Shelter in Place (7 page)

If I were Tess? I'd have been thrilled to watch Joey March drive away. Thank God. Good fucking riddance to you and your crazy, murderous family and your fucking bird. Your
bird.
Who
cares
? Stand up and live. Enough with your whining and your moping and all your boring sadness and your exquisite sensitivity and your lunatic mother and your selfish sister and your pathetic father all alone in his prison-town dump. Good riddance, asshole. I'd have been dancing on the bar.

No matter what she saw in me, or what she said, how could she not have thought,
Good riddance
?

A
nd if she didn't then, she certainly has since. Days and days when I have been inert, pinned to the floor, unable to see. Days throughout our years, throughout our homes—Cannon Beach, White Pine, Seattle, and at last, here, in our house on the coast of our clearing. Days when all Tess wanted was to play, to go wandering our beaches, our woods.

“Please, Joe.”

When she wanted to laugh, when she wanted to fuck, when she wanted to wrestle, when she wanted to sing. Get up and do something about it, whatever
it
is, whatever people do.

But all I've ever known to do was run until my heart pounded it from my veins, or talk to Tess.

Or, in my way, to Claire.

It's the only medicine I've ever wanted.

Tess said, “Please, Joe.”

This is Seattle, years after moving there from White Pine. Years after abandoning our war, after we'd become adults, bar owners, earners. It is morning and I have woken up so heavy that I can feel it in my lips. From bed I watch Tess singing to herself, naked, packing her bag.

It has been difficult lately. We are working too hard. We've gone a little numb, lost so much of our former selves. And Tess wants to be away. Everything is arranged. We have a cabin on Whidbey Island for the weekend.

It has been a long time since I've seen her so light.

I want nothing more than to make her happy. I want nothing more than to leave with her, to stand and pick her up and spin her around.

But I cannot.

I will not do what she asks. I do not want the advice or medicine of others.

And when she sees my face, she closes her eyes and takes a long breath. I know the expression. She is out of patience. She is out of sympathy.

“Please, Joe,” she says, beginning to cry.

But I cannot.

And this time she goes anyway. Without me.

As well she should.

S
o I left Tess in that Cannon Beach parking lot and drove on with the image of her in torn jeans and that black sweater she loved.

And I was sorry to have done it to her. I was sorry to have drawn her down into our ugly muck. I was ashamed. I felt I had done her some kind of violence. So I drove on faster and faster, racing out of town, up the highway north toward White Pine.

I thought, the best thing, the kindest thing I can do at this moment in my life is to release Tess, free her of it all.

As if she were mine to release.

Whatever it did to my heart. No matter how that distance frightened me. I drove and I drove and I kept an eye on the mirror, on that unraveling spool of highway, that black path which ran from her big bare feet to the back wheels of my truck.

Against all instinct I never turned back.

Anyway, we weren't sentimental people.

There was only the future. For better or for worse. The past was dead. Sink or swim.

“Forward, Joey Boy, forward,” she said. Calling to me from her prison cell.

“Toward the future, Joey, Joey, Joe, drive toward the future,” she whispered.

Over the engine noise, my mother sang me all the way to White Pine.

I
t is a town tucked away twenty-five miles west of the 101 in a pocket of land where the highway breaks inland from the ocean. A protected cove, a natural harbor. Moored fishing boats, seafood restaurants. An aging wooden promenade. The Chowder Hound. Nick's Knacks selling postcards and disposable cameras. Wind chimes made of driftwood and oyster shells, spoons and sea glass. Carl's Clam Shack the only restaurant still open by the time I come to town red-eyed, miserable and starving.

In the afternoon sun, I sit at one of the red-varnished picnic benches and eat fried clams from a red plastic basket. It's the first thing I do. Drive into White Pine and have a late lunch while the gulls call and circle, their yellow eyes on my food.

My parents are in this town. I try to believe that. My father in his house. My mother in her cell. But it's a difficult thing to understand.

Somewhere here is a prison, and within it lives my mother. It seems impossible. As impossible as our house in Seattle emptied of all our things and a realtor sign stabbed in the front lawn. Or Claire refusing to come home, Claire marrying that pink-faced man in London.

Or Tess gone.

Or me gone from her.

Or my mother a killer.

I sit in the sun pushing the empty basket around the table trying to settle it all somehow.

I think of Tess. I wish for her. It does only harm. Still, I can't help myself wishing. And it's Tess that makes me saddest. Terrible as that sounds.

It takes all I have, but I stand up and I return to the truck and I go in search of my father.

The house is better than I expect. White with grey shutters on a street twelve blocks in from the beach. There's a picket fence and a short cement walkway to a red door. The front yard is scruffy and mostly dirt with a hardened pile of soil in one corner, a shovel stuck into it. This is not my father's abandoned project, I know. He doesn't leave things unfinished, wouldn't let soil go to waste. Would never leave a tool out to rust.

The paint is peeling on the door and on the pickets, but nothing serious, nothing he can't take care of. The Wagoneer is in the driveway and I'm parked in the street. It's a stranger's house, but it's not so bad. I expected maybe an apartment in one of those concrete and stucco blocks built around a half-drained swimming pool with some cheerful name painted next to the address—The Seaview, The Ocean Mist, The Dolphin Court. The kind of thing you see all over LA. I didn't want to find him in one of those places—bent over a hot plate, mattress on the floor, a folding chair at a card table. I'm relieved, but for too long I can't get out of the truck.

And when I do, pulling the handle, I can feel it start. This new life. What it means. The beginning of something else. I know that walking up the path and knocking on his red door is the next thing.

Behind it I'll see my father's eyes.

I'll find my mother in her cell.

I knocked and then there he was—tall and gaunt and brown eyes flat. He'd started to grow a beard again. The sandy scruff and blond hair falling around his face made him look pale and washed out.

“Joey,” he said, his voice so full of relief I didn't know what to do but hug him.

He kept his arm around my shoulder as he gave me a tour. His bedroom, his bathroom. My bedroom, my bathroom. A kitchen that opened to a living room. TV on a stand, tinfoil antenna, a bookcase full of paperbacks. A couch, easy chair, coffee table, fireplace.

“I rented it furnished,” he said.

“I can see that.”

“Sorry about the single bed.”

“It's great. You got lucky.”

“
We
did,” he said. “We did. Sit down.”

I dropped into the chair. An overstuffed thing, soft and worn, covered in brown corduroy. I watched him in the kitchen opening beers, shaking chips from a bag into a bowl. His posture was weaker. He moved slowly, everything delayed. He seemed to forget what he'd set out to do. He came back and put it all on the table and sat on the couch.

“To you,” he said with the clink of the bottles. “To my son.”

I told him about driving up the coast. I told him about meeting Tess, how I saw her across a crowded bar, the way I swallowed my fear and went to her.

I made it simple. I made it clean. I didn't tell him that there had been no fear to swallow. I scrubbed it of the madness and ecstasy. I told him about bartending and living in the motel. About walking along the beach, about Paul the dog. I told him about the bonfires, and the house and Tess's friends. I gave him a summer without complication, a summer of independence and falling in love.

“Joey,” he said. “What a time you had. It makes me happy to think of you there, doing all those things. Above all, in love. I'm sorry to make you leave it.”

“You didn't make me leave it. Everyone was going home anyway. It was getting cold.”

We talked around it and around it.

“Tell me about Tess,” he said. “What's she like?” He was watching me with just the start of a smile on his face. His lips together, his eyes bright again. “When do we get to meet her?”

We
.

I picked at the label.

He looked away. “Of course, she's welcome here.”

“Thanks.”

He shook his head, got up and walked into the dark kitchen. He was a ghost in that light. “I'm sorry, Joey.”

“There's nothing to be sorry for, Dad.”

“No?” He said it to the refrigerator shelves.

“What do you have to be sorry for?”

He came to the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room. He had a beer in each fist.

I knew he didn't understand. It was pure, incomprehensible mystery.

But I did. The shock I felt was brief. Like being punched in the head by a known enemy. Shock but no real surprise. No confusion. It was something like that. But my father, well, no layer of his being saw it coming. Not a molecule. Like being hit by a truck. One day you're walking down the street. One day, out of thin air, the phone rings.

I think it's what I understood that first night, in some stranger's corduroy chair, watching him in the kitchen. He was blind in his way. There were elements of himself he could not access. Or no. That's not right. Those elements were simply absent altogether. This, his great fortune. He was absent something his wife had in stores. Stores she shared with her son. My inheritance of fog. And my father in his new kitchen, his face turned to me, he had none of it.

I saw that then.

So I did not hurl my bottle through the front window. Instead, I tried to subtract the acid from my voice, and I asked again, “What do you have to be sorry for?”

He came out to the couch, put our fresh beers on the coffee table and sat down. He leaned forward as if about to speak, but then said nothing. He looked just like a boy then, slumped against the cushions, deflated, frustrated.

“There's nothing to be sorry for,” I told him.

“What's your plan?” He'd taken on the old voice again. Fatherly. Serious.

“I don't have a plan. I just got here.”

“Well, maybe you
should
have one,” he said.

I stared at him.

“I'm sorry.”

Both of us waited.

“Have you been out there? Dad, have you seen her?”

He nodded.

The house was so quiet. I couldn't look at him any longer.

I shut my eyes and found Tess, and the motel bed. Her cool hand on my calf. The black highway. The Clam Shack, the red baskets, my father's ghost in the kitchen. And across the expanse of the coffee table, I could hear his breathing. My diminished father breathing as the two of us waited in the night.

Soon he will go out to the truck, collect my things and deliver them to my new room. He'll move quietly as I fade in and out of sleep. He will turn on a lamp and light a fire. I will fall deeper. I will dream. Some of this I will know by the sound, by the smell. Some I will only know later, when I find my clothes folded and stacked in the yellow dresser, my shoes neatly arranged on the floor of the closet, my jacket on a hook. Some I know in recollection, which is perhaps not to know at all.

But all of it happened.

In one way or another, it all happened: me, my mother, Dustin Strauss, Tess, Claire, the small fire, the smell of smoke, that soft chair, my father taking so much care to be quiet, to put my clothes away, to keep me warm.

T
hat first morning in my father's new house, I lay in bed and remembered him teaching me to swim. First waking after having slept deeply, then opening my eyes to an unfamiliar ceiling, and its coastline crack curving from wall to wall. Waking to that memory—the two of us in a public pool.

The hot concrete deck beneath my feet, the soft water, the lifeguards in their black sunglasses and red trunks, twirling their whistles, towering above me, my father's hand, my arms around his neck, skin that smelled so much of him and was so warm, us two descending, hanging on tight as he walked us step by step toward the menacing deep end, where the older boys dove for weighted rings, where he swung me around to his back and said, “Hang on, engine starting,” as his feet came up and him breaststroking while I sputtered speedboat sounds, until we made it back to the shallows where I pretended to keep my eyes closed calling “Marco”
 
and him gliding away saying “Polo” on and on until he let me catch him and climb his shoulders and crash into the water again.

I am walking alone to the concession stand, knowing he is watching me, pretending not to be afraid, standing on my toes now, reaching up to exchange the damp dollar bills for an ice cream sandwich and then returning, slaloming through the chairs, between towels, giddy for the achievement, and my father smiling at me as I walk-don't-run, walk-don't-run as quickly as I can. The folded paper, the Carnation rose, hospital corners, the delicate task of removing the wrapper without leaving any of it stuck to the cookies, the taste of it, the texture and always preferring the sandwich deep-frozen and stale.

The warmth of the towel around my shoulders as I fall asleep watching him read
Sports Illustrated
, wishing I had one more ice cream, knowing it would not be allowed.