Barbara Kingsolver - Animal Dreams

When we passed it I saw that it wasn’t a convertible after all; the top had been sheared off, and lay on the other side of the road. An are of glass and chrome crossed the highway like a glittering river littered with flotsam and jetsam: a pair of sunglasses, a bright vinyl bag, a paperback book. At the trail’s end was the pile of steel. I’d never seen such a badly wrecked car.

“Doesn’t look like anybody walked away from that one,” Loyd said.

I thought of Hallie walking out of the library that time, years ago, then remembering her sunglasses and turning back just before the marble façade fell down. She could just as well have died then. It made no difference now.

The luckiest person alive.

The ambulance pulled out right behind us, its warning lights alternating like crazy winking eyes. We quickly left it behind, though, and we weren’t speeding by any means. Loyd saw me watching the ambulance and glanced up at the rear-view mirror. “They’re not in much of a rush, are they?”

Just then, while we watched, the lights stopped flashing. I understood that I had just seen someone die. No reason to hurry anymore. My limbs flooded with despair and I didn’t see how I was going to survive. I kept imagining what that little white car must have looked like half an hour ago, and the driver, some young woman listening to the radio, checking her hair in the mirror, preoccupied with this afternoon or tonight or whatever small errand had taken her out.

“Why does a person even get up in the morning?” I asked Loyd. “You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you’ll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down 1-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can’t stand it.”

“Hallie knew exactly what she was doing. There wasn’t anything stupid about her life.”

I practically shouted at Loyd, “I’m not crying about Hallie right now. I’m crying about that person that just died in the ambulance.”

He was quiet.

“Loyd, I don’t know what I’m going to do.” I was afraid the muscles in my chest might tear themselves apart. I thought senselessly of Doc Homer’s discussion of liver tissue and heart tissue. As if it mattered what part of your body was the seat of emotion, all of it could be torn up, it was just flesh. Doc Homer didn’t even know about this yet. I’d called, and we talked, and it was clear he didn’t know what I was telling him. He talked about Hallie being kept after school. Maybe he never would understand, maybe his mind would just keep wandering down other happy trails. Loyd handed me his handkerchief and I tried to blow my nose.

“What would she want you to do?”

“She would be crying for a person in a damn ambulance that she didn’t even know. Not me.”

I saw lightning erupt in the dark clouds behind the Catalina Mountains. It was an impossible time of year for a lightning storm. I’d seen photographs of lightning frozen in its terrible splendor, ripping like a knife down the curtains of the sky. They say that to take those pictures you just open your camera on a dark night, in a storm, and if you’re lucky you get a wonderful picture. You have no control.

“Hallie isn’t dead,” I said. “This is a dream.” I laid my head back against the headrest and cried with my knucklebones against my mouth. Tears ran down to my collarbone and soaked my shirt and still I didn’t wake up.

Getting on the bus was the easiest thing in the world. I only took what I could carry. Emelina would send my trunk to Telluride.

I noticed the junkyard again on the way out of town. They should have had a sign there: Welcome to Grace. Farewell to Grace. Dead grass poked up through the rusted husks of big old cars that hunched on the ground like elephants, the great dying beasts of the African plain. It was early June, soon after the end of school. The land was matchstick-dry and I felt the same way, just that brittle, as if no amount of rain could saturate my outer layers and touch my core. I was a hard seed beyond germination. I would do fine in Telluride. Carlo had lined up a job for me as a model in a summer fine-arts school. I would sit still for solid hours while people tried for my skin tones.

Uda Dell and Mrs. Quintana, Doc’s assistant for twenty-one years, were going to take shifts with Doc Homer. His office was closed for good, and everybody now drove over to New Mexico to be healed. There were no thunderclaps when it happened; all this time we’d thought he was indispensable. Uda and Mrs. Quintana revered him. I couldn’t picture them feeding him, buttoning up his shirt, but I knew they would do those things. Somehow reverence can fashion itself into kindness, in a way that love sometimes can’t. When I went up there to tell him goodbye, he was eating a soft-boiled egg and said he couldn’t tarry, he was in a hurry to get to the hospital.

I bobbed along with the motion of the Greyhound bus, leaning with the curves. When I relaxed enough I could feel like a small chunk of rock in outer space, perceiving no gravitational pull from any direction: not from where I was going, nor where I had been. Not Carlo, not Loyd, not Doc Homer. Not Hallie, who did not exist.

“Where do you think people go when they die?” Loyd asked, the day before I left. He was on his way out to take a westbound into Tucson; the next day he would fetch home the Amtrak. We stood in my front door, unwilling to go in or out, like awkward beginners trying to end a date. Except it wasn’t a beginners’s conversation.

“Nowhere,” I said. “I think when people die they’re just dead.”

“Not heaven?”

I looked up at the sky. It looked quite empty. “No.”

“The Pueblo story is that everybody started out underground. People and animals, everything. And then the badger dug a hole and let everybody out. They climbed out the hole and from then on they lived on top of the ground. When they die they go back under.”

I thought of the kivas, the ladders, and the thousand mud walls of Santa Rosalia. I could hear the dry rattle of the corn dancers’ shell bells: the exact sound of locusts rising up from the grass. I understood that Loyd was one of the most blessed people I knew.

“I always try to think of it that way,” he said, after a minute. “He had a big adventure up here, and then went home.”

Leander, he would mean. My spleen started to ache when I thought of Hallie fertilizing the tropics. Thinking about how much she loved stupid banana trees and orchids. I said, “I have this idea that if I don’t stay here and cry for Hallie, then there’s no family to absorb the loss. Nobody that remembers.”

“And that’s what you want? For Hallie to be forgotten?”

I couldn’t have said what I meant. “No. I just don’t want to be the one that’s left behind to hurt this much. I want to be gone already. If you’re dead when somebody stabs you, you don’t feel it.”

“Leaving won’t make you dead. You’ll just be alive in a different place.”

“This place has Hallie in it. When I lived here, I was half her and half me.”

“Going away won’t change how you feel.”

“I won’t know that till I’m gone, will I?”

He picked up my hand and examined it as if it were a foreign object, which was just how it looked to me. He was wearing a green corduroy shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, and I felt I could look at that shirt for as long as Loyd might choose to stand in my door. There were all those small ridges, the greenness, the nap of the cloth. If I kept my focus minute enough I could remain in the world, knowledgeable and serene.

“Anyway you’re wrong,” he said. “There’s family here to absorb the loss.”

“Doc Homer, Loyd, he’s…I don’t think he understands she’s gone.”