There Is No Long Distance Now

by Naomi Shihab Nye

  There was a long silence. Birds sang in that silence. They sang and they stopped singing.

  Annie whispered into the phone, “So now I know.”

  “What?”

  “Why I had this dream.”

  “What dream?”

  “Your father told me to tell you something.”

  “But you only saw him once.”

  “I realize that.”

  Rainey’s first impulse was almost rude. She wanted to say, “Why would my father send a message through you? He met you once. Why wouldn’t he speak directly to me?”

  But she said, “Tell me.”

  “He said to tell you he’s fine. He’s really fine. Everything is fine.”

  “Could you see him when he said this?”

  “Of course I could. That’s how I recognized him. But I didn’t know—what happened, you know. I thought, maybe you two just had a fight or something.”

  “We never fought,” Rainey whispered. Long, long pause. Then, “You saw him.”

  Rainey had not seen her father even once in a dream, which surprised her. She’d always thought you’d dream incessantly about the people you loved most.

  “But there’s something else, too,” Annie said. “It’s as if he kept talking in my head after I got up today. He kept saying, Call her right now.”

  “Wow. Well, this is the day.”

  “What?”

  “The day he died, a year ago.”

  “Seriously?”

  Another long silence.

  Rainey whispered, “Yeah.”

  Annie said, “Well, I didn’t tell you after camp, because it might have sounded jealous or something, but your dad seemed like the dad I always wished I had. I thought about him after we met that day. I thought, that’s the dad.”

  “Well, now nobody has him.”

  “That’s not true. You still have him. Inside your blood and bones and DNA. Your memory and all that. I’m sorry, Rainey. I’m kind of in shock. But you really still have him.”

  “I know. I guess I know. But he can’t pick up the phone.”

  Rainey thought of Selim’s phone. Maybe they should go to lunch. She could ask him questions. It would be like visiting with a proxy. Could she find him again? Was it possible her father was really communicating with her through such unexpected delegates?

  Horizon

  Jake said, “Sometimes divorce is not a negative. Sometimes it is like, you know, things are going to get better now.”

  Margot was crying in the front seat of his car. They were trying to go into a movie, Amelia, but she had blurted the bad news right after he picked her up at her very quiet house. Jake had noticed, walking up the sidewalk to ring her bell, that her house looked darker than usual—no lights in the upstairs bedrooms, not even the porch light turned on. She’d started sobbing as they ascended the ramp to the highway, and cried all the way to the theater. Now it looked as if they might miss the previews for sure. He really loved previews, even when they told too much and overdosed on volume. Sometimes he watched previews he loved on his computer over and over again, just to note the editing elements.

  Maybe it wasn’t the best night to see a movie in which one of the main characters disappeared.

  Mostly Margot seemed upset because she had had no idea her parents were this close to splitting up. She always felt in touch with what was going on around her—extreme attentiveness, very important trait. Jake called her the Detail Queen and she liked it. But she had really been in the dark on this one.

  Sure, her parents argued, but mostly she would have called it pernicious squabbling, not big fights in which people threw things or slammed doors. Sure, they spent regular periods away from each other (her father was a pilot—which now seemed another reason, thought Jake, they shouldn’t see this movie) but that was his job, and no, she had never dreamed her mom could be attracted to a flight attendant she’d met at a company party. Weren’t those guys usually gay? No, she shouldn’t say that. She was trying to catch herself any time she stereotyped anything, even people who shopped at Target as if it were a cultural endeavor, or women with too many children under the age of five.

  “I wish they’d let me in on it sooner,” she sobbed.

  Jake said, “Why?”

  “Because it’s like a slap in the face, thinking you have a regular family, then finding out you don’t.”

  “But aren’t half the families in America divorced by now?”

  His certainly was. His parents had divorced when he was in middle school, and it wasn’t so horrible. In fact, it was easier dealing with only one of them at a time.

  Margot gasped. “I’m moving to Dubai.”

  “What?”

  “My dad flies there and he says the buildings are incredible and cute boys from Holland play Frisbee on the beach.”

  Now Jake felt slapped. She would talk about “cute boys” to him? Who was this person in his vehicle? He gulped and tried to gather his wits.

  “Margot, you just need to let the news settle in, and maybe it won’t even happen. Sometimes parents say things that never happen after all.”

  “Do yours?”

  He thought about it. “Not really.”

  People were walking past his car into the theater. Happy dates holding hands. Long-married people, the women pulling shawls tightly around their shoulders. It was always so cold in theaters.

  “Are you ready to go in?” Jake asked.

  Margo sniffed. “I may never be ready to do anything again.”

  “Your parents love you.”

  “Ha! That’s what they said. Obviously they haven’t had a thought about me in months.”

  “Would you rather see a different movie? I’m not attached to Amelia at all.”

  “I love Hilary Swank and Richard Gere.”

  “Yeah, but the reviews were pretty weak. It said, like, a script written by the same guys who write CliffsNotes.”

  “Don’t we love CliffsNotes? They’re like previews. Or after views or whatever.”

  He kissed her on the side of her head, above the ear. Her hair smelled peachy.

  “We could see the Michael Jackson movie.”

  “That’s really happy.”

  “I heard it’s great.” Jake looked at his watch, then the leaves scattering in the parking lot. “Or, we could just go back downtown and take a walk by the river and get hot chocolate or something. If you are not in the mood for a movie.”

  “No, I need a movie. I need to forget my life and fly away. Well, maybe not fly. I need someone else’s troubles.”

  They stood in line behind three boys who were seeing the Michael Jackson movie. One wore a T-shirt that said “Michael Forever” in glittering script, with a silhouette of Michael’s face. Margot thought it was really terrible what had happened to him—it seemed so preventable somehow—as in, why didn’t he just hire a spectacular massage therapist with lavender oil to stand by at his bedside night and day when he couldn’t sleep and sing him lullabies? She wished she had been a bigger fan of his songs while he was alive. Mostly she liked his dance steps—how he slid and scooted and skated across a stage. It was inspiring just to think of a human body with so much high-velocity potential.

  Jake said, “I think all the movies may be equally depressing right now.”

  Amelia aka Hilary was wearing a leather flight jacket in the poster. She looked tough and hopeful. She had a weird haircut. She could go anywhere, cross any horizon, do anything. No one could stop her.

  Thoreau Is My Partner

  Andy’s father Roberto said, “Are you sure you don’t need anything? Room service? I could order eggs for you before I go?”

  “No thanks.” Andy rolled over in the other bed. “I’m not hungry yet. I’ll find something when I get hungry.” He could feel his father standing in front of the mirror without even opening his eyes. “When will you be back again?”

  “Well, we have that luncheon, so I have to stay at the conference center—I may not see you before
four or five, that okay?”

  “That’s great. I mean, fine. Perfect.”

  It was so rare to have a completely free day in a city where you did not live.

  Andy wanted to wander. Cross the streets in Austin, Texas. Gaze at trees poking out of improbably small strips of soil between sidewalk and street. Sit by the state capitol on a bench as office workers stepped out for lunch. Imagine other lives. Check out music club posters, see who was playing. When you lived in Brownsville, way south in the giant state of Texas, Austin seemed like the distant northern land of Oz. Huge university, now hard to get into. Orange sweatshirts. Metropolis.

  His father closed the door softly, saying, “Have fun!”

  Andy knew he was lucky.

  None of his friends’ fathers said, “Have fun.” They said, “Be careful, don’t get in trouble.”

  Andy jumped from his puffy white hotel bed. Why didn’t he have a bed like this at home? He could have slept till ten. At 7:50, he felt ready for a shower, then to hit the streets, find a breakfast taco, see girls. Austin girls. See guys more cosmopolitan than he was. See anyone. Homeless people wrapped in old blankets sleeping in the doorway of St. David’s Church. They’d walked past them last night on the way back from dinner to the glossy AT&T Center Hotel where the coffee tables in the giant lobby were made of vertical pecan branches chopped to the same height and topped with glass. The branches had been cut from trees at the site where the hotel now stood. That didn’t seem like something to feature, but the tables were eye-catching.

  Exotic plum-colored lilies or orchids in gigantic glass vases, submerged entirely in water. They were so beautiful they looked fake. Andy bumped one of the vases gently with his thumb to see if the water sloshed and it did.

  It was the fanciest hotel Andy had ever stayed in. His dad had taken him to meetings in other Texas cities over the years, when Andy didn’t have school. Too bad for his mom, unable to get off work till Thanksgiving day; she would have loved those lilies.

  Because this was the AT&T Center, their room had more capabilities than many rooms. What looked like a radio promised to do all sorts of other things, if you punched buttons. Send food. Send help. Even the telephone welcomed them by name on a small phone-screen: “Mr. Roberto Martinez, welcome to the AT&T Center, please let us know what we can do to make your visit more enjoyable.”

  Find me a girlfriend? thought Andy. Get me into UT when I graduate?

  He tied his tennis shoes. A cream-colored cardboard coaster next to the telephone caught his eyes. “Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each. Henry David Thoreau, 1817–1862”

  They’d just been reading from Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” in school, well-chosen because many people down at the Texas border were attempting various sorts of disobedience regarding the border fence—marching, speaking out, planting crops that continued on both sides of the fence, purchasing billboards against it, building ladders taller than it.

  It seemed a bit odd to have Thoreau’s words in such a high-tech room. Mix it up, mix it up.

  An orange poster on the wall advertised the Austin Varsity Circus, which seemed to have taken place seventy years ago. Andy wished he could have seen it.

  He liked tents. Really big tents with dozens of stakes and poles and ropes, the kind circuses used to be in, like Fellini’s La Strada tent. Tents fascinated him. What if countries made border tents instead of border fences? Cultural-exchange tents, foods and curios from each country traded, bartered, exchanged . . . there were so many more imaginative things people might do in the world than take drugs and shoot one another. He popped a Thoreau coaster into his pocket.

  Out on the extremely chilly street, he wished for a muffler and a cap. Maybe that’s what he’d buy—a stocking cap, thug style. The headline on a rack of Austin American Statesman newspapers said, “110 DIE IN BAGHDAD BOMBING.” And Andy had to stop walking for a moment and place his hands over his ears.

  Could anyone else hear it?

  He felt as if he heard screams from the other side of the world. It was his one secret power.

  He’d always felt it. When he was small, his family visited some humble mountain villages in Mexico with his mother’s church group at Christmas. They dispensed fresh American socks and denim jackets, and he heard a very old woman moaning in her house. People said she was dying. For the whole next year, whenever he tried to sleep back at home, he felt he could still hear her moan. When did she die? One day he stopped hearing it.

  Baghdad. Austin. He passed bars and museums. In some places the whole sidewalk smelled like beer.

  Live each season as it passes… Well, what else could anyone do? Live the future? Live history? He crossed the street.

  I Don’t Want

  To Talk About It

  Maria found it impossible to believe she would never see him again.

  Never, never, never. The terrible fact would clutch at her chest when she walked home from work in the evenings. A brick wall slapped in front of her along the path. She would have to stop walking. Close her eyes, conjure his voice in her ear. “Hey you.” His musical drawl. Never. Never. He was not coming back, he was gone, she could not reach him even if she stretched her arms out for the rest of her days.

  In the park across the street, a middle-aged man in a long beige raincoat paused for his little dog. Although the man looked angular and intelligent, like a person who might be walking a golden retriever or German shepherd, he had a stupid-looking fluff ball. Why did Maria imagine this mysterious man, whom she had been seeing from a distance for years, would know what she was talking about? She had never noticed him with another human being, only that dog.

  Obviously, someone was lost for him, too. If you lived to be that old and only walked with a fluff ball, never another person—bad news.

  “What may I get for you?” All day Maria repeated the same question over and over to everyone who approached the counter at SIP.

  “Latte double shot. Decaf cappuccino. Blueberry muffin. Blah blah blah.”

  “I am so sick of coffee,” she said to Lucky, at the silver sink, where they washed the pitchers. He worked the afternoon shift with her. He drank only tea. She preferred water with no ice. Tepid water. What was wrong with her?

  “Personally I am sick of people treating us as if we are just fixtures,” Lucky said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “As if we have time to listen to their troubles while they are making up their minds. Today a woman yakked endlessly about losing her car keys. I had to nod and be pleasant. She had a ring of keys in her hand so obviously she had found them again and anyway, what did I care? I am a coffee man, not a counselor for bimbos.”

  “Don’t say bimbos.”

  “I’ll say anything I like, sweetheart.”

  “Don’t say sweetheart.”

  James had also called her sweetheart. She was his little sister, his shadow, his personal FBI agent, always tracking him, worrying about him, leaving him messages on his voice mail. When she begged him not to hang out with Rusty and Chad, because they seemed tough in a way James was not, he said, “Sweetheart, I don’t want to talk about it. Have I selected your friends this month?”

  She had had a very bad feeling. One of those intuition things she trusted and James placed no stock in.

  Maria was taking a year off between high school and full-time college. For now, she took two community college courses in the evenings—Cultural Anthropology and Physical Geography, and wondered why everyone in the city didn’t attend community college—it was cheap and inspiring; people didn’t realize what they were missing. Her high school counselor had suggested it—she should write that woman a thank you letter.

  “Don’t you think it’s amazing what aboriginal people of Australia have suffered and we almost never hear about it up here?” she asked Lucky. He stared at her. They didn’t hear about a lot of things. When she wasn’t making coffee, sh
e was in class or studying. Her parents were mad at her. After James died, she had moved out of their sad home piled with junk mail and broken parts and clipped recipes her mother would never really make, to a minimalist apartment down the street, a single room costing $450 a month. “What a waste of money! You are four blocks from your own bedroom! Why don’t you save your money for next year?”

  It was hard to explain.

  She could not be in the same rooms with their sadness. She could not sleep there. The weight was too heavy.

  Separate sadness was worth whatever it cost. But of course they worried about her double time now, since she had become their only child. “Do you have a deadbolt on your door?”

  “Please give me a sign,” she whispered to James, up into the air. “A sign you are still in the atmosphere, like rain particles or toxic waste. Please check in with me. I need to know that. I am so lost.”

  He had left her all his money. He actually had a will in an envelope in his desk drawer, which disturbed their parents. He left her nine thousand dollars saved since the days he was a newspaper delivery boy rolling papers, poking them into plastic wrappers.

  Why would anyone with enough stamina to be a newspaper delivery boy get talked into driving a getaway car for two horrible thieves? It made no sense at all. Did James even know what he was doing?

  He was the only one who got shot.

  When Maria walked into her tiny bare apartment, she noticed her favorite picture of James, as a twelve-year-old perfect person with all his life still ahead of him, in the middle of the floor. Usually she kept this picture on a small shelf above the bathroom sink, so she could look at it first thing in the morning and before bed.

  There was absolutely no way the picture could have traveled from the bathroom to the center of her single room by itself. Even if a gale wind had been blowing through an open window (all the windows were closed). No way.

  She picked it up, placed her lips right on it, held it out and said, “Thank you, James. You heard me. You were always a good brother. But was I right about those guys? I miss you horribly. What else can you do?”