As a remedy, we began to take short vacations. Out to the San Juans, to the Olympic Peninsula, into the mountains around Leavenworth. Nothing far, nothing exotic. No cafés, no cobblestones. Maybe Tess would read about a little lodge somewhere and we’d stay there, or we’d drive until it got dark and stay wherever we could find. Anyway, we always had blankets in the back and neither of us minded sleeping in the truck. It was just the silence we liked. Just the emptiness of those places.
Even if we were restless for different reasons, even if our respective discontent was born and made of distinct materials, the quiet served us both the same.
It was during one of those trips that we saw the sign staked right outside the mailbox.
For Sale.
The land.
Or, this land.
I am there now. Or, I am here now. Here atop our little hill, looking out across that same perfect clearing into the dark woods.
Dear Tess, Dear Mom, Dear Dad, Dear Claire,
I am writing to you from the house we built on the land we found by the side of the road one late autumn afternoon.
It wasn’t a shared fantasy, wasn’t something we’d been working for. It wasn’t meant to be our next move, or our next life. But we stopped at a sign next to a mailbox and we turned down a long dirt driveway. There was a soft wind coming from the west. And all those pines looked so blue.
So we bought it. It didn’t take very long. It wasn’t very expensive.
Then we sold our bars. Not to some local who owned a good restaurant down the street, but, I am ashamed to tell you, to a hospitality group. Owner of restaurants and hotels throughout the country. There were other offers, but none remotely comparable. None that even entered the same realm.
“If we do this, they will kill them,” Tess said, so full of contempt.
It was true. She was right. There would be branding and mission and dress code. Everything would be standardized and made efficient. Every shot would be measured and accounted for. There would be new language imposed. Scripts to be learned. Our people would have to speak like cheerful machines. All collective, all continuous: How are we enjoying our burgers? How is everything tasting? Are we still working on that?
Problems would become concerns. Customers would become guests.
“Fuck these people,” Tess said.
But even Tess, Tess of our later years, could not turn away from that deadly black figure printed at the bottom of the page—a single number, which held such power, so much promise and possibility.
We fought for the health insurance to remain, for a baseline hourly wage well above minimum. We won those battles anyway. Not that it was any consolation to either of us.
And just like that, just like everything else, with shocking speed, we were wealthy. I don’t want to overstate it. We hadn’t sold an oil field, but for us, for the small life in the woods we said we wanted, we had plenty of money.
119.
If ever I was an ambitious man, I cannot remember him. Yes, there was general fire, desire for experience, for sex. I wanted to consume all that passed before me. But that was a state of youth, the state of youth.
But beyond those years? No.
I never wanted to be great. I never wanted to prove myself to the world. I had no fantasies of standing triumphant before a crowd. I never wanted to be anything in particular.
Neither astronaut nor fireman. Neither cop nor assassin.
Now my single conscious ambition is the same as it’s been for so many years.
I want only a life with Tess.
You may ask, well, what have you done? What have you done with your life, Joseph March, and I will very happily tell you that I have loved my family, I have loved Tess Wolff.
And for these things I feel no shame.
But is this why she left? Have I suffocated her? Am I absent some vital thing, some essential American element? A passion for empire and celebrity? Do you think somehow it was murdered along with Dustin Strauss? Did my mother shatter something in me as she was shattering that man’s skull?
Or perhaps I would have wanted more had my father been some other kind of man. Or if I had a stronger, more constant mind.
Well, whatever the case, here I am and there we were in our new house in the woods. And as with the bars, here, too, we were makers and masters of our own diminutive kingdom.
Put this here, put that there and when all was done, every cup in its cupboard, then at last we would begin. Then we would be provided with what? Peace of mind? Stillness of soul? Yes. That is precisely what I expected.
But I should also admit that there was some aspect of imprisonment, too.
Yes, I was trying to bind Tess to me.
Yes, I thought that here in the woods, I might fully and finally possess her.
Yes, within the confines of our house, our land, our perfect keyhole, the dense forest would eternally attach us together.
Like some kind of fairy tale witch, I would keep her here.
Was this house a prison? Was our clearing its yard?
Is that what I have done?
120.
Claire, she was in the yard.
Out by the west wall, just at the very edge of that little field they have. You can see it from the back end of the parking lot. No matter the season, it’s mostly dead brown, but in late spring there are bits of green near the basketball courts.
It was Seymour who called.
It wasn’t protocol, but he’d become a captain by then so he took his liberty and did it anyway.
“Joe?”
I hadn’t heard his voice for so long.
We were on our deck. I’d been for a run. The sun was out and I was half-asleep on one of our new lounge chairs. Tess was potting flowers.
The phone rang, the one with all those megahertz.
She went inside to get it and when she returned said, “It’s Seymour.”
She pointed the handset at me. I see her looking down, her terrible expression, and most of all, and as always, her eyes.
Seymour told me Mom was standing on her own. She was there, not doing anything in particular. The guard who saw her fall said she was looking toward the east, her back to the yard, but that he didn’t know what she was looking at, or if she was looking at anything at all. Seymour didn’t want to go on, but I pressed him. I wanted to know exactly.
For me, but for you as well.
If you ever come by here. In case you ever ask.
“The guard said, ‘It was like she’d been shot. One minute she’s standing and the next she’s on the grass.’”
She was sixty-four years old, Claire.
I’m glad she didn’t clutch her chest, or stagger, or cry for help.
I like to imagine her facing the sun.
I like to imagine her looking through the fence, beyond the walls.
Who knows? Maybe she had her eyes closed. Maybe she was absent from herself entirely. But I will remember her with eyes open, her face full of sunshine, looking at something very far away.
I think of Dad dying as if falling into water.
I think of Mom vanishing quick as light.
I suppose we’re fortunate. No protracted illnesses. No suffering for our parents. Both of them gone so quickly.
121.
We returned to White Pine and stayed in a motel. Tess was tender with me, but very quiet. In the evening we got pretty drunk and then drove over to Lester’s to meet Seymour, we took the same old booth.
I saw him come in with a large box under his arm. He was bald now, and had lost a bit of weight. I watched him make the rounds. It was still a guard bar so he knew everyone there.
It was hard to imagine him then as anything else, but once, I swear to you, he had been so entirely different.
He made his way over and sat down next to Tess.
“C,” she said, and began to cry.
He put his arm around her and she slumped into him, pressing against all that soft flesh.
He reached across the table and shook my hand. “Joe,” he said. “I’m sorry, brother.”
I was glad he spoke that way, still a bit of the young soldier left, my long-gone friend.
We shared a pizza and drank too much. There was little talk of the past, and certainly no mention of Sam Young.
Seymour pushed the box across the table. In it were packets of my mother’s letters. Four of them. From me, from my father, from Tess, and then from her fans, Marcy Harper among them.
Her wedding ring. Some clothes.
And my mother herself, who’d been burned to ash and poured into a plastic bag, which had been sealed and fitted into a small white cardboard box. There was a printed label stuck askew to the top of it: Anne-Marie March.
122.
In the morning the three of us drove out to the beach below the meetinghouse and shook her ashes into the wind with some sentimental hope that she would return to my father, or he to her, or both of them to God, or whatever it is one hopes for the dead.
And because we couldn’t help ourselves, or really, because I, forever my father’s son, couldn’t help myself, we drove slowly past his house. There were purple pig lilies in the garden and a boy on the front step with a yellow Tonka truck upside down across his knees.
We stopped on Mott Street and watched for a while, but only saw a shadow pass in the upstairs window.
There was no sign of the Night Gardener.
At the Young house nothing moved. The trampoline was gone.
We didn’t visit Hank. I can’t remember why.
We dropped Seymour off at the prison.
“See,” he said, leaning down to us and pointing to the far basketball court, “it was there. She was right there.”
123.
We returned home with my mother’s wedding ring, and her packets of letters. Home where we pulled weeds from our garden and cut the grass and wildflowers when they grew too high. Home where we ran a damp cloth over all our smooth surfaces.
It was then something changed in Tess. Or changed again. My mother’s death had provoked in her some of that former fire and panic, unearthed the old desire. She spoke less. Was remote in her old way. A new heat and charge to her.
We’d been home a week or so when I woke in the night to see her dressed and standing by the window in the moonlight. I called her name and she came to me and sat on the bed. She moved her fingers through my hair and kissed my forehead.
“Sleep, sweetheart,” she said. “I’m not tired.”
I closed my eyes.
“I’m not tired at all,” she whispered.
I woke again hours later as she was climbing back into bed, her skin so cool and smelling of night. She pressed her back to my chest.
I trapped her in my arms. I locked her ankle with my heel.
“Where have you been?”
She moved against me until I was inside her.
“I went for a walk.”
“In the forest?”
“There’s so much light out there,” she said.
“I would have gone with you.”
I moved my hand between her legs.
“I know.”
“It’s dangerous, Tess.”
“It’s not,” she said. “It’s fine.”
She broke free and rolled me hard onto my back.
“What could possibly happen, Joe?”
Then she was on top of me, her hands pinning my wrists.
“Will I be torn apart by wolves?”
She laughed. Her teeth were on my neck.
She let go and rode upright, her hands on her breasts, nipples between her fingers. I watched her moving above me, her open mouth, her eyes closed, her hair swinging forward and back, face flashing dark and silver in the moonlight.
She was loud that night, and after she’d come, fell asleep almost immediately.
124.
There were many nights I’d wake to find her vanished, or slipping back into bed.
There were days she barely spoke at all.
And then, in an instant, Tess was gone.
I’d been to town to have my father’s Wagoneer serviced and when I returned the house was empty and on this table, here in the middle, held down by a white bowl of berries, was her note.
“I am too various to be trusted. But I am safe and I love you. T.”
That’s all.
One of those lines she’d always kept around, stolen from a novel she loved, followed by her tired cliché of meager reassurance.
125.
Over the time she’s been gone, nearly a year and a half now, I have often thought that had I just paid closer attention to her marginalia, to her stars and underlines, to all her bits of paper tacked to so many walls, I’d have saved myself a lot of trouble, and a great deal of pain.
Those scraps might have served as warnings, rather than thin decoration.
Well there are many ways of being held prisoner.
It may be that we can reassemble a person this way. Or, really, assemble them correctly.
God knows I have tried.
Surely there is a formula to be written, an algorithm to be employed. There must be a way to input all of the variables and have returned to us the woman herself. If we take the library of a true reader, as Tess is, and evaluate all of the books, plus all of the markings, would we not have some fundamentally truer version of that person than if we were to do the same with her spoken language, or even her letters, her journals?
Take all of those well-ordered books there on our great wall of carefully crafted shelves. Take the texts themselves, and then add to them whatever has been inscribed in their first pages.
Tess Wolff. Seattle. Washington. 1995, for example.
Add then the drawn lines—vertical and horizontal, doubled and tripled, plus their various flourishes—finishing hooks, upticks and down, plus power of pen stroke—depth of impression, plus considerations of paper stock, plus all the notes and stars, asterisks and brackets, exclamation points and question marks, plus stains and bookmarks—blood and coffee, insects and flowers, photographs and train tickets and sand. Take all of it and I am certain that out of the right machine would come the very truest portraits.
We are so much better told by the sentences of others.
It may be that I am doing a better job of telling your story than I am of mine.
126.
After my mother died they made a film about her. They stood outside our old bars. They went to London to find Claire. All of us refused, so they turned our desire for privacy into a subject of suspicion. Enigmatic Tess, rich and glamorous Claire, shy Joseph. Richard the good Quaker. Anne-Marie March: hero or madwoman? They put Claire in black-and-white ducking into a clean white Mercedes. They filmed the prison and played their music of doom.
It was a despicable film, but we watched anyway. It was the first time I’d seen you, Claire, in such a long time.
So many years gone. You were a woman in a black business suit. A stranger. Serious and pretty.
127.
We left Seattle for this place where we were to start a family, where we were to be at peace, where we were to find relief from our terrors and our passions. But one day I returned home to find the house empty, and Tess replaced by a slip of paper.
And now here I am, a man alone in the woods writing to Tess and to Claire, to my mother and father. To you.
I am trying to hang on to order, to believe in it, but now that I have told you everything, I’m afraid I’m beginning to spin away into some foreign and frightening land.
I can feel the frame shuddering.
I am rapidly approaching the present.
I have come to the end and she has not returned and I do not know what to do next.
What should I do? Tell me, please.
Now that I have realized our nation’s great dream. Now that I have pulled myself up by my bootstraps and worked hard and made of my life what I could. Now that I have money and quiet and a good place to live, what do I do?
What do I do if the love of my life has gone, and my parents are dead, and my sister has shunned me, and my friends have dissolved?
What do I do if I have come to the end of the story and there’s nothing else to tell, what do I do next?
There is no way to change the will of others.
The whole thing is falling to pieces.
This story, this eulogy, this letter, this prayer. The foundation, the frame.
I am running out of energy. I am running out of faith. I can no longer understand the system. The logic is faulty.
What good are more anecdotes, more stories of our great love?
One more.
I will tell you one more. I promise it’ll be brief. And then I’ll let you be.
Just the recollection of a few hours of a single day.
We were in this house. A wild storm was blowing through. We were trapped inside. We were drinking. We were listening to music.
Tess closed her eyes and began to count backwards from fifty.
“Hide,” she said.
I was in the entryway closet where we kept our coats. She was calling to me, singing my names, and I was laughing from cabin fever or love or bourbon or joy and I couldn’t stop. Soon she yanked the door open, and when she saw me there giggling like a little boy, she began to laugh and tackled me to the floor and we kept on like that until we had no more left. There were boots and shoes and sandals all around us. She reached up and pulled my father’s old down parka from its hanger and covered us with it. Her hand above us on the sleeve. I pulled the door closed. The wind and rain and thunder were shaking the house.
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