by Rumaan Alam
“I need my clothes. I need clean clothes.” Ruth looked toward Amanda.
“Oh. Of course.”
“I just need to go into my closet.” They rented the house, but they’d never actually seen strangers inside it. They always had Rosa in before they came out. They always found the house spotless and chilled and ready to receive them.
“Clay’s just getting dressed, I’ll ask him to hurry.”
Ruth didn’t need to say anything about the look on their faces when they’d opened the door to them. Guess who’s coming to dinner? “Thank you.”
Ruth was sixty-three years old. She hadn’t been raised to do—though that had been expected—but to convince. This was, her mother understood, how women made their way in the world: convincing men to do the things they wanted. “I’m scared.” She was confessing. “Maya and the boys. She’s probably trying to call us.”
“Our daughter,” G. H. explained. He put a hand on his wife’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about that now.”
She mostly could bear not thinking about the ice caps or the president. She could hold fear at bay by focusing on the small matter of her own life. “You remember that year we went to Italy?”
Dry heat, a luxury hotel, Maya in her pigtails. They’d sipped glasses of sweet juice, they’d eaten pizza topped with rosemary and potatoes, they’d rented a car, they’d stayed in a villa in the country. It was a flat, near treeless place with the mercy of a swimming pool. Maya, taking in the rubble that was the Forum, asked why they’d come there to see a place so wholly wrecked. History meant nothing to her. Time was unimaginable at nine. Maybe it was at sixty-three too. There was only that moment, the current moment, this life. “What made you think of that?”
“I don’t know what else to think about,” Ruth said.
15
ROSE TURNED THE SECRET OF THE DEER OVER AND OVER, AS you would a hard candy on your tongue. She was not yet old enough that her words would be believed. They would say she’d made it up. They would say she’d exaggerated. They would say she was a child. But Rose felt the change in the day, even if no one else did. For starters, it was hot, impossibly so, given the sun had not fully come up. The air felt artificial, like inside a greenhouse or some botanical garden exhibition. The morning was too quiet. It was telling her something. She tried to hear what.
In the kitchen, her father was talking to an old man she’d never seen. Rose did not bother reminding her father that he’d been supposed to come see her outside. It was better that he had forgotten. He made introductions.
“Nice to meet you.” Rose was well brought up.
“A pleasure.” G. H. couldn’t help think of his own daughter. He remembered he’d used her name for the combination to the lockbox.
“Did you brush your teeth?” Clay wanted to get rid of the girl.
“It’s super hot outside. Can I swim?”
“Fine with me. Just find your mother first. Tell her I said it was okay. I need to talk to Mr. Washington.”
In the night, somehow, each man had forgotten the other, would have been unable to describe him to a police sketch artist. They said eyewitnesses were unreliable anyway; most people cared only for themselves. That was true of both these men, rudderless without precedent for etiquette, in a house to which they each laid claim.
Seeing the man again, in the day’s light, was like seeing a stranger with whom you’d had sex. “G. H., would you mind if we stepped outside?” This sounded so masculine and decisive if you didn’t know that Clay wanted a cigarette.
“Let’s do that.” G. H. chuckled a little. It was hard not to assume the role of genial sitcom neighbor. Television created the context, and black people had to play along. But this was his house. He was the protagonist of his story.
They left through the side door. G. H. was proprietary about even the grounds. Thicket was right—the lawn petered out at a wall of trees. It was different than having a home at the sea. The ocean loomed. The trees were protective. “Hot out.” He looked at the sky and noted how pale it was.
Clay produced cigarettes from his pocket. “A little vice—I’m sorry.”
G. H. understood: man to man. Men didn’t say such things anymore, they just implied them. Once it had been one of the secretary’s responsibilities to empty the desktop ashtrays. Now you didn’t even say “secretary” but “assistant.” “I understand.”
They walked past the hedgerow. The gravel crunched pleasantly underfoot. Clay went farther than necessary—the hedge obscured them, the children would not see—because he felt this was respectful. “I wouldn’t smoke in the house, you know.”
“There’s a reason we ask for the security deposit.” They’d had fine luck with renters. A broken wineglass, a loose doorknob, a missing soap dish that Ruth had replaced with a large seashell.
“Amanda told you what she saw? The news alerts.” These didn’t worry him, only the one that was gibberish. He worried about the technology more than the nation.
G. H. nodded. “Do you know what I do for a living? I manage money. And do you know what you need to do that job? Information. That’s it. Well, money. But information. You can’t make choices, you can’t assess risks, unless you know something.”
But Clay wanted to be the one. Clay wanted to put everyone at ease. Clay was just selfish enough. “I’m going to drive into town. It’s the only way.”
“I suspect it’s terrorism. But that’s not what scares me. Terrorists are dumb hicks. That’s how you convince them to incinerate themselves for God. They’re patsies. But what comes next?” G. H. once had faith in the institutions of American life, but he had less now. “Let’s say something happens in New York City. Do you think this president will do the right thing about it?” This kind of thing used to sound like paranoia, but now it was just pragmatism.
“Well, I’m going to get to the bottom of it.” Clay was proud of himself. His chest swelled in some primate’s instinct.
“My contractor lives just a few miles down the road. He’s a good man. I trust him. We could head over there.” G. H. was mostly thinking out loud.
Clay was relieved by the nicotine. “We’re safe out here, I think.”
G. H. was less certain. “It seems so. At the moment.”
“I don’t think we need to bother your friend. I’m going to go into town. Buy a newspaper. Find someone who knows more than we do.”
“I’d say I’d join you, but I’m not sure if Ruth would approve.” He was a dealmaker by trade. He didn’t want to go.
“You stay here.” Clay was thinking, on some level, of his father. “You see those rentals where the homeowner is on the premises. Hosts. It’s really not so odd.” He worried about them driving more. He thought this was decent of him. He wanted to be seen to be good.
G. H. looked again at the sky. “It looks like it might be a nice day. Very hot out already.” When you got older you could say that kind of thing, as though you were somehow in tune with nature’s secret rhythms, as though G. H. had spent his life on a fishing trawler instead of in a Midtown skyscraper. Maybe he’d have a swim.
Clay looked up too. The yellow was setting into blue. He’d thought it seemed like rain, but now it felt like summer. How wrong they’d been!
16
HE PRESSED THE BUTTON TWICE TO LOWER ALL FOUR WINDOWS simultaneously. Clay appreciated this feature, the brainstorm of one particularly insightful engineer who understood that on a hot day the first thing you wanted was air. There was, though, a kind of pleasure in the close dry heat inside the car, flecks of dust, the way you could almost smell the sunlight. The wheels made a particular noise on the gravel, then cleared that and moved smoothly over the asphalt. He drove slowly, nonchalant, to make himself feel the more brave. Also, he figured, the longer those people stayed, the more right he had to their thousand dollars.
There was a field of something being cultivated, but Clay had no idea what it was. Were soybeans the same thing as edamame, or were they something else, and what co
uld they be used for? He drove slowly past the little shack selling eggs. The road was an intermediate thing, still narrow, not quite real; he waited for the GPS to register, but hadn’t he found the way to the shore only yesterday morning? Clay knew what he was doing.
Someone had once told him that people found smoking calming because it was essentially deep breathing. There was no shoulder, so he simply stopped in the road, turned the machine off, depressed the button to bring the windows back up in beautiful unison. He stood ten feet away because he didn’t want the smell of smoke to permeate the car.
There was that familiar, pure rush of satiety. There was an almost swoon. He had nothing to lean on, so he simply drew himself up taller and looked around at the world, which was quiet. He had a fleeting desire for the clarity of a cold Coke, to shake off the vague hangover. That’s what he would do. He’d drive down this road, turn onto the main road, wind around the curves and end up at that four-way intersection and instead of bearing right, toward the sea, he’d go left, toward the town. There was a gas station, there was a public library, there was a junk shop and an ice cream parlor and a motel, and farther down the road one of those depressing low-lying complexes with a grocery, drugstore, dry cleaner, and chain sandwich shop tidily arrayed before a parking lot so large it would never fill up. That’s where he’d go in search of knowledge, not to the library but to the place where things were sold. You could get a Coke almost anywhere.
Clay looked at his phone. Habit was powerful. It showed him nothing. He dropped the cigarette and stepped on it, then got back into the car. The brain was a marvel. You could drive without wholly thinking about driving. Sure, familiar routes, the everyday commute—start the car, find the highway, maneuver through lanes, take the usual exit, glide to stops at red lights, move forward at green ones—while not exactly hearing the top stories being reiterated on NPR, or thinking about some slight at the office, or remembering a production of The Pirates of Penzance you saw the summer between sixth and seventh grades. Driving was rote. It was something you just did.
He wasn’t actually thinking about the production of The Pirates of Penzance he’d seen the summer between sixth and seventh grades, though he remembered that as the golden, temporary season in which he’d still been his mother’s favorite child, but he must have been thinking about something because Clay turned, at some point, and drove for some distance—he found estimating distance and measures of volume impossible—and realized that though he was definitely on a road, a more serious, two-lane road, the sort of road the GPS would know and name, he could not be certain, not really, that it was the road he’d wanted. There were directions written down in Amanda’s notebook, of course, but Amanda’s notebook was back at the house, in Amanda’s Vuitton bag. Anyway, the ability to take written directions to one destination and simply invert them to move in reverse was an obsolete art. It was like winding the car windows down with a crank. Human progress. Clay was lost.
Everything was very green. There was nothing to hold on to. There were some trees. There was a field. A glimpse of a roof and the promise of a building, but he couldn’t say whether it was a barn or a house. The road curved, and then he emerged somewhere else where there was another field and some more trees and another slice of roof of barn or house and Clay thought of those old cartoons that recycled their backgrounds to create the illusion of movement. It was impossible to say what was more sensible—to stop the car and backtrack or to forge ahead as though he knew where he was going. He didn’t even know how long he’d been driving, or whether he’d know the turn back onto the road that led to the gravel driveway up to the house where his family waited. He didn’t know whether that road was marked by a sign or what the sign would say. Maybe he ought to have paid closer attention; maybe he ought to have taken this errand more seriously.
The sound of the wind and the sensation of it on his face was distracting. Clay slowed the car a little and sent the windows back up, then jabbed at the center panel until the air-conditioning came to life. He continued straight, but that wasn’t exactly correct, since the road undulated and twisted and maybe he’d gone in a complete circuit and that was why the trees and occasional buildings looked so familiar: because they were. He found a piece of gum and put it in his mouth. Fine.
There were no other cars, and he didn’t know if that seemed odd or not. Anyway, it was not the kind of road for stop signs. The local planners trusted the local people. He pulled onto the dusty shoulder and turned the car around and drove in the direction from which he’d come. Now nothing looked familiar, though he’d just driven through it. It was all inverted, and he noticed things on the left side of the road that he’d missed when they had been on his right: an amateurish painted sign reading “McKinnon Farms,” a lone horse standing in a field, the remains of a building that had burned down. He drove and then slowed, because he felt he must be close to the turn back to the house. But he wouldn’t take that, he would drive on in the other direction, where he knew the town waited.
There was a road on his right, and he turned to look up it as he passed, but it was not the road that led to the house, because that road had that little painted shack where you could get a dozen eggs for five dollars. He sped up and drove on. There was another turnoff, but again, no painted shack. Then he wondered whether he’d turned twice to get to the road where he now found himself, and was looking for a landmark that did not exist. Clay took out his phone, though he knew you weren’t supposed to look at your phone as you drove, and was surprised that it did not seem to be working. Then he remembered that of course it had not been working, that was the real purpose of this errand, not an ice-cold Coke. He had driven out to show everyone that he was a man, in control, and now he was lost and felt ridiculous.
He tossed the phone into the seat beside him. Of course there were no other cars. These were rural roads, for the convenience of a handful of people. The day only seemed strange because the night had been strange. He was a little turned around, but he would find his way; he hadn’t gone so far that he’d need rescue. He thought of how the government sent helicopters for the antisocial weirdos who insisted on living atop wildfire-prone mountains. People thought fire a disaster, failing to understand it was an important part of the life cycle of the forest. The old burned. The new grew. Clay kept driving. What else was he supposed to do?
17
THE SUN CREPT ACROSS THE SKY AS EVER IT HAD. THEY WELCOMED it; they worshipped it. The prickle on the skin felt like punishment. The sweat felt like virtue. Cups collected on the table. Towels were used and abandoned. There were sighs and feints toward conversation. There was the plash of water and the sound of the door opening and closing. It was the kind of heat you could almost hear, and in that kind of heat what could you do but swim?
Amanda worried fresh sunscreen into her chest and could feel the stuff of herself, ropy and fibrous, beneath her skin. It was an improvisation. Someone in the audience’s shadows had shouted out this scenario. It made no sense, and she was tasked with performing as though it did. Clay driving into town. She was doing this. She thought of that movie where the man pretended for his son that life under the Nazis was normal, beautiful even. Something about that seemed prescient now that she thought about it. You could fake your way to a lot.
Ruth told the children there were more pool floats in the garage. They returned with sagging plastic mini Oldenburgs. Archie put the little nub between his lips (it was meant to look like a doughnut, sprinkled, with a bite taken out of it), the effort of exhalation exposing the filigree of his ribs.
It was so unfair, how much more capable Archie was. Three years of advantage. Rose couldn’t get a single breath into her float, which was just a round raft, but looked comfortable. It was annoying. Archie was basically a grown-up, and she was stuck being just herself.
“I’ll do it, honey.” Amanda took the limp thing between her legs and, perched on the edge of the wooden chaise, coaxed it into shape.
“I like the doughnut on
e better.” Nothing went her way and she couldn’t stop herself from noting it.
“Too slow, stupid.” Archie tossed the ring onto the surface of the pool. He bounced from the diving board, landing only half on the thing as though he’d meant to. He was unbothered by his sister’s protests, had long learned how to ignore most of the things his sister had to say.
“The raft is more comfortable.” Rose was the sort of plain, chubby girl Ruth couldn’t help feel sorry for. Ruth thought Archie so like every boy she’d seen troop through the halls of her school, convinced of his own charms. Maybe this was something mothers did to sons. She worried about her grandsons, mothered/smothered twice over.
Rose was old enough to know how to feign manners. Still, she whined. “But the doughnut is funny.” Rose spoke in that particular mode kids deploy when appealing to adults who are not their parents.
“Funny is no good in the long run.” At the umbrellaed table, Ruth crossed her legs. She wore her clean things. She’d stalked into the master bedroom, wincing at the unmade bed, the spent washcloths on the bathroom floor, the scattered dirty laundry. She felt better. Almost relaxed.
“This is harder than it looks.” Amanda thought of Clay’s cigarettes, stealing her breath. She knew it wasn’t fair, not to have a vice. The modern world was so joyless. When had they turned into parents to each other?
Rose was impatient as any thirteen-year-old. “Mom, hurry.”
She pulled the translucent nipple, shining with saliva, from her mouth. “Here you go.” That was good enough.
Rose stood on the steps, tepid water to her shins. She and Archie vanished into their game, the private conspiracy of childhood. Children sided with one another, the future against the past.
Amanda often thought that siblings were like long-married couples, all those shorthand arguments. This endured only in childhood. She had little to do with her brothers beyond the occasional too-long email from her older brother, Brian, the rare misspelled text messages from her younger brother, Jason. “How long has he been gone?” Amanda checked her phone. At least the clock was working.