The Practical Navigator (30 page)

“Did you blame yourself?”

Tim grunts and then shakes his head. “No. Could have been any one of us driving that car. But I did think to myself, it cannot get any worse than this. Shows what I knew. Bottom was still a long way down.”

“It works that way, doesn't it,” Anita says.

“But then I got lucky. Beat cop, guy I'd played ball with, yanked my ass off the street and into his car one night. Took me to a meeting. You can be here or you can be in prison, he said. And brother, you will die in prison. I had just enough left up here”—Tim Warner points at his head—“to know he was right. Took a little while. Stops and starts. But now I haven't had a drink in six years. I don't even touch aspirin. I run fifty miles a week. I go to church. I go to meetings. Anybody needs a sponsor or a helping hand, I'm there. That's my life now.”

“Does it pay well?”

He laughs. She's pleased that he recognizes a joke when he hears one.

“The father of one of the guys who died in that car, he gave me a job at his shipping company. I'm an actual manager. I've had more people forgive me in this life than I deserve.” Tim Warner reaches across the table. His fingers stop just short of touching Anita's hand. “I hope you will too. That's all I really wanted to say.”

“Not a problem. Done.”

A smile creases Tim Warner's long, sad face. “I was so crazy about you, Anita,” he says. “You were my dream girl and I was afraid to say so much as a word. I had no clue in the world.”

“None of us ever do,” she says in reply.

*   *   *

He walks her to her car. A shuffling, shambling gait, hands stuffed in his jacket pockets as if he's walking her to class and is pleased but is self-conscious about it, trying to make it out as no big deal and failing completely. I'm glad I'm not a man, thinks Anita. And then the next thought—

He's sweet.

“Well, listen,” he says. “You ever get to Tucson, I'm in the book. I have a pretty nice house. Quiet. Some land around it. Way too big for one person, so if you and yours ever need a place to stay.” He is silent for a moment and then he repeats himself, “I'm in the book.” It sounds cowboyish, a lonesome sheriff letting the settler woman know she's welcome at any time. She is touched. Again the thought—
sweet.

“Thank you, Tim.”

“No. Thank you.”

She gets in the car, feeling at ease for the first time in days. If Tim Warner can become a real person, perhaps she can too. It's something to seriously consider.

 

50

Fari calls mid-morning, knowing it will be the best time to get the answering machine. The first time a woman with a brisk English accent answers the phone …

“Hello. Yes, hello? Anyone there?”

 … and Fari quickly hangs up. When she tries again an hour later, she thankfully gets Michael's voice on a recording, and when she hears the beep, she composes herself with a deep breath and begins what's she rehearsed in her mind so carefully.

“Michael, this is Fari. I'm so glad it's a machine and not you. It makes it much easier this way.”

Meaning she's a coward and they both know it. Meaning she is unwilling to face the surge of emotions that seeing him or hearing his voice again would entail.

“Michael, my father has died. Three weeks ago. Very fast, a stroke. Even though we had issues, it pains me. I never got to say good-bye to him. But that's another long story.”

In preparing to leave, Fari has felt as if she's been putting photos that are meaningful to her into a box, not for safekeeping, but for storage, in all probability never to be looked at again. Photos, of course, are memories captured in real time. Some photos, she thinks—

—
those of you, Michael
—

—unfold like a deck of cards, a single image in the mind's eye cascading open into many. Some, those of her father, are nothing more than a single, frozen image in her head.

“My mother is now in London with my sister and I'm going to join them. For how long I'm not sure. I might even stay. Regardless, I've decided to close my practice for the time being.”

Fari hesitates. She takes another breath. She goes on.

“I need to tell you that for a couple of months now I've been seeing your wife as a patient. I didn't make the connection at first and then I did. I probably shouldn't have continued but I thought I could help and yes … I was curious.”

Fari hears Michael's voice in her head, concerned and asking the obvious question. She answers it.

“She's a troubled woman. Terrified of abandonment, both real and imagined. Her interpersonal relationships alternate between idealization and devaluation. She's subject to intense mood swings, mostly depression.”

Speak English.

“She wants to go back to a place and time where she can make everything right again. She thinks this will make her whole. I've tried to tell her that a person who needs a specific other person to feel whole will never be whole and, try as they might, will always create circumstances that lead to even more damaging behavior.”

She hesitates. She continues.

“You know, Michael, I have always understood why a person can have reasons to be sad. But I've never quite understood why when a person has every reason to feel joy, they don't. It's as if all the feeling has gone out of them. Perhaps they've grown tired of feeling pain and so they've decided to try and feel nothing at all. I fear Anita is like that. I'm sorry to say I've been guilty of it as well. Please don't ever let it happen to you.”

The script she so carefully composed has flown from her head. She's off book now, knows it but can't help herself, knows now she wanted to be all along.

“Guess what? I'm a single woman, Michael. My husband divorced me. My father asked him to do so just before he died. It was a gift to me.”

What a martyr she's being. A Muslim woman who has never married can marry any man she wants in paradise. She's blown that possibility.

“Isn't it funny? The timing of things? I can do anything I want now and all I want is—”

Fari stops. No, not funny at all. When he listens, if he listens at all, he'll probably have hung up by now.

“I leave on the seventeenth. Perhaps we'll speak before then. If not …

*   *   *

“Stay well.”

*   *   *

It's late when Michael goes to bed. He hasn't changed the sheets since Anita slept over and he knows now he'll do it in the morning. But at the moment the faint scent of her perfume, rose and lavender, full of memories, is still on the pillows. It's as he's drifting off into restless sleep, the message playing over and over again in his head, that the fragrance changes. Rose becomes entangled with sandalwood, lavender with jasmine. The essence of one woman is somehow transmuted into two. Both women are equally vivid to him, both to be cherished, both ephemeral.

He calls to them in the dark.

“Come back,” he says. “Come back.”

Neither one answers. He is alone.

 

Storm surge. Increase or decrease in sea level by strong winds such as those accompanying a hurricane or other intense storm.

Flood current. The movement of a tidal current toward the shore.

Stranding. The grounding of a vessel so that it is not easily refloated; a serious grounding.

Umbra. The darkest part of a shadow in which light is completely cut off by an intervening object.

 

51

Arriving at the club, Neal Beacham scrapes the back fender of an Audi sedan as he pulls into a parking place. He spends a good three minutes wondering if he knows who the owner of the car is and, coming to the conclusion he doesn't, decides the ding is minor and that it's not worth leaving a note. Just to be safe, he parks several stalls away. Silly for the place to be crowded on a Tuesday afternoon. The damn club really should have valet parking.

He enters the locker room, in a hurry, wanting to hit balls before the regular one o'clock drop-in. His locker, one of the big ones, is toward the rear, away from the showers where a man can have some privacy.

Neal unlocks his locker and opens it. Sitting on the cushioned bench, he takes off his street shoes. It's pleasant to think they'll be newly polished when he returns after his round. He takes out golf shoes and a bucket hat. He wonders if he should take a wind shirt. As he reaches to the top shelf of the locker for a sleeve of new golf balls, something in the back catches his eye. It's a manila envelope. There is a note on it—
thought you should see this
. Puzzled, Neal Beacham opens the envelope.

*   *   *

In the living room at the Beacham house, Beth and Tisha are going through fabric swatches for new dining room curtains.

It's most annoying.

Tisha has felt for a time now that Beth's old ones, faded and beginning to fray at the bottom, are in need of replacing. Beth, of course, thinks they're perfectly fine. And so now Tisha has not only had to offer to pay for the new ones, she's had to go to all the trouble of finding a good interior designer, not because she wants or needs advice on design for goodness' sake, no, but rather, because designers seem to be the only ones who have access to decent fabric houses these days. It's enough to make one do all one's shopping online. Well, at least the woman's local and Beth hasn't had to drive far to pick up the samples. Still, Beth is
not
being a help. It's almost as if she resents everything that's being done for her.

“What about the silk?” says Beth, holding up a heavy cream-colored swathe of fabric. Naturally the most expensive.

“It won't stand up to the sun,” says Tisha. She reaches for another swatch. “This plaid's nice.”

“Why don't I just stuff a golden retriever and stick it in the hallway?” says Beth.

A golden retriever? Oh. All right, yes, thinks Tisha, the plaid
is
a bit
Town & Country
. But the attitude. “Beth, why do you ask for my advice when you really don't like it.”

“It's my way of bonding. And I didn't ask for it, you're just giving it to me. I can pick out my own curtains, Mother.”

“Not on my dime.”

“Whatever.”

Rolling her eyes like that. It's enough to—

They both look up at the sudden sound of the front door slamming hard.

“What on earth?” says Tisha.

“Anita?” Neal Beacham's voice sounds like his vocal chords have been shortened with a dull bread knife.

“Whee!” says Beth. “Daddy's home!”

“Don't you dare start.”

“Aneetah!”

“Neal? We're in here!” calls Tisha. “Why are you yelling like that? What's wrong?”

They hear the heavy steps. Both hear and feel the dull thud of a closed fist against the doorjamb.

Oh, well,
that's
helpful, thinks Tisha.

The man who appears in the doorway looks like a cartoon character on the verge of a heart attack. His hair is disheveled and there is sweat on his pale face and lined forehead. The eyes are bulging with heavy bags beneath them and the mouth is twisted into a tight red line. “Where is she?” says Neal Beacham. “Your
daughter.
Where is she?”

Tisha Beacham regards her husband calmly. “I think she's upstairs. Why?”

Without answering, Neal Beacham turns from the room. “Oh, this is gonna be good,” says Beth, as if pleased at the prospect of a total conflagration.

“Beth,” says Tisha. “I'm warning you. Keep your mouth shut.”

They quickly follow Neal out of the room.

*   *   *

Anita lies on the couch in the darkened library, her headache finally fading. Maybe she shouldn't have gone cold turkey on the antidepressants. This migraine was the kind that started with an aura of flickering light, a warning that the oncoming headache was going to be a doozy. A few times she's felt as if she were actually floating above her own body, looking down at herself. She listens to her father angrily calling her name. What is it
this
time? she wonders. She rises and, still unsteady on her feet, walks toward the closed door.

*   *   *

“Anita!”

Neal Beacham moves across the house entryway and starts up the stairs. He is aware that his wife is behind him, that his daughter who seems, God help her,
amused
at all this, brings up the rear.

“Neal, you're acting like a madman. What's wrong, what has she done?”

His wife, always putting the blame on
him,
making it his fault. His daughter always acting as if everything is so
funny
. On the upstairs landing, Neal Beacham turns on them both. “What has she done? What hasn't she done? Disappointing us, failing us. Ungrateful slut from the beginning!”

“Gee, I thought
I
was the slut,” says Beth, as if thrilled about it.

Pushing past his wife, Neal Beacham slaps his daughter across the face. “Is it funny now?” He swings again, missing her but pushing her now, back into the wall. His daughter cries out in fear. He's hurt her, but he can't help it, can't stop, he won't. “Is it funny!? Is it?”

The sudden wild blow to his own face takes him by surprise. The next one, hard to the ear, the sharp
pain
of it, even more. His daughter, sobbing, her face that of some deranged harpy, is striking back, wildly pushing and punching—no, now
kickin
g—him.

“Don't you—ever—you—ever again—”

Impossible.

“Stop it!” his wife cries, grabbing at Beth. “Stop it! Are the two of you insane!?”

It takes Neal Beacham only a moment to muster his outrage. “Talk sanity the next time you go to the club to play golf and someone sticks this under your nose!” Taking the DVD case from the pocket of his wind shirt, he thrusts it at Tisha, makes her take it.