And Sometimes Why

by Rebecca Johnson

  Sophia tried to pretend she hadn’t heard, but then the man was next to her, addressing her face-to-face.

  “Yes?” she answered with a frown.

  He opened his mouth. “I wanted to say…” Harry began, and then stopped. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to say.

  Sophia made an effort to soften the expression on her face. Perhaps he and his gay lover had lost an adopted child, one they’d had to jump through numerous hoops to get in the first place. Maybe they had adopted an AIDS baby who had died of complications from the virus. Or a Romanian orphan who’d hit adolescence and killed himself with an overdose of pills. Who could tell what kind of trauma people carried tucked into their solar plexus, just out of sight, ready to leap out at the first sign of sympathy?

  “I’m Harry Harlow.”

  Sophia brought her hand to her mouth. “Shit,” she said, dropping it again. Harry Harlow was a name she had come to hate almost as much as Bobby Goralnick, a.k.a. Virgil Tilden. The police said it wasn’t his fault and he had never been charged, but in the same irrational way she secretly blamed Siri for not driving Helen, she had come to hate Harry for being there. In that car. At that moment. His celebrity only made matters worse. What would it matter to him that a girl’s life had been crushed like a cigarette butt? His life, in all its glittery fineness would go on unchanged, untouched by the tackiness of tragedy. Then again, why was he at the meeting? Was he stalking her? She forced herself to look him in the face. Close up, Harry looked older than he had on television (she had watched a rerun once for five minutes so she would know what he looked like). The skin around his eyes had gone soft. His flesh had that velvety droop that presaged old age, and his hair was a weird yellow, black, white, and gray, like a wild mushroom she’d once seen in a rain-soaked forest. Under his chin, a small swell of flesh that would only grow as the years passed seemed to quiver at that moment with some unexpressed emotion.

  “I want you to know,” he began to say, “how very, very—”

  Sophia held up her hand. “I know,” she said. She looked toward her car longingly. How much more of this would she have to endure before he would let her go? “You’re very, very sorry. Everybody is very, very sorry. I know that.” She rattled her keys and took a small step toward her car.

  “If you think I’m crazy, I’ll understand, but do you think I might come visit her sometime?”

  Sophia gasped at the audacity of the idea. “No. My husband would…” She couldn’t finish the sentence because she didn’t actually know what Darius would do. Punch him? Hug him? Once upon a time, she could have predicted with reasonable accuracy how Darius would react to things. Not anymore. It was as if they lived in a new world. That she and Darius looked the same, sounded the same, dressed the same, seemed irrelevant. Inside, they were as altered as could be.

  “Of course.” Harry looked down. “It’s only, I’ve been thinking of setting something up. Some kind of fund. Maybe a memorial. A foundation.” He was winging it now, making things up, throwing words around. He’d never had those thoughts but now that he was saying them, he liked the sound of the words. The meeting seemed to have tightened his focus, given him insight into what ailed him. It was the girl, of course. He’d been too afraid to really think of her before, but seeing the mother somehow made it possible. The man driving the motorcycle was dead. There was nothing he could do for him, but the girl was alive. If he could help her, he might actually feel okay again. Better than okay. In some perverse way the accident had actually improved his life. His bad job and lousy wife were gone. The girl had done that but he had only brought her misery. Running into Sophia had to be part of a design, the universe reminding him that a bill had come due.

  “It’s not necessary,” Sophia said, moving toward the parking lot, away from Harry’s obsessed, feverish gaze. He raised a hand as if to stop her, but Sophia turned and ran to her car.

  19

  miranda crossed the busy commercial street that bordered the campus on the west, mulling the tone of Jason’s voice on the phone.

  “Are you breaking up with me?” she’d asked when he suggested coffee, trying to make a joke out of it. The four weeks since they had slept together had been the happiest of her life. She was only slightly reassured by how quickly he’d answered. People blurt good news out on the phone; it was bad news that required a face-to-face meeting, the solace of flesh on flesh.

  “If you were breaking up with me,” she pressed, “would you tell me?”

  He’d taken time to give the question genuine consideration. This, she’d thought in the synapse of the moment, was why she loved him. He took her seriously, even when she was being stupidly, girlishly insecure.

  “Probably not,” he’d finally answered.

  “Well, you can’t break up with me. My sister is in a coma.”

  Miranda scanned the Starbucks for a good table, miraculously finding what she was looking for right next to the window in the front. A good sign, she tried to tell herself as she placed her books on the round table. As she sat, she looked up to find a scowling young woman holding a container of coffee.

  “I was about to sit there,” the girl said.

  “I’m sorry,” Miranda answered, “I was obviously here first.” Bitch, she silently added, using a napkin to push a constellation of crumbs on the floor.

  The girl stuck out her bottom lip. “You don’t even have your coffee yet,” she observed.

  “I’m waiting for my boyfriend. When he gets here, I’m going to order.” Miranda resented having to impart so much personal information to a virtual stranger, but there was no way she was giving up the table.

  The girl turned her head to look for another empty table, then sat down. “Fine,” she said, “we’ll just share it.” She took out a book—Ideology and Utopia—and started reading.

  Miranda glared at the girl. In principle, she frowned on people who fought with strangers, but the girl’s assumption that she could do as she wished, combined with the arty knee-high stockings she wore, the little-girl tartan kilt cut high on her thigh, and the ubiquitous dangling iPod earphones around her neck, infuriated her. She curled a hand around the girl’s coffee and stood up, holding the cup at shoulder height. The cardboard was warm to the touch. “You can’t sit here.” The shock on the girl’s face made Miranda feel powerful and reckless, like a person who could change the world.

  “Excuse me?”

  “No, you’re not excused. This is my table. I was here first. I can’t share it with you because someone is about to show up and he will need that chair. I asked you nicely.”

  She watched the girl scan the room for someone who could help. A few of the students at nearby tables were watching them with interest, but when the girl tried to catch their eyes, they looked away. On the other side of the room, Miranda saw Jason enter the shop. She saw how she would look to him. A crazy woman holding a latte hostage. But backing down at that moment would be impossible. She had made a stand and had to see it through to its end. From the concerned expression on his face as he approached the table, Miranda guessed that Jason was probably not going to understand how important it was that she prevail.

  “Miranda?” he asked, staring at the coffee, which she was holding awkwardly, like an unfamiliar weapon. The girl seemed to sense that Jason would not support Miranda. “Could you get a muzzle for your girlfriend?” she asked.

  “I was minding my own business, waiting for you, and this woman walked up and put her coffee down. I told her I needed the seat, but she refused to leave.”

  “Obviously, this table is more important to her than it is to us,” Jason said slowly, looking around the room for another table.

  “Actually, this table is important to me,” Miranda answered. “She can have her coffee back when she leaves.”

  A boy—barely twenty by the looks of him—appeared. A tag on his shirt read “Tom, Manager,” but he looked as if he’d rather be anywhere else. “Can I help?” he asked.

  “Thank God,” the
girl said. “Can you please tell this crazy woman to give me back my coffee?”

  The boy’s forehead was shiny with a thin layer of perspiration. Suddenly, Miranda’s anger guttered like a spent candle, replaced by a queasy sense of embarrassment. When did she become the kind of person who could not let go of a slight? Was this, she wondered, what happened to people who had been hurt by the world? Did they became powder kegs, ready to blow at the slightest provocation?

  “Fine.” Miranda walked to an empty table a few feet away and put the coffee on it. When she returned, the manager was handing the girl a gift card. Jason was staring at one in his hand, a bemused smile on his face, as if he thought it was all a big joke. The value was ten dollars.

  “Let’s go,” she said to Jason.

  “Come again,” the manager said, nervously pointing a card toward her.

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t know why you are giving her one. She’s the one who created the scene,” the girl said.

  “Pathetic.” Miranda rolled her eyes at the girl.

  “Freak show.” The girl sneered.

  Outside, on the street, she felt absurd but right. “Sometimes you have to take a stand,” she said, without looking at Jason’s face. He took her elbow and guided her back toward campus and the always empty lawn facing the math building. A long time ago, her father had pointed out that the lawn in front of the English building was always packed, while this one was always empty. Miranda sat cross-legged and sullenly picked a blade of grass. If he was going to leave her, she had certainly made it easy for him.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  “Nothing. We can talk about it later.” He ran a thoughtful finger up her bare calf, as if he were counting the follicles of black stubble beginning to sprout.

  “Look, it was stupid of me to get upset. But we can’t always control how we feel.” She withdrew her leg, making a mental note to shave that night.

  “Tell me about it.” He took her hand and kissed the open palm. Miranda willed herself to relax. A person who was going to break up with you wouldn’t kiss you like that.

  “Tell me what you wanted to talk about. I’ll be in a bad mood until you do.”

  Jason sighed and rolled over on his back. The bright sky made his eyes a deeper, almost violet blue. There were times when the sheer loveliness of him left her breathless.

  “I have to go back to Alaska,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “No, I mean I have to go back next month, at the end of the semester.”

  “Oh.” She hoped it sounded innocent, a small word registering surprising news and not what it was, a reaction to a knife in her gut. “Why?”

  He sat up. “I told you my dad represents a lot of Native Americans who get stopped on drunk-driving charges?”

  “Yes.” Miranda nodded her head, trying not to ponder the ethical implications of that fact.

  “They’ve done studies. The Indians lack a chemical for metabolizing alcohol. More than two beers, they’re blotto. But up there, they have to drive fifty miles to get anywhere, so when the cops are bored, they round them up. They never pay him because it’s paycheck to paycheck for most of them, if they even have a job, and my dad doesn’t want to take money out of their families’ mouths. So it’s more like a hobby than a paying job. Anyway, there’s this one guy, Willy Loman.”

  “Really?”

  “No. His real name is Lomaw, or something like that, but a judge got it wrong once and the name stuck. Willy is Athabascan and one of the worst offenders. His driver ’s license has been suspended a dozen times, but my dad has been friends with him forever. Anyway, last month the government announced it was opening up the Tongass region to logging.”

  Jason looked at her to see if the name meant anything to her.

  “It’s old-growth spruce. Usually it’s shit for anything but pulp, but this stuff is top grade.”

  “They cut down the old trees?”

  “They leave every third tree standing. Letting air and light in allows the saplings to grow. Still, it’s controversial. This is an area that has literally never been logged. To make the tree huggers happy, the government is only giving permits to Natives with valid logging permits. It’s kind of a sham, because they need the money upfront to rent a helicopter.”

  “What for?”

  “Heli-logging. There’s no roads and the nearest river is ten miles away. It’s the only way to get the wood out. It’s dangerous, but my dad knows a guy who flew a medevac in Vietnam. He can get anything out of anywhere. Willie’s got a permit for six months only. After that, the region could be closed for another fifty years. To pay my Dad back, he’s giving his permit to my father. Or he’s making him a silent partner. My dad will give Willy a percentage of the profit, but he needs me to come help. I know it might sound silly, but in the logging world, this is like winning the lottery. He could make enough money to retire.”

  “Oh.” He was leaving her.

  “I’ll be back,” Jason said.

  “No. You won’t.”

  “Yes. I will.”

  “Things will be different.”

  “Things are always different.”

  “Don’t get philosophical. You’re abandoning me.”

  Jason rolled over and pinned Miranda down with the full weight of his body. “Can’t you wait for me?”

  He must have weighed fifty pounds more than she, but somehow, it was easy to breathe with him on top, as if their breaths were inversely coordinated. She out. He in. A lock and a key. That wasn’t something you walked away from.

  “Take me with you,” Miranda said.

  He laughed.

  “No.” She pushed him off. “I mean it.”

  “Believe me. You don’t. For the next four months, the sun will rise at ten in the morning and set at two. People go crazy this time of the year. They shoot each other or drink themselves to death.”

  “People shoot each other here because someone changed lanes without signaling. I’m getting in arguments in coffee shops over a window seat. It would be good for me to get out of here.”

  What she didn’t tell him was that she was failing all her classes. The accident had happened so early in the semester, she’d missed half the lectures. It might have been okay if she were at all familiar with the topics, but over the summer, she had pored through the course catalog, self-consciously choosing a syllabus that was, as her father said, “all over the map.”

  “I thought it would be good to, you know, expose myself to a lot of different things,” she’d answered.

  “You can’t go wrong with Professor Dalton,” Darius had said approvingly of the art history teacher, “but I don’t know anyone in economics or environmental science.”

  “I think that’s the point,” Sophia had observed over the rim of a wineglass. Once Miranda finally started attending classes, she wished she had heeded her father’s advice. Listening to econ lectures about supply-demand curves or monopolies versus duopolies, it all seemed both incredibly obvious and extraordinarily difficult.

  “There’s nothing to do up there in the winter,” Jason said.

  “I could help you out. I could make your lunch, keep the house clean.”

  Jason laughed. Miranda was not noted for her neatness.

  “You’re saying no without even thinking about it.”

  “Miranda, we don’t live in a nice house with curtains and Oriental carpets.”

  Miranda winced at the description of her family’s bourgeois home. “I don’t care,” she insisted.

  “You will when it’s twenty degrees below zero and you have to use the outhouse because we don’t have indoor plumbing.”

  Miranda blinked. What happened to piss at those temperatures—did it freeze midstream? Was that possible?

  “Or when the only people you ever see are loggers who haven’t had a shower in weeks. And the only green thing you eat comes from a can, and you’re so sick of dried salmon, the thought of it makes you want to p
uke.”

  “Okay,” Miranda said quietly.

  “Or when you can’t get a satellite signal for a week because it’s been snowing for five days and no plane can get through.”

  “Jason.”

  “Or you’re boiling coffee grounds for the third time.”

  Miranda stood, hoisted her book bag onto her shoulder and started walking. She regretted the petulance of the gesture but wanted to be alone, like a dog, with her pain.

  He followed her. “Look, don’t you think I’d love to have you there?” he asked.

  “Apparently not.”

  “Listen to me.” Something unfamiliar in his voice made her stop.

  “It’s my dad. I try and paint him as this ‘colorful’ character for people, but honestly, he’s not colorful, he’s fucking crazy.”

  “How crazy?”

  “Crazy like he hasn’t had a shower since I left.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Crazy like threatening to scalp the census taker. Crazy like his toenails look like something from the Guinness Book of World Records. Crazy like he and Willy Loman can drink Everclear for three days then threaten each other with chainsaws and nobody raises an eyebrow because it happens all the time.”

  “The logging thing was a lie?”

  “No. It’s all true. But, apparently, ever since I left he’s gone downhill. If I can get the trees cut, I might be able to get him some real help.”

  “Honey.” Miranda put her arms around him.

  “I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me,” Jason said stiffly.

  “I don’t feel sorry for you. I feel sorry for him.”

  “He just wants to be left alone. But if I don’t do something, he’ll die of something stupid like gangrene from an ingrown toenail, and I’ll spend the rest of my life feeling guilty.”

  “I want to come. There’s nothing for me here. I’m failing my classes, my sister is a cauliflower, and my parents don’t know I exist. We can help each other. If I can’t stand it, I can come home.”

  “I might be able to find a house. People move up there all the time thinking they want to live off the grid. After one winter, they’re ready to go home.”