22.
AFTER SOL LEFT, I WOKE TOO EARLY IN THE MORNINGS, drank black coffee on my porch alone, watched the sun rise muted orange over a dead vineyard.
I didn’t want to talk to friends. It was hard enough explaining why I didn’t live with my mother anymore. Had she finally died? Not exactly. Was she healing? Probably not.
I had no better language for talking about divorce beyond failure or a victim-fest. What could I say? Was Sol having an affair? Not exactly. Had I done something wrong? I didn’t think so.
The few people I did talk to got a shrug and, “It was a long time coming.”
How could I explain about the mime and Steely Dan? About not really knowing what kind of music I liked anymore? About the reasons we’d moved to New Mexico? About trusting a stranger in an alley more than I trusted this woman who might have been my wife had the good voters of Oregon not gotten together and amended their constitution to keep me from making that mistake?
How could I explain that everything seemed a part of the self-same ugliness: All the death urges, the legacies of abuse and conquest, the poisoned lakes and rivers, the waving knife in the night between a mother and her child, and all the lies I had to tell myself daily to make all this violence seem necessary and inevitable.
I felt more comfortable with people I hardly knew, with Abra and her friends from the Native Arts College, with the queers who’d brought the summer rain, with the nervous single mom and a few of our other righteously paranoid neighbors.
I invited them over evenings to drink and eat and play new music for me so I could start to think about what I liked.
Mornings when Maxito was home with me, he wiggled out of bed, excited to check on his chickens and collect the eggs.
He adjusted the pirate scarf around his head. “I love my chickens.”
He stayed with Sol three days a week now. He came home miming sometimes, but otherwise he seemed to adjust.
I hadn’t lived without a partner since I was 30; hadn’t lived without a kid at home since I was a teenager. Now I was nobody’s daughter and half the time nobody’s keeper. Some days I felt high with the limitlessness of it all. I could sleep until midmorning if I wanted to, or drive to Mexico. But most days with Maxito gone, I just had the mild panicked feeling that I’d misplaced him.
I TOOK AN old painting out from the back of a closet: A wooden house with feathered wings taking flight against a blood-red sky. I’d been dragging that painting around since my first apartment with Maia.
Her kindergarten school counselor cornered me in the hallway once, holding up a crayon drawing of a flying house. “This image,” she warned me, “it can be a sign of wanting to run away.” The counselor was my age – maybe 24 by then – with a freshly pierced eyebrow.
I nodded, wanted the counselor to know I took warning signs seriously. “It might also be a sign that Maia’s had a painting of a winged house hanging over her mantle all her life.”
The counselor laughed at that, kind of embarrassed. “Well, yes. I’m sorry. I just learned about the flying house last week. I’m in grad school at the Alternative University.”
The painting sat crooked in its frame now, but I nailed a hook into the adobe wall and hung it up.
ABRA ATE HER diabetic-friendly omelet, glanced up at that painting. “Is that Baba Yaga’s house?” She peered around the living room with new eyes. “Is this Baba Yaga’s house?”
I didn’t think about it, just said “yes.” And then, “Wait. Does that make me Baba Yaga?” I didn’t mind being the old witch.
But Abra laughed. “ You’re too young to be Baba Yaga. We will call you Lady Yaga.”
IN THE FAIRY tale, Baba Yaga’s house walks around on chicken legs, doesn’t fly with feathered wings, but somehow it made sense. This was Baba Yaga’s house out here on the road no one would drive if they didn’t live here. Maybe we’d come here just like the lost young souls in the stories – like Vasilisa – come seeking some light other than death, come to serve the irrational, to sort the poppy seeds from the dirt, to gather strength, to figure out how to trust ourselves.
“Look,” Abra pointed with her chin toward the living room window. The first snow of winter’s return.
I looked up. “Beautiful.”