Special Topics in Calamity Physics (62 page)

He switched on the radio. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows, so when he shifted gears, the cute burnt toes of the tattoo angel became visible like the edge of a seashell peeking out of sand.

"What was strange," he continued in his buffalo voice, "was that she said
you.
'When
you
get back.' Not when
we
get back. Well, I've been thinking about the
you.
It can only mean one thing. She never planned to return with us."

"I thought you didn't think she committed suicide."

He seemed to tobacco-chew this for a minute, squinting in the sun, shoving down the sun visor. We were speeding along the highway now, barreling through the thickened sunshine and the limp-rag shadows of the trees standing stiffly on the shoulder of the road. They held their branches high in the air—as if they knew the answer to an important question, as if they hoped to be called on. The Nissan was old and as Milton shifted the gears it rattled like one of those famished motel beds one feeds quarters to, a bed I'd never seen first
-
hand, though Dad claimed he'd counted seven within a one-mile radius in Northern Chad. ("They don't have running water or bathrooms, but never fear, they have beds that buzz.")

"She was sayin' good-bye to us during those talks," he said, clearing his throat. "She told Leulah, 'Never be scared to cut your hair.' And Jade. She said, 'A lady should be a lady even when she removes her little black dress'— whatever the hell
that
means. She told Nigel to be himself, then somethin' about wallpaper. 'Change the wallpaper as much as you like and screw how much it costs. You're the one who has to live there.' And she said to me, before the thing about you, she said, 'You just might be an astronaut. You just might walk on the moon.' And Charles —no one knows what she said to him. He refuses to say. But Jade thinks she confessed she loved him. What'd she say to you?"

I didn't answer, because obviously Hannah hadn't said anything to me, not a single sentence of encouragement, however inscrutable and bizarre it sounded (no offense to Milton, but frankly, he didn't strike me as the astronaut type; it was dangerous for a kid that size to float through the shuttle at zero gravity).

"See, I don't want to believe suicide," he went on thoughtfully, "because it makes me feel stupid. In hindsight, though, it adds up. She was always alone. That
haircut
Then, there's what happened to the Smoke guy. And her thing for truckers who eat at Stuckey's. Shit. It was all just sittin' there. Obvious. And we didn't see it. How's it possible?"

He looked to me for help, but obviously I didn't have a decent answer. I watched his eyes ski down the front of my dress, stopping somewhere around my bare knees.

"Any idea why she'd want me to take you to her house?
Alone?"

I shrugged, but the way he asked made me wonder if Hannah, after my flat-falling attempt to fix her up with Dad (mind you, that'd been B.c., or, before I knew about Cottonwood; A.C, or after Cottonwood, I'd sort of decided, for health reasons, she really wasn't Dad's dish), wanted to return the favor and had decided to tuck this sexy question mark of a sentence into Milton's breast pocket, thereby ensuring at some point, in the Big-Bang aftermath of the camping trip (it was a simple scientific principle: after explosions, new beginnings) we'd conveniently find ourselves together, alone, in her empty house. Maybe she'd caught wind of my fixation from Jade or Lu or had figured it out on her own, given my graceless behavior at dinner. (I wouldn't be surprised if all Fall and Winter Semester I'd had bird-nervous eyes: at Mil-ton's slightest movement, instantly airborne.)

"Hopefully, she left you a suitcase full of cash," Milton said, smiling lazily. "And maybe if I'm nice, you'll split it with me."

As we approached Hannah's house, slipping past the pastures, the quiet barns, the horses waiting like men in bus stations (the sun had cemented their hooves to the grass), the corkscrew tree, that little patch of hill where Jade always floored the Mercedes so the car flew over the top and our stomachs flipped like pancakes, I told Milton my account of what happened on the mountain. (As with Jade, I omitted the section where I found Hannah dead.)

When he asked me what I thought Hannah was going to tell me, why she'd led me away from the campground, I lied and said I didn't have a clue.

Well, it wasn't exactly a lie. I
didn't
know. But it wasn't as if I hadn't outlined, in the middle of the night, in meticulous detail, in the library silence of my room, on my Citizen-Kane desk (switching out my light if I heard Dad skulking around the stairs to make sure I was asleep), the Infinite Possibilities.

After laying some groundwork, I'd concluded there were two generalized schools of thought arising from this mystery. (This wasn't including the possibility Milton had just disclosed, that Hannah might have wanted to hand me a few lukewarm good-byes—that one day I'd be strolling Mars, or that I shouldn't hesitate to repaint my house in a flamboyant color since I was the one who lived there—stale, crumbly, oyster-cracker phrases she could have easily said to me as we hiked the trail. No, I'd have to assume what Hannah wanted to tell me was entirely different, more vital than anything she'd whispered to the Bluebloods.)

The first school of thought then, was that Hannah wished to confess something to me. It was an attractive idea, considering her hoarse voice, moth-moving eyes, the fitful starts and stops of her sentences as if she were operated by sporadic electricity. And
what
she wanted to confess could be any number of things, ranging from the crass to the crazy—her Cottonwood habit, for example, or an accidental affair with Charles, or that somehow she'd managed to kill Smoke Harvey; or perhaps she'd cultivated (another one of Jade's shot put accusations, flung out with all her might, then forgotten as she strolled back to the locker room for stretches) a secret association with the Manson Family. (Incidentally, I still had Hannah's copy
of Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night
stored in a bottom desk drawer. My heart had stopped when I'd overheard Dee mention in second period Study Hall that Hannah had asked her Intro to Film class if anyone had removed a book from her desk. "Some bird book," Dee said with a shrug.)

If
this
thesis was true—that Hannah had hoped to disclose a secret—I could only surmise she chose me to confess to, over say, Jade or Leulah, because I looked unthreatening. Maybe she sensed, too, I'd read all of Scobel Bedlows Jr., his essays on judgments; basically, you weren't allowed to have any so long as "devastation was directed inwards, at yourself, never other people or animals" (see
When to Stone,
Bedlows, 1968). Hannah also seemed to have had an innate understanding of Dad and perhaps she figured I was already a highly forgiving person, that I did my best to treat shortcomings like hobos I'd found dozing on my porch: take them in and maybe they'll work for you.

The second school of thought, and obviously the more disturbing one, was that Hannah wanted to disclose a secret All About Me.

I was the only one, out of all of them, who hadn't washed ashore and been collected by Hannah after some tempest of a home life. I'd never run off with an old Turk, tried to throw my arms around the torso of a trucker (and strained to touch my hands together on the other side), suffered a street-life blackout, had a parent who was a junkie or in maximum-security prison. I wondered if Hannah knew a secret that revealed me to be like them.

What If Dad really wasn't my dad, for example? What If he'd found me like some penny on a public promenade? What If Hannah was my real mother who'd given me up for adoption because no one wanted to get married in the late eighties; everyone wanted to go roller-skating and wear shoulder pads? Or What If I had a fraternal twin named Sapphire who was everything I wasn't—gorgeous, athletic, funny and tan with a carefree laugh, blessed not with an Osmium Dad (the heaviest metal known to man) but a Lithium Mom (the lightest) who slaved not as a vagabond professor and essayist, but was simply a waitress in Reno?

Such paranoid What Ifs caused me, on more than a few occasions, to run downstairs into Dad's study and quietly rummage through his legal pads, his unfinished essays and faded notes for
The Iron Grip,
to stare at the photographs: the picture of Natasha at the piano, and the one of her and Dad, standing outside on a lawn in front of a badminton net, holding racquets, arms pretzeled, wearing antique outfits and expressions that made them look as if it was 1946 and they'd survived a World War, rather than the year it
really
was, 1986, and they were surviving the Brat Pack and Weird Al.

These frail photographs cordoned off my past again, made it staunch and impermeable. I did, however, venture asking Dad a few off-hand yet probing questions, and Dad responded with a laugh.

Dad, on Secret Bastard Siblings: "Don't tell me you've been reading
Jude theObscure."

Milton had no further light to shed on this conundrum—why Hannah had singled me out, why I wasn't with them when Charles, trying to ascend a jutting rock promontory in order to get a sense of direction, perhaps spot an electrical tower or a skyscraper sign for a Motel 6, "fell down this Grand Canyon sorta thing and started to yell so loud we thought he was bein' stabbed." After I finished telling Milton the remainder of my story, which had drooled a little into my confrontation with Jade in Loomis, he only shook his head in bewilderment and said nothing.

By then we were inching down Hannah's deserted drive.

For lack of a better plan—embarrassingly inspired by Jazlyn Bonnoco's
Fleet Book Evidence
(1989) —I suggested to Milton, maybe Hannah wanted us to find a clue in her house, a treasure map or old letters of blackmail and fraud—"something to tell us about the camping trip or her death," I explained—we decided to peruse her possessions as discreetly as we could. And Milton read my mind: "Let's start with the garage, huh?" (I suspected we were both afraid to enter the actual house, for fear we'd find some specter version of her.) The wooden one-car garage, standing a decent distance from the house with a flabby roof, crusty windows, looked like a giant matchbox that'd been in someone's pocket too long.

I'd been worried about what had happened to the animals, but Milton said Jade and Lu, who'd hoped to adopt them, found out they'd gone to live

with Richard, one of Hannah's coworkers from the animal shelter. He lived on a llama farm in Berdin Lake, north of Stockton. "It's fuckin' sad," Milton said, pushing open the side door to the garage. "Because now they're gonna be like that dog."

"What dog?" I asked, glancing at Hannah's front porch as I followed him inside. There was no POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape on the door, no immediate sign anyone had been there. "Old Yeller?"

He shook his head and switched on the light. Neon light spilled through the hot, rectangular room. There wasn't space for two tires, much less an entire
car,
which explained why Hannah always parked the Subaru in front of the house. Heaps of furniture—blistered lamps, injured armchairs, carpets, chairs—not to mention a few cardboard boxes and random camping gear— had been brutally tossed on top of each other like bodies in an open grave.

"You
know," Milton said, stepping around one of the boxes. "In
The Odyssey.
The one always waitin' for his master."

"Argos?"

"Yeah. Poor old Argos. He dies, doesn't he?"

"You want to stop please? You're making me . . ."

"What?"

"Depressed."

He shrugged. "Hey, don't mind me."

We dug.

And the longer we dug, through backpacks, boxes, armoires and armchairs (Milton was still fixated on his suitcase-full-of-cash idea, though now he figured Hannah could have stuffed the unmarked bills into seat cushions and goose-down pillows), the more the experience of digging (Milton and I, cast as unlikely Leading Man and Woman) became sort of electrifying.

Scrutinizing those chairs and lamp shades, something began to happen: I started to imagine myself a woman named Slim, Irene or Betty, a dame who wore penciled skirts, a cone bra, had zigzag hair over an eye. Milton was the disillusioned tough-guy with a fedora, bloody knuckles and a temper.

"Yep,
just makin' sure the old girl didn't leave us somethin'," Milton sang cheerfully as he gutted an orange couch cushion with the Swiss Army knife he'd found an hour ago. "No stone unturned. Because I'd hate her to be an Oliver Stone movie."

I nodded, opening an old cardboard box. "If you end up a well-publicized mystery," I said, "y
^ou
no longer belong to yourself. Everyone steals you and turns you into anything they want. You become their cause."

"Uh huh." Thoughtfully, he stared down at the cottage-cheesed foam. "I hate open-ended stuff. Like Marilyn Monroe. What the hell
happened?
Was she gettin' too close to somethin' and the president had to shut her up? That seems
crazy.
That people can just take a life, like it's—"

"Free fruit."

He smiled.
"Yeah.
But then maybe it
was
an accident. Stars align a crazy way. Death happens. Could just as well've been the lottery or a broken leg. Or maybe she had a thought that she couldn't go on. We all have thoughts like that, only she decided to act on hers. She forces herself to. Because she thinks that's what she deserves. And maybe seconds later she knows she was wrong. Tries to save herself. But it's too late."