A talisman was waiting for me when I came home after the surgery. She stood on the window ledge where Jack usually kept vigil, a slender, wood-chopping woman carved out of red pine. A tiny ax was gripped between both hands, held high above her head. A pile of miniature split firewood logs was scattered around her, and she wore a lumber jacket painted in a checkerboard pattern of orange and red and black. The carver who had posed her like that, who had taken a pocketknife and drawn the lines of her body so that the grain of the wood became sinew and muscle and bone, who had raised up my mother’s arms in the sky, ax clenched between her hands, the master carver of this miniature scene was someone who had seen through to the essence of my mother. Tamar Winter, queen of the northland, in her prime. And off to the side, cradled between the boughs of a miniature white pine, was a girl, watching.
“What kind of wood is that?” I had asked the bartender, that night when my heart went pinballing off the rivers and highways and byways of my body. Woods of the North for $200.
“Red pine.”
Chris was already a hundred yards down the rutted dirt road. He had driven me the fifty miles back to the cabin from the hospital in darkness complete but for the sweep of the headlights. He was quiet and I was quiet and my burned heart was quiet in my tired chest. The places where the electrodes had been were smooth now. I put two fingers on the side of my neck, in the familiar hollow where so often a racing heart fluttered. An artery pushed up against my fingers: One. Two. Three. They had found the faulty place and burned it. Part of my heart had died. That was the kind of thought you couldn’t say out loud, or write in a book, because it was too dramatic. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t true.
Chris had gone to get the car out of the parking garage while I waited in the doorway of the hospital. My clothes were back on, my sneakers tied, and on my head for good luck, the same too-big scallion hat that I had been wearing that freezing day we wandered around Old Forge. The tiny silver hammer brushed against the wool and I slipped it out of my ear. Back into the pocket, little hammer. They all said goodbye—the doctor, the nurse, the techs, the receptionist—and out I went. Age of miracles, I said to the invisible cold air. We are living in an age of miracles. The faces of Sunshine and Brown and Chris and Tamar hung in my mind, all of them alive and living in this world, all of us together in the age of miracles.
He pulled up in his big white car and he pushed the door open for me and waited until my seat belt was buckled. Then he put the car in gear and we drove in silence until we were past the Utica floodplain, heading north.
“We get two of so many things,” he said. “Two eyes, two ears, two kidneys, two hands, two legs, two feet, two arms. But only one heart. You know?”
I knew. Only one brain too. His right hand stretched across the giant expanse of seat between us and I took it.
“This car feels like a grandmother car,” I said.
“That’s because it is. She left it to me.”
“Did you love her?”
“I loved her completely.”
The vast expanse of seat and the pressure of his fingers in mine. The darkness of the night sky with no stars. I remembered the night my mother woke me up and took me downstairs onto the porch, cold cement underneath my bare feet, the aurora borealis pulsing overhead.
“My mother is leaving me,” I said. “She’s going somewhere and I can’t go with her and she’s never coming back.”
He was steering with his left hand, and his right hand was laced in mine, and he kept nodding and not looking at me, maybe because I was crying. My heart was quiet and beating evenly, even though it was missing a tiny piece of its original whole.
“You’ll miss her,” he said. “You’ll miss her and you’ll love her.”
“Is that how it is with your grandmother?”
“Yes. She’s still with me, though. That’s the way it will be with your mother.”
“Things get winnowed down,” I said, and he nodded. “The less time, the more winnowing. If you’re lucky, some peace. Some happiness. Love. You know what I mean?”
“It’s like panning for gold at the Enchanted Forest,” he said. “Did you ever do that when you were a kid? My grandmother took me there once. You must have gone all the time.”
No, I had not gone all the time. But yes, I remembered holding my pan of dirt in the stream of running water and shaking it back and forth, letting the sand wash away. Glints of gold beginning to appear, until gold was all that was left. He and I had been children at the same time. We had both stood at the same stream, strangers on the lookout for treasure.
When we got to the cabin he didn’t leave until I had fished out the key and opened the door and flipped on the lamp by the kitchen table. I hadn’t noticed the woodcutter talisman yet; that would come later. He put the car in gear and I watched the taillights recede down the dirt road. I wished I had told him about the night my mother woke me up in the wee hours to show me the northern lights. I wished I knew what he was thinking right at that moment, whether he would stop at the bar before he went home, check in and see how the night had gone.
I was past the part of my life where long before now we would have taken our clothes off and flung ourselves onto a bed. That day would come—we both knew it—but it was not now. We pass through each stage of our lives unknowingly, until the day comes when it is behind us.
* * *
“Do you think you’ll write a book about Tamar someday?” Brown said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because then that’s who she would be. She would be a woman in a book instead of a living, breathing woman.”
Or instead of the living memory of a woman who used to live, who used to breathe, who used to be set down so firmly on this earth. That was the danger, if you were a word person. It went with the territory, if your territory was words, and sentences, and paragraphs that turned into chapters that turned into books. When the old man died I built him a house of words to live in, and he would live within its walls forever. He was kept alive in there and yet he was still dead, despite the fact that there were questions I never got to ask him because I hadn’t thought them up yet. The world was a place where people were and then they weren’t. We remade ourselves so that we could keep living in it.
“You might write about her someday,” Sunshine said. “Never say never. You’re her word girl, after all.”
I talked to my mother sometimes now, in the dark of night, when I was far away from the place where she lived. It was easier to talk to her bundled up on the porch, with Jack next to me and Dog in his urn inside and Sunshine and Brown a mile away. I asked her questions and I waited for the answers to come floating up the hill, from the dirt road, from the huge and silent trees that surrounded me. Answers like fireflies, floating up out of the darkness.