“You sure?”
She nods, and he hands her one. She puts it in her mouth and he leans over to light it for her.
She takes a drag, inhaling deeply. It’s been ages since she’s smoked. The nicotine goes straight to her knees. She coughs.
“Easy there,” he says. “Probably shouldn’t take up smoking now.”
“I used to smoke when I was in college,” she says. “Just cloves though.” And for some reason, she remembers the way the clove cigarettes made her lips sweet. She remembers Sam commenting that she tasted like autumn the first time he kissed her.
She wonders, if she were to reach for his hand, if he would take it, kiss her palm, press it against his face. If she were to reach for him, would he put his hand on her waist, his fingers circling her ribs as though they were the spruce ribs of a violin?
He snubs out his cigarette and takes hers from her fingers and snubs it out too. The last of the smoke disappears into the air. He faces her and leans toward her, until his forehead is pressing against hers. She closes her eyes.
And she knows that if she were to open them, he would kiss her. She knows this, and suddenly, that is enough.
When he puts his hands around her waist, she stiffens and pulls away.
“I’m sorry, Jake,” she says. And she is. So sorry. “I need to get home. My husband is stuck with his agent and his horrible wife.You have a beautiful house. And this is ... just amazing.” She gestures to everything, to nothing.
He retreats, bowing his head. Graceful, even in defeat.
“Jake,” she says, forcing him with her gaze to look at her. “I really am sorry.”
He nods, tilts his head at her, as if she might still change her mind.
In the car, she starts to laugh, giddy from the wine. She backs out of the driveway and laughs and laughs so hard that tears begin to roll down her cheeks, and then she is crying, really crying. She has to pull over at one point to get herself together. She finishes, looks in the rearview mirror. Her mascara has run, her eyes are rimmed with red. She takes a deep breath, wipes under each eye with her finger, removing the evidence. And then she drives back down the long driveway, onto the dirt road, toward home.
Sam thinks that he should go get Finn so that he can have his room back. He knows he promised him he wouldn’t bother him tonight, but he’s pretty sure he’ll be happy to know he doesn’t have to sleep outside. He looks at the bump on his head in the mirror. It’s going to be a bad one.
He pulls on a pair of running shoes and grabs a flashlight. He takes the path that Finn told him about and heads out into the woods. The moon is a half crescent tonight, but it has gotten cloudy, and it is so dark. He can hear the loons calling to each other on the water. There was a time when the loons were endangered here, but now there are signs posted everywhere protecting them. It must be nice to have the world looking out for you, he thinks. For someone to make it their project. To create legislation, organizations all aimed at keeping you and your family safe.
He follows the exact directions Finn gave him, but when he gets to the place in the woods that he thinks is the spot, there’s no one there. He looks around, almost positive this is the area Finn was talking about. He finds the fire pit, cold black ash. He turns on his heel, his heart racing.Where the hell is Finn?
He runs back to the house, tries to think about how he might have gotten it wrong. The house is only on about three acres. If he’s on the property, it shouldn’t be too hard to find him. He sets out in the opposite direction, walking first and then jogging. “Finn?” he calls out. “Finn?” And then the idea strikes him that maybe Finn has run away. Maybe the past couple of months he’s just been working on gaining their trust so that he can dash out in the middle of the night. He imagines him standing at the edge of some road, his thumb jutted out into the night, his backpack filled with clothes, stolen money, food from the fridge.
He’d had the same fear that night at home after Finn got in trouble in Tijuana. He was worried that night that he might never find him again. As he drove up and down the coast, from OB up to La Jolla and back down to Imperial Beach, he’d wondered how he would tell Mena that not only was her daughter dead but that her son was gone now too. He thought he’d rather die than go home without him. When he finally found Finn, sitting under the lifeguard tower just blocks from their house, he’d wanted to both kill him and kiss him.
Sam is running now, past the barn, through the woods. It is chilly out, but he is sweating. The flashlight bobs up and down, illuminating the world in wobbly flashes of light. He can feel his pulse in the tender knot on his eyebrow. He is breathing hard, feeling panicked. And then he sees the smoke. At first it could just be fog, filtering through the trees like filmy fingers. But then there is the smell of a campfire, the smell of something burned.When the trees thin out to reveal an open field, he sees the orange glow of the smoldering embers of Finn’s campfire. He sees the tent.
He sighs, relieved, and wonders how many times he can go through this. He stops and puts his hands on his hips, bends over to catch his breath. He must have misunderstood Finn’s directions. He’s here. He’s safe.
He starts to trudge toward the tent, just to make sure, the flashlight lighting his way. He’s never been this far out on the property. He didn’t even know there was anything out here but woods. But this is a big field. A big, open field without trees. He shines the flashlight across the empty expanse, illuminating it in large sweeping beams of yellow light. The light catches on what seems, at first, like glass, but he quickly realizes it is only plastic. A bunch of plastic grocery bags. He walks toward them, curious, and then he sees the plants.
There must be a hundred pot plants out here, about a dozen of them carefully covered with grocery bags, secured with twist ties. Jesus Christ, he thinks. This is unbelievable. His first impulse is to unzip the tent and yank Finn out by the scruff of his neck. To shake him until his teeth are rattling. What the fuck is he going to do? If he drags Finn out of the tent, he’ll run. And out here, there’s no way Sam could outrun a seventeen-year-old kid. From the looks of things, Finn is familiar with the area. Jesus Christ. So this is where he’s been all summer. Out here growing a fucking crop of marijuana.
Furious, he clicks off the flashlight and walks as quietly as he can toward the tent. Finn has left the outer flap unzipped; just the mosquito fly is up. Sam kneels down and peers in. Finn is a heavy sleeper; he’s not sure what it will take to wake him up. He may need to shake him back to life. He clicks the flashlight on but doesn’t shine it directly on him, and peers into the tent.
Inside:
He sees not one but two figures. Two blond-headed bodies, curled around each other, their bodies (arms, legs, breath) intertwined. Sam stumbles backward, confused. Delirious. For a moment, just for a moment, he thinks Franny, and then, as he backs away from the tent, away from the garden of weed, away from the night, he remembers that Franny, unlike Finn, is not coming back.
Dale calls her mother from the motel. She sits on the edge of the queen-size bed, jiggling her legs. “Mama?” she says. It’s been almost a week since she called her.
“Where are you, honey?” her mother asks softly. Dale can hear the TV in the background. She closes her eyes and pictures the house. She can see the thin fabric of her mother’s housedress, the pale pink and blue roses. She can see the blue rivers of knotty veins running down her bare legs. She can feel the hot light of a Phoenix summer sun through the window, smell the Hamburger Helper her mother has made. “When are you coming home?” her mother asks.
Dale can hear her wheezing, worries about her asthma. “Mama, are you okay?”
“Pookie died today,” her mother says, her voice catching in her throat.
Dale feels like someone punched her in the chest. “What?”
“I found her this morning. She was curled up underneath the couch. I wouldn’t have noticed except her tail was sticking out. I thought she just got under there to scratch and was about to get the spray
bottle, but she didn’t move. If I hadn’t seen her tail, she could have been under there for weeks, and I woulda had no idea.”
“How?” Dale asks.
“She was old, honey. We’ve had her since you were just a little girl.”
Dale remembers her father bringing home the kitten in a shoe box. He’d found her on his way home from work. Somebody had dumped her on the side of the road near the freeway entrance. Four lanes of traffic, it was a wonder she was alive at all.
“She wasn’t sick though, was she?” Dale asks. Her heart is racing, her mind reeling.
“She wasn’t acting sick,” her mother says.“She was just old, sweetie.”
“What did she eat today?” Dale asks. She’s up and pacing now, walking as far as the phone cord will allow before turning on her heel and walking in the opposite direction. Her socks make sparks on the motel carpet.
“Just a Fancy Feast for breakfast. Salmon, I think. Honey, you need to tell me where you are.”
“Mama, check her bowl. See if it smells funny.”
“Honey, the Fancy Feast was in a can. I just opened it up this morning. She ate it all up. It couldn’t have gone bad.”
“Mama, just check the bowl.”
There are people standing outside her motel room. She can see their silhouettes behind the heavy drapes. Dale walks as close to the window as she can before the cord stops her.
She tries to imagine how somebody could have gotten into the house and poisoned Pookie. Her mother was always forgetting to lock the door to the kitchen from the garage. It would have been easy. If she’d fallen asleep on the couch after breakfast like she often did, somebody could have walked right in.
She hears ice tumbling from the ice machine; two people are still standing there, talking.
“Mama, I’ve got to go,” she says, and hangs up.
She clicks out the lamp that’s next to the bed and walks slowly to the window and pulls back the drapes about an inch. It’s hard to see, but it looks like a man and a woman. The man has on jeans and a white button-down shirt. The woman’s got on a black sweater, jeans, and boots. She’s got short black hair, big breasts.
Their voices are muffled. Dale pushes her finger against the window frame and gently slides it open a crack.
“I can’t believe we drove all the way up here for this,” the woman says. She throws up her hands and gestures all around her: at the vending machine, the empty parking lot, the blinking VACANCY sign. “We should have stayed in the city. He’s a mess. If I were you, I’d just give up.”
“Jesus, Laur.Try not to be so fucking sensitive.”
“It’s not like he’s even making any money for you anymore. I’m not sure why you, or the house, are putting so much energy into this.You’ve got other clients.”
Dale sits down in the chair and presses her ear close to the open crack.
“You tried. He doesn’t want your help. I’d write this one off, Monty. Call it a day.”
“I’ve know Sammy Mason for twenty years. He’s not my fucking client. He’s my friend. God, you can be such a bitch.”
Dale’s eyes widen; she clutches her hand to her chest.
The man pushes the button on the ice machine and a cascade of ice tumbles down; it is so loud, she can’t hear what the woman is saying. But it doesn’t matter. They’ve found her. They know where she is.
Mena takes a deep breath and goes into the cabin, and Sam is sitting at the dining room table, which is no longer collapsed and broken on the floor. The bottle of wine she picked up for Monty and Lauren is almost empty, and the pan of spanakopita and three dirty plates are still on the table. The bump on his head is huge, and his eye is completely black and blue, swollen shut. He looks up at her and she can tell he’s had at least a good share of the bottle. Her stomach flips. What has she done? What is she doing?
“Where are Monty and Lauren?” she asks. Their car wasn’t in the driveway when she pulled up.
“Staying at a motel.”
“Why?” she asks.
Sam shakes his head, throws up his hands. He looks defeated.
“Listen,” she says. “I’m sorry, about what I said earlier. About what I did.” She sits down in the chair next to him and touches the bruise softly with her finger. She is overwhelmed, suddenly, with tenderness toward him. As she starts to pull her hand away, he reaches up and covers her hand with his, pressing it to the side of his face. He turns and kisses her palm, squeezing his eyes shut. His lips are warm.
“I didn’t mean it,” she says. “Any of it. It was cruel. And God, I shouldn’t have hit you. I don’t know what happened to me. I snapped.”
“Shhh,” Sam says, and shakes his head. He stands up and looks at her, framing her face with his hands, contemplating her. Seeing her. God, he hasn’t even looked at her, considered her in so long it feels almost new.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she says, shaking her head.
He steadies her face, forces her to return his gaze. “Look at me,” he says. His hands are strong against her jaw, her cheeks.
She does what he says. And she looks into his eyes, the clear one and the one she’s damaged. She stares into his eyes, as she has done a thousand times: on those first mornings they spent together back when they were just kids, naked and tangled in sandy sheets. The first time he’d told her he loved her (he’d waited so long, she was almost swollen with love—she thought she might implode). Fourth of July. He’d pulled her under the pier and looked at her, like this (the smell of burnt firecrackers, bonfires and salty air enclosing them). After the twins were born, as she lay breathless and trembling in the hospital bed, he’d sat down next to her and made her look into these eyes. These same eyes that had studied and admired, comforted. The ones that had grown wet with joy and with sorrow. The eyes that had locked with hers with pride the first time they watched Franny dance, and every time after. Those shadowy gray pools that managed to capture any available light in a room and keep it, sparkling. These were the eyes that had told her, I’m here, I love you, I want you. I know you.
She is afraid to blink. She doesn’t want this moment to be gone; she’s afraid that the thread between them has grown so ragged and frail it might snap if she tugs too hard, or holds on too tightly.
“Mena,” Sam says, still gazing at her.
She nods, unable to speak.
“I will make this better.”
She nods again, believes him. Because in all this time, not once have those eyes lied.
In the morning, Finn wakes up to the sun shining brightly through the open flap of the tent. He is tangled up in the sleeping bag, which has become twisted in the night. His back hurts from sleeping on the hard ground, and he has a trail of bug bites up his left calf. He scratches his ankle and then reaches for Alice, pulling the other sleeping bag back. But Alice isn’t inside, and he feels his heart drop. He sits up, rubs his eyes and crawls out of the tent.
It is bright outside already, warm. Everything is green and misty. Alice is bent over in the dew-drenched garden, pulling the plastic bags off the plants.
“Morning!” she says, standing up. The light behind her makes her hair look almost white, a sort of halo.
“Hi,” he says. He feels embarrassed now, in the daylight. He rubs his hand across the top of his head, trying to flatten down what he’s fairly sure is a big mess.
Her hair is messy too, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She yawns. “Are we going to have to do this every morning?”
“Just until the days start to get shorter,” he says. “How do they look?”
“Good, I guess.”
Finn nods, sits down next to Alice on the ground, reaches for her hand and pulls her down next to him. He puts his arms around her and hugs her.
She kissed him last night. They had kissed for hours. And it wasn’t like it was with Misty. For one, they weren’t fucked up. No Ecstasy. Not even any weed. Just the two of them. It was nice. And it was enough, just
to kiss. They fell asleep kissing each other. It was the first time, in a long time, that he’d been able to fall asleep without getting stoned. And he’d slept so deeply, he was pretty sure he’d had dreams, a lot of them, though he can’t remember them now.
“When do you have to be home?” he asks, whispering into her hair, which is so soft. He touches it absentmindedly as he studies her face.
“Doesn’t matter. Mom’s at work,” she says, looking down at their intertwined hands. “What about you?”
“I promised my dad I’d be home by eight,” he says. “What time is it?”
“Eight-oh-five,” she says, glancing at her watch.
“Shit,” he says, grabbing her hand. “I’ll have to come back for the tent later.”
They run together back to his house, holding hands. He doesn’t ever remember feeling like this with anyone before. Certainly not with Misty. Even though he’s late, even though his father is going to kick his ass, when they get to the barn, he stops to kiss her again. It’s different kissing standing up, in broad daylight. Nice. He touches her face, her hair. He’s so much taller than she is, it’s sort of awkward. Afterward, she leans into his chest. And then she says, “I’ll call you later!” and he watches her as she jogs off toward her house, her hair swinging behind her. She’s wearing the same clothes she had on yesterday. He can’t stop smiling.
When he gets to the driveway, he sees that Monty’s Mercedes is gone. He was hoping they’d be there. His dad can’t act too pissed if they still had company. He can’t imagine where Monty and Lauren would have gone this early in the morning. Out for breakfast, he guesses. Lauren probably made him drive all the way back to Burlington for some fancy brunch somewhere.
Inside the house his mom and dad are both in the kitchen. His dad is sitting at the kitchen table eating an omelet, reading the paper. His plate is a mess of eggs and tomatoes, feta cheese and olives. His mother is at the stove, singing to the radio, her hips swinging. They barely notice him when he opens the door. He lets it slam behind him and stands there, bewildered.
The Hungry Season Page 22