Exiles (33 page)

He remembered the evening in Kathmandu when he and Alex were out walking Wayne Lee and saw the plane flying in. Alex said she’d switched sides, that she used to think the plane was normal
and now she could relate to the goat. It seemed that whichever place Peter inhabited, the other felt more like home, as if hereafter he would live always in exile.

When he thought of Alex, his eyes grew hot again. He stepped into an alley and walked to the end, where there was a dumpster. He leaned against the grimy wall across from it and lowered his head. The trash smelled of ether from rotting vegetables; that was a little better. The alley’s walls rose up like canyons to a bright band of sky, but between the walls it was dark and cool. All it lacked to make him feel more comfortable was a pack of feral dogs.

Everything had been an emergency lately, and even though he’d worked enough ERs to know how to function in emergencies, he was not functioning well anymore. All these years of waiting and he would have to wait longer still; it was excruciating, like waiting for pain to stop and not knowing when or if it would.

After a few minutes a metal door by the dumpster swung open and a busboy brought out a bag of restaurant trash. The kid had pimples and long, pale arms. He looked at Peter and his eyes narrowed a little, in disgust or confusion or fear; then he put the bag in the dumpster and went back inside. Peter figured the next person to come through the door would be the manager, asking him what the hell he was doing, so he walked out of the alley and onto the street.

He found a park and sat down in the grass under an oak. He wanted to sleep, to just keep sleeping, but he knew sleep would be hard to come by for a while. A tabby cat was stalking the birds in the next tree. The cat wore a collar and a tiny bell, but it had learned to move so that the bell stayed quiet.

Peter didn’t want to see the cat catch a bird, so he got up and left the park. On the way home, he came to a clot of traffic in the street, two cars together in the middle, others crawling out and around to pass. A fender bender. A couple of guys in their thirties had climbed out of the crumpled cars and were screaming at each other, raising their arms like enraged chimps. They looked demented.
They had new cars, they had insurance, they had money, everything would be fixed. Peter couldn’t figure out what the hell there was to yell about.

He walked up the hill to where the road ended. A cable was strung thigh-high between bent poles, and a trail began on the other side of it. He climbed over and followed the trail up to the ridge. From there, he could see the bay to the east, blue under a blue sky, two bright mirrors with a strip of land between. He sat down, but he was restless and soon got up again. He thought about calling Mina back, but he wasn’t ready. Anyway, it was the middle of the night in Kathmandu. It hadn’t been that long since her call, so apparently she wasn’t sleeping either.

He walked back down the hill into town and found a store. He bought rice and lentils, thinking
dal-bhat
might somehow conjure a time when he and Alex were happier and felt more at ease in the world. When he got to the house, Alex was still snoring softly in her room.

Ben came home from school at about 4:30, ate a snack, and plopped down in front of the television to play video games. He sat there, mesmerized, clicking away with his thumbs while various engorged-looking creatures blew one another to bits on the screen in front of him. There were beautiful woods outside, and trails, and nothing in the streams that would kill you. No armed bandits roaming the hills to kidnap you or make you join them and carry a gun. Peter wanted to pick Ben up and throw him out the door. But it wasn’t his house; Ben wasn’t his son. Peter asked him to turn down the sound, then went into Alex’s room and sat down to read, so he’d be there when she woke up.

He was making the
dal-bhat
when Connie came home from work. Alex came out and helped Ben set the table, but when dinner was served Ben took one bite of it and put down his fork.

“It tastes like dirt,” he said. Connie apologized to Peter, but Alex smiled, which as far as he was concerned made the meal worth it.

Ben went off somewhere with friends after dinner. Peter sat with Alex for a while, but by 8:30 she had conked out again, so he joined Connie at the table. She got them a couple of beers.

“Your son is a lard-ass,” Peter said. “He’s going to have diabetes before he’s thirty.”

“You’re welcome to step into the father-figure role anytime. Cody’s trying, but he’s two hours away.”

“Cody? Whatever happened to Don?”

She sighed. “I got tired of feeling I had to dress like a hooker to make Don happy.”

Peter smiled. “Did I miss this phase?”

“Jesus, you don’t remember? I was always in some getup that made it look like my tits were about to leap out and launch themselves at Russia.”

“That’s quite an image. Sorry.”

She glared. “Oh, you can laugh, it’s funny now.”

“You’ve always accommodated your men too much,” said Peter.

“Like you, you mean?”

He looked down at his beer sheepishly. “I know I haven’t been the easiest guy to have around.…”

“Forget it,” she said. “Given the situation, you’re practically a prince.”

“That’s a lie, but thanks.”

“What are sisters for, if not to lie to you when you need it?”

Connie was forty, with frizzy hair and a comfortable, well-rounded figure. She still had a trace of the South in her speech, and Peter liked hearing it. In Jackson, where they’d grown up, their mother taught high school English. She’d become friends with Eudora Welty after their father had removed a precancerous mole from the writer’s shoulder and they’d gotten to talking about writing and teaching and the importance of not ignoring melanoma. Miss Welty, as they called her, would on occasion read her work to their mother’s class, though when she was older she gave it up,
noting with her usual polite candor that most of the kids didn’t actually seem to give a rat’s behind—her term—about what she had to say.

Connie took a drink of beer and looked at Peter. “You going to call Cheryl?” she asked.

“If I tell her what happened she’ll just scream at me, and the worst part is she’d be right to.”

Connie spoke quietly. “Has anybody ever told you you’re kind of a fuckup, bro?”

He rested his elbows on the table. “I appreciate your pointing that out, but you didn’t really need to.”

She looked out the window for a moment. “Do you ever wonder how much of our screwed-up lives had to do with Dad and Mama?”

“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?”

Their parents’ lifelong war had had roots in both disposition and politics. Their father was a courtly conservative who cared deeply for his children and tended his patients with consideration and skill, but who frankly didn’t give a damn about anyone he didn’t know personally, which meant 99.9 percent of the world.

Their mother, by contrast, had a variety of causes going all the time, and was always expressing outraged sympathy for some endangered species, tribe, or wetland. She was sincere, her heart good, but these obsessions left her without much time or attention for her own kids. Her attitude seemed to be that there was plenty of
real
trouble in the world, and that whatever petty problems they had—say, eating on a given day—they’d best work out for themselves.

When things progressed from cold war to hot war, Connie and Peter would retreat upstairs and shut the door so they didn’t have to listen to it. They couldn’t imagine why their parents had married at all until they got into the family papers one day, compared Peter’s birth certificate to the marriage license, and did the math.

“You’re not completely unlike Dad,” Connie said. “Thank God you’re not a Republican, but you became a doctor, and you’re kind
in the way he was. You also suffer from the same sorts of anxieties.”

“I didn’t know he
had
anxieties.”

Connie just stared. “When you dropped out of college and became a climbing bum he went on Xanax for months.”

“Probably more because I’d dropped out than because I was climbing,” he said. “Though I’m kind of touched, postmortemly, to hear it. You don’t know how fucking hard it is to be a dad until you become one.”

She smiled. “Anyway, I visited their graves last year.”

“You didn’t tell me that.”

She nodded. “I think they’re finally at peace with each other,” she said. “All it took was dying.”

Since Peter wasn’t sleeping anyway, he started pulling a few night shifts in the ER at Marin General to help Connie with the rent. It was, if nothing else, perversely comforting to be reminded that there was plenty of suffering to go around.

Alex’s eighteeth birthday came, so Connie baked a cake. They all ate some and sang “Happy Birthday” to Alex, who indulged them with reasonably good humor.

Afterward, Connie took Ben to a movie so Peter and Alex could have the house to themselves for an evening. They made popcorn and built a fire, even though it was late summer and still warm out. Alex climbed onto the couch, curled up, and leaned against him.

“You’ve become a cat,” he said.

She made a sort of purring noise, her first attempt at a joke.

“See, this is normal,” he went on. “Popcorn, fire, cat imitations.”

“Extreme hyperglycemia from the cake,” she added.

He put an arm around her shoulders. “Still don’t want to talk?”

“It’s not anything a father should hear,” she said quietly. “I’m telling Edelstein. Let’s leave it at that.”

“Those guys are going to be in jail for a long time,” Peter said. “I hope somebody fucks them up the ass every day they’re in there.”

“If I could pay to make it happen, I would.”

She sighed. “We’re kind of vindictive, you know?”

“Are we?”

“Don’t you think we are? Is this a family trait?”

“I think it’s a
normal
trait, under the circumstances.”

“We’re melancholy in the same ways too, aren’t we? I mean, before this.”

He thought about it. “I guess maybe so,” he said.

She started eating the popcorn; apparently there was nothing wrong with her digestion. “I should write Devi,” she said, “but I don’t know where to send it.”

“Send it to Sangita; she’ll know what to do. I should put in a note for Lama Padma too.”

“If he’s picking up our vibes these days he’s probably having a heart attack,” she said. “How is it with Mina? You guys barely talk.”

“We’re working on it,” he said. “We just need time.”

They sat quietly, watching the fire. “Speaking of forgiveness, sometime I want to see Mom,” said Alex.

“Were we speaking of forgiveness?” he asked. “Is Edelstein planting crazy ideas in your head?”

“What’s the alternative, seriously? Spend your life crazy with rage at everyone who’s ever done something bad to you?”

“It’s always worked for me.”

“Yeah, but Dad, it
hasn’t
,” she said. “You see that, right?”

He looked at her, too stunned by this insight to speak for a few moments. “You’re way too grown up for somebody your age,” he growled, finally.

“For that I blame you.” She took his hand and held it to her cheek. “Do we have anything else to eat?”

“There’s a fridge full of steaks with your name on them,” he said. “Want one?”

“Yeah.”

He started the grill. She ended up eating two of them, with baked potatoes and a protein shake. Afterward, she noticed the weathered old basketball goal out over the garage, the hoop hanging down a little dejectedly in the front, the net half shredded.

“Is there a ball to go with that?” she asked.

He found it, flat, on one of the shelves in the garage. There was an old bike pump and a needle, so he filled it. It held the air. She bounced it on the cement, tentatively.

Her arms were still thin. She missed shot after shot, and Peter could tell she was getting pissed off. She finally sank one, and then another, and then after a couple more misses, a third.

“Edelstein tells me you’re quite the hotshot these days,” she said. “Saving lives left and right where lesser mortals fail, or something.”