Exiles (36 page)

“You glued them down?” he said. “What if you’d derailed the train?”

Peter laughed at this, then realized too late that the cop was serious and was now displeased that his concerns were being ridiculed. Twenty minutes later Peter called Cheryl from the station and asked her to come down and bail him out. She showed up with Alex in tow.

“Look, honey,” she said. “Dad’s a criminal.” Then, as Alex gazed, clearly impressed, Cheryl pulled out a camera and took Peter’s picture with the scowling cop. They couldn’t explain to Alex why he was there, of course, because it would ruin the surprise. So Cheryl told her it was because he’d left too small a tip at a restaurant.

“Don’t ever do that,” Cheryl said, sounding extremely serious. “When you’re older, you’ll learn how to figure percentages.” Alex looked at her gravely and nodded with pretend comprehension.

Three hours later, breaking the terms of his bail before it was even technically the next day, Peter was back at the tracks with a hammer and a chisel. The 8:18 had flattened the pennies pretty well, as it turned out. They were slightly oval now instead of circular, and although Peter could still distinguish heads from tails, he figured it was a good enough job for a six-year-old.

When she opened the package the next morning, she turned the coins over and over in her hands, inspecting them as if she’d been trained to identify counterfeit. She looked at Peter, then at the pennies, then at Peter again. She opened her arms, then he picked her up and she said “Thanks,” softly, in his ear, with her sweet breath.

Before that moment, she had always considered anything made of metal to be immutable. Peter realized what he’d really given her was a firsthand understanding that this was not true, not of copper or of anything. With the right forces, any face could be erased.

They found Cheryl at a scarred-up kitchen table in a moldy trailer, twirling her hair around her finger. She looked fifteen or twenty years older than she was. Her hair had gone gray and strawlike, and what teeth she had left were rotten.

“Mom,” said Alex, both longing and horror on her face. Cheryl got up and gave her a hug, but she was emaciated and tottering. She sat down again and lit a cigarette.

“Well,” she said. “Home from the wars, huh?”

Alex was fighting back tears, but for Peter this wasn’t a completely unexpected trajectory. He’d held out some small hope, for Alex’s sake, that Cheryl might have finally gotten her life together, but it didn’t take an ace diagnostician to see that she’d been heavily into booze and meth, and was eating mainly on whim.

Alex looked around apprehensively. “Wayne Lee isn’t here, is he?”

“He got offed last spring,” Cheryl said, not quite matter-of-fact but also not with the emotional heft you’d expect from someone reporting the demise of her lover.

“He’s
dead
?”

“Somebody sweetened his gas tank and his engine seized. Pulled a big ender on 101. They were picking up the pieces for a quarter-mile.”

She took a drag from the cigarette. Peter didn’t want to, but he couldn’t help it, he felt sorry for her. He sat down at the table. “You find out why?” he asked.

“Well, he was Wayne Lee,” said Cheryl. She reached for the Kleenex box, but it was empty. “This was outside a bar. Probably came on to the wrong guy’s girl.”

She opened her mouth and pulled one of the loose teeth out of her lower jaw, studied it absently, then put it back in. Alex looked at Peter, alarm in her eyes.

“Mom, is there anything we can do for you?”

Cheryl launched into a rambling monologue of apology, blamelessness, and persecution, the gist of which was that Wayne Lee had taken all the money and gotten her hooked on various drugs. One day they’d had a fight and he’d roughed her up, so she moved out here to the trailer. She finished the story with a vague digression about how rude the local Hoopa Indians were and that this trailer really wasn’t her kind of place, but it was all she could afford, because her lawyer had screwed up the divorce settlement. She spent a minute or two cursing the lawyer and then cursing Peter, as if she’d forgotten he was sitting right there. Then she just trailed off and sat staring, tracing patterns with her finger in the tabletop dust.

“Anything else you want to say to your daughter before we go?” Peter asked.

Cheryl looked at him, and then at Alex. She shrugged. “I don’t want you to think I’m a bad person,” she said. “I always loved you in my own way.”

Alex wiped her eyes. “You need any money, Mom?”

“I’m all right,” she said. She took her daughter’s hand briefly, then let it go.

Alex got up and looked in the fridge. There were two bottles of Miller, a tin of sardines, and three eggs. In the cabinets were Cheerios,
saltines, chocolate-chip cookies, a jar of peanut butter, and enough mouse droppings to start a fertilizer plant.

“Dad?” she said.

Peter stood and opened his wallet. It had been futile in Nepal, it would be futile here, but he did it anyway. Four twenties, a ten, three ones. He put it all on the table. Cheryl reached out and took it, then shoved one of the dollar bills back at him.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“The ten and the three,” she said. “It’s thirteen; it isn’t lucky.” Peter took the dollar and put it in his pocket. “You’re right,” he said. “Sorry.”

“Anyway, I appreciate it,” she said. Her voice echoed a little in the tinny trailer. “I know you think I don’t, but I do.”

“We know, Mom.”

“I’m not a bad person,” Cheryl went on. Her hands were against her forehead; she wasn’t even looking at them. It was as if they’d already left, or she had. “I loved both of you in my own way. In my own way, I always did.”

|   |   |

Peter drove them east, up 299 and into the mountains.

“You think there’s anything we can do for her?” Alex asked. “I only had one house to sell.”

She made an exasperated noise. “You know what I mean.”

“There’s nothing I can do if she doesn’t want it herself, Alex.”

“You’re lacquering the cat,” she said. It was an expression she’d coined a year or two previously, which meant slapping a thin intellectual gloss on a clawed, fanged, unruly thing. “You make it sound like there are no emotions involved.”

“There are too many emotions involved, is closer to the problem,” he said.

“Just because you’re done with her, it doesn’t mean I have to be, does it?”

“No, but I think it might be a good idea if you took care of yourself for a while.”

She looked pensively out of the window. “Where are we going, anyway?”

“Weaverville.”

“Why?”

He explained that one advantage of the disintegrating American healthcare system was that small rural hospitals were folding up left and right, so he was able to get good deals on used medical equipment. He’d promised to send Franz a crate with an autoclave, a ventilator, a case of IV saline, and whatever else he could pick up.

They drove through a series of beautiful canyons on the Trinity River, then crossed Oregon Mountain pass. Weaverville was a pretty little town supported largely by a lumber mill, framed to the north by the peaks of the Trinity Alps.

“What happened to the hospital?” Alex asked.

“I read that the locals voted down a bond measure to keep it open,” Peter said.

She looked at him, incredulous. “So these people will be dying because they wouldn’t part with, like, a buck a week for a
hospital
?”

“Frontier mentality up here, I guess.”

“Talk about survival of the fittest,” she said. “A self-culling herd.”

Peter was delighted to find that there was, indeed, an autoclave, along with two plastic crates of ER supplies, a hundred sheets of X-ray film that wouldn’t expire for another year, and sundry other supplies.

They stopped for lunch at Miller’s Drive-in, where Alex had three burgers and a shake. They headed south out of town toward Hayfork, where they picked up Highway 36 back toward the coast. Peter thought it might do Alex good to see some of this country, which was pristine and stunning. She put her feet up on the dash, let her seat back, and opened her window. The cool air smelled of conifer forest and dust.

Peter was thinking about all his fuckups, and what exactly was required of someone before he could be said to have put things right.

After they’d been driving for fifteen or twenty minutes, he turned to his daughter. “There’s something I want to ask you,” he said. “You don’t have to answer, but someday I might like to know.”

She sounded a little sleepy. “Mmm?”

“Mina said you shot one of the men who came to get you.”

That woke her pretty well. She sat up and put her feet on the floor, but she didn’t reply.

“Alex?”

She set her elbow on the armrest and ran her fingers through her hair nervously. “I might have,” she said.

“You don’t know?”

“It’s a long story,” she said. “Edelstein’s heard it.”

He watched a doe and her yearling cross the road ahead of them to the west. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” he said.

She rubbed her forehead. “We didn’t know who they were,” she said. “All of a sudden, in the middle of the night, these guys in fatigues were running through the place, shooting the dogs and whoever came out. They killed two of the others right in front of me before I got back inside.”

“You had friends there?”

“Not exactly,” she said. “I thought they’d killed you, but then we heard you’d gotten away, and the last guys who went after you never came back.”

“They didn’t?”

She shook her head. “We never found out what happened to them. They may have just snuck back to their families.”

Peter thought of the boys, and of Tsering Wangmo, and smiled.

“So you didn’t even know if I was dead?”

“I figured you must be, or you would have come back for me,”
she said. “Anyway, I thought the kids in the camp might be all I had left. So they weren’t really my friends, but they weren’t exactly enemies either.”

He was trying to figure out if he actually did want an answer to the question. “But you really shot somebody?”

“We were scared shitless and we couldn’t
see
,” she said. “There were just the fires and these blinding flashlights, and it was chaos. I ran back inside, grabbed one of the rifles, and hid behind some crates. I was shaking, I was so afraid, and then this guy kicked in the door and three of them came inside. I don’t know if I fired; if I did, I don’t remember. But one of them somehow ended up on the ground, and then the other two grabbed me and pulled the gun out of my hands, and they were screaming at me and really angry.”

“Jesus.”

“Believe me, I was totally freaked and basically just cried for hours. But later, when they took me off the road and did what they did …”

He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear what came next, but he said, “Go on.”

She was sobbing. “After that, to tell the truth, I pretty much wished I’d killed them all.”

He was quiet. “Nobody’s judging you,” he said. “I just wanted to know.”

They drove on. The road passed across mountainsides and wound through verdant meadows and tall stands of fir and pine. Some of the hillsides were dotted with huge old oaks. After a while Alex sat back and seemed to calm down some.

“Do you blame yourself for what happened to me?” she asked.

He hadn’t expected the question, but he nodded.

“Don’t,” she said. “You did the best you could. I know that, and you should too.”

It was such a grown-up thing to say. Tears welled in his eyes and rolled down his cheeks. They felt scalding. He couldn’t forgive himself, but she could forgive him.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

She realized he was crying and put her hand on his shoulder, and then they were both in tears. He steered the car around a wide bend in the road, and a beautiful valley opened before them. Alex wiped at her cheeks and smiled. “We’re quite a pair,” she said.

It seemed crazy that you could raise someone from birth and still be mystified by who they really were inside. But it had been true of his father and him, and it was true of him and Alex. Was anyone capable of anything, as Sangita had once implied about the Chinese soldiers? What could you do except take people as they were and do your best to love whatever they brought with them?