The Outside Lands

by Hannah Kohler

  Her dad was awake, standing at the picture window, waiting. The headlights flared over his face, and he screwed his eyes shut. He didn’t open them until Jeannie slammed the car door.

  He opened the front door. He was clean-shaven, his hair trimmed, his bathrobe tied neatly around his body. Jeannie held out her hand; he took it, and Jeannie felt the steel in his fingers. She stepped inside; Billy hung back. “Charlie,” he murmured, and Jeannie nodded, and eased the door closed.

  In the kitchen, her dad waved her to sit. He stood, his hands resting on the top of a wicker chair. His face was fuller, the old keenness in his eyes. “Tell me,” he said.

  “Twenty years,” said Jeannie. “They sentenced him to twenty years.”

  The following Wednesday, Billy came home early from work. Jeannie was sitting on the living room floor, doing a world map puzzle with Charlie, listening to a speech by Hubert Humphrey on the radio. Jeannie heard shoes take the steps outside two at a time, heard the push of Billy’s key in the lock, saw Billy’s face appear, shining with excitement.

  “Get in the car,” he said. “You too, bud.”

  Charlie scrammed to find his shoes; Jeannie stood.

  “You eat anything today, honey?” said Billy. “You look beat.”

  “What’s going on?” she said.

  “Get your purse. We’re going for a ride.”

  They drove over the Golden Gate Bridge. Jeannie craned her neck to gaze at the city, wondered if it was hiding Tom, if he’d found a place between its close, pale buildings; imagined he felt the weight of her eyes.

  “Beautiful day,” said Billy. The September sun had burned off the fog, and the ocean chopped blue-black beneath them. The bridge slipped under the wheels. Jeannie rolled down the window, felt the air slice into the car, felt the reflex of freedom she always felt crossing the bay; thought of Kip, and her breath caught.

  Billy placed a hand on hers. “I’ve got something to show you,” he said.

  They drove through Sausalito, through Mill Valley, past signs for San Quentin. It was the first time Jeannie had driven beyond the headlands. It was beachy and bleak, scrubgrass showing bald patches of sand, communities gathering in clumped strings, then trailing away. It smelled like the Sunset—grass and dust and salt. They reached a small town, ropes of white bungalows stringing from a cutesy center with a church, an elementary school, and a general store called Monroe’s. Billy pulled up outside a large tan house with a bare front yard and dim windows.

  “Here we are,” he said, looking up at the house, admiration in his face.

  “What, Daddy?” said Charlie.

  Billy pushed open his door and stepped out of the car, waving his hand for Jeannie to do the same. He lifted Charlie from the backseat, raised him in one arm, and pointed to the house.

  “This is our new home,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” said Jeannie, climbing out of the car.

  “I made an offer on it,” said Billy, pushing open the front gate. He set Charlie down in the yard; Charlie ran to the old swing, lay his belly on it, and swung.

  “But how . . . ?”

  “My folks lent me the money,” said Billy. “My mother and I thought it would be good for you to get out of the city. Get a fresh start. After the shock with Kip.”

  Jeannie looked up at the house, with its smooth walls and its dark glass. She heard the noise of a car door closing down the street, saw a heavy middle-aged woman wearing loose plaid pants and a tennis visor carrying bags of groceries into a near-identical house. Across the street, an old man with an anxious face mowed the lawn. A fat tabby cat stretched on the sidewalk, and at the end of the street, a homely freckled girl rode circles on her bicycle. It was the kind of place that you didn’t need to move from—plenty of space, safe neighborhood, commutable to the city. Room to grow, to grow old.

  “It’s fifteen hundred square feet. There’s a big backyard. We could have a couple more ankle-biters.”

  Charlie was at her knee. “Mommy, there’s a swing.” She placed her hand on his sun-warmed hair.

  “There is,” she said.

  Billy pushed his glasses up his nose and blinked. “What do you think, honey?”

  Jeannie thought of Kip, of Walter, locked in jails an ocean apart; thought of Lee, hiding from her mother at Mrs. Moon’s; of her dad, stuck in a house she couldn’t spend another minute in. Thought of Tom, trapped in his own body, cutting a life for himself, somewhere she couldn’t know. And this was where her life would slow and narrow and stop: a family home in a quiet suburban street across the bridge, sheltered from the assaults of the city, the Pacific, from the marvels and inducements of the world.

  “I think,” she said, accepting his hand in hers and swallowing the breath that thickened in her throat, “this is it.”

  Jeannie / 1969

  The room took Jeannie back to the cafeteria at Liberty High—the kids hunched in their chairs, the attendants hovering, the slow shuffle through the door, eyes craning for a place to sit.

  “Physical contact is prohibited. Please do not touch or hold hands—”

  Jeannie scanned the room, hurrying over strange faces. A meat-faced inmate with stitches running over his shaved scalp caught her glance; he pressed his fingers in a V against his mouth and moused a fat, wet tongue between them. Jeannie looked away. She felt eyes on her, saw a figure rising from a chair in the corner. “Jackson, sit.”

  Kip. He raised his hand in a slow salute, mouthed Hi, as though across a noisy street.

  She crossed the room, her heels sounding bright above scraping chairs and low voices. He was sitting straight and square in his seat, his forearms laid flat on the table—the way a soldier might sit, and the thought made her afraid. He had grown muscled and mustached, and had an awkward, unfinished tattoo of a cross inked on his forearm. She placed her hand on the chair opposite him, saw the closed look on his face, and her mouth grew sticky.

  “Kip,” she managed. She sat herself in the chair, her heart chasing, her arms uncertain where to place themselves. And then he grinned: that shit-eating, annoying, kid-brother grin.

  “You’re getting fat,” he said. He slid a hand across the table, as though to touch her.

  “You’re getting . . . I don’t know.” She covered her awkwardness with a smile, put her hands in her lap.

  He was watching her with sharp, steady eyes. Jeannie remembered how it was growing up, how in the everyday acting-out and dressing-up of family life, it was Kip who really saw her.

  “Where’s Dad?” he said.

  “Waiting outside. He’ll visit tomorrow,” she said, recalling the look on her dad’s face outside as he looked up at the immense, crenellated structure, its windows full of darkness; how like a child he was in his naked trepidation. Kip was bobbing his head in a nod—too fast, and for too long—and Jeannie felt the sting of his disappointment.

  “How’s Charlie?” he said.

  “Good. Naughty. He’s starting kindergarten next year.”

  Kip whistled. “Big boy. He’ll be a man by the time I’m out.” Jeannie was silent. Nineteen eighty-eight. Perhaps sooner, with clemency and parole. Kip seemed to trace the thought in her face. “The nineteen-eighties,” he said. “I’ve been reading about it. We’ll get electricity from the sun and people will be able to vacation on the moon. And everything will be covered in plastic—carpet and walls and stuff—and when shit gets dirty, you’ll just hose it down.”

  A smile pricked Jeannie’s face. Here was Kip, full of zip and bullshit.

  He caught her smile, his eyes wide. “I’m serious. We’ll get our food from these little green pills, and cars will be able to fly, like rockets. War will be dead, the commies will surrender, and blacks and whites will live in peace.” Kip’s voice sailed the room; a colored inmate sitting three tables away turned his head and stared. “Dad might even be able to see me by then.” This in a murmur, his mouth curled in a smile, but Jeannie heard the roughness in his voice, saw the purpling skin beneath h
is eyes, the eczema that chapped his cheeks. She wondered how it had been for him, over there, over here.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He leaned back in his chair, linked his fingers, and pushed his arms in a long stretch. He was eyeing something beyond her shoulder; Jeannie glanced behind her, and saw a pale guard, lingering.

  “About the lawyer . . .”

  He cracked his neck: one side, then the other. “Doesn’t matter anyway.” He watched the guard walk by. “Wouldn’t have changed anything. It was done.” He turned his head away, his face pinching at the white light that streaked the window.

  Jeannie thought of the drab water surrounding the prison, wondered if, when glimpsed through bars, that cold, muscular river might seem somehow gorgeous, benevolent. “How is it?” she said. Kip kept his face to the window, tapped his palm on the table. The tips of his fingers were chewed sore. Jeannie leaned toward him. “Kip. In here—how is it?”

  He faced her. “Better than sitting in that dick-licking, horror-show, motherfucking war.” He ran his voice loud, drew eyes. A flicker of gratification crossed his face.

  Jeannie swallowed. “I shouldn’t have let you go,” she said, setting her voice low.

  He studied her, something clear and even in his expression. “You wanted me gone.”

  “That’s not true,” she said, but she heard the lie in it. Her throat was tight and gluey. “It was hard. After Mom died.”

  He was gone again, her kid brother—his face cowled, all pallor and shadowed places. The silence dragged between them, heavied with all the things unsaid since it happened, the fears and longings and resentments that words couldn’t find. Until—

  “He was wrong, you know,” said Kip.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Dad was wrong. She did feel it.” Jeannie felt the fever of that day return to her skin, raising heat beneath her dress. “She didn’t die right away.” A forcefulness loomed in Kip’s face, and she knew he was going to hurt her. Tom pressed into her mind, a body floating to the surface of the water. “She was lying there . . . her legs under the car . . . and she was blinking, all slow and dumbfounded. Like she was trying to figure out what had just happened.” Jeannie shut her eyes. “And even before it hit her . . . I was yelling, and she turned, and froze. Just for that moment, before it hit—there was the start of a smile on her face, like it was some kind of joke.”

  Jeannie’s face stung; she put her palms to her eyes.

  “I didn’t want you to replace her,” said Kip. Jeannie heard the strange labor in the words, his difficulty in saying them; she remembered his searching face, the grip of his hand in hers at the funeral.

  She sighed. “I couldn’t replace her,” she said, dragging her palms to wipe her cheeks. She burrowed a handkerchief from the wrist of her dress and pushed it to her nose; it smelled of home.

  “You couldn’t,” said Kip, and Jeannie was surprised to see the thuggishness still pressing in his face.

  “We’ve all had to grow up,” said Jeannie.

  Kip blew a sharp, “Ha.”

  “I mean,” she said, moving to place her hands on his and, remembering herself, pulling them back to grip the edge of the table, “I’m trying to do what’s right now. I’m trying to take care of my family.” She felt it move inside her, an elbow pushing at her stomach, the roll of a shoulder.

  “I never saw you as a housewife,” said Kip, and Jeannie looked for the contempt in his face, but his features had softened.

  “I never saw you here,” said Jeannie. Tom again, bobbing at the surface of her thoughts, nudging circles in the water. “What happened, Kip?”

  He sighed, a long, emptying sigh, one that implied that everything that needed to be said had been, and in it, Jeannie recognized the weariness and impatience of their father. “There was murder everywhere,” said Kip. “It was in me, but it was all around me, too.” He pushed back his chair, as though readying to leave. “You’ll know about it one day, sis. Something dark in you catches something out there, and it carries you off. Even you. Even in fucking Marin County.”

  “Visitation is over. Inmates are to stay seated. Visitors are to exit slowly and in an orderly manner through the far door.”

  “I better go,” said Jeannie, standing; and suddenly, Kip looked as lonely and daunted as a schoolboy.

  “Hand your passes over at the door; collect any personal items in the waiting area. Exit slowly and quietly. No touching, ma’am.”

  “I’ll come again soon,” she said, and he dropped his head in a nod. As she walked through the door, she turned, saw Kip’s face, dark with secrets, the narrow hunch of his shoulders, the smallness of his frame against the pale hard vastness of the room.

  Jeannie / 1975

  She watched Saigon fall on television, Charlie and Michael sitting on the floor, dirty-kneed and too close to the set, Joe sitting frog-legged in her lap, a bottle lolling at his lips.

  “Did Uncle Kip kill bad guys in Vietnam?” said Michael.

  “I don’t know, honey. He was only there a little while.”

  “I’m going to write him and ask,” said Charlie. He turned to face his mother. “Can Grandpa take my drawing too?”

  “Sure, honey. You give it to him tomorrow.”

  Charlie gave a large, contented sigh. They watched helicopters drag and fall into the ocean, their blades churning spray like smoke, their tadpole heads sinking in the water.

  “Cool,” said Michael.

  Since Kip had been moved from Portsmouth to Fort Leavenworth, their dad had visited every month, making the thirty-five-hour drive to Kansas, sleeping in his car at the side of the highway. But it had been almost a year since Jeannie had seen her brother. In the long spaces between her visits, she boxed him away, tried not to think of him, writing short, factual letters about the boys and briskly scanning his letters before stuffing them in the trash. Each visit, she felt a kind of powerful surprise that he was still alive, that he was still Kip; those days after a visit, the pain of his absence was so sharp it made her chest hurt, and it was weeks before she could bury him again. And though she hadn’t visited him in Kansas—she was too busy caring for Joe—each trip her dad made (the preparations, the gathering of authorized gifts, the meticulous debriefs) skewered her as though she’d made the trip herself.

  And now the war was over; and the sight of the crammed helicopters lifting into the sky, the Vietnamese women staring, the scrawny children playing on the roof of the embassy, brought up the other bodies from that hot, violent summer.

  It had been a long time since she’d thought of Lee, years since she’d visited her in the San Jose mental institution her mother had placed her in after Lee had some kind of breakdown. It had been a warm November day, the sun pushing through the windows in thick, orange fingers. Jeannie had been directed to a long room with a dirty tiled floor. It was the day before Thanksgiving, and two inmates—an old woman with long, lank hair and a middle-aged woman with a large fat flap for a stomach—were fixing what looked like arts and crafts creations to the wall with tape: a wreath made of dead leaves, a painting of a turkey (a footprint for the body, handprints for the feathers), pinecones hanging on threads. Lee was sitting in the corner, blank and slow with barbiturates, hair cropped short to reveal ears like small pink cups. Jeannie pulled up a chair to speak to her; but Lee stared emptily and didn’t move, even when a fly landed on her cheek and crawled over her lower lip. When Jeannie leaned in to brush the fly away, she let her fingers touch the girl’s mouth; it was sticky, as though she’d eaten something sweet. Jeannie held the younger girl’s hand and watched as her head dipped and she fell into a gawk-necked sleep. When the nurse came to take Lee away for shock therapy, Jeannie was relieved, and ran back to the waiting cab, shutting her eyes until Lee’s face dimmed—it’s not my fault, it’s not my fault—opening them onto the gray slide of the highway and letting the words murmur from her lips: “It’s not my fault.”

  And Tom—swallowed by the city that wa
rm, sick August day, vanished. She had buried him too; whenever her mind strayed too close, she turned it away, like a face turning from a low sun. But sometimes, when the house was dark, the boys were asleep, and there was a drink in her stomach, she would picture him sitting in the shadows and run a silent conversation with him, whispering the secret tests and triumphs of her life—Billy’s disappointments; the long, quiet evenings; Joe’s easy smile—until the lights came on, and Billy was home, and dinner was waiting.

  Harry Reasoner wound up his broadcast, and Charlie stood to switch networks. “Let’s look at CBS,” he said. Walter Cronkite shimmered onto the screen. “That’s enough,” said Jeannie. She heaved herself up, propping Joe at her shoulder, and switched off the TV set, the picture contracting to a small white circle. The world disappeared, fuzzed to a distant crush of sound and energy, like closing a window overlooking a busy street.

  “Homework,” she said, waving the older boys to the table and pouring glasses of milk. She carried Joe to the nursery, changed his diaper, dressed him in his footed pajamas, folded him in her arms, and rocked him till he sank asleep. Lowered him into his crib—careful not to startle him—and crept from the room. Filled the bathtub, watching Mrs. Bundy struggle through her calisthenics in her backyard and savoring her own solitude before returning to the kitchen, where she spelled b-r-i-d-g-e for Michael and untangled Charlie’s math. Supervised bathing, brushing, peeing; read a chapter of Where the Red Fern Grows; switched off the lights. Warmed the casserole, mixed a blue cheese dressing for the lettuce wedges, set the table. Billy returned, white-faced from his commute; he swiped the Examiner from the countertop and retired to the bathroom, emerging twenty minutes later to inquire after dinner and the baby. After their casserole, after Billy had smoked a Dutch and Jeannie had done the dishes, they dressed for bed and climbed under the bedspread. Jeannie sank into a blind sleep before waking two hours later, soaked in anxiety and swelter, Joe pleading from his crib. Outside, the moon slept, a sliver of light curving against the dark, a parted eyelid, dreaming blind.