Heroes of the Frontier (11 page)

When she and Carl were together, they'd decided not to tell the kids anything about Candyland, but now, as she lay in the Chateau, soaked in sweat, breathing the stale air inches from the ceiling, she knew she would have to be on guard around Sam. Sam, she knew, had told her twins about it all, Sunny and her own emancipation, and would be determined to bring it up in front of Paul and Ana.

Josie's parents had been nurses at a hospital. She could tell her kids that—she had told them this. This was enough for now. At Ana's age that was all Josie knew. Her parents wore white when they went to work at Rosemont, and came home together, changed out of their whites and said nothing about their day. Josie's knowledge of their work came in stages. When she was seven she realized their hospital was for veterans. When she was nine, there were the musicals at home, and she became aware of Vietnam, and that most of Rosemont's patients had fought there. But she didn't know what ailed them: she pictured rows of beds of happy soldiers with sprained ankles and black eyes. She didn't know, as a child, where it was exactly, if the war was still on or not.

Occasionally her parents talked about the patients. There was a man who spent the days knocking the side of his head, as if to free up some loose bolt. There was the man who, not wanting to disturb the perfection of the made bed, slept under it.

“I hope your parents aren't part of that Candyland mess.” One of Josie's teachers said this one day. Josie had never heard of any Candyland mess. But the news that year became inescapable. The suicides. Rosemont had been overprescribing their psych patients and they were dying in alarming numbers. They slept eighteen to twenty hours a day and when they weren't drugged into a stupor they were killing themselves at the rate of one every few months. Most of the suicides happened in the psych ward itself, a few after discharge, and all were horrible in their strange detail. A man of thirty-two using a bedsheet to hang himself from a doorknob. Another drinking bleach, rupturing his lower intestine. A man of thirty-three throwing himself from the roof, landing on another patient's mother, breaking her neck, and then, realizing he was not dead, using a piece of broken glass to slice open his wrists and jugular, there on the sidewalk.

That was the one that opened Rosemont up to national scrutiny. The newspapers discovered the place had a nickname among the vets, Candyland, and that macabre touch stoked public fascination. Eighteen suicides in three years, five accidental overdoses, maybe more. The faces of each young man, most of them in uniform, stared out from the paper each day.
We sent them to Nam to be killed,
the editorials said
. When they came back alive, we killed them again
. The head of the ward, Dr. Michael Flores, was arrested, and most of the blame fell on him—“I only wanted them to live without pain,” he said—but Josie's home became loud. Her parents had been questioned, had been blamed privately and publicly. Four of the suicides had happened on their watch, and the whispering grew. How could they have let it happen? Their colleagues at Rosemont stood by them, said they hadn't been negligent, but the doubts persisted and grew. The ward was closed, then the hospital itself was closed, her parents were out of work, and Josie learned the meaning of the word
complicity
.

Then, in what she saw, as a teenager, as a stunning display of irony, they both began abusing the very drugs, Dilaudid and Thorazine and Dilantin, that Flores had overprescribed. Just after her fourteenth birthday her father moved out and, a year later, moved to Cambodia, where he stayed and still lived. When Josie was sixteen, her mother was working as an in-home nurse for a family fifty miles away, caring for an elderly woman, Mrs. Harvey. “I'm in love, Joze,” she said one day. She'd gotten involved with Mrs. Harvey's middle-aged son, another vet, another addict, and wanted Josie to come live with them in this new home, with the dying woman and her son, making specious promises about their lives being good again.

Josie thought: No. She had two years of high school left. She broke down one day at the dentist's office, in the waiting room, and the receptionist had come to her, had brought her to the bathroom, had sat her down on the toilet and dabbed her face with a warm wet towel, and this had made Josie cry harder, louder, and soon she was lying in one of the examination chairs, face soaked with tears, and Dr. Kimura was next to her, initially thinking it was some body image breakdown. When the receptionist had caught Josie weeping, she had a
People
magazine on her lap, open to a story about heavy teenage girls being bullied. So she and Dr. Kimura thought Josie, who towered over both of them, was upset about her size, had been harassed at school. They brought her into a back room, where surgeries were done, and they huddled around her like saints. There was something in Dr. Kimura's wet eyes and chandelier voice that invited Josie to talk. And when Dr. Kimura asked the receptionist to leave, and told Josie she had the afternoon free, Josie told her everything. Her father was in Chiang Mai and, according to Josie's mother, lived with a paid harem of four women, one of them thirteen years old. Her mother had been sleeping on the couch for two years. Now she was in love, but was using again and was marrying an addict. There had been new people in the house. They were dealing, they weren't dealing, Josie didn't know. She remembered backpacks lined up in the foyer, always different backpacks, and the new men would arrive and leave with one of these backpacks. Josie began hiding in her room.

Through Josie's ramblings, Dr. Kimura said very little. But her eyes seemed to have settled on something. “Why don't you come here after school for a while? Tell your mom it's an apprenticeship,” she said. “You need a calm place to be for a few hours every day.”

The first week Josie sat in the waiting room, doing her homework, feeling the thrill of betraying her mother in this small way. But she grew accustomed to the calm, to the simplicity, the predictability of the office. People came, went, paid, talked. There was no chaos, no screaming, no mother on the couch, no mother interacting with skittish men with hollow eyes. Sometimes Dr. Kimura brought her back to show her something interesting—an unusual X-ray, how the molds were made. But usually she spent those hours in Sunny's office—Dr. Kimura had told her to use her first name—doing her homework, sometimes napping, occasionally wondering about the photo of a teenager, a dishwater-blond girl who looked so unlike Sunny that Josie assumed it was a patient. After the last patient, Josie would help close up the office, and Sunny would ask for updates about happenings at home. Sunny listened, her eyes angry, but never said a disparaging word about Josie's mother. They were about the same age, Sunny and her mother, somewhere in the late thirties, but Sunny seemed a generation or two removed, far more settled and wise.

One day she closed the office door. “I know this might be the last time I talk to you,” she said. “Because what I'm about to suggest will trigger a series of events that might get me in a world of trouble and might cost me my practice. But I think you should pursue emancipation from your parents, and if you do it, I'd like you to come to live with me. I know a lawyer.”

The lawyer, a quiet but persistent woman named Helen, was a friend of Sunny's. They met the next day. She had a tight mound of curly hair and unblinking eyes. The two of them, Sunny and Helen, sat across from Josie, shoulder to shoulder. “We won't do this if there's any possibility of it getting ugly,” Helen said. “You already have enough drama in your life,” Sunny added. “If your mother objects…” Helen began, but Sunny finished the thought: “then we can reassess. What do you think?”

Their eagerness was both unnerving and infectious. Josie wanted to do it. She wanted to be around these sober, functioning, efficient women who made grand plans quickly.

“Okay,” Josie said, utterly unsure.

“Good,” Sunny said, and took Josie's hand. “Come home and have some dinner with us tonight. I want to introduce you to someone.”

So Josie called home, told her mother the truth—that she was eating dinner with her dentist, and because her mother had lost all hold on propriety, she agreed, told her to be home by ten. Josie rode in the backseat, Sunny's car old but clean, Helen in the front seat, Josie feeling very much like they were in a getaway car, sure that the three of them would be thereafter best friends and an inseparable trio. She entered Sunny's house, walking between Sunny and Helen as if being protected, like a president or pope.

“Samantha!” Sunny yelled, and a girl tromped down the stairs and stopped midway. She was the girl from the picture.

So Josie was Helen and Sunny's second project. The realization knocked her back. Samantha had been taken in a year before, fleeing a mother who beat her and a trucker father who had photographed her in the shower. Samantha lived forty miles away, and Helen had been alerted to her case by a high school counselor there. Samantha's emancipation process was quick. Now Samantha was home-schooled in some self-guided arrangement that Josie didn't immediately understand. She didn't understand, either, why Sunny hadn't told her about Samantha before the emancipation discussions had begun.

“I couldn't tell you about Samantha before we were sure,” Sunny said. After dinner that night, Sunny had suggested a walk, and so, under a dark canopy of trees, she explained Samantha's situation. “It's best if she keeps a low profile. We have the restraining order on her dad, but it's best not to risk it. You understand? Does the existence of Samantha change your mind about all this?”

It did. During the drive from Sunny's office to her home, Josie had believed Sunny was taking her in an act of bravery, of wild and even irresponsible courage. But it was more mechanical than that. She and Helen had a system.

“You coming to me after Sam was serendipity,” Sunny said, trying to return the situation to something closer to a fairy tale. “You two are only a year apart, and could make each other stronger.”

Or we could drag each other into a succession of feral teenage dramas, Josie thought.

“I know it's awkward,” Sunny said that night and often thereafter. “But it's quiet here, and safe.”

It was awkward. Josie and Samantha were put in the same room, meaning Samantha's room had been instantly halved and her personal space evaporated. “What have those two sluts done now?” she muttered to herself while loudly moving her belongings around the room to make way for Josie's. She cooperated, seething, competitive one month, then aloof, prone to occasional eruptions. Josie stayed in her school, and they had different friends, so their contact was incidental, and avoidable. Sam treated Josie like a freeloading drifter who had come in from the rain to share a room she'd paid for.

Eventually there was detente, and they revealed each other's weaknesses, only to have them exploited later. They were smart and angry girls who were not properly grateful to Sunny or Helen, who argued with their teachers, who flirted with each other's boyfriends, who stole or broke each other's things.

But their home was sane and calm, and Josie's own emancipation was accomplished without resistance. “I laid out the pros and cons for your mom,” Helen said one day, and Sunny smiled—the implication was that they'd utterly overpowered Josie's mother; it gave Josie a twinge of guilt. Josie visited her mother every month for the next year, and their meetings, always at a highway Denny's situated between their two towns, were cordial and tense, and they talked mostly about how good it would be in a few years, when all was settled, when whatever resentment had burned off between them and they could return to each other as adults and equals. Ha.

There were some whispers about Sunny and Helen, just what they were up to—building some kind of cult, one lost teenager at a time? Were they lesbians? Were they lesbians starting a lesbian cult? But after Josie there were no more strays, not that year at least. Eventually Sunny's home became a known haven for young women fleeing calamity, and the power of Sunny's interest in Josie was diluted by all the girls who followed. Sunny knew it, and worried Josie and Sam would feel neglected. Don't worry, Josie told her. Never worry.

IN A FLURRY JOSIE WOKE THE KIDS,
got them in their seatbelts and drove up the Spit and back to the Cliffside RV park, to meet Sam. They were late, stupidly late. In twenty minutes Josie was putting on their shoes in the parking lot, Ana's like little rubber bricks, and then they were all standing atop the bluff, looking down at Sam, who was with about twenty others, a barbecue in full swing on the beach below, all to welcome Josie and her children.

“Sorry!” Josie yelled down, as they made their way down the steep path, trying to smile, trying to laugh, as if they were all in this together, the Alaskan way, a life without schedules and set times for beach barbecues. “We fell asleep!” Josie said brightly, trying to make it sound adorable, as Paul and Ana dragged groggily behind her, so she kept a smile frozen on her face as they jumped the last feet from the path to the beach. Sam was quickly upon her, swallowing her in a wooly embrace, her hair and sweater smelling of woodsmoke. She was wearing shorts, boots with the laces open, and a handknit black sweater. Her hair was windblown and unwashed.

“Don't worry, you're only an hour late to your own party,” she said, releasing Josie and grabbing Ana and lifting her high. “You've never met me but I plan to eat you,” she said, and Ana's eyes went electric, as if alerted to another of her wild breed. Sam kissed Ana roughly on the ear while eyeing Paul more cautiously. “Is this Paulie?” she said, and put Ana down. Paul faced her, and seemed to be accepting the possibility that Sam would lift him, too. But she didn't. She squatted in front of him and held his face with two red hands. “I always remember those eyes of yours,” she said, and then stood up.

The barbecue was being held close to the bluff, on a vast beach at low tide, the beach striped in orphaned strands of ocean water, silver in the low light. Across the water were the Kenai Mountains, but no one paid them any attention. The rest of the guests were accustomed to all this rugged beauty, all this driftwood and all these round grey stones, the vast tree trunks hollowed by the sea and bleached in the sun. There were introductions to everyone assembled—a mix of scruffy people who worked for Sam, scruffy people who had worked for her in the past, parents of her twins' friends, and neighbors, most of whom wore down vests or wool sweaters, all of them in old boots. All along, one man seemed to be standing very close to Sam, and Josie guessed this was some kind of boyfriend. Josie tried to remember Sam's approach to marriage. She'd been at Sam's wedding, to a commercial fisherman named JJ, but hadn't seen him since. Was it an open marriage? Something like that.

This man in front of her, leaning into Sam with obvious familiarity, could have been ten, fifteen years younger, but a thick rust-colored beard made it hard to tell. Sam introduced him last.

“This is Doug,” she said, and held his hand up, high over her head, as if he'd just been declared the winner.

No. It wasn't an open marriage. Now she remembered. JJ was away for months at a time, and they'd made an arrangement: whatever happened while he was away on these trips didn't count. No questions could be asked, and he had only one request: No one she fooled around with could be anyone he knew. But here they were, among all of their mutual friends, and there was this man, Doug, who to all seeing humans was sleeping with her.

“Do you still have kids?” Josie asked. “Or do they already have jobs at a cannery or something?”

Sam raised her chin toward the shore. A few hundred yards toward the water two silhouettes were standing before a large boulder. On the boulder was a giant bird, and Josie laughed to herself, figuring that any second she would be told that it was a bald eagle.

“Bald eagle,” said a man's voice, and she turned to find Doug, holding a brown bottle of local beer out to her.

“You guys want to go see Zoe and Becca?” Josie said, and gave Paul an imploring look. “Go say hi and come back to eat.” Paul took Ana by the hand and walked toward the water.

Josie had a surging feeling that Sam had made a good life for herself here—she had many friends, friends willing to come out to the beach on a weeknight to greet Josie and her children.

“You get lost?” Sam asked. “We got here at four, set everything up and everyone showed up at five. We said five, right?”

Josie tried to flare her nostrils.

“We knocked on the doors of a bunch of the RVs up there,” Sam continued, “but no one had seen you guys.”

It was fascinating, Josie thought, how little she knew what to expect from Sam. Five years was a long time, and Sam, a shape-shifter to begin with, might have changed into some entirely new entity by now. But she was still a keeper of grudges.

Josie explained that they had been driving all day, and that they were off schedule, napping at odd times, that she didn't have a phone, and thus didn't have an alarm clock, and anyway so what, it's summer and Sam was among friends anyway, so who cares if she was late, does anyone really care anyway, ha ha.

At the end of her soliloquy, Josie saw that Sam was looking at her in a certain way, her eyes searching and her mouth amused, and she remembered that Sam had often done this, had presumed she had a direct line into Josie's elemental soul, could get messages no one else could receive or decipher.

“Don't do that,” Josie said. “Don't act like you know me so well. I haven't seen you in five years.”

This delighted Sam even more. Her eyes opened like cartoon headlights. “You left your practice and fled Carl. Or fled your practice and left Carl. That's what I heard.”

The only person she could have heard any of this from would have been Sunny, who was anguished over the loss of Josie's practice and who would never have put it in such terms. But Sam had always been flippant about any loss, any tragedy. She felt it her right, as a survivor of a broken personal world.

“Well,” Josie said, and couldn't conjure a way to finish the thought. She hoped the one word would suffice.

In the stretch of Josie's silence, Sam only grew more delighted. “Well indeed!” she said, as if they were engaged in some cute verbal dance they both knew and loved.

“My kids should eat,” Josie said, hoping to focus herself and Sam on practical matters.

“Doug's on it,” Sam said, nodding toward a bonfire, which Josie realized was also the barbecue. This was a barbarian arrangement—a vast open fire being fed with giant logs, and over it a grill held high by a complicated latticework of sticks.

“They like bratwurst?” Doug asked.

Josie said they did, knowing she would have to cut them into tiny pieces and tell her children they were hot dogs.

Paul and Ana returned with the twins, thirteen years old, identical, willowy and athletic, taller than their mother or Josie. Their hair was strawberry blond and thick, and with their light freckles and their eyes dark and bright and intense and laughing, they had the look of medieval warrior-women just back from joyous plundering and man-beating and whale-riding. They strode to Josie and hugged her as if they really knew and loved her. Josie, overcome, told them they were beautiful, that she couldn't believe it, and they each looked directly at her, actually listening. They were not quite of this world.

They took their leave, throwing sticks that the many large dogs could chase, and Josie gave her children plates piled with fragments of bratwurst and corn grilled in foil. Her kids sat on an enormous log, next to a line of boys, all of whom were nine or ten years old, and each of whom was holding his own carving knife. As Paul and Ana ate, the boys whittled, their fists white, their long hair covering their eyes. Paul was watching passively, but Ana was enthralled. Josie knew she would want a knife and would talk about nothing but knives for days.

“You look tired,” Sam said.

“You're sunburned,” Josie said. “That your boyfriend?” She indicated Doug, who was dodging the changing direction of the bonfire's smoke. Sam shrugged and went to Doug, rubbing his back and then ducking from the smoke as it enveloped her.

Josie glanced over to see that Ana had repositioned herself. She was now sitting on the sand in front of the child-carvers, her eyes at blade level. The boys were laughing, thinking Ana was a trip, that this girl was the craziest thing they'd ever seen. Then Ana's eyes lit on an idea, and she lifted her sweater, the Bolivian one, all that heavy wool woven loosely, pulled it over her head with great effort to reveal a Green Lantern shirt underneath. She was showing the boys that she was no girl, no simple girl—that she was like them, that she liked Green Lantern, that she appreciated fighting evil with great supernatural force, appreciated the cutting of wood with big knives. The boys didn't care enough, though: they glanced, chuckled, but said nothing. Ana was not dissuaded. Shivering in her Green Lantern shirt—the temperature was dropping into the fifties—she squeezed in next to them on the log, every so often putting her hand on one boy's forearm, as if to participate somehow in the carving. As if, through this human transference, she could be carving, too. Josie served her a second brat on a paper plate and Ana devoured it, never taking her eyes off the boys and their knives.

Paul, meanwhile, took his plate and walked to the twins near the eagle and the boulder on the beach. Josie watched as he made his way directly to them, and then stopped short. The girls turned toward him and seemed to acknowledge his presence in some satisfactory way. He squatted on the beach and ate his food and the three of them looked at the eagle, and a pair of horseback riders trotted slowly across the horizon in the shallow water, until one of the girls threw a rock close to the bird, and it lifted off, its shoulders seeming tired, the movement of its wings far too slow and labored to create flight, but then it was up, rising like it was nothing, flight was nothing, the planet was nothing, nothing at all, just another place to leave.