She called me later that night.
“He’s going to be okay,” she said, letting out a long breath. “Okay. Okay. They’re pretty sure he’s going to make it. It was really iffy at first, but he’s stable now.”
“Do you still need to get back home?”
“I’m going to wait a few days. He’s going to stay with my parents while he recovers, so I’ll help out.”
“Right up your alley.”
“Lucky for my mom and dad, right?” She paused. “Can I ask something?”
“You want me to bring you your van from Carol’s house?” I replied. Lauren sniffed and laughed.
“Well, yeah, I guess I do, now that you mention it. But I really wanted to ask if I could take you to dinner when I’m back from Pittsburgh.”
This was maybe the last question I was anticipating, but I smiled.
“I’d like that very much. But there’s one thing I need to tell you right away.”
“Yes?”
“I need to be sensitive to how Chris is going to feel about anything like this.” I knew how I felt about it; my heart was pounding so hard I could feel my pulse in my neck and fingertips.
“I understand,” Lauren said. “I think I can work with that.”
And that was how it started.
It doesn’t take us as long to get the next shelf assembled, and when it’s complete we stand it upright and shuffle it over against the wall. Lauren starts arranging things on it—books, candles, framed photos—and I get to work on the final piece of furniture. This shelf is smaller, shorter and broader than the first two, and it goes together quickly.
“Where are we putting this one?” I ask as I gather up some torn plastic bags and leftover screws from the floor.
“That’s for the office,” she says. The condo has a master bedroom on the main floor above the garage, and Lauren has the upstairs loft arranged as an office and guest room.
The piece is heavy, but not too difficult to carry upstairs. I go backwards, slowly, stepping cautiously on the smooth wood treads with my bare feet while Lauren looks up at me saying: “Careful, Neil. Be careful. Three more steps. Two. Let’s put it over there. Right there. Whew! Good.”
We sit on the bed to let our breathing come back to normal, and I squeeze my fingers where they were crimped by my awkward grip. It’s dark up here, barely illuminated from the living room below, but neither of us bothers to flip on a light. It’s nice in this darkness. Lauren rises to unlatch the skylight on the pitched ceiling, and when she swings it open I can hear the waves washing in from the lake and the continual low grumble of the river flowing over the spillway. She returns to my side, and lets herself drop back to a reclining position with her legs dangling off of the bed.
“Thank you,” she says, stroking my back. “That was heavy.”
I listen to the sounds of the night. Some kids are laughing out on the beach, and when the wind gusts the papers on Lauren’s desk tremble. The breeze carries the smell of autumn. It’s easy to let myself fall back to lie at Lauren’s side, my feet dangling just like hers, and when I close my eyes and draw in a long breath of that end of summer air her hand finds mine and our fingers weave together. The room seems darker and there’s nothing but the outdoor noises. Waves, river, kids talking. I imagine two kids, a boy and a girl, teenagers, walking on the beach. Talking in low voices. Fingers together, just like this. I’m that boy. There were so many walks in the sand by the lake.
“Don’t fall asleep,” Lauren whispers. “Neil.”
I open my eyes. “I’m not asleep.”
“I wish you could fall asleep. I want to watch you sleep.”
“I can’t,” I say. I turn my head to look at Lauren. With her free hand she’s drawn a hank of hair across her face, under her nose. She looks at me and blinks.
“Have you ever thought of growing a mustache?” she asks.
“My father has always had a mustache. He still does. I doubt I’ll ever grow one. Why are you asking me this? And why are we whispering?”
“It’s good to whisper in the dark,” she says. “Please don’t ever grow a mustache. Come up here.” She tugs my shirt to move me higher on the bed, then clambers on top of me and presses her face to my neck.
“No, no, no,” I say. “We can’t. Tomorrow. I need to get home. Chris will be…I need to get home.”
“I know.” Lauren sighs into my collarbone. “Just pretend we can fall asleep like this. Ten minutes. Then you can go.”
“It’s not like I want to leave—”
“Shh. I know. Ten minutes.” She sighs again. “Don’t really fall asleep. Just pretend you are so I can watch.”
I close my eyes and breathe. Ten minutes. It isn’t really long enough at all.
Even with a stop for gas on the return trip, I’m home well before my son. And this is good: there’s always been something troublesome to me about the idea of him coming to an empty house at night. I like to be there waiting for him; I like to hear about what he did, or where he went, or how he’s feeling. My motivations aren’t nosy, not usually, though from time to time it is necessary to engage in parental intelligence gathering. But most of the time I just want to hear what he has to say about things. And I guess I want him to know he’s always got someone to come home to.
I could have stayed longer with Lauren, but I think she understands why I needed to go.
I put away my tools in the garage and go inside to check for messages on our machine; there’s nothing. When I pull my mobile from my pocket I’m surprised to see a five minute-old text from Chris waiting for me. I must have been driving when it came in.
“Leaving now, should be home before 1,” the message reads, and I tap the screen to call him back. I’m not really expecting him to answer, only wanting to leave a fatherly “be careful” message, but Christopher answers on the second ring.
“Dad, what’s up?” It’s funny to me that I’m still so surprised to hear—especially over the phone—how deep his voice has become. He’ll be eighteen in two months, so I should be used to it by now, but it still gets me.
“How was the game?”
He laughs, and I hear his friends talking in the background. “We lost. Those Grayling guys are pretty big.”
“I heard they were tough. Back around one?”
“Should be. Maybe sooner. We’re hanging with the buses on the way back. Slow lane.” This is exactly what I want to hear. Not drunken, not fast. Slow. He’s a good kid.
“You’ll call me if it’s going to be later? Or if you need anything?”
“Dad, come on.”
“I know. My job to say that. Right?”
“Right. Are we still going to see Mom tomorrow?”
“I’m helping Alan in the morning. And we can’t let the field go another week without mowing—”
“I’ll get the field. Don’t worry about it.”
“That’s what you said last week.”
“Dad, I’ll get it tomorrow. I swear.”
“All right. We’ll go see Mom after we finish our stuff. Take it easy driving, okay?”
“I will.” I hear a happy commotion on his end, young shouts and laughter, and Chris says: “Gotta go, okay? See you later. Bye.” And he’s gone.
I like to think I’m not overprotective. I also like to think I give my son appropriate freedom and room. He’s shown himself to be mature and responsible—as a person who’s spent his professional life corralling individuals his age, I think I’m a pretty good judge—and as those traits have shown themselves in him, and grown, so too have his freedoms expanded. But here’s a funny thing: every time Christopher is away like this, and we say goodbye on the phone, I actively say to myself: “I wonder if that was the last time I’ll say goodbye to my son?” or, “I wonder if that was the last time I’ll hear his voice?” It sounds insane, and maybe it is, but here’s my crazy logic: think of every time you’ve seen or read about the tragedy of a lost loved one, think of the wounded souls left behind, always say
ing: “I never got to tell her I loved her,” or, “I never got to say goodbye.” They never thought it could happen to them. I know how it happens, though. By thinking about it, I jinx it. And by jinxing it, Chris comes home.
I wonder if that was the last time I’ll say goodbye to my son?
I wonder if that was the last time I’ll hear his voice?
The night is quiet. With the cable news muted on TV I write a couple emails on my phone. The news is meaningless to me, so I turn it off and try to read my book and consider Leland’s offer from earlier. There’s not much to think about, enticing as it may be, because I’ve promised Carol, and I know just the thought of it would have broken Dick’s heart. My answer, when Leland returns, will be just the same as Alan’s, just the same as it ever is: No.
I try to stay awake so I can say hi to Chris when he gets home. I always try this, and I often fail. It’s a quarter past one when I feel a hand on my shoulder and hear my son’s deep voice saying: “Come on, Dad, get up. You should go to bed. What happened to your lip?”
I sit up, and the book that was open across my chest tumbles to the floor.
“Broke up a fight after school. No big deal.” I blink and rub my eyes. “So we lost, huh?”
“We got crushed.” My son smiles and pats my arm. “Go to bed, Dad. Maybe put some ice on that. I’ll see you in the morning.”
It really does work. Chris comes home every time.
From: [email protected]
To:[email protected]
Sent: September 8, 6:20 am
Subject:envelope
_____________________________
W-
Do you recall a student when I first started teaching named Jake Martinez? He was super nice, played varsity soccer, and for some unknown reason all the kids called him “Envelope Martinez.” Even I started calling him Envelope at school. Everyone else did, so why not? He didn’t seem to mind. I think he even signed his schoolwork that way. I remember asking a couple people how he got the nickname, but no one seemed to know.
ANYWAY, I found an old padded mailer in one of your boxes in the garage last night. It totally surprised me because it had your name written on it in that loopy, high-school-era-Wendy handwriting, not the straight, grown-up-Wendy style. I thought I’d seen all that stuff too, everything there was to see, but every once in a while something new turns up, like artifacts uncovered by a retreating glacier. I was sort of reluctant to open the thing, to tell the truth. But I did, and inside I found:
- Four paperclips, one of which had been opened up and bent into a circle
- A photograph of your dad (wearing his orange hunting hat)
- A photograph of two Labrador retrievers playing tug-of-war with a stick (Uncle Art’s dogs, maybe?)
- A half-depleted lined stationary pad (with FROM WENDOLYN OLSSON printed over a rainbow at the top)
- Twenty-eight opened letters, from me to you, bound with a rubber band. Seven were written when I was fifteen, eleven more when I was sixteen, and the remaining ten when I was seventeen. ALL were painfully embarrassing to read (indeed, some of them included poems/song lyrics I’d written for you)
And finally:
- One sealed, stamped, but unsent letter in a light blue envelope, addressed to me from you and thick with folded paper inside
I didn’t open it. Part of me just didn’t want to, and part of me wanted to save it for later, for when the glacier melts away and stops spitting out artifacts for good.
-N
CHAPTER FIVE
Christopher sleeps in the next morning while I make coffee. It’s still early, not yet eight, and through my kitchen window I’m watching the day come over the world to turn the orchard from monochrome to color. Mist burns away. Across the field, under one of our twisted old apple trees, two deer nose at rotten fruit down amid the bent, dewy grass. They spring upright and freeze—cautious, ears turned forward—and bound away when Alan Massie and his old bicycle come rattling around the curve of my drive.
Alan leans the bike against my deck and shuffles in through the side door like he has a thousand times or more over the course of my knowing him—silently, a stainless steel travel mug in one hand and a half-eaten bagel in the other—and takes a seat at my kitchen table.
“Could almost see my breath out there,” he says, settling into a chair.
My arms are crossed as I continue to stare out the window. “It’s coming.”
“We’ll get rain next week.”
My coffeemaker hisses to completion, and I top off Alan’s mug before filling one for myself. I leave a note for Chris on the whiteboard on the fridge (Gone to town w/ Alan, back by 11, DON’T FORGET TO MOW THE FIELD) and we quietly make our way to the garage to climb aboard my pick-up truck. Alan and I hardly speak again until we’re almost to the city limits, when my friend directs me to take a detour.
“Hold up, hold up,” he says, pointing at an upcoming turn. “Go through Old Town.” Old Town, as the name might imply, is the oldest part of Port Manitou; a strip of nearly hundred year-old Victorian-style homes along the harbor with our long defunct rail depot-turned-brewpub and some overpriced tourist shops at the center where the cannery once stood. Recently deemed a “Historical District,” it is also ground zero for the latest wave of gentrification spreading across our fair incorporated burg. I turn off the highway and Alan cackles as we start down Main Street.
“Have you seen that fucking house they’re working on?” he asks, suddenly animated and leaning forward in his seat. “The one they painted—”
“You mean the purple one?”
“Yes, the purple one!”
“My girls call this ‘Purple Street’ when we run it now,” I say.
“Here we go,” he says. “Slow down. Will you look at this shit?”
We coast to a stop in front of a narrow house; tidy behind scaffold boards and clad in shocking purple siding, its perfectly restored gingerbread trim has been painted an equally vibrant lavender. Some painters are gathered around a work trailer, and I wonder what their thoughts are on the color choice, or if they’ve left all their scaffolding erected because they know they’ll be forced soon to climb back up and cover their work with more sane pigments.
“I can’t believe anyone in the town approved that,” Alan says. “Someone’s going to make them paint over it.”
“You say so.”
One of the workers has noticed that we’ve stopped, and the way he shakes his head suggests we’re not the first gawkers he’s encountered. I let off the brakes and we roll away down the street. The guy watches us as we go.
“I don’t know,” I say. “At least it has some character.”
“You’re kidding me, Neil. That place is beyond tacky.”
I laugh at this. “I don’t think I’d be so quick to judge—”
“Don’t start with me!”
“—Considering that thing you have in your yard.”
Alan shakes his head. “My thing is different. It’s so different. Mega-Putt is a mission rooted in principle.”
I knew, without needing to ask, that this morning’s trip to the lumber store would be in material support of Alan’s most recent obsession: the construction of an eighteen-hole miniature golf course along his bit of property adjacent to the highway. This is not a labor sprung from some deep love of golf on Alan’s part; Massie Mega-Putt is a project rooted almost entirely in spite. At the beginning of last summer, not long after Leland Dinks established his heavy equipment storage lot in full view of Alan and Kristin’s back door, Alan went over to ask if he’d maybe consider relocating it. Leland repeatedly said no, tough luck, that was the area most out of sight from the resort and it made no sense to put it anywhere else. As the story goes (and I’ve heard it more than once), Alan said something along the lines of: “Christ, Leland, what if I had a bunch of excavators parked right out there in my yard for everyone coming by to see? Or what if I had some tacky bullshit like…like a mini-golf course right the
re by the entrance to your development? That’s how much it sucks to have to look at your stuff. What if all your buyers had to see some garbage like that before they pulled into your stupid resort?”
To this, Leland simply replied: “Well thank goodness they don’t.”
Alan had eighteen holes plotted out on graph paper and a backhoe rented before the week was done.
Thanks (or maybe no thanks) to the lack of zoning or building regulations beyond town limits, Alan’s creation is over the top. It’s beyond over the top: it’s a Gaudi-esqe fever dream of leaning concrete towers, spouting jets of water, sneering gargoyles and general obnoxiousness. I’d call it brilliant, in a madman sort of way. I have no idea if it’s fun to play (Alan, to the best of my knowledge, hasn’t let anyone try it out yet), but I do know it’s achieved its primary goal: through the small town gossip telegraph we’ve heard that Leland has approached out elected officials more than once to see how he might legally force it to be razed to the ground.
The home improvement store is in a strip mall complex on the east side of town, and the place is already crowded when we pull into the lot. There seem to be many retiree-types out at this hour: dogged faces pushing loads of plumbing supplies, circular saws, and light fixtures.
“So what are we getting today?” I ask, threading the truck through carts and shoppers to a near-enough parking space.
“I shorted myself on light posts last week. Why don’t you ever park any closer to the store?”
“Why don’t you ever get enough supplies to begin with, so I wouldn’t have to drive you out here every Saturday morning? Then my proximity to the store wouldn’t be an issue.”
Alan laughs as he climbs down from the truck. “Frugality, Neil. This period of unemployment has led me to become a frugal man.”
The Banks of Certain Rivers Page 5
