[Deleted Scenes] 'It's nothing you did,' and, At the other end of it

There had been plenty of screaming and fighting before then, maybe years of it, but it certainly intensified in the preceding months before she awoke one morning to a silence that was at first a relief, then like a weather-beaten port in the storm, before it became a portent of all her days afterward. What could she remember of that first day without her mother? Not much. It hadn’t yet taken on any significance, and so passed with little acknowledgment that anything in the world might be out of place. That day was a school day and she walked it like any other school day, her bag slung over her shoulder by its strap and a pink-billed baseball cap angled on her head to keep out the sun.

She stared into the houses that she passed, their curtains drawn and the windows transparently opaque, and wondered as she always did what it was like to be on the other side. Not so much to live in these other houses, but to explore where their stairways might curve upward, or to walk into tiny rooms that were hidden away like secret compartments among the larger rooms. She wished that it would be proper to knock on these doors and ask the occupants for a look around. At times she would imagine these spaces to be unscarred and devoid of the markings of tenancy—furniture and dishware and clothing and books, etc.—and at other times her mind came to be wading into the flotsam of coagulating lives long lived and stuck away into basements and attics. Or at the back of long, disused hallways that couldn’t be said to lead anywhere at all anymore. And in all her imaginings she was always alone to make what she would of whatever she found: faded banisters worn by the climb and descent of hands, or a tiny dancer set free, for the first time in ages, from the wooden enclosure of her box.

These would have been her same thoughts on that first day, walking the same slate slabs that lined either side of the street and wearying quickly beneath the weight of her schoolwork. Of course she didn’t worry that her mother may be gone. Her mother had gone before and come back, a little humbled but no less furious, time and again, like a ball tethered to a paddle, and no less temperamental. But as the days moved forward and numbered one atop the other her father’s passing gaze in the kitchen over their breakfast, or his kisses goodnight when they stood together out in the hall after she’d brushed her teeth, communicated a kind of weariness and loss. As if Ana herself was the one who had left. He began to look at her as if he always had something to say but never the courage to say it.

The succeeding days were long, quiet ones in the aftermath of a hurricane when ships and docks are repaired of their broken and torn planks and sheets of metal, and are refitted with fresh hulls and new paint and reinforced struts. Her father was rebuilding something inside him that had been recently rebroken—and continuously rebroken for a long time. He took to standing alongside windows at odd times, morning and late evening, and appearing in the darkened living room during the night when she had gotten up for a glass of water. Was it his gray form at those dim hours that sometimes haunted her dreams, or was it herself that found it difficult to exit a room that felt both infinite and confined as she stared at a wall-bound nail that hung nothing? What was it that she was rebuilding inside herself? She never had a clue about what might’ve happened and how she should feel about it.

“Your mother’s a difficult woman,” her father said to her once. “She…she’s…I think don’t think she’s ever been very happy.”

Years later this would become the only description that Ana still retained of her mother. In adulthood, after the rejection of old photographs and the cut of familial ties, when she would no longer be able to recall even the woman’s hair color, this would seem the most apt thing to say of the person who partially raised her. But while he said it she could imagine her mother standing in the next room, silent and tight-lipped, brimming with fury. It made her want to retreat quickly, either to her room or to the sidewalk in front of their home, her mind falling upon a single object, one sentence within her favorite book or the action of a neighborly dog turning circles around a colony of dandelions, so she wouldn’t hear the fever pitch of her parents’ voices.

“I understand,” she’d said.

“I’m taking you out of school for awhile. You’ll live with your aunt and uncle and cousin. Just until…. And you’ll have to fly down there alone. I’m sorry.”

Did she cry then? In her memory she didn’t, though she must’ve been scared. He held her, she did remember that, and he said something about being bigger than he remembered, though she still felt quite small to be held that way. It was the first of a lot of goodbyes, her plane wouldn’t be until the end of the week, and she still had to pack. “It’s nothing you did,” he assured her, and his voice was just sweet enough to make it true.

…

At the other end of it she felt a little weather-beaten and demure, her skin the creamy color of an exotic coffee and her hair lightened to natural streaks in the illogical, obsessive attention of the sun. She walked bare-footed among black, fat scorpions with their almost-ineffectual sting and venom, and for awhile there was a hawk that had fallen from the sky whom she fed little pieces of cut up lizard to and held in a cage hooked at the end of the clothesline. And the clothes she came in became frayed and shrunk, herself grown more slender and angular, every part of her reaching outward as if to touch an unseen boundary. Her eyes a wall, her mouth an oasis, her palms and the soles of her feet openings for every extra-sensual admission: she knew herself as somebody different, began to move in strange ways that weren’t always apparent to her at first, the objects of her attention not always the ones she was looking directly at.

The message came for her to fly back on a day as cloudless as any other, except for a dark bank to the east fast approaching the jagged teeth of a range of mountains that would tear open its stomach and spill it far away from where she stood, gazing in the other direction, almost toward infinity. The gutted contents of her suitcase needed to be re-folded and re-inserted in the proper order (her mind was trying to recall how these same articles of clothing had looked in the light of her room) and the suitcase itself sutured by its zipper around its face. The message had mentioned nothing of her mother, mentioned nothing really at all, except that she would return to him, to meet him in the jostling expanse of an airline’s arrival gate. The message came with a one-way ticket that seemed too precious to send by mail.

Ana spent the day swimming again and again to the bottom of the spring where the water broke surface in a calm, imperceptible gush like the jets at the bottom of a fancy tub. She held herself under and opened her eyes to the stirred-up settling of silt that danced with her and traced the valleys of her probing fingers, a little like what it would be to glide freely between the Earth’s geologic layers. She felt the roots of herself and the roots of everything else running deeper than the spring’s secret geyser. In the claustrophobic mass of liquid all around her, her mind could only contain one thought in the single present moment, if she was anyone else she may have worried that she might drown. It stripped her down to everything that she actually was.

“You have grass on your lawn,” she’d said once to Geoff.

“Hmm?”

She’d pointed to the thick islands of scrub that she’d been warned away from as being homes to other (probably dangerous) creatures. There, the grass was as tall and thick as reeds, and could be plucked and held aloft in the air like an impossible wingspan. He’d followed the line of her arm, past the hinging bones of her wrist, to the point of her finger, and farther on to the island, which he’d looked upon unimpressed or disinterested or just not willing to comprehend. It was joke, didn’t he see? Though a broad kind of joke that didn’t require laughter. She’d meant it only as another way of saying goodbye.

Catalpa Ln.

Within the past week, Jack found he couldn’t stand the thought of walking through the thick fog that stood as a wall at the end of the street, couldn’t believe that there was any longer a side opposite to what he could see. He grew apprehensive when he thought about it, and that apprehension turned to fear. He might be lost within it. Five, maybe ten, feet in the fog became impenetrable, a wall of flat white, and each time previous when he’d ventured into that white, often herding his brother and sister in front of him, to school or to buy groceries, his mind remarked (calmly, even though his heart would race as the words began to form): So this is what it’s like to be struck blind.

The fog began farther uptown about six blocks past the higher end of Sonora Grade and created a giant ring either encompassing or cutting through three separate neighborhoods. Newspapers began to report on the phenomena and scientists were asked to hypostulate on its structure. It began as a haze building in ground fog and with tendrils of mist lacing a three-story wall in a tight knit. The wall of fog stood at an estimate of thirty feet high and twenty feet thick, and only as it became a thing of depth instead of water particulates floating through the air, did the ring begin to shrink toward its center and gradually—over a duration of a year and a half—encroach upon Jack’s street: Catalpa Ln.

And now he worried that there may no longer be a world outside of that thick mass, the fog retroactively (his mind could easily convince itself of a sentient knowledge and a willful act of bio-chemical sabotage that allowed the chemical bonds in all things—buildings, plants, animals, and even human beings—to break down long after the fog had passed, as if on a timer) erasing everything that should’ve been and replacing it with itself so that he might be doomed to wander a sightless landscape until the end of his days.

Jack Corbeau Page, Jr. (age 15)—known as ‘Corbeau’ only to his family and to his parents’ friends—lived at what he believed to be the very center of the fog’s circumference, what would be the last bastion if the fog continued to shrink. He woke up again that morning to his mother’s violent coughing, followed by a few sympathetic coughs of his father’s own. They had been sick for three months and twelve days by then, falling ill one after the other like dominoes over a period of several days, and were too weak to work or do household chores or to even totter the short distance from the bed to the bathroom. Jack had taken to caring for them, as well as his younger siblings, feeding them, helping them to the bathroom, and changing their bed sheets after depositing them in twin rockers brought up from the living room. His parents had a sizable sum in savings and Jack made trips to the bank carrying slips of paper scribbled in his father’s hand allowing him to withdraw a predetermined amount. But, lately, the account had run dry and the last bit of it wasn’t going to last after next week’s groceries.

He needed a job. He needed to make money.

Mr. Aalto—maybe equally apprehensive about traveling through the fog—had bought bag upon bag of potting soil and fertilizer and, building plywood walls and laying down a thick tarp over the tarpaper to create a large square bowl, turned the roof of his building into a small garden to grow and harvest tomatoes, peas, and squash. But he didn’t need anyone. Nor did old Mrs. Starbird, who morning after morning walked undaunted into the fog and returned a couple of hours later with bags of potatoes or oranges or a whole watermelon. The potatoes were sold ‘as is’, the watermelon divvied up into shrink-wrapped slices, but the oranges were squeezed to juice in an archaic-looking press that only produced a third-glass at a time. But she resisted his offers of working the juicer for her so that left only one last opportunity on his street: Cass Tinker of Tinker’s Toys.

Rumor might have it that Cass Tinker were dead if he wasn’t seen every Friday on his way to market in a suit, polished shoes, trimmed beard, slicked hair, and gas mask (maybe Jack wasn’t the only one convinced of the fog’s ulterior motives). He stood at five-foot-six but always seemed much taller if you happen to be coming from the other way. It was difficult for Jack to pinpoint what made Mr. Tinker so ‘huge’, though it might have to do with childhood memories of being towered over by the man as Jack, with mother usually, perused the shelves of toys in his shop and Mr. Tinker followed close behind remarking upon this or that toy’s unique qualities and limitless ‘imaginatory’ potential, always due to their existence as handmade objects. All of the toys Mr. Tinker sold were handmade, and all of them were handmade by him.

So Jack woke that morning, having decided the night before that he would bug Mr. Tinker for a job.