One String Guitar Read online

  “I understand you were Maya Owl Feather’s counselor, is that right?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “You were also her father?” I nodded. This is when it hit me. This is why they had me. They wanted to break me.

  “How long have you been working at New Hope?”

  “Two years.” I try to keep the answers short and to the point. Nothing more, nothing else. If you answer less, they end up asking more and that’s a good way to get lost. If you end up answering more, they’ll end up using it against you, like with Jimmy.

  “What hours did you work yesterday?”

  “I worked 8 to 6.”

  “Is that your usual shift?”

  “Yes. Sometimes I work nights on Saturdays.”

  “Are the people at New Hope allowed to keep alcohol on the facility?”

  “No. It’s a rehab center.” I could smell the trap in the making. I could feel them reining me in like a wild horse. I tapped my feet on the ground to remind me of the earth.

  “Maya was found with two empty bottles of whisky. Can you tell me where she might have found them?”

  “No. I can’t.”

  “So you have no idea where Maya could have gotten the whisky?”

  “No.”

  “And you were not aware that she had it?”

  “No, of course not.” I cursed myself for that last bit “of course not” makes cops mad when you express emotion, riles them up, and makes them wanna break you. When they can feel the life force in you. Gets them going.

  “Yet you are responsible to keep the people of New Hope alcohol free, are you not?” Trick question. If I tell the truth, they’ll get me; if I lie, I’m screwed.

  “Patients at New Hope are responsible for their own actions. If they end up drinking, it’s no one’s responsibility but their own.”

  “So then, would you say your job is useless?”

  “You can’t save everyone.” That seemed to satisfy him. Sometimes if the answer is short, strange, or vague enough, it throws them off balance and they either take a different turn or they stop.

  “I think that does it for now, Mr. Owl Feather. Let’s just walk over to the morgue so you can identify the body of your daughter.”

  Chapter 2 – Elbe

  Syracuse, New York, 1998

  I didn’t know they were coming. Later, my mother said she didn’t want me to fuss regarding their visit. I knew the moment she walked in the door that she had something to tell me. My mother would also say it wasn’t a secret that she had never kept secrets from me. But I knew that this too was a lie.

  I was forcing my way into consciousness when Wolf began to bark fiercely. The advantage of having a dog is the advance notice he affords. He barked and then the bell rang. Since I’d taken leave from school, I’d slipped into a strange and diluted world of blurred visions and nauseous mornings with my brand-new prescription of antidepressants. This was my new shield against the world. I rolled to the edge of the couch and sat up slowly. Sudden movement always made my head spin. I’d found that lying still kept the world perfectly bearable, like a nice static image in a diorama.

  The bell sounded again, this time with more insistence. Maybe I knew before I opened the door that my parents had traveled the distance from Vermont to see me. On some plane, in some dimension of reality, I already knew of their visit. I even knew what they had come to tell me.

  I saw them standing in the cold, blustery gusts of winter. I watched my mother through the thick glass of the storm door as she held herself, wrapping her arms around her own body as if she were trying to find comfort from within. She looked small, fragile, with my father standing next to her in his perfectly poised composure, his removed stance from the world. I remember seeing the blue of my mother’s eyes bleeding through the thickness of the glass door. The oval of her face accentuated by the magnifying effect of the glass into an almost replica of Munch’s terrifying scream.

  Even before I opened the door, I recognized the strange urgency in my mother’s blue eyes, the same urgency she’d shown on the day she told me about my birth.

  When I opened the door, I noticed something in my mother’s face had changed. I wondered for a moment if she had aged, somehow, in the few short months since I’d last seen her. The distance between Montpelier, Vermont and Syracuse, NY is not as far as one would think, but geography and the miles between us had nothing to do with the distance that had always separated my mother and me.

  “What are you doing here?” A cold gust of wind blew into the house as I propped my body against the open door. Wolf growled behind me.

  “You know grandma and grandpa! Wolf, stop growling.” I said addressing the dog as he pushed his way between my legs to sniff my mother’s thigh. He stopped growling. A tentative tail wag later and he was off into the house in absolute indifference.

  “I thought he was going to bite us for a moment. He doesn’t bite does he?”

  “Mother, of course he doesn’t bite! You know Wolf doesn’t bite.”

  I quickly closed the door behind them. My mother looked older since I’d last seen her only months earlier. Her face was worn, the usual elegance in her movements dulled.

  “I can’t believe you’re here!” My heart was racing now. I hadn’t moved or walked around in two days, except for a couple of trips to the kitchen for food and to the bathroom to relieve myself.

  We walked into my apartment and I suddenly noticed the chaos of my cocooned life since taking a leave of absence from school. I felt awkward with my parents in my home, reduced to a perpetual state of childishness in their presence. The simplest task became insurmountable. Making tea: boil water, find cups, choose tea. Each task equally puzzling. I asked myself: is it the depression or is it their presence that reduces me to this paralyzed state? I had no words; I had lost language. Fallen echoes in a strange vast space of emptiness. I recognized their faces. I knew them by heart. Now they were aging, and even this I was unable to measure, to notice, to accept. I had lost track of what my parents looked like: even they had become invisible. I tried to see them as they were. I tried to see myself as I was. In their presence, small and girl-like. Docile and perfectly nimble. I became flexible like a reed in the wind.

  I looked at my mother. Maybe I was looking at her for the first time. She wore a red shawl on her shoulders that offset the paleness of her face. I’d always admired my mother’s paleness. The way her face reflected the slightest bit of light, like a field of white bringing light out onto itself. I looked at her in search of comfort. How many times had I searched for answers in the chiseled lines of her aristocratic lineage?

  I thought about the time my mother told me about my birth. I remembered the pink of her skin, the lines of constricted blood in her palms as she wrung her hands. I don’t remember her words, except for one: adopted. I just remember watching her hands for the first time and realizing that we were not the same color. Afterwards, she held me close and cried. I put my head on her lap and watched my own sandy-bronzed arm resting against her pale and pinkish skin. It seems odd for me now to think that I’d never noticed my difference before that day. And maybe I’d always known it but I had never needed to name it before. When my mother said adopted, I bit my cheeks and tasted metal in my mouth. I thought about the taste of my own blood as I held out my arm against hers trying to name the difference between us for the first time. That’s when I started counting and measuring everything around me. I remember the world before she uttered the words of what I’d always known, out loud: adopted. I remember everything being less sharp around me, more blurred, without so many lines to count. 43 steps between my bedroom and the bathroom. 43 steps as long as I walked in a straight line and didn’t have to step over anything along the way. 42 steps to the bathroom if I wore my big fuzzy bear slippers. I couldn’t stand the difference; I walked barefoot every time. I grew up hearing my mother yelling at me about my feet and catching my own death. I imagined death, a strange wolverine-like creature, all crumpled a
nd wet, shaggy like a dog at the bottom of my butterfly net. I’d caught my death.

  Each time my mother held me, everything shifted and I pushed my own difference outward like a shield. “I am not white!” I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs, even though I’d been reminded of that fact a thousand times by my classmates growing up. They’d called me everything from squaw to nigger and everything else along the way. I remember mimicking Jennie Jones’ every speech pattern, her every gesture. She was blond and the most popular girl in school. All the boys wanted her and I was determined to be Jennie Jones in every possible way. I’d learned to blow my bubble gum the way she did, to flip a small piece of my hair in between sentences looking away annoyed the way she did. I’d learned how to intonate every statement I made with a strange question-like tone at the end of every sentence I uttered. I was Jennie Jones.

  One day in gym class, Jennie Jones spoke to me. It was the only time she ever addressed me directly. She stood next to me by the mirror as I was brushing my hair and she said:

  “It’s too bad your hair is so black and your eyes are so brown, otherwise you wouldn’t look like such a squaw.” And then she walked away. I remembered the contrast between the two of us standing next to each other, her talking to my reflection in the mirror, and me looking at the light of her blond hair and the blue of eyes reflected back to me. I remember feeling like an opaque black hole that sucked the world’s energy.

  Early on, I learned to make an inventory of my past: one Lakota mother, one unknown father, one birth on a reservation. These were the facts that contained me, like the four corners of a box. I wanted more than that; I wanted so much less. A clean slate onto which I could have raised myself from the ground up. A clean slate and a white body, pink hands like my mother’s, dirty blond hair like my father’s, blue eyes, or even green. An insipid past encroached in the comfort of my family’s Quaker religion. Settlers and well meaning middle-class teachers who approached everything in the world with good measure.

  “I can make the tea,” my mother said to me when they had finally settled on the couch in the living room. I looked around and saw the mess, the residues of my own life, this part of me exposed to my parents. I felt myself shift uneasily on the couch. I caught my father watching me; he watched me without seeing.

  My father has always been like a ghost, now more so that his hair had turned white. I was used to the way he pulled back into his quietude. The way he gazed at everything and rarely spoke. I wanted to see my father’s hands. He always said he had the hands of a farmer, like his parents before him. I knew that I could find my father again in the callous of his hands, in the thickness of his fingers. But he was standing by the bookshelf in my living room examining each title like he’d found a hidden treasure. My mother smiled. She looked tired. I visualized the distance they had traveled to see me. The miles they had covered to erase the distance between us, a distance that had always existed since birth.

  “I’ll make the tea,” I answered rhetorically.

  This is my territory. I thought. This is my turf. I was determined to stand my ground, to not lose any of it in their presence. I was still able to make tea in my home. I got up, shakily, uneasily. The medication they had prescribed had buried me inside the bottom of a barrel. Sometimes it felt like the ocean, or a tunnel, a place of confinement.

  Suddenly, memories of childhood came flooding in. I remembered my mother telling me how she began speaking her native French to me when I was old enough to see. I never understood why she waited until I could see to speak her native tongue to her brand-new baby girl. I imagined myself cooing to the sound of my mother’s voice, to its nasal and glottal stops, to the guttural R in French. I’d read somewhere that babies have the latent capacity to speak all languages at birth. How many languages had I heard by the time I’d reached my mother’s arms?

  But the woman who became my mother spoke French.

  Ne pleure pas mon bébé. Mon bébé. My mother must have whispered in my ear. “Don’t cry, my baby.” I was her baby then. To whom do we belong when we are born?

  Behind me, I heard her footsteps. The kitchen appeared small. My kitchen had never looked so small. So remotely removed from anything I knew. This place was paltry, dingy, and dark. I felt sorry for the person who lived here. I thought of myself in the third person now. I had become a third being, removed from all of this. I filled the kettle with water.

  “You don’t use filtered or mineral water?” My mother’s voice called me back to this moment.

  “The water is clean here. The best water in the state.” Here I was, making up statistics about water quality. I found myself defending the water source; I wanted to defend all water sources around me.

  My mother dreamt of birthing babies of her own. Long before my birth, Marie bought a pram. The old-fashioned style, a pram with thin, pretty white wheels and shiny silver rims. A pram with the high handles and the beautiful white hood to protect her new baby. The pram was bought when I was still elsewhere, in that place between worlds, in this hovering before birth. I tried to imagine the place again, the warmth of it, my knowing of its impermanence. And I thought: all babies are bred to die. We come into the world wired with the knowledge of change, wired with the understanding that the warmth and darkness from which we come has been altered into a world of noise and light and chaos. When we’re born, we become imprinted with the shock of this change, we become experts in impermanence. One passage to another; this is the way of the body.

  Mother began opening cabinets at random in my kitchen.

  “Where do you keep your tea?”

  “Here,” I answered, pointing to an overcrowded cupboard packed with tea boxes and expired snacks. She rummaged through the cabinet. My mother was known to organize any content in alphabetical order. I began counting the different items inside the cupboard: chamomile, mint and hibiscus, two types of honey, two large bags of sugar, one bag of flour, four cans of corn.

  The kettle was whistling now. In the distance, I heard the sound calling me out of the tunnel. My mother was pouring the water in the cup. One cup. Only one cup.

  “You’re not having tea?” I asked.

  “No, none for me.” My water was not clean enough. The water quality in my life was not good enough for my mother. We sat at the kitchen table. Where was my father? I glanced at him from the kitchen door and saw him standing in the living room; he was standing by my bookcases and looking through my library. Not a single history book. How would he find his way home?

  Long ago, my mother had told me about her family and about the day my father, Rowan, had met my grandparents. My mother came from a dwindling aristocratic family in France. She met my father in Paris, where he was doing a semester abroad. She held him, like the way someone grabs a blanket before running out of a burning house, and she never let go. Marie’s parents, the grandparents I never met, were horrified by the idea of their daughter marrying an American. Maybe if he had come from an old family, it would have been less shameful. After all, old in America is nothing more than a parenthesis in French history.

  Marie, born Marie Françoise de Peussy, was the only daughter out of three children—two sons and one wayward girl. My grandparents come from a long line of ducs and duchesses dating all the way back to the Middle Ages. There is an entire village in the Limousin named after them. The small castle south of the village, hidden in the hills was the home of their ancestors.

  My mother spoke of her family as one speaks of ghosts. Their presence among us was a constant and yet it was their absence from our lives that defined her. Born Marie Françoise, my mother dropped the second half of her first name when she moved to the United States. This severance was a symbol of what she had left behind. My mother told me she had never really liked her name and when she turned the page on her past, she severed a part of herself she no longer needed, like a piece of her residual tail or losing a wisdom tooth one night. Wisdom is not what she lost when she traveled to Vermont where my father grew up
. She didn’t know then that this was a permanent change, that turning her back on her parents—the divine de Peussys—would not be an alterable condition.

  At first, my mother felt at home in the rolling green hills of Vermont. She felt as though she had traveled to an unknown part of France or maybe, at worst, to a remote place in Ireland. Vermont’s resemblance to Ireland had been one of the reasons why my father Rowan’s parents had moved to the luscious hills of this forgotten state. My mother liked to say that my father’s parents differed from her own as a pig differs from a peacock. Over the years, I often wondered which family was the pig and which was the peacock.

  Rowan’s parents were each spawned from a family of farmers. Farming was in their blood: tending to the earth, watching the crops grow, or die, depending on the season. Rowan had grown up with stories about ruined crops, crops that rotted in the muck of a violent spring. He’d been lulled by stories of late frosts killing all young plants or the sudden visit of a scorching sun, devilish and queer, in that part of the world where the sun had little business. Marie, on the other hand, grew up with the presence of social rules, oppressive directives of conduct that molded and shaped her every action. In the de Peussy family, there were the aristocrats like themselves and then there was the rest of the world. My mother grew up with her two siblings in the city of Limoges. She was the only daughter, and her defining characteristic had more to do with the nature of her sex than with her own disposition. Having grown up around boys, Marie Françoise developed a rambunctious sort of boldness that her mother liked to define as “vulgar.”

  My grandmother, Marguerite Marie, confused my mother’s bold and free ways with a lack of refinement. For years, she tried to teach her daughter the ways of the feminine world. She showed her how to hold a wine glass, how to delicately wipe her mouth after each bite, or how to laugh without crossing over into depravity and coarseness, long before my mother was out of childhood. And then there were the things my mother learned from her mother indirectly, in a symbiotic way—an osmosis of knowledge of things like how to smile to those who are by nature, “lesser than they were,” how to indicate disapproval of behavior in a social setting without uttering a single word and most importantly, how to discern the faux-upper class from the nouveaux riches. This was of course the most important and the easiest. It had always been expected that my mother would grow up to marry within the realms of her ranks.