They’d snapped at each other so fast Marshall hadn’t been able to interject a word; he hadn’t been able to object to McCallum’s pushing this frightened girl too hard — couldn’t he see this was her notion of protecting her mother? All she must feel she had at this moment was her mother, her life with her mother — the same person who had compromised her without realizing it.
“Cheryl,” Marshall said, “I’m going to do my best to see we leave without any call being made to your mother. I want you to know I agree with you.”
“Can you imagine it?” Cheryl burst out. “Don Quixote and Sancho Panza at Dolly’s restaurant in Buena Vista, Virginia? I mean, poverty like this would bring down even Don Quixote. How would anybody”—she looked at McCallum—“nobody,” she said, “could believe in resuming a great romance in Buena Vista. I’m here while she recovers from her leg surgery, and that’s the end. In another few months, I am out of here.”
It was the first time Marshall had the sinking feeling that she was trapped.
McCallum paid the bill, smoothing wadded-up bills on the table-top. “You might both dislike me right now, but at least it should prove to you that I can be transparent,” he said, putting a saltshaker on top of the money. “See? Willing to let my friends know my failures, see my flaws. Willing to admit my shortcomings, to try to make amends.”
“I don’t see it that way,” Cheryl said. “I don’t believe what you say. You’re a barnacle. You attach yourself. You stick on, like a parasite. That’s what’s most important to you.”
“I had no idea in hell about any of this,” Marshall said to Cheryl.
“You seem not to have an idea in hell about a lot of things,” she said.
“You’re mad at him. Don’t be mad at me,” he said.
But her comment had been on target: he had no idea what Sonja was doing tonight; he’d never had a clear idea about what to do in the face of Livan Baker’s problems. He remembered the night he’d talked to McCallum about their talking to someone in an official position, when McCallum had derided the entire concept, saying, “What is ‘the record’? Is it like ‘the Force’?” All his life, he’d stayed the younger brother, looking to someone else for cues. Two days into the trip, he didn’t know whether he’d done the correct thing in leaving New Hampshire, or if Gordon was really looking forward to seeing him. There seemed every chance Gordon had called the other night half hoping Marshall’s plans had fallen through. He was also unsure whether, the more he knew him, McCallum receded farther or began to seem more comprehensible.
“I want things to turn out well for all of us,” McCallum said, pushing open the restaurant door. Over his shoulder, Marshall saw that the family still sat around the table, the man stubbornly remaining until he was asked to leave, the little girl powerless, the mother fatigued, resigned. My God, Marshall thought: Were those people so different from their own trio? McCallum bullish; Cheryl trying to resist intimidation; himself, sitting silently for most of the time they were there at the table, under the weight of a situation — a constantly unfolding situation — that seemed never to stretch to full length, so it could be examined and understood.
The cold air might as well have literally smacked them, the impact was so powerful. It took Marshall’s breath away. In the parking lot was an old pickup, a Toyota, and a black Ford station wagon. A sheet of newspaper blew across the lot, followed by a can of Coke that rolled from underneath the pickup. Back in the restaurant, one light was turned off, then another.
“If you didn’t know me, if you didn’t know anything about me,” McCallum said, “would it bother you as much that she had a place in her heart for me, and that I still cared for her?”
“You don’t care for her,” Cheryl said, hunched in the wind. “This isn’t some cosmic coincidence either. Your marriage is over and you’re doing what’s expedient. You were driving through on your way to Florida anyway.” She gestured toward Marshall. “Wasn’t that what you pointed out earlier?” she said.
“Don’t confuse me with him. Please,” Marshall said.
“I don’t,” Cheryl said, arms crossed over her chest. “I remember you, too.”
That night, as McCallum slept curled against the pillow he clung to like a life raft pushed against his stomach to ride out another stormy night, the flashlight from the road emergency kit sending an oblong beam along the dirty gray shag carpeting because there was no bedside lamp, Marshall played back in his mind the night he’d left his house intending to go to Livan Baker’s rescue. Had he really been going to the apartment because of her, or because of Cheryl? Cheryl more than Livan, to tell the truth. In the moment, though, that trip had seemed to be about something else; it had been convenient not to think it through. Now he thought Sonja might have been with Tony. Was that why she wasn’t home, though it was late? Was that why she’d said, “Happens” with such resignation, sitting tiredly on the bed, still in her clothes, after McCallum’s long night of revelations? “Happens.” Well, that was indisputable. Things happened, situations materialized and transmuted, changed of their own accord, it seemed, as if they were not within people’s control. Maybe, he thought sleepily, everybody in the face of life’s power, its tragedy and its absurdity, its changeability, became the little brother, looking to someone else for explanations, confirmation, guidance. That would be one of the reasons people procreated: so they’d have someone impressionable to tell their stories to, someone who would believe them, at least for a long time, an audience to whom they could recite their stories instead of introspecting. All those little dramas, made huge because they were personaclass="underline" How Dad Met Mom; Your First Brilliant Statement; Why Our Family Has Special Reason to Fear Thunderstorms; Gentlemen Open Doors for Ladies. Family myths, passed on from generation to generation, along with a tendency toward tooth decay, or genes determining baldness.
He could remember distinctly lying in bed, a twin bed far more comfortable than the bed he was lying in now, taxing Gordon’s patience by wanting everything the adults had said that day verified or refuted by the one person he trusted absolutely. What a reluctant interpreter Gordon had been: caught in the middle, Marshall now understood, having to decide whether it was better that Marshall believed what they said, because that would make things easier on everyone, or whether he should respect his little brother’s intelligence and give him more information, allowing him to see through the adults’ rhetoric, their shaky scenarios passed off as absolutes, their parents no more convinced what direction to take than their mapless children. For years, Gordon had pointed out the fallacies in their parents’ logic, kept from sleep by the necessity of setting Marshall straight: the parents needed to believe in Santa Claus, so it was best to pretend; their father had sent them from the table not because they’d had inappropriate fits of giggling, but because he wanted time alone with his wife. In retrospect, he had been a burden — more than he’d suspected, thinking over their nighttime debriefings this many years later. He could remember Gordon saying, She’s really dying, and He doesn’t think you’re a sissy for playing with paper dolls, he wants someone to blame for her getting sick, because he can’t blame her and he can’t blame himself. You just happened to have your stupid paperdolls out. He could also remember climbing into Gordon’s bed, when no amount of reasoning would work to make him feel better, and Gordon’s deep sighs, as if Marshall’s presence were a boulder rolled onto his tiny island of mattress to displace him, though another part of him knew that Gordon was flattered to have him there. Yes, she’s sick; she’s dying, he remembered Gordon saying, whispering it with real urgency, but there’s something else, he had said. I can’t figure it out, but there’s something I don’t know.