“Down in Tama.” Lisa smiles. “You already know all this stuff.”
“OK.” A silence. Lisa looks at the lens, waiting. “OK, then. Why do you make these movies?”
Over the years, she has taken great pains to hide the face of the child she once was. She does it by trying to feel older than she is. She began this practice when she was young; it made her feel better the first time she tried, so she kept at it. Over time it has been a great comfort, this discipline of imagining herself alive and intact, safe on the other side of years she might otherwise have had to live through, uncertain of where they would lead. The camera catches her out now; there’s a part of her that never left Crescent, that still waits there for someone.
“For my mom,” she says.
“How do you mean, for your mother,” asks Sarah Jane.
“I wanted her to be able to tell her story,” says Lisa slowly.
“But we don’t even know what her story is.”
“Well, to do her a kindness, I guess.”
“But she can’t really receive that kindness.”
“It’s so she won’t be forgotten,” says Lisa, looking pleadingly into the lens.
“But there’s nothing you can do about that,” Sarah Jane presses. “And besides, Lisa—I don’t really see how any of this helps with any of that. They don’t seem connected. You have to see that.”
“Look, I do it for myself, too, I know that,” says Lisa, casting her gaze out now past the tripod, around it and out to the tall rows of corn on the neighboring property, the pigs in the distance. “I don’t see why you have to make me say it out loud.”
She gets up then, walking past the mounted camera, and there’s an extended quiet during which we can’t see that she’s gone to stand beside the friend she made of the lonely woman from Nevada; the two of them looking out from the porch to the corn, and the brace of sycamores farther down, the wind at play in the leaves.
* * *
Emily called Ed down to the basement when her gut told her it was time; after they’d all spent a couple of hours watching movies together, they congregated in the living room. This was an unfamiliar scenario for all of them. The Pratts hadn’t ever been the sort of family to hold meetings, to regiment their lives like a business. Still, they all took their places on the couches and cushions, like they’d been doing it all their lives.
Ed spoke first, from his heart: “I don’t really know what to say.” He looked at his children. “Are you both all right?”
By now James had managed to summon up his defenses. “No, Dad, I’m hurt. I watched a lot of movies,” he said.
“I’d appreciate it if you could be serious,” Abby said.
“Thanks, Abby,” said Ed. “I mean it, James. We live in a world now where people see things all the time, all kinds of things, and they think nothing ever leaves a mark on them, but—”
“I’m fine,” said James.
Ed looked at his son, who had fixed his eyes on the floor between his feet. “All right,” he said gently. “Just checking in.”
He looked over at Emily, whose face was sad.
“I wish we hadn’t watched it down in the darkroom,” she said. It was her special place in the world. “It will feel different for a while. But I’m all right. I’m not the one who’s hurt.”
“I’m real glad you guys all feel great,” Abby said, exasperated. “Can we talk about those poor people now?”
“We’ll rescue them, right, Abs?” said James. His recovery was progressing rapidly. “We’ll just head out to the driveway, maybe follow their scent out into the cornfields.”
“You shut up,” said his sister. “That stuff was fucked up. She hit that boy hard enough to leave a bruise on his face. You could see his cheek turning red.” Her voice caught in her throat when she described it; she hadn’t been able to look away.
Ed felt so proud of his daughter; someday she’d stop seeking the high ground all the time, and she’d be happier for it, but it would mean that the child he’d known so long ago was finally gone forever. It gave him such joy to see her putting that moment off for as long as she could.
“Easy, Ab,” he said. She nodded. “There’s nothing we can do right now. Let’s eat something, and maybe try not to think too hard about it just now, and then we’ll think a little more about it tomorrow morning.”
The children slept hard; it had been a very long day. The Pratts had some decaf in the kitchen, and then they, too, turned in for the night. Those shaky visions from the basement weren’t strong enough to crowd out the pleasure of having everybody under the same roof for the first time in well over a year. Was it two years? Retirement time was a new and disorienting rhythm.
“It’s great to see the kids, anyway,” Emily said, nuzzling Ed’s shoulder in the dark.
“I miss them,” said Ed, whispering as if to guard a secret from temperatures in which it wouldn’t survive, from the threat of all that open air.
5
James was at the tiny drop-leaf table in the kitchen the next morning—“You have a breakfast nook!” Abby’d squealed when she spotted it yesterday, her mother trying not to beam with satisfaction—scowling at his open laptop, muttering incredulously to himself as he scrutinized the upper right corner of the screen. “You have to be kidding,” he was saying just as his mother came in.
“You be nice to your parents,” she said. “There’s Internet on the computer upstairs.”
He blinked at her. “Mom, you are the last people in the country who have to plug into the wall to get online.”
“Your parents are older than you are,” she said, lifting her eyebrows pointedly. “You are the last son in the country to come to this conclusion. We’re even.”
He rose from his chair, pulled his phone from his pocket, and held it up, screen side out. “Half a bar!” he said. “I can’t do anything on half a bar! The Vatican is more wired than this place!”
She laughed. “We’ll have a wireless router installed when we can, dear,” she said. But James, pacing past the kitchen door, had seen his signal suddenly jump, and was hurriedly typing search terms into Safari. There is nothing wrong with the upstairs computer, Emily was thinking defensively as her son’s attention disappeared into the palm-sized glow. The upstairs computer was a Gateway. It had come in a big box with adorable cow spots on the sides.
“He’s twenty minutes away,” said James, quietly but excitedly, not looking up, his grip tightening around the phone in his hand. Emily leaned over her son and looked down; a blue dot throbbed atop a highway map. “He’s literally twenty minutes away.”
“Who is?” said Emily.
“Jeremy Heldt,” he said, in a low tone like a Hollywood priest lapsing into church Latin.
* * *
I wonder what you see in your mind’s eye when I ask you to remember the house in Nevada where Jeremy Heldt used to live. Wood? Brick? Vinyl siding? High windows? A fireplace? Try to remember whether Steve Heldt had a garage to park his car in: Did he? How many cars did it have room for? What kind of cars? Was there a door leading into the house from the garage, as at the Sample house in Crescent, or did the outbuilding stand free, with a little grassy alley between its outer wall and the house’s west-facing side? Did the street out front have a sidewalk, or was it one of those more recent developments, a neighborhood planned to keep the riff-raff out: no public thoroughfare, streetlights kept on all night, awkward traffic islands at the four-way stops? If you’re able to imagine Steve Heldt grown older now, answering the door, do you hear an accent—something homey, something quasi-Southern?
No. There is no identifiable accent here unless you’ve cultivated a very careful ear. This is an easy place to live, milder in feel than Nebraska to the west, negligibly warmer in the winter than Minnesota to the north, of less imagined consequence to the world than Illinois to the east or Missouri to the south. The reason you have a hard time seeing the house is that it was built not to stand out. It went up in 1951, and is brick wi
th small four-square windows made of Pella glass, and there is no garage, because most people back then had only one car, and they parked it in the driveway.
“What can I do for you?” said Steve to the young man now standing on his doorstep, a boy who reminded him of his son in scruffier days, in times gone by; maybe all young men remind aging fathers of how their sons once were, years ago.
“I was looking for Jeremy,” James said, trying to sound natural.
Steve cocked his head and considered his visitor: the shaggy hair, the flash of silver in the left earlobe underneath the curling locks; the too-smart gray summer blazer, linen or seersucker, stuff nobody wears around here. “Probably have to wait until Thanksgiving,” he offered after a moment, smiling. “Who should I say stopped by?”
“Is he all right?” James asked, bluntly, the way people talk where he grew up, and that was when the temperature of the air on the front porch seemed to drop, the two considering each other, spanning a gulf neither could accurately describe.
I wish I could have been there to see it: moments like this were like oxygen for me once. But I had to move on. There’s no going back. I lost all my equipment in the move.
Steve Heldt’s face froze. “As far as I know,” he says, and then: “What’s this about? I hope there’s nothing wrong,” gesturing to the unknown visitor with his free hand and holding the front door open with the other, come in, come in, tell me nothing’s wrong tolling steadily in the privacy of his heart, the younger man fishing now inside the inner pocket of his coat, retrieving from it a thick eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet folded lengthwise, printer stock his mother has on hand for when she plays around with her digital camera in Collins: this printed page bearing the image of a young man in a chair, eyes avoiding the lens, colors badly corrected and gaudy but visibly Jeremy Heldt, young Jeremy as he’d appeared to his friends and family and coworkers over a decade ago.
* * *
James took the Lincoln Highway west from Nevada instead of heading directly back to his parents’ place. He wanted to clear his head, and he felt starved for time to himself. Back at St. John’s, he’d been sharing a dorm room with a computer science major; it was a zero-pressure environment. The discord of finding himself alone in a house with his whole family inside it had been a shock he’d struggled to conceal. Up near the mountains in New Mexico, he sometimes yearned either for their company or for the promise of it, but Collins, however novel, made for close quarters.
Entering Ames, he didn’t feel much of a difference—there was a big city park with a wide stream running through it on one side of the highway, and a few auto shops dotting the other—but then the buildings began to form clusters. It wasn’t Albuquerque, the place he and his friends liked to spend weekends they later wouldn’t remember, but it had an excitement to it all the same. Ames! Who knew anything about Ames, Iowa? But here it was: florists and fast food and four-way intersections where it’d actually make a difference if you ran the red light.
The little downtown was trying to shed some of its quaintness; there was a big abstract steel sculpture on one corner, but across the street stood a statue of an anthropomorphic bird, its cartoon-gloved index finger pointing at the sky: We’re Number One. The surface of the statue was composed of rectangular shards of reflective glass; its glint was blinding. Down in Las Cruces, New Mexico State had a mascot, a mustachioed cowboy pointing a revolver at an unseen aggressor. You saw him everywhere. His name was Pistol Pete, and his aspect was unambiguous. The mirror-shard bird was harder to read.
But the window of the health food store made him homesick for Santa Fe specifically. He could see the blue corn chips and the expensive bottled water from the street. He was a senior now; maybe he’d take a six-pack back to the farmhouse. Have a beer with Dad. Why not?
Inside Wheatsfield Grocery he felt less uprooted than he’d felt since landing in Des Moines. This could have been anywhere: the same Odwalla juices, the same Kettle chips. A hot bar with sautéed kale and grilled pineapple chicken. The guy with the beard at the checkout had a huge scar running from his elbow to his wrist instead of the tattoos he might have had in Santa Fe, but he was still a guy with a beard.
He was quiet, though; he didn’t look up from the scanner while his hands worked, and he didn’t return James’s attempt at making eye contact. When he scanned the beer, he did say “See some ID?”
James offered his student card from St. John’s; the guy with the name tag reading EZRA squinted at it, handed it back, and said: “Need a driver’s license for beer.”
James still had his California license; he fished it out. “Sorry,” he said. Ezra’s quiet had the effect of making James want his approval.
“No, it’s fine,” Ezra said, bagging the groceries. “Lot of students here.”
“You go to ISU?” James said.
“No,” Ezra said, gently laughing, and then he finally looked up; James felt an intense relief. “I’m just a farmer’s kid.”
It was a remark with a soft finality to it: I’m just a farmer’s kid. You’re buying groceries from me at a cooperatively owned and operated store in a university town, but I’m just a farmer’s kid. If someone in West Covina at a Sprouts had said this to James, he would have come back with something really smart and cutting, but there was no guile in Ezra’s voice. Fluorescent light caught the scar on his arm: the suture marks gleamed. They had to be a few years old.
“Well, thanks,” James said. Some people acclimate faster than you think they will. It’s not the easiest rhythm in the world to catch, but its ability to roll wordlessly over the depths has a real appeal.
* * *
“He’s fine, they’re all fine,” James said from the worm-worn desk in front of the upstairs computer; Mom had bought it for twelve dollars at the monthly auction in Colo, where she’d also bought the antique office swivel chair he was sitting in (five dollars; the seat, back, and arms were solid oak, and the springs creaked loudly) and the lamp he was working by (three dollars, with a porcelain base bearing the image in relief of a bending willow, from Taiwan circa 1970).
“How can they be fine?” Abby said. “Did he specifically say everybody was fine?”
“It was his dad,” said James. There was a pop-up window open on the monitor in front of him; the cursor blinked awkwardly, anciently. “His dad said he’s fine, he lives in Des Moines now.”
“Did you ask him about the videos?”
James swiveled; the chair groaned. “I showed him the printout,” he said. “He got scared something had happened and I told him, no, this was on some movie we found in Collins. He asked me inside and I had a beer with him.”
“You did not.”
“It was a Milwaukee’s Best,” said Jeremy with great satisfaction. “‘Want a Beast?’ the guy said when he grabbed it from the fridge. Just like that: ‘Want a Beast?’ It was perfect.”
Abby felt a small, guilty pang of grief for the lurid tableaus she’d drawn up in her head: blood and death, a body buried in the field outside the house. She’d felt so sad for the boy on the tapes, the young man answering questions about his life and his family—specifically about his mother: that long sequence about how she died, and whether she’d lived long after the crash or been killed on impact, and what he and his father had done to make their lives bearable after she’d gone—and then being struck so hard in the face, once, then again, and then a third time, hardest of all, for no immediate reason Ed or Emily or Abby or James could imagine, no matter how many times they replayed the sequence that immediately preceded the attack:—Do you miss her?—Sometimes. Not all the time. At Christmas.
“Did you tell him what you saw?”
“Abs, no,” said James. “You gotta see this guy. He’s not old like Mom and Dad, but he’s at least in his fifties. When he saw the printout I could tell he thought I was going to tell him his son was dead or something, it was horrible. I told him we found some tapes where a lady was talking to his son, asking him questions, and he goes, oh,
yeah, Jeremy used to work at a video store, it was a long time ago. He looked sad.”
Abby waited for something else, but James held his hands up on both sides, elbows bent, palms up.
“I just felt like if his son’s OK now he doesn’t need to hear that a long time ago some bad shit happened to him that he maybe doesn’t know about, you know?” he said. “So I go, yeah, we found these movies that used to belong to him, I guess, we thought he might want to have them back, and then he went to a corkboard in his kitchen and copied out his son’s e-mail address, which is why I’m up here.”
She looked at the screen: Gmail was doing its best to auto-save over the slow connection available to it. James had typed, “Dear Jeremy Heldt,” but that was all.
“What do you even say,” said Abby.
“I know,” said James. “And I was in there, for, like, an hour. It felt pretty empty. There’s pictures of the whole family on the walls in the living room but it definitely feels like the only guy who lives there now is the dad.”
“What do you talk about for an hour with some guy you don’t know alone in his house?”
“I know,” said James again. “Mainly his son, though. How good his son is at his job.”
“That’s weird.”
“It’s not weird, is the thing,” said James. “I mean I know it sounds weird, but it didn’t feel weird. We just sat there and had a Beast, right, and then he started to cheer up, talking about how his son Jeremy kicks ass at his job, how he got this job back when things looked kind of sketchy but it all turned out great and now they don’t even think about how sketchy it was for a little while, because now it’s all just great, you know? And my eyes kept drifting over to that picture of their whole family up there, and I thought, I’m not gonna push this guy, everything needs to be just great for him.”
Abby thought about going back down into the basement for more tapes, to see who else might have been compelled to identify themselves by name; and about then locating those people, trying to ask them what they remembered about something strange they’d done or been asked to do ten or more years ago; and about where they might go from there, what other roads might lie open. She remembered her own mother’s face by the screenlight, that look of worry; Mom loved everyone’s children, her heart was like the sun.
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