Night Navigation Page 15

  All of them, one hundred junkies, start up the long marble stairs, heading toward Lazarus Hall, even some sick guy in hospital pajamas. No talking and all eyes down. Up, up, up. Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight. Jesús and William up ahead. Roxanne. He follows Ricardo. Watson—right behind him, slipped in out of nowhere and walking too close. A setup. Somebody's turning up the pressure. Maybe if his head wasn't buzzing. Long line, single file close to the wall, past the pews. Same man, head almost on his knees, sitting all alone.

  He follows Ricardo into the big hall, careful not to step inside the black border. Three huge chandeliers light the scene. Building was once a mansion for some railroad baron, then a monastery. What it's come to now: junkie reclamation. Chairs three or four deep all around the room in a big circle, with two in the middle: straight back torture chair like they use for the Monad; the other, a padded job, a throne. Seat of authority. Watson sits on his other side. Watson has on a shiny pair of fancy shoes, leather tassels at the ends of the laces.

  A counselor he's only seen in the dining room, man named Morris, little guy with huge glasses that owl up his eyes, walks slowly around the circle. The room is silent.

  "Listen up," Morris shouts, and all heads rise at once. "This Family Meeting is to see if this man should come back into the Family. One person at a time, and give Robert a chance to answer." Morris surveys the room to get a nod of agreement from each of them. "Bring him in," Morris tells the two men standing by the door.

  Robert is the guy who's been out on the bench all day. Ashy looking, caved in like he's still coming off the dope. They guide him to the hard chair. His jaw muscles are locked, the paper shaking as he tries to read the list of his transgressions: "I used drugs. I stole a radio from the community."

  A woman directly behind him screams, "Robert, you ain't saying what's really in your head." Leora's voice.

  A man on the other side of the room, Bernard, the guy who takes care of the kitchen trash, yells, "Start following the rules or stop wasting our time."

  Morris comes up close to the crowd. "Let him state his case."

  But before Robert can speak, more shouts. Someone way in the back, a large woman with bright red hair, stands. Everything goes quiet. "Did you know Henry?"

  Robert shrinks down in his chair like he's been hit. "I was in his work crew."

  "Did you know he's dead?"

  Robert turns toward Morris. "I'm not to blame."

  Another woman rises up slowly. "We're not accusing you, but show some honesty. Why should we take you back?"

  Robert fills himself up with a little air. "Because I want to be back in Lazarus. Because I'm done doing drugs."

  The Hall becomes a din of whistles and catcalls: "What bullshit." "Get your sorry self a different free ride." "Take your sleaze action somewhere else."

  Morris is on his feet again, circling. "Listen up." The room quiets to whispers. "Robert, if the Family votes now, nobody's going to say yes to you returning. You keep ducking responsibility. Making excuses. You've got to stop that or you know what's going to happen to you back out there."

  Robert looks at Morris, then he gets up quick out of his chair, knocks it back a little. "I can't make you believe me," he says, and starts for the door.

  "Get back in that seat. I'm going to give you three minutes to save your life." Morris turns toward the audience. "Give him time. Let Robert say why he should come back and be a member of this Family."

  Robert looks like he's wavering, but then comes back and sits down. For what's got to be two minutes or more, he says nothing, keeps his eyes closed. The room is totally silent. Robert's body begins to shake all over. Finally his voice comes out, not much more than a whisper, "Lazarus House is the only chance I have. I've got no place else to go." Robert is crying so it's hard to hear him.

  Mark does not want to listen to Robert. What he wants is to stand up, go down the steps, through the big double doors, out the gate.

  "Because I'll die," Robert says. His head is down, his arms wrapped around his legs. "I need you." Robert looks up. He feels like Robert's looking right at him. "You ask me why I'm here? Because I'm an addict."

  How can Robert expose himself before this mob? To be beaten on in all this light, how can that help? This is the gentle and kind Sydney talks about? Morris nods and the two who brought Robert in escort him back through the door.

  Morris circles the room, his hands behind his back. "Up to you. Robert's past behavior doesn't say much for his chances. Going to take a lot of your energy if you decide to let him come back. Anything you want to say before we take a vote?"

  A lot of hands go up: "I say yes to Robert because there but for the grace of God…" "I'll help him get his shit together." "Maybe this time he'll see the light."

  Morris walks around the front row, gets up close. "Everybody who thinks Robert should be allowed back in Lazarus say aye."

  A boom of response.

  "Nays?"

  Silence.

  The door opens and Robert is brought back in to face Morris.

  "Robert, do you believe you can change?"

  Robert's back to full size, his voice is even cocky. "Of course I do."

  "Well, you're lucky because the power's with you today."

  Everybody but him swells out of their chairs. They all jam around Robert. "Welcome back, Brother," they shout.

  Mark stays on the edge of the swell. This is just a show. Humiliation and rebirth. The sinner will finally say anything to put out the fire.

  He's the only one left in the bathroom. The face in the mirror is a death mask. Shifting into Aaron's face. All his teeth ache. Stuff surging up in front of him that he's pretty sure isn't really there. Dad in the pole barn, blood all over. Aaron, drifting down. And always the low hum. On top of the paper towel rack—a book of matches. CLOSE BEFORE STRIKING. Rule: no matches until you're three months clean. No way he's going to sleep tonight. Who's to know if he steps into the john to take a piss and he has a quick smoke. Help him get through a long one.

  He looks around and then palms the matches, sticks them in the band of his long johns.

  "Good night, Family."

  Shit. He's late. Just as he starts for the door: Watson. Watson passes him, checks the towel dispenser. Watson. The matches. Prick set him up.

  Watson just puts out his hand.

  He can hit him and go out the door or he can suck it in and have time to pull something together. He hands the matches to Watson and turns to go to his room. "Junkie behavior. I'm supporting you to staff. Bring you up before a meeting."

  He doesn't say anything, just keeps heading toward the dark door at the end.

  The moon's coming through the window. A moon like that night he drove back from Camden, Rozmer conked in the back of Charlie's station wagon. Could use some guidance from Rozmer. No way is he going to go up before the firing squad. He pushes down in the bed. Red and yellow jumping around back of his lids. Legs twitching and he can't make them stop.

  What do you think, Aaron? How about if we go out there and yell into the darkness, Yes, we are scared. We are so fucking scared we're going to have to step off, shut it all right down. What you did, buddy. Stepped off and went down, down. Green water. I always think of how cold it must have been.

  13 : Almost April

  NO CHOICE but to keep going until she backs her way to the top. Only about twenty feet more. How had Aaron managed to haul so much stuff up this steep path? Each heave drags the wheelbarrow another few feet. At least there's only the weight of the shovel, the box of trash bags. Then there's the scrabble of Luke behind her, coming down at a dog-gone-wild run. "Stop," she screams. If he bumps her, she'll be upended. He veers off and returns below the barrow, panting. The next trip she'll go the long way, even though that means negotiating a sea of briars.

  One last tug and the wheelbarrow bumps over the ridge. The plan is to haul down all the trash and debris: the rotted bags of garbage, the rolls of soggy insulation, the broken windowpanes,
even the busted doors, one load at a time. One load at a time, once or twice a week, until the site is clear. Get the guy who picks up her trash to take it all to the dump. Even if she never does anything more beyond clearing away the wreckage, when her mind wanders here, it will feel easier.

  True, she may get no further than she did the last three or four springs. The first warm days, she forces herself to go up. She manages to drag down a few bags. Then she doesn't go again. She can never do any of it when Mark's around. But with Mark swaddled in the order of Lazarus House. Twelve more days before he'll even be allowed to call or write.

  She pushes the wheelbarrow through the wet leaves, but then her legs feel so tired she sets it down and straddles a stump. Luke leans his warm side against her leg. In the distance there's the glint of sunlight on Aaron's stovepipe, beyond that she can see a bit of blue almost-April sky. April: more than any other month, the month when people end their lives.

  She was living in an apartment in Marwick, renting out the house. It was mid-March and she'd just come back from a month-long artist residency in New Hampshire. Mark and Aaron were living with a bunch of musician-friends in an old house in Danford. Mark was staying with her for a few days because he and his housemates were out of money for oil, heating only one room with a kerosene heater, and Mark was feeling paranoid. She picked him up at the mental health clinic. They stopped at CVS for some different meds. "Going to beaker me up a new trick-or-treat for the red ghoulies," he said.

  She was coming up the stairs, Mark ahead of her in the kitchen, when she heard Aaron's voice on the machine. "I'm ready to do the Oprah thing." They played it a few more times, trying to read the sounds of his voice.

  "What do you think he means?"

  "Finally we're going to talk about Dad. Eighteen years later."

  They drove to Danford to get him, all the way speculating on what Aaron was going to say, rehearsing their responses. He was finally going to talk to them. Aaron was twenty-eight years old. He'd been eleven the last time she remembered him being open. A few months after his father died, she found him crying. She sat on his narrow roll-away bed in the house she had rented in town, her arm around his thin boy-shoulders. "Nobody likes me," he said. This had been such a surprise from a child she'd always seen as easy to love, this blond child who was so sunny and patient. "Why, everybody likes you," she told him. He said no more. Later when he retreated into "I'm fine" as his standard answer to all questions about how he was, she regretted her easy response, her not really listening.

  When they pulled up to the house, a ramshackle place, sheets hanging over all the windows, Mark went in to get him. She prepared herself for Aaron's appearance. She hadn't seen him since January, the night they'd gone to the movie Hoop Dreams. The night she'd asked him to keep an eye on Mark, who'd just gotten a diagnosis of manic-depression. Aaron's response: "I can't."

  She saw Aaron coming toward the car: so thin, his tangle of long hair, his stained jeans. The last few years whenever she saw him, always her impulse was to take hold of him, to say up into his thin face, My god, Aaron … Instead, she looked away. Right after Lee's death, Aaron had left his notebook lying open next to a panda Lee had won for him at the county fair. Though she would not normally have done such a thing, she read his last entry: "My father didn't want us to be there when it happened. That's why he sent us away." And then, he had carefully crossed out every word. Soon after that, Aaron hung a sign on his door: PRIVATE.

  Aaron got in the front seat and gave her a fierce hug. "I do love you, Mom," he said, as though she'd just told him he didn't. "I don't think it's mania," he told Mark. To her he said, "It's just that you were the woman who brought bad news." Not only his father's death, but twice later, the deaths of two friends by suicide. One of the deaths only a few weeks earlier in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where Aaron had gone to high school for a while. He'd just returned from Lawrence, an attempt to reconnect with the whole group who'd been friends with Dan Fitzgerald, the boy, the boy now a man, who'd just died. He was clearly disturbed by this trip. "All the old cycles kept repeating," he told them.

  Several times he said, "I keep walking into a trap I've made." By then they were sitting in the living room, the tuna bagel she'd fixed for him uneaten on the end table. "I have trouble getting things down," he said. She offered to make him soup. She said she was always making him the wrong thing. Right after Lee died Aaron had started to have stomachaches and a pediatrician had put him in the hospital for tests. She drove to Marwick to visit him every day after work. He was in a big section all by himself. The nurses only came by now and then to check on him. She hadn't even been there when he'd had to drink glass after glass of barium. "How could I have left you all alone at the hospital like that?" She saw that what she wanted was to have Aaron and Mark, then twenty-eight and thirty, understand why she hadn't been a more loving mother.

  What Mark wanted was to be forgiven. "I was terrible to you," Mark said to Aaron. "I was a monster." "Nothing to forgive. We did the best we could" was Aaron's response. They latched on to that.

  What Aaron wanted was to talk about his father. "You know he talked to me about it. I was eleven and he discussed with me the moral issues of someone killing himself. We sat up there where he was camping and we talked about how a person had the right to do this if he couldn't find another way. And I agreed with him. The thing is," he said, "I have this fear that someone else is going to die."

  Aaron also told them other things: about getting directions, about forces colliding, about wood being safe. Later that evening, after she returned from taking Aaron back to Danford, she and Mark tried to make sense of it: "What did he mean when he said those things about the train?" "I didn't understand the part about the stones." But they were so happy that he'd talked to them, that they'd all forgiven each other for whatever it was they felt they'd done wrong. "We must have missed a transition," they decided. All his life Aaron had convinced them he'd come through.

  She remembers that during that drive to Danford she said to Aaron, "You know you could stay at the apartment where it's warm, easier place to get through the winter." "I'm twenty-eight years old" was his answer. When she pulled up in front of his place, he made no move to get out, sat silent for several minutes, then he said, "It was such a sad day." The day she walked toward them from across the street, August 14, 1977, after her in-laws pulled up to the curb and gave her the news. Mark and Aaron were standing in the yard, watching her come to tell them something terrible. "Yes," she said, "yes, it was." And they sat in the car for a while and cried.

  The wheelbarrow moves easily through the leaves and needles. She breathes, readjusts her hold, steels herself for the sight of Aaron's place. From a distance it looks almost all right, the pine-sided loft section rising up to look out across the valley, morning dew steaming off the single slant roof, the doors and windows thrown open to take in as much of this first heat as possible. Two sawhorses stand in the yard, a plank thrown across them as though someone had just left off working. Even daffodils coming up in a bright green clump by the steps.

  Luke rushes ahead, begins to nose the matted grass where deer must have bedded down not too long ago. She pushes the wheelbarrow to the steps and looks in. The small downstairs room seems about the same. Only time at work now: the woodstove rusted a deeper shade of brown, with the stovepipe so corroded it has finally come away from the hole, the two-foot planks Aaron had milled to panel the room turning a damp gray. Lots of mouse droppings. She isn't ready to go inside. Instead she pulls a sodden roll of pink insulation from under the steps and sets it in the wheelbarrow.

  Aaron had been pleased with this building. That fall he was living back home for a while. He'd started working at a sawmill a couple of years after he decided not to return to music school, that he wasn't interested in the years of disciplined conservatory study, that he just wanted to write music, play on his own, hitch around the country when he'd put together a little savings. This, after trying to make it in Boston, in New
York. Doing a lot of busking in the subways, playing his tongue drum, his hat set out for contributions. He must have been twenty-two or twenty-three then. Could he have some of the pines? he'd said. He wanted to build a little shack up on the bluff overlooking the valley.

  The next day, she remembers she'd been making chili, when she looked out the window to see Aaron and his boss coming up the road on a big red tractor, then turn to chug up the hill along the line of pines that grew all the way to the top. All day the chainsaw whined. In the afternoon she looked up to see the tractor laboring back and forth, dragging logs toward the bluff. The next day Aaron and his boss trudged up the hill again, again the whine of the saw, the chug of the tractor, dragging. When Aaron had come down for a jug of water, she'd asked him how it was going. She'd started to believe by then. He told her his boss would be bringing the portable mill the next day, that they'd skidded all the logs he needed, and he'd be milling them all next week. She'd been amazed that someone was going to loan this person with the dozens of mismatched socks all over his bedroom floor an eighteen-thousand-dollar piece of equipment.

  The following morning, very early, she'd looked out to see an orange portable mill being winched up their hill. The next evening when she got home from teaching, she'd plodded up the rise to see the mill in operation. There he was, Aaron, his back to the valley below, black trees laced against a lavender sky, putting a big log through, his red wool ski cap pulled down over his ears. She stood in the distance and watched, not wanting to distract his attention from the blades. He looked up and saw her. She waved. He smiled and kept on steering the log along its path.

  The loaded garbage bags under the little deck have started to disintegrate. There's no way she can lift them up into the wheelbarrow without them bursting. She will have to slide each one down into a new bag. The wheelbarrow is stacked as high as it will go and still be able to make it down the hill. She sets one last bag on top of the rest, goes up the steps and finally enters. Her eyes look toward the loft. She has never been up there. Afraid of what she might find.