One day he taught her a new word in his language, kinara, which means both edge and corner but he thinks it also has something to do with the sea. Like listening to a new song, she felt her synapses rearranging as she grappled to make sense of a world where edge and corner could be described with the same word. She saw an edge as a cliff. If you cross over the edge, you could fall. The edge was where everything came to an end. Maybe it’s like the shore, or the horizon. To be on edge is different from being cornered. Backed into a corner. Fight your way out of the corner. But then again, the edge of a knife blade is like the outer edge of a corner. It’s perspective, she concluded. It depends on whether you are inside the corner or on the outer edge of it.
*
The trivia question was to name all of the states bordering Ohio. For the first time, a mental picture formed in her head of invisible boundaries and rivers. She listed the five states easily and in clockwise-order: Michigan, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana. She didn’t know how she knew. Thereafter, her ability with geography became known to the family. On her ninth birthday, she was gifted a Time for Kids atlas. It was flimsy and colorful. She stayed up at night reading and rereading it. She cross referenced information in the Atlas with facts from the Almanac that she had also received on that birthday. She studied the pictures, the dots, the lines and flags. She made connections and dreamed of the places she could go. A subscription to National Geographic ensured a supply of new maps, which she plastered to her bedroom walls, corner to corner. She saved money to purchase newer, more updated atlases than her Kids one, which had been reduced to loose pages that would slip off of her wooden bookshelf and scatter on the floor.
*
She called her mom one day from far away, “Do you think I could be friends with James Taylor?”
*
That day in the airport, the flight was delayed about forty-five minutes. There was not enough seating available at the gate, so she stood among the gathering crowd in a half-circle facing the desk where the agents fielded questions and found seats for other passengers. She looked around the noted the familiarity of the crowd around her. They were the people of the place where she was born and raised. Middle aged mothers and their grumpy husbands in football-themed shirts, as well as the younger ones like her, who mostly wore headphones and looked at phones or clacked away at laptops. She wasn’t wearing headphones and this seemed to invite conversation from the older women, roughly her mother’s age, who stood with her in the semi-circle of onlookers. They were returning from anniversary trips and visiting grandchildren. They wanted to know about her and about this place on the West Coast that was so far away from home. How long have you been here? Is it really always rainy? What are you going home for? Where did you grow up? Oh, that’s a nice neighborhood. What high school did you attend? Is this your mom’s second marriage, then? Well, where is your husband? By the time she was answering the final question, she had grown weary of these people. And do you have an accent, asked the woman? It took her off guard. This was not the first time she had been asked this question.
“I’m asked that a lot,” she said. It was true. She had been asked this question many times before: by the apple-seller at the farmer’s market before they moved, by the cashier at the grocery store three years ago, and by a college counselor when she was in high school. She was prepared to get an unsatisfactory answer to her practiced follow-up question: “What do you hear?”
“I don’t know, somewhere foreign,” was the response. Just then the woman’s husband walked back from the Hudson News Stand grumbling about Dr. Pepper and Cherry Coke.
“Do you want a Cherry Coke?” The woman asked. “He got the wrong pop earlier.”
She declined and felt a wave a relief when her cell phone began to ring.
“It’s my mom, sorry, I have to get this,” she told the woman, then drifted off toward the bathrooms down in the corner of the terminal. She saw the woman turn and watch her walk away.
*
She knew her dad probably would not approve of him. But that’s not why she loved him—like some girls who go after the wrong guy because they know they’d be told no. No, she hadn’t thought about this because she hadn’t seen her dad in more than a decade and thought little of his opinions, approvals or wants. In fact, he was the one who posed the question after he found out about her dad. What do you think your dad would think of me? She scrunched her nose then remembered a memory. It was a sunny day and she was in her dad’s bedroom where the TV was on. She remembers the dust hanging in the air in the sunshine streaming through the top left corner of the window on to the bottom right corner of the bed, where they were sitting watching the TV.
It was a half-sneeze, you know, one that gets interrupted half way through, the builds right up to the edge but before jumping, resolves and dissolves itself with no real exclamation or utterance.
“What was that, a Chinese sneeze?” her dad said as she laughed. He imitated her half-sneeze and she laughed until she fell off the of the bed.
*
Love is just a word I’ve heard when things are being said.
*
The barista called his name, then called it again as he made his way through the crowded coffee shop. They had chosen it because it had a water view and they were on a quick getaway trip. But all of the seats close to the windows were taken and it was too cold outside. So, they found a table amidst the monochromatic crowd, amiable on the weekend morning. With a hat on he almost blended in, but heads turned when his name was called for a third time now. The barista set his drink down on the edge of the counter.
“Excuse me,” he said as the line made space for him to pass, reaching for the cup on the edge. He made eye contact with a waiting woman, who was looking around for the person with the strange name. Her eyes took him in and she said to her boyfriend, “Oh, now that makes sense.”
*
Sweet relief is the languages of the city the train kissing your ears after being all day on a plane. On the way home, the man behind her sneezed. She heard it between the seats. When she landed on a foggy Christmas Eve, she fell ill with a cold. Now that she was back and feeling better, she thought back to the start of the trip. The train rounded a bend and then the tracks narrowed. They were twenty feet above the highway. She scooched up to the edge of her seat to see through the window. The thing about it is that the woman in the airport didn’t know that she was married to a foreigner. Maybe kissing one changes your tongue.
*
Sun on the moon makes a mighty nice light.
*
As the snowstorm rolled in over Yellowstone, they were turned away.
“Avalanches in the park,” said the ranger at the gate. He gave them a paper map and pointed with his finger at an alternate route. He turned the car around and drove back through Shoshone National Forest, where Yellowstone Lake had no bank. Then they aimed North toward 90. She studied the paper map. The GPS said to get in 78 in Red Lodge. On the map, it looked like switchbacks, a mountain highway. The clouds were sinking behind them.
“I think we should stay on 212,” she said, not knowing it had already been closed.
“I think we should do what the phone says,” he said and turned left on to 78. Twenty miles later, the phone said to turn again and the road behind them was gone. They crossed a one lane path over a ditch into a road in a field, then a sign on the side of the road stated pavement ending.
“The pavement can’t be ending,” she said. But then it ended, the road reduced to black mud. He stopped the car, got out, went pee. She realized that the gallon water bottle had leaked all over the floor. There was no food in the car. The tank was a quarter full.
He got back in the car. “This is how people die,” she said, scanning the foggy landscape for signs of habitation.
“Shit,” he said. The phone put their dot in the middle of a green expanse, no service, with the instruction to turn left in twenty miles.
The choice was either mud below or snowstorm above. He started the car and they began sliding their way down the mountain. The fog was so dense that all they could see was the road ahead. Through the window, she imagined ditches and cliffs hidden just out of sight. And ranchers with guns, mostly ranchers with guns.
“Shit,” he kept saying. She counted down the miles. Only fifteen more to go. Nine more. Two miles. The turn should be here. They stopped and looked left but the road was gated.
Beyond the gate, more mud rose into a gray sky. A herd of deer serenely grazed on tufts of grass that escaped the earth’s clutches. They didn’t look up.
“Shit.”
She looked at their dot on the phone again. 90 was somewhere ahead, like a long snake resting between mountain peaks. Waiting for the sun. “If we keep going north, we will hit 90,” she told him. “Drive.” The road began to follow a creek and small trees lined the edges of the unpaved pathway. Birds scattered in front of their windshield and they thought they hit a small blue one. The mountain that rose to the right was burnt to an ominous wet black from a past wildfire. Two trucks passed going up the mountain, the drivers in cowboy hats looked down upon their little car at the brown boy and the whitenuckled girl and didn’t stop.
“This is how people die,” she said again looking at a white house set back a distance from the road. It was getting dark and a light shone in the window, smoke from a chimney. They didn’t stop until the pavement returned.
On 90, the car shook in fourth gear. They found a hotel in Bozeman and when they ate dinner their hands shook. In the morning the good-natured mechanic didn’t laugh and wasn’t surprised and didn’t make them feel bad. They were surprised. A dog lounged in the waiting room. He said it happened all the time and charged them fifteen dollars to dump mud out of their wheel wells until the imitation of a mountain was piled on the threshold of the garage door and the parking lot.
*
After the man sneezed, she held her breath for fifteen seconds, hoping that whatever germs he propelled into her seat might dissipate before her next breath. She pulled open the window shade and saw the snow-covered prairie stretching out below her bathed in moonlight. It reminded her of the white duvet that her brother-in-law had bought three years before for her father-in-law when he fell sick during a visit. This was before they moved. Her heart lifted at the look of the flat land. She knew that if she was down there she’d be able to see for miles in every direction, that the shadows would be soft and purple, the hills rolling, the grass long, and the ground frozen and hard. Land she could trust.
*
From the front window of a large Victorian house overlooking the Mississippi river and the town below, she felt that these people were hers. They were soft and strong people who looked at the horizon with a squint, but had no urge to go into the horizon. Content to look and make up the horizon of their own. The earth was full of food here, like a mother, she thought, and she was sorry that they would be leaving. If there was no destination, she could stay here in this town with stained glass windows, where they were invited by strangers into the locked church to admire the view from the bell tower. That morning on the road, the air was filled with a golden purple mist. This was a Midwest like she had never before seen, one of a dream. A student in New York some years before she had tried to hide where she was from from her disapproving classmates, who either had accents as long as the California coast, or brownstones in Bed-Stuy. But it was as if her own hide was stained with the black and white patterns of the cattle by the side of the road. This was a land that looked like it was supposed to. She suddenly knew what amber waves of grain were. Like the people, the land is soft and gentle and strong enough to sustain life. But the fog was so dense that even the bends in the road appeared straight. The last bend and the next bend an imitation of the each other as they traveled to a place they’d never been before.
*
Long ago, in New York, she learned to make herself bigger on the bus and train and to jockey for position. The front car at this stop, means you can reach the stairs first. Reaching the stairs first means you can reach the last first when you transfer. In the street she learned to keep her eyes up above the heads of those around her, however in the train station, she always looked down to see what had fallen to the rails below. In the city, she was an imposter. Everybody knew it, including her. They knew it because she walked the wrong walk, talked the wrong talk with the wrong accent. A nail begging to be hammered. The game was exhausting, and after nine months she bowed out of the race, deflated, wishing she was invisible.
*
Sometimes at work when it’s quiet, she pulls up a map on her computer. She traces the lines and the dots and reads the names of the places wonders where she can still go.
*
I love the way your skin looks next to mine.
The way your tongue moves when you speak turns me on.
Your long black hair is a shield in the sun.
*
Lately she has been hearing God. It arrives in flashes of understanding. In the shower on Saturday morning. Walking to the bus stop on Wednesday afternoon. By the bananas at the grocery store on Friday evening. She is reminded of her grandfather, the minister, feels him close.
*
When they first met, she wrote him a note.
I think if we knew each other when we were kids, we’d have been great friends.
*
In his language, the word for evening is sham. Sham. He teaches her a poem. From green corners, gray shadows ripple toward me.
*
In December, a week before his trip home, the office calls. “If you don't get a job by the end of this month, we cannot afford to pay you, you'll just get your benefits. If you don't get a job by the end of next month, you will be terminated.” He calls her to relate the news after work. "It's going to be ok." She is standing at the bus stop. Her mom says that this is expected, don’t worry. She hangs up and puts in headphones. The bus is late. She stands apart from the other commuters, gets on last. She stares out the window. After Home Depot the bus turns down a narrow, busy road. A gulch runs along the side of the road. Tall flowers and grasses she cannot name bow to the bus as it flies by and as she does every day, she marvels at how the driver can get so close to the edge without slipping over. When she was a kid, her bike tire would always get caught between the grass and the sidewalk. She could never go straight. She stifles tears. Then a thought occurs. Find God. Now she holds back a laugh. This is what people do, right? Her phone buzzes. She puts it out of her jacket pocket. Mom texting, apologizing for being insensitive. She types back I'm thinking of becoming religious. She knows she’s laughing on the other side when she types back, should I be worried?
*
The old professor wiped his tears and set down the essay she had written. The class sat around four long tables arranged in a square. They watched him. She sat at the opposite corner from him.
“Do you know what you did or was this just luck?” He asked her. Heads turn to her corner.
*
She closes her eyes and conjures a vision even though she doesn’t have a driver’s license. In the Black Hills her car stalls and sputters. But before morning arrives, the world opened up and she sinks her foot to the floor of the car. She thinks that if she could stick her arms out both windows the vehicle might simply take flight. The sun rising behind her propels her forward like a jet-engine. Are there any birds that never land? She wonders to the sky. She thinks she heard something about that some time ago. Land, both a noun and a verb. It is thoughts like these she keeps to herself, thoughts like these whose mysteries she delights in, whose answers she doesn’t want to know or understand, that make her want to run.
Now the land is cradled between two mountain ranges and she lets the car drift into the bottom of a valley. She rides past a ranch where thousands of cattle moo and chew their cuds. Cowboys on black and brown horses that glisten with sweat through dust kicked up by manicured hooves pay her no mind. They merely squint toward the car as it blows through. She thinks about pulling over and stopping there, but the wind whispers that she was of no use to this place.
She passes another mountain range, this one crowned with firs and pines, then finds herself at the edge of a lake between two sandstone cliffs. The water is bright blue and still. The stillness catches her attention. She stops the car and gets out. With a pang of concern, she looks above and behind her in case it is hiding. We’re all between here and there, she thinks with resolve, reaching down to grab a fistful of dirt. Maybe she’ll see the wind in the land. The soil falls, as if in an hourglass through her fingers. How can we ever hold on to any place?
She gets back into the car. She knows that she will drive until she reaches the ocean where the wind begins and never ends. Maybe it is from the heat of the noon sun, but she can taste salt on her lips.
It is a day later that she finds the ocean. The sky arches and veils itself in a gray mist that cascades down and sprinkles her car. It cleanses it of the dust of the mountains and planes. Trees begin to push in close to the road, reaching out, a royal touch. As if in reverence, the wind retreats to the treetops. At first sight of the ocean she stops the car. She picks a path through the forest, her nose filling with cedar and brine, and she scrambles down a steep embankment of logs. The vista opens up wide and the wind rushes home to her ears. The waves are easily ten feet tall, even and long. Staring out to sea, she tallies up what is hers on this earth and found that she has nothing, and nothing is hers. Then her eyes fall upon a lone schooner at sea, it’s sails full and taut from the wind and thinks that is what I seek.
*
At home, her mom gathers them into her bedroom and picks up the TV remote. She sits at the foot of the bed, leaning into the empty space in front of the television.
“I found the video of my ducks,” she says, and hits play. “I had recorded this off of the television when you were kids. Do you remember it?”
James Taylor’s forehead, made wide and round by a receding hairline, is glowing on the screen, his eyes alight from within, his face twisting into the music. She remembers the ducks but not his face, which can’t hide.
“I think this is the happiest he has ever been,” she says to her mom, nodding to James Taylor. She an impossible compulsion to be his friend, like he is already her friend.
There are others who can’t hide in the corners.
*
The poem ends with a message of rebellion against tyranny. Though they might smash the lamps that light the rooms of lovers, the light of the moon can never be extinguished. No poison will make me bitter if just one evening in prison can be as strangely sweet as this moment in the moonlight.
*
“He’s here for us,” she tells him.
“Then why are we here?” He asks.
“As a reflection,” she says, “like a mirror in the sky.”
*
“It’s an old word,” he says. “People would know what you mean if you used it, but they’d think you’re old-fashioned. It describes how the blue of the water and the sky are reflections of each other. But nobody says it anymore. Maybe my grandma would.”
*
Before they moved, she got up before everyone else and crossed the highway and climbed over the guard rail edged between the road and Lake Superior. She climbed down the green bank to where brown rocks stood overlooking the water. It was strange to her that this lake had no shore. From the rocks she watched summer leaves drift over the black and white surface of the morning lake. She imagined they were sail boats. She asked the lake for a sign. The leaves never reached the shore and they never sank.
*
As the bus rounds the bend by Home Depot, again another day, she puts in her headphones. She knows what she’d say to the professor now, years later. She’d say, Let us throw our lot out upon the sea. It's been done before.