The From-Aways

by CJ Hauser

  “Who was that on the Georges’ doorstep?” I say.

  Carter leans back, his shoulders relaxed. “I couldn’t begin to tell you,” he says. “But I give Jethro Newkirk use of my father’s taxidermy studio. Perhaps you should ask him; he’s the only one who’s used it in years.”

  And sure, I’m relieved Carter hasn’t done it. Relieved that it’s a bait and switch and the cat is fine. But now my plan is all shot to hell. Carter starts rubbing the cat under the chin. He’s too close, right next to me, and I lean in a little so our arms are touching.

  Do you know what the bitch of this is? This is a man I wouldn’t have wanted to hate. This is a man whose approval I desperately would have wanted to win. The irresponsible asshole who spent his days on the road while Marta went crazy back at home, the man I hate, is gone, gone, gone, and all I’ve got is this guy, this mild guy who, in the way of many aging men, does not quite fill out the seat of his jeans.

  I take a step back. I hold the cat tight to my chest. “Well, thanks for your time, Mr. Marks. I’ll just go ahead and cite you in my article. That’s M-A-R-K-S, right?”

  “You go ahead and use my name,” Carter says. “Just get the quotes right. I hate to be misrepresented in print.” He looks at the nothing where my notepad should be. “You think you can handle that?”

  “I’ve got it,” I say, and tap my temple.

  “Real journalistic vigor,” he says, and shows me out.

  13

  Leah

  I can’t believe Quinn wouldn’t tell me something like this. I also can’t believe she left. This was supposed to be my story too.

  “Charley!” I bang into her office. “Quinn and I are supposed to be on assignment together. Where does Marks live?”

  “Let her be, Leah.” And Charley looks almost sad as she says it. Like for me to bother Quinn now would be an intrusion too terrible to consider. But has she read Quinn’s copy lately? I like the girl but the idea of her going solo on the only interesting story to hit Menamon since I got here drives me crazy. The accusations are against her dad; there’s no way she won’t go easy on him. It’ll be a mess. A little intruding is definitely in order.

  “Always together. That’s what you said,” I say. I hate being kicked off a story. “Where, Charley?”

  Charley leans back in her chair and says, “If you need something to do, go interview your friends in Elm Park. You can contribute quotes to the piece.”

  “I’ve never met the Georges,” I say.

  “I’m sure you’ll hit it off, they speak Jeter,” she says. Her disdain is so idle it’s infuriating. This woman is my sister, and I feel cheated. I want someone to call when things are bad at work, or Henry is driving me nuts. I need a sister. Even if it’s Charley.

  “What would you say your problem is, Charley?” I say. “If you had to put a finger on it?”

  She throws her hands up. “I don’t have a problem. I just don’t like it when a reporter, a damn Gazette reporter, who I’ve hired, by the way, who is on my staff, asks stupid questions. You and Henry sell Pop’s boat to buy the house, you waltz around like it doesn’t even matter. Fine. That’s personal, I deal. But here? You work for me. You’ve been working with Winters for weeks now and you didn’t realize she was Marks’s daughter? The only semifamous person in Menamon, she’s his spitting image, and you’re dumb enough to miss it? Learn your fucking beat, Leah.”

  The window is open and the world outside is dizzying through the screen: sea and sky chopped up into pieces. “What boat, Charley?”

  I can tell she wonders if I’m screwing with her because she starts stacking papers she hasn’t touched since I’ve worked here. Tapping the bottom out on her desk while biting her lip. “You don’t know this,” she decides. “Of course you don’t know this. Because the two of you are children.”

  It creeps up on me. The first assignment she sent me on. The one Quinn called hazing. “The Menamon Star,” I say. “The lobster boat at Deep’s. It was yours?”

  She sighs. “How the hell did you keep a job in New York?” she says. “The Star was Pop’s lobster boat. The paper came later. After he died I got the paper and Henry got the boat. Family businesses. Then Henry says he’s leaving. Going to New York. You know what he said? ‘Just give me a few months away and I’ll come back and take it over.’ ”

  I feel seasick. I don’t want to believe what she’s telling me, but I can hear Henry making that vow, offering up that timetable. It’s just the sort of thing he would say.

  Charley smacks the table. “But he didn’t, and you know why? Because he met a girl. Henry sold the Star, used the money to pay off the bank’s share of Mom and Pop’s house, and lost us our lobstering license.”

  I think of Henry beaming proud as he gave me that shiny ring of keys with the green ribbon. The money. He just made it work.

  “Henry doesn’t even fish!” I say. Because it’s so improbable. Henry as a lobsterman. My Henry. I would have known. “He’s a gardener,” I say, then regret it. I wish I’d said landscape architect.

  Charley goes back to the papers on her desk, through with me. She says, “There’s a picture of the Star above your mantel. Unless you’ve been redecorating.”

  She sighs, pinches her crooked nose. “Just leave Winters alone on this one. That’s all I was trying to say.”

  OUR FIREPLACE IS made of smooth rocks that Henry’s grandparents picked out by hand. Riverbed rocks, schlepped back from inland, his grandparents’ arms growing strong and their palms callused, Henry told me. Henry’s grandfather caked them together with mortar and built this hearth. In the top right corner is a lumpy stone that Henry says his grandmother made his granddad dive for. The family legend is that she claimed it was shaped like a heart, asked for it to make her husband show he loved her. He dove for it and now love is cemented in with stones. History. Everything that has happened to this town, everything that has happened to Henry’s family, the local celebrities and their obvious estranged children . . . this unknown history comes between me and everyone I am trying to reach.

  Like Charley said, resting on the mantel is an architectural drawing of a boat, blue on blue, the original plans for the Star. I have been living with the ghost of this boat for months now. Ghosts of boats and of people I will never meet. I cannot believe Henry did not tell me this thing everyone in town clearly knows and resents me for. He is doing the opposite of helping us live here.

  I pour a large whiskey and head into the attic through a trapdoor in the ceiling. Detritus is piled in stacks: a mustard-colored velvet armchair, several empty aquariums, a pair of wheelless roller skates, a rifle, blackly marred bottles that once contained ink. There are fishing poles and lures: rubbery, squidlike baubles that glint and wiggle so that even I want to put my mouth around them. There is a mirror so thick with dust that it reflects nothing but the time that has laid its ashes there. There is something that looks like a coffin, but of course it’s only an old storage box, made of cheap pine. Not for the dead but for their trappings: documents, photos, and files.

  I flip through documents until I find what I am looking for: the registration papers. The Menamon Star had been a functional lobstering rig since 1935. There was a brief hiatus in function (though not in license) during the Second World War when Henry’s great-grandfather served. The Star resumed function after the war with Henry’s grandfather at the helm. It continued on that way until his father died. Until Henry met me.

  He made it work, he said. The photos, the keys. He was so happy and so was I. But he lied, Henry. A lie of omission, but still a lie. How many times do you lie to someone when you are married? I think the answer might be: a lot of times. No, I don’t mind, I am not in the mood, you look wonderful. But big lies, lies like this one? Certainly you can only have so many of those.

  Does Henry think I am the sort of woman who he can keep things from? Is this the sort of guy he is: a secret keeper? A glosser-over? No, he is not. I don’t think so. I did not marry a fisherman or a s
ecret keeper, I do not think.

  It is, however, possible that I was underinformed about who Henry was and was not when we got married.

  There is a chance that in our few months of courtship we did not really take the time to do our due diligence. But who slows down for such a thing when they are in love?

  I leave the attic and run outside. I am going to show Henry that I know things. That he should not keep secrets from me. That he too may have been underinformed about who I was and was not. Outside the one-lane road is wet and black. I start running and I do not stop until I get to town, my wet hair slapping around my ears.

  The bells chime a frozen tinkle as I walk into the hardware store, which smells like rubber piping and rat poison. The neon hammer sign is pulsing pink and blue in the window. The tumbler of Red Hots is near the checkout and an old man squinting at the rain asks if he can help me.

  “I need some paint,” I say.

  “What kind?”

  “The kind that sticks to a car,” I say, and hand him part of the file I’ve taken with me, a photo of the Lynch family lobster buoy. “These colors.” He collects a series of paint chips and splays them like a winning hand of cards. He has a pair of glasses on a dingy braid of string around his neck and he puts these on.

  He says, “I suspect what you want is some tadpole green, honeysuckle orange, and walking-on-eggshells white. Will that be all, Mrs. Lynch?”

  “That will be all,” I say. I scoop some of the Red Hots out of the jar. I let them clack against my teeth and then I crunch them. Sugar and spice. Mrs. Lynch.

  IT’S STILL RAINING, so I keep the car in the garage, but open the door so I don’t asphyxiate myself. The garage lights are a warm orange color and I clonk the open bottle of whiskey on a plywood shelf next to a drum of gasoline. I have a portable radio, so besides the sound of the rain there is also the sound of Motown. Squeaky-voiced men harmonize with other squeaky-voiced men in a way that is beautiful. I’m moonin’ over you and I’m thinking about my baby and ain’t that peculiar.

  I’m singing and painting and drinking and painting and singing and outside it is getting dark. The foliage is deep green, like in that Rousseau painting at the Met I would sleep under if given the chance: gorillas with faces sweeter than the virgins’ and moons like tangerines and all that nighttime black vegetation. When I was small I thought that painting was of capital n Nature. That somewhere outside the city limits, past the Spanish groceries that sold dried fishes, past Co-op City, which still smells like burning, past all the storage facilities where people keep the stuff they can’t stand to look at but can’t throw away . . . I thought the city dropped off, and that Rousseau painting is what I thought the world looked like beyond it. A midnight-dense jungle.

  That deep green elsewhere is where I live these days, and tonight I feel at home in it. I will show Henry what kind of native creature I am becoming and then he will know that I can handle anything he has to tell me. Did he really think he could keep these truths from me? I am an investigative journalist! Though apparently I have not been a very good one these past few months.

  I am finished. I have clumps of paint stuck in the down of my arms and my jeans are soggy, but the car looks pretty good. In fact, the car looks phenomenal.

  Henry’s family’s lobster buoy was cream-colored. It had two orange stripes circling the middle, where the form begins to taper. It had a light green nose. I step outside. The rain has stopped. The best way to dry a fresh coat of paint, the way I understand it, is a swift breeze.

  14

  Quinn

  I drive the living, mewling Derek Jeter back home and exchange him for his stuffed double with as little explanation as possible. I head to the Uncle, taxidermied mystery cat under my arm.

  I’m barely in the door when I hear Jethro calling, “A beer for my friend!”

  I put the taxi-cat on the bar. “Who is this?” I say.

  “My mother had many tabbies,” Jethro says. “But I believe this is Agatha. She passed in ’76.”

  “You taxidermied your mother’s cats?”

  “She loved them,” he says. “And it helped her remember. It’s a highly respected science and pastime.”

  I moan. My grandfather was a taxidermist and my father is an asshole and I’ve fucked up my article so badly I can’t even claim to have moved the family interest along to journalism. What happened to my plan, the screed and the guitar? It was such a good plan and then . . . what did I say I was Leah for? The way Carter looked at me like he knew me from somewhere. His bare feet. His small, clean house. Forget about it. Think about anything else.

  I think of all the things neither Woodward nor Bernstein would have done:

  1. Forget to write anything down

  2. Say “cat slaughter”

  3. Accept gifts from an interviewee suspected of a crime

  4. Touch an interviewee (unless she was pretty and withholding information)

  I’m lousy at this, is the truth. I keep on telling myself that if I stick with writing articles, one of these days I’ll just become a good journalist. But maybe it doesn’t work that way. Maybe I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.

  The summer I was eighteen my mom was in the hospital for the first time. We didn’t know it was cancer for the first month. A nervous breakdown, is what they called it. To do with being a single parent and Carter abandoning her when I was so small. Raising a teenager all alone? No wonder the issues have come to a head now, the nurses said.

  I was angry, and we thought she was going crazy, so we had her in the crazy wing. She slept most of the day, so there wasn’t shit to do except sit in the lounge and watch the TV attached to the wall. I sat there and stewed over all the ways this was probably Carter’s fault. If he’d only married Marta in some flowery ceremony instead of all that free love crap, maybe he’d have stayed. If only that damn song, the song about her, hadn’t done quite so well. Maybe then he’d have lived with Marta instead of singing about her on a nationwide tour and never phoning. If anything else had happened, I thought, and he was here, then at least there would be someone who knew what to do. How to fix her.

  In the lounge, I watched game shows. Password was my favorite. I loved how ridiculous the clues were and how the announcer would whisper the words to the viewer so the contestants couldn’t hear. The password is, he would say, automobile. The password is Alka-Seltzer. God, I loved that whisper. I was convinced the whisper would tell me what was wrong with my mother if I listened carefully enough. Shared it quietly, just between the two of us.

  Then one day a nurse brought in this old geezer in a wheelchair. She rolled his chair right next to mine. She shut off the game show.

  Hey, I said. Don’t you wanna know if Carol Burnett can get him to say “carnival”?

  He’ll never get it, the guy said. And it’s time for my movie.

  The nurse popped a cassette into the VCR.

  Man, I said.

  Dim the lights, Lucille, he told the nurse, and she did.

  If you stay, there is to be no idle chatter, he said. He was a hell of a guy. He was strong-looking in the chest and arms, but his legs looked skinny in his hospital pants. He wore a hospital top, but over it a tweed sport coat with elbow patches.

  What are we watching? I said.

  All the President’s Men, he said. It’s my film. I have a cameo.

  Are you an actor? I said

  As I mentioned, he said. I have a cameo.

  We started watching the movie and I was thinking it was pretty good. Better than game shows, for sure. By the last scenes I was so into it, all I could see were Woodward and Bernstein scurrying around trying to get their backup by phone. The guy spoke up.

  There, he said.

  What? I said.

  He pointed at the screen. Fourth cubicle from the back, he said. I looked. In that cubicle was another newspaperman. Yammering silently into his phone. Writing things down and touching his temple in distress.

  That’s you? I said.
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  That’s me, he said.

  When the movie was over the nurse came back and pressed rewind. She stood there looking at the cassette the whole time. She popped it out, stuck it in the case, and wheeled him out.

  The next day she rolled him in again. It’s time for my movie, he said. And Lucille went through the whole thing again.

  Alzheimer’s, she said.

  We watched the movie.

  The thing is, the more I watched it, the better it got. The more I realized it was actually the best movie of all time. It was a month later, when I had seen All the President’s Men two dozen times, that they realized there was something wrong with my mother other than being tired. That it wasn’t just a nervous breakdown set off by my hormones, and that probably she had cancer instead. So they moved her to a different hospital. And I went too.

  When Marta’s hair started falling out, she insisted on brushing it anyway. Let’s just get this over with, she said. The losing, I think she meant. She brushed until she had just a few whorls left, curled against her head in patterns like a galaxy map. The tangles that came away in her brush she would pluck from the bristles and let go out the window. She’d drop them, soft knots of hair drifting out across the lawn. A bird will use this to make a nest, she’d say. I wasn’t sure if that was true.

  In the new hospital lounge I watched game shows again, but, man, did I miss that movie. I missed Mr. Fourth-Cubicle-from-the-Back and Woodward and Bernstein too. I missed thinking that my mom was just a little tired, a little crazy. That I could watch my film and wait it out and then it would be time for Marta and me to go home.

  When they finally did send us home, it was because they had run out of ideas. When college started in the fall, and they asked me what I was majoring in, I said journalism. Investigative reporting. And that was it. I was a journalist, just like the boys in the film.

  I WISH LEAH were here because I have a masochistic urge to tell her how badly I fucked up the interview, even though it would only confirm all her worst professional suspicions about me.