Certainty by Renée Branum

There is a hazy landscape separating memory and truth. “Certainty” lives in this space where even false memory can gain heft, if it is conjured long enough. Original in form, “Certainty” makes us wonder how we can ever trust those narratives around which we construct our lives or if such verifiability finally matters at all. 
—Judge Carol Becker, author of Losing Helen, on LAR Fall Creative Nonfiction Award winner “Certainty” by Renée Branum

These are the things we were uncertain of:

Whether, when the bandages came off, the dog’s eyes would be shrunken and clouded like juniper berries, or still brown and clear, though unseeing.

Whether the persimmon tree would produce any fruit that year, or if we even cared.

Whether the man who came to tune our piano had killed himself deliberately or accidentally.

Whether my sister liked boys or girls and whether this had anything to do with her being touched inappropriately by a babysitter when she was practically still a baby.

Whether I was actually beating Ryan at arm-wrestling, or he was occasionally letting me win.

Whether or not my father blamed himself for the dog’s blindness.

Whether or not my mother blamed herself for the inappropriate babysitter.

Whether or not Uncle Mark would ever wake up from his coma.

That year, we were certain of a small handful of things. We knew the proper way to kill and dispose of a spider. We knew that Uncle Mark had never been to Africa; that the piano was deeply out of tune (though our mother still made us practice); and that the dog was an expert at being blind, brushing between the furniture quick as a fish through underwater reeds. I thought to myself pretty often, “I will never love anyone as much as I love this dog,” and I believed it.

When Uncle Mark finally woke up, his hair had grown back enough since the surgery that no one hesitated to hand him a mirror when he asked for one. But when he saw himself there, in the tiny pink-and-white frame of the makeup compact, all he could say was “Ay, caramba!” And we all looked at each other; one of the uncles laughed because he didn’t know what else to do. And then Mark said it again, “Ay, caramba!” and we all started to titter, couldn’t help ourselves. It was all he said for days, rolling his head side to side on the pillow, lifting spoonfuls of pudding all the way to his mouth then letting them plop back onto the tray. “Ay, caramba!”

Before the accident, he’d looked like Paul Newman. After: like someone who was once told they look like Paul Newman.

When he began to speak whole sentences again, his tongue seemed to get in the way. He bit it and it bled. He talked at length, sharing memories that none of us could remember: dogs none of us had ever owned, bones we’d never broken, continents we’d never been to. He talked to me about the first time I saw snow, driving to the top of Mt. Diablo and packing snow into shapes, monoliths and turrets we sculpted barehanded. I looked at my mother, mouthed the word as a question, “Snow?” She shrugged and mouthed back, “Ay, caramba.” That phrase had become code between us, code for: your uncle’s mind isn’t quite right.

But, strangely, he remembered it all so vividly: even the purple coat I had worn, even the fact that he’d begun to worry I might get sick from eating so much snow.

To his fiancé, he said, “Remember that time we went to Africa?”

We watched the fear shiver through her and waited to hear what she’d say. She said, “No, Mark.” With calm certainty she said, “We’ve never been to Africa.” Mark’s scalp showed the color of rage through the fuzz. She, of all of us, was the only one who refused to humor him and so we watched him begin to hate her.

“In Africa,” he told us once, “it is so hot that people leave stones out in the sun and use them to cook on like hot plates.”

“In Africa,” he told us another time, “the soil and the trees and the animals are all the same color and that color is red.”

“In Africa,” he told us, “people go to war with monkeys over watering holes.”

After weeks of this, his fiancé stopped coming to see him, returned his ring in a yellow manila envelope.

“How,” my mother once asked, “could he be so convinced of something that wasn’t real?”

And yet, week by week, year by year, I’ve become less and less certain about the snow, seem now to remember how cold my hands were, curved ice walls melting and hardening beneath. I’m almost certain of one thing Uncle Mark never mentioned: that on that day, on the mountain, I put snow into my own hair, as if anointing myself, and I cried because it burned with cold, and my scalp shrank and tightened.

Renée Branum currently lives and works in Missoula. She recently graduated with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Montana. She received an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2013. Renée’s fiction has appeared in Blackbird and The Long Story, with stories forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Tampa Review, Narrative Magazine, and Alaska Quarterly Review. Her nonfiction essays have been published or are forthcoming in Fields Magazine, Texas Review, True Story, Denver Quarterly, and Chicago Quarterly Review.