Arcadia (29 page)

Astrid waits beyond the point of comfort to speak. Ever majestic, she is now blinding in her authority. The midwives whom Bit knows in the city speak of her with reverence; it wouldn’t surprise him if somewhere in the world there were shrines with her picture, the way Arcadia had been stippled with colorful altars to Gandhi, Marx, the Dalai Lama. Astrid had her bad teeth pulled in her fifties, and the dentures finish her face the way woodwork finishes a room. She wears long, loose clothes in earth tones that she manages to make elegant. Helle would have been like her mother, if his wife had chosen to share her old age with Bit. But when Grete sits beside her mormor, leaning against her warmth, he sees how his daughter is a second Astrid, leavened with Hannah’s honey. It brushes him, the good feeling that he is sitting in a fold of time.

I wish you could stay, Astrid, he says, surprising himself.

The old Astrid looks at him, her face soft. She shrugs, says, Handy.

Handy is demented. He thinks at night that he’s in Korea, shouts things like
Off to the Repo Depot for you, soldier!
and
Ash and trash!
Everything after his early twenties has been expunged: Arcadia a golden hope perpetually growing in him, his experiments with the doors of perception only glimpses down a long corridor. After his fourth wife left him, only Astrid visits every day. Fat Erik comes three times a year. Old-people garage, Astrid calls the nursing home. But there is a pool, gourmet buffet spreads; it is its own perfect place, in its way.

Into the silence, Hannah speaks. Her hair is still soft around her face, though white. The black dress bags on her, the pearls as sallow as her skin. The only thing I wanted, she says, was to not be a burden. Quick and painless, how I wanted to go.

But the Universe called you back, Astrid says.

For no reason, Hannah says.

You find the reason, Astrid snaps. Finish with the self-pity, and move on.

Bit is so surprised he laughs. Grete begins to cry: So mean, Mormor, she whispers. Astrid ignores them. First, I have hired a nurse, she announces. She is beginning tomorrow. Luisa, her name, a fine lady. When more help is needed, we will hire more help. Second, she says, Ridley, you must talk today to your department and take the rest of the semester off. Third, I have talked to Grete’s school in the city and the school up here. All is settled. She may start on Monday.

Wait. No, says Grete. I have a
life
. I can’t be here. I have college prep tomorrow. Right, Dad? We have to go home.

Oh, yes, says Astrid. Your father has decided. I’m surprised he hasn’t told you.

I wanted to, he says, ducking from his daughter’s glare. But you were out for a run.

No, Grete shouts. I will
not
.

The strange new anger rouses itself in Bit, and he hears himself saying in a tight voice, Grete, outside, now. His daughter shuts her mouth. They walk through the ferns into the Sugarbush, Grete’s face blanketed with darkness. Dad, she says, turning on him at last. Isn’t this already traumatic enough for me?

Since when, Bit says, has this been about you?

I
don’t have to be here. You could be here and I could go home and stay with Matilda. Or Charlotte. Or Harper, you love Harper, she’s a total nerd.

I’m going to need your help, he says.

She looks trapped. But what about my stuff? she says.

I’m heading home tonight, he says. Make a list. I’ll be back when you wake up.

What about school? I’m not going to any shitkicker school. They
can’t
be as advanced as we are. I’m doing precalc. I’ll be
bored
.

It’s only the rest of the semester, baby. Probably.

I can’t. I can’t, Dad, Grete says, her voice sharp. I can’t be in the house. She smells like she’s rotting or something. I can’t be where Grumpy fucking killed himself, Dad, I can’t do it. You can’t
make
me. I’ll run away.

She sees the way he winces. Like Mom, she says, watching him. I’ll run away.

Bit turns. He can hardly see the ground. How did I raise such a selfish child, he says, so quietly he’s not sure she heard him. But when he walks into his parents’ house, he can hear her sobbing, then the heavy front door of Titus and Sally’s treehouse slamming over and over again.

When the others have gone to sleep, Bit takes Hannah’s ancient car. For the first hour of the drive, he loves the violence of the wind through the open window, how it chases off his cloud of dread, but when it gets too cold, he rolls up the window and turns on the radio. Classic rock, apparently, is the music he loved in his twenties. He finds himself singing along in a voice raspy with disuse. The announcer comes on, then three chords that make Bit laugh with surprise: a funk-flavored song, Cole’s one big hit. He’d struggled for so long, had so many bands, and this success out of nowhere had shattered him. He stopped playing music and bought a nightclub. Now he writes monographs on Palestrina, of all things.

At the end of the song, Bit turns off the radio to savor the pleasure of Cole’s young voice. The lights of the city rise in the windshield. He pushes through the flashing streets. There are fewer pedestrians out now that the disease is rushing toward them, and on most faces there are masks like glowing muzzles. He drives into his poorly lit neighborhood. When he steps from the car, he hears the deep, low hum of the city, both growl and digestion. He only ever notices this sound after returning from the quiet of the country.

Inside, the house is cool and there is the sweet rot of garbage he’d forgotten to take out when they left. He does the dishes, pays the bills, redirects mail, turns off the water, sets the lights to turn on randomly at night, makes sure everything is secure.

He takes a cooler of food outside for the family beside the steps. They are under a tarp, in two connected sleeping bags. The heads of the parents curl over the children, two small lumps close together. He watches them for some time and wishes he had the courage to rouse the father, tell him quietly that Grete and he will be gone for some time, to apologize for not leaving food every day now. But he can’t take the risk they’d try to break into the house, to squat there: squatting laws being what they are, it’d take months to get them out. He creeps away, unsettled.

He spends only a few minutes packing for himself. In Grete’s room he gathers everything he thinks she’ll need: the clothes he remembers her wearing recently, the shoes, the photograph he’d taken of her and her mother when Grete was a toddler, forehead to forehead like conspirators. How alike they’d been, two sections of one soul. He takes the stuffed frog from when she was little, knowing she’ll need it. She looks like an adult now, but there is still a sliver of girl in her that Bit would fight to protect: the uncertainty that steals over her when she’s talking about boys, the delight on her face when he buys her anything pink. The moments when the e-reader has fallen from her hands and she gazes out the window, biting the corners of her long pale mouth, dreamy as her mother.

He has been staring for a while at a yellow raincoat when he sees that its big pocket is bulging. He reaches in. When he opens his hand, he finds his own Zippo lighter from so long ago, rolling papers, a huge bag of weed. Something catches like a fish bone in Bit’s throat. It doesn’t dislodge again until he’s a half hour away from Arcadia, the sunrise burning in the rearview mirror. He steers down a long straight road with his knees and rolls a hasty joint and smokes it. When his head swims, he tosses the inch-long roach and the rest of the weed out the window in the direction of a maple thick with crows. A mile later, he goes hysterical at the thought of stoned birds, their wings failing them as they drop lazily from the sky.

The dawn echoes its quiet in Bit’s city-dinned ears. He is making pancakes to wake up Grete and can’t resist gobbling the first four down. Astrid marks Hannah’s medication bottles, and they’re drinking orange juice from powder. It is all they can get anymore, after the citrus blight. He misses pulp and the acid burn of real juice in the throat.

Honeybees, Astrid says out of nowhere.

Honeybees? Bit says. He wonders if this is a rational thought that his pot-slowed brain just can’t digest.

Passenger pigeon, she says. American bullfrog. I am trying to discover what we are, Arcadians. Going extinct. So many of us dead, dying, gone.

We are the dodo, Bit says and laughs. Abe’s shadow moves, brief and cold, over the room.

I’ll say honeybees, says Astrid. You remember before the die-off? Their funny fuzzy bodies. Always, they seemed to me, the symbol of happiness.

I remember, says Bit. But it’s not just Arcadians dying off. It’ll be all of us soon enough.

Astrid frowns at the bottle in her hand. That sickness hasn’t reached us yet, she says. It will be contained. It always is.

I don’t mean the sickness, he says. That’s just a symptom. Too many people, too little land, the oceans polluted, animals dying. It makes me think we don’t
deserve
to be saved.

She puts down the medicine and spears him with her icy blue stare. If this is what you think, she says, I don’t know who you are anymore, Ridley Stone.

He opens his mouth, but finds no words there. In any case, he can say nothing for the bald eagles, the bullfrogs, the honeybees, just now filling up his throat.

The house is quiet, save for the gentle ticking of solar panels on the roof. Hannah has disappeared into her room; Astrid has driven her rented car to the airport, promising to return when she’s needed, damn the fortune it takes to fly these days; Grete has gone for a furious run.

After so many days full of people, it feels good to Bit to have this solitude. He wanders into Hannah and Abe’s little office. It is shining, even the drafting table Abe had used as a desk. Abe kept some of Bit’s earliest photos on a shelf: Verda’s face, reflected again and again in a heap of tarnished silver; Helle standing on the boulder by the Pond, reflecting into two long girls joined at the ankle; Hannah, gorgeous and young and slender on Abe’s lap, both beaming as they hurtle down Arcadia House hill as fast as Abe’s wheelchair could take them.

He reaches out with his finger and brushes Hannah’s cheek. He can’t believe what babies they were. The reaction seems to well up all the time now. A few months ago, walking through the city, in the window of an old record store he looked up to see a huge poster of Janis Joplin with round glasses and feathers in her hair, and almost wept at how just-hatched she’d looked. Now, nestled behind his photos, he finds his first Leica, the one his Kentucky grandmother had sent him. He picks it up, marveling at its lightness. Since he begrudgingly began to use digital cameras, a few years back, began doing more commercial work and less of his own art, his own analog gear has sat neglected on its shelf. He has grown accustomed to the ease of digital life.

He rummages in Abe’s drawers and finds a shoebox of color film. He feels a dizzying upsweep of possibility: the rolls could be thirty years old and useless, true, but the distortion of age could make for the unexpected, the sublime: the emulsion cracked or melted, the plastic fragile and easily rent, the effects unreplicable. In his mind, the images unfold atop one another like layers of translucent tissue: ripples of off-white and red, a watercolor cloud composed from the silhouette of a tree, a bubbled landscape of grasses.

He wants to sing. How perverse, the possibility of beauty, unearthed when he least expected it. That there could be such surprises left in the world. He goes out into the sunlight, something softening and settling within him.

The winter before Leif disappeared was the last time Bit had walked out into the forest. He was usually in Arcadia briefly, to drop Grete off for a month in the summer or to spend a night during a holiday. That time, they had all taken a walk together on the twenty miles of trails that Erewhon kept up. His parents were hale, Astrid and Handy were there, Leif even let them see him smile. Bit pushed Abe easily over the frozen ground, his father turning around once in a while to beam at him, his grizzled beard full of ice. Every so often, employees would whip by, snowshoeing or running or in the sleek black uniforms of cross-country skiers, gliding over the hills like tall skinny birds. Grete was a little girl still, her long legs gawky as a fawn’s. She tried to pack the powder into snowballs and heave them into their faces. Their breath wreathed their heads, the crows shimmered so black they were green. It was just an average afternoon in the winter’s dim at the end of a forgotten year, but that day, everyone was happy.

Now the Pond is forlorn, with its lifeguard chair overturned on imported sand. A kickbuoy between two rocks makes a sad thumping sound in the wind-driven waves. Bit thinks of another man at another pond, long ago; the way Thoreau saw the moon looming over fresh-plowed fields and knew the earth was worthy to inhabit.

Bit is not so sure. Besides, there are no fields here. In what he remembers as the sunflower patch, he finds thirty-year-old trees, more enormous than the trees of his youth, greener, casting deeper shadows: all the extra carbon in the air. He follows a strange metallic scrape off into the brambles and, after some effort, locates Simon’s sculpture for Hannah in a wild raspberry bush. Swords into plowshares, the painful earnestness of the thing. Oh, he thinks, helpless before the squat sculpture. This could be a poster illustrating the early eighties. It is iconic, almost already in silkscreen.

He laughs, and the forest, which he has missed to his marrow, laughs back at him. He feels everything, the birds swinging on the currents of air, the early ferns uncurling, the creatures hunched somewhere, watching him. Faster, almost running, he goes through the woods that were once cornfields. These he remembers as sorghum, the Naturists bending in their sun-bronzed flesh to weed. He emerges onto the edge of the tennis court Leif put in, plunked in the middle of what had been the soy patch. Already, tiny trees have sunk roots into the clay. They stand, brave and budding on the fault line, like a small child’s prank.