by Ruth Ozeki
“I’m not crying,” Cass said stiffly. “I’m angry.”
“Oh. Well, good.”
“I mean, how could you go running off like that? Tonight! Of all nights!”
“I know. I know. And you know what? You’re right.”
“Of course I’m right.”
“I’ve been out of control lately. I’m not usually like this. Something about coming back here, just being in this house . . .”
“I know,” Cass said. “You’ve told me many times.”
“The minute I got back here, it all just came flooding back, all the acting out and the anger at Lloyd. . . .”
And hearing this set Cass off again. “For God’s sake, Yummy, just drop it, will you? Lloyd’s dead. It’s over. You can’t blame everything on him. Not anymore.”
It came out harsher than she meant it to.
Yummy sat back in her chair as though she’d been shoved. “Wow.” She closed her eyes and didn’t speak for a long time.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . .”
“No. You’re right.” She covered her face with her hands, and her body started to shake. “It’s really over, isn’t it?”
She was laughing, Cass thought, or maybe she was crying. It was hard to tell, and it didn’t much matter. Cass looked at her, disgusted. “You’re still drunk,” she said. She picked up her jacket and stood to go.
“No, wait,” Yummy said. She looked up, and Cass saw there were tears in her eyes. “I’m not drunk. I’m serious.” She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. “It’s so hard to remember that I loved him. I’m so used to calling it something else, you know?”
She got up and went to the sink to fill the coffeepot. Cass watched her spoon coffee into the filter and realized she had stopped being angry. Now she just felt drained and a little bit lonely, too. “Do you know what you’re going to do next?” she asked.
Yummy turned and leaned against the counter, aligning her feet over the two worn spots on the floor in front of the sink. She hugged herself. “Getting the hell out of here for starters. I’m taking the kids back to Pahoa.”
Cass felt her heart sink. “What about your mom?” She could just picture the next few years, hauling casseroles up and down the road.
“I was thinking of trying to bring her back, too. You think she’d be up for it?”
“She can’t stay here on her own.”
Yummy nodded. “She can have a garden. Things grow like stink in Hawaii. I thought if she likes it there, we’ll forfeit the life-estate clause, and you and Will can move into this house. I certainly don’t want it, and you own it, so you might as well live in it.”
They would finally have enough room, Cass thought, but she felt oddly disappointed. She’d always wanted to live in the Fullers’ place, ever since she was a little girl. Of course, she’d wanted to live here with the Fullers. She’d wanted the house and the family, too.
“That’s good, right?” Yummy said. “You guys want to move in?” She brought the coffeepot over to the table. She poured two cups and sat down across from Cass and shared the cream and sugar.
Cass stirred her coffee and felt the loneliness grow. “I’m going to miss you,” she said suddenly. “I said it was beside the point, but it’s not. I thought we were friends.”
Yummy looked surprised. “Of course we’re friends,” she said. “We’ve always been friends. We grew up together.”
But it wasn’t the same thing, Cass was thinking. It was just what happened with country kids. People’s houses were so far apart you didn’t really choose your friends, you just ended up living next to a person. When they moved, you grew apart.
“Cass?” Yummy said. “You okay? You’re real quiet.”
“I’m fine,” Cass said. “Really. Just fine.”
Yummy reached out across the table and took hold of her hand. “Thanks,” she said. “For everything. For giving a shit.”
Cass nodded. “Well,” she said, “I guess that’s what friends are for.”
It had been a long night. It was still dark outside, but from the kitchen window she could just make out the horizon line, where the sky met the potato fields and was starting to brighten. Now that the vines had wilted and died, the fields looked like the aftermath of a battle, but underneath the earth the tubers were hardening off and soon would be ready for harvest. Will would be up and outside already. It was a busy time of year, but after this it would be winter and things would settle down. She brought her coffee cup to the sink, said good-bye to Yummy, and pulled on her jacket to go.
Outside, the smell of burning hung in the chill air, but it was not autumnal. It wasn’t leaves. It was the acrid stench of scorched rubber and battery acid and diesel oil. It was french-fried potatoes. She looked down from the porch into the yard at the skeleton of the Spudnik, crouching in the dim light.
She crossed the porch and picked her way through the muddy yard, looking toward the wreckage. A few birds, muted and irresolute, chirped in the overcast morning, but their cries were swallowed by the silence that the explosion had left in its wake. Cass shivered and turned away, but as she headed down the drive toward her car, she heard a noise. She stopped, then heard it again, a low groan that sent shivers across her skin. She approached the wreck and stood at the edge, straining to see into the twisted shadows. A large black scar marked the ground, and the torqued metal seemed to remember the force of the explosion that had melted it down. The ground was littered with bits of shattered glass and bubbled plastic. Cass stared into the darkness. How could a person just vanish like that? An entire girl, plump with milk, brimming with life. Where does she go? Does she just get reabsorbed into the air?
She heard a rustle, the sound of a boot scraping, then a sigh. Her heart leaped, fully expecting in that moment to see Charmey reappear, soot smudged and disheveled, poking her head out from behind a pile of rubble. Ooh la la! And if not Charmey herself, then at least her ghost or spirit, some residue or trace of her to ease the transition that the living hadn’t yet had time to make.
But it wasn’t Charmey. It was Frankie, hunkered down on the ground, rocking on his heels and waiting.
“Hi,” Cass said. Her breath came out like smoke in the chilly morning air.
“Hi.”
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.” He shrugged. “I just thought . . .”
She waited for him to continue.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe she was still here? Maybe she’d come back? It’s stupid.”
“I was thinking that, too.”
“Yeah?” He looked up quickly, then dropped his head and let it hang. “Well, she isn’t here,” he informed her. “So I guess she’s pretty much split for good.”
He hugged his knees and nodded to himself. The sky was growing brighter now, and Cass could hear the low drone of a harvester starting up in a distant field. She squatted beside him and put a hand on his back. She could feel his ribs under the T-shirt.
She started to talk. She told him about the weeks leading up to Tibet’s birth, and all about the birth itself, and how difficult it was and painful, and how brave Charmey had been. “She didn’t think she was going to make it. All she wanted was to see the baby just once.”
“Yeah,” he muttered. “It was always about the baby.”
“No. When things were really bad, you’re the one she called for. She squeezed my hand so hard I thought the bones would break. She said, ‘Tell Frankie I love him.’ ”
“Yeah?” He looked up.
“She was in more pain than I’ve ever seen a person bear, but she made me promise to tell you. I didn’t before, because she made it through just fine. But I’m telling you now.”
He dropped his head again and butted up against her chest, and it was like holding a calf or a goat kid, the way he bleated and breathed so rapidly. And just as she would calm a scared animal, she rubbed his back in long, even strokes and restrained him gently while he cried.
checking
out
Later that morning, around eight o’clock, the sheriff came back out to the house to question Phoenix about the man with the mirrored sunglasses and the GroundUp cap. Someone had phoned in an anonymous tip, he told us. Phoenix repeated his story, and Lilith confirmed it. She had seen the man talking to Elliot at the action. Everyone fell silent, and Phoenix stared at me until I volunteered the information that Elliot was in Room 6 at the Falls Motel. I also told them about Elliot’s reaction when I’d asked him about the explosion. Odell immediately sent a pair of officers around to the motel, but they found the room empty. It was the second time that Elliot Rhodes had checked out of Liberty Falls just before the police could talk to him.
Billy was disappointed. He came back several times to grill me about the events of that night and my relationship with Elliot. He seemed to think that I was withholding information as to his whereabouts. He was all puffed up and secretive about the anonymous tip, and for a while it seemed he was looking to implicate us all in a Washington-based conspiracy, but in the end he concluded that Elliot’s sudden departure was consistent with that of any spurned lover and had nothing to do with the explosion. Besides, Billy informed me, Elliot had been fired from his job at Duncan & Wiley, so he no longer had any motive to harass the Seeds.
In the course of the investigation they turned up bits of Charmey. Unrecognizable pieces. A section of her skull, I heard them say. A bit of blackened heel that looked like a charred potato. I told Cass, and together we kept everyone else away. Frankie. Geek. My own kids, who were still in shock. Momoko was there, though. We held hands and edged toward the police line and peered at the evidence bags that the forensics men were filling.
Why did I let Momoko watch?
How could I have watched without her?
She knew the old ways. She knew how to identify remains. In Japan bodies are ritually cremated, and afterward the relatives use chopsticks to pick through the bones, identifying this bit and that. Momoko stood next to me and said nothing as we watched the forensics men work. She squeezed my hand, hard, but when the bags were removed, I felt that we had witnessed Charmey’s earthly body passing.
Odell turned his attention to Geek’s confession, but Will stuck by. He made sure Geek didn’t say anything to implicate himself further. It was a horrible and tragic accident, Will insisted, and when Geek had claimed responsibility that night, he hadn’t been in his right mind. When the results of the fire department’s investigation failed to produce any evidence to support charges of arson, terrorism, or even criminal negligence, the sheriff gave up. Happenstance prevailed as an explanation.
On his way back from the Quinns’ one day, Odell stopped by to thank me for the way I’d handled the information about his son’s bringing the handgun to school. He said that after Will had spoken to him, he’d confronted his son and gotten him to admit to it and to say he was sorry.
“Phoenix might like to hear that, too. He was the one with the gun in his mouth.”
Billy nodded. “Of course. I’ll bring him by.” He was standing at the bottom of the porch steps, and he turned to go, but then he paused. “The gun wasn’t loaded. I don’t keep loaded weapons in the house.”
“That makes me feel a lot better.”
Odell did track down and question Rodney Skeele, retired private investigator and a founding member of the Tri-County Interfaith League of Family Values. He denied any knowledge of the explosion but freely admitted he had done patent-infringement work for Cynaco in the past. With Elliot checked out, however, any further connection to Cynaco ended with the logo on his cap. Lilith fumed. She muttered dire prophecies of corporate conspiracy into my son’s ear. I found it worrisome, but Phoenix didn’t seem to mind. More troubling to me was the thought that by banishing Elliot I had blown the only chance we had of ever finding out what really happened.
“What did Elliot want that night?” Cass asked a few weeks later.
I was packing up by then, sorting out the winter stuff I’d bought for myself and the kids at Wal-Mart—all the snowsuits and mittens, the parkas and muffs and thermal socks—to donate to the Salvation Army. I hoped I would never need them again.
“He asked me to marry him.”
“No! He didn’t!”
“Had a ring and everything. I told him to fuck off.”
“Good for you.”
“I’m sure he didn’t mean it. He lied about everything else. He even lied about being fired. He told me he’d quit. Like I would have cared?”
“It was just habit with him.” She saw me toss a knit shawl into the discard pile. “Hey, I’ll take that. It’s nice and soft.” She folded the shawl and placed it in the bag that she’d been filling. “He was a fucker, Yummy.”
“Cass!” I was shocked. I’d never heard her swear before.
She made a face at me. “I’ve been wanting to say that since we were fourteen.”
“How does it feel?”
“Great,” she said grimly. She sat there and fingered the shawl and thought for a while. “You think he had anything to do with it?”
“You mean the explosion?” I sat on the side of the bed. “Oh, God, Cass, I don’t know. What if he did? Maybe I shouldn’t have sent him away like that—”
But Cass cut me off. “No, you did the right thing. He was in public relations, for goodness’ sake. PR people don’t just go around blowing things up!”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “I guess that’s what I think, too.”
“He was a fucker and a liar, but I don’t think he was a murderer, in spite of what Lilith says. You know, the way that girl carries on, you’d think you could actually kill someone with public relations. . . .”
Maybe you can.
After she left, he’d sat there for a while longer staring at the phone, then he reached for his pants. He dressed quickly and started throwing stuff into his suitcase. He grabbed his toilet kit from the bathroom, put on his coat, and left the key to the room on the dresser along with a dollar for the maid. He felt remarkably calm. He carried his suitcase to the doorway and took a last look around. When he was sure he hadn’t forgotten anything, he closed the door behind him.
It was still dark in the parking lot. He loaded his suitcase into the trunk, got into the car, and started the ignition. Then it hit him. He had no plans, nowhere to go. He drove toward the interstate and stopped at the twenty-four-hour gas station up on the hill. As he filled the tank, he knew he had to decide. East or west. The East Coast filled him with dread. He couldn’t see going back, tail between his legs, to scrape up another PR job at a lesser firm. It was too depressing. But the West Coast—now, that had some appeal. He thought about San Francisco. About Berkeley in the sixties. Maybe he could find a job on a newspaper somewhere and get back to writing. He went inside to pay for the gas and asked the attendant for a map of the western United States.
“Taking a trip?” the guy asked.
Elliot nodded. He started to spread out the map on the counter, then changed his mind when the guy started getting nosy. “Where you heading?”
“North,” Elliot lied. “Up to Canada.” He handed back the map. “Wrong one. Hey, listen, you got a pay phone?”
It was just before sunrise when he called in the anonymous tip to the Power County sheriff’s office. He gave the officer on duty Rodney’s name and suggested they question him in conjunction with a vehicular explosion that morning at Fullers’ Farm. Then he got back into his car and pulled onto the interstate, satisfied that he’d done what he could to make things right. He headed west on 84, past Massacre Rocks. When he passed the sign marking the Liberty Falls town limits and watched it disappear in the rearview mirror, he felt glad to be putting all this behind him—it was terrible about the girl that died, and the propane tanks probably leaked, but if not, if Rodney had taken it on himself to go solo and had done something crazy, it wasn’t his business anymore. It was already the past, and there was his entire future to think about.
He reached into his jacket poc
ket and pulled out the statue of Kali. He set it on the dashboard, but after a few miles he started to worry. The statue sat there, centered in the windshield, holding her severed head like a pocketbook. He used to like the way she looked at him, dusky and ever so faintly cross-eyed, but now it struck him that in all likelihood it was inauspicious to travel with the deity of destruction on one’s dashboard.
Just then the sun broke over the rimrock. The glare reflected in his rearview mirror, blinding him, so he changed into his sunglasses. The light chased him, bright and hard, across the desert. It was a good day for driving. He would have to ditch the rental car along the way, but he could buy a secondhand beater to get him out to the coast. Maybe an old VW. He switched on the radio, scanning the airwaves for classic rock, then laughed as he recognized the lyric.
“You are the crown of creation . . .” Gracie sang, “and you got no place to go. . . .”
The little goddess on the dashboard was sticking her tongue out at him. He rolled down the window and chucked her out the window.
With no place to go, he felt like he was going back to the beginning.
small victories
In early October the New York Times ran an article with the news that Cynaco’s main rival in the life-sciences industry had decided not to sell seeds sterilized with Terminator technology. The CEO had written an open letter stating that his corporation was committed “not to commercialize gene-protection systems that render seed sterile.” Geek printed out the article, and the Seeds gathered around the computer and surfed the Net for reactions. The alternative presses were declaring it a victory. TERMINATOR TERMINATED! read more than one banner headline, but Geek shook his head.
“It’s a total lie. A PR maneuver. The Terminator issue is too hot right now. They’re just distancing themselves from it. Going underground.”
“But it sounds so positive,” Lilith said.
