Prodigals (11 page)

In the fantasy she would play out for herself Lyric found them like this. Or better still, found Robert fucking her with her dress hiked up on the log. And Lyric watched, dismayed, entranced, relieved in some way perhaps, or just submissive to the actuality before her, the new order spread as creaselessly as linens on the sovereign bed. She would go down on Robert, yes, with Zeke watching—that was good—and her father, their precious
flower
, defiling herself and for nothing, for no more than the monstrousness of their own vanity, the wild-burning ego that had to vindicate itself in the ashes of all it laid to waste. She, the daughter of a goddamn Indian ambassador, wed so regally and for all to see, front and center in the
Times
notices, like a fucking princess! Look, Daddy! Look, Zeke!
Look
 … But even as she entertained the wish, she felt the gap between the fantasy and reality like a plummet in the mist, a fall awaiting her, a dizziness, a despair. She would come back to herself, she and the dream would fall apart. And there she would simply be, bereft of even shame and anger, bereft with only her life before her, all the things that made it up, her job and few friends, the rental, the cottage, the knowledge that it would all be there waiting for her tomorrow and the next day, and through all the days ahead. Days demanding to be filled, because even if you got rid of the
stuff
there would still be days. Time had to be filled, one way or another. And what an obligation it was! There had once been places for people like her, hadn't there been, walled off in the countryside or mountains, where you were spoken to in a soft voice and spent your days beneath arbors, wandering garden paths, stilled in the lovely sedation of pills from tiny plastic cups? Yes, that sounded right. And Daeva would come visit once a year, citing concern but really there to gloat, to delight in her sister's ruination. “If only you'd been less sure you were special,” she would say. “Less certain that the world
cared
. But you were always very self-involved, weren't you?” And Hara would smile and nod agreeably, lost to the wondrous indifference—that's how it would feel—the delicious peace of no longer having a life to fight for, an identity to pretend was hers.

*   *   *

Hara did not remember getting home. She remembered very little, in fact, when she heard Lyric speak and felt the project of locating herself in space and time crash in on her with such violence it seemed she might never pull clear.

“Hey, are you all right?”

She was in the living room, her own living room, that seemed true. Yes, on the sofa; she could feel it now as more than a cloud holding her aloft. Was it daytime? It was. Lyric sat facing her, a magazine open on her thigh.

“I think … I'm alive,” Hara said. “You look like a friend of mine, but of course the devil takes many forms.” She tried to catch Lyric's eye. “Joking.”

“I'm leaving soon.”

“To town, or…” Lyric was silent. In the stillness Hara saw something flash at the periphery of her consciousness, something awful. She squinted. She couldn't quite make it out, darting and flitting among the trees. Another flash. It nearly gave itself up, dodged away, dashed this way and that, almost at hand.

Then she saw it.

“Ah,” she said. She hoisted herself up—it took some effort—and went to the kitchen to make coffee.

“Where will you go?” she said. “Do you know?”

The girl shrugged.

Hara shook her head. “Just friends,” she said under her breath, too softly, she thought, for Lyric to hear.

But the girl said yes and laughed once.
“Just.”

It was Robert's car Lyric piled her stuff into. Well, that figured. Hara couldn't see into the driver's seat and she didn't go out. She stood in the doorway with her coffee and watched Lyric carry out her bags.

“Well,” Lyric said when she was done. “Bye.”

“Bye,” Hara said, feeling that crippling dignity hold her in the doorframe and seal her lips.

But the things she could have done, the things she could have said!

She watched the car drive away and listened until the sound of the tires faded on the drive. Then she took her coffee to an armchair. She didn't move until the sun began to dip in the sky.

By evening she felt better. She got up and wandered around the house. How big it was! How quiet. Had it always been so big or was it bigger in the silence? The lights were off and shadows lengthened across the room. The early evening had turned a golden color outside; the light seemed to burn as it fell, catching on the lawn, scattering on the ocean. There was the puzzle. Her hand had fallen on it without her realizing. God, she had been truly crazy to think Lyric wouldn't leave until it was done. She touched it tenderly for a moment, the stiff-edged cardboard, the soft joints where the pieces met. Then on an impulse she swept it to the floor. The sun pulsed. Good riddance, she thought. The sun pushed into the clouds,
good riddance
, pushed through the clouds, and she saw them, the wolves. Out in the meadow the pack was running. The sun caught their backs as they tore across the grass. They reminded her just then of the golden jackals she had heard calling from the grassland in her youth. On the darkening porch she heard the jackals calling and her mother calling—“Haaaaaaara”—summoning her to another of their prim, stately dinners. She strained for a moment to hear the jackals. She wanted to join them, as if such a thing were possible! They were deniable, she supposed, the wolves. But then who was to say? Who was there to contradict her now? The trees around the yard were so much fiber and pith. Milkweed and primrose flowered here in spring. The moon was rock, Hara thought. The ocean so many particles of water. And people—what did they say?—minerals and proteins, was it? Minerals and proteins who ate to persist. Who slept to persist. Who fucked to persist. At some point the stories had to stop. At some point the wolves died, the people died. The alarm clock went off. The particles did what they did and at times, out of chaos, suggested order. And at times, out of chaos, dashed order. And at times, who knew? The facts were stubborn. They were also stories. Quite a lot, in other words, was left to interpretation. But moments continued to come, this one on the last one's heels. And a new one. And a new one. And a new one.

 

Dynamics in the Storm

The storm was coming. The storm was coming. For days that's all we heard. How big it would be. How the colliding systems might encounter each other. How long power could be out. Towers would come down and houses too. Lives would be lost (about that we heard less). About how to protect ourselves we heard a
lot
. Residents stockpiled candles, batteries, and canned food, cleaning out stores. Critical patients were flown to hospitals inland. Those who could, left. Most stayed. They had nowhere to go. And could they leave every time, could they make it a habit? Train and bus stations were mob scenes. Flights were canceled en masse. Grounded fliers camped out in airports, amateur survivalists. We saw them on TV. Going nowhere in an airport was now news. I was still brash and foolish enough to wait for the day of the storm to drive south. I had a car, the storm wasn't due until evening, and I had no interest in cutting my visit short. It wasn't often I saw my old friend Mark and his wife, who had once almost been my wife long ago.

So, brash and foolish, yes, but not quite young. Nor was I well-off. I was okay, I was doing okay. I taught filmmaking and video art at the college in the small southern city where I lived. I had two kids, three and five, and a wife I loved who no longer loved me. I drove an old Nissan Pathfinder that was, like the rest of us, doing okay. It had four-wheel drive and I thought it could handle the trip even if things got wet. That was how, Monday morning, I found myself walking the thirty or so blocks north from Mark and Celeste's to the cheap lot near Penn Station where I'd left the car. The sky that morning was clear and pretty, a violent, indecisive wind the only sign of the storm to come.

It was on my way to the lot that I saw Susan. The streets were a mess but I picked her out at once, and then, because it was so improbable to see her, I convinced myself it
wasn't
her, couldn't be, watched for another minute wondering whether she hadn't said something about a conference, ducking and pushing through the crowd to catch her face (she was in front of me), only to realize, unbelievable as it was, that it
was
her, and I called out, half in jest, I suppose, “Dr. Duranti,” and when she didn't respond to that and yelling “Dr. Duranti” sounded ridiculous, I called out “Susan,” which she responded to at once, turning and seeing me, and then we had to acknowledge each other's existence as people outside the rarefied context in which we habitually encountered each other.

“Ben,” she said, a bit the way you say hello to an ex you've run into on a date. At times she seemed tense around me, I thought, as though worried I might bind her to my distress, but Susan was a therapist and you would have been forgiven for thinking she was prepared for this.

“Of all the places,” I said.

“Yeah, this is funny,” she said, like it was maybe the least funny thing ever.

“You told me you were out of town, I forgot. What was it?”

“Conference,” she said. “APA, or last week. I saw my sister over the weekend.” People streamed by us, an island with our luggage in the middle of the sidewalk. “Actually, I was supposed to head back yesterday. My flight got canceled.”

It came back to me then, a conversation the week before, the schedule juggling. I was teaching three classes and trying to keep a few of my own projects afloat. I was preoccupied. Maybe I preoccupied myself to keep from being alone with my thoughts. Susan's eyes were red, I saw. Her hair unwashed. She looked like she hadn't slept.

“So what's the plan?”

“I don't know, I don't think I can get anything,” she said. She took a deep breath. “I've been bouncing between Penn Station and Port Authority all morning. It's a nightmare. People are paying five hundred dollars for bus tickets. Five hundred dollars! I can't even withdraw more cash from the ATM. I'm just really—”

She stopped herself. I was so used to telling her things while she listened quietly that this speech surprised me. I couldn't remember the last time I'd heard her string as many sentences together.

“Well,” I said, knowing it would make her uncomfortable, but still myself, a person who doesn't believe in rules or in standing on ceremony, life's too strange, “I'm just on my way to the car. I'm driving back now.”

We had moved onto Thirty-Fourth Street to stand aside the flow of pedestrians. Susan's bag kept slipping from her shoulder. She looked small next to the rolling suitcase in her hand.

“I don't know, Ben. It's what, an eleven-hour drive? Do you think that's such a good idea?”

“These are pretty exceptional circumstances,” I said. “I think we need to triage the bad ideas.”

I wouldn't go so far as say I was
invested
in her coming with me, but I thought it would be silly of her not to. And I liked her, I liked her company. I thought it would be fun.

“It's the kids, though,” she said. “They're at Karen's, and I told her I'd be back last night. I told
them
I'd be back. They were upset on the phone…” She wasn't saying it to me. “It's all such a disaster.”

“Literally,” I said. “Look, this is stupid. I'm driving back right now. We can listen to music the whole way if you like.”

“Okay,” she said. “Okay.” She smiled, but her smile seemed mostly to convey that she was too tired to say no.

We got the car. We braved Hell's Kitchen and the Lincoln Tunnel, which was clogged many blocks back. At last we dipped beneath the river, lurching forward and stopping, watching the taillights of cars paint crimson streams on the white tile. For a time it seemed that the rest of our lives would take place in that tunnel, but finally we emerged. It took maybe two hours to reach 95, and 95 was a mess too. By then the clouds had begun gathering. A breath of luminosity lit them, but you could tell the thickening would continue, that the sky would turn brown-gray, then gray and darker, that the rain would come. And still it felt okay in the Pathfinder, which was warm and dry, it felt okay to be driving into the storm.

We were in stop-and-go traffic among the oil refineries of northern New Jersey when I said, “You mentioned that the kids were unhappy on the phone last night?”

“Yes, well, they're young—what do you expect? They've been at a friend's place for five days.”

“I'm just asking.”

“Sorry,” she said. She seemed to mean it. She had two kids, a boy and a girl. Alice, the younger, didn't talk much, which worried her. Like certain other people I know, I thought, realizing how easy it had been at points to take Susan's inscrutable silence as tacit approval of me, of my life and my decisions, and how in many ways this assumption was the basis of our relationship.

“Is your husband worried?” I said.

She looked at me. I thought she almost rolled her eyes. “You'd have to ask him.”

In the river of cars ahead an ignition of brake lights rolled back to us like a wave. I told her it wasn't really fair, how I told her such intimate things and she conceded so little. I hardly knew what was fair game to ask.

Our eyes met and she gave me that look I knew so well, which said that just because I had stopped talking didn't mean she was obliged to speak.

“What's fair game?” I said.

“Ask,” she said, a hitch of exasperation in her voice. “I can tell you if I don't feel like discussing something.”

“Okay, your childhood then. Tell me about your childhood.”

She laughed. “Now you're just fucking with me.” It was playful the way she said it, playful and warm, and with this lightness the drive seemed to open out before us as faceted and lovely as a long descent into a twinkling valley. Was Susan pretty? Sort of. Not extravagantly, not at first. But she grew on you. Maybe anyone who listens to you attentively for seven years will.