Wish You Were Here (2 page)

She hadn't been to Buffalo in years, would probably never go again.

“Were there any bills in Buffalo?” Emily asked.

“Were there any pirates in Pittsburgh?”

“Besides Andy Carnegie and Mr. Frick.”

“How's Rufus doing?”

“He's fine,” Emily said, before turning to check. Rufus lay with his head resting on his crossed paws, looking up at her guiltily. At each corner his rubbery lips held a gluey drop of slobber. “He's a good boy.”

“Rufus the Doofus.” It was the children's nickname, but coming from Arlene it didn't sound loving.

“Be nice.”

“I am being. As long as he's on the towel.”

“He is.”

Arlene lighted up a Lucky, and Emily flicked down her window. The air rushed in with the sound of a blowtorch. It did nothing to clear the smoke, if anything pushed more in her direction.

“Shoot,” Arlene said, and smacked the wheel.

“What?”

“I forgot to bring film. I wanted to take pictures of the house.”

For old times' sake, Emily thought. “You can get some there.”

“I know, but … I bought some special. I know right where it is, it's sitting on the kitchen table.”

“You can borrow some from me, I've got extra.”

Emily hadn't thought of taking pictures of the cottage, just of Kenneth and Margaret and the children. When Mrs. Klinginsmith, the realtor, had asked for a recent photo, Emily couldn't find one. Mrs. Klinginsmith said it was okay, she'd take one, and produced on the spot a digital camera from her massive bag. Emily and Henry had taken hundreds of shots of the house, but always in the background. They had hours of videos—Sam and Ella playing croquet, Sarah and Justin shooing a younger Rufus away from the doomed geraniums.

She'd watched some this winter, trying to catch a glimpse of Henry, but he was behind the camera, at best a shadow on the screenporch, tipped back in his chair. The only good one she found was of him playing wiffle ball with Sam and Ella. Kenneth must have taken it from behind home plate, because there was Lisa on first and Henry wearing his Pirates cap sideways, pitching behind his back and through his legs, doing a goofy windmilling windup only to deliver a soft lob that Ella smacked past him. And then the scene changed to Ella's seventh birthday, and Emily could tell Henry was shooting because Lisa was bringing in the lit cake and Emily herself was standing beside Sam's chair, singing, her hair a mess from swimming, and she stopped the tape and rewound it.

“Here comes the old radio ball,” Henry joked. “You can hear it but you can't see it.”

She'd only watched the scene a few times, the last standing right by the set as if she could get closer to him that way.

They'd relied on the video when the grandchildren were little, made an event of sitting around the Zenith watching themselves, but since last fall she couldn't remember using it once. For Christmas she was at Kenneth and Lisa's, Easter at Margaret's (Jeff had showed up perfunctorily for the egg hunt but had other dinner plans). Today, like then, it had never crossed her mind to bring the camera, and now she was sorry.

She looked out at the grassy embankment rising beside the highway, pink with mountain laurel despite the drought, a rock wash laid neatly down one manicured flank. The trees were bright, the darkness beneath absolute. She wondered how far back they ran, and what lived in them, but without any real interest, just something to look at, to stop her from chewing on things she could do nothing about.

It wasn't just riding in the car that sent her off like this. Watching TV or reading, she found her mind wrapping itself around the irreducible new facts of her life, like Rufus winding his chain around the sycamore out back. Like him, she only managed to tear off more bark, leave even more raw scars. To soothe them, she remembered, and the remembering became a full world, a dream she could walk through. It felt real, and then it went away and she was left with the kitchen, the garbage can nearly full, the fly that wandered the downstairs, knocking into screens, making her chase it with a magazine.

Arlene had gotten them behind a silver tank truck. A stream of cars passed them on the left while Arlene darted her head at her mirrors and over her shoulder. A space opened in the chain. At the last second Arlene said, “I can't make it,” and backed off. She waited until everyone had overtaken them, then signaled primly and swung around the truck, their reflection dimpling as they passed. A green sign on the side said
CORROSIVE
. Another diamond beside it showed a test tube dripping liquid on a disembodied hand spiced with cartoon shock marks.

“Lovely.”

“What's lovely?” Arlene asked, concentrating on her lane.

Emily explained.

“What do you think it is?”

“Some sort of industrial acid, I imagine.”

It was an answer Henry would have given, noncommittal but promising. Emily had no idea what might be in the truck and didn't care. Some chemical. The driver would deliver it to some factory, and they would make something people would buy and put in their homes and use until whatever it was broke or was relegated to the attic or a tag sale, then eventually thrown away, left to rust in some dump or to rot under tons of garbage at a landfill while more trucks rolled past day and night.

A dead deer slid by on their right. It was a spotted fawn, its neck bent back unnaturally, black blood coating the nose, staining the pavement. Arlene obviously saw it but said nothing—to spare her feelings, Emily supposed.

She wanted to respond, to remind Arlene that she was a country girl from a family of dedicated hunters, intimate with back roads littered spring and fall with fat, soggy possums and capsized raccoons. And really, she'd gotten used to death. There were as many dead things as living in the world. More. Everywhere you looked there was a cemetery, a dried leaf, a husk of a fly. And yet the world rolled on, green and busy as ever.

The thing that secretly moved her to tears now was not death but parting. Watching TV, she would be reduced to sniffling and wiping her eyes by soldiers waving from trains, mothers putting children onto school buses, confetti snowing over the decks of cruise ships. It didn't have to be some sweeping movie she was caught up in. A long-distance commercial could do it. And the quality didn't matter—it could be the most obvious, manipulative, sepia-toned slow motion, it still hit her like a brick. It was funny, because in real life she had no trouble saying good-bye, simply did it and walked away (a trait she credited to her mother's stringent Lutheranism). She and Henry had had a year to tell each other good-bye, and she thought she was happy with the job they'd done. There was nothing lingering, nothing left to say between them. Then why did these clichéd scenes tear at her?

“I brought paper plates,” Arlene said.

“So did I. How about napkins?”

They would need to stop at the Golden Dawn after they got there.

“We should make a list,” Emily said, and dug in her purse. “Paper towels, film … what else?”

Pie from a roadside stand. Blackberry was in season for another week. They could wait till tomorrow for corn, and get two of those rotisserie
chickens from the Lighthouse. Did they have to call and reserve those? Probably, on the weekend. Peaches. Tomatoes. They would have to make a separate trip to the cheese place and pick up a block of the extra-sharp cheddar the children liked.

Miles in the car, the air-conditioning growing too cold. Forest, crows, police. She had made this drive so many times, yet parts of it still surprised her. She'd forgotten the barn they pointed out to the children when they were little, the faded advertisement dull but legible:
CHEW MAIL POUCH TREAT YOURSELF TO THE BEST
. A rest area was barricaded, a customized van with back windows faceted like diamonds inexplicably sitting in the middle of the empty lot. Clouds repeated in the sky to the horizon, a fleet steaming out of harbor. The woods gave way to dairy land, slouching red barns and fields overgrown with burdock and Queen Anne's lace. Outside Mercer they ran into a thundershower, the rain so heavy that Arlene braked and Emily braced for a collision. A mile later it was sunny, a rainbow rising from the hills.

“Make a wish,” Emily said, then cleared a space in her mind and thought, slowly, as if speaking to God, I wish: that they will all understand.

They left 79 and headed east along Lake Erie, Arlene tentatively joining the four lanes of I-90. In back, Rufus gulped for air, huffed and swallowed hard, and to placate Arlene, Emily twisted in her seat and sweet-talked him.

“You're all right,” she said, but Rufus didn't look convinced. He lifted his head, woozy and confused.

“No!” Emily said. “Down!”

He did, his muzzle jumping with a hiccup.

“Should I pull over?” Arlene asked.

“He's fine. It's not far.”

“It's another hour.”

“Forty minutes,” Emily said. “Just drive. He's not going to throw up on your precious seats, and if he does I'll clean it up.”

“I was just trying to help,” Arlene said.

“I'm sorry. I know you don't like him.”

“I like him, I just don't want him throwing up in my car.”

“Well, that's just what dogs do, I can't do anything about that.” Emily sighed at the pettiness of the argument and the needling fact that
she was in the wrong. “Listen, I appreciate you driving, and I'm sorry he's not the best passenger. I don't mean to be rude, I just want us to get there.”

“I don't mind him, really,” Arlene said, as if she'd already accepted her apology.

The sign welcoming them to New York was pocked with yellow paintball splotches, the one panel with the new governor's name a darker green. Crossing the border, Kenneth and Margaret used to lift their feet off the floor and hold their hands in the air, something they'd learned on the bus to church camp. She thought of doing it now but knew Arlene would be baffled.

She could almost hear Henry tell her to simmer down, could almost see the sideways look he'd give her that meant please take it easy on Arlene—or, more often, on Margaret, whose whole personality seemed designed to drive Emily to violence. She still could not get over the way Margaret had treated Jeff. Neither could Jeff, apparently, because he'd left her. That it had likely been the one trait they shared that finally drove him away seemed fitting to Emily. For Margaret, it was all the proof she needed that once again her mother had ruined her life. They'd been officially separated less than a year, but from Margaret's scattered calls and what Kenneth let slip, divorce seemed more probable than reconciliation.

Wouldn't her own mother feel justified now, always telling her to calm down and hold her tongue? “Why can't you be nice?” her mother once said, gripping her forearm hard, and what answer could Emily give her? She saw the same helpless anger in her daughter and was just as powerless to save her. And who would save Emily when everything piled up?

Henry had, his placid heart the perfect balm for hers. Now that he was gone, she feared she would turn sour, take it out on those around her. Sometimes it seemed that was exactly what was happening. It was hard to tell. It was like menopause all over again, the crazy swings—or like being pregnant. Half the time she had no idea why she felt the way she did, except the overall excuse that Henry was dead.

“Here,” Arlene said of a sign coming up. “Nineteen miles.”

Route 17 was so new through here the bridges were still under construction. Orange-and-white-striped pylons funneled the two lanes into a chute between concrete barriers. Arlene brought her face closer over the wheel, and Emily sat up straight, as if lending her attention. No one
was working, but a state trooper had tucked his cruiser in behind a dusty water truck.

Arlene was going slow enough that it didn't matter, but from reflex Emily stiffened as if caught, a jagged spasm shooting through her. Henry had been a fast driver, a great believer in the Olds V-8.

“Tricky tricky,” Emily said.

“And it's a work zone, so the fines are doubled.”

“Even if no one's working. What a racket.”

A sign for Panama came, and then, off in a disused field, a billboard for Panama Rocks, where they'd taken Kenneth and Margaret as children. Margaret had been pudgy then, and refused to even try Fat Man's Misery, standing outside while the rest of them squeezed through, the lichened walls cold against their bellies. She'd always stood apart from them somehow, and Emily had failed to bring her in.

Rufus had settled back into his tuck, a thread of slobber dried over his nose. “We're almost there,” Emily promised.

They got off at the exit for the Institute, tracking a balding blacktop past lopsided Greek Revivals with washing machines on the porches and horses grazing in with cows. The road dissolved in spots, cinders clinking beneath them, wildflowers in the ditches. It reminded her of Kersey, the roller-coaster shortcuts through the state forest full of dips and switchbacks. The old homesteads were the same, the gingerbread Gothics on hilltops safe inside windbreaks of oaks and willows, mailboxes jutting from whitewashed milk cans, ponds with stubby docks for the kids to swim off, ducks sunning on an overturned rowboat. She could live here, give up the house in the city and watch the mist settle in the trees at dusk, the cows come lowing home.

Another billboard loomed over a slight rise:
RUNNING ON EMPTY? FILL UP WITH JESUS
.

Well, that would be nice, she thought.

“Corn's high,” Arlene noted.

“They're north enough to get the lake effect.”

“I hope it doesn't rain like last year.”

Emily had not been up last summer because of Henry, but she'd heard the horror stories—the children playing video games all day and fighting. She could see Arlene abandoning the house, throwing on a poncho and going for her walk by the fishery, cupping her Luckies against the drops.