Shelter in Place (29 page)

But all this peace and simple pleasure, this silence and contemplation, did not change our course. It occurred to me, yes, and perhaps I even prayed for it then, but in the end, our hour together out on the rock on that fine day was only prayer before battle.

Afterwards we returned in a new formation. My father and Seymour far ahead, Hank and Tess and me behind. We came to my father's house, the garden planted for spring. Inside, the table was already set. The living room smelled of ocean and frying onions.

There were bottles of his good Washington wine on the table. There was green salad and garlic bread and a tray of lasagna on the bar. Once everyone had been served we took our seats and my father stood.

“To families,” he said, “new and old and in between.”

When I leaned across Seymour, extending my glass toward my father's, he said, “In the eye, Joe, in the eye,” and when I looked up, I felt a shock, a shot of pain or sadness or anger. Or love. I'm not sure. It must be a common experience. You must know it, must have felt it in the course of your life, that unsettling, visceral response, that distinct emotion we feel upon looking directly into our parents' eyes. What is it exactly? I suppose it must vary. We must each of us see many things, many combinations—longing, love, disappointment, need, frustration, possession. Is there not some universal experience? Do the eyes of all parents contain some basic and common ingredient? I believe they do. I believe they must. At least when they're turned directly on us, when they come in perfect contact with our own. Well, whatever the case, time slowed, and there were my father's soft eyes full of love and warning, fear and reproach.

But this is all fabrication, an illusion, a trick. An eye is an eye is an eye.

And we were off. Seymour and my father laughing together, and Hank with his toothy cowboy grin, and I thought, Why not? Why not love him, too? Let my father be happy, grant him his new friend, his new pleasures, his new routines, his church that is not a church, his walks without me along the beach, his beatific smiles and shining eyes.

So peace was made official without war having ever been declared.

I was insatiable that night. I ate and ate. All three of us did. We'd been so cold all the time, half-starved, living on whiskey and peanuts, and here was hot food and a safe room.

I went outside to get some wood from the pile.

I looked in at the glow of our father's home and I thought of you, Claire.

I thought of us at our table in Capitol Hill when we were kids, when Mom was a nurse and Dad was a carpenter. Outside, listening to the ocean, the sounds of Dad's new life, our new life, and I could feel you. Can now. First your left arm around my shoulder while you dug your fork into my piece of pie. Then the way you smelled as a kid, which was the smell of your bedroom, which became the feeling of the floor where we used to play, the cream carpet and the lines we drew through it with our thumbs to create borders for battles, circles for marbles. And then I began to feel you not as a physical thing, but as a tone, the way all the absent exist within me.

And there was Mom too, laughing, and she was saying, “Are you crazy? Are you fucking crazy?”

I don't know why. There is no secret meaning. It was one of those flashes. Another clipped from the reel. She is at the table leaning forward over her plate, shaking her head, looking right at someone, and she is laughing so hard, saying, “Are you crazy? Are you fucking crazy?” Then she too became tone, not the one I'd been carrying with me in White Pine, not the frozen milk color, not the unoiled metallic sound, not the smell of industrial floor cleaner, but the old one, the good one I took with me to school, the orange moon, the match light, the coffee, the gasoline.

I stood out there with my former family, waiting, drunk, watching the two worlds, cradling a stack of split logs in my arms until I heard my name and I came back. I built the fire up and we all moved over from the table to the couches and the brown corduroy chair and the worn-out rag rug. We finished off the wine, Hank revealed a bottle of scotch and everyone cheered.

“I guess you're not much a Quaker, after all,” I said to him because I couldn't help myself, because when I drink I'm no good, or wasn't, or because I was still angry, or because I was still a child, or for some other reason I can't explain or even understand.

Stupid for so many reasons, not least of which is that plenty of Quakers drink to their hearts' content.

Anyway and as always back to the flow of time, and its dull markers: action and event. To the floor of my father's house one warm spring evening in White Pine, Washington, where rape was in the news, and Anna Young flew through the trees while her father hurled his wife against kitchen walls.

“Leave it, Joe,” Tess said. So I did. I relented, gave Hank a break, and the band played on and the scotch was poured and I rested my head in her lap and listened to the ghosts.

They were everywhere that night. Singing and whispering from the branches, from the blood in Tess's thigh, from the fire, from my father's hands, which moved above me, from the rug beneath my back, from the floor lamps transplanted from my childhood to that foreign town no longer foreign.

And all night my father's eyes appeared like entities separate from the man himself, singing:
Do not debase yourself, Joseph March. Do not give in. Do not break.

Or they were only the blurred eyes of a drunken man, with no message, no meaning at all. But I will tell you this: Late in that cool night, we sat on the front step together and my father said, “I hope that you are smarter. I hope that you are gentler.”

And what he meant was
, more gentle than your mother, more gentle than my wife.

“How do you know?” I asked. “What we're planning.”

“Seymour,” he said.

He put his arm around me. “You think I don't know what it is, Joe? You think you two are the only people who understand what it's like to want to destroy someone, something?”

By
two
, he meant my mother and me.

“No,” I said, though at the time I think the answer was, yes.

“I'm asking you. I'm saying please, Joe.”

He was holding me too tightly. His hand on my shoulder. As so often, I wish I could tell you that it was a moment of tenderness and change. But what I wanted was for him to let me go.

The Royall Lyme, his wishes, his strong fingers, they all made me want to run. Made me want to fight. His admonitions, his pleadings. They made me want to go
to
war, not away from it. I do not know why. I do not know why I wasn't gentler, why my father's soft voice instilled in me a desire for violence and destruction. For the opposite of what he asked. I don't know why that is.

Was it really so simple as an adolescent instinct for rebellion?

Before we went back inside, he said, “I love you, Joe. I love you very much.”

And I said, “I love you too, Dad.”

And I did love him. In spite of it all. In spite of the anger he caused me. In spite of the claustrophobia. In spite of knowing I would do precisely what he did not want.

If ever there'd been a doubt, now I was sure.

But I told him I loved him, and it was the truth.

T
ess handed out black balaclavas, we stuffed them into our pockets and left headquarters after sunset.

Those masks were all we carried. No wallets. No identification. No keys.

Well, Tess, she had a backpack.

We walked up the hill and turned on Vista. The porch light was on, but the house was dark.

When we returned home that night Seymour asked, “What if they're on vacation?”

Tess stared at him. “No,” she said as if it were her decision.

It was the second week of March, the second week of spring break at Emerson. The three of us had taken it off. A vacation, we said. Down to Cannon Beach. Told the bar, Hank, my father.

As per instructions I'd rented a house, sent the money, used our names. The keys came in an envelope along with a few photos, a stapled packet of directions. Not right on the ocean, but an easy walk. A view of the water from the upstairs bedroom. Blue whale weather vane on the roof.

The next night it was the same thing. Nobody home.

Our victim would not cooperate.

Tess broke a rocks glass against our bedroom wall.

But a few nights later, as soon as we came around the corner, we heard the springs.

Tess made a noise I've never forgotten. Half sigh, half moan. Relief and resignation.

We picked up our pace.

Up ahead Anna was falling through the branches. Her small face appeared featureless at first. A pale oval surrounded by rising black hair.

“
Anna
,” Tess said, as if she'd spent the whole week searching for her.

The girl looked at Seymour and said, “
You're
big,” grinning as she lifted off.

“Did you go away, Anna?”

“Went to see my uncle.”

Something about that chilled me.

I thought, we should have a dog, we should have some reason for walking this street. It's a terrible plan. Anyone can see us. Someone will call the police.

But Tess said, “Joey, do any of these fucking people call the police when they hear what goes on in that house?”

The next night we returned later. It was dark out. Clear and cold and full of stars. No clouds, no rain, no moon.

Again, the trampoline sound.

We came around the bend. I could feel the thing. All of us could.

That's how I remember it.

Or how I'd like to: A falling in our hearts.

Tess stopped before we came into the edge of light. Anna flew through the night. She didn't see us, or she pretended not to. We said nothing. We waited and listened.

Then there was the sound we were hunting: clatter and screams. Sam Young's low voice, then a full and heavy thud. Tess drew the straps of her backpack tight. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the balaclava.

Then her face disappeared.

I put mine on.

So did Seymour.

We marched in a column. Ovals for eyes, circles for mouths.

We followed Tess to the back door. She turned the knob. We followed her in, passing through a darkened living room—two lit candles on a sideboard—toward the bright kitchen.

Tess point, me middle, Seymour flank.

Then we were crowding the kitchen. Sam Young, who was standing above his wife, turned to us carrying a vile expression of hatred.

He took a step back and said, “What the fuck?”

The woman was sitting against the white oven. Her black hair fell forward over her eyes and there was blood smeared from her nose across her cheek.

She looked like Anna. Or Anna looked like her.

Outside the trampoline went on—high and low, high and low.

When she saw us she brought her hands up to cover her mouth and nose.

We followed Tess deeper into the kitchen. I stood just to her right.

Sam Young was frightened now. The anger was gone.

He tried, but seemed so suddenly frail. “What do you want? Get the fuck out of my house.”

Tess slapped him. He took one step toward her, and I hit him clean. I was waiting for it. An even right cross to the mouth.

Just like my father taught me. Straight from the shoulder. Use your hips.

It had nothing to do with why we were there. I did it only because he moved at Tess. I would never learn. There was pain in my wrist, worse for the old injury.

At first, I was so even, so calm.

Sam Young was on the floor. He didn't get up, but he was conscious. His lip was bleeding.

“Sit there.” Tess nodded at a chair, which had been tipped over.

When he didn't move, Seymour did it for him. Then the three of us were standing side by side in front of the man.

Now he was seated at the small kitchen table. I think we expected more talking.

“Why are you here?”

It occurred to me only in that instant that I wasn't sure of the answer. I mean that I didn't know what Tess would do exactly, or what she'd hidden in that backpack.

Then my heart started to go and I felt that first hot flush of power.

Tess hit him again. This time with her fist. I could tell it hurt her. It was the first time she'd ever hit a person like that, straight on with a closed hand.

She may have broken his nose.

His wife whispered, “Leave him alone.” And Tess spun as if she might attack her too, but after a brief hesitation she left the kitchen, returned with a small green blanket and spread it over the woman's lap.

Something about that gesture set Sam Young off.

“Get the fuck out of my house,” he said, but his voice was desiccated and feeble.

“Why do you do it?” Tess asked.

“Please,” he said. “Leave us alone.”

“Why?”

Sam Young stared into Tess's mask.

“Well,” she said, “it doesn't matter.”

I wished Tess wouldn't talk so much. I thought
, surely he recognizes us. Surely he knows who we are.

Then he screamed, “Fuck you. Get the hell out of my house.” His voice broke. It was all panic.

I thought I heard the trampoline noise stop.

Maybe across the quiet neighborhood a dog barked. It was that kind of scream.

“You've got a daughter, you've got students,” Tess said quietly, unfazed, practiced as a cool mafia thug.

She unslung the backpack. She removed a camera and took Sam Young's picture. When the flash went off, he closed his eyes and kept them closed. Then Tess turned it toward the woman.

“I'm sorry,” she said, and took that photograph, too.

With his eyes still closed he whispered, “Please get out of my house.”

I thought he might cry, but he didn't.

“Put your hands on the table,” Tess said.

He wouldn't so Seymour did it for him. Then there they were, flat on the smooth laminate.