Shelter in Place (35 page)

You want us reunited with Seymour.

You want Claire returned and reborn having seen the error of her ways, so full of explanation and regret.

You want a long grateful letter from Anna. You want her grown up, an undamaged young woman of real independence and intelligence.

You want Sam Young crawling to our doorstep broken and heavy with remorse.

You want Hank laughing at our dining table.

You want Tess to return home.

You want us happy and married with lovely, joyful children.

Or perhaps not that. Maybe you're sick of Tess and wish that I would just, for the love of fucking Christ, go sweep Beth into my arms. Or someone.

Or is it me you're sick of? Me and all my weeping, my weakness and wretched devotion, my broken
filters
, whatever the fuck
they
are, whatever
that
nonsense is.

Maybe you're rooting for Tess to find a true revolutionary, a constant man with high ideals and a good beard, who wears fraying rope bracelets, his long hair loose beneath ragged-brimmed hats, who is devoted to the cause. A man who will never, not for a single instant, tire of war and ambition.

Ah, but no matter what you want, I will give only what I have.

But why not lie? Why don't I invent these things you want? It would be so simple to construct warm reunions, moments of sweet revelation, tender letters from White Pine, a jubilant, lantern-lit dinner around a long oak table in our green clearing.

It is to do with some foolish idea of honor.

No good prayer, no true love letter, no great eulogy may be composed of lies.

Isn't that right?

I insist it must be.

I
t takes so much work to run two bars. It requires a constant presence, a heightened energy. It is both theater and sport. All the ritual preparation. Two shows a day. Us against them. So unpredictable. So often on the edge of chaos and disaster. It is physical work. It takes a toll. And after all those years, we were sore and we were tired. Our bodies hurt. My lower back. Her feet. Then my knee, then her shoulder. We had been doing it half our lives. Maybe it was more.

As a remedy, we began to take short vacations. Out to the San Juans, to the Olympic Peninsula, into the mountains around Leavenworth. Nothing far, nothing exotic. No cafés, no cobblestones. Maybe Tess would read about a little lodge somewhere and we'd stay there, or we'd drive until it got dark and stay wherever we could find. Anyway, we always had blankets in the back and neither of us minded sleeping in the truck. It was just the silence we liked. Just the emptiness of those places.

Even if we were restless for different reasons, even if our respective discontent was born and made of distinct materials, the quiet served us both the same.

It was during one of those trips that we saw the sign staked right outside the mailbox.

For Sale.

The land.

Or, this land.

I am there now. Or, I am
here
now. Here atop our little hill, looking out across that same perfect clearing into the dark woods.

Dear Tess, Dear Mom, Dear Dad, Dear Claire,

I am writing to you from the house we built on the land we found by the side of the road one late autumn afternoon.

It wasn't a shared fantasy, wasn't something we'd been working for. It wasn't meant to be our next move, or our next life. But we stopped at a sign next to a mailbox and we turned down a long dirt driveway. There was a soft wind coming from the west. And all those pines looked so blue.

So we bought it. It didn't take very long. It wasn't very expensive.

Then we sold our bars. Not to some local who owned a good restaurant down the street, but, I am ashamed to tell you, to a
hospitality group
. Owner of restaurants and hotels throughout the country. There were other offers, but none remotely comparable. None that even entered the same realm.

“If we do this, they will kill them,” Tess said, so full of contempt.

It was true. She was right. There would be branding and mission and dress code. Everything would be standardized and made efficient. Every shot would be measured and accounted for. There would be new language imposed. Scripts to be learned. Our people would have to speak like cheerful machines. All collective, all continuous: How are we enjoying our burgers? How is everything tasting? Are we still working on that?

Problems would become
concerns
. Customers would become
guests
.

“Fuck these people,” Tess said.

But even Tess, Tess of our later years, could not turn away from that deadly black figure printed at the bottom of the page—a single number, which held such power, so much promise and possibility.

We fought for the health insurance to remain, for a baseline hourly wage well above minimum. We won those battles anyway. Not that it was any consolation to either of us.

And just like that, just like everything else, with shocking speed, we were wealthy. I don't want to overstate it. We hadn't sold an oil field, but for us, for the small life in the woods we said we wanted, we had plenty of money.

I
f ever I was an ambitious man, I cannot remember him. Yes, there was general fire, desire for experience, for sex. I wanted to consume all that passed before me. But that was a state of youth,
the
state of youth.

But beyond those years? No.

I never wanted to be great. I never wanted to prove myself to the world. I had no fantasies of standing triumphant before a crowd. I never wanted to be anything in particular.

Neither astronaut nor fireman. Neither cop nor assassin.

Now my single conscious ambition is the same as it's been for so many years.

I want only a life with Tess.

You may ask, well, what have you done? What have you done with your life, Joseph March, and I will very happily tell you that I have loved my family, I have loved Tess Wolff.

And for these things I feel no shame.

But is this why she left? Have I suffocated her? Am I absent some vital thing, some essential American element? A passion for empire and celebrity? Do you think somehow it was murdered along with Dustin Strauss? Did my mother shatter something in me as she was shattering that man's skull?

Or perhaps I would have wanted more had my father been some other kind of man. Or if I had a stronger, more constant mind.

Well, whatever the case, here I am and there we were in our new house in the woods. And as with the bars, here, too, we were makers and masters of our own diminutive kingdom.

Put this here, put that there and when all was done, every cup in its cupboard, then at last we would begin. Then we would be provided with what? Peace of mind? Stillness of soul? Yes. That is precisely what I expected.

But I should also admit that there was some aspect of imprisonment, too.

Yes, I was trying to bind Tess to me.

Yes, I thought that here in the woods, I might fully and finally possess her.

Yes, within the confines of our house, our land, our perfect keyhole, the dense forest would eternally attach us together.

Like some kind of fairy tale witch, I would keep her here.

Was this house a prison? Was our clearing its yard?

Is that what I have done?

C
laire, she was in the yard.

Out by the west wall, just at the very edge of that little field they have. You can see it from the back end of the parking lot. No matter the season, it's mostly dead brown, but in late spring there are bits of green near the basketball courts.

It was Seymour who called.

It wasn't protocol, but he'd become a captain by then so he took his liberty and did it anyway.

“Joe?”

I hadn't heard his voice for so long.

We were on our deck. I'd been for a run. The sun was out and I was half-asleep on one of our new lounge chairs. Tess was potting flowers.

The phone rang, the one with all those megahertz.

She went inside to get it and when she returned said, “It's Seymour.”

She pointed the handset at me. I see her looking down, her terrible expression, and most of all, and as always, her eyes.

Seymour told me Mom was standing on her own. She was there, not doing anything in particular. The guard who saw her fall said she was looking toward the east, her back to the yard, but that he didn't know what she was looking at, or if she was looking at anything at all. Seymour didn't want to go on, but I pressed him. I wanted to know exactly.

For me, but for you as well.

If you ever come by here. In case you ever ask.

“The guard said, ‘It was like she'd been shot. One minute she's standing and the next she's on the grass.'”

She was sixty-four years old, Claire.

I'm glad she didn't clutch her chest, or stagger, or cry for help.

I like to imagine her facing the sun.

I like to imagine her looking through the fence, beyond the walls.

Who knows? Maybe she had her eyes closed. Maybe she was absent from herself entirely. But I will remember her with eyes open, her face full of sunshine, looking at something very far away.

I think of Dad dying as if falling into water.

I think of Mom vanishing quick as light.

I suppose we're fortunate. No protracted illnesses. No suffering for our parents. Both of them gone so quickly.

W
e returned to White Pine and stayed in a motel. Tess was tender with me, but very quiet. In the evening we got pretty drunk and then drove over to Lester's to meet Seymour, we took the same old booth.

I saw him come in with a large box under his arm. He was bald now, and had lost a bit of weight. I watched him make the rounds. It was still a guard bar so he knew everyone there.

It was hard to imagine him then as anything else, but once, I swear to you, he had been so entirely different.

He made his way over and sat down next to Tess.

“C,” she said, and began to cry.

He put his arm around her and she slumped into him, pressing against all that soft flesh.

He reached across the table and shook my hand. “Joe,” he said. “I'm sorry, brother.”

I was glad he spoke that way, still a bit of the young soldier left, my long-gone friend.

We shared a pizza and drank too much. There was little talk of the past, and certainly no mention of Sam Young.

Seymour pushed the box across the table. In it were packets of my mother's letters. Four of them. From me, from my father, from Tess, and then from her fans, Marcy Harper among them.

Her wedding ring. Some clothes.

And my mother herself, who'd been burned to ash and poured into a plastic bag, which had been sealed and fitted into a small white cardboard box. There was a printed label stuck askew to the top of it: Anne-Marie March.

I
n the morning the three of us drove out to the beach below the meetinghouse and shook her ashes into the wind with some sentimental hope that she would return to my father, or he to her, or both of them to God, or whatever it is one hopes for the dead.

And because we couldn't help ourselves, or really, because I, forever my father's son, couldn't help myself, we drove slowly past his house. There were purple pig lilies in the garden and a boy on the front step with a yellow Tonka truck upside down across his knees.

We stopped on Mott Street and watched for a while, but only saw a shadow pass in the upstairs window.

There was no sign of the Night Gardener.

At the Young house nothing moved. The trampoline was gone.

We didn't visit Hank. I can't remember why.

We dropped Seymour off at the prison.

“See,” he said, leaning down to us and pointing to the far basketball court, “it was there. She was right there.”

W
e returned home with my mother's wedding ring, and her packets of letters. Home where we pulled weeds from our garden and cut the grass and wildflowers when they grew too high. Home where we ran a damp cloth over all our smooth surfaces.

It was then something changed in Tess. Or changed again. My mother's death had provoked in her some of that former fire and panic, unearthed the old desire. She spoke less. Was remote in her old way. A new heat and charge to her.

We'd been home a week or so when I woke in the night to see her dressed and standing by the window in the moonlight. I called her name and she came to me and sat on the bed. She moved her fingers through my hair and kissed my forehead.

“Sleep, sweetheart,” she said. “I'm not tired.”

I closed my eyes.

“I'm not tired at all,” she whispered.

I woke again hours later as she was climbing back into bed, her skin so cool and smelling of night. She pressed her back to my chest.

I trapped her in my arms. I locked her ankle with my heel.

“Where have you been?”

She moved against me until I was inside her.

“I went for a walk.”

“In the forest?”

“There's so much light out there,” she said.

“I would have gone with you.”

I moved my hand between her legs.

“I know.”

“It's dangerous, Tess.”

“It's not,” she said. “It's fine.”

She broke free and rolled me hard onto my back.

“What could possibly happen, Joe?”

Then she was on top of me, her hands pinning my wrists.

“Will I be torn apart by wolves?”

She laughed. Her teeth were on my neck.

She let go and rode upright, her hands on her breasts, nipples between her fingers. I watched her moving above me, her open mouth, her eyes closed, her hair swinging forward and back, face flashing dark and silver in the moonlight.

She was loud that night, and after she'd come, fell asleep almost immediately.

T
here were many nights I'd wake to find her vanished, or slipping back into bed.