Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

“They never woke up,” he said, and then realized how morbid that sounded. “They’re sleeping like angels,” he said, making it worse.

Josie wanted to know only this: Are my kids dead or what?

She went upstairs to check on them and they were asleep, the four of them, in the twins’ room. Her two were on a mattress set on the floor. They would sleep on cut glass if they could sleep next to those two young warrior-women.

Downstairs, in the bathroom mirror, Josie looked at her wound. They’d shaved a tasteful three-inch square from the side of her head. It almost looked intentional, like she’d gone to some 1980s throwback stylist and asked for something that told the world she couldn’t be trusted near the office supplies and shouldn’t ever have children.

She returned to the basement bed, and, prompted by the hospital, the rubber gloves, she had some unproductive thoughts, starting with Jeremy and Evelyn. Jeremy bleeding out on a dusty hillside. Evelyn’s black tongue. No, she thought. Not that, not now. She could write a letter to Jeremy’s parents. No. She’d already done that, and had gotten no answer. She thought of the many letters she’d written in the last year, none of them returned. Why wouldn’t they answer her letters? An unanswered letter made the sender feel like a fool. Why send letters? Why feel like a fool? Why leave the house? Why pick up a pen? Am I rotting? Josie wondered. She smelled something sour, and realized it was her.

—

The pain woke her up. It was dawn and her brain was swollen. She was on the couch, and Sam was upstairs with Leonard Cohen, so Josie couldn’t ask her for Advil and Sam hadn’t thought to leave any out for her — though she’d assured Dr. Blachblah she had plenty at home.

Josie lay on the couch, watching the sky turn gunmetal blue then grey then white. Moving her head was impossible without inducing a hot blade of pain, slicing her head lengthwise, so she closed her eyes and planned exactly how she would leave Sam and Homer. Something had changed — was it being run off the road? Had that altered the chemistry of her visit? — and now a quick exit, while Sam was at work, held a certain appeal.

Josie tried to conjure the name of the day. Was it Friday? Wednesday? Was it? She could leave. Sam would be going to work soon and they could leave then. Josie could write a note, telling Sam they were heading north and would come back soon. Maybe they really would return. Josie went to the kitchen, and of course found a tidy pad of paper with a pen attached to it. She picked up the pen and began writing, and then, for the first time, Josie had the familiar sense that she was making a choice that was contrary to what would be best for the kids. Her children, she knew, would prefer to stay here, with Zoe and Becca, learn from them, worship their older twinly ways, and to use regular plumbing, to be for a time free of the unknown dangers of the Chateau. Josie’s pen hovered over the pad, saying nothing.

Leonard Cohen came downstairs, looking somehow older now, his face not unlike the mummified banana in the fridge, and Josie hid in the pantry. He put on his shoes and exited quietly. Josie went back to the couch, suddenly unsure of her plan, and fell asleep.

Sam thumped loudly down the stairs at seven, making no attempt to be quiet. She made breakfast for all the kids, and Josie allowed herself to be served while still sitting on the couch. All the while, Sam said nothing about Josie having been in the hospital, near-dead, hours before. This seemed uniquely Alaskan, and Josie grudgingly admired it — being hit by trucks and found in ditches, it was a valid way to spend a weeknight, nothing to get too excited about.

“How do you feel?” Sam finally asked.

“Like a champ. I feel like a champ,” Josie said.

“You want any of the Vicodin?”

Josie declined. “You keep it,” she said, feeling stoic and superior. She wanted badly for Sam to keep the Vicodin, which would imply that Sam would use it sometime in the future, and when she did, Josie would archive some small and meaningless victory.

Now Sam sat down on the coffee table in front her.

“Listen, I forgot to tell you last night. They called Carl.”

Josie stopped breathing. She held a finger up, and sharpened her eyes, wordlessly telling Sam to shut the fuck up. She grabbed Sam’s elbow and led her outside, to the back porch, and there, Sam explained that when Josie was unconscious, she’d told the nurses that she, Sam, had to get back to Paul and Ana, the patient’s kids, and then the nurse asked about the father, and Sam had maybe fucked up — her words, maybe fucked up —a little bit by explaining some rough outline of the situation, that the father was back in Florida, and that the nurse very nicely suggested they could call the father, and maybe, Sam said, she got flustered, said No! and the nurses got suspicious and then it turned into a real thing, with everyone, including Dr. Blachblah, insisting on calling Carl, and then it got a bit weird for about an hour.

“You couldn’t just tell the nurses you had called Carl?”

“My job isn’t to lie for you, Joze.”

“You’re right,” Josie said, already knowing she and her children would be on the road within an hour of Sam leaving for work. “You’re right. Thanks for all you’ve done.”

Sam was taken aback, and grew gentle and idiotic. “Maybe this is good. Relieves the pressure.” Again she put her hand on Josie’s arm.

Having the father know not just that Josie had kidnapped the children, but exactly where she’d kidnapped them to, was not likely to relieve any pressure. “You’re right again,” Josie said, holding back a laugh. “You better get ready. Don’t want you being late for work.”

—

When Sam had gone to her boat and the twins to school, Josie packed her kids’ things, choosing not to tell Paul and Ana they were leaving for good.

Josie found Sam’s perfect reminder pad.

We’re heading out , she wrote.

“What’re you writing?” Paul asked.

“A note for Aunt Sam.”

“What’s it say?”

Ana came to look.

“That’s a short note,” she said.

THE SHAVED SQUARE ON THE side of Josie’s head was fascinating to Paul. This is why he wanted to sit in the passenger seat. They’d left Homer and were approaching the confluence of many highways, going east and west and north.

“Does it hurt?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Does it look good?”

Paul shook his head slowly. His eyes conveyed how scared he was by this square cut into his mother’s scalp. It was not motherly. It would shake him, just as Josie had been shaken by seeing her own mother return from the hospital with her head wrapped in gauze. She’d fallen on the back deck, clumsy on mixed meds. This was when she started taking the drugs they were giving the soldiers, before the scandal, before Sunny. Josie turned her head to look at the shaved square, the lines so clean. She did not want to scar her son this way, with the knowledge of her frailty, her aptitude to be abandoned by her pseudo-sister and to get hit by Homeric delivery trucks, sent into a ditch. But the introduction of frailty in a parent — is this so terrible? It should, perhaps, be introduced right away, so the shock is not so great later. We are better when we expect tragedy, calamity, chaos.

“Budget!” Raj had said to her in one of his wild revelatory rants. “You just need to budget!” he said, or exclaimed. He was the only human she’d ever known who actually spoke in a way that could warrant that verb, to exclaim . The word was a strange one, so common in the picture books she read to her children. There, in the fifties and sixties, everyone was exclaiming, but in real life she’d never known the verb to be true. But then there was Raj, with his wide eyes and loud voice, exclaiming all the time. “You need to make a life budget!” he exclaimed. “You ever make a household budget?”