Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders (28 page)

R
uthie is at the wheel. I sit beside her. George is in the backseat. She says that, on the way home from the restaurant, Tilton pointed out this field not far from the house. Tilton said it was a field like the one where the dead fell from the sky.

For reasons I can’t explain, I feel like something inside of me has been ripped open. I sit in the car like I am gliding toward an oncoming calamity. But Ruthie wears no helmet this time. There’s no foil-wrapped leftover in my lap. No cigar. No radio.

No lightning, no thunder.

But there is rain. A heavy dousing. The windshield wipers pound and pound.

I’m breathless. I can’t even look at George. I fold my hands in my lap, and I know I’m going to pray, but not to God. I grip my hands tightly and think of my mother. The smell of burning paper at the end of each day, for years—years! The piles of ash in the small metal trash can by her desk. That faker. The thought makes me smile.

I wonder what the pages on the floor of my mother’s bedroom will offer—some small bit of the truth for once? Will there be some hint of my father? One final shred she volunteered before she died?

This is praying, I tell myself.

I’m suddenly glad that George is alive—especially for my daughters.

Ruthie passes a car, to get in the far lane. I love her conviction. She comes from me, after all.

“Would it have been better?” I say to George.

“What?” George says.

“If we’d stayed together,” I say softly. “Confirm or deny.”

“What’s that, Eleanor?” George says. “Do you see something? Do you see her?”

“There!” Ruthie shouts.

Tilton is a dark silhouette with bare legs in Harriet’s blue dress. She could be my mother, young and alive. It occurs to me that maybe no one ever really dies until everyone who remembers you has died too. It feels as if the heart attack has electrified and recircuited the wires in my brain. For the moment, there’s such a blur of love that death doesn’t matter. Harriet before me and Tilton and Ruthie after me. I’m a joint, an axis, a hinge—with love on either side.

The field is beyond the divided highway. Ruth puts on her blinker and, barely slowing, she U-turns. Up ahead, caught in the glare of headlights, there’s a dog—or is it a fox? Ruthie hits the brakes. The tires catch the scrim of water, and the car starts to spin.

Everything slows, even my own heartbeat—I’m sure of it. The headlights tour the divider, the long highway, the field stitched together by a weave of roots and individual blades of grass. Again and again—until one of the tires bumps into the field itself, and the tread catches the mud.

The car stops abruptly. Ruthie’s air bag pops into her face—a gust—but mine doesn’t. Then the car is silent.

The headlights point into the field at the distant trees, the air between trees. The car fills with our breaths—George, Ruth, me.

Where is Tilton? Where is she?

And then there’s a tap, tap, tap on a back window. A door pops open and Tilton slides in the backseat. She shuts the door.

My bedtime story has always ended the same way: “The family was torn apart and it couldn’t be put back together again. The end.”

And yet here we are.

Tilton says, “I’m the little knot.” She says, “This is the new beginning.”

My heart twinges—its threaded capillaries, blushing veins, and shushing valves. It’s an old, familiar ache, a pain that reaches back to my adoration of Tilton and Ruthie, to my first rush of love for George, that needles all the way back to my mother and my anchorless love for my lost father. I was so sure everything was over, sewn up, ended, but the rain thrums and beads on the windows.

Begin.

I’ve worked on this novel for approximately eighteen years. The research slowed me down, yes, but I’ve never written a novel that has gone through so many profoundly different drafts. The first piece of this novel was published more than ten years ago at failbetter.com, and about five years later, two more pieces were published, one in the anthology
Behind the Short Story: From First to Final Draft,
and another in the
Chattahoochee Review.
The anthologized story became a thirty-page section of the novel that has now been whittled to one paragraph, as it goes. Aside from these early publications, I’ve kept these characters close. I’ve grown to love them, deeply. I admit that there were times when I walked away from the book—working on it was like wrestling bears—but the characters always called me back. This novel represents a large swath of my creative life, and it feels foreign to hand over these lives to the world, but I’m honored to.

I’m thankful for a historical book that documents Sheppard Pratt called
Gatehouse: The Evolution of the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, 1853–1986
by Bliss and Byron Forbush and for the small footnote within it that mentions the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children. That footnote sparked this novel, in many ways. More than a decade ago, the good people who work at what was once the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children allowed me to walk the grounds and look at the old records, which I photocopied and held on to. These were incredibly precious documents to me. I don’t know if those beautiful, old, asbestos-ridden buildings still exist. I’ve lived far from them for a long time. I’ll tell you this: if you saw them, they would break your heart.

I’m thankful to the University of Delaware Library, where, during my early career as a writer, I was allowed to roam the stacks with a card that cost twenty dollars a year. In those stacks, I randomly came across a book called
Man Bites Man: The Scrapbook of an Edwardian Eccentric;
his name was George Ives. It was a discovery of pure joy. I’m also thankful for the library’s deep collection of old magazines.

A special thank-you to my father, as ever. He has always been my greatest researcher. When I was a child, he let me sit in the booth at the Howard House in Elkton, Maryland, with the framed clipping that read “Dead Fell from Sky,” and he didn’t hide it from me. Instead, he told me his recollection of the tragedy. I’m thankful for friends of the family Jack and Abbie Fassnacht, who were witnesses and kind enough to recount the tragedy for me over eighteen years ago. My father also tracked down the wonderful people at the Wildwood Historical Society; they were incredibly generous with their time. I appreciate David W. Francis’s historical book
Wildwood by the Sea.
I’m also thankful to Peter McCall and Bill Perkins for discussing the inner workings of the heart with me.

I’m thankful to my fantastic agent, Nat Sobel, who is always there for me, as well as the brilliant Judith Weber and all those who’ve worked at the agency: Kirsten Carleton, Julie Stevenson, and Adia Wright. I’m thankful for Justin Manask, manager extraordinaire. You all allow me to follow my whims, and I love you for it. Special thanks, also, to the brilliant and wonderful Caitlin Alexander and Kara Cesare. And, of course, thank you to Ben George for tackling this novel with me.

And I’m forever thankful to my mother, my father, and my husband, who have loved this book for years, have guarded it protectively, and have pushed me to live up to the promise it holds, a promise of the imagination—my imagination and now yours, dear reader.

I’m thankful for you, as ever.

The Pure Trilogy:
Pure, Fuse, Burn

Which Brings Me to You
(with Steve Almond)

The Madam

The Miss America Family

Girl Talk

The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted
(writing as Bridget Asher)

The Pretend Wife
(writing as Bridget Asher)

My Husband’s Sweethearts
(writing as Bridget Asher)

Compulsions of Silkworms and Bees

Lizzie Borden in Love

This Country of Mothers

The Ever Breath

The Prince of Fenway Park

The Amazing Compendium of Edward Magorium
(writing as N. E. Bode)

The Slippery Map
(writing as N. E. Bode)

The Anybodies Trilogy (writing as N. E. Bode)

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