Homing (9 page)

* * *

Charlotte placed her cowboy hat on the dresser, smiled at herself in the mirror, whispered
yeehaw
to her reflection, and went to wash her face.

* * *

Johnny Parker couldn't decide who he liked better, Cherry or Tina, and just when it looked like they'd all go home together, all drunk and horny, Cherry and Tina started making out with each other and completely ignoring him. He walked home across the frozen Common alternately cursing his luck and fantasising about what Cherry and Tina would do when they got home. All in all, he thought, not a bad night.

* * *

Henry awoke with a mouth like a swamp and a head stuffed with cotton. He groaned and rolled over, away from the light streaming in through the window. “Last night,” he said aloud to no one in an attempt to remember how he'd ended up so miserable. It came back in flashes. The Pool House, the library, the Booze Barn, Tina. Wait, was that right? Had he seen Tina last night? Jesus Christ! He sat up, too quickly, and felt his vision darken at the sides. He let out a long breath and lay back down. No, not Tina. A brown-haired girl, though, with a boyfriend. “Jeeeeessssuuuuuusssssss,” he moaned, rubbing a hand over his face. He shook his head. It was behind him now, though, and no better place for it.

He had to make a change, he knew. Had to stop screwing around, had to get serious about himself, about his life.

“You can't go on getting drunk and picking up college girls in bars,” he said sternly to himself in the stillness of the room.

“Wait a minute,” he answered himself, “why can't I?”

That was a puzzler. He waited, and thought, but no reason presented itself. Still, he didn't feel particularly good today, and that was a direct result of having got terribly drunk last night and picking up a college girl in a bar. So, no more. At least for the time being.

And more than that, he was going to get healthy. He was going to get out of bed right now, this second, and go for a run. Yep, that's right, a run. That felt good, that felt right. That felt like the opposite of the previous night's debauchery and dissolution. He sat up, swung his feet down to the floor, stood up. He stretched, arms to the ceiling, squinting in the sunlight.

In the bathroom, he rooted for some running clothes. Sweatpants and a long sleeved shirt, again the problem of socks. The hairdryer had been a neat trick, so he turned that on again, blew fresh a pair of grey gym socks and pulled them on.

Back in the bedroom, he pulled the sheets off the bed, surprising himself. He stripped the pillows of their cases, and shoved the sheets in one, took the other to the bathroom and pushed his dirty clothes inside it. He twisted the tops closed, then jogged down the stairs, full of virtue, to the basement. Detergent, hot water, the machine began to fill, and he dumped the clothes in. Extra detergent, maybe. It'd been a while. Even Henry didn't know exactly how long. He closed the lid on the washer, jogged back up the stairs.

In the kitchen, he pulled open the fridge, surveyed its contents. Three kinds of mustard. An assortment of mostly empty jam jars. Two beers, a bottle of soda water that had been in the house at least as long as he had and was no doubt by now flat. Yogurt containers that also predated Henry, and that might or might not contain what their outsides advertised.

“Right,” he said. “This is disgusting. So, no breakfast, okay, I'll run to the store.”

And feeling like he had a mission, Henry sprinted to the living room to stretch his legs.

* * *

Leah selected a piece of hot pink paper from the origami packet on the kitchen counter. She pictured Nathan, and as always, the first image she got was of him sick, in the hospital, his feet grotesquely swollen, alarming, greyish-green. She wished it was otherwise, but she always saw him this way first. She struggled past that and tried to picture him well and walking, but the best she was left with today was a vague impression of the way his body moved through the air, the angle at which he stood, the way his hands made loose fists to keep his arms from flapping. Her mouth twisted to the side as she thought of him, and she bent her head to the paper and composed the day's message:
A feeling of relief
, she wrote,
in the quiet room. The heat subsides.

She folded the square into a dog and took it back upstairs to Harold.

“Your turn,” she said cheerily, reaching into the cage. Harold was bright-eyed this morning, and the feathers on his head were ruffled again. She felt a wave of affection for the creature. He was almost cute. She attached the paper dog to his sheath, patted down his head feathers, and carried him over to the window. She held him tight in one hand and raised the sash with the other, then took him in both hands, stretched her arms out the window and tossed him up into the air.

“Hurry back,” she called after him. “And bring me something, why don't you?”

* * *

Henry heard the woman's voice as he began to jog down Moran toward the Common. He turned to see her, but he could see nothing but brilliant sun. The voice was unfamiliar, and as far as Henry knew, he knew no one on the street. He stopped running and stood still, looking back the way he'd come. There was no one else out, no one on the sidewalk, no one starting a car, no one locking a front door. The woman had clearly been talking to him, but who the hell was she and why would she call after him? It was, to be sure, a puzzle. And then out of nowhere came a rush of wind, the flapping of wings. “Fucking bird!” Henry yelled, for the second time in as many days. It was a greyish-brown pigeon, same as the other had been, though this one had something bright pink attached to its leg. It seemed to throw a look at him before it took off again, swooping over the Common. Henry shook his head, trying to shake it off, and started running
again. He thought for a moment about following the bird, but his stomach gurgled and he remembered his mission. He curved away from the bird and ran across the Common toward Quinpool Road.

In the grocery store, Henry pushed the cart through the brightly lit aisles. He leaned against it, glad of the chance to catch his breath. He really hadn't run very far, or very fast, but he was winded. He really would have to quit smoking again. And actually, it shouldn't be that hard, he thought, considering how broke he was and how much cigarettes cost. Still, he had run. And he felt incredibly virtuous about that. It filled him with inspiration as he strolled through the produce aisles leaning on his cart like an old man leaning on a walker.

Filled with new appreciation for his health, he loaded fruits and vegetables into the cart, added a loaf of multigrain bread and a box of frozen tuna steaks. He grabbed yogurt, granola, extra-pulp orange juice and free-range eggs. In the pharmacy aisle, he picked up all-natural toothpaste and deodorant, and a twelve-pack of toilet paper just for good measure. He backtracked to the health food section for a block of tofu and a box of veggie burgers. He was browsing the wheat-free cookies when he heard her voice. Tina. Goddamn. He could feel his face flush to the roots of his hair. She was talking loudly to someone who wasn't talking back, he thought, but that didn't seem right. She came around the aisle and opened the freezer door, shifting the cartons of soy-based ice cream substitutes. She held a shiny silver cell phone squeezed between her ear and her shoulder, and she was talking into it.

“Carob Mint,” she said, loudly, as if to a screaming toddler. “You like that, don't you?” Henry couldn't hear the response. He shrank behind a display of kamut pasta and watched her through the packages. She leaned right into the freezer case so her ass was in the air, and still her voice boomed out. “Strawberry Ripple?” she said. “Dealcoholised Rum Butter?” She went quiet for a minute. Henry knew he should just keep backing away, back all the way to the cash register, pay for his groceries and get the hell out, run all the way home, but he was caught in a death-grip of fascination. He hadn't seen Tina since the night she'd thrown him out, and now here she was, rampaging through the grocery store like an ill-behaved soccer mom. Where on earth had that cell phone come from? And who was she talking to?
Henry couldn't figure it out. Maybe her nieces had come to visit, or maybe she was talking to the child of a friend, but it didn't add up somehow.

“Rene,” she said — that's when it hit him — “Rene, sweetie, I can only tell you what flavours they have. I can't bring you home Cookies'n'Creme if all they have is Carob Mint, baby, you dig?”

Now Henry could hear the other voice, though not what it was saying. Rene the cranky old artist was yelling at Tina, as she stood buried to the shoulders in her grocer's freezer. He was yelling at her, apparently, about flavours of ice cream. And Tina, his Tina, his fearless, take no shit, give-back-at-least-as-good-as-you-get Tina, was standing there, hands turning white in the frigid air, taking it.

Henry smiled broadly, turned his cart around and headed confidently for the checkout.

At the checkout, he scrabbled through his wallet for enough money to pay the bill. He was going to have to find work soon; these healthy groceries did not come cheap. And they weren't exactly light, either. Once they were bagged, Henry finally realised the folly of his plan to run to the grocery store — there was no way he could run back with all those bags. Even walking would be a chore. Fuck it, Henry thought, it won't cost more than five bucks to take a cab, and I can go for another run later on. Meantime, though, his stomach was bitching that it hadn't eaten a square meal since at least yesterday, maybe longer. And Henry was itching to get back home to his guitar and see about beating his head against that brick wall for a few hours. It was a day for getting things done, and if that meant spending a few bucks on a cab, well, so be it. He gathered the bags, staggering a little under their weight, and wobbled to the cab-stand to see about getting home.

* * *

In the study, Leah nudged the computer on. She'd made tasting notes on the few bites of soufflé she'd been able to manage, and she had a few thoughts on the cookie recipe, too. She needed to write them up while they were still fresh in her mind, and send them off to her editor at
Bite This
, the cooking magazine she worked for. She'd been letting this part of her job slide a little, and that wouldn't do. It was one thing to cook and create, but if she didn't keep Laurie apprised
of her progress, she wouldn't get paid and if she didn't get paid, well, she'd have to get a real job, and that might prove difficult, what with her reluctance to leave the house, and all.

She was tired of herself, anyhow, tired of thinking about herself, feeling sorry for herself. Tired of wondering where Nathan was and tired, so tired, of feeling guilty, both for cutting him loose and for everything before that. She needed the pure, unbiased immersion of a morning's work to bring her back to the world.

That, she figured, and anything like a sign from Nathan. But at the very least, the work.

The computer booted up slowly, and Leah stared out the window. The maple tree in the backyard reached its grey-brown fingers to the sky, a sky the same colour as the tree itself. The snow in the backyard beyond her fence was trampled down, rolled into balls, tinted with food colouring, hollowed out, all at the whim of the children who lived there. It drove Leah crazy to see it. Winter drove her a bit crazy. The only time she liked it was after a snowfall when everything was fresh and white, untouched, clean and new. Strangely, she also loved the spring, when all was mud and chaos. It was these last days of winter that wore her down though. And this trouble with Nathan wasn't helping.

She wondered how he was making out. It was funny, she realised, she had no idea what his needs were, whether he knew he was missing, whether he missed her. She missed him. No question. Even though having him around spooked her.

He had revealed himself to her slowly, over several months. He never said anything to her, but he turned up often, stood by and simply stared at her. It didn't seem to matter where she was, or what she was doing. More often than not, she'd catch a glimpse of him, fleeting or otherwise. It started at the library.

She'd been asked to write a piece for
Bite This
about the last dinner on the Titanic. It seemed like a somewhat ghoulish idea to her, but she had to admit she liked the idea of salmon mousseline and roast loins of one kind of meat or another.

She'd spent the day at the library, researching the wrecked ship. It had been a trying day, all that freezing cold water, all those high waves, all those devastated families, those lungs filled to overflowing
with saltwater, those blue fingers clutching stricken throats. She'd had to wade through pages and pages of heartbreak to find any mention of the food. It hadn't been a priority, it turned out, for many of the authors who'd written about the doomed voyage. She was exhausted by lunchtime, and it really wasn't helping that Nathan was standing there, just standing there every time she looked up from a page or computer screen. He wasn't exactly looking at her, but he wasn't not looking at her. And it had startled her every time.

By now she was used to seeing, about once a week, someone who looked like him. Someone she'd almost swear was him. When that happened, she'd think, well THERE you are, for chrissakes, where have you been? It would take her a moment to realise, and then her mouth would go small, lips pulled inside it as the wave washed over her. With astonishing regularity she saw him. The Chinese Nathan driving an SUV, something the real Nathan would never have done. The black Nathan pushing her kids in a shopping cart through the Superstore. The blond Nathan running down a field after a frisbee, shouting at his teammates to get the lead out. So many Nathans, and never the same one twice. But this, in the library, this was different. This was Nathan. Nathan Nathan. And it was completely unnerving.

He didn't look the way he did when he came to her in dreams, and that was a good goddamn thing. Because in the dreams — well, at first, in the early days, he'd clearly been dead. That is to say, he'd been a corpse. Or, more properly, he'd been a zombie. In one memorable dream that came maybe two weeks after the funeral, Nathan had pursued her around some suburban ranch-style house on a gurney. He was just skeleton in places, his mouth hung open and reeked of the grave, his eyes were hollowed out and eternally staring. And he wanted her brain. To eat. It would have been comical, if it hadn't been horrifying. It would have been comical if Nathan had still been alive and she could have called him up the next day and said, “Dude, last night, in my dream, you were a zombie piloting a gurney expertly through this ridiculously large, nice house neither of us lived in, and I was running away from you because you wanted to eat my brains! “And Nathan would make some crack about how she must have been dreaming because he was by far the smarter one and had no use whatsoever for her brain. And she'd have laughed and told him to fuck off,
and he'd have laughed and asked her when she was coming for a visit, and they would have made some vague plans to see each other.