Fiona Maazel - Woke Up Lonely

He was exhausted. He pressed his forehead to the slab.

“What do you want?” he said, and then aired every question he had: “Is it that you need me to go along with some story for the press? Whatever you tell me to say is fine. It’s not like I have any answers of my own. Why send me and the others to the Helix House to begin with? The four of us? Why send a psychotic to play hero and break my neck? Why give me the most amazing and tragic documentary story ever and then take it away?” He closed his eyes and pictured Norman’s face in the instant he’d lost the Orca’s punishing rage to Bruce — the disappointment and resignation writ into his every pore — and said, “Just leave me alone.”

She joined him by the curtains. “I can fix at least one of these things. That’s why you’re here.”

He laughed. “Unless you want to dump eight thousand dollars in my bank account in the next three seconds, I doubt there’s much you can do for me.”

“How’s a hundred thousand?” she said.

“Funny.”

She snorted and produced a bank statement, his bank statement, dated today, or at least one day after he last knew what day it was.

“Now do I have your attention?”

Martin drove him all the way back to Rockville. It took nine hours with stops for gas. Bruce lived just off the highway, half an hour from D.C., in a Cape Cod that looked regal, as far as he was concerned, he was so happy to be home. It was the middle of the night. They circled the house three times to make sure no reporters were there.

Martin killed the engine. “I’ll wait out here,” he said.

“I don’t know. I have to talk to my wife. I’m not doing this unless she’s okay with it, and I’m not going to rush her just because you’re waiting.” He said these words and swelled with pride. His priorities were like the stars — aligned in patterns no one could see from Earth, and all the more beautiful for it.

“I’ll wait here,” Martin said.

Bruce ran into the house and made straight for the bedroom. He was ready to grovel. He’d get on his knees and take Rita’s hand and grind her knuckles into his eye sockets like a pestle to nut, if that’s what she wanted. Had she been alone this whole time? He was supposed to have been gone only for two days and had not made plans for anyone to come help Rita beyond that. She’d have called a friend, right? If something felt wrong with the baby and it was 4 a.m., she’d have called a friend? He opened the door and yelled her name, but when he got to their bedroom, Rita still didn’t seem to realize he was back. She was sitting up in bed, above the blankets. She wore sweat shorts and a sweatshirt. Her legs were parted, she slouched, but the moon of her belly was rising.

“Rita?” he said. His voice was gentle. He stood in the doorway and watched. Either this was his wife so furious she could not talk, or his wife kicked into a whole new register of feeling that was too refined for the language she had to express it.

“You missed the reporters,” she said. “They’ve been here every day, only what’s to see? I haven’t left this bed.”

She had yet to look at him — she did not appear to be looking anywhere — and he could tell from the musk coming off the sheets that she was in earnest. She had not moved since the second he’d been announced missing. No longer kidnapped, just missing.

“Baby, are you okay?” He did as planned and knelt by the bed.

“I answered the phone once, thinking maybe it was you, but it was just the press.”

“I know, I’m sorry. But there was no way—” He paused, because even in pain, when her feelers were down, she always knew when he was lying. “I made the wrong choice,” he said. “But would it mean anything to you if I promised things were going to be different? Starting tomorrow, I will look for work. Anything I can get.”

Rita took his hands and slipped them under her sweatshirt. Her belly was warm and frosted in cocoa butter. “He kicked a lot while you were gone. Missed his dad, I guess.”

He sank deeper onto his knees. It was true there were people out there worse than him, but that hardly mattered now.

“Go,” she said. “I want you to go.”

But he could not get up. He willed himself to get up — he owed his wife no argument — but he couldn’t. It was what he deserved, to be cast out and abandoned and, in the bearing of this punishment, to be reminded of its cause. Only he could not bear it.

Rita touched his cheek. “I got another call, too,” she said. And she told him all about it. A call from the woman on TV. The woman named Esme. Asking for Rita’s permission, because there was a family outing she needed on film and only one person she wanted to film it, the documentarian who swears to see love where others cannot.

“Go,” Rita said. “We’ll still be here when you’re done.”

His body believed it before the rest of him. He stood up tall. And felt reconciled to the goodness in himself that had been, at last, ready to prevail. He kissed his wife and unborn. Made for the front door with no need to look back. In his mind’s eye, a documentarian sees love where it is abundant.

In sum: one must learn to love one’s people ardently.

They were together. As a family. Two fugitives and a child in a camper van, hurtling through the woods. Dad in the passenger seat, his wife at the wheel. His wife? Yes, his wife, driving like nuts, as their child in the back looked from one parent to the next, going: Wow. Just: Wow. How little they knew of each other. How little time they had left. She held a videotape to her chest. A gift from her dad. For after, he’d said, which turned out to mean: For after I am gone.

Bruce sat in the back with camera aloft. He’d arranged the lights and from this arrangement had developed a mood. Tender and elegiac, while the snows fell from Ohio to North Carolina. He felt, in the making of this film, like a balladeer, for theirs was the action of tragedy that’s often told in song. But only from his vantage, which was not shared. The three were happy; they were on the road. In action: a country station yodeling its best, and a child whose parents were tributary to her needs. A child whose thoughts skewed from the brake that might pitch her through the windshield — she was rooted between the front seats, had refused the belt — to the man, the dad, in the passenger seat, whose presence did not reconstruct the geometry of her universe so much as animate the triangle she’d long imagined herself a part of anyway. My dad is famous. My dad is God. My dad is right here, with me.

Bruce did not say a word for the rest of the day; he just trailed the family as it went.

The van was registered to a woman who had died a few months back; Martin set it up. There were provisions for a week, though a day was probably the most they could expect. They drove in silence but always turning to look at one another. By nighttime, all Thurlow had managed to say to Ida was that he’d missed her. He was afraid to say anything else — he did not know her at all — but he marveled at the joy dawned in his heart just to have her near. He waited for her to sleep — maybe he could talk to her in sleep — but she fought to stay awake. Her eyelids rolled back with terror every time she nodded off; she did not want to miss anything. Thurlow felt this wide-eyed girl could see right through him. Finally, she went down. Neck angled like it might snap for the weight and bounce of her head against her shoulder, but holding fast.

He was not a strong man, but he could lift his daughter and tote her to a cot in the back. The rest was in his head. Dread of letting her fall. Dread of waking her up. Dread when she groped for his arm after he swaddled her in a blanket — for swaddling was all he knew of how to care for her — and then the retreat, like the end of an endless night, of every sorrow of every year intervening, as she said, half-asleep, “Dad. Don’t go.”