You Could Be Home by Now (33 page)

Then Ali broke out maps, stacks of them, annotated all over. They had nowhere to be and so could travel slowly; make a big-time road trip of it: Santa Fe, the O'Keeffe museum, the Grand Canyon, Arches, a Shakespeare festival in southern Utah. She'd written that paper on Shylock—remember?—but had never seen
Merchant
performed. They could hike the Narrows and Angels Landing, see the Tetons and Old Faithful, maybe do some rafting on the Snake. Come August, they could meet up with her brother in Helena. He'd be going up against the AAA Brewers. They'd score tickets on the first-base line.

And so they packed. Seth started with the books. When they first moved in together, marrying his library to Alison's had felt like a bigger commitment than picking out a ring could ever be. He checked an empty box for damp and slotted the first book in. Alcott, Louisa May. He worked along the alphabetized shelf. Unless Ali made a big thing of it, he'd jettison the volumes under the sink. She was all zeal and sudden energy; they both were. He wanted to ride that, indefinitely, and the sink books would say it was not to be trusted. The box was full by Bambara, Toni Cade. He tore a strip of packing tape and without warning was lit with a feeling so pure he couldn't say where it had originated. Despite it all, they were young. They were American. They wouldn't really be in trouble till they ran out of West.

Five
A.M
. Two hours till Lily's ridiculous crack-of-dawn flight home.
Home.
The word was a glutinous mass in her stomach. School started up in another month. Sierra'd had a whole summer courting people to her side; Lily would have to be strategic. Forest Park Day had a tradition: Upperclassmen never wore uniforms on their first day, and she was a junior now. People would be watching.
Lipstick
's ex-chickadees. Headmistress Brecken. Sierra. Jennifer Vogler, in all probability. She had bitched about the uniforms for years but now she got them. She was still hard at work forming herself. It was patently unfair to expect a visual display of the person she meant to be. Maybe she would wear the uniform. Melt their collective minds, signal that Sierra was the interloper and
she
was the one who belonged. Lily could work the whole Cathy Coed thing. Saddle shoes. Knee socks. Yes.

She toweled off and pulled a striped sundress over her head. Cotton, because she was a paranoid little freaknugget. Organic fibers were best for air travel, the logic being that if the plane went down, synthetic ones would melt into your skin.

In the kitchen, Gran made toast. Lily's hair was still damp and her blow dryer was zipped away in her suitcase. She grabbed a rubber band from her carry-on. She worked her fingers through her hair and twisted it into a pony. She heard Gran say, “Huh. Here comes Benjamin.”

Lily looked out the window. Benjamin Thales, sure enough.

Gran said, “I was teasing him about that giant espresso machine. He said he'd bring some round, start you home with a proper sendoff. Good grief, at this hour.”

Lily smoothed her ponytail and went to the door. She had been thinking about what to say the first time she ran into any of the zillion people who were ticked at her back home. It had to be polite because she didn't want to make things worse. It had to be savvier than social autopilot because what if she said something like
wow, nice to see you
when obviously it wasn't. She was pretty sure she had a line that worked, and here was Gran's would-be
whatever
to practice on. Lily opened the door. She said, “Mr. Thales, what a surprise.”

He held out a trio of travel mugs. Even though it was dead early, Lily had managed lipstick and blush, eye shadow, liner, and a quick coat of mascara. She still felt impossibly bare. It was, of course, the ponytail. Her thing about ponies wasn't just that they were lazy. It was that they made it impossible to hide your flaws. Oval faces turned full-on equine; rounder ones chubbed out. Without tendrils to smooth its angles, Lily knew that her face looked sloped and sharp. Well. It was only the per-vet, and she was almost sixteen. About time she learned to carry herself exactly as she was. Besides, even a pony couldn't screw up her eyes. She had read once that they were the only part of you that stayed the same, their size and shape unchanged from the moment they opened to the day—distant, distant, please distant—they shut for good.

No one in The Commons noticed when the deed of ownership for 16 Daylily Crescent officially passed from M. Rosko to H. Lobel. County Records recorded it, as it had centuries of transactions and transitions, the land claim of Garner Chalk, the ordinary death of his ordinary wife. No one reported on it. The
Crier
had been re­imagined as an e-calendar and weekly newsletter and the Rosko story had nothing approaching national legs. No one was left to ask Lobel: Nicky Tullbeck wasn't digging, not now that the course catalogue for Rice had arrived. And the Colliers were in a grocery store, stocking a cooler with beer; they would cross into Utah tomorrow, camp for a bit around Moab, and Utah was the land of 3.2 percent alcohol by volume. Still, it would have been nice to know. Did Lobel's checkbook open out of kindness? Paranoia? A circling of wagons, or a true belief in what he'd built? Maybe he'd use it in promotional materials. The Commons: so fan-damn-tastic even the founder bought in.

Picnic season, the worst of the heat finally waning: Ben packed the last of the donut peaches and the first of the Honeycrisp apples. Crackers remembered at the last minute and soft, herb studded, spreadable cheese. Sugar cookies sliced from a refrigerated tube and baked at three hundred fifty degrees for fifteen minutes. These, he'd rolled in a mixture of cinnamon and sugar before popping them in the oven. A domestic trick of Veronica's, her failsafe in case of last-minute bake sales, and he pondered the ethics of using it for an excursion with Sadie. It probably wasn't the thing to do, but his life was here now and he had to get on with that life.

Sadie stood at her door, watching him cross the street. He liked that he seldom had to knock. That would have brought back too much of his youth: Ben, as a boy, sauntering up the nervous walk in a shirt that his mother had ironed. No. This with Sadie was something different. For one thing, he did his own ironing now.

“Ready?” Sadie had on funny sunglasses, green and lilting up.

“Yup. I packed a knife and napkins, the whole shebang. Can't have you thinking I'm in this because I can't take care of myself.”

“Oh, who the hell can take care of themselves?”

They took Sadie's car. She was one of those people who actually enjoyed driving. They'd been meaning to have this picnic a long while, but he'd had a hard time pinpointing exactly where they were supposed to go. He hadn't kept the damn
Crier
article, and it was harder than he'd anticipated to track the directions down. Follow the belt route to the northern edge of The Commons. You'll find a shallow box canyon. Park and hike in. In about half a mile, you'll find a stump. Back when it was a tree, it marked the boundary of Garner Chalk's holdings.

They stopped. Sadie's sunglasses gave her an inadvertently coquettish look. I'm out of practice as a flirt, she'd told him once. I met Gary at twelve and never really learned how. I'm fond of you, Ben, but not enough to learn at this late date. Ben liked that about her, that study in contrasts, because she looked the part to string you along. He spread the blanket on the ground. Pendleton wool, itchy and from another life. The blanket unfolding was ripping and intimate and couldn't help but call to mind a bed. When they sat, they kept their spines straighter than they otherwise might have.

Ben scooped up a handful of dust and let it run out between his fingers. “The red earth of Tara,” he said.

“I've never seen the movie all the way through,” Sadie admitted. “I get snippets on TV now and again. Aside from the costumes, I don't really get the fuss.” She opened a bottle of water. He hadn't remembered cups, so they took turns drinking. They caught each other's eyes. The shared gaze was self-conscious, and how could it help but be? They were old enough to know this was the sort of scene they showed in movie previews or used to promote a new brand of antibacterial soap. What a funny thing. The moment was cheaper for that awareness, but sweeter, too.

If they'd been looking—and they weren't—they might have noticed a slight disturbance of earth, a few paces south of the stump. Or they mightn't have at all. It was subtle, a mound of fist-sized sandstones leaning one against the other. But before Ben or Sadie was born, before their parents were, or their parents before them, that stump was a tree and its branches fanned out, casting its shadow a gracious cool. Garner Chalk had stood there, sweating, its shade the only possible place for the work at hand. He wiped filthy palms against his thighs, then fashioned a wood marker, binding its short planks tight with twine. Sandstones secured its base. The rocks were smaller than the rancher would've liked, but the ground was hard and dry and his strength largely spent from digging. The cross was decades gone now, but the rocks endured, and beneath them, in what weathered scraps of calico remained her, lay the bones of Adah Chalk and her unnamed son, cradled quiet in earth that in truth never dressed the set of
Gone with the Wind.

It was dusk when the Colliers passed into Montana. Alison had her feet up on the dash and thumped a drumroll with bare heels. It was true what the license plates said. Big sky country. A thousand blues melded one into the next. Here were clouds, rolling in a thunderous herd. Here were fields burnished by the day's last light. Seth thought
here
. This might be a place for us, its dome big enough for the things we feel.

They found a motel off Highway 15, an off-brand, shingled barn of a place with a politically incorrect totem pole visible all the way from the off-ramp. The room was warm and when the AC kicked on Seth smelled dust. The sheets were clean though and the bed made up with hospital corners. They coupled on that bed, and Alison laughed at the creaking springs that would give them away to anyone who cared to listen. His hands tightened at her hips; she shifted beneath him, then stilled, eyes crinkling at the corners with every breath. In time, with luck and patience, those crinkles would deepen into lines and Seth would learn to love them.

But that would be then. For now he held his wife. For now the sweat began to bead. Together, they held the knowledge, tender and taught, utterly daunting. She'd tossed her last clamshell of pills with their final move-out trash run. The foil accordion of Trojans lay unopened in their suitcase. The thought of it was nearly enough to collapse him unspent. Shift his hips this way and it was one baby; if she bucked to meet him in the moment, they might spark another entirely. And then there was this: Perhaps you were only ever whole for an instant. That cellular moment of fusion: each nucleotide reaching out to find its counterpart, two single helixes spiraling into double. One cell, briefly, then mitosis. One into two, two into four, eight, sixteen. Ali moaned, flushed on her cheeks and on her chest. Amazing. Amazing that you could call life beautiful—and it was—when it was relentless separation upon separation upon separation.

There simply aren't thanks enough for my agent, Ayesha Pande, for her faith in this venture and in its author; I'd accomplish very little without her patience, perceptiveness, warmth, and wit. The same can be said for “Team Truck” at Tyrus Books, Ben LeRoy and Ashley Myers, for their enthusiasm, humor, and keen editorial eyes; this book wound up so much
better
than the one I thought I'd written, and so much of that is due to them.

There would've been no book at all without the extraordinary generosity of my many talented teachers: Kiana Davenport and Anne Greene at Wesleyan University, and Ethan Canin, Edward Carey, Adam Haslett, James Hynes, Marilynne Robinson, and Jennifer Vanderbes at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Copious thanks. Prodigious thanks. I'd list more adjectives, every one of them true, but they also taught me the value of restraint.

Probably the best thing about being a writer is that you get to make writer friends. I am deeply indebted to V.V. Ganeshananthan and Robert James Hicks for their support, both literary and moral, their friendship, and for the way they put up with my intermittent bouts of whining. I'm fueled, as a writer and a social being, by the Wednesday night wisdom of The Guttery, a thriving writers' group that has lasted longer than the average American marriage (at least if Wikipedia's statistics are to be believed). This work owes a particular debt to longstanding and emeritus members David Cooke, Bruce L. Greene, Jennifer Lesh Fleck, Beth Marshea, Lara Messersmith-Glavin, A. Molotkov, Brian Reeves, Kip Silverman, Cameron McPherson Smith, Carrie-Ann Tkaczyk, and Robin Troche.

Thanks also to Sigrid Brunet, who looked at this book earlier and oftener than any friend of the author should be obliged to; Lily's voice especially owes her an
uber
debt. To Rachel Jagoda Brunette, for the constant general support and the occasional specific word. To Cristina Cavazos, who converted me (kind of) to running; I got a subplot out of it and also a really great friend. To the denizens of 40 Fountain, Ben Paradise, Emily Archibald, and Nicky Pessaroff, who have been waiting a long while. To Sophie Bird, who always
gets it
, and then helps me say it better.

To my parents, Steve and B.J. Manaster, for telling me my first stories, and to my sister, Katy Strand, whose willingness to listen encouraged the nascent storyteller in me. Thanks is far too small a word. To my in-laws, Jeff and Susie Alifanz, for their many years of cheerleading.

To my astonishing daughters, Adeline and Elodie, with absolute love. Next book, I'll try to put in the witch and the cheetah that you asked for.

And to my husband, Marc Alifanz. It sounds glib to say thanks for everything, but it's exactly what I need to do here. For your support. For your patience. Your humor. Your taking out the compost and talking me off metaphorical ledges. For your insight and your honesty. For everything. Everything.