Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

“How?” Paul asked. “Can we send a letter to a ship?”

Charlie didn’t know. He fumbled in his pocket and brought out what turned out to be an itinerary. “Just take it,” he said to Josie, and she saw that on it was the ship’s every port of call.

IN THE WHITE LIGHT MORNING Josie had not slept well and her mood was apocalyptic. It was not a matter of falling asleep. After the magic show, they’d walked the mile home along the waterfront, the night brisk and the moon bright. They walked past the fishing boats, to the end of the docks, and then along the dirt road and through the woods until reaching the Chateau. Ana and Paul had been animated at first, recounting the show, asking questions about Charlie, where he was from and when he would die (Ana wondered this, throwing a stone into the cold water), but then, when they arrived at the Chateau, the kids were silent, somber, and didn’t bother to take off their jeans or socks before dropping off to sleep.

After a nightcap of pinot — the last of the second bottle, she deserved it, given all she’d done and endured — Josie climbed up to join them, and fell asleep readily. But at first light she awoke, as she often did, her mind leaping with the realization that she had indeed killed that young man. Some young prosecutor with Josie’s own face — it was her, but younger and with hair in a high tight bun, a great suit. This legal version of herself was leaping around a courtroom, wood-paneled and filled with sensible citizens, insisting upon it. Convict this woman! Hold her accountable!

Josie opened the door to the quiet woods and walked to the waterfront. The sun was beginning to bring pale color to the mountains on the bay’s far shore. She squinted at the water’s blinding shimmer and beyond, the otherworldly glow of the low sun on the mountain snow. She walked across the beach, almost stepping on the otter skull her children had presented to her the day before. She sat down again on her petrified white tree stump and raked her hands through the gravelly sand, lifting a handful, letting it pass through her fingers.

Jeremy. He’d been a patient since he was twelve. One of those boys who said Ma’am. Yes Ma’am. Thank you Ma’am . He had beautiful teeth. Every time she saw him she hoped for cavities, loved seeing him that much, but it was only twice a year in the office, a cleaning, a checkup, some conversation, and the occasional sighting on the street. The kind of boy who, when they ran into him at the park, he would leave his group, a group of teenagers lying about, a pride of lazy lions doing nothing on the park bench by the creek, and he would jog over and crouch down and talk to Paul and Ana, would offer them whatever gum or mints he had in his pocket. His parents were not well-off but they were solid — both worked for the city and had good health plans. The father was from Venezuela, the mother from Cuba, and they began to come for check-ups, too, on his recommendation — Jeremy had vouched for Josie, was the light of the family, and though the parents weren’t nearly as talkative or preternaturally aglow as their son, they all liked to talk about Jeremy. How could we make more Jeremys? He had four younger siblings, and he knew everything about each one of them. Josie could ask any detail, How’s little Ashley? And he’d have a story. What’s the baby doing now?

Then he was seventeen, eighteen, and had become a tall and strikingly handsome young man with a boomerang jawline. Tania, the hygienist, took notice of the way he filled a room, six two, his wide shoulders, and made sure to brush her breasts against him as she cleaned his teeth. His bright green eyes, his unblemished flesh, his impossibly smooth chin. He did not need to shave, he said. “No Ma’am. Once or twice a year is all I need right now.” He smiled and ran his hands over his noble face. He played soccer, lacrosse, and then, at Josie’s doing — she insisted when she signed up — he had been Paul’s counselor at the rec center summer day-camp.

Paul was no athlete but had been treated with special consideration. Jeremy had given him a nickname, El Toro, because Paul had one day worn a T-shirt bearing the silhouette of a bull, and Paul grinned shyly when Jeremy yelled the name across the street, from his car window, whenever he saw Paul in town. “El Toro! Charge!” Josie had found it written on all the flyers Paul took home from camp. Under “Name of Camper,” Jeremy had always written, in bold all-capitals, EL TORO! Even the exclamation point.

After summer camp she’d been one of the many mothers who asked Jeremy to babysit. So rare to have a male babysitter, she said, every other mother said. She’d been able to wrangle his services three times, and as far as she could tell he had spent each of those nights being attacked, with affection, by her children. Were they so starved of contact? When she got home she would find them asleep, their hair matted to the pillow, Jeremy on the couch, exhausted, smelling sweetly of sweat, and he would tell her about the night. They’d eaten their pizza, he’d say, and as they walked away from the table, Ana had leaped on him like a wolverine.

“I don’t think she let go for the next three hours,” he said. Paul was reticent at first, but soon the three of them were wrestling, were jousting with Jeremy’s lacrosse sticks and shields made from couch cushions. “But mostly wrestling. Me on the ground and them jumping on me like little animals. They’re pretty physical. Way more than Paul was at camp,” Jeremy said.

Convinced that they were expelling some latent aggression toward their absent father, that this could only be healthy, she asked Jeremy to come back, and he did, two more times, and each time the battles grew more epic, the final one taking place in the backyard.

“They would have broken something in the house otherwise,” Jeremy explained. “Ana called me Dad at one point. When I was brushing her teeth. It was pretty funny. Paul was embarrassed.”

Josie was mortified. Did Jeremy know that Carl had moved out? Was he old enough to know that her children were starving for a male presence in the house, and that her daughter, being four, had virtually no memory, would be happy with Jeremy as a replacement man, that he could eclipse and erase Carl in a matter of weeks?

“So were you in Panama?” he asked, pointing to a photo of Josie with a dozen Peace Corps volunteers. She’d spent her two years in Boca del Lobo, and it was a mixed bag, a few successes, a few friends, the whole issue with her friend Rory, now in prison, but still. Good work could be done, she said.

Jeremy didn’t know what he would do after high school. This was the fall of his senior year. She had assumed he would have had a sturdy plan by then, limitless college options.

“I don’t want to be in more classrooms right away,” he said, and turned at the sound of footsteps. It was Ana, awake, in her Buzz Lightyear pajamas. Josie stretched out her arms, and Ana rushed to her but then paused between them, as if wanting to fall into her mother’s arms but afraid this would alienate Jeremy in some way, would hurt the chances he’d come back. Instead she did a sort of twist-dance on the carpet, and said “Champagne on my shoulders!” She’d been saying that recently.

“Step here,” Jeremy said, crouched on the floor, putting his palms out. Ana did not hesitate. She put one bare foot on each of his hands, balancing herself with her hands on his shiny black head. Her eyes betrayed that she didn’t know what would happen, but was certain it would be incredible and worth any risk.

“Okay, now let go,” he said. She obeyed.

Now he slowly rose to his full height, somehow balancing Ana on his palms with such sureness that she felt free to spread her arms wide, as if receiving the bounty of the sun.