Earthy, she thought. Her university friends were anything but earthy. In one way or another they were all obsessive. They all carried baggage that had nothing to do with anyone but themselves. Mary and Richard were earthy, but they carried the baggage of their dead son. It was like an invisible, sad cocoon that protected them from the world and the world from them. She, Annie, lived in a similar cocoon, carried the baggage of her dead husband.
Those of like cocoons hang together.
Patrick has no baggage, no cocoon. He is an open book. He is an innocent.
I’m the one with baggage. Why would he want to be burdened with me, even as just a friend?
“Don’t think of me as a guy,” he continued after chewing and swallowing. “Think of me as a girlfriend.”
She tilted her head and gave him the, you’re crazy, look.
“If I was a girlfriend, what would we do?”
“Paint each other’s nails, compare makeup, do each other’s hair, go clothes shopping, talk about guys, check out scanty underwear.”
He had stopped his hamburger halfway to his mouth to stare at her. “That’s not exactly what I had in mind, except maybe that last part. Do you think a lacy, strapless bra would look good on me?”
She snorted a laugh that sent something back up into her nose. She coughed and jumped up, nearly spilling her plate, coughed some more. When she had herself under control she wiped her eyes and sat back down.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know the picture of me in women’s underwear would get you so excited.”
She held up her hand. “Let’s not go there, okay. The last thing I want to do in my life right now is get . . . excited.”
“Okay.” He forked up some potato salad. He chewed. “This is good stuff. Where’d you get it?”
“Safeway.”
“Hmm.” He took another forkful and chewed silently. After a time he pointed to Tolstoy’s book with his fork. “Must be light reading for you, a step down from nuclear physics.”
“Ha ha! It’s more like a big side step. I don’t read fiction.”
“You don’t?”
“The last fiction I read was Anne of Green Gables and The Hobbit when I was seven.”
“You didn’t read The Lord of the Rings?”
“The Hobbit bored me. Why read more of the same?”
“So why have you decided to read these now?” He held up Steven King’s IT.
She considered that for a time, then said, “King lives up in New England somewhere and it seems a lot of people like his stories, and this one is long. Tolstoy is also long and something many academics have talked about.”
“Amazing.”
“What’s the point of reading made up stories when there is so much real stuff in this world to read about?”
“I mean amazing that you were reading that kind of complexity when you were seven years old.”
“Oh. Yeah, well, I learned to read rather early.”
“I think Anne of Green Gables is more like a twelve or thirteen year old level, don’t know about The Hobbit.”
“Actually I believe it is nine and up. I wasn’t that far ahead.”
“My sister is thirteen, and trying to read it right now, though she’s not the slickest rock in the pond.”
“That’s not nice to say about your sister.”
He shrugged. “She’s a real sweetheart and I love her to death, but school has been a challenge.”
“She’s reading Anne of Green Gables at thirteen. That’s not that bad.”
“Yeah, but she can’t add two numbers.”
“There are probably lots of kids who can’t add.”
“You say that like you’re not sure, like you don’t know of any.”
“Actually I don’t, but realize I come from a background where I wasn’t mixed with public school kids.”
He gave her an odd look and then darkness fell over his face. “Are you saying public school doesn’t provide a good education?”
Annie opened her mouth to try and eject whatever she just stuck in it.
“What do you know about public education?” he added, cutting her off.
“I didn’t say . . .”
“I went through public education all the way, and then through a state university in backwoods Montana.”
Annie’s mouth went dry. “I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant. I just meant that I grew up rather isolated.”
“Yeah, well,” was all he said.
They sat in silence for a long time, plates empty except for a spot or two of potato salad. She stood, added his plate to the top of hers and carried them inside. When she returned he had his keys out.
“Thanks for the hamburger. I guess I need to get going.”
She had felt buoyant since he arrived, which surprised her since she had made no effort to call him, but now it was like her insides were deflating. She wanted him to stay, but she also wanted to be alone. “Okay.” She also wanted to apologize but it seemed that whatever there was that she could say—she’d first have to figure out what she already said—would only make it worse. I’m glad you came by; please stay a little longer, rose into her throat, but he turned before the thoughts became sounds.
He got into his truck.
Call me, she wanted to say, or wished that he would say. He said nothing; only backed out, raised his hand in goodbye and drove away.
She put her head in her hands. Was what I said all that bad?
She sat there for another ten minutes then went inside, sat on her sofa and opened her computer.
June 13, 2007
Mother,
I could sure use some help here. It seemed like Patrick was the perfect guy, that all I had to do was fix my own personal problems, sort out my baggage. I can’t believe that I was thinking that he didn’t have any baggage. Now it is obvious that he does. I just have no idea what it is.
Mine, of course, is Tony. But is it also my intelligence? Am I carrying around two heavy pieces of luggage? Tony will fade eventually. I know that, but what about my intelligence? Is my IQ going to be a 188-pound Samsonite suitcase that I’ll have to drag around my entire life, handcuffed to me like national secrets? Am I going to have to settle for someone at my level just so that we feel intellectually comfortable with each other, not caring if our obsessions aren’t compatible? Tony was the only guy I ever met who fit the IQ bill and who liked me, and with whom I had other things in common, who was fun. But out of the blue he popped up with the, I have to die for my country, baggage.
How did you find dad? Dad told me about meeting you in the library, but how did you know he was the one? How did you learn what his baggage was and if you could live with it? Did he have baggage? Did you? IQ isn’t heavy baggage when you both have it.
Annie looked up and spotted the dishes stacked together on the counter; small chunks of potato salad waited for their final resting place in the garbage can. She put the computer aside. As she rose to her feet to take care of the cleanup, Patrick’s license plate flashed back at her and she suddenly understood its significance. It had nothing to do with BNTHERE. It had to do with the fact that it was a Montana plate, and that the one she noticed that morning on the back of the white trailer with the logo, Have Time Will Travel, painted on the side, was not a Montana plate.
It was a Massachusetts plate.
Chapter 35
June 13, 2007
Annie stood in the middle of her kitchen/living room/dining room for thirty seconds, thinking, not breathing. The image of the caravan of vehicles passing by while she waited to turn onto North Fork Road came back to her. She saw the tractor-trailer rig with the simple logo on the side, followed by the RV driven by a man who looked a lot like Professor Grae; she saw the Massachusetts license plate.
Three points of related coincidence have a high probability of not being a coincidence at all, she recalled a professor saying one time. It didn’t escape her that that professor was her own grandfather, Doctor Hair.
“Click, click, click, Grandfather! Mexico my ass!” And what about that SUV that was in front? “Who was in the Yukon, Doctor Robert Hair?”
Hearing a noise behind her, she swung around and came face-to-face with Patrick. “Holy crap!” She jumped and then tripped over her kitchen chair, would have ridden it all the way to the floor except he grabbed her.
“Sorry,” he said as he helped steady her on her feet.
“Don’t you knock?”
“The door was open. I was going to knock anyway but I didn’t want to interrupt your conversation with . . .” he looked around the small cabin, “yourself.”
“Conversation?”
“You said something about Grandfather, and then, I quote, ‘Mexico my ass!’ You were also asking someone who was in the Yukon.”
She looked down at his hands still holding onto her biceps. She shrugged away. “I must have been thinking out loud. What are you doing here?”
“I came back to apologize.
She blinked at him. “Apologize?” She heard the irritation in her voice and immediately wanted to take it back.
His eyes drifted around the room, though not appearing to be in focus. When they came back to her he said, “I guess I shouldn’t have. Sorry.” He backed up and turned around.
“No! Wait!” She thought of her grandfather and how all she wanted to do was march upriver to confront him. “I . . .” But she didn’t want Patrick to leave; not like this. “You caught me off guard. I shouldn’t have snapped at you. I’m sorry.”
“I’ll accept your apology if you’ll accept mine.”
She smiled. “Deal.”
“Can we talk?”
“A guy who wants to talk, and twice in a week.”
“I’m not your ordinary guy.”
“Neither was Tony.”
“Your husband?”
She nodded, surprised with herself that she brought up Tony’s name.
“What was he like?” Patrick asked.
The question took Annie back a step. She worried for a second that she would go into one of her spells again. She pulled the chair around that she had nearly fallen over and sat down.
“Are you okay?” Patrick asked.
She nodded her head. “Yes. I think so.”
“You don’t have to talk about him if you don’t want to.”
“No. It’s all right. It’s just that I wasn’t expecting that question.”
He pulled out the other chair and sat facing her. “I threw you off guard again.”
“Yes.” She thought of the kiss after racing him out of the ice-cold creek. “You’re good at that it appears.” She looked out the open door. “Tony was . . .” BNTHERE glared back at her from the front of Patrick’s Blazer. What is in that trailer? He’s got an RV and a huge tent. Are all four of them here; Grandfather, Professor Grae, Professor Bradshaw and Charles Walshe? Do they seriously think that I’ll suddenly join them because they came all this way?
“Tony was what?” Patrick said.
She looked at Patrick and then out at his truck. He turned his head to follow her gaze. “What are you looking at? Is there something wrong with my Blazer?”
“No! No! I just . . . my grandfather . . . I can’t tell you.”
He looked at her and then again at his Blazer. “Your grandfather? Is he here or something?”
“No!” Annie took a deep breath. “No,” she said again, almost in a whisper. “It’s nothing. Ah . . . he told me he was going to Mexico a few days back and I just discovered, in the moment that you came in the door, that he wasn’t. He lied to me.”
Patrick looked around the little cabin. “You discovered that he lied about going to Mexico . . . how?”
“What do you mean, how?”
“You were standing right here; no phone in your hands, or letter, or any device I would think would be necessary to make such a discovery. Or are you telepathic?”
“Telepathic?”
“You were talking to someone; your grandfather, maybe? You received a telepathic call from him and discovered in your telepathic caller ID that he was not calling from a Mexican telepathic area code.
She rolled her eyes. “I just put together a series of clues and made a mental discovery; I deducted.”
“Thank God. For a minute there I thought you had gone weird on me.”
“Oh.”
“So that’s the secret?”
“What secret?”
“You said it had to do with your grandfather and that you couldn’t tell me. Is the fact that you deducted that he didn’t go to Mexico what you couldn’t tell me?”
“No.” She dragged out the word. “It’s something else.”
“Related?”
“No. Yes! Can we leave this subject?”
“Sure.” He sat back in his chair, legs out straight, hands behind his head. “You were going to tell me what Tony was like. I have a feeling you two had a rocky relationship.”
She considered that. Was their marriage rocky? “No, it wasn’t; at least not until he joined the Marines. Even then I was only a little irritated with him until he announced that he was being deployed to Iraq. After that things got rather hot at times. We fought the worst in the couple of days before he left.” She leaned forward and put her head in her hands. “It’s not something I like to talk about.”
He stood, pushed his chair aside and grabbed her hand. “Let’s go for a walk.”
She immediately wanted to say no; thoughts of Tony and that last morning were filling her head again. The tingle of Patrick’s touch, however, found her on her feet, being led out the door. He didn’t let loose of her until they were at the river. When he did she walked over and sat down on the log.
“What’re you doing?” he said. “Let’s walk.”
She looked up at him. “I don’t know.”
“You have something else going on? Hair to wash? Laundry to do?”
“No.”
“Good, because I want to tell you why I got upset over the private school thing and I talk better on my feet.”
“You don’t have to give me any explanation.”
“Of course I don’t, but I want to.” He looked up and down the river. “Which is the best way?”
Her curiosity about what set him off earlier lifted her to her feet. “They’re both good.”
He pointed north. “Let’s go this way.” They put the river on their right and started walking, side-by-side when they could, single file when the path closed down.
“Leslie, my sister, is thirteen years old,” he said. “When she was four she had an accident. My parents had just rented a new house . . . well, not new, but new to us. We had finished moving in but had a problem with our dog.”
Annie waited while he took off his ball cap, pushed his hair back, and then reset it. The movement seemed necessary to build the courage to go on with the story.
“Bartholomew. He was my dog actually. He was a black lab, big and strong; good with Leslie; would have given his life for her, for any of us.”
He suddenly stopped talking, and stopped walking. He bit his lip, looked straight up to the treetops and the cloudless blue sky beyond, took a deep breath, glanced at Annie and then away. “I guess he did.”
A chill ran down Annie’s arms.
He started them walking again. “The house had a huge backyard, but it was not fenced. There was a garden to the back and a path of flat rock out to it from the porch. Dad and the landlord had come to an agreement to split the cost of the fence, so dad went out and purchased the materials right after we moved in, but the weather turned bad and the fence building got delayed. Meanwhile Bartholomew was confined to a chain attached to a tree on one side of the yard.”
They cleared a stand of trees and suddenly, there was Brad’s rock. Brad was sitting on it, staring downriver.
“Hey, Brad,” Patrick called, raising his hand in a greeting.
Brad raised his.
“Elvis has left the building,” Annie said to him.
“Close but no cigar,” Brad replied.
Nothing more was said and they passed on by. “What was that all about?” Patrick asked.
Annie chuckled. “Brad and I had an idiom fight one day. Now whenever I see him I say an idiom. He immediately gives me one back. It’s a game we play.”
“I’ve never seen him that communicative.”
“He talks to me a lot, though I have to admit that our conversations are strange. How do you know him?”
“We went to high school together. He and Leslie have the same counselor.”
Annie considered asking why his sister was seeing a counselor, then thought better of it.
They walked on in single file again until Brad’s rock slipped out of sight. The path opened out and Annie took Patrick’s hand. “So,” she said softly, “Bartholomew spent a lot of time chained in the backyard.”
“It wasn’t the greatest yard in the world,” he said, “being more dirt than grass, and after the torrential rains, more mud. I was sitting on the back porch watching Leslie run up and down the stone walk; flagstone I guess you call it. I didn’t want to be there. I was sixteen and had better things to do than baby-sit my little sister on a Friday night.”
That last was said with bitterness in his voice; bitterness, Annie was sure, not at having to baby-sit, but at thinking at the time that he’d rather have been doing something else. Her hunch was that his bitterness was guilt in disguise.
“We had a 2-foot piece of thick, braded nylon rope for Bartholomew to chase and retrieve. It was lying on the porch. Bored, I picked it up and threw it deep into the yard, way off to the left, knowing that he would chase it away from Leslie. I had enough sense to know not to toss it the other direction, as Bartholomew’s chain would knock Leslie down. He was on the rope almost before it hit the ground. He raced it back and dropped it at the foot of the porch, which is as close as he could get. I made like to stand up to get it and he took off into the corner of the yard again, expecting that I would toss it. I didn’t. I went into the house instead, to get a soda. What I didn’t know but we figured out later is that Leslie ran over and picked it up, and then had to have run halfway up the walk before throwing it in the opposite direction. It can’t have gone very far. She was only four.
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