Coming of Age at the End of Days

by Alice LaPlante

  “Dad, don’t you believe at all in an afterlife? A place we go after we die?”

  Rattling his paper, Anna’s father says, “What I believe is that this conversation should come to an end.”

  But Anna isn’t ready to give up. “Okay,” she says, “for now.”

  20

  “HEY. HEY!”

  Jim Fulson has come out of his house. He has actually spoken to Anna. She is waiting for the bus, alone, Lars being sick with the flu. Jim Fulson joins Anna on the sidewalk; he stands on the c in C-A-R-O-L-I-N-E, Anna is on the r. It feels too close. She retreats to the l. A moment of awkward silence.

  “I’ve been watching you,” Jim Fulson finally says. Even now, Anna doesn’t know how to think of him except by his full name. Jim sounds too familiar, Mr. Fulson pompous and ridiculous. But Jim Fulson has been watching me? For the first time Anna regrets her shorn head.

  “You’ve been really pushing your workouts,” he says. “Training for anything special?”

  “No,” Anna manages to say. “Just trying to get in shape.”

  Jim Fulson laughs. “You must certainly be that,” he says. “What’s your name again? Ann? Annie?” He smiles, and it is a genuine one, but with a good deal of pain in it, too. When Anna nods, he smiles again. “You were a cute kid,” he says, then backtracks. “Not that you aren’t cute now. I was just remembering. Do you recall the day I caught you hiding under my car? Right behind my back wheel. I was about ready to reverse when I saw your foot from my side mirror. You gave me a scare!” And he presses his right hand to his left breast. “You must have been seven or eight.”

  “We were playing hide and seek,” Anna says. She remembers that day well. “I didn’t want to be found.”

  Silence.

  “So,” Jim Fulson says, gesturing at Anna’s head. “What’s up with that?”

  Anna doesn’t feel like going into it. “New fashion,” she says.

  “Well, if anyone can carry it off, you can.” His words are flirtatious but there’s nothing in his manner except a sober sort of propriety, as if he has aged at double Anna’s rate. If his manners are mature, everything else about him rejoices with health and youth. He must be twenty-five by now.

  “So what’s the deal? Why are you back?” Anna asks, feeling courageous. Jim Fulson kneels down, adjusts the laces on his sneakers, then says, “I’ll tell you if you tell me what you and that new kid are up to.”

  “How much time do you have?” Anna asks, acting as though she thinks it’s a joke. She does want to hear his story, badly, but not necessarily by telling her own. To be scorned by the boys at school is one thing. To look ridiculous in the eyes of Jim Fulson is something else. She stops short when she realizes it. Is her faith so shallow? A stab of anger takes her by surprise.

  He somehow senses this, because he takes a step back, and his eyes look off in the distance. He points to the bus stop sign. “This has been here since I was your age,” he says. “Only I rarely took the bus. Had to get to school early for practice, and stayed late for the same reason. I still drive by the school sometimes. Everything looks the same.”

  “Nothing ever changes,” Anna says, repeating a phrase she hears the teachers at school use. “I probably even have the same teachers you did.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Mr. Roberts. Ms. Evans. Señora Sharp. Ms. Tedious.”

  “Ms. Tedious?”

  “I mean Ms. Thadeous. She’s boring.”

  “I remember Clara Thadeous. She was a student teacher my senior year. In science. So they hired her.”

  Anna shrugs.

  “She was anything but tedious,” he says, and there is something in his expression that puts Anna on alert. He notices her watching him and gives a little laugh. “Teacher crush,” he says. “Funny to remember. She was only a few years older than we were. So we gave her hell. She gave us hell back. She was pretty cool.”

  Jim Fulson lowers himself down and arranges himself cross-legged on the grass. Anna remains standing. He picks a small white pebble off his parents’ flowerbed and throws it at the nearest tree, the same one he’d used to teach Anna a lesson all those years ago.

  “I hate these trees,” he says. “Reminders of my wasted youth.” Although the subdivision is more than fifty years old, none of the trees look mature. No matter how much individual homeowners nurture or neglect them, all the trees turn out the same: scrawny and crooked with fly-specked leaves that turn brown and fall off in the middle of summer. The temperature in their neighborhood is always ten degrees hotter than the other subdivisions lining El Camino because of the lack of a tree canopy.

  “What’s been wasted?” Anna asks.

  “You go first,” he says. “What’s up? Not just the things you’re hauling, but your hair, and the fact that none of your old girlfriends come over anymore.”

  “How do you know that?” Anna asks, startled.

  “You’re pretty much the only show in town,” Jim Fulson says. “Not much else to do around here but watch it.”

  “There’s not much to tell,” Anna says, shrugging. She tries to look like she’s telling the truth, that there are no mysteries here, that the only thing different about her is that she’s more mature than other seventeen-year-olds.

  “Okay, but I’m not letting you off the hook,” Jim Fulson says. “I’ll get your story, sooner or later.” He picks up another stone, idly tosses it into the air, and they both watch it bounce off the sidewalk into the grass.

  “I did everything right,” he says, finally. “Went away to UCLA. Got the degree in management. Got a job at one of those consulting sweatshops, where you spend sixty, seventy hours a week on the road getting paid a ton of money to pull business advice out of your ass. I worked hard. You could say I was clawing my way upward.”

  “And you decided you couldn’t take it?” Anna asks. She is trying not to appear too eager. How he ended up in his parents’ rec room. She wants to hear something that will reveal her own future to her.

  “No, all that was okay. I found an apartment with two college buddies in LA, and within a year had racked up more than a quarter of a million frequent flyer miles. The lifestyle was brutal, but I didn’t care.”

  “Did you have a girlfriend?”

  “I was just getting to that,” he says. “I didn’t, but one of my roommates did. Maxine.”

  “Ah,” Anna says.

  “Yeah.”

  “And . . .?”

  “The girl was just incidental,” he says. “It was even working out okay. We decided we liked each other, my roommate decided he didn’t like her so much, and everything looked as if it was easy going for me just the way it always was. If not an A+ then not a C either. Right down the middle of the fucking—I mean frigging—road.”

  “Don’t worry,” Anna says. “I’ve heard it all.”

  Jim Fulson laughs and reaches out, rubs her shorn head, she can hear the rough bristles buzz his palm. “You look so young like that,” he says. “How old are you, anyway?”

  “Seventeen,” Anna says. She doesn’t like being patted on the head. Not by Jim Fulson. “But what happened?”

  “I just lost it,” he said. “I woke up one morning and couldn’t get up. Couldn’t get my head off my pillow. I thought it was physical. Went to my doctor, and she was concerned enough to run a battery of tests. Nothing. Eventually, they gave up. Said I was depressed. But that’s not what it felt like to me. Something more shameful.”

  “Yes,” Anna says, careful to look away. “But they can treat that now. I know lots of Zoloft zombies at school. They’re even proud of it.”

  “But they said my particular depression was resistant to treatment,” Jim Fulson says. “They tried all sorts of drugs, concocted all sorts of cocktails, as they called them. No luck.”

  He stretches his arms above his head, and the loose sleeves of
his shirt fall back. Anna sees. Did he want her to? On his arms. The marks. The raised white lines that extend in long graceful vertical strokes from his wrists up to the bends of his elbows. On both arms. Anna counts four, no six, long scars before he pulls down his sleeves. Anna knows what she has seen. Jim Fulson, braver than she will ever be.

  He sees that she understands.

  “I am tenacious, if not particularly effective,” Jim Fulson says, and they both sit for a moment. Anna looks out at the trees.

  “So I ended up twice at Aurora Las Encinas. The hospital for the crazies in LA, at least the ones with a death wish and good insurance. I was thinking of trying for a third time when my parents brought me home.” He pauses. “Now,” he says, “your turn. My sources tell me you’ve found the Lord.”

  Anna can’t tell if he’s making fun of her.

  “Yes,” she says. “But not in the Lord-Jesus-Christ-is-my-savior way. I’m more of a Book of Revelation kind of girl.” She is trying to keep her tone light.

  Then Jim Fulson puts a question to her that no one else has bothered to ask, not even Lars. Certainly not her parents.

  “How’s that working out for you?”

  Anna is taken aback. She has to think about this.“It’s not exactly a choice,” Anna says, finally.

  Anna feels Jim Fulson is about to speak again when the bus rounds the corner. He’s immediately on his feet. “Talk to you later,” he says and he’s walking away, disappearing inside his parents’ house before the crowded bus even pulls up at the stop.

  21

  SCHOOL ENDS. A DRY HOT summer ensues, the hottest of the past decade. Then, late one July night when Anna can’t sleep she runs up against Jim Fulson again.

  At midnight she escapes her stifling house and is walking aimlessly around the subdivision, pacing along the familiar streets. She is wearing a T-shirt and gym shorts. On one of her trips past C-A-R-O-L-I-N-E, suddenly Jim Fulson is there, sitting on the stoop of his parents’ house. He is more formally dressed than Anna, in jeans and a button-down shirt, but his shirttails hang out and some of his buttons are undone. It is nearly 2 am.

  “Clara Thadeous,” he calls out to Anna as she approaches. “An interesting woman.”

  “She’s not a woman,” Anna says, standing awkwardly by the stoop, looking down at him. “She’s a teacher.” Then, curiously, “Why do you say that?”

  “I just had the pleasure of spending an hour in her company. One of the few pleasurable hours I’ve had in the last two years, I might add.” Anna can’t see his face in the shadows, only his hands and legs are lit by the streetlight.

  “And where did you meet her? A PTA meeting?”

  “No. A place sixteen-year-old girls don’t go.”

  “I’m seventeen. And what’s that mean? A brothel?” Anna asks. She is hurt by his flippant tone, but tries not to show it. To prove that she is neither timid nor intimidated, she sits down next to him.

  “Of course not. And what do you know about brothels?” He has to turn to the right to see her. She can smell the alcohol on his breath.

  “I read the Bible,” says Anna. “And I’m not an imbecile.”

  “Ah yes, I forgot. You read the Bible. You know every vice on the planet and then some.” Jim Fulson lapses into silence, begins to examine his hands.

  Anna considers Ms. Thadeous. The last time she’d seen her was the day school ended, monitoring the final assembly. Although early June, the heat had already settled in, and Ms. Thadeous’s face was red and shiny with perspiration. Anna envisions her in a dark bar, her thick waist pushed against a table, leaning over it, looking into Jim Fulson’s blue eyes. They would make a nice couple, Anna thinks spitefully. A Godless pair. She stoops and picks up a pebble next to the stairs and viciously throws it. It hits nothing.

  “I don’t feel depressed,” Jim Fulson says, following his own thoughts. “Just diseased.” And he traces one of the scars up his right arm with his left index finger. When he reaches the end, near the crook of his elbow, he pinches, hard.

  Anna has not, until this moment, fully understood the meaning of self-hatred.

  “I was . . . melancholy . . . once,” she says. “That was before.”

  Jim Fulson half smiles. “I hate the ‘D word’ too,” he says. “Melancholy. That’s a good one.”

  “No, listen,” Anna says. “I got better.” She is desperate to communicate this, feels that the moment is urgent.

  “But at what cost?” he asks.

  “What do you mean?”

  Jim Fulson hesitates. Then he says, almost tenderly, “You’ve become a bit of a nutcase, haven’t you?”

  Anna isn’t offended. It must seem this way to people, she knows. Still she reaches up and strokes her head self-consciously. She has found that it is easier and more effective to use her father’s razor rather than the kitchen shears. The stubble feels rough under her fingers.

  “It’s not a route I’m inclined to take,” says Jim Fulson. “But,” he continues. “Back to Clara Thadeous . . .”

  “Ms. Tedious.”

  “That I will never allow to be true,” Jim Fulson says and suddenly stands. He wavers a little before he can get completely upright, but when he has control of his balance he looks severely down at Anna. She finds she can’t meet his eyes.

  “I hereby declare Clara Thadeous off limits for you to denigrate,” he says.

  “What are you, her knight in shining armor?” asks Anna, but she finds she is ashamed of herself for her uncharitable words. He would not approve.

  “I’m sorry,” she tells Jim Fulson, and he must have heard the sincerity in her voice because his face softens and he sits down again.

  A momentary silence, then Anna says shyly, “So you like her?”

  “A lot,” he says after a pause. “Even more so meeting her as a person rather than as a teacher.”

  “So the teacher crush turned into a real crush?”

  Anna isn’t sure due to the dim light, but she thinks Jim Fulson is blushing.

  “Perhaps,” he says. Then he turns to her. “And would that be against your newfound religion? Two people coming together?”

  “I don’t know,” she admits. “To me it seems like it might be frivolous to be thinking of such things when the crisis is near at hand.”

  “By ‘crisis’ you mean the end of the world?”

  Anna nods.

  “Well, if the world ended tomorrow I would die happily knowing I spent my last evening with Clara Thadeous,” he says. His voice is solemn.

  To this Anna has no answer. But something within her quivers.

  22

  SUMMER PASSES WITHOUT MUCH OF note happening.

  Anna is nothing if not ambitious. Her ambitions fuel her ten-mile runs every morning, and her kickboxing in her parents’ rec room, where there is a television and DVD player and an aging cache of fitness videos. Anna spends hours down there, mimicking the moves of the beautifully muscled instructor on the video screen. Kick right! Kick behind! Twist and extend both arms and kick up! She is dripping with sweat by the end of the workout. Anna is waiting for her instructions. She will do anything, is ready to lead armies, to smite the ungodly in battle. To burn. She is burning already. She most longs to be Fred Wilson’s handmaiden—to help make the Red Heifer prophecy come true. She feels chosen. She wants to get on with it.

  Anna emails Fred Wilson regularly. She is determined to know more; she feels that she has been called to help in some way.

  The first email from Fred Wilson is a form letter, with Anna’s name printed in slightly larger type than the rest of the words.

  Dear Anna,

  Thank you for your interest in the Wilson Ranch and the work we are doing with the Third Temple Commission in Israel. As you can imagine, our work is very labor and capital-intensive, and thus we are grateful for any donation you can make. Our sev
enth generation of cows is now gestating. We expect to have great news to announce before Christmas! We accept payments by personal check, PayPal, and all major credit cards.

  Yours in Christ,

  Fred Wilson

  Anna answers it promptly.

  Dear Mr. Wilson,

  I don’t know if you remember me from Reverend Michael’s parish in San Jose, California, but I am very interested in helping you any way I can. I will be both eighteen and personally independent this coming spring. I am hoping to have a place in your operations. You could think of me as an intern. I am willing to do anything. Or, if you need couriers as you mentioned in your talk here, I would be happy to act in that capacity. I have a valid passport and would feel honored to be associated with your work.

  Sincerely,

  Anna Franklin

  Fred Wilson emailed back almost immediately, a personal note.

  Anna,

  Of course I remember you. Despite the crowd, your beauty of person and spirit shone through. I would welcome you as an intern on the Wilson Ranch. As far as becoming a courier, that depends on the circumstances. Certain complications have arisen with exporting the embryos as we have been doing. Please keep in touch and we will make plans as you near your date of emancipation.

  Yours in Christ,

  Fred Wilson

  Anna draws a circle around May 30 on the calendar. Her eighteenth birthday. The day her real work on earth begins.

  23

  EARLY AUGUST. THE SUN HAS broken through the fog. For the first time in weeks Anna revels in a gorgeous day of the type she is used to taking for granted in the California summer: clear skies, mid-70s, a slight, fresh wind.

  Anna’s father is rolling up one of his geological maps. A series of mild temblors had shaken Central California this bright Sunday morning, and he is anxious to get to the epicenter, near Parkfield of course.