by Jenna Blum
“Yes,” Karena says. “I know that guy, Charles.”
She pulls Charles’s hand aside so she can speak directly into his ear.
“Listen,” she says, voice low. “I will help you. I will help you, Charles, but you have to help me too, okay? The Stranger—he’s terribly strong. But you’re stronger. I know you are. You have to try. You have to help me beat him. You have to go back to the doctors with me, try different medications until you find ones that fit. It’ll be tough, but I’ll be with you. We’ll do it together. You hear me?”
Charles nods vehemently. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, yes, anything, K, I’ll do anything you want. Just please don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me alone here in the black.”
Karena leans back against the sink, and as she soothes him, yawning now, her eyes grainy, she thinks of a recurring dream she has. It’s one she has never told Charles about, a dream she is quite sure he does not share. In it he and she are standing on an assembly line in some shadowy between-world, waiting to be born, looking down a long shimmering tube at the home they’re about to join. There are the roofs of New Heidelburg, the spires of the churches, the blue lollipop water tower, the small rectangle that will be their house. Just before they jump, however, a cup is handed down the line toward them. Karena takes a sip to be polite, makes a face, starts to pass it on. But Charles, profligate even then, grabs it from her and drains the whole thing, then flings it aside and turns to her. Ready, K? he asks, smiling, and they join hands to begin their lifelong adventure.
She will never leave him. Because Karena merely sipped from the bitter cup while Charles drank it all, she will never abandon him, not for anything in the world. So as Charles weeps and begs Karena not to go, she reassures him she won’t, she won’t. And she means it. She’ll wait until he falls asleep, then go only so far as the phone, to call Hennepin County Medical. Then she’ll come back, she’ll stay with him the entire time. But it’s Karena who must sleep, she must be exhausted after all, because when she wakes the window is a bright square of sun, the blood drying dark and tacky. And she is alone. Charles is gone again.
50
Before Charles’s arrival this summer Karena returned to New Heidelburg fairly often. But she realizes, as she speeds south on Highway 52 past the single spire of the Lone Oak Church, the Arch to Nowhere, that it’s been a while since she has been there to visit Frank. How long? Early July? Late June? Over a month, which is shameful—and that’s another thing about her brother’s disorder, the way it sucks oxygen from other areas of her life, her friendships and obligations. Not that Frank will notice. He hasn’t registered Karena’s presence since before his stroke, which would have been—2002, at the Widow’s Thanksgiving, when Karena sat among a flotilla of side dishes and tried to make conversation with her six stepsiblings, silent and thatch-haired as giants. Frank was at the head of the table and the Widow simpered at the other end, and when the meal was done Frank got up, patted Karena’s shoulder, and disappeared into his new home office. Six years ago, and Karena can’t remember for the life of her what her dad’s last words to her might have been.
Now Frank spends his days either parked in his chair or as a thin ridge in a hospital bed, a husk smelling of urine and disinfectant, and the best Karena can hope for is that her dad isn’t aware of anything within the prison of his body—and what is she thinking about Frank for, anyhow? Karena is in a bad way. Her thoughts are like water bugs, skittering all over the place. She keeps glancing at the note on the passenger’s seat, anchored by her purse:
Sistah. I’m so sorry to take off like this after everything you’ve done for me, but I just can’t stand to destroy your life anymore. I’m going back to where it all began, & you know why. Love you, sistah. Charles.
The thing is, Karena doesn’t know. But she can guess, and neither option is good. Charles is going back to New Heidelburg to turn himself in. Charles is going back to New Heidelburg to kill himself in some dramatic fashion, and Karena has no idea what to do. Should she call the sheriff? But she can’t, because if the sheriff does find Charles, Charles will confess everything. Karena wants to weep. She exits in Pine Island for a pit stop and more caffeine and almost bursts into tears in the SuperAmerica over the convenience store smell of old coffee and hot dogs, the rack of corn nuts. She uses the bathroom and slaps cold water on her face.
Back on the highway, she checks the clock—almost noon—and pushes the Volvo to eighty-five. The tiny skyscrapers of Rochester wheel into view on the left. Tiff lives at Exit 49B, in the Little McMansion on the Prairie, as she calls it. If she knew Karena were nearby, she would invite Karena over for scones and a scolding. But Karena can’t quite make herself pick up the phone. She hasn’t talked much to Tiff since the disastrous lake walk, and she doubts Tiff will be very sympathetic to yet more bad news about Charles. You know what to do, Tiff would say. Effing cut him off, Kay. Deal with your own life. Otherwise, I don’t want to hear it. Talk to the hand.
And Tiff doesn’t know the whole story, so she wouldn’t be much help. Only one person has all the pieces of the puzzle, would be able to advise Karena, give her counsel she trusts. And if she’s going to call him, she’d better do it fast, since her cell phone loses service in Foss County. She is already through Rochester and on the two-lane road toward her hometown. Karena opens her phone and hits speed-dial 1. It’s not that she thinks he will have forgiven her—not already, not yet. Maybe he never will. But Karena just can’t believe Kevin wouldn’t want to hear from her, if only to know where she’s going, what she’s doing. He has become her personal GPS, tethering her to the world. At first this seemed to Karena an amazing luxury, something to be marveled at and gloated over. Then it became habit, and now, apparently, it is a necessity.
Kevin picks up on the fourth ring, as Karena is entering the bluff-bracketed cornfields near Merrion, lush and steaming in the midday sun.
“Go,” he says.
“Kevin? It’s me.”
“I know that, Karena,” Kevin says flatly. “I have caller ID.”
“Oh,” says Karena. “Right.” She waits, and when he doesn’t say anything, she ventures, “How are you?”
“How the fuck do you think I am?”
“Um,” says Karena. “Not very good?”
She tries a shaky laugh, but when that doesn’t work, she says, “I’m sorry, Kevin. I really am. I’m going out of town for a bit, maybe a couple of days, but I was thinking when I get back, we could talk? Get coffee or something—”
“I asked you to leave me alone, Karena,” says Kevin. “Remember?”
Karena nods. She clears her throat. “Yes,” she says.
“Why do you disrespect that?” Kevin asks.
“I’m sorry,” Karena says, gulping. “It’s just that—I love you, Kevin. I should have told you that before. And I’m not just saying it now because I need you, although I do, I desperately do. But I love you more desperately than that, and more passionately, and more deeply. Happily, even.”
She stops. Kevin doesn’t respond, but Karena thinks she can feel his surprise. She can hear him breathing, anyway, and the creak of leather. She pictures him in his living room recliner, wearing slippery soccer shorts and a Whirlwind T-shirt, his hair sticking up on one side. Looking out the window at the bird feeder he has hung in the oak, the cardinals at play there, and her throat hurts until she can barely breathe.
“So,” she says finally. “I have to go to New Heidelburg, I don’t know how long exactly, but Charles is there. I think. Anyway, he’s gone again, and I have to find him, but when I get back—”
“I’m sorry, Karena,” Kevin interrupts. “I can’t.”
“What?” she says.
“I can’t deal with this. With you or him or any of this. I need a break.”
“Okay,” Karena whispers. Then she says, “But a break is a good thing, right? Because it’s finite, there’s an end on the other side. So how long—”
“Karena,” says Kevin. “Stop. Just st
op.”
Karena switches the phone to the other ear and waits.
“You’re not hearing me,” Kevin says. He sounds very tired. “I don’t want this. Don’t call me. Don’t call me anymore or contact me in any way. All right?”
Karena doesn’t say anything. She drives. Squints at the curving road.
“Good luck with your brother, though,” says Kevin. “Sincerely.”
He pauses.
“Bye,” he says finally, and hangs up.
Karena keeps the phone wedged between her shoulder and her ear until the recorded lady says, If you’d like to make a call . . . Then she tosses it into her bag. Takes a sip of coffee. Her hand is shaking, so she sets the cup back in the holder. Carefully she steers the Volvo up and around a hill—she is deep in bluff country now, the road wending between blocks of corn so dense and green Karena can feel its humid breath through her window. She remembers playing in the Hallingdahl cornfield with Charles, how they would emerge from its secret, shady world soaking wet, covered in silk and cuts. At this time of year the crops produce moisture so intense it creates its own microclimate and helps form storms—evapotranspiration, Kevin has called it. And the sun is beating through rows of little clouds like lambs in heaven, AltoCu, altocumulus, sign of potential severe later in the day—
Suddenly Karena hears Kevin’s voice not just in memory but in the car—coming from her bag. He must have called her back! Karena almost runs off the road scrabbling for her phone, but when she finds it there are no new messages. Yet Kevin’s voice continues, and she understands: It’s her recorder. When she threw the phone into the bag, it must have knocked the play button. Karena fishes the recorder out and props it upright in her lap.
. . . look at this . . . 45 percent probability is impressive, usually means significant, long-lived tornadoes. I wouldn’t be surprised if we got upgraded to a high risk by morning.
That’s good, right? I mean, depending who you ask.
Indeed, Laredo. It means we could have an outbreak on our hands. But remember Dennis’s story, the one about the tire. That happened on a high-risk day. Things can get ugly fast. We’ll have to watch our timing.
Wow. That’s scary.
Not scary, Laredo. A learning experience. Remember what I said about fear too. You just need to know what you’re doing . . . Like me. I’ll learn ya.
Oh boy. Now you’re just showing off.
True. But any more lip from you, young lady, and I’ll make you stay after school. . . . Want to walk, Laredo?
Sure.
Karena listens to this conversation all the way through. When it finishes, she presses replay. She listens to it over and over, dazed with sorrow and wonder. Finally, when she gets to Norwegian Ridge, the town before New Heidelburg, she turns the recorder off. “God damn it,” Karena says. “Oh, God damn it!” She hits the steering wheel with the fat side of her palm, wipes her face on an old Caribou napkin, and keeps driving.
51
On the other side of Norwegian Ridge Karena starts to see the homecoming markers, which usually bring dread because they are harbingers of a difficult visit to Frank but today are welcome signs of familiarity—like little notes saying You Belong Here. The Lutheran cemetery where her mom and uncle and all four grandparents are buried. Siri’s favorite contour-farmed field, the puffy parallelograms of corn between emerald-green grass. The New Heidelburg airstrip, its wind sock pointing northwest—which means, Karena calculates automatically, the winds are from the southeast, backed and bringing moisture from the Gulf. The New Heidelburg golf course. The Starlite Supper Club. The town limits sign—WELCOME TO NEW HEIDELBURG, WILD EAGLE CAPITAL OF SOUTHERN MINNESOTA!
And then all the businesses on the strip of highway bordering town: the Ford and Deere dealerships, the New Heidelburg Propane Co. with its belching orange flame. The IGA, the new American Inn & Suites, the dollar store and Dairy Queen. There is the water tower, visible over the trees—except there are two now, a second blue lollipop identical to the first, punctuating the north end of town. Karena doesn’t normally notice any of this industry—it’s just the backdrop of her birthplace, a topography she accepts has always been there and always will be. But now her perspective has changed, and when she assesses New Heidelburg through an adult lens—measures it against the ghost towns she saw this summer on the Plains—Karena finds her hometown doing well. And she does feel like a visitor here after all.
Out of habit she looks for Charles’s yellow Volvo at the Elmwood Café and the Kwik Trip, where Karena and Tiff used to hang out in a booth and wait for boys. But Karena doesn’t really expect to find Charles here. She knows where he is. She exits onto Main Street and drives into downtown, turning a block left and making the first right onto Lincoln. There is the B&M gas station, its fuel pumps still the kind whose numbers roll up, its air compressor emitting its eternal ticka-ticka-tick. The original water tower looms like a blue balloon at the end of the block. Karena parks and waves to the B&M brothers peeking curiously out of their garage, two sixtysomething bachelors with brushy hair and amiable faces. Charles’s yellow Volvo is across from hers, at the curb in front of their old house. He is sitting on the lawn, Indian style, chewing a stem of grass.
“I wanted to go in,” he says sadly when Karena walks up, “for one last visit, but nobody’s home.”
Karena thinks it shows remarkable restraint on Charles’s part that he didn’t just go into the house anyway, since like most in town it is probably unlocked. She sits beside him and Charles hands her a piece of what she sees now is not grass but parsley. It grows wild here, a runaway from Siri’s garden. All Karena’s adult life she has been am-bushed by its sharp green smell, the bullet of childhood nostalgia it brings. She sticks the sprig between her teeth.
“Thanks,” she says.
“Don’t mention it.”
They sit chewing and contemplating their childhood home. It too has changed, though subtly. Karena has driven past it a couple of times before and noted the new roof and driveway, the removal of the lilac hedge and the replacement of their old front door with its louvered slats with a more modern model, a slab of etched glass. The black pine in front of their bedroom window is still there, sheltering Siri’s red maple, but altogether the house appears in much better shape. This is like a personal affront, and Karena wonders if it still smells like Siri’s handbag inside, if the new owners finally chopped down the big bush in back and disposed of the boat swing. She sighs.
“I know,” Charles says. “It’s a mind-fuck, isn’t it? It’s like those place mat games: Find Twenty Things Wrong with This Picture.”
He rips up a handful of grass, sieves it for another piece of parsley, and piles the remaining blades on the Ace bandage wrapped around his wounded ankle. Where did he get that? Karena wonders. It’s already grubby.
“Charles,” she says, “what are you doing?”
“You know what I’m doing,” he says. “Having one last look around before the slammer.”
Karena sags with relief that is woefully short-lived. Charles’s plan to turn himself in is better than the alternative, but not much. In fact, Karena wonders if it isn’t an oblique attempt at suicide. How does Charles imagine he’ll survive in jail, without his holistic medicine, his exercise, his chasing? Does he really think he’ll get through it?
“Charles,” she says, “do you remember what we talked about last night? You promised to come see a doctor with me.”
Charles leans back on his splayed hands, chewing. The sun highlights little cuts on his face Karena hasn’t noticed before, from splinters of flying glass, and makes a bright dandelion of his hair.
“I know, K,” he says, “and I’m sorry, but I can’t. I just can’t do it your way. I still don’t believe in meds, for one thing. There’s nothing in that black bag for me. And even if I did, I’d still have to pay for Motorcycle Guy. Without my fixing that, everything else is moot.”
“With all due respect, Charles—” Karena starts, but Charles interru
pts her.
“I know you don’t agree,” he says. “But I’m so tired, K. I’m tired of being a fuckup. I ruin everything, all the time. Your life. The Loaf’s. Situ’s. Mom’s. Dad’s—and don’t tell me his stroke wasn’t in some way my fault. I know it might have been some weird congenital defect, but the mental aggravation I brought him didn’t help, that’s for sure.”
Karena would like to dispute this, but having had the same thought herself on occasion, she doesn’t. Instead, she says, “But Charles—”
“But Charles nothing,” Charles says. “Don’t you get it, K? I can’t control the guy in my head—The Stranger. Not without eliminating myself completely. My personality. And that I can’t do. But Motorcycle Guy, I can make amends for. He’s the one situation I can fix. And I’m so sick of it hanging over my head. Aren’t you?”
Charles puts his hand on her arm. The stern face of the Lakota brave gleams in the sun.
“Don’t answer quickly,” he says softly. “Don’t give me the knee-jerk reaction. Really think about it. Why don’t you come with me? When I go to the sheriff. Because aren’t you tired too, K? Goodness aren’t you tired?”
Karena is about to retort with some wisecrack, to say of course she’s tired, she was up all night with him. But she knows what Charles means. She is tired. Not ordinary tired, not even exhausted, but weary in mind, in spirit. Karena is tired of being on the outside looking in, feeling as though she can never join the normal human family. She is tired of editing her conversations, trying to remember who she told this information to, how much she gave away to that. She is tired of waking up at four thirty in the morning and feeling wretched over a man she never knew. She is tired of trying to control the damage and trying to repair it when she can’t. She looks at her parents’ old house, at the bay window she was sitting on the other side of when this persistent tiredness began, on the living room davenport in the night-light glow, and for the first time Karena considers giving it up. Handing the whole mess over to the people who are paid to take care of it, the authorities in charge. Officers of the law and courts who will parse the emotion out of it, reduce it to paperwork, sentencing, clarity.