The Year We Left Home (37 page)

Matt said, “I think it’s great too, Aunt Torrie. Plus there’s a fire escape you could use for a porch if you wanted some fresh air.”

“Family escape,” Torrie said, a joke.

The gas stove still had to be hooked up, and Blake had Matt help him with that. “Where did Torrie go?” Blake asked after a time. He’d lost track of her, and even though he wasn’t his mom, he felt a tug of worry, which was stupid. She was going to live here alone and come and go as she pleased. That was the whole point.

He went to the front windows, with their view of what used to be a five-and-dime and then a discount grocery, and down the block, the old Rialto, its marquee still in place, an
R
and a
T
dripping off the edge of it. A lawyer’s office hung on, and the ad agency that put out the free flyers. A realtor specializing in agricultural properties. A furniture consignment store. The American Heart Association, the Knights of Pythias on the second floor. A place for orthopedic shoes. The laundromat. His brother was either a real estate genius, about to catch the crest of the next big wave, or else he’d spent a lot of money on a really big For Rent sign.

Torrie came into view, the top of her head bobbing along the sidewalk beneath him.

They heard her on the stairs, then she came in, blowing a bit with effort, a brown paper bag under her arm. “What you got there, Tor?”

“I got lunch.” She set it down on the oilcloth table cover and lifted out a number of foil packets with their edges crimped together, and different styrofoam containers, and a quantity of paper napkins. It smelled of something hot and cooked.

Matt said, “Hey, Mexican.” He unwrapped rolled burritos and containers of rice and refried beans and salsa, and a waxed-paper sleeve of tortilla chips.

“Where’d you get this, Tor?” There were some Mexicans in town now; Blake guessed this was what they ate.

“La Tienda.” She scooped her hand to indicate a little distance. “It’s on the next block.”

“Well that’s something new.” He picked up a burrito, pried the foil open, sniffed it. Sometimes Trish made taco salad, with hamburger and sour cream and guacamole. He guessed he wasn’t a real adventurous
eater. Unknown Mexican people cooking in a back room somewhere, that made him think food poisoning. But he’d have to chance it, for politeness’ sake.

Torrie brought out plates for them, an old melamine set of his mother’s. They opened the door to the fire escape and moved the table so it caught the breeze. He asked Torrie if he could smoke, remembering that it was her place now. Just before they sat down, Matt brought out his band’s CD. Torrie didn’t have a stereo, but Matt said they could play it on her computer.

“Really?” Blake said. “You can do that?” Matt and Torrie laughed at him and said, Sure. He shouldn’t be surprised. Computers did everything but wipe your ass for you these days.

Matt’s band was like the Mexican food, in that it could have been a lot worse. The music was a little on the screechy side, but in parts of it you could make out an actual tune, some harmony you could latch onto. “Is that you singing?” Blake asked. Like most people, Matt’s speaking voice was one thing and his singing voice was another. The singer was all bothered about something, a no-good low-down woman. “You sound pretty good.”

“Thanks, Uncle Blake.” Matt was pretending to be embarrassed at the praise, but you could tell he was all kinds of pleased with himself.

“Aside from your, like, brokenheartedness.”

Torrie punched Blake lightly in the arm. “That’s just the song,” she informed him.

“Oh, beg your pardon. Here I was feeling sorry for him.”

“Ha ha,” Torrie said. When she was teasing him or making fun of him, that’s when he could see her as she used to be.

You couldn’t let the thought all the way in or it would kill you with sadness. The life she might have had. She would have got married, had kids. There wouldn’t be any of that for her now. She was a fish out of water.

Pretty soon they’d have to go back to the house and let his parents and Anita pick on them for a while. His mom and Anita would probably want to come over here with every cleaning product in the world
and turn the place upside down. But not just yet. The sun slid over his face, warming it. It was a nice moment, and he felt a kind of useless melancholy at the idea that the three of them would never again sit here in just such a moment and that no moment of life was like any other and as soon as you became aware of them, they were as good as gone. He must have been tired.

Matt stood up. “I brought you something for your new place.”

He showed them. It was a small flat metal shape, a rabbit hunkered down on its front paws. Its eyes and whiskers and toenails were indicated by raised lines. “It’s a cookie cutter,” Matt said. “It was Great-Aunt Martha’s.”

Blake took another look at it. “I’ll be damned. You remember that, Tor? Aunt Martha used to bake a ton of cookies and bring them over in potato chip canisters.” He hadn’t thought about that in years.

Then he thought about the night of Martha’s funeral and he went cold.

“How’d you get this?” he asked Matt, wanting to move the conversation along.

“I don’t remember. Mom says Martha gave it to me. Here you go.”

Torrie held the rabbit in her open hand. It wasn’t Matt’s fault. He’d been too young.

If Torrie was upset, Blake couldn’t tell from her face, which wasn’t able to do much in the way of expressions anymore. Torrie closed her hand around the rabbit. It seemed like everything was going to be OK, and he felt a careful relief.

You couldn’t pretend that people didn’t exist, or that things hadn’t happened.

Torrie said, “Don’t you want it?”

“I kind of think it should stay around here.”

Because Matt wasn’t going to. That much seemed clear. He was going wherever it was that a guy with a guitar went these days. So many kids left here now. They felt they were missing out on things, they wanted a chance to earn the kind of money that everybody except him was pulling down these days. He worried about his own kids.
You didn’t raise them just so they’d grow up and you’d never get to see them.

He guessed he should be happy for Matt because he was doing what he wanted. Maybe some people just weren’t born to stick around. They already had a ticket on that rocket to the Final Frontier.

Torrie put the rabbit up in a windowsill where you could see the shape of it against the light. It looked more like a cat perched up in a tree than anything else.

Blake was just getting ready to say they should head back. Torrie crossed the room and came back with a T-shirt she spread out on the table. The picture printed on the front was the one Torrie had taken of him, the one where he was turning into a board or a tree.

“What’s this? I’m a shirt now?”

“I owe you money.”

“Money, what for?”

“Guy in Seattle sold a bunch of you.”

“Wow,” Matt said. “You’re a hit in Seattle.”

“He says, to Japanese tourists.”

“You’re shittin’ me.” He couldn’t get his mind around it. People on both sides of the Pacific Ocean walking around wearing him on their chests.

“Hey Uncle Blake, if I ever get to Japan, I’ll look you up.”

“You do that, slick.” He saw it behind his eyes: the ocean waves slapping against each other, the cities and trains and temples, the slash-stroke writing, the women dressed up like fancy, teetering dolls. The Land of the Rising Sun.

He told Torrie she didn’t owe him money. They listened to the rest of Matt’s music for another moment and a moment and a moment more.

This was
the trip his wife had always wanted to take, although like most things she wanted, Ryan had needed to talk her into it. And it had been a wonderful vacation. They reminded themselves of this whenever they had to get past some unavoidable and predictable space of boredom or irritation. The great time they’d been having was on one side of the chasm. They had only to ride things out, reach the other side, where a new and unexplored great time awaited them. Although they tried not to think of it in such terms, the grand amount of money they were spending made happiness feel like a matter of some urgency.

The kids had done really well, better than expected. They had probably been more awestruck by the plane ride than anything else. Sam had never flown before, and Anna had been too young to remember it. So that the airport crowds, the loudspeaker announcements, the smiling stewardesses in their trim uniforms, the cunning little packages of peanuts were all new to them. As was the terrifying skyward lurch. There were a few bad moments then, but soon they were coaxed by the impossible views of clouds, close up, all around them, underneath!

Anna was ten, Sam was six. Anna was her mother’s. Sam was his. Everybody said so. They were a little genetic laboratory, a real-life
demonstration of selected traits. Anna had Ellen’s sturdy seriousness and gray eyes. Sam could have been any one of Ryan’s Norwegian farm relatives from the last century. “Mom,” Sam said, looking down at this new country of sunlit fleece, “how do clouds stay up?”

While Anna just stared. Ryan put an arm around her shoulders. “Look,” he told her. “There’s another plane over there, do you see it? I wonder if it’s crossing the ocean too.” Sometimes he thought he understood his daughter better than his son, if only because she’d been around longer. Sam was still a cheerful savage, immune to most terrors. Anna needed to be reassured that hurtling through space in a pressurized tin can was absolutely normal, natural, and delightful. One of the lies parents told children for their own good.

When they first arrived in Rome (the children cranky, jet-lagged, complaining of tummyaches, earaches), it was hard for them to be impressed by anything. The Colosseum, which was too hot for anyone’s comfort and had the look of something that ought to be either built back up or torn down. After one museum gallery, the pictures all looked alike to them and talking about the Renaissance only made them fretful. This although Ryan and Ellen had primed them for weeks beforehand with
Let’s Go to Italy!
coloring books and storybooks and fun examples of Italian vocabulary.
(Buon giorno! Grazie!)
Children only saw what was here and now, not any of the past glories. Here and now, in Rome at least, had been the staggering, murderous traffic, clouds of unfurling exhaust, trampling herds of tourists, food the kids didn’t want to eat. Thank God for gelato.

“Hey Anna,” Ryan said. “It’s lemon. You like lemon, don’t you?” And her little round chin stopped its trembling. What wouldn’t he do to comfort her, coax her, shield her from hurt? How much longer would ice cream be enough?

Florence, Orvieto, and Venice had gone better for all of them. The kids had settled into the routine of travel and regained their noisy energy. There were the family-friendly activities that had been promised: the hands-on pasta-making workshop, the mask-making workshop. The actor dressed up in pantaloons and doublet and plumed hat who
scared Sam at first with his extravagant delivery, his barker’s spiel designed to convey historical narrative in an entertaining manner. So it reminded them of Disneyland. Kids liked Disneyland.

Ryan and Ellen were also privately relieved by the presence of other peoples’ loudly misbehaving kids, those who screamed and squalled and provoked their parents into shows of public discipline. Although they were always mindful not to invest or project too much of themselves into other people’s opinions of their children, since it might be their turn next to deal with tantrums or brattiness. Still, how well Anna and Sam looked by comparison to this or that raging child, how comely, how sweet, how serious. They were good and vigilant parents. It was nice when some of that showed.

And if parenting had come to replace other parts of marriage, if every other sentence seemed to begin with “The kids,” if unspoken things took up more and more space between them, well, none of their problems were anything new, in the history of the world. Especially this ancient world they had come to view, its palaces and fountains and statuary, its courts and grottoes echoing with old secrets. So much that was bloody and splendid and barbaric and grand had happened here. They were content to be eclipsed for a time. That was part of a vacation too.

It was the height of tourist season, you could hear English spoken on every street, which struck Ryan as somehow rude. And disappointing, as if they’d waited too long to come, and now everything had been tamed and colonized for them. There were charter tours that catered to Americans, with cheerful Italian guides and well-plumbed hotels. Even though Ryan and Ellen decided against these, it was hard to avoid incongruous reminders of home. An Italian TV lady with a Jennifer Aniston hairdo introduced a feature on Jennifer Aniston. The Stars and Stripes lurched into view, a whole field of them, worn on the T-shirts of some girls’ high school athletic team. Basketball? Lacrosse? Ryan couldn’t tell. They clomped off in their shorts and braided hair, the flags jigging over their breasts.

“Maybe if we were Italian,” Ellen said, frowning. “I mean if it was
our heritage, there would be things we’d recognize, things that would resonate for us. Not that it isn’t all amazing . . .”

Where was the real Italy? How would they know? So much strangeness in the midst of so much strangeness. The elegant carabinieri, certainly the tallest men in Italy. The little golden towns, the walls of ancient, lichened stone, the excellent wine, both red and white, that they drank and drank without, it seemed, ever getting drunk. All the things they had been warned against: pickpockets, beggars, overpriced taxis, scams. In Florence, two young men on a motor scooter slowed beside them in a concerning way. “Where you from?” one called, and when Ryan said, “Chicago,” they laughed and brandished imaginary machine guns,
rattaratta tat tat,
waved and rode off. What a goofy, happy moment, a relief, a release. In Venice the gondoliers were bored, oh painfully bored, with having to haul the tourists around. They waited sourly on the landings in their silly striped shirts and ribboned hats. Ryan and Ellen opted for the vaporetti instead. There was no reason to pay money for such guaranteed contempt. And this made them happy too, as if they had escaped some circle of tourist hell.