Animal Dreams

Those first few weeks are an unearthly season. From the outside you remain so ordinary, no one can tell from looking that you have experienced an earthquake of the soul. You've been torn asunder, invested with an ancient, incomprehensible magic. It's the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.

I'd written this to Hallie in the pages of a bound notebook that would never be torn out or mailed. These letters stayed with me. I told her: it feels like somebody's moved in. It's a shock. You find you're not the center of the universe, suddenly it's all flipped over, you have it in you to be a parent. You're not all that concerned any more with being someone's child. It helps you forgive things.

We reached the crest of the canyon where the white salt crust of the old alfalfa fields began. Dead for two decades, the earth was long and white and cracked, like a huge porcelain platter dropped from the heavens. But now the rabbitbrush was beginning to grow here too, topped with brushy gold flowers, growing like a renegade crop in the long, straight troughs of the old irrigation ditches.

A wind was picking up from the south, and Viola and I could smell rain. High storm clouds with full sails and a cargo of hail made their way in a hurry across the sky. Viola's hair blew around her face as she walked. I asked, "Did you know her kidneys had failed her once before, when she was pregnant with me?"

"Sure," Viola said. "She was real sick both times."

"But she went ahead and had Hallie anyway."

"You don't think about it that much. You just go on and have your kids."

I wanted to believe my mother had thought about it. That Hallie was her last considered act of love-an act with unforeseen consequences, some of them just now coming into flower in the soil of another country. I said, "I always knew I was up here that day. I can remember seeing the helicopter."

"You remember that?"

"I thought I did. But people told me I hadn't, so I'd about decided I'd made it up."

Viola took my hand. I could feel the soft flesh and the hard wedding band in her grip. "No, if you remember something, then it's true," she said. "In the long run, that's what you've got."

I knew the place when we came to it. We were right there already.

This is what I remember: Viola is holding my hand. We're at the edge of the field, far from other people. We stand looking out into the middle of that ocean of alfalfa. I can see my mother there, a small white bundle with nothing left, and I can see that it isn't a tragedy we're watching, really. Just a finished life. The helicopter is already in the air and it stays where it is, a clear round bubble with no destination, sending out circular waves of wind that beat down the alfalfa. People duck down, afraid, as if they're being visited by a plague or a god. Their hair is blowing. Then the helicopter tilts a little and the glass body catches the sun. For an instant it hangs above us, empty and bright, and then it rises like a soul.