Descent: A Novel

by Tim Johnston

  The story had put into the boy’s mind the story of a man who dropped into a forest far from the war and the cities, a black forgotten forest where a man could walk for years and never come across another man nor the end of the forest. Back home his young wife and his son wept over his gravestone but the man was alive in the forest and he lived there for so long that he forgot that there were such things as wars and cities and families. He simply became, like the deer, the owl, the fox, a thing of the woods. And like them he one day died, not from war, or the violence of another man, but because he’d grown old and could no longer hunt and could no longer protect himself from the other things in the forest.

  I think you should come back with me to Colorado, Grant said.

  Why?

  You don’t seem very happy here.

  Am I supposed to be happy?

  Grant looked at him.

  The boy took hold of the brace he wore over his jeans, the steel bars to either side of his knee, and gave an abrupt, adjusting jerk. What about Mom?

  What about her?

  She needs me here, remember?

  Grant nodded, absently. I think it would mean more to her right now if you came back with me, he said. To help look.

  For a time the boy said nothing. Then he said: She bought me something, out of the blue. Guess what.

  What.

  A model airplane.

  Grant studied his son’s face—grown thin in the last year, like the rest of him. The soft blond mustache he ought to just shave. His son had lost interest in model planes years ago, he knew, though dusty fighters still patrolled the skies of his room.

  Sean, he said. Did Mom ever tell you about her sister, Faith? Her twin?

  The one who drowned.

  Yes.

  No. Caitlin did.

  What did she tell you?

  That mom had a twin sister named Faith who drowned when they were young.

  Grant nodded. They were sixteen, he said. Your age. Their folks, your grandparents, would rent a house on the lake for two weeks every summer—swimming, suntanning on the dock. One day they left the girls alone to go into town. They left little Grace with them. Grace was walking by then and she walked right off the end of the dock. Do you mind if I smoke?

  No.

  He lit the cigarette and went on, describing the day as Angela had described it to him one night just before their own daughter was born (long wretched night of no sleep, of fears bursting all at once from his wife’s breast): the two teenage girls on the porch painting their toenails, talking to a boy on the house phone, accustomed to their mother watching the baby. The moment when something splashed and they looked at one another—each seeing in the other, in her twin, her own face of immediate comprehension. Immediate fear. Two girls running as one to the end of the dock and diving in. Angela could see little Grace down among the rocks like a sunken doll. The water wasn’t deep and she quickly had her in her hands and she came up kicking, reaching for the dock, calling out, I got her, I got her. But Faith hadn’t come up. Was still down there looking, she thought. She got Grace onto the dock and turned her on her stomach to push the water out and then turned her over again and as she blew into the tiny mouth, filling the tiny lungs, she was thinking about both sisters: the one she was trying to save with her breath and the one who wasn’t there, who wasn’t coming up. She had this feeling that, as a twin, her twin self ought to be able to dive in after Faith, her actual twin. She thought she ought to be able to be on that dock and in the water again, both places, at the same time.

  The ember of the cigarette flared, and he let the smoke out slowly.

  Finally Grace coughed and began to breathe, he went on. And as the life came back into her baby sister, your mom told me she felt another life going out. Going out of herself. She dove back in the water and searched, and she came up to make sure Grace was still on the dock, still crying, and dove under again. It took too long. She could feel that other part of herself slipping away. Just slipping away.

  Grant stared into the distance as if into those waters. Faith had misjudged her dive, he said. She hit a rock on the bottom and her lungs filled with water and she drifted under the dock, into the shadows.

  He took a last drag on the cigarette and crushed it out.

  The boy had found photo albums in his aunt Grace’s garage, the plastic pages separating with a loud kiss of time on the twin girls as babies, as blonde birthday girls, as teenagers who with their pure, rudimentary features looked more like daughters of the grown woman he knew than his sister did. After sixteen, it was one blonde girl alone, and to study pictures of his aging mother was to wonder if, in some other, ongoing world, some divergent world, that identical sister once so happy and pretty remained happy and pretty, or must she grow as well into the same tired, beclouded woman who went on in this one?

  He didn’t know what to say. He understood that his mother grieved not only for a daughter but for the lost half of herself.

  But it didn’t change anything.

  School just started, he pointed out, and Grant said they would get him into school up there or down in Denver; they’d have to look into it.

  You’ve got your license now, don’t you?

  Yes.

  And you can drive all right? He glanced at his son’s knee.

  Yes.

  He handed him a key and took three twenties from his wallet and handed these over too. He told him to go over to the house after dinner and get the old green Chevy and gas it up and drive it back to Aunt Grace’s. Pack up his things. Be ready to go at 7 a.m. sharp.

  Your mother knows the plan, he said.

  16

  It was a modest but handsome house, gable-roofed, with large ground-floor windows that caught both the morning and evening light. There was a time, pulling up to it, when her heart would fly out of her, like seeing the ocean, like seeing the mountains. Here was the shape of her life, of all she loved. A solid house. Nothing in disrepair. The house of a carpenter. Grant had done the bedroom over the garage himself when Angela was pregnant with Sean, and when it was finished, Robert and Caroline across the street, who’d watched the whole process, said they couldn’t believe it hadn’t been there all along.

  It was late and the sun was dropping through the washed and dripping trees. Above her reached the long arm of the sycamore where her children once swung. She became aware of a dog barking but only when it ceased. Lights coming on in the houses. Yellow-warm lights in houses where once they’d gone for dinners, drinks, to see new babies. Birthday parties in the backyards. She was almost surprised to see no lights in her own windows. No boy doing homework at the dining room table. No woman at the kitchen sink.

  A minivan rounded the corner with its lights burning and Angela went up the walk fishing in her tote bag for keys. Finding them and getting the right one in the lock and opening the door as the car prowled by and stepping in and shutting the door as if casually behind her.

  In that first moment, that silence, she heard the clicking of little toenails as Pepé came skating around the corner. But Pepé was years ago, his crooked little body buried out back under the elm in a pine box that Grant and Sean had built. Such a profound absence for such a small creature. Days of grief and Sean lobbying for replacement.

  We’ll see.

  When? When will we see?

  After Colorado.

  She stood looking up the stairs into the shadows. The absolute stillness of the house. Silence like a pulsing deafness. Smell of some depleted candle perhaps but otherwise nothing, not even the smell of dust.

  She poked at the thermostat and listened for the furnace to kick in, and then she went into the kitchen and turned on the light and ran water in the sink—something to do with the traps, you had to keep water in them. In the basement she filled an old plastic pitcher at the utility sink and poured water down the washing machine drain and into the floor drain. Finally there was nothing to do but go up to the second floor. Three sinks up there. Two showers. Two tubs. T
wo toilets.

  We need to talk about the house, Angela.

  All right, let’s talk about it.

  Neither of us has worked in over a year.

  That was the point of the second mortgage, I thought.

  It was. But we’re burning through it. All these flights back and forth. The bills. The hospital bills.

  Grant.

  It’s just a house, Angie. It doesn’t mean anything.

  Just a house?

  You know what I mean.

  Is that what we tell her? Sweetheart, it was just a house? It didn’t mean anything?

  She stood before Sean’s door at the end of the hall. Her impulse was to knock, and she shook her head at that and opened the door on a fantastic scene: military airplanes swarming in outer space. The sun’s last rays flaring along wings and stabilizers against a backdrop of stars.

  He strode before the wall-sized map like a little explorer, Here’s Polaris, Mom, the North Star. Here’s Andromeda.

  Just above her in diving attack was a fighter plane with its wicked shark’s smile. It banked and shuddered at her touch.

  She shut the door and took a few steps and stood before her daughter’s door. Her hand on the knob.

  You don’t have to, Faith said.

  I know.

  She turned the knob and stepped inside.

  Posters. Pictures from magazines in the way of young girls since there were magazines. Wild-haired crooners at the microphone, one shirtless guitar player, but mostly athletes, caught in one marvelous instant or another, the unbelievable physiques.

  The white girlhood vanity stood as Caitlin had left it. Scattering of makeup. Books, CDs. Small gifts from friends: a rubber heart with legs and arms, standing on clownish shoes and waving hello. An open jewelry box holding mostly hair bands. Pictures of family, pictures of friends. Lindsay Suskind and three other girls in the air, in casual stances, as if levitating.

  Angela saw her movement in the mirror but did not look, her gaze landing instead on the silver brush, a thing she’d always loved. The rich weight of it, the raised cameo of a young woman on the back, head slightly bowed as if to receive some blessing. Burnished by generations of young girls’ touching. Our family hair-loom, Caitlin called it when she was little. It rested on its back. After a long moment Angela reached and touched. Fine lacings of hair deep in the bristles. Hairs still eighteen and silky. Hairs that would never age.

  Here were her trophies in a fine dust. Here the layers of ribbons, so many of them blue. The handsome small Christ on his cross. The neatly made bed. The pillows. A stuffed ape with gleaming eyes, a lapsed, shabby bear of countless washings and dryings, propped like a couple, just as she’d left them.

  Dusk had come into the room. She was so tired.

  She slipped the tote bag from her shoulder and set it on the bed and reached into it for her phone, the bottle of water from the market, the amber vial, placing each of these with care on the white lamp table by the bed. Then she moved the ape and the bear and lay down with her hands over her stomach, over her womb. The room slipped into darkness. Heat breathed in the vent. The dog began yapping in the backyard, mad little Pepé, tormented by the neighbor’s fat gray tom. In the metal building a blade hummed to life and went singing into a length of hardwood—oak, maple perhaps—Grant calling to Sean to feed it smoothly, smoothly, and any moment now the front door would swing open and her gym bag would drop from the height of her hip to the floor with a joyous whop and she would be so hungry, she would be famished, my God, Mom . . . when do we eat?

  17

  In the bleary daybreak the boy passed a gas station just beyond the off ramp and drove into the little town the deputy had told him to stay out of. He took Main Street at the posted speed, parked among the spaces, and fed two of his dimes, and a third, into the meter.

  The cafe door opened with a disturbance of small bells and he stood a moment in the warm, ancient reek: ages of coffee, ages of bacon. The quiet tink tink of knives on chinaware. A girl said, “Anywhere’s fine,” and he went to the row of stools at the counter. She came around and poured him a coffee and handed him a menu. She had the black hair and round face of a native people, although native to what he didn’t know. He ordered an English muffin.

  “That’s all you want?”

  “With butter and jam, please.”

  She looked at him more closely. He seemed all bone and muscle under his denim jacket, and with that limp she’d first thought rodeo, but the boots were wrong and he wore no hat. He looked as though he’d slept on a rock. She imagined touching his yellow hair, dirty as it looked.

  She played the thickness of her ponytail through her fist and held his eyes. “Douglas back there pours a humongous flapjack, and it only costs a dollar more than an English muffin.”

  The boy glanced at some men behind him, their jaws working at their meals.

  “No, thanks,” he said, and with a sigh, with an air of having done all she could do, the waitress left him. A minute later a toaster popped and she placed the muffin before him and stepped away to the cash register.

  “How was breakfast, Gabe?”

  “I reckon I’ll live.” The man winked a leathery lid at the boy and slipped a twenty from his wallet. The drawer rang open with a rich slosh of coins.

  MORE DINERS CAME IN and the waitress carried loaded plates along her forearms. On one trip a plate appeared before the boy, the great flapjack steaming. When she returned to the counter it hadn’t moved. She inched a small china bowl toward him.

  “Real maple syrup,” she said.

  The boy popped the last of the muffin into his mouth. “Thank you. But I won’t eat it.”

  She made a birdlike motion with her head. “Why not?” Behind her in the pass-through a man appeared. Large man stooping to look. Toothpick in his lips. One dark eye looking at the boy and the other wandering off into the world.

  “I ate that muffin and that’ll do me,” the boy said.

  She looked at the man in the pass-through until, muttering to himself, he went away, and then she turned back to the boy and collected the plate and turned again to upend the flapjack into a bin, and with each turn of her head her ponytail swung like a girl on the move, like a girl in a race, that thick and fitful, that alive.

  He left the diner and walked along the sidewalk until he came to a Laundromat. He cupped his hands to the glass and then stepped inside. He thought he was alone but he wasn’t—a dwarfish round woman turned and blinked small black eyes at him and then turned back to monitor the portal of a dryer, her head cocked as if listening for some false note in the thumping heartbeat of it. The air was humid and sharp with the ammonia stink of piss. He went to the back by the soap-dispensing machine and stacked his quarters on top of the pay phone and pulled the slip of paper from his wallet and stood looking at it. He’d stopped calling her cell phone months ago because of the way she answered, and because of the way she sounded when it was not the call she wanted.

  He got a cigarette to his lips and dropped two quarters in the slot and dialed the number and a voice told him to deposit more money and he did so and then lit his cigarette and waited.

  “You can’t smoke in here.”

  It was the woman, the dwarf monitress, torn from her vigil.

  He nodded and showed her the receiver at his ear.

  “This here’s a nonsmoking facility,” she said. “Says so right there.”

  The ringing in his ear ended and he turned from the little woman as a voice said thinly, electronically, over the miles, “Hello? Hello . . . ? ”

  “Hello, Aunt Grace?” he said. “It’s Sean.”

  “Sean?” she said. “I can barely hear you. Where are you? Are you still in California?”

  “I’m in New Mexico now.”

  “New Mexico! What’s—Jordan, please stop poking him with that, now he asked you to stop, so stop.” There was a pause, a clatter of silverware, a young girl’s despairing voice. Covering the mouthpiece with her hand or her
breast, his aunt said, “Right, young lady, just keep that up till I get angry, okay?”

  The boy drew on his cigarette and sudden pain lanced into his knee, deep between the bones. White hot and twisting. He shifted his weight to that leg to force the blade back out.

  His aunt said into the phone, “Ugh. I’m sorry. Are you there, hello—?”

  “I’m here.”

  “New Mexico!” she said again. “What’s in New Mexico?”

  “I’ve got some work,” he said.

  “You should come home, Sean. You can do that kind of work here,

  can’t you?”

  He knew that if there were news from Colorado his aunt would have

  said so.

  “Is Mom around?” he said, and for a long moment it seemed the connection had failed. At last his aunt said: “Sean, haven’t you talked to your dad?”

  He said nothing. Then he said, “Why?” and his aunt said, “Seanie, your mom’s back in the hospital.”

  He saw a dim phantom of himself in the face of the soap-dispensing machine.

  “When?”

  “Two weeks ago. She took too many pills.”

  “She tried to kill herself.”

  “No, she didn’t, Seanie, it was an accident. She was just taking too many of those damn pills.”

  “Do the doctors think it was an accident?”

  “The doctors are . . . cautious. They want to watch her for a while, that’s all.”