by Reed Karaim
She held her hair back against the wind, smiling as she remembered.
“You really found fossils?”
“No, they were just the bones of dead animals. Rabbits mostly, I think.”
“Thus, Hopasaurus.”
“Thus, Hopasaurus.”
“But Megasaur?”
“Probably a buffalo. I can’t really remember. But it was something big. And it was a big thing for me. I thought I might visit Africa. I thought I might wear a pith helmet.”
“Wow.”
“Yes, wow. The thing is, everybody needs their wow. Everybody needs their Elvi. I’m sorry this is a hard time, Eric. I don’t know what to say to you. It just is. And it will be for a while and then it won’t be quite as bad, but it won’t ever go away, either.” She hesitated, as if her thoughts had been diverted down a different path.
“But you think I could use a hobby.”
She laughed. “Beyond quoting the OED, yes, I think you could use a hobby. Something to care about, or at least something to take your mind off things.”
“I care about all kinds of things. I care about everything.”
Anna stood and moved quickly to the edge of the bluff, shooting the boats briefly arrayed in a fan across the sparkling water, each sail like a cupped palm waving goodbye. I hadn’t seen the shot at all.
“How’s Emily?”
“I don’t know. She comes and goes.”
“Are you okay with that?”
“I don’t know. Sure. No. Whatever. I don’t care.”
She held the camera at her chest, watching the sails disappear into the scattered light of the lake.
“You need to care, Eric. And you need to find something to do, something that takes you from this day to the next one. That’s what people do. That’s how they manage.”
• • •
ANNA WAS IN THE DARKROOM and Edith had mysteriously disappeared into the back shop, so I was alone in the front office when Louise came through the door, sat down on the corner of my desk, and fixed me with her death-ray eye.
“I hear you had a breakdown, Ricky. I hear you were breaking down in the newsroom.”
Perhaps it hadn’t been quite as unnoticed as I’d thought.
“Uhm . . .”
“Artie and I have talked about it. We’ve had a discussion, Ricky, and we believe we’ve been working you too hard. You’re young. You’re strong. We thought you were invulnerable. We treated you like you were Superboy. Now we realize we’ve asked too much. You’re dad died, Ricky, he’s dead! He’s gone! I was not close to my own father—he was an asshole—but that must be painful. We want you to be having fun. We think you should take a week off. Take a vacation. Go to a lake. Go fishing.”
She said this with radiant enthusiasm, as if hearts could be restarted, limbs reattached, sins undone by impaling a worm and casting it into a lake.
“I don’t really like to fish,” I said.
This worried her even more. “Just some time on a boat,” she said, a slight edge of panic in her voice. “Get out, Ricky, enjoy the fresh air. Nature! It’s rejuvenating. It can refresh the mind and the soul. We want you to take some time off! Have some fun!”
Louise insisted that my rejuvenating, fun vacation start immediately. I told her I was only going to take a couple of days and would be back in time to paste up the next issue. I thought I might go home to see how my mother was doing, but when I came to the interstate, I turned west, heading in the opposite direction from both my family and the healing waters of Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes. I had never been to the badlands in western North Dakota except once, on a camping trip when I was very young—all I remembered was a brown river and a herd of wild horses that came up to our campsite in the morning—but I had two days’ worth of clothes in a duffel bag and a MasterCard in my wallet. I wanted to see this far part of the state I had ended up in, the wild country where Anna had collected her fossils and cast off a young husband, where something so bad happened that a kind and gentle woman tore off her scabs to make sure she didn’t forget.
I drove west on I-94 through Bismarck and then another hundred miles and on past Dickinson, the only other town of any size. The land was treeless and seventeen different shades of tan. It slowly grew more rugged, but the badlands still came up unexpectedly: a crenellation along the horizon that opened up on both sides of the highway into a phantasmagorical landscape. It wasn’t so much the buttes rising above the earth, but more as if the skin of the earth had been ripped away, revealing the ragged, broken flesh beneath. You stared down into the badlands, and the maze of twisted gorges, trapped meadows, wind-eaten towers and bluffs were a geological underworld, as unearthly as beautiful.
I pulled over at a rest stop to get a better look. Only one other car was parked in the lot. A family of four leaned into the hurricane wind at the railing, the father and son holding their Chicago Cubs caps in place. The boy pointed and I saw something moving deep in the landscape, a line of russet-colored horses disappearing into a keyhole canyon. They were so hard to see against the red and brown country they could have been a hallucination. The mother spotted them through the swirl of her hair and applauded. But as the horses winked out of existence one by one in the shadow of the canyon, I felt the last bit of life leaking out of the day. Now that I was here, the reason for coming had disappeared. What had I thought I’d find? I could drive down to the little town where Anna had grown up, but I had no idea where her farm was or where she had lived once she was married. And what did I think I’d see, anyway? It was a lonely country, but so is any place when things go bad. So is the well-mown lawn inside your own head.
I drove to Medora instead, an old cowboy town that had been remade into a new-and-improved, fake cowboy town. I checked into the Rough Rider Hotel, ate a buffalo steak in the dining room, walked down the street, had an ice-cream cone at a candy-cane-colored shop, and went to bed early.
I couldn’t sleep. The air-conditioning slammed on and off and a neon haze drifted in the window from the hotel sign directly below. Somewhere in the middle of the night I felt as if I had come someplace to die, and I thought of my father and the last night he had lain in bed beside my mother, and I wondered if he knew, if he understood what was happening when the stroke hit. I thought about the pain, and wondered how much there was before you could no longer feel it, and these were not good thoughts; these were not things I wanted to think about; this was not my restful vacation. Sometime even deeper in the night I became convinced my father was standing in the corner of the room, watching me with his arms folded, a knowing compassion creasing his dark brow. I could see him clearly in the shadows, but when I sat up in bed, there was nothing there, not even a chair or a coat rack.
The window had shifted from black to blue to indeterminate gray when I got up and dressed. I drove out to Theodore Roosevelt National Park and took the loop road. I had this idea I would climb a butte and watch the sun come up, but light flooded the eastern sky before I had gotten more than a couple of miles into the park. I kept driving. No one else was out. The morning was lovely and still, the air scented with wild sage. I came around a corner to find a buffalo in the middle of the road. A very big buffalo. He stood sideways, filling the pavement, considering me with a baleful eye. I stopped less than two dozen feet from his dusty flank and he didn’t move. There was no way around him. We considered each other through the windshield for a while and then I stepped slowly out of the car, which I am sure was a stupid thing to do.
I stood beside the door while he turned his massive head to contemplate me. After due consideration, he seemed to conclude I was unimportant enough that he could go back to staring at whatever he had been staring at on the far side of the road. I took a slow step toward him and then another. Up close his fur was thicker than unshorn wool and matted and dirty and scarred. He was huge and he wasn’t any kind of symbol; he wasn’t a metaphor; he didn’t stand for anything; he didn’t feel sent by God or the obscure workings of the universe to del
iver any sort of message. He was just a very large animal unimpressed by me, my car, and quite possibly all of history since the saber-toothed tigers had stopped bothering his kind. Here he was, nothing else. He didn’t care. He didn’t not care. He offered no explanation. He just was. I looked at him, breathed in his all-encompassing, ancient smell of earth and dung and hair. He made me smile and then he made me laugh. I backed up carefully, leaned against the car, and waited until he ambled down into the narrow ditch and a cleft between two buttes. I drove the rest of the loop road quickly and headed home to Shannon.
Chapter 21
I HAVE A DAUGHTER NOW. SHE WAS BORN to my wife and me relatively late in life, so she’s still young. I usually take a last look in at her when I’m shutting down the house for the night, and, standing there in the glow of her revolving cow night-light, contemplating her sleeping form, the profile that echoes her mother’s half hidden behind mussed hair, the skinny arms and legs poking out of a tangle of covers and stuffed animals, I’m overwhelmed by my own sense of vulnerability. I love my wife, and my mother and brother and sister, and, of course, there are other people, old friends, I care about deeply. But when I look in on my daughter, I know I am standing in front of the one part of creation whose loss, I think, would leave me unable to go on.
Helplessness is the essence of unconditional love; you know you would do anything, surrender anything, betray anything. My daughter is a dark star—space and time bend around her until it becomes impossible to see clearly. I believe it is like this for most of us when it comes to our children, but if we are lucky we have chosen someone to have a child with who feels the same way and, in this, there is a shared strength and reassurance that makes it easier. You can turn your attention to the outside world knowing there is someone with you, keeping another eye on the one thing that matters.
If not, if you have to do it on your own, I think you should be forgiven a kind of blindness. The question that always comes up with women who stay with men who hurt them is why. Anna might have had her own answer. I don’t know. But I think of her holding the hands of her two children that night they walked toward the Ferris wheel and I think I understand. Here is what I see happening after he first hit her:
Her husband woke up the next morning crosswise on the bed, very nearly dead from alcohol poisoning, and he was silent and sullen and then childishly regretful, sweeping their child too awkwardly into his arms and promising it wouldn’t happen again, promising they would make a new start. She saw the boy she had fallen in love with, the mixture of shyness and Southern bravado that had once seemed to promise both safety and escape. And she wanted to believe him so badly she did believe him, and if she believed him a little less the next time, and a little less after that, there was always a hope, one she mocked with increasing bitterness even as she could never quite abandon it. And there was always their child.
Or maybe it was like this:
He woke up the next morning and he was out the door for work without saying a word. He came back that evening, sober and tired and suspicious, as if she had done some injury to him. He was dismissive at dinner and she knew it would never be the same, that a fundamental thing had changed between them. But there was still their child.
Or maybe it was very simple:
She got up early the next morning to leave him. She picked up the baby and she was half a mile down the road before she stopped. She had nowhere to go. And this was their child.
I can imagine any of those mornings, and I can understand the choice in any of them when I look in on my own daughter. But the truth is, I don’t know what happened the next day or the day after that. She never told me and there are too many possibilities. All I know is what she said one night as we were working at the light tables.
• • •
THEIR CHILD STARTED TO WALK that fall, and before Anna could imagine how her life might change she was chasing the baby everywhere. There had never been a child that took to running so quickly after walking, never a child so endlessly curious about what might be ahead, just out of sight. That autumn was, for Anna, the autumn of tiny footsteps, a pair of thick little legs disappearing around a corner of the house, high-pitched laughter from somewhere in the green beans, a blond head floating in the brown prairie grass, and sly satisfied giggles from behind the cottonwoods down by the—thank God—dried-up creek.
It was the autumn of sweeping up a small, stocky body against her chest and feeling the surprisingly strong kick of legs that wanted to keep going, wanted to keep moving. She was very happy, Anna said, to be watching their child grow up in the country she loved, and she was also terrified by how it was a land without fences, how it went on and on, and there was nothing, really, to stop anyone—any creature that was mobile—from disappearing into it forever. She learned to hang out the laundry, do her gardening, walk down the road to the mailbox, with one part of her always tracing the small steps by her side, one part of her focused on the hand in hers. The nightmare that woke her at night, gasping for breath, was of feeling, a second too late, that her hand was empty, of looking down and realizing she held nothing but air.
Every parent has to learn you can’t hold on all the time, and she didn’t, but she developed an invisible tether that tugged at her if her firstborn strayed too far. Yet at the same time she was proud, very proud, of the pint-sized exploring spirit that paraded away from her without looking back, that charged into the world at every chance as if there were a danger the planet might escape before it could be properly explored. “Always running,” she said. “Always curious. Always wanting to see . . . ”
Telling me about these months, she made it sound as if it were just the two of them, living on her garden and wild raspberries in the trailer in the valley in the badlands. And maybe that was what made it all possible, creating a separate peace, severing the days from whatever happened at night when her husband came home.
• • •
EMILY’S CAR WAS PARKED on the street when I returned from my restful vacation. She was sitting in the living room reading a paperback with a flat green cover. When I came into the room she dropped it wearily onto the floor.
“God, I hate this shit.”
“What is it?”
“A book.”
I went into the bathroom and when I came back she had turned her gaze to the window. I got a glass of water and pulled the stool from the kitchen counter over to sit next to her.
“You can’t just keep showing up. You have to call. And it’s not always going to work out to visit.”
I had surprised and hurt her, at least a little, but she didn’t want to admit it.
“I thought it was just kind of easy for both of us,” she said.
“Yeah. That doesn’t really make it good.”
“But not bad.”
“No.”
I followed her gaze out the window. The unlit neon sign of the Buffalo Bar, the tarred rooftops broken by rusted metal vents, the cyanic North Dakota sky.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “What are you doing all day here? What do you do when you disappear from here?”
Her full mouth pursed slightly. “I kinda started taking a couple of classes again.” She nodded toward the book on the floor.
“Do you like it? I mean, is it what you want to be doing?”
Her hair had grown out into an unkempt blonde tangle that reached her shoulders and was always falling into her eyes. She brushed it out of the way.
“I don’t know—I like it as much as I ever did. I like it better than all the other things I could be doing. It was never for me like it is for you, Ricky. I never knew what I wanted to do. I never had a thing I loved doing. College was just a way to avoid other stuff.”
“Hold it,” I said. “I didn’t have some thing I loved. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I still don’t.”
For the first time since I had come into the room Emily looked at me fondly. “You were always so smart and such an idiot. Sure you do.” She waved her han
d to take in the town. “All this.”
“My goal was to sit and stare out a window at some nowhere little town?”
“What you do here. What you’re doing. You’re so lucky, Ricky. You have this. I thought we might start over. But I guess you can’t, really.”
“I’m not sure we really even started,” I said.
“Mean.”
“No, I don’t mean it like that. I just see people”—and I thought of all the couples I had come to know in this small town, Paul and his wife, Todd and Christina, even Art and Louise—“and I just think they have something that, you know . . . we don’t.”
Emily was quiet for a long time.
“Okay.”
She stood up and went into the bedroom. It took her only a minute to gather her things while I stood in the doorway. She packed the way she did everything, with a kind of goofy, haphazard grace that tugged at my heart even as the halfhearted nature of it all remained a mystery. I thought about how you could watch someone brush her teeth, watch her undress, feel her crawl into bed beside you, listen to her breathing, feel her cheek pressed against your shoulder, her arms wrapped around you for comfort, and not know her at all. I know this is commonplace wisdom, but there is a first time you have to learn it, and it hurts.
“You never told me what happened with . . .” I honestly couldn’t remember his name again.
“Ted.”
“Yeah.”
Emily threw a T-shirt into her duffel bag, rummaged through the bedcovers, and found a stray sock. “I thought he might be the thing. He thought Giselle, the new waitress, might be the thing, at least for a couple of nights, until some other new thing came along. But Giselle, she once thought somebody else might be the thing, and that somebody had a disease, and then Ted did and I did, and you don’t, you know, because I took care of it, and that wasn’t so nice because I got infected, and I actually had to spend a couple of days in the hospital, which would be just fairly sucky, anyway, but he never came by once, and that was when I knew I wasn’t the thing and he wasn’t the thing, and I really had no thing. Nothing at all.”