Fiona Maazel - Woke Up Lonely

“No, no, I’m just leaving.”

But it was too late; the kid was hollering for his dad, who came lumbering in from a back room. “Didn’t I say not to bother me?” But then, seeing a customer, he said, “Well, well! Out in this weather? Brave man. What can I do you for?”

But Ned was backing out of the store, mumbling thanks and trying not to hear the radio, which was live from a Cincinnati hospital treating some of the people from around the Helix House. The place had gone up in flames, but the fallout was minor. Smoke inhalation. First-degree burns.

The guy whistled. “Sorriest thing I ever heard. You been following this mess? House blows up and all four of those hostages are gone. Even the Grand Poobah. Something’s not right.”

Ned looked up for the first time. “All four of them gone?”

“Maybe taken to a new place. What do I know. Radio’s telling me nothing.”

“Is anyone looking for them?”

“You just come out of a coma? Everyone is looking for them.”

Ned felt the blood recede from his skin, roll back through his veins, and log his heart, so that it grew tenfold. Everyone? He fled the store and, back in the car, told his dad to gun it.

What is tolerable in a person you love? Or want to love so much you will tolerate most anything? If his sister was a meth head running a lab, and if her husband, Phil, and son, Willard, partook of the results — one enjoying them and the other sustaining brain damage no one would notice for months — if they sold meth to local teenagers who marked it up and sold it to kids in Westwood, and if their franchise rivaled for quality what was coming in from Mexico, so that if they weren’t meth heads they might have been rich and put their son in a day care that served arrowroot animal crackers, if his sister’s face was all bone, and the skin was loose and pocked with gore, would he still see in her proof that his life had meaning? Would she still outfit his unconscious with the fabric of their bond so that he could go out and find someone to love romantically? And if she could do this for him, would he be able to prove he was worth it? The car splashed down the road, but the rain was on break.

“Do you at least have a plan for now?” Max said. “Do you know what you’re going to say?”

Ned was looking out the window for street signs. The closer to the mountains they got, the more sporadic the housing and signage, so that even though they were within a mile of her place, it took forty-five minutes to get there. Every time he thought they were close, it was as though a giant hand snaked down his throat, grabbed his lungs, and squeezed. Then when they were lost again, he tried to breathe double-quick. Get it in there, fill the sacs. He was not hyperventilating, but still he felt sick. One more U-turn and he’d lose every meal he’d ever had.

“Neddy, are you all right?” Larissa said. Amazing how well she could dial into his anxiety. A good mom. “How about we go up the road and park above the house so we can just see what’s what?” Giving him a face-saving way out. He said, “If you insist,” though he was relieved and grateful for this woman above all.

The road did not have a shoulder, so Max pulled onto the dirt. Fog was rolling in, dusk too, but they could still see Tracy’s house, which was actually a barn, and the yard, more like nature in a fence. There were tufts of buckwheat and sage and bitter brush laid out across the ground. Cockleburs up to your neck. Ned squinted but could make out nothing of relevance from this distance except a tricycle on its side and two cars in the driveway — a pickup and a town car much like the one whose engine Max was now gunning with impatience.

Larissa reached into her bag. “Here,” she said, and she thrust binoculars in Ned’s hand. “I got them at that philharmonic fund-raiser. They’re opera glasses, really.”

“You always carry around opera glasses?”

She blushed. Ned said, “Oh,” and then started to laugh and then to tear up.

“I was just going to watch for a second,” she said. “Just to see if she looks like you.” She cupped his face. “My sweet boy.”

He swiped at the tears. He was afraid to look through the binoculars, but he looked all the same and instantly regretted it. He hurled them down the slope.

“What?” Larissa said. “What is it?”

He threw his hands in the air and again his mom said, “What?” She looked at the binoculars, some twenty feet below, and calculated the wisdom in retrieving them. She was wearing clogs and had probably not exerted herself in this regard in years.

He sat on the ground. It was wet and shrill with needle grass. “Goddamn it,” he said. “If you hadn’t taken so long at the gas station we could have beat them. ”

“Beat who?”

“The cops. The feds. I don’t know. I saw a woman in the door, maybe it’s her, but I couldn’t get a good look because she was half-inside the house, talking to some jackass.”

Larissa stared down at the car in the driveway but could make nothing of it. “What makes you think it’s the police?”

“Mom, he was in a suit and tie. Look where we are. Everyone’s after me — of course they were going to check in on Tracy.”

“But—”

“Mom, they’re the government. They know everything. And now so does she. I can’t believe it.”

He felt so cheated, he almost could not move. Thanks to the feds, now he’d never know how she had felt in the instant she learned she wasn’t alone in this world, either. Not without blood family. Did the news come as a relief? Would it moor her to the universe and save her life? In receipt of major news for the first time, a face cannot lie.

“Maybe it’s for the best,” Larissa said, and she began to finesse her way down the hill.

Ned had his back to her. “Goddamn it,” he said. “This was idiotic. She’s probably a meth head. Maybe they were coming to arrest her. Let’s get out of here. I’ll call in to work tomorrow and that will be that.” He waited for his mom to hallelujah the plan but heard, instead, a small cry followed by the circus of a body tumbling downhill.

“Ah, Christ,” he said, and he plunged headlong after her, grabbing for balance what he could.

“I’m here,” she said, and she jutted her arm from a bed of sage that, in its congestion, had hidden her whole. “I think I twisted my ankle. Go get your father? He’s waiting.”

“Clearly,” Ned said. The car horn had been blaring through the night for three minutes. If the feds had any sense, they’d hear in the urgency of this horn a sennet for their catch.

“Mom, can you get up?” He took her by the forearms and was shocked at their girth. They were bamboo; she was so frail. She tried to put pressure on her foot but buckled at the knee. “I can’t walk,” she said. “How stupid.”

Ned looked up the hill. The night was livid now, but he could still see in the angle of the hill’s incline no way to get back up together. Unclear, even, if they could get down. He told her to stay put while he went for Max.

“Neddy,” she said, and she grabbed for the hem of his pants. “I’m so sorry. This is all my fault.”

He waved her off and began uphill. The sky crackled, and you could hear the dry ravel and a sound like horse hoofs on cobblestone, which was actually rocks and pebbles and earth caroming down the mountainside.

The only light for miles was a halogen nested in the gable of Tracy’s barn. It guided their way as they picked through the brush.

“We can act like we’re someone else,” Larissa said. She was pendant between the men in her life, and, though the throbbing in her ankle was getting worse, the pendant thing was nice.