by Owen Thomas
Hi Darling. Mom. Just checking in. I’ve been thinking about you. I’m back on the road. I know I’m hard to get a hold of these days. So I just wanted to make sure you were doing okay. I’ve heard…well, kind of a rumor. Someone in the group I’m with was watching one of those gossip shows. I’m sure you know all about it. There’s supposed to be a video … I don’t want to leave you a message in case someone steals your phone or something. I know that’s probably silly. And I know it’s all nonsense and you’re just going to tell me to ignore it like you always do. Lies, lies, lies. You’d think these people in the media could think of more productive things to do with their time and money. Like how about giving some attention to these wars! Oh, goodness, don’t get me started. I think I told you the Obama people said they would try to find time for us when they hit Pittsburg. I think they want to put us to work. We’re really pumped up about it and crazy, crazy busy. We’re still trying to corner Hillary but no luck so far. Our group is split right down the middle. Hillary’s the odds-on favorite but Obama’s stronger on the war issues. We’ll see I guess. Oh, and get this, I talked to your father a few days ago. He’s registering as an Independent! Can you even believe that? What is the world coming to? I mean you could have knocked me over with a feather. He says he’s always been Independent, which makes me think he has gone crazy, but I really think that I’ve pulled him to the left! He’d probably sooner die than vote for Hillary… but Obama? You think that’s possible? I’ve still got another year to work on him. No! Turn here! Gayle! Here, here, here! Sorry, Sweetie. I’m just rambling and filling up your phone. I just miss you and hope you’re well. Love you. End of Mess…
Tilly. Blair again. Listen, I know, I know, but this is a different call entirely. Call me as soon as you get this message. I don’t care how late it is. I’ve just heard that Zack has been arrested for possession. You can sure pick ‘em Sheila. I don’t know where you are, but do not go home. The police are looking for you. Detective came by about four o’clock. I don’t know if you’re mixed up in this but I think you need a lawyer. I took the liberty of talking with studio counsel about it and he said you should have your own guy. So I called a lawyer at the firm that handled my divorce. Dalrymple is his name. Burt, no, Burton Dalrymple. He wants to meet with you before you have any conversation with the police. He wants to go in with you to talk with them. Let’s avoid a public arrest and keep this out of the papers if we can. Just don’t go home. Come to my place if you … fuck, you’re never gonna do that are you? Not after I was such a dick. Did I mention that I’m sorry? Well then just go to a hotel tonight and call me. Where the fuck are you anyway, Tillyjohn? I’m getting worried. Oh, and on the off chance you hear from Angus, tell the son of a bitch to answer his goddamned phone. Why doesn’t anyone answer their goddamned phone anymore? End of…
I let the phone go dark and sat down slowly on the bed. Kelly and Kyle were accusing each other in the courtyard. The air conditioner kicked on again, washing over the outside voices like footprints in the sand, leaving only the inside voices.
It’ll pass, said Eric.
I’m sorry for everything, said Peg.
And then, said Elena, when it was completely dark, and everyone was in their tents, the lions came.
CHAPTER 47 – Susan
“Hey. It’s me.”
“Well, Gayle. I was just going to call you.”
“Right. You were just going to call me and tell me to come over tomorrow and pick up a few pages of inspiration, right?”
“No, I…”
“You were just going to call and assure me that you were not going to let me down, right?”
“No…”
“I know you were not just going to call me up and tell me that you haven’t written anything because you’ve been busy matching your husband’s socks. So I know that I can come on over, right? I can drop by on my way out of town, right? Right, Susan?”
“Wrong.”
“Ah Suze...”
“Don’t come by.”
“You’re hopeless. It won’t take you that long. It…”
“I’m coming to you.”
“…”
“Gayle?”
“You’re coming to me?”
“I’m coming to you. I’m coming with you.”
“You are?! Really? You’re actually coming? Are you fucking with me?”
“No, I’m not. I’ll be there first thing in the morning. Do you have an extra helmet?”
“What? I was just going to drive.”
“We take the bike or I’m not going.”
“Damn, sister! What’s got into you?”
“Forty years of marriage. One day at a time.”
“It’s not the fastest bike, you know. Probably lookin’ at, oh, four hours or so.”
“All the better.”
“My spare helmet says Biker Bitch on it.”
“All the better.”
“We’ll have to swing through Springfield on the way.”
“Springfield?”
“Can’t leave Mary Jane behind, now can I?”
“Ah. All the better.”
“I do love that laugh. You know, you’re going to … uh…heh…you’re gonna have to hold on to me pretty tight the whole way, Susan.”
“All the better, Gayle.”
CHAPTER 48 – Hollis
Clink. Thud.
Hollis Johns dropped his keys into the ceramic bowl and closed the front door. The sounds traveled outward, moving away from him, up the stairs and down the hall and out through the living room, like domestic sonar, like bloodhounds searching for life. They never returned. Nary a bray.
Not that he had expected something different. He knew the house was empty. It was empty when he had left to take Ben to school and it was still empty. And that was okay. Empty was good. Empty was what he needed for awhile.
He managed, although not without assistive grimacing, to wrench each foot out of its shoe and then pad his way, slowly, painfully, upstairs to the bedroom. It was now the second full day following his enthusiastic return to physical fitness and his body felt like it had been beaten over a rock and then quartered in a four-way tractor pull. He stooped at the waist, as though even the sky were dangerously low. His legs resented the weight of his feet. His thighs objected to climbing stairs, and getting in and out of the car, and standing up. He could not fully extend either arm below the elbow, nor lift his arms above the level of his shoulders. Turning on and off a light switch required a semi-controlled flail. Lamps – which required reaching both out and up – were not worth the trouble. The lowest third of his back was a tree fully engulfed in flame and ibuprofen was but a limp stream from a plastic, candy-colored squirt gun. All Hollis had really wanted to do over the past forty-eight hours, and increasingly so, was to sit down. Or lay down.
Susan, who had not found it in herself to muster any sympathy whatsoever for Hollis’ condition, had snipped at him to go see Dr. Finch and to get a prescription for something. Vicodin, Percocet, Percodan… something… anything… that would, as she had put it as she had stuffed clothing into an old Kent State back pack, wipe that ridiculous grimace off your face every time you move a muscle.
Hollis had taken some offense at the whole notion of grimacing, even knowing that she was angry and simply looking for ways to insult him. I’m fine, I’m fine he had scowled, waving dismissively at the silliness of her suggestion as though it were a nettlesome insect, an action that was like a serrated knife through the shredded meat of his right bicep. The wave had produced another grimace. Susan had rolled her eyes.
Hollis swatted at the light switch inside the bedroom door, swinging his arm up and out with the momentum of its own weight, like an angry marionette, rather than daring to flex any muscle. He missed. He didn’t need the damn light on anyway.
He looked around the darkened, empty room. The unmade bed beckoned. Its rumple of white sheet spilling in cool, seductive rebellion from beneath the cumulous butter crème duv
et. He shuffled over to the edge of the bed where only two hours earlier he had groaned and grimaced his way up into the day, Susan already gone. He sat on the edge of the bed, not in a controlled descent, but heavily, in a free fall down onto the cushion of mattress so that he would not have to call upon the muscles of his upper thighs for any assistance. He knew better than to lie down. Were he to lie down, it might be a week before he had the fortitude to pull himself upright.
There were scattered dots and streaks of blood on his pillow from the opening on the top of his head. The wound had finally stopped hurting and had stopped bleeding, hardening over into a scab the size of a nickel. The scab itched, like something very small and tentacled had been sealed inside and was scraping the underside of his scalp trying to get out. After a long, very hot shower that had loosened up his shoulder muscles enough to allow him to lift his arms, he had scratched.
“You’re just going to open that thing up again,” Susan had said, not trying to contain her exasperation. “You’re going to get blood on the pillowcase.”
Of course, Hollis understood that the point of her comment had not been about the damn pillow case at all, but rather to tell him that she thought he was a child… no, it was worse than that… to tell him that he was an old man with the sense of a child. She wanted to scold him. To emasculate him. To infantilize him. Well, he was having none of it.
“Why don’t you just worry about yourself,” he had chided from across the bathroom. “How about that? Hmm? How about that? I’ll worry about my own head and my own pillow and you worry about putting all of your little toiletries there in your bag. I thought you lesbians didn’t wear make-up.”
Susan had looked sideways at him, not deigning to pivot her head.
“I’m not a lesbian, Hollis.” The words were like little chips of ice, shattering on the tile. Hollis had picked up his brush, pulling it through his hair as vigorously as his rapidly re-stiffening muscles would allow, the bristles relieving the aching scab with every stroke.
“I know you’re not a lesbian, Susan. I’m just trying to be … supportive.”
Thinking about it made his head itch and he wanted to scratch. He wanted to find the scab with his fingertips and scratch and let whatever was on the inside of him out. But his arms were having none of it. So he sat quietly on the bed, surveying the darkened room, swaddled in a thickness of ache and quiet, wondering what to do with himself.
He pondered at how it had been a point of pride, not asking Susan where she was going. Initially, Hollis did not think that he had needed to ask. He thought it a foregone conclusion that she was headed back to Peebles for another dose of lesbian war camp. Another hot tub toke-and-tickle party. There was no particular reason for him to think this except that this is where she had gone the last time.
But in the frigorific pall that settled over the house in the day before she left, it had occurred to Hollis that maybe she was going someplace else. Some other retreat. A different camp. Gayle’s home. A hotel. As far as he knew the war camp was done and over and this time she was headed down to Mexico or taking a road trip through New England. She had given him no clues, and while he might have simply asked her, that was precisely what she had wanted him to do. She wanted to be chased. Pined after. Worried about. Fretted over. Susan, oh Susan, where are you going? When will you come home? Will you call me when you get there? Will you be safe? Will you take some sunscreen? Did you remember your cell phone? Do you still love me? She wanted some sign that her immature, petulant decision to leave again – coldly and casually announcing as she bent over the sink to wash her face that she was going away for awhile – had gotten his attention; had rattled him; scared him. She had hoped that by holding back the details, he would assume the worst – whatever that was – and that he would drop to his knees begging forgiveness. Begging her to stay.
Well, he was not about to play that game. He had not played that game with Tilly and he sure as hell would not play that game with Susan. Emotional manipulation could not be rewarded with attention. The best response was to ignore it; to turn one’s back, giving nothing. Never pay the ransom, he had thought. Wherever she was going, and for however long she planned on being away, he would not validate her tactics with displays of concern or even idle curiosity. If she wanted to go, then, by all means, she should go.
And she had.
The downside, of course, was that he now had no idea where she was, or who she was with, or what she was doing, or when she would be back, and not knowing these things was driving him crazy. He told himself that she surely had her cell phone with her and that he could call her whenever he wanted. Furthermore, he knew that Susan would only abandon Ben – who was he kidding … she would only trust him to take care of Ben – for so long before her maternal instincts brought her back to the nest. Any real concern, therefore, was an over-reaction and he knew it.
Still, it was the principle of it all that bothered him.
Hollis reached out, grimaced, clutched the glass of water on the nightstand and took a drink. It tasted warm and dusty and old. He put it back down near his stack of nighttime reading; books he was working his way through more or less simultaneously, ten minutes at a time, in that sliver of consciousness between pulling the covers over his chest and dropping into the black ocean of sleep. The stack, twisting like a spiral staircase to just beneath the rim of the lampshade, bespoke a carefully balanced eclecticism. From bottom to top: Diamonds in the Rough: The Success of Warren Buffet; The Toa of Mindfulness; The Age of Idiots: The Case Against Democracy; Second Wind: Why Sixty is Only the Beginning; If You Meet Buddha on the Road, and Other Life-Changing Aphorisms; and The Complete Works of Vladimir Nabokov.
For a moment he considered taking advantage of the empty quiet by propping up a pillow and reading. Susan would have never let him lay in bed in the middle of the day reading. Imagining her disapproval, he eyed the stack of books. He almost reached. But the idea died on the vine. Even if he was able to stay awake for more than a few minutes, which was highly unlikely if not unprecedented under such conditions, the thought of holding up a book for more than a few minutes made the ravaged muscles in his arms ache and moan with dread.
He had tried to sleuth out where Susan was going. She had placed several phone calls before she left, and she had received several phone calls. Hollis had turned down the music in his den and listened, straining for single words that might start a trail of deduction; “Peebles” or “Gayle” or “airport” or “Mexico” or “orgy.” But he had been too far away. He could hear her voice, but not her words. On three occasions she had laughed and said I know, I know. But while the laughter on the eve of his abandonment had been disturbing, and it certainly had, the words I know, I know, had done nothing to shed any light on his wife’s intentions.
This morning he had awakened to the sound of the toilet flushing. Struggling to consciousness, and then struggling further to come to terms with the slabs of concrete that someone had placed over every inch of his body during the night, Hollis had seen Susan passing through the bedroom door, across the room, and out into the hallway, pack in hand. She did not look back. Hollis had turned his head to the nightstand. It was 6:39. Less than a minute later he had heard the front door closing. Wherever she was going, she would be getting breakfast on the road.
Hollis had felt a dull pain in his chest. He had told himself it was only a flange of the same pain that afflicted the rest of his body. He had closed his eyes. Against his will, and for only a fraction of a moment as he lay there listening to the closing door, he had wondered whether he would ever see her again. The car accident. The serial killer. The stray bullet. The poisonous spider. The unchewed bit of steak. He had wondered whether his sense of her physical presence in the last sixty seconds was the last that he would ever have. What if the last act of his wife before departing his life forever was to flush the toilet and close the door?
But if the musings of 6:39 am had tended towards the self-pitying and the maudlin, those si
nce his second awakening at 9:15 had been entirely different. The normal activities of the morning – showering and dressing and making Ben breakfast and reading the paper and cleaning up the dishes – had been grounding, allowing his thoughts to steep in a broth of wry, amused equanimity. Ah, Susan. Ol Susan. Wife of mine. When will you just relax about the world long enough to see how silly this is? When your head clears you’re going to feel more than just a little sheepish about all of this. You’re going to wish you had realized sooner. We’ll be laughing about this. You’ll see. I’ll wait, like I always wait, until you can see things in a better light and we’ll laugh. Life is a process of understanding. A perpetually unfolding revelation. She can’t just skip to the end. I can’t expect that from her. She has to go from here to there. And that just means that I have to be patient. I’ll wait and she’ll see and we’ll laugh.
The flavor of his ruminations continued to change as he drove Ben to school. His morning had gotten away from him. When he had looked up from his paper and seen his youngest son –Buckeyes cap backwards on his head, headphones, backpack – dancing to his music in the back yard, he had realized in a jolt that he was late. Oh, damn it. Damn it, Susan. It was only halfway to the school that he had remembered what else he had forgotten. Lunch. He had not made Ben lunch. Normally, Susan made Ben’s lunch as though it were part of making breakfast. Even before she had cleaned up the dishes, Ben’s lunch – double-decker PBJ, chips, apple, carrots, juice – was in the refrigerator waiting. Damn it. Did she not even care? Was she just oblivious to the inconvenience? To the imposition? What the hell is she thinking?
The realization had forced Hollis to detour sharply into a fast food drive-through six blocks from the building in which Ben’s daily education had long since started without him. Hollis’ mood had leavened a bit at the unqualified, seat-bouncing, high-fiving, my-dad’s-the-best-dad-in-the-whole-wide-world glee Ben expressed at the prospect of eating a double-cheeseburger and fries and a Coke in a place of learning.