“Right,” said Tom. “Shall we push on then?”
After a certain amount of back and forth and after-you-ing and arguing over who would ride in the front seat—Tom insisted he’d be fine in the back—he crawled into an oversize American sedan, next to a girl who barely glanced at him, her eyes black-rimmed with kohl, her hair black as jet, her face round as a moon and almost as pale, with an unhealthy sheen to it. She looked bored almost to the brink of death. Her pallor reminded him for an instant of Claudia toward the end. He fought the unexpected pang at his heart, a claw. That was the tricky bit, he knew. You could never tell when another wave might rise up in that sea of grief and knock you off your feet.
“Hullo,” he said to the girl. “I’m Tom.”
She mumbled a few words. There was something wrong with the girl. It was hard to tell exactly what it was. Her lips were chapped, her eyes looked glassy—what little he could see of them behind a shock of greasy black hair. Perhaps she’d recently been ill. Another stab of pain.
“Sierra is sixteen,” said Michelle, as if that explained everything. Possibly it did. Tom could not really remember his teens. The past was a blur. He was more than fifty now. He thought he’d probably been an ass; most teenage boys were.
“Pleased to meet you,” said Tom. The girl gave him the barest glance, just grazing her eyes over him for an instant, then resumed staring out the window, licking her chapped lips. She wore some hair product that smelled like strawberries, only sweeter, and more artificial.
They pulled out onto the crowded three-lane motorway, which the blonde woman called “The Pike.” She twisted almost completely around in the front passenger seat to smile at him. It gave him an odd sensation, since she was sitting on the wrong side of the car, from his point of view.
“So, I never asked you,” she said brightly. “What is it you do exactly, for a living?”
“I’m a consultant.” He looked down at his hands, folded in his lap.
“Really,” she said. “Isn’t that fascinating! What kind of consulting do you do?”
“This and that, yeah,” said Tom.
The girl beside him snickered.
“Computers, chiefly,” he added. His work was too complicated to describe or explain. Most of it was highly technical. Dull as ditch water. If he mentioned the research work he did for the British secret service, they’d all assume he was a spy, which of course he was not. Nothing as glamorous as that.
“And what do you think of our president?” the woman went on, still awkwardly twisted around in her seat. Her neck must hurt, Tom thought.
“Seems all right,” said Tom. He was not keen on politics.
“He’s black, you know,” she said, unnecessarily. “And this is his second term. We’re all very proud of him!”
“For being black?” asked the daughter. “Would you be proud of him for being white?”
“Good point,” chuckled the father. He seemed like a quiet, easygoing sort of person. He drove the large, crowded motorway with confidence.
“Oh, for Peter’s sake,” said the mother. “I just mean our country is making some strides. Finally. We’ll never go back to where we once were, and I say good riddance! Next election we’ll probably get a female president.”
“Ha,” said the girl. “Fat chance.”
Tom looked at her.
“Let’s try not to argue in front of strangers,” said the father.
“No worries,” said Tom.
“Except Tom’s not a stranger,” the mother put in quickly. “He’s family!—But you mark my words about a woman president,” said the mother. “And about time. It’s only taken us two hundred years to get there.”
“I take it you didn’t like President Bush?” asked Tom.
“Oh!” Michelle looked distressed. “Oh, golly—I wasn’t thinking . . . I’m so sorry! I forget you’re not ever supposed to talk about politics. Did you Europeans all like George W. Bush?”
“I wouldn’t presume to say.” Tom realized he had somehow been thrust into the role of diplomat, spokesman, and family mediator. Apparently he was now also the representative of an entire continent. It was dizzying, and he was still suffering from jet lag. Nor had he been fed a decent meal on the plane. Tinned beans and eggs. It had been billed as “an authentic English breakfast.” He didn’t know anyone in England who ate that poorly. As far as he was concerned, it was hours past his bedtime. He stifled a yawn. He went to bed early and rose early. “Obama seems all right.”
“I’m so glad!” the woman enthused, her relief as visibly keen as if the president were an extended member of her own family. Perhaps he was, for all Tom knew. He knew nothing about any of these people, after all. Another dismal wave of loneliness rolled over him. Without Claudia, he was adrift in the world. He would be a stranger from now on, no matter what might happen, no matter where he might go. The day he’d buried Claudia, the sun had dropped straight out of the sky, and yet somehow daylight came, day after tiresome day.
“What year are you in?” he asked the girl, struggling for something to say. The sort of aimless adult question he had always hated, when young.
She didn’t even bother to turn her pale puffy face toward him. He couldn’t blame her. The rain had let up slightly, or perhaps they were driving through the soaked hills and valleys into a new microclimate. The names of towns flashed past, making it feel as if he was back in England: Brighton, Framingham. He knew Framlingham, a smallish town in Suffolk: Mary Tudor was proclaimed queen behind the stone walls of Framlingham Castle.
“I’m sixteen,” said the girl in a barely audible voice. The register of her voice was deeper than he expected, almost an octave lower than her mother’s.
“Tom means what year are you in school,” said Michelle. “Sierra is in tenth grade,” she announced. “We call it being a sophomore!”
“I call it being in hell,” said the girl.
“As bad as all that?” asked Tom, hoping he’d trick her into looking at him. It was discomfiting, sitting next to a child who refused even to meet your eyes. It made him feel untrustworthy. He could see her ghostly complexion reflected in the car’s side window, clotted by silvery drops of rain.
“Sierra was an honors student,” said Joe.
“High honors,” added Michelle proudly.
“Not anymore!” piped the girl. “Now I’m not smart enough even for low honors. Not here in Wormtown—that’s what we call Worcester.”
“I hate that name. I never call it Wormtown,” said the woman.
“Wormtown is what it is,” said the girl.
To Tom’s relief the woman turned on the car radio. It played some mindless upbeat American pop song, about “call me maybe.” Did that mean the person’s nickname was Maybe? Tom couldn’t make any sense of it at all.
Out the window Tom saw nothing of interest but the lashing rain; nothing else that drew him in, at any rate. If he could have made out the outlines of the mountains, that would have been all right, watching for where the high oaks gave way to maples and ash. In England the motorway ran right up along the margins of fields and farms. Cows and sheep ambled down onto the shoulders of the road, and now and again right across it. Here in America the green living world seemed a vast distance away, like something from a film. They drove in a center lane, which only made matters worse. Around them were nothing but cars and more cars. All of them so unattractive and alike it seemed as if they must have been designed to be ugly on purpose. Bumpers, fenders, and headlamps. Old bangers and articulated lorries. When finally he spotted a field of cows they were so distant they looked like the plastic figures in a child’s play set.
After they’d traveled in silence another ten kilometers the rain eased up a bit, and the day turned gray as gristle. They passed factories, industrial complexes, and shopping malls. It was as if they had evaded nature entirely; stretch after stretch of carriageway whipped by, ugly and man made. For an instant Tom thought of snapping a photo to send to Claudia as proof that so
mething this insane actually existed, and then he again remembered her absence with a renewed jolt. How long must this go on?
In any event, there was nothing around here that would have delighted even Claudia. She could find beauty in almost anything. Not here. The rigid backs of factories and blind windows of flats. Scrubby oaks; no hedgerows to speak of; no flowers at all, except, high on a hill, a patch of identical yellow flowers that thickly spelled out a single banal phrase: NICE ’N EASY.
Tom leaned forward and pointed toward the hill. “Is that the name of the town?” he asked. “Nice ’n Easy?”
Michelle chuckled. “It’s a business,” she said. “Farther west along the Pike you’d also find Friendly’s, in Wilbraham.”
“There’s Liberty Mutual in Boston,” Joe put in. “Peace in Dedham. Converse in Malden.”
“And there’s B.J.s in Natick,” said the girl from her corner. “We all know what that means, right?”
Tom looked at her blankly for a few seconds before he got it. He hadn’t heard those initials in a long time. Blow job. He really had been an ass as a teenage boy.
“Sierra!” scolded the mother. “Honestly.”
The radio had moved on to a song about “the one that got away.”
“It’s quite a long journey from the airport,” said Tom, shifting around uncomfortably. He was aware that the bottoms of his trousers were dripping water onto the carpet of the car. He wiggled his wet toes inside his sandals. Claudia had bought them for him. “You didn’t need to collect me. I could easily have taken the coach.”
“Just another fifteen minutes or so,” the man reassured him. “You’re not feeling carsick are you?”
The girl eyed him and inched away.
“Of course not,” Tom said.
“We wouldn’t have dreamed of letting you take a bus,” said Michelle. “The very idea! We’ve all been so excited to meet you! I could hardly sleep a wink last night. And of course,” she added, “you know you’ll also see my sister Louisa tonight at our dinner.”
There was something in her voice that sounded like a warning. “I take it she’s not been dying to see me?” said Tom.
“Of course she has!” protested Michelle. “Louisa is—” She hesitated, apparently at a loss for words, for a change. “Louisa is different. She is her own person,” she finished lamely.
“Amen to that,” said Joe behind the wheel.
“Aunt Louisa is a weirdo,” said the girl, Sierra. “And there’s like something definitely wrong with Uncle Art.”
“Now, that is enough of that!” exclaimed Michelle, putting an end to the conversation.
“I’ve recently had a loss myself,” said Tom abruptly.
If you had wagered him a thousand pounds, he’d never have believed himself making unwarranted confessions to strangers. Less than an hour after he had first laid eyes on them, no less. Being in a foreign country felt oddly liberating, he was finding. Nothing here on this foreign continent seemed real. The lettuce-green American dollars looked like something you’d use in a child’s board game. The coins were flimsy and light-weight.
“What happened?” asked the girl, Sierra. Her heavyset face was flushed for the moment, as if from the effort of asking a direct question.
“My—girlfriend, died,” he said. The words sounded so lame. The concept of a “girlfriend” fell so unbelievably far short of what Claudia had actually meant to him.
“Oh! I’m very sorry,” said Michelle, twisting around again to look at him. “You poor man.”
“Bummer,” said the girl. “Serious bummer.”
“When did she pass away?” asked Joe.
“Seven months ago,” said Tom.
“Oh my goodness,” said Michelle. “That must have been a terrible shock.”
“She’d been ill a long time.” Hideously, tears came to Tom’s eyes. He blinked them away and turned his head to look out the side window. “She died of MS.”
Michelle faced front again. “But she couldn’t have been very old, even so. My goodness!”
“Forty-one.”
“That’s how old I am!” Michelle exclaimed. Everything seemed to amaze her. She spoke only in exclamation points. “I’m so sorry! MS. What a terrible loss!”
“Well, you’ve had your own loss as well,” Tom said. “Of course.” Now he was feeling guilty as well as foolish. He should have voiced his condolences earlier. He had been an ass as a teenage boy, he was even more of an ass now. This woman had just recently lost her own mother. Would he ever outgrow his own stupidity? Apparently not. “With the death of your—um.” Was he supposed to say our mother? He could not force those words out of his mouth.
“Yes, Mom’s death was quite a heavy blow,” she said.
“Everyone loved Alma,” Joe put in. After a moment Michelle blew her nose. They drove along another kilometer or two. Then the teenager spoke.
“I don’t see the point of living,” said Sierra. “Everyone ends up old and decrepit, or dying. It’s all so useless. I mean. What. Is. The point.” She sounded like she might cry. “Seriously!”
There was a moment’s total silence in the car. The radio was playing “Set Fire to the Rain.” Adele’s voice wailed. Joe reached out and switched over to a news station. The newscaster talked unbelievably fast. To Tom it sounded more like gibberish than the English language. He wished Claudia were there to translate. Something about a collapse of the mortgage industry. Maybe the announcer was trying to get the bad news over with.
After a moment, Michelle said faintly, “Well my goodness, Sierra.” She didn’t turn around in her seat again, but everything in her posture radiated worry and disappointment—the slump of her shoulders, the stiff set of her neck. Even her bobbed blonde hair looked sad, the pale ends curving under.
“Hey. Sorry,” said the girl in a soft voice, touching her mother’s shoulder. She glanced at Tom. “Sorry.”
Tom gaped at her. Why should the girl apologize? He couldn’t think of a single good argument for living at the moment, but neither did he want to say straight out, I quite agree with you. Let’s just make a sharp turn into the next tree and end it all. Instead he offered the black-haired girl a wrapped stick of Doublemint gum.
“Can’t,” she said. “But thanks.”
“Sierra needs slow-acting carbs,” explained her mother. “We watch her numbers like a hawk. She has type 1 diabetes. You might find that’s the topic of quite a few of our conversations,” she added.
“Or all of them,” said Sierra. She offered up a singular grin.
Dinner that night at Michelle’s house was a lengthy, knock-down, drag-out affair that went on for hours. Tom hadn’t sat in one place that long in years. Nor was his chair especially comfortable. There was far too much food, all of it too salty, and everything, even the salad, tasted greasy or fried. The vegetables were limp and heavily sauced. The wine was bad, and came in enormous bottles.
Granted, the British were a circumspect lot, never the type to air their dirty laundry, but did he really need to be introduced to the whole world as a newly found relation, given his unorthodox role? “I’m the bastard,” he was tempted to say. “How do you do?”
All night long he was prodded to tell his story over and over—and really, there wasn’t much to say. “His biological father is dead!” one sister called to the other, unmistakable glee in her voice. What on earth was wrong with these bloody people?
Neighbors and friends as well as acquaintances seemed to come and go at will, carrying on, milling about aimlessly, and after a few hours Tom could no longer remember which of these people he was supposedly related to. By the sixth or seventh introduction, he gave up and confessed himself lost.
“But you do remember us at least,” chided Sierra, circling a black-lacquered fingernail toward herself, her mother (Michelle), and her father (Joe).
“Yes,” Tom reassured her. “I know who you are.”
She sank back in her seat. “Well, that’s all that matters,” she said.
“We’re the fun ones.”
“And we are the broken ones,” quipped the older sister, Louisa, from across the table. It was the first time she had volunteered a full sentence all night.
She sat beside a sulky, feminine-looking man who refused to look at Tom. Not directly, at any rate. Nor had he spoken a word. Not even a hello. Why?
The older sister’s unexpected phrase, the broken ones, captured Tom’s attention. It actually made him catch his breath.
He knew what Claudia would have said. She’d have said that Tom was attracted to brokenness like a fly was to honey. And she’d have been absolutely right. It was his need to fix things. Solve mysteries. To pluck the invisible web of connections, and draw the lines taut between them, putting the world to rights. Suddenly he felt alive, alert. He looked more closely at the tall, gaunt woman, Louisa, sitting across the dining room table from him. She was the elder of the two sisters, he believed.
Her hair was drawn tightly back from her face, as if to keep the bones pulled together. If she didn’t look so fierce, she might have been an attractive woman. Her body was athletic looking, energetic. Her husband—Tom forgot the man’s name—leaned his whole pudgy body away from the table, looked away. Even his feet pointed away, toward the door. Everything proclaimed that he was not really in this room, and that he preferred to be elsewhere. Now and again Tom felt the man sneaking a glance at him, and it reminded him of a predator in the wild. Tom had known enough unhappy couples to recognize the symptoms of a stale marriage. But the trouble here seemed to go deeper. There were sharp lines carved deeply on either side of the woman’s mouth.
Ah, Tommy, he seemed to hear Claudia say. Don’t go poking around where you’re not wanted.
“You don’t have to look so serious,” said the gaunt woman, Louisa. “I wasn’t asking you to fix us.”
“But that’s what I do,” Tom said seriously.
They all laughed. Even Tom managed to crack a smile.
Now you’re in trouble, said Claudia. She sounded pleased as punch.
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