Lake Overturn (27 page)

That night, Gene and Connie sat down to their separate projects. For the first time Connie wished that she had a touch-tone phone. Everyone was getting them. Somehow, to dial each number and wait as the disc made its rattling return seemed more than she could bear. Should she go to K-mart and buy a touch-tone phone? Now she was being silly.

She dialed the first number. A woman answered, “Hullo?”

Connie’s throat was suddenly dry. She coughed. “Is this the Anderson residence?”

The woman said yes the way Eugene had: “Yayes.”

“I’m looking for Eugene Anderson. Is this his residence?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry to bother you, but do you happen to know a Eugene Anderson?”

“Sawry. No.”

“Have a good evening,” Connie said. She hung up and dialed the next number.

One by one, the Andersons of Kansas City answered their phones and told Connie that, no, there was no Eugene there, and, no, they didn’t know any Eugene Anderson. They all had Eugene’s twang. Thirteen years ago it had seemed exotic, big-city, but now it sounded hickish and—Connie thought the word before she could stop herself—stupid. Why had she feared calling these people?

It took less time than she had expected, so she had Gene put himself to bed, and she called the Bakersfield and Fresno Andersons, as they were in an earlier time zone. One of them knew a Eugene, and Connie’s heart raced in a moment of fear—not hope, fear—but this Eugene was the man’s eighty-year-old uncle who lived in San Diego.

Connie sat at the table long after she had finished her calls and Gene had gone to sleep, wondering if she had really wanted to find him.

W
ITH NO SCHOOLWORK
to do this Tuesday night, since Thanksgiving break started the next day, Liz finally had time to go to the Rollerdrome. A sign taped to the Plexiglas window said,
ENTRANCE: $2.50. NO EXCEPTIONS
. Would she really have to pay for what might be a fruitless visit that lasted only a minute? She bent to speak into the vent, which was situated low to be within reach of little children. “I’m picking up my little brother. Do I have to pay?”

The woman waved her cigarette and said, “Pull hard.” With her other hand she unbolted the door.

Liz entered, then stood for a moment to let her eyes adjust. Fragments of light cast by the disco ball raced along one wall, then jumped the gap to race along the next. The floor was blackened at each entrance to the rink, and the walls, where they met the floor, were riddled with colored marks left by the rubber stoppers of roller-skates. There were only a few kids skating in the rink. Their shouts echoed, and their skates hissed. Liz wondered why the place seemed so forlorn, then realized there was no music.

A boy whizzed by her and disappeared into the deejay booth. A moment later, a song began. The boy emerged and whizzed back behind the snack bar. His face was marred with zits and freckles as if to match the walls. A bank of lockers, Liz noticed, stood near the snack bar. She went to it and found locker 21 in the top row. She took from her pocket the key that she had been carrying for the last two days, inserted it into the lock, and twisted. Machinery shifted, locking the key into place. She opened the door, peered in, and saw something near the back. She reached in and took out a plastic Ziploc bag, half-full of water. She looked at it for a moment, then opened it an inch and sniffed. Just water. She tossed it into a nearby trash can. Then she rose to her tiptoes and again looked into the locker. There was a wet sheet of paper stuck to the bottom. She carefully peeled it up and read the blurred, typewritten message:

YOU’RE THE ONLY ONE I LIKE.

Was that it? Were these clues or some sort of booby trap? Was the water meant to pour out on her head? Maybe it
was
some junior high brat.

“Hey!” yelled the boy behind the snack bar.

Liz crumpled the note and turned toward him.

“You want a Red Hot?” he asked. He rested an elbow on the lid of a giant jar in which pickles swam in a cloudy liquid, and held toward Liz a bright red ball in a plastic wrapper.

Liz smiled and shook her head.

“For free?”

“No, thanks,” Liz said. She dropped the wet wad into the trash and left.

Jay, who had watched the whole thing from the game room, huddled into the black booth of the Frogger game until Liz was gone. To allow her time to leave the parking lot, he finished his game. This took quite a while; he had gotten quite good at Frogger over the past two nights. Then he strolled over to the lockers. He took a few deep breaths, as if her scent would still hang here, or anything of her—the dust of her skin in the air or a wet finger-smudge on the key.

Step Four:
Experimentation

Chapter 13

A
t the end of Thanksgiving dinner, when the Nelsons, Chuck’s big, hearty in-laws, began to clear the table, Sandra, who had been quiet during dinner, put her hand on his wrist to stop him from rising to help. “Take me for a walk, Chuck,” she said.

“Should I?” Chuck asked. The reason they had spent Thanksgiving crammed into Sandra’s parents’ little shoebox house in one of the older neighborhoods of Salt Lake City instead of having it at her brother’s ranch in Ogden was because of Sandra’s condition. Sandra was too weak to be jostled into cars and up stairs, and, moreover, she was to use her oxygen as much as possible to ease the burden of her low lung capacity on her heart, the doctor had explained. The tank stood like a green sentry in the corner of the living room; its twenty-foot tube reached the kitchen and the bedroom Sandra’s parents had given over to her, having themselves moved upstairs to Sandra’s old room.

“Yes,” Sandra said. “The doctors say it’s good for me to walk, when I have the capacity.” The day before, they had drained the fluid from her lungs with a needle. They did this once a week; Sandra had told Chuck that she looked forward to it, because she breathed easier after. “Abby?” said Sandra, unhooking the tubes from her ears. “Could you—?”

Abby appeared over her shoulder and took the tube to the living room, coiling it as she went, then returned with Sandra’s coat. Abby, it seemed, knew the details of her mother’s treatments, the dosages and the drug names, better than Sandra herself. She kept track of her mother’s appointments from Eula and called reminders in to her grandparents. Chuck helped Sandra up, and all those big, nice Nelsons turned and assaulted them with questions: “Where are you going?” “Do ya need a hand?” “Are you sure you should go out, Gully?” They had called her Gully since childhood, because Sandra, who had never had the square face of a Nelson, looked like a seagull.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Sandra said, and the children, who had seemed to forget about her during dinner, parted with frightened expressions.

Sandra held Chuck’s arm as they walked. There had been no snow yet, but the grass was silver at the tip, as the overnight frosts no longer melted in the sun. They passed little houses with two-dimensional windmills, milkmaids, and welcome signs standing in their yellowed gardens. Almost all the mailboxes had something childish painted on them, ladybugs or flowers with faces.

Sandra hadn’t let the illness take any of her stature; she was still as tall as Chuck. All the Nelson women had wide shoulders, but Sandra held hers high while her sisters allowed them to fall into the general thickness of their bodies. Sandra had been stout too, but now her body hung from her shoulders like a curtain from a rod. Slowly Chuck led her down the shadowy block and around the corner into the light of the setting sun.

“Pretty,” Chuck said.

“Mm,” Sandra replied. “Can we sit?” She indicated a wrought-iron bench on someone’s lawn.

“Is it all right?” Chuck asked.

“The Jacobsons. They brought over a casserole.”

The frosty grass crunched with every step as they crossed the lawn, but gave underneath like a cushion.
No one’s sat on this bench for years
, Chuck mused as he eased Sandra down,
not even the Jacobsons
.

“Chuck,” Sandra said presently, “I have a favor to ask.”

“Yes?”

“It might be difficult for you. I want you . . .
not
to continue coming down here, after a certain point.” She let this hang for a minute, perhaps to let Chuck accept it before she explained it. “I don’t think I can bear to have you see me, how I might come to be, near the end. I’ve thought this through, and it has nothing to do with malice or hard feelings between us, it just has to do with my own comfort. I’m prepared for the pain, but I need to be comfortable. Do you see the difference?”

“Yes,” Chuck said. “You might need me, though.”

“I’m sorry. I won’t. I’ll need Abby. She’s proven, without even trying, to be the one. Mom and Dad are helpless without her.”

“It’s a lot for her to carry,” Chuck said.

Sandra inhaled quickly, then stopped herself—from telling him, he was sure, that she
knew
it was a lot for Abby to carry. Instead, she said, “We don’t always have a choice about these things. Abby knows she’s the one, and I don’t think she’d have it any other way. She’s strong. I only hope it doesn’t make her bitter.”

The way I made you bitter
, Chuck thought.
I didn’t mean to.

They sat for a while, gazing at the jagged peaks visible through the black, leafless branches of the willows that crowded the house across the street, touching it here and there at the corners and under the eaves, as if to keep it standing. The snowy mountains were made rosy by the sun that, in setting, no longer struck this low-lying neighborhood.

“We were never everything to each other,” Chuck said. This was something he had only realized as Lina had, more and more, showed herself to be someone who could be everything to him.

“No,” Sandra said.

“Would you . . . like to talk about why we weren’t?”

Sandra shook her head and looked down at her hands, folded in her lap.

“Sometimes,” Chuck said, “I look back, and I can’t remember what I was thinking. Like I was in a fog all those years, and it took the fog getting really, really thick for me to come out of it. In the meantime, I didn’t give you what you needed.”

“You did, though,” Sandra said. “You gave me Abby.”

They watched the line of darkness climb the mountains, until only the tips were lit.

“When is it, that you want me to stop coming?”

“When it’s too late for me to tell you so. That’s why I thought we should talk now.”

“That’s pretty hard.”

“It’s all hard, Chuck.”

“I’ll look like a bastard.”

“I’ll explain to Mom and Dad, and to Abby, sometime between now and then.”

The most inappropriate thoughts occurred to Chuck all the time. Jokes popped to mind in the middle of meetings at City Hall, and he’d have to suppress a laugh. He had read that this was the way the minds of people with Tourette’s syndrome worked, and sometimes Chuck wondered if it was a side effect of the antidepressant. All through this conversation, Lina had been springing to mind, as if to mention her would make Sandra happy. He thought of how Lina, who was clearly ashamed of her widely spaced teeth, would keep them covered with a tight-lipped smile, until it grew too big and her lips parted. Then she’d cover her mouth with her hand. Chuck had taken to holding her hands down when she did this, which made her laugh and whip her head from side to side. Nothing made Chuck happier than this toothy, uncivilized smile, but to call it to mind now was absurd.

Now that Chuck had found his happiness, he wondered where Sandra had kept hers all those years, or if she had never had it, and that made it easier for her now to die. Or, by the same token, if she had had that happiness all along, would it have inoculated her against this illness?

“We’ll see how this next round goes,” Sandra said. “Maybe I’ll have another . . .” (In her pause, Chuck feared that she would say “reprieve.”) “. . . good spell.”

“Let’s hope,” Chuck said.

“Hope and pray.”

“You’re shivering, Sandra. We should go back.”

It was Chuck’s turn, that night, to sleep in the living room. Weeks before, Sandra had tripped on the way to the bathroom and bruised her elbow. Abby had made her promise to let someone help her out of bed from then on. So Sandra slept with the door ajar and the others took turns sleeping on the couch. She took more pain medication at bedtime, which made her forget whose turn it was, so, in the middle of the night, she didn’t call Chuck’s name, only, “Hello? Hello?”

Chuck started, then leaped off the couch. “Sandra, I’m here. Are you all right?”

“Oh, Chuck, I’m okay. I just need to use the bathroom.”

Chuck turned on the bathroom light, then took Sandra’s arm and led her in. He went back and sat on her bed and waited. He heard a flush, then Sandra opened the door. She held a small bottle in her hand. “Could you help me with my morphine?”

Chuck took the bottle from her, unscrewed it, and fed her a dropperful of the red liquid. “What hurts?” he asked.

“My back and my leg.”

Chuck took her hand and eased her back into bed. She didn’t immediately let go of his hand, so he sat down beside her.

“Sometimes, when I wake up in the dark,” she said, “I think it’s already happened.”

The thought horrified Chuck and made him feel small and quiet. He decided to let it pass without comment, and Sandra seemed to fall asleep. Rather than waking her by removing his hand from hers, Chuck lay down beside her.

“I think about Yellowstone sometimes,” Sandra said dreamily.

Chuck gave a little laugh of assent, then said, “We should have kept going.”

“One thing Elder Robinson said . . . in our meeting . . . after the diagnosis . . .” It was harder for Sandra to speak lying down. Her sentences were punctuated by deep breaths. “Don’t regret.”

“He was right,” Chuck said. “What I meant is, I’m glad that we went to Yellowstone those times.”

Sandra was quiet for so long that Chuck, again, thought she had drifted off, but then she said, “You’re lonely, Chuck.”

“I’m all right.”

“Still, I wouldn’t fault you . . .” She didn’t finish.

Grateful, both for her saying it and for her not finishing, Chuck fell asleep like that, holding her hand.

. . . .

B
ACK IN EULA,
winter was announced, not by a blanket of white snow but by an old man who lived on the boulevard, rising after his Thanksgiving dinner, walking outside, flipping open the rusted metal cover that guarded the outlet under the front porch, and plugging in the cord that dangled nearby. The multicolored lights that he had left up all year turned on, then off . . . on, then off . . . all in unison. He had used a staple gun to put them up, and feared that, given the chewed-up state of the boards, if he pulled the lights down, the gutter would come with them.

By the next morning, Santa’s Village had sprung up at the crossroads of the mall, with its glitter frost and quilt-batting snow, and the great stable that would contain a larger-than-life Mary mechanically rocking the baby Jesus was under construction on the lawn of First Church. Soon the stores downtown had colorful scenes of candy canes, holly leaves, and red bows painted in their front windows by artists from Boise who had been trained in the art of how to make a painting on the inside of the glass look right from the outside; and soon after that, kids scratched dirty words backward into the paint.

It snowed in Eula about as seldom as it rained. The ground hardened in early December and, by Christmas, Lake Overlook was frozen solid enough for hooky-bobbing, a kind of late-night wintertime waterskiing, using a car with a rope tied to the back bumper leading to a kid on snow skis, or an inner tube, or merely a pair of old boots. The disadvantage of hooky-bobbing was that one had to do it late at night, and, even then, only in half-hour bursts, to avoid being interrupted by the sober strobes of a patrol car catching the shiny tire trails in the otherwise-dusty lake top. The temperature would drop so low on these nights that mothers set the faucets to dripping before bed to keep the pipes from bursting, and fathers, in the morning, went out early in slippers and parkas to warm up the cars and scrape off the ice, which had grown thick in fantastic starburst and snail-shell patterns on the windshields. When the children got into these cars after breakfast, they touched their curls, still wet from the shower, and found them frozen.

December would often end without the arrival of snow. When it finally fell, people would remember why they had been hoping for it all that time: their yellow, broken gardens were buried and the trees were full again, only this time full of jewels. Snow was like a good sermon that made everything simple and clear: there was the snow and the sky, with Eula wedged cozily in-between. It only stayed that way for a day, two days at most. The snow didn’t melt, it just got pushed around, changed colors, and became tiresome.

And some years it didn’t snow at all.

So, in this snow-poor town, they looked for other signs of winter: the lifting of the sugar factory’s odor, a line of colored lights marking a house lost among the dark fields, or the announcement of the first basketball game and wrestling match in crooked capitals on Eula High’s sign.

The gap between the end of football season and the beginning of both basketball and wrestling season—a gap that was due to Eula’s never making the football playoffs—gave Coop a break. For a couple of weeks he didn’t have to take a team to another town, and all his nights were free. He took the glider from the porch to the basement. Then began the season when Coop worked hardest and, with all the overtime, caught up on bills and maybe bought something nice for Maria. In the fall there was only one team each for high school and junior high, football, with one away game per week between them. In winter there was both basketball and wrestling, so nearly every weeknight he was driving some team somewhere. Occasionally a basketball game and a wrestling match were scheduled for the same night, and he had to call in Dwayne Shelby, who had been the bus driver before Coop, and who, now in his seventies, still liked to pick up a few extra bucks from time to time. True, he drove the bus down the middle of the road, but everyone saw him coming. Coop preferred to pass the wrestling team on to Dwayne, as it was the rowdier bunch, and Dwayne, being nearly deaf, was less likely to be distracted by the noise. Coop kept the basketball team for himself. It was made up mostly of tall Mormon boys who sometimes sang hymns on the way to and from games. This too was an annoyance to Coop, one jarringly unnatural to teenage boys compared to the wrestlers’ fighting and hollering, but it made for an easy drive; and Coop liked watching basketball better than wrestling anyway.

One night in December, Coop drove the team out to Homedale, and Maria joined him at the top of the bleachers. She carried with her a bag of books and papers, which she proceeded to spread around her. “Translating,” she answered to Coop’s raised eyebrows. Part of her job as Owyhee County’s one and only social worker was to translate forms into Spanish. Coop’s attention remained primarily on the game, and Maria’s primarily on her work as they traded bits of conversation: