Family of Origin

by CJ Hauser

  * * *

  ——————·

  In the Lobby kitchen, there were long steel tables and industrial sinks. It had been built to service a hotel of eighty guests with a three-star restaurant. Now there were masking tape labels on cupboards that said things like JIM’S GRUB! DO NOT TOUCH!

  Elsa scrambled eggs and did not offer to make any for Nolan, who poured some of the cornflakes he had purchased into a bowl.

  They brought their food to the dining room, a tall-ceilinged space with a chandelier and a dozen round tables with pink linens on them. Gates was at one of the tables vivisecting a grapefruit. She had a stack of toast next to her, cut into triangles.

  It’s nicer in here than I expected, Elsa said, sitting down next to her.

  Mitchell renovated some of the facilities, Gates said. The kitchen, showers, pool. The upstairs is mostly uninhabitable.

  It’s not that bad, said a man entering the dining room, weaving between tables to greet them. I live up there, after all.

  Elsa set down her fork.

  Mitchell Townes had heavy brows, a dark mustache, and a silver goatee. He was lean in the way of former addicts, a tall man with bright eyes and a sunburned Anglo complexion. He wore a t-shirt, the sleeves rolled up, unlaced boots, and dirty jean shorts. Across the back of his left calf was a wide, toothed scar that cut crosswise across the bulge of flesh. An empty woven laundry bag was slung over his shoulder.

  Mitchell, he introduced himself, and they all shook hands. Then he remembered the circumstances of their meeting. My condolences, of course, he said. Your father was a brilliant man.

  Elsa could tell that Mitchell did not mean this. Or if he did, that he’d found Ian’s brilliance something irritating, too precious, and she liked this about him.

  Elsa had expected a certain kind of man when she’d read that Leap’s was privately owned. Someone idle and stupid and entitled. She was surprised by the man in front of her. His face was deeply creased around the eyes and mouth and on his right bicep was a tattoo of a ship framed by a banner that read: HMS Beagle. She considered what it might mean for a man to live his life on an island. To not need anything from the mainland, or desire it. How this was not unlike living on Mars. She was curious about the kind of man who could do this.

  We appreciate that, Elsa said. She smiled. Nolan put his cereal bowl down on the table and looked at her.

  We were hoping we could talk—Nolan felt himself about to say, to some of the quacks—to some of you. About our father.

  If you’d like to hear remembrances of your father— Mitchell said.

  It’s his research we’re interested in, really, Nolan said.

  Mariana frowned.

  Did you introduce them to Esther yet? Mitchell asked.

  Gates shook her head. I was leaving that to you.

  I’m sure Esther Stein would talk to you. She’s been hoping to meet you for some time. Gates will show you the way.

  What about the others? Nolan asked.

  I can’t speak for everyone, Mitchell said. He wrapped his laundry bag tightly around his hand. But why hurry? Enjoy the island. If people want to offer their condolences, they’ll find you. He saluted them and left.

  That this island was a place to be enjoyed was an absurd thing to say, and yet Elsa thought Mitchell might believe it. He spoke Southern, his accent hard to place. He was a commune kid, and it sounded like a dialect all the island’s own.

  Elsa said, I thought Mitchell was rich?

  Rich? Gates said.

  She nodded.

  Mitchell’s grandfather was rich. The past two generations worked their way through most of the money. The Leap-Backers in particular. Communes are expensive if you don’t know what you’re doing.

  So if the money’s gone, Nolan asked, not that it’s any of my…but how— He had finished his cereal and wished for some of Elsa’s eggs.

  A tax exemption is the only thing keeping us afloat right now. We have to refile as a scientific organization this year. Which is a headache, because we need to show publications as proof we’re working “in the public interest.” Mitchell’s got an editor at Nature interested in a kind of soft feature—which is amazing, but even Nature can’t publish the feature if we don’t come to some kind of agreement about what exactly is going on with the ducks.

  People disagree? Elsa said.

  You could say that.

  What did our father think was going on? Nolan asked.

  Gates placed her spoon across the hull of her grapefruit. Were you close to your father? she asked.

  There was no good way to answer this.

  Nolan would say yes, of course. Nolan would say that his father had talked him through every decision of his life, had made every decision of his life for him, really, except a notable few that were Elsa’s doing. He would say that he could sketch his father’s face, his posture, from memory.

  But if this were true, then how could Nolan explain the fact that he was on an island on the Gulf Coast with no idea what his father was doing there? How could he explain Jinx and the Beethoven t-shirt, which surely belonged to a more lighthearted man than he knew Ian to be? What could he say to account for the fact that, since his mother had died, the only thing he and his father could reliably talk about with any kind of ease was baseball? That they had held things together in the little Bay Area house—which never seemed to run the right temperature or smell quite right with Keiko gone—by endlessly speculating over the Giants’ home versus road abilities and whose arm was about to fall off in the bullpen. But when the season ended, and the off-season hot-stove reports provided so little, they’d lapsed into silence. It was not long after this silence had left them unable to access each other that Ian had left. And moved to this island. And Nolan could not even begin to say why, but he suspected that if he’d just been able to keep talking about baseball, then maybe Ian would have stayed and maybe Ian would be still alive.

  Not really, Elsa said. We were estranged.

  Estranged was a stupid, dramatic word, and Nolan hated her for using it, particularly because he supposed it was the word she used for him too. He could imagine Elsa, a few drinks in at the bar, leaning in close to some cowboy or lake rat, saying, Yes, I have one brother but we’re estranged.

  Or maybe that was wishful thinking. Probably Elsa never spoke of him at all.

  Sorry to hear it, Gates said, with the impassivity of someone who has already known something to be true. You can ask Esther about his research. If she knows anything. Most of us don’t.

  Who lives in the shack on the western shore? Nolan asked. The tilting one at the very edge?

  That’s Remy St. Gilles, Gates said.

  Nolan put both his palms on the tablecloth and tried to remain very calm.

  The British science fiction writer? The Asterias series?

  Gates nodded. He also has a master’s in evolutionary biology and an ABD PhD in cosmology. But yes, the writer.

  Nolan had read all eight of the Asterias novels. The series followed a spaceship on a mission to discover a new Goldilocks Zone home on other planets for earthlings, but at every stop, they discovered a new species, evolved “perfectly” for the conditions of that planet. Every time, after some hijinks, the crew decided, no, still not right for us. Ian had read Nolan the first two books, The Great Space Sea and Stardrift, about Mars and Jupiter, when Nolan was small. Ian had scoffed at all the implausible details (You know a ship could never actually land on Jupiter, right? You know the ice-moss people’s agricultural system could never really feed a population that large? Yes, Dad. Read another chapter?), but by and large, even Ian found the books irresistible. The fourth book, about Pluto, was now a collector’s edition, because St. Gilles had demanded they stop printing it after Pluto was designated a dwarf planet. The ninth and final book of the series, about Earth, had yet to be releas
ed. Readers had been waiting for it for seven years. Nolan had heard that St. Gilles had left London, gone mysteriously missing, and was presumably at work on the novel. But to come here? To Leap’s?

  Is he working on the last book? Nolan asked.

  I wouldn’t ask him about that, Gates said. If you really want to talk to people, I’ll get you to Esther.

  Park Rapids

  ONE WEEK BACK

  Maybe Elsa did it because she’d had to rush to grade all the last spelling tests before class that morning and the tests said things like bux, which was books, and werl, which was world, and srpry, which was either surprise or sorry. She could use a word that meant both those things at once.

  Surprise! (I’m Sorry.)

  Elsa put stickers that smelled like strawberries or licorice on all the spelling tests, even though some children had gotten everything wrong.

  Maybe Elsa did it because Dylan had left her a month ago to the day and it didn’t seem like he was coming back. Or maybe it was because she’d slept hardly at all. Or because it was the last day of school. Maybe it was because Nolan had called her the day before and told her that their father was dead.

  (This was a bad day, but it wasn’t the bad day. Elsa would have to look back much farther to find the first gonging of her unhappiness.)

  But probably it was because Elsa thought of James Peacock as a particularly sensitive kid that she thought she should tell him the truth about the dead bird.

  James was a quiet, apocalyptic child who did things like stare directly into the sun and then report to Elsa that it made cool fire in his eyes. He was the oldest in the second-grade class and a source of great worry among the teachers: What to Do with James? He’d been held back a year because he “lacked emotional maturity,” but Elsa didn’t think that was true. Sure, James acted babyish sometimes, but it seemed to her a defensive strategy, as if he knew that growing up was a bum deal and was trying to opt out.

  Part of the problem was that James’s emotions were enormous and tended to move across the schoolroom like weather systems. Several times a day something would set him off—a wasp trapped between the windowpanes, a crooked carpet square—and he would sob or scream and want to press his damp face against the female teachers’ chests. Good news was equally distracting. Whenever James was proud of something he had done, he would climb the highest available structure—a desk, a chair, a slide—and shout out his own name.

  In fact, right before they’d found the dead bird, James had won an elaborate playground game involving six jump ropes and promptly climbed to the top of a jungle gym to pump his small fists in the air and shout: James Maxwell Peacock!

  He’d fallen off a moment later and scraped himself up.

  He trundled over to the teachers.

  I am looking for the nurse, he said.

  I’ll take him, Elsa said, when her co-teacher rolled her eyes.

  James didn’t cry over falling; this was not the sort of thing that made him sad. He was philosophical about pain. On top of the world one moment, bleeding and headed for the nurse’s office the next.

  You’re being very brave, Elsa told him, and he nodded.

  They were as far as the cracked basketball courts when James said, What is that?

  There was a turbulence of birds at the three-point line. They complained as Elsa and James waved them off, wings popping, all chattering beaks and squawks.

  What was left was most of a dead grackle. It had obviously been hit by a car, one wing at a terrible angle. Its eyes were partly eaten.

  What happened to it? James asked.

  Let’s look and see, Elsa said. This was her first bad idea. But James seemed so calm.

  A red tangle of guts had been pulled from the grackle’s belly like party streamers. His intact eye was oily. The other was punctured, leaking some kind of fluid. His talons were overextended, as if launching off and away.

  Why does it look like that? James asked.

  Elsa said, It’s dead.

  She felt that this was an opportunity to have James reckon with the realities of the world. A teaching moment. He could handle it. If people just told him the truth for once, maybe he could put all the small miseries that set him off into perspective and growing up wouldn’t seem so terrible.

  Do you think he was really old? James asked.

  No, Elsa said, I think he was about…a teenager bird.

  Should we take him to the nurse, James asked, and see if she can help him?

  Sure, Elsa said, why not.

  She scooped up the bird and put it into his hands.

  It seemed like a healthy impulse.

  They arrived at the nurse’s office looking like Hitchcock extras, James already bleeding from his knees and now also carrying the mangled bird, its body in his right hand, the wad of its mangled intestines balanced neatly in the palm of his left. And at this point, Elsa was actually feeling pretty proud of James. She was feeling like this experiment was a success. James had not felt too many feelings or been immature or too sensitive. Here he was, reckoning with something really grown up. The nurse screamed.

  For Elsa, the screaming nurse wasn’t the worst part. It was the way James Peacock calmly looked at the bird in his hands and then at Elsa. It was as if he had decided that they, calm, bloody, were right, and the nurse was wrong, and as she saw this terrible idea cementing into a lesson in James Peacock’s mind, Elsa wanted to say, No, no, please forget this. Don’t learn from me. I’m sorry. This was the wrong answer. I am always the wrong answer.

  * * *

  ——————·

  If it weren’t the last day of school, I’d make you take a leave of absence, her principal had said.

  I don’t know what I was thinking, said Elsa.

  Just have a good, long summer, the principal said.

  * * *

  ——————·

  At the bar that night, the teachers celebrated the end of the school year, and they could not stop laughing at Elsa for what they considered a kind of ballsy last-day stunt. It was a shitty bar. They’d been feeding quarters into the jukebox all night, trying to get something danceable to come on, but the same sad-sack old country music kept coming out of it, and Elsa suspected they were actually just listening to the bartender’s phone. He was young, in his twenties, slinky black t-shirt, skinny ribcage, and a too-large rodeo buckle at his waist. She would have said a standard-issue farm boy, but he had exquisitely beautiful blue-inked tattoos of a squid snaking up his forearms.

  Soon, the teachers were drunk.

  So when her phone rang again, Elsa picked up ready to tell Nolan that no, she would not help him plan a funeral for a man who obviously didn’t want either of them in his life. She pressed a hand to her ear and wandered away from the teachers’ table and stood in a back hallway next to crates of soda and a mop.

  I need to know if he killed himself, Nolan said. I just don’t believe he would have.

  Of course he would have, Elsa shouted over the bartender’s horrible music.

  You owe me.

  Don’t pull that.

  It’s true. You owe me more than this, Nolan said. The least you can do is come out and just help me get his stuff and talk to a few people. Figure out what he was working on.

  And if he killed himself.

  No, no matter how crazy he went, I don’t believe he would ever do that. He wasn’t like that.

  You mean he wasn’t like me, Elsa said. You’re just mad because I understand why he would do it.

  Are you drunk? Nolan asked. Where are you?

  It’s the last day of school.

  So you’re free, then.

  You’re really calling this in? Elsa said. Because I’m telling you, if you’re going to pull this I Owe You shit, you only get to do it once. This is it.

  Nolan laughed. You think
something else is going to come up? That someday I’ll be in trouble and be just waiting for you to ride in and—

  Okay, okay, okay.

  Good.

  I hate you.

  I know.

  Elsa hung up the phone and leaned against the wall. There was math to be done. As children, she and Nolan had always seen each other a couple times a year. Holidays, birthdays, graduations. But then, when everything went wrong—how long ago was it? She had been nineteen, which made him thirteen. Or no, fourteen, because it had been the fall and his birthday had just passed and her twentieth yet to come. Jesus, he’d been fourteen. That was the year their parents forbade them from seeing each other anymore. After that, Nolan called her sometimes. She’d driven down to Carleton once, when he was in college, when he’d begged, which must have been a decade ago. And then at Keiko’s memorial. But these were cursory meetings. Since they’d met in earnest? It had been a while. It had been a long time.

  * * *

  ——————·

  It was eleven-thirty and the teachers had been on the tequila. The night had acquired its own kind of momentum. They had drunk enough to forget almost everything, and they were feeling good.

  Elsa had just returned from the bar with new drinks for everyone when the PE teacher said, Of all the kids, James Peacock. What a basket case.

  He’s not, Elsa said.

  The gym teacher jumped up on his chair and raised his arms.

  James Maxwell Peacock! he shouted, and all the other teachers chorused along with him, arms in the air, laughing.

  They were still shouting and laughing when Elsa slipped away to the bar’s back porch. You couldn’t even see the lake from it, just the parking lot. Elsa sat on the railing, legs swinging, and finished her drink.

  Poor James Maxwell Peacock, she thought.

  Elsa could not be trusted around people, was what she was thinking. Trust your gut, people said. Just be yourself. But whoever had said these things was not thinking about Elsa when they said them. Did not know how far afield her gut could lead her. Every good thing she touched turned—into what? Wounds. Her ideas never panned out. She’d always end up hurting people.