The Other Mr. Bax (33 page)

T
roubled by the awareness
that Roland, asleep in the guestroom, was only a few feet beyond the other side of her bedroom wall, Dana tossed and turned in her bed. He was a few feet away, but missed more than she had ever missed him before.

Nothing
…
nothing
—
doesn’t remember meeting, falling in love, nothing of our life together
.
Sixteen years
—
our years
…
Nothing
.

She turned onto her back and began tracing back through those last few years with Roland. A sunny, late-winter day came to mind—cross-country skiing through a snow-covered forest, south of Akron, just her and Roland, as happy as ever. She skipped to an earlier memory, the houseboat they’d rented with his family—Roland at the helm, relaxed, smiling, content, a gentle breeze brushing back his hair. Then, the night of the fireworks—that same vacation, same boat—the night he was burnt. They were sitting together, drinking, laughing, having fun, when a rocket, launched from the deck above, went spiraling into a crazy loop, then shot down into the bow and exploded on Roland’s back. The memory was so vivid, as if it had happened only yesterday—her jumping up out of her chair, the rocket, still spewing sparks, clinging to Roland’s shirt as she swatted wildly at it. It left a serious burn. They were out in the middle of a large, remote lake, late at night. No one had a clue how far the nearest hospital was, or
where
it was. What would a doctor do, anyway? Keep ice on it? That’s exactly what she ended up doing—staying up the whole night, holding a damp washcloth, with ice wrapped up inside, over his wound.

How do you forget a thing like that
?

A clear picture of the scar, left by the burn, was stuck in her mind—a triangular-shaped patch of skin, a few shades lighter than the healthy skin around it—unavoidably noticeable.

What memory would he have now? What story to explain his scar?

The chance that he’d replaced this memory with another seemed every bit as disloyal as the phony “other woman” story. She glanced at the clock on the nightstand.
1:22
. She got up, put on a robe, and went to the doorway of the guestroom. It was open; the room was dark. She stood there for a moment listening to his slow, steady breath.

She spoke just above a whisper. “Roland?” And again. “Roland?”

He rolled over and peered toward the doorway.

“I’m sorry for waking you, but there’s something I need to ask you.”

“Oh?” He blinked a few times.

“I couldn’t sleep. I was just thinking… about things that we’d done over the years. The houseboat we rented with your family and the scar on your back.” She hesitated, then said, “Do you remember the houseboat?”

“Uh… when was that?”

“Eighty-seven, I think. Or… it may’ve been eighty-eight.”

He shook his head. “I don’t remember.”

“The scar… Do you remember how you got it?”

He yawned. “I have a scar?”

“Yeah, about five inches down from your right shoulder.”

Roland sat up and reached back over his shoulder. “Do I?”

“Can I see? You mind if I turn the light on?”

“No, go ahead.”

She switched on a small lamp sitting on top a nearby dresser. Roland turned his back to her. Unable to see the scar, she moved closer, then reached out and touched the spot where she remembered it being. She stepped back to the door and flipped the overhead light switch. Roland squinted toward her, and then, again, twisted around. Dana moved closer and stared. The flesh on his back appeared healthy—not so much as a hint of a scar.

The next morning, as Dana headed toward the bathroom, she noticed Roland standing at the window in the breakfast nook, looking out over the backyard. She stepped into the kitchen doorway behind him. “Hey.”

He turned. “Good morning.”

The shirt he was wearing at first looked unfamiliar, but then it came to her—the blue shirt, the thin, red, vertical stripes—the shirt from the curious vision she’d had months before.

His eyes filled with a mix of bewilderment and concern. “Is something wrong?”

“No…” She shook her head, then pulled her eyes away. “I’m going to take a quick shower, then make us some waffles, okay?”

After breakfast, Dana and Roland went for a walk down the bike path. It was a chilly, but sunny morning. The missing scar had left her restless. She’d struggled through the night, trying to find a footing of logic, the end or beginning of any one of the tangled fibers that her and Roland’s story had become. And there was something else pestering her, something he’d said the night before. “Did you mean what you said last night… that what you remember isn’t important to you anymore?”

Roland glanced into Dana’s eyes and wondered if Joyce was perhaps, at that very moment, struggling with the same questions that Dana was. He hoped that the other Roland, the one who Dana remembered, was there with her, filling the void that
his
disappearance had left in her life. “I’d be lying to myself if I said the memories of my past aren’t important to me,” he said. “But equally, it’d be a mistake to continue living there. I’m no longer there, am I? I’m here.”

“I’m sorry that I didn’t believe you.”

He stopped and turned, his brow furrowed. “You do now?”

“I kind of do, and I don’t, but I’m trying to.”

“Yeah…” The crow of a rooster came from somewhere up the path ahead of them.

“It’s not easy.”

“Right. It’s not natural,” he said.

Dana looked off to the left, into someone’s leaf covered back yard. “You can stay, you know… live here. I have extra bedrooms.”

“Really? You sure about that?”

She nodded. “I think we’d get along okay.”

“But, what would I do here?”

“What were you doing before?”

“Well... It’s not that simple.”

“I know. You don’t have to decide now though.” She stopped, bent down, and picked up a small branch. “You’d like it here. There’s lots of cool things to do. Music, art… food…”

Later, as they were on their way back to the house, Dana described the work her husband did at the art gallery in Buffalo. At the corner of Clinton and John, she said, “You could maybe get your old job back.” She checked up and down the street for traffic—“Mr. Anderson, the owner… he’s a kind man”—then stepped into the street. Roland followed immediately behind her. “You could maybe tell him”—she searched her mind for an amusing angle—“you came down with a bad case of amnesia, and…” She glanced back over her shoulder; he was right there, a step away, wearing that blue shirt… She’d nearly forgotten—the shirt, the corner, the vision. A sudden distinct dread filled her, like an emphatic premonition.

Roland smiled. “And I forgot to call in sick?”

She held her hand out for his. He hesitated for a brief moment before accepting it. Her grip was firm as she pulled him with sudden urgency toward the opposite corner. He took a quick peek up the street—no apparent danger. She dragged him into the park, forcing him to keep up with her.

“Dana?”

Nearly breathless, she stopped and turned, then released his hand.

“Are you okay?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.” Her eyes were moist with tears. “I’m sorry.” She turned away and wiped her cheeks. “I’m just really glad you’re here.”

They walked on, her hand swinging close to his. He caught it and took hold of it. He held it, not so much for himself, or even for her, but for the other Mr. Bax.

F
ollowing the beam of her flashlight,
Joyce stepped past the rocks, cactuses, and small shrubs scattered along the path leading to the butte. She swung the light to her left, pointing it toward the ground, where she heard a rustling come from below a shrub with long, skinny, dried-out seedpods dangling from its twisted branches. The instant she stopped, “it,” whatever had made the noise, stopped as well. She turned and looked back at the house in the distance behind her. Like the nightlight in a child’s bedroom, the bulb glowing by the backdoor served only as a symbol of security. She again scanned the ground around her feet. There was nothing to see—no snakes, lizards, or detached human hands crawling about.

She’d never before done this—camped alone. If anything went wrong, she could blame Roland. He had just the other night expressed his enthusiasm for solo camping, telling her about his going off for two or three nights at a time, hiking into little known state forests around Buffalo—the only person in the entire woods, as far as he knew. “It’s always a bit scary the first night out,” he’d said. “All those monsters lurking within”—the monsters held at bay through our daily routines and countless forms of escape. She wasn’t so much concerned with monsters, however; she had only recently become acquainted with hers. They still haunted her—tried to—but they no longer controlled her.

Another noise. She swung the light to her right and stared. Perhaps the decision to do this was overly impulsive, with it being already dark, but the thought of spending another night in that lonely house more than compensated for this concern. The house, it seemed, had contracted a contagious malady. At the very moment Roland said goodbye, the air within it changed, as though
that
part of the house, the essence that made it a home, rather than just a building, had been sucked out. Camping out in the wilderness, alone, as scary as it was, had to be better than the lifeless box she’d just walked away from.

After making it up and around to the backside of the butte, Joyce stopped to catch her breath. The weight of her backpack, pulling down on her shoulders, was almost too much. She tugged on the straps, readjusting them, then looked up the path—just a hundred feet more. She gave the pack an upward heave. A glow in the south caught her eye—a break in the clouds. The moon sent a shaft of light to a spot of ground about a mile away, like a spotlight on an expansive, darkened stage—just the light, unaccompanied. It was a rare night; the air was warm, still, quiet; the desert was suffused in a color at odds with its warmth—the cool glow from the moon hidden behind a thin blanket of clouds. Joyce marched on, and soon came to the ladder that was fixed to the rocks at the upper edge of the plateau and climbed it to the top.

There were still a few pieces of firewood left unburned from two nights before, the night she and Roland spent there, and in her backpack was some kindling. She slid the straps of the pack from her shoulders, leaned it against a boulder, and savored the sudden feeling of lightness its absence generated. She lifted her chin toward the sky, stumbling backward as though the earth had shifted beneath her. The cloud cover, which had been solid the whole day, was breaking up into an even patchwork of goose-gray forms, each defined by a soft glow around their edges. The clouds crept almost imperceptibly across a deep, navy-blue sky dotted with stars, while the moon collaborated in a slow movement of light and shadow, like a dance—a dance that had been going on for a billion years, a dance of sublime patience that would likely continue for a billion more. It was a dance, which few people consciously engaged in, and then, only fleetingly. Joyce had but a vague sense of it, though even that carried the possibility of revelation.

She removed the wood from her backpack and set about building a fire. After nursing the kindling to flames, with a lot of huffing and blowing, she carefully added the larger chunks of firewood.

Seated before the fire, her eyes shifted from the flames to the sky, back and forth as the moon appeared and disappeared and reappeared. The clouds slowly lost their dominance to the moon and the stars. She stood and surveyed the moonlight-mottled desert to the south. Not a sound. Not the slightest movement of air. The encroaching chill of night was held at bay by the intimate envelope of warmth produced by the fire. A thin wisp of smoke, carrying an occasional orange spark, rose with a shimmy, straight up. She followed the sparks upward, fifteen… twenty feet…

The eerie howl of a coyote, like a creature in mourning, broke the silence. Though distant, it nonetheless provoked an awareness of her vulnerability. She studied the lights along the northern horizon, trying to locate her house, searching for her nightlight.

A response to the lone howl came from a pack of six or so animals, their unearthly yips, yodels, barks, and howls, were faint, though nonetheless unnerving. She repeatedly assured herself that all this activity was far off, and these dogs were incapable of climbing that ten-foot ladder. She gazed into the burning embers, trying to ignore the subtle but potentially escalating unease that the calls and counter calls aroused. Roland had warned her of this. He’d said, “You can’t really know it until you do it.”

She placed another piece of wood on the fire, and watched as narrow tongues of flame licked up around it. Her mind drifted to a distant past, to the first time she’d ever camped in wilderness.

It was soon after she and her family had moved to Indianapolis. Her father was given a few weeks leave from the military. The first week and a-half were spent moving and getting settled into their new home. The new school she was enrolled in had just dismissed its students for their annual spring break. With the new house in order, and her and her sister home from school, the family piled into the car for a trip to Southern Utah. Joyce recalled she was yet feeling cheated by their recent move from Selma, as it seemed to have happened unannounced—though it actually hadn’t—and she was not interested in being even farther from the boy she’d become enamored with there. But there she was, a few days later, somewhere in the Escalante, seated on a rock before a campfire her father had built, day-dreaming about Roland, her parents and little sister tuned out.

She had concocted a fantasy: the two of them sitting cross-legged before a fire—Roland, a young, beautiful, dark-haired boy, his features lit by the flames, sitting opposite her—two young children camping alone in the desert, entertaining themselves with marshmallows and ghost stories.

Joyce smiled at the innocence and absurdity of it. The memory seemed to mean more to her now than it ever had.

A band of moonlight crept toward the western end of the plateau, chasing a shadow, eastward, and over the edge. The calls of coyotes continued from an ambiguous direction, their howls sounding eerily human—a quality which was absent before. She turned toward the south, the direction she’d climbed up from—the direction, she reasoned, the coyotes likely were. A
snap
came from the fire. She listened, almost breathless—a chill in the pit of her stomach—and then another sound, like a voice, a muffled shout.

There’s
no one out there
, she told herself,
there’s no one there
.

The yips and howls returned for another round—the thumping of her heart competing with the faint, crazy chorus.

Coyotes
…
that’s all
.
Dogs
…

She drew in a breath then let her shoulders fall with a long slow exhale. And then again the crazy yaps and barks—sounding this time almost like her name being called. Her pulse pounded in her ears, nearly drowning it out.

God, they make the stupidest noises
, she silently cursed.

“Joyce…” Her name drifted on the air, dulled by distance.

She straightened. Her mind twisted in confusion and disbelief. She leaned away from the fire, searching the air, straining to hear any little sound.

“Are you up there?” The words came from below the mass of rock the ladder was attached to. “It’s just me.”

She rose to her knees and stared toward the ladder, creaking from weight. A head appeared above the edge of the rock.

“Roland?”

He paused at the top, peering in her direction—his eyes, his face—not some dreamed up monster or phantom, but something even stranger than she would have allowed herself to imagine—more complex than a dream, but just as unlikely.

He climbed up over the top of the ladder and approached. “I saw your fire from the house. I called, but…”

She got to her feet as he came nearer. Her eyes followed his until he was standing no more than three feet away—the corners of his lips turning up into a smile. She leaned to his right, pulling his eyes around with her into the moonlight. His smile and the moon glowing in his hair and something even more subtle than that—like a reflection of the warmth tumbling within her chest—an acknowledgement of what had always existed between them, all of it. All that had been missing before was again within reach.

“I was just thinking about you,” she said.