by Jamie Kain
So while I’m alone in the too-quiet house after the arrival of my mother’s letter, I find an empty journal with a plain black cover in Dad’s office, and I start writing.
But what comes out this time—it feels different. I realize it’s because I’m literally writing to my dad this time. I’m writing something I want him to read, if he ever returns here. After all, what can he do to me, really, if he doesn’t like what I have to say? What can he do that’s any worse than living in this broken-down house alone?
August 3, 2002
By the time you return, maybe the end will have come.
The End, as in the apocalypse, or the next ice age, or the Second Coming, or …
* * *
The longer our parents are gone, the more I start to wonder about them. Two weeks, and we haven’t heard a word from Dad. I start to imagine the worst.
What I don’t know about my parents could fill volumes of notebooks. I open the black journal and start with the questions I can think of:
Where did Mom go?
Why did she leave?
Why didn’t she take us?
Why didn’t she tell us she was leaving?
Why did she feel like she had to sneak away?
How did she meet Dad?
Did she love him?
Why did Dad retire from the army when he did?
Maybe these questions are connected, but I don’t know how. I just know I want to find answers. I start by looking through my parents’ stuff. Not just the obvious places, like the bottoms of drawers and backs of closets. I check those places, but I know I won’t find anything there. I dig deeper, into boxes left unpacked in the garage, but my father isn’t a saver of things that aren’t useful. Mom, however, has a box somewhere, mementos. I remember coming across it once, years ago, but I haven’t seen it recently. I wonder if she took it with her when she left. But Dad did all of her unpacking, so where would he have put it, or would he have thrown it away?
I turn away from my parents’ closet to find Izzy standing in the doorway.
“What are you doing?” she says.
“Looking for something.”
“You’re snooping.” She scans the room, taking in the open closet, the drawers I’ve failed to close all the way. “I’m telling Dad when he comes back.”
I say nothing. If I act like I don’t want our dad to find out, she’s sure to tell him first chance she gets. Instead of arguing, I close the closet door and start putting everything else in the room back the way I found it.
Izzy gets bored and leaves, but I hear her call out in the hallway, “You’d better stay out of my stuff!”
I realize if there is anything to be found about Dad, it will probably be in the downstairs room he set up as his office. He keeps a locked file cabinet, but I don’t know where the key is, and he has a laptop computer that he uses instead of the family computer, but he probably took it with him when he left.
For a moment I feel a pang of guilt for snooping. But then I think of the time that has passed with us here alone, no telephone, no way of contacting anyone, and the guilt fades.
This whole situation is crazy.
I doubt Dad has any important files on the desktop computer we all use, so my best option for now is to try picking the lock on the file cabinet. I can hear Izzy in her room, listening to music now, so I creep past her door and through the kitchen, where I stop to get a Leatherman tool out of the utility drawer, then back to the office. I close the door behind me and lock it, because I don’t want Izzy to catch me trying to break into the file cabinet.
It seems unlikely that Dad would keep anything all that important in here. He has a fireproof metal box where he keeps things like our birth certificates, a handgun, and I don’t know what else. He told me the handgun is there as a last resort, in case all the other guns are stolen, and he said he would give me the combination to the lockbox, but he never did.
This file cabinet is an antique, something Dad inherited from his own father, and it’s made out of heavy oak, with a lock that doesn’t look too terribly strong. I open the Leatherman and pull out the tool tip that looks most likely to fit in the keyhole. It doesn’t fit. I check all the other implements, but none of them are small enough, so I open a desk drawer and rummage around until I find a paper clip.
I unfold the paper clip so that the end fits into the keyhole, and after some jiggling around, I feel a surge of victory as the lock releases.
I roll out the top of three drawers and scan the headings on the files, all neatly labeled in my father’s careful handwriting and ordered alphabetically. I don’t even know what I’m looking for. The top drawer starts with “Auto” and goes through “Homeowner Policy,” with nothing in between sounding all that promising.
Randomly, I pick up a file labeled “Firearms” and open it. Inside are some owner’s manuals for guns, a few articles printed off the Internet about models of rifles, and the ownership certificates for all of Dad’s weapons. He has most but not all of them registered.
I put the file back and close the drawer, then open the next one down, which starts with “Income Tax Docs” and goes through “Retirement.” Every file has the sort of heading you’d expect a boring manila file to have, and I feel stupid for thinking I might easily uncover anything here that would tell me more about my parents’ lives. I randomly pick out a file labeled “Household,” because it’s vague, and also because it’s out of alphabetical order.
Placing it on my lap, I open it and find on top a receipt for a GE refrigerator. Next is an article about how to remove stains from carpet. I flip through and find more of the same. Exciting stuff.
After putting the file back, I open the bottom drawer and scan again for anything that might be helpful. The “Passports” file catches my eye, because I am pretty sure Dad keeps our passports in the locked fireproof box. When I open it, I find a photocopy of my parents’ marriage certificate staring back at me. I pick it up and study it more closely. It has their full names and birth dates and says they were married at Fort Lewis, Washington, which is near where my mom went to college.
I do the math on their dates of birth and figure out for the first time my mom’s age when she married Dad. She was twenty-one and he was thirty-four at the time—thirteen years’ difference?
I try to imagine myself in five more years getting married to some thirty-four-year-old man and my stomach goes sour.
There is a photo I have seen of them as newlyweds, standing in front of a church, Mom wearing a simple white sundress and Dad wearing his army dress blues. They smile as if it hurts to do so. She looks impossibly young, like someone I could be friends with now.
I never used to wonder about their age difference. When I was young, I thought that was just how things went—Dad had some gray hairs and Mom didn’t.
It also hasn’t escaped my notice that no way in a million years would our dad let us date someone that much older, even if we were eighteen or nineteen. He’d flip out, I’m sure.
So why was it okay for him and Mom?
I’ll have to add that to my list of questions in the journal.
I flip to the next paper after the marriage certificate copy, and I find a handwritten letter from my mom to my dad, on thick white linen paper with my mom’s careful script in blue ink.
Dear James,
I miss you, and I wonder what it’s like for you in Bosnia. I know it’s only been a month since your deployment, but I can’t help wondering if I’m cut out for life as an army wife. It’s a lonely life. If I’d known just how lonely, I’m not sure I would have gone dancing at the officers’ club a year ago, or agreed to dance with you, or gave you my phone number after, or accepted your invitation to dinner. I don’t regret our meeting and falling in love, but I do wish I’d understood how hard it would be.
I try to be strong and keep my mind on my classroom, but something has come up that I need to let you know about. I’m pregnant, eight weeks along to be exact. I’ve been taking my bir
th control pills without fail, so I don’t know how this happened. I wish I could tell you in person, or even over the phone, but every time we get a chance to talk, I just can’t make the words come out.
What I need you to know is, while I understand you’d like to have children now, I’m not ready, and I don’t know when or if I ever will be. I can’t have a baby right now, not when I’m just getting on my feet as a teacher. This is the first year I feel like I know what I’m doing, and I’m excited about the progress I see in my students and in my own skills. I can’t throw all that away now. I just can’t.
This is almost as hard to write as it would be to say out loud. I have decided to end this pregnancy, I’m sorry to say. I sometimes think I should just do it without telling you, and you’d never know the difference, but in case something goes wrong, I want you to understand my reasons.
I hope you’ll forgive me. I know when we talked before about having kids, you were sure I’d change my mind about not wanting to. You thought our love for each other would conquer my doubts. And I do love you—but I need you to love me enough to understand and accept my feelings. I trust that you do, and you will.
Love Always,
Maly
Mom didn’t want to have kids? I look at the date at the top of the page, and it’s from five years before I was born. I let this sink in.
I might have had an older brother, or sister. I might never have been born at all. Maybe Mom changed her mind about having kids, or maybe Dad steamrolled over her wishes and insisted it happen. Though, from the sound of this letter, she would not have been easy to steamroll over.
The doorknob rattles, and then there is a knock. “Open up! What are you doing in there?” says Izzy from the other side of the door. I shove the papers back in the file cabinet, close it, and go to the door.
Before she can say anything, I push past her and run outside, down the stairs, across the yard, and toward the woods. I keep going until I’m far enough that I know she won’t follow. Then I sit down on the ground and cry.
* * *
I never should have snooped around, if I couldn’t handle the secrets I’d find. I understand that now, a day too late. So I lie awake, unable to sleep, trying to force my thoughts away from my mother and my father and their complicated history.
Whenever I hear the old REM song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine),” the lyrics get stuck in my head and won’t leave me alone. When I was younger, I’d hear it come on the station my mom liked to listen to when we were in the car, and I’d think of Dad, always talking about how we had to get ready for the end of the world as we knew it, how only the smartest and most prepared would survive. I would think, why do the guys singing feel fine about the world as they knew it ending? Wasn’t it scary?
Now the lyrics, forever burned into my memory through repetition, make perfect sense to me. The world as I know it isn’t the kind of place I could ever feel safe in.
I lie in bed, listening to the sounds of rodents scratching around in the attic, and I feel as if the ceiling is going to come crashing down on me. It’s so hot that I’m drenched in sweat, and the fan blowing hot air on me does nothing to cool me off, but I can’t open the windows tonight because then we’ll be breathing in acrid brown smoke from the forest fires burning in the hills nearby.
In one corner, bits of the ceiling are falling off, a semi-steady shower of white plaster crumbs forming a pile on the floor next to my bed. This sight, most of all, makes me want to scream, or break something, or do exactly what my mother did—run away from it all.
Except I can’t run.
I’m trapped here with my bratty sister and no one to turn to for help. I could count on two hands the relatives we have ever met, people who might possibly be called for help in a normal family. But we are no normal family.
I barely know our distant cousins in Fresno, because no one in our family is all that close. My mom’s family never liked my dad, and so we kept our distance. Maybe they would help if I called them, but I know deep down that I’m not ready to admit defeat.
I want to prove to myself—if not to Dad anymore—that I can handle this.
But can I handle it?
I don’t have any choice.
Eleven
WOLF
In the latter half of the 1800s people came here to this part of the country looking for gold. If you read about Gold Rush history, it’s mostly about how people endured hardships, died, and fought to find their fortunes. I used to think they were all driven by greed. But then I realized how desperate some of those people had to be, to leave their homes, travel across country before there were cars or highways or planes or even many roads, and then struggle for years to find enough gold to survive on.
Maybe if I’d been alive then, I would have been a forty-niner too.
The older I get, the more I feel as if I am some lone explorer in a strange new world, where I understand few of the rules and am not sure I have the right equipment to survive. I think of Nicole and her hunting rifle, her finger poised so easily against the trigger, ready to take away any life she chose.
In this way, I can’t escape Mahesh’s teachings about peace and universal love, no matter how well I understand that we all have to survive however we know how.
There’s a darkness that hovers at the edge of my thoughts. It’s been there for as long as I can remember, and at least what I’ve learned from Mahesh helps me keep it at bay.
This darkness is what killed my father, according to my mom. Drove him to put a bullet in his head, a death so sudden and violent I cannot begin to fathom him inflicting it upon himself, my gentle, earth-loving father. That he would even touch a gun is incomprehensible to me, let alone aim at himself and pull the trigger. How would he even come to own an object capable of such destruction?
How could he destroy his own life so completely, leaving me behind with only his brown hair, his brown eyes, and his dark edges?
I’m glad I haven’t seen Nicole with guns since that first day. I’m not sure I could call her a friend if she considered them her favorite objects.
I’ve invited her to see the Yuba River, which is an hour-and-a-half hike from the village but worth it if you set out early and bring water. Finding cold water to swim in seems like the only thing worth doing.
We walk along the path toward the river, gradually downhill, in silence for a short while.
She seems a bit subdued since the last time I saw her, a bit tired around the eyes, but she hasn’t said if something is bothering her, and I don’t ask. If she wants me to know, she’ll tell me.
The sound of the rushing water can be heard now above birds chirping overhead. The miracle of water, still here in spite of drought, always makes me grateful. It is frigid snowmelt, difficult to swim in and with treacherous currents in certain spots, but not here, where the arrangement of rocks and water creates a semiprotected pool, perfect for swimming.
When we enter the clearing, I hear Nicole exclaim something, and I turn to see her staring in awe.
“Wow. It’s a real river.”
“Yep. The great Yuba, as pretty as they come.”
She smiles, and I know it was worth the long hike. She could have spent the day doing the endless list of chores her dad expects her to complete, but she’s here with me instead.
“There used to be a lot more birds around,” I say, feeling myself wanting to impress her with my skills of observation. “More animals of all kinds really, but the past few years, there are fewer and fewer.”
“Why do you think?”
“Drought. Even the Yuba’s a lot smaller than it used to be. I guess the wildlife have mostly died or migrated to spots with more water.”
She stares at the dark woods across the river, seeming to give this some thought. “What’s the best thing you’ve ever seen out here?”
You is what I almost say. Instead, I tell her about the next best thing. “I was out hiking once and got a little lost, so I ende
d up heading home in the dark. I was walking along a fire road when a young mountain lion ran across the road ahead, chasing a hare. The moon was out, and I could see them clearly, and I nearly pissed my pants.”
Her expression goes from shocked to amused. “That’s amazing. I’d have been terrified.”
“He was only about fifty pounds or so, but yeah. I didn’t go wandering around in the dark for a while after that.”
I watch her move toward the water, then bend to touch it when she reaches the river’s edge. I wonder if she’s ever been kissed or touched.
I wonder if she would let me.
Or if I should even dare to hope.
It’s not why I brought her here, or it’s not consciously why, but as I watch her take off her shirt and shorts, revealing a one-piece blue swimsuit, I know that someday soon I want there to be more than a friendship between us.
I want to know her in ways I cannot fathom, and it’s an urge so powerful, I feel as if the energy of all humanity past and present is pushing me toward it.
NICOLE
What most people don’t understand is that just because I know how to use a gun doesn’t mean I like to do it.
But since the age of six, my dad has been trying to convert me. Mostly I have gone along with it. First it was just with an air rifle. He used to take me out in the backyard and have me aim at cans on the fence or homemade paper targets.
Once, though, when I was eight and had gotten so good at shooting targets and cans and tennis balls my dad threw into the air, he convinced me to aim at a squirrel, and when I actually hit it—when I watched its small brown body flinch and fall from the tree branch, landing with a quiet thud on the ground—I felt as if I’d just committed murder.
I had committed murder, as far as I was concerned then.
In that instant of realizing what an awful thing I’d done, I dropped the gun onto the ground and started to cry. My father tried to shush me, to tell me I’d done great, that the squirrel wasn’t going to go to waste—heck, we could eat it for dinner, he’d said—but I was not comforted. I only cried harder, until my mother came out to see what was the matter, and I darted past her into the house and locked myself in my room for the rest of the night.