Night Navigation Page 27

  "It's me. I'm packing up to leave tomorrow. I'm thinking of going to Key West, get a dishwashing job, a cheap room for the winter, get myself straightened out."

  "All right."

  "But I need my money in the morning. I need to pay Wayne Smith four hundred for a drug debt. I need the rest for a bus ticket."

  "Mark…" His stomach seizes up: Bad News coming. The phone, a slick of snot and sweat. "Mark, I already mailed a check returning the money to Social Security this afternoon."

  Bursts of fire explode down his arm across his chest. "You can stop payment."

  "As soon as you find a new rep-payee or get a psychiatrist to say you don't need one, Social Security will deposit all the money…"

  His scream lifts him, locks his fingers on the phone. "You've done it now."

  "Mark, it's not good for you to be so dependent on me."

  He kicks the chair over. Luke jumps out of the way, disappears. "Listen … you listen to me: Anything you ever gave me, I got by scamming you. You never gave me what I need. You … you're the one, the one most responsible … for what happened to my brother."

  "Mark, I'm going to hang up now."

  "Don't you hang up." He pulls the drainer off the counter. There's a crash of dishes, the breaking of glass. "Don't you dare hang up." He throws the door open. "I am not leaving."

  Cold rain. He grips the wet stones. "This is my land, my house more than yours. My father built it. My father's blood…"

  A dial tone. Rain pounds his face. She's gone.

  28 : Aaron Merrick, 1967-1995

  SHE TURNS THE NOTEBOOK over, inspects it: 120 sheets, wide ruled. Two torn shreds of paper bunch inside the spirals: the remains of two sheets that have been removed. On the back cover, a number: 994-7755. "Keep this," Mark said when he handed it to her the day after the memorial service. "Found it by his bed in town." Aaron's last words. Page after page of unsent letters to his old Lawrence high school friends, written only days before he moved back to his cabin that April. This worn spiral neither of them has ever read. She begins where she left off the last time she tried this. Finally she has gone up into the loft of his cabin, now she is going to go here:

  April 7, 1995

  Hey, Cuz, thanks for letting me know about Fitz. Very sorry to hear it. He was one of the few and first real artists I've ever known. Fitz was an affront to the sensibilities of many of the white suburbanites' offspring that attended Lawrence High. He was a freak and would clearly never be the perfect consumer, therefore automatically ineligible for instant happiness. He wasn't weak, so it must have been a big ass bus that ran him over.

  She is the one who delivered the message about the death of Aaron's friend Dan Fitzgerald. It was the third suicide message she delivered to Aaron: his father; Justin, another friend from the same high school crowd a few years earlier; and Dan. Soon after, Aaron called her the woman who brought bad news.

  Below her room, the murmur of the other seven Owl Lake residents' after-dinner talk, their chairs pulled up close to the fire. She is glad to begin reading these letters where if she needs to, she can drift down to join them: a poet, a fiction writer, a journalist, a composer, a printmaker, a photographer, a sculptor. Four men and four women, including herself. The youngest, perhaps thirty, the oldest, maybe in his late seventies. Talk has been mostly about what they're all working on. This is the space she would like to stay in, the comfort of almost-strangers, none of whom seems inclined to ask, And do you have children?

  Me, I just can't get enough of my beloved hometown, located at the end of the path of least resistance. My only struggles here are with boredom, but I have a secret appreciation for stability. At the same time I am completely unattached, so I can freebird it outta here when monotony overwhelms.

  Her studio is in the boathouse. Twenty by thirty feet of floating space, with a huge sliding door at one end that opens directly onto the lake. Skylights, several high, long tables, so she's able to spread out her preliminary drawings, to let images float around in her mind's periphery: the Morris chair, Aaron's jacket. But not the studies of Mark: the cigarette burns, the blasted Escort skeleton. They're in the trunk. After all, Mark hardly qualifies as a "memory." He's right there banging away in the front part of her brain much of the time. If he hasn't moved when she returns home at the end of the month, she'll have to begin eviction proceedings. Then get the house ready to rent and make her escape to Richard's. She has only given Tess and Richard the emergency office number. Her main fear, when she goes back to her room each evening, is that she will find a "Please call" note attached to her door. Always there is that rush of relief when nothing is there.

  April 9

  Hey Ken

  Here's some buds. I recommend ½ dosage. Wow—it was great to see you guys again. With Lana it was a lot like walking into a trap that I had set for myself way back when. I hope she knows I have no intention of complicating her life.

  Lana. Aaron's first love when he was seventeen. A girl five or six years older. Ken's sister.

  But Lana was immediately brought to mind when my mother handed me a sealed envelope and told me a friend had died. Lana is the girl who introduced me to love, sex, and high-stakes mind games, and she took me to see Hotel New Hampshire 6 times. It is my nature to spend the second half of my life correcting the mistakes of the first half, which I think is better as opposed to continuing to make the same ones over and over. Starting to wander here, so I'll sign off.

  These last letters all about those days, what went wrong with Lana years ago. His trip back to Lawrence after Dan's death. Not what she expected, feared. What did she expect? Not Aaron so alone. Aaron, who as a child had seemed so out the door without a care.

  Each morning she sits in the boathouse doorway and watches the mist rise off the water, watches the sun light the trees across the lake. A Prussian blue mountain in the distance. The smell of water, black soil, pines. When she wants to wake herself up, she reaches down and lifts a handful of cold water to her face. Her lunch is delivered in a basket. One of the staff hangs it from the boat-house door. When she realizes she's hungry, there it is: lentil soup, homemade oatmeal cookies. While she eats, sitting with her feet almost touching the water, the open pages of master drawings in her lap, she follows the lines of Dürer, Ingres, Watteau with the same excitement she used to feel when she was twelve and tying her shoe skates to get out on the roller-rink floor, to leg over leg make the turns to the swell of the organ, those notes that held on and on. Finally, hours pass when she does not think of Mark at all.

  She places Lee's grandmother's mirror, the one from Aaron's cabin, on the back of her drawing table. Even more of the silver backing has flaked away. She enlarges some of Aaron's cartoon figures, some of the phrases from his songs. Take my words home to your point of view and watch them change. She arranges these and some of his belongings so that they're reflected in the mirror: Aaron's Chinese checkerboard full of non-filter Camel cigarette butts, his wire-rimmed glasses with the duct tape holding the frame to the stem. She decides which parts of the objects she wants to be missing.

  So here's the trap: the more I focus on connecting in any way, the more she will feel I'm seeking special treatment, causing resentment. It is most definitely not in my nature to ignore something like that, but I can't have her thinking I've been brooding over her these many years can I? What signals must I send to express the fact that I do have a life, yet without seeming defensive and therefore perceived as bitter?

  Draft after draft about Lana, but now not addressed to anyone. Each a fresh start, but all of them containing the word "trap." Always that underlying longing to stop feeling the pain of Lana's past and recent rejection. Her cruelty. And all of them reminding her of how she had often felt about Lee beginning in high school and lasting until several years after his death. Lee, I do have a life.

  All morning she draws the great coil of rope Aaron used when they were taking down trees. As she draws, the boathouse gently rocks, the lap of the water am
niotic. Rendering the heavy twists of rope from every angle, on torn sheets from a lovely Lavis Fidelis roll. So far she works with graphite only, some erasing away, but mostly using the white of the paper to catch the light on the loops. This rope she was relieved to finally find, hanging from a hook behind a door in their barn, that first week after Aaron disappeared—at least one terrible vision cut from the possibilities.

  I usually just expect people to know that I'm not capable of completely losing my mind, but I see now that anyone who knew me then (and Justin and Fitz too) would have no reason to assume that I was automatically OK.

  We did believe he was okay. That he would be okay. How are you doing? she'd say. "I'm fine." She knew he wasn't fine, but she always thought he'd come through: freebird it outta all that family darkness. The coroner whispered to her that they had written "accidental drowning" as the cause of death as though somehow this would make it easier. But knowing that he had taken his own life never led her to "Why?" From the moment the sheriff told her a body had been found, her sorrow took her to this: Aaron was gone and they would never be able to get him back.

  She blurs the drawing of the leather harness Aaron used when he climbed trees. Smudges the lines. Images seen through water. Images surface.

  Coal is in the creek, just his big black head visible; Mark grips Coal's collar, to be pulled to the bank on the other side. She is sitting on the grass reading. Aaron is off somewhere, probably damming up one of the springs that flows into the creek. Often he absents himself to get away from Mark's insults and directives. The water must be cold, late May or early June, because the three of them are still living in the pole barn, Lee staying up on the pine bluff in a tent, working on the stone house alone while they're all in school—Mark in seventh grade, Aaron in fifth. If Lee walked to the edge of the bluff, beyond the stand of hemlocks, he would be able to see them. She knows Aaron and Mark climb the hill to visit him; not together, each goes on his own. They do not tell her about this. They do not talk of him at all. They do not say his eyes are strange.

  "Don't look now, Mom," Mark says, pointing toward the bridge that crosses the creek downstream.

  Aaron is up on the top girder of the bridge, his arms out like a coasting gull, each step steady and without pause. Something catches the light, streaks down each time he lifts his foot. Both sneakers are untied.

  When it comes to suicide, well, I want you to know, I would never, ever do that and I suspect most people who have lost a father "that way" (I can say it, but only once to a page) would not be able to do that, no matter how badly they want to. Even if this isn't true, I feel that it is in my case, and my brother's as well. And the less said about "mental health" the better … I would not know how to begin to explain to someone that I am not crazy…

  When it comes to suicide…

  The letters are not what she feared. They are not about them. They are not about the silent dinners, the time she stayed out all night and forgot he needed a ride to the All-County band try-outs. So far only one mention of his brother, his father … Beyond bringing bad news, he does not seem to blame her. Or is it that he can't say any of that even once on the page?

  She doesn't know where she's going to start or what image she's going to start with, but she fastens a long roll of paper, six feet wide and horizontal, on the boathouse wall, pins down tight eight feet of it, where the morning light seems best. She pulls a small table close and spreads out her pencils and pens, charcoal, the watercolors, erasers, brushes, India inks, glasses of water, clean rags. Tomorrow, she's going to leap into the empty space, drop down and down, try to make it to the other side.

  If I'd been thinking right, I would have recognized your voice, but I wasn't on account of the dark days of winter…

  Early one morning—it must have been 1992, '93, she was still living in the apartment in Marwick, renting out the stone house —there's a steady knock on the downstairs door. Her body gets ready to flee or lift a car off a child. From the top of the stairs, she cannot see who it is. She goes down, peeks out. It's Aaron. When she opens the door, the strong smell of beer hits her. He says he and Mark went to Albany last night because someone's drummer had an accident and they wanted Mark to fill in. In the end the injured drummer showed up and played anyway and it was all a bust. They got back at three; he's only had a couple of hours of sleep and he wants to hitch a ride to Stanton so he can get to work at the sawmill.

  She finishes dressing for school, six classes and a study hall today. Aaron sits in the rocker in the living room. "Want some breakfast?" she says.

  "Not this early. Unless you have a Mountain Dew."

  She only looks at Aaron a little at a time. Finally she fully takes him in. Beneath the matted hair, the duct-taped glasses, the greasy jeans, he's in there. She sits on the couch and eats her cereal, Aaron across from her. Once Aaron told of seeing the sunrise from the window of his cabin, but soon after, the town began building a central school in the adjacent fields, and every day the bulldozers rumbled by from the gravel bank to the site. Aaron has moved to an old camping trailer near the mill. His explanation for moving: one day fields of flowers and the sounds of birds, the next day dust and the roar of machines.

  Aaron sits and rocks, his eyes closed. She drinks coffee. The squeak of the chair, the sound of her swallowing. She bets if they did a study of families where there has been a suicide, they would find there had been half as many words as the average the years before the death and one-quarter as many after. Finally she says, "It was a hard winter, wasn't it?"

  "I wouldn't do it again."

  "Do you ever think of going back to school?"

  He laughs. "I've been in school."

  "The school of life you mean?"

  "The school of life. Yes, sometimes I think of going back, but I don't have any credit to get a loan."

  Aaron had bought a truck on time. She had refused to co-sign. Then he moved to California and didn't make the payments. When the bank called her, her bank too, she said she didn't know where he was; which was true; she didn't. Don't call me again, she said. It's too painful.

  "If you ever decide going to school is what you want to do, there's probably a way. That's what I've found if I really want to do something. I could help."

  "I'll see," he says.

  April 14

  Four days before Aaron disappeared.

  I'm still here and doing fine. Feeling sad about old friends and broken connections from the old "glory days" at Lawrence. As I am unable to correctly express myself in a letter, this dotted half note will have to do until we meet again. I have your number and will be in the neighborhood sometime this month, so don't be surprised when I call you. If I don't, that means I have crawled back under the rock, and am completely undeserving of your correspondence. Thanks for thinking of me and I hope to see you again soon.

  Love, Aaron

  And then, on the last page of the notebook, Aaron's final entry.

  Near life experience almost touched the ground

  Midway deliverance was found

  but now I'm lost, could drown

  just beneath the surface. Hard to breathe

  just beneath the surface. Don't know what to think

  How to act

  How to sink

  swim

  For weeks, after the fishermen found Aaron's body, the investigator from the Onango County sheriff's department kept calling her. I have a few final effects. The things that were in your son's pockets. I need to return them to you in order to close the case. No. Not yet, she kept telling him. When she opened the door, the investigator was standing there with a small plastic bag. She had to take it. Fourteen stiff one-dollar bills, a Bic lighter, and eight pennies, the copper turned green. She still has the investigator's card in her wallet— Martin J. Murphy 446-9175— as if one day the question she'd wanted to ask him may come to her.

  She unpins the long roll of paper from the boathouse wall. Using a stepladder she anchors the paper lengthwise this time, as
high as it will go where the ceiling and the wall meet. She pins it down to finally touch at the level of the floor. Up on the ladder again, she splashes ink from five bottles onto the center of the emptiness. Quick strokes with a thick brush and the image begins to emerge. The locomotive engine, its great steel force, fills the entire space, rams off all the edges.

  The night Mark visited Aaron up in his cabin, the night she and Mark feel certain was Aaron's last night, Aaron stood on the ridge high above the gravel bank, and said he knew the train was coming, that his father was telling him he better get on that train.

  The engine lights are so bright, you can't see if a hand's on the throttle. The rest of the image is huge, black, black, head on: no room to leap away.

  Mark, he kept saying, can't you feel the vibrations of it coming down the track?

  29 : small

  BEN JACOBS SETS a cup of coffee in front of him. Ahhh, Mark's body says, whooshes it out: gratitude. He wraps both hands around the heat of the mug. Airlift from the icy waters. One look and Jacobs knew pouring his own not an option. Lucky if he can get the cup up and back without a major slosh. He takes it slow. Plenty of cream and a ton of sugar. They've been out of coffee for weeks. Dog food the only thing Tess still supplying.

  Jacobs takes a seat behind his desk, his usual no-hurry position: chair back, hands across his flannel chest, a look away out the window. Nothing but bare trees now. Like they left off talking minutes ago, when it's been months since he sat here. Two, three? "I'm ready," he says.

  "Ready?" Jacobs leans his way, gives him the full check. Jacobs doesn't bore in like Rozmer, but he's always got the BS meter running.