The Divide (31 page)

But the truth was, he wasn’t angry with his dad. He just felt sorry for him. The poor guy had left because apparently he wasn’t happy, but leaving didn’t seem to have made him any happier. Sometimes, when Josh glanced at him and caught him in an unguarded moment, his face was as long as a shovel. Of course, Josh felt sad about what had happened, but it didn’t make him angry or even resentful. In fact, he worried that this meant there must be something wrong with him, that he was somehow emotionally deficient. Perhaps he should be feeling what Abbie was feeling. Perhaps he should be spending this week screaming abuse at the guy, telling him what a disgrace he was, what a terrible father and husband and example he was.

But Josh didn’t feel that way. It was all so goddamn confusing, he couldn’t figure out what he
did
feel. Except a little ashamed and guilty sometimes. Because, if he was absolutely honest, he didn’t really mind too much that his dad had left. Wasn’t that a shocking thing to admit? But it was true. Apart from the fact that it had made everybody else so unhappy, Josh didn’t actually
care.

In a way, if anything, it had made his life better. He wasn’t in his dad’s shadow anymore. The guy wasn’t there, on his case the whole time, telling him to go easy on the weed and not to drink or stay out too late. Or giving him a hard time over some paper he hadn’t handed in on time. Suddenly, from troublesome teenager, he had been transformed into man of the house. He was the pillar now, the rock, the one who fixed the fuses and chopped the wood and shoveled the snow off the porch.

Of course, Josh didn’t so much as hint at any of this when they talked last night in the little restaurant where they had ended up going almost every night because everywhere else was too noisy and crowded. On the one hand his dad might have been happy to hear it, of course. On the other, it might have upset him to discover he wasn’t too badly missed or, in truth, missed at all. So Josh sat there and listened while his dad kept apologizing and then did his best to answer all those questions about his mom and Abbie and how they were doing, trying to give it as positive a gloss as possible so the poor guy wouldn’t beat himself up even more. Because what was the point in telling him how broken and wretched the two of them really were? And how weird was that? There was Josh, still a year to go in high school, playing the rock, the man of the family, even with his dad, for heaven’s sake.

The week he and his mom had spent with Abbie had been about as much fun as one of those asthma attacks he used to get when he was little. Josh hadn’t seen his sister since the beginning of the year, when they came back from Mustique (which would forever be engraved on his heart as the place he had at long last lost his virginity under the palm trees to the luscious Katie Bradstock). The change was pretty staggering. Abbie had cut her hair all short and dyed it black and was dressed like something that had crept out of a crypt. His mom was brilliant. She hardly batted an eye, even told her how nice she looked. Abbie was clearly a little disappointed.

But it wasn’t just her appearance. It was how she now talked and what she talked about. Her every sentence was peppered with swear words. The whole week she never stopped going on and on about how the world and everything in it was fucked and beyond hope. How the big corporations were fucking everything up, the rivers, the forests, the entire fucking planet. And we were all going along with it and happily letting them.

It started the moment they flew into Missoula when she gave their mom a hard time for renting an SUV. It was something they had always done in Montana and never before had Abbie questioned it. As their dad used to say, in the West, unless you drove a truck, you weren’t getting your money’s worth.

“Do you have any idea how much fucking gas these things burn?” she said.

“No, honey,” their mom said calmly. “How much fucking gas do they burn?”

“You get, like what, twelve miles to the gallon? And do you know how much carbon dioxide and other shit they pump into the atmosphere?”

“I imagine it must be quite a lot or you wouldn’t be so upset.”

Josh suggested Abbie should chill out a little, which was a big mistake and had precisely the opposite effect. She flew into such a rage that their mom went quietly back to the Hertz desk and rented a Subaru instead.

There was no way they could go stay at The Divide. There were too many bad memories for their mom, though Abbie said later that they ought to have gone just to exorcise the ghosts and give the finger to their dad. Instead they had booked into a god-awful dude ranch called the Lazy Spur, an hour out of Missoula. The food was grim, the people grimmer, and the horses were about a hundred years old and kept trying to bite everyone. Abbie had brought Sox along and paid no attention to the rule that dogs weren’t allowed in the rooms or anywhere else on the ranch. She and the owner got into a big fight about it and probably would have come to blows if their mom hadn’t stepped in to negotiate a compromise.

Their mom figured some of Abbie’s anger and much of her new dark view of the world must have something to do with her new boyfriend, the German guy she had met in Seattle. Josh thought he sounded pretty cool and was sad they didn’t get to see him. Rolf traveled a lot, Abbie said, and that week was up in Eugene, Oregon, visiting with friends. She later let it slip that actually he had come back to Missoula two days before Josh and his mom were due to fly home.

“Can’t we at least meet him?” his mom asked. “Just to say hello?”

“He doesn’t do that kind of thing,” Abbie said.

“He doesn’t say hello?”

“He doesn’t do, you know, the meet-the-parents thing. All that bourgeois shit.”

“Ah. Well, you do it for us, okay? Say hi from the bourgeois shits.”

“Yeah, right.”

After the Lazy Spur and a week of Abbie’s anger, Cape Cod with his dad had turned out to be almost fun. Whale-watching was hard to avoid if you were staying in Provincetown because there wasn’t much else to do, especially when the weather was so miserable and the house had no TV and there wasn’t a single movie on anywhere that you hadn’t already seen. Come to think of it, maybe that was why there weren’t any whales around, not even gay ones. They’d all gotten too bored and gone off someplace else.

Just as the thought slid by, somebody at the rail hollered and everybody started babbling and craning their necks and looking through their binoculars.

“There, look!” the woman yelled. “At ten o’clock!”

For a second Josh didn’t know what she meant and had a sudden fear that they might all have to stay out here another five hours but then he realized she was giving the direction. And now he could see it. It was three or four hundred yards away and about the size of an ant, a black lump slowly rising from the water.

“Look! Look at him spouting!”

Then the captain, or chief whale-watcher or whoever he was, woke up and started telling everybody over the loudspeaker what they’d already seen for themselves. It was a right whale, he said, which was the name the whalers had given it on account of its blubber being so rich in oil. In other words, it was the right one, the best one to kill, a name the poor old whale must have been pretty proud of, Josh imagined, until he figured out the implications.

He felt his dad’s hand on his back now.

“Well, there you go, Joshie. Worth the wait, huh?”

For a moment Josh thought he was being serious, then saw the grin.

“Absolutely.”

“What do we think about the whales, save them or not?”

“I think . . . save them.”

The creature was diving now, its great tail hanging there in the air for a moment, then slowly sinking in a surge of foam. And that was the last they saw of it. The darned thing never came up again. But it had made scores of people’s day and they all sailed home with smiles on their faces, their lives just a fraction enhanced.

They drove back home the next day, chatting and listening to music and occasionally stopping, with appropriately affectionate jokes at Abbie’s expense, for both Starbucks and McDonald’s. Their talk about the elephant two nights ago seemed to have loosened things up between them and Josh felt, for the first time in as long as he could remember, totally relaxed in his father’s company.

“I know it’ll be a while,” his dad said as they stood by the car, waiting for the ferry to take them over to Long Island. “But sometime I’d really love you to come down to Santa Fe and, you know, meet Eve properly.”

“I’d like that.”

Neither of them said anything for a few moments, just stood there watching the boats out on the Sound, the seabirds whirling, the ferry coming in.

“Are you guys going to get married?”

His dad laughed. Josh didn’t know why. Just nervous maybe.

“It’s too early, Joshie. Your mom and I aren’t even divorced yet.”

“I know, but you and Eve are, kind of, living together, aren’t you?”

“I’m staying with her now, while I look for a place of my own.”

“Are you going to work down there?”

“I hope so, Josh. I’m talking to some people, got one little job going. I want to get back to designing houses. It’s what I always enjoyed doing, but for some reason I stopped. Got a little lost, I guess.”

He seemed to drift off into his thoughts. Down by the water a Stars and Stripes was billowing in the breeze, the hoist wire clinking against the pole.

“Maybe I should think about becoming an architect,” Josh said. He didn’t really mean it. He just wanted to please his dad and it was the first thing that popped into his head.

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s great, Joshie. I had no idea. You used to draw well. And what was that game you were always playing on your computer?”

“SimCity.”

“That’s it. Boy, you were so good at that.”

“I still play it sometimes.”

“You do?”

He put a hand on Josh’s shoulder.

“I think you’d make a fine architect.”

As they drove closer to Syosset, their conversation faded. Even in the late-afternoon sunshine, the shadow of their fractured home seemed to reach out and silence them. Josh led the way into the house and his mom made a big fuss of him without once looking at his dad, who had slunk in behind and was standing there, timidly waiting. At last, after she had asked Josh a hundred questions about the trip and told him that his hair needed a wash, she turned and looked toward his dad and gave him this funny, formal little smile.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi, sweetheart.”

They touched cheeks. Like a pair of glancing icebergs.

“We saw a whale,” Josh said. It was the sort of thing a four-year-old might say.

“You did?”

“Yeah. It was a right whale.”

“Well, hey, I’m sure glad it wasn’t a wrong one.”

Josh picked up his bag and at the foot of the stairs turned and looked back. His dad smiled and gave him a peace sign.

“Almost peace, man.”

And with his one and a half fingers, Josh replied.

He took his bag up to his room and left his parents standing like strangers in the hallway. He heard his mom say something in a hushed and angry voice and then his dad wearily replying. It was about some letter she had received from his lawyers. Josh didn’t want to know. He put on some music and called Freddie on his cell phone to ask him what everyone was doing that night and did he have something good to smoke.

T
he sad thing about it was that you never really got to see the full glory of your labors. You had to sneak in, set things up, and then get the hell out as fast as you could without being seen. The whole idea was that by the time the place went up in flames you were out of town and miles away. Of course, you got to see the pictures of the charred remains in the newspapers the next day, but it wasn’t the same as seeing the whole thing go boom.

The part Abbie liked best was spraying slogans on the walls and across those big showroom windows. This was basically her job, while Rolf set the fire. It was one long rush of adrenaline, knowing that at any moment some security guard could come strolling around the corner. She had gotten quite inventive with what she wrote. Her best efforts to date were
Fat Lazy Polluters
and
SUVs = U.S. GREED,
which had a kind of rhyming thing going. Rolf said she shouldn’t get too clever in case people missed the message. For example,
Despoilers
and
American Avarice
were too obscure, he said. He also made her vary what she wrote and the style she wrote it in, so the cops would think there were a whole lot more cells operating than there really were. The only thing it was important to keep repeating was
ELF.
Or better still, if time and space allowed, spell it out in full:
Earth Liberation Front.

The one thing he was really strict about was not spending too long at the location. Hanging around was how you got yourself caught, he said, so Abbie didn’t argue. He was probably the first person in her whole life whose instructions she felt happy to follow and whose every opinion she respected, usually without question. He knew so much, it was almost scary, like he had this amazing computer in his head. You could ask him absolutely anything—about politics or the environment or international affairs or the human rights record of the most obscure country you could think of—and he inevitably knew the answer. She loved to sit or lie beside him and just listen to him talk.

Abbie knew her awe and compliance had something to do with his being ten years older than she was. And it obviously also had something to do with what was going on between them sexually. From the very first time, he had completely blown her away. His body was so lithe and beautiful. She let him do things to her that she could never have imagined she might like. Things that, had anyone told her about them before, would have shocked, even disgusted, her. It was as though he had unlocked in her some secret room to which she now went willingly and unbidden.