Salamancas Reise

Gramps says that I am a country girl at heart, and that is true. I was plucked up like a weed from my home in Bybanks, Kentucky, and replanted in the tidy, birdhouse neighborhood of Euclid, Ohio. My father took me there to live near a woman with wild red hair named Margaret Cadaver, and on the day we arrived, I saw a frightened, round face pressed against the window next door. I didn't know it then, but that face belonged to Phoebe Winterbottom, and her story would become tangled up with my own. My own story was hidden behind hers, the way the brick fireplace in our old house was hidden behind a plaster wall, waiting for my father to chip away at the surface and find what was underneath.

It was on a long car trip, locked in with my grandparents for six days, that I told them Phoebe's story. We were driving west to Lewiston, Idaho, a trip I had to take, a trip that had to be finished by my mother's birthday. The wind and the sky and the trees all whispered *rush, rush, rush*. To pass the time as we barreled across the country, and to keep from thinking too much about my mother, I began the tale. “I could tell you an extensively strange story,” I warned them. “Oh, good!” Gram said. “Delicious!” And so I told them about Phoebe Winterbottom, her disappearing mother, and the lunatic.

Phoebe's world was one of thumpingly respectable order on the surface, but underneath, it was teeming with suspicion. Her family was polite and stiff, a place where cholesterol was a graver sin than unkindness. Soon after I met her, a nervous young man appeared on her doorstep, asking for Mrs. Winterbottom. Phoebe, with her vivid imagination, immediately labeled him “the lunatic.” Then, mysterious messages began appearing on her porch: *Don't judge a man until you've walked two moons in his moccasins*. Phoebe was certain it was all connected to our neighbor, the spooky Mrs. Cadaver, who, Phoebe theorized, had probably chopped up her husband and buried him in the backyard beneath a rhododendron bush.

As I spun out Phoebe's story, my grandparents stitched their own lives into the telling. Gram, with her cries of “Huzza, huzza!” and Gramps, with his tall tales and his unwavering love for his “gooseberry,” were a caboodle of goodness and peculiarity. They got into trouble borrowing a senator's tires and dismantled a stranger's engine in a rest stop, all with the best intentions. But on the hot, flat plains of South Dakota, our journey took a sharp turn. While we cooled our feet in the Missouri River, a water moccasin took a snack out of Gram's leg. The boy with the bowie knife who had tried to rob us was the one who knelt and sucked the poison from the wound, saving her life. For a time, the whispers in the air changed. They no longer urged me to hurry; instead, they warned me to slow down.

Back in Euclid, Phoebe's world truly began to unravel. One afternoon, her mother was gone. She left behind neatly labeled casseroles in the freezer and a series of notes, the last of which said simply, *I had to go away. I can't explain*. Phoebe refused to believe her mother had left on her own. She insisted the lunatic had kidnapped her. She collected evidence - stray hairs, suspicious floor stains - and dragged me with her to the police station, convinced that Mrs. Cadaver was the mastermind behind it all. While Phoebe was searching for a villain, I was watching her family and remembering my own. I saw the way her mother had tried to reach for her children, only to be pushed away. I remembered my own mother, before she left, asking me to walk in the fields with her, and how I had said no.

Phoebe and I followed the trail of our own suspicions to the local university, searching for the lunatic. We found him. He was sitting on a bench on the college green, and beside him, holding his hand, was Mrs. Winterbottom. She leaned over and kissed his cheek. The truth, when it came, was not a story of murder or kidnapping, but one of secrets and quiet sadness. The “lunatic” was Mike, the son Mrs. Winterbottom had given up for adoption years before she ever met her husband. She had left not to escape her family, but to find a piece of herself she had lost long ago.

As my story of Phoebe reached its end, our own journey was growing more desperate. We flew through the mountains of Montana, the car gobbling up the miles. Gram was quiet, her breathing shallow and rattly. Her one wish was to see Old Faithful in Yellowstone. We watched it erupt, a whole river of water shooting into the sky, and Gram tilted her face to the mist, her voice a happy rasp. “Huzza, huzza!” she cried. It was the last time I would hear her say it. She had a stroke that night, and in a hospital in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, with Gramps holding her hand, our gooseberry died.

Gramps gave me the car keys and a wad of money. He knew, without me saying a word, that I had to finish the trip alone. I drove the last hundred miles on my own, down the treacherous, winding road to Lewiston. I pulled over at an overlook, the same spot where a man once pointed out to me the wreckage of a bus that had plunged off the cliff a year before. He had told me only one person survived.

I finally understood. I had been searching for my mother, hoping for a miracle, but she wasn't in Lewiston. She was in the ground, on a hill overlooking the Snake River. She had been on that bus. The sole survivor was the woman who had been sitting beside her, a stranger who became a friend in their last hours together: Margaret Cadaver. My father had not brought me with him when he first came because the grief was too sharp, the truth too terrible.

I visited her grave and kissed the willow tree that grew beside it. I saw that my mother wasn't truly gone; she was singing in the trees. The long trip was a gift from Gram and Gramps, a chance for me to walk in my mother's moccasins. Now, my father, Gramps, and I are back in Bybanks. Gram is buried in the aspen grove, and we miss her every day. I've learned that underneath one story is another, and that you can't keep the birds of sadness from flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair. And sometimes, even when you're walking through the deepest sadness, you can still find a singing tree, a new puppy, and the promise of a blackberry kiss. Huzza, huzza.