The Solace of Leaving Early (23 page)

“Walt? Walt could say all that?”

“Absolutely.”

“Has he?”

“No, never.”

“Then how do you know?”

She looked at Amos with a bit of disappointment. “Because I know. Because he’s my husband. So imagine that, what Walt knows. And yet he gets up every day and goes without a word of complaint. He does it for me, for our family. He’d defoliate this county with his bare hands for Langston. He’d walk on broken glass for her.”

It’s Langston who walks on broken glass
, Amos thought, remembering the piece removed earlier in the emergency room.

“There’s Langston, earning straight A’s and doing everything right, and after she and Alice stopped playing together—”

“Alice and Langston were . . . they played together?”

“Oh, sure. They were best friends, well, as much as those two could have a best friend.” AnnaLee shook her head. “Misfits. Literally, they, Alice and Langston, did not fit with other children, and so for a while they had each other and they didn’t really fit there, either.” She rubbed her thumb up and down the length of her palm, distracted. “Anyway, Langston was earning straight A’s and doing everything right, and she’s running along beside her brother as fast as she can go, and what is her family doing? We’re all saying, my mother included, ‘Good for you, Taos, that you flunked the eighth grade. You’re obviously just too smart for public school.’ And everyone has to have something to rebel against, it’s an existential requirement, so when Taos turned sixteen he rebelled.”

“How?” Amos nearly laughed, imagining a world so wide open and welcoming there was nothing to push against.

“County boys, at first, drinking. All those farm boys prowling around out there, not the sort you see in church, Amos, but the other kind. The ones who brag about having sex with pigs, the shotgun-toting, beer-swilling end of the world. And they loved him. They ate him up. He had a peculiar metabolism, Taos, and he couldn’t self-medicate like a normal boy, couldn’t sleep at night, and he could drink and drink and not feel drunk. And then he’d just collapse in a heap. He was great fun for them, for those boys.” AnnaLee looked down at her hands in her lap. “Langston worried about him so much she started to get physically sick, a whole collection of symptoms; stomachaches, numbness in her legs, double vision, our doctor could never find the source of her illnesses. And then Taos found this dog, a big, white mutt he named Strife. He became Taos’s soldier, he was mean and unpredictable, a cat killer, and we were all afraid of him. And you know, I saw through that in about three seconds, I took one look at that dog and said, ‘You picked him out on purpose, Taos, and you want him to be dangerous, because you’re afraid of something.’ But by that time no one could get through to him. He was out of school, working with Doc Fielding at the veterinary clinic and as a hand on Nathan Leander’s farm part-time. He was still living at home with us but almost never there, and when he was home he was out in the barn—there used to be a barn in the backyard?—with the doors bolted shut from the inside. And when he was with us he was this person none of us knew, a sort of mad, handsome rogue; he could imitate anyone, and the four of us would be sitting at the dinner table—but he hardly ever ate anything—or on the front porch and Taos would tell us stories about his exploits, imitating all his brain-dead cronies, and the three of us, Walt and Langston and I, would laugh uncontrollably. We laughed like we were in a panic. He had a robber’s smile, those last few years.”

Amos watched her. There was no sign she was talking about the love of her life. “Life is robbery,” he said, quoting one of his favorite ideas of Whitehead. He meant it to comfort her, but he wasn’t sure how.

She made an exasperated sound. “Quote the rest of it, Amos, ‘. . .
and all robbery requires justification.’
That’s the part that really mattered to Whitehead.”

Amos was speechless. How many times (he was humiliated, thinking back) had he done this exact thing, and not just to AnnaLee, but to everyone in his life? Using bits and pieces of better men and women to shore up his authority, his wisdom, to people who were too kind to correct him?

“Taos wasn’t justified. That should be said right up front.” AnnaLee stretched, rubbing a fist against the small of her back. Amos’s back began to hurt. “He had been good in chemistry in school, and somebody, probably one of the uncles of the farm boys—they all seemed to have these uncles who were unemployed, veterans, some of them, living in shacks in the woods, staying afloat by running traplines—one of the uncles gave Taos methamphetamine, and that was it. I don’t know when or how it happened, but he set up a lab in the barn and he was making it out there, and at first we really didn’t have any idea. Can you imagine us, ten years ago? A homemade laboratory in our barn? I don’t know what we thought he was doing in there, but he didn’t get it right at first, not until he got ahold of a recipe called the Nazi method—please, Amos, I know,” she shook her head, then squeezed her earlobe, “which uses anhydrous ammonia. He was able to get it from the tanks at Nathan Leander’s, just a gallon at a time, but we could smell it. Everyone could smell it, the whole town. For almost a year we walked around afraid of him, afraid of what was happening. He was either working or driving back and forth to Muncie and Indianapolis buying supplies, good Lord you should have seen what was in that barn. Hoses, coffee filters, tubing, hundreds of boxes of cold medicine, muriatic acid, starter fluid. He never slept, none of us could sleep, and then word started to get out. I guess he had been selling it to people at work, and they started showing up here, and one of them, a boy named Derrin, was coming out of the barn and saw Langston in the yard, watching. She hovered, she was always trying to figure out how to get to Taos. And Derrin grabbed her—when we saw him later, on the street, his skin was gray, ash—”

“He
grabbed
Langston, what do you mean—” Amos felt a flutter in his stomach, wings, or stage fright.

“He shook her, yelled in her face. I wasn’t home, but Walt was, and a lot of things happened very quickly. Langston shouted and Walt, I think he must have looked out the window and seen them in the backyard, grabbed a shotgun, and of course Derrin let go of her as soon as he saw the gun. Walt walked past him toward the barn and Langston followed, and Strife flew out the open doors at them, Langston told me later that all of his teeth were bared and he was barking so hard she could feel it in here,” AnnaLee tapped her chest, “like a bass drum. Like percussion. And Walt didn’t hesitate. He just raised the gun and shot Strife in the chest.”

Amos opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. “Oh boy.”

“Yes, it wasn’t good. Not a good moment for Langston. Then Walt stepped into the barn, saw what was there—but he didn’t know what he was seeing, not really—and stopped Taos from what he was preparing to do, which was to blow it up. He was going to blow the barn up, he had gallons of anhydrous, along with the muriatic acid and the starter fluid—can you imagine? Jolene’s house would have been gone, ours too. The windows would have blown out of the church.”

“But, wait. Would he have killed himself, killed Langston and his own father, is that—”

AnnaLee shook her head, “I don’t know, I don’t know what he was—his thinking was very disorganized by that time, and he’d become paranoid—it didn’t matter, anyway. Walt dragged him out of the barn at gunpoint and held him until the police came.”

“Oh boy.”

“My mother posted his bail. She who keeps a ledger of every pair of gloves she’s given me at Christmas, every ten dollar bill tucked inside a birthday card, just withdrew twenty-five thousand dollars from her savings account and got Taos out of jail. We brought him home, he went to his room, and within a day, maybe a day and a half, he was gone. He was facing a long prison sentence.”

Amos sat back in his chair. On television a man who seemed to be wearing a Frisbee on his head was healing a woman on crutches. Amos blinked; it was just Frisbee-shaped hair. “Ten years ago? And you’ve—”

“Not a word. He just vanished. And no, we’re not looking for him anymore, either. My mother paid a private detective from Indianapolis for two years, but he never turned up anything, not a trace.”

“I wonder,” Amos squeezed the bridge of his nose, where a headache was taking shape, “if it’s harder for you, not knowing? Would it have been better if he’d been sent to jail, or if—”

“I know, I think I know the answer to that. I think it’s best that he’s gone, best for everyone, really. Because after a couple years we were free to . . . reinvent him? do you see what I mean by that? But if he’d gone to jail and then come home . . .” She shook her head. “I can’t imagine. And he freed Langston, although I don’t think she knows she’s free. I think of him every day—”

“Of course you do.”

“—and do you know what I always think? ‘He’s twenty-seven now,’ or ‘He’d be almost thirty.’ If he’s alive, he’s thirty-two years old now, Amos, he’s a man. And that makes me shudder, trying to picture the sort of man he might be.”

Amos was silent.

“I’d like . . . I’d like to face Jacques Perrin just one time. I have a very strong sense of him from his two books, and from things I’ve heard from kids around here who went to Bloomington. He fancies himself such a dangerous little scholar; he left that trail, you know, and Langston was one of them. But if I could say just one thing to him, it would be: ‘You are an amateur. You can’t imagine what kind of love she’s capable of.’ ”

AnnaLee, it seemed to Amos, was sending him a message, but he didn’t understand the content. “What are—”

But she had turned away, and was settling herself against the arm of the couch to go to sleep. “Listen to me. You asked me about Langston and I answered you with Taos. If that doesn’t just tell the whole story.”

“I heard her, though,” Amos said, “in there. She’s in there.”

AnnaLee closed her eyes. “We tore the barn down. That’s probably the end of the sordid tale.”

“I can see why you would.”

“It smelled to high heaven. I couldn’t stand it.”

*

In Introduction to Pastoral Care, Amos had been taught to say, “Thank you for trusting me enough to share your story,” as opposed to “That story reminds me of all the reasons I’m planning to die young.” But he didn’t say anything to AnnaLee when she finished the tale of her children, and she didn’t say anything more, either, just closed her eyes and fell asleep. For a few minutes he watched the Frisbee-headed man declaim, exhort, and smack innocent people on the head. Amos had missed so much without a television set. Finally, he let his head fall back against the couch, and the next thing he knew, AnnaLee was shaking his arm.

“Amos?” she said quietly, trying not to startle him. “The doctor’s here.”

He tried to gather up his dignity and meet the man head-on, he was a minister, after all, and the clergy never sleeps. But he had a few problems remembering how to stand up, and then when he did get to his feet, nearly involuntarily, he rose and rose like a helium balloon. His head felt very small, and his ears were ringing, and he was so tall he could barely see the small people staring at him in the waiting room.

“Mr. Townsend?” The doctor, an older man with a kind, exhausted face, held out his dry hand. “Mrs. Braverman, I’m Dr. Harrison.”

Amos shook his hand, and Dr. Harrison delivered the news, and the three of them talked for a few minutes, and on the whole Amos comported himself as if he were in his right mind. When the doctor left, Amos turned to AnnaLee and said, “I’ll go tell Langston,” and ran out the door before she could stop him.

*

Pediatrics was on the second floor, and Amos took the stairs down instead of the elevator, grateful for the chance to use his legs. He opened the door to the long hallway, and heard again over the intercom something he’d heard twice already tonight, but had barely registered.

At the information desk a lone nurse was entering information into a computer. She was overweight and had one of the dreadful haircuts Amos secretly referred to as “local,” plus she was wearing a smock covered with teddy bear doctors and nurses, and for just a moment he was tempted to feel sorry for her, but the moment she looked at him he was chagrined (for what had to be the twentieth time in a single day): she was pretty, and her smile was joyous, and if he had sick children, he’d want her to take care of them.

“Can I help you?”

“Yes, I’m looking for my . . . I’m looking for Madeline and Eloise Maloney.”

The nurse looked at a chart, then said, “They’re in 211-B, just around the corner on the left. Are you with Langston Braverman?”

“Yes, I am, and thank you,” Amos said, heading for the room. He stopped after a few feet and turned around. “Can I ask you one more thing? Three times tonight I’ve heard, out of the blue, a little piece of Brahms’ lullaby over the intercom. What does that mean? Is it a code of some kind?”

She smiled, the looked back at the computer. “Sort of. We play it every time a baby is born. New moon. Busy night.”

Amos nodded but didn’t say anything. He felt shaky, walking toward the girls’ closed door. Two children were born in the time he sat with AnnaLee, right in the same building, and another as he bounded down the stairs. Brand-new lives.

*

He opened the door quietly. Langston had left the curtains open, and a security light across the parking lot was shining in the room, enough that he could see all three of them clearly. Epiphany was on one bed, asleep on her back with her mouth wide open. One arm was above her head, and the other was resting on her stomach. Immaculata was in the other bed, curled up on her side, breathing deeply. Langston had pulled the lone, uncomfortable chair up to Immaculata’s bedside, and fallen asleep with her head on her outstretched right arm.

Amos walked over quietly and knelt beside Langston’s chair. There is nothing in the world, he thought, quite as strange as watching another person sleep; the way they are both present and not. Langston couldn’t know her own face at that moment, couldn’t know how young she looked, or how innocent, but Amos knew. Her braid was hanging down the side of the bed like a rope a suitor might climb to meet her in a tower, and he was just beginning to think, he’d just had the slightest glimmer of a thought, but before he fully grasped it, Langston’s eyes opened, and she was looking right at him. An amazing thing, the way she went from being sound asleep to wide awake.