Part 3
Four steps led down to it, and the wheelchair could not cross the threshold. During the first year Derek still carried her in. Later he said his back hurt. Eventually he stopped.
Lydia took over the cheesemaking. She hired two women from Pine Creek and used grant money to buy a stainless steel vat. Cheese began moving out in quantity, vacuum-sealed, with the name of the valley printed on a sticker.
It was not bad cheese. It was different cheese.
Julia tasted it once a week, and each time it felt like hearing a stranger sing her song with something wrong in it.
The oilcloth ledger stayed on its shelf by the cellar door. No one wrote in it anymore.
Sam grew. Now he was nine, tall and thin, with scraped knees. He was the only person in the house who spoke to his mother as if nothing had happened.
He climbed into her lap although he was getting too big for it, telling her about school, about the boy from the lower road who had caught a grayling in the Alder River, about the teacher who had asked them to draw their families.
“Did you draw me?”
“I drew everybody.”
“How did you draw me?”
Sam hesitated.
“Standing up,” he said. “You’re standing in it.”
Then he ran off.
Evenings, it was Derek who carried the cup in from the kitchen, where his mother had already counted the drops into it. He set it by Julia’s hand and turned on the television.
He brought the papers too. It became ordinary, like bringing in the electric bill. “Need your signature here. More farm paperwork.”
“What is it?”
“Reports. You’re the owner, remember.”
Sometimes there were two pages, sometimes ten. Julia looked at them, but the letters drifted apart. After the drops, her head always felt stuffed with dry grass: no pain, just an empty rustling.
She took the pen and her hand did the rest. She had a lovely signature, with a looping flourish. Her grandmother had taught her that too.
“Julie, don’t make this harder. I have to be in town by three.”
Once or twice a year they took her to Millbridge, to a bank or an office where papers could be notarized. She remembered those trips in scraps, the way she remembered dreams. A white office. A cactus growing in a teacup on the bank employee’s desk. A notary reading in an even voice, like a prayer, and saying one phrase twice, power of attorney, because Julia had asked her to. Her own hand holding a pen.
Lydia’s voice: “Yes, she agrees. She’s just tired from the drive.”
Her face in the elevator mirror, gray, her eyes sunken, her dull, thinning hair pulled into a little tail.
Her hair had begun falling out in the second year. She found it on the pillow, in the brush, on her shoulder, in her plate. The braid she had been so proud of as a girl dwindled until it was scarcely thicker than a mouse’s tail.
“Cut it off,” Lydia said the previous fall. “It’ll grow back thicker.”
She cut it herself on the porch with kitchen scissors, newspaper spread underneath, and swept the hair into a dustpan.
That night, when everyone was asleep, Julia wheeled herself to the porch. She found her braid in the trash, held around the middle with a rubber band from the pharmacy. She washed it in a basin, dried it, wrapped it in an old waffle-weave towel, and pushed the bundle down beneath the worn-out clothes at the bottom of her grandmother’s trunk in the shed.
She suspected nothing then. She was thirty-two, and it was her hair.
On the evening of Pearl’s visit, the house felt like the air before a thunderstorm. Lydia banged the dishes louder than usual and talked to herself so that everyone could hear.
“Fool that I am, letting her into the yard. Wanders around whispering, waving those hands. Scares people so they’ll give her something. Honey, meat, whatever she can carry.”
She stopped at the sink with a plate in her hands and looked out at the dark yard.
“Thirty years I’ve held this place together,” she said to the window. “Since his father died. Nobody handed me a thing. And nobody is going to take it away from me now.”
Derek ate silently, bent over his plate. He was thirty-six, broad-boned and fair, with a sunburned neck. At twenty-three, Julia had thought he was the best-looking man in the valley. He was still handsome, yet something in his face had blurred over the years, like a photograph left too long in the light.
“Derek.”
“Mm?”
“Did you hear what she said to me?”
“I was with the cattle.”
“Didn’t your mother tell you?”
His spoon stopped for a second. Then it moved again.
“She told me.”
“What do you think?”
“I think that old woman has lost her mind and she’s getting people worked up,” he said to his plate. “You saw specialists. You think she knows more than they do?”
“The specialists didn’t find anything.”
“Exactly. Because there’s nothing there to find. Julie, please don’t start. I’m worn out.”
He finished eating, carried his plate to the sink, and went out to smoke on the porch.
Julia did not sleep. She lay in the low bed by the window, the one with boards beneath the mattress, watching the apple tree’s shadows move across the ceiling.
Somebody’s keeping you drugged.
A hundred times she told herself it was nonsense. Pearl was a good woman, but strange. She saw curses and ill wishes in everything. That came from living alone beyond the river.
A hundred times Julia came back to it. There was one memory she could not get past.
May of the previous year.
Lydia had gone to Spokane for cataract surgery. Derek had driven her and stayed at his cousin’s house because his mother could not be left alone afterward. They were away for two weeks.
Julia stayed home with Sam. Her neighbor, Anna, came every day, bringing bread, helping her bathe, helping her move from the bed to the chair.
On the third or fourth day, Julia’s headache stopped. She noticed only when she realized she was reading aloud to Sam without losing her place.
On the sixth day she woke and felt the blanket against her feet.
On the eighth she was sitting in bed, both hands gripping the headboard, when she pulled one leg beneath her. She had not lifted it with her hands. The leg itself had moved.
She sat very still afterward, afraid to do anything else. Then she cried and told no one.
On the tenth day she stood, holding on to the windowsill, shaking all over. Eight seconds, perhaps ten. She looked out of the window from a height she had not seen in more than a year, and that made her dizzier than any sickness had.
She thought it was a miracle. Prayer, perhaps, or summer, or her body finally finding a way to fight back. She planned a surprise: when they returned, she would meet them standing in the doorway.
They came home on Saturday. Lydia walked in wearing dark glasses, set down her bag, and said, “Well? Run poor Anna ragged? Come on, I’ll give you your drops. I bet you haven’t taken a thing the whole time.”
Julia drank them. There was no surprise.
Within three days, her legs felt foreign again. Within a week, she could no longer draw a leg beneath her.
She decided the miracle had ended. The illness had retreated and come back. Things like that happened.
It was the bitterest summer of the three.
Now, in the dark, she went through those two weeks day by day, like counting beads on a rosary. Anna had given her no drops. Anna did not even know about them.
Lydia had taken the bottle away in her bag. Julia remembered that clearly because she had asked, “What about me?”
“You’ll manage,” Lydia had said. “There’s only two weeks’ worth left anyway. I’ll make a fresh batch when I get back.”
Two weeks without the drops, and Julia had stood. Three days with them, and she had lost her legs again.
She lay listening to her pounding heart. If this was true, the illness was no illness at all. The people asleep beyond her wall had been bringing her that cup for three years…
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