by Sarah Stark
You ask where I have been and I answer: Out there.
His belly was empty from bellowing out the truth of those words. He refilled his gut and went at it again.
You ask where I have been and I answer: Out there.
In the third breath he saw through the slits in his eyes that the doctor was on her phone, her face that of a crazed feline. Nonetheless he shared the line one more time.
You ask where I have been and I answer: Out there. Out there.
Jefferson continued chanting even as a security officer ushered him roughly by his elbow back down the long blue hall and out through the waiting room, still full of young men who looked like they might have been his brother. By the time he was dumped outside in front of Building 1, the flags fluttering high in the May air above, he could claim the satisfaction of sharing the last word with the famous writer.
10
That afternoon Jefferson took the pup and a crowbar out to the back corner of the yard, where his mom’s old camper van had sat since 1986, and pried open the passenger-side door. The steel creaked as he’d expected, but there were no rats or snakes. Anything that had spoiled had long since turned to dust, so he climbed inside and took a look around, wondering in part why his curiosity had never taken him this far before. From this vantage the back of the house looked almost foreign, the tan stucco mottled with the sinking sunlight, the half-dead elm off to the left. God, did it need to be pruned. He made a plan to get his old clippers out the next day and clean up the tree and all the other neglected shrubs in the yard. It was one of the things Jefferson seemed to be alone in caring about—the errant twigs and branches sprouting helter-skelter off the main trunks of trees and bushes. Didn’t anyone else in the family see the mess that was going on in the yard? He tried to envision a covered deck off the back of the house—a redwood-stained deck with pots of petunias, Esco’s favorite—and how happy that would make her.
He pulled the door closed behind him and crawled into the back. It was quiet and warm, and he felt he might bring out a pillow and blanket, a flashlight, and stay out here all night. How had this not occurred to him before, this ultimate hideout? And though it felt mildly juvenile to be hanging out in his backyard—he’d always wished his family had been into camping out in the woods, but they hadn’t—it also felt undeniably pleasant.
He was in the midst of calculating the dimensions of the deck he might build for his grandmother, how much lumber it might take, and how he might muster up the money, when he saw movement from inside the house and knew she must be home from the store. He’d go inside and tell her. She wouldn’t believe it. The van was intact, and he was going to sleep out there, plus he had a great idea for a deck off the back.
Jefferson jumped from the van, opened up the driver’s side as well as the sliding door for a little ventilation, and dashed into the house. He could not wait to tell her that he’d found a cost-free solution to his need for a little privacy. It was hard to believe he’d never thought of the van as a refuge before. Here it had been, right here, all that time.
“Hey, Esco!” Jefferson shouted, but she must have gone to the bathroom, because there was no reply. There was no time to waste, so Jefferson pulled down two blankets from the high shelf in the hall closet. He was looking for a flashlight in the kitchen when she found him.
“I didn’t realize you were home. How was the meeting? How was the doctor?” Her eyes were so hopeful.
Oh, that, he told her. It was okay.
And then he asked her where he could find a flashlight. The morning’s meeting with Dr. Wesleyan seemed to have happened in another lifetime. The train ride home alone had taken almost three hours, counting the bus ride and the waiting and the walk back to the neighborhood. Though he felt that in some ways it had gone well, he also knew he would not be returning to her office, and he was not sure which part of the story to share with Esco. She’d become a worrier, and this fact made him uncomfortable and generally complicated their conversations.
“The office walls were blue,” he said finally.
“Yeah?”
“Yep, sort of an ocean blue. Dark, but calming.”
“So that’s it?”
“Pretty much.”
Knowing that food would be a good distraction, he began opening cabinets and feigning hunger. Esco hovered a few feet away, pretending to sort mail.
It was impossible to find anything in his grandmother’s cabinets. She had a horrible sense of order, and so, as Jefferson thought back to the meeting with the doctor in Albuquerque, he began taking all the spices and cans of food out of the pantry and sorting them into groups on the counter. If someone had asked him, he would have said there were no better words in the entire novel for him to share with the young doctor than the ones he’d chosen. Out there. He chuckled to himself, thinking what perfect words, what a gift that he had been able to recall them just before he’d had to leave the office, and he felt himself swell with pride. It was a good example of everyone doing his or her part to make the world a better place. Him, Jefferson Long Soldier, reciting the perfect words to her, Dr. Wesleyan, the words she needed to hear if she was going to put herself out there like that, trying to help ex-soldiers, trying to get in their heads and reshuffle their bad stuff. There had also been a few looks of interest among the veterans in the waiting room as he had continued chanting while being escorted from the office.
He hummed the words again now as he spooned peanut butter onto a rice cake.
You ask where I have been and I answer: Out there. Out there.
Jefferson felt confident that at least one of those guys in the waiting room had benefited from his recitations. He told himself, just as he’d told himself every day in the war zone, that if he’d reached one person, that was enough to make the effort worthwhile.
Esco moved closer to Jefferson, trying to remind him that she was there, she was standing right next to him. Where had his mind traveled now? What was all this garbled humming? And what did he plan to do with that pile of blankets on the couch?
“Are you hungry?” she asked. “I was gonna make dinner in a little bit, but I could start now.” She gave a heavy sigh as she surveyed the contents of her cabinets, strewn across the counter, and clucked her tongue. She didn’t really mind, though; it wasn’t the first time Jefferson had organized her cabinets. In fact, it was one of the things she’d missed when he was at war. She would not have chosen this moment for it, but then again, at least he was home and alive. Let him do it. Busy his brain and his hands with something a little more useful than finger-crocheting and chanting.
Ah, he was a little heavy now, but the skin-and-bones would be back soon enough. That was his nature. She’d probably never stop worrying that Jefferson was undernourished, even now when he was eight pounds pudgy and eating peanut butter. As a baby he’d been underweight and prone to ear infections, and then too, she would always be the grandmother, trying to make amends. Feeding Jefferson had been the best way she knew to try to make things seem okay for him.
He was smiling at her, that goofy smile that was new since he’d returned, almost like he’d had a stroke and was visiting a distant galaxy, and now he smacked another bite of the peanut butter rice cake and told her he could wait for dinner. He just wanted a snack.
“Okay, sweetie. Okay.” She took the sponge from the sink and began to wipe down the countertop where the rice cake had crumbled.
Jefferson hoped Esco wasn’t upset. Her short round frame bent down and away from him as she wiped the crumbs off the counter, and now she seemed intent on silence. He didn’t feel as if he’d been withholding important information, though. She was probably just fine. Grandmother rarely got upset, and when she did, it usually had something to do with the bread order for the store or a dog pooping in her yard, practical things like that. She wasn’t the fragile kind of woman who cried or got her feelings hurt. She’d had too much in her life go haywire to afford to cry every time some little thing upset her—or, for that matter,
to get in a bad mood. Moodiness and anger were for rich people, Jefferson had always thought.
“I love you, Esco,” he said, just after she brushed against his arm with the sponge. “So glad to be home, you know?”
She paused in her cleaning and took a breath as she looked at him. And then it was as if a meteor had hit the earth somewhere far away and shaken Santa Fe in the process. She lunged against his chest, burying her face in his T-shirt and letting out a long string of wails that to him sounded both nocturnal and oceanic. He held on to her head, breathing into her hair and telling her it was okay, it was okay, everything was going to be okay now. When she had sobbed several long minutes without cease, she began to speak into his chest, as if she could only get out the words she needed to say if she did not look at him straight on, a barrage of thoughts and emotions that went on and on, Oh my grandson, oh my god, you are home you are home, you really did make it home alive, oh my god, oh my god, oh my beloved, my child, my sweet one, you are alive, oh I love you so much, so much you will never know, never know, never know, you are here, here you are, your sweet skin, oh my god, your sweet skin, your sweet hands, oh your eyes, oh your tiny little fingers, when you were a baby, oh my god, I was so worried, I was so worried, I thought you wouldn’t survive and I did my best, oh my god, my sweet baby, I did my best.
Jefferson had always imagined but never witnessed Esco saying things like this. Of course he knew she loved him. Of course he knew she was the reason he’d survived childhood without a mother. Of course he knew she worried. But this outpouring, this desperate clinging to his chest, this sobbing . . . She wasn’t supposed to be crying, and now that she had flung herself against his chest, now that she clung to him as if to prove to herself it was really him, Jefferson knew more than ever that he had to find a way to heal himself. If that doctor down in Albuquerque was not the one to help him, then Jefferson had to find someone else. Esco needed him to be well.
Finally the darkness seemed to have lifted within Esco. She raised her head, and looked past Jefferson at the pile of blankets on the couch.
“What is that all about?” she asked.
When he told her in an excited voice that he’d opened up the van and that it was a perfect hideaway in which to heal, no visible rats or snakes, and that he planned to start spending time out there, beginning that very night, and that tomorrow he was going to prune all the dead stuff out of the elm and beautify every chamisa and lilac and rosemary bush in the yard, and oh, by the way, did she know where his clippers were? she thought someone had yanked the braided rug, the rug that had covered the floor under the kitchen table for fifteen years, away from under her feet.
“You can’t sleep out in that van,” she said.
But he was already gone, halfway through the expanse of dirt and weeds, humming a tune she couldn’t place but that she’d heard several times as he’d showered lately.
11
A week later, while his grandmother thought he was on his way by train back down to Albuquerque to meet Dr. Wesleyan for the second time, Jefferson watched Nigel read the weekly alternative paper—he liked the classifieds on the back page and the kinky sex column written by the gay guy—as one of the Bee Gees screeched yet again that whether you were a brother or a mother, you’d best be staying alive, staying alive. Piles of projects awaited his cousin’s attention: a blender, several kids’ bicycles, a footstool missing a foot. Over in the corner a Kawasaki 400 motorbike, rebuilt and repainted burnt orange—a classic from the 1980s, Nigel claimed—leaned against the wall. It was hard to believe, but Nigel actually made enough to pay for his food and entertainment working as a fixer. He charged by the job—small jobs, $25; medium jobs, $65; large jobs, $100—and always had a backlog. Several hours each day he devoted to his own projects; for a while now that project had been that Kawasaki 400, which he’d bought for $50 from the bike’s owner’s widow.
“You ever hear anything about Josephina?” Jefferson had waited just about as long as he could, and now he finally had to ask.
“You mean Joz?” Nigel raised his eyebrows and curled his upper lip when he said it.
Jefferson nodded.
“She’s all messed up, man. I think she’s havin’ a kid, I don’t know really.”
Jefferson did his best to show no reaction to this information, instead asking his cousin about the Kawasaki again—when he was going to be finished with it, what he planned to do with it when he was done. As Nigel talked about how he was going to bask in his creative juices, though, Jefferson wasn’t really paying attention. Instead he was thinking about Josephina being pregnant and what Nigel meant by the words messed up and whether or not he should still drop by her house and say hello. In other words, whether or not he and Josephina had any hope of turning out like José Arcadio and Petra Cotes, in love despite it all.
Nigel flipped through a few more pages of the paper, paused briefly, and then moved on again, finally refolding the whole thing and flipping over to the back page. He read every back-page ad on Wednesday mornings, the day the weekly came out, and now, as Jefferson watched, he began reading from the top left column.
“Listen to this,” he said, reading aloud. ‘Want some affection? Hug ’n’ cuddle therapy sessions.’ How ’bout that, cousin? You want some affection?”
Jefferson could hear what Nigel was saying, but something about his cousin’s voice seemed very far away now, echoing as if Jefferson’s eardrum had been bored through. He was thinking of Josephina. Josephina Maria C de Baca. The girl who’d been his friend since second grade at Kaune Elementary. They’d been in the same class all the way through elementary school. Ms. McIntyre. Ms. Thompson. Mr. Treadway. Ms. Amanda Cisneros. Ms. Otero. They’d held hands for a week during sixth grade on the walk home from school, and Jefferson had never forgotten the tingling, the sensation of his heart momentarily stopping. He’d helped carry the diorama Josephina had constructed on the Great Sphinx of Giza, using bottle caps and Styrofoam curlicues. He knew that she preferred Dr Pepper to any other soda, and that she had alternated between salted peanuts and M&Ms as an after-school snack through most of middle and high school.
“Here’s one,” Nigel continued. “ ‘Yoga for Veterans.’ How ’bout somma that? Or this—‘Potters for Peace. Make a handmade bowl to feed the homeless. This Saturday on the Plaza.’ ”
But Jefferson was thinking that if he were really honest, he’d have to admit that he’d always thought he would end up with Josephina. That they were meant to be together. It didn’t hurt that she lived on Brae Street, one block over from his house on Tesuque Drive. It was true that he hadn’t had many real conversations with Josephina since ninth grade, and that since that time she’d spiked her hair in an odd asymmetrical way, and that her new friends called her Joz. It was true that she’d dated a few rough guys who had dropped out of Santa Fe High, one of whom was busy selling weed at the park while another already had a kid with a girl from Española.
Sometimes Josephina had shown up at track meets and watched Jefferson dash the 200. Several times she had invited Jefferson over to tell him about one of the rough guys and how bad he had treated her, but the whole thing was so nauseating to Jefferson that he had started saying he was busy when she came into the store with her mascara running. He was smart enough to know when being in love with a childhood friend was going to bring him nothing but trouble.
“Here’s a woman who’ll help you write your novel and give you a massage. I mean, I think she’s a woman. Says her name is Per. I guess that could be a guy, no?” said Nigel, jiggling the newspaper.
Esco had gone to Walmart with her friend Waci on their biweekly outing for toilet paper, paper towels, frozen burritos, candy and canned beans and condiments for the store. Jefferson needed to be around when she returned, help her unload, but that would be hours from now.
“What about you, Jefferson? What’re you gonna do? You unpacked yet? You need me to give you a job?” Nigel could go on all day like this, but already Jefferson’s wea
riness had developed an edge. What was he going to do with himself? Not just today, but tomorrow and the next day and the day after that? Before Iraq he hadn’t been the type to be bored; he remembered being excited about free time for reading or listening to music or cutting out magazine clippings for his bulletin board. Clipping trees and shrubs in the backyard. And walking around on his hands. Coach Shelton had suggested handstands as a way of calming his nerves before a race, but Jefferson had come to think of being upside down as one of his favorite pastimes.
“Esco thinks I’m seeing that VA doctor again today,” he said now, without explanation.
“Yeah?”
“Yep.”
“So?”
“So what?”
“So . . .” This was one communication technique the cousins shared, conversation Ping-Pong. With nothing but grunts and sighs and one-syllable replies, there could be a lot of talk with little chance of any significant communication. Jefferson felt it was just what he needed.
Besides, his mind was still stuck on Josephina.
Toward the end of senior year, when things were getting serious and it was starting to sink in that Jefferson really had signed on the army’s dotted line—he’d received a letter in the mail with an actual start date for basic training—he’d found he couldn’t stop thinking about Josephina. He wanted to talk to her, to let her in on the secret he had yet to share with his grandmother or Nigel, to make up for all the times he’d hesitated, for all the times he’d watched her walk by on the other side of the street without saying more than “Hey, Josephina, how’s it goin’?” He began to imagine normal conversations with her, and then he began to imagine that all those conversations in his head were real.