Heroes of the Frontier (10 page)

Soon Ana was standing on the floor, using her chair as her table, eating her slice with her elbows on the seat. She was a disgusting shark-child but Josie loved her monumentally at that moment. Her never-questioning confidence in herself, in how her limbs should work, made clear she would always do things her way and never wonder if it was the right way—this meant she could be president and certainly would always be happy. She wiped her mouth on her arm like a feasting barbarian, and Josie smiled at her and winked. The sun swished around in the gold in her glass and it sang a song of tomorrow. Josie drank it down.

The kids ate two slices each and Josie had two, and then wanted more wine. She asked the kids if they wanted anything. They didn't, but she convinced them they wanted some of the cookies she saw in a jar on the counter downstairs. Then she convinced Paul it would be great fun if they wrote an order down on paper, and if he brought it down to the political pizza women. Josie didn't want to see their eyes or puckered mouths when they heard her order a third chardonnay at three p.m. on a Monday. And besides, Paul was at a stage where he liked to be entrusted with making a phone call, with punching in ATM codes, with running into the 7-Eleven himself. He knew it would be a decade before Ana would be allowed to do this kind of thing. He knew he was responsible and he liked proving it.

She wrote out the order:
1
milk,
2
cookies,
1
chardonnay, and the check,
and Paul took it downstairs. He returned a few minutes later with another bark plate, all the items balanced on top. He was struggling a bit, and Josie thought, for a fleeting second, that she could get up and help him, but would he really want that? She stayed put.

He made it to the table, and looked at her with a terror that seemed to question whether or not his parent really knew what she was doing. To put him at ease Josie smiled benevolently, like a grandma-saint. She wanted to toast him, and briefly raised her glass, but thought the better of it. “Look at the new ship,” she said, before turning toward the bay and realizing it was the same one she'd seen before.

The chardonnay ennobled her, made her stupid. Her tongue grew and could no longer form words. She didn't want her children hearing her slur in the afternoon so she said she was resting her eyes, to soak in the warmth of the sun, and she raised her face to the streaked glass ceiling. Josie saw Jeremy's face, then her father's, and heard her father, in his white nurse's uniform, joking about sticking his head in the oven. Josie opened her eyes and saw Paul and Ana standing, his face near the back window, watching a pair of dogs humping in the dunes.

After Carl she'd alternated between complete indifference to any carnal pursuits—she had no urges, no drive, made no plans, could muster nothing approaching an effort—and then, once every six weeks, there would be a calling within her, something like possession, and she would be in heat. She occasionally slept with Tyler, a high-school boyfriend. No, not a boyfriend. Someone she'd known glancingly in high school and with whom, through the miracle of internet nostalgia-sex, she had reunited. He'd written to her one day, attached a photo of her in her Halloween costume—she'd gone as Sally Bowles from
Cabaret
after her unsuccessful audition (I defy thy verdict, Ms. Finesta!). She recalled the feel of the tight satin on her legs in the cool night, the silver wig, and remembered her many admirers that evening and in the days after. A pair of satin tights, a black vest and the imaginations of hundreds of boys were alive for decades. So Tyler re-found some picture, called, said he was in town—passing through. Okay, fine. They ate pasta, drank numbing red wine and later, in his hotel, he did a fine job with his small cock until he became determined to stick his finger in her ass. He tried it once and Josie moved herself in a discouraging way. Five minutes later he tried again, and this time she gently pushed his hand away, assuming the matter settled. He tried once more, though, five minutes later, and this time she tried to make it funny, laughing a bit as she said, “Why are you so hellbent on sticking your finger in my ass?”—but despite her caution and obvious decorum he pulled away, pulled himself out of her, no great loss, and then—this part was delightful—he smelled his finger. Very slowly, very discreetly, as if he was just scratching his nose. He even looked away when he did it! Out the window! As if hoping he'd gotten at least a little bit of her feces on his forefinger before she'd thwarted him. That was why he'd been sticking his finger in there. To smell the finger afterward. He was memorable. And there was the other man, the one who died. The last man she'd slept with had died a few weeks later. How did she feel about this?

Vincent. He had been a kind man. A kind man who had said he would never leave her. For the children, he'd said, and she had appreciated this, his grave seriousness about not damaging her children in any way by entering and exiting their lives, for he knew about their father, Carl's powers of invisibility.
I won't leave you
, he said.
I won't do that to your kids
, he said. Never mind that he barely knew them and they couldn't pick him out of a lineup. It was too soon. She understood he meant well, but after two months of seeing each other, he had said that if they were ever to break up it would have to be her doing it. He could not abandon her. He would be in it for the long haul. She was flattered, maybe even impressed, but it was a bit constraining, no? She asked her friends: This was constraining, yes? To be told that this man would be attached to you, for the sake of the children he does not really know, for eternity.

He had a habit of watching her as she watched movies. He caught her tearing up during an Iraq War soldier-widow movie and after that, every time there was an emotional scene of any kind on the screen before them, he turned to her. She could always sense in the dark his face angling toward her, to see if she was crying, or about to cry, or welling up. To what end? What internal score sheet was he keeping? He didn't carry a handkerchief and never offered her a tissue. But he'd been indoctrinated. Stay with woman for sake of children. Watch woman and her displays of emotion.

“Come to Normandy with me,” he said once. “The kids, too. I want you all to see something.” He wouldn't tell her why he wanted to go to Normandy. He thought it would be some wonderful surprise. She explained the difficulty in leaving her practice, and trapping her small children for fourteen hours on two planes—all without knowing why they'd be going to that French beach. Finally he told her: He'd been learning more about an uncle—no, a great-uncle; he corrected himself the next day, apparently after some phone calls to his Salt Lake genealogists—who had fought and died on D-Day. He wanted to go, pay his respects, and apparently because he'd decided whatever was his was hers, he wanted to share it all, the field of graves, with Josie.

She'd suggested a few weeks away from each other and he'd nodded, agreeing, praising her wisdom, and then two weeks later he'd died. He'd collapsed on the beach. At Normandy. He'd gone to lay flowers at the grave of his great-uncle, then, apparently after that he'd gone jogging, and suffered a venous thromboembolism. The funeral, back in Ohio, was a mess of ex-girlfriends and sisters—the man had a life full of women, and they had all loved him, so why hadn't Josie tried harder?

The check from the political pizza makers arrived. They wanted eighty-two dollars. With a tip she would be paying a hundred dollars for a pizza, two cookies and three glasses of wine. This was Alaska. It looked like a cold Kentucky but its prices were Tokyo, 1988.

Josie paid and walked down the steps, out the door, and felt so free, out in the open, and happy that the women of pizza hadn't seen her, drunken afternoon mother. Then she felt the afternoon's new chill, and looked at her children, and realized they didn't have coats on. Where were their coats? Josie turned around to find one of the women of pizza, standing at the door, holding their coats and long-sleeved shirts, smiling like she could have Josie imprisoned.

Josie took the coats, hustled Paul and then Ana into them, and they wandered down the street. Three shops down was a kiosk full of hand-woven hats and sweaters and Josie was sure she'd never seen such beautiful things.

“Were these made here?” Josie asked the woman, grey-haired and with bright opal eyes. The woman was grinning with joy barely contained, as if to be in Homer, selling handicrafts, was more than she deserved.

“No,” the woman said. “Bolivia, mostly.” She purred the
liv
portion of the nation's name, implying this was the only place or way to do it,
to live,
and it seemed to Josie the only way to say the word.

Josie fondled the sweaters and hats, thinking she must purchase these Bolivian goods in Alaska, and if she didn't, she would have missed an opportunity to fully seize this moment.

“You let me know if you have any questions,” the woman said, and sat on a nearby stool, raising her face to the sun with a beatific smile.

Josie found a scarf, wrapped it around Paul's neck and stood back to admire him. He looked five years older, so she took it off.

“Mom, how do you know Sam again?” Paul asked.

This was unusual for him. Normally she didn't have to tell him anything twice; his memory was airtight for unusual information about the adults in his life. Before she could explain, this time more memorably, he asked, “Have I met her?”

He had met her. Or Sam had met him, held him as a baby. Josie told Paul this, and made up something about how he had really bonded with her, that she was sort of a godmother to him.

“So she's my godmother?” he asked.

Josie looked quickly to the opal-eyed woman, expecting judgment, but her ecstatic expression hadn't changed.

The truth was that Josie hadn't given Paul godparents yet. When he was born, she held off, wanting to wait till his personality had formed, to better match him to the right people. It had seemed radically enlightened at the time, but since then she'd plainly neglected the task. Now, this notion of Sam seemed inevitable.

“Sure,” Josie said.

Anyone would be better than Ana's godparents, friends of Carl's, who received the honor like a bad wedding gift quickly shelved. Ana hadn't seen anything from them—never a card, nothing.

Sam, well, it could go either way. She would not likely be a smothering sort of godmother, but perhaps she could be the distantly inspiring sort? She could ask Sam about it when they saw her. No one ever said no to being a godmother, so it was as good as done.

“Sam's the best,” she added. “Did I tell you she had a crossbow?” Sam wasn't the best, and she was only guessing about the crossbow, but Josie was overcome with a sudden longing to see Sam, and to strengthen their ties over this godmother notion. She did love Sam in a complicated way, and hadn't seen her in five years, and they'd walked the same strange path, and above it all and most important for Josie this day, Sam was an adult. Besides Stan and magic-show Charlie, Josie hadn't said more than please and thank you to anyone over eight years old since they'd been in Alaska.

“She's your stepsister?” Paul asked.

This was true in a general sense. Telling the whole truth of their sisterhood wasn't possible, not to an eight-year-old. Though she'd tried, Josie hadn't arrived at a simple enough storyline to explain Sam to her children.

“Right,” Josie said. “Pretty much.”

Now the grey-haired woman opened her eyes. Josie caught her looking at Paul, as if assessing if he had the strength to live through all this—cloudy step-aunt and godmother, tipsy mother. Josie bought sweaters and hats for Paul and Ana, showing the woman her competence and love by spending $210 on bright Bolivian clothing that her children would wear only reluctantly.

Josie did some math and realized she had spent all of the money she'd brought, $310 in an hour, while in a state of being most would consider intoxicated. Across the street she could see the Chateau beckoning, warm and still.

“Who wants to watch
Tomás y Jerry
?” she asked.

They went back to the RV, the kids settled into the breakfast nook and she started the movie. Josie crawled upstairs, fully clothed, lay down on the sunny mattress. Before she fell asleep, she heard Paul say to Ana, “Are you going to get your coloring book? I don't know how long you can play with a carrot.” Were they watching the movie or not? How did it matter? She drifted off, and woke up an hour later, sweating heavily. She looked down to find Paul and Ana asleep, with their headphones on, hair matted.

She closed her eyes again, feeling the heat of the afternoon, thinking that what she had done, taking the kids up here, notifying no one, especially not Carl, might be considered criminal. Was it illegal? Insane? Carl would use that word. For Carl, good things were insane. Bad things were insane. Josie was insane. “You grew up next to a nuthouse!” he would say, as if that meant something. As if the entire town where Josie had been raised would have been deranged by osmosis. As if Josie growing up near the Rosemont Veterans' Administration Hospital, formerly the Soldiers' Home, better known as Candyland, would explain whatever he hoped it would explain. He thought her childhood, her proximity to the scandal, her emancipation from her parents at seventeen, gave him some kind of leverage. He was from sturdier stock, went the implied logic, so he was entitled to drift—was allowed to do nothing. This was nonsense, of course. His father was part of a beef conglomerate that deforested some large swath of Costa Rica to make room for cows and grass, cows that would eventually be chopped into American steaks. That's why he grew up in some luxurious expat school in San Jose—Costa Rica's, not California's—and why he'd grown up with servants, and why he had no idea how to work, what work meant. And because he'd never seen any connection between work and the ability to pay mortgages and the like, he felt at will to judge Josie's every quirk. And because Josie had been born to two nurses—an occupation Carl associated with the servant class he'd exploited as a child—and because both of them were implicated in the Candyland scandal, any variance in her behavior, any flaw or weakness, could be exploited, tied to this VA tragedy.