The Breakdown Lane

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “Oh, you mean the hippie joint. Nice folks, generally. Ayuh. Except they’re taking in ex-cons now. Try to teach them better ways. I don’t know that everyone doesn’t deserve a second chance, but seems funny, with all them children there, to take that kind of a risk. Those are men who grew up in New York, Chicago. Not from here. Seems impossible they could adjust…” Caro began tapping her foot.

  “But, we have to go there….” she said. “Pretty much right away.”

  “Well, it’s about seven miles to the crossroads, County C. Then you go left at the fork, another seven, eight mile. They have a sign about as big as my two hands, but you’ll notice the apple trees, not just Granny Smith or Golden Delicious, but Garland, too….”

  “Can we hail a cab?” Caro asked.

  “A cab?”

  “Can we find a…ride? We, I don’t think we can walk there. My brother is sick, and we just rode the bus from Wisconsin.”

  “No cabs around here.”

  “Oh,” Caro said. There was a five-minute silence.

  “Ned Godin. He’ll be in shortly. He lives out there, does carpentry. Built the porch here for me. Nice porch. Good workman.”

  “And, so?” I asked. I wanted to say, Your point is?

  “He might give you a ride back, once he gets his nails and such,” said the old man. “One thing they can’t grow’s nails. Nobody can.” Ayuh, I thought. They were slower here than in Sheboygan.

  “And he’ll be in…?” I asked.

  “Lemme see. It’s ten now. Twelve, latest. He called. They have the one phone there. That’s the sum of it. Don’t see why they want to do it that way. Seems a person can do with a little privacy during a conversation…”

  “Daniel!” came a voice from the back of the store, where, we saw, there was a little curtain, “Don’t you go chewing off those children’s ears.” A tall old woman appeared; she had the best posture I’ve ever seen other than my mother’s. “You can wait right here. There are two chairs by the window; that’s right, where the checkerboard is….”

  We felt we had to buy something, just to sit there that long, and so we bought a bunch of doughnuts, and I don’t think I’ve ever played more consecutive games of checkers in my life. Finally, the doorbell tinkled, and a big, heavy man with a beard strode in—he literally strode, like Paul Bunyan—with a big square wooden box on each shoulder.

  “Snow again, you think, Daniel?” he asked.

  “Could be. Sugar snow. Won’t stick.”

  “I need fifteen pounds of sixteen-penny sinkers, Daniel.”

  The old man said that thing again, that sounded phony, like he was in a movie about a guy who owned a general store. “Ayuh.”

  “And a thirty-pound bag of wheat flour, two peck of potatoes,” the man went on. The whole thing was like a movie about how you’d act in a small town—in a previous century. The guy was going to need a hand truck. I felt like I was going to crawl out of my own skin, waiting for them to talk about syrup and leaves and shit. The big guy had brought about seventy pounds of stuff out to the car and old Daniel was scribbling on a pad of paper and no one had mentioned us. Caroline kept kicking me in the shin.

  Finally, I stood up and said, “Let me help you carry that stuff out.”

  “Eh, Ned. These here two young people need a ride out to your spread. Do you think you have room for them?”

  “What business have you got at Crystal Grove?” the big man asked me, as if I were the CIA or something.

  “We think our father is there, or at least we know he was there,” Caroline said. “His name is Leo Steiner.”

  “I don’t know any Leo Steiner.”

  “Well, he wrote lots of letters to India Holloway. We know that. They were friends.”

  “You say. Did you try to get a hold of him, by writing letters or trying to call him?”

  “Of course we did; that’s why we are here. He hasn’t answered.”

  “Okay,” said Ned Godin, “get in the truck. You look like you could use a sleep and a good meal anyhow.”

  People ordinarily converse in a car, but Ned Godin didn’t say a single word for the entire twenty minutes it took to get from the town to the sign (really, about as big as your hand) over a huge wooden mailbox that read CRYSTAL GROVE. There was also a NO HUNTING and ABSOLUTELY NO TRESPASSING sign, which I guess is more severe than merely NO TRESPASSING.

  “I expect,” he finally said, “I’ll let you wait in the car while I find India. Then she can talk with you.”

  We sat there and watched the windshield fill up with snow, for about ten hours.

  At last, the passenger door opened, and there was this bright-eyed little old woman all in purple, even wearing high, purple, suedelike Sherpa boots, who said, “Hurry on into the big house. You look a sight.”

  Long story short, she wouldn’t listen to anything we wanted to say until we got showered and changed and fed. They gave us coats and boots and sweaters and jeans from this other lady with gray hair but a young, rosy face, whose hair was twisted into a bunch of ropes and twists and clipped down. She asked us for our wash, and I said, “You don’t have to bother, ma’am.”

  But she said, “I’m washing anyway. Doesn’t matter how many socks I do.” She said to call her Janet. It was also this same woman, Janet, who gave us big plates of soup with lentils in it—the kind of thing that Caroline would have moaned at if my mother served it, but was glad enough to have it after two days of nothing but two bagels. We ate all that and some homemade applesauce, and then Janet said, “You can meet India in her study. It’s at the top of the stairs.”

  The stairs were the size of the whole front of our house and they led up to this balcony or gallery about ten feet across, all with big timbers of wood, whole trees it looked like, holding up a peaked roof where some birds were flying around. Off the gallery, there were some real little kids in a schoolroom, and a bunch of closed doors, and finally this massive couple of double doors standing open, with an iron owl holding each door, and we could see India at her desk, which also was big, bigger than our porch. I’d seen strange offices at the university, but India’s office was undoubtedly the strangest office I’ve ever seen anywhere. For starters, where regular people would have a vase or a statue, she had bird nests. Like thirty of them. She had a stuffed snow owl so big it scared the hell out of me even though I knew it was dead. She quickly told us she had not killed it; it had died of natural causes and one of her sons, Pryor, had found it in the woods when he was a boy. There were rocks holding down stacks of paper, and little jars of colored water on the windowsill, a regular birch tree in a pot and, most peculiar of all, a human skeleton I had the feeling was not a model hanging on a stand, with India’s woven purple hat on its spotty head.

  “My husband,” she said, gesturing with her pen at the skeleton, “Doctor Hamilton Holloway. This was his wish, you see, that he remain here, and I thought, why scatter ashes, when what better way to teach people, the children and the adults, the names of the bones than with a genuine human skeleton?” I didn’t ask and hoped to Christ she wouldn’t explain how Hamilton Holloway had been transformed from a dead body to a skeleton. “He died six years ago, at the age of eighty-five, and I think his bone structure speaks well of an active lifestyle, don’t you?” We nodded. I didn’t know what to say. I don’t think anyone’s skeleton looks particularly terrific. Caroline poked me in the back. “Moreover, it comforts me to have him here.”

  Mr. Holloway wasn’t the only skeleton in the room. There were a few other heads, a deer, I guess, and something little, a squirrel, and the whole room smelled like the inside of a nutshell.

  “But you’re here about your father,” India said, motioning us to sit down on some fairly normal chairs. She was herself sitting on a big blue exercise ball while she worked at her computer. “Your father was here, for a month, several months ago. He loved the place, and he was a genuinely nice man. But we had to ask him to leave.”

  “You did?” Caro squeaked.


  “Yes, but not because of anything he did wrong. Although we have our own system for wrongdoing here, and it’s not unheard of, the reason Leo had to leave was because our Gathering didn’t believe his reasons for being here were consistent with our philosophy. You see, my husband started this intentional community with simply ourselves, our daughter and sons, and one other family, the Godins. They’re still here, but so are about twenty other family groups, a few single people, and a few guests of my son Pryor. I’m sure if you spent any time with Daniel Bart at the store, he told you about the dangerous convicts. Well, they’re not. They’re young people who made a couple of serious mistakes in their lives, with drugs or thievery”—I had never heard anyone actually speak the word thievery, but she went on “—and it’s Pryor’s contention that working and living here can undo what their previous lives and their incarceration has done to them. I don’t say it isn’t a challenge.”

  “About our dad,” Caroline said.

  “Yes, of course,” India apologized. “I’m continuing my husband’s work, a study of the evolution of this kind of closed community, the ideals, the adjustment of new members, the inevitable conflicts of trying to live outside the so-called normal world, the personal stresses and rewards; and Leo was very interested, and I must say helpful, in helping me see how it was possible to set up a judicial—”

  “I’m so sorry to interrupt,” said Caroline, “but this is so urgent. Our mother is so sick, and we have to find our father. Why did he have to leave?”

  “Well, that was just it,” India said, as the lady named Janet entered quietly with a pot of tea and some cookies for all of us. “We don’t accept members who are running from something, only people who are trying to find a way toward something. Leo was leaving behind a family, and it wasn’t difficult to gather from our conversations that this was not an amicable or mutual parting. It’s not that we don’t accept divorced people. But we didn’t think that Leo’s reasons for leaving his family were valid, that he’d explored all the ways of healing before making a permanent break.”

  “A permanent break,” I said.

  “Yes, he intended to stay,” India told us. “He said he’d brought everything that he needed and he intended to enroll, I believe along with a close friend of his from New York, whom we never met, after the mandatory three-month period of probation. He made a substantial donation. But though I can’t say there was honestly anyone here who—excepting my son Pryor, who’s rather the alpha male and I think was a little threatened by Leo’s advanced degrees—didn’t like him, we didn’t want to put him through the waiting period knowing we weren’t going to be able to accept him. So he left after, perhaps, a month, and I believe when he wrote last week, he said that—”

  “He wrote you last week?” Caroline gasped. “We’ve been trying to find our father for months. We’ve been in hell. I mean that. I’m not making this up. Our mother is sick, and we had to sell our house….”

  “That was the problem,” said India. “We thought Leo lacked responsibility for dealing with his past.”

  His past, I thought. Here we were, fifty percent of Leo’s past, zero percent of his future.

  I said, “Thank you. I guess we’ll…walk back….”

  “It’s snowing.” India smiled. “You may have noticed. No, it would be irresponsible of me to send the two of you off in this weather and after you’ve had a shock….”

  “What did he say?” Caro asked.

  “He said, I believe, that he was doing well, that he’d found the place for him, that he remembered us fondly…. I have two grandsons, Muir and Paul, who are about your age, and Jessica Godin, Willow Sweeny, Maggie and Evan Menzies, the Calder boys, and the Ramirez girl—Liliana—they’re all within a year or so of you. You stay with us for a couple of days; get your strength back. Then we’ll take you back to the bus. Do you need money? We can give you passage to the Hudson Valley.”

  “We’re okay. We have money,” Caro said softly.

  “Then I’ll ask Janet to show you to the little house we keep for guests, unless you want to stay here in the Gathering house. I hope you don’t mind sharing a house; there’s a private bedroom space….”

  “No, it’s fine,” I said. “We don’t want to impose.”

  We sat facing each other across the pull-down table in the little house, neither of us knowing how to begin or whether it was worth saying anything. Caro finally tossed her head and said, “What does she know? Maybe he meant he’d found the place for him for the rest of his time away, not forever. At least now we know where he is….”

  “I’m for we just go home.”

  “Well, no, Gabe. We came this far.”

  “I got to sleep on it then.”

  I pulled down a bed, and heard Caro, as if I were dreaming her, talking on the telephone to Cathy. I heard her leave and return, after trying to shake me awake for dinner. Then, when it was dark in the room, I felt another hand on my shoulder and knew it wasn’t my sister. Jumping up, I almost pulled the bed out of the wall. “Don’t be scared!” the girl laughed. You could barely see her in the dark, but she was the pretty girl from the picture in the computer, Jessica with the long auburn hair. “I only came down here because your sister is watching a movie with the others, and I thought you might like to see the waterfall in the snow. It’s something else.”

  If she hadn’t been so cute, I probably would have pulled the blankets up and gone back to sleep. But, while she waited outside in her coat, I got dressed, then followed her along this twisty narrow path she said was a deer track until we could hear the water rushing. “Slow,” Jessica said, holding me back, her small hand on my chest. There was a buck and a couple of does at the waterfall, drinking out of the tumbling water as if it were a bubbler. This was all pretty surreal. I’m standing in the snow, watching deer about six miles from the four corners of Nowhere. “See, they won’t drink from the pool. But the waterfall, they like.” She stepped out into the clearing. “Hi, deer people,” she said, and the deer regarded her gravely with their dark golden eyes. “You better take off, because we’re going swimming.” The deer, in no hurry, ambled up the slope behind the waterfall.

  Great, I thought. They’ve adapted to the point that they no longer feel cold.

  “Come on,” Jessica said, pulling off her coat and hat and then her sweater. She had on this stretchy sports thing under it. I had such a hard-on I thought I’d stab myself in the intestines.

  “Uh, I don’t think I can…. I don’t want you to think I’m stupid…but I don’t do ice-cold water.”

  “Neither do I,” Jessica said, jumping in, basically only in her underwear, a jet of steam applauding her entrance. “Come on. You’ll be surprised.” I smelled the sulfur then, and I realized it had to be a hot spring, that the waterfall was runoff from a spring somewhere farther up in the hills. And so I pulled off everything but my running shorts and slid in. It was hotter than a bath. I felt my muscles melt. “There,” Jessica said, “you were so scared. I thought guys from Wisconsin were tough.”

  There was nothing else to do. I kissed her. I felt sort of like hell about it, but you don’t jump half naked in a pool with a guy at night if you don’t want him to kiss you; and though I thought of Tian, and my private vow to never kiss another girl, Jessica was so beautiful, and I was clearly not the first person she’d ever done this with. When I ran my hand up her ribs, she kind of sucked in her stomach so I could get my hand under the sports bra. Then, she let her stomach back out and gently moved my hand away. “I like you. But I’m not ready for anything else,” she said. “My parents and I agree.”

  “Your parents know you’re here, with me?”

  “Sure.”

  I thought of her father’s size, relative to my size, and felt like a popsicle stick. Suddenly, the idea of loyalty to Tian and the pull-down bed seemed very appealing. “I got to get back,” I told her.

  “Okay,” Jessica said pleasantly. “Isn’t this a cool place?”

  “Yeah, but how
can you stand the same people all the time?”

  “Well, are you with different people every day?”

  “No,” I said. “But…well, yeah, I guess that makes sense. You’re with the same people anyhow.”

  “See?” She began to climb out of the pool. “Turn your back,” she said, “I can’t put my clothes on over wet underwear.” The thought of her stripping off her underwear behind my back was excruciating. When I turned around, she had her cap and boots and coat on, and I asked her to do the same. She was really a nice kid. I wished she lived in Sheboygan. Her “little house” was back farther in the woods, so she pointed me the way back to the guest place, and I started walking, seeing already I’d left the light on.

  But as I got nearer to the guesthouse, I heard voices, muffled but you could tell they were angry, where the path cut to the left away from the waterfall. I veered off, curious. There was a little clearing, but the snow had stopped, and I could see a wide circle of tamped-down grass around a big old oak. There were two people either…well, fooling around or fighting. The one on the bottom was much smaller. Then I heard.

  “Let me up, you bastard! I mean it, I’ll scream!”

  “Go ahead! No one will hear you,” said the deeper voice.

  But the first voice had been Caroline’s. And she did scream. But the scream was cut off, as if someone stuffed something in her mouth. I heard fabric rip. My first impulse was to wade right in there and pull him off her. But the guy was about six twelve, and I had nothing in my hand but my pair of wet gym shorts. Running on my toes, I got back to the little house, rifled in my backpack, and got out the gun. I had to pray to God there wasn’t some obvious way a normal person could tell, in the dark and at a distance, that it wasn’t loaded. My chest literally thudding, I stopped at the lip of the clearing and called softly, “Get off her.” The big bastard rolled to one side, and Caro began to kick and fight, but it took only one arm for the guy to hold her down, easily.

  “Who the hell are you? Go away,” he said.