Forgiving Ararat Read online

  I took a deep breath and nudged the shifter into gear. The car accelerated forward smoothly and I actually enjoyed negotiating my way through the seasons, blasting through the alternating bands of rain, slush, snow, and dry pavement. The drive from northern Wilmington to our home in Huntingdon took about three hours, arcing west along the Lincoln Highway through the flat farmlands of Lancaster County, then turning north at Harrisburg and crossing the Susquehanna River on Route 322, following the Juniata River Valley into the Allegheny Mountains. I tried to remember the trip down to Delaware from Huntingdon the night before—what I’d seen, what I’d been thinking, what I’d been listening to on the radio. I couldn’t recall anything. I’d always had an excellent memory: I remembered the first chapters of the novels I read as a teenager, and the holdings of the Supreme Court decisions I read as a law student; I remembered the lyrics to old TV theme songs and all the birthdays in my husband’s family to three degrees of consanguinity; but I couldn’t remember anything after picking up Sarah yesterday at the daycare and stopping by the convenience store on the way home.

  The gas gauge indicated the tank was full when I left Delaware and it didn’t move the entire drive home. Strange, but no more so than anything else that had been happening to me. The trip was otherwise uneventful: the typical number of cars and trucks occupied the highway and did the typical things cars and trucks do; the landscape, sky, road signs, buildings, and billboards looked as they had always looked, except everything was wrapped in variegated bands of winter, summer, spring, and fall. The mountains crawled along the banks of the Juniata River like gigantic striped caterpillars, their deciduous forests alternately ablaze in reds, oranges, and yellows, snow covered and white, just budding and speckled green, and deep leafy jade. Gorgeous. Another pleasant but unexpected aspect of the drive was the serendipitous way the radio stations seemed to play the music I wanted to hear, when I wanted to hear it, without any DJs or commercial interruptions. All in all, things looked brighter for me with every mile, and I believed an end to my misery was near; but as I turned toward Huntingdon on Route 522, an anxious feeling overcame me that washed my optimism away. I began to worry about the nature of my illness and what it might mean. Maybe I had a brain tumor? I worried. Or maybe my hallucination of being dead was a premonition of the real event to come? Bellini women from my great-great-grandmother on down swore they were visited by an angel in the middle of the night to prepare them before somebody close was about to die. Was Nana Bellini that angel, coming to prepare me for my own death? Suddenly the possibility of a terminal illness was more unbearable than the possibility of already being dead. I imagined receiving the news from the doctor and falling to pieces, then telling Bo and holding Sarah close, knowing I wouldn’t see her grow up. Who would braid her hair, or make her Halloween costumes, or teach her to bake cookies? Who would introduce her to Louisa May Alcott and Harper Lee, or take her camping or to the ballet, or comfort her through puberty and adolescence? Who, but her own mother, could convince her that there’s nothing in life that she, as a girl, or a woman, couldn’t do? I was nearly hysterical by the time I turned down our street.

  Bo’s car was parked in front of the house and I screeched to a stop and ran inside. Everything looked as I’d left it Friday morning, but no one was there. Bo’s cereal bowl with a puddle of milk in the bottom sat on the coffee table next to the unread back sections of the New York Times; bagel crumbs and empty jars of strained peaches and pears cluttered the kitchen counter; our black Labrador retriever, Macy’s, food bowl was half full, but she didn’t bark when I entered and was nowhere to be found; our bed was still unmade and the romper I’d decided not to dress Sarah in that day was still draped over the rail of her crib. I checked the garage and found the jogging stroller, so they couldn’t be out for a run. There was no note by the phone. The only message on the answering machine was the one I had left from my grandparents’ house. I called the Channel 10 studios but nobody answered the switchboard—worrisome, but not necessarily uncommon for a Saturday. There was no answer at either my mother’s or father’s, no answer at Bo’s parents either. I went back outside and looked around the house and in the garage. Nobody. The entire neighborhood was deserted.

  We lived on a Lilliputian street in Huntingdon near Juniata College with small brick homes dwarfed by old sycamore trees shaped like giant broccoli. Having been born and raised in Brooklyn, Bo insisted on living in a town with a college; it was his only hope of transitioning from Manhattan to Appalachia. His dream was to be a reporter and news anchor in New York City, but the television stations there told him he needed small market experience before they would even consider looking at his audition tape. This disappointed and terrified him. He thought of small market television as a forsaken third world of vacuum tubes and static that existed somewhere between the Hudson River and the Hollywood Hills. Applying to Channel 10 in Altoona was my idea, actually; it was one of the stations I had grown up with on visits to my Cuttler grandparents’ farm in the fertile valley outside of State College, one of only two stations with VHF transmitters strong enough to reach the arrowhead antenna strapped to the brick chimney on their house in Warriors Mark. Channel 10 in Altoona was just about as small market as you could get. Central Pennsylvania is mostly dairy farms where the land is tillable and coal mines where the mountains rise up—still populated by black bears, white tail deer, elk, and more cattle than people. Schools and businesses there close for the first day of buck hunting season; and, in contrast to the skyscrapers of Manhattan, silos and coal tipples are the tallest manmade structures. When Bo got the job, I called Bill Gwynne, the lawyer in Huntingdon who had represented me and my family after the accident with my arm. Although Huntingdon was even deeper in the middle of nowhere than Altoona, Bill was considered one of the top trial lawyers in the state and he happened to need an associate. The timing and location seemed just right, almost destiny.

  I heard music playing in the house next to ours and went over, hoping to find somebody who might have seen Bo and Sarah. Nobody answered the door when I knocked. I pounded on the front doors of all the houses on our street, some with frosted windows, the sidewalks in front covered with slush and snow, and others baking in the afternoon heat; nobody answered, and I started to get worried. I walked over to Washington Street. The hoagie shop and bookstore were open but empty—no customers or employees. The entire commercial district was strangely silent except for the occasional sound of passing cars and buses. Growing more frantic, I ran down the sidewalk past bicycles chained to parking meters and cars parked at the curb, looking in the doors of vacant shops and cafés for any sign of life. It made no sense. This was the busiest part of town on a Saturday in the fall. I eventually ran out to a line of cars queued at the stoplight to ask if anybody knew what was going on, but as I approached and peered inside the windows, I saw no drivers or passengers in any of them. Even so, when the light turned green, they revved their engines and proceeded on their way down the street in the normal flow of Saturday traffic. Astonishing—and creepy. I thought back over my drive from Delaware and realized that I’d passed hundreds of cars and trucks that stopped, turned, yielded, and accelerated, but I’d been so preoccupied with my thoughts of fever and death that I hadn’t noticed drivers or passengers in any of them.

  A tormented howl suddenly shattered the eerie silence of the street. I looked around to see where it was coming from and discovered it was coming from me. It was the sound of madness. I made a wild dash through the cafés and shops, throwing things from tables and shelves, smashing dishes and glasses. I wanted someone, anyone, to come and restrain me. When no one appeared, I tore out into the middle of the street without looking, daring the cars to hit me. On cue, they screeched and smoked to a halt.

  “Where is everybody?” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “Why won’t somebody help me?”

  I climbed onto the roof of one of the cars to get a better view and watched in disbelief as traffic backed up in both directions throu
gh the changing seasons: some cars had their windows down, some up, wipers and lights on and off. Two police cruisers raced to the scene, red and blue lights flashing and sirens blaring but no officers emerged; the cruisers just pointed menacingly at me.

  I broke down sobbing on the roof of the car. There was nothing left to do. I’d been frightened this badly only once before, as a child in the emergency room of Tyrone Hospital when the attendants laid me on a gurney and placed my severed forearm inside a lunch cooler beside me. I had been amazingly calm until that point; I believed my Grandpa Cuttler when he promised me in his pickup truck racing to the hospital that if I kept my eyes closed everything would be all right. But then they started wheeling me down the hall and I saw the anguish on his face and tears pouring down his cheeks; the gurney crashed through the swinging doors and deposited me into the nightmarish hell of an operating room. I was crazed with terror. They slashed away my clothes, stabbed needles into my wrist, and removed my severed arm from the cooler and held it up to the light like a wild game trophy. The arm didn’t seem real at first: the skin was slimy and dishwater gray, the white elbow bone protruding from the end like the plastic connector of a doll’s arm, tinged with smears of cow manure and blood, the fingers—my fingers—gnarled into a grotesque fist. I fought the nurses until they forced an anesthesia mask over my mouth and I lost consciousness.

  Losing consciousness...howling on top of the idling car in the middle of gridlocked Washington Street, this was all I hoped for now, losing consciousness and awakening on the other side, in a hospital room where my mother and father would be there to hold me and tell me everything would be all right. But it wasn’t to be. I stayed on top of the car that first afternoon in Shemaya until the sun overhead divided back into four suns, each setting over the mountaintop at different points and different times, torching the sky into a blaze of pink and gold flames. Inconsolable, I crawled down and walked back home. The traffic jam cleared as the cars continued on their way to nowhere.

  When I reached our house, I heard a voice.

  “I’m sorry, child,” Nana Bellini said. She was sitting in the rocker on our front porch, enjoying the beautiful evening as though she’d just stopped by for dinner. I was certain now that I’d be locked up soon and sedated. I was obviously insane and dangerous. I talked to her while I waited to be taken away.

  “How was your drive?” I said flatly, adopting her everything’s normal and we’re all happy to be here attitude.

  “We’re not there, dear,” she said.

  “We’re not where?”

  “Do you remember when you were a little girl and your bedroom turned into a palace and knights rode beneath your windows on great white horses?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Remember, child? You pretended to lounge in long flowing gowns, dreaming of the prince in the next castle. You created a world within the world that had been created for you; you painted its skies, constructed its walls, and filled its spaces; like a tiny goddess, you caused a land to exist with nothing more than your mind; but as you grew older, you found the existing structures of time and space more convincing and put aside your own power to create in favor of the creations of others. The power to create wasn’t lost, Brek. It can never be lost. It’s natural at first for you to re-create the places that have been dear to you.”

  “Where’s my husband and my daughter?” I demanded. “Where is everybody?”

  Nana smiled—that patient, knowing smile of hers and Luas’, as if to say: Yes, my great-granddaughter, reach now, reach for the answers.

  “We’re not there anymore, child,” she said. “It was a wonderful illusion, but it’s gone; you’ve returned home. You won’t see them again until they come home too. Free will is absolute; we can’t direct the movement of consciousness from realm to realm—”

  She was scaring me again. “Leave me alone!” I shouted. I ran back down the walk toward my car.

  “Wait, child,” she said. “Where are you going?”

  I didn’t know where. I just knew I had to find Bo and Sarah. I had to get help. Maybe it wasn’t Saturday, maybe it was still Friday and I could pick Sarah up from daycare and start all over. It’s all just a dream, I kept telling myself, just a bad dream; you have a fever and you’re sick. I climbed into my car and started the engine. Nana called out to me:

  “What would the daycare look like?”

  As soon as I thought about it, I was there. The house vanished, and with it my car, the trees, the street, the entire neighborhood. The rough brick wall of our neighbor’s house transformed into the daycare’s smooth white wall decorated with paper blue whales that Sarah and the other children had colored with Miss Erin’s help. Bright, freshly vacuumed play rugs now covered what had been the lawn; the cubby I’d crammed with fresh crib sheets, diapers, and wipes on Friday morning stood where the passenger seat of my car had been; colorful plastic preschool toys were stacked neatly near the curb; a craft table with boxes of Popsicle sticks, bottles of glue, and reams of colored construction paper sprang forth from the porch steps; and a row of shrubs became shelves holding clipboards filled with blank activity sheets for each child, ready to document the food consumed, bowel movements produced, and fun had during the day. The scent of baby powder and diaper rash ointment filled the air. But there was no laughter in the daycare, no squeals or cries. Not a child. Not a teacher. Not a sound. Nana stood in the doorway, watching me explore the space, probing it for hidden gaps, searching for the wizard behind the curtain. The movement between locations had been seamless, immediate. I wasn’t transported: my surroundings simply evolved, and I caught on quickly.

  The next thought that came into my mind was the set of the morning news where Bo had tried to banter with Piper Jackson. As quickly as the memory arose, the wall of colored whales metamorphosed into the sunrise mural of the Horseshoe Curve that served as a backdrop for the newscasters. Studio cameras with TelePrompTers stood where the cribs had been; lighting racks dangled from the ceiling, and a green background for the computer generated weather map emerged from a closet; coffee mugs with large “10”s on their sides steamed next to sheets of script with last night’s sports scores and the latest national news. Fresh doughnuts and fruit covered a small table behind the cameras. Like my neighborhood and the daycare, the set was deserted.

  I thought of my law office next. My desk, computer, files, bookshelves, treatises, diplomas, and pictures of Bo and Sarah surrounded me instantly. Then came Stan’s delicatessen on Penn Street and my Bellini grandparents’ beach house in Rehoboth Beach, followed by my Cuttler grandparents’ barn in Warriors Mark and my bed in the physical therapy ward at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where I watched Bobby Hamilton, with both arms amputated, learn to tie his shoes with a long crochet hook in his mouth. I revisited the cinder track behind my high school where I’d won several races against two-armed opponents and amazed myself and the small crowds. I sat at the bar at Smoky Joe’s on Fortieth Street near the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia where I had danced the night away with my girlfriends during law school. I knelt before the altar at Old Swedes Church, where my best friend, Karen Busfield, who had become an Episcopal priest, asked whether I would pledge my troth to Boaz Wolfson before God and a rabbi and pronounced us husband and wife. I wept in the delivery room at Wilmington Hospital where my mother had given birth to me, and then again at Blair Memorial Hospital in Huntingdon where I’d given birth to Sarah and Bo’s tears dropped onto my lips. Each room and space from my past came as fast as I thought of it, as though I were plunging down a shaft cored through the center of my life.

  I went back to linger, walking the sands of the Delaware shore, climbing the hay mow in my grandfather’s barn, pulling on the Nautilus machine that strengthened my left arm to do the work of my right. I revisited not only the locations but the reality, every detail: the sinewy saltiness of Stan’s corned beef, the burning smoke and stale beer of Smokey Joe’s, the warm rain on our wedding day, the cold
stirrups of the delivery room bed. Nana accompanied me, but did not interfere. Her fascination with how I had lived my life nearly equaled my fascination with the power to re-create it; but the exertion of doing all this exhausted me, and soon portions of one space began blurring into others: ocean waves lapped at the corn crib on my grandparents’ farm three hundred miles from the coast; Bo’s anchor chair sat behind the high altar of Old Swedes Church, and in it sat the ornate gold altar cross, staring into camera three as if delivering news of the Judgment Day. The images, the realities, congealed into a single nonsensical mass that finally ground to a halt under its own weight.

  And then, everything went blank and filled with an indescribable light that seemed to emanate from nowhere and everywhere. Through this light Nana extended her hand to me in a gesture of love, smothering the blaze of fear that had nearly consumed me.