Family of Origin

by CJ Hauser

  To think: she’d imagined the two of them together might be more powerful than the whole of the Gulf.

  Mitchell lifted a can of Schlitz. Elsa took it. She was not dead and she was going to drink a Schlitz and this was good. It was warm but bubbly.

  What are you doing out here? Elsa said.

  Mitchell reached for the radio and turned it up. A baseball game was now playing. The Texas Rangers.

  Rebroadcast. Signal’s stronger out here, Mitchell said.

  Mitchell looked older than she’d first thought. A little leathery. He sipped his beer and she hers. She pulled the blanket closer around her. Her hair was soaking it clean through.

  How did you get to be a Rangers fan?

  I spent a while on the mainland, Mitchell said, when I was eighteen. He pivoted to show her the back of his leg. His tan revealed the long, shocking white scars she’d noticed at the Lobby. They were crenulated and puffy and covered the soft underpart of his knee. There was also a piece missing from his calf, she saw now.

  How’d you do that? she said, because she could tell he wanted her to ask. And because she liked it when people offered up their bodies in this way, as evidence.

  * * *

  ——————·

  It was stupid and it was his fault. He’d been moving too quickly. His father, David, had asked him to build new steps for his mother’s shack; the old ones were rotted through, like every other soggy thing on the island. Why this was his job and not David’s, he didn’t know. Mitchell was eighteen and resented being bossed around, but his father bossed around everyone on the island, so he couldn’t complain.

  The saw had been balanced on the porch railing. He’d laid it there only for a minute while he drilled together the finished planks. When he’d put the drill down on the step, the saw had tipped. It was heavy, a crosscut saw, and so had its own momentum as it fell, teeth first, like a mouth, from the railing. Mitchell tried to move away, but he’d pivoted on his back leg and so the saw bit into him, wedged into his calf, right below the back of his knee, at the top where the muscle bulged out. It did not cut clean through. Instead it stuck there, the weight of the saw pressing farther and farther into his flesh.

  He grabbed the saw. He should have cut everything first before he started assembling the steps. He should not have put the saw there. It was hasty. His brain told him this over and over now that the blade had sunk into his leg. His brain told him this with the urgency of a new thought each time, as if to understand this now could undo what had already happened. It was such a small slice of time that had passed. Surely he could cross back the way he’d come? Go back to just a moment before?

  Mitchell yelled. The delay of feeling had expired. His body wanted him to run, as if it could get away from the pain. But Mitchell made himself be still. He held the saw steady as he slowly lowered himself to the ground. He twisted around to see the back of his leg. There was a flap, and it was dark, almost black near the edges; the blade had not been clean, and there were beads of blood emerging from the sides. Mitchell’s back seized up with revulsion, and pain, and he shivered, but still he held the saw. He knew he needed to pull it out, that he would not be able to get to help if he had to hold the saw at the same time. But there was a hot white line of pain in his body that would resolve itself into a scream when he pulled the blade from his leg, and he didn’t want to do it.

  He pulled the saw carefully, a workman with his tool, and as the teeth retracted from his flesh, he yelled because there was nothing else to do. The flap gaped away from the leg it belonged to, and Mitchell dropped the wet blade onto the ground, and he pressed the flap to his leg and yelled again.

  He knew the wound was dirty inside. He did not want to press it closed. He wanted to open it up and wash it. He wanted to look inside and see what was there. But if he did, the blood would come too fast, so he pressed. And he stood. And he went looking for help. And as he did, blood trickled from beneath the well of his knee and down his calf the way sweat does when it runs into a sock.

  Mitchell found his way to his mother, who lay him in his bed while she tried to clean the wound. Get David, she told one of the women.

  David came, but refused to take Mitchell to the hospital. He’d managed to raise his son on the island for eighteen years without exposing him to the poison of mainland life and he wasn’t about to change that now. David left the room, knowing he would be unable to hold to the ideals he forced on everyone else if he had to stare his son in the face while he proclaimed them.

  Mitchell’s mother gave him someone’s painkillers, and one of the men stitched his leg up with fishing line, and everyone said he would be fine, even though they all knew that this was what they hoped would happen, not what was likely. This was how every bad thing ever happened to the Leap-Backers: insisting on believing in the world they wanted in the face of the world that was.

  And of course Mitchell wasn’t fine. The wound was infected and only got worse.

  He was sick for weeks, hallucinating with fever and infection. Time started to slip for him, and by the time Mitchell’s mother got him off the island and to the hospital, the wound was septic and they had to cut away part of his leg.

  In the hospital, Mitchell grew to love the morphine drip they gave him.

  Time kept slipping.

  Mitchell had elaborate morphine dreams spun from the stories his father used to tell him about the Darwin Walking Backward and the island reverse-spinning into a pure and uncorrupted state. He dreamt of Darwin’s skull cane, tortoises, finches, the HMS Beagle cutting backward through its own wake.

  At some point, his mother went back to the island. She just really hated hospitals, she explained, couldn’t bear all those sick people and machines, the way the hospital smelled. Mitchell remembered his mother shoving money into his hospital pillow before she went. Mitchell had seen money only a few times before; they had little use for it on the island. The green bills sticking out of his pillowcase were so miraculous and strange that he kept staring at them, and perhaps it was because he was so distracted by the money that he could not remember what it was his mother had said about returning. Whether she had promised to return to him at all.

  On the day they were meant to discharge him, it occurred to Mitchell that there was no one around to tell him what to do, which was terrifying and thrilling. It was the first time in his life this had ever happened.

  He was on his own. He could choose.

  So he ran away.

  He had one pair of hospital pajamas and a bottle of OxyContin.

  He crashed in shelters, he crashed in churches, he crashed in strangers’ vans. He crashed with kids he sold Oxy to and he crashed with kids he bought heroin from when the Oxy got too expensive.

  Mitchell spent two years running and crashing, and time slipped for him in new ways.

  He told himself that anything was better than going back to the island.

  But one morning he woke up with the Darwin tattoo. A black outline of the HMS fucking Beagle on his bicep that a friend had done for him the night before when he’d been out of his head. Seeing the Beagle there on his arm, it was hard to deny how much he missed the island. Some part of his brain, tired of being ignored, had made the evidence conspicuous on his body. And Mitchell couldn’t ignore it, not when his arm throbbed all week. He was dope sick, and tired of crashing, and maybe the island felt like the only place he might be able to get clean. On the island, he would have no other choice.

  Mitchell made it back to Leap’s, almost nodding out on his way across the Gulf in a boat with an about-to-kick motor he’d traded the last of his stuff for, but when he arrived, he saw the wreckage of the commune on the shore and realized it was gone.

  He was too late.

  His father had been dead a year; his mother had run away. He would never see either of them again. This wreckage was his inheritance.


  Mitchell got off the boat. A new man on an old shore.

  * * *

  ——————·

  Elsa reached over and pulled Mitchell’s leg toward her. She touched the scar. She cupped his calf in her hand. Mitchell leaned into her grip.

  He piloted the boat back home.

  Mitchell took her to the Lobby. It was dark, and from the pool, the popping sound of the fish mouths breaching the surface came in intervals. There were several ducks sleeping beneath the stairwells, and Elsa left wet footprints on the wood steps as she followed Mitchell upward. He carried a lantern.

  You live up here? she asked.

  For a long time now, he said.

  Upstairs, the walls had once been papered in a pattern of ferns, but large strips had fallen away, and beneath the paper the walls were a mottled reddish color, paint or mold. There were alcoves along the hallway with dead sconces in them, their frosted glass grown over with moss. The floor alone looked unaged, as if Mitchell himself had scuffed it to a good polish over the course of many years.

  Almost his whole life had been lived on this island. Elsa wanted to learn how to be alone and to need nothing like Mitchell. She would need to, if she was ever going to survive on Mars.

  She knew that fucking people who seemed as if they had all the answers wouldn’t get her any closer to her own. Would not change who Elsa was in any permanent kind of way. And yet.

  The enormous bedroom he led Elsa to held the skeleton of a canopy bed with a made-up mattress and pillows on it, clean and printed in colorful chevrons. There were three jugs of water on the floor. Expensive-looking, bulbous light fixtures hung like clustered grapes above an empty fireplace, and when Mitchell toggled a junction box on the floor, they lit up, buzzing slightly. The room smelled of lemongrass oil.

  Mitchell did not lead her to the bed.

  Because in the corner was something like a yurt. It was a geodesic dome, the size of a four-man tent, built with well-sanded two-by-fours. Bright canvas had been stapled to its honeycombed rungs. It looked like nothing so much as a man-sized pupa, a larval cage, and it glowed softly, a Coleman lantern running inside.

  Did the boys build that? Elsa asked.

  They want to build them for the buffles, Mitchell said. They think it will fix them.

  That doesn’t seem right, Elsa said.

  We can’t be sure, said Mitchell. He disappeared inside the tent, and Elsa could hear him taking off his belt.

  She knew this wouldn’t solve anything, and yet, here she was outside of this damn pupa.

  She’d sworn she would change, again, or for the last time. She’d promised to never again be the way she was with that bartender outside the cowboy dive, half-feral and buckle-fucking him on the porch. Would she ever be allowed to make different mistakes in her life?

  Elsa untied the knot in her suit behind her neck. No, it wouldn’t solve anything, but she felt desperate to let someone rush in and fill her with new feelings and new questions and new fucking and new regret, because even all that was less painful than being her own actual self.

  Elsa fell into the same traps over and over again because she knew that inside she was wrong, so why not let Mitchell, or anyone, rewrite the space inside her. Why not let them annihilate her completely? There was a kind of pleasure in being relieved of her own self. She pulled down her bathing suit and it was cold and wet around her ankles as she kicked it away.

  San Francisco

  FIFTEEN YEARS BACK

  He’d made her a cake. Lemon coconut. Keiko had said it would be nice if he did something for Elsa, for her birthday, because she’d been having such a hard time lately. With what? Nolan asked, but Keiko didn’t offer particulars. There had been a week’s worth of hushed phone calls, and now Keiko said that Elsa and her mother were in San Francisco for a special birthday shopping trip. It seemed insane that they would come all the way from Minnesota, but what did Nolan know about girls and shopping?

  Nolan strained seeds from lemon juice. Nolan whipped frosting. He layered the thick cream between the sections of the cake, put them together, and patted the top, supple and spongy. He frosted the cake, careful to do a crumb layer first, and sprinkled an even, fragrant layer of flaked coconut onto the frosting.

  Nolan had taken Home Ec as an elective instead of Metal Shop, because he noticed that only girls took Home Ec, and he figured if he were the only boy in class, something good would happen. It was his freshman year of high school, and Nolan was fourteen. He was interested in girls, but he could never figure out how to act around them. Home Ec was good for this. He was told exactly what to do, and Nolan found that if most of his brain was busy trying to chiffonade basil or macerate strawberries when one of the girls spoke to him, he’d answer back no problem. I love your hair, the girls said. Nolan wore his hair in a ponytail tied with a leather thong. He was going for Keanu Reeves. He was pretty sure girls loved Keanu Reeves.

  So when his mother said that Elsa was coming to town for her twentieth birthday, he made a cake. He was doing it because he was good at it. He was doing it because his mother had asked him. He was not doing it for Elsa. Elsa had tried to kill him when he was small. He’d seen her only once or twice a year for the past decade, and she’d always made it clear that seeing him was a terrible chore.

  As Nolan wiped the rim of the cake plate clean, his parents buzzed around the kitchen unloading groceries and setting the table. They were edgy, whispering to each other hoarsely. For the first time, it occurred to Nolan that these family reunions might be a chore for them, too. Were grown-ups really still on the hook for doing things they didn’t want to? Nolan would be fourteen forever. Or at least, he would make sure to still be cool later, like he was now. He’d like to be eighteen. Or twenty-one, in case it turned out he liked beer. Twenty-one was the absolute maximum. Being any older than that looked to Nolan like too much work.

  * * *

  ——————·

  Elsa arrived at their apartment complex raging. She burst in the door, leaving her mother in the car yelling after her to please put on a jacket. Elsa would not put on a jacket. She was wearing a black sateen tank top. She was wearing a bra with green straps and a lot of pushup padding going on, unless those were just Elsa’s boobs now. She was heavier than Nolan remembered. Heavy was bad; he knew this from the girls in Home Ec. They stole spoonfuls of the buttercream frosting Nolan made because they said it tasted better than theirs. They clicked spoons against their teeth and said they really shouldn’t be eating frosting because it would make them so fat. They clutched at their stick thighs as they said this.

  Anyway, Elsa was not fat. There was just more of her than there was of the freshman girls. Her legs and hips were thick, and her waist nipped in alarmingly. She was so pale, so blonde, and Nolan thought she looked strong, like she was meant to be working a farm, sweating joyfully outdoors, not dressing like an anemic punk.

  Nolan noticed Elsa appraising him too. He unhitched his slouching back so she could inspect him properly. He was five foot eleven now. He was getting grown up. Keiko told him all the time: Too big! I wish I could keep you little. I would keep you in my pocket. Right here, she would say, and pat her breast pocket.

  You got tall, New Baby, Elsa said.

  Nolan said, I made you a cake.

  * * *

  ——————·

  At dinner, Elsa did not look at their father. Elsa was at Macalester, studying education, and Ian asked her questions about her classes. But instead of answering, she made elaborate forkfuls of food and then ate off the tines in a nibbling way that Nolan found disgusting but kind of sexy.

  Elsa, Ingrid said.

  Ian and Keiko exchanged looks but did not know what to do.

  She’s really loving it, Ingrid said, answering for Elsa. Elsa snorted.

  Nolan had never considered being rude to his parents, and the wa
y Elsa disobeyed them so fluently thrilled him.

  After dinner, he brought out the cake with twenty blue candles in it. All the parents complimented him on how beautiful it was, and as they sang to Elsa, it was almost a nice moment. But Elsa’s face hovering in the glow above her coconut birthday cake was so intense that the adults’ singing quavered. When she blew out the flames, they were too afraid to ask what she had wished for.

  They ate their cake in silence.

  Ian suggested that the children give the adults some time to talk. We have things to discuss, he said, and looked at Elsa meaningfully.

  I’m here, Elsa said. I’d like to talk.

  Keiko suggested the children go for a swim in the complex pool.

  Night swimming! How exciting, Ingrid said. And we just bought you that new swimsuit, isn’t that lucky, Elsa?

  Why can’t we talk now? Elsa said.

  Nolan, go change into your suit, Keiko said.

  Nolan shrugged and went upstairs to change into his suit, knowing it was his job to take Elsa off the parents’ hands. So they would have a moment alone to talk about whatever it was grown-ups needed to talk about.

  * * *

  ——————·

  At the heart of Nolan’s apartment complex, there was a small indoor pool. The lights were always orange and wavery inside and the air was warm and steamy with chlorine and cleaning bleach. There was Astroturf around the perimeter. Chaise longues. A number of enormous potted plants, waxy jungle leaves and ferns. The deep end was only eight feet, and there was something hospital-like about the ladders and steps with their handicap-accessible railings, as if the average user of the pool was assumed to be infirm.

  Nolan threw his towel down on a chaise and jumped in. He loved to swim. He wished the pool were bigger and outside. He swam laps at the high school sometimes. Vaulting between the beaded lane markers made him feel strong.