The From-Aways

by CJ Hauser

  They hold down the last line of the chorus, long and low, and then everyone cheers. For my song. Just like they would one of Carter’s. I’m still frozen there, halfway to the exit, when Rosie comes trotting through the crowd. When she gets to me, she stands facing me square, out of breath again. “It’s a good song,” she says, by way of apology.

  I put my arms around her. “You sounded so good,” I say. “In a real band and everything.”

  Carter thanks Miss Rosalind Salem and then lets everyone know this will be the last tune of the night. “But there will be hats going around for donations for the protesters to pay off their fine. If any of you all should see fit to put some change or a dollar inside, it would be greatly appreciated. And either way, to all of you, we thank you for coming out and listening.”

  The band passes around their hats and each of the protesters has brought one too. The guitar player’s green hat, Billy Deep’s knit cap, which I can’t believe anyone would touch, and some of the boys running things add their Red Sox hats to the mix too. The hats start going around and then, suddenly, they’re multiplying. I swear there must be nothing but bare heads in Menamon tonight because everyone has taken off their hats and is filling them with nickels and with bills. I put a dollar in every hat that comes my way, and five bucks in an empty Yankees hat I swear is Leah’s. I don’t see her, but who else would have such a thing?

  Carter hits the first chords of his last song and I know what he’s playing. So does the crowd. They cheer before he even starts singing. It’s “Leave Your Shoes Behind,” the one about the whiskey-eyed dame, his one big hit, the one he wrung out of Marta before ditching us, the one they have all come to hear him play.

  I think of Marta, and how she loved this song so much even after he was gone. How she was so proud that she wanted it in her obituary and I thought she was a fool for not seeing the truth. But when Carter moves into the chorus, you can tell this is not a musician playing his number one song for the millionth time, jaded and running through the motions. Not the way he plays it. The way he bangs out the big chords and then quietly moves into the sweeter finger picking makes my throat catch tight. Goddamn if the way he plays doesn’t make you think it still means something to him. I watch him and know, just like that, that he still loves my mother.

  Loving Marta Winters was never an easy thing. I can tell you, because I love that woman too. It’s not something I would say out loud, but there were times when I thought about running. When she was screaming irrational things, just to test me, or making me beg and fight just so she would take her pills. When I felt like I had to be more of a grown-up than she was, and couldn’t stand the way she forced me into it, again and again. I didn’t run, because that’s not what I do. But sometimes I wanted to, and it occurs to me now that it’s possible a person could have loved her, but run anyway. That those two things might not be mutually exclusive. Can’t it be both? Marta said.

  I have an urge to visit her weeping willow down in Mystic so she’ll know that I get it now. That I’ve followed her please all the way to the end. I want to climb up in that willow’s branches and spend the night there, just in case she’s forgotten all about us two people who love her, like the forgetful dead sometimes do.

  Carter finishes the song, wishes everyone a good night, and says he hopes they get home safe. The crowd starts to get up and disperse, but I stay put. I will never stop missing my mother. And that’s the way it should be. Carter maybe has been missing her awhile too. It’s possible, I admit, that I was not the only one grieving when Marta Winters died. Possible I am not the only one who has been feeling random, alone, and full of holes. It’s possible that in hoarding my grief, denying Carter the heartbreak that was rightfully his, I’ve prevented us from portioning out the load between us. And mutual heartbreak is what a family is built of, I think. People need to be all broken and busted up first in order for their parts to heal fused together.

  Rosie and I help Joseph break down his barbecue. We load plates with some leftovers, supporting both sides of the paper with our hands, and the three of us head over to the gazebo, where everyone is milling about, eating food and drinking beers. Billy is sitting on an amp and messing around with Carter’s guitar, no longer plugged in. Carter is sitting on the platform. His shoes are off and around his hairline he’s sweaty. He is drinking an Allagash.

  “Great show, boys,” Joseph says. Carter turns to Rosie and me and nods.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Quinn,” Carter says. No bullshit “Miss Winters” stuff this time. No “hey, girls.” There’s something about him, postshow, that is earnest and stripped of agenda.

  “That last song,” I say. “It was pretty good. You got that one on CD?”

  The other guys crack up.

  “Sure enough,” Carter says. “I think we’ve got that one laid down somewhere.”

  “You never did get sick of playing that song, Carter, you bastard. I told you last time we played it I wasn’t never playing it again,” the mustache guy says.

  “How long’s it been, Carter?” the drummer asks. “Since the last barn show?”

  “Fifteen years, you fool,” the guitarist says.

  Carter turns to me, serious, nervous. “Listen,” he says, “I hope you didn’t mind we worked up your tune. It’s a good song. I just thought—”

  “It’s fine,” I say. “It sounded good how you guys did it.”

  And then he hugs me, wrapping his arms around my head, his beer cold against the back of my neck. Before I can react I feel a second set of arms coming from behind: Rosie, not wanting to be excluded, not even for a second, hugging on to both of us. Goddammit, I think. This is it. This is it.

  Squatting on the ground, Joseph Deep, ever reasonable, is counting the money from the food and the donation caps. He’s got piles of bills on the grass and he whispers numbers to himself.

  “What we got, Joseph?” Carter says.

  Joseph Deep clears his throat. “We’re more than two hundred dollars over. The food and all the fines aside, we’re two hundred dollars over what we needed.” He pats the stack of bills and stands up, cracking his back straight.

  WE WALK HOME half dreaming. Carrying beers with us through the street because it feels like a holiday. Even the buzzing of the substation sounds like a fantastic song as we walk by, and by the time we clomp up the one thousand wooden stairs to our apartment, Rosie and I are singing about the whiskey-eyed dame.

  As Rosie puts the keys in the door I run my hands up and down her sides. The key catches wrong in the door once, and twice, and she says, real low and sweet, “How am I supposed to get us inside when you’re doing that?”

  We get inside and I kiss Rosie in the dark. She drops her keys on the floor. They hit, heavy as a fruit, and she wraps her hands around my neck and kisses me back. We don’t stop, and we’re walking backward like one animal, toward the bedroom, when we realize that the phone is ringing.

  I flick on the lights, too bright now. It’s the house line, which no one ever calls. A faded olive-green phone with a curly cord mounted on the kitchen wall.

  “That thing works?” I say.

  “Not for good news,” Rosie says. She goes into the kitchen and lifts it off the cradle. “Hello?” she says. Then, “Hi! How are you? What are you calling at this time for?” Next there are a lot of yeahs and um-hmms. But the way they sound starts off neutral and gets worse and worse.

  From what I can piece together, a family friend has called Rosie’s parents. Someone who saw her up onstage tonight. Peter McKenzie, who works for the town. Apparently he’s got Rosie’s parents convinced that Rosie is up to some dangerous shit and that she’s hanging out with all these older men and do they really think that’s appropriate?

  For one batshit-crazy moment I consider getting on the phone and letting them know that’s the least of their worries.

  “But, Mom,” Rosie says, “it’s not like that. I’m just helping with singing and stuff. It’s—” She gets cut off
for a while. I see her shoulders slump. Finally, she says, “Have you been looking at my Polaroids? Have you seen what they’ve been doing to the house? Did you see the picture from last week?” And then she’s crying, like I’ve never seen Rosie do before. Like a little girl. “Mom,” she says. “Mom, I want my time capsule back. You remember my time capsule?” She’s leaning against the wall, the lights on in the kitchen and black everywhere else. Black in the living room, where I’m standing. Rosie’s cheek is against the wall and her hair is in her face, which is pink and wet, and she’s pressing that plastic olive-colored phone harder against her face as she tells them that she’s not coming to Florida.

  I’m standing there uselessly. All I want is to help, but there’s nothing I can do, so I go to the bedroom to give her some privacy. I lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling. She was happy just one hopeful minute ago and I can’t believe her parents have spoiled it. I wonder if there’s any way to rewind the evening and get us back to how we were.

  It’s quiet, I realize. Rosie’s hung up the phone.

  I sit up. She’s standing there in the doorway, watching me.

  “Were you having deep thoughts?” she says. “Or just hiding?” Her face is wet and her hair is falling into it, blond and too straight and parted right down the middle. Her lips are red and chapped and her eyelashes tear-separated. The way she tries to smile despite it all just about kills me.

  “I’m not hiding,” I say. “I was trying to think of ways to cheer you up.”

  She walks over and pushes me, just a little, almost like she means it. “I thought maybe you were hiding,” she says. “Because you saw me crying.”

  “Definitely not,” I say. “You can cry. You can cry every day and on your birthday too. You can cry on Presidents’ Day and Arbor Day and even Christmas.”

  She comes over and squashes herself against me, her face on my neck. “I love you,” she says, “for serious.”

  My limbs all feel like rubber. I take a deep quick breath and let it out real fast. I kiss her ear and talk into her hair. “I don’t want you to golf,” I say.

  “I won’t,” she says, letting me get a look at her so I know she’s serious. “They can’t make me. I’m nineteen,” she says. Like this is an argument that has ever worked before. And yet she says it so fiercely I believe her. I pull her down on the bed with me, and we lie there for a long while, cupped together. She’s too skinny these days and her curves are disappearing. I stroke her hair, and I can tell by the heave of her chest she’ll fall asleep soon.

  I list things to her as she falls asleep: “I don’t want you to drink orange juice, and I don’t want you to drive a fan boat, and I don’t want you to swim with manatees, or eat at Waffle House, or watch NASCAR, or anything,” I say. “But if you go, I’ll come with you.”

  35

  Leah

  The Monday after the benefit I walk into the Star feeling sick to my stomach.

  Charley and Quinn have rearranged the desks so they face each other, one big megadesk. They’ve got the files organized and laid out. A spider plant Charley’s been wishing dead for months is in the middle of the desk and she is ashing into it.

  It was magical seeing everyone happy and dancing at the concert. It was everything I’d dreamed up Menamon to be. But there I was, hiding out on the far corner of the green with Henry, hoping no one saw us. I tried to enjoy myself, but Henry was so tense, standing rigidly beside me, and my newspaper brain just kept turning. I kept coming up with ways I could describe the crowd and explain what this kind of show of support meant for the Dorian property. How the tide was turning, a person could feel it, watching Carter perform. Of course, I knew I would write no such story. My stomach twists.

  “Morning,” I say.

  “So,” Charley says. “You covering the townie beat today or are you going to help us out over here?”

  “I can’t,” I say. “Stop giving me a hard time. You know I can’t.”

  But I want to, so badly. Not working on this piece feels like sacrificing up a little piece of me and who I like to be. I know I should give that piece of me over, feed it to the thing that is Henry and me, together, to help us grow. But when I think about not putting my name on this piece, I think, How could anyone ask me to not do this thing that I want to do? I say to myself, It’s not fair, and after all, this is the news.

  “Can I think about it some more? Can you hold the piece awhile?” I say to Charley, even though the truth is I wouldn’t still be standing here, lurking around their desk, if I didn’t already know what I wanted to do.

  “No time,” Charley says. “We’ve got to run it by next Monday latest. If we wait any longer the house will be too far along to do anything about it, or, more likely, Carter will open his mouth and we’ll be scooped by the gossip mill.”

  “I feel sick,” I say.

  Quinn holds up a trash can for me.

  “You can be sick later,” Charley says. “Are you gonna do this or are you gonna make Winters pull the copy out of her ass?”

  “You ungrateful favor whore,” Quinn says. “After I wrote you one million human-interest stories about wasp’s nests and christenings?”

  Charley reaches across the table and pats the tops of Quinn’s hands. “You know your charms, Winters, and they are many. But let’s be real.”

  “I’m a smoker again for the day,” Quinn says. She takes Charley’s cigarettes and starts packing them. “This doesn’t mean I haven’t quit,” she says as she lights one.

  It would be so easy to sit down with them. “You talk like it’s so easy for you. With Henry,” I say.

  “It’s not,” Charley says. “And I love him. But he’s got to know that if he’s not going to do what’s right, it’ll all come falling down around him.”

  “This won’t make him go back on the boat,” I say. Charley shrugs and starts organizing the papers on the desk. I look at the way she’s got the Dorian property files organized into stacks. “Why are they like this?” I say. “You’re not actually going to lead with the loons, are you? Is that why these are in the first pile?”

  “People love the loons,” Quinn says.

  I look to Charley for support. She shrugs again.

  “You’re both insane,” I say. “If you want to start it off right, you have to begin with a hook. Something about how the land deal seemed shady to begin with. Or just a declaration of the facts. Something that straight out says, ‘Money has changed hands illegally.’ ”

  Quinn drags. Charley puts her arm around my shoulders. “You know, Leah, we might really botch this story if you didn’t help out.”

  Quinn nods. “I’m a total fuckup,” she says. “Who knows what I’ll do.”

  “You just want it done right,” I say to Charley. “That’s the only reason you want me here.”

  “Eh,” Charley says. “Your charms are many too, Lynch. Don’t make me enumerate.”

  “Fine,” I say. “We won’t put my name on it, but I’ll help.” If Charley has anything to say back, I don’t hear it, because I’m too busy flipping through the papers, arranging them into piles. The correct piles. I am busy putting this article in order.

  36

  Quinn

  Leah’s writing up the biggest part of the piece, the one that lays bare all the details about the money. The fiddly fucking details that I know are the most important thing, but don’t have the patience to write about because it’s boring, and there’s no glory in it. Me, I’m writing about deer fencing, the protests, and the loons. You better believe no one has ever pleaded the case of the fucking loons like I’m going to.

  It’s quiet except for the mad clacking of keys and the coffeemaker shhhing a new pot every hour on the hour. It’s raining outside but we keep the door open because all three of us are chain-smoking. Leah keeps reading things out loud, trying them out on us.

  “ ‘Ever since the construction of the Elm Park development,’ ” she reads, “ ‘Menamon has experienced an unprecedented culture shift.
’ ” Unprecedented Culture Shift. Why can’t I ever come up with stuff like that?

  And even Charley’s writing. She’s covering what she calls the Deep Background. The stuff about the original deal and what made all those Penobscot families sell in the first place. The stuff, she points out, neither of us From-Aways was around for. I loiter nearby and read over her shoulder. There’s a description of the waterfront as it was when Charley was a kid that chokes me up a little.

  “Holy shit, Charley, you’ve been holding out on us,” I say. “You can write!”

  “This place is built on my fucking bones,” Charley said. “Don’t talk to me about holding out.”

  I consider the fact that I may be the weakest link in our chain here.

  We work until late. Charley heads home at ten but Leah and I keep going. I’m exhausted. I’m no marathoner.

  But then I get a crazy idea. One that could make me as useful to this operation as Leah and Charley are, even if I can’t write like they can.

  “I keep thinking about Woodward and Bernstein,” I say.

  “I just assume that’s your resting state,” Leah says, pencil X-ing something out.

  “I think we need to call the Dorians for comment,” I say.

  Leah puts down her pencil and rubs her eyes. “Quinn, it’s eleven o’clock at night.”

  “It’s almost midnight,” I say. “They’ll be asleep in New York. Their defenses will be down.” I think of all the late-night calls Woodward places and how the sleepy fuckers always give away more information than they mean to.