PIPERHere are the opening pages of Keegan's PIPER: The night of my first period I remembered sitting with Mom on the back porch steps. The sun was flaming out behind the garage and we were admiring the bamboo teepees of snap beans and the pink-veined patches of rhubarb in her garden. Her hands were caked with dirt from weeding the beds and I could smell the guano. I was waiting for the big sex talk, but instead she told me about the journey. "You're just starting it, Piper." She took my hands between hers and I could feel the crust of the loam crumbling between our fingers as she pressed me. "You're going to sprout wings and dazzle some man with your wizardry." There was a glisten of tears in her eyes and the prospect of it all frankly overwhelmed me, but she laughed. "Don't worry. You'll be bathed in light like Aphrodite." At the time, I didn't have the presence of mind to ask her the details of her own journey. She'd told me about meeting Dad and how he'd fawned over her and coddled her back to health in Chicago when he was at Loyola and she was in art school. They eventually married and moved to Stampede, a small town north of Seattle where Dad ran the newspaper owned by John Carlisle. Mom mainly did her art, but she probably kept up with as much of the goings on in Stampede as Dad did cooped up in the offices of the Herald. I couldn't tell if she disliked Stampede or it just amused her. "The Cold War's over and people here are still building air raid shelters," she told me once. "We're in a time warp, honey." She wasn't just my mom, she was my sail, the source of my energy. She pushed me as I slouched through the awkwardness of high school. Then the summer before my senior year her hair became enmeshed in the drain of the Jacuzzi at John Carlisle's house and held her under until she'd drowned. I was devasted. I wished I'd never been born. The bottom had fallen out of all those mother and daughter intimacies. But I refused to believe what everyone else was thinking about her. |
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