by Pete Fromm
DAY 9
Taz stands in the kitchen, two in the morning, awake since the last feeding, Midge quiet in her room at last. His eyes scratch as if bedded in gravel. The car seat’s on the table, empty and ready, as if they’ve someplace to go. Yesterday’s coffee sits cold in his cup, but he thinks about it, looking around, the light from the bare bulb dangling from the last of the knob and tube, scalding. The computer sits open on the table, waiting, the screen gone blank. She’ll be awake, hungry, in another few hours.
He does the math. Ten o’clock at night, still the same day. New Zealand, land of his father’s dreams, twenty hours ahead. He sits. Taps the mouse. The screen lights up, Skype still sitting there waiting. They’re online. He takes a breath and makes the connection. He has no idea anymore what hours they keep.
But his father answers, his face pixilated on the cheap screen. He grins, calls, “Serena!” and his mother dodges in over his shoulder. They’re both still dressed, so.
His mother says, “A girl?” Her smile so wide. Their first grandchild. Their only. “Come on,” she urges. “We’ve got money on this.”
Taz says, “It’s a girl.”
She whoops and, even as the loser, his father cries, “Good on ya’!” as if he’s lived there all his life. Taz has seen neither of them since his father packed it in, his original escape to Montana—a career building log homes he’d pretended were for the back-to-nature crowd, not just the impossibly wealthy—no longer far enough, not, as he said, with a second Bush junta. He’d abdicate, he declared, and by god, he did, dragging his wife with him, landing on the same Tasman Sea beach Taz had been nicknamed for, a place his father had seen forty years before, a seed finally taken root, building one last cabin. If Taz lets him get going, like a broken record he’ll get into the conspiracies, how ICE will stop him at the borders, his name on some blacklist, an adversary too dangerous to ever let back in. His mother, if she gets a chance, would only say something quietly about the astronomical airfares.
Now she has to say, “Taz?” twice, bringing him back, and when he looks, she smiles, asks if he can hold her up to the screen. So she can see.
“She’s sleeping,” he says, and he can see them start in on their own calculations, realizing it’s the middle of his night. His mother leans closer, studying him. He should have at least patted down his hair. She says, “How’s Marnie?”
They’ve never met her. Were waiting for them to make the expedition to the antipodes, those plane tickets light-years further away from him than his parents.
They’d only ever, he realizes, seen this jerky, grainy image of her. Like she’d never even been real.
Under the interrogation light hanging overhead, he takes a catastrophic breath, lets it out. “Dad,” he says. “Mom.”
DAY 30
Taz leaves the clinic, Midge strapped into the car seat. He walks out beside the emergency doors, still getting used to the floating feel of pure exhaustion, a fever kind of thing. The doctor had greeted him like a cheerleader, told him how great it was to see the two of them again, to see them doing so well. Taz had no recollection of her whatsoever, even when she showed the marks on her charts from the two-week checkup. She showed him her new marks, told him what a great, great job he was doing. “Job?” Taz said. She assured him the nights would improve, that her tummy was too small to hold eight hours of nourishment. “Each day will bring a little progress,” she promised, and pointed again at her ballpoint dots; height and weight both on the overachiever’s side of the bell curve. Midge’s eyes followed the doctor’s finger. She blinked at her light. Milestones toppling like dominoes. Simple things, Taz tells himself, but he smiles as he wrestles the belt around the car seat, runs the back of his finger down her cheek. “Can you believe it, Marn?” he says.
He turns the key, works the gas, five quick pumps to get it to fire, the roar almost hiding the phone’s beep. Her mother. Clairvoyant, checking in for the first time. But she’d given him the time, weeks, a chance to catch his breath, maybe get his feet under him. He cranks down the windows, puts her on speaker so he can get rolling, pour some air through the cab, the heat wave and fires hanging into October, longer than anyone could have guessed, the sunrises still blazing, Taz and Midge, on their schedule, catching almost every single one.
He tells her mother the doctor’s assessment, says, “I’d let you talk to her, but she’s doing another sudoku right now.”
Her mother gives a short, staticky laugh, hard to say how forced, then says, quietly, “You sound better.”
“Better?” Taz says, a word he can barely recognize. “I don’t think,” he says, “I mean,” and he manages, just barely, to switch his I to we. “Do you think we’ll ever really be that?”
“Ever is a dangerous word, Taz,” she says, and realizing just how hard she’s trying, he almost has to pull over.
“Has she let you sleep yet?” she asks, more clairvoyance.
“The doc said she will. Eventually.”
“She will,” Lauren says. “There isn’t a teenager on the planet waking every two hours.”
She tries that little laugh again, and he pictures her alone, her phone pressed to her head. For the first time ever, he wonders if she has friends. People she sees every day. Who call now and then, check in on her this way. At least sit on her porch.
“Lauren,” he forces himself to say. “How have you been?”
There’s silence, then she says, “Oh, you know, just following the headlights.”
He does pull over, wonders if it had been passed down, or up, Marnie’s line in the dark patches, her promise that even if they couldn’t see past the headlights right now, they could still make the whole trip that way. Hell, Taz, we are the headlights.
A car zips past, and he looks up, wonders where he is. A maple-lined street, trim old bungalows. Almost home.
He thinks how many more years Marnie had following those lights with her mother than with him, how much more experience Lauren has as the single parent, how much more prepared Marnie would have been for this than he is.
“Yeah,” Taz says. “We’ll make the whole trip.”
There’s a noise, a muffled bark. A laugh? A sob? He hears the draw of breath. “Are you back to work?” she manages to ask.
“Soon,” he says. “Marko’s trying to give me time, but they’re starting to get houses closed in, and, well, pretty soon we’ll be starving.” He trails off, remembering Marnie poring over plans with him, laughing at people’s tastes, or saying, “Hmm,” tapping her finger against her chin, her lips. “Maybe we steal this?”
“And?” her mother says.
Taz edges back into the street, makes the last corner, almost home. “I’ve been looking around,” he says. “Day cares. Nannies.” All lies. Just the word nanny almost cracks him up. Mary Poppins floating down, saving the day.
“Taz,” she says, “You know I . . .” She leaves it at that.
He does know. She’d move. In a minute. Would be happy to. Is dying to. To have this new Marnie to raise, some reason for each next day. Same as him. “I’ll let you know,” he says, and pulls into his drive. Tells her he has to go.
DAY 35
Taz lies under the apple tree, Midge on his chest as he explains the tree house plans. He points into the branches, the blue stronger beyond them than through the smoke haze at the horizons. He hears the crunch of footsteps in the drive and slows the rattle of terms he’s been rolling off: balcony, French doors, louvered cupola, widow’s walk. Anything he can think of, like a conversation. Maybe, he admits, just white noise, something she might drift off on.
He listens to the steps come closer, up the side of the house, toward the shop, the two of them. “I wanted eyebrow dormers,” he whispers, “but your mom says that’s just showing off.”
Then he’s quiet, not looking, hand still pointing up into the air, until he hears, “Taz?”
It’s not Rudy, or any of the others who keep dropping by, Hards, the Sirens, even Marko. Jus
t checking in. “Just passing by, you know, so . . .” He turns his head, lowers his hand to shield his eyes.
“It’s Ron,” the silhouette says. “Ron Berquist.”
Taz sits up a bit, shifting Midge to his lap. Big house on a corner lot, a real renovation, not a remodel, ten-inch mahogany crown molding, Ron one of the good ones, wanting it saved. Marn wanted to steal all his plans.
“I tried calling,” Ron says.
“Phone’s been on the fritz,” Taz says.
“Well, Nicole and I, we were wondering if you’re available for a little more work.”
There’s just the slightest edge of uncertainty, a note Taz can pick out anywhere now. So, he knows. Taz raises an eyebrow, waits.
“Just a pair of doors, front and back,” he says, rushing a little. “To match the others. They look so good, we can’t really hang on to the last two old ones.”
Vertical panels, oak, quarter-sawn. “Usually they jazzed up the exterior doors a little,” Taz says. “The front anyway. A mantel maybe. Glass. Sometimes sidelights.”
Ron says, “We’ve got an old stained-glass window we’d like for the front door.”
Taz says, “Of course you do,” and Ron smiles. “When are you looking for them?”
“There’s no rush.” Ron steps closer, looks at Midge. “She’s beautiful,” he says.
“We’ve been discussing tree house plans.”
“She’s got big ideas?”
“Well,” Taz says. “She’s particular. Gets it from her mother.”
He and Marn had barely started on their own house when Marko sent Ron and Nicole over to discuss their renovation plans. They’d looked around the wreck of Taz and Marn’s place, maybe wondering if Taz was really the guy they wanted working on theirs, but smiling at them, like they knew what it was like to be just starting out, when tearing down plaster could be like a date.
“Taz,” Ron says, struggling for a name, and Taz says, “Marnie,” and Ron puts a hand up to his cheek. “We just feel horrible, it’s just not, we’re so sorry, we—”
Taz pushes himself up the rest of the way. “Thanks,” he says. “I’m on child duty this afternoon, but I could come by tomorrow, take some measurements.”
Ron says, “Really?” then, as if he can’t risk letting Taz get away, adds, “You can just follow me straight home now if you want. I’m heading there for lunch.”
Taz looks around the yard, cannot spy an excuse. “Okay,” he says. “We’ll be right behind.”
Nicole is home, caught off guard, sputtering through more of the same condolences, but she’s more than happy to take Midge for a minute, talk about their granddaughter, who is maybe just a bit older, almost a year now, and the measurements take only a few minutes, and then Taz is back home, opening the door to his shop, Midge cradled against his chest. He doesn’t even turn on the lights. The tools, all honed and oiled and ready to cut, gleam dully in their places. He doesn’t have a chance, everything set up to be within reach. And even if he just put her in her car seat, set it on the workbench, the planer’s roar, making a rocket launch sound like a sweet nothing, would leave her deaf before she could shape her first word. Lungs too clogged with sawdust to draw the breath for it.
He imagines calling Lauren, saying, “Got a job. Come on out.” Pictures her standing waiting for him every morning with her coffee and cream and two sugars. Such a well-intentioned intruder in the nest they’d built for only the two of them. He brushes the top of Midge’s head with his cheek. “The three of us, I mean. Of course.”
He steps back out of the shop, locks up the door, but still takes Midge out to the hardwoods place. Something will come to mind.
At the yard, he takes Midge out of the car seat, walks her through the recycled lumber piles, mulling through their old, old, oak, real two-inch, all quarter-sawn, the grain hidden beneath the gray and the dust, but still stuff that even rough will cost more than a finished Home Depot pre-hung. He could pull enough extra for a door for their place, too, he thinks. Pad the bill a little. It was Marnie’s idea long before it was his, but still he hears her calling him a criminal, a shady character, someone to watch out for. Punching at his arm, smiling, already fitting the ill-gotten wood into all their plans.
He gets the lot kid to help him load the wood into his truck. Does all he can while still holding Midge, who, truth be told, has had about enough of the sun, the lumber, all of Taz’s plans.
At home, he backs down the drive to the shop, sits behind the wheel, Midge out hard in her seat, mouth sprawled, head down at an angle so severe he wants to tip it up right, though the fear of waking her keeps him from moving a single muscle. Only his heart and lungs, things he can’t control.
He glances in the rearview, the shop looming just as deadly and impossible as it had before, now his pickup loaded with old-growth oak, this ancient wood felled a hundred years ago on the other side of the country, beautiful stuff he loves to touch, run his hands over, his eyes, even as he imagines it standing, arms reaching into the sky, branches waving in breezes that won’t reach the ground.
He looks back down to Midge, her lip downed with sweat, one hand clasping and unclasping in some dream he can’t begin to imagine or decipher. He closes his eyes, still seeing the lumber, the shop, those tiny fingers, the carbide steel tipping each tooth of every blade.
Easing his head back onto the rest, he drifts off laboring over math. Sixty-five hundred rpm, somewhere north of a hundred revolutions a second, an eighty-tooth blade ripping eight, nine hundred teeth into whatever it might touch. Every second.
Jesus, Marnie says, knock it off. She doesn’t go into the shop. Ever. Plain and simple. You’ll be fine.
He wakes to Rudy tapping a knuckle against the side of the truck’s door. Appeared as if by magic, nodding toward the wood in the back, whispering, “Looks like we got work to do.”
DAY 40
Another night from hell behind them, Taz and Midge lie side by side on the floor. Wondering if she’ll ever sleep, he watches the ceiling fan with her. He thinks about dimmer switches. Making the fan rotate even more slowly, each individual blade visible as more than a blur.
He looks over. Her eyes always open, deeper than cenotes, a thing Marnie had always wanted to see. And, in the light of day, she looks so harmless, so peaceful. Really, the sweetest thing he has ever seen. He might even say that if she weren’t his. But, man, nights? Horns sprout. Fangs. Fire-breathing. He’d even called the doc, gotten the nurse, gotten assured that sometimes it’s just an adjustment period, the baby getting used to the world. He looked up colic, closed the computer in horror.
He reaches up, spins the rattle wheel on the mobile bridge above her, a gift left inside the front door one day, a tag, Susan, the woman at the plans exchange, written in after the name, in parentheses, a name he never could have come up with on his own. A never-ending flood. One morning he’d found Rudy sitting on a stack of Enfamil cases. He’d just handed the card back over his shoulder, said, “You remember Mr. Brown?”
“Our math teacher? Hellgate High?”
“Apparently he’s not liking the statistical probability of you feeding her on your own.”
It’s a moment before he hears the delicate tapping at the front door. A pause, then repeat, just a touch harder. Midge’s arms jerk. She blinks. Taz, too. He glances at his watch, stunned to see it’s well beyond dawn, the day waiting out there, Rudy ready to start. Or maybe just another gift.
But Taz can’t imagine moving a muscle, can nearly feel them wrench clear of the bone with the first attempt at rising.
He listens to Rudy mull around, call his name once, too wary of Midge’s sleep situation to dare ring the bell. Taz hears him sit, resuming his vigil. He should become a monk, Taz thinks, something that requires the patience of Job.
Yesterday Taz called Ron, let him know the doors might take longer than he thought. Maybe he should let him and Nicole watch Midge, a surrogate granddaughter. Even if just long enough to rip the stiles and
rails, glue up the panels, get it to the assembly stage, which Midge could watch.
It’s pushing an hour, maybe more, Taz anchored to the floor, before he hears a truck pull in, a door creak. Rudy says, “Nobody home.”
There’s more talking. Marko. Then a knock. Once, twice. Once more. Midge blinks each time, and he prays she doesn’t cry.
She blinks again when the big truck cranks over. Marko and his headers. Before he backs out of his drive, Taz’s phone rings, but he’s already pulled it from the tool pocket of his Carhartts and pressed the silencer. Marko’s name there.
He lowers his arm. Sets the phone on the floor. Nudges it away with the back of his fingers.
Without rolling over, he reaches across and touches her chest. His arms ache, his back, from doing nothing more than not sleeping. He runs his fingers down her side, over the diaper and down her legs, around her ankles, the bottoms of her bare feet, like he used to with Marnie, barely touching. Midge wriggles head to foot. Waves her arms. Kicks.
She about pops out of her skin when the front door swooshes open and Rudy says, “Hey, just, you know, welfare check.”
Taz puts an arm up over his eyes. “Privacy?” he says.
“You alive?”
“Breathing, anyway.”
He feels Rudy step closer, feels Midge squirm under his touch, too.
“Guess you didn’t hear Marko,” Rudy says.
“Who?”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
Taz lets his arm flop to the side, looks over at Rudy.
“You retired now, too?” Rudy asks.
“Maternity leave.”
“And I bet Marko’s all set up for that. Those benefits you must be raking in.”
“Yeah.”
“The kid’s gonna have to eat,” Rudy says. “Once Hellgate’s formula’s gone. Or you’ve done something miraculous with your tits?”