Mary Coin (23 page)

Walker

37.

San Francisco, California, 2011

I
t is a clear November day, and Walker is having trouble staying put for the remaining time left of his office hours. More students than usual have come to see him because today is the filing deadline for the senior thesis proposals. Alice will arrive soon. They are going to see a rerun of what she claims is one of the great films of the twenty-first century:
Wet Hot American Summer.

She has been living with him since the beginning of the school year. She hates her mother, she says. She hates Harry. She hates Walker, too, only a little less than everyone and everything else. Lisette is unhappy about the new state of affairs, but she is also worn down by Alice and is relieved to have a break. Walker is grateful that in her fury, Alice has chosen him. He has enrolled her in a city school where she is repeating the eleventh grade. She goes to rehab. He tests her urine once a week, and she is not allowed to hang out with her friends at night. She and Walker eat takeout and listen to music. She shows him funny videos on YouTube.

He continues to read through his students’ proposals. The work is serious and eager. The seniors have taken his introductory class and followed up with courses in narrative nonfiction and methodology. Their undertakings are all versions, in one way or another, of his work, and he is flattered by how much they believe in him and his endeavors.

Over the last few months, he has pursued a project of his own, constructing an imagined narrative of intersecting lives—his and Mary Coin’s. He wonders if he is really looking to find the truth, or if he is only trying to find a way to confront his unexpected sorrow at his father’s passing, and his guilt about his children, and the essential loneliness he feels each day. In each case he has failed. He can no more prove that Mary Coin was his grandmother than he can repair himself. He hears his father’s voice in his head:
What good is history?

He turns to his computer and pulls up the photographs he took the previous year of the kids on the fishing trip—Isaac recoiling from a flapping trout, Alice caught in a private moment thinking about Walker knows not what. He resisted digital photography for a long time, knowing that once there were no paper photographs, there would be no dusty albums hidden in attics for someone like him to discover. But every age deserves its fashion and its forms, and no one can control what survives.

He scrolls back to the beginning of the file and studies the pictures of Alice when she was five and Isaac when he was two. He has an urge to see them younger, and so he finds the box of old photos he brought to the office intending to scan them. They have sat under his desk untouched for two years. He sorts through the disorganized clutter of images, looking at newborn Alice and Isaac held up for the camera, his or Lisette’s hands clutching their tiny torsos. At six months old, Alice’s sharp worry is already etched into her expression. And there is sweet Isaac, his gaze limpid and trusting, open to the world. Walker imagines that he can see his children’s characters in their earliest photographs, and this alleviates the guilt he bears knowing that the divorce was a terrible blow to them and that his absences were small, repeated wounds. But he knows he could be deceiving himself. What if their faces are those of any children vulnerable to parental whim? If Alice and Isaac had been raised by another, happier couple, would they be better off now or just differently harmed?

Emily Muller, an ambitious senior, taps on his open door.

“Hi, Professor Dodge?” she says. He hears the upswing at the end of the sentence, the strange combination of parent-inflicted overconfidence and global uncertainty he notices in his students.

“Hello, Emily,” he says.

“Just wondering if you’d gotten to mine yet.”

He shuffles through the proposals, finds hers, hands it across the desk. She looks at it, bouncing on her toes a few times as if she cannot contain her anticipation.

“So you liked it?”

“It will be fine.”

“I think I can uncover something really interesting. Something truthful.”

“Something truthful?” he says. He looks at the pile of student papers on his desk. He wonders if he has led them all astray.

“I’m not going to predetermine anything. I’m going to let the evidence lead me,” she says hesitantly. “Like you said.”

Alice blasts into the office with her typical disregard for what she might be interrupting. She has dreadlocked her hair and dyed some of the knotty hanks purple. She wears combat boots and shorts. He is so happy to see her. She drops a package on his desk.

“The lady at the front said to give this to you.”

“The ‘lady’ is Mrs. Elliot,” he says of the secretary who is a whiff of old-world San Francisco propriety in a department filled with sloppy, self-aggrandizing academics.

“I guess I’ll go?” Emily says.

He looks from his brazen daughter to the fearful Emily. He knows he has done her a disservice. “I’m very interested in your project, Emily,” he says. “I look forward to seeing what you come up with.” She backs out the door, looking pained.

“What’s her problem?” Alice says.

“A surfeit of faith in her teacher,” he says.

Alice looks at him quizzically. “Are you high?”

“I have never gotten high in my life.”

“Bull
shit
,” she says, smiling.

“Well, it’s the bullshit I’m supposed to dish out. You’ll see when you’re a parent.”

“Now you sound like Mom.”

“Your mom is right about a lot of things.”

“Is she right about you?”

Now they are in dangerous territory. “I don’t know what she says about me.”

“That you are searching for something and you haven’t found it yet.”

He looks at Alice. What could these words possibly mean to her? He wonders if he is as inscrutable to his daughter as his father was to him.

“Are you going to open your package, or what?” she says.

He studies the box for a moment, then finds scissors in the clutter on his desk.

“What is it?” Alice says impatiently.

He lifts out crushed newspaper that protects the contents of the package. Before he can go further, Alice reaches into the box and takes out a hat. It is made of red felt and has plastic fruit affixed to its brim.

“Who sent you
this
?” she says. Her distaste is evident, but she puts it on her head anyway. The disjunction between her purple hair and the prim hat makes him laugh. “What else is in there?” she says.

He takes a legal-sized envelope from the box. His name is written on it. Inside is a letter that informs him that James Coin has died and that his instructions were that these items be sent to Walker.

“Oh, no,” Walker says.

“What?”

“Someone died.”

“Who?”

Something else is in the envelope, and he pulls it out. It is a framed newsprint photograph. The glass is cracked down the center. The picture shows a man sitting in a chair with his eyes closed. He holds a shotgun in his arms.

“Who died?” Alice repeats.

Walker does and does not understand why James has sent him this box. Or, rather, he understands something, but it feels far off, like weather in another county, or history, which becomes more present as it recedes, a paradox of time.

“Dad? Hello?”

“His name was James Coin.”

“How come I never heard of him?” she says.

There is another letter in the box. This one is addressed to Mary Coin. He opens it. Alice looks over his shoulder.

“Who is Vera Dare?” she asks softly.

38.

W
here are we?” Alice says. They left the city early in the morning. She fell asleep when they were outside San Francisco and has just now woken up.

“Nipomo.”

“That’s a weird name for a place.”

“It’s a Chumash word. It means ‘the foot of the hills.’”

“Meet me at the Nipomo and we’ll take a hike.”

“Something like that.”

She straightens up, stretches, smells her breath with a cupped hand. “Forgot to brush.”

He was surprised when she agreed to take this day trip with him rather than sleep in on a Saturday. She was out late. It is April, now. She has been clean for nearly a year, so he has relaxed the rules. Last night, she texted that she was at someone named Nicole’s house. This information made him feel comfortable until he realized that she could be lying, that she could be anywhere in the world. It chilled him to think that location had become a highly conceptual notion that a teenager might be crafty enough to exploit. But she came home when she said she would, and she did not smell of liquor nor did she appear to be high. She looked like a girl who had met a boy, excited and private and distracted. He and Lisette agree that Alice is doing well in San Francisco and that she can stay through her senior year. She has decided to go back to Petaluma for the summer to be with Isaac. She misses him.

The Nipomo Visitors Bureau is a lofty name for the small room in a building that also houses the mayor’s office and the local Department of Water and Power. No one appears to be manning the place. A sign instructs that all purchases can be made with the mayor’s secretary. A quick perusal reveals the usual fare Walker finds at visitors centers all over the country—glossy leaflets advertising the town’s handful of trumped-up attractions, self-published family histories typed and copied poorly so that the text runs at a slant. There is an informational sheet about flora and fauna written by a local nature enthusiast. On the wall, a small box frame displays three arrowheads, which are meant to attest to the Indian heritage of the town, although there is no accompanying information that would prove their authenticity. Walker leafs through a glossy magazine called
Birds of Florida,
which seems to have no particular pertinence except that maybe the person who donated the magazine is a town alderman or the president of the Women’s Club. Perhaps the person who owned the magazine about birds is also the person who donated the arrowheads, so that the relationship is not one of subject but of character and predilection.

“Look at this,” Walker says. He picks up a secondhand book from a shelf. Published in 1952, the book is a selection of a hundred years’ worth of articles from the local newspaper edited by someone named Terence W. “Dub” Jackson. In his foreword, Mr. Jackson explains that he set about this project because of the “wonderful and adventurous history of our little town, Nipomo, California.”

Alice takes the book from him, opens it to a random page, and reads aloud. “‘There was a water shortage in Nipomo. The springs were being used to their capacity, but that was not enough. Bonds were voted, and two additional pumps were bought
.
’” She hands him the book. “Fascinating,” she says.

Walker reads another random entry.
It was reported in February that there were twenty-five prisoners in the jail and that all were healthy except for one case of pneumonia.
The book is a wonderful discovery. He will spend weeks with it.

“Look, Dad,” Alice says. She leans over a glass case. “They made a stamp of her.”

He peers down at the sheet of commemorative stamps. There she is. The woman, the two children—he wonders if one of them is James. And there is his father, the baby in her arms. Or maybe it is not his father—he will never really be sure. Walker knows this, just as he knows that any story told about what has happened in the past can never be certain, that there is always yearning in the piecing together of information. The story of history is the story of its telling and its retelling. There are truths lost to time and desire.

“She’s worth thirty-two cents,” Alice says.

He’s told his daughter everything—about finding the article and visiting James Coin. About this curiosity that has latched onto him and that won’t let go, so that he will spend his next year’s sabbatical traveling to Tahlequah, then making the same journey west Mary might have taken. He doesn’t know what the project will ultimately yield. He doesn’t want to know. Not now. Because answers are inert things that stop inquiry. They make you think you have finished looking. But you are never finished. There are always discoveries that will turn everything you think you know on its head and that will make you ask all over again: Who are we?

He buys Alice a T-shirt because they both think it’s funny that a town as inconsequential as Nipomo has its own T-shirt. It says “I Heart Nipomo.” She slips it over her tank top. As they walk across the hall to the mayor’s office, they debate whether the inclusion of the full word rather than the heart symbol is naïve or ironic. When they pay the secretary, they ask if she knows where the famous picture was taken.

“There’s just fields out there,” the woman says. “It’s hard to tell one from another.”

•   •   •

H
e pulls the car to the side of the road next to a low stone wall—the kind he remembers from the original orange groves at his family’s farm, built at a time when the land was marked off by these crude structures that were nothing but rocks piled on top of one another without mortar to bind them.

“You think the picture was taken here?” Alice says.

“Could be.”

She gets out of the car and he follows. She climbs onto the wall, then jumps the small distance to the ground, a bit of playfulness that makes him happy. He is with his daughter in this place. Something happened here once. Something that might have gone unnoticed but for a person with a camera.

“Tell me what it was like,” Alice says.

“What?”

“Back then.”

He tells her about the Depression and the farmers and the poverty. He tells her about a photographer who was sent by the government to record what was happening. He tells her a story, some of it based on facts, some of it embellished, because he wants to keep her attention and he knows how stories need to go. When he is finished, they stand quietly looking out over the fields.

“Hey!” she says brightly. “Take my picture!”

He gets his camera from the car. She climbs onto the wall again and strikes an intentionally silly pose, one hip jutted out, her chin in the air, “I Heart Nipomo” blazoned across her chest.

“Don’t pose,” Walker says.

“Just stand here? Like this?” She lets her arms drop to her sides. She looks disarmingly young and lovely, a vessel into which so much life has yet to flow. He lifts the camera to his face and places her in the frame. Just his girl, front and center, getting her due. His girl and this land.

“Let me see! Let me see!” she says, jumping down and running to him as he lowers the camera. She leans against his shoulder, her purple hair brushing his cheek. He brings the image onto the digital display. She falls silent, her giddy energy submerged beneath a weightier understanding. He wonders what the picture makes her feel. Does her subjectivity enlarge or diminish her? Does she see what he sees: her singularity made symbolic? She takes the camera from him and studies the image. Her expression is solemn, as if she were witnessing something that tells her that the world she thinks she knows will only become more mysterious.

“It doesn’t look like me,” she says quietly.

It is a photograph, an alchemy of fact and invention that produces something recognizable as the truth. But it is not the truth.

“Who does it look like?”

“Just some girl.”

She presses the trash icon. They watch as the picture slides down the screen and disappears. But it will always exist. In a cloud. In an invisible language of zeros and ones. There is no erasure.

•   •   •

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