With this hamlet in my mind as our ultimate destination—but very mistily, vaguely in mind, since how could I possibly have an inkling of such a place?—I leaned my head against the window and watched Greenland and Iceland sliding darkly under my feet. M lay across three seats just on the other side of the aisle. In the front rows of the cabin, low chatter and snores and a lone baby crying, large families and elderly gents from the Bulgarian enclave in the Bronx, headed home for the feast days of December. The tourist season had ended, and Jimmy’s friends at Air Bulgar, a cut-rate charter line with a single U.S. node in a lonely hangar at Newark, had seated us in the plane’s empty aft. Plenty of space to stretch out, and a peaceful spot to reflect.
MY DEED WAS RASH. PERHAPS UNWISE. I TOOK A STEP AND IT SENT me tripping and catapulting over the curb of reasonable behavior. But I won’t say it was irrational. I understood the risks—I’d already thought it through at length, after all, the idea of fleeing with her.
Even at that crucial juncture, as I stirred my emergency stash of Elavil into warm milky tea, adding extra sweetener to disguise any undertastes—I understood that the move might bring deliverance but not love. I saw it that night for the selfish thing it was. I told myself: there might not be any heartfelt declarations, sticky breathless passion, long years of sweet union and shared, still-charged memories of our reckless escape.
That may not pan out.
But she would be in a better place, and I would be the one who set her free.
Let the fates decide. Just take this unknowable ride with her. Get her safely launched into her future, away from institutionalized justice and half-hearted therapeutic interventions. Out of the basement and into the world. Grant her the remainder of her life, and play out the rest of mine, whatever shape it might take.
Redemption may require strange detours. But the end result is what matters.
Also on my mind, an undeniably good turn: as we jetted over the icy zones, Clyde was being delivered by the very reputable Balkan All Boro radio-car service to a fancy, discreet clinic, within visiting distance of Dad. One day, perhaps, we’ll be in touch. I’ve left enough cash behind to pay Clyde’s bills. I’ve got plenty of cash now, and Jimmy is well versed in Swiss banking.
22
December 1999
Can you remember what you dreamed for yourself, once, when you were younger? Life blurs the dream, blears it, the endless wash of days, the constant tumbling of minutes, wearing that vision away, mote by mote, detail by detail. The daily worries, tiny grains that etch and abrade. And of course, a dream is sketched onto the softest of substances anyhow, isn’t it? Not engraved in granite or marble, not even sculpted in sand. The dreams of your youth are merely ripples on your brain, subtle wavelets in soft tissue, malleable, pliable. Very impermanent.
For example: At twelve, she had dreamed she’d be the president. She saw, driving through Washington, the shattered neighborhoods and she thought, I want to help the world. I could help the world. If not president, then senator. Or congressperson, like Dad. She ran for the seventh-grade seat on the student council, and won.
But then, Amy. And that November. The second losing campaign, witnessed at a remove, because she and her mom shunned the dais, no waving and smiling at his side. Her father alone up there, exposed, his compromises, his failings, every day more achingly clear. At first too young to understand, really, but somehow, gradually she began to understand. And every moment of understanding that came after, an endless tidal wash of such moments, until that notion that she could help the world, that she should help it, was faint, then fainter, then gone.
By twenty-six, another dream. The dream was Duncan, the life stretched out in her love-drunk visions, when she allowed herself to indulge in those visions. He’d move beyond those druggy nightspots. Together, they would own restaurants. He’d be up front, she’d do the PR and the numbers. Artists and performers would gather around them, they’d fill private parties and become their close friends. Together, Duncan and Miranda, they’d buy a house out somewhere in the hills, their talented guests on the veranda, their children rollicking on the lawn.
Children. The thought made her open her eyes.
The car window cool against her head. Flat fields, low cream-colored houses with brown roof tiles, a power plant at the horizon, its three smokestacks chiseled in the bright sky. Hard cool glass against her head, and the smell of cigarettes. Snatches of static-edged pop beats on the radio. Then a soothing woman’s voice, cooing random syllables.
How long had she been asleep? “How long have I been asleep?” she whispered, her tongue sticking to her mouth’s insides, gummy, tasting like a licked envelope.
“You’re awake,” he said.
Cyrillic letters on a truck streaming by. Two men in the front seat, both with close-cropped hair. Sun razoring through the windshield. On the side of the driver’s neck, a Mickey Mouse face tattooed. A crude Mickey, a deranged Mickey.
Frank Lundquist put his hand on her shoulder. “We’re stopping. Food? Bathroom, maybe?”
His hair needed a shampoo, his beard was growing out, wheat stubble.
Look what he’s done, she thought. You need to look at it.
INSIDE: A PASTRY TOPPED WITH CUBED MEAT AND A FRIED EGG. TOMATOES and cucumbers in sour white sauce. She devoured it.
“It’s good, right?” Frank had finished his plate, now watched her eat. “It’s pretty warm for that sweater,” he whispered. “The clothes are in the trunk. You could change.”
Whispering, she realized, because of their foreignness. The place was just a box of smoke-darkened glass, a cement floor, crowded with men, truck drivers, judging from the jammed parking lot and the rigs lined up at the pumps. Through a tobacco smog, she could see a television suspended behind the bar. And then a hairy belly blocked her view.
“America.” The man loomed over them. His teeth were alarmingly sharp. A tight jersey rose over his fuzzy, round stomach. He hoisted up the belly to show them a Texas-shaped belt buckle. He grinned, the teeth stained.
The man called something out to the next table, five men slouched over fuming cigarettes and shots poured from an old water bottle. They stared at Miranda and laughed. The big-bellied man grabbed the bottle and two of the men’s glasses and raised them in their direction. “Rakija. Bulgar.” He poured and handed them the drinks. “America,” he said, toasting with the bottle, swigging deeply. He nodded at them, watched until they followed his lead. She didn’t meet Frank’s eye. She drank it down and let it burn.
Mr. Belly grabbed her arm, squeezed, shouted something to his compadres with a laugh. His grip actually hurt quite a bit. Frank tried to shove the man away. The grip on her arm tightened. Chairs scraping, scuffling, and suddenly Mickey Mouse up close, inches from her face. The driver said three sharp words, her arm was free, and Frank’s was around her shoulders, steering her outside.
“THE HOUSE HAS A VIEW OF A LAKE,” HE SAID. “APPARENTLY THE lake is full of fish.”
Still they drove, and with every minute, she was feeling more awake. And Frank Lundquist was speaking to her softly, as if soothing a cranky child. She moved her head to see the wide view out the windshield. More flatlands slipped by—slashes of irrigation ditches, a tractor here or there, a cinder-block silo. They were close to the border, Frank said, taking small roads now, all dirt and gravel.
They fell silent again.
From the front of the car, from the driver’s neck, Mickey laughed in her face.
“How many times have you found yourself in the back seat?” he chortled.
How many?
Edward Greene up front at the wheel, bickering with her mom about money, Miranda stretched out across leatherette upholstery in back, pretending to sleep. Pretending to sleep! Mickey chuckled.
Taxi driver up front at the wheel: some why-not guy reeling off his address and breathing boozily into her hair.
Limo driver up front at the wheel: Duncan slipping his hand up her skirt.
Candora
County sheriff up front at the wheel: no handles on the doors.
State corrections officer up front at the wheel: the van stinking of fear and vomit.
Frank Lundquist up front at the wheel: someone else’s damp clothes on her body, the streetlights wheeling by in a panic in the rain.
Now this. Whose car was this, even?
Thousands of miles from any place like home.
The Mouse leered at her. So when, girl?
When are you going to get up front, take the wheel?
She looked away from that mocking face. She glimpsed, way in the distance, far across the fields, a ruffle of blue mountains. At the sight of them, a notion arrived.
I’m free. I’m out. I’m gone.
And then the line of the azure mountains opened her mind to another thought.
I’m the new driver.
23
Terminate Therapy When Threatened or Otherwise Endangered by the Client/Patient
(Standard 10.10.b)
What joy compares to a risk that pays off?
Viscott delineates the many kinds of risks one can take: risks of emotion, risks of growth, risks of change. Despite the fears many of us have about risks, he reminds us that the very act of living entails risks.
In fact, believe me, you are risking everything at this very moment. Just by sitting there, taking a breath, you accept the risk that this breath could be your last.
SOMETIMES I LIE HERE STARING UP AT THE CRACKS IN THE CEILING, cracks that form a river delta in the old, smoke-smudged plaster, and the faces of my former patients flash by me. Quillaba, shoplifter of fine chocolates and expensive wines, because why should an Arby’s paycheck stand in her way? Harriett, who couldn’t sleep without waking up screaming. A dentist named Hazen, who couldn’t be faithful to his wife, though he yearned to be. Zachary Fehler.
And finally, M. And I turn to her and there she is, lying in her bed, sleeping, maybe dreaming, her newly short hair like a soft copper crown.
We share a room, but we sleep in separate beds. Why? I think I understand.
Jimmy found us a good place. There is indeed a lake, it does indeed teem with fish. The locals don’t eat them; they say the potash spoiled the waters. Jimmy’s oldest sister once lived in this house—never married, the village teacher, traveled each year to Frankfurt to buy schoolbooks. Her well-made German clothes are still hanging dusty in the closet. She died last year, we heard. The sister’s funny little dog, white with brown and black patches, has adopted us.
All day, the men of the village are off at the potash mine up over the hills. At about noon, a local woman named Olla comes to cook. She does a little cleaning, singing strangely heart-wrenching songs taught to her by her Romany mother. I sweep the floors, when she allows it; I like to sweep the floors. M studies a French dictionary she found. She learned in prison, I guess, how to make the most of downtime. I’m still learning, myself. Of course, basketball is big in these parts, so I do play a bit, at the hoop behind the village shop. I’m thinking of taking up target shooting. There are a lot of weapons around here.
One day, I found a list she’d scribbled on the back of an empty sugar sack:
francophone
ivory coast
senegal
congo
algeria
burkina faso
haiti
guadelupe
martinique
st. martin
polynesia—Iles du Vent, Iles Sous-le-Vent
APPARENTLY, SHE’S NOT QUITE SETTLED YET, TO OUR LIFE HERE. SHE spends long afternoons walking the shores of the lake. I see her standing there, gazing across at Mount Ulsec. Sometimes she stops at Olla’s hut, which sits at the far end of the shore, and I just make them out, M and the old woman, sitting on plastic chairs on the dirt yard. I understand: female companionship. It’s all she has known for these last years.
She’s so very much better off now than she was on that spring morning she first walked into my office. She is free, so to speak. Safe. Saved. I believe that she is beginning to appreciate this.
Though my professional peers would frown on my method, this knowledge fills me with a sense of satisfaction, a feeling of completeness. It’s a new sensation for me.
M may not have turned the corner to contentment, not yet. But she hasn’t once talked of leaving here, of leaving me.
And we’ve had our good moments. One evening a week after we arrived, we walked down to the lake and we watched the lights of distant airplanes passing over the mountain, drifting away like stray thoughts.
CANDORA, NEW YORK, IS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE, IF ROUGH AROUND THE edges. Dairy farms and trailer parks and deep woods. And that river is just how you’d want a river to be. It looks clean, rushing along its sloped banks, trees dipping their limbs in here and there, swimmers testing the current.
I sat parked alongside the Oshandaga three days before M’s escape. Staring down at the brown-green water. I’d just driven past the firehouse. Where her boyfriend and the fire captain had been killed. Where M’s life had ended, too, in a way. Her old life.
People get mixed up into things. People sometimes want something so much that they do things they never dreamed they’d do. This I now know. This I understand.
After a while, I pulled back onto the road and headed north out of town. Turning right at a narrow unpaved road, I drove several rutted miles through state forest, then past fallen down wire fencing and bullet-pierced NO TRESPASSING signs. The road petered out, and I climbed from the car. Opened the trunk, hauled out a shovel. Following a scant trail, I swatted at ragweed and thorny shrubs. The old hunting camp sat a quarter mile down the path. I didn’t really have a clear idea of what a hunting camp might be. Turned out, just a tumbledown shack of plywood and tin, and a rock-ringed campfire. Inside the shack, a mattress spilling its rusted guts. A single blackened boot. Some beer bottles strewn around, looking pretty new.
Safe to say that, by this point, looking around at the mattress, the bottles, the boot, the hair was bristling on the back of my neck. The place was deadly quiet. No birds were calling. Not even wind in the trees. I stepped out of the hut and hurried around it to the woodpile, the shovel held up at the ready, my hand gripping its neck.
As I pulled down that pile and dug into the ground beneath it, I saw sightless worms and enormous maggoty things that I wasn’t happy to see, not at all. But I dug without stopping. Breathing hard.
“Are you sure it’s still there? They didn’t dig it up after you were arrested?” I had asked her.
“I tried to tell my lawyer about it. And he stopped me. He said, Don’t breathe another word, don’t ever breathe another word about it. To anyone. He said that, as far as the jury was concerned, the less I knew, the more innocent I was. And look, he said, no one alive knows that you know. So let’s just say you don’t know. Eventually you will forget that you know, he said, and at that moment it’s the same as if you never did.”
“Jesus.”
“The guy moonlights as a campaign consultant,” she said.
About two feet down, I hit it. Shovel sinking into something softer than the clay-thickened dirt, something that had give. I uncovered more of it. A sturdy bag of red rubberized cloth. CANDORA FIRE DEPT. printed on the side.
An hour later, I was driving carefully, extra carefully since I was shaking all over, veering up the on-ramp to I-90 East. Two point three million in the trunk.
THAT MONEY WAS HANDED OVER BY SMALL-TOWN CITIZENS, GAMBLING for a good time, taking a little risk, believing it would all be flowing toward a good cause. And, after some delay, it did. What better cause is there than the saving of souls?
The albino snail crawling up the window now, its red eyes rotating on their tiny stalks: it has crawled into my world, just millimeters in front of my face, to tell me that the unlikeliest outcomes are absolutely possible.
Yes, choice is power, and I made my choice. I urge everyone who reads this to do the same.
24
March 200
0
Frank Lundquist slept soundly, and he didn’t wake as she pulled on a shirt and shorts, laced up her shoes, and, with the little dog following, slipped out of the house. The sun already fell hot on her shoulders as she began to descend, the dog skipping ahead of her, over small boulders and under the low evergreens and scrawny clumps of wild tarragon.
Reaching the lake shore, she turned to look up at the little cluster of buildings, the roofs shining. All was inutterably still. Nothing much ever stirred that place. The locals understood about silence.
Olla had seen her approaching along the rocks and had a small cup of her bitter coffee waiting. Miranda sipped it in the dark cottage, contemplating the ancient phone.
She and the dog were both panting a bit by the time they scrambled again up the last bit of the steep path that led back to the house. Under the shade of a gnarled yew tree was an old pump, and she sent water streaming into the trough. The dog lapped it happily. Miranda put her mouth beneath the spout and drank, too, though the water was warm and smelled slightly of sulfur.
ENTERING THE HOUSE, SHE HEARD FRANK LUNDQUIST SPLASHING IN the bathroom. She quickly pulled the two small duffels from under her bed and began to pack some things for herself, and for him: underwear, fresh shirts. As she stuffed the clothes into the bags, other items presented themselves. The curling old photograph, his mother and her sons, that he’d set on the mantel. A drawing she’d made of the little dog. A tiger-striped stone they had found one time when they’d sat together by the lake.
Finally she pushed aside the bed, lifted the loose wallboard, gathered the Canadian passports, fat envelopes of German marks, and Swiss bank documents. She held them in her hands and gazed at them, as if at an arrangement of tarot cards. She forced herself to read the message there.
Then something tucked under his bed caught her eye. A gray composition book, cheap cardboard binding. She didn’t recall seeing it before. Flicked it open, the first page was covered with Frank’s lopsided handwriting. She read the line at the top: What happened to me is universal. And I can prove it.
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