by Kaya McLaren
Paul chewed and thought about it. “After Amy’s … you know, winter, I used up a lot of my leave. I need to let it build back up. Plus, it’s such a big job. I wonder how much difference a week of just me working on it could make, you know? But do you keep a key to your house hidden in case I get there and change my mind?” He was confident he wouldn’t, but it never hurt to have alternative plans.
Rae gestured for him to follow her and led him outside to show him the nail under the eve where it hung.
“Thanks, Rae,” he said. “Hey, if this doesn’t work out for any reason, call me and I’ll come back out as fast as I can. Amy has taken off, so call my cell phone.”
“What do you mean Amy has taken off?”
“Uh, she’s gone on a trip back to Washington State to visit trees.”
“I have trees here,” said Rae.
“I mentioned that to her, but she wanted to visit those trees.”
Rae’s eyes narrowed with concern. “Is she slipping away?”
“I don’t know,” he answered.
Rae paused and then asked, “Is she slipping over the edge?”
A few weeks after the bombing, she had asked him the same question about himself. Amy had driven him out here to visit, knowing getting out of the city would help. Paul had given Rae the same answer then. “Maybe.”
“After the bombing, you did a lot of walking by yourself out here. Sounds like she’s doing the same thing. Did it help you?”
There were too many thoughts in Paul’s mind for him to process all at once. He hadn’t considered the ways in which his experience and hers might be similar. Once Amy was cancer-free and the surgeries were over, he had expected all would be well—joyous, even. Why wouldn’t someone be happy about a second lease on life? But before he could finish that train of thought, it was interrupted by her last question, Did it help you? He didn’t know. On the one hand, maybe. It surely hadn’t hurt. It probably allowed his nervous system to calm down and his lungs to clean themselves out. But on the other hand, nothing had really helped. Not even time. He could only shrug his answer.
“Well, maybe it will help her,” Rae said, and led the way back into the house, where Paul rinsed his coffee cup, gave her a little good-bye hug, thanked her again, and then carried his bag to his car. Rae stood on her little porch, waving, as he drove away.
He found it hard to drive away from his still-sleeping daughter. Life was short—too short not to make good memories with the ones he loved the most. He saw it all the time. Every day. People’s lives cut unexpectedly shorter. He hoped Carly knew how much he loved her just in case it was his life that would be cut short next. It was his preference to leave things in better order than this.
As he drove down the road and into town, the old narrow-gauge train whistled like a ghost and then whistled again, this time even more emphatic, before beginning its journey into the Rocky Mountains along the Continental Divide. And maybe because he wasn’t used to hearing it and hadn’t learned to tune it out as he had all the other noises in his life, it struck him as such a haunting, lonely sound. It was the sound of a loved one leaving, growing farther and farther away until they could no longer be seen or heard. For a moment, he envisioned himself on the platform, looking at one train taking his wife away in one direction and another train taking his daughter away in the opposite. It still felt to him as if they were growing farther and farther away with each passing moment until one day, he’d be unable to see them or hear them at all. They were leaving him. He could feel it, and there was really nothing he could do about it. And perhaps there was nothing he should do about it, because it was the natural course of things. Nonetheless, he pulled out his phone and texted Amy, Thinking about you, because he really didn’t know what to say.
The distance between Aunt Rae’s ranch and his house was not more than a mile. He passed the Laundromat, both the Catholic and Episcopal churches, then the elementary school, and one more block. There, he parked and just sat in his car for a moment. This had been his dream, this dilapidated old Dutch Colonial house that he had bought two years ago, thinking he would fix it up so he and Amy could move there when he retired. It was far from the urban troubles and chaos and the heat of Oklahoma City, and close to Amy’s aunt, whom Amy wanted to be near as she grew older. He had been more excited than he had been in years when they bought it, because it made retirement seem so close and so real. His escape route was in his sights. He supposed it still was. In a few months he would turn forty-eight, and then it would just be three more years. But it was different somehow when he had this place to go to the day after he retired.
He had taken three trips out here and made a little progress on some basic upgrades, but then last October, not even a week before Amy knew something was wrong, whatever progress had been made was erased when the upstairs bathroom had a water leak that showered the house until a neighbor noticed water running out from under the door and called city hall. He’d come out for a few days and gutted all of the saturated drywall and floorboards before they molded.
And then he got the call from Alicia, Amy’s sister, who knew Amy wouldn’t tell him what was going on—that she wouldn’t want to cause him worry if it turned out to be nothing. Amy had found a lump and gone to the doctor. The doctor was concerned enough that he got radiology to get her in for a mammogram that day. And after the radiologist looked at the images, she was concerned enough to slip her into someone else’s canceled appointment for a needle biopsy the very next day. Alicia was going to take her. But it was all happening so fast, Alicia said. Nothing ever happened that fast. It had to be serious.
It was as if the house had been an omen of what was about to happen. To her. To him. To them. Cancer, as silent as water rotting the inside while everything on the outside looked normal. Destroyed. Then gutted.
As Paul pulled up to the house now, what he noticed was the darkness on the other side of the windows where there should have been light. The windows were just like Amy’s sad eyes.
But while the changes Amy had been through showed on the outside of her, the outside of this house still looked as it always had—rather charming. The covered porch was supported by scalloped posts and embellished with gingerbread. While it did need a new coat of paint, the old paint didn’t look all that shabby. Squares of leaded stained glass framed the front windows. The old front door was welcoming, with a doorknob embossed with intricate flowers and, below it, an equally elegant plate with two holes for skeleton keys. This had always been Paul’s favorite part of the whole house, this doorknob like a person in their Sunday best shaking his hand for just a moment before he came in. There was something very polite and formal about it. But now that he had started to entertain the notion of this house as a reflection of his wife, he thought about Amy’s delicate, feminine hand in his as he touched the doorknob. All the times he had held her hand … in the beginning, during the vows, while she gave birth to Carly, when she was so sick and he lay on his side facing her. Her eyes looked so scared, so weary … he held her hands and hoped she felt all of his love flow from him into her through this place where their bodies met. He had hoped she would absorb his strength. His resolve. Because he could feel her surrender and it scared him. He held her hands as if he were holding her here to earth when she had ambivalent hours.
For a long moment, he simply stood there, holding the floral doorknob, as it occurred to him that he might never hold Amy’s hand again. He probably would, he told himself. Probably. But it wasn’t certain.
In the middle of the door was the doorbell, like a bicycle bell on the inside but with a knob on the outside. He turned it to wind it up and then released it so that the striker repeatedly hit the bell, as if he could call out to Amy in this way. As if he could say he was so sorry for the neglect prior to the big disaster, so sorry. But he was here now. And he wanted to fix things. Fix them and then maintain them better.
Paul unlocked the door and opened it. Inside, the complete wreckage overwhelmed him on a
new level now that the metaphor was taking root. Paul shook his head in disbelief. What a nightmare. “Fix” was the wrong word for what had to be done. There was not enough left to fix. “Rebuild” was more accurate. Starting anew in an old structure was so much harder than just building an entirely new house. It was so tempting to just bulldoze the whole thing and start over, but then he thought of all the details he could never re-create in a new structure, the touches that had charmed him in the first place.
As Paul set down the skeleton key on a nearby windowsill, he marveled again how no one locked their doors here in Chama. For a cop like him, this was unimaginable. This house in this community seemed like a portal to another time, a simpler, more honest time.
He walked into the house on the exposed floor joists and examined the giant tree root that had grown under the structure. Someone had cut it long ago. He looked out the window in the direction from which the root had come. A large elm tree seemed to be just fine despite the injury.
An elegant old light fixture was mounted to the ceiling by an intricately embossed plate. If he still wrote songs, he would have been inspired by that, by how people used to make practical things beautiful instead of cluttering their lives to make up for functional things that were not beautiful. But he hadn’t written songs in nearly two decades, and so he turned his mind back to creating a list of everything that needed to be done and all the tools and materials that would be needed for each job.
This was his chance to start all over, to redo the ancient knob-and-tube electrical wiring, greatly reducing the chance that the house would burn down on its own, to examine the plumbing and see whether more disasters could be averted by changing out parts, to put in a really good floor, one tight enough to keep mice and drafts out, and to install good insulation. He could do all that or he could cut his losses, get rid of it, maybe find something else. Making all the repairs seemed like it would either take him a lifetime to do himself or cost him a fortune to contract someone else.
Hopping from floor joist to floor joist, he realized that he wouldn’t be able to use a single power tool to do the work until he put in a new circuit breaker box. That would be step one. The old electricity had been run through the attic and under the house, not so much through the walls, so the studs didn’t have holes for wires to run through. He would need to drill holes through all of them. That would be step two, and that alone could take weeks. Looking at the cluster of exposed asbestos fabric–covered wires connected to the old fuse box, he marveled that the house hadn’t gone up in flames a long time ago.
He walked back out the door to the porch and sat down. Although he would have liked to stay a week, make some progress, and be here in case things didn’t work out between Carly and Rae, there really was no decision to make. He simply didn’t have sick leave to waste.
Music interrupted his thinking. At first it seemed as if one of the neighbors were listening to a Spanish guitar recording, but at some point he realized, no, someone was actually playing it. He followed the sound to the backyard, but the neighbor’s border collie barked at him through the back fence and the music stopped. A moment later, after he retreated back to the front porch, the music continued.
* * *
The first time Paul had seen Amy, he was playing his guitar outside the art building at the University of Oklahoma early one September evening, shortly after fall quarter had begun. He thought he was alone out there, but the window to the room where she was working on a painting was open.
She applauded for him when he finished each song, finally standing and peeking out the window when the music stopped. He was bent over, snapping the final clasp on his guitar case. “Hey, thanks for the concert,” she called out the window, her smile competing with the sun. “Your music inspired great things.”
Well, he had to see that. “Yeah? Can I see?” he asked.
“Um, okay. Sure,” she answered, her demeanor changing to shy and self-conscious. “Room 105.”
Paul entered with a smile and admired the landscape painting. There were trees that served as a windbreak on someone’s farm, rippling wheat, and sky. “It reminds me of the national grasslands near where I grew up,” he said. “Have you ever stood in the middle of wheat or tall grass when it’s rippling like that?”
Amy shook her head.
He smiled, remembering the experience, looking for words. “Hard to describe,” he finally said.
He was aware of her proximity as they stood near the painting, of the electric current passing back and forth between them each time they looked at each other and even when they didn’t. He knew even then that something significant was happening, but he played it cool, giving her painting a nod, and said, “I like it. Thanks for letting me see it.” With that, he gave her a little wave and left, stepping into the hall to catch his breath before he passed out. She had that effect on him from that very first moment—she took his breath away.
Years later, while they were lying in bed in each other’s arms, trying to figure out on what day they had first met and recounting the story, she told him she had wondered whether she had somehow blown it, whether she should have proposed getting some coffee or something, wondered what she might have said or done differently so that her visit with him might have lasted longer. She said she kicked herself all night and all the next day, until he showed up again the next night and serenaded her again and every night after that, until it finally got so chilly that he would come directly inside room 105 and play for her there. Something about that confession—vulnerability, he supposed—had made Paul love her even more, which he hadn’t thought possible.
* * *
From the step where he sat on the front porch, he dared to dream of life after retirement, of staying there in Chama, of fixing up this house that had once been his dream, of taking guitar lessons from the man with the border collie, of going for runs out the dirt road past Rae’s house, out into the seemingly infinite Edward Sargent Wildlife Area without locking his door behind him. He imagined each room in its perfected state, the remodeled bathroom with a floor tiled in white and black octagons and the stately claw-foot bathtub put back where it belonged, hardwood floors in the main room, a copper backsplash in the kitchen.
But then he remembered his caseload at work. As reality hit him, his shoulders sagged. He had to go back. The other officers on the force had covered for him enough throughout Amy’s battle with cancer. It was time for him to come through for them, to take extra shifts so that they could take vacations with their families. Yes, that was the responsible thing to do. Of course, he thought, it would be better for the structure of the house if he put a floor in to keep the moisture out next winter.… He would have to consider either doing that this summer or hiring a carpenter to.
Reluctantly, he locked up the house, walked to his car, and began the ten-hour drive home. After all, he had a shift tomorrow. Criminals weren’t going to stop committing crimes just because he had a daughter that was somewhere between at-risk and off the rails and an old house to fix up.
Carly
Watching carefully, Carly tried imitating Great-Aunt Rae’s circular movement with the curry brush, firmly enough to remove dirt clods from Mister T’s fur but slight enough not to scratch his skin. Then she picked up the stiff bristle brush to brush over where she had just curried and a softer brush with longer bristles for the horse’s face and legs. Finally, she combed out his mane and tail. He was a massive black Clydesdale with a white blaze down his face and white “feathers,” the long, fluffy fur, on the lower part of his legs.
Great-Aunt Rae picked through the grooming box until she found a hoof pick. Then she bent over, tapped his ankle, and said in her best Mr. T voice, “I pity the fool who doesn’t pick up his foot!” Mr. T the horse picked up his foot and she picked the mud and rocks out of the massive cavity between his shoes. “See that?” she asked, pointing to a V-shaped structure on the bottom of the horse’s hoof. “That’s the frog. Don’t try to pick that out.”
She groomed two more horses, and in the same time, Great-Aunt Rae groomed four. As Carly glanced over at Great-Aunt Rae’s progress, she said, “Don’t worry. You’ll get faster,” as if it were pure encouragement, as if she weren’t clearly telling Carly that in the future, she expected her to work faster.
Carly’s dad was gone—left before she even woke, left without a good-bye. Although a part of her was glad to have the freedom of his absence, another part felt offended and abandoned—just a problem to be cast off onto someone else, no longer the little girl that he loved. She knew that was likely baloney, but still, those feelings echoed around inside of her as she worked.
In light of his absence, there was no real point in putting on a show of rebelliousness. The truth was that while Chama was otherwise lame and she already missed her friends, she was pretty excited to ride these giant horses every day. She kept her excitement hidden, though, just in case she needed to play martyr at some point in the future.
She followed Great-Aunt Rae into the tack room, where she picked up the saddle, pad, and blankets on the rack labeled “Mr. T” and the bridle on the hook next to it. Her arms full, she returned to the horse and began saddling him. Great-Aunt Rae came over and moved the blanket and pad forward a little bit before Carly attempted to lift the heavy western saddle high up onto the horse’s back. She wasn’t quite able to make it.
“Swing it like this,” said Great-Aunt Rae, lifting the saddle as she twisted a quarter of a turn. “Or use that ladder. I think it’s safer to stay off ladders whenever possible.” Once the saddle was on, she reached under the horse to grab the girth and cinch it up. “Some people tie a knot. I use the buckle so it lies flatter. Just be sure to sort of back it up once it’s buckled so there’s tension on it.” Sticking two fingers under the girth, she said, “About this tight. Two fingers.”