by Mark Gilleo
Chapter 2
There is crazy, and then there is crazy. Clark Hayden knew the difference, and the madness in the Immigration and Customs lines at Dulles International Airport barely registered as a blip on his crazy meter.
The middle-aged man in front of him, draped in a dark raincoat, carried on a conversation with himself, fingers in his ears to drown out a crying baby in the distance. A mother with a pitchy, nasal New York accent chased her twin two-year-old boys, grasping for them as they weaved in and out of the people in line before snagging one and reeling him in like a fish with pudgy arms. A young couple plugged into a single iPod was speaking the silent language of love through music. The boy’s head bounced slightly to the beat, long strands of pink hair bobbing near the end of his nose, the volume loud enough for Clark to hear every four letter word in the song’s lyrics. Behind the rocking couple, a group of Chinese nationals sat on their luggage, rattling back and forth in tonal floods.
Clark took a deep breath and exhaled. He nudged his duffle bag a few inches across the floor with the toe of his gray sneaker. The businesswoman behind him, Blackberry in hand, closed the gap in the line and jammed her rolling suitcase into his Achilles. Another deep breath. Just as the Dalai Lama recommended on the meditation CD he had bought with his last wad of yen from his three-week stint in Tokyo.
Clark pinched a tattered novel between his knees and removed his baggy gray sweatshirt with the Nike swoosh stitched on the front. He was down to a plain white t-shirt with sweaty pits, the last layer of clothes between himself and the heat of the terminal. The last layer between himself and a human with any semblance of pride.
The line in Dulles International’s terminal snaked through half a football field of straight-aways and hairpin turns made from temporary barriers with nylon belts stretched between poles. The crowd behind Clark grew steadily, pushing forward from their arrival gates like dough being shoved into a funnel. At Christmas, navigating through Immigration and Customs was like making a trek to the original nativity scene. Time stood still. There was no food or water. Progress was measured one step at a time. All he needed was a camel.
Clark kicked at his bag again with his foot.
In gold letters framed against a blue background, the sign above the door just beyond Immigration read “Welcome to the USA.” The customs officer on duty beyond the Immigration checkpoint nodded towards Clark from his stool without the obligatory “next in line.” A narcotics dog passed within sniffing distance of his jeans, the handler in a crisp blue uniform looking for any indication of prohibited goodies. The four-legged import-enforcer briefly stuck his nose on the edge of Clark’s suitcase and then moved on to its next suspect. The handler followed the dog’s lead. Amazing animal, Clark thought. A finely tuned machine, powered by repetitious training, and Milk Bone diligence.
“Where are you coming from?” the customs officer asked with Clark’s passport and paperwork in his hand.
“Japan.”
“What was the purpose of your trip?”
“I was in a robotics competition.”
“Robotics?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of robots?”
Clark sighed quietly and opted for his elementary explanation. “We design robots to go through mazes, up flights of stairs, through a few inches of water, over balancing beams. They have to do simple tasks like moving an object from point A to point B.” He looked at the customs officer, hoping the simple illustration was sufficient and there was no need to get into gyroscopic balance and infrared vision capabilities.
“Where are these robots?”
“The rest of the team is bringing them back. Well, actually the rest of the team will ship them back. They can be pretty sensitive to travel.”
“How long were you gone?”
“Three weeks.”
“How did you do in the competition?”
“MIT kicked our butts, but Tokyo University kicked theirs.”
The customs officer looked at Clark’s worn duffle bag and his single suitcase. “Do you have anything to declare?”
“A bottle of sake.”
“Three weeks over the holidays and only one gift?”
“I’m on a student salary. It was either souvenirs or food. I chose the latter.”
Clark was rewarded for his wit.
“Please place your bag on the counter,” the customs officer responded.
Clark exhaled again, the departing rush of air sounding more like a perturbed sigh than an exercise in relaxation. The customs officer glared over his gray moustache. He dug around in Clark’s black duffle bag with one hand and eyed the suitcase, threatening to open it.
Looking towards the next person in the never-ending line, the customs officer gave his automatic response without making eye contact. “You’re free to go. Welcome home. Happy holidays.”
Clark took his passport and pulled his bag off the long, shiny aluminum table. He walked through the final smoked-glass barrier, happy to be back in the land of forty-plus-inch waistlines.
The automatic exit doors led to a sixty degree drop in temperature from the warmth of the terminal with its teeming bodies. Clark scanned the horizon and focused on the pink sky and the last remnants of the day’s sun as it dipped behind the mountains in the distance beyond Leesburg. A nipple-tightening gust of wind rippled Clark’s shirt, and a pair of early twenty blondes eyed him as he scrambled to pull his sweatshirt over his dark brown wavy hair. His naturally athletic build concealed, the ladies smiled as they piled into a waiting minivan. Clark adjusted his glasses, an old pair with frames that needed updating, and grinned through the side window of the vehicle as he danced his way across two lanes of traffic. A light layer of post-snow slop concealed the lines in the access road that encircled the airport. He jumped to the curb and yanked his suitcase onto the sidewalk. With his free hand he slapped the trunk of a parked taxi. A minute later he slid into the back seat.
“Where to?”
“Arlington. Between Clarendon and Pentagon City, just off Washington Boulevard.”
The cabbie nodded, eyeing the rear-view mirror.
In a half hour Clark would be home, back into the real madness. He was coming home three days early. And it was going to cost forty-five dollars to the taxi driver from Ghana to surprise everyone.
Bing Crosby caroled Clark through the closed door with his dream for a White Christmas, as good as any prediction on Old Man Winter’s plan for the D.C. area. The Potomac, Chesapeake, Appalachians, and rolling farmland all converged on metropolitan Washington to make weather gumbo. The precipitation depended on the day’s ingredients and how long they were in the atmospheric pot. The Nation’s Capital could spit out a minus-five Christmas Eve or a sixty-degree New Years Day. One just never knew. This year the meteorologists were calling for a brutal winter, and so far the forecast was right on target.
Clark pulled the storm door and the weak hinge on the aluminum frame held for a moment before releasing its load, the metal banging into his suitcase. He pushed the interior wooden door open with his hip and the small Christmas festivities in the living room ground to a sudden halt.
Maria Hayden, dressed in green pants and a bright red sweater, heard the front door open as she was returning a ladle to a bowl of fruit punch. She looked across the room, past her holiday guests and overdone decorations, and her knees buckled. She grabbed for the edge of the counter and swiped an unattended glass of eggnog onto the floor. She composed herself as Clark smiled, pulling his suitcase into the room and shutting the door behind him. Unable to speak, tears welling in her eyes, eggnog splattered halfway up her elf pants, Maria stomped her way across the small living room floor and hugged her son until he quietly surrendered.
“Mom, you’re crushing me,” Clark said like a squeeze-toy running out of air.
For twenty-five years, Maria Hayden had held the record as the oldest woman to give birth in Fairfax Hospital through natural conception and delivery. Sure, there were a doz
en older women on a smorgasbord of fertility meds who had given birth since, but Maria Hayden was different. She had avoided the on-ramp to menopause and was in her late-forties when her purported infertile eggs and her husband’s dysfunctional sperm decided they didn’t appreciate their respective titles. At forty-nine, Maria Hayden gave birth to her first and only child. Her son would be twenty-six in March, but she easily passed for his grandmother. When she was a young mother it had upset her, snide comments made from women less than half her age while they pushed their strollers through the park and wedged their kids into the grocery carts at the supermarket. Now, Maria didn’t give a damn about her age. She had bigger concerns.
After a moment of smiles and tears in the middle of the annual Hayden Christmas party, Clark’s mother rubbed his cheeks and ruffled his hair. She turned him around, patted his belly, and checked his weight with motherly eyes.
“My son,” she finally said, first to Clark, and then to the room as if she was introducing a newborn to the world. Everyone smiled, Bing Crosby moved on to “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” and the warmth of the room engulfed Clark like a comfortable blanket.
Clark made the rounds, first with relatives, a number countable on the fingers of one hand. His mother’s older sister, Aunt Betty, sporting a new walker, wanted to hear all about “China” and the food. Clark smiled, his teeth exposed, his disappointment hidden, and told her the egg-rolls in Beijing were superb. Someday he would find out.
Clark’s slight-of-build second cousin, Eugene, a retiring bald federal employee making a hundred grand a year doing nothing in the truest sense of the word, gave Clark a quick “Welcome back,” and then vanished into the oversized cushions on the sofa. Clark shrugged his shoulders slightly, grateful for an abrupt end to the most uncomfortable annual conversation in the mid-Atlantic.
Clark approached his neighbors, a piece of ham hanging off the edge of his thick paper plate. An elderly man and a young woman with a daughter in her lap sat face-to-face in old wooden dining chairs. As Clark approached, the woman, dressed in a traditional Muslim headdress with Christmas colors, looked up through her thick black-framed glasses.
“I like your hijab,” Clark said. “Green and red, very appropriate.”
“Just thought I would show my festive side for my Christian neighbors. I had to make it myself.”
“It’s great.”
Ariana looked at Clark and the dark circles under his eyes. “It’s good to see you. Your mother didn’t stop talking about you and your trip,” Ariana said, her olive skin radiating in the light from the Christmas candle on the side table.
“Your daughter has gotten bigger.”
“As has her vocabulary. She is starting to talk up a storm.”
Clark bent his knees and looked the young girl in the eye. “Hi Liana.”
Liana, big dark eyes resting over perfectly placed dimples, nodded once and then buried her face in her mother’s chest.
Ariana smiled. “She’s acting shy, but trust me, once you get her going she never stops.”
“Thank you for keeping an eye on my mother, Ariana. I appreciate it.”
“Don’t mention it. I just stopped by to say hi, to see how she was doing.”
Clark looked her in the eyes, through her thick-framed glasses. “I know it’s not that easy.”
“Nor is it that bad.”
Clark smiled to avoid agreeing. “I don’t know if you have heard or not, but I have decided to move back home. I should be able to take better care of her in a week or two.”
“You’re moving home?”
“I don’t really have a choice. Aunt Betty is knocking on eighty and she can’t drive until she gets hip replacement surgery. Her cousin Eugene is no spring chicken and lives in Annapolis. It’s just easier for me to move home. I have one more class to take and a thesis to write, but I can attend the class remotely — interactive education they are calling it at Virginia Tech. I’ll have to drive down to Blacksburg occasionally but it won’t be that bad. My professors understand.”
“As long as you finish school. That’s the most important thing you can do right now,” Ariana said.
“I’ll finish. I’ve come too far to quit now.”
“I hope so.”
Clark paused for a moment, watched his mother buzz around the room, and then changed the subject. “Where’s your husband?”
“Working, as usual. He said he might stop by if he gets home in time. You know how he is. He’s not much for crowds.”
Clark looked around at the eight people in the room. “He should be fine then. There isn’t much of a crowd here.”
Ariana laughed quietly and her two-year-old daughter followed suit with a muffled giggle from the depths of her mother’s sweater.
“What was that? Did you say something, Liana?” Clark asked, shaking the girl’s foot, her face still hidden.
Liana looked up at Clark and proudly stated. “I like airplanes.”
“You do?”
“Yes, we saw them at the airport,” Liana said, eyes wide.
“Did you know we have airplanes in the basement?”
The young girl smiled coyly and then turned away again.
“Leave the girl alone and have a drink,” Mr. Stanley interrupted, his raspy voice cutting the air. He reached out his arthritic hand and Clark grabbed a seat, the last seed from the Hayden family tree landing in a lopsided wicker rocking chair next to his favorite neighbor.
An octogenarian with a full head of silver hair and World War II stories, Mr. Stanley had been spinning yarns since Clark was in grade school. A million-in-one shot had brought the two together; a misdirected soccer ball fired two houses away that somehow managed its way through a small bathroom window. When Clark knocked on Mr. Stanley’s door offering to pay for the window and asking for his ball back, an unlikely friendship had been born.
When Clark became old enough to pull the cord on the mower and push it around the yard with a reasonable amount of predictability, he started earning twenty bucks a week during the warm season. By the time he hit high school, he had added raking leaves, cleaning gutters, and shoveling Mr. Stanley’s driveway to his list of money-making duties. His pay increased over the years and when Clark turned sixteen Mr. Stanley began shoving pre-screened Playboy magazines into brown bags as supplemental income.
“How was Japan?” Mr. Stanley asked. “Were the people polite to you?”
“Very polite. Distant, but very polite.”
“Don’t forget what they did to our boys on Bataan. Treated them worse than rabid dogs.”
“I know all about it.”
“Don’t forget; that’s all I’m saying.”
“I won’t forget, but I’m also trying to look towards the future.”
“You gotta keep one eye on the past and one eye on where you’re going.”
Clark sipped off his eggnog. His brown wavy hair was heading out of control. Two hours waiting on the tarmac at Narita and another thirteen hours in the plane had sucked a few years from his appearance. “I also want to thank you for your help looking after my mother.”
“You’re welcome,” Mr. Stanley said, waving his hand in the air. “We all pitched in.”
“You took her to the grocery store.”
“I was going anyway. Have to take that Cadillac for a spin just to keep her breathing.” Mr. Stanley paused and took a gulp of eggnog from his paper Christmas cup. “Your mother gets along fine, as long as she doesn’t forget to take her pills.”
Ariana, Mr. Stanley, and Clark fell into a moment of quiet understanding and then Clark spoke. “There is a lot of stress worrying about someone all the time.”
“I understand,” Mr. Stanley responded, his blue eyes alive.
“We understand,” Ariana added.
“I probably shouldn’t have even gone to the robotics competition. But we put a year of work into those. And the World University Robotics Competition is a good thing to have on your resume.”
“W
e understand,” Mr. Stanley said again. “You don’t have to convince us. You’re doing the best you can. You play with the cards you are dealt.”
Ariana changed the subject. “How did you do?”
“We came in sixth. MIT and Cal Tech were the highest placed U.S. universities. Oslo University came in third. Tokyo University took the title. We made a lot of friends. We were dormed on the same floor as the team from MIT. We got to be pretty close, outside of the competition.”
Mr. Stanley spoke. “Always good to make friends. Especially smart ones. You know what they say…”
Clark rolled his eyes as his neighbor and friend prepared to pontificate. “No, what do they say?”
“If you’re the smartest person in your group of friends, you need to meet new people.”
“There’s truth to that,” Ariana said.
Clark smiled and then turned his thoughts to his mother. He looked at Liana who was still clutching her mother’s bosom.
Mr. Stanley broke the silence. “We’re glad you made it home in one piece. And if you need any help while you are making the move back from Blacksburg, you know where to reach me.”
Clark knew his mother was more effort than Mr. Stanley and Ariana were admitting, even on a good day. He had been keeping an eye on her since he was in grade school. But there were things to be thankful for. His mother still knew where the two bathrooms in the house were located. She still managed to make it down the small flight of stairs to handle the washer and dryer at the back of the garage. And on any given day she could appear completely normal to an outside observer. It was the sudden emotional swings, the nonsensical outbursts, the moments of blankness that worried Clark and scared the shit out of everyone else.
“Once I get back into the house, things should improve.”
Mr. Stanley and Ariana nodded but said nothing. They knew better.
Clark watched his mother mill about the kitchen acting as normal as any seventy-four year old woman with a penchant for baking. As if to prove she had heard the conversation, Maria Hayden stepped towards the dining table with impeccable timing and presented a massive tray of baked goods, a pile of gluttony begging for a glutton. The smell of the already baked Christmas ham was immediately overpowered by cream puffs, hazelnut cookies, and a warm pecan pie.