Among the Ten Thousand Things (14 page)

The Phoenix weather was up over one hundred and dry everywhere except the back of Jack’s neck and the greenhouse taking seed in the crotch of his shorts. A shuttle had carried him from baggage claim to car rentals, and now he was on I-10, driving himself for the first time in how many years?

On the road.

In a way, too easy, that the Hertz people should send him off like this, all because of the card in his wallet that vouched that he had money, and another, softer card, confirmation that once, at sixteen, he’d been able to parallel park. If human cells regenerated, what, every seven years, then wasn’t he a wholly new person? Several new people, it felt like, and not all of them knowing how to drive.

He didn’t see why renting a car should be any easier than buying a gun; a car was every bit as much a weapon. Driving was faster and more freeing than he remembered, how directly the wheels responded, a little left or right, coasting along as though in a spaceship, a future in which friction was a thing of the past. The highway, so flat, came at him in rushes that hung in the air before they were over, reversed in retrospect, in the rearview of the ridiculous red convertible he’d let them give him for a joke.

Like virtual reality. The world shimmered and Jack thought: mirage. With his sleeves rolled up, one arm on the car door and the other on the wheel in front of him, he kept noticing the sweated skin inside his elbow, glistening to match the road where it glittered, concrete flecked with glass.

So driving was giving him a bit of a thrill, everything winking at him under the hot sun, and he sped up to get a good wind going on his face, ruffling his hair.

Probably it
was
just as easy to buy a gun out here, where if you didn’t look too close at the edges of things you could feel yourself back on the frontier, a place you’d never been but in your mind. At the sign for Tempe, he turned off the interstate and followed the guideposts straight to the university. He’d figure out hotel, motel stuff later. There was a Super 8. Might be fun.

The campus was mostly pink brick and palm trees. He parked in one of the visitor spots and followed the campus map to the art museum, then called the department line that always put him through to Jolie, who said to stay right where he was and that she’d send someone out to meet him. He got the feeling that she would have come herself if not for the heat. He had yet to see a person.

Standing in his own sweat made him irritable. He stood in the shade of the building, stucco with tiny square holes cut out for windows so that he felt himself on the wrong side of a bunker. He kept an eye out. They were probably up there rock-paper-scissoring to see who would have to go down, and he half expected to see someone in a hazmat suit plodding over.

His phone came alive in the pocket of his shorts.

“Deb! Can you hear me, Deb?”

“I hear,” she said into his ear, and the fact of that changed everything. He was less alone, less unmoored than he’d thought.
She called.
“Is it a bad time?”

“No, no.” There was a space between them, and he waited for her to fill it. “I’m in Arizona.”

“I figured. That’s good,” she said quietly, like maybe the kids were around and she didn’t want them to hear.

“I’m glad you called me.” He propped his elbow up into one of the square holes, trying to seem jaunty. “How is it there? Everything running okay? Hey, how’s the weather?”

“It’s fine. It’s beautiful.”

Jack nodded into nothing and, to fill the space again, said, “It’s hot here. Hot enough to bake potatoes.”

“I’m sorry,” she breathed heavily into the phone. “I can’t talk like this, about the weather.”

“Okay.”

“Can you hang on a second? Just, hold on.”

What was she doing? There was a sound like something dragging across the floor, and then the white noise around her changed, became more outside. She was in the yard, or out the window. “Hello? Deb, hello?” There was more jostling, and why the hell had she called, then, if she didn’t care that it was hot in Arizona? If she didn’t care that
he
was hot in Arizona.

“Mr. Shanley?”

Jack turned, his elbow catching in the hole in the wall so that he had to twist back and try again. A spindly Asian man with a thin smile was walking toward him, hand out, thumb at the sky. That he should be in a suit was strange, with a jacket even in this heat.

“Deb?” Jack gripped the phone. “Honey? Can you hear me?” No answer. The Asian man stopped in front of him. He had a sticker over his left lapel,
HELLO MY NAME IS
with “Kevin” spelled neatly in red marker. “I have to get off here, honey. I’ll call you later. All right.” He put the phone in his pocket and shook spindly Kevin’s hand. “Sorry, the wife.”

“Know how that is.” Really? You look twelve.

The museum, on the way in, had been appropriately dim, but upstairs, where they kept the faculty and staff, it looked like any office, white lights and low, gray dividers. It took a few tries to get them to stop calling him Mr. Shanley. Kevin offered him a bowl of candy, little Bazooka gums and squares of Now & Later. Jack answered, “Maybe later,” and Kevin laughed. So did
HELLO MY NAME IS
Lissa, standing over by the copier, and
HELLO MY NAME IS
Missy at the desk with the most phones. Both Melissas, wasn’t it funny? “What are the odds?” Jack said.

When Jolie emerged from her corner office, there was no surprise about how she looked. Her voice fit her just right: dark blond hair that hung flat, skin deeply tanned but yellowy, maybe the wrong makeup. Big girl, though not quite in the way he had imagined—big on bottom, like a pear, with not much chest and stubby little arms.

The little arms she spread out at him. “Jack!”

He went in for the hug. “Jolie!” They were old friends.

That the line was dead by the time Deb got back, this was another of the steps she took away from the man she was married to, from the hope that he would ever stop behaving like the sun. She said his name a few times into the phone and was aware, on the outskirts of her vision, of her daughter’s hand, waiting to take it from her, his daughter who wanted to talk to him. Deb had gone to ask her, Do you still want to talk to Dad, because I’ve got him on the phone, and you don’t have to, he doesn’t even know I’m asking.

Kay was here, for him, and now Deb would have to tell her that actually he was gone, that actually never mind. She redialed, but the phone rang and went to voice mail. “Shit.” She brought the phone down to her lap. “Sorry,” she said, and for a moment it seemed she was sorry just for cursing. “He must’ve lost service.”

Kay swallowed, nodded seriously.

“He’s in Arizona for that project, you know? The reception, he must be roaming.” She touched Kay’s hair, smoothing the front piece down her cheek and curling it around her chin like a comma, after this face and before the next one, all the faces her daughter didn’t know she would have. “Hey. Hey. Isn’t it beautiful out here, the country? Let’s go for a walk.” But her hand stayed where it landed, on Kay’s shoulder. “Whatever, however things— What’s important to me is that you’re happy. That’s the number one thing in the world to me.”

“I know.”

“Okay. Okay, good,” Deb said and let her go. “Head on down. I’ll be there in a minute.”

Kay’s footsteps disappeared down the stairs. Deb would talk to her daughter now, finally. She would hear all she had to say. But first she tried Jack once more, this time getting nothing, not even the rings.

Jolie gave Jack a grand tour that afternoon, safe within the confines of her arctic SUV, cold air pouring from every vent and blowing motes into his mouth and up his nose. She drove him in circles around the empty square where his piece would be, not even stopping to get out and walk around. Then up to the school’s prize building, an auditorium that had been one of the last designs of a Very Famous Architect. He felt like he was on the plane again, anytime his arm drifted toward the ledge of the rolled-up window, Jolie looking at him like she was afraid of getting sucked out.

“Okay!” She parked, and only from the gutted square on the other side of the curb, a dirt hole where there should have been a palm tree, could Jack tell they were in a different lot from before. Jolie was between the seats, twisted as far around as her seat belt would allow, grabbing a large patent leather purse with one hand and stirring everything around in it with the other.

“What’s next?” Jack drummed his fingers on the computer in his lap (no babies, dogs, or electronics were to be left in the heat). Did he sound genial? Genial was what he was aiming for.

“Next…” Her voice trailed off and she forgot to answer. “Shoot. Ah! Herewego.” She wriggled back the other way, holding forth one of the five or six worst things Jack could imagine, outside of, you know, a shiv. A digital camera, lime green. “Next we’ll go up and talk to some of the grad students real quick.” She licked her finger and scraped dirt off the screen with her nail.

“You know, this visit, it was just to see the space. I haven’t prepared anything.”

“You just be yourself.” The camera bugled on. “You don’t have to say a thing.”

Fathers have a way with daughters that mothers never do. Deb had never known Kay to stay mad at Jack, or to deny him anything. And Deb couldn’t hold it against her; things had been the same way with her own dad. If her mother dressed Deb’s wounds, her father was the one who kissed them to make them better. It was Ruth who’d scratched the satin from Deb’s first pair of pointe shoes, who’d singed the ribbons to keep them from fraying and knelt with her daughter on the driveway, pounding the toe boxes against the asphalt while Norman sat in the living room with his tray dinner and TV. “Who won?” he’d say when they came in after.

Women were the real workers of the family; men got to be allies to their children. It was Ruth who’d scheduled Deb’s audition at the school in New York, who waited among the other nervous mothers in the room outside, hands folded with mysterious calm over her handbag that always had gum and Band-Aids and tissues in it. And when the call came, when Deb was accepted, it was Ruth who drove the hour each way into the city, four, five, then six days a week, for classes after school and all day Saturday. Deb still didn’t really know what her mother had done those Saturdays. Maybe took herself to eat, took herself shopping, window-shopping.

Norman came to this and that performance. He said, You’ll be great. You were great. You were the prettiest. You had the nicest what-do-you-call-it. Your shape was the nicest of any of them, all those bunheads. Best legs in the group. My girl. And she’d loved him for it.

On their walks Deb and Kay went no particular where. This time Deb asked the clerk at the souvenir shop down the road about a piney old pub where she and Jack used to drink red ale, marooned on a residential street that the town had since grown away from. Through the shop window he pointed and she traced a line from his finger with imaginary string, across the water, where the coast curved and ebbed out again.

They set out on the broken road, inching along at first, trying to keep pebbles out of their open shoes. When that grew tiresome they let the outside in to mingle with their feet. A grassy field, tall and thick with ticks, thrived beside a dead meadow, as though the two lived in different atmospheres.

Deb stopped every so often to point out a flower she couldn’t name or the way light changed the color of the leaves. “Look at that. Isn’t that beautiful?” She’d always wanted to be a person who felt close to nature. Such a practical bond to have; nature was free and it was everywhere.

Kay answered, “Uh-huh,” or nodded vaguely. She didn’t suspect that she’d ever wish to grow such interests.

“You remind me of what you used to say, about where you wanted to grow up. Do you remember what you’d say?”

“That was stupid.”

“Why? I don’t think so.”

“Mom,
because.
Nobody lives in Times Square.” But Kay had wanted to, to live where the lights were always on and there were always people and so you were never lonely.

“Well. I understood,” Deb said, thinking the city had done that to her daughter: safety in other people, safety in strangers. “I thought it made a lot of sense.”

Forest green siding,
BAR & GRILL
neon never turned on—Central Bay Pub had not changed a day, apart from having reversed itself completely. Deb was sure it had been on the other side of the road.

Inside, the different wood tones bounced off the shuttered windows and brass, turning the day into night. Deb led the way to the bar, where they had their pick of where to sit, and watched her daughter struggle onto a high stool. A faded Orangina poster hung on a wall through the kitchen. They ordered two of those.

“Honey,” Deb started. “I’m sorry. I’m going to bring this up again, and I don’t want you to get mad at me.”

“I know what you’re going to say already.”

“Well, okay, but it’s not about that. Sweetie? It’s about what
you
have to say. And, I just want to listen. And, any questions you might have—about anything, all this stuff, sex stuff— Don’t roll your eyes at me. I mean it.” She squeezed her daughter’s knee. “Anything that you have questions about or, because, believe me, you aren’t going to shock me, all right?”

Kay was quiet. Then to her glass she said, “I just don’t get what’s the big deal.”

“About what?”

“Like, if this is just what happens. I don’t get why we have to be so upset.”

“You don’t have to be upset—I’m glad if you’re not.”

“No, but I am. I just don’t get why.” Kay covered her face and breathed out her nose. “It’s so stupid.”

“I know. It’s strange. You want to think that what someone does with someone else has nothing to do with you. And yet it does. That’s why we have these rules, to protect us from getting hurt.”

“Are you hurt?”

“Am I hurt? Um, hm…Would yes be too scary an answer?”

Kay swished her hair, no.

“Then yes. I was hurt. Yes, what your father did was very hurtful to me.” Maybe it wasn’t right to let Kay see her angry, letting her know that this was a thing to be angry about, but Deb, sorry, wasn’t a saint, and did, maybe, in bursts, want her daughter to be a little bit angry too. It hurt to see Kay, after everything, reach for that telephone, want Jack anyway, want to love him. It was where her daughter looked most like herself. She thought of her own mother, how she’d overheard Ruth once telling a friend,
Well, you know Deborah. She was the child who learned to walk by never letting go of anything.

Kay began scrunching the paper wrapper down her straw. “So why do they do it, if it’s going to hurt us? Because it feels good? That’s
it
?” She wet the wrapper with a few soda drops and watched it unfurl like a snake.

“There are a lot of reasons,” Deb said, though her daughter’s had bottom-lined them all.

On the walk back, the telephone poles began to look like stripped, alien trees, without the armor of bark. They could see the coves of Newport across the bay, the roads that wound around them, in perfect miniature, cars with their high beams curving in and out of sight and new ones replacing them, as if on a loop.

“We don’t have to call him,” Kay said. “Dad.”

Deb stopped. “Why not? It’s perfectly normal if—I mean, we still can. We totally, totally can.”

“I just don’t want to anymore.”