Moving Day: A Thriller (10 page)

“Why the rush?” But even in her mild protest, he can hear her acquiescence.

He smiles. “Our American tour continues.” An upbeat explanation they both know is rich in the unsaid.

They are finally setting off on their delayed cross-country trip.

He has no plan, exactly. But he has purpose. He has motion.

A country is waiting. And a vague, unshaped rendezvous.

S
tanley Peke drives with few possessions, no firm itinerary, no responsibilities. Severed from the conventions of his previous life. Unburdened of everything—except a leaden sense of mission. He would feel truly free at this moment, he thinks, except for that.

He is aware of how he must appear to the cars that pass him, to the cars that he passes. Like the desirable result of America’s promise. The magazine version of its comfortably retired and healthy senior citizens. Clothes new, button-down shirt and slacks and cardigan in tasteful tones of brown and gray, creases crisp, thinned white hair cut and combed neatly. His wrinkled but still pretty white-haired bride next to him, in a pale-peach blouse and blue skirt with a bright, new scarf—her attire sensible but with flair. Respectable and appropriate, but smart and alive. They will never be sweatsuit seniors, he and Rose. Despite the convenience, the thoughtless ease, it just isn’t in them. Set in among the wrinkles, her blue eyes still sparkle. Twin jewels admired for a lifetime. Like a final fashion touch.

They are setting out across America. Like twenty-two-year-olds, fresh from school or just sprung from some dispiriting job, free now, on an adventure, exploring their unknown homeland. Except that he is seventy-two and she is seventy. This trip—this venture across
America—is a trip on which a twenty-two-year-old would feel possibility, boundlessness, a sense of new beginning. Peke feels it, too, but also feels a sense of ending. How can he feel both beginning and ending? Feel both so acutely, riding along together companionably, like he and Rose? It is no surprise to him. His life has been filled with such ironic extremes. With a double helping of experience. Twin lifetimes, collapsing into each other, each breathing down the other’s neck.

On the Pennsylvania Turnpike, he turns to her.

“You wonder where we’re going.”

She looks out the window, not saying anything.
Yes, of course I’m wondering.

He knows how she feels. He’s always known. Like she is one of his possessions. It is how he treats her—even in his wonderful, attentive, seamlessly caring way. An object. A possession. It’s a survivor mentality he can’t escape or surmount. A characteristic bluntness derived from the bluntness of his experiences. A possession, too, because he had no others. Arrived with no others. And she seems to accept it. To understand. She has taken it as part of the bargain, along with what she perceives as his strength, his confidence, his seriousness, his solicitousness. She has understood the bargain, and that was something vital and essential he saw in her from the beginning.

She was always his possession. They both understood that. And now she is his last possession. His only possession.

They cross America. An America he has always felt safe in. At home in. An America he has felt a similar possession of, ownership of. Wide bands of interstate, like asphalt carpet runners just rolled out in infinite multilane welcome. And the countless colors and models
and variety of the automobiles that cross them, their radios emanating a hundred songs and opinions—American choice, American prowess, and personal freedom, on simple and prominent display. Taillight brigades slipping smoothly beneath the westering sky. Democratic America. Standing next to one another, lined up silently, obediently, and respectfully at rest-stop urinals.

There are two pasts for Stanley Peke, in a continual, sinuous dance of veils with each other. The past that is primped and shaped for familial and marital consumption, and the past that remains—like a watch in a safe-deposit box—locked away, unavailable, even to him. He has never spoken very much with her—not even her—about certain details. That was clearly part of the bargain with him, too, like accepting the sense of being his possession. Part of their understanding from the beginning. Once, when he drove her around his first American neighborhood, it was with the hope it would satisfy her, subdue further curiosity, fulfill his husbandly duty. As for the time before his arrival here, he’s made only a passing reference here or there, with the understanding that anything further, any deeper revelation or exploration, will come from him at some more opportune time. Yet it never has. After fifty years, she is still waiting, he knows. Oh, she has a good sense of it, he’s sure—from her reading, from history, from his passing references, from his personality. But she is still waiting to hear it from him.

“We are going to find our things,” he says.

“But they don’t matter,” she responds, flatly, without pause.

“But they do matter,” he says as flatly back. The familiar ping-pong of a half century of marriage.

“Then you’ll have to tell me why.” All this while watching out the windows, not looking at each other. That, he has thought, is maybe the greatest freedom, the deepest genius, of automotive design. Intimacy, because you are not looking at each other. Perspective as you talk.

But he doesn’t know what to say to her. He doesn’t know how to phrase any of it, how to even begin to unwrap it. Here is a chance to explain, but he doesn’t know how to tell her—yet he knows exactly why. Because it defies the shape, stretches the bounds, of the survivor’s story. And more than that, because it is unfinished. Because it continues—furtively, sickly, perversely—in his head, and in the bedroom’s blackness around him at night. No, he still can’t tell her. This kind of story, you can’t adequately tell until it is finished. So he is left alone with the story’s newly insistent fragments as the landscape slides by.

On both sides of the highway, Pennsylvania’s steeply raked hills display broad swaths of forest. Surprisingly dense and unbroken and pristine, he thinks, for a main artery in the eastern United States. Only occasionally, a gas station plaza—its meaningless flags and pennants waving colorfully, vaguely carnivalesque—flies bright and fleeting by their windows, disappears evanescent, as the landscape melts into slanting green woods again.

“I know you had nothing,” Rose says, and after a pause, “I know it has to do with that.”

And unsaid:
I can’t know any more than that, because in all these years of marriage, after three children and a life together, you have never told it to me fully. You mythologize yourself, you gain psychological advantage, by not telling it, and I know this about you by now, and I think you are at least honest enough with yourself to know this, too, about yourself: that you are very much about psychological advantage, and that’s the main reason you don’t tell it. Not the pain of the past. No longer the pain of the past. The pain must be gone by now—must have healed somewhat by now.

He knows she feels all this, feels it and senses it all in her slight resentments, accumulated into a small and still-manageable mound after fifty years. He wishes—he only wishes—that that were the truth about his past. It should have healed. That would be the natural human course, the standard human response.

He is asking a lot now, he knows. Driving her into the unknown.

The device on the dashboard blinks occasionally, silently. She regards it with some inseparable mix of mild abhorrence and prim, formal interest.

“That’s a tracking device of some sort, isn’t it? From that ridiculous catalog. We’re following somebody, aren’t we?” she says. And, after only a slight pause, “Following it to our furniture.”

She’s always been an intelligent woman.

There is a long silence, which answers her definitively.

A survivor, he has thought, has no identity. To others, yes. Ultraidentity. Sacred identity. Worthy of hallowed whispers and respect, respectfully pointed out at a benefit, a gala, a charity function, all in smooth black tie. Look how far he’s come. Imagine, from nothing to this. A survivor fills a chandeliered room—any room—with his brutal past. But to him, no, it doesn’t work the same way. To him, he has no past.

So, to a survivor, other things must fill in for identity. Affiliations. Clubs and memberships. Responsibilities. Children. (Who are made too important—it is a hard burden for children to bear. He has observed the brutal toll on some survivors’ children, has eventually seen the subtle toll on his own, but it is a toll he seems unable to mitigate. Mitigation would be to change who he is or what has happened, and that can’t be done.)

A survivor is caught in a world of surfaces. Like his daughter as an awkward preteen girl, he thinks, curled up with a fashion magazine. Minutely observing a luscious world, imagining herself vividly in it, but separated from it: a world that played across the page without her. The survivor knows nothing but glossy surface. Lives in glossy surface. Because nothing else in the present can ever be as real.

He wants his possessions back. Because he wants back the part of his identity that his possessions helped to make.

His possessions are part of his assimilation. An assimilation he hasn’t thought very deeply about, yet he senses now that it’s gone. In part because its important trappings are gone. And he’s tossed back. As if to begin again.

Peke. From Pecoskowitz. Not everything is what it seems, after all. The big, white, sparkling moving van. The crisp uniforms.

The American-sounding name. A bent-over, harmless old man.

No, not everything is what it seems.