Mary Coin (18 page)

27.

H
e is back in San Francisco, correcting papers at the university, when Lisette calls. Alice has been suspended from school.

“They found pills in her locker,” she says.

“Pills? What are you talking about? What kind?”

“The bad kind, Walker. Vicodin. Oxy.”

“Did you know?”

“Fuck you, Walker.”

He takes a breath. “Where is she now?”

“Here. Grounded. For the rest of her life. Except for parent-escorted trips to rehab.”

“Rehab?” Too much information is coming at him.

“Yes. Rehab. Every day. School rules, if she wants to be readmitted. If she wants to get a high school diploma and have a chance at a life.”

He’s still trying to bridge the distance between what he thought was happening in his life and what is actually occurring. “Isn’t that a little extreme?”

“Wake up, Walker,” she says, fighting with the emotions that are thickening in her throat. “Your daughter is popping pills.”

He drives to Petaluma that evening. When Lisette answers the door, she looks shrunken. She seems to have exhausted all energy for facial expressions. She points up the stairs then disappears into the back of the house.

Walker tries to open Alice’s door but finds it locked. He leans his forehead against the frame. “Let me in, honey,” he says.

After a few moments, she opens the door. Without greeting him, she turns and goes back to her bed. She lies down and stares at the ceiling. He starts to summon the energy to be jolly and enthusiastic, to prove to her that his love will not diminish no matter what she has done, but he can’t.

“You messed up,” he says, sitting on the edge of her bed.

“Thank you for stating the obvious,” she says.

“Why were you taking that stuff?”

“Really, Dad? Are you going to be like my therapist now?”

“I’m going to be like your father. What’s going on with you?”

“I was stupid. I got caught.”

“Getting caught is the least of your problems.”

“I know that. Don’t you think I know that? Do you think I’m an idiot?”

He tries to figure out what comes next. “Look,” he says. “We’ll get you help. You’ll go to this rehab.”

“I’m not a drug addict. I just took some pills.”

I smoked but I didn’t inhale. She is too young for the reference, and sarcasm will get him nowhere with her. “So what’s your plan?” he says.

“I don’t have a plan. I got kicked out of school. I guess I’ll have a stimulating career in fast food.”

Her attitude creates havoc in him. “You can be a snob about the people who work at Burger King, but the fact is most of them are high school graduates.”

“Is this your idea of a pep talk?”

“I’m not here to give you a pep talk, Alice.”

“Why are you here, then?”

They are both quiet.

“Can I ask you a question?” he says.

“Free country.”

“What kind of person do you want to be?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that at a certain point you have to decide who you want to be. You either want to be the person who is getting high all the time or you don’t.”

“Well, I guess I want to be the person who gets high all the time.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“So tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“Tell me some things about you. Tell me who you are.”

Alice sits up. She is crying. “How am I supposed to know that?” she says. “You act like it’s so easy. Like pick one from column A and one from column B and then, presto chango, you are this perfect person who everybody loves and who is pretty and smart and is going to go to a good college and have this perfect life . . .”

“Oh, Alice.” He reaches for her, but she pulls back.

“I fucked up, okay? I fucked up. Tell me how bad I am. Tell me how I have disappointed you and Mom. Tell me whatever the fuck you want to tell me and then
please
get the fuck out of my room.”

•   •   •

H
e spends the night on the couch in Lisette and Harry’s living room. He turns on the television, muting the sound so that he doesn’t bother anyone. A late-night talk show is playing. He has no idea who the celebrity is, but she laughs and preens and waves and yanks down her too-short dress as the host teases and cajoles and pretends to flirt, or really flirts. The condition of watching the talk show is that you must accept that what is false is real and that what is real is false. Either Alice is a drug addict or Alice is not a drug addict, but the condition of being her parent is that he must accept that he can never be sure what is truth and what is the opposite of truth. All that he is certain of is that he has not provided her with whatever she needs. What is she missing? Security? Love? Or is it that he has not adequately shared himself with her and so denied her the firm foundation of history that anyone needs in order to say, “This is who I am”?

It is not so different for him. His history is lopsided. He can trace the Dodge lineage back, but what about the missing quarter of his heritage? The story has always been that George’s mother died in childbirth. Either this is true or it is not. And if it is false, then it is also true, since the woman was erased from the family history as if she never existed. Not in a name, not in a piece of heirloom jewelry, not in a photograph of happier days. Mary Coin’s face comes to him. Her skin baked and etched by the sun. Her thin lips gripped against—what? Eyes looking off toward—what?
You know, that picture of the woman and her children in the Depression.
It’s all you have to say and people’s faces open in recognition. They nod, a hundred suppositions falling into place about a woman they think they know.

You look but you don’t see. It’s what he’s told his students hundreds of times over the years. You have to see past looking.

Isaac comes downstairs, barefoot but otherwise fully dressed.

“Do you sleep in your clothes now?”

Isaac smiles, sweetly embarrassed. “It’s faster in the morning.”

“You’re ready to make a clean getaway.” Walker is joking but he realizes that there might be some truth to this. He pats the couch beside him, and Isaac sits down.

“What will happen to Alice?” Isaac says.

“We’ll figure things out.”

“How will you figure things out?”

Walker looks at his son’s earnest expression and comes clean. “I don’t know.”

“Maybe it’s my fault,” Isaac says.

“You didn’t put the pills in her locker.”

“She says things, and I get upset, and then Mom yells at her for saying mean things to me, and then Alice goes and does shit—I mean stuff. Sorry.”

Walker puts his arm around Isaac. “It’s not your fault.”

“I just wish . . .” Isaac says, but he doesn’t finish.

“What do you wish?”

“I don’t know.”

They watch the silent hilarity on the television. Isaac hunches, his shoulders turning in as if he wants to fold up. His sense of his insignificance is palpable. The storm of his sister rages around him, and there is nothing he can do to stop it or flee its path.

“Hey,” Walker says. “What new apps have you invented lately?”

“Do you even know what an app is, Dad?”

“Yes I know what an app is. What do you take me for?”

“A Luddite.”

“Good word. Although it sounds like an insult coming from you.”

Isaac smiles down at his lap, shy and proud.

“I could use your help with all this computer stuff, actually,” Walker says.

“How?”

“Do you think you can find anybody online?”

“Sure.”

“Even if they’re not famous?”

“You can find anybody,” Isaac says, the devilish gleam of a proto-hacker in his eye. “You just have to know where to look.”

28.

E
mpire, California. Another town. When Walker arrives in a new place, he knows without ever having been there how it will be laid out. Historically, certain areas, often the north or the west sides, were typically the wealthiest, and if any remnants of architectural grandeur remain, this is where they will be. Whether there are actual train tracks or not, there is always the other side of something—a river, a gully, a dump—some division that allows a town to organize itself along class lines so that people know where they belong. Things are less insidious now than they were fifty or a hundred years ago, but the psychic territories remain.

Although there is sometimes a modestly refurbished old hotel in towns such as this one—a Mission Inn or a Pacific Arms—Walker always chooses whatever version of a Motel 6 lies off the highway. He likes the practical sterility of these places, the way the rooms seem to float in and out of time, bare stages on which scenes appear and then evaporate daily. It is June now, and the heat of the Central Valley has settled in for the duration of the summer. His room is dark. He forgoes the overhead fluorescents and turns on the bedside lamp. Somehow, the stucco-ceilinged room looks more correct in a tawdry weak light, as if shadows and obscurity are the natural characteristics that allow for what takes place in motel rooms. He phones the rest home, learns that visiting hours begin at four o’clock.

He reminds himself that a newspaper article and a name on a payroll do not add up to much and certainly not a fanciful notion that he has allowed to blossom into a full-fledged idea just shy of fact: that somehow Mary Coin’s connection to his family is intimate, that an article secreted between the pages of a poetry book signifies a buried emotion and that Walker’s father’s ambivalence about his position at the head of the Dodge clan, and his final wish to be burned, all add up to the answer to a question that was never allowed to be asked. Isaac’s computer searches turned up the names of Mary Coin’s children, all but one of whom are dead.

The nursing home is a beige, single-story building that, to judge from the small figure-eight planter that still bears the iron structure of a nonexistent diving board, must have once been a motel. Despite the season, the lobby is heated; the smells of industrial cleaners and food hang in the viscid air.

“I don’t have you down for a visit,” the woman behind the front desk says. She wears a scrub top printed with teddy bears. Her fingernails are long and elaborately lacquered with flowers. The manicure alone suggests the nature of the place. There is no medical heavy lifting here. This is where people wait for the end.

“I was put through to Mr. Coin a couple of times, but he hung up.”

She laughs. “James is not a big talker.”

“I’d really like to have a chance to meet him.”

She looks skeptical. “We don’t like to upset our clients.”

“I think Mr. Coin’s family and mine might be connected in some way.”

“He’s got Medi-Cal,” she says suspiciously.

“It’s not like that. I’m not after money.”

She looks down at her desk and shuffles some papers, signaling that she is done with the conversation.

“When is the last time he had a visitor?” Walker says.

She makes a show of looking through the appointment book, then gives up the charade. “You’re the first.”

James Coin is wheeled into the common room by a tattooed orderly whose shaved head shines. He bends over the chair and speaks softly to James, then hands him a small object that looks like a garage door opener. “You press this if you need me, Mr. James. I’ll come for you fast.”

James is thin. More than thin. His clothes hang limply as if there is no actual body beneath them. The angular contours of his knee bones press against the material of his slacks. His skin is waxy and liver-spotted, his fingers curl against his palms. Surprisingly, he has a full head of hair, the leached color blond goes to with age. He does not look at Walker but instead stares at the blank wall opposite, and Walker cannot be sure the old man is aware of him.

He is not certain how to begin. In his work his conversation is strictly with the dead. Someone turns up the television and then quickly adjusts the volume. Walker reacts to the sound, but the old man does not. Maybe he is deaf, Walker thinks, but then remembers that the orderly spoke to him.

“My name is Walker Dodge,” he begins, speaking too loudly. He looks for a sign of recognition, sees none. Of course, James would have been a little boy when his mother worked the oranges and he would no more recognize the name than those of the many other farms where she must have found employment during that time. Walker realizes, too, that if the name does register with the old man, it would certainly not elicit the heart-quickening reaction that Walker felt sitting in that chilled basement among his family records. Rather, the connection between James’s family and his own would stir troubling memories. James moves his mouth as if he is about to say something but he is just worrying his gums. Walker reaches into his briefcase and takes out the photograph he’s printed off the Internet. He touches James’s shoulder lightly. James looks at him, and then his gaze falls on the picture. This is the first indication of interest he has shown, but Walker cannot tell what the man feels. When James looks away, Walker senses he has done something terribly aggressive, as if the photograph were one of maimed bodies rather than this man’s mother and his siblings. He turns the picture over and lets it rest on his lap. He explains his story, tells James about the article in the poetry book, about the coincidence of finding Mary Coin’s name in the work rolls, about the tiny suspicion that he knows is absurd but that he cannot banish: that Mary Coin was important to his grandfather in some particular way. The man’s silence makes Walker feel as if he is on a disastrous first date and he says more than he intends. He talks about his difficult experience with his father, about George’s death. Occasionally he stops talking, waiting to see if James will give him some sign that any of this information registers. James says nothing. Still, there is something about the man’s silence that feels attentive, as if the quiet is a manner of being and not the result of a deteriorating mind. And for reasons Walker cannot explain, he feels drawn to James, who looks to be only a few years older than Walker’s father was. The two men grew up experiencing the same history but from opposite sides of fate.

Walker glances around the room. A few plastic tables and chairs. Generic floral paintings hanging on the walls. A box of toys for visiting grandchildren. When George became ill, Walker’s sisters wanted to move him to an assisted-living facility. They chose one and sent Walker the brochure. The home was a mock-Georgian manor sitting on acres of land. Welcoming outdoor furniture and games were set up on the evenly cut grass as if the residents were in the habit of taking afternoon strolls and challenging one another to games of lawn bowling. George took one look at the brochure and refused to waste the money.

“My father never knew his mother,” Walker says. He thinks of his children, of Alice. “It’s a terrible thing not to know your parent.”

The orderly appears. Walker realizes James has signaled that he wants to be taken back to his room or some other safe place where he will not be attacked by the past or by a deranged college professor who has invented a false history to fill some maw in his life.

“I’m sorry,” Walker says to the orderly. “Maybe I tired him out.”

The orderly puts a hand on the old man’s back. “We’ll take a rest now, Mr. James.” He unlocks the wheels of the chair, turns it around, and rolls James out of the room.

Walker drives back to his motel, feeling disconsolate. He was optimistic when he thought he might stay the night, that James Coin might have important things to share and that Walker would speak with him a second time, maybe even make arrangements for further visits. He gathers his bag and goes to the front desk to check out. Upset about the bungled meeting and the possible harm that he inflicted on a sick old man, he takes a sheet of university stationery out of his briefcase and writes James a thank-you and an apology. He has no way of knowing if tomorrow, when James receives this letter, he will remember who Walker is.