And she started weeping silently again, no sobs, only tears running down her cheeks. She didn’t know if Laura had talked to him much about God, but they would pray together for her anyway. Will you pray with me, sweetie? At the next traffic light we’ll say a short prayer, okay? Thomas stared straight ahead, the road went on as far as the eye could see: Tennessee spring all red and gold, low rundown buildings and sidewalks on either side of McCallie Avenue, and living people everywhere, in cars and behind windows and standing next to rusted metal fences. He was polite with this woman he didn’t know personally but had heard so much about. He still felt sick, it wasn’t going away, he could feel it faintly in his lungs, it was something he’d been trying to get under control for a while but his nose was still kind of plugged. He silently prayed they wouldn’t hit a red light.
It was strange for Thomas, at fourteen, to see someone for the first time and know she’d been a secret smoker for decades, going everywhere with a bottle of perfume and moist towlettes to hide the smell. Just knowing she was the kind of person who would do that was strange, even as pure information, free of connotation, and then, out of nowhere, to find yourself sitting beside her. He imagined the blend of nicotine and eau de toilette, it was a smell with no associated mental image because he couldn’t imagine himself smelling it.
They were heading out of town, getting further away from the house on 17th Avenue. It felt like they were on a tightly regulated schedule, yet at the same time floating aimlessly through space, as if their cold, calculated plan were melting in the new warmth of spring. Having no control over where they were going made Thomas nervous, but their route seemed precise, its inevitability embodied in this old woman’s firm grip on the steering wheel, leaving Thomas no option but to go with it. Beside him she was focused on the road, occasionally fixing a loose strand of her hair, it was grey and her nails were red and she wore a jumble of bracelets that clacked on her wrist. He knew she was coquettish (his mother said “vain”; his father, with open scorn, “materialistic”), and he also knew she had wanted to pass on this plastic, superficial femininity to her daughter. She was smug, phony, a hypocrite. That’s what Thomas knew, what he’d always known. He also knew that, though she wasn’t doing it now, she often made little burping sounds from gastric reflux.
The feeling of being held hostage was hard for Thomas to adjust to. It was making him sick to his stomach, a feeling that would soon be joined by a silent fear as they approached the end of their drive, when he would meet his grandfather. He didn’t speak during the entire trip, his moist hands resting on his knees, back very straight against the seat, sinking deep into the sweet-smelling worn leather.
They emerged from the highway tunnel into jarring bright light, “Dear God,” his grandmother exclaimed as she lowered the sunshade with a jerky movement. Thomas didn’t recognize the neighbourhoods they were driving through. There were lots of trees, old, massive ones of a kind that was rare downtown, trees whose broad trunks were overrun by green moss, covered with a layer of damp, planted generations ago. Hilly streets meandered, up and down and left and right, instead of stretching out in unbroken straight lines. He wanted to roll down his window but she made it known that he shouldn’t, the air conditioning was running. It was the first time they touched, her hand exerting delicate but firm pressure, No, sweetie, she said with a bossy smile, the A/C is on. To comfort him she turned a dial next to the radio and angled one of her vents toward him. He wanted to close his mouth and breathe in through his nose, like an adult, but his left nostril was totally plugged, and it made an unpleasant, asthmatic sound.
She drove slowly and with an almost dangerous caution. At stop signs she counted, One, two, three, you could practically see her lips moving. Other cars passed them, engines revving. She didn’t seem to care. He wondered if she was thinking about Laura. Or maybe about airplanes more generally, air traffic, the expanse of the ocean and her daughter in it somewhere only experts could determine with certainty. He wondered if she was thinking about the same things he was, or about nothing at all, if the emptiness worked its way into her head when she didn’t express her grief openly, didn’t put it into words.
She put on her blinker and took a small street called Evergreen. The trees were tall, Thomas couldn’t see their tops, even with his cheek pressed up against the glass. At the end of the winding road, on this March afternoon, after crossing the town from west to east, they came to a Victorian two-storey house whose bland colour contrasted with the green of the young leaves springing up all around them. She pointed vaguely toward an upstairs window, set at the same slope as the roof, and turned toward the garage: That’s your room, that was your mother’s room. The car came to a halt. She told him to get out, as if that were the obvious course of action. He opened his door. The paint on the walls of his new house seemed to be crackling with static, but then it could have been something in nature, or the wind in the high branches.
When Laura would get home from her shift at the public library her shoulders slumped the moment she came through the door. She loved having Thomas there to greet her and spending their evenings together. The tradition had taken root soon after Albert left, and she often had a hard time squaring her joy that her son was almost always home with her concern that he didn’t seem to have any friends. In his room he kept a collection of minerals, quartz, and igneous rock. He enjoyed saying their names and listing their characteristics. When they saw Jurassic Park together he shared his opinion that, according to his research, the theory that DNA could be preserved in amber was preposterous. It was a good movie anyway, sure, but he wasn’t buying this prehistoric amber business. She asked why and he answered with a long sentence about the difference between geology and DNA, or something like that. She’d never thought about dinosaurs except as mythical giants conjured up to entertain kids and make work for special effects teams.
When she got home from work, often late because the library was in another part of town, she liked to sit with Thomas on the living room sofa and tell him about her parents, a family tree full of pastors and judges. Sometimes her words grew heated and a certain animosity crept in that she regretted only later, alone in bed. With lights dimmed and a glass of milk in hand she’d describe the atmosphere of her family home. One night in particular, a year before she died, she’d attempted a physical description of her father. She was adamant; this was the best way to understand him. You had to start from a distance and then zoom in for a close-up, take in his features, the cut of his jib, it was the only way to get an accurate sense of who he was. This man’s appearance and his personality were all of a piece. She told Thomas that she had learned this late, well into adolescence. No matter what she said, or what he thought, everything you needed to know about this man was visible in the shape of his eyes, nose, and lips, the cast of his shoulders and his posture. Without being especially tall, or for that matter strong, he managed to be so imposing that his shadow sometimes seemed to wrap around his body, as if the light couldn’t figure out how to approach him. She was certain he would not have changed. She took another sip of milk, observing Thomas, and said again that she was sure he hadn’t changed a bit. Fifteen years may have passed, but he was the kind of man who wouldn’t have aged. When she thought of her mother, she pictured a woman somewhat different than the one she’d known, maybe paler and a little more stooped — but not her father, he would be identical. He had unquestionably retained his bearing and his stature, there was no doubt about it. Maybe one day Thomas would meet him. For his sake she hoped not.
She finished her glass of milk and turned on the TV. Thomas, beside her, noticed his own glass was untouched. Albert’s rocking chair sat still in the corner of the room, no one had used it for a long time. He took his glass back to the kitchen and poured the milk into a cereal bowl so it wouldn’t go to waste. Plus he was always hungry after listening to his mother, as if a corresponding space emptied out in his stomach while his head was filled with blurry ye
t vivid images.
One of them was the image of a timeless man who seemed to be preserved in amber or cryogenic ice, refusing to age or weaken, an image Thomas associated with his own father, Albert, who had disappeared years ago. It was ridiculous, but he couldn’t help it. He didn’t dare talk to Laura about it, worried she would be disappointed in him for some strange reason. No, you don’t understand, your father and my father have nothing in common, far from it; they’re opposites. Yes, Thomas would answer, I get it, but in my head it’s their absence that ties them together and mixes them up. Those may not have been the exact words but that was the gist of the thoughts roiling in his mind, the magma of hazy impressions with sharp edges: his grandfather, as described in Laura’s stories, must resemble Albert, because Albert possessed the very same authority in his memories. He didn’t dare talk to Laura about it because he knew how much both men had hurt her. At the end of his mother’s stories he would never have dared ask to see a photo to compare impressions, to use these prints and souvenirs to recast the double face that appeared in his mind: Albert’s eyes with brows like ash pointing every which way. Albert ageing, or just plain old. Albert wasting away. If Thomas concentrated on a way to make him younger he would only grow weaker more quickly. That’s what happened when Thomas tried to stop the turning or change the direction of the wheel spinning in his mind. He lost control and scrunched up his closed eyes a little harder, but nothing changed, the wheel just kept spinning faster, there was no way to slow it down, as his face, like a sea sponge eroded by time or an old film played in fast-forward, would show all its wrinkles and cracks. His father and grandfather resolved as a single concave image, still in the vivid blackness of the movie theatre in his mind, and he understood that his father was all he ever thought about, almost all the time, almost at all times.
Thomas slurped his bowl of cereal, celebrating the departure of this man who had left them six years earlier one last time with a giant final sip of milk that almost made him choke. In the living room his mother muted the TV.
“You okay, honey?”
“Yeah, there were just some chunks at the bottom of the bowl. I drank it too fast. I’m okay.”
So he got out of the car. Closed the door with a two-handed push and looked at himself in the window, an image superimposed over the leather seats and the big trees behind and around them. Huge trees with trunks eaten away by green moss, taller than he was, trees older than all the actors in this story put together. He was postponing the moment when he’d have to look in the right direction, but his grandmother was coming closer, no doubt to firmly and solemnly direct him. There was no point putting it off any longer. The asphalt in the driveway was cracked in several places. The garage door was new, the windows too. The first- and second-floor shutters had been repainted, but the rest of the exterior walls seemed to be peeling badly. The trees were tall and powerful, rooted deep under the asphalt, probably all the way under the house, wrapped around the pipes so they groaned in the night. There was no point.
When he saw the man waiting for them, standing on firmly planted feet under the unlit lamp at the front door of the large hundred-year-old home, Thomas remembered the image his mother had used to describe his grandfather. He was surrounded by a halo of shadow that both attracted and repelled the light. He looked like a calm, solitary patriarch who hadn’t yet heard the news of his only son’s demise in the trenches. And he looked like an old, slumped man who had just learned of his only daughter’s death over the Atlantic. His hands were stuffed in his jacket pockets, his collar was turned up, and a pipe hung over his chin, he was the kind of man who could convince a crowd of the Maker’s intelligent design by appealing to their reason and emotions.
Thomas was drawn forward, not by his own force, but under the sway of some independent gravity. His grandmother, like some minor moon, was buzzing next to him, just outside his field of vision. The car engine had been turned off, you could hear the insects swarming, talking amongst themselves, alert to the collision of forces. The man didn’t move, and the smoke expelled from his mouth and nostrils travelled along the contours of his hollowed-out face before fading away. He was waiting for Thomas to move forward, a bit further. He was waiting for Thomas to take a few more steps toward him, understand that he was now on his grandfather’s turf, and feel the solidity of the ground he would walk on, before formally welcoming him with firm words that sounded like a summons: This is your home now. Your home is my home.
Beside him, Thomas’s grandmother had lit a cigarette. Thomas failed to understand how that could be. She was a secret smoker, Laura had told him the story dozens of times. Her mother hid her smoking from her father. This trait expressed her personality, epitomized her, shed light on who she was and helped explain the kind of relationship her parents had, full of dirty secrets and hypocrisy. Thomas didn’t see how this woman could light a cigarette in front of this man, how she dared to do out in the open what she had concealed her whole life behind a screen of mouthwash and eau de toilette. This was one of the details that came up more than any other in Laura’s memories of her mother: she smoked a secret cigarette between the parking spot and the shopping centre door, a ritual that had remained etched in her daughter’s memory. She had never said that it was their little secret. Laura knew without being told.
That was how Thomas ended up between two smokers, between a pipe and a cigarette, with curls of smoke that didn’t reach his nose but coloured the air. His grandmother exhaled vigorously; his grandfather let the smoke slip languorously out of his mouth and nose in opaque curlicues. He was between the two of them. No one said a thing. Nature was full of sounds, or maybe it was a plane high overhead, invisible to Thomas through the foliage of the great elms.
CHAPTER THREE
APRIL 1998
WOODMORE—AVONDALE, CHATTANOOGA, TS
Almost all the facts of Thomas Langlois’s life are ordinary, believable, everyday occurrences despite the shape they take here, seen through the prism of our faraway, speculative imagination. It’s not hard to see ourselves in Thomas. The fears and emotions that brought him here are our own, the very same, just like a thousand others: the feeling of emerging from childhood and adolescence, the fear of growing up without the support of parents we’ve rejected or otherwise lost. We may have chosen to tell the stories of his father’s departure and his mother’s death, out of our desire to dig all the way down to the very heart of an experience, but it doesn’t change one simple fact: for the eighteen years described above, his was largely a monotonous existence.
We could also have talked about the thousand other days when nothing much happened in Chattanooga, as Thomas grew up, increasingly alone and self-absorbed. Entire days that, piled one upon another, eventually turned into one single thing. The same day over and over again. The same sky that cleared up in late afternoon to let the sun break through. The same walk home through the side streets along the railroad track. We could have talked about Thomas’s attempts to collect various objects, maybe find the missing link connecting them all. Or the changing colours of the leaves, or the giant rock in a neighbour’s yard split clean in half that he walked by for years on his way home from school or for a hike in the woods south of the river. This massive stone had been cloven by mechanical or natural forces, a bolt of lightning or the blade of a giant saw. Thomas had never asked anyone: what could cut a stone like that, so straight and neat, split clean in half? It was displayed in a carefully chosen spot in the yard where it looked good and added a decorative touch that set a scene. He had passed by it almost every day for fourteen years before he moved to a new neighbourhood; had passed by, lost in his thoughts, thinking things over. Sometimes he noticed it and stopped for what almost turned into a moment, but more often he didn’t. It had been part of his life and it helps us understand him, even more perhaps than certain dramatic events that neatly separate one episode from the next. For years he also captured living insects, like everyone used to, an
d placed them in jars and observed their behaviour; he wanted to see certain things for himself, like how they suffered as their feet raced ever faster on the transparent glass surface, unable to gain a foothold, antennae sprawling everywhere. Eventually he freed the insects and set the jar back down on the counter. One day he realized he no longer saw it from the same point of view. The day before, it seemed, he had looked up at the counter from below; today he looked down from above. It was an observation of facts: he had grown, time had passed unnoticed, and as the days slipped by they all began to look the same, like two sentences spoken at the same time so their meanings blur together. He tried to articulate what he was feeling but had to content himself with touching the counter and nodding his head, convinced of something, not quite certain what.
The two tragic and unusual events we’ve described hold a place in Thomas Langlois’s life like unexplained phenomena, the kind that occur only when no witness is present, the kind we later try unsuccessfully to explain to incredulous friends. With no one there to notice their importance or assay their true worth we keep them to ourselves, to prevent them from sticking with or coming to define us. Thomas would tell himself his grandparents were there, somewhere outside his field of vision. That they had taken him into their home but he was still alone in his efforts to understand and draw conclusions — about absence, death, lack, and those memories becoming less distinct, tiny sparks like jellyfish in deep water.
The Longest Year Page 4