Poe (30 page)

His voice drifts off, and I can see Ernest imagining a much better obituary than the one I currently have filed away in the event of his death.

“But it’s also quite possible they’re clever forgeries,” he adds reluctantly. “I do have a friend who could authenticate the books, but he’s on sabbatical right now in—”

“Let’s just say they’re authentic. If I leave the books with you, you’ll translate them? Unless you have better things—”

But already Ernest is rewrapping the pages in an almost possessive manner. “Of course I will. Much more fun in any case than my crossword puzzles. And if they are genuine, I’ll be immortal in the only realm it matters. Academia.”

“I need to know what they mean—
soon
.”

“You understand normally this kind of undertaking would take months, if not years—but if I scan some of the pages and let Google do the rough translation…”

“I don’t have months, Ernest. I have hours.”

“Well…” he says reluctantly. “I could have some partials done by tomorrow. At least give me a day.”

I sigh.

“There are no shortcuts with these kinds of things, young man.” He grabs my elbow with a surprising degree of strength and ushers me toward the elevator; it’s clear he’s eager to be rid of me so he can get back to the pages. “But I appreciate your keen enthusiasm… Have you ever considered going back to college and actually getting your degree? With your knack for discovering material…” At this he licks his dry lips. “And you will tell me where you found these books, won’t you? Before we’re finished?”

I nod. What’s one more lie added to the others? And in that moment I realize I’m changing in some core inner space I’d never been aware of before. And that thought truly scares the shit out of me.

CHAPTER NINETEEN: REFUGE

T
here is a rustic, lakeside summer cabin that Elizabeth knows of, a friend of a friend’s electricity-free, phone-free artistic retreat that’s only a half hour away. This is where I take them, Lisa in the front seat, saying nothing and staring hard out the window, Elizabeth equally silent in the back, while Amelia happily makes her doll play air guitar for the benefit of Buddy, who’s either really into it (not a single bark or growl since he laboriously climbed onto the backseat) or long past caring.

The cabin is a place they have never been. It goes unsaid, but weighs heavily, that it’s a place Daniel wouldn’t know about.

The road winds through small towns, smaller towns, and then it’s just a few scattered farms with looming red barns. The wind pushes snow across the road, and it snakes over the recently plowed asphalt. The sun is setting behind us, glinting against the ice in the barren trees. I don’t want to stop. Ever. I want to keep going, maybe drive south through the stripped mine towns of Pennsylvania, the Smoky Mountains, and down into the heart of Florida, until we reach Miami—palm trees and Cuban restaurants. I could reasonably kidnap them all, couldn’t I?

Somehow I don’t think Elizabeth would go for it.

But once we get into the backwoods, some of the heaviness lifts. I’ve always found that when life is starting to turn to crap, it’s never a bad idea to change the scenery, if only for half a day or a night. There’s something comforting about seeing different things, different people; it makes life seem less claustrophobic, less pressing. The first
six months after my parents’ death I put ten thousand miles on my Mustang. Sometimes I’d go find a park I’d never been to or a café I’d never eaten at and hang out for the day, people watching. It was good to think that I could literally pack everything I owned in a suitcase and walk away from my life, start again.

“Right here,” says Elizabeth.

We turn off on a road that’s barely a road. The branches are low, and twigs scrape at the sides of the Mustang. Then there’s a clearing and a small two-story cabin. The sagging front porch and unpainted clapboard exterior make it a little too
Deliverance
, in my humble opinion. I half expect to see an overweight man in dirty overalls break the front glass window and aim a shotgun at us.

But Elizabeth sighs with relief. “Here we are.”

I note that the snow is perfectly undisturbed, except for a few deer prints. A good sign. Behind the cabin stretches the lake, a flat expanse of snow-covered ice; wind has created drifts of snow like mini–sand dunes.

Amelia jumps out of the car and drops backward on the pristine snow, waving her arms and legs. “I’m making snow angels!” Of course she’s barefoot.

“Jesus Christ, Amelia, do you not
know
how to wear boots?” says Lisa.

“They make my feet itch,” replies Amelia happily.

Lisa mutters something incomprehensible, but there’s a welcome color in her cheeks as she digs under the car seat for the boots.

Elizabeth notices too and catches my eye. We silently agree that this was a good idea.

“Well,” says Elizabeth cheerfully, stepping out of the car. “Let’s go scare off the bats and get some canned beans going.”

The inside of the cabin isn’t too awful. It’s sparse, the twiggy wooden furniture looks like it’s been feasted on by termites for decades, but there’s a good stack of firewood next to a rock fireplace and no sign of mouse droppings or other critter occupation.

A few trips to the Mustang bring in our essential supplies—luggage, hot dogs, canned beans, instant coffee, oil paint, four loaves of Wonder Bread, two red Maglites, a guitar case, paintbrushes, matches, peanut butter, one ten-inch-by-eight-inch tom (Amelia solemnly corrects me when I call it a drum), marshmallows, hot pepper jelly, one half-empty bag of dog kibble, and my thousand-page doorstop of a novel, “Rasputin: Secret Tsar of Immortal Zombies.” I’m planning to scan it to see if I’ve inadvertently incorporated information that could prove useful, while Ernest’s translating the books.

By the time the sun has completely set, Elizabeth’s got a good fire roaring, the hot dogs are only mildly charred, and we each have a bowl of steaming baked beans, heated up in the cans they came in.

“I don’t want to share a bed with Lisa,” says Amelia, picking out one bean that is too brown (she only likes the light brown ones) and tossing it into the fire. “Her feet are too cold.”

One of the first things Elizabeth pointedly did after we brought the suitcases in was assign rooms. She gets the smallest upstairs bedroom, Lisa and Amelia are to share the other, and I’ve been given a sleeping bag and a place by the fire. I have a feeling it’s quiet retribution for making off with her daughter the night before, but I don’t care. Travel had always been my father’s realm. My family never took vacations together, or went camping, not even a day trip. In a strange way, this is almost fun.

“
My
feet are too cold,” says Lisa. “Yours are like icicles, ’cause you never wear boots.”

“Are not.”

Lisa reaches over and grabs one of Amelia’s bare feet, tickling the bottom. “Tell the truth.”

Amelia falls to her side in a peal of giggles, dropping her beans on the wooden floor. “Icy feet, icy feet!”

“Tell the truth!” says Lisa, laughing and reaching for Amelia’s apparently even more ticklish waist.

Elizabeth shakes her head ruefully. “A waste of perfectly good beans.”

It’s astonishing how easy they are with each other, considering. Like there’s a groove they naturally fall into, a congenial warmth. Long ago I convinced myself that happy families are a myth, a construction that only exists in television sitcoms and syrupy Hallmark cards. It was easier to believe no one is happy than to think that maybe I was missing something. And even though I’m still somewhat on the outside looking in, I don’t mind. It’s enough just being this close. I once had to read a story about a man who made a pact with the devil—he gave up his soul in exchange for a clock so he could stop time at the happiest moment in his life. Of course the man couldn’t choose his happiest moment. There was always something to look forward to—falling in love, marriage, the birth of a child—so the man ended up dying before he stopped time.

I wouldn’t make the same mistake. I’d stop it now, because the truth is I could stay here, like this, forever.

Everyone’s gone to bed, the logs are comfortably smoldering, I’m in my sleeping bag, and at about page 595 of my novel when I hear a creak on the stairs.

I look up. Lisa’s standing on the bottom step, holding a red Maglite. She’s wearing an oversized gray sweatshirt and pair of boy shorts. Impossibly sexy as usual.

“You’re still up,” she says.

“So are you.”

She sighs. “Amelia kicks. I’m going to have bruises on my legs in the morning.”

“I don’t kick.”

“Yeah, well, you’re in deep shit. Surprised my mom hasn’t manacled you to the floor.”

“Trust me, I get that.”

Lisa crosses the room and settles on the floor next to me, hugging her knees. “What are you reading?”

I blearily rub my eyes with my fingers. “Nothing interesting.”

“Looks like some kind of manuscript,” says Lisa, peering at the type. “Your novel?”

“If you want to call it that.”

“I want to read it.”

Sound effect of screeching cars crashing into each other.

“Umm, really,” I say as politely as possible. “You know that would actually take days. Days and days. Long, tedious, boring days. Weeks maybe.”

“That’s
completely
unfair,” protests Lisa.

“Life’s not fair.”

She gives me a look then, a look that sets off more than a few alarm bells, but before I can react she’s grabbed the first two hundred pages. I try to get them back, but she wiggles expertly out of my grasp. I feel like a fourth grader playing keep away.

“C’mon, give it back.”

“No, wait,” says Lisa. “I played my drums for you, now I get to read your writing.”

“Lisa, I’m really not—”

She shushes me dismissively and settles closer to the warmth of the dying fire, holding her flashlight steady to read. I fall back on the floor, lift a cushion, and mock suffocate myself.

While I wait for death to come, I wonder why I really brought my novel along—the odds of it containing any factual information about Rasputin are slim. And scanning it again has only confirmed that it’s not the Great American Novel; it’s not even an averagely acceptable novel—no, it’s a thousand-page albatross that I’ve been lugging around for years, like one of those sad patents for mobile bathtubs and gerbil shirts. Lisa reading even a bit of it is excruciating, to say the least.

“Wow,” she finally says.

It’s an unqualified “Wow,” the kind of “Wow” you say when a friend has just gotten an irreversible bad perm, because what else can you say when it’s horrible beyond fixing, and there’s nothing to do but wait and let it grow out?

“I know,” I mumble from beneath the cushion.

“It doesn’t sound like you. It feels like it was written by someone in their late fifties. ‘Rasputin gazed at the fire; oh, the weight of it, the future, here was the fate of Russia in his hands. Could he heal Alexis, and therefore the nation?’”

“I wanted it to be serious,” I say defensively.

“But then later he’s a zombie killing peasants.”

I groan. “Okay, okay, it’s a thousand-page piece of rambling shit. I admit it. But if I let go, it’s like I wasted two years of my life.”

“Letting go is part of the artistic process,” says Lisa with the optimism of someone who actually has artistic skill.

“Well, the process sucks.”

Suddenly the crackling starts to get louder, and I peek out from under my cushion. Lisa has just tossed a good chunk into the fire.

“Holy crap!” I jump up and—damn!—burn my hand while trying to rescue it. Who knew cheap paper was so flammable?
Snap, crackle, pop
; in goes another chunk. “What are you doing?!”

“I’m liberating you,” says Lisa calmly.

“The way we liberated Iraq; the way China liberated Tibet? Hey, give me that!”

Holy mother of God, she’s got about three hundred pages in her hand.

“Let go,” says Lisa. “It’s time to let go.”

“
Jesus
, Lisa,” I say, really irritated now, and I try but fail to wrestle the next chunk away from her. For a relatively small person she’s pretty strong. Or I need to work out more. Or maybe just work out.

The flames crackle happily like they’re overdosing on speed, and the pages curl before turning to a blackened lump. It’s really kind of
beautiful in a sick way. I can suddenly see the attraction of cremation and funeral pyres; there’s no going back once something is burned. It never felt real, on a certain level, the death of my parents. I tossed my scattering of dirt after their coffins were lowered into the ground, but I never saw their faces, and maybe I should have in spite of what Lucy said. She thought I should remember them the way they were—“The accident wasn’t kind” is how she put it—but a part of me never let them go. I reach my hand toward the fire and let it hover over the pages. See how close I can get before I feel the burn.

“I wanted to make him proud of me, for once,” I say quietly.

Lisa gently pulls my hand back. “Who?”

“My father.” Suddenly the heat from the fire seems to jump—I can feel a burning flickering up my arm, reach into my chest, land in my stomach. I grab the next hundred pages and toss them in. It’s amazing how powerful it feels to pass anger and dip into pure, crystalline rage. “My father.” Fuck it, I grab about five hundred pages and jam them in over the rest of the burning mess. Now the flames are wild, they lick at the top of the mantel—they want to escape, these flames, take a walk, transform everything in their path to blackened soot.