“It’s for you. It’s Dad,” she said.
I took the phone from her.
“Hi,” said Zip.
“Hi,” I said. “Hi. Zip.”
“It’s been a long time,” he said.
Nine years, I thought. “Yes, it has,” I said.
“I wanted to call,” he said. “My apartment burned down two weeks ago. They said it was a fire in the bathroom fan.”
“Are you all right?” I said.
“I’m all right,” he said. “My stuff. That’s another thing.”
I heard Haley go into the living room. “Chase,” she said. “Chase. Dad’s on the phone.”
Chase rushed into the kitchen, his dark eyes shiny. “Dad?” he said. “Dad?”
“Chase’s right here,” I said. “If you want to talk to him.”
“Sure I do,” Zip said. “Of course I do.”
I handed the phone to Chase.
“Dad?” he said. “Dad? I haven’t talked to you in a really long time.” He waited, eyes alight. “I’m fine,” he said. A pause. “Yeah.” Another pause, longer this time. “Rage Against the Machine. And Korn.” Pause. “Yeah, I go to school. I work at rehab.” He paced up and down and smiled and smiled and smiled. “Okay,” he said. “Yup. Okay, Dad. Bye, Dad.”
He handed the phone back to me.
“How’s he doing?” Zip said.
“Better.”
“Aw, he’s all right,” said Zip. “He’s fine.”
“Well,” I said. “No. I wouldn’t say fine.”
“I know some of what happened,” Zip said. “My mother wrote me letters.”
I thought of all the times Peggy told me that she wrote to Zip and tried to explain what had happened to Chase. She never heard from him, so she told me she thought he’d never read a word of it.
“He’s just visiting this weekend,” I said flatly. “He doesn’t live here all the time.”
“Then I called at a good time,” he said.
I heard him light a cigarette, and then I heard the familiar sound of an exhalation of smoke. He told me about the fire. The firefighters woke him and got him out. It turned out to be a four-alarm blaze. The whole apartment building was wrecked. The landlord put him in a new apartment, and the people at work took up a collection for him and bought him new furniture and pots and pans and dishes. He said that in many ways, he was better off than he had been before. People checked in on him and told him they would help him with anything he needed.
“Did everything burn?” I asked.
He exhaled again. “No. I know the landlord put my stuff in another apartment.”
I thought of Zip’s nine guitars, including a vintage hollow-body Gretsch, and his digital recording equipment, and his big amp. I was sure his landlord had taken care of this stuff, but good, and as it turned out, Zip never saw these things again. But that night, on the phone, when I felt a swift, sharp pain on his behalf, I had to remind myself that this—thinking about this—was not and could not be my job anymore.
“Do you want to talk to Haley?”
“If she wants to talk to me,” Zip said.
She had spoken to him once before, when she was twelve. She had come to me very gravely and said that she was ready to talk to her father now, as if she had not been ready before, as if he had not been the one who failed to call her. I called Zip at work and arranged a time for the two of them to speak. They stayed on the phone for twenty-five minutes. Afterward, I asked Haley if she wanted to talk with him again. She shook her head. “No, thank you,” she said.
Now she stood with the phone next to her ear and answered his questions. Then she handed the phone back to me. The doorbell rang and the pizza guy delivered the pizza, and Chase and Haley came in and loaded up their plates. I listened to Zip’s voice in my ear while I handed out napkins, and for a moment I felt what I thought it would feel like for the four of us to be a family again. The next week I sent him pictures of the kids, and he called again and we talked some more. He told me that he worked most of the time and spent the rest of the time at home, except on Friday evenings, when he went for a beer with a woman he knew from work. It didn’t take much for me to picture Zip in a dingy little bar drinking himself blind with a woman who shared his inclinations. He told me that he never expected that we would move away. I wanted to remind him that he’d promised to follow us south, for the kids’ sake. I wanted to remind him that he could have called us. But these were things I would have said to a man who had done something intentional and mean. When Zip spoke, I heard nothing but pain and bafflement, as if he truly had no idea what had happened, or what his responsibility in any of it might have been. And when I spoke to him, the thing I felt more than anything else was sorrow.
It turned out that my suspicions were correct: he needed someone to care for him, because he really could not care for himself. I was glad the people around him recognized that and made a point of looking after him. Years before, when the kids were younger, when I was entirely susceptible to self-skewering through guilt, I felt responsible, as if I had abandoned Zip in the rural Midwest. I didn’t recognize his illness. I only thought of the man who had descended into near silence and, when he spoke at all, made claims that were unsupported by fact: the water bill unpaid, even though he assured me he had paid it, and the water turned off; the gas bill unpaid, even though he assured me he had paid it, and the gas nearly turned off in the dead of a Midwestern winter. By the time Zip called me to tell me that his apartment had burned, I had long since realized that I was no more the origin of what had happened to Zip than I was the origin of what had happened to Chase. Our brains do as they will, just as our hearts beat or fail.
AT CHRISTMASTIME, I TOOK Chase to see a matinee of King Kong at a local mall. When the show let out in the late afternoon, we stepped outside into a square where a tall Christmas tree stood in the blue basin of a dry fountain, its lights twinkling merrily around frosted green and blue and red glass ornaments the size of soccer balls, and loudspeakers shrieked “Deck the Halls” at us. Chase stood next to the tree in the blue light of dusk and looked around and spotted a restaurant across the way, with huge cheese-cakes turning on slowly spinning platters in the yellow window.
“Can we go there?” he asked and patted my arm.
Inside, it was crowded so the hostess seated us at the long marble bar. When Chase sat down, all of the people who saw him stared at him. He was extremely tall and very thin, of course, but he wore his hair buzzed short and his coat collar open, so it was easy to see the two huge red scars, a long lateral scar bisected by a shorter horizontal scar, that made a ragged cross to the left of his throat. When he took his coat off, the scar that ran from the base of his skull to the top of his shoulders in a divet as deep as the circumference of a big man’s thumb made a purple-red channel. When the people around us saw me looking at them as they stared at Chase, they turned their faces back to their menus but still they spoke to one another and shot glances at him and some looked back at me, belligerent and defiant, as if staring at Chase was an entitlement of some sort.
Chase carefully studied his menu with its long lists of different kinds of cheesecake available by the slice and then turned to me, confused. “What do I get if I just want cheesecake?” he said.
“Just plain cheesecake?”
He nodded.
“It’s right here.” I pointed to the first entry on the menu. “Do you want me to order for you?”
“I’ll do it,” he said slowly.
When the cheesecake arrived, Chase ate fast and I had to ask him to slow down. He stopped and put his fork by his plate. “Is this place expensive?” he asked.
“Kind of,” I said. “It’s not too bad. It costs more than Wendy’s.”
He didn’t say anything but turned back to his cheesecake. I looked past him out the window behind the bar and saw that the sun had gone down fully and families hurried along with their parcels. I knew it must be late and I had to have Chase back at Murdoch by
six.
When the check arrived in its black vinyl case tricked out to look like leather, Chase picked it up and said, “I pay.”
“What?”
“I pay,” said Chase. He showed me the check and he showed me the money in his pocket. “Do I have enough?”
I started to tell him to save his money, that I would take care of this, but then I saw the look on his face.
“Just right,” I said. “Thank you, Chase.” Chase laid three fives on the counter for a fourteen-dollar check and then added three quarters.
“Good job,” I said. We gathered our things and made for the door. Halfway to the car, Chase said, “Why are you crying?”
“I’m not crying,” I said stupidly and wiped ferociously at my eyes with the heels of my hands.
“What’s that?” said Chase and lifted his index finger to point at the tears on my face.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. I’m crying. Sometimes moms feel so happy that they cry.”
He didn’t say anything but, when he got in the car, I could see that he kept ducking his head and smiling.
ONE MORNING IN THE late fall, Chase and I drove Haley out to the barn. We walked around the upper ring while she went out to the field to catch Willy, and Chase asked about the horses. I pointed out Kure and Romeo and Bandit and Babette and Caramel and Oliver and Prissy and Red Scooter. I asked him if he wanted to walk through the barns and see the horses stabled in their stalls but he was tapping and patting and staring up into the clouds over the pines, his eyes squinting, as if he was waiting for something to appear, so I took him back to the car.
Haley stood in the upper barn with Willy half tacked up in the cross ties. She had just lifted the bit to his teeth when I came in and she glanced over at me.
“Where’s Chase?”
“He’s waiting for me in the car. I think we’re going to head home after all.”
She nodded. “I didn’t think he could do this,” she said.
“At least not today,” I said. “I think we’re going to rake leaves when we get home. We’ll save some for you.”
She made a face.
“Have a good ride,” I said. Outside, I could hear her instructor calling for the girls to bring their horses into the ring. Willy shook his head and his tack clinked and jingled and Haley took him by the reins and led him cloppety-clop out into the morning light. I crossed the dirt drive to our car and after I buckled up and made sure Chase was buckled up, I looked back at the ring and watched Haley laugh as another girl came by and said something to her. I saw her focused anywhere but on us and I breathed and was glad, because this was the way it was meant to be.
When we got home, I gave Chase a pair of canvas work gloves and a rake, and I got my work gloves and the other rake and pulled the plastic tarp from the utility shed.
“If we work together, we can get the leaves here in the backyard out to the curb,” I said. “Can you help me?”
He nodded and I helped him pull the work gloves on and showed him that we needed to rake from under the trees out onto the grass, where we would spread our tarp so that we could rake the leaves onto the tarp and then haul the tarp to the street.
At first Chase patted uncertainly at the ground with his rake but when I showed him how to move his rake in a long stroke over the grass, he caught on quickly and set to work raking out the lawn along the fence. Leaves had spun down and carpeted the yard, and covered the daylilies and the hostas, had pressed themselves against the neighbor’s fence, and grown listless in the corners of the house. For a time, all I could hear was the susuruss of the rakes moving through the leaves. When Chase had amassed a pile and I had amassed a pile, I showed him how to rake the leaves onto the tarp and then we each took a corner and dragged the tarp up to the street, where we spilled them into the gutter for the town leaf vacuum. It was a cold day and we worked like this for an hour or so, until the sun came out from behind the clouds and I felt sweat trickle down my neck. I looked over at Chase. His upper lip was beaded with moisture.
“Hey Chase,” I said. “Chase. Let’s stop for a minute.”
But he didn’t hear me. He just kept raking and raking and raking, and I followed along behind him as he cut his path through the world.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank Tobias Wolff, Pam Durban, Michael Fitzgerald, John McGowan, James Leloudis, Lynn York, Anna Gemrich, and Joan Gantz for their unswerving support. I also wish to express deep and abiding thanks to my brilliant editor, Kathy Pories, and to my agent, Julie Barer. Each has been generous, tireless, and insightful. I’m very grateful to the Wildacres Residency Program, which supported the writing of this book through a number of long silent weeks in the North Carolina mountains, and to Rachel Willis, who told me the time had come to get started. My family and friends provided help in the way of encouragement and kindnesses of every description. I thank them all.
Above all, I wish to thank my beloved children. Nothing I write could ever match their courage, strength, and hope.
The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes Page 35