“When do you go back to Canaan?” I asked after a moment. I didn’t notice until after I said it that I hadn’t said we.
Mama swallowed. “Well, this is the big news I’m nervous to tell you.” She paused, then began again with difficulty. “I kept the house and twenty acres for us, if we want to go back. The rest . . .” She looked at me. “I’ve sold to the Resettlement people, to replant. I was in the paper,” she went on sheepishly. “I brought the clipping.”
She showed it to me, a wrinkled square of paper she pulled from her bag.
“It says here Beezie and I are dead,” I pointed out, amused.
Mama looked apologetic. “I told the reporter you were gone because of dust pneumonia. I think he thought I meant you were gone. People came out of the woodwork to offer condolences, and I had to explain over and over that it wasn’t true.”
I reread the article. Twenty acres was still a farm and a home. But I had a strange, sad, weightless feeling.
“What are we going to do with the money?”
She looked at me searchingly. “I used twenty-five dollars to get here. The rest, we have to decide.”
I tried to think of what I wanted to say, but Mama went on.
“Do you want to go back home?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Neither do I,” she said. “Even if there ends up being something to go back to, I really don’t know at all.” She looked at me. “Maybe it’s not too late for me to be someone who is brave.”
This brings me to my second big news, Ellis. And what is hardest to say.
A few days after Mama and I talked, Sofia and I took our usual walk. Beezie pinged around us this way and that as we made our way to the river (now that she’s well she is uncontrollable, a bolt of lightning ricocheting off the walls).
We walked past fruit sellers and stands hawking meat and flour, watching the seagulls over the water and the boats float past.
I’d never felt, that day, less like I belonged anywhere at all: no longer sure about going home, but not at home in the city either. On the edge of something even more unknown than leaving Canaan.
Sofia and I leaned on a railing to watch the boats. Manhattan can be beautiful, Ellis, if you are willing to see it and not compare it to what you loved before.
She turned to look at me. “I’m getting so many customers at the stables. I think they’d follow me if I left. So I’m thinking of starting my own,” she said. “I already found a space to rent, and I just have to put down a deposit.”
I listened, thinking how brave she was to try.
“I was thinking . . . there will be too much work for just me.”
“You’re offering me a job?” I asked, surprised. I felt, at that moment, as if the dust had jumped from Beezie’s lungs to mine, and my chest squeezed. I guess this is the way some moments that decide our future happen; with a few little words on a walk.
“It’s not much, it’s not our dream, but we could make the best of things here. You and Beezie and your mother could get your own place, and I could too. We could be those people who can afford a taxi someday,” she teased, and then turned serious. “To be honest, I feel like, with Beezie here, it’s like having a piece of my dad. I couldn’t save him, but I helped to save her. And every time I look at her, it reminds me of that. It feels like I can say to him, ‘Look, I’m doing things right.’”
Sofia watched me nervously. I think she could already see that I was going to say no, because she became more solemn as she looked at me.
I said finally, “I have a proposal too.”
Not a day goes by when I don’t see home in my mind. The pond and the garden, always faltering under our hands, and the dust whirls—when they were small—lifting across the Chiltons’ fields and whirring toward us like ghosts. I even miss the sight of that, Ellis—can you believe it? How is it that home invades you like that? How can I ever get over the loss of it? Especially now, when it’s slowly coming back to life and I’m not there to see it?
I know I’ll miss it forever, but I also know that I can’t give into that. As much as I’ve always loved Canaan and loved you, I want my life to go forward even if it hurts. And I’ve decided I have to reach for what I want even if my hands are trembling from fear. I’m sorry, Ellis, but I’m not coming home.
We’ve come halfway across the country and now we only have to get across the sea. Now that New York’s gotten easier, I am leaving it for something I’ve only dreamt about. I want to soak the drizzly English rain into my skin and see green wherever I go, and visit the Cave of the Cup, and walk the paths Mama and Lenore used to walk. I want to see where they were born, and see what they saw.
We leave tomorrow. We’ve written to the Allstocks that we’re coming—well, and that I exist at all—and we hope they’ll welcome us once we’re there.
I’m not taking all that much with me. I have this journal, and Beezie and Mama, a few clothes, and a photo of Mama and Lenore she gave to me the other night. They’re holding each other’s waists; Lenore is pregnant enough to pop. But they look so happy, hugging for dear life.
Mama says God will show us the way forward. Her faith never changes, while mine does all the time—blinking out at times, flaring up at others. For the moment, I think maybe there is a God but a different one than she says. I think God might be the dust and the jackrabbits and the rain, that God might be Teddy and the bullet that killed him, the beautiful and exquisite moon and the terrible zeppelins, all spread out and everywhere. I’ve begun to think that maybe we are God’s fingers rubbing against each other to see how it feels. Do you think that is a sacrilegious thought—that God might be everything and its opposite?
A farm is a very small thing to offer in return for a sister’s life. But it’s all I have to give. I’ve told Sofia what’s left of our land is hers . . . if she can bring herself to leave the city and take another big chance. I know it’s just a dried-up piece of nothing for now. But I think someone like her, with everything she knows and everything she’d be willing to give, might be able to pull it back from the brink. I want the farm to stay in our family if I can, and that’s what Sofia is now. It belongs to her already, I think, according to something written under the surface of things that I can’t claim to understand but only feel. I think she might even be a match for Galapagos.
Ellis, you once said you could save us, and I couldn’t afford to believe it. As tempting as it is to pin myself to anyone else’s strength—Mama’s or Sofia’s or yours—I have to navigate my life myself.
I don’t think you can leave a person you love without leaving your skeleton behind. But I also think that sometimes you can’t stay.