Shelter in Place

by Alexander Maksik

  No, I thought. No, it does not.

  “Joey,” she said and took my hands. “You can’t protect me. Go live. Go be with her.”

  I was so angry.

  “What’s her name? Tell me her name.”

  “Tess.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “No,” I said.

  She smiled and leaned back, drawing her hands away.

  “Okay. Either way, you need to answer that question. What are you doing here without this girl you love?”

  I stood up and left and got into my truck and tore out of there.

  The questions were only part of the problem. What disturbed me as I drove home that afternoon was her aspect, her detachment, the loveless way she looked at me not as her son, but as her patient, her subject.

  Something had gone missing and that absence scared me more than the prison, more than anything else. And so along with my sense (however misplaced, however wrongheaded) of duty, I suppose that’s also why I stayed—the belief that somehow I might return this missing element to my mother. In being there, visiting her week after week, I might bring her some peace, give her back some warmth, staunch the flow of hot blood.

  She seemed to be dying in there, all the softness vanishing and, reasonable or not, I wouldn’t leave until I could change that.

  Then I’d go.

  Then I’d get on with my life.

  I miss those days of fear and violence, days when love and desire always won out over reason.

  36.

  In White Pine in October it began to rain. Massive storms barreling in off the ocean. Weeks and weeks of wet sunless days. The wind blew straight onshore. Days it was difficult to distinguish between ocean and land.

  Lodgepole pines forever gnarled and bent, defending their forests. The sun breaking through here and there, briefly returning color to the world. Great hunks of basalt standing guard, shifting with the sun from shining black to grey and back.

  When the storms were particularly vicious we drove down to the beach and parked in the empty lot to watch them come. My dad with his red Thermos full of strong coffee, the pounding waves, a mix of salt and fresh water beating against the truck. The smell of Royall Lyme and coffee in the cab, the sound of the storm, the Wagoneer shuddering in time with the wind.

  My father and I then were bound to each other the way we might have been had she died, had she been lying sick in a hospital bed. It was, at first anyway, an obligatory camaraderie. So it seemed to me.

  Claire clearly felt no such obligation. Had my mother been dying of cancer, my sister would have been home. But not for this. This she took as an opportunity to remove herself from us. To excise us from her. Which she’d begun to do well before my mother had her little adventure with the hammer. Already in London. Already engaged. Already affecting her silly accent. And here was an opportunity at long last, justification for a final severance.

  Am I being uncharitable in suspecting that my sister was in some way relieved to discover my mother a maniac killer? To learn that she would be locked away for what would likely be the rest of her life? Certainly there are kinder ways to see Claire’s behavior—she was in shock, could not accept what had happened, could find no way to reconcile mother and crime. Whatever her reasons, I don’t begrudge her those choices. We are all looking for a chance to run. One might even see my mother’s hammering Dustin Strauss to death in the same light. Here’s a chance to escape. It didn’t land her on a Mexican beach with a sack of cash, but she sure as hell got out.

  So Claire dissolved into her new life. None of us was invited to her wedding. Claire March became Claire Lloyd and we never heard from her again. It is as simple as that. Her disappearance, her refusing to return my phone calls, drove me to feel an immediate loyalty to my father, and then, in turn, to my mother. It was no longer a responsibility that would be shared. It fell upon me to take care of our family, and I began to believe I was right to have come to White Pine. At least I had some rational reason for being where I was. If not me, who?

  Those early days came to provide a vague sense of purpose. A slow incremental formation of an idea, the building of some kind of belief system. All the silent meals with my father in that little house with the fire going. Those afternoons the two of us sat in the cab watching the storms come. The red Thermos full of coffee. Him drinking from the cap, me from the chipped red Peanuts mug he kept in the glove box, the handle snapped off.

  I believe now that here began my desire for a systematic life very far away. Some way to escape the disintegrating present. Whatever order I could muster would be an antidote to the all that madness. Internal and external, both.

  But the result of too much order, I would come to find so much later, is a deadened mind, an insipid heart.

  Just as with the medication they tell you to take.

  But back then, and for so long after, I saw my only hope for happiness within a martial structure.

  And anyway, happiness was irrelevant. My duty, I was certain, was to protect my parents, to be there in White Pine instead of flying across Galicia on a train with Tess.

  37.

  This morning, Sunday, I dressed and went to town and had bacon and waffles at the diner. It’s a nice walk along a country road, though you’ve got to be careful. There’s not much of a shoulder and the logging trucks are speeding buildings driven by lunatics.

  When we were kids, for a while Claire and I played a game she invented. She couldn’t have been older than eleven.

  She put me in her closet.

  Her clothes fall around me. They brush against my cheeks and gather in folds across my shoulders. Soft dresses, a ratty green robe. I watch for her shadow to break the line of white light at my feet. Smell of laundry detergent, strawberry Bubble Yum and a sachet of my mother’s cinnamon potpourri. In my throat I am making the growling noise of an eighteen-wheeler. From full throttle to downshift. The braking whine, the stuttering stop, which always makes her giggle.

  I push the door open.

  I roll down the window.

  There’s Claire, with her thumb out, wearing the giant sombrero my parents brought back from Tijuana.

  I say, “Where to, ma’am?”

  I’ve got my Mariners hat on low over my eyes the way she says a real trucker does.

  “Where you headed?” Claire shields her eyes from the sun and gives me a wary look.

  “Other side of the country.”

  “You’re not some nut, are you?”

  “No, ma’am,” I say.

  Then she’s in the cab with me, the door closed, and we’re sitting on the floor, while she goes on and on about what’s out the window and where we’re headed and all we’ll do when we get there.

  Do you remember that, Claire? You called it Hitch-a-Ride.

  Sitting with our eyes closed, in the dark together, you going on and on, I saw everything you told me to see.

  38.

  Tess and I liked Sunday mornings in town. We’d have breakfast and then do some shopping. I’ve tried to keep up that tradition, though needless to say, it’s not as much fun. I’ll smile and make small talk when it’s necessary, but I try not to.

  Tess draws people to her. No matter the room, she is always the center of energy. Hers is a beauty made of intelligence, of confidence and ease. Also, she’s interested in other people. Truth be told, I rarely am. Unless I’m on the upswing, I get bored and irritated. Tess always wants to know how you are.

  I loved to watch her talk to people, to watch them respond. Especially those we hardly knew. All the people in town, the farmers, the cashier at the diner, kids on their bikes. As long as I didn’t have to talk much, I was happy to stand there all day. She was magical like that. No one was immune.

  It’s different now that I come in alone. The conversations are shorter and when they ask about Tess I tell them she’s g
one away for a while. It’s the truest statement I can make. Well, perhaps it would be truer to say that she’s gone away. But I don’t have the heart for that. I can’t help myself. I add a minor tag of hope.

  Anyway, today I came in and ate my breakfast and read the paper—a thin, and very bad regional rag, but it’s enough. It reduces the world to a few pages. It’s all I want now. And sometimes, I don’t want that. I’ve long given up, I’m afraid, trying to know everything, maintaining a constant state of outrage and fury. I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve turned away.

  We’ve lost a battle I was once so sure we might win.

  After the diner I stopped by the farmers’ market and bought a couple of steaks, a bag of red onions, a few heads of lettuce.

  The woman selling pears and goat cheese was there. Often she’s with an older man I take to be her father, but today she was alone. She had her hair piled on her head, a few black twists falling against her pale neck. I bought some pears and a small round of cheese.

  She smiled at me in a way she wouldn’t have if Tess had been there. It wasn’t much, but I did like that quick chemical flash.

  Here is something, I thought. Some possibility, some local promise. Perhaps I am not entirely doomed.

  39.

  My father’s truck amidst a terrible storm. A peculiar pressure in the air. Rain buffeting the back window.

  He’s pouring his coffee into our cups, the smell of it in the closed cab. The Thermos screwed closed and laid between us.

  “Do you have an answer to her question?” He is scratching his beard. “What are you doing here without Tess?”

  I’d not been back to see my mother. I was gathering courage, or preparing an answer, or trying to put language to this strange thing I was building.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Well, whatever the answer, we can’t stop visiting her because she’s cruel from time to time.”

  “No?”

  “Otherwise, why are we here? Otherwise, what’s the point?”

  I shrug.

  “That’s what she’s asking you, Joey. That’s what she’s asking us both.”

  “And you have an answer?”

  “I told you. I’m here to protect her. I’m here to love her.”

  “Till death do you part.”

  I can feel his eyes on me. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” I say. Why can’t I help myself?

  “Doesn’t matter, Joey, but that’s right. Till death do us part.”

  I nod and sip my coffee and watch the waves march in one after the other and I think of Tess. I stare straight ahead and imagine her fingers tapping at the glass.

  On cue, my father asks again, “You call Tess?”

  He can’t stop himself no matter how many times, and how many ways, I tell him to shut up.

  I shake my head and laugh. He laughs too.

  “Sorry,” he says.

  The March men, always apologizing.

  I close my eyes.

  I’m in our motel room in Cannon Beach. And here in the parking lot Tess is tapping on the glass, smiling at me through the fogged window, her hair all wet, but when I roll it down there’s only surf and wind and rain.

  “You’re letting water in,” he says and I roll it back up. We go on looking out at the storm and drinking our coffee and I return to constructing this thing. Because my mother is right, of course. Forget her demeanor. And anyway what am I to expect of a homicidal maniac? Deep sympathy and great tact? So forget her coldness. It fits her now. What she is. Killer. Prisoner. And hers is a good question. Really, it is the only question. White Pine or anywhere else. Incarcerated mother, or not.

  What are you doing in this town without the girl you love? What are you doing here at all?

  40.

  My mother sitting in prison for murder, and my sister Claire having sworn off us, and I’m eating dinner with my father four times a week and seven nights a week I hear him snoring through the walls. He’s pretending to take care of me, but mostly it seems the opposite. I worry about him especially at night, and wonder how I can prop him up a bit, how I might make him stronger while every day it seems his beard goes greyer, his eyes a little duller, sinking a little deeper into his skull.

  So there’s him in my head, and my mother locked up, but above all the one thing I really care about exists as a hole in my chest the size of a fat fist. So who gives a shit about the names of the guys I was working with or the sawdust on the floor or the smell of the places I went or the beauty of the beach in the early morning? But maybe all those things matter, too. I’m just trying to give you a sense of it. Or bring a sense of it back to myself. The strangeness. Always in my head trying to work out what the fuck I was doing there, just like she’d asked.

  Say it’s a Saturday in late October. 1991. It’s busy. Two bartenders. Me and a tall guy with a beard. Maybe his name is Matt. Let’s call him Matt. Half the guys I met back then were named Matt. Who cares? So two bartenders. Me and Matt and a barback. Call him Craig. The other half were called Craig. Matts and Craigs all over the place in White Pine. A senior from the college, let’s say. So us three back there pouring Olympia and well drinks. The bottom-lit bottles behind us are mostly decoration. The occasional Cuervo shot, the occasional kid trying to impress her friends by ordering Frangelico on ice or some other bullshit.

  Lester’s is prison guards. The Owl is college kids. Two separate parts of town. Lester’s up on the ridge. The Owl down by the beach. Both with sawdust on the floor. In this part of the world, you want a bar without sawdust on the floor? Go to Seattle.

  This particular Saturday The Owl is jammed. They’ve got a band setup on the stage in the corner. Let’s say they’re playing Nirvana covers. Temple of the Dog. That kind of thing. Kids from the college doing their best Kurt Cobain. Matt and I, we’ve got a solid rhythm going. I’m a good bartender when I’m on and I’m on tonight. Everything makes sense. Everything logical. Here we are now, entertain us. Every now and then we’ve got to pack down the tip jar. Put a fist into all those ones and punch. Flying along. The place is jammed until close and when it’s time, no one wants to go, but no one’s an asshole.

  The prison guard working the door is named Seymour Strout. Hand to God that’s his name. Rock solid from the sternum up. Sternum down? Belly like you wouldn’t believe. Seymour fucking Strout. He matters to me, to all of us, but for now, let’s say Matt and I drink a few bourbons while we’re scrubbing the bar down. And not the well junk either. The barback, too while he’s doing inventory. Craig. The three waitresses are at a table doing the same, counting their tips.

  Let’s figure Matt’s mixed them something special. He’s working one of them. Julie? Cathy? Kerry? The girls there all had that long e at the end of their names. And at the end of every night what bartender wasn’t mixing something special for some waitress somewhere? Maybe just the sad fuck whose mother is a murderer, the mopey kid who’s lost the love of his life. So let’s say Matt is working on Kerry and she and her friends are counting tips and drinking whatever it is out of rocks glasses at a sticky table over by the empty stage.

  It’s that end-of-shift feeling. Camaraderie and fatigue and fading adrenaline. Alcohol burn. All the noise sucked out of the room. Ushered out, really, by Seymour and his big belly. Maybe someone’s got Paul Simon on the jukebox, because by the end of the night nobody wants to hear another moaning Seattle band. Let’s say it’s “The Obvious Child.” Another song my mother loved. See her singing loudly, badly, fingers drumming the wheel. So it feels good. I am remembering a girl when I was young. And we said these songs are true, these days are ours, these tears are free. And it is one of those nights where I stuff two hundred bucks into my pocket, the paperwork all adds up, and I look around and smile at the new waitress with the red hair and think it’s okay, it’s all fine, this new life. And some people say the sky is just the sky, but I say wh
y deny the obvious child?

  So I take my drawer to the manager’s office upstairs. Another name I can’t remember. She’s smart and fair and tough and keeps her distance and doesn’t behave like she’s the CEO of some multinational corporation the way a lot of them do. She doesn’t sigh when your drawer is off ninety-seven cents as if you’ve just betrayed the fucking nation. Maybe we chat about something or other, because we like each other, but it’s late and we’re both tired and a little drunk, so have a good night and see you tomorrow and go easy on whatever it is you’re drinking.

  Then I’m coming down the stairs, not happy, but fine. I’m okay. I’m surviving. I’m alive. It’s enough of a good night, enough goodness to smooth over the holes in my chest. Drywall over a bad frame. And downstairs, say I give the new waitress a smile just to piss off Craig and she smiles back, and I keep that, along with the two hundred in my pocket, and out I go past Seymour at the door who’s waiting around hoping one of the girls will ask him to walk her home.

  “Have a good one, Seymour,” I say.

  “Peace,” Seymour says. “Peace,” Seymour always says.

  This is back before we knew each other at all, when I kept my distance, and hated him for no other reason than his being a guard.

  This is back before I knew Seymour Strout was the gentlest bouncer ever born to bounce.

  And here, right here, is my favorite part of the night. Stepping out into the fresh air. The parking lot all quiet. Only a few cars left. The smell of the ocean. The sound of the waves breaking across the wide beach. Sometimes the rain coming down hard, but not tonight. No reason to run for it tonight. So I take a minute before I pull on my coat. I let the air dry the sweat on my neck, under my arms. Let it cut away the dullness. Let it sharpen my eyes and light me up.

  Then I see a flash of my mother in her cell. The cell I’ve never seen. Always there when I’m coming out of the bar. A quick stab, like’s it’s been thrust into my eyes. Always. Every time I step into the night, there she is, forehead against the bars, as with every prison cliché in the world. And holding on tight with her fists.