Exiles

by Cary Groner

  Before that moment, she had always considered anything made of metal to be immutable. Peter realized what he’d really given her was a firsthand understanding that this was not true, not of copper or of anything. With the right forces, any face could be erased.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  They found Cheryl at a scarred-up kitchen table in a moldy trailer, twirling her hair around her finger. She looked fifteen or twenty years older than she was. Her hair had gone gray and strawlike, and what teeth she had left were rotten.

  “Mom,” said Alex, both longing and horror on her face. Cheryl got up and gave her a hug, but she was emaciated and tottering. She sat down again and lit a cigarette.

  “Well,” she said. “Home from the wars, huh?”

  Alex was fighting back tears, but for Peter this wasn’t a completely unexpected trajectory. He’d held out some small hope, for Alex’s sake, that Cheryl might have finally gotten her life together, but it didn’t take an ace diagnostician to see that she’d been heavily into booze and meth, and was eating mainly on whim.

  Alex looked around apprehensively. “Wayne Lee isn’t here, is he?”

  “He got offed last spring,” Cheryl said, not quite matter-of-fact but also not with the emotional heft you’d expect from someone reporting the demise of her lover.

  “He’s dead?”

  “Somebody sweetened his gas tank and his engine seized. Pulled a big ender on 101. They were picking up the pieces for a quarter-mile.”

  She took a drag from the cigarette. Peter didn’t want to, but he couldn’t help it, he felt sorry for her. He sat down at the table. “You find out why?” he asked.

  “Well, he was Wayne Lee,” said Cheryl. She reached for the Kleenex box, but it was empty. “This was outside a bar. Probably came on to the wrong guy’s girl.”

  She opened her mouth and pulled one of the loose teeth out of her lower jaw, studied it absently, then put it back in. Alex looked at Peter, alarm in her eyes.

  “Mom, is there anything we can do for you?”

  Cheryl launched into a rambling monologue of apology, blamelessness, and persecution, the gist of which was that Wayne Lee had taken all the money and gotten her hooked on various drugs. One day they’d had a fight and he’d roughed her up, so she moved out here to the trailer. She finished the story with a vague digression about how rude the local Hoopa Indians were and that this trailer really wasn’t her kind of place, but it was all she could afford, because her lawyer had screwed up the divorce settlement. She spent a minute or two cursing the lawyer and then cursing Peter, as if she’d forgotten he was sitting right there. Then she just trailed off and sat staring, tracing patterns with her finger in the tabletop dust.

  “Anything else you want to say to your daughter before we go?” Peter asked.

  Cheryl looked at him, and then at Alex. She shrugged. “I don’t want you to think I’m a bad person,” she said. “I always loved you in my own way.”

  Alex wiped her eyes. “You need any money, Mom?”

  “I’m all right,” she said. She took her daughter’s hand briefly, then let it go.

  Alex got up and looked in the fridge. There were two bottles of Miller, a tin of sardines, and three eggs. In the cabinets were Cheerios, saltines, chocolate-chip cookies, a jar of peanut butter, and enough mouse droppings to start a fertilizer plant.

  “Dad?” she said.

  Peter stood and opened his wallet. It had been futile in Nepal, it would be futile here, but he did it anyway. Four twenties, a ten, three ones. He put it all on the table. Cheryl reached out and took it, then shoved one of the dollar bills back at him.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “The ten and the three,” she said. “It’s thirteen; it isn’t lucky.” Peter took the dollar and put it in his pocket. “You’re right,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “Anyway, I appreciate it,” she said. Her voice echoed a little in the tinny trailer. “I know you think I don’t, but I do.”

  “We know, Mom.”

  “I’m not a bad person,” Cheryl went on. Her hands were against her forehead; she wasn’t even looking at them. It was as if they’d already left, or she had. “I loved both of you in my own way. In my own way, I always did.”

  | | |

  Peter drove them east, up 299 and into the mountains.

  “You think there’s anything we can do for her?” Alex asked. “I only had one house to sell.”

  She made an exasperated noise. “You know what I mean.”

  “There’s nothing I can do if she doesn’t want it herself, Alex.”

  “You’re lacquering the cat,” she said. It was an expression she’d coined a year or two previously, which meant slapping a thin intellectual gloss on a clawed, fanged, unruly thing. “You make it sound like there are no emotions involved.”

  “There are too many emotions involved, is closer to the problem,” he said.

  “Just because you’re done with her, it doesn’t mean I have to be, does it?”

  “No, but I think it might be a good idea if you took care of yourself for a while.”

  She looked pensively out of the window. “Where are we going, anyway?”

  “Weaverville.”

  “Why?”

  He explained that one advantage of the disintegrating American healthcare system was that small rural hospitals were folding up left and right, so he was able to get good deals on used medical equipment. He’d promised to send Franz a crate with an autoclave, a ventilator, a case of IV saline, and whatever else he could pick up.

  They drove through a series of beautiful canyons on the Trinity River, then crossed Oregon Mountain pass. Weaverville was a pretty little town supported largely by a lumber mill, framed to the north by the peaks of the Trinity Alps.

  “What happened to the hospital?” Alex asked.

  “I read that the locals voted down a bond measure to keep it open,” Peter said.

  She looked at him, incredulous. “So these people will be dying because they wouldn’t part with, like, a buck a week for a hospital?”

  “Frontier mentality up here, I guess.”

  “Talk about survival of the fittest,” she said. “A self-culling herd.”

  Peter was delighted to find that there was, indeed, an autoclave, along with two plastic crates of ER supplies, a hundred sheets of X-ray film that wouldn’t expire for another year, and sundry other supplies.

  They stopped for lunch at Miller’s Drive-in, where Alex had three burgers and a shake. They headed south out of town toward Hayfork, where they picked up Highway 36 back toward the coast. Peter thought it might do Alex good to see some of this country, which was pristine and stunning. She put her feet up on the dash, let her seat back, and opened her window. The cool air smelled of conifer forest and dust.

  Peter was thinking about all his fuckups, and what exactly was required of someone before he could be said to have put things right.

  After they’d been driving for fifteen or twenty minutes, he turned to his daughter. “There’s something I want to ask you,” he said. “You don’t have to answer, but someday I might like to know.”

  She sounded a little sleepy. “Mmm?”

  “Mina said you shot one of the men who came to get you.”

  That woke her pretty well. She sat up and put her feet on the floor, but she didn’t reply.

  “Alex?”

  She set her elbow on the armrest and ran her fingers through her hair nervously. “I might have,” she said.

  “You don’t know?”

  “It’s a long story,” she said. “Edelstein’s heard it.”

  He watched a doe and her yearling cross the road ahead of them to the west. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” he said.

  She rubbed her forehead. “We didn’t know who they were,” she said. “All of a sudden, in the middle of the night, these guys in fatigues were running through the place, shooting the dogs and whoever came out. They killed two of the others right i
n front of me before I got back inside.”

  “You had friends there?”

  “Not exactly,” she said. “I thought they’d killed you, but then we heard you’d gotten away, and the last guys who went after you never came back.”

  “They didn’t?”

  She shook her head. “We never found out what happened to them. They may have just snuck back to their families.”

  Peter thought of the boys, and of Tsering Wangmo, and smiled.

  “So you didn’t even know if I was dead?”

  “I figured you must be, or you would have come back for me,” she said. “Anyway, I thought the kids in the camp might be all I had left. So they weren’t really my friends, but they weren’t exactly enemies either.”

  He was trying to figure out if he actually did want an answer to the question. “But you really shot somebody?”

  “We were scared shitless and we couldn’t see,” she said. “There were just the fires and these blinding flashlights, and it was chaos. I ran back inside, grabbed one of the rifles, and hid behind some crates. I was shaking, I was so afraid, and then this guy kicked in the door and three of them came inside. I don’t know if I fired; if I did, I don’t remember. But one of them somehow ended up on the ground, and then the other two grabbed me and pulled the gun out of my hands, and they were screaming at me and really angry.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Believe me, I was totally freaked and basically just cried for hours. But later, when they took me off the road and did what they did …”

  He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear what came next, but he said, “Go on.”

  She was sobbing. “After that, to tell the truth, I pretty much wished I’d killed them all.”

  He was quiet. “Nobody’s judging you,” he said. “I just wanted to know.”

  They drove on. The road passed across mountainsides and wound through verdant meadows and tall stands of fir and pine. Some of the hillsides were dotted with huge old oaks. After a while Alex sat back and seemed to calm down some.

  “Do you blame yourself for what happened to me?” she asked.

  He hadn’t expected the question, but he nodded.

  “Don’t,” she said. “You did the best you could. I know that, and you should too.”

  It was such a grown-up thing to say. Tears welled in his eyes and rolled down his cheeks. They felt scalding. He couldn’t forgive himself, but she could forgive him.

  “Thank you,” he whispered.

  She realized he was crying and put her hand on his shoulder, and then they were both in tears. He steered the car around a wide bend in the road, and a beautiful valley opened before them. Alex wiped at her cheeks and smiled. “We’re quite a pair,” she said.

  It seemed crazy that you could raise someone from birth and still be mystified by who they really were inside. But it had been true of his father and him, and it was true of him and Alex. Was anyone capable of anything, as Sangita had once implied about the Chinese soldiers? What could you do except take people as they were and do your best to love whatever they brought with them?

  What struck him then was how hard it was to love it all, but also how easy it was. The notion of Alex with a rifle, or other things he might have thought would shock him, when it came down to it, didn’t end up shocking him very much at all. Things he didn’t understand, and at the same time understood completely. He thought again of Tsering Wangmo, how he couldn’t comprehend what she’d done but had to acknowledge she’d done it, that she apparently altered whatever he took to be reality solely by the force of her chanting or even by her mind. The world was everything he thought it was and nothing he thought it was. Messiness and misery coexisted with perfection—were, paradoxically, part of perfection—and there was no way to reconcile these things except to accept them and live with them the way old lovers lived together, with understanding and humor, and with mercy.

  He was sick of his own insufferable cleverness, too, which now struck him as a kind of golden idol, the antithesis of genuine wisdom. He wanted to be rid of it, but he wasn’t sure what to replace it with, for he still felt a long way from any sort of transcendent knowledge. Maybe it wasn’t necessary to replace it at all. One thing he felt increasingly convinced of, though, was that emotions were more than just the means by which DNA drove his behavior. They were, at least in the best case, how he understood in his heart what he was unable to comprehend with his mind, and they deepened his intelligence in ways that were no less real for being difficult to articulate. He wondered what Lama Padma would think about all this.

  Alex watched the mountains. “It’s beautiful up here. Even if we don’t buy hospital stuff, we should just come out sometimes.”

  He was glad she suggested it. “Well, how’s your schedule?” he asked. “Should I call your secretary?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’m worried about Edelstein, though.”

  “Why?”

  “He practically falls apart if he doesn’t see me.”

  “Is that right?”

  She nodded. “Oh, yeah. Sooner or later I guess we’ll just have to wean him, don’t you think?”

  | | |

  A week later they were surprised to get a letter from Devi.

  Dear Alex & Peter,

  I’ve been so upset since I heard what happened. Please keep me informed. When I learn about something like that I think maybe my mother was right after all, that no one can really be trusted. I’ve been thinking of that nun, Ani Dawa, because now I understand what she was feeling when she wanted to kill those Chinese soldiers.

  I am at Lama Padma’s for a couple of weeks to receive teachings, though, so of course I must give up any such notions of revenge. He is very strict about this kind of thing—not just acting but thinking. I hope your minds are more at peace and less unruly than mine.

  When they got to this, Peter and Alex just looked at each other and smiled.

  The letter continued:

  You should know that Lama Padma is quite ill, and we aren’t sure how long he will live. I guess Peter’s concerns about heart failure were right. He was distressed to hear what happened to Alex, and he is praying for her, as you requested. He says that if he does not have an opportunity to see you both again, he very much appreciates meeting you, and that you wrote to him.

  As for your last letter, he asked me to tell you that it is perfectly natural for you to be angry, but he hopes you will not cling to these emotions, thinking they will somehow give you the power you did not have when you needed it. They do not, and you will become their prisoner if you believe otherwise.

  Soon I will return to Tsering Wangmo’s. I may stay there for some time. Ramesh came to visit and brought the goat. Tsering Wangmo is delighted to have her, and Wayne Lee is thriving there. She and the dog often sleep together for warmth, and they seem to have become friends.

  Tsering Wangmo says I should plan to stay as long as she lives, and maybe even after she dies. So in fifty years you may find me still there, all wrinkly, as her replacement! But for now, she and Lama Padma think it is time I went into solitary retreat, in a small cave up behind her house, possibly for three years or more. Tsering Wangmo has agreed to bring me mail from time to time, though, and to take mine out, so I won’t be out of touch with you.

  I miss you and think of you all the time. I don’t know when I’ll see you again, but I love you both. I am so glad to hear you have found your way home.

  —Devi

  Alex cried for her Devi, lost and found, and for Lama Padma. “I wish he’d let me operate,” Peter said. “He’d have a few good years left.”

  Alex brushed her tears away. “It’s not who he is, you know? That’s the trouble with these people. They ignore all our terrific advice, and then they miss the chance to be as unbelievably happy as we are.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  Peter accepted the night position at Marin General and bought an old clapboard house near the water in Sausalito. It wasn’t fancy but it was big, and they w
ere going to be needing room.

  In late September, almost a year to the day after they had flown into Kathmandu, Peter and Alex drove down to SFO to meet Mina and Usha. Mina walked down the ramp from the boarding gates and right into Peter’s arms, then Usha joined her, and finally Alex glommed on, and they all just stood there in a scrum, breathing one another in.

  The next day, after Alex and Usha took off to see a movie, Peter and Mina went for a walk in the hills.

  “I’d forgotten how much I like it here,” she said.

  “We’ll get you back up to speed,” he said. “Most days I’m free.”

  They sat in the shade under an oak. “Usha really does want to study medicine, you know,” Mina said. “She’s already into biology.”

  “Well,” he said. “A chip off the old block.”

  “We have to figure out how to get her visa extended.”

  “That’s easy. We’ll just explain to the INS that I paid good money for her.”

  She laughed. “I checked it out a little,” she said. “It seems like it’s important to have a stable couple.”

  He considered this. “Any chance we could impersonate one?”

  “We’ll have to practice,” she said. She kissed him on the cheek. “Sure you want to keep the night shift?”

  | | |

  Two months later, Alex and Usha loaded the car with potatoes and beans and pie, while Mina and Peter packed in the soda and the wine.

  “Explain this holiday?” Usha asked as they set out. Alex launched into an elaborate description of the origins of Thanksgiving in the English-Nepali patois that the girls had developed to communicate with each other.

  “So these Indians gave food, and you killed them?” Usha said. “I do not understand.”

  “No, you understand,” said Alex brightly. “China’s got nothing on us.”

  They drove north and west toward Mendocino, following Connie’s scrawled map. After a couple of hours, Peter came to the turnoff, and the gravel drive took them up a little rise to a clearing. The house, two stories of blue clapboard, was built in a broad, open field of mown grass, with acres of apple orchard to the west. A stand of pine began where the orchard ended, and beyond the pines the Pacific glinted in the afternoon sun.