Fellow Mortals (3 page)

The creaks finally stop and Nan prays the rosary, counting Hail Marys briskly and efficiently, the words so ingrained they form a kind of silence in her mind. She prays for Sam and Laura Bailey, the Kanes and Carmichaels, the man who cut her off at Stop & Shop, the sick of the parish, the obituary names from the morning paper, Wingnut, and most of all Henry. Bearing one’s cross is a much-neglected art, she thinks, glancing up at Joan, and then she says a prayer for Ava, her own private thorn, a good woman whose only serious fault—domestic inflexibility—irritates Nan because it’s her fault, too.

With the Hail Holy Queen, she wishes for a home, and then she lays her beads on the nightstand, takes a sip of water, and settles into bed with the latest issue of
O
.

3

Laura’s wardrobe burned. The funeral home provided clothes—or had it been him?—but Sam Bailey spent most of last night remembering the wake, unsure if she’d been buried in a dress or a skirt, unable to visualize the style of her hair. Eventually it struck him: she was out there, right that minute, in a coffin underground less than twenty minutes from the motel, her clothes and hair all perfectly arranged and it was possible—unthinkable but possible—to see her face and even hold her hand. And there he sat, sipping soda, flipping back and forth between several different movies, and he couldn’t shake it off until he finally grabbed his keys and got in the car. He drove in a daze, at the very least determined to see her grave—he had no memory of the headstone, either—until the bustle of the town, the high-school students playing music in their cars, the neon colors of a normal Friday night, brought him back to his senses and he skipped the cemetery altogether, returning once again to his room at the motel.

He’s been staying at the Chalet Motor Inn for nearly a month, long enough to feel at home with the green telephone, the wood veneer on the walls, the carpet stain shaped like the birthmark on Laura’s right thigh. The first night of his stay, he found a bat clinging to the air conditioner. He told the owner but the bat disappeared. He’s called the place the Bat Chalet ever since and often remembers the first night in bed, when he was scared he’d feel a flutter if he drifted off to sleep.

He hears a Johnny Cash ringtone playing through the wall, enough to get the song looping in his head, and when a motorcycle roars, he opens his eyes, sees the daylight, and groans out of bed. He walks into the bathroom and the toilet seat’s up. He puts it down, bothered that he’s already lost the habit, then raises it and pees and puts it down a second time. He brushes his teeth, wets his hair, and dresses in the same clothes he wore yesterday.

“No,” he says.

He dresses in a fresh shirt and jeans, takes an awl from his toolbox, and pokes a new hole into his belt. He’s lost close to fifteen pounds and his skin is too pale, but even though his appetite’s been iffy, he decides he ought to treat himself to breakfast, something to commemorate the day.

He packs his knapsack, heaps the bedsheets and pillowcases by the door, ties the garbage bag, and wipes down the counter of the sink. He does a final check for the bat in the air conditioner, and then he takes his bag and leaves, closing the door and squinting in the light. There’s no one at the checkout office. He realizes that he hasn’t seen the owner since he prepaid early in the week—that from now on, he really won’t be around people anymore.

He takes a notebook out of his bag, writes
Thanks. Sam Bailey
, and folds the paper and key into the drop slot before driving off. He orders two egg sandwiches, coffee, juice, and a bag of crullers at a drive-thru and takes his time going to Arcadia Street. He listens to a male and female DJ team, their banter both confident and desperate in its humor, like they know there’s something shameful in their own forced cheer. He turns them off and rolls down the windows, trying to pretend that it’s an ordinary drive.

When he reaches the old neighborhood he parks around the corner and walks the rest of the way, checking each house for signs of life, but he slept so late that it’s already midday and everyone’s at work. He’s so intent on reaching the woods that he’s oblivious to fragments of his home underfoot. Looking back from the trailer, he’s reminded more of anonymous construction sites than any place he once lived, until he notices a seltzer can—one of Laura’s—that must have fallen out of the old recycling bin. He leaves it there and checks the trailer door, where Peg has left a note asking if there’s anything he needs. Wait until she hears he used another real estate agent.

He shoulders his bag and hikes into the woods. There’s no trace of the path he beat the previous day, but he follows the terrain and recognizes garbage: a snack-size bag of Wise potato chips, the heel of a bottle, a forty-gallon oil drum, empty and graffitied with a penis. Several minutes walking and the trash disappears. The trees smell richer and the weeds thicken up. Here and there it’s so dense he has to fight his way through, tripping on the roots and getting lashed around the face, and when he stops to take a breath he can’t see the trailer anymore.

The woods back here used to scare him in the dark. He and Laura hiked it several times and they’d considered—in a playful, mostly Laura-driven way—camping this spring before the bugs got bad. But he had planned to build a fence like the Carmichaels have because at night, when he stood in the yard and looked toward the trees, he often heard sounds and wasn’t sure if they were animal or human. Now the woods are his: thirty acres of undevelopable land, surrounded by hundreds more that may as well belong to him, too, all of it sprawling backwards from Arcadia Street and off toward the long, rolling hills around town.

The land and the trailer cost him most of his homeowner’s policy, but with Laura’s life insurance he won’t have to work for upwards of a year, longer if he’s frugal. He’s been an art teacher at the high school for half a decade, but now a substitute is finishing his classes and he’s glad to put it behind him. It isn’t the kids. He likes quite a few and he’s relatively popular, but he couldn’t bear the adults lurking in the teachers’ lounge, asking how he is and second-guessing all his answers. How’s he doing, is he eating. Is he getting any rest.

“Laura would want you to smile,” a colleague told him at the burial.

He’d always liked this woman, a soft-spoken social studies teacher with a lisp.

“No, you’re right,” he said. “I’ll rent a comedy or something,” and the woman went away looking glad that she had helped. He remembers it now whenever he watches TV. He wouldn’t mind trying a comedy some nights except he always pictures her, sitting with her husband, laughing at a show with her tongue between her teeth.

He reaches a clearing in the trees, a quarter-acre plot of grass and wildflowers with a small, lumpy hillock in the rear. Sunlight flickers through the leaves, dappling the ground with a thousand moving shadows. He can see the open sky directly overhead. On the hill there’s an outcrop of shale, mossy at the base and dampened by a freshwater trickle. Sam sits and eats one of his egg sandwiches, watching titmice and tossing pieces of croissant to some of the squirrels. Minutes pass, possibly an hour, enough to move the angle of the light upon his face. He takes his time standing up, unsure if he’s been dozing. The squirrels are gone. His legs are pins and needles so he tries to walk it off, hiking back farther than he did the day before, looking for the tree he needs so desperately to find.

He has an Audubon guide and spends the day exploring and identifying species. Cedar, birch, elm. Tamarack and ash. He sees fewer and fewer promising shapes the longer he looks until eventually he can’t see the forest for the trees, or the trees for the forest, or a single good reason to have purchased thirty acres. He’s tired from the hike, out of shape and out of food. He left the crullers at the trailer but he can’t bear the thought of walking out without a nap, so he settles on the ground and sleeps much longer than he means to.

When he wakes it’s already evening—an evening much darker in the woods than in the town. He’s up right away, heart jolting in alarm. The rushing in his ears is like the rustles of the leaves. He can’t remember which way is out. It’s got to be less than half a mile west, but he can’t quite determine the direction of the sunset. He rummages around to find the flashlight buried in his bag, thinking to himself,
It’s all right, it’s all right
, because he doesn’t want to say it out loud.

There were times he lost his mother as a child, at the beach or at the park, and he’d been told he once went missing thirty minutes in a corn maze. He can’t remember this—wouldn’t that have traumatized a child, just a little?—any more than he can remember his father, who died in a crash when Sam was only two. But hiking in the dark now, trying not to panic, he’s reminded of the year he lost his mother to an aneurysm. She’d been relatively young and reasonably healthy, and quick as a phone call he didn’t have a parent in the world. If he hadn’t had Laura to support him when it happened … well, he really doesn’t know. But he hadn’t been alone.

The flashlight only makes the situation worse, the focused beam pointing out the darkness all around him, threatening to find something fearsome in the trees. One set of trunks looks the same as any other, but he thinks he knows the way and follows anything that strikes him as familiar. He’s aware of every sound: swishes, snaps, whippoorwills, and insects. A blood-chilling squall he hopes is only a fox. The clouds are breaking up, and now and then he sees the moon passing in the gaps. It’s arresting as it always is, common but surprising, like his own pale face shining in a glass. He thinks of Laura on a moonlit pillow on their bed. On a pillow in her coffin. At the wake and underground.

He sees a maple in the dark, giant and profound. It’s shaped like a Y but the wind has cracked half of it away. The remainder of the left-hand fork juts up, six feet tall and pointing at a bough. At the bottom of the bough, there’s a tiny sprig of leaves. It hovers only inches from the jagged piece of trunk; he can feel it in his fingers, how they almost seem to touch. This is it—how’d he miss it during hours of exploring? Through a thicket up ahead, he spies the clearing where he sat and ate lunch, but he doesn’t want to leave anymore and turns the flashlight off, waiting for his eyes to readjust so he can watch the little sprig when it lowers in the breeze.

4

Henry’s reading the paper out in the yard, a well-groomed lawn with a vegetable garden and watermelon vines. Earlier this morning there was tension over tomato paste, Nan favoring a high-sodium classic and Ava holding firmly to the no-salt variety. Henry was called upon to settle the debate. He knew that Ava’s choice was for the benefit of his own blood pressure, but how could he of all people deny the Finns their favorite—and, it must be said, more flavorful—tomato sauce recipe? Ava left for work in a snit and Henry’s been hiding outside ever since, and despite having sided with Nan, he cowers when the elderly sister opens the door and joins him and Wingnut on the steps.

“Sam Bailey bought the woods behind his property,” Nan says. “My friend Louise plays bingo with a woman whose niece works for a lawyer. The lawyer handled the closing. He’s been staying at the Chalet Motor Inn but checked out early this week. He’s living in a trailer on Arcadia Street.”

“Wow,” Henry says, looking up to see her. Sun glints off the door and forces him to squint. He massages newspaper ink around his neck and feels a clenching in his chest, a physical awareness of the trailer, and the man, less than fifteen minutes from his own backyard.

Nan bends as if her body is a well-made hinge, leaning down to pet Wing without compromising her posture. Henry breathes until the pressure near his heart begins to dissipate. He listens to a chickadee singing from a tree.

“It’s the right thing to do,” Nan says, cleaning another smudge of newsprint off the side of Henry’s forehead. “If you don’t see him now, you’ll both keep dreading it will happen accidentally. You’ll look for him at gas stations, supermarkets, everywhere you go, and when you see him you’ll remember that you never made an effort.”

“What do I say?”

“Say you’re sorry. After that, you’ll have to feel it out. But say and do whatever you have to say and do, because you might not get a second conversation.”

He shuts his eyes and tries to picture it—a trailer on the plot—and then imagines pulling up and knocking on the door. He stands and locks his knees and feels a tingle in his thighs. Nan hugs him with a pat and Wingnut wags, intuiting a car trip entirely from Henry’s body language, and they all go inside and feel refreshed by the coolness of the kitchen.

Joan’s sitting at the table with a thousand-piece jigsaw, a recent gift from Henry, who’s convinced that old ladies love doing puzzles. He set it up this morning right in the kitchen—another thing that irritated Ava, who uses the table more than Henry realized—and then he hovered there and cheered when Joan made her first tentative connection. She checks the picture on the box, a hedge maze with a fountain in the center, mostly shadow, leaf, and sky—a puzzle for legitimate fanatics.

“Look,” Joan says, showing him the six-piece fountain.

“Hey, you’re doing great! You’ll have it done in no time.”

She smiles at his smile, says it’s “wonderfully green,” and recommits with a tremor and a small, fragile sigh.

Henry calls Ava at the lab.

“Lindt Diagnostics.”

“Good morning,” Henry says, thrown as always by his wife’s professional voice. “May I please speak to Ava Cooper?”

“What,” she says.

“Av?”

“It’s me. What do you need?”

“Oh, it’s you!” he says. “Hey. How’s your morn—”

“I can’t talk. Ruby called out and there’s a half-dozen patients in the waiting room.”

“Nan found Sam,” Henry says. “He’s living in a trailer on Arcadia. I’m heading over now. I’ll be home before dinner. If I’m late, start without me.”

“You’re going now?”

“You said—”

“I said you ought to find him. I don’t know if suddenly showing up … How do you know he’s living in the trailer? Maybe it’s construction. He’s probably rebuilding.”