She sits back, looks at Lily indifferently.
And I never did.
So you can see why I’m a bit dismissive of men.
I got the consummate version right up front; the basest, truest version, without any of the smoke and mirrors.
And the problem with them is that they don’t just die and it’s over.
They carry forward in time, the things they’ve done.
Cascade down through the generations.
Not any surprise why your daddy in turn was the bad man he was.
Wasn’t his fault.
Lucky it ended with you.
Woman’s got a chance to put out that wildfire; if she puts her head down and keeps things sensible, gets on with life, and doesn’t try to take what’s not hers, or exert power over others, the future’s got a chance, you know?
Lily absorbs it all.
I’m sorry I brought it up, she says finally.
Marlena comes in, whispers something to Tish.
Tish nods, looks to Lily.
I’ve got to go; food bank.
Lily thanks her for the time, the drink.
But she stops just as she’s headed for the door.
You said he shipped out to Europe.
Tish nods, eyes Lily.
What?
Nothing, it’s just, they say he died in the Pacific, which doesn’t make any sense.
Dead’s dead, that’s all that matters, Tish says, then goes into the bathroom to freshen up.
II
Missed you yesterday, Wes says.
The tone: dubious.
She motions vaguely at her neck without looking up from her spreadsheet: throat-thingy.
Mm-hmm.
Lily squints, leans in a centimeter closer to her screen, focusing hard on the spreadsheet.
The tone: go away unless you have something real to say.
He walks away after a moment.
She smiles inwardly.
She drags aside the spreadsheet on her desktop, revealing what she’s really working on—a webpage—Ancestry.com.
Which she’s paid entirely too much to become a member of.
Maybe Bruce will pay for it.
And even if he won’t, she’s all-in now anyhow.
The shining promise of sixteen million dollars has been joined with something else—the perverse thrill of learning one has a blackguard somewhere in their lineage.
Like Jack the Ripper.
Or Attila the Hun.
Then you just had to know; they drew you in, mesmerized you—because so much would be revealed if that lineage proved true—so much about one’s self would be explained—the dark places within, those shadowy corners from which the bullshit parts of our characters came from.
It would be like finding an entry in an encyclopedia after all these years, with a picture of Gray Allen, beneath which it said: Here, this man, this psychopath, is the reason, Liliana, you’re such a spun-out, self-serving wreck.
**You are now forevermore absolved of guilt in this matter; carry on in your spun-out-ness and do so with a light heart.**
Ancestry.com confirms that her father was Gray’s only offspring.
Her family tree is less a tree than a branch.
A straight line from Gray to her father to her.
No siblings.
No offshoots.
And no one, she realizes with some frustration, who can give her more perspective on the family blackguard.
Like, for instance, the confusion about where he was deployed—said to be the Pacific, when it was clearly Europe.
Another coffee and some absent spreadsheet work later, she realizes she doesn’t just have to look down the family tree, but can also look up it, toward his parents.
See if generations spidered off those branches.
But in short order she learns that by the time Gray had shipped off to war, both his parents were already dead.
Parentless, like her.
A soldier with no one to write home to.
But, Ancestry.com tells her, he did have a brother.
A soldier, too, who served in the Pacific.
Maybe that’s why there was the confusion—the Europe-Pacific thing?
But he was a Bill Allen, deceased 1945, returned to the States and buried in Pennsylvania.
There’s nothing MIA about that.
She delves a little deeper, learns that Bill Allen managed to have two children before deployment, one of whom was now deceased, but the other still alive, living in Centralia, Pennsylvania.
Peter Michael Allen.
This number is disconnected or no longer in service.
That’s the recording she gets when she calls the only phone number she can find for Peter Michael Allen in Centralia, Pennsylvania.
She tries it again, gets the same response.
She looks up Centralia.
It’s the tiniest dot in a sea of tiny dots in eastern Pennsylvania.
She tries to figure some work-arounds, the other online avenues you employ to get to people—social media, search engines, directories—but it all comes to naught.
She sort of expected this.
There is, in the end, only a snail-mail address.
Which curiously has no zip code.
Obviously, a typo.
But the more sources she checks, she comes up with the same zip-code-less address: Peter Michael Allen, 44 Locust St, Centralia, PA.
Not even Google puts a zip to it, and they put a zip to everything, whether you ask for it or not.
Which precludes, she assumes, being able to send the man a letter.
(Which would also be way too slow at this stage—her digital-device-induced ADD of the last ten years has only been heightened by her enthusiasm for answer.
[Now now now!
What do you mean I can’t get an answer with a finger swipe anymore?
Things aren’t done in Days anymore.
They’re done in Hours, Minutes!])
Nevertheless, all she has is that strange, zip-code-less address.
And that tiny mute dot on the map.
Bruce tells her to go when she calls him.
Hell, I’ll go, he says.
Eastern Pennsylvania—that’s half the reason you do a job like this: get out into the world and see all the random places you hadn’t a clue existed, he says.
She likes him, she decides.
Yes, he’s a leech.
But there’s no “no” in him.
(Too much “no” in the world already.
Not enough goddamn “yes.”
Yes: beautiful word, exalted.
Opener of all doors.)
It’s, of course, easy to say Yes when you might have three million dollars sitting on the other side of things.
But she subtly redirects the conversation, isn’t quite ready yet to be on a flight with him, confined in the same rental car with him for hours on end.
There’s no “no” in him, yes.
But he’s still got that mustache.
And those meaty sausage hands.
The important thing is, he says he’ll cover her travel.
She can’t quite believe it—can’t quite trust it—this idea that someone would give something away when there was so little chance at recompense.
He laughs, says it’s part of the gamble of our business model; ninety percent of the time, it’s good money after bad, but when we hit it that ten percent, all that pain goes away real quick.
Now, go make me some money, Lily, he says, and hangs up.
She’s multitasking, blazing through the manifests and invoices while she simultaneously builds an ironclad, quick in-and-out itinerary on Kayak.
The itinerary, a bear: two flight connections and five hours of driving afterward.
Essentially a whole day each way.
Feels like she’s going to Timbuktu and all she’s doing is going up the Eastern Seaboard.
No way around it, though.
South Car
olina to Centralia is not exactly a trending itinerary at the moment.
The real problem is not the flights or the transfers or the rental car.
It’s the time off it’s going to require.
Any chance I can take Monday off?
Wes is communing with his computer, doesn’t look up.
You had vacation last month, remember?
And you were just sick.
He casts a half-second glance at her over the top of his monitor for emphasis, as if to say, I didn’t believe it for a second, you know.
Monday’s all hands-on-deck, one of the bigger days of the year.
We got two tramps coming in.
Four hundred ninety containers that need to be tagged and bagged.
All she can see now is the top of his head and the back of his monitor.
It’s a giant twenty-seven-inch wall that basically says Go Away.
She can’t be certain, but she thinks she can hear, barely audible from his computer’s speakers, the sounds of screeching tires.
The tense, hyperactive fingers on his mouse are consistent with a man mid-lap in time trials at Daytona.
She opts not to say anything else, returns to her cubicle.
Clearly there is No in Wes.
He is made of No.
Which she understands, to some degree.
He is her boss.
Bosses are No-men.
That surround themselves with Yes-men.
You earn the right to say No.
But who the hell wants to do that?
Say No to everyone all the time?
That’s the reward for climbing the ladder?
So, she takes it upon herself to begin a covert operation.
She will say Yes to the questions Wes said No to.
She will compress the margins of the trip.
It is barely realistic, but with a whole lot of caffeine and the pedal to the metal, she can do it in a day-and-a-half of travel, with a little bit of sleep mixed in somewhere.
Which means the weekend.
She’ll go after work on Friday, come back late Sunday, and no one will be the wiser.
She finds herself smiling the rest of the day.
After she has clicked Purchase on the itinerary.
Not a word comes from her lips.
She is just another silent, anonymous woman in a cubicle.
But inside, she is an echoing carnival of Yes.
III
O to be on that flight Friday night!
Just that feeling of the plane getting airborne beneath her in the darkness, the hydraulics tucking the landing gear in, the rolling weightlessness of the sky welcoming her into its embrace…she’s free!
Careful, Lil, don’t get too nutty.
That’s what she told herself.
But she did anyhow.
Splurged.
Rented a car two sizes up from economy.
But because she doesn’t know how to deal with the gas issue, whether she can lay that back on Bruce’s company—if that’d be right—she splits the difference, stops two sizes up from economy when everything in her screams Cadillac.
The idea, now that she is on the ground in Pennsylvania: to drive through the night, streaming Pandora, with a 5-Hour-Energy drip keeping her between the lines and not in a ditch.
That’ll get her to Peter Michael Allen by sunup Saturday.
She’ll sleep in the car after that, after all the adrenaline and caffeine have worn off.
Then she’ll be back on a beeline to the airport, plenty of time to spare for the late Saturday night flight home.
When she climbs into the rental car, she high-fives herself, because there’s no one else to high-five.
Make it happen, girl.
There is nothing but night out here.
Nothing but night and intermittent light poles strobing through her headlights.
The Pennsylvanian blackness has consumed her.
She likes it like this, even more so than being on the plane.
This sense that she’s removed from the rest of the world, unreachable, untouchable, on some sort of holy quest.
(Maybe this is why Jesus went into the desert.
People couldn’t give him shit in the desert.)
Both the hours and traffic thin around her.
Seems nobody wants to go to the middle of nowhere.
Especially in the middle of the night.
The first few 5-Hour Energies are like a crack party.
Every song is a thumbs-up and every lyric is belted out at the top of her lungs.
Even if she doesn’t know the lyrics, she makes them up.
But the next few energy drinks do the opposite.
They seem almost to put her to sleep.
She tries to sing but her lips won’t keep up with the lyrics.
She rolls down the windows, lets the wind howl into the rental car.
Must.
Stay.
Awake.
At.
All.
Costs.
But soon she’s thump-thump-thumping to the left, thump-thump-thumping to the right.
Car tires finding the serrated rumble strips on either side of the lane.
Each time it sends a sudden jolt of adrenaline so wickedly through her that she thinks various internal organs will explode.
(Caffeine has nothing on crack, and crack has nothing on fear.)
But then in short order that blackness outside the window again seeps in, swirls inside the car, and despite her best efforts, floods into her head, swallowing up her vision and thoughts again…
Thump thump thump!
Any more of this ping-pong—between abject bolts of shock and the sweet siren song of sleep—she’s liable to go mad.
So when she sees a motel materializing ahead in the darkness like a glorious, broken-down vision of Shangri-La, she exits.
It takes her all of five minutes to park, check in, and plop down on the bed.
The idea is to grab two hours of sleep and still be in Centralia by sunup.
A lot can happen in two hours.
For instance this, some ten years ago: a hysterectomy.
About the length of a movie, if you sit through the commercials.
Of course, Lily was out and drooling through the whole thing.
Modern medicine: crazy.
They open you up like a cupboard while you’re asleep, take away the bad stuff, then quietly close the cupboard again and tiptoe away.
You wake up half-drunk and a little sore, but for the most part the same person you were when you fell asleep, minus the troublesome bits.
Yes, Tish is right, Lily will be childless, at least by natural means.
And that’s the only means she’s interested in.
The good news is Lily gets over things.
She’s gotten quite good at this, moving on.
Forgetting.
(People are no longer people, are no longer real, if you do not name them in your head.)
Besides, it could have been cancer, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
She is still fully functional and 100 percent healthy.
So, to bemoan it is an exercise in raging against the machine, against the true and irrevocable history of things.
Onward.
Too bad, yes.
But onward.
Sunlight.
Oh, this is a bad sign.
She quickly moves to pull on her shoes.
She berates herself as she leaves the motel.
She hasn’t had coffee yet and is not her own friend.
No way she can make the late-night return flight now, not with the seven hours she just burned up.
She’ll have to move the flight.
From Saturday night to Sunday morning.
Good that she built in the entirety of Sunday for a buffer.
Centralia is not what she expects.
With a name like that, she expects some Utopia with light rail and street sweepers
on every block.
It is day, light has risen on the world, but here there is not much for it to illumine.
The buildings on the peripheries of the town have not just been abandoned, they’ve been leveled, so that only their foundations remain.
And the ravenous overgrowth is doing its best to erase their history from the world.
Ahead, there is a sign.
A city-limits sign, no doubt.
That’s what you always pass in situations like this.
In the movies.
The rotting old sign that tells you you’ve arrived at the end of the world.
But this sign does them one better.
It’s not a city-limits sign.
It’s a warning sign.
WARNING: Unstable Ground; May Emit Underground Fire or Carbon Monoxide.
She thinks vaguely about taking a picture of this sign, texting it back to someone.
But most of those someones are at work, so she opts not to.
She wends through Centralia.
It’s as if they built the city but forgot the houses.
There’s indeed a grid of streets here, with sidewalks and rusting stop signs, but between those streets is nothing.
Fields.
Half-committed to weeds.
Maybe that’s why there isn’t a zip code.
Because there isn’t a town.
She gets out of her car.
Just stands there for a moment.
Lets the humidity enshroud her.
Lets the electric sound of unseen cicadas sting her ears.
Well, isn’t this a goddamn?
She walks up the sidewalk because she doesn’t know what else to do.
There’s smoke ahead.
Rising from the street, a block up.
She nears it, sees there a crack: the asphalt buckled upward along a fissure running perpendicularly across the street, splitting not only the pavement, but the sidewalk as well.
And that constant, ill-smelling smoke rises from it.
She’s somewhere between freaked-out and incredulous, and for that reason laughs.
It’s a nervous laugh.
An are-you-kidding-me laugh.
Because someone, somewhere must be seeing this.
Seeing her standing in the middle of the Apocalypse, Hell’s own emissions rising up before her.
But there isn’t.
Just her and the cicadas.
The Far Shore Page 5