Winter Loon

by Susan Donovan Bernhard

My parents had been wiped away, a smudge off glass, and I was to get on with it, to accept it in my open hand like change for a dollar bill. But I couldn’t imagine getting past the brokenness I was feeling.

My father had told me that if you put a frog in a pot of water and boil it, the frog won’t jump out. “It’ll sit in that pot and stare at you while you cook it alive,” he’d said. But if you tried to put a frog in a pot of boiling water, he’d jump right out to save his own skin. I couldn’t save my mother. Could I save myself?

Did the dust in that left-be room contain fragments of her skin? Were the bitten fingernails tangled in the shag rug hers or mine? I’d never thought to ask why Gip and Ruby hadn’t done anything to change that room, hadn’t taken down the posters or thrown out the ratty teddy bears. It was a room stuck in place, a boot in a bog. “Why didn’t you ever clean this room out, Ruby?” The rattle of her stilled and she let her eyes drift to some middle space, out of focus. Her voice simmered and she mostly whispered, “Thought she might come back someday.”

The look he gave me, what was it? He was telling me that he remembered and that I had best forget. He popped out his shoulders, made himself big and me small. I wish now that I had stood up to him, called him on it right there, made him say in front of me and Ruby and God that he had been in that back bedroom time and again. But that’s not what I did. Instead, my hand went to my neck as if it were my problem, not his. Shame wormed up from the chair and took me over,

My father would go to town first thing—that was his routine—and get coffee at a local diner. He said it gave him a feel for the place, what kind of people might show up on the midway. He said you could know a town, take its measure, by the six a.m. folks.

“I meant nothing by it,” I said. But that wasn’t true. I had never felt a part of anything that good and wanted more than anything to not be the thing I was. By day—with Jolene and her family, with Lester even—I let myself believe that my father’s disappearance was on him and not me. But when I climbed into my mother’s bed at night, when my fingertips touched that knife that I still stored in the bed rails, I couldn’t help but think of myself as a person who didn’t belong, a person who could be left behind.

“Got drunk, I guess.” “Don’t much explain it, you ask me. I’ve seen lots of good people slip down the neck of that bottle until they’re no better than the worm. It’s poison. You don’t want that in your blood.”

“I ever tell you I’m proud of you, Wes? All the grief with your mom going under the ice? Your dad taking off on you? Plus, you got those grandparents of yours? That’s a lot for one person to take. But you’ve been nothing but decent here with my family and me.”

Without winter, how would we know to welcome spring? No death, no rebirth. Accept the cycle of things.

With each mile I traveled, I felt the past slipping away from me and catching up at the same time, a leapfrogging memory game stuck in reverse.

I thought about calling Jolene, to let her know where I was and that I was fine, but who wants to know the details of loneliness, the way it sticks to the inside of your mouth, runs through you, a spit through a pig?

I’d seen firsthand how to love a hurt child, not from my wounded parents, not from Gip and Ruby, whose decisions were cast from failure and despair, but from Mona and Troy, who’d taken Jolene in, who gave her love that was a constant, steady drumbeat. That drum was beating in my ears and chest.

“Time to be a man now, Wes,” Aveline had said. “Time to be a man who can give this woman the gift of honesty and of good wishes. A man of courage who can love and let go.