The Likely World

by Melanie Conroy-Goldman

  A voice said—and it did not sound recorded; it sounded precisely like the voice of the scarred counter girl—“I’m going to patch you in now.”

  Nancy appeared, smiling, in her black crop top, a stone set around her neck. “Hello, friend,” she said. “Power and strength to you. Inspiration and whatever.”

  “Whatever to you, too,” I answered.

  She held herself with a sense of purpose, of certainty which wasn’t so much new as newly visible to me. Between ’06 and ’08, she’d been gathering wealthy benefactors, managing local factions, and priming the former directors of the OneLife compound such that when things faltered with the retreat, she was positioned to take it over. Now that I recalled my time at the compound, I realized she had operated with a kind of command, was already running things, but I hadn’t seen it—she had still been fuck-up Nancy to me.

  The first OneLife franchises had been in friendly territory, Telluride and Ashville, in Eugene and Taos, in Killington and Provincetown, college towns like Ann Arbor and the one here in the Catskills. Then the storefronts had spread. She’d made money, lots of money, but I would never believe she used it for personal enrichment.

  “Are you my private counselor?” I asked, keeping my eye on the towel, which I had begun to cut into strips. “Or is someone more objective going to minister to me?” I was for some reason unsurprised that they were piping Nancy into my cubicle. It was much less strange than my friend’s being the mastermind of a new age empire.

  Among her current followers, at the several dozen OneLife centers in North America, it was widely held that Nancy had made her retreat at the original site of Ensenada Sur, from which location she sent north vague guidance that would arrive to avert crisis at mystically perfect moments. There were accusations, embezzling, that OneLife was a cult, that they harbored fugitives, that they had some sort of agreement in place with the narcos. Someone snuck onto the compound not long ago and filmed an exposé, but then he retracted it. Anyway, I wasn’t there to get worked up about the ethics of her organization. I thought of my Nancy, my fifteen-year-old friend with the weed in her Altoids tin and the diaphragm jelly in her pocketbook, and I saw her easy smile from the screen in front of me, and I wished for that ending for each and every young girl on the planet. For each boy, too. Why be sexist about it? I wished for the hideout and the beach and the money to do what you believe is right.

  “What kind of work would you like to do today?” asked Nancy.

  “Honestly, Nance. I’ve pretty much had all the memory fucking I can take.”

  “You never called me Nance when we were young,” she said. “Remember that phase I went through when I wanted to change my name to Nana? And you guys were like, but that’s a grandmother’s name? Different life, honey, different world. I could be an actual grandmother by now. Women in their mid-thirties are, without its even necessarily being a scandal.”

  She twinkled at me. In the background, now, I could see she was walking through the dry, hard country on the promontory above the OneLife center. It had been allowed to go to seed when I’d been there, that time before I left Los Angeles. There were things that occurred during that visit, probably, that would never return to me with any clarity, but it was clear to me finally that he had survived. Whatever had happened to him in that dark place, he’d emerged, but the person who had returned to this world had no longer been Paul. Anyway, this part of the compound had been covered with trash and abandoned machinery then. I remembered the morning, looking over the cliffs, and Nancy’s approaching me.

  On the OneLife screen, the dry scrub appeared transformed, had been converted into a working ranch. Before me, Nancy climbed the sandy path, palms and other hardy arid plants flanking her. A handsome horse whinnied. Distantly there was the sound of manual labor. The workers were nearly all girls, young and newly strong, as if they’d been growing their muscles for a very short time. There was also a cohort of lean, feminine boys flirting with one another over the barbed wire. Steel buckets clanged; gates were opened and closed. Two high-pitched voices called to one another in Spanish.

  “When we were kids,” I said, “you never twinkled.”

  “Do you remember what you said to me, back in school? How the problem was that each person assumed everyone was just like her? It’s a kind of delusion, or projection. People just act, so often, just lash out for animal reasons, and we’re all kind of like paranoiacs; we assume that if it hurt us, it was intended to.”

  “I said that?” I was paying attention to Nancy, sure. She was speaking to me from a more enlightened state, which I respected, but I was also taking advantage of the lavender salve, rubbing it into my burns, and I’d begun to wrap strips of towel around my hands. “I was wrong, obviously. I think the basic problem is that the world is full of fuckers.”

  “I’m not sure,” says Nancy. “Take the end of a relationship. One person leaves. The other person tries to make a coherent story out of it, a cause for the effect.”

  “Great point,” I say.

  A girl in braids who looked somewhere between fourteen and sixteen appeared at Nancy’s side. She was a brilliant redhead, pale and seemingly Anglo, but when she asked her question, it was Spanish she spoke. Something about el cerdo gordo. Nancy laughed, and then the girl laughed, and then she ran off, braids flying. There was in her limbs total possession of her body, the confidence to leap rocks and tree roots. Wherever she came from, whatever she escaped, it would appear she got out in time.

  “Sometimes, we don’t intend to leave. Sometimes, we don’t know why we’ve left. The world is always more chaotic and nonsensical than we tend to assume.”

  “Or crueler,” I told her. I dipped my fingers in some of the cucumber water, splashed it on my face, and prepared to get moving.

  Nancy brushed her hair out of her face. There was a slight breeze. The stones at her neck clicked. I realized she’d let her long curls become threaded with gray. Nancy had broken through the trees and I could see now that we’d reached the scar of an old stone quarry. There was a little house there, empty but maintained.

  “Who are all those kids there with you there, Nance?” I asked.

  “People I’ve tried to help. But it doesn’t always work.”

  “I know,” I told her. “Believe me, I know.”

  “Shall we begin?” Nancy asked.

  My eyes were sticky. “Mmm,” I said. The stones’ warmth permeated my chest, seemed to spread.

  The lights dim. Soft music gains in volume, something you can almost dance to, but which instead aligns with your heartbeat. The warm stones on your chest seem heavier, more gravitational. You resist. You have urgent business elsewhere. There are fires burning in the brush land and there are survivors in the rubble, and you cannot stop and listen. You are listening. A man’s yearning voice begins to call. The song is familiar, the singer. But you must rush on. Everything is collapsing, and only you have the tool which will stall disaster. Ay yi yai ya. You know this voice. You know this singer. The song is alien, but utterly familiar: Oh, love, it calls to you. Oh, love. Listen to me. Ay yi yai ya. Ay yi yai ya. Remember the day—ay yi yai ya—you hid my token beneath that prickly tree—ay yi yai ya. Ay yi yai ya. Now all the prickly trees have grown and which one shelters me? Ay yi yai ya.

  Something stirs. You feel yourself brush against an ancient worry, a childhood panic. The song carries with it some knowledge, some terrible knowledge. Ay yi yai ya. Find the token you have lost beneath the prickly tree; the knowledge is not new; it is something you knew before but lost or it is something you refused to know, because you did not think you could bear it, but now it is returning and you can no longer fight it.

  I, Mellie. Say, I.

  I could not bear it. I could not bear to know it. It cannot be undone, that fragile thing we once were. It cannot be returned to.

  “It’s going to hurt,” said Nancy. “Being alive is going to hurt.”

  The stones on my chest pressed down and down and down, as if Nan
cy were reaching out of the screen and touching me just there.

  —pop—

  The knot in my chest at the Juni place loosened. And then there was something, small and terrible, a dense point of pain just where my ribs met and I felt her, right there at my breastbone for an interminable instant. The grief returned like a cloud blackout, like a fire, and it hurt, but I knew it was the fire that would drive me through the end.

  “You’ll be needing your refund,” said the counter girl, on my way out, and she handed me a couple of bills. “Sorry for the overcharge.” Maybe there was a wink there, but it might have been the scarring. Anyway, it was enough to get me my bus ticket home.

  Nine

  Brookline and Environs

  2010

  The bus pulls into South Station on Monday morning. I take the T to Longwood, and on foot, I follow a car into the Towers’ garage. Judah’s spot is empty, the car Emily had escaped in not returned, but this doesn’t necessarily mean anything bad. My own hatchback is where I left it, in the Cohens’ secret space by the pillar, the door open and the key in the lock. Otherwise, it appears undisturbed. I ease the car forward, readjust the mirror, and I roll. I’m already on 93, crawling through traffic, when I acknowledge the object poking into my back. It’s my phone battery. I find the device on the floor, plug into the car charger, and follow the flow of commuters onto the exit ramp.

  School’s out and the day is warm. Flag Day, Patriot’s Day, some quirk of the school calendar. The kids are gathered in front of Quincy Independence, waiting their turns to jump in the sprinkler. Marisa’s girl, the overweight one, is dangling an unfamiliar toddler’s toes in the spray. Her boy is showing someone something he’s been awarded, a certificate of being awesome at hallway behavior, a commendation for sportsmanship, whatever.

  The minder with the support hose counts her kids. There is no child in her arms, no one grasping at her knees. She calls the small ones back in, ticking off their names on her clipboard list. The spot on my chest where my daughter belongs throbs. I want to hold her in my arms and fall asleep with her breathing next to me and know everything is over, but I don’t get that. Juni is not among them. That deadline passed with me in the front seat of the black SUV, pounding my fists into the driver’s chest. I see the slog ahead, what it’s going to take to fight for my daughter. To the system, I am a woman who abandoned her child. I have no job, and little money left to pay a lawyer. Even with the best luck, there are no guarantees of anything except a long, hard climb out of the pit I’ve dug into. I make the small incantation that I can, for good hands, like the ones I’ve fallen into from time to time, the hands of Nancy, and Marisa, and Emily, for those to be the arms she’s held by until I get her back. I am just like Noreen now, a childless mother. I’ve come to believe in ordinary loss, its grinding and mundane evil. How you lose what you love: by loving other things, bad things, more.

  I’m no longer welcome on the premises and while I wait for my phone to charge, they send out a woman with my things. The new resident—black bangs, knuckle tattoos—isn’t someone I recognize. I can see she’s curious, that she’s eying me for lessons or warnings or just gossip, but she keeps her distance as she hands the shopping bag through the window. She’s got her program, and she’s fought too hard to get my spot to let my bad fortune contaminate her future.

  At the far end of the parking lot, I see the van idling, ready to take the Quincy Women to their commitment, and for a tenth of an instant I try to recall where we’re headed this week, which basement, which community room, which treatment facility. Like I still have a place among them. Like I’m ever going to be riding in that van again.

  But it’s almost noon on a Monday, and there is somewhere I have to be.

  I pull into an illegal parking spot. I’m just in time for the Monday meeting. Already, most of the regulars have headed inside. Only a few desperate smokers still stand in the circular drive, sucking down the butts of their generic cigarettes before the bell tower chimes. I recognize the pink-haired rehab enthusiast from two months ago. I’m surprised, but then you can never tell who’s going to make it back, who will wind up overdosed in an alley. She’s flirting with a boy about her age in new white sneakers. They’ve both got their problems. The girl expertly push-pulls a janky baby stroller with a sagging fabric seat, periodically checking in on the little one bundled within. The boy pauses in his conversation to kneel in front of an older woman in a wheel chair. He dabs at her knee with gauze. She’s been through hell, but her hair is a perfect, Dorchester blonde. I begin to run.

  Oh, G-d, I think. Emily. Relief floods me. She’s alive. She’s safe.

  I want so much for her to be fine, annoyed that I’m behind schedule, ready with a program platitude. The world wobbles. Her back is to me and Leo makes careful, minute ministrations, concentrating very hard. My legs are weak, as after illness or extraordinary exertion. As I near, I see her leg. It is propped on one of the elevated footrests. The skin on her outer thigh and shin, from the thigh to nearly the ankle, is covered in bandages, but there is bleed-through, and Leo lifts away the gauze. The skin has been sheared away entirely.

  Leo timidly applies some kind of ointment to the raw mess, and I can see from the rigidity of Emily’s spine, the controlled wince, that it hurts. No fucking duh, Nancy would have said. No fucking duh.

  “Just let me,” says Emily.

  “I can do it,” says Leo.

  “You’re all fidgety and nervous.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “That’s why I should do it. Anyway, Britney someone needs to walk her inside.”

  “Would you?” asks the pink-haired girl with the baby stroller. “It’s dumb, but it feels, like, awkward alone.”

  Leo pauses, and I take advantage of the opening to step forward.

  “Hi,” I say.

  As I move in, the child in the stroller reveals herself.

  “OK Mama all day Mama make way.” It is my waking child, raising her tousled head. There is the afternoon sun through the arch of the bell tower; a kid across the street strikes a pop-it on the pavement; the smell from a pizza delivery bike drifts past, and I am beside myself. Juni.

  Leo unbuckles my daughter from the borrowed stroller and gingerly sets her on the uninjured half of his mother.

  “Mama,” Juni says, reaching for me. “Mamamamamamamama.”

  “Well,” says Emily, finally meeting my eye, “one of us is in a forgiving mood.”

  I step forward, everything in me seizing, then Leo turns and steps between us.

  “Ma,” he says. “Ma, she showed her face. Look who showed her frickin’ face.”

  Emily raises a hand. “Stand down, big man. Since when have I needed you to protect me?”

  During my muteness, Britney shifts from one foot to the other; Emily gestures to her and Leo relaxes his stance. The pink-haired girl is more interesting to Leo than whatever is unfolding between the adults. He only hesitates another moment before walking her inside.

  I lean forward to take my sweet Juni in my arms, but Emily holds her tight. I can’t believe what I am seeing.

  “There’s a caseworker, Mellie. A docket number. I do not have to release her to you. I’m within my rights.”

  “Oh, Jesus, Emily. No.”

  “I’m five years sober.” She lights a cigarette, blows the smoke away from Juni and me. “My ex is coming for my kid. He’s circling my fucking block, and no one can find Leo. You stood there gaping like some dumb animal while this phantom with a pocketful of cloud shoves me in his car. Honestly, it was like you were high again.”

  There are excuses I could make, explanations I could offer, how the door stuck, how the cloud sickness overtook me, but what she says is also true. That I was chasing cloud, what it offered, the whole time.

  “You know how I find Leo, when I get back yesterday? His daddy’s car parked out front of the house, and the kid is leaning in the window. I swear, Mellie, I have had nightmares this exact scenario.
Leo’s dad comes back, all the sweet talk I know he can do, and then it’s all over, because I can fight the daddy, but I can’t fight them both together. Mellie. I felt it. That—whatever—the crack or the pop when you pass through from one thing to another—like here it is, one of those instances when everything breaks apart. The hitting, the blacking out, everything’s going to start again, and this time we won’t get free. Then Leo sees me; he sees the blood running down my leg. And by the time I reach him, he’s so totally perfect. He’s—” she pauses, her throat caught, swallows.

  “I can hear him. He’s standing like you do before a fight, filling more space, man-sized space. And he’s saying to his daddy, to his shithead daddy, don’t you ever come around again. He’s like, you hurt us. You don’t get to be family anymore.” Her grip around Juni is gentle, but there is rigidness elsewhere in her body. “And Mellie, that boy, that is why I can’t do apology time with you. I have to be at least half as strong as a smelly eighth grade boy.”

  I don’t know what to say to that. She’s right. It’s fair. “He’s OK, though?”

  “Seems to be. I don’t know. I believe in that flaky crap. Maybe this is how it had to go down to get us through the crisis. Anyway, yeah, he’s back in now, my ex. Parole violation plus all the judges in Middlesex know me. Plus, there was some press too, so now every teenaged girl in Metro Boston seems to think Leo is a tragic celebrity, like Twilight or some shit.”