The Unforeseen

by Molly Gloss

  He had not padlocked the garage—a pry-bar would have got anybody in through the small side door in a couple of minutes. He pulled up the rollaway front door to let light in on the tools, the sheets of plywood. Mare put her lunch down on a box and stood looking at the lofted pieces, the hull bottom and deck panels drawn on the plywood. He would make those cuts today. He manhandled one of the sheets up off the floor onto the sawhorses. Mare took hold of one end silently. It occurred to him that he could have gotten the panels cut without her, but it would be easier with her there to hold the big sheets of wood steady under the saw.

  He cut the deck panel slowly with hand tools—a brace and bit to make an entry for the keyhole saw, a ripsaw for the long outer cuts. When he was most of the way along the straight finish of the starboard side, on an impulse he gave the saw over to Mare and came around to the other side to hold the sheet down for her. She looked at him once shyly from behind her long bangs and then stood at his place before the wood, holding the saw in both hands. She hadn’t drawn a saw in her life, he could tell that, but she’d been watching him. She pushed the saw into the cut he had started and drew it up slow and wobbly. She was holding her mouth out in a tight flat line, all concentration. He had to smile, watching her.

  They ate lunch sitting on the sawhorses at the front of the garage. Jay had carried a carton of yogurt in the pocket of his coat, and he ate that slowly with his spoon. Mare offered him part of her peanut butter sandwich, and quartered pieces of a yellow apple. He shook his head, shrugging, smiling thinly. She considered his face, and then looked away.

  “I get these little dreams,” she said in a minute, low voiced, with apple in her mouth.

  He had a facial expression he relied on a good deal, a questioning look. What? Say again? Explain. She glanced swiftly sideward at his look and then down at her fingers gathered in her lap. “They’re not dreams, I guess. I’m not asleep. I just get them all of a sudden. I see something that’s happened, or something that hasn’t happened yet. Things remind me.” She looked at him again cautiously through her bangs. “When I saw you on the porch, when you gave me the letter, I remembered somebody else who gave me a letter before. I think it was a long time ago.”

  He shook his head, took the notepad from his shirt pocket, and wrote a couple of lines about déjà vu. He would have written more, but she was reading while he wrote and he felt her stiffening, looking away.

  “I know what that is,” she said, lowering her face. “It isn’t that. Everybody gets that.”

  He waited silently. There wouldn’t have been anything to say anyway. She picked at the corduroy on the front of her pants leg. After a while she said, whispering, “I remember things that happened to other people, but they were me. I think I might be dreaming other people’s lives, or the dreams are what I did before, when I was alive a different time, or when I’ll be somebody else, later on.” Her fingernails kept picking at the cord. “I guess you don’t get dreams like that.” Her eyes came up to him. “Nobody else does, I guess.” She looked away. “I do, though. I get them a lot. I just don’t tell anymore.” Her mouth was small, drawn up. She looked toward him again. “I can tell you, though.”

  Before she had finished telling him, he had thought of an epilepsy, le Petit absentia, maybe it was called. He had seen it once in a witch-child in Haiti, a girl who fell into a brief, staring trance a hundred times a day. A neurologist had written to him, naming it from the description he had read in Jay’s journal. Maybe there was a simple way to tell, a test, a couple of things to look for. Of course, maybe it wasn’t that. It might only be a fancy, something she’d invented, an attention-getter. But her look made him sympathetic. He reached out and pushed her bangs back from her smooth, solemn brow. It’s okay, he hoped to tell her with this small gesture, his hand lightly brushing her bangs. I won’t tell.

  There hadn’t been a long Labor Day weekend for years. It was one of the minor observances scratched from the calendar by the exigencies of war. But people who were tied in with the school calendar still observed the first weekend of September as a sort of holiday, a last hurrah before the opening Monday of the school year. Some of them still came to the beach.

  The weather by good luck was fair, the abiding peninsula winds balmy, sunlit, so there were a couple of small trailers and a few tents in the RV park, and a no-vacancy sign at the motel Saturday morning by the time the fog burned off.

  Jay spent both days on the lawn in front of the town’s gazebo, behind a stack of back issues of his journal and a big posterboard display he had pasted up, with an outsize rewording of his form letter, and clippings from newspapers and from Time. He put out a hat on the grass in front of him with a couple of seed dollars in it. His personal style of busking was diffident, self-conscious. He kept his attention mostly on the notebook in his lap. He sketched from memory the archway at the front of the RV park, the humpbacked old trailer, the girl Mare’s thin face. He made notes to do with the boat, and fiddled with an op-ed piece he would send to Time, trying to follow up on the little publicity they’d given the Cuban chemist. The op-ed would go in his October journal, whether Time took it or not, and the sketches would show up there too, in the margins of his daybook entries, or on the cover. He printed other people’s writings too, things that came in his mail—poetry, letters, meeting notices, back-page news items pertaining to peace issues, casualty and armament statistics sent at rare intervals by an anonymous letter writer with a Washington, DC, postmark—but most of the pages were his own work. On bureaucratic forms he entered writer as his occupation without feeling he was misrepresenting anything. He liked to write. His writing had gotten gradually better since he had been doing the journal—sometimes he thought it was not from the practice at writing, but the practice at silence.

  Rarely, somebody stopped to read the poster, or stooped to pick up a journal, or put money in his hat, or all three. Those people he tried to make eye contact with, smiling gently by way of inviting them in. He wouldn’t get any serious readers, serious talkers, probably, on a holiday weekend in a beach town, but you never knew. He was careful not to look at the others, the bypassers, but he kept track of them peripherally. He had been arrested quite a few times, assaulted a few. And since Colombia, he suffered from a chronic fear.

  Mare came and sat with him on Sunday. He didn’t mind having her there. She was comfortable with his silence; she seemed naturally silent herself, much of the time. She read from back issues of his journal and shared the best parts with him as if he hadn’t been the writer himself. Not reading the lines aloud but holding a page out for him silently and waiting, watching, while he read the part she pointed to, and then offering her terse opinion: “Ick,” or “I’m glad,” or “I’d never do that.”

  He had written about a town in the Guatemala highlands where he had herded goats for a couple of months, and when she pushed that page toward him she said in a changed way, timid, earnest, “I lived there too. But it was before. Before I was me. I was a different person.”

  He had not gotten around to writing anyone about the epilepsy after he’d lost that first strong feeling of its possibility. His silence invited squirrels, he knew that, though it made him tired, unhappy, thinking of it. He was tired now, suddenly, and annoyed with her. He shook his head, let her see a flat, skeptical smile.

  “Mare!”

  Her father came across the shaggy grass, moving swiftly, his arms swinging in a stiff way, elbows akimbo. Jay stood up warily.

  “I’m locked out of the damn house,” the man said, not looking at Jay. “Where’s your key?”

  Mare got up from the grass, dug around in her pockets, and brought out a key with a fluorescent pink plastic keeper. He closed his fingers on it, made a vague gesture with the fist. “I about made up my mind to bust a window,” he said. “I was looking for you.” He was annoyed.

  Mare put her hands in her pockets, looked at her feet. “I’m helping him stop the war,” she said, murmuring.

  The man’s e
yes went to Jay and then the posterboard sign, the hat, the stacked-up journals. His face kept hold of that look of annoyance but took on something else, too, maybe it was just surprise. “He’s putting up signs and hustling for money, is what it looks like he’s doing,” he said, big and arrogant. For a while longer he stood there looking at the sign as if he were reading it. Maybe he was. He had a manner of standing—shifting his weight from foot to foot and hitching at his pants every so often with the knuckles of his hands.

  “I got a kidney shot out, in North Africa,” he said suddenly. “But there’s not much fighting there anymore, that front’s moved south or somewhere, I don’t know who’s got that ground now. They can keep it, whoever.” He had a long hooked nose, bony ridges below his eyes, a wide lipless mouth. Strong features. Jay could see nothing of him in Mare’s small pale face. It wasn’t evident, how they were with each other. Jay saw her now watching her dad through her bangs, with something like the shyness she had with everyone else.

  “Don’t be down here all day,” her dad said to her, gesturing again with the fist he had closed around the house key. He looked at Jay, but he didn’t say anything else. He shifted his weight one more time and then walked off long-strided, swinging his long arms. He was tall enough that some of the tourists looked at him covertly after he’d passed them. Mare watched him too. Then she looked at Jay, a ducking, sideward look. He thought she was embarrassed by her dad. He shrugged. It’s okay. But that wasn’t it. She said, pulling in her thin shoulders timidly, “There is a lake there named Negro because the water is so dark.” She had remained focused on his disbelief, waiting to say this small proving thing about Guatemala. And it was true enough to shake him a little. There was a Lago Negro in just about every country below the US border; he remembered that in a minute. But there was a long startled moment before that, when he only saw the little black lake in the highlands, in Guatemala, and Mare, dark-faced, in a dugout boat paddling away from the weedy shore.

  • • •

  He had the store rip four long stringers out of a fir board and then he kerfed the stringers every three inches along their lengths. With the school year started, he didn’t have Mare to hold the long pieces across the sawhorses. He got the cuts done slowly, single-handed, bracing the bouncy long wood with his knee.

  Mare’s dad came up the road early in the day. Jay thought he wasn’t looking for the garage. There was a flooded cranberry field on the other side of the road, and his attention was on the people getting in the crop from it. There were two men and three women wading slowly up and down in green rubber hip waders, stripping off the berries by hand into big plastic buckets. Mare’s dad, walking along the road, watched them. But when he came even with the garage, he turned suddenly and walked up the driveway. Jay stopped what he was doing and waited, holding the saw. Mare’s dad stood just inside the rollaway door, shifting his weight, knuckling his hips.

  “I heard you were building a boat,” he said, looking at the wood, not at Jay. “You never said how long you wanted to camp, but I didn’t figure it would be long enough to build a boat.” Jay thought he knew where this was headed. He’d been hustled along plenty of times before this. But it didn’t go that way. The man looked at him. “In that letter you showed, I figured you meant you could talk if you wanted to. Now I hear your tongue was cut off.” He lifted his chin, reproachful.

  Jay kept standing there holding the saw, waiting. He hadn’t been asked anything. The man dropped his eyes. He turned partway from Jay and looked over his shoulder toward the cranberry bog, the people working there. There was a long stiff silence.

  “She’s a weird kid,” he said suddenly. “You figured that out by now, I guess.” His voice was loud; he may not have had soft speaking in him anywhere. “I’d have her to a shrink, but I can’t afford it.” He hitched at his pants with the backs of both hands. “I guess she likes you because you don’t say anything. She can tell you whatever she wants and you’re not gonna tell her she’s nuts.” He looked at Jay. “You think she’s nuts?” His face had a sorrowful aspect now, his brows drawn up in a heavy pleat above the bridge of his nose.

  Jay looked at the saw. He tested the row of teeth against the tips of his fingers and kept from looking at the man. He realized he didn’t know his name, first or last, or if he had a wife. Where was Mare’s mother?

  The man blew out a puffing breath through his lips. “I guess she is,” he said unhappily. Jay ducked his head, shrugged. I don’t know. He had been writing about Mare lately—pages that would probably show up in the journal, in the October mailing. He had spent a lot of time wondering about her, and then writing it down. This was something new to wonder about. He had thought her dad was someone else, not this big sorrowful man looking for reassurance from a stranger who camped in his park.

  A figure of jets passed over them suddenly, flying inland from the ocean. There were six. They flew low, dragging a screaming roar, a shudder, through the air. Mare’s dad didn’t look up.

  “She used to tell people these damn dreams of hers all the time,” the man said, after the noise was past. “I know I never broke her of it, she just got sly who she tells them to. She never tells me anymore.” He stood there silently, looking at the cranberry pickers. “The last one she told me,” he said, in his heavy, unquiet voice, “was how she’d be killed dead when she was twelve years old.” He looked over at Jay. “She didn’t tell you that yet,” he said, when he saw Jay’s face. He smiled in a bitter way. “She was about eight, I guess, when she told me that one.” He thought about it and then he added, “She’s twelve now. She was twelve in June.” He made a vague gesture with both hands, a sort of open-palms shrugging. Then he pushed his hands down in his back pockets. He kept them there while he shifted his weight in that manner he had, almost a rocking back and forth.

  Watching him, Jay wondered suddenly if Mare might not put herself in the path of something deadly, to make sure this dream was a true one—a proof for her dad. He wondered if her dad had thought of that.

  “I don’t know where she gets her ideas,” the man said, making a pained face, “if it’s from TV or books or what, but she told me when she got killed it’d be written up, and in the long run it’d help get the war ended. Before that, she never had noticed we were even in a war.” He looked at Jay wildly. “Maybe I’m nuts too, but here you are, peace-peddling in our backyard, and when I saw you with those magazines you write, I started to wonder what was going on. I started to wonder if this is a damn different world than I’ve been believing all my life.” His voice had begun to rise, so by the last few words he sounded plaintive, teary. Jay had given up believing in God the year he was eighteen. He didn’t know what it was that Gathered a Meeting into the Light, but he didn’t think it was God, or not the God they talked about in most churches. It occurred to him, he couldn’t have told Mare’s dad where the borders were of the world he, Jay, believed in.

  “I don’t have a reason for telling you this,” the man said after a silence. He had brought his voice down again so he sounded just agitated, defensive. “Except I guess I wondered if I was nuts, and I figured I’d ask somebody who couldn’t answer.” His mouth spread out flat in a humorless grin. He took his hands out of his pockets, hitched up his pants. “I thought about kicking you on down the road, but I guess it wouldn’t matter. If it isn’t you, it’ll be somebody else. And”—his eyes jumped away from Jay—“I was afraid she might quick do something to get herself killed, if she knew you were packing up.” He waited, looking off across the road. Then he looked at Jay. “I’ve been worrying, lately, that she’ll get killed all right, one way or the other, either it’ll come true on its own, or she’ll make it.”

  They stood together in silence in the dim garage, looking at the cutout pieces of Jay’s boat. He had the deck and hull-bottom pieces, the bulkheads, the transom, the knee braces cut out. You could see the shape of the boat in some of them, in the curving lines of the cuts.

  “I guess you couldn’t taste an
ything without a tongue,” the man said after a while. “I’d miss that, more than the talking.” He knuckled his hips and walked off toward the road. All his height was in his legs. He walked fast with a loose, sloping gait on those long legs.

  • • •

  In the afternoon Jay took a clam shovel out of the garage and walked down to the beach. The sand was black and oily from an offshore spill or a sinking. There wasn’t any debris on the low tide, just the oil. Maybe on the high tide there would be wreckage, or oil-fouled birds. He walked along the edge of the surf on the wet black sand, looking for clam sign. There wasn’t much. He dug a few holes without finding anything. He hadn’t expected to. Almost at dusk he saw somebody walking toward him from way down the beach. Gradually it became Mare. She didn’t greet him. She turned alongside him silently and walked with him, studying the sand. She carried a denim knapsack that pulled her shoulders down: blocky shapes of books, a lunch box. She hadn’t been home yet. If she had gone to the garage and not found him there, she didn’t say.

  He touched the blade of the shovel to the sand every little while, looking in the pressure circle for the stipple of clams. He didn’t look at Mare. Something, maybe it was a clam sign, irised in the black sheen on the sand. He dug a fast hole straight down, slinging the wet mud sideways. Mare crouched out of the way, watching the hole. “I see it!” She dropped on the sand and pushed her arm into the muddy hole, brought it out again reflexively. Blood sprang bright red along the cut the razor-edged clamshell had made. She held her hands together in her lap while her face brought up a look, a slow unfolding of surprise and fear and distractedness. Jay reached for her, clasping both her hands between his palms, and in a moment she saw him again. “It cut me,” she said, and started to cry. The tears maybe weren’t about her hand.