Breakdown Lane, The (20 page)

“A permanent break,” I said.

“Yes, he intended to stay,” India told us. “He said he’d brought everything that he needed and he intended to enroll, I believe along with a close friend of his from New York, whom we never met, after the mandatory three-month period of probation. He made a substantial donation. But though I can’t say there was honestly anyone here who—excepting my son Pryor, who’s rather the alpha male and I think was a little threatened by Leo’s advanced degrees—didn’t like him, we didn’t want to put him through the waiting period knowing we weren’t going to be able to accept him. So he left after, perhaps, a month, and I believe when he wrote last week, he said that—”

“He wrote you
last week
?” Caroline gasped. “We’ve been trying to find our father for months. We’ve been in hell. I mean that. I’m not making this up. Our mother is sick, and we had to sell our house….”

“That was the problem,” said India. “We thought Leo lacked responsibility for dealing with his past.”

His past, I thought. Here we were, fifty percent of Leo’s past, zero percent of his future.

I said, “Thank you. I guess we’ll…walk back….”

“It’s snowing.” India smiled. “You may have noticed. No, it would be irresponsible of me to send the two of you off in this weather and after you’ve had a shock….”

“What did he say?” Caro asked.

“He said, I believe, that he was doing well, that he’d found the place for him, that he remembered us fondly…. I have two grandsons, Muir and Paul, who are about your age, and Jessica Godin, Willow Sweeny, Maggie and Evan Menzies, the Calder boys, and the Ramirez girl—Liliana—they’re all within a year or so of you. You stay with us for a couple of days; get your strength back. Then we’ll take you back to the bus. Do you need money? We can give you passage to the Hudson Valley.”

“We’re okay. We have money,” Caro said softly.

“Then I’ll ask Janet to show you to the little house we keep for guests, unless you want to stay here in the Gathering house. I hope you don’t mind sharing a house; there’s a private bedroom space….”

“No, it’s fine,” I said. “We don’t want to impose.”

We sat facing each other across the pull-down table in the little house, neither of us knowing how to begin or whether it was worth saying anything. Caro finally tossed her head and said, “What does she know? Maybe he meant he’d found the place for him for the rest of his time away, not forever. At least now we know where he is….”

“I’m for we just go home.”

“Well, no, Gabe. We came this far.”

“I got to sleep on it then.”

I pulled down a bed, and heard Caro, as if I were dreaming her, talking on the telephone to Cathy. I heard her leave and return, after trying to shake me awake for dinner. Then, when it was dark in the room, I felt another hand on my shoulder and knew it wasn’t my sister. Jumping up, I almost pulled the bed out of the wall. “Don’t be scared!” the girl laughed. You could barely see her in the dark, but she was the pretty girl from the picture in the computer, Jessica with the long auburn hair. “I only came down here because your sister is watching a movie with the others, and I thought you might like to see the waterfall in the snow. It’s something else.”

If she hadn’t been so cute, I probably would have pulled the blankets up and gone back to sleep. But, while she waited outside in her coat, I got dressed, then followed her along this twisty narrow path she said was a deer track until we could hear the water rushing. “Slow,” Jessica said, holding me back, her small hand on my chest. There was a buck and a couple of does at the waterfall, drinking out of the tumbling water as if it were a bubbler. This was all pretty surreal. I’m standing in the snow, watching deer about six miles from the four corners of Nowhere. “See, they won’t drink from the pool. But the waterfall, they like.” She stepped out into the clearing. “Hi, deer people,” she said, and the deer regarded her gravely with their dark golden eyes. “You better take off, because we’re going swimming.” The deer, in no hurry, ambled up the slope behind the waterfall.

Great, I thought. They’ve adapted to the point that they no longer feel cold.

“Come on,” Jessica said, pulling off her coat and hat and then her sweater. She had on this stretchy sports thing under it. I had such a hard-on I thought I’d stab myself in the intestines.

“Uh, I don’t think I can…. I don’t want you to think I’m stupid…but I don’t do ice-cold water.”

“Neither do I,” Jessica said, jumping in, basically only in her underwear, a jet of steam applauding her entrance. “Come on. You’ll be surprised.” I smelled the sulfur then, and I realized it had to be a hot spring, that the waterfall was runoff from a spring somewhere farther up in the hills. And so I pulled off everything but my running shorts and slid in. It was hotter than a bath. I felt my muscles melt. “There,” Jessica said, “you were so scared. I thought guys from Wisconsin were tough.”

There was nothing else to do. I kissed her. I felt sort of like hell about it, but you don’t jump half naked in a pool with a guy at night if you don’t want him to kiss you; and though I thought of Tian, and my private vow to never kiss another girl, Jessica was so beautiful, and I was clearly not the first person she’d ever done this with. When I ran my hand up her ribs, she kind of sucked in her stomach so I could get my hand under the sports bra. Then, she let her stomach back out and gently moved my hand away. “I like you. But I’m not ready for anything else,” she said. “My parents and I agree.”

“Your parents know you’re here, with me?”

“Sure.”

I thought of her father’s size, relative to my size, and felt like a popsicle stick. Suddenly, the idea of loyalty to Tian and the pull-down bed seemed very appealing. “I got to get back,” I told her.

“Okay,” Jessica said pleasantly. “Isn’t this a cool place?”

“Yeah, but how can you stand the same people all the time?”

“Well, are you with different people every day?”

“No,” I said. “But…well, yeah, I guess that makes sense. You’re with the same people anyhow.”

“See?” She began to climb out of the pool. “Turn your back,” she said, “I can’t put my clothes on over wet underwear.” The thought of her stripping off her underwear behind my back was excruciating. When I turned around, she had her cap and boots and coat on, and I asked her to do the same. She was really a nice kid. I wished she lived in Sheboygan. Her “little house” was back farther in the woods, so she pointed me the way back to the guest place, and I started walking, seeing already I’d left the light on.

But as I got nearer to the guesthouse, I heard voices, muffled but you could tell they were angry, where the path cut to the left away from the waterfall. I veered off, curious. There was a little clearing, but the snow had stopped, and I could see a wide circle of tamped-down grass around a big old oak. There were two people either…well, fooling around or fighting. The one on the bottom was much smaller. Then I heard.

“Let me up, you bastard! I mean it, I’ll scream!”

“Go ahead! No one will hear you,” said the deeper voice.

But the first voice had been Caroline’s. And she did scream. But the scream was cut off, as if someone stuffed something in her mouth. I heard fabric rip. My first impulse was to wade right in there and pull him off her. But the guy was about six twelve, and I had nothing in my hand but my pair of wet gym shorts. Running on my toes, I got back to the little house, rifled in my backpack, and got out the gun. I had to pray to God there wasn’t some obvious way a normal person could tell, in the dark and at a distance, that it wasn’t loaded. My chest literally thudding, I stopped at the lip of the clearing and called softly, “Get off her.” The big bastard rolled to one side, and Caro began to kick and fight, but it took only one arm for the guy to hold her down, easily.

“Who the hell are you? Go away,” he said.

I took a step forward, tried to remember various Mel Gibson movies, and took what I hoped looked like a military firing stance. “Let her go, or I’ll shoot your balls off.”

“Not at that distance,” he said easily.

“Can you bet on that?” I was panting. “After all, you can barely see me, but I can see you perfectly, in the light. That is my sister there, you son of a bitch. And she’s fourteen years old.”

“You said you were eighteen,” the guy scoffed, but he didn’t let go.

“Gabe, he tore my shirt; my lip is cut!”

“Big man!” I said. What in the fucking hell were we doing here? Dipping in the pond and fighting off big, crazed rapists in the peaceful paradise of Vermont? “Big man to cut a little girl’s lip! Get up,” I said, waving the gun enough so the moonlight hit it and it sparkled.

“Okay, man, settle down,” the guy told me, getting up first to his knees, then his feet. Stumbling, with one shoe off, Caro ran to me. “Put down the gun,” he said.

“You gotta be really stupid. I’m from the real world, asshole. I’ve watched a lot more reruns of
Law and Order
than you have. This is a .38. You come any closer to us, and it’ll make a hole in you big enough to throw a softball through. What I want you to do is walk in front of us until you get to the…shed or garage where the trucks are.” He made a fast move toward me, but Caroline tripped him, and he fell, hard, his thigh against a shard of stump.

“Fuck,” he cried. “You know my father owns all this? I’m Muir Holloway!”

“I don’t care if you’re Muhammad Ali! I’m the one who has the gun!” I said.

Grumbling, he began to walk, or limp, along in front of us until we reached this long tin shed. “The key’s in the red one,” he said, turning.

“Stand still!” My knees were rubber. “Caro, go check and see if he’s lying.” Caroline ran, hopping and prancing on one foot.

“They’re in there!” she called.

“Get in!”

“Gabe, all our stuff is in that little shed. My shoe is in that clearing….”

“You have your tennis shoes….”

“And our money, and Cathy’s cell phone.”

“Run and get it then, our bags. That’s all, fast…. So this is what the peaceful life of the commune leads to, you loser,” I said to the back of this guy. I could see his muscles tense and roll under his shirt. The guy probably didn’t need a coat because he had a full pelt of hair. “You know, you’re named for one of the greatest naturalists in history, and you—”

Of course, he wheeled around then and knocked me on my ass. And as I was getting up, still holding the empty gun, he grabbed for a hoe and started to draw back.

Never since that night and never before it have I ever intentionally hurt another person. But I flipped the barrel of the gun in my hand and hit him first across the jaw with it, then when he reached for that wound, across the back of the head. He went down in the straw. I knelt and felt for his pulse, and it was strong and regular.

“My God, Gabe! Did you shoot him?” Caroline cried, throwing our stuff in double handfuls into the back of the truck. “And where did you get a gun?”

“Get in the truck, nimble wit,” I told her, because Muir was already beginning to moan and stir. We gunned it out of there in fourth gear, down through the woods, and drove south for half an hour before either of us said anything.

“What were you doing with him?”

“He said he’d show me the hot pool,” she told me. Must have been the night for it.

“Couldn’t you tell he was an asshole?” I asked, thinking all the while, this is the girl who thinks Ryan, the Were-man of Sheboygan, who says ’Nam, as in Vietnam, so it rhymes with lamb, is a total hero.

“Where’d you find a gun?”

“Did he get to you? Did he rape you?”

“No,” Caroline said. “No, I fought the whole time. Where’d you get the gun?”

“At home,” I said. “In a drawer in Dad’s dresser.”

“
Dad
had a gun?” she whispered.

“Caroline, we don’t even know Dad,” I said, and she started to cry so hard she finally fell asleep.

You get to know far more, faster when you break the centrifugal pattern that holds you in the same routine of things you do and think and believe. In our case, it was more, faster than we ever wanted to know, and we didn’t know anything yet. I called Cathy and told her I was on the bus to New York State. She let Mom hear me say “Hi,” but said my mom had basically been asleep for two days. I was glad of that. She’d never know this.

I drove, so keyed up I could never have slept, feeling like my blood was full of little wires, hearing over and over again the crunch of the butt of the gun against that kid’s jaw. How awful and how satisfying it was. I wanted to be home, and yet I knew that home was changed, forever, if home is something you keep in you, like a memory or an idea.

I drove until morning, until the light hurt my eyes. Then I pulled over in a rest stop outside a town called West Springfield, Massachusetts, and, after locking all the doors, fell down a hole into sleep.

We woke to the sound of a state police officer tapping on the windshield.

The only reason that we are not in foster care in Massachusetts
to this day
is that, if there were ever an Olympics for liars, Caro would medal in every goddamned event.

I’m sort of exaggerating.

But it was tense there for a while.

The first thing the cop asked for, obviously, was the truck’s registration. In fact, the truck had no registration, in the glove compartment or anywhere else. It did, however, have a revolver, in plain sight on the backseat. The guy asked for my driver’s license, which I gave him, but then he asked me to get out of the truck and open the back half door.

“You can’t do that,” I said softly, standing quietly with my hands at my sides next to the truck, adding, “sir.”

“And why would that be?” It was early in the morning, probably not even seven o’clock, and this guy looked like shit, either having just ended a lousy shift or just begun one. His eyes were red and his breath was evil and he wanted prey.

“It’s, uh, and I mean no disrespect, it’s illegal. You have no probable cause to search our car, and there’s nothing in it but our clothes, and it’s a violation of my civil rights. And on top of that, I’m not a minor. This is my sister, and we’re going to my father’s, and he lives right up the road about two towns. But we can’t take a bus until one comes….”

“Why do you need a bus if you got a truck? What if I book you for resisting arrest?”

“You’d have to arrest me first, and…look, I don’t want to say any of this, my father’s a lawyer…” I told him sadly.

Caro leapt out of the truck with cell phone in hand. “The reason the car has no registration is that we’re
supposed
to leave it here to be picked up by Missus India Holloway of Pitt, Vermont. She gave it to us to get this far and we arranged in advance for her grandson, Muir, to pick it up here. Call her. She’ll tell you.” I wondered how she’d come up with this whopper. Caro, as she had probably done more than most people ever do, was just leaning on the arm of lucky charms. It had worked in the past. She smiled winningly and rubbed her eyes. Even I would have thought she was a little doll.

“I have my own phone, young lady,” the officer said, but he didn’t try to open the doors of the truck. This
was
Massachusetts, where they started all this rights-of-people junk. He walked back to his car and I could see him on the radio, then on the car phone. He then tipped his hat over his eyes and seemed to fall asleep while I stood there, unable to move or barely breathe but utterly wretched with the psychotic need to piss. I think police are trained to do this—to foster maximum frustration so that people become crazed and confess to shit even if they didn’t do it. I had to wait his pleasure, and he knew it. My father once said state cops don’t really have to wear black leather gloves. They buy them, themselves, because they like to. I knew if I moved, he’d, like, kill me.
His
gun had bullets.

Finally, he seemed to wake up, to notice us, and he walked back to our car. “I spoke to Missus Holloway’s grandson, and this is your lucky day, because your story checks out. But you can’t leave an abandoned vehicle in a rest area, because it’s going to take them a day to come and get it, so if you’ll just follow me into town, we can leave it in the parking lot at the station.”

“Excuse me,” I said. “Is it okay for me to use the bathroom here first?”

“No,” answered the officer.

So we drove into town, about ten minutes of feeling my bladder fight to pop out of my body, and the cop watched us as we cleared our stuff out of the backseat and shoved it into our backpacks. As it happened, the gun had fallen off and was under the way-backseat, but I could see the tip of the handle from the corner of my eye as I shoved my socks and books and now-dry shorts into my backpack. I wondered if I should lunge for it. My gut said leave it there. It could only get Muir in more trouble, which would be a good thing. The cop then drove us to a diner, where he waited while we bought ham sandwiches, and then he drove us to the bus terminal, where we got our one-way tickets to Peekskill, New York, the only name of a town in New York, outside Manhattan, we could think of.

The first thing I asked Caroline was, “They lent us the truck?”

“Look, I didn’t think he’d
buy
it! I figured,” she said, with her mouth full, “that Muir would go to them with this bullshit story of how you beat him up and we stole the truck. But I took a chance because his grandmother didn’t seem like an idiot. When we left that night, she told him to be careful and take a flashlight. She’d nag him until he told her what really happened, or most of what really happened….”

“That was so likely, Caroline!”

“I didn’t say it was likely! I said it was an off chance. I didn’t think it through that far! I had to do something. You were talking about an illegal search. That’s more balls than I’ve ever seen you show….” She held her hand up as I began to object. “Except out there in the woods. Which I appreciate, of course. God, I don’t have to tell you that. And the gun. Well, it’s basically a collector’s item if it doesn’t have bullets…it doesn’t have bullets, does it?” she asked me.

“No. But I’m completely sure they wouldn’t have seen it that way.”

“Well, like you said, Dad’s a lawyer. Don’t get all dramatic. We got lucky. That’s all.”

I had a headache the size of the Goodyear blimp. “Whatever you say, Caro,” I told her. “Shut up long enough to let me sleep.”

We got to Peekskill and found a bed-and-breakfast place and we splurged on a buck and a quarter for two rooms. I slept twelve hours, during which time Caroline ate two breakfasts, but the lady was nice and saved a bunch of food for me.

The problem was, we were there, in the Hudson Valley, but there’s a lot of the Hudson Valley, and we didn’t know which part of it contained Leo. That night, when we called her, Cathy commented on how tired we sounded. And my mother, now rallying and sitting up and eating miso soup and in her right mind, said, “You don’t sound like you’re having much fun. Let me speak to Jane.”

I said, “She’s out shopping. She’s having this big dinner thing tonight with people who have kids our age.” Couple more days, I’d be as gifted as Caroline. I went on, “Most of what we’ve done is sleep.”

“That’s good,” Mom said. “You’re kids. You’ve had too much going…I’m glad. Kiss Janey for me.”

“We’ll be home…soon,” my voice began to crack as if I were fucking twelve. “We, uh, love you.”

The next morning we had to ask the lady where the bus station was. She told us. It was like, twelve blocks, and she offered to drive us. “I hope you don’t think me out of line,” she said, “but I know you aren’t nineteen. I also know you must be in terrible trouble to come this far alone, young as you are.”

“We are,” Caroline said stiffly, her lip quivering. “I’m just small for my age. I’m…anorexic.”

“I know you’re not,” said the woman. “I didn’t say I was going to do anything about it.”

Caroline began to cry. “You don’t know how far we came.”

The woman didn’t move, didn’t try to hug her or anything, which probably made Caro respect her more. “I can imagine,” she said. “Where are you going?” Caroline kept on crying. Her hair fell across her face, frizzed and helpless-looking.

“We have to find someone. We don’t know where he is,” I said. “Actually, I have no clue. I know he’s somewhere next to the river, because he wrote about it in his e-mails, and we have all of them. We’re really desperate right now, because we’re trying to find him. We have to. He talked about a place called Sunrise…Hill? Road? Crossing?”

“The weavers. Yuh,” she said, “the ones who sell jam.”

“He didn’t say that name. Weaver.”

“No, they weave. They sell weaving, cobweb scarves and afghans and things at the art fair. And jam. They’re famous for their jam. Let me think. Sunrise…Valley. Is that it?”

“Thank you, ma’am,” I said. “That’s it.”

“How do we find it?” asked Caro.

“If you took the bus, you’d take the bus to Irvington, then…but you can’t do that. Let me get my wallet and such…” she said.

“How far is it?”

“Good two hours.”

“We can pay you,” Caro said. “We’ll pay you…what does it cost? The gas? I…really don’t drive. I’m fourteen.”

“Thirteen, fourteen and about a minute, I’d guess,” said the woman. “And no bigger than one. My name is Virginia. I won’t hurt you. Though I reckon if I were you, I wouldn’t trust anyone about now.”

“Look, it almost doesn’t matter,” I said.

“Well,” she said, “I don’t need the money that much. We’ll just call it a benefit of the breakfast package.” She wrapped up thick slices of bread for us, with peanut butter and jam, and called upstairs to her husband, “Warren, I’m going to run over past Irvington. You want anything?”

“We have people coming in at two, and in the Rose Room. I think those need to be seen to,” a gravelly voice called back.

“See to them then, darling,” called Virginia. We went out the back door and got into her Dodge Durango.

The country we drove through was some of the most beautiful I have ever seen in my life. The river birches had their little tongued leaves out, and there were clusters of little purple flowers in the sunny spots, even if there was snow on the other side. We drove up these lanes of sugar maples, and a couple of people waved at Virginia from these little houses that looked like houses never look in real life, white and covered with little lattices and scallops of painted wood, not dirty but shiny white with scallop-shell drives. You could imagine lives in those houses, how even the sweaters would smell clean. You could imagine wanting to hide there. I thought of our house, which to me smelled sort of perpetually like urine.

At Irvington, Virginia stopped at the Central Perk for coffee, and she bought Caro and me each a cup, mine chocolate-toffee with whipped cream. “You look like a toffee man,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Thank you, ma’am.” When she saw me eyeing the slices of lemon cake, she bought a couple of those, too.

We drove up some hills with these fields of horses and their little-legged babies and down into a long valley between two hills that followed a creek.

Finally we rounded a turn with a big square yellow sign that read

BREAKDOWN LANE
.

“What’s that?” I asked Virginia.

“Well, that’s…I don’t rightly know what you call it where you come from—where you pull off when your car’s in trouble….”

“The shoulder of the road,” I said.

“The shoulder of the road,” she said. “I’ve never been out west. Sounds romantic.”

Caroline leaned forward from the backseat. “Do you think he’ll want to see us, Gabe?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Do you think we should call Cathy, right now?”

“Nope.”

“Gabe!” Caro cried, and I don’t know what she expected me to do. I gave her my ball cap, which she stuffed on her head, pulling all her pale curls in a brush out the back of the rim. Then, she sat back and bit her cuticles.

Right below the sign that read
BREAKDOWN LANE
was one of those little clusters of signs on a pole, all pointed in different directions, like a stripped Christmas tree. One of them, which pointed down a gravel road to the left, said
SUNRISE VALLEY, BEWITCHING WOOLENS AND SACRED WORKOUTS
.

“She teaches classes. Dance or some such. And she makes jam I get by the case for my breakfasts. It’s that good. The one, maybe Jane? Jean? I’m not sure what her name is. But she’s the one that makes the jam. I know the mother a little, a Miz Devlin, Claire Devlin. I’ve bought several of her scarves and quilts. Gifts for my daughters in Boston. She has five daughters, and they all have kids and husbands, and then there are other families who all live on the same acreage. Share expenses and such. They built an exercise building down in there they call a ‘kiva,’ as the Indians would. It’s basically a shed with a wooden floor and curved walls. People come from all over…nothing sacred about it if you ask me.”

The shadow was deepening under the maples, some still heavy with wet snow. Virginia stopped at a mailbox and got out of the car, and before she could even get to the walk, a woman about her age but a lot thinner and prettier came out and hugged her. “Virginia Lawrence! What brings you all the way over here?”

“I have two friends with me,” she said slowly, “who need to find a man they think…they think might be living here.”

“Well,” the other woman said, peering at us, me in the front seat and Caro in the back. “Children?”

I got out and stretched my legs. I wasn’t as tall as I would get, but I was nearly six feet. I could see the woman measure me. I looked back at her with what I hoped was a look that said nothing except, we come in peace, like we were aliens. Caroline and I had been like creatures staying out of the light the whole way, and we were at the end of the road. The getting here had been one thing. The being here was another. I looked at her and considered the years between us, the insults we tossed at each other like wads of balled-up paper, the slammed doors. It all seemed like such kid shit. And we weren’t kids anymore. I walked over and got Caro out of the car and put my arm around her neck, trying to goof off a little.

“There’s no Leo Steiner around here,” Virginia said dryly, as she came back to the side of the car. “But up in that house where Joyous Devlin lives, is a man called Leon Stern.”

Leon.

I began to walk, with Caro slipping along behind me on the wet leaves. So did Virginia. “You don’t have to come,” I told her. “We don’t expect you to do any more for us. You’ve done more for us than most of our family, to be honest.”

“No reason to stop something I started,” said Virginia. “What if he’s not the man, your father?”

“We never said it was our father,” Caro murmured.

Virginia smiled tightly. “Lucky guess.”

The girl who opened the door was older than Caroline, maybe twenty. She called for another girl, who was probably a little older than her, maybe…you can’t tell how old women are. Maybe she was twenty-five. “Hi,” she said. “Do…can I help you?”

“Well,” Virginia said evenly, “they want to see Leon Stern. Is Leon Stern here?”