Barbara Kingsolver - Animal Dreams

“That’s me? Are you sure?”

She took the stack and shuffled through it like a card trick. She produced another photo. “There’s Hallie. You didn’t look a thing alike when you were born.” To her the eyes were commonplace, not a feature to connect us, but they were the only feature I could see. To me, we looked identical.

I held the two photographs up to the light, mystified. The eyes were unearthly. We were two babies not of this world. Just like every other one in the stack of photos; two more babies of Grace. He was doing exactly the opposite of setting himself apart. He was proving we belonged here, were as pure as anybody in Grace. Both sides. Our mother’s name was Althea. Her family despised him.

“We’re puro ,” I said out loud. And then I dropped the photographs because I heard the broken-glass pop of the flash and went blind. I heard myself make an odd little whimper.

Then Uda appeared in my field of vision, moving away. “Codi, hon, I’m going on downstairs and beat the rugs or something. I’ll try not to scare up too much dust.”

“Hallie, I’m going to die.”

“I’m Codi.”

“I’m dying.”

“Well, I know. We all are, more or less.” After a lifetime on the emotional austerity plan, my father and I were caving in to melodrama. When I put my hand on his hand it lay dead on the sheet. It was the diagnosis that killed him. Sometimes that’s how it happens.

“Where is Hallie?”

“Please don’t ask me that again. We don’t know where she is. Don’t worry about her right now, okay? We can’t do anything.”

He looked at me accusingly. “You shouldn’t have stood on the slide. I defended you on principle, but it was dangerous.”

How do people live with loved ones after their minds have fallen into anarchy? I rejected his ruined monologues every day, still expecting order to emerge victorious in Doc Homer’s universe. I can remember once seeing a monument somewhere in the desert north of Tucson, commemorating a dedicated but ill-informed platoon of men who died in a Civil War battle six months after Lee had surrendered at Appomattox. That’s exactly who I was-a soldier of the lost cause, still rooting for my father’s recovery. Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

He’d gone off the Tacrine, his experimental drug; the doctors in Tucson found his liver was wrecked from it. Now his mind scuttled around like a crab, heading always for the dark corners. People with this disease can linger on for six or seven years, I’d read, and on average they do. But Doc Homer wouldn’t.

“Do you want something to eat? Uda brought over this thing made out of crackers and walnuts and apples. It looks like one of your concoctions.”

“No, thank you.”

His bedroom was the largest upstairs room, with dark green walls and a high white ceiling and dormer windows across the west side. As children, Hallie and I rarely came into this room; it held an aura of importance and secrecy, the two things that most attract and frighten children. But for two days now I’d been taking care of Doc Homer here, and when I stopped to notice, I found myself the most commanding presence in the room. I felt long-legged and entitled, and strode around in my boots, adjusting curtains and moving furniture to suit myself. I’d tried to close the blinds, but he wanted them open. He insisted on the light, so I let it be.

I’d been keeping a restless vigil by his bed throughout the late afternoon, watching for signs of a lucid moment. I’d about decided it wasn’t coming. I pulled my chair closer and squeezed his hand hard in an effort to make him pay attention. “Pop, I want to talk to you about Mother.”

“Her kidneys were weak, and we knew it was a possibility. She had already had one episode of renal failure with the first pregnancy. She knew the risk.”

I didn’t really try to absorb this information. “Her name was Althea. How was she related to Doña Althea?”

“No relation.” The answer, quick and firm.

“What relation? I know she came from here. I found some things in the attic. What was she, a great-niece?”

“What things in the attic?”

“Cousin?” I crossed my arms like the obstinate child I was.

No answer.

“Granddaughter?”

His face changed. “ Malcriado.”

“Doña Althea’s family didn’t want you to marry her, right?”

He let out a short, bitter little laugh unlike any sound I’d ever heard him make. “We were Nolinas .” Just the way he said it told me plenty.

“And you married her anyway. You eloped.” I leaned forward and touched his forehead, something I’d never done. It felt cool and thin-skinned, like a vegetable. “That’s so romantic. Don’t you know that’s what all of us would like to think our parents did? You didn’t have to hide something like that from us.”

“You understand nothing.” He seemed very lucid. At times I suspected him of feigning his confusion, or at least using it to his advantage.

“That’s probably true,” I said, withdrawing my hand.

“We were a bad family. Try to understand. We learned it in school along with the multiplication tables and the fact that beasts have no souls. I could accept the verdict, or I could prove it wrong.”

“You did that. You proved it wrong.”

In the slanted afternoon light his eyes were a cloudy blue and his skin was translucent. He looked up at the ceiling and I had a disturbing view of his eyes in profile. “I proved nothing,” he said. “I became a man with no history. No guardian angels. I turned out to be a brute beast after all. I didn’t redeem my family, I buried it and then I built my grand house on top of the grave. I changed my name.”

“You still have plenty of guardian angels.”

“I don’t think anybody in this town remembers that I’m a Nolina.”

“No, you’re wrong about that, they do remember. I think people are sorry. And they love you. Look at your refrigerator.”

He gave me an odd, embittered look. How could he not know this was true? “Refrigerators don’t preserve love,” he said.

“The hell they don’t. Yours does. The women in this town bake you casseroles and pies like the world was going to end.”

He made a slight sound by breathing out of his nose. He seemed strangely like a child.

“They probably can’t forgive themselves for the past,” I said. “Mother died before they could get everything straightened out. And then you kind of took your phone off the hook, emotionwise.”

He looked away from me again. “We aren’t from here, we came from the outside. That is our myth and every person in Grace believes it, because they want to. They don’t want to see a Nolina when they look at me. They want a man they can trust with their children’s ear infections. And I am that man. If you change the present enough, history will bend to accommodate it.”

“No. I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about that. What’s true is true, no matter how many ways you deny it.”

He closed his eyes for a while. I’d never seen him frail or impaired. All the time I’d been his daughter, he’d never been sick.

“How long are you going to stay in bed?” I asked softly, in case he was falling asleep.

“I’m exhausted.”

“I know. But after you rest, you might want to get up for a while. I can warm up some soup.”

He didn’t open his eyes. “Do you think Hallie is coming back?”

“I don’t know what to think. We have to think yes, don’t we?”

“You’re the advocate of ordained truth. Are you telling me now that we can will Hallie back to safety?”