Know Your Beholder: A Novel (37 page)

After the service there was a small gathering in the back of her father’s favorite restaurant, the Gem, where Baylor had proposed to his wife some thirty-five years earlier. The Gem is a mom-’n’-pop seafood restaurant with an enormous salad bar and everyone from the burial site heaped a plate and ate quietly to Lite FM music. I wasn’t hungry but I forced myself through a baked potato, which I’d loaded up with fixings and consumed to Lionel Richie’s “Truly,” an eighties weeper that would have made me lose it were it not immediately followed by the Carpenters’ “Top of the World.”

I was never farther than an arm’s length from Emily, who sat beside me and picked at a bare salad with many black olives.

At one point she asked how I was doing.

I told her I was okay. I knew she was checking about my condition, but I felt like I was answering a larger question.

“How are you?” I said.

She looked at me and smiled, but her brown eyes seemed to be aching.

There was something about watching Baylor Phebe’s simple, unadorned casket being lowered into the earth that had brought me back to myself. And Emily’s genuine concern for me at that little seaford restaurant in Cairo—was
I
okay?—even as she was picking at her salad and collecting shoulder squeezes from her father’s friends and colleagues and touching each of their hands in a sincere way, made me feel something I hadn’t in a very long time: that I was actually taking up space in somebody else’s head.

We stayed at the Gem until the bitter end, and Emily put the whole thing on her credit card. It hadn’t even occurred to me that she was going to be the one footing the bill, and I was touched by her generosity.

We drove back to Pollard in relative silence.

It started to rain again and the windshield wipers made dry weeping noises, as though the car were mocking us. Amid the silence the only sounds were the simmering rain and the low hum of the engine and the Dopplering swoosh of an occasional southbound car.

Perhaps twenty minutes into the trip, Emily thanked me for joining her, and before I could respond, she said that up in Milwaukee she’d been thinking about me a lot.

I told her that she’d been on my mind too and confessed to drawing her eyes in the margins of this manuscript.

She asked me if I was a good artist and I told her every face I draw winds up looking a little like a rabbit and she laughed and looked over at me and her eyes were so big and brown and kind I had the distinct thought that one could warm one’s hands by them.

I asked her what her immediate plans were and she said she was going to have to head back to Milwaukee in the morning.

“What about bereavement leave?” I asked.

She said that the academy had given her a week off, but that she just felt like she needed to be in Milwaukee.

Then I heard myself asking her if I could come with her.

“Like just for the road trip?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I could stay with you for a while.”

Emily pulled the car over onto the shoulder. It was raining harder now and the wipers were really slashing across the windshield. She removed her seat belt and leaned toward me and rested her forehead on mine. Her breath smelled sweetly of black olives.

“You can say no,” I offered.

She smiled and her eyes at such close proximity made a strange parallax. Eventually she nodded, which forced me to nod along, and then she drew her head back and put her seat belt on and we drove the rest of the way to Pollard.

The following morning, after I had secured the travel case over the manual Corona and packed a small duffel bag, while Emily was loading her father’s last few boxes into the hatchback of her Ford Focus, I went into the backyard and with a small gardening spade buried my mother’s manuscript under the copper beech, which seemed to me an appropriate gesture. I figured that if compelled someday I could dig it up and read the story again. I had the strange thought that the story will continue to write itself, that it will call to me when I’m an old man and teach me something about my life.

Although I offered to drive, Emily insisted. We took back roads most of the way through central Illinois. The farmlands were ripening. Fields of soybeans and wheat and cabbage. Corn was starting to rise. We passed silos and old, dilapidated barns and grain elevators and surprising rolling prairies that led to vast forests. In the weak blue light, the tree line barely discernible in the distance now, we happened upon a farmhouse that had been damaged by the tornadoes. There was a small barn, a stable for horses, hitching posts. One corner of the house had been torn away and the place appeared to be abandoned.

It was a simple two-story clapboard house. It was so far from the road it felt like a fable. Like if you started running toward it, by the time you reached the front door you would be changed forever.

Emily sensed my fascination with the house and pulled over onto the shoulder of the empty two-lane road. For the briefest moment I thought I saw a shadow pass across an upstairs shaded window.

“What is it?” she asked.

I simply said, “That house.”

“What about it?”

I couldn’t answer. Finally I said I was just amazed that it was still standing. I imagined all the things inside that had been tossed about by the tornadoes. Cabinets and tables and a library of books. A grandfather clock. I imagined an upside-down kitchen. Dining room chairs embedded in the walls. Half the staircase in some faraway field, leading to nowhere.

“Do you want to take a look?” Emily asked.

“No,” I said, “let’s keep going.”

I would like to thank Hari Kunzru, Hallie Newton, and my agent, David Halpern, for their careful, early reads of the manuscript, as well as my editor, Ben George, for his meticulous, passionate, and artful care.

An acclaimed filmmaker and playwright, Adam Rapp was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his play
Red Light Winter
and is the recipient of the Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors. In addition to his numerous plays, he is the author of the novel
The Year of Endless Sorrows
and several YA novels, including
Under the Wolf, Under the Dog,
a finalist for the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize. He lives in New York City.

The Year of Endless Sorrows

The Hallway Trilogy • Red Light Winter •
Stone Cold Dead Serious • Nocturne • The Metal Children • Kindness • Blackbird • Finer Noble Gases • Animals and Plants • Essential Self-Defense • Gompers • American Sligo •
Ghosts in the Cottonwoods • Trueblinka • Bingo with the Indians

The Children and the Wolves • Punkzilla •
Under the Wolf, Under the Dog • 33 Snowfish • Little Chicago •
The Copper Elephant • The Buffalo Tree • Missing the Piano

Ball Peen Hammer

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