The Brothers K (91 page)

Love, Everett

A
t 4:50
A.M
. on June 3, 1971, the “We Want Winnie Caravan” (Linda had spontaneously named us during the Adventist contingent’s parting round of Heartfelt Prayers) eased into the empty streets of Camas. I was sitting at the dinnertable of my aunt and uncle’s thirty-two-foot Nomad as we departed, the top of which table was a four-color Formica highway map of the United States. When I lay my arm on this map with my elbow on Camas, I could touch LA with my fingertips: Irwin was an arm’s
length away. Outside a late-spring rain was falling, and the Crown Z mill, as we left it in our wake, was doing its best to turn the gray dawn grayer. We had no planned stops and no plan of action. When we’d telephoned Papa to tell him we were coming he’d had no words of encouragement or advice. But after so many weeks of helpless fear and waiting, the mere act of setting forth—the physical sensation of being thirteen humans moving as fast as we could toward a place where we hoped to accomplish one clear and simple good—was almost more than I could handle. If I’d had a board I could have surfed the waves of affection I kept feeling for my fellow travelers. Almost anything set me off. The way Aunt Mary Jane looked up at the wheel of the Nomad in her blue cowgirl boots, amberlensed aviator glasses and a red baseball cap that said “Totally Electric” above the bill. The trucker-esque snoring, in the curtained-off bed in back, of old Sister Harg. The dovelike cooing of baby Nash as Linda lay nursing him in one of the bunks. The silhouettes, in the Dodge wagon up in front of us, of Elder Joon and Freddy’s dog Suncracker, sitting side by side like a placid old married couple. The unshaved faces, in the ratty GMC pickup a few car lengths behind, of Brother Beal and Uncle Truman, sipping from their coffee mugs and chatting equably, though even as I watched Truman was refilling his own mug with his fourth or fifth beer. The way Uncle Marv was staggering round the Nomad’s bucking cabin, stowing loose gear and food in closets and cupboards. The way Mama was staggering around right behind him, restowing everything in a more sensible place. The perfectly deadpan expression Marv kept when he noticed this, started singing the bluegrass tune “Pig in a Pen,” and began stowing stuff in the stupidest, most out-of-the-way places possible. The equally deadpan expression Mama wore as she began humming “Nearer My God to Thee” and banging her kid brother into walls and closets with her hip …

We were headed for an insane asylum in California. We looked more as if we’d escaped from one. But in the pouring gray rain, I felt clarity. With the war still raging, I felt peace. With Papa in despair, Everett in prison and Irwin in the asylum, I felt release. I didn’t understand my feelings, didn’t even desire them, really, but they kept filling me so full that my eyes began to well. Which embarrassed me. So I finally stood up, darted into the tiny bathroom, locked the door.

“Why didn’t you do that at home?” I heard Mama mutter outside. And even this! Even this filled me with elation. The tires began to drone against the metal grid of the Interstate Bridge. Uncle Marv started singing in tune with the drone. Little Nash kept cooing. Out the little window,
green girders flashing. On the window curtains, green-headed mallards facing north, flying south. The gray Columbia straight down below us. Everything in question, nothing resolved—yet an overwhelming sense of resolution. I didn’t understand any of it, didn’t know what I was saying, but I found myself suddenly whispering to my brother, a thousand miles to the south, “You know this feeling, don’t you?”

Something inside me turned fierce. “How you laugh that way. Why you love us all. This is what you live by, isn’t it?”

I heard Mama, humming still, knock Marvin right into the bathroom door. Heard the tires’ drone become a shishing as we hit the asphalt on the Oregon side. Sister Harg kept snoring. Baby Nash kept cooing. Pain and sorrow never end. Nothing we do is enough. It’s always been this way. “But joy,” I whispered to Irwin. “This joy. It’s boundless too, and endless. So hold on. This isn’t theirs to knock out of you. It’s not yours to lose. It’s not mine either. But it’s making the trip. It’s coming. So please. Just hold on.”

T
he solo journey mentioned in the following letter—from Arizona to Shyashyakook, B.C.—took place on the same days, and for one of the same reasons, as our caravan journey to Mira Loma: somebody was trying their desperate best, without really knowing how, to help Irwin. So here is her letter:

Dear Everett,

I have so much to tell you and want to say it all so fast that it’s too big, too scary, there’s nowhere to begin. But it was your letter—all 211 pages of it—that got me this far. So I’ll try to start there. It caught up with me four days ago. I don’t know where on earth you found Grandma Maggie’s address (she’s been dead twenty-two years), but the daughter of the family who bought her old house in Knoxville, one Bitsy Buchanan, was on high school rally squad with my mom, still sends Xmas cards, funeral notices and so on. So she just mailed it. Or read it and mailed it. (Her note to my mom began, “
What
in
heaven’s name
is going on between your
poor daughter
and this
odd
young man?”) (The underlines are all Bitsy’s.)

Anyway, it made me feel a thousand ways, your letter did: surprised me (especially with its ongoing gentleness); melted my heart; quelled a
hundred fears; raised a hundred more; made me feel like a worm; reminded me over and over how much I love you (even when I can’t stand you). But then I reached the last two pages—the ones about Irwin—and they scared me so badly I drove the fourteen hundred miles here in two days (have I even remembered to tell you I’m in Shyashyakook?) in hopes, as you said, of “undoing the chemical damage” and giving you your center back.

But I reached the Nessakoola cottage at six yesterday morning, didn’t recognize the car outside, knocked and knocked on “our” door anyway. And when Yulie McVee finally opened it wearing nothing but a big red bedspread, guess what I thought? Don’t laugh. She may be forty and she may be huge, but we both know she’s also hugely appealing. While I was thinking what I was thinking, though, Yulie looked me in the eye, read my mind perfectly (how does she do that, anyway?), then started laughing so hard she had to sit down on the steps and squeeze her legs together to keep from peeing the bedspread. “That’s the nicest compliment I’ve had in years!” she finally told me. “And I
do
love him. But like a
brother
, honey. Only reason I’m here is that Corey landed his caretaking job.”

She stood up to hug me hello then. But soon as her arms were around me she backed off, grabbed me by the shoulders, and said, “Natasha! Sweetheart! Look at you!” Which brings me to my main topic. And to my reason for running away. And to all the pain I’ve caused you. The subject is so complicated it’s going to take pages to really describe it. But we can jump a long way toward the middle in just two words:

I’m pregnant.

Seven months pregnant, at this point.

Which puts conception back in January.

Guess who the father is?

I’d give all the money I have ($73, at the moment) to see your face right now. And I’d give everything I own (
including
my Russian-lit collection!) to know that the first thing my news did was make you smile. But I know, Yulie’s made it clear, that I’ve hurt you terribly. And though I doubt I can explain how I came to do it, let alone inspire you to forgive me, I beg you to let me try.

We have, at the minimum, a six-part problem. On my own I’d have said “an overwhelming problem” and given up right there. But Yulie and Corey think there’s hope for us still, and are trying to help me think clearly. Like when I sat down to write, and I guess did nothing
but a lot of sighing, Corey told me, “If the subject’s too big or weird to think through, draw a map. Make the parts of the subject into rivers and mountain ranges and deserts and towns. If it’s still too big, add a whole ’nother province. That’s what I do with my papers at school. It works.”

“Where’d you learn such a trick?” I asked her.

“Everett,” she said. Wouldn’t you know it. But here goes:

Our Problem, Part 1: One of the first things I ever said to you was that I’m old-fashioned where romance is concerned. “A dinosaur” I think I called myself. Being a dinosaur, I made a huge exception to my own laws of survival when I started living with you. But I didn’t start living with you because I’d changed. I did it because I couldn’t help it. There’s a big difference. I never really thought we were living “in sin.” (I’m not
that
Paleolithic.) But we were living with dangerously little definition by my standards, which standards are based, by the way, on my belief that romance isn’t just romance, that it naturally leads to love-making, which naturally leads to babies, who are naturally helpless creatures in a naturally beautiful but lethal world, so they naturally need as many pieces of the ancient Father-Mother-Shaman-Tribe-Home-Hearth Paradigm as we are able to gracefully give them.

Our Problem, Part 2: Here’s where I imagine you wanting to grab me and say: “But the emphasis should be on
gracefully
. No romance need lead to babies if the parents aren’t ready. Not if they’d be driven into poverty or misery. Not in the age of birth control, family planning, safe abortions.” Remember the column you wrote at U Dub called “The Other Bomb”? The one about population explosion? One of the unfunniest, most powerful diatribes I’ve ever seen on the subject. I didn’t even know you yet, but it haunted me for days. The topic has always haunted me, Everett. Because no matter how devastating the arguments against untimely infants get, they’ve never made a real difference to something inside of me. What is that something?

Our Problem, Part 3: I wish I knew. But here’s a possible clue. I am (as I kept trying to emphasize and you kept trying to deemphasize) an ex-Catholic. But my reasons for ex-ness don’t fit the typical Western Woman’s Agenda. If the Roman Church would merely reunite with the Eastern Church, reinstate the Latin liturgy, trade purgatory for reincarnation, saint Meister Eckhart, stop damning people for stuff like condom-use (though a lot of good the damned things did us!), allow women and married people to be priests, bishops and popes (or better
yet dispense with the bishops and popes), I’d be back at Mass in a minute. Of course they won’t. Hence my ex-ness. But did you notice the popular woman’s complaint my list left out? I don’t know why I’m this way. I half-wish I wasn’t. But you can pick this girl up, shake her well, and pour and pour and pour and one result you will never see (unless I’m raped) is an abortion. I don’t think it’s murder, I don’t think it’s criminal, I don’t tell friends not to get them, I don’t even think my aversion is rationally defensible. But for this dinosaur, this lifetime, nobody but me, nobody’s business but mine, that aversion is an absolute.

Which brings us back to last January. Do you see what was coming? At the time when I loved and needed you most, I felt positive that my news was going to bring all your “Other Bomb” arguments crashing down upon my indefensible absolute. And if by some miracle my absolute had held up, I imagined you, me and a colicky infant living in poverty in Shyashyakook—and I was afraid you’d grow to hate me. And if my absolute had fallen and I’d agreed to abort, I was afraid I’d grow to hate you.

Our Problem, Part 4: My body. Remember telling me that you’d thought it was impossible but that my breasts had somehow become even more beautiful to you? Imbecile!
Bigger
is the word you were looking for! And remember teasing me, right before I left, about always locking the bathroom and turning the faucet on full-blast to cover my sound-effects? “Methane denial” you called it. And when I burst into tears you couldn’t help saying “Touchy touchy!” before you apologized. And I don’t blame you. I
was
touchy. But it was morning sickness, not “methane,” that I was trying to cover up. And I don’t know why, Everett, but those two little words, “touchy touchy,” felt like all my worst fears beginning to come true.

Then the bleeding started. Not a lot of it. But it didn’t take much to scare me with the nearest decent doctors forty miles away and our joint income your $100 a month. As soon as I saw blood I was all through thinking. Terror took over. Terror of trapping you, terror of losing you, terror of losing the baby, our love, my life, my soul. So when you went to Victoria that day (to get me a Valentine present, I know, my poor sweet, I know!), I cried as I packed, cried as I tried again and again to write to you, cried when I gave up and cut out Dmitri’s America speech, cried clear to the ferry, stopped crying and threw up all the way to Port Angeles, then started crying again. Because I knew I was wrong. No matter what else was happening to
me, I knew I was running away from love. But I’d come find you again, I told myself, just as soon as I knew things were okay inside me, soon as I’d honored my absolute.

I drove to Lake Havasu City, Arizona—my mom and stepdad’s new home. And yes, it’s a “planned community,” yes, you’d hate it, it’s no dream of mine either. But my mom used to make a point, every time I came home from college, of saying at least once—in front of as many guests as possible—that if I ever got pregnant and wasn’t sure what to do about it, “Just come home and I’ll help you with everything
except
your decision.”

“You’re
embarrassing
me!” I’d always whine.

“Yes,” she’d say. “But only so you won’t be embarrassed if the situation does arise.”

“Well,” I told her, patting my tummy when she answered the door last February, “The Situation is arising.” And—Lake Havasu planned community and all—she just hugged me, and has kept her word. She was even right about the guest test: I’m not embarrassed. I’ve seen doctors too, baby and I are healthy, and I know already it’s a boy. I’m keeping him too, Everett. I’m not going through this to give him away. Myshkin Lee, his name will be. After my absolute. (Do you know the prince in
The Idiot
?) And I know the naming should have been shared. I know that all of this should have been shared. But when I got so scared and ran, I lost all claim on you. That’s the reason I haven’t consulted you. Myshkin is not ammunition for a shotgun marriage. He’s not some kind of bait I’m using to try and win you back. He’s just someone I’ve chosen to love and live with and care for from now on. Except,