The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories (7 page)

“You should see the wood,” he’d said, a joke.

“I believe it,” she’d said back.

At night, while talking—or, rather, listening—to John, he would return to this surgery again and again, rolling the memory around in his head like a marble. The rhythmic tugging. Their proximity. She had been able to help him, in a concrete way. It had been so simple. At one point he’d reached out, put his hand on her hip to brace himself, and she’d let it rest there. Her skin was warm. He could feel her hip bone in conversation with the rest of her body as she concentrated on her work. When, periodically, she’d reached behind him for the faucet, her loose shirt brushed against his upturned face. Thomas had sat with his eyes closed, his hand more alive than any other part of his body. He had loved the touch of her skin. Sarah was professional and quick, and had patted him on the shoulder when she was finished, the way dentists, postcavity, do. The whole thing was over before it had begun.

Now, in the truck, they were close again.
If you would reach out,
he thought.
If you would just reach out, I can handle whatever’s coming next
. And then she did just that, a quick, darting gesture, her hand on the side of his face, her thumb compressing, lightly, the skin near the wound. Thomas felt her breath on the side of his face. “Not bad,” she said.

He was now going well below the speed limit. He hadn’t seen any other traffic, did not see why this wouldn’t be allowed, but behind him, suddenly, there was honking. He sat up straighter and looked in his side mirror. A red pickup was almost on the gate of his trailer. Thomas slowed even more, rolled down his window, and motioned for the truck to pass. As the driver pulled parallel, Thomas looked over, just in time to see the man in the passenger seat move his eyes from him to Sarah. He was dressed in red and white camouflage. He looked vaguely familiar.

“Do you know that guy?” Thomas said. The truck had slowed to Thomas’s speed. Sarah said nothing. The man rapped at his own window, then made a gun with his fingers and pointed it at the two of them. Then the rust-gutted truck was speeding ahead into the distance, weaving in and out of lanes, as if driving a cone course. “Weird,” Sarah said. They’d been silent while it happened.

“Someone oughta shoot his tires out,” Thomas said after a few minutes.

“Someone will,” Sarah said. “Eventually.”

T
he flowers Joan had bought and placed on the mantel were already beginning to wilt. She turned the vase, stood back, turned it again. Yesterday, she had talked to her therapist about John, hoping he could help her out of what, in the last few days, had become a panic. Children aren’t going to be what you want them to be, he said. I don’t want him to be anything! she said back. Tears again. Some people, he said, just need more time. When she asked him how much time was enough, he fixed her over his desk, and said that was something she ought to think about. “When he talks—what he says—it’s like an infection, like an earache. I can’t get it out of my head,” she said. “It has the ring of verdict to it.”

“But you’ve told me”—here he flipped his notes, to make sure. “The two of you have stopped talking. That he only talks to your husband, now.”

“When we talked,” she corrected. The last time she’d been on the phone with John, the last time he’d asked for her, she had been unable to give him what he needed, and he had said:
I’m thinking maybe you don’t love me
. And at the moment he said it, at the very moment the words were out of his mouth and coiling toward her over the line, it had been true. He had
made
it true. Now, lying in bed, she would listen to Thomas down the hall, saying yes, or no, mumbling inaudibly so it sounded as if the floor itself was humming softly with the murmur of her husband’s voice. Sometimes, unable to sleep, she would imagine John’s side of the conversation, and in her head this would become a conversation between her and her husband, the conversation they never had, a constantly invoked What have we done? To what degree is this our fault? How much longer will this take?

“You’re confessing this to me. He sounds like he’s confessing to you,” her therapist had said. He cleared his throat.

“I don’t think it’s love he’s after,” she said.

“Then, what?”

“It feels,” she said, “more like he’s looking for confirmation. Like he’s . . . begging us. For something. Some confirmation that his problems are bigger than we are. And that he wants us to prove it to him. To confirm it. I don’t know.”

Her therapist had put his pen down, folded his arms, and made a bad-smell face. “That,” he said, “doesn’t sound quite right to me. We’ve only been seeing each other for a few months, and it’s possible I’m not getting a handle on John. But that doesn’t sound quite right.”

This kind man, Joan thought. Letting her talk like this. Of course he wasn’t getting a handle on her son.
They
didn’t have a handle on him. But she hadn’t helped; she hadn’t told this man everything; she hadn’t fully confessed, if that was the right word. She hadn’t told him about the chicken Thomas found. She hadn’t told him how at thirteen, John’s eyes, which had always, she thought, appeared dilated, went hard, and seemed to demand a distance from her that she’d perhaps too easily granted. How, at fourteen, he’d cuffed her left ear and Thomas had had to wrestle him to the ground, and from the kitchen floor, under his father, John had cried until he choked. She’d made Thomas promise never to hurt John again; and then she’d asked him to apologize. He’d done both. And now, when talking to this man, her therapist, she simply described John, growing up, as too observant for his own good, too hard on himself. A boy whose loneliness transformed one day into sarcasm and then into a strange, emotional cruelty. She regretted having only one child, she said. She thought a brother, or a sister, might’ve helped. Maybe they shouldn’t have moved so far away from other people, into the country, like they had done. She was protecting her son from this man, and what he might say. It wasn’t the point of these sessions, she knew that. But just as she was secretly relieved that Thomas hadn’t called the police on John, had acted, in fact, as if he had never set foot in that chicken coop, she took a shameful pride in not giving this man the full story. Mothers protect their sons.

John, at four, giving her a red Play-Doh heart he’d sculpted at school for her birthday, which she’d hardened in the oven and, with a piece of ribbon, made into a necklace and worn on that day every year since. At seven, learning to ride one of their old horses, coming back inside on a fall day, sweaty and elated, asking her if she’d seen him do it. You don’t let go of those things, she thought. You can’t. They don’t release you.

“Joan,” her therapist had said. He wasn’t accusing her of not loving her son. He wouldn’t go that far.

“That’s because it isn’t,” she said.

T
homas’s phone rang as they were pulling into a gas station. The road had widened into a four-lane, and as they’d begun passing little convenience stores, roadhouse bars, and a McDonald’s, Thomas had put the wipers against the snow. Sarah kept her hands in her lap. She didn’t mention the scar again. The storm was picking up but didn’t appear to have the steam that had been promised. The first stoplight they’d come to was near the paper mill, and as they waited for the light to turn, a smell like old eggs came in through the heater. He parked near the pump and cut the engine before answering. “Dad?” his son said. “It’s John.” This was how all their conversations started. As if there could be anyone else who called him that.

“John,” he said. “How’s the driving?”

“I’m about two hours away, I think,” John said. “The snow’s coming down, though. Making it slow. Snow-mageddon casualties. Car crashes. Ascension. Blood on the road, and all that.”

“All right.” Blood on the road? Thomas looked at Sarah. She’d unbuckled her seat belt and was reaching behind her for her coat. Out back, he could hear the alpaca, evidently roused, kicking the side of the trailer.

John cleared his throat. “You in the car?”

Thomas nodded, then remembered he was on the phone. “Groceries,” he said. “Last minute.” He wasn’t going to tell John about Zachary. In the background, Thomas could hear someone else. Or maybe it was the radio. The connection wasn’t good. It seemed, to Thomas, that the two of them were talking through strung-together cans.

“Well, how’s this for a turn of events: Jocey’s not coming. I’ve got her car, I’m driving in it, but she’s not coming.”

“That’s not her in the car with you?”

“No.”

“Everything all right?” Thomas said. “I was looking forward to meeting her.” The alpaca was really kicking now; tin heavy thumps reverberated through the cab of the truck.

There was silence on John’s end. “Bet you were,” he said finally. “My car’s not working right now. You better tell Mom. All that dinner planning and stuff. The agonizing over who sits where. Because she’s Mom.”

“She’s just going to be happy to see you,” Thomas said.

John snorted. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “She’ll probably be happy about Jocey, and the decisions Jocey felt necessitated to make.”

“I don’t think so, John,” Thomas said. “What happened?”

More silence. Then John said, “Ruination.”

Jesus Christ, John,
Thomas thought. John’s car, the one they’d given him, was two years old. “Does she know you have her car?”

“I knew you’d ask that,” John said, and snorted. “Yes, in fact, she does. She gave it to me. A parting gift.” Thomas decided not to answer. John continued: “So the three of us. Maybe you should invite God’s Gift to Medicine for dinner. We’ll see how that plays the second time around.” Sarah opened her door, stepped out, and slammed it shut. Thomas felt his face flush. He watched her make her way into the gas station’s food-mart, and wave at the kid at the register.

“Who’s with you, Dad? Is that her? That her in the car with you? I heard a door slam. Did she hear what I said? Put her on the phone.”

“John, what’s the problem?”

“No problem,” he said. “Why?”

“We’re looking forward to seeing you. Jocey or no Jocey.”

“Well, good,” he said. Then he said, “Here’s a problem. Answer me this problem, if you want. I do everything I can for everybody, and it always fucks up. I do everything I can to get people’s attention, to hold it, and I get nothing.” It sounded to Thomas like John might be crying.

“You have our attention, John.”

“No,” he said. He
is
crying, Thomas thought. But his voice was rising, not getting weaker. “No. All you do is listen and nod. I could do anything. And you listen and nod.”

“That’s not true, John,” Thomas said. “I’m trying to help. If I listen, I’m helping. What do you want me to do?”

John’s voice faded, as if he had taken the phone away from his face. Thomas couldn’t quite hear him. It sounded like he was giving instructions to someone else in the car, but no second voice answered. Then, suddenly, he was back. “You know what I want for Christmas this year? Old times.”

“Old times?”

“You heard me.” John was talking softly now. “I want, fucking, old times.”

Maybe John was drinking. On the road, and drinking. Thomas saw that Sarah was coming back from the food-mart, holding two cups of coffee. He got out of the truck, pointed to the phone, signaled that she should get back in.

“You still there, Pops?” John said. “Still there?”

“I heard you,” Thomas said. He was walking, now, away from the truck, and away from Zachary. The traffic on the road, suddenly busy, made a wet noise that kept him from hearing John clearly. “Old times.”

“That,” John said, “and I want to see that doctor you’ve got above the garage.”

Thomas stopped. He was fifty feet from the road. He looked, saw his truck, and the trailer, but couldn’t see Sarah in the cab.

John’s voice was picking up strength. “Right? Maybe spend the night over there. See if she can tell me why this, shit keeps happening to me.”

Thomas drew a deep breath, and felt the cold on the back of his throat. He shifted the phone from one hand to the other. “I don’t think so, John,” he said, and shoved his cold hand into his jacket pocket. “I don’t think so.”

“And why not?” John said. The radio in his car was suddenly silent. “Isn’t she perfect for me? Isn’t that what you want?”

“No,” Thomas said. “No, John, she’s not.”

“Well,” he said, “I’m single and available, and I’ll be there soon. I want answers. This is fresh stuff I’m talking about here. Heartache. I think we all want answers.”

“You’ve got—” Thomas began, but stopped. His jacket felt tight. He had nothing to say.

“Well, look at that,” John said. “That doesn’t sound like a nod from here.”

Thomas felt a pressure in his ears, a dull pain that began at his jaw and clustered at his temple. He pulled the phone away from his head. John was still talking. For what felt like years Thomas had endured nights of badgering like this, had waded into an endless abyss of silent listening. He’d cajoled and placated John; dodged his accusations, done what he could to mitigate the self-pity and anger as John went up and down, even though it was never clear to Thomas where he’d slipped up as a parent and a friend, where he’d fallen short. He’d come to terms with feeling responsible for things not working out the way they were supposed to. For John not working out the way he was supposed to. He absorbed everything John said like a distant dark star so it wouldn’t radiate any farther than it already did. Beyond that, he didn’t know what to do. But there must be a limit to all of this. He swallowed a shoot of saliva, and brought the phone back to his ear.

“Give me one reason she isn’t,” John said. “I can wait.” There was no mistaking his tone, this time. It was a threat. The texture of John’s voice on the phone sounded different to Thomas—it had become thicker, angrier. Thomas could feel desperation rising in his body. They had been approaching this moment for a long time now, and it had finally arrived. It was clear: this kid—their son—he would take everything if they let him. And he would keep taking. The desperation was turning to panic. Perhaps he and Joan were to blame for all of this, perhaps that was true. Perhaps they could have tried harder to help their son. Perhaps they had tried too hard. But that would have to wait. For now, the connection with John needed to be cut. Thomas looked up the road, back from where they’d come. At the end of it was their home. At the end of it there was a language John would understand. “Because, John,” he said, and took a breath. “Because she’s mine.”