by Dan Chaon
——
That was the last time he talked to Ray. It’s been a month and a half now, and as he spills from the junior high school parking lot onto the road toward home, he has half a mind to call Ray when he gets back. To apologize, maybe. To explain about drug pushers and enablers, to explain the mistakes he’s made in his life. It wouldn’t be illegal, he thinks. They can’t stop him from talking to his own cousin. But he’s also afraid. If Ray is selling drugs now, it might be a way for them to keep him from Loomis for even longer.
By the time he’s back at home, he’s feeling too depressed to call anyone. It’s eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning, and all he wants to do is get back into bed. The weather is starting to get cold. He sits in the bedroom, takes off his shoes and socks, peels off his shirt. He turns on the little space heater, plugs in the electric blanket. He burrows under the covers, closing his eyes tight against the pale sunlight that slants in through the blinds. Sometimes he believes he’s been instrumental in screwing up the lives of all the people he’s loved—Ray, Carla, Loomis. Sometimes he thinks that if he could only trace the path of his life carefully enough, everything would become clear. The ways that he screwed up would make sense. He closes his eyes tightly. His life wasn’t always a mistake, he thinks, and he breathes uncertainly for a while, trying to find a pathway into unconsciousness, into sleep.
——
But instead there are memories. Unfortunately. Prodding him. He follows a line from Ray, back through Carla, back through Bruce and Michelle and their trailer, back into all the old stuff. His mother, his father, his childhood, all the little details he hasn’t thought about in years. Suddenly they are present, and he is aware of that distant recollection of contentment wafting over him as he closes his eyes.
He finds himself thinking of his old family—he thinks of climbing into bed between his parents on Sunday mornings, his mom and dad murmuring sleepily as he slipped under the covers at their feet and burrowed his way in between them. He thinks of sitting on the couch, watching TV, how his mother would put her arm around him and her leg over his father’s lap, all of them tangled together under an afghan spread, or together in a tent, when they used to go camping, their three sleeping bags side by side.
They had all seemed so happy. He can remember those weekends at the lake so clearly—gathering wood for a fire, swimming, climbing onto his father out in the water, his bare feet slipping against his father’s skin. Diving off his father’s shoulders. At night, the three of them would wade along the edge of the shore, catching crawdads.
There was something, some magic, about the way the flashlight’s beam made a bowl of light beneath the water, the way, under the beam, everything was clear and distinct—the bits of floating algae and minute water animals, the polished stones and sleepy minnows flashing silver, the crawdads sidling backward with their claws lifted like pistols. His parents were silhouettes against the slick, blue-black skin of the lake, and Troy was aware that the sky and the lake were both like deep water, depth upon depth.
At that moment, he had loved the world so much that it almost ached; he had loved his young mother and father with a kind of fierceness that he could feel in his muscles. His mother would enfold him in a towel, drying him, her nose brushing against his hair. Smelling him. His father, smiling, looking at the two of them, carefully setting another piece of wood on the fire, his face alit and noble and full of a stern, kingly pride.
——
Even now, after all these years, he still can’t understand why they’d gotten divorced. For such moments to exist, and then to vanish seemed impossible, and he certainly couldn’t fathom it when he was eleven, when he and his mother finally moved out of the house. Back then, he was certain that his parents would get back together eventually—how could it be that people who had experienced such happiness wouldn’t want to return to it?
He remembers when he was thirteen, when his mother got married again, he still firmly believed that it was only a passing phase. His mother’s new husband was a gentle, boring man named Terry Shoopman, a balding high school guidance counselor with a foreshortened, potbellied torso and incredibly long, spindly legs, and Troy couldn’t imagine that it would last between them. He watched with skepticism as Terry moved in, ignoring his presence for the most part, weathering it.
A year later, when he was fourteen, Troy was still expecting things to go back to normal. Then Terry had gotten a job in Bismarck. Troy had refused to go, despite his mother’s cajoling and promises. She wouldn’t be able to stay away for long, he thought. He had moved back in with his father then, though the truth was he had begun to spend almost all his free hours at Bruce and Michelle’s trailer, by that time smoking a lot of pot along with Bruce and Michelle and their parade of teenagers, while he waited for his mother to give up on Bismarck, to tire of Terry Shoopman and come to her senses. To come home.
He probably should have gone with her. Sometimes, thinking back, he is aware that he would have been better off. His father’s drinking had grown quietly worse, more involved and ritualized, starting shortly after dinner and continuing, with steady determination, until he passed out. Meanwhile, Bruce and Michelle had begun to lose themselves to cocaine.
It wasn’t until much later, not until after he’d been arrested and sober for several months, that he understood the sort of quiet, steady life that Terry had offered his mother. And he was aware that she had made a choice. She had let him go—had taken her own chance for happiness and comfort. He would have made her miserable, if she’d insisted that he come with her.
Back then, though, he thought she’d done him a favor to let him stay in St. Bonaventure, to let him settle into the life of a resourceful, unsupervised teenage boy. Back then he’d dreaded his visits to Bismarck, that anonymous bedroom they prepared for him: bed, dresser, desk, the pictures of sailboats on the walls, the books that some son of his mother and Terry might have read: Treasure Island and The Flora and Fauna of North America and Jonathan Livingston Seagull. At least they had cable TV.
——
Years later, when his father died—his heart finally, steadily poisoned by years of alcohol and cigarettes and self-pity—Troy probably should have gone back up to Bismarck with his mother. But he was twenty years old. He had started to date Carla. He told his mother that he was planning to go to college, or trade school, or maybe the military, but the truth was that he had taken over a large part of Bruce and Michelle’s marijuana business—Bruce was in prison and Michelle was dating an odd, wealthy old man named Merit Wilkins, thirty years her senior, and moving to Arizona.
And then he’d married Carla. They lived on in his dad’s old house, the house he’d grown up in, and there were wonderful, invigorating parties. Ray, aged fifteen, had run away from the place in Arizona where he’d lived with Michelle and Merit Wilkins, and he stayed with Troy and Carla, sleeping on the couch and irregularly attending high school in St. Bonaventure. It was another little family, Troy thought for a while, and shortly before Carla found out she was pregnant with Loomis, they even took a camping trip together, Troy and Carla and Ray. He’d made them wade around looking for crawdads with a flashlight.
But it wasn’t real in the same way. Even after Loomis was born, it didn’t feel as natural as it had when he himself was a little kid. His mother wasn’t coming back—she couldn’t come back now, of course—and when she, too, died, she hadn’t yet had the chance to drive down to Nebraska to see Loomis. She’d only seen him in pictures.
——
They’d behaved badly at the funeral, he remembers. He and Carla and Ray, all of them stoned throughout the whole thing; the fourteen-month-old Loomis, solemn and intelligent even then, sat in the crook of Carla’s arm as they toked up in the car outside the funeral home. The smell of marijuana must have wafted off them as they promenaded slowly past his mother’s corpse in its casket, as they sat in the pew and listened to the preacher. He dully greeted a few of his old aunts and uncles, faces from his parents�
�� long-gone parties, now scattered, now strangers. They went back to the house where his mother had lived out the last decade of her life with Terry Shoopman, and ate from relish trays of raw vegetables and dip, casseroles and cold fried chicken, pies and cakes. They sat together in a little cluster, he and Carla and Ray, talking about the idiotic things stoned people talk about, and when Terry Shoopman had come up and clutched Troy in a hug, he had seen Carla and Ray widening their eyes ironically from beyond Terry’s shoulder. Terry had called Troy “son,” and held Loomis tenderly.
“I still want to be a grandfather to this child,” Terry had said, wet-eyed. “I hope you know that. I loved your mother very much. She was a very special lady.”
For several years, Terry Shoopman had continued to send Loomis presents on his birthday and at Christmas. He had even called a few times. “Why don’t you come up and visit me?” he’d said. “I’d love to see Loomis.” And he had tried to remind Troy of the “fun” they’d once had, when Troy, as a teenager, used to spend Christmas or summer months with his mother and Terry in Bismarck. The truth was, Troy hardly remembered those times, he’d been so stoned; and after a while, after a few gentle rebuffs, Terry stopped calling, stopped sending cards and presents. Troy hoped that Terry had found another woman. Though he’d never wanted Terry as a stepfather, he didn’t wish him ill.
——
His memory tunnels through these paths as he dozes under his mother’s comforter, his mind a slow-moving dune. He opens his eyes long enough to see that it is after four in the afternoon, and then he is dreaming again, going over and over his own history. He can clearly see the places where he might have changed things, where he might have done a better job making his life, though most of those paths also lead away from Loomis’s existence, and he can’t bear that. Loomis, he thinks, is the one good thing he’s done in his life.
As for the rest, he doesn’t know. Can someone help him? He could call Michelle, in Arizona. She’s forty-four now, she might have something wise to say, as she walks the golf courses with her wealthy husband; he could call Bruce, who is still in prison, denied parole after attacking another inmate; he could call Terry Shoopman, or one of the various relatives he once knew as a child—the aunts and uncles, the cousins he once played with on those long-ago childhood nights, to whom he hasn’t spoken in years. But there is no real connection left, and he is aware that he is not even held to them by blood. He is the one who was adopted. His mother and father pulled him into their families, but now that they are dead, what remains? There is only Carla, who has left him; and Loomis, who has been taken away; and Ray, gone now, too, banished. Get out, you moron, he’d said.
He opens his eyes again, rubbing his bare feet against each other. God, God, God, he thinks, and lying there, he can picture his mother’s body in the casket. She didn’t really look like herself, and when Troy touched her hands they were as weightless as husks. They moved easily out of their folded position across her chest. He thought they’d be stiff, frozen into place, but in fact they were like dry branches and when he tried to press them back into their prayerful position they slipped farther astray. They hovered above each other as if they were trying to clasp something to her chest, and he had to ask the mortician for help. “I screwed up my mom’s hands,” he said, stoned out of his mind. “I’m sorry.” He didn’t cry for her until much later.
21
October 20, 1996
Even though it’s almost sunset, Troy has to get out of bed to answer the doorbell. He hasn’t been asleep, exactly, but he hasn’t been quite willing to get up either. What is there to do, after all? Make coffee, this late in the day? Find something to eat? Watch TV? Continue to contemplate the unchangeable mistakes he’s made?
But when the bell rings a second time, he finally slides himself out from under the covers.
He looks terrible, he knows—shirtless, barefoot, wearing only a pair of sweatpants, his eyes bleary with unsustained sleep, hair standing up in stiff tufts. He sees himself in the mirror that hangs by the doorway, tries to pat his hair down a bit as the doorbell bongs its three descending notes again. “Screw it,” he whispers to his drawn, bleary face, and turns to throw open the front door.
It’s Jonah—Jonah from work.
They both stand there, hesitantly. Jonah is holding a grocery bag in each hand. “Hey,” he says, as if he is surprised that Troy has appeared at the door. “How’s it going?” he says.
“Hey,” Troy repeats, and then they are silent again. The chill wind ripples Jonah’s hair and loose jacket as he stands there, and Troy crosses his arms tightly across his bare chest.
“I thought you might need some groceries,” Jonah says at last.
“Some groceries?” Troy says. He tries to take this in, but can’t quite gather what Jonah’s getting at. It has the quality, he thinks, of some very dry-witted practical joke, and he feels himself wavering at the edge of a punch line. “You brought me food,” he says. “From the supermarket.”
“Yeah,” Jonah says, and he gives the bags a little lift, to demonstrate. “I was going to, just, like, leave the bags on the . . . doorstep. But then I was worried that, you know, some animals or something would get into it. So.”
“Okay . . .” Troy says, and raises his eyebrows. “And you’re leaving food on my doorstep because . . . ?”
“Well,” Jonah says, and looks helplessly down at the two bags as if he’s handcuffed to them. “I wanted to make myself useful, I guess.” Another gust of wind bursts across them, fierce, bending the heads of the trees and sending the leaves into a flutter of birdlike uproar and alarm.
“Dang,” Troy says, flinching at the chill. “Listen, man, why don’t you . . . Just come in, okay? Let me close this door before I freeze to death.”
——
Jonah stands nervously in the living room while Troy slams the door shut on the weather. When Troy turns back to look at him he is red in the face, blushing noticeably, the long scar that runs from his eye to the edge of his mouth paler and more prominent.
“I hope I’m not . . . intruding,” Jonah says. “I feel like this was a really stupid idea.”
But Troy only shrugs. He finds a half-clean T-shirt draped over the couch and pulls it on with a shudder. The transition from the sleepy, overheated bedroom to the icy winds on the porch has left his mind and body in a little state of shock, and he peers at Jonah, slow-blinking. “So . . .” Troy says. “What’s up?”
“I don’t know,” Jonah says, and then seems to consider. “I feel really stupid. It was just—I don’t know, I was talking to Crystal. And she was saying how she was worried about you, and she didn’t know how you were able to even do simple things like go out and get groceries with the . . . the house arrest. And so I was out in the supermarket, and, so. I bought some food. I mean, I thought it might help you.”
They look at each other.
“Crystal’s kind of a fricking busybody, don’t you think?” Troy says.
“Well,” Jonah says. “Not necessarily.” He stands there, still holding the two sacks in a posture that seems both hopeful and resigned to failure. What do you do with such a person? Troy wonders. What do you say? He has heard the story of Jonah’s life—from Crystal, of course—all about the car accident. Jonah and his wife, eight months pregnant, driving on the expressway in Chicago, on their way to a movie. The semi-truck, boxing them in and then suddenly veering out of control, the crunch of metal, the sound of the wife screaming. He had found himself picturing it vividly, and now looking at the scars on Jonah’s hands, Troy can’t help but think of these images again. Here is a guy whose life has been even worse than Troy’s own, and it’s hard to be rude to him.
“Well, anyways,” Troy says, after a pause. “Come on in the kitchen. Let’s see what you’ve got there.”
——
They don’t say anything as Jonah sets the bags on the kitchen table. Troy glances at the stack of dirty dishes in the sink, the visible balls of dust that have collected
at the bottom of the kitchen counters, the unsent letter to Mrs. Keene still propped between the salt and pepper shakers on the table. Yes, he thinks. It is the house of someone whose life is falling apart, the sort of person you’d bring charity groceries to.
“I don’t want to seem like a jerk, or anything,” Jonah says.
“Don’t worry about it,” Troy says.
“I mean, I didn’t know what you really needed, so I just thought . . .”
“I appreciate the gesture.”
“I thought you might like some bread . . . and cheese . . . and some lunch meat . . . and maybe, like, a cantaloupe?”
“Okay,” Troy says.
“I bought a six-pack of beer, but I don’t know whether you can drink it.”
“Not really,” Troy says. “That’s probably not a good idea.”
“So . . . I also bought some soda? Coke?”
And Troy sighs, softly.
“Coke is great,” he says. “That’s fine.”
——
They are sitting at the kitchen table, with the food laid out between them like some complicated puzzle. Troy finds glasses and some plates, and a jar of mayonnaise in the refrigerator, then sits down across from Jonah, both of them shyly quiet, concentrating on their work, as they make sandwiches. Troy pours a Coke over the ice in his glass, and Jonah opens a beer.
“You know,” Troy says, “I know that Crystal means well, but I really wish that . . .”
“It’s my fault,” Jonah says. “I’m sorry. It was a really dumb thing to do.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I understand what you mean,” Jonah says. He smiles apologetically at his sandwich before biting it. “But I’m not doing it because of that. I . . . just wanted to be friendly. You seem like a cool guy. And . . . I don’t have a very easy time getting to know people.”
And Troy isn’t sure what to say to this. “Okay,” he says at last, watching as Jonah takes another cautious bite of bread. It’s strange to be sitting here with someone, after all the time he’s spent alone. Jonah is the first person who’s been in Troy’s kitchen since he kicked Ray out, a month and a half ago, and despite the guy’s edginess, it’s not a bad feeling. Troy has spent a lot of time at this kitchen table—laughing it up with his customers, playing cards with Ray, eating cereal with Loomis in the morning—and he can feel the remnants of these old comforts hovering in the back of his mind.
