Chapter Four
Helen didn’t feel like killing worms today. As she peered down at her Brussels sprouts in the garden, she couldn’t find the
energy for it.
It was such a dreary morning. Gray clouds blotted out the sun, and the wind rattled a loose board on the farmhouse. The dirty
white paint was peeling away in places, revealing the old wood siding beneath. Maybe I should do chores inside instead, she thought and looked toward the empty house. It had been built for a husband and wife shortly after World War I, and Helen
wondered if she was staring at the same siding they had stared at a hundred years ago.
Wade always boasted how he got a “real deal” on the farmhouse. The son of the original owners had died in a nursing home without
a will or next of kin, so Wade had scored the property at a state auction. Helen was pretty sure he got a “real deal” on it
because the redbrick chimney was starting to tilt slightly to one side, and the land was in the middle of nowhere: a half-hour
ferry ride across Puget Sound and another two hours by car. People came out this way to hike and ride horses in the nearby
national forests more than they came here to make a life.
It was very peaceful though. That is, if you measured peace by quietude and nature and not by one’s thoughts.
The house’s best feature was its wide front porch with the shaded overhang held up by thick columns.
Helen rarely sat in the porch rocking chairs though, because that’s what she would have done with Tyler when they were old together, and now she didn’t want to do it with anyone else.
Most days she floated across the porch and went straight to her garden.
The Brussels sprouts were getting close to harvest, and she had planned to check them for cabbage worms yesterday but had
forgotten to do it. Neem oil could only do so much, so the worms needed to be picked off by hand, and you would think the
more she had to do that, the less it would bother her, but it was the opposite. She’d come to closely associate Brussels sprouts
with the squishy little caterpillars, and she cringed at how they hid in the folds of the vegetable. Eating the sprouts made
her feel like she was eating worms. She used to love them. In the city, she’d walk into the grocery co-op and say, “One pound
of Brussels sprouts, please,” and a lady in a cheerful apron would give her a container full of Brussels sprouts that someone
else had planted, harvested, cut, cleaned, salted, and roasted. All she had to do was stick a fork in them and open her mouth.
They’d have carrots tonight instead, she decided.
Minutes later, she sat in the dirt and used a hand trowel to loosen the soil around the shoulder of a carrot. Then she grasped
the carrot greens and tugged lightly, twisting. The carrot pulled free. It was nice and thick, and the orange shade was bright.
She brushed off the soil before adding it to her basket.
As she worked, her eyes sometimes drifted to her surroundings. Peeking through the gray day, the early hints of autumn’s brilliant
yellow and orange shouted their presence in the forest. Some of the thirstiest trees weren’t yet recovered from the dry summer,
still brambly and dead-armed, but others were deepening into brown colors that signaled an approaching winter. Everything
was in transition.
It was the beginning and the end.
Helen’s mind wasn’t really in the trees though; it was lost in the past.
Inside the kitchen, still deep in thought, she peeled the carrots for a dinner stew she’d made a million times before.
“Ow!”
She gripped her left hand in pain. After a moment, she stole a look and saw that she had cut her left index finger when the
peeler had slipped. A tiny stream of blood trickled down across her middle finger and pooled around her wedding ring.
There were first aid supplies at the house. That had been one of her conditions when she had agreed to this lifestyle with
Wade: She wanted modern medicine. So Helen sat on the edge of the clawfoot tub in the bathroom and tended to her cut with
a tube of antibacterial ointment and a Band-Aid.
After she finished peeling the carrots, she put them in the refrigerator—another modern amenity that she had insisted upon—and
went outside to get Wade’s work clothes from the clothesline. Washing clothes by hand was one of her least favorite tasks.
The cold water made her hands hurt, and no matter how many times she rinsed and squeezed, she could still see soap suds in
the water.
As she was folding Wade’s clothes into piles on top of their quilted bed, she noticed one of his shirts had a hole in the
elbow. She retrieved her sewing kit and sat on the bed to thread a needle.
Helen often imagined that her own body had stitches running the length of her spine, barely holding her together. Take care of dangling threads, she wanted to warn people, or you might pull my entire soul loose.
She encountered few people though. There were the ones she saw in town during the once-monthly trip for supplies.
And there was Agnes, the young woman who lived in the nearest house.
Every so often, she hiked from her own property and through parts of the Olympic National Forest to visit Helen.
Agnes hadn’t been by in weeks, and Helen was so ready to have a conversation with her, she was afraid she might start crying when she next saw Agnes emerge from the trees.
Helen was keeping a list of things she wanted to tell her.
Town was twenty miles to the south. It had a grocery store that was really a glorified corner market that included general
and tackle store items. There was also a post office, a library, a gas station, a pizza place, a flower shop, two taverns,
a gun shop, several churches, and an elementary school. She wanted to check out books from the library, but the longest you
could keep books was three weeks, and Wade said they didn’t need to go into town that often.
Each trip, Wade filled up his red gas cans with fuel for the generators, they bought food and supplies, checked their post
office box, and Helen used the phone at the grocery store to call her parents. She always felt a flutter of anxiety beforehand,
hopeful the call would go through and go well. She and Wade weren’t the only off-gridders who used that phone. A guy with a grubby beard had twice tied up the
line until Wade had finally announced they had to “get back before dark,” as if dark were some pressing deadline. And since
there was no designated call time, Helen’s parents had missed the call more than once. With no way for them to call her back,
that meant she’d had to wait another month to try again. As much as she craved the familiarity of talking to her parents,
the conversations were often disappointing: too brief and uncomfortably stilted. Helen was usually within earshot of shop
employees or customers, and even worse, she and her mother were pretending Helen’s life hadn’t taken an utterly bizarre turn.
The phone calls felt like a stage play, and everyone knew their part. Her parents were good at that.
They had been the only two guests at Helen and Wade’s courthouse wedding. Wade didn’t have any family to speak of since both
of his parents were gone, and Helen hadn’t wanted to invite any of her friends because Tyler had been someone people adored.
She didn’t want comparisons being drawn between him and Wade. Even her friend’s fear-aggressive rescue mutt had licked Tyler’s
hand the first time they’d met. Everyone had laughed and rolled their eyes and said of course. She was just protecting Wade, she’d told herself. Helen’s parents had arrived ten minutes early with a beautiful bouquet
of pink peonies. They were the type of parents who showed up without fail, but she had been able to plainly see the strain
on their faces as they hugged her before the ceremony, and she could sense they wanted to ask if she was certain about marrying
a man she’d known barely three months. But her parents were also the type of people who didn’t talk about hard things. Instead,
they pretended things were okay, cosigners of an unspoken agreement that seemed to run through her extended family on both
sides: aunts, uncles, cousins. Everybody just carried on. Helen sometimes wondered, if she’d had a sibling, would they have
talked about the real things? She used to talk about real things with Tyler.
Even if the words were sometimes hollow, she still missed the sound of her mother’s voice in the weeks that stretched out
between phone calls.
Helen hadn’t been able to call home in almost three whole months now, because she hadn’t gone to town on the last two supply
runs. In September, she had been sick in bed when Wade went. Strange, since it’s hard to contract a virus when you have no
contact with people. She’d been nauseous and vomiting and had briefly worried her IUD had failed. When her period had arrived
four days later, she’d decided it was just a spell of heartsickness. She doubted that any regular doctor would diagnose it
as such, but it was the only explanation that made sense to her. When Tyler had died, her heart had been broken into so many
tiny pieces that sometimes it seemed like there was nothing left except for heart dust that stained everything she tried to
touch. How could that not make her nauseous some days?
The month prior, August, Wade had gone into town without stopping by the house to pick her up.
He’d driven directly from the trees and shown up after dark with bags of groceries.
When she had looked out the window and seen him unloading the bags from his truck, she’d felt like a fist had closed around her throat.
It was so thoughtless of him, and as she felt anger rising, the feeling was quickly replaced with something closer to humiliation. Was this a punishment of some kind?
She’d kept quiet as they’d unpacked the supplies together, rolling it over in her brain, and suddenly she’d wondered if it
was because of their July trip. “Is this because I wanted pizza last time?”
Wade had looked at her like she was crazy, asked her what in the world was she talking about.
Helen wasn’t crazy. She still vividly remembered the way he’d reacted during their July trip when she’d suggested they eat
dinner at the pizza place. He’d recoiled as though she’d suggested they drink the gasoline.
“Pizza is garbage food,” he’d said.
“So?”
“So why would you want pizza when we can eat good food?” He’d meant the animals he hunted and the vegetables she grew in the
garden.
“Because I wouldn’t have to cook it,” she’d said, and she hadn’t masked the venom in her voice.
The following month, he’d gone to town without her.
Some things aren’t coincidences.
As the day plodded forward, the cold started to wrap around her. Despite the clouds, it had been a warm October morning, so
she’d skipped making a fire when she woke up. Now she was beginning to feel the chill.
Outside, Helen gathered an armload of chopped wood from the tidy woodpile on the side of the house. In the living room, she
arranged the wood inside the fireplace and struck a match. Then she just stood there, soaking in the warmth and gazing at
her poetry books. She couldn’t face the dinner stew yet, chopping all those vegetables.
Helen pulled her Sylvia Plath poetry book from the collection and fanned through the pages. She hadn’t always read poetry. Before Tyler’s death, she’d read mostly historical fiction. She’d wanted exciting character arcs and climactic endings, not circular words.
Now poetry was all she could read. Oh, she missed all those castles and battles. The faraway worlds delivered the highest
stakes of all—kingdoms on the brink of collapse. Yet none of those books had been able to hold her attention after Tyler was
gone. The irony was that after his death she’d needed to escape from reality more than anything, but instead she’d found herself
staring at the type on the paper, turning from page six to seven only to flip back to five and realize she had no idea what
the name of the main character was. Her mind couldn’t hold the storyline when it was already crowded with the real one she
was living and reliving. There was no castle wall tall enough to keep the memories out. Moats and spires. Memories of Tyler’s
death could swim and fly right over it all.
And so Helen had given up reading altogether. For months.
Until the soggy Sunday she’d wandered into a used bookshop on Second Avenue. She’d had no umbrella with her, so her jeans
had been wet all the way up her thighs to where her raincoat stopped, but she’d barely noticed the weight of the denim cling.
She’d stared absently at the fiction section for a long time but not pulled a single book from the shelves.
Then she’d drifted into the poetry section.
The name Sylvia Plath had caught her eye.
Helen had thought, oven; suicide. And then, Did her hair singe off of her scalp?
And then, Wait, no. It must have been a gas oven.
Of course. She simply faded away. Helen didn’t know why that had never occurred to her before.
Previously, the thought of Sylvia’s death had been so horrifying
that Helen had avoided actively imagining it but had vaguely assumed the woman cooked her own head.
That day in the shop, Helen had pulled the book from the shelf and opened it to the first page.
Ten pages later, she’d felt the knowledge heavy in her chest that Sylvia Plath was dead and buried and couldn’t write anymore, but she’d felt glad these pages lived on. Helen could finally read again. She had bought the book.
Sometimes when she read Sylvia’s poems, she couldn’t help but think about Sylvia and the oven. What disturbed Helen most of
all was that she remembered being a person, lifetimes ago it seemed, who used to think, How in the world does a person stick her head in an oven and just turn it on?
But now Helen understood how sometimes it just comes to that.
Standing in front of the crackling fire, she slid the Plath book back onto the mantel and took down the thick hardbound W.
B. Yeats compilation. Her favorite poem of his, “When You Are Old,” she’d read hundreds of times. On lonely nights, his words
comforted her changing face and her pilgrim soul, as he so aptly described them, but her bookmark wasn’t tucked there. It was toward the back of the book, in the biography
section. Only recently, she’d discovered the forty pages detailing Yeats’s unusual life, including his belief in ghosts and
the occult. He’d been a member of a society called the Ghost Club, and he believed his poetry was delivered in part from the
spiritual realm.
She reread a passage she’d circled last week in black ink:
Yeats believed that in death, we love with the same love and hate with the same hate. The tortured souls, the unresolved,
they search for windows back into our world. If we grant them passage, ghosts can be just as real as the mortal walking. Yeats
believed we lived with ghosts all around us.
Helen closed the book. She needed to summon her own ghost today.