Nathan Hill - The Nix

Leave and never come back, is what he’s telling her.

“What did she do?”

She got herself knocked up. In high school. She let that boy Henry get her pregnant. Wasn’t even married yet. And everybody knew about it.

Which was the thing that enraged him most, how everyone knew. All at once. Like she advertised it in the local mailer. He never figured out how that happened. But he was more mad that everyone knew than about her getting knocked up.

That was before he picked up the dementia and stopped caring about things like this.

After that, she had to go to college. She was an outcast. She left for Chicago.

“But she didn’t stay long, right? In Chicago?”

Came back a month later. Something happened to her there she never talked about. Frank didn’t know what. She told people college was too hard. But he knew that was a lie.

Faye came back and married Henry. They moved away. Left town.

She never really liked him, Henry. Poor guy. He never knew what hit him. There was a word for this in Norwegian: gift, which could mean either “marriage” or “poison,” and that probably seemed about right to Henry.

After Faye left, Frank became like Clyde Thompson after his daughter died: kept a straight face in public and nobody asked him about Faye and eventually it was like she’d never even existed.

No reminders at all, except for the boxes in the basement.

Homework assignments. Diaries. Letters. Those reports from the school counselor. About Faye’s issues. Her panic attacks. Nervous fits. Making up stories for attention. It was all documented. It was here, at Willow Glen. In storage. In the basement. Many years’ worth. Frank kept everything.

He hadn’t seen her now in so long. She’d disappeared, which of course Frank deserved.

Pretty soon, he hoped, he wouldn’t remember her at all.

His mind was falling away.

Soon he would be only Fridtjof again, blessedly. He’d remember only Norway. He’d remember only his expansive youth in the northernmost city in the world. The fires they kept going all through the winter. The gray midnight sky of summer. The green swirls of the northern lights. The splashing schools of blackfish he could spot from a mile away. And maybe if he were lucky the walls of his memory would enclose only this one moment, fishing from the back of the boat, pulling up some grand thing from the depths.

If he were lucky.

If not, he’d be stuck with the other memory. The terrible memory. He would watch himself watching that salmon-red house. Watch it shrinking in the distance. Feel himself growing older as it faded. He would live it out over and over again, his mistake, his disgrace. That would be his punishment, this waking nightmare: sailing away from his home, into the darkening night, and judgment.

SAMUEL HAD NEVER HEARD Grandpa Frank talk so much. It was a constant bewildering monologue with occasional moments of clarity, moments when Samuel managed to seize a few critical details: that his mother had gotten pregnant and left for Chicago in shame, and that all the records from Faye’s childhood were stored here, in boxes, at Willow Glen.

About the boxes, Samuel asked the nurse, who led him down into the basement, a long concrete tunnel with chain-link cages. A zoo of forgotten things. Samuel found his family’s heirlooms under a skin of dust: old tables and chairs and china hutches, old clocks no longer running, boxes stacked like crumbling pyramids, dark puddles on the dirty bare floor, the light a hazy green mist of overhead fluorescents, the sour smells of mold and damp cardboard. Amid all this he found several large boxes marked “Faye,” all of them heavy with paper: school projects, notes from teachers, medical records, diaries, old photographs, love letters from Henry. As he skimmed through them, a new version of his mother took shape — not the distant woman from his childhood but a shy and hopeful girl. The real person he’d always longed to know.

He lugged the boxes to his car and called his father.

“It’s a great day for frozen food,” his father said. “This is Henry Anderson. How can I help you?”

“It’s me,” Samuel said. “We have to talk.”

“Well, I would love to interface with you one-on-one,” he said in that polite, artificial, high-pitched lilt he used whenever he was at work. “I’d be happy to discuss this at your earliest convenience.”

“Stop talking like that.”

“Can I tell you about an upcoming webinar you might be interested in?”

“Is your boss, like, standing over your shoulder right now?”

“That’s an affirmative.”

“Okay, then just listen. I want you to know that I figured something out about Mom.”

“I think that’s outside my area of expertise, but I’d be happy to send you to someone who could help you with that.”

“Please stop talking that way.”

“Yes, I understand. Thank you so much for bringing this up.”

“I know that Mom went to Chicago. And I know why.”

“I think we should put in some face time on this. Shall I schedule an appointment?”

“She left Iowa because you got her pregnant. And her dad kicked her out. She had to leave town. I know this now.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. Samuel waited. “Dad?” he said.

“That’s not true,” his father said, now much more quietly, and in his normal voice.

“It is true. I talked to Grandpa Frank. He told me all about it.”

“ He told you?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you?”

“Iowa.”

“That man hasn’t spoken ten words to me since your mother left.”

“He’s sick now. He’s on some pretty heavy-hitting medication. One of the side effects is loss of inhibition. I don’t think he knows what he’s saying.”

“Good lord.”

“You need to tell me the truth. Starting now.”

“First of all, Frank is wrong. It was all a dumb misunderstanding. Your mother wasn’t pregnant. Not before you.”

“But Frank said—”

“I know why he’d think that. And he believes it’s true. But I’m telling you that’s not what happened.”

“Then what happened?”

“Are you sure you want to hear about this?”

“I need to.”

“There are things you might not want to know. Children don’t have to know everything about their parents.”

“This is important.”

“Please come home.”

“You’ll tell me?”

“Yes.”

“No more lying? The whole story?”

“Fine.”

“No matter how embarrassing it might be to you?”

“Yes. Just come home.”

On his drive back, Samuel tried to imagine himself in his mother’s shoes, making that first trip to Chicago, going to college, her future all precarious and full of mystery. He felt like they were both going through this at the same time. A new world was about to open up. Everything was about to change. He almost felt like she was there with him.

It was odd, but he had never felt closer to her than he did at that moment.

FAYE HEARS THE CRACK of metal and knows work is being done. Metal is moved and dropped, battered and bent; metal collides with metal and sings. She cannot see the ChemStar factory but she can see its glow, the coppery light beyond the backyard oaks. She pretends sometimes it’s not a factory over there but an army. An ancient army — the light from torches, the noise from brutal weapons at forge. This is what it sounds like to her, like war.

She thought maybe tonight — because of what happened, what is on television at this very moment — the works would go quiet. But no; ChemStar, even on this night, roars. She sits in the backyard and listens. She stares into the thick gloom. Her father is over there right now, working the night shift. She hopes he’s not watching the news, hopes he’s keeping his focus and concentration. For the ChemStar factory is a deadly place. She toured it once and was horrified at the masks and gloves and thorough safety demonstration, the emergency fountain for the washing of eyes, the way her breathing seemed interrupted, how her scalp itched. She’s heard stories of men spending months in the hospital after some stupid ChemStar mistake. Whenever she drives past the factory she sees that logo with the interlocking C and S, and the sign: CHEMSTAR — MAKING OUR DREAMS COME TRUE. Not even her uncles will work there. They prefer the steelworks, the nitrogen plant, the fertilizer plant, the corn plant, or they cross the river to Illinois to take shifts making Scotch tape. Not the tape itself but the glue that makes it sticky. In big vats of milky foam, stirred and shipped out in oil drums. How it appears on Scotch tape, no longer liquid but rather perfectly adhesive, is a mystery. How it appears on shelves, packaged so pleasingly, sent to every store in America — that’s another factory’s job, another set of thick, itinerant men. No wonder her uncles never talk about what they make. Such is the way of commerce. Such is the way of this strange little river town. There’s something always eluding her. She can see the pieces but not the whole.