Among the Ten Thousand Things (17 page)

“Tomorrow,” he answered, and it was a real thing he could carry home with him, real as a pot, or a vase, lying out on the grass.

Kay, from the upstairs window, had watched him go. Her shoes were on already. Into the closet she said, “Stay,” and pulled the door almost closed, dragging a chair in front of it. Her mother, out in the garden with Gary, had only waved as she passed. There were new rules in Jamestown—there were no rules: Kay could go where she pleased.

It’s hard to follow a person who doesn’t know where he’s going. Simon would slow and look around every couple of streets, so that she was always ducking around corners and once behind a too-narrow tree, feeling herself in a movie. Outside a gently bowed house with a junky yard he appeared no less confused, actually scratching his head before realizing this must be it. Kay waited behind a fence wrapped in plastic netting and counted Mississippis in her head.

At ten-Mississippi Simon was
still
not inside but looming like a scarecrow on the porch, looking down at his feet. Kay squatted low and looked back between her legs. Behind her stood a rickety swing set with yellow seats and rusted chains, one post tilted an inch up off the ground.

By twenty-Mississippi the house had swallowed him up.

She stood now, feeling the quiet of the street. Suddenly so loudly quiet. She’d followed her brother—why?—just to see what would
happen,
but she couldn’t, of course, see; she wasn’t invited. In her front pocket, she felt the hard of Simon’s phone. She’d borrowed it while he was dressing, saying she wanted to play
Falling Gems,
and he had forgotten to take it back. If Simon had caught her following, she would have said it was to give it to him.

She wandered, past the church and the library with its sign that read
RESUME WRITING TONITE
7
, then came to a row of outdoor tubs under a clay-tiled roof. Rubber tubes dipped lazy into the water, collecting little air bubbles like straws in soda, or drifting up and breaking through the surface. That was where the gurgling came from, so many soft brooks in a row.

It was a whole world to which she wasn’t invited, sometimes.

Sitting Indian-style on the concrete, the knobby outside parts of her ankles hurting, she pulled the phone from her pocket and found his name.

On the third ring, she heard her father still clearing his throat. “My boy!”

“It’s me,” Kay said.

“Pumpkin! I’m so glad it’s you. You know I’m thinking of you a lot, all the time. How are you?”

“Fine,” she answered, scratching a twig along the ground. It was over orange sodas with her mother that she’d made up her mind to call, that she could talk to her dad and it wouldn’t have to bother anyone. “Where are you?”

“I’m driving. I don’t know if Mom told you, I was in Arizona. I’m going to visit your Grandma Phyllis.”

“Is she sick?”

“No no, just ah, a few things to sort out at the old house. How about you? Where are you?”

She described the concrete and the tubs of water.

“The basins! Old-fashioned Laundromats. People used to wash their clothes in them, before washing machines.”

“Really,” she said doubtfully.

“I used to get a lot of premium thinking done down around those basins. It gets much darker out there, not like New York. Here, why don’t you hold me up to the water? I want to hear it.”

Kay got up on her knees, bearing the sharp pain, and swung an arm over the side of the nearest bath, angling the phone at the corner that bubbled. When she brought it back to her ear, her dad was saying, “That’s a sound you don’t forget.”

“Dad?” Between her fingers the twig bent and broke. “When are we going home?”

“Where’s your mom? Are you with her?”

“I’m alone.” She was surprised how sad it sounded, the way she said it.

“Does she know you’re calling? Honey, you there?”

“I think I have to go now.”

“You know we can talk whenever you want. You don’t need to ask your mom.”

“I have to go before it gets dark I love you bye.”

The drive, some thousand miles, would take him two days. He slept a few hours at A Day’s End Lodge in Las Cruces, making the rest up with naps, some-hour intervals in empty lots. He spent magic hours smoking by the side of the road, the sun slinking up or down the sky. Sitting on a rock or the guardrail, a few yards from where he’d pulled over, and the car sitting waiting for him.

The cigarettes he smoked in chains. He’d never been a real smoker, just around drinks and other people. With no one to talk to he watched the paper brown and burn, smoke curling and uncurling, mingling with the painted lines on the road. At a tag sale near a gas station he bought a set of longhorns, seven feet across, bound together with cowhide. He drove with them levitated in the backseat, rested on the open windowsills, points peeking out.

Whenever he rode out of the country station’s range, the radio would start to autoscan, searching for stronger signals. Spanish talk scrambled with Chopin scrambled with Evangelical preacher people for miles. Sometimes the poor radio couldn’t find anything. Some places, nothing was out there.

Deb couldn’t sleep. The pillows lumped too hard under her head and each position felt like a pose she was holding. Instead she sat, switched on the light, and stacked her enemies the pillows up behind her. So unyielding before, they were fine now, perfect for leaning and for reading. Gary at some point had stocked all the nightstands in all the bedrooms with books; here were historical novels about Pompeii and the Chicago World’s Fair.

Good Gary. If only she could like his boring fucking paintings of boats.

He’d been so great with the kids over dinner, planning the next day’s trip. Great with Simon, mostly, who was suddenly almost chatty, and full of questions—about fishing, of all things. Boys and boats. Who knew?

Those stupid paintings.

Or maybe they weren’t so bad. Maybe she’d been thinking Jack’s thoughts.

In the next room, Simon and Kay were also up, though neither knew it of the other. Simon faced the wall, poring over the time he’d had with Teagan frame by frame, poring over the girl herself inch by incredible inch. He flexed his arm muscle, pressed into the mattress with his fist. Trying to rehearse their next meeting, he invented answers to questions that kept changing. There was this fishing trip tomorrow. Maybe some kind of story would come from that.

Kay had noticed the change in her brother at dinner, and how her mother had seemed so pleased by it. It shouldn’t have made her feel left out—she didn’t see why it should have—only it did, not least of all because she thought she knew the real reason he was happy, that it had nothing to do with fishing. There were just too many secrets.

And today she’d made one of her own, calling her dad.

Deb still wasn’t tired at all. Sure, it was night, but that didn’t mean she had to lie still in bed watching the dark inside her eyelids. Also, sure, hard and unhappy things were happening, but she didn’t have to hold still for them either. Why not not sleep? Why not not be sad? No need to be all-the-time sad! Everyone thought she needed this time to mope and to cry, but wouldn’t it be great if she didn’t? The important thing was to stay on your own side.
Remember whose side you’re on
.

So only Gary slept, or was presumed asleep, who could say.

“Mother.” Jack could feel Phyllis idling behind the front door, unsure. He’d parked the car midway up the drive and stopped to pluck a yellowy green clover, three leafed, from a seam in the pavement. Now, among the guardian mallards of the porch, he looked up and down, past hedges, across striped fields of grass, where lawn mowers ghosted pale ribbons, for the first stirrings of neighborhood watch. “It’s me. It’s Jack. I’m outside.”

“Jackie?” The locks came undone, and the front hall revealed itself in pieces, new ivory bookends bearing up the same old books, and his mother, thinner, hair more black, inky, like she’d taken a Magic Marker to it. Didn’t anyone tell her how ridiculous it looked? Someone should tell her. Charles.

“Mother, you look well.”

Phyllis said it was such a surprise to see him, and come in, Jackie, what are you doing here? Would you like a drink? Something? Charles, he’s out—you know he goes to church to get everything ready. Will you come to service? Well, sit down.

“My, but it’s a surprise.”

She called questions to him from the kitchen, where she never let anyone. Only Charles now had been granted access, every few weeks, to make his storied and bland jambalaya, which he packed into Tupperware and kept too long in the freezer.

No, Jack was not coming from New York. Tempe, in Arizona. I know you know where Tempe is. Yes, just passing through. No, Tempe isn’t so close to Houston. New York’s fine. Deb’s fine. The kids.

Phyllis came into the living room with heavy crystal glasses trembling, tonic water over ice. Charles had gotten her off drinking, and tonic was the only thing she’d touch. Said everything else tasted like kid stuff. She went back again and brought out a saucer of saltines.

“Now, when are you going back?”

“I just got here, Mother.”

“Oh, don’t be bad,” she said, sitting on the opposite end of the new blue-and-white-striped sofa and crossing her birdy legs. “It’s only I wish you’d called ahead. And things with Deborah?”

“Everything is excellent. You make it like I can’t come here—”

“Don’t be ridiculous—”

“
Like I can’t
come here
without something being wrong. You make it this great imposition. When I thought it would be a nice visit.”

“I only wanted to know how much to buy at the market.”

“I don’t need anything. If I need something, I’ll go out and get it myself.”

“Should I make up the guest?” She held her drink out in front of her face like a boxing glove, like it was her chin that was made of glass.

“I’ll stay in my room.”

Jack ate a cracker and watched Phyllis watch for crumbs. He held the plate out to her, knowing she wouldn’t take any. His mother had started out beautiful and had stayed that way, pin thin, all through Jack’s childhood. The general consensus back then, which she’d encouraged, was that Phyllis Shanley was a woman of remarkable self-possession.

It didn’t have anything to do with restraint, though. It was never about not doing exactly what she wanted. Food simply didn’t hold any interest for her, and she’d subsisted, through age seventy-five, on a mostly liquid diet.

“Well of course we are so glad to have you, Jackie, just surprised.”

In a house perpetually renovated, so much history sanded down and refinished, it almost passed as a show of tenderness that Jack’s old room had gone untouched. Almost passed as proof that the child was missed. Almost, but didn’t.

Jack could hear how it didn’t in the breaking sound the door made, unsticking from its frame as though the two had grown together, fused into wall. In the room he could smell how
much
it didn’t, could taste it in the mildewed air. The difference between what’s kept and what’s left. Jack’s room had been left. Not saved but cordoned off.

He stood staring at an old poster over the bed, an illustration of an airplane in a mass of white clouds, Mick Jagger’s mouth tattooed on the tail, his tongue out at you,
AMERICAN TOUR 1972
. There was not much to look at besides. The bed itself seemed miniature. The quilt flattened and thinned and its paisley swirls, kidneys in utero, flat too, another pattern he knew by heart.

When the hour came for Phyllis to have her bath, Jack pussyfooted into the kitchen and ferreted out the twisted sleeve of saltines from a cabinet over the sink. He ate them in the new blue-and-white chair that matched the sofa and let his eyes glaze over a week-old
Chronicle
on the end table.

When the garage door hummed open in back of the house, the floor and every wall hummed with it. Jack recrossed his legs and continued to scan the articles, one hand sliding the remaining four crackers into his mouth and tucking the plastic sleeve, half-folded, into his pants pocket. When the back door opened, Jack was inspecting newspaper columns, the shapes of them, like bar charts.

“Hello, Jack.”

The old man in the foyer, holding a canvas bag up high against his chest so that it seemed a schoolboy’s lunch, or a hat he’d taken off to be polite, this man
lived
here.

“Hi,” Jack answered, the hard
h
hurling observable crumbs through the air. He stood and shook Charles’s hand. “Guess you’re wondering what I’m doing here.”

“I suppose those are your longhorns outside the house.” Charles was a few years younger than Phyllis, seventy-two, seventy-three—Jack didn’t know exactly—but he seemed older than everyone, than Father Time. His questions weren’t questions but assessments he’d made, data to confirm, grimly. God could make a man that way. Put God behind a man and he thinks he knows everything.

“I guess you’re surprised to see me,” Jack tried again.

“Your mother phoned up at the church.”

“Did she?” Jack imagined his mother upstairs, frenzied over her adult son, calling her new old husband, the Prophet.
No, Charles,
she’d have whispered
, I have no idea what for.
“I hope I’m not a bother to you two.”

“It isn’t that, that you would be a bother.” If it were possible to have
taut
jowls, that was what Charles had. They were broad and smooth, like Droopy Dog’s. His skin was pink and looked impossible to shave, it was so dry. Skin that cut easily, would bleed a lot, if Charles weren’t drained already.

“Well, I’m sure you all have your routine that I’m upsetting.”

“Suppose we sit down after dinner and have a talk.”

Jack didn’t suppose he could say no.

From the plain and spoon-shaped, Kay sifted out the kind that looked like fish, with wide-open eyes and painted scales. Also the feathered ones, hot pink and yellow, which felt soft skimming her cheek. (“Gross,” said Simon.) She’d been sitting, hunched, beside the cooler at the front of the boat, cataloging Gary’s lures as they rode further into the blurred blue. She arranged them by type, by color, by which would make the best dangly earring.

Simon pressed his finger against one of the silver barbs, umbrellaed into three points. “I thought we were using worms.”

“Oh, yucko,” Deb said, yawning from under Gary’s hat. “Be glad we aren’t.”

“Clouds are high today.” Gary, at the motor, had begun to broadcast mysterious things about the weather, casting his words across the water.

Kay looked up, hands shading her eyes. It still looked like sky, but she could see how high clouds might be preferable to lower, hanging ones. Because, if it rained, the drops would not reach them, or would not hit so hard when they did. Or because high clouds left more room for the air, for it to blow around.

When the lines were cast there was nothing to do, the rods even rigged to hold themselves up over the water. Gary produced a barrel of pretzels, his fingers wide spinning off the ridged red lid, and they ate gathered around it, backs to the sun, heads huddled against the wind. Crunching into each other’s ears.

Gulls shrilled. Kay searched the sky for them but brought her face down again quickly, to the deck and their passing shadows, swelling and shrinking and sharpening at the edges.

“Baby, you okay?” Deb touched her shoulder. “She gets a little carsick.”

“Yeah.” Simon laughed. “A
little.
”

Kay leaned her head against the side of the boat. The water below kept up in little bursts, frothy and fizzing. The boat’s edge was hot in a good, painful way.

Kay had forgotten the last thing about fishing—that there would be fish. Mostly they caught bluefish and stripers, too small, that had to be pulled off the hook and thrown back. Then a splash as the fish rejoined the water and Gary cried, “Good as new!” which seemed unlikely.

Simon got the real first catch. Shouted, “Holy crap holy crap!” At the other end of the line, the fish thrashed silver bodied through the air. In the excitement Ayn Rand fell overboard. She bobbed along for a few waves before disappearing under the boat. (“What a shame,” said Deb, faintly smiling.)

Gary collected the fish with a long-handled net, the kind for butterflies or scooping leaves out of pools. “He really hit.” Captive, the fish held very still. Only when he took it in his hand did it come to life again, wanting to wag itself away.

“Yeah!” Simon shouted. “I’m the
man
!” His face filled with the kind of thrilled alarm Kay had seen on him only during chase scenes and the bloodier parts of movies.

“If he’d of hit any deeper, we’d have been cut off this way,” Gary was saying. Kay folded all the way forward and gripped her sneakers, wishing to close her ears. “Because those teeth are sharp.”

“Sick,”
Simon said. “Mom, isn’t that sick?”

“Very impressed.”

Suddenly Kay didn’t like Gary, how he looked cut from stone and how his toothbrush could have touched hers in the bathroom. How her mother looked in his hat. He went on, “Now, this would be a darker meat, which I like, but some people don’t because it’s oilier. Okay, now see where I’ve got him here? I’m just going to reach in there, all right? One, two—”

“Siiiick.”

Kay was hooking and unhooking lures from her laces when Simon’s bottom half stepped into view. He flipped the lid to the cooler, pulling out the last of the soda cans two by two and lining them up along the boat floor as Gary planted the fish, white plastic bagged, into the watery ice.

A few minutes later, she heard it. A crinkle. Might have been only the plastic bag settling. Then she heard it again, louder. Crinkle. Crinkle.

For Kay, the day fell mostly away after that. The waves rolled the boat, and the boat rolled the cans, and parts of her rolled too. She had to pee. Simon had had to go earlier, and Gary had shown him where he could do it off the side. “The burden of our sex,” her mother said. Kay hadn’t been around boys peeing before, except maybe when they were small and she didn’t remember. Not like she saw anything, only the way Simon stood with his back to her and didn’t talk while he was going. Then Gary went too, and the sound of his pee stream was louder than her brother’s.

She had to go so bad. The boat lurched. All of her lurched. The plastic bag crinkled. She wondered, because she hadn’t seen, which lure the fish had chosen, feeling it was more her fault if he’d liked her earring. She could hear him, twitching, through the quarter-inch space below the lifted lid.

Nothing of the day would stay with her as much as that cooler and its faint but awful rustling sound. It was the sound she’d hear, the small coffin she’d think of, whenever she saw another of these blue-and-white coolers, packed with ice and glinting soda cans, at picnics, at field hockey, the whole next year at school.