“So why am I wasting my time?” Jenna said.
“That’s my girl. Speaking of dogs—you know Johnny’s coming back? For the wedding?”
“I didn’t know for sure. But I wondered. I —”
“Hoped?”
“Yeah.”
“I know it was a tough time. When Johnny left five years ago. I know he never really had a chance to say goodbye.”
“I was so . . .” Abandoned? Devastated? Pissed? There wasn’t an adequate word for it. But none of that mattered anymore.
“He didn’t have a choice. Okay? I can’t say why, but trust me on this. It couldn’t be helped. You don’t need me to tell you it was a crazy time. Getting out of town hurt him just as bad as it hurt you. Understand?”
“Not really.”
“Look. Might not have always seemed like it, I know, but I liked you and my baby brother together. I really did.”
“Did you?”
“Yeah,” she said and popped a piece of bacon into her mouth. “He always said you drove him crazy, but it’s the opposite that’s true. He was crazy without you.”
Jenna didn’t know what to say, so she doodled a heart on her notepad until it was a black blob.
“And you were loyal,” Talia said. “Even now, you’re loyal. Nothing’s more important, in my book.”
Ten minutes later, when Jenna returned with the check, she found the booth empty, the plate clean of everything but a smear of ketchup, and ten hundred-dollar bills stacked neatly beneath the coffee mug.
* * *
And now her husband is gone. Has been for over a week. Was she being naive when she contacted Talia, like the child who reaches impulsively for a flower and then cries when she realizes that once plucked, it will die? Or was she in fact cleverer and crueler than that? Didn’t she expect something like this would happen? Was it possible not to know yourself?
The past few years, her life felt like it had perimeters. The chain-link fence around their yard might as well have been a symbol of her marriage—a rusty, humble boundary. She was only going to go so far.
But now? She had lifted the latch on her own. And there was a sudden sense of openness that scared the hell out of her. But she’d take being scared over being bored and sad. She couldn’t change her history, but she could alter the direction of her future.
Of course the feeling doesn’t last. The country music and the ugly laughter across the street continue through the night, and Timmy eventually joins her in bed and what little sleep they get is restless. The next morning, the sun shines too brightly and aches her eyes and washes out any hopefulness she might have felt. Timmy crawls on top of her and says, “I’m hungry. I miss Daddy. When is Daddy coming home? Can I have breakfast?”
She lives on a shit house on a shit street and has a shit job and her shit husband might very well be dead because of her. She considers, for the hundredth time, texting Talia but can’t bring herself to ask if Dan’s dead, if she killed him. It’s better and it’s worse, the not knowing. She opens the fridge and stares into it for a long time. There is nothing to be found but condiments, pickles, and a moldy rind of cheese.
Timmy is still in his pajamas when she drives him to the Pamida and plunks him into the cart and rattles up and down the aisles and grabs whatever catches her eye. Spaghetti. Bologna. Bananas. Cheerios. Hi-C. She doesn’t have a list. She doesn’t have a plan. She just has an empty fridge and a hungry kid.
At the register, she rolls the cart in backward and hands Timmy the groceries. He fumbles them onto the black conveyor belt and smiles proudly when the woman working the register calls him a big boy. The total is over a hundred dollars and Jenna says, “Okay,” and reaches for her purse and only then realizes she’s forgotten it. “Oh no,” she says. “I’m so damn sorry. I —”
“No swears, Mommy.”
A line has formed behind her and everyone in it is staring at her. So is the woman at the register, whose hand has paused inside the paper bag she’s packing. Muzak plays from the loudspeakers. Timmy grabs her shirtsleeve and says, “What’s the matter?”
“I don’t have . . .” She keeps patting her pockets, as if the purse might magically be stuffed inside them. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
Timmy starts to cry as soon as she rips him out of the cart—and continues crying the whole way home. “I want my Cheerios,” he says between big hiccupping breaths. “I’m hungry and I want them.” The wailing force makes every muscle in her body tighten. She tries to distract him with the radio, but that only makes him cry harder. Then she reverts to the shh-shh breathing that helped him fall asleep as a baby.
She pulls into the driveway and says, “Wait here. Mommy will be right back,” but Timmy screams, “No! No, don’t leave me!”
So she fumbles with his seat belt and carries him inside and his crying is in her ear, so high and watery that she feels like she’s drowning and can barely breathe. She plops him on the couch and hunts through the whole house twice and finally locates her purse hanging from the inside of the bathroom door, of all places. “Got it!” she says. “I’m just going to pee and then we can go back and get your Cheerios!”
She flushes and washes her hands and scoops up Timmy and heads out the door and nearly stumbles. Because there, on the porch, humped together, are the groceries.
Immediately Timmy stops crying and says, “Cheerios! Yay!” He squirms out of her arms and rummages the box of cereal from the bag and hugs it to his chest. “My Cheerios!”
“But who —” she says and looks up and down the street. A familiar black Bronco turns the corner and flashes out of sight. “Johnny?”
Why did he leave? Why is he always leaving her?
20
* * *
Five years ago . . .
* * *
Hawkin wandered off mindlessly into the night with metal coursing through his veins. Inside the house, his father lay sprawled on the kitchen floor, dead in a puddle of his own blood, while his mother sat upright against the dishwasher, gutshot, paralyzed, fluttering in and out of consciousness.
There were no clouds, but lightning veined the air, a constant strobing from the charged particulates moving through the atmosphere. Imagine an ocean full of bioluminescent jellyfish, the waves violent and shifting by the half-second, and you’ll have some sense of the sky that night. Meteors still fell, but fewer of them now. A hot wind blew. Thunder boomed, and it was like a memory, an after-song of what had come before, when the ground shook from the constant cratering.
At Gunderson Woods, the land was puddled and coated with liquid metal that reflected the lightning. Sirens wailed in the distance. A utility pole along the highway toppled with a splintering crash, and the downed lines sizzled and spat on the asphalt. Somewhere in the dark, an animal cried out plaintively.
Compared to what had happened earlier, it was a quiet time. A time of confused recovery and bruised stillness.
Until, out of the melted pool of omnimetal in the backyard, something burst forth. Featureless and smeared, like clay being shaped. Like a sloppy melting snowman with no coal buttons or carrot nose or stick arms. A gray shadow. A golem. A nothing.
His name was Johnny Frontier, but he didn’t know that then. He wouldn’t be capable of any cogent thought for some time. He understood only pain. He touched himself hurriedly all over, trying to make himself familiar. And then he ran wildly into the night. It was an unthinking movement, like pulling a hand away from a fire. But it was more than fear that propelled him. It was the energy of the strike woven into the very fiber of his muscles, the spark of his neurotransmitters. A kinetic throttle.
Talia didn’t find him for another day. He was curled up in a ball in his closet. Shivering and reeking of sulfur. Hairless. His eyes a wicked blue. Almost unrecognizable except for his tattoos and the birthmark on his cheek. “Jesus, Johnny—we thought you were dead.” When she touched him, she hissed; the blisters were already rising from her skin. “
You’re hot. You’re blazing hot.” The carpet beneath him was scorched in his shape. “What’s happened?”
That was the question everyone was asking. In St. Louis County, cell service wasn’t operational. The power grid had gone dark. Hundreds had died and hundreds more had gone missing. News choppers wasped the air. The National Guard rolled into town in their hazmat suits and promptly quarantined the region. The governor and then the president declared northern Minnesota a disaster area.
It wasn’t the apocalypse, but it was a taste of it. The cumulative energy released by the meteors at the blast site was estimated as equivalent to three Hiroshimas, although diffused by the impact timeline and a hazard zone of some seven thousand square miles.
Slowly Johnny crawled out of the closet. And with every shaking inch he dragged himself forward, Talia retreated. She was not one to flinch from anything, but this was beyond her. “What happened?” she kept saying. “What happened to you?” The air was still hazed with smoke, and through the window, the sun burned red and burnished the room with its light. If he could have spoken, he would have said, I have been punished.
* * *
Talia did her best to nurse him, though not without doing a good deal of complaining. “If you think you’re going to owe me up your ass for this,” she said, “you’re right.” She moved him to the wine cellar, made his bed among the rows of Bordeaux and California cabs and Willamette Valley pinots, checked on him several times a day, and learned not to say, “That’s impossible,” when islands of silver seemed to drift across his skin or when the syringe of diamorphine broke against his vein or when seizures sent a kinetic wave off him that zigzagged a crack through the concrete floor and collapsed a rack of zinfandels that shattered into a purple-red puddle. Anything was possible, she was coming to realize.
He sometimes shouted in his sleep, nonsense about eyes and tentacles and doorways. She wasn’t sure if he was going through withdrawal from the booze and the pills or if something else was speaking darkly through him. Something that came from the sky, a poisoned frequency that inhabited him, along with the metal. When she asked him about it later, he looked at her with a blank expression.
It wasn’t difficult to hide him. He had already become something of a ghost in their lives. The estate was large, and the people who lived there were all otherwise occupied. Nico was in Taos, participating in a New Age workshop that focused on crystals and vortices and chakras, his latest obsession, after his yoga phase and then his painting phase and then his poetry phase and then his sculpture phase. He always had to have a thing. Some crutch to hold him up. And Yesno had not so much as sat down for a meal because their father needed him.
It was Ragnar who toured the devastation and shook hands with affected families and spoke to the press about strength and hope and endurance. He was there long before the governor arrived. Long before FEMA and the Red Cross set up their emergency stations. He immediately rented every hotel in Northfall and the outlying communities and offered up the rooms to those in need. He paid for the catering services that supplied bottled water and three squares a day at the high-school gymnasium.
Because cell service was mostly unavailable, Yesno worked off a satellite phone. He arranged for three geologists to fly in immediately and give him a profile of the alien metal. He determined the global reach of the meteor shower. He wanted to know whether their debris field was indeed unique. He assessed the standard and projected value of the alien matter. His voice went hoarse and his ear and shoulder ached at the end of every day.
The Frontiers presented a charitable front, but their ultimate concern was Northfall and the market. To protect the town, they had to own it. Otherwise Ragnar would be like a board president with a minority share, soon to be ousted by the prospectors and investors who would come their way. He understood what would happen before anyone else did. Where others saw destruction, he saw rebirth. The economy here had long ago bottomed out. This was the most dramatic course correction imaginable.
It was possible, Ragnar told people, that State Farm and Allstate would pay for damaged property. But what had even happened? Would it be considered an act of God? Was this sort of devastation in the fine print of any contract? Was it an incalculable loss? And then there was the fallibility of the payout. With Yesno whispering in his ear, Ragnar cited numbers from the floods in New Orleans and Houston, the fires in California—the family who, two years later, still couldn’t return to their mold-ridden home and who received only forty-one thousand in compensation. The three-hundred-thousand-dollar homeowner’s policy that called for a sliding deductible of thirty thousand. The rise in rates that would inevitably follow, sometimes resulting in a quadrupling of yearly costs. That’s what might happen. Or?
Or they could take the money he was offering: the estimated market value on their property—calculated with absolutely no regard for the destruction that had taken place—plus 15 percent. A fair price. More than fair. When asked by the Star Trib about his land grab, Ragnar said, “This area has already been devastated by the declining logging and mining industries. These people can’t afford to wait around for help. I want to see them taken care of.”
But when he spoke privately to Yesno, he said, “The world is always moving faster and faster. How do we keep pace? How do we anticipate today what will dominate tomorrow? We study history for clues. And the winners in history have proven, time and time again, that land is power, whether it’s a restaurant sited on a busy street or the army positioned on a steep-cliffed island or pumps built over an ocean of oil. Economic power and military power and political power are based on geography. And we’ve got it.”
Weeks passed. The quarantine ended. The rebuilding began. By this time Frontier Metals had quintupled its property holdings and Ragnar was already looking to invest in infrastructure: Water and sewer. Roads. Cell towers. Fiber-optic cable. An expanded electrical grid. Even the railway that would become the Bullet. The money wasn’t flowing yet, but it would. And he understood it would flow more freely with a pipeline to accommodate it. He had always believed in the potential of Northfall—the future of this region—and now, by his hand, it would be realized.
To John this felt all too familiar, like some echo of what followed his mother’s death. Everything was on fire, and he was consumed by inexpressible pain and facing an uncertain future, but rather than acknowledge that his son and his family might need help, Ragnar locked himself in his office and pursued his work.
Johnny had once heard his father say—in a dedication speech given at a high-school sports complex he funded—that there were five plays that determined the fate of a football game. They could happen at any point in the two halves, but those five critical plays added up to a victory or loss. He wished the players of Northfall High the very best on game day, but more than that, he hoped that they would recognize that the truths of the football field were universal. “There might be five moments that determine the fate of a life. Will you be ready to seize them when they come?” His eyes settled on John in the audience then, and when everyone stood up and clapped, he remained seated. The words that had felt like an insult then—implying squandered opportunity—resonated now.
His hair was growing back, his whole body stubbled. He would develop twitches—a blinky eyelid, a jerky elbow—but they were short-lived. He ate alone. He refused to answer any calls. Jenna came to the house every day, and every day he had her turned away. When he wasn’t in his bedroom staring at the wall, he was tromping through the woods on long hikes. He needed silence. He needed to think.
Until he didn’t anymore. Down by the lake, there was a warming shed for skating and a wood-burning sauna. Their whole lives, their father had used it once a week and claimed it was good for circulation and mental health. He often held family meetings down there. He said it was a good place to be honest. “When you’re naked, there’s nothing to hide.”
In that same spirit, Johnny invited Talia for a sauna. They alternated fifteen minutes sweating in
the cedar shed and then ten minutes swimming in the cool water outside. Talia fed more wood into the stove and the temperature clicked up to one seventy. They were dripping sweat and sitting on opposite ends of the L-shaped bench when—in a slow, measured voice—he told her everything. The events leading up to that night, and what he had done. The two-day bender. The ten-hour poker game. The hot streak that became a losing streak. His pockets were turned inside out but he wanted to keep betting and the men at the table wanted to keep betting, but they needed a promise. Collateral. “I shouldn’t have done it,” Johnny said. “But I did it. And when I turned up a pair of twos and lost again, things got out of control.”
“That’s a fucking understatement,” Talia said.
When Johnny finished, she ladled a scoop of eucalyptus-scented water onto the hot stones. The steam billowed and the temperature notched up a few more degrees and she said, “You’re telling me this now? Why didn’t you ask for my help before? You should have called me from the game.”
“Because you would have called me a fuckup.”
“Because you are.” She cracked her neck. “Did you find it, at least?”
“No.”
“Well, could it still be there?”
He wiped the sweat off his face and shook his head. “I looked. I looked everywhere. And now there’s no one left to ask that question.”
“You bring me down here and you lay this on me—I assume for advice?” she said.
“No advice. I just want you to know what’s next.”
“And that is?”
“I know I’ve been a disappointment to the family.” The sauna stones had gone red with heat. He reached his hand out and picked one of them up. Silver-blue veins began to trace their way down his knuckles, wrist, and forearm. “But I’m going to be different now.”
The Ninth Metal Page 16
