The Hungry Season

by Greenwood, T.

  “I guess,” he’d said, smirking. “A little bit.”

  The lake also looks smaller, a miniature version of what he remembers. Compared to the Pacific, still bodies of water like this are pathetic. He picks up a rock and chucks it into the lake, watches as it disturbs the ridiculous peace of the water’s surface. He looks across the lake at the opposite shore. There are a handful of houses, all of them empty still. Beyond that are trees and still more trees. A small mountain jutting up into the hazy sky.What have they done to him? What has he done to deserve this?

  Of course he knows exactly what he’s done. And when he thinks about that night now, even he thinks it was stupid.The trip to Tijuana, and coming back across the border so loaded he could barely walk. They’d gone down there to celebrate Misty getting into Brown. She was a year ahead of him at school, second in her class. She’d gotten into every goddamn school she’d applied to, but Brown was her top choice. And he was an asshole that night, jealous a little, maybe, of Misty getting exactly what she wanted (she always got exactly what she wanted). Jealous of the way she was dancing while every guy at that dirty bar was watching her. He was wasted, but he remembers the flash of her skin, the belly ring, the way her sweaty hair clung to her face and neck. But he shouldn’t have left her there alone. God, it was stupid.

  Where’s Misty? his father had asked, shaking him by the shoulders inside the brightly lit cubicle at the border station until he felt almost carsick. Where’s Misty?

  It took six hours before he was sober, six hours before they found her. Her parents were mad as hell; they’d never liked him before and now this. But Misty had forgiven him. And wasn’t that all that really mattered? Nothing bad had even happened. Everybody was down in TJ that night. Half the kids from their school did the same thing almost every weekend. When Finn left, Misty just found another girl from Country Day. They’d crossed back over the border and went to the beach. A fucking bonfire in Mission Beach. No big deal. It wasn’t his fault she didn’t go straight home. Later, when he told her what his parents were making him do, she’d apologized to him. Said it was her fault that he was getting banished for the whole summer before his senior year. Their last summer together before she went off to college.

  Of course he knows that TJ wasn’t the last straw. That came afterward. He’s never really known when to stop. Even he has to admit that. But still, he is pissed at his father. At his mother. He knows that Misty won’t wait for him; why the hell should she? He’s got to figure out a way out of here, a way to get back to her. He looks up at the cottage, at the scraggly lawn, at the woods behind the house that, for all he knows, stretch all the way to fucking Canada.Where the hell can he go? He picks up a handful of rocks and hurls them into the quiet water, watching the stones come crashing down like rain.

  Sam wrote his first novel when he was twenty-one years old. He can still remember what it felt like the day he sat down to write. He remembers the massive oak monstrosity from Goodwill that served as both his kitchen table and his desk. The blue electric typewriter he��d bought at a pawnshop for five bucks and some change. His father had just died. Sam was living alone with a family of gray mice in an apartment in downtown Burlington, the one above the French bakery. There was a poster of a giant fried egg that the last tenant had left behind, hanging from thumbtacks in a bright yellow kitchen. Every morning he bought a chocolate croissant and a cup of coffee from the pretty redheaded girl who worked in the bakery. It was the winter of his senior year at UVM, and outside the wind coming off Lake Champlain felt like knives. After his father died, he’d stopped going to classes and started to write. He didn’t plan on getting famous; he just wanted to bring his father back.

  But strangely, as he wrote, it wasn’t his father who appeared on the page; all that crazy love and grief and horror conjured, instead, a girl.When she first appeared, he’d been thinking about his father’s hands. About the gray work gloves he wore when he was splitting wood. He’d been thinking about the sound of the ax splitting through the thick trunks. He’d been thinking about the way his father would run his hand over the top of his head, leaving a dusty layer of sawdust in his hair. But the words that came out (pine, autumn, chill) captured, instead, a girl in a red wool coat standing in a field of fallen leaves. He knew he was meant to be a writer when he left his father and followed her, when she offered him her soft hand and he took it.

  What he didn’t expect was everything that happened afterward. He didn’t expect when he finally showed up to English class again that spring with the manuscript (a cardboard shirt box filled with smudgy onionskin papers) that his professor at the university would give it to his friend’s son, Monty Harrison, who had just started up a literary agency in New York, and that three days later Monty would drive all the way up to Burlington in his beat-up Karmann Ghia to tell him that he’d written something brilliant. That this novel would make them both famous. He also didn’t expect that Monty, who was only a handful of years older than Sam himself, would proceed to pull off what finally amounted to a series of small miracles: a book contract with a reputable house, a sizable advance, and the one thing that would change everything: a film deal with an independent film producer in Los Angeles who knew a girl who would be perfect to play the lead. She was nineteen, a student at CalArts who came from somewhere in Arizona. Phoenix, Flagstaff? No matter, she was Greek, a knockout, and her name was Mena.

  Mena. The first time Sam saw Mena was on the film set, inside a crappy warehouse in Studio City. But when he saw her, it was as if she had crawled out of the pages of the book. Mena, with her gypsy hips and oil spill hair. She was wearing a pair of brown motorcycle boots and faded Levi’s held up by a belt with a massive pewter Alice in Wonderland buckle.When she offered him her hand, he couldn’t stop himself from turning it over and over in his palm, examining it. He had written this skin. This smell of trees. She was his words manifested in lovely skin and hair and breath. And when she leaned into him and said, “Come with me?” he understood that, just as he had pursued the woman in the woods, he would follow Mena anywhere. Within a couple of months, he’d relocated to Los Angeles, leaving Vermont and school and his old life behind.

  He watches her now, as she unpacks the groceries, as she blows the dust off the cupboard shelves. Her hair still spills down her back, liquid, but in the last year he has watched as tiny gray hairs sprouted up, asserting themselves with their wiry defiance. He has watched lines etch themselves into the corners of her eyes. He has watched sorrow take its toll on her. Looking at her now no longer fills him with desire but remorse.

  “You want the loft again?” she asks. “For your office?”

  He nods.

  “Why don’t you go set it up,” she says. “I’ll make dinner.”

  Her eyes are so wide now. She always looks on the verge of tears. At first it made his heart ache; now, it makes him want to retreat. He can barely stand to look at her, at those pleading eyes asking him for something he doesn’t have.

  He leaves her and goes to the main room. The furniture is covered with tarps. The windows are greasy. There is an upright piano here now, painted bright blue and sitting in the middle of the room like something abandoned. It wasn’t here the last time. The dining table is still there, the long wooden expanse of a top and its wobbly legs. They used to put matchbooks under them to keep it still, opting to eat outside most nights. Everything smells like dust. He remembers the way it used to feel to come here, the excitement of uncovering the furniture, the sense of anticipation. He used to love to sweep the dusty floor, tear the cobwebs down, collect handfuls of dead flies from the windowsills. The windows, swollen shut all winter, always seemed to thank him as he lifted their sashes. He remembers the thrill of two tiny sets of footprints leading from the dusty floor all the way to the back door.

  He climbs the ladder to the loft.Years ago, he had the blue electric typewriter that he would lug up with him every summer. He still has the typewriter, but has opted now, reluctantly, for a laptop.
It was a gift from Mena. After two years, he still resists its streamlined body. Its silent keys.As he climbs up, he misses the old typewriter, both the burden and the sense of possibility. He will miss the rhythmic clickety-clack. He will miss the noises.

  It isn’t the same. He must have been crazy to think it would be. The faded red velvet chair and small wooden desk are still there, but the view out the window is not as he remembers it. The first time he brought Mena here, she was pregnant with the twins. He remembers her sleeping on the mattress he’d also hauled up here, while he wrote. He remembers the words and the way they felt: swollen, sunshine, repose. He remembers the way the light caught on the water through the small round window over the desk. Later, when the twins were small, he would watch them below through the window—the choreography of a mother and her children: bloody noses, pinched fingers, tiny toads and perfect stones. But now, as he looks through the dirty window at the still water, he only thinks: lost, gone, was.

  Outside the sun is starting to melt over Franklin Mountain in the distance, like pale fire.

  “Where’s Finn?” Mena hollers up, and he hears that new panic in her voice that’s been creeping in lately. A tremble, a breaking. And the worst part is, he doesn’t think there’s a damn thing he can do to make it go away.

  “He’s just down by the water,” he says. “Throwing rocks.”

  Mena wishes she had the ingredients to make a real dinner, but she only has the things she bought at Hudson’s and some nonperishables she brought from California. She finds a jar of organic spaghetti sauce and some whole wheat pasta in a box. But she doesn’t even have an onion, garlic. The dusty tin of oregano she finds in the cupboard has lost its potency.

  She can’t see Finn from the kitchen, and this makes her nervous. She feels the same way she did when he and Franny were little. In San Diego, she never let them go outside alone. Not after that string of abductions: little kids snatched right out of their own front yards—the one girl who was abducted when her mother went inside for sunscreen. Mena would bring whatever she was doing outside with her as they played in the sprinkler or in their playhouse: her reading, her knitting, the bills. If she had to go inside for something, they came with her. After the twins were born, the world became dangerous; it seemed that there was always someone waiting, lurking, ready to steal your life out from under you. Mena used to be afraid of how other people might harm her children. She was worried, then, about strangers.

  One of the reasons she first loved the lake was because it was the one place where that insidious anxiety would disappear. She, like Sam, had grown up fearless, free. In Flagstaff, she played in the woods alone, took long bike rides without bothering to tell her mother where she was going or when she’d be home. Coming to the lake was like returning to the world of her childhood. At first, the twins were skeptical of this new freedom. Mena remembers the first time Franny took a bike ride by herself, looking back over her shoulder, wary, as she pedaled away from the cottage. And then the furious and joyful way she disappeared down the winding dirt road that led around the lake.

  As the water heats in the large pot, Mena goes to the main room where the smudged windows look out over the water. She can see Finn at the shore. He’s smoking a cigarette. She doesn’t know when he started being so brazen. He probably figures he’s got nothing left to lose. In a way, she can understand this. The smoke from his cigarette curls up into the air as the sun sets. She watches him, his slouchy stance, his hair a mop of white blond curls. Finny. My little boy. She wants to believe it was a good idea to come here.

  When she hears the oil crackling in the pan, she leaves the window and returns to the kitchen. Sam has brought in the box she packed with the spices and staples she knew she would never be able to find here: Attiki honey, Kalas sea salt, mastiha. In the morning she will go into town. There’s a Shop’n Save in Quimby, but they probably won’t have the ingredients she needs: Vine leaves, filo, anthotiro cheese. She’ll need to order those items. The Athenaeum probably has a computer—there must be someone, somewhere, who can ship her tarama. Suddenly she feels disconnected from the entire world. Did she feel this way when they came here before?

  She cracks the fistful of pasta in half so that it will fit in the small pot of boiling water. She can’t find the colander; she’ll need to use the lid to drain the water. She pours the sauce over the pasta and dumps everything into a giant bowl. She feels awful about this dinner. No salad, no bread. God, she hopes Sam packed a bottle of wine. Remembering the six-pack of beer from Hudson’s, she goes to the refrigerator and grabs one. It is cold and good.

  She clears the long wooden table that separates the kitchen from the living room, grabs four plates from a box and unwraps them from their Bubble Wrap. She circles the table, setting. She digs through another box for four forks, four knives, four spoons. Napkins. Glasses. She arranges the table and then steps back. And then, that choking feeling, the suffocation that comes every single time she forgets. It’s been seven months; how can she keep making this same mistake?

  She glances quickly up to the loft where Sam is shuffling around and then out the window at Finn, who is making his way back to the cottage, his hands shoved into his pockets, kicking at the ground. She hurries to the table before anyone can see, and pulls the extra setting from the table. She sits down at the vacant place and closes her eyes, imagines Franny and swallows hard, past the terrible swelling in her throat.

  “Dinner!” she says, brushing at the tears in her eyes.

  Finn says he’s not hungry, and he knows this hurts her. He finds himself doing things to hurt her all the time lately. It feels good, and then it feels like shit. He leaves them sitting at the table with not just one, but two empty spaces.

  They told him that he could pick whichever bedroom he wanted. This concession was supposed to make up for them dragging his ass all the way across the country for the summer. Well, thanks, he thinks. That makes up for everything. He thought about taking his parents’ room, leaving them with the one that he and Franny used to share, but he knew that this was a cruelty that not even he was capable of. And so he drags his duffel bag into the room at the back of the cottage, the one with the small window and the awful peeling fake wood paneling. The last time they were here, he and Franny had peeled one whole panel off, written their names on the battered wall behind it with a Sharpie.

  The last time they were here. God, he was still just a little kid then. Twelve seems so far away now. He remembers that at the beginning of that summer he’d fallen off his bike in Jimmy Goldstein’s driveway, and that his knees were raw. Every time he bent them, the scabs cracked open. He hadn’t been able to go surfing afterward, because the salt water made his knees feel like they were on fire. He’d been so happy to get to the lake that summer that he ripped off his clothes as soon as they got out of the car, ran down the path to the dock and threw himself into the water. It had stung too, but only from the cold.

  In the house in San Diego, in the house they left behind, Franny and Finn each had their own room. Finn’s room was painted a midnight blue, one entire wall papered with a topographical map of Southern California. He’d used those little pushpin flags to mark every beach he’d surfed: from Encinitas to Baja. Someday he’d go to Costa Rica, Australia, Brazil. Both bedrooms had a view of the beach, though Finn’s was actually a little better.They each had a twin bed. Franny’s was unadorned (none of the stuffed animals or frilly pillows you’d expect of a typical teenage girl), but it was always made. Finn’s, on the other hand, was a catchall, a chaotic mess of blankets and books and whatever else hadn’t fallen to the floor. The sheets on Finn’s bed were the same ones he’d had since he was little, patterned with cowboys and Indians, threadbare but so soft they were mildly pornographic. The Patagonia blanket was also time-worn—something one of Finn’s father’s fans from the Northwest had sent.

  Finn’s walls at home were riddled with thumbtack holes. He never bothered to try to put up posters in the same spot when he took
the old ones down. He was restless in that room, the holes a testament to his inability to settle on anything, not even a picture on the wall. He must have had a thousand CDs, most of them stacked up in teetering piles on his bureau. His musical taste was also fickle. He was the kind of kid who could never name his favorite color, his favorite food, his favorite anything. Franny, on the other hand, was resolute. She had chosen red as her favorite crayon from the time she knew the names of the colors. She’d picked it and stuck with it. It was the same thing with favorite food (sushi), music (Tchaikovsky, Billie Holiday, Coldplay) and old movie stars (Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck). When she decided on ballet at six years old, their father had installed a barre along one long wall. Franny’s room was an exercise in certainty while Finn’s was a wasteland of abandoned interests.

  Their mother said that when they were babies, they would start out at opposite ends of their shared crib every night, but by morning they would be nose to toe, like two little slugs curled into each other.When they were little, Finn never woke up without Franny’s breath being the first thing he smelled. Before coffee, before bacon, there was always the musty sleepy smell of Franny. Of course, they eventually got too old for that, but sometimes Finn missed the way it felt waking up next to his sister. Sometimes he’d wake up and knock on their shared wall just to make sure she was still there, on the other side. His four quiet taps echoed by four more; she always answered back.

  He lifts the heavy moth-eaten quilt off the bare mattress and grabs the new package of sheets that his mother has left on a wicker chair by the window. He rips open the package, which are crisp and unyielding. He makes the bed and curls up inside the covers. He can hear the clanking of glasses and silverware, the distant sound of the radio. Quietly, he reaches for himself, closes his eyes and thinks about Misty. About Heidi Klum. About the girl he saw at the gas station somewhere around Little Rock. Afterward, he’s spent and hungry.