At the Far End of Nowhere

by Christine Davis Merriman

  It was the child’s dream to ride forever on this bus in the soft and twinkling Christmas night, to float through endless passing scenes kept safe for her beyond the window.

  The bus jolted to a sudden stop. The child’s chin jarred against the pane. Her eyes blinked open to see an old man staggering down the aisle, grasping wildly at the seats, fighting for his balance. He descended the steps slowly, unwillingly entering the cold city street. The driver grew impatient, rocked back and forth against his curtain. The child shivered from the sudden draft of cold and huddled farther down inside her coat. The door banged shut at the old man’s back. The bus jolted to a start.

  The child sat up, removed her left mitten, and touched the icy window with her fingertip. The glass had grown steamy from her breath, and she began to trace her name across the surface. But her letters were too large, and she ran out of space before her name was finished. She replaced her mitten and erased the entire square of glass with a flattened, red-wooly palm.

  She could see the stars now. They were very white and clear. Some were sharpened spears of cold and ice. Others were sparkling spikes of flame and fire. The child made one wish upon them all.

  Now the bus was passing the suburbs—the glowing-yellow, clustered suburbs. Many passengers got off at square brick houses with painted shutters. The bus was nearly empty now. The child watched as, one by one, the last passengers rose and filed out—a lady in a cloud of thick perfume, a tall man with umbrella and galoshes in hand, a brown woman whose face looked worn and crispy. They all buttoned coats and lifted collars before leaving the bus.

  The bus moved on. The child sighed one small, happy sigh, leaned back against the seat, and continued to watch the roadside as it passed swiftly by. She needn’t get off yet. There was still a long way to go.

  Soon, the bus crossed a bridge. Now it traveled darkened roads instead of lighted streets. There were no more road signs, no more stoplights. The child peered out at thick black winter woods.

  She could not remember having come this way before. She wondered if the driver could have lost his way. Looking forward, she saw only the vacant flapping of the plastic curtain exposing an empty driver’s seat. She felt one frosty tear upon her left cheek, one scalding tear upon her right. The air was calm, yet full of wild and wondrous wind to fill each lung with chilling warmth. The child breathed deeply.

  Just beyond the Manor Bridge, they found a shattered bus, plunged through the left-side railing of a seldom-traveled roadway and lying on its side at the foot of a ravine. A dazed, undamaged driver was found wandering some miles away. He had taken a wrong turn, leapt free.

  Beside the tilted bus, a woman cried. A man looked on. They shivered in the cold and eager dawn.

  Beneath the bus, they found a small, bundled body, half-crushed, peering through a shattered window. The left cheek was broken, covered with countless drops of glass and blood. The right cheek was whole and firm beneath a single streak of tear, still warm.

  Inside the bus, a single, small, silent child rode endlessly into a soft and twinkling Christmas night. The End.

  When I finish reading my story, the bedroom has grown dark, and Daddy has fallen asleep in his Morris chair.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  RED SLIPPERS

  BY Christmas Eve, Daddy is bedridden. I have to put a rubber mattress liner under his sheets and keep absorbent bed pads—that look like large, unfolded rectangular paper diapers—tucked under him.

  Spence and I don’t do anything special for Christmas this year. We don’t buy each other presents. I don’t send Christmas cards or bake cookies. We don’t put up a Christmas tree. I don’t play the piano. I don’t sing “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas.” The only present I buy is one for Daddy.

  Aunt Essie stops over with a plate of homemade cookies, arranged under a red paper napkin on a plastic platter shaped like an indented Santa Claus. The weight of Daddy’s condition in the bedroom upstairs casts a heaviness throughout the farmhouse.

  Daddy doesn’t even eat baby food anymore. I do a trick I learned at Bonnie Blink. I concoct a high-calorie, high-protein milkshake—whole milk, ice cream, and dry milk powder—in a blender, and get Daddy to suck it through a bent glass straw. For hydration, I hold ice cubes wrapped in a washcloth to his parched lips. He suckles at the washcloth like a baby.

  I change his bed pads and sheets throughout the day and night. I give him sponge baths in bed, and rub his skin with lanolin. I roll him and prop him in different positions to prevent bedsores.

  On Christmas Day, I wake early on the sofa in the dining/living room. I’ve taken to sleeping there instead of in my bedroom. I don’t know why. It just seems safer there, farther away from Daddy’s dying. I make coffee for myself and go upstairs to check on Daddy.

  I clean him up, dress him in fresh long johns, and get him to swallow a sip or two of milkshake. Then I prop him up in bed and bring him his Christmas present. I place it on his chest. I haven’t bothered to wrap it. It’s a pair of red bedroom slippers. Red is still our favorite color.

  “Merry Christmas, Daddy,” I say, and kiss him on his forehead.

  Daddy clutches the red slippers to his chest, tears in his eyes, and says, “My little Lissa, my little Lissa.”

  It is two days past Christmas, in the middle of the night, and Daddy is dying. I call to Spence in his bedroom, pound on his door. Finally, he answers.

  “I think Daddy’s dying. What should I do? Should I call the doctor?”

  “You can try if you want,” he says. But Spence doesn’t get up.

  I call our local doctor. His wife calls him to the phone. The doctor tells me he doesn’t make house calls.

  I go back upstairs and pound on Spence’s bedroom door. I shout through the closed door, “Spence! Spence!”

  “What do you want?” He sounds cross.

  “I called the doctor. He says he doesn’t make house calls. What should I do, Spence?”

  “Go back to bed. There’s nothing we can do until morning. Now let me get some sleep.”

  I go back to Daddy’s bedroom and sit in the Morris chair beside his bed for a while, until I hear the death rattle begin in Daddy’s chest. It’s something I’ve read about in novels, and I’m a little surprised that such a thing really exists, really happens.

  Then something, I don’t know what (is it cowardice, panic, the selfishness of youth?) prevents me from staying there to watch my father die.

  I take Daddy’s hand in mine one last time and say, “You’ll have to do this by yourself.”

  I know that he hears me, that he understands what I have said. I can see, quite clearly, two tears roll down his cheek. For a moment, his hand tightens around my hand. Then he releases it.

  I sleep fitfully on the sofa downstairs. My mind is saturated with a rapid flow of dreams and fluid visions. I am seeing into Daddy’s mind as he lies dying. I see Fringe-A-Frock exploding. I hear the distant echo of the words Urchie’s dead. I hear Moses Queen’s laughter echoing in Fallen Angel Swamp.

  Tonight, winds roar around the wooden clapboard farmhouse, rattling the windows. But it’s not our farmhouse. It’s a different one, the one on Tulip Hill. It is on nights like this that Daddy comes up with some of his most important inventions. I see the boy Stouten put aside his schoolbooks, climb into bed, and run his fingers lovingly over watches and watch parts he keeps in an old cigar box under his bed. With young Stouten, I fasten my eyes on the two prettiest things he’s ever seen—his mother’s smile and the workings of a watch.

  It is long past midnight when Stouten turns down the wick, extinguishes the kerosene lamp on his bed stand, and drifts off to sleep. Dreams come to him, and now to me—apparitions of inventions past, auguries of inventions future—gears meshing, pistons sliding in cylinders, steam pressure building and releasing to drive the engine that powers the world.

  Now, more intricate visions arrive—escapement mechanisms with balance wheels and hairsprings, the controlled expansion and contrac
tion of the delicately coiled hairsprings—watches ticking like mechanical hearts, counting out the hours until the first light appears above the swampland east of the Loco Moco River.

  The dream shifts forward in time, and I see my Uncle Francis burst into flames. I see Daddy wrapping his younger brother in his overcoat.

  And now, and finally now, I see an old man and his little girl sitting on white marble steps in front of a brick row house, bidding goodnight to a world of once upon a time under the watchful eye of Natty Boh.

  Early in the morning I return to Daddy’s bedroom. His body is there, but I can tell that Daddy’s not in there anymore. My mind seems paralyzed, locked, frozen. I am seized with a terrible sense of confusion, vertigo.

  I run from the bedroom, down the stairs, and, in desperation, phone Aunt Essie next door. She is a nurse. She is Jimmie’s sister. She will know what to do.

  I take Aunt Essie up to Daddy’s bedroom. She says she needs to prepare the body.

  At first touch, she says, “He’s stiff. They’re going to have to break his legs to straighten him out.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I begin to sob. I’m filled with guilt. “The doctor wouldn’t come. I didn’t know what to do.”

  I run down and phone the doctor again. “My father is dead,” I say. It feels like a confession.

  “You have my condolences. You’ll need to notify the coroner.”

  I run back upstairs. I pound on Spence’s door.

  I go back to Daddy’s bedroom. Aunt Essie is bathing the body.

  “It’s all right, honey. I’ve pulled him straight.”

  Spence is up now.

  “Spence, the doctor said we have to call the coroner. I don’t know the coroner’s phone number. What should we do? Aunt Essie’s here.”

  Finally, something clicks in Spence. He becomes my big brother again.

  “It’s okay, Liss. I’ll take care of it.”

  The rest of the morning spins past in a crazy blur. Spence calls the coroner. The coroner comes and writes a death certificate. Sometime before (or is it after?) the coroner’s visit, I don’t know when, I’m startled to hear a tap at the kitchen-door window. It’s a police officer. He sits across from me and Spence at the kitchen table, asking us questions, filling out a police report.

  Guilt comes crushing in on me as I hear myself say, “I wasn’t with him when he died. I found him this morning, around six o’clock.” Have I broken the law? Does he think I’ve killed my own father?

  “Sorry to trouble you like this,” the officer says. He must see the anguish on my face. “But in situations like this, we have to make a report.”

  He finishes the report. “Take care, you guys,” he says, pats me on the arm, and leaves.

  We arrange to have a Roman Catholic funeral mass held for Daddy at an old stone chapel in Baltimore County with an elderly priest. I think this is what Daddy wants. Then we have his body transported for burial in the family plot at St. Ignatius, in St. Mary’s County. Throughout it all, I seem to be watching myself from a distance.

  I see a young woman, walking dazed like a zombie beside her brother away from a fresh grave, past rows of gray monuments, engraved gravestones, and solemn stone angels. But this young woman’s hair is short, very short, like a boy’s. She has cut off the two long braids herself, wrapped them in tissue paper, and placed them in her father’s dresser drawer, nestled alongside another young woman’s auburn curls in a cedar box.

  Relatives come to pay their respects. She hears them whispering among themselves, saying things like, “She’s really taking it hard,” and “Is she okay?”

  At the edge of the graveyard, I stumble on a loose rock in the pathway. Spence grabs my wrist to keep me from falling. We get into his sports car, and he drives me home.

  Some believe that the soul must make a journey after death. Tonight, I take that journey with Daddy’s soul. He is floating somewhere, looking down on his watchmaker’s bench. I watch with him through darkening glass panes. With him, I see crows swirling and descending from the sky. But they are not crows; they are instead large ashes, rising above a flaming trash barrel in the yard, spinning, then slowly descending to rest upon the frozen grass. Daddy and I see remnants of burned newspaper pages, year after year, still smoldering red at the edges. Their photos are blackened, their words swallowed and obscured. Man’s messages to man are immolated and transformed into twisted shadow birds of sorrow, or of prey.

  Daddy was ninety-four. I am twenty-two. The year has ended.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  AFTERMATH

  IN February 1973, after Daddy’s death, I return to college full-time and immerse myself in American literature—Faulkner, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers—and in French literature: Proust, Gide, Sartre, Camus, Robbe-Grillet.

  Reading Sartre jolts me, fills me with anxiety and despair. His words lead me to believe that my life means nothing unless I give it meaning. I must accept individual responsibility for every action I take. I cannot depend on someone else’s rules. I must define myself, create myself through every decision and choice I make. Only in this way can I be authentic and free.

  In March 1973, the last American combat soldiers leave South Vietnam. For our country, the war is officially over. But at what cost? To what end? Again, the counting comes! And what are we left with when the numbers are counted, the tallying done, the balance sheet drawn up? Of the more than three million Americans who have served, nearly 58,000 are dead, more than 1,000 are missing in action, and 150,000 are seriously wounded. And these are just the tallies in the American column of the balance sheet.

  I continue into summer, taking back-to-back semesters. I’m preparing to spend my junior year abroad in France. I read A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway’s memoir about his years as an American journalist in 1920s Paris, struggling to become a great writer. I imagine myself mingling with other writers in cafés, gathering with the literati at a salon, flourishing under the roof of a benevolent and inspiring host or hostess, being recognized by like-minded artists, and becoming the next great expatriate American writer.

  I sell the Corvair to my friend Alice’s father for $200; he’s a collector. I get a passport and a student visa. As a going-away present, Spence buys me a vintage 1940s British fireman’s jacket at Sunny’s Surplus. Coarse blue wool, NFS (for National Firemen’s Service) embossed on its double-breasted silver buttons, it matches one he bought for himself that I’ve long admired. Wearing it, I think, will make me appear strong, intrepid. I leave most of my things behind and pack only one suitcase—a couple of changes of clothing and a huge Larousse French-English dictionary.

  In October 1973, I depart for France aboard a champagne flight to Paris. All of this is funded by Spence. He’s been incredibly generous with me since Daddy’s death, financing me, encouraging me. He makes good money now.

  I remember asking Spence once, not long after Jimmie died, “Spence, do you ever think you’re going to be famous?”

  “Nope…well, maybe once…nah, not really.”

  “Well, I do, Spence. I’ve always thought I’m going to be famous one day.”

  Now Spence says to me, as he sends me off, “If somebody’s going to do something important, then maybe it should be you.”

  I think Spence is motivated, even driven, by words Daddy drilled into his head over the years: “You must always take care of your little sister. She’s just a little girl.”

  I fly from Dulles to JFK, then from JFK to Paris. Spence has bought me a first-class ticket. As the plane crosses the Atlantic, champagne flows endlessly. I drink too much, and the alcohol, combined with the dose of Dramamine I’ve taken to prevent motion sickness during the flight, has put me in a groggy, dreamlike state. I can hear Daddy’s voice saying, “You’re coming, and I’m going.”

  Throughout the long plane flight, I sleep and wake, sleep and wake. Suddenly, it’s morning, and I’m in Paris! Even though I’m bleary, jet-lagged, and disorie
nted, adrenaline propels me from Orly Airport to Gare de Lyon. Here, I buy a ticket for the next train to Clermont-Ferrand, where I will be attending classes at the Faculté des Lettres.

  Like so many of the buildings in Paris, the Gare de Lyon train station is built on a grand scale, an elaborate concoction of Belle Epoque architecture. At one corner, a massive clock tower greets me, and I am reminded of Daddy’s Bromo-Seltzer Tower in Baltimore.

  My train won’t be leaving for several hours, so I make my way into the station’s magnificent restaurant, Le Train Bleu. Its interior is breathtaking. I enter, and am at once enfolded in an extravagantly appointed rococo décor, an ostentatious swirl of red velvet, gilt moldings, and painted frescos depicting historic French scenes. Pendulous chandeliers cast romantic lighting on the parquet flooring.

  I take a seat alone at a wood-paneled booth upholstered in maroon leather, and order a café au lait and a ham sandwich, un sandwich au jambon. I’ve kept my hair short, sort of a brunette version of New Wave actress Jean Seberg’s cropped hair in Breathless.

  Soon after, a Frenchman, wearing a corduroy suit and a black turtleneck sweater, approaches my table and asks if he can sit with me. Though he’s not exactly Jean-Paul Belmondo, I say okay. He makes a quick bow, settles into the seat across from me, introduces himself as Paul Duval, and asks my name.

  “Je m’appelle Lissa.”

  Monsieur Duval seems neither young nor old. He has a smooth mustache, a receding hairline, and wears his hair oiled and combed straight back. His face is curiously rodent-like, and extends itself into a classic Gallic nose reminiscent of the one I’ve seen in photos of Charles de Gaulle. His smile is oddly feral and his teeth are quite yellow, almost as yellow as Daddy’s. With a seamless flow of movements, he draws a blue packet labeled Gauloises from his pocket, lights a short, unfiltered cigarette, snaps his fingers for a waiter, orders a Pernod, and offers to order me a drink, as well.