“Her father called to the guide who had brought the crying woman there and begged that he return her at once to the land of the living. And so the guide carried her back up to the grave tree on a board, where she lay like one dead, and he sang as her father had said, and the tribe heard the song and came to the tree where the man was buried. But though they saw the board and heard the singing voice, the people could not see the girl lying beneath the tree.”
I waited for a long time, though by then, I was fifteen and knew one of Grandmother’s endings when I heard one. “That’s it?” I said finally.
“That’s it,” she told me.
I sat in bed, turning the story over in my mind, trying to make sense of it. Several times I thought I’d caught the meaning, but then it would slip away again. “Sometimes,” I told her, “when you tell these stories, I feel them.”
“How so?” she asked, narrowing her dark eyes.
“Like, I almost remember them. Like they happened to me. Like they’re more real than my actual life, only I can’t quite pin them down. Does that make any sense?”
“No,” she said bluntly. “But I know what you mean. I feel that too.”
“The world doesn’t feel right,” I said, yawning. Sleep was overtaking me, and my mind began to chatter half-formed thoughts, things I couldn’t fully understand.
“We’re hostages, Natalie,” Grandmother said softly.
“Hostages?”
“We’re living on our own land, but it’ll never be ours again. We answer to a government that doesn’t acknowledge that we’re many nations—nations they bought from people who had no right to the land in the first place. We’re surrounded by people who forget we exist except when they read about our downfall in their history books, as if we aren’t still here, occupied, waiting for an ending that, after five hundred years, we know will never come. Trying to learn how to live in and belong to two worlds at once. There’s a separation between us and everything around us. We can’t get close enough to it, no matter how hard we try. You and I, we feel that distance every moment of every day. In a way, we’re ghosts already. These stories are the thread that connects us to the world that came before us, a world we’ll never see but always dream about.”
“Well, that’s a cheery outlook.”
She shrugged. “Sometimes the most beautiful moments in our lives are things that hurt badly at the time. We only see them for what they really were when we stand at the very end and look back.”
“You’re particularly cryptic tonight,” I said.
“I feel particularly old tonight, Natalie. Age makes one think.”
“About?”
After a long pause, she said, “Regret.”
I watched her eyes glaze over in thought. “Grandmother?”
“Hmm?”
“Do you know my mother?” I asked. “My biological one, I mean.”
“Of course,” she said. “I know everyone you know, and many people you don’t.”
I steeled myself before asking, “Do you know . . . why?”
Grandmother fixed her eyes on me and rubbed at her chin. “Why she left you?”
I nodded.
“I understand her decision as well as she does, but these things are rarely simple.”
“She was young.”
Grandmother nodded. “And poor.”
“And unhappy.”
“Very,” Grandmother said.
“Will I ever meet her?” I asked. “Does she think about me?”
“She thinks about you every day,” Grandmother assured me. “And someday, you may very well meet her.”
“But you can’t say for sure?”
Grandmother hesitated, then shook her head. “The future’s rarely certain, Natalie. All we ever have is the present.”
But my present might already be over. He could be trapped in my past.
Beau doesn’t show up for dinner. My calls don’t reach him, and he doesn’t come to take me to the studio either, so I lie in bed and worry. To make matters worse, Joyce Kincaid just sent me a picture of Matt in his hospital bed, and, for one millisecond, I think she’s telling me he’s awake until I see her caption: Thought you might miss seeing his face.
I don’t. Maybe I should, but there’s nothing comforting to me about Matt’s pale skin or the tubes in his nose or the bruising along his temple. Every time I close my eyes, the image resurges until, despite my fatigue, I get out of bed and pace.
I hate driving at night, probably because of both my nightmares and my steadfast conviction that a murderer’s hiding in the backseat, but I grit my teeth and decide to drive to NKU anyway.
I navigate my way through the unlit building to our studio and force myself to stretch quickly, straining my mind for the sounds of Beau’s fingers settling against the piano keys. He’s here. I know he’s here. I can almost feel him. I close my eyes and try to catch his smell in the air, the twang of his voice, the line of his shoulders.
But I can’t. He’s here, but we’re separated by worlds, and it feels so wrong—I’m so terrified it could be permanent—I can’t take being here any longer, and I head home, heart thumping like a jackhammer and breaths coming spastically all the way there.
When I tell Alice in Thursday’s session about Beau’s disappearance, all I can get out of her is one of her infuriating hmms.
“Hmm what?” I press.