Carry the One (18 page)

Out of Illinois he headed up through southern Wisconsin, past the cheese curd shops, then, at Madison, caught Route 14 west toward Black Earth, which he had not visited since Carmen’s wedding. He remembered, with a surprising Technicolor vividness, driving out that day with Olivia, Willie Nelson on the tape deck as they passed through the already-fading green of high summer, looking out at the heat shimmering over the crop rows. As he took this road again through a different weather system, in a better car and a more serious frame of mind, he remembered something he had totally forgotten about the accident—that it had started out as a wonderful day.

Not too long after he passed Cross Plains, farm fields gave way to woods as he reached the spot. Surprisingly he didn’t need any markers. Some primitive part of his memory, some pigeon-like homing device knew how to find this exact place even though he had been totally stoned that night, even though that night was now a dozen years back. He pulled over to the side of the road, got out of the car, and walked toward the old oak—big that night, bigger now—that Olivia swerved into as she tried, too late, to get out of the girl’s way. There was no longer any sign of that maneuver, no scar remaining on the tree’s trunk. In nature, what happened here had healed over, filled in.

He stood absolutely still. Branches above him flickered with new leaves. He squatted as close as he could remember to where the girl lay twisted on the ground. He remembered Maude working so hard,
giving the girl mouth-to-mouth, then CPR, then listening for breath or heartbeat. While he and Olivia sat there as useless as Raggedy Ann and Andy.

He scooped up a handful of the soil, which was the same deep carbon black of the fields he’d been passing. When he stood up, he had no idea how long he’d been there.

Back in the car, he took a run out past the town to what used to be the co-op—long since taken back by the ordinary. The house still stood on its majestic rise, but was now painted an undistinguished, drab white. The multicolored barn where Alice had her studio was now back to red, and from what he could see, had been reclaimed for storage and livestock. From the road, he couldn’t see if the flower garden remained behind the house. He sat parked on the side of the road for too long. A state trooper drove past him, then stopped, but didn’t back up, just waited. Nick turned the key in the ignition, made a U-turn and headed into town. He stopped at a no-name bar, a cement-block shack with a neon
OLD MILWAUKEE
sign hanging in the small front window. A bar-fight bar. He had been in enough of these that he could smell blood without even opening the door. Inside, he asked around in a low-key way for Terry Redman, made up some bullshit about repairing his septic system, which got him directions to the house, on a dirt road not far from here, very close to where they hit the girl.

Then he found the house he was looking for, sided in a weary tan with bent, paint-flaked gutters—where the girl was most likely headed that night. There was a scrappy front lawn being idly dug up at the moment by a sluggish basset hound. Nothing here signaled pride of ownership; this was not a place that would prompt a glance backward when leaving it behind. A carport sheltered a small Toyota pickup, and four very old cars parked one behind the other on a semicircular dirt driveway. An ancient Falcon, a Pontiac Bonneville, a boxy convertible Packard, an early Mustang. As though a ghost party were going on inside.

The front door was open, so he knocked on the storm door glass.
No one inside heard him; the TV blasted out an old episode of
Roseanne
. He could hear Roseanne tell one of the kids, “Go ask your father … your real father.”

He pulled the door open slightly, the basset nudged by him into the living room. Nick poked his head inside.

“Hey in there,” he said, then listened. Creak of Naugahyde, heavy shuffle of feet, then the TV clicked off.

“What do you want?” An adolescent voice, followed up by a fat boy in T-shirt and sweatpants coming to the door. Security guard material. The girl’s brother. The kid who lived.

“Your folks home?”

“He’s around back.” The kid had mastered an absence of interest that was almost a vacuum. He pulled the door shut and disappeared back into the house. A click and the TV blasted back on.

Behind the house, Terry Redman rode a tractor hitched to a wide-blade mower, circling to cut down a meadow. Eventually he saw Nick and pulled up in front of him, but didn’t shut down the engine.

“Hey!” Nick shouted, then signaled “TALK?” Made a yakking sign with one hand. This got Redman to cut the ignition, leaving Nick awash in a thick, oily current of gasoline fumes. The guy was still the scrapper Nick remembered from the police station that night, now with the addition of a small paunch.

“You don’t remember me,” Nick said. He no longer had his pony-tail, now wore glasses for driving.

“No, I remember you, all right,” Terry Redman said. “I never forget a guy in a dress.” His face was composed of jutting jaw and brow, a knifelike nose, teeth that were stained in various shades of brown. A face forged in the fire of too much bad experience. Fights, lost jobs, accidents with machinery, domestic disputes.

“I don’t want to waste your time,” Nick said.

“You know, I’m not really interested in anything you’ve got to say, and Shanna—she’s not here.”

“I could wait.”

“That would be a problem. Right now, she lives a couple of states away.” He dismounted from the tractor and came to stand in front of Nick, a little too close. A well-like sourness seeped from his mouth, a plug of chewing tobacco made a slight bulge on his cheek.

“I’m just here to try and make amends is all,” Nick said. “I want you to know I haven’t put this behind me. That night sits inside me as if it were yesterday. Time passing doesn’t touch it.”

“Why would I care about that? What do you want from me? I hope you haven’t come around for some kind of bullshit forgiveness.”

“No, just that … I just want you to know that someone shares your sorrow. I think everyone needs to think there was something they could have done to make it different. Otherwise it’s all just chaos and flying crap hitting a flying fan. And I’m thinking maybe you’ve taken some of the blame on yourself, and I wanted to—”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Redman stepped forward as he said this and started flicking a really dirty fingernail sharply at the collar of Nick’s shirt.

“Just that, well, your daughter being out alone in the middle—”

“Look. I don’t know who you are now. Looks like you’ve cleaned yourself up a little. But back then you were a freak like your friends. We live a different kind of life out here. At three a.m., we don’t expect cars out on the road. Or if there is somebody, it’s somebody we know. Somebody who knows there are kids here, and kids can be up to anything, even in the middle of the night.”

Nick had more to say, but saw he wasn’t going to have a chance to say it. Terry Redman shot a fast brown glob out the side of his mouth; it splattered about an inch from the toes sticking out of Nick’s thick sandal. Spit hitting dirt was the last thing Nick heard before the snap of something coming loose in his head, and then there was only the fierce and sudden seizure of pain, the blistering red, then black.

When he came to, he was lying where he’d fallen; the left side of his face felt as though it had gotten in the way of something industrial. He saw a small puddle of vomit and a bloody tooth on the ground in front of him. It took him a moment of poking around with his tongue to understand this tooth had recently been secured in his mouth. He put it in his pocket. He touched his nose to see if he was going to once again need a new one, but this time it was still intact. Slowly, with several pauses for regrouping, he stood then walked around to the front of the house. It was quiet inside now, the pickup truck gone. All that was left were the ghost cars.

He stood in a whippy wind, watching a darkening sky, a spring storm fast approaching. He understood that by taking this, his second punch from Terry Redman, another extremely small adjustment, a minute recalibration had occurred in an as-yet-unsolved equation. This must have been what he came for.

in the corner, in the spotlight

“I hate her.” This was a new Gabe, one Carmen hadn’t seen before. Part of the new Gabe was about the old Gabe turning twelve. Another part was that first Rob, and now Heather, were living with them.

“I know she can be difficult.” Carmen was having a small talk with him. Yesterday he and Heather got into a bad fight. She teased him about something neither of them cared to disclose. In response, he slapped her hard enough to leave a bruise on one side of her face. This was unacceptable, of course, but also not a parenting issue she’d ever contemplated.

“I just hate her. I think her anorexia is boring. Her stupid punk style—also boring. She’s on the phone all night with her stupid friends. They talk about nothing. There are all sorts of weird little dishes of food pieces under everything, or between the sofa pillows, like there’s a squirrel in here storing up for the winter. This used to be our house. Now it’s just like Dad’s—crowded with other people all the time.”

When Carmen and Rob got married, Heather was living with her mother. Then, when she got down to ninety pounds Heather went into a residential program where they got her to examine her relationship to food, or whatever, and eventually she beefed up to 102, and
she was ready, according to the doctors and psychologists, to rejoin the regular world. But Rob didn’t want her going back to living with her crazy mother.

Carmen always took the supposed craziness of Rob’s ex, Louise, with a large grain of salt, given what people (herself included) will say about whoever they used to be married to. But then, at one of the family support meetings at ReNew, she finally met Louise (and the two not-quite-housebroken dogs she insisted on bringing with her), and it was case closed. No one, let alone a seventeen-year-old girl, should live in the same small apartment with her. Not to mention that Louise herself weighed maybe 103; funny Rob never mentioned that.

Clearly the better situation for Heather would be to live with her father and Carmen and Gabe. Theirs was the most stable situation available to her. When Carmen and Rob were looking for a new place, instead of moving, they painted Carmen’s rooms with more contemporary colors and bought some new furniture and established their own occupation of the house on Ravenswood. The neighborhood used to be a hodgepodge of dilapidated frame houses and low brick factories with vague industrial activities, and was farther west than anyone lived, anyone she knew. In the past few years, though, it had become fashionable. Architects had revamped the industrial buildings into studios, yuppies had bought the houses and renovated them with narrow-board siding and Victorian gingerbread trim. All she had to do to become hip was stay put and get the right siding. Sort of how staying in exactly the same position politically had moved her from liberal to radical. She had left the moving to others.

But the house was small and they had to move Heather into the room Gabe had been using as his art studio, so of course he hated her from the start.

“I know, I know, it’s not the best situation for you. Just maybe look at it this way, that we are helping her stay alive. Alive and out of the asylum.”

He didn’t answer, just looked at the ground and made the little
buzzing sound he made when Heather wasn’t around. This was about the bee she had tattooed above her eyebrow, which had tiny motion marks on either side of it.

Carmen believed they were doing the right thing taking Heather in. But she also saw how Gabe legitimately felt displaced, and she didn’t like putting anyone’s well-being over his.

She talked to Rob. His idea of how to fix the problem was completely crackpot. The four of them were going on a trip to Alaska as soon as the kids were out of school for the summer.

“Trust me on this,” he said, standing in his underwear, looking critically at his profile in the mirror on the closet door. He patted his flat stomach. “The baptism-by-fire method. We all go together to someplace wild and unknown to any of us. Someplace where we can heave and ho together, fall on each other, form a bond. It’s a management trick. A variant of the corporate retreat.”

Both kids rejected the idea out of hand, then were told the trip wasn’t optional. A lot of complaining (Gabe) and silence (Heather) followed, but one day at the end of June they took Walter over to Gracie’s house (a mutual dog-sitting arrangement), then headed for O’Hare.

“Man, this is an amazingly long trip,” Carmen said as they ran through the Minneapolis airport to make their connecting flight.

“You were looking at that map and forgetting Alaska’s drawn in there as an inset,” Gabe explained. “It’s actually way over by Russia.”

When they got off the plane in Fairbanks, it was bright and sunny and nine p.m. They picked up a rental car and drove to a hotel they picked out of a travel guide, an old lodge for mining executives.

“That would have been quite a while ago,” Carmen said as they pulled up in front of a scattering of maybe historic, but definitely collapsing, cabins. A pair of teenagers checked them in, a boy and a girl. They were sharing a fork and a Tupperware container of macaroni salad. The next morning, when Rob checked them out, the same couple figured up their bill.

“I think they killed the real owners,” Gabe said.

Heather smiled very slightly. She was in the backseat with Carmen, eating miniscule pieces she broke off an energy bar. Part of her recovery was eating frequently. This had turned out to be eating energy bars in this labor-intensive way.

They drove south through the morning to a huge national park where they waited for a school bus that would take them six hours into the park to a nature lodge. None of them had much interest in nature. They were urban creatures. Out the windows of the bus they saw elk and rabbits. In the distance a bear prowled in a circle. He had killed a cub—one of his own—to eat, and was guarding his food. This was upsetting to the guide driving the bus. It was deviant behavior among bears, killing their own young.