“Could we go today, Nathan? Oh, I’d love to get this weight off my chest.”
Jake must have been listening too because he said from the lawn, “I want to see Lise.”
I kept quiet but there was no way I’d let myself be left behind.
“All right,” my father said rising from the swing. “I’ll call.”
Half an hour later we piled out of the Packard at the front gate of the restored farmhouse. Emil stood on the porch holding to one of the posts, tracking our procession with his sightless eyes in that way that made me think he could actually see us coming up the flagstone walk.
“Emil,” my mother said taking him warmly in her arms.
Brandt held her, then stepped back and extended his hand which my father grasped with both of his own.
“I’ve been afraid this would never happen again,” Brandt said. “It’s been almost unbearable. Come, sit. I’ve asked Lise to fix lemonade and a plate of cookies. They should be here any minute.”
There were four wicker chairs around the wicker table. The adults occupied three and I leaned against the porch rail. Jake said, “I’m going to look at the garden,” and he took off and disappeared around the side of the house.
“Emil,” my mother said, “I’m so sorry for what’s happened between us and what’s happened with Karl. It’s horrible. It’s all so tragic.”
“The tragedy continues,” Brandt said. “Julia has lost her mind. I mean really lost it. Axel says she’s threatening to kill herself. She’s heavily sedated most of the time.”
My father said, “Axel must be in hell. Is there any way I could talk with him?”
“And I with Julia?” my mother asked.
Brandt shook his head. “I don’t think that would be a good idea. It’s complicated.” He reached out with both hands and although he could not see he immediately found my mother’s hand and took it. “How are you, Ruth? Really.”
It was such a simple question on the surface but nothing these days was simple and the delicacy with which he held my mother’s hand made me recall my own hollowed-egg image of her.
But she was no longer fragile that way and she said, “It hurts terribly, Emil. Maybe it always will. But I’ve survived and I believe I’ll be all right.”
The screen door opened abruptly and Lise stepped onto the porch holding a plate of sugar cookies and giving us an evil eye. She was dressed in dungarees and a dark blue blouse and red canvas slip-ons. She put the cookies on the wicker table and quickly went back inside.
“Lise doesn’t seem happy to see us,” my father remarked.
Brandt said, “She’s been in seventh heaven for a while. Had me all to herself. For Lise to be happy, all that’s necessary is this little sanctuary and someone in it who needs her. In a way, it’s enviable. When you arrived she was about to work in the garden, which she dearly loves. Now she’ll just sulk.”
Jake reappeared and mounted the steps just as Lise came out with a pitcher of lemonade and ice cubes. When she saw my brother her attitude changed. She hastily put the pitcher on the table, went back inside, and returned almost immediately with a tray of glasses which she set next to the pitcher. She made signs to Jake that I didn’t understand but to which Jake nodded and said, “Sure.”
“I’m going to help Lise,” he said, and they both left the porch and headed toward the shed where she kept her yard and gardening tools.
When they’d gone, my father asked, “Will you finish your memoir, Emil?”
Brandt was quiet a long while. “Without Ariel I don’t think I can go on,” he finally said.
“You could get someone else to transcribe,” my father suggested.
Brandt shook his head. “I don’t want someone else doing for me what Ariel did. I don’t think anyone could.”
I’d been so deep in my own experience and emotions that I hadn’t considered the effect of Ariel’s loss on those outside my family but I saw now that Emil Brandt who’d mentored my sister and encouraged her talent and championed her work and who, after Ariel’s disappearance, had given my mother so unselfishly of his time, this man had suffered great loss as well. His face was turned in profile and I realized that if you didn’t know about the scars on the other side you would think him in every way normal, maybe even handsome for an older man.
And then an extraordinary possibility occurred to me, a possibility paralyzing in its magnitude.
Brandt and my parents went on talking but I no longer heard them. I stood up and in a kind of daze drifted down the porch steps. My father said something and I mumbled in return that I would be right back. I walked through the yard, passed the garden where Jake and Lise were at work, and went to the fence gate that opened onto the path leading down the back slope to the cottonwoods and the railroad tracks and the river. I closed my eyes mimicking blindness and fumbled with the gate latch. I pushed the gate open and started down. I went slowly, my eyelids clamped shut, feeling my way carefully. It wasn’t difficult at all to sense the difference between the thick undergrowth that edged the path and the worn thread of the path itself. I cleared the cottonwoods and came to the raised bed of the railroad tracks where I was sorely tempted to open my eyes but did not. I mounted the roadbed and felt the crushed rock and stumbled over the first rail but caught myself and kept going. On the other side I descended and felt through the soles of my tennis shoes the place where hard ground gave way to the sand along the river. And finally I stepped into water up to my calf and opened my eyes and looked down into the murky flow. I drew my leg back and glanced upriver and saw that I was standing only a few hundred yards from the stretch of sand at Sibley Park where bonfires were sometimes lit and where Ariel had last been seen. I stared back at the path I’d blindly walked, at the thread that was visible if only you knew where to look, and I understood with icy clarity how Ariel had come to be in the river.
37
Jake came looking for me, sent by my parents who’d begun to be concerned by my long absence. He found me sitting in the sand.
“What are you doing down here?”
“Thinking,” I said.
“Will you come back up?”
“Tell everyone I’ll walk home. I’ll walk along the river.”
“Are you okay?”
“Just tell them, Jake.”
“All right. Don’t bite my head off.”
He started away and then came back. “What is it, Frank?”
“Go up and tell them, and if you want to talk, come back down.”
He returned in a few minutes, huffing so I knew he’d run the whole way. He sat down beside me.