Elizabeth Stamford

REMEMBER?

Most vividly, Rose remembers the dirt road through the woods: the ruts studded with tread marks, the rain slipping down the windshield and the dark bulk of dripping trees. She remembers how the tires jolted along those wet tracks, jolting into her stomach, and into her head when she looked out of the water-streaked window. She remembers the smell of dog hair and her mother's lemony perfume. She remembers puddles silvered by the car headlights, the high arch of fine dark pines and shadows passing over her body like waves.

"Don't change stations, Mom," Luke says, annoyed. He's fourteen and he's allowed to sit up front. His voice cracks ever so slightly when he speaks.

Mom takes her hand away from the dial and accelerates. They pass a sign that reads NO TRESPASSING. And, curled up in the back of the station wagon, Rose wonders what that means.


Sometimes now, years later Rose wakes up from disturbing dreams and she realizes that she has been driving again, through the night woods: Hurry! Hurry up Mom, we're going to be late for the movie. And Mom is squinting at the rain, into the matrix of branches up ahead. White pines flash by, their blistered trunks glowing in the headlights. Rose sees clusters of Indian paintbrush, bloody warrior thistle. They approach a place where the road teeters along the edge of a sheer rock face dropping into a deep ravine. Long wet grass slaps the underside of the car and spatters it with mud. The radio music continues to play, and Rose hums along to the weary twang of canned guitars. And then suddenly, the car jolts backward. Mom slams on the brakes, and there is a loud thud. The movement is so abrupt that Rose bounces off her seat and falls forward. The radio tune keeps on, and the night shapes outside grow speckled and fractured in the distorted brilliance of light and water. Mom's face is startlingly white in the darkness.

"A deer," she says, slowly and deliberately. She reaches out and grasps her son's shoulder. "Help me, Luke."

Rose's brother opens his mouth to speak, but only a strange choked noise comes out. With trembling hands, Mom undoes her seat belt and then she turns off the radio, so that there is silence except for the dashing rain. She turns to Rose. "Don't look. Just don't." Then, opening the door she says, "Come on Luke, come on, you've got to help me."

"Oh God, Mom," Luke's voice comes out in a whisper and Rose notices that he is breathing very quickly. She buries her head in her arms. Her mother has told her not to look, but she does, and she sees them, two rain-blurred figures at the edge of the ravine. They appear to rolling something; they heave and stumble. Rose hunches in the back of the station wagon, and now she hides her face until her mother says it's okay to look.


There is a family photograph somewhere, taken in the mid 1980s. The last one ever, before things fell apart. Rose aged six or seven, wears a skirt with a lace-hemmed slip hanging from underneath it. She has streaky blond hair and a blunt nose like her father's. Her father is a college professor who keeps his own hours in the summer. He is tall, moody and unshaven. Rose has heard people say he drinks too much, but she's not sure what that means. Luke, then thirteen or so, holds a floppy-eared black puppy under one arm. Rose is too young to understand much, but she knows that since the accident something about her brother has changed. He keeps his narrow shoulders curled over and there is a hunted look in his slate gray eyes. He wears clothes that are slightly too small for him: frayed T-shirts, shrunken flannels, patched jeans - as if he is trying, somehow to return to that point in time, that point in space when everything fit. He has always walked with a limp, but now it seems more pronounced. Rose never did find out exactly how the limp had come about- in one version of the story Luke had fallen out of a tree as a small child, in another version Mom had, in a dreamy haze, driven over him while he played on the driveway in a cardboard box. In the photograph, he stands behind his mother who sits on a tree stump. The light catches Mom's hair and it looks so silky it seems Luke is reaching out to touch it. But Rose remembers that day clearly, how Luke reached out, then drew away, as if to say that no, his mother did not deserve such tenderness - she must be punished.


Fall, 1987. Rose's parents often argue: Mom has picked up the wrong shirts at the cleaner's again, she doesn't buy the right groceries, she smokes all Dad's cigarettes, she never does anything but paint pictures, she never keeps house, she forgets to take care of things like the electric bill and the gas, she loses her keys and leaves the car motor running. There is no end to Mom's mistakes.

Sometimes Rose hears her mother locked in the bathroom, weeping and she stands outside, wanting to be let in, so that she can sit on her mother's lap - so that she can cry along. Rose goes with her mother everywhere. She remembers the trips to Maidenberry's, the supermarket in town. Mom never lingers there, and other shoppers step out of the way when they see her coming. They dislike like the way she streams down the aisles, pushing sometimes when she's in a hurry. The women who work the registers gossip and laugh, relating small town anecdotes. But when little Johnny Blaine is mentioned the laughter immediately stops. Johnny's picture hangs in the window, a fuzzy Xerox: MISSING September 15, 1987. Below the print is a photograph of a young boy. Blue-eyed, fair-haired, and missing his two front teeth. Johnny was last seen in the woods behind his house two Mondays ago, and now he has vanished.


And then the black puppy dies: killed outside Maidenberry's by a speeding VW van. Luke blames Mom. He says she should have been watching. She should have tied the dog up. He flies at his mother, his arms whirling like the hands of windmill, but he doesn't hit her. He can't - after all she is his mother. Instead, he calls her names, while Rose stands there and wails. Rose is crushed too, when the puppy dies. She remembers the day her father brought it home: a present, he'd said, for the whole family. But it had been Luke who took care of the dog, who fed it, walked it, nursed it when it was sick, and Dad was proud. He said that Luke was learning how to be responsible, and then he shot Mom a look as if to imply that she didn't know the meaning of the word: Responsible.


A few weeks later, for Luke's birthday, Rose helps her mother pick out a new puppy - one that looks exactly like the dead one. Jet black and floppy-eared, with a long lolling tongue. But when Luke sees, he backs away from it, doesn't want to touch it. The muscle in his jaw twitches the way his father's does. At the time, Rose can't understand why, but now she does. Is loyalty so easily transferred? Can love be so cheap? She goes with her mother the next day to return the little Labrador to its breeder. And then they buy Luke something he's always wanted: a BB gun that pops when it shoots, hits tin cans on the lawn, squirrels, and once, a baby rabbit.


Rose often spies on Luke. She wants to see where he goes, what he does on his own. He almost always carries the BB gun now. Sometimes he sneaks out at night, and she follows him through the dusty starlit house, crouching on the braided rug at the top of the stairs. There is a grandfather clock in the hallway. It has never kept the correct time and chimes whenever it pleases. The wind whistles in the eaves of the house and Rose hears copper wind chimes in the pines. Again, through unopened doors, she can hear, quite unmistakably, her mother crying. Luke cocks his BB gun, and aims it at the full moon hanging in the window glass, perfectly round and tantalizingly creamy. Rose knows he longs to puncture it, to drink its milky light. Someday he will position the gun on his shoulder and he will shoot the moon, pierce it through the very center and hear it cry out in the still of the night. One day the gun will pop and the glass will shatter outward in a diamond flurry. Luke will smile when he sees the hole, its cracks glinting. He will find the still center and blow it apart.


"I don't want you going into the woods," Mom says, "Stay away from the woods, okay Rose? I'm serious!" And she looks it. Mom is a beautiful woman, but in no ordinary way. Her translucent skin and her upward pointing eyebrows give her a vaguely sinister air: ethereal, yet surprised. Rose notices how her father looks at Mom sometimes; baffled, fascinated…frustrated. "Don't go into the woods, sweetheart," Mom says. And her cheeks are hot when she says this; her rain colored eyes unusually bright. Her breath smells of peppermint and cigarettes, and her auburn hair is covered with a wide, gauzy scarf. "Promise me, sweetheart," she begs. And Rose promises.


NO TRESPASSING the sign says, but Rose trespasses. They had all trespassed until the accident. And Rose continues to go there, drawn back again and again to the shadows and the sheltering leaves. After a storm, the trees are green and dripping and the dirt track turns to mud the color of melted chocolate - a milky brown with dark flecks in it. After the rain the puddles bloom, cool and bright, their surfaces mirroring the sun. The light comes like a hot bullet through the trees shattering the air into shards of gold and black. Rose is afraid to go near the edge of the ravine; the place where the earth falls away, down, down over rocky crags, into dense bushes, and water running in a snaky line far below. Years later she will dream about this ravine, this steep sharp drop.


Fall, 1987. Early morning. It will be an hour or so until her parents get up: the sun is rising orange and soft, bleeding into the sky above the latticework of trees. Rose knows she shouldn't be here, but right now she doesn't much care; this place is magical, mysterious. She stands here in the woods, on the dirt track looking up at the canopy of trees and the sky beyond, and then she looks down into a puddle watching her blurred reflection ripple with the breeze. She puts her foot in the puddle, and wets her shoe, her sock, all the way up to the ankle. The water is cold, and when she lifts her foot, her sneaker and her sock are sopping, dripping dirty water. The sensation of it moves up her leg, and quickly, she tries to shake it off. She thinks of the warmth of the kitchen, her mother's brushes and canvas. She remembers the half-painted deer, its face as soft and empty as little Johnny Blaine's. A soup of darkness lies beneath its feet and no light shines from its eyes. This is the creature that never got away, yet Rose is glad to be spared this knowledge. She feels a surge of love for her mother, a gratitude mitigated only by an image: a memory of Luke in the driving rain.