That was their advice to me about everything these days. Keep talking. Keep asking. Keep at it. Do it anyway, all of it, no matter if it scared you. Whatever you could find out, find out. When I was younger I believed that the stories I didn’t want to remember could be pushed so far down inside me that they would stay there forever. But I knew now that I had been wrong.
The memory of Asa kept coming back to me, the day we broke up. The way he stood there, the way he kept shaking his head. It was the day after the night that something had happened between my mother and Asa. Had she told him to break up with me? No, that wouldn’t be possible. He was a grown man, nineteen years old, with a full-time job driving truck. Sometimes I tried to convince myself that they hadn’t argued at all. That they had just been sitting at the table chatting, waiting for me to return home. But that wasn’t the case. The way Asa brushed past me when I got home, the way my mother wouldn’t meet my eyes, the way the next day everything fell apart. Something had happened. But no one would talk to me about it.
It was after that day that my mother must have set the college plan in motion.
Reckon your losses.
That was what the bartender told me to do, when I told him about Asa. How he had helped me find my earring, how he loved The Velveteen Rabbit, how his father, Eli, used to read it to him. How Eli had come driving through the woods to retrieve his son on the day that he broke up with me, the day that Asa’s car wouldn’t start, how he had put his hand on Asa’s shoulder and guided him into the truck and how the curtain that Tamar was watching behind had dropped back down over the window. How I had not spoken to Asa again, much as I wanted to, and not to his father either, even after Asa died in Afghanistan.
The bartender listened in silence.
“It comes back to me,” I said. “I keep seeing the two of them. That day. I keep hearing my voice.”
“You haven’t talked to his father since?”
“No. At this point it’s too late. Nothing can be done.”
My voice wanted to speak in exclamation marks??—! ! !—but I would not let it. Nothing can be done! Nothing can be done! scrolled across the bottom of my brain.
“Something can always be done,” the bartender said.
Around and around and around the wineglass went the towel. He had been polishing that wineglass for ten minutes. Twenty minutes. A lifetime. Who was the bartender to tell me what to do? He had never known Asa and he didn’t know Eli and he could give me no advice because this was not his situation to deal with. Protests rose up inside me but behind them was Eli, guiding his son into the truck on that awful day. Behind them was that old velveteen rabbit, loved and abandoned. Behind them was my mother, looking up from her Neil Diamond album and crying. Behind them was Blue Mountain at the museum, cross-legged on the floor with the other children, their faces turned up like cups. The skinless walked among us.
“What would you do?” I said.
“I’m not a word person like you. I’d carve something out of wood, probably. A talisman of some kind.”
“Like what?”
He shrugged. “Something that felt right.” He reached up and put the wineglass in its overhead rack, sliding it into place with both hands. It gleamed and sparkled and shone. Bright and clear, unlike the fairy lights at the cabin, glimmering in their shadowy ways.
“I used to make stories,” I said. “Stories were my talismans. But I can’t do that right now. If I wrote about everything that’s happening right now, with my mother, with the past and the present, she would be trapped forever in those words. A bug in amber. And then I’d have to live forever with her like that.”
He put his hands on mine. They were warm. They were always warm.
“We all have to live forever with the things we’ve done,” he said. “We all have to reckon with our losses.”
* * *
“Adirondack Mountains That Could Also Be Children’s Names for twelve hundred, please,” Brown said, and I slammed my hand down on the table. We were playing Jeopardy! and I was far in the lead.
“What is Blue Mountain?” I said.
“What is a terrible answer?” Brown said. “You’re slipping, Winter. If you and your boyfriend ever choose to name your future child after an Adirondack mountain, promise us you’ll do far better than Blue.”
“I agree,” Sunshine said. “Choose your mountain carefully. Not Bald. Not Haystack. Not Whiteface. Geez, especially not Whiteface.”
“Or Dix,” Brown said. “That would ruin your kid’s life. Think about it.”
“I’ve got a worse one,” Sunshine said. “Nippletop. Who in God’s name would name a mountain Nippletop, let alone a child?”
“Remember your nippletops?” Brown said. “They were the nippletops of the century.”
“They were pretty awesome, weren’t they?”
We all made prayer hands and bowed our heads in the direction of Sunshine’s sinewed chest. She had decided to go flat in the wake of her surgery.
“There are some good names in the high peaks,” I said. “Like Marshall. Or Phelps. Or Cliff. Esther. McKenzie.”
“What about Grace?” Sunshine said. “I like Grace.”
“Grace is a good name,” Brown said. “Can’t go wrong with Grace.”
“It’s settled then. Grace can come for sleepovers when Winter and the boyfriend get sick of being parents. We’ll make her cinnamon rolls for breakfast.”
“With extra frosting because Winter won’t be around to stop us.”
“We’ll play Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders with her. You know damn well Winter and the boyfriend won’t.”
They were off and running, configuring out loud how they could put a toddler bed into the corner of the study, next to the window. How they would have to move the cleaning supplies to a high shelf during the toddler years. How Winter and the boyfriend could list them on school emergency forms so they could pick her up if she had a fever. How they would be Grace’s cool aunt and uncle, which meant that Grace would, in a way, love them more than she would love Winter and the boyfriend. Maybe they should start collecting stuffed animals and picture books for Gracie now. What about a college fund? You were supposed to start those things early, right? Even fifty dollars a month would be a help to Gracie eighteen years from now.
“She’s already gone from Grace to Gracie?” I said, and they looked at me patiently.
“Of course she’s Gracie,” Brown said, and Sunshine nodded. “You can’t call a little baby Grace.”
There was a time, with Sunshine and Brown, a year after the second diagnosis and the second surgery, when they were hell-bent on adoption. The same conversations, about where the baby would sleep and what if there were more than one baby, sibling adoption maybe, or twins, two for one, and was Old Forge Elementary a good school, and what if their kiddo or kiddos—they had already progressed to “kiddo or kiddos”—were bullied on the school bus. Should they go straight to the principal or should they begin with the bus driver? Or maybe go straight to the bully, circumvent the authorities entirely? All that talk stopped after Sunshine’s third diagnosis, when they were told that people with certain recurrent health conditions were not adoption-eligible.