Take What You Can Carry

way, talking with neighbors about their vines, doling out advice from his reading, even learning the Latin names of plants. Once, after Olivia’s thirteen-year-old heart had been dismantled by her first crush, he’d found her curled against the couch far too early in the morning and, not knowing what to do, had grabbed the car keys. They drove and drove. As if maybe they could outrace this new stage. As if pain could be left behind. She thought it both charming and juvenile, his response, but after five hours of listening to music with the windows down and her feet on the dash, she started feeling better, despite the fact that not a word had been spoken about the boy. Distance, perhaps, really was the answer. They were in the Palouse, a side of Washington she didn’t know, when a field of orange flowers slowed him to a halt and almost got them rear-ended.
“Fire poppies,” he announced.
Within seconds, he was out of the car, stepping into a wind. His shirt and pants billowed flat against him as he turned to face the flowers, and when Olivia opened her door to the noise and rush of passing cars, she, too, was gripped in the warm gusts that rippled the field. Tall poppy stalks were bent, papier-mâché-like petals quivering as if in a desperate rush to leave.
“They’re fire followers,” he said. He had to speak loudly, which was not his nature, and so Olivia moved closer. “That’s a group of plants that needs heat or smoke to tell the seeds to germinate. Sometimes even ash in the soil. They’re rare because of that. People hunt for them after fires.” He pointed to the charred skeleton of a tree. Snarled black arms. Behind it, more trees, all charred. “For decades sometimes, the seeds lie dormant. Tucked away and asleep. Then a fire comes along and wipes everything out and that’s what they need. The challenge. The wake-up call. Like a slap. Everything else is gone, and the world’s just recovering, and that’s their cue to rise from the ashes.”
“You’re saying I should be a fire follower.”
He turned to her, studying her as if she’d suddenly changed clothes. “No. You got that from what I said? I was telling you about the flowers.”
After a moment, he knelt, tracing a finger in the ashy soil, and when he stood, he wiped his hand on his pants, leaving a streak of dark by the pocket. “Loss keeps going, you know? It doesn’t just stop with what was taken from you. It grabs new things all the time. You think you’re up against missing the memories, all that happened, but Christ if you don’t miss all that didn’t happen even more.”
The wind against her face turned cold with her tears. “I think you’re doing just fine. With me.”
Maybe she’d not spoken loudly enough. Maybe her words had been claimed, snatched by the hurried air, because still he faced the flowers. But at last he nodded, slowly.
“If you wanna know,” he said. “These flowers, they’re beautiful, but maybe they’re just beautiful because there’s nothing left around them. You don’t need destruction to shine. And you don’t want to be one of those people who thrives when it’s difficult. The sooner you figure out easy is good, the better off you’ll be.”
And here she is. In a country she doesn’t know, with her boyfriend who just allowed a man who could kill them into their car. She’s not sure if she should laugh or cry. Instead she tries to only take in her surroundings.
“Can we stop?” she asks. “Here?” She wants to capture his home from a distance. This photo, she knows, would be taken differently from one she’d take at the end of the trip.
Delan’s cousin glances at his watch and then the lowering sun before pulling next to a hawthorn tree, its white blooms like a snowfall.
The mountain’s tinged with red, draped in the start of sunset. Studying the setting, she finds a large boulder with a view and leans against it, facing the valley with her camera in hand. The ground at her feet is slightly red as well, but from iron. Iron and chrome are in the mountains, she remembers reading. Mountains with caves and remnants of the first human settlements. A direct link to the start. And there, she sees, shoved up against the foothills, is a large cluster of rooftops and roads that round another hill and disappear, out of sight. The edge of a large town or a city, where for the next two and a half weeks she’ll live.
Above, in the tree’s canopy, is a gray bird, the feathers at its throat parting as it sings. “Hawthorn trees are fairy trees,” she says to Delan, who’s wandered up beside her. “According to the Celts. Other trees, too, if they’re alone in a field, but fairies love the hawthorn.”
“You know, I did hear you back there,” Delan says. “What you said. I got it.”
Her anger seeps back. “But you couldn’t acknowledge that in front of your cousin? Women can’t talk back?”
“You’re about to meet my mother. Trust me, talking back is not an issue. But you were right,” he says and then pauses, searching the valley. “And so was I. Here, everyone thinks they’re right. And they are, in a way. The Kurds. The Turks. Arabs, Assyrians. Everyone. They all have their stories, and the stories sound good.” He shrugs. “They should. They’ve been worked on for thousands of years.”
She says nothing, just takes the lens cap off her camera and kneels before a yellow daisy, focusing on the flower as the valley below becomes a distant green blur.
“You cannot make a perfect choice here,” Delan continues. “That’s what I’m saying. It doesn’t exist. It’s a mistake to care, just like it’s a mistake to not care enough. You may live another day, but you will never win.”
On the grass before them is a hawk’s shadow, broad wings thinning to a line