Given World (26 page)

When Grace stops playing and puts the banjo away, I say, “Damn. That was amazing. I wish I’d had the patience, or any talent, to learn how to do something like that.”

“You ever try?”

“A couple of times, but I never stuck with it. I have my brother’s guitar back in San Francisco, though, so it’s not like I couldn’t have.” Except I never did. But I did keep it. That guitar is the only thing left—the only thing I didn’t lose, hock, or break—from the trunkful of Mick I’d taken with me to California.

“Your brother play?” Grace says.

“He did. He taught me some chords, but I keep forgetting them.”

“My grandma taught me every song I know.”

“You miss her?”

“Yeah, I do.” She sucks in the corners of her sweet mouth. “Not sure it’s sunk in yet. That she’s gone gone.”

I do not say, “It may never.” I say, “You thinking about staying in North Dakota?”

“I doubt it. I was thinking New York. Or New Orleans. New something.”

“I’ve never been to New Something. Always wanted to go.”

“I’ll send you a postcard. When I hit the big time.” Grace grins again. “Would that be okay?”

“Sure,” I say. “I’d like that.”

Nearly a whole day has gone by, and my stop is less than an hour away. Grace finds a timetable, stuffed deep in the seat pocket, to write on, and I give her the address, the one I’ve sent some letters to, when I found the time.

“You going to be there for a while?”

“No idea, really,” I say.

“Does your brother still live around here?”

“No.” I swallow. “He left a long time ago.”

“Where is he now?”

“Dead,” I say, for the first time ever, knowing full well I have not answered “Where?” but also knowing that once you said “dead,” where doesn’t really matter all that much anymore. I wait for the ache, for the tears I have never once cried sober or stoned, but they do not appear, again. Maybe someday I’ll send out a posse. Put out an APB.

Grace asks, so I tell her they never found his body. There was nothing to bury, nothing to put my hands on, kiss good-bye, say, “This was my brother. This was my best friend.”

Grace holds up the box and looks at me, eyes shining more than usual. “You knew, didn’t you?” she says. “You looked.”

I bite my lip, nod. Busted.

“These are my grandma’s ashes,” Grace says. “They can’t help you. I can’t give them to you.”

“I know.” I thank her, silently, for something I’m sure neither of us could put a name to. We are in cow country now. Probably not much prayer of that horse anymore either.

Grace gets her banjo back down and starts to play, messing around for a minute, trying to find the right key, or whatever it is that banjo players do. I have no idea how it works; I just know the song when I hear it, like I heard it so many times from behind his bedroom door, or from inside his room—“Rave On”—when he’d let that little girl in, grab her, and twirl her like a little top, like a little gyroscope set to spin across the floor, careening into shoes, bed legs, the bookcase, and back into the middle of the room, until it finally fell over, like someone had shot it.

Her.
Like someone had shot her.

T
he letter my father sent did not say Mom had taken to wandering off, or that her head sometimes trembled uncontrollably in a regal, Katharine Hepburn
On Golden Pond
sort of way.

“I can’t go after her,” he says, shrugging, slinging a hitchhiker’s thumb over his shoulder at the small oxygen tank that trails him everywhere now, strapped to its little wheeled cart: tentacled, shiny, ferociously present. “I thought if I told you, it would make it hard for you to come back.” I think he must mean hard
er
, but I do not say so. He tries to meet my eyes with his own matching turtle-green ones. Tries. Nearly succeeds. “I thought it would scare you. I thought you might not come.” I might not have—might have gone ahead and jumped off that train and onto that pony, somewhere on the forested side of Glacier Park. Or not gotten on the train at all. Probably? Most certainly probably. Most probably certainly.

Sometimes she’ll bum a ride back with the neighbors. People we don’t know, who have bought up small parcels of subdivided land (some of it once ours), out here on the still mostly empty prairie. Still mostly still. In the scope of things, at one time a half section—320 acres—did not seem a lot, certainly not enough to share with strangers, in a place where the cattle ranches run to a thousand square miles or more. But a world gets smaller, doesn’t it? All of a sudden my father has a range of about a thousand square
yards
. It’s like someone came when he wasn’t looking and installed one of those underground electric fences, the kind that shocks when a dog (presumably a dog) gets too close. But this is my most-human dad, forced into retreat by invisible barriers, driven inside or to the porch, where it doesn’t cost him so much just to breathe.

We play Scrabble; sometimes the three of us, sometimes just us two. Mom goes in and out: lucid some days but often drifty, flirting intermittently with pure loopy, or gone. She always leaves on foot, can’t get too far walking, and seems generally to be a happier version of herself when she gets back, so Dad and I leave it to the neighbors to decide how they feel about it. They don’t tell us. Typically.

I am amazed at how easily those two words—Mom and Dad—have again become a part of my vocabulary. For so many years now, they have been Rose and Henry to me, as if removing the familial tags would make it all right to stay away. On the loose, out on my own recognizance—that has been my MO. I had my reasons. Who knows if they were good ones? Who the hell even knows what they were? Other than us, there are only two, maybe three other people on the planet who could possibly care.

Mom adds her letters to an existing word, making “funhouse” for thirty-four points. She’s kicking our asses. She’s always been good at this game.

“Nice one, Rosie,” Dad says. Her expression softens as she looks up at him. I wonder when he started calling her Rosie, and not just plain Rose. I wonder if it was when she started going away. Or maybe he always called her that when me and Mick weren’t around. Maybe it was part of a dialect they spoke only with each other. I feel an intense and alien longing, somewhere in the vicinity of my stutter-stepping heart, and it takes me completely by surprise. I know I once had, at least with that long-haired boy out at Cherry Gulch, the slightest taste of a similar, if less evolved, kind of love. I have been invited in but had no idea what to do about it, save for leave it in the rearview as quickly as possible. Do I regret that? Something fierce I do.

I watch them when I think they won’t notice. Signs of age—the usual—overlay faces that were once a full half of my entire solar system, two of the three planets that would always be visible in the night sky. Then, of course, I thought it would be that way forever, and even if the third planet’s orbit sometimes kept him out of sight a bit too long for my liking, he would still keep coming around. That’s what planets are supposed to do. They are not supposed to jump the track, fly off into an alternate universe, leave a gaping black hole in space. We don’t talk about my flight path. Not here we don’t. Except to say I think I was not meant to be that fourth planet necessarily. I think I was meant to be a moon, or a satellite. Gravity was meant to be my friend. I don’t know how any of this happened.

Dad’s thick, dark hair is only now beginning to turn gray. Absently, he runs his fingers through it, clutches it in his bony fist, as if making certain he is really still here. The backs of his hands, and his forearms, are darkly bruised. Sarcomas. A constellation of blazing black stars. I ask if they are painful.

“Only to look at,” he says, tugging the sleeves of his flannel shirt down as far as they will go. He smiles. I see exactly now what they mean when they say “ruefully.”

I have the letters to spell most of it, hunt down an opening and spell “rufely.” To make my mother laugh. She cuts her eyes at me, sly.

“What did you study out there, Riley?”

“Boys,” I say. I don’t mention the other things I studied, or my frequent sightings of nothingness. Though I know the evidence is visible, and not only to me.

She turns her head, tilts her chin down, and looks into my eyes. “Books?” she says, and I nod. She knows. There is no point in pretending, about train wrecks, holding patterns, or reconstruction. My mother is no dummy, even when the synapses misfire, and throw sparks.

A few minutes later: “Remember that time I fell off the roof?”

“Roof?” my mother says. “What?” Meaning, I suspect,
Don’t be an idiot, Riley. Of course I do.
Or could it be that she really doesn’t remember? I don’t believe it. How effortless, though, for me to be clueless and seven, nine, ten again. As if I could take us all back to that picture-perfect existence. And by “all,” I do mean all four of us. This is a trick I have been working on since I was a teenager, a poster child for the seventies. It’s amazing I remember anything. But I did, goddamn it, have a brother. He was not one of my frequent hallucinations or one of the flashbacks I was promised. And, no, I don’t have those anymore. They too have passed their expiration date.

My feet reach for Cash under the table, but of course he is not here. I feel an imprint though. An outline. Some residual dog warmth. “Roof roof,” I say. My parents look at me. My mother nods. I see the corners of her mouth think about smiling. Dad just goes ahead and does it. Rufely.

Mom’s hair is straight and long and pure white. It is lovely, as she is. She bites the ends sometimes; it is a signal that she is flighty, as in liable to fly. I see just the smallest, moon-sliver curve of ear peeking out. I reach over slowly and touch it. I can’t help it. She stays perfectly still, a bit taken aback, frightened even, at having been snuck up on like that; then relieved, or released, when I pull my hand away.

They have already restarted my father’s heart once, brought him back to the land of the living, so he can play Scrabble with us in the kitchen. One night after a game he pulls letters from the board, and on the red-faded-to-pink Formica table spells, “D-o n-o-t r-e-s-u-” and then hesitates, his long, battered fingers spidering between an
s
 and a
c
. Mom helps him finish it, and with letters of her own, and a few she steals from Dad, spells “gone so gone.” I try not to wonder what it means, and do not enter into this braille-like conversation, as I have clearly not been invited in. It is almost as if I am not here.

I recognize that they are trying to make a place for me, for my actual body, but there will be times it will not seem worth the effort, and my role will be to witness. Whatever comes next. I do realize I’ve had my chances.

If I had been listening, and reading her letters more carefully, I might have at least sensed something coming. One letter told about waves crashing against the front door. In another, she was trying out names for all the itinerant ground squirrels and gophers, voles, mice, and wood rats: Smokey, Clarence, Ophelia, Sparky (Smokey’s evil twin), George. And on the phone, when the conversation faltered, or strayed into dangerous territory (disappearing acts, family), she would tell me who was at the bird feeder, or in the horse trough turned birdbath.

“Magpie,” she would say. “Drowning feathers.” “Baptismal finch.” Lone geese worry her, up there honking like sonar, waiting for that twin sound, that echo in another’s voice, to return to them. They worry me too. I remember daily the source of my echo, in every cell. And I remember, as if I had actually been there, Leonard on a wild-goose rescue, going through the river ice. The current grabbing his boots and pulling him in, where he skimmed the undersurface like a shadow. Like a big sturgeon, Darrell said, even though he had never seen one of those.

I asked him, not right away, but later: a recalcitrant challenge. I was like that then.

“How do you know?” I demanded.

“I can imagine,” he said, not wanting to argue, obviously, but knowing I did. I often wonder what he could have loved about me, or wonder if maybe, after all, he only wanted to take care of me, a mission I would not have wished on anyone at the time. I wonder how we would find each other now. If our boy has been given a real name. I really ought to know. No one needs to tell me that.

Mick’s motorcycle is in the barn. Exactly where he left it, up on blocks, though the canvas tarp looks suspiciously new. I wonder how many of those my father has replaced, laid over the bike and pinned down with the same water-smoothed, calf-skull-size stones my brother chose so carefully and hauled back from the river in 1966. The wheels still hang on the walls, the tires completely dried out, brittle as shed snakeskin.

I remember enough about motors to get it started, take the wheels to town for new rubber. Mick taught me to ride a long time ago, so long now that I stall her once or twice before we are out on the road, and then it is all I can do not to twist the throttle full on and just wait for the road to turn. But I know I have to baby her, or she’ll die, and my brother’s reincarnation, in whatever form, will have my ass if that happens.

When I get back after the first ride, I see that my mother has fastened a helmet to the porch rail. I undo its strap, hold it up to inspect it, thinking for a second it might be my old one, but then remember mine was red, and smaller. This one is black, with an American flag decal, upside down, on the back. Clearly Mick’s. I am not putting it on my head. I will get a new one. I forgot I had promised him to never ride without one.

I had also promised to never drink more than I could handle, not to do drugs other than smoke pot, never sleep with anyone I didn’t at least think I was in love with. Since I was too young at the time to even be able to imagine doing any of those things, it was easy to say yes. I promise. Swear on the moon. The helmet, at least, I can do something about.

Every night after my parents have gone to bed, I get a beer and go outside, stretch out on my back in the prickly grass, and wait for full dark. It takes a long time, but it is worth it. Even with the new houses, there is almost no ambient light here, and I can clearly distinguish so many individual stars it makes my head spin. The Milky Way appears painted on. It is as sharp, as delineated, as the stripe on a skunk. It is harder to pick out the constellations, with so many minor players swarming the stage. But I do at least still remember where to look for a lot of them, as I had two authorities to teach me: first Mick and then Darrell. Between the two of them, I got several versions each of the same arrangements. My eyes stray habitually to where the Pleiades will appear when they come back around in the fall. Darrell called this group the Seven Sisters, or Dancing Girls, but he told me, too, that in tribal legend they are orphan boys, abandoned at birth. Blue stars—there are thousands of them in just the one cluster, but only six are clearly distinguishable to the naked eye from this little planet. One of the sisters is missing, and there are various theories as to her whereabouts. These stars might also, as far as some ancient Greek poet was concerned, be a flock of doves. This, according to Mick. There is another group nearby, the Hyades, meaning “piglets.” I love that. But I keep thinking about those boys and hating that word, “abandoned.” It seems so judgmental, as if someone did it on purpose. As if she had a real choice.