“Why won’t you stop this,” she begged, hating the tinny, pleading sound of her voice. She wanted so badly to get angry, but she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. She remembered too well how Patrick put her on his shoulders during the Fourth of July parade when she was little and nearly burned his hair off with her sparkler. When he let her hang out with him and Becky when they were in high school and Becky still filled her with such older girl awe. How when Stacey’s team lost in the finals of their seventh-grade volleyball tournament, and she was so embarrassed by how hard she was crying, he hugged her, and made dumb joke after dumb joke that cracked her up despite herself. How when she, Patrick, and Matt got Monopoly for Christmas and played it to exhaustion, Patrick would always win, but he would also team up with her to make sure Matt finished last. He was her brother. She was helpless not to love him still. “Mom and Dad are over this. They’re past it. Why can’t you be?”
“Mom and Dad are doing what they think is right.” He put his hand on her cheek. The wrinkles of a husband and father had crowded around his eyes. He was beginning to look so much like their dad. “And so am I. You can still change, Stacey. You can get help. There’s still time. God can forgive anything if you allow Him.”
She stood in front of her brother’s home holding the envelope. She couldn’t say on the phone—let alone to his face—what she’d written in this letter. It only occurred to her to pen it after she agreed to see Bethany. She’d say to Lisa’s mother what she’d always wanted to say, and then she’d tell Patrick what she needed to tell him. She’d confront the two people who’d long made her ashamed for what she shouldn’t have been ashamed of. She’d hurl at these two birds the same lethal stone. Yet she almost wanted to fail at this. To walk away. More than that, she wondered if Patrick would even hear what she was saying. She’d sealed the envelope before rereading, but certain phrases came back to her, things she’d written to be as cruel to Patrick as he’d been to her. If she wasn’t cruel, he wouldn’t understand. He would not comprehend that his “love” for her was part of the reason she almost did something horrifically drastic as a scared, lonely eighteen-year-old. She recalled the line where she said he was part of the reason she almost hanged herself in her dorm room closet. No god could save a person from the responsibility of doing that to someone they claimed to love.
She opened the mailbox, set the letter inside, and closed it.
As she walked away, she pulled her phone from her pocket to text her parents that she was running several hours behind but instead saw the push notification for an e-mail. She slid it open. A chill rippled through her.
Hey Magical. Things are going well. Kiss the ground of The Cane for me. Let’s catch up soon.
Stacey wasn’t sure what drove to the core of her aching and resentment and love for Lisa more: that after all these years all it had taken was one stupid e-mail, maybe not to hear Lisa’s voice, but to at least see it alive on the screen—or that in the last decade Lisa had forgotten the nickname she’d bestowed on her, the one Stacey so wanted to hear again.
“We have our lenses, our goggles,” Hilde told her at some point in their three days together in Zagreb. “We see our friends, our lovers, our home—all of it through this filter. And in many ways the impossibility of ever removing that lens, it’s our defining trait as a species.”
In 2011, Stacey moved to Ecuador to teach English while she applied to English graduate programs. Before she flew back to the States to begin at Michigan, she decided she wanted to see the world’s greatest rain forest while it was still around. She flew first to Rio de Janeiro and then to Manaus, where the Rio Negro and the Rio Solimões split from the Amazon. Jet lag and an unpleasant reaction to the malaria pills made it a dizzying, mostly miserable trip. She felt hungover the whole time, in a perpetual state of soggy-headed exhaustion. On the tour she met a young couple, Nadja and Carlos, who were departing from the tour early, driving a rental car back to Manaus, and they offered Stacey a ride. She fell asleep in the backseat of their SUV, the jungle canopy blocking most of the sunlight from the lonesome highway that wound through the fringes of the jungle. When she came to, it was like she’d been dropped onto an alien planet. The rain forest was gone. They were driving along the side of a mountain, running parallel to a valley below where parched, sickly trees clamored from dry grass. Down in the valley, moving along a dirt road as wide as an airport tarmac, were thousands and thousands of cattle. The sun had fallen just to the horizon and a brown-yellow light filtered through the massive constellation of dust kicked up by the hooves of the animals. They were being corralled by two helicopters, which hovered above, blades beating the wind in a thudding, staccato percussion. The beasts moved like a river of flesh and leather, chugging over the land in loose formation, braying in fear or boredom or annoyance. Carlos was asleep, and stupidly, she asked Nadja what they were looking at.
She said it first in Portuguese and then translated. “Cattle ranch.”
But this was only a ranch the way Noah’s disaster was only a flood. This line of cattle stretched farther than she could see, brown and white, black and spotted, a ghostly noise rising from their collective voices, until they reached an enormous enclosure of aluminum gates and barbed wire fencing. The helicopters buzzed along like dragonflies, their opaque windshields grinning with the smugness of conquerors, certain that nothing could come along and sweep them away. Urine-yellow clouds wafted over the land, coating the draining day, the horizon ablaze with sickly brown light. Never in her life had Stacey felt so ill, the invisible scent that links us to our ancestors, to all living things right down to the lichen at the beginning of creation, rising through her lungs, throat, and nostrils like gorge. Watching that river of beasts was akin to watching a man try to bite off and eat his own tongue. In the years to come this image would never quite leave her. She’d think of those animals, and the reality of what was happening to her, to the people she loved, to her home, would become overwhelming. Occasionally this sensation would take hold of her heart and grip it with the loneliness of death, and she would wish for Lisa. Because when your waking mind is consumed at all times by wanton devastation, by oblivion, you have no choice but to dream of courage.
Now, driving through a dark Ohio night, remembering the collective moan of those cows, she thought of what she might say to Lisa. If she just bought a plane ticket. If she showed up at her door. Not with expectations but just to say thank you for what Lisa had given her. The girl who’d taught her to swear, to drink, to use a condom, to read weird, wild books, to explore this one irreducible, unquantifiable life. Without whom she never would have left home, never climbed down to the crater lake of Quilotoa, never tasted criolla in Argentina with a group of Israeli backpackers, never stayed up all night on the streets of Vilnius with a gorgeous artist who painted only sex zombies, never explored a foreign capital with a woman who could explain to her its opera house and what carbonic acid does to the ocean’s calcifying organisms, never thought to try to scrape her nails against the ceiling of her imagination and then claw past it.
Turning on to Stillwater, a shortcut to Highway 36 which would eventually lead her back to the interstate, she reached over and turned off her phone. She would wait until morning to write back to Lisa because the anxiety that had taken hold reminded her of that moment on the scarred edge of the Amazon, watching as that noxious cloud of dirt and shit and sun engulfed the world.