Reunited families were hugging each other all around us and I could tell my father felt uncomfortable.
“You must have a plane to catch,” I said.
“You should try and become happy, Paul,” Dad said. “You’ve spent your whole life like this. But, you know, you still have time, you can still decide to make something positive out of all of this. That’s what I’m doing. I’m living again. It feels good, son, it feels mighty good.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” I said. “Are you going to marry this woman?”
“Oh, I don’t know about that sort of thing,” he said. “I still love your mother a great deal. Like you must still love Molly.”
“Molly’s still here,” I said. “I guess the challenge for me is to just make things right.” Dad didn’t respond. He’d pushed himself onto his tiptoes and was looking out into a crowd of people coming down the concourse.
“She should be here anytime now,” he muttered after the group had passed us.
“I’d like to meet her,” I said.
Dad grimaced then like he’d been stuck with a cattle prod. “She doesn’t know about my old life,” he said. “I figured that she wouldn’t want to be burdened with the details. It feels good. To her I’m not a widower or the manager of a restaurant. It’s like an adventure. I can be whomever I want. You understand that, don’t you?”
“I don’t,” I said.
“I’m happy for the first time in a long time,” he said and then he took my hand in his and shook it. “It was good to see you. You look good. You look like you’re on your way to becoming happy.”
“I am then,” I said. My dad’s hand was trembling and I got the sense that this was just how he’d wanted this conversation to go, whenever he had it with me. “I’m better in all possible ways.”
My dad let go of my hand and patted me once on the back as if we were old friends, our meeting shaped strictly by chance. “You give Molly and Katrina all my love,” he said, not catching his slip, and then he just backed away smiling, like I was a distant shadow from a life he’d completely vacated. If I’d known then that he only had a few more days to live, I might have told
him that I loved him and that I was sorry I’d made such a mess of things. I might have said that I’d like another chance to grow up with him and Mom, in a different time and under different circumstances.
I remember all of this as I sit and stare at the pictures of Katrina. Time and circumstance have ruled every aspect of my life: I’ve never made proper use of either. All the times I’d come back here, to this lake, with the intent to say to Molly that we should try to get back with each other, that we should try to have another child, that we should try to get really happy, but all that ever transpired was that I would sit in the woods and watch her life. It was as though I was hunting her existence, letting her stray only a few precious feet from me sometimes, so close that I could smell her perfume, so close that I could touch her, could pet the loose strands of her hair, could blow kisses onto her cheek.
It was in those times that I got the sense again that there wasn’t a clear line inside me, that I’d somehow overlapped—that the part of me that was human and the part of me that had evolved from animal ceased to exist. I was an anomaly, a trick in evolution. The truth is that I think my dad knew everything he needed to know about me that day in the airport.
I was forgettable.
When Molly asked me to go outside that night, I did willingly. I stood in the shadows for over an hour, paced around the trees, thought about life and love. Thought about my daughter. I decided then that I wasn’t a horrible person. That if given the chance, I think I’d like to meet me, would like to share a cup of coffee with me, would have a nice time finding out about how I lived. Sure, I’d let my lines go slack now and again, had done some things that were crazy, had made mistakes with the people who I loved, but I thought that this night was something of a turning point: I was hiding outside so my wife could put a man who loved her to bed.
“I’m sorry,” she said, stepping out onto the back porch. She had my overnight bag in her hand. “I wanted this night to go differently.”
“I’m fine,” I said, and I think now that I must have believed that. Must have thought that this wasn’t the kind of thing I’d obsess over. I was wrong.
“He’s drinking again,” Molly said.
“I didn’t know he had a problem.”
“Yes you did,” Molly said. “Remember the night we saw him at the Branding Iron?”
“No,” I said, but then I heard Kenny Rogers singing in my head, heard Molly say that Bruce looked like a real man, but that he was probably no smarter than
the fish he caught on the lake, heard her say that the time was now, that an egg was dropping. “Wait. I do remember that.”
“Maybe we can do this tomorrow?”
“Yes,” I said. “We can do that.”
Molly handed me my bag. “Let me go back inside to make sure he’s asleep and then I’ll walk you back to your car. Okay?”
“You don’t have to.”
“Please wait.” Molly touched me on the arm. “I’ll be right back.”
Chapter 16
I
slide the photos of Katrina back into the envelope and walk out the front door. The sun is up and, despite the storm last night, the sky is clear. It looks purple to me, but I know it’s just a trick of light. Everything is as it is supposed to be. Nothing has changed in the last twenty-four hours.
What a slow process this life is. We die in sixty-second increments every day. Things cannot continue to slip away forever; at some point all of this must end. And where does that leave me? I’m not ready to leave this world without some sense that I’ve done what’s right at least once. I want to leave a mark, something more than the stain that already exists. The truth: I believe now that Molly is dead. I believe I may have killed her.
Time has gone missing for me, days and weeks turning to ash in my mind, so that I’m not sure what I’ve
done, what I’ve seen. I’m not certain that I’m capable of rearranging events correctly anymore.
I turn and look at our house. It seems so small. Hardwood floors and a view of the lake couldn’t save me. So many lives lost to such a tiny place.
Each step I take triggers another scene in my mind, so that I wonder if I ever lived here in complete happiness, or if my mind has always opened like a trap door and I’ve slid through it all, blinded by the speed.
“Why don’t you at least come out and get your stuff,” Molly said to me once on the phone. I’d been back in LA for just over a month. I’d been out of the hospital for two months. They gave me a clean bill of health, prescribed me Diorxel, told me to let go, get back to the things I love doing.
“I’m coming back,” I said. “We’ll be a family. We have a house.”
“Are you still on medication?”
“Yes,” I said. “For a while.”
“That’s good,” she said.
“I’ve made some drawings,” I said. “I appreciated you coming down to the hospital and showing me how. It will help my research.”
“It was just basic,” she said.
“I made some drawings of you,” I said. “I’d like for you to see them someday.”
“Maybe I will.”
“I guess what I want to say is that you’ve helped me,” I said. “More than any doctor or psychologist. It was always you who made things seem substantial.”
“Let’s not do this anymore,” she said. “Let’s not have every conversation be a ‘session.’ Can’t we just speak like adults?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“No,” she said and I thought I heard her laugh. “Too many nights on the ledge, I guess.”
“I’m teaching again,” I said. “They’ve hired me at Pierce.”
“That’s good,” she said and then neither of us spoke for a moment. “I want to ask you some things, because they’re troubling me. And I guess it contradicts everything I just said. But I need to know. Did you hurt Katrina? I remember you cutting her hair and she was crying. Did that happen?”
“I never hurt her,” I said. “She’d never seen her hair come off. She didn’t know what was happening.”
“Is that true?”
“Yes,” I said, and it was, is.
“I remember you holding her, like she was hurt.”
“She wasn’t,” I said. “You know what she did, Molly? She told me that she loved me. It is my fondest memory of her.”
“She never said that to me,” Molly said.
“I’m sorry for that,” I said, and for a moment Molly was silent. In my mind, I could see her holding the phone beside her ear, trying to find words where none existed.
“You aren’t still reordering things, are you?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I know where everything fits.”
“I’ll just send you your stuff,” she said. “Okay? Is that fine? I’ll get Bruce to come out and UPS it all to you.”
“It will have to be,” I said.
“I want you to stay on your medication.”
“I will.”
I kneel down and dig my hands into the sand; it feels cool and damp, and I think that all of this has been put here just for me. The whole world was built to serve me: the earth, the sun, the moon, all of God’s people, placed here to be my lab. And the birds fly just for me. And the wind blows just for me. I’ve gotten what I’ve always wanted. I am free now. I am so terribly free.
I stood outside, behind the house, and waited for Molly. I imagined her walking barefoot across the hardwood floor, going into our bedroom and checking on Bruce, leaning over, kissing him on the forehead, sliding into bed beside him.
This is not happening, I thought. My arm felt warm from where she’d touched it. How long had it been since she’d touched me? Years, I thought. Years since her touch was electric on my skin, since I deserved it, years since I’d run through this forest with Katrina in my arms. How long since Molly held me and said that everything would be fine, that everyone was trying to help me?
It had been a long while since we’d talked like people, not patients. What made me think I could come back to this house on this lake and think things could ever change toward the positive?
It felt like a lifetime ago, a moment ago, it felt like a grain of sand frozen in an hourglass.
I took a step toward the house and remembered our first night in it, unpacking our dishes and silverware, remembered the moment I knew we’d never leave this place. I took another step and I was on the porch, opening the door back into the kitchen. Had I really seen Bruce Duper there at the house? Had I really heard Molly and him arguing? Had she really stepped outside and touched me on the arm and told me to wait for her? Didn’t she know I’d always waited for her?
Yes.
Our teacups were still on the table, the kettle on the
stove, and from the other side of the house I could just make out the sounds of Molly cooing to Bruce, coaxing him to sleep.
THINGS OCCUR TO
me differently today, standing on my dock on this perfect fall morning.
For the first time, I feel balanced. I feel calm. I feel that things are happening just as they were destined to occur.
This sense of balance, this understanding of gravity, astonishes me. Because, for a time in my childhood, I believed I was invisible. My parents could perceive me only slightly. I’d walk through school in a trance, touching only the outlines of a real life, speaking only when I had to, and then coming home and dissecting everything, anything: words, telephones, animals. I’d cut into anything I could find, hoping to find a center—equilibrium, significance. It never worked. I’d get into an argument with my mother just so that I could diagram the sentences she said. I’d rush to my room to write her words down from memory, breaking down the prepositional hitches, commas splices, adverbs, nouns, subjects, predicates, her entire way of dealing with me.
There have been moments in my life when I’ve questioned if I was actually
real
. It was in those times when
I hurt myself, clawed at my skin, ripped at my hair, just so that I might feel some kind of pain, something to let me know that I was
here
and that I was
now
. I’ve never thought I was entirely human, never understood how I could be asked to exist when I couldn’t figure out how, exactly, we’d all come to be. I could never find that delicate balance.
If my mother were still alive, I would tell her that she should have been afraid of me. I would tell her that she should have me removed, she should take me back to Mexico and get me extracted, let me start again.
The day that forward motion ended for my life was when Katrina died. I’ve been living in rewind since then. There’s a tendency in me that says I should have just ended it all then. Ginny, in many ways, saved me. Maybe I do love her. Maybe I am capable of giving that to her.
I stood in the kitchen and recalled the day I tried to cure Katrina, remembered the Sundays when Molly and I made love for hours, the terrible quiet when Katrina was gone and there was nothing left for us to say, when I thought love had died.
Love doesn’t die, I decided. I was looking at the teakettle Molly had been warming up before Bruce arrived. Love can change into other emotions, can linger like a disease in a dead animal, until it rises again
and attacks, and you’re left with the sense that it has always been a part of you, even when you thought it was lost forever.
I picked up the kettle to feel the weight of it, to make sure I was tangible, and caught a glimpse of myself in the shined silver. I brushed the hair away from my face where it was matted with sweat, and I saw this: a good-looking man with an honest face, someone who’d led a decent life, had parents who loved him, a profession he valued, had nobody, had nothing, was utterly and without mistake alone.
It seemed perfectly appropriate; my face was that of a man whose endings and beginnings seemed to be the same. I set the kettle back down and quietly backed out of the house.
Half way through the shrubs, I heard Molly calling for me from the backyard.
“Paul?”
I stopped in the forest and listened to the way her words hung in the air. She called my name again, this time louder, and the letters fell from the sky and crashed around me. I curled myself around the trunk of a tree and waited for Molly to find me.
She would come for me. She would take me back to the house and show me Bruce. She would say, “I love him,” and I would try to understand, because I
couldn’t be hurt anymore. I couldn’t be seen or heard or touched or cheated or lied to or told that my daughter was dead or that my wife was loved by another person or that everything, everything, had fallen to pieces.