His fingertips are shaking. His heart feels flat in his chest, like it’s been run over by the past. That’s what it feels like. How is it possible that after all these years—decades—that memory brings the feelings that went with it? It’s as if the past is not past at all but just layers inside us that are no more dead and gone than an old song on the radio. The crow is back. It caws up in the trees outside Daniel’s window. If Daniel had a pellet gun he’d walk out there, take aim, and shoot it quiet.
And that bad afternoon only last year. Daniel was getting ready to pull into a handicapped parking spot for Rudy Schwartz. He had Rudy’s handicapped card hanging from the mirror of his Tacoma too. Rudy always handed it to Daniel before he even said hello, which he didn’t say often. It was one of those bright cool days in the fall, and Rudy needed paper towels and pomegranate juice. Daniel had his indicator on and was taking the turn when a gray SUV swung into the spot and a man in a tie and tasseled loafers climbed out talking on his cell phone and walking toward the store pointing his key remote behind him to lock his doors.
Daniel leaned on his horn, but the man kept walking. Daniel doesn’t remember climbing out of his Tacoma, but very soon there was the man’s back only a few feet in front of him, a wrinkled button-down, and words were coming out of Daniel and the man was turning around, his phone still pressed to his ear, his eyebrows rising as he pulled his phone away.
“Excuse me?”
“I said you took my fucking’spot and that’s handicapped parking. Now fucking’move it.”
The man, tall and deep-chested and under fifty, some kind of businessman, Daniel was sure, glanced over Daniel’s shoulder to his old Tacoma and old Rudy hunched in the passenger’s side, maybe the wheel of his chair visible in the bed, and the man raised his palm to the words that kept coming out of Daniel, this spewing heat.
“I’m sorry, I’ll move it, all right?”
More words kept tumbling out of Daniel. He was aware of being watched, of a woman pausing at her open car door, of a man behind the wheel of a sedan cruising slowly by and staring out at him as Daniel followed the businessman to his SUV. Daniel’s truck door still was open and he climbed behind the wheel and watched the SUV back out of the parking space Daniel pulled into a bit too quickly, Rudy’s chair bumping up against the cab.
“Lookit,” Rudy said. “He’s driving off to shop somewhere else.”
That’s all Rudy said, and he looked at Daniel no differently than he had before, but for the rest of the day Daniel kept seeing over and over again the surprise on the businessman’s face, that phone still pressed to his ear. It was the same look Danny had gotten from Squeeze’s brother Bill, the same Danny had gotten from Chucky Finn and Chico Perez and all the boys and men down through the years who had tripped the switch of the Reactor, their expressions those of anyone who’s just stepped into it. It was the look cobras and rattlesnakes must get all the time—a dark, rising fear while searching for a way out and seeing it’s already too late—all in less than a heartbeat.
And there was Linda’s face, too. Always, there was her face.
That was not a good week, for it left Daniel believing he had not changed at all, that the only reason the Reactor had remained dormant was because Daniel had for years kept to himself.
He writes: Everything I’m writing to you now Susan is the story of a changed man.
Daniel’s cheeks heat up, and he knows it’s not the weather. Is he a changed man? Because he still has a temper, doesn’t he? But Danny would’ve thrown punches, he shouldn’t forget that. He would’ve walked up to that rich sonofabitch and punched him in the face. He lost his cool, but he didn’t do that.
A car passes by on the other side of his fence, and their windows must be open because he can hear rap music. It is the sound of angry young men and he hates it and always will. He puts down his pen. There’s the feeling he’s climbed back into a very old boat, one with no engine or oars or paddles, and he’s letting the current take him to a place he’d walked away from so long ago, each step away better than the last.
Can’t he focus on the good parts now? Being with his young daughter? How much he loved her? But ever since that night in that jail cell when the worm crawled into his guts where it grew into the Captain who ruled him, the air of Danny’s house had been poisoned and even two- and three-year-old Susan was breathing it.
But no, he isn’t going to tell her everything. How can he? That hunger he and Linda used to have for each other was gone, and what replaced it was another kind of hunger, at least for him. What he needed from her was a confession, and what did Linda need?
She needed to get the hell away from him, that’s what.
Dear Susan,
The sickness I had has been gone a long time now, that’s all I’m trying to tell you. Captain Suspicion. That snake in my guts. All that—none of it had anything to do with you.
He underlines that last word three times.
You should know that I tried to find you too. After five years on parole I was cleared to go out of state and I quit my barbering job and
That Greyhound down to Fort Lauderdale, a three-day trip. He had no idea where in Florida she was, but his mother had heard Lois owned an antiques store. If he had to, he would make his way to every town and city, searching through every set of yellow pages and visiting every shop he found.
The bus was half full, mostly black women and their little kids. One of the mothers was riding with a teenage boy, a skinny kid in a tracksuit, and if those two weren’t napping or eating some kind of snack she pulled from a paper bag—apples and nuts and beef jerky—then they were talking quietly, smiling a lot, sometimes laughing out loud. And it became clear to Daniel that this woman had raised this young man alone, that she was probably escorting him down to some college where he’d earned some scholarship. Sitting on that bus heading south, Daniel pictured his mother-in-law Lois, her pretty face and big breasts and sprayed hair. Susan would be twenty-three years old, raised by one woman like that polite young man had been two rows in front of him. Who the hell was Daniel Ahearn to show up now? His daughter was who she was going to be, and how would his showing up be good for anybody but him?
At a rest stop in Savannah, he stepped off the bus into a hazy heat and he walked across the highway and the median strip of cracked red clay to the northbound lanes, where he put his thumb out.
. . . and I quit my barbering job and took a bus as far as Georgia. But I changed my mind and went back home Susan. I didn’t want to bother you and I don’t want to bother you now but I’m coming to see you in a few days just this one time and I hope that’s all right with you.
Love,
Your Dad
No, that doesn’t look right. He hasn’t earned the right to use that last word. Daniel crosses out Dad and writes Father. Then he capitalizes the word LOVE and he signs his full name: Daniel Patrick Ahearn.
He rips out each page of his letter and numbers them and folds them together. Then he stands, lets his work glasses hang, and walks back out under the sun to this chair entrusted to him to mend. The coil of cane droops from the golf tee in the front rail, and he can see how dry it’s gotten. This gnaws at him far more than he knows it should. He pulls the tee away and reclips the cane and pushes the coil back into the water that is its natural home. There’s the ground-tilting sense that time and space are whirring by too fast, that he had better bear down and get something done or he’ll be flung someplace where it is forever too late. He needs to get his daughter’s college’s address off the Internet, and he needs to mail that letter. There’s a queasiness rising, and his back and hips ache, and it occurs to him he should get the oil changed in his Tacoma too. But first he has to get this job done, and he wants to get right back to work but can’t. He must wait for the cane to moisten up. And so he waits. He cleans the lenses of his glasses on his shirt, puts them back on, and Daniel—he, and Danny, too—they wait.
14
IT WAS late afternoon. Susan sat at
the desk of her girlhood in her newly cooled room staring at the screen of her open laptop. She ran the cursor to where she’d last left off: And whether their intent was to give pleasure or to inflict pain, whether they used their fingers or sharp objects never meant for a woman, she had been carried to where she had never before allowed herself to go: the final moment of her mother’s suffering.
Now what?
Failure. It was an iron wall pressed against your face. You step to the right or to the left, and it’s still there. If you turn and run in the other direction, it’s there too. At least that’s how it had felt to her for years. Then Bobby—and yes, Phil, her thesis advisor, even though he clearly wanted to fuck her—they had cut a window in that wall, one that looked out over a deep valley of wildflowers, and just when Susan had summoned the nerve to climb through it and leap, she no longer believed a word Phil had told her about her novel, and she could feel her enemy approaching, her love for her husband fading like an old photograph on a sunlit wall.
Three soft knocks on her door. Lois stuck her head in. She’d been taking a nap. The hem of her boxy dress was wrinkled, and her left bra strap had slipped halfway down her shoulder.
“Want a glass of wine?”
“I need to work first. Can I help you with dinner later?”
Noni waved her hand in the air. “Do your work. Doesn’t your school start soon?”
“I’m on sabbatical.” Which really meant she hadn’t signed her contract to teach three composition courses this fall, behind her a long line of adjuncts happy to take them instead. Lois took in Susan’s bare feet and legs, her denim shorts and cut hair. She narrowed her eyes at her and looked like she wanted to say more but then pulled the door closed.
That blank screen was bright and empty and all it said to her was, “You can’t.” Shit. Maybe she was wrong about her Culiacán novel. And maybe Phil was right, that it was good and she should stick with it.
This was last winter over coffee in the Student Union. It was her second residency toward her second graduate degree, and she hated how thin and cold Vermont air was in January, how it made her lungs ache even when she’d been back in the warmth for hours. It was late afternoon, and Phil was dressed in a black sweater and an open-collared shirt, curls of silver hair poking out the front buttons. He pulled a pint of brandy from a paper bag and poured some into his coffee and hers. “I think it’s the violence,” he’d told her. “It’s your subject matter, I’m sure of it.”
She’d felt naked and ugly and of course he was probably right. Should she be surprised? “Why do you say that?”
“With your other work, Susan, it’s as if you’re clearing your throat. But this Mexico novel, all that brutality, well, this is your song, I’m sure of it.”
That was a phrase Phil Bradford used a lot. In class he would say, “There’s more to this passage than we’re getting, I’m sure of it.” Or—and this to James Cobb, a former hedge fund manager writing an espionage thriller, “Throw this shit out, Jimmy. There’s a real artist in you somewhere, I’m sure of it.”
Susan wasn’t so sure of that at all. James was a rich, self-absorbed asshole who spoke to everyone about their work as if he were their teacher, his patronizing tone having far more to do with his hundred-thousand-dollar Mercedes parked in the campus lot than anything else. But he was an anomaly. So many of Susan’s fellow writing students seemed to be far more like her: middle-aged or older and trying yet again to find a way to write something substantial and accomplished enough to move a stranger. Some of these writers had become her friends, a new turn of events Susan had somehow gone most of her life without, for these new friends were women. Most of them had children and husbands or ex-husbands. Many of them had always had jobs, too, and now that they were fifty, sixty, sixty-five, it was their time and they were stealing it to write a novel or memoir, a collection of stories or poems. The woman Susan felt closest to was Diana Clark.
She was sixty-two, the mother of three and the grandmother of seven. She had short white hair and wore loud colors all year long—blazing flowered blouses in the summer, bright red and yellow scarves and sweaters in the winter. In July she drank gin. Come January, she switched to straight bourbon. From her ears hung earrings she made herself, most of them silver hoops with some kind of cheap gem soldered into the bottom center, and in workshops she said just what she thought about a piece but in a way that was somehow still encouraging. “Mary, honey, you’re a good-hearted soul, but your sweetness is killing your stories because you’re trying to rescue your characters from their own damn trouble.”
Mary was a retired fifth-grade teacher from Illinois. She’d blushed and glanced over at Phil Bradford, who was studying her over the rims of his reading glasses, her manuscript pages laid out on the desk before him like plans for a house he’d decided not to build. “I can’t disagree with that, Mary. I really can’t.”
Mary’s eyes had filled. She dabbed at them with her fingertips then looked around the room at the eleven other writers looking back at her. “But, how do I fix that?”
Diana had leaned forward in her chair, her hoop earring swaying. “Just let the shit hit the fan, honey, and get the hell out of the way.”
There was laughter, and Mary smiled weakly and Phil began to make some point about characters’ actions being their destiny and hours later Mary was drunk in Diana’s room, her head in her lap as she thanked her over and over again for telling her “the truth.”
That was a word that showed up quite a lot in those residencies.
“This line doesn’t ring true to me. I think you’re lying.” Or, “This entire story captures the messy truth of domestic life, as far as I’m concerned.” Or, “Truth and beauty. Isn’t that why we’re here?”
Yes, she’d thought, and because Bobby had nudged and encouraged her to go. Because ever since meeting Bobby Dunn just over three years ago and marrying him not long after, her life felt less like an airless room and more like an open field of fertile ground and all she had to do was dig and plant and something good would grow.
Tall and bald, one eye blue, the other brown, how Bobby would dip his head and smile at her sideways. Fifty when they’d met, ten years older than her. It was a mixer for adjunct faculty in the Student Union, and they were standing side by side at the bar waiting to order a drink. He’d winked down at her and said, “How do like being a member of the Migrant Farmworkers of Academia?”
She’d shrugged. “No meetings.”
“No benefits, either.”
“But there’s freedom.” That’s when she’d noticed what he was wearing, a linen jacket with frayed sleeves over a T-shirt. In fiery letters over black was: HARMOLODICS = FREE JAZZ.
“Harmolodics?”
“Ornette Coleman. Harmony, melody, and rhythm all share the same value.” He winked at her again, and she was surprised she didn’t like it.
She never really knew what Coleman’s theory meant, and she never grew to like his music, either. Painted on the study wall of Bobby’s one-story house across from campus were Coleman’s words: That’s how I have always wanted musicians to play with me: on a multiple level. I don’t want them to follow me. I want them to follow themself, but to be with me.
She and Bobby had made love for the first time with Coleman’s frenetic saxophone playing over them, the discordant bass and meandering drums. They had known each other for three consecutive days—a drink together at the Eckerd Student Union that first night, a shared crab salad in downtown St. Petersburg the next day, another lunch, this time at his house the day after that. It was a Sunday, and Bobby, in that same T-shirt, stood in the small kitchen whose walls he’d painted red, the window and door trim black, and he kept refilling their wine glasses from a jug of cheap Sauvignon Blanc while he explained to her his thesis about modern jazz, that by the 1960s it had fallen into patterns as controlled and repetitive as classical music and it was Ornette Coleman, “this poor black fucker from Texas with a plastic fucking sax, who set jazz free
again.”
Bobby had stood there at the stove sautéing spinach in olive oil, smiling down at her sideways. He was barefoot in baggy shorts, his legs pale and thin, his shoulders slightly stooped. His bald head glistened with sweat, and she liked how his passion was directed not toward her eyes and hair and breasts, but to her.
Only two weeks earlier Alan had asked her to marry him. Usually he’d leave for work at six and let her sleep, but that morning he brought her coffee and nudged her awake. He sat on the edge of the bed in one of his white T-shirts stretched tightly across his back. He’d shaved his cheeks and throat, which made his mustache look thicker than ever, some gray in it, and outside her window the trunk of her sable palm looked gold in the first light of this day she knew would come, for they always did; boys became men and men seemed to need nests to work for and without a woman in it there could be no nest.
What she’d loved about Alan was his physical strength, his callused hands and fingers. She’d admired his quiet, discerning confidence, the kind that came from years of building iron and concrete buildings rising into the sky. She liked how gently he made love to her and what a good father he was to his two sons in college, one in the East, the other out West, how she and Alan would be driving to a restaurant in his truck and he’d pick up his cell phone and call them both. Ask about school. Ask if they were taking care of themselves. Ask if they needed any money. And she loved how he’d always sign off with, Love you, pal.
And now here Alan was sitting on the edge of her bed at dawn on a Wednesday, his eyes on the carpet, telling her how much he’d learned from being married once before and how he was going to bring all those skills to her. That’s the word he’d used, too—skills. Then he’d raised his head and looked at her, and in that moment she resented him for giving her so much power over him.
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