Arterial Bloom, page 15
Watching Abby pass through the trees from her room, last month’s events unspooled in my head on cue. I’d left for the airport in Durham four hours earlier to beat the storm. A work weekend in Boston. Milly, their grandmother—Larissa’s mother—watching them both for me, had fallen asleep. It was what she kept apologizing for on the phone before I could pry any information from her. The facts remain muddy to this day, and I couldn’t remember who saw what when, but someone claimed to have spotted Justin’s little form, etched by lightning strike, arms out in airplane liftoff mode, waddling through rain and tall grass until suddenly he couldn’t be seen anymore.
After landing in Logan I immediately booked the first flight back to Durham, which wasn’t till 4AM. The whole time I was being fed details over the phone, first by Milly, then by the local police.
Harlowe Creek had swelled and crested its banks, trenching a roiling brown finger across our front yard. They surmised Justin had simply not seen it and walked straight into it.
I kept picturing Justin in his bright blue Thomas the Train overalls with the puffy, jiggly eyes on the front lapel. The right one always came undone and we were perpetually gluing it back on to little success.
A hand-me-down from Abby, who’d herself worn it to death.
Justin’s screechy peals of laughter between thunder cracks. How he loved the water and being wet, even clothed. Many a time I’d have to catch him before he hopped into the half-filled bathtub upstairs while still dressed, breaking into contagious belly-laughs without fail.
By the time I got home after several flood detours, the sun was up, the storm long past, and a division of police and volunteers had besieged my property.
After hugging Milly and Abby inside the house, both of whom were still soaking wet, I was beckoned outside by the police chief and asked the standard questions—where I’d been, what time I’d left, etc. Then he broke it down: the flash flood likely swept my boy into the Newport River, its current pushing him into the channel, then through Beaufort Inlet, and finally into the Atlantic.
He promised to search every pebble of shore, every drop of water, but it didn’t look good.
So for the next two weeks I searched with them, barely going to work, spending all my downtime near Abby. Always a reserved child, she was likely internalizing, surely levying blame on me for her family getting halved in under two years. And then she started taking flowers to her mother, and I kept searching. But I worried as to what else she might’ve been doing while gone. What thoughts caromed through her head while unburdened from home. Unburdened from me.
The following Sunday, Abby kept to her sacrament: a next-to-nothing breakfast, buying flowers, grabbing water, and plunging into the woods.
This time she returned near dark, close to suppertime.
As upset as I was, I couldn’t bring myself to yell at her, though I did ask why she was so late.
“It took me longer to pot the flowers,” she said.
Her chocolate eyes and mouth pitched in an undying backslash that perfectly ghosted her mother’s. Faces crafted for hoarding retorts and denunciations.
I was exhausted, having spent hours up and down the southern shore of Newport River, probing the sandbars, all for naught. The search parties had dwindled in the last two weeks, as Justin had been all but officially declared dead, but I kept looking. There was simply nothing else I could do.
In the end I hugged Abby. Her arms gradually wound around my waist—the most reaction I’d gotten since before Justin disappeared—but she said nothing, retreating to her room without dinner just as Larry arrived.
Larry Anspaugh, our neighbor to the southeast, had been checking on us every day since the storm, often bringing leftover dinner his wife made. He was a kind old coot with pomaded gray hair and eyes greener than jades, a wicked chortle that time-warped me back to middle-school hijinks always at hand.
That night I told him about Abby’s sojourns, and asked if he’d seen her by chance late Sunday mornings.
“Oh yeah,” he said, forking half-a-yam into his mouth. “Seen her skipping along the meadow, borders mine and the Frick farm. They got this old potting shed out there.”
He must’ve caught something shift in my expression, because he stuttered to a stop and squinted at me over his fork, tongue sliding between the seam of lips.
“Looks like I hit a nerve,” he said.
Being in no state to explain myself, I shoved in a mouthful of chicken stew and waved him on, asking him to tell me more about Abby and this shed.
“Well, she’s gone in it the two times I’d seen her. Doubt even the Fricks knew about it, the damn thing’s practically more on my land than theirs. Far as I knew they didn’t even bother to clean it out before moving two months ago.”
Thomas and Pamela Frick. The trashy but affable young couple to Larry’s east, now in Oregon plying their trade, riding the pot wave.
“In any case,” continued Larry, “I’d hear Abby singing in there. Lord knows what a girl her age occupies herself with, but about an hour later she’d come out, a clay pot of flowers in her arms and jar of water clipped to her belt, and she’d keep on heading southeast. Never see her on the way back, so I reckon she takes a different route home. All that terrain’s safe though—level and unpopulated—so I wouldn’t worry much. But I promise to keep my eye out just the same.”
We finished dinner, then shared a shot of Jim Beam on the porch where he mocked my embarrassing lack of pastoral acumen, and I his technical ones—how something called the internet allowed me to still work remotely as a financial planner—and before long he slouched back home chuckling to a crescent moon.
My thoughts rarely shifted from that shed. Whatever Abby did there, it seemed to be making her happy. And yet I still fretted.
The following Sunday, I decided to follow her.
Fog had slithered in, knuckling over the hummocks to the southeast like fig tree roots. I had half a mind to tell her to stay home, but neither did I want to interfere with whatever passed for healing, so I let her pink jeans and olive bomber jacket get a head start before peeling myself from behind the garage to follow.
Crossing the wash accused of taking my son proved the hardest, partly from a sudden need to imagine a final imprint of his small feet in the dry clay. A marker of his last earthly moment.
All that remained was a smooth channel marred by recent adult and canine tracks.
Regardless, the footing proved daunting and twice I nearly face planted on the bronze clay. By the time I scampered up the opposite end I just glimpsed the pink of Abby’s pants vanishing into the tree line between nimbus bands of fog.
Entering the gauntlet of trees, it didn’t take long for me to lose my bearings. Even if the fog, warping distance and time alike, hadn’t been present to blot the sun, it was easy to picture myself walking in endless, panicked circles. Had I not managed but a hint of rose bobbing in my peripheral vision, I might’ve done just that.
I pushed on, moving in the direction of color, trusting that my ten-year-old had developed a mastery of instinct now shuttered in her middle-aged father. The fog kept congealing, extracting metal and brine from the air, as if sky and sea had joined forces to reclaim the earth, and by the time I wandered flailing and stumbling into what seemed like an opening, my heart was drum-rolling and icy sweat shivved all my folds and creases.
Down at my feet, what was dense root and a carpet of leaves had become the lumpy crabgrass of a meadow. The fog waned in enough places there for me to see an opposing tree-line, which I started for.
I’d made it partway when I heard something behind me. What began as the sputter of a distant car with bad timing quickly morphed into the looming breaths of something unmistakably four-legged and aggressive, and it jumpstarted me into a high-step for the trees.
Risking a look back, I beheld the charging mongrel as it coalesced from the pall in a time-lapsed Polaroid.
I huffed and kicked my all, and only the tapping out of its tether waking the grass behind it—a sudden jerk that put the yowl in its otherwise chomping jaws—kept it from easily chasing me down.
Hands on my knees, coughing and spitting out my shredded lungs, I glanced up at the massive bloodhound as it repeatedly yanked itself towards me before settling into a left-right pace, head low, scarlet eyes locked, saliva snarling in coils onto the grass.
“Fuck you,” I said. A stupid, useless gesture, and it boomed several retort barks that pummeled my chest.
Wind gathered, I lumbered towards the trees, eyes smoldering back what I hoped translated to explanation, challenge, defiance in my canine foe’s brain.
The tattered bloodhound kept stalking its ground, all the muscle and kinetic go-get-’em of ancient predators, its howl-barks echoing in French-horn peals across the glen.
Having lost Abby by then, I settled for making it out of the woods, hedging towards what I figured was the highway. Eventually I stumbled onto Harker Road. I was pretty certain south was to my left, and before long Larry Anspaugh’s colonial revival peeked between the leaves.
All told, I’d wandered nearly a mile from home.
Larry sat on his porch, seeing me before I saw him and waving me over.
“What the hell are you gallivanting out in the fog for?” he asked through pipe smoke, tittering as if from a joke unearthed after years.
I shrugged. Told him that morning walks did me good. That I thought I’d emulate Abby.
That just invited more good-natured chortles and further condemnation for my country ignorance.
The bloodhound’s distant baying still scoring the morning, I asked Larry if he knew anything about it.
“Oh, that,” he said, switching the pipe to the other corner of his mouth. “The Fricks left her. Word is the dog went mad, though she’s just plain mean. Sometimes animals, like people, they aren’t born right, yeah? Never even knew the dog was there until I all but stumbled over Pamela Frick sunbathing last summer. Hot little number that woman, even with all them tattoos.” He suckled on that reverie, offering it smoke and smirk. “Thank god that dog was asleep and tied up, or it would’ve chomped my balls off. Anyway, I’ve been lobbing her hotdogs from afar. Filling her trough from a hose while she eats so she won’t charge. Keep meaning to call animal control. Ain’t no way to leave a dog, no matter how bad a bitch she is.”
He rambled some more about the Fricks’s “queer” ways before slowing himself down with wistful small-talk. I said little, thankful that he never brought up Justin and the search, and left shortly thereafter.
That evening, after Abby came home and I heated up a pizza for dinner, of which she only had a slice, I asked her calmly but point-blank where she went and what she did on Sundays.
She just gazed out the window, smile floating someplace uncharted, and said, “Mom and I just talk.”
The whole time she watched me through a steady sidelong, probing my thoughts and tsk-tsk-ing me for their flights and heresies.
I brought up the bloodhound. That Larry Anspaugh had told me about it, and that she should be very careful to avoid on account of its meanness.
She said that she knew. That kids in school have told her about it, and that she gives it a wide berth each time.
Then, as if changing a TV channel, delight swelled her face, and she said, “Dad, the Pollard’s mouser cat had kittens, and I would love to have one if that’s okay. They’re soooo cute.”
Despite her rare display of joy, I was unsure if that was a good idea. She locked again with those dark eyes of hers, knowing I was thinking precisely that. Her impish smile so like her mother’s, mining my defenses, siphoning my spirit, and for the briefest, most lucid of moments, I understood odium for a child.
As private amends for my heinous thoughts, I took her to the Pollard’s the next day after school, and she picked out the two sister calicos of the five-kitten litter. The whole way home they purred against her chest like idling Harleys.
I sat on the porch the following Sunday as Abby bought her flowers. Before going to the garage to fetch her water jar, she stopped by and showed them to me.
“These are lupines,” she said, her voice measured, academic. “Most were purple, so I had to dig around to find the blue ones. Aren’t they beautiful?”
Of course I agreed that they were, and no sooner was mason jar in hand than she was off.
I went up to her room to watch her from the window, and on impulse looked up lupines in her mother’s flower book. Along with biological and regional information, each flower’s mythological and symbolic properties were also listed
Their standard color, purple, had been underlined in pencil.
Purple is the color of majesty. Of good judgment and trustworthiness.
Under that, in Larissa’s tight script, she’d written: All reminders of their famine in our world.
The undertow in the words pulled the Frick property shed into view, and a shudder mainlined through me from another realm.
That night, well after Abby had gone to bed, I decided to clean the upstairs bathroom, a chore long delayed.
Since it held the only bathtub in the house—a century-old claw-foot—it was Larissa’s preferred bathroom, as well as the only place to bathe Justin. I don’t remember even having set foot in it since he disappeared.
I grabbed gloves, sponges, and Ajax from the hall closet. From downstairs I could hear the kittens mewling and roughhousing in their box. It reminded me of Abby as a toddler, wreaking havoc. I went to work, starting on the toilet, then the sink, biding my time on the tub until I could no longer defer it, and just dove right in.
Some triviality Milly had shock-mumbled upon my return from Boston skipped through my brain. About the sinks not draining that night because of storm backup.
Milly, always suspicious of me. Never one-hundred-percent on board with the city boy wedding her country daughter.
No sooner had I thought that when something drew my attention. An object caught in the mesh plug. I reached in and picked it up.
One of the wobbly eyes from Justin’s Thomas the Train overalls. The one that never stuck.
It sat in my palm, wavering of its own accord, as if searching my thoughts.
I put it in my pocket and walked out, leaving the tub only partially cleaned.
Outside, the Frick’s abandoned bloodhound howled its grievances to a leaden sky.
Woke up the next Sunday to dreams of storms and iceboxes, and decided to head off Abby this time instead of following her to Larissa’s grave.
Once more after breakfast I took my spot on the porch swing and watched her bound for the flower shop before returning with a single blue orchid.
Walking back to the garage, she said, “So many green ones, and only this one blue!” And she cocked it triumphantly in the air like a blue ribbon.
Before she even grabbed her customary water jar in the garage, I was hoofing it up the stairs and thumbing through Larissa’s book for orchids.
Underlined: Green is harmony and tranquility.
Right under that in pencil, large as a theater marquee: Green is also jealousy and fertility, but who needs those reminders?
White-hot anger surged before I could tamp it down. I hadn’t wanted a second child, but Larissa pressed it. Her payback for returning her to the life she swore never to relive. But it had gotten expensive living in the city. Plus, Abby was becoming more withdrawn. Quieter. Larissa felt she would grow out of it. I wanted her to grow up someplace safe, far from the danger and temptations of cities.
Larissa called me a quitter.
I slammed the book shut, then changed into shorts and running shoes, and jogged north on Harker Road towards Larissa’s parents’ farm.
Her final resting place.
By the time I got there I was on my last wind, thighs roaring and heart punching through my throat.
Making sure to skulk behind the trees so Milly or Don wouldn’t spot me, I fumbled through prickly red buckeye and squatted between twin oaks about a dozen yards from Larissa’s grave to wait for Abby. I didn’t approach the raised plaque, still too vexed by Larissa’s barbs, both from life as well as the grave.
I must’ve dozed off against the trunk because Abby’s singing nearly prodded me to my feet, giving me away.
Turning onto my belly I watched between the fork of trunk as she approached her mother’s marker, a terra-cotta pot as wide as a Frisbee embraced against her tummy. The orchid sprouted from it at an angle, as if a palm tree under serious gale.
Her process was fluid and precise, scooping out a hole near the lupines while speaking casually to her mother as if knelt right there next to her, asking how she enjoyed having Justin all to herself, especially because she never got to meet him outside her belly.
While her sincerity saddened me, it also nudged at deeper nerves. She was never that chummy with her mother in life, nor with me after her death.
After planting the orchid, Abby poured the water from the mason jars over all the flowers.
“Water from home,” she said, smile flat upon her work.
I shuddered at the sight. An Andrew Wyeth come to life.
She then stirred the soil of the pot that held the orchid, and I thought I saw plastic poke through, like a grocery bag, before gathering up the pot, the jar, and starting back.
I toyed with the impulse to touch Larissa’s grave after Abby was out of sight, but channeled that unrequited energy into beating my daughter home.
The subsequent Sunday was bright and clear for the first time in weeks.
Spying her from behind the oaks, I watched Abby smile into the sun, the blue hibiscus potted like a tiny piece of Hawaii captured, and she got right to work planting.
Before leaving the house, I looked them up, of course. There waited Larissa’s writing under some yellow hibiscus.
Yellow is cowardice. Yellow is milksop.
Her task done, Abby started back.
I let her get a lead, but not enough to lose her, determined to ascertain her route from the grave to home.
