The Constant Heart (6 page)

I bought some Reese's Peanut Butter Cups at the Russian's, a six-pack that he probably got at Costco, and for some reason he gave me a break on the price. At the supermarket I got some medium-absorbent Tampax, some toothpaste, mouthwash, and a toothbrush. My father had given me fifty dollars in cash, which I put in the bag with the other stuff and hoped no one would steal it. Then I went to the Staples down the street and got a notebook, a pen, and some glue. I don't know why I got the glue. It sat in the bag with the other stuff, its little bottle with the flat nipple-like thing at the end, and I took the bus out to the Dukakis Center for Troubled Girls. No barbed wire or anything like that, but a fence around it that looked like one around a new tennis court. Some trees had just been planted and were held up by guy-wires that had little pieces
of hose around the places where the wire touched the trees, so as not to hurt them. The bus stopped and I got off its steps, which were black and worn. The bus pulled away, leaving a cloud of exhaust, which had a smell of the future about it: something burning and ominous in a way I couldn't sum up but which left me uneasy.

It was a new building, made of cinder blocks and with doors painted cheerful colors, which made you feel like you had ants or grit in your sandwich. The walk to the front door didn't go in a straight line, but in a long, lazy S, as though to show that the path of life wasn't always straight, as though any young woman who came to this place didn't know that. The grass was thick and beautifully mowed, and the surprising thing was that to the touch it seemed real. No AstroTurf. But grass.

A woman who could easily have been Mrs. Kilmer's cousin sat at the reception desk. The room itself was painted a pastel green, sort of like the best possible version of money, and as I came in the door, the voices of young women, from the gym behind the reception desk, came into the room. I guessed they were playing volleyball.

“I'd like to see someone,” I said to the woman at the reception desk, who went right on typing at her computer, a new one with a flat screen, when she said, “Are you a family member or immediate relative or has your visit been approved by the court or a probation officer?”

“I'd like to see Sara McGill,” I said. The paper of my bag made a sad wrinkling.

“Are you a family member or immediate relative . . . ”

“No,” I said.

Her eyes, dark as ink in a bottle, turned in my direction.

“Then what are you?”

“Just a boy. A friend.”

“Hmpf,” she said. “Forget it. You don't get to see her unless you are an immediate family member or your visit is approved by a probation . . . ”

The bag made a crinkling noise as I put it on the counter in front of the computer. Then I took out the notebook and wrote in it, “I love you,” and pushed it back in the bag.

“Can you give this to her?” I said.

“Does it contain contraband, metal, knives, weapons, inflammable material, controlled substances, or other items on this list . . . ?”

She gave me a clean, crisp list.

“No,” I said.

“OK,” she said. “I'll give it to her. No personal messages though.”

She reached into the bag, took out the notebook, ripped out the page, and gave it back to me.

The bus didn't come for an hour, and as I sat on the bench I put the paper on the seat next to me. The idea, when you made one of those origami things that Sara made, was to start with a fold that made a sort of triangle, although you had to fold the bottom of it to get it even. I creased the edge with my thumbnail and folded it again, each step coming without even thinking about it until I was left with a heavy, small triangle, just like the ones she had thrown up to the window of the women's prison. Then the bus came and I climbed the steps through the cloud of exhaust that swept up from the rattling exhaust pipe.

T
HEN , ONE MORNING, as though my father had gotten through a moment of profound confusion, he came into the kitchen and kissed my mother on the cheeck and she seemed so glad to have him do that. She said, “Well, Romeo, what's gotten into you this morning?” as though it was a joke that he already knew the punch line to. He sat down and whistled, “Oh, what a beautiful mornin', oh, what a beautiful day . . . ”

A letter from Sara came a week later, and it said, “You know, they must think I'm dim or something here because the first thing I did was run a pencil back and forth on the first page of the notebook, where I could see an indentation, like someone had written something on the first page but it had been torn out. And they left the little lacy stuff in the spiral part of the notebook when you tear a sheet out. So I got your message. Sweetheart. We should have been more honest. And, get this, Mr. Junior Astronomer, how about unintended consequence? Now that I'm in here, I can see something I didn't really understand before. You were always curious about that
Constant thing. You know, Einstein's attempt to make something work. Well, how did that come out? Sara.”

The letter was on stationery that was so thin you could almost see through it. The return address was her name, the address of the place, and a number, too. That number would have made Mrs. Kilmer happy.

I wrote back and said that I didn't know about the Constant, not yet. And after a few weeks, she wrote back to say, “Well, Jake, do me a favor. Find out, will you? It would be nice to have something to depend on.”

Then I put the next letter I wrote in an envelope with her number on it, too, in addition to her name.

I worked through the calculus books I stole from the bookstore, and then began with integral equations. I liked calculus because it showed how one thing was related to another.

Sara's letter arrived, and my father brought it in and put it on the graph paper where I was working out a problem, and he didn't say a word, not about the handwriting, which was done so carefully as to seem awkward, since you could see the line she had drawn to make the letters straight and hadn't been able to erase, although you could see she had tried. And he didn't say anything about the number.

“Well, you let me know when you find out what that Constant thing really means,” she wrote. “And get this. Now my mother writes to me.” Some spots were here and there where some moisture had gotten on the paper and had dried. They left a little wrinkle. “But Jake, you're the only one who ever kept his word to me. I asked for help. You gave it. Or you and your father. So, good luck, Mr. Junior Astronomer. Everyone in this place reads the
National Enquirer
,
Star
,
Globe
,
and the
National Examiner
. I'm going to get out of here and get famous. Do you know how much money there is in being famous? How about a screenplay? I've got a killer idea. I'm going to make you proud. Sara.”

T
HE MIDDLE FORTIES and early fifties are a hard time for a man, although I didn't know that at the time. When Sara got arrested, my father was a wildlife biologist, as I've said, and he worked for the state. There were things he knew that no one else did, particularly about certain birds, such as ruffed grouse, and fish, too, such as brook trout. He had done a paper on bears and what seemed like their random attacks. A lot of it had to do with garbage that the bears ate and how doing this made them lose their fear of people. He also found that the smoke from burning trash when there was food in it seemed to make them very cranky. The study about random attacks had been published in the
U.S. Journal of Wildlife
and had been translated into German, which he was pretty proud of. This German magazine came with the pages uncut, and he sat at the kitchen table with a steak knife, slipping it in between the uncut sheets and slicing them with a slow, constant, and careful motion. He had a drink when he did this and took a particular delight in the roughness of the cut pages.

He was an assistant district commissioner, and an opening came up for the commissioner's job. One of the advantages of the commissioner's job was that my father would get a car and a cell phone, and he would have a secretary, too. So, after he put in for the job we played a game in which he sat on the back steps of our house and pretended that he was driving the commissioner's car, and I would be a state trooper who had stopped him for speeding. He told me who he was, and I'd say, “Well, excuse me, Mr. Commissioner. I will know better in the future and will remember the car. Have a good day.” This was about three years before Sara was arrested, and so I must have been fourteen, but even then I thought this was the kind of thing an eight-year-old would have done. But we were tense, and when you are tense you often don't know what to do and so you act stupid.

In the evening, my mother would say to him, “Any word?”

“No,” he said. “Not yet. I've heard, though, that they have stopped interviewing.”

“That's a good sign,” said my mother.

“Yes. I think so,” he said. “It's possible.”

Then he told me a story about a fish that someone had caught, one that was ugly and deformed and probably caused by a pesticide that the potato farmers were using on Japanese beetles. Or by the nuclear power plant that was upstream on the river. He brought a fish like this home once, a creature that had a hump on its side and iridescent scales the color of a housefly. One eye was clouded over, just like it had been cooked. I took the thing out to the garage and looked at its skin with a magnifying glass, and in its mouth, too. Scales like a rainbow. Big ridges in its mouth.

My father sat on the back steps when I came home from school. I used to come in quietly sometimes, and this time I wish I hadn't. He was on the back steps, looking at the empty field, the place where those sheep had been when everything had seemed so filled with hope and possibility. When he saw me, he turned away. His expression was one I had seen before, as though someone had slipped that viper into his chest and it was moving around, although I saw now what it cost him to pretend it wasn't there.

“Who did they give it to?” I said.

“Frank Ketchum,” he said.

“That asshole?” I said. “What does he know about brook trout?”

“He has a degree in business from Stanford,” said my father.

He made a sound, not a sigh exactly, but more like the first breath of surprise perfectly imbued with a long-held suspicion.

“Frank Ketchum is an asshole,” I said.

“I don't know, Jake,” he said. “You get to a certain point in life and you realize things are going to stop. You hit a wall. Nothing new will happen.”

He was afraid to touch me for fear I would pull away. But I wasn't old enough to do anything aside from going on about Frank Ketchum, which, of course, didn't help. The worst thing, I suppose, was that I was a little ashamed, because things were supposed to advance in a certain way and the fact that he didn't get the job just showed that we weren't advancing as everybody else was, and that meant there was something wrong with us, didn't it? Well, everyone knows how brutal things can be. Either you're in or you're out, and if you're out, God save you.

The odd thing is that Frank Ketchum died of a heart attack a couple of years later when he was at a convention of state commissioners. This was just after Sara had been arrested. Ketchum died in a room with a nineteen-year-old hooker, who at first just thought, as the police said, that Ketchum was very satisfied, and she was waiting around for a tip. When my father heard of Ketchum's heart attack he said something that made me certain I would never be ashamed of him.

He said: “That's a shame.” He said it as sincerely and as definitely as anything I have ever heard. When I heard his voice, I immediately thought of that region of space where galaxies collided in a gilt-colored mist. But that's what he taught me and one of the things that is disparaged these days. A standard of behavior, of feeling, of knowing that when you feel a nasty thing, or screw someone over to get ahead, it isn't that you are getting somewhere, but are being reduced, made into less of a human being. The notion of dignity, these days, is a hard one; it's this tension that makes it hard to be a decent man. Of course, it is difficult to have beliefs that are hard to live up to, but sucking it up and going about your business aren't looked upon as anything but the kind of thing a foolish man does.

This time, when the commissioner's job came available, my father didn't apply for it, but they offered it to him anyway, and he took it, not with the same joy as he would have had the first time, but with the air of a man trying on an expensive secondhand suit.

We used to go fishing from time to time at a place called Furnace Creek, and what my father said when he heard about
the job was, “Jake, you know what? Furnace Creek is going to be in my territory. What do you think of them apples?”

My mother brought home a bottle of champagne, already chilled. My father opened it. They sat at the kitchen table, and my father said, “I guess we can get the house painted.”

“Yes,” said my mother. “It's funny how things work out.”

My father had a glass of the champagne, the little bubbles in it looking polished.

“Do you think the police told Ketchum's wife about the prostitute?” my mother said.

“Yes,” I said, “I bet they did.”

My father looked at me. He sat down at the table.

“Hmpf,” he said. “Well. I guess they did.”

“They wouldn't let a chance like that slip by,” I said.

“No, of course not,” said my father. “Understanding comes at a price, huh, Jake?”

“What price?” said my mother. “What are we talking about?”

“The price is knowing the cops would blab,” my father said to me. “Isn't that right? You know that cruelty has an instinct to show itself. Goddamn it.”