Heroes of the Frontier

IV

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.

“My dad used to do that with me,” he said, barely exerting any effort, this forty-pound child still standing on his hands. Now he lifted her higher. “Can you get the ceiling?” he asked.

Ana reached, grunting, until she tapped it with her finger. “Down please,” she said, and he lowered her slowly, then dropped her in a heap on the couch and pretended to sit on her, trying to get comfortable as she shrieked gleefully below.

“You’re a great mom,” Jeremy said to Josie, still sitting on Ana. “I mean, in general, but especially because you let me do stuff like this. Not all parents do. But kids are beasts. They need to sweat and scream and wrestle.” Jeremy collected Ana in his arms and plunged his mouth into her stomach, making a loud wet raspberry. Ana’s eyes were charged, her hands like claws in front of her, waiting for the next attack. But instead Jeremy smoothed her shirt, patted her tummy and stood her up on the carpet, as if restoring a fallen statue.

“Thank you,” Josie said, overcome.

In return for Jeremy’s kindness and strength, all Josie had ever wanted was to tell him how much she felt he was the hope of the world. Is that all she did? No. She said more, and this is why she should not speak, ever again, and why she cherished every day when she spoke to no one but her two children. She knew that the color of the sky affected her moods, the sun changed her outlook and words, and if she took a brisk walk during lunch and saw something beautiful she was liable to say something exuberant, or be too full of happiness for an hour or so, and this was when she made mistakes. In her exuberance she would reveal too much about herself. She would overpraise, she would urge people into tasks they could not complete.

It happened two weeks after that night. She had come back from lunch and was feeling some joy the fall air had given her, and could hardly concentrate. She had three patients that afternoon, and all were subjected to her inane bliss. First there was Joanna Pasquesi, a Rubenesque high-school sophomore who revealed she was considering going out for the school musical. It was A Chorus Line that year, and with altogether too much zeal Josie urged her to try out, to make their selection of her beyond debate, and went on a bit about the need for body diversity on the stage, though in reality she was trying to score a very belated victory against the gatekeepers who had kept her out of her own high-school musical, Cabaret, for which Josie was not called back. So Joanna Pasquesi, who had actually checked her watch twice while Josie rambled on, left feeling inspired — she said so, at least — though she might have been simply stunned into submission.

And then Jeremy came in, and they talked for a time about her kids, Such cool kids, he said, and they laughed about their hyperactivity, their madness, their need to wrestle with him, touch ceilings with him, and then conversation turned to her, and the Peace Corps, and though she rarely was so exuberant about it, this time she told him it was the greatest experience of her life, that they had made such a difference there, that it was just after the country had taken ownership of the canal, that there was such optimism then, so many changes, and that being part of that transition, representing the U.S. in Panama, this crucial partner, at a crucial moment — she went on and on, and it was wildly convincing. Even Tania was listening.

And then, with his smooth young face and sincerity, Jeremy told her he wanted to enlist. He wanted to be a marine. He wanted to make a difference in Afghanistan, help open schools for Afghan girls, work on clean water projects, bring stability to a country on the verge of great things. Josie’s eyes filled and she squeezed his shoulder. She did not do what good people would have done, which would have been to say nothing. Enlisting during a war was such grave business that only an idiot would praise this notion. Josie should have been judicious enough to know that she could not, should not influence such a decision in any way — to recognize that this was between Jeremy and his parents. To know that she was nothing.

But she was a fool who knew no boundaries, and was not very sure about the state of the war — she was relatively certain it was winding down and would present little danger to Jeremy. So she told him that sounded wonderful. That he, as the hope of the world, a gentle soul, a formidable figure, could make such a difference. That the marines, that the region — that Afghanistan itself! — needed someone like him. Somehow she had confused her enthusiasm for Joanna Pasquesi’s musical ambitions with Jeremy’s nation-building hopes, and further had conflated her own time in Panama, the expression of American love through cisterns and the teaching of English by men and women in sandals and khakis (for the impulse did come from love, love of the world) with Jeremy’s expression of the same love, though in uniform and carrying an AK-47. It was not the same thing, and now he was dead and his parents hadn’t spoken to her since.

This has absolutely nothing to do with you, her friends said, bewildered that she would take any responsibility at all. But then why hadn’t his parents been back? Josie had heard, later, that they’d been against his enlisting from the start. And what they didn’t know, and she would never tell them, and had not told anyone, was that he had approached her, in the parking lot of her office one evening, at five — he knew when she’d be there, weeks after that visit where she squeezed his shoulder and said Wonderful—and told her that her support had been so important to him. That his parents had been unsure, they’d been worried, but they had respect for her, for Josie, his dentist, that her support had meant so much to them and him. He had enlisted and was killed six months later.

This is why she no longer offered advice, why she was happy to let go of her practice. Liberated. Thrilled. Away and free. This was why, outside her parenting duties, she had not left her bedroom most of January, her limbs unliftable and her face numb. No one had told her. Not the parents, none of their friends. The funeral had already happened. He’d been shot in some remote Afghani hillside and had bled for six hours before dying. He’d had time to write a note to his parents, which had been found on him, the contents of which Josie would never know. A boy of eighteen dying alone, bleeding alone, writing to his parents — how did all this happen? How was this allowed? Josie wanted no more of this. This idea of knowing people. Knowing people meant telling them what to do or not to do, providing advice, encouragement, guidance, wisdom, and all of these things brought misery and lonely death.

“Mom?” It was Paul.

Josie turned. Her son was in yesterday’s clothes, and had somehow gotten out of the Chateau, walked through the woods, across the parking lot and found her there, on the shore.

“We’re hungry,” he said.

—

They ate in the camp cafeteria, the eggs and sausage excellent and costing only fifty-five dollars before gratuity. The Norwegians ate nearby, waving again.

There was a television hanging from the ceiling, showing a loop of the park’s services — iceberg tours, glacier tours, whale watching, each excursion costing somewhere in the thousands per person — and every so often there was a public service announcement featuring Smokey the Bear. Josie had forgotten about his very existence, hadn’t seen him since her Girl Scout days, and between then and now something had happened: he’d been working out. The cuddly and round-bellied old Smokey was now a burly bear with a flat stomach and arms like bent steel. In the animated message, his friends were trying to give him a birthday party, and they carried out a cake full of lighted candles. Smokey didn’t like this. He gave them a disapproving posture, his huge arms on his waist, and Josie felt a stirring within her. Did she have a crush on this new Smokey?

Her table shook. Someone had bumped it. An older man turned to apologize but his wife spoke first.

“Nimble as a cat,” the woman said, her voice a patrician purr. Josie looked up to her, laughed and took in the woman’s face: it was beautiful, with an upturned nose, a delicate chin. She had to be seventy.

Hearing Josie’s laugh, the woman turned again to her. “I’m sorry. He’s just lost a step lately. He was a very debonair man — even last month.” The woman smiled, turned away, evidently embarrassed. She’d said too much.

“Who are those people?” Ana asked.

Josie shrugged. Her daughter’s face was streaked with dirt and dried snot. Josie had seen a sign for showers available at the campground, somewhere in a vast log cabin in the woods, so after breakfast they put on flip-flops, bought the necessary tokens and brought their shampoo and soap and towels.

They undressed, leaving their clothes high in a cubby, and stepped across the plywood floor to the women’s shower area, where there were two young women, each of them facing out, unabashed and vigorously shampooing their hair. They were ravishing creatures, taut and tanned with tiny breasts alive and alert, and their teeth were white, their asses high and shiny and pubic hair artistically groomed. Josie stared at them as she would a pair of unicorns. What are you doing here? she wanted to ask, though she had no better idea of where they should be. Where does young beauty belong? Maybe stepping through fountains in Rome calling Marcello! Marcello! Or on a plane. Piloting a plane. Josie pictured the two of them flying a plane through pillowy clouds, each wearing white, their legs uncovered and so smooth.

One of the young women now was looking back at Josie, who in her reverie was caught staring, and now she was telling her friend they were being watched, and soon they were hustling out of the shower and into towels. Josie thought of her parents, both nurses at a veterans’ hospital, how they taught her how to dry herself after a shower. Her mother and father mimed the brushing of all excess water from their arms and legs, left arm, right arm, left leg, right leg, saving the towel for whatever was left. Josie thought of their demonstration — they’d done it in the living room when she was eight — every time she showered; many days it was the only time she thought of them. What did that say about her? About the limits of memory, the threshold for the tolerance of pain?

Seeing they had the showers to themselves, Ana ran naked into the mist. Would she break into song? Josie got up and Paul followed, they hung their cheap rough towels on rough hooks and the three of them formed a tight circle, facing one another, the warm water falling between them. Ana looked between Paul’s legs and said “Hello penis.” It was not the first time she’d greeted Paul’s machinery. He’d gotten used to it, and took some pride in being the only member of the household so equipped. Josie soaped their bodies and shampooed their hair, Ana making underwater sounds and stamping her feet. We gravitate toward comfort, Josie thought, but it must be rationed. Give us one-third comfort and two-thirds chaos — that is balance.

—

Their hair wet and bodies clean, they stepped out of the hygiene cabin and into the dappled sunlight and Josie felt they were in the right place. The last few days, their many trials, were only adjustments. Now she knew what she was doing. She had the hang of it and all was possible. They rested awhile in the Chateau, during which time Paul brought Josie a card, dictated by Ana and written by Paul, which said “I love you Mom. I am a robot.”

That settled, they walked back into town.

“Mom?” Paul said. “Was that show good?”

“The magic show? Yeah,” she said. “Did you think so?”

He nodded, utterly unsure.

Where the town met the onslaught of the rough black bay, there was a monument to Seward with a long accounting of why the town had been named after Lincoln’s trusted advisor. Josie tried to explain it all to her children but they needed context.

“Okay, who freed the slaves?” she finally asked. Paul knew the answer, so Josie raised her finger to allow a moment for Ana to try.

Ana thought about it for some time, and then a light entered her eyes. “Was it Dad?”

Josie laughed, snorting, and Paul rolled his eyes.

Ana knew she had said something funny, so continued saying it.

“Dad freed the slaves! Dad freed the slaves!”

Near the monument there was a rocky beach decorated with wild debris and driftwood. They walked amid great rough-hewn beams, big as truck axles and thrown ashore like pencils. Paul picked up a steering wheel and Ana found the remains of a buoy, smashed into the shape of a child’s torso. Josie sat on a round rock and felt the salt air rush at her. Happiness swelled inside her with equal force, and she wanted to stay there all day, all night, wanted to live in that moment for as long as was allowed. She was right when she thought, every hour, that children, or at least her children, needed to be outside, amid rough things, and all she needed, beyond feeding them, was to sit on rounded rocks watching them lift things and occasionally throw them back to the sea. The sand was damp, a deep brown dusted by lighter clouds of dry sand. Soon Paul and Ana sat on either side of her.

“What’s that smell?” Paul asked, though Josie smelled nothing.

“It’s really bad,” he said, and then Josie saw something. There was a large stone in front of them, the size of a shoe, and it looked like it had recently been dislodged and replaced. Josie lifted it and the smell flew upward and filled the air. She replaced the stone but had seen, in a glance, a terrible thing. It was feces, and there might have been some sort of diaper there, too. She thought about it, examining the memory of what she’d seen. No, that wasn’t it. The answer came to her: it was a maxi pad. It was a maxi pad covered in caramel-colored feces. “Let’s move,” she said, and hustled Paul and Ana up from the beach, past the monument to the great man, and through town.

There could be no doubt that humans were the planet’s most loathsome creatures. No other animal could have done something so wretched. Someone, an outdoors someone, came to this shore, knowing it was beautiful and rough. Then they had shat here, even though there was a bathroom two hundred yards away. They had shat in such a way that most of the feces was attached to the maxi pad — the physics of it Josie couldn’t conjure. And then, instead of bringing the shit-covered maxi pad to a garbage receptacle, one only fifty yards away, they had left it under a rock. Which showed some strange mixture of shame and aesthetics. They knew no one would want to see the shit-covered maxi pad, so they hid it, under a rock, where, they surely knew, it would never decompose.

So they walked into downtown Seward and Josie, feeling magnanimous to compensate for the depravity of the rest of humankind, allowed Ana and Paul to explore the souvenir shops, and bought them each horrifying talking-moose T-shirts and snow globes. They walked along the waterfront and after half a mile found a vast green park with an elaborate play structure full of blond and black-haired children.

“Can we go?” Paul asked, but Ana had already run ahead, crossing a parking lot where she narrowly missed being crushed by a truck backing out. For all her young life Josie had had to envision the tiny coffin, the words she would say, life without this girl. Ana was doing everything she could to bring herself to an early end and the force and focus she brought to the endeavor could not be overcome. Oblivious, she ran through the woodchips and would remain among the living for at least another hour.

Josie found a bench, set the bags of horrible souvenirs down, and watched Ana tear through the play structure. Next to her, Paul was standing still, hands at his sides, carefully examining the playground, seeing its many features, judiciously deciding which would be best to experience first. Josie opened the free newspaper she’d been handed outside one of the stores, while keeping an eye on Ana, who she knew at some point would throw herself from the slide or find some new way to land on her head. Soon Ana stopped, had spotted a small skate park nearby, and was mesmerized by the teenagers in their gear. For no reason Josie remembered something Carl had written in a folded note, slipped under the pillow: I will never tire of your sweet ass. Was that sexy? His handwriting was a murderer’s scrawl. Otherwise Carl didn’t take sex seriously. He liked to make jokes during and after. “Well done,” he’d say afterward, immediately afterward, obliterating any mood, extinguishing any afterglow. When Josie told him she’d rather do without the jokes, he was so sad. He loved his jokes. After that, whenever he’d finish, she could see him staring up at the ceiling, wanting to say “Good work,” or “I think that worked out pretty well” but unable to. She’d squashed this crucial avenue of self-expression.

“Okay, locals against tourists,” a kid yelled. He was in the playground, standing in an area between Ana and Paul, and seemed to be about twelve, black-haired and handsome, and was organizing all the kids on the playground. He was a leader — if there were ever a true thing it was that some people, some children, some infants, were leaders and some were not — and in seconds he had divided eighteen children into teams and Paul grabbed Ana and all the smaller children were dutifully listening to the boy’s instructions. “This is how it works,” the boy-leader announced, shaking his long raven-black hair out of his eyes. “It’s like tag, but instead of being tagged it’s like you’re a zombie and you die if your neck’s broken, like this.” Then, as Josie watched, horrified and helpless, he took Paul, put his hands on either side of Paul’s head, and twisted, quickly, mimicking the breaking of someone’s neck as done in action films. “Now fall,” the boy said, and Paul dutifully crumpled. “That’s how it works. You’re dead until the game ends then we start over. Everyone got it?”

Ana’s eyes were huge, from fear or fascination Josie didn’t know. But she did know she was leaving and her kids were leaving. Seeing a twelve-year-old pretend to break her son’s neck had left her cold. She waved Paul over, as if she had some casual unrelated news or instruction, then grabbed his arm and didn’t let go. “Ana!” she yelled, and they walked off. Ana soon followed.

Seward had been nice but it was time to go. They still had a day to kill before Homer so they packed up the Chateau, Josie filled the tank—$212, an abomination — bought a map and left town.

“Where we going, Mom?” Paul asked.

“Put a seatbelt on,” Josie said.