by David Hicks
That evening, while walking to a convenience mart to find something for dinner, Flynn dialed Sydney’s number. “They call them the Endless Mountains,” he told her, “but I assure you, they are neither.”
He had emailed the realtor and asked if she knew of any places in that area for rent, preferably in the woods, preferably by the creek. The woman wrote back that she couldn’t think of any offhand, but she’d do some investigating. “Maybe you can expand your options?” she had asked.
“There are no other options,” he had said.
“Like endless love,” Sydney said. “Can you imagine that ring of hell?”
Flynn sighed. “I could be having endless sex right now,” he said, “but the women I’ve been meeting are either married or psychotic.” He and the artist had stopped for dinner on their way home, and when Flynn had noticed mozzarella sticks and chicken fingers on the menu, he told her about his kids, and she had flashed a look of revulsion. Well that’s the end of that, Flynn thought. He told her he loved his children madly, and with any luck they’d soon be an intricate part of his life again, so it looked as if this would be their first and last date—and with that she put down her fork, told him she couldn’t believe he had just used her like that, then stormed out of the restaurant, leaving Flynn to hitchhike all the way home. But then she called him all night, increasingly inebriated and hysterical, until Flynn finally shut off his phone at one a.m. When he turned it back on the next morning, he had six tearful voicemails and twenty-seven texts.
Now, as he walked down the bumpy sidewalk talking to Sydney, Flynn found himself looking over his shoulder for a half-naked woman with wild hair, chalky arms, and a shotgun.
“Be careful out there,” Sydney said. “The mass of Catholics live lives of quiet desperation.”
“The cleaning lady gave me a list of the women at school who want to marry me,” Flynn said. He told Sydney about his other dates, including his tryst with the Admissions Director when his hair had caught fire.
“What on earth is wrong with the missionary position?” she said. “There’s a right way and a wrong way to lie on a bed, you know. Do you aspire to be a contortionist?”
“I’m making all the wrong moves, Syd.”
As Flynn paused outside the convenience mart, holding his cell phone to his ear, a large man with a cratered face exited the store balancing a six-pack of Yuengling, a box of Krispy Kreme donuts, and a carton of cigarettes. “I’ve just discovered the Pennsylvania Food Pyramid,” Flynn said.
“At least you’re getting laid,” Sydney said. “My Latin lover is currently asleep on my lap, where other things should be happening.” She took a drag of her cigarette and sighed. Len was twenty years older than Sydney, but Flynn knew that Sydney was the one who typically abstained. “I keep hoping that if I emit some primal odor,” she said, “his loins will stir and the slumbering brute in him will awaken.”
“Sex is the last thing I need now,” Flynn said. “What I need now is a home.”
“Well, you could have had one,” Sydney said, and then cut off whatever she was going to say next. She was probably thinking of the Sociology colleague she had fixed him up with after he moved to Grand Junction, or of her and Len’s insistence that they really did like having him in the house with them and he didn’t always have to make himself so scarce, or maybe something like With me, you big dummy. When he had first gotten the job at Mesa State, Sydney had just separated from her husband and moved in with Len, so it had never occurred to Flynn to throw his own hat into that crowded ring.
“Listen,” she said, changing her voice. “As soon as you have your kids with you, you’ll be home. No matter where you are.”
Flynn nodded. “But I have to find a better place,” he said. He watched as one car after another swerved to avoid an enormous pothole. “I want a proper home for them. I need to anchor down here, Syd.”
“Ah,” Sydney said. “That’s what Leonardo is. My anchor. I’m petting his hair as I’m talking to you. What’s left of it, anyway.”
The phone beeped—another text from the artist: You will pay dearly for this betrayal.
“Here’s something,” Sydney said. “My lover’s hair will never catch fire.”
“I need that,” Flynn said, imagining living in the kind of place where he, Nathan, and Janey would be happy, and finding a woman who valued the kids’ presence in his life. “I need an anchor.”
Sydney sighed, then described a Hemingway story she had taught in her summer class that morning, about a father and son on a drive together. While the son sleeps in the passenger seat, the narrator thinks of his father—about his sharp eyes, his weak chin. The two of them didn’t get along, but there was one thing they had in common, their love for the outdoors, and that’s what the main character keeps thinking about, now that his father is dead. “And sex,” she said. “He thinks about sex, too. Because you guys can’t turn that button off, can you?”
Flynn cleared his throat. “I’m familiar with the story,” he said. His favorite professor—a man Flynn held in the highest esteem—had considered it the best short story ever written.
“Well then if you remember,” Sydney said, “when the boy wakes up, out of nowhere he starts asking about his grandfather; he asks if they could go to Grandpa’s grave. And at first the narrator says uh, I don’t know, son, it’s a long way away. But then, by the end, he’s saying yeah, okay, I guess we’ll have to do that. I guess we’ll have to go to Grandpa’s grave.”
Flynn stared at the blue gallons of windshield-wiper fluid outside the convenience mart, three rows long and four deep. He hadn’t been to his father’s grave in almost ten years—since the day he asked Rachel to marry him. He hadn’t even talked much to his kids about their grandfather, except to tell Nathan whom he was named after.
“The moral of the story being,” Sydney said, her voice dropping low into his ear, “sometimes you don’t know what you need until someone tells you what you need.”
*
In the middle of the Gunnison River in Escalante Canyon, south of Grand Junction, two enormous boulders are wedged together in the clear, rushing water, creating a giant stone recliner. This was where Flynn used to go when he was missing his children. He would sit there and listen to the water, watching for bighorn sheep. On the day he left Colorado, he had awakened before dawn and turned off at the canyon road to say goodbye to the river. He climbed down the embankment, removed his hiking boots and socks, and waded into the icy water just as the rising sun slanted its rays through a split in the canyon wall. He heaved himself onto the rocky recliner and listened to the canyon awaken: the screech of a hawk, the whistle of a marmot, the wet spanks of a beaver’s tail. He imagined what it would feel like to hold Nathan’s spindly body again, to breathe in the sweet scent of Janey’s skin. He inhaled deeply, trying to remember her smell, and when he did, another image came to him, the smell of his father’s jacket the last time he had seen him—cigarette smoke, the slight scent of mothballs, and something else . . . the faintest whiff of his deodorant: Aramis.
It was in his bedroom. A summer morning. His father had come in to apologize for having to miss Flynn’s baseball game that afternoon. Flynn had often tried to remember what he had said back: “That’s okay, Pop, don’t worry about it”? Or was it more like “What, again?”
As the river water rushed past on both sides, Flynn imagined sliding down the smooth rock, his body getting colder and colder, until he was submerged in the icy flow, his long hair floating behind him like algae. As the sun climbed up the canyon and warmed the water, he would drown in a rush of brilliance. And he would see his father again.
*
When he got back to his room and microwaved the pizza rolls, Flynn stared at a picture on his wall, taken when he was with Nathan at Rye Beach. Flynn stood knee-deep in the Long Island Sound, holding his son, who was two at the time, in his arms. Flynn had always kept
the picture because of how Nathan looked—a depth of sadness in his eyes. But now Flynn found himself staring at his own image: alarmingly pale, with short hair, a strange moustache, and a stooped posture.
He went into the bathroom and gazed into the cracked mirror. He looked completely different now from the man in that photograph: his hair long and thick, his complexion healthy. Something had happened to him in Colorado, something good. Whatever it was, maybe he could pass it on to his children. But if he stayed here, in the basement of Helen Siczlytsky’s house in Scranton, eating microwaveable food products and drinking Dr. Pepper, he would soon turn into that man again.
*
After the phone call with Rachel’s neighbor, Flynn had filed an online petition with Broome County Family Court and a hearing was set for the tenth of June, two weeks away. When she received the notice, Rachel called and swore to him that she would never let him see the kids again; and sure enough, on his next scheduled visitation, the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, he drove up to Binghamton, but found nobody home. He texted her. This shit is getting old, isn’t it?
Never forget, she texted back, you brought this all on yourself.
After trying again the next day with the same result, he drove home, and on Tuesday morning he called a support investigator at Broome County to tell her what was happening. At 2:00, he left his office and drove up to Rachel’s house again, hoping to see the kids during the hour they spent at home with their neighbor after school. He waited for an hour on the front stoop, then saw Rachel’s new yellow Jeep Wrangler barreling down the road. He stood up, but instead of pulling into her driveway, she accelerated past the house. In the back seat, Nathan and Janey leaned forward, and Nathan, closest to the window, lifted his hand.
Minutes later, Flynn received a text: NOT GOING TO HAPPEN, BUDDY.
*
The next weekend he drove up once again, and this time they were home, with a family gathering going on. He rang the doorbell and heard someone come to the door, but it never opened. He rang it again and again as he heard windows being shut. He walked around to the back, feeling like some pathetic character from a movie, and found all the shades and curtains being drawn. He peeked in and saw Rachel’s family in the living room, the kids playing with their cousins on the family room floor—a board game, like Life or Trouble. But they had stopped the game and were all looking up. Nathan’s chin was lifted, his eyes alert.
Flynn banged on the window. He banged on all the windows. He pounded on the back door, calling out for Nathan and Janey, his throat closing up, not caring that he was crying.
Finally Rachel’s brother opened the door and held out his arms, as if to prevent Flynn from perpetrating a violent act. “You better split,” he said, shaking his head. “She just called the cops.”
“I love you Natty!” he screamed at the top of his lungs. “Janey, Janey where are you?”
*
The next Saturday, the twenty-second anniversary of his father’s death, Flynn did not drive to Binghamton, and he did not call Rachel. Instead, he went to Lackawanna State Park, where the grass was tall and moist, the sky low and gloomy. He sat on a bench and watched the swans.
His father’s eyes had never been sharp. They had been soft and tired, a faded green. He had been a gentle man who had suffered a heart attack in his car while on a sales trip to Peekskill, hours after leaving Flynn’s bedside—a man who had traveled half his life but had never gone anywhere. After the discovery of his car on the side of the highway (even in the midst of a heart attack, he had had the consideration to pull over onto the shoulder and put the car in park), after Flynn’s sister drove him home from his baseball game and there were police cars in front of his house (her mother running up to him, putting her mascara-smudged face in front of his and saying “This is it, my life is over now, do you understand?”), what had remained, following the stifled confusion that dropped in at the wake and persisted for years after, was not the softness of his father’s eyes or the weakness of his chin, but the sound of his voice: mild and muted normally, but sharp and terrifying when angry.
Now, if Flynn could have anything in the world besides his children’s breath on his neck, it would be to hear his father’s voice again, saying his name.
*
The following morning, Flynn called the Broome County Family Court and asked the support investigator why, after six phone calls and four emails, no action had been taken on his case. The investigator informed Flynn that she had spoken to Rachel, and since Flynn had gone to Rachel’s house on days that were not scheduled in the visitation agreement, it had been perfectly within her rights to deny him access to the children. It was in the agreement, she said. As for Memorial Day weekend, Flynn had neglected to provide Rachel with sufficient advance notice of his arrival, so she had presumed he wasn’t coming and had taken the kids to her sister’s. When Flynn asked the support investigator if she had considered the possibility that Rachel hadn’t told her the truth, if perhaps during her years of experience as a child-support investigator she may have discovered that divorced couples occasionally lied, if she would like to see the emails and copies of his phone records that would prove Rachel had plenty of advanced notice, and if it would maybe be a good idea in the future to get both sides of a dispute before coming to a conclusion, the investigator sighed, and Flynn realized that he was not, to this woman, a father who needed to see his kids; he was just another deadbeat dad who had left his children and now wanted to see them again at his convenience.
Which, he had to admit, was true.
The investigator told Flynn he needed to be patient, wait for the hearing date, and not engage in any more “erratic behavior” like “trying to break into” his ex-wife’s house. When Flynn explained that he had only knocked on the windows, and asked if his behavior might be understandable, considering how long he had gone without seeing his children, the woman said, “Well what were you doing way out there in Colorado?”
He started to respond, but then stopped. How to describe the effect of the mountains on him, that big sky, the smell of pine and sage, the sight of those quaking aspens, after so many months of being treated like an outcast to his own children, a traitor begging for forgiveness, a beggar pleading for a crumb of time with the children to whom he had for five years devoted nearly every waking hour? Or the powerful influence of the woman he moved there for, who told him his children were better off without him, that he was already being replaced by their mother’s boyfriend? It would have been a much longer stay had he not realized it was the land he loved and not the woman; for once that happened, he had left her, his life unraveling again until he discovered, at the core of himself, and with the unknowing help of Sydney and Len, the embryonic stirrings of something new, a different way of being. It had been tight for a while, after his move to Scranton, right there in his chest. But now, with each new dispute, with each day of gray, drizzly weather, with each interaction with the miserable colleagues he had inherited, that feeling was tolling from him, out of his body and back west, back toward the mountains, back up to that cornflower blue sky.
*
The next day, the woman from Endless Mountain Realty called Flynn to tell him about a house in the woods that wouldn’t be advertised until that weekend, but the owner had agreed to show it to him. Flynn met her in the parking lot outside her building and followed her up Route 11 about a half hour to Nicholson. They passed an enormous concrete railroad bridge, and after several missed turns, she found the dirt road she was looking for, called Tom’s Lane. It ran deep into a pine forest. They passed acres and acres of trees, slowing as a gaggle of turkeys ran out into the road and clumsily tried to take flight. After passing an alfalfa farm with “Tom” on the mailbox, Flynn saw a creek that ran alongside the road, curved sharply away, then back. He hoped the house would be there.
It was. They pulled over at a wooden sign that said Hemlock Ridge, by a house sided with red slats, its
front porch bursting with plants, a rickety terrace jutting out from the second floor. The woods surrounding it were stuffed with towering pines, the sun barely filtering through. A shirtless middle-aged man was in the garage, lining up a two-by-four on a band saw, and as the realtor went over to speak to him, Flynn took a look around. In the front was a garden with tomato plants, ready-to-eat lettuce, green onion shoots, flowers in full bloom, and a mound of compost off to the side. In the back was a makeshift slate stairway down to the creek where a red canoe floated, tied to a tree. Flynn inhaled the cool, clean air.
On the other side, he found a tree house in progress and a hammock stretched between pine trees over two hundred feet tall. He dropped into the hammock with a sigh. When he heard some wheezing, he looked up to find an old black Lab limping toward him; when the dog reached Flynn it went up on its hind paws and pushed down on the hammock with his front paws, trying to climb in with him. Flynn petted the dog’s bony head and closed his eyes, listening to the whisper of pine needles, the wheezing of the old dog, and his heart pumping blood to his body, like creek water rushing.
“It’s six hundred a month,” the realtor said when she found him there. Flynn smiled at the mud on her high heels. She flinched as a hummingbird trilled by her ear. “There’s such a thing as too much nature,” she muttered.
The owner came over then, wiping his hands on his jeans. He had a ruddy face, and blond hair that grayed at the temples. Flynn realized how rude he was being, lying in this man’s hammock, but as he tried to get up, the man gestured for him to stay put. He stuck out his hand.