Tumbledown (6 page)

i llove yo.u marry me

It was noon the next day when she sent a return message:

LUV U2 LETS SET DATE

Which meant it was settled. His long bachelorhood was at an end. His career as a counselor was almost at an end, as well. In both cases, he was moving on to something better, but big changes caused psychological strain. The Center had a stress calculator on its website, and both marriage and promotions were heavily weighted. He had recently purchased a house—more stress points. And that preposterous car, the death of his brother-in-law, a friend moving in. The accident was both the product of stress and a bonanza of new points. His score would be off the charts. He felt stupidly proud.
Proud to be a reckless bonehead out to destroy his own life?
If the trucker called the police . . . but he wouldn’t. He was taking advantage of a mentally impaired woman. Candler would get away with his stupid, careless, juvenile acts.

His office window provided a view beyond the low rock wall that marked the Center’s boundaries. In the avocado orchard that bordered the grounds, the rise and dip of the earth was visible as a rise and dip in the treetops. Near the wall, beneath the leafy limbs and between rows of trees, an old tractor with wide headlamps eyed Candler. Clay Hao had warned him that there would be days when his personal life interfered with his professional composure. He had offered advice but Candler could not remember it. Relax? Concentrate? Take a slug of whiskey?

He grabbed the phone on his desk and dialed his home number. Billy Atlas would be up by now. Candler had known Billy since elementary school and still thought of him with that childhood label
best friend.
Billy had been there, tossing the imaginary pitch, when Candler swung the very real bat and knocked loose his sister’s teeth. A month ago, Billy had shown up at Candler’s doorstep. His marriage had disintegrated and he had left Flagstaff. “Only after I told her she could have the house,” he explained, “did it occur to me that I had no place to sleep.” Billy was the perfect person to hear the story of the accident. He had a long history of bad decisions and, concerning Candler, he possessed not one judgmental bone in his body.

There was no answer at the house. Billy was either still asleep or riding the bus downtown, where he was a valet parker. Billy owned a car—the same Dodge Dart he had driven since high school—but it was in the shop, awaiting an alternator. Candler tried Billy’s cell, got voicemail, and hung up.

Among his emails, he found a memo from the director’s office advising that the term
patient
was no longer to be used officially or informally; the term
client
was now
mandatory and required.
The word
therapy,
while still appropriate for clients’ monthly appointments with psychologists, was being phased out for appointments with counselors.
Esteem and direction sessions
was the new term of choice. Candler tried to imagine himself the director and worrying over such malarkey. He wanted the job but the thought of it made him weary—
energy challenged,
he amended. Forgetting the eggs for the brownies had displayed
poor sequential instruction comprehension.
Punching the truck driver had shown
impulse control impairment.
And racing on the highway? What was the official euphemism for mortal folly?

He opened the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out his bottle of Mr. Clean Multi-Surface Spray, but Rainyday buzzed him. “The War Vet is here.”

“Please don’t call him that. Can he hear you out there?”

“He’s at the window,” she said softly, “checking for enemy soldiers.”

“Send him in.”

Candler put Mr. Clean away. He dashed off an email to the woman in charge of personnel, recommending Billy Atlas for any nonprofessional position at the center, noting that he had completed the requisite days of training. He took a deep breath and stared again out the window. The waxy avocado leaves lifted and fell in the breeze. The old tractor returned his stare, its headlights drooping slightly, as if in sympathy.

“Something happened to me today,” Candler said. “It could have been avoided, but no one was hurt. After that, I struck a man with my fist, but from now on I’m okay.”

If the tractor was listening, it gave no indication.

The dormitory supervisor used his key to let Patricia Barnstone into Maura Wood’s room. Barnstone offered a quick thanks and closed the door on him. She hated this kind of thing, but the girl’s parents were worried. She started with the unmade bed, lifting the pillows, the thin mattress, searching for what? Drugs, certainly, a flask, a beer can, knives or scissors, sure, but what else might give her away? A black leather jacket lay over the bedspread. When Barnstone lifted it to check the pockets, a skull painted on the back leered at her. Maura liked the punk scene, which Barnstone could not see as a cause for worry.

For the first thirty-eight years of her life, Patricia Barnstone had attempted to become a rock star. She came of age in the 1960s when the hard-core rock world was almost exclusively male. Her first real band was Stiff Warning, for which she wrote and sang songs, and played lead guitar. Everyone else in the band was a guy. They opened for Ten Years After in Phoenix when the scheduled band canceled after an overdose. They played a great set to a receptive audience and were invited to continue on the tour, but the drummer got an offer to join It’s a Beautiful Day and split. While Barnstone tried to locate another drummer, her bass player was promoted to manager of a car stereo outlet and decided he couldn’t leave town. Stiff Warning was silenced.

Barnstone abandoned Phoenix for the coast, founding a new band she called the Lawn Chairs. There were two other women, the rhythm guitarist and the keyboard player. She had the notion that mixing in women might up the sanity quotient. They became house band for a San Francisco bar and were discovered by Grace Slick, who arranged for them to open a Jefferson Airplane concert. They had a disastrous set. The rhythm guitar player had also been using rhythm as birth control and on the day of the concert discovered she was approximately four months pregnant. She spent the afternoon listing every drug she had taken, terrified she’d give birth to an octopus. On the same sheet, she listed the possible fathers of the child. The doctor had said he could only guess at the date of conception. “They can send a man to the moon, but they can’t tell me when I got knocked up?” she cried and burst out bawling, letting the sheet of paper fall to the floor. The drummer was in immediate trouble with the keyboardist when she saw his name on the WHO FUCKED ME list.

The Lawn Chairs ultimately folded.

Barnstone drifted to Oxnard and continued her schooling. She found work as a studio musician and tried to reinvent herself as either a folk singer or a performance artist. She cut some small-label demos, and two of her songs were recorded by other singers. Jerry Jeff Walker did an acoustic version of “Butt Drunk and Blue” and Dolly Parton recorded “I Still Have the Suitcase You Gave Me.” Neither was released as a single, relegated to the mid album ghetto of a mid list release. Meanwhile, she waited tables, baked for a catering service, finished her degree, sold shoes, substitute taught, and pulled an unsuccessful stint as a real estate agent. In 1988, she was aimed in the general direction of Austin, Texas, when her aged Ford Fairlane broke down near Onyx Springs. She hiked from the freeway into town and then rode in the tow truck back along the interstate, only to discover that someone had busted the windows of her car. Three guitars were stolen, along with her suitcases, her record albums, and the briefcase that held the folders of her original music.

The Onyx Springs Rehabilitation and Therapeutic Center needed someone to stay weekends in the Minton Dormitory, which housed the severely retarded and brain damaged. Before the month was out, she was the house resident and on the path to her current job. She took a few courses at the local community college and every training session the Center offered, but she never earned a graduate degree. She simply became good at dealing with the clients. Her promotions were slow in coming, but she was persistent. Eventually, she became a level-one counselor. She was one of the rare few who had switched from the nonprofessional to the professional track.

Maura’s desk was strewn with objects: ballpoint pens, tampons, a map of Onyx Springs, a couple of paperback novels, and photos of Maura’s family, along with a Polaroid of Maura with Mick Coury and Alonso Duran. Maura Wood was an ordinary girl made to feel ugly by the beauty of the rest of her family. One of her sisters, the nine-year-old, was an actress and appeared briefly in a movie with Colin Farrell. The older sister was waiting tables in New York, trying to make a go of a modeling career. Her only brother—a full-scale prick, from Maura’s description—was voted homecoming king at the same school where Maura endured daily humiliation. Barnstone believed Maura Wood required nothing more than separation from her pretty, petty family.

All the girl needed was a new life. Wasn’t that what everyone needed?

In the Polaroid, Mick and Alonso were smiling, while Maura looked from the corners of her eyes at Mick. Barnstone seated herself and took from her jacket pocket the printout of the email Maura’s parents had sent. It was one sentence.

Barnstone put the slip of paper back in her pocket and examined again the Polaroid. Sleeplessness and heart palpitations sounded a lot like being in love. Mick seemed an unlikely boyfriend for Maura. Barnstone did not know him well, but she had made a point of eyeballing him. If there was such a thing as a god, it was likely she personally chose Mick’s bones, skin, and eyes. His body was not especially athletic, but it was well proportioned. Only his confused mind undercut his looks, and yet that was all it took—the same god, having a joke. Mick had little manly presence because he had so little presence of any kind.

When Maura first came to the center, she was furious, suicidal, often stoned, and on the way to being seriously overweight. She was now only occasionally in a rage, no longer suicidal, and her body, though not fashionably emaciated, was in the healthy range. Barnstone took no credit for the girl’s success. Maura needed only a safe place and some supervision. She was one of Barnstone’s favorites and came to her house often, which was why this letter from her parents was so upsetting. If Barnstone had lived an ordinary life, she might have a granddaughter Maura’s age. The thought was appealing but not overwhelmingly so. Those traditional comforts were not worth the expense of having embraced the mundane.

She pulled open the desk’s drawers. Only once in the past few weeks had she seen Maura stoned, and Barnstone’s response had been direct: “You can get kicked out of the sheltered workshop for that. You’ll lose your privileges.” She did not know how pot made its way into the Center, but there didn’t seem to be any way to stop it. She wasn’t so naive as to think the girl would never get high again. Nor was she so naive as to think a little pot was a big deal. Barnstone believed the unlikely route she had taken to her job served her well. Twenty years in rock and roll had taught her that people who give every impression of being mindless may yet surprise you. Many of the great rockers were basically idiots, and yet their music far surpassed her own. And she was not in the least an idiot. Whatever she might have been in the past, she was never an idiot.

She was not conditioned by advanced schooling to think she always knew what she was doing. This, too, seemed an advantage. It meant that she would make mistakes the others would not, but it also meant there were times the others would commit mistakes that she wouldn’t. This made her a valuable member of the counseling team. That was not just her opinion. All of the counselors valued her—or they had until they discovered that two clients, at different times, had lived with her. Letting a client move in was not the type of error any of the other counselors would commit. She understood why they
claimed
it was a mistake, and she understood why they actually
thought
it was a mistake, and the two were not the same thing. They claimed it created ethical conflicts, but what they really feared was that they would be forced to scrutinize the ever shifting line between counselor and client—how much of your life to hand over to the clients and how much to hold back. As it turned out, inviting a client to live with her actually
was
a mistake but for a completely different reason: it had ripped wide a seam in her heart.

Mercy,
she said, just audibly. It had become her preferred exclamation since she first heard Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman.” Maura had a box of condoms in one of her desk drawers. The box advertised two dozen prophylactics in a variety of colors, ribbed for pleasure. Barnstone counted. None was missing. A hopeful box, she understood, a rainbow of wishes.

Patricia Barnstone’s life had not worked out as she planned, but it nonetheless pleased her. She had two decades of fierce fidelity to her passion, and then, by means of blind luck, she was permitted to make a new life. She had become a stubborn but amicable and able colleague, lumbering now into her late fifties, aware that old age was perched on her stoop and it knocked now and then at her door. She did not have a particular affinity for the mentally ill. If the Fairlane had fallen apart in a prison town, she might have become a reformatory specialist, or a parole officer. If she had been stranded in a university town, she might have become a tutor or an adjunct teacher. Sometimes she wondered what place she would have fled. A canning town? A home to the porn industry?