by Mark Powell
She had to drag Wally back, pulling him from the surf a little rougher than she intended, and he kept fighting her, standing knee deep in the glossy water and clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth.
“Please, Mom.”
“Tomorrow, honey.”
“Please, just five more minutes.”
“I’ll bring you back in the morning. I promise.”
“But, Mom—”
“Wally, now.”
Like the ride down it ended in tears, after eleven by the time she got everyone down and into the shower and then—please just leave me alone for two minutes—her mom was tapping against the bathroom door wanting to know if now was a good time to talk and no it wasn’t, and no it never would be.
She wanted sleep and finally got it.
Alone in her childhood bed, Laurie in the Pack ’n Play, the boys on air mattresses in the playroom, and John, John far, far away.
And Tess realizing in that moment just before she collapsed into a dreamless sleep that maybe that was exactly how she wanted it.
46.
When his phone rang late the next morning John assumed it was either Stone or Tess. But when the screen read NUMBER UNAVAILABLE he wasn’t exactly surprised. He thought he had heard it different, the ring, or maybe it was that he now occupied some different place, everything shifted a half inch off center, some ancient hairline crack in the world he only now detected. He took the phone out onto the deck and into the freezing morning. It was a woman’s voice. She sounded young, but very level, and very much in control.
“You don’t know me, but we had a mutual friend in James Stone. You tried to reach him a couple of times yesterday.”
John felt the crack open. Coming through it was something more than the freezing air. He touched the railing and thought of those nights in Minnesota when there’d been something almost approaching friendship. You think any society that sells life insurance could be anything other than damned? Jimmy’s question. A parable John no longer had any interest in considering.
“Mr. Maynard?”
“What happened?”
“A house fire. This was yesterday morning. A little lake house up in the mountains.”
“It was set?”
“There was a good deal of accelerant involved, yes.”
“Jesus.”
“I’m going to send you something, Mr. Maynard.”
“Who are you?”
“You can call me Aida. But listen. I’m going to send you an image. When I call you back I want to know what it means to you.”
The text was a photograph of a letter, on it a blurry swim of Arabic.
His phone rang.
“What is this?”
“Stone sent it. Likely just before it happened. The line you’re looking at translates as ‘I forgive everyone for everything.’ ”
“ ‘I forgive everyone for everything.’ What the hell does that mean?” Then he thought of the message in Arabic.
“We aren’t certain. What I need from you—”
But John had already hung up and opened his e-mail. The sender’s name was in Arabic, unreadable, but below it he identified the same characters: I forgive everyone for everything. Beyond that, there was nothing except a green square that read: ACCEPT TELESCOPE INVITATION. He touched it and it pulsed for a moment before something began to download. A few seconds later a screen appeared, and in the center of that screen was his daughter, laughing. She wore a red coat and appeared to be riding in a car, filmed unsteadily by the driver. The image fizzed, came in and out, and was gone. When it wouldn’t reopen he closed the window and put the phone in his pocket. Something inside him was dead, but something else was very much alive.
Erin was still in bed, propped on the pillow, when John came in and started going through his bag, both hands grabbing until he felt it.
“You want to shut that door?” she asked. “Chilly.”
When he turned he had the gun in his hand.
“John?” and now the chill was in her voice, too.
“I have to go,” he said. “I’m sorry, but this is an emergency.”
She had her eyes on the gun.
“I guess it is,” she said, and tried to laughed. “Let me go with you.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t.”
“Why not?”
He put his wallet in his pocket.
“I just can’t.”
“So you’re going to leave me here.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.”
He called Tess from the car—no answer, no answer, no answer, finally she picked up and before he knew what he was doing John was yelling at her and she was hanging up on him. He called her back but she didn’t pick up and he knew she wouldn’t. But he also knew Kayla was at his parents—that was where the car had been heading.
He called them, no answer. Called again.
He was straddling the centerline of the empty parkway, fifty, sixty in the straightaways, the window half-open and the sting in his face because without it there was some possibility of losing touch with his body, some possibility of allowing the car to go through the guardrail and into the snowy valley.
He called his parents—no answer.
Lost the signal. Called again when he had a single bar of service.
They were fixing lunch. They were blessing the meal. They were busy with their gratitude. He knew they wouldn’t pick up.
The answer was to drive there. The answer was to hurry.
When the phone rang it was Erin.
She sounded as if she had only now woken to find the day not at all to her liking.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“I don’t know exactly, driving. I might lose the signal in a minute.”
“I’m waiting on a cab.”
“I’m sorry. I would say I’ll come back for you but I’m not sure I’ll be able to.”
“I’m sorry too. I’m—”
She stopped herself and with the phone against his cheek he pictured her as golden, all bronzed skin, her face flecked with pinpoints of mica, feet bright with granules of sand. Her arm restored. He was seeing her at twenty, except it wasn’t her he was seeing. It was Karla that summer after freshman year, Karla down below the highway bridge, stepping barefoot into the current of Cane Creek. One ear made translucent with sun.
“I always knew this was coming,” she said. “How could I not know this was coming? But it’s harder than I thought. I feel like we’ve lost Karla all over again, we both have.”
He said nothing. Stone’s pistol was on the seat beside him and he wanted to touch it, badly he wanted the fit of it in his hand. He wanted it as an extension of himself, the trigger metalled to his finger, the one part of him that might actually matter.
“John?”
“You know you never told me about your dream.”
“What dream?”
“That first night at church.”
“No,” she said. “I guess I didn’t. I guess I won’t.”
He didn’t speak again until he was sure his voice wouldn’t break.
“If it’s possible,” he said finally, “I’ll call back.”
“She’s dead, John.”
“I might lose the signal up here.”
“She’s dead. We were stupid to think otherwise.”
“I know that.”
“But we’re human beings too. We’re lonely.” She waited for him to speak, but there was nothing else to say. “I know you’re married, John,” she said finally.
“It’s maybe not like you think.”
“I hope that’s where you’re going. I hope you’re going back to them.”
“I might lose the signal.”
“Please don’t hang up.”
But he had to, and he did.
He didn’t bother calling his parents again.
He drove faster. He had to go faster. But something seemed to be containing him, holding him back. Then he knew what it was tha
t was slowing him down, he saw it on his wrist. That old holdover, the vestige of his dead faith.
The prayer rope was half up the sleeve of his coat, half-fluttering in the onrush of air, and he slipped it off, slipped it right off and let it sail out the window where it fluttered once in the withered sunlight and was gone.
47.
Christmas Eve broke gray and overcast on the Gulf, and by the time Tess woke it was ten. The room was warm and behind the blinds was no more than the merest notion of light. Someone—her mom, she guessed—had taken Laurie from the crib.
She stretched her body beneath the sheets.
She had slept eleven hours and somewhere in the night seemed to have shaken loose from everything that had weighed not only last night but the last several months.
John and the USB drive.
The man in the basement.
John’s man in the basement.
It occurred to her that what she had classified as some free-floating metaphysical dread might have been no more than exhaustion, sleep deprivation instead of existential angst.
She was in the bathroom when she remembered the whales, the blue whales her dad had mentioned, the blue whales that had caused all of them to clatter out to the beach. She would take Wally and Daniel on a long walk up the sand. It had rained during the night—she had some vague recollection of rain against the windows—and the beach would be littered with kelp and dead jellyfish. They might even see the whales. It might even be possible to take her father’s boat out into the harbor. It might even be possible to spot them.
Then it occurred to her that of course it was possible.
Anything was possible in this new world she inhabited.
The boys were in front of the TV with her father and David and his three girls when she came down. Some teen movie entirely age-inappropriate.
“Sleepyhead,” her dad called.
“Mom!” from first Wally and then Daniel.
They hugged her but somehow managed to keep their eyes on the screen.
“Who wants to go to the beach?” Tess called out.
“I do,” Wally said. “We both do. But we want to watch this first.”
“What is this?”
“Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” Wally said. “Come watch it with us.”
Tess switched her eyes between her father and her brother.
“Is this?”
“It’s fine,” David said.
“It doesn’t seem fine.”
“Doesn’t matter now,” her brother said. “There’s like twenty minutes left.”
She turned to her father.
“Where’s Laurie?”
“Your mother has her out on the deck. Sit down with us, honey.”
“Twenty minutes?”
“At most,” David said.
“I’ll be back.”
She took her coffee onto the back deck where her mom, sister, and her sister-in-law sat looking at their phones and playing with Laurie.
“There’s Mommy,” her mother said, working Laurie’s plump arms, “there’s my mommy.”
“She okay?”
“Happy as can be. I fed her out here with the pelicans.”
“What time did she get up?”
“I don’t know,” her mom said. “What time, girls? Maybe eight? I didn’t know if you were still nursing her or not so—”
“Not really. A little now and then, but—”
But she felt that warm tightness now and took her daughter and nuzzled her, pulled up the corner of her T-shirt and her jog-bra while everyone stared at their phones.
“Wally’s dying to go down to the water,” her mother said.
“I tried to get him to go.”
“David tried to take him, but he said he was waiting on you.”
“I tried just now but he’s watching something.”
“He said the two of you are the whale experts. That no one else quite understands them like you two.”
“He’s sweet.”
“He’s an angel. They all are. I want her back please when you’re finished.”
When she was finished Laurie was asleep and Tess passed her back to her mother. She went inside to refill her coffee and saw they were on to something else.
“What is this now?” she asked.
“Sit down,” her dad said.
“I thought we were going to the beach? Wally?”
But he was ignoring her, or not ignoring her so much as completely oblivious to her presence.
She was in the kitchen when she heard her phone going off upstairs in the bedroom. She trotted up and saw she had three missed calls, all from John. She was about to dial him when it rang again.
“Hey,” she said.
“I need Kayla’s number.”
“What?”
“I need Kayla’s number right now, Tess. I know you have it.”
“Merry Christmas to you, too,” she said a little sadly, because although she still existed in the happy bubble of the morning, she knew in another second she would leave it, possibly forever.
“Tess.”
“I don’t have it.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“How would I know her number? Why do you need her number?”
“This is a goddamn emergency, all right? So—”
“I don’t like you talking to me like this.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but listen, just give me her number.”
“I’m telling you, I don’t have it.”
“Don’t lie to me. I have to find her.”
“Where are you? And did you give Wally your phone without so much as a word to me?”
“Tess, goddamn it.”
“I’m hanging up now.”
“I have to find her.”
“I’m sure she’s at your parents.” Then she held the phone away from her ear so that she could scream properly into it. “Where are you?”
She hung up. It rang immediately but she cut it off.
And then everything rushed back in only it was closer now, so close she felt it cutting off her air. The days alone with the children while her husband was off doing whatever it was he did, and Tess, Tess never asking, Tess the good wife, the quiet acquiescent one whose husband was gone every weekend.
She thought of Pat Glenn in the grocery store.
She thought of the dark soles on the feet of the kneeling man in the photographs and she thought of the face of Jimmy Stone.
She thought of those weeks on St. Simons Island and how a part of her knew her survival was a one-time thing. She couldn’t do it again, wouldn’t do it again, but she sensed it, smelled it on the changing wind of the gray day.
She walked to the landing in the turn of the stairs and called to her brother.
“Hey, did you seriously get me a pair of Hoka Ones?”
“Seriously,” he said without looking up from the screens.
“Could I have them?”
“They’re yours.”
“I mean now.”
“Have at,” he said, and made a broad gesture toward the tree. “They’re wrapped.”
She took the box to her bedroom, tore it open, cut the tags with nail clippers, and put the cushy shoes on her feet. All of it rushed, her fingers nearly useless but somehow working because she had to hurry. She couldn’t breathe. She needed out.
Immediately.
She was coming down the stairs when Wally came running up toward her. He was still in his pajamas, his hair flattened with sleep.
“I’m ready, Mom.”
“What?”
“To go to the beach.”
“Now?”
“You said you would.”
“Honey, I’m going running now. I waited for you.”
“But you said.”
“I waited for you, remember?”
“But I wanted to see the rest of the movie.”
“And then another.”
“It wasn’t another movie. It was just a cartoon. Please, Mom.”
“Give me one hour, all right?”
“Mom.”
His voice broke and she could see he was on the verge of tears, but couldn’t he see she was on the verge of suffocation? Couldn’t he see she needed out, if only for a few minutes?
“Let your Uncle David take you.”
“But it’s supposed to be us.”
“One hour, Wally. Be reasonable.”
“Please, Mom.”
She should have given in then, she knew she should have. But instead of giving in she squeezed past him, kissing the top of his head as she went.
“One hour.”
“Fine,” he yelled.
“One hour, honey.”
“Fine.”
She trotted down the boardwalk to the gray beach, the sky low-slung and hammered into a ceiling of clouds. There were people everywhere, walkers, families, people out shelling, but she hardly noticed them. Just started her watch and began to jog, steadily picking up the pace until she could breathe again, until her heart rate was no longer rising but settling.
Reasonable, she told herself. Be reasonable.
48.
John pulled into his parents’ yard, his phone in one pocket, Stone’s pistol in the other. It was snowing now, not much yet, but gathering, starting to stick on the banks and in the boughs of trees. Kayla’s car—what John thought must be Kayla’s car with its parking decal and IRON GIRL sticker on the back glass—sat in the yard. A line of smoke went up from the chimney.
He found his parents in the kitchen, cleaning up. His mother at the sink plunging dishes in the suds. His father clearing the table. A clear Tupperware container held what was left of a salad and he knew that was Kayla’s.
“Where is she?” he said.
They both startled and then smiled. John! Merry Christmas! We didn’t think you were coming. We didn’t know if—
But John just repeating it: Where is she? Where is she?
Tearing through the house calling Kayla? Kayla?
He came back into the kitchen where his parents stood, their happiness giving way to confusion, their smiles just beginning to wilt. Their world of family reunions and Bible study, of vegetable gardens and green stamps, of things made right because things were done right—all of it just beginning to unwind in the face of their son’s manic anger.