Electric City: A Novel (29 page)

Woven into the electrostatic ribbon, someone was playing piano in the next room or maybe another apartment, practicing “Für Elise” the way Simon used to all those years ago when their parents made him take lessons. Piano for him and ballet for her, though neither of them stayed with it. Hearing those familiar faint notes in the background on Martin’s tape, she felt their old childhood worlds were blended again, at least for a while.

“It’s just another September up here, Sophie. One of those perfect fall mornings that’s like someone warning you not to miss out on the light because it’s about to disappear for a while.”

The piano player paused on the other side of a thin wall. Martin swallowed from his glass.

“The neighbor’s cat left a dead mouse on my doorstep late last night, ears and tail quite delicately chewed off, and I’m trying to figure out
what it means. An offering, maybe. Some cat wanting me to know he’s ready to make friends.”

He laughed, a soft sound.

“This cassette is my offering to you, Sophie. A voice in your ear so you won’t forget me.”

“How could I forget you?” she said back to the tape player.
Anything but that.

“Für Elise” started over again imperfectly, keyboard notes under some stranger’s fingertips, someone who lived audibly close to Martin in a nameless city in Ontario or Quebec, a place kept secret from her. She was grateful anyway, telling herself that not knowing meant extra safety for Martin, protection from jail, or worse: from war. She’d rather he stayed in Canada for good if it meant he didn’t have to kill anyone, or get killed himself.

“You know why there’s no return address on this, right?” he whispered at the end.

There was a bittersweet melody in his long-distance voice, a song she wanted to memorize. And then the tape hissed into her ear, empty of voice and piano, full of magnetic dust.

Much of the time she couldn’t differentiate between losing Henry to death or losing Martin to the northern lights. On Friday nights with her parents, Sophie prayed aloud to the holy god of her ancestors; silently, she prayed for help from the dead left in Europe, the ones who
didn’t
make it out alive.

Although her first year at Union College had begun, she was still living at home, struggling to keep her gaze on the future. Simon’s choice
of cross-country distance seemed impossible to consider. Union’s eight-year program would relay her straight through college and into medical school, relieving her of the decision-making that paralyzed her in advance. Instead of a shimmering uncertainty, Sophie could yield to the river closest to home, the one already in motion.

T
HAT
S
EPTEMBER
1967 audiotape from Martin was the only one he ever sent, even though he had intended for it to be the first of many. Every time he sat down in the blank-walled kitchen with the coiling microphone cord attached to a new cassette player, his mouth wouldn’t open. Hopelessness caught in his chest and tightened his jaw, convincing him he had no right to whisper into Sophie’s ear. Not with all those miles between them, not without anything palpable to share. If he couldn’t hold on, he was supposed to let go.

He imagined Annie saying, “You can’t be the tree trunk for anyone until you can be your own.”

By October he had found a job with the phone company, climbing telephone poles all day and listening to the wires humming, subtle messages being sent back and forth, faster than thoughts. On a Saturday morning in early November he struck up a conversation at a truck stop diner with a woman named Lucy Justine, whose weathered face and chapped hands reminded him of nobody.

He found out that she’d been living for a dozen years in a remote cabin where she raised huskies and trained them for sled-dog races, pulling teams hitched to her pickup on the snow-covered back roads of Northern Ontario. Each of them seemed surprised to be willing to talk about themselves at all, a pair of hermits looking into the wary eyes of a
mirror. They’d ordered the same meal, cheese omelet with hash browns and toast, black coffee and bacon on the side.

In the diner’s parking lot, when her truck wouldn’t start, Martin in his Ma Bell 4x4 came to her rescue, and surprised them both a second time by following her home on a black-iced road. He found himself invited into a bed that she admitted hadn’t held a man in years. She didn’t apologize for the indoor outhouse-style toilet or the fact that she hauled her water supply once a week in her pickup.

He was confused to see that Lucy Justine’s dogs slept outside the house, in sheds she had built herself.

“They’re animals and I’m not,” she explained, utterly serious. “Other people have pets, but I’m not other people.”

Martin didn’t bother trying to describe what his life with Bear had been like. In the morning, he watched her train her best team of blue-eyed dogs, seeing that she used a vocabulary of tasks and skills, never playing favorites, never being overtly affectionate. Nothing like the way Bear had anticipated his every move, always awake when Martin opened his eyes in the morning, happy to be alive and in each other’s company.

Bear had stayed behind in Electric City with Martin’s grandmother, a separation as brutal and necessary as saying goodbye to Sophie. Now twenty years old, Martin had begun imagining this was what his own father had done, staying gone one year at a time, practicing solitude as a kind of penance for being alive. The idea of being motivated by so much guilt made Martin furious as well as mystified, but even if he could have asked Robert if any of it was true, Annie would have shaken her bony fist at him.

“You don’t need to ask favors from the ones gone missing,” she had told him. “They do what they please.”

He hoped that his father had reconciled with loss more completely than his son had been able to. After a while, the ghost of Martine must have drifted away like smoke, leaving no residue at all.

With minimal discussion, Martin and Lucy agreed he could move in for the winter. They joked it was a way to cash in on body heat, reduce her need for cord after cord of firewood to make it through the longest nights.

Trudging deep into the snow wearing thigh-high boots, Lucy used a rifle for target practice with a row of old beer bottles. She tramped through the drifts to shovel snow off the woodshed, propped a row of new green-glass targets. She loaned Martin a gun to use too, but it never felt quite comfortable in his arms.

“You could improve a lot more if you cared to,” Lucy pointed out.

“I know,” Martin said. It was the one-year anniversary of Henry’s death, and once again Sophie’s birthday. He was farther than ever now, beyond a mountain range of pines.

The truth was Lucy had always preferred to live alone with the huskies outside and the open space all around; the time she spent with Martin was an experiment. Exactly four months from the day of his moving in, she told him the whole thing wasn’t right for her after all. She just wanted the dogs for company, she said. She knew their language best.

Martin tucked his long braid under the collar of his coat, gave her a rough hug that in his mind translated into something like mutual relief.
He would probably miss the rasp of her voice calling commands to the huskies, her whistles and shouts. He would miss watching their speed and grace. But he was content to see for all of them that parting was so effortless.

From that spring onward, he took to wearing his braid inside his shirt, the flannel collar resting just where the braid began at the nape of his neck. It was a reminder that he preferred to keep himself to himself, not giving anyone else the right to see his private body. For some reason this felt similar to the way he had reclaimed his left-handedness after so many teachers had tried forcing him to use his right.

“You’ll be thankful later on,” they insisted, but his right hand said
No
and his left took back the pencil with simple defiance, because it knew better.
There is no point
, he had said to himself, relaxing his tormented right hand and feeling the blood come back reluctantly into his tense fingers. When he told her about it, his grandmother had nodded and said nothing, just took both of his hands and folded them into her own, brown to brown, strong and tender.

Things Martin kept with him:

One blue-inked sketch of Sophie and Henry, from that Lake George weekend out of time.

A strand of knotted gray rope he used as a toy when Bear was a puppy. Coiled into a fist-sized shape and no longer used for anything except remembering.

A Blackstone cigar box that once belonged to Steinmetz, with its time capsule of aromas: spicy, ashy, sour, and sweet.

The memory of the “anonymous” American GI on the radio explaining: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

His handmade canvas bag, torn and repaired over and over. Martin’s own scent woven into its fibers. The smooth leather tobacco pouch, always.

His molecular history, not visible to the eye.

A
FTER NEARLY TWO
years of construction, a new bridge appeared on the Mohawk River. One day everyone crossed the river using the old bridge, and the next time they crossed there was a slightly confusing diversion around some traffic signs, a battered orange plastic cone or two, and they were on the new bridge, with the same old river down below.

The sounds were different: Sophie sensed someone had adjusted the dial on the radio station or turned the volume way up. The wooden slats and metal roadway had been replaced by asphalt over concrete and steel. They played a new tune now, car after car, trucks and buses and delivery vans. She wondered if the pigeons and ducks noticed. Maybe the slow-moving fish gliding silently through the shadows cast by the steel trusses and the wires—maybe all of them were listening. Maybe not.