“It’s just a phone,” he called out to the kid, who kept his hands up and shook his head. Greg put the phone in a cup holder so the kid would relax. “Do you know someone named GJ?” he called. GJ went to concerts when he was younger, at first because he liked music and then because he was selling drugs, which Greg found out after GJ had been arrested at a concert in the park.
“DJ?”
“G. GJ,” Greg said. “Gregory Junior.” Again came the surprise grief, his eyes flooding and spilling down his cheeks. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice raw. “Been driving a lot. I’m just tired.”
The kid walked closer, put his hand back on the window. “I don’t know him,” he said. “I’m going to walk up a little bit so I can keep trying to find a ride, but I think you should just park here for a while. Get yourself together.” The kid held his hand up in a wave and jogged away.
Greg let the tears come, flowing out like he’d been tapped. His throat ached. He eased the RV back onto the highway. When he passed the kid, he felt a sudden embarrassed rage. That kid playing at being a loner, playing at being open to the world, Hey, man, check out this hat, check out the dirt in my nails. Greg hadn’t even offered the boy a ride; all he’d done was show his hand. The boy couldn’t deal. His parents probably knew right where he was; had probably dropped him off at the highway exit and waved goodbye. GJ didn’t even like being dropped off at school. I want to stay with you. And Greg just answering, You’ll be fine, his mother’s words. One time even rolling the window up, GJ snatching his hand away so it wouldn’t get crushed. He was trying to prepare the boy for the day that he’d be dropped off for good, the day he became an adult. He was trying to prepare the boy for heartache and drudgery and disappointment. Smooth out his edges. A smooth stone skips easily over the water; GJ went straight to the bottom, I want to stay with you, Greg pivoting and flicking his wrist and letting the boy go, plonk.
He glanced in the rearview, but the kid was gone.
And then he was only fourteen exits from Marie. He drove slowly, coasting in the right lane, counting them down as he went. I know why you married her, Marie had said one afternoon when he and Deb were dropping GJ off after a weekend together. Deb had stayed in the car, lifted a hand in a bland, placid wave. Marie returned the same nothing wave. She’s perfect for you, you know, she’d said. Because it’s like you can be alone without being lonely. Then she’d smiled at him like they were in on the joke, and closed the door. Heading back to the car he’d smiled to himself, and then at Deb. Marie was right, and what was wrong with that? But it stayed with him, and it began to molder and stink, and after a while he could see what Marie truly meant. Deb accepted him for who he was, big body and all, end of story, a never-ending ending. Companionship was what it could be called. Greg shook himself. Marie was always finding a way in, making him feel doubtful. He had led a peaceful existence with Deb for many years. It was time to pull off now, time for the game face he’d have to put on to face Marie. There were no more exits to go.
He had glimpsed bits of Florida from the highway, tall gas-station signs and a gluttony of palm trees and the heat coming in through the windows despite the constant exhale of air-conditioning through the vents in the RV, heat that made seeing drivers in their bathing suits or shirtless men riding shotgun taking polite swigs of beer seem like no big deal. Greg had forgotten how the heat made shorts a necessity, how flip-flops and tank tops were part of the uniform, if you could stand to wear that many items of clothing. If you cropped the picture just so, you could get a portrait of nature, a foreign, mean, insect-laden, sun-beaten, green slice of the outdoors. “Ponce de Leon,” he said to himself, driving along the road he took after leaving the highway, the one that shot east and west in a near-perfect straight line, the one that would take him ever closer to Marie’s condo. Ponce de Leon, Florida’s first explorer. GJ had learned that in school, had loved to say the man’s name. Ponce de Leon named Florida, which means “place of flowers.” Now it could be known as “place of Circle Ks,” “place of rednecks,” “place of sprawl.” If you pulled back to capture a wider view, that’s when you got a better picture. Apartment complexes in tans and beiges; tile-roofed strip malls; brown-water beaches; textured and freckled and crisped skin. Greg had lived in places where you could get by without air-conditioning, where it was a badge of honor to go without, but it had never been that way here. People loved to go into the shopping malls and movie theaters and Chili’s and Olive Garden because it was guaranteed to be ice cold inside, an escape from the squinting and sweating and constant nuisance of fabric against your body.
Greg hadn’t been overweight when he’d lived in Florida, not all that much, anyway. It was a new sensation, that extra weight of sweat pulling his shirt closer, like a room with collapsing walls. He felt betrayed by his driver’s seat, which seemed also to be sucking him deeper in, his ass seeping into his khakis, every part of him melting but not getting any smaller. He had gotten used to it in the fifteen years he’d lived in central Florida, his blood had adapted to the constant heat; but once he left, all of that had faded away. Coming back to visit GJ, he’d feel himself dissolving again, his body cooked, his face exhausted from baring his teeth to squint his eyes, even wearing sunglasses.
There were beautiful parts of it, too: old brick roads and older stucco homes and shady trees dripping moss; quiet lakes and endless green and candy-blue swimming pools and yes, the palm trees. Greg had never gotten over the palm trees. They had one in the yard out front of the house they lived in—he, Marie, and GJ—but they were everywhere, even inside shopping malls. The cold and snow offered its own harsh unrelenting bullshit, its layers of clothing and short, gray days, its long nights, its ice and salt. But it seemed more natural to Greg, to have the seasons change, to watch everything die and be buried, gone gone gone, and then the soggy resurrection of spring, the smell of black mud and the sight of green sprouting out of a melting patch of gray. In Florida it was an everlasting summer, a relentless oven. The first thing you noticed about a person was how he kept his feet, which seemed childish to Greg when he lived there, but it was another thing he missed, along with the palm trees. He wore sandals when he could now; he kept his feet as tidy as he could, trimming the nails with Deb’s nail scissors and sometimes using a Band-Aid to hide a small bit of fungus.
Marie lived in a development with manufactured rolling hills, sodded of course, that encircled three short rows of condominiums, four stories high and three units deep. Marie had a view of the parking lot, something the developers did their best to minimize with palm trees and shrubbery and ornate iron grating. It was either that or a view of the retention pond, which wouldn’t have been so bad if the developers hadn’t quickly placed a chain-link fence around it when residents complained that small children could wander down to get a better look at the filthy ducks splashing around in it, fall in, and … Marie had told GJ all of this, and GJ had recounted it to Greg, near-breathless with excitement to be included in the discussions of which condo to choose: front, middle, or back? That was when Greg lived in his apartment, a one-bedroom shithole that did its best to rise above its class in life (faux-granite countertops; glass doors in the shower; textured ceilings that the leasing agent pointed to the way a fraudulent jeweler might gesture to a cubic zirconium).
The condo was in a gated community, but Greg was able to follow a Hummer in, which felt like a miracle. It was Saturday, but he suddenly realized that he had no idea if she’d be home. Greg sometimes thought of it as his condo, since surely she’d purchased it with the money from the divorce, but pulling in, he felt afraid. This was her turf. All of Florida was her turf, the whole state feeling off-limits to him, blacked out, redacted. Every resident in the complex might be watching him; who drove a Hummer unless you were someone looking for a fight? But the Hummer pulled up to the mailboxes and a thin woman in bright orange flip-flops got out, holding up her keys in a wave. Greg waved back and drove past.
Up close, the iron grating of
the covered parking looked old and rusted. There were yellow patches in the green rolling hills, and more than one car had a serious dent in it. The palm trees wore shaggy skirts of their own dead fronds. It wasn’t there yet, but the place was going to shit. Marie should get out while she could; he started having the conversation in his head, the one where he asked her what her plans were and then she asked him just why he cared, and there in the RV, with his gut shellacked to his shirt by a slime of sweat, he had to agree that the Marie in his head had a point. He didn’t care. Twenty minutes, tops. In, out. Where’s GJ? Where’s GJ? Where is our son? Answer, no answer, he’d be back in the RV in twenty.
He turned down her row of parking. There was nowhere to put the RV. If he pulled in between the parking-space lines, half of his compact RV would be sitting in the narrow roadway. And he’d never make it under the covered parking. Instead he pulled the RV parallel to the curb, taking up three or four spaces. If Marie was looking out her window she’d definitely see him coming, so he waited on the other side of the RV for a few minutes, letting the blood flow back to his legs, hoping the weak breeze might dry some of the sweat. His toes looked pale, stunned, like grubworms under a flashlight. He walked around the front of the RV, his heart pounding. He had made it his life’s mission to keep contact with this woman down to almost nothing. Would she laugh at him? Put her hand over her mouth and look at him with amused and pitying eyes? He could take it. He had to take it. In, out.
He tripped on a divot of asphalt and fell to his knee, his sandal bending under his foot and zings of pain shooting up his thigh. He was holding himself up by his fingertips. He pushed himself to standing and kept walking, but there was Marie. Shoulder-length black hair behind her ears, the same kind of flowery blouse she always favored, shapeless and flowing, cropped khaki pants, crossed arms.
“Do you have GJ?” she called. And then, “Oh, Christ, your knee is bleeding.” Greg looked down and saw a tear in his pants, a dark red gash of blood. “I have stuff inside to clean that up.”
He hadn’t thought to buy Band-Aids or Neosporin at the Walgreens, and Marie was the type to put a poultice of herbs on a gunshot wound. “It’s no big deal,” he said. He hadn’t planned out what he’d say to her when he first saw her, but It’s no big deal would not have been high on the list.
“I have real stuff,” she said. She turned and walked toward her open door, and Greg saw that she had a hitch in her step, like her hips were too tight. Like she was old. She wasn’t fat, but she was fatter than she had been, like she’d been fluffed. She was wearing orthopedic sandals, shoes that Deb called old lady shoes. Deb was younger than they were; she didn’t understand. Yet. He followed Marie, turning to look down the dark hallway to the RV. In and out, he told himself. In and out, the RV answered back.
Marie stood at her door, waiting for him to go in first. “Go on in,” she said. “Wait for me on the couch.” His knee felt hot with pain. She had decorated in earth tones. Earth tones, another phrase she favored. Deb liked whites and grays. Marie’s couch was a deep red; a fat spray of woodsy greens decorated her coffee table; a tapestry was mounted on the wall behind the television, woven browns and reds, like an ode to shit and blood. He hated it; it was like something you’d see on TV in a college dorm. None of it calming; all of it shouting, hollering, screeching. When he sat on the couch it made a whump noise. It was as plush as the RV’s driver’s seat, and he felt himself sinking, losing control of his posture, so he sat forward, his elbows on his splayed knees.
“I saw you pull up,” Marie called from the bathroom, which had been painted a deep clay orange, if Greg remembered correctly. “I was coming out to yell that you can’t park like that.” She walked into the room holding a bag of cotton balls and hydrogen peroxide. “Sometimes the mouthbreathers around here have family come stay and tell them to park their trucks and vans and RVs in the way back.” She bit off a corner of the bag and took out a handful of cotton balls, which she doused with the peroxide. “Like because we’re back here we won’t care.” She waited, bent over him, holding the cotton poised just above his knee. “You’re going to have to pull your pants up or down.”
She was still attractive, Greg could see now. Her eyes were still jet black, her lips wrinkled but full. She still stared full on into his eyes; she’d never stopped doing that, even when it was at its ugliest between them. It was unnerving but hard to look away. Push, pull. He reached down and ripped the hole in his pants wider. “There,” he said. “Now I don’t have to do either.”
She held the cold cotton to his knee. The fizzing felt like a million tiny teeth eating away at his leg, moving in for his bone. “I’ve never seen you fall before,” she said. “Here.” She gestured for him to take over holding the cotton. She sat next to him on the couch, no whump for her. “So GJ isn’t with you, then?”
“No,” he said. “I came here to look for him.” Saying it out loud to Marie felt ridiculous. Idiotic, a word GJ loved as a teenager. A tear of peroxide slid down his shin.
“He’s not here,” she said. She took the cotton from him and placed it on her coffee table; she’d never cared about keeping furniture in good condition. “I told you over the phone that I don’t know where he is. You think I wouldn’t call you if that had changed?”
“I had to do something,” he said. “He’s been gone three weeks.”
“I know that,” she said. She was dousing more cotton balls. “I know how long my son has been missing.”
“Did you file a police report yet?”
“Did you?”
“No. I figured, what if—”
“What if the police find him and he’s doing something that could get him arrested again,” Marie said. She handed him the new batch of cotton and started unpeeling a Band-Aid. She still had fake nails, something she’d started doing after they divorced, fat white tips that looked like she dipped her fingers in Wite-Out. She’s trying to be young, GJ said once. They were at Mick’s, both craning their necks up at a golf tournament neither cared about. Greg had asked about Marie, something he did to make GJ feel like he still cared, but also because it allowed him to keep tabs on her without having to talk to her. She’s fine. She got a lot of new clothes. Did her nails. She’s trying to be young. Greg laughed to show GJ that this was a laughable, silly thing, but he had recently bought silk undershorts for the same reason he imagined Marie was making herself over. Marriage froze them in time, forever young inside but aging on the outside. Divorce unfroze them, and there was so much catching up to do.
“That’s part of it,” Greg said. He took the bandage from her and stuck it to his wet knee, could already feel it sliding off.
“I get it,” Marie said. “Any move you make feels too final, too real.” Too real. Marie always wanting to proclaim something as too real or unreal. “He’s been gone longer than ever, Gregory.”
This had been exactly what he’d been trying to say to her just moments ago, and she’d snapped at him. Now it was supposed to be some revelation?
“I know how long my son has been missing,” he said. She laughed, a single dry ha that he felt sure she believed made her seem superior. On the reading chair behind her, a gray cat suddenly appeared, its tail like a brushstroke come alive, fluid and undulating, its green eyes both alarmed and disgusted at this fat sweaty oaf sitting on the couch. Greg’s throat prickled, as if someone had blown the puff of a dandelion back there, each seed carrying a bloom of itch.
“What do you want to do,” Marie asked, and there didn’t seem to be a question mark at the end of the sentence. It was a statement, bored and flat. What do you want to do. Greg started counting all the tiles he could see, that old habit rearing up whenever he felt cornered. He stopped himself after thirteen tiles, but he wanted to roll up the rug, push back the love seat, push it onto the tiny porch if it would fit among all the creeping vines and potted whatevers and carpet of dead leaves, so he could keep counting. The cat poured off the chair and began plucking at the rug with its paws.
Making biscuits. Who called it that? Deb, who loved cats. So she had that in common with Marie. Greg sneezed, holding the crumpled Band-Aid wrapper up to catch the shout of air and spit. He had no idea what he wanted to do. This had been his destination, and now he was here, and now it was dissolving, no longer. He shrugged, because it was what GJ would have done. What are you doing with your life? Shrug. Don’t you want to live? Shrug. Where are you? Shrug.
“We could look for him in places he used to go,” Marie said. She got up and sat in the chair the cat had vacated. Greg wondered if he smelled, if the RV’s essence had invaded his pores, gotten muddled in his sweat and fear and love of meat. But likely she just didn’t want to sit next to her ex-husband, the father of her fucked-up son, this fat lump who shrugged in the face of the unknown.
“I googled him the other night,” she said. “I found his arrest records, all stuff we knew about. I found that blog he had back in high school, too. No new posts. And I found this other guy with his name, this man who lives in Idaho with his wife and four children. He’s the principal of an elementary school out there. He loves the television show Law and Order. His favorite band is Metallica. One of his daughters’ names is Hailey. I found all that about this other Greg, even his address and phone number. We could drive to his house right now. I couldn’t stop learning about him, everything I could. I called him.” She stopped, put her hand to her mouth, looked at him the same way her cat had. She hadn’t wanted to admit that, Greg knew. It made her seem batty, or she would worry about it making her seem that way. Marie wasn’t one to let her guard down.
“Why did you call him?”
Now she was the one shrugging. “It felt like a thing I could do.” She crossed her arms, pushing them up under her breasts, like they needed the hoist. “And I was angry at him. His life was exactly what a man’s life should be: family, work, home. We tried to do that and we failed. GJ never even tried. Anyway, no one picked up. I hung up after seven rings. I can show you his picture if you want, though.”
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