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Do all your work as if you had a thousand years to live and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow.
I don’t much like the place without her in it. I’ve liked it even less since they put Samuel Littleton’s name by the door. Preposterous. That was more my house than it ever was his.
In every graveyard in every town in all the world, there lie buried stories more remarkable and strange than a name, a date, a designation on stone could ever in a million years convey.
She had imagined reuniting with David as a new, better version of herself, but here was the same old shitty version, greeting them both.
“Embarrassed? Nah,” Abe said. “Don’t worry about it. Welcome to the club.” Jane wished she were that person he saw, that good girl, for whom such behavior was an anomaly. She did not need to be welcomed to the club. She was president, vice president, secretary, and treasurer.
“It feels like you didn’t bother to try,” he said. Jane protested. She had worked hard on that paper. “Maybe you’re not up to the task,” he said, the only thing worse she could imagine than his guessing that she hadn’t tried. Jane looked around the room, with its sloped ceilings and books piled everywhere, and wondered if he was right. Her intellect was the only part of herself that she had never doubted, never despised. But right then she questioned whether she was as smart as she had always believed.
Tuesday broke beautiful and hot, a perfect beach day. By then, children were back at school, their mothers and fathers back to work, suntans and freckles the only proof that they had recently experienced some other, better form of existence.
There were versions of death that existed inside of life, Jane thought. Her drunken blackouts, that time unaccounted for. The state Betty and the other patients here were in, almost the opposite of being ghosts—a body with no awareness, no memory. The shadows of past lives all around in graveyards, in old houses, in Jane’s work as an archivist. In stories. Allison told Jane once that a person’s oldest memories were the last ones the brain held on to, and that every so often, her mother would come out with some story about playing tetherball or going to the Sadie Hawkins dance, even though she
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On Betty’s nightstand were framed photos of her children and grandchildren, and a shot of Betty and Richard on their wedding day. Jane wondered if these were meant to jog Betty’s memory, if they brought her comfort or confusion or no feeling at all. Maybe the pictures weren’t even for Betty, but there as a reminder to the doctors and nurses that she had once had a life every bit as full as theirs.
How could all of Betty’s kindness turn to this? Watching Judge Judy alone when she should be traveling the world with her husband, reaping the rewards of her hard work?
Suffering was relative. Jane had the luxury of knowing she could start again, even though she had no idea what that meant. The not knowing felt terrifying, but she was certain any one of the patients here would give the world to trade places with her.
Jane thought about the terrible thing Genevieve had done. She doubted they would ever speak again. She thought of the basket Genevieve bought from Thomas Crosby, and wondered about its provenance, whether the hands that made it had belonged to someone who suffered, or survived, or both. Human beings did so much damage to one another just by being alive. To the people they loved most, and to the ones they knew so little about that they could convince themselves they weren’t even people.
Receiving wedding gifts for this, her third marriage, felt somewhat embarrassing, but she was trying to resist that reaction in herself. She was older now, wiser. This one was going to stick. Maybe people thought all newlyweds felt that way, but it wasn’t so: the first two times, she had known on some level, even as she walked down the aisle, that they would not go the distance.
She had watched Naomi deliver a few lectures via YouTube. She said she loved the way Naomi introduced herself in front of a crowd. As “Naomi Miller, citizen of Penobscot Nation, daughter of Lucille, granddaughter of Beatrice, great-granddaughter of Rosie, mother of Wren.” That connection to family, Barbara said, the idea of them all as one unbroken chain, was what she had longed for all her life.
The tribe hadn’t had camera equipment until the sixties. Any photos taken prior to that time were taken by outsiders, who possessed them, put them on display, but had no awareness of the stories attached to them, or the people in them. The photos were stripped of all context, meant to symbolize some idea of the exotic other. This went for recordings as well. Of their language, their songs, their traditions. Made by white visitors, and taken away from the people to whom they would matter most. This had become her life’s work. To locate all sorts of items, to reunite them with their stories and
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It began one summer, somewhere on the coast, in a place called Sawadapskw’i, on a cliff overlooking the sea. It was there that a young man named Manedo—our twelfth great-grandfather—kissed his wife, Kanti—our twelfth great-grandmother—and told her: “Wait right here.” This was nearly four hundred years ago, when you could stand on that cliff, turn right, left, and backward and see only trees. Long before there was a house, a sawmill, a shipyard, a town, though all of that would come. The spot on the cliff held great meaning for the couple. Their people camped by the nearby river each summer. It
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The English came in droves, intent on staying, no matter the cost. They believed their god sent illness to erase the Native people from the new world they were making. In the first wave of disease, three out of every four of them were killed. Yet even as the English killed them, the Native people came to depend on them. The metal the white men brought could be fashioned into spearpoints, fish hooks, knives, and needles so that all their work could be done in a quarter the time. They traded iron pots, and guns, changing their ways.
“He said you were trespassing on private property. That he was given a grant to build a sawmill on the river, and as part of the agreement, he got this land as well, for his home, and he pays a tax of four pounds to prove it.” None of this made sense to her. This house was built on a cliff that was sacred to her people. Sacred to her. Why did he think it belonged to him?
She had long since stopped talking about Manedo. She knew no one could understand how much she missed him. How often she imagined how different life would have been if he had stayed. In a place teeming with murder and violence, illness and death, what value could one man’s life hold? Except that he was her world. Impossible to comprehend how a love so strong as theirs had no power to save him.
The silver lining of being a total fuck-up was that you could sometimes find the grace to give others a pass for their failings.
a line from Emily Dickinson tattooed on her wrist: That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.
There was one exhibit that moved Jane to tears, on the subject of Native Americans and epigenetics, the newish field of study that said the effects of mass trauma—genocide, slavery, colonialism—got passed down from one generation to the next at the cellular level. Native Americans referred to this as the soul wound. Some believed it played a role in high rates of addiction, mental illness, suicide, and sexual violence in their community today.
trauma could be passed down from the cells of one body to another, Jane wondered, was it so much further a leap to imagine that trauma might infect the land on which it happened? Was that a form of haunting all its own?
The Abenaki word for history was ôjmowôgan. Rather than a static event from the past, it conveyed an active, ongoing collective practice. Something ever-cycling, ever-evolving, building upon itself.
Eventually, David said he had to go. But instead of leaving, he kissed her. They ended up having sex on the sofa. Strictly speaking, unprotected sex with one’s soon-to-be ex-husband was not the recommended course of action at three months sober. But Jane would always feel lucky that things happened the way they did. Mary was conceived that day. She and David hadn’t slept together since.
She sensed David still moving through it all, trying to figure out what he could forgive, what he could live with. They loved each other, and said so. They had made a perfect baby girl together. Even if that was all they could ever be, it was enough.
The only plausible scenario, then, was for them to break apart. Jane never thought to imagine them settling into something unexpected instead.
