The Oregon Experiment (18 page)

So this was what he was going home for. No, not home. He never really thought of it as home. Or Yaquina either. The house he’d grown up in was torn down, the whole neighborhood—bungalows full of fishermen’s families and boatbuilders, engine mechanics like his dad could’ve been—was now a golf club, right down to the beach, a private course reserved for Californians living in the new condos surrounding the harbor. Talk about a fucking metaphor. He should have told that one to the girl from Duluth.

A busload of problem kidneys. A constant parade in and out of the toilet and the whole back of the bus reeked of blue chemicals. Living with the crap we make. You swallow your spit all day, Flak liked to say, but spit in a cup and the idea of swallowing it becomes revolting. He thought he should switch seats, but instead turned his face to the window to breathe the circulating air. He doubted he knew anybody in Yaquina anymore. The only reason to go would be to check on Billy. But Clay didn’t drive. Driving Naomi to the hospital had been the only time he’d driven in nine years. Cars were part of the problem. And Californians.

No, Douglas wasn’t home, but he’d been living there nearly five years. Paid rent. Knew people. Had a crew. Hooked into the network from Arcata on up to Seattle. Nothing you’d call home about his apartment—his room, actually. A single mattress on the floor. Never bought any sheets, so every couple weeks he’d flip the mattress over. No pillowcase either, so he’d put a clean T-shirt over the pillow each night and wear that one the next day. He had a blanket he’d lie under, awake in the dark.

The worst time was when the sounds stopped. He appreciated a frat party that went late, drunks hooting and hollering at two and three and four a.m. Without them, after the midnight Greyhound came in and the 7-Eleven
closed and the bars shut down, besides a few late-night sirens, the hard quiet got inside his head and squeezed. As well as he knew anything, he knew silence: the oppressive weight of all that was not.

There was a friend of Flak’s who’d done two tours in Iraq, said he needed noise to sleep. Said quiet was when bad shit happened. Back in Douglas quiet stalked him in his sleep, turning him into a madman. Went to bed with a loaded AR-14 under the blankets, which scared off his girlfriend. He had to reenlist, get back to the chopper base in Baghdad for a decent night’s rest.

When Clay drifted off to sleep just before dawn, he’d dream of smashing glass and crunching steel, and he’d wake with a jolt and carry that torment through his day. His mind was pulled down so hard it hurt his neck.

Memories reached toward him like fingers of smoke in the darkness: Ruby Christine in his arms, the warmth of her wound up tight in clean blankets, black eyes rolling like marbles, her magnificent strength, even the nurses said so. And later, with the baby asleep on Daria’s chest, Clay was curled in beside them on the hospital bed, crinkly when he moved, and he realized that all the shit of his life—his father going off the deep end, Billy dying, his mother losing it—had led to this moment. If any one thing had been different, he wouldn’t be drifting off intoxicated by the warm room and Daria’s warm skin, her peaceful face, their baby’s randomly flopping arms. Heaven. And he rested his head on Daria’s shoulder, closed his eyes, and slept deeply for hours, slept like he hadn’t since Billy was killed.

Two days later, Daria and Ruby Christine were gone. Still gone.

The silence wormed in, and not long after it the sound of Ruby Christine’s cry inside the house in Idaho. Clay had taken the Greyhound, then walked to Daria’s parents’ house, a white ranch on a street of white ranches, the dry wind blowing up dust. A big man opened the door. Clay recognized him from a picture and knew he was Daria’s father, but hadn’t expected the other resemblance—Ruby Christine. “Wait here,” he said, and closed the door. On the front steps, Clay leaned on a wrought-iron rail, picking at chips of black paint and blotches of rust with his fingernail. And then he heard the baby cry. A sweet, hungry, healthy demand. That day she was one week old. He closed his eyes, half sat on the rail, and let his daughter’s spirit flood him. And he didn’t sense anything else until a large hand clamped his upper arm. A cop. Two cops. They put him in a cruiser and then on the Greyhound and waited until the bus pulled out. Clay got off
at Walla Walla and went right back. This time he didn’t hear his baby, and the cops threw him in jail for the night before shoving him on the bus at dawn.

If hatred and violent yearnings and blinding anger got hold of him at four a.m., they didn’t let go for days. He became them. In those times Clay believed in demons, in possession, and hoped he believed in exorcism.

And then he remembered the picture. The photograph of Naomi. Her pregnancy, her arm covering her breasts, embarrassment in her grin. The picture was next to his mattress, propped up against a Mountain Dew bottle. He remembered the dark tan on her legs and arms and how the sunlight coming in their bedroom window wrapped around the white skin of her belly, her eyes looking straight at him.

Through the tinted bus window, across miles of pasture, Mount Hood was out. Llamas grazed beside sheep. Grass-seed fields shimmered electric green under the sun. A few more miles of interstate. He was suddenly excited to get back to his room, to look at the picture. He hadn’t felt anything like this in a long time. Anticipation. Urgency.

At dawn, she slipped out of bed and pulled the covers over Trinity. She put her hand to her daughter’s forehead. What did Trinity know, and how could she know it? She was born four years after the boy fell, and Sequoia had told her nothing of the details; her daughter had absorbed Sequoia’s horror through her skin.

But it would pass. The
Bleigiessen
had been a good omen. Sequoia had done it every year as a girl—a German tradition, her father’s, to foretell the coming year—and this past New Year’s Eve she’d clacked the hunks of lead into a huge spoon and helped Trinity hold it over a candle flame. As it melted, smoke twisted from the searing murky liquid, and when they tipped the spoon over a bowl the molten lead hit the cold water with an explosive crack, hissing bursts of steam, and Trinity dunked in her hand to retrieve her prophecy. “A sun,” she declared. Rays of lead beamed out from the center. “A bright sun that lights up the deep dark and scary.”

Sequoia turned the heavy
Bleigiessen
on the nightstand to face Trinity so her sun, glowing under the scarf-draped lamp, would be the first thing she saw when she awoke. Then she closed the door to let her sleep.

At the kitchen table with the water heating, she opened the morning
paper straight to the op-ed page. Without even reading the column, she felt a rush of relief: Dawg Declares had weighed in on the church moving.

The police chief, Baxter Hazelton, had come down hard; he’d reprimanded the two cops who’d done nothing but issue tickets at the scene of the crime, he’d accepted all of Ron’s complaints, and through statements to the
Union-Gazette
he’d scorned “this group of vigilantes who defied the law and stole a church under the cover of darkness when the good people of Douglas were innocently sleeping.”

Hazelton had been elected by mistake. He was the conservative law-and-order candidate running against Stemp Godwin, who’d been chief of police for eighteen years. Every six years a right-winger would be pushed forward to run against him, and every six years he won in a landslide.

But five years ago, Stemp had a stroke two weeks before the election. Even in a coma, he almost won, but after a hand recount Hazelton was declared the winner by fewer than a hundred votes.

Five years later almost no one would admit to having voted for Hazelton, whose incompetence matched his arrogance. He handed out jobs to hunting buddies. He’d been involved in accounting scandals. There’d been talk of a recall, but mostly people were holding their noses and waiting for his term to expire, figuring he couldn’t do too much harm.

But now Hazelton pledged to destroy the “hazardous building.” He’d heaped on thousands in fines. He said Ron had been “terrorized.” He threatened Jim and Pete with prison. He charged everyone in the group with throwing a brick through the Bank of America window.

Dawg Declares was penned twice a month by a woman in her seventies who lived in a converted school bus up among the heavy firs and mossy live oaks of the coast range. Except for right-wing Christians and Humvee drivers—the proud Hazelton supporters—no one questioned her moral authority. Mountain-dweller asceticism, simple unqualified opinions, old age, and good-heartedness earned her enormous respect in the community. Mother Teresa mixed with the Dalai Lama and Yoda. City counselors and citizens alike accepted her evenhanded judgments.

So as Sequoia read the column she was comforted. Dawg declared that this local effort to save a historic church and create a new community center should be “shampooed, brushed, belly-scratched, and given a treat” by one and all. The column ended, “Dawg scolds YOU, Chief Baxter Hazelton: Bad cop. No doughnut.” Sequoia believed that the police chief, the
railroad and building inspectors, and even Ron Dexter would be shamed into acquiescence.

She was reaching for the phone to call Jim Furdy when she spotted his letter to the editor:

Sammy latched on—5:57 a.m.—and while he nursed Naomi drifted toward sleep but was yanked back by Scanlon’s heavy breath catching in his throat. She’d had trouble falling asleep last night, partly because Joey was watching Leno on the other side of the wall—though she couldn’t make out the words, she’d heard the quick rhythm of Leno’s cracks and the audience laughter—but also because she couldn’t stop thinking of Sammy’s big brother. He’d been “baby” to her until his first birthday, when she named him Joshua. She told no one about the name (all these years later she’d never even told Scanlon), but it had helped transform him from a hospital receiving blanket squirming with lumps of guilt and fearful loss into a child, separate from her.

That separateness felt more defined when she went to France, even more so in Tokyo. Although she felt hollowed out watching Parisian three-year-olds in smart wool coats by the river, then four-year-olds with brothers and sisters climbing up slides in Japanese playgrounds, she was increasingly sure she’d done the right thing.

But when she came back to New York, Joshua’s nearness clutched at her like heat. The fear that she’d made an irrevocable mistake returned. Weeks after her father told her the news about Clair and his wife having twins—weeks into her anosmia—anger and a desperate sense of loss took hold of her: Clair had two babies now, and she had none. Night after night she’d come to the conclusion that she wouldn’t forgive herself, couldn’t
regain
herself, until she held her own child.

When she fell in love with Scanlon, he wanted to wait for the stability of tenure track before contemplating pregnancy; and although it was difficult, she waited. Finally, though, last winter, when it looked like a job
would come through, she couldn’t wait any longer and intentionally left her diaphragm at home (Scanlon still didn’t know she’d left it on purpose) when they went to Cape Cod for Thanksgiving.

Last night, long after Leno had ended, she fell asleep crying. Sammy’s birth was supposed to redeem her, supposed to relieve the burden of her loss. But as she nursed him these three weeks, bathed him and changed his diapers, blew between his toes and fished his limbs into onesies, she could summon no forgiveness for herself. Staring eye to eye at Sammy, she was appalled that she’d surrendered Joshua to strangers. How could she have done it? What kind of woman turns away from her baby?

She cried through the two o’clock feeding, then the four. And now, at 6:10, she switched Sammy to the other side, and a pinch in her nipple clawed into her breast. “Christ!” she shouted.

Scanlon shot up. “What is it?”

Sammy started crying.

She tried to get him back on her nipple, but the pain was too intense. “Goddamnit,” she said. “This breast infection, whatever the hell it is, it’s worse.” She was panting from the pain as she tried again to bring Sammy to her, his wailing mouth sucking at the air.

“Just relax,” Scanlon said. “Take it easy.”

She got Sammy on and he sucked hard, frustrated, and after a moment the pain pulled back. Bearable.

Scanlon was patting her head.

“Fuck,” she said. “Something’s very wrong.” As her milk flowed easier, she let herself relax. She kissed the top of Sammy’s head.

“Let’s get you into the doctor this morning.”

“It’s Saturday. I’m not going to urgent care. Those bozos.”

“Well, let’s just think this through.” That tone of his. Would he always be the caretaker?

She kissed Sammy’s head again—and gasped. She sniffed his scalp. She sniffed behind his ears for the scent of almonds. Her heart thumped. He reared back howling from her breast. Her neck and shoulders clenched as if claws were ripping at her flesh. She blew her nose into the sheet and lurched at Scanlon, trying to smell his breath: blank.

Scanlon felt her spiraling down. He’d seen it before. She sat sobbing at the kitchen table, clutching the phone while he rubbed her shoulders. His
mother rocked Sammy in the living room, but he was crying, hungry, and Scanlon knew Naomi couldn’t handle him right now. She’d called her ENT in New York, and her New York allergist and OB/GYN, but got their weekend services, and no one had called back. Sammy wailed.

“Bring me the baby,” she said.

“Let my mother bounce him a little,” Scanlon suggested. “Just to settle him down.”

“Joey!” Naomi called, then blew her nose and took Sammy into her arms.

When his gaping mouth found the nipple, he was silenced, like a soundproof door had whooshed shut. Naomi winced, and Scanlon saw it all: she was crashing. Anxiety had gotten on top of her again. Exhaustion had allowed the demon to tighten his grip, and now it was riding her to the ground. The best thing he could do was to not let her surrender. To keep her moving. In those early days, before they’d zeroed in on the right anti-depressant, the right dose, he’d bring her coffee in bed, then pull her to her feet and button her shirt and get her out for the farmers’ market or a weekday matinee.