Shelter in Place (20 page)

Go up there and sit in our booth, share a pitcher and a pizza. Onion, mushroom, pepperoni. Just the two of us.

I miss him.

It's the simplest thing in the world isn't it? Missing someone. It is the purest form of sadness, I think. A person gone. A person absent from you.

Once a person, now an abstraction, now a ghost. Nothing to do about it. Not with the dead anyway. The dead are gone. Funny how true that is. How deeply true. The dead and the missing.

I'd like to go up there with him and share a pizza. That's all.

And somehow knowing that it's impossible, that I'll never listen to him talk, it makes all of this more urgent.

I want this to work.

I want Tess to come home.

I know there's no logic to it.

I can feel you pitying me. I can hear your sorry heart.

But I believe. If I can just finish this, whatever it is, I believe Tess will be there on the other side. You must have faith in something. Isn't that true?

I wish you'd answer me.

L
ast night I was waiting to fall asleep. It was very dark, no moon, and I was lying in the center of our bed with my arms and legs spread out wide.

The windows were open and the air was coming in nice and cold, and I was huddled down beneath the comforter.

I was lost within that bed, that room.

I mean that I couldn't find myself in time.

People say, I didn't know where I was.

But last night, the air moving over my face, I didn't know
when
I was.

I kept thinking,
When am I? When am I?
 

I couldn't answer it. I didn't know when I was. Or who was still alive.

I don't want to lose my mind. I don't want to leave this present life.

When my father said, “The purest expression of love is truth,” or “The purest expression of truth is love,” he was drunk on his new religion. In love with his bromides. Full of faith in some cosmic reconciliation. Faith in the idea that goodness and truth and love and kindness and purity, whatever those things were, would somehow heal him. Would heal us all.

“I'll object with kindness,” he said, “will her into peace. Do nothing unkind. Abandon anger. I will only love. I will construct, I will not destroy.”

And he did those things, you know.

He wasn't one of those awful people proselytizing and pious and seething. He really was a kind and gentle man. So much like a wide-eyed child who arrives in adolescence and finds a way to reject all its implications. My father looked around at all the violence and horror of adulthood and he shook his head.

“No,” I imagine my father saying, his wife in prison, his children having abandoned him in their respective ways, “No, I will remain as I am.”

Then he turned and walked in the other direction.

W
e went to work, hung around with Seymour. Seymour, whom you must miss by now. How could you not? Who wouldn't miss a man like that? I'll return to him. I will.

But for now imagine us at The Owl.

Imagine Tess running that room, threading those drunks.

Imagine me pouring drinks for the college kids crowding the bar.

Imagine my father out at Arbus Lumber, working his station, dispensing good advice from behind his green apron.

Imagine Tess wound around me in the early morning, the two of us a pulsing knot.

Imagine time passing.

What do you see? Calendar pages blown into space? A spinning hour hand? A speeding sun rising and falling? A turning earth, tracing stars, a wheeling sky going dark and light, dark and light?

Tess and me on a cold night, both of us in our wool beanies pulled low. Now we are on Vista again. And even from the corner we can hear a distant, rhythmic sound—two bass notes, the first slightly lower than the second, and underlying those, a double high note. The same repeated phrase.

Thump-thump, squeak-squeak. Silence. Thump-thump, squeak-squeak. Silence.

We are walking.

The sound is louder.

Bass drum, bad violin.

There is a girl flying through the oaks. Vista bends slightly. We see her before we see the house. Her long hair rising as she falls, falling as she rises.

Bass drum, violin, and she floats, her pale face flashing through the branches.

Tess squeezes my hand. She speeds up and I follow until we come to the fence. The girl keeps bouncing. A joyless face. Until her eyes find Tess.

Then there is life. She takes a last great leap, turns an easy backflip, little white shoes arcing through the air. She lands, climbs down, and comes to the pickets.

“Hi Tess,” she says.

“Hi Anna. Nice flip.”

The girl smiles.

“This is Joey.”

“Hi,” she says. “Are you her boyfriend?”

“Yes. I guess I am.”

“Okay,” Anna says and shrugs as if granting permission. “But are you nice?”

“Sometimes,” I say.

“He is.”

“Okay.” She looks at me a long moment. “Okay,” she says. “So do you want to see a flip?”

I say that I do and she returns to the trampoline. Drum and violin. Anna going higher and higher. Front flip, back flip.

“Gumdrop,” she sings, landing on her butt, “jellybean,” flopping on her back. “Indian,” landing cross-legged. “Gumdrop, jellybean, Indian.”

Thump-thump, squeak-squeak.

“Gumdrop, jellybean, Indian.”

She chants in rhythm with the drums, altering her skinny body midair while we look on.

Tess is quiet. I watch. I don't ask the questions. I know they'll be answered. I'm in no hurry.

It is late and it is cold for a child to be alone on a trampoline. The girl is charming but she is strange.

The sound of the bouncing rises inside me. It is in my ears, thudding behind my eyes. The street is otherwise so quiet. She must drive the neighbors mad. Or maybe it's only my failing filters. Maybe it's not so loud. Maybe, but in memory we are inside a kettledrum. The violins are screaming. On and on she goes. The music changes slightly here and there, extending or shortening the time between beats, but mostly it is the same.

Though then it was not music. Then, in that present, there was just the sound of a girl on a trampoline. The music, the drum and violin, they come only in recollection.

The present doesn't need comparison.

Only the past is made of metaphor.

“Gumdrop, jellybean, Indian.”

The girl goes on bouncing, goes on chanting, goes on flopping like a fish, while Tess and I watch. Her audience of two.

And still I don't ask the questions, which come to the sum of one: What exists inside that house?

Tess loves her flourishes of drama, her suspense, her intrigue, and I would give her those. I would go along. I would stay her second, her soldier. I would follow orders.

“If you go looking for something, you will find it,” my father told me deep in his season of platitudes.

Ask Tess and you know what she'd say? She'd say, the problem is what most people call looking. That's what Tess would tell you.

And she'd be right.

Most of us haven't got the heart for it.

Most of us stay where we are and instead of searching, we pray.

Tess on the other hand. I think by now you know. Tess had the heart.

There is the click and slam of a door. A man strides across the lawn. He comes barefoot through the cold grass in jeans and a white T-shirt, white vapor blasting from his nose and mouth.

He pauses at the trampoline and presses a palm against the blue protective padding.

“Gumdrop, jellybean, Indian,” the girl chants.

“Anna,” he says with surprising evenness. Surprising for a snorting bull. “We don't say Indian.”

“Gumdrop, jellybean,
seated man
,” she says without breaking routine. Or, used to the correction, as part of routine.

The bull comes to us. He says, “Seated man. Same number of syllables. Better to break those habits early.” He smiles and extends his hand. “Sam Young.”

I take it. I say, “Joe March. This is Tess.”

“Tess Wolff,” Tess Wolff says.

They shake.

“Gumdrop, jellybean, seated man,” Anna repeats a last time, falling back flat, arms and legs outstretched.

“I am a starfish,” she says.

“Out for a walk?” Sam Young asks.

He has a flat nose, which seems to draw the corners of his eyes downward, making him appear a little sad. He is amiable, and well spoken. His eyes are indecipherable in the dark.

I imagine them colorless.

Then.

Now, I know their color.

“Stopped to watch the acrobat,” Tess says.

“She's a good one. You two live on Vista?”

“Mott,” I say.

“Out for an evening constitutional?” He laughs. Chuckles. A chuckle the only thing to accompany that question.

Sam Young is a professor at Emerson. Of History. I do not know which. Or whose.

The trampoline a birthday gift for their only child. Anna the acrobat. Anna the starfish. The jellybean, the gumdrop, the Indian, the seated man.

On we went. Speaking the double language.

And us? We work down at The Owl. My father lives here. We came to visit and we liked it. Cheap enough. Pretty town. Good beaches. Good place to stop for a while, et cetera.

“What's your father do?” he wants to know.

“Works out at Arbus Lumber,” Tess says. A tone of challenge only I can detect. What of it?

“Ah,” Sam Young says. He relaxes. “Honest work.”

Tess and I stand silent.

“Anyway. Better get this one to bed. Say good night, Anna.”

She remains a starfish. “I'm dead,” she says. “I can't speak, I can't sleep.”

“Anna,” Sam Young says now with a point of impatience.

“I'm dead.”

“And I'm not going to ask again.”

Anna takes her time. She climbs from the shining surface of the trampoline. A little animal dragging itself from water onto land.

“Good night, Tess,” she says. “Good night, boyfriend.”

Sam Young smiles an apology at me.

“Nice to meet you both,” he says. “Have a nice walk.”

We watch as he catches up with his daughter, and ushers her inside. The sidelight goes off. Pop. Gone with all their sound.

“Honest work,” Tess says.

And then our footsteps replace the beat of the Trampoline Girl.

T
hat night on our porch, the night we came home from meeting Professor Sam Young, Tess spoke for a long time. She said, “I go after work, or on nights I can't sleep and you're dead to the world. You can't know everything, Joe. What fun would that be? Walking by myself is different than walking with you. I know you understand. You must feel it too sometimes, the desire for a little quiet, to be alone. So I walk. I love to look in on those houses. People watching television, eating dinner, a naked man. I like to see them fucking, too. I love that. I wait for it. I don't hide in the bushes. I'm not that nuts. I just walk slowly and I hope for it. It turns me on, but there's something else too. I'm not sure what. There's something about being alone at night, outside, all that black space around me, watching from within it. So that's why I started going. Or it's half the reason. The other half is that I was looking for something. Waiting for it because I knew that it was there. I knew what every cop alive has always known. If you listen, if you walk slowly enough and long enough, you will hear someone scream. If you wait. And that's what I was waiting for. Everywhere in the world, mostly it's the women who scream. And in a neighborhood like The Hill, it's not mostly but only. And I did hear them. Crashing plates and crying and yelling. I stopped in the street and waited. I don't know what for. Or I didn't when I started out. Or didn't know that I knew. Sometimes the sound stopped and then it was impossible to find the house. Or it didn't stop and I still couldn't tell where it came from. A couple fighting, something falling, a woman screaming, but I couldn't trace the sound to the act. Was it the backyard of one house, or the bedroom of another? And what had I heard anyway? Then one night when you were fast asleep, drooling on yourself, I got out of bed and went out. I was off. A Sunday maybe. Around midnight. I was walking up Water, so quiet, not a car on the road, and then I heard that trampoline. The same sound over and over. So that after a few wrong turns, I tracked it to Vista and came to the fence where I found Anna. She wasn't doing her flips. Just jumping up and down like a little machine. It was frightening, Joe. The vacant look. I don't know how long I watched, or when it was she saw me, but even after she did, after I registered in her robot eyes, she went on jumping. She went on despite the noise in the house. A woman yelled, ‘Stop it. Stop it. What did I do? What did I do?' Something fell, something broke. They were the sounds of a kitchen fight. The woman screamed. It went on like that and all the while I stood behind the fence with the girl looking at me and me looking back at her. ‘Leave me alone,' the woman said. She sounded exhausted now. Exasperated. ‘Please,' she said. Then there were heavy footsteps going off somewhere. The girl stopped bouncing. She sat on the edge of the trampoline and dangled her legs. She was less a robot then. She told me her name. I told her mine. ‘I have to go to bed,' she said as if I should have known, scolding. Me the child. She walked around the back. That tiny little girl alone. So determined. I heard the door open and close. I heard some footsteps. The woman's voice, but not the words. A light came on. A light went off. I waited and then I walked home to you. That was the first time.”

T
ess and I fell in love one summer in Cannon Beach. My mother killed a man and went to prison for the difference between one and seven. My father sold our house, gave up his business, moved to White Pine, and took a job at Arbus Lumber. Out of duty, yes. But he would say there's no difference. Duty is born of love. There are no other factors, he would say. And my sister Claire stayed in England where she married a man named Henry Lloyd who had a red face and thinning hair and a lot of money. He was twelve years her senior and she would never come home. And me, I moved to White Pine too. I took a job as a bartender at a place called The Owl, where a massive man named Seymour Strout worked the door with a towel around his neck, and a pack of Virginia Slims in his pocket. Me, I had come out of duty, but I do not know if that duty was born of love, or if there were other factors, or if those factors add up to love or one of its derivatives. And then Tess Wolff appeared on the hood of my truck, beneath an orange streetlight with her heels on the bumper. Tess whose mother died of breast cancer, whose father had remarried nine months after that, not enough for a year, but enough to have a child. Two of them. Girls. Fraternal twins. She came to White Pine to worship my mother with the passion and devotion of an acolyte.