The Survivor

Chapter 51

Beside Nate in the back of the Jeep, Janie remained stiff, leaning forward, straight arms pushing down on her knees, the hollow of her neck pronounced. They were twenty minutes from the hospital, but she was still fleeing it. Though she was done crying, each breath ended in a slight hitch.

Up front, Jason sang along incorrectly to the AC/DC disc he had taken from MonkeyBiz12’s Silver Lake house, keeping time on the steering wheel: “The walls was achin’, my heart was bakin’, and we were shakin’, ’cuz you-”

“Where are we gonna go?” Janie said. “They can track everything. There’s nowhere. No one we can call.”

“My father,” Nate said.

In the front Cielle reached across and slapped off the radio. “Did you say your father?”

“I’ve never even met him,” Janie said.

“That’s exactly why we should call him,” Nate said. “He’s not on any of our emergency contact lists, phone records, nothing. No one will think to look.”

“He still lives in your childhood house, doesn’t he? Won’t they look there?”

“He’s got a cabin. Or at least he used to.”

Jason took a corner too sharply, making Casper bounce to attention between the suitcases in the back. Nate put his phone in his lap and stared down at it for a moment. His skin prickled, all those memories buried in his cells. The tires thrummed across the road. Everyone stayed quiet, deliberately focused on the scrolling view past the windows, giving him space.

His thumb traced the familiar pattern on the number pad. A ring. Then another.

“Hello?” The voice was dryer than before, but even over the phone every subtlety of pitch and timbre found resonance.

“It’s Nate.”

“Who?”

The freeway flew past. “Dad. It’s me.”

The line crackled. Then his father, through the phone lines: “Nate.”

The words came hard but he pushed them through. “You still got that place in Bouquet Canyon? With your friends?”

A beat while his father tried to catch up to the hasty conversation. “Just me and Ross now. Hugh passed. But I’m pretty much the only one who ever-”

“Is it under your name?”

“No. Ross set up one of those whaddayacallits. A partnership. What’s this about, Nate?”

Nate pressed his forehead to the pane. Outside, headlights and red brakes streaked together, the whole world passing them by and them it. It took him a while to find the words and even longer to say them. “I’m in trouble, Dad.”

The pause drew out, no sound but the faint rush of his father’s breaths. Nate had no idea what was coming next.

The old man cleared his throat, an awkward prelude. “Then I’ll be right there,” he said.

* * *

They followed the directions to the outskirts of Santa Clarita, the freeway yielding to a smaller freeway, which in turn gave way to a two-lane road. Houses petered out, and traffic grew sparser, though Harleys roared by with enough regularity to suggest a biker bar tucked off somewhere behind the pines. They passed the mouth of the Angeles National Forest and the reservoir itself, the road winding more aggressively as they headed up Bouquet Canyon. Between the trees, fishermen flashed into view, their heads bent beneath khaki hats, toting poles and strings of rainbow trout that gleamed in the headlights’ glow. Roadside, families loaded coolers and grocery bags of picnic residue into tailgates, kids braying and quarreling as the fathers pulled at longnecks, one last beer before the drive.

At the turnoff someone had jumped the gun and erected a plywood cutout of Santa on a chopper with the spray-painted rhetorical, WHAT’S YOUR WISH FOR THE NEW YEAR? Jason veered upslope, and they chased the creek, the not-quite-cabin houses spacing out more and more, and then it was all pines and oaks and the occasional tendril of smoke from a hidden chimney. That was one of the miracles of Los Angeles: less than an hour from Rodeo Drive, and you might as well have been transported to a square state. Nate felt his nerves rising with the altitude; he’d not seen his father in a decade and a half and was uncertain what he’d be confronting on just about every level.

Offering a cheery wave, Jason steered past a few forest rangers in their trucks.

Janie spoke for the first time in half an hour. “Thank God you have a license.”

Through the wisps of his bangs, Jason’s eyes flicked to the rearview. “I don’t have a license. I just said I could drive.”

A drawn-out silence. Cielle took care to stare straight ahead through the windshield. Finally Nate’s scowl lightened a bit, and then Janie tittered, and they all laughed a little, Jason the loudest.

Jason said, “So I can keep-”

“Pull over,” Janie said.

She steered them the final leg and down the driveway, a dirt slope leading to a Craftsman perched a stone’s throw from a finger of the creek. A bowed footbridge arced across the ribbon of water like something from Disney. At the side of the enclosed porch, bent over the propane tank fussing with a knob, was Nate’s father.

He straightened up, dusting his hands, and came toward the Jeep without waving.

“Really?” Cielle said breathlessly. “That’s him?”

He was grayer, a touch stooped, the years heavy on him, but he had good healthy color in his cheeks and his eyes were clear and sober. He wore a flannel shirt fastidiously buttoned to the throat, and it struck Nate that he had never seen the man in a T-shirt. In a flash Nate was five years old again, strapped to the foam backseat of the LeSabre convertible, his father’s elbow perched confidently on the windowsill ahead, holding the world together.

They climbed out, Casper bounding from the back and stretch-yawning with a curled tongue. Shuffling in the leaves, they confronted one another, Nate standing to favor his left foot.

“Cielle,” he said, “this is your grandfather.”

The old man’s eyes crinkled as he regarded her for the first time. “Hello, then.”

Cielle gave a self-conscious wave, all wrist. “Hi.”

Janie gave Nate’s father a quick hug, and then Jason strode forward. “I’m Jason. Her boyfriend.”

With minimal interest Nate’s father took the kid’s oversize hand, looking past him at Nate. “They’re not sleeping in the same room.”

“You’re telling me,” Nate said. They studied each other from a safe distance. “I suppose you’re wondering what the hell is going on.”

“In due time. It’s late. And you look tired.”

For the first time in his life, Nate was pleased at his father’s reticence. A rush of gratitude overtook him. “Thanks for coming, Dad.”

His father turned for the house without so much as a nod. “No use in standing around out here,” he said.

They showered and changed while Nate’s father pan-fried some elk steaks, which he served with over-easy eggs and mugs of hot cider. Drying his shaggy hair and staring down at his plate, Jason said, “I’m sort of a vegetarian,” and Nate’s father replied, “Eat the damn food, son.”

For a man’s getaway, the place was surprisingly cozy, with spongy carpeting, throw blankets over the chairs, and exposed wood beams bracing the vaulted ceiling. No television. Nate’s father threw some cedar logs in the fireplace, and they ate on the surrounding couches, breathing in the sweet fragrance, letting the flames warm them. Casper lapped meat from a mixing bowl with enough exuberance to push it across the linoleum. His tags dinged against the metal lip, and then he gave out a tragic whimper that the elk was no more.

Wearing a borrowed sweater three sizes too big, Janie leaned into Nate, and he rested his arm across her narrow shoulders, and Cielle looked at them and for once said nothing cynical. He stole looks at his father, not quite believing that they were here under the same vaulted ceiling, and damned if the old man didn’t almost smile a time or two. Nate felt his muscles relax by degrees; maybe it was the meds starting to leave his system, or maybe he just finally had the space to let go a little. Cielle cracked a stupid joke and then giggled at it herself, leaning into her mom. Janie started laughing, too, and then Nate. He caught their reflection off the glass fireplace screen, something about the arrangement of the three of them tugging at a thread of a memory. And it struck him: the family portrait. Same pose, eight long years later. The sight of them was all different but somehow the same. They finished eating and talking, then sat for a moment in silence, basking in the afterglow, no one wanting the gathering to break up. It was magical, a momentary respite from reality.

After a while, as Cielle and Jason, with some prompting, cleared the dishes, Nate took his cell phone and started outside.

Janie caught his arm. “Where you going?”

“Find a signal. Abara. After the hospital-”

She plucked the phone from his hand and turned it off. “Not tonight,” she said gently. “Just one night.”

He could give her that.

Later, though it took some doing, Nate climbed the ladder to the open loft where Cielle was bedding down. Beyond the dormer window, black fangs of treetops bit into the star-patterned sky. He combat-crawled a few feet toward her pillow.

“Are you stupid, crawling up here with your muscles all tweaked?”

“Yes.” He leaned to kiss her on the forehead, but before he could, she hugged him around the neck, holding on.

“What’s gonna happen to us?” Her voice caught, and he felt her cheek growing hot against his.

He pulled away to answer, but she just squeezed tighter. He said, “I will let nothing happen to you.”

“You can’t promise that.”

“Yes. I can.”

“Are we ever gonna get home again?”

He thought, I am home.

He kissed her on the forehead and started to back out of the cramped space when she asked, “Why’d you and Mom split up?”

He halted, hunched beneath the low ceiling. “It took me a long time to come home from the war.”

“How long?”

He considered. “Till now.”

“So you fell out of love with her?”

“No. Never.”

“But you…?”

“Couldn’t figure out how to love her right either.”

“That’s really what men are like? This is what I have to look forward to?”

He smiled a little.

She said, “If you loved her-us-then how could you stand being away?”

“I couldn’t. I always thought tomorrow would be different.”

“And it wasn’t.”

“No. But today was.”

She smiled secretly and lowered her head to the pillow. “Dad? Will you…?”

“Of course.”

He inched forward and lay up there by her until she fell asleep.

After descending with difficulty, he searched out his father and spotted him just outside the back door, scraping leftovers into a composter. He started for him, but a neat row of framed photos hanging in the brief hall brought him up short-his own school pictures from preschool on, ending with his second-grade photo.

The year before his mother got sick.

He stared at the shrinelike display of himself. A collared shirt each time out, the neat side part, his small face not yet shadowed with loss. The abrupt end at second grade. He pictured those pen marks in Cielle’s doorway, her heights marked at various ages. Where was the line at which childhood ended? His mind drifted to Nastya in her VIP booth, an ash-heavy cigarette forked between manicured fingers.

Despite our best efforts, we fail each other, he thought, all the time.

And yet there was still so much to keep trying for.

At once his father was at his side, looking on with him at the four small frames. “You deserved to have that wall filled.”

By the time Nate could recover to reply, his father had moved on down the hall.

Nate stood for a while, leaning against the wall beside those pictures. He was about to start back when he heard the quiet plucking of guitar strings from the front of the house. He made his way through the kitchen and living room, Jason’s form drawing into view outside on the porch swing. The kid sat Indian style, large shoulders bowed, guitar across his lap. Nate drew near to the window. Jason was singing so softly that the words were barely audible, but the song slowly resolved: McCartney’s “Blackbird.” Jason’s voice was startlingly good, high-pitched and pure, almost feminine. Nate kept on toward the door, a snatch of lyrics coming clear-“take these broken wings and learn to fly”-but when he stepped onto the enclosed porch, Jason stopped playing abruptly, the guitar lying awkwardly across his thighs like a lapdog that could at any instant turn hostile.

They faced each other there in the light of the dark black night. The door clicked shut behind Nate, cold running up his sleeves and around his neck. “Why don’t you play that instead of the other crap?”

“You really know how to pay a compliment.”

“You really know how to play.”

The kid actually blushed. “Yeah, well.”

“I’m serious. Why don’t you play more like that?”

Jason shrugged, jerking his head to flick the hair out of his eyes. “Dunno. Guess I figured I wasn’t supposed to. You know. Be good at something.”

Nate sat beside him, the porch swing rocking. “Maybe it’s easier to just lump along sometimes.”

“No,” Jason said. “It’s exhausting to be a fuckup.”

Nate laughed.

Jason picked at his shoe. “All my life I was told no. Can’t go outside to play. Can’t do algebra. Can’t date a smart girl. Well, I’m sick of it.” A touch sharp-an accusation.

Nate thought for a time, then said, “You should be.”

The crickets were at it out there in the blackness.

Jason nodded a bit to himself. “You know when you hear a song on the radio that you just dig? And it sticks in your head, right? So you download it from iTunes. At first you love it. Take it with you to the skate park. Go to the beach with it, everywhere. But then you have it, so you get sick of it. And later you hear it on the radio, it’s not as exciting. Because you own it, right?” He licked his chapped lips. “That’s how it was with other girls. But I never feel that way about Cielle.”

They swayed a little on the porch swing, the silence growing awkward. Then Jason reached over and chucked Nate on the shoulder, a touch too hard. “Glad we had this talk, Pops.”

Suppressing a grin, Nate rose. “Good night, Jason.”

Jason threw his hands out, all smart-ass smirk. “C’mon. Shouldn’t we, ya know, go throw a ball? Quick bonding game of catch?”

Nate passed through the door. Safely out of view, he couldn’t help but crack a smile.

Janie lay across him in the sweaty aftermath, her lips at his chest, the blades of her shoulders forming an erotic ridgeline in the darkness. Starlight angled through the curtainless pane, blanketing half the bed in a faint blue glow. Her mouth worked up his neck and found his mouth. She lifted her head, catching the sheet of light, her face smooth and beatific save the inadvertent half sneer of her swollen lips. He tugged at her hair, damp and heavy at the nape, and she pulled forward into the gentle pressure, tilting her head as if to stretch her neck.

The moment was timeless-no, it was of a different time. It was before Fort Benning and the Sandbox, before the man-boy shackled to an outhouse and Abibas and a helicopter that capsized four feet above a dune. Before death notifications and a failure of will in the car outside Charles’s childhood home. Before nightmares and ghosts and a Westwood apartment with two photographs thumbtacked to the wall. Before safe-deposit boxes and interrogation rooms and oversize footprints in the back lawn. Before neurologists and little white pills and a body that slowly and unpredictably betrayed him.

But of course it wasn’t.

The muscle beneath his cheek rippled-a tiny bout of fasciculation-and Janie’s eyes tracked down to it. Her breathing changed, ever so slightly. The mood, taking a turn, paradise interrupted by a twinge of the flesh. The illness had brought him home again, but it also meant that he wouldn’t be able to stay.

His voice was husky. “I’m gonna die,” he told her.

Her fingertips were at his face, fording his lips. “I don’t care.”

“Do you have any idea how awful this is gonna get?”

“I don’t care.” Her mouth trembled, then firmed with anger. “Your eyes can dry up and you can stop talking and lie there choking on fluid in your lungs-I don’t care.” She clutched at him, her nails digging into the skin beneath his collarbone. “You can stop swallowing and have a ventilator rammed down your throat and … and barely be able to blink, but I still want you there. Dying. For me. I don’t care. I don’t care.”

She lowered her damp forehead to his chest and kept it there for a time. He held her and looked at the stars outside and thought how they’d be there the morning after he died and the morning after that. He stroked her back, and she fell asleep on him, and half his body went numb from the weight of her, but he didn’t dare move, didn’t want to waste a single instant of it.

Finally she stirred and shifted off him, raising her sleep-heavy face. “I don’t mean it,” she said.

He ran his fingers gently down her back and up again. “I know.”