Things that can happen where I work

Anna woke in the predawn silence.  She sat up, swung her legs over the side of the bed, and sat staring unfocussed out the window.   After a few minutes she rose and crossed to the bathroom, listening.  A sleepy chirp came through the open window, an early warning of the approaching day.

She brushed her teeth, rinsed, then leaned over the sink and cupped her hands in the cold water.  It cooled her skin as she splashed it on her face and rubbed it into her eyes, washing away the sandy feeling of night.  She scrubbed her face dry with the hand towel, then folded it neatly. Making the bed went quickly.  She snapped the sheet smooth, then pulled the blanked over, folded and tucked the corners tight.  In moments it was pristine.

She faced the mirror as she dressed.  White cotton shirt, brown shorts.  Her white sneakers were fraying a little on the front.  Wearing out fast from all the washing.  Was it worth dealing with the crowds in town to go buy a new pair?  She shook her head slightly.  No.  Not yet. Her hair hung below her waist.  Longer than her mother’s had been, she thought, brushing and braiding it.  No-maintenance hair, someone called it.  Just brush and braid and forget.  It was lighter than her mother’s honey-brown hair now, too, bleaching pale in the sun.  She stared at the mirror as her hands wove the loose strands.  Her face had thinned so much in the past year.  Her body too, now that she no longer worked out.  She felt so old.  Too old to be just twenty four.
Time and age no longer corresponded.

She left her room to the slow dying night.

In the dining hall, she watched the sun rise as the coffee finished brewing.  The hills to the east were outlined in golden light that fell onto the roofs of the buildings at the top of the rise, night sliding away from the main house, the chapel, the dining hall, slipping down the hill to rest in the lowest hollows of the valley below. The landscape looked the same as when she first saw it, years ago.  Open.  Quiet.  Protected by time and space, too wide and rural to invite attack.

She shivered.  The hall held a dim chill stillness that suggested sleeping dogs and the approach of autumn.  Quickly she went to the kitchen to unload the dinner dishes from the drying rack.  Heavy grade ceramic plates, opaque brown plastic cups.  Silverware.  Large pots and serving utensils.

She kept her mind focused on the work, getting the food ready to cook, concentrating on the details of place settings for the sixty-odd campers and counselors attending this session of summer camp.  She worked systematically, laying out paper placemats, then napkins, then forks, spoons, knives.  It might be faster to set things out for the campers to pick up themselves, but she had hours to fill.  Eventually the campers and staff would wake, the grounds would echo with voices and she would lose herself in the never-ending tasks of managing the retreat center.

Right now the silence echoed the long quiet of winter.  In winter she could go the whole day without speaking or hearing another voice.  For a moment she stood still, remembering the cold brightness of February.

Her joints cracked as she stretched her arms over her head for a moment, took a deep breath.  She was stressing again, she thought.  Until now she had felt adjusted to the hectic pace of summer.  But suddenly she found herself irritated by the loud voices and laughter of teenagers, annoyed at the sight of the young men and women running across the lawns or laughing in clusters by the swimming pool.  God, I wish this was over, she though.

It had been a shock at the beginning of summer, when the first campers and counselors arrived.  The quiet paths and buildings rang with loud voices and laughter, the dorms shook as bodies ran up and down stairs, and the staff retreated to their wing of the main building and fortified themselves for the assault of summer.

But after a few weeks they adjusted to the new pace.  “After all, it is what we are supposed to be,” Father John told the staff at dinner one evening.  “This is a place where people retreat, yes, but when the world comes to us, it tends to bring itself with it.”  Even more of the world would come at the end of this choral session, with its final night’s performance of “Man of La Mancha.”

The side door banged closed as she was pouring a second cup of coffee.  She stopped for a moment with the pot held over the cup, then looked up.

“That smells like morning.”  It was the music director, Jim.  “You ready for us?”

“I will be.  You’re early.”

“That’s right.  I’ve never been able to sleep late.”  She felt a slight irritation looking at his clean-shaven face.  His eyes had the brightness of the natural morning person.  He poured a cup of coffee, spilling a little.  “May I help?”

“Sure.  The coffee mugs are in that cabinet – you can lay them out on the counter.”  His arms and chest stretched his t-shirt.  He looked more like an athlete than a music director, she though.  Or a soldier.  She shook the thought away by asking, “Have you been coming up here long?  We had a different head counselor when I was coming to music camp.”

“Last year was my first here.  Before that I was going to college at Loyola.  I got a job teaching at St. Ignatius in San Francisco, and a lot of the kids come here.”
He lifted the tray of mugs down and carried it to the table next to the counter.  “You’ve sure made an impact on this place,” he said, laying out cups on the counter.  “Last year things weren’t nearly as organized.”

She was in the pantry, bringing out loaves of bread.  “Oh? I’m surprised.”

“For instance, we didn’t have the information packets in each room with the maps of the grounds and schedule for the session,” he carried the empty tray back into the kitchen.  “And the grounds look cleaner somehow, more garden-like.  It’s more like a real resort up here now.”  Anna began straightening the rows of cups he had laid on the counter.  “It’s no big deal.  I just like to keep busy, get things tidied.”

She heard him come out of the kitchen, looked up to see him grin. “You sure do.”  She dropped her hands.

“Well, that’s it, we’re set.”  She poured fresh coffee into her cup.  Jim did the same.  “Want to sit outside?  I love the morning here.”

They sat on the edge of the east porch, watching the sun bring the valley to life.  Sunlight, faint haze of dew, sky unbroken by clouds.  Quiet and serene.

He spoke first.  “So you came here when you were in high school?”

“Pretty much every summer for six years – I started in junior high.”

“Did you just graduate?  You weren’t up here last year, I’d remember.”

She looked into her cup.  “No, I graduated a few years ago, class of 1999," anticipating - this was going to get unpleasant.  “Oh?  Where did you go to college?”  It was the natural question, but it always led down paths she wanted to avoid.  “I didn’t go to college.”  Next would come “What did you do instead?” and the condescension of the educated to the grunt.

She tensed in anticipation, but he didn’t press on.  Instead, “I heard you playing the piano here last night,” he said.  “You’re a lot better than I am.”

“Thank you.”  Where would this lead?

“You sounded pretty good.  We really need someone better than me for the performance at the end of the session.  Would you be interested?”

An invitation from the past, an echo of a memory.  She thought of the music, of performing again.  Longing and hesitation held her immobile, then:  “No, I can’t.  I don’t really have time to practice for a performance.”

“It shouldn’t take that much time,” he said, “you could practice on your own in the evenings maybe, and just join the group for the last few rehearsals.”

She hesitated again.  She was in practice, had been playing for the weekly services in the chapel; and she knew the music to be performed.  Too well. Her stomach knotted.  No.  She wasn’t ready.

“I really don’t think so.” Let this end the discussion.

“Sure you won’t?”

She frowned and stood.  Enough already.  “No.  It’s just not something I want to do.  Leave me alone.”

Her braid swung sharply in time to her steps as she crossed the drive and entered the staff door to the main house.

The big house still slept.  Anna went into the staff kitchen, picked up a mug from the neat stack on the counter and poured coffee from the carafe she had filled at dawn.  Her hands trembled and she splashed coffee onto her sneakers.  The dark stain glared against the bleached white.  She would have to wash them again.

She thought of Jim’s question and sighed.  She didn’t know how to explain why she could not bring herself to play in public again.  She had run away from understanding it herself. She sat on a stool in front of the counter, looked out the window into the wooded valley behind the house.  The coffee smelled good, better than it tasted.  How long had it been since that mattered though?  She hadn’t even liked coffee until after high school.  Now it was a necessity and she would drink it cold and three days old if she had to.  Hot coffee was a luxury.  Her thoughts drifted away.  She pulled out a chain from inside her blouse, fingering the warm metal dog tags as she stared out the window.  Unnoticed, her shoulders tightened slowly inside her loose-fitting shirt.

She stayed inside the main house working until the campers had emptied from the dining hall and begun gathering in the large common room of the main hall.  Their voices flowed through the house, driving away quiet and restfulness.  She went out the back door into the morning.Today’s project waited.  A half dozen rose bushes rested in the shed, their root balls wrapped in burlap sacks, needing to get into the ground.  She gathered tools and carried them over to the side of the chapel, above the gently sloping meadow reaching down from the chapel and main house to the cabins and pool.  The ground was dry and hard packed from the sun.  She had to stand with both feet on the top of the shovel blade to drive it into the soil and then lean all her weight back on the handle to tear the soil loose.  Then again stand on the shovel blade, drive it further into the hole, tear out another lump of soil.

Voices in song dragged her attention out of the hole.  The group had left the French doors to the common room open.  They were warming up with scales, reaching higher and higher in rising and falling waves.  The voices went up in scale, thinning in the upper registers as individual voices reached their breaking point and dropped down an octave.  Anna listened to the sopranos contest the high notes, striving to maintain pitch and tone.  Voices tried to hold, then broke and fell silent, until one last soprano floated up to a clear ringing call and held it for a full breath.  Then silence.  Then cheering and laughter, and the calls of the counselors bringing order again.

She turned again to digging.  The soil was hard-packed with disuse, and fought her for every shovel full.  She worked steadily through the morning.  By the time she had to break to work on lunch she had turned the soil in a long trench between the wall and the walkway, and had passed through the topsoil into the tough resistant adobe clay under soil.

She paused, resting a little on the shovel, looking over the trench, noticing again the singing from the main house.  She could just make out the sound of the piano, staggering through the songs.  The voices of the sopranos rose out of the mix.  They had pulled together now, working through a two-part harmony exercise.  One clear voice projected through the rest, leading them.  Heather’s voice.  It reached out to Anna, stirring memories and emotions.  She rested heavily on the shovel, closed her eyes, and became memory.


She had always loved that voice, from the first concert she had heard it in.  She was waiting in the wings with the other junior symphony members, while the senior chorus performed.  One voice rose up in an incredibly clear note, an unbroken call of joy.  Anna had listened to the solo in amazement, then asked, “Who on earth was that?”

Rich, one of the trombonists, answered with pride, “My sister.”

Rich would become the social coordinator for their group of friends in high school, and many of them developed the habit of hanging out at his family’s home after school, talking and playing role-playing games and making music.

In their senior year the music and drama departments did a presentation of classic Broadway musical numbers.  The group at Rick’s house one afternoon fell to singing the selections, Anna as always on the piano.

Heather came in as they launched into “Cats.”  She leaned against the wall across from the piano, listening to them stumble and laugh through the more up-tempo numbers.  Then, as Anna began the introduction to “Memory,” Rick called out, “Hey, Heather, we’re playing your song!”  Heather smiled, and walked over to the piano as if walking on stage, with a hint of a swagger, tossing her head to shake back the brown curls.  Anna slowed as the introduction ended and looked up as Heather began to sing, poised like a dancer with head high.

She began quietly, almost murmuring the words, yet projecting clearly across the room.  Slowly she increased in volume and tempo, Anna matching her, holding the piano in the background, listening to the lovely clear voice weaving into the notes from the instrument, working into a single sound.

The room erupted into cheers as they reached the end.

Heather looked at Anna.  “That was brilliant.”

Anna flushed.  “No, I didn’t do anything.  You were incredible.”

Heather smiled.  “It took us both.  I’ll sing with you anytime.”

Anna closed her mind to the memory, retreated to the present.  The clay soil was packed too hard for the shovel.  It needed breaking up to make holes deep enough for the root balls of the roses.  She went back to the shed, found a pickax, returned.  Her arms tightened as she raised it over head.  She put her body into the swing, guiding the force of the blade so it struck the dirt cleanly, digging deep into the ground.  Again and again she struck, tearing apart the clay and throwing it open to the sky.

Voices, chattering and laughing, brought Anna back from her work.  The other staff members were gathering at the kitchen.  It was time to get lunch ready.  Anna pushed the pickax into the dirt one more time and left it standing upright as she headed off to the dining hall.

Heather was waiting outside the dining hall and stepped towards her as she approached. She too was thinner than before, and moved with uncertainty as if feeling her way with each step.

Her eyes looked tired.  “Anna?”  She faltered.

Anna stopped.  “Heather. Hello.” her voice ice.  “I have things to do. Excuse me.”  She felt tears rising in her throat, angriness and unhappiness mixing together.

“I just want to . . .” Heather’s eyes flicked up to hers, then off to the hills.  “There's something I have to tell you. . . I – I found out you were here when I signed up to be a counselor this session.  I need to. . .”

Heather’s weakness was infuriating.  “I don’t want to hear it.  Just leave me alone!”  Anna turned her back on Heather and walked away.

Heather’s call reached her as she opened the back door to the dining hall.  “Anna, I’m sorry! I know it wasn’t your fault!” The kitchen door slammed on the words.

Anna stopped, dazed, just inside the kitchen.  Sound struck her again.  She struggled to survey the kitchen, take stock of the preparations.  Pots and utensils clanged as food was prepared, dishes rattled as trays were loaded and carried into the hall.  The staff chattered as they worked.  She stayed just inside the door, catching her breath.  She did not want to think farther, to test the difference Heather’s words made to the memories she fought to avoid.  She turned away from them to the chaos of finishing, serving lunch.

When that had finished, she returned to the shed, filling a wheelbarrow with sacks of potting soil and a trowel, and pushed it out to the chapel. She returned to the shed for the rose bushes, and laid them in the small shade thrown by the chapel as the sun crossed over it into afternoon.  She opened the bag of potting soil and began mixing it with the newly dug earth beside the trench, kneeling down and working it with her hands.

Sounds of laughter leaving the main house made her look up.  Campers were streaming down the lawn to the cottages, emerging quickly with bundles to run into the pool house changing rooms.  The piano in the common room repeated a single note several times, then launched into melody accompanied by a single voice.  Try-outs for lead characters had begun.

She felt no surprise to see Heather emerge from the main house, nor to seeing her turn and look over at the chapel, waiting.  It had been Anna’s resistance to remembering, not Heather’s, that created the distance between them.  She waited in silence as Heather’s footsteps up the slope carried them both toward the end.

Their eyes met.  Anna sat motionless, kneeling in the dirt, the long trench before her. Heather glanced around the meadow as she neared.  A few yards separated them when she paused, her carriage decisive but her face uncertain.  Determined to see this through but not sure how to begin.  Anna thought of reaching out, extending a hand, and felt her limbs weighted down and unable to move.

Heather eyes turned to look at the tools, the wheelbarrow, the ground.  She sat down on the other side of the hole, facing east across the valley, so that her words seemed to address the distant hills.

“I’m sorry.”

In the silence following they could hear the quiet sounds of welcome from the swallow chicks greeting the constantly-returning adults who were swooping up to the nests clustered under the eaves of the chapel roof.

“That day in church.  I’m sorry about my mother.  And me, too.  I’m sorry.”  She paused, looking down at the dirt piled next to the hole beside her, reaching out to push her fingers into it, make a fist, and pull out a handful.  She watched it intently as she continued speaking.

“When he died, I felt empty, like a deflated balloon.”  A pause, a sigh.

“I filled up with hate.  I hated Rich for dying, the world for killing him.  When my mother went nuts that day in church, I hated her.  And I hated you.”

Anna remembered.  She had been home on leave, feeling cut off from everything around her.  She was back where she had lived before joining the army, but she was no longer the innocent child she had been.  She spent days sitting at home in her old room, finding no reason to leave, sitting in emotional darkness.  At last she went to Rich’s church one Sunday, feeling lost and wanting something of her friend to hold onto.

Rich’s family was there.  His father simply ignored her, but Rich’s mother had whispered to him with agitation throughout the service, and then rushed at Anna as she left the building.  “You bitch! You don’t belong here! You should have died, not Rich, you don’t deserve to be here!”

Anna stepped back.  Clawing hands struck towards her face, then wrenched back as Rick’s father grabbed his wife and pulled her away from the church.  Anna wanted to curl up in the street and let the shrieking woman batter her into pulp.  Instead, she stood, stupidly, while people passed out of the church.  She looked up, and saw Heather stare at her with a look as hard as a blow, then slowly turn away and follow her parents.

Anna sat in the shadow of the chapel, thinking of the misery of that moment, of so many moments that she had tried to run away from.

Heather spoke again, her voice breaking with emotion.  “I couldn’t sing for a long time.  We had a funeral for Rich, and I couldn’t even sing for him.”  A tear shook itself loose and slid down her clenched cheek.

“Finally I realized I had to choose.  Either hate the world for not being what I wanted it to be, or use the gift I have to make something in the world better.  I started singing again this spring.  When I was signing up to be a counselor this summer I found out you were up here.  I was hoping,” she picked up a lump of dirt, “I thought maybe we could reconnect.”

Anna sat silently beside her for a long time.  Finally she started. “When Rich told me about how he signed up, I wondered what it was to be able to do something like that. He said it was his first priority in life, to be doing what he was.  He said he could have gone on and been a doctor, and been happy with it, before 9/11, but afterward he had to decide what did he most need to do in life. I was just there because it was something to do, an alternative to working in an office.  It felt like I was just drifting compared to him.”

“So when my tour was up I decided to leave and see if I could do anything as with music.  It was the only thing that gave me any feeling at all.  But Was difficult, too different, back home.”  Although her parents had welcomed her, she found living at home constricting.  But she could find nothing that paid enough to live on her own.  And the city felt like a trap.

“I came up here pretty soon after. . .that time in your church.”  She fingered the handle of the trowel.  “I didn’t have many places to go, and it seemed a good place to get away, before starting over.”  Simple jobs, a peaceful setting.  A place to hide.

The two women sat side by side, considering the time since they had been close.

At last, as the afternoon sun spread the shadow of the chapel across the meadow before them, Heather asked simply, “What happened?”

Anna rocked slightly back and forth for a moment, gathering strength.

Then spoke softly, “It was just after the front line reached Baghdad.  My team was convoying supplies behind the main force.  Rick got assigned to our group as a medic.  I didn’t know until I saw him in our team meeting getting ready for the drive.”  She looked over at Heather.  “It was so good to see him, it was like coming home.”  She had hugged him, and he had lifted her off the ground and spun her around, laughing.

She turned to stare across the valley, seeing instead the flat brown desert horizon.  “I drove lead vehicle, and Rick rode shot-gun.  Most of the time it was like driving across the moon, there was nothing but flat packed dirt, dust and the road running ahead of us.”  She blinked rapidly.  “Rick said we were eating the dust of the infantry.”

“We would drive through these small towns.  There would be crowds of people lining the road, mostly just watching.  We were edgy though, because someone had said they were firing on convoys in other parts of the country.”

Her eyes closed.  “Then we were going through one town, we were almost out of it, and I heard these “pop-pop-pop” noises.  Someone yelled ‘they’re shooting, they’re shooting!’ We had planned what to do already, and I just floored the gas and took off.”

Her voice flattened into detachment.  “The steering wheel was like a jackhammer in my hands, we crashed through that town at sixty miles an hour.   I heard my gunner, the other gunners, firing.  ‘There’s one! Over there!  Look out he’s firing!’ I felt like I was dragging the whole convoy on a rope behind me.”

“I drove for a long time, I think.”  Heather waited, watching Anna viewing a scene from another lifetime.  “Finally I slowed down.  I thought we must be out of danger by now.  It was sunset, we should stop to rest but I didn’t think anyone wanted to, yet.  I asked Rick if he thought we should stop.”

Anna stopped, sat motionless for a long time.  She opened her eyes, tears slipped down her face.   “He made a noise and I looked at him.  I mean, I had looked over  as we drove, I think, but I hadn’t really noticed him, I was looking for people outside shooting at us.  He was sitting there, hugging himself, leaning on the door, all covered in blood on his front.  He just said, ‘Houston, we have a problem,’ softly, just like that.”  A moment’s pause.  “He even grinned a little when I started screaming for a medic.”

“We stopped, and I ran around to his door.  He just fell out onto me when I opened it.  Then somehow he was lying on the sand, and I was trying to hold this huge hole in his chest closed, shoving his shirt into it, trying to keep the pieces together.”

Anna’s head bent over her hands.  “My hands were so wet, things kept slipping around under them. . .When the medics came up they told me to stay put, keep my hands there.  They were working on him, talking to him, telling him to hang on.”  She clenched her fingers together.  “They took over, but I had his head in my lap.  I wanted to stroke his head or something, but my hands were all wet. . .He looked up at me at one point. . . and then he was gone.”  Heather took a deep breath, let it out in a sigh.   Tears had made clean paths in the dirt on Anna’s face, but she sat without moving.

“The medics didn’t want to give up.  One of them swore incredibly when someone finally said, ‘it’s not gonna happen.’  I just stood up and walked away.  I could have just walked off into the desert forever.  But someone said we had to keep going.  So they put Rick,” a sob broke out, “into a bag in the back of my HumV.  We didn’t stop for anything until we reached Baghdad.”

The valley and hills across from the camp now glowed with evening light.  Heather put her arm around Anna as the sobs finally broke out, finally washed away into quite.  The swallows whirled above their heads, swooping to capture insects then swirling back to their nests.  The faint sound of the baby birds calling for food deepened the quietness of the scene before her.  Anna straightened at last, wiping her face to smear the dirt into mud.

Heather sat silent beside her, watching evening fall across the landscape.  Finally she stood, offered Ann a hand up.  The two women stood looking out at the shadows filling the hollows before them.  Anna took the hose attached to the faucet by the lower door of the chapel, turned it on and splashed the cold water over her face.  Pulling her shirt tail, she wiped her face with the bottom.  Looking up at Heather, she smiled.  “It’s all right, it’ll wash out.”  Heather smiled back.“You won’t get these roses into the ground today by yourself,” she said, and picked up a trowel.  “Shall we?”

Without further words, the two women set to work, finishing the job.  They tapped down the dirt around the last plant together and got to their feet.  They stood a moment looking at the newly planted roses, then each other.  Heather reached out a hand. Anna clasped it, then felt Heather pull her in for a fierce hug.  “Thank you,” Heather said.

As they walked toward the work shed to put the tools away, Heather spoke.  “Jim said he asked you to play at the performance.  Do you want to?”

Anna’s voice said, calm with certaintly, “Yes.”

First Post: just filler copy

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