You’re just scared because we hit that ice driving up here.
But we’re fine, Lenny—we’re okay.
Nothing happened.
10.
He sat there facing the flames his daughter had summoned. Transfixed by thought and by heat. At least they would be together. He felt they were together, even after familiarity had culled the anxiety mistaken for love.
But of course, nothing was going to happen. He would soon tramp upstairs and fall asleep, let the world disappear but not end. He would remember the announcer’s voice, but it would have no power over him. Words are the shadows of things—not the things themselves.
11.
Lenny would have known if such an event were even a possibility. Scientists would have taken over the television and told everyone months ago. He would not have driven into the mountains for the weekend, for snowshoeing, hot chocolate, and Monopoly. How Jane loved it when Lenny went to jail.
But there was no doubt in the announcer’s voice. He believed it himself for sure. How do people like that get on the air? Lenny thought. How are they allowed?
He felt anger then. How people could mistake conviction for truth. Maybe there were others who actually accepted what this man was saying? What if there were people out there now, killing themselves to escape death?
Such thoughts made Lenny realize how tired he was. Made him feel like going upstairs to Carolin and Jane.
He got up off the living room floor and went to the kitchen to make hot chocolate. Jane had brought a box of packets. It was probably just radio drama, or a religious show—fire and brimstone every week—with a telephone number for donations. And of course it was late, and Lenny was aware his mind might be playing tricks. His unease most likely the result of jumbled-up feelings from their harrowing car journey up the mountain. They had skidded to the side of the road after seeing a bright light, a blinding light that came toward them.
Standing over the kettle, Lenny warmed his hands on the steam. What would he do if something really were taking place?
When he was alone, he sometimes had fantasies. He would pretend something was going on—a car accident; earthquake; things on fire—then picture Carolin on his back, Jane in his arms.
In real life, Lenny knew if the world were ending, saving his family would be a matter of chance rather than courage. He’d owned a gun out west, but then he met Carolin and she didn’t like guns and, to be honest, he couldn’t shoot anyway.
As he poured boiling water onto the heap of brown powder, hard white pieces floated to the top and transformed into marshmallows. They reminded Lenny of Jane’s baby teeth.
The preacher on the radio had said total devastation with no escape. Gather your loved ones, he had said, for the day of reckoning is here.
Lenny imagined rocking them awake. Telling Jane to put on her slippers and come downstairs, there is something important to tell. As he thought of doing this, he carried his hot chocolate to the living room and looked around, deciding where they would sit when he told them. The fire going strong, it would flicker on the surface of their eyes.
Maybe they should eat something before he tells them? Maybe if they ate, it would be better?
He knew what Jane would want and imagined preparing a last meal. The onion so white. He would break the pasta and add salt to quicken the boil. He would think: This is our last meal. They would all die with the food in their stomachs. Lenny wondered if most people died with food in their stomachs.
He imagined his daughter Jane as an old lady with her parents long gone. Pictured her in a nursing home trembling on the couch with no one alive who knew or remembered her. There were people like that everywhere, who had outlived their lives.
The thought of it made Lenny want to rush upstairs. Until hearing the preacher’s words, he hadn’t fully understood how one day they would be separated.
The world might not end, but they would. And that was the forever part. Not love.
Love was just something tiny and bright with eternity on all sides.
12.
When the fire was just a deep, rolling glow, Lenny went into the hall. It was cold near the front door of the farmhouse. He peered through the darkness up the staircase. Maybe he should see what was happening. It was almost two in the morning. He had been on the couch for a long time.
The announcer had said bright light followed by judgment.
But the worst . . . Lenny thought . . . the absolute worst, would not be telling them the end was coming—or even the dying. The worst would be after that, when they were gone—lost from one another with no hope of ever meeting again.
Jane was only ten years old and might be afraid if she were alone. Without memory, she might not realize there had once been two people called Lenny and Carolin, who created her body, then put food in her mouth, changed her diapers, bathed her in the sink of a pink house in Albany, read stories, lied about animals being able to talk, and wrote messages on cards once a year to make her feel important.
Lenny heard the announcer’s voice speaking to him directly—but now it was more like the voice of his father, an oilman who his mother said used to walk around with a diamond-tipped drill bit in a briefcase. Lenny met him once. But he wasn’t carrying a briefcase, just a bottle.
Lenny went back in the living room. Tried anchoring himself to reality by staring at his empty mug. Then the mantelpiece; the glowing logs he and Jane had piled into the grate; a painting of the house they were in. He stood and went closer. Wondered if inside the painting of the house there was a painting of the house.
He considered that he was already dead. And there was really no one upstairs. No upstairs even, and he was imagining everything to get through this part of the dying process. On the other side of the curtain, where the living dwell, it was summer. Carolin and Jane were back home in Albany going on with their lives and having lunch, or picking out shoes online, or in bed watching television—learning to live without him, happiness leaking back into their lives.
He could rest then. If he knew Jane and Carolin could be happy without him, dying wouldn’t be so bad after all. And as a father and a husband, it might be nice to go on ahead. Soften the unknown. Get everything ready. Be waiting with his arms out.
13.
Hours before, when they were packing up the car to escape Albany for the weekend, Lenny noticed his daughter just standing there in the house. She would be eleven soon, and no longer believed in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus. Jane wanted to be older, and was waiting for it to happen the way some people wait for an inheritance.
Carolin had taken her shopping the weekend before to pick out bras. There was probably a small bra in the room upstairs where she was sleeping right at this minute. Lenny loved seeing Jane’s shoes everywhere at home, and staring into the yard at her toys full of rain.
Training bras, Carolin had said, help girls prepare mentally for the coming change. But Jane wasn’t wearing one when Lenny saw her standing there in the hall that morning as they packed for the trip. He could tell she wasn’t wearing one—and was going to ask if she should, but then felt it was wrong of him to have noticed.
Every time he got used to a new Jane, she would change again. At times, it was as though a stranger had taken over her body, making her say and do things that his old daughter would never have said or done.
Loading up the truck, the air smelled like wood smoke, pine, and diesel. With the front door open, cold went through the house like a broom. Lenny knew it was going to snow pretty bad, and tied a blue tarp over their suitcases. The same tarp he’d used years before, moving east with Carolin to watch her father die.
14.
Lenny went back to the kitchen. Set his cup in the sink.
Then he opened the refrigerator door and stood there, stuffing coconut pie into his mouth. Carolin had brought some from the diner where they stopped to eat.
; Then he went back to the fire. Red coals were now breaking apart. He put a log on. One of them was covered in green lichen. It would be a while before the fresh wood took flame, but the heat from the cinders was steady.
Tomorrow, he planned on taking the girls hiking deep in the woods. Jane was worried about bears, but Carolin said they would most likely be hibernating.
Lenny imagined a bear loping toward them. If Carolin were caught first, he’d put Jane down and fight to save his wife. He imagined flesh coming off in strips, then his hand in the bear’s stomach. The stump shooting blood. Carolin’s scarf as a tourniquet. Jane still holding her doll with its ice skates on. If only the blades were real.
If there had been an Internet connection in the farmhouse, Lenny would have looked up bear attacks. Was it safe to carry Hershey’s Kisses in your pocket? Was chocolate to bears like blood to sharks? What if Carolin was menstruating? Lenny thought quickly. Then he realized it was honey, not chocolate or blood, that bears like. He knew that from Jane’s book Winnie the Pooh.
If the world came to an end as the man on the radio said, Jane would never menstruate. According to nature, her body would have been meaningless. Jane’s life, meaningless. Lenny just couldn’t imagine it.
But what did the opinion of one religious fanatic matter?
Out west they were everywhere, screaming and hollering, standing by the road toting signs and eyeballing truckers. One of them must have wandered onto the radio. That’s all it was.
As a child he’d tried to believe in God more than anything. If his missing father was dead, Lenny wanted him to be in heaven. And if he wasn’t? Maybe God would guide him home. But in the end, it’s hard to believe in something you can’t feel.
There were so many things he couldn’t understand.
For instance, heaven. Didn’t people there watch their loved ones suffering on Earth without them? How could they be happy seeing that? And if heaven dwellers didn’t know about people suffering on Earth because they left their memories behind in their bodies—how would they know who to reunite with later?
Hell was worse.
Lenny figured that if his father had gone to hell, he might as well go there too, at least to get some answers. It would have been torture to know his dad was in hell if he himself ended up in heaven. In that case heaven would be hell for him. But if his daddy were in heaven, and he, Lenny, eventually went to hell for the few bad things he’d done—then it would be okay, because he’d know his father and mother were safe. So hell would be heaven because he wouldn’t have to worry. More important than that—what if he lied and said he believed in God when deep down he didn’t? Then it was all for nothing anyway—as God would know he had been lying.
When he was in high school he tried to get answers from his teachers. But nobody knew anything, as though what they hadn’t thought of didn’t exist.
Driving up the mountain they saw a tractor-trailer with JESUS IS LORD on the back. Jane asked what it meant, but Lenny still didn’t know.
15.
When they arrived at the house, Lenny helped unpack Jane’s clothes. There was an old chest of drawers in her room that had been painted over several times. Wood is living, he’d told her. It has a spirit. His daughter sat watching her father take things out and fold them.
Lenny could tell she was thinking things but not saying them. That happened more and more now she was older. Though she still played with toys. Lenny listened sometimes through her bedroom door. To the animal voices. To the dolls being moved around in their made-up lives.
16.
That was earlier when they arrived, a matter of several hours, but to Lenny another lifetime. They had stopped for dinner on the way up because of snow. The roads had gotten worse and worse. Cars abandoned at strange angles. Carolin usually slept on long journeys, but was too afraid this time. She felt better when they stopped to eat. After that she closed her eyes.
Finding the house they had rented was easy because there were no other cars. They could crawl along and read the numbers on mailboxes. Lenny didn’t want to leave them alone in the truck, and so they went up the steps to the dark house together. When Lenny got the door open, Jane screamed there was someone in the house, but it was just Lenny’s reflection in a hall mirror.
It was late and they were excited to be away from home. Carolin went upstairs, and Lenny took Jane outside to explore the barn. The driveway was ice with some fresh powder. When they came back in, they thought Carolin was unpacking, but when they went upstairs she was asleep in her clothes on a patchwork comforter. Their laughing woke her up.
An hour later, when Carolin went to bed for real, Lenny let Jane stay up and help build the fire. After brushing teeth, they sat on the couch. She wanted to play Monopoly. But it was too late for Monopoly. That game took a long time. When Lenny said no, she cried, which meant she was tired. For a while they just sat there, not playing Monopoly.
“So how’s school?”
“Good.”
“What’s your favorite class?”
“Recess.”
Then the room got hot because the fire was really going. They could hear it crackling, as though trying to tell them things.
After a while Jane leaned into her father.
“The logs look like elephant legs, Dad.”
“Yeah.”
“Fire is weird. I mean, where does it come from?”
“I don’t know, except what I learned at the reservation school when I was a boy.”
“Tell me.”
“Well, I guess the story goes that after people and animals got made, there was a rattlesnake who was popular with everybody, because they liked the sound of his rattle. So they kept bothering him and he couldn’t get no sleep for being poked. So he went to an elder and told him, and the elder took a hair from his own face and cut it into little bits, which made teeth for the rattlesnake’s mouth. If anyone comes near you again, the elder said, you just bite them. A bit later a rabbit went to the rattlesnake and poked him to hear the rattle, so Rattlesnake bit him, and Rabbit was mad and scratched Rattlesnake and got bit again. And then Rabbit got sick from the bites and died.”
“The rabbit died?” Jane said. “That’s sad.”
“Yeah, and no one had ever died before, and the people and animals didn’t know what to do. If they buried Rabbit, Coyote would dig him up. If they put him in a tree, Coyote would find him there too. So at last they decided to burn him. But there was no fire on the Earth yet, so the animals and people sent Coyote on a long journey to get some from Sun. But Coyote thought he was being tricked and kept stopping to look back.”
“What happened then?”
“While Coyote was gone, another animal figured out how to make fire by twirling a stick onto another stick, and when Coyote saw smoke in the sky, he rushed home. But the animals had formed a circle around the fire, so Coyote ran around the circle, until he found two short animals to jump over, and then he dove into the fire, where he tried to get Rabbit’s heart but burned his tongue, which is still red to this day.”
“Is that story true?”
“I don’t know.”
“Coyotes do have red tongues so it must be, right?”
“Yeah, it must be.”
Jane and her father looked into the flames, at Rabbit’s glowing heart.
“You know,” Lenny said, “when I was your age, I felt sorry for Coyote because the other animals didn’t want him.”
Jane nodded. “I thought that too. Daddy, can I ask you something?”
“You can ask me anything.”
“Can we play Monopoly?”
* * *
• • •
Upstairs, she wanted another story, but her eyes were closing. Lenny knew she was sleeping when her face lost its expression. He wondered where she was then. If she knew her father was watching from outside the darkness, bey
ond the thump of her own fiery heart, in the quiet flames of sleep.
17.
Just before three, Lenny was exploring the farmhouse when he came upon something that frightened him.
There was no truth in what he’d heard on the radio. He knew that. But when he noticed the newspapers and the magazines, he decided, right then and there, to go on a quick journey into the woods on foot, to try and pick up reception on his cell phone.
His boots were by the door beneath a heavy coat that was stuffed with a hat and tan gloves, Christmas presents from Carolin’s mother. In winter he rubbed his boots and Jane’s boots with mink oil. He could smell it now as he pulled them on. He tried to go out quietly, but the screen door yawned before snapping shut.
At first he did not feel the cold except on the surface of his cheeks.
Beyond the driveway, snow was waist high. How deep it would get, he didn’t know. Carolin lost reception on her phone an hour before they arrived at the house—but going higher might bring it back.
He turned his hips through the white powder. Clambered over roots and mounds of frozen earth. The temperature was too low for the snow on his clothes to melt. It covered him like powdered sugar. He moved through the cold wilderness like his ancestors.
If Lenny hadn’t found those magazines on the table by the fire, he might have just gone up to bed. Of course, he knew the easiest thing would have been to drive somewhere, but starting the truck would have woken Carolin—pulled her to the window in time to see the glow of taillights. He would have had to explain when he got back, and she’d laugh or get annoyed.
If he could get a single bar for a few seconds, he would know. He could check the television or a news website and be satisfied then. He could go back inside, peel off his clothes, and get into bed with his wife. He did not wish to return without a feeling of certainty, and kept moving through the dark, clustered trees, entering first with fear, then with his body.
The Sadness of Beautiful Things: Stories Page 8