The Orchard, page 18
That’s how I bonded with Marie, and for the next year and a half until she passed, we didn’t say much but we played together a lot, on the bench, side by side.
Rosie was Rosie. We decided I would go to school full-time and she drove me the six miles down every morning, and I actually liked it. The consistency of showing up every day, the growing friendships. Ben became more and more isolated, and seemed to prefer it that way, but I kept an eye on him and ate lunch with him once in a while.
A few nights a week, randomly, when the weather was enticing or stormy, Rosie did not continue down the long straightaway on the Westminster West Road, but waved to Sci-Fi and the brothers at the corner and turned up Tavern Hill and drove to the cabin and we spent the night. We lit the stove, we played horseshoes, we fished in the pond, in the brook. Even when it wasn’t warm enough, we swam, and we ran naked back into the cabin and stood shivering by the woodstove.
Bear loved these interludes. He loved being at the cabin more than anything, and I learned to look away when he bounded out of the car and whined, and zigzagged, sniffing everything, searching for Hayley, hoping this time she’d be there.
I was happiest there. I am happiest here now. I will keep the house in Northampton for the two days of teaching, but we will live here.
* * *
*
Rosie was my best friend after Bear. A good surrogate. When I was fourteen, she enrolled me in the Putney School, which was only a mile from the orchard, and I adored the place, the serious attention to the arts, working in the dairy barn, the outdoor trips. I loved being a day student and being able to have my friends over to Westminster West, and with Rosie’s assent I spent some nights at the cabin by myself. My best friend at school was a foreign student from China named Mei Yan. She knew the Tang poets and loved them, and even knew the most famous poems of Li Xue. Maybe that’s why I decided she would be my friend. She was very shy, she was a serious flutist, and she had never been camping until her fall trip in the White Mountains. Once in a while I dared to accompany her on the piano, and she teased me gently. Sophomore year, we got permission from the dorm head and I invited her to the cabin for a night and she fell head over heels. She couldn’t get over that we were lighting a kerosene lantern, a woodstove. Mei is still my best friend. She plays with the Amsterdam Symphony Orchestra, and she married a serious Dutch biologist, but I talk to her almost every month and visit when I can. Last year she brought her own young daughter, Kim, to the orchard for a week.
When I got my driver’s license, and with an unspoken understanding from Rosie, I began to spend more time at the cabin, maybe half my nights. The school didn’t know about it—I’m not sure they would have approved, I was only sixteen—but I loved it, I needed it. I slept up in the loft in our old bed, and I curled on my left side as I always used to do, and I imagined Hayley’s arm thrown around me and I felt comforted.
I studied Spanish and literature and then Spanish literature, then the works of Latin America, and I went as far as the good teachers at Putney could take me. One Saturday night in June, Rosie and I were eating outside on the patio of the yellow house. We were swatting away blackflies; I could see them trying to burrow into Rosie’s thick blond hair, and Bear was snapping at them and generally irritated, and I asked her if it was okay to love the Colombian, Álvaro Mutis, so much and not, say, Mo Yan. Rosie put down her fork and unconsciously adjusted her rimless hexagonal glasses. She pursed her lips.
“You’re thinking of Hayley?”
I nodded.
“Hayley wants you to be your own person. That’s all she wants.” She blinked and took off the glasses and polished them with the tail of her flannel shirt. She settled them back on and smiled at me through whatever emotion and said, “The only way to do that is to follow your nose. Follow what you love, always. It’s the best way to stay safe.”
I’ve thought about that often. It’s what Hayley gave to me, and what Li Xue gave to her: That we are of this earth. All of us. That if we stay close to her, and to what we truly love, we will be okay.
* * *
*
I got into grad school in California. I loved the coast, San Francisco, Marin, and especially the wild cliffs and beaches of Big Sur, and all the literary history there. I drove down whenever I could and hiked the hills and swam in the turbulent pocket coves. In late November of my third year, I got a call from Ivy Darrow. She said, “Frith, Rosie’s had an accident.”
“An accident? When?”
“Tonight. She was driving to the cabin, up Tavern Hill…”
“Yes?”
“Well, it was dark—it is dark—and the first snow of the year had put down a couple of inches and slicked the road…”
“Ivy, what?”
“I’m sorry.” I heard the huff. “She was at Brelsford Corner and a bunch of the bikers from below—that bunch that you and Hayley befriended—they were coming down from a party up on the mountain and two skidded out and lost control. They drifted into her and she swerved away and went over the bank.”
“What?” I stammered. “Where is she?”
“Well.” Static. “She died.”
She died. I stood outside the Nepalese restaurant on Lytton in Palo Alto and gasped for air. That was one thing that was never going to happen, that was definitely not supposed to happen. I passed out, right there on the sidewalk, and was revived by three strangers and two Nepali waiters.
She died. Grimm and a Raider named Tuner lived, thank God.
I caught a red-eye to Hartford that night, rented a car and drove up. I never saw her. She was broken badly in the wreck and Ivy ID’d her for the coroner and we held a service at the Grange in Brattleboro, where she’d often shown and sold her hangings. She’d grown up in Saxtons River and was a fixture in the area and there may have been two hundred people. I slept in the cabin that night. I turned onto my left side and I felt the emptiness behind me as I had so many times, and I whispered for a long time to Hayley and Rosie. Wherever you guys are, I know you’re together. Bear had gone my first year at Stanford, but I kept waking up, thinking I was hearing him whimper, his claws on the wood of the floor. It was the wind in the stovepipe.
I sold Rosie’s place. More and more well-to-do back-to-the-landers were moving into the area—who could blame them?—and it sold for a lot. I finished my PhD. I got a professorship at Amherst.
I am pregnant.
I am here now. On the bench, our bench. If I turn away, I can almost imagine Hayley next to me. Pup, rouse yourself. Go get some exercise. I never had to say that to you before. Little Feisty in your belly will appreciate it too.
I can hear the brook. I know by the rush it is running high. I know what the little ledge drop will look like just by the sound. I know that the water will be sieving through Mr. Beaver’s dam, now maintained by what I’m guessing are his great-grandchildren. They lumber over and into the pond once in a while and I beg them not to screw with it in any way and they aren’t afraid of me in the least. You should be, I murmur. I am Frith, queen of this place.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to my first readers, without whom this book would not have been written. Kim Yan, Helen Thorpe, Donna Gershten, and Lisa Jones shared, as always, their insight, energy, and enthusiasm. As did Geordie Heller, beloved cousin.
Thanks to Suzanne Heller and Jim Lefevre for guidance on birds, and to doctors Mitchell Gershten and Melissa Gillespie for advice on all things medical. I am grateful to Haifeng Ye, Gabby Masucci, Isaac Savitz, Li Peters, and Catherine Shoeffler for their input, and ever thankful to the spectacular translator Céline Leroy for helping me to understand the process of translation.
I raise a glass to my original editors at Scribd, Mark Bryant and Laura Hohnhold, who were with me when I was a kid and are with me again. Such an honor. And thanks so much to Jenny Jackson for giving the novel renewed life.
It has been one of the great privileges and pleasures of my life to work with David Halpern, who shepherded the novel from the beginning as early reader and then as agent.
And lastly, I wish to thank Kenneth Rexroth, W. S. Merwin, and Red Pine for their exquisite work in translating from the Chinese some of the most beautiful poetry ever written.
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Peter Heller, The Orchard
