A Small Crowd of Strangers

by Joanna Rose

  He’d told her he wanted to name their first child after his father or his mother.

  He couldn’t remember what she’d said. If she’d said anything. If she’d laughed.

  He pulled the silk tie off the rack, sliding it over his hand, and then anger rushed through him that left no air for breathing. It was the tie he’d worn when they got married. He hung it back up. His hand shook. He took the green-and-gold-striped tie and rolled it neatly. He zipped closed the hanging bag and took it out to the car.

  He looked up the routes back to New Jersey. He made toast. He was being as quiet as he could. He wanted her to stay asleep. He lay on the couch and felt his heart beating hard. Too hard. He thought of his father’s heart beating this hard, and now he had to tell him about this.

  Everything was weird. Time was weird. He always stopped his students from saying weird. He would ask them, What does that mean?

  When it finally got light, he left her sleeping. He’d get the oil changed. Get the tires checked. The day was weirdly sunny.

  He drove toward the school, past the grocery store on the corner, where he’d sometimes stop to pick up something for lunch and visit with the obese woman who owned the place. That was it. “New on the deli menu,” she’d told him. She’d handed him the foil-wrapped meatball sandwich, the size and shape of a football. “This will make you happy.” She said things like that, never cracked a smile, or laughed.

  He called Father McGivens from the small waiting room at the oil-change place. No one else was there. He told him about the fire and the birth control pills and that they were coming back early. That he would quit his job. That he wanted to bring her back home and stay there. Finally, he didn’t know what else to say, and stopped. The sounds of the garage were loud. Guys were shouting at each other.

  He said, “I don’t really know what to do.”

  Father McGivens said, “Come here first. We’ll talk before you see your folks.”

  He went to the school. The kids were already gone on break. The halls were empty. He went into the office, and the office manager, Sister Therese, was there, at the copy machine. She had on jeans and a Green Bay Packers sweatshirt instead of her usual clothes.

  She said, “Hi, Michael. Got your grade book for me?” Not really looking up from her copying.

  Other than that, everything was quiet. Weird.

  He thought about telling her he wasn’t coming back after break. He wanted to tell someone. He wanted to explain to someone.

  He could just say, My father is ill.

  Or, I need to be with my family at this time.

  What if he said, My wife has gone crazy, starting quite some time ago, actually, so you see, we really have to go back to New Jersey. Sort things out.

  What he said was, “Rick in yet?” His voice felt weak.

  “Nobody but us church mice,” Sister Therese said.

  Relief. He took some mail from his box and went up the hall to his classroom.

  The desks were in their rows. The whiteboard was clean. The stack of graded final papers was on his desk, all the edges squared. He sat down, and the rows of empty seats stretched away in front of him. He felt the crying well up in him, and he pulled out his grade book. He looked each paper over and entered each grade. When he came to Joshua’s paper, inked all over with his own trademark bright green corrections, with C- at the top, he stopped. Reread it. It was pretty bad. He got the green pen from the drawer and changed the C- to B-. Entered it in the book and went on.

  When he was finished, he sat still. The late winter sun across his desk showed the dust. They’d had a conversation in class that last day about graffiti. He had told them about Kilroy. World War II graffiti, he’d told them. No one knew for sure who Kilroy even was. They’d all agreed it was weird. And now here was Kilroy, drawn in the dust on his desk.

  If not for this moment, with the sun across the desk, he would never have seen it.

  He said, “Fuck,” out loud, but not very loud. Then he left.

  She was up when he got back. She was wearing that pink hippie shirt. The toast was still on the plate on the kitchen table. The dog was on the couch. Its tail wagged, and that flash of anger came and then was gone.

  He said, “We can’t take that dog home with us.”

  She stood perfectly still in the middle of the living room. He didn’t want her to wear that shirt.

  She said, “I’m not going.”

  The sky was turning red and purple out the window behind her.

  He said, “What do you mean?”

  The sunset clouds streaked all the way across the sky.

  She said, “I think we’re breaking up.”

  She’d been crying and her face was red. She looked awful.

  He said, “What about my father?”

  She held out the sapphire ring.

  He said, “What about my mother?”

  She just kept holding out the ring. So he took it. His hand was not shaking. He put the ring in his pocket. She just cried, without sound. She wouldn’t look away. Her face looked like it was cracking apart.

  He went into the office. His bag sat by the desk. He picked it up. It wasn’t even heavy.

  He went back out, and she hadn’t moved. She was still crying.

  “I’m sorry, Michael.” Her voice was choked.

  He said, “So you mean divorce?” It sounded like someone else’s voice. Not his.

  “I think so.” Her nose was running, and she wiped it on the big pink sleeve.

  He went out the front door and it clicked shut behind him. His running shoes were on the porch step, like he wasn’t really leaving. But he was. He picked them up and went down the walk and looked back. She stood in the window. He got in the car and shut the door quietly. She didn’t move. He started the car and she still didn’t move. He had to drive away.

  By the time he got to the highway, the sky was purple and black.

  The lights hurt his eyes, so he rubbed them a lot and was glad when it got dark, but then the headlights of cars across the interstate were worse. The rest of him didn’t feel anything. He rolled the window down. He rolled the window up. Down and up.

  His cell phone rang. Rick. He let it go to voice mail, and a moment later, it chimed.

  Rick didn’t like Pattianne. Rick had told him about her, with Angela, their faces painted and feathers in their hair. Drunk in the middle of the afternoon. In their underwear. He’d been shocked as Rick spoke. Confused.

  Somewhere in the bright mess of Chicago, the handle came off in his hand. The window was half open, half closed.

  Gary, Indiana, spread out, off to the north. There were grids of factory lights in colored patterns that didn’t seem like they were on the ground. Just floating. Like the highway was just floating. Like he was. This was what it must be like to not believe in God. How could anyone not believe in God? What else was there to believe in? He lay on the horn. After a while, he realized he couldn’t even hear it.

  This was what it must be like to not believe in God.

  He banged his hands on the steering wheel until they hurt.

  The sky went from black to gray over Ohio. It was a shiny steel gray. It was going to be a clear, sunny day, and that made him cry. Actual tears. He wanted it to still be night, or maybe snowing. Maybe a blizzard. When the sun finally cracked the horizon, he pulled into a huge truck stop and drove around until he found a spot away from the loud idling semis, behind a tire warehouse. He pulled his coat around him and pulled his stocking cap down over his eyes and didn’t think he would sleep. His eyes twitched. He heard a sound that he realized was him, grinding his own teeth.

  Father McGivens had said to stop for rest and food. He had not said that everything would be okay.

  He woke up with shooting pains in his neck. The sun was shining on the car, but it was freezing. He should call her. He held his phone and stared at it. The battery was dead. His eyes didn’t focus. Both legs had pins and needles, and when he got out, he had to lean against t
he car and shake each leg.

  He went into the truck stop store limping, and bought a large black coffee and dumped sugar in it instead of cream. He thought it would help keep him going. He bought a pair of plastic sunglasses. He stared at the big map. New Jersey was a long way away. Farther ahead than St. Cloud was behind him. He should turn around and drive back to her.

  They were married. There was no just breaking up. No divorce. A sick feeling filled his stomach. He gulped the coffee, and it was too hot. It scalded his tongue and burned his throat. It hurt all the way down.

  He put on the sunglasses and kept driving. He bought more black coffees and kept driving. He argued with her.

  “How can you not believe in God?”

  And what if she explained how?

  “You’ve been lying to me every time we made love.”

  And what if she said she wasn’t sorry?

  “We’re married. We’re Catholic.”

  She wasn’t.

  “How can you do this to my parents?”

  That would make her cry. He wanted her to cry.

  He stopped and got a Big Mac and a vanilla shake. She teased him about vanilla being his favorite flavor. He had never understood why she thought that was funny. Now it seemed like he knew. Something about the ordinariness of vanilla. He was ordinary. He believed in God and rules. But they had used condoms, and they hadn’t disentangled, and he had lied to his parents and Father, pretending they weren’t living together. The Big Mac was too big, even though it wasn’t as big as a meatball sandwich, and he took huge bites and forced it down. He had lied to them, but he hadn’t lied to her. He hadn’t tricked her. He drank the shake fast, and it gave him a headache.

  He pulled onto the highway, and a semi roared past with its loud horn blasting, like it was blasting him right off the road, and he could have gotten killed right then, with sins of omission on his soul.

  The roads and highways started to fill in the fields, and the green highway signs got filled with information, and the names became familiar. He drove faster. He got to the dense tangles of Pittsburg, Highway 27, Highway 38, the New Jersey Turnpike.

  It was dark when he pulled into the small driveway behind Christ the King. Empty coffee cups rolled around on the floor. The sludge of all that sugar was all over the floor mat.

  He didn’t know how to do what he had to do now.

  He got his bag, and got out, and locked the car, even though the window was half down. The back door opened before he knocked, and Father McGivens stepped aside for him to go into the kitchen. He set the bag on a chair and said something, and Father said something. His throat was sore. Father poured them both a drink, a shot of dark whiskey, which burned his throat when he swallowed it in the one gulp. He leaned his elbows on his knees, and stared at the floor, and felt the road in his body. He stretched back and wished something would crack in his neck or his spine. He got a Kleenex out of his pocket, and there was the sapphire ring. It was so heavy. It glittered in the kitchen light. For the bride of their first-born son. It had always looked big on her hand. Her bitten fingernails, her hangnails. Next to her thin, gold wedding ring.

  Father said, “Are you angry?”

  “No, I ate at a McDonald’s.”

  There were probably a lot of places to get a meatball sandwich now that he was back in New Jersey. Back home.

  “What she’s done is a grave betrayal. Certainly grounds for annulment.” Father’s voice was low, almost a whisper. “But you can help her.”

  Help her. Change her. Fix her. Convince her to have a baby. Her red Keds and wispy hair and that scared look, like someone was about to notice her.

  He said, “She doesn’t believe in God.”

  “You need to get some rest. Come on to the guest room. Take a hot shower. We’ll call your folks.”

  Michael closed his hand around the ring. How could he face his father? Now he felt it. The sharp pain inside him. It felt like it was inside his chest, and in his stomach. Disgust, like nausea, like a meatball sandwich, rising.

  Day by day, she went to work and she came home to the house, to Bullfrog wagging his tail and oddly happy. She sat on the couch, at the kitchen table, on the bed with Bullfrog, and she tried to imagine what she didn’t really know. She tried to fill in bits and pieces from the news. She wondered if she’d heard the siren that day. The siren that was a man who rushed into a burning building early in the dark before dawn because he thought his daughter was in there, his daughter who sat in the clinic at night and read books about Buddhism, getting up every hour to walk through the building and make sure everything was all right. She looked out windows and doors and scanned the parking lot, which was lit with tall lights. There was never anyone there, and there was a cozy windowless room off the reception area of the clinic that once was a supply room. It had a soft leather couch, and a CD player with spacey meditation music, and a little windup alarm clock, and the daughter had catnaps there sometimes. The man took her breakfast at five a.m.—cinnamon rolls that he made himself from a tube that he whopped on the edge of the stove and called whopping biscuits. The tube popped apart, and the cinnamon rolls popped out, and he baked them for fifteen minutes on a cookie sheet while he shaved and dressed. The smell filled the house. He left one on a plate for his wife, next to the coffee pot full of coffee, and he wrapped two of them in a paper towel and put them in a bag along with two small boxes of juice. He loved those boxes of juice, with their little straws attached. The modern world amazed him. The morning of the fire, it was apple-cranberry juice. The morning of the fire, his daughter wasn’t dozing in the cozy room, she was out in the back of the building, calling 9-1-1 from her cell phone.

  Pattianne decided what to do, one thing to do, and she and looked up the number and called. The daughter answered.

  “Hello, my name is Pattianne.” She stopped because she didn’t know her own last name, or what to say next, or why she was doing anything, or how anything could make sense.

  Mission said, “From the bookstore?”

  So he had told her. Pattianne hadn’t even known that he’d known her name. When had that happened, that he’d learned her name and she hadn’t learned his?

  “Thank you,” Mission said. “He liked talking to you. That book you gave him was perfect.”

  “I just wanted to call. I liked him.”

  “Well, thank you.”

  And she made the decision she hadn’t known she would make.

  “I’m going to Canada,” she said. “I might be. I mean, to look for the silver tide.”

  Mission said, “Can we meet?”

  So she came to Pattianne’s house, knocked at the door, stood there for a minute in the cold wind, her hair wispy and red, and she seemed even smaller than she had at the Mizpahven Funeral Home. Pattianne held the door wide and she came in. The living room was empty, except for the couch, a table that used to have a deer lamp. Empty bookshelf. A box of books in the middle of the floor.

  “I’m moving.” Pattianne’s voice seemed to echo.

  “To Canada?”

  “No. I’m looking for a place here. In St. Cloud. Would you like some tea?”

  And she made jasmine tea for Mission, and said that she always wanted to go west, and that yes, that was her dog.

  “The silver tide,” she said. “I could go there, to that town. Tofino. I could take your father.” Swallowing hard. “On that journey.”

  Mission’s eyes were clear blue, and she closed them over the steam of her tea, sipped, opened, tears brightening and then slipping back.

  Pattianne said, “I’m so sorry.”

  She said, “I can tell.”

  But forgiveness wasn’t hers to grant, and Pattianne was on her own.

  “Please,” she said. “I would be so honored.” Which sounded awkward and not even close. “Humbled, I guess.”

  Not that either. Mission sat there blinking those eyes, and Pattianne couldn’t remember the color of the road worker’s eyes, just his bushy twitching e
yebrows.

  “I just promise I would do it right,” she said finally.

  “All by yourself?”

  Pattianne nudged Bullfrog with her toe, and he groaned in his sleep. “Me and him.”

  Mission smiled then, the tears slipped down her cheeks.

  “When?”

  Pattianne didn’t know, except that it probably didn’t matter. Maybe right after Christmas, before Michael came back. “Next week?”

  Mission reached into the pocket of her shirt, and when she held out her hand, there was one of the blue glass vials, lying flat in the middle of her small palm.

  Pattianne said, “Okay,” and took the vial and closed her own fingers around it and held it.

  And after that, it all came down to boxes, what to put in which box, and then what to do with the boxes. They were everywhere. In the living room, in the kitchen, in the bedroom, in Michael’s office. Open corrugated-cardboard boxes, the flaps making tricky geometric patterns in the sunlight on the floors, each box with just a few things in it. There wasn’t enough of anything to fill up a whole box. The blue glass candlesticks in with the antique duck decoy. A small wildlife parade in a box with a picture of Grandma Anthony. A rose-colored shirt in with Flora and Fauna of the Upper Midwest and a blue scented candle. A silver-framed wedding picture that kept moving from box to box.

  She put the dark wooden crucifix in with his college yearbook and his Donald Duck tie and the orange Fiestaware chip set with no chips. Purple beads and white origami cranes went in another box. Michael, her, Michael, her.

  A deer lamp with eyes that glittered. Michael. Extra jeans, a blue flannel pajama shirt, the Scrabble game. Her. The tiny stormscape. Her. She broke down then. Hard, loud sobs all through the small house.

  All the ways to stop what she’d started.

  III. TOFINO

  11: THE DRIFTING FOG GAVE IT A FACE

  The Pink Dolphin Motel was almost to Tofino. She and Bullfrog were driving, winding along the road, the road getting darker, the sky getting darker, the tall Douglas fir trees forming a tall, dark wall along the road. And there was the sign, up on one of the trees, a wooden sign, painted white, neat black letters, “Pink Dolphin Motel—Stay with Us,” and a smiling blue dolphin. About a mile down the road beyond the sign was another sign, “PINK DOLPHIN MOTEL” and another smiling blue dolphin, and a driveway off into a grassy clearing. She caught a glimpse of a low building, white-painted cinderblocks, and then the wall of fir trees closed back in around the Fiat.