Part 6
Anna Parker worked at the post office in Millbridge and lived three houses away. She had one quality people in Cedar Fork found dull: she never repeated what she was told.
On Sunday she came with fresh bread and green onions from her garden. Sitting beside the wheelchair, she began talking about her niece, Chloe, who had been accepted into a college program in Missoula.
“Anna,” Julia said. “Would you close the door?”
“Draft bothering you?”
“Close it and sit down.”
Anna looked at her, then closed it.
Julia told her everything: Pearl’s words, the drops she was no longer swallowing, the two weeks in May, the cookie tin, the hearing set for September 30.
Anna did not interrupt. Her face grew steadily more still.
When Julia finished, the room was very quiet.
“You don’t believe me.”
Anna rose, went to the door, opened it a little, and looked into the hallway. She closed it again, returned, and crouched in front of the chair.
“Last May, you were standing by the window.”
Julia flinched.
“You saw?”
“I came with bread. You were standing there looking at the mountain. I almost called out. Then I thought I’d startle you, so I left. They came home, and you were back in the chair. I decided I must have imagined it. I’ve spent a year wishing I’d asked.”
She took Julia’s hands.
“What do we need to do?”
They counted their money. Julia had none.
Her disability benefits had been approved during the second year of the illness. Lydia kept the bank card. Once a month she announced what the money had gone toward: incontinence supplies, medicine, electricity, groceries.
“I’ve got three hundred,” Anna said. “That’ll get us to payday.”
“I won’t take it. You’ve got Chloe in college.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“I have cheese.”
At the far end of the cellar, behind the barrels, five wheels lay on a low shelf Lydia never checked because she considered the things there junk. Julia had made them during her last summer on her feet. Three she had put away for long aging. The other two she had set beside them just to see what time would do.
They were three years old.
“Cheese?” Anna said.
“Three-year-old cheese. Nobody else in this valley has it. Nobody can afford to keep it that long.”
Julia explained how to photograph the cut face so that the white crystals showed, the tiny flecks that formed as the cheese aged. The stamped date had to be in the picture too.
“Call Matt, the chef who used to buy from me. His number’s on the last page of the ledger.”
Matt Collins called the next day. He was the sort of man who adopted a businesslike tone immediately, to keep from paying too much.
“Julia, hello. Good to hear you’re still with us. Listen, I saw the pictures. Looks interesting, but everybody’s selling cheese this time of year. I’ll take all five. Eight hundred.”
“Not for eight hundred.”
“Where else are you going to sell them? They’ve been sitting there three years. Probably dried out by now.”
“They haven’t dried out. They’re three years old, made from upper-meadow milk. You tasted cheese like this once, at my place. You won’t find it in Pine Creek. You won’t find it in Spokane. You’ll put that age on your menu, and one wheel will bring back half of what you pay me.”
Matt was quiet.
“Fourteen hundred for the five.”
“You pick them up yourself. Tomorrow, eight in the morning, at the lower bridge. At the bridge, not the house.”
“Why the bridge?”
“Two thousand, and that’s where we’re meeting,” Julia said.
He came.
Anna carried the wheels out at night in two sacks while Julia lay listening for every sound in the yard. In the morning Anna returned with the money and half of one wheel, which Matt had cut off and given back.
“For the woman who made it,” he had said. “Let her taste what she did.”
The cheese was yellow, nearly amber, crumbly, with those minute crystals crunching on her tongue. It was the cheese she had wanted to make all her life.
She ate a small piece and saved the rest for Sam. The two thousand dollars she wrapped in a scrap of cloth and hid beneath her mattress.
Then they made a plan.
On Thursday Lydia and Derek were going to Millbridge: first the bank, then the office where their papers would be notarized, then the feed store. The trip took all day.
They discussed it in front of Julia, as they discussed everything. A wheelchair had long since stopped counting as a person whose presence required a lowered voice.
Sam would be taken to his aunt’s in Pine Creek that morning. Julia would have seven hours or so.
“Cal can drive you,” Anna said. “He’s taking the four-wheel-drive into Missoula for a part anyway. But you understand there’s no going back? If you leave and this doesn’t work, they’ll bring you home and never let you out of bed again.”
“I understand.”
Julia looked through the window at the apple tree she had sat beneath for three summers.
“Anna, I’ll die in this house either way. It would just take a little longer.”
On Thursday she woke before daylight. The car left at seven. She lay listening to doors slam, Lydia calling something about a bag, then the engine fading on the rise beyond the village.
She got up.
Into a coated-canvas tote she put the ledger, Sam’s phone, her identification, the hospital records from her nightstand, and the cloth bundle of money.
Then she walked to the shed, lifted the lid of her grandmother’s trunk, and pulled the towel-wrapped bundle from the bottom.
The braid lay as it had for nearly a year, dark, held in the middle by the pharmacy rubber band. Looking at it, Julia felt as though she were holding someone who had been waiting all that time in the dark.
Cal brought the vehicle to the narrow passage at seven-thirty. He said nothing as he helped her in, and almost nothing for the rest of the drive. At the pass he asked if she was cold and put his jacket over her knees.
They drove for nearly three hours.
Julia could not stop looking out. She had not seen the valley beyond the village in years. Far below, the Alder River ran cloudy turquoise, broken by white water. Vacation lodges stood along its banks where there had been none before. Roadside stands sold honey; signs advertised hot-spring spas.
Above it all rose the enormous, untroubled mountains.
In Missoula, Cal drove her to the hospital and helped her reach the doors. She walked slowly, shuffling, one hand tight around his elbow, the other on a cane Anna had found in the shed.
She was walking on her own feet. It seemed impossible that anyone passing could fail to see what a miracle this was. They saw nothing. They kept going.
The neurologist was Dr. Ethan Shaw, a young man with closely cropped hair. A lidded glass jar of tea stood on his desk. Whenever Julia remembered that day, she saw the jar.
He listened without interrupting, then examined her for forty minutes. He used a reflex hammer and a pin, asked her to squeeze and release, pull toward him and push away. He checked her eyes and took her blood pressure lying down and standing.
“All right,” he said at last. “Your reflexes are present. You have feeling across both feet. There’s muscle loss, but not the pattern I’d expect from the diagnosis in these records. What I see is years of disuse. Weak muscles, shortened tissues, poor coordination. Getting that back will take months of work.”
He tapped the old discharge papers.
“There’s something else. Your skin and mouth are dry, and your pupils react sluggishly. Certain drugs can cause that with repeated exposure. Some of the numbness you had may have come from the drug, and some from years of sitting still with poor circulation. A standard workup wouldn’t look for something like this unless someone asked. Nobody asked.”
“Do you believe me?”
He finished the tea in his jar.
“I believe what I’m seeing. But today’s blood tests may tell us very little about what happened earlier. It’s been about a month since you stopped. Some substances clear much sooner than that.”
“What about hair?”
He looked up.
“What hair?”
Julia took the bundle from her bag and set it on the desk.
“My braid. They cut it off last fall. It’s been in a trunk ever since. Someone told me hair can remember what a person drank.”
Dr. Shaw opened the towel and studied it. Then he pulled a sheet of paper toward him and began writing quickly.
“You need more than a neurologist. You need an attorney, law enforcement, and a laboratory that can test sections of hair for the particular substances involved. A specialist lab, perhaps in Seattle.”
He looked back at the braid.
“Scalp hair grows roughly three-eighths of an inch a month, though it varies. If the strands are kept aligned, testing along their length can sometimes show a pattern of exposure over time. It won’t give us an exact calendar. But your braid may be another kind of diary. One you didn’t write with your hand…”
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