The From-Aways (12 page)

I’m singing and painting and drinking and painting and singing and outside it is getting dark. The foliage is deep green, like in that Rousseau painting at the Met I would sleep under if given the chance: gorillas with faces sweeter than the virgins’ and moons like tangerines and all that nighttime black vegetation. When I was small I thought that painting was of capital
n
Nature. That somewhere outside the city limits, past the Spanish groceries that sold dried fishes, past Co-op City, which still smells like burning, past all the storage facilities where people keep the stuff they can’t stand to look at but can’t throw away . . . I thought the city dropped off, and that Rousseau painting is what I thought the world looked like beyond it. A midnight-dense jungle.

That deep green elsewhere is where I live these days, and tonight I feel at home in it. I will show Henry what kind of native creature I am becoming and then he will know that I can handle anything he has to tell me. Did he really think he could keep these truths from me? I am an investigative journalist! Though apparently I have not been a very good one these past few months.

I am finished. I have clumps of paint stuck in the down of my arms and my jeans are soggy, but the car looks pretty good. In fact, the car looks phenomenal.

Henry’s family’s lobster buoy was cream-colored. It had two orange stripes circling the middle, where the form begins to taper. It had a light green nose. I step outside. The rain has stopped. The best way to dry a fresh coat of paint, the way I understand it, is a swift breeze.

14

Quinn

I
drive the living, mewling Derek Jeter back home and exchange him for his stuffed double with as little explanation as possible. I head to the Uncle, taxidermied mystery cat under my arm.

I’m barely in the door when I hear Jethro calling, “A beer for my friend!”

I put the taxi-cat on the bar. “Who is this?” I say.

“My mother had many tabbies,” Jethro says. “But I believe this is Agatha. She passed in ’76.”

“You taxidermied your mother’s cats?”

“She loved them,” he says. “And it helped her remember. It’s a highly respected science and pastime.”

I moan. My grandfather was a taxidermist and my father is an asshole and I’ve fucked up my article so badly I can’t even claim to have moved the family interest along to journalism. What happened to my plan, the screed and the guitar? It was such a good plan and then . . . what did I say I was Leah for? The way Carter looked at me like he knew me from somewhere. His bare feet. His small, clean house. Forget about it. Think about anything else.

I think of all the things neither Woodward nor Bernstein would have done:

1. Forget to write anything down

2. Say “cat slaughter”

3. Accept gifts from an interviewee suspected of a crime

4. Touch an interviewee (unless she was pretty and withholding information)

I’m lousy at this, is the truth. I keep on telling myself that if I stick with writing articles, one of these days I’ll just become a good journalist. But maybe it doesn’t work that way. Maybe I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.

The summer I was eighteen my mom was in the hospital for the first time. We didn’t know it was cancer for the first month. A nervous breakdown, is what they called it. To do with being a single parent and Carter abandoning her when I was so small.
Raising a teenager all alone? No wonder the issues have come to a head now,
the nurses said.

I was angry, and we thought she was going crazy, so we had her in the crazy wing. She slept most of the day, so there wasn’t shit to do except sit in the lounge and watch the TV attached to the wall. I sat there and stewed over all the ways this was probably Carter’s fault. If he’d only married Marta in some flowery ceremony instead of all that free love crap, maybe he’d have stayed. If only that damn song, the song about her, hadn’t done quite so well. Maybe then he’d have lived with Marta instead of singing about her on a nationwide tour and never phoning. If anything else had happened, I thought, and he was here, then at least there would be someone who knew what to do. How to fix her.

In the lounge, I watched game shows.
Password
was my favorite. I loved how ridiculous the clues were and how the announcer would whisper the words to the viewer so the contestants couldn’t hear.
The password is,
he would say,
automobile
.
The password is
Alka-Seltzer
. God, I loved that whisper. I was convinced the whisper would tell me what was wrong with my mother if I listened carefully enough. Shared it quietly, just between the two of us.

Then one day a nurse brought in this old geezer in a wheelchair. She rolled his chair right next to mine. She shut off the game show.

Hey,
I said.
Don’t you wanna know if Carol Burnett can get him to say “carnival”?

He’ll never get it,
the guy said.
And it’s time for my movie.

The nurse popped a cassette into the VCR.

Man,
I said.

Dim the lights, Lucille,
he told the nurse, and she did.

If you stay, there is to be no idle chatter,
he said. He was a hell of a guy. He was strong-looking in the chest and arms, but his legs looked skinny in his hospital pants. He wore a hospital top, but over it a tweed sport coat with elbow patches.

What are we watching?
I said.

All the President’s Men, he said.
It’s my film. I have a cameo.

Are you an actor?
I said

As I mentioned,
he said.
I have a cameo.

We started watching the movie and I was thinking it was pretty good. Better than game shows, for sure. By the last scenes I was so into it, all I could see were Woodward and Bernstein scurrying around trying to get their backup by phone. The guy spoke up.

There,
he said.

What?
I said.

He pointed at the screen.
Fourth cubicle from the back,
he said. I looked. In that cubicle was another newspaperman. Yammering silently into his phone. Writing things down and touching his temple in distress.

That’s you?
I said.

That’s me,
he said.

When the movie was over the nurse came back and pressed rewind. She stood there looking at the cassette the whole time. She popped it out, stuck it in the case, and wheeled him out.

The next day she rolled him in again.
It’s time for my movie,
he said. And Lucille went through the whole thing again.

Alzheimer’s,
she said.

We watched the movie.

The thing is, the more I watched it, the better it got. The more I realized it was actually the best movie of all time. It was a month later, when I had seen
All the President’s Men
two dozen times, that they realized there was something wrong with my mother other than being tired. That it wasn’t just a nervous breakdown set off by my hormones, and that probably she had cancer instead. So they moved her to a different hospital. And I went too.

When Marta’s hair started falling out, she insisted on brushing it anyway.
Let’s just get this over with,
she said. The losing, I think she meant. She brushed until she had just a few whorls left, curled against her head in patterns like a galaxy map. The tangles that came away in her brush she would pluck from the bristles and let go out the window. She’d drop them, soft knots of hair drifting out across the lawn.
A bird will use this to make a nest,
she’d say. I wasn’t sure if that was true.

In the new hospital lounge I watched game shows again, but, man, did I miss that movie. I missed Mr. Fourth-Cubicle-from-the-Back and Woodward and Bernstein too. I missed thinking that my mom was just a little tired, a little crazy. That I could watch my film and wait it out and then it would be time for Marta and me to go home.

When they finally did send us home, it was because they had run out of ideas. When college started in the fall, and they asked me what I was majoring in, I said journalism. Investigative reporting. And that was it. I was a journalist, just like the boys in the film.

I
WISH
L
EAH
were here because I have a masochistic urge to tell her how badly I fucked up the interview, even though it would only confirm all her worst professional suspicions about me.

“You’re a pretty girl,” Jethro says. “You look just like an Irish setter I used to have.” He twirls the end of my hair around his finger.

“You make a girl feel special, Jethro,” I say, batting his hand away.

This is when the bartender, Sara Riley, tells me she thinks I’d better go outside. Leah is driving around the parking lot in circles. The woody used to be a red car. Now it’s old-lady-lace-colored. There are orange stripes, like rings around an Easter egg, circling the passenger door, roof, wood panels, and driver door. The best part is the hood, which is a cheerful springtime green. In sloppy green script, on the driver’s-side door, is inscribed:
THE
MENAMON
STAR
.

“This is my lobster pot!” Leah drunkenly yells as she passes me, black hair flapping out the window. “It is Henry’s family boat returned unto him!”

I weigh my tactical options. “Let me buy you a drink, Captain!” I yell through cupped hands. Leah stops the car, straddling two spaces, and says okay. She leaves her car door open and heads for the bar. I slam her door shut. My palm comes away painted, a red negative space in the shape of a hand on the door.

Settled at a table, Leah tells me that she’s probably been fired from the
Star
and also her house. She says Henry was supposed to be a lobsterman and he sold his family history so she could have a home but did not tell her about it because she and Henry are hasty and underinformed.

“I see,” I say. “Sorry for ditching you.”

“Ohhhhhhh,” Leah moans. “I didn’t understand that it was for your life, not for a story.”

“It
was
for a story,” I say. I don’t know why I say it. It just seems so much easier to slip across the surface of things, to avoid the sucking mud below.

“It was for your father,” Leah says. “Fathers are not stories.”

“Mine is,” I say. I explain about the cats. I point at Jethro, who is drinking a beer with one hand while petting taxidermied Agatha with the other. I try to get Leah to fight with me about the story, the way we usually do.

“You never told me about your father,” she says. “And then I was in trouble with Charley. For not knowing my famous Menamonians.”

“I’ll be sure to give you the scoop next time,” I say.

“No!” Leah says, and slams down her glass. She spatters beer all over the table. She closes her eyes and shakes her head back and forth. “That’s not what I mean. I mean you should tell me things. I bet you tell zero people zero things. And not telling people things is not a favor! If you try to not bother people by not telling them important things, all you do is put fluffy unknowable stuff between you, and that is sad and also dangerous.”

“You have paint all through your hair, you know that?” I reach across the table and pinch out a piece of green that’s dried there.

“Quinn,” she says. “I am being very serious. What about your mother? Is your mother a famous Menamonian too?”

My mother is buried in the ground with a fucking weeping willow growing roots through her pelvis. My mother is a song I have stuck in my head that will never play on the radio again. A song of memories I’m stuck remembering in a looping, fragmented way, pieces missing. My mother was my only home.

“Marta is gone,” I say. And then I say, “I told him I was you. Carter Marks.”

“What? Why?” Leah says.

“Because you’re good at things, Bernstein! And I’ve basically never met him before and I had this whole plan, but then things weren’t going the way they were supposed to and you’re so good at questions and understanding what needs to be said that it just seemed like it would be easier if he met you first. I thought I could meet him later.” I suck air in and blow it out of me in a stream. Three long, hissing exhalations. I feel calmer.
Your breathing is like a pressure release valve,
Marta said.
You have to let the stream escape slowly
.
You’ve got to let that stuff out, or the whole joint will blow.
“And let me tell you, Leah Lynch,” I say. “You really cocked up this story.”

Leah looks down at her damp, paint-spattered body. “I am good at things?” she says, and starts laughing so loudly the few people still left in the bar turn to stare. “You can be me whenever you want,” she says. “Do you want to be me later when Henry sees his car?”

I laugh. I’m getting a warm and fuzzy pleasure out of rubbing the sorry state of my life up against the sorry state of hers. I go pull a chair up behind Leah, one knee on either side of her waist. I start picking all the paint from her hair, piece by piece, like one of those monkeys on nature television. Grooming, they call this.