and formal. "You are a very good boy, I'm certain," I said. Beewee stared at me, his mouth hanging open, his thumping halted. His body continued to sway to the rhythm of the now-not-rocking horse. He looked as though I'd slapped him, and for some strange reason, I felt as though I had. I cringed.
And then Jay was behind me, arms around my waist. I felt his mouth through my shirt. "Let's rustle up a bedroll," he whispered, squeezing me.
"Where's your mother?" I asked.
"Gone to bed, I suppose," he answered, squeezing me harder.
"Oh," I said, settling myself in his hug. Everybody must have been pretty tired, I thought.
Jay pulled me backwards towards him. "Let's call this day done," he said, and moved his mouth to my neck. We did.


We left. On the morning after our return, Jay had been working on his truck for a couple of hours already by the time I awoke. We had slept on the front lawn, the only patch of grass in the yard. The sun that hit my eyes was a late one, I realized right away. I pushed myself awake, despite my fatigue, because I was suddenly overwhelmingly embarrassed to be laid out in the middle of someone's neighborhood. I assumed that dozens of eyes were watching me from all the surrounding windows.
For a few minutes I was scared to move, to make myself an animate object to watch. I laid there, my face hot, wishing hard for Jay. Finally I couldn't bear it any longer, and I pulled myself out of my sleeping bag as fast as I could. I took a humiliated glance at the front of Jay's house, expecting to see his whole family lined up and scrutinizing me, but bunches of mismatched drapes prohibited any view from any windows. I walked around to the side where I found the remains of the prior night's reunion on the porch, bottles, sweaters and a huge, bright box of diapers.
Beyond the porch was a two-story garage and just then I saw Jay's bent-over backside sticking out of it.
"It's Sleeping Beauty," Jay replied to my smack on his butt.
"Yeah, well I wouldn't be if you'd have gotten me up," I complained. "What are you doing anyway?"
"Not a whole lot," Jay said, wiping his hands on his jeans. "It started up right away."
It was a dusty forest green pickup, antique looking. I knew it was an International, a forty-something, because Jay had included a description of it in many of his various antidotes about living here.
"So that's the truck," I said. "Pretty cute."
"Yeah, and apparently in pretty good shape too," Jay said, leaning against one of its big round fenders. "I didn't know at all what to expect."
"Which reminds me," I interrupted, "how do you think it all went, last night, seeing everybody again."
Jay shrugged. "Well, it wasn't everybody, exactly, and about what I figured, I guess, nothing too spectacular. But I'm not complaining or anything, because it's better if it all stays real mellow." He ran his hand down the fender then added, "it doesn't matter, one way or the other, a whole lot anyway."
"It'll probably just take some time," I agreed.
"Whatever," said Jay. "I'm here, it's what they wanted so bad, and that's all there is to it, as far as I'm concerned."
"Oh," I replied, as casually as possible. "Did you get a chance to ask about Sarah, anyway?" It had been my most important priority and I had half expected her to be there, just by chance or something. The past two weeks seemed like a year and my worry about Sarah hadn't diminished.
"Hell, no," said Jay. "Why would I want to bring that up? She's already tried to screw things up as it is."
"Hey, don't worry," he added in response to my frown. "I didn't mean it that way. Actually, my mom heard from her, she made it back, end of story."
"Oh, well, good," I offered, relieved. "Maybe I'll call her, then, later on, apologize, see what's going on."
"Okay, okay, enough family. I'm starving." Jay grabbed my hand, "let's get something to eat."
"Are you sure it's okay to leave?" I asked. "What about your parents?"
"We're going to be right back. I just want to take the truck for a spin, get something to eat. Nothing like that available around here, I'm sure that much hasn't changed."
The truck clattered to a start when Jay pushed a button. There was no key. The leather seats crunched under my weight. The passenger window was a spider web of cracks. Exhaust filled the garage. Jay slammed the hood and it took several tries before the latch caught. When he slid into the driver's seat he was grinning like a maniac. The stick shift had large leeways between gears and when Jay let out the clutch, we abruptly stalled. Another clacking start and we rolled down the drive.
After breakfast Jay drove up to what he said was called Pine Creek, one of the many drainages down the east slope of the Blues. I didn't like it. The truck took the road like a tank, careening, vaulting over rocks and plunging into potholes. I got grumpy. A light drizzle had followed us up the mountain, and the truck's wipers, hanging from the top of the windshield, slapped a monotonous rhythm. "BEEwee, BEEwee," it sounded. I got a headache.
It took Jay some time to notice that I'd lost my interest. I hadn't known how to tell him. So much seemed to depend upon me enjoying myself. When he did, he pulled off the road with a jerk. The truck sputtered to a stall. Dumb-faced cows, grazing between the pine trees, stared. Their eyes had no depth.
"Not what it used to be," said Jay. He groped under the seat and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. His shoulder hit the horn. It blared. I jumped. The cows remained motionless.
"Hey, this is no place to be," Jay admitted, reaching his arm across the seat to my hand. "There's way better places than this. Do you hate it already?"
"No," I said, "I don't think so. It's just been logged a lot, hasn't it, and so many cows."
"Well, wait awhile and you'll hate it, I'm sure."
"Why do you say that? I don't understand that," I said. "You do want to be here, don't you, aren't you glad we came?"
"Hell, it's great," exclaimed Jay, somewhat sarcastically. "Don't get me wrong. Nothing like a big dose of Baker to get my blood boiling."
"Jay, what's wrong?" I was starting to feel anxious. There was something to his tone, something I could feel about him, that seemed to be coiling him up tight.
"Nothing that a trip out of here won't fix," grinned Jay, apparently oblivious to my concern. "We're going to some real mountains, find some fun. This ain't happening."
"But Jay, we just got here," I answered, shocked. "Do you really want to leave so soon? What are your parents going to say?"
Jay pulled his hand from mine. He pushed the starter button and the truck roared. "Hey, Meg," he said over the engine, "all of this is going to take some time." He struggled with first gear. "It's not like something that can just be fixed overnight. Hell, it probably can't be fixed at all. But I learned a long time ago to not spend my life trying to prove it otherwise. They're bent on maintaining that."
I wondered if I'd missed something. Had we been at the same place the night before? "I just thought," I offered, "that you would want to stay awhile longer, after all this time away, after it took us so long to get here."
"It's the same as it ever was, Meg," Jay said, speaking loudly still, shouting? over the engine, "I knew it before I came and verified it for certain last night. They want me here, I'm here. But that's as far as it goes." He let out the clutch and accelerated. We lurched onto the road.
"And besides," he added, more softly now, "no one can begrudge me my honeymoon."
"Oh, Jay," I said, scooting closer to him. "I love you so much, I'm just worried, nervous, I want you to be happy."
"And I couldn't be more so," replied Jay. He kissed the top of my head. "Anymore than this and I'd be delirious."


Jay and I had crossed the border into the States a week to the day we'd returned from Oaxaca. The packing up of our things didn't take nearly as long as we thought it would, once we got started. The paintings took the longest to prepare for shipping and all Jay's kitchen stuff, but I'd been living out of a suitcase anyway, so once the studio and kitchen were emptied out, there wasn't much left to do.
We got married in San Diego by a judge. She read a few lines while Jay and I held hands and then asked us some questions which we answered, and in just about ten minutes we were married. We got on the Amtrak and traveled up to Portland, and over, then, to Baker.
Jay probably should have called. That's what she kept asking, his mother, why it was he hadn't called. Why he'd left her out by not calling, excluding her, didn't let her know he'd gotten married. She'd known already, about my presence in Jay's life, because Sarah had told her all about it. But she didn't know about the marriage. She was quiet in her asking, and I didn't know her well enough to make any judgments, and her quietness seemed to me to be by nature and not by any kind of holding in.
And her quietness followed us to the truck that morning we left again, to live in the mountains all summer, and still I didn't question anything, even though I felt that something buried deep but not unliving, was there.
"It happened really fast, mom," Jay explained, "just overnight, no planning, really, there wasn't any time to call."
I could see the loopholes in that argument but I didn't offer them.
Jay's mom shrugged. I was trying to get used to thinking of her in terms of her name, Gloria, and Jay's dad, Ted. This shrugging and speaking quietly, both seemed a contradiction to my association of the word GLORIA! from my exuberant singing in the high school choir.
"It's just marriage!" she said. "I mean, we'd have done something, knowing, from Sarah, that you met, your infatuation, of course," she added, looking briefly at me.
"God, Sarah," interrupted Jay, "is another story completely."
"Yes, I suppose it is," answered Gloria.
"And one you may want to discuss, but I've got places to go," continued Jay.
"Yes," she agreed, quietly still, denying my sense that an argument was beginning. "Another time, then, you must be anxious to go, to show Meg your country."
"Well, shoot, mom," Jay laughed. "Let's keep our priorities straight here. This is my wife, my sweetheart, and I'm back home! Family, family. Won't that all wait?"
"You're right," agreed Gloria, more lively now. "We want to see you soon, though, plan something for the marriage, you know, and everyone's so anxious to meet Meg."
"Time," agreed Jay, "give me some time and I'll be around."


I've never been one to read the signs. Even though my intuition is quick and usually exact, I have always failed at picking up on the little things that make up a person, the signals and symbols we use to tell what words can't say. I relied on words. If someone spoke to me I could hear them, plainly, and communicate what I knew in return. It's how I thought relationships were, speaking, and then doing what the words paved the way for.
I married Jay because he told me things about the ways life is, how one decides which are the things that matter, and after deciding, pursues them. Jay helped me understand the importance of mattering, all the forces that exist for specific purposes, that must have coexistence, compliance, so that everything matters as much as everything else.
And it all made a lot of sense to me because I understood words and their consequential actions, we spoke of love, Jay and I, and then expressed it, and all of it mattered.
But Jay's mother's quietness told me nothing. And she played a part, it's true, there were moments when she could have, perhaps, refused her quietness and said something. And even though I tell this story, it's still, only mine, the parts of it I saw and know, and there's more and much I've missed, and in the end, a lot that's not mine to tell.
Jay's mother had twelve children and it wore her out and down, and expecting much different isn't real and doesn't matter. By the time she had seven children, the first five boys and the next two girls, the establishment of certain truths had been accomplished. For the first three boys these truths included a basic fact, I believe, that the world as they saw it was an unsafe and unyielding place, full of contradictions and collisions. Someone got them in their soft places, the ones that lie wide open when children are young and eager, breathless to follow along the paths that least resist them. It could have been anyone with any of this sense about children who got them in those soft and pliable places and taught them that those places aren't for hoping, for expecting good things and believing, but are, instead, for closing over and cinching tight. Those places that later feel the saxophones on warm nights downtown where friends are, and feel and not just hear them playing, the places where some of us are allowed to keep open so the saxophones play notes and trade fours that we feel like breathing and heartbeats, and give us the ability to turn that feeling into swaying, into holding hands and smiling at strangers, those were the places Jay's older brothers had been forced to abandon.
It could have been anyone who knew about those places and used them for their own purposes, a sense and desire that escaped me, at first, when things started settling down upon me, the knowledge and realization of all the unspoken things. I resisted. I couldn't see past their strangeness and meanness, those qualities of Jay's family, that exploded out of them during those times I first met them, and later, when I was piecing the story together. I couldn't see past them, past their granite-hard strange and mean ways to anyone else: it could have been anyone and I don't know but maybe they do, and that is theirs to tell.


We only stayed one day. It wasn't, then, because things had gone poorly, necessarily, although they didn't really go that well. We left for the mountains because we wanted to be alone, still, just the two of us, merging our lives together. We arrived and quickly left, the entourage of family intimidating us, having to share each other, include others in our conversations, interrupting our sharing. It didn't go well but it didn't go bad, I didn't really think much of it at the time, except for having to sleep outside, when Jay's dad had refused to let us sleep together under his roof, insisting that a marriage in Mexico wasn't real. "San Diego," Jay insisted, but eventually threw up his hands and rolled out our sleeping bags on the lawn.
"Something's gotten into him lately," Jay's mother explained, but that was all she said, she only shook her head when Jay muttered something too soft to hear.
We left at dusk. Jay loaded the truck with every type of camping equipment manufactured. I did what I could to help, but there wasn't much I could do. He kept pulling things out of a cellar door to the basement, and once when I went to see if I could carry something, I peered through the opening and couldn't see anything. When I called for Jay he hollered back, "don't even think about coming down here, Meg."
So I perched on the truck seat and waited, feeling strangely ignored by Jay's family, busy inside with dinner. I waited and watched Beewee running a hose in the dirt, drilling deep holes and screeching when the mud splattered all over him. And then there was a resonance that filled my ears, a rackety swoosh overhead, and I looked up to see the crows come, caught a glimpse of their black mass before they settled, nervously anchoring themselves to the branches of a tremendously large tree at the dark, empty house next door. The big tree shuddered, and then it was still.


Obsidian
Laura Davis
Chapter 5



Jay's childhood seemed to be marked by events of loss. Sometimes these losses were so large, it seems to me now, that they all became accustomed to them, like it was a regular, expected thing.
In the house where Jay grew up was a room that, in other families, would simply have been called a den. At Jay's it was called the Goat Room. Set between the kitchen and the dining room, the Goat Room held a television, a stereo and two couches. These things crowded its small space. It quickly became a place for the lost books, clean and dirty laundry, all the coats and all the toys and forgotten snacks and homework.
Goats never lived there, at least not really, but the point, apparently, was that they could have. The very nature of the environment invited anything to happen. But what lived there, instead, were the family's memories, and promises made and all those broken, as the room nursed grievances and prompted retaliations. Once I thought that if that room were cut out of the rest of the house, if someone, somehow, could remove it and haul it away, maybe all those memories and broken promises would disappear with it. But that could not occur. The Goat Room, directly below an upstairs bedroom, had major structural purposes.
At first the Goat Room's doors were closed to muffle the arguments over Legos and racecars that threatened to awaken a sleeping baby or toddler. Later, wide open with the television as its only light, the Goat Room contained stronger threats and harbored more serious resentments. Jay's dad would, on his occasional visits home, reach in and grab out a perpetrator of one wrong or another, and not necessarily the right one, in an attempt to impose some discipline ignored during his absence. The younger children beat a path in the rug going back and forth doing favors for the older ones or complying with an order to get out of the way. It's where the girlfriends waited, when stopping by the house to proclaim their interest. It's where Ray took his younger brother Danny by the hair and crashed his face into the door and broke his teeth. It's where Rachael freaked out, late one school day morning, fell to the floor and twisting, screaming, threatened to kill them all if everybody didn't quit and leave her alone. It's where Danny, later that afternoon, pushed up next to her, hard, and told her again what he'd do if she told. It's where Sarah, years and years before, had simply refused to let them hurt her, and had appeared, instead, to show an interest. It's where Jay, not too much later, sat by Sarah on the couch and where, during Adam 12, felt Sarah take his hand and put it underneath her shirt. "If you don't like it you're a faggot, Jay," she said, "you're a faggot if you don't like girls."
It's where, a few years later, after all the big boys had left, that Peter held court; four point, letterman Peter, with all his girlfriends and strange blonde contrast to the dark haired siblings around him, where he reigned regardless of the fact he was not the oldest, then, at home, but the third, but it was girls above him, older, and they moved out of the way.
In the Goat Room were stacked all the events of loss that became what Jay's childhood was about. I know there were others, that it wasn't just him growing up there, but it was him and not them, whom I found to love. Ever since Oaxaca I'd left part of myself behind in exchange for a little piece of Jay. It wasn't as though I owned it, that part of him, a sliver of shiny black obsidian, but rather, I had taken it into my possession. And until I found out where to put it, where it was supposed to belong, I rubbed it between my fingers and let it lead me.


Shannon's family's U-haul pulled in on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend the year Jay was going into sixth grade. Jay and his two younger sisters watched their new neighbors unload. The house had been vacant for a couple of years, no one locally interested in buying it. Cecil Ford had murdered his wife there, leaving his two daughters homeless, and ever since, the house sat empty.
Jay remembers being curious about the two new girls moving in. His younger sisters, Rachael and Sarah, were even more interested. For them, two more girls in the neighborhood upped their ante tremendously. Surrounded by five older brothers above and two below, another boy on the way, and all the friends that came along, Rachael and Sarah were smothered in the boys' territory.
Jay wasn't supposed to be interested. He had spent his summer trying to meet the demands of his four older brothers who accounted for his quietness by calling it wussy, and proved it by calling attention to the time he spent playing with his sisters. They contended that Jay made them look bad. And looking bad didn't cut it. Jay's brothers went far beyond the normal adolescent concern of appearances. Their space at home long conquered, they'd spread out to include as much of the small town as they could reign in as insurgents. Jay wasn't a threat, but when bored, when out of gas or too lazy to get up off the couch, they let him annoy them.
Jay's brothers showed little obvious interest in the goings-on next door that September Sunday. For them, the impending school year meant little change. The three oldest, Sam, Ray and Danny, were all in high school together for the first time, and Bill, eighth grade, was granted the same status and allowed to go along with them and their friends.
The past summer had been good to them. With jobs, and consequently a couple of cars, nights were spent driving through the roads of the Blue mountains or cruising around town. It was the summer of what became to be known as their Reign, and it would continue, uninterrupted or checked, for the next five years.
No one apparently knew, at least not then, exactly what they were up to. There was some suspicion that it wasn't all good, but at Jay's house in particular, no one was really available to do more than occasionally issue a reprimand. Jay's mother, pregnant with her tenth child, and overwhelmed with the responsibilities of her other young ones, hardly had the energy to get through her daily chores. And Jay's dad, struck again with gold fever, was gone for days and often weeks, working another new mine.
Jay didn't see Shannon and her sister on Monday. Busy inside, Jay and his sisters waited on the roof trying to see through the windows until, discouraged, they gave up. On Tuesday, the first day of school, Sarah came home to say that the younger girl next door was in her class. Her name was Hannah. Shannon was a sophomore.
Jay says it was about four thirty, when he was taking the garbage outside, that he heard his brothers in the garage. Silently, he went inside. Above him, in the garage's attic, he heard his brothers' voices. They were laughing. He heard Danny say, "c'mon, Peter, is that all you've got?" Jay realized that his younger brother was up there too. Through the laughter he heard Ray say, "Hannah can't say we never made her feel welcome," and they all laughed louder.
Jay went in the house and out his bedroom window to the roof. From there he could see the garage. It's why he knew when his brothers left, and why he knew where to find her, Hannah, later.

He waited until she climbed down the ladder from the attic. Waited until she had pulled up her knee-hi's and buckled her white school shoes. "Wanna look around town?" he asked her. She nodded her head, yes. "Well, c'mon, then," he said, "I'll show you." He took her down Court street and turned right on Resort, down to Bridge street and past the Oregon Trail restaurant to the base of the hills. Climbing slowly, they reached the top of the hill that viewed the whole town. Driving by, someone could easily have spotted two kids in bright, first-day school clothes. But in Baker, no one looked up.
It wasn't Hannah's last encounter with the boys next door, but the ones that followed never cut her, again, like that first one did. It was that first time that kept her quiet clear through her school days, kept her too eager to please at school, too willing, and later, kept her in a marriage that thrived only from her meekness. But even so, Hannah wisely kept her cut in a place where she could find it, under her left arm and running down to her waist. She never did hide it like Shannon did. It's what made them different.



Shannon wooed them all. It was, perhaps, what spared her. Sandwiched between Jay's second and third oldest brothers, she was too old to escape by hiding. She didn't wait to be asked, she invited herself, bringing an air of civility with her. When Hannah and Jay came down off the hills she was there, eating a Pop Tart at the dining room table, helping Rachael and Sarah with their homework. Danny and Ray watched T.V. in the adjacent Goat Room. She gave Hannah a quick, compassionate glance as they came through the door and said to Jay, "well, now, I guess everybody's here."
Jay said he felt it right away, the difference her being there made. She looked silver, he says, sitting there against all that old and grungy furniture, walls long faded, piles of gray laundry and, like always, some other day's dishes stacked on every horizontal surface. She looked, he says, like an angel, a silvery angel sitting there at the table. But a silver angel, a white Christmas or the mother Mary herself, Jay was, from that moment on, not the one to make an objective judgment of Shannon. Whatever she really was was lost in his confined vision. Jay fell in love with Shannon that first day of his sixth grade year with his new jeans too stiff and big and a shock of pale skin showing beneath a new haircut. He shoved his hands in his hip pockets and, leaning, waited.
He waited six years. In the meantime he guarded Hannah, and taught her, too, to ride a bike, and how to steal, how to pick the stores that would let them. In this way they were able, now and then, to get a few things they needed, that neither of the families remembered to buy them. Slowly and quietly they finished Baker junior high.
Sometimes Hannah left him, went off with her girlfriends, a pack triumphantly led by Sarah, who picked up her older brothers' habits like second-hand clothes that needed no alteration. When Hannah was in her possession Sarah glistened, proud and powerful like a prized boxer. Sarah fixed Hannah up, rubbing foundation and blush and powder into her skin, scrubbing her nails and polishing them and twisting her hair into curlers that made tight loops. "Stay away from Jay," she'd tell Hannah. "He acts like a stupid Indian. Nobody's going to like you, Hannah, you won't make friends at all."
And then, sometime later, Hannah would return and Jay would be there, like always, ready to take a ride, and especially in the spring and most of all in the summer, Hannah and Jay returned only after the late sun set, fortified and hopeful.


Tenth grade changed everything. And it wasn't just Hannah who chose the distance. Jay, too, finally the second oldest at home, started seeing things differently. His older brothers' leaving left no calm, but instead caused a wave of delayed reaction to their long-held grip. Jay asserted, for the first time in his life, his until then quiet conviction that what had often been referred to as "Baker's Other City Dump" needed to be cleaned up. It preoccupied him, the sorting through and organizing. It meant hauling, boxes and bundles, pruning, forsythia and lilacs that obscured every downstairs window, and, in stages, sifting through all the closets and the Goat Room. He enlisted help. The five siblings beneath him were assigned tasks and commitments. He made them quit forging their mother's signature on notes to school which supposedly excused their absences. He matched up socks and required haircuts and attendance at dinner. He financed a valve job on the pickup and carried all the piles to the landfill. An adjacent neighbor, noticing the effort, contributed a chain link fence, guaranteeing a firm property line between them.
But after only a few short weeks Jay's authority was challenged. The neighbors weren't the only ones to notice the change. Sarah noticed, too, and didn't like it. Nor did his father, recently returned after yet another failed mining endeavor. Sarah just quit coming home. Her father went out to find her. One night, victorious, he dragged her home. On the front porch he beat her, screaming she'd whored around town long enough.
Jay retreated to his basement bedroom. Upstairs things returned to normal, piling up and getting lost. The cat had her eighth litter in half as many years. Several times one or more of his older brothers came home from college, determined to keep a stronghold on the family. Jay, defeated, stayed downstairs while they fought with their father who retaliated, more often than not, with a two-by-four or a white-knuckled backhand. Their mother cried, or sometimes she screamed too, once emptying the china hutch.
Hannah got a boyfriend. Loading groceries in his bike basket, Jay heard her call his name. Hanging out the window of a Chevy, primed and stuck up high in the back, Hannah, breathless, explained her new status. "This is Tony, Jay," and gesturing with her thumb to the driver and smiling, promised, "I'll come by, soon, Jay, I won't be a stranger," as Tony ground the gears and jerked out of the parking lot.
Jay found Rashaan Roland Kirk and drifted. When Rashaan blew the soprano Jay believed. When he blew the alto, he hoped. When the tenor played he quit both and rolled reefers, smoking himself to a place where no on had ever heard of Baker City.
Jay didn't go to the prom. No one would have expected him to. But he was downtown sitting in his truck when he saw Hannah walking, caught a glimpse through his rearview mirror of her coming down the street, taffeta torn and barefooted. She'd had a fight, she said, with Sarah in the bathroom. "We used to be best friends, Jay," she cried. "What's happening to all of us? Everything's so fucked up. I wish we'd never moved here I wish I'd never been born."
Jay didn't know what to tell her, what to say. All he could do, instead, was turn her on to the soprano, first, letting its sorrow touch all their sad places, and the alto, too, that sang a song of longing, and when the tenor blew, Jay drove, this time, to the bottom of the hills, parked the truck and they walked on the dark but by now so familiar path that led to the top.
Glory comes to the city of Baker twice; on certain clear nights when lit, and on mornings after a snow. Warm and clear with the tang of blooming sage around them, Jay and Hannah finally became the age they'd had to pretend to be so long, and stronger now, and older, Jay abandoned his defensiveness, and they made love, feeling the inevitableness of it all pushing up with the new sage, and down, from the stars and city lights.


Obsidian
Laura Davis
Chapter 6



By the time Jay left for school he was trying to forget about Shannon. He was trying, I think now, to get as far away from everything and everybody he'd called home. No one could blame him, and Shannon, of course, didn't either. She encouraged him to go, in a way Jay told me later, was so authentic, even he could hardly tell she was lying. But it wasn't lying, really, either. Shannon was sad. Tough upper lip or not, those were the ends of her safe times, and even then, she may have known that.
Jay just wanted a life, something of his own after all those years of being identified with his strange and mean family. And even though I think he must have walked onto that university campus and into that art department with a mere trace of self-understanding, he did get there. And as much as I grew to love Shannon, and will grieve for her fiercely until the day I too die, I love Jay more. And he might never have made it, had he stayed.
Jay told me the story, how that last summer was, and the following fall, and the winter after that. And of course there was spring, and some people might have noticed, but not Jay.
The six year difference that had kept Shannon and Jay apart evaporated Jay's senior year. Jay said it wasn't like fireworks, but just like it was meant to be, he'd already loved her all those years and acting on it was calm and steady. Shannon loved him, he told me, in the same manner she loved everything else, her sister and her horse, and the surrounding country that was home to her, with the kind of passion a person has when their loves are few and focused.
Hannah got married. It had helped Jay decide, and he said he didn't know for sure what he'd have done, otherwise, about being with Shannon, he says he can't say. And since he didn't have to know he didn't pursue it further, the complications of two sisters, because he'd guarded Hannah like he'd promised Shannon he would, that first day they'd met when she'd smiled straight at him, and nodded.
Hannah married Tony, married him out of town, and they hadn't returned from wherever they'd landed: Jay thought Caldwell but Shannon thought Boise. Either way, Hannah had left, and neither Jay nor Shannon were quite sure what to do with another anticipated loss, that of Jay leaving for school.
Jay says Shannon's distraction that summer wasn't anything new. She always came and went, her thoughts bumping into each other, causing her to say one thing and do another. They took care of Arnold, her horse, and they camped. Shannon hung out while Jay worked on his paintings and Jay hung out while Shannon served dinners at her job. They played cards. Jay read her poems he'd found. He'd planned on reading her more, lots more, but it was always hard for her to sit still.
Labor Day. Jay had to go. He almost changed his mind, he says, at the last minute, when Shannon got the flu so bad up camping, sick and heaving and feverish. Too sick to hike down so Jay helped her recover and it was that vulnerability he says, that almost made him reconsider. He wondered what Shannon would do with herself all fall and winter, what would she find to do?
"Oh, don't be silly," Shannon replied. "I've got a ton to do. Finding Hannah, you know, family stuff. I'm going to be just fine."
Shannon bought Jay a shirt as a going-away present, a pale blue work shirt, the kind he coveted. On this shirt she embroidered, zillions of tiny, perfect stitches, a picture of an eagle. On the cuffs and collar were other birds, magpies and crows and robins. A tiny sparrow all creamy gold.
There's a picture of Jay wearing it a couple of nights before he left. Standing in front of his parents' fireplace, leaning and smiling. His eyes are red from the flash, but other than that, it's Jay. Head slightly bent, hands in hip pockets, Shannon took the picture, and it's her hand, gesturing, waving probably, that's in the foreground, nearly threatening to obstruct the photo. That smudge of pinky red is the only photo we have of Shannon except, of course, the high school year book one.
Jay forgot the shirt. Now he doesn't know how he could have, but back then he never even remembered it until later, long after remembering was no longer important. The worst part about it is not how the shirt got left, but how his mother washed it - don't ask me why - and how it came out of the wash, bleached and twisted. As she explained, later, when Jay was screaming for explanations about everything, and finding none, zero that would suit him, was that she'd hung the shirt out back on the line, intending to try to repair it once it had dried. "And how would you have gone about that, hunh?" Jay screamed. "You've never repaired anything in your life."
But Shannon must have seen it out there and gone over and got it, and obviously, we know now, took it home and tried to restore it. But that wasn't all. Because when they found her there were two shirts on her ironing board, the first one she'd made that got ruined, and another, the same brand new pale blue, with stenciled in-outlines. They were all of fish and whales.
Shannon died on January third, sometime in the early morning. It was at two o'clock when her new husband left, headed back for Ontario where they lived. Jay had been there, playing cards with Shannon, tired and mute after having been introduced to a man she'd impulsively married. Jay, home for Christmas and worn out with the troubles his always-growing larger and meaner family conjured, had gotten a phone call from Shannon two days after New Year's. She called, he said, finally breaking his concern with where the hell she'd been, by shocking him with the news that she was married.
"Jesus, Shannon," he said. "I can't believe it. Who is this guy?"
"He's from Ontario," said Shannon.
"Yeah? Well, what else?"
"There's nothing else than that." Jay said she sounded really far away. He could hardly hear her.
"Well, there's got to be something else if you married him, I mean, he must be a god."
"You could come see for yourself, Jay, if there's something else."
"To Ontario? Why didn't you call sooner, Shannon? I'm going back to school tomorrow."
"It's not that important, Jay."
"What's up with you, Shannon?" Jay started feeling uneasy. "Are you still there? Must be something wrong with this stupid phone. Shannon are you still there?"
"Yeah, I'm here Jay."
"I don't know if I can make it over to Ontario," Jay said. Then he heard her crying. He'd never known her to cry. "Talk to me, Shannon," he pleaded. "What's the deal here?"
She cried. Jay started crying too. "I'm so mixed up, Jay," she said, "wasn't everything good before, just you and me, wasn't everything good then?"
"Oh, God, Shannon. Of course it was good. What's going on now, why are you feeling so bad?"
"I'm here, Jay, in Baker. I'm living here now. I moved out. We just don't get along."
"You're here in Baker? Why didn't you tell me, where?"
"Here, at the White apartments. I took a room."
"What room? I'll be right there."
"Oh, I don't know if you should, Jay. Everything's so complicated now. It's not like it was before."
"Shannon, Shannon, just relax a second. Is he hurting you, is that what's going on?"
"No, it's nothing like that at all." Shannon's voice was firm, suddenly what Jay recognized. "It's not that at all, Jay," she repeated. "It's me, is all, just me. Look forget that, will you. Just something about Christmas has got me funny. You know, I wasn't going to call at all, you being with your family and everything. But I just wanted to see how everything was going with you and school and stuff."
Relieved, Jay said, "but are you really here, at the White?"
"Yeah, I'm here," said Shannon, laughing now. "I'm here. We just needed a little time apart is all. God, I don't know. You know how I am, so flighty, weird."
"Well, that's not exactly how I'd put it."
"Yeah, well, but anyway, hey, it's Christmas, so how about you come on over and we'll put on some music and kick back. You up to playing cribbage?"
And Jay went over and she seemed just fine when he got there. Right away she was her old self, teasing him and pulling out all kinds of information about how he really felt being at school, how he was glad to get away from Baker but at the same time unable to find friends to relate to, who understood where he came from. He realized, he told her, that the country was in him tight, and his family, so confused and hurting, was in him too. He told her about his classes, the drawing and painting ones, how they liked his work at the university and they encouraged him. He said, later, when he told this story to me, that he told her all he knew, his feelings down deep came rushing out. Fifteen two, fifteen four, fifteen six and two is eight. Shannon played the Temps on the stereo. They smoked a joint. Jay says she listened to him so hard he never stopped to think, not once, not until later, of course, when it all hit him like a bomb, exploding, shattering his entire life clear off center.
"It was just like her," he told me, "to get me talking, to listen, to reach out and hold my hand. And smile, and always, always saying stuff like, oh, Jay, I'm sure you'll figure it out, you'll be okay."
They quit cribbage and settled back with the record player on repeat, smooth and grateful being stoned. Jay says they must not have heard anybody knock, and he thinks, now, in looking back, that Greg must have stood there, in the doorway, watching. Jay says he felt something, he remembers, but didn't put it together.
He knows what the new husband saw. It's how he, Jay, remembers her for the last time. On opposite ends of the couch, sprawled out, their legs in each others' laps, Shannon holding a thin white joint in her fingers, her head bent back, blowing smoke to the ceiling. It was Michael Jackson, Jay says, on the stereo, singing Shannon's favorite, "I'll Be There."
"Well, I guess we need to be properly introduced," is how Greg put it, according to Jay. Jay turned towards the door, startled, missing Shannon's first reaction. He's wondered, since, what it was like, believing that it carried the vital information he somehow missed.
When he did turn back to her she had propped herself onto one elbow and was looking at Greg. "Formalities have never been your thing, Greg," she said, suddenly very unstoned. She untangled her legs from Jay's and got up from the couch. At the stereo she lowered the volume and with her back to them said, "what can I do for you Greg?"
"I'm coming from Portland," Greg said. "Just wanted to stop by and make sure you're all right."
"Fine," said Shannon, still not turning.
"I'm Greg," he said, stepping into the room. "And you're?"
"He's Jay," said Shannon, turning to face him. "It's Jay, and you know what? I'm fine, Greg, just fine."
Jay stood up. "Nice to meet you," he said, taking a few steps towards Greg. He told me Greg felt fine, completely friendly and outgoing. They shook hands.
"Jay's leaving in the morning," said Shannon. "He's going back to school. And Greg, why don't you go? I'll catch up with you in a couple of days. I've got some things I want to do here first."
"No problem, Shannon," Greg said. He blew her a kiss, Jay said, and started to turn towards the door. He stopped, and over his shoulder said to Shannon, "but would you call me first, before you come? These roads are hell. I could maybe even pick you up if I'm coming through."
"Sure, Greg," said Shannon, looking down. "That's what I'll do, I'll give you a call."
"Nice meeting you," said Greg.
"Yeah, and you," said Jay.
Greg shut the door behind him. Jay said he didn't know what to do so he just stood there. He says he felt obtrusive, uncomfortable. After a few minutes Shannon said, "I'm sorry, Jay. He's really a pretty cool guy. But like I said, I've been so weird lately. He just gets concerned."
"Don't worry about it, Shannon," Jay said. "I'm just still so surprised you're married."
"It's really more like me than you think, Jay," Shannon said, her voice hardening a bit. "You know, things change. They changed between you and me, things just change, that's all." She sat back down on the couch. Jay sat down too, and after awhile they held hands for a half hour or so, not talking not looking at each other, just feeling stoned again and listening to the record.
Jay says he left around two or so, but he wasn't really sure. He says when he left, Shannon was almost asleep, and didn't get up when he went to the door. He says he said goodbye, and she smiled at him, sleepy, and he went back over to the couch and kissed her. "Promise you'll come over," he said. "Come on the train, it'll be fun."
"Oh, Jay, I'll get there," she said. "Don't worry about things so much. Just paint me something nice, would you? Something from the Snake river, some big funky catfish."
"I will," Jay said, laughing. "I'll paint you some big catfish, Shannon."


Jay pulled out of Baker a few hours later, dreading the long trip ahead with snowy roads. He says he had to sit in Ladd Canyon for an hour until it opened, and then had to stop again before Meacham to chain up. It was almost ten o'clock when he got to Pendleton and stopped for gas and coffee. He noticed the state police pull in when he was inside paying. He watched the driver park behind his truck and then get out. He could feel it, Jay says, he could feel it coming from the sky, pushing up the earth, cracking down hard on the asphalt and bouncing, skidding off the icy glare of the car's steel sides and windshields. He says he felt it and when the cop reached him he was retching, throwing up on the linoleum floor. "Careful there, son," the cop said. "These things happen, people know somehow. Seen it a hundred times myself. You were the last one to see her. We just want some information."
Jay gave it and drove back towards Baker, back up Cabbage Hill and down again, through Ladd with nearly zero visibility. He forgot to turn the truck's heater on until he got to the Baker exit.
Jay quit school that term. He says he stayed in his room most the time. He says he read, but a lot of the time he slept. Spring term came without him realizing it, and when it had almost passed he woke up one morning to the crows in the tree at Shannon's old house, and it was the crows, he says, that got him curious again, and it was his curiosity, he says, that pulled him back up to a sitting position. By July he was standing.
Jay left Baker in August, one afternoon, taking nothing and telling no one goodbye. He never wrote to Hannah, though he said he meant to a million times, and returned to school in Eugene. He went straight through the terms he needed to finish, and two days after his last exam, flew to Mexico with the Peace Corps.


Obsidian
Laura Davis
Chapter 7



Shannon shot herself in the head. The police investigation found that she did it while talking with Greg on the phone. He'd called her collect at 2:23, shortly after Jay left. The autopsy showed she was killed instantly. But isn't that what they always say, when it doesn't matter anyway?
A neighbor found her at eight thirty, probably right about the time Jay got to the pass. The landlord identified Jay as her emergency contact, the name she put on the rental agreement. The cops went to Jay's house and his mother told them he'd already left. They promised to intercept him. It was around nine thirty when Pendleton got the call, and sent someone out to find Jay at the gas station.
With everything going on everybody forgot about the paper sack containing Shannon's things. The police had gathered them up when they found her. They probably should have gone on to Hannah, being Shannon's sister, but instead, they ended up at Jay's house. His mom said she didn't remember them being dropped off, and, in fact, she might not have. Probably one of the kids took the sack and put it in the Goat Room.
But it was Jay, finally, who found the sack with the embroidered shirts inside. He says it split his head right open, pulling out the shirt she'd made, bleached and torn from the washing machine, and the other one with all the fish and whales outlined and ready to sew. He tells me he felt her pain going through him - all her pain he should have known about, that she stored up all those years. He says it looked just like the spearhead they'd found while camping in the Wallowas, black and shiny and triangular shaped. Jay says Shannon's pain was just like that spearhead, and she'd kept it under her ribs too close to her heart and it killed her.
Jay says he felt it there when they made love, when they went swimming, when they got so brown that summer, legs and arms calloused from living in the mountains. Jay says he felt it there and he caressed it, rubbing against it, marveling at its hardness against all her softness.
Jay said these things but he's not the one to blame. He had it too. Maybe not as surely defined as Shannon's, so perfectly symmetrical and refined. But it was Jay who found Hannah in the garage attic and taught her to ride a bike and Jay who believed that bike riding and learning to steal the right way would help to save her. It saved him. And he thought that was all he had to do, take care of those specific things, and that Shannon, then, would be okay in turn. He thought they were the same.
When Jay found the shirts he felt his head split and it was the spearhead that split him, and bleeding, he held his head in his hands.
Staying wasn't an option. Jay had none at all. Even though he went back to school, and finished, and went with the Peace Corps, he wasn't living. Even though his head had healed years before, it wasn't until Mexico, wasn't until nearly four years had passed before he took the splinter out, the little piece of obsidian stone left in his scalp after the splitting, that he started, again, to live.

Obsidian
Laura Davis
Chapter 8

Suicides are mortal sins or some such crap like that and maybe the worst thing about Shannon dying, if there's any such hierarchical order possible, is that once it was over, once the mortuary came and took her and the autopsy was complete, St. Dogbreath or whatever the parish was named, refused to hold the service in their church. Jay didn't go so he didn't know where they held it and he always wondered who did go, Hannah for sure, he thought. All those years he worried about Hannah being there, and whether she had looked for him to attend, and he'd wondered too, if Hannah had been there alone, since Shannon had, in some ways, overstayed her welcome in that small town's tolerance. Jay thought Hannah might have been there alone, except for all those types who go to every one.
So he never knew for sure, but he wondered. He said that the summer she died he'd hear the church bells all the time, even when they weren't ringing, he'd hear them when he was downstairs or when he was sleeping, but they weren't like bells at all, they were, instead, like scraping noises or clanging, sheet metal or iron gates, grating. He thought it might drive him crazy.
He painted the catfish. After the crows came and he finished school and settled himself in Mexico, Jay painted the catfish. And then he painted some more. There were dozens and dozens of paintings of catfish, all the canvases rolled up after they dried, some you could tell what they were, whiskers and fins, and all of them huge, taking up the whole space, brilliant oils, layer after layer.
Jay'd been gone a real long time. Maybe things would have been different if he'd returned by himself, without me. And when things got bad for us that first year we came home from Mexico and lived in Baker, we sometimes wondered and sometimes shouted, about how different it should have been. But we were in, by that time, too deep to spend much time questioning. We just lived the days.
And it was timing, finally. If I hadn't shown up somebody else would have. It was a perfect coincidence that when I was first taken to Jay's hometown I recognized the house on the other side of Shannon's, two doors down from Jay's, from a reoccurring dream I'd been having, and coincidence again when it was for sale and we bought it. And it could have been anyone who saw the crows and asked about them, wondered why they arrived right at dusk the way they did and nested, briefly, and flew away in a rush after an hour or so. All the things, it could have been anyone, but instead it was me. And then, finally, no one was too pleased about all that.



In the mountains, Jay loved me deeper and with more faith than before. I returned to him everything I knew about loving, and all the things I learned each day that passed. We went high into the Wallowas, returning only for groceries and to use the phone.
My mother and Jay got to know each other through long distance conversations, she'd been traveling herself, and we made plans for a real visit once she returned. It was a cold summer that year, occasionally it would drizzle, and one early evening when I hung up the phone with my mother, I turned to look for Jay and saw him under the hood of his truck and it was the first time since I'd met him that I'd seen him from any kind of distance. I liked it, what I saw, it was comforting to recognize his shape and to know I was with him, that he was waiting for me. But as I heard my mother's last laugh before she clicked off the phone, I stood there in the booth by myself feeling oddly between two worlds, and alone in both, and it seemed to me that loving Jay is what made that happen. It meant everything to have him there waiting, while at the same time it seemed to be showing me all that I'd forever be without. While that slow summer rain stuck to the glass I felt a kind of grief settle over me.
We talked it through. Where to live and how, what it was we needed, individually and together. How to do that, make it work. It wasn't hard to agree. It was all very simple, continuing in the same fashion it had from the time we met, things fitting into place with ease and grace. We left the mountains with the dream of accommodating each others' desires as wholly as we could.
But up there we'd lost all track of time. Once back down in the valley, we were immediately reminded.


Jay and I needed to find a place to settle down, the summer had been great, but we both needed to find jobs, at least, acquire a phone number and a mailing address. I was anxious to connect with my friends. No one had yet to meet Jay and I wanted to show him off. And also, despite it all, I was getting a tiny bit homesick for family and friends.
The last time we came to town, not realizing it was to be our last, we came for groceries and for a battery for the truck, and Jay's dad told him when we stopped in, that they were looking to hire someone to teach art at the high school and it seemed like the right thing to do. We weren't worried about for how long, or about making lifetime decisions. Jay just applied, and then it was offered to him and when he accepted we were suddenly citizens of Baker.
And then we bought the house, and right away I called it home, even though when we walked through it was a horrible wreck, that's what made it affordable to us. We thought we could fix it up, stay awhile, who knows, and that it was close to Jay's growing up home wasn't good or bad, that we were in his hometown wasn't either, we only did what we thought was best, what suited us at the time. Our only concern was for each other, for spending our time together and having it matter. We had no idea, not while it was happening, even, of the extent of the commotion Jay's homecoming would bring. We figured on a little, but our calculations were way off.


I didn't have a clue. Jay and I stopped into visit, just to say hello, and she was there. It hit me that second, how long it'd been since I'd seen her, and how much I'd missed her. Right away when I saw her I knew that we were going to be able to finally make up and put all the misunderstandings behind us.
"Sarah!" I nearly shouted. "Boy, it's just so good to see you, how've you been?"
"Hello, Meg," she replied quietly. When she didn't match my enthusiasm, I should have been warned. She was standing in the living room next to where Gloria was seated. They exchanged looks and I saw Gloria nod her head, affirming something.
"And Jay," Sarah continued, walking towards us, smiling. "You're looking good, it's been such a long time." All of the excitement Sarah had shown in Mexico over reuniting with her brother had disappeared. She was as formal as a stranger.
"Hey, Sarah, you too," said Jay, accepting the hug she offered him.
"And my new sister-in-law," Sarah said, hugging me also, "a married woman now, Meg, from what I hear through the grapevine." She refused to look at me.
"Yeah, how about that, Sarah? Who would have ever thought? You always said, but..."
"Said what?" Sarah interrupted, harshly.
"Said, well, you know, just stuff like that." I stopped talking when Sarah abruptly looked me in the eye.
"I don't know what you're talking about, anyway, it's Jay I want to see, no offense Meg, but he is my brother and you'll have to get used to sharing him one of these days."
Like I believed otherwise, I thought. How ridiculous.
"So here I am!" laughed Jay, breaking the tension. "God, you gave us a scare Sarah, running off like that."
"Why should you be scared, you didn't seem the least bit concerned."
"Oh, Sarah, please, come on," I started, annoyed with her flippancy.
"Okay, okay, so that's that, then," said Jay.
"Pretty much," agreed Sarah.
"Well, I've missed you," I told her, trying again. "I've called and called, why didn't you answer?"
"When?" Sarah looked straight at me, smirking. "You think my life revolves around you, Meg?"
"Oh, of course not. I just meant, well, you know, everything happened so fast, I wanted to talk with you." I was puzzled by this new Sarah. She was behaving nothing like the helpless roommate I was used to.
"Things change Meg, get used to it," she asserted, as if reading my mind. "You're the one who decided to marry my brother so you're in the family now. I've accepted it, nothing I can do about it."
"Meg's still trying to remember all the names, Sarah," chirped Gloria. "Isn't that right, Jay. Isn't Meg doing a good job of remembering everybody's name?"
"Oh, for crying out loud, it's just not that hard," said Jay, "it's not that big of a deal."
"For you, maybe," Sarah shot back. "But you seem to have forgotten the entire past four years. Or have you just blown off the family altogether?"
"Oh, screw this," muttered Jay.
"Screw, what, exactly," shouted Sarah. "You planning on bolting again, Jay, jumping ship? Always the goddamn prince around here. What about the rest of us who are forced to stay and work things out, hunh? What makes you so special, anyway?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," Jay replied, sullenly.
"Oh, you certainly do too. You know exactly." Sarah started shouting louder. "What about the rest of us. You think we like it, dealing with this crap all the time?"
"Then don't," Jay yelled back.
I glanced at Gloria. She was staring at the floor.
"Well," I offered lamely, trying to calm things down, "we're here now. Maybe that will help."
"Jesus Christ, Meg, you've got no fucking clue," Sarah hissed at me.
"Okay," said Gloria. "You know how your father feels about language like that."
Sarah stared at me. "Well, you're in for an awakening," she said.
"Goddamn, Sarah, lighten up," said Jay. "We just walked in the door, give it a break."
Everything was so weird, out of kilter, I couldn't recognize Sarah, the friend I'd known, she was angry and sarcastic and aggressive, and maybe that's why I said, "yeah," agreeing with Jay to give it a break. But whatever prompted me to do so, Sarah flipped, "oh, go fuck yourself, Meg," she screamed at me. "The last goddamn thing I need is to have you hanging around my neck for the rest of my life. Who invited you anyway?"
"Well, actually, I did," Jay shouted back. "So you deal with it."
"And who exactly invited you," Sarah yelled. "Everything's been just fine without you, why don't you just pack up and leave again? We don't need you, we don't need your bullshit, your pity party."
"All right, slow down," interrupted Gloria.
"Don't get into it, mom," said Sarah, rudely. "Jay knows what I'm talking about. Acting like it's our fault Shannon did herself in, well, she had it coming, Jesus, she was messed up her whole life."
"Fuck you," said Jay. "I'm out of here."
"Yeah, well, typical," Sarah answered.
"Let's just everybody settle down," Gloria said again.
"Why mom?" shouted Jay, "why? This is exactly your cup of tea, this is what you live for. You set it up so why try to stop it?"
"She does not," said Sarah. "You do."
"I'm out of here," repeated Jay.
"Good, go," said Sarah.
Jay slammed out. I heard him pounding down the porch stairs and I turned to follow him.
"You got something to say?" Sarah asked. "Now would be the time."
I turned back towards her. There was hardly anything about her I recognized. Her already dark eyes were black with contempt. Inside I shuddered. "I just think," I offered, "that everything's happened really fast and I'm sorry if I hurt you, Sarah, but I don't think it has to be the end of the world."
"You know what, Meg?" Sarah asked, taking a couple of steps towards me, "this really isn't even about you, you just got in the way."
"Well, I'll try not to," I replied.
"That'd be good," Sarah concluded. "Just stay out of it."
"All right," I agreed. "I guess I'll just go find Jay." Both Gloria and Sarah said nothing so I took it as a cue to leave. Figuring Jay had gone home I started that way and then behind me I heard Sarah crying.
"It's not fair, mom, this just isn't fair." Her tone had changed dramatically. That was the Sarah I knew.
"I know, I know," said Gloria, "honey, I know."
"I can't stand it," Sarah shouted, crying harder, "I won't be able to stand it. It's just making me sick, I can't even come home anymore, that's the worst part. She's just going to be here, around all the time. Now I'm going to be stuck with her the rest of my life."
I walked away before I heard Gloria's reply. I was shaking and everybody's shouting was echoing in my head and I couldn't make sense of any of it. I hurried home to find Jay, anxious to hear what had happened, to get things straight in my mind. But Jay wasn't home. He was gone.


The afternoon took days to conclude, dusk came and I felt the light change through the window and across the table where I sat, smoking Jay's cigarettes, one after the other. It was the first time I'd stopped to think, and I didn't really want to be doing it then, either, and the cigarettes helped me push everything down, keep certain thoughts at bay.
Jay should have been there, with me. I knew that. Jay should have left a note, at least. Sarah shouldn't have been screaming, we should have called, I shouldn't have shacked up with Jay so quickly. I waited and waited for Jay, thinking. I waited for him to come back so he could explain everything, set it straight. I felt cast out, alone. I wanted him with me to make me feel less scattered.
His step was light on the stair but I heard it.
"Hey."
"I was getting worried," I said, "this is the longest we've been apart," I added, trying to lighten up the speck of anger I felt inside me.
"Sorry."
"That was pretty wild," I started, reaching to turn on a lamp, "it all felt pretty weird to me."
"Yeah? How's that," he replied, as if nothing had happened.
"Well, don't you think?" I started, confused by his tone. "I mean, it all got pretty intense, the screaming and stuff."
"About how it is," replied Jay, still not looking at me.
"Oh, well then, I'm sorry about that, if that's an everyday kind of thing." I was still alarmed and Jay was making me more so.
"Don't be," said Jay softly. "Don't start that, you'll just lose."
"So, where've you been, anyway? I came home and you were gone."
"Went driving, then went back over there."
"You went back? Why?" For some reason, it felt like a betrayal.
"Just to talk to them."
"Oh. Well, how'd it go?"
"Fine."
"Really, fine? What'd they say? How's Sarah?"
"I don't know about that. Just talking. They're coming over later."
"Coming here?" I was alarmed again. I'd had enough drama for one day. "Why are they coming over here?"
"Seems as though they want to talk." Jay got up and I heard him open the refrigerator and then shut it. Behind me he said, "Got something on their minds, I guess, who knows."
"Well, that's okay," I answered, reluctantly. "Is Sarah coming too?"
"I doubt it," answered Jay.
"Well, shoot, this place is a mess for company anyway."
"It's not that kind of a deal, Meg, don't worry about it." I glanced over my shoulder at Jay to figure out that remark. He was leaning against the kitchen counter, head down. I got up to heat some water for tea. I was feeling nervous. I figured something was up but what I didn't know. I tried to stay busy, pushing the ominous feeling down. Eventually Jay went into the living room with a book. I kept glancing out the window to see if they were on their way. When I checked next on Jay, he was asleep. I decided I didn't want to wait up by myself so I turned off the lights and went to bed. It was the first night since we'd met we slept apart.

Obsidian
Laura Davis
Chapter 9


I got away with all kinds of excuses. It took me a long time to realize I was making them, except for once or twice, at first, when we'd had to sleep outside because of our dubious marriage: I excused it as a misunderstanding, maybe even some kind of embarrassing one, and didn't pursue it too hard or question it too deeply because naive as it sounds, I actually thought that Jay's dad, Ted, might not be the kind of guy to have known that San Diego wasn't in Mexico. I couldn't figure him, didn't know where he was at enough to know if it had been an honest mistake. And even though that didn't really explain anything, like what if we hadn't been married at all, I guess we'd have stayed the night someplace else.
And I excused that one time when we came into town for groceries and to get a battery for the truck, when Gloria asked Jay if she could speak to him privately, and they disappeared for over two hours, talking somewhere upstairs while I waited in the living room with all the little kids. Later Jay said it was nothing important, nothing to worry about, but wouldn't say exactly what, and I got the strangest feeling it had to do with me.
And a couple of other times: the postcard from Sarah that was waiting for me when we checked in one time that summer, and that was kind of embarrassing too, though I had to just hope that no one else had read it. "Meg," she'd written. "You've just got to tell all your old boyfriends to quit calling. What were you running here anyway, a brothel? I'm tired of taking messages for you while you're off wherever." I couldn't even think of one person who'd be calling, but Sarah's note made me look stupid.
And then there was that small remark Ted made to the owner of our house. I figured he was showing his concern in his own way, and when I offered the assurance that we really were planning on staying, that our impulsive days were behind us and that we would, of course, keep our end of the contract, it seemed that everything was going to be just fine.
At first I got away with all kinds of excuses. But just for a while.


They came in pairs and threes, always with a bunch of kids. Jay's family. Later it became "The Family," no identification needed, and eventually, simply, "Them."
They came in pairs or threes, and always with their children. They weren't unfriendly. They never introduced themselves. The only protocol that existed at all, I soon figured, was that they were family and since I was now family, we were all in the same boat together. No reason for formalities. They went through the fridge, went through the house, showed up without calling, stopped by constantly even when Jay was working and I was alone, plopped down on my couch, and never showed any inclination to be in a hurry to leave.
Ted and Gloria, too. It got so I just started to expect Ted everyday, he'd walk in without knocking, find me wherever I was in the house, cleaning up some mess Jay and I had made in our beginning attempts at house renovation. I got the picture right away that Ted was the head of the household, the one in charge, and that his visits to me were to educate me of this fact and see to it that I accepted it. It didn't matter to me. I was busy, the house needed more work than we could ever hope to accomplish.
Truthfully, they annoyed me. I found them to be a bit arrogant, mouthy, loud. Even though I came to expect Ted everyday, he bugged me. But ever since the scene with Sarah, I'd kept my feelings to myself. I was friendly, I smiled. Everything seemed to be going along just fine.


I'd never heard the word pigfucker. And I almost didn't hear it that first time, either. It was accidental, I walked in on it. I laughed. I didn't exactly laugh out loud, it was more like a weird, twisted smile with some sort of sound accompanying it. Later, I dreamed of my face that way. Everybody else laughed in a regular way, except for Jay. He was in the kitchen cooking.
Danny and Bill and their wives and kids were visiting and Jay was cooking so we could offer everybody something to eat. It was dinnertime and they'd shown up so unexpectantly. and we waited, I think, believing they would leave, but then it became obvious they weren't going to anytime soon. So, Jay had to cook and he was in the kitchen when Danny said it, pigfucker.
It was so loud. Bill's wife, Barge, had turned on my stereo and the kids were taking turns changing the discs in the player. I'd been watching nervously, hoping they wouldn't break anything. I didn't want to appear too uptight, and not having kids of my own, I figured their mothers knew whether or not the situation was getting out of hand.
It was loud and then Danny kicked a beer bottle by mistake and it skidded across the floor leaving a trail of foam behind it. I'd started towards the kitchen for a towel when I heard the doorbell. The papergirl wanted me to pay her and I followed her outside on the porch. When I came back in, I heard it, "you filthy little pigfucker," he said, and I looked to see Danny bent over his daughter where she sat on the floor, holding the side of her face in her hand.
Then they laughed. And that's when I joined in.


"What?" Jay said, later when they'd left.
"He called her that," I repeated.
Jay shook his head, "Jesus, he's an asshole."
"No kidding," I agreed. "And it must be really damaging to a young girl." I would hear that reply playing in my head for months and months, the assessment I'd made, straight out of some provincial, little sheltered life, where people spoke in such phrases as "damaging," and "harmful."
"No doubt she's used to it," replied Jay.
"I don't think anybody ever gets used to stuff like that," I declared, still isolating the incident in my safe little world. "You mean this probably goes on a lot?"
"Hell, I don't know," Jay said, sighing hard. "You know, I've been gone. I thought things had gotten better," he added, "or at least calmed down some. Jeez, Meg, I don't know."
"Either do I," I said, putting my arm around his shoulder. "But I know this hurts your feelings, hearing it. I was shocked, you know, didn't really know how to react, what to do."
"It'll get better," Jay promised. "Everybody's probably just still under a lot of pressure from me coming back and being married. Maybe it's some kind of reaction to that, the stress."
"Maybe," I agreed, though it sounded like another excuse. How long would Jay's homecoming last, anyway?


It was the next morning we got the waffle iron in the mail, a wedding present from Sam and Shirley, Jay's oldest brother and his wife. "I buy absolutely everything from garage sales," the card read. "Hope it works!" It didn't. But it had, at one time. There was still an old chunk of batter stuck inside.
I understood how they were, poor, still, like when they grew up. Poor because of lots of kids and no opportunities to finish college and get better jobs. That's the assessment I made of the gifts, Sam and Shirley's and the others that arrive: a rope plant hanger, mounted deer antlers and the check for ten dollars from Gloria and Ted. Jay made another assessment altogether. He threw it all in the trash.
Obsidian
Laura Davis
Chapter 10

I was never really regular. But I'd never had the opportunity to realize that until it was much too late to do anything about it. I had sex for the first time when I was twelve, completely in agreement with my friend down the street who proposed it. She was thirteen, but she explained kissing and we rolled around on her Star Trek sheets and afterwards we thought we were very sophisticated. Her name was Josie and she left me three months later when her family moved to Illinois.
I didn't have sex again for a long time, until my senior year in high school, and it had always been boys after Shelly. A couple of my girlfriends liked girls, it was pretty much matter-of-fact with us, despite all the ruckus created, it wasn't ever much of a big deal. I hadn't thought about Shelly in years, but I remembered her when Sarah started sending me letters. Sarah sent me so many letters I could have stacked them like cord wood. At first I tried to keep up, respond to them, but before long they were about things I didn't understand and even though she claimed they were about me, everything was all mixed up with a whole lot of other family stuff.

She was really mad. Hurt, she kept claiming. She wrote obsessively about all the time we'd spent together, remembering tiny details, events, that I'd forgotten completely. The way she wrote it, our time together, made me feel as though I wasn't even there, that we had participated in two entirely different friendships: I didn't, for instance, even vaguely recall bringing her flowers.
It wouldn't have mattered, any of it. I'd remembered Shelly, because of it, and my other friends who'd chosen that kind of love, but Sarah had never stated that, about herself, about me. It didn't matter to me, that way, but something did matter, something did worry me, because I didn't share the information with Jay.
We were busy. Jay was gone all day and often, evenings, too, and I kept thinking about finding a job for myself, but I'd found plenty to do just trying to establish some sort of home. We didn't talk about Them much, I'd already noticed that Jay didn't want to, he seemed more content to focus on us, on our plans and lives together. It made me uneasy, still, some of the things I'd seen and heard, but I didn't want to drag stuff up.
So I kept Sarah's letters to myself, not out of any dishonesty, just because I knew Jay didn't care, didn't want to hear it. I figured it was my problem, anyway, my relationship with Sarah before I was related to her - it had always had its problems and I really wasn't all that concerned.
Obsidian
Laura Davis
Chapter 11



Jay's job kept him busy. He graded papers at night, and there always seemed to be one kind of meeting or another to attend. He didn't say much about it. In fact, Jay wasn't talking much at all about anything. After dinner we'd talk about the house, what I was doing and what he needed to help me with, and often we'd take a drive, and Jay would point out things, the mining camps, where the Chinese had lived, a particular draw where he'd hunted. Those times were good. I liked them.
But I couldn't believe how quickly the honeymoon had ended - I'd heard about that happening, but I thought we were different, and that we were facing the same changes as any old couple worried me. When Ted and Gloria came by in the evenings to check on our progress, Jay always managed to be someplace else, up on the roof repairing shingles or buried beneath the high-pitched whine of his circular saw. Gloria would usually try to find a way to speak with him before she left, asking about work, did he still know people there, things like that. I noticed how Jay never really looked at her, nor his dad, just kind of looked down and answered as much as he had to.
I thought I should count my blessings, a Calinda motto, but something was bothering me. As the days had gone on, Jay slept tighter at night, pulling away from me and once or twice he'd snapped at me, shocking me into silence, and even though he quickly apologized, it left me with my feelings hurt.
I called my mother. There were private lines to each apartment in the complex where she lived, but when someone was gone their phones turned over to a receptionist. I knew her, Margaret, exactly the kind of woman who would adore my mother and take a personal interest in her. "Calinda is out tonight," she would say, and after so many time of that I started hanging up when I heard the phone click over, not wanting to arouse suspicion or sympathy with my frequent calling.
When I had talked to her, she was full of news and information of her own, though not inattentive to my own new life. She and Sharon had been traveling a great deal and had actually bought a time-sharing place in Greece and I couldn't believe my mother was making so many decisions without even talking to me first. "You and Jay ought to think about going," she'd offered, "it's so beautiful, inspiring."
Me and Jay. In fact, my mother hadn't been home long enough in the early part of the fall before school started, for us to get over and see her, she'd never even met Jay yet, face to face, though they'd talked many times on the phone. It seemed to worry me more than my mother, she'd hardly been surprised at all at our quick marriage.
"The first couple of years are the hardest," my mother had said once in reply to my hesitation when she asked how things were going. "You're so independent, Meg, just like me, it takes awhile to adjust. I wouldn't worry about it, sweetheart. You always make such good decisions for yourself."
That was it, that relentless trust. I felt like yelling at her, my mother, do you know? you don't know. Because I've done a lot of bad things but you just never found out. But she would only reply, I knew because I'd tried it, "you know what's right and wrong, Megan, and you know how and what to do to make up for your mistakes. Everybody makes them. Onward and upward," she'd say. "Better to do something wrong than nothing at all."
So I tried. Walls came down and cupboards out. I scraped and sanded. My fingers were deeply calloused, cuticles beyond repair, slivers always hurting. I never got bored, just tired. The muscles in my arms and legs got tight. My stomach thinned. I made discoveries, like oven clean takes paint off metal hinges quickly and easily.
I didn't know it at first, but the house we'd bought was famous to some extent, known for its haunting, which made me laugh, but also for the length of time it'd been empty. The only time anyone around Baker had acknowledged my presence (though they constantly greeted Jay) was in regards to the house.
"Made a lot of drug busts right there in your living room," a Baker cop told me at the grocery store. "Yes, that's right," he persisted in response to my questioning look, "I know you, you bought that old house. Well, lots of drugs through there, yes sir, lots of riff raff types through there."
By the time Jay and I bought the house the wallpaper drooped and the ceilings bulged. The floors were swollen. Lots and lots of rain and melting snow had found its way through the roof. Lights and outlets didn't work - water ran through a ceiling fixture like a drain. Left-behind pet rabbits had inhabited the carpets. A toilet flushed into the backyard. And for the first few weeks before our presence was known, there were a few stray folks, transients and school kids, who showed up in the evenings, expecting their usual shelter in the abandoned house.
There was not a single practical reason that Jay and I had bought the house, outside of needing a place to live for awhile, although I had noticed the extensive Victorian trim throughout and secretly believed there was potential for charm. And during those first weeks and months that I started tearing that house apart, it seemed that all of Baker showed up at one time or another to express their absolute disbelief over two apparently widely-known facts. One of these was that Jay and I had been absolutely and thoroughly ripped off. Apparently everyone in Baker read the land sales transactions published in the town paper, and the price Jay and I had agreed to had them all in stitches. "Could have bought the whole block for that," they all hooted.
Number two, was their vocalized concern that any woman, young, old or anywhere in between, should have any right, desire or inclination, to make as big a mess as I was making in our front yard with piles of demolition debris. "Whatchoo doing in there all day, missy? Be careful you don't hurt yourself." And each and every time I sucked a hurt finger or rubbed a bruise incurred from an unruly board, I speculated on whether they were right.
Right or wrong, and I was entirely convinced they were wrong, I essentially had no choice. The place was a wreck. Only I could see what it would someday be. And in the meantime, it was up to me to do as much as I could to get the process going.
And then a weird thing happened. I didn't think too much about it at the time, put it away with everything else, but it scared me when it happened, something didn't seem quite right. I was working in a back room, the old original kitchen, taking out the lowered ceiling, which amounted to removing sheetrock, a chore I'd come to call the worst, and then taking out the framing behind that. I was making a lot of noise. I didn't hear Ted when he walked in, which wasn't weird there - the back door stood wide open, and if he had called out for me I wouldn't have heard him.
I was banging away and then out of the corner of my eye I saw him, standing in the doorway, staring. "Jesus, you scared me," I accidentally yelled. Ted didn't answer, just kept staring. He was making me nervous and I could hear my voice squeaking from it. "How's it going, Ted? I'm making some kind of mess here, aren't I?"
He answered, still staring, "I've been meaning to find some time with you alone, Meg, it seems we never get that chance."
Still on the ladder, hammer in hand, I caught something suggestive in his voice. I flushed. I told myself to quit acting stupid. I said, "We're busy so much, it seems, around here. The work just never ends."
Ted laughed. "Don't know why you think you can get that job done with a hammer," he said. "Need a crowbar. Didn't Jay tell you that?"
"Jay hasn't told me much of anything," I answered, but that sounded funny so I added, "I'm just pretty much on my own around here. Jay checks up on me in the evening."
"Well," Ted interrupted, "I've got me several daughters-in-law now, and to each and everyone of them I've said the same thing. Now you're a little bit different, Meg, I can see that, but we're a very, very close family, always have been and always will be. Everybody gets along. And where the girls are concerned, I tell them, the things they see in their men, my sons, came from me, just chips off the old block, and I try to spend a little alone time so we can get to know each other better."
I was still on the ladder and didn't feel entirely comfortable about getting off and moving closer to Ted. I knew he was a different sort of guy, had had his own share of problems, and I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt in case I was overreacting to what I thought I was hearing. "Sure is a big family," I offered, lamely. I shifted my weight. Ted stepped in the room, closer.
"All I'm saying is, Meg, and I don't think you're listening, is that everybody has to get along here, and I'd like to spend some time getting to know you better, you're a very attractive woman. No blondes yet in this family, and spirited, aren't you, Meg? Got a lot of spirit. Well, I like that." He laughed again. It made me cringe.
And then he turned towards the door, "tell Jay hello for me," he said, "like I told Gloria, I've got to get over there and say hello to that gal personally, one-on-one, or else she'll think she's not been made welcome."
And then he was out the door and I hollered, "bye, Ted," but he didn't answer, and I found myself concerned and then mad for being scared, there was no reason to be, the guy was just old, overworked, some of his kids had given him such a hard time, he didn't even realize how he'd sounded, how did he sound? Threatening. But what was the threat?
I didn't know. Ted was just trying in his own way, not very eloquent at all, but trying. I should admire that, all my worrying about people not getting along and here was Ted trying to do just that. And I was tired, most of all, of criticizing the family all the time, I had the feeling it could eventually cause problems between Jay and I, noticing all these little things that probably would add up to nothing.
I went back to hammering, hard, intending to get my day's work done and all cleaned up, keeping with the schedule I had set for myself. But after only a few minutes I stopped. I just didn't feel like working anymore.

Obsidian
Laura Davis
Chapter 12


We visited my mother for Thanksgiving, had the greatest time, they'd planned a surprise party, she and all her friends, there were three hundred some people living in that place, it was like a small town. Must have been fifty or so of them there that she'd invited to our party, with presents even, and Jay and I unwrapped for the longest time. It was like a real wedding.
We got all this stuff. I didn't realize it until the cake and the music and the presents, that Jay and I had kind of passed over the wedding in any traditional sense, which had been fine, it's what I'd wanted, but being there with my mother and her friends made me a little sad, I guess, and driving home with Jay that long trip back, loneliness set in, deeper than I'd felt since my father died.
I thought about him. Andrew. Once I'd walked through the Meier and Frank store in downtown Portland, walked through just to shortcut a couple of blocks, and all of a sudden it had hit me, the smell of a man's cologne, coming from the display counter, and right there in the store I'd started crying, bawling really, it had just washed over me, the loneliness, the smell of my father from such a long time ago.
Andrew had served in World War II, like nearly everybody else his age, and after that he'd worked for air traffic control at the Portland airport. My mother had worked also, during the war, in a factory in central Washington, putting together war planes, of course. They met at a dance in Seattle, complete coincidence, my father was on leave and my mother was visiting her sister there. It was love at first sight, naturally, they were born for each other, and they worked hard and saved - the war had made them cautious, but each of them managed to retain their enthusiasm and spirit, it comes through the photographs, even, the ones I have of my father.
I don't think they planned me. I would never say the word "accident," because I can just hear my mother's shocked reply to that suggestion. But I wasn't planned, but a "blessing," I'm sure it'd be called, because there are fourteen books of photos of me, just in the first year alone.
I wasn't a cute kid. It took quite awhile for my edges to smooth out. My hair stood straight up until school age, my face kind of thin and pale on the black and white film. But I was loved. Cherished. The picture I like best was taken at the Grand Coule dam, a friend or stranger shot it, and my parents are wedged together, holding me in the middle, and the smile on my face, just around twelve months, makes my heart still happy today. I was elated.
Nobody knows why Andrew died. He wasn't old, no history of heart problems, and the job stress was nothing compared to the war. He was loved and happy. But he died anyway, young, and left my mother and I alone. I know he didn't want to do that, that he'd regret it if he could, it was senseless, unpredictable and it changed us. We were deprived of much more than a third.
There was a time I spent mad at my mother, figuring in my young mind, that losing a daddy was way worse than a husband, and I wanted her to get one, somebody else, to love me and raise me up. But after I married Jay I knew it wasn't worse, there was no better or worse, it all hurt way too hard.
I cried on the way home off and on and Jay held my hand or rubbed my leg, saying things to try and make me feel better, and it helped, finally. And once we hit the Blue mountains, once we left the basin and got to Pendleton, it was the funniest thing, but I felt like I was going home. Even with things so torn apart and lonely, I couldn't wait to get home.
Jay had loved my mother and she had obviously thought he was the "bees' knees," and Sharon wouldn't quit, she fussed and flirted until Jay was finally relaxed. I'd seen Cathy too, home after finishing graduate school and had the perfect timing to visit Jessica in the hospital after delivering her baby. I'd been left feeling satisfied with the life I'd chosen.
It started snowing outside of town and as we got closer the flakes thickened, and pulling off the freeway they were lit up by the streetlights and neon of the commercial strip. Our house looked cold and dark, and it was, but Jay built a fire and we went straight to bed, and it was like Mexico, again, we found each other, remembering. I was so happy I thought it would kill me.





Obsidian
Laura Davis
Chapter 13



Everything was going so well. It'd gotten better. I was calling it home, and Jay seemed good too, and I was thinking it had all been a period of adjustment as they call it, getting married so quickly and moving to a new place. I was settling in. Some accomplishments were being made. Seeing my mother had warmed me.
In the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas Jay and I spent lots of time together, we strung outside lights and cut ourselves a tree. I found, in the dozens of crates and boxes I'd brought over from my mother's storage, old Christmas tree ornaments, dishes, tablecloths. My mother even had Christmas curtains, fluffy white with green and red holly, but they were too short to hang in my long windows. I put those aside but used everything else, and especially in the evenings when the lights were dimmed, the place looked softer, with the low lights covering the rough spots.
School let out for Christmas break and Jay and I went shopping, clear to Boise to pick out things for his parents and his nieces and nephews. We wrapped them all and set them under our tree and Jay hooked up the stereo and we listened to all our old records.
Everything was going fine. Jay was eager, even, I could tell, about going to his parents' house for Christmas, the whole family would be there, his mother repeated endlessly, for the very first time in four years. Gloria seemed to want more than anything else for everyone to be together for a photograph.
I saw it. It came to me in the mail. My face, like always, is thin and pale, especially in contrast to the darker skin surrounding me. But that picture was early yet, the night still starting, it had taken a couple of hours for everyone to get warmed up.
I was nervous about going, and Jay was too though he didn't admit it. I was most anxious about seeing Sarah, not knowing what kind of a mood she'd be in, but the rest of them too, especially Danny, and I wasn't real keen on meeting up with Ted. Actually, I was more than nervous, I guess I was scared.
But I felt ridiculous right away, because nobody even paid much attention to us. The big family reunion and it didn't appear to be much of a big deal at all. There were kids everywhere, insane from the excitement, bulging with candy and pop and babies and toddlers falling down and crying. I didn't bother counting but there must have been over forty people there, crammed into that house and all talking at once.
I hovered close to Jay but everybody wanted to talk to him and finally he got led away to a discussion with his brother Peter. I stood there feeling really self conscious, nobody was talking to me and I felt like I was obviously not fitting in. I found a seat on a couch and was instantly surrounded by little kids calling me "Aunt Meg," like they'd known me their whole lives. Everyone was aunt or uncle somebody. The kids seemed nearly robotic in their repetition of their relatives' names.
I assumed that Sarah hadn't arrived, but after some time, she came down the stairs and walked past me.
"Hi!," I said, "Merry Christmas, Sarah, how are you?"
She didn't say a word, just kept walking, and once in the kitchen I heard her say, "Too bad you can't choose your relatives."
That would have been bad enough but Gloria answered her, "now, Sarah, try and be nice, you know how to share."
Danny's wife said, "she sure is stuck up, that's my impression." And then everybody was laughing and my face felt like it was on fire. I thought I was going to start crying and humiliate myself further, but then the stereo was turned up, blasting, and I couldn't hear anything else anyway.
Then Ted was by my side, bringing me a huge glass of wine, and he put his arm around my shoulder while he squatted down next to me and shouted in my ear, "how are you, Meg?"
I nodded, fine. "But have you seen Jay?" I asked.
"Oh, Jay," he shouted back. "Who knows. Now don't get to worrying about Jay. Why don't you play cards or help out in the kitchen? Plenty to keep you busy around here, mingle a little, Meg, don't feel sorry for yourself."
I nodded again, hoping he would just leave and when he did, I got up to find the bathroom. When I came out, Sarah was leaning against the door.
"Oh, sorry," I said, for what I didn't know, "if you were waiting."
"No problem, it's a big family, get used to it."
"Can I talk to you, Sarah, a minute, you got a minute?"
"For what?" she answered, looking me coldly in the eye.
"Well, just because, because I don't want things to be estranged between us, I want things to work out."
"It's too late for that, Meg."
"But why? What's changed, what's the difference, why can't you talk to me?"
"Hey, forget it. Will you move?" Sarah jabbed her elbow into my side to get into the bathroom. Over her shoulder she sneered at me and slammed the door.
I was shaking. I started walking back to the living room and then stopped, afraid to go back in without Jay. I felt everybody was going to be watching me to see every little thing I felt and I wanted Jay to protect me from feeling like I was the focus of everyone's conversations. But no one seemed to notice as I squeezed myself back in the living room, Sam and his wife were dancing and Ray as dancing with a niece and I noticed they were reeling, from drinking, already, and then Danny was in front of me, grinning, "I want you to dance with me," he demanded, and I hadn't said yes or no, just kind of smiled and I saw his eyes narrow and then he shouted, "I said, you're going to dance with me," and he reached out and grabbed me by the arm, jerking me out towards the stereo.
He shouted again, "somebody tell Miss Megan the procedure around here, this is your family now, not your sorority house or whatever you're used to."
He still had me by the arm and for a second I saw in his eyes how much he hated me and then somebody yelled, "oh, knock it off," and relieved, I pulled away, but then I heard someone else say, "what's her problem, anyway?" and someone replied, "really, just chill out, Meg."
I started for the doorway and got tangled up in all the chairs and kids in my way. Nobody moved to let me through, and I had to stop, right there in the middle of the room, and I chose to get scared instead of made, I got scared because they were all staring at me and it made me feel humiliated, all those eyes, it was my fault, I should have known how to get along better, should have laughed and talked back hard the way they all did, even Jay knew how.
And then he was behind me, Jay, with my coat. "We're out of here," he said.
Jay stormed home. I could barely keep up. And in just the short walk to our house, the sub-zero cold burned my skin. Jay threw open the door and I shut it behind me. When Jay turned on the light, his face was pale with anger. I was angry too, I could feel it. I waited for him to say something, or better yet, to come over to me and hold me, explain what had happened, but he did nothing, and it was that moment, I believe, that made things change for us, me and Jay, things changed hard right then and we had to work a long time getting it all back.
"Why'd he do that to me?" I finally asked.
Jay shrugged.
"You do that a lot, you know it," I told him. I ask you something and you shrug."
"Well, what do you want me to say?"
"I don't know, something, anything. I don't know what's going on. I've been trying so hard, Jay, but you won't help me, it's like you don't even want to be here. Your mother comes over all the time when she knows you won't be home, your dad shows up, threatening me."
"What?" Jay looked up sharply.
"Oh, I don't know," I wailed, "I don't know how to even explain anything, it's like everything is out of control and nobody but me thinks it's weird, it's normal to you but I'm scared."
Jay didn't move, just said, "there is no explanation, Meg. Just stay out of it. Do you hear me? Don't even get started trying. You've already put way too much effort into this thing with Sarah, trying to get everybody to be friends. That's not the way it is, end of discussion."
I couldn't believe this was the same guy. No compassion, no warmth, "oh, so blame me, Jay," I shouted. "Blame me. Whatever I do is wrong. Well, what about your brother? What's that all about. He grabbed me by the arm. That's my fault?"
"My brother's an asshole. I already told you all that. I told you. Why did you expect otherwise?"
"Goddamn it Jay! Then why did we go? You believed it too. Quit blaming everything on me, you wanted to go yourself just admit it. And you're hoping too that they're nicer than they are."
"Forget it Meg." Jay sat down at the table. He looked defeated and it made me feel bad for yelling. "Forget it," he repeated, "you're trying to hard."
"You're still talking about me, Jay," I pleaded. "What about your brother? Just saying he's an asshole is it? Some kind of excuse?"
"What do you want me to do?" Jay stood back up. "What do you want me to do? Go over there and beat the shit out of him? Wouldn't do any good. That's all anybody ever does, it's what they want to have happen."
"C’mon, Meg," he added, "he was drunk, he's crazy when he's drunk. And I'm sorry he hurt you, I'm sorry. But nothing will ever change him, so you're going to have to get tougher."
Jay looked exhausted, standing there, and I thought how it was probably harder for him, since they were his family, having to see the way they acted. I walked over to him and put my arms around him and with a hug I said, "I'm sorry too. It's Christmas, Jay, our first. I love you."
I felt him nod his head, yes.





Obsidian
Laura Davis
Chapter 14



At first nothing happened. Christmas day I expected something, an apology, for one, though I didn't hope too hard for that. Something told me I was just one of many causalities, and that even though I'd taken it all personally, nobody else did.
And even when Gloria showed up that afternoon, came over with a couple of her young granddaughters to tell Jay what time dinner would be, he told her he wasn't coming, and it was easy to see she was upset, she stared down at the floor, waiting, I supposed, for him to explain himself or change his mind, and he just sat there too, waiting, a kind of stand-off.
So, Jay took that stand, I understood later, for the first time anyone had, refused their mother, and he paid for it hard, especially at first.
Gloria went home, hysterical. Even though she left our house appearing disappointed, but not anything drastic, within that short walk she became hysterical. By the time she got to her front door her granddaughters were having to hold her up, she could barely walk, and once up the steps and inside, she collapsed.
Rachael called and said Gloria was really upset, that she was lying on the floor, and I thought something horrible had happened, and then Peter got on the phone and told Jay he'd be right over.
I hadn't been able to make much sense of what Jay told me Rachael said to him, just that Gloria wasn't feeling well, and when I opened the door to Peter, that's the assumption I was under. I invited him in and he said, "this has nothing to do with you, where's Jay?" and I thought, well, it doesn't, after all, it's their mother, not mind, but it seemed rude, either way.
I went upstairs to leave them alone and I heard Peter talking to Jay, loud, in the kitchen, I heard Peter say, "What kind of bullshit is this, Jay?" he just started right in, yelling, and then I heard him talking about me, and I didn't want to hear but I couldn't help it, he said, "and what's with that wife of yours? Just too goddamn good for anybody? Read my lips. She's only going to break this family apart and we're not going to stand for it. Mom's sicker than a dog, can't even move. It's fucking Christmas and you're letting that wife of yours fuck things up."
"Oh, shut up," Jay replied.
"I'm not going to shut up, motherfucker. This is our mother did you forget? And Sarah, what about her? She's lost twenty pounds over this? What kind of a girl you got here, Jay? She wants everybody to accept her as family, then just sits there in that chair doing nothing, too goddamn good for anybody, doesn't work out that way, you know it."
"What's your point?" I heard Jay ask. "Because the old lady's pulling a stunt? Lying on the floor? That's always her last resort. I'm not buying it."
"Fine! When she's lying there in the hospital we'll know who caused it. Your stupid wife. And I'll just let everybody else know what you're about, Jay. Look, why don't you just leave. Everybody was way better off without you here. But I know one thing. You're not going to move back here, live right next door and fuck things up."
"Oh, nobody makes me do anything."
"Right, I forgot, you're the fucking prodigal son, like we're all supposed to lie down and worship you."
"Bag it, Peter," I heard Jay say. "Go home. There's nothing you want here, anyway."
"No problem," shouted Peter. "I'm out of here."
I heard hard footsteps and the front door slamming. I couldn't move. It seemed like that had been happening a lot lately, I couldn't move. I waited a long time before I heard Jay, heard him running water in the sink and then the smell of coffee brewing. It made me feel hopeful, like an olive branch or something. I got off the bed as quietly as I could. I really didn't know what to expect. Jay was different, sometimes, that I knew, that this family thing was making him change. If he'd have been the same guy as in Mexico, I could have bounded down the stairs into his arms. But we were cautious, now. I felt it during my descent on the stairs, my heart thumping with worry.
"I don't want to talk about it," he said to me, without turning around.
"That's okay," I offered, even though it really wasn't. I felt bad, wounded, all the things said and done about me, they weren't even true, I wasn't like that. But I said it anyway, and waited.


It was quiet. For days and days at our house. And two houses down, too, I guess, because nobody came over again right then, and after New Year's, I'd catch a glimpse of cars being packed and leaving, loaded with kids, dogs and presents.
It was the day the Gulf war started and I was trying to catch the news through the static of my small T.V., all day I couldn't stop watching, adjusting and tuning constantly, trying to hear what was happening. Jay came home for lunch, the kids were weird, so many relatives involved in the military, and still pumped from Christmas. He came home and rigged an antenna for me and we watched awhile together, the crisis somehow making us feel safer with each other. But it didn't last long, our closeness, we'd been so far apart since Christmas, anyway, and then that evening, Ted and Gloria showed up, and all the bombs flashed on the mute screen behind where we sat in the kitchen.
It wouldn't have been so bad if Jay hadn't just sat there, they went on for such a long time, if he would have talked back, or sat up straight, but he didn't, we were all at the table and I watched them all, even when it came to be my turn, but Jay just looked down and said nothing.
I'd never been lectured in that way before, put down. The things they said to Jay were predictable in my opinion, just more about being family and how important that was, shaming him fairly impactfully, bringing up things he'd done, really bad things, as a kid, and how he'd already caused everybody enough pain by leaving for so long but that they were never ones to close the door on their kin, the welcome mat was always there, and anytime he was ready to be forgiven, and to do some forgiving himself, everything would work out fine.
My turn. It twisted right away. I couldn't follow it, it took so many turns, it wasn't even me they were talking about, they didn't even know me. No one had taken that time. They thought they knew me, however, from Sarah, who'd apparently stayed on longer after the holidays, they'd had some really long talks, and it was clear, Ted told me, that we were dealing with some deeply rooted problems, probably going way back to childhood, "never had to learn how to share, and what you've done here," he noted, "is bend this situation for your own best interests, apparently a tactic of yours, men and Sarah says, women, too, and in my book that's sexual perversion and I'd just like to ask you, Meg, have you shared this information with your husband?"
"Shared what?" I asked. Jay said nothing.
"Meg, get this straight," Ted continued. I couldn't believe Jay was allowing him to. "Our family times are few and far between. And we cannot afford to spend that time fighting. Sarah missed opening the presents! She was just too sick. And on top of that, you made Danny's wife, Mootie, extremely upset also when you overreacted. We all dance together!"
"I didn't want to," I said, trying hard not to cry. I felt embarrassed and attacked. But still Ted went on.
"We have our own problems, Meg, and I am not going to suggest otherwise, but we work them out," he added, speaking very slowly, as if I were a child. "But this thing with Sarah has me really bent with you, you seem to be wanting to intentionally hurt her.
"Sarah claims this is the worst experience in her life, all of it, it's made her very ill, and it's easy for me, and for Gloria too, to believe her, we can see it with our own eyes. She's only asked that you just leave her alone and you don't seem to be able to do that but just keep forcing her.
"But you're married, now," he added, and I jerked my eyes to his face to see where he was headed, "and I expect you'll put all that behind you, with Jay's help of course," nodding in Jay's direction, "often times there's thing we do when we're young that are painfully dark and brooding, that need absolution - you were raised in the church, Meg, you could turn to the Lord for assistance, and it's the Lord I'm calling on, being here today, you two have a long road ahead of you, this marriage, Gloria and I had our days and days of it, but praying your way through it is the only route to take."
Mute and numb. Apparently he was finished. And nauseous way down deep. Insane. I thought, he's got to be insane.
Jay sat. Not a word. It probably could have gone on forever, but Ted fucked up. He broke through my numbness and muteness with a mistake, a failure on his part to know when he'd gone too far, to know when to stop.
"I've been trying to reach your mother by phone," he said.
I snapped. My heart just nearly stopped. I was in Ted's face in a minute, leaning across the kitchen table, my hands pounded down breaking blood vessels, "my mother," I shouted, screaming, really, "what the fuck are you doing calling my mother? Get them out of here, Jay, get them out. You're fucking nuts, I'm not taking this shit."
"Jay, make them leave," I pleaded, crying that he hadn't made a move, "I can't take this, I don't even know what's going on."
"Ted," said Gloria, the first word she'd uttered.
"This is exactly my point," interrupted Ted, jumping out of his chair, "exactly the kind of behavior Sarah has been talking about."
"So take your proof, then," I shouted back, back away from the table. Ted was scaring me.
And they were, already, Gloria was out the door and Jay was still sitting. Ted gave me one more look, shaking his head and laughing, he said, "I feel so sorry for you, Meg, I'll pray."
"Don't bother," I shouted at his departing back. "Don't bother at all. Because WE'RE NOT TALKING ABOUT THE SAME GOD HERE1"
I turned on Jay. Still sitting Jay. I said I wanted to leave. I said I was leaving. I told him he was full of shit. Sitting. "Can't even say a word?" I asked him. "Why'd you bring me here, to this, you should have told me. Can't you even stick up for me?"
"I did," he answered, not moving. "I told you all of it."
"You told me nothing," I said.
"Yeah, well what did you leave out, Megan?" he said. "What really went on between you and my sister, hunh?"
"What are you talking about?" I shouted. "What the hell are you talking about," I repeated, shouting louder in response to another shrug from Jay. "Nothing happened between me and your sister, nothing! And even if something had it's no business of yours anyway."
"I see."
"And what's that supposed to mean? You believe them? You believe Sarah? Besides being homophobic, what's in it for you, this believing? What's so important to you that you want to stay in the middle, keep picking sides? I don't get it Jay, not at all.
"If he would have called my mother," I continued, crying, "if he does, I'm out of here. You know my mother, she'd be panicked, worried, and she wouldn't know what to think about this, all this convoluted crap you call family."
"Well, I guess you've got your mind made up."
"What a lot of bullshit. You just sit there and take it. Why don't you fight, stand up for what you believe in?"
"I couldn't get a word in with you."
"Oh, right, Jay. We're back to me again. Funny how that seems to always work that way."
"What do you want me to say, Meg? To do? What do you want me to do?"
"Something, anything. This is awful, wrong, I can't accept this, being accused of things I've never even done, taking the blame for Danny, for Sarah, allowing your father to speak to me that way."
"Fine. Then leave if you have to."
"What is with your complacency? Anyway? What is this? What is so hard for you about calling this wrong?"
"I don't have a problem with that."
"Then do it!"
"Okay, it's wrong, so what?"
"Wrong. Great. How about sorry, how about feeling sorry for me?"
"You know I care, Meg. I care. I can't change them, what they do."
"But why can't you say when they're wrong, Jay?" I was crying so hard it was making me sick. "Why can't you say something instead of just letting them. I was scared of Danny, scared, and your dad, they scare me Jay, you just don't get it."
"I get it," shouted Jay. "I get it perfectly. And this is it. They're out of here completely. Not coming around. I will tell them that. Is that what you want, would it make you feel any better?"
"Oh, forget it, Jay. What I'm asking is that you want to do this. I'm not going to force you. Do what you want, I don't care." It seemed impossible to make my point.
"Fine," said Jay.
I took a deep breath. "Fuck you, Jay." I'd never meant anything more in my life.


I didn't sleep with Jay that night, I couldn't. I was too upset and hurting, and Jay was still refusing to talk. It'd been years since I'd heard myself like that, the way I yelled at Ted, the last time had been in high school when a pack of worthless females had decided to gang up on Sullie, practically retarded, she was, she'd started her period for the first time, right there in the shower, and crying, breaking, staring at the blood swirling around the drain, they'd decided it was funny, seeing her like that, all in a circle at the entry to the showers, laughing, hooting.
I knew I was leaving, that night, that I'd be going home to what I knew and understood, and that Jay could either come with me or he wouldn't, but either way I couldn't see risking anymore. The anger and aggression scared me too much. And I thought it over and over before I fell asleep, how I'd leave as soon as possible, I told myself I couldn't look back, just do what I thought was right, like always.
I'll probably never know why I didn't follow my carefully thought out plans. It had something to do with the snow the next morning, snow on the foothills of the Blue mountains, that, and how when I woke up I was staring into a hole I'd smashed through in yet another ceiling and I felt like I had to finish it, what I'd started, and it was Jay, too, his own pain and eyes swollen from crying. And I couldn't be made at him, as much, because it wasn't like he was the one, it was them, not him.
And so I stayed. Because I wasn't yet willing to give him up.


Obsidian
Laura Davis
Chapter 15



A shrink would probably have said something like, you're internalizing your guilt, your father's death most definitely has something to do with it, you're afraid of loss, of abandonment you go out of your way to patch things up, it's a thing with you, patching, wanting things to work out a certain way, everybody happy. You have a fear of letting go. Your mother is elderly, though lively as you describe her, but old just the same, and her death terrifies you, being completely alone, and to compensate, you're clinging, idealizing, some loose boundaries here, somewhat unable to differentiate between yourself and others so you can let them go their own way, despite that you may not think it's best for them. But, in your situation, it's all completely understandable, yes. Losing a parent so young. Yes, natural.
Or whatever. But there were no shrinks in Baker. There wasn't dink. I could have sworn, that first year, that there was not a single other woman my age, even within a decade. I wondered why. Then I looked closer, at Safeway or Albertson's, and saw there were plenty my age, they just didn't look it, with all their hair done up in a peculiar old-fashioned way, nylons and belted dresses, they were my age after all, even younger.
I felt completely out of place. Even at the library, always my favorite refuge, when I went to order books from the interlibrary loan system, after looking each of them up and carefully recording their numbers, thinking, out of desperation, that I would use the time on my hands to consider pursing a doctorate, the librarian looked at my list and said, "why honey, there's thousands of pages total in all these books put together."
"Yes," I agreed, "but it's not like I'm going to read every one, every page," I explained, though I didn't know why I was offering her an explanation, "research," I continued, "you know, taking notes, that kind of thing."
"Well, I think it's best," she said, smiling patronizingly at me, "if we start out with just one, and see if we like it. Then we can go from there."
"No," I told her, surprising myself with my assertiveness, "we aren't doing anything, I am. Do you have some sort of limit or something?"
She hesitated, then admitted, "well, we never have before, but I think we should now. How about three," she conceded. "I could agree to three."
I went in the "Oregon Room" and pouted, flipped through the pages of old diaries and journals, intricate entries from days on the wagon train, and then the details of settling down. The women kept incredible notes, writing down each item purchased, even food, and whatever was sent to them by relatives still back home. Not much small talk. Too tired, I guessed.
That was a particularly bad day, I remember, one in a series that had persisted since Christmas. I went home, but the walk was too short to soothe me. I thought about going for a run, something that always made me feel better, but the last time I had, some old dude had yelled at me from across the street, "where are you going, is something wrong?" and even though I didn't understand his question, I shook my head, no, but then did notice after watching for a few days, that nobody in Baker jogged.
So that day I went home and sat at the kitchen table and it was cold, really cold, the woodstove didn't heat enough, the old house had too many ways for it to escape, and it did, leaving ice on the windows, inside, only a few feet from the stove itself. It had to be stoked continually, every half hour or less, and if I went to the store or even just forgot about it a minute too long, it would burn itself completely out and I'd have to start over from scratch, crumbling newspapers and snapping kindling. That stove was as insistent as a baby and sometimes made me feel as confined as a new mother.
It wasn't a good stove to start with, a glorified trash burner, Jay had called it, and I hadn't known, when he'd first said that in the summer, when he shook his head and said it wasn't worth more than scrap iron, that what he meant, what the truth was, was that it wouldn't keep us warm, either.
I remembered that conversation Jay and I had about the stove and the way I'd felt confident that we could make it work for us. Just like anything else, all it seemed to need was some tender loving care. Besides, the stove might have worked out fine, except for the weather, which dropped to thirty below for nearly two weeks straight and that did not include the wind chill factor which I had quickly learned was not an acceptable measurement in the real west.
"Some kind of first year initiation you're gettin'," a store clerk told me. "It's only like this every decade or so. Couldn't have picked a worse winter to move here!"
It's extremely difficult to feel sorry for yourself when it's cold. I managed. And even though I'm an ugly crier, I did it anyway. I always envied my friend Cindy, who cried so beautifully, huge, fat tears that made her eyes sensual and romantic. But when I cried, everything turned red, blotchy. It was one big mess but I couldn't help it, sitting that day at the table, the tears kept coming, propelled by my yearning to comprehend everything that was happening and then, sustained by all I'd ever held inside.
I cried for things I hadn't thought about in a long time, things I thought I'd forgotten, and into my focus came loves and hopes I'd had, Andrew, naturally, and then Calinda, too, I cried for her death, even though it was still years away. I cried and couldn't catch my breath.
I was only twenty two. And even though I turned twenty three soon after we met, when Jay and I first saw each other I wasn't yet, and I will always think of my age, then, as twenty two.
It's a little young, I concluded that day. Jay was twenty five, and that's young too, but it's rarely thought of that way, in all the rush to get things started, a life. Living in Baker, I saw women much younger, girls really, teenagers, wheeling babies in carts at the grocery store, walking with the boy or the man hand in hand down the street, the baby dangling from on top of shoulders. I'd done college in four years plus one term, making up all those incompletes, and what does that teach you, college? How to answer questions the way the professor intended, pushing the number two pencil down hard on scan sheets, filling blue books with pages of scrawling assertions, followed by examples. That's all, nothing practical. There's only one right answer.
I cried for the F- I'd received, my second term at college, in a survey of American literature class, for Pat Gage, the professor, who'd traced his cheeks with his fingers, imitating tears, when I'd gone to ask why, how does anybody get an F-? And he'd said he'd never known it was possible either, until he'd read my essay, pure opinion, as he'd noted, and if I wanted to do that, give my opinion, then I should save myself several hundred dollars each term and talk to my little friends on the phone.
I must have cried for an hour or more. New things kept coming up to cry about. But then I was done and did what I'd always done as a kid after crying, I went into the bathroom to look in the mirror and see what my face looked like. I couldn't. It was frozen.
After crying I spent time thinking, mostly about how there's two sides to every story, and I tried to find theirs, Jay's family's, the side they saw and I figured I must seem strange to them, too, just like they did to me. And I thought back to Mexico and how I knew I had to have Jay, and even though Sarah got mad, I let her, I didn't try very hard, and how I'd thought, even then, how I'd known, really, that the whole black sheep idea would have its complications.
I started wishing I'd been nicer, that I'd tried harder to understand Sarah, been more compassionate. And all of them, letting Ted and Danny scare me when in the past I'd never reacted that way. But it was Sarah, most of all, that made me search myself for what I could have done, if I'd tried harder to reach her on the phone, if that would have changed things, working things out before she got to her family. And the letters she wrote, all those letters, wasn't there something I could have said that would have made her feel better? Was I secretly glad she was hurting?
Nobody really knew me at all, my terms on the Deans' list, the thesis I wrote on bat wing evolution that got me a "Brilliant!" scrawled in the margin. Or basketball. Or anything.
I wasn't like she said, like she'd led them to believe, and they did believe, even Jay. And my stomach twisted just thinking about that. Blaming me for spoiling Christmas, for breaking their family apart. It felt heavy, that blame, especially that winter afternoon, it felt like all I was had been peeled off and somebody else, somebody else entirely, had been pasted on instead.
I chose regret. I chose it because it worked, because it helped explain things I couldn't understand. I chose regret and it slunk back in like it'd never been gone, right to the spot I'd housed it before, and I felt it there and then felt it spreading out, to the tips of my fingers and across my scalp and it took me just a second to take it back, that choosing, and I quickly changed my mind.
Two sides to a story, forget it. They were nothing more than a big pack of meanness. I'd been gone too long, too far from friends and family and home place. I was losing my perspective. All that stuff about God, about wanting to make me feel welcome, coming over when Jay wasn't home.
I started getting mad, and mad at Jay, too, sitting around the ways he did, having nothing to say to them, unable to stick up for what he believed in and the more I thought about it, the more mad I got, and with being so mad came a bunch of new energy, I felt it, it pounded through me the way a new idea does, one that comes to you first thing in the morning, and I got up out of my chair, and went to find my hammer.


Obsidian
Laura Davis
Chapter 16



I was acting nice, but inside I was totally ticked off. The house was never going to be finished, let alone even presentable. There was just too much to do. By April I was sick of being cold, sick of being filthy dirty with one hundred year old dirt, sick of driving up to the smelly dump with another load of carpet, vinyl and sheetrock, all of it moldy and gross. Underneath all I took out was just another ancient house that creaked and shifted with every breeze, every footstep. Two coats of paint meant nothing on the walls. The house demanded more and more, sucking it down like a spoiled toddler, wanting another ice cream before the first one's finished.
It was in April that I started wondering who Jay was. That's how I remember it, now, I wondered who he was. Because I didn't know him, really, when I stopped for a minute, to think. It's the house that made me stop and think, and when I did I had to accept I didn't even know him.
I'd married Jay because we'd had some great times. Everything seemed so different in Mexico, it seemed like we could have it all, all it was we wanted, spending our time together and having it matter. It didn't seem to matter anymore. In April he seemed to be a stranger, someone I woke up next to. I had no idea what made him an individual man.
I don't know how relationships are for people. I look around me, still, and just don't know. I see them shopping and having kids and buying stuff at Christmas. They vote. They share last names with a hyphen in between. They're same sex and opposite, and even though the polls say they hate their jobs they keep on going anyway. Mother's day and father's day and birthdays, all have cards and candles, and flowers for women and tune-up kits for men. But I don't know how they are.
In April I remembered when I was a kid and my best friend Cathy and I used to ride our bikes around the neighborhood when it had just gotten dark, and look in the windows of the people who lived around us. I was mesmerized. Cathy grew tired of our game long before I did. I could have gone on spying every night of the week. I watched the mothers and fathers while they sat in their living room chairs or at the kitchen table. I scrutinized every move, every tilt of a head, every shrug of a shoulder, hoping to see how they were. Maybe, I decided, it was an understanding of the most vital kind, buried deep in a heart, as spontaneous and biologically predictable as regular beating or breathing, something more to do with organ function rather than mindfulness.
But if it were more a thinking thing, I considered it like an invisible thread that connected them to each other, kept them in the vicinity of each others' intentions and desires.
Long after I gave up my spying game I continued to watch and worry that what they had between them would somehow be passed over me. And when I married Jay I hoped it would just happen, that understanding, of who somebody was. And during all the rush of coming home from Mexico and getting married and moving into Baker, I'd forgotten my long-held curiosity. But then, in April, when it was so cold and lonely in my house, I remembered once again. And it made me scared.
I wanted to live a right way. And it began to seem increasingly more important that I decided exactly what that was so I could begin to go about doing it.
And then I started hearing voices. It wasn't voices like they show in the movies, right before people start giving in and going crazy. No one actually spoke to me at all. Instead, I found myself reciting names while scraping and sanding, names of the women I'd found in books at the Baker library, names from journals and records of births and deaths, names of the women who'd walked and birthed and buried their babies in the prairie's dirt, on the trail that still passed through my town. I recited their names like others count their blessings or count their beads, one by one with reverence. It got to be a thing. It got to be such a thing that I wanted Jay to hurry up and leave in the morning so I could have some quiet time to count.
Maybe I was going nuts. I will never know. It was cold and I was lonely, and really a little young to think that housekeeping could maintain me.
I went to the Pioneer cemetery, looking for the graves of the women whose names I was spending so much time reciting. I found Bertha Mason, the sister of the man who'd built my house, surrounded by her relatives. Bertha had died back east while attending college, died one night when she answered the door to her jealous suitor's gun. I closed my eyes and felt the train, winding up the hillside and down the other to Huntington. I smelled it, that old train, and felt the wind bite and howl at my long skirt, muddy and worn at the hem, and the pressure on my feet from the shoes, pinching and not yielding to the frozen ground. I recognized the solemnity and the reverence of those around me, the men ashamed and the women scared, and the coffin, of course, black and draped like they need to be, with Bertha's body inside, another human body with a bullet hole in the head.
When I opened my eyes I looked across the cemetery to the row of houses that border south Baker, the low-rent district of a low-rent town, tiny, without foundations to hold up all the kids they're supposed to support.
I opened my eyes and stood up and started walking, and zigzagged back and forth across the graves until I finally found the one with Shannon's name engraved on it. Then I went home.


I've never believed in ghosts. But it's irrelevant, really, what someone believes. There's always something coming around to prove whatever belief is wrong. Like justice, for instance, or faith. It may be possible to cling to a thread of a belief. Take justice. What it would be like to achieve it. All those bullet holes to heal over, and, like with Lazarus, rise up and walk. This planet would be bursting.
Some discussion of the nature of ghosts is as fruitless as one on the nature of justice. When it happens it happens. Maybe Shannon was a ghost, or maybe she was nothing but a figment of my imagination, a manifestation of my grief, and Jay's. Any explanation will do.
I talked Jay into returning to the cemetery with me. At first he didn't want to, saying he had papers that needed to be graded. But then he agreed, abruptly, and even suggested we pack a lunch and hang out in the new sun. I was feeling hopeful that afternoon, just spending time with Jay. It's like we hadn't seen each other in a long while and it felt, too, almost awkward, and a few times I felt shy, not knowing what to say.
It's when we were leaving that I saw her. Jay, hunched under his backpack, had already turned down the path toward the gate. I had hesitated, brushing some crumbs left on her grave. As I straightened up she was beside me, hands in jeans' pockets, watching Jay walk away.
"Hello there," she said. "He's stayed so, um, committed, don't you think? So, um, in search...I guess. But this isn't about him, Meg, please forgive my distraction."
I thought two things at once: Jay, come back, and why is she wearing two jackets?
"He won't come back, Meg, right now, and I've always been completely incapable of choosing what to wear - don't you know? Like, both these coats are hip, you know, and don't let anyone ever tell you that you can't take it with you."
"Jesus," I whispered.
"Another misconception, Meg. It isn't what you think. It's closer to that Freudian thing that I never really grasped - something about how once the subconscious stops desiring and repressing simultaneously - death occurs. It's really nothing like the stories."
"Are you her?" I couldn't recognize my own voice.
"Of course I'm her, though I understand your confusion, Meg, believe me. This isn't easy on anyone."
"But what, why? Don't you want to talk to Jay?" I started feeling dizzy. I shook my head.
"Jay's going to be just fine, Meg. It's you I'm here for. We're neighbors, after all, it's the neighborly thing to do."
An incessant starling, squawking, distracted me, and in that split second, she was gone. Honest to God, I rubbed my eyes. I rubbed my eyes and shook my head. Then I must have fainted.
I woke up to Jay's face bent over mine, concerned. "What?" I said. My voice sounded extremely loud and far away. I didn't know where I was, what happened. "What?" I repeated, louder, "what's the matter, Jay?"
"You must have fainted, Meg."
I felt my head hurt and realized I had hit the ground hard. "Why did I faint? What do you mean I fainted, Jay?"
"I don't know, but please take it easy." He put his hand on the side of my face.
"Let me up," I said, suddenly upset that I was sprawled out on the ground. "I don't know why I'd just faint, Jay, that's ridiculous." I sat up. My head hurt worse and I started shaking, just a little at first, then more.
"Meg, take it easy," Jay said, standing up.
"I heard you the first time, Jay, I'm fine." I hadn't intended to snap at him, but I felt disoriented. "I'm ready to go now," I said. "Are you?"
"Sure, if you're ready." Jay picked his backpack up off the ground and swung it over his shoulder.
"Why are you doing that," I asked.
"What?"
I tried to think. Something felt funny. Something about his backpack like that. "I don't know, never mind," I said, "forget it. C'mon, let's go home. I think I'm just tired or something."
At home Jay decided I'd had a reaction to all the various chemicals I was using on the house, and I agreed. It had been too cold to keep any windows open and we figured the woodstove just cooked everything into a chemical soup. And when we went to bed that night I blamed my uneasiness on feeling sick and really didn't think too much beyond that.


I dreamed she was dying. I dreamed we sat in the swing on the porch of her house. All the crows, they all lined up on the railing, scrunched up together and silent, heads turned to one side or the other. We sat and I held her hand as she was dying, watched as she watched the crows, as her head, too, began to tilt sideways.
I dreamed I watched her dying and as she died my head grew heavy and slumped forward and gave in, finally, to sleeping.
I dreamed I jumped awake to someone shaking me. Shannon's hands were on my shoulders. Shaking me, she shouted in my face, "wake up, Meg." Her mouth was twisted, her barrettes undone in her hair and bangs falling in her eyes. "Wake up, Meg," pleading, "wake up."
I tried to shake her loose, she was hurting me. Her fingers dug in my flesh. I felt her tears, hot, streaming down her face into my lap. "Meg," she said, "help me Meg, please help me."
"What's wrong, Shannon, what is it?"
"Help me, Meg, I didn't do it, that's not the way it happened. I want to go now but he won't let me."
I dreamed she was a little girl and I pulled her on my lap and we rocked in the swing. I stroked her arm. I twisted long strands of her hair around my fingers. We rocked. We both cried. The rocking and crying soothed us. She leaned her head on my shoulder and I leaned mine on hers. We slept.
I dreamed I held her and we rocked and her arms grew stronger around my waist. Her head nuzzled my cheek. We rocked and she pushed herself into me, head and shoulders, pushed and I didn't resist. We rocked and she pushed me and I laid on on my side and she turned me over, my eyes still closed and I felt her hair on my face.
I dreamed she kissed me and I kissed her back with my eyes open and I saw hers, too, looking at me hard, her hands still on my shoulders, pushing.
"Shannon," I whispered, closing my eyes. She didn't answer. I opened my eyes, and found myself on my bed, the weight of her body and the feel of her hair and mouth still on me. But no one was there.



Obsidian
Laura Davis
Chapter 17

I remember that morning and that week. I got Shannon on my mind and she stayed there. I'd find myself, at the most unusual moments, wanting to stop what I was doing and sit, finding the chair in the living room bay window the most suitable. But it was also the coldest, and I dragged a sleeping bag with me so that I could curl up and sit there, staring past the frosted windows and still-frozen yard to the slushy streets. Just staring.
I wasn't getting much done. It was cold and I had Shannon on my mind. Lots of times I wanted to call my friends, wanted to catch up on the news, but it seemed I couldn't do things like that. I spent my days so quietly I was afraid to hear my own voice echoing through the house. Once I picked up the phone and the dial tone sounded strangely foreign, as though it came from another time in my life, one I no longer knew how to access. I hadn't even talked to Cathy since right before Christmas. It was the longest time we'd gone without catching up. She'd called several times, and each of them I'd told her I was busy, a lie she believed, I hoped, understanding the complexities of a new marriage. I had no idea of how to explain to her that my life had become more complicated than that, all the stuff with Jay, Jay's family, and I guess I really didn't want to hear what she would inevitably think to be true.
And then Jay quit his job. And we had another fight.
I had told him about my dream, how it seemed so real I felt I knew her, that we had met somewhere before. On the day Jay quit his job I was on my hands and knees in the living room, wiping down the just sanded floors with cheesecloth. My hands burned with hundreds of miniscule slivers from the fir flooring.
"Megan!" I heard the door slam.
"Here," I called.
"Megan, I quit, I've had it." He dropped his satchel on the kitchen table.
"What happened Jay?" I was shocked by his impulsive decision and couldn't really believe he'd quit his job.
"Jesus Christ, Meg, Tom Swearingen had Nicky standing in the corner today. Six foot three Nicky Mitchell standing in the corner. Know what he did?"
"No."
"He was late to class. No shit. He was late to class and Tom locked him out. That's the new thing now, locking the doors." Jay paused, shrugging off his sports coat and throwing it on top of the satchel.
"So how did Nicky end up in the corner?" I knew Nick. He was Baker High's best chance for state in basketball in a couple of decades.
"Oh, Christ, Nick's late to class every goddamn day of the school year. It's just the way he is. Couple of weeks ago Tom decided, not in his classroom, he wouldn't have any of that. So he tells Nick he's not coming in late anymore and so many tardies, etcetera, etcetera, add up to an absence, and so many absences and he's on the bench." Jay pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down hard.
"And of course," he continued, "when Nicky kept showing up late anyway, Tom keeps the door locked and Nick's got to run down to the office and get a tardy slip signed to be let back in. So the kid got nineteen absences in one week. His butt's on the bench for life." Jay rummaged through his satchel and pulled out his lunch sack. He dumped its contents on the table and sat there staring at it for a minute, shaking his head. Then he said, "I think he was trying, this morning, to get there on time, and a couple of other kids said it was just a matter of seconds, that Tom was actually standing in the doorway watching the clock and slams the door shut before Nicky got in. Well, Nick lost it!" Jay shoved his lunch aside and stood up.
"He started pounding on the door, calling Tom a lot of names we all call him behind his back anyway, and from what I understand, Tom opened the door and grabbed Nick up and walked him to the corner and started some litany, just going off in front of the class." Jay smacked his hand on the table. "Goddamn it Meg, this is all a bunch of crap."
"But you've said you've expected things like this, Jay," I said, "you've told me it was like this when you went there."
"No shit it was. I thought these years would make a difference, but not here. It's the goddamn dark ages. They still even refuse to take down the barbed wire from the top of the chain link fence on the field."
"Look Jay, don't take it so hard. You didn't know how long it would last anyway. I think you've done good just giving it a try at least." I got up off the floor where I'd stayed sitting, mesmerized by Jay's rage. I brushed the dust off my jeans and instantly my hands were on fire from the slivers.
Jay's voice was lower when he said, "Meg, I've got to tell you, I'm not so sure this is working out. I've never felt so much pressure in my whole life. I shouldn't have come home. Nothing's ever going to change, and on top of it you've got all this weird shit happening, and nothing is making any sense." Jay sat back down in his chair and folded his arms across his chest.
"What do you mean, my weird shit?"
Abruptly Jay added, "I didn't mean it the way it sounded. But dreaming about Shannon, all this has worn you down too."
"It was just a dream Jay."
"Well, yes, but whatever. It's just added another complication to an already screwed up situation."
"Just a second," I demanded. "I thought this conversation was about you, about Nick. Why is it about me now, my dream?"
"I said. Because it complicates everything."
"Well, don't let it! I shouldn't have told you."
Jay jumped up. "Look Meg. Things have always been messed up around here and now they're even more so and I really don't need you interfering, telling me what I already know."
I was short of breath. "Here we go again."
Jay hunched over the table. "There's some things you're not going to understand, they can't be explained. And I don't want you to keep trying."
"Screw you, Jay," I shouted. "You're always changing the subject, putting it onto me when it's really about yourself. So you quit your job, so what? I don't care. Do whatever you have to do. And it's your family, not mine. They don't belong to me. I didn't choose them, I don't want them, and all of this stuff happened way before I came along. And you're just doing what they do, blaming me for everything. You guys were messed up before I met you."
"That's how you feel?" Jay stared at me.
"Yes," I agreed, defiantly, knowing I'd included him in my assessment of his family. I didn't care right then. "It is how I feel. I know it hurts you. But you know them, you're at least used to them, to this town. You knew it all before you brought me here. And I've reacted this way, sure, but I can't think of anything else to do. I'm tired of it Jay. It's making me sick."
"So I'm making you sick too," he added, sullenly.
"Hey, you take it whichever way suits you. You like that anyway, playing the martyr. Now everyone's out to get your, your job, your family and even me. Well, I can't change how you feel Jay."
"Fine," he concluded. He stood up abruptly, knocking the chair over. Without picking it up he stomped to the stairs and took them two at a time. I heard the door to his studio slam hard and then the blast of the radio.
I watched the spot I'd last seen him. I stood there, hands on fire and crying. Then I left the house and went outside. The unexpected heat from the clear day's sun ripened the air. I cringed at the irony of the unforeseen change in the weather, all its warmth and sweetness, when my own personal day had turned so lousy. I saw Jay's work shirt hanging on the shovel and went through his pockets for a cigarette and matches.
I'll bet a couple of hours passed while I sat there, dull and smoking. My head was absolutely dead except for an occasional thought that bombed my brain. Like, what did I get myself into. Or, how am I going to get out. Or, how could I love somebody so much and hate them at the same time. And then I changed my course, and started counting the reasons why I deserved it, this chaos, it was as if all my sins were laid in front of me, slimy, twisty, all sharp teeth and venom. And then I thought of Shannon, how I probably shouldn't have said anything, that it had just been a dream, and one more thing that Jay and I didn't need.
The sun hit a cloud. I realized I was hungry. Standing up to go inside I noticed the flower beds at Shannon's old house, how they'd been cleared of leaves and debris, and wondered if it was going on the market again, for sale.
Inside, the house was colder than outside, proving spring in eastern Oregon isn't predictable. The sunshine is the only thing that makes it different from the season before, two or three more hours of warming each day, and those few hours would get me hoping so hard but by early afternoon make me feel a fool for believing.
I stuffed newspapers in the woodstove and shoved a handful of kindling on top. As I did, I remembered a time just a few months before, when I'd built my first fire, and how satisfying it had been, how the heat filled the house so fast we'd had to open doors. But that was only fall, then, when things like that had still been possible. As the first flames snapped the wood, I rubbed the black soot into my knuckles.
My past still stood firmly in front of me. I could feel it there - skipped classes, lack of respect for even the nice teachers, and more than my share of playground cruelty. I remembered the day I kicked my dog, kicked him in the side and sent him sprawling, yelping, and the look in his eyes and the way he didn't even stay away from me, just came back, wagging his tail, worried about me. I couldn't recall why I did it.
Sitting in Jay's chair at the kitchen table I felt the house, quiet with Jay's retreat upstairs. It breathed with him and I realized he was sleeping. The first wince of a headache started on the bridge of my nose. I pushed my finger into the spot to stop it. Then I started crying, again.
It wasn't how I wanted him to find me and so, when I heard him on the stairs I tried to push all the crying away so he wouldn't notice. His steps were deliberate and slow, and when he got to the landing, he paused. I heard him strike a match, then smelled sulfur. He exhaled. I waited.
"Meg," he said finally, softly, exhaling again. "I don't know how to say I'm sorry."
I caught my breath from crying. "I don't know either," I admitted.
"But I am," he added.
"Me too."
"And we'll work it out, somehow," he promised. "I'm just sure we will."
"I know," I agreed. "But it's still hard."
"I really love you," he offered.
I nodded, agreeing. And turning to look at him I knew I did, deeply and wholeheartedly, there were just some things in the way, and even though we began that day, making repairs and promises, making up, renewing, it was sadly clear, that even though we both believed we'd somehow manage, that we would somehow survive, one thing was unmistakably sure that certain afternoon: For Jay and me, the honeymoon was over.
Obsidian
Laura Davis
Chapter 18



I wouldn't call it settling in, Shannon and me, it was more like a crash landing. Shannon never gave it a second thought, naturally, it wasn't in her constitution to question such arrangements. The passage wasn't easy but I made it somehow, that required transition. I don't think too much about that, now, don't try to answer hows and whys. It's too tender. Nobody'd believe me and even though that doesn't really matter, I can plainly see the raised eyebrows, the shaking heads, typical reaction kind of stuff, even Calinda, I'm sure, and Shannon, who would always come to my defense like a screaming mother mountain lion, would probably wonder, too, what the long winter had done to me, being cold and lonely.
So it's kind of personal, I guess, the hows and whys of Shannon, but as I get older and run into more and more things, I've started to believe there's a lot we don't know, and can't answer, the ways things go and come to be, all the workings of what we call real. Like love. Give me a break. There just isn't any rhyme or reason to put a finger on. We must do it because it's there.
But Shannon became a part of my life, slipped into my daily existence, and bridged the gaps between the life I'd begun to plan on and the one that had come to be.
Where I live many came before, their bones all scrunched up together underneath where I walk, and before Shannon I'd never wondered who they were, nor cared, because they were, every one, gone away from my vision.
Gathering their names didn't help, tracking down their names and reciting them. It prompted me, I suppose, to welcome Shannon, but it didn't help me to feel them, nor all the others whose names could not be tracked and recited.
Because, I thought of it then and them and not me, those names, they weren't me they were somebody else, and when somebody else is buried already, it's not me because I am still alive.
But in that space between present and future, it may be that we are joined with those others we refer to as dead, and those others, still, whom we can't yet imagine, whose names can't be tracked and recited, because they are not yet born.
Into me I breathed a part of Shannon, that dust that made me, that made my mother who carried me, dust consisting of her, a piece of Shannon, and it was that particle that she came back for, wanting me, it's owner, to understand, and remember, where I came from.


It's like I lived two separate lives for awhile there, the one during the day with Shannon and the evenings and nighttimes with Jay. I didn't think about it much, Shannon's comings and goings, because it was a thought I couldn't follow far. It was an odd piece of time, wedged in like it was, between what I knew to be orderly, having dinner with Jay and later, going to bed for the night, and getting up again and saying goodbye, and then the time with Shannon: A shim between two kinds of living.
I recall it this way but it might not have been, that time with Shannon, symmetrical and sequential, the way I tell it now. And then, there's all that I have missed already, put away to remember for other times. But that's because she needed it just that way.
At some point there came the day when I realized that the time I was spending with Shannon wasn't about me and it wasn't about Jay. Shannon made me laugh and she helped me understand. But the time of Shannon was about her, finally, about her finding her way home.


Jay ignored me. He ignored the times he walked into the house and I was in the middle of a conversation with Shannon, but from all appearances, I was talking to myself. He ignored the way I was getting things done more quickly, painting and planting, mostly, and postholes for all the fencing. He ignored my apparently before-then hidden abilities to know how to mix concrete in the wheelbarrow and set the posts, nailing the two-by-fours and then the one-by pickets, cut in perfect eight foot curves. He ignored Shannon's insistance on fuschia paint for the trim in the guest room, in the end the perfect contrast for the bright, white wall, ignored my sudden conversion to the color pink.
Jay ignored me and I ignored him. I was too busy and he was too sullen. He didn't want to talk and I was tired of trying to make him.
Ever since he'd called it my "weird shit," I hadn't spoken to Jay of Shannon again. How could I? It would have been one thing if they'd never known each other, if she'd been a complete stranger. But Shannon was imprinted upon Jay. Knowing her helped form him, I could see that plainly, and losing her, also, had left its own mark. Jay didn't want to see her. Jay wanted to forget her. He'd been trying really hard. It seemed to be what was demanded, especially after returning home, that the "whole Shannon thing," as Ted called it, settle into its spot of historical significance and exist there like a dash on a timeline. And that demand, unlike every single other one, was the one Jay chose to adhere to.
I saw through him. But I kept it to myself. After all, it was one of the first things Jay had told me, about Shannon dying and how it helped make him who he was, and I believed it even though Jay had come to appear not to.
And besides. The family demand I had met was bringing Jay back home. The whole Shannon thing was just fine with me. It was my ground to stand on.



Shannon loved to dance. Shannon loved a lot of things. It was either love or hate, nothing in between. She loved dancing and horses, but hated getting her hands dirty. One of her first demands was that I keep a stock of gloves if she was going to help me work.
She loved clothes, all kinds of clothes, and sometimes changed several times a day, choosing from the extensive and elaborate wardrobe that had mysteriously accompanied her arrival. She hated power tools and cars, preferring to saw by hand, for instance, and agreeing to go somewhere in the truck only because it got her there, where she'd talked me into taking her.
Shannon loved Motown but hated to read. She loved the music loud, hated the silence, and even when nothing played she appeared to be listening, anyway, head, feet and shoulders moving to a beat only she could hear.
She loved pink and white and hated green. She loved nail polish, every shade of red, she loved boot cut Wranglers and hated straight legged Levis.
I know these things about Shannon because she made them all very clear, her likes and dislikes. And when she said something, I remembered. Forgetting seemed like a betrayal, somehow. I had lists in my mind of the things Shannon hated and those things she loved. I memorized them like I once had the Catechism: We are to fear and love God so that we do not.
Some things became a problem. Where to keep the clothes was one. My closets and bureaus became so tightly packed in a tangle of hangers and fabrics that I gave up using them for myself, sticking, instead, to a couple of pairs of work clothes I recycled every other day. I was working, anyway, and didn't have any need for dressing up.
But Shannon did. She had bustles and corsets with long fitted dresses she wore over them and small pointed shoes to match. She had red flannel petticoats and others of white linen cutwork. And then she'd change into bellbottoms, striped orange and red with a halter top and love beads. She spent a lot of time in black leather pants with a mysteriously appearing tattoo and silver bracelets. Then, later, it could be a prairie skirt and bonnet, calico faded and soft, her hair faded white blonde. Once she wore a long black dress, cut deep at her chest and tight to the floor, her hair curled short and peroxided, nails fire red, circling a cigarette holder. Another time it was a jumpsuit, silver and NASA looking, complete with a crew cut and nose ring. But most the time she went back and forth between her Wranglers and western shirts and one of her many thirties-style dresses, peach, rose or blue.
That was the real Shannon, the one most like the original. It struck me so often during those times with her, how much she fit that girl-next-door ideal, smart and kind and friendly, and generous, most of all. She'd give the shirt off her back. Course, it wasn't necessarily one of her own. All that had eventually happened to her seemed buried beneath her true spirit, one that should have lived forever. But those first days I couldn't let myself think of any of that, those eventual days of Shannon's. Even though I knew the circumstances exactly, I was forced to concentrate only on the fact that Shannon's existence had quickly become a source of hope for me, and how that had been accomplished was unimportant. She helped fill my days with conversation and laughter and stayed true to her promise to lend a helping hand. Because of Shannon, my world that had shrunk to a mere dot by winter, expanded suddenly, but spring. She was my true-blue ally.


The first day we spent together, Shannon declared she was starving the minute she arrived.
"You got anything to eat?" she asked me.
"Eat?"
"Yeah, I'm hungry," she said.
"Hungry, well, I guess," I admitted. "Just like something regular, as far as food goes?"
"What else?" she screeched.
"Never mind," I muttered.
She followed me into the kitchen. I opened the double cupboard doors and stared. Cans, only cans. I couldn't remember the last time Jay had cooked something. "Just cans," I told her.
"Oh, that would be just fine," she agreed, rubbing her stomach with one hand the way a kid does. "Anything, anything at all. I haven't eaten in ages."
"I'll just bet."
"Now, Meg, don't take advantage of me with jokes like that."
"Right. But you can. Joke, I mean."
"Of course."
"Un hunh, I see this has nothing to do with any rules of any kind."
"And who needs those?" Shannon asked me. "Here, this is good," she said, reaching for a can of shrimp. "Got any olives to go with this?"
"Olives."
"Sure."
"Actually, no, neither of us like them."
"Wait! Here's some, I knew it. I just love shrimp and olives."
They weren't mine, I knew it. I'd never bought them. I started to question but then thought, never mind, why bother. Shannon opened the cans and picked pieces out with her fingers. "Want some?" she offered.
"No thanks," I answered. "Not that hungry, really."
"Well now, Meg," she said abruptly. "What are we going to do with ourselves, me and you. I was thinking," she continued, hoisting herself up on the countertop with her cans, "now you've got a lot of work to do around here, to get everything done. I know that, and what you need is a helper, some kind of help, you can't do this all by yourself."
"Now what I've decided," she continued, "is that I could stay around and do that, be your helper, we could have this whole house worked over and done in no time, and then we'd have time for other things, to do something else, what do you think?"
She smiled wide. There was a bit of olive in her teeth.
"What'd you have in mind?" I inquired.
"Oh, fishing, going to the mountains, I need to check on my horse, THAT'S IT!" she shouted. "God I almost forgot. We could do that right now Meg, go and check on my horse."
I was dizzy. That the horse put me over the edge didn't make sense, but nothing made sense, and the wood floors looked wavy beneath my feet. I was finding it hard to breathe.
"NO, NO!" Shannon shouted. "Don't do it Meg."
I steadied myself on the countertop. "God, Shannon, it's too much, all this, the horse, what horse, WHAT HORSE?"
"Forget it, Meg," she said quickly. "Forget I said it, it's too soon, I'm sorry. Let's just be friends first," she added, and then stopped talking and waited.
It passed, the dizzy spell. I guess I was getting used to it, to her. "I'm fine now," I said.
"Okay."
"Fine. It just comes over me."
"I know."
"Maybe it won't, anymore."
"Maybe."
"Well," I agreed. "I could use some help."
We smiled. "I think so," she said.
"But not too much, too fast," I told her. "Like, you know, the fence and the painting and some of that. It's just all going too fast."
"Okay," she agreed.
"And I don't understand this," I asserted, "this, whatever it is, you being here, and I know you do but I don't, and just let me, okay, get used to things."
"I can."
"And Jay's going to flip, he really is, he thinks you're dead, I mean, you know what I mean, it was really hard on him, you dying, it...you don't know, Shannon, how hard." I felt tears. I clenched my teeth.
"I do know, I do," she replied softly. "We can fix that, make it better."
"If you could do that, Shannon," I said, the tears coming harder now, "if you could do that," I repeated, my teeth together tightly, "I would agree, to this, to you being here, working together, whatever all you said. It's just Jay, it's too much, and it's me, too," and then I started crying so hard I was choking, "I can't take it either, all this, God, what a mess, everybody mad and hurting, I'm going to lose him, Shannon, it's not going to work out I don't think, he can't and I can't, no one could, really." I was sobbing and covered my face with my hands.
Shannon reached for my arm but I pulled away. She let me be. She waited until I was done. It didn't really take that long, this time. I was running out, maybe, of my supply of tears. I whined down to one last sob and stopped.
"Better now?" Calinda.
"Maybe a nice hot bath." Sharon.
"Just a sprain, you didn't break it." Jessica.
"A little something to eat." Calinda.
"I'll fix it," said Shannon. "Something to eat. You go take that long bath. What's definitely needed around here is an extra set of hands."
I nodded. I'd never known weak women.


Obsidian
Laura Davis
Chapter 19



I started repairing the greenhouse. Shannon helped, of course, but relying on her for specific chores never did prove wise. It took me awhile to catch on that she felt no obligation whatsoever to conform to any kind of protocol at all, and, consequently, I was left several times, with no one on the other end of a board or a hammer mysteriously hanging in midair. But we did manage to do a pretty good job on the greenhouse repairs, all the glass replacement and glazing and the building of the counters and the hooking up of the water. Shannon knew a little bit about everything.
We planted a flower garden of perennials and they started to bloom in a sequential order the catalogs had promised. We also worked inside, graduating, finally, to putting some things back together that I had spent the winter tearing apart. And that's how those days passed, for the most part, working together and talking. They were few, those days. The time of Shannon was really not that long. But time and space had been altered, so I can't count them like anything else.
Shannon listened. Hands always busy, knitting mostly, or repairing a saddle or ironing one of her dozens of cotton dresses, she'd listen to what I had to say, what it was that was on my mind that day. And there was always something. Everything I'd once known, just a few months before, was completely gone. Nothing remained. It was beginning to seem as though it had never been, any of my life before. And in its place was a whole set of things, people and situations, of which I knew nothing, and all of which would have existed exactly the same, without me. Everything I'd counted on as part of who I was, mattered nothing in the place I was calling home: My college degree, my summer traveling, my friendships. Even Sarah was gone.
Jay might as well have been. There were times, those days, when I wished he'd just quit coming home, because his presence only reminded me of all we'd lost that we'd once had.
"He'll be all right, Meg," Shannon assured me. I chose to believe her.
I told Shannon all about it, how I didn't know what to do with myself anymore, "if it wasn't for this house," I told her, "what would I do? How could I live here, like this, with nothing to do and nobody around?"
"Maybe coach basketball," she suggested, "for the kids, you know, that's useful."
But I didn't want that, things like that, Calinda kind of suggestions. Do something, even if it's wrong. Find something constructive to do. I wanted out, one day, just out, out, out and away, back to the city, to Portland, downtown for coffee and jazz. I thought back to how it was then, in Portland, when I'd finally gotten old enough to go downtown on my own with my friends on the bus, and how every time we went, it's a small enough city, I guess, we always saw someone we knew, a teacher, a neighbor, friends of our mothers shopping for clothes for their kids. Not us, though, we were grown then, and doing those things for ourselves.
I'd worked for years, volunteered at the Shriners' hospital, a couple of hours a week during the school year, much more during the summer. I'd gone year after year starting when I was about twelve, and continued into high school, up until the year Katie died.
I couldn't take that, her dying. We'd joked the night before, my mother had driven me over, and I'd popped in real quick just to say good luck and see you later, and they never even called me or anything, those Shriners, after all those years I played with the kids and wheeled them all around outside, they didn't call, I just walked in and she wasn't there, in recovery, where all the kids spend a few days after surgery. I went to her room, to her nook in the ward where the girls lived, and everything was gone, all her animals, and I knew, it hit me like lightening, when I saw them, her parents, the mother in a long wool coat much to warm for the season, clutching a paper sack full of things.
My mother told me that not everyone grows up, that some people just get older, and it was irresponsible of them not to call me, but that maybe they forgot, too, I didn't know for sure after all, and I heard her low voice on the phone later that afternoon while I rested, heard her talking to Bev, the daytime supervisor. "Yes, I see," said Calinda, "but that doesn't really answer my question, she's been so committed, has bonded with those children, and I'd expect more finesse on your part, being professionals."
That's Calinda, finesse. And being a nurse herself I was comforted, and felt like she'd righted a wrong, knowing that she herself wouldn't forget someone, a Candy Striper for instance, who'd spent time working for her.
And sitting with Shannon those days, I thought about so many things, it was kind of like they say drowning is, I guess, my life passing before my eyes. But it wasn't something to do that I wanted, it was something I needed to find, to untangle myself from who I'd become expected to be, some kind of wife thing, an in-law, a housekeeper, a carpenter. Not a good one, any of them. My mother's daughter, still, but not the same as before; Calinda owned the goddamn friendly skies. I thought she and Sharon, and Louise sometimes, too, were getting a little carried away. My mother's daugther meant picking up the phone to some overseas operator and then the predictable, "you just wouldn't believe it, Meg," and they'd be off, launched into an endless story about architecture, landscapes or food.
The worst thing to me was that I was no longer anyone's best friend, no one's at all, I didn't have one and seemingly no chance of finding one. I'd never gone without. It was Meg and Cathy, Cathy and Meg, and then Jessica and Tanya, we spread out like fingers on the same hand once we all met up in high school.
"What are you girls up to this weekend?" was my mother's mantra of my adolescence, and it was always something, choir or basketball of course, and summers we picked berries and beans instead of babysitting or working at fast food, just so we could all be together, the four of us, it was never supposed to end.
I told Shannon all about it, it took a long time, it was all pent up inside me, it needed to come out.
"Meg," she said, one time, "meet your own expectations, not Jay's," because she knew it was him that worried me the most, that I was willing to call him my friend, if we could only find a way to do that, to get past the troubles.
"It wasn't right or fair what they did," she told me, "and you're worrying about it too much. You're nobody special, just like a number, almost, nobody's really real. Quit trying so hard and worrying, if it wasn't you it'd be somebody else, they did it to me, too, remember?"
But I'd hoped harder than that, not quite able to accept that they might never change, might stay mean and strange forever, not wanting more. I was still into patching, wondering about hurting that hard, the ways they did, couldn't it just all stop and start over?
"Maybe," said Shannon, "it might. But you just go on, Meg, with the ideas you have for yourself. So it's not the kind of family you thought you'd end up having. Look at me, at my sister. Hannah didn't want it either, ending up alone. And me, myself, I had plans for old age. There's nothing romantic about dying young. You got all of eternity for being dead.
"I wanted those things too, Meg," she continued, "just like you do now deep down inside. It's just finding them, that's where you're stuck. Bringing them up and out."
And she was right, Shannon always was. "But what about Sarah?" I asked her. "What about that?"
"Oh, Sarah," Shannon said, "Sarah's the easy one, so easy to see. Can't you see it Meg? She saw you as a way out of her family and then when you came in, her escape route was done with. It's like you've said yourself, you made a family when there wasn't a real one around. Nothing is wrong with that. Sarah just went too far. She scared herself, even, got attached to you in ways she couldn't follow through on.
"Her family would have rejected her," Shannon said. "She could harbor those feelings for you secretly, but she couldn't possibly reveal them without losing all of them. And sad as that situation is, it's what Sarah knows and will forever cling to."
I shook my head. I detested the sadness. "But I'm mad still," I confessed. "I'm mad at them for all this and it hurts. Because Jay's never coming back at this rate, he's buried in himself. I can't reach him. And I have to, if I'm going to stay here or else I've got to leave and go someplace else.
"It really ticks me off," I added, "that in a way, they get him back, back where he's hurting and scared. They've taken him away from me and he hasn't protested a bit."
"Hmm," said Shannon. "Wait, I'm thinking. There might be something we can do."
"But what?"
"Plan something," she said. And she did.


Obsidian
Laura Davis
Chapter 20



One day she was gone. I waited for her, but she never showed up, and I went to bed that night uneasy and doubting, restless with the worry that I never should have trusted her in the first place; her, whomever she really was. I couldn't get comfortable and finally dragged some blankets with me to another room, one darker and less distracting.
I woke up late and cranky, my first thought of Shannon, and I strained to hear if she was anywhere around. The house was completely silent. I remember the instantaneous lethargy that settled on me, once I realized she was still gone, and the observation also, that I'd come to depend on her so fully. Gone. When she never really existed. Left. When she never really arrived.
It was a quick and intentional decision. And right after I made it, right when I said to myself, forget her, she's gone, she was never anything to begin with, I began to condemn every fiber of my entity that had ever had the foolishness to give her credence in the first place.
Just as instantly, the screen door slammed and she called out, "morning, Meg!" and I jumped up out of my blankets calling back, "Shannon, I'm here, I'm coming, hang on." And I heard in my own voice my eagerness for her, heard plainly in my voice the truth: Shannon was genuine despite the odd circumstance, and my necessity for her was profound.
"What the hell is holding you up? she shouted.
"Nothing, nothing," I yelled back, scrambling.
A cupboard door slammed. "You got that right, God, Meg. Get some groceries around here."
Smoothing down my hair I went into the kitchen. Shannon's clothes were muddy, even the tip of her long braid was dirty.
"Where've you been anyway?" I asked.
"Missed me?" She glanced over her shoulder, still digging for food, and smiled. "Oh, just around. But I'll tell you one thing Meg, things sure never change around here. That one guy I told you about, Doobie? That I dated a couple of times? You know the one," she insisted in response to my shaking head. "That guy with the truck?"
"Oh, sure, that's right," I agreed, still slightly wounded that she'd been gone at all and didn't seem concerned.
"Well, shoot," she continued, "I saw him the other day, works for the city now, water or something, and I'll be danged if he isn't the same cocky sonofabitch he was at seventeen, and he must be, what is it, forty something, now?"
"Guess so," I replied.
"Got three kids and married that chick, what's her name, Meg, the one who had a locker by mine, you know, with the glasses? The smart one!"
"I have absolutely no idea, Shannon, how would I know something like that?" I reached past her for the cereal box.
"True," she admitted, getting the milk out of the refrigerator, "but besides that, I saw him, which is no big deal, just coincidence, he passed me when I was headed out to Arnold's, passed me, flipping me the bird, must have been going almost eighty. They need to get some kind of speed trap on that highway to Haines. Somebody's going to get killed out there."
"But WHATEVER," she continued, "I'm trying to tell you about Arnold, he's missed me, I could tell, I shouldn't have waited so long to visit."
"Who exactly is Arnold, Shannon?"
"My horse!"
"Well you've never told me his name, jeez."
"It's Arnold, God," She shook her head. I smiled at her exasperation. It was just so good to have her home.
"So anyway," she added, "he was so excited, I took him a whole box of apples, probably made him sick, but still, but then the funniest thing happened, I just love doing this, after I fed Arnold and brushed him, I was walking him by the barn and Jamie was standing there, talking to Juniper, his wife you know, and I haven't seen Jamie in years and years, but he's treated Arnold just like he's his, which is nice of him.
"So anyway," Shannon continued, "Jamie is talking to Juniper, she's sitting there on the fence and he's fiddling around with his tractor, and I'm walking Arnold like I said, and then just out of the blue Jamie brings me up, he says, 'sometimes I feel Shannon here, Juniper,' just like that. I mean, I'm standing within hearing distance and they don't even know it, and Juniper says, 'I wish I could have met her Jamie, she must have been real sweet,' and God it was funny, hearing them talk about me."
"That's kind of weird, you doing that Shannon, listening in that way." All of a sudden I was nervous, wondering if she did that to me. Or to Jay and me!
"I don't," she answered.
"Don't what?"
"You know, bug you guys. You and Jay," she added, reading my mind. "I mean, when you're together," she added, grinning.
"Except!" And she shoved her hand into a pocket of her jeans, rummaging around, and pulled out something and laid it on the table between us. It was Jay's nail set.
"He's been looking everywhere for this," I exclaimed. "Just couldn't figure out what happened to it. He always keeps it in his nail bag."
"Yeah, well, when he wasn't looking I snatched it."
"Oh, Shannon. It was driving him crazy."
"Well, that's what I was trying to do, loosen him up a little."
"You're probably helping him go crazy instead."
"Hey, give me some credit." She pulled off a boot and I realized it wasn't mud but horse stuff. "Could you ever wipe your feet?" I suggested.
"Yes to that question and no to your other one. I am not helping Jay go crazy. Why'd you say that?"
"I didn't mean it bad, Shannon."
"Well good. Because he could have slipped off the roof the other day but I changed things a little."
"What?"
"Just tipped things so he caught his balance."
"You mean he was about to fall?"
"Absolutely. To his death probably. Two stories, face down, smash, it could have been over."
"I can't believe it! Almost fell? That's awful. What would I have done then?"
"Calm down, Meg. He didn't, so don't worry about it."
"But I am. I thought he was really careful up there."
"He usually is, I'm sure. Just had an off day."
"Oh, God." I leaned back in my chair, my heart pounding, visions of widowhood flashing through my head.
"Don't be dramatic, Meg," Shannon insisted.
"Don't be dramatic? Will you cut it out? Quit reading my head, Shannon, just quit it. Jay could have fallen. I don't think you understand how awful that is."
"I heard you the first time and it's true. But he didn't fall, I saved him!" She grinned, smugly.
"This is getting out of hand," I declared. "He probably wasn't going to fall at all, you just did it so you could save him and you read my mind so what's the point in me bothering with talking? I'll just sit here silently and you do all the talking."
"Oh, so what! So what." Shannon shook her head, annoyed. "Even if I cooked the whole think up, I have to get his attention somehow don't I? I don't like being ignored. And as for the other, it's best if you keep talking because mind reading takes up a lot of my energy."
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah. And I'd rather save it for other things."
"Like tipping buildings?"
"Right. You got it."
"Great. Hey, who am I to tell you what to do?"
"Are we testy this morning Meg?" Shannon's second boot thumped to the floor creating a cloud of dusty manure.
"Yeah, actually," I declared, surprising both of us with my intensity. "Actually I really am. I couldn't sleep last night, ended up on the floor, worrying about where you've been, if you were ever coming back, thinking I'm nuts and then poof, you're back, slamming the door, tramping mud everywhere like always, stealing stuff, yeah, I'm a little bit upset I guess."
"No shit, Seymour."
"And aren't you cheery yourself, hunh?"
"Sorry!"
"No problem. I've got work to do anyway. Some of us have to you know, work. I'm going to get dressed." I pounded upstairs, not mad really, just frustrated. My jeans were stiff on the floor from too many days in a row. I pulled them on anyway, figuring that unlike Shannon, I had no time for playing dress up. I shoved my hands into my hip pockets. "Goddamn," I sighed, "ow." My pockets were full of sheetrock nails, the sharpest kind. It was one insult too many.
"I'm going downstairs," I yelled to Shannon. "I've got to figure out the hot water heater."
"Okay," she sang back. "I'll just find something constructive to do up here."
"Easy for you to say," I muttered.
Downstairs I pulled up a stool and began the process of deductive reasoning, which I'd never been too fond of, to try and determine whether the hot water heater was broken or simply not working. I was still agitated with Shannon's abrupt comings and goings and it got me to thinking about how I was kind of starting to be like her, one extreme to the other. One day I'd wake up my usual self, optimistic and eager, loving Jay and our lives together, our house, and even the surrounding country that first seemed so desolate, was starting to hook me. I'd wake up ready to take charge, like Calinda would say, rolling up sleeves for whatever project was on her list that day.
But the contentedness was often shattered when I stopped for a minute to think, and on the top of my list was my still daily struggle with my status as something-in-law. I couldn't accept my failure. One day I'd think, well, this is how it's got to be, it's how it is, being married, and I'd blame myself, my sheltered childhood and always being the center of attention, figuring like Gloria and Ted insisted, that I just needed to learn how to get along better with others.
I thought back to all my grade school report cards, and my consistent failure in that area. Always, in the comment section, one or another teacher would write something like, "Meg needs to remember that she is not the teacher in this classroom."
But on other days, or often the same one, I would choose to believe that something was wrong with the whole picture, this family of Jay's and their demands, and Jay's stance that I blow if off like he did. But either way I looked at it, there was no spot for me, no place I seemed to fit. All those seemed to be already taken. Even Jay, with his invisibility, still had that status, but being the wife of someone invisible was actually nothing at all.
Three of Jay's four older brothers had married before him. Two of them, Danny and Bill, were married to sisters, Mootie and Barge. Shirley was married to Sam. These three women were all around the same age, a decade or so above me, and all were loud and big and bossy. They scared me to death.
Shirley's name was real, but Mootie and Barge were nicknames. I hardly remember being told their actual names and no one ever used them, but the origin of Barge's nickname was relayed often. Apparently, one young child in the family had noted her resemblance to a barge, and unanimous agreement with the child's precocious observation caused the name to stick.
I chose to call them, at first, the Storm Troopers. It really seemed to fit. But only in my mind did I think this, it wasn't something I said aloud, even to Jay. It gave me a tiny sense of satisfaction, even though it was mean.
I didn't expect them to show up at my house. No one had, since Christmas. Nor had anyone called. So it was really weird that morning when I was in the basement where I'd been for almost an hour, making no progress on the hot water heater. I heard voices and footsteps, someone calling my name.
"Meg, we know you're here," someone shouted.
"Here!" I yelled, not having any idea who was calling me. "I'm here, I'll come up." I took the cellar steps at the forty five degree angle necessary to not smack my head and came face to face with the Storm Troopers.
"Long time no see," said one.
"Hey, what are you guys up to," I offered lamely, wondering what they wanted.
"Hay is for horses," said Barge, and they all laughed.
"I'm surprised you even know who were are," said Mootie, "considering how you've disappeared lately."
"Well," I admitted, feeling trapped on the stairs. The troopers didn't appear to be budging. "Been busy, I guess, so what's up, anyway? Why don't you guys come on inside and see the house while you're here." I wanted to get off the stairs.
"Whatever," said Mootie. "Didn't appear as though you were ever going to invite us so we invited ourselves, didn't we girls?"
"Sure thing," said Barge.
I squeezed past them on the porch and they followed me to the door. I went inside and held it for them. They came in one by one, lumbering, working my floors hard and shedding coats and scarves as they passed. Single file, they headed for my couches, narrowly missing Shannon who was sitting, as usual, on top of the piano. She rolled her eyes and shook her head. "What a circus," she said.
"Shh," I told her.
"What?" said Barge.
"Nothing," I answered. They looked at each other for a minute then Shirley said, "so, Meg. Did you think you were going to get away with not having anything to do with us?"
"No doubt she did," answered Mootie.
"She doesn't seem to think she's a part of this family after all," added Barge. "Do you Meg?"
"Just a minute," interrupted Shirley. She turned to me. "Meg, it's for your own good that we're here. It's kind of like swimming, after all, when you join this family. The best thing to do is jump on in. With your clothes on."
Mootie shrieked. "Which Meg probably hasn't done much of lately since she's met Jay."
I blushed. Shannon snapped her gum hard. I gave her a dirty look.
"So, what are you planning on doing now, anyway," Barge asked me. "Just hanging out here in the wilderness forever? Isn't that kind of a drag - you being so used to all that city culture and everything?"
"Yeah, how are you going to make it over here, Meg?" asked Mootie. "Are you and Jay on some kind of a mission to change this town or what? Clean it up or whatever Jay was doing down there in Mexico?"
"Well, not exactly," I started to say.
Barge interrupted. "You're really not at all like Jay's other little friends, is she? Look at her," she demanded to the others, "does she look like Jay's type to you?"
"Can't see it," her sister Mootie replied, "but then, Jay's a tough one to get a hold on."
"Yeah, what about Jay?" asked Barge. "Word has it you've got him brainwashed over here, taking him away from his own family."
Shannon slid off the piano and came to stand beside me. I hunched my shoulders, hoping she'd leave me alone. She moved closer, breathing hard. I felt her hot breath on the side of my face.
"I'm just working on the house, mostly," I answered, hoping things wouldn't start getting out of control. They did.
"Jay's always been stuck up, Meg," said Shirley. Her voice was more contained and less silly than the sisters. She spoke slowly and deliberately. "Always thought he was too good for anybody else, this town, the family. And now he's doing it again, acting like he's better.
"What's his point, Meg," she continued, "can you explain it? And what have you done, are you doing, to contribute to that? Do you think this is some kind of a game here? Gloria's nearly beside herself. You must know her heart is weak. She can't take a lot of trouble."
I couldn't look at her any longer, I fixed my gaze on the floor. Shannon kept breathing hard, almost panting. Everyone seemed to be waiting for Shirley to continue. She did.
"I'm here to tell you," she said, "and Same knows I’m here and he thinks it's right, that if you and Jay aren't interested in being a part of this family, then it's best for you to just leave. You'll kill Gloria, living here, never coming around. Nobody particularly likes Jay, never has, he seems to want it that way. Whatever.
"But he's Gloria's kid too," she added, and I felt her energy getting more assertive, "and we know to accept him the way he is for her sake. It's the way it's got to be. And I think the sooner you understand that, the better, and convince Jay of it too."
She hoisted herself off the couch. I took a step backwards, bumping hard into Shannon. Shirley narrowed her eyes and shook her head.
"Don't go making trouble, Meg. Ask Jay. Ask him to tell you the truth. What the hell he's doing here, anyway. And it ain't the good country living or whatever shit he's told you. Jay's here to pick up where he left off, causing trouble for everybody."
The atmosphere in the room was caustic, I thought I heard it crackle with tension, but it was only Shannon. I hadn't felt her leave, but noticed her return because of her change of clothes: Cowboy hat, boots, and her trademark Wranglers, leather gloves and a lasso in one hand. The rope snaked around her feet. Under the pulled down hat I saw a deliberate wink and then the loop of the rope began to swing.
"Aren't you interested in this conversation?" Barge demanded.
"Apparently not," Mootie answered for me. "Because we have much better things to do than sit around all day staring at your walls."
"I'm sorry," I offered, but already ashamed of myself for acquiescing, "it's just that everything has happened so fast, I don't know what to do."
"Well, you're the one who made that mistake," Barge proclaimed. "You're the one that decided to hurry up and get married without giving it some time. Don't blame us for your problems."
"I'm not," I began.
"Exactly," agreed Mootie. "What else did you think would happen Meg? Did you think you could get away with forcing everybody out, try and pretend this family doesn't exist?"
"But it's not like that," I said. Shannon snapped the rope.
"Well, WHAT then?" shouted Barge.
My floor lamp in the entryway crashed to the floor. I jumped. Shannon's rope was cinched tight around it.
"What the hell was that?" Mootie yelled. "You got ghosts or what? Jesus this place is weird."
"I don't know," I answered, trying to appear as unnerved as possible. I walked over the picked up the lamp, slipping the rope off. I stood it back up.
"This is fucking weird," agreed Barge. "I'm out of here."
"Wait just a second," Shirley hissed. She'd been quiet, watching, back to sitting rigidly on the couch. "I'm going to finish what I came for," she added.
Barge and Mootie looked down. Shannon, her rope free, started swinging it again. I rubbed my hand across my eyes. I could feel a perfect headache starting.
Shirley straightened up, pulling one of my throw pillows out from underneath her. She tossed it on the floor, grimacing like it was tainted.
"You will be forced to leave. We will do whatever it takes."
I stared. Barge smiled.
"You heard me," Shirley said. Her eyes drilled into mine. I blushed again and felt my stomach collapse.
"You heard me," she repeated. "And so did they." She pushed herself off the couch again. Shannon elbowed her way past me, rope swinging, bounding to her place on top of the piano. I thought I saw Shirley's eyes follow her, but they couldn't have, they never left my face. She stared at me. Shannon stood up on top of the piano.
"Oh my God," I thought, "please Shannon, don't."
"We're leaving now," said Shirley. "We're leaving and then we're going back to see Gloria and Ted and we are going to tell them that we have all reached an understanding, and that you will be convincing Jay that there are certain responsibilities in this family, none of which he isn't aware of, and that the both of you will be adhering to them. You will show up when you're invited and get along, and keep all your opinions to yourself.
"And if you have trouble understanding that," she added, "just let Jay know that Sam will back me up. This has all been discussed thoroughly. And Ray and Danny agree, and so does Bill, that this kind of behavior will not continue. Got that?"
Shirley reached over and grabbed her huge purse off the piano stool. Shannon spit. It landed an inch from Shirley's hand. Barge and Mootie hurried to gather their bags and coats. They headed for the door in the same single file they'd arrived, Shirley leading the way.
At the door Mootie turned and said, "don't sweat it, Meg, it's really not as bad as it seems."
"Not at all," agreed Barge, turning from her descent down the front stairs. "Everybody's had to go through the initiation process. You're nobody special."
I held the screen door from slamming behind Barge. She copied her sister's lopsided negotiation of the stairs, taking them sideways instead of straight on. I couldn't take my eyes off of them as they followed the sidewalk to the street, hauling themselves up beside Shirley in a big pickup. Shirley punched the gas and the engine roared.
Dazed, I trailed behind them, down the stairs and partway down the sidewalk. I kept waiting, I guess, for one of them to call to me that it was all a joke, an initiation as they called it, a test. I braced myself so that if they did I'd be ready to claim I knew it all along, that they were really kidding, that Jay and I had not been the topic of some big family discussion, that our lives had not been dissected and analyzed and called to shame. I was braced, but Shirley only slammed the truck into reverse and backed out into the street.
And then I heard a howl, an ear shattering howl fill the air. The truck lurched to a halt and the three women in it crashed towards the windshield in unison. Simultaneously they turned to stare at me and my house, searching for the source of the sound. Their mouths hung open. They looked like triplets, identical bloated faces and squinty eyes with large round Os for mouths.
The howl began again, starting low and rising with a crescendo into a whine. I put my hands over my ears and ran to the middle of my yard, looking up to where the sound originated. Standing there on the peak of the roof stood Shannon, her skinny legs spread wide, her boots anchored to the slope of the roof. Her head was thrown back, arms straight out and palms facing upward.
And then out of her mouth came the howl, shorter this time, followed by a series of sharp yelps. Then she looked down and saw me staring up at her with the same open-mouthed dumbness I'd just witnessed on the faces of my in-laws. And even though I was standing just a few feet beneath her, she cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted to me, "let the good times roll, Meggie," she hollered. "Let's let the good times roll."
And then she started clogging, right there on the top of my roof, fingers snapping and concentrating hard. I heard truck tires squeal behind me, the truck roaring down the road. But I was too tired to look, to acknowledge their departure with some kind of goodbye. Like always, Shannon commanded my entire gaze.

Obsidian
Laura Davis
Chapter 21



It was on a Tuesday Jay quit speaking.
Gloria sent a letter. Sent it through the postal service even though we were two houses away.
"My dear Jay," she wrote. "It seems like only yesterday I gave you birth, my long awaited fifth son. I will never forget the moment I first saw you. It was love at first sight. Now you are gone away from me even though you are really near. My heart is crying. I would give up everything I own to have you back. I am not perfect. I have made mistakes. I have said I am sorry about Shannon but you left anyway. I am sorry about Meg but you left anyway. Whenever you want to come home please know I love you. The past is the past Jay. Maybe you need to forgive and forget and go on with your life. Your loving, Mother."

Jay wouldn't talk. Not even a hello coming through the door after work. "Hi babe," I said. Nothing.
Jay wouldn't talk and at some point he started ticking me off.
"What's your problem?" I shouted. Nothing.
By Friday morning I was sick of it. "This test of yours Jay. It isn't working. Whatever you're trying to prove I don't know."
Nothing.
And then, I guess, I tried to hurt him. I think I purposly tried to hurt him.
"Is it Shannon?" I asked, desperate. I couldn't believe it but I said, "is that what's making you mad, that I've seen Shannon and you haven't?" The words came out of my mouth before I had formed the sentence in my mind.
Jay gave me a quick, hard look.
"Oh, so you can hear," I yelled. "But you just can't talk, is that it?"
Jay put his head in his hands. In a split second he was crying so hard his body shuddered. And then just as quickly he started gasping for air like he was choking.
"Oh my God, Jay." I rushed to him, pulling his head from his hands. His face was contorted, tears streaming, his body rigid.
"Jay, God, are you sick, what's the matter?"
He shook his head violently, jerking out of my reach.
"You need to see a doctor."
He groaned, shaking his head harder, his jaws clamped tight.
I leaned over and put my arms around him. "Tell me," I pleaded, "tell me what's wrong."
He shook his head but continued struggling against my hold.
"Jay," I whispered, "what is it, what's wrong? Don't you want to tell me, talk about it?"
He nodded. I noticed his forehead was thick with sweat.
"You do?" I asked. "You do want to talk?"
He nodded again and wiped his face with his hand.
I squatted down next to his chair. "Why don't you, then," I asked.
He shrugged.
"Do you mean you want to but you can't?" I asked, wondering how that could be possible.
He nodded.
"Oh, God. Is this true, you can't?"
Jay covered his face with his hands again.
"Don't do that, please. Look at me, will you?" I gently pulled his hands from his face. "Look at me, please?"
Jay glanced at me and then quickly looked away. He shook his head.
I was terrified. I believed something horrible had happened. I imagined heart attacks, strokes. As I held Jay I kept changing my mind that he should see a doctor, but each time I moved at all, he clutched at me, shaking his head like he didn't want me to leave.
I held him for a long time. He cried and was sweaty and clenched his hands in his lap. I rubbed his shoulders and smoothed the hair away from his eyes. When he had been settled for awhile I laid my head in his lap feeling the strong curve of his thigh against my cheek. I felt a couple of cold tears on my neck, mine or Jay's, I couldn't tell.


"Meg," Jay whispered. I jerked awake.
"Jay."
"I'm sorry."
I started to lift my head to look at him.
"No," he said softly.
"Please."
"I'm okay, okay. Just let me sit a minute."
"Oh, God."
"It's okay," he whispered again. "I'm past it now. I'll be fine, just a second I'll be fine."
"I was so worried."
I felt him nod.
"I'd forgotten," he said after a pause, "about this. About this from before. I was young, very young. And now and then I wouldn't be able to talk." Jay took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He put his hand on my back and rubbed. I could feel his heart beat through his hand.
"I was so worried about you."
Jay moved his hand to my hair. "Not until I was five," he continued. "I never spoke once before five. And then it happened later, too, I couldn't. My dad used to make me stay in my room until I'd say something. I got hungry and had to go to the bathroom but I couldn't figure out how to talk. It's like I forgot, lost my ability." Jay's voice broke and I heard crying again.
"Don't babe," I pleaded. I raised my head and looked at him. He looked tired, old even, eyes black and pale skin beneath the brownness.
"Jay," I cried, "this is too much for us, just too much. We've got to stop, slow down, something bad could happen.
"I could lose you," I sobbed, "and I don't want to lose you."
"That won't happen Meg," Jay said solidly. "There's no way I'm going to let that happen." And he was crying again, too. We sat that way, crying. We sat that way until somebody decided we could find our bed. We slept.


Either way, alone or together, we were a basket case. The first thing I did that next morning was to vow I'd never think about Shannon again, and I figured if I kept that promise I wouldn't see her, either. I got up that morning determined that Jay and I were going to get things resolved, working for us, before something serious happened.
We were emotionally spent that morning and for the two or three that followed. Jay seemed ashamed and I worried about him following that path, believing it would lock him in the grip of silence once again. I was nervous and couldn't work. The noise would have been too much to endure. We were jittery enough.
On the third day Jay spent some time fixing his truck and I thought that should be okay, doing something regular and normal. I didn't think sitting around was getting us anywhere, even though once he went outside it's about all I could do. Then the next morning seemed fine, hot summer sun already before eight, and so much light that nothing could possibly be as bad as it seemed.
But then that fourth morning Jay startled me, coming through the side door, letting the screen door slam hard.
"Why's her bike here?"
My stomach lurched. "What are you talking about?"
"Her bike," he repeated, his voice deep and oddly sinister sounding. "Shannon's bike, what's it doing here?"
"I don't know anything about it." It startled me, hearing Jay say her name.
He stood in the doorway staring at me. I stared back at him. Then he sighed and his shoulders sagged, and he rubbed the back of his neck hard, then his face, he ran his fingers through his hair, long now, without working at the school.
"So how is she," he asked, softly.
I waited a minute, anxious. I took a couple of deep breaths. "I think she's pretty good, Jay."
Then he shouted, "so what does she do on the bike? Ride it? Are you trying to tell me she's riding around town on her bike? Right. No way. Explain this to me, Meg. That rim's been bent for fifteen years now."
He looked at me hard. "It's impossible to ride, that way, with the rim all bent like that. Tell me Meg. How does she do that?"
"I don't know."
"You don't? Why not?" he shouted again, and then he lunged towards me and grabbed me by the shoulder and shook me and I gasped.
"I'll tell you what, Meg, ask her this for me, will you? Ask her why now? What am I supposed to do now? There wasn't anything I could do before and there's less I can do now."
"Jay."
And there she was.
"Oh, God."
"Shannon."
"But I promised," she whispered, "that's all, I just promised. We both did. If anything ever happened, to never forget."
"Promised," Jay repeated.
"So I kept it," she said, "like I always said I would."
"But Shannon," Jay pleaded, "the shirt and that night. I tried to know, I really, really did."
"The shirt Jay, the shirt. It is not the shirt. That night. Jay you loved me! That's all. There's nothing more than that."
"Oh, God," he said again. "Oh Jesus, it's wrong. You died, Shannon. How could you do that, die? How could you die like that? It was over, you were gone. I never even told you goodbye."
"So tell me hello, then, instead Jay," she said and walked towards him and gathered him up.
And I saw him, jeans stiff and all that pale skin where the summer hair had grown, and Shannon, too, able to gauge that sixth grader's crush and how she honored it.
I slipped past them, unnoticed.



Jay left. Shannon told me he had gone.
He told me later that he went first to Sparta and then to Cornucopia and a couple of days later, the opposite direction, to Auburn. He was only there, in Auburn, a couple of hours, and then he left and went to Huntington but didn't cross the bridge, but went back a ways, instead, and drove across to Virtue where he camped again, for another day or two.
After Virtue he drove to Joseph and there he paused, and when he left Joseph he drove to the Snake river where the catfish are, and there he stayed the longest, another couple of weeks, before he returned home again, to Baker, and came back, again, to me.


Obsidian
Laura Davis
Chapter 22



"Oh, Meg." Her hair had come loose from her barrettes and her bangs hung in her eyes. And when she sat that way, with her hair hanging, I remembered all of a sudden, my dream of her, the dream I'd had of her dying, and what she'd said to me in the dream, that she didn't do it, he'd made her, Greg, "he told me how to use it," she'd said.
And then I knew without having to hear her say it again, how things had gone, how Shannon hadn't wanted to die either, no more than anybody had wanted her to, and she was just as sad about leaving, herself.
We sat there for awhile without talking, just sharing the things we were thinking, the story wasn't very long or complicated at all, it was simple, really, how it all went down. Shannon had just met up with somebody bad, someone who didn't care at all about who she was, she wasn't even real to him, just a body. Shannon was only a girl who did his errands, ran his cocaine from Portland to eastern Oregon, to the rural towns, cut down hard but he turned a good profit anyway. Nobody knew the difference.


It had been a long summer, God, it was hot that year, and I don't know, I'd met Greg a few years before at a party in Baker. He was a lot older than me, at least then, when I was still in high school. He must have been, let's see, probably thirty then, twelve years older I guess, because when I married him I was twenty six and he was thirty eight. Tall guy, dark, like Jay that way, dark, and I'd met him again in Payette when I was over there with a girlfriend, she had wanted to buy some pot.
And it has to do with Jay, it does, not any kind of blaming or anything like that, but that summer was so long and hot, and we'd been gone, me and Jay, nearly the whole time, just coming in for supplies, and heading back right again, to the mountains.
And I loved Jay, I could never say I didn't, I loved him a lot, but maybe I already knew how things were going to change, or something, I don't know, but that summer I laid the blame on me being too much older than he was, not really taking advantage or anything like that, because Jay and I had grown up together, so it wasn't like we didn't already know each other really well.
It was more like I was getting too old to be hanging out with a high school kid, college I guess, but still, Jay was so excited to be going to school, it was written all over him, and I wanted him to go so bad, to get away, it was only getting worse and worse.
I'd been gone so much from home, living in Portland for awhile, Ontario, Boise, wherever some fun was. I don't know how I got to be that way, just could never settle down, find something to do with myself. But when you're young like that, I couldn't wait to get out of Baker, God. And getting out, finally, was the thrill, I just couldn't put it away, stop running around, find a place to live and a real job or whatever. Where? No small town I knew that. But the cities were so lonely too.
And that's where I was at, that summer with Jay. I knew it was different for him, a little, and that's the thing that kind of made me feel bad, was that I'd met him when he was just a kid, and he never really got the chance to see me for who I really was, just instead, this girl he'd had a crush on his whole life. Couldn't see straight. But Jay was no dummy and he knew getting out and away was the only route to take, or else he'd end up like so many did, logging, the Forest Service, something shit like that, that wasn't for Jay.
Then after he left it hit me harder than I thought it would, because there was almost no autumn at all, it just turned cold right after summer, one extreme to the next, and it affected me the same way, I could feel it inside me, and I started back up with my friend Nancy, she was tending bar out someplace by the freeway, never a good friend, really, always fucked up, four kids and we weren't thirty yet. But she had weed all the time and I decided that's what I needed, I guess, and we smoked a month straight, practically, and then she needed to go to Payette to get more and that's where I met him, Greg, he's the one who sold it to us.
Shit. He put a pile of cocaine on the table that looked like a sack of flour, just sweet as can be, full of compliments, kept staring into my eyes, no shit, I know it's a cliché, but Greg knew what he was doing. He'd done it a hundred times before. Had a great stereo, kept it cranked, we went on for five days straight. Nancy forgot all about her kids, got really messy as a matter of fact.
There were people in and out of Greg's house night and day, dozens of them, and Nancy so stoned and such a mess, totally fucked up, she slept with a bunch of guys, but me and Greg, we waited, see, that was the big romance of the whole thing, we waited two days before we did it, and I never got messed up like Nancy did, just kept a kind of steady high.
But anyway, we finally did, sleep together, and Greg was great, too, got to say that. But he knew the route well, how to keep it smooth and sweet, knew girls like me who had no place else to go would do just about anything to call someplace home.
And then it all just happened like they say, a rolling train. Only took a couple of months of living with Greg and he had us married, said it would look better that way for business. I knew, down deep, that it was all a bunch of bullshit, I knew it wasn't good. But I never thought for a minute it would get as bad as it did, that I'd lose so much so fast. I had no idea I had that small amount left in me, that I was closer to the quick than I realized. I thought I had more in storage.
He only hit me a couple of times, no big deal. Nothing dramatic. It was the little things that wore me down. Jesus, all the other women, just busloads, I swear, and I got so sick of walking in on him with some kid, they were always so young, it was the combination that got to me, wrung me out. That's exactly what I felt like, wrung out.
That winter. I could have told Jay more, I guess. Could have asked for help. But I couldn't admit how bad I was, I was doing coke all day and other junk at night and I was so ashamed and I meant to tell him, that's why I called him, but then when I saw him I knew I couldn't do it, tell him, he needed to live a life, after all.
Greg called me. Everybody knows that. But I didn't mean to do it the way I did. Didn't want to at all. But after Jay left I got to drinking really fast and hard. I wanted to get it over with, all the pain, wanted to pass out as soon as possible so I could get some sleep. Really, I was thinking I'd go to Eugene the next day, surprise Jay. I thought I'd go to school too, or just hang around or whatever.
I'd drank half a bottle, I was already feeling so bad when I started, and it just put me into this mood, really, really low, and then Greg called and it only took a few minutes, listening to him, he was off that night, told me he'd kill me this time, but the worst thing was when he started in on Jay, about my preppy boyfriend, something like that, it doesn't matter, now, what exactly he said.
It was kind of like a dare. That's the way I heard it. He said, why don't you just shoot yourself, get it over with, quit messing up people's lives, and when he said it, it made sense to me that minute, even though it's hard to believe that's true, but when he said that it was like the only true thing I'd heard in years and years, that I was worth nothing, really, just fucking around, everybody was gone and there I was with no place to call home or family anymore, everybody was sick of me, and I was sick, most of all, of my own self.

I regretted it later, dying. Right away I knew I'd done something wrong. While I was leaving, I was sorry.

I couldn't figure out for the longest time, how to make it right. I just stayed sorry and regretful. And then one day I thought how I was still staying the same, one circumstance after another was controlling me, and I was never going to amount to anything that way, and that's when I decided to try again, to pick up some of the pieces, the ones I have left, anyway.

It's not so bad, now. It's getting better everyday. Pretty soon I'll be able to leave again for good. I want to. I'm tired. But until I make that right I can't quit.



Obsidian
Laura Davis
Chapter 23



There wasn't anything I could say. It wasn't quiet in the room between us; Shannon's regret and sorrow filled the space like banging on metal, so jarring I wanted to put my hands over my ears, shut it all out. "Take it back," I thought, "all of it, this story. It's too much, too hard."
Shannon sat, swinging her booted foot, distracted. I couldn't look straight at her, it hurt, her sadness, but sideways I thought I saw her pale a bit, or dim, the swinging foot leaving traces in the air behind it, the way a sparkler does, on the Fourth of July. I got mesmerized by that foot, couldn't stop staring, and I felt myself slipping for a moment there, feeling lots of reasons to stay with the rhythm, where it seemed to be able to lead me, someplace warmer, soft.
"Remember that time Meg," Shannon said, interrupting my musing, "remember when you were six or so, when Andrew was still alive, and you caught that snake up there fishing, remember that, Meg?"
I nodded, pulling my eyes away from her foot, glancing at her briefly. She smiled at me. She looked like Calinda, a little, I'd never noticed that before.
"Yeah, the snake," I said. I smiled myself, remembering. "I just snatched in up from the rock right at the head, not scared or anything, was I?"
Shannon shook her head. "It was just a teeny little rattler, that's why. That's why you didn't get hurt. You must have caught it by surprise."
"My dad was just so calm," I added. "He said, 'well, what's that you got there Meggie?' and me grinning up a storm, so proud to be showing him something, and then he said, 'now you just hold on there a second, I'm going to tell you something, what to do,' and he came behind me and put on arm around my waist and held me tight and took a hold of my arm with his hand. I'll never forget how he held my arm, so strong, and then he said, 'now, Megan, you're going to have to do exactly what I say, are you listening?' And I nodded real hard up and down, realizing, I remember, that Andrew's voice was a little different than usual, kind of firm, and it scared me, I think, hearing his voice that way, or else it was that I could feel him being scared.
"And then he said he'd count to three and we were going to pretend we were throwing a Frisbee and when we did we were to let go of the snake and that it wouldn't hurt at all, but if we didn't let go right away, that it might hurt us."
"Uno, dos, tres," added Shannon. "He was teaching you Spanish too."
"Oh, Shannon. I'd forgotten about that."
"Funny girl you were," Shannon said, "high spirited. I was too, you know, I did a lot of things, Meg, you just don't know." Her voice had risen and I glanced again at her, her face had changed, her eyes were hard with thinking.
"What Shannon?"
She started swinging her foot faster and then I saw her hands were clenched into fists. Her body tightened up, hunched over and I saw her close her eyes and some kind of pain flash across her face.
"Shannon, please tell me. What is it?"
"Oh," she moaned, rocking her body. "It hurts Meg, my head hurts, it won't stop hurting. Oh, God, what am I going to do, I can't believe he did it, why'd he do it? Meg? Meg, why'd he do it?"
"I'm right here, Shannon, do what?" I couldn't touch her, her pain was like a shield around her. I didn't even know if she could hear me, her moaning was so loud. And then she cried out, "I can see it Meg, I can almost see it, it's clearer now, look. It wasn't a snake, Meg, it was a gun, wasn't it, that he had in his hand. Does it look like a gun, Meg? It wasn't mine after all, was it?"
My heart pounded. I wanted to give her the right answer. I was sweating and scared. Her moaning turned into crying, coming from some place deep down, she wrapped her arms around herself and then she shouted, "I know it, I know you, he called me, Meg, he did, he called me, that's true. But I can see it now. I can see it. Greg? Greg, is that you? I can see you. I know you're there."
"He called me, Meg," she shouted louder, "he called me, it was collect, he said he was someplace, where did he say he was? But it was someplace between Baker and Ontario. Someplace wherever he said.
"But it wasn't!" she screamed. "He wasn't gone at all, he was right there, downstairs, and I kept talking to him on the phone like he was really far away and I admitted to loving Jay, I told him to stay gone. I said I wanted out, I had all this courage because he wasn't there, but he just walked right in, he must have been downstairs in the lobby.
"Oh my God, Meg," Shannon cried, "why didn't anybody ever check? The number? Didn't they check the number Meg?"
All her tears were running down her face, the front of her dress was soaked, and I couldn't move, my body wouldn't move, I don't think I was breathing, even. And then she shuddered really hard and put her hands on her face and then I saw the rings, on every single finger, all her rings silver and turquoise, flashing, it seemed like dozens of rings on all her fingers.
When she took her hands away her face had settled, tearless now, and she whispered, "right downstairs, such a setup. And he walked right in. I'd been drinking, on the phone, oh, I was drunk." She spit it out, hissing, "and that's why it was so easy," she added, her voice heavy with sarcasm. "I tried standing up. He said, 'well, well, well,' and I tried standing up, halfway up, and he hit me so hard I slammed into the TV. and I felt it break behind me, the table it was sitting on, and I remember worrying about that, it breaking.
"Don't touch me!" Shannon screamed, her face stuck out, fists clenched.
"And then he walked over and kicked me, he kicked me in the stomach, all I could see was his boot coming, it just went right through me, it felt like, being kicked that hard, and I saw it, Meg, the gun.
Shannon stood up, screaming, "move, Meg, he's got a gun, see it? It's right there, look out!"
Greg smiled. It was an awful kind of smile. I couldn't speak. He held it loosely in his hand, almost dangling, his eyes weren't real, just glass, nothing in them that was living. Shannon lay sprawled on the floor, bleeding, I could see the blood seeping through her dress where he shoulder had hit the t.v.
"You're fucking with me," Greg said, low. His voice was grinding. "Nobody fucks with me. Here, bitch, use this, put yourself out of your misery." The gun skidded across the floor.
"Pick it up," he demanded, snarling, "pick it up Shannon. C'mon, shoot me. That's what you want to do, you know it, do it."
Shannon started crying. "No I don't Greg. I don't want to do that."
"Pick it up, goddamn it," he screamed. "Pick it up or else I'll do it for you. Pick it up, pick it up!" He leaped across the room and kicked her again in her knee.
"Don't, don't," pleading.
"So pick it up."
"I don't want to, please Greg," begging, eyes huge and black, and then he kicked her again, right in the face, and she was bleeding everywhere, all over, and crying, she moaned and Greg started laughing.
"You're stupid, you know that?" he told her. "So fucking stupid.
"Shannon, Shannon," he sang, mocking, and then he screamed again and his profile looked deformed, twisted, a scream like he was being tortured, "sleep with anything that moves, look at you now, ugly isn't it? Look at yourself, Shannon, get up. Get up! Look what you are now, just a piece of shit, well, fine, then," and he bent down for the gun, but Shannon grabbed it first, and then it went off, just that fast, it exploded and there was smoke, I couldn't see and I was reeling, dizzy and then I thought he'd see me, that'd he get me too, and just as I thought that, everything went black.


"Meg," Shannon whispered. "Meg, wake up."
"What? Leave me alone, go away."
"Meg," she insisted, "it's over, he's gone. Wake up."
"Leave me alone, Shannon, please. I'm tired, I want to sleep."
"You have already, Meg. Wake up now, it's time."
"For what? Go away, Shannon, I'm tired." I pushed down harder to where the sleeping place was, where it was soft.
"I told you wrong, Meg, I think I told you wrong. Wake up, please. Wake up."
"No." There was something warm on me. A sleeping bag, I thought. I was cocooned in darkness and warmth.
"Maybe it wasn't like that," she said.
"That's okay, okay."
"I think it was kind of that way, kind of not. Maybe just the phone. Maybe he didn't really hit me. Wouldn't they have noticed the bruises, Meg, on my body from the kicking? When they did the report? Wouldn't that have shown up?"
"I don't know."
"I think so. I think it would have. So it doesn't add up. It's something else."
"Does it matter really?"
"Maybe. I think so. I think it matters, Meg."
"I don't know about that stuff."
"Meg," she said, close to my ear.
"Meg," she repeated. "There was no one there at all. I was all alone. Yes, that's it. He called is all. Just called. Maybe he said I should do it, maybe not. Maybe I imagined it. I was feeling really bad. Anything would have upset me. I did it on my own, Meg. That's the way it was."
"Okay, Shannon."
"I mean, maybe. Because I don't know. I don't think I can remember anymore. Which way's exactly right. There might be something I've forgotten."
"Maybe."
"Well, I wanted you to know. Now that I've thought it through. I just wanted you to know."
"Okay."
"So go back to sleep."
"Okay."
She started humming, then singing softly. "Have you heard that one Meg? On the radio, it's new."
"Don't think so."
"I'll sing it."
"Okay, Shannon," I agreed, drifting. "Sing me that song."
"So you go to sleep, all right, and I'll sing."
I nodded.
"Here goes." She paused and then;
"I've got a horse
Out in the country.
I get to see him
Every second Sunday.
He comes when I call
He knows my name.
Someday I'll saddle up
And the two of us will ride away."
She paused again, then finished,
"This town wouldn't be so bad
If a girl could trust her instincts.
Or even if a girl
Could trust a boy."



Obsidian
Laura Davis
Chapter 24




"It was so pretty. I'd never seen water so clear. You know how they say that, about the sky and the water, and the grass being green. It's probably just because we see what we want to, and that's what we want, someplace pretty and warm, we all do, because there's never enough of that, through our days.
"It didn't kill me, my shot. I never even aimed for myself. It's lodged somewhere they never found, though they probably never checked. It looked real enough, I suppose.
"There's so many bright thing a person could focus upon, they're everywhere all around. Wouldn't take that much to make it real, that thing we're supposed to call living. Funny how we don't, though, most of us. It's the other things that get our time.
"I remember in this class in school, the teacher told a story about how before there were written contracts, before people relied on paper to know what they owned, that fathers would take their oldest sons to the four corners of their property, and at each one they would beat them so they'd never forget the boundaries.
"This is mine and that is yours. But it doesn't pay to get too philosophical either. Without death, everything would be different. We wouldn't know it, this way, couldn't recognize it. But death is that stronghold. We're all just so afraid. Start counting up the days left, like even if somebody knew for sure they'd do anything about it. To change.
"Call it what you want. Even that doesn't matter. Nobody can know for sure. I have trouble knowing. I didn't want to go but I'm gone now, that part, the part we call something, and this is supposed to be nothing but it's not. Like before, it's figuring out what to do with it, it's still all up to me.
"And that's all right, it should be, but someone had to know. I guess that's what it was. That it wasn't how they said, how they wrote it up in all those reports and newspapers. One said, following a brief illness. Well, I wasn't, ill. It was accidental and sudden in that regard, no time to prepare like there would have been, in a hospital.
"I just went from living one day, to not, and I wanted to clear it up, how it happened, because I wasn't crazy or mean, I wasn't. A little sad, maybe, but isn't everyone from time to time? Unexpected, that end. But it's better now, much better, that the story's being told."



I stayed there awhile with Shannon. I don't know how long. Nothing was like I knew it, but it wasn't like floating, either, or anything like that. We just stayed. It was warm.
She had to cry off and on, and I did too.
Everything made sense. That I can say. Not like we're all a bunch of ants or anything, that's not it, but still, there is something about how everybody gets to be how they are. Even me. I realized that. It was up to nobody else but me.
And that's all I thought about in that regard. I couldn't think about it much because it wasn't that important like it had been before - trying to figure out all the secrets of the universe. It just is. I don't know how to explain it.
I stayed there awhile with Shannon and we got to be good friends. I needed that. She did too, I suppose, but in a different kind of way. She always had that bit of distraction to her, not completely grounded, which is understandable I guess. We slept a lot, just regular things, nothing special, talked all about when we were growing up and told each other things we hadn't told others, there was nothing owed or owned between us so it was easy that way, to share. Nothing at stake to be scared about.
And then I felt it first though she's the one who said it, and when she did it hurt me, even though I'd already realized it, that it was time for me to go, I missed Jay a whole lot. But Shannon said it, "it's time for you to go, Meg, you know that," and for a minute I felt betrayed, as if she'd never like me or needed me as much as she claimed, that she was really fine all along without me. But she was right, I had to go.
"I'll come back to say goodbye."
"You promise?"
"Yeah," she laughed. "Have I ever lied to you?"
"No."
"Well, then."
"But how will I know?"
"You will."
"Will it be soon, or a long time?"
"Soon."
"Okay then, but Shannon?"
"What?"
"Be careful, okay?"
"Righto."
"So, I'll see you."
"Okay."
"Okay, bye."


Obsidian
Laura Davis
Chapter 25



It was quiet in my mind. I worked. The weeds in the flower beds came back as soon as I pulled them, and I worked towards winter, too, not wanting to get caught again, unprepared.
But I didn't know for sure if I'd be there, by the time winter came around. I didn't know about Jay, about us together, but I did it anyway, the preparation, figuring he might stay even if I didn't and that he'd need it, those things to be done.
It was only a couple of days, but still. It seemed like an endless amount of time.
While they were gone, I waited. The days were short. I didn't miss them because I couldn't feel. The days were short without feelings. Sitting once, at the piano, I remembered the day Shannon had sat there, knitting, things tiny in pastel colors, things too small for me to determine what they were, the needles seemed the size of spaghetti.
I'd catch a glimpse of that memory of her from time to time in passing or in pausing, of that time when she had sat, on the top of the piano, knitting.
On the day Jay returned nothing felt different at all. I'd gotten up like I had everyday since he'd left, with nothing on my mind and nothing in my heart. I opened the front door like I did every morning, a habit I'd maintained since Jay first diagnosed my fainting as a reaction to the chemicals. I opened the door and Jay was there, he was home, sitting on the hood of his truck.
It makes me smile, now, when I think about that day Jay came home and I opened the door and there he was, sitting on the hood of his truck, because I hardly noticed him at all, it didn't register, at first when I opened the door. All I could see was our fifty feet of front yard in full bloom, all those flowers lit up like Christmas.
They rolled towards me, a wave, and caught my gaze, and I couldn't shift it, onto Jay. But he didn't hold it against me, my preoccupation with the flowers. He jumped off the hood and walked to where I stood in the doorway, and against the porch post he leaned, waiting.

Obsidian
Laura Davis
Chapter 26




I'm looking back, now, to a time that's becoming increasingly unclear as my existence continues. I'm looking back, calling it back, because I am, presently, where I've spent most of my life, counting the days behind me as past, and viewing the days ahead as future. But for that season when Shannon came, the days weren't like that at all.
It all became about loss. And dying, of course, but also of letting go, standing alone for that time, without anything behind or ahead. There was nothing left to put a finger on, no point of reference. There was nothing we'd done, before, that mattered, and nothing seemed to lie ahead that we could hope for.
But it wasn't hope like we'd defined it before: a kind of yearning, underneath specific ideas of how to meet specific desires and needs. It was, instead, a time where we just perched on each day, waiting, and unable to change that, or want to.
That's how it was those days Jay and I stayed home, lighting candles and burning incense, trying to help Shannon go on, leave us, finally, behind her.
We could feel her hesitating. Candles and incense seemed so naive, but neither Jay nor I spoke a word of our concern. We simply refused to do that. We even refused eye contact during those moments when we, too, got scared and hesitated also, wanting to grab it all back. But we were determined and our determination won out.
I don't think we could have, anyway, influenced any of the events those days, just as, we were beginning to believe, we probably had had little influence on any of the events of our lives. But it occasionally felt like an option during those long summer afternoons when we searched out a breeze on the front porch, or when we slept, at night, rigidly curled together.
Later we both realized how we knew that day, after another nap, that she was gone. But it wasn't like we'd expected it to be.
Jay made coffee and I complained when it burned my lips. I remember Jay's surprise as he looked at me.
"You okay?" he asked.
"Sure."
Jay took a deep breath. "I was thinking," he said, "about going out to Henry's sometime, I don't know when, really, but just to see about that tractor, you know, see how much work it's going to take to get it going."
"That might be fine Jay."
He took another deep breath and let it out all at once. "What would you think about coming along, maybe, to help decide if it's a project we're up to doing?" He raised his eyes from the floor and looked into mine.
I sighed. And I felt it, and so did he, just then, maybe like a sliver of light through a late winter sky, I don't know, but something like that. Maybe more like a screen door bumping the frame, or a curtain shifting, but whatever it was, Jay caught my gaze and held it and then we both smiled and looked away.

We never bought the tractor, it was just too far gone. And besides, we had so much to do. We caught the tail end of summer and spent it, mostly, at the Snake river, where I browned myself senseless in the sun while Jay fished and fed me, catfish, of course, and in return I played for him every night while the fire roared, every song I could think of on my accordion.
Nothing was for certain. But we tried hard to not let the uncertainty overshadow the things we had come to know, that we wanted to share our time together and find ways of having it matter.
The house stood still while we were gone, and when we returned the summer-blooming flowers had ceased and the mums and asters and taken their place.
But the biggest surprise, when we pulled in our drive, was the house next door, the one we'd always called "Shannon's," that had a yard packed with kids, noisy and busy and a young woman perched high on a ladder. We just went inside that day, wanting some quiet to ourselves, but later she told me she'd had to throw salt on her roof, because, she'd been warned by the realtor, a flock of crows lived there. I returned her smile and nodded my affirmation, but I knew the crows wouldn't return.
A couple of nights later while sitting on the porch, Jay and I heard a screech and a howl and from next door the sounds of arguing children and recognized the voice of Beewee, drilling holes with the hose. Jay froze for a moment, but then it left him, his fear.
"I'm going to tear down that garage," he said, and I knew he meant the one at his parent's house, where he'd first found Hannah.
"But it isn't yours, Jay," I replied, though reluctantly. I wished it could disappear too.
"Yeah, you're right," he admitted. "I almost forgot about that."
It was quiet for awhile between us and I found myself holding my breath, but then Jay said, "there's a lot of dark places where children can go."
I tried to think of something to say, some kind of promise. I could think of not one single guarantee. Finally I just had to admit he was right. "That's true, Jay," I told him. "There are a lot of dark places."
"And a lot of other kids," I added, "watching for them out of windows."
"Right," said Jay. He smiled.



I found a box not long ago, tucked away in the attic of our shed, and when I opened it I wasn't surprised, not a whole lot, anyway, to discover the knitting, caps and booties, and sweaters and leggings that matched, tiny perfect stitches, with whales and flying fish and turtles, but the catfish are my favorite.
And I still find strands of her hair, and once a button off her jacket, and I leave them lie, untended. And when we visit her grave we always remember something new about her, something she said or wore or did, and we're grateful that our memories run so deep they can contain her.

Obsidian
Laura Davis
Epilogue



It seemed like a lifetime but it was only a season, but it seemed like a year, anyway, when it was really less than a season, not even that, a couple of months, about six or seven weeks. It seemed like my lifetime, all I'd ever know or ever would know again, it seemed that way, it seemed that way then.
On the eastern side of Oregon there's a place called Sparta. Looking at the Wallowas, the scant peek my upstairs window affords, looking in that direction is a place called Sparta, at the base of the mountains, at the bottom of the foothills that lead to the mountains, the Wallowas. There are orchards there, apple trees, that were brought by settlers, trees brought or seedlings sent over later, that were planted and remain; untended, but still producing fruit.
There's a place called Cornucopia, further up from Sparta, still looking at the Wallowas from the direction of my upstairs window, where there's a cabin, a cabin that somebody burned. Not too far from the cabin is an old enameled cook stove. It seems someone dragged it from the cabin, maybe, when it first began to burn.
There is a place called Auburn in the foothills of the Blues where there's another cabin almost falling down, and a shed some distance behind it with a fainting couch inside, an old velvet and mahogany fainting couch, brought or shipped over new from the east, broken now and housing mice, a tinge of maroon, still, that can catch an eye in the midst of all this old mining camp.
There is a place called Huntington where the train used to unload before the bridge across the Snake river was built, where anyone expecting a delivery, goods from the east, or if someone died and was being returned home, would have to go, from Baker City, to accept it, the delivery.
There is a place called Virtue Flats where the trail still runs, it's there, the trail, and there's a sagebrush tree grown so tall it can shade a lunch break, take the glare off a desert afternoon. Out at Virtue no one can hear you if you cry, if you moan for things long lost to you, no one can hear if your moans stop and start, unsure of the sound they make, so unusual, so constrained, as far as moaning is supposed to go.
There's a place called Joseph, and the people native to this state dance there in the summer, during a time they allow for those of us who've forgotten or those who wish to recall, so we can be there, too, when they dance about a time before; far, so far, before the time of me.
There is a place called Baker City where I still maintain my home, a place I return to after traveling to Sparta and Auburn and Huntington and Virtue, and after coming home from Joseph. I come back to a house that is more quiet now, after she's left already. It's sanded and lacquered and painted too, of course, and roofed and planted. It's my pride, this house. Nobody'd ever know it sits on top of bones, bones and dust and centuries of things compacted and, any day now, ready for transformation.
At home I plan my days, it's true, almost exactly like I did before, wondering and hoping, and trying to find the things that matter.