by Heidi Pitlor
“Still.” Jake used to see random people roaming his own neighborhood in Portland, craning their necks as they passed each house. He’d finally decided to have a wall of bushes planted near the end of his driveway so passersby couldn’t glimpse him and Liz having breakfast or going about their daily business.
The water glittered with sun. It was, after all, a picture-perfect day, and a good number of other people strolled the beach. A family who’d just moved in a few houses down sat by the tide, and the children buried a young boy in sand. The boy didn’t appear to be enjoying it at all. In fact, he was complaining loudly.
“I hated that when I was little,” Jake said. “Daniel and Hilary used to bury me and then leave me there for hours. Remember?”
“It wasn’t for that long. And you know we wouldn’t have let anything happen to you.” A small girl danced around the boy’s head, sprinkling sand on his hair and singing a song about a bluebird. “Children do that sort of thing. You let them,” his father said, and Jake didn’t know whether this was a command or just a statement.
The two continued on. Jake realized with a pang that he could now see the top of his father’s head, the shiny scalp barely covered by stray threads of hair. He looked away, and then he had an idea: he would give his father the box of things he’d collected over the years. He’d explain how he’d rescued these items that would otherwise have been thrown away or destroyed, and how he’d found each one somehow poignant. The unpainted, sturdy oak box in which Jake kept the items reminded him, in its plainness and utilitarianism, of his father. Jake would tell him that he taught him how to be a good person, how to work hard and steadily and how to love one’s family.
When they returned to the house, Jake went to find the box. Hilary and Ellen sat in the living room sipping glasses of lemonade, and Joe joined them. Jake would present his gift later, when they were alone, for he didn’t want his family to know about it. They would think it strange and sentimental, and they wouldn’t see the point. He and Liz had bought his father a sweater and shirt for his birthday, as they did every year, but Liz reveled in predictable presents, having grown up receiving miniature statues of Buddha and crocheted prayer shawls as gifts. He brought the box down to the basement, where he found a roll of wrapping paper and ribbon.
When he came back upstairs, Hilary was reminding Joe of earlier days. She was talking about the times he brought her to work at the lot and let her sit in the driver’s seats of the most expensive cars. “I still remember that popcorn the guys there used to make. I think I still associate Chevies with the smell of butter.”
Jake made his way around the edge of the room and dragged in a chair from the kitchen. The room grew silent and he said, “This is nice.”
“Mm,” his mother said. “My family in the same place.”
“Almost,” Hilary said. “Has anyone talked to Dan?”
“When I called earlier, he said they’d try to come later today,” Ellen said.
“Well, if they don’t come, it’d be okay,” Joe said firmly. “It’s enough that you all are here with me.”
“I don’t know. I sort of hope that they do come,” Hilary said, and Jake agreed.
*
Liz, Hilary and Ellen shuffled around the kitchen and Jake stood behind them, asking what he could do to help—cut the biscuits? slice the steak? “You just relax,” his mother said, and then suddenly, “You know, with your interest in collecting, you really should think about art.”
Hilary nudged past him, a bowl of salad in her hands.
“Nah,” he said, worried she’d press him on the subject. Why had he brought it up earlier? He supposed he’d been feeling a little pensive all day. More reflective, even, than usual.
“You ought to. I could help you.”
“I’m not a big art buff, you know that, Mom.” Liz elbowed him aside as she made her way to the stove. “I like my pictures of sunsets and forests. I don’t have an eye for the really expensive stuff. Or the interest, really.” He glanced at his wife. Did she see that despite his success, he was still the same down-to-earth person he always was?
Ellen shrugged and went to the refrigerator, and soon he began to feel that he was in the way, so he turned and left the room. His father sat on the back porch reading a new-smagazine, and Jake hurried off to get the box. When he returned, Joe made no gesture of acknowledgment. The beach had emptied, probably because it was lunchtime. Only a group of seagulls circled the messy mound that had earlier buried the young boy. Jake wondered if the family had left food there, or their beach toys, and considered walking down to check. Perhaps he would start a new box now, and maybe someday he could give it to his children. He could start two new boxes, one for each.
“I can feel myself sitting still,” his father said.
“Hm?”
“I can feel my bones even when I’m not doing a damned thing. That’s when you know you’re old.”
“Dad, you’re not all that old.” Jake quickly handed him the present. “Here. Something from me alone. It’s a little different.” He waited quietly while his father tore open the wrap, his hands a little shaky, and held the wooden box before his face. “A good box,” his father said, and shook it.
“Yes, that’s how I think of it,” Jake said.
Joe removed each item—the dirty dog collar, the heart-shaped earring, the stained Bible, the pacifier, the photograph of the elderly strangers—and held it to the light, turning it slowly.
Jake grew embarrassed by these things that now looked so old and worn. “They’re things I’ve saved,” he said. “Things I’ve found over the years.”
“Trash?”
“Sort of, I guess. But not really. They’re things people left or forgot somewhere, things I didn’t feel right throwing away. I’ve been collecting them since I was a kid.”
“You have?” His father lowered the box to his lap.
“I wanted to thank you for being good, and I wanted to show you how I can be good, I mean how I can be considerate—”
“I know that already,” Joe said.
“I guess I like to think that behind each of these things is a person, you know, a whole life.” His words sounded silly. They’d made more sense in his mind. “Each time I find one and bring it home, it sort of feels like I’m saving something important.”
Joe nodded. “It’s a nice thought, isn’t it?”
Jake watched the lines of the tide as they pushed toward the shore and bled across the sand. He wondered if it looked the same to his father, the water pooling into fingers, piles of wet, shiny seaweed like neglected, soggy clothes. “You understand why I gave you this?”
His father nodded again and stood, his legs creaking. “I do.”
Jake looked at him. “No one else knows I’ve been keeping these. Not even Liz.”
“I won’t tell them.” Joe stretched his arms.
This hadn’t happened the way Jake had hoped. “Do you think I’m crazy for keeping these things?” he said.
“No, I don’t,” Joe said. He looked down at the box in his hands. “I was just thinking that you’re a little like me. When I found Babe on the side of the road and when I wrapped him up in that shirt and brought him home, it was the best feeling.”
“I thought you got Babe at a store.”
Joe smiled at him with a sparkle. “Don’t tell your mother.”
“I won’t,” Jake said.
Joe squeezed Jake on the shoulder and headed back inside, the box in the crook of his arm.
—
Hilary slipped off to the pink bedroom to lie down for a while. The mattress, yesterday too soft and short for her, now felt only a relief, and she closed her eyes.
Outside the room she could hear Liz ordering Jake to clean off the table, get her two eggs, find the mixing bowl, and Jake snipping that he was only capable of doing one thing at a time. Hilary could also hear her mother in the next room, picking up the phone receiver and setting it down every few seconds. Each time she did, t
he phone beside Hilary’s bed clicked. Finally Hilary picked up the receiver to hear ringing on the line and then a man answer, a voice that was faintly familiar. Ellen and this man asked each other about their weekends, and then she told him about Daniel and Brenda, about Hilary’s surprise pregnancy (“and she won’t tell us a thing about the father”), Jake’s beautiful house, the bad weather, and then returned to Daniel and Brenda, and the heartbreak of it, all of the unbearable heartbreak Daniel had weathered.
Hilary froze, her hand curled tightly around the receiver. When her mother finally stopped talking, there was an awkward pause in the conversation and the man said, “I’m sorry,” and then nothing. Ellen continued on, repeating her sadness about Daniel’s fate as if she were trying to elicit something, anything more from this man. “I just don’t know what to say to him. I mean, what do you say to your son after he’s been through this?” she finally asked, and the man said, “I wish I knew. Wasn’t it Oscar Wilde who said, ‘Where there is sorrow there is holy ground’?” “Oh, I don’t know, but I’m not sure that would be adequate anyway,” Ellen said, and the man gently changed the subject to his daughter in San Francisco, and her kids, and what they’d all done together while he was there. Hilary tried in vain to remember which of her mother’s friends had kids in San Francisco—wouldn’t Ellen have given her their names and told her to look them up? He went on about MoMA, the Matisses and the Diebenkorns, all the exquisite daguerreotypes, and Hilary could practically hear her mother’s mind wandering back to Daniel and Brenda. Hilary considered hanging up but didn’t want them to hear her, so she stayed on the line. The man mentioned some plans they’d made for next week, some concert at the Gardner and maybe supper, and finally they began their goodbyes. “I miss you,” her mother said in a hushed voice, to which the man responded, “À bientôt, E.”
“Do you miss me?”
“Of course I do.”
“I mean, do you miss me as a person? I don’t mean the time we spend together, or the things we do. Do you really miss me?”
He paused. “Yes?” he replied tentatively. “Is everything all right?”
“Sure,” Ellen said. “Oh, I don’t know. Nothing here is really all right at this point, is it? Haven’t you heard what I’ve been telling you?”
“What can I do?”
“You could say more. You could tell me that everything will be fine, even if it won’t. You could comfort me a little.” She paused. “You could come here.”
“I can’t do that. You have your whole family there. I’ve just gotten back and—”
“I know, I know.”
“I’m not sure what you want from me right now.”
“I suppose I want you not to say things like that. I want you to do something, anything, M. Let me ask you this: what is it that you want from me? What is it that you even feel for me?”
He swallowed. “Gratitude. The deepest, warmest, loveliest, most loving gratitude.”
Hilary held the phone away from her ear, then brought it back, just in time to hear her mother say, “… more?”
“Of course. I couldn’t have survived these last months without you. You’ve been my lifeline, you know that, my rope to sanity. I miss you and I do want you to come back here. I want us to go to the Gardner this week and I want to give you something I bought when I was away. It sounds corny, I know, but I do need you. I absolutely need you and I do love you and—”
“I have to go.”
“E?”
A man who was not her father had a nickname for her mother. He loved her and had given her a nickname and this vaguely familiar but ultimately unrecognizable voice, this complete stranger had now learned all about the weekend. Ellen said again, “I have to go now. I’ll call you when we get back,” and quickly hung up. Hilary slammed down the receiver and looked around the room. She grew lightheaded—had she imagined this? Maybe through her growing fatigue and surging hormones she’d conjured this phone conversation. Maybe, in fact, this whole weekend was some sort of mirage, and she’d wake to find herself back in her apartment in San Francisco, Beatle scratching at the window, the sirens screaming past on their way to the hospital down the street.
“What the hell is she doing? What is going on here?” she said into the air. She ran her fingers in circles around her belly and tried to imagine a baby curled inside her, its head to her side. She could feel it there, positioned in such a way that it could have been looking up at her face. “Married people are nothing but miserable. You might never have a father, little one,” Hilary whispered. “I might be both of your parents. What do you think about that? Would that be all right?” The baby stayed still beneath her hands.
She sighed. She would try to find a place where neighbors watched out for each other, a real community. She would move somewhere less crowded than San Francisco, somewhere more contained, where everyone knew everyone and she’d get help raising her child merely because she lived here. She closed her eyes again and laced her fingers across her stomach. Despite everything that had gone wrong this weekend, there was something about this island, its unpredictable weather and small streets, its history, its people—the men who worked on the ferry, the cabdriver. They exuded a sort of innocence and earthiness and history—they seemed to have lived here for thousands of years. She thought of Alex. Maybe, she thought, maybe she could rent Jake and Liz’s house until she found one of her own. But there was the girl in the bookstore, Alex’s messy apartment, his intrusive dog. More worrying and potentially more troublesome in the end, there was the way he drifted from Hilary when she was mid-sentence as if he were plotting an escape. There was no reason he should be a cause for her to move here. There was no good reason at all. What kind of person would move here for someone she’d spent one day with?
But he didn’t own the island. He shouldn’t have any purchase on her future one way or the other. If this was the right place for her, then so be it. She could find a job at one of the stores in town, or at a restaurant. She’d waitressed plenty of times before. She smiled to herself, relieved to have a new plan finally. And only then did she remember the phone call, and her mother, and the fact that soon she and the rest of them would all be seated around the dinner table, celebrating her father’s seventy-fifth birthday.
*
Hilary stood in the corner of the kitchen and watched Liz pull a steaming chocolate cake out of the oven. Ellen sat at the kitchen table.
“Have you been to the Gardner recently?” Hilary asked. She couldn’t help herself. Her mother looked up, surprised.
“Yes. I’ll take you when you move back home, if you’d like.”
“Actually—” Hilary said, but then stopped herself. She would wait until after dinner to announce her revised future. She didn’t want to upset anyone now, before the birthday celebration—and her mother, not to mention Jake, might well disapprove of her new plan to move here. What sort of opportunity is there in a place like this? they’d say. What sort of men? Why must you change your mind every five minutes? Pick something, anything, just make a plan and stick with it.
“Actually what?” Liz turned.
“Nothing,” Hilary said. “Forget it.”
She helped Liz prepare the icing for the cake, and as they worked, as her father dozed in the living room and her brother puttered around somewhere else, maybe on the back porch, Hilary noted a pleasant silence in the house. So much could be said right now—so many concerns could be expressed, so many accusations made—but no one was saying a thing, and this made her grateful. Hilary heard her father shift on the couch. Nothing was changing. Nothing was happening. Even Jake had let them be.
For her father she had brought a framed photograph of herself holding his hand on her seventh birthday (the two stood next to each other in front of an ice cream stand on the Cape), and another photograph of them a few years ago, when she’d come East for her grandmother’s funeral. (Hilary had just told him she’d gotten a new job in insurance, and he’d seemed skeptical even then of
this career choice for her.) She’d also brought a third frame that was currently empty. In a few months, she would give him a picture of the baby, herself and Joe. The past, present and future, all neatly framed for him. She’d considered giving him photos of the entire family but her mother had filled their house with these. He had none of just her and him, and none of her recently. She’d wrapped each frame separately. They now sat on the bed in the pink room, and she went to gather them and asked Liz where she could start a pile of presents.
*
The cake was frosted, the steak nearly ready. No one knew whether Daniel would join them, but everyone seemed content to let the subject rest for now.
“You’re almost there,” Hilary said, taking a seat beside Joe on the couch. Ellen was having an affair, but Hilary put it out of her mind. “Wasn’t it three-thirty P.M. you were born?” She remembered finding her parents’ birth certificates years ago on her father’s desk.
“I’d like to just stop forever at seventy-four.”
“Hear, hear,” she said. She grabbed a pen from the side table and held it in front of her mouth like a microphone. “Any last words of advice? Thoughts, impressions, hopes, wishes?”
“Nah,” he said. “Well, there is something you told me when you were about eight, it had to be. You’d run away into the woods and your mother sent me to find you, and when I did, you’d climbed way up high into an oak tree and I stood there down below you, wondering what on earth to do. I tried to talk you down. I started climbing up, even, but you yelled down to me, ‘Stop trying so hard. Just let me stay here, because eventually I’ll have to come down. You can’t always fix everything.’ You remember that?’”
Hilary tried but didn’t remember this particular scene. She’d escaped to the woods so many times they’d blurred together in her mind. “I said that?”
“You did,” he said. “It was good advice. You might want to remember it with your child.”
Hilary nodded. It seemed to her that her father had in fact fixed quite a lot in her life; he’d listened to her litany of complaints about school and her mother and Jake over the years. Joe had decoded some of the mysteries of her brother; her father had secretly sent her what money he could when she’d needed it. She considered the ten or twenty birthdays that lay before him, the awful days to come that marked only the passing of time. She took his hand and squeezed it tightly.
