Deep River Burning (14 page)

Jimmie and a few others from the church traveled inland to help with the cleanup where mosquitoes flew in droves and bacteria were looming thick in the trees and in the muddy grasses and shrubs. The sanctuary sustained little damage except for beach erosion, but the sound of the wind had seeped into a part of Iris’s heart where fear sits very close to its marrow. Not long after Bernita, Iris moved away to live with family in northern Alabama. She was never the same after the hurricane. Iris had been through several major storms during her fifteen years in North Carolina, but there was something about this hurricane that made her feel unsettled. It was expected to do serious damage to places like Isabel Beach, but the small coastal towns that were supposed to be leveled by the storm were spared. Maybe it was Bernita’s unpredictability. Maybe it wasn’t fear at all. Maybe the hurricane was one of a number of forces coming together at one time to stir inside of Iris a need for change. She was such an important part of the seascape around the sanctuary, so it was difficult for Denver to watch her leave. She was a loving woman who didn’t judge people, and Denver hoped to learn that lesson from her. Iris could forgive anything. Other than Father Allen, Denver had never met another person who so fully embraced and loved humanity, the good and the bad.

One day, just a few days before Iris moved away, Denver sat on the staircase in Iris’s house and watched her filter through boxes she hadn’t touched in many years, reminiscing, asking in her mind, “where did I get this, who gave me that?” Denver had been helping her pack and organize her belongings so that they would be easy to load into the moving truck. She wondered what Iris thought of her life, the part of it she had boxed and shelved, filing through it, making decisions about what to discard and what to keep. Did she find evidence of old interests she had left behind? Did she find regrets stuffed in the bottoms of torn boxes crushed under a heavy stack of notebooks with every line filled? Did she find the artifacts of old love affairs looking back at her with only a vague sense of conflicted recognition?

In the corner of the living room, Denver saw a guitar propped up against the wall. “I didn’t know you played the guitar,” Denver said.

“I don’t,” Iris replied. “I used to,” she added. Other than a few small things, Denver tried not to hold on to much of anything. To her, the past was gone. She believed that keeping things that were of no use to her in the present seemed to be a waste of space. If she ever decided to move out of her apartment on Topsail Avenue, she would have very little work to do.

Iris found an envelope of letters, old and yellowing. She read a few and a soft smile came over her face. Iris gazed upward and her eyes dimmed. She looked up at Denver and then looked quickly away, and Denver felt sorry that her presence was an intrusion, but she never forgot that soft smile on Iris’s face, even long after she had moved away. It was the kind of look you might have when you think no one is looking, when a love story reveals itself through tiny, involuntary movements of the face.

Chapter 20

Letters from Colorado

Dear Denver,

  I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye. I had to go. I hope you understand. Please go to Waterfowl Landing at midnight, the night of the July full moon. I took this photo of a poppy field in California. It reminds me of you.

Love,
Josh

Postmarked in Colorado, the letter arrived in North Carolina the following spring. Denver looked at the photograph, and she wondered when Josh had become such a good photographer.

The photo was a stunning blend of color with a blue sky and just a few ballooning white clouds over a hillside covered with green and vibrant orange poppies. But when the images of Adena flashed through her mind like a band of running torches, her answer to his request was “No” and she folded the letter and put it in her desk drawer. She couldn’t go back. She had her fill of smoke and ashes. Too much time had gone by. She wasn’t the same person she was back then. The sea had extinguished that fire and washed most of it from her consciousness, so that only a few memories remained, and even those were like strings of seaweed, dried and withered on a sun-drenched rock, waiting to be blown away with the next swift wind. She was surprised at how little she thought about Adena, and she had no desire to visit old haunts. The past doesn’t exist except as a story, as a narrative, and she could choose the shape of that story in her mind, and extract from it only what was useful to her.

She was happy about the fact that at some point, her life had slipped imperceptibly into a comfortable routine. In addition to her volunteer work at the sanctuary, she transferred as many of her college credits from Branton University as she could to UNC Wilmington, so that she could finally complete her degree. She registered for a few courses in Marine Biology and loved learning more about coastal ecosystems.

In the meantime, she got a full-time job as a waitress at a nearby crab shack. She had been working part-time at a few odd jobs in retail, but she liked the high energy atmosphere of the crab shack. The owner, Ray, also known by the locals as Stingray, liked to play songs like “Barracuda,” “Yellow Submarine,” and “Octopus’s Garden” for the customers, and sometimes on Friday evenings when the beer began to flow, some of them would sing out loud, especially the chorus for “Yellow Submarine.” In the summer, tourists would come in to experience their first crab shack and in many cases, their first taste of crab. There were always a few perverts who couldn’t keep their hands to themselves, but Ray told her to “give them what they deserved.” So, if that meant a quick slap and cold beer in the crotch, then that’s exactly what they got.

Working at the crab shack would give her the money she needed, but it wasn’t going to smooth the dilemma that had been growing inside of her ever since she had moved to the coast. What she knew about ocean pollution and commercial fishing practices was almost enough to cause her to quit her job and give up eating seafood altogether. She no longer thought in terms of specific oceans, such as the Atlantic or Pacific or Indian, but rather, she saw one large, nameless ocean, one body of water, which cradled all of the continents, so what was happening in the coastal waters of Japan was just as important as what was happening in coastal Carolina. She rationalized that the job at the crab shack was only temporary, but every day the feeling gnawed at her that she wanted to work on the side of saving sea life, not serving it to hungry tourists.

She also began to build a little family of her own. It was a cool day when she walked into the Isabel Beach Animal Shelter and looked around at all the animals. Most of the animals in the shelter were in cages and a few cats were out walking around or sitting on shelves or countertops. She went into a separate room for cats that were so morbidly obese they couldn’t move. She spoke at length to a woman at the shelter named Mary Ann, who explained that some of the animals were not properly cared for by their owners, and when the owners could no longer manage them at all, or were not willing to provide the cats with healthcare, they brought them to the shelter.

She asked Mary Ann to show her the animals that nobody wanted, the ones that were older, the ones that required special care. In less than an hour, Denver was on her way home with a four-year-old dog that was an undernourished stray named Shelly who liked to bite into seashells, and a long-haired three-year-old cat that lost all of its hair due to a food allergy. When the shelter started the cat, Alexi, on a special diet, all of her long, silky tan and white hair came back. Her previous owners didn’t believe in taking pets to see the veterinarian. They thought it was a waste of money.

As Denver opened the door of the pet carrier in the living room of her apartment, it dawned on her that these two creatures may not like one another and her apartment was too small to host a family feud, but for the first hour or so, Alexi and Shelly sniffed each other and everything in the apartment curiously, no matter how big or small. Shelly started with the love seat and worked her way down to a paper clip on the floor. Alexi tentatively explored each room, starting with a sniff, followed by a paw, then another paw, until she finally checked out the whole room and stopped in the middle of the floor to take a break to clean her face. The two new additions to the household kept a close eye on one another, but they didn’t seem to object to being in the same room.

Denver took Shelly for a walk along the beach while Alexi napped on a blanket bundled on top of Denver’s bed. Even though it was chilly outside, Shelly pulled Denver down to the surf and she wagged her tail and held her snout up into the wind until she tired herself out, and then Denver took her back home. Denver got less sleep at night, but Shelly and Alexi learned to love each other like sisters, like best friends. They slept together, played together, ate at the same time, and wherever Denver was in the apartment, her two girls were there beside her. They knew Denver’s routine and whenever she came home from class or from the crab shack smelling like hush puppies and cole slaw, they were there to welcome her home.

Most days, she went to the sanctuary to speak with Father Allen and Jimmie after her work shift was over, so it was a surprise to her to find that one day Father Allen wasn’t feeling well. He looked tired and pale and was developing a persistent cough.

“Are you okay?” Jimmie asked.

“Yes, I’m just feeling a little light-headed,” Father Allen answered.

“You feel a little clammy as well. Do you want to go to the hospital?”

“No, I have an appointment with my doctor tomorrow. I just need to go home and rest.” Father Allen coughed a few times into his hand and reached for a paper towel. He wiped off his hands, tossed the paper towel into the trash, and left the sanctuary. Denver went to the trash can and peered over its rim. The paper towel was soiled with small streaks and smudges of blood.

She was worried about Father Allen. The next evening, she gazed out the window of her apartment wondering what the doctor had to say about his cough, about the blood. She sat at her desk reading to distract herself. She reached for a cup of tea on the desk near a small lamp that sat next to a closed, but thinly-curtained window that overlooked a patio.

Something came to her window. Fingernails again, like that one time on her tent at Bear Island, but this time stronger, amidst a flurry of movement like paper scraping. It was dark, and she couldn’t see through the curtains, so she went around to the kitchen where a door opened to the patio and turned on the outside light. There was stillness. Then a flutter.

Perched on the window sill was a Luna Moth, the largest she’d ever seen. The wing span must have been six inches long and about four inches wide. It takes nearly twenty minutes for the moth to unravel and spread those long wings once it wriggles from the cocoon. Its wings were a delicate two-tone lime green with little brown eyes in the center. The adult life of a Luna Moth is only one week, not that much different from human beings in the whole grand scheme of things. The big difference though is that the Luna Moth has no mouth. It receives all of its nourishment in the cocoon stage and then doesn’t eat for its life in flight.

Father Allen would love the Luna Moth, she thought. He would say that our lives exist only in the larvae stage and that we haven’t even begun to conceptualize how beautiful we are and how dazzling we will fly when we bloom, once we leave the cocoon.

Maybe it was the papery brush of the wings against her window, maybe it was the seduction of light, maybe it was the rare sighting of the Luna Moth whose life would be cut off too soon, maybe it was its wildness, its freedom, its nocturnal dance, but she returned to her study, opened the desk drawer, and read the letter again, the letter from Colorado.

On a literal level, she didn’t understand why he was contacting her now, but on another level, one more unconscious, at a place very elemental, not just beneath the skin, but a little bit deeper, she did understand. She knew what was inside Josh, his intensity, his passion, and over the years, he must have discovered a way of expressing those things, through photography. She still couldn’t do what the letter asked. It would be a while until the July full moon, but she didn’t know if she could prepare herself to meet her past and its places in that amount of time. The thought of it created a wave of anxiety throughout her body that felt like seasickness. She needed to put the letter away. She wanted to leave the room, leave the apartment, and go where there were people who knew nothing about Adena. But it was late, and she needed to get some sleep. She hoped that someday she would see another Luna Moth.

As hard as she tried, she didn’t sleep at all that night, but this time it wasn’t because she was afraid she would miss something like when she was out camping and listening to the crashing waves around her.

The last time she looked at the clock, it was 4:44 in the morning, but she did finally fall asleep until Alexi, whose food bowl had been empty for hours, pressed her soft, purring forehead up against Denver’s face. The light of late morning was shining in through her bedroom window, and Shelly sat patiently on the floor at the side of the bed looking up at Denver wondering why she was still in bed.

All day, she busied herself with an assignment for one of her classes that involved documenting changes on the beaches at Isabel and observing the waves that were cresting unusually high because of a storm out at sea. That afternoon, she received another letter from Colorado and she decided not to avoid its contents. She walked over to the base of a large dune and sat down eyeing the envelope. She opened the letter. It read:

Dear Denver,

  I will be waiting for you.

Josh

The root of the matter had arrived. Not the center, or the core necessarily, but a governing presence most powerful, precisely because it was denied. The root is the origin out of which all else grows, a starting place. The doors needed to open, and the basement door that was locked, with the key thrown into a sea trench, needed to be cracked open, and the staircase leading down that creaks with each footstep needed to be awakened. Mystery is a blessing, she convinced herself. Make peace with not knowing where you are, what the next step is going to be, jagged or leafy, the darkness may lead the way out. He would be waiting for her there.

In only a moment’s time, it didn’t matter. Jimmie found her sitting on the beach and told her that Father Allen had been diagnosed with tuberculosis and had been admitted to the hospital.