This Place of Wonder

by Barbara O'Neal

The night was clear, full of stars. The mountains carved a jagged line across it, and I had to pause to admire the scene for a moment. So beautiful. Such beautiful land. Such a beautiful night. How could things still be so beautiful? Shouldn’t everything stop? A song ran through my head, an ancient pop song. Before me stretched the tidy rows of vines, so very alive even without leaves. I raised the bottle I carried to my lips and drank of their fruit, sharp and dry, almost perfect. I imagined I could hear the vines breathing, taking in the moonlight and the cold night air, preparing for the new season, their roots drinking nourishment

Only I would ever taste it. No one else, ever. I wept, and swung, and drank, and chopped open every single cask in that room. Sticky, cold, swaying, I climbed the stairs to the outside and pulled my phone out of my pocket. “Meadow,” I said when she answered. “I think you need to come get me.”

She’s sobbing, incoherent, and it makes me impatient until I remember that she’s barely thirty.

A faraway howl rises in the canyons of my body, coyotes crying out. The world will not be the same without him.

Bookstores can solve any problem, at least for a little while. It was humid and too warm inside, the lights bright against the gray day, and it all smelled of paper and glue and dust and humans and damp wool and coffee brewing somewhere. Only this place of wonders could soothe me.

The marriage had failed by the time I made it to Santa Barbara, as much as you can say a marriage failed after twenty years. Does it only count if it lasts forever? I mean, I’d be pretty happy with twenty years of almost anything.

Somewhere in my body there must be some grief, but right this second I can’t find it. I hold

realize with a shock that we have entirely different responses to the death of the man we both call Dad. “I am so wrecked about this,” she cries. I hug her tightly, rubbing her back. “I know. I’m so sorry.” It makes me feel like a monster because I’m still not feeling that much. Funny that the biological child is so chill and the adopted one is falling apart. It’s a mean thought, but I’ve discovered over these months in rehab that I have a pretty wide mean streak, one of the millions of things I drank to cover up.

feels like home. Something in my body lets go. I can’t afford to keep the house, but for now I can crash here. Get my life together.

My sponsor’s voice nudges me. Stay where your feet are.

I stand there, wanting. Wanting, wanting, wanting in a way that’s both pointed and vague. Wanting the life I destroyed, and not wanting it at the same time. Wanting one more day in the before times, wanting to yell at my father, wanting—

That’s the thing about grief. It spirals up and up and up, revisiting us again and again, reaching out with electrified tentacles to sting us when we least expect

The noise of the ocean will drive me crazy overnight, rolling and rolling and rolling. Some people love it, but the endlessness of it, the knowing it will never stop, makes me restless. Only the house, settling in like a grandfather made of stone, calms me; only being inside the rooms I know so intimately eases me.

A handful of women greet me, offer the slogans that seem so corny unless you need them: keep coming back; it works

It’s hard to let go when you’ve been married a long time. It felt as if we had to find every single one of the threads that connected us and snip each one individually. A long and trying process. Some of the threads were more like steel cables

really want to say yes. Please pour it out and don’t drink in front of me right now. Just for a little while, just until I get used to this. But I don’t, just as I always let Josh choose the music. “No, it’s all right.”

I’m not alone, I think. Rory will always be in my corner.

“You just reminded me of Dad right then. You have a lot of his mannerisms.” A wave of emotion swells through my gut, resistance and recognition rolled up together. “

Even when I’m walking, things pop up, memories and regrets and shame and guilt, but they don’t stick around and needle me the same way.

We’re all broken, says my therapist’s voice. I somehow have always felt more broken than most, but maybe that’s not actually true. Keep your head where your feet are.

Seeing me. That was his gift, after all: seeing people. It’s why we all had our own nicknames, why he knew how to give gifts that were so perfect, how he managed to hire and keep staff long term in an industry rife with turnover.

Then I tell the truth. It’s a muscle that’s hard to use when you haven’t bothered for so many years.

The wine hit the back of my throat and the middle of my chest with a great zinging blast of something unexpected. Quiet. Quiet that spread from that center of my chest upward and sideways and downward, rippling out to my brain and my lower back.

drank again. And again. It was amazing. All the noise, all the anxious wishes to please, all the memories I hated cropping up—all of it just . . . stopped. It was an amazing discovery, that anything could do that.

“That’s kind,” I begin my refusal, and then my mouth says, “Roast chicken sounds great.” He smiles.

he was devastated by everything that happened. He felt like he let you down.” Her face goes hard. “Funny, because I feel like he did, too. At least we agree on something.”

He left behind a fragrant spell that worked its way into my body, spreading like alchemical ink through my veins, staining every molecule with desire. My mind and my body were at war.

I feel splintery.

“I miss him, too. The world feels so quiet.” “Yes,” she gasps, and tears fall on my neck. “I feel like someone unplugged something inside of me.”

How many summers have crickets been singing? A million? Ten million? How can they simply offer it up every night, over and over and over?

Only people without the kind of wounds she and I carried think you need to live it all over again. Not everything can be forgiven. Not everything can be healed.

Only he knew what that actually was for me. It wasn’t part of my public story in any way. I made sure of that. If you let people into the secrets of your life, the worst of it will always be at the forefront of their minds. I wasn’t about to let that happen to me.

missed him, of course, but I didn’t call all that often because I was content and whole in myself, something that came to me very last.

“Ah.” A hush moved through my body. I knew, in that moment, but I didn’t allow that knowledge to surface for months.

He was smitten. He didn’t want to give her up, but he didn’t really want to leave me, either. It dragged out for six months, my spinning in a whirling dervish of fury and betrayal, Augustus falling ever more deeply for a woman he could rescue, not the one who’d learned to stand on her own two feet.

How could I still feel so completely in love and he didn’t feel it at all?

For a long moment, I can’t move, thinking that we are both orphans. Motherless daughters. It’s almost laughable how drawn I am to others like me in this way.

Shame spreads beneath my skin like acid.

So angry. In daily life, as a regular student and girlfriend, I wasn’t angry at all. It was only when I drank that the fury rose from some unknown source like the noxious bubbles in the cauldron of a Shakespearean witch.

Together, we created a label—Shanti Wines, named for my mother in a fit of generosity that I don’t understand even now—and it gave us the glue we needed when the sex started to flag.

and let the shame escape my body through my tears.

His eyes rest on my face without judgment.

chose what to tell the world. It’s my story. I’m allowed to leave out what I don’t want the world to know.

“That’s rich, since he did the opposite of rescuing me.”

She’s the only one he never left. How have I not noticed this before?

feel I’m wasting time, doing nothing, not making choices.”

“Forgive me. I am sometimes at the mercy of a patriarchal society that judges women very harshly.”

we dive into kissing like it will end climate change. The

let go of all the things he should have been, and allow myself to love the things he was.

My father couldn’t wreck what was built to last. Whatever form our family takes, it’s still a bulwark against the winds of the world. It’s still mine.