I Have Some Questions For You

by Rebecca Makkai

because what is she now but a story, a story to know or not know, a story with a limited set of details, a story to master by memorizing maps and timelines.

The bystander, the voyeur, even the perpetrator—they’re all off the hook when the girl was born dead.

This doesn’t make me special, and I knew that then, too. I’m only saying it by way of explanation: I cared about details. Not because they were something I could control, but because they were something I could own. And there was so little that was mine.

They were all beautiful, in a way we never were. I don’t mean this on some profound spiritual level.

If I can chart everything around me as far as I can see, then I must be in the middle of it all, real and in one piece. You are here.

We thought we knew, so we became certain we knew. It became as real to us as those lightning bugs, their mating dance at the tree line, our laughter, Bendt’s good-humored relief, our feet hitting the earth as we raced to catch them for him, bringing him miracles in our cupped hands.

I could sense my proximity panicking him. Since August, I’d been just my electronic self, nudes in his phone, words and pixels. And now here I was, shaking him from his moorings.

I’d loved her, the way she gave the Greek or Latin roots of every term, the way she insisted we say zo-ology instead of zoo-ology. “It’s the study of life,” she’d say. “Not zoos.” The way she articulated photosynthesis, as if speaking the private name of God. I loved the poetry of leaves converting sunlight to glucose and oxygen. And I loved the idea of adaptations, the ways plants battled for access to the sun: sprouting early or unfurling enormous leaves to catch more light or bearing tiny needles that hardly wanted any.

For reasons I can’t articulate, he was, to me, an incarnation of some Platonic ideal of both maleness and sex, like something conjured from my own imagination. I could never quite believe he was real.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.”

Here is what I want to say to you: When I was still raw and unformed, everyone failed me. No one was permanent.

So here I was in a place that looked nothing like home, and I was an island. You were one of the only people who saw me as that—as an island—and made me feel good about it.

My loyalty was a fierce thing. It was a dangerous thing. But you no longer had it.

What happens when your only escape is the same thing you’re trying to escape? Here’s the soundtrack of your tragedy: Dance to it.

Do you sleep well? Do you dream? Is there forgiveness, in your dreams?

Something I wish I’d figured out earlier in life: Walk into any place like you belong, and you will.

The light filtered through in solid beams, made the water a cathedral. I wanted to breathe, but I didn’t want to rise to the surface. I wanted to breathe in water, to discover that I had gills.

Wasn’t this the problem, all along? All we did was take from each other and from the earth and from ourselves.

My point is, you were a part of the machine: an arm, a leg. You drove the getaway car. You threw bricks through the window and someone else grabbed the jewelry. You distracted the feds while the spies got away. You held her down while someone else beat her. You shot the deer and wounded it; when the second hunter came along, the deer could no longer run.

This, though—this was a thing of beauty, these lasting marks. Like someone had summitted a mountain and wanted to leave a mark, to say I was here.

Picturing Carlotta young was picturing someone soaring through the sky, someone with everything to look forward to. Someone living more in genesis than aftermath.

Why on earth, despite the leaden sadness of yesterday and today, I felt profoundly light right then—ready to float away—I’m not sure.

These plants below were lucky, the early arrivals. The ones born later to a choked summer ravine would have to fight for sun and space. Plenty would make it. Everything green is something that’s survived.

there’s constantly something new and impossibly technicolor blooming on my street. I could still tell you a few of them, the stalwart trees and ephemeral flowers of New Hampshire: painted trillium, bunchberry, hemlock, sheep laurel, white cedar, bloodroot. Below me and above me and in the woods stretching thick and endless, their leaves made sugar out of nothing but light.