Fiction

By LINDA SHAPIRO

True north

While sipping an umbrella-topped cocktail on Kauai, Hedi gets news from her sister Carla in Duluth that she can’t ignore, and an offer she can’t refuse. After twenty minutes or so of blabbing about her hard life as a single mother with three kids to raise, Carla mentions, MENTIONS that their grandmother, the woman who raised them and refused to let them call her anything but Anna, has been diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer. 

“Which, as you recall, is what Mom died of and what we are probably going to die of.” 

“Unless, Carla, we die of reckless and incompetent behavior like Dad, and besides, Anna made me promise not to tell you yet. She knows you hate this place, but since you are the one who is free and clear of any obligations except that dead end job you’re always complaining about, I thought maybe you could come home and take care of her for the short life span she has left at this point, at least according to the doctor, who I managed to wangle the truth out of since she refuses to talk about it.” 

Pissed at her sister for reasons of tone and the lousy structuring of this revelation, she calls Anna. 

“I can manage perfectly well without you having to give up your life to come home and watch me die.” 

This from the woman who took her and Carla in at ages four and eight after their mother died and their father moved further up north to open a bar. One year later he took a snowmobile and a bottle of Johnny Walker and a young woman barely out of her teens on a joyride that ended badly for both of them. Hedi and Carla found this out years later, of course, told at the time that their father had passed away and joined their mother in heaven. 

So Hedi quits her job writing advertorials for Hawaiian periodicals and returns to her grandmother’s house in Duluth. She has settled into her old bedroom, now a sewing room where Anna runs up clothing for Carla’s kids and curtains for Carla’s “pigsty of a house” as she terms it. 

Immaculate and drafty, the rooms of Anna’s house seem strung out, waiting for something to happen. She and Grandpa Jack had hastily purchased it when they moved to Duluth to become the girls’ guardians. Throughout Hedi’s childhood their house felt more like a place where the family vamped between the outside things that made up real life—school, dates, jobs. After he lost his job, Jack mostly barhopped while Anna continued working as a practical nurse. The two of them lived in obstinate circumflexion, politely winding around each other. Carla acted out all the crap the rest of them kept tamped down, while Hedi buried herself in that very bedroom, obsessively remodeling it in the part of her mind not involved in planning her escape. 

Hedi shows photos and video clips of Kauai to Anna. They seem to soothe her, which surprises Hedi since Anna, an Iron Ranger of Finnish descent, has stern views on tropical climates and the tourists who flock to them. Hedi injects commentary on this island where virtually nothing is native, having been brought in canoes, or by birds or sea winds. Wrapped in a couple of Afghans, she re-creates condo landscapes with springy golf course turf and large-breasted flowers. Describes botanical gardens where imported plants from all over the world create an ersatz Eden where everything over-thrives. Like the giant Australian Banyan trees with roots “the size of my thunder thighs,” transplanted and wildly replicating in that alien climate. 

Anna shakes her scraggly head laughing even as her own cells replicate wildly, messing with her iron will and orderly existence. Within two months of embarking on a harrowing chemo regime, and with the lack of restraint typical of her, she has lost most of her hair and suffers bouts of projectile vomiting. A big woman almost six feet tall, hauling her heroically forged bones around, biding her time. 

Actually she works her fingers to the bone, organizing possessions with tags for where they should go, getting rid of stuff, updating her Will so there will be no arguments between her granddaughters, whom she considers incapable of reconciling over her dead body. What she won’t discuss is when and how she wants to die. 

“Anna, we need a plan here. What do you want to happen? I mean, do you want hospice care here, at home? Or maybe move to Seven Pines? It’s nice there, and your Medicare should cover most of it....” 

“I thought Carla should have the car, since hers is shot and you never know where you’ll wind up, probably not a place where you’ll need a car that starts at twenty below.” She speaks from the bathroom, where Hedi has insisted she keep the door halfway open while she is in there waiting for awful things to happen. 

“Fine. And she can have all the plants you deadhead every day and the furniture for the kids to ruin and the sewing machine...” 

“T’aint funny, McGee,” she says, lurching toward Hedi, holding on to things. Spouting yet another cryptic tagline she refuses to explain. They both laugh anyway.

When Hedi was ten and Carla fourteen, Anna finally kicked Grandpa Jack out. He came from a long line of miners. After the iron ore business tanked, he’d taken a job guiding tourists through an abandoned mine at Tower-Sudan before the drinking led to him losing that one too. Jack was good at it—a bullshitter from way back, as Arne, Anna’s brother, put it. 

Before Arne moved back up north to the cabin where he and Anna were born he had worked as the foreman of a construction crew on an underground laboratory in the other half of the Tower-Sudan mine. Scientists were attempting to catch protons decaying. “Prot rot” as the construction crew termed it. T-shirts bearing that inscription were given to the physicists by the crew when the lab was completed and champagne was served in the depths of the earth.

She’d been down there once on a tour, fighting claustrophobia as massive pieces of equipment purred ominously in what looked like the set of a James Bond movie. They were trying to prove, as one of the scientists explained, that protons can decay into subatomic particles, can transform, can perhaps someday give scientists the ammunition they need for a Grand Unification Theory. 

Tonight she sat in another cave feeling highly un-unified, downing several watery beers with an old high school friend in a bar that sported taxidermy specimens festooned with twinkling lights. In an effort to get high, she managed to get bloated and had to visit a ladies’ room marked Setters, after passing another door labeled Pointers. Two hours of lugubrious chitchat later about jobs that were not jump-starting the bright careers they had taken for granted, in these same booths, not so many years ago, she headed out into the sub-zero night. 

She refused a ride, preferring to walk home under stars so icy and remote they made her think about how little people born and raised on the Iron Range actually spent in wide open spaces. For years Iron Rangers had hunkered down in mines, never standing up straight. Spent their off hours in shacks fishing on icy lakes, or crouched down in blinds waiting for ducks, or bent over bars. When not huddling in enclosed spaces, they assaulted nature with snowmobiles and speedboats, stalked mammals with high-powered rifles. 

After Anna refused further chemo, things got better. No more orgies of vomiting, no more false talk about future this and that. It was as if they all breathed a collective sigh, and even Hedi and Carla found some common ground. Highly selective flashbacks to girlhood abounded in Anna’s kitchen as the two cooked up a vat of the split pea soup Anna had asked for, one the dishes she craved when her appetite briefly returned to avenge all the time she’d wasted expelling the toxins they were pouring into her. Carla’s kids became absorbed in old photo albums, laughing hysterically at snapshots of their mom and aunt in baggy swimsuits, or their attempts at punk accessorizing. 

Anna lay in a bed in the living room. The subject of hospice care lingered like an unwholesome, neglected cat. 

“You’d be so much better off at Seven Pines than having to wait for the nurses to come here to administer your medication,” Carla yells from the kitchen. 

Hedi notes that Carla has not in any way acknowledged that it is Hedi who administers most of the medication, although a nurse checks in a couple of times a day to adjust various intravenous drips. In fact Hedi, who was all for hospice care a month ago, now thinks of Anna as her vocation, the place she has located herself for as long as it takes. Watching Anna transform into something taut and stringy, undaunted by pain or the indignities of being cleaned up and manhandled, gives Hedi some unleaded perspective on the part of her life she has so far thought she was living. When really, she thinks while negotiating the choreography of changing the sheets, rolling Anna gently this way and that, she’s just been hauling her crap around, literally and figuratively, for a quarter of a century.

“And Hedi and I can’t give you the twenty-four hour a day care you really need now, although of course we really want to, but Hedi should really get on with her life and the kids are so needy right now...” 

“I’ll be going up to Arne’s,” replies Anna. 

Carla raises eyebrows at Hedi in a what-the-heck-is-this? look, to which Hedi responds with a news-to-me shrug. On New Years’ Day Arne, on his annual holiday visit, had huddled with Anna for a couple of hours. Every time Hedi walked by they were sitting in silence, profiles in bas-relief over the kitchen table. But somehow they had worked out how Anna’s journey would end in a makeshift cabin near the Canadian border. 

Carla protested in stuffed phrases of familial responsibility, while Hedi moved with surprising ease into Anna’s mindset knowing she could not die here, in this house, this city she had never fully inhabited. 

A week later Hedi and Carla bundled Anna up in the back of her old van along with the oxygen and major meds Nurse Anna had somehow managed to commandeer. The Barbarian Invasions came to mind, a Canadian film in which a wayward academic flees a dysfunctional hospital to die among old friends at a lakeside retreat, replete with enough wine and heroin and fresh air and philosophizing to make everyone’s life a lesson in abundant closure.

They, on the other hand, were headed to a cabin in the woods where two stalwart siblings would eek out the end of one of them. 

Hedi had never been there in winter, though they used to drive up every summer for visits. She and Carla hated it—the outdoor privy, which they often had to use because Arne’s toilet was usually in need of repairs he hadn’t gotten to, made them hold their pee as long as they could. When things got unbearable they would saunter off to a patch of weeds, which once turned out to be poison oak. They sat on Arne’s rickety porch sipping lemonade that Anna had brought in a thermos, since Arne drank only coffee at room temperature, or exploring this ancient site where, unbelievably to them, Anna and Arne had grown up. 

The trip took almost three hours in summer, at least four in winter taking into account the snow, which had started about half an hour after they left. Hedi had forgotten how the country air up here slams you with deep evergreen, the real dose of all the chemical surrogates that dilate the insides of cars and public bathrooms. The sharp air invades your lungs, jolts you awake to the stuttering currents of dark clouds and small lakes inebriated by silence, engorged with evergreens right to the shoreline. 

Hedi checks on Anna, fast asleep with labored breathing, as they pull into the rest area near Embarrass where they used to make a pit stop in the summer. The place looks the same—a small parking lot and a log cabin, set among some scrappy little pines. Leaving the heater going and Anna asleep they exit the car, leaning into the wind. The big thrill for Hedi and Carla had been the maps and brochures that lined the cabin walls, and especially a kind of storefront mock-up of a Finnish sauna. Inside a family lounged haphazardly: Mom, Dad, two kids in the shape of crude rag dolls with exposed seams and bushes of red yarn hair.

“I didn’t remember how sad they looked, that droopy little family,” says Hedi as she and Carla peer through a plate-glass window at the louche diorama. “I remember you wrote a story about the way the little brats were dragged into the sauna against their will and made to stay there until they were properly roasted,” says Carla. They laugh, fogging up the window. The cabin feels almost cozy. They breathe on the window some more, then write their names in the condensation, Hedi & Carla, which disappear by the time they make their way back to the car. 

Two hours later they pull, or rather plow, into Arne’s excuse for a driveway and find, to Hedi’s surprise, a new sauna almost as big as the cabin huddling next to it. Anna wakes as Arne comes out to greet them, his glance settling on her endangered form for a few moments, sizing things up. Hedi and Carla have avoided discussing exactly what was going to transpire once they reached True North, as they referred to their destination. Anna has come here to die her own way, but what that exactly meant was unclear. 

Arne slides Anna out of the back seat, folding her bones into himself as he heads for the sauna. He nods to them to follow with the stuff she needs to dull the pain that still seems to loiter, even in her sleep. Or perhaps her groans and sighs are only a final replay of the years that have flattened her soul. At any rate, troubled sleep has become her natural habitat. 

They trudge through ankle-high snow that cocoons around them, softening all the edges. Once inside the heat assaults them, a blast of cedar scented air that feels welcoming, a luxury they can’t afford. The sauna is furnished with a hospital bed, a utility table, a long bench across from the bed. During a brief period when Hedi delved into her Finnish ancestry for a college paper, she discovered that saunas were traditionally used for cooking, childbirth, even dying when winters in drafty cabins stretched into six-month binges of survival. 

Arne deftly administers morphine—where did he learn to handle a hypodermic needle? Hedi and Carla shed their parkas and sit side by side on the bench, feeling like a couple of Quakers in an overheated meeting house. 

For the next few days they spell each other, keeping watch as Anna’s breathing grows shallow and her body sinks into a deep, anonymous settling. Hedi and Carla relieve Arne every three or four hours, spending the breaks in Arne’s cabin trying to keep warm, or rather lessen the chill, beneath old army blankets smelling of damp and camphor. 

The snow had stopped briefly, then continued seriously, clocking in at dawn, lessening toward evening, revving up again by midnight into a real March blizzard. Hedi thinks of obsessive Stephen Spielberg filming Jurassic Park on Kauai, risking his life during Hurricane Iniki to nestle fake dinosaur eggs in the gigantic roots of the Banyan trees. And here is Anna, hunkered down in a storm, obsessed with dying where her own roots fester. 

Arne grunts, re-shoveling the path to the sauna. Hedi thinks that soon they will need a rope strung up between their two habitats so they can move through the blinding snow, hand over hand, as Anna’s ancestors must have. She turns to look at the stars, blurred by the snow, rendered greasy and less remote. 

One of the things we want to know is: Why do we have an extraordinary amount of matter in the universe, and so little antimatter? She recalls the physicist saying down in the mine, antimatter being among the many things she has looked up and tried and failed to understand, though now she thinks she has her own read on it. Maybe. If you balance matter and antimatter, then what have you got left? Apparently particles colliding, demolishing one another, creating exhausting supplies of energy. Like Anna pit-bulling it out with life only to wind up here, processing annihilation. 

*** 

After Arne takes her body to town for the cremation (you don’t need to be there for the crisping up, Anna had whispered with one of her last breaths), Hedi creeps into Anna’s bed. She feels the imprint of Anna, the layers of Anna odors and Anna history shifting beneath her like tectonic plates, sucking her in. She soaks up what remains, her warm body absorbing incorporeal matter. 

The snow has stopped and the county plows are clearing the roads. Soon they will be heading back to Duluth. She pictures Carla sitting impatiently in the front seat of Anna’s van, anxious to get back to her kids, but not daring to rouse and displace Hedi. Not daring to dismantle the tangle of sensations connecting her to Anna.

the fischers

They all felt it, a crack in the system, just as their circular driveway had developed fissures for no reason. As if seismic forces loitered below ground, assuming things about them, the Fischers, that were not true. 

They were not, for instance, careless about keeping up the property. Father did that. Sometimes the children joined him with their miniature plastic lawn mowers and snow shovels. 

But a certain decrepitude had snuck in. Mold asserted itself in the grouting of tiles; alarming streaks of rust appeared everywhere. 

Then the washer no longer whitened, producing clothes with a yellowish tinge, and the dryer refused to function at all. When the mother hung clothing out to dry, the neighbors noticed her sagging clothesline and remarked that the Fischers’ laundry was looking dingy. 

Early on, the father had planted the back yard with perennials, some bulbs, a careful succession of flowers that bloomed well into September. The garden was lined with curvy brick paths that he created himself. When the kids were little, they loved to walk along the paths, playing at careful little games involving songs and chants. They liked being contained, not allowed to take even one unsteady step into the fairy garden, as he called it. 

But it had gone to seed long ago. Now they preferred the empty lots staggered here and there on the edges of the subdivision where they lived, soon to be plugged into plans for shoddy new developments, as their mother put it. They returned home with pants and shirts full of stickers and leaves, wild and dirty debris. 

Their mother seemed to be in the kitchen ironing whenever they returned home from their sometimes daylong jaunts, with only cheese sandwiches and a bag of chips to share and apples, which they did not eat. Their father was usually around too, staring at the computer, or at the National Geographic channel, while their mother sighed and made comments about unpaid bills, unmowed lawns. 

At home the children took care to stay within bounds, though there were so many: time segmented into slots for a chore or a rebuke or a meal carefully selected to nourish their bodies, or a lesson selected to nourish their minds. 

Their souls were nourished in Sunday school, where their parents dropped them off before checking out the sales at Sears or the inappropriate signs on other people’s lawns that needed to be removed. They did not go to church, they explained, because they did not believe in a higher power. But the children must be educated in religion, free to make up their own minds.

It was in Sunday school that the children heard the story of King Solomon and the two women who came before him, each claiming an infant they presented was their own. The king in his wisdom said something like, Lo, then I will split the child in two with my sword so that each of you may have half. Then the real mother prostrated herself before Solomon and wept, saying No, No, let her have the child. And Solomon in his wisdom said that She who would not let the child be harmed must be the true mother. 

Logan, the girl child named after a berry, said to her brother Henry, named after a very dull uncle, that Solomon could not have known the outcome, that the real mother would lose it and have a breakdown. So, was he really ready to rent the child asunder, as their Sunday school teacher had put it? 

But Henry would allow no such heresy. Solomon was a great king, richer than anyone, with lots of wives and children. Therefore, he would never have killed the child, would have taken him as his own son rather than slice him up. 

Later, the children waited for their parents to pick them up from the church, which was a rural church abutting a cornfield. They quickly forgot all about Solomon as late afternoon approached and the shadows grew long. 

Where were their parents? Had they forgotten, or been in an accident, or been arrested for sign stealing? 

More and more frequently, Henry had caught their parents staring at him or Logan, sighing and shaking their heads. 

It being a pleasant summer day, the children decided to hunker down in the cornfield, so that when their parents arrived late, they would feel really bad that their children had disappeared/ 
been kidnapped/ 
been the victims of ravenous animals. 

Let’s imagine, Henry says, just for the heck of it, that our parents decided they could only afford one of us, and that we had to choose which would stay and which would go. 

Go where? Says Logan, annoyingly literal as ever. 

That’s not important. Just go. Get sent to an orphanage, say, or just left to starve in a corn field after all the corn’s been picked... 

They would never... 

But say it did happen, and we had to decide. 

We could draw straws.

Or both run away, into the woods, or to a place where no one knows us…

How would we live? 

By stealth. 

I would just live on my own, in a hut that I would build, and get food by dumpster diving. 

Where has she heard about dumpster diving? Henry wonders what kind of stuff she’s been watching on Netflix at Cora’s house, where the parents were more lenient. 

Once at Cole’s house Henry saw a movie about the kids in the cornfield, who took over the town and massacred most of the adults and worshipped some pagan idol of the corn, He Who Walks Behind the Rows. 

But this day was so pleasant that the children soon found solace in the chirping of crickets, the soft wind rasping through the corn husks, the separate thought waves that allowed them to drift gently apart, even as they sat close together, each humming a different tune.