A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain (14 page)

Most sincere,
Leila Chen

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in.

—L. Cohen

Forget your perfect offering.
Yeah, yeah. Okay, Professor Chen. But tell me how I'd break the news to my mother.
That's how the light gets in
. Would I ever have the courage of Leonard Cohen, to explain to my heartbroken mother that my physics course was, in fact, an impediment to my light-filled, imperfect future?

Forget your perfect offering.

Hey, hey, I wanted to call out, did you hear that?

Forget your perfect offering.

What a concept. Tomorrow, I could leave Uncle Lud to my mother's cousin Trudy and her morning blender and run down Lamplight Hill straight into town to Tessa's door and wait for her, couldn't I? We'd walk to the corner of Fuller, and along the way, I'd say everything, imperfectly, my hands barricaded in my pockets, and when we reached Bryan's truck, Ursie would be with him, but instead of joining them up front, she and Ursie tilting their heads together, Tessa would climb in the truck bed with me. We'd let Jackie and Ursie do all the shooting tomorrow, well away from Hana Swann and the motel, and Tessa would stay beside me as I persuaded Bryan that Flacker could not be beat, as I mapped out a full strategy for avoiding Flacker and the Nagles the rest of our days. And afterward in the bouncing truck, Tessa's hand would claim mine. I'd stretch my arms around her and hold her tight to me, the distance between us finally breeched.

There was once a woman who had twelve daughters. The girls ranged in age from six to thirty-six, and of course, they weren't related by blood; that wasn't the way they counted sisters in this family. Only one of the middle sisters, a girl of seventeen, could look forward and backward and relate her family's history with any clarity. Her mother had given birth to three girls and then had taken in her crazy cousin's two daughters and a pregnant girl who'd been at school with the eldest. More girls were born. Years later, the girl who'd been the baby of that daughter's school friend came to live with the family too, and a few more girl cousins moved in for a while. The middle girl herself went once to live with a relative and claimed a couple more sisters that way.

Oh, yeah, try and keep track.

Over the years, the sisters multiplied and divided. They reconfigured themselves into new extended families, then looped back into this one, often holding the hand of yet another sister. Through tragedies and joys, they kept track of one another, and even the thieves among them were never denied a home to steal from. One sister died in a truck accident. Another drank herself to death. One hitched to Idaho and married a fellow who started a church. That was a birth sister; Saint Audrey, they called her. Of the others, one was in jail, but it wasn't her fault at all. A debt she'd claimed for another had led her there. One sister was a nurse, the kind who came out to your house and gave examinations. A success was the near-eldest, a pretty, heavy-browed artist who taught at a university but had no luck with men. A family of tough, big-hearted women who looked out for one another. All of 'em loved one another fiercely. No matter where they traveled or who they almost killed or married, enough of them returned or stayed to keep the house, full and crazy and close—real close.

Throughout it all, the mother cared for them. Across the wide backyard, she strung a clothesline long enough to hang twelve dresses. Twelve empty dresses hanging limply or flapping madly. Twelve skirts tucked tight or flitting inside out. Each laundry day, the woman pinned up the clothes and gathered them hours later, smelling of hay and the thin piney northern sun. The filled basket at her feet might have been heavy with gold, the woman prized it so much. No one else could touch it. But one day, Uncle Lud says, the woman went to the line with her empty basket to find a man in a suit, leaning against the far pole.

“Can I help you, mister?” the woman called out, clutching her empty basket. “Are you lost?”

“I may be, ma'am,” he said, bowing his head to light a cigarette. “I surely may be.”

Warily, keeping distance between them, the woman pointed and waved and tried every which way to send the fellow toward town, short of striding toward him and pushing him. And he did soon leave her. But first he must help, he declared, as thanks for setting him on the clear path. With almost physical pain, the woman watched the fellow unpin the dresses on the far side. He moved so quickly, her outstretched hand couldn't touch a one, and soon he was right beside her, dresses looped over one arm. He laid them across her basket, and when she bowed her head to bundle them inside the basket, the fellow loped away, past the kitchen garden, out of sight around a corner of the house. She did not hear a car engine start up, and she hurried indoors where daughters were cooking, daughters were gabbing, daughters were fussing on outfits to go to town. For the first time in memory, she latched the door behind her. Only then did the mother untangle her laundry, dress by dress, to find each bearing a tiny stain, a constellation of cigarette burns, or an irreparable tear. One dress was missing altogether, a sister's stolen dress, a stolen sister's dress.

Yes, an ordinary summer's night, a Tuesday like any other. A dry tempest, the mountains glowing beneath a bruised, turbid sky, an occasional truck screaming up Fuller Road onto the highway, the distant sound of bottles hitting pavement, and echoing outward, the too-familiar siren of monotonous, perfunctory screams, rising complaints joining the chorus:

Somebody shut that kid the hell up!

Even Tessa—quiet, superstitious Tessa—wouldn't escape the devils' wanderings this time. For her, the night began when her eight-year-old nephew, Brice, fell into one of his fits. Tessa says the kid's got a real medical condition caused by her own sister, who spent most of that pregnancy so drunk that she didn't even notice her labor pains until her feet were knocked out from under her and she lay flat against a wall in a growing puddle as if tossed there by one of her boyfriends, which in a way she had been. Brice was born within minutes and really has never stopped hollering, reminding everyone that he's a wronged child. He's a big kid for his age, almost aggressively affectionate when he's not crashing down the walls, and Tessa wears bruises as much from his attempts to have her hug and cuddle him as from his rampages.

That night, he took issue with Tessa when she tried to get him to bed and aimed a steel-tipped boot that nailed her face hard, missing her eye but opening her left cheek so that she had to wake up the grandfather to keep a still-roaring Brice from killing the other kids, and then call her sister at the bar where she worked for a ride up to the clinic. Her sister groused but showed up fifteen minutes later, shaking her head as Tessa, her head spinning, crawled into the tattered backseat and her sister gunned and swerved toward the Health Centre.

“First, your ‘accident'
with the teakettle,” her sister said, grimacing at the bandage that covered Tessa's blistered palm. “Now this. You'd think you wanted to be hurt.”

Earlier that afternoon, Jackie's mother had come to visit Tessa. It had been almost a week since the family had had word from Jackie up at the camp. Jackie's mother knew something was wrong almost the moment Hana Swann arrived at the camp, as if she'd actually witnessed that bone-white girl materializing at the dining hall's battered screen door. Folding laundry, an old plaid shirt Jackie liked to wear, Jackie's mother could not get the sleeves to lie flat. Twice she bent and folded and smoothed, and twice the folds undid themselves, slowly unwinding as if the arms were opening themselves to her, beseeching.

She had an emergency number for the camp and fretted through one whole day as she waited for another sign. When none immediately occurred, Jackie's mother tried to quell the nagging images that appeared like Technicolor plates on her bedroom wall. More than once, she rose from her sleepless bed and banged a flat hand on that wall, which seemed to be conjuring up fears all on its own. The hours of utter darkness were brief, but Jackie's mother never slept right until the sun rose again and the wall lost any opportunity to display the worst. She knew Jackie slagged off for breaks with Tessa and the others, and the afternoon after Hana Swann's appearance at the refuse station, Jackie's mother decided to walk up to Tessa's grandfather's house.

Although it was after noon when Jackie's mother knocked on the door, Tessa had only just returned from shooting with us at the refuse station and, still quietly reeling from the visit with Hana Swann, she was struggling to help her two nieces change out of their damp pajamas and into T-shirts and shorts. Soppy bowls of cereal covered the kitchen table except for the corner where Tessa's bleary-eyed older sister was shakily applying a deep lavender nail polish while also obsessively eyeing a pink plastic toy beside the nail polish bottle. She barely managed to leave off both tasks to greet Jackie's mother and shout for Tessa.

A grubby pair of boys' underpants lay on the empty chair beside the door. Jackie's mother pushed them aside and sat down to wait for her daughter's friend, feeling the wisps of her own confusion gather into clouds the more time she spent in this disorderly household. She could hear Tessa consoling a weeping child, then commanding the lot of them to play outside. Jackie's mother barely had time to raise her knees and shift to one side as they clambered past her to get to the door, one boy knocking down an empty chair as he bullied past and not one of them walking a straight line, either because they'd just been shoved from the side or because—and Jackie's mother feared this was more likely—balance was not a family trait.

She stood and hugged Tessa when the girl entered, despite the bundle of dirty clothes the girl held. As Jackie's mom released her, Tessa snatched up the underpants and rolled them quickly into her tight bundle, which she deposited in a basket by the back door.

“Please,” she said, even as she began to stack cereal bowls with one hand and swipe at the oilcloth on the table with a dishrag, “please, sit down.”

Her sister, who'd yet to manage a civil greeting, seemed to take Tessa's cleaning as an affront.

“You wouldn't have to do this now if you'd stick around during the morning,” she began, “instead of leaving me alone with . . .”

The pink toy beside her buzzed, and she left off her complaining and snatched it up, forgetting about her wet nails.

“Shit,” she said as she surveyed her damaged polish. Then, “Hey. Hey? Hello? Anybody there?

“Piece of crap phone,” she said, shaking it. “Only gets reception in the washroom,” she explained as she fled the room.

“No, no.” Jackie's mother shook her head as Tessa put the kettle on to boil anyway.

“You want something else?” Tessa asked. “A Diet Coke?”

From the back bedroom came a resonant thump, and Jackie's mother knew whose Diet Coke she'd be taking.

“No, honey. I've got a question, that's all. You seen Jackie lately?”

“Well, yeah,” Tessa said. The table was cleared now except for her sister's bottles and a handful of strewn cotton balls. And somehow, too, Jackie's mother noted, Tessa had managed to fill the sink with soapy water and stash away the Sub-Rite brand cereal and the nearly empty jug of milk—milk, Jackie's mother guessed, that had originally arrived powdered in a paper sack and been reconstituted with too much water; the stuff was so thin, it looked blue in the jug.

“She was at the refuse station with us this morning.”

“She okay?”

“Sure,” Tessa said. “Yeah, she looked good. Tired, you know, but good.”

The girl cracked open an ice tray and filled a clean glass with ice and water and gently presented it to Jackie's mother, who sipped at it while she waited to hear what was behind the clouded look Tessa was wearing. Maybe, Jackie's mother thought, it's nothing. Maybe now I'm worrying her.

“She hasn't talked to any of us for a week or so, that's all,” she said, hoping to relieve Tessa's worry. But the girl's face remained burdened. Finally, she offered Jackie's mom a single telling fact.

“Well, she's got . . . she's got . . . a new friend.”

Jackie's mother felt the kick of that swift revelation. A boyfriend. A fellow up at the camp. Sure, that would make sense. It was about time some fellow tamed Jackie.

“A good guy?” she asked Tessa. “You meet him?”

“Ah, no,” Tessa hurried to explain, “not a boyfriend. Another girl cooking up there. Good company, I guess. Like a sister.”

Old fool, Jackie's mother chastised herself. Bumblehead, Worry Queen. You'd think a woman with a dozen daughters would know when to worry and when to disregard the vagaries of laundry magic. Jackie was their own good girl; of course, she was in no real trouble. Jackie's heart was a tender one, that was all. And when she fell hard for a new friend, she was consumed by that new passion and the world fell away.

The older woman downed the glass of ice water Tessa has set in front of her and snatched Tessa close for another quick hug as she left. That girl needed hugs. Surely, it was the weight of this household the girl was bearing, not any bad news about Jackie. Jackie's mother noticed Tessa's new curvy figure and the worry lines starting on her forehead and wondered when this little girl had become such a woman. A hard-pressed woman without even a man to blame. Just that blasted sister. As Jackie's mother closed the door behind her, she heard the pink phone squeal again and the kettle whistling, but she did not hear Tessa's agonized gasp as, an image of Hana Swann swimming before her, the girl inadvertently poured the thinnest stream of boiling water into her own palm.

Mere hours had passed, and now Tessa was hurt again.

“I've told you,” her sister said. “Just smack him when he gets bad. Smack him and drag him out to the shed. Get that old padlock out. You remember how they did it.”

Tessa didn't have the energy to argue with her sister, nor much chance. Her sister dropped her at the Health Centre's emergency entrance but no way would she stay with her.

“I'd like to, but people are waiting, you know?”

Her sister didn't even get out of the car. She lit a new cigarette as Tessa fumbled her way, barely managing to close the car door behind her.

“That's okay,” her sister shouted as she leaned over to slam the door properly, and Tessa staggered up the ramp and into the clinic to take her place beside the steadily growing clientele of the maimed and bruised, the punctured young men emerging from the bad end of bar fights. A lethargic woman at the desk passed her a slim pad of gauze loosely packed with another thin wad of some kind of frozen gel and an actual piece of ice, and she pressed it over her swelling cheek and waited and waited and waited.

Across the room, Markus Nagle, a bone jutting out of his own arm, dozed fitfully, slumped in one chair, his long legs stretched across the aisle. He was stoned. He was drunk. Still stoned, still drunk. As far as he knew, he'd been wrecked for the previous five days, had worked hard to get in that state, and would have liked to remain that way, but the night had nattered on too long, his wallet had unaccountably slimmed, then fattened, he'd almost certainly indulged in a goddamn fight he barely remembered, and now he was feeling the corners of his drunkenness slip away against the waiting room's bright, flat lights. He could feel the fall into sobriety rushing toward him, and it pissed him off so that even as he managed a few unconscious moments, he grumbled, and when his eyes did open, they were full of disdain. He hated this waiting room, which he knew too well, which was always, depending upon his own condition, chill-inducing or hot as hell, which was designed for another level of torture as if to illustrate for you, you stupid dick, that due to your complete lack of judgment, your unfailing bad luck, not only had you incurred a peculiar, searing pain—an injury that promised the loss of work and yet more public humiliation—you had also somehow invited the hospital staff to join in and ramp that experience up just a little bit.

Welcome,
the place seemed to say,
let's screw with you a little more.

The chairs, uncomfortably hard, were interconnected by long metal bars behind the seat backs so that you couldn't move them around and, say, get an extra foot away from some weeping monstrosity whose head you might have plowed in a mere half hour earlier. They crammed you in here, and although the Health Centre itself wasn't that big, the waiting room had been positioned so that you couldn't see into the reception station, so unless an aide dashed by to park another gurney in the queue or to motion someone out of the room, you had nothing to gauge your own progress. The magazines were crappy too—ripped and stained
Celebrity Digest
s (with mustaches and swear words and well-endowed body parts scribbled over the pretty people) and pristine
Golf World
s. Who the fuck looked at
Golf World
around here? The place stunk of bleach, which from Markus's experience was a surefire sign of cover-up. One nurse stalked up and down the corridor outside the waiting room, seemingly doing little more than reading a clipboard. Markus despised her and probably told her so every time she clattered past the door in her white clogs.

But of all the Health Centre's nasty tricks, the long, wobbling strips of fluorescent lights enraged Markus the most. He had once been escorted directly from the examining room to the holding center for shooting out the entire row above him, sending glass and sparks hailing over the room. He was shaking bits of glass from his hair for hours, his scalp stinging continually, but he'd been too satisfied to care. He liked to imagine that grand flash of blue light bursting out of the waiting room and engulfing the reception desk and the fat white girl planted there. And for weeks he'd felt a singular sense of heroism as if he'd saved other vanquished souls from that at least. He was pissed to realize they'd replaced the light fixtures since the last time he'd been in here, making not a single improvement in the process. Now one long bulb spasmed above, making him downright nauseous. He was tempted to start anew, but he couldn't raise his arm. And so it was with particular pleasure that he watched Tessa set down the ice pack she'd been pressing against her cheek to pivot onto the highest edges of her paralyzed chair and use the corner of her bloodied shirt sleeve to unscrew the hot lightbulb and give them all ease. He would have applauded if he could have; his relief at the absence of that pulsing light was so great.

After that, he could not take his eyes off the corner where Tessa slumped, her head tilted into the hand holding the gel pack, her eyes closed, the dead gray fluorescent tube beside her. She seemed to Markus a kind of heroine in disguise, and he marveled again at how, slight as she was, she scrambled up onto the chair arm in her little red sneakers and balanced so neatly. The sight of her relieved a pressure in his heart he hadn't realized he felt before. She cleared his vision.

With the gallantry so common among the continuously drunk, he resolved to do his own good deed before every last bit of his edge vanished and he felt too crappy to care about anyone but himself.