You're a Big Girl Now

by Neil Gordon

  One day he told her, driving up to the run, that he had a nickname in his family, for always reading the map on a road trip and finding ingenious shortcuts: the Navigator. Much later, he told her how, in what he’d called “the Underground,” he’d used that as a code for a certain kind of payphone-to-payphone contact, an initial contact that buried, in code, served not for communication but as the modality to set up a future conversation. “The Navigator call,” they called it: the call that gave directions of where to be for the next call.

  And finally one day, having beat him on the Colgate run for the sixth week in a row, she repeated to him, with a shrug, a line her father had used, often, from his own Navy days during Korea.

  “You know the expression, Little J., ‘the navigator is always lost.’”

  Jason was bent over, hands on knees. “The fuck that mean, Mol.”

  “Sailors say it. Because by the time the navigator’s fixed a position, you’ve already moved to another? You know where you just were, but not where you are. That’s you on the trail, buddy. You never know whether it’s a climb or a sprint or a goddamned bridge because you’re always lost.”

  That inspired him to run the trail straight for a month to figure out the stages.

  But that was the thing. Even straight, it took J a huge effort to put the trail together into a continuous narrative. Everything was fracture for him, disconnect, and the stages of the run stayed for him forever different stories rather than parts of the same. In time, he came to follow her speeds rather than memorize his own. It allowed him, he said, to experience the thing he liked most about running in the woods: the fun of being lost.

  The fun of being lost. The fun of being lost. The thought annoyed her so. Like everything he had done? Weatherman, and all? It was all fun. It was all the fun of being lost. Weather was a delusion, a self-delusion by a bunch of rich kids who thought they were underground. But all they ever were was lost, and when they were done having fun being lost that way, they went on to have fun being lost other ways: lost as adults, lost as parents, lost as runners.

  Molly has never been lost. Never in her life. She’s running uphill now, on her heels, hamstrings and gluteus muscles, minor and major, a boxer’s run as she takes the wide climb, feeling the ill effects of her earlier profligacy with her energy, working very hard indeed. She has never been lost. She comes from Saugerties, for God’s sake. Both of her parents were born and died here. The only time she ever left was to go up to New England for college—Dartmouth, on a track scholarship, where she met Donny. They came back after college to be married—nothing else made sense but that she came home while he went to war. Then Donny was killed on his first tour of duty, and the farthest away she ever went again, save tourism, was Albany for her Ph.D., which she needed when they offered her Mount Marion School, as principal. Now she lived in her parents’ house, her childhood bedroom hers, her mother’s kitchen the kitchen where she raised her son, and was principal of her own childhood school. Briefly she saw her life as leaving a trail of memories that rose slowly behind her as she moved on, to gather in the parabola of the sky’s depthless blue. She tried to hold the thought, breathing very hard in the last hundred yards of the uphill, using a great deal of muscle to keep her speed up. But it flew away too, up into the sky, up into the parabolic heights of the sky, and she thought instead, “It nearly swept me off my feet.” A distant line from Dylan. Memory was two-edged. Sometimes for weeks you could only remember the bad things. At the edge of her capacity, she increased her speed. Fifty yards. The runner’s myth was that you could go through a wall, find a source of energy where you’d feel no pain. But the pain was a wall, and you could also halt before it. That’s why it is all so high stakes, so high stakes. Real depression could result from that: days of wondering whether you’d run again. With a wresting in her attention that she could feel in her legs, she forced herself to count steps, seven at a time marked off on a finger, seventy steps times seven, then seventy more. It was so hard to let pain just be physical. It infected your brain. You could not tell the two apart, whether it was age, and exhaustion, and gravity slowing your step, making you feel pain, or if it was your mind, your mind, your mind, your mind. If only your mind could go silent.

  And she crested the hill, her step naturally lengthening, and in the relief of the downhill across, now, the softly grassed path, for a suite of seconds, it did.

  Molly’s run is over now. Not literally, but in every way that matters. She’ll hit Dutcher’s Notch soon, turn around, and run out, the way she came in. It’s virtually all downhill, the way out, and still she’ll run on stiff, injured legs, badly, painfully, her eyes on the trail, her mind half occupied with reminding herself to lift her feet, to avoid tripping, worried about a fall, a real injury. Who’ll pick Izzy up after school then? She’ll think more, but her thoughts will be useless, and she’ll know it: pure self-destruction, no insight, no value.

  Just living, unattached, uncontrollable worrying.

  Worrying about the sky, graying above her, lowering with the sudden, approaching rain.

  Worrying about the wind, coming up in the trees, as if a huge hand were passing its palm over them, loosing dry leaves into the air, and dust, and scaring the birds from the branches, and carrying the distant howl of a coyote, bereft, waiting for winter.

  Worrying about the afternoon, trying to hide her anxiety from the child in her care.

  About the night, waking at midnight, the light of the computer screen, the kitchen.

  About J., alone in the woods as the rain came in.

  J., alone in the woods. She sees him, in the door of his tent, under the rain trap. He sits, arms around his legs, watching the darkness, saturated with rain. She hopes he hasn’t gotten high. That will make it harder. J., for all he’s done, is not equipped for the view before him, the world drained of all its color, the degree zero where every hope runs away. J., for all he is the rock of support for so many people, he’s not equipped for what he’s going to see, tonight, in the rain. It’s not a view for the optimistic, for the hopeful. It’s not a view for people who believe in things. It’s a view for people like her, like her, people who hope for nothing, people who’ve lost everything.

  Except she hasn’t lost everything, has she? Not yet. Not until now, now, when she loses J. J., the last survivor, but it’s not the Vietnam era, or the underground, or the ’60s, that he’s the last survivor of. It’s that he’s the last to come see that view of the world without color and know that everything he’s ever hoped for was a ruse, a self-deception, a fantasy that can only be maintained until now and now, losing J, she has truly lost it all. In the falling light, in the gathering wind, in the chill of approaching rain, she finds she is hissing the word aloud with the shock of each step on the trail: “All of it. All of it. All of it.”

  At her car, in the parking lot, rain is just splattering the windshield. One o’clock, a late November weekday afternoon. Inside the car, the air rancid. She cannot open the window, because of the rain. For a long moment she sits, traversing the huge emptiness inside of her, an absolutely inaccessible, inscrutable emptiness. She puts her hands on the top of the steering wheel and then her eye sockets on the top of her knuckles. Furiously, she hisses: I am not going to lose everything, I am not going to lose everything. With a huge effort, eyes still against her left hand, she reaches down with her right and ignites the engine, then down again to put the car in reverse. When she is rolling backward and has hit the brakes, hard, the movement finally jerks her head up off the wheel. And only now does she flip into drive and pull out, very fast, down the road to East Jewett, speeding. She has no intention of passing in front of Onteora Park. She’ll drive all the way through Windham to Catskill, then around and down the highway to Saugerties, adding some forty miles to her drive.

  Besides anything else, it gives her an excuse to drive fast.

  6.

  It’s gone midnight at Molly Sackler’s house, several hours gone, and something is wrong
.

  It’s that there’s no kitchen light on.

  You’d think the power was out. There is no light at all. Not the faint illumination of a night light; not the glow of the second computer screen in the upstairs study.

  Is it a power failure? But the outside light is burning at his house, and that shows Jason Sinai that the electric is on in the neighborhood. Is Molly gone? Her car is in the driveway. But Molly’s house, under the moonless sky, is black.

  It is a fact so strange that Jason, crouching in the drizzling rain at the edge of the nameless dirt road between the two houses, checks his watch again.

  Two a.m.

  It’s a fact so strange that without even going into his own house, he crosses to Molly’s yard and lets himself in the front door with his key.

  He is not surprised, not exactly. Two and a half hours before, Molly had missed checking in. When he was away anywhere, an 11:30 call to his pager meant all was well—for Molly, for Izzy, for him. An 11:30 call to his pager meant nothing had happened to Izzy, and no one had come looking for him. Out on Huckleberry Point, sitting in front of a hissing fire under the rain fly of his tent, Jason had checked and double-checked his pager, though he knew it received here: the Woodstock cell tower was in line of sight, across Platte Clove.

  Their plan for this contingency was simple. Jason would run away. Run away and call in, the following morning, to a phone booth in Catskill—a straight call, not a navigator, and every day thereafter, ascending one hour per twenty-four save for the 10th and 21st of any month, which threw the schedule backward three hours, and keep calling, and keep running, until they had made contact and Molly had told him what was wrong. That there had been, say, an America’s Most Wanted episode about him. That someone had been asking about him in town. That there had been a suspicious car on the intersection of un-named roads between their houses. Or that one of his failsafes—the toothpick bolted to his office back door that would crack if it were opened; the potato chip under the doormat by the back door—was reading wrong.

  At Huckleberry Point Jason put the pager back on his belt and watched the fire for a moment. It was 11:35, and those five minutes seemed to glow like the core of the fire. Then, in a fluid motion, he rose and turned. His pack was hung from the bears in a tree on nylon climbing wire; in ten minutes he had struck the tent, dropped and packed the bag, doused the fire. Pack shouldered, he was following the path out by the light of a halogen flashlight.

  One of two improbable things had happened.

  The first was that he had been found, somehow, by some trail that led to him from his father’s death.

  The second, even more unlikely, he thought, was that Molly was asleep.

  Either required investigation.

  A strange lightness had floated in Jason as he came out through the misty rain, the woods black save for the circle of his flashlight darting up for trail markers, then down at his boots slapping the path of wet autumn leaves, the saturated black of the perimeter of his vision, the long reiteration of the rain revealing distance as the sound fell away into the woods, shh, shh, shh. He remembered the day he first kissed Molly in the sibilant rain and for a moment he felt the times between then and now touch up against each other, itself like a kiss. Then the present came back and he cried, suddenly and briefly. Just as suddenly he stopped. Then for a long time there was just the abstraction of flashlight and black night, the slap slap slap slap of the balls of his feet, the shh, shh, shh of the rain.

  He had come out of the woods and reached his car around 1:00, not at the Huckleberry Point trailhead but down Platte Clove Road where he’d parked by the Bruderhoff’s logging operation in the woods. Even then he did not approach directly. Rather, he circled through the woods, across Platte Clove Road and into the woods again, then out again and slowly, keeping to the tree line, up the dirt road to the parking lot.

  No one was there.

  In November, the 16—the seasonal road down to Saugerties—is meant to be closed, but he descended it anyway, in first gear and still having to ride the brakes, peering worried through the rainy windshield. Nor did he approach his house directly. First he went in to town, driving with his lights off, parked behind the theatre and walked through the parking lot and alley to the back door of the brick-façade colonial housing his office. He climbed the back stairs—raw wood, dry with dust. His anxiety was a thin, attenuated note high in his ear. With the flashlight, in the crack of the hinge he could see that the toothpick tip that he knew to be held down with a gunned staple was unbroken. He opened the door slowly with a key, went in, and reached down for the toothpick to check that it had indeed broken when he opened the door, which meant that it had done its job. Then he crossed to the front door, in the dark, and checked the tattle-tale there, and the one on the desk, and the one on the telephone, the latter two made with thread.

  But no one had been there.

  He left the office through the backdoor, regained his car, and crossed town now, still driving with his lights off. He parked down from the little crossroads near Molly’s house and climbed out. Then he walked up the side of the unnamed dirt road until he could see, crouched down in the rain, and watched.

  That was when, for the first time, he saw something wrong.

  It was something for which he had no plan.

  There was no light in the kitchen window.

  For a long time he crouches and thinks. But really, there are only two things he can think of to do: go away or go in.

  Jason rises and walks across the driveway to the front door.

  Inside the kitchen, there is still no clue. On the table were the remainders of his daughter’s homework. This, clearly, was an after-dinner activity, because the dinner dishes are cleared to the sink and a smell of thyme is in the air. The smell makes his stomach awaken: he has been fasting since the previous morning.

  He climbs the dark stairs quietly, crosses the hallway to Leo’s old room, and opens the door. I sleep here neatly in the bed, composed under taut wool covers. Next he checks Molly’s room. So. It was against all his rules, but he was right not to run. As unlikely as it seems, Molly is actually asleep too, in total darkness. It is so remarkable, in fact, that Jason actually goes into the bathroom, shutting the door before he turns on the light, and checks the medicine chest. There’s a little plastic vial of Lorazepam in there, but it’s as full as last time he looked at it. Don’t think he never counted the pills: numbers, for Jason, are a map of life. Anyway, it’s his Lorazepam. Molly never took pills.

  Reassured, he turns off the bathroom light, slips out of the bedroom, closing the door behind him, thankful for its solidity, for its even swing and quiet hinge, and goes back downstairs.

  So, Molly didn’t send the failsafe message because Molly has slept all night. The second time in thirty years. His surprise stays with him all the way through the leftovers of our dinner, which Jason now consumes with a full quart of milk. Then he turns on Molly’s computer to read about his father in the papers, and this is what he is still doing when hours later he hears Molly’s step coming down the stairs.

  7.

  Molly wakes at dawn, feeling bruised, as if a crowd of people had been haranguing at her, her dreams a loud memory. Her sleep has been black, syrupy, a sleep of resistance rather than rest, a stubborn refusal to face what lay ahead. With consciousness came the fact of having slept all night, an astounding event that she greets with sourness. Now she had broken a thirty-year habit of insomnia twice, and both were for the wrong reasons: once for that completion she didn’t want, the other, now, an act of nearly childish denial. Sitting on the side of her bed, she also knew that for this second failure, she couldn’t blame Jason.

  When at last she rises, it is first to check Izzy, across the hall in Leo’s room. Next Molly goes to check the web, not in the kitchen but in her study on her desktop: she wants to do this now; she does not even want to wait to go downstairs. Her heart stops, then pounds when she sees that two Marines have died in Somalia.
She can barely focus enough to absorb that they were both ground force, so neither one was Leo. When she sees their names she shuts down the monitor and then leans her forehead against it until the adrenaline flood passes. Now the day, with its blank, metallic sunlight, its matter-of-factness, the tedium of pain. She goes downstairs slowly, her calves and ankles aching from the run yesterday. On the stairs she smells woodsmoke and stops. In the kitchen, at the computer, is J, reading.

  She watches him watching the computer screen, still unaware that she is watching. The smell is the campfire he had come from. He is unshaven, his face pale. His T-shirt hangs loose on his shoulders and arms, the still-faintly-red hair on his temples curled and bushy. Normally, you look at J., you see the power of his wide shoulders and strong arms. Now he is hunched, thin, defeated.

  Temporary. Watching him, her mind catches on the word, and the conviction comes to her from the other side of the night, from the afternoon before, that J. has come to say goodbye. For a moment, she detests him, purely and bitterly, a little paroxysm of hate squeezing in the pit of her stomach like an endocrinal process. She says, coldly, before she means to speak: “Where do you plan to go?”

  He looks up, surprised.

  “Plan? I planned to go to Chicago. But . . . I broke all my own rules. I just didn’t believe it.”

  She takes a long moment to understand. When she does, horror floods her.

  “Jesus Christ. The pager. I could have sent you to fucking Chicago.”