Far Far Away (5 page)

“So,” she said, “does any French just come to you, like the German or Martian?” Something saucy slipped into her voice. “Because if you could talk to me in French, you might really kick that whole enchantment thing into high gear.”

Poor Jeremy’s tongue was tied, and the color in his cheek was again rising.

Ginger laughed. “It’s okay. I didn’t really expect you to.”

Well, what could I do? As she turned to go, I whispered a few
pleasing words for Jeremy to say:
“Au revoir, mademoiselle aux jambes longues.”

Ha!
Exzellent! Exzellent!
Now it was Ginger who was dumbstruck. A few seconds passed before she found the voice to say, “So you
do
speak French?”

Jeremy made a modest shrug of his shoulders.

She eyed him. “It sounded like you said, ‘Good-bye, maiden of the … logjam.’ ”

Long-legged
.

“Legs,” Jeremy said uncertainly. “It might’ve been ‘maiden of the long legs.’ ”

A small, satisfied smile appeared on Ginger’s lips, and with that, she turned on her heel, gave a quick shake of her coppery hair, and used her long legs to stride away.

Well
, I said.
At last that is over. Now let us hurry home to our studies
.

But Jeremy stood watching the girl’s progress until she threw a quick, smiling glance over her shoulder to let him know she knew he was watching her.

Jeremy, with face burning bright, ducked his head and turned toward home.

Jeremy’s home was unlike anyone else’s in this village. He and his father lived in a small apartment attached to the Two-Book
Bookstore, of which Jeremy was the sole proprietor—and sole employee. The store was his inheritance from his grandfather, and its shelves were stocked with just two books, volumes one and two of his grandfather’s autobiography.

No one wondered why Jeremy’s father hadn’t inherited the store. Harold Johnson had not worked a day for the past five years, nor even left their apartment. It had not always been so. As a young man, he built caskets for Jeremy’s grandfather’s Coffin Shop, and when that was converted to a bookstore, he began driving a truck for the delivery of heating oil to citizens throughout the countryside. Though a quiet man, Harold Johnson liked to sing as he did his solitary work. One day, a young woman came out of her farmhouse to sit on the wooden fence and listen to him sing his songs while he pumped the heating oil. She was called Zyla Johnson, and though she and Harold Johnson shared the same last name, they were in no way related. They had never before exchanged a word, but on this day Zyla’s presence so distracted Jeremy’s father that he forgot some of the songs he had always known by heart. When he made ready to leave, Zyla looked at his delivery truck and told him she’d always wanted to ride around the countryside in a big truck like that. After several days of riding together, Harold Johnson asked Zyla Johnson to marry him. She thought about the proposal for half of half a second and then said the answer was yes because at least she wouldn’t have to change her name.

They went to live in the apartment behind the bookstore on Main Street. Within the year, Jeremy was born, and his mother gave him the middle name of “Johnson,” so that he would be sent into the world as Jeremy Johnson Johnson, a redundancy Zyla thought both amusing and befitting the marriage of one Johnson
to another. She also passed on to him her fondness for fairy tales, which she had collected since childhood, as had her mother and grandmother before her. She was not very interested in Jeremy during the day, but at night she would let him sit in her lap and she would read him a tale. When he reached the age of five and could climb a ladder, she built into the attic a little library full of tales. Jeremy’s father helped with this construction and even converted a gabled window into a half door and tiny balcony, where on pleasant evenings Jeremy could sit in his mother’s lap and stare out at passing cars on Main Street while she read him tales. For a year or so, this attic was where his mother could most often be found if she went missing from other parts of the building. But there soon came a time when his mother no longer stole away to the attic, but instead drifted farther from home, and one September night, at the annual Harvest Festival, she began to dance with men other than his father, who finally drew her aside. Their conversation started softly but grew louder. “Because I am your husband!” Jeremy’s father was heard to say, a declaration that drew the attentive eyes of other citizens as well as a laugh of contempt from Zyla. “Husband?” she said. “I would call you more of a minor inconvenience.”

Well, that is how it can sometimes be between unhappy men and women.

Not long thereafter, Jeremy came home from his first-grade classes and, to his surprise but perhaps no one else’s, found his mother absent.

“She’s gone,” Jeremy’s father told him.

“Gone where?” Jeremy asked, and his father’s eyes slid away.

“I don’t know. In search of a happy ending, I guess.”

Jeremy did not understand. “When will she be back?”

“I’m not sure,” his father said. “When she’s ready, I guess.”

In time, Jeremy learned the story that had kept him from entering the Green Oven Bakery until the very day on which our own tale has begun, for that was where, on her final day in the little town of Never Better, Jeremy’s mother had been sitting and eating a slice of Prince Cake when a traveler from Canada walked through the door. Minutes later, she followed the man to his car and was heard asking him for a ride out of town. No one could explain this behavior—her manner was described by one villager as “mechanical” and by another as “confounded”—and Jeremy had always wondered if she had looked up from her first bite of Prince Cake when the man from Canada walked through the door, if the legend of the first bite had come true for his mother because she really believed it could.

That night, Jeremy climbed the ladder to the attic. Her books were all there.

“That was why I thought she would come back,” Jeremy said when he related this sad tale to me. He looked down. “I wasn’t sure she’d come back for me, but I always thought she’d come back for her books.”

It was not long after his mother’s disappearance that Jeremy began to hear voices, though none of them would be the voice he wanted most to hear: the voice of his mother.

Jeremy’s father did not speak Zyla’s name, nor did he try to find her and bring her back. He made his oil deliveries, but he no longer sang his songs. His supervision of Jeremy was absent-minded.

Then, about five years ago, Jeremy heard his mother’s voice,
faint and sorrowful, but, still, he was certain that it could be no one other than his mother.
I’m sorry
, the voice said.
I’m sorry, sorry, sorry
.

The voice fell silent then.

Perhaps ten days thereafter, Jeremy’s father received in the mail an envelope with no return address. It contained a
Todesanzeige
—an obituary—scissored from a paper in Saskatchewan, Canada. I have seen the document myself—Jeremy brought it out one day to show me. It announced the death of Zyla Johnson Newgate, who had suffered death by drowning after her canoe capsized among rocks and boulders in fast-moving water. She was survived by her husband, Theodore Newgate, and two stepchildren, aged seven and nine. A photograph of the woman was positioned above the text. It was of Jeremy’s mother.

When Jeremy arrived home from school that afternoon, he saw the obituary lying on the table. Even after reading it again and again, he was hardly able to believe its meaning. He put his head on the table and closed his eyes. Some moments went by, and then all at once he became aware of the deep and strange stillness of the house. He went to look for his father. He found him in his bed completely covered with blankets.

“I’m awful cold,” he told Jeremy.

“She married and became somebody else’s stepmother,” Jeremy said. “I didn’t even know you were divorced.”

“Neither did I,” his father said. His eyes were red.

That his father had been crying scared Jeremy. He had never seen his father cry before.

Jeremy looked again at the picture of his mother in the newspaper. “Guess she didn’t find her happy ending.”

The only sound in the room was the tick, tick, tick of the clock. Finally, his father said, “You can’t tell anyone what’s happened to your mother.”

“Why?”

A second passed, then another. “Because I’m asking you not to.”

“Okay,” Jeremy said. “What do I tell people?”

“Nothing.” His voice, to Jeremy, sounded not quite alive. “No one needs to know anything.”

Jeremy thought it was strange that his father wanted to turn his mother’s death into
Their Secret
.

“Okay?” his father asked.

“Okay,” Jeremy said.

“I need to stay here,” his father said. He stared up at the ceiling. “Here in this room. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Jeremy counted the ticks of the clock. He had reached one hundred ten when his father said, “Here’s what you tell people. Tell them that I have a rare sickness that not even the doctors can understand and I just want to be left alone. Okay?”

Jeremy nodded, and his father closed his eyes. “I’m sorry, Jeremy,” he said in a whispery voice. “I’m sorry for you and I’m sorry for me and I’m sorry for Zyla.”

This was the first time in five years he had spoken her name, and he would never speak it again.

Jeremy sat in a chair beside the bed until his father fell to sleep, and then he slipped back into the kitchen, for an idea had occurred to him, one that, when he again read the obituary and inspected the calendar on the wall, proved to be true: the
afternoon that his mother died was the very date that he had heard his mother’s voice whispering that she was
sorry, sorry, sorry
.

Jeremy climbed into the attic to be with his mother’s books, and that night he dragged his bedding up the ladder. Ever since that darkening day, the attic above the bookstore had been Jeremy’s private room and the apartment behind the bookstore had been his father’s sanctuary, and also his prison.

After saying
au revoir
to Ginger Boultinghouse, Jeremy pulled out the key attached to the long leather cord around his neck, unlocked the bookstore door, and found a letter from the bank lying on the floor below the mail slot. “Final Notice of Trustee Sale” was written at the top of the letter, followed by a dense text containing terms like
default, unpaid balance, collection fees, late fees
, and
lender’s legal department
.

“God,” Jeremy said under his breath, and still carrying the letter, he pushed through the door that led from the bookstore to the apartment, where his father lay in bed watching television.

“There you are,” his father said in the tone of a person both relieved to see someone and annoyed by his late arrival.

“I went by the bakery,” Jeremy said, and his father’s face turned rigid, for he, too, had heard the story of his wife asking the man from Canada for a ride.

“I had to go sometime,” Jeremy said.

Well, it is true. Sometimes avoiding something can give it more and more meaning rather than less and less.

His father tipped his chin and poked his fingers into his gnarled beard, which seemed to irritate Jeremy and make him go even further. “I had a piece of Prince Cake, too,” he said, and this was too much for his father—he clamped shut his eyes, as if not seeing his son might put him beyond hearing him as well.

“I had a piece and it tasted really good and nothing happened.” He softened his voice. “Nothing happened, Dad.” He waited another moment and made his voice softer still. “It wasn’t the bakery’s fault that Mom left.”

Mr. Johnson pulled at his beard, kept his eyes clamped shut, and said, “I know what I know.”

“Well, here’s something else for you to know,” Jeremy said a bit tensely. He held out the letter from the bank. “Open your eyes and take a gander at this.”

Harold Johnson gave the letter a squinting look. “What is it?”

“It’s from the bank. They’re going to schedule the sale of the store.”

His father said nothing and turned his eyes to the television screen, where several men in cowboy hats shot at one another from behind barrels, feedbags, and horses. One dying man splashed into a watering trough. A bleeding man dragged himself across the street while bullets sprayed up dirt all around him. Yes, yes, it was quite a spectacle.