to go back, but her foot missed purchase and she felt the overwhelming topple of the weight on her back, the swing of something beyond her control.
Pain was everything when she struck the ledge below. She lay there for a while unable to fully take in the injury. Turning her head she could see the mountains in the distance, a shadow cut from the granite sky. She kept her eyes there for a long time, not wanting to see what the fall had made of her, but eventually she looked down. Her right leg was twisted in a way she had never seen on a person and with each breath the ache traveled until there was no part of her body without hurt. She tried to move but when she did she felt a sudden wave of nausea and everything she had eaten that morning came up from inside her in a warm wash. She was humiliated to think she could die like this.
With slowness and care, she raised onto her elbows and propped against a stone outcropping so that she could see over the ledge and into the valley below. It was a terrible chaos, this loss of where she was, something akin to madness. She called for help, but even as she did so she could hear the frailty of her own voice swallowed by the mountainside.
Memory had thrust down then into her brain, something she’d not recalled in a long time. It had been when she was thirteen and her mother had left her alone in the house for three days, chasing some man or some other easy fix. At first she’d turned out the cupboards for food, found a couple of cans of Campbell’s soup she heated and drank that first day. By the second evening she was sick at her stomach with hunger and she turned the garbage can out looking for something left over, but there was nothing. She prayed, though she damned herself for doing it even as the words were in her mouth.
That third morning she decided to find help. She went down to a place on the Watauga River where a piece of storm-broken tree jutted over the water. She’d seen out-of-town fly fishermen down there many times, geared out expensively, and she knew if one of them saw her there they would have no choice but to try and help her. She didn’t care what they’d want of her in return. Hunger didn’t care about virginity. Hunger only knew and feared itself.
She edged out on the log, tested each inch of advance until she was suspended above an avalanche of whitewater. The dam had been let go that afternoon and the pool below her was too deep to see bottom. It was dangerous being there and the thrill of being that close to something she couldn’t stop was like looking into the seductive eye of nothing.
For hours she waited there, waited to be seen, waited to be sought out by anyhow who might have noted her missing, but there was no one and as she recognized this something greater than hunger overtook her. She was utterly alone. When she got back to the trailer her mother was passed out on the couch. She covered her with a blanket from the front closet. In her purse there was a twenty-dollar bill. She had lifted the bill, left quietly and walked into town for what she could find.
And now, lost and hurt here on the mountainside, she felt she was reliving the ache of being forgotten. Perhaps she’d been fooling herself to think that anything she could do would make her any less alone. Perhaps loneliness was an inheritable trait, an infection. Her mother suffered from it as much as any person she’d ever known. Why would she believe she would be any less subject to its injury?
She would not pray this time. At the very least, she still had that much she could refuse.
Then, there were voices. Distant but nearing. She called out and they answered, came faster and more urgent. Two faces, Wolf and Winter, peered over the ledge. Blind love crowded in her until she wept.
So much time in so few months since that day on the mountain and this night at the Tennessee homeplace. Sometimes Rain was unsure when she let go of herself, when it was no longer she alone but Winter or Wolf who thought a thing, who felt a thing. Was that what love was, this gradual resignation of what she believed to be distinct? She had read in the university library that some scientists believed that the dimensional world we live in is in fact an illusion, that the concept of space and time can be compressed down into a flat surface of information—one thing or another, this or that. In the world of the tiniest things there was a basic buzz that rendered the plans of God. If that were true then couldn’t her mind be its own deception, a product of contraries that needed one another to exist at all? Perhaps this loss of herself in her marriage to Wolf and Winter was what made it possible to really love.
The night had cooled and she was ready to go back, but she lingered a while still, felt the brush of sedge and vetch against her bare legs, the earth’s lightest touch. She wanted to be cold before she returned to her lovers. She wanted to know the hurt of not having what she desired.
6
STRATTON LEFT early for Knoxville. He got up in the warm summer dark, fed the cat, and stood on the porch with his coffee. There were many songbirds out there in the concealment of the tree line; their voices seemed to testify to the belief that they could dissuade nighttime air. In a while it seemed to be the case, the old parchment gray of the hour filtering in.
When the light was full he went back to where he’d boxed so many of Liza’s pictures. It felt wrong to keep them like that, even given what the real estate agent had said. He hung many where they had been before and the rest in the back bedroom. If he were to have his way, they would soon disappear, but it was better to have them where he could see them for now. Better to deal honestly with what they were.
I-40 was flanked with occasional crosses to mark the highway dead. Semis pressed from behind, headlights in the rearview mirror like threats. Things slowed as he came into Knox County, the glut of commuter traffic rising up as suddenly as something sprung from the ground. There were stalled vehicles on the shoulder, yellow roadside assistance trucks flashing code lights. At a halt, he quick-timed the intervals of traffic, plunged his foot on the gas so hard that his heart bobbed up to his ears and then the gridlock fell away.
There was a spot on Volunteer Boulevard on the university campus; he fed the machine with all the spare change he had and tried to remember how to get around. In a quarter of an hour he found himself standing in the waiting room of the office for the art and photography program. The woman behind the front desk was on the telephone. He took a seat and waited.
“Can I help you, sir,” she said a few minutes later in a tone that suggested the very prospect grieved her.
“Yes, ma’am. I was hoping to talk to John Easterday. I wanted to see him about some photography he might be interested in.”
“Let me check his schedule.”
She made a face that was less than encouraging before turning to consult her computer monitor.
“It looks like he’s on campus early this afternoon and has an office hour. From one to two. It’s an open hour so he should be available to walk-ins. I suppose you might need to know where his office is?”
Stratton said that he would. Without a word she scrawled an abbreviated title and a number on a pink Post-it and stuck it to the desk counter. He peeled it off as carefully as he would a bandage, thanked her, and left.
He wandered down to the banks of the Tennessee and walked the greenway for a while. He had not been to the city in well over a year, and it was always a pleasure to come and spend a little time here where the river flowed under the old iron railway spans. It provided the perfect opportunity to empty himself, to walk beside something of magnitude.
An old spaniel with a gray muzzle popped up a few feet in front of him and wolfed. His owner, a sleek black man in a battered fedora, told him to hush as he flicked his fishing rod toward the water and the reel sang.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “he
