The Possibilities: A Novel (14 page)

She doesn’t open her eyes, but she smiles. “Yes,” she says.

“You told it to my dad today. He had heard it before from Cully. He must have liked the line.”

“That’s sweet,” she says, and I have a feeling that if she wasn’t his girlfriend she may have wanted to be.

“Good night, then,” I say.

I watch her for a moment. She grips the edge of the blanket that she’s pulled up to her chin. Her mouth parts. She’s sinking into sleep. I shake myself out of it. For a moment I was almost at peace.

Chapter
11

Billy arrives when my dad is on the phone. He circles the room as if in a museum—he looks at the furniture, gets close to the pictures, running his hand along the spines of books on the shelf by the fireplace. He was here for the service but probably didn’t absorb a thing then. I watch him from the stove and tell him what happened last night.

“Was she drunk?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say. “She said she found out who I was, then came to give it back to me, but got nervous. Here. Come look.” I gesture to the calendar on the counter, and he picks it up then sits down next to my dad.

It’s strange seeing them side by side. He flips through the calendar while my dad talks on the phone, a business call about things that are not his business.

“All in a twist over the boreal toad,” my dad says on the phone. “The lynx I can understand, but a toad? I mean, come on. They’ve been around since the dinosaurs. Their time is up.”

“He shouldn’t have retired,” I say to Billy.

“Ever consider the idea that he didn’t want to?” Billy asks.

“He wanted to,” I say. “They always want to, then never know what to do with themselves.”

I walk over with his black coffee, place it down on a
Colorado Homes
magazine, which my dad has scribbled notes on. On the cover of the magazine is a loft in Keystone shaped like a mailbox. The heading: “First-Class Delivery.” I imagine the writer striving for the perfect mail pun. Priority Living. First-Class Package. Stamp of Approval. It’s sad imagining the writer settling on this particular one.

“Why did he move in?” Billy asks, quietly.

“He sold his house and wanted to move into a condo. I told him to move in with us until he found the right one. And now . . . we’ve gotten used to one another.”

Billy takes a sip of the coffee and looks back down at the calendar. I sit down next to him to look over his shoulder.

“Your birthday’s in there,” I say.

“I saw that,” Billy says. “Funny he has this.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“I mean it’s funny because I gave it to him,” he says. “Just one of those free things I got somewhere. I didn’t think he’d use it.”

“When did you give it to him?”

“In November,” he says, without hesitation, looking at me. “He came down for my birthday.”

“Oh,” I say.

I imagine him driving those five hours, window down, heater on, music blaring.

“What did you guys do?” I ask.

Billy turns the pages. “Um just, you know, drove around. Went for a ride.”

“Went for a ride on what?”

He looks up from the page. “Motorcycles. I took him on the Million Dollar Highway.” His look dares me to be angry with him, and I know that I can’t. There’s no point. He rode a motorcycle. He lived.

“He must have loved that,” I say.

Billy’s eyes are glassy. “I did,” he says. He closes the calendar. “This doesn’t seem that hard of a thing to hand over.”

“Shy, I guess.”

“Or she had more to say,” Billy says.

She must be nervous to come up the stairs, especially with all of us here. I’d always dread this part of being a guest in the morning—the tentative yielding into the house’s normal traffic. She’s not a guest, I remind myself.

I get up to finish making us breakfast, sort of amused, sort of charmed by this situation: a girl who was connected to Cully. There’s a comfortable clamor in the room, the smell of bacon and coffee, as if we are just all normal people doing normal domestic things. I smile to myself thinking of Cully on a motorcycle, that stretch of road through mountain passes. He must have laughed out loud.

“Where did she sleep?” Billy asks.

“In his room,” I say.

“Really?” He rubs his jawline with his thumb.

“It was empty,” I say. “Why?”

He avoids my hard stare.

“No, nothing,” he says.

Why did I let her sleep there?
he’s wondering and now I am too. Why not on the couch? At the time I didn’t even think about it and wonder if this is good—if it has become what I intended it to become, a spare room. I place strips of bacon in the simmering pan. I drank a lot last night but am experiencing a nice energy. My house is full.

Kit appears at the top of the stairs.

“Hi there,” I say. She looks puffy-eyed and pale.

“Morning,” she says.

“Hi,” Billy says. He holds a hand up in the air.

She mimics his gesture, looking like she’s taking an oath. “Hello,” she says.

“That’s Billy,” I say. “Cully’s father. We’re not married. We were never married.”

“That’s quite an intro,” Billy says.

Kit tucks her hair behind her ear and scratches her nose. “Nice to meet you,” she says, taking him in. I wonder if she’s seeing Cully everywhere like I do.

“Thanks for the calendar,” he says.

She makes to answer but then doesn’t say anything, embarrassed.

“Come sit,” I say. She sits on the same stool as she did last night. “Here we are again.”

She smiles and covers a yawn.

“Listen to this,” my dad says to the person on the phone. “In half an hour I’ve found the solution to your little problem. You tell Critter Conservation, Center for Colorado Ecosystems, WILD, whomever—tell them two words: chytrid fungus . . . You don’t need to know what it is, I don’t even know what it is exactly, but I do know that it’s killing them. The toads are going extinct with or without your expansion! With or without your existence! You tell these people this and all the attention will move to Fish and Wildlife, who are going to get their asses sued for not putting froggy on the endangered species list.”

“Who is he talking to?” Kit asks, amused.

I look at my dad on the edge of the couch. “Someone from his old job, I assume.”

“Oh, right,” she says, as if recalling something they had talked about.

“I heard you had a fun night, Kit,” Billy says. He walks over to us, joining me on my side of the counter.

“It was something,” she says. She is wearing her dirty shirt, though I can’t see the bloodstain.

“Do you want to borrow a sweater?” I ask.

“I have mine,” she says. “Somewhere.”

“It’s over here,” I say. “I hung it up.”

I walk to the closet by the front door and get her sweater. Like her coat it’s well made, understated, and elegant.

“And get this,” my dad says. He has raised his voice. “Research has shown that golf courses are the ideal habitat for the toad. They’ll go crazy over that; probably tell you to go on with the expansion—better than a golf course any day. All the groups will back off, figure they may as well go retro and start fighting for the whales again. Tell Dunbar maybe instead of hiding the toads and skirting the issue, he
advertises
their existence and their demise. The resort could be the savior. Make a promise to the EPA to build artificial hibernacula for the ailing amphibians.”

We all look at one another. Kit puts on her sweater.

“Hibernacula,” my dad says. “I don’t know, google it. Hibernation units. Toad condos. The units could stay on the mountain but down near the base. Prime real estate. Okay . . . okay . . . roger that. Good. You bet. Glad I could help. Hup,” he says, then lowers the phone and peers at the buttons. “No one says goodbye anymore,” he says. “Hello, Kit.”

“Hello, Lyle,” Kit says.

He stands and walks over. “Well, all right.” He nods, appraising her. “Sarah told me all about your late-night vandalism. You sleep okay?”

“Very well,” she says.

“Can I get you some breakfast?” I ask. “Eggs? Or more cereal?”

She doesn’t laugh at what I consider to be our inside joke.

“No, thanks,” she says.

My dad comes into the kitchen with his mug. “Kids, kids, kids. Crazy, crazy kids. Yesterday I was telling Kit—Billy, this was when she was our hired hand—I was telling her about the old days.”

“You were?” I say.

“Old, old days.” He brings his fist over his mouth and burps silently. “Criminals would come here to hide, rich guys from the East Coast would come here to slum, fancy women who didn’t want to be fancy anymore. They’d all migrate to our town to find their fortunes, begin again.” He smiles to himself while filling his mug with coffee. He adds his milk and sugar and I tap in some cinnamon because I read somewhere that it’s good for your heart or immune system. I forget which.

“Guess you found an adventure, Kit,” he says. “Pretending you’re a snow shoveler, delivering a token. Boy.”

“I didn’t think of it that way,” she says.

“And you shouldn’t,” I say. I may have sounded gruff, but this is hardly some western adventure. Delivering belongings to a heartbroken family. Or I guess it does sound like a plot.

“Why didn’t you just tell us you had it?” my dad asks. He shakes his head, as if not needing an answer. He lets her off the hook, and I try to remember what her explanation had been when I asked her last night. I recall it being long-winded.

“Those toads you were talking about?” Kit says.

“Yeah?” my dad says.

“They have red warts.”

“Really? Goodness, that’s another strike against them.” He’s next to me, stirring in the cinnamon, and then he pours coffee into another mug. “You take cream? Sugar?”

“Both,” Kit says.

“Atta girl. Did you see your truck out there? It’s completely buried.”

“I can help you dig it out,” Billy says.

“But she’s the snow shoveler, right?” my dad says.

“I wouldn’t say that,” she says.

He walks back around the island to her with her coffee. “I wouldn’t say that either.”

“I was telling Sarah last night that I’m sorry about doing such a stupid thing. I can help clean up or . . . the sheets. I can wash the sheets.”

My dad waves her words away.

“One night my grandson, Cully, who you knew of course, he drove right into someone’s wooden fence on Harris. He was inebriated, had just gotten his license, and now had to deal with a torn fence and a cut through his eyebrow.” He makes a sound as he slices his face. “Instead of driving the one-minute drive home, he drove up to Shock Hill to Sarah’s bountiful friend’s house—she wasn’t as bountiful then, though. He went there for help. He asked Dickie—he’s the husband—he said, “Can you say I was playing football and that I fell and got a concussion, and that you drove my car home and accidentally hit a fence on the way over?” My dad uses a comically whiny voice.

“So, Dickie actually agreed. He comes over here—and I’m here for some reason—and he starts with this story but can’t see it through. He starts to crack up. And you know how red Dickie gets when he laughs. Looked like he was going to implode. So he gives up the lie, hits Cully on the back, and says, ‘You take it from here, kid. Take it away,’ then tells him it’s good to be grounded. Gives you an excuse to stay home with your mom.”

“And the moral is?” Billy asks.

“I don’t know,” my dad says. “Kids do stupid shit.”

“I’m sorry,” Kit says again. Her gaze drifts over to the television behind her, where my program is on. It’s an old segment, shot almost six months ago.

“In addition, these residences reside on sixty acres of land, forty of which are a conservation easement,” Penny, the property manager says. She had an accent that I couldn’t place.

“Now what does that mean?” I ask on TV.

I look at myself, feeling compassion for this past self, afraid for what her life is about to become. At the same time I don’t exactly want to be her again.

“Will you guys turn this off?” I ask.

“Well, it means that nothing will ever change,” Penny says. “No one will come and build something to obstruct your views and our forest won’t be destroyed.”

“And no one wants that,” Katie says.

“No,” Penny says.

Billy and my dad both laugh. I do too. It’s as though we’re watching a sitcom. I look so interested, so sincere. I understand now the disappointment Holly and Katie must feel in me, but watching this makes me feel that I will never be able to show that interest ever again. I look like the women on Dad’s show, going over the same things with disproportionate enthusiasm, nodding mechanically as the people we interview say over and over again, “We’re really excited.”

“—really excited about this one in particular, which is designed to capture the timeless quality of quaint and elegant European villas, but the architects have fused it with that rustic Rocky Mountain character we know and love.”

“Look at that chandelier!” Katie says. “Are those antlers? Are they real?”

“Are those antlers!” Billy says.

“Are they real!” my dad says.

“I honestly don’t know how I’m going to do this again,” I say.

I walk to the couch, click the TV off.

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” Billy says. “Begin again. Do the opposite.”

I try to think of what the opposite would be: demolition derby? piano tuning?

I go back to the kitchen and lay the bacon out on paper towels and use its grease to scramble the eggs. I will cater to her hangover and make her comfortable to indulge. I look up to see if she’s tempted. She’s crouched on her chair, as though bracing herself. Her eyes are closed.

“Are you okay?” I ask. “You want some juice?”

She nods yes or no. I can’t tell.

“Use your words,” Billy says, and smiles.

“I should go,” she says. She stands up but doesn’t move.

“Whoa there, you all right?” Billy asks.

“I think I might be sick,” she says. She looks at me with a pleading sort of look, runs to the kitchen and straight to the sink, where she proceeds to throw up in a way that makes her look possessed. Some splatters on the bacon and eggs. We all watch, our mouths agape. When she’s done she stands over the sink and takes deep breaths, then turns on the faucet and splashes her face with water. She stays over the sink, letting the water run, and water drips from her face.

“Wowza!” my dad says from behind. “That was some fine work.”

“Stop it,” I say. “Hon, are you okay?” I gather her hair and let it fall on her back. I hand her the towel from the hook on the wall.

“Why don’t you dry your face off,” I say.

We all stand close to each other, huddled.

“This?” she says. The towel is dark blue and has a design of a small cat licking its paw.