Mary Coin

by Marisa Silver

  “Go ahead.”

  “Can I trust you with my car?”

  She saw his teasing smile.

  “You’d better take your keys,” she said.

  She turned her attention back to the house. She had always thought Charlie had taken her on that midnight tour in order to show her how much better a life he could offer their baby. Now, so many decades later, she wondered if she had been wrong, and if he had only been trying to show her something of himself and let her know that she had relieved his loneliness for a time, and that he was grateful.

  The door of the big house opened. A teenage boy ran out. He collected a bicycle from where it lay on the lawn and swung his leg over the seat. A man appeared at the door just as the boy pushed off and pedaled down the driveway.

  “Walker Dodge! Get back here right now!” the man called out.

  The boy reached the end of the drive and raced away.

  The taxi driver returned and got into the car, saying something about that boy needing to be careful, but Mary didn’t hear him. Her heart was beating too fast, and the rush of blood made her deaf. The man stood by the house looking in the direction the boy had gone. His gaze then settled on the cab. He stood too far away for Mary to make out his face. He began to walk toward the car.

  “Please,” Mary said urgently to the driver. “Take me back. Take me back to—” But she had forgotten where she had come from. “Please!”

  The driver put the car in gear and drove away.

  35.

  The San Francisco bus station was nearly empty. A woman stood at the ticket counter. A man wrapped in layers of coats slept on a bench. A poster advertising a runaway hotline showed a glum teenager sitting on a garbage-strewn curb. Mary walked into the gray drizzle of the afternoon. She saw a hotel across the street, but the men lounging in the doorway told her what sort of place it was. She had wasted so much money on that taxi ride to the house and the extra bus ticket, but what use did she have for her money anymore? She got into a waiting cab and told the driver to take her someplace clean.

  All night long she lay on her hotel bed, not bothering to remove the spread. She dozed on and off. Every time she woke, she did so with a start, as if she had missed something crucial. She listened to the sound of nighttime delivery trucks on the street, to the crunch and grind of the ice machine in the hallway. She did not think the word sick could describe what she was feeling. It was more the sensation of her body shrugging itself off like a coat. How much longer would she be able to perform the particular sleight of hand that convinced everyone and even herself that this body and these thoughts added up to a particular person named Mary Coin? That was what living was, after all. A trick played on fate for as long as you could pull it off. She was in a hotel for only the second time in her life, and for the second time she did not know who she was.

  In the morning, she showered and put on her dress and her white shoes. She sat on the bed and opened her purse, taking out an envelope that was wrinkled and soft. She’d carried the letter with her for nearly twenty years.

  Dear Mrs. Coin,

  There is a sense you get when you have taken the right photograph. It is a feeling that you have lived that second of your life more completely than any other. The moment opens, and you realize how much larger your life is than you thought it was, how much closer to a kind of . . . is it happiness? I don’t know.

  I saw you and I recognized you the way you recognize people in your dreams even if you don’t know who they are. That’s all a photograph is, really. A recognition.

  Very sincerely, and with great sadness for the end of things.

  Forgive me,

  Vera Dare

  Mary tucked the letter into the envelope and put the envelope back in her purse. She washed out the bathroom sink and dried it with a bit of tissue then straightened the bedcover so it appeared as if no one had been there at all.

  36.

  At first she thought someone had released a flock of birds into the room. The museum gallery whispered with the sound of wings and flight, and she thought of the starlings wheeling through the flat Oklahoma sky, a solid flag of them waving in the currents of a wind. Was that sixty years ago? More? She knew her death was near because time had begun to fold like a fan so that the past and the present rubbed together in ways that made her feel supple and porous, as if time were moving through her body and not the other way around. She clutched her purse to her chest, her palm sweating against the leather. In her other hand she carried the wrinkled bag filled with her travel clothes and the red hat. Her feet ached in the pumps. The pain in her abdomen told her that she was not going to be able to outrun herself for much longer.

  There were no birds, of course, only the hush of voices and the soft rustle of feet as museum visitors shuffled past the photographs. The gallery was crowded, and people jostled one another to get closer to the images. They crossed their arms over their chests as they studied the work, their faces set grimly as if they were standing in their doorways listening to someone trying to sell them religion. The crowd circulated in one direction, and Mary let herself be moved along at its slow pace. She stopped in front of a picture of a young girl standing by a barbed-wire fence. In the background, a woman—the girl’s mother, Mary supposed—stood with her hand to her brow to shield herself from the sun’s glare. She looked sad, or maybe that was just the set of her face; some people had a mournful look to them. Or perhaps the mother was watching the photographer, wondering why she wanted to take her girl’s picture. But she could have been looking at something else, maybe another child she had to keep her eye on or a neighbor who was coming over to see what was happening. Mary looked at another picture, of four men picking lettuce. If you didn’t know what it felt like to be bent in two for ten hours a day, you might think it was a pretty picture because a field of ripened harvest is pleasing, the way the rows lie out evenly and because it reminds you of full stomachs and good rains. In the next photograph, a man stood knee-deep in a truckload of cotton pickings that looked soft as a feather bed but which she knew were filled with burs that would draw blood if your arms and legs weren’t covered. She paused before more photographs: a man holding a baby outside a shack made of bits and pieces; a boy standing in the doorway of a tobacco barn; a couple in the middle of a terrible argument.

  The accretion of images in the gallery operated on her like too much noise, and for a moment she forgot why she had come all this way, why she had ridden a dirty bus that smelled of cramped sleep and useless disinfectants, why she had paid to stay in a hotel that was supposed to be clean but where a curl of someone’s pubic hair greeted her when she went to take her morning shower. She could not faint. She would not. Someone would look in her purse and find her wallet. Another person would make the connection. Some eager reporter would write about it in the newspaper. And how would she look then? She reached to steady herself against a wall, but a guard shot her a look. She found a tissue in her purse and dabbed at her forehead and along the sides of her nose. It was too much, being in this big room filled with all these trapped people, the ones in the photographs and the ones revolving slowly like fish in an aquarium.

  A child cried out. Mary turned toward the sound, and there, across the room, hung the familiar charcoal-gray shapes of the image that shadowed her life. Time collapsed again, and she was on the side of the road with her children, exhausted from pitching the tent, knowing that it could be hours before Earl came back with the repaired radiator so they could move on from that place. She was a stocky old woman in a museum in 1982. She weighed a hundred pounds, if that, a half century earlier, watching as a lady with a limp got out of a car and asked to take her picture. She walked across the gallery and stood in front of the photograph. She remembered her children’s haircuts. Just the day before, she’d taken a scissors and snipped straight across. She was pleased by the way the bobs framed their small faces. And there was the baby in her arms. Her George
. Sometimes, even all these years later, she could still feel that heaviness. A watermelon might do it, or a load of clothes warm from the dryer.

  She did not know what was in the minds of the people in the other pictures hanging in the gallery, but she knew exactly what she had been thinking when that picture had been taken: she had been asking herself a question, the same one she’d been asking every day since. Whenever she thought she knew the answer, she also realized that she didn’t. Six times she heard the click of the camera. And each time the woman drew closer, Mary had the same feeling she had when her mother caught her in a lie. You didn’t wash out the sheets. Yes, I did. Then why are they still dirty? They fell off the line. They fell off the line and rolled around in the dirt? It was windy. Lies to cover lies, until she was cornered and there was nothing left but to submit to the back of her mother’s hand. It was useless to lie to herself any longer. She could not manage with seven children and no real husband and no work. She could not keep this very sick child alive without medicine. George let out a wretched howl. Mary felt his burning forehead and saw his misery.

  The photographer went back to her car and started the engine. The wheels gained traction in the mud and she drove away. Mary imagined what would happen: They would drive back to Porter. She would go to the house during the day, when Charlie was likely to be out on the farm, so that she would not have to face him. Alma would answer the door. The girl would be confused, but all Mary would need to do to make her understand was to hold the baby toward her. Alma’s arms would go up automatically the way any woman’s arms would, no matter if it was her child or not, because holding was a woman’s purpose. And as soon as Alma felt the heat coming off George’s little body, as soon as she saw his glassy eyes and his parched lips, she would understand. Mary imagined George grown into a boy. She saw him running through those wonderful rooms Charlie had shown her that night, his keen eyes and bright laughter making it impossible for the Dodge family not to love him as one of their own.

  In fact, Alma did answer the door, but as soon as she saw Mary she went back into the house. After a few minutes, an older man appeared. “I’m Theodore Dodge,” he said. He stared at her with contempt. “If you’re after money, you can leave.”

  Events were unfolding so differently from how Mary had planned. She hadn’t thought she would have to explain herself.

  “Please,” she said. “Take him.”

  “I don’t—”

  “He’s sick,” she said, interrupting. “He’s so sick.”

  The man looked down at the baby. His expression shifted imperceptibly.

  “I’m begging you,” she said. “He’s your grandson. Please have mercy on him.”

  He said nothing, only turned and walked back into the house, leaving Mary standing at the door. She waited, unsure if she had been dismissed or if the open door was an invitation. Finally, he returned with Alma. She took George from Mary’s arms. “Lo siento,” she whispered.

  “We will never see you again,” Theodore Dodge said to Mary.

  “Never,” she said weakly.

  The door closed. Mary hadn’t expected it to happen so fast. She hadn’t been ready.

  A couple stepped up to the photograph. “She reminds me of someone,” the man said.

  “Who?” the woman said.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe no one. Maybe I’ve just seen this so many times I feel like I know her.”

  “She looks so . . . so . . .”

  So what?

  A teenager said, “We learned about that picture!” rushing toward it with excitement, as if she were meeting someone at the train station. But as she stared at the photograph, her expression grew vacant, as if she could not think of what to say next, her eagerness snuffed out by the dullness of familiarity.

  “You can see it all in her face,” someone else said.

  What all? What do you see? She was a ghost in the room. She looked at the other ghosts in the photographs lining the walls—the farmer with dirt on his cheeks, the woman posing next to her car. None of them had known that one day they would be hanging in this museum, a single moment of their lives frozen into an indelible past like an insult you can never take back.

  Mary turned again to face the picture and saw her reflection in the glass. There they were. Two women named Mary Coin. If they met on the street in the high heat of a summer’s afternoon, they would be polite in the old-fashioned way to show they meant each other no harm. “Hello,” they would say in passing. “My, but isn’t it a wretched day?”

  Walker

  37.

  San Francisco, California, 2011

  It is a clear November day, and Walker is having trouble staying put for the remaining time left of his office hours. More students than usual have come to see him because today is the filing deadline for the senior thesis proposals. Alice will arrive soon. They are going to see a rerun of what she claims is one of the great films of the twenty-first century: Wet Hot American Summer.

  She has been living with him since the beginning of the school year. She hates her mother, she says. She hates Harry. She hates Walker, too, only a little less than everyone and everything else. Lisette is unhappy about the new state of affairs, but she is also worn down by Alice and is relieved to have a break. Walker is grateful that in her fury, Alice has chosen him. He has enrolled her in a city school where she is repeating the eleventh grade. She goes to rehab. He tests her urine once a week, and she is not allowed to hang out with her friends at night. She and Walker eat takeout and listen to music. She shows him funny videos on YouTube.

  He continues to read through his students’ proposals. The work is serious and eager. The seniors have taken his introductory class and followed up with courses in narrative nonfiction and methodology. Their undertakings are all versions, in one way or another, of his work, and he is flattered by how much they believe in him and his endeavors.

  Over the last few months, he has pursued a project of his own, constructing an imagined narrative of intersecting lives—his and Mary Coin’s. He wonders if he is really looking to find the truth, or if he is only trying to find a way to confront his unexpected sorrow at his father’s passing, and his guilt about his children, and the essential loneliness he feels each day. In each case he has failed. He can no more prove that Mary Coin was his grandmother than he can repair himself. He hears his father’s voice in his head: What good is history?

  He turns to his computer and pulls up the photographs he took the previous year of the kids on the fishing trip—Isaac recoiling from a flapping trout, Alice caught in a private moment thinking about Walker knows not what. He resisted digital photography for a long time, knowing that once there were no paper photographs, there would be no dusty albums hidden in attics for someone like him to discover. But every age deserves its fashion and its forms, and no one can control what survives.

  He scrolls back to the beginning of the file and studies the pictures of Alice when she was five and Isaac when he was two. He has an urge to see them younger, and so he finds the box of old photos he brought to the office intending to scan them. They have sat under his desk untouched for two years. He sorts through the disorganized clutter of images, looking at newborn Alice and Isaac held up for the camera, his or Lisette’s hands clutching their tiny torsos. At six months old, Alice’s sharp worry is already etched into her expression. And there is sweet Isaac, his gaze limpid and trusting, open to the world. Walker imagines that he can see his children’s characters in their earliest photographs, and this alleviates the guilt he bears knowing that the divorce was a terrible blow to them and that his absences were small, repeated wounds. But he knows he could be deceiving himself. What if their faces are those of any children vulnerable to parental whim? If Alice and Isaac had been raised by another, happier couple, would they be better off now or just differently harmed?

  Emily Muller, an ambitious senior, taps on his open door.
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  “Hi, Professor Dodge?” she says. He hears the upswing at the end of the sentence, the strange combination of parent-inflicted overconfidence and global uncertainty he notices in his students.

  “Hello, Emily,” he says.

  “Just wondering if you’d gotten to mine yet.”

  He shuffles through the proposals, finds hers, hands it across the desk. She looks at it, bouncing on her toes a few times as if she cannot contain her anticipation.

  “So you liked it?”

  “It will be fine.”

  “I think I can uncover something really interesting. Something truthful.”

  “Something truthful?” he says. He looks at the pile of student papers on his desk. He wonders if he has led them all astray.

  “I’m not going to predetermine anything. I’m going to let the evidence lead me,” she says hesitantly. “Like you said.”

  Alice blasts into the office with her typical disregard for what she might be interrupting. She has dreadlocked her hair and dyed some of the knotty hanks purple. She wears combat boots and shorts. He is so happy to see her. She drops a package on his desk.

  “The lady at the front said to give this to you.”

  “The ‘lady’ is Mrs. Elliot,” he says of the secretary who is a whiff of old-world San Francisco propriety in a department filled with sloppy, self-aggrandizing academics.

  “I guess I’ll go?” Emily says.

  He looks from his brazen daughter to the fearful Emily. He knows he has done her a disservice. “I’m very interested in your project, Emily,” he says. “I look forward to seeing what you come up with.” She backs out the door, looking pained.

  “What’s her problem?” Alice says.

  “A surfeit of faith in her teacher,” he says.

  Alice looks at him quizzically. “Are you high?”