Shelter in Place (8 page)

This is what I woke to that morning in my father's new house, and because of the memory, when I came into the kitchen and found him at the stove frying eggs, I kissed the back of his head. He turned and smiled at me with such gratitude.

It wasn't our way. My kissing him like that, as if I were the caretaker, such a protective, paternal act. I don't know why I did it, but when he smiled I began to understand something that only years later would I be able to articulate.

Later while he was in the shower, I sat on the front step with a cup of coffee.

Now I lived in White Pine with my father, who had given up so much to live as close as he could to my mother, who had one day, with a hammer, without apparent warning, beaten a man to death.

My sister was in London.

Tess was in Cannon Beach.

I considered each of these things. I was not happy, but I was calm.

There was no circling bird. I was not burning with life. I was not pinned to the bed.

I was even. My brain had slowed to a gentle pace. I found a brief peace in the sun, on the front step. And while it lasted, in those hours, I tried as best I could to work out a plan.

I would see my mother. I would call Tess. I would take care of my father. I would find a job.

He sat next to me. He smelled of soap and, as always, of Royall Lyme, a bottle of which his first girlfriend had given him before he left for Vietnam.

“What do you do all day?” I asked him.

“I work on the house. I read. Go into town. I've been looking for a job.”

I nodded.

“And I visit Mom.”

“Every day?”

“Often as they let me,” he said.

We sat for a while, neither of us talking.

“I think I'll come with you then.”

He put his arm around my shoulder. “Sure,” he said. “All right. If that's what you want to do.”

E
ven today I hear sounds only my mother and those children would have heard.

And, maybe, at first, Strauss himself.

Two metallic clicks of the buckles.

Her shoes on the asphalt.

The solid steel making contact with Dustin Strauss's skull.

I have done experiments with bone. I have tapped a hammer against the back of my head.

I have tried to know.

I have been hearing these sounds now for nearly twenty years. Metal breaking bone. Metal moving through brain, the two textures. Hard and soft, a solid noise, a sucking noise. And those two children, four feet moving with my mother's two. The back door opening. The slight give of the brown fabric beneath them, side by side. Scrape and click, scrape and click of the two seat belts. Male into female. Male into female. The solid slam of my mother's door. Then the three of them waiting inside the sealed station wagon. Waiting while Mrs. Strauss cried over the body of her dead husband.

After all these years, it is the sound that never recedes. The images fluctuate in clarity, but the sound only becomes louder.

When I first arrived in White Pine, I did not ask questions. I did not read the papers. I did not watch the news. I didn't know the man's profession, or the names of his children. I had not yet seen the pictures. Not of my mother's mug shot. Not of her hospital ID. Not of laughing Dustin Strauss, arm around his wife, grinning children by their sides. Not of my father on a bench at the courthouse hanging his head. Nothing in those early days had been filled in, so that morning with my father, I possessed only what I had manufactured. I was lonely and terrified, but I was not yet haunted by those photographs, that videotape.

Tess though, she had seen all of it. I know that now. All of it. While I was lying blank in the motel room, she was out there reading about my mother and her crime. She came back to me each evening after work carrying all that information, all those images—victim, crime scene, father, mother, sister, me. The image of that bloodied hammer resting on the ground. For weeks she carried those images, those words—
brutal
and
horrific
and
senseless
and all the rest. And still she slid into our bed without hesitation, without fear, still she held me as we slept.

Imagine this young woman, twenty years old, coming home and not saying a word. Having seen the photographs of my mother's cold eyes, the way the papers added their dramatic shadows and sharp contrasts. Their cruel shading, doctoring the life from her face.

Still Tess came home to me. Even after all that, even after what I'd told her about the bird and the goddamned tar? After breaking my hand? After all the
I could die of you
nonsense?

Me, back then? I'd have run. Not a second thought.

S
o for a long while I was numb in my oblivion, but abruptly, as my father started the truck, I was frightened.

We drove east up Water Street to the top of the hill, which separated the valley from the ocean, and then north along Bay View, which everyone called the Spine. We followed that ridge road, with the town down to our left and the wide green valley to our right.

“There,” he said after a while and pointed.

Nestled far away at the base of a steep yellowing hill was the prison. It could have been a factory or an electrical plant.

We began to descend toward it. Now I could see the walls, the fine lines of barbed wire, the guard towers at each corner. I made him pull over. I got out, walked into a sloping onion field and vomited. When I returned to the Wagoneer, I found my father sitting on the hood. I climbed up next to him and he handed me a gallon jug of water.

“They never turn them off,” he said.

“What?”

“See the lights? Hard to tell in the day, but they never turn them off.”

It was true. If you looked carefully, you could see that faint orange burn at the end of each post.

“At night it looks like a spaceship.”

I glanced at the side of his face.

“And when the fog comes in, it all glows.”

“You come here at night?”

He nodded. “She knows.”

“What do you mean?”

“I've told her.”

“She likes that? Knowing you're up here?”

He shrugged. “She doesn't talk much.”

I see him there all those nights, boots on the front bumper, red Thermos at his side. Wearing his old Levis jacket, faded denim with the fake shearling lining, sitting in the cold, watching the prison, watching my mother, trying his best to look after her, to keep her company.

“Doesn't do much good,” he said. “But it's something.”

Soon we were down on the valley floor, on the prison road, and then pulling to a stop. It struck me as so odd that there would be a parking lot the same way you'd have one at a supermarket. Somehow it hadn't occurred to me that people came and went, that there were employees, that people came to work in the morning, and left at the end of the day. I'd never thought about it. Until then, prison had never been more than one awful thing—a foreign and far-off place of cruelty and terror.

I was frightened by the prospect of seeing my mother. By those doors and the light and the din of the place. The general, suffocating horror of it. It took a long time to get through, even though they all knew my father by then, there was still the signing in, the patting down, the processing, before we even got to the visit room with its yellow walls and fluorescent lights, the tables bolted to the floor and the bored guards giving the deadeye to everything that moved.

I'd imagined it packed with visitors, but not many people were there that day. We sat at the table my dad liked and we waited. Side by side, our hands on the blue fiberglass table, neither of us speaking, both of us facing the closed door, which was double-wide and painted the same sickly yellow as the walls.

And then there was my mother.

I was prepared for a wretched version of her. A woman wild-eyed and drawn, bruised, scarred, bloodied. But most shocking was how much she looked like my mother. How familiar she was. How much the same. She hadn't lost so much weight. She was still tall. Her hair the same black, her eyes the same blue.

There she stood before me. She was alive and she was whole. She wrapped her arms around me and whispered, “I love you,” on and on and on while I cried like a child.

We all sat down and she leaned forward and laid her arms across the table. This is all that remains of our first visit. Us three, our hands joined.

Maybe we spoke, but I don't think so. They took her away. There's the sound of the door buzzing open and the sound of it closing.

Then my father and I were in the truck climbing out of the valley, moving across the ridge, while below in the darkening evening, the prison glowed, yes, just like a spaceship.

M
y dad took me to Lester's, a pizza place up the hill and well removed from the fading charm of the waterfront. Sawdust on the floors. Wooden booths. A jukebox. Two coin-operated pool tables. A long bar facing the front door, the requisite Bud mirrors and neon Pabst signs. It was one of those good places. Worn without being dirty. Something about the proportions, the lighting, the height of the stools. It's that golden combination. Certain bars have it, others don't. All the wood helped. That's one thing, so little plastic in that place.

We came in happy to be there and we took a booth we'd later claim as our own. The two of us turned a little sideways, watching the room, a pitcher of Olympia between us, the pizza in its metal pan landing on the table. Pepperoni, mushroom, onion, always. The two of us eating with such pleasure. The slice-shaped spatula. The indestructible white ceramic plates. Chili flake shaker.

“Good place,” he said, so pleased to have me there, to show me this element of his new life.

“You come here a lot?”

He nodded.

“You know anybody?”

He shrugged. “Few familiar faces. Some of the waitresses. Bartenders. But no, not really.”

“Takes a while, I guess.”

He leaned back from the table.

“I don't like them much.”

I looked over at him. “Why not?”

“This place? It's the prison here. Most of these people are guards.”

He nodded at a table across from ours. A few burly guys. Some sturdy women.

“So what?”

He leaned toward me. “These fuckers have your mother in there, Joe. These are the people opening and closing her cell. They're the ones with the keys, the ones dragging her away every time I go to visit.”

“So what are you doing here all the time? What are we doing here now?”

“You saw the papers, Joe. What they wrote about her.”

“No,” I said. “I didn't.”

He looked at me for a long second. “No?”

I shook my head.

“There wasn't a lot of sympathy. Let's put it that way. Not a lot of sympathy.”

“So what, you think there
should
have been?” I couldn't contain it. My adolescent tone. My generic contempt for him, for the bar, for the town.

“Hey, hey. Look at me. I've been there every minute from the beginning. I went to that jail. I slept on a bench. I went to the courthouse. Every single day. I sold all we owned to be here. I've given up everything to do this, while you and Claire did nothing. So don't give me that bullshit. Don't bore me with your bullshit. Every day I've been there. Meanwhile you and your sister? Who the hell knows where you were.”

“I'm sorry,” I said after a long time.

“Look at me,” he said.

I did.

“I don't need you to be sorry. Just be an adult, okay?”

I nodded.

“They know who I am, Joey. You understand? I see the same guards here as I see there. And pretty soon they'll know who you are, too.”

“So why come here then?”

He turned away from me.

“I want them to know. I want them to
know
, Joey. You understand?”

“No.”

He sighed. I'd never seen such impatience and frustration in my father. I hated it as much as I hated my own insolence, that piercing sense of irritation.

“Look,” he said, “These are the people who have your mother. They've got her in there, Joey. What do we know about what they're doing to her? Nothing. Are they beating her? Starving her? Is it worse? Half these guards are men. They think she's a goddamn animal.”

“She was protecting those kids.”

“One crack with the hammer, sure. But not seven, Joe. Seven changed everything. Seven, seven, seven, seven, that's all they talked about.”

“They called her an animal?”

“Joey, listen to me. I'm here to protect her. Do you understand that? I want them to know I'm
around,
you see?”

There was no reason to it, no logic. I didn't like his desperation. None of it was like him.

“So I keep going out to the prison. And I keep coming back here. It's the only thing I can do. Force them to see me. Force them to look. Show them what else we are.”

“I'm sorry,” I said again.

“Sorry isn't the point. Just think, okay? Look around. I wish it hadn't, but the world's changed.”

“I'm sorry I didn't come sooner. That's what I mean. I'm sorry you were all alone.”

“It was better that way. Saved you some pain. The thing is, you're here now. And I'll tell you, kiddo, goddamn am I happy about that.”

He reached across the table and squeezed my shoulder. “I'm happy to have my son here. It makes me so happy to have my son here.”

We were both a little drunk by then.

“You make me strong, Joe.”

We listened to the jukebox for a while. I wanted to be strong too, but I wasn't sure what that would mean. Or how either of us could protect her. Or what good we could do for her or for anyone else.

That night in bed, on my back, listening to the sounds of the house, I tried not to imagine what might happen to my mother inside that place, or the things people do to each other.