Mendocino Fire (14 page)

Only when she is well away from that roundabout, settled into her favorite corner of the couch in her office; only in this quiet, narrowing her pointed eyes in pleasure in an interval of aloneness she has no right to, because they should be here, the students, they've said they're going to come by and one of them will knock on the door any second, meaning the value of this interval, the preface to losing oneself in a book, is heightened by her awareness of its likely end; only in the particular space created by unexpected liberty (in which thinking her own thoughts has a stolen or illegitimate savor) does she grasp the real reason for her love of standing motionless in the bicycle onslaught, in the student whirlwind. As usual, the real reason has been expertly swaddled in and obscured by false, lesser reasons, attractive in and of themselves. Oh yes there is pleasure in being unmoved in the midst of an every-which-way assault. But also, this is like her life. They come at her from every direction! They never touch her! No. That's not it, not the bottommost layer, not the meaning revealed only when other meanings are peeled away, whose existence you only ever discover if peeling is a habit, if you love this deft quiet work of lifting away length of gauze after length of gauze to find the true face. Down down down down down and down. They mean something, these almost-winged cyclists, in their seriousness and lightness, their concentration, in their searchingness that must discern every signal
or else
, in their absorption. This is reading. No wonder she loves standing there: in the middle of a steady cascade of virtuoso reading on which their lives depend.

It could be, she tells herself, that apart from your work and your teaching you do not have enough going for you, that you need
to get out more, that due to your aloneness—which we're not going to call loneliness because it's not that; it's a deliberate, cultured, desirable, nonnegotiable state, necessary if you want to get work done, intelligent aloneness,
good
aloneness; it has a point!—your students matter too much. At least you have to ask yourself once in a while, you have to check in regarding whether or not it is wrong, what you feel for them, the students. Without fail you need to recognize that the easiest transition love ever makes is into coercion, and that your most useful quality as far as students are concerned is
dis
interestedness. You've said often enough that you love teaching, but you have never said the truer thing, which is that you love your students, because it would only worry everyone to hear it, it would worry even you, and it might not even be true, because there is, remember, the risk that aloneness has exaggerated what you feel for them. Which may not be love, but some minor, teacherly emotion that nobody has ever bothered to give a name. Who were they, the people who figured out what the emotions were, and how many of them would be recognized and named, and which shadings or gradations could safely be ignored—who were they, these feeling namers, and what did they have against shades of gray?

The students rarely embark on a difficult or painful subject without some sort of rhetorical exit strategy. There is almost no sorrow they can't disown with an immediate laugh, designed to prevent the professor from realizing that she has glimpsed genuine emotion. After many years as a professor it still strikes her as unnatural that students, that
people
, fear what she might think: Who the fuck is she? But they watch her eyes for what
she's thinking. Will she say something actually useful to them, or something they in their desperation (because sometimes it is desperation) can
twist
into usefulness, which will be more useful for coming from her, the professor? What can she tell them about what comes next?

In the corner of the couch, with a titanium-sheathed machine balanced partly on the arm of the couch and partly on one raised knee, the professor clicks through the forests and clearings of a few contested acres. Mild and unexceptional except for being somewhat forlorn, these acres, sad in the way of woods that don't thrive, lacking the cannons, the plaques, the bronze generals on horseback that tell you blood was shed here. The Wilderness, this battlefield is called. Walmart wants this particular scrap of the Wilderness for a supercenter whose aisles will be lined with toys for the children of tourists drawn to other, already protected acres of battlefield. There is no telling from these unphotogenic, scantily wooded hills that her great-great-grandfather was badly wounded here. If he had died, he would have been one among thirty thousand, and she, of course, would never have existed. He lived—the War Department records his new status as prisoner of war, sent by train to Fort Delaware, also known as Pea Patch Island. The professor both likes and hates the irony, the sunny potager promised by the name Pea Patch Island and the reality of filth and exposure and fever and starvation, tainted water and maggoty flour, that befell him at nineteen. Was he
as alive
to himself as she is to herself, did he feel
as real
? If he flexed his fingers or studied the lines intersecting and diverging in the palm, did he marvel? The deepest despair, the blackest pitch of
disillusion about humankind: those are what she imagines, envisioning his emotions in the prison camp, but these conjectures could be wrong. He is remote in time and culture. Consolations that seem to her the most childish lies and self-deceptions might have been his salvation. Not books, but Book, the King James Version. He might, if time were transcended and he could know her and what she thinks and what she teaches her students and her preference for ambiguity over conviction and her godlessness, turn his savage Civil War eyes on her, his billy goat beard, his cavalryman's uprightness, his gaunt authority, and renounce her, his distant child. A cousin emailed the professor the only known photograph of him, a slouch-hatted elderly figure astride a sorrel horse, and even in this image, no bigger than a matchbook, and even in extreme old age, he is plainly someone to reckon with. From the year 2015 she gazes into the pixels that comprise his gaze. Back to the home page of the historical trust fighting Walmart, and with several clicks of the mouse, she “buys” an acre of these woods where he lay wounded, and while she is aware such ownership is merely honorary, a contribution toward the trust's large-scale purchase, she chooses to believe her mouseclick has saved the exact patch of earth once stained with her great-great's blood from becoming a parking lot. Her in-box
dings
with instant thanks from a computer in the trust's distant offices. It's
his
thanks she wants to come dinging in. She is amused at herself, though there are tears in her eyes, for longing to connect to that long-ago, unknowable, very likely hostile old man. For whom she's somehow as lonely as if she had once been a child cradled in his arms, as if, leaning down so his mouth was close to her ear, he had said her name, and then said
Listen
, and then told her the story that was the story within all the other stories of her life, the oldest and most beautiful and
farthest back, the one that would elude death forever and ever and ever amen.

Me.
Say you lived at least partly for
me
.

This is the story that must exist somewhere; this is what she never finds to read.

This was his life now, his real life, the thing he thought about most: his boy was in and out of trouble and he didn't know what to do.

Friday night when he got home late from the mill Daisy made him shower before supper, and he twisted the dial to its hottest setting and turned his back to the gimmicky showerhead whose spray never pulsed hard enough to perform the virtual massage its advertising promised—or maybe at forty-three he'd used his body too hard, its aches and pains as much a part of him now as his heart or any other organ, and he had wasted good money on an illusion. Ah well. He rubbed at mirror fog and told the dark-browed frowner (his own father!) to get ready: she'd had her Victor look. Whatever this development was, it fell somewhere between failing grade in calculus and car wreck, either of which, he knows from experience, would have been
announced as soon as he walked through the door. Whatever the case, the news was bad enough that she felt she needed to lay the groundwork and had already set their places at the table and poured his beer, a habit he disliked but had never objected to and never would. When she was a girl, Daisy's father had let her tilt the bottle over his glass while the bubbles churned and the foam puffed like a mushroom cap sidling up from dank earth, and if she enjoyed some echo of the bliss of being in her daddy's good graces while pouring
his
beer, Sean wasn't about to deprive her.

Daisy told him:

Neither girl seemed very brave, yet neither seemed willing to back down. Not their own wounds, but a sturdy sense of each other's being wronged, had driven them to this. They had a kind of punk bravado, there on the threshold, armored in motorcycle jackets whose sleeves fell past their chipped black fingernails. A flight of barrettes had attacked their heads, pinching random tufts of dirty hair. They were dressed for audacity, but their pointy-chinned faces—really the same face twice—wore the stiff little mime smiles of the easily intimidated, confronting her, the tigress mother, bracing their forlorn selves as best they could, which wasn't very well at all. There was nothing to do but ask them in. As she told it to Sean, Daisy wasn't about to let them guess that A, she pitied them, and B, she understood right away there was going to be some truth in what they said. Victor's favorite sweater, needing some mending, lay across the arm of the sofa, and when one of the twins took it into her lap—talisman, claim—Daisy hardly needed to be told that girl was pregnant. As the twins took turns explaining that not just one of them was in trouble, both were, an evil radiance pulsed in the corner of Daisy's right eye, the onset of a migraine.

A joke
, Sean said.
Because, twins? Somebody told these girls to go to V's house and freak out his parents.

Drinking around a bonfire,
Daisy said,
and they wander into the woods and stumble across this mattress. They have a word for what happened. Three-way. They have a word for it, so ask yourself what else these girls know. Why they have no sense of self-worth. Their mother's in Arizona, their daddy's a trucker, never around.

Across the table Sean shook his head, his disgust with his son failing, for once, to galvanize Daisy's defense of the boy. In the harmony of their anger, they traded predictions. Victor would be made to marry a twin, maybe the one whose dark eyes had acquired a sheen of tears when she petted his old sweater, because she seemed the more lost. Victor would be dragged under.

“When's he get home?” Sean said.

“Away game. Not till two
A.M.
” It was Daisy who would be waiting in her SUV when the bus pulled up at the high school to disgorge the sleepy jostling long-legged boys.

“We hold off on doing anything till we hear his side of the story.”

We hold off?
If she hadn't loved him she would have laughed when he said that. It wouldn't be up to them to hold off or not hold off, but if Sean was slower to accept that reality than she was, it was because he hated decisions being out of his hands.

However disgusted he'd been the night before, in the morning Sean was somber, mindful, restrained, everything Daisy could have wished when he sat Victor down at the kitchen table for what he called
getting the facts straight
. The reeling daylong party was true, and the bonfire, and the rain-sodden mattress in the woods where a drunken Victor had sex with both girls, though not at the same time, which was what
three-way
meant. They must have claimed that for dramatic impact, as if this sce
nario needed more drama, or because they had been so smashed that events blurred together in their minds. The next several evenings were taken up with marathon phone calls. Sean asked most of the questions and wouldn't hand the receiver to Daisy even when she could tell he'd learned something especially troubling and mouthed
Give it to me!
By the following weekend they had established that only one twin was pregnant, though it seemed both had believed they were telling the truth when they sat on Daisy's velvet couch and said the babies, plural, were due July fifth. The sweater-petting girl told Sean she had liked Victor for a long time—
years
—and had wanted to
be
with him, though not in the way it had finally happened. Questioned, Victor remembered only that they were twins. He knew it sounded bad but he wasn't sure what they looked like. Nobody was quote in love with him: that was crazy. And no, they hadn't tried to talk to him first, before coming to the house, and was that fair, that they'd assumed there was zero chance of his doing the right thing? And why was marriage the right thing if he didn't want it and whoever the girl was
she
didn't want it and it was only going to end in divorce? The twin who was pregnant had the ridiculous name of Esme, and what she asked for on the phone with Sean—patient, tactful Sean—was not marriage but child support. If she had that she could get by, she insisted. She'd had a sonogram and she loved the alien-headed letter
C
curled up inside her. At their graduation dance she shed her high heels and flirted by bumping into the tuxes of various dance partners. Victor followed her into the parking lot. Below she was flat-footed and pumpkin-bellied; above she wore strapless satin, her collarbones stark as deer antlers. He backed her up against an anonymous SUV hard enough that their first sober kiss began with shrieks and whistles.

In the hushed joyous days after the baby was born Sean made a mistake he blamed partly on sleep deprivation. The narrow old two-story house had hardly any soundproofing, and because Victor and Esme's bedroom was below his and Daisy's, the baby's crying woke them all. He had stopped in the one jewelry store downtown and completely on impulse laid down his credit card for a delicate bracelet consisting of several strands of silver wound around and around each other. Though simple, the bracelet was a compelling object with a strong suggestion of narrative, as if the maker had been trying to fashion the twining, gleaming progress of several competing loves. He was the sort of husband who gets teased for not noticing new earrings even when his wife repeatedly tucks her hair behind her ears, and any sort of whimsical expenditure was unlike him, but he found he couldn't leave the store without it. He stopped for a beer at the Golden West, and when he got home the only light was from the kitchen where Esme sat at the table licking the filling from Oreos and washing it down with chocolate milk. Her smile hoped he would empathize with the joke of her appetite rather than scold the late-night sugar extravaganza as, he supposed, Daisy would have done, but it was the white-trash forlornness of her feast that got to Sean—the cheapness and furtiveness and excessive, teeth-aching sweetness of this stab at self-consolation. With her china-doll hair and whiter-than-white skin she was hardly the menace to their peace they had feared, only an ignorant girl who trusted neither her new husband nor her sense that it was she and not her mother-in-law who ought to be making the big decisions about the baby's care. Esme wet a forefinger and dabbed the crumbs from Daisy's tablecloth as he set the
shiny box down next to her dirty plate. She said, “What is this?” and, that fast, there were tears in her eyes. She didn't believe it was for her, but she'd just understood what it would feel like if the little box
had
been hers, and this incredulity was his undoing: before those tears, he had meant only to ask Esme if she thought Daisy would like the bracelet. Now he heard himself say, “Just something for the new mama.” As soon as she picked the ribbon apart, even before she tipped the bracelet from its mattress of cotton, he regretted his impulsiveness, but it was too late. She slid it onto her wrist and made it flash in the dim light, glancing to invite his admiration or maybe try to figure out, from his expression, what was going on. In the following days he was sorry to see that she never took it off. Fortunately the household was agitated enough that nobody else noticed the bracelet, and he began to hope his mistake would have no ill consequences except for the change in Esme, whose corner-tilted eyes held his whenever he came into the room. Then, quick, she'd turn her head as if realizing this was the sort of thing that could give them away. Of course there was no
them
and not a fucking thing to give away. Sean began to blame her for his uneasiness: she had misconstrued an act of minor, impulsive charity, blown it up into something more, which had to be kept secret. The ridiculousness of her believing he was
interested
was not only troubling in its own right, it pointed to her readiness to immerse herself in fantasy, and this could be proof of some deeper instability. He didn't like being looked at like that in his own house, or keeping secrets. He was not a natural secret keeper, but a big-boned straightforward husband. Since he'd been nineteen, a husband. Daisy came from a background as rough as anybody's, her father a part-time carpenter and full-time drunk who had once burned his kids' clothes in the backyard, the boys running back into the
house for more armfuls of sweatshirts and shorts, disenchanted only when their dad made them strip off their cowboy pajamas and throw those in too. The first volunteer fireman on the scene dressed the boys in slickers that reached to their ankles and bundled their naked teeth-chattering sister into an old sweater that stank of crankcase oil, and to this day when Sean changes the oil in his truck he has to scrub his hands outside or Daisy will run to the bathroom to throw up.

As Esme alternated between flirtation and sullenness, he tried for kindness. This wasn't all her fault: he was helplessly responsive to vulnerability, and—he could admit it—he did have a tendency to rush in and try to fix whatever was wrong. Therefore he imitated Daisy's forbearance when Esme couldn't get even simple things right, like using hypoallergenic detergent instead of the regular kind that caused the baby to break out in a rash. The tender verbal scat of any mother cradling her baby was a language Esme didn't speak. Her hold was so tentative the baby went round-eyed and chafed his head this way and that, wondering who would come to his aid. More than once Esme neglected to pick up dangerous buttons or coins from the floor. She had to be reminded to burp him after nursing and then, chastened, would sling him across her shoulder like a sack of rice. Could you even say she loved the baby? Breastfeeding might account for Esme's sleepy-eyed bedragglement and air of waiting for real life to begin, but, Daisy said, there was absolutely no justifying the girl's self-pity. Consider where she, Daisy, had come from: worse than anything this girl had gone through, but had Sean ever seen her spend whole days feeling sorry for herself, lying in dirty sheets reading wedding magazines, scarcely managing to crawl from bed when the baby cried? It wasn't as if she had no support. Victor was right there. Who would have believed it?
He was attentive to Esme, touchingly proud of his son, and even after a long day at the mill would stay up walking the length of the downstairs hallway with the colicky child so Esme could sleep. For the first time Victor was as good as his word, and could be counted on to deal uncomplainingly with errands and show up when he'd said he would. Victor's changed ways should have mattered more to Esme, given the desolation of her childhood. Victor was
good to her
.

Esme could not explain what was wrong or what she wanted, Daisy said after one conversation. She was always trying to talk to the girl, who was growing more and more restless. They could all see that, but not what was coming, because it was the kind of thing you didn't want to believe could happen in your family: Esme disappeared. Dylan was almost four, and for whatever reason she had concluded that four was old enough to get by without a mother. That much they learned from her note but the rest they had to find out. She had hitchhiked to the used-car dealership on the south end of town and picked out a white Subaru station wagon; Wynn Handley, the salesman, said she negotiated pleasantly and as if she knew what she was doing and (somewhat to Wynn's surprise, you could tell) ended up with a good deal. Esme paid in cash, not that unusual in a county famed for its marijuana. She left alone—that is, there was no other man. None that Wynn had seen, at least. The cash was impossible to explain, since after checking online Victor reported that their joint account hadn't been touched, and they hadn't saved nearly that much anyway. Esme had no credit card, of course, making it difficult to trace her. Discussion of whether they were in any way to blame, and where Esme could have gone, and whether she was likely to call and want to talk to her son, and whether, if she called, there was any chance of convincing
her to come back, was carried on in hushed voices, because no matter what she'd done the boy should not have to hear bad things about his mother.