Part 7
Ayana Holt worked at the post office in Garnet and lived three doors down. People in town held one thing against her: she never passed anything on. They found her dull for it.
On Sunday she came by with fresh bread and green onions from her garden, sat down beside the wheelchair, and started telling Jules about her niece, who had just been accepted to a community college in Boise.
“Ayana,” Jules said. “Close the door, please. Close the door and sit down.”
Ayana looked at her and closed the door.
Jules told her everything: what Pru had said, that she wasn’t swallowing the drops, the two weeks last May, the tin cookie box, the hearing on September 30. Ayana listened without interrupting, and her face grew more and more still.
When Jules stopped talking, the room was very quiet.
“You don’t believe me,” Jules said.
Ayana got up, went to the door, opened it a crack, looked out into the hall, closed it again, came back, crouched down in front of the wheelchair, and said, “Last May you were standing at the window.”
Jules flinched.
“You saw?”
“I saw. I came with the bread, and you were standing there looking at the mountain. I wanted to call out, and then I thought I’d scare you, so I left. Then they came home and you were in the chair again, and I decided I’d imagined it. I’ve been kicking myself for a year for not asking.”
She took Jules’s hands in hers.
“What do we need to do?”
Next they counted money. There wasn’t any. Jules’s disability checks had started in the second year of her illness. They went into an account Linda managed, and once a month Linda reported out loud where it had gone: adult diapers, medicine, electricity, groceries. Jules didn’t have a dollar of her own.
“I’ve got four hundred,” Ayana said. “Till payday.”
“I won’t take it.”
“Jules—”
“I won’t take it, and don’t argue. You’ve got Shayna starting college.”
Jules was quiet for a moment.
“I’ve got cheese.”
At the far end of the cellar, behind the barrels, on the bottom shelf, where Linda never looked because she thought it was junk, lay five wheels of her grandmother’s cheese. Jules had set them the summer she was still walking, her last make. Three wheels she had put away to age, and two she had set beside them just because, “for the mood,” as her grandmother used to say. They were three years old.
“Cheese?” Ayana didn’t follow.
“It’s three years old. Nobody in the valley has anything like it. Nobody holds a wheel for three years, because they need the money now.”
She explained how to photograph it so the cut face showed the crystals, the little white crunchy specks that only come in old cheese, and how to be sure to get the date stamp in the shot.
“And call Matt, the chef. He used to buy from me. His number’s on the last page of the log.”
Matt called back the next day himself. He was the kind of man who goes straight to business so he won’t overpay.
“Jules, hi. Glad you’re alive and kicking. Listen, I saw the pictures. Nice stuff, but you have to understand, it’s summer, everybody’s selling cheese. I’ve got suppliers lined up out the door. I’ll take all five for a thousand.”
“Not for a thousand.”
“Jules, come on, what else are you going to do with them? They’ve been sitting three years. They’re probably dried out.”
“They’re not dried out. They’re three-year wheels off the high meadow, lupine grass. You’ve had cheese like that exactly once in your life, and it was mine. You won’t find it in Ketchum now, and you won’t find it in Boise. You’ll put it on the menu, write that it’s three years old, and one wheel will earn back half of what you pay me.”
Matt was quiet.
“Seventeen-fifty for the five, and you pick them up yourself.”
“Tomorrow, eight in the morning, at the lower bridge. Not at the house. At the bridge.”
“Why the bridge?”
“Because it’s twenty-five hundred,” Jules said.
He came. Ayana carried the wheels out in two sacks during the night, while Jules lay listening to her heart pound, and she came back with the money and half a wheel, which Matt had cut off and handed back.
“That’s for the lady who made it,” he’d said. “Let her taste what she did.”
Jules tasted it. The cheese was yellow as amber and crumbly, and those tiny crystals crunched on her tongue. It was the cheese she had wanted to make her whole life. She ate a small piece and set the rest aside for Sam.
She wrapped the twenty-five hundred dollars in a rag and hid it under the mattress.
That left the plan. On Thursday, Linda and Travis were driving to Garnet: first the bank, then the notary, then the feed store. It would take all day. They discussed it in front of her the way they discussed everything in front of her. The wheelchair had long since stopped counting as a person you had to lower your voice around. On Thursday morning Sam was going to his aunt’s in Pine Hollow. That gave her seven hours or so.
“Arlo can drive you,” Ayana said. “He’s going to Boise anyway for a part.”
Arlo was Ayana’s brother, a man who drove an old Bronco and talked about as much as a fence post.
“But Jules, you understand there’s no going back after this?”
“I understand.”
“If you leave and it doesn’t work, they’ll bring you back, and they’ll never let you out of that bed again.”
“I understand.”
Jules looked out the window at the apple tree she had sat under all those summers.
“Ayana, I’m going to die in this house anyway. This way it just takes a little longer.”
On Thursday she woke before light.
The truck pulled out of the yard at seven. Jules lay listening to the doors slam, to Linda shouting something about a bag, to the engine fading on the grade beyond town. Then she got up.
Into an oilcloth bag she packed the log, Sam’s phone, her papers, her passport and the discharge summaries that had always been kept in her nightstand, and the rag with the money. She walked out to the shed, lifted the lid of her grandmother’s trunk, and took the towel-wrapped bundle from the bottom.
The braid lay inside just as it had lain for almost a year: dark, held in the middle with a rubber band. Jules looked at it, and it seemed to her she was holding someone who had been waiting all this time in the dark.
Arlo pulled the Bronco up to the path behind the garden at seven-thirty. He didn’t say a word while he helped her in or for the whole drive. He spoke only once, up on the pass, to ask whether she was cold, and he laid his jacket across her knees.
They drove more than four hours. Jules looked out the window and couldn’t tear herself away. She hadn’t seen the valley in three years. The river ran below, milky green, white over the rapids. Along the banks stood lodges and rafting outfits that hadn’t been there before. At the roadside people were selling honey and elk-antler velvet. Above all of it, huge and calm, rose the mountains.
In Boise, Arlo drove her to the hospital and helped her to the doors. She walked on her own, slowly, shuffling, gripping his elbow with one hand and with the other a cane Ayana had found in the shed, but she was on her own feet. She had the feeling that everyone passing could see what a miracle it was. They saw nothing and walked on by.
The neurologist was Dr. Tim Ortega. He was young, with close-cropped hair, and on his desk stood a glass jar with a lid that he used for tea. Afterward, whenever Jules remembered that day, she always saw that jar.
He listened without interrupting. When she finished, he sat quiet for a while, tapping a pencil on the desk.
“Lie down on the table, please.”
He examined her for forty minutes. He tested her with a reflex hammer and a pin, asked her to squeeze, release, pull toward herself, push away. He looked at her eyes and took her blood pressure lying down and standing up.
“All right,” he said at last. “The polyneuropathy in your records, I’m not seeing it. At all. Your reflexes are there. You have sensation across the whole foot. The kind of wasting that has to be there after three years of nerve disease isn’t there, not the way it looks when a nerve is sick. What you do have is what comes from being immobile for a long time. The muscles are weak, the tendons have shortened, your coordination is gone. That can be treated. It takes months of work.”
He paused.
“There’s something else. Your skin is dry, your mouth is dry, your pupils are slow to react. Things like that can come from certain drugs taken over a long period.”
“Do you believe me?”
The doctor drank the last of his tea from the jar.
“I believe what I see. I’m going to work you up again from scratch. And I’ll tell you now: the tests today probably won’t show anything. By your own account you haven’t taken it in more than a month. Blood clears everything out.”
“What about hair?”
He looked up.
“What about hair?”
Jules took the bundle out of her bag and laid it on the desk.
“This is my braid. They cut it off last fall, and it’s been in a trunk ever since. I was told hair remembers what a person’s been given.”
Dr. Ortega unfolded the towel and looked at the braid. He pulled a sheet of paper toward him and started writing fast.
“You don’t need me. You need a lawyer, the police, and a lab that does segmental hair analysis. Nobody around here does it; the samples go to a forensic lab in Denver. Hair grows about half an inch a month. They cut it into pieces from the root to the tip, and each piece is a month of your life. From it they can see what was in your body and roughly when.”
He tapped the paper.
“That braid of yours is a diary, basically. Just not one anybody wrote by hand…”
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