“It was like a big shadow, Donnie,” he said then. He wouldn’t look at Don. He looked off toward the Catholic church, the biggest building in Gilman, and alternated drags of his cigarette with sips of beer. “The Shadow. It just started to creep up on me at forty, you know? And I couldn’t get right. I kept feeling like, like—you know, there were layoffs coming then, and we were in debt, big-time, we had made some decisions, your mom and I, which is why she went back to work.”
His voice trailed off.
Don spoke: “It’s over with, Dad. It’s over.”
Don stopped short of forgiving him, or saying it was okay. He just said, a few more times, it’s over now. It’s done.
“I just feel, always have felt, Donnie, that I shoulda gone to prison for it, you know?”
“For what?”
“For how it all went down.”
“But you didn’t kill anybody.”
“But they’d both be alive if it wasn’t for me.”
Russell Lowry did not show up for graduation, although a number of relatives and neighbors offered him a ride. He was too drunk. But he did drop off a gift for Don, at Don’s mother’s house, which Don left wrapped in its plain brown package until he and Claire had arrived at their new efficiency apartment in New York. The gun was accompanied by a scraggily and shaky-handed letter from Russell that came with an explanation: somehow, years after the murder-suicide of Dottie and Matt Good, a county sheriff’s deputy—Don figured it was Steve Halverson, who had played high school football with Don—had given Russell Lowry the handgun in question. To Don, this seemed like a strange and possibly illegal gesture, but Russell provided no other context, only wrote that it was the only semivaluable possession he had and thought maybe Don might want a gun for the nightstand in a place like New York.
Over Claire’s objections, he kept the gun, kept it all of these years. It was in a hidden case, properly stored and cleaned and maintained and locked away. But he had the gun. He thought of the irony of it; in some dark places, he would think, what if he took his own life with that gun?
He wouldn’t do that; once you had kids, suicide was off the table, wasn’t it? Didn’t that make sense? Suddenly, he understood what ABC had been talking about—she wanted to slip out of this world, and hope that maybe there was some threshold to cross, some new world to go into, with a clean slate, with no shadows. But once you had kids, your world was here. If you left it, you left them.
His father had died a few years after that of liver cancer. The gun was all Don had of his father’s possessions. Had he not had that visit with his father, had a sit-down those days before his college graduation, the gun would mean nothing to him. But he was glad to have that conversation in his memory, glad his father had had the chance to tell him of the Shadow.
He had had no intention of going to see his father ever again, frankly. His sister, Rosie, never did, and his mother only did so in secret, taking him food and vitamins and money to help him stay alive, though she probably would have been better off if he had died, since Don and his sister would have gotten some Social Security money. But Claire had told him he should do it, that time before graduation. He’d been having dreams about his father, and one day, lying in her narrow dorm bed as the sun came up and blazed onto the window, he was telling her about the dreams, stroking her bare back, and she said, “Go and see him. See him today. Tell him you’re going to New York and want him to celebrate your graduation with him.”
Claire made it seem easy. She knew how to make, back then, Don feel capable of the impossible feat. She filled his wounded heart with possibility and generous impulses that would not have been there without her. Once, when they’d come back from New York for Christmas, Claire and Don took Russell out to dinner, to a steak house in Malcolm where he’d once loved to eat, and Claire sat next to Russell as he happily cleaned his plate and then Claire ordered him a second dinner, despite his protests, which he ate half of and boxed up the leftovers along with a slice of cake for dessert. And afterward, after Claire had given Russell a hug and a quick peck on the check, he said, “It’s been a long time since anybody treated me as if I was a decent human being. Thank you.”
And to Don, he said, “You are luckier than lucky, son. You really are. But you deserve to be lucky. You do.”
Don was grateful for that night, though he didn’t know it would be the last time he saw his father, who must have already been sick. Don had balked at the expense—they’d been scraping by in New York, and a lavish dinner, even one at a rural Iowa steak house, was not something they could really afford. But Don had followed Claire’s cheerful lead and picked up the tab as if he had no care in the world when it came to money.
In truth, all of Don’s better impulses have been Claire’s. Everything in his life that he has done well—anything to do with his job, his marriage, his kids, his friendships—has all come from Claire. Now, he feels as if he has drained all the goodness and happiness from her. The Shadow has come for him too.
3.
Oh, Claire! Eau Claire!
I love to see you on campus. I love running into you.
That is all I have to say.
Your new friend, Don Lowry
This was the first note that Don Lowry had ever written to a girl in his life, and he had written it six weeks into his first semester of college and handed it to a girl named Claire Miner, who was in his French class and whom he ran into everywhere: he had served her a slice of pizza in the dining hall, had worked out on a nearby treadmill at the rec center, had seen her at the diner downtown, and, the time when he had finally introduced himself, he had looked up from his book at the library to see her sitting at a desk across from him. He always raised one casual index finger in greeting, as if he were an Iowa farmer passing in a rattling pickup, half-smiled, and turned bright red.
Claire found him adorable.
After French class, she thanked him for the note.
“I just realized, you know, that Oh Claire was the same as Eau Claire, like the city in Wisconsin, and then I realized that, in French class, like, the name of the city in Wisconsin means clear water. And that your name means clear, and it is so fitting because I don’t know if this makes sense, but you have the clearest eyes I have ever seen.”
“What?” she said.
“You just have a clear face, that’s what I mean. Like, I mean, beautiful. And no bullshit. It’s there. It’s all right there. I love clarity like that in a girl.”
And then she, though not a blusher, blushed.
“Woman,” she corrected. It was a bad habit of hers, correcting people, editing their sentences. She often did it when nervous, but Don didn’t seem to mind.
“Right,” he said, grinning, as if suddenly confident. “Woman.”
She had always been a force in social situations, never shy, never bashful. It exhausted her, the social effort of gatherings, but in high school, in New York, walking her way to the strange and somehow isolated all girls’ prep school where she went with one hundred other girls, she dominated the classrooms and the hallways with her big laugh.
She told jokes of the most raucous nature, belched in the cafeteria, made up raunchy fight songs for the Boswell School Beavers, and, in general, was a card.
She had chosen Grinnell for its strangeness. She had grown up in a small two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, on the Upper East Side, with summers in Sag Harbor at her grandfather’s place. Her father was a philandering poet who did better in Europe than he did in the States and, financially irresponsible and unwilling to work a day job, offered almost nothing to the family’s coffers; what he made for giving public readings and lectures he spent on travel and food and drink. Claire’s mother was a filmmaker who’d had some early success and then was relegated to freelance work at any place that would have her. She directed and shot toothpaste ads and dog food spots. She began to have affairs out of boredom and revenge, highly visible affairs, messy entanglements that were plain as day and hurt large swaths o
f people. She often taught five or six classes a semester as an adjunct lecturer. Still, Claire’s cultural pedigree had helped her get a scholarship to the Boswell School, and she had loved it. Although acutely aware of how much richer many of the other girls in her school were, she did not mind the disparity. She often spent her vacations in exotic parts of the world, perpetually the friend-who-gets-to-tag-along, and by the time she had come to Grinnell she had been to Greece and Turkey and Costa Rica and London and southern France and Scotland and New Zealand, and never, never in her fucking life had she ever met a guy as cute and with triceps as cut as Don Lowry.
A week later, they borrowed Don’s mother’s car—he lived at home to save money that semester, which almost nobody at Grinnell ever did—and drove north to see the fall colors, driving up along the Mississippi River and then taking the back roads east to Eau Claire, Wisconsin. They checked into a Super 8 there, Don Lowry charging the room on a brand-new credit card. It was 1995 and credit cards for college students were something new. Don had a $250 credit limit. Don did not have condoms, but Claire did. She was also on the pill, which her mother had insisted she get on before leaving for college. When they checked into the room, Claire, clinically and in a businesslike way, asked Don some questions about his sexual past, as she had been instructed to do in the college’s orientation session.
They had three condoms. At six in the morning, Don walked to the PDQ gas station and bought more. It was the era of safe-sex hyperawareness. Even two virgins, with only a handful of blow jobs between them, used condoms religiously, fueled by the fear of AIDS and whatever else might befall practitioners of unprotected sex.
Oh, Claire! he had moaned as he came the second time, sending them into a fit of giggles and pretend moans and orgasmic noises that, although meant to be parodies, turned them on enough to fuck again after a shower.
4.
On his way to work that morning, Don swings by the Manetti house with some doughnuts from the bakery and a latte for ABC.
He finds Ruth and ABC on the front porch, enjoying some fresh air before the day swells with humidity and heat, and he is happy to see them, both of them barefoot, swinging in the porch swing. He notices a small pipe next to ABC’s thigh. He hands her the latte and sets the box of doughnuts down on the table.
ABC finds a chocolate-cake glazed for Ruth and hands it to her.
“Fuck, this is good,” Ruth says after taking a big bite.
This makes ABC laugh and spit some latte out of her mouth.
“Must’ve been some good shit,” Don says.
“It is,” ABC says. “You want some?”
“No. No, I have to get some work done today.”
“You just came by to bring us coffee and doughnuts?” ABC says. “How sweet!”
“Have you asked him?” Ruth says.
“Asked me what?” Don says.
“About Minnesota.”
“Ruth,” ABC says. “Not now.”
“Not now what?” Don says. “I tend to hate surprises, so you might as well tell me.”
“Ruth has this idea.”
“I didn’t have the idea,” Ruth says. “You had it. In your dream.”
“What are you guys talking about?” Don says.
“Nothing,” ABC says. “We’re stoned.”
ABC gives Ruth a cold look and Ruth loses her smile and takes another bite of doughnut. She shrugs.
“She has something to tell you,” Ruth says.
“No I don’t,” ABC says. “I really don’t.”
“You guys are fucking baked,” Don says. “And I really have to go.”
“It’s a portal, Don. You’re gonna show ABC the portal to the other side. To find Philly.”
ABC makes a small circling motion with her finger, pointing to her temple, as if to say, “She’s crazy.”
Don uneasily backs down the steps.
“You guys have a good day. Maybe lay off that shit for a few hours,” he says. “It seems a little strong.”
“You should tell him,” Don hears Ruth say, just as he gets to his truck. He shuts the door. Tell him what? he wonders, but part of him doesn’t want to know.
5.
Don’s mother, Annie, comes to the door and tells the children to take off their shoes—easy to do since both of them are wearing Crocs that day—and then she asks Claire if she wants coffee.
Claire politely declines. All she wants is to be alone. She suddenly has a craving for it. It’s as if she couldn’t possibly bear to talk to anyone any longer.
“Is there anything they need at the mall tomorrow?” Annie says. “I plan to take them. I don’t have much money, but I did just get my Social Security check and could buy them some new shoes or slacks or . . .”
“You don’t have to do that,” Claire says. She knows Annie has enough money.
“I want to,” Annie says. “I feel so bad for the kids.”
Claire watches as Wendy looks up at her. Claire knows exactly what her younger kid is thinking: Why does she feel bad for us? What’s wrong? So Claire smiles and says, too loudly, “What in heaven’s name for? The kids are going to have a great summer! Swimming and hiking and then Minnesota in August, just like always.”
“You’re still going to Minnesota?”
“Yes. It’s a free vacation. We love it up there. We haven’t ever missed a summer, not since Wendy was born.”
“Have you found a place to live yet?”
“What do you mean?” Claire says, gritting her teeth and glowering. She nods her head toward the children and whispers, “Little ears, Annie. Please.”
Annie does this thing she sometimes does where she has her eyes fill with tears by making this extended grimace of pain. It is an ugly expression. Claire has seen her do it at funerals and weddings.
Claire ignores the tears; she looks past Annie at the living room, where her kids are flopped, already bored, on the sofa. Bryan leafs through a magazine and Wendy doodles in her journal.
“Grandma,” Bryan says. “Can we go swimming tonight?”
“Oh, it’s getting late,” Annie says. “It’s almost five. You’ll get chilled without the sun.”
The children protest with moans.
“It’s light for four more hours,” Claire says. “And hotter than hell.”
Normally she’d let Annie do her thing, which is to ask the children to sit still and watch television, but she wants to picture her kids leaping into a swimming pool rather than sitting dejectedly in a dim living room of a gated community, eating Sam’s Choice lemon cookies from Walmart. “It’s at least ninety degrees out.”
“Okay, okay,” Annie says. “Go get your swimsuits on.”
Then Annie hands Claire two hundred-dollar bills from the pocket of her khaki capri pants. “Get some groceries for your family, Claire,” she says, without a smile. “I’ve already bought mine for the month. I don’t need much.”
Claire takes the money. She’s no fool.
6.
Is it sad if you admit that, for many mothers, the only moments of solitude come when driving to and from a store, or shopping within one? Claire’s at the Trader Joe’s twenty minutes after leaving her mother-in-law’s condo and it feels like a small vacation to be there alone, away from home, away from Grinnell, walking through the steaming parking lot. It is a new addition to the sprawl of West Des Moines and she hates being there in the traffic and the barren, treeless acres of box stores. She always feels profoundly dumb when she shops at places like Trader Joe’s, as if she is confirming her rather pathetic status as an easily led member of a target demographic.
She finds herself, soon enough, cooling off in the overwhelming frozen foods aisle—a visual cacophony of strange wraps and pastries and prepackaged casseroles that promise life will be easier, warmer, more wholesome if only you consume these products. She’s trying to remember which frozen whatever it is that Don likes—samosas or the minichimichangas or maybe the pierogis—because she is going to pack up the kitchen soon
and they will not be cooking much after that.
The whole store looks garish to her, and all the convenience foods are suddenly some profound judgment of her worth as a wife and a mother, a discounting of her choices and her marriage.
She will have a night alone with Don that evening, and that will help matters. Won’t it? They’ve been spinning their wheels for two weeks, acting on those twin demons panic and impulse, and they’ve not made any progress, not logistically or emotionally. Maybe she would seduce Don as soon as she got home, fuck him on those basement stairs again. Could she fuck her way back into loving him? Or maybe she could write all night—a night without kids—and go on some manic fifty-thousand-word binge, producing one of those sly, powerful comeback novels in one weekend, a fragmented tour de force about a thirty-nine-year-old woman’s emotional free fall, surprising her agent on Monday morning with a phone call and saying, “I have a new book.”
She realizes she has paused right there in the frozen food aisle, and gets snapped back to reality when a fat man nudges her aside and opens a freezer door with a chilly blast.
Um: samosas, Don likes the samosas, and there is a pear-mango chutney near the salsas that he also likes. Claire is reaching for the samosas when the phone rings.
“I have a terrible migraine,” Annie says. “It’s just awful. I am sorry.”
“Oh dear, Annie. I’m sorry. What should I do?”
“You have to come back. You have to get the children.”
“Really? I mean, if you need to sleep, they can watch a movie.”
“They’ve been fighting since they walked into the house, Claire. They are being monsters.”
“Let me talk to Bryan,” Claire says.
“Just come and get them. I am going to lie down. I can’t do this tonight.”
It’s clear to Claire that she didn’t show Annie a significant enough amount of respect and deference earlier. This is payback.
That is fine, Claire says. She will finish grocery shopping and then she’ll come and get the kids.
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