Wind Phone

Mariah marched into the woods with a purpose. I darkened the sky the moment she set foot on the path. She had practiced what she would say for weeks, refining it, re-memorizing it. Like an actor practicing lines that dulled into a congregant reciting a creed without meaning or emotion.

She would need miles before she was ready.

She gripped a small totem in her jacket pocket—a football with her high school mascot, a 25-year-old keychain with no keys. I bent the trees to obscure the sky but slipped the wind behind her, urging her on. I twisted the path left when it usually twisted right. Rocks and roots emerged from the packed dirt.

Mariah found hills where she expected flatness and muddy places where little streams crossed her way. She missed a fork in the path because a wild raspberry bush suddenly covered the sign. Her long brown ponytail snagged on a dogwood branch.

She traveled twice as long as she expected, nearly three times as long, her breath growing more ragged.

She questioned her sense of her own body relative to the website’s description of the path as “easy—level 1.” She got angry at the website author and questioned out loud why she’d set out on this journey. She got a little closer to me then.

She was sweating and no longer minded the chill wind, which stayed at her back and further confused her sense of direction. Still, she marched on, the totem out of her pocket in her clenched fist, determined to find what she came here for: the version of me that resided in her mind’s eye, from someone else’s experience.

I dropped the path sharply down. Mariah’s boot heel slipped on a muddy rock, and she landed on her back and slid until she grabbed a sapling. Once she stopped skidding, she jumped up without pausing to brush off the dirt. She stomped around the next bend, her face thundering.

And there, she was brought up short by the river.

It moved slowly, nearly silent, cloudy brown and gentle. Mariah looked up and down the bank, but the path ended at her mud-splattered feet. Silently, I rolled a boulder near her, just the right size to rest on. Dropping her head, she noticed her empty and mud-smeared palms. She made a small choking noise as she dug in the pockets of her jacket and jeans. She looked helplessly up the path, at the leaves falling heavily down, already covering her footsteps. The football was gone.

Mariah sat on the boulder, and in the weight of her legs, her back, and her head, I felt her give up. She let go of her determination, her purpose, and her anger. Although she remained upright, her body released, and with it, her mind.

The small river flexed in its burbling, trickling way. Mariah looked up. She exhaled. Then she sat still. More still than she’d sat in the last 417 days. Since the day she started her journey here.

She listened to the river chatter on, saying nothing, saying everything. To the leaves swishing their ballroom skirts above her head. To the insistent tapping of the woodpecker. To the cracks and snaps from the chipmunks going about their daily food-gathering business. I let nothing buzz her ears or crawl on her skin.

For the first time in much longer than 417 days, she didn’t try to accomplish anything. Didn’t try to be anyone. Didn’t judge anything. Didn’t even think about anything. She just was.

She stayed on the rock by the river for as long as she needed to—a minute, an hour, a week? Then she stood up. On the toe of her boot sat a golden, heart-shaped leaf. Smiling, she twirled its stem between her fingers, watching it morph into a transparent, three-dimensional object. She bowed toward the river, sighed, and turned back to the path.

At the top of the steep riverbank, Mariah noticed a sign she’d missed earlier pointing to a small path she hadn’t seen. She followed along, less determined, less hurried. She carefully raised a drooping redbud branch and ducked underneath.

I turned the path left, and she no longer heard the river. Right, and the fallen leaves softened her booted footsteps. When it sloped downward, Mariah wondered without panic if she would ever leave the forest, or she’d died during that earlier fall, maybe hit her head, and this was simply whatever was next.

And there in a shaft of sunlight, she found me.

Incongruous floated into her mind and then drifted away. In a small clearing, just a wide spot in the path, stood a phone booth. The old kind that used to be ubiquitous on city street corners. The black receiver rested purposefully in the cradle, and she half-expected it to ring. As Mariah approached, she noticed that there was no glass in the walls, just a metal frame. And a small wooden stool in front of the phone, peeling from the weather.

It wasn’t at all like the website had said it would be. She noticed this and let it go.

Mariah picked up the receiver and listened. She heard the ocean. She heard the shivering of trees. She heard a breath.

She sat down without noticing she sat down. She whispered, “Hello?”

A question, but not for me to answer. I waited.

“Hi—Hi, Chase,” Mariah said. She cleared her throat and then tried again. “Hi, Chase. Can you hear me?”

She waited now. The breeze that had pushed her along, every step of the way until this point, now brushed her hair from her sweaty forehead. Mariah closed her eyes.

“I got lost.” She barked a small laugh. “I flew all the way to Japan. Airports, trains, maps in Japanese, no problem. The damn forest?” Her eyes floated up, noticing for the first time the yellow-green of the canopy and how each leaf flipped independently, creating drops of sunlight that showered into the clearing where she sat.

“I came to tell you about Mom. I know it’s been almost 20 years, I really didn’t expect her to last that long. After you—She died, Chase. All that time she mourned you until there was nothing left.”

Mariah clenched her jaw. “Maybe she thought she’d be joining you or something. I mean, no one wants to tell me it wasn’t an accident, but it wasn’t an accident. Maybe it wasn’t exactly planned—there was no note or anything. Or at least Dad didn’t tell me if there was. But if you’d seen her, you’d know.”

After listening to the wind in the phone, she said, “After you died, Chase, they broke. I was only 10, dammit. I needed them. But because of your stupid arrogance and your stupid friends and your fucking stupid car…” Her voice caught in her throat.

She began again, quietly. “I didn’t come here to forgive you, just so you know. You left too much…trash behind. I’ve spent the last few years cleaning myself up, getting myself together. Making something of myself on my own, goddammit, because no one else was able to help me. You were supposed to be the one looking out for me. Dad tried as best he could with Mom, but he was just as devastated. You were supposed to be his football star with the beautiful wife and 2.7 children.” Mariah hunched over the heart-shaped leaf and spun it between her fingers.

She sighed. “I’ve tried to forgive Mom and Dad. Even after Mom… I’d been so angry at her for so long. I’m… I’m glad I’d started trying to forgive her before she died. I mean, it didn’t help her, I guess. But it helped me. At least I could grieve her, I could feel sorrow.” Mariah pressed the leaf onto the shelf, which may once have held a phone book. With her free hand, she scratched at her scalp nervously.

“It’s been more than a year now. I found out about this phone thing after she died. At first, I thought I’d come here to talk to her once more, say the things I couldn’t say to her with that face full of pain she wears every time she remembers you, Chase, which is pretty often. But after a while, I realized I had a lot more to say to you.”

She sat up taller on the stool. “I was in Mrs. Benson’s 5th grade class when the principal called me out to take a phone call from Dad. He told me you’d been in an accident and I was supposed to go home with my friend Christy so he and Mom could go to the hospital. I’ve never stopped thinking about that morning before school, the last time I saw any of my family normal. At this point, I’m not sure how much was true and how much I embellished over the years.”

“Dammit, Chase,” she squeezed the receiver and held the leaf against her forehead. “I had a whole thing to say, a whole speech for you, about what a selfish jackass you were, and how I’ll never forgive what you did to us. But I just realized that I came here to forgive myself.”

Her body shook with a hiccup sob. “I forgive myself. I forgive myself for not knowing how to grieve you. I forgive myself for blaming our parents when they didn’t know how to handle me or themselves or anything else. I forgive myself for lashing out, making some terrible choices. Generally behaving badly because I didn’t know how to be. I forgive myself for not understanding.”

Mariah sat still and quiet for a long time. She watched a teardrop splash onto a green, oval-shaped leaf by her foot. I expected her to hang up the phone and walk away, having spent her energy. But then she looked up into the canopy overhead and whispered back into the wind. “Thank you for this talk. I think soon I’ll be able to work on forgiving you too.”

She stood, and before she hung up the receiver, she said, “Bye, Chase. Take care, wherever you are.”

Mariah rested the receiver in the cradle, and looked again at the gold, heart-shaped leaf in her hand. She held it briefly to her face, breathing it in, and then pushed the stem into the coin slot of the pay phone. Satisfied that it would stay put, she turned to leave.

On the stool where she’d been sitting rested the football charm. She halted, mouth open. Her hand instinctively went to her jacket pocket, but found nothing. Her eyes darted around the full majesty of the forest, but found no one. I shifted the breeze behind her, nudging her forward.

She reached for the totem. She pulled back. She touched it with a finger and pulled back. Then, she closed her eyes and smiled. Smoothly, she reached down, wrapped her hand around it, and slipped her fist into her pocket.

“Thank you,” she whispered. I answered back by swishing the tree branches overhead. A small bird whistled. Far off, another answered it. A squirrel chattered from a nearby bush and leaped noisily into a pile of dry leaves before running off.

She turned to walk back down the path, which was dappled with sunlight and mostly clear of roots and hidden stones. The way ahead wasn’t well marked, but she stepped confidently into it. I didn’t know if she would tell others about her experience, post about it online, or keep it only to herself. Those who seek me find me.

A stiff wind rattled the phone booth’s metal frame, and the golden leaf whipped into the canopy above. Although it was unique in the universe, not even I could distinguish it from every other leaf covering the sky and earth in all directions.

THE END