She heard Thomas coming downstairs and turned from the window to greet him. “That was John,” he said when he came into the kitchen.
“I didn’t hear the phone ring,” she said.
“Cell phone.”
“Oh,” she said. Thomas walked halfway across the kitchen before remembering something upstairs. “Goddamn it, I’m unraveling,” he said.
“You’re just tired,” she said. “I didn’t sleep much either.”
Thomas looked at her. His eyes were bagged. His beard, which she still wasn’t used to, was neatly trimmed. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “It’s his birthday on Thursday. I’d forgotten.”
“I know his birthday,” she said.
He would be thirty. For the last year he’d been calling in the middle of the night, waking them, sometimes with nothing to say, sometimes angry, sometimes crying. It happened once a month. Maybe more. It was impossible to say what he wanted, needed, from them. Thomas would take the phone across the hall, and talk to him until he calmed down. John never wanted to speak to her, not recently at least, and when she asked Thomas what they talked about he gave her an abbreviated, bare-bones account. The rest, he said, was nonsense, that John had just wanted someone’s ear until he was tired enough to fall asleep. They’d been married for thirty-four years; she knew he was protecting her. She didn’t like being shut out, it drove the two of them away from each other and into themselves; but after John’s last visit, which had been frightening, and had shaken her, she was, at least partially, grateful for it. She was also grateful for Jocey, John’s girlfriend. Since they’d been dating, the calls had become less frequent; where they’d failed to find a way to help him, it appeared she succeeded.
Thomas walked back into the kitchen, holding his hat. The scar on his forehead, just below his hairline, was healing well. The accident had happened two weeks ago, when Joan was running errands: Thomas, chopping wood, had yanked their axe out of the stump too quickly and brought the blunt end to his head, opening a deep cut. He’d knocked on Sarah’s door, and she’d taken him inside and stitched him up. Joan had wanted to go to the hospital when she returned—when she saw his stitched forehead, his bloody bunched-up shirt on the floor—but Thomas insisted Sarah had closed it perfectly, and the hospital was unnecessary.
“So he’s on his way?” Joan asked. “He knows about the storm?”
“Already on the road,” Thomas said. “He does.”
“Do you think they’ll make it tonight?”
“I do.”
“Good,” Joan said. She wasn’t sure if she meant it. “Do they have an emergency bag? Just in case?”
“He said they’ve got jackets, and jackets, and jackets. He wants to go skiing while they’re here. I said that was fine.” Thomas picked up an apple from the fruit bowl on the counter, inspected it, put it back down.
“Well, they’ve got a cell phone, at least.”
“Yes. At least they’ve got that phone, thank God.”
“You don’t have to make fun of me,” she said, and turned toward the window. The snow was coming heavier now.
Thomas moved to her side and rubbed small circles at the base of her neck. A comforting, nonsexual gesture. She wasn’t used to the way he looked with a beard; it wasn’t him, he’d never worn one; and for the last two weeks it had been a surprise, always, when he entered rooms. Another surprise: just this morning, she’d caught him masturbating in the shower. He’d apologized through the glass. When she’d asked him, later, and playfully she thought, what he’d been thinking about, he’d said, “Oh, nothing. You.” She was embarrassed. She knew it wasn’t true. What she imagined for him was an orgy of young women who looked just like Sarah, thirty upturned mouths, some bad music—but whatever image or scenario it was that he conjured, Thomas wouldn’t say, and this morning, of all mornings, the inwardness of the action had upset her.
“I’m not making fun of you,” he said. “You’ve barely slept. I wouldn’t do that.”
“All right,” she said. “All right.”
“I’m going to take Zachary down to the pit,” he said. “You want to say good-bye?”
She shook her head. “No.” Then she said, “I already did.”
They stood near the window, looking out at the snow. “Call if you need anything,” he said.
“I will,” she said. Then she said, “Say hi to the nudist for me, if you see her.”
She was talking about Sarah. It was a routine between them. Thomas squeezed Joan’s hand, grabbed his keys from the peg by the door, and left the house. On a walk last summer, a few weeks after Sarah had moved in, he’d caught her swimming in the river near their property. He didn’t realize—or, the word he’d used when telling Joan was notice—she was naked until he’d hailed her and begun a conversation. It wasn’t true, of course. He had noticed, her nudity had stopped him dead in fact, but he didn’t think about what he was doing—standing still, watching dumbly, and, the word had come later, peeping—until she’d looked up, started, and then, as she recognized him, relaxed, and put her hand over her naked heart. He’d been embarrassed; she, apparently, was not. She laughed, said something about not having a suit, and then waded to the bank and stood, nude, like some robust Greek emerging from a clamshell. One of her breasts was slightly larger than the other; on her hip was a scar like a holster. She’d asked Thomas to hand over her clothes, hanging on a branch behind him, which he’d done. Before he turned away, he caught sight of her stooping to step into her shorts and it had stilled him, even as he looked down the river to give her privacy. Midstream, there was a rock that was slowly parting the calm water, folding it over itself, and he concentrated on that until she’d said, okay.
He could’ve understood, and explained away, the sensation if it was merely desire. But it was larger than that. Seeing her exposed, and unafraid, had made him feel responsible for, and protective of, her. She knew very little about their troubles with John. Perhaps that was part of it. He knew Sarah felt affection for him, but also knew that was where it ended. He regretted telling Joan about seeing Sarah by the river. Recently, she’d confessed that she’d come to imagine Sarah as the daughter they’d never had: a successful, out-in-the-world-and-thriving child who offset the leaden feeling that congealed the air in the room whenever they talked about John. She didn’t like that Sarah was waltzing around naked, for anyone to see. Right, Thomas had said. That’s not what I was talking about, but right. That was five months ago, before John had become worse, before Sarah had stitched Thomas up. Before John’s last visit. Before they’d decided, together, that relieving Zachary from the burden of his pain was the humane thing to do, and was, in fact, something required of them.
Outside, the clouds were low and gauzy, and walking across the lawn to the garage, Thomas put his hand on the hedge and realized that this day held only the promise of things he wasn’t looking forward to: he didn’t want to see his son, their only child, a man now, who had begun to view his entire life as someone else’s fault; he didn’t want to drive the dying alpaca to the pit, unceremoniously shoot it, and leave it to nature so they could present a home front untouched by sickness; and he didn’t want to see Sarah. Earlier this morning, when Thomas had gone to the garage to take care of Zachary, there’d been a strange car, a red VW, in the driveway, parking him in. Someone visiting Sarah. This was a first. It was before dawn. Sarah’s lights were still on, but he didn’t knock. He didn’t say: I’m blocked in down here. He’d stood near the car for a few minutes, feeling strangely deflated. Then he’d turned and walked, quietly, home. He would wait for whomever it was to leave. It was an intrusion he didn’t like, but could do nothing about.
He was, however, looking forward to the storm. Deep snow, the kind they got in eastern Washington, dampened the landscape, rounding angles, muffling sound; everything became globular and remote, unrecognizable under the blanket. He wanted sloping drifts, up to the eaves. He wanted a crunch under his boots, the cold, granulated air in the back of h
is throat. Growing up, John had loved to shovel byzantine, snaking footpaths so one had to go first to the street, then in a small circle, and then, say, around the cherry tree in their front yard before getting to the car. Charming then. Indicative of character now.
The alpacas—there were ten of them—stood like a cluster of mops near the fence, away from Zachary, who was on the ground with his head nestled in a patch of grass, as if he were listening to the earth. “Hey, buddy,” Thomas said as he approached. The alpaca stirred and let out a soft moan, then regained his stillness. The others would watch this taking away, Thomas knew, with the same slack-jawed and impenetrable apathy they greeted everything else.
“Ah, poor little guy,” someone behind him said. He turned and saw Sarah. She was standing just outside the garage door, smoking a cigarette; he didn’t know how he’d missed her. She wore only a thin, white undershirt, and sweatpants tucked into a pair of oversize Sorel boots, seemingly immune to the cold. She was in her late twenties, the same age as John, but looked, on account of her round face, younger. And healthier. Her long hair was pulled back into a messy ponytail.
“He’ll be all right.”
“No, he won’t,” she said, taking a deep drag and blowing it out. “Isn’t that the point?”
A doctor who smokes. Thomas looked at the sick alpaca, and then back at Sarah. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and he could see the dark outline of her nipples through her shirt. “Not exactly tee-shirt weather,” he said before he could stop himself.
“Snow-mageddon!” she said cheerfully. She took another drag, and then nodded in the direction of the herd. “Some of those guys are pretty seriously dreadlocked. You should call them rasta-pacas.”
“What-apacas?”
“Rasta. You know, like Bob Marley.”
“Ah,” Thomas said. “That works. I get it now.”
Sarah stubbed her cigarette in the coffee can she kept outside for that purpose. Thomas walked over to the sick alpaca and roused him with a soft hand on his neck. The animal startled, then stood and allowed himself to be led to the trailer. Sarah watched with her arms folded over her chest. “It’s brave of you to do this,” she said when Thomas had the animal near the gate. Upon seeing the trailer Thomas had hitched to the back of his truck, Zachary teetered, then dropped to his haunches. Sarah kneeled, and took Zachary’s blank face in her hands as if, Thomas thought, to kiss it.
“I don’t know if brave is the right word,” he said back.
Sarah stood, reached into the pocket of her sweatpants, emerged with another cigarette, and lit it. “That vet’s an asshole. You shouldn’t have to do this alone.”
“He couldn’t be bothered with it until after Christmas, apparently,” Thomas said. “Joan and I talked about it. It doesn’t seem right to wait that long. This is something we can do. Something I can do. He’s in pain. We discussed it.”
“You want me to come?”
Thomas looked at the alpaca. “It’s going to be messy, I think,” he said.
Sarah snorted. “You don’t know messy. Try the ER. Try arterial blood. Try a bunch of maniac drunks trying to kill each other in the waiting room. Blood doesn’t bother me.” She smiled, and looked at him. “As you know.”
“We,” Thomas said, “your legion of lucky patients.”
“Lucky indeed. That’s me. Dr. Luck. That’s what I’ll be called.”
“It’s going to be cold,” Thomas said. “And probably awful. I can handle it.”
“Let’s not worry about it,” Sarah said. She stubbed her second cigarette on top of the first. “I don’t have much else to do. I’ll get my coat.”
As she disappeared back into the garage, Thomas hushed the sick animal into the trailer and closed the gate behind him. Zachary nestled down in the center of the trailer as he had in the field, as if, Thomas thought, he knew the sort of remoteness required of him now. Thomas could hear Sarah clomping up the garage steps, heard her door closing. He looked up to her window—he’d wave her off, say thanks but forget it—but the shade was drawn. Maybe her company would be welcome after all. It would prevent him, at least, from thinking too much about John. He dropped his keys in the cab of his truck, went back inside the house. He yelled good-bye up the stairs to Joan, and retrieved one of his shotguns out of the gun cabinet on the first floor. When he came back, Sarah was already sitting in the passenger seat, and the two of them drove, with the sick alpaca, out of the driveway, and away from the house.
S uicide, Ma, John had said on the phone to Joan three months ago. Don’t you ever think about it? Once she heard this, the receiver she’d been holding to her head had suddenly turned heavy and cold on her ear. John had been talking about his new obsession: the death of a childhood hero, a musician who’d stabbed himself in the heart, collapsed in a bathtub, and hadn’t been found for seven days. That guy, he had the whole world in his hands. And decided to end it. So tell me what I’ve got? Why are you so sure I’m going to pan out? He went on, digressing here and there, grandstanding, and backtracking. It was manipulative talk, but John had always had a bit of that in him. This conversation was different, both aimless and purposeful, and she didn’t recognize where it was coming from. It felt stagey, mobilized to elicit a response which, she knew from past experience, would only send him further down his own private rabbit hole. Nothing she said was ever “right”; nothing she’d ever said to John had been “right.” Her therapist had told her she ought to take the things her son said both seriously (engage with the ideas presented) and not seriously (not to let those ideas infect their relationship). What relationship? she’d wanted to say. I’m a life-support machine here, all tubes and knobs. Fuzzed-out beeps, posing as sentences with a life of their own.
They hadn’t done much to John’s room since he’d left for college, and Joan now stood leaning against the doorframe, looking in, as if there were an invisible line in the carpet that separated where he’d slept from the rest of the house. The posters he’d put on the walls with rubber cement still hung slightly off center; the news articles he’d carefully clipped and pinned to his bulletin board, though yellowed now with age and brittle, were undisturbed. He’d wanted it kept that way. This was the room where they talked to him during the night. Or, rather, where Thomas talked to him. After long nights, bad nights, she’d find Thomas diagonal on John’s bed, phone resting on his chest, an expression that looked like anger, or, sometimes, sadness, caulked onto his sleeping face.
It was almost one o’clock. Joan crossed the threshold and finished her tour of what she and Thomas had begun calling the amber museum, straightening pillows, making the bed—it was a single, almost child-size, she had no idea how both John and his new girlfriend were going to share it, but that was their intention—and then she surveyed the room. John’s posters and clippings—of overdosed and dead musicians and obscure Japanese movies; reports of unsolved crimes and natural disasters, sunken ships raised to the surface—these things told her nothing she wanted, needed, to know. Surely, these chosen artifacts were important, these records of her son; surely they were clues a careful and loving parent could assemble to glimpse the whole. But she couldn’t piece them together. She had no clarity, overwhelmed, as she was, by the desire for him to be all right. All right. Whatever that meant.
He was smart. He always had been. He’d gone to a good and expensive college, where he’d won awards for his art projects. But he’d never been happy. He’d never stayed in one place very long, but until recently they’d understood his restlessness to be a symptom of what he called his high standard of living: he simply wasn’t content following the crowd, doing what everyone else was doing. But now, some sort of switch had flipped. He called when he got a job; he called when he quit, or lost it. He complained about the pressure everyone put on him. He called when his friends paired off, and stopped talking to him. He called when he was out of money. They gave it to him, and endured his resentment. Thomas had reassured her that this was just a phase; that he would grow out of it, t
hat he would straighten his course on his own. But here he was, thirty years old. And here they were, trying to convince themselves nothing was wrong.
She went to the window. The snow had begun to stick. The room was in good shape. It was whisper quiet. It was, she thought with some satisfaction and some sadness, just the way he liked it. John’s favorite song, when he’d been small, had been “What Do We Do with a Drunken Sailor?” Now the melody came back to her, and, standing at the window, she hummed some fragments. She’d never liked the violence of the song, but what stuck with her this time was the question that began the refrain—what do we do? What do we do. The alpacas, who had not moved, and who would not move unless prodded, were turning white with the weather. They did not appear to mourn the missing.
What had happened in September, the last time John was home, was this: they’d invited Sarah for dinner. They hadn’t thought much about it at the time—how John would react, showing up late as usual, the drive always taking him longer than anyone expected, upon seeing the three of them sitting around the table, already halfway through the meal. But they had waited to eat until it was too rude to Sarah not to. Thomas brought the phone to the table, said eat, eat, why not. As it was, the food was cold by the time they sat down. They’d finish the meal, and then, after Sarah had gone, reheat it for John when he arrived.
The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories Page 5