Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

Apologizing, Blake stood and sternly motioned for me to join her, and after explaining to Dale that we had to be somewhere we didn’t have to be — me shaking Dale’s hand and agreeing we’d see him again — she began to drag me toward the basement stairs. This was all fine with me. This was how she’d been spending her time? It seemed to lend credence to the idea that she’d suffered some kind of break. She looked up to this odd man without any sign that she perceived his oddity. Instead she responded like an eager student to his seemingly rhetorical questions, and took seriously what I might have, were it not for taking her lead, laughed off. Was it a continuation, a manifestation of her war on irony? Had she taken herself a bit too seriously? There would be no discussion about all this today, I knew. After embarrassing her before Cooper, I’d be lucky to get a ride home. And yet, as I followed Blake’s march back across the communal lawn, I had to admit that, truly, there was something infectious about the man’s apparently artless sincerity. Despite my uneasy feeling about Dale Cooper, I’d just passed a not inconsiderable amount of time during which my mother’s cancer was the furthest thing from my mind.

SOMEONE KNOCKED ON THE front door and my mother, eyes closed, whispered, “Would you?”

After a quiet morning, we’d moved to the back porch, where she was sitting in the sun, not moving. I was reading the paper. The Seattle Lights, it turned out, were not Seattle’s alone — sightings along the Himalayas, in Japan, in Borneo, and in the UK had also been reported, though there was even less agreement in these areas about their nature, behavior, or even appearance, and because the very rural regions in which they’d been seen lacked a modern communications infrastructure, many sightings were all but dismissed from the official account. It seemed to me that as the phenomenon grew, its credibility diminished, as though people had simply gotten caught up in the fun. Perhaps it was a harmless distraction after all.

“I think Kent was right,” I said, standing.

My mother mhmm ’d — of course she had no idea what I was talking about — and said she was expecting something from her lawyer.

The dining-room table was overrun by flowers, though they’d finally stopped coming, and as I passed them my nose tingled with their undifferentiated richness. I held my nose as I opened the door, trying to stave off a sneeze. It was Happy. He was with Alice, who remained partially hidden behind his legs. He was crying.

Or rather, he had been crying. But now, as he saw me look at his flushed, wet face, he began to cry again.

“I’m sorry to ask,” he said, “but I wonder if you could look after Alice.”

“Happy, what’s going on? I mean, of course. For how long? Is everything okay?”

“Just for the afternoon. It’s Josie. She’s in the hospital. She hurt herself and I have to…”

He pulled his daughter from behind him and prodded her toward me, and as he did she began to cry, and as she cried he began to cry harder. He took two deep breaths and turned back down the steps. His car was idling in the street, its door open, and he climbed in. Then, with a wave of his hand, he was gone.

Now sobbing uncontrollably, Alice tried to follow her dad, to get free of my hands, and I had to struggle to get her inside.

“Don’t worry, Alice,” I said. “Your dad will be back really soon. Everything’s going to be okay.”

My mother came charging through the house. “What happened?”

“It’s Josie. She’s in the hospital.” I made a face I hoped would communicate something and let go of the little girl’s arms as my mother reached down and picked her up.

“Shhhh,” she said, “Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh. It’s okay, sweetie. It’s okay.”

My mother carried her into the living room, bouncing her gently and swaying. Alice seemed big in my mother’s arms, too big, and her squirming made them look like some kind of two-headed beast trying to hold itself together even as it tore itself apart.

“Can I get her anything,” I said, “do you think?”

“Unless you have her mother in your pocket, I doubt it. We just have to give her some time — don’t we, Alice? Just a little bit of time!”

She’d hurt herself . This was clearly no fall, no sprained limb. I tried to summon my morning with Alice’s mother, but in competition with what had come later, with Dale Cooper and his clocks and his dream, the memory was in full retreat. I was well aware that one’s first response, upon learning of something like this, was to accept, escape, or assign blame, depending on one’s personality type. My mother bounced around, and on her shoulder perched Alice’s face, red and disfigured like a third-degree burn.

“Shhhh,” she said. “Shhhh.”

When another knock came, I figured it had to be Happy, come back after realizing that to leave his daughter with a dying woman and her wastoid son was a bad idea. I opened the door half-thankful, half-ready to defend my mother against any judgment of her parenting skills. It took me a moment to place the man before me.

“Hey, Blake,” said Echo. “I thought I recognized this house.”

Echo was a drug dealer who occupied an orbit in my social galaxy far enough from the center to be safe, but close enough not to spin away entirely; someone I knew well enough to feel awkward about just buying drugs from, but who I’d never invite anywhere unless he had some.

“What are you doing here? I mean, you know, what’s going on?” I stepped onto the porch and closed the door behind me. Echo had aged in the year since I’d seen him: his face was long unshaved, with greasy whiskers sprouting out of his chin and in patches on his cheeks. His eyes were tired.

“Jesus,” he said. “Someone needs a nap or something.”

“It’s a neighbor’s kid. Her mom tried to commit suicide, I think.”

“A neighbor’s kid, huh?” he said, as though that were the significant part of the story.

We stood together for a moment, Alice’s muffled wail seeming more distant than it actually was. Echo wore a green short-sleeve polo shirt with a company logo on the breast pocket: Emerald City Errands .

“Oh, you must be here for my mom.”

“I’ve got a package for someone named.” He removed a manila envelope from a messenger bag at his side and read the label. “Rose Williams?”

“That’s her,” I said, reaching for the package.

Echo pulled it slightly away, a dealer’s reflex, then handed it over reluctantly. “She’s supposed to sign.”

“Well,” I said, “she’s got her hands full right now.”

A woman walked by, reading while walking her dog, and after she passed Echo leaned in, raising his eyebrows. “Hey, you need anything?”

“Like, a package delivered?”

“Fuck off. Seriously, I got buds, acid, blow, whatever.”

“So this is, what, a cover?”

“Gas,” he said, and nodded back at his company car, a little Honda pulled halfway in the drive. “I go all over the place, man, and they don’t even check the mileage.”

I was actually impressed, and failed to hide it.

“You should go for a drive with me.”

“We have a houseguest.” As I said this, the crying suddenly ceased. Anyway, it would be shitty for me to leave my mother alone with Alice, and if I were to leave, it certainly wouldn’t be with Echo. His beeper went off, and he brought it up to eye level as though looking through a tiny pair of binoculars.

“Hey, I gotta go,” he said. “Last chance.”

I smiled and shook my head, then opened the door as he sprang back down the steps. Inside, my mother was sitting on the couch with Alice in her lap, reading from a picture book. She looked up at me, and the calmness, the clarity of her face surprised me.