by Mark Powell
Debit or credit?
I’ll take next available.
These voices around her, these people.
Just go ahead and sign with your finger, honey, that’s right.
Go ahead and swipe your card, ma’am.
They were everywhere. But the question was: where had they been? If they were real—if they weren’t figments of Tess’s imagination—why was she only now noticing them?
Shouldn’t life hold itself together?
That seemed the essential problem: none of it held.
Eating the big Sunday dinner. John taking the boys on a walk through the woods while John’s mother was in the yard and his father dozed in his recliner, a bag of microwave popcorn on his lap, ESPN Classic on the TV. That 1990 Portland team, you remember them, John? And her husband reeling off the lineup: Drexler and Terry Porter in the back court, Jerome Kersey at small forward…
None of it quite held, these things collected into life.
Or they both did and didn’t. Either way, it was too late to turn back.
6.
John couldn’t turn back either, or wouldn’t, at least. It was raining now, not hard but hard enough, and he crouched in a thicket of mountain laurel, sheltering over Wally and Daniel. The boys didn’t care, the boys wanted loose. They had crossed the ridge that marked the back edge of his parents’ property and were on Forest Service land, green and dense but for the graveled fire roads and hinged gates. John watched the sky. Cloud traces visible through the canopy. Beyond it a blue openness that would arrive without warning, the day becalmed, almost apologetic in its clarity.
In a few minutes it would be gorgeous.
There was no reason to turn back. The day was warm, the boys loved the rain. Can we run around, Dad? It’s not cold or anything. Fine, that was fine, and they did, they ran. We’re like wolves, Dad. This was Wally. Woofs, Daniel called them. The boys raced bare-chested through the newly dark trees, hair matted, palms upright as they spun in circles. It was a slight miracle the way they turned, the way the water beaded and ran. They were honey colored from summer and in their loping strides there really was something wolf-like about them. It was one of those small gifts that reminded him that even if he had given up his hold on the earth, the earth had not necessarily relinquished its hold on him.
He looked back in the direction they had come.
He had no intention of going back, at least not until he had to.
Because honestly, what was waiting for him back at his parents’ house? Not Karla and Kayla but reminders thereof. The sense of loss he felt everywhere there, their consistent and eternal failure to appear—it had gone on so long it seemed less like death and estrangement than something willful, something spiteful.
He watched the boys spin, and began to pick at the beggar lice that had adhered to his pants and shoes, everything below the knee. These green triangles the size of an infant’s fingernail. Their legs were flecked with mud. They were here and that was real—he understood that, he knew it. But there is a tension in absence that is almost equally present, an area of damage spread over the skin like scar tissue, a mapped silver so bright it almost shimmered.
He saw it everywhere he looked.
7.
Tess walked around the house.
Laurie was asleep in her Pack ’n Play, so she had a few minutes alone and this was what she wanted, the chance to explore. The farmhouse had been built in the 1940s. The original home place was somewhere deep in the woods, hand-built in the 1830s and passed down through his father’s side of the family. But this wasn’t the house John had grown up in and because of that, or maybe despite that, he seemed to have no desire to visit. John had grown up south of here in Peach Creek, halfway between Atlanta and Garrison, where his father worked on the assembly line until a faulty drill press collapsed on his right hand. His parents had used the settlement to pay off their house and moved here—moved home—after John graduated high school. He had spent only a few college summers here and seemed to care nothing for it.
Tess, on the other hand, was fascinated by every nook and corner. It seemed to come from another world, or not just come from another world, but hold open a window on a little outpost of the past. A thousand square feet of shuttered life, of ceramic figurines and a clock that chimed bird song. A northern cardinal at noon. At three a tufted titmouse. There was a linen closet full of their canning, Mason jars of chow-chow and tomatoes and peppers and okra stacked along the contact paper. Louis L’Amour Westerns. An actual family Bible.
In the refrigerator was a cellophane-covered pitcher of sweet tea and a few biscuits packaged individually in Ziploc bags. But there was also a spareness. The walls were wood pasteboard and largely unadorned. The big oaks and tulip poplars buried the house beneath permanent shade. It was the kind of place that would soon be gone. You’d walk up to find it deserted, to find it had become the kind of place where you might scrounge for relics. You’d sit on the ruins beside the chimney and reconstruct the lived lives, knowing all along you were insufficient to the task.
She walked into John’s old room—to the extent that it ever was—and sat on his bed. More recently it had been John’s daughter Kayla’s room. Technically it still was, even if she lived in Sevierville now. She worked at the desk of a fitness club and attended a community college where she studied something practical Tess couldn’t quite remember, dental hygiene, maybe. Radiology tech. It had been her room, Tess knew, from the time she was eleven and John went to work in California until she graduated high school and moved two hours north. How much her husband saw of Kayla Tess didn’t know. Very little, she suspected. Tess had met her only once, purely by chance when Tess brought the children here and Kayla was visiting. Her sense was that was once more than John intended.
She did know John sent her money now and then. And Kayla wrote to him. There were occasional letters that came in the mail from her, addressed to John. Bright, cheery stamps, glowing hearts, waving flags. She hoped to God John responded. Kayla was quiet and sweet, content, it seemed, to disappear into whatever landscape she occupied. A pretty girl who always seemed to have one hand in front of her mouth, half-obscuring the thin filament of scar tracing the lower half of her face. Tess had looked her up on Facebook and gleaned the contours of her life: education, employment, a few pictures.
A bird tattoo on her thigh, planets and stars on her shoulders.
The hair pink-streaked and ponytailed.
The snaggled bottom teeth.
She was a fitness competitor of some sort and there were pictures of Kayla at the gym, Kayla working out. Kayla in Lycra, laughing in front of a rack of dumbbells.
But her privacy settings didn’t allow Tess to look any deeper, and Tess wouldn’t dare send her a friend request. So to Tess, she wasn’t a person so much as an idea, sentimental and a little uncomfortable, but never real. Which meant there were times Tess had to remind herself that John hadn’t lost his daughter in the wreck that took his wife. Even though in certain ways, he had.
So it was John’s room to Tess, and always would be.
John’s room, John’s life.
Not Kayla’s, and surely not Tess’s.
They had been raised in different worlds, John’s childhood cemented in the working-class South of the ’80s, the Budweiser and Bocephus. A world of revivals and potlucks and a day of summer vacation at Six Flags Over Georgia. They ate Jell-O salad and feared the Soviets with their parades and tactical nukes because at that point it wasn’t a joke, it was their lives. His mamma cleaning houses and selling Amway to schoolteachers in teal wind suits. His daddy paying off the mortgage by losing three fingers at the tool-and-die plant, a year before they shipped the whole operation to the maquiladora belt. It would have been a sad country song punched into the jukebox—B3, E6, F5—if it hadn’t been true.
Tess’s childhood had been privileged and coastal, a world of citrus and light and a Chopin nocturne playing softly in another room. Walking the acres of orange grove h
er father kept as a hobby. She was in her early teens on September 11 and the only world she had ever known was one of war and surveillance, a planet of muted fear animated by that gnawing sense that somewhere out there was someone who wanted very much to kill you. Not that we would ever deign to talk about it. Not when there were vacation pics from the Caymans to upload to Facebook or turn into a calendar on Shutterfly.
Some of John’s things were still in the closet. Beneath Kayla’s plastic-bagged winter coats and zippered prom dresses were John’s basketball trophies. His medals from high-school track and cross-country. There were a few books, running shoes, old L.A. Gear high-tops. Bottle rockets. Slim red-sticked fireworks, banned now even in Georgia. It was one of the first things he’d ever told her about his life, these giant bottle-rocket fights they would wage in pastures. Tossing them. Firing them out of PVC pipes. A vanload of his college buddies in their army surplus camo, a few in pool goggles because that shit can blind you. Hammering a bottle of Mad Dog while one gets out to open the gate and then close it behind them, drunk and giggling.
You put the sticks in your teeth—she remembered him telling her that. You carried the bottle rockets in your mouth so your hands were free and when it was over you had this clown’s smile of red dye. Nose full of cordite. Thumb raw from the wheel of the lighter.
But had Karla ever been there? Tess knew they had met in Peach Creek, gone to high school and college together, started dating after Christmas break freshman year. So had she been there, out in those fields with the boys? Nineteen and laughing in her cutoffs, white pockets against tan thighs? Mouth breathy with Boone’s Farm?
Karla had surely sat on this bed, lay on it, made love and then napped on it. There was no doubting that, no reason to ask. Karla had been here with John, and not some rumored pre-John but John himself, John as he was.
Something within Tess didn’t like it, the memory, the room. This sense that her own life was the by-product of tragedy, that had Karla Maynard not lost control on a stretch of wet interstate Tess Maynard would not exist. And neither would Wally or Daniel or Laurie.
She found a cardboard box and carried it onto the screened porch.
A light rain was starting to fall. She heard it first in the trees, ticking the leaves so that their glossy bellies showed, and then she heard it thumping into the soft ground, the moss and pine needles. The trees were streaked silver, brighter despite the clouds. The air cooled. Everyone would be coming in soon, but she didn’t feel rushed. She simply opened the box.
Immediately, she could tell it was newer, more recent than the trophies and old shoes. It had about it the John she knew. The flesh-and-blood John she passed as they trafficked in and out of the shower. Everything else was the John of hearsay, everything, perhaps, but this.
She didn’t like it.
She could tell that right away too, but she dug in anyway. The first thing she came across was a box of chocolates, the sort of commemorative thing not meant for actual consumption. It read CARLY SLOVENSKO in slanting script. Twenty individual chocolates, each bearing the image of a different landscape. Mountains, barns, rivers, churches. It was Czech or Polish. Maybe Hungarian. Then she found the label, a single word buried in the vowel-less print: it was Slovak.
Below that she found the axe, or hatchet, maybe. Wood handled with a brass blade. Not a real weapon or tool but the sort of thing you bought at an airport gift shop, an afterthought, a way to blow through those last few euros.
The postcard was below that, a crowded beach, behind it mountains.
GREETINGS FROM SUNNY YALTA in three languages and two alphabets.
She stopped when she came to the photograph. It was John’s daughter, it was Kayla, four or five years old in a pink leotard. Kayla before she became fixed in the universe by memory and a collapsing guardrail. Kayla before she became defined by the idea of too fast for conditions and a wiggle of scar tissue.
Looking at her, Tess thought of that verse from the Bible, not even the verse but the line. But it wasn’t the Bible. It was William Blake. Something about “thy fearful symmetry.” For that was exactly what she was in the photograph, this fantastically made child who soon enough would be unmade, who would be lost. Then she remembered—my God! What a fool I am—that Kayla was alive and so far as Tess knew, happy.
She put the photograph back, intentionally burying it in the bottom.
Which was how she found the USB drive. A Memorex thumb drive meant to be attached to a key chain. But it was attached to nothing beyond her hand. It was, it occurred to her, hers.
If she wanted it.
But she didn’t, and she dropped it back in the box.
It was only when they had strapped the children into the van for the ride home, folded the Pack ’n Play and given hugs that she changed her mind. A second before she knew they would drive away, she suddenly needed to pee—so sorry, gimme like sixty seconds—and ran back inside not to the bathroom but to the closet where she hid the USB drive in her bag.
It was hers. She just hadn’t wanted to admit it.
8.
Monday morning a university-wide faculty meeting was called at which the provost explained that Professor Hadawi had tendered his resignation and would not be returning to campus. That was all. It hardly seemed worthy of announcement. Professor Hadawi had spent the last year on sabbatical, teaching courses on social justice in his native Yemen on a fellowship from the Soros Foundation. He had decided, so said the provost, to accept a permanent administrative position there. There was no mention of the clearing of his office.
The provost dismissed the gathering without opening the floor to questions.
Some hands went up and hung there, ignored. There was a general grumbling, but eventually they all got up and returned to their lives. John went back to his office and sent friend requests to thirty students.
The next day Stone called and asked him to meet him at a club in Atlanta.
“I’m hearing rumblings,” Stone said. “Lots of information and disinformation. Puts me in mind of the good old days. I want you to meet me Saturday evening.”
“This is about Hadawi?”
“Come Saturday and find out.”
“Sorry, can’t do it.”
“You know the Show Pony in Little Five Points? We’ll have a little powwow.”
“Can’t do it, James.”
“Ask the wife for a ride. Take the family car, I don’t care,” Stone said. “Just don’t stand me up.”
“Jimmy—”
“We have history, John. Don’t sit there and act like we don’t.”
*
Or if not history, John thought, at least a shared past.
After his wife—his first wife, he reminded himself—died in a car wreck on I-75, after the funeral, after the surgeries to repair the arm, shoulder, and face of his daughter who didn’t die—his first daughter—after the drinking necessitated by watching his daughter endure her surgeries, after the temporary leave of absence from his teaching position that was immediately understood as permanent, which is to say, simply, after, John Maynard accepted a position at a conservative think tank situated on the campus of a small Jesuit college north of St. Cloud, Minnesota. The think tank was ill-defined yet well-endowed, and he spent ten hours a day reading and sipping the bourbon that had replaced his wife.
Kayla was ten by then and almost whole, enrolled in the college’s school for faculty children. She was quiet and attentive in a way John was not. Almost as if it were her father and not her who’d been catapulted into the windshield, her father and not her with the silver thread of scar that unspooled across the bottom of her face. Besides heightening her already shy nature, it didn’t seem to affect her.
John was different, lonelier, less able. His single friend was a fellow drunk named James Stone, a documentarian with a muddled past and connections to right-wing causes. A man, it was said, who had access. How he had landed at the think tank no one seemed certain and John never asked. Stone hinted at
some spiritual crisis he intended to drown, something too painful to address directly. There was a rumor he made high-end porn in Miami.
A few nights a week they drank, together but alone, Stone sitting behind John’s desk, downing J&B from a paper cone and holding forth.
“My past.” Stone saying this. “Let us dignify it henceforth by referring to it as my private history. I didn’t go through life with this jammed in me. This is what I’m saying. This is not my area of operations, squalling and bitching.”
It appeared to be the same paper cone, night after night, beginning to fray, going transparent.
“I got a brother. Guy’s got three daughters and a lovely wife. A house in Sleepy Hollow with like five bedrooms, and you think those girls aren’t gorgeous? Christ. Left and right you get the boys coming around. My own brother, younger brother, just for the sake of the record, and here’s this free-range grassfed American dream. How do you think that makes me feel?”
John tried to imagine. That was, in fact, what he did during that period of his life: he tried to imagine the way others lived. His daughter, alone in their campus apartment. James Stone, alone in his brother’s kitchen at night. Stone would go to give the milk carton a little shake before pouring it on his cereal—you wanted to do that, that little shake—and the cap would fly off, milk all over the goddamn counter because someone had failed to secure it. His brother, his brother’s wife. Those three gorgeous daughters. He should have known. Still, you see a closed cap and you assume security. Was he wrong in this?
“You think I don’t consider these things? Look at me, John. This is a question I’m asking.”
His brother’s wife had a running joke that the loudest sound in the world was James Stone taking the plastic cereal bag from the box. Not ha-ha funny, but you get it. But that wasn’t the real issue. The real issue was why you needed a cellophane bag inside a cardboard box. Milled corn. Sugar. That’s what we’re protecting?