The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel (20 page)

Dean Yates chewed the inside of his lip and as he nodded he seemed to let out a little smile. “Must have been mistaken.”

Preston smiled back and took his enormous tip.

Exiting the building, filled with the kind of exhilaration that came from beating the house, he should have known something would happen. The last time he had felt this good while sober he had cracked his ribs on a ski slope. But even after he had gotten in his car and cranked the engine, with its squealy belt and gray fart of emission, and heard a clunk from somewhere under the hood and watched all the dials go flat, he still believed the 4Runner was invincible. So he cranked it again, but there was nothing, and again, but nothing. It was silent, a death. Dean Yates was standing with his hands in his pockets, watching him calmly from the doorway.

Gil wasn’t happy when Preston reported the situation (he responded with a long, inscrutable pause), and in a moment of panic Preston promised him he would be back tomorrow, which, unless he could find a garage that accepted maxed-out credit cards, seemed highly unlikely. The driver towed it where he asked, though he warned him that getting caught dumping a machine that size would cost him easily five grand. Considering what he knew of the Park and Ride, though, Preston wasn’t too concerned. They pushed it into his old spot between the dead Corolla and the utility van. He gave the tow-truck driver most of Sophie’s money and everything else he had made on tips, and once he was alone with nothing but the high sounds of geese somewhere and a phone that was quickly running out of juice, he propped open the back hatch with the ski pole and found himself face-to-face with two wooden cases of champagne.

It took three tries with his Leatherman to jimmy the case open and what he found there, floating in a confetti of high-end packing peanuts, was the sort of joke-size bottle that seemed to be used only to pour champagne into the Stanley Cup. It must have cost a fortune. He lifted it out and hauled it onto the back bumper.

There were cars idling at the stoplight on the Sherwood connector, and the drivers were gazing at him. All but one had children in the backseat, and apparently none of them had seen a jeroboam of champagne before. He heaved it up and carried it like a toddler against his hip down through the brush and sticks to the big shale bed of the commuter tracks.

On the marsh side, where the brown matted grass had the fallow feel of the upper Midwest, he found a seat on a rock. As a kid, this was his shortcut, a path that bisected town through backyards and the rear dumpster lots of strip malls, skirting the roofed salt mounds and the recycling center with its giant acrid bins of tin. There was almost zero chance of encountering anyone, and so, like the neutral space on either side of the border, it seemed to render the laws of the land beside it inapplicable. It was where he had coughed through his first cigarette and learned to spit like a major leaguer and where, later, he had lain between the north and south express tracks while monstrous streaks of noise and wind blurred by him in both directions, leaving him shaking and weeping until most of a bag of mushrooms had worked its way out of his system. It was curious that he was still drawn here, that he still bothered to go off in private to do a shameful thing, that he still felt shame at all. He was tired of needing to see himself as a good guy who had merely been sidetracked when the clearest evidence to the contrary was propped between his knees in front of him. He was tired of needing, but more than that, he was tired of pretending he didn’t need. The worst part—the exhausting, grueling part that ended up making him feel worse about himself than any credit card number he had stolen from his parents—was the amount of lying it took these days to sustain the general impression that he could take care of himself.

The foil came right off, as did the wire cage. It was cold down there, frozen and gray, and it already felt like the sun was retreating to a tiny white prick through the clouds. Across the mangy marsh grass, the geese were back, his morning buddies, waddling and staring and somehow leaving their oyster shits all over town. He put his thumbs under the lip of the cork and pushed. It squeaked and groaned and eventually came loose with a faint, bassy pop.

All at once, the geese began flapping, taking off together, and soon they were just specks in the high white sky. He looked down at the mouth of the bottle and was overcome with regret that he had opened it. There was so much champagne, it sickened him—the fumes, the bubbles, the excess of it. He tried to push the cork back in but it had expanded in an impossible way and the foil was torn and the more he tried to rewrap it around the neck, the more it came apart and littered the ground at his feet.

Behind him, the tracks had begun their metallic whinny and the overhead wires swayed. It was a local, hurtling up the coast from Norwalk, and it had a good head of steam. He wasn’t so desperate he would do anything stupid, but he couldn’t spend any time on a subway platform without falling into a gruesome daydream of every story he had heard about decapitation by train, which caused him to stand a full ten feet back from the yellow strip, and still he flinched when the train blew by him into the station. Something about it fascinated and disturbed him, which was probably why he had gone there as a teenager in the trance of those mushrooms and why he was backing away from the gravel bed now with the jeroboam sloshing down the front of his sweater.

Which was when he had an idea. He hauled the bottle back up to the track and set it down as gingerly as he could on a railroad tie. The train curled around the bend. Its lights were on and it was hauling ass, so Preston retreated to the safety of the frozen marsh. The bottle was so still, almost obedient, that for a moment he felt bad, until an inexorable force blew past in an explosion of glass and foam and gold leaf, a magnificent spray that made him jump up and down and whoop with laughter as the rest of the train galloped by.

The wreckage was exhilarating. There were shards of glass everywhere, puddles of champagne still fizzing, and down in the trees, he found what was left of the bottleneck, balanced on a felled trunk. He reached for it, a trophy to hang from his rearview, when he noticed a sneaker. It was off the track a ways, on the border of the gravel and the woods, and through the sparse trees and reeds, it seemed to be just another piece of detritus that collected along these tracks. It was here that he had found his first nudie mag, a neon-pink overture into the world of the forbidden, which had made this swath seem sordid and magical. The sneaker had probably been hurled over the power lines by its laces, but as he looked closer, he could see it was attached to a foot, and the foot to a leg, and the leg to a person.

It wasn’t clear if he was sleeping—he looked like someone who was sobering up—until Preston was close enough to see his skin. He was gray, his lips the faint blue of snow at dawn, and his mass of dark hair frozen to the leaves. Preston turned and began to run before he stopped himself and went back. He was young, the kid. Preston thought of Sophie and he thought of those two women smiling at him from the photograph. He gagged, pulled his shirt up over his nose, and bent down to check the name on the boy’s hospital band.

There’s a moment right
after the great box stores lock their doors on Christmas Eve, after the frenetic shopping has crescendoed and the long train of headlights on the Post Road has slowed and even the radio stations sound unmanned, a quiet moment when all of the stuff in the backs of the SUVs suddenly feels real and all the money seems as though it were spent in a dream. There’s a meal to prepare and presents to wrap, and the songs have yet to be sung, but already there’s a new kind of worry—about the food and the gift count, about the wine that seems suddenly too heavy for fish. Everyone will be there and that’s what matters, the rest will be forgotten, but still this is it, the ritual of coming together. It’s time for all the preparation to pay off.

For Helene this year wasn’t so simple. She had spent the better part of the night, her first away from Sophie in nearly a week, debating whether to have Christmas Eve dinner at all. It felt inconvenient and insensitive, an intrusion into everyone’s grief. It had been less than a month since Sophie’s son had hijacked their lives, and what could be worse than “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year” in the wake of your own child’s funeral? And yet, wasn’t that, in a way, what these occasions were about—bringing people together and affirming their need for one another? Wasn’t that the underlying point of all this fuss? And it wasn’t just her own hopes coloring things—the months she had looked forward to this, the vision that she had allowed herself of her new family gathered around the table—no, in light of everything, it seemed to her the holiday ritual was more necessary than ever.

She mentioned the dinner to Mitchell and Sophie, who had mumbled from under their mound of comforters that sure, it might be a good way to get out of the house, and she had spent most of the night padding along the halls in her slippers, taking down the garland and putting it back, de-lighting and relighting and worrying over how to reconcile Christmas with death. Eventually, she had woken up on the stiff upholstery in the living room, the sky outside still dark, and decided to leave everything in place. To turn the house into a mausoleum would be no comfort to anyone.

Getting Mitchell and Sophie into the room and making them comfortable would be her top priority. She could install Tommy beside them to keep the conversation pleasant and moving, and most important, she would keep the wine corked in the kitchen. They had enough pharmaceuticals floating in them already—it was the only thing, in those terrible first days, that kept Sophie from wailing like an injured animal. Mitchell, during the final day Helene had spent at their house, had begun to speak, and it was clear from his first quiet sentence that the shock of his grief had settled into something harder to assuage, something closer to a desire for vengeance. And who could blame him? The problem for her was where he was directing it. “The thing I don’t understand,” he had said in the lamplight of their blacked-out room, “is what your son was doing there in the first place.”

She didn’t have an answer for him, or at least not the sort that Mitchell was looking for, though after Preston had shown up at home, shivering and sniffling at their door, and Donny had taken him in, she had learned that he’d been living at the Park and Ride and (if true, this detail destroyed her) was going for a walk along the tracks to try to stay warm. What it didn’t explain, though, was why he had called the police but disappeared before the medics and officers arrived or where he had gone for those twenty-four hours, and what it really didn’t explain was why, despite the other recreational narcotics that were stuffed in his backpack, Charlie Ashby had decided to swallow half a bottle of his mother’s sleeping pills. That, of course, was a matter for the police, who seemed to be in no hurry to resolve any of it, and it was a question that, at least in the dim, still room, while stroking Sophie’s head on her pillow, she had opted to keep to herself.

She smelled a waft of coffee from the kitchen and heard the tinkle of cereal in a bowl. It was 4:00 a.m.

“Did I wake you up?” Preston was standing at the cutting board, chopping walnuts. In front of him was a tray of hollowed-out orange halves that he was going to fill with yams.

“Are you
cooking?
”

Preston glanced down at a recipe. “Figured you might need help.”

He was fully dressed in a clean button-down, sleeves rolled up, a lone tattoo tentacle (or was it a typographic flourish?) visible on his arm. Donny had told her that Preston seemed different, that he was getting up early and going to meetings, that he was
jogging,
and while she had seen his radical transformations before, she had never seen them involve the general consideration of other people.

“There’s coffee,” he said.

She sat down with her mug and watched him stir a pot on the stove. “Can I do anything?”

“I think I got it.”

His insomnia was of the antsy and restless school, and watching him chop walnuts with unusual urgency, Helene found the behavior all too familiar; it made her want to apologize to him for his cowlicks and his flat feet and his untannable skin, all of which he came by quite naturally.

“Press,” she said. “I have to ask you something.”

“I was with Dad,” he said without looking up.

She put her mug down. “What?”

“That’s where I went. When I disappeared. That’s what you were asking, right?”

“Yes, actually.”

“I called Dad.” Preston turned off the stove. “He came and got me.”

“Oh,” she said. Helene hadn’t heard a word from Anders—total radio silence—during any of these rushed, strange days. She swirled her spoon in her coffee.

“You know he’s moving.”

“He’s what?”

“His condo’s for sale.”

“He’s
moving?
Where?”

Preston shrugged. “He said Maine.”

“Maine?”

“That’s what he said.”

She stood up. “I’m sorry, that’s such a middle-aged male fantasy I can’t really even take it seriously. What, is he going to drive a lobster boat and make his own rope?”

Preston scraped a spoonful of yam into a hollowed-out orange. “People make their own rope?”

“Did you know your father was on drugs?”

Preston looked at her. “What?”

“He smoked angel dust with Charlie Ashby.”

“That doesn’t mean he was on drugs.”

“Your father has
lost
his
mind,
” said Helene. “That’s what it means. He’s
moving?
” she said again.

“I think he’s already done it.”

She looked at him. “He’s gone?” she said.

“That’s what he told me. He just kind of left.”

She sat back down.

“I need to know something,” she said. “What were you doing on the tracks in the first place?”

Preston’s face changed. His eyes went glassy and distant and for a moment she thought he might begin to yell. “I was living at the Park and Ride,” he said, “because I was kicked out. And my car was broken, so I had no heat, so I was trying to stay warm. Is that okay?”

“Oh, honey,” she said. “I’m sorry all of that happened.”

Preston looked back at the yams, his fingers caked in orange mush.

“And it’s not just a middle-aged fantasy,” he said. “It’s also what I would’ve done.”

What he had actually done was wander the tracks in the dying twilight, hoping another train would come by, and when one hadn’t and he had made it all the way to the Southport station, its New Haven–bound platform empty and spotted with yellow light, he had pulled himself onto that cement slab and wept. Then he used the last two percent of his phone battery to call his father.

Despite what Preston knew his mother believed, his extended silence with his father—what, since moving home, had become a childish game of avoidance—wasn’t caused by disgust or offense at his father’s newfound selfishness; it was caused by absolute fury at it. His reaction to their divorce was so intense, so unexpectedly harsh, that it embarrassed him, and whenever the subject came up with his brother or on one of the weepy calls he received in the aftermath from his mother, it was all he could do to stay silent until the whole topic had passed. He understood the irrationality of his reaction—that he, the family runaway, the family addict, the serial abuser of trust and goodwill, would become outraged at anyone else’s impropriety—so he buried it.

And yet, he
was
outraged. He didn’t know why, though he suspected it had something to do with the accumulated years of shouting matches with his father, all on the recurrent theme of good-versus-bad decisions, with good decisions, according to his sweaty, purple-faced father, meaning considering the effects of actions on people other than yourself. Which was
funny,
given the last conversation he had had with his father was on the sidewalk outside his graduation dinner, the graduation dinner his father had ruined by choosing to inform his mother he was going to divorce her in the taxi on the way there and then had tried to un-ruin by ordering excessively for the table, a gesture that made his friends uncomfortable and Preston even more uncomfortable, especially when his father made a show of putting the whole thing, more than a grand in wine and uneaten tapas, on his American Express.

All of which would have been easily forgotten in the high drama of the moment if his father, looking for some kind of praise, hadn’t followed him when he slipped outside to smoke and, when Preston wouldn’t look at him, hadn’t put a hand on his shoulder and told Preston he was being ungrateful.

He couldn’t remember what he replied, though he did remember his father continuing on about
money,
of all things, making the whole moment—his one chance to explain himself—about numbers: the amount he had spent on Preston’s schools and rehabs and unfinished programs, the amount he had wasted on his son’s extended adolescence. That was the phrase that set Preston off,
extended adolescence,
coming from a man who, hours before, had nuked his family because he didn’t feel like dealing with them anymore. A man who, like the rest of his fat, rich, self-absorbed generation, a generation that had spent and drilled and bickered away the largest surplus of wealth and resources anyone had ever inherited, believed that the mark of a good life could be found in the quantity you consumed. Of the stream of hurtful obscenity that followed, Preston remembered spitting something about the fact that his father had written some lovely checks over the course of his fatherhood, that he should be real proud, and if he felt like he was owed some debt of gratitude, he should just tally them all up and send Preston a goddamn bill.

That was the last thing he had said to his father,
Send me a bill,
and the astonishing thing was that his father actually did. It arrived a week later, an itemized list scribbled on four full pages of yellow legal paper, that was surprisingly detailed—he had clearly taken the time to go through old files—and in the end totaled, including a quarter of the mortgage, two unrefunded expulsions, and a fistful of lost orthodontics, an impressive $2.4 million.

There it was: the price of privilege at the end of the previous century, an imposing figure to contemplate—his cost—and yet somehow relieving. He knew the boundaries of what he owed. And so, newly degreed and highly unemployed, he sat down one night in his shared Evanston living room and wrote out a check for the total. It felt good to spell out the full sum in words, to specify at the end with that strange little fraction that there were no pennies involved, this was it, nothing more, and then to sign his full name in black. And though he may have been a tad blazed when he did it, he addressed the envelope in neat block letters, stuck a ridiculous Bart Simpson stamp on the top, and dropped it in the big mouth of the mailbox at the end of his block. On the memo line he had written, simply,
Freedom.

His father was at the Southport platform to retrieve him within minutes of Preston’s call, stepping out of his ancient orange station car and wrapping his son in a noisy nylon hug. He told him again and again how happy he was to see him, how wonderful it was that he was home, how much he had missed him. “How are you? What are you doing here? I want to hear everything,” his father had said as they drove in the rattling wind machine of his car. Preston told him. “You’ve been living out of your
car?
” His father began to laugh. “Jesus, what took you so long to call?”

“I don’t know,” Preston said as he watched the commuter tracks disappear behind him.

Seeing his father’s condo, Preston understood why his brother kept talking to him about it, how
interesting
it all was, their father’s new home, which he now understood was his brother’s way of saying “tacky and somewhat heartbreaking.” Trying to crawl inside the bizarre private logic that had led their father here was one of the few things he and Tommy had to talk about, with Tommy eventually dismissing his own anger with one of their mother’s pleasantries—“As long as he’s happy…”—to which Preston would think but never say,
Of course he’s not happy, he’s never been happy,
which wasn’t actually true, but what he meant was that, like everything else in the grand stoical chess match between fathers and sons, they were never shown it.

“Well, here it is,” his dad had said with a smile that seemed, in its own way, proud. They were standing in a living room that was higher than it was wide. It was vacuumed and spotless in a vacation-rental sort of way, with all of the furniture and adornments to demonstrate that somebody lived there and no evidence otherwise of human existence.

“It’s great,” said Preston.

“We have wi-fi,” said his dad. “And the master tub has jets if you want to soak.”

Under his coat, his father was skinny, which Preston noticed mostly in his narrow neck and the deepened wrinkles on his face, as if someone had let a bit of air out of a balloon. On the shelf behind him was a replica lobster trap, its wood aged to seem as though it had been brined by the sea. He had heard his friends talk about the moment—in a hospital, say—that their parents all of a sudden became old to them. In their stories, it was often physical frailty—the way the IV tubes were taped to the inside of the arm with little white Xs—that did away with their lifelong fights to surpass them, but for Preston, it was the mental image of his father browsing the shelves of a reproduction-antiques store, picking up a vase or a decoy duck, finding a little jar to put on the back of his toilet for the matches, and trying to figure out, in his own dislocation, how to make a home.