But you know all this. I’m repeating myself, as always. While we’re young, Iris, right? Funny, I know you said that all the time, but I can’t hear how you said it. Well, we’re not young anymore, that’s for sure. But I made it. Still here, keeping it together. Mostly. I made it this far without you.
The other big news. A new woman in town, she’s a new professor at the Syc, was out walking in the dry wash out by the old lake where you used to fish—shoot, I don’t know if I ever told you that story. Not long after you died, a sinkhole opened up under it, and whoosh—it was gone overnight. Maybe I already told you. Anyway, the woman was walking in the wash, said she was looking for rocks to add to Stevie Prentiss’s pile. Oh, Stevie. You should see her now. Still as odd as she was as a kid, and for years she’s been gathering up stones and placing them inside and around the old lake. She moves them, changes the patterns, adds new circles and lines. It’s lovely, actually. Our own strange Spiral Jetty. Anyway, the professor! While we’re young, Iris! I’m not good with straight lines, buster, never have been.
The point of this is, the professor found bones. Wedged in a deep crack in the wash. They think it might be Jess Winters. I know you never knew her, but maybe you know anyway. That was a tough one when she never came home. I hired her out here, oh, about six months or so after you’d died. She and her mother Maud moved here alone, and Maud delivers our mail here, and I told her I was looking to hire someone part-time, so she sent Jess on over. Great kid. Great worker. Sharp, funny. Quirky, really. Struck me as a kind of old soul. Then all hell broke loose with Adam Newell, and Paul right in the middle of it, like he needed that to worry about on top of everything. I didn’t know Jess well, certainly not like Maud knew her. She was a lovely girl, but that wasn’t it. She loved the orchard, and the fact is, she reminded me of you. She was fascinated by the trees. She soaked up everything I told her—all those things you and I figured out as we spliced together our life out here. And then she was gone, too.
It’s hard to believe how long it’s been. Maud—every day, she still brings the mail. Neither rain nor sleet nor snow nor missing child. Jesus. Some days I can hardly stand to see her coming. She’s changed so much. So gray now, her back humped. We’ve all been waiting for this news. For any news. Something. I was over there tonight after Esther called me. Esther and I brought food. Sat with her. What else can we do? Rachel would have come, but she’s out of town. At this point, there’s nothing much to do but wait. The police are running tests. I haven’t had a chance to tell Paul yet. He was in bed by the time I got home.
After all this time, still no one knows what happened. I mean, we know what happened before, of course. I was at Thanksgiving dinner, and Rachel blasted the town with that letter. But the night she disappeared, he was in Flagstaff. He still lives up there, I guess. Haven’t seen him since. Rachel still doesn’t talk to him. I don’t know if Dani does. Rachel remarried, gosh, what, ten years ago now? Hugh’s a good guy. Town attorney. Ten years younger, good for her. But Dani, poor kid. I know I wasn’t sorry when she broke up with Paul. They were too serious, too young. But I didn’t think she’d fall apart quite the way she did. Got into Stanford and you better believe Rachel scraped together that tuition. Then she failed out, came home, worked odd jobs. She finished her degree a year ago, finally. Hallelujah, as Rachel said. She works out at the medical clinic now. A phlebotomist. She’s living in Esther’s guest house. Aside from Maud, I think it hit her the hardest.
So much for plans, eh, Beau? So much for dreams.
Do I need to speak? Maybe you can read my thoughts. Maybe I’ve breathed you in.
The truth is, Beau, I’m tired. I’m tired of running this place. Our place. There. I said it. Thinking about retiring. About what’s next. That’s the age I am now.
If Paul comes home for good, then great. He can take it over. If he decides not to, well, then we have a decision to make.
We. After all this time, I still do it. We have a son, we have a grandson, we own an orchard.
I have a decision to make.
I still have the acreage up in Payson. I still think about our plans: selling the orchard, the land, the house. Taking our profits and building our retirement home in the mountains. A house with pine beams and a big fat deck overlooking the lake and not a pecan tree in sight. Hiking, cooking, traveling, reading books, taking care of the grandkids. A perfect life. I’m sure it would have been, or pretty near to it. I don’t know. It’s easy to sentimentalize, to idealize you. You sure as heck weren’t perfect, buster, and neither am I. But somehow we were perfect together. Don’t you think?
Anyway, now I have to think about my life. I’ve outlived my husband and a seventeen-year-old girl and friends and too many young soldiers to count and god knows who else. You would think by now I would have a goddamn clue what I want. You’d think I’d have figured it out by now.
Do you know what’s in my heart, Beau? What I don’t tell you? Can you see inside of me?
Because I’ve been thinking. Thinking and thinking and thinking. And you know what I want to do? I want to go to college. Almost sixty, and I think it’s time for this old girl to learn a thing or two. About art, and philosophy, and literature, and the whole blooming universe, all that starrrr stuff. To get out of my body and into my mind for a while.
I wish you were here to tell me if I’m right. I wish I could hear your voice.
The Shaking Season
September–November 1991
The envelope, with her typed name and address in the center but the left corner blank, arrived on a Saturday in her mailbox in early September after school had started. Jess collected the mail after work as usual and almost missed it. There was never anything for her, except for those cards from California with her father’s phone number, which she stuck in her desk drawer.
Inside was a torn slip of paper folded in half. At the top were two words: “I can’t.” Beneath was an address and a date—Sept. 7, 1991—followed by the words “after midnight.” Adhered to the sheet with two strips of masking tape was a silver key.