Family of Origin

by CJ Hauser

  ALSO BY CJ HAUSER

  The From-Aways

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by CJ Hauser

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover illustration © Diana Sudyka

  Cover design Emily Mahon

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Hauser, CJ, author.

  Title: Family of origin / by CJ Hauser.

  Description: New York : Doubleday, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018036898 (print) | LCCN 2018037675 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385544634 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385544627 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385544269 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3608.A8697 (ebook) | LCC PS3608.A8697 F36 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018036898

  Ebook ISBN 9780385544634

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by CJ Hauser

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Landing

  San Luis Obispo

  Part I: The Island

  Leap’s Island

  San Francisco

  Leap’s Island

  Park Rapids

  Leap’s Island

  Palo Alto

  Leap’s Island

  Park Rapids

  Leap’s Island

  Carleton College

  Leap’s Island

  Lake Itasca

  Leap’s Island

  San Francisco

  Part II: Darwin Walking Backward

  Part III: The Paradise Duck

  San Francisco

  Leap’s Island

  Park Rapids

  Leap’s Island

  Park Rapids

  Leap’s Island

  San Francisco

  Leap’s Island

  Park Rapids

  Leap’s Island

  San Luis Obispo

  Park Rapids

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Meredith

  I would enjoy flying to Mars…I am ready to fly without coming back.

  Valentina Tereshkova

  Forgiveness and the future are tied together in both directions.

  Time is reversible…The past must not mortgage the future.

  The Gap of Time

  Jeanette Winterson

  The Landing

  People came to Watch Landing to forget things. They gave themselves over to its Gulf Coast fug, its boardwalk amble, its funnel-cake smell, its open-carry vodka, its fireworks every night in order to forget, because they were on vacation.

  This was the summer people came to the Landing to forget their jobs, forget climate change, forget police brutality, forget opioids, forget refugees, forget their inboxes, forget white supremacists, forget tsunamis out of season, and forget forget forget anyone who took it upon themselves to remind them of these things.

  The Greys did not belong here.

  Elsa and Nolan Grey might have been happier if they could be forgetful, or dead, but they were not. The Greys remembered everything.

  They were fondlers of old grudges and conjurers of childhood Band-Aid smells. They were rescripters of ancient fights and relitigators of the past. They were scab-pickers and dead-horse-beaters and wallowers of the first order.

  The Greys had not seen each other in almost three years, but they would converge at Watch Landing because their father was dead, drowned off the coast of Leap’s Island, an hour’s boat ride south, and as much as they would like to forget Dr. Ian Grey, they could not.

  The first sign the Greys did not belong here was that, on the bus bound for Watch Landing, Elsa was the only one not dressed for the beach.

  Two girls in front of her, smelling of coconut oil, wore bikini bottoms and t-shirts and hugged collapsible beach chairs. Elsa wore green pants turned up at the cuffs and Teva sandals. Her legs itched hotly. A giant backpack rode in the seat next to her and Elsa looped her arm around it like a conspirator. The bus turned onto the bridge to the peninsula. Once she got to the Landing, there was still the matter of finding someone with a boat to take them to Leap’s. Nolan, Elsa’s brother, who was meeting her there, claimed this would not be difficult, but it didn’t seem likely the island got many visitors, because the people who lived there were all crazy.

  Elsa and Nolan’s father, Dr. Ian Grey, had moved to Leap’s after being humiliated at nearly every distinguished biology department on the West Coast and then losing a fellowship in Alabama. Ian’s fall from grace had been going on for so long that his children thought he might never stop falling. But he had, two years ago, when he’d joined the Reversalist movement and gone to live on Leap’s Island for good.

  Leap’s was owned by Mitchell Townes and was inhabited by seven former scientists, researchers, and naturalists whom Townes had convinced of his theories and brought to live there, free of charge. The scientists’ work was dedicated to the world’s smallest known sea duck, the undowny bufflehead, and the island was the species’ only known nesting ground. The undowny bufflehead’s existence comprised the sum total evidence of the Reversalists’ core belief: that evolution had begun to run backward.

  Elsa had learned all this on the Reversalists’ vague though well-maintained webpage. According to a counter at the bottom of the site, she was not alone. More than ten thousand people had been interested enough in the Reversalists’ theories to scroll through their manifesto. Elsa puzzled over the Reversalists’ logo: the silhouette of a bearded man with a walking stick, his foot extended behind him, as if taking a step back. A caption referred to the logo as the “Darwin Walking Backward.”

  It seemed unlikely to Elsa that her father had believed in any of this.

  And yet, by the time Ian Grey had drowned, his rumpled clothes found among pouches of seaweed in one of the island coves the past week, her father had been living with the Reversalists for almost two years, which implied that, despite thirty years at Stanford, Cal Poly, and Berkeley, Ian did believe that human progress had slowed and swung on its fulcrum. He believed that evolution had reversed its course. And he believed all this because of some fucking ducks.

  The bus slowed to its final stop at the Landing and everyone got off.

  The pavement was cracked. The beach-going people scattered to the ramps over the dunes, to the liquor stores, to the snack shacks and t-shirt shops, and Elsa followed them.

  She was a woman whose sweat smelled of iron, and already Elsa was sweating.

  She hitched her thumbs in her pack straps. Her sandy hair was roped and piled on her head, and she wore a white tank top that did not cover her soft, curved midriff. Elsa’s mother, Ingrid, was a milk-pale Scandinavian nurse with very few bad moods. Elsa had inherited her paleness and li
ttle else.

  There were many bars, because Watch Landing was the kind of boardwalk where people came to get drunk and stare at the ocean. No one was swimming. There were shrimp shacks and burger joints and a more formal restaurant with a long deck full of tables with white cloths, and of course this was where Elsa found Nolan.

  There was a knot between Elsa’s shoulders that twisted taut when she saw him. Nolan’s mother, Keiko, a microbiome researcher from Kyoto, had been beautiful, and Nolan’s sleek hair and open, inquisitive face were his mother’s. The rest was all Grey.

  Nolan’s hair was to his shoulders, and he’d pushed it back with a pair of sunglasses. His long legs were jacked out from the low deck chair, and he leaned over the table as he sucked from the head cavity of a crawfish. A glass of pale beer on the table was only a quarter drunk, beaded around the rim. He wore a blue oxford, open at the neck, and linen pants. In front of him was a bowl of carcasses. He looked so much like their father that Elsa paused. She’d not seen Ian since he moved to Leap’s, and Nolan on the boardwalk approximated a reincarnation.

  This is mourning? Elsa called.

  Nolan looked up. He stood respectfully, like a subordinate officer. His eyes were reddish and the bridge of his nose was dented from the glasses. She wanted to grab his elegant Adam’s-appled throat and squeeze. Weakness in Nolan had always driven her mad. Ever since he was small and needily sucking up all of Ian’s time.

  Elsa drew close. Nolan’s fingers in the four o’clock light were oily and spotted with red; he held them out as she embraced him, so as not to stain her clothes. He kissed her cheek, and was it possible she felt the sting of cayenne?

  We’re not mourning yet, are we? Nolan asked, as if he really wanted to know. As if he would not believe their father was dead unless Elsa said it was so. This pleased Elsa, and yet, why should it be up to her? They were thirty-five and twenty-nine years old, too old for this. Elsa’s life was a litany of troubles caused by the various absences of Ian Grey. Why should death be any different? Probably, the ghost of Ian Grey was off plunging his big-knuckled fingers into the layers of a duck’s eiderdown and squinting at whatever inscrutable thing he found there—oblivious that his disappearance had inconvenienced anyone at all.

  Even this, even death, Ian would not make simple.

  No mourning yet, Elsa told Nolan. She set her pack down as the waiter appeared and convinced her that a sweet, red slurry called a zombie was just the thing for a day like today. Elsa agreed. She ordered fried oysters and two sides of fries, because otherwise, she knew, Nolan would eat most of hers and she’d have to be angry at him, because she was hungry and wanted to eat them all without sharing, and there was no time for them to be angry with each other now.

  San Luis Obispo

  TWENTY-FIVE YEARS BACK

  The first time Elsa met Nolan, he was sitting on the blue velveteen piano bench of a Steinway that had once been hers. Inside the bench, Elsa knew, was a cupboard that held sheaves of music. Before her father left, she used to practice scales or slow pieces for him: Tchaikovsky’s “The Sick Doll” and some of the Gymnopédies.

  Now Nolan was banging on the keys.

  Nolan’s father was her father, but his mother was Keiko, who was beautiful in a way that made it difficult for Elsa to hate her. Nolan had downy skin and fat, childishly dimpled fists. His hair was soft and fell to his neck. They were not cutting Nolan’s hair until he asked that it be cut, Ian had told her, which was stupid because Nolan was only four. No one asked Elsa anything about what she might like, and she was ten. Her mother, Ingrid, had dropped her at the door and left to take a tour of a vineyard. Ingrid did this because she was a hospice nurse and took her days off seriously—but Elsa suspected Ingrid also hoped to force her into playing with her little brother.

  Elsa was marooned with her father’s new family and her father was not even there. He’d been held late at the Cal Poly lab, so she was stuck with Nolan.

  Nolan swung his perfect legs.

  Can you play it? Elsa asked.

  Dad plays it, Nolan said, and banged on the keys with his small fist to show her how.

  Keiko appeared in the doorway, tumbling her hands dry on a nubby pink towel, eyeglasses on her head.

  Why don’t you play outdoors?

  Nolan’s playset was made of smooth, gray beams, not like the splinter-giving kind on the playground at school. Elsa wondered if her father had built the set for Nolan or if Keiko had done it. Her father had built things for her when they still lived in the farmhouse: a bottomless sandbox, a platform in the boughs of an ash tree from which Elsa could spy on the animals, a pony and a milk goat. That was before.

  She sat heavily in a swing.

  Do you want me to push you? Nolan asked. He had a gravelly voice, a child with a perpetual frog in his throat.

  You’re too little.

  Nolan ran at her from behind, pushed, and the swing went flying. He tipped his head back when he laughed, the long hair spilling from his face like water.

  Elsa stopped the swing, her feet in the dirt. The ground was black-wet and sparkling with flecks of mica.

  What else is there to do? she asked.

  Nolan pushed up the sleeves of his waffle tee, looking at Elsa as if he was deciding whether or not she could be trusted. He led her to a stand of cedars at the back of the yard.

  Secret passageways, Nolan said. He knelt and shuffled into the hedgerow, the rubber bottoms of his sneakers disappearing.

  Elsa followed him. Bittersweet vines had overgrown the property in a maze of wickery tunnels. Vines grazed Elsa’s back as she crawled. Red berries in yellow sheaths peppered the packed dirt. And there was trash in the vines—a rusted kettle with a dented side, a gallon milk jug full of rainwater, a snarl of pink shoelaces. Nolan carefully disentangled these. They followed the tunnel until they came to a clearing.

  There was a wide pit in the center, an old well, its stones scattered. And there was junk from the tunnels, each piece curated on a well stone: a set of horseshoes, a mangled kite, two Day-Glo tennis balls, a moldy netted hammock. Nolan selected a new stone and put the tangle of pink laces on it.

  Elsa picked up the tennis balls. Secret spaces. Just the sort of thing she loved. She wondered if it was because it was the sort of thing their father loved that Nolan loved it too. That it was a kind of proof he really was her brother.

  She hated that Nolan had this whole cloistered world to himself, when she’d had to leave the farm. These days, Elsa spent hours cooped up in the Potato Lake house while Ingrid was on nursing shifts, because she was not allowed to play outside by the water alone. It felt as if she was always waiting for Ingrid to return. When Ingrid did, it was wonderful; they invented word games and made newspaper ships for the bathtub and melted crayon ends in the oven, but it was not the same as it had been when Elsa was small and there had been the farm with the animals, and the tree house above the field, and the piano in the great room, and everything that she was still allowed to have when her father was there. Her father, most of all.

  Elsa looked at the well hole and chucked the tennis balls inside. Nolan shouted and ran to peer over the edge.

  Why did you do that? He considered for a moment, then clambered onto his belly and slid, backward, into the hole.

  Elsa looked into the pit. It was only about six feet deep. Dry for years and full of dead leaves that crackled as Nolan treaded on them.

  Nolan retrieved the tennis balls and threw them up. They bounced away among Nolan’s other treasures. He extended his arms toward Elsa, so she could pull him out.

  Elsa reached for him, then withdrew.

  Can you reach? Nolan asked.

  But Elsa took three steps back. Nolan’s face in the hole, as she drew away, started to disappear.

  Pull me out, Nolan said.

  But each step she took made Nolan go away more, until
finally she could no longer see him over the lip at all, and it was as if he were gone. Elsa left him and crawled back through the maze of bittersweet.

  * * *

  ——————·

  When Keiko called them in for dinner, it was almost an hour later. Elsa was swinging, humming a small song to herself.

  Where’s Nolan? Keiko asked.

  Elsa shrugged.

  He was playing over there, she said, pointing at all of the woods.

  Keiko called Nolan’s name. Paced the yard. After each call, Keiko stood very still, quietly listening for a response for almost a full minute. The fifth time there was no response, she asked Elsa again: Have you seen your brother? Elsa shook her head.

  Keiko ran for the house and Elsa followed her inside. She heard Keiko call her father and tell him to come home. Elsa was pleased.

  But when Ian did arrive, Elsa only saw him through the sliding glass doors. He slammed out of his car and went straight to the lawn, to Keiko. He called Nolan’s name. He didn’t even come inside.

  Elsa went to the blue velveteen piano bench and squeezed the piping between her fingers as if it were a fat caterpillar. She lifted the seat and smelled the familiar oily woodiness of the cupboard, but it was empty. The music she used to keep in there was gone. She closed the bench and lifted the lid from the piano keys. She played as much of the first Gymnopédie as she could remember, but some parts she’d forgotten, and without the music she could not find her way. Hours later, her hands were stiff, and they were still searching for Nolan, their flashlight beams bouncing across the dark lawn.