Part 3
Playing the part was harder than the pain and harder than the sleeplessness.
All day she sat and let herself be wheeled, lifted, tucked in. She dropped a spoon and waited for someone to pick it up. When Darlene walked past, something inside Leah pulled tight as fence wire, and she knew that if she said one wrong word it would snap. At night she walked. First three steps along the bed with her hand on the wall, then five, then all the way to the door and back.
After a week she knew she couldn’t do this alone.
She had no paper, so she tore the last page out of Sam’s math notebook and wrote in pencil:
Mrs. Pruitt, you were right. Please don’t tell anybody. Come to the window by the apple tree at night. L.
“Sam. You know where Mrs. Pruitt lives? Out past the ford, with the mean dog?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you ride this out there on your bike? Don’t let Grandma see. Don’t let anybody see.”
Sam took the folded paper and gave his mother a long look that didn’t belong to a ten-year-old.
“Is this because of what she said in the yard?”
“Yes.”
“I won’t tell. I don’t tell anyway.” His ears went red, and then he blurted out something he’d obviously been carrying around. “I heard Grandma on the phone with Rob. She said you wouldn’t last past fall. I was behind the woodpile.”
Leah’s vision darkened at the edges. “Rob who?”
“The guy with the white truck. He walked around Grandma Ada’s place and went up the hill behind the garden taking pictures on his phone.”
Vesta came on Thursday night. Leah never heard the gate, and the Gunnells’ dog didn’t bark once. Later she wondered about that and never worked it out. A face in a low-tied kerchief simply appeared in the window against the dark orchard. Leah hauled herself up on her arms and eased the sash open.
“I’m standing,” she whispered. “At night. I walk along the wall.”
Vesta said nothing for a full minute. Then: “So.”
“Please. What is she giving me?”
“I won’t put a name on it. I’m no pharmacist, and I won’t make one up. I can tell you what I saw. Your eyes have looked drunk for three years, and you don’t drink. Your mouth’s dry. Your skin’s dry as newspaper. And when a leg loses its nerve it wastes clear to the bone. Yours still has the meat on it. It’s only asleep.”
“Who’s going to believe me?”
“Nobody,” Vesta said. “Not yet. Right now it’s just you taking my word.”
“Then what do I do?”
“Three things. Keep spitting it out, but don’t push. Don’t break yourself hurrying. Your body’s been down a well three years.”
“All right.”
“That braid they cut. You kept it?”
“It’s in my grandma’s trunk out in the shed.”
“Leave it alone. Don’t wash it, don’t comb it. There’ll come a day it talks for you.”
“How can hair talk?”
“How does a tree tell you how old it is, and which summer was dry? Rings. Hair grows in rings too, only lengthwise instead of across. Whatever a person swallows stays in it, layer on layer, root to tip. Find somebody educated who can read it.”
Leah gripped the sill. “And the third?”
“Find where she fills that bottle from. Stuff like that won’t keep in a warm kitchen. It wants the cold.”
Leah knew the coldest place in the valley.
From the Gunnells’ back steps to Grandma Ada’s place was a hundred and some yards along the path through two gardens. In daylight it was nothing. At night it was as long as a life.
She went at three in the morning, when the house slept deepest. She slid off the bed onto the floor so the springs wouldn’t creak and crawled through the mudroom dragging her flip-flops. At the back door she pulled herself up by the frame.
The valley breathes out all its August heat at night, and off the river came a chill like ice somewhere close. The sky was black and full of stars down to the ridgeline.
For the first ten steps she held the fence rail. Then the rail ran out into open garden between the potato rows. She made four steps and fell, soft, into the vines. Getting up took a long time because there was nothing to hold. She did it the way a new calf does: knees first, then one foot planted, then the other, swaying until she was upright. She fell three more times. On the last stretch she slid down the slope toward the cave door on her backside, holding on to the grass.
She twisted the wooden turn button and dragged herself inside. The smell rolled over her, sweet and nutty and damp, and something in her chest let go that had been clenched for three years.
She found the switch, and a bulb came on under the low stone vault. Near the door stood Darlene’s setup: the stainless vat, painted shelving, rows of shrink-wrapped wheels. The ledger lay where she’d left it on the shelf, its oilcloth faded and mildew along the spine. She held it against her chest and didn’t move for a while.
Then she went to the back.
Behind the old whey crocks was a recess in the rock. Her great-grandfather had built it for ice hauled up from the river, back before the power came through. Now it held whatever mustn’t get warm: jars of culture, jugs of vinegar, a crate of veterinary odds and ends, and a blue tin that had once held Danish butter cookies. Grandma used to keep buttons in it.
Leah sat on the dirt floor, set the tin on her knees, and pried off the lid.
Inside were three brown glass vials with screw caps. Two had been opened, and one was full. Their labels carried a long pharmaceutical name, and under it, in small type: For veterinary use only. For immobilization of large animals. Store refrigerated. Protect from light. A purple stamp across each read Halvorsen Elk Ranch.
Under the vials lay a little notebook, homemade from folded paper and stitched down the middle with thread. Dates ran down the left side, month after month, three years of them. Beside each were small tidy numbers and, here and there, a word or two, the way people write when they never expect anyone else to read it. More. Less. Limp. Walks along walls. Fell on porch. Asked about the land.
Across two pages in the middle was a gap of two weeks, and slanting through the blank space was one word: Salt Lake.
Leah sat on the cold floor of her grandmother’s cave and held three years of her life in her hands.
She didn’t cry. She felt very calm and very clear, the way the air goes after a long blizzard quits and you can see every branch.
She put the vials back, set the tin exactly where it had been with the same side turned out, and laid the stitched notebook on top. She took only the ledger. She crawled back up into the black garden with it pressed to her chest. She was halfway down the potato rows when the Gunnells’ back porch light came on…
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