by Toni Jensen
Sometimes he takes his medication, and sometimes he does not.
“Call Jennifer,” I say. “She’s just across the hall,” I say. “Hang up right now and go over there or call.”
And he does. She talks to him in her very calm voice, and though he doesn’t last the year at college, he doesn’t hurt anyone that year, including himself.
He’s already home and is already mostly lost to me by the time I get my news—a full scholarship. All I have to do to maintain it is to keep decent grades and to write stories for the school newspaper.
Years later, my last official contribution to that newspaper, the Volante, my last story filed, is the one about the abduction at 1:45 in the morning. None of the other people on the news staff, for various reasons, can take the story, can do the interview with the victim, who they tell me is a former student. I don’t recognize the name, and so I agree.
When she arrives at the newspaper office that day, when she sees me, her knees buckle a little and so do mine. I didn’t recognize her name, of course, because she got married. But there’s no doubt that the woman in my story is Jennifer. I reach out to catch her, and I steady her by the shoulders, and we walk together down the hall like that.
Jennifer is only twenty-three that day, and I’m twenty-two. She is dear to me because she saved the life of the first man I loved. But for any of us to care about this story, we shouldn’t need her to be dear. We shouldn’t need her to have saved a man. We shouldn’t need her to have a baby.
I don’t know much about the story she’ll tell me over the next hour, except for how it ends. She doesn’t know much about my life the past few years, including how the relationship with my boyfriend has ended.
My first year at college, my boyfriend and I try to stay together, but he takes his medication less and less. He calls most nights late, and one night, the phone wakes me from thick sleep, his voice saying, “There are men outside with guns. I don’t know why they’re after me. I don’t.” His voice is like someone being strangled from the inside out, like the warning squeal of a rabbit on the run.
This is the moment when I decide to leave him. Once he’s a little better, I break up with him, but we do still stay in contact. The last time I see him, he’s arrived at school unannounced, is in the parking lot outside my dorm. This time, his voice on the phone sounds less strange, is saying more regular things: “I’m downstairs. Please come down.”
So I do. I cross the icy parking lot and sit with him in his Chevy Impala, and the heater isn’t working, not really, and he has driven the three hours from home to here without much heat. I know all is not okay. His voice does not sound strangled, but he’s speaking flatly and very, very fast.
He’s been to Chicago, he says, and he thinks maybe he killed a man. He thinks, maybe, someone has paid him to do it.
“Do you know what it sounds like when you shoot someone?” he asks. “Not even as loud as a bass drum.”
His voice is calm as he says it, his hands steady on the wheel of the running car. Our breath fogs patches on the inside of the car’s windows like the fake snow people decorate with at Christmastime. It is hard to see out. I sit next to him on the bench seat, though closer to the door than to him. I sit in that car and think of Christmas decorations, of my biology exam the next morning, and his hands beat a rat-a-tat-tat on the wheel.
We stay in the car, not moving, for over an hour. He does most of the talking.
“I just wanted you to know,” he says, and my hand finally awakens and reaches for the door handle’s cold metal.
He pulls from the glove box a newspaper clipping, which rests under a handgun. The Chicago Tribune. What a good paper, I think. I fixate on that detail. I focus. Not the Sun-Times—the Trib. The clipping has been folded a dozen times.
“I just wanted you to know,” he says again, and then I cross the parking lot and put the clipping into a folder in my dorm room, where I sink onto the floor’s cool tile, where I rest awhile, the biology exam forgotten, where I wait for the world to stop spinning, where I wait for everything to right itself.
That day in the newspaper office, when Jennifer asks after him, I tell her he’s at home with his parents. I tell her they are looking after him. This is not the day for telling any of the rest.
I don’t remember too many of the details of what she tells me that day, either. But I remember the last question I ask. Her parents, once they learned the news—that she’d been taken and how—charter a helicopter. As soon as the police call, the parents are in the helicopter on the way to her. So I ask her about this, about the helicopter ride, but I don’t recall her answer. It’s the part of the story that sticks with me, though, because it’s the only part I can’t imagine—what it must have felt like when the helicopter arrived, when her parents swooped in and picked her up, all the pieces of her, what it must have felt like when they came for her, when they came to carry her home.
VIII.
I’m talking to my father, and he reports to me the propane man is there. He’s got his truck turned sideways, and now my father can’t see him anymore, this propane man. He’d better get his shoes on and go check. He’ll call me right back.
I have grown used to this narrative thread, the story ending with “I’ll call you right back,” the waiting for the call that doesn’t come. I no longer wait or have any expectation. This day is no different. He does not call right back. He may or may not remember we’ve spoken. There may or may not have been a propane truck, a propane man.
He has begun a course of treatment, a medication regimen for his Lewy body dementia, and reportedly it’s working. When I ask him about it, in person, he says, “At least I’m not seeing people who aren’t there anymore. Or if I am, I don’t remember.” And then he grins his most winning grin.
I’m glad for this moment though the progress feels tenuous, feels like the same sort of moment as the phone call—“I’ll call you right back”—and then I wait.
We are now, of course, so many of us in America, experiencing this sort of waiting. Though we are beginning to have a national dialogue about mental illness and guns, we are not quite yet beginning to have a national dialogue about dementia and guns. Part of my waiting, then, is worrying.
If it is delicate or tricky to take away an elder’s car keys, it is delicate times a thousand to take away the guns of a man like my father.
In the lucid moments, as with car keys, the person will understand but most likely will not like what is happening. In the less lucid moments, as with car keys, the person will search for the missing guns, will ask after them, will wonder what you’ve done with them, and what is wrong with you? Don’t you know he bought those guns? Don’t you know they’re his?
My stepmother says, when I ask about the guns, “Oh, yes. We did that long ago,” but not all the gun cabinets are empty. So the cabinets, then, tell a different story. I don’t know what to make of the contradiction.
I wait for the day my father will call and report the missing guns like he reports the end-of-the-driveway ghosts. He is missing something. What is it? He is missing something, and can I help him, please? Won’t I help him look? Won’t I?
I am waiting with no answers. I am waiting with no idea how or what I’ll reply.
IX.
It’s a bright summer day, and we sit on my father’s deck, the sky the color of cornflowers, the birds busy at their feeders. I have that fall been to North Dakota, to Standing Rock, where I stayed a little while at the water protector camps, helping sort donations and helping manage and wrangle children.
Someone has told my father about my trip, or, he wonders, did he imagine that.
I tell him he is not imagining things and say only a very little about my time there. It’s my last day in Iowa, and I am looking forward to returning home.
My stepmother says, “You were there?” an
d her eyes grow large. “Oh,” she says, “what was that like?”
“I met a lot of nice people,” I say, which is true if limited.
My father says “North Dakota,” and nods. He and my brother used to visit a friend there sometimes in the fall. “Good pheasant hunting in North Dakota,” he says, “but you probably didn’t shoot a pheasant.”
“I did not,” I say, and then we laugh a little.
I think of the men on Magpie Road, the ones I’d first mistaken for bird hunters, but I put them out of my mind. I think instead of the hawk that flew overhead when I walked the children from the camp to school the first day with Tiffany, who was in charge of some of the camp’s day-to-day. But I don’t say anything about her, nothing further about the camp or birds. My father’s face looks like his mind is moving on to other topics, anyway, or is reaching for something, and I am ready to make my exit.
On the drive home, though, I replay that first morning at camp. After Magpie Road, the men with the gun who I mistook for bird hunters, I do this sometimes—replay the days before, the ones that are good days.
The first morning in camp, a hawk circles over the river. It moves in a way people often mistake for laziness, on a high wind, a thermal, but it really is working toward an economy of motion.
The morning comes, and the children need to be walked to school. The night before, I had arrived into sunset, the exact right time—dinner almost ready in the camp kitchen and ten minutes of light left in which to put up my tent in a good spot near the river.
The river, the Missouri, is why we’re there, all of us, or is part of why. The other part includes the pipeline that threatens the river and that brings the men, who bring violence, who work to make the women disappear, despite their sovereign right, of course, to exist on their own land.
It rained hard the day before, and so walking the children to school involves a dirt or mud road through a field next to the river, involves waiting for the farmer’s cattle to make up their minds. Of the three of them—red-and-white Herefords, a cow and two calves—the cow is the problem. She places her body between the threat and her calves, stamps her hooves in the dirt and shakes her head as if there is a fly. There is no fly, just her worry, just the seven of us as perceived threat.
“Mothers are like that,” I say to Tiffany, who is walking the children to school with me, who is showing me the path, so I can pick them up by myself later in the afternoons.
“Yeah,” Tiffany says. “Except when they aren’t.”
We have already instructed the five children to shush and hold still. By all indications, the cow would like to charge. By all indications, she is making up her mind.
The road is all mud after yesterday’s rain, and one of the children is wearing cowboy boots that now are hard to recognize as what they are.
I nod to Tiffany, and in this moment, I wonder over the boy’s mother. Who sends a boy to camp in cowboy boots? And who are the mothers who get in between their children and danger? And who are the other ones, the “except when they don’t” mothers? And what kind of mother am I to be here instead of at home with my own daughter?
I am well prepared, then, for the conversation we have by ourselves on the return—after the cow decides we aren’t a real, true worry, after we cross the bridge and into the main camp and curve along the path to the school.
I already know these children well enough from the half-hour walk to instruct two of them to behave for their teachers. That I will be getting a report. That I will be delivering a report to their father, who is on the front lines, and are you listening, boys? I will see your father. I will deliver a report. Already they straighten their postures and stop trying to trip each other. Their sisters give me shy smiles before entering the school’s tent. They were quiet on the walk over, but then, their brothers were loud.
On our return, Tiffany and I do talk about our childhoods, about mothers, about men. We talk about her perspective on the violence of the days before I arrived at camp, the private security people who used dogs and bear spray on those at the front line, on men, yes, but also on women and children.
I ask about that, about children on the front line, and she says, when the security arrived, some of the men stayed and some ran. She says, the women ran toward the security detail, toward the dogs, and the children ran after their mothers.
I have no way to verify whether this is fair or true, but it is the news she reports.
“We need more women,” she says.
“Always,” I say. And we walk on.
* * *
—
On the drive home to Arkansas from my father’s house, I replay my conversations with Tiffany and listen to music and replay the conversation some more.
I count nine hawks of varying types and sizes, a good but not an exceptional amount for this mostly rural drive. The last one dives and swoops high over a field, keeping pace a long while with the car, a long enough while that it begins to spook me, to make me question what it is I’m seeing. The hawk is red-brown and large, with long, full tail feathers, and it’s the same size as the one who flew above us in North Dakota that day.
It is just a bird, I tell myself. It’s not a ghost bird. It’s not a ghost of any sort. There’s nothing strange about it. The sky is still blue and mostly cloudless.
If I drive fast enough toward home, I will outrun this bird. If I drive fast enough toward home, I will see my daughter, who waits with her own stories, who waits to tell me all her stories. If I drive fast enough toward home, if I stop counting birds, I will surely outrun all the other ghosts, too. If I drive fast enough, I will surely find my way home.
For my family
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the editors and writers who first published some of these essays in journals, magazines, and anthologies: Beth Staples, Anna Lena Phillips Bell, Michael Ramos, Emily Smith, Cinelle Barnes, Billy Stratton, Elissa Washuta, Theresa Warburton, Hannah Ensor, Natalie Diaz, Nick Almeida, Marie-Helene Bertino, Yuka Igarashi, Clint Crockett Peters, Phong Nguyen, Diana Owen, Layli Long Soldier.
This book was formed in part through the generous gifts of financial support and/or time from the following organizations: Fulbright College at the University of Arkansas, the UCross Foundation, Hedgebrook, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation.
I hold a world of debt and gratitude to and want to thank writers at the following publications whose work I used as source or inspiration. The writers’ names and the publications are cited directly in the essays, but I also salute these publications who employ them: the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Granta, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, the University of South Dakota Volante, the Henderson Gleaner, The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Star Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel.
To my friends, colleagues, first readers, and general supporters, I owe a world of gratitude. Naming you here does not seem sufficient, but I will offer up your names, anyway: Geffrey Davis, Davis McCombs, Rodney Wilhite, Mary Angelino, Raina Lyons, Jane Blunschi, Allison Hammond, Lisa Corrigan, Katy Henriksen, Kelly Hammond, Ana Krahmer, Gail Folkins, Ito Romo, Aaron Rudolph, Dennis Covington, Jill Patterson, Stephen Graham Jones, and all my colleagues and students at all my workplaces—the University of Arkansas and the Institute of American Indian Arts and at Waxwing. All of you inspire me. A good many of these essays were first read at the Institute of American Indian Arts summer and winter residencies, so I also thank those audiences for being such good first listeners. Everything the students write and read there pushes me to be better, as a writer, as a person.
I could not have written this book without the unflagging support of agent extraordinaire Julia Kardon and the equally extraordinary editorial work of Elana Seplow-Jolley and everyone at Ballantine. Special thanks go to Emily Mahon for the beautiful cover des
ign.
Last, I’d like to thank my family, past, present, future, but in particular—Eva and Matt and Bella the dog.
About the Author
TONI JENSEN teaches in the MFA programs at the University of Arkansas and the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is a 2020 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and her work has been published in Orion, Catapult, and Ecotone. She is Métis.
tonijensen.com
Twitter: @ToniJens
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