Ernie's Ark (5 page)

“No,” she says, easing my car down one humble street after another. “The plan was to hole up in a B&B, admire some foliage, and figure out how we got to the point where you couldn’t be bothered to fly back for my mother’s funeral.”

“You told me it was all right, Emily,” I say, and her name clangs in this troubled northern air. Emily. It sounds foreign and untried. “Emily, you gave me permission.”

“And you took it,” she says. “That’s how little you ever knew me.”

Except when you sang
, I want to say. Or, I
want
to want to say. I felt like a child when you sang, and also grateful that you were my child. I did.

Instead I say, “I don’t see what you hope to accomplish here.”

“Well, I see that now,” she snaps. “I know how stupid I was to think we could fix everything in a weekend.”

“So this is Plan B? Cruise enemy territory in a brand-new Mercedes?”

She shakes her head. “I couldn’t bear to stop, so I just kept driving.” She pulls over about a block from the mill gate, where I can see an idle picket line. I glance at the glowing face of my watch. It’s mid-shift, thank God, so the line is quiet, a small pack of people, all men, holding signs loosely across their shoulders, the smoke from their cigarettes rising around the veiny, burned-looking skin of their faces.

These people are not, as my daughter believes, noble and bereaved, forced by circumstance to occasionally do the wrong thing. That is a description I find myself wishing she could reserve for me. What these men are is desperate, enraged, and a hair’s breadth from violence. They are also shrewd, they read the papers, they follow their own fates with the practiced eye of a stockholder. They know the players, the rules, and how those rules have been pretzeled into legal documents that they naturally perceive as having been tipped exclusively in my favor.

“They’re tired,” my daughter tells me. “They’re hard-bitten and lost. What they want is so ordinary. Don’t you see that, Daddy?”

“The one on the end. Blue-and-red jacket.”

“What about him?” She’s suspicious now.

“He bought your braces.”

She sits back in the driver’s seat and folds her arms, staring ahead.

“The one right next to him paid for your voice lessons. His son footed the bill for Harvard.”

“Don’t make me your accomplice, Daddy.”

“If you want to interrogate some assumptions, my girl, you can start with your own innocence. Why don’t you boycott paper until this is over, put off your dissertation for a few months?”

“You have an answer for everything, don’t you?”

This is not true. I do not have an answer for my daughter, Emily. I have never had an answer for her, except that I fear her, or rather the ache that comes from recalling the one way I really did fail her: I folded her in with the other Emily and abandoned them both. She did not have to spirit me to the scene of my alleged crimes to teach me this.

All at once the gate lights come on, activated by the darkening mist. The picket line stirs lightly, a hint of motion that appears to me rife with menace. It is then I remember my vanity plate, the one my daughter sneered at, the one that has been made much of in the news. A sound comes from their midst, a shout of uncertainty mixed with outrage, then the sound takes the shape of a question and the small, edgy pack shifts toward us with the precision of birds changing direction and my daughter is making a sound like a surprised squirrel.

“Start the car, Emily,” I say. I try messing with the buttons to get out of the cradle of this seat and can’t find the right ones, end up in a perfect position to be stabbed in the belly if someone so desired. “Emily. Start the car.”

They are upon us now, a ring of faces peering at us from the murk, about six of them, backlighted by the safety lights around the gate, their faces feverish and easy to interpret. I start jabbing buttons at random, trying to get myself worked into a more manly pose. My window sinks soundlessly down.

I hear my name, hear some expletives and two or three obscenities entirely new to me and regional in a way I didn’t expect. I admit my identity. I tell them just who I am. Out of nowhere, like a magician’s trick, they produce a couple of baseball
bats, fine blond small bats of the sort you might see on a Little League field.

“Oh my God Daddy oh my God Daddy,” my daughter is calling, and then the sound of the revving motor fuses with the first downward chop of a bat on the hood and my daughter’s high-pitched squeal. The fog lifts and lowers, lifts and lowers, and I see them in pieces—a frayed shirttail, a tuft of hair, a twisted lip. I see a raised arm, the rounded tip of a bat, then hear the splintering of one six-hundred-dollar headlight. For a few moments there is nothing but sound, an enraged battering, high cries inside the car and low grunts and murmurs outside, the nails-on-chalkboard grind of the engine, which my daughter is trying to turn over and over, not realizing it’s already on. She is banging on the console, engaging the wipers, the locks, the air-conditioning, as the windows rise and fall. Finally there is silence. The men stop. My shrieking daughter turns the wheel and the men stand back with no more passion than if we were a taxi pulling away from the curb.

They broke only one headlight. They creased the hood in such a way that the engine was not damaged. They pleated the sides and roof and trunk, but not enough to spring the doors. They left the tires alone. They gave me plenty to get home on, plenty else to think about. They damaged me in such a way that I would not be apt to tell. I believe they mistook my daughter for a girlfriend, a prize package I picked up at an awards dinner or theater opening; their intention was to compromise my manhood, not my fatherhood. It is then that I see what I have on my hands, that my predicament will last longer than I thought, that I am up against not the nobility that my daughter will insist on recalling after her hands stop quaking and we are well on our long way home, but
rather the bone-deep stubbornness of men with only one path up against a man who appears to have many.

“I thought they might kill you,” my daughter says as we cross the border back into New Hampshire and feel safe enough to search for a motel. We are tired, it is dark, I have long since taken the wheel.

“No,” I assure her. “They were making a point.”

“I’m sorry, Daddy. I had no idea.” She wipes her eyes but they keep gushing; she has always cried this way, like her mother, in rivers. “I thought they were going to kill you, Daddy. Really. I thought they would pull you out of the car and kill you and I wouldn’t be able to do anything to stop them.”

I pull into the parking lot of a decent-looking motel, the kind with an attached restaurant that specializes in fried fish and kiddie plates. “Garrett and I broke up,” she says, reaching over me to turn off the ignition. A chuffing sound beneath the hood can portend nothing but trouble. “And I dropped out of my program. No doctorate for me, Daddy.” She looks at me, her eyes shiny in the neon reflection of the motel sign, expecting something that I am uniquely unable to deliver. I find myself hoping, God help me, to deliver accidentally. “I can’t get over Mom, is the thing,” she continues. She looks up, eyes brimming. “Garrett got tired of this.”

My daughter waits as I grope for something to say. “He should have helped you,” I manage.

She unbuckles herself and picks up her purse. “He didn’t cherish me. No man has ever cherished me.”

“Well, he should have. He certainly should have.”

“He didn’t. So I’m telling you. There’s a hole in my life that I’m falling straight through. I’m in trouble, Henry, and you’re all I’ve got.”

My name sounds flat and sad. She grimaces in such a way—a twist of her soft mouth, smooth, elegiac—that I lose a little breath.

“You’re it, Henry,” she says. “It was either call you or check myself into a hospital. I’m really sorry.” Just when I think I’m close to understanding what she’s apologizing for, she adds, “You should’ve produced that sister I wanted. Then you’d be off the hook and she’d be on.”

I look into her shiny, wide-set eyes. Another Emily. Imagine.

“I’ve been seeing a shrink,” Emily admits. “This trip was all his idea.” She laughs this awful, humorless laugh. “Obviously he doesn’t know us.”

I fumble out of the car and open her side. “Come on,” I tell her. “I’ll buy you something nice for dinner.” She gets out, looking small and baffled in the thickening dark. “This will look a hell of a lot better on a full stomach, Emily, I can promise you that. That I can promise you.” I wait for her, considering how I might frame an apology, some careful ordering of words that might cover what I’ve done without including who I am. What I have in mind requires a fragility of construction that will not appear to me in this hastening moment. Instead, I shepherd her into the motel lobby, thinking to keep my hand on her shoulder, the way I imagine a father would.

Marie Whitten, part-time librarian

She figured to die in summer, then in fall, and now it is winter, a mild one, and she sees that her time has finally come. Everything takes on a pleasant fuzz, like the skin on a peach. For days now she has lain still, staring calmly at her own hands, blue and needle-scarred, folded over her favorite quilt, where her tiny dog slumbers within reach of her fingers. Ernie stays by the window, endlessly glancing back at her, believing she can’t die as long as he is watching. In these final hours she has discovered the ability to read his thoughts, and though she is sobered by the expanse of his panic, the bottomless howl he cannot express, she is touched by it, too.

Despite the ice-white sky outside the window, it is not winters past that Marie dwells on, their muffled sense of safety, the cold stars, the hall closet straining with the wet-wool scent and weight of the tangled coats of her husband and son. Instead, it is autumn she thinks of, one autumn in particular, when for a time the days felt like these days: upside down, fraught with meaning.

That one autumn, Marie headed up to the cabin alone. From the first, something looked wrong. She took in the familiar view: the clapboard bungalow she and Ernie had inherited from his father, the bushes and trees that had grown up over the years,
the dock pulled in for the season. She sat in the idling car, reminded of those “find the mistake” puzzles James used to pore over as a child, intent on locating mittens on the water-skier, milk bottles in the parlor. Bent in a corner somewhere over the softening page, her blue-eyed boy would search for hours, convinced that after every wrong thing had been identified, more wrong things remained.

Sunlight pooled in the dooryard. The day gleamed. The gravel turnaround seemed vaguely disarranged. Scanning the line of spruce that shielded the steep slope to the lake’s edge, Marie looked for movement. Behind the thick mesh screen of the front porch she could make out the wicker tops of the chairs. She turned off the ignition, trying to remember whether she’d taken time to straighten up the porch when she was last here, in early August, the weekend of Ernie’s birthday. He and James had had one of their fights, and it was possible that in the ensuing clamor and silence she had forgotten to straighten up the porch. It was possible.

She got out of the car and checked around. Everything looked different after just a few weeks: the lake blacker through the part in the trees, the brown-eyed Susans gone weedy, the chairs on the porch definitely, definitely moved. Ernie had pushed a chair in frustration, she remembered. And James had responded in kind, upending the green one on his way out the door and down to the lake. They’d begun that weekend, like so many others, with such good intentions, only to discover anew how mismatched they were, parents to son. So, she had straightened the chairs—she had definitely straightened them—while outside Ernie’s angry footsteps crackled over the gravel and, farther away, James’s body hit the water in a furious smack.

She minced up the steps and pushed open the screen door, which was unlocked. “Hello?” she called out fearfully. The inside door was slightly ajar.
Take the dog
, Ernie had told her,
she’ll be good company
. She wished now she had, though the dog, her first Yorkie, was a meek little thing and no good in a crisis.
I don’t want company, Ernie. It’s a week, it’s forty miles, I’m not leaving you.
Marie was sentimental, richly so, which was why her wish to be alone after seeing James off to college had astonished them both.
But you’re still weak
, Ernie argued.
Look how pale you are.
She packed a box of watercolors and a how-to book into her trunk as Ernie stood by, bewildered.
I haven’t been alone in years
, she told him.
I want to find out what it feels like.
James had missed Vietnam by six merciful months, then he’d chosen Berkeley, as far from his parents as he could get, and now Marie wanted to be alone.

Ernie gripped her around the waist and she took a big breath of him: man, dog, house, yard, mill. She had known him most of her life, and from time to time, when she could bear to think about it, she wondered whether their uncommon closeness was what had made their son a stranger.

You be careful
, he called after her as she drove off. The words came back to her now as she peered through the partly open door at a wedge of kitchen she barely recognized. She saw jam jars open on the counter, balled-up dish towels, a box of oatmeal upended and spilling a bit of oatmeal dust, a snaggled hairbrush, a red lipstick ground to a nub. Through the adjacent window she caught part of a rumpled sleeping bag in front of the fireplace, plus an empty glass and a couple of books.

Marie felt a little breathless, but not afraid, recognizing the disorder as strictly female. She barreled in, searching the small
rooms like an angry, old-fashioned mother with a hickory switch. She found the toilet filled with urine, the back hall cluttered with camping gear, and the two bedrooms largely untouched except for a grease-stained knapsack thrown across Marie and Ernie’s bed. By the time she got back out to the porch to scan the premises again, Marie had the knapsack in hand and sent it skidding over the gravel. The effort doubled her over, for Ernie was right: her body had not recovered from the thing it had suffered. As she held her stomach, the throbbing served only to stoke her fury.