Shelter in Place (31 page)

But they never came. The television says not to change behavior after committing a crime, but we never went back to work. We drew the blinds. We drank too much. We barely ate. Tess clung to me as if I might protect her. She had cruel nightmares and woke me with her trembling.

We stayed in bed and read the paper, but nothing was reported.

As if we'd never been in that kitchen.

I said, “You see? We're going to be fine.”

Of course, that wasn't the entire problem.

“It's that I don't ever want to do it again,” she said. “I thought he would be the first, Joe. I thought it was only the start.”

Tess went to see my mother. I don't know what happened there. She wanted to go alone.

When she came back she said, “I told her what I did. I told her I couldn't do it again, or anything like it. She was cold. She didn't say anything. I'm sure she'd thought I was one kind of person and now she knows I'm another.”

I went to see my mother myself.

I told her we were leaving.

I said, “Why would you be cruel to Tess?”

She smiled. She seemed drugged and sad. The early prison charisma was gone. She took my hands off that awful table and raised them to her lips.

One of the guards turned his head.

“You'll come back and see me, Joe?”

“Of course,” I said.

I wanted to shake her back into her first self. Or into whatever version had raised us. The self that sang to me in the mornings on the way to school, that drove too fast, said, “Sink or swim, fight or die.” The woman of all that light and fire, so severe, so tender, so funny, so sure of her place in the world.

I said, “What happened? How are we here?”

She took a long breath, fixed her gaze on my hands, and said, “I don't know how. There was just that woman, those kids. Then that man, Joe, that goddamn man.”

Her cheeks were flushed. She pushed a strand of hair back from her forehead.

“Afterwards, for all this time, I thought,
somehow I can make it mean something
. The letters. The visitors. Tess.”

“Look at me,” I said.

She refused and kept on talking. “I thought all of us could make it matter.”

She shook her head, glanced up, and when I saw the blue of her eyes, I said, “Sometimes I'm on fire and the world is so perfectly clear and I am so bright and alive and I can't stop moving. And other times, other times I'm just the opposite. I wake up and I'm so miserable I can barely see. I can't move at all. I don't know what it is or where it comes from.”

She squeezed my hands tight.

“Do you have that, Mom? Does any of that happen to you?”

She sighed and looked at something behind me while I studied her mouth. I waited for her, for some absolute conclusion, some explanation, a final answer, a last and crucial bond. I waited and waited. I waited until I thought I would take her shoulders in my hands and shake it out of her but when at last she returned, she only said, “Me, Joey Boy, I can always move.”

W
e packed the truck and left our home. Not much ceremony. Perhaps we passed by my father's place when we drove out of town, but I don't remember it that way.

We pulled off to the side of the ridge road. We looked down on White Pine.

We found the roof of what was no longer our house. We found Vista and the trampoline. We found the college and the meetinghouse. We found Lester's and, in the other direction, the prison surrounded by those dazzling green wheat fields.

Then we drove out to the highway and left as if we'd never lived there at all.

O
nce we lived in a motel in Cannon Beach, Oregon. Once we lived in a white house in White Pine, Washington. Once we lived down in Belltown. Once in a pretty apartment in Capitol Hill.

Once we moved to the country.

And for a time we told ourselves we were still warriors. In those years after White Pine, before we became business owners, before we became
entrepreneurs
, we said we were radicals and artists. We would organize and write poems and songs and perform them and spend our time in dark clubs listening to
angry
musicians play
angry
music.

And we would call all of it fighting. Art our weapon and all that nonsense.

Neither of us believed in any of it. Sam Young was a poison, our crime a festering gash. Tess's passion turned hollow. Her conviction was still gone.

We went to D4 and High Dive and Rock Candy. We saw Mudhoney and Hammerbox, Nirvana and Sound Garden. In the smoking dark we flung ourselves against all the others like us while King Cobain hid behind his hair.

We told each other we were angrier, wiser, and more serious. We insisted we had done something to prove it, to earn it. We were not posing. We of experience had blood on our hands and somehow that terrible fact would mark us as people of distinction.

We were furious and drunk and stupid, and sometimes still we were terrified the police would come crashing through our door.

In our damp apartment we slept badly and stayed in bed late watching the ships come in off the horizon, listening to gasping trucks leaving the market. We tried so hard to convince ourselves it was all part of our revolution, that we were still at war and living this way, afraid, broke, adrift, in possession of our cold secret, was all a form of battle.

But it didn't last long.

I was always only in it for Tess, and Tess had so terrified herself that it was just a matter of time before all that pretense would become a kind of venom, a reminder of another person, of what she had lost.

One night at Showbox, we watched a woman onstage take a circular sander to the steel bra of her bandmate. Sparks scattered over the crowd. The drummer played in time. “I am not my body, I am not my body,” the singer sang.

Tess, she'd had enough.

She took my hand and pulled me out of there. She said, “I'm done, Joe. Fuck these people.”

And
that
was the end of it. We gave up the clubs. We drank less. Our vigilante days formally ended. Just like that. In a weary word.

I never believed I was any kind of artist. I was no revolutionary.

It's just that I was in love with Tess Wolff and I'd have done anything she wanted.

C
laire, it was night when Dad died.

Or early morning.

Seven years after Tess and I left White Pine for Seattle, his heart stopped beating.

Hank said, “He went in his sleep.”

But how can any of us be sure? He might have been wide-awake, staring at a circle of blistering paint. He could have been praying. He could have been drafting a letter.

Dear Joey, Dear Tess
.

And for all I know,
Dear Claire
, too. Did he write to you? He must have and I want to believe that you read his letters, that you too keep a stack of them bound in some drawer.

His ragged box of stationery was open on the kitchen table, strapping tape neatly reinforcing the corners. There was a roll of stamps. A couple of blue ballpoint pens.

Hank found him in the morning.

He'd gone over to meet Dad for their walk, but there was no answer. He'd brought two large coffees from that new place they liked on the boardwalk. A bag of donuts between his teeth.

Not that there's any evidence of this.

It's just the way I always see it: Hank outside the front door, a cup in each hand, knocking the brass kick plate with the toe of his boot calling,
Richie, Richie, up and at 'em
.
Richie, Richie, rise and shine
.

T
ess and I were home in Seattle when he called. We had to be at the bar early that morning to meet an investor and were irritated to be disturbed.

Tess pulled the phone under the covers, said, “Hello, handsome,” and pushed it at me, the cord cold against my ribs. “Hank,” she said.

And then his weak and cracking voice: “Your father died, Joe.”

No euphemisms from Hank Fletcher. No bullshit from that man.

I gave the receiver back to Tess. She returned it to the cradle.

Half-conscious, she said, “What's new in White Pine?”

I didn't answer and she fell back to sleep.

The talons dug deep into my throat, sharp into my heart. The tar spread with vicious speed. It was everywhere. It was ruthless. I kept thinking the same thing
.

I don't know how much time passed between that phone call and the moment Tess turned on her side and rested her warm palm on my stomach.

“What is it? What is it, Joe?”

I thought, this is an irrevocable thing. This is a thing that cannot be altered.

I began to speak to myself with a new formality, as if I were a lecturing professor, an expert of the absolute.

I don't know if I spoke out loud.

I couldn't shake Sam Young. I wanted only to think of my father, but there he was clinging to me, striding across his wet lawn.

“Joe?” Tess was sitting up now.

I did not want to tell her what I had learned. I thought,
Is there any way to defend her from this?
 

“My father died,” I said.

She began to cry. She lay next to me on her side with her head on my chest and her legs wrapped around mine. She was quiet, but she was shaking.

I said, “I wish I'd been kinder, Tess.”

We stayed together like that all morning.

It was an irrevocable thing.

W
e drove down to White Pine and stayed in my father's house. His landlord was generous the way everyone in his later life seemed to be.

She said, “Take your time. What a lovely man he was,” and gave me a plate of peanut butter cookies covered with foil.

We went to the prison to see my mother, who had already been notified of her husband's passing. She was frail and whatever had been left of her first or second or third self was now gone, but she was not impassive. She was affectionate with us both. She cried for my father and said that he'd been to visit her just a week before, that he'd seemed so well. He'd told her about his trip to Seattle, about us two, about our life there, our apartment, our bar, how proud he was. He had told her about the house, that it was the same, that he missed us all in it.

She leaned across the table and held our hands.

We told her that he'd been cremated. There would be a service, we'd asked permission for her to attend and it had been granted.

“No,” she said. “I can't do that.”

“Look at me,” I said. She raised her eyes. “It'll be Sunday morning. They'll bring you there, they'll take you home.”

“Joey,” she began, “Listen.”

I stood up fast. My eyes fell into inordinate focus. I heard Tess say my name, but she was so far away. There was a pressure on my shoulder. It wasn't Seymour, but once it might have been. I wanted to tear the ceiling down. Rip the bolted bench from the floor. I wanted to break the fucking walls with it. I pulled but nothing moved. I had lost again. The lights hummed their indifferent tune. Everything so goddamned secure, so flawlessly locked in place. With my vision recoiling, the fight leaching away, I hit the table with my open palm hard enough to silence the room, to set a bruise creeping out from my thumb.

“Goddammit, you will be there,” I said giving in to the hard pressure on my shoulders. “It is the only thing.”

She nodded and when I was sitting again, said, showing me her hands, “All right. Okay, Joe. Okay.”

T
ess took a frozen pork chop from my father's freezer and bound it to my hand with one of his Ace bandages. It smelled of Right Guard. She didn't say anything about the prison, or the way I'd behaved, or my mother, but it was clear she was exhausted by all of us.

We slept in the spare bedroom, squeezed together in that tiny bed where once my father had put me to sleep. We separated his things—to trash, to Goodwill, to keep. Tess chose a thick grey cashmere cardigan, which had once been my grandfather's. I kept his lined Levi's jacket. His duffel bag. We kept his Wagoneer. Otherwise, there wasn't much to hold onto really. Photographs. Papers. Books. The record collection. Some clothes. Some wine. The ammo box.

The booze we gave to Hank, who came to see us on our first night carrying a pizza from Lester's. We gave him an umbrella, too. A good black one with a polished-oak handle.

Hank said my father had begun discreetly using it as a cane.

Y
es, we called Claire.

We left messages, but she did not respond and she did not come home.

I know you want more than that—explanation, resolution. But some people, regardless of blood, choose to live in other ways. What more is there to say? I have tried to grant her this without anger, without contempt. I know no better way to love her. It is what my father did, and would have always done.

I tried to hate her, to cling to the wound, to protect myself with it, but it did me no good.

She was lost to us, like so many other people we'd known through the course of our lives.

What difference does it make that she is my sister, that she was his daughter?

What difference does blood make?

Although lately I have wondered whether I missed some signal, whether all those years ago, in looking so carefully at my mother, I ignored Claire.

Was she too possessed by the bird and the tar? Is she still?

If so, perhaps this is her way of fighting.

We all have different methods of waging war.

You want reason and resolution, I know. Clean systems. As do I. As did my father. As do we all.

But time goes along anyway.

There is nothing to be done.

T
he service was out at the meetinghouse on a Sunday morning. There was little difference between this and any other meeting of Friends, except that I stood and spoke, except that I carried a squat brass urn, except that it was more crowded than usual. Hank said it was evidence of how much the people of White Pine had cared for my father. Guards and bartenders and waitresses and college kids from the new café.