A Thousand Miles from Nowhere (7 page)

He hadn't meant it, of course. He had believed that he could make her happy, that he could offer her his devotion, his attention, his admiration. And he had believed that she would erase—that she had already erased—his peculiar proclivity for melancholy, his abysmally romantic attachment to sorrow. He was, had always been, his father's child, not in intellect but by temperament—and yet for five years with Amy, he had mostly managed to swear off the pallid and grim, the mournful and forlorn. Amy had cooked for him, and just this was enough to summon in him a dazzling joy—the real thing, complete and total. He felt the same mixture of delirious gratitude and dizzying overindulgence after Amy's meals that he felt after sex. Amy, notebook in hand, planning her next book, bombarded him with questions, the very questions he might have asked her when he lay exhausted in bed:
How good was it? What in particular did you like? How soon would you want it again?

What man would walk away from such a woman, would hurt her the way he had hurt her?

Yet he
had
walked away. He
had
hurt her. And now—now he had lost everything. He had executed with unlikely depth and precision his grand and transcendent plan for ruin. Sitting at his table at What a Blessing, listening as Miles Davis gave way to Oscar Peterson and then to some tenor player he didn't recognize, he tried to picture the past year or so of his life as a line drawn on a page. It looked like a child's scribbles, like a madman's preposterous treasure map. He finished his lunch, paid the check, and went back to his car. He took out the road atlas, pulled out a pen from the windshield visor, and put an
X
over the spot where Marimore stood.

Here,
he said to himself.
Here.
He carved the
X
into the page as if that would make everything more concrete, more real.
Here is where I am.

And where would he go? How far might he get? He considered the fact that Amy, somewhere near, would be only an inch or two away on the map. An inch or two. Maybe he would find her if he just drove and drove, winding his way from one town to the next, looking for the sort of farmhouse where Amy would be living, some beautifully weathered clapboard and tin-roofed cottage tucked beneath great towering trees, surrounded by a garden of hostas and peonies and phlox and a dozen other flowers and plants whose names he knew from Amy but couldn't identify, not even if a gun were put to his head. Maybe he could roll the car windows down and drive until he detected the scent of her cooking, of whatever recipe she was trying out.

Was it possible that Amy already knew he was here, had felt some change in the atmospheric pressure, some subtle signal in her dreams that announced his arrival, the same way she'd known, three years ago, that she was pregnant but that something was somehow wrong, that her body and the baby weren't right?

She'd had a dream, she told Henry, that she was growing taller, a little more every day until she no longer fit into her clothes, her sleeves inching their way up her arms, her toes punching through her shoes. She had to bend down to step through doorways, had to sleep curled up on the bed. This time she hadn't asked Henry what the dream meant, hadn't wanted him to explain. Six weeks later she'd had a miscarriage, and for the next few months she'd cried every night when she got into bed, curled on her side exactly the way she had imagined herself curled up in her dream, her hands tucked between her knees. Henry, who had been both terrified and thrilled at the prospect of being a father, had not known how to comfort her except to say that they could try again, that he was sure the next time everything would be fine.

But there had not been a next time, and Amy had gradually set aside her sadness in the manner she always did, with a kind of ferocious energy that Henry admired but could never muster for himself. He was always amazed by Amy's capacity for joy. She'd had plenty of tragedy in her life—her parents had died a few years before she and Henry met, in a plane crash on their way to visit her brother in Sierra Leone, where he worked for a relief agency. But sadness never managed to take hold of her the way it did Henry; she seemed to emerge from it with a kind of burnished regard for all that was remarkable and fortunate in her life.

“It's all a wonder,” she'd said one Saturday morning to Henry as he lay next to her in bed. His eyes were still closed; he hadn't moved but she knew he was awake. It was spring, and when he opened his eyes he saw that she was sitting up and looking out the window, running her hands through the tangle of her hair. He told her he'd misunderstood her for a moment, thought she'd said
wander.

“That too,” she said. “It
is
all a wander.” And she lay back down and started in on one of her favorite games, reciting whichever list she'd been forming in her head: ideas for future volumes of A Pilgrim's Provisions, or the places in the world she'd like to go that she had not yet been, or the foods she most longed to eat again—tropical Filipino fruit salad and Indonesian fish eggs and Australian wild boar and roasted Basque peppers with cider.

“I don't want to go
anywhere,
” he'd once said to her as she spoke, her eyes closed as she imagined a trip down the Amazon, stopping at each village along the way to find out which foods they considered their greatest delicacy. Everywhere in the world, she'd once told Henry, it was the foods that were considered aphrodisiacs that were deemed to be the most delicious, no matter how disgusting they actually tasted.

“Except here,” Henry had added, sneaking his hand beneath the sheet, beneath her nightgown. “I don't want to go anywhere except here.”

“You're an idiot,” she'd said, but she kept her eyes closed, let his hand work its way up her leg.

“Yes, but I'm
your
idiot,” Henry had said.

“My idiot, yes,” she'd said. “All mine.”

He returned to Route 29 and headed back to the motel. He figured he would get his bag and say good-bye to Latangi. He would thank her for her kindness, ask what it was she wanted to speak with him about, and then be on his way. Only then would he decide where it was he was going next. To stay with his sister. To find Amy. To continue wandering. To decide to decide what he needed to decide.

Up ahead, Henry could see, the pale blue prison bus was still parked on the highway's shoulder, exactly where it had been before. The prisoners, though, had switched sides, as had the rifle-toting guard. Most of them were scattered across the sloping berm at the highway's edge, slowly moving forward in unison, but three of the prisoners stood just beyond the yellow stripe on the shoulder.

The men appeared to be staring at something on the ground or perhaps shielding their eyes from the sun as they talked. Just as Henry approached, he saw one of the men, an old black man with gray hair, step across the yellow stripe. Henry wasn't sure what was going on. Then the old man took another step and then another and then, now, he was directly in front of Henry's car.

Henry did not have time to swerve or even slam his foot on the brake before the awful collision.

Later, when it was done, he would wonder if he really had seen what he thought he remembered seeing: the old man, as soon as he was out in the road, raising his arms at his sides, raising them as if what he meant to do, in the moment before Henry's car struck him, was fly.

IT MADE
no sense to him. A man was dead, not by his hand but by his car. Not by his choice but by the man's own choice. Even so, a man was dead, and Henry had killed him, had spilled the man's red blood all over the black stink of the highway and across his car's bumper and hood and windshield, the bumper and hood now smashed as if he had struck not a man's body but a tree, the windshield cracked into a jagged puzzle. Henry lived nowhere, had nowhere to go—yet he'd been told that although it was clear he wasn't to blame, that he bore no responsibility for what had happened, he ought to stay put awhile.

Those were the precise words the Marimore County sheriff had used, and though he had posed it as a question, Henry had understood it was not a question. “You'll stay put awhile, Mr. Garrett?” the sheriff had said, peering up from the papers on his cluttered desk, the late-afternoon light angling through the windows, illuminating the dust, and Henry had nodded, his hands still shaking, knuckles white as though he still gripped the steering wheel. He had never been in a sheriff's office, had seen them only on TV and in the movies, but this one looked exactly like those, like a stage set from
The Andy Griffith Show
or some John Wayne Western. The wooden furniture was chipped and faded and worn. Giant hoops with large keys hung on the wall near two cells with sliding metal-bar doors. A bulletin board displayed faded posters of wanted men, their faces unshaven and their eyes glazed, and of missing children, and on a bookcase beneath a dirty window, dishes and wooden plaques were stacked haphazardly on the top two shelves while old magazines and plastic three-ring binders spilled out of the shelf below.

When Henry looked out the dirty window, he saw a young woman and a little boy stepping out of the hardware store across the street. The young woman was carrying the boy's stuffed animal—it looked to Henry like an elephant, like Ganesh on the lampshade at the motel, but he figured that he must be wrong, that it must be something else, a bear or dinosaur or pig or some fanciful imaginary creature. The woman was also holding a brown paper grocery bag, her purse slung over her shoulder. Henry watched as the woman awkwardly tried to shift everything to one arm so she could take hold of the boy's hand, but the boy ran down the block ahead of her. Henry could see that the woman was shouting for the boy to wait but couldn't hear her. He felt panicked, as though the child were in terrible danger of darting out into the street, of getting hit by a car—or maybe just of winding up lost for a few awful, frightening moments. He turned away and looked back to the sheriff, who was saying something that Henry had missed.

“Excuse me?” Henry said, and the sheriff explained that he'd provide Henry with a copy of the report once it had been processed.

Earlier, right after the accident, a deputy had arrived at the scene, asked Henry a few questions, and then driven him into town to the sheriff's office and brusquely handed him over to the sheriff as though Henry were being taken into custody. Henry figured he must be in shock. He had considered giving the sheriff a false name when he began to fill out the report. The idea had come to him almost immediately when he stumbled from his car. He'd blindly hit the brakes after he struck the old man, desperately trying to see through the broken windshield as the car skidded off the road and slammed into something. He had pushed open the car door, heard pieces of the windshield crack and fall, felt his legs give way as he tried to stand. A small V-shaped cut on his forearm bubbled to his pulse; he put his hand over the cut and slumped down to the ground. He heard shouting and saw the guard herding the prisoners across the highway and back onto the blue bus; he heard the prisoners yelling, cursing, saw them waving their arms in protest. Only then did he see the man's body, all the blood. He retched and looked away.

Who are you?
Henry had heard in his head, the question somehow a threat, and he had begun to scroll through a list of names as though he were randomly calling the roll on the first day of classes at Ben Franklin: Louis Stieb, Arthur Ganucheau, Harry Tomeny, David Delery, Jerry Giorlando, Emile Broussard.

Emile Broussard.
No, that wasn't a real name. That was the father in the family that Henry and Mary had invented—that Mary had invented, actually. It was Mary who'd come up with it all on her own. Henry had simply agreed to play along.

He'd sat on the ground, felt the heat against his thighs and hands, the small trickle of blood beneath his fingers. He looked again at the man lying there, his body circled by the dark stain of his blood. A few cars had stopped; people rolled down their windows, stared. No one spoke to him, though. A crowd gathered on the side of the highway—men with sunburned faces and arms, a woman wearing a green scarf and sunglasses, her hands covering her mouth—but no one approached him. No one approached the dead man facedown on the road either. Maybe they thought Henry was dangerous; maybe they thought he had killed this man on purpose. But why didn't someone rush over to the dead man, kneel beside him, turn him over? Henry waited, trying to calm the shaking in his arms and legs. He took his hand away from the cut. It had already stopped bleeding.

Emile Broussard. Emile Broussard.
It was two years or so after their father had left them. Henry was seventeen, so Mary would have been fourteen, and their mother had begun spending all day every day in her bedroom, which soon became crowded with books and newspapers and magazines and paint-smeared cloths and an ashtray for her thin cigars, whichever canvas she was working on perched on a low easel by the bed—landscapes with fiery-red hills and trees bruised with purple-tinged leaves and clouds as dense and dark as smoke. A small gallery uptown sold his mother's paintings, most of which Henry found frightening, nightmares of color with titles that bore no apparent relation to what was depicted in the paintings—
Erica Controls the Weather, Waving at Trains, The Gatekeeper's Forgotten Garden, The Florentine's Leaves
—which somehow made them even more disconcerting.

The gallery owner, an Italian woman named Marianna Greco, would stop by the house sometimes when his mother finished a canvas or needed more supplies. Marianna usually arrived with a bottle of wine or champagne, and she and his mother talked for hours, Marianna laughing and cursing and recounting long stories that Henry could never follow. He had no idea who bought his mother's work or what they paid for it, though once, when Henry was still in high school, a man in a gray flannel suit had knocked on their door at home and asked to speak with the artist Jocelyn Garrett.

Henry had hesitated, surprised that anyone other than Marianna knew who his mother was. The man then held out a card with the name and address of some gallery in New York:
Maldich and Lietche,
it said in gold-embossed letters,
46 East Seventieth
Street.
Henry left the man in the front hall and took the card to his mother's bedroom. She looked at the card, frowned, and handed it back. “Tell him he needs to speak with Marianna, Henry,” she said. “Tell him I'm not here.”

“But you
are
here,” Henry said.

“Then tell him I'm not available,” she said.

“But he might be important,” Henry said. “He might be somebody it would be good for you to know.”

His mother put her hands on his shoulders. “I don't want to speak to him, honey,” she said as though she were merely trying to comfort Henry. “I just want to be left alone to paint.”

And Henry had looked at her for a few seconds and then said okay. He nodded and said that he understood. Then he walked back to the front of the house and told the man that his mother wasn't available just this moment, that he should please talk to Marianna Greco at her gallery. Henry shook the man's hand. He had tried to make his voice sound both professional and casual; he hoped that he'd conveyed that, although his mother was a bit shy and strange, there was nothing truly disturbing about her.

When the man left and Henry closed the door, he wondered again, as he'd wondered before, if it was somehow because of his mother, because of something she had said or done or simply because of who she was, that his father had decided to leave them. Who had been the crazy one? Maybe she'd told him to leave, told him she just wanted to be left alone, told him she was done with their marriage and from that moment forward just wanted to paint. Maybe she had somehow convinced him that it would be best for Mary and Henry not to know where he was going, or even why he had to go.

“You understand the problem?” he'd asked Amy after recounting what had happened. “I could never figure out which part of my life was the
most
fucked up. All of it was fucked up, I knew that. But it seemed important to clarify what the
worst
part was.”

A few months after his father left, shortly before his fifteenth birthday, Henry had come across an old photo album tucked beneath some books on a shelf in the living room. Paging through the album, he'd stared at each picture as if it might contain some kind of clue. There were black-and-white photos from his parents' honeymoon in Jackson, the two of them sitting side by side on a porch swing, looking like teenagers out on a date, their hands clasped together, fingers entwined. There were photos from his father's research trips, his father dressed in a seersucker suit and standing in front of old white clapboard churches next to ministers in red robes, Bibles clutched to their chests, and women in elaborate hats and matching dresses who smiled but also seemed to regard the camera with suspicion. He had no idea who took these pictures—his mother, maybe, if she'd been with him. One of the photos from a trip his parents had taken to New York showed them both at some crowded, smoky jazz club sitting with their arms around each other at a small table with people Henry had never met, all of them laughing and raising their glasses for the camera. These photographs seemed to depict the life of two strangers, of some couple Henry only vaguely recognized.

But his parents had always been, if not exactly affectionate with each other, then at least gentle and soft-spoken and kind; he didn't remember ever hearing them argue, didn't remember them talking about anything except art and literature and music, as if the real world didn't exist. Surely there had been other things that required their attention—bills and pediatrician appointments and parent-teacher conferences and their children squabbling or outgrowing their clothes—but Henry couldn't remember any of this. It was as if he and Mary had been merely angelic, mildly entertaining sprites who floated—vaguely, indecipherably—in their parents' midst. Why, then, hadn't his mother been enraged or despondent or even discernibly surprised when her husband, their father, had left? Why hadn't she been, like Henry and Mary, stricken with grief, reduced to a numb, staggering silence, as though their house had become shrouded in an impenetrable fog that they would be forced to wander through for the rest of their lives? Wouldn't she, if they had loved each other, if they had been happy, have done anything to find her husband? Wouldn't she—wouldn't anybody—have told them what had happened, how they were supposed to carry on with their lives? Wasn't what his mother had done as inexplicable, as unforgivable, as his father's leaving, even if he had betrayed her in some shameful, unspeakable, detestable manner?

How hard was it to list the possibilities? A murderer, bigamist, homosexual, drug addict, epileptic, amnesiac, con man, philanderer, incorrigible cad, compulsive gambler, Mob boss, hit man, foreign agent, a black man passing as white. And which of these would have been, in his mother's eyes, sufficiently worthy of shame? Which would have convinced her to declare, again and again, that he'd simply been some kind of helpless dreamer, a man carried off by the blues?

Henry knew, of course, that other people didn't live like this. He didn't know anyone whose father had simply disappeared; he didn't know anyone whose mother was an artist who shut herself off from the world, who spent days and days without getting dressed, who was content to eat bread and fruit and cheese and canned soup for dinner, who didn't watch television, didn't call on friends or seek any commerce with the world. Everything in his mother's bedroom had wound up covered with paint: her pillows and blankets and sheets, her nightstand and alarm clock and slippers, the carpet and closet doorknobs and drapes, the window sashes and windowpanes. When Henry complained about the mess, when he told her she needed to get out of the house and they really ought to clean her room, she had simply laughed; she said she liked being at home, liked working in the bedroom, liked that it had become her studio. “It's not dirty, honey,” she told him. “It's paint. It's pigment. It's all just light.” Having everything around her, living with her work, made her feel comfortable, she told him. It made her feel free. She was more than okay, she said. She was content.

And she
was
content, it seemed to Henry, more content than she'd been before his father left, when she had spent her days attending to his father's academic career, organizing his field notes, typing transcripts of his interviews, cataloging the recordings he made, proofreading drafts of the articles he wrote. She had lunch with his colleagues' wives, prepared dinners for his graduate students, accompanied him to lectures and concerts. In the midst of all this activity, she had seemed almost normal, though Henry had also sensed, as though it were a menacing villain standing just beyond the stage lights, poised to make an entrance, the presence of despair.

At night, his mother painted. She shut herself off in the spare room she had used as her studio, a room across the hall from where Henry slept. He would wake up sometimes before dawn and know that she was still working. He'd hear a brush clattering in a can of turpentine, the palette knife scraping again and again against the canvas as though she were erasing everything she'd just done. He'd hear her pacing back and forth, talking to herself; even under the covers, he could smell the oil paint and the turpentine and the smoke from her cigars. By the time morning arrived and he had to get up for school, she would be in bed, asleep next to his father, as though Henry had merely imagined her working through the night. He had wondered why his mother's painting seemed somehow furtive, a secret she did not want to share.