The Solace of Leaving Early (22 page)

Langston and her mother reached the girls. She tried to lift Epiphany, but couldn’t separate her from her sister, and AnnaLee finally said, “Let’s just lift them up together and carry them into the house,” and that’s what they did. Lights were coming on in other houses. As soon as they reached the couch, Langston left the girls to her mother and ran across the street, and she, too, leapt to the top step. Inside, Walt was on the floor with Beulah, performing CPR, and Langston had to jump right over them to get to the bathroom where the inhalers were kept. Her hands were trembling, and she kept seeing little dancing pinpoints of light, but she knew she wouldn’t faint. She felt remarkably clearheaded. She grabbed the inhalers and jumped over her father a second time, then leapt straight to the sidewalk from the door of the trailer, skipping all the steps.

In the house AnnaLee was trying to hold both girls, who were limp and gasping for air. Langston handed her the inhalers and AnnaLee said, “Go get Amos, Langston. He isn’t answering his phone. Run.”

Langston ran out the door and headed down Chimney Street, Germane at her side. They reached the corner of Chimney and Plum and Langston saw the wide, dark street ahead of her, lit by streetlights and patches of moon, and she felt like she could fly. She felt like Beulah or Sarah, one of the Macon Sisters. She hadn’t run so hard or so fast since she was a little girl, racing Taos down the very same sidewalk. She always lost. Her feet were bare but she couldn’t feel anything, no stones or broken pavement, and just when she began to wish it could go on forever, that she could run straight out of town, Amos’s house came into view, and she stopped in her tracks. AnnaLee hadn’t been able to get him to answer the phone, but all his lights were on. His windows were open, and Langston could hear music, and this was the strangest thing: a moment of awareness can only contain so much—it is finite, after all—and Langston was overloaded. She wasn’t really certain who she was anymore, and she had only the vaguest sense of what she was supposed to do. She had forgotten everything but
Run
. But as soon as she heard the music, she thought very clearly, as if a voice had spoken it to her: that’s Schubert. The trio in E-flat, Opus 100, one of her favorite compositions in the world. She stood still a moment and listened to the texture of it, the way the cello creates an illusion of sadness that is really just an implausible . . . She even closed her eyes and took a deep breath before she remembered where she was.

“Amos!” she screamed, running toward the house. “Amos, wake up, it’s the girls, it’s Beulah!” She pounded on the front door, but he didn’t answer, so she ran down the sidewalk and around to the screened porch, and just as she started up the steps, the screen door opened and there he was, fully dressed, his shoes and glasses on, looking like two in the afternoon.

“Get in the car,” he said, without a hint of worry or vexation.

“Amos, we can run and get there faster! Drive if you want to, but I’ll just—”

“Get in the car, Langston. Your foot is bleeding profusely.”

She looked down, and he was right. Blood had pooled where she was standing, and just like that, as soon as she saw it, she could feel something embedded deeply in her heel. It
hurt
. She got in the car.

The Rabbit was reluctant to start, and Germane was panting; Langston’s window wouldn’t roll down and a piece of the roof seemed to be stuck to Amos’s glasses, but he remained quite collected. The engine finally caught, and they drove off with a shudder.

“You’ve called an ambulance.”

“Jesus. Yes. And Daddy’s doing CPR.”

“The girls are with your mother?”

“Amos, are you
retarded
? Yes, the girls are with Mama, and she has the inhalers, and there. Listen.” An ambulance was on the way, blaring down the highway between Hopwood and Haddington.

Just before they pulled up in front of the house, he turned to her. “Langston, I need to say something to you, please. It’s about what happened between us, the things I said, and about Beulah’s—”

She held up a hand to stop him. “Save it, if you would. The Amos Townsend Show was yesterday. I’m much more interested in what’s happening to the children.”

Langston jumped out of the car and limped through the front door. AnnaLee was sitting on the couch with the girls, who were crying, but breathing. When they saw Langston, they both sprang from AnnaLee’s lap and grabbed her, and she still had enough of the strength she felt when running to lift them off the ground, resting one on each hip.

“Langston, we found Grandma on the floor!” Immaculata wailed, her face shiny with sweat and tears.

“Langston, she is died!” Epiphany pressed her face into Langston’s neck.

“Shhhhh,” Langston said, kissing first one and then the other. “Don’t worry. I’m right here, and Amos is here, and nothing,
nothing
is going to hurt you.” She glanced at Amos, who was watching her with an expression so pained and tender that she felt something travel up her spine, a jolt of recognition, news; no one had ever looked at her that way. Not once in her life. He took Immaculata out of her arms, and they headed for the car, AnnaLee following with a towel for Langston’s foot. The lights from the ambulance made the whole of Chimney Street look like some gorgeous emergency: the red trailer, the red dogwood tree, Langston’s empty, red backyard, the red sky.

Chapter 21

WORD I HAD NO ONE LEFT
BUT GOD

Amos paced like an expectant father for a solid thirty minutes, right up until AnnaLee said she would call security if he didn’t stop. They were the only two people in the Intensive Care waiting room in the small hospital in Hopwood. Walt had gone home to get some sleep, and Langston was with the girls in a room on the pediatric ward. A television, suspended from the ceiling, was on and couldn’t be turned off, at least by mortals. The sound was mercifully low.

“What do you make of this profusion of televisions in the hospital? They’re everywhere,” Amos asked.

AnnaLee put her book down, a collection of E. M. Cioran. “I think it’s sinister, frankly. I feel like we’re in a Ray Bradbury short story.” She went back to reading.

Amos tapped his fingers on his bony knees. “Why do you have a book and I don’t?”

“Because I’m a woman, Amos.”

“Yes, but why do you have a book and I never do in a situation like this?”

AnnaLee put the book down. “I carry a bag. I also have safety pins and emergency money, and a package of those little wet towelettes. We live in Indiana. I could get stopped by a train, I could get bored. I always carry a book.” She went back to reading.

Shuffling through the pile of magazines on the table at the end of the sofa they were sharing, Amos was disappointed to find nothing changed in the past ten minutes:
Parents, Money,
and
Sports Illustrated,
and a
Children’s Book of Bible Verses
. He sat back. “Have I ruined your daughter?”

AnnaLee gave him a look of great forbearance. “No, Amos. Langston is fine, this was nothing. She had a single bad afternoon and night.” She checked her bag for another book, but didn’t find one. “I’ve always thought that the thing she does, this minor catatonia, is just a way for her to gather up some time. She needs time to process things. You should have seen what happened to her two years ago, when her affair with the Donne scholar ended.”

Amos felt his breath catch. “She had an affair with a Donne scholar?”

AnnaLee nodded. “Jacques Perrin.”

“Jacques Perrin? I own his two books, that’s just—” He stopped, unclear about what he wanted to say. “Was it serious?”

“Oh, yes. At least from Langston’s point of view it was. They lived together, in essence, for quite a while, although she never told us that. We never met him—I think he didn’t want the entanglement of a family, of her family. And she took a year out of graduate school to travel with him. She adored him. Amos,” she said, touching his arm, “don’t mention to Langston I told you about this.”

He shook his head, “No, of course not. He broke up with her?”

“Brutally, I think. She was one in a long line.”

“And she didn’t take it well?”

“No. No, she didn’t take it well.”

“What happened?” Amos turned to face AnnaLee, which required the folding of a leg. “I mean, did she—”

“Amos? Are you preparing her dossier?”

He shook his head, looked at the floor.

“You know what I think?” AnnaLee asked, slipping her book into her bag. “I think what you’re really asking is not whether you broke my daughter, but how she got broken. You want to know what’s wrong with her. Is that it?”

“No! Okay, yes, I have wondered, in passing.” Amos paused. “Am I pushing you?”

“No, I’m past all that, really.”

He believed her. Amos had become accustomed to the undisguisable fragility of the bereaved; he’d welcomed women back to church after miscarriages and stillbirths and SIDS; shaken the hands of men who had just buried beloved wives or parents or children. And always there was the slight nod in the grief-stricken, he wasn’t sure how to describe it, a primitive fear or wariness. Amos spoke to them and they tried to look directly at him, but their eyes constantly shifted, as if they were looking for a door—a psychic door—a way into or out of their own condition. Beulah had it in the beginning, but didn’t have it anymore, and Langston had an embedded form of it, but AnnaLee didn’t have it at all.

“Taos, my son, was . . . I didn’t love Taos wisely, I’d have to say. There were no role models for me, I was just winging it. If he’d been normal I think my instincts would have been okay, but. He was a child who
strained,
I’ve thought about this for years. When he was born, all he wanted was to roll over, and when he could roll over he wanted to sit up. You can see where this is going. He wanted not to walk, but to run, he yearned. And then,” AnnaLee pinched the end of her earlobe repeatedly, a nervous gesture Amos hadn’t noticed in her before, “you know. He was bright. I’ve probably mentioned that. He reminded me of my father, David. David Wilkey. There’s a point in that, in the way they were alike. My mother adored my father but she destroyed him, she went at him with her great guns every day, every day of his life, and she did so because my dad was smart and kind, a reader and thinker, even though he was just a farmer. And there was something in the way he stood in relation to the world that made my mother
insane
with, I don’t know what it was, maybe he made her own life look trivial by comparison. Though my dad never would have said such a thing. And I had an older brother, or I would have had an older brother, he choked to death at the dinner table when he was a baby and neither of my parents could save him, and that was really the end for them. For my mom and dad. I did nothing. My coming along did nothing to help them.” AnnaLee reached up and let her hair down—there was some strip-of-leather-and-chopstick combination involved, the likes of which Amos had never seen before—and then in one fluid motion, twisted the hair back up and replaced the stick and everything was perfect.

“And then Taos was born, and he was so pretty and robust, he was a fabulous, strong little boy, and Mother preferred men to women in any case. And he turned out to have that mind, that same searching, curious mind my dad had, and what do you know?” AnnaLee laughed, still amazed. “Mother adored him. What she loved but had to destroy in my dad she loved unconditionally in her grandson. Do you know, listen to this, that Mother threw away all of my dad’s books when he died? Didn’t even offer them to me, wouldn’t sell them, wouldn’t give them away.”

Amos had long wondered whether Tolstoy was right about the difference between happy and unhappy families, and had come to believe he’d never be able to test the theory, having never,
ever
encountered a happy one.

“So my mom loved Taos too much in her brittle way, and Nan Braverman loved him too much, but like the other sort of grandma, the grandma everybody dreams of. And Walt and I were young, we didn’t know anything, and we were liberal, progressive, especially for Haddington. We thought we could . . . we thought if he wanted to run, we should say run. And we did, we said run, we said climb, jump, swing, sing, you name it,
eat
.” She laughed. “I called him ‘Zorba’ when he was little, he was the life force, Amos. You should have seen him.”

Amos watched her, struck again by how exquisite the stories were the people around him carried, and mostly silently, the lives they’d lived and endured, the sweetness and loss.

“He was two when Langston was born, and Amos. How to say this?” She paused. “Taos was the love of my life, I honestly believe, I truly believe that people who never have children, or who never love a child, are doomed to a sort of foolishness, because it can’t be described or explained, that love. I didn’t know anything before I had him, and I haven’t learned anything of importance since I lost him. Everything that isn’t loving a child is just for show. This is a terrible confession, it’s the worst confession I could possibly make, but Langston was born, and,” AnnaLee swallowed, “I loved her
better
.”

“What?” He was stunned. “But I thought—”

“She, Amos, the moment I laid eyes on her in the hospital she was just my favorite, there was no way around it.” Her eyes filled with tears. “When Taos was born my instinct was to nurture him and help him grow up into what he wanted to be, the man he could be, but Langston. Her head was so small, and so perfectly round, and when she slept her eyelashes touched her cheeks, and the first time, the very first time she looked at me I could see
her
in there, not just a baby but a great, extravagant soul inside the body of a sparrow, it was like a fairy tale, she weighed so little.”

Amos nodded, remembering.

“I named her after a doll my dad won for me at the county fair, my most precious toy, how’s that for a metaphor? And when we got home from the hospital, you know, I thought I’d gone crazy. Because I wanted to hurt people who got near her, I didn’t trust anyone to hold her. I wanted to stare at her for hours and hours and breathe her air. I had a dream once that I was holding her and an animal suddenly appeared from the shadows, like a combination of a dog and a lion, and it took a single step toward us, crouched to spring, and do you know what I did, in the dream?”

Amos shook his head.

“I ate it. So you can see. There was trouble everywhere. Taos never stopped moving, and I could sense this thing around him, not a shield really, but more like a repellent field, and no one could penetrate it, and it seemed to get stronger every day, after Langston. He knew, he sensed in some way, that my heart had turned. I was afraid of what I was going to do to them, what I might do to them with my
love,
Amos, imagine that.”

“You don’t have to tell me how much damage love can do, AnnaLee.”

She patted his arm. “No, I don’t.” She paused, thinking about what to say next. “I just, you know. Taos started talking, and then I knew. I knew what to do with him. When he wanted to run, I had said run, and so, when he was three I said, ‘You want to be a genius? We’ll be geniuses.’ And I made a place that was just for the two of us, and I closed Langston out of it. I thought she could have everything else, and I would save Taos this way, but it didn’t work. Because he was insatiable, and I had to struggle to keep up, and oh, please, I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that once I realized what we were doing I simply dove in. I gave him my worst self, Amos, as a gift. And I saved nothing for the child I loved best, that delicate little girl standing at the edge of my life.”

Amos closed his eyes as the story became clear. In the insufferable woman, a nearly weightless child. They were just ghosts, he knew, just spirits, the young mother and father, the hard little boy, but it seemed to Amos the past was right there with them, shimmering on the surface of everything AnnaLee said.

“So guess what she did? Guess how Langston tried to save herself? She turned to her brother, wouldn’t you just know it, and he wasn’t . . . he wasn’t the sort of person you’d want raising your baby. But he took her in, I’ll hand it to him. He never turned her away, he never said no, protected her from other kids. And she was sweet, Langston was, and she gave all that sweetness to him, and it became something else, I don’t know.”

AnnaLee leaned up and pulled her sweater on. It was so late, and they’d both had too much coffee, and Amos thought AnnaLee must have been feeling terrible, physically. He did.

“They became parallel lines, those two, like railroad tracks. Taos was on one rail being destroyed by me—I’m telling you, Amos, I protected him from nothing. If he said, ‘But what about evil?’ my response would be, ‘We’ll spend a couple of weeks on Nietzsche, and then a month on the Holocaust, beginning with the historical causes and the roots of German anti-Semitism, Hitler as an Enlightenment figure, and ending with the liberation of the camps and a discussion of whether Roosevelt should have bombed Auschwitz-Birkenau.’ He was twelve when we had that lesson. I was like some dark wizard, or a bad fairy godmother, I gave him everything he asked for.”

“And what, what did you think you were doing? I mean, not what did you do, but what was your intention?” Because it did seem very odd to Amos, it seemed like a mistake, but he didn’t want to say so.

She shrugged, hopelessly, as if he’d asked her the most impossible question, and then shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I was doing. I do, actually, I know what I thought at the time. Don’t . . . I started to say don’t laugh, but that seems unlikely. Amos, I thought I could give Taos
all,
the face of God, whatever. I thought he wanted it all, and I honestly . . . I believed then, I believe now, that in the end the information balances, and that he’d see that for himself. I was trying to lead him to Beauty, if you can swallow it, and I was willing to get there by any means necessary, including terror.”

“The sublime.”

“Kant, yes. That’s the sort of terror I mean.” She paused. “And so Taos is on his rail, and he’s moving fast, he’s hell-bent, and on the other side is Langston. And here’s an interesting thing, an example of the crazy sort of upside-down life we were living: Langston was an A student, and no one noticed. Walt noticed, of course, and he tried to let her know he knew, but I don’t think Langston ever really saw Walt. She was
his
favorite, too, but he couldn’t tell her.”

“He’s a mystery, that Walt.”

AnnaLee nodded. “Still waters run deep, as Nan Braverman used to say. Walt’s my favorite secret. He . . . here’s, I think, the strangest thing about him: He’s steady as a rock, I know this, I’ve been married to him for thirty-three years. The man cannot be rolled. And yet he lives life without any guard, he feels and sees everything. Nothing gets past him. I can’t reconcile the two things in my mind, because at the moment I’m most open to experience, I’m also the most paralyzed. He hates working at the plant; he’s farsighted, you know, and he has a mind for math—categories, strata—and so he could, if he wanted to, but he doesn’t, lay out for you or me the various concerns associated with pesticides in a rural community. He could delineate the economic impact either way, use or nonuse, the short-term benefits versus long-term effects, etc. And then he’d toss in the possibility of birth defects or miscarriage as the result of pesticide contamination of the aquifer, and the great likelihood that chemical contaminants can’t be removed from fruits and vegetables with any amount of washing, meaning they lodge inside babies and children, eventually flicking little DNA switches that will change the course of human evolution. Not to mention the evolution of parasites.”