Jane Smiley - Early Warning

What with Emily and day care and her own classes and Jared’s schedule, she put it out of her mind, because, thank God, he was alive, and once she got used to his being alive, well, why stir up old business — curiosity killed the cat. That worked for exactly one month.

Right before moving day (Solon to Iowa City), she was packing books to give away, and out of one of them (the Bible, in fact, which was why she had never opened it after leaving San Francisco) fell a note. It read, “Too much is going on. I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got a possible gig at a recording studio in L.A. I’m hitchhiking, and will call you when I can. Lucas.” She turned the note over and turned it back. She smoothed it out. Why he had tucked it into the Bible, she had no idea. But she had given in to panic and let Aunt Eloise take her off to Iowa City. She knelt there for a moment, looking at the note, and imagined the phone ringing in her old room after her departure. Or of Lucas getting that message, “The number you are trying to reach is not in service at this time.” Not only was he not dead, she turned out to be the betrayer. Did he know that she was alive? It was entirely possible that he assumed she was the one to change her mind and go to Guyana, that he had read the newspapers horrified. Hadn’t she, after all, been more accepting of Reverend Jones than Lucas had been? She perused the note several more times. It was dated, too—“Friday,” the night he never returned from the gig she thought he had.

She stuck it in her sock drawer and left it there. But as she made scrambled eggs for Emily (it was Jared’s late night), she kept jiggling her legs and walking around. When Emily wanted to go out onto the porch and work on the snowman she was building, Janet jumped about as if she were cold, though the weather was pleasant. When it was time for Emily to go to bed, she could hardly read the book. When Emily pointed out letters and even short words she recognized, Janet was too distracted to be enthusiastic. Janet kissed Emily good night, turned out the light, closed the door, and she went straight to her sock drawer, got out the note, read it again. She would do nothing.

Jared rented a truck. Seven of their friends turned out to help with the move. Everyone was a little excited: Janet and Jared were buying a house, a first in their group. It cost $55,000; the sellers were holding the mortgage and letting them pay 12 percent. The house was a brown house on Brown Street, with screened-in porches front and back, three bedrooms upstairs, and a spacious if not modern kitchen. Janet and Jared had, painfully, come up with $10,000, and their mortgage payment would be $450 per month, which seemed huge, especially compared with their $160 rent in Solon. But the price of gas was $1.30 and didn’t look like it was going down. Jared thought they could save $120 a month on his commute, not even counting the few occasions where they came into town to go to a movie or to the Mill to listen to music.

Salt crunched under their feet, and Janet kept having to sweep it off the entry floor just inside the front door. Everything was out of the rental in an hour and fifteen minutes. The guys drove off in the truck, and Janet, Leslie, and Gina cleaned. When the girls and Emily got to Brown Street, though, the former owners were sitting glumly on their own boxes. The driver of their moving van, which had the name of a religious organization painted along the side, had gotten lost in Illinois and then again in Iowa City — he and the two movers were too tired from their long trip to do anything. Jared and Janet and the seven friends moved all of the previous owners’ furniture and boxes into the van while the movers looked on, and then Janet gave the movers five sandwiches she had made. She knew the look of their faces — the obedient look of people being “given a new life.” She wanted them to go away. When the owner thanked her and gave her a hug, Janet said, “Be careful; good luck, and I hope you get there.”

She put him out of her mind by focusing intently on everything she was doing, whether it was reading a book, listening to one of her professors, playing Legos with Emily, or chatting with Jared. She could feel herself getting louder, brighter, weirder, the way she always got when she was converting herself. As a result, she could sense Emily withdrawing, Jared looking at her sideways, her Realism and Naturalism professor watching for some other student’s raised hand. Finally, one day when Jared was home with Emily, and she was supposed to be going to class, she went to Student Health Services and talked to a Dr. Constance. She talked so fast that Dr. Constance stopped writing things down, had no opportunity to ask questions, just stared at her. She talked for exactly forty-five minutes, thereby giving Dr. Constance five minutes to tell her what to do. The silence was total. Janet waited. Clearly, Dr. Constance had no idea, either. The silence continued. There were three minutes left. Janet shifted her gaze from the woman’s gray curls to the window and the brick wall outside, and remembered how her own mother disappeared so often, heading out to see Dr. Somebody. “Dr. Dix,” her father had called him. Dr. Constance said, “I think maybe you should consider your marriage and your feelings for your husband.”

“I consider my family all the time.”

“No, I mean ponder them, not take them into consideration. Whenever we are feeling something strongly, it is related to what is going on in the present.”

Janet said, “I guess now you are going to tell me to live in the moment and take things one day at a time.”

“That isn’t bad advice.”

Janet looked at her watch. She really, really didn’t want to be rude, so she smiled and said, “Well, anyway, thanks for listening to me, and I think that’s a good idea.” Then she ran.

Yet another blizzard was in the offing — the snow already on the ground seemed to vaporize upward into the low-hanging clouds. She put on her gloves and pulled the hood of her down jacket over her head, snapped it closed over her chin and mouth. She stepped carefully around the puddles that were slickening as the afternoon cooled and darkened. She had almost done it, almost fallen right into the trap. It didn’t matter, Janet thought, who they were or how well meaning they might think they were; as soon as they started talking to you about your problems, their language captured you and put you in a prison of cause and effect, and you had to go along inside that, whether it was Oedipus complex or vitamin deficiency or admitting you were powerless or accepting Jesus, questing for a result that you could feel in yourself. The last thing Janet wanted in this life was to say, Maybe I still love Lucas, he was beautiful, a charismatic and fascinating person — and for the person to whom she was saying this to reply, Tell me about your father. She would of course reply, My father is an asshole, I wouldn’t ask him for a penny. And she certainly did not want then to hear, Define what you mean by asshole? She would be thirty-two this year. She had to accept the system that was herself. It had to move forward as well as it could. When she got home — sliding a little as she climbed the hill between Dubuque and Linn — Emily was standing in the middle of the living-room rug, and Jared was sitting on the floor cross-legged in front of her, juggling three of her dolls and saying, “Look at them fly, Emmy. Boom! Up and over! Can I catch it? I can’t catch it! Oh, I caught it! There goes another one!” It was Janet who laughed, not Emily. Since they were going to be snowbound for another couple of days, she decided that that was enough for the time being. Then, looking at the daughter who reminded her so much of herself, she thought, If I don’t get over this by the first of April, we’re getting a dog. She felt better at once.