Shelter in Place (36 page)

There were days she barely spoke at all.

And then, in an instant, Tess was gone.

I'd been to town to have my father's Wagoneer serviced and when I returned the house was empty and on this table, here in the middle, held down by a white bowl of berries, was her note.

“I am too various to be trusted. But I am safe and I love you. T.”

That's all.

One of those lines she'd always kept around, stolen from a novel she loved, followed by her tired cliché of meager reassurance.

O
ver the time she's been gone, nearly a year and a half now, I have often thought that had I just paid closer attention to her marginalia, to her stars and underlines, to all her bits of paper tacked to so many walls, I'd have saved myself a lot of trouble, and a great deal of pain.

Those scraps might have served as warnings, rather than thin decoration.

Well there are many ways of being held prisoner
.

It may be that we can reassemble a person this way. Or, really, assemble them correctly.

God knows I have tried.

Surely there is a formula to be written, an algorithm to be employed. There must be a way to input all of the variables and have returned to us the woman herself. If we take the library of a true reader, as Tess is, and evaluate all of the books, plus all of the markings, would we not have some fundamentally truer version of that person than if we were to do the same with her spoken language, or even her letters, her journals?

Take all of those well-ordered books there on our great wall of carefully crafted shelves. Take the texts themselves, and then add to them whatever has been inscribed in their first pages.

Tess Wolff. Seattle. Washington. 1995
, for example
.

Add then the drawn lines—vertical and horizontal, doubled and tripled, plus their various flourishes—finishing hooks, upticks and down, plus power of pen stroke—depth of impression, plus considerations of paper stock, plus all the notes and stars, asterisks and brackets, exclamation points and question marks, plus stains and bookmarks—blood and coffee, insects and flowers, photographs and train tickets and sand. Take all of it and I am certain that out of the right machine would come the very truest portraits.

We are so much better told by the sentences of others.

It may be that I am doing a better job of telling your story than I am of mine.

A
fter my mother died they made a film about her. They stood outside our old bars. They went to London to find Claire. All of us refused, so they turned our desire for privacy into a subject of suspicion. Enigmatic Tess, rich and glamorous Claire, shy Joseph. Richard the good Quaker. Anne-Marie March: hero or madwoman? They put Claire in black-and-white ducking into a clean white Mercedes. They filmed the prison and played their music of doom.

It was a despicable film, but we watched anyway. It was the first time I'd seen you, Claire, in such a long time.

So many years gone. You were a woman in a black business suit. A stranger. Serious and pretty.

W
e left Seattle for this place where we were to start a family, where we were to be at peace, where we were to find relief from our terrors and our passions. But one day I returned home to find the house empty, and Tess replaced by a slip of paper.

And now here I am, a man alone in the woods writing to Tess and to Claire, to my mother and father. To you.

I am trying to hang on to order, to believe in it, but now that I have told you everything, I'm afraid I'm beginning to spin away into some foreign and frightening land.

I can feel the frame shuddering.

I am rapidly approaching the present.

I have come to the end and she has not returned and I do not know what to do next.

What should I do? Tell me, please.

Now that I have realized our nation's great dream. Now that I have pulled myself up by my bootstraps and worked hard and made of my life what I could. Now that I have money and quiet and a good place to live, what do I do?

What do I do if the love of my life has gone, and my parents are dead, and my sister has shunned me, and my friends have dissolved?

What do I do if I have come to the end of the story and there's nothing else to tell, what do I do next?

There is no way to change the will of others.

The whole thing is falling to pieces.

This story, this eulogy, this letter, this prayer. The foundation, the frame.

I am running out of energy. I am running out of faith. I can no longer understand the system. The logic is faulty.

What good are more anecdotes, more stories of our great love?

One more.

I will tell you one more. I promise it'll be brief. And then I'll let you be.

Just the recollection of a few hours of a single day.

We were in this house. A wild storm was blowing through. We were trapped inside. We were drinking. We were listening to music.

Tess closed her eyes and began to count backwards from fifty.

“Hide,” she said.

I was in the entryway closet where we kept our coats. She was calling to me, singing my names, and I was laughing from cabin fever or love or bourbon or joy and I couldn't stop. Soon she yanked the door open, and when she saw me there giggling like a little boy, she began to laugh and tackled me to the floor and we kept on like that until we had no more left. There were boots and shoes and sandals all around us. She reached up and pulled my father's old down parka from its hanger and covered us with it. Her hand above us on the sleeve. I pulled the door closed. The wind and rain and thunder were shaking the house.

We stayed on the floor for hours, breathing, bundled in the pitch dark listening to the storm.

I
have written you across time.

I have written you across my life.

I have gone to town.

I have taken care of the garden.

I have called Seymour, who is getting married.

I have called Hank, who is hanging on.

I have left messages for my sister, who still refuses to respond.

Perhaps one day, Claire.

I cannot fully explain it, but somehow I understand you. It is perhaps healthier to turn entirely away. Begin again from nothing. If I were capable of it, I think I'd like to do the same.

No matter how you live, there are casualties.

I have tried. I have tried to rid this house of its detritus. But there are objects I cannot burn. I don't know why that is. The books remain on their shelves. There are still matchbooks, feathers, champagne corks, photographs.

Despite my efforts, there is all the usual crap.

I want to burn the whole thing down. But I don't get very far.

The devices are easy.

My own clothes are easy.

I have fantasies of dying like my mother did. Leaving so few objects behind. It thrills me, this prospect. Give everything away.

Leave nothing behind but a pistol and a paper box of ash.

A legacy of bone.

I see the box, square and white on this table, and I feel calm. My own ashes here as a centerpiece. I feel chills of pleasure to think of it. Such clean simplicity.

And yet I cannot even take the books from the shelves. I can barely rid the house of anything that holds her mark.

The other night I sat outside with matches we'd kept from some lodge in Leavenworth. I burned them all at once on the deck, and only felt regret.

And now when I see the black mark on the wood, I think of them, and then of our room there, and then of Tess on a mountain path in the snow.

I dream of Tess in all the ways a person dreams: nightmare and vision, fantasy, hallucination and reverie.

It is no good.

You see how I am stuck?

Even if I have tried so hard to do so, even as I keep the .45 in front of me. I cannot rid myself of hope. And perhaps that's what nostalgia is. Perhaps that's what it is to be sentimental. An inability to abandon hope.

Look at my father. He died with a heart on fire, so full of faith in all of us, and our pure and fertile futures. He died believing we would all be happy, Tess and I and Claire. Seymour and Hank. Perhaps, even, my mother.

When I burn the feathers and the matches. When I burn the books, and all her fragrant clothes, the photographs and all her notes, that is when you might truly worry.

I
want you to know how it ends. Or how it ended for a while.

Just like that.

Suddenly.

Out of thin air.

The way my life has changed over and over again.

I go along and then there is horror.

I go along and then there is wonder.

It was late afternoon. Cool. A soft wind blowing through the apple trees. Hundreds and hundreds of high white clouds racing through the sky. Sunlight flashing across the house. I'd collected green beans from the garden and was sitting outside with a basket of them snapping off their ends. There was a cardinal flitting around, returning again and again to the same branch. I was talking to him. He was singing to me, cocking his head in that sweet cardinal way—human and questioning like an old man, half deaf. When he took off for the woods I looked up and there was Tess.

Is Tess.

Is Tess.

Is Tess.

As sudden as my mother's temper, as sudden as my mother's death, there was Tess at the edge of the clearing just as I had dreamed her. Well, no pistol, no saber, no stallion, but otherwise, just as I had dreamed her.

She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. Over it, her ragged army surplus jacket. The sleeves rolled up. Her hair cropped short again.

There was a dog at her side.

I was still, basket between my bare feet.

She was coming toward me, talking to the dog. The animal stopped first, raised its head and barked. Then Tess looked up. Both of them with a similar expression—heads canted at the same angle, gaze on the same line, mouths slightly open. Both were tense, muscles coiled, ready to spring.

And you know what I saw? Watching Tess Wolff in her boots and army jacket? The strangest thing: I saw my mother sitting on our front step in Capitol Hill in a red summer dress, the fabric drawn loosely between her knees, a blue bowl of cherries to her right, and she was pushing the pits out, dropping the flesh onto a white plate to her left, while Claire and I played in the spray of our Rain Bird.

I had been injected with the image, the needle slipped straight into my brain.

And it was not Tess who made me think of my mother.

It was me.

Or it was me through Tess's eyes.

I might have been wearing the same dress, dropping green beans into my lap, smiling at my knight errant returned from battle.

She stopped.

She was only a few yards away now.

Her skin was deep brown. Her hair gone greyer.

I saw her sailing some subtropical river.

Against her tan face, those green eyes appeared exaggerated, lit from within, the lines at their corners deeper, more beautiful.

Tess stopped, but the dog kept coming, tail down, head down, all curious submission. I reached and once he found me friendly, he began to wag what was left of his tail and nuzzle my leg. He flopped at my side and rolled over.

It was an Australian shepherd, barrel-chested, black and white and grey with one of those milky-blue eyes.

“What's his name?”

“Zeus.”

She smiled at me.

The dog looked at her, his head hanging upside down off the step.

She was still too far away to touch, standing in her boyish way, hip kicked to the right.

I said, “Is this as close as you're coming?”

She came near enough so that I could see the down on her arms. And then enough to touch. She pressed her hands against my thighs. She pulled herself forward by her nails until her balance was gone and she knocked me back and I had the full weight of her body.

“Joe,” she said, “Joe.”

It is not possible to translate into language what it was to feel her against me.

It is not possible to describe what it did to my skin, to my eyes, to my blood.

I can only tell you what I have always known, and what I knew again with such pure certainty: I would give anything for the full heat of her body.

There was nothing I would not do to have her.

No.
Have
is the wrong word.

There is nothing I would not do to be in contact with her. I would do anything to see her move, to listen to her speak. I would do anything to be near her.

Whatever she asks. Whatever she wants. No matter what.

There is nothing I would not do. Do you understand me? There is nothing.

I have given up.

We went to bed and I did not want anything else.

I did not want to know where she had been.

I did not want to know how long she would stay.

I wanted nothing else.

I have given in. I have given up.

We went to bed and I did not want anything more.

I have abandoned all of it: logic, control, and system.

In those first days I held onto her with such fierce and desperate strength.

We pressed so hard against each other. We were trying to make some seal, some perpetual lock. We were trying to make some absolute and final joining.

For nearly two years she was gone.

Now Tess is here. When I wake she is next to me.

E
very morning I run through the cool forest. Sometimes with wild brightness, sometimes dragging behind me the tar and the bird.

And when I return home Tess is there on the deck in the sun with her books.

In the evenings we cross our clearing and walk together along the elk trails while Zeus charges ahead.

L
ast week we drove all the way out to the coast and spent a thunderstorm getting drunk in the back of the Wagoneer while Zeus cowered and farted between us.

After the rain passed, we had the beach to ourselves. All three of us were delirious with joy, chasing seagulls, running in circles.