Breakdown Lane, The (17 page)

Except if you’re my asshole sister Caroline.

She kept trying to sneak out the door to see Ryan the Hairy, in his car made almost entirely of body putty, and going wacko when Grandpa, who could hear like a bat, met her at the door while she was trying to slip out in her stockings, carrying her four-inch platform shoes. I think it was that, Grandpa trying to control the life of Princess Caroline, that turned the key, made her think the search-and-seizure adventure she’d only toyed with was an actual plan.

I was going through Mom’s folders one week, looking up adolescent sexuality and stuff, and I saw this red folder. I picked it up because it was marked
BULLSHIT
.

Inside it were poems. I only read one, but I copied it down. Since I read her poems later, I guess this was sort of a baby step, an early Julieanne Gillis, poet, effort.

But it made me see how bad she was hurting, not only physically. And how much she knew. You always like to think a person doesn’t know how sick she is, so you can tell her the same thing.

Mirror, Mirror

There used to be a series of three pictures of Mom in the Houston Ballet the summer of her sophomore year at the U. of Colorado. They’re professional, probably done by a guy who wanted to sleep with her because she was only in the corps de ballet; but my father had them framed and lit, hung up as a sort of triptych in the hall.

When Grandma Steiner came, she took them down and put one of them in each of our rooms.

You would not call my grandmother subtle.

In Aury’s room, today, the picture of my mother looks like this little arched doll, even her fingers are extended like they were little ballerinas, she’s on pointe, in what I think you call an attitude. In the one I have, she’s a blur, on purpose; she’d been in a series of pirouettes. I don’t remember what Caro’s was. When she took off, she took it with her. She’s sentimental.

What I thought when Caro woke me up about two in the morning was that Mom was sick or that Grandma, who was always clutching her heart over some new outrage (like that Caro had stolen ten bucks from her purse), had actually
had
a heart attack. But instead she said, “Gabe, major truce. I’m sorry I yelled at you. No kidding. Do you have money?”

I had birthday checks and such, in the credit union at the U., totaling about two hundred bucks. “I’m not lending you any. Ask Ryan,” I told her. “Have him sell a couple of his lake pipes.”

“No, it’s for…I have this idea. We’re going to fix this.” She brushed a middle piece of her blonde hair behind her ears, like she did when she got serious. I thought about the pictures of Mom in our hall. When Caro danced, she looked almost like Mom.

“Do you still take ballet?” I asked.

“No,” Caro answered.

“Why?” I asked.

“Semester off,” she told me.

“Grades,” I said.

“No,” Caro said honestly, “I didn’t think she could pay for it. That’s why we have to fix this. We have to find Dad.”

“Find Dad? As in, Doctor Livingston, I presume?” I asked, punching my pillow and preparing to dive back into it. “Get out of my room. Go howl with Justine or Mallory at the Taco Bell.”

“This, all this,” she went on, shaking me until I sat up. “Listen. We can get Dad to come home. I can. If we can find him. See?” she went on. “He probably found out about Mom from somebody, like one of his old friends. And he’s freaking out. When you have a midlife crisis, what you want is to be a kid again. You want less responsibilities. I heard this in family dynamics. So you would never want a wife with a chronic illness and one kid with learning disabilities…and a brat teenager, which I know would be me,” she said. “But once he
gets
here, because he’s probably totally homesick, he’ll see she’s not so bad—and, you know Dad—he’ll want to fix everything. And we’ll be back to normal.”

I shook my head. “We’ve tried and tried to call him.”

She stared at me. “So have I.”

“So if he got any of the messages, he knows what’s wrong here.”

“If he got any of my e-mails,” she said.

Caro looked like a scared little kid. She bit one side of her lip. “Kid, I’m sorry.” I sort of awkwardly put my arm around her.

“That’s why we have to go get him, Gabe!” she whispered, sitting up and jerking away, wrapping her arms around her knees. “He doesn’t get how serious this is. Gram and Gramp are going to file a hubus petition against him, or whatever it is. For desertion. Freeze his assets…”

“I’d like to freeze his assets,” I said, quoting Grandpa Steiner.

“They’re going to sell the house,” my sister said then.

I sat up higher, reached over, and grabbed my sweatshirt and rubbed my face. “What do you mean?”

“To Klaus and Liesel. They’re going to sell the house and…I heard the whole thing. They’re going to let us rent our place from them, but Klaus is going to put up a big greenhouse or bug house lab in our backyard. In
our
backyard…”

“When’d you hear this?”

“I heard Mom tell Cathy and Grandma. Like, a couple of days ago, they came up while we were at school, and she told them the whole thing. That’s why we have to act fast.”

“We can’t stop her from selling the house,” I said. “I heard Grandpa say that if he can take out both their money and junk, she can sell the house without him.”

“Yeah, but if we find him fast enough, and he gets the message, and Gabe, you know I can talk him into anything….”

So I listened.

Turned out it was no spur-of-the-moment idea. She had it all down, in a folder with our spring-break schedule taped on the outside. A folder! My sister! While there was nothing wrong with Caro’s wiring, at least when it came to logic, I didn’t think my sister cared to do much planning at all, beyond deciding on Thursday to go shopping on Saturday. Actually, she’s very smart. And she has Leo’s gene for knowing exactly what she needs.

The folder she showed me was filled with e-mails. They were all Dad’s e-mails, and they were some fascinating reading.

Before Dad left, Caro had downloaded all Dad’s saved e-mails onto Mom’s computer, slugging it “Caroline’s Diary,” thus ensuring that Mom, who was pathological about not invading our privacy, would never look at it. Then, when Caro got her own laptop, she downloaded the whole schmear from Mom’s onto hers.

They started a couple of years before, with a man named Aimen and his wife, Mary Carol, who had started what they called an “intentional community” in New Hampshire. The first place it had been housed had been a gutted Kmart, where the people just partitioned off their individual “living spaces,” but since then, the people involved had all moved to the same neighborhood—too much closeness being too much of a good thing. As far as I could tell, they all believed in the same ethical stuff—like universal health insurance, keeping kids out of public schools, buying all their organic food in big bunches from farmers and sharing it out among the families. The families, I gathered, now all lived on the same couple of blocks in a town in New Hampshire, but in their own houses. They saved a lot of money because the whole group of them—Caroline said she had figured, from reading all the e-mails, that there were eight or nine families—co-owned only two vans and a truck as their only vehicles and, like, one snowblower and one TV, which they used only for movies and seeing stuff of outrageous significance, like the Olympics or 9/11. They had a meeting each week, “and it can get a little uproarious,” said Aimen, who had been a Marine and whose wife, Mary Carol, was the New Hampshire State Champion Skeet Shooter. Caroline asked me what a skeet was. I had no idea, but I thought of the gun in Dad’s drawer.

Aimen wrote, “We make joint decisions, such as curriculum, and when there are people who want their kids to read only novels that have modern social themes, and people who want their kids to commit Shakespeare to memory, and everyone over the age of fifteen has a vote, we have to do some real diplomatic negotiation. But we have a nice mix.” Rituals, he wrote another time, “are one way we stay a community. The coming-of-age ritual at thirteen is a big one. Nothing religious about it. No. We don’t ‘do’ religion; those who have their own faiths practice those faiths in their own way. But we think attaining maturity is a big deal, as have most indigenous cultures, and we have a feast, with gifts, an engraved Book of Life for the young person to fill with his or her own memories….”

It sounded right up Leo’s alley, especially given the sprinkling of names throughout, some of which were normal, but others of which were obviously chosen by parents who really wanted to crawl down into the earth and be it. There were kids named Willow and Muir and Diego. I
hoped
they were kids, anyhow.

There were various others, some from some fucking hostile survivalist nuts Dad didn’t correspond with for long. But the next big batch were from two locations. The one we could tell was sort of in upstate New York, because the Hudson River was mentioned; and one was in Vermont.

The one in Vermont had a return address of [email protected], and it was another community like the one before, only more so. Everybody who lived there had, like, three full outfits of their own, period. They lived in what they called “little houses” (an attachment had a picture of one of these) that were like something Aury would play in, but they had real rooms, only tiny-sized and with everything built into the walls. Your bed folded down. Your desk folded down. Your goddamn kitchen table folded down. This was supposed to encourage you to be outside more and at the Gathering (this sounded to me like some creep horror movie, about people who went to paradise and got turned into clones), which was this big lodge with a table longer than the one in the Last Supper and a lot of little ones—I assume for the children—where everybody ate every single meal together, and every single meal was made from stuff that was grown at the place, even the meat. The kids went to regular school, but they had to work on the place every Saturday as their “tithe.” (I looked it up and it meant their tenth or percentage or something.) Adults had regular jobs, but—this blew me away—they put all their money together! I mean, one worked at a garage, and one was an orthodontist, and they put all their paychecks in one big pot and paid everything out of that. They were totally in it for life! Some people only worked for the place, farming and sewing and canning and junk. There were pictures, though, and the place was beautiful-looking. Like a magic place, with a waterfall the kids were playing in. The waterfall was supposedly connected to a pool with a hot spring. I hadn’t ever heard of a hot spring in Vermont, but why not? They have them in Alaska. There was a class of graduates and what colleges they were going to, and some of the high school kids who went to a mountaineering camp—they had a big banner in front of them that said
STRONG PROUD BODIES
—including one really cute girl named Jessica Godin. The old lady—she said she was an old lady—who wrote to our dad seemed totally nice. Her name was India. She said it was her real name because her parents were teachers and she grew up in Delhi.

“Our life is not for everyone, Leo,” she wrote in one of the early ones. “So I would advise you to counsel long and hard with your wife and perhaps come for a visit, for as long as a month or even two before you make a choice. We have had very few members leave, but the few families who have left (mostly due to marriages ending or the needs of elder relatives) have had a very hard time adjusting to the other world….” Dad had written that the other world was just what he and his wife were so anxious to leave. He’d also written a lot of stuff about himself that wasn’t necessarily…true, like that he’d done half marathons and such. I don’t know why he said that, maybe because he wanted to look like the macho guys in the pictures, who were all buffed from chopping wood and making little houses and butchering oxen and shit. The correspondence with India went on until she was the one to stop it, gently suggesting that Leo needed to come to see Crystal Grove because they had talked about it as much as was feasible for her with her own “research” and her duties in the community.

In the one from the last place, the one in upstate New York, he seemed to be talking to this one person, “J.” J’s address was [email protected].

“J.” was a very sympathetic person. She sympathized about how selfish Julie and “the three children” were, how they wanted to work him into an early grave so they could have more junk food and electronic gadgets. “It’s the way of the world, Leon,” she wrote—who the hell was Leon?—“and most people don’t have the courage to recognize it. As my mother says, most people live lives of quiet desperation.”

Her mother and Henry David Thoreau.

I couldn’t believe it. Electronic gadgets? We didn’t get a TV or DVD player until I was in middle school. The parents had their laptops. They wouldn’t even give
us
a used one, until Caro’s guilt gift. That was it. I didn’t even have a Gameboy thing, though I used Luke’s. Not only did Luke have one, so did every one of his brothers. Even Caroline had to save for a year to buy her disc player and headphones. We had to buy CDs out of our allowance and birthday checks. Wrote J., “When my mother first brought us here, Leon [Leon?], my father was corrupting all our lives with the same stuff. Plus, he was cheating on her with a cocktail waitress. Imagine, her taking five girls and moving to a remote little town in the Hudson Valley. She was like a pioneer woman. Like Sojourner Truth. [“J.” did not sound like the sharpest pencil in the box. It was funny that this was how my mom signed her columns.] But our whole community at Sunrise began around her, around my mother. She loved my father, but she had to leave him behind because he couldn’t let go of the world….” That was Julie all over, my father wrote back. No inner life. Just a shell.

The coldhearted bastard, I thought. A shell? A shell was what I figured Leo had in place of a heart.

At some point, Caro left the room and went back to bed, but I kept unfurling this long, long, long string of e-mails to “J.” and they got…sort of sick. My father was picturing himself with his body pressed against “J.’s” back, feeling safe and clean for the first time in his life. One equally sick part of me wanted to go on reading it, but this is
so
stuff you don’t want to know about your father. I was also nauseated. Safe and clean? What were we, a methadone clinic? How could he be such an asshole as to call Julie a “social climber” with “trivial” friends and his children “self-absorbed” and “materialistic”? I’d had the same backpack since the fifth grade.

In the car the next morning, Caro asked, “Like the part about all our electronic gadgetry?”

“I don’t get it!”

“He was just trying to impress her, you know, the way you do a girl.” Caro was completely calm about this. “He was trying to make himself sound like this poor victim.”

“He’s married, Caro!”

“I told you, we heard this in health, a lot of guys do this! They e-cheat. Anyhow, that’s not where he is. He’s at the Crystal Place. I have a sense. That India lady was the one who was talking like he did before he left. So that’s where we have to look first.”

“And when Mom notices the car is missing…?”

“We aren’t going to take the
car,
idiot,” Caroline said. “We’re going to take buses. The whole way. And when—”

“Mom notices we’re gone—”

“I have this worked out. I told Grandpa and Gram we were totally stressed out and Aunt Jane asked us to come to the summerhouse at spring break; and Grandpa and Gram wouldn’t know how to reach Jane if she was on fire, plus they’re leaving tomorrow for Florida. Then, I wrote to Jane and told her we were totally stressed out, and she sent us, like, six hundred bucks to buy plane tickets to go see Gram and Gramp in Florida, and said not to worry Mom by telling her, just to say Gram and Gramp invited us. So, I figure we have about a thousand bucks between us, and—”

“We’re going to be able to find him, on buses, staying at hotels—”

“No, Gabe, they have these youth places in every town in the world, hostels, where kids can stay if they’re runaways and they give you money to call home and a bus ticket home….”