Digging Out (2 page)

“You and Hallie walk straight home from school, hear.”

In the playground everyone is talking about the fog. Mrs. Morgan rings the handbell, saying she thinks with all this fog it is as beautiful as it gets in the valley. We queue up in class order and the girls go through the side entrance straight to Assembly, me marching behind Hallie. It’s Friday; we have Assembly Hall on Friday. We sing “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” and then we go back to our classes.

Mrs. Morgan gives paints out to each of us. Bobby and Dai go out for the rain gauge. That’s my favorite job. I did it Monday, before I took ill, when there had been three inches of rain. This morning, the gauge registers one and a half.

A call comes for “dinner children.” These are the children who are getting milk. So I stand to give my shilling to the dinner lady, asking Hallie for hers.

“I’ll do my own,” she says.

“No, I’ll do it for you, I will. You’re sharing your ham roll.”

“But I want to do my own,” Hallie says. “I want to queue up. I’ll do yours. You’re the one’s ill, like.”

I try to grab Hallie’s shilling from her. I want to fetch her milk to show how much I love her. I hold on to the edge of the coin, pulling hard as Mrs. Morgan calls out our names, marking the register.

“Come along now. One of you’s enough,” the dinner lady says, putting her arm around my shoulder. “No need for your squabbling, then.”

In the hallway, everyone is talking. When Hallie looks away I pull her shilling so hard it falls to the ground.

“Look what you’ve done, now, Alys!”

Hallie is down on her knees searching when a terrible roar starts, screaming low over us, the roar swooping low to swallow me. Windows crash in, rush of black water, mud, a tidal wave. It comes and comes higher, higher, till I lose sight of Hallie.

I hear screaming. Then all around is black and still.

P
ART
I

D
URANGO,
C
OLORADO
A
UGUST 16, 2002

T
he darkness I wake to in the early mornings is hardly ever sweet. More often than not I awaken to the sharp pain of panic mixed with a maudlin homesickness, a longing for my beginnings, before all the trouble, a grieving for my past. It is what the Welsh call
Hiraeth.
No matter that thirty years have passed and I am more than six thousand miles away. I have tried to give up that other world, leave that long-ago time behind, staying with what is now. But my past is screwed down deep inside me. In these dark moments I feel lost. There seems nothing that can hold me or make me feel safe.

This morning, while first light edges the horizon, I do not immediately remember that I am in Durango. But as the brilliant Colorado summer sun shows through the white lace curtains I see at the foot of the four-poster bed, the plaid flannel comforter and the overstuffed chair. I hear the river rolling over the boulders and I am reminded of all the years, all the sweet uninterrupted time Marc, Dafydd and I have spent in this cabin. Perhaps we should have kept it, taken out a second mortgage, borrowed from someone. After Hannah was born, Dafydd all grown-up, we sold it to Elizabeth, thinking we’d travel more, take long trips together. But somehow that hasn’t happened yet. Marc’s work and mine take us away from each other more often than we’d like. So sweet Elizabeth grants us usage rights whenever we are lucky enough to string a few days together.

I’ve been here for only twenty-four hours, and despite my abrupt
entrance into the morning, I have already felt the tight muscles of my heart giving way and my breath going deeper. Even my voice last night sounded more sonorous. Lying here, I remember how I always feel an instant repair of spirit in Durango. So why is it such a bloody struggle to get here? I guess it doesn’t matter. I’m here now. And ahead of me is a ten-day yoga retreat in Hesperus, the next town over, bordered by the La Plata Mountains and the ancient Anasazi ruins, said to be one of the most powerful energy vortexes in the world.

I don’t really understand what an energy vortex is, but I believe in it, like astrology, numerology, tarot cards and psychic readings. For me, there is more than enough room for these kinds of possibilities, these mysteries.

Gram used to say I was born twice: the first time from out of my mam like the rest of the world, and then born again, straight out of the earth—in fact, dug out, saved. “You’re special,” she’d say, her fingers going through my long brown hair, making it feel like fine silk thread instead of a tangled bush of weeds. “Must have been saved for doing something truly exceptional.”

Special. I’ve written three books of poetry. Is that exceptional? Despite what Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel laureate, says about poetry having the potential to save people and nations, or what Stanley Kunitz says about poetry being the most indelible testimony we have of the adventures of the spirit, sometimes I feel my work is a wasting of words, nothing more than falling ashes.

When I am in Durango, it seems to matter less that at thirty-eight I have not yet done anything truly life-changing. Aside from my children, that is. In the heart of the Weminuche Wilderness, I am placed in a way I am not in the stark edges of Los Angeles.

For hours I’ve been listening to the rain beating down on the tin roof Marc and I laid the first year we owned this house. I smile, remembering our balancing act that day, yelling at each other from our opposite and precipitous rooftop spots.

“This is too much for me, Marc. This thing weighs a ton. Where should I put it?”

“Just hold tight, baby. I’m coming over.”

“Omigod, I’m actually swaying. It’s gonna pull me over the edge. Is that vertigo? Shit, I think I’m going to fall. Marc, really I’m not
joking. I’ve always been scared of heights!” And dark places, murky lake waters, high waves, low waves for that matter, being left alone, you name it.

“Hold on, honey. I’m coming. Don’t talk. Concentrate on your balance. Remember, ‘balance is everything,’ ” he said, poking fun at my yoga practice. “If you start to fall, do
Trikonasna
or whatever that pose is called where you put your arms out and pump hard!”

Back then, I was certain Marc thought I was special, but in the last several years, something has changed between us. I think it started after Marc’s mother’s death, when he was understandably raw and oversensitive anyway. Then, after having done the music for the last five of Joe’s films, he lost what he called “the big one,” the one produced by DreamWorks Pictures, to someone else.

“The guy’s not even a good composer. He doesn’t do his own orchestrations. He can’t conduct. Man, I thought Joe and I were just starting to understand one another! He knows I’ve got a million different styles. I know what he wants, for Christ’s sake, or I thought I did.” Losing Joe’s film added to our already somewhat precarious emotional situation at the time, not to mention our financial picture, causing even more frequent misunderstandings.

I try not to think of our most recent confrontation, when Marc actually turned on the tape recorder behind the piano in his studio.

“I’m just going to do both of us a service here and tape this conversation, because it is so typical of the way we don’t seem to get each other.”

“If you do that, I won’t speak,” I said.

“Why not? It might give us a clue about things.”

“A clue about what things?” I asked. “It’s a rough time, that’s all. Things are not perfect. What’s the big deal, Marc? Let it go, as you would say.”

“We have both let it go so much and so often now, that it’s almost gone, Alys.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Alys,” he said, shaking his head, “come on.”

“I’m going to take a run.” I started to unbutton my shirt.

He came over to me then, put his arms around me. “Let me do that.”

It would have been so easy to just let him. To fall into that
moment with him as we had before so many times. But I wasn’t in the mood. I’d already decided that the only thing that could make things right for me was to get my endorphins going.

“Later,” I told him, pulling away.

“Fine. I’ll go smoke a cigar.” He knew I hated his breath after he smoked.

“Whatever.” I turned my back and walked out.

These last months we’ve actively steered clear of any further possibility of discord between us. We are careful with each other. Cautious to a fault. And we are both aware of it. I keep trying to convince myself that I’m just letting things between us be. But what I’m doing, plain and simple, is not dealing with it. Of course, neither is Marc. In the fragile moments between us, I am hoping for some easy way into our strain. Or more truthfully, around it. Perhaps we will simply grow out of this phase as we have others and into something else before too much more time passes.

Now, through the white lacy curtains and a thousand miles away from Marc, the whole wide-open blue sky of a Durango morning pulls me out of bed. I’m always eager to put these hard, wakeful hours behind me no matter where I am. And knowing that, I wonder why I have yet to find a way to avoid them. I’ve thought about taking up early-morning running—when it’s still dark out, when I need it most. In Los Angeles I’d be in good company down San Vicente Boulevard and then along Ocean Avenue, even on the beach. I suppose there are good reasons not to run in these underpopulated urban areas in the middle of the night, but people do it. Here in Durango I am never afraid of the possibility of intruders or even of running into wild animals, day or night. Two years ago, just starting out on an evening run, I spotted a large, blond mountain lion not far from the back deck. His face was the size of a dinner plate. I was surprised at how I wasn’t at all afraid. In fact, I was amazed to find that I tried to follow him. I wanted to see him again, so I slept out on the deck alone, waiting, hoping for his miraculous return.

I pull on my running shorts, socks and sneakers. Outside, the early-morning air is soft against my skin, lilac-sweet. The crack of cicadas, like the earth’s pulse, whirls through the wires of my own nerve endings. The low-flying buzz of a hummingbird, a horsefly—
each of them reporting their morning news. All of this, and the everyday possibility of an elk sighting, reminds me how much I love this place.

I walk for a while, trying to take it all in, looking and looking again at the wide, clear vistas of uncluttered ranchland. These views make me believe in the possibility of spaciousness in the mind, in the soul and in the heart. Two years ago a terrible fire on Missionary Ridge took over seventy homes and burned upward of sixty-five thousand acres, fortunately just missing our valley. The mountains around us have started to recover. I move into a slow jog down my favorite dirt road, the Animas River running next to me. Soon, I am sweating. Despite my lack of sleep, my muscles engage. After a mile or so I pick up the pace, running faster and faster.

As I often do at this point in my run, I begin to slip into silent meditation. I watch my breathing, the in breath, the out breath, the quiet way my lungs fill and empty, and I am grateful for the natural red-blooded feel of my life’s promise. “Happy,” as Rilke says, “to know that behind all words, the Unsayable stands; and from that source, the Infinite crosses over to gladness …”

Unfortunately, too often my mind clicks on to some desperate fantasy and sticks to it, and I must forcefully drag the wandering seat of my consciousness back to my breath. It is always one or another of my fears surfacing: Hannah being snatched on her way to school, Dafydd falling out of the air from a plane. Death by fire, falling, drowning—death by any means at any time, anywhere. Not probable, not even logical, but the fears are always there, clutching and pawing, pulling me down. I have tried to work with these fears for years, but like my early-morning wakeful hours filled with longing, when fear shows up, it feels like my mind stretches over some long muddied lake. Although I try to rise above it, to hold some higher thought from entwinement, shrubs and sticks, to place myself on higher ground, I am always pushing against the rush of water for dear life. Running helps.

I’ve got my speed up. I am running so fast now, my hair is a dark mane flying out. As I break into a full lope, I feel Marc behind me.

I turn as though he might actually be there instead of where I know he is, home with Hannah, making one of his big breakfasts, reading the
New York Times,
a cup of black coffee and his morning
pipe, cigarette or cigar. Reliable. Dependable. Sturdy. Always where he says he is. I hold my hand out to him, seeing him so clearly, it seems as if in that moment there is absolutely nothing between us besides our full, trusting hearts.

Another mile uphill and then turning back, like a speeding bullet, a beam of light, empowered. I call out, “Wonder Woman!” Strong thighs, heart and lungs push the hallucination, Los Angeles, Hannah and Marc aside. I am not thinking about my unfinished and fettered poetry galleys due to my editor at the end of the month. It is just me filling up with clean summer air, and the stark loveliness of parched fields, bleached white bones of long-ago winter months against the lush mountains. Yes, running has always helped.

Elizabeth’s front door is open. The phone is ringing. I hear it stop. She shouts, “Alys, are you back?”

“I’m here!” I head toward the back deck to do a few yoga stretches, and see the kitchen table, where Elizabeth has left me half a papaya with a slice of lime. I am taking my socks off by the French doors when she calls out, “It’s Phillipe.”

Phillipe is Marc’s partner and friend. There’s something about him that makes me uncomfortable, always has. Until Elizabeth is in front of me and I see her expression I don’t think about why he might be calling me here. She hands me the phone. “Phillipe?” I wonder if he’s told her why he is calling.

Elizabeth shrugs and shakes her head. Her top lip, full and dashed with red lipstick, is quivering slightly. After she hands me the phone she leans her small, compact body against the plaid wing chair near me and gently holds my elbow. Things begin to move in slow motion.