Lost Art of Mixing (9781101609187) (18 page)

When Tom was young, his family used to go to a lake in Vermont every summer for two weeks. They would arrive, Tom blasting out of a car that had become stifling during the last few miles, as his father drove with the windows rolled up against the dust of the dirt road. And there it would be, a circle of blue surrounded by trees, the air suddenly, startlingly clear. Cousins and summer friends would come out of the cabins and run down the steps and they would all disappear into a world of cattails and rowboats, wooden docks and cannonballs into early morning water so cold it stole your breath.

Over the years, those two weeks had served as chapter headings in his life. His first broken bone (arm, rope swing). His first fish (trout, slamming about in the bottom of the boat, anger coloring the taste of its meat; he would try it later that evening and never eat trout again). His first sighting of a female breast (his older sister's friend, whose bikini top had miraculously disengaged in a dive into the water, allowing a stunningly generous portion of flesh, a shell-pink nipple, to appear for a moment before she dunked, with a scream, below the surface). His first sexual experience (sixteen; Julianne from the next cabin over). The only time his father had sent him home (see above). The first time he beat his aunt at poker. The last time he saw his grandfather—the chapters over time creating a coherent plot line for his life.

For some reason, everything seemed so much clearer when he was at the lake. Tom had tried to talk about it once to his father, who had misunderstood and gone on a long tangent about weather patterns and a lack of pollution. But that hadn't been what Tom meant. For Tom, life in the city was full of patterns so complex you could never see the separate strands. But the cabin never changed; it was the place he returned to, judged his own progress against its sameness—the unexpectedly tall top porch step that tripped him as a toddler later becoming a comfortable resting spot for his long teenage legs as he sat on a Fourth of July watching the fireworks. When he returned after his freshman year in college, he came to see that porch step as a joke played on every newcomer, whose eventual instinctive adjustment to its height would be a sign of their true inclusion in the tribe of summer people.

The cabin had held the shape and color of his childhood, had given a wholeness to the intricate relationships that were his family. Tom wondered now, if his father hadn't died and the lake tradition with him, would Tom have completed a circle, returned and seen the porch step with the eyes of a father, worried that his own toddler would trip?

Behind him, Tom heard Isabelle picking her way along the rocks toward the water. She came up and put her hand on his shoulder.

“Feeling better?” she asked.

Tom took a long, steady drink from the beer bottle.

“Isabelle,” he said, as he put it down on the driftwood log, “I think I know what we should do.”

•   •   •

“YOU MUST HAVE BALLS
the size of Georgia peaches.”

Chloe stood in the restaurant kitchen doorway. Tom could see the after-lunch cleanup going on behind her, but no Lillian in sight.

“Chloe,” he began.

“We trusted you. With Lillian. Do you remember what that means around here?”

“Would you just let me try?”

Finnegan came up behind Chloe.

“Chloe,” he said. “Lillian doesn't need a guard dog.”

“I don't either,” Chloe snapped.

“Okay, then.” Lillian said as she approached, wiping her hands on her apron. She was beautiful, Tom thought.

“Back to work, you two,” Lillian directed Chloe and Finnegan. She stepped outside, closing the door, bringing the smell of lemons with her. Tom could feel in his bones how much he wanted to be part of the clear, citrus world in front of him.

“They really need to figure that out,” Lillian said, gazing over her shoulder toward the kitchen.

“Would you come with me?” Tom said. “There's something I'd like to show you.”

She turned to look at him. “We've done this before,” she commented.

“There are three of us now.”

“There were three of us then.” Her voice was sad but firm. Lillian the teacher, the girlfriend, had always been calm and understanding, her insights a river you could flow into, float down, knowing you would be taken care of. This new Lillian's river had muscle, a destination. Life on this water would require different skills, but you'd get somewhere, he understood as he looked at her.

“Yes,” he said. “Different three.”

She nodded, and went inside, closing the door behind her. Tom thought that might be it, that she was gone, or at best he would have to wait until the dishes were washed, the last of the leftovers covered and set on the shelves in the walk-in refrigerator. But then she stepped out, a jacket around her shoulders.

•   •   •

THEY DROVE FOR AN HOUR
, the car silent. Tom could feel the words jostling about inside him, wanting to come out, but they all felt tainted by the things he hadn't said. Two months ago she had offered him the gift of herself, of the baby, and all he had done was look for the price tag, to see how many memories it would cost him. So now he matched her quiet as they drove along the highway, then onto a winding two-lane road, and finally down a long tree-lined lane to where it ended and opened at the edge of a bay.

Lillian looked at him appraisingly, but Tom just got out and pulled two paddles, a blanket, and a cushioned seat pad from the trunk and walked over to a red canoe that lay on its side, locked to an evergreen tree. Lillian got out and watched as he took a key from his pocket and undid the canoe, pulling it down to the rocky shore and placing the cushion on the bow seat.

“Can I ask where we're going?” Her hand resting on her stomach.

“Not far. It'll be safe; I grew up doing this, remember?”

“That was a lake, in the summer. The water was a bit warmer.” But he saw a smile swimming below the surface of her expression. He knew she was remembering—a late morning in her apartment, Federico sautéing trout in the restaurant below. Tom lying next to her, telling her about trying not to catch fish as his father pretended not to notice. She had relaxed into the stories of his childhood and they had opened to let her in.

“We'll stay close to the shore,” he said.

•   •   •

SHE SAT IN THE FRONT
of the canoe, her back to him, the green-and-black-plaid blanket across her lap, the paddle resting lightly in her hands. The water was quiet around them, the ink-dark evergreen trees rising up on the hills around the bay. Tom's paddle met the water, sliding back, pushing the canoe forward. On the second stroke, Lillian's did the same. Tom angled his blade to steer their course, keeping to the shallows where they could look down and see the rocks that would later, at low tide, be dried by the evening air.

Tom looked at the straight line of Lillian's back, the movement of her arms, strong from years of mixing and kneading. He could just see the rounding of her stomach as she shifted her body into each stroke. The canoe rocked gently, and Tom wondered if the baby could feel the motion. He wondered if a baby that had spent its gestation on the water would love boats later, or perhaps simply come into the world believing it was as peaceful as everything that had come before. It would be nice to think so.

They rounded a finger of land that stretched out into the bay, creating an inlet on the other side. At its head was a single cabin, the lights on.

Tom steered the canoe down the inlet; Lillian turned her head and gazed over her shoulder at him, questioning.

“It's ours,” Tom said, letting his paddle rest across his knees.

“Just us,” he added. Lillian looked at him more closely.

“Well, almost,” he said, embarrassment running through his voice. “I mean, I did promise her visitation rights.”

“Who?”

“Isabelle.”

Lillian's smile spread slowly across her face.

“Might there be a bed in that cabin?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Good,” she said. “Paddle on.”

F
innegan Short had grown past his name by the age of six, muscles and bones racing in a sprint to his eventual six-foot, seven-inch height. By the time he was eight years old, he had stretched into the world of adults. He would try to play with children his own age, folding his legs like an origami crane, curling his spine, lowering his head. But it was never quite enough. It didn't matter how excited he got, whether he used the same vocabulary as all his friends or crashed his Hot Wheels cars with equal enthusiasm—there was something that happened when his long fingers reached out to fix the racetrack that was laid across his friend's living room floor, when he extended a seemingly endless arm to catch his car before it skittered under a couch. Whatever his actions, the body he did them with screamed grown-up, invader. His only option was to go where his height dictated.

Finnegan's parents were mountain climbers; at night, they told their son stories of mountains in foreign lands, about the decreasing amount of oxygen in the air as you ascended, the way it affected your heart and clarity of thought. It made sense to him; there was a straightforwardness to life lived down among children that disappeared in the altitude of grown-ups. In the upper climes of maturity, Finnegan found, the issues were the same as where he came from—a desire not to share, a burst of love or hate, an overwhelming sense of fear or anger or despair—but with adults, it was as if they were talking through oxygen masks; you had to concentrate hard to understand what they were really saying.

Which was perhaps why Finnegan began to listen so carefully to the conversations of grown-ups. If he was quiet enough, he could observe unnoticed; the irony was that while his height made him obvious to children, his youth made him invisible to adults. From his vantage point he learned the rules of their interactions, saw how the language that ran underneath their words tended to hold the meaning. The drop of a gaze, the pulling back of a foot, the leaning forward of a chin. The hugs that weren't hugs, just shoulders meeting, hands patting backs in silent, mutual applause. Sometimes Finnegan wondered why adults used words at all. Some days words seemed more like clothes, created to distract attention from things you didn't want other people to notice.

Finnegan's parents were an exception, however. Perhaps it was all the ascents they had done, inuring them to the effects of thinner air, strengthening the muscles of their hearts; perhaps, Finnegan would think, years later, it was the simple fact of facing death more often than others that made them approach life with such joyful honesty. All Finnegan knew, and all he wanted to know, was that he was loved without question.

•   •   •

DURING HIS CHILDHOOD,
there were only a few places where Finnegan did not feel tall, but one of them was his home. Finnegan's parents ran a climbing-gear company in Boulder, Colorado, and their house was an extension of their business, the ceiling in the living room reaching twenty feet into the air, one wall lined with windows, the opposite side set up with climbing routes. Almost as soon as he could walk, Finnegan found himself in a harness, heading upward. He never had the heart to tell his parents that he was scared of heights, that even his own altitude was almost more than he could bear—that the best part of climbing, the only part that made him continue, was the feeling of their arms around him when he landed back on the ground. For that, he would go as high as they wanted him to.

Afterward, they would sit on a blanket on the wide-plank wooden floor of the living room, eating peanut butter sandwiches and drinking milk or coffee from blue metal camping cups, and his mother would talk about the mental puzzle of making your way up a difficult wall or how miraculous it felt to have the tips of your fingers and toes holding up the weight of your body. On Saturday nights, they would set up a tent in the middle of the living room and his father would tell tales of fearless climbers and evenings in base camps, of the way a lamp could light up the inside of a tent and make it feel like home in the midst, or perhaps because of, the wind and the cold outside.

Unlike his parents, Finnegan was not fearless, and the thought of ever losing them felt like a hole where his lungs used to be. When his mother or father was off climbing a mountain, he would replay their stories in his head, but there were never enough to make up for the absence. At the next picnic in the living room, he would clamor for more, fingering the climbing-chalk bag attached to his belt, pretending that he was putting the stories in there, where they would always be safe and close to him.

After Finnegan's birth, his parents had agreed they would no longer climb mountains together, one of them always staying behind. But when Finnegan was fourteen, they were offered an opportunity to climb Everest. They gazed at their son, by that time taller than either of them, his face showing the early signs of a mustache, and accepted. It had been so long, and look, there was Finn, as grown-up as anyone you could imagine. The storm that swept their base camp and stranded his parents beyond the reach of help was heralded as a great tragedy for the mountaineering community.

Finnegan refused to comment when the press, hungry for the emotional story in the orphaning of a freakishly tall adolescent—How would he ever fit into life without the guidance of his parents? What did he think of their leaving him? Would he ever be able to forgive them?—rang the doorbell and took pictures through the giant living room window. They waited outside the house for days without ever catching a glimpse of the boy-man they sought.

The neighbors, who had promised Finnegan's parents to keep an eye on their son while they were on Everest, were overwhelmed by caretaking of this magnitude. It was Finnegan's father's sister who arrived and took over, chasing the reporters away with a vocabulary worthy of a shipful of sailors.

“We're the only two left of our tribe,” she told him after the last reporter was gone from the front lawn and she had shut the door. “All the rest went and got themselves killed.

“Sorry,” she added. “I'm not really used to being around people. Your dad always said I was missing the filter on my brain.”

She was shorter than Finnegan and had to crane her head back to see into his eyes, but she did just that.

“Do you want some scrambled eggs for dinner?” she asked. “I can't really cook, but I can do that.”

•   •   •

AUNT AILIS WAS A
technical writer for a software company in Portland, Oregon. She was as wide as Finnegan's father had been wiry, loud where he had been contemplative. And she definitely was missing her filter. She said what she thought—sometimes, it seemed to Finnegan, before she thought it, her comments flying so fast and far beyond social convention that he caught himself looking for their jet trails.

“For Christ's sake,” she told the funeral director who came by to offer his services, “what would we need a coffin for? His parents are popsicles. And when their bodies are found, they'll be burned.”

Finnegan could see the reactions on people's faces, the shock they quickly tried to hide when Aunt Ailis would make one of her comments. They saw his aunt as someone devoid of sensitivity; he knew by the way their hands would flutter in his direction, as if trying to shoo her words away from him. They would change the subject, talk about flower arrangements, grief counselors, the solace of knowing someone you loved died doing something that brought them joy, talking in their smooth, soothing voices, so much like vanilla pudding that Finnegan wondered if they had to be refrigerated at night.

They thought he should be taken away from her, he could see that, too, in the way their shoulders inclined toward him, but not so much as to take responsibility for doing anything about it. He was glad of the latter part. In an odd way, it was a relief being with Aunt Ailis. She said what she thought, her body mirroring her words. She didn't expect him to agree with her, or even want him to, for that matter; it was obvious she had given up on the idea of anyone doing that years ago. As a result, Finnegan felt his own mind open and walk about, finding its way into thoughts that felt real or true or good to him.

“Your parents were idiots,” Aunt Ailis had said that first night at Finnegan's house. “What were they thinking?”

She looked at him over the plate of scrambled eggs.

“But they loved you. How can you fit both those things in one mind? I wish there was a way we could look in people's brains and see how they do it.”

Finnegan nodded. He wondered what his own brain would look like now if someone scanned it, whether grief would be green, anger red, fear a neon orange. Or maybe the colors wouldn't stay separated; maybe that's how all the emotions fit in one brain, and it was only people who needed to compartmentalize them. Maybe it was okay to be sad and scared and angry and lonely all at the same time—if he could be all those things without having to choose, then maybe his parents could have left him and loved him without choosing, either.

Aunt Ailis took Finnegan with her when she went home to Portland. She asked him if he wanted to keep his parents' house, for later. He looked at the walls, the grips, the ropes, and said no. So they sold it to a retired circus performer, who happily told them that he planned to recreate the big top within the high walls of the living room. Finnegan thought his parents would have liked the idea of their house turned into a giant red-and-white-striped tent, filled with dreams of trapezes and elephants and the occasional clown, all of them together, sheltered against the cold and the wind.

•   •   •

BOULDER HAD FELT
like a wide-rimmed teacup, held in the benevolent hands of the mountains that surrounded it. Portland was more like a game of hide-and-seek, a city nesting at an intersection of rivers and roads, covered by bridges and rain clouds. Finnegan missed the big, wide sky of Boulder, the way the thinner air seemed to require more space, spreading out blue and clean. At Aunt Ailis's house, which sat a scant eighty-three feet above sea level, the air was thick and rich and green; it made his lungs heavy.

Finnegan told his aunt he was a runner, although that had never been true before. Running seemed the only way he could bring back the slightly breathless feeling of his childhood. He dug through his boxes and found an old pair of tennis shoes and set off early in the mornings. His long legs took him far from Aunt Ailis's house, but she never commented, just replaced one pair of shoes with another as he wore through them. He ran through that first summer, his stride lengthening with the days, taking him along rivers and into rambling parks with trees that towered over his head and made him feel, finally, small. In the fall, he ran after school and even though the cross-country coach approached him, he preferred to be by himself, if for no other reason than the team never ran far enough to get him past the weight of his own lungs.

He ran his way around lakes and up hills and through the canyons of downtown buildings, through the end of middle school and into high school. Aunt Ailis said some people just took longer to acclimate.

•   •   •

A COUPLE OF BLOCKS
from Aunt Ailis's house was an old, decrepit relic of a house. Its once-white paint was peeling off the wooden siding, the windows were covered by red curtains now faded to pink by the sun, which must have taken decades, Finnegan thought, considering how little the sun ever seemed to find its way to the Pacific Northwest. The garden was wild, untended, a rummage sale of rhododendrons and dandelions. Finnegan had seen evidence that someone lived there—a newly delivered telephone book disappearing from the front porch, although not immediately; a light at night behind the heavy curtains upstairs. There was much speculation among the neighbors, but not a one of them had had any contact with the inhabitant over the past ten years.

And then, one autumn day some four years after he moved to Portland, Finnegan went by the house on his way to school and saw an ambulance in front, two men carrying out a frail woman on a stretcher. Not covered; he could see her face, her eyes looking around her with a kind of marvel in them. The paramedics put the woman into the ambulance and shut the doors, and Finnegan went on to school, thinking.

There was no sign of habitation for weeks after that. Rumor traveled around the neighborhood; it seemed that once the door to the house had been opened, news followed. The woman, it turned out, had been moved to an assisted-living facility after the hospital. Her name was Maridel House, an appropriate surname for someone who was known for nothing other than the residence she lived in.

Every day, Finnegan walked by the House house, and every day his steps took him a bit closer—to the edge of the sidewalk, then onto the front lawn, where the tall grass soaked his shoes and left his socks damp for the rest of the day. By the second week, he had ventured as far as the porch; by the third, he was trying windows, the back and basement doors, one each day—a game of roulette.