Given World (29 page)

“Tell him?”

“Yes. Tell him.”

“As soon as—”

“Possible.”

Of course I had not thought this through; had thought, if anything, Darrell would tell him, if it came to that, and then we could all just go on and do whatever it was we were going to do, whatever it was.

While I am busy thinking about what I had not thought through, Darrell is busy getting ready to say, “I’m not the one who left.”

I almost say, “The hell you weren’t,” but I don’t have to, because he hears me thinking it.

So this is the part where he is angry. As angry as Darrell gets, which isn’t very, or maybe it’s very, but it doesn’t hold. “That was different. And, yes, I should have told you. Do you want to play who should have told who what?”

“No,” I say. Because he did not say, “I’m not the one who left 
him
.”

“Good. I don’t either.”

“Okay.”

He picks up the basketball, does that finger-spin thing with it, palms it back to earth, to the concrete space next to him. I ask what happened to his leg.

Multiple fractures, he says, while he was still in Texas. A bunch of white guys jumped him at a bar. Army guys, from the same base. “One of them stomped my leg with his shitkickers. No one even called the cops or the MPs.” He pulls up his pants leg and shows me the scar where the bone came through. I want to touch it, but I don’t. He spent six weeks in traction while it healed, which it did just in time to ship out.

“Except they were done shipping us out. They’d stopped the deployment. Just like that.”

“They what?”

“They stopped sending guys over there.”

“Enlisted guys? Or drafted?”

“Both.”

How could I not have known that? Because I had pretty much stopped paying attention, is why. For some years. For some reasons.

“So—”

“I was never going anywhere. Or I wouldn’t have been. Or, you know.”

Well, I’ll be damned. “So none of this—”

“Ginger. Don’t.” He’s saying we can’t go back, but that’s easy for him—I’m sure he’s already done it.

“Didn’t you?”

“Oh yeah.” He pauses. He drops his head backward and frowns up at the sky. “And you can if you want to, but it won’t change anything. It’ll just keep you up at night.”

I have two choices: believe him, or make myself crazy. Seems so simple. Flip a coin. Pick one.

I ask him if he wants to hear something funny. He brings his chin back down and turns toward me, raises one eyebrow. “Funny weird? Or ha ha funny?”

I say, “The first one, I guess.” I say I did end up going to Vietnam, looking for . . . things.

“Your brother?”

“For starters.”

“What did you find?”

“Not sure, but something.” I look down at my hands, thinking maybe it will appear there, like whatever the opposite of stigmata is. Are.

“Name it?”

“Not hardly.”

“Yeah.” He gets it. Me. He still gets me. Like when I was seventeen. I believe this.

But I still have to scout the territory, do some recon. Start at the beginning and creep up, or it will bury me. “Who was I then?”

“Ginger,” he says.

“I wasn’t really.”

“To me you were.”

“Exactly.”

He nods. Because, again, he knows. This is not something so easily sorted.

Ginger. Cupcake. Punk. Tinker Bell. Cookie. Stolen identities. Or borrowed. Some kept. Maybe all.

“Tell me the rest,” I say.

“I thought we were talking about Ginger.”

“Not yet. Tell me the rest.”

“After Texas?”

“Yes.”

They didn’t send him to Vietnam, but they held on to him and his bum leg anyway; he still owed them some time. So he went AWOL: came home for a week and then headed, finally, for Alberta. Lived on the rez up there and started back after the amnesty in 1977. Somehow he was included in the all clear.

“Good timing, I guess. Or they just didn’t know what the hell they were doing.”

“I’m glad.” Without planning to, I reach for the braid that still goes halfway down his back. His hair is shot through with a few streaks of silver. I tug on it. Lightly.

“You’re a pal,” he says. “Thanks.”

The years come together, not crashing, more like a folding paper fan I brought back from Saigon and forgot to take with me when Annabelle and the boys didn’t have room for me anymore. I am too dumbfounded to even wonder how such a thing could happen, with the years; how it could seem, if only for a moment, as though I have, after all, taken the most practical route (if scenic was a consideration) from point A to point B. It makes no sense.

“When did you find out?”

“About Slim?”

“Yes. That.”

“My uncle wrote me in Canada,” he says. “And then when I got home, there he was, for real, like magic. You always were a clever girl.”

“Not so clever,” I say.

He says something about camouflage, something about pain ponies.

“Pain? Or paint?”

“Whatever,” he says, smiling, and I don’t know why, but also know I don’t need to. “Ponies is ponies,” he says.

He pulls a loose thread from the hem of his shirt, wraps it tight around his finger. “I didn’t go home right away,” he says. “Slim was four already, by the time I got there.”

What? If he was four, that means at one, two, three, he didn’t have his mother
or
father. But here we both are, so how is that even possible? I try to picture him. It’s easy. I know just what he looked like. How long his hair was. How he never wanted to wear shoes. I can’t imagine a world without him, even though we’ve hardly met.

“Why?”

“They arrested me at the border for some pain pills a buddy gave me. For my leg. One bottle, but they gave me all the time they could get away with.”

“Where did they send you?”

“Leavenworth. Always keep track of your drugs, girl. And you can skip Kansas altogether. It’s as flat as they say.”

“I’ll try to remember that.”

I get around—before long is too long—to asking about our son. He tells me Slim has been jumping out of planes about five years now, since he graduated. Smoke jumping. I smell sage, sweetgrass, tinder for the fires that come every other summer, like clockwork.

Now he wants to go to college.

“Away from here,” Darrell says.

I wonder if my mother has anything to do with this. Encouraging him to go away, but to something legitimate. Not to war. Not to the coast to try all the different ways of forgetting. My mother, as I have already said, is no dummy, and maybe Slim is her second chance. Maybe he is all our second chances, and maybe, more likely, I am the only one who really needs one, and including a cast of others just makes me feel less like the Lone Ranger after Tonto has had the good sense to ride off into the sunset.

“College,” I say. “That’s good. That’s—”

“Yeah,” Darrell says. “It’s good. It’s great. But he wants to join the Guard to pay for it.” He clearly hates the idea. The army. “But I can’t tell him what to do. He’s not a kid.”

I think, but not aloud because I know he won’t want to hear it,
It’s only weekends, right?
I’ve seen the commercials. Weekends and a month in the summer. Something like that. It’s not like he’s
joining up
. Not like he has to go fight real enemies. It’s not even like we have those anymore. It’s just practice. Killing practice, but no one actually dies.

I think we must all have had enough of war by now, that from now on it will be there—always but only peripherally—like a shadow, to keep us expectant, keep us on our toes. But not real war. Not boys putting on uniforms to go away and not come back. It makes me feel better, to know this.

“Maybe it’ll work out, or there’ll be some other way.”

“Maybe,” he says. This time what he does not say is “He’s yours too, you know,” for which I am grateful, and I imagine it is because he knows I am not planning to fall off the face of the earth again. Like before. Once was enough. I know that. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but it won’t be that.

He looks at me for, it feels like, the first time. “How have you been?” he says.

I have to smile. “Not bad. Getting by.”

“Sure?”

“Sure.”

He leans into me, and I have to lean back, hard, or fall over.

“So now what?”

“I don’t know. I miss California. The ocean.”

“Just the ocean?”

“And a whole gang of dead folks. Some live ones too, though.”

“Ghosts,” he says.

“All of them?”

“In a way.”

“Are you a ghost?”

“I am.” His shoulder feels so necessary, next to mine. Like a limb I didn’t know I was missing. I don’t know which limb, or what kind of necessary, and it’s okay. He tells me we need our ghosts; we are
made
of our ghosts.

“I could be starting to figure that out,” I say. “I could be starting any day now.”

“Don’t wait too long,” he says.

I say I won’t.

Something else to figure out, and soon, is what, on earth, I want. And to know if this trip has been worth . . . all I let slip away. Maybe if I knew the final destination. Or not. Could be that’s the whole point of this exercise, to not really
know
much of anything, but to feel it, finally, and to live with that.

We wait, still leaning but not quite so hard, not so much like there’s something we’re trying to prove.

Eventually he says, “The ocean isn’t going anywhere.”

I look beyond the sagging fence, the precarious confusion of swings and slides and monkey bars taken finally down by the weather, and the years. I see no hawk, no rabbit, no horse—just that one small mountain range in the distance, still holding its own out there, a reminder that there is such a thing as permanence, or something close to it.

Darrell reaches his long arms out, palms up, toward those mountains. I know what he is doing. He is presenting to me this landlocked, bone-covered, rock-strewn, river-crossed country—and that ridiculous sky. These are extravagant gifts I really do not deserve. But it is just like him, always trying to give me things I don’t deserve.

“What about this?” he says.

“This is good,” I say, and stay where I am, for now. I try as hard as I can to concentrate, to see what he is seeing. What is out there. What is left. What is possible. Still. Or again.

This book would never have been realized or even dreamt of without the benevolence of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I am eternally and deliriously grateful to my teachers, my cohort, and the ones who wandered in, for generous teaching, reading and thoughtful criticism; for believing in me and for making me believe; and for setting the bar so damn high. Special thanks to Yuko Sakata Burtless, Lydia Conklin, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Judith Mitchell, Chris Mohar, Lorrie Moore, Rob Nixon, Jonis Agee, Meghan O’Gieblyn, Hannah Oberman Breindel, Barrett Swanson, Jacques Rancourt, Josh Kalscheur, Vicente M. López Abad and Seth Abramson.

I am also indebted to the John Steinbeck Center at San Jose State University, Nick Taylor in particular, and to the Elizabeth George Foundation, for generous support while I wrestled these sentences. And to Jon Peede at the
Virginia Quarterly Review
, for invaluable assistance in wrestling a critical mass of them; I learned a lot from you.

Thank you to the Squaw Valley, Napa, and Mendocino writers’ conferences for support and community, and especially to Jim Houston, in memory, for his indelible warmth and good heart; to Gary Short for many reasons, but mostly just because; and to Peter Orner, for his generosity of spirit and for the final chapter.

Friends, family and fellow writers who have read this book for me in all its messy iterations, bless and thank you: Constance Palaia, Terese Palaia, Lee Doyle, Al Perrin (in memory), Raoul Biggins, Coco O’Connor, Frances Scott, judy b, Margaret Sofio, Sallie Greene, and Emily Nelson.

Bless and thank you, too, Dick Jones, for giving me Asia (and free rent for life at 1 Nga Kau Wan), but not for leaving us so soon.

For the others we lost before I had a chance to say in just the right words what a huge part of my life you were: Tenley Galbraith, Shery Longest, Pat Ramseyer, Bill Owen, Jeffrey Kirk, and Anthony Holliday, you are dearly missed. And for the ones still kicking (too many to name) at the Wild Side West and Teamsters Local 921, I hope you know who you are. I bet you do.

Finally, a million thanks to my agent, Emma Sweeney, for her many talents and her guidance; to her assistants, Suzanne Rindell and Noah Ballard, for all the not-at-all-little things: and to my editor, Trish Todd, for hawk-eyed and insightful editing, and for taking a chance on an old dog and her tricks.

Simon & Schuster Reading Group Guide

The Given World

Marian Palaia

In her riveting debut novel, Marian Palaia courageously explores love, loss, and survival, offering a candid and unforgettable look at what it means to be human. Unable to come to terms with the disappearance of her beloved brother in Vietnam, Riley leaves her home in Montana behind and sets out on a wild and uncertain journey to find peace. From San Francisco to Saigon, she mingles with a cast of tragic figures and misfits—people from all walks of life, bound by the unspeakable suffering they have endured and their fierce struggle to recover some of that which they have lost. Spanning more than twenty-five years, the coming-of-age story of one injured but indefatigable young woman explodes into a stunning portrait of a family, a generation, and a world rocked by war—and still haunted by it long after.

Topics for Discussion

1. Why does Riley leave her home in Montana? What informs the choices she makes about where she travels? Does she ultimately find what she is seeking in each place?

2. How do Riley’s parents respond to her departure and her long absence? Consider how the author uses shifts in point of view to reveal this information. Are the reactions of Riley’s parents expected? Surprising?

3. In the first chapter of the book, Riley says: “They say our early memories are really memories of what we think we remember—stories we tell ourselves—and as we grow older, we re-remember, and often get it wrong along the way. I’m willing to believe that, but I still trust some of my memories.” Is Riley a reliable narrator? How can we determine it? What does the novel seem to indicate about the nature of memory? Is memory a benefit or a curse?