She Matters by Susanna Sonnenberg Page A

the good thing, to gather her uncontained sorrow.
    â€œWhatever you need,” I said, but what that might be was beyond my imagining. The scope of this experience was a blank to me. Again, she’d stepped into the terrain of significant event, major. For a while she called frequently, and it was the same call, stuck. She wore her father’s flannel shirts and went over the accident repeatedly. I knew my job was to hear it repeatedly, but I drifted. Had I paid attention, she would have shown me a first real lesson about grief, its disorganizing confusions, its inescapable solitude. She talked stiffly of her marriage, their wrong-headed tensions, and at first I joined her agitated laughter about his AA meetings and his shoplifting charge, but I couldn’t keep it up. I was worried about her, really worried. She got pregnant.
    When her girl was walking, and we were thirty, she flew to Missoula. It had been many significant cycles since we’d seen each other. I was married, too, pregnant, and to both of us it felt important to herald together the start of this new phase. Touchstone, we said. That’s how my husband understood her in my life, ready to feel courteous affection when he met her. I drove to the airport. She held her daughter’s hand, bulging bags hoisted onher hip, a backpack weighing from one shoulder strap, and after our long fervent hug we walked at the toddler’s pace to the car. I kept looking over at Claudia, hunting the antic, loyal girl, my girl. I couldn’t adjust to her as a mother, her tranquility and command in the role, but she was a mother—calmed, attentive, adoring. As I made dinner, she played peekaboo under the table with her daughter, and then the next night, rhyming and singing to her the whole time, she taught me a recipe for enchiladas, coriander and shredded carrots to sweeten the tomato and onion, which I make still. She shrugged off her husband’s danger, but he was the main subject; we spoke in code to protect the baby. We didn’t mention the drowning. In the morning, after thinking about her trouble and risk and child, her fragile grief, I walked out of my bedroom. “Stay,” I said. “Just stay, Claudia, you can live here, we have the whole basement.” It was the good thing to offer, what the good friend says. At the same time, I was thinking, “Careful, Susanna. You don’t know how to follow that through.” Claudia, I’m guessing, already knew that.
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    I woke in the root cellar, morning unable to penetrate. I wanted day, wanted off this compound. I pulled on jeans and went outside to the big natural nothing, tingly with Mick’s silent surveillance. Inside the dirty truck the keys hung from the ignition, but I didn’t understand the knobs and sticks and extra pedal. We weren’t going anywhere until Mick wanted to take us down.
    Claudia appeared. She said, “Do you have any tampons? I’m bleeding.” She was less in love with the land and the event of my arrival.
    â€œWe could go down and get some.”
    â€œSwim in the pond, Claudia,” said Mick, who had followedher, tin cups in hand. “It’s natural, it’ll clean you.” She brightened and stripped off her blouse, dropped it and her skirt to the ground in front of the root cellar. White naked except for brown leather sandals, she grabbed my hand. “Don’t come near us!” she called to him. “Susanna’s very shy!” We burst into hysterics, because flamboyance in front of each other had always been required, egged on. Beyond his earshot she said, “He’s quiet, isn’t he? It’s the pot, I guess.”
    â€œAre you, do you, is it good?” I said. “With him?”
    â€œHe says I’m the smartest person he’s ever met. He says I intimidate him.”
    â€œOh. Good.”
    Although swarming with pinprick gnats and mosquitoes, the water felt