The From-Aways

by CJ Hauser

  “I don’t know, Carter,” Jethro says.

  “Seriously, Jethro?” I say. This is ridiculous.

  “We’re wasting time,” Carter says. “Some of the boys have school tomorrow. Let’s talk.” Two of the boys, mouths full, look embarrassed, swallow.

  “The fences have started going up already,” Riley says. And I swear to God she’s brought fucking snapshots. She spreads them on the rug. I snort. Rosie gives me the fisheye.

  “Have they done the whole perimeter?” Carter asks.

  “That’s a ways off,” pipes one of Billy’s friends.

  “Who asked you?” says Jethro.

  “He’s working construction on the job,” Billy says. He looks extra pale tonight.

  “Don’t say that in front of Quinn,” Jethro says.

  “What the fuck, Jethro?” I say.

  “You might weasel,” says Riley.

  “I’ve never blown a secret in my life and don’t act like you know me well enough to say different,” I say, standing up.

  Riley sets her jaw. “I might know you better if you’d lived here more than a minute,” Riley says.

  And I’m so sick of this. I feel like I’ve been living here for ages and forget it doesn’t look that way to other people. How long before my dues are paid? “It always comes back to the credit with you, doesn’t it, Riley?” I say.

  “Quinn won’t tell,” Rosie says. “I know she won’t.”

  “Thanks a fucking lot, Rosie,” I say.

  Rosie twirls an earring around in its hole. Everyone is quiet.

  “Can I talk to you a minute?” Carter says.

  No fucking way, I want to say. But he walks into the other room and I guess I’m supposed to follow him because everyone is looking at me, though maybe just because I’ve embarrassed myself. Rosie isn’t looking at me. Her face is bright red and her hands are still. Her position here, I see now, is tenuous. Everyone watches as I try to meet her eyes, but she’s fixed on the rug pattern.

  I have no choice but to agree, so I follow Carter down the hallway, his boot steps too loud in the wood-planked hall. “I need your help with something,” Carter says over his shoulder. He opens the door to a roomful of taxidermied animals. My grandfather’s studio. It smells odd. There’s something too warm and chemical about the air. Wires, drills, a sewing kit are all strewn over a large worktable. Molding clay sits in damp, plastic-shrouded lumps. There are more boxes like the one he showed me with the eyes. Big crates stamped WASCO. We are watched by yellow molds of deer heads and fox bodies that have the blank expressiveness of Greek masks. In the corner is a stack of old tapes: Advanced Squirrel Mounting Techniques and Carcass Casting a Bobcat.

  On various mounts the animals are posed in creepy tableaux. A raccoon is reared up on his weird feet, tail defensively slung to the side. He’s poised for battle with a copperhead snake who is coiled at the base, his scales more visible for being shellacked. The plaque has the date and, in quotes, Raccoon vs. Copperhead.

  Carter lets me look around. “Quietest place in the house,” he says. “I’m taking you aside because I think you should go, but I don’t want to tell you what you have to do, and I didn’t want them to hear me say so.”

  “Why the hell should I go?” I say. “I didn’t start yelling like crazy Riley.” I can’t believe he actually thinks he’s going to kick me out of his house right now. That he can get away with this.

  Carter shuffles and moves some nose-shaped and wet-looking glass pieces around the table. “I’m saying you can do what you want, but that I think you should go because they’re just starting to let Rosie be a part of things,” he says. “And I know you care about her. And I know you know she wants to be part of this.”

  Behind Carter I spot a barred owl. It looks just like the one Mom called down. I wonder if they all look like this, being the same species, or whether these two are actually more kin than others. She looks pissed off, this owl. Her feathers don’t lie straight, they’re ruffled, and one of her wings is crooked.

  “Your father made these?” I say.

  Carter nods. “Jethro’s done a few, but mostly they’re my father’s, yes.”

  “Your father, my grandfather,” I say slowly.

  Carter looks like he wants to say something. He opens his mouth and his eyes get big and panicked. It’s not that he’s speechless, I think, he just doesn’t know which thing of many bullshit things to say first.

  “Quinn,” he says.

  “You tell me you think I should go, because you’re looking out for Rosie? I didn’t even want to come today, okay? I never wanted to come here at all, except she asked me to. Fucking Marta asked me.”

  “You don’t have to go,” he says. “I’m sorry. Just—”

  “Don’t say sorry. She’s dead,” I say. “Marta is. And don’t tell me she lived a full life because you don’t even fucking know. You missed it. The whole long excruciating thing.”

  He stands there hopelessly, his body open like he’ll take whatever it is I’ve got. “I read about it in the paper,” he says.

  “The obituary?” I say, before I can stop myself. Then he moves likes he’s going to say something, and before he tries to fucking explain everything or show me a boxful of never-posted birthday cards, or explain why he never could love my mother at all, I get the hell out of there, angry at how stupid I was to think that scrap of please was the first step in a scavenger hunt. That Marta was just waiting for me somewhere, wondering why it was taking me so damn long to piece together the clues.

  I stomp out past the dead animals, past Rosie calling after me, past the seven fucking rebels eating ice cream.

  I WAIT UP for her, back at the apartment. I lie in the bed, with its pink sheets, and look at the postcards on the walls from Rosie’s parents, pictures of oranges and alligators and big greasy women in bikinis. Two hours later I hear her thumping around the Stationhouse. I creep down in sock feet.

  Billy’s at a table drinking ginger beer. His nose twitches from the bubbles. “Heya,” he says. “Hungry?” I don’t say a thing, just push through the swinging kitchen door.

  Rosie is at the griddle. She’s got her black pocket apron on, the tie in the back catching her T-shirt, hiking it up in a bunch. Her hips spill over her jeans in the back. On the griddle there is one giant sunny-side-up egg puddle with six orange eyes. She speckles it with pepper.

  “How was the rest of the meeting?” I ask.

  “Good,” she says. She flips the giant egg over. One of the yolks breaks and dribbles.

  “Just good?” I say, because if she’s not regurgitating details it means she’s still mad at me. And I don’t blame her. “Rosie, I’m sorry,” I say. “About earlier.”

  “I’m probably never going to be a singer,” Rosie says. She pokes at the eggs.

  “What? What are you talking about?” I say. “Of course you are. Someday you’re going to be so famous I’ll need to buy tickets just to see you.”

  “Don’t tease me, Quinn,” she says. Her cheeks are pink and the hair around her forehead is damp from hovering over the grill. She sighs and leans against the counter, arms crossed. “I’m young but I’m not stupid. I’m not leaving this place anytime soon or probably ever. I’m never going to live in a big house like that. So I might as well do one thing that actually matters. The park? The carousel? That’s something I can do.”

  “Hey,” I say. “That’s not true. You can do whatever you want. You just have to work at it. You and me, we’re going to practice more. You’ll see.” The truth is that I feel like I’m trying to convince a kid that Santa’s real. Like I know he’s not real, and the kid knows he’s not real, and really it’s me that needs the kid to keep believing.

  “I know what’s possible,” Rosie says. “Stopping things with the park is possible and I can do it. Don’t try to tell me the rest of it is. You don’t even believe it yourself.”

  She’s right, of course. People love to tell you that in America everything is possible and all
you have to do is want it enough. Work hard. Keep trying. But those people never knew Marta. Never saw how whole long stretches of your young life can just disappear into sick-smelling bedrooms and hospital lounges. How one day you’re suddenly twenty-four, hard in the heart and utterly alone with no idea of what to do with yourself, much less ready to work hard for your fucking dreams. Those people don’t know what they’re talking about.

  Still, it’s a lie I wish I believed. It’s nothing I want Rosie to know. “You’re so young, Rosie,” I say. “You can do anything you want.”

  “I just don’t think that’s true,” Rosie says.

  “Rosie, what happened at that meeting tonight? I’m sorry I left like that. What are you guys up to?”

  “Nothing,” she says. “I mean a lot.” And there’s a look on her face I don’t like. Like part of her mind is all wrapped up in this spinning thing inside her I can’t get to. I feel her slipping out of my family portrait, leaving me alone. Just the tip of Rosie’s sneaker visible as she runs from my perfect frame, ruining everything.

  “You don’t owe Carter anything,” I say. “He doesn’t know shit, Rosie.”

  “Don’t talk to me like a child,” she says. “I take care of myself.”

  And it’s not that I don’t think she can; it’s that I don’t want her to. I want to do it, the caretaking. I did it for my mom, after all. I know no one would believe this but it’s something I’m good at, really. Let me.

  21

  Leah

  In April, the Dorians decide to come see how the construction and landscaping plans are going. Henry tells me and then reminds me every day for a week. When he’s not reminding me, he’s asking me about nasturtiums. He hates nasturtiums, he says, will they really want nasturtiums? This is the only request the Dorians have made throughout the entire project.

  I say, “Sure they will,” because I’m reading the Gazette, which features a small but front-page story by a woman I was interns with. It’s about a UN delegates meeting taking place in the city. It seems pretty thin to me. For front page? Come on.

  “Why! Why will they want nasturtiums?” Henry says. He throws up his hands and stares at me, boggle-eyed. I imagine a Menamon Star front pager: LOCAL MAN DRIVEN TO MADNESS BY NASTURTIUMS.

  I AM HAVING a dream in which Henry shows his landscaping plans to the Dorians, who in the dream are played by my parents. The sound of ironing wakes me, the hiss of its pass. I open my eyes. The light is dim and blue, and Henry, showered already, is wearing nice pants and gold-toe socks and a sleeveless undershirt, his face too close to a white button-down shirt as he passes the iron over it. He has shaved, and I can smell the almond cream that will make his cheeks smooth for all of an hour. His jaw is squarely set with a determination that is sweet: he uses the iron like it’s a spade. Like he can dig the wrinkles from his shirt. I wish he wouldn’t have to put the button-down over his undershirt. He looks so nice as he is.

  I close my eyes. The dream blips, trying and failing to come back. No, the Dorians will not be my parents masquerading under another name. Surprise! Here we are; we’ve bought a summer house to be near you! No. They would not do that. It is six o’clock on a Sunday in New York right now. My mother is sleeping, shiny under the eyes with cream, her décolletage smelling of lilacs. She’s a nighttime moisturizer. She has a miniature radio near her bed and listens to it through one earpiece as she sleeps. Never music, usually late-night talk radio. In the darkness, all these late-night callers are phoning in and whispering in my mother’s ear. She says it helps her sleep. I asked her once, Doesn’t that give you strange dreams? She said, What dreams?

  My father is likely awake and looking through the paper right now. He’ll be wearing a bright African-print robe purchased at one safari resort or another, the waist cinched around his stomach, no longer as flat as it was in his tennis-playing days. He’ll be quietly exclaiming over the idiocy of the paper, both the events that have transpired and the people who have chronicled them. Are you kidding me? he’ll be saying, looking around to see if there’s anyone to elaborate for. Then, returning to his paper, You’ve got to be kidding me.

  I open my eyes again. “Morning,” Henry says. “The Dorians come today.” As if I didn’t know.

  “I had a dream about nasturtiums,” I lie. “The Dorians said they wanted you to rip them all up.”

  AT THE SITE I try hard to remember that I must not call the house the casa grande while the Dorians are here. The property map lies on Henry’s truck hood and he traces the route he will take the Dorians along to view the landscaping plans. It is hard to imagine what the Dorians will see when they arrive. What I see is a hulking monstrosity of wood beams on a dirty concrete foundation. The builder is inspecting his building. The electricians are taping wires that seemed conspicuously exposed to the spring damp. Everyone is doing his job. I pace about. Today my job is to wait and then to smile and be kind so the Dorians see that a city person can live in Menamon too.

  “Hey, Leah,” Batman calls. He is sitting on some lumber, his hair lying neat over his blue anorak, his hands perfectly still. Batman knows how to wait. “Leah,” he says, “if you keep pacing we won’t have to till that land.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “Leah, it’s okay.” He smiles, and it is such a good smile. I wonder who the person is that Batman loves the best.

  There is murmuring from the men, and when I turn an enormous black car is wending its way toward us. Henry’s body goes rigid, tall, like a soldier’s, and again I anticipate my parents climbing out of the car. Of course this is ridiculous, but I feel a slow-creeping panic all the same. What would they think, seeing me like this? Here I am with my pant cuffs dragging in the mud, on a small-town beat where taxidermy constitutes big news, my hair going wild, the little pieces around my forehead astray.

  The SUV parks and the car door opens. A man steps down, gives a quick wave and walks around to the other side of the car. He opens the door for his wife. No, these are not my parents. The Dorians are not like my parents at all. In fact, they are young. They are my and Henry’s age.

  As if rehearsed, Alex Dorian goes to speak with Henry and the builder and Elena Dorian walks over and kisses me on both cheeks. She smells womanly, her perfume better suited for someone two generations older than her. Than us. “Hello,” Elena Dorian says. “You must be Leah.”

  “Yes,” I say. “So nice to finally meet you.”

  Mr. Dorian is clapping Henry on the back. He is a peer I never could have dreamed for Henry. When I first met Henry I knew he was not like the boys in New York with their vodka tonics and smartphones and cologne, but the way he is with Alex Dorian troubles me. Before, he was Henry, by a bonfire at my parents’ country house, laughing, baring his snaggletooth, falling off a log over something someone had said. Henry, eating a breakfast sandwich so intently you’d think it’d save his life. Henry in soft pajamas, grumbling in his sleep and radiating heat like a furnace. I sensed it when I first met him, and knew it later, when he grabbed my ass and pulled me to him, what kind of man he was. That his were hands that really knew how to do things. They were decisive and hard and for once I knew it would stick, my love. It had been a too slippery a thing for so long, with other men. But Henry was the sort of man who had nooks and spaces all through him where I could squirrel my love away. And I didn’t bother remembering any of the hiding spots. I just stashed it there, in him, again and again.

  Alex Dorian laughs at something Henry has said, smacks his thigh, and Henry winks at him. I wonder about the reserves I’d tucked away. I suddenly feel that I would like to open up a few. Just to get us through this dark season, with the days still short and Henry getting more or less like himself, I am not sure which. Henry laughs a laugh deeper than normal and points a finger at Mr. Dorian, saying something about his car. Mr. Dorian puts his hands up in the air and chuckles. Mea culpa! Mea culpa!

  As Henry is chuckling next to Alex Dorian I know he is imagining them going out for drinks togeth
er, talking about additions and upkeep, being friends. Henry does not want to drink beers with the guys from the docks, the boys he grew up with. Henry’s mind is full of this new Menamon with nice houses and stable jobs for everyone. He wants people to see how much better things could be. Better than snooping neighbors and crumbling barns and drunk cousins and dangerous jobs that barely pay the bills.

  But this thing that Henry is trying for? It’s impossible. I say this not as his wife, but as a newspaperwoman. If people let it, this town will change, and not in the ways Henry wants it to. When I wrote for the city section, I saw it happen again and again. The Lower East Side, Williamsburg, Bed-Stuy. Places don’t get better for the people already in them; they change so new people want to live there and then the old people have to scatter. It’s just the truth. And, because I am my parents’ daughter, I also have this gruesome understanding: no matter how many attaboys pass between the Dorians and Henry, he will always be their employee and not their friend.

  Of course, there’s no way to tell Henry any of this without sounding like a condescending, know-nothing From-Away. So I don’t. So here is Henry, changing before my eyes.

  Where is that love I tucked behind your ear last winter? Where is the store I left between your ribs?

  Elena Dorian comes over to chat with me. “Look at it! It will be so wonderful,” she says as she gestures at the skeleton of the house. I know she is seeing something there but it is beyond my imagination what it might be. I think of my own house, worn smooth from care and rubbing. It is nothing like the casa grande. I wonder, if Henry had the option of swapping this house for our own, would he do it?

  “It will be stunning,” I say. Stunning. A word I have not used since I left New York.

  Henry says, “Mind if I drive your car, Alex? I’d like to take you on a tour of the grounds.”

  We bump along the road and it is dim inside this large dark car. The leather seats are so smooth I fear I will slide along the bench to Elena. She is petite and compact. She has long dark hair slicked neatly back and fastened with a tortoiseshell barrette. She has on a black sweater over dark and tailored jeans, large gold earrings, and a string of red beads. My legs do not neatly cross behind the passenger seat. Instead I am folded up at all angles, trapped in this close space, the smell of Elena’s perfume heady and intimate.