16. MEGHAN
Oquirrh Mountains, Utah
1 year before
For several days after the girl with the messy blond bun drove away, I stayed where I was, sitting shiva by the shoe. Waiting. Hoping that the photos she took would lead someone to this place. To find me. To take my body—and what was left of my soul—home.
I still couldn’t have explained why. I didn’t know what good that would do. I would still be dead. I would still be invisible to everyone I loved. But at least maybe I could be near them. For reasons I couldn’t really articulate, every part of me wanted to be found.
A few more cars passed me on the rutted dirt road on the way to Ophir Canyon. None of them stopped. The raven returned every few days with new tiny treasures to add to the collection by the shoe. A piece of glass. A little white slice of quartz. A black pebble.
I drifted carefully while I waited, treading lightly through memories of my first job, some of the lectures I’d attended in college, a campout with my church group in high school. I re-read my favorite book, The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver. I got drunk with Sharesa in San Diego during spring break.
The sun rose and set in the dusty hills, and rose and set again. The darkness still scared me when the shadows finally overtook my corner of the woods each night. I saw the coyotes every once in a while, their eyes flashing green and white when the moon caught them right. They gave my little shrine by the side of the dirt road a wide berth. I didn’t approach them again, either.
When the sun had risen and set at least five times, I ran my hands—which I had given an intricate rainbow manicure—over the raven’s altar. The shoe had bleached even further and was covered with a new layer of dust from a windstorm two nights earlier. It was getting hard to recognize as a shoe at all, unless you saw it from just the right angle.
As the days wore on into weeks, I couldn’t bear to be alone with the shoe any longer. And I couldn’t bear to leave it.
So finally, I drifted back to the memory of Bubbie Rosie.
If this was all I had left—this dusty road and the raven and the coyotes and the bleached shoe and the precious memories I turned over and over in my mind like a worry stone—I needed to know.
I started at the beginning of the memory. To the challah dough, to the sound of my grandmother’s delicate laughter and the way the bowl clinked against the counter as Bubbie tipped it out onto the countertops and dipped her hands into a little hill of flour.
I watched Grandma Rosie’s eyes as ten-year-old-me asked if I could watch TV while we waited for the dough to rise.
I watched her mouth form the words, “Yes of course, Bubbelah.”
And then, while the younger version of myself hurried up the stairs, I tried to hold onto Bubbie.
“I’m sorry I left you to make the bread,” I told her.
I felt myself grasping at the edges of the memory. Ten-year-old me didn’t have any more memories of Bubbie here. She just had memories of Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Specifically, the episode where Sabrina tells her friends she’s a witch.
The threads were unraveling quickly. “I wish I had more memories with you,” I whispered before I lost them.
Bubbie’s soft, rosy cheeks turned up in a slight smile. “Ah, but here you are Bubbelah.”
I felt a jolt of electricity as the threads stopped unraveling, the focus suddenly clear again.
I wasn’t drifting anymore.
Instead of watching myself sprawl out on the bed and watch Sabrina tell her friends the truth about being a witch, I was still in the kitchen with Bubbie.
It was more than that, though. Before, I had been a fly on the kitchen wall—a voyeur, I guess—watching the interaction. It had been kind of like a movie.
Now I was in the kitchen. And Bubbie Rosie was looking at me intently, her hands still covered in flour.
The feeling spread through me like sunlight, and for the first time since I’d disappeared into the hills, I felt a spark of joy.
“Bubbie? You can hear me?” I’d expected the words to sound choked, like they would if I were trying to squeeze them out through all my feelings if I were alive. Instead, they seemed to drift into the memory with me, perfectly clear, caught by the current that surrounded me and Grandma Rosie.
“I can hear you, Bubbelah. I’ve been waiting for you.” Her eyes crinkled with joy and then softened with sadness. “I had not expected to see you so soon.”
“You’re alive? I mean, not alive, but—I don’t understand any of this. Is this heaven or something?”
Bubbie Rosie’s face broke into a smile. I wasn’t sure whether we could hug. I doubted it. Not like before, anyway. Physical sensation had died when I died. But the joy that filled me to the brim and the love that radiated from Grandma Rosie’s voice was as warm and as comforting as any hug I’d ever had while I was alive. “I don’t know the answer to that question, Bubbelah.” She looked down at her hands, covered in flour. “All I know is that we are here together, in this memory. That somehow it still connects us.”
“How …” I struggled to put the pieces together. “Is there like, a god or something? What have you been doing all this time? What happens now?”
Bubbie’s smile softened. “I don’t know the answer to those questions either, Bubbelah. What I know is that the people we loved on the other side are gone. I mourned you, like you mourned me when I died. But I have learned, as you know now, that the people we love are not gone forever. That everything we ever loved, ever did, ever said, ever read, ever experienced, comes back to us. See, here we are together.” She gestured around the sunlit kitchen.
“So, you live here now, in this memory?” I asked. “And some of my other memories?”
Bubbie nodded. “In a way, yes. Like you live in mine. It’s the tapestry we wove together. The threads still bind us.”
I felt a shadow of despair creep into the joy. “We can’t make any more memories together, though. It’s just … like a movie?”
She shook her head. “Ah, that is what I wondered at first too. But Bubbelah, there are so many movies you have not seen.”
I stared at her in confusion. She continued, “Those threads, they branch out forever, if you know the way to go. Lifetimes of threads. Mine, yours.” She gestured around us. “So many threads. Ima is here. Satva is here. I will show you.”
Ima. Mother. Her mother, my great grandmother who I had never met. Satva. Son. Ben, my uncle who had died of an overdose when I was a baby.
I stared at her in amazement. “I don’t have any memories of Ima, though. She died before I was born. And I really only met Uncle Ben once, right after I was born.”
Grandma Rosie nodded. “That doesn’t matter anymore, Bubbelah. We couldn’t see so many of the threads that tied us together while we were alive. Those threads are visible now.” She paused, then added, “If you know the way.”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”
Grandma Rosie brushed off her hands, and a cloud of flour sifted through the air in front of her. She looked thoughtful for a moment. “We can follow the threads together. The story I told you about your mother, when she was a little girl carrying spiders from the house under paper cups? We can visit that memory together. I can show it to you. Because I was there. Even though you were not.”
I suddenly understood what she meant, and the shadow of despair disappeared. So many memories. An eternity of memories stretching backward forever. “Show me,” I told her excitedly. This meant I could meet my uncle Ben. I could meet Ima. I hadn’t lost my family forever. Yes, I’d lost some of them—for now. But in a strange way, I’d also just found the ones I’d lost.
Grandma Rosie nodded and her smile softened. “When you are ready, Bubbelah. I can’t show you until you are ready.”
I shook my head, confused all over again. “I’m ready, though. What do you mean?”
Bubbie gestured around the kitchen. “Even now, this memory is changing. You are following my thread—instead of yours. In this kitchen, where you never were but I was. It will be hard to go back, after. If you continue, if you follow my threads, it will be impossible.”
“Go back?” I let her words sink in. I thought of the coral shoe. The forest road. My body moldering in the rocky ground, disappearing into bleached bones as the ants and the hornets did their work. “You mean, I won’t be able to get back to the other side. The side where my body is.”
Grandma Rosie nodded. “Yes, Bubbelah. And where your mother is. And your friends.”
“But I’m lost out there,” I told her, the despair sweeping back in. “I’m alone. I don’t think anyone is coming for me. He dumped me in the woods.”
The joy that had filled the air suddenly went flat. Grandma Rosie’s expression crumpled. “Oh, Bubbelah. Oh no.”
“I thought you knew,” I whispered.
She shook her head. “I can’t see the other side anymore. I stayed for a long time in the ‘real’ world. With you. With your mother. But when Ben died, it was time. Time to be here. To find each other in a way we could not while we were alive. Because this is real too, Bubbelah.”
I no longer felt like I was drifting. I just felt like I was here. All of me, here. I wanted to tell Bubbie about Jimmy Carlson. For someone to know what had happened to me in the woods. To meet my great grandparents. To see, through Bubbie’s eyes, my mother carefully and fearfully carrying spiders safely outside.
Part of me wasn’t ready though. Not yet.
“I think I need to go back for a while,” I said softly, trying to soak in all the love in the room, buoying me up. “I can find you again, here?”
Grandma Rosie nodded. “Yes, Bubbelah. You can always find me. Here or anywhere our lives touched. I love you, little doll.”
“I love you too, Bubbie.” The threads I’d tried to grasp so tightly earlier now felt like they were pulling snug. Falling into place.
For a moment, I panicked. Grandma Rosie and the sunlit kitchen with the challah bread rising on the countertop didn’t disappear like they had before. I thought of the shoe. I thought of the little shrine the raven had assembled. I thought of the Ophir Canyon campground signage, trying to piece together the place that suddenly felt far away. As if it were now the dream.
Then I found myself back on the shoulder of the rutted dirt road, beside the pebble and the little shard of glass, the coins, and the shoe.
I was reminded of the feeling of waking up from a too-late nap in the afternoon, when you sleep until dinnertime and aren’t sure, for a few moments, what happened.
The sound of crunching footsteps hit me before I recognized there was someone there with me.
Someone standing over me, looking directly at me.
Looking at the shoe.
The man had a thick auburn beard. He was in his fifties, and wearing a tan shirt and pants.
In one hand, he held a radio.
My gaze drifted in slow motion to the lapel of his shirt.
Forest Service.