“I made an offer on the cabin,” Sam said.
“At the lake?” she asked. They hadn’t been to Gormlaith in five years. As the kids got older, it was harder to leave for a whole summer. Finn had his surfing, his friends. Franny had ballet. Mena still dreamed about the lake. About Franny swinging on the tire swing. About Franny floating on her back in the water. About Franny stepping onto a hornet’s nest.
“Just for the summer,” he said, pulling her into him. It was the first time he had touched her first in weeks.
In the other room, she could hear Finn wretching, spilling. The phone was ringing: Misty’s parents again, she was sure.
His face was hopeful. Bright. Sam had smelled like citrus; his hands were rank with the scent of the oranges he’d just squeezed. He touched her face, looking at her, really looking at her, for the first time in a long, long time. She knew that it must pain him, to see Franny’s nose. Her mouth. Her chin.
She shook her head. She couldn’t imagine going back to Vermont without Franny.
“We can’t lose him too,” Sam said.
She knew he was right, but still, she’d resisted the idea of the lake. She couldn’t imagine that it would be any better anywhere. She worried that at the lake there would be too few distractions. At least here there were things to do, places to go, people in their lives whose main purpose was diversion. She had her catering business, as sporadic and small as it was. She had some semblance of a life. But then, two days after the Tijuana episode, Finn gave them no other choice.
The Monday after that awful weekend, Finn disappeared. He took off for school that morning as usual, backpack slung over his shoulder, skateboard tucked under his arm, but that afternoon, he just didn’t come home. Normally, he was in the house to grab his wetsuit and surfboard by 3:00.And then he was making his way down the wooden steps that led from their house to the beach. That day, as the hours slipped by (3:00, 4:00, 5:00), Mena tried not to panic, but by the time the sun started to disappear into the water, casting brilliant golden shadows across the empty living room, she could feel the prickly disquiet of his absence turning into paralyzing fear. She could taste it, bilious and sour in her swollen throat.
Misty’s parents assured them that he was not with her.
“Misty is home. Grounded,” Misty’s mother said. “She has been punished for her behavior the other night.”
Mena felt scolded, ashamed.
Sam dialed the police, and as he waited to speak to someone about filing a missing person report, he paced back and forth across the kitchen floor.
The hours continued to pass. 7:00, 8:00, 9:00.
“I’m going to look for him,” he said.
All night long, Sam drove aimlessly around the city, looking for Finn—as if he might just be standing somewhere at the side of the road. Mena stayed at the house, in case he came home, sitting at the edge of the couch, a kitchen chair, her hands gripping anything (counters, tabletops, the walls) to keep from falling.
When Sam pulled into the driveway, the sun was already starting to fill the house with light. He opened the front door, pushing Finn ahead of him.
“Apologize to your mother,” Sam had said, pushing him toward her.
Finn shook his hair out of his face, defiant. His pupils were so large, the black obliterated the normal clear blue of his eyes.
“Why?” was all Mena could manage. She had to resist the urge to pull him into her arms, to cradle him as if he were a child still.
“Apologize,” Sam said, his jaw set.
“Why did you do this to us?” she cried, as he came toward her. Still, she reached for him, even though she half-expected that her hands would go right through him. That he too was only a ghost.
She wants to think this was a good idea, that taking Finn to the lake would at least get him away from the kids he’s been hanging out with lately. She wants to blame San Diego for everything that is happening; she wants to believe that geography alone can save him. But she knows that it has nothing to do with California and everything to do with Franny. And as she wanders around the cabin, she knows that Franny is no less present here than she was at home. She is in the crazy quilt that covers the overstuffed chair on the sunporch (Mena’s arms still remember the way she would have to lift her sleeping body and carry her to bed). In the jelly jars they used for glasses (jellies, she called them). In the ticking of the clock shaped like a loon (she’d learned to tell time on this clock: half past a feather, quarter to an eye). But at least here Franny is still just a little girl. Here she is never older than twelve. God, even Mena has to smile at the thought of Franny at twelve. Before.
Finn’s cell phone doesn’t work here. He’s tried it from every room in the house, from the neighbor’s dock, even up on the roof. Nothing. He’s not even sure if they’ve gotten the regular phone hooked up yet. Maybe they won’t get it connected at all. He wouldn’t be surprised. He needs to call Misty. He just wants to hear her voice. Just shoot the shit for a bit. Sometimes, at home, he’d call her in the middle of the night, and they’d watch something stupid on TV together. Listen to each other breathe. Once he even fell asleep with the phone resting on his pillow, the sound of her sleeping on the other line.
He thinks about what she might be doing now, and it makes him crazy. He wonders how long it will be before she finds a new boyfriend. He’s not stupid; he knows that if he’s not around, somebody else, somebody better, will be.
Misty doesn’t live in Ocean Beach like the rest of his friends. He wouldn’t have met her at all if his parents hadn’t spent every dime they had to get him into Country Day after Franny was gone and he started smoking weed so he could sleep at night. He and Franny had gone to the public schools since kindergarten. They probably thought that sending him to some stuck-up private school would straighten him out. What they didn’t realize was that private school kids were actually worse than any of the stoner friends he had in OB. It wasn’t private school, but their parents’ bankrolls, that kept them out of trouble. At first, he figured Misty was just one of those bratty rich girls who got her rocks off slumming it. There were a lot of girls like that at his school, the über-wealthy chicks who hung out with the scholarship kids and kids like him to either feel cool or pretend that their whole lives weren’t dipped in freaking platinum. Misty’s parents own a gazillion-dollar place up in La Jolla: obnoxious, pseudo-Mediterranean villa crap. And the first time she brought him to her house (with its Mexican-tiled fountain out front and double winding staircase inside, its great room), he knew she was way out of his league.
But she liked him. God knows why. And even though her parents had more money than God, she wasn’t like some of those other girls at Country Day. She honestly didn’t seem to care too much about it. She thought it was cool that his mom and dad were artists, and that their house was just a nine-hundred-square-foot bungalow in OB. She liked him.
The real test would have been Franny though. Franny was the gauge by which Finn tested just about everything. Franny got people. She just did. She knew when somebody was a liar or a cheat or the kind of person who would say one thing to your face and another to their friends.
“She’s good,” Franny said. “For you.” She had said that about Finn’s first girlfriend, Jessie. Jessie who was smart and funny and could burp the alphabet backward. Jessie who smelled like suntan lotion and Big Red gum.
They were all at the beach, and Jessie had gone to use the restrooms. He waited until Jessie’s bathing suit was just a hot pink speck in the distance before he raised his eyebrows and said, “Well?”
Franny was digging in the sand, letting it pour out through her fingers. “She has honest eyes.” She nodded approvingly. “And really big boobs.”
“And that’s the most important thing,” Finn had said, laughing.
“I like her,” Franny said.
With Franny’s seal of approval, he’d asked Jessie out again, and again, and soon Jessie was a fixture at their house. And because she and Franny bec
ame friends too, sometimes she was even allowed to sleep over. The three of them would stay up all night watching old movies on TV, falling asleep spread out across the living room floor. In the morning, his mother would make mountains of pancakes, and they’d eat until their stomachs hurt.
But then Franny was gone. And he couldn’t even look at Jessie anymore. He transferred to Country Day, he met Misty, and that was that. Franny wouldn’t have liked her at all. She would have told him to turn the other direction and run away. That he knew for sure.
God, this sucks, he thinks, peering out the window at the lake. There is haze covering everything. It’s hanging in the trees like ghosts.
He’s been thinking about how he can get back to California. He knows it’s probably ridiculous, but there’s got to be a way. They can’t watch him twenty-four hours a day. This isn’t fucking prison. If he had some money, he’d hitchhike into town and get on a bus. He’s pretty sure there’s a Greyhound that comes through Quimby. But he has no cash. Not a dime. They took away his credit card after he took out the hundred-dollar cash advance to buy weed. Maybe he could hitchhike home to San Diego. Kerouac his way back. Or maybe, instead, he could just kill them with kindness. Show them what a good boy he is. Convince them that he can be trusted. Then maybe they’d realize what a mistake they’ve made. Let him go home.
But he knows this isn’t even totally about him, not really. Granted, he’s been getting into a lot of trouble lately, smoking too much weed, the whole TJ thing, and then his taking off that night. But his mom and dad are cool. They’ve always been way more understanding than anybody else’s parents. Some of his friends’ folks are so uptight. They act like they were never kids. Like they don’t remember anymore what it’s like to be young. But his mother and father at least always listened to him. If he had a case to make, he was always allowed to make it. At least that’s the way it used to be.
They told him this is about the X they found in his pants pocket after his father found him camped out underneath the lifeguard tower that night, about his not coming home, about anything but what was really the problem. Franny. Why wouldn’t somebody fucking say it? Nobody even says her name anymore. Franny. They lost their grip on her, and now they’re afraid they’re going to lose it on him too. They’re cool, but they’re afraid. Both of them. Terrified of everything.
There must be a word for this, Sam thinks. For the sound of Mena downstairs when she thinks that no one else is awake. For the quiet careful sounds of her feet moving across the floor. There must be a word for a woman awake and moving in the glow of dawn. Once, a long time ago, he had called it Tara. Once, when he was young and his father was newly dead, he had decided that writing was the best way to deal with the overwhelming pain and panic and pathos. The words are what saved him. They helped him identify, classify, protect. He had only to sit down and tap at the typewriter for a few minutes before the letters formed words which formed sentences and paragraphs and chapters which compartmentalized his grief. Transformed it into something real: the blocky letters of the typewriter ribbon’s ink making solid all that liquid horror. And soon the words grew fluid again, into the hips and calves and breasts of a woman standing at the edge of a forest in a crimson coat, rubbing her hands together, leaves crackling under her small feet. He’d called her Tara. And later, Mena.
It used to be that the words came in a seemingly limitless supply. He had simply to sit down, and they poured out: copious, an endlessly replenished stream. He was wrong. He did take things for granted. He took a lot of things for granted.
He can’t write. And he and Mena haven’t had sex in months.
The last time they tried was the night before they left San Diego. It was three o’clock in the morning before they finished packing. Their backs were sore, their hands tired. But she had moved toward him, her hands reaching to cradle his face. It was the first time he’d seen anything even remotely resembling hope in her eyes for months. It was contagious. “This will be good,” she said. “For us. A fresh start.”
And then she was slipping out of her clothes, letting her jeans pool around her feet. Pulling the soft white T-shirt smudged with newsprint from packing over her head. He let her undress him; he wasn’t even sure how it was that they used to do this. How long had it been? How long had they managed to keep from touching each other? It used to be that they couldn’t stop.
As she buried her face in his neck, her hair soft in his face, she reached down into his shorts and touched him. Tentatively.
There must be a word for this, he thought then. There must be a way to describe this old touch, this familiar hand and the softness of fingerprints. But he couldn’t find it, nothing.
She tried, whispering her own words on his neck. But after a few minutes, she withdrew her hand from his limp penis as if she’d been burned. “We’ve got an early morning tomorrow,” she said, blinking hard, climbing back into her T-shirt and into the bed.
“I’m sorry,” he said. When he crawled in next to her he should have reached over and held her, but he was too ashamed, and so instead he rolled onto his side and shut his eyes.
After breakfast, Mena leaves to go to the grocery store, and Sam surveys the yard from the window. It looks like some god-awful jungle out there. Feeling suddenly full of purpose, he goes out to the shed and finds the lawn mower behind a bunch of rusty lawn chairs. He gives it a few good yanks, but it’s dead. Finn is pouting in his room, waiting for the good people at AT&T to come and connect him to the world again. Mena had offered him a phone card at breakfast. “They’ll be here between two and five.You can use the phone then.”
Sam stands in the knee-high weeds and wonders if one of the neighbors has a mower he can borrow.
Inside the cabin, he hollers down the hall to the bedrooms, “Going for a walk!” But when he pushes Finn’s door open, he sees that Finn has fallen asleep again, curled up into a tight ball. His impulse is to go to him, brush the mop of white blond curls out of his eyes. But instead he just stands in the doorway, leaning against the woodwork for support.
When the twins were little, he could never leave them alone when they were sleeping. He would check on them two, sometimes three times a night. “Let them sleep,” Mena would say, as he slowly opened their door again. They slept curled around each other, holding hands, little feet tangled. Intertwined the way they probably had been inside Mena’s womb. When he couldn’t see the blankets rising and falling with their breaths, he would feel a sort of urgent rush of blood in his temples, and he would go to them, press his large flat palms or his ear against their tiny chests until he could confirm first one and then two heartbeats. Sometimes he woke up in the middle of the night in a panic and he would check again.
He starts down the road, sure that Finn will be out for another hour or more. He knows he has trouble sleeping at night. At home, Sam could see the green glow of his desk lamp under the door all through the night. Finn had become nocturnal, staying up all night and then crashing after school and through the weekends.
Most of the camps are still empty.The summer people usually don’t come until the Fourth of July, which is still a week away. The blackflies are the primary residents this time of year. When he was a kid, his dad would bring him here to go fishing, back before the lake’s peace had been disturbed by summer folks’ powerboats and water-skiers. He’d hated the blackflies that filled his ears and flew up his nose, but he loved being with his father out on the empty lake. They’d sit there for hours, with their lines the only interruption in the still surface of the water. They didn’t talk much. There wasn’t any need then for words.
He wonders if Finn would agree to go fishing with him.
He gets to the McInnes camp. Gussy McInnes used to be a fixture here, sitting on the sunporch watching the world go by. Today the Athenaeum Bookmobile is parked in the driveway; he seems to remember someone telling him that her granddaughter lives there now. That she works for the library.
Old Magoo still lives in the next camp ove
r. His boat-sized Cadillac is in the driveway. He’ll have a mower.
“Sammy Mason!” Magoo says, opening the door after Sam has almost given up. “How are you?”
This simple question, this nicety mumbled a hundred times a day, is still excruciating.
Sam nods and smiles. “We’re up for the summer again, but the yard’s a wreck.You wouldn’t have a mower I could borrow, would you?”
“Oh sure,” he says. “It’ll give you a workout though. Still using the old reel mower.”
Magoo motions for Sam to follow him to the shed and gives Sam the manual mower. It looks like some medieval torture device.
“Thanks,” Sam says, shaking Magoo’s hand. “I figure I should be done in a month or so.” He smiles.
“Hey, Sam,” he says, his face softening. “I just wanted to let you know I heard about your little girl. And I’m real sorry.”
Sam nods again, says nothing. He appreciates the apologies, but they make him cringe. It makes it sound like it was someone’s fault.
Back at the cottage, he starts to mow, pushing the mower through the weeds and grass. His arms tremble after the first hour, but something about this hard work feels good. His father always used to say the best way to work out a problem was to go chop some wood. Better for your back to hurt than your heart. The sun is hot on his neck. By the time Mena pulls up, he is drenched in sweat, and only a quarter of the front yard has been trimmed.
“I’ll make some iced tea,” she says. “Come inside?”
“I’ve still got the side yard to do,” he says. He’s on a roll now, he doesn’t want to stop.
“Sure?” she asks.
“Yeah,” he says. He wipes his arm across his forehead, sweat stinging his eyes. “I’ll be in soon.”
He doesn’t know why he can’t give her what she wants. What she needs. Not even the simplest things. And he hates himself for it.
The Hungry Season Page 4