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CHAPTER 1

"I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

Methinks I should know you and know this man; yet, I am doubtful; for I am mainly ignorant what place this is."

— WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

King Lear (act 4, scene 7)

BEN

The fields are poured ice, rippled and waved as if a frozen lake. Ben considers the way the sun has melted — and the earth absorbed — the snow that fell months ago, which is how such strange patterns got created. But he also entertains the idea that his pastures have reverted in time to the great sea they once were. Ben has been partial to water, always, which is why life gets measured in terms of irrigation and rainfall and acre-feet and even the dry rainless days needed for baling hay. Even now he considers the watersheds in his brain, how water moves through tissue, how rivers of electricity pulse in stops and starts.

The pastures have never been this way, so icy, and it makes walking hard. There are no cattle to check, no fields to irrigate, nothing to doctor or wean or birth, and yet he wants to walk anyway, down the iced-over dirt road to the back of his ranch even though the walking is tough because this year the snow has not melted as it should. He has that memory thing — he can't remember the name — and he knows it's normal to be able to remember his childhood but not yesterday and not, on occasion, his wife's name. Or the name of this daughter walking beside him.

He's not supposed to feel bad about the things he can't remember, although he is allowed to feel bad about the fact that this disease only gets worse. Deeper still, he has clarified that he's allowed the terror and the claustrophobia of wanting to say words that are dammed up inside.

She comes more often now, this daughter, she says to walk her dog, a huge yellow puppy that is supposed to bring you things but does not. Just like his brain, this dog doesn't work right. The dog (whose name he can't remember but it reminds him of music) is chasing those big birds out in the field. The dog sends them honking into the sky, and this also reminds him of music. He used to shoot those birds, and his wife would complain because cooking hamburger from one of their cows was always easier than cooking one of those big birds.

He's never seen the likes of a winter like this.

His daughter calls her yellow dog and the creature comes galumphing or galloping or grazing toward them but stops short to pick up a piece of frozen horse manure. "Damn it," his daughter says. "No, Satchmo! No!" She pries the frozen square of manure from the dog's teeth and flings it away. Then she unzips her jacket and sighs one of those frustrated sighs that is supposed to help get patience back and which he hears from his wife all the time now. "Remember, Dad, how you used to say 'tell ya what I'm gonna do, see'?"

Sometimes his brain works if he can manage it like music, like a song, like a river that does not halt. So he singsongs it: "Tell you what I'm gonna do, see." With the accent, like a Brooklyn boxer, although he has been a Colorado rancher all his life. He puts up his hands in boxer pose and that makes her laugh and her laugh is like music.

He wonders if she notices how all the wooden fence posts each have a small cap of frozen snow at the top. They put many of these posts in together — he with the posthole diggers and she with the tamping bar — he remembers how proud he was that she could and wanted to do such work. Some of the older posts, the original ones — which are not posts so much as chunks of wood from fallen trees and covered with lichen — are rotting. He tells himself to remember to replace them in the spring. Only he will not be here in the spring.

"And remember how Rachel would say, 'Tell you what I'm gonna do, see,' and punch you in the arm."

"Oh, yes. Rachel." He rubs his arm, over the duct tape on his down jacket, where his daughter used to punch him. He has two daughters and one is dead. He remembers her as a child sitting on his lap, twirling her dark fine hair in her finger, and he remembers that she loved to be carried to bed on his back.

"I wonder how my cabin is," he says.

"You just asked me that, Dad. It's the same. It's always the same."

He wonders if it's true, that he just asked that, or that it's always the same. He misses the cabin. He knows nothing about it was ever the same, including the view from the window where the light would change as it shifted across the snowy seas of hayfields, where the small irrigation ditches would sparkle like rows of starlight, where the fox would pause and stare at him from the edge of a field, where the horses would dip their heads like swans.

His cabin. His ranch.

He fingers a thin slice of tree, the one in the pocket of his jeans. He sees in his mind's eye what he knows the paper says. He's glad his mind's eye will be consistent with what is written on paper, that the two sets flow together. Today, he is tuned in, and he'll stay tuned in as long as he can. When he pulls the slice of tree out, it will be creased and worn to the point he can barely see his penciled marks, but he knows it will list his family.

I am married to Renny.

Carolyn = daughter. Who is married to Del.

Rachel = dead daughter

4 grandchildren: Jack - Leanne (C's) and Billy - Jess (R's)

He fingers the paper because it is calming and stalls the terror. He can sense his own fear of this disease, how it has grown to be a constant companion now, but one on which he still has the upper hand. Today he is winning.

"I built it," he says.

"I know it, Dad. You did a good job. It's a beautiful cabin."

"When Rachel died."

"I know it. It's a nice tight cabin. Dad —"

"It never healed."

She jams her hands into her red coat, takes them out, swings her arms. The fabric makes the swishing sound of water. Then, "What never healed, Dad? Do you mean you? You and Mom?"

"The water is running backwards."

She looks at him, even as they walk, and then says, "If you say so."

"But Jess will take care of it."

She swishes her arms back and forth. "Okay." Her voice is small and quiet like a mourning dove, like the soft gray on a mourning dove's back.

But none of this is what he means. And Carolyn does not mean it's okay, either. He'd like to tell Carolyn the real story. Not the story that she knows, but the story that registered in his heart. How although he and Renny argued they could also look at the other and know what thoughts were transpiring, what waterways of feeling were moving between them. But then they forgot how to talk. With words or with touch or with eyes. They were silenced. So he moved to the other end of the ranch. He hated and missed his wife. He hated and missed something particular. Perhaps he had no direction, perhaps he had stalled out, perhaps he knew it. Oh, yes. He wants to tell this daughter all this. How can he explain it?

"Dad?" His daughter takes her ball cap off, ponytails her hair, puts the cap back on, and threads her mane of hair through the back. All in one fluid motion, like water.

"Oh," he says. "Oh. Well. That orange twine. That we use to graft calves on to new mothers. I —"

But his daughter is already talking. "Remember that cow we had? I called it Twisted Snout, but everyone else called it Crooked Nose. No, actually, Pablo Picasso. Remember that cow? That cow's nose was bent from the get-go. I'm sorry Mom yelled at you this morning. About the bacon. She's just so ... tired out, I guess."

"Crooked Nose." He remembers her well. "Yes. She gave birth to Soft Eyes, Crooked Hoof, Wild Mama. Some others." He remembers that Renny yelled at him about the bacon but he can't remember why. Something about needing to put it in a frying pan and not on the burner, but he had put it in a frying pan, hadn't he? Of course he had. Because bacon always needed to go in a pan. He must have just been sleepy. He hates the dark rooms in his brain. He knows they're there, but surely he can also push them into the corner and live in the rest of his brain. "Her sire was X313 and her mama was an Angus-Hereford mix, one of the originals. Pangaea, Renny called her."

"Yes!" Carolyn zips and unzips her jacket. "You're exactly right. This ice. You would think it would be white, because of the snow. But no. It's all gray in parts, blue in parts, brown in parts. It's like an ocean. I can't get comfortable. It's too hot and too cold. Too something."

Later she says, "Dad," but she doesn't say more.

They walk in silence, listening to their feet crunch the ice. Walking is slow. Even young Carolyn has to watch her step, only she is not young anymore; she is not a girl, but a woman, but young relatively. When they get to the end of the property, they're at the first rise of the Rocky Mountains, with the startling red-orange cliffs that preface the blue-gray waves of mountains. Here the barbed wire fence stretches across this bulge in the earth, this fence that marks one man's land from another, and they will turn around.

But here is the cabin.

He walks up the steps and onto the porch and peers in the window. It is not locked, there is no reason to lock it, but still he would rather peer in. It looks just as he left it, kitchen table wiped clean except for a pile of slips of papers, a few dishes stacked in the drying rack by the sink. For one year now it has sat empty.

But he feels too tired to ask about that, and so he turns and they start back across the ranch, a two-mile walk. There is a river to their left and a ditch and a county road to their right and the long sprawl of his pastures in between, a long stretch of frozen sea. He loves the aspen trees, both the ones at the edge of the property and the ones he planted near the house. Right now they are bare white trunks with eyes, next to the streak of orange-red willow branches that throb out along the ditch. It is true that willows are the most beautiful thing in the winter. The willows and the backside of the foothills are the only orange-red things out here; the rest is all the white and brown and blues of winter, and he loves that nature thrust in a little bit of strange color. There is a bald eagle roasting or resting or perching or roosting on a branch above the river, which he points to and his daughter says, "Yes, I see it. There are more of them now, aren't there? Some things heal."

His daughter calls the dog whose name sounds like music. The not-retriever dog is rolling in another pile of horse manure and his daughter says, "At least it's frozen." Then, "This is the stupidest winter ever. It's like one great glacier out here, and it's never going to melt." And much later, "Dad? I love you no matter what. No matter what happens. Okay? You've still got some time. It will be hard to know when to ..." And then later, under her breath, she says, "Ah, god. Fuck." And then, finally, she holds the old wooden gate for him, and although he slows, she stands patiently, insisting that he go first.

RENNY

At the Early Stage Alzheimer Association's Support Group meeting in town, Renny is separated from Ben, which makes her sigh with irritation only because everything makes her sigh with irritation because she is in fact irritated. This is new, this parting of the waters. Ben goes off with the others to make Valentine cards for their caretakers, which is possibly the stupidest thing Renny can think of. Or not stupid, just plain pitiful. Embarrassing. This separation will give caregivers a chance to speak freely, says Esme, the leader, whom Renny really does like. (If only her daughter Carolyn would dress so smartly instead of wearing jeans and T-shirts and a ball cap with a ponytail pulled through the back. And Esme attends church, unlike her daughter. And Esme's name, which is short for Esmeralda, is very pretty; she should have named her daughter Esmeralda.)

Renny sighs and glances around at the other women and men, all white-haired, some fat and some thin, some smart and some seemingly on the verge of the disease themselves. In front of each person at the table is a journal, presented each week so they can vent their frustrations and feelings on paper. She was supposed to decorate hers but instead she just wrote THE SAD STORY OF RENNY AND BEN in thick Sharpie marker on the front. Everyone else cut out pictures of flowers or old automobiles from old-timey newspapers and glued them on the front. She refuses to be reduced to childlike behavior.

Beyond the journals, in the middle of the table, is a plate of cookies. She is so tired of these cheap-brand cookies. No one likes them. Always Lipton tea, which no one likes either. She would like to issue a proclamation to the world: NO ONE IN THE UNIVERSE LIKES LIPTON TEA. Maybe people could stomach the Lipton tea if fresh mint leaves and honey were also provided, but they never are. She wishes she and humanity could both get it right for once. When this winter is over, and summer comes, and the mint springs up next to the farmhouse like weeds — even then she will forget the mint every week, and these idiots will still be putting it out, plain, even though no one wants it. She's sure of it, and she will drive Ben to this meeting and forget the mint because her life has always seemed too chaotic and busy to remember basic things like reaching down to grab mint that is right at your feet. She sighs, and then sighs again. She is so tired of the plates with the creased edges, like a pie, only not a pie, only a boring white paper plate. She is tired of this winter.

The truth. The truth. The truth is what Esme wants.

When it is her turn, Renny says one version of it, which is, "If I care for him well, if I stay patient, well, then whatever freak god is out there might let me into heaven. I am only nice because I believe He's watching. I'm afraid of hell. Otherwise I would have flown off to Greece some time ago."

A few others chuckle but she isn't joking. God is a freak — must be, to allow people to suffer like this — and therefore must make freak decisions such as putting people in hell for letting their husbands die of a natural disease. Ben could have died a million times over by now, burning down his house or crashing his truck. Perhaps he would have rotted like a fence post, forgetting to eat. Although, no, he's always hungry, always wanting food, and it's his incessant whining about being hungry that makes her crazy. She wishes she could stay more patient but it's like dealing with a two-year-old, and she didn't even enjoy her daughters at that age — she liked kids when they were older and more self-sufficient and interesting.

At some point people have to die. Ben should just die. But the truth of the matter is that Ben's a good man who still loves his life. She looks around the room, quickly, to mitigate the closing sensation she is having in her throat. She's clarified this emotion with herself many times before: the simultaneous wish for him to die and never die makes her, at times, unable to breathe. The situation is, by its very nature, claustrophobic.

The group is waiting to see if she wants to say more. So she breathes in, acknowledges the panic attack that is threatening her, and smiles sweetly. She will comply to humor them. She says, "This disease is like a yo-yo. Or no, it's much like putting a toe in the river. It's too cold, so you back out, and you try again, you go deeper, you back out, then deeper, and then you are submerged and totally lost. For example, he forgets to fry bacon in a pan and instead puts it right on the stove. But I bet he doesn't do it again. He forgets how to zipper a coat. But then he remembers. Then he's angry for no reason, accusing me of stealing money from his wallet. Then he isn't. One day he couldn't tell time at all. But this week he can. He can't remember that he has four grandchildren, and then he remembers them all, and he even remembers what they are doing. He even remembers to care that they're probably going to turn out rotten. In and out. Pulling in and out of water. Now that I think about it, I think his disease might have set in years ago, the same year our daughter died. Only I didn't notice for a while. But it's moving fast now. We're definitely leaving Stage I. We're moving into Stage II. There's a big difference lately. And he knows it, but he won't know it for much longer. He'll be too underwater to know."

There are murmurs of approval and agreement and sorrow, which makes her feel like a schoolgirl that has gotten an A. She has described it well. "Submerged, yes," someone says, and someone else adds, "Exactly," and someone else apropos of nothing says, "Sometimes this disease reminds me of a Stellar's jay." And Zach, sweet Zach, says, "That was well put, Renny," and winks kindly at her. She tries to stop the smile but it's too late. She curled her hair this morning with pink plastic curlers and she's glad she did that because what- oh-what source of joy is there left for her in this world? She is not interested in men and their sexual needs (oh, what a relief, when she took Ben's hand off her breast decades ago and told him that she was just done with that stuff), but she could use a friend, maybe even a friend that would rub her stiff shoulders and hold her hand, and it might as well be a man since she can't picture wanting a woman to touch her.

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Excerpted from "Stars Go Blue"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Laura Pritchett.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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