Here, his thoughts drifted from his own life to the land around him, to the Gold Rush and dreamers and fortune seekers heading west, all these stories he’d learned in high school: the Donner Party and the Mormons and characters from Steinbeck novels, all crossing over the Sierra Nevada. He imagined how they must have felt at the end of winter when the snows broke, when they were finally able to make their descent; he imagined how it must have felt when they finally lay their eyes on the glittering bowl of the sea. In his tired, half-crazed state, he felt a kinship with them, as if they were one and the same only that he was late, a Century too late because where was left to go once you’d already made it to the sea? Where did you go when there was no West left? Back East? Back to your parents? Back to beg forgiveness from the life you’d left behind?
Eventually, the road descended onto a wide, moonlit plain that stretched away from the mountains and he started across, intent on driving all night, but soon his eyes grew heavy. After another hour, he had to pull over.
He stopped at an Interstate rest station and bought a bag of chips from a vending machine inside the concrete bunker of the restrooms, then he got back in his car and curled up in the front seat, aching for Jen. He wished that she could see him now, contorted around the steering wheel, stuffing his face with junk. He wanted her to know, to understand how badly he felt, but no one was there to witness his wretchedness. He twisted about miserably, then, after a few hours of fitful sleep, he was on his way again.
Sunrise found him in the desert proper. It seemed almost impossible that he was in the same country as the day before, the coastal rainforest having given way to miles on miles of emptiness, to sharp rocks and white skies with the thin line of the road cutting across. Alongside the road were telephone wires strung between forlorn wooden crosses, miles on miles of wire stringing small, dirty towns together like dusty beads of civilization with this roar of nothingness pressing in . . . It made him think about the game they’d played at Jacob’s birthday. What was it? Telephone. Madness, pass it on, he thought. Madness and aliens, pass it on. Weird military shit and surreal psycho acid trip, pass it on, I’m going fucking mental in the desert pass it on.
Every once in a while, he’d pass a dusty old trailer tucked away in a ravine or a small house in the lee of a blackened hillside and think why? Why would someone choose to live out here? What kind of person would go to such extremes for solitude? Then he’d find himself thinking about Annika in her lonely cottage by the sea, Annika who’d seemed so normal and beautiful at first and then he’d think of her thin body arcing upwards towards him on that last night and his mind would go rushing, rushing away along the telephone wires pass it on.
The night before she’d left him, Jen had looked at him with utter contempt and said, “Doesn’t it bother you? That you’re waiting for someone to die?” and he’d felt terrible, he’d felt like the worst person in the world, even worse because she didn’t know the half of it. He’d come clean about the viatical settlement and most of the financial stuff but had lied about who Annika actually was. His face began to burn just thinking . . . don’t think don’t think don’t Annika Annika he’d slept with her he’d loved her told her to die he was sorry pass it on. He drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and ate candy for the rest of the way.
When he arrived in Sedona, his mother greeted him outside the yellow stucco villa she shared with Al. She looked good, he thought, fit and streamlined in bright athletic clothes, her white hair cut into a sleek, stylish bob; the frizzy curls he remembered from his youth long gone. He hugged her tiny birdlike body next to his and felt bad about all the time gone by.
“Oooooo it’s so good to see you,” she said. She kept repeating that he was welcome to stay as long as he wanted. “This is your home too,” she said but of course it wasn’t.
It was Al’s unit in a retirement complex in Sedona and it was nothing at all like the townhouse where Matt had grown up with its wood paneling and rust-coloured carpets and yellow light in all the windows. After the divorce, his mother had always kept the lights on and that’s how he remembered her house: looking back from the school bus window before dawn to see all the windows filled with yellow light. Al’s unit couldn’t be more different. Al’s unit had cool blue carpets and vague watery artwork and Al was fighting a war against brightness, the modern white shades drawn down against the day.
Matt took his things into the dainty spare room. His mother had laid out the towels for him on the bed, as if it were a hotel.
When Al got back from the golf course, he announced that it was happy hour and poured them all drinks. Al put his hand on Matt’s mother’s back and guided her out through the screen door and Matt followed, watching Al’s papery hand on his mother’s back. Al’s forearm was still wiry and strong despite his age and there was a glimpse of blue ink peeking out the old man’s shirt sleeve.
Al was ex-military and still lived his life as if the enemy might swoop in at any moment. When Matt had first met Al, he’d figured it would never last between Al and his mother. He’d figured his mother would never stand for it: this hawkish presence hovering over her, controlling her every move, checking her tire pressure before he’d even let her drive to the store. And yet, to Matt’s surprise, his mother had not only stood for it, she even seemed to like it, submitting to Al’s authority with a kind of peaceful acquiescence. It always made Matt embarrassed to be around. It made him feel like he didn’t know her at all, like he’d never really known her as a person.
They sat out on the concrete slab behind Al’s unit and watched the sun on the red hills in the distance. Matt asked his mother how she was doing and Al answered for her.
Al said that Matt’s mother was going to an exercise class. He said they were planning a vacation to Panama City with friends and that he’d taken her up in a hot air balloon for her birthday and they’d seen the Grand Canyon from the air. He said that she’d enjoyed it.
“It was beautiful,” his mother added and Al put his hand on her thigh.
Matt looked away. He gulped the watery gin and tonic and watched the shadow creep up the hill. He hadn’t remembered her birthday in years.
The following day he came out of the spare room to find they’d already been up for hours. Al was out with his cycling group and his mother was just getting back from Pilates. There were several varieties of cereal laid out for him on the counter and coffee in the pot.
“Sorry I slept in.”
“Don’t be silly. You young folks need to rest. Working so hard all the time. Take it easy. Why don’t you go out to the pool?”
He slouched over his bran flakes. The coffee cups were too small and the coffee was weak and his mother already annoyed him, the way she flit about tidying the already tidy kitchen. He felt like a horrible person for being annoyed.
“The pool gets the afternoon sun,” she said.
He took a shower and shaved his face then came back out to find her reading the paper. She looked up and tilted her head to see overtop her fashionable, pink rimmed reading glasses. “It’s so great to have the pool. Why don’t you go out and have a swim? Go and relax by the pool.”
So he went.
He put on his bathing suit then went out to an inner courtyard surrounded by more yellow villas and concrete slabs and boxwood hedges. A small, liver-shaped pool glimmered in the middle of a white concrete deck ringed with empty lawn chairs. There was no one else around.
When she’d first moved in with Al, Matt’s mother had used the pool as a way to entice them to visit: Jacob could swim in the pool, she’d said. Then, the week they’d come down, Jacob had practically grown fins. He’d barely left the pool at all while his grandmother sat out on the deck in her tilly hat, proudly watching his every move.
Now, Matt jumped in the water and lolled about. He did a handstand in case his mother was watching from the window. It used to be his father that took him to pools, he thought, n
ot his mother. His father used to take him to hotels with waterslides and ice machines and long pink twilights. Now it was his mother who had the pool. He went underwater and opened his eyes, staring up at the shimmering interface where the water met the air, the sky and the red hills just visible beyond the tumbling glass.
When he thought he’d been in long enough to satisfy her, he hauled himself up and installed himself in one of the lawn chairs. He put on his sunglasses, lathered his chest with sunscreen then lay back. He felt restless, like he was wasting precious time there by the pool, yet somehow, he felt like he owed it to her after not coming down here for over a year, before he could ask her for money.
He tried to relax but couldn’t.
Then movement behind one of the hedges caught his eye. Something quick and dry and rustling. He sat upright. Annika, he thought, his heart pounding. It was stupid to think it, he knew, yet that was the first thing that popped into his head: that Annika might have followed him down here. You’re going mental, he chided himself, and had just settled back when he saw it again. Someone really was there, hiding behind the hedge. He was about to get out of his chair and go investigate when a tall, thin old woman appeared between two hedges. She was covered completely in white and tan cotton. A large sunhat and what appeared to be glacier goggles obscured her face. She looked at him, then loped away carrying a small bucket and pruning shears. He shook his head. He felt like he’d landed in outer space.
He sat back and stared at the water, wondering how much time would be appropriate to sit by the pool. The sun was high now and it bounced off his slimy chest, making it glisten as if he were some giant, newly hatched pupae. Jesus. What was it they called them now? The adult children? The adult children that came back to stay in your basement and eat your food and drink your beer? Isn’t that what the big problem was these days? The adult children coming back and tanning their greasy guts by the pool, doing underwater handstands so they wouldn’t feel so fucking guilty?
That night they sat out on the concrete slab again with their watery gin and tonics. The hills were bright but they were in the shade. High above, hot air balloons drifted lazily. Al said, “Have you talked to a lawyer, Matt? Your mother and I were talking. We think you should talk to a lawyer.”
Matt watched the balloons as they drifted higher and higher. “We’re not getting divorced, though. It’s time away. A break. That’s all. We’ve been under a lot of stress.”
His mother shifted in the plastic chair. She crossed one leg, then the other. “It wouldn’t hurt though, Matt, to talk to a lawyer. As someone who’s been through a divorce, I look back and wish I’d been more practical instead of just assuming your father would be fair. I could have gotten a much better deal if I’d acted sooner.”
Al took her hand and massaged it with his papery fingers. He looked at Matt with fatherly concern. “You know, I have a friend that used to specialize in family law. Why don’t you go and talk to him? He’s retired now but I’m sure he wouldn’t mind helping you out.”
Matt closed his eyes. You’d think someone who used to kill people in the jungle would mix a stronger fucking drink. “We’re not getting a divorce,” he repeated. “We’re going through a rough patch, that’s all. Everyone goes through a rough patch on occasion.”
“They’re not as hard on fathers as they used to be,” Al continued as if he hadn’t heard. “Back in my day the mother was always awarded full custody, no matter what. Now a man’s got at least a fighting chance. I’ve seen a lot of men go through it. Friends. Colleagues.” Al himself was a widower. Al’s own adult children were doctors and lawyers and paid for a yearly gathering in the Dominican. Al’s adult children remembered his birthday every year.
“Look, I know it looks bad, but really, I’m not about to let that happen. I would never, not in a million years, leave my family.” Matt’s voice grew thick and he looked with pleading eyes at his mother but she sat in the shadow with her legs crossed and her mouth in a hard set line.
In River City, she’d always been a person who seemed slightly surprised, her lips parted, her hair in disarray; he remembered a charming unsureness, a gentle shyness in how she used to move and speak but now she was different. She was like a different person. “You should start keeping a journal of your interactions with her,” she said. “Times. Dates. Conversations. If she’s harsh with Jacob, write it down. If she’s late. Anything that might help you in a custody battle. Just in case.”
Matt felt as if he’d been slapped. “Mom. We’re talking about Jen here. Jen. Not some abusive crack addict. You can’t be serious.”
“Of course I’m serious,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I be serious? The lawyer will tell you the exact same thing. It helps to have everything in writing, just in case. I always thought she was too young for you anyway.”
He looked down at the concrete between his feet because he couldn’t stand to look at her. There was an ugly, shrill note hiding behind her attempt to seem casual; he recognized it from growing up, in the years after the divorce; he did not want it to be there but it was.
They were silent for a moment then she said, “I’m not about to give up my grandson!” Her voice rose in pitch and intensity with every word. “I’m not about to let her take Jacob away!”
Take him away? She only ever saw him once a year! Matt looked up unbelieving to find that his mother was actually serious and he recoiled to see her face so pinched. Looking at her, he had a terrible, blasted feeling, as if the entirety of the desert were passing before his eyes, as if all of life were drying out, shrinking down to this one week a year, to a sapphire pond in the midst of a vast dryness, to this one thing, this one precious thing: the beautiful, the beautiful, the opalescent boy.
He gulped at his drink to make the feeling go away but he couldn’t drink fast enough. Eventually, he went back to the dainty spare room for the night and lay awake, aware that he didn’t have the gall to ask for money.
He stayed another three days because he felt too guilty to leave, and then, as he was going, she stuffed some bills into his hand when Al wasn’t looking. “To help with the stress,” she whispered and he thanked her. It was $500.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
After her conversation with Matt, Annika went to find Helmut.
She knocked on his door but it was Marion who answered. Helmut wasn’t home, Marion said, then tried to entice Annika to stay for tea. Annika refused. She got back in her car and drove out to the dump, hoping to find him there.
Annika had never been to the Saltery Bay Transfer Station before and assumed, wrongly, that a person would be able to drive right in. Instead, she found that the dump was under tight security. It was situated in an old quarry, tucked away as far as possible from the rich people’s summer homes and surrounded by an eight-foot chain fence with barbed wire at the top. The entrance was guarded by a surly little woman who sat in a trailer alongside the scale.
Annika pulled up beside the trailer and rolled down her window. “I’m not taking anything in,” she explained. “I’m looking for someone.”
The woman glared at her. “He’s here,” she said then rolled her eyes. “He’s always here. I’ll let you through this once, but I’m getting awfully tired of you treasure hunters.” She made Annika weigh in anyway.
Annika drove overtop the scale and waited for the light to turn green. She’d been shaken, physically rattled after talking to Michael but now she just felt strange, light-headed and faraway. The day around her seemed impossibly bright; the sky was too tall and pulling upwards, expanding up into the darker blue of the stratosphere. It was the illness, she realized. The sickness was starting to take her.
When the light turned green, she eased her car onto a compacted old road that wound through a series of tiered excavations and old mounds that were covered with wildflowers and grasses. She passed various piles of waste: a great heap of appliances, a metal container labelled e-
waste, mountains of brush and grass, the bright deadheads from someone’s flower bed scattered amongst them. Above her the sky kept pulling up and up while the gulls wheeled and screamed and hovered on the wind.
She spotted Helmut. He was out on the main face, combing a pit of miscellaneous refuse peppered with the white heads of the gulls. His truck was parked at the edge. She pulled up beside it.
He didn’t notice her at first, and she watched him for a while as he clambered about in the pit, stooping, bending, considering. He wore rubber boots and a bandana over half his face.
Eventually, she got out of her car and climbed down. The wind stung her face and whipped her hair up around her as she made her way towards him, stumbling occasionally as the garbage shifted underneath her. There were buckets, a broken lamp, great heaps of clothes and plastic, lots of plastic.
Helmut looked up, then stood with his hands on his hips, waiting. She couldn’t see his mouth but could tell by his eyes he was smiling.
“I thought you’d be here,” she said as she approached.
“Welcome to the Saltery Bay Thrift Store,” he said. He pulled the bandana down over his mouth so she could hear him better, then his face changed as he looked her over. “You’ve lost weight.”
“I’m not feeling very well.”
He nodded. A gull landed near his foot, then came at him with its neck extended and its wings in a wide V behind it. He flicked his hand at it and made a hissing noise. “They are more aggressive each time. I would like to bring my gun one day but this dump lady is very strict with me.”
“Yes. I was worried she wasn’t going to let me in.”
“She is very strict with me,” he repeated, raising his eyebrows mischievously. Annika laughed. She wasn’t even sure what the joke was meant to be: the dump lady’s outrageous aversion to firearms? Helmut and the dump lady in an elaborate bondage scenario in the little trailer? And why not? Nothing seemed impossible to her anymore.
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