by Lisa Gornick
“Some of the kids on the unit can’t go back home. I do short-term foster parenting until longer placements can be found for them.”
“How old was the baby?”
“Nineteen months. A pip, into everything, talking up a storm. At the last minute, his grandmother from Louisiana agreed to take him, but she had to wait for the weekend to travel up here.”
She wants to ask more questions, but she senses that between the baby and the grandmother lies a moat of misery and for the first time in a very long time she yearns for something else for herself.
They eat. He eats quite a bit. She swallows a few forkfuls. Then he pulls her up from the table, into her bedroom, where she feels herself falling, falling, like one of the trust exercises she’d been led through at camp as a teenager, backward onto the snowy white quilt never touched by hands other than her own.
He tastes of wine and tomatoes. His back is taut. His mouth travels from her eyes to her neck to her collarbone.
She pushes him away, props herself up on an elbow. She tries to steady the whirling inside her. “I need you to tell me some things about you. Something before the babies.”
“Now?”
“Yes. Now.”
He lies on his side, facing her, his limbs sinewy like an animal that hunts.
“How did you learn to do the circus rings?”
“Climbing trees. I grew up in McCall, Idaho. There are a lot of trees there.”
“McCall, Idaho?”
“There was a smoke jumpers’ base there. My father was a smoke jumper until he disappeared.”
He pauses but does not make her ask how, why, when. “I was one. My mom thinks he staged it to look like his death so we could get the insurance money, but I think he might really have been killed.”
“A smoke jumper?”
“Guys who fight fires by jumping from planes into the middle of a blazing forest. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?”
“And dangerous.”
“He’d been a conscientious objector during the war. A lot of the COs trained to be the first smoke jumpers. Most of them left the Forest Service after the war, but my father stayed on. The CIA was just forming, and some of the smoke jumpers were recruited. They passed over my father, my mom said, because he’d been a conscientious objector.”
“Why were they interested in smoke jumpers?”
“They don’t panic in circumstances that usually make people panic. They take risks but still follow orders.”
Talis pushes the hair off Caro’s forehead. “With fires, my father told my mother, you know whose side you’re on. Later, when half the fires were ones the Forest Service set themselves to prevent other fires, some of them lacking the good manners to stick to the perimeters drawn in the home office, having to be fought themselves, he stopped thinking fires have definable sides.”
He smooths her forehead with the palm of his hand, so that for a moment Caro sees her mother’s face, feels her mother’s hand. “Is that why he left?” Caro asks, stumbling over her words, unsure if she should refer to Talis’s father as someone who chose to disappear or as someone who was killed. “I mean, is that why your mother thought he might have left, because he no longer knew what he was fighting?”
“Sometimes. Other times, she thought it had to do with us. That he couldn’t stand all the people that came along with family life. Too many relatives, too many neighbors.”
He runs a finger along the outline of her mouth, then kisses her again. “Enough with the Q and A.”
29
They are each amazed at the other’s lack of hesitation, unquestioning of their own.
“I knew the first time I saw you, when I covered you with a blanket.”
“I was sleeping.”
“I could see everything about you. How sweet and loyal and tough you are. How hard you work at everything.”
“But you didn’t do anything.”
“I didn’t think you were ready.”
“I knew when I watched you on the rings that day.”
“That I am more monkey than man?”
“That you are all heart and muscle with no bullshit.”
Because he works nights, during the week, there are only mornings, every morning until the end of the month, when Omar and Adam will return and Caro will need to go back to her job to get ready for the school year. They grab each one, Caro waking early and walking in the morning cool to his Riverside Drive apartment so she arrives before him. Letting herself in and then preparing breakfast—breakfast without coffee, since she goes back to bed with him afterward.
On the last morning before Omar and Adam’s return, he asks if she wants to have kids. She stares out his bedroom door, at the table still littered with juice cups and waffle remains. It is a question that fills her with shame, a subject she has not discussed with even her mother. “I don’t think so. I’ve never made a definitive decision, but I think I’m just letting time run out.”
“But you’re so close with Omar.”
“It’s totally different being an aunt. Being an aunt is like swimming in a lake. There’s a shoreline all around. Being a parent has no shoreline. I’m too selfish. I don’t want to give up my routines, my time to read the newspaper, walk to work, talk on the phone, sprawl on the couch.”
“It will change,” he says. “I’m sure of it.”
30
When Adam and Omar return, a week before Omar will go back to school, neither of them seems surprised that Talis is now part of her life.
“Second grade,” Talis tells Omar, “that’s prime baseball time.” He takes Omar downtown to buy a mitt. He shows Omar how to soften the mitt in the clothes dryer, instructs him to sleep with it under his mattress.
For the rest of the week, every afternoon after Talis has slept, he brings Omar to one of the baseball diamonds in Riverside Park. He teaches him how to catch, first without the mitt—“You gotta know how that ball feels in your hand”—then with the mitt. He teaches Omar how to bat. How to bat like they did in McCall, Idaho, so each hit makes a fat cracking sound. He teaches Omar how to slide so his feet touch the base first.
On Friday, Caro meets them in the park. Talis has gathered a group of kids so with the grown-ups they can have teams of six each. Omar has his baseball cap on backward. He is playing first base, jumping and whooping.
Caro sits on a bench watching, marveling as her nephew hits ball after ball into the outfield. “Must be Rachida’s genes,” she says to Adam that night as he kneels by the tub carefully washing the sand and dirt from Omar’s scalp.
Talis asks Caro to show him the work being done on the house. The woodwork has not been sanded to his standards. He talks to the crew leader, insists on a finer-gauge paper. He shows Caro photographs from design magazines about how the molding can be painted a shade darker or lighter than the walls. He takes her to a paint store, has them custom mix a blue for her room that will have no sweetness in it—pure sky and water—so it washes out in sunlight and is phosphorescent at night. He has her rethink the lighting, encouraging her to add wiring for bedside sconces, channel the parlor ceilings for art lights, install under-the-cabinet halogen bulbs.
He chips out the concrete slab in front of the decorative fireplace in the parlor and lays copper tiles in a railroad pattern for the hearth. He does a dirty wash on the plaster surround so it looks like limestone. He paints a dinosaur on one wall of Omar’s room. He draws plans for floor-to-ceiling bookshelves around a long counter to make an office area in the room that will be Adam’s and finds a cabinetmaker to construct them. He clears the shattered glass from the garden, installs a trellis for Spanish flag and trumpet vine, and plants mums and flowering cabbages for the autumn and daffodil and iris bulbs for the spring.
Packing the last of her books, Caro finds her tattered copy of The Odyssey. A bookmark is still at the Penelope passage: “In the daytime, I would weave at my great loom, but in the night, I would have torches set by, and undo it.” She takes out the bookmark and puts the book in a b
ox.
31
The weekend before they are to move into the house, Talis brings over a ceramic dish and the ingredients and utensils to make a peach cobbler. In McCall, he’d grown up with kids from the Nez Percé tribe. From them, he’d learned that a new home should be blessed with something homemade. Peaches, he tells Caro, are symbols of contentment. She sits on the kitchen counter, watching while he puts the cobbler together.
Caro invites her mother to see the house and eat the cobbler. Myra walks through what had once been her home, slowly, from top to bottom. “It’s more beautiful than ever,” she says. “Polished like a jewel.”
Talis serves the cobbler on yellow paper plates. Myra bites into the flaky biscuit floating over the honeyed fruit and proclaims it the most delicious thing she has ever tasted.
Talis goes outside to inspect the garden. Myra reminds herself, as she has over and over since Caro told her about Talis, not to entrap Caro by comments that she knows however lightly intended will feel like leg irons—not to jinx this late, first love with ominous hope.
Caro finishes her last bite of cobbler. “I worry that he’s too good to be true,” she says.
Myra tries to figure out how to say what she wants to say without condescension, then, turning an about-face on her weeks of prudence, says, “He’s perfect for you.”
“I could hear Dad biting his tongue when I told him I was involved with a nurse. I’m sure he thought I meant a woman.”
“He probably imagined a girl with nice buns and a little white cap.”
“I had to tell Dad he was in the Pliocene, that there are male nurses even on sitcoms these days. I told him it comes down to love or money—there are guys with worldly success gained at the cost of not being able to love deeply and guys who can love deeply gained at the cost of worldly success—and asked which he wants for his daughter. That shut him up.”
Myra studies her daughter, who knows, of course, that her father had been the former kind of man. It had been Myra’s own failings that had not let her fall in love with the latter.
Myra can hear Talis moving about below, in what was once her haven. She waits for Caro to tell her that Talis will move in too, and when Caro does, Myra leans over the ceramic dish filled with sweet peaches and kisses her daughter on the forehead. She holds her breath so no tears will tumble on the blessing cobbler.
32
By December, they have settled into the house: Caro and Talis on the fourth floor, Adam and Omar on the third, a young psychiatrist in the street-level office, a music student in the au pair suite. Because Talis does not hang up his clothes and leaves his books and mail in heaps on the floor, Caro has made the front bedroom on the fourth floor, the room that had been Eva’s, Talis’s own. During the week, when he works nights and sleeps days, he stays in his room. On his days off, they sleep together in Caro’s room.
They fall into an easy pattern. Except for Wednesdays, when Myra picks up Omar, Talis wakes in time to get Omar at school. Talis and Omar walk the eight blocks to the school where Adam teaches, after which Talis leaves Omar with Adam while he does errands or takes a run or works in the garden. By the time Caro arrives home at six, he has dinner ready. They all eat together. Then Caro does the dishes while Talis takes a nap and a shower before going to work.
On this afternoon, Omar has a classmate over. The children are upstairs in Omar’s room playing with a train set. Talis is cutting cauliflower into florets and eggplant into chunks when Adam sits down at the farm table. He fidgets in the chair and picks at the crevices in the tabletop.
Talis positions himself so he is looking at Adam. “Something on your mind?”
Adam glances at the stairs, then changes chairs so he is sitting closer to Talis.
“I figured out why she set the fire.”
“Who?”
“Eva. Our housekeeper who disappeared.” Adam clears his throat. Talis can feel his impatience rising: impatience with Adam’s mumbling, unfocused quality, like a thirteen-year-old kid who needs a kick in the pants to pull himself together. No wonder he has chosen this age to teach; he must be right at home with the kids. Other times, recalling the night he met Adam and the plastic bag with the dirty magazines, Talis feels overcome with disgust, so that he has to remind himself that it makes no sense to be angry at a person for being himself. When he told this to Caro—not about the magazines, that he decided to keep to himself, but about his irritation with Adam—she put her arms around him. “Poor Talis, instead of a girlfriend, you got a menagerie. You’re still getting used to Adam. He’s so much improved. He has a job. He gets up every morning and puts on a tie. Last year, he spent all day locked in the music room, sleeping, for all I know.”
“Do you remember those magazines I showed you?” Adam asks.
“Kind of hard to forget them.”
“There were pictures…” Adam looks at his hands arched like spiders on top of the table. “Pictures I’d cut out from other magazines in a file box in the music room closet. I think Eva found them, and that’s why she set the fire.”
One of the few words Talis remembers from the year of French he took in high school is the word for eggplant: aubergine. In San Francisco, he painted the bedroom of a potter with gray hair coiled around her head a color called aubergine. All he’d wanted for this evening was to chop aubergine, grind coarse salt, drizzle extra-virgin olive oil on the gorgeous purple skin. Fortify himself for a night of dermis, puffy and red or white and blistered or ashen gray. Now, though, Adam is staring at him, waiting, it seems, for Talis to say something. Something different from the snarl Talis is rolling around inside his mouth: Hey, I’m a nurse, not a priest. Or a rabbi, or whoever the fuck you want to absolve you.
“Do you think I should tell my mother and Caro?”
Talis puts down the eggplant. He dries his hands on a dish towel. To his relief, the disgust for Adam has never been concern that Adam would do anything wrong with Omar or with his students. Rather, the porn seems to Talis a sign of weakness, a substitute for a real human being, as pitiable as a grown man who can’t throw a punch reading superhero comics. A guy scared of horses writing Westerns.
“Do you?” Adam repeats.
“What good would it do?”
“They’d understand how fucked-up I am.” Adam clenches his hands, the spiders disappearing into his fists. “I haven’t looked at any of that stuff since the fire, but I’d be a liar if I said I don’t still think about the pictures.”
Talis’s mother had taught him how to live with a secret. He can’t recall her ever having actually instructed him not to tell anyone that she didn’t believe his father was dead, but he’d always known that this was more forbidden than anything else he might do. For a long while, he resented the burden of something that could not be said, but as he grew older, he’d been able to see the situation through his mother’s eyes: the secret, a small price for not living hand to mouth as they would have on her supermarket cashier’s salary alone, for not worrying about buying her kid shoes or having the electric turned off, for not asking for handouts from her sisters, who looked down on her, or her parents, who kept accounts of every penny given.
“So you want to tell them so they can then forgive you?”
And the kids were right. His mother had been Red Hot Dot, screwing married men on their late-night trips for milk and diapers in the manager’s office, where she was the one who closed out the registers each night.
Adam digs his nails into his arm. He looks like someone who could gouge out his own eyes.
Parachuting from a plane was easy next to what Talis wills himself to do now: to pull it out of himself, the goodness to respond, to grant the healing of one soul revealing itself to another. “Let it go, man. Let it go.”
33
At first, there are only hang ups. Three on Caro’s cell phone in January, two in February. When Caro calls back, there is no answer. Trying the numbers again, a few hours later, she discovers pay phones at a gas station, a laundroma
t, a convenience store. No girl from Peru anywhere near.
From the area codes, it seems that Eva is moving west: Pennsylvania, Ohio, then a leap to Colorado. Six calls. Six hang ups.
In April, there is a call without a click. Caro can hear breathing. Eva? Eva, is that you? Caro asks over and over again. On the second of these calls, Caro just talks into the receiver. The monologue comes surprisingly easily. Omar is doing well, she says. His skin graft has taken, and he doesn’t seem too self-conscious about the bald patch he will have until he is old enough for the tissue expansion. Her mother, Dr. M., has healed well, too. The house has been repaired.
The calls stop. Caro wonders if Eva is satisfied, having heard that everyone has survived, or if she is afraid of her whereabouts being traced.
34
When Caro gets home, Adam is in the kitchen making dinner.
“Where’s Talis?” she asks.
“He left about an hour ago. He was called in for an emergency. A fire in Queens, I think. One of the burn-unit nurses has a stomach flu. Something like that. He said he’d call you later.”
Caro turns on the television, which they keep now in the parlor. She flips to the local news, watches reports of the mayor’s press conference, beach closings due to sewage. Then, the report of the fire. It was in the basement apartment of a semiattached house. An Iranian family lived in the apartment. Only the baby survived. Someone broke a window and threw burning paper inside. A neighbor, a man whose son died in Iraq, is the prime suspect. Another neighbor, an old man wheezing beneath a checked shirt with buttons strained against his girth, is interviewed. “Twice, I seen him go after those people. Once, he threw garbage at them, rotten eggs. Screamed something about go back to your caves. Another time he chased them into their house with a crowbar. I tried to tell him these people are from Iran, not Iraq, they don’t live in caves in Iran, but all he’d say was all of them’s out to destroy us.”
The reporter wears a sleeveless turtleneck and gold hoop earrings. Her arms are lightly tanned. “And no one ever called the police?”