by Brock Clarke
“Well, Bea, I don’t suppose we’ll be seeing you again,” Leland said from the driver’s side, and my aunt then put the truck into gear as if to say, I suppose not. And then Leland Otis took a step back from the truck, too, and my aunt drove off.
29.
Two hours later we were on the highway, already near the New Hampshire border, making very good time. My aunt, unlike my mother, was not afraid of high speeds. Although I couldn’t say exactly how fast she was going. The truck’s speedometer seemed to be broken. The needle hadn’t moved from zero. The gas gauge seemed to be broken also. Its needle hadn’t moved from empty.
“Do you know what your mother was afraid of?” my aunt asked me.
You, I guessed in my head. John Calvin, I guessed in the same place. “High speeds,” I said with my mouth instead.
“No,” she said, “it was you.”
This was a ridiculous thing to say—no one had ever been scared of me, least of all my mother—and couldn’t be true. But I very much wanted it to be true, and it embarrassed me how much I wanted it to be true, how much I wanted my poor dead mother to have been scared of me. I wanted that so much that I was worried it would be obvious to my aunt, that the want would appear plainly on my face, like a pimple or a tic, and so to distract us both from it, I blurted out the first thing that came to my mind, which was, “Well, she should have been afraid of trains.”
It was something my aunt might have said; I’d even said it in my aunt’s bright tone of voice. My aunt smiled, in approval, I thought. And looking back, I realize what was going on: John Calvin had taught my mother how to love, how to talk, how to think, how to write, how to live, and now, my aunt was trying to teach me how to do those things, too.
30.
My lessons began immediately. One of the things my aunt taught me during the drive to the airport was to make sudden, sweeping generalizations, generalizations that would be hard to defend, which was why it was important that you made no attempt to defend them. For instance, just over the New Hampshire border, my aunt pointed out my window. There, in the middle lane, was a green sedan, and on the driver’s-side door of that sedan were numbered buttons. You unlocked the door using a combination instead of a key or a remote control clicker. My aunt asked if I’d seen one of those combination locks before, and I said yes. My aunt asked if I’d ever owned a car with that kind of lock on the door, and I said no.
“Good,” Aunt Beatrice said. “I find that people who have those on their cars are racists.”
31.
As we crossed into Massachusetts Aunt Beatrice said, “You know, I liked that you wrote about me.” She was, I realized, talking about my blog. I felt my head, my chest, filling up with warm liquid. No one had ever said they’d liked what I’d written. Not my parents. Not Dawn. Even my employers in the pellet stove industry were neutral on the subject. The sentence Please don’t go to Stockholm popped into my head, and it might have then popped out of my mouth if my aunt hadn’t added, “Of course, it was all lies.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” my aunt said. “That’s what I liked about it.”
32.
Some miles later I asked, “Aunt Beatrice, where have you been . . .” I was going to finish the question with “all my life,” but that sounded like a thing you’d say not to an aunt but to a wife, or a future wife, although, as Dawn would be the first person to tell you, I’d never said it to her. Although in fairness, to myself, she’d never said it to me either. And in fairness to both of us, this was not the kind of thing you would ever say if you were a blogger for the pellet stove industry because the person would know where you’d been: you’d have been on your phone or your computer, blogging for the pellet stove industry. If you were that kind of person, then no matter where you were, that’s where you’d been and that’s what you’d been doing.
“All over the world,” my aunt said. She brushed her hair away from her forehead, but then it fell back again immediately as though it could not be denied.
“Did you live in Stockholm?”
My aunt nodded. “I wanted to show you some of my old haunts,” my aunt said, then added in voice much more pitiable than the one she’d been using, “before I die.”
I didn’t respond to that, perhaps because I began to suspect my aunt was manipulating me. But then we were getting closer to Boston, and like many people from small remote places, cities made me paranoid. Whenever I approached a city—and before I met my aunt I almost never approached a city—it was as though I were entering a question, a question directed at me, and inside the question was the answer to the question, plain for me to know, and yet somehow I knew that I would never know the answer. The trees thinned, the roads grew wider, the number of lanes multiplied, the traffic thickened and slowed, the billboards proliferated. On one of the billboards was this message: you call him “the man upstairs.” but he has a name.
33.
Which is to say that earlier I was thinking of how I didn’t want my aunt to go to Stockholm, but now I was thinking about getting her to the airport as quickly as possible and then getting back to Congress, to my house, where I could write my blog for the pellet stove industry and be alone.
But at each moment, when I should have been getting closer to achieving that goal, something got in the way. For instance, I’d supposed that my aunt would just pull up to the departures curb, that she’d get out, and I’d say goodbye, then get into the driver’s seat and drive home. But instead my aunt ignored the signs for departures and followed the ones toward parking. When I asked her about it, my aunt said in that same pitiable voice, “An old lady does like to be escorted into the airport.” Once again I felt manipulated—Aunt Beatrice’s appeal to her old age wasn’t exactly convincing—but nonetheless, I didn’t argue as my aunt drove to the parking lot, which was full. So she drove to the next lot, which was also full. Finally, she found a spot in the economy lot. But then we had to take the shuttle bus to the terminal. My aunt’s terminal was the last on the shuttle’s route. And then, right before our stop, there were an extraordinary number of cars, all of them dropping off people at the departures curb (which was exactly what I’d planned on us doing in the first place), including several cars that were parked where the shuttle bus was supposed to stop. And the driver wouldn’t let us off anywhere but the official stop. My aunt was very calm this entire time. But at each delay, my need to return to Congress felt more urgent but also more impossible. I’d had a kidney stone once that made me feel the same way. Very painful.
Finally, though, we got off the bus and stepped inside the terminal. I would have said goodbye to my aunt and driven back to Congress in the truck if two things hadn’t happened.
“Does that man look familiar, Calvin?” my aunt said, and that was the first thing. She’d nodded her head in the direction of one of the large neon boards announcing departures and arrivals. There, standing in front of it, was a man reading the board. He was dressed in a suit, funeral gray, and was holding a hat in his hands, brimmed, old-fashioned, dented at the crown, also gray. His hair was likewise gray, not as thin as mine would have been had I allowed it to grow but still thin enough, combed to the side. His face was thin, too. The man looked hungry. He was looking at the board in the way of a turtle. By this I mean, his head was tipped back to look up at the board, but his shoulders and neck seemed to hook downward, like a shell, making looking up difficult.
And that’s how I recognized him, from his terrible posture: it was the flat-voiced minister who’d been talking to my mother in her church while I spied on them from above in the balcony. I explained this to my aunt. I didn’t find his presence in the airport unusual. I hadn’t noticed him at the funeral, but then there were lots of gray-faced and -clothed ministers in the crowd. Surely he’d been among them. Surely he’d flown into Boston, driven up to Congress for the funeral, and then driven back and was now waiting for the plane to take him back from where he’d come. I explained this to my aunt, too, and
she nodded and said, “He followed us all the way from Congress to the airport in a 2012 Dodge Lumina, yellow, procured from the Hertz rental car agency. He parked the car in a spot eleven spots to the east of where I parked the truck.” My aunt said this in her usual voice, but I noticed her fingers were lightly dancing on the strap of her purse as though it were an instrument.
I looked at my aunt, who was looking at the flat-voiced man, and so I looked at him. He was still looking at the board. Aunt Beatrice’s accusation seemed unlikely. But it was also true that the man had been looking at the board for a long time now. And it was also true that his eyes seemed to dart in our direction, just for a second, before returning to the board.
“Huh,” I said, and might have said more if the second thing hadn’t happened.
34.
The phone rang. It was Dawn.
“I do love you, Calvin Bledsoe,” she said. If she hadn’t called me by name, I might have wondered if she’d meant to be saying this to someone else: Dawn had said those words—“I love you”—to me before, but until now she’d never sounded especially happy saying them.
“All right,” I said. I mentioned earlier that Dawn hated that expression. To me, it meant that I was being agreeable. To Dawn, it meant that I didn’t care. But what was I supposed to say? I love you, too—I suppose I could have said that. And I supposed Dawn would be the one to point that out to me. But no, she laughed. She laughed and said, “Under contract!” and I had to suppress the urge to say “all right” again. “Under contract!” she shouted. “Under contract!” Dawn sounded so happy, and I thought of my mother, who always distrusted loud public expressions of happiness. “Those who loudly insist on their happiness are rarely happy.” Those were my mother’s words. But Dawn’s chanting of “Under contract!” made me also think of these words by John Calvin: “What shall we then say of chanting, which fills the ears with nothing but an empty sound?”
Meanwhile, Aunt Beatrice had turned away from the flat-voiced minister and was now looking at me. I wondered if she could hear Dawn’s chanting. I shrugged in apology, mouthed the name “Dawn,” then turned away from my aunt and back in the direction of the board, and I noticed that the flat-voiced minister was no longer there. And then Dawn said, “You did it!”
“I did?”
“Under contract!” Dawn said again. Those words were like the words on the billboard: I knew they contained a message meant for me, one that I should easily understand, but its meaning seemed very far away. In between it and me was Dawn’s voice in my ear, chanting the message. I held the phone away from my ear and said to my aunt, “Under contract?”
My aunt thought about it a moment. Then she reached into her purse and brought out her own cell phone. It was the newest in the most sophisticated line: as long and wide as a folded map, as thin as a cracker. The phone was so expensive, so cutting edge, that even for a professional blogger it would seem like an indulgence. It was rumored to be the phone of choice for the intelligence and security communities. I wouldn’t have been more surprised if my aunt had reached into her purse and brought out the newest, most expensive pellet stove, the Huntelaar from Germany, which cost upward of fifty thousand dollars and was able provide heat, for long stretches, without pellets.
My aunt spoke the words “under contract” into her phone, and seconds later a female British robot’s voice said, “A term common to the real estate profession.” The voice continued to talk, but I wasn’t listening, because the coin for me had already dropped. I returned to my own phone. On it, I was supposed to be able to talk to someone and get on the internet simultaneously, but Dawn’s voice coming out of it seemed to short-circuit its features and my fingers. Once again, I turned to my aunt and she handed her phone to me without me asking for it, and I handed her my phone without her asking for it either. Only after I’d handed my aunt the phone did I remember that I’d lied, or not told her the whole truth, about who Dawn was to me. But by then it was too late. Aunt Beatrice put my phone to her ear and immediately broke into a wide smile as though hearing the voice of an old friend. Her missing tooth made her look like a lunatic, and if I were a stranger walking by, I would have thought that she needed mental help even more desperately than dental.
Into my aunt’s phone I typed “under contract” and then my address, 41 Maine Street, Congress, Maine, and then hit the Search button, and I found what you might have already expected I would find: the website of a real estate company, Admiralty Realty, which reported that my house was not only for sale but was also already under contract.
35.
My namesake once wrote that “God tolerates even our stammering.” It would be nice if that were so, because when my aunt handed me back my phone, I stammered into it. I knew what words I meant to say—they were “how” and “why” and “who”—but I suspect those weren’t the words Dawn heard, because her word in response was “what.” “What? I can’t hear you, Calvin.” And then, before I could try to make my questions clearer, she said, “Never mind. I’ll be on first flight from Charlotte to Boston tomorrow.”
“Why?” I said, and that she heard.
“Why?” she said with the incredulity she normally reserved for someone dense enough to wonder what was so wrong with the “conventional woodstove.” “To celebrate!” she said. “And to help you pack up the house.”
36.
After my mother met the president of the United States, she led a nondenominational service at the National Cathedral. The title of that sermon—“A Pilot Steers the Ship”—was also the title of one of the chapters in her famous book and was taken from these words by John Calvin: “Seeing that a Pilot steers the ship in which we sail, who will never allow us to perish even in the midst of shipwrecks.” And I thought of those words right after Dawn said that she was flying up to help me pack my house. I remembered these words and thought yes, I am in the midst of a shipwreck, and yes, I need a pilot to steer me away from it. I closed my eyes and asked for a pilot. Whom did I ask? Whomever was listening: God, my mother, my father, John Calvin himself. I didn’t expect anyone to listen, because as far as I could tell, no one ever had. But this time, someone did: a moment later, I heard a loudspeaker announce immediate boarding for a flight that would take its fortunate ticket-holding passengers to some distant place. And then I opened my eyes and there she was: dark spectacled, black haired, weathered face, gap toothed, my aunt, my mysterious long-lost aunt, both pilot and ship, waiting for me. She reached into her purse and withdrew my passport, with the ticket sticking out of it, and handed them to me.
“I was just going to call and tell you,” I said to Dawn on the phone. “My aunt Beatrice and I are about to go on a trip!”
37.
One hour later I was still on the phone with Dawn. Yes, I told her, I really was going to Sweden with my aunt. Yes, I know it seemed sudden. No, I wasn’t lying to her. Yes, I was coming back. Yes, I really was selling my house. No, I didn’t like it when she called me a big pussy.
“It’s time,” Aunt Beatrice whispered into the ear that wasn’t up against the phone. I assumed my aunt was telling me that it was time to board our flight, and so I told Dawn that I had to go, that my flight was boarding, that I’d text her when I got to Stockholm. Then I hung up, looked at the time, and saw that we had at least an hour before boarding. I looked to my aunt for clarification.
“It’s time to grow up,” she said.
“I’m nearly fifty years old,” I told her, which was my way of saying I already have. But of course Aunt Beatrice heard it otherwise.
“It’s never too late to grow up, Calvin,” she said.
38.
Do you know that that was my first time on an airplane? When I was a child, my parents in word and deed and occupation suggested that we did not need to go anywhere; later, as an adult, my blogging for the pellet stove industry suggested the very same thing. But now, at nearly fifty years old, I was finally going somewhere in an airplane. The miracle of it! Not the miracle of f
light, but the miracle of finally doing what so many people had already done.
39.
And do you know that it wasn’t until we were already on the flight, already in the air, that I remembered my aunt’s dog, which was waiting for us, or at least me, back in Congress?
“Aunt Beatrice,” I said. “Your dog!”
My aunt seemed to consider these words, crunching the ice from her otherwise empty cup. Before she’d downed it, the cup had been full of scotch, as had the cup before, as had the cup before that. If I’d had that much liquor and that little water, I would have feared dehydration and the return of my kidney stones.
“Oh, he came with the truck,” Aunt Beatrice finally said.
I said earlier that entering a city was like entering a question that contained an answer that you suspected was obvious to everyone else but was obscure to you. Entering a conversation with my aunt could be like that also.
“Where did the truck come from?”
“I stole it,” my aunt said.
There was a man standing in the aisle. He had taken his suitcase out of the overhead compartment and then taken something out of his suitcase, and now he was shoving his suitcase back into the compartment. But when my aunt said, “I stole it,” he seemed to pause in his labors, just for a second, before closing the compartment and retaking his seat. I was suddenly highly conscious of people listening to us. And now that I’d noticed the man and his suitcase, I finally became aware that my aunt was flying to Europe and yet she had no luggage, only a purse, which she’d slung over her head and left shoulder. The strap cut diagonally across her chest like a bandolier.