The Compass

by Tammy Kling

  “Los Angeles,” I said, almost shouting. “I need to go to California!”

  “Are you changing your mind?” she asked, confused. For some reason, which I could not have explained, that made me angry.

  “Well, obviously, yes. I am changing my mind. First I said Dubai, now I told you Los Angeles, so that means I have changed my mind.”

  Another agent wearing a green jacket with the same gold wings on his lapel stepped forward.

  “Sir, are you under the influence of something?”

  I stared at him.

  “No, I’m not,” I said, but I knew I sounded agitated.

  “You do not have to be rude,” he said. He muttered into his walkie-talkie in Dutch and firmly instructed me to step aside.

  Within minutes another man approached and asked me to follow him to a room behind the ticket counter. Once there, I complied with every request, even smiling politely and waiting while an overweight airline employee checked my bag. I knew I risked being held there for days if I didn’t say the right things.

  Once they were done, they brought me out to the counter again where the original agent glared at me and issued a boarding pass.

  Seat 31B

  Amsterdam-LAX

  When we touched down in Los Angeles, I used the last of my money to take a cab ride to Orange County, passing the familiar restaurants and places Lacy and I had once spent all of our time. I had lost seventeen pounds and hadn’t shaved in months, my face so overgrown that I doubted anyone would recognize me.

  I directed the taxi driver through my old neighborhood, and, when we drove past the house, everything seemed in order. I thought about calling my brother and remembered that my Blackberry was sitting in the top drawer in the kitchen beside the toaster. I considered going in to get it, but then remembered how ridiculous that would be, since I hadn’t paid the bill in months.

  “Keep going,” I said, and I directed him to the arts district, asking him to park in front of the gallery beside the bookstore.

  “I’ll pay you to wait here,” I said, and I got out and traveled the sidewalk, walking past the bookstore to the corner and then back again. I imagined Solomon walking the street in Romania and Pete, elated to find the long lost family he’d always longed to know. I imagined Marilyn then, and Conrad, and felt all of their souls inside of me, connected by one single thread that was breathing life into me, giving me courage to move forward.

  I got back into the cab and waited.

  Moments later the bookstore door opened and a woman stepped out, followed by a man. She had a slight build like Lacy’s, but her hair was short. Lacy’s had been long, ending just above her waist, and as straight and fine as a Barbie doll’s. The girl looked up, nearly straight toward the cab, then laughed at something the man said.

  They moved down the sidewalk toward a restaurant on the other side of the street, and I strained to watch.

  She walked like Lacy, but her arms were thinner, and muscled. Could it be?

  I examined the hair, the blunt cut above her shoulders and the darker color. It was auburn, a tint of red and brown. It wasn’t like anything she’d ever worn before. She was wearing skinny jeans and a red t-shirt printed with letters across the front in a modern pattern. Some of the letters were large, some small, and all were jumbled in various shapes and sizes and order, the way my thoughts felt now. She wore tall spiked heels, something I’d never seen her in.

  My stomach churned. I had expected to feel anger, but I felt a longing instead. I wanted to talk to her, but I had no idea what to say.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I told the driver, when they disappeared into the café. “312 Emerson.”

  I found the key exactly where I’d hidden it under the ceramic frog in the garden and entered the house through the back. I opened the door slowly, listening for any sign of life, but there was none. I left my backpack by the door and locked it behind me, walking through hallways and into the dark kitchen.

  A post office change of address form sat on the counter, and it seemed as if someone had gotten the mail and then forwarded the address so it didn’t stack up in the box for the past few months. There was a letter from my mother and father, lying unopened on the granite countertop along with a stack of bills.

  I walked over to the drawer and opened it, turning on my Blackberry. It beeped and buzzed for nearly five minutes, sending off voice mail, calendar alerts, and text messages. Someone had paid the bill. I pressed the button and a text message from my brother popped up on the small screen.

  Call me when you see this.

  Thinking back, it seemed more possible than ever that there would be people who can see into your life like angels, people who seem as if they were sent to you to deliver a message. I thought of all of the people I’d encountered on my journey and wondered about each one of their lives.

  Would Marilyn still be alive? There were Toin, Anja, and Solomon. Lacy, Boo, Pete, and all of the people before them on my journey, who had shared their wisdom and love, leaving a little part of themselves. I felt more complete than ever before, the emptiness replaced with a sense of peace—that everything would be okay. I felt that for the first time, I was unhurried, not rushing toward any specific achievement. I’d listen, let my compass guide me, without pushing and hurrying for outcomes, like I had my entire life.

  In the past four months I had transformed, so completely.

  Who will I be tomorrow?

  The answer to that question didn’t seem as important as who I was right now.

  I wanted to call my brother. I sat there in the chair in the living room, found the remote, and hit the button, only the cable didn’t seem to be working. So I put it back down, picked up the Blackberry, and dialed my brother’s number.

  In seconds he was on the phone, and he sounded elated.

  “Jonathan!? Are you back?”

  “I am, little brother. I am indeed.”

  “You sound well,” he said. “You at the house?”

  I explained to him about my plans to go to Dubai, and how standing there at the airport, something had clicked inside, and I knew my escape was over. I told him about how I’d driven down to the arts district and stared into the bookshop and watched from a distance before I came home. I swore him to secrecy.

  “I need time to adapt,” I said. “Don’t go calling mom and dad.

  “Or anyone,” I added.

  “Are you going to contact Lacy?”

  “I saw her today,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “Outside of the bookstore. But I didn’t say anything. I just watched her from the curb, turned around, and left.”

  “You’re going to have to confront it eventually,” he said.

  “What would you do in the same situation? Would you be able to forgive your wife for the same thing? For killing your child?”

  My brother exhaled. The line was silent for a long time.

  “It’s impossible to say,” he said slowly. “But there’s a lot of forgiveness that has to take place here, Jon. We’ve all sent text messages, or taken calls while we’re on the road. It doesn’t make it right. But the other truth is that you left your wife, the woman you vowed to have and to hold through sickness and in health, and you left her in a coma after two months in the hospital.

  “Can she forgive you for that?

  “Should she?”

  I began crying then, softly.

  “I don’t know. It’s all so screwed up. Our life seems lost.”

  “Not lost, bro. Just in need of repair. I’m here for you. You can put things back together. Lacy needs you right now.”

  We hung up, and I scanned the house, rooted to the chair for a long time, stuck in my memories of them, of the three of us.

  Out of habit I scrolled through the phone and the text messages, deleting most. I sat for a long time until my eyes hurt from staring at the screen, and then I walked upstairs and ignored Boo’s room entirely, closing the door when I passed by, pushing out any emo
tions that threatened my new resolve.

  I took a shower in the master bathroom. Lacy’s toiletries were gone, and all that remained were old bottles of shampoo and conditioner and the bottle of cherry bath bubbles that Boo used to insist we sprinkle into the large round tub on the days she took a bath in there.

  I let the water run for thirty minutes, washing it all away. I had a conversation in my head there, with Lacy, imagining it as if it were real, as if she were right there.

  “As smart as we were, we were limited by the life in front of us,” she said.

  “We had a good life,” I replied.

  “The greatest,” she agreed. “But now we have a different one. We have to be willing to accept the things we cannot see. We have to be willing to believe that there’s more than this, more than just the life before our eyes. If we don’t, what then?”

  In that daydream I stared into my wife’s eyes and saw hope. For the first time, hope.

  I turned off the water and found a towel in the cupboard. I dried off, found some jeans and a sweatshirt in my old closet, and pulled them on. A light rain fell outside the window. I stared out into it and felt a memory of them come in before casting it away.

  Over the course of the brain study research we’d done for pharmaceutical training, I’d learned about the effects of dissociative disorder, which was a process that occurred when someone who’d experienced a trauma disconnected from it completely and had limited memory of it. Sometimes the mind was able to eliminate the memory, so the trauma could never be recalled.

  I wished, then, that it would happen to me.

  The next day I found the Lexus in the garage, just as I’d left it. I drove for miles, wandering the town aimlessly like a lost tourist, down one street and then the next, my thoughts fragmented.

  I drove past the school Lacy and I had carefully chosen for Boo and watched a group of kindergarteners walk across the crosswalk with a safety patrol. I felt my grief then, as I went slipping into what would have been instead of the reality of what was. I saw a little girl in bright yellow rain boots and I looked away, focusing instead on the road ahead.

  I drove for miles into town and pulled over in front of the bookstore. I sat and watched then, for a sign of movement, and saw various customers stream in and out of the store.

  The memories came clearer now, unlike the robotic feelings I’d had at the beginning of my journey. At five o’clock, I watched what seemed like the last customer leave the bookstore, and a tingling gathered in my stomach.

  Opening the car door, I got out and walked up to the door. I pulled on the handle and a bell on the inside clanged. Lacy stood at the counter, facing me. Her short hair curved sharply along the lines of her face at her jawbone.

  I stepped forward, time suspended in slow motion. I heard Solomon and Marilyn and Pete and Toin in my head.

  Be alive, Jonathan. Old pain is like an anchor. Let it go.

  Your destiny is like a garden. You must water, weed, and repeat.

  Lacy’s mouth opened, but words didn’t come. She set the book she’d been holding down on the counter, her slender fingers graceful as always, like those of a pianist.

  “I’m back,” I said feebly, stating the obvious.

  “I knew you would be,” she replied.

  She walked forward, stepped past, and motioned me to follow her out into the day. We stood on the sidewalk and leaned against the building.

  “I’ve been watching you,” I said. “Mustering up the courage. Your hair . . . ”

  “I changed it,” she said, tears appearing in her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She looked at me with curiosity, tears flowing hard now.

  “For?”

  “For leaving.” We were both crying now.

  “Is this pointless?” she asked, anger appearing in her words. “You think you can just waltz back here and talk to me, as if you hadn’t left me there dying in the hospital? Is this even worth repairing?” The questions flooded out.

  “I just . . . ”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.

  “I don’t know what to say . . . ” she continued. “What do you say to the man you married, after you killed his child?”

  “Oh Lacy . . . ”

  “I can’t do this,” she said, turning away. “You have to go now.”

  I stood on the sidewalk and watched the woman I’d married walk away, back into the store again. She locked the door and placed the “closed” sign in the window.

  Chapter 13

  THE TIME IS NOW

  There are lies we tell ourselves, and lies we tell others.

  In college I had the same roommate for two years, and we lived in a co-ed dorm on campus in the small town of Gainesville, Florida. Throughout that time, my roommate’s parents had visited, and he had the kind of mother who made muffins and sent care packages with cookies and chips and everything a college kid could want, each time calling to make sure it had arrived.

  One night his mother called and left a message on the answering machine, and I reminded him to call her back. The next day she left a message again and it sounded urgent. When he came back to the dorm a day later, he had a blank look on his face.

  His brother had notified him that their mother had died that morning.

  I contemplated telling him about that last call, but I deleted it instead. What difference would it have made? It would only remind him of the truth. And the truth was that he never called her much in the first place, and when she did call him, he never called her back because he’d taken her for granted the way we often dismiss the ones we love. That evening he’d been at some girl’s house, staying overnight, while his mother lay dying on the floor from a massive stroke.

  The truth would have injured him even more.

  Sometimes we make decisions like the one I had made, playing God when perhaps we shouldn’t. We create realities in our own minds, judging from our own internal beliefs and perspectives. We feel rejected when someone doesn’t call us back, when the intention isn’t to reject. We feel anger when someone slights us, without considering that he might just be focused inward, on a problem or unsolved thought.

  This is how the world operates. Each human is an individual jumble of limiting beliefs and emotions, toppling other humans like a string of dominos. Each one affects the other, and then another, and so on. Each thought leads to action that leads to a reaction that may even occur thousands of miles away. One word can infect groups and teams and cultures and entire countries, creating ideas—and ideals—that spread like a virus.

  There were secrets and lies I wished I could take back, but nothing I wished I could reverse more than the words I heard that day, months earlier.

  I’m sorry, Mr. Taylor, your daughter is dead.

  I sat in our old house the next day, in shock, thinking about the conversation. Could this ever be repaired? Was our love still in there somewhere, or was I just lying to myself?

  I built a fire in our living room fireplace exactly the way Pete would have done it, methodically stacking the logs around the first foundational one, like a teepee.

  Once the fire was roaring, I wrote down the memory I most needed to let go of on a sheet of paper and then tossed it into the fire.

  I’m sorry, Mr. Taylor, your daughter is dead.

  Instead of hiding from myself and my emotions, I decided to try to confront them. The core of the exercise was to create new meaning for a tragedy, redefining it in your mind. If I created a new meaning—instead of hanging on to the old one—I hoped to be able to move forward. The old meaning might remain in my DNA, like a toxin seeping into my blood, year after year until finally I would find I’d been poisoned.

  The new meaning wouldn’t change the event, but it would change my perspective of it. I needed to address it, redefine it, and move on. It was a symbolic exercise designed to help me let things go.

  I decided that my new meaning for the event that day would be that Boo had bee
n here for a short time as a gift for me, and to dwell on the loss of her would diminish the joy her life had brought to me.

  To us.

  We’re not guaranteed anything, you know, Marilyn had said. Yet we come into this world feeling entitled as if we are. We arrive acting as if we’ve been handed a manual for life with a certificate that guarantees us a hundred years.