You’re perfect, she said. You’re perfect for it. In the background, there was ambient noise; the sense was muffled. Still, I caught the mood. The mood said, soon talk won’t be enough; soon, steps will have to be taken.
I have been too passive. The voice on the phone, the frequency of the runs, the clothes in the trash. The last window of opportunity is closing. Now, it is evening, Paul fifteen hours gone on his incendario run. I carefully replace the lid on the bureau, wipe my face and check myself in the mirror. The peppers in the pan are just starting to sizzle. When he returns, I am going to tell him what Lew and I have planned, and finish the conversation we began on that drive. I am going to ask him to leave with me.
—pop—
Where I am when I hear his key: at the stove, just plating the dinner. He is standing at the threshold, the drifting balloon quality of the incendario still upon him. For all that fear drives me with Paul, he still calls up such tenderness in me. I guide him into the house and then I place my head on his chest. His arms hover for a moment, at his side. In one hand, he holds the warming case from Nancy’s compound. It’s a joke, he says. It’s not like he buys into it. Still, he is careful as he sets down the case, takes his time before he wraps me in his arms. That way, wrapped together, we hold each other until the stutter in his breath calms.
During dinner, he pushes his food around on his plate, nibbles when he catches me looking.
He looks like he always does when he gets back from a run, like his whole body is having an allergic reaction. He is imposing, now, fills up door frames, but the drugs from Ensenada puff out his face, hide his eyes, still twice, he takes out his phone surreptitiously under the table, and by that I know he has returned to himself.
I set down my glass. “I called your father,” I say. “He got that offer he’s been talking about.”
The conversation about Frank’s three-story brownstone has been ongoing between us. When we go back East, for whatever, often a medium-level Jewish holiday, we stay with his dad. He’s gotten, if anything, more erratic since the days of kicking Paul out over custody disputes. There is a hole in the bathroom, for example, where he tried to take on a plumbing project, and you can see into the tenant’s unit below. They’ve stopped paying rent, and Paul’s father claims to shower at the Y, but by the facecloth and soap in the kitchen, the stepstool by the sink, I suspect him of relying on sponge baths instead.
Frank, the hole in the bathroom being just one sign, needs taking care of, but it has been hard to imagine ourselves as caretakers.
Now, Paul pushes aside his uneaten dinner, glances at his phone again, and sighs. “He’ll never take it. He’ll never sell the building.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He spoke to his lawyer. There’s paperwork being drawn up.”
“Fine, then,” said Paul. “One less thing on our plates.” But his voice did not sound fine.
“His lawyer tells him it’s a good offer, but they’re not lunatics. There are all kinds of conditions before they’ll close, things inspected and fixed.”
“He could do it. Contact it all out.”
He means, contract. That he is using too much incendario is an urgent conversation, right beneath this one, but I have my own indulgences, and there is the whisper of soon and perfect, so this is my last, best offer.
“I told him maybe we could take it over.”
“As in, buy it? Are you crazy? We can’t even get approved for a credit card.”
“Come here,” I say. “There’s something I have to show you.”
I lift the lid on my bureau. Paul and I salvaged this dresser from the trash. After we’d wrestled it up the flight of stairs and into the bedroom, after he’d gone off to the gym, I discovered it had a secret. If you flip the top, underneath you find a thin, plastic-covered pad with little kitsch ducks and a vinyl strap to hold a baby down while you change him. Here is where I have kept my secrets since. Now, I push aside the papers and the cloud, and stack the three boxes in my arms. Paul is silent, regarding me. I set the boxes on the bed, and open them.
“That’s real?” he says.
I dump one of the boxes on the bed. The sight of that much cash is disconcerting, I know. It turns money back into paper, filthy paper.
“It’s a down payment. A good one.”
I can see thoughts moving beneath the surface of his skin, faint signs whose meaning eludes me. Perhaps he is thinking of all the things he might have bought along the way, voice coaching and five-hundred-dollar t-shirts, the little luxuries which might have altered the outcome of his auditions. Perhaps he is deciding what it means that my love is the kind that can keep this much from him. But I am not the only one. We keep things from each other.
Then, at last he smiles, though it is still a smile with things behind it.
He shakes his head. “There’s always some point where you stop being what you wanted to grow up to be, isn’t there? It happens even to—what’s the word? Astronauts, football players. People who get what they wanted?”
“Success?”
“It happens even to successful people. They begin to ache, to slow. Mathematicians pass their prime. Maybe some people are relieved when they get there. Maybe some people think, thank God. I’ll never have to hear applause again.”
“Paul,” I tell him. “I’m just getting so tired. It’s like it accumulates; at some point, it’s going to be unbearable.”
Paul finds my eyes. G-d, he’s still so beautiful. And I’ll admit it, as much as I hate the incendario bloating around his face, I do love the hard muscles. What a strange delight for a thirty-six-year-old to suddenly find herself beside.
He takes my hand. “I’m not an idiot, Mellie. I know what we’re doing to ourselves. I know you don’t retire from lives like ours. I know you don’t start getting work at thirty-five. No one leaves this life for a sweet old age.”
“But?” I say.
He shakes his head. “I don’t know how to feel that way about applause.”
I sit beside him on the bed. The money is still there, the filthy metallic smell of handled bills nestled between us like a Labrador or a toddler. I feel the weight of his arm around me, the thump of his adrenalized pulse in my ear.
“Yes or no?” I say.
“Lady,” he says. “Honey. Give me a day. Just let me think.”
And then, at once, both our phones are ringing. He picks his up, says hello, and then steps out onto our balcony. Mine is from Lew, and it’s an emergency.
Paul may still be aiming for perfection, but I cling to the smaller hopes. That no one else will want a brownstone without a toilet, that we can learn to sand and sheetrock and rewire doorbells to prevent total collapse, that Paul will say yes to me instead of to the woman who calls.
Lew is still talking to me. “Do you hear me, Mellie? We’ve found what we needed. Get in the car. Come to me. Everything begins now.”
Two
Sullivan County, New York
2010
The compass pings faintly as I near the place where Judah had found Kif-Vesely’e. It directs me down county highway, rural route, and into abandoned farmland with clots of purple flowers pushing up through last year’s gray ragwort. The woods are dense. Dawn is still an hour or so off, and the gathering clouds blot the moon. The two lakes come into view, and at the edge of the screen, the dark kidney shape appears. As I grow nearer, I slow. Occasionally, the trees leap and sway. Probably, these are only animals, but how am I to know?
Any one of them could be Emily. Any one of them could be the man.
I am good at details, can pick a bright thing out where others only see a dark landscape. This has always been my talent. But, too, it has betrayed me. I have missed things, or confused one thing for another; I have read significance where none exists. For the final miles, I have been trying to think of the man from my driveway—not my response, the rush of recognition, the certainty, but the data. For example, the way his speech gapped into silences, as if the words that m
ight have been there no longer existed. It had not only been my confusion, I think to myself now. It had not only been that I was trying to make the man match the longing inside me. As a person, he’d been more blank than filled in. What any of this will help me, as the dawn approaches, and my journey ends, I can’t say.
I reach the first lake. It is denuded of forest, and I circle, peering into the shadows. The instinct is to speed, but I force myself to take my time. I find the campsite, a few tents, a station wagon, an RV. There is nothing like a cabin visible and the few trees are leafier, squatter than in my memory. There might be movement beyond my field of vision, things across the water. And now what? At Independence, I have been learning how to tell the difference between what I should pursue, what I must release. I have been trying to remap the circuitry, so that new, rich links will form. But this is a slow way, a hard way. Anyway, it is too late to take time, so I follow something older, stranger that tells me this is not the place.
And what of the man from my driveway? Is something similar pulling him, too? Or is it only the map he follows, Judah’s mark?
The second body of water is a dammed reservoir, elevated and fenced. I cruise the neighboring roads, find a VW Bug abandoned in the trees and startle a deer. I smell pines; above the line deciduous growth, the pointed silhouettes of conifers thicken, and some sense, some small force begins to pull. I am not there, but I am moving closer. There’s a thickening. It’s akin to returning somewhere after a long absence, but richer even, as if I have returned here this way again, and perhaps again. As if my returning has intersected with other returns. I turn back onto the road, and the impression intensifies as the dark spot on the field compass grows larger. I cross some invisible barrier, and now the entire screen goes dark.
Then, the world. The headlights blink out. I am hurtling into darkness, the woods beyond shapeless and colorless and I might be in deep space or under the sea or might have slipped out of time.
My journey back east, two years ago: I am wearing my hospital bracelet, carrying a bag I know I have not packed. I am standing in line at the bus station, a woman urging me forward from behind. Focus, she says. As we reach the front of the line, she hands me a pharmacy bag which rattles with pills. I am pliant, unresisting. My body is slack, the effort too great, but I shuffle up the steps anyway. Then, there is an endless interval of highway, toilet smell, the sticky floor. I lurch up suddenly to vomit. Mountain after mountain, billboard, desert, industrial sprawl, cornfield, sex shop, forest. At last, after an eon of pain and sickness and drugged sleep, I am descending into a parking lot. I am large. I have grown large, but I refuse to look down at myself, to see what is happening to me. Still later, I am on foot, moving through a place which smells of pine and leaf mold and algae.
The headlights illuminate again. Trees rush toward me. I pull on the steering wheel and swerve into a field and the compass pings my arrival. The smell through the windows is the same, is the same as every time I’ve been here.
Occurrences, my mother once said, can leave ghosts of themselves in the landscape. Judah says, cloud is mapped into the world like a scar. We can fall into these places, quarries in the landscape; we are drawn to them as if guided by a faulty compass. These points are points of inversion.
I navigate my car into the tall grass of the clearing. Light is coming, delayed by cloud cover, but the shapes refuse still to emerge from the darkness. Nothing is around. There are no landmarks, no signs.
Somewhere near here, I had dropped a bus ticket. How had I gotten from the station, if even it is the same place? I could not have walked in that condition.
A stranger, a kindness, red truck slowing on the road between the bus depot and this place. “Your boyfriend ditch you?” The driver clasps a thermos of coffee between her legs. “People go camping in these parts, don’t know what to expect. I’m always finding lost backpackers.”
“City people. You a city person? They think it’s all rolling hills and sound of music out here. But people cook meth; bad stuff happens. You sure? This is the place?”
This is the place.
“I’m meeting my—” they would always take care of me; I have instructions, where to go and what to do; there is a thing I have promised to do, and sworn never to.
“Father? Mother?”
“Family.”
“They did a drug bust here, back in the eighties. Big one. Made the news. And then they turned it into a summer camp. Isn’t that funny? Same place. Drug den. Cub scouts.”
Still, I climbed from the truck, walked into the trees alone. Beyond, a lake shore. Towering pines. A nest where I curled up. And what next?
A red wall, and a voice. What I remember cannot be so, but still it comes. It’s a boy, and he’s telling me to get up, to turn around. Then I am in the pickup truck again, beside the woman.
“Christ,” she says. “Christ almighty. I should have known. I knew better. How could I not know?” She leans over, puts a hand on my stomach. “I’d like to get my hands on that boyfriend.”
“There’s no boyfriend,” I say.
The interval between plays like a night of broken sleep, though it is longer, a circle that goes around and around, that keeps sliding into a blank place. The rattle of the pill bottle, the twist of the cap. The smell of animal droppings, the collapsed eaves of a building, drinking muddy water from an old Coke can. No one comes. And eventually I know that no one is coming. A sense of fading, time lengthening, hunger I cannot move to sate, thirst I cannot slake.
The red place. The boy. The boy had gotten me up.
Perhaps that is the thing which pulls me now. The car makes it maybe forty feet into the unmown meadow, and then it’s done. I pocket the chip reader, my keys, place the book in my purse, my purse on my shoulder, then fling open the door and launch myself into the knee-height grass. Creatures scatter, as from gunshot. Black shapes lift from the trees. Into the overcast sky, gray swarms of insects lift and then veer oddly. The coming rain has darkened the sky, and I am coming down hard off a cloud high. I am sleepless and exhausted. But I am as certain of my feet as I am one of the ghosts that inhabit this place. The future casts its shadow beforehand. I push through the memories like cobwebs.
All that matters is speed. Light is coming, and there are two lakes left, and I may already be too late. I have a sense of moving toward something, something in particular. I do—I recall my body, how it felt when it was pregnant and drugged. Another body, younger, light and afraid. As I near the tree line, I make out some incongruity in the movement of the wind in the grass. My older sense falters as, ahead, the trees part to form a track—wide enough for a car. A few more feet, and I see it, a double black parabola burnt into the meadow. Tire tracks, fresh.
I let the specters leave me, and I follow the hard evidence. The first drops of water fall from the sky. I stumble as I hit a downward slope in the land—a new sound—the rain landing on the surface of the water. Shapes in the darkness, textures and angles, a gathering of deciduous crowns. Before me, a lake. Rain drums on the leaves overhead, on the wooden roofs. And yet, there is no perfect recognition, no final piece locking in to complete the picture. The lake is not a lake, but a pond. It is like, yes. But imperfect. An imperfect match. And where is Emily? It must be here. This must be it.
Then, to the left, something tiny sparks.
In the space around the flare, I pick out the clean curves and dense blackness of a vehicle. The spark, within, comes again, metal against metal in the electric air. I approach, keeping low, hear a branch crack, still. Then, after a silence, I take the last few feet toward the car. Black SUV. I lift my face to the window and peer in.
The vehicle is like a rodent’s nest, bunched clothes, soda cans, indecipherable shapes crowd against the glass. Mud-spattered. It is a vehicle that has been lived in. I find an eyehole: nothing, darkness. Then the thing sparks once more and illuminates the contorted body of a woman who has fought like holy hell. Two bloodied fists, pant leg slashed open, skidded fl
esh beneath. Her face, under her filthy bleached-blond hair, is fixed.
Maybe it’s because she’s still high, but she doesn’t startle when I slide into the car.
She only says, “Easy does it. He’s coming back. Any minute.” In her bound hands, there’s a key. It’s a house key, not a car key, but she is working it into the lock.
“Oh, Emily,” I say, beginning to try for the knot. She pushes me away with her elbows.
“Don’t. Don’t you fuckin’ get sentimental.” There’s another spark and she swears. “I used to could hotwire anything. But these new fuckers. You gotta get into the steering column.”
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s go. There’s a car, not far.”
She looks at her leg. “I can’t, Mellie. Don’t you think I’d be gone by now? I can’t fuckin’ do it.” Something happens to her voice, a thickening.
The way she looks at me, even cloud could not denature what it means. There is no forgiveness. Not possible. Not in this lifetime, not in a dozen dozen dozen steps. There will be no amends.
“I had five years, Mellie. Five years like you can’t imagine. Now I have one day. And you saw it happen. You just watched it. And Leo—fuckin’ Leo—”
“Emily,” I say.
She stabs the key into the lock, and the alarm flares. The night strobes. Sound pulses. And between, the break of branches, a man’s voice. There is no room for guilt, or for apology. I bend, and gently, quickly, slip my shoulder under her good arm. The skin of her legs, one of her arms, is pulped raw, a mess of graveled flesh. There is no touch light enough that it doesn’t make her seize, and I must grip her to hold her.
“Emily,” I say. “Emily, you can. I think you can. Emily, you can.”
The man breaks into the clearing. I haul her across me. I hear her grunt of pain, but then she’s on the seat beside me, opening the door. I press the keys into her hand.
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