A Thousand Miles from Nowhere (20 page)

HE DID
not see Amy for the next two weeks. He hadn't gone back to her house; he couldn't make himself do it, certain that she'd come out and say, unequivocally, what she had not had the chance to say when she'd shown up at the motel—that too much time had passed, that he had walked out on her and on their marriage, and that now, a year later, she was done; they were done. But he did not want to be done, had never wanted to be done. He had been ill, that was all. He had been ill and now he was cured, he wanted to tell her.

He was not cured, of course. He knew he was not. He was better; he
was
better. But the melancholy and despair, the clatter and chaos, swept over him now and again, particularly when he spent too much time watching the television, keeping track of what was happening in New Orleans—the city emptying out bit by bit until virtually nothing and no one remained except the giant piles of debris and the uprooted trees and dangling wires, the muddy, oil-and-shit-smeared streets and the gun-toting soldiers spread out across the Quarter and the Garden District in search of disoriented stragglers, of looters, of the forgotten. In search of the dead. Worst of all were these grim discoveries, dozens who had been left behind in hospitals and nursing homes and halfway houses, young mothers who had drowned cradling their newborn babies in their arms, the sick or elderly or disabled who'd died in their beds. It was not clear if their caretakers had abandoned them or if they had died as well.

How could it take so long to rescue the stranded, to recover the dead? How could there still be, after so many days, anyone left to save? Henry didn't want to watch any more but knew that he should, that he must—that for all the ways in which he had tried to flee his life, for all his efforts now to begin again here in Virginia, he still belonged to that city, was part of it in a way that could not be severed. He had been lucky; he understood that he had been lucky. He had been able to leave. He thought of all the folks who'd taken refuge in Endly's—the homeless, the crazy, the ancient, the infirm. Who would have taken them to safety? Why hadn't he thought to take them with him, as many as he could take? He'd had room in his car. What had saving his own small life been worth compared to all these others?

So he watched the news, looked for buildings he recognized, looked for the faces of those he knew. The city was now just a place of trash and ruin, of darkness and death, but even so, he searched for the familiar. Hundreds of thousands of others, spread out across the country, must be feeling the same way, watching the news too, reading the signs that the refugees in Houston and Atlanta held up before the news cameras, signs bearing the names of those they hoped to find amid all the chaos and loss.

When he couldn't stand it anymore, he would turn off the TV and step outside, watching the cars come and go in the parking lot, striking up conversations with those who looked his way. Many, though, seemed not to see him standing there, as if he had become part of the dreary display, his body undetectable against the background of the motel's dusty gray walls. But with those who did nod or wave hello, he discussed the heat, the clear sky, whatever destination the person was headed for: Monticello, Washington, DC, a business meeting, a family reunion, a new job. No one knew where Henry was from; none of them thought to ask, as if they had concluded that because he was already at the motel when they arrived, he had been there all along, simply waiting for these conversations. He listened to stories of aging parents and prodigal children, of just-born nephews and nieces; he learned what it was like to be a pharmaceutical-company representative, an itinerant youth pastor, an ambulance and fire-truck salesman.

Those who did not look over at him, Henry simply watched: couples drunkenly tumbling from their cars into the office and then, once they had acquired their keys, quickly shuffling to their rooms and drawing the curtains; exhausted parents carefully hoisting their sleepy children from minivans; men who looked exactly like he must have looked when he arrived: dirty and unshaven, a haunted look in their eyes, their clothes stuffed in rumpled duffel bags. What sad stories, he wondered, were they carrying with them? Wasn't it possible that, even this long after the storm, someone else fleeing New Orleans could show up at the motel, having exhausted the goodwill of relatives or friends?

Henry wanted to offer each of these guests—the furtive and the friendly, the content and the calamitous, the wretched and the blessed—a quiet benediction: that though they were unaware of its presence, Mohit's poem rested in the drawer of that one corner room, a light against the dark night, an anchor against all manner of stormy seas.
Sit at His feet and be blessed!
he wanted to tell them.
Make a way out of no way!

A way out of no way.
As simple and childish as that sermon's wordplay seemed, wasn't that precisely what he was trying to do? He thought of the scene in Mohit's poem in which the young maiden doubts the prince's ardent expressions of his love.

Why do you speak so?
the maiden asks the prince.
Aren't your words but a wracked ship?

I am the wracked ship,
the prince replies.
You are the sea into which I sink.

No,
she says, blushing.
Let me be your salvage. I will be your shore.

Oh, Amy. He needed to photocopy the manuscript. He needed to give it to her, see if she might hear in the poem what he heard—that it spoke what he had never been able to speak. Maybe she'd think the poem was publishable; maybe she would pass it along to her editor or agent. He still had, though, the niggling suspicion—ridiculous, absurd—that doing this might break the poem's spell, that the delicate pages tied with the twined colored strings were part of the work's great power. Shouldn't it simply remain where it was, in this secret shrine?

He had even begun—not seriously, but still—to think of the Spotlight in precisely this way—as a shrine. Latangi had told Henry that when she and Mohit purchased the empty building, he had planned to call it the Ganesha Motel. Mohit had created the design for a sign he wanted to erect out front, the motel's name printed below a blue silhouette of the elephant-headed god, patron to both writers and travelers, their guardian and protector, steering both on their proper paths.

Latangi, though, had told Mohit the sign was a bad idea. She'd told him—and Henry figured she'd been right—that a sign saying
The Ganesha Motel
would keep customers away. It would confuse them. It would make them wonder if the place was not, despite its name, a motel but a Hindu temple, reserved for its own worshippers, just as the dozens of churches along the highway collected each Sunday morning only their own kind.

Mohit argued with her, Latangi told Henry. “But, yes, we know who wins these arguments,” she said, laughing. “Always the slim girl, not the happy man.” Though she triumphed in this instance, Mohit never acknowledged, she told Henry, the suspicion and judgment, even disgust, with which they were often regarded when they ventured out into, as she called it,
the Virginia world.
“Men and women look away and chitter-chatter,” she said, motioning with her hands to suggest their gossiping. “I see their eyes grow thin, like the coin slots in soda vending machines.” She squinted her eyes, then she shrugged.

Henry was reminded, with that peculiar image of the suspicious coin-slot eyes, what he had recognized when he first began to read
The Creator's Mistress
—that the poem was as much Latangi's as Mohit's, that the original Bengali work may have been his but that she was the one who had preserved its music, its beauty, in English. He thought then of Tomas Otxoa. Henry felt sickened at the thought that surely Tomas wouldn't have left New Orleans as the storm approached, that he wouldn't have known to leave. Such awful ruin.

Sit at His feet and be blessed!

I rest in your heart, bathe in your soul, find solace in your every word.

It was all the same everywhere, for everyone who believed, the prayer for relief from suffering, from pain and loss and grief and ruin.

“But not the children,” Latangi had been saying, and Henry turned back to her. He hadn't been listening. “When children laugh at Mohit's dhoti kurta, they do not know to keep their thoughts to themselves. They have not yet learned this. They approach and ask why he is a man wearing a dress, and Mohit grabs the dhoti and pretends to be filled with surprise. ‘Oh, what is this!' he cries out. ‘I should not allow my bride to select my clothes!' and the children laugh with him. They want to touch the cloth. They want to learn its name. They want to know of the place where men wear dresses and women touch vermilion to their foreheads. I promise you, Mr. Henry, Mohit could gather as many children around him just by his words as the clowns with their painted faces and,
ayeee!
—” Latangi wrung her hands and made the screeching noise of a twisting balloon.

Henry smiled. “I'm so sorry I didn't get to meet him,” Henry said.

“I am sorry too, Mr. Henry,” Latangi said, and she placed a hand on his arm. “A great writer, you tell me, yes?”

“Yes,” Henry said. “A great writer.”

“A greater man,” she said.

Though he hadn't seen Amy again in those two weeks, he had spoken once more to Mary. He had gone to the motel office and called her, told her he just wanted to check in. He thanked her for telling Amy where he was, for letting her know that he was okay. He said he was sorry that he hadn't done it himself.

“Yep,” Mary said, unsurprised. She wasn't going to bother, he realized, to scold him.

“I saw her with that man,” he said, “the professor. I couldn't make myself do it.”

Mary didn't say anything, so Henry said, “You know about him?”

“I do,” Mary said.

“Okay,” Henry said. He didn't know what else to say, so he asked about New Orleans, if she was watching too.

“I am,” Mary said. “It's hard to get out of your head, isn't it? Even here, in Baltimore, people are watching like they did after 9/11. Everybody's just waiting and waiting like there's a logical story being told, like there's going to be an ending to it and then everyone can finally turn their attention to something else.”

“What's it going to be, you think? The ending?” Henry asked.

“I don't know,” she said, and he heard the quaver in her voice. “Maybe
this
is the ending. Maybe it's already happened. Maybe it's just all gone.”

“It can't be,” Henry said. “They wouldn't let that happen.” He realized that he was now trying to comfort Mary, that just that tremble in her voice had made him want to comfort her. He hoped that they could see each other before too long, he told her, that it would be great if she had the time to drive down from Baltimore. But he explained that he wouldn't need to stay with her, that Latangi had offered him a job—she hadn't exactly, but even so—and that he was hoping to help the family of the man who'd died in the accident, that this was something he wanted to do.

“Okay,” she said, and he heard the wariness in her voice, the suspicion. “But you understand you can't make everything okay.”

“I know,” he said.

“That's what you've always figured you could do,” Mary said, and Henry wondered why she'd say this, how she thought this could possibly be true. What had he ever done, really, to try to make everything okay? He couldn't think of a single thing.

“You need to choose, you know,” Mary said.

“I'm trying to choose,” he told her. “I'm choosing this.”

“And Amy?”

“I don't know,” Henry said. “I think she's already chosen.” He'd learned more from Marge—who seemed to have as many sources of information as any private investigator could ever hope to acquire—and from Latangi's friend Rebecca Douglas, the English professor at Briarwood College whom he'd met when Latangi invited her over for dinner and introduced her to Henry. Hunter McClellan, it turned out, was not just a dandy in nice suits; he was a fine and decent man. He'd had a young wife, a former student, who had died from a rare cancer, and he'd cared for her with great love and attention. He'd been devastated by her death, but he'd eventually emerged from his mourning. He'd dated quite a few women before he met Amy. Once he'd met her, though—that was nearly a year ago, when she'd first arrived in Virginia—he'd had to pursue her quite a long time before she relented.
Relented.
That was the word Rebecca Douglas had used, and it had made Henry shudder in agony.

“Listen to me,” Mary said on the phone to Henry. “She hasn't chosen. She doesn't love this guy. She doesn't.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know,” Mary said. “You just know these things.”

Why, he wondered, didn't
he
ever just
know
something?

“I hope you're right,” he said.

“I am. Hang in there.”

How exactly was he supposed to hang in there? What did that mean? “How do I do that?” he said into the phone. “Hang in there?”

Mary paused, as if she didn't know whether or not she should say it. “It means don't be crazy,” she said. “Do what you can to not be crazy.”

“Okay,” he said, and he thought again about what Amy had said to him even before he moved out:
See someone. See someone.

“Can I ask you something?” he said.

Mary was silent, as if she sensed what was coming.

“Was she crazy too? Mama? I know Daddy was, but was she?” Just using those words, saying Mama and Daddy, brought everything back to him, took his breath out of his chest. He sounded like a child. But what other words for them were there?

“No,” Mary said. “She wasn't crazy. She was injured. She was hurt.”