by Fiona Maazel
“Apprehend you,” she said. “But the feds didn’t hire him, just me. I’ve got people all over the Sub. But no one was supposed to hurt you.”
“Can you stop with the mind reading?”
“Maybe if your thoughts weren’t so primitive, I wouldn’t keep guessing right.”
“So now you’re going to insult me? You’ll have to do better than that. My wife calls me a caveman ten times a day.”
“Oh, right,” she said. “I almost forgot,” and she retrieved from her pocket Bruce’s wedding ring.
He snatched it and shoved it back on his finger and felt greedy and fearful and gnomish.
“Are we on better terms now?” she said. “I did you a favor; now you do me a favor?”
He made for the door. It wasn’t locked, but on the other side was a guard with his arms folded across his chest. He made for the curtains, and though he expected they were trick curtains behind which was a concrete slab, he was still shocked to see the concrete slab.
He didn’t know what to say, and anyway, she’d say it for him: We’re just a few miles from the Helix House. Outskirts of town. But no one’s going to find us.
He was exhausted. He pressed his forehead to the slab.
“What do you want?” he said, and then aired every question he had: “Is it that you need me to go along with some story for the press? Whatever you tell me to say is fine. It’s not like I have any answers of my own. Why send me and the others to the Helix House to begin with? The four of us? Why send a psychotic to play hero and break my neck? Why give me the most amazing and tragic documentary story ever and then take it away?” He closed his eyes and pictured Norman’s face in the instant he’d lost the Orca’s punishing rage to Bruce—the disappointment and resignation writ into his every pore—and said, “Just leave me alone.”
She joined him by the curtains. “I can fix at least one of these things. That’s why you’re here.”
He laughed. “Unless you want to dump eight thousand dollars in my bank account in the next three seconds, I doubt there’s much you can do for me.”
“How’s a hundred thousand?” she said.
“Funny.”
She snorted and produced a bank statement, his bank statement, dated today, or at least one day after he last knew what day it was.
“Now do I have your attention?”
Martin drove him all the way back to Rockville. It took nine hours with stops for gas. Bruce lived just off the highway, half an hour from D.C., in a Cape Cod that looked regal, as far as he was concerned, he was so happy to be home. It was the middle of the night. They circled the house three times to make sure no reporters were there.
Martin killed the engine. “I’ll wait out here,” he said.
“I don’t know. I have to talk to my wife. I’m not doing this unless she’s okay with it, and I’m not going to rush her just because you’re waiting.” He said these words and swelled with pride. His priorities were like the stars—aligned in patterns no one could see from Earth, and all the more beautiful for it.
“I’ll wait here,” Martin said.
Bruce ran into the house and made straight for the bedroom. He was ready to grovel. He’d get on his knees and take Rita’s hand and grind her knuckles into his eye sockets like a pestle to nut, if that’s what she wanted. Had she been alone this whole time? He was supposed to have been gone only for two days and had not made plans for anyone to come help Rita beyond that. She’d have called a friend, right? If something felt wrong with the baby and it was 4 a.m., she’d have called a friend? He opened the door and yelled her name, but when he got to their bedroom, Rita still didn’t seem to realize he was back. She was sitting up in bed, above the blankets. She wore sweat shorts and a sweatshirt. Her legs were parted, she slouched, but the moon of her belly was rising.
“Rita?” he said. His voice was gentle. He stood in the doorway and watched. Either this was his wife so furious she could not talk, or his wife kicked into a whole new register of feeling that was too refined for the language she had to express it.
“You missed the reporters,” she said. “They’ve been here every day, only what’s to see? I haven’t left this bed.”
She had yet to look at him—she did not appear to be looking anywhere—and he could tell from the musk coming off the sheets that she was in earnest. She had not moved since the second he’d been announced missing. No longer kidnapped, just missing.
“Baby, are you okay?” He did as planned and knelt by the bed.
“I answered the phone once, thinking maybe it was you, but it was just the press.”
“I know, I’m sorry. But there was no way—” He paused, because even in pain, when her feelers were down, she always knew when he was lying. “I made the wrong choice,” he said. “But would it mean anything to you if I promised things were going to be different? Starting tomorrow, I will look for work. Anything I can get.”
Rita took his hands and slipped them under her sweatshirt. Her belly was warm and frosted in cocoa butter. “He kicked a lot while you were gone. Missed his dad, I guess.”
He sank deeper onto his knees. It was true there were people out there worse than him, but that hardly mattered now.
“Go,” she said. “I want you to go.”
But he could not get up. He willed himself to get up—he owed his wife no argument—but he couldn’t. It was what he deserved, to be cast out and abandoned and, in the bearing of this punishment, to be reminded of its cause. Only he could not bear it.
Rita touched his cheek. “I got another call, too,” she said. And she told him all about it. A call from the woman on TV. The woman named Esme. Asking for Rita’s permission, because there was a family outing she needed on film and only one person she wanted to film it, the documentarian who swears to see love where others cannot.
“Go,” Rita said. “We’ll still be here when you’re done.”
His body believed it before the rest of him. He stood up tall. And felt reconciled to the goodness in himself that had been, at last, ready to prevail. He kissed his wife and unborn. Made for the front door with no need to look back. In his mind’s eye, a documentarian sees love where it is abundant.
In sum: one must learn to love one’s people ardently.
They were together. As a family. Two fugitives and a child in a camper van, hurtling through the woods. Dad in the passenger seat, his wife at the wheel. His wife? Yes, his wife, driving like nuts, as their child in the back looked from one parent to the next, going: Wow. Just: Wow. How little they knew of each other. How little time they had left. She held a videotape to her chest. A gift from her dad. For after, he’d said, which turned out to mean: For after I am gone.
Bruce sat in the back with camera aloft. He’d arranged the lights and from this arrangement had developed a mood. Tender and elegiac, while the snows fell from Ohio to North Carolina. He felt, in the making of this film, like a balladeer, for theirs was the action of tragedy that’s often told in song. But only from his vantage, which was not shared. The three were happy; they were on the road. In action: a country station yodeling its best, and a child whose parents were tributary to her needs. A child whose thoughts skewed from the brake that might pitch her through the windshield—she was rooted between the front seats, had refused the belt—to the man, the dad, in the passenger seat, whose presence did not reconstruct the geometry of her universe so much as animate the triangle she’d long imagined herself a part of anyway. My dad is famous. My dad is God. My dad is right here, with me.
Bruce did not say a word for the rest of the day; he just trailed the family as it went.
The van was registered to a woman who had died a few months back; Martin set it up. There were provisions for a week, though a day was probably the most they could expect. They drove in silence but always turning to look at one another. By nighttime, all Thurlow had managed to say to Ida was that he’d missed her. He was afraid to say anything else—he did not know her at all—but he marveled at the j
oy dawned in his heart just to have her near. He waited for her to sleep—maybe he could talk to her in sleep—but she fought to stay awake. Her eyelids rolled back with terror every time she nodded off; she did not want to miss anything. Thurlow felt this wide-eyed girl could see right through him. Finally, she went down. Neck angled like it might snap for the weight and bounce of her head against her shoulder, but holding fast.
He was not a strong man, but he could lift his daughter and tote her to a cot in the back. The rest was in his head. Dread of letting her fall. Dread of waking her up. Dread when she groped for his arm after he swaddled her in a blanket—for swaddling was all he knew of how to care for her—and then the retreat, like the end of an endless night, of every sorrow of every year intervening, as she said, half-asleep, “Dad. Don’t go.”
He and Esme spoke in the front. The future was bleak; they left it at that.
She told him about their meeting in North Korea. The DoI employees, her plan.
He told her about the ransom tape. His demands for wife and child. To have them back, to live as old.
Esme drove on without a word, though to everyone who saw this on film later, she seemed to glow, irradiated with feelings that, for their light and color, were as an aura that repelled the gloom of every day she’d spent without him.
“But why didn’t you come six months ago?” he said. “Or six years? Why didn’t you tell me what you wanted? Everything could have been different.”
She gripped the wheel. It was fleeced and hot. She said, “I didn’t know how. Please leave it at that. We have what we have.”
They wended through the woods until the way was impassable by camper van. The roads were icy, the angles acute.
Esme pulled over. It was a Sunday dawn in the Pisgah National Forest; no one would be coming this way for hours. Only someone did come. He passed them, then stopped, because the van was not so much pulled over as whaled on the margin of a road that had no margin for this. Of the two, Thurlow was the more recognizable, so Esme took her chances. A stranger just trying to help. Were they okay? Yes, just camping. Did she know there was a turnoff just up the road? She did now, thanks, and with that, the man left without a hint of recognition; he was old and hermited to the woods, and probably did not know the cold war had ended, either.
But Esme knew better. “Quick,” she said, packing a bag and giving Thurlow one. “We don’t have much time.”
He did as told, but without vigor. Couldn’t they stay in the van? Drive around? Just be with each other? He looked back on the camper with a heavy heart. It was not as if he didn’t know where this would finish for him, all hours but one till the end of his days in a ten-by-twelve cell in the most isolating penal institution on earth. Where the government sent its evil, the evil and his beloved, who’d simply waited too long to know herself.
The astronomical center was close enough, and Ida, for having come here every summer for years, knew the way. She said, “Are we meeting Pop?” and from the lift in her voice Esme knew this was the apotheosis of joy for her child, to have parents and grandparents together at last. The right time to break the news had come and gone. Esme nudged her on.
For February, the weather was clement, and they were able to trek through the snow with ease. Flecks of light breached the canopy of leaves overhead, so it was not until they came to a clearing that the morning sun made its brilliance known. The trees were slick and pitched in tar, the ground painted new, and everywhere a glaze that refreshed the land as though no one had ever come this way before.
Thurlow looked up. A cloud drifted across the sky. “My God,” he said, squinting. “What is this place?”
Ida skid across a patch of ice. “Come on, Dad, I’ll show you.”
His heart near broke for the sound of it. Dad, Dad, Dad.
Esme nodded. She was right behind them.
They reached the foot of a steel lattice that sprung 120 feet in the air. A radio telescope.
Ida said, “It’s for listening to stuff from outer space. So we know who’s trying to reach us.”
Esme smiled. “That’s right, tulip. Because the world’s got ears, they’re always open. Now come on. I’ve got a surprise.”
There were landings all up the side of the scope, and stairs between each, and though Ida was scared, she didn’t look down. In ten minutes they were in the dish, which was like sitting in some giant’s breakfast bowl.
Gaps had let out the snow, so mostly it was dry. Esme opened her knapsack. She had powdered donuts and hot apple cider in a thermos.
“A picnic,” she said. “How ’bout it?”
Ida wanted to know if they were allowed to be up here.
Thurlow laughed and grabbed his daughter and held her tight until he was red and wet in the face.
They got on their backs and stared at the sky.
“Hear anything?” Esme said.
“You’re not supposed to hear them,” Ida said, though she knew her mom was kidding.
Thing was, they all heard it—faintly but not for long—sirens closing in, wailing the news. Ida could have wormed up the side of the bowl and peered over the rim, but why risk it? The hours ticked by. They got twelve. A Day in the Life of Family was what Bruce would call it later. Look at the clouds, what do you see? My favorite food is grape jelly. I like skating and candy and coconut soap. My worst fear has been that this day would come and it wouldn’t be enough, but it’s plenty. I have been shadowing you for nine years. The mistakes we made. The child we had.
The film showed on PBS and was released on DVD. It made the evening news alongside the Intelligence Commission’s report slamming the government for its failed assessment of WMDs in Iraq. After that, the pope died. News anchor Peter Jennings got lung cancer. Prince Charles and his paramour got hitched. And waiter Dave Franklin, who had just gotten off work at TGIF, had a first date with the Bakelite salesgirl of his dreams. Problem was, the date ended in the chagrin of sex. Nice girls didn’t put out so freely, at least not with Dave Franklin, whose experience of women ranged from the close-but-no-cigar to the haha, no. In bed, he was cavalier. Assumed positions he had seen only on video. But after, he was mortified about his socks, black dress, which he had forgotten to take off. He turned on the TV and stared madly at the screen and hoped she would just go away. It was 4 a.m., and here was a documentary about that cult leader and his family of three, sipping cider in a radio telescope 120 feet in the air. The mother saying she’d hired the documentarian to film the daughter every month and to send her the tapes when possible; the father saying he wanted copies, too.
Meantime, the salesgirl had wrapped a sheet around her body because she really liked Dave but had maybe been frugal in the expression of her feelings, and so, she, too, stared madly at the screen. The film rolled credits. An epilogue said that three of the Helix House hostages had gotten home safely but that one died with his parents in a plane crash off the California coast. A few government officials were headed to jail. Most were not. The salesgirl fumbled for the right words, not I like you, but maybe, Can we talk about it? And as she thought it through and the screen went black, Dave took off his socks, and grew his heart just enough to fathom her own. He reached for her hand. Didn’t let go.
Acknowledgments
Big thanks to the following people and organizations for helping me write this novel:
Bard College, the Corporation of Yaddo, Casa Libre, the MacDowell Colony, the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute, Michael Bronner, Mary Caponegro, Martha Cooley, Steven Ehrenberg, Bill Geerhart, Myla Goldberg, Claudia Gonson, Michael Hearst, Brigid Hughes, Bill Karins, Patrick Keefe, Robert Kelly, Bradford Morrow, Nelly Reifler, Helga Siegel, Lydia Wills, John Woo.
Leigh Newman and Peter Trachtenberg, both of whom saved this novel from the trash.
Stacia Decker, a tremendous reader and agent, both.
Fiona McCrae, for her incredible guidance and unflagging engagement with this novel from the moment it fell into her hands. Also: team Graywolf, which g
ot behind me and pushed.
Jim Shepard—again and again, with boundless gratitude, Jim Shepard—who shows me how it’s done.
And finally: My family, in particular my brother (whose work on nuclear nonproliferation was invaluable to me), my stepdad, and my mom, whose response to Woke Up Lonely in draft—draft after draft after draft—spurred me on to greater extremities. I could not have written this novel without her.
FIONA MAAZEL is the author of Last Last Chance. She is winner of the Bard Prize for Fiction and a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree. She teaches at Brooklyn College, Columbia, New York University, and Princeton, and was appointed the Picador Guest Professor at the University of Leipzig, Germany. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Contents
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II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
Acknowledgments
About the Author