The Wonder of All Things (15 page)

“We all are,” Carmen replied, smiling. “Every single day. Would you like to come in and sit for a while, Tom?” Carmen asked. “That’s the kind of thing parents do, too.”

Finally, Tom looked up at her. His brow furrowed, growing the “thought trenches” that Ava often teased Wash about. “I guess they do,” Tom said.

“Come on in and make yourself at home,” Carmen said, leaving the living room and walking into the kitchen. “I’ll fix us something to drink.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Tom said, but he only lingered in the doorway.

“I appreciate the manners,” Carmen replied from the kitchen, “but don’t ma’am me. Hell, I’m guessing we’re about the same age.”

“You’re probably right,” Tom said. Finally he took a few steps inside the doorway, and he remained there, just inside the house, looking around, feeling uncomfortable. “I’m not sure how to do any of this,” he said to himself. “I feel like I’m wearing a costume.”

“What’s that?” Carmen said, waddling back from the kitchen. She carried two glasses of iced tea and smiled brightly.

“Nothing,” Tom said. He took the glass and looked at it skeptically. “I don’t suppose you have any beer, do you?”

Carmen shook her head. “Not since I got pregnant. We hardly drink, anyhow, but once I got pregnant and couldn’t drink at all, Macon decided to give it up, too.” She wanted to sit, but Tom was still standing near the door and she didn’t want to be rude. “So how are you and Wash getting along?” she asked.

“Okay, I suppose,” Tom said. “He’s a smart kid. Smarter than me.”

“I know the feeling,” Carmen said. “He and Ava are two of the smartest kids I’ve ever known. Sometimes I feel like I’m just holding her back, you know?”

Tom nodded. Still he had not tasted his tea. The glass was ice-cold, forcing him to shift it from one hand to the other intermittently.

“We’re all just doing the best we can, though,” Carmen said. “Ava and I have some tough days. She’s still warming up to the idea of me being married to her father.” She couldn’t bear to stand any longer. The night had been sleepless and her muscles were sore and her back ached and her ankles were swollen and there were a dozen other things that her body was doing to her in the throes of the pregnancy. So, finally, she sat. “You’re welcome to sit down,” she said.

“No, thank you,” Tom said. “I...I should be going.” He stepped forward and placed the glass of tea on the coffee table in the center of the room. When Carmen began preparations to stand, he motioned for her not to. “No, you sit,” he said. “I’m okay.”

“You don’t have to leave, Tom,” Carmen said. “This might sound strange, but it feels good to talk to someone who’s new to this parenting thing, too.”

Tom flinched.

“I don’t mean it as an insult,” Carmen said, keeping her eyes on her glass. “It’s just that, well, Macon has been doing this for years and Brenda’s been a mother and a grandmother. Me, I feel like I’m always playing catch-up. And, to make it worse, things between Ava and me are tense.” Finally, she looked up. “I guess it’s just good to meet someone else who’s struggling.”

Tom watched the woman for a while. His first thought had been that she was coming on to him, but looking at her now, listening to her, he realized that it was the exact opposite. She was just as frightened of being a parent as he was. The only difference between them was the fact that she was enduring the struggle, day after day, while he’d run off into the world after the death of Wash’s mother. He’d abandoned his child.

“I’ll be going now,” he said. He turned to leave.

“Wait, Tom,” Carmen called after him. She struggled to stand. It was a clumsy and ungainly maneuver, getting up from the chair in a rush—an awkward maneuvering of her hips and stomach, followed by a hard push into slow, vertical lurch—and if Tom had continued walking, she wouldn’t have been able to catch up to him. But he stood, and he waited.

“Nobody’s asking you to be perfect, Tom,” Carmen said when she had finally crossed the room. “You’re allowed to get it wrong sometimes.”

Tom nodded. He tightened his jaw, preparing his mouth for something. “Can I ask you something?” he said. “About Ava?”

“Sure, Tom,” Carmen said. She did not know what Tom wanted to ask. And, yet, at the same time, she felt that she knew exactly what he wanted to ask. Everyone had their own version of the same question about Ava. And Carmen was getting adept at answering them. There was a balance that needed to be struck. A compromise between saying that she didn’t know more than anyone else and reassuring people that, regardless of what she knew, there was a plan in place.

Now it was Tom’s turn to phrase it how he wanted to. Tom’s eyes were downcast when he spoke. “How, uh, how does it work?” Tom asked. He lifted his eyes from the floor and looked at Carmen. He seemed afraid and penitent all at once. “Could she fix somebody that’s never done nothing but fuck up their life?” He laughed darkly and twisted the hat in his hands. “Does what she’s able to do work like that?” he continued. “Can she fix mistakes?” He looked down at his wedding ring. “And if she can’t fix things like that, can she make it so that a person doesn’t remember? Can she make it so that a person doesn’t dream about the moment when everything in their life fell apart?”

“I don’t know,” Carmen said. She had learned to answer quickly when people asked her impossible questions. To delay was to offer hope where she did not have hope to offer. Then she added, “However she’s able to do it, I don’t think it works like that.”

Tom nodded. He cleared his throat. “I figured as much. I just thought I’d ask,” he said. “I’ll be going now. I’m sorry for...well...‘I’m sorry’ about sums me up, I guess.”

Without pausing, he turned and walked out of the house. Carmen stood in the doorway and watched him walk to his car and leave. She wanted to call out to him, but the words she would have said eluded her.

* * *

“Do you like having your dad around?” Ava asked. They sat on opposite ends of Ava’s bed with their legs folded beneath them with Wash’s copy of
Moby Dick
between them. Ava still didn’t particularly care for the book, and Wash was still determined to sway her. Once or twice since the two of them had been sitting, she opened the book to the dog-eared page where they’d stopped last time. She stared down at the words, then closed the book with an exaggerated look of disgust on her face.

“Grandma hates him,” Wash replied. “But he’s not that bad. He’s different than I thought he’d be, is all. I’ve been staying with him a couple of nights.”

Ava folded her arms across her chest and shrugged. She rubbed her arms to generate warmth. Both she and Wash were beginning to get used to the way she was never able to feel warm anymore. She wore jeans with a layer of gym shorts underneath, along with an undershirt, T-shirt and sweater. While she waited for Wash to answer the question about his father, Ava grabbed a knitted hair sash from the bedside stand. She tucked it onto her head—wrestling with the thick black frizzy mass of her hair. It was a comical process, watching her puffy hair resist the sash. When she had finished, they resumed their conversation. “What did your grandma say about it?”

“She said, ‘He’s your daddy. You’ll figure out the rest.’” Wash looked down at the book in his hand. He considered reading it, but did not. “It’s not like my dad died,” Wash said. “He just left. And I think a part of me thought that maybe he
had
died. But now suddenly he shows up again, which is almost worse because I know that every day he’s been gone was a day that he woke up and decided not to come see me.” He paused for a moment, taking in the sight of Ava in all of her swaddling. “Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked.

She shrugged her shoulders. “New topic,” she said. Ava sat with her legs folded against her chest and her arms wrapped around her knees. She looked down at the copy of
Moby Dick.
“This book is pretty terrible,” she said. She picked it up and tossed it into Wash’s lap.

“It’s a classic,” Wash replied. “Just ask anybody.”

“Just because people say it’s a classic, doesn’t mean it is. That’s all I’m saying.”

“It’s an adventure book,” Wash said. “But it’s more than that, too. It’s a book about a whole lot of things.” He took a breath in preparation to continue, but could not find what he wanted to say. He could see the words in his mind—all the things he wanted to say—but they were like bees buzzing about him in the air: just enough to catch sight of, but impossible to contain. “It’s hard to really get my head around it all.” Wash’s face tightened, not unlike his father’s sometimes did. “You just don’t get it,” he said, frustrated at himself much more than at Ava. “Even I don’t really get it. Not all of it, anyway. But I think that’ll change when I get older. Just think about all the stuff people have said about this book.” He held up the novel as evidence of both its existence and merit. “It wouldn’t still be in print if it wasn’t really doing something amazing, right?”

Ava gave him a sidelong glance. “Just shut up and keep reading,” Ava said.

Wash snorted a laugh and opened the book. He searched for his place, but when he found it he immediately closed the book again, still keeping his finger in place to hold the page. “Why do you think he did it?”

“Who?”

“Ishmael?”

“Why do I think Ishmael did what?” She reached over and took the book from Wash’s hand. “I swear, Wash, how many times are you going to start conversations halfway in the middle?”

“It’s all part of my charm,” Wash said quickly. He sat up straight and smoothed his hair the way people did on television.

“Who said you were charming?”

“People.”

“Whatever,” she giggled.

“Why do you think Ishmael left home?”

“I thought it was because he was tired of being on land. He’s a sailor, right? And that’s what sailors do—they sail.”

“Yeah,” Wash replied, “but what about the people in his life. He had family.”

“He didn’t have any kids, though. So he could really do what he wanted.”

“I guess,” Wash said, his face confessing his confusion.

“But...”

“But why does someone do something like that?” Wash said. “He had to have people that cared about him. Friends, cousins, somebody. We’ve all got somebody, you know? We’re all connected to somebody. What does it take to just pick up and leave like that?”

Ava turned and looked out the nearby window. Beyond the window there were trees and brush and, beyond that, the steeply rising mountain. Sliding over the mountain, like a narrow serpent, was a thin, discernible trail. Ava and Wash had walked that trail countless times. It led away. It led into the world. “Wouldn’t it be something,” Ava began, “to go off on your own like that? To get away from everyone?”

“Would you do it?” Wash asked.

“Maybe,” Ava said.

“Why?”

“Why shouldn’t I?” She rubbed her shoulders again, beating back the chill she felt. “Do you really think somebody could do it?” she asked.

“What?”

“Do what Ishmael did,” Ava replied. “Run away.”

Wash could see the seriousness in her eyes, even if he did not fully understand its genesis. “Maybe,” Wash said.

“How would you do it?”

“I’d head north,” Wash said definitively. Perhaps there was a part of him that had considered this, as well. “If you got past the radio tower you could really disappear for a while. Nothing but trees and mountains.”

“There’s Rutger’s cabin,” Ava inserted, and it was clear that she was thinking ahead of the boy. “Dad and I go hunting up there. And Mom took me there once.”

“Oh, yeah,” Wash replied. “Grandma told me about that place. Some guy and his wife lived up there a long time ago. They didn’t want to be around anybody. They only came into town once a year.”

“Once every two years,” Ava said. “Dad told me where it is. It’s not too far from where we go hunting sometimes. I know almost exactly where it’s supposed to be.”

“We’ve got to go sometime,” Wash said. “Grandma says the ridgeline takes you right there, but nobody goes that way because that part of the ridge is pretty rough.” Wash’s face tightened, as if a decision had been made. “Anyhow,” he said, “if you keep going, you could make it up into Virginia. The Appalachian Trail runs up that way—once you get past the radio tower on the north side of town. And then you could really control just how much running away you wanted to do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, there are always people up that way. But at the same time, when you’re on the trail, you can really disappear. You could walk along the trail, just off to the side—that way you wouldn’t get lost and, if you needed help of some kind, there would be people not too far away. It’s the perfect place to run away...if such a thing exists.” He smiled awkwardly.

“Would you do it?” Ava asked.

“Are you going to do it?” Wash replied.

In Ava’s mind she saw a small cabin in the woods—silent and forgotten and waiting. Calling to her as the sirens called to Odysseus, full of promise and terror.

* * *

It was Macon’s second time attending one of Reverend Brown’s sermons. He had trouble explaining to Carmen exactly why he came back—knowing full well what reaction people would have to him attending the church. To the rest of the world, it appeared that he was choosing sides, making a statement about what he felt Ava’s gift meant, where he felt it was rooted. And, after his first appearance at the church, there were already people formulating theories that he might someday take over Reverend Brown’s church. Or that he might start one of his own. There were all manner of theories and ideas drifting around the internet and television about why Macon was coming to this particular church. But none of them struck at the truth of things: the simple fact that Macon felt adrift, and Reverend Brown, for better or worse, was something of a tether.

But Macon was smart enough to know that he didn’t need to fan the flames of conjecture any more than he already was. So when people asked him why he came, he simply said, “Because I want to,” and left it at that. He knew that regardless of what he said, it would be twisted to each person’s own ends, so he chose simply to tell the truth. Yes, it was a manicured version of the truth, but it was the truth nonetheless.