by Cary Groner
He walked back down the hill into town and found a store. He bought rice and lentils, thinking dal-bhat might somehow conjure a time when he and Alex were happier and felt more at ease in the world. When he got to the house, Alex was still snoring softly in her room.
Ben came home from school at about 4:30, ate a snack, and plopped down in front of the television to play video games. He sat there, mesmerized, clicking away with his thumbs while various engorged-looking creatures blew one another to bits on the screen in front of him. There were beautiful woods outside, and trails, and nothing in the streams that would kill you. No armed bandits roaming the hills to kidnap you or make you join them and carry a gun. Peter wanted to pick Ben up and throw him out the door. But it wasn’t his house; Ben wasn’t his son. Peter asked him to turn down the sound, then went into Alex’s room and sat down to read, so he’d be there when she woke up.
He was making the dal-bhat when Connie came home from work. Alex came out and helped Ben set the table, but when dinner was served Ben took one bite of it and put down his fork.
“It tastes like dirt,” he said. Connie apologized to Peter, but Alex smiled, which as far as he was concerned made the meal worth it.
Ben went off somewhere with friends after dinner. Peter sat with Alex for a while, but by 8:30 she had conked out again, so he joined Connie at the table. She got them a couple of beers.
“Your son is a lard-ass,” Peter said. “He’s going to have diabetes before he’s thirty.”
“You’re welcome to step into the father-figure role anytime. Cody’s trying, but he’s two hours away.”
“Cody? Whatever happened to Don?”
She sighed. “I got tired of feeling I had to dress like a hooker to make Don happy.”
Peter smiled. “Did I miss this phase?”
“Jesus, you don’t remember? I was always in some getup that made it look like my tits were about to leap out and launch themselves at Russia.”
“That’s quite an image. Sorry.”
She glared. “Oh, you can laugh, it’s funny now.”
“You’ve always accommodated your men too much,” said Peter.
“Like you, you mean?”
He looked down at his beer sheepishly. “I know I haven’t been the easiest guy to have around.…”
“Forget it,” she said. “Given the situation, you’re practically a prince.”
“That’s a lie, but thanks.”
“What are sisters for, if not to lie to you when you need it?”
Connie was forty, with frizzy hair and a comfortable, well-rounded figure. She still had a trace of the South in her speech, and Peter liked hearing it. In Jackson, where they’d grown up, their mother taught high school English. She’d become friends with Eudora Welty after their father had removed a precancerous mole from the writer’s shoulder and they’d gotten to talking about writing and teaching and the importance of not ignoring melanoma. Miss Welty, as they called her, would on occasion read her work to their mother’s class, though when she was older she gave it up, noting with her usual polite candor that most of the kids didn’t actually seem to give a rat’s behind—her term—about what she had to say.
Connie took a drink of beer and looked at Peter. “You going to call Cheryl?” she asked.
“If I tell her what happened she’ll just scream at me, and the worst part is she’d be right to.”
Connie spoke quietly. “Has anybody ever told you you’re kind of a fuckup, bro?”
He rested his elbows on the table. “I appreciate your pointing that out, but you didn’t really need to.”
She looked out the window for a moment. “Do you ever wonder how much of our screwed-up lives had to do with Dad and Mama?”
“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?”
Their parents’ lifelong war had had roots in both disposition and politics. Their father was a courtly conservative who cared deeply for his children and tended his patients with consideration and skill, but who frankly didn’t give a damn about anyone he didn’t know personally, which meant 99.9 percent of the world.
Their mother, by contrast, had a variety of causes going all the time, and was always expressing outraged sympathy for some endangered species, tribe, or wetland. She was sincere, her heart good, but these obsessions left her without much time or attention for her own kids. Her attitude seemed to be that there was plenty of real trouble in the world, and that whatever petty problems they had—say, eating on a given day—they’d best work out for themselves.
When things progressed from cold war to hot war, Connie and Peter would retreat upstairs and shut the door so they didn’t have to listen to it. They couldn’t imagine why their parents had married at all until they got into the family papers one day, compared Peter’s birth certificate to the marriage license, and did the math.
“You’re not completely unlike Dad,” Connie said. “Thank God you’re not a Republican, but you became a doctor, and you’re kind in the way he was. You also suffer from the same sorts of anxieties.”
“I didn’t know he had anxieties.”
Connie just stared. “When you dropped out of college and became a climbing bum he went on Xanax for months.”
“Probably more because I’d dropped out than because I was climbing,” he said. “Though I’m kind of touched, postmortemly, to hear it. You don’t know how fucking hard it is to be a dad until you become one.”
She smiled. “Anyway, I visited their graves last year.”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
She nodded. “I think they’re finally at peace with each other,” she said. “All it took was dying.”
THIRTY-TWO
Since Peter wasn’t sleeping anyway, he started pulling a few night shifts in the ER at Marin General to help Connie with the rent. It was, if nothing else, perversely comforting to be reminded that there was plenty of suffering to go around.
Alex’s eighteeth birthday came, so Connie baked a cake. They all ate some and sang “Happy Birthday” to Alex, who indulged them with reasonably good humor.
Afterward, Connie took Ben to a movie so Peter and Alex could have the house to themselves for an evening. They made popcorn and built a fire, even though it was late summer and still warm out. Alex climbed onto the couch, curled up, and leaned against him.
“You’ve become a cat,” he said.
She made a sort of purring noise, her first attempt at a joke.
“See, this is normal,” he went on. “Popcorn, fire, cat imitations.”
“Extreme hyperglycemia from the cake,” she added.
He put an arm around her shoulders. “Still don’t want to talk?”
“It’s not anything a father should hear,” she said quietly. “I’m telling Edelstein. Let’s leave it at that.”
“Those guys are going to be in jail for a long time,” Peter said. “I hope somebody fucks them up the ass every day they’re in there.”
“If I could pay to make it happen, I would.”
She sighed. “We’re kind of vindictive, you know?”
“Are we?”
“Don’t you think we are? Is this a family trait?”
“I think it’s a normal trait, under the circumstances.”
“We’re melancholy in the same ways too, aren’t we? I mean, before this.”
He thought about it. “I guess maybe so,” he said.
She started eating the popcorn; apparently there was nothing wrong with her digestion. “I should write Devi,” she said, “but I don’t know where to send it.”
“Send it to Sangita; she’ll know what to do. I should put in a note for Lama Padma too.”
“If he’s picking up our vibes these days he’s probably having a heart attack,” she said. “How is it with Mina? You guys barely talk.”
“We’re working on it,” he said. “We just need time.”
They sat quietly, watching the fire. “Speaking of forgiveness, sometime I want to see Mom,” said Alex.
&nbs
p; “Were we speaking of forgiveness?” he asked. “Is Edelstein planting crazy ideas in your head?”
“What’s the alternative, seriously? Spend your life crazy with rage at everyone who’s ever done something bad to you?”
“It’s always worked for me.”
“Yeah, but Dad, it hasn’t,” she said. “You see that, right?”
He looked at her, too stunned by this insight to speak for a few moments. “You’re way too grown up for somebody your age,” he growled, finally.
“For that I blame you.” She took his hand and held it to her cheek. “Do we have anything else to eat?”
“There’s a fridge full of steaks with your name on them,” he said. “Want one?”
“Yeah.”
He started the grill. She ended up eating two of them, with baked potatoes and a protein shake. Afterward, she noticed the weathered old basketball goal out over the garage, the hoop hanging down a little dejectedly in the front, the net half shredded.
“Is there a ball to go with that?” she asked.
He found it, flat, on one of the shelves in the garage. There was an old bike pump and a needle, so he filled it. It held the air. She bounced it on the cement, tentatively.
Her arms were still thin. She missed shot after shot, and Peter could tell she was getting pissed off. She finally sank one, and then another, and then after a couple more misses, a third.
“Edelstein tells me you’re quite the hotshot these days,” she said. “Saving lives left and right where lesser mortals fail, or something.”
He leaned into the doorway, watching her. He thought, I’m atoning the only way I know how. What he said was that they’d offered him a spot at the hospital, but he wasn’t sure if he wanted to take it.
“How come?” She dribbled, watching the ball rise to her hand and pushing it back to earth as if she’d never witnessed such a marvel. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
“I guess I feel a little disoriented, still,” he said. “What do you think about it?”
She lifted the ball and shifted it over to her right hand, then cocked her arm and tried a hook shot. It hit the backboard, then bounced twice on the rim and fell through, just the way it had when she was wowing the nuns. She stepped forward to get it.
“I mean, it is Marin County,” she said. “Is that not good enough? Should we maybe buy a map and a set of darts, and try again?”
| | |
After another few weeks, though, they were restless. The house was cramped, and both Connie and Ben were obviously feeling the strain. Things were going reasonably well with Edelstein, and Alex was seeing him only when she felt like it, every two or three weeks.
One day she tracked her mother down via Google. Cheryl had sold the Berkeley house and was living somewhere in the mountains up north, near Arcata.
“What are you going to do?” Peter asked.
“I want to see her but not really,” Alex said. “I’m thinking of, like, getting closer but not actually going there yet. Is that totally weird?”
“Totally,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
He went into San Rafael and bought a beat-up Subaru at a used-car lot. Then he signed up with a locum-tenens agency that placed temporary docs in the cash-starved, broken-down ERs of the North Coast. The next day they said goodbye to Connie and Ben, threw a couple of bags in the car, and headed out.
When Highway 1 left the valleys and crossed over to Garberville, and then to the sea, the coastal mountains bled all their color out and seemed to drift in shades of gray and green. A world of conifers on layer-cake ridges frosted by fog, a place they had no history. So what if this relief was illusory? Moving toward it satisfied some deep need for flight that itself held an ancient kind of promise.
“You okay?” he asked.
“This is good,” Alex said. “This was the right thing to do.”
“I’m glad you’ve got instincts, because I don’t trust mine anymore.” He recalled the last time he’d found himself in new territory, the morning he awakened in his hard bed in Kathmandu, and how he’d seen in his passport photo the face of a man who had begun to rely more on endurance than on enthusiasm as a way of living. Thinking about it now, he realized that endurance wasn’t such a bad thing, if that was all you could count on. That half of the game, or more, was simply whether you could outlast whatever came up—the purification of karma, or the whims of the drunken-parrot god, who gave you what you wanted and only later exacted his price, with compound interest.
They stopped in Fields Landing for dinner. It was one of those old coastal towns that had experienced an influx of Bay Area retirees, and where the price of an average house had gone from fifty thousand dollars to ten times that in just a few years.
At Jimmy’s they had bad Hawaiian music on the sound system and posterized photos of whales on the walls, with titles under them such as “Sea Trek” and “Twilight Tale.” The waitress, Susie, was tall and slender and vaguely albino, a sort of human egret. But the place had the best clam chowder they’d ever tasted, five dollars for a huge bowl. Afterward they walked down to the beach before heading north. Long green whips of seaweed lay about on the sand. Alex picked one up and twirled it over her head, then tossed it out into the waves. Gulls shrieked and hovered, and from the surf emerged the black, whiskered head of a sea lion. It watched them for half a minute, then dove back underwater.
In Arcata, they found a motel with a couple of double beds. Peter rested awhile, then, after Alex went to sleep, he started his first shift. It came as a shock, working in an American ER, to remember that there were people who weren’t just struggling to survive, who actually had the luxury of wanting to hurt themselves.
At about 2:00 A.M. he found himself stitching up the forearm of a Humboldt State student not much older than Alex. It was a nasty cut, a couple of inches long, deep and bloody, but fortunately her tendons were intact. Caroline was slender, with listless blond hair and big green eyes. She looked intelligent. Peter asked her what had happened.
She shrugged. “There’s this sharp piece of siding by our front door that I keep asking my housemate to hammer in, but he never gets around to it. I was in a hurry, and I caught myself on it.”
Peter numbed the wound, cleaned it, and stitched it up. She didn’t remember when her last tetanus booster was, so when he tied off the stitches he asked her to roll up her sweatshirt sleeve so he could give her one.
“Couldn’t you just do it down here, on the back of my wrist?” she asked.
This got his attention. “It’s either your shoulder or your butt,” he said. “You decide, but those are the choices.”
She hesitated. “I don’t much like people seeing my butt,” she said.
“Then that leaves you one option.”
Reluctantly, she rolled up her sleeve. Her arm was laced with scars. Peter counted seven, some old, a couple as fresh as the past few weeks, red and angry-looking. Two had been stitched before.
“Let’s see the other arm,” he said quietly.
She rolled up the other sleeve and watched his face while he turned over her arms for a better look.
“How long have you been doing this?”
“Doing what?”
He spoke as softly as he could. “You know what.”
She looked toward the hallway, as if she might be thinking about bolting. Peter tightened his grip on her wrist just a little and cleared his throat.
Her shoulders sank, and she blinked back tears. “Eight or nine months,” she said. “Since last fall.”
“If I had to guess, I’d say X-Acto knife, the one with the curved blade. Am I right?”
She looked surprised, but she nodded. “How would you …?”
“My daughter’s preference, when she was fifteen,” he said. “For some reason the pointy blade freaked her out, as did the right angle of a razor, but the curve didn’t seem as bad to her.”
The tears came. Peter handed her a box of Kleenex. “You know what happens next, r
ight?”
She said she didn’t, that he was the first doctor who’d noticed.
“They stitched you up and they didn’t see the other scars?”
She smiled, a little wanly. “I tell them my family raises pedigreed cats. They actually believe it.”
“Jesus,” he said. “Just shows that a medical degree doesn’t make you smart, huh?”
“Well, I always come to the ER; I figure they’re really busy.”
He could see why they needed docs up here. “Okay, what happens next is counseling,” he said. “As in mandatory, arranged through the college. As in, if you don’t show up, they boot you out of school.”
She nodded, watching him. He gave her the tetanus shot and put the empty syringe in the red sharps container.
“Why did your daughter do it?” she asked, rolling down her sleeves.
He hadn’t anticipated the question, but he knew he should have. He didn’t feel like bullshitting her with something vague, though. “She drove herself at everything,” he said. “She told me sometimes it felt like there was so much pressure inside her she was going to explode. That was how she let it out.”
Caroline nodded. “I think I understand that.”
“I’ll bet you do.”
“Is she okay now?”
“She got over it,” Peter said. “That’s the thing: People can get over just about anything. Live long enough and you’ll see. But you do have to live long enough.”
He could see from her bone structure how she’d probably looked as a child, and he could see what she would look like as an old woman when the fat pads and facial muscles had collapsed and melted downward. This sort of vision had been happening occasionally since they returned from Nepal, with patients and even with people on the street. He could see their faces at all ages in an instant. It filled him with a vague sorrow he couldn’t explain, perhaps partly because their lives seemed to accelerate from infancy to death right before his eyes, and he was beginning to understand that this wasn’t actually far from the truth.