Love in the Present Tense (24 page)

Three, four, five miles later, he shouts out, startling me.

“Stop right here!”

I slam on the brakes, and we sit there a moment in silence.

“Is this the spot?” I ask.

“Pretty close to it, yeah.”

“Did you know that on the way out?”

“Yeah.”

I pull on the hand brake and shut down the engine.

“I'm sorry,” he says. “It's just that I know you're gonna go straight to the authorities with this, and they'll dig up this whole damn mountainside, and I was just thinking how awful this is gonna be for my kids, even if I'm already gone.”

I breathe a minute and then say, “I wasn't actually planning to try to dig her up.”

“Oh,” he says. “You weren't?”

“I wasn't thinking that way, no.”

“Okay. Why then? I mean, why not?”

I'm not sure how to explain. Should I tell him how I feel about the thought of a backhoe or even a handheld shovel slicing through the tiny vertebrae of her neck or spine? Or just try to explain that the body is not the heart of the issue here? That it's more about a reverence for the last place on earth visited by her soul. About my wanting to visit that place, too.

About marking the spot.

But it's all hazy and hard to pin down, so I just say, “I'm not sure how to explain.”

“Get the chair,” he says. “I'll show you as best I can.”

I wheel him as far as possible across the rocks, but the chair gets hung up over and over, and it's getting hard on both of us. Finally I lift him up onto my back and carry him piggyback. Every now and then one bony hand appears beside my head, pointing the way. I feel as if I'm in the presence of ghosts. Plural.

“Stop here,” he says after a mile or so.

I set him down, and he folds onto himself in the dirt. Looks around.

“It's either the side of this hill or the side of that one,” he says. “I'm not jacking you around. I'm really trying. But things change, you know? Erosion, and trees fall down, and things don't look just exactly the same. But if you're not really digging, just wanting to see the place, it's right around here somewhere. Over there or over there. I'm sorry I can't say closer than that. I really tried.”

“I know,” I say. “It's okay.”

I look around and breathe. Memorize the site in every possible way, so I can always find it again. Much the way I'm sure Chet did that night. I raise my face to the wind and feel for signs of Pearl around here somewhere, but there's no one here but us. I'm sure he's right—I believe this is the right place. But it's been washed clean now. The past has moved aside.

“You know,” Chet says, “that thing you said about how if you knew everything about somebody, then you'd understand? I think that might be true of everything. Everybody. I think if you walked every minute of somebody's life in his shoes then everything he did would make sense to you, even the bad things. That's why I left the force. Went out on a stress pension. When you stop seeing differences between them and you, you gotta quit and go home.”

I pick him up onto my back, and we begin the long walk to the car.

By the time we get to his house, he's out cold. Head back on the seat, mouth open. Worn down from the trip, I suppose.

I pull up in front of his house and I'm struck with an awful thought. I pick up one of his wrists and feel around for a pulse. I'm not sure what I feel or if I feel anything at all, and my gut turns icy and tingly. But after a second I find it. A pulse. Weak, but there. I beep my horn lightly, and his daughter comes out and takes over. Opens out the wheelchair, lifts him back in. He never wakes up.

She turns a horrible look in my direction. Holds a hand in front of his nose feeling for breath. I can tell when she gets it. When she realizes he's just sleeping. The look softens, and she turns her eyes on me in a whole different way.

“Get what you wanted?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “I think so. I'm not really sure what I wanted. But I got something.”

While I'm driving back up the coast I look at my watch. I'll be about ten minutes late to pick up the kids at school. So I step on it, hoping to get back some of that time. My wife is home with the new baby, and besides, we have only the one car. They'll wait for me. They're good kids. They know I wouldn't leave them waiting long.

I wonder if I should tell them what I learned today. Mitchell is at that age where he jumps from the middle of the room all the way onto his bed and pretends it's just a game. Says he does it for no reason in particular. He doesn't know he didn't invent the fear of something under the bed. That it didn't start with him.

Pearl still every now and then crawls into bed with us, claiming a bad dream. We all have these bogeymen, from the time we're old enough to reason, they just don't have any faces or names. We're all scared of something but we can't quite put our finger on what. Today I looked over my shoulder and saw mine. Memorized faces and took names.

What I can't figure out is whether I should be comforted or terrified by what I discovered. There is no bogeyman. Just a bunch of flawed humans, some more flawed than others, but more or less cut from the same human mold.

MITCH,
age
50:
the marker

It's raining on the top of this mountain. We're huddled up here in a tent, hoping it will pass. It's dark, and a little windy. I wanted to put off this trip until after the storm, but it's an anniversary of sorts. It's the day Pearl left Leonard at my house and disappeared, with twenty-five years added on.

And it's the rainy season, just like it was then.

I was thinking maybe leave the kids at home, but Leonard promised, and he hates to break a promise to them. Or to anybody else, for that matter. And a different night was out of the question. He didn't say it was because of the significance of the date. He didn't have to. Some things are just there, and anybody with eyes can see them.

All he said was, “Worst that can happen, they'll get wet.”

And it's true, really. Why does the rain trouble me more in a tent than it would in a house? I can't even say.

So I called in sick at school, they called up a substitute teacher, and here we are.

Mitchy is out like a light but Pearl is sitting up with us, in the light of the lantern, leaning against Leonard's side.

Now and then she looks up and watches shadows flicker across the inside dome of the tent. You can see her listening, hearing the wind buffet the fabric in irregular gusts. It's just that right amount of fear. Just enough for a kid to handle, providing some part of the kid is in direct contact with some part of the parent.

“I was just thinking,” Leonard says. “I was just thinking how close I came to missing all this.”

“That crossed my mind, too,” I say.

He looks down at Pearl, who looks up into his eyes to see what she's done right all of a sudden.

He cups her chin in one of his hands. “I mean, not only would I not have gotten a chance to see this face, but nobody else in the world would have, either.”

Pearl makes a face. Crosses her eyes and sticks her tongue out. A way of diffusing the compliment.

“I stand corrected,” Leonard says. “The world might've gotten by.”

After Pearl is asleep, her back up against her brother, I ask Leonard a question I've been meaning to ask.

“Did you want to hurt him? Maybe just some part of you? Some little instinct out for revenge? Or maybe just justice?”

I ask because in the past I've noticed things I thought were missing in Leonard, but they were only delayed.

We sit still and listen to the rain hammer on the fabric of the tent dome. We're still dry in here, though.

“That's what got Pearl. Somebody out for justice.”

“That might not stop you from wanting to, though.”

“I didn't. I didn't want to. I thought I would. But it just wasn't there.”

“What if you had met the other guy?”

“I don't know. But I don't think so.”

“He killed your mother.”

“Yeah, and my mother killed my father,” he says. “And I still have to believe that she had her reasons. How can I hate the guy who killed my mother without hating the woman who killed my father? It's almost exactly the same crime.”

I lie down. In time Leonard does the same. Our hands are clasped behind our heads.

Leonard says, “Leonard Devereaux Kowalski Sung DiMitri. And to think I started life as the boy with no last name.”

“And I was so excited when I found one for you.”

“Well, back then it was a pretty big deal. I mean, it seemed like an issue. I took it hard. I thought I didn't belong anywhere. Never occurred to me it would turn out I belong a lot of different places at once. All over the place. Right now I belong right here. On this mountain. Thanks for coming up here with me, Mitch.”

After ten or fifteen minutes goes by, I look over and see that he's fallen asleep. His face looks young in the soft lantern light. More the way I knew him as a boy. Another one of those faces the world would have been poorer without.

I blow out the lantern and try to get some sleep myself.

When I wake up it's nearly light, and the rain has stopped. The children are asleep beside me, but not Leonard.

I open the tent flap.

He's about a hundred feet away, standing on a slope of tumbled rocks, facing away from me. His shirt is off, and he's standing out in the cold in nothing but his jeans, his arms straight out from his sides, the tattoo visible even from here. There's a mist, a sort of wet, heavy fog hanging over the mountain, and Leonard is standing on the approximate site of his mother's grave, and he is a cross.

I watch in silence, knowing how little I understood until just now.

Leonard was never trying to be a Christ. He was trying to be a marker. He used the tattoo to transform himself into the only tangible proof that Pearl had lived and then died. He was her grave marker when she had no grave to mark.

And now he's finally found where to stand.

I watch him for the longest time.

I want to walk up behind him and throw my arms around his back, but I don't want to disturb his delicate balance.

I want to remind him—and myself—of the first time he showed me the tattoo. Standing in Jake and Mona's garage in a beam of sun from the skylight, under the bare wings of his glider in progress. He told me he wasn't going to live to be thirty.

But he is thirty. Right now.

And I don't even have to ask if he regrets the tattoo, because I already know.

After I've watched long enough, I hike out to the car and get the camp stove. So I can stoke it up and get some coffee going. Maybe breakfast for the kids.

When I get back, the kids are awake. They've found their own way to their father, and they're standing with him, still in their sleepers on the wet, muddy ground, each kid hugging one of his legs.

So I decide that if they can do it without disturbing him, maybe I can, too.

I think about Pearl, and how everything she did, whether it was right or wrong, caused Leonard's life to intersect with mine the way it did. If she had done anything differently, not only would I not have had him but I wouldn't have had my grandkids, either. And I think how much poorer I would have been without him, without all of them.

Without all the things I've learned.

Then I walk quietly up behind him and wrap my arms around him from behind, and he comes out of his marker position, his cross, and wraps his arms around my arms. I hope I didn't make him stop before he was done.

But that's silly, I think. How could he stop before he was done? If he stopped, he was done.

I silently congratulate him on being done, and he pats my arm.

I think he hears and understands most of what I don't say to him.

I think he always has.