Your mother is not the bad person. I am. None of this would have happened if it weren’t for me.
I don’t know what it is like for you to read this letter. Or how any of this sounds.
Your mother chose to give you a fresh start in this world. I hope that’s what you got. She thought the least she could do for you was to give you some relief from us, your parents.
Well, what is there to say?
When you’re up, you’re really up, you know? When low, really low. You sound like you’re in one of the low places. Despite my initial surprise, I am glad you got in touch, though it is breaking my heart to have to tell you these things. I thought about lying or not writing back, but I don’t want to do the wrong thing anymore.
I guess the only other thing to tell you is that your mother wanted to name you Jo, after her mom.
Send a picture of yourself, okay? Here’s one of me. I used to look a lot younger, I promise you that.
I want to keep writing to you but I fear I’ve run out of things to say. My wife’s mother is driving me crazy. Every time she walks into the kitchen, she washes her hands three times and then takes a sip of water and spits it into the sink like it’s mouthwash. It’s been kind of a weird day. For instance I woke up and looked out our kitchen window and Kip’s soccer ball, which had been in the very back of the yard (in the long grass, impossible for it to roll) was now around the other side of the shed, on the patio, by the patio furniture. Impossible for it to have gotten there on its own. How did it get there? This has been bothering me for hours. My wife is upstairs watching a movie with the sound on loud and the only place to escape the noise is in the basement, where I’ve set up a little office space for myself. I like to read down here. Never was much of a reader but I’ve gotten into it a bit lately, nonfiction mostly, biographies and history books and the like.
I think about you every day, do you know that? How would you know that. Well, you know that now.
I’m going to give you a P.O. box number should you wish to write me again. My wife doesn’t know about you—and, for reasons that are too complicated to get into, I don’t wish to spring this on her right now. Maybe at some point in the future I will come out to B.C. and I can meet you. I miss the ocean. Do you love it as much as I do?
Because you ended your letter with a joke, I feel compelled to respond in kind, but I don’t know any jokes, except for one about a snail.
So a snail buys a new VW Beetle but he decides that it’s missing something. So he takes it to an auto body shop and he says to the guy, “Hey, guy, I got a question. Could you paint a bunch of S’s all over my car?”
And the guy says, “Well, sure, Snail, I guess we can do that. Come back tomorrow and it’ll be ready for you.” So the snail goes home and makes himself a bowl of chicken noodle soup and falls asleep watching a rerun of Cheers. And the next day he goes to the auto body shop and there’s his VW Beetle, all ready for him in the lot, and he goes up to the counter to pay, and the guy behind the counter says, “Hey, Snail, glad to see you again. But I got a question—why do you want a bunch of S’s all over your car?”
And the snail leans in to the guy and he says, “Well, guy, so that when all the pretty girls see me driving by, they’ll say, ‘Hey, look at that ESCARGOT!’”
With love,
Harrison
XXIII.
there’s no wind and it’s hot this morning, even though it’s barely nine o’clock. I’ve got on Lydia-Rose’s old Sonic Youth shirt and my penguin pajama bottoms, and Miranda walks beside me in her bathrobe, a mug of coffee steaming in her hand. Lydia-Rose stands on the sidewalk, wipes the sleep out of her eyes, and watches Winkie noodle around, looking for somewhere to pee. It’s the end of August. All summer we’ve started our days like this—first coffee, then oatmeal, and after Winkie starts barking (though we never hear anything), we walk outside to check the mail. You’d think we’d have given up by now, quietly abandoned the ritual and never spoken of it again, but this is what has brought us together as a family once more: this slow walk from our front door to the row of mailboxes on the sidewalk, the little key in my hand, our mailbox, day after day, stuffed with junk mail, bills, pleas for charity donations, credit card applications, the local newspaper, Lydia-Rose’s glossy new driver’s license, the latest issue of Rolling Stone, Miranda’s paychecks, but never, until today, a letter from my father.
Miranda opens the mailbox and we stare at the single envelope inside, our address written in small shaky letters, my name underlined above it. She puts her hand on my shoulder but does not speak.
“What’s going on?” says Lydia-Rose. Winkie trundles over to where we’re standing, her tongue hanging out the side of her mouth from the heat.
“Should we go in?” Miranda asks, but I shake my head. I hold the envelope and weigh it in my hands. I’m trying to gauge the odds of it saying, Dear Shannon, Thanks for the letter but I’m not your father. Good luck to you.
“Open it, honey,” Miranda says. “You can handle whatever is inside.”
We stand in a herd on the sidewalk in the hot sun. I fold and unfold the letter, stare at his shaky handwriting, which is even messier and more unruly than my own. It looks like someone was shaking him while he wrote it; it looks like there was an earthquake going on. It looks like he wrote it on his knee while being jostled side to side on a city bus.
I read the letter to myself at first, my back to them, my shoulders hunched. I study the little black-and-white photograph, attached to the letter with a paper clip. My father.
In the photo, a man sits in a white plastic patio chair on someone’s back deck. He’s wearing a baseball cap and has a big bushy beard. His white-blond hair pokes out from under the cap, and the curls frame his face. He looks too thin. He is wearing jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, his feet bare. He holds a can of diet 7-Up. There’s an ashtray by his foot, a cigarette balanced at the edge of it, the smoke drifting toward his pant leg. The sky behind him is overcast. There are no trees, just a large barren field. He isn’t looking at whoever is taking the photograph. He’s looking up. Whatever he’s looking at holds his full attention. Maybe a bird. He has big, strong-looking hands. He looks tired.
I stare at the photograph for a long time, then turn and read the letter out loud to Miranda and Lydia-Rose. Miranda’s face pales when I get to the part about Eugene. As I read, she looks up at the sky, as though she is searching for him.
“Vaughn. Vaughn. You awake?”
I am tapping on his bedroom window, on my tiptoes, praying none of his weird neighbors emerge and ask me what the hell I’m doing. But it’s urgent, and he isn’t answering his front door. So, I’m in the weeds, tapping. I’m still in the penguin pajama bottoms, and I’m wearing Vaughn’s big white bike helmet. I’m so full of emotion that I could catch on fire.
I hear Vaughn’s big laugh before I see him, and then he’s standing in the small space between his house and the neighbor’s, in gym shorts and flip-flops, his denim shirt buttoned up wrong so that the left side hangs down farther than the right. Behind him, Chloe appears in a pair of sunglasses, car keys jangling in her hand. She waves, her hair twisted into a bun on top of her head. She’s wearing a nylon tracksuit, black with a pink stripe, and bright-red running shoes.
I take in the whole scene: his shirt, the time of day, her.
“Oh, jeez, I’m sorry,” I say to Vaughn and blush.
“Hey, it’s no problem.” He waves good-bye to her, and we watch her get into her car and drive away. She drives a brand-new silver Mini, and I wonder where she gets her money.
“Oops,” I say to Vaughn, but he shakes his head, tells me not to worry.
He looks at me, then at the envelope in my hands. “Should we get some breakfast?”
“Yeah.”
Vaughn gets his bike, and we ride together to the greasy spoon across from the hospital. I ride on the sidewalk while he rides alongside me on the road. If anyone yells at me, which they frequently do, Vaughn tells the
m to mind their own beans. He tells me when to change gears, and when he sees how tightly I grip the handlebars, he says I need to loosen up or I’ll damage my wrists. He tells me to roll my pajama bottoms up a bit or tuck them into my socks. He cycles slowly beside me, one hand on his knee. He can tell I don’t want to ride on the street or go very fast. I tell him it’s because of my eye, but the truth of the matter is that I’m scared. He says I’ll get better at it—one day, he says, I won’t notice the speed at all. The cars slow behind him on Shelbourne Street; there isn’t enough room to go around. He rides ahead of me on the sidewalk for a while, glancing back every now and again to make sure I’m okay. He stretches his arms out like a bird, as if to show me how easy and effortless all of this could be.
When we get to the café, we lock up our bikes and spend a few minutes wandering up and down the block, considering the old art deco building. There used to be a magazine stand attached to the café, but it’s been boarded up and is covered in graffiti. A blue marquee above our heads, the bulbs burned out years ago, says Magazines.
“They’ll bulldoze this place soon,” Vaughn says. “After a while no one will remember it.”
Inside, we sit at the counter on squeaky metal stools. The walls are decorated with old photographs of famous people, mostly baseball players, in crooked gilt-edged frames, and there’s a handwritten sign in the window advertising homemade doughnuts. From our seats we can see through to the kitchen, where a tall, skinny guy wearing a bandana is frying eggs on the grill.
The old guy who runs this place fills our coffee cups with his big shaky hand, hollering at his daughter to put on a fresh pot. Vaughn has a rapport with both of them—he seems to have a rapport with everybody in this town. The old guy’s daughter tells Vaughn he’s goofed up the buttons on his shirt. She is a husky woman with olive skin and frizzy black hair. She has a little tattoo of a heart on the back of her hand.
I run my fingers over the laminated menu and try to figure out what to have, what will be the biggest plate of food for the least amount of money. Vaughn always pays when we’re together, but I don’t want him to think I don’t notice or appreciate it. I rip open a pink packet of sugar and pour it into my hand, and Vaughn eats a little personalized container of peanut butter with his teaspoon. We are starving.
“This your daughter, Vaughn?” the waitress says to him and gestures at me with an empty coffee carafe.
“I wish,” he says, and then we’re telling her the story while she stands there shaking her big frizzy head. She’s the kind of woman who would stand there forever if we kept on talking. She beams at us, in no rush for the story to be over. The sunlight pours through the windows and dazzles all the silver things: the salt and pepper shakers, the cutlery, the metal sides of the napkin holder, the rim of the counter, the edge of the stools, the woman’s little wedding ring.
“You hearing this, Dad?” she says to her father, and he nods while he refills our cups again. His white hair is pulled back into a little ponytail, his nose spiderwebbed with hundreds of broken blood vessels, his cheeks bright pink. The two of them don’t look related at all. The old guy asks us what we’d like and we both say pancakes.
When he’s gone, I take out Harrison’s letter and hand it to Vaughn. He reads it, one hand cupped over the page. The paper is blindingly white.
After he’s done, he hands it back to me. “Escargot,” he says.
“I know.” We laugh a bit.
“Well?” he says.
“I’d given up,” I say. “So much time passed. I figured I’d never hear from him.” But the thing I find most shocking, I tell Vaughn, is how much has happened to my father in sixteen years. He has gone to jail; he has gotten over my mother; he has married and had children. He has suffered and come out on the other end of it. He lives thousands of miles away.
“It takes awhile to understand this,” Vaughn says to me, “but there’s enough room in a life for failure and loss.” He picks up his coffee and takes a big sip, swivels in his stool. “You can really fuck up in your life. You can fuck up and then have things be okay.
“You learn something else, too, after a while,” Vaughn says. “Everyone’s happy when someone fails.”
“I wonder if he’ll come out here,” I say.
Vaughn scans the letter again. “He will.”
“I hope he tells his wife about me.”
“He’ll do that, too.”
“How do you know?”
“Just do.” Vaughn holds the photo of my father up to my face. “It’s hard to say,” he says. “Hard to tell, really, what he looks like.”
I study my father’s face again. His eyes are small and dark. His nose is crooked. His hair falls around his face like white silk. It’s his eyes that make him attractive. They are soft, almost feminine. They are terribly sad.
I try to get a sense of what kind of person my father is from the photograph. He doesn’t look like a bad person. He doesn’t look like he has any money. He looks a little rough around the edges, I guess, but not as bad as I’d imagined. The thinness is troubling. I wonder if he’s sick. Still on drugs? That seems impossible, after what he said in his letter. I don’t know what I wanted him to look like, but now that I can see him, I know I didn’t want him to look like this. I wonder what his children look like, if they look like me. I wonder about his wife. I wonder about Eugene.
“Escargot,” Vaughn says again.
“Will you come to Finlayson Arm Road with me?” I ask.
“Yep.”
“Soon?”
Vaughn nods. We pause for a minute while the old guy sets two stacks of pancakes in front of us. Vaughn unwraps a little foil-covered packet of butter and drowns his cakes in hot syrup. He cuts through the stack with the side of his fork, shovels a huge bite into his mouth. “How we getting there?” he asks between chews.
“Know anyone with a car?”
“Sure, sure.”
I stare at my pancakes. For the first time in my life, I don’t feel like devouring them all on the spot. “Do you think you’ll recognize her?”
“Your mother?” Vaughn sets down his fork and looks at me. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
“What if she’s not there?”
“Then she’s not there.”
“Then what?”
“Someone will be there. We’ll talk to them. We’ll make a new plan.”
“But what if no one is there.”
He takes another bite. “You never take the road back empty-handed, Shannon. You return to the place you left and see it for the first time.”
I fiddle with my pancakes, spread butter and syrup over and underneath them, but I still don’t take a bite. They look weird suddenly. Eating seems weird. The old guy fills Vaughn’s coffee cup again, and his daughter starts talking to a couple who have just come in. Her laugh is suddenly loud and grating. The light in here is too bright.
“I saw Julian,” I tell him.
His body stiffens, and he turns to me. “What? When?”
“It was my choice. I went to see him.”
“Shannon. What on earth for?”
I furrow my eyebrows at Vaughn. I’m in no mood to be interrogated. “Don’t get all worked up.”
“Okay.”
I keep glaring at him.
“Okay,” he says, throwing up his hands. “I’m sorry.”
“I wanted to see what happened to him, to see what he’d be like.”
“And?”
“He’s a disgusting little man.”
“Are you glad you went?”
“No. Not really. I don’t know.”
“Well, you survived it—all of it. The past, I mean. That’s what matters.”
I pause a minute, staring at my uneaten pancakes. “Do you get along with your family?”
“I saw my brother yesterday,” he says. “I hadn’t seen him in weeks.”
“Okay.”
“He’s shrinking, for one thing. Used to tower over me. Now we stand eye to eye.”
>
“Where does he live?”
“Not far.” He pushes his plate away, tosses his napkin over it.
“You like each other?”
“He thinks I’m okay,” he says. “I like him more than he likes me.”
“What’s with you and Chloe?”
“I asked her out a couple of months ago,” he says, “like you told me to.”
“Told you it’d work out.”
“Well. We’ll see.”
“But you like her?”
“Jeez,” he says. “What’s with all the questions?”
I look at him. “I’m a snoop.”
The old guy comes over and clears our plates, and Vaughn says he’ll take my pancakes and a powdered doughnut to go. He puts a twenty-dollar bill on the counter, tells the guy to keep the change. We leave the café together, his right hand on top of my head, his left holding a Styrofoam container with my pancakes and the doughnut. The hot morning sun is obscured by a cloud and the air cools. The hair on my arms stands up in protest.
“You going to send Harrison a picture of yourself?” Vaughn asks. He unlocks our bicycles, fastens his helmet and hands me mine.
“Maybe.” I study my reflection in the picture window of the café. “Definitely wearing this bike helmet.”
“Suits you.”
“I know.”
Vaughn swings his leg over his bike and pushes off, and I watch him cycle up the street. He has said nothing about giving him back his bike or extra helmet, and I wonder, suddenly, how much of a burden I have become over this past year—how much of an obligation. I hope he needs my company as much as I need his.
At some point he senses I’m not following him. He swivels the bike around and coasts back down to where I’m standing.
“What if she’s not there?” I say to him.
“Then she’s not there.”
“What if I never find her?”
“Then you never will.”
“What if she isn’t happy to see me?”
“Then we’ll leave right away.”
“What if she doesn’t like me?”
Y: A Novel Page 24