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Ohio

Page 24

by Stephen Markley


  Ben waited. “She didn’t take it well.”

  “No, she did—I . . . There was this moment when I saw in her face—like she was trying to make a decision. And she could’ve gone either way, I’m sure of it.”

  Telling Ben this, she was basically right back in the moment. Dizzy and so short of breath that her apologies emerged in dry little heaves, like she’d just finished a sprint.

  “I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry,” she kept saying to her mother.

  When her mom started crying, tears pretty much exploding out of her eyes, Stacey truly felt like she might pass out. Why had she thought it would be a good idea to tell her? She should not have done that. It would destroy everything she had left. She would never be able to come home without this hanging between them. Her mom would never see her the same way, would never again be her best friend. And Lisa was gone. And now she had no one.

  “How long?” Her mom wiped spastically at her eyes, open wounds that kept refilling. “How long have you thought this?”

  “I don’t know. A long time now. Years, I guess.” For some reason, Stacey remembered camping and the time she fell into her own patch of pee. How hard they’d both laughed. She mourned to go back to that moment. She couldn’t think of anything else to say, so she kept apologizing.

  Finally, her mom’s arm slid under hers, and she gripped Stacey’s hand with the strength of a fever.

  “No. Don’t be sorry. I just can’t believe you didn’t tell me.” She took Stacey’s chin and pulled her face up so they were eye to eye. She’d never seen her mother so distraught, so sorrowful. Her bright blue irises, which she’d always thought of as a configuration of home, bore into her own. “I just wish you’d have known you could tell me.” She palmed Stacey’s skull, then her cheek. “You’re my love, Stacey. And that love has no conditions, no exceptions, no matter what. Do you understand? I would die before I’d stop loving you.”

  There’s something about hugging your mom that sends you back in time. Something about the detergent smell of her shoulder and the clean shampoo scent of her hair that reminded Stacey she had a long life ahead. So many things to do and see. She couldn’t believe that all this time she’d let the dark gods of her neurons guide her so wrong. When Matt and her dad got home, she told them, and then they sat around on the couch for a while, teary and alive, laughing about how much they all loved one another.

  “So it sounds like it worked out,” Ben said very carefully. She reminded herself she was nineteen years old. There was so much more left to see.

  “It did, but . . .” She shook her head because he wasn’t getting it. She pointed to the table, jabbed her index finger to gain focus and control. “Lisa didn’t do this to me. This is who I am and who I’ve always been, but I cared about her. And let me tell you, I could fucking kill her if I saw her right now. Because she left. I faced this down alone. I didn’t run away. I didn’t hide. Even though it terrified me to do it, I did it. And now everyone talks about how much courage Lisa had to go running off to the other side of the world? Fuck her. I had fucking courage. I had courage.”

  She retracted her finger and folded her arms. Ben sat back in the booth and looked out the window, glum on his pretty face like mud. “I realize . . .” He hesitated. To think about what would happen to him. To think of him then: so beautiful and alive and her friend. “I realize this may not be helpful, but you’ve got . . . a good thing.” He spoke each word deliberately.

  “How do you figure that?” she wondered, almost angrily.

  “You just said it. Your family’s standing by you. You know when I last spoke to my dad? Last summer. He’s down in Florida visiting my uncle while I’m here. Know why? Because we can’t be in the same room together.”

  “You two always butted heads.”

  “No, you don’t understand.” He held his hands apart like he was cupping a loaf of bread. “I hate him. I hate him totally and completely. He is a small-minded, bitter man who’s going to get liver disease and be dead within a decade, and you know what? I cannot fucking wait. I love my mom, I love my sisters, but I hate that man. He’s poisoned everything I’ve ever done, and if I let him near me he’ll poison whatever I try to do.”

  Because in those days she felt so close to bursting into tears all the time, it was unsettling to see Ben clear-eyed, motivated, and convinced of what he was saying.

  “If you have people beside you in life who care about you, who love you, who you can count on—that’s all there is, Stace.”

  “And you don’t.”

  “No, I do! That’s what I’m saying. I learned the difference. I’ve got Mom and my sisters, and Bill and Rick—if I can ever get them to talk to each other again.”

  She laughed despite herself. “You’re counting your two douchebag high school friends?”

  He grinned, surely knowing what a torch his smile could be. “I consider them more douchebag high school brothers.”

  Then they were both laughing hard enough that other lunch patrons glanced over the tops of the booths to see what could possibly be so hilarious.

  * * *

  “Speaking of your neighborhood, I saw Bethany Kline tonight. Actually, that’s sorta the reason I’m here. She wants my help getting Lisa to come home.”

  Mr. Clifton arched his eyebrows once. “Ah.”

  “Do you ever . . . Have you ever . . . heard anything from Lis?”

  He took a long quaff and then licked the foam from his upper lip, now missing the mustache he’d worn for so long. “The inimitable Lisa Han.” His eyes and lips searched for the right words. “Let me say two things: One, I have no patience for what Lisa did taking off like that. If Kim or J.D. pulled that on me, I would consider them cruel people. I would wonder if they could take into account human beings other than themselves.”

  She wanted to shout both Yes! and But you don’t understand.

  “On the other hand, I’ve lived across the street from Bethany since they moved in, when Lisa was seven or eight years old, and I know that woman has problems. She needs to see a therapist as badly as anyone I’ve ever met.” He inspected a chip in his glass, scratching a thumb over the divot. “I wrote to Lisa maybe a year after she left.”

  Stacey’s entire body tensed. “You did?”

  “Sure. Just to say I understand why she did what she did, but that didn’t excuse it. Her mother was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and she had a responsibility to call her, to try to work it out.”

  “Bethany didn’t tell me that.”

  “I at least got Lisa to write to her, but . . .” He waved a hand to indicate how it ended there.

  “Where was she?”

  “About to cross into Cambodia, according to her.”

  She blinked back furious tears. Mr. Clifton could see this struggle, though.

  “I take it you have not heard from her in some time?”

  “No.” She shook her head, swallowed, and swallowed some more. “It’s not just her fault, it’s mine too. I was . . . pissed at her. I didn’t try very hard.”

  “If it makes you feel a bit better, you’re not the only one. Lisa was always brash, impulsive, and I think she’s completely miscalculated how much she’s hurt the people who care about her. Take Danny. Those two were thick as thieves when they were little. He went and did three tours in the army. Three tours. Paul and I were supposed to get beers tonight, but Danny wandered off and didn’t come home, so now Paul’s back at the house waiting up. It’s like even though Dan’s the same sweet kid I’ve known since he was in diapers, he’s not. Not really. It’s not just his injury either.” She’d heard of Dan’s lost eye, torn from its socket in some botched operation pushing the pointless Sisyphean boulder that was Afghanistan. Maybe he hadn’t suffered Rick Brinklan’s fate, but there was something about the intimacy of an eyeball, the slick softness, that demanded it bear no injury in anyone’s lifetime. “He’s erratic,” Mr. Clifton went on. “He’s distant. He’s about a million miles from the kid he w
as, and really, I’m coming to realize I always thought of him basically as one of my own. Now it’s like talking to the ghost of Danny.”

  “Talking to Danny was always like talking to the ghost of Danny.”

  He appeared not to appreciate this gentle ribbing.

  “No, not like this. He needed someone, and Lisa could have been that friend to him. You know? If you do talk to her, please tell her I said that.”

  She felt an urge then. Because sitting across this table surface felt confessional. She wanted to spill everything about Lisa, about Bethany, about her final errand of the night. But something stopped her. Instead she drained the last of her beer. It wasn’t the note she wanted to leave on, but it was late, an hour had gone by in a blink, and her mom and dad would both be waiting up. She told Mr. Clifton how glad she was that she ran into him.

  “Just keep being yourself, Ms. Moore,” he said. “The world needs souls like yours.” She hugged him again, said good-bye. He turned his attention to the baseball game, and as she departed into the warm fluid of the night, she marveled at how many extremely decent people she’d known in this place. How much she’d taken them for granted.

  * * *

  She crossed from New Canaan’s downtown into the nearest residential neighborhood. She passed her old church on the corner of McArthur and High Streets, where as a toddler she’d played in the basement, where she’d sat every Sunday of her adolescence. She remembered the First Christian Church as staggeringly tall, looming over the town, a fixture of permanence and strength. Passing it now, maybe five years since the last time she was inside, it was like seeing it through a new set of eyes. Fixed atop the twin wooden doors, the stained glass mural of Jesus on the cross looked like a cheap, garage-sale version of the epic mosaics she’d seen in old European cathedrals. The gray brick edifice was too bright. A sixties ranch home architect trying to pawn off a Gothic sensibility and failing badly.

  She had to walk only another block. When Patrick and Becky went house hunting right after her niece Jamie was born, they decided on an old colonial-style near downtown because it was walking distance from First Christian. The porch light was on, but the home was otherwise dark. She took the envelope from her purse and read her brother’s name one last time—as if she might have accidentally written another one without realizing. She stood beside his mailbox, letter in hand. Just staring.

  When she told Patrick she was going to Columbus to see their parents, he’d, as usual, asked that she spend the night with him, Becky, and the girls.

  You haven’t been to see us in New Canaan in years. We always have to catch you at Mom and Dad’s. There was good reason for this. At their parents’ place, Patrick dared not bring up what she knew he wanted to.

  The last time she stayed with them—not the kitchen conversation right after she came out, but years later, well after she thought he’d given up on his absurd notions of conversion—he’d cornered her after Becky and the girls went to bed. Sat her down on the living room couch. Put his hand on her shoulder. And he started crying.

  “Hell is real,” he said. “I know you don’t want to hear that. But I have to say it.” He tapped the corners of his eyes to staunch his tears. “I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try. Because, Stacey, you’re playing with literal fire here. You’re living a lifestyle contrary to everything laid out in the Bible. You’re in danger. You have to understand that.”

  “Why won’t you stop this,” she begged, hating the tinny, pleading sound of her voice. She wanted so badly to get angry, but she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. She remembered too well how Patrick put her on his shoulders during the Fourth of July parade when she was little and nearly burned his hair off with her sparkler. When he let her hang out with him and Becky when they were in high school and Becky still filled her with such older girl awe. How when Stacey’s team lost in the finals of their seventh-grade volleyball tournament, and she was so embarrassed by how hard she was crying, he hugged her, and made dumb joke after dumb joke that cracked her up despite herself. How when she, Patrick, and Matt got Monopoly for Christmas and played it to exhaustion, Patrick would always win, but he would also team up with her to make sure Matt finished last. He was her brother. She was helpless not to love him still. “Mom and Dad are over this. They’re past it. Why can’t you be?”

  “Mom and Dad are doing what they think is right.” He put his hand on her cheek. The wrinkles of a husband and father had crowded around his eyes. He was beginning to look so much like their dad. “And so am I. You can still change, Stacey. You can get help. There’s still time. God can forgive anything if you allow Him.”

  She stood in front of her brother’s home holding the envelope. She couldn’t say on the phone—let alone to his face—what she’d written in this letter. It only occurred to her to pen it after she agreed to see Bethany. She’d say to Lisa’s mother what she’d always wanted to say, and then she’d tell Patrick what she needed to tell him. She’d confront the two people who’d long made her ashamed for what she shouldn’t have been ashamed of. She’d hurl at these two birds the same lethal stone. Yet she almost wanted to fail at this. To walk away. More than that, she wondered if Patrick would even hear what she was saying. She’d sealed the envelope before rereading, but certain phrases came back to her, things she’d written to be as cruel to Patrick as he’d been to her. If she wasn’t cruel, he wouldn’t understand. He would not comprehend that his “love” for her was part of the reason she almost did something horrifically drastic as a scared, lonely eighteen-year-old. She recalled the line where she said he was part of the reason she almost hanged herself in her dorm room closet. No god could save a person from the responsibility of doing that to someone they claimed to love.

  She opened the mailbox, set the letter inside, and closed it.

  As she walked away, she pulled her phone from her pocket to text her parents that she was running several hours behind but instead saw the push notification for an e-mail. She slid it open. A chill rippled through her.

  Hey Magical. Things are going well. Kiss the ground of The Cane for me. Let’s catch up soon.

  –L

  Stacey wasn’t sure what drove to the core of her aching and resentment and love for Lisa more: that after all these years all it had taken was one stupid e-mail, maybe not to hear Lisa’s voice, but to at least see it alive on the screen—or that in the last decade Lisa had forgotten the nickname she’d bestowed on her, the one Stacey so wanted to hear again.

  * * *

  “We have our lenses, our goggles,” Hilde told her at some point in their three days together in Zagreb. “We see our friends, our lovers, our home—all of it through this filter. And in many ways the impossibility of ever removing that lens, it’s our defining trait as a species.”

  In 2011, Stacey moved to Ecuador to teach English while she applied to English graduate programs. Before she flew back to the States to begin at Michigan, she decided she wanted to see the world’s greatest rain forest while it was still around. She flew first to Rio de Janeiro and then to Manaus, where the Rio Negro and the Rio Solimões split from the Amazon. Jet lag and an unpleasant reaction to the malaria pills made it a dizzying, mostly miserable trip. She felt hungover the whole time, in a perpetual state of soggy-headed exhaustion. On the tour she met a young couple, Nadja and Carlos, who were departing from the tour early, driving a rental car back to Manaus, and they offered Stacey a ride. She fell asleep in the backseat of their SUV, the jungle canopy blocking most of the sunlight from the lonesome highway that wound through the fringes of the jungle. When she came to, it was like she’d been dropped onto an alien planet. The rain forest was gone. They were driving along the side of a mountain, running parallel to a valley below where parched, sickly trees clamored from dry grass. Down in the valley, moving along a dirt road as wide as an airport tarmac, were thousands and thousands of cattle. The sun had fallen just to the horizon and a brown-yellow light filtered through the massive constellation of dust kicked
up by the hooves of the animals. They were being corralled by two helicopters, which hovered above, blades beating the wind in a thudding, staccato percussion. The beasts moved like a river of flesh and leather, chugging over the land in loose formation, braying in fear or boredom or annoyance. Carlos was asleep, and stupidly, she asked Nadja what they were looking at.

  She said it first in Portuguese and then translated. “Cattle ranch.”

  But this was only a ranch the way Noah’s disaster was only a flood. This line of cattle stretched farther than she could see, brown and white, black and spotted, a ghostly noise rising from their collective voices, until they reached an enormous enclosure of aluminum gates and barbed wire fencing. The helicopters buzzed along like dragonflies, their opaque windshields grinning with the smugness of conquerors, certain that nothing could come along and sweep them away. Urine-yellow clouds wafted over the land, coating the draining day, the horizon ablaze with sickly brown light. Never in her life had Stacey felt so ill, the invisible scent that links us to our ancestors, to all living things right down to the lichen at the beginning of creation, rising through her lungs, throat, and nostrils like gorge. Watching that river of beasts was akin to watching a man try to bite off and eat his own tongue. In the years to come this image would never quite leave her. She’d think of those animals, and the reality of what was happening to her, to the people she loved, to her home, would become overwhelming. Occasionally this sensation would take hold of her heart and grip it with the loneliness of death, and she would wish for Lisa. Because when your waking mind is consumed at all times by wanton devastation, by oblivion, you have no choice but to dream of courage.

 

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