Thinking about the house sitting there empty back in Kansas starts the Big Sadness swinging in my chest like a pendulum and soon a blue flood is streaming around the edges of my vision. It comes on fast this time and the axe blade is slicing up organs willy-nilly and all of a sudden it feels like I’m looking into a very blue bag and someone’s yanking the drawstring closed. I fall over into the willows.
I lie there for who knows how long. Up in the sky I see Dad emptying his pockets after work, dumping coins and breath mints and business cards onto the kitchen counter. I see Mom cutting a fried chicken breast into tiny white triangles and dunking each piece in ketchup. I see the Virgin Mary walk out onto a little balcony between the clouds and look around and take ahold of French doors, one on either side of her, and slam them shut.
I can hear Mishap sniffing around nearby. I can hear the river sliding past and grasshoppers chewing the leaves and the sad, dreamy clanking of faraway cowbells. The sun is tiny and flame-blue. When I finally sit up, Mrs. Sabo is standing beside me. I didn’t know she could walk so far. Little white butterflies are looping through the willows. The river glides past. She says something in machine-gun Russian and sets her frozen hand on my forehead. We watch the river, Mrs. Sabo and Mishap and me, in the grass in the sun. And as we watch and breathe and I come back into myself—I swear—a fish as big as a nuclear missile leaps out of the river. Its belly is spotless white and its back is gray and it curls up in midair and flaps its tail and stretches like it’s thinking, This time gravity will let me go.
When it comes back down, water explodes far enough across the river that some drops land on my feet.
Mishap raises his ears, cocks his head. The river heals itself over. Mrs. Sabo looks at me from behind her huge eyeglasses and blinks her milky eyes a dozen times.
Did you see that? Please tell me you saw that.
Mrs. Sabo only blinks.
Grandpa Z gets home at 3:29.
I buy you a surprise, he says. He opens the hatchback of the Peugeot and inside is a crate of American toilet paper.
Grandpa, I say. I want to go fishing.
Dad used to say God made the world and everything in it and Grandpa Z would say if God made the world and everything in it, then why isn’t everything perfect? Why do we get hernias and why do beautiful healthy daughters get cancer? Then Dad would say, Well, God was a mystery and Grandpa Z would say God was a, what’s the word, a security blanket for babies, and Dad would stomp off and Mom would throw down her napkin and blast some Lithuanian words at Grandpa and go jogging after Dad and I’d look at the plates on the table.
Grandpa Z crossed the ocean twice this spring to watch his daughter and son-in-law die. Did God have explanations for that? Now I stand in Grandpa Z’s kitchen and listen to him say that there aren’t any sturgeon anymore in the River Nemunas. There might be some left in the Baltic Sea, he says, but there aren’t any in the river. He says his dad used to take Mom sturgeon fishing every Sunday for years and Mrs. Sabo probably caught a few in the old days but then there was overfishing and pesticides and the Kaunas dam and black-market caviar and his dad died and the last sturgeon died and the Soviet Union broke up and Mom grew up and went to university in the United States and married a creationist and no one has caught a sturgeon in the River Nemunas for twenty-five years.
Grandpa, I say, Mrs. Sabo and I saw a sturgeon. Today. Right over there. And I point out the window across the field to the line of willows.
It is photos, he says. You see the photos of your mother.
I saw a sturgeon, I say. Not in a picture. In the river.
Grandpa Z closes his eyelids and opens them. Then he holds me by the shoulders and looks me in the eyes and says, We see things. Sometimes they there. Sometimes they not there. We see them the same either way. You understand?
I saw a sturgeon. So did Mrs. Sabo. I go to bed mad and wake up mad. I throw the stuffed panda against the wall and stomp around on the porch and kick gravel in the driveway. Mishap barks at me.
In the morning I watch Grandpa Z drive off to work, big and potbellied and confused, and I can hear Mrs. Sabo’s machine whirring and thunking in her house next door and I think: I should have asked Grandpa Z to trust me. I should have told him about the pastor’s old daddy and the stepladder and Jesus and gravity and how just because you don’t see something doesn’t mean you shouldn’t believe in it.
Instead I wade into Grandpa Z’s shed and start pulling out boxes and granite samples and chisels and rock saws and it takes me a half hour to clear a path and another half hour to drag the old aluminum boat into the driveway. It’s flat-bottomed and has three bench seats and there are maybe a thousand spiders living beneath each one. I blast them out with a hose. I find a bottle of some toxic Lithuanian cleaner and pour it all over the hull.
After a while Mrs. Sabo comes tottering out in her big eyeglasses with her little arms folded against her chest and looks at me like a praying mantis. She lets off a chain of coughs. Her son comes out in his track suit with a cigarette between his lips and they watch me work for ten minutes or so and then he leads his mother back inside.
Grandpa Z gets home at 3:27. There are boxes and hoses and rakes and tools all over the driveway. The bottle of solvent has left bright, silver streaks across the hull of the boat. I say, Mrs. Sabo and I saw a sturgeon in the river yesterday, Grandpa.
Grandpa Z blinks at me. He looks like maybe he’s looking into the past at something he thought had ended a long time ago.
He says, No more sturgeon in the Nemunas.
I say, I want to try to catch one.
They not here, Grandpa Z says. They endangered species. It means—
I know what it means.
He looks from me to the boat to Mishap to me. He takes off his hat and drags his hand through his hair and puts his hat back on. Then he nudges the boat with the toe of his sneaker and shakes his head and Mishap wags his tail and a cloud blows out of the way. Sunlight explodes off of everything.
I use an ancient, flat-tired dolly to drag the boat through the field and over the fence to the river. It takes me three hours. Then I lug the oars and the fishing poles down. Then I walk back and tell Mrs. Sabo’s son I’m taking her out on the river and guide Mrs. Sabo by the arm and lead her across the field and sit her in the bow of the boat. In the sunlight her skin looks like old candle wax.
We fish with blunt, seven-foot rods and ancient hooks that are as big as my hand. We use worms. Mrs. Sabo’s face stays completely expressionless. The current is very slow and it’s easy to paddle once in a while and keep the boat in the center of the river.
Mishap sits on the bench beside Mrs. Sabo and shivers with excitement. The river slips along. We see a whole herd of feral cats sleeping on a boulder in the sun. We see a deer twitching its ears in the shallows. Black and gray and green walls of trees slide past.
In the late afternoon I pull onto what turns out to be an island and Mrs. Sabo steps out of the boat and lifts up her skirt and has a long pee in the willows. I open a can of Pringles and we share it.
Do you remember my mother? I ask, but Mrs. Sabo only glances over and gives me a dreamy look. As if she knows everything but I wouldn’t understand. Her eyes are a thousand miles away. I like to think she’s remembering other trips down the river, other afternoons in the sun. I read to her from one of Grandpa Z’s nature magazines. I tell her a bald eagle’s feathers weigh twice as much as its bones. I tell her aardvarks drink their water by eating cucumbers. I tell her that male emperor moths can smell female emperor moths flapping along six miles away.
It takes me a couple of hours of rowing to get back home. We watch big pivot sprinklers spray rainbows over a field of potatoes and we watch a thousand boxcars go rattling along behind a train. It’s beautiful out here, I say.
Mrs. Sabo looks up. Remember? she asks in Lithuanian. But she doesn’t say anything else.
We don’t catch any fish. Mishap falls asleep. Mrs. Sabo’s knees get sunburned.
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sp; * * *
That one day is all it takes. Every morning Grandpa Z leaves to go etch dead people’s faces into granite, and as soon as he’s gone I take Mrs. Sabo out in the boat. An old-timer six houses down tells me I should be using rotten hamburger meat, not worms, and that I should stuff it inside the toes of pantyhose and tie the pantyhose to the hooks with elastic thread. So I get some hamburger and put it in a bucket in the sun until it smells like hell, but the pantyhose won’t stay on the hook, and a lady at the convenience store in Mažeikiai says she hasn’t seen a sturgeon in fifty years but when there were sturgeon they didn’t want rotten food, they wanted fresh sand shrimp on big hooks.
I try deep holes behind rapids and eddies beside fields of bright yellow flowers and big, blue, shadowy troughs. I try clams and nightcrawlers and—once—frozen chicken thighs. I keep thinking Mrs. Sabo will pipe up, will remember, will tell me how it’s done. But mostly she sits there with that long-gone look on her face. My brain gradually becomes like a map of the river bottom: gravel bars, two sunken cars with their rust-chewed rooftops just below the surface, long stretches of still water seething with trash. You’d think the surface of a river would be steady but it isn’t. There are all these churnings and swirls and eddies, bubblings and blossomings, submerged stumps and plastic bags and spinning crowns of light down there, and when the sun is right sometimes you can see thirty feet down.
We don’t catch a sturgeon. We don’t even see any. I begin to think maybe Grandpa Z is right, maybe sometimes the things we think we see aren’t really what we see. But here’s the surprising thing: It doesn’t bother me. I like being out there with Mrs. Sabo. She seems okay with it, her son seems okay with it, and maybe I’m okay with it, too. Maybe it feels as if the wretchedness in my gut might be getting a little smaller.
When I was five I got an infection and Dr. Nasser put some drops in my eyes. Pretty soon all I could see were blurs and colors. Dad was a fog and Mom was a smudge and the world looked like it does when your eyes are full of tears. A couple of hours later, right around when Dr. Nasser said it would, my eyesight came back. I was riding in the backseat of Mom’s Subaru and the world started coming back into focus. I was myself again and the trees were trees again, only the trees looked more alive than I’d ever seen them: The branches above our street were interlaced beneath an ocean of leaves, thousands and thousands of leaves scrolling past, dark on the tops and pale on the undersides, every individual leaf moving independently but still in concert with the others.
Going out on the Nemunas is sort of like that. You come down the path and step through the willows and it’s like seeing the lights in the world come back on.
Even when there’s not much of a person left, you can still learn things about her. I learn that Mrs. Sabo likes the smell of cinnamon. I learn she perks up any time we round this one particular bend in the river. Even with her little gold-capped teeth she chews food slowly and delicately, and I think maybe her mom must have been strict about that, like, Sit up straight, Chew carefully, Watch your manners. Emily Dickinson’s mom was like that. Of course, Emily Dickinson wound up terrified of death and wore only white clothes and would only talk to visitors through the closed door of her room.
Mid-August arrives and the nights get hot and damp. Grandpa Z keeps the front door open. I can hear Mrs. Sabo’s oxygen machine wheezing and murmuring all night. In half-dreams it’s a sound like the churning of the world through the universe.
Yellow, green, red runs the flag flapping in front of the post office. Sun up top, Grandpa Z says, land in the middle, blood down below. Lithuania: doormat of a thousand wars.
I miss Kansas. I miss the redbud trees, the rainstorms, how the college kids all wear purple on football Saturdays. I miss Mom walking into the grocery store and pushing her sunglasses up on her forehead, or Dad pedaling up a hill on his bicycle, me a little person in a bike trailer behind him, his maroon backpack bobbing up and down.
One day in late August Mrs. Sabo and I are drifting downstream, our lines trailing in the river, when Mrs. Sabo starts talking in Lithuanian. I’ve known her forty days and not heard her say so much in all of them combined. She tells me that the afterworld is a garden. She says it’s on a big mountain on the other side of an ocean. This garden is always warm and there are no winters there and that’s where the birds go in the fall. She waits a few minutes and then says that death is a woman named Giltine. Giltine is tall, skinny, blind, and always really, really hungry. Mrs. Sabo says when Giltine walks past, mirrors splinter, beekeepers find coffin-shaped honeycombs in the hives, and people dream of teeth being pulled. Anytime you have a dream about the dentist, she says, that means death walked past you in the night.
One of Grandpa Z’s magazines says that when a young albatross first takes wing, it can stay in the air without touching the ground for fifteen years. I think when I die I’d like to be tied to ten thousand balloons, so I could go floating into the clouds, and get blown off somewhere above the cities, and then the mountains, and then the ocean, just miles and miles of blue ocean, my corpse sailing above it all.
Maybe I could last fifteen years up there. Maybe an albatross could land on me and use me for a little resting perch. Maybe that’s silly. But it makes as much sense, I think, as watching your Mom and Dad get buried in boxes in the mud.
At night Mrs. Sabo and I start watching a show called Boy Meets Grill on her big TV. I try cooking zucchini crisps and Pepsi-basted eggplant. I try cooking asparagus Francis and broccoli Diane. Grandpa Z screws up his eyebrows sometimes when he comes in the door but he sits through my Bless us O Lord and eats everything I cook and washes it all down with Juozo beer. Some weekends he drives me up the road to little towns with names like Panemuneė and Pageėgiai and we buy ice cream sandwiches from Lukoil stations, and Mishap sleeps in the hatchback and at dusk the sky goes from blue to purple and purple to black.
Almost every day in August Mrs. Sabo and I fish for sturgeon. I row upriver and drift us home, dropping our cinderblock anchor now and then to fish the deep holes. I sit in the bow and Mrs. Sabo sits in the stern and Mishap sleeps under the middle bench, and I wonder about how memories can be here one minute and then gone the next. I wonder about how the sky can be a huge, blue nothingness and at the same time it can also feel like a shelter.
It’s the last dawn in August. We are fishing a mile upstream from the house when Mrs. Sabo sits up and says something in Russian. The boat starts rocking back and forth. Then her reel starts screaming.
Mishap starts barking. Mrs. Sabo jams her heels against the hull and jabs the butt of her rod into her belly and holds on. The reel yowls.
Whatever is on the other end takes a lot of line. Mrs. Sabo clings to it and doesn’t let go and a strange, fierce determination flows into her face. Her glasses slide down her nose. A splotch of sweat shaped like Australia blooms on the back of her blouse. She mutters to herself. Her little baggy arms quiver. Her rod bends into an upside-down U.
What do I do? There’s nobody there to answer so I say, Pray, and I pray. Mrs. Sabo’s line disappears at a diagonal into the river and I can see it bending away through the water, dissolving into a coffee-colored darkness. The boat seems like it might actually be moving upriver and Mrs. Sabo’s reel squeaks now and then and it feels like what the Sunday school teacher used to tell us during choir practice when she’d say we were tapping into something larger than ourselves.
Slowly the line makes a full circuit of the boat. Mrs. Sabo pulls up on her rod, and cranks her reel, gaining ground inch by inch, little by little. Then she gets a bit of slack so she starts reeling like mad, taking in yards of line, and whatever is on the other end tries to make a slow run.
Bubbles rise to the surface. The swivel and weight on Mrs. Sabo’s line become visible. It holds there a minute, just below the surface of the water, as if we are about to see whatever is just below the leader, whatever is struggling there, when, with a sound like a firecracker, Mrs. Sabo’s line pops and the swivel and broken
leader fly over our heads.
Mrs. Sabo pitches backward and nearly falls out of the boat. She drops the rod. Her glasses fall off. She says something like Holy, holy, holy, holy.
Little ripples spread across the face of the river and are pulled downstream. Then there’s nothing. The current laps quietly against the hull. We resume our quiet slide downriver. Mishap licks Mrs. Sabo’s hands. And Mrs. Sabo gives me a little gold-toothed smile as if whatever was on the other end of her fishing line has just pulled her back into the present for a minute and in the silence I feel my mom is here, together with me, under the Lithuanian sunrise, both of us with decades left to live.
Grandpa Z doesn’t believe me. He sits on the edge of his bed, elbows on the card table, a moderately renowned Lithuanian tombstone maker, with droopy eyes and broken blood vessels in his cheeks, a plate of half-eaten cauliflower parmesan in front of him, and wipes his eyes and tells me I need to start thinking about school clothes. He says maybe we caught a carp or an old tire or a sunken cow carcass but that for us to catch a sturgeon would be pretty much like catching a dinosaur, about as likely as dredging a big seventy-million-year-old Triceratops out of the river muck.
Mrs. Sabo hooked one, I say.
Okay, Grandpa Z says. But he doesn’t even look at me.
Mažeikiai Senamiesčio Secondary School is made of sand-colored bricks. The windows are all black. A boy in the parking lot throws a tennis ball onto the roof and waits for the ball to roll down and catches it and does this over and over.