While The Shining-esque visitations hadn’t been enough to make my parents take me to a shrink, an elderly American Indian celestial being showing up to tell me creation stories had. When I’d mentioned Grandmother over breakfast, Mom immediately left the kitchen to call Dad. It was obvious I’d done something wrong—I just didn’t know what until a week later, when Mom got home from her meet-and-greet with a child psychologist and had her first talk with me.
“It’s only natural to wonder about your heritage, honey,” she’d said, voice shaking. It sounded like a line from one of the You Were a Special Gift books she read to me as a toddler, in lieu of the more devastating “You’re adopted” speech some other kids I knew got later. “It’s okay to explore your identity.”
“My eyes were open,” I told her then. “I wasn’t dreaming. Grandmother’s real.”
I couldn’t convince Mom or Dad or Dr. Langdon, but I still knew: Grandmother was real. And she may have never admitted to being God, but I knew she was something, or a part of something, sublime.
“Fine,” I say, “the Great Spirit, the Above Old Man, the Earth Maker, or Holitopa Ishki, or whatever exactly you are or call yourself—just answer the question. Are you going to leave me now that I’m an adult or . . . whatever it is I am?”
Grandmother’s mouth tightens. She stands, and my heart starts to pound—she’s never stood before, in all the dozens of nights she’s come to me. She crosses the room, perches on the edge of my bed, and takes my hands in hers. Her skin is impossibly soft, like velvet, like powdered sediments or antique silk.
“This,” she says, “may be the last time you’ll see me, Natalie. But I’ll always be with you.”
I blink back tears and shake my head. My oldest friend in the world, someone who doesn’t exist according to all the experts, who is only and fully mine. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise. I’m leaving for Brown in three months. Soon, that rocking chair, this bedroom, the rolling blue hills of Kentucky will all be things of the past. Did I really think she’d come with me? Still, I hear myself ask her, “Why?”
She smooths my hair back from my forehead, the same way Mom always does. “Lie down, girl. I’m going to tell you one last story, and I want you to listen well. It’s important.”
“It’s always important.”
“It is always important.” She returns to the rocking chair, stopping to scratch behind Gus’s ear when he lets out an unconscious whimper. She sits and clears her throat. “This is the story of the beginning of the world, and the woman who fell from the sky.”
“I’ve heard that one before,” I remind her. “Actually, I’m pretty sure it was the first story you ever told me.”
She nods. “It was the first, and so it’ll be the last, because now you’ve learned to listen.”
Learn to listen, listen with your bones, let the story fill you. Things she’s always saying. Honestly, I have next to no clue what she’s talking about, partly because I only ever see her in the middle of the night when my brain’s full of fog, and partly because her voice is the phonic equivalent of a music box playing “Clair de Lune,” so soothing that the words get lost in the blanket of the sound. I lie back and close my eyes, letting that voice wash over me now.
“There was an old world that came before ours,” she begins, “a world that had never before seen death. And in that world there was a young woman who was very strong and very strange. The woman’s father was the first person to die in the world, and even after he did, she would speak with his spirit often. Death had opened her father’s eyes to all sorts of secrets the woman could not yet see, and because of this, his spirit told her to marry a stranger in a distant land whom he had chosen for her. So against her mother’s wishes, the young woman trusted her father’s spirit and journeyed to that distant land and presented herself to the stranger. This man was a powerful sorcerer, and he received the woman’s marriage proposal skeptically, since she was still very young and he would need a wife with strength and resolve. He decided that he would give her three tests, and if she should pass, then he would marry her.
“First, he took her into his lodge and gave her corn. ‘Grind this corn,’ he told her. And she took it and barely boiled it, and though there were many mounds of it, she ground it against the stone very quickly, and the sorcerer was amazed.
“For the second test, he ordered her to take off her clothing and to cook the corn over the fire. As she did, it popped and splattered on her, the mush burning her skin where it landed, but she didn’t flinch. She stood, unmoving, as the corn burned her until the mush was finished.