Orient

by Christopher Bollen

“God, I’m just like my mother,” she said, “crying on the corner of the bed over nothing. I like to think she did that only after my father died, but it started before. She always left the door open so I would come in when I heard her sobbing, or so she could stop when she heard me coming. I never knew which.”

  He touched her knee. His eyes weren’t absent when she looked at him. His lips moved together, building warmth. She might have kissed him if she hadn’t known better. She might kiss him anyway.

  “Maybe it’s just a different way for people to see,” he said. “Maybe it doesn’t have to answer anything. It’s perfect that some things can be just like you said—confusion. There needs to be a place for that.”

  “Does there?” she asked. “Is that really what we need more of? Isn’t there enough?”

  “It puts food on the table. And it gives all of your friends nice lives. So it does do something. Maybe you’re just expecting too much.”

  “Maybe,” she said. Somehow, for the last six months, she’d thought she hadn’t been expecting enough. She rounded her shoulders. “I’m sorry Gavril gave you such a hard time. Part of that brilliant-artist trip is the license to ask a lot of stupid questions, thinking he can be honest where others are afraid.”

  He stared at the floor. She thought she could see the lights within him disappearing one by one. If she did paint again, she’d want to start with his face, if only to stoke that light, to free the fire and open it to the air.

  “It didn’t bother me,” he said. “I told him I didn’t know anything about my parents, but that’s not true. I found my mother, saw her just as I see you.”

  “Oh, man, that must have been hard,” she said. “Did you spend any time with her?”

  “Not much. We spoke. Not like you and I are talking, though. Like we were strangers trying to sell each other things.”

  She waited, but he didn’t continue. She didn’t press him. She had no right to push him further. But she no longer felt like she was talking to a child. They sat together on the edge of the bed, staring forward, as if they were traveling in the front seat of her car.

  The sound of glass, shattering, came through the window from the back porch. Beth heard feet slapping on the pavement, followed by a sharp, aborted scream. “I better make sure no one’s hurt,” she said. She hurried down the steps and moved through the deserted living room. She heard engines revving in the driveway and saw headlights passing through the windows before disappearing down the road. Luz rushed through the back door, her breasts shaking as she reached for a towel. Her dark skin was wet and glinting, her white underwear tracing a shell of hair.

  “Our husbands are at it, fighting,” she said, covering her chest with the towel. “Those men are idiots, wrestling like dogs.”

  “About what?”

  “Whatever it’s about, it’s over each other.” Luz managed to compose a smile for Mills as she scooted by him to locate her clothes. “Hi. We’ve met before.”

  “Get out here, Luz, we’re leaving,” Nathan yelled from outside. Beth watched him walk past the living room window, a trickle of blood running from his lip. Gavril slammed the kitchen door, holding his bleeding hand by the wrist.

  “He cut you?” Beth reached for the towel, but Luz had already taken it.

  “No,” Gavril said, running the gash under the sink. “I was picking up glass.”

  “What happened? What were you fighting—”

  “Nothing. Jealousy, no talent, trying to steal my career from me, making up lies.” His face contorted. Beth kneeled down to get the first aid kit from the cabinet. “Get out,” Gavril yelled after Nathan. “Leave and do not come back.”

  Beth glanced over her shoulder. At the end of the hallway, Luz was pulling on her pants, her sweater hanging from her sinewy arms. In profile, bent at her waist, she almost looked like she was smiling, a caught shark hanging from a fishing dock. Mills stood against the wall.

  “Maybe you should go,” she said to him. He nodded and grabbed his coat from the corner. “And don’t forget, you need to get that thing back for me.”

  “Yes, no more party. Everyone out.” Gavril held his hand out for Beth to dress the wound. Mills stepped around them, glanced back at Beth, then left as wordlessly as he had come.

  Outside, Nathan honked his horn.

  “Is he okay?” Luz asked in the doorway, clutching her jacket.

  “I’m okay,” Gavril answered. The anger had died, and, with it, his spirit.

  “It was a lovely party,” she said, winking at Beth. “And to think we almost made it through without remembering who the real stars of the night are. When you two make up tomorrow, please don’t give the rest of us a second thought.” She moved to kiss them, thought better of it, and made her way to the door.

  They stood in the kitchen a few degrees apart. It was so quiet Beth could hear the hush of falling snow. There was a moment after a party when desolation crept over rooms that once were filled with noise. Beth knew she should try to cheer Gavril up with a memory or a kiss, but she didn’t. She left the kitchen as her husband flexed his injured hand and went outside to pick up the glass.

  Beth fell asleep before Gavril came to bed. When she woke at five in the morning, he wasn’t lying next to her. Snow covered the backyard. The lights in the garage were off, but from the window she saw his faint footprints leading to its door.

  CHAPTER 17

  The nor’easter came to Orient like a night parade, whistling and trumpeting and waking residents from their sleep. What it left was quieter than sleep: two feet of snow and lakes of ice that glittered like sheet metal. The streets were empty except for a few bundled figures setting their marks on the white. In winter, that urge to leave the first footprint was as human as crying at death. Cars were locked in snowdrifts, and the air was gritty with the smell of burning wood.

  After a winter storm, Orient hung so motionless that it was easy to forget the village was surrounded by water. The first reminder was the voice of a radio announcer broadcasting news of the condition of the causeway. The water had breached the road, icing it over and cutting the village off from the mainland. Until the county plows and salt trucks cleared a lane, no one could get in or out.

  Paul carried in logs from the woodpile and arranged them in the fireplace. Mills rummaged through the downstairs closets for boots, gloves, a wool cap, and a nylon snowsuit, which zippered so tightly across his chest he could barely breathe. Paul stood watching with an incredulous smirk as Mills dressed, missing the significance of the occasion. For a westerner, snow was a special occasion; being absent from Mills’s life, it had rubbed itself into his dreams. Mills jumped at the chance to meet the snow in full uniform, like an Alaskan donning flippers and a snorkel mask in the Caribbean.

  “It’s really not that cold,” Paul said. “You’re going to overheat in two minutes.”

  “Then I’ll come back in in two minutes.”

  Mills lasted twenty. He slipped on ice patches and fell on his padded side. His thighs whisked as he ran in circles, and he wore himself out trying to keep upright. He took lunar strides across the lawn, his lungs hoarse from the cold, sweat prickling against his woolen cap. It seemed to him that he’d finally found his reason for coming to Orient: overnight the town looked less menacing and far lonelier, able to cling to the smallest bead of life like a faucet holding a drip of water.

  It was the presence of the Muldoons that finally drove him back inside. Theo sprinted from his house with a sled. Tommy stumbled out in a sweatshirt and jeans, his sneakers kicking up flurries. The father, Bryan, stood at the door, trying to talk Tommy into taking a shovel. Mills hurried up the porch steps. He didn’t even stop to shake off the snow on the welcome mat, in case he looked over and found Tommy returning his gaze. Mills no longer wanted anything to do with the teenager next door. He was a casualty of another season, a warm current that had gone cold.

  Winter exposed the weaknesses of the Benchley mansion. Chilly air leaked through the floorboards, th
e pipes shook out gluey streams of water, and the dishes trembled in the kitchen cabinets with every step. Mills learned the reason for all the books in the living room: they were distractions for Paul in his breaks from the computer. Mills went up to his room and sat by the window. Through the frosted glass, he saw Tommy and his brother rolling a large ball of snow across their yard, one ball and then another, until four globes formed a row by the curb. Tommy issued directions and Theo followed them, scurrying over the balls like a spider tending its eggs. The late morning sun hit the bedroom window, blinding the glass with yellow frost.

  Mills thought of the sun in California, and the hard, white light beating down on his mother as she walked along the street. Perhaps the memory came to him because he had spoken of her to Beth the night before. He had stood on a corner in Sacramento, almost eight months ago, in the merciless heat of that stone-white capital. He had learned that his mother lived here, a mere hour-and-a-half bus ride from Modesto. For his whole life, she had been an hour-and-a-half bus ride away: a twenty-dollar bus ticket, seventy miles up the I-5 through the green vacuum of the central valley, six blocks west of the depot where Mexicans sold scoops of flavored ice for fifty cents. Anyone with twenty dollars could take that trip. But finding her had cost five hundred and twenty dollars, a sum he had earned mowing lawns on weekends.

  The records on his birth were sealed, but the county’s attempt to digitize its records had left a hole in its security walls that foster kids had learned to exploit. There was a small-time hacker in Stockton who charged five hundred bucks to break into the county database, and a second hack matched the name of the parent to a current place of employment. Mills knew several friends who had used the service; some had confronted their parents and returned with money, or pictures of siblings, or black eyes and quiet voices. Mills sent the money in cash, and the response had brought him to that corner in downtown Sacramento, across the street from a jewelry store.

  Under a flapping green awning, a neon sign in the shop’s window read CENTRAL GOLD WE BUY WE SELL. BUY blinked blue and SELL flatlined red. He stood across the street for an hour, the sun pressing on his skin, his stomach swirling, the sweat of his legs speckling his only pair of dress pants. Every time he worked up the courage to cross the street, the traffic swelled and his resolve seemed to blow away with the exhaust. Finally, he saw her walking toward the store: a thin middle-aged woman in a leopard-print dress, with dark, wavy hair that collected on her shoulders, black sunglasses that hid her eyes, and a nose that was dented at the tip like the seam in a peach. He knew it was his mother, knew it from the stillness of her lips, anchor shaped and uneasily moved. He felt a strange, misplaced pride when a businessman looked over his shoulder to study the movement of her hips. She stopped at the door of the jewelry store, gathering her hair at her neck the way a person in a rainier city stopped to gather the folds of an umbrella. It was so bright she seemed to melt into the glass. The door gave in, and she disappeared into the darkness of Central Gold.

  Mills was startled out of the memory by the sound of Pam calling to her boys. Tommy and Theo had built four snowmen—one for each member of the family, except their absent sister. Their bodies were arranged facing the street in invitation, with black batteries for eyes, leaves for mouths, sticks for arms, and scarves wrapped around their necks, tight as nooses. Tommy fit a Giants cap on his snowman and placed pinecone eyebrows over his mother’s Duracell eyes. Pam had come out to see their work, and she paced around the family portrait and hugged her sons, face tight with joy. For once, Tommy seemed to welcome his mother’s company, receiving her hug and keeping his arm around her shoulder. Mills was happy to see that the incident in his bedroom hadn’t left any noticeable hostility. Perhaps the four snowmen were a kind of peace offering, a return of the happy Muldoons, arms stretched wide to embrace all of Orient. At night, Mills thought, the lawn lights would make them look like a family of smiling ghosts.

  While Pam kneeled in the snow and took photos of the snowmen, Tommy stood to the side, awkward even among the snow family. When Theo and Pam ran back to the house, Tommy did something strange: he removed the eyes from the father and placed the two batteries, like buckshot, into the snow where its heart would be.

  Tommy squinted up at the bedroom window. Mills stepped back. When he looked out again, Tommy was gone.

  The snow melted quickly—first to sludge, and then altogether, uncovering the brittle grass, retreating into islands of white. The Muldoon snowmen withstood the thaw, grinning crookedly, as if they were certain another storm would preserve them through the winter. Mills was sorry to see the snow disappear. He had enjoyed the two days marooned in the house, sitting by the fire. As Paul worked away on his laptop, Mills played rounds of solitaire and flipped through art books, trying to figure out the trick that earned Beth’s artist friends so much attention and money.

  Beth phoned on Sunday afternoon, telling him she’d take him for a drive when the roads were better. He knew she’d expect him to have Jeff Trader’s book by then. Before Beth could mention it, Mills started whispering to her about a plan he’d been hatching to surprise Paul with a birthday cake. Would she take him to the bakery in Greenport?

  “Okay,” she said, but she wouldn’t be diverted from her purpose. “Did you manage to get the book?”

  “No, but I will.”

  “You have to,” she insisted. Then she told him that Isaiah Goodman, one of the artists at her party, wanted to invite him over for dinner next week. “He’ll pick you up,” she said. “He and his boyfriend are very nice. It’ll be good for you.” Mills realized that Beth had probably coerced Isaiah into extending the invitation, but he was grateful for the kindness. Beth recited Isaiah’s number, which he jotted down on a scrap of paper. And just like that, as one season changed into another, he felt that Orient was opening itself up to him.

  When he returned to the parlor, Paul was picking up a lime green pamphlet that had been slipped under the front door. The same picture of the creature decorated the front flap, but this time with a new message: WHAT ELSE DO YOU EXPECT THE GOVERNMENT TO SAY? A SKEPTICAL ORIENT IS A SAFE ORIENT. The pamphlet listed the date of the next council meeting in Southold, asking residents to confront the board about environmental concerns related to five decades of exposure to Plum.

  “He’s still at it?” Paul groaned, tossing the pamphlet in the kindling stack.

  “Maybe he really believes that the lab has messed up the land,” Mills said.

  “What Adam is trying to do is jump-start his security company with all of his newfangled environmental tests, and he feels like people won’t shell out money unless they’re scared. What he doesn’t understand is, the more new people come out and buy up the land, the more they’ll want security to protect their houses. But with all those posters of mutant corpses all over town, who’s going to want to move to Orient in the first place?”

  Mills sat on the floor, flipping through an art book. “But like he said in that meeting, if the land turns out to be toxic, no one’s going to buy it.”

  “Exactly,” Paul snorted. “So maybe it’s in his best interest not to ask those kinds of questions. But you tell folks out here how to run a business, they’ll do the exact opposite just to prove they’re not city-minded.” Paul shook his head, and Mills thought of the mug on the bureau in his bedroom: We are the superior beings. As Mills watched Paul hovering at his laptop, he considered how lonely superior beings must be in this world, so superior they didn’t even need the confusion of love or sex to distract them. Then again, maybe superior beings made ideal foster parents: they took over for those who couldn’t deal with the burden of what love or sex had brought them.

  Mills picked up his deck of cards. “Should we play a game of hearts?”

  Paul checked his watch. “I have to go to Greenport to get groceries. The causeway should be clear by now. You want to come?”

  Mills chose to stay by the fire. By the time Paul pulled out of the driveway, the sun had already
set. Mills walked through the backrooms and out the door, hopping over the last islands of snow. A few boats swayed in the distance, near the Connecticut side of the Sound. He hoped Tommy might see him from his bedroom window and come down—not for another replay of that mistaken moment between them, but to return the book and shake hands in peace.

  The bushes rustled. The presence of a deer was no longer a remarkable sight to Mills, but the doe walked out into the open accompanied by a snow-flecked fawn. Their purple hides bristled and their noses smoked. The mother watched Mills as she strode across the grass. The fawn trembled, almost as if he were a reflection of himself in water, taking shy steps. A strip of yellow plastic wound around his neck, loose as a dog collar. If the plastic didn’t fall off, Mills thought, it would strangle the fawn as it grew. There was nothing he could do about it; another step and the deer would bolt. He could only hope the plastic broke free before it became a noose.

  He went inside and lay down on the tweed sofa. He slept so deeply that he didn’t hear Paul when he returned with the groceries. He slept until a few minutes after midnight, when he was awakened by sounds like loud thunder and crashing waves. He opened his eyes and saw the glass coffee table reflecting orange. Mills heard screaming, and, beyond the screams, the sirens.

  Bryan Muldoon had gone to bed angry. He had tried to sit down with his son to have “the talk”—a compilation of specific talks bundled together in an after-dinner father-son summit. The topic was “What the hell is the matter with you, Tommy?” It had gone as badly as Bryan had predicted. Bryan wished he could put his arms around his eldest son, half shaking him, half hugging him, a shake-hug of love and correction. Instead Tommy just sat on the kitchen chair with his hands braced on the seat, looking like he might bolt at any moment.

  Pam had supplied a working script for Bryan to follow: mediocre grades, a lapsed interest in the extracurriculars in which he once excelled, a disrespect toward his parents’ rules for peaceful cohabitation, a sullen quiet that seemed to permeate his entire being in his last year at home before college. Pam had provided Bryan with a stack of state university catalogs, should the conversation take an aspirational turn.