The Accidentals

by Minrose Gwin

  I sat down in a metal folding chair across from Landon Higginsworth and told him about Daniel and George, gave him what little information I had. June had told me about the military schools they’d been banished to. Both the families had left Opelika, the Bakers almost immediately and George’s parents the year after. That was all I knew.

  “Usually the ladies come in looking for one man, not two,” he said.

  “The three of us were friends.”

  “Friends?”

  “Yes.”

  He twirled his pencil and raised an eyebrow.

  So I told Landon Higginsworth everything. I told him about the baby too, how I was sure it had been adopted. Some nice family had the baby, who of course wasn’t even a baby anymore, but hopefully a happy, well-adjusted young person, on the brink of a brilliant career, maybe as a fledgling astronaut—the first woman in space, sturdy and brave and adventuresome, blasting off into the great unknown.

  Landon Higginsworth didn’t even look up while I told it all, just kept on twirling the pencil. You could tell he’d heard worse.

  “Five up front,” he said.

  “Five?”

  “Hundred. Five hundred. I’ll throw in the child.”

  I wrote out the check and shoved it across the dusty desk.

  “I’ll call you,” he said.

  Ten days later the phone rang as I was heading out the door to teach. He asked me when I could come in. I said that afternoon.

  HE WAS STANDING behind his table, in front of the window, his long arms dangling. The window faced west and the late afternoon sun poured through the cobwebs and cast his frame in deep shadow. He came around and pulled out my chair and hovered as I sat down. He patted me once on the shoulder and walked around his card table, his fingertip on the surface, tracing a line in the dust as he made his way to his seat. There was a stack of papers on his table.

  When he sat down and looked across at me, I could tell by his eyes the news was not good. It was May and warm outside but the metal folding chair beneath me felt like a block of ice. I began to shiver.

  First he told me about George, how he’d traced him to Seattle where he’d worked on a fishing vessel for a while, then over the border to Vancouver, where he’d spent the Vietnam War taking tourists out whale watching; how he’d gone from there to Herendeen Bay, Alaska, where he’d worked at the Bering Sea Packing Company, and then, two years ago, he had packed his things in one duffle bag and paid the outstanding rent on his single room above the Voodoo Bar, and vanished into thin air. “Off radar,” said Landon Higginsworth.

  I digested this information, wondering whether my five hundred dollars had bought me anything but more questions.

  Then he stood up, cleared his throat. “You need to prepare yourself,” he said.

  He picked up one of the pieces of paper on his desk and began to read. Second Lieutenant Daniel Baker, fresh out of ROTC at Virginia Military Academy, had fought bravely. He had led his platoon into the village of Cà Mau in the southern tip of South Vietnam, June 7, 1969. After receiving an order to level the village, he had run out in front of his men, by all accounts leaping into the air and flapping his arms like a wounded bird, thereby calling attention to himself, thereby taking the heavy artillery fire, thereby saving the four men directly behind him.

  My ears seemed to fill with water; there was a roaring in my head, as if I were swimming in the deepest ocean. This despicable little man, taking my five hundred dollars and telling me Daniel and George were gone, vanished like my daughter into thin air! What a joke! What a rip-off! How I wanted to slap his impassive face! His lips—tight, thin lips—pinched together now, his words drifting here and there about the room like dust, in all the languages of the world.

  Landon Higginsworth started to speak again. I told him to shut up, I didn’t want to hear anymore.

  The dog in the corner lifted its lip and began to growl.

  “I’m sorry.” He said the words tiredly, as if he were disgusted by the slick sound they made on his tongue.

  I put my hands over my ears and backed up, feeling for the doorknob behind me. “I don’t hear you,” I shouted at him. “I can’t hear you.”

  The dog rose from its pillow and barked once. Landon Higginsworth pointed at it and it sat back down.

  He came around the desk and reached out to take my arm, to touch my arm, to comfort me. I smelled his vinegary sweat, old sweat pressed into soiled fabric, new sweat pressed into old. What a smelly little man, telling such lies.

  I said, “Don’t you dare touch me! Don’t you dare get near me!”

  He took one neat step backward, those quick gold eyes of his glittering in the late afternoon sun.

  I thought: June. This is your doing.

  “The baby,” he said, tiredly, soberly. But I was out the door by then, I was running down the gray and silent hall into the rest of my life. Only later would I wonder why he’d called my almost grown daughter a baby.

  When I got home from that despicable man’s office, I didn’t even take off my coat before calling my sister. June answered on the first ring.

  “You killed my Daniel,” I said, without preamble. “You as much as killed him.”

  “I know,” she said, her voice a filament of sound, threaded through a needle. “I know I did.”

  “How can you live with yourself? How can you get up in the morning and look in the mirror?”

  A long silence. I could hear her breathe, her inhalations ragged as wind in straw. Then a click—gentle, final—as if she’d put her finger on the button just to let it rest there.

  Later, I wanted to call her back. But I wasn’t ready to admit the truth: that I, not my sister, was the one who had launched George and Daniel into outer darkness. Without me, the two of them could have carried on indefinitely, they might have even gotten away with it, gotten off scot-free, perhaps gone south to New Orleans or north to New York, lived out their lives happily, quietly.

  THAT WAS A decade ago. Since then, I’ve had my compensations: Alexandria and Vienna and Copenhagen, the thrill of bending over the ancient texts. I show my slides to yawning sophomores and write the occasional article. I’ve been praised and promoted. I’ve bought a house in a neighborhood with old trees. I’ve made friends with my neighbors next door. I tutor their sons in Latin; in turn the boys shovel my driveway in winter and their mother invites me over for Christmas dinner. I joined the Audubon Society of Davidson County and go out birding. My life hasn’t been so bad.

  Men I’ve stayed away from, except a casual encounter every now and again, and after a while, even those came to an end. The heart is, after all, only a muscle.

  LATER, MUCH LATER, I regretted not letting Landon Higginsworth tell me what had happened to my daughter. Over the years I’d watched girls her age—the young women in my classes—to see how they acted, what they wore, how they fixed their hair. I imagined her beautiful like Mama, but braver, brave enough to live a large life in this flawed and treacherous world. Once, I even called the number I had for Landon Higginsworth, but it had been disconnected. That’s when I knew she would live out her own precious life without me, that’s when I let her go.

  On summer nights now, I sit on an old splintered bench under the dogwood tree in my backyard, sipping gin and tonics and swatting mosquitoes while the Johnson boys next door shoot hoops in the steamy dark, calling back and forth. I think about my sister and me, how, when we were little, our mother would summon us in from our night play and sit us down to supper. At the table, Dad would ask us about our day, how it had been, had we run into any giraffes out back? We would giggle and say yes, we had. Several, in fact, had galloped through and said to tell him hello.

  Some nights the clouds pass over and block the moon and stars, but sometimes, when it’s clear overhead and you can see far out into space, I think of Daniel flying, forever flying into the gunfire, George silently wandering a world of ice. My baby girl too, always loud in my thoughts, forging ahead in her distant life like
a bird in winter, her eyes glittering, seizing on dark berries amid the snow.

  I finally called June to say I was sorry I’d blamed her for what happened to Daniel and George. That’s how we’d always patched things up; I would call and mutter a halfhearted apology and then we’d talk about something mundane, the more boring the better, as if the humdrum details of our lives would somehow anesthetize the slice left by my knife. June, who’d been mostly homebound with Noel, would go on and on about extremes in weather. In the summers she talked about how hot she was, how her air conditioner was on the blink again, the latest tropical storm or hurricane in the Gulf; in winters, it was the rare freeze and worries that her water pipes would burst. The more extreme the weather, the quicker the call would come.

  This time, though, she didn’t pick up the phone. I called again, morning, afternoon, evening; I wrote her a short letter of apology, but she didn’t write back. I was hopeful when it snowed briefly in New Orleans that winter. But nothing. The weeks melted into months and the months into a year; then in a breath, one year became ten.

  AND SO TIME rattled along like Dad’s old Rambler in its last days. When the 17th Street levee broke the Monday after Katrina and all of Lakeview went under, Dad and Frances made their way up into the windowless attic of her little house, not thinking they should take an ax to chop their way through the roof. I was in Cairo, so June had to make all the arrangements. They were cremated and once we were all able to get back into the City, we took the two boxes of ashes over to the lake and scattered them onto the breakwater as the sun set over the water.

  As we sat on the bench Noel had pointed out as Dad and Frances’s favorite place, I turned to June. She glanced over at me. Her pupils had grown cataracts of ice.

  “You don’t mind if I handle their financial affairs, do you?” she said. “I’ll send you your half of whatever’s left.”

  “I can help.”

  “That’s not necessary. Jim can help me.”

  “What about their things?”

  “There’s nothing left, Grace. Everything was underwater for three weeks.”

  Noel, who’d grown up to be an astrophysicist, buried his face in his hands and began to cry.

  June put her arm around him. “It’s time to go.”

  “I think I’ll stay a little longer,” I said.

  “Suit yourself,” said June.

  “You’re welcome to stop by our room,” Jim said. Their house had been lost too; they were rebuilding it from the ground up. We were all staying in a Hampton Inn up on St. Charles.

  June shook her head. “I need to get to bed.”

  “Well, I guess this is it,” I said, but she had already gathered the two empty boxes and headed toward the car.

  TIME WENT ON. My bones began to ache on long flights, and I cut back on my travels, fieldwork now out of the question. Homebound, I became every bit as enamored of birds as my mother had been, my yard sprouting a profusion of feeders, birdbaths, and nest boxes. I began to settle.

  Then one night, the phone rang, and it was Jim. June, damn her hide, had gone and gotten cancer. She was at Zumba with her friend Helen and had fainted dead away. Jim explained what stage four meant. He said they were trying to stay positive.

  The morning after he called, a gorgeous sunny fall morning, I awoke with a weight on my chest so heavy it took my breath away. I lay there all day, barely moving, not even bothering to call in to cancel my office hours and a committee meeting. At dusk I finally got up, moving like an old woman, which I suppose I am (unbelievable, all those years gone!), and went outside to put out corn for the deer, already clustered in the deep bowl of my front yard, having missed their morning feeding. I stood under the canopy of towering trees and listened to the sounds of their shuffling and soft breathing. The bats that lived under one of the shutters out front were emerging into the darkening sky, swooping here and there to feed. The air was sweet and crisp; the trees sighed and swayed. There was smoke in the air; someone was burning leaves.

  Unthinkable, the idea of losing my sister.

  I sent cards and flowers, then made that first visit and, before I knew it (why did I do it?), opened my big mouth at the table, over June’s nice meal, and the words, old and crippling, swarmed out like yellow jackets, and for no good reason; nobody had poked a hole into that nest. I said something sarcastic and underhanded, something about how my sister couldn’t keep a secret. It was meant as a joke but June flinched like she’d been slapped. When I left the next day, she stood, bald and gaunt, by the front door. The house was full of stray dogs, and my nose was stopped up from dander and no small amount of crying. My throat felt like a sandpapery tunnel. When I turned my swollen face to my sister, she scanned my eyes as if she were looking for a lost fleck of color.

  I took one long ragged breath and my throat collapsed under the weight of the words I wanted to say. I tried to say them, but they wouldn’t come, they didn’t come.

  23

  June

  I HADN’T WANTED TO GO BUT I’D GONE BECAUSE MY GOOD friend Helen had asked me to. She said she wanted company, didn’t want to go by herself. She said to bring Jim. Jim said he didn’t want to go either, it was his night off, but he would because it was Helen.

  Whatever Helen asked us to do, we did. She was like a sister to me, better than a sister, or at least better than mine. Grace sent cheerful Hallmark greetings that, as the cancer was making progress in its valiant effort to put me six feet under, had gone from “Get well soon” to “Thinking of you.” She wrote perky little notes in the cards, saying how busy she was at the university, where she’d become a big muckety-muck professor, deciphering chicken scratches on papyrus.

  Grace, I wrote to her over email, don’t worry about coming, I’m fine. I’m tip-top.

  There was also the fact that Grace still hadn’t let me off the hook for ratting her out. After the cancer, though, I had bigger fish to fry than asking my sister for the millionth time to forgive me, to get over the fact that I’d told Dad on her a lifetime ago, that I had told him the truth: that my sixteen-year-old sister who, as it turned out, had a teenage menage à trois going strong in hicktown Opelika, was pregnant. When I got the diagnosis, I didn’t want Jim to call her. He waved me aside and picked up the phone.

  You killed him, you killed my Daniel. Her words still rang in my ears. She hadn’t needed to say it. Ever since I’d seen his picture in Life the day the first man walked on the moon, I’d come to understand that I had set something in motion that could never be undone. My actions had propelled that boy into outer darkness. Through the years he had circled and circled my small life. It was as if I’d given birth to him; the face in the picture had become my second son.

  Grace came to visit a few weeks after Jim called. She stayed the weekend. She took me to the grocery store and helped feed the dogs. I thought it was finally going to be all right between us. I thought at least I’d leave this world knowing she’d finally forgiven me even if I hadn’t forgiven myself. The last night, as we sat at the dinner table, something Jim and I had stopped doing years ago, Jim began to rant about all the backroom shenanigans in Washington, one of his favorite topics. One of hers too, as it turned out. Grace, to my surprise, had gotten political; she was working for John Kerry; she agreed with Jim that the Iraq War was a crime and things were going to hell in a handbasket in Washington. Earlier in the day I’d asked Grace what she wanted me to cook and she’d grinned and said coq au vin if I felt up to it, and I’d grinned back and our eyes had met and I could tell she remembered how I’d cooked our way back into the world after Mama died. “You’ll be surprised at how much my coq au vin has improved,” I said with a wink. Between Jim’s ravings and my sister’s murmured assent, punctuated by the clink of ice cubes in their third gin and tonics, things were going swimmingly at the meal until I said, “Maybe we should all run for office. Any one of us could do a better job.” Grace got a gleam in her eye. She leaned toward me, over the congealing plate of what was left of the c
oq au vin, and said, “You’d never make it as a politician, June. You can’t keep a secret.”

  Which of course wasn’t true. I’ve never breathed a whisper about her baby girl being dead, the biggest secret of all.

  After the words popped out of her mouth, she looked confused and rattled by them. She started chewing on her thumbnail the way she used to do as a girl.

  What she said felt like a grain of sand in my eye. I wanted to say: get out of my house, get out of my life. I can’t abide that blaming look; it burns a hole in my heart. I wanted to say: I don’t have the energy for all of this, for any of it, really. The past: Mama and what she did, Grace’s little child now decades-ago dead, Daniel and George. Everybody’s old stale stories: just lay them down, sister, I wanted to say, let them rest in peace, just as I’d soon be doing, just as we’d all be doing before long. I wanted to say all that and tell Grace to go fuck herself. I pushed my plate aside and opened my mouth, but Jim glared at me and launched back into his rant on Halliburton and needless bloodshed and political scheming, and we got through the dinner.

  “WHY DOES SHE do it?” I asked Jim while we were doing the dishes. “Why does she keep holding my feet to the fire? Haven’t we all suffered enough?”

  “You’re her memory,” he said. “You remind her.”

  Grace left the next morning and she hasn’t been back, though the cards continue like clockwork, one per week, usually arriving on Tuesdays, as if they have become a routine weekend chore. These days it’s all I can do to drag myself out of bed and get to the grocery store for Christ’s sake, much less get worked up over something I’d done when I was fourteen years old. Under normal circumstances, I’d ask Grace for help. I’d ask her to take some time off. But after that dinner, I gave up on my sister the way you’d give up on a hopeless alcoholic or drug addict. I said enough already, I quit.