The Locals
Page 38
“Mom!”
“You’ve heard what happened with the guy who was the trooper here before you, right?” Karen said. Her arms were spread wide apart.
Something in the trooper stiffened. He tried to establish eye contact with Haley around her mother’s body.
“Anyway it’s not a crime, it’s a protest,” Karen said, her voice shaking. “A political protest. Free speech.”
“A protest,” Officer Pratt said skeptically. “Against what?”
They both turned to look at Haley on the bed.
“Miss?” the officer said. “What are your demands?”
“What?”
“Demands. Conditions. I mean, if it’s some kind of sit-in or something, then you are refusing to leave the premises until X happens, right? So what’s X? Because then I can relay those demands to whomever,” he said, turning back to Karen, “and we can negotiate, and that buys you some time.”
“I don’t have any demands,” Haley said.
“You what?”
“I never had any demands. That would be stupid. I’m not in a position to demand anything from anybody.”
“Okay,” Karen said, “we are three reasonable people, we’re talking reasonably now, let’s give this one more try. Officer, I am asking you as humbly as I know how, I’m begging you, please let us just pack up my daughter’s few things and we will leave this place and not come back. I mean, I’ll come back, because I have to. But she will never come back.”
Pratt gazed above her head and said nothing.
“If you arrest us both, there’s a record, and there’s publicity, and that won’t look great for anyone,” Karen said. “It’s in our power right now to make this whole thing go away, to make it exactly like none of it ever happened at all.”
“How do I know she won’t publicize it?” Pratt said. “Or hasn’t publicized it already. Why else do it? What’s the point of this kind of agitation if you just keep it to yourself?”
In witnessing this encounter between her mother and the cop, this confrontation between authorities that was resolving itself into a collaboration, Haley felt beginning to descend on her the understanding that she’d been hoping for all along.
“She won’t,” Karen said. “We give you our word. I mean, she hasn’t yet, has she? Haley, does anyone else know about this?”
“Just Dad,” she said.
“See?” Karen said. “It’s not political like that. Just a kid rebelling.”
Pratt looked much more irritated than relieved. “If you’re lying to me and this is not the end of it,” he said, “next time we meet there won’t be all this debating going on. Understood?”
Karen nodded meekly.
“I’ll go downstairs and I will give you five minutes to collect your things and remove all trace of yourselves from the premises. Also, you have to understand that it is still within the rights of whoever actually owns this place to file a criminal complaint against you, if they ever hear about it, and should that happen, it’s beyond my discretion. Understood?”
“Yes,” Karen said. “Thank you, Officer. Haley, say thank you to the officer.”
“Thank you,” Haley whispered.
He left the bedroom. Silently they packed Haley’s clothes and together walked down the broad stairs and out the front door. Pratt waited in his cruiser. Outside, Karen entered the code. Pratt followed them until they were back on the main road, then he turned left and Karen turned right.
“My car’s still in the lot,” Haley said.
“It’ll be safe there until we go get it,” her mom said. “Where do you want to go right now? I mean you probably want to go home and take a shower or something but are you hungry right now?”
There was a new Denny’s on Route 7, so they went there, in part because it seemed unlikely they would run into anyone they knew. Haley ate ravenously, trying to hold back tears, although she didn’t know why. Should she have resisted? But what kind of resistance could she have offered? She looked up at her mother, who had put her body on the line. Karen ate a little but then got lost in a long texting exchange. “Your father needs to see you,” she said gently.
They drove to his house in silence, for a while anyway, past the greenery preserved by the eternal land trust, another space to be revered, a space governed by the dead. “I’m sorry, Haley,” Karen said suddenly. “I’m sorry that you’re so unhappy. I mean it. I guess I’ve been in denial about it because on some level I know it must be my fault. I’ve tried, I really have, but it’s so hard to know what’s the right thing to do, even when that’s the only thing you’re trying to do. But I’ll keep trying. Maybe we ought to get you into some kind of therapy or something. We can certainly figure out some way to do that, your father and I.”
“Okay,” Haley said. She wasn’t unhappy, and she had no intention of going through any sort of therapy, but in the moment she just needed to bring that whole line of conversation to a close, to do or say whatever in order to keep her mom from further upset. They pulled to the curb in front of Mark’s apartment, the left half of a condo-style construction that shared a wall with another unit. She could see her father’s face in the window. She hugged her mother, pulled on the backpack and grabbed the duffel, and started up the path. It was only about twenty or thirty feet to the front steps, but still it felt exhilaratingly strange, in the moment, that neither of her parents came out to help her, that they were each contained inside and she was in the heavy August heat and open air between them all alone.
Was she a political person? Probably not, she thought; political people were probably more focused than she was, less distracted by what was in their own hearts. Still, she’d been right, she felt, not to make any demands, even when the opportunity was presented to her. She saw how that had made them all afraid of her. And what demand could she have made, really? To ask for any redress from the powerful, however small or just, was a tactical mistake. You gave up the only weapon available to you, which was to deprive them of their power to say no.
For Claire
BY JONATHAN DEE
The Locals
A Thousand Pardons
The Privileges
Palladio
St. Famous
The Liberty Campaign
The Lover of History
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JONATHAN DEE is the author of six previous novels, most recently A Thousand Pardons. His novel The Privileges was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and winner of the 2011 Prix Fitzgerald and the St. Francis College Literary Prize. A former contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, a senior editor of The Paris Review, and a National Magazine Award-nominated literary critic for Harper’s, he has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He lives in Syracuse, New York.
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