The From-Aways (2 page)

I sometimes worry what we’ve got ourselves into.

It was my idea to move here. Because even though I am good at many things, it wasn’t until there was Henry that I enjoyed any of them. From the moment I met Henry he made everything seem realer, better. He reminded me that all the people on the streets and subways were actual people, not just a crowd to push through. He found delivery sashimi more miraculous than the moon landing. From my bed, he’d open the slatted blinds I never touched and sit cross-legged, looking out the window of my twelfth-floor apartment while totally naked.
Are you aware the neighbors can see you right now?
I’d say, pulling the covers around myself. But Henry didn’t care. He’d point at the slash of cloud and blue visible between the buildings and remind me that it was incredible, us floating twelve stories above the earth in a gently swaying tower.

Henry reminded me that I was a human being, on a planet, with a body. And when he put his hands on my body I felt myself returning to it. My self who too often lives only in my brain and forgets about the rest of me. Henry was always in a state of wonder about the city, my city, and he saw it in ways I never had: looking straight through the sidewalks and subway tunnels to the black earth underneath. I started seeing things Henry’s way, the realer, better way, and found I wanted more of this. I thought, What could be realer or better than moving to Maine where he is from?

I knew Maine was the best place because of the stories Henry told. He lay around my apartment, hand behind his head and T-shirt riding up to expose a trail of fur, and he spun me stories. Back home, someone found a yellow diamond the size of an egg in a shark’s belly. Back home, the old woman who ran the lighthouse could be seen drinking coffee with the ghost of her dead husband at night. Back home, there were moose the size of Mack trucks. Back home, everyone owned land. Back home, everyone knew each other and said hello.

I’d jump on him, clumsy because I am tall and sometimes forget what to do with my limbs. I’d pin him there and say,
It’s not really like that, though, is it? Did all that really happen?

Sure it did, bub,
he’d say, and swat me on the butt. Then I’d settle into the crook of his arm and make him tell it all again. Menamon sounded magical. For months I demanded these stories over and over. Soon I could imagine Menamon so completely that I knew it was the right place to live. I practically lived there already.

Let’s go there,
I said.

I throw off my blanket. I can barely hear the ocean from here, but the steel bell buoys ring out a baritone song, one note for each time the waves rock the buoy. It’s a deep, echoing sound I found haunting until Henry explained that the noise is meant to let ships know they’re too close to shore when visibility is bad. I thought that was nice.
Dong, dong,
you’re too close.
Dong, dong,
it’s all right, just turn away, we’re watching out.

I listen and stare at Henry’s back. He is teaching me these things he already knows so that I can make a home here. I reach out and run my fingers over his back so just the finger pads are touching. Henry is still, but I trail my fingers between his shoulder blades that just barely protrude, like vestigial wings. I follow the vertebrae of his spine down to the small of his back where the bones disappear beneath the surface.

“Were you drawing a sailboat?” Henry asks.

I wasn’t, but suddenly I wish I was. “A sailboat would be like this,” I say, and trace a boat body shaped like lemon wedge. I add a tall mast and two triangular sails. They would be white, if they weren’t invisible. I move my finger in a curved but unbroken line along his lower back.

“Those are the waves,” he says. “I can feel them.”

“Yes,” I say. “Those are the waves.”

2

Quinn

I
went to find my father because my mother was the most beautiful dead woman I knew and I thought someone should tell him she was gone. If he had plans to make amends, I figured he should know it was now too damn late.

Not that I thought he had plans.

Listen, between Mom’s hospital bills and my college tuition, we broke even. I got a mediocre journalism degree. She got the best care the state of Connecticut could provide and a weeping willow planted over her plot. I asked her, Couldn’t we get a nice dogwood or maybe a cherry? A weeping tree seemed maudlin.

She said,
Won’t you cry when I’m gone?

I said,
Well, yeah, but could you stop being so goddamn macabre?

She said,
I’ve indentured a tree to do the grieving so you won’t have to.

Okay,
I said,
okay. We’ll get a willow
.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a cemetery that will let you plant a tree over someone’s grave?

I know three things about my father:

1. He used to be a folk singer.

2. He named me Quinn, after the Dylan song about the Eskimo (just what every little girl dreams: igloos, pigeons, and shitty acoustics).

3. He was born in Menamon, Maine. He moved back there to live between gigs ever since he split from my mom, right after I was born. Carter and Marta were believers in loving free and easy. No papers between them. Just me.

M
Y MOTHER
’
S OBITUARY
ran in the local paper. It was the normal rigmarole about her being an art teacher and a mother and dying of cancer, but the last line was the kicker:
Marta Winters is perhaps best known as the “whiskey-eyed dame” in Carter Marks’s 1960s anthem, “Leave Your Shoes Behind.”

That line was removed by the obituaries editor twice during revisions and both times Marta insisted it be put back in. I know, because I was the obituaries editor. Twenty-two-year-olds with journalism degrees often get their start in obituaries, or so I was told by the
Fairhaven Hour
. I think Marta wanted that last bit included because she hoped Carter would take notice. Like he’s reading the
Hour
. Like anyone reads obituaries.

After she died, I found a note she’d left me. I braced myself. I assumed it would be a teary missive full of loving words and advice for the future. But when I tore open the envelope it wasn’t even a letter. It wasn’t typed or signed or dated or any of the things a deathbed mother-daughter letter should be. It was a scrap of yellow-lined paper and she’d scrawled on it, so sloppy it seemed like an afterthought:
Go see your father, please.
I put the note away in Marta’s sock drawer, shoved between the balled woollies and bright hippie stripers. She’d never before suggested I do anything like this, and I felt so cheated out of a real letter, or any parting affection at all, that I came close to crumpling the paper and chalking the whole thing up to terminal delusion.

But something kept nagging at me. Yes, Marta was crazy, but hers was a crazy with reasons behind it. A month later, I was sure of it: Marta was trying to show me something. I dug the note out of her socks and I taped it to the television set so I could see it while I watched. After I sold the TV, I left it in different kitchen cabinets—next to Marta’s jars of pickles, or taped to a canister of flour. Then, the house was all packed up. Sold. There were all these boxes headed for storage, and that note.

It was the
please
that got me. You’ve got to understand, Marta never said please. She must have spoken the word before, but when I sat there with the note in her still-unmade bed and tried to recall a single individual instance, I couldn’t. So I packed one duffel bag and my father’s old guitar, Marta’s note slipped into the case. I decided to go find Carter—and to get a new job, at the
Menamon Star
.

T
HE
S
TAR
OFFICE
is small and the staff nonexistent. A she-editor named Charley Lynch runs the place and is too young to have doomed herself with an editorial position like this. But who am I to judge with my portfolio that is, literally, DOA? I watch Charley’s face for signs of approval as she looks through my folder, but what qualifies me for this job has nothing to do with my clippings. I want to say:
Listen, I’ve watched
All the President’s Men
more than twenty times and I know everything about how this works already. I’ve studied Woodward. I’ve studied Bernstein. I’m an investigative reporter. Just watch me.
I want to say:
Those guys? The way they throw down like nothing matters? The way they fuck up left and right but always come through in the end? I am those guys. This is what qualifies me.

“All these clips are about dead people,” Charley says. She’s wearing jeans so worn they’re almost white and brown duck boots. Her hips are wide; they make her look battle-ready. She appraises me with a stare that leaves no barrier between her judgment and my face, and I like this. I want the respect of this woman, just to have it, like a lucky green penny in my pocket I could pull out from time to time and say,
Look, this is something I’ve got.

Charley sighs. “You’re hired,” she says.

“What’s my beat?” I ask.
No obituaries, no obituaries,
I telegraph silently.

“Beat?” Charley says. “Your beat is to find some news in this godforsaken excuse for New England idyll. And much luck to you.”

I
THOUGHT IT
would be hard to find him but it says
CARTER MARKS
right on the damn mailbox. Driving from the
Star
to my new place, I’m taking a hairpin turn, braking into it and ready to zoom out with my wits about me, when I see it. I’m used to seeing his name in newspaper articles, on late-night radio shows, in used-record bins, but the mailbox is a first.

I brake. I let the car idle. The mailbox has a stuffed fox wired to the post. Its glass eyes glint at my low beams. The drive is gravel, red lollipop reflectors all bent to hell along the sides. The trees are tall and thick here and the house is surrounded by a wall of juniper bushes. Through the branches I can see that the roof dips low at its center and clots of lichen spread outward like a saddle. It looks uninhabitable.

I have an impulse to march in and do this right now, but sometimes I also feel like screaming loudly in silent movie theaters or leaping over railings at the mall. What I’m saying is that this is not a healthy impulse. Even if I got so far as knocking on his door, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. I’ve been working my speech over in my mind, and it’s not quite done yet. Actually, it’s less of a speech and more of an ode, to my mother. More of a song, really, but fuck if I’m going to sing to that man. Fuck if he’ll ever hear the sound of my voice outside the tirade of life-smashing information I’m going to deliver to him like a smiting angel with a badass sword.

Maybe I won’t even tell him my speech. Maybe when I do go down his creepy fox driveway, I’ll go like a soldier. I’ll unfold a piece of paper and eyeball it the way those sad-eyed boys do in the war movies. Carter Marks? I’ll say. And when he says yes I won’t even spare a glance to see if our noses are the same or if I got my green eyes from him. I’ll just inform him in my most official way that Marta is dead. And that she was beautiful. And that he is a total fool for using her so cheaply. Wringing a song out of her, knocking her up, and then leaving once there was no more juice to the squeeze. That he never really loved her at all, and I want nothing to do with him.

Although I am curious about the fox. Whether or not taxidermy runs in the family is the sort of thing I’d like to know.

R
OSIE AND
I live above the Stationhouse Café, where she waits tables. Our apartment shakes when the local passes through, but this is nowheresville, so that’s only four times daily. In the online listings, hers was the only apartment under
MENAMON (West)
. The subject read,
Area Girl of Little Means Seeks Same as Roommate
.

Rosie’s room has a single bed with pink sheeting that’s twisted into knots by morning because she thrashes like a demon in her sleep. She has postcards from her parents taped to the wall. Rosie grew up here but her parents moved to Florida a year back, right after she graduated from high school. She refused to go with them because she thinks Florida is where people go to die. She ticks off on her fingers: skin cancer, alligators, syphilis-carrying mosquitoes, retirement homes. “Besides,” she says, “there’s nothing less appealing than a man in Bermuda shorts offering you a drink made from bananas.”

I think she means encephalitis-carrying mosquitoes, but I don’t have the heart to correct her. Rosie is nineteen. She started working at the Stationhouse right after high school. She comes home from work smelling like coffee and the butter the café fries their eggs in. “This job is ruining my complexion,” she says. Rosie says she’s going to be a famous singer when she grows up, so her complexion is of paramount importance. She sings in the shower and likes to wear a shower cap because if she takes a bow at the end of a song, the drumming of water on plastic sounds like applause.