I’ve been avoiding Condor’s calls, along with everybody else’s, and hiding out whenever I see him coming, no matter how long he stands on the porch. Now—three days after my dad died—he finally gives up knocking. But I hear a rustling sound and, after I’m certain he’s gone, I swing open the door to the night air. Tucked behind the screen door is an envelope marked with my name. Inside, enfolded in a soft bit of cotton, I find a beautiful fishing hook and a handmade lure, feathered and beaded in rich stripes of gold and blue, work my dad would have found impressive.
A short note is attached. I hope you catch your big fish.—Dave
Seeing his first name, a name he almost never uses, jolts something in me. I suddenly think I’m going to cry, am overwhelmed with the memory of his mouth on mine, the urgency of him, his anger, his concern.
Carefully, I rewrap the fishing hook and stuff it into the pocket of my dad’s old work vest. It still smells a little like he did: like car oil and Old Spice and wood shavings.
The note, too. I can’t bring myself to throw it out.
Dave.
—
The team returns to Chicago, and I bury my father with only TJ in attendance, under a bleak sky hinting at a storm that never comes. Although a few other people expressed interest in showing up for the funeral—Monty’s mother, Condor, and Brent among them—I know I won’t be able to stand the weight of their sympathy and how little I deserve it. Besides, it seems fitting that my father’s burial is as lonely and brutal as his death.
Afterward, I stop at the gas station for two six-packs and what my dad would have considered party food: frozen mozzarella sticks, Hostess crumb cakes, nacho cheese dip from a jar, salsa and chips. The house is hot, and it smells. I haven’t yet been able to bring myself to start cleaning, and there are week-old dirty dishes in the sink attracting a swarm of flies.
Instead, we set up on the back porch, overlooking the woods. TJ brings Jim Beam, and he and I take turns sipping straight from the bottle, feet up on the railing, creaking back in the rocking chairs my dad built for my mother when I was a baby. My father’s mess has even spread to the porch: stacks of plywood, old air-conditioning screens, salvaged pipes, and electronics that haven’t worked in decades. The view has hardly changed since I was a kid, only gotten a little wilder, a little overgrown. I can see the hard glint of the sun off the reservoir—not the water itself, exactly, but little solar flares, as if something behind the trees is catching fire.
If I breathe deeply, I imagine I can smell the lingering smoke of a bonfire.
Only the present is solid. The past is smoke.
“You need any help sorting through your dad’s stuff, you let me know,” TJ says. He twists to grab the whiskey bottle with his “good” hand and we drink for a while in silence.
“What happened to your arm, TJ?” I ask him, when I’m drunk enough to think it’s a good idea. I’ve heard of phantom limb, of course, of people feeling a twinge in their missing fingers or getting an itch on an amputated kneecap. But I never heard of anyone with the opposite problem.
“IED,” he said. “Iraq, 2004. Blew up half our unit. I got lucky.” Then: “My friend Walt lost his head. He always made me swear I’d take his wedding ring back home to his wife, but I couldn’t get it. Too many bodies, and people blasting us from all sides. Eventually we had to pull out.”
I nod, even though his story doesn’t answer my question. Maybe the past doesn’t have to explain everything. Maybe it can’t.
—
It doesn’t take me long to pack up the rental. The hardest part is trying to move Kaycee’s paintings. I can’t just carry them openly. So I wrapped them and tied them all together, but now they have a gruesome kind of weight to them. I imagine I’ll have to cart them with me wherever I go, forever.
Hannah, Condor’s daughter, has returned from her grandparents’ house with a new toy: a plastic tablet she keeps about an inch from her nose. But she glances up from her perch on the front stoop when I wheel my suitcase out to my car.
“Are you leaving?” she asks me, very solemn, and when I nod she scrunches up her face. “Are you going back to Chicago?” She says Chicago like someone might say the moon.
“Nah.” I still have to dispose of my father’s things, get his house in order, sort through the accumulation of his junk. But my rental contract in Barrens is up and there’s already a new tenant scheduled to move in.
Maybe all along this is what my future held—what I tried so hard to escape, and what, ultimately, is inescapable. Time isn’t a line, but a corkscrew, and the harder I’ve pushed, the more I’ve drilled back into the past. “I’m going home.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
TJ borrows an industrial-size Dumpster off a friend with a roofing business, and the next morning, I sort and dump. Mostly dump.
My father’s belongings hold no nostalgia, no feeling at all besides shudders of bad memories. Mismatched plastic place settings, holiday mugs, frayed chamois shirts, stained towels, a La-Z-Boy, a three-legged bookshelf: these are my inheritance. I chuck the contents of my dad’s refrigerator and spray the whole kitchen down with disinfectant, chasing insects out of the open windows with misty clouds of Windex.
I would throw out the whole refrigerator if I could lift it.
I’m lonelier than I’ve ever been in my life. My inbox fills up with e-mails in the days after my dad’s death—even Portland sends me a note, morbidly titled “Digging,” which I don’t bother to open—and then the communication, predictably, slows. Brent calls stubbornly, every day, always leaving a version of the same message. Hello, it’s Brent, I’m worried, please call me. An arrangement of flowers arrives, a wreath of lilies appropriate to an enormous church service. They go right in the trash.
I don’t want to see anyone. I can’t.
Ironically, Barrens has never been fuller; first the local news channels arrive to speculate about a growing corruption scandal. Protesters begin to gather outside of the Optimal gates, preaching the importance of clean water, and every day their camp swells. Then come ambulance chaser personal injury lawyers and lobbyists with their talking points and political agendas.
All of it seems distant, as if it’s happening in some other town. The few times I turn on the local news I’m surprised by Joe’s face, conferencing in from Chicago to give updates, and even by footage of the whole team hard at work looking busy and official in the Chicago office. No one on the team even mentions me.
The one exception is the county prosecutor, Dev Agerwal, suddenly the darling of Indiana news: he never fails to mention that a local woman, Abby Williams, tipped him off to long-standing corruption in the office of his predecessor and inspired his current mission to end Optimal’s influence in local and state politics. One enterprising reporter from WABC even tracks me to my father’s house. When I answer the door, carrying a trash bag rattling with junk from the bathroom cabinets, he takes a step backward and nearly tumbles off the porch. I tell him he has the wrong Abby Williams.