Exiles (34 page)

He leaned into the doorway, watching her. He thought,
I’m atoning the only way I know how
. What he said was that they’d offered him a spot at the hospital, but he wasn’t sure if he wanted to take it.

“How come?” She dribbled, watching the ball rise to her hand and pushing it back to earth as if she’d never witnessed such a marvel. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

“I guess I feel a little disoriented, still,” he said. “What do you think about it?”

She lifted the ball and shifted it over to her right hand, then cocked her arm and tried a hook shot. It hit the backboard, then bounced twice on the rim and fell through, just the way it had when she was wowing the nuns. She stepped forward to get it.

“I mean, it
is
Marin County,” she said. “Is that not good enough? Should we maybe buy a map and a set of darts, and try again?”

|   |   |

After another few weeks, though, they were restless. The house was cramped, and both Connie and Ben were obviously feeling the
strain. Things were going reasonably well with Edelstein, and Alex was seeing him only when she felt like it, every two or three weeks.

One day she tracked her mother down via Google. Cheryl had sold the Berkeley house and was living somewhere in the mountains up north, near Arcata.

“What are you going to do?” Peter asked.

“I want to see her but not really,” Alex said. “I’m thinking of, like, getting closer but not actually going there yet. Is that totally weird?”

“Totally,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

He went into San Rafael and bought a beat-up Subaru at a used-car lot. Then he signed up with a locum-tenens agency that placed temporary docs in the cash-starved, broken-down ERs of the North Coast. The next day they said goodbye to Connie and Ben, threw a couple of bags in the car, and headed out.

When Highway 1 left the valleys and crossed over to Garberville, and then to the sea, the coastal mountains bled all their color out and seemed to drift in shades of gray and green. A world of conifers on layer-cake ridges frosted by fog, a place they had no history. So what if this relief was illusory? Moving toward it satisfied some deep need for flight that itself held an ancient kind of promise.

“You okay?” he asked.

“This is good,” Alex said. “This was the right thing to do.”

“I’m glad you’ve got instincts, because I don’t trust mine anymore.” He recalled the last time he’d found himself in new territory, the morning he awakened in his hard bed in Kathmandu, and how he’d seen in his passport photo the face of a man who had begun to rely more on endurance than on enthusiasm as a way of living. Thinking about it now, he realized that endurance wasn’t such a bad thing, if that was all you could count on. That half of the game, or more, was simply whether you could outlast whatever came up—the purification of karma, or the whims of the drunken-parrot god, who gave you what you wanted and only later exacted his price, with compound interest.

They stopped in Fields Landing for dinner. It was one of those old coastal towns that had experienced an influx of Bay Area retirees, and where the price of an average house had gone from fifty thousand dollars to ten times that in just a few years.

At Jimmy’s they had bad Hawaiian music on the sound system and posterized photos of whales on the walls, with titles under them such as “Sea Trek” and “Twilight Tale.” The waitress, Susie, was tall and slender and vaguely albino, a sort of human egret. But the place had the best clam chowder they’d ever tasted, five dollars for a huge bowl. Afterward they walked down to the beach before heading north. Long green whips of seaweed lay about on the sand. Alex picked one up and twirled it over her head, then tossed it out into the waves. Gulls shrieked and hovered, and from the surf emerged the black, whiskered head of a sea lion. It watched them for half a minute, then dove back underwater.

In Arcata, they found a motel with a couple of double beds. Peter rested awhile, then, after Alex went to sleep, he started his first shift. It came as a shock, working in an American ER, to remember that there were people who weren’t just struggling to survive, who actually had the luxury of wanting to hurt themselves.

At about 2:00
A.M.
he found himself stitching up the forearm of a Humboldt State student not much older than Alex. It was a nasty cut, a couple of inches long, deep and bloody, but fortunately her tendons were intact. Caroline was slender, with listless blond hair and big green eyes. She looked intelligent. Peter asked her what had happened.

She shrugged. “There’s this sharp piece of siding by our front door that I keep asking my housemate to hammer in, but he never gets around to it. I was in a hurry, and I caught myself on it.”

Peter numbed the wound, cleaned it, and stitched it up. She didn’t remember when her last tetanus booster was, so when he tied off the stitches he asked her to roll up her sweatshirt sleeve so he could give her one.

“Couldn’t you just do it down here, on the back of my wrist?” she asked.

This got his attention. “It’s either your shoulder or your butt,” he said. “You decide, but those are the choices.”

She hesitated. “I don’t much like people seeing my butt,” she said.

“Then that leaves you one option.”

Reluctantly, she rolled up her sleeve. Her arm was laced with scars. Peter counted seven, some old, a couple as fresh as the past few weeks, red and angry-looking. Two had been stitched before.

“Let’s see the other arm,” he said quietly.

She rolled up the other sleeve and watched his face while he turned over her arms for a better look.

“How long have you been doing this?”

“Doing what?”

He spoke as softly as he could. “You know what.”

She looked toward the hallway, as if she might be thinking about bolting. Peter tightened his grip on her wrist just a little and cleared his throat.

Her shoulders sank, and she blinked back tears. “Eight or nine months,” she said. “Since last fall.”

“If I had to guess, I’d say X-Acto knife, the one with the curved blade. Am I right?”

She looked surprised, but she nodded. “How would you …?”

“My daughter’s preference, when she was fifteen,” he said. “For some reason the pointy blade freaked her out, as did the right angle of a razor, but the curve didn’t seem as bad to her.”

The tears came. Peter handed her a box of Kleenex. “You know what happens next, right?”

She said she didn’t, that he was the first doctor who’d noticed.

“They stitched you up and they didn’t see the other scars?”

She smiled, a little wanly. “I tell them my family raises pedigreed cats. They actually believe it.”

“Jesus,” he said. “Just shows that a medical degree doesn’t make you smart, huh?”

“Well, I always come to the ER; I figure they’re really busy.”

He could see why they needed docs up here. “Okay, what happens
next is counseling,” he said. “As in mandatory, arranged through the college. As in, if you don’t show up, they boot you out of school.”

She nodded, watching him. He gave her the tetanus shot and put the empty syringe in the red sharps container.

“Why did your daughter do it?” she asked, rolling down her sleeves.

He hadn’t anticipated the question, but he knew he should have. He didn’t feel like bullshitting her with something vague, though. “She drove herself at everything,” he said. “She told me sometimes it felt like there was so much pressure inside her she was going to explode. That was how she let it out.”

Caroline nodded. “I think I understand that.”

“I’ll bet you do.”

“Is she okay now?”

“She got over it,” Peter said. “That’s the thing: People can get over just about anything. Live long enough and you’ll see. But you
do
have to live long enough.”

He could see from her bone structure how she’d probably looked as a child, and he could see what she would look like as an old woman when the fat pads and facial muscles had collapsed and melted downward. This sort of vision had been happening occasionally since they returned from Nepal, with patients and even with people on the street. He could see their faces at all ages in an instant. It filled him with a vague sorrow he couldn’t explain, perhaps partly because their lives seemed to accelerate from infancy to death right before his eyes, and he was beginning to understand that this wasn’t actually far from the truth.

They decided to keep working their way north. Outside of Trinidad the road eased down a long, straight grade, and a wide bay opened up. Mountains and blue sky lay inland on the right, fog and gray on the left, as if the road were a boundary separating the kingdoms of hope and despair—both of them, Peter was beginning to understand, built on the same great lie. The passage between required navigational skill.

The highway flattened out at a series of freshwater lagoons. They passed the headquarters for the redwood parks; then, as they came into Orick, they saw a sign that read:

GASOLINE
SANDWICHES

Alex smiled. “I wonder if you can get unleaded on rye?”

Orick, population 650, elevation 26, was also the home of “Burl Art,” and the road was lined on both sides by giant rough-hewn sculptures of grizzly bears, Indian faces, eagles, and indeterminate burly masses that might have been giant mushrooms, tiny
mushroom clouds, or disembodied brains with spinal cords attached. Peter decided on the last option, which somehow made him feel better about the town, as if it had melded chainsaws with neurological research in some way that was better not to think about too deeply. They passed an old red building with a tin roof over a front porch and second-story windows looking out onto the tin. A couple of blond girls in their teens were hanging out up there, taking in the sun and watching the cars go by. As Peter and Alex were passing, a log-truck driver blared his horn, and the girls waved. Peter could see their futures the way he saw the future of Caroline’s face, and the whole panorama depressed him.

They made Crescent City by mid-afternoon. After the Alaskan earthquake of 1964, the town had been flattened by a tsunami, the primary reminder of which was now Tsunami Lanes, a bowling alley. It was a village of tidy, if precarious, beachfront homes on the west and worn-down blue-collar neighborhoods inland. They parked on a bluff overlooking Pelican Bay. The fog had burned off, and they got out and stood in the wind, facing the sea.

“It feels like the end of the world,” Alex said.

“It is, in a way.”

She smiled. “Visually, not apocalyptically.” He dredged up his best Mississippi accent. “Don’t use them big words, girl,” he said. “Y’all make me feel dumb.”

“Isn’t hard, is it?”

“Way too easy, I reckon.”

Pelican Bay was not only a bay; it was also the name of California’s supermax prison, which they passed on their way back into town, hunkered blocklike behind a stand of pines. The prison was the county’s biggest employer, but Peter had bought a tourist map and the facility wasn’t on it. It was a destination spot, for sure, but not for people who’d be spending money here.

They drove by the hospital, a small, white, one-story building. Humble but reasonably new.

A couple of blocks down, they passed two middle-aged men on bicycles riding in opposite directions. One was lean and sun-burned,
with a scraggly beard; he had on torn jeans and a ball cap, and he pedaled a beat-up old Schwinn into the wind, on the wrong side of the street. Peter figured he’d lost his driver’s license. The other guy was pink and clean shaven, packaged like salami in a bright jersey, bike shorts, and a white helmet. He rode a carbon-fiber Trek, and he was obviously out for exercise. Old poverty and new money passed each other without a look.

They checked in at the Travelodge, then showered and went to find some food. The evening fog had rolled in, chilling the air and dropping visibility to about a hundred feet. People seemed inward, guarded, and not particularly keen on strangers. He didn’t know how often inmates got released from the prison, or how inclined they were to stick around afterward, but he figured a certain xenophobic insularity wasn’t a totally unreasonable response to having this monolith of forcibly contained mayhem planted in the middle of your town.