A Thousand Miles from Nowhere (21 page)

“She didn't act hurt,” he said, remembering how she'd made him send that gallery owner away, telling Henry that she was content, that all she wanted to do was paint.

“What do you mean?” Mary said. “Of course she acted hurt. How she lived, alone like that, all those paintings, all that art. That was all hurting. It was productive hurting, I guess, or at least the art part was. But the rest of it?”

“That's what I mean,” Henry said. “It seems crazy to me.”

“Listen,” Mary said. “Everything she did—
everything
she did—was trying to find something to ward off the hurt.”

“Why didn't we ask her what was wrong? Why didn't we say anything, you and me?”

“We were kids,” Mary said.

“Then why didn't she?”

“I don't know,” Mary said. “Maybe she knew even then we had it in us. Maybe we already knew.”

“That we had what?”

“You know,” Mary said. “Dad's craziness. His depression.”

“I remember Dad talking about it, warning me. But I don't remember anything crazy.”

“No, he just sank. That's what Mama said. She said he'd sink so low she couldn't find him.”

“So she didn't talk about him leaving because she figured she knew what had happened, what he'd done?”

He couldn't make himself say it:
Killed himself. Committed suicide.

“She knew,” Mary said. “She knew what would happen when he went that low, when the weight was too great.” He thought about how he'd skipped their mother's funeral, how he couldn't make himself go—
to ward off the hurt?
Was it all as simple as that?

“But you were fine,” Henry said.

“I was
not
fine,” Mary said. “You just didn't know me. I didn't let you, or anyone, know me. I'm fine now, it's true. I've got a career, and I love it. I've got friends. I see people. But it's not perfect. I haven't found the right person the way you did. But I talk about it. I take my meds. I do what needs doing.”

He hadn't known, of course, that Mary took
meds.
He hadn't even known that she suffered from—
what?
What was the name for it? Was there a name? It was more than depression. He wanted to tell Mary that he heard things, that his head got filled with clatter. He wanted to ask her if her head did too. But how do you ask something like that?—
The noises? The memories? You hear them too? The song lyrics? The radio sermons?

“What do I need to do?” Henry asked.

“That's the question,” Mary said, and Henry could now hear the struggle, the hopelessness, the pain, in her voice. It had probably been there all along, all those years—when she kept their mother company, when she made up the story of the Broussards, when she left New Orleans for Baltimore and started her whole life over. He just hadn't known to look for it. Like their mother, she had always seemed to him content. He'd believed the face she'd shown him.

“I do know one thing,” he said. “I know I've caused so much—” What was the right word?
Pain? Suffering? Hurt?
“Damage,” he said. “I've caused so much damage.”

Mary didn't even pretend to contradict him. “Yes, you have,” she said. “That you've done.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. He didn't know what else he could say. “I'm really sorry.”

“Well, a whole lot was done to you first. And maybe you can put an end to it. This family that you're trying to help, that's you trying to end it, I think.”

“I don't know what it is,” he said. “Maybe that's crazy too.”

“No, it's a fine thing,” Mary said. “What else can we do except help other people along? And maybe you'll succeed. Maybe you'll actually ease their pain a little. You will, I'm sure. But you're going to have to figure out what you should be doing. In regard to Amy, I mean. But staying sane is the first step. That's all the wisdom I've acquired through these years. First, you stay sane.”

“Got it,” Henry said, and he realized that he actually did get it now. He would talk to Marge about seeing her doctor friend again. If Rusty Campbell thought Henry needed
medication, he would take it. If he thought Henry needed to talk with someone, go into therapy, he'd even do that. He hated the idea, and he didn't know how he'd pay for it, but he would do whatever he needed to do. After all this time, after so much damage, he finally understood that this was what it would take. He wasn't going to just figure this out on his own. Somehow he'd thought that Mohit's poem would do it, that giving the manuscript to Amy, having her read it, would put them both under the same enchanted spell. That was crazy—just as crazy as everything else he'd been thinking—that running away from his life would somehow make things better, that Amy would just wait and wait for him to get straightened out, that she wouldn't give up and find someone else. He needed to do something to win Amy back—he needed to be sane, yes, but what else?

He asked Marge what she thought. He asked Latangi as well. Both said more or less the same thing in their own very different ways—that he must simply
be,
that he must show Amy his true self. The problem, of course, was that most of the time he didn't feel as though he was in possession of a true self, something solid and predictable. Instead, he felt as though he were lost inside the clatter and chaos, the clutter and noise, the wreck and ruin.

Again and again, though, in the evenings when he could not settle his thoughts, when words and images and memories raced through his head, he went back to Mohit's study, to the quiet room with its bare white walls, the only movement a moth or two tapping against the windows, drawn by the fluorescent lights in the parking lot outside. He sat down at Mohit's desk, not a speck of dust on its surface, and he took the manuscript from the drawer. When he began to read Mohit's poem, he felt—what other word for it was there than
magic?
—he felt as though, by some strange magic, by some power of enchantment, his
self
had finally grown quiet, had become something certain and calm, something he did indeed in that moment possess.

Henry could not have found, had he been asked to do so, the precise words for this quiet, for the absolute peace he felt.

Henry took the blue truck and drove back to the real estate office—Marge had given him directions—only to catch Rusty Campbell walking out the door. “Mr. Garrett,” he said, shaking Henry's hand. “Good to see you again, sir. I've got a nice A-frame heating up on Long Mountain. Two folks back to back want to see it. Care to take a drive?”

They drove west, toward the line of mountains.

“What's on your mind?” Rusty Campbell asked, lowering his window and pulling a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. Henry tried to explain the way he'd felt in Mohit's study—the magic of Mohit's poem, the calm it had brought over him. He wanted to know if this seemed like another version of the craziness he'd been through before. “It seems different to me somehow,” Henry said. “It feels more real, if that makes sense. It feels more like being okay than being sick.”

Rusty Campbell leaned forward and squinted as if he were having trouble seeing. “I know doctors are supposed to believe in science,” he said. “You know, cause and effect, treatment and cures. But I was never convinced that's all there is to it. And that motel where you're staying? I had my own kind of healing there. Spirits,” he said, and shook his head, “and spirits—there's a world of difference, isn't there, between the two meanings one word can have.”

“Spirits?”
Henry said. “You mean, as in
haunted
?”

“I mean that too, I guess, but mostly I just mean liquor.” He looked over at Henry and then back at the road. “I went to the Spotlight to dry out. More to the point, I was deposited there by my wife, who told me she was not letting me in the house again and would get a court order if necessary to keep me out. Well, the help I needed was losing every goddamn thing I ever had.”

He threw his cigarette out his window. “I was visited by more than a ghost or two, and I figured my choices were being dead or being better. I finally chose better, or better finally chose me, and that happened in a month's time at the Spotlight.”

They passed a lumber mill, pine trees heaped on one side of the property like giant matchsticks, neat stacks of two-by-fours on the other.

“I'm not saying there is or isn't something special about that place,” Rusty Campbell went on, “but I tried church and I tried the hospital more than a few times without success and the one occasion when it worked was when I found myself waking up every morning in that one dark room at the Spotlight and wanting nothing really but to be a man who was sober enough to stand in front of his two boys again and look them square in the eye and say I was done with that past nonsense and I was ready if they were to start from scratch. I wanted nothing so much in this world as their forgiveness.”

He looked over at Henry. “Which, by the way, is what I got.”

“And your wife?” Henry said.

“Well, you win some and you lose some.” They turned up a steep gravel driveway. “That's one I lost. Big-time. But this—” He stopped in front of a beautiful house looking out over the valley below. “This one I intend to win.”

Henry waited outside while Rusty Campbell led one couple and then, fifteen minutes later, another through the house. He sat down on a bench at the top of a clear-cut and tried to figure out what he was seeing down below among all the trees, if he could indeed discern, as he thought he could, Main Street in Marimore and then Route 29 running north and south alongside it. He tried to find the stretch of 29 where the Spotlight stood, but he couldn't.

When Rusty Campbell was done and the second couple drove away, he walked over and sat down next to Henry. “Beautiful up here, ain't it?”

“It is,” Henry said. “You make a sale?”

“We'll see,” he said. “Here's something I didn't know: this real estate business takes patience. And patience is something I've always had to learn. I started out in the emergency room. A problem presents itself, you tackle it. Broken leg, ruptured appendix, stab wound, psychotic break. It can be rough and it can be scary, but at least you know what needs doing. But that's not how it worked when I came out here to practice.”

“Why'd you stop working in the ER?” Henry said.

“Well, the hospital administrators decided—fairly enough, by the way—that they didn't want me working for them. That was one of the things my drinking cost me. Anyway, when you're a country doc, you've got folks' whole family history and all their good and bad affairs and money troubles and other worries to consider. Any one of those things might be the reason their head has been hurting or their leg has been twitching. Or it might be much worse, something that's going to get them in the end, but nine times out of ten, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it isn't. The biggest lesson I learned was to just sit there with folks and wait them out. You wait long enough, they tell you what you need to know. Same in real estate. You just wait and it all becomes clear. But you've got to be willing to wait. If you don't wait, I've learned, you scare folks away.”

Rusty Campbell pulled a cigarette from the pack in his pocket and lit it. He turned and looked back down the mountain, at the winding road and the gravel drive that had brought them up here to this house. Henry wondered if he was expecting someone else to come see the property. “Is that what you're doing now?” Henry said. “Waiting me out?”

“I'm resting is all,” Rusty Campbell said. He coughed. “Anyway, I thought you said you were better.”

“I feel better. I do,” Henry said.

“That's something, then.” He took another drag on his cigarette and then held it out and squinted at it, as if he were surprised to find it there. “But you want something more?”

Henry sighed. He noticed a deer and then another skitter in the woods. “Don't we always?”

“Yes, I guess we do,” Rusty Campbell said. “I guess we do.”

Rusty Campbell bent forward and coughed again, and Henry wondered if he might be truly sick. He thought again about
The Awakening.
Edna hadn't been sick the same way, but she also hadn't been well. She'd been depressed and miserable and one day she just swam out to sea and that was that. What if, though, there'd been someone to give her a pill?

There wouldn't have been a novel then, would there? There wouldn't have been a story to tell. She'd have felt a little better, gone off for a swim, and then what? Would she just have returned to her life? It seemed impossible somehow. She couldn't have just gotten better.

Then it occurred to him: What about his father? Or his mother? How different would things have been?

Rusty Campbell seemed like he might be asleep; his eyes were closed, his chin resting on his chest. But he was just waiting, Henry knew. He was waiting to see where Henry's thoughts took him. Finally Rusty opened his eyes.

“I need to take something,” Henry said. “Something, you know, to keep me sane. That's what my sister told me. I think she's right.”

“That could help.” Rusty Campbell nodded. “Given all you've said, I think it will. But even with all the stuff there is these days to take, it's not enough on its own. There's usually more to the story than that. There's still things to sort out. You understand?”

“I do,” Henry said. “Yes, I do.”

After they drove back to the real estate office, Rusty Campbell gave Henry some sample packs of something. “Prozac,” he told Henry. “Pretty basic stuff. See what you think. If anything strange happens, call me. Don't expect to feel different right away. You won't. And don't expect any miracles.”