American Subversive (4 page)

At 9:04 a.m. a gray Toyota Corolla slid into a parking space beside
the picnic table farthest from the entrance. I got up, went outside, and walked casually across the bustling lot. Keith was behind the wheel; next to him sat a wiry girl with dirty-blond hair. I climbed in behind her and pulled the door shut. Then the locks clicked. It's a sound I still hear these many months later. The sound of leaving one life for another.

Keith turned to back out and caught my eye. It was only a second, but it was enough. No one said a word. We edged past minivans, mud-splattered pickups, and on the far side of the rest stop, the big rigs, parked diagonally like giant dominoes suspended in midfall. For several minutes we drove in silence. Up front, they peered into mirrors and sneaked looks at passing cars. Keith changed lanes a lot, slowed down and sped up, never too fast. The inside of the car was spotless, no maps or magazines. A single blue duffel bag inscribed with the words
TEXAS IS GOD'S COUNTRY
lay on the seat beside me. I didn't touch it.

This went on awhile, the silence. Maybe ten minutes. Had I done something wrong? Keith and the girl were fidgety but focused. They'd traveled a long way already. They'd come up out of the South and the plan was to keep going. Where, I had no idea. That was the toughest part in the beginning, the lack of information. I knew not to ask questions, not to speak at all. But I knew something else, too, knew it as soon as I sat down. That this felt right. These two people, this car, it was where I wanted to be,
needed
to be. The thought soothed me as we drove east, past towns I knew well, then not so well, then not at all. The sun was high now, the fog had lifted, and as the minutes passed, so did the memories, as if taking a victory lap before disappearing forever—school dances in Dellwood, family camping trips on Fontana Lake, and out of nowhere, little Danny Ingram, a childhood crush whose house I'd biked past hours earlier. How many times I'd written that name in the margins of my sixth-grade notebooks, how many crayon-drawn love notes I'd taped to the inside of my locker—

We're clear, Keith said.

I jumped in my seat, startled.

You're sure? the girl asked.

Yes.

They both exhaled at once. The girl rolled her head around, stretched her neck. The tension evaporated, the car lost weight.

Sorry, Keith said, addressing me in the mirror. That's always the most dangerous part.

We had some trouble a few days ago, the girl began. We stopped for gas and a car started following—

Paige, this is Lindsay, Keith said. Lindsay, Paige.

Oh, I'm so sorry, said Lindsay, turning fully around. She smiled, then put a hand on my knee and squeezed. It's really nice to meet you.

You, too.

And don't worry, you were perfect back there, she continued.

I don't think she
was
worried, Keith said.

Of course not, Lindsay replied. I didn't mean it that way. Her eyes darted around, looking for a soft landing, and settled on the bag beside me. Oh, that's for you, some clothes and stuff. Keith guessed your size.

Thanks.

I unzipped it. The contents had been stuffed inside haphazardly, clearly all bought at once, probably in a hurry. A few plain T-shirts and tank tops, a pair of cutoff Levi's, a zip-front windbreaker, knee-length skirt, blue drawstring sweatpants, flip-flops, and a pair of open-toed mules I could tell were too small. At the bottom was a plastic bag with some basics: underwear, socks, black tights. I held each item up, like a Christmas gift from a distant relative, then folded it neatly and moved on to the next.

There wasn't much of a selection, Lindsay said. But, you know, it's not like we'll be out on the town that often.

Right, I said, and laughed nervously.

Lindsay played with the radio until she found a static-free station—a breathy teenager singing of love. I tried to ignore the music and forget the clothes, their awful anonymity. Everything would be fine. I'd made this choice carefully, thought it through for weeks. But that doesn't make it any easier in the moment. The moment your history disappears, all you've known cast aside for all you don't.

Ten miles short of Asheville, Keith pulled off I-40 and headed east toward the Blue Ridge Parkway. We were driving through the backcountry now, no one in front, no one behind. I thought of rolling down the window, breathing in the Appalachian pine. But I didn't know the rules yet, and I didn't want to ask permission. I could wait. I
had been waiting. From the radio came another ode to youth and lust. Lindsay started humming along. Suddenly, without a word, his eyes never leaving the road, Keith reached down and tuned in a country station. The old stuff. Kris Kristofferson drinking a beer for breakfast, and one more for dessert.

Lindsay went silent. I stayed quiet, too. But I knew all the words.

His full name—or at least the one he went by—was Keith Sutter. I knew him mostly by reputation, though we'd met once before, late one night last spring, in a dimly lit apartment in Raleigh. Keith had showed up there to recruit me, though I was far too occupied by the illicit particulars of my new life to realize it at first. It was a life that had risen from the black depths of grief following my brother Bobby's death, and while its day-to-day requirements partially tempered my despair, the void was still vast, and I would come to see Keith as a worthy surrogate. And my only chance for vengeance.

But let me start at the beginning, or the end—Bobby's funeral, a year ago yesterday. Having endured the twenty-four longest hours of my life—unbearable hours I cannot revisit, even now—I flew home to Maggie Valley foolishly determined to pull myself, and everyone else, together. And for a few days—consumed by the hushed and morbid business of the funeral itself—my parents and I managed to scrape along intact. The agony came afterward, when the people we cared about were still lingering around the house, bringing us food and magazines and books about bouncing back. What we really wanted, of course, was to be left alone. We needed time. I called the think tank where I worked in D.C. and told them I'd be gone a few more weeks. Each day, each hour, became a marathon of emotion punctuated by free-flowing tears and drawn-out embraces, by muted dinners and sleepless bodies shuffling across late-night floors. I was worried about my mother. She was taking it the worst. For days she cooked and cleaned with a singular ferocity, then switched gears, loaded up on pills and pushed the world away. I talked to my father when I could, when he could, in the morning mostly, before the hours of memories had a chance to pile up. He'd been a soldier, like Bobby, and I thought he might have answers, some kind of explanation. He tried his best,
but there are no answers when a soldier dies. Only questions. Only blame.

Weeks passed, then one night my parents accepted an invitation to a dinner party down the street. My mother did her hair, put on a dress, and, taking my father's hand, followed him out the front door. From my childhood bedroom window I watched them stroll down the driveway. They looked tall and determined.
Now
, I thought. I can go back to my life. People do recover. A faint light comes on somewhere in the darkness of despair and instinctively we move toward it. We move
forward
. Of course,
I
hadn't moved forward. In taking care of my parents, I'd shut myself down, become a professional support system, a body to lean on, talk to, cry with. My mourning would take place over many months and years. I knew this, even then—though I couldn't know the form it would take. Bobby's death would haunt my solitude, test my sanity, drive away those I loved. Because my older brother—my
only
brother—was everything to me. And as hard as I would try, I just couldn't accept what had happened to him.

The next day I told my parents it was time. I had to get back to D.C., just as they had to get back to their lives, piece together some semblance of normality. I found a flight and packed my bags. My father insisted on driving me to the airport, so I hugged my mother good-bye, then hurried out to the garage where he was waiting in the car.

Mom seems much better, I said, reaching for my seat belt. When he didn't answer, I looked over. He was staring straight ahead, tears streaming down his face.

Dad, I said, putting my hand on his cheek.

But he didn't move.

Dad, it'll be okay.

But even as I said it, I knew it wouldn't be. That was the hardest moment of all, the two of us just sitting there. The breath had been knocked out of me, and the life would be next. What was I doing? There was nothing I cared about in Washington anymore. I'd just be running away from myself. From my parents. From my brother. The only way to survive overwhelming grief, to emerge on some theoretical other side, was to face it head-on. I couldn't leave. And I didn't want to. I kissed my father on the forehead, then opened the car door and took my bags back inside.

Old routines. Nothing maudlin. We didn't set a place for Bobby at the table or leave his old bedroom untouched. Just small comforts. A way to get through time intact. Another month passed. Back in D.C., my sublet ran out and my leave of absence at the institute ended. My boss e-mailed several times but I didn't respond, and a week later he wrote to say I'd been let go. I was almost relieved.

I began taking walks, to the edge of the backyard and beyond, into woods at once remote and intensely familiar. In autumn Maggie Valley, North Carolina, became the most beautiful place on earth, the leaves bursting into color overnight, like fireworks exploding across the sky. In the forest it was my brother and I again, playing cowboys and Indians, our faces painted, feathers in our hair. We carried child-size hickory longbows, fashioning quivers from rawhide sacks, arrows from the branches of elms. Bobby spent hours whittling each one down until it flew straight and true. Or hikes we took along old homestead trails, Bobby naming all the animals we saw. Once, he tiptoed up to a deer and stroked its head so softly it didn't even flinch. We spent our childhoods back there, in the hills behind our modest ranch-style house, hills and then mountains that ran hundreds of miles in every direction. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the jewel of the Appalachians, a world unto itself. It was a place you were born to, rooted to—a place you could never leave behind. Our lives came flooding back, one year after the next, until the memories became too recent, and I pictured my brother as I'd last seen him, the morning he deployed, surrounded by his friends from Appalachian State. Just twenty-nine and with so much life to live.

They all came to the funeral, of course, caravanned down from Boone to say good-bye. At the service they stood off to the side, but still no one could miss them. Their pain was so raw that for several minutes I was too overcome to focus on anything the minister was saying. Afterward, Carter, Bobby's old roommate and best friend, came over and we hugged, long and hard, wiping tears away with our sleeves.

You should come up and see us for a weekend while you're still home, he said.

I told him I'd try, then turned to greet the next tortured face.

Carter Gattling was from Black Mountain, not far from Maggie Valley, and he shared my brother's love of the outdoors. They had both majored in Sustainable Development, and after graduation Carter put his studies into practice. He bought a patch of forest in the middle of nowhere and joined the small community of back-to-the-landers who called the wilderness around Boone home. A few weeks after that scene in the garage, I took him up on his offer. It was late November by then, and the air was ripe with the smell of burning leaves. I met Carter and his girlfriend, Jodie, at a bar near campus, and for a long, idyllic afternoon we drank cold draft beer and shared stories about Bobby, stories I'd heard before or hadn't, it didn't matter, all of them were wonderful. I'd spent a lot of time around Carter over the years, but always with my brother, the result being that while Carter and I knew the facts of each other's lives, we didn't
really
know each other. We realized this right away and were embarrassed by it. To compensate, we moved quickly to stress our more flawed natures, if only to make Bobby seem more perfect. We unburdened ourselves in the comfort of loose acquaintance, laughing and crying and then laughing again. Everything I'd stored up, all I couldn't show, couldn't say, back home.

They asked me to stay the night. There was a party in the high country. Good people, friends of Bobby's. I said I couldn't, that I had to get back to Maggie Valley, but even as I spoke I pictured my parents in their half-lit living room, silently staring at the TV screen,
through
the TV screen, through the Saturday-night movie, through even their own reflections, their eyes drawn to the images, the color and light, but unable to follow story lines or process plots. I called them on my cell phone, told them not to wait up.

Two hours later I was sitting at the edge of a lake watching a blazing sun sink below a cloudless green horizon. It was a pageant of perfect color. The lake caught the waning light and held it for a time, dead still, and the fifteen or twenty of us assembled on the small, rocky beach watched with reverence until the last glow vanished beneath the surface. We were in the mountains, a few miles from Silverstone, but we could have been the only humans on earth. Nothing man-made marred the landscape—no boats on the water, no electrical towers in the hills—and I knew that wasn't a coincidence. Bobby's friends were called back-to-the-landers because there was cachet to the term, but
really they were Luddites, smart kids who'd grown up near nature and felt an attachment to it that trumped all else. They weren't starry-eyed hippies. They held down jobs as geologists, engineers, park rangers, community planners. Most owned land and paid taxes, had young families, and drove hybrid cars. In other words, they lived, however tenuously, within our fragile system. Still, they rejected its creature comforts in favor of organic farming, renewable energy—
sustainable living
. These weekend get-togethers, it was clear, were their chance to talk shop, and as we settled in around the campfire, I listened transfixed as Carter and his friends began discussing agronomic breeding, gyroscopic precession, photovoltaic incentives. . . . It was another language altogether, strange and scientific, the language of pioneers and homesteaders stuck in the wrong age—the modern one—and perhaps it was the glow of the embers, or the flawless starry night, but everyone suddenly looked so beautiful, so wonderfully alive.