But he’d shown up middinner. Walked in the door with his bags, looked at the scene in front of him—everyone around the table, Sarah in his seat—and said, So this is the famous doctor? I’ve heard some things about you. She’d asked him what kind of things, and he’d shrugged, and said, You know what doctors do? They make healthy people feel better about themselves.
You’re late, John, Joan had said. We just sat down. It’s no one’s fault. Don’t be rude.
Roads were bad, he’d said, still looking at Sarah. I’m just talking. I’m not being rude.
Sarah had tried her best to recover—everyone had, Thomas getting up from the table to get a plate, Joan saying how good it was to see him, Sarah explaining she wasn’t a doctor yet, but could pass on some terrible doctor stories if he was interested. John had remained in the doorway, slack-faced and thinner than Joan remembered until Thomas came to take his bags. Apparently satisfied by the effect of his arrival, John shoved his hands deep in his pockets and went quiet, radiating a strange, barely coiled aggression that was unrecognizable to both Joan and Thomas. He walked over to where Sarah and Joan were still seated, politely pulled out a chair at the table, and began complimenting the food he hadn’t yet eaten. Thomas wasn’t sure if he smelled alcohol on his son or not. By the time the meal was over, a pall had descended over the four of them, and the discussion, when there was any, was stilted and vague. They knew why they’d invited Sarah, and they realized their mistake, suddenly plain to everyone. They’d invited her because they hadn’t wanted to be alone with their son.
The following morning, Sarah called early, upset, to say that the door to the henhouse near the garage was unlatched and open. She thought the worst, but had been afraid to look herself. There were coyotes in the area, they’d lost chickens before; but this time the coop had been locked. Thomas was sure of that. He left the house knowing what he was going to find, hoping he was wrong. The door to the coop stood wide open. Half the chickens were missing. Feathers covered the ground like snow. It hadn’t been coyotes. In the center of the coop lay a single dead chicken, its neck twisted and broken. There wasn’t much blood. John’s car was gone. He’d left before anyone was awake.
Thomas found a hen outside the coop, near the garage, and picked her up. She made no move to get away, offered no resistance in his arms, but she was not calmed by his whispering. He saw Joan watching him through the kitchen window. He thought about calling the police, and knew as he thought it that he would not. He would tell Sarah it had been coyotes; that he had forgotten to latch the gate. He would tell Joan the truth, but he wouldn’t let her see it. Later that night, John called, sobbing, and Thomas said, It’s okay, it’s okay. John said he hadn’t meant to frighten anyone, and Thomas comforted him, said okay.
The pit was twenty miles to the southeast. The roads were empty, and as they drove Sarah twisted the radio dial, looking for a station that wasn’t wrapped up in storm tracking. She settled on a country station, and turned it down. As they’d pulled out of the driveway, Sarah had asked him how the law practice was going, but that conversation wrapped itself up quickly. Now they were on a road that continued to Montana, driving in what Thomas called the Farm Truck—a rusted old Tacoma he’d bought years ago, had repainted, and drove whenever they were transporting animals, doing dump runs, or otherwise trying to fit in around town. Sometimes, when John called, Thomas would leave the house just to sit in this truck while he listened to his son. The clutch, when engaged, hummed and clunked. The cab smelled like old boots. He liked that smell. He liked the way it blended, now, with whatever perfume Sarah was wearing.
Finally she switched the radio off and turned in her seat. “So John’s coming in today, right? Joan told me a while ago you were expecting him.”
“He is,” Thomas said. There was a muffled thud from the trailer, and he slowed down. “With his girlfriend.”
“Ah-ha,” she said. “So I don’t need to come for dinner, then.”
“Right,” Thomas said. “We didn’t figure you’d want to.”
“No. I’ve got plans,” Sarah said. “You know, most people love doctors. He didn’t like me very much.”
“It’s not you. He’s got other things going on. It’s not you.”
“What kind of other things?”
Thomas sighed. He adjusted the heater on the dashboard. “We don’t really know, I guess.”
“Is he seeing anyone now? You know, a therapist?”
“No,” Thomas said. “Well, yes. Sort of. The last one figured out some sort of medication regimen that seems to be working for him. I think the girlfriend has helped.”
“Joan told me you guys talk a lot.”
“More like, he talks.”
“Are you worried about him?”
Thomas gripped the steering wheel. This wasn’t what he wanted to talk about. He wanted to know who had been visiting her, blocking him in, but he didn’t know how to bring it up. “Worried like how?”
“I don’t know,” Sarah said. She was absently chewing one of her fingers. “Do you think it’s helped? I don’t— I’m not trying to pry. Not my business.”
“The therapist helped,” Thomas said. “Jocey’s helped. The medicine’s helped.” He felt his throat tightening. “It’s hard to know what he wants sometimes. It’ll straighten out. He will, that is. I’d rather not talk about it. That’s all I’ve been doing. Talking.”
Sarah adjusted in her seat. “Got it,” she finally said. “I’m glad things are working out.”
They went back to driving in silence. The heater was cranked and pushing hot air directly into Thomas’s face. He took his hat off, tossed it on the dash, and adjusted the vent. Sarah, Joan. John, for Christmas. He cleared his throat. “So you’ve got plans tonight?”
“I do.” She’d been digging around in her pockets, and stopped. “Now, that,” she said, “that’s healing nicely.”
At first Thomas was confused. Then he remembered—his forehead, the stitching, the scar. “It is,” he said. He lowered his head so she could get a better look. As she leaned over the center console, he brought his speed down. He’d taken the stitches out four days ago, in the mirror with sterilized tweezers like Sarah had instructed.
“Very nice,” she said.
“Something to be proud of,” Thomas said. He was glad the conversation had picked up again, had moved past John. He glanced at the road, then brought his eyes back to hers. Her lips were pursed. “You can barely see it,” he said.
Sarah unfastened her seat belt, and moved closer to study the scar. When he’d shown up, bloody, at her door, she’d been so concerned. She had guided him inside her apartment, sat him down in the kitchen. Wiped the blood away gently with a wet and warm towel, applied pressure. Took his face in her hands to inspect the wound and then decided, if he was up for it, that she could stitch him up right then and there. She’d given him painkillers and a small shot of anesthetic so he wouldn’t feel the needle. And he hadn’t felt it, not exactly. He’d closed his eyes. He could feel pressure and tugging and knew the wound was coming together.
“You should see the wood,” he’d said, a joke.
“I believe it,” she’d said back.
At night, while talking—or, rather, listening—to John, he would return to this surgery again and again, rolling the memory around in his head like a marble. The rhythmic tugging. Their proximity. She had been able to help him, in a concrete way. It had been so simple. At one point he’d reached out, put his hand on her hip to brace himself, and she’d let it rest there. Her skin was warm. He could feel her hip bone in conversation with the rest of her body as she concentrated on her work. When, periodically, she’d reached behind him for the faucet, her loose shirt brushed against his upturned face. Thomas had sat with his eyes closed, his hand more alive than any other part of his body. He had loved the touch of her skin. Sarah was professional and quick, and had patted him on the shoulder when she was finished, the way dentists, postcavity, do. The whole thing was ov
er before it had begun.
Now, in the truck, they were close again. If you would reach out, he thought. If you would just reach out, I can handle whatever’s coming next. And then she did just that, a quick, darting gesture, her hand on the side of his face, her thumb compressing, lightly, the skin near the wound. Thomas felt her breath on the side of his face. “Not bad,” she said.
He was now going well below the speed limit. He hadn’t seen any other traffic, did not see why this wouldn’t be allowed, but behind him, suddenly, there was honking. He sat up straighter and looked in his side mirror. A red pickup was almost on the gate of his trailer. Thomas slowed even more, rolled down his window, and motioned for the truck to pass. As the driver pulled parallel, Thomas looked over, just in time to see the man in the passenger seat move his eyes from him to Sarah. He was dressed in red and white camouflage. He looked vaguely familiar.
“Do you know that guy?” Thomas said. The truck had slowed to Thomas’s speed. Sarah said nothing. The man rapped at his own window, then made a gun with his fingers and pointed it at the two of them. Then the rust-gutted truck was speeding ahead into the distance, weaving in and out of lanes, as if driving a cone course. “Weird,” Sarah said. They’d been silent while it happened.
“Someone oughta shoot his tires out,” Thomas said after a few minutes.
“Someone will,” Sarah said. “Eventually.”
The flowers Joan had bought and placed on the mantel were already beginning to wilt. She turned the vase, stood back, turned it again. Yesterday, she had talked to her therapist about John, hoping he could help her out of what, in the last few days, had become a panic. Children aren’t going to be what you want them to be, he said. I don’t want him to be anything! she said back. Tears again. Some people, he said, just need more time. When she asked him how much time was enough, he fixed her over his desk, and said that was something she ought to think about. “When he talks—what he says—it’s like an infection, like an earache. I can’t get it out of my head,” she said. “It has the ring of verdict to it.”
“But you’ve told me”—here he flipped his notes, to make sure. “The two of you have stopped talking. That he only talks to your husband, now.”
“When we talked,” she corrected. The last time she’d been on the phone with John, the last time he’d asked for her, she had been unable to give him what he needed, and he had said: I’m thinking maybe you don’t love me. And at the moment he said it, at the very moment the words were out of his mouth and coiling toward her over the line, it had been true. He had made it true. Now, lying in bed, she would listen to Thomas down the hall, saying yes, or no, mumbling inaudibly so it sounded as if the floor itself was humming softly with the murmur of her husband’s voice. Sometimes, unable to sleep, she would imagine John’s side of the conversation, and in her head this would become a conversation between her and her husband, the conversation they never had, a constantly invoked What have we done? To what degree is this our fault? How much longer will this take?
“You’re confessing this to me. He sounds like he’s confessing to you,” her therapist had said. He cleared his throat.
“I don’t think it’s love he’s after,” she said.
“Then, what?”
“It feels,” she said, “more like he’s looking for confirmation. Like he’s … begging us. For something. Some confirmation that his problems are bigger than we are. And that he wants us to prove it to him. To confirm it. I don’t know.”
Her therapist had put his pen down, folded his arms, and made a bad-smell face. “That,” he said, “doesn’t sound quite right to me. We’ve only been seeing each other for a few months, and it’s possible I’m not getting a handle on John. But that doesn’t sound quite right.”
This kind man, Joan thought. Letting her talk like this. Of course he wasn’t getting a handle on her son. They didn’t have a handle on him. But she hadn’t helped; she hadn’t told this man everything; she hadn’t fully confessed, if that was the right word. She hadn’t told him about the chicken Thomas found. She hadn’t told him how at thirteen, John’s eyes, which had always, she thought, appeared dilated, went hard, and seemed to demand a distance from her that she’d perhaps too easily granted. How, at fourteen, he’d cuffed her left ear and Thomas had had to wrestle him to the ground, and from the kitchen floor, under his father, John had cried until he choked. She’d made Thomas promise never to hurt John again; and then she’d asked him to apologize. He’d done both. And now, when talking to this man, her therapist, she simply described John, growing up, as too observant for his own good, too hard on himself. A boy whose loneliness transformed one day into sarcasm and then into a strange, emotional cruelty. She regretted having only one child, she said. She thought a brother, or a sister, might’ve helped. Maybe they shouldn’t have moved so far away from other people, into the country, like they had done. She was protecting her son from this man, and what he might say. It wasn’t the point of these sessions, she knew that. But just as she was secretly relieved that Thomas hadn’t called the police on John, had acted, in fact, as if he had never set foot in that chicken coop, she took a shameful pride in not giving this man the full story. Mothers protect their sons.
John, at four, giving her a red Play-Doh heart he’d sculpted at school for her birthday, which she’d hardened in the oven and, with a piece of ribbon, made into a necklace and worn on that day every year since. At seven, learning to ride one of their old horses, coming back inside on a fall day, sweaty and elated, asking her if she’d seen him do it. You don’t let go of those things, she thought. You can’t. They don’t release you.
“Joan,” her therapist had said. He wasn’t accusing her of not loving her son. He wouldn’t go that far.
“That’s because it isn’t,” she said.
Thomas’s phone rang as they were pulling into a gas station. The road had widened into a four-lane, and as they’d begun passing little convenience stores, roadhouse bars, and a McDonald’s, Thomas had put the wipers against the snow. Sarah kept her hands in her lap. She didn’t mention the scar again. The storm was picking up but didn’t appear to have the steam that had been promised. The first stoplight they’d come to was near the paper mill, and as they waited for the light to turn, a smell like old eggs came in through the heater. He parked near the pump and cut the engine before answering. “Dad?” his son said. “It’s John.” This was how all their conversations started. As if there could be anyone else who called him that.
“John,” he said. “How’s the driving?”
“I’m about two hours away, I think,” John said. “The snow’s coming down, though. Making it slow. Snow-mageddon casualties. Car crashes. Ascension. Blood on the road, and all that.”
“All right.” Blood on the road? Thomas looked at Sarah. She’d unbuckled her seat belt and was reaching behind her for her coat. Out back, he could hear the alpaca, evidently roused, kicking the side of the trailer.
John cleared his throat. “You in the car?”
Thomas nodded, then remembered he was on the phone. “Groceries,” he said. “Last minute.” He wasn’t going to tell John about Zachary. In the background, Thomas could hear someone else. Or maybe it was the radio. The connection wasn’t good. It seemed, to Thomas, that the two of them were talking through strung-together cans.
“Well, how’s this for a turn of events: Jocey’s not coming. I’ve got her car, I’m driving in it, but she’s not coming.”
“That’s not her in the car with you?”
“No.”
“Everything all right?” Thomas said. “I was looking forward to meeting her.” The alpaca was really kicking now; tin heavy thumps reverberated through the cab of the truck.
There was silence on John’s end. “Bet you were,” he said finally. “My car’s not working right now. You better tell Mom. All that dinner planning and stuff. The agonizing over who sits where. Because she’s Mom.”
“She’s just going to be happy to see you,” T
homas said.
John snorted. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “She’ll probably be happy about Jocey, and the decisions Jocey felt necessitated to make.”
“I don’t think so, John,” Thomas said. “What happened?”
More silence. Then John said, “Ruination.”
Jesus Christ, John, Thomas thought. John’s car, the one they’d given him, was two years old. “Does she know you have her car?”
“I knew you’d ask that,” John said, and snorted. “Yes, in fact, she does. She gave it to me. A parting gift.” Thomas decided not to answer. John continued: “So the three of us. Maybe you should invite God’s Gift to Medicine for dinner. We’ll see how that plays the second time around.” Sarah opened her door, stepped out, and slammed it shut. Thomas felt his face flush. He watched her make her way into the gas station’s food-mart, and wave at the kid at the register.
“Who’s with you, Dad? Is that her? That her in the car with you? I heard a door slam. Did she hear what I said? Put her on the phone.”
“John, what’s the problem?”
“No problem,” he said. “Why?”
“We’re looking forward to seeing you. Jocey or no Jocey.”
“Well, good,” he said. Then he said, “Here’s a problem. Answer me this problem, if you want. I do everything I can for everybody, and it always fucks up. I do everything I can to get people’s attention, to hold it, and I get nothing.” It sounded to Thomas like John might be crying.
“You have our attention, John.”
“No,” he said. He is crying, Thomas thought. But his voice was rising, not getting weaker. “No. All you do is listen and nod. I could do anything. And you listen and nod.”
“That’s not true, John,” Thomas said. “I’m trying to help. If I listen, I’m helping. What do you want me to do?”
The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories Page 6