The Land of Steady Habits

by Ted Thompson

  “It’s not quite done,” said his dad, looking around. “But it’s getting there. The guest room’s all ready for you. Tommy’s never stayed to use it so it’s all brand-new—new pillows, new mattress. I even put a globe in there,” he said. “You still like those, right?”

  Preston nodded.

  His father put his hands in his pockets. “God, it is terrific to see you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know I was starting to worry that something had happened or that maybe you were back on drugs.”

  “No,” said Preston, shaking his head. “Nope, none of that.”

  “Well, good,” said his father, nodding, and a strange silence settled over them. “Hey, want to see something kind of crazy?” his dad said and took him into the bathroom. He pulled aside the shower curtain and there was a turtle in the bathtub, gnawing on a piece of lettuce.

  “Recognize him?” his father said.

  “Not really.”

  “C’mon, think back. Way back. I’ll give you a hint: thing scared the crap out of your mom.”

  Preston looked up.

  “That can’t be the same one.”

  “Crazy, right? Here, hold him.” His father picked up the creature and plunked it in his hands. “Don’t worry—he’s sweet. I’ve been letting him crawl around. Takes the thing all day to make it to the kitchen.”

  “Dad,” Preston said. “Why the hell do you have this?”

  “Sophie and Mitchell’s kid brought him by. He needed a turtle-sitter.”

  The reason he hadn’t yet told his father had less to do with his desire to protect him than with his need to pretend the whole thing had never happened. Which was obviously impossible. But during the first few minutes in his father’s warm condominium, he had almost been able to forget the image of Charlie lying in those frozen leaves, and the fact that he was so young, and the eerie parallels to his own stunted life.

  “Press?” his father said. “You okay?”

  And, as if answering for him, the telephone rang.

  Listening to his father register the news—a series of questions and Gods and a long, grieving silence—Preston was tempted to slip back out into the freezing night and hoof it to his mom’s. He found his father sitting on a stool in his narrow kitchen. “Everything okay?” he said. His father didn’t look up. In the morning, his father’s bags were packed.

  Now there was a realty sign out front and the dark, sad windows of an abandoned home. He knew his father wasn’t so rash as to leave without the turtle, he knew that, and yet the thought had occurred to him, so here he was, at seven o’clock in the morning, trying to crack the key code on the garage just to be sure.

  It was surprisingly easy to get inside—his father had used the same password for the past twenty-five years—and he found a cardboard box in the garage. He punched some holes in the top with a screwdriver, which was the entirety of what he knew about transporting animals, and slowly opened the door inside.

  For a man who claimed to be moving, his father had been strangely even that morning, as though there was nothing to it, which he supposed there wasn’t when you left all your belongings behind. The furniture was there and there were dishes in the sink; the cupboard was full of food. On the refrigerator was his address in Maine, which he’d left for the real estate agent. But there was no turtle. He checked the bathtub and the guest room, pressed his cheek to the carpet to look under the sofa. Of course his father had taken the creature with him, but for a brief moment, he had thought—he didn’t know, it wasn’t totally thought through—but he had thought that maybe it would be there, stranded, and maybe there would be some way for him to save it and bring it north, to his father’s grateful hands. When he had checked everything and there was still no turtle, he opened the door to his father’s bedroom.

  It was striking how much it reminded him of the one he had sneaked into as a child, musky and dry with a hint of cedar shoe trees and the dust that collected, along with his pocket change and little rolls of breath mints, on the surface of the dresser. It was the same in this sparse, carpeted room, which was really nothing but an unmade bed and a wall of mirrors. The closet was full of shirts and chinos, starched jeans folded over the cardboard dowels of dry-cleaning hangers, and the floor was strewn with loafers and running shoes soiled with the stains of yard work. Behind the next panel, packed in the grid of a closet organizer, were all the gifts it appeared he’d purchased on some kind of holiday-shopping bender. There were drab Amazon boxes and high-gloss toy boxes, the deckled edges of books and sweaters wrapped in tissue paper and sealed with department-store stickers. Each had been tagged with a sticky note, a name scrawled on it—Emma, Tommy, Emma, Ryan, Helene.

  All this shopping made a certain sense to Preston. Some of his heroic daydreams had him showing up on his mother’s doorstep with keys to a new Lexus and Bruins tickets for Donny. As it was, if he sold the 4Runner for scrap, he could pay Gil what he owed him for the jeroboam, and that left him with exactly zero, another year of giving poems as gifts, handwritten sentiments on leftover résumé paper that everyone cheerfully pretended to admire. He found an old gym bag amid the footwear and chose carefully—one per person. What harm could there be? It was all small stuff that would otherwise sit here until the place sold, then get hauled out to the curb in contractor bags. He found a guidebook for Hawaii that was tagged for Donny, a rated-M video game for Ryan, and a microplane zester for Tommy. But for his mother he could find only one gift, a large envelope closed with wire brads. In it, there was paperwork of that awkward legal length that had to be folded at the bottom and typeset in a font that was best read on a microfiche machine. One document was yellow and official-looking, and from what he could make out, Preston realized it was the original mortgage, signed in 1976 and updated ten years ago, and underneath, on regular computer paper, was the deed to the house.

  In the weeks Preston had been back home, Tommy had exhibited a near obsession with the story of Franklin Matthiesen, the father of a high-school classmate who had been a trader at Lehman and, after the crash, had lost most of his retirement and all of his pride, and so, according to Tommy, he had found a product on the Internet you could swallow and it would kill you painlessly, which he had taken while his wife was with her book group discussing Eat, Pray, Love—a tragedy, no doubt, but one that Tommy wouldn’t shut up about whenever anyone mentioned his and Preston’s father, who had walked away from his job under totally different circumstances and who would never troll the Internet for suicide products (a phenomenon that Preston couldn’t help but find darkly hilarious—that somebody would market a product like that, and that an important trader, one of the billions of essential bacteria in the belly of national commerce, had even found a consumerist way to do himself in—a point that he’d brought up the last time they were bickering over the nature of their father’s psyche, like didn’t Tommy think it was at least a little funny, in a sad, ironic, isn’t-the-culture-inherently-fucked kind of way, a statement that, as soon as he said it, he knew confirmed his brother’s silent suspicion that he was, at his core, somewhat of a dick).

  But holding that heavy document and seeing in front of him all of his father’s earthly possessions, Preston found himself deeply uncomfortable. He put the gifts back exactly where he’d found them, with the Post-its facing out, and got out of that room and down the hallway in a hurry.

  What was his father thinking? Was he up in Maine because he had finally lost himself in the way Tommy had been implying? Was he seriously in the realm of pulling a Franklin Matthiesen? Had they misread all of the signs? And how was it Preston’s job to figure that out? His job, at the moment, was to get to the grocery store, where he was supposed to have been an hour ago, and buy some mini-marshmallows and lactose-free half-and-half, an assignment that was pretty much the most he could be expected to handle. His job was to get the hell away from this condo and tell Tommy all that he had found and let the responsibles handle it. His job was to get back in Donny’s s
hiny SUV and feel its huge, smooth engine take him away.

  He turned the ignition and felt the Cadillac rumble to life. One gauge rose to F and another to 0; the black expanse of its hood was ready to carry him wherever he pointed it when he realized the envelope was still in his hand. He sighed. His father was angry and lost and isolated. His father was transparent in his pride and in his need for others, and in his inability to reconcile the two. His father, in other words, was more than a little familiar to him.

  Preston pulled the car out of the driveway and floored it to I-95, heading north.

  * * *

  The room he had wanted at the Longfellow Inn was no longer available because, it turned out, the Longfellow Inn was no longer an inn at all. It had changed hands so many times with such little upkeep that he was shocked it was still standing. According to his real estate agent, it had retained everything except its name from the days he had worked there, down to its crumbling stone foundation, which was why it had sat on the market for so long and why its new owners were finally going to tear it down and build a home on the property that was worthy of its view.

  The place that was available instead was a drafty unit in a row of summer rentals with a sleeping loft and a high-angled roof and a stovepipe that ran up its center like a support beam. It was situated at the end of a forested point, a sea-kayak paddle from the open Atlantic, with a trampled path that led through dense evergreens to the silver glint of the inlet, and, most important, to a view across the water of the Longfellow Inn.

  In the five days he had been here, he had made a habit of waking before dawn, walking down that path to a small clearing, setting up a camping chair, and, as the first slice of sunrise caught the old building’s eaves across the water, concentrating on all the ways life up here was better. It was peaceful, for one thing, even now, on Christmas Eve day, when he was used to the throngs at the mall and the cart-clogged aisles of the supermarket; it was rare up here to hear more than the distant cry of gulls or the occasional pickup along the peninsula road. It was relieving, this silence. People said hello to each other, for another thing, and they dressed in clothes that were functional and drove cars that were functional and knew the importance of good wool socks. Nobody seemed to care how you had made a living or how much money you had or what in your past life you might have done.

  Not that he had done anything. Not that a boy’s preposterous decision to swallow a handful of sleeping pills had much to do with him. It incensed him when people inflated their own importance in the life of a person who had recently died, when they romanticized their final interactions and twisted the story until somehow it had to do with them. And, oh, the twisting they would do. Oh, the righteousness disguised as sympathy, oh, the headshakes and the silence and the gathering demand for blame. Give them their sanctimony, he didn’t care; let them have their shaking heads. Charlie Ashby was gone, a fact he repeated to himself on the hour, and while he longed to stand before the rest of them and howl, he knew it wouldn’t do a thing to bring the boy back.

  On the opposite shore, through the faint blue wash of dawn, the building looked exactly the same—three Federalist stories skirted by a wraparound porch and topped with a hip roof and twin stone chimneys. It was a treasure, this building, an artifact of history, and anyone who couldn’t see that, anyone who believed his view was more important, was unworthy of it. He had rage for the negligent bums who had allowed it to fall so far into disrepair and he had rage for the greedy offspring of his former bosses who had sold the place to the first bidder, but it was nothing—nothing—compared to how he felt for the new owners as he sat on the opposite shore and waited for them to show themselves.

  He had started to wonder if they would ever come. It had been five days of staring at an empty building, of watching the gulls swoop and the gray sky get heavy but never snow. Maybe the new owners were waiting until the new house was finished. Maybe they would send bulldozers first, a troubling thought; he was picturing himself chained to the porch with a protest sign around his neck, picturing Christmas alone in jail, when, from the opposite shore, a light came on. It was warm and bright and, in these dark moments before daybreak, looked like a star hovering at the tree line. Anders leaned back in his chair. They had arrived.

  When he had gone to the county clerk, the public record of the sale had turned up only one un-Googleable name: Emily Adams of New York, New York. And while there was no information to narrow that down, he had found, in the bowels of the image results, a society-page photograph of a woman in pearl earrings who was sandwiched between two tuxedoed gentlemen at a private-school fund-raiser, all with the affluent glow of winter tans, and he suspected he had found the culprit. Emily S. Adams, treasurer of the capital campaign at Brearley School; annual donor to the Manhattan Theatre Club; gun-control advocate; bike-lane advocate; proponent of spaying and neutering; resident of the West Seventies; resident, also, of Rhinebeck, New York; mother of two; employer of two; employee to none; and, most interesting, according to the items unearthed from the digital landfill of the Internet, at least, wife to no one. There was no divorce he could find, no change of name, no shots of the kids with their dad. It was as though the kids were conjured from the same mysterious source as her endless supply of money.

  He waited until a decent hour to knock on the door. The woman who answered had a guarded, tentative look and a child koalaed to her front. She was shorter and wider than any of the people he had seen grinning at him in formal wear from the screen, and in her sweats and with her bullfrog frown, she had the air of a boxing coach.

  “Hi,” he said. “I’m looking for Emily Adams?”

  The woman held his eyes.

  “I’m a neighbor,” he added, as though that explained everything.

  “Just a second.”

  Through the door, he could see that almost nothing had changed. There were the same old sandy rugs; there was the same huge, drafty fireplace (which someone had gotten crackling quite nicely) and the same swinging door to an ancient industrial kitchen, and, behind the desk, which had been repurposed as a jumbo credenza, was the same old chart of the ragged Maine coast.

  “She’s in the shower,” the woman said when she came back, and it occurred to him all at once that they were a couple. She shook his hand, introduced herself. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  Anders had come armed with a page of talking points, most of them focusing on the value of the building, in terms of both money and the community, whose scenic-calendar-ready New England charm was the engine of both its tourism and its identity. “I understand you have children,” he said. “And a young family certainly has needs, but I wondered if you were aware of the historical significance of this building.”

  “The significance.”

  “Yes. Supposedly Joshua Chamberlain, the Civil War general, lived here for a while. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “Also, for many years, the governor would hold a Fourth of July party here.”

  “Seems like a good place for one.”

  “I guess what I’m wondering is if you’ve considered the larger impact of destroying a building like this.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, taking a step onto the porch and letting the storm door close behind her, “but who are you?”

  She had said her name when she shook his hand and he could have sworn it was Karen, or Sharon. Her eyes narrowed on him in a manner that showed she was comfortable with confrontation—she controlled the silences in the way of someone who was used to being in charge—and it was clear to him where all their money came from.

  “All I’m saying is that renovation is cost-effective and would maintain the property value.”

  “I understand what you’re saying. What I want to know is how you know about our plans.”

  “It’s public record.”

  “You looked them up.”

  Anders could see how this appeared. “I did.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” she said.
“When you do something to your place, I’ll be sure to do you the favor of stopping by and telling you what I think.” She flashed him a bland smile and turned toward the house.

  “Listen to me,” he said to her back. “It’s a piece of living history, it’s a landmark, it’s not—”

  The storm door, it turned out, still slammed with quite a bang.

  When he knocked again after a few hours had passed, he brought everything he had—newspaper clippings with photos of the porch full of men in hats and waiters in ties, of cigars and lobster bibs and bunting along the railing, all from the hundredth anniversary of the place, in 1934, as well as a study on the environmental impact of building something new so close to the shore, the delicate ecosystems that were destroyed and never regenerated, not to mention the economic impact. It was everything he had failed to communicate, just the facts, so they could at least engender a productive dialogue.

  Karen answered, still in sweats. “Yes,” she said.

  “I brought this for you.”

  She sighed and took the folder. Behind her, they had decorated a tree in blue and white lights.

  “You collected all this?” she said, flipping through it.

  “I’m a visual person.”

  She flipped past the photos of lobstermen and sailors, past a stump speech by a now-long-dead governor, and stopped at a chart about the impact of erosion on the Acadian hermit crab.

  “The hermit crab.”

  “I know it seems silly, but the hermit crab is a part of the lobster diet, and if you get rid of the hermit crab, you very well could get rid of the lobster. And if you get rid of the lobster—”