Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [97]
He had been mine.
After
Remembrance is a form of meeting.
—KAHLIL GIBRAN
There is a land of the living and a land of the dead
and the bridge is love, the only survival,
the only meaning.
—THORNTON WILDER
It was early June 2000, almost a year to the anniversary of his death, and I was driving across the country with a man I was in love with, afraid of the grief I would feel the closer we got to New York and July 16. We’d been in the Grand Canyon for two nights, and John had been present in my mind. He loved this place. Ten years before, we’d planned to go, but a play had kept me in New York, and he had gone without me. I got a postcard from him, telling me how much he loved it, how hot it was, and how he would have much preferred me in the sleeping bag next to him rather than his friend Dan, aka Pinky. “Ha! Ha, Baby!” he wrote.
There’s a picture he gave me: John in a tank top, green-and-black nylon shorts, mirrored glasses, and hiking boots, dancing the funky chicken in celebration of the seven-thousand-foot descent on the Bright Angel Trail. The light is failing, and there are shadows on his face.
On the drive northeast to Durango the next day, we stopped at the Navajo National Monument to see the ancient cliff dwellings. We paid the fee and walked through the small museum. My friend went on ahead while I lingered by the headdresses and the labeled pottery shards. When I was done, I stepped into the open-air courtyard and began to cross toward the turnstile entrance to the dwellings across the gorge. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a small girl, maybe five, twirling like a dervish for an older couple, who sat with folded hands, watching. You couldn’t help but watch. Half-wild in a dirty T-shirt—with hair in her mouth and her arms spread wide—she lifted her face to the sky, as if she was pivoting from the very center of her heart.
What freedom, I thought. I used to be that girl: asking people in airports if they wanted to see me dance, singing songs in kindergarten I made up on the spot instead of bringing a favorite toy to show-and-tell. I had a dispensation from Miss Mellion and even a title, “Make-Up-Song Girl.” I used to be that girl and I wasn’t anymore.
I smiled, dazzled by the heat. Then, at the turnstile, with my eyes on the ruins ahead, I heard her say something to her grandparents, to the bright sky, and to no one in particular. “Do you know where John Kennedy is?”
How odd, that I should pass by just now. Maybe she meant his father. Maybe I hadn’t heard right. The heat.
She kept spinning. “Do you know where he is!” she insisted in singsong. “In the ocean? … Noooo. In heaven? … Noooo. In the Indian spirit world?” She paused briefly, then answered herself, “Yes! Yes! He’s in the Indian spirit world!”
Laughing, sibyl-like, she spun faster.
I stood for a moment, half-expecting her to disappear. When she didn’t, I lowered my hands to the shiny metal bar in front of me and pushed until it clicked. I didn’t look back until I’d reached the bench where my friend was waiting. I sat near him, unable to grasp what I had just heard. Across the gorge, shadows began to dart like swallows from the ancient portals in the rocks, and finally, when I could speak, I told him the story.
It was only later that I knew, on a trip I took alone to Gay Head and the lighthouse, to the wild grasses and the smooth road near his mother’s house called Moshup Trail and the view of the sea where the plane had fallen. I stayed at a bed-and-breakfast nearby, an old whaling captain’s house, with sand on the floor and a ball-and-claw bathtub in the small room. It had been eight years since he’d died. I needed to go back, but on the ferry from Woods Hole, I argued with myself. What are you doing, you don’t need to come here; you’ve already said your goodbyes.
At dusk, on the day before I was to leave, I walked back from the beach through the thick dune to the road. It was September and warm, and for some reason I thought of the girl. I’d remembered her from time to time, as