The From-Aways

by CJ Hauser

  Dedication

  For Boo, Lemo, and Daddio—my family

  Epigraphs

  I will arise and go now, for always night and day

  I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

  While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

  I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

  W. B. YEATS

  Take me down to the paradise city

  where the grass is green and the girls are pretty

  Oh, won’t you please take me home?

  GUNS N’ ROSES

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Summer

  1. Leah

  2. Quinn

  3. Leah

  4. Quinn

  Fall

  5. Leah

  6. Quinn

  7. Leah

  8. Quinn

  9. Leah

  10. Quinn

  11. Leah

  12. Quinn

  13. Leah

  14. Quinn

  15. Leah

  Winter

  16. Quinn

  17. Leah

  18. Quinn

  19. Leah

  20. Quinn

  21. Leah

  22. Quinn

  23. Leah

  24. Quinn

  25. Leah

  26. Quinn

  27. Leah

  28. Quinn

  29. Leah

  Spring

  30. Quinn

  31. Leah

  32. Quinn

  33. Leah

  34. Quinn

  35. Leah

  36. Quinn

  37. Leah

  38. Quinn

  39. Leah

  40. Quinn

  41. Leah

  42. Quinn

  43. Leah

  44. Quinn

  45. Leah

  46. Quinn

  47. Leah

  Summer, Again

  48. Quinn

  49. Leah

  50. Quinn

  51. Leah

  Acknowledgments

  P.S.

  About the author

  About the book

  Read on

  Praise

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Summer

  1

  Leah

  I have two lobsters in my bathtub and I’m not sure I can kill them.

  I’m sitting on the rim of the tub. It has curled brass feet. Everything seems alive and haunted in this house; that’s my first problem.

  My second problem is that I pet the lobsters. I roll up a white-buttoned sleeve and run my pinched fingers along the length of Lobster Number One’s antenna. It feels sensitive and unbreakable like coiled wire. Lobster Number One knocks his crusher claw against my hand, but there’s a thick pink rubber band binding it up, so I’m in no real danger. I stroke Lobster Number Two’s antenna as well, so they’re even.

  Henry says one lobster boil won’t make Maine my home, but he is wrong.

  Both lobsters have dark spotted backs that remind me of Dalmatian puppies. I really should not be thinking of them as puppies.

  I get a six-pack from the fridge. This is my plan: I will get blind drunk and then I will kill these lobsters. I tie my hair up in a dark knob. I use the faucet to pry the cap off my bottle. Beer geysers up and fizz plops in the water like sea foam. Henry says his mother, June, gave her lobsters beer before cooking them. She also bathed them in seawater so they’d have one last taste of home. I ask the lobsters, “Do you feel at home?”

  Of course not. Some bearded yahoo caught them in a pot. Their home is long gone. As is mine, but no one snatched me up. Instead, I snatched Henry. I married him and begged for us to move to his hometown: Menamon, Maine. I broke the lease on my apartment. Quit my job at the New York Gazette. Donated the tangle of wires and smartphones and life-simplifying devices from my purse, because I wouldn’t need them once I left New York.

  People use those in Maine, you know, Henry said. We’re not going back in time. Just north.

  North!

  So now I will find a way to do this, because love is boiling the lobsters your freckle-backed husband doesn’t believe will grow you instant roots. My parents raised me an only child in a nineteenth-floor penthouse. No one grows roots nineteen stories deep.

  I swing my legs over the side of the tub and stare at my underwater feet. My toes are painted the color the lobsters will be once I boil them. Lobster Number One and Lobster Number Two conference at the other end. I turn over my beer bottle so it glugs empty into the tub. I open another one for me.

  We take turns, the lobsters and I, finishing the six-pack. I had imagined tonight so clearly. The boiled red beasts on blue plates. The melted butter in its crock. The wine bottle sweating. The sound of waves through the screen door and of Henry, laughing. A warm breeze wending through the house. I have been imagining this dinner for months. Ever since I started thinking about Maine.

  The lobsters jostle around my feet. I look at the empty six-pack and know I won’t be able to kill them.

  I splash my feet around in the tub and devise a new plan. I’m going to name them. I get a box of salt from the kitchen and shake it over the water so it will be briny like the sea. I lie on the fuzzy bath mat and wait. It is almost six but the day is still warm. My legs stretch out past the mat and the tiles are cool.

  “Leah?” Henry appears in the doorframe, searching for me. “What are you doing down there? The bathroom smells like a bar.”

  “Welcome to the Lobstah Bah,” I tell him. Henry’s face is tan and his arms are covered in small scratches. The knees of his jeans are dark-wet and dirty. He has been planting. There have been thorns. He pads over to me in sock feet. He smells sweaty and like mulch.

  “Are you okay?” he says. “Why are there lobsters in the tub?”

  “Meet Lavender and Leopold. They eat scurf and they have names and so we should not eat them.” Still lying on the floor, I gesture toward the tub. “Don’t they look at home?”

  “You stubborn girl,” he says. “I told you we didn’t have to do this.”

  I sit up and Henry and I both kneel by the bath. He puts his hand on my back. Lavender and Leopold scuttle to opposite ends of the bathtub. Their carapaces are the color of dried blood and their legs are like machines and I wonder if they are married. But how would I know? I don’t even know their sexes. There is no way to tell which is the boy and which is the girl unless we eat them and see who has eggs inside and who has nothing.

  “There wasn’t enough room in the sink,” I tell Henry. “They looked crowded.”

  “Naturally,” he says. He leans an arm on the rim of the tub and rests his chin in the crook of his elbow. He looks so much a part of this house, like another piece grown out of it. The lobsters flick their antennae around. “It’s lucky you’re cunning ’cause you’re not much for cooking,” Henry says.

  “Do you want to cook them?” I say, and curl into a position like his.

  “If you think I’m eating something named Leopold, you’re crazy,” Henry says.

  I say, “Let’s return them to the sea.”

  We remove the lobsters’ rubber bands and wrap them in a beach towel. At the end of our backyard wooden steps descend to where the grass falls off into rock into sand. To our own tiny boardwalk with a dinghy tied up. To the coast.

  The sun is fizzling out and I smell the musk of a small rotting carcass. The ocean stretches wide and green waves tumble in. Gulls are screaming. They have clever faces, spatter-patterned backs, mean spirits. Birds are hollow in their bones. I do not like the way they hang overhead.

  I release the lobsters and Henry looks around cagily as they scuttle toward the tide
line. If the neighbors see him, he will be laughed out of town. I crack up at the expression on his face.

  “Oh sure, laugh,” Henry says. “You’re the one who’s got us on this lobster mission. Guys spend half their lives buggin’ and here we are dropping them back in the sea.”

  I count trap buoys bobbing in the deep water, each one marking a pot. It seems like a cruel trick to me. These playful hunks of foam are jail markers, guiding fishermen to the places lobsters have come to practice poor decision making. Traps my lobsters may or may not be smart enough to avoid their second time around. Lavender and Leopold march until a wave crashes and they are gone.

  Henry watches the spot where his dinner disappeared. His hair and eyebrows get wild in the sea air. His face tans, so quickly, and already I can see an underglow, a darkening. This is my husband in his natural habitat, in more ways than one. Our house is Henry’s childhood home. His parents passed away five and two years ago. June in an accident. Hank in a boat.

  I hug on to him. “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “Don’t be sorry,” Henry says. “Jeezum, just don’t buy any more, okay?”

  The sun is sunk as we walk back.

  THAT NIGHT, IN bed, we are quiet although neither of us is sleeping. I wriggle so Henry can feel my arm against his back, but he doesn’t roll over.

  I want to mention that I am good at many things. To start, I am good at writing newspaper articles, which is what I did in New York. I’m also a good cook, a fast runner, and I am excellent at loving Henry. In fact, I did such a stellar job of loving Henry that three months ago he decided to marry me despite the fact that our two ages lumped together didn’t amount to half a century.

  I sometimes worry what we’ve got ourselves into.

  It was my idea to move here. Because even though I am good at many things, it wasn’t until there was Henry that I enjoyed any of them. From the moment I met Henry he made everything seem realer, better. He reminded me that all the people on the streets and subways were actual people, not just a crowd to push through. He found delivery sashimi more miraculous than the moon landing. From my bed, he’d open the slatted blinds I never touched and sit cross-legged, looking out the window of my twelfth-floor apartment while totally naked. Are you aware the neighbors can see you right now? I’d say, pulling the covers around myself. But Henry didn’t care. He’d point at the slash of cloud and blue visible between the buildings and remind me that it was incredible, us floating twelve stories above the earth in a gently swaying tower.

  Henry reminded me that I was a human being, on a planet, with a body. And when he put his hands on my body I felt myself returning to it. My self who too often lives only in my brain and forgets about the rest of me. Henry was always in a state of wonder about the city, my city, and he saw it in ways I never had: looking straight through the sidewalks and subway tunnels to the black earth underneath. I started seeing things Henry’s way, the realer, better way, and found I wanted more of this. I thought, What could be realer or better than moving to Maine where he is from?

  I knew Maine was the best place because of the stories Henry told. He lay around my apartment, hand behind his head and T-shirt riding up to expose a trail of fur, and he spun me stories. Back home, someone found a yellow diamond the size of an egg in a shark’s belly. Back home, the old woman who ran the lighthouse could be seen drinking coffee with the ghost of her dead husband at night. Back home, there were moose the size of Mack trucks. Back home, everyone owned land. Back home, everyone knew each other and said hello.

  I’d jump on him, clumsy because I am tall and sometimes forget what to do with my limbs. I’d pin him there and say, It’s not really like that, though, is it? Did all that really happen?

  Sure it did, bub, he’d say, and swat me on the butt. Then I’d settle into the crook of his arm and make him tell it all again. Menamon sounded magical. For months I demanded these stories over and over. Soon I could imagine Menamon so completely that I knew it was the right place to live. I practically lived there already.

  Let’s go there, I said.

  I throw off my blanket. I can barely hear the ocean from here, but the steel bell buoys ring out a baritone song, one note for each time the waves rock the buoy. It’s a deep, echoing sound I found haunting until Henry explained that the noise is meant to let ships know they’re too close to shore when visibility is bad. I thought that was nice. Dong, dong, you’re too close. Dong, dong, it’s all right, just turn away, we’re watching out.

  I listen and stare at Henry’s back. He is teaching me these things he already knows so that I can make a home here. I reach out and run my fingers over his back so just the finger pads are touching. Henry is still, but I trail my fingers between his shoulder blades that just barely protrude, like vestigial wings. I follow the vertebrae of his spine down to the small of his back where the bones disappear beneath the surface.

  “Were you drawing a sailboat?” Henry asks.

  I wasn’t, but suddenly I wish I was. “A sailboat would be like this,” I say, and trace a boat body shaped like lemon wedge. I add a tall mast and two triangular sails. They would be white, if they weren’t invisible. I move my finger in a curved but unbroken line along his lower back.

  “Those are the waves,” he says. “I can feel them.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Those are the waves.”

  2

  Quinn

  I went to find my father because my mother was the most beautiful dead woman I knew and I thought someone should tell him she was gone. If he had plans to make amends, I figured he should know it was now too damn late.

  Not that I thought he had plans.

  Listen, between Mom’s hospital bills and my college tuition, we broke even. I got a mediocre journalism degree. She got the best care the state of Connecticut could provide and a weeping willow planted over her plot. I asked her, Couldn’t we get a nice dogwood or maybe a cherry? A weeping tree seemed maudlin.

  She said, Won’t you cry when I’m gone?

  I said, Well, yeah, but could you stop being so goddamn macabre?

  She said, I’ve indentured a tree to do the grieving so you won’t have to.

  Okay, I said, okay. We’ll get a willow.

  Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a cemetery that will let you plant a tree over someone’s grave?

  I know three things about my father:

  1. He used to be a folk singer.

  2. He named me Quinn, after the Dylan song about the Eskimo (just what every little girl dreams: igloos, pigeons, and shitty acoustics).

  3. He was born in Menamon, Maine. He moved back there to live between gigs ever since he split from my mom, right after I was born. Carter and Marta were believers in loving free and easy. No papers between them. Just me.

  MY MOTHER’S OBITUARY ran in the local paper. It was the normal rigmarole about her being an art teacher and a mother and dying of cancer, but the last line was the kicker: Marta Winters is perhaps best known as the “whiskey-eyed dame” in Carter Marks’s 1960s anthem, “Leave Your Shoes Behind.”

  That line was removed by the obituaries editor twice during revisions and both times Marta insisted it be put back in. I know, because I was the obituaries editor. Twenty-two-year-olds with journalism degrees often get their start in obituaries, or so I was told by the Fairhaven Hour. I think Marta wanted that last bit included because she hoped Carter would take notice. Like he’s reading the Hour. Like anyone reads obituaries.

  After she died, I found a note she’d left me. I braced myself. I assumed it would be a teary missive full of loving words and advice for the future. But when I tore open the envelope it wasn’t even a letter. It wasn’t typed or signed or dated or any of the things a deathbed mother-daughter letter should be. It was a scrap of yellow-lined paper and she’d scrawled on it, so sloppy it seemed like an afterthought: Go see your father, please. I put the note away in Marta’s sock drawer, shoved between the balled woollies and bright hippie stripers. She’d never before
suggested I do anything like this, and I felt so cheated out of a real letter, or any parting affection at all, that I came close to crumpling the paper and chalking the whole thing up to terminal delusion.

  But something kept nagging at me. Yes, Marta was crazy, but hers was a crazy with reasons behind it. A month later, I was sure of it: Marta was trying to show me something. I dug the note out of her socks and I taped it to the television set so I could see it while I watched. After I sold the TV, I left it in different kitchen cabinets—next to Marta’s jars of pickles, or taped to a canister of flour. Then, the house was all packed up. Sold. There were all these boxes headed for storage, and that note.

  It was the please that got me. You’ve got to understand, Marta never said please. She must have spoken the word before, but when I sat there with the note in her still-unmade bed and tried to recall a single individual instance, I couldn’t. So I packed one duffel bag and my father’s old guitar, Marta’s note slipped into the case. I decided to go find Carter—and to get a new job, at the Menamon Star.

  THE STAR OFFICE is small and the staff nonexistent. A she-editor named Charley Lynch runs the place and is too young to have doomed herself with an editorial position like this. But who am I to judge with my portfolio that is, literally, DOA? I watch Charley’s face for signs of approval as she looks through my folder, but what qualifies me for this job has nothing to do with my clippings. I want to say: Listen, I’ve watched All the President’s Men more than twenty times and I know everything about how this works already. I’ve studied Woodward. I’ve studied Bernstein. I’m an investigative reporter. Just watch me. I want to say: Those guys? The way they throw down like nothing matters? The way they fuck up left and right but always come through in the end? I am those guys. This is what qualifies me.

  “All these clips are about dead people,” Charley says. She’s wearing jeans so worn they’re almost white and brown duck boots. Her hips are wide; they make her look battle-ready. She appraises me with a stare that leaves no barrier between her judgment and my face, and I like this. I want the respect of this woman, just to have it, like a lucky green penny in my pocket I could pull out from time to time and say, Look, this is something I’ve got.