The Breakdown Lane

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “Our life is not for everyone, Leo,” she wrote in one of the early ones. “So I would advise you to counsel long and hard with your wife and perhaps come for a visit, for as long as a month or even two before you make a choice. We have had very few members leave, but the few families who have left (mostly due to marriages ending or the needs of elder relatives) have had a very hard time adjusting to the other world….” Dad had written that the other world was just what he and his wife were so anxious to leave. He’d also written a lot of stuff about himself that wasn’t necessarily…true, like that he’d done half marathons and such. I don’t know why he said that, maybe because he wanted to look like the macho guys in the pictures, who were all buffed from chopping wood and making little houses and butchering oxen and shit. The correspondence with India went on until she was the one to stop it, gently suggesting that Leo needed to come to see Crystal Grove because they had talked about it as much as was feasible for her with her own “research” and her duties in the community.

  In the one from the last place, the one in upstate New York, he seemed to be talking to this one person, “J.” J’s address was Jdevlin@devlingoodjams.com.

  “J.” was a very sympathetic person. She sympathized about how selfish Julie and “the three children” were, how they wanted to work him into an early grave so they could have more junk food and electronic gadgets. “It’s the way of the world, Leon,” she wrote—who the hell was Leon?—“and most people don’t have the courage to recognize it. As my mother says, most people live lives of quiet desperation.”

  Her mother and Henry David Thoreau.

  I couldn’t believe it. Electronic gadgets? We didn’t get a TV or DVD player until I was in middle school. The parents had their laptops. They wouldn’t even give us a used one, until Caro’s guilt gift. That was it. I didn’t even have a Gameboy thing, though I used Luke’s. Not only did Luke have one, so did every one of his brothers. Even Caroline had to save for a year to buy her disc player and headphones. We had to buy CDs out of our allowance and birthday checks. Wrote J., “When my mother first brought us here, Leon [Leon?], my father was corrupting all our lives with the same stuff. Plus, he was cheating on her with a cocktail waitress. Imagine, her taking five girls and moving to a remote little town in the Hudson Valley. She was like a pioneer woman. Like Sojourner Truth. [“J.” did not sound like the sharpest pencil in the box. It was funny that this was how my mom signed her columns.] But our whole community at Sunrise began around her, around my mother. She loved my father, but she had to leave him behind because he couldn’t let go of the world….” That was Julie all over, my father wrote back. No inner life. Just a shell.

  The coldhearted bastard, I thought. A shell? A shell was what I figured Leo had in place of a heart.

  At some point, Caro left the room and went back to bed, but I kept unfurling this long, long, long string of e-mails to “J.” and they got…sort of sick. My father was picturing himself with his body pressed against “J.’s” back, feeling safe and clean for the first time in his life. One equally sick part of me wanted to go on reading it, but this is so stuff you don’t want to know about your father. I was also nauseated. Safe and clean? What were we, a methadone clinic? How could he be such an asshole as to call Julie a “social climber” with “trivial” friends and his children “self-absorbed” and “materialistic”? I’d had the same backpack since the fifth grade.

  In the car the next morning, Caro asked, “Like the part about all our electronic gadgetry?”

  “I don’t get it!”

  “He was just trying to impress her, you know, the way you do a girl.” Caro was completely calm about this. “He was trying to make himself sound like this poor victim.”

  “He’s married, Caro!”

  “I told you, we heard this in health, a lot of guys do this! They e-cheat. Anyhow, that’s not where he is. He’s at the Crystal Place. I have a sense. That India lady was the one who was talking like he did before he left. So that’s where we have to look first.”

  “And when Mom notices the car is missing…?”

  “We aren’t going to take the car, idiot,” Caroline said. “We’re going to take buses. The whole way. And when—”

  “Mom notices we’re gone—”

  “I have this worked out. I told Grandpa and Gram we were totally stressed out and Aunt Jane asked us to come to the summerhouse at spring break; and Grandpa and Gram wouldn’t know how to reach Jane if she was on fire, plus they’re leaving tomorrow for Florida. Then, I wrote to Jane and told her we were totally stressed out, and she sent us, like, six hundred bucks to buy plane tickets to go see Gram and Gramp in Florida, and said not to worry Mom by telling her, just to say Gram and Gramp invited us. So, I figure we have about a thousand bucks between us, and—”

  “We’re going to be able to find him, on buses, staying at hotels—”

  “No, Gabe, they have these youth places in every town in the world, hostels, where kids can stay if they’re runaways and they give you money to call home and a bus ticket home….”

  “But they call the cops if you’re underage.”

  “But we aren’t underage.” She reached into her backpack and produced two beautiful professional driver’s licenses, describing her as Elaine Drogan, eighteen, and me as Kevin Drogan, nineteen.

  “No way could I pass for nineteen!” I told her.

  “You could. You’re really tall. Look at Cathy. She looks about twenty-five and she’s practically thirty-five!”

  “Where’d you get these?”

  “Ryan.”

  “Who’s Elaine Drogan?” I asked.

  “She’s dead,” Caro said, again with that complete nonchalance. She was staring seriously in the driver’s-side mirror at her eyeliner. “She’s a dead baby. So is Kevin. That’s what you do. You get a birth certificate for somebody who died and apply for all their stuff under their name. They died in a fire.”

  “Is it against the law?”

  “Yeah, probably. But we aren’t going to rob banks with a couple of fake driver’s licenses. We just want to find our lost father for our sick mother.” She pressed her hands together under her chin like a choir singer and closed her eyes.

  I saw how God created Leo.

  SEVENTEEN

  Gabe’s Journal

  Probably because it was two days before we left, I got sick two days before we left. I lay in bed on the day before spring break started, shivering and burning, and my mother made chicken noodle soup with her own noodles, and I wanted to puke and tell her the whole thing.

  Caroline kept coming in and warning me, “Don’t say anything. You’ll blow it all….”

  But I knew we had to tell one adult.

  We had to.

  If we got goddamned arrested or hurt out there, what would we do? We’d be unconscious, or dead, and we’d be the dead Drogans, who were already dead, so who’d care? We’d end up in some unmarked grave in fucking New Hampshire, and my mother would eventually find out when the animals uncovered our molars and would commit suicide.

  So when I packed, while loading up on jerky and peanuts and raisins and junk, I called Cathy and asked if I could see her at her house. She was immediately leery. I got about two sentences into explaining when she began shaking her head. Honor bound by being an adult, she immediately vetoed the whole thing as irresponsible and nuts.

  “You do it, then, Cathy,” I said honestly. “You’re her best friend. Somebody has to go find him. Gramp hired a private detective, and he paid him a thousand bucks, and he’s spent two weeks going through Leo’s bank records because he has strict orders not to ask Mom any questions or upset her….”

  “I can’t leave her now, Gabe. You know how sick those shots make her. On the other hand, your grandparents could come over, and I could fly out—”

  “Out where, though, Cathy? You’d have to look all over the eastern seaboard….”

  “I can’t take off that much work, Gabe! I’ve taken off so much already
because of—” She stopped.

  “Because of my mom,” I said. “That’s what I mean. And we can’t send my grandparents.”

  “Why? You probably could. Well, theoretically.”

  We exchanged a look of unmixed comprehension. We both knew why. What we found might not really kill them, but close enough. So I said something more neutral. “Well, there’s the practical reason. They’re going to Florida to get their stuff. They already sold their share in the condominium. And there’s…He wouldn’t listen to them. We have at least a chance. I stockpiled some columns,” I further offered. I was getting to be a real reporter. Stockpiled. Words my mother used.

  “What were they?” she asked.

  “Some woman asking if their having a baby would help their marriage have more common ground between them…”

  “And you said…?”

  “It would definitely put more ground between them, like a continent, so that unless she wanted a child for reasons completely unrelated to her marriage…”

  “You’re going to be a therapist, Gabe.”

  “Not me,” I said. “I already feel like the sin eater whenever I read those letters.”

  “The…?”

  “The story you told me. They had to hire a starving person….”

  “Maybe that is what I do, and what your mom does.”

  “I think you do it more. I mean, they walk out feeling better….”

  “That’s what I want,” Cathy insisted.

  “But don’t you feel like all the air’s been let out of you?”

  “You develop a tough hide, but maybe….”

  “Anyhow, that’s what I feel about the column. I don’t want to know their problems. And they’re always the same problems. People never make the same mistake once.”

  “Your mom used to say that.”

  “I heard it from her,” I confessed.

  “Why did you stockpile more than one column?”

  “In case this time she got sicker, or we had a hard time convincing him.”

  “Maybe,” Cathy said thoughtfully, touching my cheek, “maybe you feel that way because…you’re her son. I mean, you’re more her son. Maybe I wouldn’t think another kid could do this. And I don’t think you should do this. But I think you can.” She brushed Abby Sun’s long hair with her long fingers. “Well, you have to take a cell phone. I’ll get one today, in my name”—she held up one palm—“no, I’ll give you mine and get another one. You already know the number of mine. And I do. My mom should have a cell phone, I guess. Be wise and don’t object. You have to call me every day. At the same time. Eastern time. You have to take enough extra money from me to get plane tickets home if anything, and I mean anything, goes wrong. You can give it back. And didn’t you even think your mother was going to want to talk to you, while you were with Jane…?”

  “We thought we’d tell her we were lousy about calling and that stuff.”

  “That’s so limp, Gabe,” Cathy said. “Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll let you talk to her a couple of times. You say, Fine, Mom. Fun, Mom. Yeah, I met a girl, Mom. She’ll be half out of it, especially at first, so I don’t think she’ll remember all that much….”

  “Do you think he’ll come home when we find him, Cath?”

  “I think he’ll come home, Gabe,” she said, taking my one huge hand in her two little ones, a gesture I would loathe as phony from anyone but her, “but I don’t think he’ll stay.”

  “That was another letter. The guy had an affair, and the woman wondered what they should do to try to repair the marriage for the children….”

  Cathy leaned back and tried to pull Abby onto her lap, but Abby had other plans and ran off to get her goldfish tambourine. “You said try counseling. Try hard. But—”

  “But it won’t work. It usually doesn’t.”

  “Which is true. But it buys the kids some time.” Cathy sighed. “Well, I shouldn’t let you do this. But Leo needs to come back here. He has to face the music. At least make sure that you’re safe. That she’s safe. He owes her at least that much.”

  “Well, no matter what, she’ll feel she’s come down in the world. Being a tenant. Having nothing.”

  We let that sit between us for a moment.

  “Well, she might have a tenant,” Cathy said.

  “She’s going to take in boarders? That’s a bit…out there.”

  “I was thinking of me, Gabe. Your mom told me once that now that I’m a mother, I’m too old to still live with my mother. And Connie’s thinking the house is getting too big for her. She’d like a little condo. Julie and I talked about it. We could help each other out.”

  “I could see that you’d help her out, but how would she help you?”

  “It’s not all about money. It’s about company, too. She helps me by just being there to listen.” Cathy punched me on the arm. “Come on. It would be like our own little community. You’ve got Leo’s sacred room and no one’s using it.”

  “That’s what my dad wanted!” I said. “You should hear about these places. Caro cracked into his e-mail. She can read whatever he writes.”

  “She figured out his password?”

  “Yeah.”

  “One of your names?”

  “Yeah. It is now. ‘Aurora.’”

  “Huh. Well, as for those places. They’re not all loonies, Gabe. They’re getting more common. They’re not like…the Manson family. They’re just people who want time more than money. It’s not that big a deal these days for married couples to share one job, or get a smaller house on purpose….”

  “I’d hate that. A house with no privacy; they have these little houses where all you have is a bed and a chair for everyone to read, and the parents’ room is the only one with a wall….”

  “I’ve heard about them. I even once, Saren and I considered—”

  “Jesus, Cathy, I thought you weren’t nuts.”

  “It was in Big Sur, Gabe. Not Nebraska. Come on. That nuts I’m not. But there are some big pluses to…having less stuff to worry about and maintain, and sharing a common vision with the people you hang around with.”

  “You should definitely go,” I said, disgusted. “You could bond with Leo.”

  “But, Gabe, isn’t one of the things that drives you nuts the most about your school the percentage of assholes per square foot? What if you went to a school where everybody wasn’t just like you, but they were okay with however you were…we just thought that would be good for Abby. I don’t mean Abby. I mean if there ever was an Abby; she was theoretical at that point. But I thought we’d stay together and eventually have a child or adopt a child. And we wouldn’t have been deserting anyone to do it.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t do it, though.”

  “Yeah, so am I. For a lot of reasons.”

  She rummaged in her purse and pulled out her cell and the charger. “Here. It has national roaming, for conferences I go to. About every thousand years. I’ll get another one in a couple of days. But call me at your house.” She stopped. “You look like shit, Gabe.”

  “I think I have the flu or something.”

  “Then you should wait a few days.”

  “I would, but we have to go while it makes sense that it would be a time when we would go. I have to beg her and tell her I feel better…or she won’t buy it, and Gram and Gramp are only going to be gone a couple of weeks. If that. They’re leaving tomorrow. They’re talking about selling the cottage, too, in Door County.”

  “That’s so sad,” Cathy said. “But the Steiners are two of the thirty-seven great people….”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re the one who’s Jewish. It’s a Jewish saying. They say that in any given time, there are thirty-seven great people on the earth. Hannah and Gabe are two of them, for sure.”

  I went home and desultorily packed my three allotted outfits—jeans, khakis, rain pants, a rain poncho, T-shirts, one silk shirt with a dragon on it that tended to make me sweat, about six pairs of thick wool s
ocks, running shorts, a swimsuit in case I had to shower in some den of lunatics in front of other people. A disposable razor (pink, the only extra Caro had) and bar soap you could use for your hair, too. Two toothbrushes (I’m a little OCD about my teeth). I picked the Beatles’ White Album and the soundtrack from Hell Hath No Fury, and then I ran out of room and figured Caro and I would fight over her disc player.

  I called Luke. “Mon,” I said.

  “Dude,” he said.

  “I’m headed for points east. See Jane.”

  “See Jane run,” he said.

  “See Jane golf,” I replied.