NORTHEAST OHIO SPOTLIGHT

Blueberry Hill

Fiction by ​​Hannah Christopher

It was like this when Mom died. I sat at the dinner table. Under a deep white crescent of crystalline light swinging from the ceiling fan on in the kitchen. The pull-chords rattled against one another. Dad cooked by the stovetop. Garlic bread and spaghetti. The tomato sauce, made from tomatoes Mom grew in her garden in the backyard and canned already for fall and winter, popped as it prepared itself for the final meal. Mom didn’t have time enough to stand up. In three seconds she was on all fours running out the back door. She broke through the screen with the flat of her head leaving behind a mangled shoulder-high hole to the outside. The leaves were turning color and behind them the sky was turning color too, a similar fragrant orange-navy over the lake called Sebago. Dad called her name through the hole. For days he called her name into their landline. He reported a woman with black hair missing after twenty-four hours. He reported a big black wolflike dog missing. No she doesn’t have her identification tags, he insisted. Does she have a chip? He had to remember that for a few moments, then he came back to himself. I watched him pace the living room in his bare feet and underwear. Yes, he said, she does have a microchip in her left arm. I mean her front left leg, thanks. He rubbed his eyes and hung up the phone.
 
On the fourth night Hancock County Animal Control called the house. It was a school night. Dad was helping me pick out clothes for the next morning. Striped tights and a flannel jumper with a button collar and a green canvas jacket. I would be ten on Wednesday. When Dad got off the phone he told me to put on my clothes and bring homework or a book I didn’t like.  
 
Do you know how to do sudoku? he asked.
 
I didn’t know what that was. He brought out a book from his bedside table bound in thin paper like a word-search compendium or a used box of tissues. I’ll teach you, he said, it’s a long drive. He put his hiking coat on over his sweatclothes. In the trunk of our 2000 Subaru Outback he loaded up a collapsed refrigerator box and a black trash bag. These were the items that served the next morning as Mom’s casket. He’d folded her body into the bag around the back of the car so I wouldn’t see, but I’d already seen through the windshield flashing between our headlights and the pulsating angry beat of the police lights. She was wet from the rain. The blood still ran underneath the mud, through water and gravel and grass cuttings.
 
Mom died of asphyxiation caused by internal bleeding. Her bones were crushed to dust and her organs were purified jam leaking out every pore of her skin. She was hit by a Chevy Astro with one broken headlight going 67 miles an hour around the slightest curve in Route 1 near Ellsworth. The man driving had stopped immediately to see what he’d hit. Standing on the berm with his hazards on. Rain cutting through four hard red portions of flashing light. He scratched his head. He called the emergency number first, then he called his son.
 
I swear I haven’t seen a wolf this far south in twenty years, he said. I’m not saying they don’t live in these parts. He had the passenger door ajar and leaned on the seat with his backside to stay out of the rain and while he leaned he stared at the dark shape he’d dragged into the irrigation ditch. It’s just unlikely, he said. I never thought in a million years I’d hit one of those unlucky sons of bitches.
 
 
Post-loss, a gap divides you from the reality of the one you’ve lost and your myth of them. Even the myth distances itself as time passes. I woke up lying flat on my back on the floor one morning in Gray, Maine. I realized my real memory of Mom had gone. What remained—quiet pictures of her young on the dock, her laughing with her hair thrown forward, her in a baseball cap in a courthouse—I’d never actually experienced. I imagined her my age, alive. I imagined her in a furry snakelike body weaving through trees in the woods outside our house. I imagined her running on all fours a great unnavigable distance, and she never got to where she meant to go to.
 
For ten years before I met my wife and we had our daughter, I lived in this house alone. The house belonged to my Aunt June, one of Mom’s six older sisters. I never found out where she fell in the order. I remember, five years after Mom died, watching June pick out a birthday card and candy for her in the antiseptic white cardstock aisle at Hannaford. The way she bent her head to examine text had reminded me of pictures of Mom. June had Mom’s hair and Mom’s light brown eyes. These were shared traits amongst all eight of Mom’s sisters. I inherited the hair but not the eyes. I had Dad’s eyes. They were a darker brown. The difference was immediately noticeable.
 
“You look tired all the time,” June said a few weeks after I moved into her house from Dad’s on Sebago. June lived several miles east on a different lake called Little Sebago. This was the town of Gray. It was populated by a few necessity stores, a coffee shop, a Thai restaurant, and every now and then a blueberry festival. Its economy was driven by summer half-millionaires living for four or five warm months in cottages around the lake much like June’s. If June was inconsistently present, her neighbors didn’t notice. They assumed she lived an adventurous life.
 
On the first day of my second semester of high school the bus dropped me off at the end of the two-mile gravel loop leading up to June’s house. They’d received the address from a permission slip I’d turned into the office that morning—June drove me to school in Dad’s Subaru. At the drop-off roundabout she ran over the curb. As she drove away the engine backfired, probably because she shifted gears too quickly, and this kid in front of me dropped to the ground with his hands over his head.
 
Coming into the house at five in the afternoon that day you’d think no one had lived there in decades. I swung the door open without a key. The windows were all open without blinds or drapes letting in a deep gold-brown light that managed to come through over the trees. Willowlike reflections of water moving climbed the ceiling. There were no dishes to be done, no blankets over the back of the single plaid couch, no lamps to turn on. I flicked the light switches. They operated on dimmers and sometimes sputtered out. I called June’s name into the kitchen. I walked through into the living room, then the screened-in back porch overlooking the water. A steep set of stairs led down to the lakeshore and a green plaster canoe tethered to a dock. So she wasn’t on the water tonight. June, I said. I didn’t care that she didn’t answer. What I wanted was confirmation of her existence, not her presence. But I wasn’t yet too attached to either.
 
I boiled myself dinner in a nonstick saucepan. Beans and rice served in a tin mug. I’d never seen June eat so I didn’t save her any. When the food was gone I rinsed and dried my own dishes and went up with my little green backpack to the room that June had designated, two weeks prior, as mine.
 
I hadn’t had time so far to unpack or decorate. My belongings from Dad’s house on Sebago in boxes signed with my name in Sharpie marker. Around the room they were piled two or three per stack and still taped shut, containing things like my bed sheets, a corkboard with a dry-erase calendar on it, a baby doll I had been gifted my first birthday, and the contents of my bookshelf. Since I’d never bought my own books this ranged from clinical analyses of biospheres to the complete works of William Stafford. And I’d never bothered to learn the difference until Dad died.
 
Dad didn’t mean to die as soon as he did. Only his life became unbearable watching this strange kid grow out long and spindly and looking more and more every day like her mother whom he loved but without the mother and I know it was incredibly difficult for him. We relied on one another. It hurt. And then I started changing.
 
June came home late that night, fumbling up the porch stairs through the back door stinking like lake water and walnuts and fragrant pine needles and fur. She opened the door to my room without knocking.
 
“Well,” she said. “Tomorrow’s your mother’s birthday.”
 
“Okay.”
 
“I want to do something special for her. We’re going out.”
 
“I have school tomorrow.”
 
“Forget school. I’m calling you off. Want to watch Wheel of Fortune with me?”
 
“Not particularly.”
 
“Will you do it anyway?”
 
I tried to remember what homework I had left to do. “Sure.”
 
June had one little television set in the living room downstairs. I guessed it was likely produced on a limited run in the early 1940’s but the thing still captured signals through a variety of wires and antennae June had jerry-rigged behind the house. Even turned off the tubes and plugs emitted a horrible high-pitched whining noise that hurt my ears if I got too close. That’s how you know it still works, June explained the second night I stayed with her. All televisions will do that to you, you have sensitive ears. I couldn’t convince her to part with it. A television was, she thought, one of the two benefits of being human.
 
The second benefit was chocolate. She and I were both allergic to chocolate. Whether the lactose or the cocoa powder I could never figure out. This mattered very little to June. She’d eat it by the bagful and lay herself out for days. Which is how we ended up in Hannaford picking out Mom’s card. She’d seen in their weekly ad they’d put out their Valentine’s candies already. She had a specific strong weakness for the limited-run cherry cordial Hershey Kisses.
 
In the morning I dressed in jeans and a corduroy overshirt scraped from the top of an open box. I tied my hair back with a rubber band. Dad always told me to avoid doing this because it would pull my hair out, but I didn’t want to search the boxes for a scrunchie. It was early still. When I went downstairs a cool air blew around on the floor, getting caught in the corners. I noticed for the first time how long it had been since June swept—leaves, dust, the hard empty shells of bugs, black curly hairs. I watched them dance. June came in from the backyard.
 
“Hey, kid,” she said. I stared blankly at her. Did she mean me? “How about breakfast?”
 
“What breakfast?”
 
“You know, breakfast. What do you eat for breakfast?”
 
“I don’t know. Sometimes cereal, sometimes eggs. Dad liked to make eggs.”
 
She found a skillet behind me in the kitchen, hanging above the stove. Two eggs from the fridge fit into the palm of her right hand. We waited for the burner to heat up, leaning awkwardly a few feet apart on the cream lino-top counter. She eyed my profile as if expecting it to belong to someone she recognized. Finally she asked, “Did he ever make her breakfast?”
 
“Mom,” I said.
 
“Yeah, did he make her breakfast? Like in the movies? She got this idea in her head as a kid that she would marry off to some man who loved her like people fall in love in movies and books. Dates in the rain and this quiet little life.”
 
“He did,” I replied. I remembered Mother’s Day before I started kindergarten, Dad shaking me awake before dawn so I could ruin the French toast he was making and spill orange juice on the floor. Ascending the stairs to their shared bedroom in the dark on his left arm and breakfast balanced on the other. The smell of cinnamon.
 
Silence, strangely, is an insufficient tool of communicating recalled tenderness to another person. As I’m sure there are many memories of Mom June wished she could communicate with me. There just weren’t any words for having lived them.
 
June twisted a length of her hair in her fingers. Then she remembered herself, turning and cracking the eggs into the pan. They sizzled in an immediately cathartic way. She fried them sunny-side up.
 
 
I first met June at the hearing of Dad’s will. He’d rowed out with a lantern to a rock in the lake we used to refer to as The Big Rock, where he and mom and I had picnics in the summer and jumped off into the water. He’d tried to climb it alone in the dark, slipped, cracked his head on a smaller rock underneath the water, and become wedged there where the current couldn’t give him air. A fisherman found his body the next morning.
 
June appeared from nowhere. There was no mention of her in Dad’s will. He mentioned his parents, who’d died only a year prior. Dad was an only child and I worried about where I’d go when suddenly Mom’s sister showed up and I had to wonder: where were you five years ago?
 
I drove us to Hannaford after breakfast. To get there we drove thirty minutes out of Gray into the neighboring city where our tourists could buy their firewood and frozen custard. The parking lot was quiet under gloomy red neon. Winter winding down. That year the weather forecasters from Portland obsessed themselves with saying climate change was giving us warmer temperatures. This only lasted until late September. But for now it was a balmy sixty degrees in the blueberry dark of earliness.
 
June popped the latch on her door and stepped out of the car. She stood hovering above the scenery for a minute. Her hands in the pockets of her light sweater and her hair mangled unattractively by an ocean breeze coming in from someplace half an hour or so beyond us. I thought of bereavement. Years later, I would think of this version of her as I sat on Cadillac Mountain with my future wife. We watched a storm eat up the little fires of residential windows below us in Bar Harbor. We felt a great wind try to push us off the mountain.
 
I got out of the car. June tore her eyes away from whatever ghost haunted Hannaford and looked dead at me.
 
“She loved to swim,” she said. I knew she hadn’t been thinking of Hannaford at all.
 
 
On my fridge I keep a picture of Mom taken on Polaroid 600 film, probably by another of her sisters. In the photograph Mom posed in a striped modest bathing suit and her hair looked permed but wasn’t. There she was leaning against a stump on the shore of June’s backyard with her elbow thrown back awkwardly and her toes pointed out and a pleasant pudge of young tummy and serious heavy eyebrows raised over her eyes. June behind her ledged on the stump’s flat top throws her head onto Mom’s neck. I can’t see her face but know it’s her by the pin-up tattooed on her high shoulder. I wonder who took the photograph. My grandmother, maybe, who I’ve never heard of. One of the other sisters. The photographer, whoever she was, shouting to keep their eyes open this time for god’s sake, then a press of a button and a flash like car headlights coming around a fast bend.
 
I received this picture from June. Rather, June left it at Mom’s grave in my old backyard on Mom’s birthday that first year I lived with her, alongside a small box of chocolates and a tiny card, whose contents I never read, and I took it several days later, feeling jaded and similarly feeling June wouldn’t notice what I did and didn’t do at Mom’s grave. She wouldn’t notice anything. She wasn’t around. I didn’t realize when I took the picture it would also be my only representation of her.
 
I tried, while our daughter slept, explaining to my wife about the picture.
 
“Do you feel bad for taking it?” she asked.
 
“No. I think she left it there for me. I don’t know how that makes sense. One day you’ll be glad to have pictures of me, too.”
 
She blinked. A little yellow light above the sink illuminated her face, putting triangles and other hard-edged shapes on the usually soft lines of her face. Her round jaw, little polite nose, the awkward protruding heel of her chin. I loved her then, but mostly I felt the battering ram pain of losing her. When I lose myself, inevitably, as all the other women in my family fell, I will leave my wife and our daughter alone. My daughter, who isn’t mine by blood, will not follow. The line ends here. It ended in the kitchen, when I looked at my wife and loved her deeply. I touched the blonde ends of her hair. She closed her eyes at the warmth of my fingertips.
 
When she opened her eyes, the picture still hung there between us saying whatever we couldn’t. We stared at it and the thread it carried.
 
“Ghost women,” she said.
 
“Ghost women,” I repeated, hoping she understood. In living I fished my hands around in their transparent forms hoping for grip, for solid ground. Hoping against all hope that two human hands could be enough to drag an entire ancestry back to miraculous, ever-present life again, like some paper chain of dolls leading back to me.
 
I thought of Dad doing the same. One night going out with a lantern in a boat, looking for an arm or a leg or an elbow or knee, anything in the darkness resembling a loved one to speak to him, to hold onto and bring home.
 
 
I assumed when June went out she went to Blueberry Hill. It’s what my wife tells our daughter the little island off the opposite shore is called. Blueberry Hill is little more than a raised goose egg floated up on the water, and in the summer the blueberry bushes growing there engorge themselves on the lake water and dangle over the island shore so you can gather them from your canoe. June never brought a bucket back, but there was no reason for me to assume she hadn’t eaten them by herself while rowing back to the house. She stayed out for hours. I imagined her: one pump of the oars, one handful of blueberries, one moment to peer judgmentally at the sky. In those moments she contemplated her heaviest thoughts. Sticky-handed, blue-lipped, she wondered how she would live. Again. One pump, one handful, one moment. Repeated.
 
I imagined her reaching a very human eternity this way. I still do, even when I know it’s not true.
 
Several weeks after Mom’s birthday I went down to the dock to look for her. I’d missed the bus to school and wanted to ask if I could take the car for the day. I saw her little spearhead shape, the shape of her body combined with her canoe, and sat on the edge of the dock waiting for her to come in. She came in steadily. I removed my socks and shoes to hang my ankles into the warm lake water. I could see snails making their paces in the reflective silt below.
 
June edged up to the dock without saying anything. She tied her canoe off and sat bobbing in it as the waves from the middle of the lake tried to take her from me again. But the rope wouldn’t let her go. She didn’t get out of the canoe.
 
“Do you think I’m a crazy old woman?” she asked.
 
I looked her over. She didn’t even have wrinkles. She could’ve been my much older sister, though strangers would never guess how much. “No.”
 
“I’m sorry I never came around, Tove,” she said. I didn’t understand what she meant right away. She paused for me. “We pretended to hate your mom for a long time for the choice she made. We thought she would always have to choose the thing she was over the thing she wanted to be. She really did try very hard to be something else.”
 
I swirled my feet in the water.
 
“You scare me,” she admitted. “You’re too serious.”
 
“I have to be,” I said. It was the truth. Grief made a serious girl out of me. Grief, and the effort of concentrating very hard on being the thing I wanted rather than the thing I was. They were almost the same feeling. They were tied up inextricably.
 
I looked up. “Where are the others?” I asked.
 
June picked her fingernails. “What others?”
 
“Your other six sisters. Where are they at?”
 
“Oh. They’re around.” June shrugged. She tried to look disinterested, looking up from her hands at the water instead. “They used to live here with me and your mother. One by one they all went away. You’ll know someday how hard it is to stay human in the world. Soon it’ll be me too, I guess. Chocolates and television programs won’t be enough anymore to convince me to stay. It’ll all be so heavy and there won’t be anything I can do about it. I feel displaced here.”
 
“I’m sorry,” I said. I felt personally responsible for some reason. For whatever misery June felt, and for the misery of the world that dissuaded her from staying.
 
“It’s okay. I have an out.”
 
“Do you think they’re waiting for you?”
 
“I know it. They’re waiting for you too.”
 
I didn’t respond to that. Since Mom’s passing I’d had a great pressure on me, the pressure of eyes. I felt their wanting. What they wanted I couldn’t give. I wouldn’t give it. I was a woman, wasn’t I? I was human in my body and I would fight the spirit in me that wasn’t until it closed its teeth around my throat and killed me. Maybe that was how Mom went. The fight was tough. Did she realize how alone she was? Did she love what she made?
 
 
June remained at the house through my second semester of high school. When she left, she left in pieces: for weekends, for half the week, for whole weeks, until eventually she only showed up for social worker visits, and when I hit eighteen she stopped showing up at all. I gained custody of the house, and though a missing persons report went out for her, I know she won’t be found.
 
I’ve never heard a wolf howl in the woods around Little Sebago.
 
 
My daughter was born on a Saturday in October in the early morning, a few minutes and an hour away from Friday. My wife wanted to hold her in the little strength she’d saved for such a thing. She was woozy from labor and pain. Lifting the kid in her arms made her sweat like she’d finished a long swim. All my life I hadn’t wanted a kid. Love makes you want little things.
 
One day she started wanting food to eat, and utensils to eat it with. We gave it to her. One day she rolled over from her back onto her belly for the first time, without our hands helping her. My wife was at the doctor’s then for a physical and I called her and sobbed down the phone and tried to get the kid to do it again. One day she crawled, then she stood bracing herself against our fingers, she walked like someone learning to swim, pushing her small body along uncertainly against furniture and walls. One day she didn’t need the furniture or walls anymore. She went along on her own. A year of accumulated unverbalized wants and needs erupted out of her. She called me Mom.
 
 
Lately I can’t stop thinking about the woods beyond our house, where Mom headed to when the snap came. The snap of her skin against her other skin, the one she was born in. I have to imagine spaces between the trees, a sort of occupational emptiness, to prevent myself from imagining my own otherness escaping. But in the gaps there are faces. I know some of them, others I don’t know. They’re lonely faces. Lonely as the loon calls on the lake at night for another loon to come to it. Lonely as the summers I spent on my own, in Gray and in Portland, and the Atlantic ocean where seals duck under the whitecaps before boats can hit them.
 
Here’s what I imagine out there. Mom. She’s running to Blueberry Hill. When she gets there she will sit on a rock howling because she is hungry. For what she does not know—no longer remembers. Only she has the vague notion of someone waiting ahead of her there. She thinks it is her daughter. She can’t remember where she knows that word, but it hangs on the horizon and is a promise. Daughter, daughter, daughter. And the tallness of the trees and the dampness of the earth and a stutter of light. She becomes the landscape.
 
At home Dad sweeps his flashlight through our lawn like the great eye of god. Her daughter sleeps.

Hannah Christopher
​
Hannah Christopher lives and works in Akron, Ohio. She graduated from Mount Vernon Nazarene University with a degree in English and Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in a variety of literary journals, including The Threepenny Review.