by Dan Chaon
29
February 27, 1997
Troy has been thinking a lot about Nora lately. Despite everything, despite all the more pressing concerns, he finds her floating up from the back of his mind. Nora Doyle, he thinks as he trudges out the back door of the Stumble Inn, past the fat, unhappy Dumpster, pulling his stocking cap over his ears, the muddy slush of the parking lot beginning to solidify beneath his shoes as the little bit of sun sinks away. “You look a little pale,” Crystal had told him as he was leaving. “Are you doing okay?” And he’d shrugged. “Just a cold,” he said, and now, sitting in the car with the defrost on, he finds a crumpled piece of tissue and blows his nose grimly. Exhaust plumes thickly out from his muffler into the cold air, and he can imagine Nora, a teenaged girl five or six months pregnant with him, staring out a window of the Mrs. Glass House at the snow. He thinks of that long ago day when he was eleven, when Carla’s friend Chrissy had talked to him about being adopted. Don’t you wonder about your mother? Chrissy had said, and he recalls the small fissure that had opened up inside him at that moment, even though he’d tried to ignore it for years and years.
He has a vague image of her. A narrow face, Jonah had said, high cheekbones, dark eyes, a prominent nose. Long black hair, he thinks as he stands in his kitchen. “It was down to her waist when I was growing up,” Jonah had told him, and Troy has a glimmer of her again, as if he has seen her before. The back of his neck quivers. He can see her face as she gazes out through her window, her mantle of dark hair, her features unclear through the layer of condensation on the glass. Would he have been moving inside her?
Probably not, he thinks, and he puts a pan of water on the stove to boil. He finds a package of powdered soup—yellow chicken-flavored dust, dehydrated noodles—and pours it into the pot, then changes from his work clothes into sweats while it heats. He looks in the medicine cabinet for some kind of cold remedy, and at last settles on a chewable grape antihistamine that he’d bought for Loomis sometime last year. He unrolls some toilet paper and blows his nose again.
She would have put her palms against the windowpane, he imagines. A sixteen-year-old girl. Water would have trickled down from the imprint of her hands.
——
The last few days have been pretty awful, and maybe that’s what brings Nora into his mind. Monday had been the fifth anniversary of his mom’s death, and he’d been surprised to find that it hadn’t really gotten easier. The dull ache of grief opened up around him, exacerbated by his frustrating dealings with Jonah, by his worries about Loomis and custody. He’d learned that Judy had already, without any dramatic confrontation, managed to terminate Carla’s parental rights, and he knew it was only a matter of time before a similar petition was leveled against him. He’d spent the better part of the day trying to reach his lawyer, Eric Schriffer, pressing the phone receiver to his ear as Nora and his mom and Carla circled through his mind in slow, lazy figure eights: dead, missing, lost. He listened to the soft, muddy bump as he was put on hold. Schriffer was “in a meeting,” or “not in the office,” or “on the other line.”
They’d been friends once, Troy thought. They used to sit around and get stoned, and they’d had some pretty good talks, and even as he listened to tinny classical music being played for him through the phone lines, he could imagine confiding in Eric. He would tell him about Jonah and all the adoption stuff. He would tell him about the odd, elusive connections he could feel at the edge of his thoughts—his adoptive mom, and Carla, and Nora, these women he’d lost, pacing together in a wheel in his mind.
But when Eric finally picked up the phone, in the late afternoon, it was clear that they were friends no longer. He had only started to talk about the termination of Carla’s parental rights when Schriffer cut him off.
“Listen, Troy,” Schriffer said, in a bright, quick voice. “This is nothing to worry about. This is a fluke of your ex-wife’s behavior that has nothing to do with you. I just got a report from your parole officer, and you’re doing great. Even if she does present a petition, it will never in a million years make it to court. The law is on the side of the biological parent, man. You just need to take it easy and relax.”
“Yeah,” Troy said, and he could feel all of the things that he’d imagined telling Schriffer shriveling up. “Yeah, I understand, except—”
But Schriffer was already moving on. “It’s really good talking to you, Troy,” he said. “But I really have to get going. I’m sorry. It’s really been hectic around here lately.”
“Ah,” Troy said. “Well then.”
——
He paces through the house, drinking his soup from a coffee cup. He changes the sheets on his bed—the old king-size four-poster that had once belonged to his parents, and which he’d later shared with Carla. He checks on Loomis’s room, the room that had once been Troy’s as a child, and retapes some of the slumping drawings, loosened by the dry, forced-air heat. He sits down and sorts through some of his mom’s things from the hall closet, her mementos and letters, her high school yearbook. Her jewelry box, where there is a little plastic baggie full of his own baby teeth, tucked alongside the earrings and necklaces. If he’d had a little alcohol in him, he might have even called Terry Shoopman, just to talk to someone who had known his mom, just to hear Shoopman bend his dull, steady high school guidance counselor voice to Troy’s worries.
“You shouldn’t feel guilty,” Terry Shoopman would say. “Your mother always wanted you to find out more about your biological family. To tell you the truth, she was always a little troubled that you didn’t show more interest in it when you were a child.
“It’s true you’ve had a run of bad luck, Troy,” Terry Shoopman would say. “But it seems silly to try to make these connections. Your wife, and your mother, and this woman Nora? They’re all very different people. Surely you realize that.”
“Yes,” Troy would say. “That’s true.”
“I think you’re spending too much time alone, young man,” Terry Shoopman would say. “You need to get a grip on yourself.”
“Yes,” Troy says aloud, and curls his palm around the baggie of his baby teeth. He recalls what Jonah had said, a few weeks ago. They had been talking about Jonah’s wife, Holiday, about the car accident, and Jonah had shrugged his shoulders abruptly.
“I really can’t think about it anymore,” Jonah said. “I need to move on.” And then he’d looked at Troy plaintively, his eyes roving, scan-ning Troy’s face. “You just . . . keep moving, right?” he said. “You’re always . . . in the process of becoming a different person. Don’t you think?”
“I guess,” Troy said. He wasn’t sure what to say to the strange, urgent conviction in Jonah’s eyes.
——
There was so much that Jonah was evasive about, so many questions he skirted with general philosophical principles. He said that it was “hard to remember,” that it was “not really that important,” that there were “things he doesn’t like to talk about.”
“Jonah takes the Fifth Amendment once again,” Troy would say, half joking, half irritated. “What is there to be so slippery about, man?”
“I’m just not that . . . interested in the past,” Jonah had said, and lowered his head stubbornly. “I like to sort of . . . live in the present.”
“Uh-huh,” Troy said. “Well, for me the present kind of sucks, so we’re a little bit at odds, don’t you think?”
And Jonah had shrugged, moodily. “I’m telling you the truth,” he said. “I just don’t remember. I don’t think about that stuff.”
Nora was a particularly touchy subject for some reason, and Troy couldn’t understand why. He knew there was something Jonah wasn’t telling him. The silences grew longer when she slipped into the horizon of the conversation. Jonah’s mouth grew small, reproachful, when Troy asked a direct question. It was as if Jonah didn’t quite recognize that Nora was what connected them, that Nora, at least biologically, was Troy’s mother, too.
“Did she ever—�
�� he had asked Jonah once. “Did she mention me, ever?”
And Jonah had shifted in his chair. “Well,” he said. He brought his foot up and cradled it in his lap. “I think she thought about you,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. It was just a feeling I got.”
“But you knew,” Troy said, after a moment. “You knew about me, that she’d given a baby up for adoption. She told you?”
“Well,” Jonah said. “More or less.” He cleared his throat. “You know,” he said, “she didn’t talk about anything personal with me. It was just like a . . . typical parent-child thing. Nothing special. I don’t have any real insights or anything. You know? She cooked, and she kept the house clean, and she liked to read books. She liked art, I guess. She had lots of postcards of different paintings. And seashells. She collected seashells.”
“Oh,” Troy said. He watched as Jonah looked down at his hands. Unlike most people, Jonah tended to rest his hands with his palms facing up—maybe because of the scars that ran down his knuckles to his wrists—but it gave him an oddly religious quality. “You didn’t like her very much,” Troy said carefully, and Jonah glanced up, abruptly, startled.
“I didn’t dislike her,” Jonah said. His brow furrowed. His expression came near to annoyance, the closest that Troy had ever encountered. “We didn’t always get along the best,” Jonah said. “But she wasn’t a bad person, exactly.”
——
He had tried to be sensitive about Jonah’s reluctance. He understood that there were things that were hard to talk about, and he had the vague notion that Jonah and Nora had some sort of falling-out, that there was some aspect that needed to be approached delicately. He even offered up his own adopted mother as an example, hoping that his stories about her would act as prompts to Jonah’s recalcitrant memory. Awkwardly, he had told Jonah the story of his mother’s funeral—how stoned they’d been, how he’d undone the prayerful clasp of the corpse’s nearly weightless branchlike hands. He had never told this anecdote to anyone before, but he gave it to Jonah, and they were both silent for a moment when he was done with it.
Troy shrugged, giving Jonah a sad, apologetic half smile. “It’s fucked up,” he said.
“A little,” Jonah said. “Not— I don’t think you did anything wrong, exactly.”
“I don’t know,” Troy said. “I feel pretty guilty about it. I miss her.” He waited, expectantly, but Jonah just sat there. His eyes shifted slightly, and he licked his lips.
“What was it like for you?” Troy said. “Was there a funeral for . . . Nora?”
Jonah seemed to freeze.
“Not really,” he said. “Well, not in the traditional sense.”
Troy raised his eyebrows expectantly.
“She was cremated,” Jonah said. “So there wasn’t a casket or anything. It was just . . . a quick thing.”
“She died young,” Troy said, after a moment. “I was thinking about that the other day. She was only, like, what? Forty-three?”
Jonah didn’t say anything. Troy was aware of a whole map of memories moving through Jonah’s brain, unspoken.
“She killed herself,” Jonah said at last. “I don’t really know why. But she, well,” he said.
“Oh,” Troy said.
“It was pills, basically,” Jonah said. There was a long, ambient silence in the kitchen, and Jonah was motionless. Outside, the icicles that hung from the eaves cast reflected waves of light through the window, trembling yellow-gray shadows. “It was pretty straightforward. She took, like, a whole bottle full of pills, and then she died. I guess she was unhappy. I don’t know.”
——
It came as a blow, this information—this death.
Troy was surprised at how heavily it settled over him. This woman, this Nora, whose body he’d once inhabited, whose picture he’d never seen but whom he has put together from Jonah’s hesitant descriptions. Suddenly she was a presence.
His mother.
Whatever he’d hoped for her crumbled a little.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly, and hesitated. His hand felt shaky as he put it across his mouth, but Jonah’s expression hardened.
“I probably shouldn’t have told you that,” Jonah said. “It’s not like . . . something I dwell on. I’m not trying to make you feel sorry for me.”
“I know,” Troy said, and paused: a shudder. “But . . . I feel sorry for her, man. I mean, she killed herself! And you didn’t tell me that?”
“I didn’t want you to think she was a bad person,” Jonah said, at last. “I didn’t want you to think she was crazy.”
“Jonah,” Troy said. At that moment, there was something in Jonah’s eyes that made Troy feel sad—a shifting, trapped look, the kind of expression you might have when you reached the dead end of a maze for the third or fourth time.
For a moment Troy half considered reaching across the table and touching the guy’s hand. Okay, his brother. His mom had killed herself. His wife was dead. He was, Troy realized with sudden clarity, desperate.
“That’s why you didn’t keep any pictures, I guess,” Troy said.
——
Troy goes through all of this in his mind as he sits there on the floor with his mother’s jewelry box between his legs. It has been over two weeks since he last talked to Jonah, and it’s weird. He’s not sure whether Jonah will ever be back.
“I don’t get it, Jonah,” Troy had said. “Look, I thought the reason you decided to find me was . . . because she was our mother. I mean, if you can’t be straight with me, what are you doing here? What’s the point?”
“I don’t know,” Jonah said.
“What do you want from this, man?” Troy said. “I mean, let me ask you a question. What do you want from life?” And Jonah just shook his head, as if the question baffled him.
The house is dark now, and Troy doesn’t bother to turn on the lights. He sits in Loomis’s bedroom with the window open a little, breathing the freezing air, blowing smoke into it.
Here are the things that Troy wants from life: He wants to be a good father, to see Little Man grow up; he wishes he was the kind of dad who maintains the love of his son, over a period of years; he wants the adult Loomis to remember him fondly when he is dead. He wants to be the kind of man that Carla would want to come back to, sober and repentant, and if he can’t have that, he wants to meet a beautiful, gentle girl he can make a home with. He wants great sex. He wants his old friends—Ray and Mike, Lonnie, all the guys he’d played cards with or got drunk with at the bar, the people who would sit out in the yard in the summer, the tiny bats dipping in the twilight above the branches, the stereo speakers sending stupid rock and roll into the yard, his bare feet in the grass. He wants to live next door to his parents. He wants them to be alive, still happily married and growing old together—and they would go on camping trips, his mom and dad, him and Carla, Loomis, maybe another kid or two not yet born. He wants to notice a piece of the world every day, something beautiful or funny or strange, that he can think about. He wants to be content most of the time.
He sighs. Across town Loomis is taking a bath, sitting with dignity among cloud peaks of bubbles, and maybe the time they spent together is already half like a dream; to the north, in Bismarck, Terry Shoopman watches a science program on public television, and a photo of Troy’s mother is still centered on the surface right above the screen—Troy’s mother and Shoopman on their wedding day; to the west, in Las Vegas or Reno, Carla runs her lighter under the glass of a pipe, her lower legs tangled in the sheets, a guy asleep beside her, and in a large house in Arizona, Ray’s mother Michelle pours herself a glass of wine, stands in her kitchen, frowning as if she can feel someone thinking about her in the distance.
As for Jonah, Troy can’t imagine what he’s doing, what he’s thinking. Maybe he’s working at the Gold Coin, or sitting in his trailer, reading, solitary, an airtight wall between himself and his past. He remembers the blank look Jonah gave h
im. “I don’t know,” Jonah said at last. “I think . . . I guess . . .” Then he let out a kind of laugh. “I really don’t know what I want,” he said. “I really don’t.”
30
April and May 1997
When Jonah left St. Bonaventure, he didn’t plan to come back. It was over, he decided. He’d made such a fool of himself—showing up drunk on Troy’s doorstep, telling him, what? It didn’t matter. It had been clear for a long time that things were never going to work out the way he wanted them to. Whatever hopes he’d had for Troy were gone now. He had screwed everything up again.
He packed only a few things before he left. He was very deliberate about it. Spartan, he thought, and liked the sound of the word. He laid all his clothes out on the bed: five T-shirts; three pairs of jeans; seven each of underwear and socks. These went into paper grocery bags, lined up in the trunk of the car. He put his cassette tapes into their little case and set them on the passenger seat. He put the envelopes with his money in the glove box, bundles of tens, twenties, fifties—everything he’d managed to save, plus what little was left of the original nest egg that he’d gotten from the sale of the house. He thought of that day, long ago, when he was clearing out his mother’s belongings; he thought of the auctioneer, dressed like some old-fashioned Grand Ole Opry singer, shaking his head sorrowfully as Jonah stuffed trash bags full of photos and mementos. “Son, don’t do anything you’re going to regret.”
There was a weird pleasure in it, though. That was what he realized. It reminded him of a time when he was a child, a day when he and his grandfather were trying to fly a kite in the stubble field out beyond their house. After a few failed attempts at getting the kite into the air, his grandfather remembered that a kite needed to have a tail. They searched around in the field for a while, looking for a bit of rag, and after a minute or two his grandfather said, “Oh, what the hell,” and cut off a long strip from the bottom of his shirt—just like that!—with a pocket knife. Jonah recalled being a little shocked. “Oh, Grandpa,” he said. “Don’t do that!” But his grandfather just shrugged, and they knelt down in the dirt to work on the kite. He’d thought about that shirt for a long time afterward. He was impressed by the idea that adults could simply tear their own shirts on purpose, and there would be no repercussions. Later, he’d taken one of his own shirts out behind the house, cutting into it with a pair of his mother’s scissors, frightened that someone would catch him but also exhilarated. He buried the ribbons of cloth in the garden, his face flushed, his shirt-murdering hands trembling.
