Julia Pierpont - Among the Ten Thousand Things

She’d whispered goodbye to him at the house’s edge, stopping short of the front window. “Hey,” she said, her bright attention snapped to him. “Come back tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow,” he answered, and it was a real thing he could carry home with him, real as a pot, or a vase, lying out on the grass.

Kay, from the upstairs window, had watched him go. Her shoes were on already. Into the closet she said, “Stay,” and pulled the door almost closed, dragging a chair in front of it. Her mother, out in the garden with Gary, had only waved as she passed. There were new rules in Jamestown — there were no rules: Kay could go where she pleased.

It’s hard to follow a person who doesn’t know where he’s going. Simon would slow and look around every couple of streets, so that she was always ducking around corners and once behind a too-narrow tree, feeling herself in a movie. Outside a gently bowed house with a junky yard he appeared no less confused, actually scratching his head before realizing this must be it. Kay waited behind a fence wrapped in plastic netting and counted Mississippis in her head.

At ten-Mississippi Simon was still not inside but looming like a scarecrow on the porch, looking down at his feet. Kay squatted low and looked back between her legs. Behind her stood a rickety swing set with yellow seats and rusted chains, one post tilted an inch up off the ground.

By twenty-Mississippi the house had swallowed him up.

She stood now, feeling the quiet of the street. Suddenly so loudly quiet. She’d followed her brother — why? — just to see what would happen, but she couldn’t, of course, see; she wasn’t invited. In her front pocket, she felt the hard of Simon’s phone. She’d borrowed it while he was dressing, saying she wanted to play Falling Gems, and he had forgotten to take it back. If Simon had caught her following, she would have said it was to give it to him.

She wandered, past the church and the library with its sign that read RESUME WRITING TONITE 7, then came to a row of outdoor tubs under a clay-tiled roof. Rubber tubes dipped lazy into the water, collecting little air bubbles like straws in soda, or drifting up and breaking through the surface. That was where the gurgling came from, so many soft brooks in a row.

It was a whole world to which she wasn’t invited, sometimes.

Sitting Indian-style on the concrete, the knobby outside parts of her ankles hurting, she pulled the phone from her pocket and found his name.

On the third ring, she heard her father still clearing his throat. “My boy!”

“It’s me,” Kay said.

“Pumpkin! I’m so glad it’s you. You know I’m thinking of you a lot, all the time. How are you?”

“Fine,” she answered, scratching a twig along the ground. It was over orange sodas with her mother that she’d made up her mind to call, that she could talk to her dad and it wouldn’t have to bother anyone. “Where are you?”

“I’m driving. I don’t know if Mom told you, I was in Arizona. I’m going to visit your Grandma Phyllis.”

“Is she sick?”

“No no, just ah, a few things to sort out at the old house. How about you? Where are you?”

She described the concrete and the tubs of water.

“The basins! Old-fashioned Laundromats. People used to wash their clothes in them, before washing machines.”

“Really,” she said doubtfully.

“I used to get a lot of premium thinking done down around those basins. It gets much darker out there, not like New York. Here, why don’t you hold me up to the water? I want to hear it.”

Kay got up on her knees, bearing the sharp pain, and swung an arm over the side of the nearest bath, angling the phone at the corner that bubbled. When she brought it back to her ear, her dad was saying, “That’s a sound you don’t forget.”

“Dad?” Between her fingers the twig bent and broke. “When are we going home?”

“Where’s your mom? Are you with her?”

“I’m alone.” She was surprised how sad it sounded, the way she said it.

“Does she know you’re calling? Honey, you there?”

“I think I have to go now.”

“You know we can talk whenever you want. You don’t need to ask your mom.”

“I have to go before it gets dark I love you bye.”

The drive, some thousand miles, would take him two days. He slept a few hours at A Day’s End Lodge in Las Cruces, making the rest up with naps, some-hour intervals in empty lots. He spent magic hours smoking by the side of the road, the sun slinking up or down the sky. Sitting on a rock or the guardrail, a few yards from where he’d pulled over, and the car sitting waiting for him.

The cigarettes he smoked in chains. He’d never been a real smoker, just around drinks and other people. With no one to talk to he watched the paper brown and burn, smoke curling and uncurling, mingling with the painted lines on the road. At a tag sale near a gas station he bought a set of longhorns, seven feet across, bound together with cowhide. He drove with them levitated in the backseat, rested on the open windowsills, points peeking out.

Whenever he rode out of the country station’s range, the radio would start to autoscan, searching for stronger signals. Spanish talk scrambled with Chopin scrambled with Evangelical preacher people for miles. Sometimes the poor radio couldn’t find anything. Some places, nothing was out there.

Deb couldn’t sleep. The pillows lumped too hard under her head and each position felt like a pose she was holding. Instead she sat, switched on the light, and stacked her enemies the pillows up behind her. So unyielding before, they were fine now, perfect for leaning and for reading. Gary at some point had stocked all the nightstands in all the bedrooms with books; here were historical novels about Pompeii and the Chicago World’s Fair.

Good Gary. If only she could like his boring fucking paintings of boats.

He’d been so great with the kids over dinner, planning the next day’s trip. Great with Simon, mostly, who was suddenly almost chatty, and full of questions — about fishing, of all things. Boys and boats. Who knew?

Those stupid paintings.

Or maybe they weren’t so bad. Maybe she’d been thinking Jack’s thoughts.

—

In the next room, Simon and Kay were also up, though neither knew it of the other. Simon faced the wall, poring over the time he’d had with Teagan frame by frame, poring over the girl herself inch by incredible inch. He flexed his arm muscle, pressed into the mattress with his fist. Trying to rehearse their next meeting, he invented answers to questions that kept changing. There was this fishing trip tomorrow. Maybe some kind of story would come from that.

—

Kay had noticed the change in her brother at dinner, and how her mother had seemed so pleased by it. It shouldn’t have made her feel left out — she didn’t see why it should have — only it did, not least of all because she thought she knew the real reason he was happy, that it had nothing to do with fishing. There were just too many secrets.

And today she’d made one of her own, calling her dad.

—

Deb still wasn’t tired at all. Sure, it was night, but that didn’t mean she had to lie still in bed watching the dark inside her eyelids. Also, sure, hard and unhappy things were happening, but she didn’t have to hold still for them either. Why not not sleep? Why not not be sad? No need to be all-the-time sad! Everyone thought she needed this time to mope and to cry, but wouldn’t it be great if she didn’t? The important thing was to stay on your own side. Remember whose side you’re on .