Family of Origin

by CJ Hauser

  Nolan—

  He gestured at the Landing, the bars and restaurants. For one night.

  This place is awful.

  Then go.

  What could we possibly want to do here?

  Everything, Nolan said, and Elsa sighed.

  Nolan hugged Elsa. Her pack made it difficult, but he stepped in and threw his long arms around her full circumference.

  * * *

  ——————·

  That night, Nolan and Elsa walked the waterfront with Jinx on her lead and they ate everything. They ate fried dough and sausage and peppers. They ate candy apples and a bag of garlic boiled peanuts. Nolan thought of all the times he and Janine had resolved to eat clean because they needed to detox themselves. Their food was poison! They were afraid of chickens with fat breasts and of Monsanto genes in cornflakes. But today Nolan was ravenous. He would eat it all. He ate fried alligator on a stick, and Elsa ate a sack of deep-fried Oreos. They both ordered enormous plastic cups of lemonade with bendy straws and walked around sipping.

  Jinx grinned and panted, her pink tongue lolling out. She sniffed and pissed on things, and this seemed like a joyful kind of thing to do. Her way of saying this is mine and this is mine and this is mine.

  It was dark out, but there was neon everywhere. On bar marquees and waterfront stands and boardwalk games. There were clubs that thumped noisily, and as they passed by them, they felt waves of body heat from the collective human pack inside. Elsa squeezed Nolan’s hand, because they were here, among people, and it was awful and glorious and they were not ruined by it.

  There was an outdoor bar on the thin spit of beach at the north end of the landing, and Nolan and Elsa sat on bar stools there. Nolan looped Jinx’s lead around the stool leg and she lay down and set her chin on his foot. Was she was afraid he would leave her? Could she smell that he was like Ian? A man who disappears. Nolan was careful not to move his foot. To let her chin rest just so.

  Just look at this, Elsa said.

  The place was kitsch. A string of seashell Christmas lights ran the length of the bar, and a glowing orange scallop covered the electric outlet next to Nolan. There were TVs showing ESPN, and the bar was a mix of men watching sports and nomadic young people getting smashed for a hot instant before they moved on to another stop. The bartender mixed Elsa a Dark and Stormy. He made Nolan a vodka tonic. Nolan squeezed his lime and stared at the orange scallop light until he saw spots.

  What are you going to do when you get home? Elsa asked.

  Nothing. I don’t know, Nolan said. He considered his job, Janine.

  I’m sure Ingrid would love to see you sometime.

  Yeah? Nolan said.

  She’d be embarrassingly happy if you visited. Holidays or summer. Whenever. The lake isn’t full of snakes. You could swim.

  Nolan nodded. But won’t you be on Mars? he said.

  You’ve made it very clear that you don’t believe in Mars, Elsa said.

  I believe in Mars, I just don’t believe in you going there. He sucked his drink. In fact, Nolan said, I’d definitely prefer it if you stayed. I’d like to share a planet with you, I think. The occasional Thanksgiving.

  Okay, Elsa said.

  So what about now, Nolan said.

  What about now?

  I think I’d like to visit Ingrid now, Nolan said.

  Now is good, Elsa said. And it was not impossible to imagine. The three of them together in the lakehouse.

  Elsa people-watched. Nolan sipped his drink. The lime tasted off, but it was sweet. He rummaged in his bag and pulled out his phone and charger. The bartender was tending to a group of young men who were all competing for the attention of the one girl with them, and Nolan pulled the scallop light from its outlet. He plugged in his phone.

  So soon, Elsa said. Nolan let the red battery symbol blink at him as he drank.

  There was a bang, and Jinx started, jumping up and barking. Elsa shushed her. You are a ferocious wolf, she reminded her. The fireworks had begun. Pale violet flower bursts. Streaking red tails. Nolan pushed Jinx’s rump down and patted her head and told her it was alright. Jinx settled into a crouch and projected a low wookiee rumble of displeasure.

  From the island, the fireworks had seemed violent. An interruption of their peace. But here, they were brighter. Gleefully loud. A celebration.

  It’s quite a show, Elsa said. She ordered another drink and set off for the bathroom.

  Nolan’s phone came to life, bleeping furiously. A week’s worth of texts, alerts, updates, emails, and voicemails made themselves known. Scrolling through the screen of things he’d missed, Nolan felt tight and anxious in his chest. He wanted to chuck the phone into the sea. But then there was the little green blink of Janine having called. Having called several times. Nolan scrolled through and saw that there were exactly seven calls and messages. One for each day he’d been gone.

  He listened.

  Janine’s messages were calm. They said she was calling to see how he was doing. They said he didn’t need to call back until he was ready. They said that she missed him and wished he wouldn’t do this, but she got it. She said she would be there when he came out of his cave. That she hoped she could go with him to the funeral. To let her know if he needed anything.

  There were bursts of music and scuffling in the background of these messages, and Nolan knew Janine was calling from dance rehearsal. Their new show was opening this weekend.

  A welling up. A little gasp that got choked in his throat and was drowned out by the fireworks. And then it was over. Jinx nudged his ankle again, worried over Nolan’s failure to notice the explosions in the sky.

  Two drunk men in jerseys began whooping from down the row of stools. Loudly ordering more drinks. Nolan looked up at the TV. The Rockies had just beat the Giants, 8–7. The Giants were at home, and they panned over the stadium. Dejected fans were standing and shaking their heads. But Nolan knew it was only June. The lights played over the field and even on the tiny screen, Nolan could make out a bird swooping past the glow of the lamps. As the leftfielder walked off, the lights cast a long shadow behind him in triplicate. A giant’s shadow. Nolan watched the spot he had left. His spot. He felt the pull of it.

  San Luis Obispo

  TWENTY-FIVE YEARS BACK

  Nolan looked up from the well shaft’s bottom. The opening was a wide oval of light. It had been a while since Elsa had disappeared with his tennis balls. He wished she’d left him one. He sat hugging his knees and playing with the stones at the well bottom, stacking them into cairns, then knocking them down again like a small god. Nolan had assumed that Elsa went to get help, but as the oval above him grew dimmer, that began to seem less likely. He shouted her name a couple of times. He whistled.

  Nolan used one of the stones to dig in the dirt. He could, perhaps, build himself a staircase. He scratched dirt from one side of the hole and packed it into a ledge on the other. He looked up. It would take a lot of stairs. They might have to spiral.

  Once, someone had worked very hard to dig this hole. To make this well. It had seemed a good idea at the time. It had been a good idea, for them, back then.

  For hours Nolan dug and built his muddy staircase, ascending slowly. And though years later his parents would convince him that this was the most terrifying experience of his life, that this was the day their lives spun off course, at the time Nolan was not frightened.

  It never occurred to him that he would not find a way out. If it had, he might have stopped building. He was absorbed in his work. Nolan tested the first packed dirt step with his sneaker, and one edge crumbled. He spat on it, packed it firm again, and continued digging. He hummed as he dug. “Greensleeves,” a song his father had tried to teach him on piano.

  He packed the mud. He worked, happily.

  He counted how many steps were left to build.

 
Park Rapids

  The airport taxi dropped them off at the lakehouse. The house was built with red wood shingles and wide upper windows. Purple salvia grew bushy by the door. The yard was mown in strips, light and dark like carpeting. But at the perimeter, Ingrid left long shaggy alleys where false indigo and thimbleweed volunteered itself. She could not bear to mow it down.

  Jinx peed on some wildflowers.

  I’ve always loved this house, Nolan said. When I was little, it felt like visiting a place in a storybook.

  That’s a ridiculous thing to say, said Elsa. You complained there was nothing to do here.

  I loved that too, Nolan said.

  Stop rewriting history, Elsa said. I hate it when people pretend pretty things about the past.

  What if I’m just outing the truth, Nolan said. I couldn’t tell you I liked it here back then. You were superior enough as it was.

  I was never, Elsa said, but of course it was true. She had been, she was sure, insufferable.

  Elsa breathed deeply. The smell off the lake was enough like home to make Elsa think she would never leave again. That she must cling to this good place while it lasted. But maybe things weren’t so tenuous. Maybe there was no reason to suspect it would disappear on her.

  Ingrid came jogging down the gravel path.

  I have missed you, missed you, missed you, she said, and hugged Elsa. She was wearing her apron and an old purple t-shirt. Jeans and Tevas. Her blond hair was pulled back messily.

  I thought you’d be at work, Elsa said.

  I took a bit of time off, Ingrid said.

  No.

  Ingrid nodded.

  You never take time off.

  I thought it would be nice to spend some time as a family, Ingrid said.

  Hullo, Ingrid, Nolan said.

  And Ingrid’s eyes welled up. You are enormous, she said. She opened her arms and Nolan hugged her, lifting her from the ground. You are so welcome here, Ingrid said.

  You’re acting weird, Elsa said, as Ingrid began pulling the backpack off of her. Over her shoulder Elsa repeated, This is weird.

  Everything good is weird, dearest. This is so heavy, let me take it, Ingrid said, shouldering Elsa’s pack. Just come in, I’m making lunch!

  Nolan was beaming. Elsa followed her mother into the house, flexing her shoulders.

  Ingrid bustled around the kitchen. Nolan sat at the kitchen table. After the past week Elsa knew him so intimately, the way he sat with his elbows on a table, leaning into his hands, the downy place where his earlobe connected to his jaw, the stupid way he looked around this room, as if it were so wonderful.

  Ingrid was setting out the sandwiches and salad and pouring lemonade and with each pass, she tweaked Elsa’s waist or patted Nolan’s shoulder and it made Elsa crazy to see her acting like there was nothing better than the two of them here like this.

  Elsa, Ingrid said. Sit! Sandwiches! Ingrid sat at the table next to Nolan.

  The sight of them together at the table made Elsa dizzy. It was as if the world had tipped to one side and everything that used to be over there, separate and away, the whole past part of her life with Nolan and Ian and Keiko, had slid across the landscape to squash together with her real life, over here, with Ingrid. She had kept them separate for so long, the past and the present. But now things were jumbled, mixed, and it seemed impossibly unreal.

  You hate Nolan and me together, Elsa said, then stopped. She was speaking the unspeakable, and yet, she found it was easier to talk because Nolan was there with her. He was the one who had opened all this up again and now it would have out.

  Ever since you walked in on us, years ago, Elsa said. You didn’t talk about it, you wouldn’t let us see each other, you pretended it didn’t happen but everything was wrong.

  Elsa— Ingrid said.

  She’s right, Nolan said.

  We could both feel it, how wrong it was, and we didn’t know how to fix it because we were children. That was your job. And none of you did anything. You just ignored it forever and then we had to fix it ourselves, Elsa said. It took us this long to fix it ourselves and we did and now, what, you’re not even going to notice that? We’re just going to eat sandwiches?

  Elsa had to say it, before Ingrid painted a rosy tint over everything that had happened. Before she erased the past completely.

  You did this to us! Elsa said.

  All three of you, Nolan said.

  You hated us, Elsa said.

  Ingrid was placid. Don’t be ridiculous, she said. No one has ever hated you.

  You did, though, Elsa said. You all did and you’re forgetting everything.

  Ingrid got up and squeezed Elsa’s shoulder. I’m not forgetting, she said. I just think that maybe we could eat sandwiches together now. Just because we couldn’t back then doesn’t mean we can’t forever, she said.

  Ingrid was letting the past slip away as if it were nothing. It wasn’t fair. Elsa and Nolan had lugged their own personal sorrow around for years, not because they wanted to, but because it felt important. Ingrid couldn’t just make things good and easy because she willed it so. Elsa could not just make herself good.

  You can yell at me, Ingrid said. Yell all you want. It’s good for you. Someday I’ll be gone and who else will you have to blame? It’s healthy for young people to yell at old people. Ingrid settled into her place and smiled. But let’s eat, she said. The past is no reason not to have sandwiches.

  Elsa sat down.

  They ate sandwiches.

  When she was small, Elsa had wanted to put her family back together like an unshattered vase, Ian and Ingrid and the farm and her pony. And now here were Nolan and Ingrid and Elsa. That this iteration of happiness would be offered had not been foreseeable, but Elsa decided she should not balk.

  Ingrid, Nolan, Elsa.

  It was a surprise that made time feel more malleable than Elsa had considered possible. Made it feel less like their lives were some sad equation strung out from left to right with a blinking equal sign at the end. And if she could untether herself from what seemed inevitable, from her own inevitability, maybe Elsa would find other possibilities. Surprise herself. Maybe there was a difference between ignorance and forgetting. Maybe the past was no reason not to do anything at all.

  * * *

  ——————·

  That night, Nolan slept in Elsa’s room and Elsa slept with her mother, who spooned her aggressively. The sheets smelled like cedar and lavender.

  Ingrid had always fallen asleep quickly, exhausted from work.

  Was there something of Duck Twelve about Ingrid? Her calm acceptance and good cheer had always infuriated Elsa. But no, Ingrid wasn’t ignorant.

  If anything, she was the opposite.

  Every day, Ingrid tended to the dying of Earth. She cleaned pockets of rotten flesh, and stripped beds wet with shit, and was often yelled at for the trouble. Ingrid stared the dying and their mistakes in the face and refused to believe in an afterlife because of her conviction that what we had here was enough. In spite of the meanness and squalor doled out to the lives she saw in hospice, this planet, she thought, was worth it. Eating your second-favorite ice cream flavor the day before you died young was worth it. Loving someone and then having him hate you and leave was worth it. Changing bedpans and holding people who tried to claw at the soft yellow bruises around their own IVs was worth it. Because there was also the tenderness of the vein. The years before he left. The child who came of strawberry just as she would have from chocolate.

  Elsa knew that tomorrow they would make margaritas and watch the birds on the lake—the one Ingrid called Potato Lake, which was what the settlers had called it, because it looked like a potato, though obviously the Ojibwe had called it something else, and before the Ojibwe it had existed with no name at all, because it was a fucking lake. When developers bou
ght the lakefront they renamed it Peeper Pond, which was what it was called now, and all the little houses the developers had built were laid out in orderly flat-roofed rows. The old houses—the Eriksons’, the Michaels’, her mother’s—had roofs extremely peaked, ready to shed snow in great, tumbling sheaves that parents warned children away from in winter. The relative flatness of the new houses’ roofs meant they would cave in on themselves come wintertime. If not this year, then next. When the new people’s roofs did cave in, it was Ingrid who would show up with a shovel, ready to dig them out.

  There was always some good work to be done, so why not do it and fall asleep exhausted? Why not make that look easy to a person like your daughter?

  Or maybe it was easy.

  If you chose it, maybe the gravity of the present moment was irresistible.

  * * *

  ——————·

  Nolan sat up in bed, hair in his face. Elsa was sitting on the floor. She had the plastic tiger float out and she was blowing into it.

  I was sleeping, he said.

  Up now, Elsa said.

  People always say that the newly awoken look like children, but Nolan did not. He was shirtless and there were creases on his face and lovely purple swaths beneath his eyes, as if all the exertion of the island were only now catching up with him. He slid up and leaned against the washed-wood headboard.

  Elsa put her mouth to the rubber stopper and blew again.

  What are you doing?

  Elsa shrugged as if it was obvious and kept blowing.

  Do you need help? Nolan said.

  Come outside, she said.

  * * *

  ——————·

  They stood by the lake. The moon was swollen and battered-looking. She hung brightly above the water as if to admire her own reflection, all pocks and cratered scars. There was a wooden lifeguard’s chair up the beach, a sign nailed to its back informing them that no one was on duty to save them. From the grasses along the shore, one cricket trilled, an embarrassed, lonely sound. Anybody. Anybody. The sand was coarse and stuck to the children’s feet as they left prints in the smooth expanse of the shore.