A River Could Be a Tree. Angela Himsel

chair, wastebasket half full, wall calendar scribbled with my father’s notes about how much it had rained and the daily temperature. Tupperware container of food scraps for the compost pile. Everything was the way we’d left it, the way it should be. And the clock was ticking. I was mesmerized by the second hand. It was a little after one. It was now seventeen minutes since we’d found Abby, and the second hand simply went ’round and ’round, as if nothing had happened. A normal kitchen, and Abby lay dead in the next room.

      My mother called our father at work and, since we shared the same party line with several families on the Portersville Road who, if they picked up their phone quietly, could listen in on whoever was using the phone, pretty soon all of the neighbors had heard the news. My mother called her parents, Grandma Himsel, and the aunts and uncles, and in that same calm voice delivered the news. Sarah, John, and Liz sat together on the couch, sometimes crying, then silent. Ed came home—he’d been back for lunch before going to the woods to set his traps, and had checked on Abby then. “She was okay when I left, I gave her some Sprite. She seemed okay,” he repeated. “What happened?”

      “We don’t know these things,” our mother said. “God doesn’t always tell us.” This had long been my mother’s standard answer for anything we didn’t understand, from where the angels lived to why people die. Of course, even I knew that God didn’t need to inform us of His plans, but I thought Abby had been healed. I thought it was cruel of God to trick us into believing.

      It all seemed removed from me as if I had stepped into some strange world in which I knew the characters and heard and understood exactly what they were saying, but in which I was not at all a part. I felt like we were stumbling around, trying to figure out this new, senseless landscape, which couldn’t possibly be.

      I went upstairs, lay across the bed, opened a book, and read. The sun streamed in through the curtainless windows. The heat felt harsh yet comforting against my face and bare legs. I was not going back downstairs. I would stay in bed, alone and quiet with my book, until it was all over.

      Books had long had the power to transport me, connect me to the past, to others, and enable me to travel freely across the boundaries of time and space. Books both opened a window into other worlds beyond the cornfields and allowed me to retreat within myself and block out the world: Abby, in a wheelchair or lying in her hospital bed, a frail, pale shadow of the girl who had sat with me in the backyard and wove necklaces and bracelets of clover with me. Who had pretended to be Batman, a white cloth diaper safety-pinned around her neck, jumping fearlessly from the top step of the porch. And now, Abby, downstairs. Dead. And I read.

      An hour later, I heard my father’s broken, “Oh, no! Oh, no!”

      The sun waned. The commotion below quieted. I decided to go back downstairs. Weeping, my father held Abby’s thin body in his arms on the couch. His sobs shook her so that her arms dropped and dangled. The ambulance arrived. The sober-faced young medic tried to get my father to release Abby to him. He couldn’t let go. Then the funeral director himself sat on the couch with my father and spoke to him quietly in German, his mother tongue, the tongue of his ancestors, of his home and his childhood. It calmed him. Reached him. Finally, and painfully, as if he were giving up a part of himself, my father allowed them to take Abby from his arms.

      In Abby’s room, her jewelry box remained on the dresser. The game of Parcheesi that we loved to play was still on the closet shelf, along with the Dating Game and the creepy-crawly bugs kit and the Easy-Bake Oven. On her chair lay Little Women. It was as if she’d walked out the door, leaving her things behind, never to return, as if Jesus had picked her up in the middle of the day and carted her off. And we’d been left behind.

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