The Humanity Project (8 page)

There were the sounds of water flushing and running. When Linnea came out, Art was relieved to see that she’d gotten rid of the sunglasses. “So, you hungry? Anything you have a taste for?”

“Food.”

“I mean, anything in particular? Thai? Seafood? Mexican? Burgers? Sushi? Ethiopian?” He thought he saw one corner of her mouth lift, a half-smile. It was like trying to win over a bored class. Clowning often worked. “Italian? Indian? Nicaraguan? Greek? Pizza?”

“Honestly, just grub.”

“We’ll head down to the café, then.” He’d save any fancy waterfront dining or expeditions into the city for later.

They were back in the car when she said, “So, what am I supposed to call you?”

“What?”

“I mean, I don’t think I can manage ‘Dad.’”

“Well . . . Art, then. And when you figure out what name you want to go by, let me know.”

He’d meant that to be a joke, sort of, but she wasn’t going for it. He was beginning to see how having a teenager might be the equivalent of having a bad class in permanent session. There was much that seemed typically kidlike about her, the studied boredom and remoteness. Then there was the odd flash of wised-up humor, and the suggestion of something else unknown, down there deep in the water.

It was only a five-minute drive to the downtown district and the café, but he felt the need to break the silence. “It’s kind of a neat little town. We have a big film festival. Art festival.” That didn’t sound nearly as interesting as he’d wanted it to. “This place, the café, sometimes they have live music.” He was pretty sure it would be the wrong kind of music. “There’s a bookstore too,” he added. Bookstores, the last desperate throw of the dice.

The sun had gone down, the soft coastal fog was blurring the twilight, and lights were bright in the plaza and the shops surrounding it. The tops of the mountains overhead were black and mysterious. All in all it was just about the prettiest place he’d ever lived, and he hoped his daughter would see it with friendly eyes. She took in downtown’s lineup of superheated boutiques—apparel, jewelry, antiques, gourmet pet food—without comment. Art said, “We have real stores too. Like, Safeway.”

“Ha-ha,” Linnea said politely.

In fact Mill Valley was one of those odd mixes of wealth and distress. The truly rich had houses up in the hills, while those like himself got by in their odd corners. People in tennis clothes drank white wine in the restaurants at one o’clock in the afternoon. But in the parking lot adjacent to Art’s apartment building, a man had lived for some months in a huge stationary white Lincoln, attending to his private business in the line of bushes between the parking lot and the busy street. The scruffy man seated at the café’s entrance, slurping coffee, might have been down on his luck, or just as easily a famous inventor of computer software.

Art and Linnea stood in line to order their dinner (he got pasta, she salad and a cup of soup), then found a table. Their food came, and they ate. Louise was right, she didn’t seem to be finicky about her food, just bore down on it. He was trying to decide if she was pretty. If you had to think about it, he guessed the answer was no.

They were nearing the end of their meal, and Art felt a rising panic: they would have to speak. Linnea was poking at the wet remains of her salad, slouching in such a way that he was reminded posture was one of those things parents were meant to monitor. He decided he’d skip that one. “So,” he began, a dumb, lurching start. “There’s probably some things we should talk about.”

“Mom told you to get after me about my hair, didn’t she?”

“No, that didn’t come up.”

“Because she’s been this huge, frigging bitch about it. Is it OK if I swear?”

“We can get to that later,” Art said, already feeling helpless. Nothing was going to come easy here. “I think your hair’s fine. I assume it will grow out eventually.”

“Huh. So what did she tell you?”

“That you were unhappy.”

For a moment her face was a child’s face, something you could love and protect. Then the wised-up expression descended like a screen. “So? That’s not some crime.”

It was going to be trench warfare. Hand-to-hand combat. She wasn’t going to give any ground easily. “Right,” Art said. “No criminality. I’m thinking about getting dessert. You want anything?”

She shook her head, and Art got up to study the dessert specials written on the menu board. When he got back to the table with his slice of chocolate torte, she was gone.

Bathroom, he told himself, but he waited a long time, watching other girls and women come and go, before he was convinced she wasn’t inside.

He got up to look in the adjoining bookstore. People often browsed there, bought newspapers to read in the café. He didn’t find her, nor was she in the plaza outside, where people were doing placid, summer-evening things like eating ice cream and pushing baby strollers. Here was a kid around Linnea’s age playing a guitar with noisy enthusiasm. A few other kids were gathered around him in an admiring circle, but none of them was a girl with purple-fringed hair.

Truly alarmed now, Art made a circuit of the building and the surrounding parking lots, calling for her: “Linnea?” Then he returned to the café to see if she’d come back. There was no sign of her.
A person in need of supervision.
He didn’t even know the number of her cell phone. He talked to the restaurant workers, explaining that his daughter was new in town and might have gotten lost, and would they call him if they saw her?

Art walked back to their parking spot to see if she might have misunderstood him, if she’d said No, she didn’t want any dessert, she’d wait for him at the car. She wasn’t there. What if she entirely disappeared, Gretel lost in the deep forest? For two or three hours he’d had a daughter, but it had all been a mistake, a kind of optical illusion. He stopped on the dark sidewalk, trying to calm himself and talk himself in off the ledge of anger and panic. She’d done some aggravating teenage thing and wandered off. They’d have to have a talk about rules, once he decided what those would be.

He doubled back to the café. The guitar-playing kid in the plaza hadn’t seen her, nor was she in the corner coffee shop, nor standing in line for ice cream. Did she even have any money? She might have been abducted, picked up by somebody. She might have gone with them willingly. She might have planned something like this all along.

After an hour of tracking up and down on foot, he got in the car and cruised the streets, expanding his circle each time, heading uphill, then down again toward the flats, keeping an eye out for kids or groups of kids, those congregating at the 7-Eleven, or in parking lots. He got on 101 and drove for a short distance south, thinking she might have hitchhiked into the city. But then, he had no idea what she might do, since he had no clear idea of Linnea herself.

By nine o’clock the café had closed and the crowds in the plaza had gone home. There would have to be calls made, to the police. To Louise. One more time he had failed and been found wanting. This would only be a different way of saying it.

Because he could not bear to make these calls just yet, and because he couldn’t think of anybody else who might help him, he called Christie. He interrupted her chiming hello, he had a problem, a problem with his daughter, he couldn’t find her. He hurried his story, interrupting himself, and stopped only when Christie said, “Do you want me to ask her friend if she knows anything?”

“Her friend?”

“There’s a girl sitting on your steps smoking a cigarette.”

Art’s chest opened up and his heart flew out, cawing and flapping. “What does she look like?”

“Oh I don’t know. Like the punks. You know, every day is Halloween. Black everything.”

“Purple hair?”

“I’d say it’s more of a fuchsia.”

“That’s her.”

“I don’t think so. Are you OK, Art? You sound like you’re catching a cold or something. I thought maybe she was Linnea, I stuck my head out to say hello, but she says her name’s Megan.”

M
ost nights, his dad fell asleep on the couch and woke at the ghost hour of two or three or four a.m. Conner would hear him in the kitchen or the bathroom, or flipping through the television channels. The pain pills knocked him out for a while, then the pain bled through. By the time Conner got up in the morning, his dad was asleep again, with his mouth frozen open in such a way that Conner always checked to make sure he was still breathing.

His mom wanted him to come live with her in Nevada. He put her off by telling her he had to take summer courses so he could graduate. By August he’d be eighteen, an adult, and nobody could make him do anything.

Even if some things had been his dad’s fault, that didn’t mean he deserved to get thrown out like some embarrassing kind of garbage.

This morning was like most others: Conner fed the dog, got himself showered and dressed, and made coffee. Coffee was something he was training himself to like. It went along with working. He ate some cereal standing at the kitchen counter, then put together a couple of sandwiches for lunch. The dog was getting excited at the prospect of going with him, but Conner told him No. Not today. The dog settled back into his corner. He was a dog who was used to disappointments.

Conner went into the living room and stood over the couch. “Dad?”

His dad didn’t stir. He slept on his side with his bad hip in the air and his face pressed into the couch cushions. A white paste had accumulated at the corners of his mouth. The pills gave his sweat a particular smell, like fruit going bad. Conner left a note for him on the kitchen counter: Call me when you wake up.

Floyd had found Conner a couple of weeks’ work in Corte Madera, helping a guy Floyd knew do some roofing. It was hard, hot work, and Floyd’s pal was only too happy to let Conner know everything he was doing wrong. But he’d get paid cash, and maybe it would lead to other jobs, and a little more money, and a little more time they could keep treading water. People did whatever they had to do. He understood that now.

Sometimes he thought about all the really miserable parts of the world, Africa or India or wherever else you were supposed to send your charitable donations, places with water buffalo and mud huts and dying children. At least there it would be obvious you were stinking poor, and you wouldn’t have to pretend otherwise. Here in America, you could walk around looking pretty much like everybody else.

He took the Corte Madera exit and drove west, then doubled back north, up the hill to the job site. They were still doing tear-off, and the dumpster was half full of the old shingles and sheathing. It was early and the roofing boss wasn’t there yet, so Conner got out to stand in the driveway and admire the expensive view, the hillsides falling away below him, dense with treetops, the smell of eucalyptus and fog in the air. It had been a wet spring, and the grass in the narrow yard was still green and growing.

Say he lived in a house like this. Say this very one. He let the notion expand in him. This was his patio of tumbled brick laid out in a cunning circular pattern, and his grand expanse of triple-sealed glass across the front wall. His well-raked garden beds, and visible through the half-open garage door, his sweet, sweet Porsche.

He moved a little closer to the windows, trying not to be obvious about looking inside. Here were things everybody wanted and nobody needed, furniture made of leather and glass, a television like a big black sculpture. He guessed he’d have stuff like that, sure. But not all the gold-framed this-and-that. Or the antique clock, or the miniature sailboat. It was amazing, the things people went out and bought, instead of holding on to actual money.

Something moved toward him on the other side of the glass, and Conner took a stumbling step back, ready to pantomime some explanation or apology: he wanted to see what time it was? But it was only a parrot, a big red and green macaw, sidling at him along its perch, wings raised to scare him, and opening its beak so that Conner saw its small shriveled black tongue.

His dad called later in the morning. Conner was up on the roof with a pry bar and the boss was loafing in his truck. If he didn’t keep making noise, the boss would poke his head out to see why not. “Hi Dad. I can’t talk long.”

“How’s it going today?”

“Not bad.” Conner one-handed some shingles onto the pile below. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine and dandy. Dandy and fine.” His dad took different pills, and some of them made him kind of goofy. “If the sheathing looks good, you can leave it on.”

“No, it’s all coming off.”

“I bet what’s-his-ass priced it that way before he even looked at it.”

“Uh-huh.” The truck’s door opened. “I gotta go, I’ll call you later, OK?”

“This is the life, I tell you. Lie around while somebody else works.”

For his lunch break, Conner drove downhill and ate his sandwiches at a bench in the waterfront park. It was only the third day of the job, and he guessed he should get used to feeling this sore.

Except for two kids walking their hyper little spitz dog, the park was empty. It was low tide, even in this small inlet of the bay there were tides, and the spit of land was surrounded by weedy mud. At a distance, the southbound 101 traffic passed over an elevated span, into the city and the million different lives people there led. There were so many things he tried not to think about.

Something tapped against the back of the bench, then skittered away. Somebody behind him had thrown a wood chip at him, and now another. Conner turned around. A girl stood on the far edge of the pathway. She had a handful of chips and was preparing to sidearm another in his direction.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.” She dropped the chips and looked out over the mudflats, which suddenly interested her. “This is a really ugly park.”

“It’s just low tide.”

She wrinkled her nose. “It smells gross.”

“Sorry.”

“Well it’s not like it’s your fault.” Still not looking at him, she walked over and sat down next to him. She had black hair with the tips bleached a yellowy white. She was wearing cut-off shorts over a pair of black-and white-striped tights, and a red canvas shirt.

“Cool tights,” Conner said, although he wasn’t really sure if he liked them.

She raised one leg and turned her foot in its red tennis shoe this way and that, admiring. “Thanks. Sometimes you have to take fashion risks.”

“Uh-huh.” He still had half a sandwich left, but he didn’t want to eat it with her watching. He put it away in the sack. He could finish it while he drove back to work. “So what are you, a zebra or a skunk?”

“Now is that nice?” She made a droll face and looked up at him, and he realized that while he’d taken her for a little kid, eleven or twelve, she was just small, and maybe only a couple of years younger than he was. “The legs are zebra. The hair’s kind of skunk. You live around here?”

“Sebastopol.”

“Where’s that?”

Conner pointed to the highway and jerked his thumb north. “Thataway.”

“Yeah? Is there anything to do there?”

“Do?”

She sighed and kicked her legs so that the stripes blurred. “This place is so boring.”

It was time for him to get back to work. He stood and stretched, trying to keep his muscles from locking up. “Maybe you don’t have enough to worry about.”

“You ever have somebody point a gun at you?”

Conner stared down at her. “I didn’t think so,” she said.

“I gotta go.”

“Bye.”

“Take it easy.”

She made her thumb and finger into a gun and put it up to her head. “Ka-boom.”

The next day she was waiting for him on the bench when he showed up. She’d pulled her hair back in a ponytail so that the whitish ends hung down like a tassel. She wore jeans and flat sandals and a plain white T-shirt. Conner followed the visible outline of her bra, then looked away. The clothes made her seem more normal, but she was still nobody he wanted to mess around with.

“Hey,” she said. “You hungry? I got some burritos.” She held up a paper bag.

“I brought my lunch.”

“This is better.” She waved the bag at him.

The food smell entered his head and landed hard in his stomach. All of a sudden he was starving for a taste of it. “Thanks,” he said, sitting down. “You didn’t have to get me any.”

She shrugged. “Like I said, I’m bored.” She began unwrapping the foil packages. “There’s one bean, two chickens, and one beef. You can pick, I like them all. I got some Cokes too.”

“Whoa, these are kind of big.” He started in on the beef. Maybe he was just hungry, but it was the best burrito he could remember eating. “Thanks,” he said again, once he was halfway through it. “Hey, what’s your name?”

“Eowyn.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Do I look like I’m kidding?”

She rolled her eyes at him. Of course she was the kind of girl who looked like she was kidding every minute. Conner said, “What, like, from
The Hobbit
? That’s not your real name.”

“Not
The Hobbit
, from
Lord of the Rings
. How would you know it’s not?”

“Your parents didn’t name you that.”

“Maybe they were big fans. So what’s your name?”

He hadn’t finished with the food in his mouth. “Conner.”

“Corner?”

“Con-ner.”

“Well I think that’s a dumb name. It’s not even after somebody.” She had a burrito unwrapped in her lap, but she hadn’t started in on it yet.

“It’s Irish.”

She gave him a critical glance. “You don’t look Irish.”

“Well you don’t look like a hobbit.”

“Oh, good one,” she drawled. She picked up her burrito and took a bite. Her lipstick left a crescent of pink on the tortilla.

The tide was higher today and they watched a few seagulls and plovers wade in the shallow water beyond the mud. Conner finished his food. It was a lot to eat and he felt sleepy. The day was already hot and would be still hotter. The afternoon was going to kill him.

“You get high?”

His eyes had closed and now he opened them. “No.”

“That’s too bad, because I found where my dad keeps his pot.” She’d finished half the burrito and now she rolled the rest back in the foil.

“Good for you.” Conner stood up. It wasn’t a conversation he was anxious to have. “Thanks for lunch, ah, Eowyn. I gotta get back to work.”

“Because, I was thinking, I could sell some of it.”

She was squinting energetically out to the waterline. She said, “Because he wouldn’t miss it, and even if he did he doesn’t want me to know he has it, and it just seems like, an idea.”

“Yeah, kind of a dumb idea.”

“Because nobody ever does stuff like that, right.”

“How about, because I have to go now,” he said again, and this time he walked away from her along the path that bordered the water. He looked back once to make sure she wasn’t following.

The next day, Friday, he stayed at the job site and ate lunch in his truck, and Saturday they worked only a half-day because of a party the homeowner was having, a party requiring the installation of a tent, and several white wooden boxes bearing miniature pink rose trees, and the lady of the house coming out to squabble with the roofing boss about why a portion of the roof visible from the backyard party area was still bare of shingles.

He spent Saturday night and Sunday hanging around the house with his dad, who got upset and fretful when he was stuck there alone. They grilled chicken wings and cooked up a big skillet of fried potatoes and onions. They watched a lot of ESPN, lame stuff like NASCAR races and golf. Sometimes his dad dozed off, but he woke up if Conner tried to change the channel. “Leave it on, they’re just getting to the good part.” The house was hot and they set two floor fans in the living room to blow crossways. The fans made enough noise that the television had to be turned up extra loud, with the commercials for motor oil and pizza blaring at top volume. By Sunday afternoon, Conner was so sick and sad and bored he announced he was going out on his bike for a while.

His dad said, Sure, have fun, and made jokes about being a pitiful old broke-down wreck. The jokes were meant as a way for his dad to pretend he didn’t mind being exactly that, a pitiful old broke-down wreck.

Conner filled a water bottle and set off on the bike, fast enough to make his own breeze. He made a point of avoiding the houses of any of his friends. He didn’t call them anymore and they had given up calling him. They tried too hard to be nice to him, which made everything worse. They’d all graduated, and most of them were headed off to some kind of school in the fall. Which wasn’t their fault, nor was it their fault that they were spending their last free summer going to the beach, or sleeping late and helping themselves to their parents’ refrigerators. They couldn’t have fun with him in the room, couldn’t talk about anything lighthearted with his big drag self sitting there. He’d broken up with his girlfriend because she wanted the two of them to live together in her parents’ basement and he said he couldn’t, he had to stay with his dad. She’d said, “I don’t get it, why can’t he go to a hospital or someplace, why do you have to turn yourself into some kind of giant loser?”

Then she said she didn’t mean that, loser, but it had been the excuse he needed to walk away from her. No one understood what he was up against. He didn’t want anyone to understand.

His dad still talked about Conner signing up for some community college classes. That was just his dad not ever wanting to look a thing in the face. His dad made jokes about them having to sleep in the parking lot at Costco. That meant he’d at least thought about it.

Conner biked a ten-mile loop that took him on a back road west of downtown and its halfhearted tourist attractions, the antiques stores and spas, out past the last scattered houses and the hippie goat farm, through a few acres of orchards and to where the vineyards took over. He climbed enough of a hill so that he could look back and see the town set out like a toy. It had been his home for all the life he could remember, and now there was no place in it for him. Maybe there was no place for him in all the wide world.