Carry the One (5 page)

Alice didn’t talk about these paintings because everyone seemed to be done talking about the accident. For Alice, a low, yellow-gray cloud had formed, obscuring the movement of responsibility being pushed around, sorted into amorphous parcels. Her parcel: Why had she even gotten into the car in the first place, and once there, seeing how fuckedup
Nick and Olivia were, why had she stayed in the backseat, not for a moment thinking to offer herself up as a more reasonable driver? Just because she wanted to keep making out with Maude? Now when she dragged out the scales of conscience, her desire, she could see, was a feather; Casey Redman’s life a rock. A rock as big as a mountain. A mountain made of lead.

Alice never had a day she didn’t think about the girl. Everybody, she figured, had to coat the grain of sand in his or her own way. Making these paintings was hers. How the others managed their own unwieldy burdens she didn’t know. How the girl’s parents bore the loss of her, she couldn’t even get close to thinking about.

She knew Carmen tortured herself for letting them all leave the farm that night in a car running with just fog lamps. She knew it was too late, and that they were too tired, too stoned, too goofed-up on sex, a perfect confluence of weak elements that only needed the addition of a stray child to coalesce into tragedy. And so Alice was certain that once Carmen understood the nature of the paintings, she would pause for a moment inside her hesitation, then turn and come back and they would all be released back into the present, into the slow forward motion of their lives.

Carmen checked her watch.

“We’ve got to get going. I need to get some dinner together. Then I’m meeting Jean at Broadway and Belmont.” She pulled from her carry all a handful of buttons printed with
TAKE BACK THE NIGHT
. There was a march tonight, which Alice had totally forgotten. Carmen was on the board of this group, which promoted a safer urban environment for women, and taught heightened awareness in risky situations along with self-defense tactics. Another of Carmen’s undeniably worthy missions. Almost everyone Alice knew had a story of being squeezed into a dangerous or just too-weird situation at the hands of the creep in the shadowy parking garage, the cab driver who suddenly veered off the expected route, or (this from her straight friends) the
guy who seemed okay in the bar, then, once in his apartment, set about chaining you to his radiator.

Carmen came to this cause already burdened with a close-up view of the dark side of male/female—and some times female/female—interaction. Her job at the women’s shelter had exposed her to all the soft spots where the fist or belt had landed. The stories dragged in by these women were harrowing. She told them to Alice; sometimes Alice could hardly listen. One woman walked in with a number of her recently dislodged teeth rattling around in her pocket. Another had a face that, when looked at straight on was okay, but from the side, had no profile; it had been punched flat. From close contact with these women, Carmen herself had acquired a bleaker gaze, a twitchy pulse at the hinge of her jaw.

Her presence at marches and demos worried Alice a little, but there was really nothing she could say. Getting in the way of what was wrong or wicked or unjust in the world was pretty much Carmen’s main point. She was in firm solidarity with the oppressed and downtrodden. She still hoped America was on its way to becoming a socialist state with homes and health care and higher education for everyone. She saw Communism as a flawed but fascinating social experiment. In college she went on cultural visas to Cuba and Russia. She made a game try at learning Russian out of an old textbook that primarily gave her a stockpile of useless phrases like “I love to smoke cigarettes at the factory.”

Carmen was Clark Kent, traveling incognito as a social worker and middle-class mother, but always with cheese crackers and a bail card in her purse, ready to spring into action. Because of all this, Carmen was the most important person Alice knew.

A riptide of guilt tugged Alice down. She should take one of the buttons and go along with Carmen and Jean. Although Carmen wasn’t pressing (she wouldn’t), Alice knew her presence would be appreciated to fill out the ranks. But she also knew from a flickering look Maude gave her a few minutes earlier, and a quick glance of knuckles across
nipple (Maude’s knuckles, Alice’s nipple) in the kitchen earlier when they were getting the Cokes, that if she backgrounded the issue of women’s safety, and stayed here after Carmen and Gabe left, she could spend the stretched end of this Saturday naked with Maude. And the thing was, she didn’t know how many of these Saturdays they had left.

That night Maude pushed Alice home in a grocery cart full of still-warm, clean clothes. Although Alice lived in a former laundry, she nonetheless had to take her clothes to a laundromat. Maude would bring her stuff over and they’d make a night of it. They found the cart in their alley months ago. One would push the other on the way over to the laundromat, the other pushed on the way home. There was a terrible bar next door. A windowless den sour with old beer, sweet with urine and disinfectant, its clientele mainly retirees with hospital hair, pressed flat to the backs of their heads from lying down through the hours they weren’t in the bar. Alice and Maude grabbed a booth near the front in case a stumbly fight broke out, which happened often enough. They had a couple of beers interrupted by runs to add fabric softener and throw the clothes in the dryer. They talked about everything and nothing, questioned each other with a casual invasiveness, assassins trying to learn everything essential about their victim before the kill.

And then they headed home. This particular night, sunk in clean clothes that smelled like synthetic flowers, the night air whooshing lightly over her face, a low buzz inside her head from the beers, Alice understood that what they had—this amalgam of passion and chatter and tearing their way inside each other—was defined by its transience. This was the thing that wouldn’t last. Losing Maude would be Alice’s punishment. All of her present with Maude was made excruciatingly valuable in this way, for being tinted with the sure sorrow held by the future. The pure, acidic penance she had earned.

As they passed the old guy bar, the pay phone in its doorway began to ring, and Alice had a brief, illogical moment of certainty that the call was for her.

general relativity

The phone had been ringing for maybe five minutes. No one but Nick appeared to hear it. No one made a move to answer. Incoming calls were tricky for the Lisowskis. Most likely the caller was a dunning bill collector. Olivia’s family was an epicenter of credit card frivolity. They were also, at the moment, distracted by a Packers game on the TV in the paneled den. Olivia’s brothers—both of them sanitation workers for the township, single and still living at home as they glided through their twenties—were perched on the front edges of, respectively, the sofa and the BarcaLounger. They had bright yellow dishtowels in their back pockets; whenever they spotted bad behavior on the part of the opposing team, they leapt up to throw down penalty flags on the play.

“Fun in Wisconsin” was the category Nick had come up with to cover this sort of activity. Fun in Wisconsin was also the old car the townspeople parked out on the ice of the lake in winter, then took bets on the date in spring when it would fall through. There was even more fun to be had in Wisconsin, activities Nick had so far successfully avoided—Friday fish fries, a card game called Sheepshead. Nick liked to say—but not to Olivia or her family, of course—that Wisconsin was an argument for Einstein’s general relativity theory, for there being masses so dense
they caused depressions in the space-time fabric, places where the fabric warped. He knew he was being a snob, but it was a private snobbery—his fun in Wisconsin. He realized some people had fun in Illinois.

He spent more time with Olivia’s family than he would have expected. This time he came up to spend last night at Yerkes, the University of Chicago’s crumbling observatory near Lake Geneva. He and his old professor, Bernie Cato, sometimes got together to talk shop—their shop being all of creation. Then, if the sky was clear, as it was last night, they got on the platform and raised it, opened the roof and spent some time searching for supernovas, puzzling out the gorgeous, operatic deaths of stars.

This morning, he had headed over to the Lisowskis’. He could have just driven straight to the prison, but he usually stopped here first, then rode the rest of the way up with them. He had never known the family under ordinary circumstances. The first time he met them was at Olivia’s sentencing.

“Time to go, boys,” Olivia’s mother said, clicking off the TV. The brothers went sullen, but rose and hovered out to find their jackets.

In the visitors’ room, the brothers whiled away the dead time doing Travis Bickle impersonations at each other. They loved
Taxi Driver
. They had the collector’s edition of the tape, with special features and outtakes.

“You talkin’ to me?”

“You talkin’ to me?”

And then Olivia entered from beyond a heavily painted metal door. She had changed in prison, but it wasn’t really prison that had changed her. She was whittling herself out of hardwood, remaking herself with only planes and edges. She looked more severe, more adult. She had lost that breathy way of speaking he used to think was sexy; that was gone. She had used her time inside to reformulate herself in opposition to the person she used to be—that is, someone who would smoke a day’s worth of hash, then eat some mushrooms, then do a little coke to balance off,
then get behind the wheel of a car and kill a kid. She took a dim view of this person. Nick envied her. Prison was forcing her to atone. And eventually she would be released.

She’d been in almost two years now, and was going to be in for a while longer. She most likely would have been out by now if the matter had gone to trial. But she went down for the whole mess, pleaded guilty to all of it. She wanted to pay, not just for her crimes, but also for her sins. At this point, she was not in for the reckless driving or the drugs; she was in for the undelivered mail in the trunk, a federal offense.

The extreme order of prison life seemed to calm her. She worked breakfast and lunch in the cafeteria. She mixed vats of powdered eggs and water; ladled canned peach halves into tiny, battered, plastic dishes; slapped slices of bologna between slices of white bread. There were nearly three hundred inmates, so there was a lot of mixing and ladling and slapping to be done every day.

She shared a cell with a huge woman named Freddi, told Nick, “You definitely want her in the bottom bunk.” Freddi was nearing the end of a stiff sentence for armed robbery; she had been inside prison walls more than half her life. The two of them were enrolled in the prison’s cosmetology program. When she got out, though, Freddi said she would probably bypass the beauty service industry and just go back into armed robbery, which was more rewarding financially and didn’t involve toxic substances, unless you counted guns. Olivia, on the other hand, had surprised herself by taking to the business of hair, and hoped to have her license by the time she got out. The cosmetology instructor said Olivia had real talent technically, but a terrible chair-side manner. She told her nobody wants her hair done by some broody, glowering vulture.

“We’ll see about that,” Olivia said to Nick.

Her own hair, which used to spill down her back, she now wore in a crew cut. Nick understood this was a statement, but he wasn’t sure what the statement was. It was weird; this revised version of Olivia wasn’t anyone he would stop to talk to on the street and yet she was the
person he most wanted to be with. This had to do with confinement. She would circumscribe him. She would be his soft, gray prison. In return he would take care of her. He owed her that.

He could not bring himself to tell her he saw the girl before she did. He could have shouted, or pulled the steering wheel around to get the car out of her way. But the thing was he thought the girl was magical, a talisman of something, maybe. One of the small surprises that come your way when you’re high.

He could have changed everything. How could he tell her that? So he just sat with this sickening piece of information, replayed it on an endless loop. Then he imagined another version where he reached for the wheel just in time and took the car over the shoulder, into the ditch. Everyone in the car was banged up a little, Maude had a sprained ankle, Tom got a good-sized gash on his head. But the girl kept running into the long rest of her life.

Olivia did not share his vision of the two of them together. Not yet anyway. She accepted these visits, but that was about as far as it went. He didn’t take this personally; she didn’t show much interest in her family either. She had made a retreat from the world outside, and prison was her monastery. She had, of course, found religion, a jailhouse brand that was all about scripture quotes and photocopied screeds and a God generous with forgiveness and second chances.

She had given Nick a few of these tracts, also a picture of herself, taken by Freddi. He kept this in his wallet. The inmates here wore denim shirts, so there was no uniform to give away her location. She might be relaxing at home, if her home had cement block walls. In the photo she is not smiling. Nick would say her expression in this picture was “reflective.” Like she was thinking about something important and still needed to think about it a little more.

“You have such dark circles under your eyes, it worries me,” Olivia’s mother told her. She was a worn-down woman. Her shoulders were like a wire hanger off which her dress hung. Her face was the face
of someone a few hundred miles west of here, and fifty years back. Her daughter’s imprisonment, you got the feeling, was only her latest bridge to cross.

The goofy brothers were silent. They almost never came up with anything to say to their sister on these visits. At first Nick thought they were ashamed of her, but over time he had come to see it was exactly the reverse. Her father was long gone, wherever. No one even mentioned him; her brothers underachieved in a reliable way. By doing something dramatic enough to land herself in prison, Olivia had earned the top spot. She was the most important person in the family.