Rachel Louise Snyder Excerpt
From The Question of Ilios Lane
After Mary went to college, her father went to India, carrying his message of bridges. Bridges as economic saviors. Bridges as portals into the twenty-first century. Bridges as purveyors of change … social, community, financial. Beautiful, beautiful bridges. Get as far away as you can. Disconnect yourself so that you can connect others. Michael McPherson, Mary Elizabeth had to admit, was a man who’d lived not entirely devoid of passion in his life. (Oh goodness, a slip of tenses, a spoiler alert. Yes. Poor Michael McPherson. He’d loved bridges. And he’d loved his family. And he may well have loved the two in precisely that order, but he was passionate only about the one).
He had died a year earlier in a tiny, mountainous village in Northern India called Motna, in the most banal way: a car accident. The state of India had been building a new road through the mountains to connect the villagers across the Tehri Dam Reservoir with National Highway 94 and Michael McPherson was there, in fact he’d spent weeks there, selling his modular bridges to local governments, trying to get them to see how the farmers in their far flung mountainous communities could sell their produce to the larger markets of Rishikesh and Meerut, maybe even Delhi. And by and large, they did see. Sales were brisk.
It had been a step down, this job. The guy on the ground. But after everything, the Real Story, which was after the day Mary Elizabeth McPherson saw fuchsia and believed God had foibled and after she had switched high schools, and after she had applied to and been accepted to the University of Illinois, Michael McPherson had asked—begged, really—to be transferred, to be sent away, to be exiled. He’d had to get a passport, and shots for typhoid and yellow fever and Hepatitis A and B and C, and Japanese Encephalitis (because you can never be too sure), and Rotovirus and Swine Flu, and then he’d gone and Mary Elizabeth had seen him once or twice a year all through college and then he had died in that most hackneyed way and she’d felt relieved now, because the awkwardness that had settled between them after The Day Of The Real Story was gone, and she could just remember him any old way she wanted now.
She remembered Arthur, too. Yes, Arthur Gardenia. The man Mary Elizabeth often believed she missed the most. He’d gone nowhere, so far as she knew. Stayed put, stayed home, stayed the same. She was less than five miles away from him, but Oak Park was a no-fly zone for Mary Elizabeth. He could have been a block away and she’d have never visited. Not from lack of desire, but for the same reasons the Bosnians who’d lived through war didn’t relish a return to their homeland no matter how safe they were now, no matter how much time had passed. No matter how much had evolved and then dissolved in the fullness of time and history. Because a place of tragedy is always only one way to its victims, and to those victims, the physical change of a place that harbors great tragedy is unforgiveable. Our memories stall in such geographies, and they lodge themselves into settings that move on so completely, so callously, so hideously.
This was Sarajevo. This was Zagreb.
This was Ilios Lane for Mary Elizabeth.
Geography, stalled.
Still, on late nights when she finds herself alone, and out somewhere in her neighborhood in Chicago, it doesn’t keep her from occasionally looking for Arthur Gardenia, wishing he’d appear from around the corner, from the doorway of a convenience store to help her carry home a gallon of milk.
