Sycamore

by Bryn Chancellor

  Never was any of it because of you.

  Please know, I am not speaking of love in how I love you, which is its own precious thing. She was not my daughter, though you were the same age; I did not see her as I see you. Never. I have no predilections, no abstract desires. This was singular. I did not intend to seek her out, nor did she seek me. I knew it was unacceptable on so many terms—I was married, she was seventeen, she was your friend—but there it was. I have loved that way once, and it was her. I believed it like I believe in gravity.

  Until then, I was not the sort of man who stepped out of line. The best I can explain it is that Jess opened a part of me I did not know was there. Let us say it was a circle. My life thus far was a line, and here was a circle. One straight, one curved, both potentially endless. Both perfectly lovely, both integral to the geometry of the world. The absolute truth is, I did not want to choose. I wanted both lives. The line and the circle.

  I had not figured out yet what I wanted to do. I was trying to get my head around what I felt. The whole thing was terrifying, deeply distressing. Unbelievable, really. I do not blame Paul for what he did. He had every right to protect you and your mother, and it would have been unfair for him to hold that secret once he had it. It was not his to hold. He was a good-hearted kid, and I bear him no ill will, though I desperately wish it could have happened differently. Of course, I know now there would be no way to make it okay. I knew it then, too. None of it would have been easy, even had it been real. That is, even if she had come here with me.

  You should know: she was telling the truth when she said nothing happened. Nothing physical. She also did not pursue me; I pursued her, not the other way around. Yes, she was attracted to me, but she turned me away. When I left town, I asked her to come with me, and she said no. She did not want me. I am not sure if she ever loved me. I only know it was real for me.

  Perhaps this should go without saying, but I feel the need to tell you: I hope it is not her in the wash. I want her to live. That night I was stuck in Flagstaff in the snow, the night she disappeared, I sat in my hotel, despondent, looking out the window. A young couple was out on the street, skating on the iced-over streets in their tennis shoes. All these years later, the image stays with me. Gliding down the deserted street, laughing, flinging their arms out for balance. If she can’t be here, I want her to be out there, beautiful, dreamy, skating the streets of the world.

  Dani, here is the truth: I have great remorse for the pain I have caused you and your mother, but I still do not doubt I loved Jess. That open circularity: I still feel it. Should I have ignored it? Probably. Many people do. I did not. I have been called everything from delusional, destructive, disgusting, despicable, and criminal to foolish, selfish, myopic, naive, and pathetic. Believe me, they have said it all, and perhaps you agree with them. Yes, I probably am all those things, too. Would it have worked out had she come here with me? Oh, good heavens. I do not know. Most likely not. Still—still, god help me—I wanted it to, even when it meant losing you.

  But I didn’t know what it meant to live with that. To really live with what I had done. To lose you. I knew at the time I caused pain and upheaval and ruin; I knew I destroyed our family. Yet somehow I thought your absence would be temporary. Somehow I deluded myself you would come back. I never thought you would not be part of my life permanently. I never imagined this version of us. I never believed I would repeat my mother’s mistakes.

  Yet I am not that man anymore. I am so far removed from him, I feel sometimes as if all this happened to someone else. I no longer know that man with the glowing hope in his heart, yet I am him. I no longer know that young painter with dreams of wildness that I could never capture, and yet I am him, too. I no longer know that middle-aged Realtor who spent his weekends holding open houses and fixing up a car for his daughter. I no longer know the boy who woke up one day without a mother and then lost her again at midlife. Of course I am him, and I remain responsible for my actions. I am trying to understand something about time here. I do not know the shape of myself.

  I cannot get this right. I can never get it right.

  When you were little, before you would remember, our next-door neighbors’ son drowned in a plastic play pool in their backyard. He was two and had wandered out of sight for only a minute. As if that were not terrible enough, there was a babysitter there that night. A young man, sixteen years old, a family friend. Whenever I think about that night, it is always the babysitter’s screams I remember. Ghastly, high-pitched. Otherworldly. A banshee wail.

  That is the sound I think of when I think of how I hurt you.

  We are no longer the same people, you and me. I am still your father, yes, but I am not that man. You are still my daughter, yes, but you are no longer that teenage girl who could not look me in the face. Perhaps you still cannot look at me, but it is as a woman now, one deep into her life and career, her own loves and mistakes and regrets. A woman I wish I knew. You are so far away, Dani. I know who you were—every image of your childhood hangs in my mind like this morning’s moon, a crooked eggshell of a thing, so luminous I cannot stop staring. But I want to know who you are now.

  I would like to be a different man. I would like to be a different father, one you would visit. I would like to find a new shape.

  I have never asked because I thought I knew the answer, but I know now how little I do know. And so I ask: Dani, will you come see me? Will you come see your old father?

  I would like to show you my view.

  Love, Dad

  A Ride Home

  December 22, 1991

  Jess pushed through the side gate of Dani’s house, and when she hit the driveway, she began to run. On Piñon Drive she ran straight down the center line, splashing through ankle- and shin-deep puddles. Her knee and palms throbbed from her falls, but she didn’t slow down. She had no idea what time it was, how long she had been out wandering. She had been so cold, but now she was growing hot inside her coat. The rain had mostly stopped, though fat drops splattered down from tree branches. When she reached College Drive, with the gates of the Syc across the street, she paused, trying to decide which way to go. Left would take her home, up the hill, almost a mile away. Two blocks to the right was the District, where she could see the lights from the gas station. She jingled the change in her front pocket. She’d call her mother from the pay phone there. She’d say, Come get me, Mom. And her mother would—she’d come get her, let her slide inside the warm car. She might yell, say Jess was stupid to go out in the rain, but to Jess even that was fine. She could get a hot cup of coffee and wait for her mom to pull in.

  At the intersection of Main, she spied a lone car in the distance. As the car drew closer, its headlights foggy, the earlier apprehension returned, a strange hand clamping down on her shoulder: Got you. She darted into the street. Her pant legs dragged in the pooled water as she raced to the gas station. She reached the door at the same time that she realized the store lights were dimmed. A sign in the window read “Closed due to storms.” Jess cupped her hands to the window and peered in. No one there. She smacked her palm on the glass.

  The pay phone was on the corner of the building, and she shuffled to it, feeling in her pocket for change. As she did, she heard the squeal of brakes. In the street a car swerved. As if in slow motion, its tail slid sideways, and it went over the curb and up on the sidewalk before it shot across both lanes. The car stopped with a jerk, its front end facing Jess, its headlights illuminating the station.

  Jess let out the breath she was holding. The car reversed and then pulled into the lot of the Woodchute, across the street. She turned and dropped change into the pay phone. After she punched the buttons, she listened to the phone ring, tracing hatch marks on the metal box.

  No answer. Her mother was either still asleep, or in the shower, or had the TV up too loud. She hung up before the machine picked up, before she would hear her own voice, too: You’ve reached Jess—and Maud—Winters. You know what to do and when to do
it, so do it. Her laugh at the end—her father’s laugh. The returned coins clanged in the dish, and she fished them out through the metal flap.

  She stared at the buttons, thinking of her father’s cards in her desk drawer. Call if you need anything. What could she say? Come get me. I need a ride home. His home was not hers anymore. He lived five hundred miles away, with a new family, a little girl who was probably walking now. His beautiful girl. Soon he would walk her to school in tennis shoes he’d bought just for her. Soon she would learn to cross-country ski and keep her eyes on his back. Soon she would swim in the ocean and look for him on the shore.

  She dropped in the coins and more from her pocket and then punched in the numbers she’d memorized.

  Her father answered on the second ring. Even after all this time, she knew his voice instantly.

  “Hello?” he said. “Hello?”

  She breathed into the receiver, the words stuck in her throat. It’s me. It’s Jess.

  “Hello,” he said. “Is anyone there?”

  I am. It’s me. I am, you are, she is.

  An automated voice interrupted, asking her to deposit more money.

  She hung up the receiver, cutting both voices off.

  She slumped against the wall. She was so tired, so sleepy. She wanted to climb into bed. She touched the torn denim at her knee, pressed against the scrape on her skin. She was hot, too hot. A mile home. She’d have to walk.

  Across the street at the Woodchute, the door of one of the rooms opened, letting out a slash of light. To Jess’s surprise, Angie Juarez and Rose Prentiss came out. Jess looked at the car that had pulled into the lot—Angie’s Impala. She hadn’t recognized it through the mist. Rose said something and laughed as they shut the door and walked toward the car.

  Angie. Her old friend. Her first friend. Angie would give her a ride home. Jess bolted through the gas station lot and across the street as Angie and Rose climbed into the passenger side.

  “Wait!” she called out. “Wait for me.”

  The Hunger Year

  At four in the morning, Roberto Navarro climbed out of his bed but paused as the springs creaked. The young woman tangled in his sheets kept snoring softly, hugging her pillow. The stove light cast a glow around the small studio apartment. His footsteps muffled on the carpet, he went to the closet and pulled out a milk crate of old school folders and carried it into the bathroom. He sat on the side of the tub under the buzzing bulb and the whirring exhaust fan. Though he smelled of a stranger’s sweat and stale cigarette smoke and spilled beer, he didn’t turn on the shower. He riffled through the folders, stuffed with loose-leaf paper, finding the ones scrawled with humanities on the covers. “Beautiful,” Esther had said a few hours ago at the bar. He scanned pages for the line she’d mentioned, from an assignment she’d given.

  There: “The ship sailed across the sky.”

  He read on: “In that sky were stars and comets and other bright shards that reminded the pilot of shattered stained glass. He gazed through the ship’s rear window as if to see the marble of his planet, but it was gone from sight. He sat and watched the silent universe spark and glow as the ship glided through it. Somehow, he smelled the bitter tang of the tomato plants in his mother’s garden, he saw the sway of a pine tree’s matchstick branches, he heard the organ pipes of Sundays.”

  He ran his finger over the markings in the page’s margin: “Kick ass, Beto!” Jess Winters had written. “Took my breath away.” Jess had been his partner during the class exchange. He traced her handwriting now, chill bumps rising on his arms. He remembered she had written a poem about the earth and sky changing places. He’d not written anything in her margins but told her instead, “It’s perfect.” Her note was too kind—after that paragraph, the story devolved into ridiculous details about the spaceship itself and a human-robot war that had destroyed the Earth. He smiled. God, he’d been obsessed with space then. He would sit with Tomás in the carport as he worked on his truck and reel off facts about constellations, about NASA’s launch that year of the Hubble telescope—about the images he’d seen on the news of exploding stars and the inner core of Comet Levy and the rippled window-curtain structure of the Orion nebula. With a laugh, Tomás would say, “Mission control to Beto. Hand me that wrench, hombrecito.” Little man, Tomás had called him, teasing, pinching his round cheeks back when they were still round. At home and in the world, he was Beto instead of Roberto. Always diminutive.

  Roberto rubbed his neck, smelling the young woman on his hands. He splashed cool water on his face, and his stomach rumbled awake. There was a time when it had always rumbled—the year he turned sixteen and grew three inches, the same year Jess Winters arrived in town, a month after two men in uniform showed up on his family’s doorstep. Back then, he felt as if his stomach were eating itself. After his paper route, he would run past his sister Luz scrambling eggs and chug whole milk straight from the jug. Luz would say, “Jesus, Beto, slow down. We gotta make it till Friday with that.” When she wasn’t looking, he would sneak extra bologna or turkey from the fridge, wrap it in a paper towel, and put it in his pockets; as he walked to school, he pulled out the meat and wolfed it, barely chewing, trying to stop the ache.

  Quarter to five now. The young woman hadn’t budged. He remembered how she’d called out his name—his full name, Roberto. He trailed his fingers across her shoulder before he pulled on jeans, boots, and his work shirt. He left her a pot of coffee, a blueberry muffin, and a hand-drawn smiley face on a Post-it note. In recent years, since he finally grew into his body and became a man who turned heads, he’d made up for lost time. He met someone new every couple weeks. He took home college students or just slipped with them out to the alley of the Pickaxe, up against the concrete wall. He was thirty-four now, an age when he ought to be doing more than screwing his way around town, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself.

  Outside, a mottled yellow moon skulked behind the Black Hills. The sky had begun to lighten but was still dark enough he could see bats at the end of their night hunts, their strange staccato flutter at the corners of his vision. Whippoorwills trilled and then hushed as he passed their roosts. He looked up in a way he hadn’t in a long time, checking the summer stars. Vega. Ursa Minor. August—time for the Perseids. He scanned the sky, but saw no meteors.

  He walked to the shop via the route he always took: down Main through the District. In a town this size, Roberto didn’t have to drive much outside of his job—thank God. As everyone in town knew, he was a great mechanic but a terrible driver. Six fender-benders and scrapes since the first in driver’s ed, when Mr. Valenzuela yelled, “Brake! Brake!” but Beto hit the gas instead, plowing straight into a neighbor’s prized roses. So he walked or biked everywhere, head down, ignoring hollers and the occasional thrown cups from passing cars. The cops left him alone because they knew him—because Gil Alvarez was a family friend—though he still knew enough to look straight ahead and take his hands out of his pockets if he saw a patrol car.

  As usual, Main was quiet at this hour, the only lights on at the Woodchute and at Ms. G’s bakery. As usual, he paused across the street from the bakery and watched her through the illumined window. Ms. G—Esther—kneaded dough, her curly hair pulled up in a bun under a green bandana, her loose pants swishing. Because it was dark outside, she couldn’t see him standing there, a bit of predawn magic. His stomach growled harder. He wished he could get a cinnamon roll hot and fresh from the oven. He wished she would open her door to him the way she once had at school: Come in, come in. What’s going on? He remembered her past words: You can’t see my heart. My heart is an inferno, and he wished he could confess to her: mine isn’t. Nothing but stone, ash, even when he fucked so hard he sweated through the sheets. Though she couldn’t see him, he waved to her, tucking his shirt collar tight against the sudden chill.

  At the shop, Roberto climbed behind the wheel of the old blue Cherokee Jeep, Iris’s orchard workhorse. He clutched at the wheel, wringing it like a wet towel. He’
d never been able to make sense of it. He understood cars and engines the way good cooks knew spices or mathematicians knew numbers or pianists knew keys. He listened to an engine and knew it was a busted gasket, a loose nut, the carburetor, a cracked block. But all that changed when he slid behind the wheel. He knew his problem was related to Tomás’s death, but it wasn’t as if he pictured Tomás in the crushed Humvee (although he did so at other times, often before bed, imagining twisted metal, a crushed roof, blood pooling on a dusty road). In the driver’s seat, all his intuition and knowledge disappeared. It was as if he’d never seen a car before—heck, it was as if he’d never sat before, as if he’d never seen his own hands and feet.

  With the radio tuned to the local station and his hand poised over the keys in the ignition, he began his mantra: You are one with the car. You and the car are one. For whatever reason, and embarrassing as it was, it worked; he hadn’t had an accident since he’d adopted it. The news came on. A wildfire on the Rim. Traffic jam on I-17. Updates about the Jess Winters case. He stopped his mantra and turned up the volume. The forensics team would arrive today and begin its investigation. Detective Gil Alvarez cautioned against speculation. He urged patience and privacy for the family.

  Roberto looked over at the shop’s open bays. Angie stood in the first bay, her white hair sticking out from under her ball cap. He hadn’t had a chance to talk to her yesterday after the news broke. He’d been so distracted and tired this morning he’d forgotten to say hello. He got out of the jeep and shut the door. Angie looked up. They met each other’s eyes. After almost twenty years, he knew when she’d been crying.

  Beto had first met Jess at Allen’s Thrift, where he liked to go on the weekends even though he had no money. He liked to wander the aisles and try on clothes, and the older women who worked there would give him butterscotches from the dish at the register. Jess was there with Angie Juarez, sorting through racks in the men’s section. He remembered it was cold because he was wearing Tomás’s wool church suit. Since his growth spurt, his own jackets and pants had gotten too short, but the suit was still a little big. The sleeves hung past his wrists, his fingers poking out from the wool, and he’d safety-pinned the waistband of the pants. The jacket still smelled of Tomás, hints of peppermint and chicory coffee and sweat.