Donna Has Left the Building

by Susan Jane Gilman

  But, oh: How I had underestimated my own son!

  I regarded Ashley. She was still birdlike in her boniness, but her face was rose-gold from the sun, her arms and calves taut with young muscle. She would be all right. Better than all right, in fact.

  I laughed. “You know, when I was a teenager, I was just sneaking out to get drunk and have sex. You and Austin, you sneak out to help refugees and build playgrounds. That’s not bad. Not bad at all, Ash. Wow.” I sat back. “You’re doing your old man and me one better, that’s for sure.”

  Snorting, she waggled her bandage like a finger puppet. Apropos of nothing, she sang in a falsetto, “I’m all about that bass, no treble.”

  “Really?” I said.

  She began giggling and snorting. “Sorry,” she said, waving her hands. “I’m so tired now, I’m punchy.”

  “Well then,” I said. “Let’s finish out the week here, then get you back to school.”

  But me? What the hell was my next step?

  At four o’clock that morning, I finally gave up on trying to sleep. The village was eerily still, though somewhere, a dog was baying plaintively, and from inside the walls of our studio, I could hear the relentless tick-tick-tick of the water heater. Tiptoeing out onto the balcony, I eased the louvers shut behind me. I took out my phone. The Wi-Fi outside was just strong enough, and I plugged in the cheap earbuds we’d bought in Molyvos. Logging onto Skype, I hit the Call icon. It rang and it rang, but finally that slurpy, digital chime came, and there he was. On-screen. It was the first time we’d seen each other, face to pixelated face, since the afternoon in our kitchen.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey,” said Joey.

  For a moment, we just sat there, regarding each other on our screens. He was in our basement, I saw, in his “man cave” alcove, his face awash in aquatic light, as if he was in one of those old-fashioned, ultraviolet tanning salons they used to have in the fifties. From the little box in the corner of my phone, I, in turn, looked like an inmate again, this time primed for interrogation; the lone porch bulb overhead was merciless, cleaving my face in chiaroscuro.

  “So,” said Joey.

  “So,” I said. With his reading glasses slid halfway down his nose, I couldn’t see if there were any bandages left on it. “You okay?”

  He shrugged. “You?”

  I swallowed. “It’s really intense here, Joey.” I added, “All these people, with their families. Trying to save themselves on these little plastic life rafts. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  He nodded. “Ashley okay? How’s she holding up?” There was a slight delay in the connection, I realized; he seemed to be hesitating more than he probably was. “I appreciate your email updates.”

  “Yeah. Well. With the time difference, it seems the best way.”

  We sat there. We nodded. I kept looking down. He kept glancing away, chewing his lip the way Ashley always did.

  “Is Austin home?” I asked finally.

  He shook his head. “Nah, nah. He’s over at Rodrigo’s. They’re performing their hip-hop Odyssey tomorrow, so.”

  “Hey, how’s that going? Is it any good? Shit,” I said. “I was supposed to help teach him guitar.”

  “Yeah, well, you’ve been busy, Donna.” His voice stung with accusation. He looked at me murderously. Then he added more softly, “I think they cut the guitar anyway. When I heard it, Rodrigo was just doing that thing with his mouth.”

  “Beatboxing?”

  “Yeah. Kid’s pretty good, actually.”

  “Joey, have you noticed them disappearing a lot in the afternoons?”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Austin and Rodrigo?”

  “Ashley told me something,” I said quickly. “It’s not bad. It’s just that apparently, Austin and Rodrigo and some of their friends have been going downtown after school.”

  “Bloomfield—”

  “No, Detroit. Ashley says that they’ve been working on a secret project for months now. They’ve taken an abandoned lot downtown and are converting it into a skateboard park. They’re putting in a half-pipe, a playground. They’re building it all themselves, I guess, but she also said something about them working with Rodrigo’s church?”

  “You’re shitting me.” He leaned back. “Jesus fucking Christ. Any more bombshells this family wants to drop on me? You’re having an affair and doing porno and getting arrested, one kid dropped out of school to run off to fucking Lesbos without telling anyone, to do God knows what with a bunch of Syrian anarchists—and now the other kid is what? Like, an undercover urban developer? Building a secret skateboard park in downtown Detroit? How the hell is he even financing that?”

  “Uh, Kickstarter, I think Ashley said?”

  Joey looked up at the ceiling and opened his beefy arms. “What else, God?”

  I couldn’t help it. I started to laugh.

  Releasing his arms, he let them fall to his sides and shook his head incredulously, though not without an appreciation for the absurdity of it all.

  “They’re good kids, Joey.”

  He ran his hands through his thinning hair and made a scrubbing sound like Brrugguhahuhh. “Yeah,” he said softly. “I know.”

  After a moment, he added, “Better than their parents.”

  “Ha. I told Ashley the same thing,” I said. “I told her that when I was nineteen, hell, I only snuck out to get drunk and have—”

  I stopped. Joey’s eyes bored through the screen straight into me. I looked down at my lap.

  “It’s that same guy, isn’t it?” he said with bitterness. “I recognized the tattoos from your yearbook.”

  “Listen. Those photos, Joey. You were never supposed to see them.”

  “So, are you with him, now? Is this a thing?” His voice cracked.

  I shook my head violently. “No. Not at all. Augh. No. It wasn’t about him, Joey. It was just—fuck. I just wanted, just one more time in my life to be—to feel—young—desired—different. You, of all people, should get this.”

  Slowly, furiously, Joey nodded, his eyes fixed in the middle distance somewhere beyond his screen.

  We were both weeping now.

  “You started this, Joey,” I said. “Not me.”

  He said with vehemence, “I just—every time I think about you in those photos, Donna, I can’t see anything else. I just want to vomit.”

  “Well, how do you think I feel? From the second I saw you in our kitchen with that horrible mistress. Betraying me. Mocking me. What you were doing was bad enough, but who you were doing it as? Are you kidding me? I was nauseated, Joe. I still am. I cannot un-see that, either.”

  “But it wasn’t about you, Donna. Don’t you get that? Zsa-Zsa’s like my alter ego—”

  “Well, what if I dressed up in some hideous parody of a dentist—or a Polish Catholic—Joey, and hired people to playact with me behind your back? And you saw me totally getting off on that?”

  We stared at each other plainly now, at the full shipwreck of us. We sighed and wiped our eyes and each looked away.

  “Would you have still done it,” Joey asked, “if I hadn’t been, you know—”

  Wow: He couldn’t even say it.

  “I don’t think so. Who knows?” I added after a moment. “Maybe.”

  We just sat there. In the background, where he was, I heard a timer go off. Beyond the balcony in Lesvos, the first few birds of morning were starting to sound.

  “Well?” he said. “What do we do now?”

  You’d think that confronting the world’s extremes and tragedies in real time—being among people who were fleeing war and terrorism—who’d had to make the horrific, calculated decision to sail across the Aegean with their children in an overstuffed inflatable boat instead of risk being blown to smithereens in their apartments or machine-gunned down in their streets or sold into sexual slavery by ISIS—you’d think that all of this would somehow mitigate my own petty, quotidian concerns. And yeah, okay, absolutely: Stuff I’d once obsessed
over like outdated kitchen appliances—or the snarky finality of Colleen Lundstedt’s response to me in Memphis (Donna, I believe it’s better to give a “Prodigal Daughter” tough love rather than an “emergency loan.”—So much for “family”)—or whether Mr. Noodles was on the right dosage of meds from his doggie shrink. All of these things just evaporated in their own ridiculousness.

  But they did nothing to mitigate the fact that when I saw my husband over Skype, nervously picking at his cuticles the way he always did, I still had the impulse to reach through the screen and slap his hand away. The world’s crises did nothing to alleviate the intense irritation I knew I’d continue to feel whenever he sang, “Oh, I want a snack” to the tune of “The Blue Danube” while rummaging interminably and noisily through our refrigerator while I was trying to work.

  More to the point, handing out containers of eggplant to shell-shocked refugees on Lesvos did nothing to erase the images in my head of Joey in all of his Pleasure Chest finery, on his hands and knees with his mistress in our kitchen. Global horror could do nothing, in the end, to alleviate the private anguish and betrayal and domestic absurdity of life in suburban Michigan. All these miseries simply coexisted. Comparing my misfortunes to the greater misfortunes of others did not, in the end, relieve the stabbing pain in my gut. Maybe it was just me—maybe I was as weak and bourgeois as my daughter had once accused me of being. Or maybe pain was just pain was just pain.

  Experiencing the world as I was now, though, did make me want to be less careless, less willing to dismiss and discard love so casually.

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t know, Joey,” I said plainly.

  We’d just have to see.

  The next night, several boats came ashore early in the evening. Ashley and I did not witness their arrival. By now, we’d firmly established (okay, barricaded) ourselves in the kitchen, focusing on what we could do without freaking out. But to our great relief, everyone aboard the dinghies arrived dry and intact. Their landings were some of the joyous ones. People cheered and clapped and hugged the Greeks spontaneously. When Kostas and the other café owners lit their fires in the oil drums for people to warm themselves by, another impromptu music session broke out. A volunteer named Igor brought out a tambori from Spain, and two refugees from Senegal, Amadou and Ousman, improvised drums out of overturned buckets. Sam, from Ethiopia, had carried a wooden flute with him over thousands of miles; and two new volunteer girls, Simone and Paula, broke out kazoos. Eleni began singing with Amir. I hurried up to our studio and returned with Aggie.

  You would think I’d find a niche playing guitar right there around the campfires with the other volunteers and travelers (the word “refugees” felt tragic and faceless now). But after I started to pluck out “Leaving on a Jet Plane” anemically (I had, it seems, become a one-hit wonder), the lyrics seemed far too heartbreaking—punishing, in fact, for people who had actually left their loved ones and did not know when they’d be back again—plus, who were we kidding? My playing stank—and so I found myself handing my instrument over to an Argentinian named Francisco. Before he set off to backpack around the world, he’d trained for several years as a classical guitarist in Buenos Aires. Although the Rogue Dreadnought was beneath his skills, he played long, intricate, hauntingly beautiful Spanish ballads and arias. Sometimes he would pause his strumming as he sang, so that his voice was suddenly a cappella, angelic and reedy and otherworldly, lifting up over the metronome of the waves like one thin note of hope. The entire village would stop, transfixed. Then, after letting the plaintive cry hang in the air, he would launch gustily into the opening, definitive bars of “You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hound Dog,” and perform a truly spirited/ridiculous impression of Elvis Presley. He could seemingly play anything, and the little children loved him, hanging over his lanky shoulders, tugging at his beard, begging for more.

  As the evening wound down, he handed me back the guitar. “Muchas gracias, señora,” he said and bowed.

  I waved my hands in refusal. “No. Keep it.”

  “Oh, no, no,” he said. “I couldn’t possibly.”

  “You have to. Trust me. It’s yours.”

  “Aw, Mom,” Ashley said as we climbed back up the hill together. “I can’t believe you just gave him Aggie.”

  “I only owned it a couple of weeks, Ash. It’s not exactly an heirloom.” I snorted. “Besides, the last thing I want to be is some middle-aged woman talking to her guitar case.”

  I did find myself, though, wanting to stay on in Lesvos. But I was not naive. Nor independently wealthy. Yeah, Skala Sikamineas was cheaper than the US, but I was a forty-five-year-old with a mortgage, and monthly health insurance premiums that cost more than my first car, and one kid in college and another on his way, and Joey and I had to pay back Arjul. And the stupid doggie shrink—and now whatever medical expenses Joey had run up beyond our insurance—thanks to his being on the wrong end of my spatula— Well, I supposed, whose fault was that? And depending on whatever happened to our marriage? Certainly, if nothing else, we needed both money and time.

  In my punk-rock heart, there also lurked a cynic who bristled at using volunteer work abroad as any sort of solution for a midlife crisis.

  Surely, I knew better than that.

  Detroit itself had soup kitchens. And homeless shelters—and God knew, I now had an intimate, Yelp reviewer’s knowledge about what might best serve them. All those ghost gardens on abandoned estates: Maybe I could team up with Austin to convert them into more playgrounds for children (though I suspected he’d be even more mortified by the prospect of this than of playing my Stratocaster: M-o-o-om!). Or, I could just get off my high horse and help other alkies like myself for a change.

  Who the hell knew? There was more than enough to do back home.

  Though at the moment, I was certainly needed right there in Greece; I was part of the Kitchen Chorus, a member of the Trash Band. After taking Ashley to get her passport replaced, I could stay on just a little longer, couldn’t I?

  Emailing Joey, I asked him to investigate what I’d need to do to cash out part of my Privileged Kitchen 401(k). There would be penalties and paperwork, no doubt—blah, blah—but I wanted to explore the options I might be lucky enough to still have. It didn’t matter whether Brenda was Nostradamus or not: She was right. The world needed much more than some white lady driving around in her Subaru ruminating over a lost love based on a tarot card.

  Time to roll up my sleeves and get the fuck down to work.

  And so I did. The next morning, Ashley and I cleaned up the town square together, methodically picking up debris from the night before. Crushed aluminum cans caught the morning light like prisms. Colored candy wrappers and shoelaces and bits of torn clothing confettied the water’s edge almost prettily: You just shouldn’t look too closely. It was high tide, and the waves came up almost to the road. A handful of young Afghan teenagers, desperate to have something to do, were helping as well, shoving one another and laughing as they scooped up empty water bottles. We paced up and down the flagstones, filling our garbage bags piece by piece. The life jackets, we piled in one heap by the stone wall.

  The breeze had picked up. It ruched the cobalt water, sunlight darting over it like quicksilver. I closed my eyes and inhaled. I could smell that wonderful briny scent of the sea, mixed with eucalyptus and rosemary.

  Suddenly, the proprietor dashed down the hotel steps right past us, a pair of binoculars bouncing against his chest, shouting to his neighbors in Greek. I heard a growl and sputter of engines, then saw the fisherman Georges starting his boat. A woman and her son emerged from the mini-mart, also shouting, carrying cases of bottled water.

  At the far end of the pier, Kostas and his son, Alex, were heaving up an anchor. Volunteers ran toward them holding armfuls of salvaged life vests.

  Philippe, Dagmar, and Amir were getting into position at different points along the seawall, peering through binoculars.

  “How many?” Philippe called.
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  “Three, but I cannot be certain!” said Amir.

  “Is the coast guard there?”

  Selena came up behind us, accompanied by three Middle Eastern teenagers. “I found some translators,” she panted, pressing her hands to her knees as she tried to catch her breath.

  “Hello,” one of the young men said. “You need translator for Arabic, my friend? My name is Ahmed. I tell my father to come as well. Last night, he rescues five people on our boat with us.”

  “Is your father a lifeguard?” I said.

  “No, he is electrical engineer.”

  Two other boys appeared. “Ma’ Salaam. I am Omar, and this is my brother, Mustafa. We can speak Farsi, Dari, and Pashto.”

  “Okay.” Selena glanced around, assessing. “Plus, we’ve got French, Spanish, German, English, Portuguese, Wolof, and Greek. That better do it.”

  I heard the pulse and chug of an engine, men shouting across the water. Other men began running. The flagstone pier hooked around the port. In the curve of it was a rocky outcropping. Perched atop this was a tiny white stucco church—the village’s famous Temple of the Mermaid—a singular outpost and beacon above the sea.

  “Ashley,” I said. We grabbed each other’s hands. Emerging from behind the temple now like a magnificent bird, like a resplendent parade float, a sky-blue fishing boat came into view on the water towing a large inflatable raft crammed with passengers, women and men and children bundled into orange life vests and thick scarves, sitting stock-still, their arms rigid against the ballast, seemingly too terrified to move or even breathe for fear of upsetting the boat.

  As soon as they saw the waiting marina, however, the children on the dinghy began to cheer and shout and point, and a few adults started applauding, and one of them, a middle-aged man upholstered in a navy-blue life vest, forgot himself; overcome with relief and joy, he half stood, shouting to the sky, “Allah Akbar!” For a few heart-stopping seconds, the entire boat lurched back and forth, and a collective scream went up from the passengers and witnesses alike as the boat tilted and a bundle bandaged in plastic tumbled off it and it slid into the sea.