Stars Go Blue

Copyright © 2014 Laura Pritchett

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pritchett, Laura, 1971-

Stars go blue : a novel / Laura Pritchett.

1. Married people—Fiction. 2. Alzheimer's disease—Patients—Fiction. 3. Caregivers—Mental health—Fiction. 4. Family violence—Fiction. 5. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

PS3616.R58S83 2014

811'.6--dc23

2013044913

ISBN 978-1-61902-390-1

Cover design by Debbie Berne

Interior Design by Neuwirth & Associates

Counterpoint

1919 Fifth Street

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10
   
9
   
8
   
7
   
6
   
5
   
4
   
3
   
2
   
1

Dedicated to

James and Rose

and

Jacob James and Eliana Rose

Contents

I.

Ben

Renny

Ben

Renny

Ben

II.

Renny

Ben

Renny

Ben

Renny

III.

Ben

Renny

Ben

Renny

Ben

Renny

Ben

Renny

IV.

Jess

Acknowledgments

I.

 

“I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

Methinks I should know you and know this man;

yet, I am doubtful; for I am mainly ignorant

what place this is.”

—
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

King Lear
(act 4, scene 7)

BEN

T
he fields are poured ice, rippled and waved as if a frozen lake. Ben considers the way the sun has melted—and the earth absorbed—the snow that fell months ago, which is how such strange patterns got created. But he also entertains the idea that his pastures have reverted in time to the great sea they once were. Ben has been partial to water, always, which is why life gets measured in terms of irrigation and rainfall and acre-feet and even the dry rainless days needed for baling hay. Even now he considers the watersheds in his brain, how water moves through tissue, how rivers of electricity pulse in stops and starts.

The pastures have never been this way, so icy, and it makes walking hard. There are no cattle to check, no fields to irrigate, nothing to doctor or wean or birth, and yet he wants to walk anyway, down the iced-over dirt road to the back of his ranch even though the walking is tough because this year the snow has not melted as it should. He has that memory thing—he
can't remember the name—and he knows it's normal to be able to remember his childhood but not yesterday and not, on occasion, his wife's name. Or the name of this daughter walking beside him.

He's not supposed to feel bad about the things he can't remember, although he is allowed to feel bad about the fact that this disease only gets worse. Deeper still, he has clarified that he's allowed the terror and the claustrophobia of wanting to say words that are dammed up inside.

She comes more often now, this daughter, she says to walk her dog, a huge yellow puppy that is supposed to bring you things but does not. Just like his brain, this dog doesn't work right. The dog (whose name he can't remember but it reminds him of music) is chasing those big birds out in the field. The dog sends them honking into the sky, and this also reminds him of music. He used to shoot those birds, and his wife would complain because cooking hamburger from one of their cows was always easier than cooking one of those big birds.

He's never seen the likes of a winter like this.

His daughter calls her yellow dog and the creature comes galumphing or galloping or grazing toward them but stops short to pick up a piece of frozen horse manure. “Damn it,” his daughter says. “No, Satchmo! No!” She pries the frozen square of manure from the dog's teeth and flings it away. Then she unzips her jacket and sighs one of those frustrated sighs that is supposed to help get patience back and which he hears from his wife all the time now. “Remember, Dad, how you used to say ‘tell ya what I'm gonna do, see'?”

Sometimes his brain works if he can manage it like music, like a song, like a river that does not halt. So he singsongs it: “
Tell you what I'm gonna do, see.
” With the accent, like a Brooklyn boxer, although he has been a Colorado rancher all
his life. He puts up his hands in boxer pose and that makes her laugh and her laugh is like music.

He wonders if she notices how all the wooden fence posts each have a small cap of frozen snow at the top. They put many of these posts in together—he with the posthole diggers and she with the tamping bar—he remembers how proud he was that she could and wanted to do such work. Some of the older posts, the original ones—which are not posts so much as chunks of wood from fallen trees and covered with lichen—are rotting. He tells himself to remember to replace them in the spring. Only he will not be here in the spring.

“And remember how Rachel would say, ‘Tell you what
I'm
gonna do, see,' and punch you in the arm.”

“Oh, yes. Rachel.” He rubs his arm, over the duct tape on his down jacket, where his daughter used to punch him. He has two daughters and one is dead. He remembers her as a child sitting on his lap, twirling her dark fine hair in her finger, and he remembers that she loved to be carried to bed on his back.

“I wonder how my cabin is,” he says.

“You just asked me that, Dad. It's the same. It's always the same.”

He wonders if it's true, that he just asked that, or that it's always the same. He misses the cabin. He knows nothing about it was ever the same, including the view from the window where the light would change as it shifted across the snowy seas of hayfields, where the small irrigation ditches would sparkle like rows of starlight, where the fox would pause and stare at him from the edge of a field, where the horses would dip their heads like swans.

His cabin. His ranch.

He fingers a thin slice of tree, the one in the pocket of his jeans. He sees in his mind's eye what he knows the paper says.
He's glad his mind's eye will be consistent with what is written on paper, that the two sets flow together. Today, he is tuned in, and he'll stay tuned in as long as he can. When he pulls the slice of tree out, it will be creased and worn to the point he can barely see his penciled marks, but he knows it will list his family.

I am married to Renny.

Carolyn = daughter. Who is married to Del.

Rachel = dead daughter

4 grandchildren: Jack - Leanne (C's) and Billy - Jess (R's)

He fingers the paper because it is calming and stalls the terror. He can sense his own fear of this disease, how it has grown to be a constant companion now, but one on which he still has the upper hand. Today he is winning.

“I built it,” he says.

“I know it, Dad. You did a good job. It's a beautiful cabin.”

“When Rachel died.”

“I know it. It's a nice tight cabin. Dad—”

“It never healed.”

She jams her hands into her red coat, takes them out, swings her arms. The fabric makes the swishing sound of water. Then, “What never healed, Dad? Do you mean you? You and Mom?”

“The water is running backwards.”

She looks at him, even as they walk, and then says, “If you say so.”

“But Jess will take care of it.”

She swishes her arms back and forth. “Okay.” Her voice is small and quiet like a mourning dove, like the soft gray on a mourning dove's back.

But none of this is what he means. And Carolyn does not mean it's okay, either. He'd like to tell Carolyn the real story.
Not the story that she knows, but the story that registered in his heart. How although he and Renny argued they could also look at the other and know what thoughts were transpiring, what waterways of feeling were moving between them. But then they forgot how to talk. With words or with touch or with eyes. They were silenced. So he moved to the other end of the ranch. He hated and missed his wife. He hated and missed something particular. Perhaps he had no direction, perhaps he had stalled out, perhaps he knew it. Oh, yes. He wants to tell this daughter all this. How can he explain it?

“Dad?” His daughter takes her ball cap off, ponytails her hair, puts the cap back on, and threads her mane of hair through the back. All in one fluid motion, like water.

“Oh,” he says. “Oh. Well. That orange twine. That we use to graft calves on to new mothers. I—”

But his daughter is already talking. “Remember that cow we had? I called it Twisted Snout, but everyone else called it Crooked Nose. No, actually, Pablo Picasso. Remember that cow? That cow's nose was bent from the get-go. I'm sorry Mom yelled at you this morning. About the bacon. She's just so . . . tired out, I guess.”

“Crooked Nose.” He remembers her well. “Yes. She gave birth to Soft Eyes, Crooked Hoof, Wild Mama. Some others.” He remembers that Renny yelled at him about the bacon but he can't remember why. Something about needing to put it in a frying pan and not on the burner, but he had put it in a frying pan, hadn't he? Of course he had. Because bacon always needed to go in a pan. He must have just been sleepy. He hates the dark rooms in his brain. He knows they're there, but surely he can also push them into the corner and live in the rest of his brain. “Her sire was X313 and her mama was an Angus-Hereford mix, one of the originals. Pangaea, Renny called her.”