Heroes of the Frontier

by Dave Eggers

  “Come to Normandy with me,” he said once. “The kids, too. I want you all to see something.” He wouldn’t tell her why he wanted to go to Normandy. He thought it would be some wonderful surprise. She explained the difficulty in leaving her practice, and trapping her small children for fourteen hours on two planes—all without knowing why they’d be going to that French beach. Finally he told her: He’d been learning more about an uncle—no, a great-uncle; he corrected himself the next day, apparently after some phone calls to his Salt Lake genealogists—who had fought and died on D-Day. He wanted to go, pay his respects, and apparently because he’d decided whatever was his was hers, he wanted to share it all, the field of graves, with Josie.

  She’d suggested a few weeks away from each other and he’d nodded, agreeing, praising her wisdom, and then two weeks later he’d died. He’d collapsed on the beach. At Normandy. He’d gone to lay flowers at the grave of his great-uncle, then, apparently after that he’d gone jogging, and suffered a venous thromboembolism. The funeral, back in Ohio, was a mess of ex-girlfriends and sisters—the man had a life full of women, and they had all loved him, so why hadn’t Josie tried harder?

  The check from the political pizza makers arrived. They wanted eighty-two dollars. With a tip she would be paying a hundred dollars for a pizza, two cookies and three glasses of wine. This was Alaska. It looked like a cold Kentucky but its prices were Tokyo, 1988.

  Josie paid and walked down the steps, out the door, and felt so free, out in the open, and happy that the women of pizza hadn’t seen her, drunken afternoon mother. Then she felt the afternoon’s new chill, and looked at her children, and realized they didn’t have coats on. Where were their coats? Josie turned around to find one of the women of pizza, standing at the door, holding their coats and long-sleeved shirts, smiling like she could have Josie imprisoned.

  Josie took the coats, hustled Paul and then Ana into them, and they wandered down the street. Three shops down was a kiosk full of hand-woven hats and sweaters and Josie was sure she’d never seen such beautiful things.

  “Were these made here?” Josie asked the woman, grey-haired and with bright opal eyes. The woman was grinning with joy barely contained, as if to be in Homer, selling handicrafts, was more than she deserved.

  “No,” the woman said. “Bolivia, mostly.” She purred the liv portion of the nation’s name, implying this was the only place or way to do it, to live, and it seemed to Josie the only way to say the word.

  Josie fondled the sweaters and hats, thinking she must purchase these Bolivian goods in Alaska, and if she didn’t, she would have missed an opportunity to fully seize this moment.

  “You let me know if you have any questions,” the woman said, and sat on a nearby stool, raising her face to the sun with a beatific smile.

  Josie found a scarf, wrapped it around Paul’s neck and stood back to admire him. He looked five years older, so she took it off.

  “Mom, how do you know Sam again?” Paul asked.

  This was unusual for him. Normally she didn’t have to tell him anything twice; his memory was airtight for unusual information about the adults in his life. Before she could explain, this time more memorably, he asked, “Have I met her?”

  He had met her. Or Sam had met him, held him as a baby. Josie told Paul this, and made up something about how he had really bonded with her, that she was sort of a godmother to him.

  “So she’s my godmother?” he asked.

  Josie looked quickly to the opal-eyed woman, expecting judgment, but her ecstatic expression hadn’t changed.

  The truth was that Josie hadn’t given Paul godparents yet. When he was born, she held off, wanting to wait till his personality had formed, to better match him to the right people. It had seemed radically enlightened at the time, but since then she’d plainly neglected the task. Now, this notion of Sam seemed inevitable.

  “Sure,” Josie said.

  Anyone would be better than Ana’s godparents, friends of Carl’s, who received the honor like a bad wedding gift quickly shelved. Ana hadn’t seen anything from them—never a card, nothing.

  Sam, well, it could go either way. She would not likely be a smothering sort of godmother, but perhaps she could be the distantly inspiring sort? She could ask Sam about it when they saw her. No one ever said no to being a godmother, so it was as good as done.

  “Sam’s the best,” she added. “Did I tell you she had a crossbow?” Sam wasn’t the best, and she was only guessing about the crossbow, but Josie was overcome with a sudden longing to see Sam, and to strengthen their ties over this godmother notion. She did love Sam in a complicated way, and hadn’t seen her in five years, and they’d walked the same strange path, and above it all and most important for Josie this day, Sam was an adult. Besides Stan and magic-show Charlie, Josie hadn’t said more than please and thank you to anyone over eight years old since they’d been in Alaska.

  “She’s your stepsister?” Paul asked.

  This was true in a general sense. Telling the whole truth of their sisterhood wasn’t possible, not to an eight-year-old. Though she’d tried, Josie hadn’t arrived at a simple enough storyline to explain Sam to her children.

  “Right,” Josie said. “Pretty much.”

  Now the grey-haired woman opened her eyes. Josie caught her looking at Paul, as if assessing if he had the strength to live through all this—cloudy step-aunt and godmother, tipsy mother. Josie bought sweaters and hats for Paul and Ana, showing the woman her competence and love by spending $210 on bright Bolivian clothing that her children would wear only reluctantly.

  —

  Josie did some math and realized she had spent all of the money she’d brought, $310 in an hour, while in a state of being most would consider intoxicated. Across the street she could see the Chateau beckoning, warm and still.

  “Who wants to watch Tomás y Jerry?” she asked.

  They went back to the RV, the kids settled into the breakfast nook and she started the movie. Josie crawled upstairs, fully clothed, lay down on the sunny mattress. Before she fell asleep, she heard Paul say to Ana, “Are you going to get your coloring book? I don’t know how long you can play with a carrot.” Were they watching the movie or not? How did it matter? She drifted off, and woke up an hour later, sweating heavily. She looked down to find Paul and Ana asleep, with their headphones on, hair matted.

  She closed her eyes again, feeling the heat of the afternoon, thinking that what she had done, taking the kids up here, notifying no one, especially not Carl, might be considered criminal. Was it illegal? Insane? Carl would use that word. For Carl, good things were insane. Bad things were insane. Josie was insane. “You grew up next to a nuthouse!” he would say, as if that meant something. As if the entire town where Josie had been raised would have been deranged by osmosis. As if Josie growing up near the Rosemont Veterans’ Administration Hospital, formerly the Soldiers’ Home, better known as Candyland, would explain whatever he hoped it would explain. He thought her childhood, her proximity to the scandal, her emancipation from her parents at seventeen, gave him some kind of leverage. He was from sturdier stock, went the implied logic, so he was entitled to drift—was allowed to do nothing. This was nonsense, of course. His father was part of a beef conglomerate that deforested some large swath of Costa Rica to make room for cows and grass, cows that would eventually be chopped into American steaks. That’s why he grew up in some luxurious expat school in San Jose—Costa Rica’s, not California’s—and why he’d grown up with servants, and why he had no idea how to work, what work meant. And because he’d never seen any connection between work and the ability to pay mortgages and the like, he felt at will to judge Josie’s every quirk. And because Josie had been born to two nurses—an occupation Carl associated with the servant class he’d exploited as a child—and because both of them were implicated in the Candyland scandal, any variance in her behavior, any flaw or weakness, could be exploited, tied to this VA tragedy.

  When she and Carl were togethe
r, they’d decided not to tell the kids anything about Candyland, but now, as she lay in the Chateau, soaked in sweat, breathing the stale air inches from the ceiling, she knew she would have to be on guard around Sam. Sam, she knew, had told her twins about it all, Sunny and her own emancipation, and would be determined to bring it up in front of Paul and Ana.

  Josie’s parents had been nurses at a hospital. She could tell her kids that—she had told them this. This was enough for now. At Ana’s age that was all Josie knew. Her parents wore white when they went to work at Rosemont, and came home together, changed out of their whites and said nothing about their day. Josie’s knowledge of their work came in stages. When she was seven she realized their hospital was for veterans. When she was nine, there were the musicals at home, and she became aware of Vietnam, and that most of Rosemont’s patients had fought there. But she didn’t know what ailed them: she pictured rows of beds of happy soldiers with sprained ankles and black eyes. She didn’t know, as a child, where it was exactly, if the war was still on or not.

  Occasionally her parents talked about the patients. There was a man who spent the days knocking the side of his head, as if to free up some loose bolt. There was the man who, not wanting to disturb the perfection of the made bed, slept under it.

  “I hope your parents aren’t part of that Candyland mess.” One of Josie’s teachers said this one day. Josie had never heard of any Candyland mess. But the news that year became inescapable. The suicides. Rosemont had been overprescribing their psych patients and they were dying in alarming numbers. They slept eighteen to twenty hours a day and when they weren’t drugged into a stupor they were killing themselves at the rate of one every few months. Most of the suicides happened in the psych ward itself, a few after discharge, and all were horrible in their strange detail. A man of thirty-two using a bedsheet to hang himself from a doorknob. Another drinking bleach, rupturing his lower intestine. A man of thirty-three throwing himself from the roof, landing on another patient’s mother, breaking her neck, and then, realizing he was not dead, using a piece of broken glass to slice open his wrists and jugular, there on the sidewalk.

  That was the one that opened Rosemont up to national scrutiny. The newspapers discovered the place had a nickname among the vets, Candyland, and that macabre touch stoked public fascination. Eighteen suicides in three years, five accidental overdoses, maybe more. The faces of each young man, most of them in uniform, stared out from the paper each day. We sent them to Nam to be killed, the editorials said. When they came back alive, we killed them again. The head of the ward, Dr. Michael Flores, was arrested, and most of the blame fell on him—“I only wanted them to live without pain,” he said—but Josie’s home became loud. Her parents had been questioned, had been blamed privately and publicly. Four of the suicides had happened on their watch, and the whispering grew. How could they have let it happen? Their colleagues at Rosemont stood by them, said they hadn’t been negligent, but the doubts persisted and grew. The ward was closed, then the hospital itself was closed, her parents were out of work, and Josie learned the meaning of the word complicity.

  Then, in what she saw, as a teenager, as a stunning display of irony, they both began abusing the very drugs, Dilaudid and Thorazine and Dilantin, that Flores had overprescribed. Just after her fourteenth birthday her father moved out and, a year later, moved to Cambodia, where he stayed and still lived. When Josie was sixteen, her mother was working as an in-home nurse for a family fifty miles away, caring for an elderly woman, Mrs. Harvey. “I’m in love, Joze,” she said one day. She’d gotten involved with Mrs. Harvey’s middle-aged son, another vet, another addict, and wanted Josie to come live with them in this new home, with the dying woman and her son, making specious promises about their lives being good again.

  Josie thought: No. She had two years of high school left. She broke down one day at the dentist’s office, in the waiting room, and the receptionist had come to her, had brought her to the bathroom, had sat her down on the toilet and dabbed her face with a warm wet towel, and this had made Josie cry harder, louder, and soon she was lying in one of the examination chairs, face soaked with tears, and Dr. Kimura was next to her, initially thinking it was some body image breakdown. When the receptionist had caught Josie weeping, she had a People magazine on her lap, open to a story about heavy teenage girls being bullied. So she and Dr. Kimura thought Josie, who towered over both of them, was upset about her size, had been harassed at school. They brought her into a back room, where surgeries were done, and they huddled around her like saints. There was something in Dr. Kimura’s wet eyes and chandelier voice that invited Josie to talk. And when Dr. Kimura asked the receptionist to leave, and told Josie she had the afternoon free, Josie told her everything. Her father was in Chiang Mai and, according to Josie’s mother, lived with a paid harem of four women, one of them thirteen years old. Her mother had been sleeping on the couch for two years. Now she was in love, but was using again and was marrying an addict. There had been new people in the house. They were dealing, they weren’t dealing, Josie didn’t know. She remembered backpacks lined up in the foyer, always different backpacks, and the new men would arrive and leave with one of these backpacks. Josie began hiding in her room.

  Through Josie’s ramblings, Dr. Kimura said very little. But her eyes seemed to have settled on something. “Why don’t you come here after school for a while? Tell your mom it’s an apprenticeship,” she said. “You need a calm place to be for a few hours every day.”

  The first week Josie sat in the waiting room, doing her homework, feeling the thrill of betraying her mother in this small way. But she grew accustomed to the calm, to the simplicity, the predictability of the office. People came, went, paid, talked. There was no chaos, no screaming, no mother on the couch, no mother interacting with skittish men with hollow eyes. Sometimes Dr. Kimura brought her back to show her something interesting—an unusual X-ray, how the molds were made. But usually she spent those hours in Sunny’s office—Dr. Kimura had told her to use her first name—doing her homework, sometimes napping, occasionally wondering about the photo of a teenager, a dishwater-blond girl who looked so unlike Sunny that Josie assumed it was a patient. After the last patient, Josie would help close up the office, and Sunny would ask for updates about happenings at home. Sunny listened, her eyes angry, but never said a disparaging word about Josie’s mother. They were about the same age, Sunny and her mother, somewhere in the late thirties, but Sunny seemed a generation or two removed, far more settled and wise.

  One day she closed the office door. “I know this might be the last time I talk to you,” she said. “Because what I’m about to suggest will trigger a series of events that might get me in a world of trouble and might cost me my practice. But I think you should pursue emancipation from your parents, and if you do it, I’d like you to come to live with me. I know a lawyer.”

  The lawyer, a quiet but persistent woman named Helen, was a friend of Sunny’s. They met the next day. She had a tight mound of curly hair and unblinking eyes. The two of them, Sunny and Helen, sat across from Josie, shoulder to shoulder. “We won’t do this if there’s any possibility of it getting ugly,” Helen said. “You already have enough drama in your life,” Sunny added. “If your mother objects…” Helen began, but Sunny finished the thought: “then we can reassess. What do you think?”

  Their eagerness was both unnerving and infectious. Josie wanted to do it. She wanted to be around these sober, functioning, efficient women who made grand plans quickly.

  “Okay,” Josie said, utterly unsure.

  “Good,” Sunny said, and took Josie’s hand. “Come home and have some dinner with us tonight. I want to introduce you to someone.”

  So Josie called home, told her mother the truth—that she was eating dinner with her dentist, and because her mother had lost all hold on propriety, she agreed, told her to be home by ten. Josie rode in the backseat, Sunny’s car old but clean, Helen in the front seat, Josie feeling very much like they wer
e in a getaway car, sure that the three of them would be thereafter best friends and an inseparable trio. She entered Sunny’s house, walking between Sunny and Helen as if being protected, like a president or pope.

  “Samantha!” Sunny yelled, and a girl tromped down the stairs and stopped midway. She was the girl from the picture.

  —

  So Josie was Helen and Sunny’s second project. The realization knocked her back. Samantha had been taken in a year before, fleeing a mother who beat her and a trucker father who had photographed her in the shower. Samantha lived forty miles away, and Helen had been alerted to her case by a high school counselor there. Samantha’s emancipation process was quick. Now Samantha was home-schooled in some self-guided arrangement that Josie didn’t immediately understand. She didn’t understand, either, why Sunny hadn’t told her about Samantha before the emancipation discussions had begun.

  “I couldn’t tell you about Samantha before we were sure,” Sunny said. After dinner that night, Sunny had suggested a walk, and so, under a dark canopy of trees, she explained Samantha’s situation. “It’s best if she keeps a low profile. We have the restraining order on her dad, but it’s best not to risk it. You understand? Does the existence of Samantha change your mind about all this?”

  It did. During the drive from Sunny’s office to her home, Josie had believed Sunny was taking her in an act of bravery, of wild and even irresponsible courage. But it was more mechanical than that. She and Helen had a system.

  “You coming to me after Sam was serendipity,” Sunny said, trying to return the situation to something closer to a fairy tale. “You two are only a year apart, and could make each other stronger.”

  Or we could drag each other into a succession of feral teenage dramas, Josie thought.

  “I know it’s awkward,” Sunny said that night and often thereafter. “But it’s quiet here, and safe.”