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Mom stayed in the kitchen for much longer than it takes to fill a kettle with water.
As I chatted with Pauline, I strained my ears for any sound. I couldn’t hear the tap, or the whistle that means boiling. I wondered what Mom was doing. If she was just standing there in the kitchen. If she was frozen by the sink as I’d caught her sometimes, when I was younger, wringing a dishrag as if she was trying to strangle it. Minutes passed and still the kitchen was silent.
Then from the backyard came the sound of chopping wood.
I looked Pauline in the eye. “What happened?”
“Scott called.”
“What?”
“He wanted to apologize. And ask if he could give her some money. Make some gesture. That sort of thing.”
My face went hot. Suddenly, my visit to Baxterville didn’t seem so heroic after all. The angry letter he had almost certainly read. I had imagined him begging for forgiveness, but now I wasn’t so sure that was a good idea. An apology didn’t seem worth the completely intrusive horror of having to hear the sound of his voice on the phone.
“Is she okay?” I said, but before Pauline could answer I was already ru
134
MOM WAS BY THE WOODPILE, HER fla
135
ON THE DAY I GRADUATED FROM E. O. James, the scabby black peach trees were covered in a pink snow of blossoms. The puddles at the bottom of our driveway were warm as soup. Mom and Pauline sat in the kitchen talking while I brushed my hair and brushed my teeth and wriggled my feet into the dress shoes that Nan had taken me to buy at the mall the day before.
Graduation was a joke. Mr. Beek gave a fu
After the graduation ceremony, everyone spilled outside, where next year’s Senior Leaders had set up refreshment tables with cake and coffee and sparkling apple juice. From the place where I was standing with Mom and Pauline and Ava and my uncle Dylan, I saw Noe turning a cartwheel on the grass, keys falling out of her pockets as her legs arced through the sky.
Something in my heart broke, then. I put down my cake plate and ran to her. We didn’t talk, but turned cartwheels on the soccer field, mortarboards falling off, hands staining green from the grass.
When I thought of the girl in my freshman-year picture, I couldn’t imagine her leaving Noe to do it alone.
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MOM ASKED ME WHAT I WANTED for a graduation present. “It can’t be too extravagant,” she added, as if I would ever dream of asking for something like a new car or a new computer or a trip to Mexico.
“I want you to take me canoeing,” I said.
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WE DROVE UP TOGETHER THE WEEK before the fall semester started. We packed matches and knives, string and sunscreen, oats and coffee. Uncle Dylan dug Mom’s old canoe out from the back of his garage and we spent a weekend rubbing the paddles with linseed oil and patching a small leak in the stern. On the drive up, the tip of the canoe poked out over the front of the truck, pointing like an arrow toward the north. Trees rippled on either side of the road, lush and green in their summer fullness.
When we put into the water at Maple Bay, the canoe leaped forward with a speed and power that astounded me. Soon the docks melted away behind us, and the families paddling around the bay in their bright yellow rental canoes, and we entered a silence unlike any I’d experienced before. In the silence was a whirring warbling dripping of paddles, musical greens and blues. I was almost afraid to look behind me in case Mom had vanished, in case the woods had reabsorbed her, greedily embraced her in their twigs and mosses.
I wondered if I would always feel her that way, as a strength propelling me, a guiding silence in my canoe. I saw them, then, the ghosts quietly slipping out from under us. I could feel mine leave me, a weightlessness. I cut my paddle into the water and felt the wilderness rush toward me, and the wilderness inside me tremble and flower, rushing, rushing toward it.
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About the Author
Photo by Gabriel Jacobs
HILARY T. SMITH lives in Portland, Oregon, where she studies North Indian classical music and works on native plant restoration. She is also the author of Wild Awake. Find out more at www.hilarytsmith.com.
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Books by Hilary T. Smith
Wild Awake
A Sense of the Infinite
Credits
COVER PHOTOGRAPH © CLAYTON BASTIANI / TREVILLION IMAGES
COVER DESIGN BY KATIE FITCH
Copyright
Katherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
A SENSE OF THE INFINITE. Copyright © 2015 by Hilary T. Smith. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.