She touched his arm. He should hug her but his arms wouldn’t move. She lifted his hand and placed the key in it.
“Sweetie, with so much flying at you, you’ve never had a moment to look very deep into anybody else. Why, when my brain popped, nobody mattered to me, either. I was working so hard to survive. But if you don’t watch it, survivors end up alone.”
This wasn’t anything he didn’t know. She was telling him she knew it, too.
“I’m not so proud of what I did to survive. You were the one drowning and I told myself I had to cut you loose for your own good. I thought you were going to drag me under.”
She dabbed at her eyes but he didn’t see any tears. He supposed he had dried her out.
“All you have to do is take care of yourself and keep out of trouble. No roommates or complaints from the neighbors. No runins with the police. No Isaac Samson showing up in my newspaper.”
He couldn’t tell her that if the eye story appeared, it should count in his favor. “Sometimes the paper won’t print what somebody does.”
“They do if you die.” She probed for her cigarettes. “I bought an air mattress. It’s in the trunk. You should have an armchair and a rug to make it homier. You could cook with a hot plate and you can have one of my bar stools to eat at the workbench. But a grown man probably doesn’t want his mother decorating his room.”
He could not stop himself. “It’s not a room, Mom, it’s a shed. A room is a divided part within a building.”
A cigarette took up whatever lips she might have pursed. The rest of her expression sank deep in her skull. She turned away from him to hiss out a straw of smoke. “You might try a thank you.”
“Thank you. It’s just—I’m afraid. Afraid of screwing this up.”
“You think I’m not?”
So.
Part Three
June
A home is less an investment than a reflection of what we include or exclude from our lives.
—“Home” with Meg Mogrin, Grand Junction Style
Once a month Meg had to deliver seven hundred words celebrating the acquisition, maintenance or disposition of beautiful spaces. With the next column due in three days, she had yet to begin. Ideas no longer descended from the clouds; they were increasingly wrenched from the tense crevice between panic and deadline. Her struggle of late owed to this realization: the magazine cared only that her musings reflected tasteful consumption and kept the advertising pages from flowing into each other.
With two free hours in the office, she had better take a hack at something.
At infertile moments like this she dipped into a file called INSPIRATION where she stocked article excerpts, quotes, news items and highlighted book passages. Once they lost their former context, the fragments might trip loose an original thought. It was not plagiarism, she told herself, but a sort of intellectual property flipping.
Sadly, the easy pickings had been harvested. Skimming, she found the dregs too self-conscious, obvious or banal. “Houses are vessels of desire.” “The ache for home lives in all of us.” “Put storage in otherwise wasted areas: above doorways, under stairs or between studs in interior walls.” No, no and no.
Oh, well. She always came up with something. She opened a New Blank Document in Word. The Blank seemed superfluous. Just start typing.
The credit crunch that fell out of the recession is nowhere to be seen. Lenders are writing mortgages again, and the terms and rates raise questions of
Blah, blah. She struck the lines and tried again.
Real estate is an asset, and a home is the largest single investment you may ever make. However, until you pay off the mortgage your investment belongs to the bank.
She hit a triple return to distance herself from the irate call she’d receive from Jules Lodge the day that piece hit the stands.
Home draws the sharpest line between what we include or exclude from our lives.
She stared at the words, fingers on the keyboard. Where was she going with this? Grand Junction Style readers didn’t want to be depressed about all the secrets and crap in their closets and the friends they never invited over.
This wasn’t just a summer funk. Somehow, she had lost the groove.
It had been agonizing to watch the City Council’s Vagrancy Committee crush the life out of the tent city idea. Eve, feeling blindsided by Winslowville and by Wesley’s infatuation with the glue factory site, had rained her wrath on Meg and the ill feeling still festered. Jules was screwing Hungerman, or whatever it was they did under cover of their own little nondisclosure agreement. And Pandora’s departure had left a surprising void in the house.
Dwelling on lost siblings—now, that was her forté. Family, nostalgia, nesting, security—home as a source of strength and a well of pain!
The home my parents left behind on Gunnison Avenue was not the darling craftsman cottage they had purchased the year before I was born… Over the years, they nudged it toward perfection, never expecting the life-wrenching changes
Oh, puke. You are not exploiting Helen’s empty bedroom!
Who was she to pronounce upon the essence of home? The cursor taunted her to continue. If she typed any more in this frame of mind, it would have to be the letter resigning her column.
Ashley cracked Meg’s door and peeped through the opening. The assistant’s doll face contained only the essential features—bright eyes, nub of nose, molded lips—leaving Ashley to paint in the rest. The abbreviated eyebrows, stenciled a touch high, gave her an expression of perpetual surprise.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Ashley said. “A gentleman is outside looking for someone named Ann. He won’t listen when I tell him she’s not here.”
This was exactly the sort of thing Meg had called out in Ashley’s performance review. The girl was baffled by any departure from the routine. The man probably got off the elevator on the wrong floor and was confused by the look-alike reception areas.
“Ann who?”
“He didn’t give a last name.”
Meg put her irritation on hold. Unfortunately, teachable moments called for teachable students. It would be quicker to deal with this herself. She looked into the lobby and saw a delivery person lingering with a sort of jittery indifference. No, it was Isaac Samson.
Ann. Isaac had a crush on Pandora. Or he’d changed his mind and wanted the eye back. Or—he knows.
The familiar churn of if-thens, might-buts and shouldn’t-shoulds. Whatever this was about, she still had the advantage. There was no more glass eye; Isaac Samson was only a street character; she was Meg Mogrin. This was her office. Her company.
“I’ll talk to him,” she said. “Offer him some water and put him in the front conference room. Leave the inner blinds open. If anything threatening happens, call 911.”
Ashley’s brows arched even higher. “What should I say then?”
“Oh, God, never mind. Just put him in the room and I’ll be out in a second.”
Ashley made her way across the carpet with the deliberate steps of a bomb-squad specialist. The 911 thing was probably overkill. Isaac had given Pandora no problems. She had even been charmed. Meg had been, too, from a distance, once upon a time. She slipped on the bulky cardigan kept for when the air conditioning dropped too low. From her purse, cash went into the left pocket, pepper spray in the right. Just in case.
Ashley sat with fingertips poised on the desktop, impersonating a lab subject who awaited a random shock. Isaac was intent upon reading the High Country Living label on the water bottle. Good. Stay calm. Don’t give anything away.
“I was right,” he said when Meg entered. “I thought you looked semi-familiar. You already know me. It didn’t seem that important until nothing happened.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you’re talking about. What did you expect would happen?”
Isaac screwed up his face and drew out the name. “A-a-a-n said she would talk to her mother about the newspaper doing a story. She said it specifically.
Months went by and no one from The Clarion contacted me. Had she forgotten? Did her so-called mother say no? Did the paper turn her idea down?”
“Excuse me…”
He made an agitated unravelling motion with his hands. “All I knew was Ann and the face of the woman in an SUV. I don’t like half-knowing things. Then I noticed your ad in Sunday’s paper. Yes, Meg Mogrin!” He raised a triumphant finger. “Coincidence rewards a prepared mind! I went to your website. Don’t realtors parade their blessed family life? It said nothing about a daughter. So if Ann wasn’t your daughter, maybe her name wasn’t Ann, either, and maybe nothing was as presented that day. Even normal life can be unruly. Order is important. Disorder, well, that’s what we call a disease, a disturbance of the norm. Not everything lines up in neat, orderly categories. In fact, categories are our invention imposed on the world to help us make sense of things.”
He was nervous, scattered, speaking in a gentle, impersonal manner to the corner of the room.
“Still, it wasn’t hard to locate your father—that would be Ann’s supposed grandfather. It turns out he wasn’t a miner and he’s not dead. He was an American Family agent and he’s still living in Arizona.”
Isaac paused and finally made eye contact, as if expecting her to congratulate him.
“Obviously you have excellent research skills,” she said. Fluency, not so much, but his meaning was clear enough. This was leading to uncomfortable places. She hoped the scotched story about a family reunited with a glass eye was all he cared about. “Did you consider that I was merely a friend giving Ann a ride that day?”
“That’s a logical possibility.” He took a long drink, then acted surprised his water bottle was almost empty. “But she pointed you out as her mother. Parent or not, I’m puzzled that someone of your stature would be involved in a prank.”
Pandora had been upset at being used. Meg wouldn’t use her again.
“It wasn’t a prank. I involved her to protect my privacy.”
“Privacy! Sometimes I forget there is such a thing.” He rapped his temples with his fingertips. “I respected Ann’s request for privacy. But you… didn’t… respect… me.” Isaac rocked as if processing an undulating signal.
This was not leading to a good place. She touched the lump of cash in her pocket. He’d already turned down a reward. She had no idea what a homeless man would consider a persuasive amount of money.
“Pandora did respect you. She told me so.”
“Ah, Pandora, not Ann. I did like that girl. But I’m talking about you, now. The purported mother, the mastermind. I’m used to being underestimated. Dismissed. Excluded. I try not to pay attention, but you went out of your way.”
“I’m sorry…”
Isaac stood abruptly, banging his chair hard into the wall. His hand shot up as if to block the words. “Keep your sorry! You don’t even know me!”
The pepper-spray canister in her hand surprised them both. As if it had gone off, Isaac’s face compressed. “Fake politeness is the worst.”
He rapped his forehead with the soft nautilus of his fist and drew in a deep breath. Meg did the same until their lungs filled together, two accordions playing the same slow song. His body relaxed and his face became placid again but Meg only mirrored his calm. Her insides still throbbed from the race of adrenaline.
“When you and Ann—Pandora—came along to claim the eye, I was happy until I realized you’d lied to me. I have to be careful. Anger leads to problems. It’s bad for the world. Okay, boo-hoo, move on. That’s what they teach you; don’t obsess about things you can’t change. Most of the time, I just let other people’s misperceptions go. I know I’m a very intelligent person. I understand many things automatically. I used to think it was voices. Now I know it’s my mind reporting back from its wanderings. Many things, though, I look up. I have a degree in library sciences. I know how to find almost anything if it’s written down. Suppose a question occurs to me, a puzzle presents itself, like a glass eye found in a canyon. What if I’m the only one to see it, the only one who can solve it? Everything is connected. Suppose the world collapsed because Isaac Samson didn’t do his job.
“You asked for privacy and I respected that, but when an upright person like you lies to get something from me, I want to know why. I understand the creeps who stole my computer really were just after money. At least you didn’t beat me up.”
He smiled to show her he was making a joke. The threat seemed to have passed. Isaac’s intensity was not physical; he vibrated from the thoughts blowing through the double reed of his mind. She would give him a few more minutes. She sat back down to show she was not afraid.
“If you’ve come here for the answer to your puzzle, I’m not going to satisfy your curiosity,” she said.
“You don’t have to. I know the answer.”
So here it finally came. The moment between the drop of the trap door and the snap of the rope. Fear was irrelevant now. If this odd man had truly put everything together, all that remained was to hear what he planned to do—or had already done. Then she would decide.
“People aren’t like books. Most of their thoughts remain inaccessible—unstructured and undocumented. Plus, they conceal and they lie. But their actions are out there somewhere. We think reality is solid, but it’s mostly floating in a vacuum, like the Milky Way that seems so full of stars and comet dust and planets, inhabited or uninhabited. A house is mostly air. A family is defined by the invisible links between the people. That’s where I look for the truth, in the spaces that seem empty. I found a glass eye in a canyon. I also found a bowling ball, a Frisbee, canned peaches, a barrel, even a car. And after a long time thinking about them, they drew me a picture. They all came from above!”
He looked up at an imaginary Cold Shivers Point. His ramblings were either mad or the comet dust of genius. Meg replaced the pepper spray and realized her hands were freezing. She placed them in the pockets of her sweater and drew it around her.
“I had started from the most random, untraceable fact. Forget the eye. Follow from the other end. I started with you. Through the scholarship it was easy to connect Mogrin to Vavoris, then to your father, as I told you, and your sister, of course, which raised the question of how she died, which led me to that canyon. Surprise, surprise. And also to a story my brother wrote ten years ago connecting her death to those of other women killed by Neulan Kornhauer. I did not know about your sister. That was a time I missed a great deal, even in my own life. But now…
“I know you’re a good person. Most people don’t lie because they’re evil. They lie not to appear evil. They lie because they know what goodness is. I finally learned this on the river from the addicts and the drunks, the child molesters—all the people you would think are no good. I used to think, you people are not like me. What is wrong with you? But that’s not how to talk to a person who is afraid. Do you know the right question? It’s what happened to you? Even then, people who are afraid may not answer. They don’t trust you or think you have the right to ask. They are ashamed.”
He clenched his water bottle and it gave a crackling sound that startled her. He frowned and set it down. The indented sides caused the bottle to rock. It pointed at her. She plucked it from the table and dropped it in the recycling container by the door.
He looked from Meg to the container, then back. “Where was I?”
She considered her answer. She was not sure she knew. Trust, fear, shame. No. “Knowing what goodness is.”
He nodded slowly. “Something happened to you. You wanted the eye because you thought it would make you feel better, yes?” His words tumbled with increasing speed. “I never had a sister but I’m sure girls are different. A boy would play tricks, put his glass eye in somebody’s mashed potatoes, make jokes to cover his shame. People would know. But I think a girl would want her disfigurement kept secret, if she could. That’s why you wouldn’t tell me the real story and no one else would either. You’re guarding her memory and here I am butting in
, dredging up this…this irrelevance, making a fuss about the eye, Craigslist, posters all over.”
He stopped for breath. “I had no business causing you this grief. This is the last I will ever speak about it.”
Did Isaac actually believe he’d found Helen’s eye? This dear, sweet, crazy man!
Isaac stared at the table, uncomfortable now, as if waiting to be dismissed. What could she possibly say to him? The Isaac she had created in her head was nothing like the man who had just unburdened himself to her. And she was no longer the woman who had named him Yoga Man.
“Are there stairs? I don’t care for elevators very much.”
He shouldered his pack and came around the table. She stood and he edged sideways to pass with more room between them. For the first time, she sensed how difficult it was for him to be in this realty office speaking to a stranger. His consideration of her was a gift and she had almost pepper-sprayed him for his trouble.
“Isaac… I’m not sure I have the right to ask, but what happened to you?”
He was almost to the exit. He turned back. This time he looked fully at her with the blue eyes that had startled her that first day on Main Street.
“I wish...” He put his arm through the other strap of his pack and hunched it square. “I wish I knew.”
She dropped back into the conference room chair and covered her face to shut out the bright lights. The aquarium gurgle, the ventilation whistle still plucked at her. A phone rang in a back office. She plugged her ears, trying to be certain of what she was feeling—what she no longer felt: Neulan, who had taken Helen, then her parents, then Brian from her, dragged them all down in one long pull, and there she was at the end of the rope, her heels planted in the unyielding ground, putting on this show of resistance for herself. But he wasn’t really there any more.
Had she been wrong about the eye, too? Its provenance no longer mattered to her, not because it was in the river and Isaac was deluded, but because she saw in full the woman who had sent Pandora to the park, the one who had let Wesley Chambers founder, Hungerman’s little champion. A shameful body of work.
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