Heroes of the Frontier

VII

AFTER THE BARBECUE THE KIDS CLIMBED into the back of Sam’s pickup, with Sam and Josie in front, and they drove back to Sam’s house, passing young pines all the way, about a mile up a hill of tidy homes. The house, with a rolling lawn and orderly rows of shrubs surrounding it, had a clear view of the rest of Homer below. This was not some deep-country log cabin. This was a respectable and modern house, newly painted and sturdy and clean.

To be a bird-watching guide in Homer, wow. Sam had it right. She had gone up to Alaska and opened her bird-watching operation, no fuss, didn’t ask anyone’s permission. She had the run of the forest, some island off of Homer, and she had it figured out. Had she left society, as Josie wanted to? Yes and no. She ran a business, she had kids, the kids went to school, she paid taxes, she sent emails. She was as trapped as Josie was, but she had a boat, and wore boots, and her daughters were these holy outdoor creatures with long-flowing sweet-corn hair. She’d figured out a few things. She’d simplified.

Paul and Ana got changed and went upstairs, following the twins, and the twins said they would put them to bed. Ana was thrilled, Paul cautiously ecstatic. Josie had planned to tell Paul about Sam being his actual godmother, or announce this to Sam, but now she wasn’t sure. She hoped Paul had forgotten.

“I have a surprise,” Sam said.

She’d been making her own whiskey and wanted Josie to try it. Josie had never developed an appreciation for brown liquor, and was fairly sure Sam’s would not be good.

Sam brought out a medieval bottle and poured anyway, and poured too much, and worse, she poured it into a coffee cup. Josie smelled it, and the stench was stronger than regular whiskey — it was wicked and fathomless, a predatory smell. Josie feigned sipping it, pretended to grimace, pretended to swallow and enjoy it in the brave rugged way Sam expected.

“Damn,” Josie said.

Sam was pleased. The purpose of the whiskey maker, it seemed, was to make the drinker gag.

“So good,” Josie said. She hadn’t tasted it yet.

They took their cups out to the back deck. Sam grabbed a heavy blanket and turned on a propane heater and brought it close. The night was cooling and the sky was grey with low cloud cover. They sat with their feet touching, their bodies making a V facing the dark trees.

Josie assumed deep talking was about to happen, and so took a long pull on the whiskey, wanting its effects without experiencing its taste. But the taste was inescapable and wretched. It burned. She thought of tennis shoes on fire. “This is awful,” she said.

Sam smiled and refilled her cup.

“So what the fuck are you doing up here?” Sam asked.

Josie laughed. Sam laughed. They laughed loudly, so loudly that an upstairs window opened and one of the twins, Josie couldn’t tell which, leaned down and her dark face said, “Quiet out there, missies. It’s bedtime for the little ones.”

The window closed and Sam turned to Josie.

“So Carl didn’t want to come?” She was kidding. “Seriously. Are you in touch with him? He in the picture?”

Josie gave Sam an accounting of his participation in his children’s lives, which took eight or nine seconds.

“Too bad,” Sam said. “Remember when he nicknamed Ana Oh No and then My Bad? He was funny. Actually pretty good with kids.” Both of these things had been true to some people at some point, but somehow his disappearance made him seem, to Josie at least, both less funny and less child-friendly. Whenever she heard Carl praised, she conjured his comical crimes. He had, more than once, asked Josie to fake an orgasm. She was ready to present this to Sam but Sam was moving on.

“And did I hear right, that you sold your practice? You’re not a dentist anymore? And wasn’t your face numb for a year or something? You’re not planning on driving that RV off a cliff, are you? Stop me if I’m prying.”

“No,” Josie said. She couldn’t think of anything else to say. She thought, You, who fled to Alaska and is somehow married but not married — you’re judging me? But chose not to. There was no point. Josie took another long sip of the sickening whiskey and felt she could just let the night pass over her, an hour until she could claim exhaustion and go to sleep. The night air was warm, and the crickets or frogs were making their noise, and there was a breeze and far off, some road hummed a forgettable tune.

Sam topped off Josie’s cup. “So you quit? You sold the practice? What did Sunny say about that?” Sam asked, and Josie was glad that Sam had stopped calling Sunny Mom. The last time she’d seen Sam, she was using that word, Mom. Neither she nor Sam had called Sunny by that name when they lived with her, and hearing her use it, twenty years later or whenever it was, was jarring — as if Sam had assessed what Sunny had been to her and had given it a name. Hadn’t she once called her Sunsy? She had! Sam liked names, nicknames. These names did what — they helped Sam define, or redefine, what she and Sunny were to each other. They gave her some control, as if to call her Sunsy put her in her place, as a small and aging woman, whereas Mom had been a holy honorific. But now she was Sunny again. Sunny was just her name. The name as they’d known her. Let’s settle on something and leave it alone, Josie wanted to say.

She sipped her whiskey, looked into the obsidian sky. This could be the cause of all modern neurosis, she thought, the fact that we have no immovable identity, no hard facts. That everything we know as foundational truth is subject to change. The world is running out of water. No, actually, there is enough water underground to cover the surface of the earth six hundred feet deep. So there’s no water problem? Well, only six percent of that underground water is drinkable. So we’re doomed? Well…The hedging and backtracking never ended. The scientists, the astronomers being the worst offenders. We are matter. No, we are surrounded by matter. There are nine planets. No, eight. We are exceptional, our planet singular in its ability to sustain life. No, there are billions of Earth-like planets, most of them bigger than ours, most of them likely to be far better developed. Sunny. Sunsy. Mom.

Sam was saying something. Josie focused on the words. “She must have been devastated. Devastated.”

Oh this. Josie had expected this. When she’d taken up dentistry in college, Sam was cruel. “You don’t have to suck up like that, Joze.” That Josie had gone through with it, and had opened her own practice. Sam had been livid. Paralyzed. Then she’d moved up to Anchorage, then Homer, and there was an unspoken theory among Sunny, Josie, and Helen, that Sam had chosen Alaska as her way of ceding victory and territory to Josie. Josie had won, she’d secured Sunny’s greater love, and thus could have her and have the Lower 48.

There was a thumping of Sam’s unlaced boots. She put her feet, huge in their heavy wool socks, on the grey picnic table.

“Sorry, shit,” Sam said, and suddenly her face was directly in front of Josie’s. Their noses touched. “I’m not mad at you. Or jealous,” she said. “I’m nothing. Nothing like that. But I know you’ve always thought I was bitter.” Josie remembered, suddenly, a time when Sam had accused her of positioning herself to inherit Sunny’s practice. She’d been so nasty, so often, again using her excuse that it was all fucked up, so what. “I love you. We’re sisters,” Sam said, and now Josie’s eyes were welling and Sam was crying. “I want to hear about what happened. It helps to talk.”

Josie felt this a dubious claim. Usually it did not help to talk. It hurt like hell to talk. It was like saying Standing still helps to a person sinking in quicksand. In this case, Josie was sure the pain would be searing, that she would think about it more vividly that night, later, lying on Sam’s basement pullout. She knew, in fact, that she would lie down there, cold and with a head full of bad whiskey, and run all this through her mind again, while also thinking of her children sleeping two floors above, who very well might wake up in the middle of the night and would not know where their mother was — they wouldn’t guess the basement, and would find that terrifying, their mother asleep in a basement. Josie was sure talking about all this was a terrible idea — talking about horrors had not been helpful to her, she was better off forgetting, structuring her life around forgetting, but Sam wanted to know, and in a moment of whiskey-driven weakness Josie thought it a wonderful idea to open this wound.

—

She had such a gentle face. Her hair was white, her cheeks pink, anyone who met her would have thought of Mrs. Claus. How could a woman like that, a woman named Evelyn — Evelyn Sandalwood! A name to soothe the tired and weary! — how could this widow with five grandchildren become such a demon? Josie thought of the strange monuments in the desert, the hunched and hollowed shapes that wind and rivers had made of respectable mountains.

Evelyn had been Josie’s patient. Years without a problem. She had a dirty mouth, yes, she was a smoker with soft teeth, two dozen fillings, poor gums. But nothing far out of the ordinary. Usually one could sense the troubled patients — they had so many worries, they would jerk around in the chair, grip the armrests, would look at you with resentful eyes before spitting into the sink. Afterward they would ask so many questions, would stay far longer than they should, they would ask for second opinions from her hygienists. Josie had broken up with so many of these patients in the past, sending them to cheaper or more expensive dentists, anywhere.

But Evelyn was one of the good ones. They talked about the creek near Josie’s practice, how Evelyn used to take a canoe through its sulfurous waters as a girl. She occasionally mentioned her dead husband in a lovely way, nothing morbid, knowing he was gone, feeling lucky to have had him so long. She was not angry about anything, had no confrontational bones. She seemed an honest woman. And so why did she come at Josie like she did? Josie sensed forces around her. A son-in-law who was a personal-injury attorney. A niece who had seen some documentary about malpractice. Josie heard things but wasn’t sure. It was a small town, Josie couldn’t know what was true, what happened in her home, in her mind.

She did know that one day Evelyn Sandalwood’s records were subpoenaed from her office. Christy, the receptionist, opened the letter, from an attorney known to be a holy terror, asked Josie about it, and Josie said of course send them, send the records, anything. But she couldn’t breathe. She stared at the letterhead. This attorney was an animal. It was three in the afternoon, she had only one more patient, just a cleaning and checkup. She glanced at the letter, afraid to read it, but saw the words “gross negligence” and “significant delay in diagnosis” and knew her practice would not survive. She let Christy close, and stopped by the grocery store on the way home, getting herself an oversized bottle of prosecco. She got to the parking lot and went back for gin.

Josie should have seen the tumor. That was the claim. In any checkup Josie would do a standard oral cancer screening, and for someone like Evelyn, a smoker, she took her time. She lifted and examined that filthy tongue, the color and texture of a car’s floormat. She remembered vividly doing so, remembered finding nothing, remembered marking negative on her chart.

But sixteen months later Evelyn had Stage 3 cancer and wanted two million dollars. Josie didn’t know who to call. She called Raj. “Come see me after work,” he said. Raj had his own practice in town, and she and Raj talked frequently, gave second opinions on root canals and, for fun, sent each other their most annoying patients. He was a round man in his late fifties with a booming voice, given to dubious philosophizing at high volume. He would stand with his legs firmly planted, as if ready to withstand a sudden gust of wind, and say things like “I love my work, I cannot deny it, because I love all people!” Or, on a less happy day, “The only problem with our profession, Josephine, is the people and their terrible mouths.”

This time, Josie arrived at his office to find him standing in the empty foyer, arms outstretched. But instead of embracing Josie, he began one of his pronouncements. “I told my daughters, ‘Don’t go into medicine!’ ” It was just the two of them but he was talking loudly enough for an open-air political rally. “Can you imagine, an Indian man telling his daughters not to be doctors? It’s these lawsuits! This constant blame. This culture of complaint! We are not the givers of immortality! We are fallible! We are human!” Josie asked him if he’d ever had a patient subpoena anything, and he said sure, back in Pennsylvania once, but he didn’t know a good lawyer in Ohio. She spent the rest of an hour hearing him talk about his own problem patients, the dozen times he’d narrowly avoided lawsuits of his own.

When Josie finally found a lawyer, a young woman who had just left the district attorney’s office in Cincinnati, she knew she was beaten. She’d hired a kid lawyer to defend her against a woman dying of cancer, a woman who happened to resemble Mrs. Claus. She did not stand a chance. It was a matter of settling and for how much.

—

The notion of giving the practice away came to Josie one day when she was arriving at the office. The moment her key turned the lock, the idea struck her with gorgeous simplicity. She would hand the business over to Evelyn Sandalwood. The woman had poisoned the business, and now it could be hers. Her lawyer was hinting at a settlement of two million dollars. Josie’s insurance topped out at one million, and she thought the business could be worth about five hundred thousand, so she offered them a trade. She would hand over the entire thing, the equipment, the clients, everything, and walk away. They could get all that, a million and a half, now, or wait forever for less.

Evelyn’s lawyer said it was ludicrous, no chance, until the former DA explained how long it would take for Evelyn to extricate the same amount from Josie in cash. Her house, even if they sold it, was only half hers, and after the sale and split and taxes and fees it might bring Evelyn one-fifty. The rest would come in wage garnishments for the remainder of Josie’s life — and Josie had made it known she didn’t plan to practice dentistry again, so that level of income was never to return. The business was Evelyn’s to own. That was Josie’s offer. And it was Josie’s idea to give Evelyn’s people seventy-two hours to decide. In those three days Evelyn’s people sent experts through the building, assessing the value of the machines, the lights, the tools. In the middle of it all, Raj called. “I’ll buy it for a million,” he said. Josie told him it wasn’t worth that. “I think it is!” he said — he roared. He was somehow louder over the phone. Josie told him he was a saintly man. “I want happiness for you, Josie!” he yelled. “I want you to forget this ugliness and find serenity! You are now free!”

Even before Evelyn, the work wasn’t fun anymore, wasn’t even tolerable. One day Josie arrived at the office to find a note taped to the door. “How could you?” it asked in a sturdy all-caps hand. The note terrorized her for weeks. Who’d written that? What did it mean? Was it about Jeremy or someone complaining about overbilling? Josie grew skittish. She started to mumble. So afraid to give advice, to impart wisdom that might get someone killed in some lonely Afghani valley, she had begun saying next to nothing. The anxiety of influence! In her country, at this particular deranged moment, a dentist had the power to send a man to his death. A dentist! She had said wildly encouraging things to Jeremy about his ability to change the world, and he was shot dead. Then, she had gone the other direction, marked a box “negative” and that had, Evelyn or her carnivorous family claimed, led to that sick woman’s cancer. Well, enough. It was better to say nothing, to avoid all people. She was done with all mouths, beginning with her own.

“Don’t worry,” Raj said. They were walking through her empty office. Everyone was gone. Raj would soon take over, rehire most of the people. She loved him for it. “Josie,” he said, holding both her hands like they were about to square dance, “the lost will always prey on the competent. Just as someone drowning will pull down someone merely treading water.”

The last meeting with Evelyn and her people — it was an ugly thing. Months had gone by since the first subpoena, and the old woman had lost thirty pounds. She couldn’t talk, and her once kind eyes had grown hard. Josie wanted to feel for her, but felt nothing. She wanted to be gone. Evelyn accepted the terms, took the money, her son-in-law watching her sign the papers with those withered, yellowed fingers.

And Josie was free.

—

“That’s why your face was numb?” Sam slurred. They’d refilled their cups twice during the tale.

“I don’t know,” Josie said. “Sure.”

Josie looked into the black night.

“Is this the way you’re supposed to live?” Josie asked.

“What does that mean?” Sam asked, and stood, and looked into the night, trying to see what Josie was seeing.

“Do you feel like you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing? That you’re using your time here properly?”

Josie laughed, to undercut what she’d just said, but she knew, even in her stupor, that this was the central thought that had occupied her mind for the better part of twenty years. Wherever she was, she could be content, and could do her work, or feed her children, or temporarily love a man like Carl, and live in the town she lived in, in the country she’d been born in, but a thousand other lives presented themselves to her daily and seemed equally or more worthwhile.

Sam didn’t answer. Then Josie realized she hadn’t said the words out loud. Josie had wanted to say them, but now the moment had passed and she couldn’t.

Instead she said, “It’s okay,” and by that she meant that they, Josie and Sam, should be better to each other. We all should be better to each other, she meant to say. Evelyn shouldn’t have gotten cancer, and shouldn’t have taken Josie’s livelihood in recompense, and why was it again that she hadn’t heard from her father in eleven years and that Jeremy was dead? How was that acceptable?

“What were you looking at?” Sam asked.

“It’s okay,” Josie said again, and then said, “I think it’s time to sleep.”

—

But she didn’t sleep. She went down to the basement and lay on the foldout couch there. Her business was gone, and there were no plaques, no thanks. Her employees blamed her, not Evelyn Sandalwood, not the cannibalistic legal climate, not the abyss that was moral order, but Josie, for the demise of the practice and the loss of their jobs. Tania had scolded her for not having the proper insurance. Tania! Who she’d insured! All these young women — they came to Josie looking for work, yes, but more important, they wanted insurance. A dentist’s office surely had the best coverage. They had unknown lists of pre-existing conditions and they could not help themselves — they asked about insurance in the first ten minutes of any interview. Josie took care of Tania and Wilhelmina and Christy, took care of all these people and none of them lost money. All the money to be lost was hers, and they took their pay and considered themselves cheated. There was no reason to run a small business and employ people. These people had been brought up to feel aggrieved at any employer, to feel cheated by every paycheck. Josie had repeatedly brought up the idea of a co-op, a system whereby everyone at the practice shared the profits and shared the risks. No one wanted any part of that. They preferred to be aggrieved.

She closed her eyes.

And was met by the face of that certain zealous woman at the school, the one with the scarf, always some scarf, who thought Josie was some kind of shirker. “How can we get you more involved around here?” she’d asked, her crazed beady eyes and wild black hair like a broom of brambles. No, no. New thought. Jeremy. Not Jeremy. Someone else. Not Carl. I read a book about html! Carl once roared, the only time Josie had ever heard him yell. I read it cover to cover! This, for him, was a kind of work. This justified his sloth. This might have been the greatest thing he’d ever done outside the bathroom. Remember the time he bought two twelve-packs of toilet paper? He had to; he went through a roll a day. No. No more Carl. Josie swept him away. Patti? Whatever happened to Patti, that friend of hers from nursery school? Patti was good. Patti was funny, ribald, knew the bullshit when it was bullshit. With a shock of recognition, Josie realized it was her fault — Patti had reached out repeatedly last spring and Josie had what? Forgotten to write back? To call. No, Patti had moved. Divorced and moved. Why couldn’t she remember these things? Running a business murders your ability to be the kind of friend people expect or deserve. Days and weeks go by and there can be no keeping up. Her best friends were her oldest friends, who did not expect constant contact. Everyone else was disappointed.

That was the primary response she provoked in others: disappointment. Her employees were disappointed in their hours and pay, her patients were disappointed in their care, in their cavities, in the fact of their dirty mouths, their soft teeth, in their slippery insurance plans. The suggestion box, the staff’s idea, had been a disaster. Kinda disappointed. Very disappointed. Super disappointed. She put away the box, had a few happy years, then the customer-review websites appeared, jesus, so many aggrieved, all these anonymous patients avenging her every slip, every imperfect moment. Disappointed in her bedside manner. Disappointed in the diagnosis. Disappointed in the magazines in the waiting room. Every disappointment a crime.

We live in a vengeful time. You didn’t get the orange chicken you ordered or the sticky rice? And now you’re already home? Meaning you’d have to drive all the way back to get the orange chicken and sticky rice you ordered? Injustice! And thus avenge. Avenge the proprietor’s crimes! This was our contemporary version of balance, of speaking truth to power. Avenge the proprietor on thy customer-review site! Right the imbalance! Josie had done it herself. Three times she’d done it, and each time it felt so good for two or three minutes, and then felt base and wasted. It meant nothing to the world. Forget it. How had she stayed in business that long? I’m disappointed, too, she wanted to say. Disappointed in your halitosis, by your hard-on when Tania leans over you, pressing her breasts into your pubescent shoulder. Disappointed in the way you hold the armrests as if I’m hurting you, fuck you, I’m barely touching you. You crybabies. You big babies. Bramble-haired mom was disappointed. Evelyn most disappointed of all. Oh shit: It was a show: Disappointed: The Musical.

Think of it: the audience leaves Disappointed. What’d you see? How’d you like it? Disappointed. That would be the ad! After This Show, You’ll Leave Disappointed. It couldn’t lose. Lying in the basement, apart from her sleeping and drooling children, her eyes now open, Josie thought about getting a notepad. No, she’d remember. It was better than Norway! Every song in Disappointed: The Musical a litany of complaint set to a jaunty score. The set a kaleidoscopic orgy of colors and products, the unimaginable array of things and conveniences available to us, all somehow falling short, all letting us down. Products to be disappointed in. Our friends: disappointing. Our parents: disappointments. Airlines: disappointing. Our nations and leaders, all disappointments. The show would make the disappointment four-dimensional. The actors would sing and dance in phenomenal outfits that would somehow fall short. The seats in the theater would be comfortable, sure, but could be better. At intermission there would be refreshments, but they would be not up to par, and the time before Act II not quite long enough to enjoy these beverages. Ticket prices: not quite outrageous, but definitely a disappointment. Availability, also disappointing. The show would be too long.

But Evelyn would be the star. Whoever played her would be in her seventies, but her opening number would be about all that she had to live for, the thousand possibilities ahead of her. We’d see an aging woman, and a woman who was not quite able to bound around the stage — and she’d be smoking, too, and possibly not even moving so much at all, perhaps just sitting on a stool — and she would sing a song as if a vivacious new arrival to the big city: all the things she wanted to do. But then. But then, she sees the dentist, who is somehow oblivious, somehow causes her cancer — that would be the end of Act I — this dentist causes cancer by not catching it. Her second solo number would be a tragic song about lost horizons, about finite time, about disappointment. The show-stopper would be that song “Every Disappointment Is a Crime,” and for it Evelyn would be joined by her children and grandchildren, all lamenting her fate, but expecting some measure of satisfaction when justice is served, when the negligent dentist is punished and cast away — perhaps some trapdoor in the stage? The show would end that way, with the dentist descending at the same moment Evelyn ascended — she would rise to heaven, amid a sweep of cornets and French horns, and then of course she would be disappointed there, too.