Leaving the Sea: Stories (15 page)

Someone always has a past, and someone’s past is always returning, ruinously. The past, in the mind of the person who had it, is terrible and shameful, but to the television viewer the terrible past this person had is only ever endearing. The illegitimate child is one of the more common shameful pasts dramatized on PBS. This plot troubles my mother. She does not care for it. Once she said that all children are illegitimate, and I laughed, but she shot me a look. Illegitimate children grow up into illegitimate adults, only to die and become illegitimate corpses, buried illegitimately. Soon she fell asleep and I learned that the illegitimate child, who was an heiress, had taken a scullery position in the very mansion where her unwitting family lived. My mother woke and angrily declared, seemingly out of nowhere, that this girl would be the first suspect in the episode, and she would be shamed and abused and shamed again, but in the end they would discover that she did not do it. There is always a first suspect, quickly forgiven. Nowadays there are several suspects who wind up innocent. That’s what you want to be, my mother advised, pointing her finger at me. The first suspect. Be the first suspect. The first suspect never did it.

If my mother did die today, she would die while I was writing. Years from now someone might ask me what I was doing when my mother died and I would have to answer that I was home, writing. This scenario implies that I will one day meet someone who will take the familiar with me, because there is no one presently in my life who would think, I think, to ask me such a question. Does a stranger, even a well-intentioned one, ask such a question? I would have to meet someone who would, quickly or slowly—I’m fine with either—gain enough familiarity with me to pose this personal question. Perhaps this man or woman would be someone with whom I would grow close, even though I would be an older person by then with little to offer in terms of romantic maneuvers. We’d pose each other questions on couches, chairs, park benches, beds, in cars and on buses and sometimes walking through fields, or so I imagine, seeking to overcome each other’s defenses, hoping that personal questions, asked and answered, would come, over time, to pass for intimacy, but wondering, sometimes, if that’s even how it’s done, and if that doesn’t somehow seem too strenuous a method of getting someone finally to love you.

This question of what I was doing when someone died, however, does not seem to be asked about the death of unremarkable citizens. We only seem to ask after someone’s whereabouts when it comes to the death of celebrities. So I can perhaps count on the odds that—even if I do gain a companion in my life going forward, an event that I would welcome—I won’t be asked what I was doing when my mother died. No one will have to know, unless I volunteer it. Odds are. Unless, in my eulogy, which I would have to write very quickly, I declare my whereabouts when she died.

It’s often the young, wild-haired simpleton, whose accent is more cockney than the others, indicating the deepest possible underdog. She assists the cook and the cook treats her poorly. Everyone treats her poorly. Her very employment is a matter of charity. They underestimate her. Not my mother. Early on, even during the opening credits, my mother wags her finger and says, Look out for that one!

What I will be able to say, without lying, is that when my mother died I was at home thinking about her, since in order to write about my mother I must first think about her, and in that sense she is very much in my thoughts. In order to increase the chances of this being true, it would seem that I should not stop writing, or at the very least thinking, about my mother, at the risk of thinking of something else and then having her suddenly die.

If, for instance, I get up from my chair and become distracted at the refrigerator, deciding that I’d like a taste of cold yogurt, and then for those moments cease thinking about my mother, I run the risk that she will die, alone, in no one’s thoughts, while her only son ate from an open container and stared into nowhere, thinking, for a moment, of nothing.

I cannot let this happen.

Episode after episode, watching mysteries with my mother, I look out for the wild-haired simpleton. I watch the wild-haired simpleton, waiting for her to strike, and yet her endgame is slow, her long play is invisible, so much so that by the time the credits roll the wild-haired simpleton has yet to pounce. She is frequently back where she started, working in a kitchen, having come to nothing. She has nowhere to go, and nobody loves her, and the wild-haired simpleton herself, with her soft, gray teeth, seems incapable of loving anyone else. My mother nods and says, Don’t write that one off.

The credits have rolled, the show is over. The contemporary people standing off camera with their up-to-date views on the world have wandered away to go home. The actress portraying the wild-haired simpleton resumes her normal, highly educated accent, yanks the tangled fright wig from her head, returns to her trailer to shower and put on her smart clothing. My mother, though, watching the credits and smiling, looks at me with sharp eyes.

Next time, she promises. That one isn’t done. She’s got more fight in her. She’s a fighter, that one. She’ll get them next time.

T
he phone call said to come alone, but he couldn’t just leave them. Perhaps they’d been called, too, and didn’t remember the procedure, which would only figure. His father was not good with instructions. Worse, his father was fatally indifferent to what people said. Other people spoke and the man’s face went blank, as if any voice but his own was in a foreign language. Perhaps his father had not heard the phone. Or maybe he mistook the message for a prank and hung up.

Later, his helpless parents in tow, Edward could explain the mistake, if necessary. By then it’d be too conspicuous to leave them stranded in the road while everyone else left town.

Owing to the roadblock that would be set up on Morris Avenue, Edward parked at Grove and Williams and trekked through muddy backyards to the apartment complex. He cursed himself, because he’d have to lead his parents back the same way, down a wet slope where his car would be waiting. In the many configurations they’d rehearsed at the workshop, somehow he had not accounted for this major obstacle: herding his parents in the dark down a steep, wet slope.

His father was awake and packed already, wandering through the apartment. When Edward walked in, his father started to put on his coat.

“Where’s Mom?”

“Not coming, I guess,” his father said.

“Dad.”

“You try. I tried already. You try if you want to. I’m disgusted. I’m ready to go. Do you know how many times I’ve had to do this?”

“Did they call you?” Edward asked.

“Did who call me?” His father was on the defensive. Had he even slept? Had he been up all night, waiting?

“Did your phone ring tonight?” Edward asked, trying not to sound impatient. There were cautions against this very thing, the petty quarrels associated with departure, which only escalate during an emergency.

“I don’t know, Eddie. Our phone doesn’t work. I’m ready to go. I’m always ready. We’re down there almost every night. Why not tonight?”

Edward picked up the phone and heard an odd pitch. More like an emergency signal than a dial tone.

“You don’t believe me?” his father said. “I tell you the phone doesn’t work and you don’t trust me?”

“I trust you. Let’s get Mom and go.”

His mother was in bed, sheets pulled over her face. It felt wrong to sit on his parents’ bed, to touch his mother while she was lying down. Standing up, he could hug and kiss his mother with only the usual awkwardness, but once she was prone it seemed inappropriate, like touching a dead person. He shook her gently.

“C’mon, Mom, let’s go. Get dressed.”

She answered from under the sheets, in a voice that was fully awake. Awake and bothered.

“I’m too tired. I’m not going.”

They’d been told that, at times like this, old people dig in their heels. More than any other population, the elderly refuse to go. They hide in their homes, wait in the dark of their yards while their houses are searched. Often they request to die. Some of them do not request it. They take matters into their own hands.

But there were a few little things you could do to persuade them, and Edward had learned some of them in the workshop.

“Mom, you don’t know what you’re saying. You really don’t want to be here, I promise you.”

“See what I told you?” said his father from the doorway.

“Tell him to shut up,” said his mother.

“You shut up,” his father barked. “Don’t ever tell me to shut up.”

“Shut up,” she whispered.

They waited in his parents’ room, where he’d come and snuggled as a child, a thousand years ago, and he couldn’t help siding with his mother. It would be so wonderful to fall back asleep right now. If only.

“Mom, if you don’t come with us, who knows where you’ll sleep tonight. Or you won’t sleep. I can guarantee that you won’t like what will happen. It will be horrible. Do you want me to tell you what will happen?”

He could hear his mother breathing under the sheets. She seemed to be listening. He paused a bit longer for suspense.

“I could spell it out for you. Would you like me to do that? I have to say I’d rather not.”

Something wordless, passing for surrender, sounded. Edward left the room to give her time and it wasn’t long before she joined them in the front hall, scowling. She’d thrown a coat over her nightgown and carried a small bag.

“Okay?” said Edward.

They didn’t answer, just followed him outside, where the streets were empty.

“Where’s your car?” his mother grumbled.

He explained what they’d have to do and they looked at him as if he were crazy.

“Do you see any other cars here?” he whispered. “Do you know why?”

“Don’t act like you know what’s going on,” his father whispered as they trekked out. “You’re as much in the dark as we are. You have no idea what’s really happening. None. Fucking hotshot. Tell me one fact. I dare you.”

When they reached the hill and had to navigate the decline, his mother kept falling. She’d fall and cry out, landing on her rear end in the grass. He’d never heard her cry in pain before. His father was beside her holding her arm, but she was the larger of his parents and when she stumbled his father strained and couldn’t hold her up. He lost his temper and kept yelling at her, and finally, softly, she said she was doing her best. She really was.

“Well, I can’t carry you!” he yelled.

“Then don’t,” she replied, and she stood up and tried to walk on her own, but she went down again, with an awful cry, sliding through the mud.

In the car she wept and Edward felt ashamed. This was supposedly the easy part.

The gymnasium was crowded. A motor roared, which must have been the generator, because they would have lost power at this point. They signed in, then looked for their settlements, divided by neighborhood. This was the drill. Edward would have a different settlement from his parents, which he’d tried to explain to them, but his father had trouble with the terminology.

“It’s not a settlement,” he’d said.

“Okay, I agree, but that’s what they’re calling it.”

“It’s ridiculous. We’ll be staying there for what, a few hours, not even, and they call it a settlement? A settlement is a place where people stop and stay. You know, people
live
in a settlement.”

“Dad, I don’t think it really matters. I think what matters is you find the area where you’re supposed to be and then go there.”

“But it won’t be the area where
you
will be, am I right?”

“That’s right. But I’ll be nearby. I’ll be able to check on you and Mom.”

“You don’t know that, though, Eddie. How could you know that?”

When Edward brought his parents to their settlement, he could not get them admitted. A young woman he knew as Hannah had the clipboard. After scanning her pages, she shook her head.

“They’re not on my list.”

“They live in this neighborhood.” He gave her their address, their apartment number. For no real reason he gave her their zip code, the solitary zip code for all of them.

In the crowd that had already registered were several of his parents’ neighbors, huddled against a wall. There were retirees from his parents’ building. Neighbors who knew his parents. This was the right place. He waved, but no one saw him.

Hannah stared from behind her clipboard. He could sense the protocol overwhelming her mind. A street address, recited anecdotally, was no kind of evidence. Anyone could deliver that information. Edward was only a man talking.

“Do you want to see their driver’s licenses?” he asked, a bit too curtly. Not that he’d brought them.

“No. I want to see their names on this list, and since I don’t, I can’t admit them. I have the most straightforward job in the world. If you have a problem you should discuss it with Frederick, but something tells me I know what he’ll say.”

From under her shawl Edward’s mother said, “Eddie, it’s okay, we’ll go with you to yours.” She sounded relieved. That would solve everything and they could be together.

Edward looked at Hannah, who simply raised her eyebrows. She and Edward had once been on a team together at the beginning. She had seemed nice. Very smart, too, which explained her promotion. Unfortunately, Hannah was impossibly striking. He had been so desperately compelled by her face that he had instantly resolved never to look at her or show her any kind of attention. Everything would be much easier that way. It was troubling now to discover that Hannah ran his parents’ settlement. Was this how things were now? Had everything shifted again? It meant he’d have to see more of her and regularly be reminded that she would never be his. She would never kiss him or get undressed for him or relieve his needs before work or stop trying to look pretty for him, which was the part he liked best, at least when he played out futures with women he’d never speak to. When someone like Hannah, not that there’d ever been someone like Hannah, let herself go and showed up on the couch after dinner in sweatpants and a long, chewed-up sweater. It was unbearable.

Edward knew that he shouldn’t do this, but Hannah would have to understand. He broke character and pleaded with her.

“There’s nowhere else to go. Can you please take them? Please? Is someone really going to come by later and match each person to a name on your list?”

She hardened her face. She wasn’t going to drop the act, and she seemed disgusted with Edward for having done so himself.

“Did they get a phone call?” she asked. Even this question seemed beneath her.

He started to answer, figuring he could lie, when his father blurted out that their phone was broken. How could you get a phone call with a broken phone?

“I assumed they did,” he confided to Hannah. “That’s the truth. Why wouldn’t they get a call? Look, their neighbors are here. People from the same building. Why would my parents have been left out?”

At this last question she looked at him flatly. Why indeed.

“They’re not supposed to be here,” Hannah said. “You shouldn’t have brought them. You might consider…” She seemed reluctant to say what she was thinking. “At this point you’ve made a serious mistake and you need to decide how to fix it with minimal impact on the community.”

She glanced pitilessly at his parents, then muttered, “I know what I would do.”

Edward figured that he knew what she would do, too.

He leaned in so he could speak into her ear. “Are you carrying?” he whispered. “Because if you are, and I could borrow it, I could kill them right here, and it would be a lesson for everyone.”

She was stone-faced. That wasn’t funny. “There are people behind you. I have a protocol to run.”

Don’t we all, Edward thought. But his protocol, to keep his parents safe, could not be achieved here.

“Okay, well, thanks for your help,” he said, sneering. “Good teamwork. Way to go.”

She kept her cool. “So you want me to make a mistake, arguably a bigger one, because you did? Let’s say your mistake was an accident, which possibly it was, although I can’t say. I’m guessing you’re not an imbecile, although this is only a guess. You want me to consciously break the rules. You want your error, a stupid error, if you ask me, to beget other errors so we’re both somehow to blame, even though I do not know you and have no responsibility for you? How does that do you a favor? How does that help you? At this point you need to fall on your sword. I don’t understand what’s so hard about that.”

Why was it so much worse to be shamed by an attractive person? Somehow he felt he could handle this critique from anyone else in the world.

Just then the lights switched on in the gymnasium and a hush fell. Frederick, leader of the readiness workshop, walked in with his wireless microphone. Everyone watched him. He stood at center court, tucked the microphone under his arm, and started to clap methodically, as if he were killing something between his hands. Soon everyone was applauding, moving in close to hear what Frederick would say. The drill, apparently, was over.

He thumped his mic, said
Hello, Hello,
and everyone fell silent. He was such a cock, Edward thought. An impossible cock.

“So,” he said, in his quick, high voice. “Fair work tonight. Not terrible. We made okay time. Maybe we’re a half hour slow, and I don’t need to tell you what that means.”

“Boom!” someone yelled from the crowd, to an eruption of laughter.

“Boom is right,” replied Frederick. “But it’s not funny.”

The laughter stopped.

“We would have lost people. A certainty. I would have faced a decision, a certainty, even as some of you drove up in your cars. Some of you wouldn’t have made it. You’d have watched us leave and, believe me, you would not have been permitted to follow. I won’t spell that out. You’d be alone now and it would be getting colder. You’d wonder how much gas remained. You’d wonder about the power grid, the water supply, the food supply. You’d determine, correctly, that you know nothing about these things. Nothing. You’d need a leader. Or would you? Maybe you could decide things as a group. You’d start to quarrel. You’d divide. It would get colder. This is supposed to be the easy leg. We didn’t even do the highway drill tonight. Do you know how much time we’ll lose on the highway?”

“Too much!” the crowd yelled.

“That’s right. The highway is an ugly variable. There’s a reason we have not shared the details with you. The highway. We cannot find a way to speak of it that is not disturbing. Whereas this”—Frederick gestured into the gymnasium—“this you can control, down to the second. Which means I’d like to see us shave off that half hour. Maybe forty-five minutes. We need breathing room. We need to join our settlements without panic, with time to kill. Next time we do this I want time to kill. Tonight we had no time to kill. And you know what?”

Someone from far in the back of the gym shouted, “What?”

“I’m disappointed,” Frederick said. He shut his eyes. The gymnasium seemed to groan.

“But do you know what else?” Frederick asked, staring from his expressionless face.

No one responded.

“I’m proud as hell of you. Every single one of you.”