On the way back from the aquarium, driving north through the mountains, all three of them were hot and tired, and Drew and Gwen were fighting in the back seat. Drew had taken his seat belt off so he could torture his sister with a rubber toy he kept snapping against her forehead. “Drew. Put your seat belt on!” Maisie had shouted repeatedly, glaring into the rearview mirror. “Put your goddamn seat belt on!”
Drew turned and climbed into the front seat and began snapping Maisie’s forehead with the toy and laughing hysterically. Gwen started crying. There was nobody behind her on the road, and something came over Maisie, a blinding pressure behind the eyeballs, maybe the same rage that drove her father to drink, certainly the same species of rage that emerged when her father was drunk, and she slammed on the brakes as hard she could. Squealing tires. The car skidded into the shoulder, toward the guardrail, her heart jumping into her throat before the car came to a complete stop.
Drew flew over the center console, and his head slammed into the front windshield. Stunned for a moment, he then threw himself back in the passenger seat and wailed. Under the flop of his chestnut brown hair, he had a large purple welt on his forehead.
Maisie collected herself. A truck whizzed by. “Put your seat belt on!” He did so, and she slammed her foot on the accelerator.
***
At LAX, the flight to San Jose is delayed due to engine trouble. “We could drive,” Bran says. They nod in agreement, and head toward the Hertz rental car counter. A whole day has passed, but it is still light out. While Bran secures a car, Maisie calls Vivian. She wants Vivian to know that she knows Vivian’s not there. She wants Vivian to experience something of what she is experiencing, the despair, the loss, the realization that every hope can be extinguished in a flash.
But Vivian doesn’t answer her phone. Ring. Ring. Ring. Maisie finds the sound immensely frustrating, and calls her again, and again, Drew’s girlfriend doesn’t pick up. Vivian must know it’s her—she must be screening her calls. Maisie is livid. She thinks with fury of all the Christmases to which she’s invited Vivian, all the summer barbecues where she’d whip up her special black barbecue sauce for mutton, and Vivian can’t even be bothered to call back?
“Who are you calling?” Bran folds the rental agreement as they walk out to the rental car.
“No one.” As she sits down in the rental, Maisie draws the tiny red toy car from her purse. She slides her fingernail into one of the skinny dark grooves on its side, and pries open its two delicate doors. Open and shut them, open and shut them, like the song her teachers belt out to the kids at daycare.
Just south of Bakersfield, driving alongside the dry gold hills, victims of the drought, the whiskey Maisie has been drinking all day comes up. “Pull over, pull over!” Bran pulls over. She opens the door before the car stops on the shoulder, and unfastens her seat belt, almost falling out of the car as she vomits onto the concrete. Twilight. The top of the sky takes on a violet cast, the air sulfurous, hellish. Bran pats her shoulder sympathetically.
The phone rings. Without looking at the ID, Maisie answers.
“This is Vivian’s mother. You need to stop calling my daughter.”
Maisie is startled she has taken such an aggressive tone. For a second, she says nothing but then the surprise passes, and she says, “My son’s alone in a coma.” She climbs out of the car, careful not to fall in the beige puddle of vomit. Cars burn by on Highway 5 with their headlights on. Tractor trailers rumble past, blocking the orange light of the setting sun with long violet shadows.
“He nearly killed my daughter.”
“Please, I just want to talk to Vivian and find out how this happened.”
There’s a sharp bitter sound, apparently a laugh. “Have you met your son? He’s an entitled menace. Viv’s lucky to be alive. No thanks to your awful parenting.”
With that, she hangs up.
Maisie wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. As she steps back into the car, she forgets about the puddle, and sinks into it. She cries out, and then removes her shoe and flings it toward the hills. She removes her other shoe and throws that, too. The toy car had fallen when she opened the car door. She picks it up, thinks about chucking it.
As her hand moves behind her head, she thinks of Drew at age five, racing it around the room, persisting in being himself, shouting Mommy, Mommy, Mommy and making a weird buzzing noise with his lips drawn in a grimace, his hair too long because he refused to let anyone cut it. She would give anything to be in that moment again instead of this one.
***
The last time Maisie went back to Kentucky, she went alone to say goodbye to her dying father. She took time off from running the daycare, leaving her second-in-command in charge. Bran couldn’t stand the man, and so she’d let him off the hook. Drew and Gwen said they were too busy with work, but she knew they simply didn’t feel any warmth toward their grandfather, and who could blame them?
The old man lived in an old single wide that smelled like cigarette smoke, weed, and dirty laundry. Maisie’s mother was long gone from cancer. In addition to the unwashed clothes and dingy streaked towels strewn everywhere, including the couch where Maisie was supposed to sleep, there were towering, messy piles of old unread local newspapers and yellowing issues of Penthouse, which seemed to Maisie a fire hazard. Her sisters were supposed to be taking care of him, but it was clear from the thick coat of dust and the horrifying odor of dirt, sweat, tobacco, and piss that nobody had cleaned the place in years.
“If you’re so worried, you clean it,” her sister Raeanne said. She’d brought over a pot of burgoo and corn muffins, and they were eating together on the couch, light sliding through the slats in the jalousie windows, licking crumbs from their fingers and gossiping, just as they had as teenagers.
Maisie said, “I’m not worried. I just thought I was sending you money to make sure Daddy was all right.” The air grew thick with what she hadn’t said, the light more stark.
Raeanne snorted. “Your precious money goes to pay doctor bills. Listen, you move back here and deal with that ornery man, then you can worry about cleaning.”
Their father lasted one more week, and Maisie spent that time trying to put out fires at the three locations of the daycare by telephone. “You’re right successful,” her father said admiringly when she finished a phone call. He was fully bald by then, and his skin, unevenly sprinkled with pale brown age spots and freckles, showed his aging. His lips were chapped and bitten a candy pink. His nose had enlarged. Maisie could see a blue vein throbbing in his forehead. He still had the thick crust of sleep in the corners of his eyes. In the memory Maisie had of him brandishing the gun by moonlight, he was movie-star handsome, all frontiers still open to him in spite of the alcohol, in spite of the violence, but in the trailer, he smelled final, like sweat, dirt, and yeast.
“I’m not that successful.”
“How did your mom and me have a girl like you?”
Maisie didn’t respond partly because she didn’t know what to say, and partly because he still enraged her so much she got a lump in her throat and the sensation that a fat man was sitting on her chest. Instead, she texted her assistant, who was in a panic over mandatory reporting procedures.
“I love you,” her father said. She paused and considered all the things he’d ever shown love toward—his whiskey, his typewriter, his gun collection, his slippers, those damn magazines. Then, she replied that she loved him, too.
She decided to get his lunch ready. Soft slices of Wonder bread and Kraft cheese, slathered with mayonnaise. She pushed the slices together gently, and she supposed she should stop protecting him, finally, and remind him of all the nightmarish things he’d done to her growing up. She rubbed her scar and fought back tears. But perhaps she would thank him, too, because if it weren’t for all the shit he’d given her, she might never have had the intensity, the drive it took to get out of that town, out of that life. If it were up to him, and not her, she would have been stuck with Jeff fo
rever. She shook her head hard and took a deep breath. She placed a couple of sweet pickles in their brine on the side, careful to make sure the brine didn’t touch the bread, as he’d always been fussy about keeping his foods completely separate.
When she returned to his bedside with the tray, her father was dead.
***
After midnight, Maisie and Bran finally reach the university hospital. Drew is still comatose, still in critical condition. Gwen is slumped on a chair by the bed. When she wakes up, her turquoise eyes are puffy, shot through with red. “His girlfriend just left him here in a coma. Who does that?” She hugs Bran immediately, long and hard. Almost as an afterthought, she turns to Maisie, placing her arms around Maisie in a pantomime of a hug—her arms are too light to qualify. Even in her leather jacket, Gwen feels like a sparrow. They release each other and Maisie stands over Drew. It seems that he’s merely asleep, a big-boned giant stretched out on a hospital bed, waiting for true love to find him. When she leans and kisses his freckled cheek, he doesn’t move. Both Gwen and Bran have rivulets of tears running down their cheeks, and they look at her like she’s crazy. Maisie realizes it’s because she’s not joining in, she’s not crying. This is inexplicable to them.
Soon they start talking about Spain. Maisie tunes them out. She feels entirely disconnected from her daughter and husband. Andalusia is a fairy tale next to the reality of the plastic tubes running into Drew’s nose, and it seems like this is the life her father had expected for her, had primed her for. These little ugly plastic tubes. Well, she used to think of the way she and Bran came together as a kind of enchantment.
***
Drew remains unconscious for months, as spring shades into summer, and summer turns into fall. Lying there, being fed intravenously, breathing with the help of a ventilator, he shrinks. Soon his body looks oddly frail, his skin loose around his bones. A body no longer his. Maisie and Bran don’t talk about unplugging him, even though the doctors have said people rarely wake up from comas that last this long.
One hot day, Gwen is in San Francisco for a conference and Maisie comes to meet her on Haight Street for lunch. They amble through Golden Gate Park discussing Drew’s condition, and they are closer than they have been in years. Maisie feels a stirring of relief when she expresses to her daughter how difficult it’s been, how she doesn’t know what the right thing to do is. Maybe there’s no right thing, and the ambiguity, the open-endedness bothers her even more. Gwen looks troubled, and doesn’t say much, doesn’t judge.
Ten feet away from the sidewalk, in a playground, Maisie spots the Indian woman Drew used to date, standing with a teenager under a tree. The two are a mismatched pair—the woman has put on some weight, and the teenager is long and coltish, wearing a shirt that says Si si puede on it. Maisie stops. The woman stares back at her, and their eyes lock.
“Do you remember her?” Maisie asks Gwen.
Gwen nods, and wrinkles her nose in distaste at the pair. Years ago, when Gwen had heard about the woman calling about Drew’s problems, they’d agreed the woman had crossed a line. Who did she think she was? “Let’s go. I don’t want to talk to a stranger about Drew.”
“Wait a second.”
Beyond the woman, a colorful whirl of dogs and roosters and tigers—the carousel spinning. Before Maisie can decide whether she really wants to talk to her, the woman approaches her, holding the teenager’s hand, and bringing him along with her. Maisie struggles to remember her name, which is not an Indian name, running through the possibilities: Sharon, Sarah, Susie . . . Susannah.
“Hi,” Susannah says. “This is Jude, my son.” She introduces the gangly teenager.
At first, Maisie doesn’t think much of it. She registers only that Susannah is even darker than she remembered, and her son is white with freckles. Perhaps he’s adopted? They make small talk, and then Maisie tells Susannah about Drew being in a coma. She hopes that, unlike Vivian, this girl who used to love her son will care. As Susannah listens, a pitying expression comes over her face, and her eyes start watering. She’s clearly trying not to cry, and Maisie is about to join her, relieved somebody besides her remembers that whatever his faults, Drew is basically good.
A small flash goes off.
Susannah and Drew broke up around thirteen years ago. The boy’s light freckles remind Maisie of Drew’s freckles, and Gwen’s, too, and her father’s for that matter. His eyes are not as dark as his mother’s, but a luminous hazel or greyish hue that shifts with the sunlight through the eucalyptus branches. Maisie wonders how to ask; she opens her mouth and shuts it.
The boy is looking at her intently, but Gwen looks irritated. She says impatiently, “Pleasure seeing you again, but we should go, Mom.”
“How old are you?” Maisie asks the boy.
“Thirteen.”
Susannah puts an arm around her son protectively. But at that moment, a tiny golden-brown girl runs up and grabs Susannah’s hand. “Mommy, Mommy, push me!” Maisie is struck by how much darker Jude’s sister is, and desperately wishes she could ask the question on the tip of her tongue.
“She needs me,” Susannah apologizes before Maisie can even approach the question. She touches Jude’s shoulder for a second as if she’s about to pull him along with them but seems to think better of it. She races with the girl to the swings. It must mean something that she trusts Maisie and Gwen alone with her son.
“What kinds of things do you like to do?” Maisie asks Jude, hoping to catch some vestige of Drew in this boy.
He shrugs and looks around, clearly embarrassed to be talking to two older women, two strangers.
“Do you like cars? Going fast?”
“They’re all right.” He blushes.
“Mom, that’s such a stereotype,” Gwen says, and tugs at her hand.
“My son loved cars. He wanted to be a race car driver when he was your age.”
Jude looks uncertain.
“Jude!” The little girl is calling from the swing. “Look at me!”
Maisie thinks she will go through Drew’s things to find Susannah’s email address later. “Wait.” She pulls the tiny red race car from her purse. “I have something for you. It was my son’s, he loved it.”
Gwen’s face is incredulous and confused by her mother’s behavior. “What are you doing?” she asks her mother. Maisie doesn’t reply, focused only on standing back, on not taking this boy and crushing him in her arms.
The boy takes it and examines it. Maisie wishes his face would transform with delight, as Drew’s used to, but he stays perfectly neutral. He’s too old for the toy, but he seems to understand that it’s important to her to give it to him. He starts running, yelling over his shoulder as an afterthought. “Thanks!”
***
Maisie and Bran obtain a court order to remove Drew from life support.
They all say their farewells. Gwen, returned from Boston, strokes her brother’s hair and whispers in his ear, something something, Major Tom. Bran says nothing, eyes watering, but kisses his son’s forehead. Maisie looks at the machine to distract herself from crying. IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou, she whispers into his soft freckled ear, the same delicate ear she kissed every morning when he was a baby and she was bringing him into the bedroom to nurse. She’s trying to be grateful that she has this moment to say it out loud to him. She holds his hand, and feels it twitch, but thinks, this is not your hand, this is not your life, and lets go.
Once Drew is unplugged, it takes time for him to pass. The nurses put him on a morphine drip because he seizes. Maisie sits by his bed, holding Bran’s hand, watching life abandon her son, wondering how she is surviving this. After many hours, he makes a wet-sounding expiration, a death rattle. She understands now why people believe in an afterlife. They have to.
She didn’t think she would cry, because as still as he was, he simply wasn’t Drew. He wasn’t the boy who wanted to be a race car driver, who wanted to ride the roller coaster at the Boardwalk fifty times at a stretch all the way
into his thirties. In spite of herself, in spite of her unwillingness to give herself over, her unwillingness to admit he’s already left the earth, she heaves with sobs.
Afterward, every fiber of Maisie’s body resists saying goodbye to Gwen, and she holds tight to her. Gwen extricates herself, and Maisie gets into the car, and closes her eyes. Bran starts the car and rolls out of the parking stop. Soon, he steps on the gas to merge onto the freeway. Soon, they are taking the exit toward home, and they drive back into hills and as ever, she’s reminded of the hills back home in Kentucky, and the man she left behind, and the baby boy she took with her to start over in California.
For a moment as the car rounds the bend, she can still feel Drew there in all the things around them, in their spirit. Wind runs cool over her face like water, the loud whir of cars rushing by, the blur of oleander and sunlight at speed. This is what he loved.
It was early spring in Paris and our yearlong efforts to get pregnant had failed. The fertility clinic tested Connall and the problem wasn’t his sperm, so that left me to measure my basal temperature, take pills, inject myself, explore homeopathic cures. Relax, the doctors said. Relax, my acupuncturist said. You’re wound too tight. I had always been tense, but I was pretty sure the problem was my eggs, or the lack of them, not the whorled knots in my shoulders. Nonetheless I rented us a Parisian apartment in the Latin Quarter, hopeful the city of light and love would work its magic.
Love Songs for a Lost Continent Page 21