The Wonder of All Things (7 page)

“The key is to think upward,” Tom said. “The fire has to start at the bottom so you put your thinnest, driest stuff at the bottom.” He struck the two rocks together. A small spark danced in the air, and then disappeared. “If the wind is high,” Tom continued, “you’ve got to be sure that you’re out of it. Block it with something, or pick a better place. You wouldn’t try to start a fire like this out here in the open if it were windy. Wouldn’t ever work.”

“You can also use glasses,” Wash said.

“What’s that?” Tom answered, striking the stones together, his attention focused squarely on the dry grass at the bottom of the pile.

“If you wear glasses, and if they’re thick enough, you can use them to focus the sunlight,” Wash said, an ember of excitement in his voice. “It’ll focus the sunlight enough so that it heats it, just like a magnifying glass, and that’ll start the fire.”

“That sounds like something you read in a book somewhere,” Tom said. “I don’t know which one, but I guess it’s true enough. Just be careful of believing what you read in books. Books are okay enough, I suppose, but too many people forget that there’s a real world out there and that they can touch it, feel it, smell it.” He continued striking the stones together and, slowly, a small thread of smoke began to rise from the pile of brush. “There it is,” he said. He began blowing gently into the base of the fire. “There we go,” he whispered.

But Wash did not see. He looked off into the distance and thought of all the books he had read, all the places he had visited in his mind, all the stories that swirled around inside of him each and every day, like an ocean he had been building up inside himself over the years, page by page, word by word. The ocean was vast and limitless, filled with joy and sadness, terror and betrayal, the deaths of friends and the final fate of enemies. And it was at this moment, as his father lay on the ground, making a fire, as he kneeled across from him, watching the man huff and puff gently into the growing fire, not looking up, not looking around at the world, but only looking into the fire, into the immediate obstacle before him, this was when Wash understood both who his father was and who his father was not.

“There we go,” Tom said, smiling. The small thread of smoke had grown into a long, silver chain rising up out of the air. Tom took more small pine needles and placed them on the growing flame. The fire sizzled and the flame leaped up. “Now we’re making something happen,” he said. “Now we’re building a future.”

For the rest of the day Wash did not ask his father about singing or about books. He gave up talk of folk songs and he did not make any more references of characters he’d read about or scenes he had enjoyed. He only listened as his father talked about fire and all the different ways to build and maintain it. He answered “Yes, sir,” at the proper intervals. He smiled when he felt it was what is father wanted. He spent the afternoon watching the dream of who he thought his father would be if he ever came back to him die, piece by piece, in the firelight.

Yet he could not deny the way that being with the father who had been gone for so long made him remember the family they once were. He remembered the small things: the lavender scent of his mother’s hair, the roughness of his father’s hands as the man lifted him into the air and spun him the way fathers sometimes did. He remembered the sugared strawberries his mother used to make. He remembered the way his father argued with sports announcers while watching football games. And he remembered how it all ended.

They were in the car together, rumbling over the highway with Tom behind the wheel. He was a construct of muscles and brown hair staring out through the windshield and chatting, now again, with Wash’s mother about what she picked out for dinner. Wash was buckled into the backseat, barely tall enough to look out of the window. He lolled back in the seat and watched the clouds as they passed in their predictable patterns, punctuated now and then by the upper quarters of buildings that he remembered from previous shopping trips. His mother turned on the radio and sang along with it and he sang along when he could. There was the sound of their voices mingled with the music and the sound of cars passing from time to time as the blue sky swept along silently, stretching out over the entirety of the world.

And then there was a squeal of the tires and Tom cursed and the sky turned at an awkward angle. The angle steepened until the boy could understand that the car was rolling, over and over. The car trembled and Wash was thrown back and forth in his seat belt and he was frightened. And then, as quickly as it started, everything came to a silent stop. The car was on its side and Wash was crying and calling for his mother. She hung from her seat belt at an awkward angle with her arms swinging limply like pendulums back and forth above the earth.

“Mama! Mama!” Wash called.

“Stay still, Wash,” Tom said. He was on the side of the car that was on the ground and he wrestled with his seat belt until it unfastened. Wash cried and rubbed his eyes and grappled with his own seat belt. “Just stay where you are for a second, son,” Tom continued. There was a tremble in his voice, a wince of pain. It was then that Wash saw the blood.

The glass of the car window had broken and there was a large open wound stretching across the side of his father’s face. Tom reached up with one hand and touched it and grimaced and the blood was beginning to flow. Wash had never seen his father bleed. It felt like a broken promise.

Wash’s mother still hung limply in her seat belt. Tom put his arms around her unconscious body and carefully cradled her neck and, after some effort, released the seat belt. She fell like a marionette doll into his arms. He collapsed beneath the weight of her, barely able to stand. Wash cried harder. “It’s okay, son,” Tom said. “I’m coming to get you. Let me just get Mommy squared away.” He placed her gently at his feet—he was standing on the passenger’s side door, still getting his bearings in the sideways car. Then he maneuvered his way back over the front seat and unbuckled the boy’s seat belt and caught him when he fell. “We’re going to be okay,” he said.

But everything was not okay. It was not until she was completely out of the car that Wash and Tom saw the wound on the side of her head. The medical examiner would eventually tell them that she had hit her head against the frame of the car as the car rolled down the side of the mountain. Death was instantaneous.

Nothing much worked for Tom after that. He took to drinking and lying in bed for the whole of the day. In the late hours of the night Wash would waken and hear his father crying behind the closed door of his bedroom. When he knocked on the door and asked his father what was wrong, the man did not answer. He did not yell for the child to go back to bed. He did not try to hide his tears. He only continued wailing and calling his wife’s name while his son sat on the other side of the door, small and powerless.

Wash began spending the weekends at his grandmother’s after that. And then the weekends spilled over into weekdays until, finally, Tom arrived one day and sat on the couch beside his son and said, in a flat and hollow tone, “I’m leaving for a little while.” The gash Tom sustained during the car crash had healed over, leaving the scar that would remain for the rest of his days. It was long and garish and impossible to ignore, like the emptiness death leaves in its wake.

That was nearly six years ago. Now Wash was alone in the mountains with a man that looked very much like the father he used to know, but who was not that man. And neither was Wash the boy he once was. They were both strangers living in the bodies of people who used to love each other.

* * *

“Five more minutes,” Carmen called through the house.

“I heard you five minutes ago,” Ava replied.

The two of them were on opposite ends of the house—Carmen in her bathroom, using it for the third time in the past fifteen minutes. Meanwhile Ava was on the other end of the house in the other bathroom, wrestling with her hair so that the two of them could leave for Dr. Arnold’s.

They had been spending more and more time together now that their world had gotten so far out of hand. It was too dangerous for Ava—and even for Wash—to attend school, and since the episode at the hospital when the two men broke into Ava’s room, it felt safer to stay inside. There were more policemen stationed around the house and, thus far, they had managed to keep people out. But because Macon’s job as the town sheriff still demanded that he leave the house, Carmen took on the role of staying with Ava, even if the girl didn’t particularly care for her. Ava felt like a prisoner in her own home.

It was enough to make a person fear the world.

They grated upon each other, hour after hour, day after day. Ava fought Carmen at every turn, picking fights over things as simple as what television program to watch and why Carmen had chosen to hang a certain color curtain in the kitchen. They were petty, small skirmishes, but most battles of family are.

But all the while Carmen smiled, offering any olive branches she could manage.

Now Carmen needed to go to the doctor for her standard checkup and Macon was tied up at work and could not go along with her. He tried his best to be with her for everything having to do with the baby, but just as he was about to leave the station to meet her at Dr. Arnold’s, a call came in about business that needed tending to across town. There was a church coming into town. There were already a few religious organizations that had set up shop in the wake of this event, but this one was larger, more organized. They brought dozens of people with them and were going about the business of erecting a large tent in the center of the park. So massive was the project and there were so many people being displaced that Macon had to be there, if only to remind everyone that there was still a sheriff in town. People oftentimes needed to be reminded of things like that, Macon knew.

Plus there was the simple annoyance of bureaucracy that demanded his being there, as well. There was paperwork that came with the job, and he was still the town’s sheriff.

So it would be just Ava and Carmen at the checkup. It was the first that Macon had missed, and he promised that it would not happen again. But even though he wanted to be there himself, he wasn’t particularly opposed to the fact that it was to be Carmen and Ava without him. Over the past few years he was constantly engineering ways to put them alone together. If there was an errand that required a long drive he would invoke responsibilities of work or the potential onset of illness. Then he would stand in the doorway and watch them as they pulled out of the driveway in the car together. He would wave until they were out of sight, as if the image of him standing there would be enough of a glue to keep them from drifting apart in their time alone. And while he could not swear to its efficacy, the two women in his life got along well enough, he felt. Small victories were still something to celebrate, after all.

More and more, since Carmen’s pregnancy began, Macon pinned his hopes to the baby. If all other efforts failed, the new life that entered the household would be the common bond between Carmen and Ava. He sometimes imagined Carmen and Ava sitting at the kitchen table together, feeding the baby, laughing as the child refused some vegetable-flavored paste. In his mind, he’d see the three of them—Ava, Carmen and the baby—walking up the driveway together, Ava’s arm linked with Carmen’s as she pushed the baby along in a stroller, coming toward him as he stood in the doorway, waving at them, waiting to wrap his arms around them all. These were the visions he held in the most hidden parts of himself. These hopes of his were too fragile to share.

Unbeknownst to Macon, Ava quickly confounded his plans. When she got word that her father wouldn’t be coming, she asked Carmen, “What about Wash?”

Carmen didn’t mind the idea of having Wash there to act as an intermediary between her and Ava. “Wash can come,” was all she said.

Ava and Carmen left the house these days under police escort. The state trooper who had been camped out at the end of the driveway knocked on the door and, when they were ready, he got into his car and led the way. Another police car slotted in behind Carmen. No sooner than they got out of the driveway was there a line of people standing along the edge of the road, yelling and shouting at the car as it passed, lobbing questions like confetti. They yelled for Ava to tell them how she had done what she had done. They called out to Carmen and asked why she and Macon had “kept it all secret.”

“People never cease to amaze me,” Carmen said to Ava as the car finally got up to speed and the crowds were left behind. They swung by and picked up Wash from his grandmother’s. There were no crowds at Brenda’s house. The lens of scrutiny was upon Ava, not the boy she had helped. They would encounter more people once they neared Dr. Arnold’s and made their way into the town proper, but neither of them commented on it. It was slowly becoming something they could pretend to ignore.

Dr. Arnold was one of the dying breed of rural doctors who was necessity-bound to be a specialist in everything. There were painfully few illnesses or health-related circumstances he couldn’t fix or, at the very least, alleviate. He had treated women with pregnancies worse than Carmen’s and brought their children into the world healthy. More than that, he wasn’t afraid to admit when he was in over his head. And, thus far, he reassured Carmen that he wasn’t and that both she and her child would survive.

Dr. Arnold’s wife was named Delores and she greeted Carmen, Ava and Wash at the front door carrying a pitcher of iced tea and a smile as wide as the sunrise. “Come in,” she said excitedly. She was blushing. She was a woman in her late sixties who walked with a slight limp and who always cooked food for her husband’s patients—whether they’d come in for a simple checkup or if they’d be staying for a few days of observation. Delores Arnold believed food was the best help for healing, and so she did her part for anyone who walked through the door. “Come on in and I’ll get you all squared away.” She presented the pitcher of tea. “I’ve got orange juice, too, if you’d like that,” she said. “I know that, for some folks, it’s still a little early for tea. But I don’t believe it’s ever early enough.” There was an exuberance in her, an excitement that removed the sediment of time from her bones. Still holding the pitcher, she hugged Carmen, Ava and Wash in turn. “I just still can’t believe any of this,” she said.