Family of Origin

by CJ Hauser

  The Greys followed.

  Hey, dog, Elsa said. Look at your crazy pretty face. She plunged her hands into the long tufts of fur behind the dog’s floppy ears, and the dog leaned into her touch, narrowing its eyes.

  Elsa’s face was too close to the dog’s snout. Nolan imagined it sinking its teeth into Elsa’s cheek. Be careful, he wanted to tell her. Sometimes, when people asked Nolan if he had any siblings, he said no. Other times he said yes, he had an ex-sister who lived in Minnesota and she was ten feet tall and strong as an ox. People laughed, but Elsa was a kind of mythical folk hero to Nolan. Larger than life. Taking up more space than she deserved.

  A woman came clomping down one of the curved wooden staircases from the upper deck.

  She’s a shepherd, the woman said.

  Mariana Gates? Nolan asked.

  She nodded. Just Gates, she said.

  Gates was tall, and Nolan noticed Elsa straightening her posture.

  The dog was now leaning the drum of her stomach against Elsa’s legs. She was a shaggy, piebald creature with a gray and reddish spotted coat, a wide smiling muzzle, and the kind of facial markings that made Nolan think of eyebrows. Her shag, damp now, fell in a wave beneath her sloping belly and stuck out from her back legs in pantaloons.

  He called her Jinx, Gates said.

  Who did? Elsa asked.

  She was your father’s.

  He never let me get a dog, Nolan said.

  Animals did not belong in the home, Ian had said, not even small ones like the Corgi in the picture Nolan had torn out of a magazine and shown to him when he made his request. This is the queen of England, Ian had said, pointing to the woman with the Corgi. That’s who believes in pets. The sort of people who still think the monarchy rules.

  Nice to meet you, Gates said. Sorry for the circumstances. They all shook hands. She worked a key off her own metal ring. There’s really not much at the shack, she said, a couple boxes, maybe, if you’d—

  I wouldn’t have thought you’d need locks out here, Nolan said, taking the key from her too quickly.

  Gates looked at him curiously. People are particular about their research.

  Gates was about forty, her face crinkled around the eyes. Olive skin. She kept her dark hair in long bangs. She wore green khaki shorts with red-laced hiking boots and a button-down shirt that appeared water resistant. She had great legs. Nolan imagined his cheek nuzzled against her thigh. His tongue pulling at the elastic of her underwear.

  Let’s get your supplies put away in the kitchen, then we’ll head out to Seven. She tossed her head and moved for the kitchen without waiting for assent.

  Elsa snorted.

  We better do what she says, Nolan said.

  * * *

  ——————·

  It wasn’t exactly a house. A house would have touched the earth. Shack Seven was not much more than a one-room hut on stilts in a brackish inlet of the island only a short walk from the spot where the Reversalists had found the crumpled ball of their father’s pants earlier that week. The spot the mainland police had begrudgingly been allowed to tramp around and investigate. The spot where, those police declared, officially, that Dr. Ian Grey had drowned in an accident.

  The stilt-house was connected to the beach by a creaky boardwalk with rope handrails. Nolan followed Gates down the gangway. She smelled like lemongrass insect repellent. The mosquitos would be terrible, Nolan bet.

  The only real bathrooms were in the Lobby. There was an outhouse on the shore, back in the woods, and already Nolan knew he would hate going there at night, and that he would probably stand on this very gangplank and pee into the ocean instead.

  Elsa watched Nolan struggle with the two locks and the door lever, which stuck.

  So the commune days are over, Elsa said. She whacked the door open with her shoulder, and gestured for Gates to go in first.

  Gates walked inside. The shack was dark, but the outside light spilled in diagonally across Gates’s shorts. We’re a field station these days, she said. Though the kitchen and showers are communal.

  Jinx trotted in and found a denim cushion in the corner that was obviously her own. She set her snout on her paws and watched.

  Gates gave them a kind of tour. The ceilings were low, and there was a large battery fan in the corner behind a mattress with surprisingly new-looking white sheets and a green cotton blanket. A door on the other side of the house led to a small porch on the water, facing the horizon. There was a generator that could run a few hours before needing to be refilled with gasoline, if they didn’t mind the sound. It was almost impossible to talk with the generator going. There was a water barrel in the corner. There were a number of battery-powered Coleman lanterns hanging from the ceiling, which Gates twisted on. On a long table attached to the wall was Ian’s ancient iPod, a small silver square. It contained, both Greys knew, hours and hours of classical music. Bach was his favorite. Tchaikovsky a close second. He could not abide Wagner but certainly had all of the Ring cycle archived anyway, because he considered his dislike a personal failing to be overcome. Besides the iPod with its dead face and trailing headphones, the table was covered in papers and journals along with feathers upon feathers upon feathers. Feathers in Ziploc bags. Feathers loose in tufted heaps. Feathers sealed in jars.

  Did the police look around in here? Elsa asked, picking up some papers.

  Not much, Gates said. It seemed clear it was an accident. The weather was pretty bad that night. Not ideal for swimming.

  Did you consider he might have killed himself? Elsa asked.

  Nolan squeezed her arm violently. They were meant to bring this up gently.

  Because truly, this was why the Greys had come to Leap’s Island.

  Yes, Nolan needed to see what his father had left him for. Yes, he had wanted to collect his father’s things, because no one else would, and leaving them uncollected or thrown away seemed too sad to bear. But really, the Greys were here because Nolan needed to settle things with Elsa, who insisted that their father had killed himself.

  Pure random tragedy Nolan could believe existed. It had come for him before, so many times. But suicide was unthinkable. His father was too rational for suicide, wasn’t he? And so, if he had killed himself, it would have been a rational choice. And if Ian had determined that suicide was a rational choice, what was Nolan supposed to do with that? Of all the impossible things Nolan had been forced to accept that Ian had done—lost his jobs, disappointed Keiko, moved to Leap’s—suicide was the one thing Nolan would not accept. He needed to show Elsa just how wrong about their father she was.

  Shuffling Ian’s papers, Elsa went on, Swimming in a storm hardly seems like something a person would do if he didn’t intend to kill himself.

  Elsa, stop, Nolan said.

  Gates looked at Elsa very directly. He had no reason to, she said.

  Except you all think the world is ending, Elsa said. She put the papers down, gusting feathers across the table. You can see why I might consider the climate here a little suicidal.

  They think the world’s going backward, Nolan corrected. Not ending.

  Evolution, Gates said. Not the world.

  Gates brushed the scattered feathers back into a pile with a cupped hand.

  A couple of the other islanders have been wanting to come in and clean out the house, she said. I’ve been fending them off.

  What do they want with the house? Nolan asked.

  To read what Ian was working on. He’d been out on his own observing and he wouldn’t share his findings. There’s a lot of interest in his data.

  Isn’t everyone looking at the same ducks? Nolan asked, then worried that perhaps there were huge differences in the ducks that Gates would know about and that his father would have known about and that he was showing his stupidity.

  Mitchell’s been trying t
o get everyone to come to a consensus about Reversalism, Gates said. But there are a lot of different theories. Some different kinds of research happening. Some people taken more seriously than others.

  What about our dad? Nolan asked.

  Everyone took your father very seriously, Gates said.

  Shocking, Elsa said.

  I live up in Shack Three, the opposite direction from the Lobby, on the sandy stretch. You can find me there, Gates said. Or else, leave a message on the board in the Lobby and I’ll come find you.

  When can we start talking to people? Nolan asked.

  We can do it all tomorrow, Elsa said. In and out. She clapped her hands together.

  It might take a bit longer than that, Gates said. People are busy. You can’t just go interrupting their research.

  She turned to go, and Jinx stood up in her bed. Stay, Gates said.

  San Francisco

  ONE WEEK BACK

  When the phone call came from the Landing policeman, looking for his dead mother, Nolan was day drinking in a bar in San Francisco with Janine, a compact modern dancer who never wore a bra, and who was, in most ways, his girlfriend. Nolan was trying to puzzle out how this had come to be so. (Certainly, his life was already a mess by this point, Ian’s death only the most recent unhappiness in a long chain of misfortunes. This was too recent to be the moment things went wrong, wasn’t it?)

  They had met online. Janine was smart about the things bemoaned in the documentaries they streamed in the evenings, and it was pleasant to shop for organic bok choy in the market with her, or to drink too many hoppy microbrews for the hell of it. She was the resident white girl in a multiethnic dance troupe called Dance for Justice, who choreographed modern performances meant to enact social change. Their most recent performance, “I Can’t Breathe,” was aimed at police brutality. Every time a dancer began a solo, the others would pile onto her while one dancer ran around the stage gasping into a microphone. The Chronicle had called them visionary activists. A Berkeley drama professor came to all their shows and was citing them in her latest book on radical theater. In the lobby, after the shows, many people signed petitions and donated money and organized actual protests. Some cried. The whole thing made Nolan wildly uncomfortable. It seemed reductive. It seemed silly. Of course Nolan wanted police reform. Of course he wanted to see Guantánamo closed and Big Pharma shamed and the NSA out of his inbox. Nolan wanted to save the damn whales, didn’t he? But he thought there was something naïve and futile about trying to do anything about it. Especially by dancing.

  He and Janine often fought about this. At least I’m doing something, she said. Nolan thought perhaps there was a quiet dignity in doing nothing rather than doing something well-intentioned but stupid.

  But Nolan loved the way Janine danced, how she moved. Her every daily machination was performed with a decisive purpose: selecting a lemon with a graceful tuck and bob, flinging open heavy wooden doors to enter bars with a fluid pivot. Janine always seemed to be heading somewhere in her sweat-wicking, neon-patterned sports ensembles, and Nolan admired this sense of purpose.

  Still, their relationship had begun to feel accidental and mismatched, and he dreaded the idea of attending another Dance for Justice performance. Right before his phone rang in the bar that day, Nolan was wondering whether he should end things with Janine or let the days string outward in the hope that whatever tepid thing was between them would dilute itself out of existence and he would not have to do anything so unfortunate as confront her about it.

  Keiko Grey? the police officer on the phone said. I’m looking for Keiko Grey?

  She died last year, Nolan told the officer. I’m her son. I’m sorry.

  Nolan was sorry. Sorry to be the one to tell the officer. Sorry his mother was dead. Sorry that it had taken two years in the hospital for it to happen. Sorry there was no one left in his life anything like an adult, like a safety net, like a person who could tell him what to do in situations like a cop calling you in the middle of a drunken Sunday asking for your dead mother. Sorry to be able to offer up no one better than himself. Janine looked at him curiously as she adjusted the straps of a batik halter top.

  What’s wrong? she whispered. Janine was alarmingly good at reading his face. Without explanation, Nolan got up and took his phone to stand on the sidewalk in front of the bar.

  Outside, Nolan stared across the street. The sun glared around the corners of buildings so the people walking home from the farmer’s market with their net bags of greens passed in and out of blinding spots of light.

  It’s about Dr. Ian Grey, the officer said. He had a soggy kind of Southern accent.

  I’m his son, Nolan said.

  Jesus, I’m really sorry to tell you this, Mr. Grey, but I’m afraid it looks like your father’s gone and drowned off the coast of Leap’s Island. Did you know he was living out there?

  Yes, Nolan said. I did.

  Ian had gone swimming, the officer said, in adverse conditions. The weather had been bad that night and, best they could tell, he’d gotten sucked out in a riptide. The officer gave him the number for the island phone, which he said to call about his father’s effects.

  After hanging up, Nolan stood outside the bar awhile. Their chalkboard had been spattered with rain, so there were translucent holes in the chalky orange lettering that announced the Giants game, drink specials, trivia night. Nolan worked for the Giants in publicity and social media. He and Janine were here to watch the game, but his father had drowned, so he supposed they should go home.

  Nolan found he wanted to stay the afternoon and watch the game anyway. In fact, maybe this was the perfect excuse to send Janine home to her apartment so he could do this by himself. Maybe this was a very humane and acceptable reason for him to send her away and never call again. To never see her with their brunch friends, her dance friends, his work friends, their biking friends, to never hear them say how inspirational it was that Nolan and Janine had met online ever again, because after all, he was grieving, and so to weasel out of the relationship in this way was perfectly acceptable.

  Jesus, grieving.

  A woman smoking a cigarette walked by, an apricot dog trotting in advance of her. Everything smelled like wet asphalt and the spice of burning tobacco, and it was early summer, and when Nolan checked in with himself, his gut, his intuition, he did not feel much yet. But maybe it was only that Ian had died so far away, off the Gulf Coast, and so, like a lightning strike seen from afar and the thunder traveling behind, this bad news had outpaced the sound of his feelings in traveling the distance.

  Nolan found himself wondering what Elsa would think when she heard. As if this might be instructive. The last time he’d heard from her, she’d still been teaching school in Minnesota. It was then that Nolan realized the policeman would not know to call her. Nolan would have to be the one to tell Elsa their father was dead.

  Again, Nolan wished there was some more-adult adult whose job this could be. That he might slip back into the bar, meld into a dark and oaky booth, and watch the Giants game alone.

  He called from outside the bar and gave Elsa the news. The balled-up clothing. The swimming in a storm. Ian being dead.

  Not really, Elsa said.

  They say he drowned.

  They say, but you—what?

  I don’t know. I don’t feel it.

  No one gives a fuck about your feelings, Nolan.

  Do you feel like he’s dead?

  He killed himself? Elsa asked.

  An accident, Nolan said.

  Nolan—

  Are you off for the summer yet? Nolan asked. We could go.

  The science quacks? No way.

  They have his things, Elsa.

  Isn’t there someone else who could do this with you?

  No, Elsa, seeing as both my parents are dead, there’s not fucking anyone else.
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  But you’re suggesting we just fly down to this island—

  We have to fly to Watch Landing. And then take a boat.

  Jesus Christ. And then pack up his stuff and leave?

  He was working on a new article. We could see what he was doing. Talk to people.

  I can’t do that, Nolan. It’s a really shitty thing to ask someone to do, by the way. He hasn’t talked to me in ages and—

  So you haven’t heard from him? Nolan asked. Since he moved to Leap’s?

  No.

  Me either, he said.

  I assumed he was talking to you but not to me, Elsa said. Like always.

  Well, he wasn’t.

  What could he possibly have been working on that would make going out there worth it?

  I don’t know.

  What did Nolan hope to find? Evidence that Ian loved him and thought he was brilliant? Ian would never say those things. If Nolan found evidence that Ian felt this way, it would prove nothing but the fact that Ian Grey had truly and finally lost his mind.

  Nolan said, They’re sending his body here. I guess we should have a funeral.

  Did he leave instructions?

  I know he wanted to be cremated.

  Put his ashes someplace and don’t tell me about it, Elsa said, and hung up.

  * * *

  ——————·

  After letting Elsa yell at him, after letting Janine sympathize, no, empathize with him for hours, Nolan begged off and said he needed some time alone. He needed a walk. Janine cocked her head to the side, asking questions Nolan did not want to answer, but she let him go.

  As Nolan walked the streets, which smelled sometimes of yeast and sometimes of piss and sometimes of the cool water off the bay, he panicked over being cut loose from the last real tether of his family. Ian and Keiko, both gone. There were Elsa and Ingrid, of course, but they had no real obligation to him. Not like real blood parents did.