“Jim.”
Silence. Then, “Clara?” His voice is questioning. Anna’s hand still on his face, the curve of his cheekbone against her palm. Oh holy of holies will she ever get this chance again? She can hardly breathe. His hand against her side stiffens. Anna thinks he’s going to take it away. Then he stops, exhales, and instead tightens it around her waist. Holds her. A moment of pure bliss. Then Anna pulls her hand away from his face, slowly and reluctantly. He also detaches, removing his hand from her body. A pause. Then he suddenly grasps Anna’s wrist. His face is close to hers; she can feel his breath again. Lars stirs on the other bed, barely eighteen inches away. “Jim?” he asks. Jim Fulson withdraws, quickly.
Anna hears him sigh, and feels rather than sees him walk away. The door opens, letting in a slice of light from the hallway. Anna shrinks under the covers but he doesn’t look back. She hears him fumbling with his shoes and coat. Then he’s gone.
Anna goes to the window, pulls aside the heavy curtains. Immediately the room is lit up by the bright moon.
The Rainbow Lodge is perched on the banks of the South Yuba. Unlike other rivers they’ve passed, this one is full, gushing and bubbling and catching the moonshine as it splashes over the rocks and logs. Anna waits, watches. Jim Fulson gets to the river less than one minute after he leaves the room. He simply leans against a pine tree, appears to contemplate the scene. He bends down, picks something up, throws it. A rock. His old habit. The river is so lively, so turbulent, the rocks he throws into it don’t make visible splashes. He heaves each one harder and farther, easily bypassing the bank on the other side, sailing the stones into the air to land, invisibly, in the forest beyond. Even through the coat she can see his broad shoulders, the strength he puts into each throw.
Anna hears Ms. Thadeous wake for another trip to the bathroom. When she returns, she comes to the window. They watch in silence. “Just beautiful, isn’t he?” Ms. Thadeous says, finally. Anna nods, but doesn’t speak.
As if he could hear them, Jim Fulson turns around. He looks up at the hotel, examines it carefully. Anna shrinks away from the window. Ms. Thadeous does the opposite; she pulls the curtains back farther, unlatches the window, and with some effort pushes it open. A gust of chill wind. She leans out, almost too far. She waves. The longing in his body as he returns the gesture is palpable. Like the schoolgirl Anna is, she wonders when her turn will come.
Ms. Thadeous throws on her coat and leaves the room. After a few minutes she reappears downstairs, then, like Jim Fulson before her, looks up toward the room’s window. Anna waves and she waves back. While she is watching, Anna deliberately draws the curtains together. But not completely. When Jim Fulson pushes Ms. Thadeous against a tree and presses his body to hers, Anna witnesses every tremor.
42
THEY’D INTENDED TO BE ON the road again by 7 am, but they sleep too late and at 8:30 are finally finishing their breakfast. Outside, the green pines stretch high into an infinite blueness. Yet the waitress is gloomy. “No snow forecast this week or next week either,” she says. “More of this goddamned sunshine.” If the weather doesn’t change, she’ll be out of a job on New Year’s morning, she says. Anna recalls that she also once thought of the sunshine as ominous, the brilliant blues and greens of the Northern California landscape as threatening. All that has passed. For He couldn’t be sending Anna a more direct message. Today is the day which the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad.
Ms. Thadeous gives Anna half her eggs and her toast. Anna is ravenous, eats it all, and then shamefacedly orders more, eats that, too. Ms. Thadeous and Jim Fulson are less affectionate this morning. Something was released in the woods last night, the fever has broken. They could be colleagues chaperoning charges on a school field trip. Lars eats methodically. His eyes go to the only other occupied table in the restaurant, the same middle-aged couple from the previous night. He is openly calculating. Then, while Jim Fulson goes to the front desk to settle the bill, Lars decides. Without saying anything to either Ms. Thadeous or Anna, he gets up and approaches the couple. Anna can’t hear what he says, but the couple’s faces, raised dully to Lars, don’t immediately reject him. “My goodness,” says Ms. Thadeous, and she is expressing admiration, “so that’s how he works these days. A little more sophisticated than his time at Sunnyvale High.” Lars pulls out a chair and hitches himself up to the table. Ms. Thadeous and Anna leave the restaurant, but not before seeing Lars place his hand on the woman’s arm. Both she and the man are listening intently.
It’s 9:30 by the time they’re able to separate Lars from his new friends. From the warm handshakes and fervent goodbyes Anna knows he’s made two more conquests, walking away with names and phone numbers scribbled on a napkin.
In the car Anna falls asleep, exhausted after her sleepless night. When she wakes, it’s after dark, a full ten hours later. She slept through three pit stops and a drive-through McDonald’s, but she doesn’t feel rested and the landscape is not reassuring. They have been transported to what looks like the dark side of the moon. Ms. Thadeous is driving on a narrow band of highway that slices through a dark sunken world of dubious aspect. In the distance, a city, dwarfed by the landscape but growing bigger by the minute, a city with a center that includes a small number of skyscrapers and some sort of large dome. Salt Lake City.
Unlike San Jose, Salt Lake City is not ringed with suburbs. Instead, the undeveloped flatland pushes all the way up to the city limits. Then the car crosses a line, and suddenly they have returned to civilization. Ms. Thadeous drives confidently past the Subways and Days Inns and McDonald’s and Hiltons but after a while becomes confused. They pass the same Chinese restaurant at least three times. Finally, she pulls over, defeated. “I don’t recognize any of this,” she says.
“How long since you saw it?” asks Lars.
She doesn’t answer for a moment. “More than thirteen years.”
“Let me drive,” says Jim Fulson. “You’ll do a better job navigating if you’re not behind the wheel.” They switch seats and move into traffic again.
They’re in a sort of downtown area, with some skyscrapers but also derelict stores and restaurants from earlier eras, many boarded up or vacant. Jim Fulson proceeds slowly, making constant detours that loop them around where they’ve already been, despite the fact that the streets are laid out on a grid. Construction everywhere. A city reinventing itself. Large, friendly signs with arrows pointing in different directions to municipal landmarks, but whatever street they try ends up blocked and forces another detour upon them. After twenty minutes, having driven past a Rite Aid more than a dozen times, Ms. Thadeous calls, “Turn here.”
At first glance, it’s just another block of gleaming and seemingly empty office buildings and new-looking condominiums with Prices reduced banners on them, but Ms. Thadeous gives a little cry, and the expression on her face is half triumph, half trepidation. Jim Fulson pulls over where she points. One of the few single-family homes left on the block, dwarfed by the grand edifices around it. A small bungalow, freshly painted. A neat front yard with gravel instead of grass. No trees. The driveway goes past the house to the rear, with a small backyard, also gravel, surrounded by a link fence. The curtains are closed.
“This is it,” she says.
“It doesn’t look like anyone is home,” says Jim Fulson.
“She’s probably still at work,” says Ms. Thadeous. “Unless she’s changed her habits, which I doubt.”
“She’s expecting us, though?” Jim Fulson seems anxious.
“She is. But we couldn’t expect her to alter her routine,” says Ms. Thadeous. “Even to greet the prodigal daughter.”
“Where exactly are we?” asks Lars. He is gazing around with a skeptical air.
“Home sweet home,” says Ms. Thadeous.
43
“BUT YOU HAVEN’T BEEN HERE for a while?” Lars asks the obvious question.
“No,” says
Ms. Thadeous.
“I take it that ‘she’ is your mother?” Anna asks.
“Yes.” Ms. Thadeous is only giving information on a need-to-know basis. She gets out of the car. They all do the same, and follow her up the path to the front door where she gives a hard couple raps. No answer.
“What did she say when you talked to her?” Anna asks.
“I didn’t actually talk to her,” says Ms. Thadeous. She turns her back to the front door and faces them.
“What?” says Jim Fulson. His voice comes out like a shout.
“I left a message on her answering machine. It’s the only way of communicating with her. She doesn’t like the telephone. Never has.”
“You said it would be safe,” Lars accuses her. He is clearly displeased.
“Actually, when I said it’d be safe, I wasn’t talking about here,” says Ms. Thadeous. She doesn’t look at any of them. “We’re still one step away from safe. But this is the only way to get there.”
Lars shrugs. It has gotten very cold. They are still standing next to the front door debating what to do next when they hear a vehicle approaching. A green Ford Escort, at least twenty years old, pulls into the driveway. The sound of an emergency brake engaging, and an engine shutting down. From the car emerges a figure so like Ms. Thadeous that Anna emits a startled oh! Her figure and the way she moves, languidly, but with a half jump in each step, are Ms. Thadeous, exactly.
“Mom,” says Ms. Thadeous. In the silence that follows Anna can hear the murmur of traffic from the main road, a block over.
“When I saw the crowd, I expected you’d be at the center of it.” The voice is most definitively not Ms. Thadeous’s. Flat and nasal, with a buzz at the back of the throat. A smoker’s voice, although everything about the neat little house and immaculate-though-aged car makes Anna doubt this is the case.
Ms. Thadeous’s mother takes a bag out of the trunk of her car. Groceries. Jim Fulson moves forward to help, but she waves him off. She decides only now to acknowledge the rest of the group.
“You,” she says, pointing to Anna. “What’s your name?”
Anna tells her and holds out her hand. When Ms. Thadeous’s mother doesn’t move to take it, Anna drops it awkwardly to her side.
“Ruth,” she says, using a curious flip of her free hand to gesture at her chest. “And you?”
“Lars,” he says, in his deepest, most compelling voice.
She turns to Jim Fulson.
“Something tells me you’re the reason we’ve all come together like this,” she says.
To his credit, Jim Fulson holds her gaze for a good five seconds before turning his head away. “You’re not far from the truth,” he says.
“Well, come in. Here”—she now decides to hand the bag to Jim—“make yourself useful.”
She fumbles in the dark at the door, finally gets it open, and gestures them all inside, pointing to a little kitchen for Jim Fulson to place the grocery bag.
“I’ll unload our car,” Jim Fulson says, and heads back out the gate to the street where he’d parked.
Ruth shrugs and leads the way into the hall. “Clara, you and her”—she gestures to Anna—“can have your old room. You’ll find it unchanged.” She turns to Lars. “You can fight with the other one for the couch. One of you gets the floor. I have some spare blankets.”
Anna follows Ms. Thadeous to the rear of the house into a tiny bedroom with white walls, no pictures or hangings of any kind. Two twin beds, a dresser. Bare wooden floors. A nun’s cubicle.
“She really exorcised you,” Anna says, trying to inject some lightness, but Ms. Thadeous doesn’t laugh the way Anna expects.
“No, I can see that she hasn’t touched this room, except maybe to repaint,” she says.
“But,” Anna says, and stops. She’s thinking of the science lab at school, the wall papered with articles from Science, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Wired, New England Journal of Medicine. The person who had a vision of that mosaic had a mind big enough to encompass much more than Sunnyvale High, or San Jose, or even California. Anna had thought of the person who created the wall as the real Ms. Thadeous, only now awakening after a fallow period. Yet peel back another layer and you had . . . this?
“I took nothing with me when I left for Berkeley, nothing here mattered,” Ms. Thadeous says. She opens the top drawer of the bureau. Neatly folded underwear and bras, all white. She is suddenly no longer the teacher, no longer the lover, but something fiercer, more primal. She pulls on the closet door and gestures. “My mother’s idea of how a young woman should dress.” A strapless pink prom dress is hanging on the inside. A frothy kind of pink fluff outlines the bodice, sequins adorn the skirt. “My father made me go,” she says, pointing to it. “I was asked by an okay-enough boy, someone I didn’t mind, and my father said I’d regret it if I didn’t go. I don’t think I would have, but my father was a big believer that we regret our sins of omission more than our sins of commission,” she says. “I like the way you kids do it, now. Everyone just goes, girls and boys, you don’t need a date, and you dance with your friends. Much saner.”
“I assume your father is . . . gone?” Anna asks. She sits on one of the twin beds. It is surprisingly hard. She tries to bounce on it, but there’s very little give.
“You were lucky. You don’t know this yet, but you will,” Ms. Thadeous says. “A lingering death is the most painful kind. Once you’ve witnessed it, you pray that everyone else you love goes quickly.” She opens another drawer—this one full of photographs—hesitates, and closes it again. “Death isn’t interesting, Anna.”
“It depends on what’s waiting for you on the other side.” Anna tries not to think of her parents.
“Oh, don’t start that. Especially not here, in this house, this room. My mother drove me crazy with such stuff.” Ms. Thadeous puts her suitcase on the other bed, opens it, and begins unpacking. A couple pairs of pants. Some T-shirts, mostly white. A large manila envelope.
“What’s in that?” Anna asks as Ms. Thadeous slips it into a drawer. Ms. Thadeous smiles, looking slightly chagrined. “My diploma from Berkeley. I was summa cum laude. I always wished my father had lived to see it. I thought the least I could do would be to bring it back home. Although my mother blames Berkeley for turning me against her, and against God.” Ms. Thadeous says God with a mocking distaste.
“Your mother is a religious woman?”
“She was excommunicated years ago, but it hasn’t stopped her from going to services or worshipping,” says Ms. Thadeous. “In her way. Always her way.”
“Excommunicated? What does a Mormon have to do to be excommunicated?”
“She wasn’t Mormon,” she says quickly.
“Oh. Sorry. I just assumed.”
“So does everyone. And she lets them. She was—is still, in her mind—a Christian Scientist. Strange, isn’t it? She was from New York. Born into an upper-middle-class Presbyterian household. Her father was a doctor. Her grandmother was a doctor. And she chose to turn her back on everything they believed and to come to this remote enclave of outsiders, and then to be an outsider among outsiders.” Ms. Thadeous shakes her head and gives a half laugh. “What a crazy family I come from,” she says.
“How did your father . . . go? If you don’t mind me asking,” Anna says.
“Pancreatic cancer,” she says, folding her hands in her lap.
“That’s supposed to be a bad one,” Anna says.
“It was. And you can imagine the horror show if you don’t treat it. Or even take palliative measures.” Ms. Thadeous smiles but there is no amusement in her face.
“Not treat it?” Anna doesn’t understand.
“Not with medicine. No. My mother was adamant,” says Ms. Thadeous. Her hands seem fused together, they are so still. “And nothing for the pain, either. Just prayer.”
Anna is shaken at the thought. She remembers Martha going through her chemotherapy treatments, her mottled skin and wigs that she and Anna’s mother giggled over. Anna’s mother even wore a wig, in solidarity, when they went out together.
“He was already so sick by the time they caught it that they probably couldn’t have saved him. But he was also in so much pain. They could have eased his last months. She wouldn’t hear of it.”
“What possible reason would she have for making him suffer?”
Ms. Thadeous’s smile is bitter. “She wanted as much pain as she could get. She ate his pain, she grew thick with it, you could see her thriving as he wasted away. As she prayed.”
“How did your father take all this?”
“He was afraid. He was not a believer. But he couldn’t stand up to her,” Ms. Thadeous says. “Those last weeks, we’d joke about what was on the other side. ‘A big black dog,’ he’d say. ‘A big black dog is on the other side, waiting for me.’ He said the only question was whether it would lick his wounds, or gnaw at them.”
They are both silent. Anna is unsure what to say. Ms. Thadeous doesn’t seem to need comfort. Rather, she seems open to talking, an unusual opportunity.
“What do you think?” Anna asks. “About what happens, afterward?” She has never dared ask Ms. Thadeous about her beliefs before.
“I think he entered the void. Where we all go, eventually. Into nothingness.” Ms. Thadeous says this without any feeling.
“A harsh fate for your father.”
“It’s a kinder vision for him than what my mother had.” Ms. Thadeous looks down at her hands. “But you’re right. He deserved better.”
“As did many others,” Anna says, thinking of her own parents.
“After he died, I had no reason to stay. Certainly not for her,” says Ms. Thadeous. “As soon as I graduated high school I left.”
Anna remembers something Ms. Thadeous had once told her. “You said that the world is divided into three categories. People who have their parents; people who have one; and people who have none. Then you said you belonged to a fourth category, but didn’t tell me what it was.”
Coming of Age at the End of Days Page 18