Woke Up Lonely

by Fiona Maazel

  “Mom? Ida?” She walked through the house. It had two floors and a porch that overlooked a valley and mountains in the distance. Half the trees had lost their leaves; the view was a mixed treat. She went to the kitchen and saw her dad by the fridge with an ice cream sandwich. He had taken off his jacket, and, since his sweater made prominent the empty sleeve hung by his side, she suddenly wondered if Ida was terrorized by the sight—if, despite the years she’d been living here, the arm creeped her out.

  In the mudroom were sneakers but no boots, the boots put to better use on Ida’s feet as she and Linda played outside, the one making a snowman and the other taking photos, a million per second, one for each second Esme had missed seeing her child grow up. She had the idea her mom was making her a scrapbook, though none such had ever materialized.

  She watched them through the window. Ida was wearing leggings that looked like neoprene and a bubble jacket she did not recognize, or recognized dimly; it was colored bark and had an HB Surf Series badge sewn into the arm. And then it hit her: these were her brother’s clothes. His steamer wet suit. His travel jacket for that one surfing trip off the coast of New Zealand when he was twelve. Esme was so floored by the evidence her parents had kept his stuff and even brought it with them to this place that it helped ease down the pill of her daughter ignoring her when she ran out of the cabin all smiles.

  She hugged Ida anyway because the parent unloved is also undeterred. They had not seen each other in 3 months. Ida had been alive for 117 months, of which most of her last 1⁄39 Esme had been traveling. There were other 1⁄36s and 1⁄27s and even 1⁄18s for that half-year deployment to Diego Garcia, though maybe that was more like a 1⁄12 expedition, since Ida was only six at the time, which meant not even math could declaw Esme’s failings.

  Next Esme greeted her mom, who did the scariest thing in her repertoire, which was to cock an eyebrow. The hairs there had shed long ago, so she’d taken to penciling them in with black liner. Every month, the curve got more pronounced and severe. It was a sickle, an arch, and, by now, a delta above each eye. When raised, the brow was lethal.

  “Well, well,” Linda said, but without the scorn Esme had been readying herself for. In fact, the A brow was a red herring. She wasn’t mad anymore. Esme thought maybe she was fronting for Ida’s sake, but so what? She would take it. They hugged. And the hug was nice. She had never found in her parents a source of strength since Chris went down, and it was not like one hug was going to lade her coffers with the courage of heart to right her life, but it wasn’t hurting, either.

  Linda said, “Ida and I were just finishing up this snowman,” and, to Ida, “What’s his name again?”

  “Don.”

  Esme was not sure she’d ever heard a name spoken with greater spite. Ida jammed a stick in his eye and looked at her mom. “Your clothes are ugly,” she said, and she marched back into the house.

  “That went well,” Esme said. “Don? Who names her snowman Don?”

  “She’s right, you know. If you’re going wear that nonsense, at least join the army. Be for real.”

  Esme shrank a couple of feet. Her parents had only a vague sense of what she did, enough to know it screwed them up—New identities? Really?—but not enough to think it worth the trouble to find out more. Perhaps her father was more sympathetic, but she didn’t know; they didn’t talk.

  She fixed the snowman’s eye. Apologized for his care.

  “Not to worry,” Linda said. “He’s cold as ice,” and then she grinned, and to Esme this grin might have seemed stupid, except that nothing about her mother was ever stupid. She was too sharp and cagey to grin like that unless it was for sport or design. “Now, listen,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here. I’ve got news.”

  Esme followed her through the snow. Her mother was the kind of woman who always liked to speak her beef with someone hungry for it.

  “Is it Ida? She looks okay to me. Or, wait, is it school? Is she failing at school?”

  Linda looked on her with what had to have been contempt, though maybe it was contempt plus pity, which is kind of like cherry Pepto—not so bad.

  “It’s about your brother,” she said. “Chris.”

  “Right, because I’ve actually forgotten his name.”

  They were on the patio under porch lights. Esme sat at the table, her mom nearby.

  “We got a call from the hospital,” Linda said.

  The words sounded tense but happy, and since Esme still had no idea how her mother felt about Chris in a coma all these years, she assumed this meant he was dead. A twenty-four-year nap comes to an end, and her mother is released from the emotional vigil she’d been on or wanted to be on: both seemed exhausting.

  Linda leaned forward, elbows on the table. She spoke the next part slow. “He said something. Out loud. A nurse just happened to be there.”

  The news blew Esme well back into her chair. Her brother’s voice. She didn’t even know its sound. “Out of the blue?” she said. “He’s awake? What did he say?”

  Linda picked up a bird carved out of wood, small as soap, and hopped it along the edge of the table. “The doctors said this could be prelude to waking up. But not to get excited.”

  Esme was surprised the doctors would presume interest let alone enthusiasm in relatives who never came, never called, but then maybe to them family was just family; you can’t judge ’em all.

  “Wow,” she said, because what else was there? Apparently, a lot. Linda got in close to the bird, as though talking to the bird. In fact she was talking to the bird; it sure as hell beat talking to Esme. She said, “Of all the things. Of all the times I imagined this happening.”

  Now the bird was in her palm, eye to eye. “What’s that? You want to know what he said?” She faced the thing at Esme. “Go on, tell her,” and then, “Oh, fine, I’ll tell her. He said, you ready for this? He said Esme. Loud and clear, too. They were amazed. Not like he’d been asleep for a quarter of a century, not like he hadn’t used his lips in as long, but just like he was in the middle of a conversation. A heated one, too. They said he sounded mad.”

  Esme had been shaking her head for a while. Her darling brother reliving their fight day after day, the anger still on his lips, with no sense of the years that had passed, him still fourteen years old. It is 1981. Ronald Reagan has just taken the oath. The president says, “We’re going to begin to act, beginning today,” and the next day, her brother’s life stops, and all because she let his friend ejaculate on her chest.

  Linda continued to hop the bird across the table and even to chirp on its behalf, the stupid smile back on her face.

  “Have you been to see him?” Esme said.

  “He’s been screaming for a year, what do you think?”

  “What screaming? He screams? Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

  “Are you serious?”

  Esme had begun to take issue with the bird and to concentrate anger in the bird and to make the bird proxy for all the ways she did not love her brother, daughter, parents, enough, and so, yes, she snatched it from Linda’s hand and hurled it over the balustrade.

  Linda stood. She seemed verged on the kind of laugh that sizes you down for life. But no, she just stood. Stood and stretched and said, “Ida and me made pineapple upside-down cake. Let’s eat.”

  “Now? I want to talk to you.”

  “I’m hungry.” And with that she slapped the table, and the laugh Esme had braced for came out. Her brother speaks for the first time in twenty-four years and her mother wants pineapple upside-down cake? Esme leaned forward and had a good look—at her mother’s face and mostly her eyes. The red tracery of veins fencing her pupils. The Windex shine in each lens. The part where her lids were barely half-open, in contrast to Esme’s mouth, which was hanging way open now that she realized her mother was stoned. Had been stoned this whole time.

  Esme knew Linda had smoked in the sixties, was a big old hippie. But she was seventy-one, and how did someone her age even acquire marijuana
? The nearest neighbor was a soldier just back from Iraq. Maybe he got high for having killed in a war without cause and maybe because he also tended chickens and harvested their eggs and brought her mother a dozen every week, he brought her a little something else, too.

  Linda cleared her throat, and, with the firmness Esme had come to expect from her but which was no comfort now, she said, “I want cake.”

  Fine. They went inside. Her dad was at the computer in the living room, under a bearskin nailed to the wall. Not just the bear but the head too, and an old-timey rifle captioned underneath, so it was hard to know which was displayed as the better prize. Her parents had bought the place furnished, but after ten years, if you’re still living with a dead bear on your wall, you’re doing so for a reason. Her dad was distraught; she watched him type. Most people of his generation finger-peck and get right up to the screen, but since he only had one arm and giant googly glasses, his deportment was in a school of its own.

  “His friends,” Linda said, and snorted her way to the kitchen. “He gets one night a week. Let’s go, Bill!”

  His hand fell on the keyboard like Play-Doh. He looked up at Esme and the look was bleak. She touched his arm, though it did no good. You can’t solace a man whose only friends are text.

  Esme said, “Come on, Dad, we’re having cake.”

  He pushed back his chair but didn’t get up. His empty sleeve hung over the armrest, and the awful thing was, you barely noticed for how slack the rest of his body was. He stared at the screen like the dead stare at us.

  Esme made for the fridge.

  Her dad trudged to the table when it was clear Linda would not stop calling his name. Esme sat next to Ida, though she still hadn’t said a word since Don. Her mother knifed the cake, but served only herself, a quarter wedge, huge. Her dad wasn’t hungry. Ida said it tasted gross, while Linda, who had retained her good cheer throughout, opened her mouth—her mouth was full—and said, “Now, Esmeralda, daughter mine, would you like to say something about Thurlow Dan and the Helix? Because I think maybe this little lady should know more of the world than she does.”

  That night, Esme fought with her parents. She promised to get it right with Ida; she bought herself more time. And then she left. And now the hospital where Chris was living called three times a day. And the morgue where her parents were called three times a day. They all wanted to know what arrangements to make. If Esme didn’t call back, they would dispose of the bodies and send her the bill. But it wasn’t as though she didn’t know what she wanted. She wanted her parents and Chris to reunite. They had died trying to make that happen; the least she could do was help. She knew she had heard this story before, about parents who died as they drove to be with an adult child who was himself dying. It turned out that when Chris spoke her name, it was the swan song he’d been trying to belt out for twenty-four years. Only in her parents’ unction for a miracle, or perhaps because one was stoned and the other disabled, they pitched off I-64 on the way to the hospital. The road was narrow and ascendant one hairpin at a time, there was no guardrail, and if you went over even halfway up, you would not survive the fall. Every time Esme thought about it, she wondered whether they had any last words, too, hurled from their lips as they said good-bye. And why not? People were crying out for each other all the time.

  They were stopped at a diner off the freeway. Ida had to pee. It was two in the morning, but still, this was not the most advisable conduct. Esme’s face was mugged on every TV, on every channel. On the plus side, the coverage gave her a visual on the Helix House, and a sense of what people were saying.

  On the downside, what people were saying was bad. For one, the feds had turned the site into a zoo. Tents, kitchen, helicopters, Bradley. Bradleys. Six tanks in a residential suburb. The team had to stump all the roadside trees just to accommodate their girth. She could tell they were M3s, though, because they had room only for five—driver, commander, gunner plus scouts—which meant this was the team’s concession to context or, more likely, the government’s attempt to look modulated but ready.

  Ida insisted on cherry pie because she wanted an American experience, they being on the road and mingled with the people. At age nine, she was already sassy with expectation of what dreams the country would make true for her.

  “Kinda late to be up!” the waitress said, and overflowed their water glasses.

  “Mom,” Ida said, and she probed the cherry glue stuffing for a fruit item. “Mom, you’re on TV again.”

  Esme was wearing a black and turquoise winter hat that had a panther on the cuff—Go Panthers!—a down ski jacket, and sunglasses. She’d had the difficult task of having to look recognizable to her daughter but foreign to everyone else. She’d made a point never to wear her rig around Ida or Crystal, so this was uncharted territory. And she had navigated it poorly. Ida had asked more than once if she fell on her face last night, it looked so swollen and pink and weird, and Esme swore the waitress, while bowling pie at her kid, also had a double take at her.

  “I know, tulip. But you don’t have to believe what they’re saying.”

  The menu was laminated and tacky with jam, and probably if she needed coverage in a storm, this vinyl would do, so broad was its wingspan. Every second item was waffles. Chicken and waffles. Ham and waffles. Biscuits and waffles. She ordered cheese and waffles to go.

  “They’re saying you and that cult guy are like friends or something.”

  “Tulip, just eat your pie. We have to go.”

  “They’re saying”—but she said it too loud, and because Esme didn’t want to silence her child with force, she did the next best thing and spilled water in her lap. Ida made a scene but at least now they were being noticed for a safer reason.

  What was the government saying? That Esme had set this up; she was on her own. No one else would go down for this except maybe the few people who knew about her, though if it panned out disastrously, the buck would move up the chain of command and stop just two or three links south of the president, whose staff would say, Look, the Helix was in bed with North Korea; procurement of a reconnaissance effort had been in the hands of the same professional for years; her ties to the organization made her best suited to the work; how could we have forecast this outcome?

  But only if it came to that. For now they had let slip, in case they killed anyone by accident, that secessionist activity with guns was not the joke everyone had taken it to be and that the Helix might have an arsenal that made the Chechen rebels look Care Bear.

  Ida was in the bathroom. Esme could hear the electric hand dryer and imagined her trying to arch her back and high her lap in quest for the hot air. She expected it would be three more minutes before Ida showed, which meant the new guy sitting opposite her needed to hurry. He looked in no hurry. He even looked expansive—job well done; he had found Esme in less than three hours. He was DoD or CIA, FBI, whatever.

  “What do you want?” Esme said. Her waffles arrived in a Styrofoam casket. The waitress looked at her replacement date and seemed to get an idea of what was going on here, which had Esme thinking about what sort of clientele this waitress called regular.

  “Seems like you might be headed to the site,” he said. “Just guessing, of course.”

  Esme rolled her eyes. This man looked about forty, too young to be for real with his noir affect but too old to find it humorous. He had frothy orange hair and tortoiseshell glasses with nose pads that were mismatched and uneven, so that the glasses sat slant on his face but not enough to be retarded. He gestured for the waitress and ordered a coffee. His suit was rumpled.

  “I’m with my daughter,” she said, meaning either: Be nice, I’m with my child, or: I’m with my child, we’re going to the park, you must have me confused with someone else.

  “I see that. She looks a lot like someone we’ve all come to know and love.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake, what do you want?” She scanned the restaurant for a back door.

  “It’s like this,” he sa
id, and she noticed he had dry skin crisped along the rim of his ear. Both ears. And she thought: This is exactly the kind of thing a girlfriend or wife does not let you get away with. He’s not wearing a ring, probably he has no one, and if he weren’t so blowhard in the delivery of a threat I know is coming, I could pity him.

  “You’re wanted at the site,” he said. “I’m here to make that happen.”

  “A driver. How nice.”

  “I get you there. You get him out.”

  Since this had been her idea all along—at least for a couple of hours—she should have been pleased with their concord. But she was not pleased, which was like when your coin turns up heads and you are let down, apprised of feelings that were secret to yourself until then. Only it wasn’t feelings she had but terror.

  “And after that?” Not that she didn’t know the answer or the spectrum from which an answer would present itself: immunity, a presidential pardon, or just her taking it in lieu of the fifty staffers who saw the Helix proliferate and did nothing precisely to hasten a crisis that would justify trawling nationwide for the last liberal drowning.

  “Just get your daughter and let’s go,” he said, and when she didn’t get up he covered her hand with his own and squeezed until it hurt, which was when Ida erupted from the bathroom, saw this man pledged in affectionate consort with her mother, and skated down the lane for their table.

  “Dad?” she said, and the glow on her face was colors a person was lucky to see once in her life.

  They were in a van with a table in the back and a screen that dropped down from the roof. Ida was watching a soap opera about thirteen-year-olds that was, apparently, in vogue. Esme looked over her shoulder and said, “Hey, Jack, how many episodes you got?” Despite her negligence as a parent, or because she was well practiced in its art, she knew the value of a pacifier when she saw one. So did the escort, since he said they had enough to get them there. Still, she decided to test what was what. “Hey, Jack, what if Ida needs to be sick?” He said there was a bucket with a snap top and a deodorizing puck adhered to the underside. “Hey, Jack, what if we don’t get there in time?” He said, “In this weather, time rushes for no man.”