The Brink (12 page)

He pulls back the blanket as if uncovering a body in a morgue. “How much for everything?” He is driving a fifty-
thousand-dollar car and buying thirdhand baby furniture. I don't press.

“I'll take seventy-five,” I say.

“Done,” he says. On his way out with the stroller, he picks up the biggest shell in the basket. It's a fan the size of a dinner plate and bleach white. “You giving these away?” he says.

I found that shell one night when Scott and I were fooling around under a pier. I had taken a black-and-white photography class—I wanted a hobby, it seemed validating—and we'd gone there to fill out my portfolio. Scott was high and determined to go down on me, but first I made him pose. Afterwards, I plucked the shell from the sand, an amateur naturalist. The photographs, though, were bad, dark, and indistinct.

“Sorry,” I say. “Keepsake.” Before, I was eager to give the shells away. But now I don't want this man to have them.

He picks up a mottled brown and pink conch, flawless. “What about this one?” he asks, and I'm back in the tide, our first summer together, bonfire on the beach. “Look what I found,” I said to Scott, and he pulled me to him. “Look what
I
found,” he whispered, and squeezed my hips.

I don't want these memories.

“Look, you can find all these shells on the beach,” I say.

“I don't have time for the beach,” says the man with the convertible.

I won't relent, and he shrugs. I help him with the stroller. It fits sideways, recklessly, in his passenger seat, ready to launch.

“It seems like you're shedding,” he says.

“Shedding?” I say, irritated.

“You should call me,” he says. “I'm a therapist. I see things.” He jabs a business card out between two fingers.

I tell him I'm good, and he answers, “Suit yourself.”

My mother remains in the passenger seat, a heap of Coffee Nip wrappers in her lap. “He seemed like a hot prospect,” she says, his car revving out into the street.

“He just bought baby stuff off Craigslist,” I say. “Not a prospect.”

“Well,
you
sold it there,” she says.

My phone has four messages: two cancellations and two from Scott.

My mother and I buy burritos at the Quick Check and pick up her prescription at Walgreens, but the fact of the two items, the vaginal steroid and our food now in the same bag, erases my appetite. On her balcony, with its sweeping view of the parking lot, I watch her chew her carefully managed bites. My mother has one brave molar left. A heavy breeze brushes the plants and lifts our napkins.

“You need to call Al,” I say, fetching the phone. “He could be a vector.”

“You love me vulnerable,” she says. “It makes you feel whole.”

“I'm being cautious,” I say. “I'm being
you
.” How true and how awful that is. There must be a place in between parent and child, a way to take care of each other without resentment and hating yourself.

“Well, stop,” she says, and stands unsteadily. “Don't be me.
Nobody should be me.” She walks inside without her cane, lurching from one piece of furniture to another. One of the sad aspects of getting older, I think, is that you lose control over the quality of your entrances and exits. She sits on the couch, in the dark, and I hear her dial and leave a message for Al. A small happiness, the satisfaction of someone following instructions, rises in me.

“What happened?” I call to her.

“Leave me alone.”

“What? He's not there?”

“He does his power walking on Saturdays,” she says. “Why don't you go upstairs to happy hour, to the bar?” She wants to shower and apply her salve in private. I'm happy to leave and take the good magazines with me.

When the elevator door opens into the Penthouse Lounge, I feel as if I'm stepping onto the pleasure deck of a 1970s cruise ship, all aquamarine and pink extravagance, smelling vaguely of pizza dough and shrimp cocktail, the aroma of recent fun. I pull a chair to the floor-to-ceiling window. At this hour, the building's shadow stretches way out into the Atlantic. Scott and I came up here just once, right after my mother moved in, and he pointed out the whole sweep, from the Palisades to the knobby tip of Long Island. He knew the geography. Below, Sandy Hook arcs out toward Manhattan. The people on it are just dots of color; maybe one is collecting shells, trying to hold the afternoon still. I could call Scott.

I should call Scott.

Living at the beach was his idea. I'd thought of other places for us—Philadelphia, Hoboken—but he wanted to sit at the beach in the sun and think and “see what surfaced.” Here I am, at the top floor, doing it without him. What we take from each other, without knowing. I remember Sundays, he'd prop his fishing pole up in the sand, park himself in a lawn chair, and stare out at the water, watching night come. Once, near the end, I showed him a perfect nautilus I'd found. He palmed it. “This used to be something's
house
,” he said with an emphasis that told me he was high, long after he'd promised to stop. “A house, until something died.” And I saw the curl of emptiness inside the shell and it was all I could see. All that armor protecting a darkness, really, an ending.

The elevator dings, and old men in baseball caps and windbreakers spill out. They discover me alone at the window and give me a wide berth. I'm probably some fantasy they've all had: the teary girl in the penthouse bar. They begin stretching on the floor, their legs up on tables, flexing. Not one has broken a sweat. It's impossible to tell if they're about to leave or are finishing up. I recognize Al in a yellow tracksuit and spotless white sneakers. His headphone-radio, a novelty of twenty years ago, loops around his neck. He smiles, and all I can see is complicated dentistry.

“You need to talk to my mother,” I say to him.

He looks concerned, almost as if he cared. “What's the matter?”

“She'll tell you about it.”

“Is she hurt?”

“She's . . . coping,” I say, righteous and inviolable. I am her daughter. I have her interests at heart.

“I'll do that,” he says with chronic gentlemanliness. I smell a peppery gust of aftershave, cologne, and sweat. When he asks if I'm all right, I huff at him. He backs away, giving me my space, except now I don't want it.

“Look, I just want you to take responsibility for your actions,” I call out. He's bent over now, fingers about three feet from touching his toes. Al cranes himself out of position, his hands on his lower back, and comes back.

“Do you love her?” I ask. His eyebrows furrow.

“Your mother and I are good friends.”

“Friends with benefits?”

“Benefits?” he says, confused. “Like life insurance?”

The other men whisper to each other. The words boil out of me. “Oh, don't play dumb. What is this place? Some kind of sex castle?” The others step toward the elevator. I know I look insane, but I'm right. If I'm not having sex, they're not allowed to either.

Al sighs. “Your mother told me about you, what you're going through.”

Of course she told him. She used me to get him. Because that's what mothers do: they get us to run errands with them, wait patiently with cigarettes, take notes at the doctor's. And then use our sadness as a story, as a friendship appetizer.

“You know something?” I say. “You've ruined her.”

Al shakes his head. “Grow up, sweetheart. Your pain's driving this car.”

Which makes no sense! I grip the magazines into a tight coil and shake them at his nose like a dog. “Love is driving this car, asshole!”

Al squints and cocks his head. “I think we're talking about different vehicles.”

I flee down the emergency stairs like a grown-up, humiliated, in flight from myself.

Back in her apartment, my mother naps on the couch in her bathrobe, with two cucumber slices over her eyes. She looks like a surprised cartoon character. And in her expression, in the small truth of vegetable matter on her face, I see that my mother has not given up. She is not done, not over, and I must make allowances. I kneel next to her and take her hand.

“Shhh,” she says. “The cream is doing its magic. It's tingly.”

“I need to leave,” I say. “I need to be alone.”

She kisses my hand. “Go do you.”

I call Scott from the beach, the empty shell basket at my feet, in the surf.

“Thank God you called, baby,” he says. “I'm falling apart here.”

“Remember those shells,” I say, “the ones from that cabinet?”

“No,” he says. “Not really.”

“Wait,” he says. “Maybe. Yeah.”

A wave comes, splashes up to my knee. I feel the last shell brush against my leg as it goes. “The tide just came and took them,” I tell him. “Everything, all at once.”

From the passenger bench of the Origin Resources surveying helicopter, Leland Barr gripped his shoulder belt and leaned over to take in the end of King Mountain. The summit, jutting out of the dissipating fog, looked like a kneecap rising out of a bath. Bright yellow company dozers worked the shale along a series of plateaus and ramps. Draglines pulled spoil rock down the south face. Typically, nothing made Leland feel more executive, more ascendant, than the unmaking of a ridge. Nature always gave, under the fuse. But today, he felt blunted, elsewhere. Merrill had taken the dog.

The chopper eased up over the ridge, and a patch of undisturbed grass came into view, at the far end of the summit. “What's that?” Leland asked into the headset.

The pilot veered and Leland saw rows of granite and marble stones. At center was a one-room shack with a corrugated tin roof, caked in moss. At the perimeter, an oak tree lay poled out on the ground, root ball lofted in the air.

“Graveyard,” the pilot answered. “Turned up during the raze.”

Nearby, Origin boys in hardhats mixed with some motley group, trespassers probably, and Leland wearily understood that somebody had an opinion he didn't want to hear. Already, he wanted a drink, his flask tucked into the ruffled pocket of his briefcase.

Six months ago, when Origin first opened King for extraction, Leland's picture ran on the front page of the Louisville paper. Sometime that night, “MOUNTAIN JUSTICE LEAGUE” was splashed in red paint on his garage in Indian Hills. A pile of tree stumps materialized in his drive, deposited by huffy females and snaggletoothed young men who wanted the country to plug into the Persian Gulf, apparently. As the mountain came down, the vandalism escalated—dozer tires slashed during a site visit, his face with fangs stapled to telephone poles along Frankfort Avenue, the driveway gate padlocked shut . . . Corporate paid for the cleanup, but the antagonism had taken its toll. Merrill told him she didn't “want to live in a bull's-eye.” She worked for a cancer nonprofit that ushered more pink into the world. She felt above enemies. In the spring, they'd separated and she'd taken an apartment near Cherokee Park, and just this weekend, she'd come back for the terrier. “Something's broke in you, Leland,” she said on the stoop, Murphy struggling in her arms. “And I don't think you know what it is yet.”

The pilot set down the helicopter on the plateau near the site office, a row of connected trailers on cinder blocks. Leland grabbed his briefcase, ducked out into the gust of the blades, and the heat hit him. The sun had a rare intensity on shadeless
ground—site visits felt like a pit stop on a hot plate. Out from the downdraft, he donned sunglasses and cuffed his sleeves. He would go through the motions of being himself. The soil was cracked and hard-packed underneath him, but small weeds still sprung up. There was always life after a leveling. The site manager waved to him urgently at the open door of the office. The blades of the chopper slowed and Leland heard the rattle of generators, the beeps of the dozers and loaders across the site, and, in the distance, the shouting.

Kyle watched Squirrel from the far end of the chain of people, glad to be at maximum distance from the conflict. His stomach pitched and rolled, unhappy with the maybe-not-entirely-cooked tofu scramble Squirrel had made for the action team at dawn. A delirium had set in, and it occurred to Kyle that vomiting was not out of the question.

“There is supposed to be a fifty-foot green perimeter around this!” Squirrel yelled, pulling the chain of people forward. “How many times do we need to say it? That is the
law
!” Squirrel's face was flush and blotchy, his hair tucked under his “lucky” blue bandana and his beard gone pubic, giving him a mutinous zeal. Kyle had wanted to bring baseball caps, something for shade, but Squirrel nixed them. He looked over Kyle's collection—like the one that had a unicorn and “Meet Me at the Creation Museum!” on it—and pronounced them
“off message.” “There might be media,” Squirrel explained solemnly, which Kyle knew meant a person with a cell phone and laser-printed media badge. Kyle was still learning to get “on message,” still deciding if he liked it.

Kyle watched Squirrel's boots sink into the cracked earth in front of the bulldozer and wondered how much longer any of this had to last. The fight, this action, his relationship to Squirrel, all in the mix of the nausea. The older woman next to Kyle, wearing an oversized T-shirt with a picture of her cat on it, vice-gripped his hand. It was the only thing keeping Kyle upright.

“Which part of private property don't you dipshits get?” yelled back one of the miners in an orange vest. His hand rested on the wheel hub of a bulldozer. “This is a
fucking
work zone. It's not safe.”

An argument in the full-bore sun, miles from Squirrel's truck and cell signal, and hours from the city, was the opposite of safe. Squirrel had asked Kyle to come join the action, to be “a witness for the mountain,” which Kyle had assumed meant s'mores and maybe a tent-bound blowjob. But there were no tents. There was no camping. There was, however, much yelling. He'd been dragged here, and now he had a low-grade dysentery for the cause.

Kyle wasn't political. He'd moved to Louisville to work as a designer for the alt-weekly, which promptly went out of business, and in the spiral of his funemployment, he fled his apartment and took long walks along Bardstown Road. He'd seen Squirrel inside the Justice League storefront, leaning almost
horizontal in a chair, wearing a knit vest and that blue bandana and smoking a corncob pipe, like you could just do that and not look ridiculous. It was the case that Kyle had always had a thing, unspoken and alarming in its power, for the guy on the Brawny paper towels. Kyle went inside and asked for “some literature,” trying to seem both curious and manly with indifference. The pink triangle on Squirrel's squalid messenger bag was all the proof he needed.

“You want to know about the corporate skull-fuck of the planet?” Squirrel said, and pointed to a television, where footage of landslides ran in a loop. Mud slurry paved its way down mountain slopes. “How much literature can you handle?”

Squirrel was, as it turned out, the literature. At the start, Kyle loved listening to him, the long filigreed monologues of invective, the precision of his authority. Undoubtedly, Kyle had enjoyed the minor and probably imaginary cachet of sleeping with a bisexual local activist who played the mandolin and read constantly, whose immodest, uncut penis Kyle considered, privately, the only virgin hardwood worth caring about. Squirrel's behaviors—shitting with the bathroom door open, eating a single spoonful of sugar for dessert—fascinated Kyle zoologically. But dating Squirrel, a boy
named
Daniel who
answered
to Squirrel, was like sleeping with a stray. Squirrel would disappear for action weekends and return with a pinecone. The fact that the dollar store didn't have vegetarian black beans might set him off. He carried with him a caustic tea-tree extract that he used to bathe
and
wash dishes. It was awful to
think, but maybe the nausea gave Kyle a certain clarity: he had to break it off before it turned bad, before Squirrel decided girls were where it was at or went off to sleep in the woods.

“What part of cemetery don't you get? These are
graves
,” shouted another activist, followed by a chorus of agreement. Kyle's stomach foamed again. The older woman next to him looked over skeptically. She lived in the hollow at the base of the mountain, in a ramshackle house with a washing machine full of green water out on the front lawn. That morning, she had led the group up the mountain, intuitively moving through the woods like Leatherstocking in blown-out Velcro sneakers. They'd passed a sign tacked to a tree, “DANGER BLASTING.” She'd given it the finger.

“Young man, you're tilting, you know that?” she said. “Do you need to sit?”

Her hand was tough and dirty and Kyle was working at not thinking about that, because thinking about it seemed to lift his breakfast up and out. Puking would definitely be off-message. “I'm fine,” Kyle said.

A miner lifted himself into the cabin of the dozer and the engine chugged to life. Black smoke belched from the exhaust. Squirrel stepped up and onto the blade, in full revolutionary mode. Kyle had seen this before, when Squirrel straightened his back and startled people with his ardor.

“Until the site ceases being in violation,” Squirrel declared, “we will
not
be going anywhere.”

Up the ridge, two men, one in a dress shirt and carrying a briefcase, made their way down. A negotiator, Kyle hoped,
since he, personally, was not planning on wilting much longer. Even if it meant bushwhacking by himself back down to Squirrel's pickup somewhere down the mountain.

The foreman spat a slug of tobacco at Squirrel's feet and nodded to the driver up in the dozer. “I don't get paid enough for this bullshit.”

The next few seconds Kyle saw in a kind of glare, an admixture of heatstroke and mild arousal at his boyfriend's leadership skills. The dozer jumped when it went into gear and Squirrel's ankle failed. He slipped, hands wheeling, and the side of his head slammed into the edge of the metal blade. His body crumbled as though someone had cut his strings. The crowd gasped and Kyle bent over and yawned up breakfast, the last thing Squirrel would ever give him.

Leland turned off the television in the sunroom and let the whir of the crickets fill the house. All the windows open with the central air gusting: his preferred climate. Outside, the line of plants, a hydrangea and magnolia and something Merrill had mocked him for not knowing, brushed against the screens in the evening breeze. From the recliner, he could see out to the backyard, the grass gone to seed, the gazebo where they'd had drinks in its dappled shadows all of once, when, for a moment, they took renewed pleasure in each other's company. Now, the lattice and structure was buried under the growth, a trophy some vine had claimed.

Since Merrill's departure, the sunroom had become the whole house for Leland—office, bar, bed, kitchen, throne. A hole he'd fallen into. Evenings, he worked from here, whiskey on the TV-dinner stand, next to the corporate laptop. Murphy's empty dog bowl remained at the base of the cabinet, where a population of liquor bottles awaited their god, the maid.

Leland was letting things go. He was seeing where they went.

He rose and dumped a half-eaten carton of Chinese into the sink. There, on the countertop, next to his computer, was the boy's blue bandana, folded into a square. The maid had washed the blood out. He picked it up and noticed lettering in the material, barely legible, made with a ballpoint pen: “The end of every civilization begins with the end of the trees.”

The evacuation had been Leland's decision. The haul roads down were too rough, the trail too uneven and long, to carry the boy out. So they got him on a stretcher and back up to the Origin chopper while he fell in and out of consciousness. Leland got in, followed by another young man—the boy's friend or handler, with some kind of ill-advised moustache. Later, he would discover that his briefcase had gone missing in the chaos and wonder, acidly, if the awfulness had been staged. On the ride, the young man with the moustache gripped his friend's limp hand. The gesture was careful and tender, and Leland found himself staring. Homosexuals, albeit unkempt ones. The pilot raised University Hospital on the radio, and the moment they landed, emergency medics whisked the body
inside. But the young man remained on the chopper bench, uncertain.

“What do I do?” he asked.

The question surprised him. Leland answered, “You go look after him. That's what you do.”

It was only later, back at Bowman Field, that Leland discovered he still had the bandana in his hand. And the awful moment returned: the boy, looking up at Leland with astonishment and single bloodshot eye before he drifted. A week later, the boy remained at the hospital with a skull fracture. Of course, without insurance. Origin would cover the substantial costs. The newspapers had not yet bit on the story, and certainly would neglect to mention the corporate beneficence.

The doorbell rang. Leland wondered if he'd ordered food twice and forgotten. Under the porch light, the young man from the helicopter, the handler with the eyebrow along his top lip, dawdled on his front step. His face seemed sharper, less comedic, and he wore a T-shirt emblazoned with a squidlike monster throttling the city skyline. Below it ran the words “Release the Kraken!” In his hand, he had Leland's briefcase.

“I think this is yours,” the young man said.

Steadying himself on the doorframe, Leland accepted it with what he hoped was unbleary firmness. The weight seemed correct, though the flask would certainly be missing. There'd been nothing of consequence inside: everything that mattered was on his laptop.

“I assume it's been thoroughly pawed?” Leland said.

The young man shrugged. “I don't know. I'm not part of them. You should have it. It's yours.”

“How's your friend?” Leland asked.

“Still in the hospital. There's swelling. On his brain.”

“All right then.” But the moment hung between them. The boy's face summoned up the last time they'd been together, on the roof of the hospital, when he looked to Leland with needfulness. He and Merrill had never had children—the treatments had impeded her fertility—but with the young man now in front of him he felt an odd calling. The night suddenly seemed to require a charity that Leland could just about deliver.

“Have a nice life,” the young man said, and turned to walk up the drive.

Later, Leland would understand it had been a mistake to allow the boy this close, to permit him to study his privacy, but the months of drinking had sanded down his discernment. And he'd come all this way, miles into the county, simply to return what was his.