Descent

by Tim Johnston

  The children began to talk to him. He listened and smiled and talked back and she remembered the little girl—her little girl—coming into her bed. The firm small body pushed against her. That heat, that smell like no other.

  “I’d better be going,” she said. “I’ve got a long walk.”

  He reached and touched her then, two fingertips, lightly to the bone of her wrist, and picked up his cell phone and showed it to her. Some sort of colorful image like a bright whorl of bruise.

  “That’s something,” she said.

  “That’s rain. You should let me drive you, Angela.”

  She looked at him. His kind face. The clear blue eyes with their overcasts of worry. She knew how she must look to him. To all of them. It’s going to be all right, she wanted to say, we’re going to survive this, but at that moment behind her a step creaked, and then another, and there was the scuffing whisper of slippers over linoleum, and fingers swept the back of her head, and she watched as her younger sister made her way around the table in her robin’s-egg robe, swooping down to kiss the boy on the head, the girl on the cheek, and lastly the man, fully on the lips.

  “Good morning,” Grace said to her husband, to her children, and to

  Angela. “Good morning, my loves.”

  4

  The moment she walked into the classroom she knew she’d made a mistake, but some of them had already seen her and it was too late. Rebecca Woods whose mother, Anne, liked a good martini in the afternoon; Ariel Suskind with her tremendous brown eyes and a father who taught graduates at the university and who had left Ariel’s mother for one of them. Angela had a brief smile for these daughters of friends and once friends, and they had the same for her before the girls were moved to urgent doodling, to matters of the cell phone. She saw the flushing young cheek. The spill of fine hair which must be rehung behind the ear. Girls of high bloom and maturity enough to know wreckage when it stood before them but not to bear it, and in that instant she abandoned every plan she’d made and asked them to open their books please and just read, and this they did without a whisper or passed note or pen poke among them. Instead there was the mute fervency of secreted devices, messages firing lap to lap like cells along a nerve chain, and she sat out the hour staring into the paperback and letting them take her in as the news reached them one by one: She lost her daughter in the Rocky Mountains, then she lost her mind; she was in the “hospital” for three months & now she’s our sub? Is that even like, legal? Yes, children, here is your lesson, here is all I can teach you, until the bell sounded at last and she stood and pretended to search the contents of her tote bag while they shouldered their packs and trooped wordlessly out and—

  “Good-bye, Mrs. Courtland.”

  “Oh, good-bye, Ariel. Please tell your mother hello.”

  “I will.” The girl slowing, not quite stopping, books held to her chest, the great brown eyes. She had an older sister with the same eyes who had run track with Caitlin but who’d broken her neck diving into a pool and lived now in her wheelchair, and Angela digging intently at the tote bag, muttering, a glance and a smile—“Bye now”—and the girl Ariel nodding and turning and going on, and Angela’s heart racing high in her chest as she shut the door and shook out a palmful of pills and then spilled them back into the vial, all but two, and clapped them into her mouth and swallowed them dry. When she opened the door again some minutes later the hall stood empty left and right. She stepped out and walked it with the rap of her heels bouncing off the tin lockers like the footfall of some following soul. Like the twin sister who still spoke to her, whom she saw in the mirror. Two old dears alone in that church-quiet corridor, they might have been, childless where a thousand living children ran.

  How do you go on?

  You just do, honey.

  The clack-clack of heels. The gray rectangles of doorlight ahead.

  Why?

  Because He asks you to. And for your family.

  She pushed through the doors and there was the smell of rain and she sat on the wooden bench and slipped off one heel and pulled the white sock onto her foot, the white sneaker after, and then she did the same for the other foot and tied the laces. She lifted her face to the sky and shut her eyes against the first cold drops. Your family. She tried to think. She tried to remember what that meant. How you were supposed to feel. Above her, the flag lapped silkily upon itself, susurrant as some creek or stream making its way across the sky. The drops fell harder. Colder. She pulled the black umbrella from her tote bag and thumbed the button and the device shot forward and flapped into tautness over its bat-wing joints. She felt the pills under her heart like a hundred small hands holding it aloft.

  At home—at Grace’s—her little sister, who did not work on Mondays, was putting the kitchen back in order. She was getting dressed, she was brewing fresh coffee and reading the paper, she was listening to that clock. She was waiting for Angela to walk in the door and tell her how it went. She was waiting to talk. Grace had no memories of another sister, of Faith. To her there was Angela, and there was this girl who looked exactly like Angela in the old albums—identical pretty young girls smiling, dazzling the camera, no way to tell which was the girl who would live and which the one who would not.

  Angie.

  Yes.

  We can’t just sit here.

  I know.

  She sat a moment longer beneath the umbrella, inside the dark bell of it, listening to the drops drumming. Then she stood and walked away from the school, and away from Grace’s.

  5

  Two days of heavy snow before the pass opened again and they could go. Unbelievably bright and crystalline Saturday morning, the little resort town gilded end to end in a deep wonderland sugar. Skiers racking their skis on a shuttle bus outside the motel and clomping aboard in splendid plastic boots. A foursome of boys jostling up the walk waving snowboards—Hold the bus!—eighteen, nineteen, careless as lords.

  It was the day before Thanksgiving. They had lived in the motel for four months. Family of four when they checked in, family of three checking out.

  Everybody in? Grant said unthinkingly.

  They were the only car going upward against a long, down-snaking procession of inbound traffic, as if they alone defied the laws of the divide, of physics. The whitened pine forests rolling by like a child’s dream of winter (if anything moved, if anything stirred in all that whiteness the eye would see it at once, seize on it—but nothing did), and they wound their way up one side of the divide and down the other without a word among them, slipping at last into a vein of freeway that carried them through the city toward the plains to the east, the great peaks rising behind them, more massive somehow with distance, undiminishing, the car doing seventy but dragging, straining, the sensation of a climbing ride that would reach its vertical limit, falter, and plummet backward. As it must. As it should.

  They drove on, away from her, mile by mile.

  In the back the boy had his homework, the things the school had sent, arranged on his lap, his naked leg pillowed along the length of the seat, the entire length of it, no other way for him to be in the car, so where would she have sat?

  East of the city nothing but the road ahead and the wintered plains and the blue sky. They drove over a ruddy stain where an animal had been struck, and Angela reset her sunglasses. Deeper into the plains dark rags of meat and hide littered the road. Black hooves in the ditch like strange blossoms. They came upon a fully intact animal in the median, a newly antlered buck on folded legs, no blood but no life either in the eye that watched them pass. Oh God, said

  Angela, and Grant said, Don’t look.

  How can I not look?

  Watch the horizon. Close your eyes.

  That doesn’t help.

  What do you want me to do?

  There was the rattle of pills and her head kicked back once and then again as she drank from her water bottle. If she looked over her shoulder all she would see of the boy was his leg. The lurid seams. The gleami
ng steel brace clinging to his knee and holding the pieces together under the skin. A thing from the future that from time to random time probed with its needle legs raw, deep beds of nerves. Since they’d gotten into the car she hadn’t looked back, not once. As if her head no longer moved that way.

  Grant tabulated through the stations and switched off the radio. How you doing back there? In one of his pockets were Sean’s pills.

  Fine.

  The leg okay?

  The boy looked at his leg. The steel arachnid.

  Are there any rest stops in this state?

  When they stopped, Angela’s head, lolled against the window, did not stir. Grant pulled the collapsed wheelchair from the rear of the wagon and after a few minutes the boy was in it and they were pushing into a bitter wind, his bare leg pink and white in the cold.

  No warmer inside the men’s room but at least windless, the wind whistling around the glass blocks where the caulking had pulled away. A large man in a checkerboard winter vest glanced at them and turned back to his loud pissing. Sean wheeled himself to the handicap stall and Grant said, Will you be all right? and Sean didn’t answer, his heart rising furiously. At school was a bathroom with a blue wheelchair sign on the door and the door would swing open when you came near it with a certain kind of card, and the only people who had the card were the janitors and a boy in his class with MS and an older girl, a friend of Caitlin’s who’d broken her neck diving into a swimming pool. And now Sean would have the card too and he would go into the cripple’s bathroom and sit like a girl when he pissed.

  Some minutes later he wheeled out of the men’s room and steered toward the glass doors of the lobby and stopped. Out in the car, his mother’s head rested as before. Sunglasses like black outsized eyes, blind and unblinking. To the west was nothing, the mountains gone, absolutely, as if into a sea. They were the survivors; all they had now was each other. Like in a book, or a movie.

  Want something from these machines?

  He wheeled around.

  They’ve got Snickers bars. Coke, his father said.

  Sean stared at the machines. I’m not supposed to eat that crap.

  You can eat whatever you want.

  Why?

  Because you can, that’s all.

  Because I’m in this thing?

  Because you’re sixteen, Sean.

  They were silent. Wind pushed at the glass doors, rattling them like a man locked out.

  What is it? his father said.

  Nothing.

  What, Sean?

  Is she going to be all right?

  His father stared at him, his eyes glassing over, and Sean said, I mean Mom, and his father looked out at the car.

  She’s going to need time. And help. She’s going to need your help.

  And yours too.

  Yes.

  But you’re going back. To keep looking.

  Yes.

  I’m going with you.

  You need to get back to school, Sean. And you need to heal that leg.

  They were not on the highway long before his knee took up an intense

  pulsing—rhythmic flashes of pain he thought he ought to be able to see like light in the eyelets of flesh where the spiderlegs sunk in. A quasar of bone and nerves throbbing under the zippered skin. He stared at his knee and he remembered the ground up there. The brown bed of needles, the weeds and the dust. Lying there looking up into the trees with the feeling of piss in his crotch. Hot piss in his crotch and a leg all wrong and his heart pounding and still seeing the man’s face behind the wheel, no surprise no fear no nothing, just the yellow lenses, and

  he’d closed his eyes when the man came up—Don’t touch him, she said—and he’d kept them closed like he was sleeping as they put the man’s blanket that smelled of wool and gasoline over him and he kept them closed as she knelt and talked to him one last time, and he kept them closed and he kept them closed with the piss going cold in his crotch.

  How’s the leg? his father said. As if the pain were visible after all, burning like headlights in his mirror.

  Fine, he answered.

  6

  Angela walked.

  She walked and her mouth was dry and there was the supermarket sign across the street like a bloodstain in the gray, side-blown rain. The trees were lashing themselves. The umbrella filled with wind and lifted, brute and purposeful. When the little walking figure lit up she stepped into the crosswalk and a man said Shit and she stopped just short of the collision—bike and bicyclist skidding by quarter-wise to the road, tires locked, rainwater fanning, a wet grimace of face under the helmet and then the wheels unlocking and the bike righting and the man glancing over his shoulder not to see if she was all right but to tender his disbelief, his fury, before facing forward again and pedaling on through the rain.

  She crossed the road, crossed the parking lot, and the glass door swung open and she stepped into the supermarket’s vast fluorescence, thinking of the winter day she’d first seen him on that bike, that three-speed from another century, himself an unlikely figure in army surplus trench coat and canvas haversack, like some courier of the tundra. Grant Courtland, someone told her. Pulling up next to her another day at a crosswalk and turning to her and waiting for her to look. Waiting. And when she looked at last she saw first the redness of his face, the bright blooms of cold on his cheeks, blooms of some essential enthusiasm, and next the eyes, stung-wet and very blue, and lastly the lips as he smiled and said, You look nice today. And rode on.

  In her apartment over the Polish bakery he would read to her, fragments of which she could still recite: Homeless near a thousand homes I stood, and O! speak again, bright angel-a, and I’ll example you with thievery. Years later he couldn’t believe she remembered the lines when he himself did not.

  Such days, such nights. Such heat in the dead of winter! How could it ever end?

  The sun’s a thief. . . . The sea’s a thief.

  Can you recite too what the father said that day? said Faith.

  Yes: God does not ask His children to bear that which they cannot.

  Right.

  But neither does He permit them to not bear it. Therefore He asks His children to bear the unbearable.

  He knows you have strength you don’t know you have.

  “Excuse me.” A woman was reaching past her for a bottle of water. Angela said, “I’m sorry,” and moved aside.

  Angela stared at the bottles. So many choices. She selected one and studied its list of ingredients: water. A little boy of perhaps five was standing beside her. She looked down at him and he looked up. Brimming blue eyes and teartracks on his cheeks.

  “Where’s your mother?”

  He shook his head.

  Angela looked around.

  “All right. Don’t worry. Come on.” She turned and walked and the boy followed. After a moment he took hold of her skirt. As they passed the long produce bin the indoor thunder sounded and a fine mist fell from unseen jets, dewing up the bright tomatoes, the perfect heads of lettuce. The thunder is to warn you, Sean said, ten years old, so you don’t get sprayed. Caitlin said, Oh, really? and stepped forward with her summer arms.

  “Bradley!” came the cry. A quick breathy commotion bearing down from behind. “Where are you going?” Wild, puffy eyes and all the goods her arms could carry as she groped for the boy’s hand. “Where are you going with

  my son?”

  “Nowhere,” Angela said. “We were going up front to—”

  “You just walk off with someone’s child in a grocery store?”

  Angela looked at the woman. Then she looked at the boy, his face buried now in the woman’s thighs.

  “He looked like a very nice boy,” Angela said, and the woman’s mouth convulsed mutely. She dropped a bag of cornchips and let it lie there so that she might palm the boy’s head and lead him away.

  Angela paid for her water and walked outside. Still raining, though the wind had moved on. The little trees of the parking lot seeme
d to be collecting themselves, checking for damage. Under a concrete shelter sat a number of iron tables with a number of people using them: supermarket employees on smoke break, businesswomen stabbing at salads. Was it lunchtime already? One old man writing in his notebook. She stood across from the old man and asked if she could sit down and he looked up over thick plastic frames, one eye pinched nearly shut and the other a clouded blue marble. He said, “By all means,” and she sat down and opened her bottle and drank from it, watching the rain.

  She looked at the old man again. Bent over his notebook with what looked like no pencil at all in the twisted and swollen fingers. Heavy brown overcoat and a tweed cap finger-darkened at the brim by a lifetime of donnings and doffings. A wooden cane was hooked on the table edge, thinner at its topmost curve as if by heavy sanding. She looked at his hands again and saw the tiny pen.

  “What kind of pen is that?”

  He held it up. It resembled an elongated black suppository.

  “That’s a space pen,” he told her.

  “A space pen.”

  “It’s the pen they use in outer space.”

  The pen itself pointed to where that was.

  “It’s antigravitational, is why,” he said.

  “What does that mean? It defies gravity?”

  “It doesn’t, the ink does. You can write upside down. You can write on the moon.”

  He gave her a last good look at the pen and resumed his writing.

  Angela drank from her bottle. The rain fell steadily on the parked cars. Women in sneakers made a run for it, water spinning from the cart wheels.

  “Do you mind if I ask what you’re writing with such a pen?”

  The old man hesitated. He didn’t look up.

  “I’m writing notes. For my grandson.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “He doesn’t. He’s dead.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry . . .”

  “He died serving this country.”