If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir (16 page)

“Was he drunk?” he says after a while.

“I don’t think so. He just looked tired. I was rushing home from school and didn’t stop to ask.”

“Well,” he says.

We sit in the car for many minutes, too tired to move. The sun breaks over the frozen pond, catching in the cracks like flames. Nick closes his eyes and leans back against the headrest. I watch clumps of snow slip from the elbows of tree branches and tumble to the ground, breaking apart as they fall, disintegrating in the colorless light. I feel heavy. A wet cold is snaking around my ankles. There is a piece of cloud in my eye and a liquor burn on my lips. The cabin is behind us, and in my half-sleep I leave my body and move toward the shore. I reach under the snow and pick clean the bones that peek out of the dirt, fingering the joints that fall apart in my hands. These are old graves and they threaten to split wide and pull me under; the moonless current is strong here. I see Nick from a great distance, that gentle soul, a boy really, snoring lightly, disturbing no one. I want to keep moving, always, but I know we need to rest.

He opens his eyes. He is watching me. He wipes at my face and pulls me toward him, holding my head to his chest. We don’t make it into the cabin. There isn’t any heat inside anyway. Every few hours, I hear Nick start the engine and feel the dry heat blowing on my neck.

We sleep like this for most of the morning, and then make sandwiches with the white bread and lunchmeat he packed in a cooler.

We sing as we drive—a song we make up about moose.
Going on a moose hunt . . .
That’s all we have, so we sing this chorus over and over and dance wildly in our seats, beating time on the dashboard. We lost radio reception a while back, soon after we pulled away from the cabin. Before we left, Nick filled three black trash bags with the wet leaves from the gutters while I carefully pulled large sections of broken glass from a splintered window frame, flakes of white paint disappearing in the snow. I watched Nick as he nailed a thin piece of plywood over the window hole, his face flushed and his tongue hanging out like it does when he is concentrating. He is thin but solid, and he moves with such willfulness that I almost stumble or weep, so earnest is that man, so devoid of all my prickly cynicism.

Now, we are moving on. We are looking for moose. Waves of shadow skip across the highway in front of us. A squirrel runs into the middle of the road, trembles, then darts for the bushes. Afternoon dissolves silently into dusk, bowing and graceful as she slinks off to bed. I am eating a banana I bought at a gas station five miles back. Eventually, we grow sick of singing about moose and begin to sing about bananas.

Nick assures me that we will see a moose in Oquossoc, at a place called the Height of the Land, a scenic outpost that overlooks Mooselookmeguntic Lake.

“
Moose-look-at-me-guns, chick
,” he calls it. “How can we go wrong?”

I am not convinced. It is too late in the season and our odds aren’t good, according to the bearded man at the gas station. I don’t know why, but I trust a man with a beard when it comes
to moose, I tell Nick, and he shrugs and rolls his eyes, rubbing his smooth chin and scowling.

“The moose is the symbol of self-esteem,” Nick says. “You could learn something from a moose.”

He eats a handful of Swedish Fish and offers me the bag. There’s one left so I bite its head off.

“When you see one, it means you are confronting all the various planes of existence between the self and the environment.”

“Do you believe that?” I ask.

“Of course not, but doesn’t it sound sexy?”

“Absolutely,” I say, feeding him the tail.

I study the map, run my finger west along the red highway line until I find Oquossoc. Then I keep going—past Wilson’s Mills, over the Canadian border and into Quebec, north to Montreal, then to a place called Saint-Sauveur-des-Monts (
what might that be like?
), and on past recognition. I suppose we could eat grilled cheese sandwiches at a roadside diner in Saskatchewan and a man called Griz might teach us to play five-card stud, beating us every time. We could see a moose rise from the banks of Utikuma Lake like a past life, shaking off silver water slicks like bad memories. He will turn and look at us with quiet absolution as we drive on across Canada—into Alaska, perhaps, over breakneck mountain passes so clean, so rich, we eat dinner and pick our teeth with pine needles.

At last, we might come to our new home, a cozy place with a garden on the edge of everything, on a tiny teardrop of land that dangles in Norton Bay, which I imagine is haggard and bold and indifferent.

Here is a truth: I cry only when we make love.

“I know,” he says quietly. “It’s okay.”

I pull at the flounced curtains beside the bed, tucking my head inside them to stare through the window at the falling snow. Nick pulls me back onto the bed and wraps me up in the floral polyester blanket that scratches my bare skin and makes me laugh a bit too maniacally. He stares at me with concern. And so does that deer, whose tattered head hangs on the wall across from the bed, and who was witness to the whole routine—Nick’s round freckled back and the soles of my chapped feet making slow circles in the air. The fervent harmonies, the two pallid asses, and that final black wall that I beat with my fists until it lets me in, tired and defeated, crying helplessly on a concrete floor. In those moments, Nick is gone. I am alone, as I should be, and I feel like maybe I will cry forever. My body does not seem to know the difference between ecstasy and death, joy and pain, and I begin to wonder if they are just the same after all. Like energy, the needle vibrates whether the source is light or sound. When I cry, I suspect it has everything to do with the dead father, absent so long and then poof,
auf wiedersehen
, the week before my eighteenth birthday. Then, my sudden departure from Philadelphia, from my home, with all that sadness and mortality trailing behind me like the train of a wedding gown I can’t take off. Or else it is because, in those moments, I am gone, and I’m not yet confident that this man will still be here when I get back. It is the loss of control that terrifies me.

WE MET NANCY,
the owner of this bed-and-breakfast, when we arrived in Oquossoc this afternoon. She is big-haired and ebullient. We are her first guests in many weeks and she is delighted to have us. She offers us dinner: tomato salad and a spicy chili with cornbread. Afterward, we sit by the fire and play Scrabble and I win, which means Nick has to call my mother “just to chat.” Nancy is watching
Wheel of Fortune
in another room. I can hear the clicking of the wheel while the contestants demand “Big money!” and Pat Sajak orders Vanna to “Show us an M!” and the crowd cheers wildly.

My mother answers and Nick says, “Hi, Susan!” too eagerly, squinting his eyes at me and frowning, so I know she is drunk.

She’s been doing this a lot lately—sitting in front of her computer all night and drinking a bottle or two of red wine. She plays word games and smokes cigarettes, her two dogs panting at her feet and walking in circles.

It’s not me she needs. I know that. But I can’t help but feel that I should be there with her, watching movies and shoveling her driveway, teasing the swollen tics from the bellies of her dogs and wiping their paws when they come in from the yard. My mother and I grew up together in many ways, waged some of the same vertiginous battles with my father, suffered over my little brother as he grew indignant and square-jawed.
Our son
, she’d sometimes say to me accidentally.
What are we going to do about our son?

Just as often I feel as helpless as an infant and I wish for my mother, if just to force me out of bed in the morning, pick out my clothes, and make me eat.

Nick is gracious and talks to her for several minutes, as if he does not hear how her tongue has grown thick, the words running together like melting butter. I know that voice well, and after Nick says, “Bye, Susan. Yes, very soon. I miss you, too. Okay. Okay. Uh huh. Okay. Here’s Jess,” and hands me the phone, I say a few words and hang up quickly.

She is sad because Eric has taken to snorting OxyContin in her bathroom, still lying and stealing and denying in that
same fucking straight-faced way
as the husband once did, until she feels she’s gone completely nuts. I know how she feels, and yet I am unable to change it. And maybe Eric is, too.

I get up from bed to wash my face in the bathroom sink. The soaps are shaped like ducklings and clustered in a porcelain nest, which makes me laugh. When I get back, Nick and I lie on separate sides of the bed, wrapped in cocoons of exhaustion. I have already forgotten about my father’s death, three years ago now, about the amorphous desolation he’s left in his stead, about the spectacle I keep making of myself, and the tender way Nick sometimes presses on my chest, as if to soothe away the pain there, whispering, “Let it out, it’s okay. You can let it out.” My grief is childlike and pure and has little to do with the father himself—he only represents the incompleteness I feel, my own wretchedness. I feel my mind clamoring desperately to reclaim the higher consciousness of youth, those swift and heartbreaking moments of clarity that I lost forever on the day he fell down those stairs, seizing, and his bowel burst and shit poisoned his blood, already thin with booze, and his heart stopped, simple as that.

A blue-fanged raccoon chases me down to the riverbanks of consciousness, where I wake in a sweat and tangled in blankets. Nick is packing his suitcase in the flickering glow of the muted television, and I realize he is leaving me here, naked in this damp dark, my legs still half-buried in the alluvium.
This was inevitable
, I think.
He’s finally had it with the theatrics. The melancholy that comes on like a tidal wave. The way I always want to eat at restaurants and hate to cook. The birthmark on my back that looks like a melting snowman. And how I never manage to remember which of his nieces is Courtney, and which is Britney
. It could be any of these things or something else entirely; I know so little of myself sometimes. What I know so completely, in those first dusky moments after waking, is that this is a good, good man and I am sorry to see him go.

He turns and sees me watching, then leaps on the bed like a child on Christmas morning. He pulls back my eyelids with one hand and pinches my nose with the other.

“Wake up, chicken butt,” he coos.

He wears a grin of boyish mischief, his blue eyes stained pink from lack of sleep. He grabs a cup of hot coffee from the nightstand and holds it to my lips, the way you do for the infirm. I sip gratefully.

“I wish I had eyelashes as long and dark as yours,” I tell him. “It’s a waste on boys.”

“I wish I had boobs like yours,” he says. “I’d play with them all day.” He cocks his head to the side, just now considering the implications. “Well, maybe not.”

Outside, a pitching snow fills the windows. It is still night,
or somewhere in the slim fissure just before dawn, and dark branches slap against the glass. I feel a survivor’s exultation.

“Get up,” he says. “Put on a sweatshirt.”

I move slowly, clutching the coffee mug like a life preserver. If I let go, I’m going back down. I see that it is four in the morning, the witching hour if ever there was one. I grab my jacket and put on socks, padding behind him into the blinding hallway. There is music, I swear, and I hesitate, leaning in toward the wall, aware only of the flowered wallpaper, thousands of tiny lilies raining to the floor.

“What the hell is that?” I say.

“Nancy’s playing the piano. She does it every morning. I told her it wouldn’t bother us. We were getting up early anyway.”

“Of course you did,” I say, and he pulls me into the dining room and down the steps and out onto the terrace.

I’m not even resisting this
, I realize suddenly, as the snow smacks my cheeks and the freezing wind drags me away from the edge of sleep. Nick is talking, but the blasts of wind are so loud I can’t hear him. His lips seem to be moving in slow motion.

“There,” he might be saying, pointing out over the hills.

To the south the sky is colorless and the land behind this frozen air is metallic and drained. Suddenly everything feels sped up, like a cartoon, which makes me gasp for air and grab instinctively for the terrace railing, my mug dropping into the snow and disappearing for good. We shouldn’t be here, not now, as the empty sky beats back a silver sun and the dead trees draw arrows for the stars. I think I see a figure in the distance,
his long stringy legs braced against a slanting mountain bluff, two giant, splintering shinbones thrust like javelins into the ice. I pray,
Don’t let go
. I look for Nick, but he is at the bottom of a deep centrifuge, smiling up at me from a long time ago.

“There!” he calls out clearly, suddenly.

I see the black moose ambling out from behind a cluster of bushes, like a piece of night sky shaken loose. My heart stills. He is the distance of a football field away. The moose chews calmly on the spindly branch of a chrysanthemum, stamping his great hoofs in the snow. He extends his neck against the wind and then whips his head forward, tearing platinum gashes in the dark with his enormous antlers. From where we stand, he walks the horizon—one misstep, I think, and he’ll fall from the earth’s rim, crashing through the universe and bellowing out to the passing galaxies. I walk toward him slowly. I don’t want to scare him off. My feet are numb, the snow up to my knees. I imagine reaching out and stroking the coarse fur on his back, clumps of it snapping off like icicles in my hands and falling to the ground. I want to bury my face in his flank and press hard; I want to be inside where it is warm. I imagine the beast reaching back and softly nuzzling me on, snorting impatiently. I take a few tentative steps.