Shelter in Place

by Alexander Maksik

  Or Tess gone.

  Or me gone from her.

  Or my mother a killer.

  I sit in the sun pushing the empty basket around the table trying to settle it all somehow.

  I think of Tess. I wish for her. It does only harm. Still, I can’t help myself wishing. And it’s Tess that makes me saddest. Terrible as that sounds.

  It takes all I have, but I stand up and I return to the truck and I go in search of my father.

  The house is better than I expect. White with grey shutters on a street twelve blocks in from the beach. There’s a picket fence and a short cement walkway to a red door. The front yard is scruffy and mostly dirt with a hardened pile of soil in one corner, a shovel stuck into it. This is not my father’s abandoned project, I know. He doesn’t leave things unfinished, wouldn’t let soil go to waste. Would never leave a tool out to rust.

  The paint is peeling on the door and on the pickets, but nothing serious, nothing he can’t take care of. The Wagoneer is in the driveway and I’m parked in the street. It’s a stranger’s house, but it’s not so bad. I expected maybe an apartment in one of those concrete and stucco blocks built around a half-drained swimming pool with some cheerful name painted next to the address—The Seaview, The Ocean Mist, The Dolphin Court. The kind of thing you see all over LA. I didn’t want to find him in one of those places—bent over a hot plate, mattress on the floor, a folding chair at a card table. I’m relieved, but for too long I can’t get out of the truck.

  And when I do, pulling the handle, I can feel it start. This new life. What it means. The beginning of something else. I know that walking up the path and knocking on his red door is the next thing.

  Behind it I’ll see my father’s eyes.

  I’ll find my mother in her cell.

  I knocked and then there he was—tall and gaunt and brown eyes flat. He’d started to grow a beard again. The sandy scruff and blond hair falling around his face made him look pale and washed out.

  “Joey,” he said, his voice so full of relief I didn’t know what to do but hug him.

  He kept his arm around my shoulder as he gave me a tour. His bedroom, his bathroom. My bedroom, my bathroom. A kitchen that opened to a living room. TV on a stand, tinfoil antenna, a bookcase full of paperbacks. A couch, easy chair, coffee table, fireplace.

  “I rented it furnished,” he said.

  “I can see that.”

  “Sorry about the single bed.”

  “It’s great. You got lucky.”

  “We did,” he said. “We did. Sit down.”

  I dropped into the chair. An overstuffed thing, soft and worn, covered in brown corduroy. I watched him in the kitchen opening beers, shaking chips from a bag into a bowl. His posture was weaker. He moved slowly, everything delayed. He seemed to forget what he’d set out to do. He came back and put it all on the table and sat on the couch.

  “To you,” he said with the clink of the bottles. “To my son.”

  I told him about driving up the coast. I told him about meeting Tess, how I saw her across a crowded bar, the way I swallowed my fear and went to her.

  I made it simple. I made it clean. I didn’t tell him that there had been no fear to swallow. I scrubbed it of the madness and ecstasy. I told him about bartending and living in the motel. About walking along the beach, about Paul the dog. I told him about the bonfires, and the house and Tess’s friends. I gave him a summer without complication, a summer of independence and falling in love.

  “Joey,” he said. “What a time you had. It makes me happy to think of you there, doing all those things. Above all, in love. I’m sorry to make you leave it.”

  “You didn’t make me leave it. Everyone was going home anyway. It was getting cold.”

  We talked around it and around it.

  “Tell me about Tess,” he said. “What’s she like?” He was watching me with just the start of a smile on his face. His lips together, his eyes bright again. “When do we get to meet her?”

  We.

  I picked at the label.

  He looked away. “Of course, she’s welcome here.”

  “Thanks.”

  He shook his head, got up and walked into the dark kitchen. He was a ghost in that light. “I’m sorry, Joey.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry for, Dad.”

  “No?” He said it to the refrigerator shelves.

  “What do you have to be sorry for?”

  He came to the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room. He had a beer in each fist.

  I knew he didn’t understand. It was pure, incomprehensible mystery.

  But I did. The shock I felt was brief. Like being punched in the head by a known enemy. Shock but no real surprise. No confusion. It was something like that. But my father, well, no layer of his being saw it coming. Not a molecule. Like being hit by a truck. One day you’re walking down the street. One day, out of thin air, the phone rings.

  I think it’s what I understood that first night, in some stranger’s corduroy chair, watching him in the kitchen. He was blind in his way. There were elements of himself he could not access. Or no. That’s not right. Those elements were simply absent altogether. This, his great fortune. He was absent something his wife had in stores. Stores she shared with her son. My inheritance of fog. And my father in his new kitchen, his face turned to me, he had none of it.

  I saw that then.

  So I did not hurl my bottle through the front window. Instead, I tried to subtract the acid from my voice, and I asked again, “What do you have to be sorry for?”

  He came out to the couch, put our fresh beers on the coffee table and sat down. He leaned forward as if about to speak, but then said nothing. He looked just like a boy then, slumped against the cushions, deflated, frustrated.

  “There’s nothing to be sorry for,” I told him.

  “What’s your plan?” He’d taken on the old voice again. Fatherly. Serious.

  “I don’t have a plan. I just got here.”

  “Well, maybe you should have one,” he said.

  I stared at him.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Both of us waited.

  “Have you been out there? Dad, have you seen her?”

  He nodded.

  The house was so quiet. I couldn’t look at him any longer.

  I shut my eyes and found Tess, and the motel bed. Her cool hand on my calf. The black highway. The Clam Shack, the red baskets, my father’s ghost in the kitchen. And across the expanse of the coffee table, I could hear his breathing. My diminished father breathing as the two of us waited in the night.

  Soon he will go out to the truck, collect my things and deliver them to my new room. He’ll move quietly as I fade in and out of sleep. He will turn on a lamp and light a fire. I will fall deeper. I will dream. Some of this I will know by the sound, by the smell. Some I will only know later, when I find my clothes folded and stacked in the yellow dresser, my shoes neatly arranged on the floor of the closet, my jacket on a hook. Some I know in recollection, which is perhaps not to know at all.

  But all of it happened.

  In one way or another, it all happened: me, my mother, Dustin Strauss, Tess, Claire, the small fire, the smell of smoke, that soft chair, my father taking so much care to be quiet, to put my clothes away, to keep me warm.

  29.

  That first morning in my father’s new house, I lay in bed and remembered him teaching me to swim. First waking after having slept deeply, then opening my eyes to an unfamiliar ceiling, and its coastline crack curving from wall to wall. Waking to that memory—the two of us in a public pool.

  The hot concrete deck beneath my feet, the soft water, the lifeguards in their black sunglasses and red trunks, twirling their whistles, towering above me, my father’s hand, my arms around his neck, skin that smelled so much of him an
d was so warm, us two descending, hanging on tight as he walked us step by step toward the menacing deep end, where the older boys dove for weighted rings, where he swung me around to his back and said, “Hang on, engine starting,” as his feet came up and him breaststroking while I sputtered speedboat sounds, until we made it back to the shallows where I pretended to keep my eyes closed calling “Marco” and him gliding away saying “Polo” on and on until he let me catch him and climb his shoulders and crash into the water again.

  I am walking alone to the concession stand, knowing he is watching me, pretending not to be afraid, standing on my toes now, reaching up to exchange the damp dollar bills for an ice cream sandwich and then returning, slaloming through the chairs, between towels, giddy for the achievement, and my father smiling at me as I walk-don’t-run, walk-don’t-run as quickly as I can. The folded paper, the Carnation rose, hospital corners, the delicate task of removing the wrapper without leaving any of it stuck to the cookies, the taste of it, the texture and always preferring the sandwich deep-frozen and stale.

  The warmth of the towel around my shoulders as I fall asleep watching him read Sports Illustrated, wishing I had one more ice cream, knowing it would not be allowed.

  This is what I woke to that morning in my father’s new house, and because of the memory, when I came into the kitchen and found him at the stove frying eggs, I kissed the back of his head. He turned and smiled at me with such gratitude.

  It wasn’t our way. My kissing him like that, as if I were the caretaker, such a protective, paternal act. I don’t know why I did it, but when he smiled I began to understand something that only years later would I be able to articulate.

  Later while he was in the shower, I sat on the front step with a cup of coffee.

  Now I lived in White Pine with my father, who had given up so much to live as close as he could to my mother, who had one day, with a hammer, without apparent warning, beaten a man to death.

  My sister was in London.

  Tess was in Cannon Beach.

  I considered each of these things. I was not happy, but I was calm.

  There was no circling bird. I was not burning with life. I was not pinned to the bed.

  I was even. My brain had slowed to a gentle pace. I found a brief peace in the sun, on the front step. And while it lasted, in those hours, I tried as best I could to work out a plan.

  I would see my mother. I would call Tess. I would take care of my father. I would find a job.

  He sat next to me. He smelled of soap and, as always, of Royall Lyme, a bottle of which his first girlfriend had given him before he left for Vietnam.

  “What do you do all day?” I asked him.

  “I work on the house. I read. Go into town. I’ve been looking for a job.”

  I nodded.

  “And I visit Mom.”

  “Every day?”

  “Often as they let me,” he said.

  We sat for a while, neither of us talking.

  “I think I’ll come with you then.”

  He put his arm around my shoulder. “Sure,” he said. “All right. If that’s what you want to do.”

  30.

  Even today I hear sounds only my mother and those children would have heard.

  And, maybe, at first, Strauss himself.

  Two metallic clicks of the buckles.

  Her shoes on the asphalt.

  The solid steel making contact with Dustin Strauss’s skull.

  I have done experiments with bone. I have tapped a hammer against the back of my head.

  I have tried to know.

  I have been hearing these sounds now for nearly twenty years. Metal breaking bone. Metal moving through brain, the two textures. Hard and soft, a solid noise, a sucking noise. And those two children, four feet moving with my mother’s two. The back door opening. The slight give of the brown fabric beneath them, side by side. Scrape and click, scrape and click of the two seat belts. Male into female. Male into female. The solid slam of my mother’s door. Then the three of them waiting inside the sealed station wagon. Waiting while Mrs. Strauss cried over the body of her dead husband.

  After all these years, it is the sound that never recedes. The images fluctuate in clarity, but the sound only becomes louder.

  When I first arrived in White Pine, I did not ask questions. I did not read the papers. I did not watch the news. I didn’t know the man’s profession, or the names of his children. I had not yet seen the pictures. Not of my mother’s mug shot. Not of her hospital ID. Not of laughing Dustin Strauss, arm around his wife, grinning children by their sides. Not of my father on a bench at the courthouse hanging his head. Nothing in those early days had been filled in, so that morning with my father, I possessed only what I had manufactured. I was lonely and terrified, but I was not yet haunted by those photographs, that videotape.

  Tess though, she had seen all of it. I know that now. All of it. While I was lying blank in the motel room, she was out there reading about my mother and her crime. She came back to me each evening after work carrying all that information, all those images—victim, crime scene, father, mother, sister, me. The image of that bloodied hammer resting on the ground. For weeks she carried those images, those words—brutal and horrific and senseless and all the rest. And still she slid into our bed without hesitation, without fear, still she held me as we slept.

  Imagine this young woman, twenty years old, coming home and not saying a word. Having seen the photographs of my mother’s cold eyes, the way the papers added their dramatic shadows and sharp contrasts. Their cruel shading, doctoring the life from her face.

  Still Tess came home to me. Even after all that, even after what I’d told her about the bird and the goddamned tar? After breaking my hand? After all the I could die of you nonsense?

  Me, back then? I’d have run. Not a second thought.

  31.

  So for a long while I was numb in my oblivion, but abruptly, as my father started the truck, I was frightened.

  We drove east up Water Street to the top of the hill, which separated the valley from the ocean, and then north along Bay View, which everyone called the Spine. We followed that ridge road, with the town down to our left and the wide green valley to our right.

  “There,” he said after a while and pointed.

  Nestled far away at the base of a steep yellowing hill was the prison. It could have been a factory or an electrical plant.

  We began to descend toward it. Now I could see the walls, the fine lines of barbed wire, the guard towers at each corner. I made him pull over. I got out, walked into a sloping onion field and vomited. When I returned to the Wagoneer, I found my father sitting on the hood. I climbed up next to him and he handed me a gallon jug of water.

  “They never turn them off,” he said.

  “What?”

  “See the lights? Hard to tell in the day, but they never turn them off.”

  It was true. If you looked carefully, you could see that faint orange burn at the end of each post.

  “At night it looks like a spaceship.”

  I glanced at the side of his face.

  “And when the fog comes in, it all glows.”

  “You come here at night?”

  He nodded. “She knows.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve told her.”

  “She likes that? Knowing you’re up here?”

  He shrugged. “She doesn’t talk much.”

  I see him there all those nights, boots on the front bumper, red Thermos at his side. Wearing his old Levis jacket, faded denim with the fake shearling lining, sitting in the cold, watching the prison, watching my mother, trying his best to look after her, to keep her company.

  “Doesn’t do much good,” he said. “But it’s something.”

  Soon we were down on the valley floor, on the pr
ison road, and then pulling to a stop. It struck me as so odd that there would be a parking lot the same way you’d have one at a supermarket. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that people came and went, that there were employees, that people came to work in the morning, and left at the end of the day. I’d never thought about it. Until then, prison had never been more than one awful thing—a foreign and far-off place of cruelty and terror.

  I was frightened by the prospect of seeing my mother. By those doors and the light and the din of the place. The general, suffocating horror of it. It took a long time to get through, even though they all knew my father by then, there was still the signing in, the patting down, the processing, before we even got to the visit room with its yellow walls and fluorescent lights, the tables bolted to the floor and the bored guards giving the deadeye to everything that moved.

  I’d imagined it packed with visitors, but not many people were there that day. We sat at the table my dad liked and we waited. Side by side, our hands on the blue fiberglass table, neither of us speaking, both of us facing the closed door, which was double-wide and painted the same sickly yellow as the walls.

  And then there was my mother.

  I was prepared for a wretched version of her. A woman wild-eyed and drawn, bruised, scarred, bloodied. But most shocking was how much she looked like my mother. How familiar she was. How much the same. She hadn’t lost so much weight. She was still tall. Her hair the same black, her eyes the same blue.

  There she stood before me. She was alive and she was whole. She wrapped her arms around me and whispered, “I love you,” on and on and on while I cried like a child.

  We all sat down and she leaned forward and laid her arms across the table. This is all that remains of our first visit. Us three, our hands joined.

  Maybe we spoke, but I don’t think so. They took her away. There’s the sound of the door buzzing open and the sound of it closing.

  Then my father and I were in the truck climbing out of the valley, moving across the ridge, while below in the darkening evening, the prison glowed, yes, just like a spaceship.