Prodigals

by Greg Jackson

  “I saw the hazards,” she said, not entirely convinced.

  “Sorry to inconvenience you,” I said. “We’ll be on our way.”

  “All right.” She had her hat off, hair pulled back like wet reeds, a plain face. She considered the storm with us for a minute. “Some people, you know, drive into the storm,” she said. “Thrill seekers. Stubborn folks. Puts us in a bad spot because we’re on the hook for getting them out.”

  I said it was selfish and the trooper nodded. “No great mystery what’s there—more storm. Some folks don’t know what’s best for them.”

  “But people need to be free, don’t they,” Susan said, “even to make terrible mistakes?”

  The officer looked at Susan. I did too. “I guess so,” she said and laughed. “I guess so.” She shook her head.

  And I could have kissed them both just then. I could have taken their hands and jumped with them into the frothing river, I thought—would have done so happily and lived my life forever in the swollen moments of that mistake.

  We waved to the officer as she pulled away and then got back in our car. I kept on to the end of the bridge. I could feel Susan waiting for me to turn around, I could hear it in the language of her body, tensing, but I refused to turn.

  We heard further reports on the radio: sea levels, wind speeds, guesses at the damage wrought. In coastal North Carolina, southern Virginia, on the Eastern Shore, along the Delaware coast. Towns had been washed away. Towns. Barrier splits dissolved, swallowed by the sea. Power was out everywhere, lines and towers down. Water ran through city streets, turning streets to rivers. People kayaked through downtowns, waited out the storm on rafts. Water touched everything there was to touch.

  “I don’t like this anymore,” Susan said. I said nothing. She had taught me the power of keeping silent, of giving the other person no shared reality to build off of, no ground on which to begin working around to a compromise. If you want to have your way, Susan had taught me, shut up.

  We passed by a town, an intersection with a dark gas station, a small retail bank. There were a few other cars, old ghostly Buicks and Lincolns. They drifted by us, pale headlights dying short, swathed in the cerements of rain.

  We would get to the coast, as near as possible, I had decided. Let Susan fight me, let her strike out from the bunker of her frightful composure. In this one way I was too strong for her, within the logic of the storm. I was taking charge. I could continue—continue driving, continue loving her—and she couldn’t stop me. Because I wanted her there with me at the ocean, watching its power, watching it surge. I wanted to film it, to capture it so I could say, Look, Susan, the unstoppable ocean!, so that she would have to see it and to stop pretending the ocean didn’t exist.

  “Our poor kids,” she said.

  We were past the town, in flat farmland. Silos stood by barns, wood fences squaring off fields. The water before us was no longer rainfall, I saw, but standing water. The far point of its incursion. A new beginning to the sea.

  “Why did you fall in love with me,” I said, “way back when?” We had been watching occasional cars pass the other way. I kept having the sensation of seeing people from our past in them, our parents and friends, old childhood friends we’d introduced each other to, grandparents who’d been dead for years, cousins we hadn’t seen since the wedding, old teachers and former lovers, all glancing at us with worry but glancing away quickly too, old enough to have learned that you never talk people out of their mistakes.

  People are bullets, fired.

  “I wanted to be the sort of person who could love you.”

  “But you are,” I said, seizing on the logic like it would matter, like I could twist her words into a prophecy against her. “Because you have.”

  “Ben, you think because you’re loving that you can’t be dangerous.”

  Perhaps she didn’t mean dangerous, but something more elusive. Or perhaps she did.

  “Some women like danger,” I said. I was being funny.

  I looked at her. She smiled—in spite of herself, I thought. I smiled too. Our smiles grew as we looked at each other and then we were laughing. The wind rattled the car and something—a branch? a rock?—hit the window and sent a web of shattering through it; and as this happened the air shifted, a sudden brightening in the sky, and I felt the wind grow confused, like the tide does when it changes, bucking. And then stillness, perfect stillness. Sunlight. The eye.

  I pulled us to the side of the road. It wasn’t a road any longer but a tiny river, eight inches deep. The land stretched before us—submerged, sodden, jeweled everywhere with light.

  The skin of the earth, I thought. We are still just only on the skin.

  The air right then was soft and moist. The sun burned on the fringes of far-off clouds, at its evening cant, glancing in. Oh, those evenings! I thought, like the first hot evenings of spring, when the air is satin and as warm as your body, as though you have descended from an airplane into some warmer place, L.A. or Tucson, say, and the breeze feels like an uncomplicated lover, and the air, that air! so full of plant life and dirt, as full of these things as the ground. That is what I smelled just then, the smell of life, the vaporous smell of life. And I had a memory of Susan, when I knew her in college, of bicycling on a night like this and watching her put her hand out by her hip to feel the breeze collect in it. And another time, of watering the lawn one evening and seeing a figure at the end of the street jogging, and knowing for no more than her awkward, determined stride that it was her, my wife. Or when I lifted her up on the kitchen counter three weeks ago, late one afternoon, and she yelped in surprise and gave me a look of lovely and time-softened lust—because time softens things, it does. If she felt I was dangerous, was it any more than this, that I threatened to pull us under in moments as small as these?

  She was standing next to me. We leaned against the front of the car, smiling into the sun, letting the light explore our faces. The water ankleted our calves. Susan took my hand, took it with a kind of purpose I recognized that said, C’mon, we’re getting out of here. We’re going home.

  The air was crazy and beautiful with life. The sun, the hills, the water at our feet. Do you remember what it’s like to go home with the person you love? Do you? Don’t say yes. Remember. Stay there with me, linger. Then make me laugh while we drive home.

  Amy’s Conversions

  A (Reluctant) Melodrama

  (I)

  It is in certain moods that I take it upon myself to tell the story of me and Amy, the years we have known each other, our friendship, and my love for her. They are moods of course that tend to the self-serious, when the inner decoration of life seems very rich and heavy in color and to call such and such simply purple or red would be a crime of inattention or laziness, a failure of patience or nerve. When you want someone to see just exactly what you are seeing and already pretty much hate everyone for not being able to get there. Not having the stubbornness or the perversity it takes.

  I am a painter. You must forgive me my cynicism about the sensitivity people bring to the act.

  But first, years before I work up the nerve to say, I am this, I am that, I run into Amy in the bookstore. It’s the one out on the northbound highway due to metamorphose into a candle shop, a discount shoe store, and finally an unrentable gap tooth in that sad strip. Amy and I trade a sly smile that says, Yes, of course we are the only ones in our town who would come here to escape the heat, and it is then, as we are talking, that she tells me she’s left the church.

  My God, I say.

  Well, she says—gallows humor—not mine anymore.

  We are home from college that day. It is June, and we are twenty. To the west somewhere a storm remakes the sky to suit its wild fancy, and if I could do the same maybe it would be Women in Love in Amy’s hands, though life is rarely like that, is it? Fitting.

  On the mission trips we took as high school students, back when we were devout—Amy and I and pretty much everyone we knew—we used to li
e in ministry basements far from home, whispering things too hopeful and foolish for the light of day. Amy would say how when He came, we would live a thousand years of peace and happiness on earth. Can you imagine, she said, the hungry fed? The sick cured? The needs of the world met? A breeze might bring the thick, exotic leaves scratching against the low windows. We talked of mundane things too, school-year gossip and embarrassments, who was gorgeous or getting hotter, teachers we liked and those we found ridiculous. I remember those nights, but nothing of the countries. An image here or there: bright colors, dirt roads. I do remember thinking, Amy, will you shut the fuck up and listen to yourself? Do you really think it’s possible to meet all the needs of the world—everyone’s—at the same time? But I also thought that in a perfect world my love for Amy would find its proper form, so I could be stupid too.

  What did it? I ask.

  I just couldn’t take the hypocrisy, she says.

  Which?

  Do I have to pick?

  And because we are young and this has the cadence of a joke, we laugh. But of course she has to pick. Who doesn’t have to pick?

  Amy was a pastor’s kid, see. Her father, Pastor Bob, was our family’s pastor, a man I found fatuous and condescending at the time but who in retrospect probably deserved better. Amy loved him, of course, and took his faith as her own. So there must be more. I press Amy, and she tells me—about the varieties of life and belief she’s encountered away from home and can’t believe lead briskly to hell. I bite down the irony, the irony of me. I know I should have given Amy more grief, then and all along, but we grow into our toughness like snakes, molting hope. And before you judge me, understand: Amy and I are different; we are the only ones who would come here to avoid the heat; the only ones who look at these fine pages of violent dreaming and think how delicate and timid a lunge at optimism should be. We spent our childhoods under the same southern sun, where possibilities grew and budded or withered silently within us, and we had only each other to look at for confirmation or its opposite. No one parted Amy’s legs when they were as young and faultless as they are that day in the bookstore. Someone should have. Youth should be used. It should be ruined and swallowed. We all know this. What else is youth for?

  Amy blushes the way she does. Less from embarrassment, I think, than from the surprise of continuing to encounter herself, the white stone of her own stubbornness, beneath everything. I know the look from the days in high school when she would pass me in the hall and whisper, Hey, we’re going out to…, thumb and forefinger pinched to her lips. And then in the catalpa grove, among the hackberries, with the floral musk of spring in the air like sex, we passed the joint around, our little group. We stole for a time too. Bras and soda, eyeliner, chewing gum. Anything you could slip into a pocket or purse. We were devout, we weren’t prudes. And what I saw at last was that Amy would have found it easier not to steal, and so she stole.

  This petty theft ended the day the cops were called. A crowd gathered on the curb to watch as they handcuffed Amy and put her in the car. She was weeping. She kept asking the cops whether it wasn’t all part of God’s plan. Doesn’t everything happen for a reason? she said again and again. Don’t you think everything happens for a reason?

  And I am sure this is what we all would like to know, but really, what reason would you devise for a scene like this? Tell me, because I’ll take a good lie over a pitiless truth. Did I expect the wind to rise up and free Amy? No, I can’t believe I did. We had been taught from a young age to put great faith in the unseen drama of our lives, but even as a kid I think I had a good sense of where the literal and figurative began and ended. Pastor Bob liked to rest a hand on the church wall and say, This is not the church. Then he would point to all of us and say, This is the church. But the building had been a department store not long before, and we could all remember the rows of perfume and sandals, the fishing tackle and cotton dresses, lining these same floors. Pastor Bob must have known as well as I did that he was correcting a mistake none of us had made. And the question begged: What then as the church did we make up? What did our privacies sum to?

  The hopeless things we want to know. I try again in the bookstore. I ask Amy, Why now? as though she can tell me something meaningful about where, in the fluid process, sentiment hardens into conviction, decision into action, or molten spirit into the rock of belief.

  It wasn’t like that, she says. It was like … You know when you’re on the phone with someone you’re into, and you don’t even realize you’re speaking in this weird, airy voice? It was like that. Like realizing I was speaking in a weird voice and stopping. Returning to my normal voice.

  She looks at the open book in her lap. There is a little universe inside it, wonderfully still.

  But how do you know? I say. How do you know which is which?

  She considers this. I guess you don’t, she says. One just feels more natural. Other answers begin to make more sense.

  Uh-huh, I say. Uh-huh. And only now do I wonder: What is an answer? What satisfies us?

  How did her parents take it, I ask. Dad threw up, she says. She stares straight ahead. But you know, we took the boat out the other night, just the two of us. We’d been fighting for days and we went out on the lake at dusk. We didn’t say anything, just held hands. And I kept thinking, In a way I should be dead to him. If I’m serious, I should be a little dead. But we just sat there watching the mist rise off the lake.

  I don’t know what I saw then. What I see now is the twilit lake, soot clouds in the distance, sky that faint humid orange blur it could be some summer nights, a burning calico, heat rising from the water like the ghost life within it. I see Amy staring out into the dim luster at the edges of enveloping shadow, like out there somewhere are the small girls we once were, without a hard decision to our name, tottering happily after a mindless joy, and I think, Those poor, unready girls!

  Are we ever prepared for the things we find ourselves incapable of agreeing to or helpless to pursue? Our twelfth-grade English teacher, Mr. Gerard, liked to say that you hate what reveals the part of you you hope to hide and love what reveals the heroic part of you looking for its cause. And who would say that, say a thing like that to teenagers, already riven with the bladelike purity of our desires? But we loved him for it, for telling us what we already believed.

  Hey, guess what? I say. I stopped spelling my name with the i. You stopped … Amy looks at me, perplexed, her confusion melting slowly into a concerned and even delicate understanding. And as I watch it settle over her, I am brought back to the last Y.G. trip we took as seniors, when hiking in the Ozarks that hot, bright day, in the sunshine and scented air, I sensed my feelings for Amy slip into a higher register, on the order of righteousness or selfless virtue, when even the need of them, crippling and illicit—illicit in God’s eyes—seemed to me as natural as the day itself, the trees and scattered light, the birds in the wind-shaken trees, when high in the mountains where the breeze swept the humidity from the air I confessed myself to Amy.

  I love you too, Jessie, she said—that same look.

  But no, no, you have come too far to be misunderstood. No, Amy, you say, and you explain.

  And she listens, with patience and sympathy, so much it makes you sick. Because even then you know where these things stand next to lust.

  (II)

  A few years later I am moving to Baltimore—

  No. Let’s try something different. Step back, get outside my head. If Amy’s reinventions make a mess of the perspective, shivering it glasslike in a cheap cubism, can we say that my constancy deserves no less? Can we grant that if there is no clean angle in on my friend, there isn’t one in on me either? Yes? From the top then.

  A few years later Jesse is moving to Baltimore.

  How’s that?

  A short young woman stands in a hallway. She has just arrived. She wears her hair shorn close, a faint rip-curl at the front, a black tank top, shorts. Dirtied brass numbers call out the apartments, the corridor st
eeped in a residuum of cigarettes and takeout. It is summer, hot. She shrugs under the weight of her bags. Sweat blossoms on her body in the stillness. The woman who finally opens the door is Dot, she explains, Amy’s roommate and a fellow student in the literature program. Amy will be back in a little bit. Jesse sets her stuff down, the duffel bag, the painting she made Amy as a gift. It is of a naked woman in the woods, wearing the bloodied head of a slaughtered stag. This is Jesse’s idea of a joke.

  Or no. She may not intend it as a joke. She may intend it as a provocation. She may intend it as a Serious Work of Art. We just can’t say. These are the things the facts omit, the things you can’t know from the outside.

  Jesse and Amy last saw each other when Amy came home for Easter. That’s a certifiable fact. They met for coffee and strolled through Retford until the rain came up and forced them under the gazebo on the green. It was very pretty there, the leaves of cloud admitting a flush of light into the rain.

  Are you sure you want to be here? Amy said. Retford, I mean.

  No, Jesse said. She told people she was there for her mother now that her father had left, but all she said to Amy was, No, I’m sure I don’t.

  I don’t miss it, Amy said. I keep thinking I should, but I don’t feel like myself here anymore. She watched Jesse light a cigarette. You’re going to leave then?

  The rain tapered, the sound of it hitting a bulkhead coming slower, heavier. A breeze picked up. Drops trembled everywhere in the wind. Jesse tapped the ash on the railing and shrugged. How’s grad school?

  Amazing, Amy said. No, really. It’s like whole worlds have opened up.

  You like it in Baltimore?

  I do. Amy seemed to place the words at careful intervals on the air. She smiled. I like never having to explain myself.

  It was after Amy left the church that Jesse returned to college and began tearing the last remnants of pretense from her life. At times she felt she had seen the tape of her childhood run backwards, until there the two of them were, frozen where they had begun. And if you ran the tape now would things unfold as they had before? You could lose a lot of time wondering. Better to leave it alone. Did people really change or were parts of them suppressed while other parts were allowed to grow? Jesse decided she didn’t care—couldn’t care. Fuck identity, fuck self-expression. Live, look, listen, be. Don’t apologize. That most of all. This is what she tells Dot and Amy that first night in the Hampden dive.