The Life List of Adrian Mandrick

by Chris White

  He really did see it. Warmth suffuses him from his head to his chest, through his groin, all the way down his legs to his ankles as though someone has taken a deep ladle and doused him with the warm water of the Gulf.

  Adrian can imagine his mother in a bent-knee stance to center her weight and steady the canoe. He can see her forearms opening out from the camera she holds to one eye. She’s who Adrian’s smiling at.

  • • •

  The cab driver opens the door to Adrian’s bedroom at Jeff’s, having insisted on helping him in with his things. He lays them on the floor by the bed, and Adrian thanks him again and gives him another twenty.

  “Can you let yourself out?” Adrian says, aware he’s never said those stilted words aloud before. Who knew he would find an occasion for them?

  “Absolutely,” the man says, already gone, nothing left of him but his cigarette smell.

  Adrian sits on the bed and unzips his suitcase. He lost all his original pills in the jungle along with the backpack, but he’s got his anti-inflammatory, a new antibiotic, and the pain meds (Percocet) he’s been keeping himself from taking. Thankfully, his video camera was in his pocket, so he’s got that, but there’s nothing on it—not a single pixel of footage. He pulls a bulky, misshapen trash bag out of his suitcase and extracts the waders and boots. Then he remounts his crutches, carries his filthy gear to the bathroom tub, turns on the hot water, and lets it run.

  The map of Eglin made it home too, in the chest pocket of his waders. He spreads it out on the daybed, all 123,000 square miles of it. He sees the river, of course, and the light-red areas (“closed to public access because of active military testing, training, and/or unexploded ordnance contamination”) and the dark-red areas (“Department of Defense personnel only”). Even now, he can’t figure out exactly where he’d been.

  Chapter Seventeen

  * * *

  Extinction is a black-and-white equation. No amount of financial wizardry, artistic genius, media glitz, religious feeling, or political heft can influence it once it’s reached critical mass: it is where math and science have the final word. It could be said that evolutionary history is unforgiving. Utterly dependent on its habitat, a species cannot continue without it. If that habitat is sufficiently degraded, overtaken by an invasive species, or altered by climate or other environmental changes of note, the species must either adapt to these changing conditions (i.e., by changing as well) or locate and adapt to a new habitat. If it is incapable of making these changes, the species in question will become extinct.

  These are the cold, hard facts with which Adrian is familiar. Changing is always difficult. Sometimes it’s too late.

  • • •

  Adrian sits in his car at the end of the driveway. The bristling cold is seeping in through the seams, and his seat is pushed all the way back to make room for his ankle. His toes are blue.

  He can see Stella standing in front of the window washing dishes, in the same way one can see a face card turned at an angle in someone else’s hand. Every now and then she seems to be looking his way, but maybe it’s only a trick of light on the glass. One can never assume. He’s mistaken love for torment, based entirely on faulty perception. He’s capable of any number of other misinterpretations: familiarity for frustration, numbness for painlessness, blame for responsibility, melancholy for regret.

  He starts the car and pulls slowly forward, closer to the window, and she disappears. He climbs, stiff and aching, out of the car and limps on his crutches to the front door. He pulls open the screen door, then quietly knocks. There’s no need to herald his presence. If she doesn’t want to answer, no amount of hammering will convince her. He’s not in the mood to hammer anyway.

  He waits. Thinks maybe he hears footsteps. Then nothing.

  He can imagine Zander sleeping upstairs, all his covers tossed off, his body in the shape of someone falling face down toward the earth. Michaela, bundled in down and quilts, pillows stacked high behind her, her head resting in front of them on the bare sheet with a bit of spittle gathered at the crook of her mouth, breath even as a timekeeper.

  There is a terrible pain in his ankle. His bone is broken. He repeats it in his mind, to help him remember the truth. My bone is broken. My bone is broken. If he doesn’t remember it, he’ll fall back into illusion. How can he hope to get well, if he doesn’t acknowledge that something is wrong?

  The door squeaks open and she is there, as if backlit by firelight. He can’t quite see whether she looks broken too. He doesn’t speak right away. She looks down at his ankle, then quickly back to his face.

  “Hi,” he says.

  “Hello. How are you?” not quite like a stranger, but nearly.

  “I would like to do something brave,” he says.

  Her eyes narrow. “What?”

  “I’d like to do something brave and selfless,” he repeats. “But in the absence of that, I’d like you to have this.”

  He takes the book from under his arm, the one with all the tattered pages and a continent full of birds. He holds it out to her.

  “Why?” Does she shrug? “Why do you want to give it to me?”

  “For safekeeping,” he says.

  There is a sound from upstairs. Maybe one of the kids hears his voice or is on the way to the bathroom. Maybe it’s just the furnace lurching on.

  “Are you going somewhere?” she asks, rubbing the ball of her foot into the floor like she’s putting out a cigarette.

  “No. I just want to turn this over . . . to you.”

  She hesitantly takes the book from him.

  “I would happily do something harder,” he says, “if I only knew what.” He’s grateful she’s taken it. He didn’t know if she would.

  She studies him, as if trying to decipher a message. She looks down at the pages and solemnly flips through them with her thumb. The cold is filling the house as they stand at the open door.

  She finds a photo, plucks it up, and holds it out toward the light. “Is this you?”

  Adrian nods. It’s the one his mother took.

  “I didn’t know you kept any pictures from when you were little.”

  “That’s a woodpecker.”

  “I can see,” she says, like someone who thinks there are more birds like it somewhere.

  Adrian thinks he’ll say, “Well, I’d better let you get to bed,” but instead he gestures to the photo. “Those birds are all gone,” his eyes suddenly brimming. “Every single one of them.”

  He hasn’t cried since Michaela was born.

  “They’re so much more fragile than anybody thought,” he says. “The birds. You think, because they can fly, they can do anything, survive anything.”

  Stella nods, her eyes still narrowed, the book’s weight in her hands.

  His crutches don’t allow him to cover his face, and Adrian weeps.

  Stella touches him on the hand. She holds the photo out toward him. “Why don’t you take this back, okay?”

  He nods and takes it from her, gratefully, sliding it into his coat pocket. “Thank you.” He hadn’t meant to give that away. If she ever lets him into the house again, he’s going to tell her that. He’ll tell her everything.

  Stella looks suddenly behind her as if she’s heard something. A light goes on in the upstairs hallway.

  Adrian finds the light with his eyes, then says, “I should let you get to bed.”

  In another moment, she’s closed the door, and he’s crunching over the frozen grass, poking perfect holes in the thin covering of ice with his crutches.

  He just wants another chance. To nurture and protect his own two children, to keep them safe in his own home, sleeping in the room down the hall until they are grown.

  As he backs out onto the cold street, he doesn’t think of blame or guilt—either his or his father’s. Only that what’s been soiled must be cleansed, so that his children may thrive. Only this rings clear to him in the dry air. The simplest of creatures hears it too. He just wants another chanc
e.

  Epilogue

  * * *

  Adrian enters the hall alone. It’s a small theater, all made of light-colored wood—the floors, the walls, everything new and airy—perhaps large enough to seat a hundred and fifty people. Adrian finds an aisle seat only one row from the back where he can quietly observe, relatively unobserved. He doesn’t want to make a show of his presence. He just wants to be here. People mill about in the direction of their seats with their scents and their markings and their calls, ignoring each other’s presence or quietly saying, “Where were you last week? We missed you,” or “Is David here yet?” A great number of them are between forty and sixty years old, fit, and understatedly stylish, either well-to-do or artistic or both, the sort of people who don’t hide their gray hair. The rest are students from the university, in groups of two or three mostly, talking into each other’s ears like children at their parents’ party. Zander and Michaela are sitting with friends of Stella’s in the third row just right of center, the best seats in the house.

  One chair and one stool stand on the stage, filling two of three neat pools of light. Adrian watches as a radiant young black woman all in black steals onto the stage with three bottles of Fiji water gathered in her hands and places one in each pool of light, then slips off again the other side. Behind him and through a glass window, a middle-aged man and a slim boy sit sealed off at a light board, headphones around their necks, laughing uproariously about something no one can hear.

  Two months ago, British Petroleum spilled 210 million gallons of oil into the Gulf. Last week, Adrian flew in and had dinner with his father, whose heart is stronger now. He invited Marilyn Whitehead, who Adrian learned is one-half Muskogee. Her ancestors have lived in and around the Panhandle for twelve hundred years. Adrian told her he’s one-quarter Catawba, on his mother’s side. The next morning, Adrian and Dean squatted by the nest of a sea turtle, dug up her eggs, and toted them away to save them from the poison. Adrian watched Dean and Marilyn wash a Piping Plover in a basin, and the world seemed more surprising then than ever before.

  His ankle is essentially healed. He stopped wearing his air cast five or six weeks after his accident, then moved on to support socks with regular shoes, and now his only remaining symptom is a slight numbness at the outer edge of the sole of his foot. Maybe that will always be there; he doesn’t know. Jeff tells him he’s got a limp. Though he can’t see it himself, he assumes it’s true.

  Getting off the pills was painful. It’s amazing how quickly the body and mind fall into addiction again, even after substantial time has passed. He weaned himself off very precisely, as if it were only science, not magic, and it took four months until he didn’t think of it for a full day.

  He thinks of nothing now, really, but the morning. The way it shows up without fail, dependable, often sunny, expecting nothing, offering everything.

  Michaela, Zander, and Adrian hike high up Sugarloaf Mountain from the parking lot by Switzerland Trail. They start out early and walk until they’re hungry, stopping to eat pimento-cheese sandwiches and dill pickles by a creek that rushes by them like quicksilver. There are wildflowers in the crevices of the rocks, along the trail, and on the hillside.

  Everyone falls into that natural hush that overtakes an audience just before the lights go down. They sense it’s going to happen. Sure enough, the lights go to half, and in a minute, quickly fade.

  A man and two women walk onto the stage in a little line, the man carrying something large, a cello or an upright bass, one woman with nothing in her hands, and Stella, carrying her oboe. A smattering of audience members awkwardly applaud before they realize they should have waited, as the musicians fan out to find their places.

  Once in their own brightening pools of light, they make their small preparations. The man, who Adrian now sees is a cellist, sits, lets out his end pin, and tightens the horsehairs of his bow. The singer picks up her bottle of water, replaces it back on the floor without drinking from it, and leans back against her stool. Stella simply stands, the oboe held lightly in both hands, and looks out across the bodies in their seats toward Adrian.

  By the time he and the kids get to the last spiral of the trail, they are sweaty and winded, and their noses are burned. Adrian tells them that the trail they are walking used to be a mining road and how carts used to carry out gold, silver, and coal along a track that was pulled up, cut into pieces, and thrown away. The kids aren’t too interested; they just want to walk beside him. He doesn’t know what he is teaching them—that it’s okay to walk even when your body wants to stop walking, how to look for things both far away and near.

  The cellist begins to play, his right hand so relaxed in posture he looks to be about to drop the bow, his left hand inching up and down the neck without frets, finding the notes. His bow saws long across the first two strings, sticky and thick, vibrating Adrian’s rib cage.

  The singer opens her mouth and sings one extended note, finally tripping forward into other notes that climb higher, then plateau, descend, then plateau, her brow furrowed, chest wide, singing only the sound of a vowel. Adrian waits for Stella, but she stands by, her face in rapt, unselfconscious attention, lips slightly open, waiting for her cue. Right now it’s cello and voice, cello and voice, in a simple harmony even Adrian can recognize as such, the singer straddling the cello’s sweet, sad melody in a tune you can almost remember.

  They see it coming: the dry, rocky summit. The three of them step upon it all at once and stand there in their sneakers. Miles away, and clear as a bell, the Continental Divide rings like a summons before them. From there, the waters of the land mass flow, every day, down the west side toward the Pacific, down the east toward the Atlantic. When Adrian’s mother called, she waited for a response but there was no answer, so she stilled her fingers and stared straight ahead. As if stillness would make a response more likely. As if her loneliness would make a response more likely. As if wild fires and tsunamis and droughts and earthquakes would make a response more likely.

  Much of the audience is unaware of the moment Stella enters the song, the oboe’s sound is so thin, but Adrian hears the very first whisper of its double-reeded tone, sustaining long and longer, then wavering and dipping into full sound.

  Just when Adrian believes the singer has become the center of the song as usual, over the top of her voice now adventuring, over the top of the cello now lamenting, answers Stella again with her call—not like a songbird brightening the branches, more like an ivorybill, with the sweet rainy-day tone of a child’s tin horn. It is oboe—and voice, then oboe—and voice, the cello omnipresent, like the earth underfoot. And the three instruments are inexorably intertwined, integral parts of the same true story.

  Michaela steps away from the edge to retie her shoe. Her laces are a tangle of cotton and burrs, so Adrian kneels down to help sort them out.

  They are surrounded, these children, on all sides—Fourmile Canyon snaking up from Boulder; the mushrooming communities of Denver to the south; the spine of the Rocky Mountains to the west, Indian Peaks, Longs Peak, Mount Meeker; and the Eastern Plains, a grassland with no grasses, stretching farther away than any of them can see—all lit within the canopy of the Colorado sky.

  “Dad,” Zander shouts, dangling a leg toward the blue abyss, sneaker full of sand. “Do you think we could find our way home from here?”

  Acknowledgments

  * * *

  Grateful thanks to: my insightful, persistent, and always encouraging agent, Tim Wojcik of Levine Greenberg Rostan; my brave, generous, and talented editor, Lara Blackman; hawk-eyed copyeditor Peg Haller; inspired cover designer Sandra Chiu; production editor Kayley Hoffman; interior designer Jill Putorti; and to everyone at Touchstone Books and Simon & Schuster, with special thanks to Tara Parsons, for giving my book a shot and lending it their support and expertise.

  To the great Larry Balch, Betsy Fikejs, Father Tom Pincelli, Tim Radford, Tim Manns, Bob Kantz, Carol Wallace, Peter Schoenberger, Barbara Heile, Dianne Hard
in, and Betsy Thomas; to John Seginak, Mike Spaits, and Gregory Kemp; to Lee Anne Auerhan, MD, Matt Andry, MD, Barbara Malach, MD, and Richard Kalman, MD; and to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the American Birding Association, and the National Audubon Society for invaluable information and research assistance.

  To Robert Boswell for the most perceptive, comprehensive set of notes imaginable; to Lili Wright, my traveling companion on the winding road to the novel; to David Field, Patti White, Barbara Bean, Hillary Kelleher, Susan Hahn, Martha Rainbolt, David Crouse, and Christie Cashner Alli for thorough and thoughtful reading. To Rosemary James, Joseph J. DeSalvo, Jr., John Gregory Brown, and the William Faulkner–William Wisdom Competition for welcoming my work and me. To DePauw University, my wonderful academic home, for helping me create the space and time to write.

  Finally, heartfelt thanks to Griffin, Fiona, Gwendolyn, and Maia, dear ones. To my husband, writer Tom Chiarella, for his keen narrative eye and unwavering confidence in my seeing this project through, and for his daily love and illumination. And to the brilliant and inimitable Cathie Malach, dearest friend and reader, for her ever-lucid discernment, inexhaustible faith, and selfless devotion to helping me uncover, shape, and refine this story.

  About the Author

  * * *

  © MADISON WILLIAMS

  Chris White is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter, with an MFA in dramatic writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her plays have been produced nationally and internationally, and her play Rhythms won the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play. She received an Award of Merit at the Women’s Independent Film Festival for her feature-length screenplay Weasel in the Icebox, and her short film Mud Lotus was an official selection at the New Hampshire, Albany, Copper Mountain, and Cincinnati Film Festivals. White is a professor of English at DePauw University teaching creative writing. She lives near the town of Bainbridge, Indiana, on Big Walnut Creek. The Life List of Adrian Mandrick is her first novel.