by Lamb, Wally
“Lydia,” Janis said.
I nodded. “Must have been quite a balancing act for her—running a prison and raising a couple of grandkids. And she was no spring chicken by then. Would have been what? In her sixties, maybe? … But anyway, Lolly said that after my father got back from Korea, he never would talk about it. Built a wall of silence around whatever happened to him over there—with beer cans and liquor bottles, pretty much.”
Janis said her grandfather had fought in the Pacific Theater during World War II, and that he’d never talked about his experiences either. “That ‘greatest generation’ stoicism,” she said. “Maybe that’s what made them ‘the greatest’: the fact that they spared everyone at home the details.”
“Well, if that’s the case, then my father would have had a leg up. We Quirks were good secret-keepers. Our family motto should have been, ‘Shh, don’t tell. What goes on in this house stays in this house.’”
As I spoke, I saw Daddy, dirty and seedy-looking, parting the cornstalks and entering the clearing at the center of the maze—him and that girlfriend of his, the one who’d shown up at Daddy’s wake and been given the bum’s rush out of there. Bums, they’d been: both of them. His-and-her derelicts, dependent on a little boy’s thievery and secret-keeping. Don’t tell your grandpa we’re out here. Okay, buddy? Because that’s a secret between you and me, right? Now what do you got there? What’d you bring us? I liked it better when Daddy didn’t show up—when I could just hide the stuff I’d stolen in the baby buggy and go. Get away from those stuffed, pumpkin-headed replicas of who the Quirk family was supposed to be. No lesbians or drunks or divorcees. It was funny the way townspeople would come in droves every autumn weekend to wander through our maze and find, at the center, the Quirks we weren’t. “Caelum?”
For a second or two, I couldn’t quite place her. “Sorry,” I said. “I was someplace else. What were you asking?”
If your grandfather ever remarried.”
“Uh, no. Nope. He had lady friends from time to time, but … God, do you really want to hear about all this?”
She said she did.
“Before? When I said Grandpa was good to me? According to Lolly, he was just the opposite with my father. Beat him, threw it in his face all the time about how my grandmother would have lived if it wasn’t for him…. I guess Daddy’s big mistake was going right back to the farm after he got out of the service. Signing on for another tour of duty as Grandpa’s whipping boy. Lolly said he’d work for his old man all day, then go downtown and get shit-faced at night. Then he started drinking day and night, and that was when Grandpa gave him the boot…. At school? I used to lie about him.”
“Your father?”
I nodded. “Tell the other kids my dad was dead—that he’d died a war hero. And they bought it, too, until this one big-mouthed girl in my class, Bunny Clauson, brought in a newspaper clipping for current events, and it was about my father. How he’d staggered, drunk, off the downtown pier and had had to be rescued by police frogmen. Having to sit at my desk and listen to that and not cry, not show any emotion: man, that had to be one of the hardest moments of my life…. But like I said, Grandpa was good to me. That time I came home drunk was the only time he laid a hand on me. And, you know, you can see where that was coming from.”
Janis sighed. “Families are so hard,” she said.
Neither of us spoke for a minute or more. Then she stood and said she wanted to walk back over to the Soldiers and Sailors Arch, study it some more. Did I want to come? “No, I’ll stay here,” I said. “Take your time.”
Sitting on that picnic bench, I put my head in my hands and thought about that weird flashback-like experience I’d had a few hours earlier. Families are hard, she’d said: well, I couldn’t argue with that. But better to have had Alden Quirk the Third for a father than Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold for a son. A brother. I’d known them both: Eric’s and Dylan’s older brothers. Nice kids, good students. How were they surviving? How had they managed to go on after life dealt them the hand it did, courtesy of their little brothers? … It made me think about something I’d read in Lydia’s diary—the part where, at the Clemenses’ dinner party, the conversation had come around to the burdens of John Wilkes Booth’s brother, the actor Edwin Booth. How had he carried on after his brother’s infamous deed? Head down and one foot in front of the other, probably. The way I’d gone on after Maureen killed the Seaberry kid….
Morgan Seaberry: he’d been a secret-keeper, too. And when his brother’d threatened to blow the whistle—out him to their mother—he’d run out of that motel room and gotten himself killed. But what if that hadn’t happened? What if Mo had left Rivercrest five minutes earlier, or been held up and left five minutes later? Hell, one minute later. That poor kid would have crossed the road safely, and the dominoes would have fallen a whole different way. Maureen would have come home from her shift that morning, and gone to bed, and never have gone to prison…. And Morgan might have gone to UConn like he wanted to, come out to his dad and stepmom first maybe, and then to his mom. Become himself, finally, and stopped pretending to be the paragon she wanted him to be. He might have met some nice guy and fallen in love. Told his lover about how hard it had been for him in high school, before he’d found himself, claimed his life as his own….
I cleaned up the picnic stuff, brought the cooler back to the car. The book I’d bought was on the front seat, and I opened it and read.
I did know that Susy was part of us; I did not know that she could go away, and take our lives with her, yet leave our dull bodies behind. And I did not know what she was. To me she was but treasure in the bank; the amount known, the need to look at it daily, handle it, weigh it, count it, realize it, not necessary; and now that I would do it, it is too late; they tell me it is not there, has vanished away in a night….
When Janis got back, she said she’d been thinking that maybe none of this was an accident.
“This?”
Maybe she and Moze had been meant to meet me at the bakery that morning. Maybe she’d been meant to move into the farmhouse and find those old diaries and letters.
I smiled. “So it’s not all just a crapshoot, then? Some Master Puppeteer’s up there in the sky, yanking everyone’s strings according to his Master Plan?”
If by that, I meant did she believe in God, she said, then yes. She did.
“Yeah? And why’s that?” I asked.
She couldn’t exactly say why, she said; it was just a trust she had that some benign presence was making sure that good overpowered evil.
“Really? Then how do you explain Hitler and Columbine and 9/11? Or Katrina, for that matter. Why’d your ‘benign presence’ okay that one?”
She neither answered me nor looked away.
“This guy I met once?” I said. “This chaos theorist I got stuck sitting next to on an airplane? He was a total nut job, but he said something to me that I’ve never forgotten. He said maybe God wasn’t Allah or Jesus Christ or any of the other deities that people are always using as an excuse to go to war over. That maybe all ‘God’ was was mutation. Mutability. The thing that happens when the DNA we’re ‘carrying forward’ from our ancestors suddenly jumps the track. Gets altered in some unpredictable way and, for better or worse, sets the first domino falling in a different direction.”
For a little longer than was comfortable, we held each other’s gaze. Then she came over and sat down beside me. Hitched her hair behind her ear. Touched her earlobe. “So I take it you and Maureen never had children?”
Children? “No,” I said. “Or me and my other two wives either.”
“Was that your choice or …?”
Where were these questions coming from?”Patti and I were only in our mid-twenties when we got divorced. We probably would’ve had kids if we’d stayed together. She and her second husband have them—daughters, I think. And Francesca was …”
God, she was cute: those smoky blue eyes, that little mole to the left of her lip…
.
“Francesca was what?”
“What? Oh. On the fast track, career-wise. Didn’t want anything or anyone to stand in the way of her ride up the corporate elevator. Including me, as it played out. And with Maureen, it was a nonissue. She’d had her tubes tied during her first marriage. So that was that.”
She shifted positions a little, and when she did, her knee bumped up against my thigh and stayed there. “Do you ever regret it? Not having kids?”
I shrugged. And when I opened my mouth, what came out of it surprised me. “A little, I guess. Doesn’t occupy major portions of my day but … Maybe it’s all this ancestor stuff you’ve been digging up. It’s got me thinking about how I’m the end of the Quirk line. How the river’s not going underground, it’s drying up.” A little bit after the fact, I realized she was touching my arm, rubbing her hand up and down it. “I read once that that’s why guys cheat—that we’re hardwired to want to spread our seed.” Now why had I just said that? Why was I shallow-breathing? “What about you and Moze? You guys see kids in your future?”
“Moses doesn’t want any more,” she said.
“Any more?”
She said he had an eleven-year-old daughter by a former lover. He and the mother had an agreement: no child support, but no contact, either. They lived in Oregon. “And before that, there was a little boy by a different woman. He died, though, when he was very young. Two, I think. I don’t know the circumstances. Moses doesn’t ever want to go there.”
“That’s got to be the worst,” I said. “Losing a child.” To spinal meningitis, I thought. Or to a couple of psychopathic kids with rifles. A nurse driving home stoned on painkiller. “So is that okay with you, then? No kids because he doesn’t want them?” I shifted a little, got an inch or so closer to her.
“Sometimes it is,” she said.
I nodded. Watched the rapid blinking of her eyes, shiny with un-spilled tears. Watched the moisture that had pooled in the little valley above her top lip. What was that indentation called? I always forgot. But God, didn’t it feel nice the way her fingertips were grazing the veins on the back of my hand? And wouldn’t it feel nice to lean forward and poke my tongue into that little valley and taste her salt, taste her …
I’m not even sure which one of us started it, but we were kissing each other—openmouthed, tongue to tongue. When I felt her begin to pull away, I placed my hand against the back of her neck and kissed her some more. Right there in public, in Bushnell Park, in front of Santiago and his mom and the ducks and whoever else might have seen us—the pretty blonde who wasn’t even thirty yet and the gray-haired guy who was old enough to be, but was not, thank God, her father. I kissed her again. And again. Those kisses felt more necessary than right.
We were quiet on the drive back—both of us a little embarrassed, I think, by what had happened. Maybe she hadn’t kissed me, I thought. Maybe she’d just been kissing her access to Lydia’s diaries and Lizzy’s letters.
It wasn’t until I reached over to turn on the radio that she spoke. “Caelum, what happened back there shouldn’t have happened,” she said.
“What happened?” I said. “Nothing happened. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh,” she said. “Okay. Yeah.”
I turned up the music. Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl.” We both stared ahead, our eyes on the highway ahead of us.
Back in Three Rivers, on Bride Lake Road, I passed the prison without looking at it. Put my blinker on, turned in, and drove up the long driveway to the farmhouse. Someone was outside, sitting on the front step. Was it a woman? A child?
“Oh, my God,” Janis said.
I cut the engine. Got out and walked warily toward her. Her face was bruised and puffy. There was a nasty-looking gash above her left eyebrow. She had dried blood on the front of her shirt, bloodstained teeth.
We sat down on either side of her. “What happened, Velvet?” I said.
“What do you think happened? I got beat up, that’s what.”
Janis took her hand. “Sweetie, who did this to you?” she asked.
“Some asshole at the rest stop. Gives me twenty bucks to go down on him, and when I start doing what he’s just paid me to do, he yanks me back up by my hair and starts slamming my face against his dashboard. Opens the door of his truck when he’s done, throws me out onto the ground, and drives off. Cocksucker.”
I stood up. Held my hands out and pulled her up. “Come on in,” I said. “Let’s get you cleaned up. See if that cut you got is going to need stitches.”
Velvet began to cry. “I want my mom,” she said.
“Your mom’s in jail,” I said. “You’re stuck with me.”
Janis looked back and forth between us.
* * *
THAT NIGHT, LYING AWAKE IN bed, I listened to their voices murmuring above me, their footsteps: Moze’s, Janis’s, Velvet’s. I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t stop thinking about everything that had happened that day: the flashback or whatever it had been, the feel of her kisses.
I put the light on. Opened the book I’d bought. I found a letter he’d written to his friend Twichell shortly after his daughter’s death.
You know our life—the outside of it—as the others do—and the inside of it—which they do not. You have seen our whole voyage. You have seen us go to sea, a cloud of sail, and the flag at the peak; and you see us now, chartless, adrift—derelicts; battered, waterlogged, our sails a ruck of rags, our pride gone. For it is gone. And there is nothing in its place. The vanity of life was all we had, and there is no more vanity left in us. We are even ashamed of that we had; ashamed that we trusted the promises of life….
I closed the book, turned off the light, and cried in the dark. For the Clemenses, the Columbine families. For Morgan Seaberry’s parents, the Harrises and the Klebolds. I cried, too, for Moze and Maureen. I wished I hadn’t kissed Janis, but I had and wanted to kiss her again. Wanted to undress her, hold her nakedness against my own, and spill my seed inside of her…. She’d lit a match to a loneliness that, for years, I’d tried hard to bear. What happened? I’d said. Nothing happened. But something had. Something had jumped the track back there in Bushnell Park. Some first domino had fallen.
chapter twenty-three
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Friday, October 27, 2006
Subject: offer u cant refuse???
Yo Quirky—U busy tommorow? Theres a car show/auction up in Springfield MA. Pretty big one—mean machines from all over NY and N. Eng. Thinking about checkin it out. Wanna go? Maybe we could hit Outback on the way back, get some steaks.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Friday, October 27, 2006
Subject: offer u can’t refuse???
Can’t, Al. I’ve got plans. FYI: “tomorrow” has one m, two r’s.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Friday, October 27, 2006
Subject: offer u cant refuse???
Yeah thanks spelling nerd. Who you got plans with—your dick and Fanny Five Fingers?
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Friday, October 27, 2006
Subject: offer u cant refuse???
Doctor’s appointment.
* * *
“WHAT DID YOU CALL IT again?”
“Vicarious traumatization. It can happen to those who bear secondary witness to the traumas of others. Therapists, for instance—an occupational hazard to which those in my profession must be alert.”
“So it’s like … transference or something?”
Dr. Patel nodded. “But I’m not sure about flashbacks, Mr. Quirk. More typically, vicarious traumatization manifests itself as hyper-vigilance or an inabilty to focus. Nightmares, sometimes. All classic symptoms of—”
“Posttraumatic stress,” I said.
“
Yes, yes. Now I’m thinking the episode you experienced—vicarious flashback or not—may have triggered a rapid drop in your blood pressure. And that, in turn, may have been the reason you seem to have lost consciousness for a second or two. Were you alone when this happened?”
“No, I … well, yeah. Yes, I was.” I looked away from her curious face. Looked back. There was no way in hell I was getting into the subject of Janis and me. “Vicarious traumatization, huh? Weird.”
“My concern is that if it happens again, you might fall and hurt yourself, and there would be no one to help you.”
I shook my head. “I’m sure it was just some weird, onetime thing.”
“Perhaps you should see your physician, Mr. Quirk. Have some tests done to rule out physiological causes. And, should symptoms persist and the problem does seem to be psychological in nature, I would be happy to work with you. But at any rate, it’s lovely to see you again.”
“You, too. And I see you’ve got a new office mate since the last time I was here.” I pointed past her puzzled face to the marble sculpture on the table behind her: elephant head, human body, four arms flailing.
“Ah, you mean Lord Ganesha! Are you familiar with him?” I shook my head. “Ganesha is the destroyer of sorrows and the remover of obstacles. A fitting ‘office mate,’ don’t you think, given what we try to accomplish here?”
I nodded. “And four hands instead of two. Must be a multitasker.”
She laughed. “Yes, yes. A Hindu deity well suited to busy Americans. You should remember to rub his big belly before you leave. It’s said to bring good luck. More tea?” I held out my cup. She poured. “I must say, Mr. Quirk, you are looking quite well despite your recent episode.”
“Am I? Well, I’ve started running again. Helps with the stress.”
