Breakdown Lane, The (8 page)

Maybe I’ll make this thing I’m writing a long letter. A Letter to My Father, by A. Gabriel Steiner. I’ve written mostly about my sister. But there’s a lot more to tell.

So, Pop, this one’s for you.

“But Julieanne,” Leo’s dad said, “this doesn’t make any sense. I understand the words you’re saying, but I’m not grasping it. The Leo I know, the Leo I
raised,
couldn’t do this. He never even told his mother. You say he’s coming back?”

“
He
says he’s coming back, Papa,” I told him.

“Julieanne, your legs, did he hurt you?”

“I…fell, Papa. I fell when we left the restaurant…a couple of nights before he left.”

“Because if he hurt you, ever, in any way—”

“Papa, he didn’t hurt me that way.”

“Julieanne, now I know Leo has a cellular phone. I need the number for that. I need to talk to my son. I need to talk some sense into him before he goes too far down this road because he might not be able to find his way…”

“Home, I know,” I said, wincing as
my
son got up and left the room, dropping his seventy-five-pound backpack (Gabe considered school lockers a riddle and a nuisance, and so carried his entire life with him like a turtle with a shell) and making a thud that caused the windows to shudder. Caroline, on the other hand, holding Aury, pulled her chair closer to get a better seat for the show. I knew I should have sent them out of the room, but I didn’t have the strength.

There was a knock at the door. Cathy, with Abby Sun in her beautifully embroidered and very PC front pack (Cathy’s mother had somehow learned to spell out “I love Mama” in Chinese characters).

“Julie,” she said, embracing me and removing the baby’s utterly unnecessary knit hat. Abby’s hair was a seal pelt that would have kept her warm in a Sheboygan blizzard, and it was Indian summer. “Julie, I can’t tell you what to do until I understand….”

“I don’t know that I need you to tell me what do or that there’s anything that I can—”

“We were just trying to get to the bottom of this,” said Gabe Senior.

“I don’t know if there is a bottom of this,” I said.

“My father took a powder,” Caroline blurted. “That’s what Grandma Hannah called it. She said, ‘He took a powder, the little putz….’”

“Caroline!” all of us said together.

“Well, she did!” Caroline’s upturned brown eyes glittered with mischief. She liked seeing the ox gored. I don’t think any of us, three days after Leo’s departure and the day the Steiners had rushed to help out when my knees ballooned into festive purple pillows, entirely knew what had happened, or was to come.

Hannah put Aury down for her nap. She told Caro to go into her room and get started on her homework. “I don’t have any,” Caroline said.

“Think of some, Hannah Caroline,” Grandma Hannah commanded in a tone that brooked no sass. “Get a head start.” She slouched away, but, we were to learn momentarily, never went beyond the wall outside the living room door.

I felt that those of us who remained, the adults, were some kind of NATO committee, trying to come up with an extradition order.

“These people,” Hannah began, when she returned, “these hippies he’s been writing to. Julieanne, you know that I love you as my own child, so you won’t be offended when I ask you, is there a woman among them that he’s…well, skirt chasing?” Hannah is the last person on earth who would have known that phrase. “What did he take with him?”

“Clothes, his camera, nothing, really,” I told her. “He had everything in a duffel bag.”

Caro stuck her head back in then: “He got a lot in that bag, though! Because he’s been buying those clothes from Travelwise that you can scrunch up to the size of your hand. They have coats you can put in your pocket, and wash and they’ll dry in an hour and come out wrinkle free.”

“Tencel,” Cathy said, “the big lie.”

I rubbed my head. My eyes, like a sea creature’s on stems, were acting independently of each other again. “I don’t think anything like that’s going on,” I told my mother-in-law. “I think what he really wants is to figure out what he’s going to do with his life after the university. And this is just his way of doing it. He’s having his adolescence.”

“But there’s more to it,” Hannah said.

“I think he wants to feel young again. Free to do what he wants—”

“He’s got a wife and children,” said Hannah. “That’s what he needs to
want
to do. It doesn’t matter that he needs to feel free.”

“That’s his whole point,” I told Hannah. “He thinks he never got the chance to feel that way. He thinks I saddled him with babies and houses and—”

“Julie, you sound like you’re taking his side!” Cathy interrupted. “It takes two to tango. Your understanding passes all understanding. Now, did you try to talk him out of this, or did you encourage him, like you did when he took his…other little trip?”

“I never encouraged him to do that. I allowed it, and grudgingly. And with this one, I put my foot down. I told him in no uncertain terms that I did not want him to retire and I did not want him to leave….”

“And…” Cathy prompted me.

“Do you see him here?” I asked her, putting my arms out to cradle my goddaughter, Abby, who popped her thumb in her mouth and, wise little math genius she would certainly be, went to sleep.

“You two discussed everything,” Cathy went on.

“Not recently,” I admitted. “He’s spent more time on the computer and at the yoga center than with me.”

“That’s what you wrote to that guy about his wife’s e-relationship with that friend of hers in Austin. You wrote that the proportions of time should be exactly reversed, that intellectual infidelity was just as dangerous as the other kind, that confidences in the secrecy of cyberspace were just as potent and perhaps even more so, than confidences between the desks….”

“That’s what you told me to write. Intellectual infidelity,” I reminded her.

“It
is
a nice phrase,” Cathy said with a sigh. “Well, we’re not sure that’s what happened here. All we know is we have a guy—”

“Who turned forty-nine and figured out he was going to die someday,” Gabe called from the family room. “If I hear that one more time, I’m gonna puke. Why didn’t Luke’s dad do this? Or Justine’s?”

“Justine’s dad is kind of a scum,” Caroline said.

“
But Dad
is a clean-living, miso-eating saint, Caroline!” Gabe yelled back. “So what’s your point, roundhead? His
not
being a scum should have kept him from doing this, not the opposite.”

“I think Dad thought about life more,” Caro whispered.

“Thinking about life too much is not necessarily a good thing,” Hannah told her. “Some things you do; some things you think about. Some things you think about you’re better off if you never do.”

“Amen,” said Gabe Senior. “I have to lie down for an hour or so, Julieanne. Do you mind? Will you keep your feet up and keep those ice packs on?” I nodded dutifully. Like all Jewish men of a certain age, even those who’d spent their lives selling marbles and kite string, Gabe Senior had, for me, the authoritative quality of a physician.

“I’ll be here, Mister Steiner,” Cathy said. “I’ll look after her.”

“I’m going to try to make some dinner,” Hannah told both of us, “with what scraps of food I can find in this refrigerator.”

“There are a whole bunch of mushrooms and some boxes of tofu in the pantry, Hannah,” I told her.

“Tofu,” she said dourly. “Gabe! I need some chicken, skinless, four breasts, some rosemary, French bread, some rice, normal, and a dozen eggs….”

“I’m going to nap, Hannah,” Gabe Senior explained.

“Nap later. I need to cook now,” his wife told him. “And Caroline, you don’t need to sit there looking pretty, although you do look very pretty. I want you to straighten this place up. I want you to get all your dirty laundry out of your room and your brother’s—”

Outraged, Caroline cried, “My brother’s…! I’m not going to do his laundry!”

“So he can take Aurora to the park in the bike holder, which I know you wouldn’t be caught dead doing, and play with her while we straighten this place up.”

“Abby’s asleep,” Cathy said. “I’ll do the laundry if Caroline dusts and picks up, because then I can talk to Julie.”

Cathy didn’t know about the night I’d spent on Friday. I was yearning to tell her, but I wanted it to be face-to-face, and everything had happened so fast. I’d spent the evening pleading with Leo as he tried to sleep, begging him to at least talk things over with Cathy—I wouldn’t need to be present—before he decided to leave. Though he’d held me gently, and kept nodding as if to say he understood my panic, though he’d even tried to make love to me, nothing I could do or say would budge him. “What if I sell the house while you’re gone, Leo? What if I decide to move to New York…
City
? Not some burg on the Hudson River?”

“You can’t do that, Jules; it’s a community-property state,” he’d reminded me.

“I could forge your signature,” I threatened him.

“If you need to do that, go ahead,” Leo said. “I don’t think it will accomplish what you want.”

“Who the hell are you, the Dalai Lama?” I asked, jumping out of bed, the pain from my battered knees immediately shoving me back down like a rough hand. “What is this, do-what-you-think-you-need-to-do-to-satisfy-your-needs shit? Zen? Leo! Don’t you give a shit what happens to us? To this house? To the holy tomato plants?”

“It’s all immaterial,” Leo said, lying back against his astronaut-foam pillow. “The material is immaterial.” He grinned. “I just said that to getcha, Jules. You know I care about all that stuff. But you can handle it. You’re a very capable woman. We have a lawn-care service. You have a strong support system of good friends. You have my parents. And a creative outlet. Sufficient money for all the face cream you’ll need. The children will help. I’m not worried. And I’ll be in constant touch.”

He had not been in constant touch. He had not been in touch at all. He had not left an itinerary, explaining that his travels might take him to people in one location where they lived, or in another, though he’d insisted that the big, brown envelope he’d given me contained a detailed list of addresses and telephone numbers where he could be reached or where messages could be left. There was none. All it had really contained were copies of our wills and insurance papers, the number of the pager he had purchased to augment his cell phone, and a funny card, a line drawing of a guy in a little car driving in circles, signed with love to me. “I have friends in Wyoming who live in the mountains in the summer, because the cabins they have aren’t plumbed, but rent in town during the winter, where they do whatever kind of skilled work can take them over the tourist season, when they don’t
want
to go
near
the town, unless they sell art….”

“What makes you think I give a shit about any of this, Leo?”

He’d seemed genuinely puzzled.

“As if I give a good goddamn what a bunch of selfish, aging drifters do for seasonal work. You want to know something? Personally, that kind of life sounds worse to me than…than camping.” Leo knew I considered camping a sin not
for
but
against
nature, a form of primitive subjugation disguised as recreation, a way for men to beat their chests at the dawning and women to wash the same dishes fifteen times a day, and with sand. “What would you do with your things, while you were slipping back and forth between worlds? Between the town and the mountains? Your clothes and books?”

“Libraries have books, Jules. And most people don’t have our clothing needs. You realize that most people who work at home don’t need twenty pairs of shoes, nine of which—”