Wish You Were Here (43 page)

“How are you going?” Emily asked, as if she knew a quicker way.

“Ask the navigator,” Ken said.

“I don't know,” Lise preempted her.

“You should be able to go right up 90.”

She shuffled through the maps in the dash—everything was New England—and then, before panic set in, remembered New York was in the door, turned inside out so they could track their progress on the way across.

“How far is it?” Ella asked, making her turn the map over noisily and scan the mileage chart.

“About an hour and a half, but that's going fifty-five.”

“How fast are you going to drive?” Emily asked, as if they were in danger. “I've heard these things tip over.”

Ken checked Lise to make sure she wasn't going to jump on it, then said, “We haven't rolled it yet.”

“Well, be careful.”

“I always am.”

“I'm serious,” Emily said.

“So am I,” Ken said, testy.

He braked for the highway, waited for a truck to pass, then turned on. Rain dimpled the ponds on the golf course. Lise expected Emily or Ken to say something about playing tomorrow, whether the course would be in shape—as a peace offering, just to break the silence. When neither of them apologized, Lise was secretly pleased, the way she was on those rare occasions he disciplined the children. For once she didn't have to be the bitch.

Ever since his father mentioned it, Sam wanted to go up in the thing that looked like a space station, but Aunt Margaret didn't know anything about it, and Justin was no help. He wished Ella was with them. She'd know.

“The tall thing,” Sam said. “There's a restaurant in it that goes around. The Sky Something.”

“Sorry,” Aunt Margaret said.

“I think I know what he's talking about,” Aunt Arlene said, and looked back at him. “A big silver tower? On the Canadian side?”

“Can we eat lunch there?”

“I don't know,” Aunt Margaret said, trying to ignore him like his mother did when she was driving. “I don't know what Grandma or your father have planned. You can ask your father when we get there.”

“I'd like to too,” Justin said.

“I hear you, but I am not making any promises to anybody about anything.”

“I'd like to see the view from there,” Aunt Arlene said. “I'd think it would be spectacular.”

“Spectacularly crowded,” Aunt Margaret said.

“I'm not sure that can be avoided.”

“I guess not.”

Sam gave Justin a high five.

“Hey,” Aunt Margaret said, catching them in the mirror. “What did I say? No promises. I don't want to hear any grumping if we don't go there.”

He wished Uncle Jeff was here. He'd let them go. Now he'd have to ask his father, who would ask his mother, which meant they probably wouldn't.

Aunt Arlene said they could see Lake Erie, but all he saw was construction, yellow bulldozers and brown gouges in hillsides, piles of white
pipes. Aunt Arlene pointed out apple orchards and vineyards like they were on a field trip and had to remember everything for a test.

“There's the lake—there,” Aunt Arlene pointed.

It was just a blue line behind the electric wires and only showed for a second, then it was back to nothing, just trucks and cars, their lights shining in the rain.

“Can we play our Game Boys?” Sam asked.

“You couldn't leave them at home?” Aunt Margaret said.

“Please?” Justin asked.

She made them wait like it was a tough decision, the windshield wipers moving faster than they had to, squeaking against the glass. Sam knew to be quiet until she turned them down.

“One hour total, no more. When we get there, you leave them in the car. And no sound.”

“Thank you,” Justin said.

“Sam? What do you say?”

“Thank you,” he said, but he already had it on, and she was speaking from another world.

“There goes the Bills' training camp,” Ken said, “the losers,” but no one laughed.

“They really seem to be going downhill,” his mother said, “if their game against the Steelers is any indication.”

Beside him, Lise remained silent, a bomb waiting to go off, and he felt obligated to say something, if only to be polite.

“Yeah,” he said, “I'm afraid they're dead meat,” then immediately regretted it.

Since his father died, he was acutely aware of using certain words around his mother. On the phone, they popped up as if he were purposely
trying to torture her, yet she never commented on it. He supposed the effect was like him hearing the word “cancer” or seeing terminal patients on
ER
—a numbness and then relief once it had passed and he could slip back into everyday forgetfulness, his father not dead, just a long-distance call away, probably working in the basement or lying on the couch in his den, reading one of his historical novels about the sea.

Maybe this was his way of reminding himself that he really was dead, asking his mother to verify that impossible fact. Perhaps, he thought.

“The Steelers aren't much better, I'm told,” his mother said.

Emily didn't remember the skyline, or any of the highways that looped them around the soggy downtown, and yet somehow they must have come this way. The roads were new, and most of the buildings, blue mirrored cubes and concrete boxes blank as graph paper. It was like Pittsburgh. The mills were gone, the rail yards obsolete, replaced by economic rhetoric, neighborhoods like the Hill and Braddock gutted, only pensioners left, the city grown old. It was a mistake to have come at all, she thought.

Their first day as husband and wife, they woke up early and made love again, and then Henry had driven the entire six hours from Pittsburgh while she fiddled with the radio, both of them singing along, pinching and prodding each other, making fun of the four-corners trout-stream towns she knew too intimately, being silly. The only person she'd ever slept with besides her mother was Jocelyn, freezing winter nights in their walk-up, and the presence of Henry in bed disconcerted her. Between the lack of sleep and her giddiness, the drive seemed an endless carnival ride. They stopped for lunch in the Allegheny Forest, laying a blanket in the shade of fragrant pines, and made love again, the trees rising over Henry's shoulders like spires. She imagined the state ranger would let them go if
they explained they were just married, showed him the clean marks the shaving cream left on the car. They ate, ravenous, shoving handfuls of grapes in each other's mouths, crushing them on their faces, a burlesque of some decadent Roman movie they'd seen, Ingrid Bergman in a sheet and sandals. She'd never laughed so much in one day.

Now, surrounded by her family, she thought it was not a loss. She had had that time, and it was still hers, if only in her memory. It did no good to compare what was present with what was gone.

They turned a curve down a long, sweeping hill, and the lake spread before them, whitecapped and almost black under the dark sky. Across the water, the shoreline was mobbed with houses.

“There's Canada,” Kenneth informed the girls.

“It looks like here,” Ella said.

“It pretty much is,” Kenneth admitted.

To Emily, newly wed, it had seemed what it was, another country, as vast and mysterious as the life she would make with this man driving beside her. It was the first time she'd ever left the U.S., and she was nervous about customs. When the uniformed guard at the booth asked what their purpose in Canada was, Henry said they were on their honeymoon, and the man ducked down to give her a smile and formally welcome them as if he were an ambassador and they were his special guests.

The Peace Bridge was familiar, traffic jockeying for the right lines.

“‘Nothing to declare,'” Kenneth read. “That would be us.”

The irony was too much, and Emily looked out her rain-beaded window at the other cars, taillights flaring as they inched up to the booths. She could declare so many things.

Her life was no more tragic than anyone else's. All these people in their warm cars would lose the ones they loved, ultimately, or die themselves, leaving their dearest behind. Cities would fill and empty, buildings crumble under the wrecking ball. It went without saying, and only a fool or a moony teenager would see something horrible in it, like Margaret thinking Duchess dying in the chives was the end of the world (it was the end of the chives for that year, nothing more, and the next spring their green spears peeked out again).

The first time she'd crossed this border, how little she'd appreciated time, thinking she'd defeated her childhood, shed it cleanly, like Kersey, the awkward girl she'd been and the unloved town left to starve in the wilderness.
And then when she returned triumphant, she found the town was the same, and the girl, her mother's house drawing memories from her like blood—spankings and bad report cards, the night she and Laurel Saunders had been arrested for drinking brandy by the football field. And ugly—it made her sick to see the downtown with its pitiful ladies' shops where her mother's friends bought their dresses. She'd been so ashamed that she never wanted to go back, but did at Henry's calm insistence, holiday after holiday as the children grew and the streets and the cramped corner stores lost their meaning, until she missed the place she'd grown up, and then her father died, and then her mother, and there was no reason to go back, only the shells of houses, the elementary school that had been turned into apartments, the movie theater whose marquee now advertised hardware, and in the cemetery two plots like twin beds separated by a chaste strip of crabgrass. She had not gone for years, and this seemed wrong. She had barely been to Henry's grave, even though it was close. She would go when she got back, she promised—and to her parents' too, a pilgrimage while there was time. The Olds could make it that far.

“What do you declare?” Ella asked beside her.

“Money,” Kenneth said, “or merchandise.”

“Anything valuable,” Lisa added.

“Guns?”

“Guns,” Kenneth echoed. “Any kind of advanced technology. Animals that might have diseases. What else?”

He was asking Emily, checking his answer with her, a habit passed on from his father.

“I think that about covers it,” she said.

Plants and produce came to mind, agricultural hazards and hitchhiking insects, but she wasn't interested, and turned back to the cars, the scudding clouds. She was glad it was raining. She couldn't imagine facing this on a sunny day.

Just the thought transported her to Henry's Chevy, the vent window tipped out all the way backwards to funnel air into the stifling box of the car. And still it was a beautiful day, and they were happy, as if the weather, like the songs on the radio, was meant for them, stemmed somehow from their love, the rest of the world a backdrop for its two most popular stars. The sun made the day sharp and promising, as if they might drive forever, only stopping to make love and eat. It had seemed that way,
though they must have waited in line like this, and sat at stoplights, and fussed with the luggage. She remembered only the best of them, compensation for the months she'd spent at Henry's bedside, memories that caught her walking across the living room or washing out her teacup at the sink, leaving her useless and fretful for the rest of the day.

“Mom,” Kenneth was saying from the front.

“What is it?”

“I was asking if you knew what the exchange rate is.”

“I haven't the faintest. A dollar forty? That's where it usually is.”

“That's not bad,” Lisa said.

“Everything's expensive,” Emily said, “that's the catch. And not just here, it's the whole country. If you don't do the math you can easily be fooled.”

It was Ken who finally said, “I don't think we're going to be doing much shopping.”

“You don't have to. See how much lunch costs. You'll be surprised.”

“The kids have to eat,” Lisa said, as if she'd suggested they didn't.

It reminded Emily of Margaret as a teenager, waiting for the littlest slip, as if they were locked in some kind of contest. She chose to ignore her and look out the window. The mist in the trees beyond the tollbooth made her think of Monet, one of his studies of light they had at the Frick this spring. It was noon, but it felt like three or four, the sky an uncertain color.

In the hospital, she watched evening build, the sun withdrawing from the corners of the room, then the dull walls, leaving only the window and Henry's bed in the whisky-colored glow—last light, which she associated with summer and the lake, the lingering end of their slow days, except as fall came on, that quiet time seemed to last only a moment, a colored lens passed in front of the sun, and then the room was a uniform gray, the skyscrapers downtown cold black shadows, the sidewalks busy with commuters, the thick, institutional pane cool and soothing against her forehead. Dinner appeared, steaming under its hubcap of a cover. The heater clinked. Henry slept in odd shifts, leaving and then returning to her, as if testing himself, getting ready.

“You should go home,” he said once, freshly woken up, and she could not have been angrier with him.

“And what am I supposed to do there?” she demanded, as if he might have an answer, as if he could still argue.

He did not want her to see him like this, she understood that, but the alternative was worse. They were so close to nothing already—or so she'd thought, because afterward it was harder than she could have imagined. There were days when she got dressed fully intending to go to the hospital, but there was no one there. It was like going mad, she supposed. Everything she was so certain of, everything that held intense meaning for her, no longer existed. She spent hours pursuing pointless rituals, talking to herself or people invisible to others, addressing objects, then suddenly stopped and scourged herself for it, furious with her own emotions.