Marion dug in his jeans. Wilfred turned to Maya. “One of these days I’m gonna leave her,” he clarified. “I might shoot her, and then this conversation is going to show up in court. So I am clarifying for the record: I meant leave her.”
Marion shone a pocket light, and Wilfred swept aside the tent’s entry panel with the shotgun.
“Run it around in there, Marion, for Christ’s sake,” Wilfred said. “This your first tent rattler?”
“I am ignoring the way you are speaking to me on account of your domestic distress,” Marion said.
“A man with a shotgun is the most forgiven man in the world,” Wilfred said. He looked up at Maya. “Empty as the day you bought it. The boy saw it go in?”
“Not exactly,” Maya said.
“Good to be vigilant,” Wilfred said magnanimously. If nothing else, this ate up the final twenty minutes of his shift. He would have spent them pacing the tiny shed and biting his nails.
“You’ve been saying that for twenty years about Carla,” Marion said. “Do it already. You look like a fool.”
“I need a mercy killing,” Wilfred said. He bounced his heavy round head. “Who wants this sack of lard, Marion? I am holding on for dear life, and you cast it away.” Wilfred tamped the hardpan with the butt of the shotgun, setting off in Maya the momentary fear that after all that, the gun would go off by accident. Wilfred seemed indifferent to the rest of his audience, Alex, Maya, and Max turning their heads between him and Marion. “People laugh at you, you know,” Wilfred said. “I would laugh at you, too, if I didn’t know you my whole life.”
“Who else do I need besides Willy Shade in my corner?” Marion grinned abusively. His features were obscured by shadow, but there was a low-shouldered stoop to his posture that again made Maya think of leaves and the forest. He carried it with him.
Looking like a defeated baby, Willy Shade waved away his friend and slowly started up the drive. It had a slight incline, harder to take on the way back. Marion was left with the Rubins. The four of them stood in the gathering cold watching Wilfred labor up the path. He gave them a gift; it took him forever. “I didn’t say anything to Mama and Papa about the rattlesnake,” Alex broke the silence, reminding the intruder of what he was intruding on. He held the flap of the tent open for Max. His son moved hesitantly. “Don’t worry, son, I’ll go first,” Alex said and disappeared from view, Max following. Their sudden aloneness unacceptable, the two friends from the diner said good night to each other, loudly enough for Maya’s husband to hear.
12
On her back, staring at the vanishing peak of the tent, Maya’s rib cage felt corseted. She switched to her stomach; the corset switched with her. Careful to avoid noise, she sat up, but there was no way to get support in a tent without right angles. Who chose to sleep on the ground in gathering cold? Well, she did. She expelled a mirthless laugh into the frostbitten air of the tent. On either side of her, Alex and Max slept without suspicion, Max’s knees at his chest. She felt a vague irritation with her son, and a less vague irritation with herself for feeling it. She looked over at her husband and felt sympathy for him, laid out on the cold ground of a campsite in the middle of nowhere.
She tried to lie down on the thin nylon of the tent, but every pebble on earth was congregated under her. Jeremiah the black Buddhist had tried to teach her that nothing was unwelcome. He ate only macrobiotic foods, which meant that she rarely had the pleasure of feeding him, but he was smarter than anyone she had met. She had loved his name — so epic, so biblical. And the transgression of dating a black, something that would have started a long silence on the other end of the line in Kiev. So she tried very hard to understand him — to understand how nothing could be unwelcome. How would Jeremiah welcome these pebbles? Was she supposed to try to imagine the pebbles as smooth as her mattress at home, or give in in some way to their discomfort? She felt dense and laughed at herself, at the pebbles (like small animals listening to her madness), at the insane line of her thought. Shivering, she climbed out of her blanket and, wanting to do an undebatable good, positioned it around Max.
She wanted to go outside but was terrified of what she would find there. She sat in place, the time blurred by the soft gallop of her thoughts and the steady, shallow report of her breathing. Through a mesh panel in the tent flap, she could see a complete darkness save for the firelight of the cold stars, the only way to tell up. They seemed to hang by invisible thread. She shuddered at their raw cosmic terror: how resplendently indifferent they looked, how implacable. But was placation required? A star asked for nothing. Her rib cage loosed slightly before seizing again. She snorted at her absurd meditations. She wondered whether some subtly toxic element in the atmosphere was actually affecting her thinking. The altitude hadn’t bothered her as much in the afternoon — maybe she was deteriorating. Patient suffers from euphoria mixed with despair. Cardinal manifestation: mild hysteria followed by disorientation. Refers primarily in the chest. Restrain.
She ordered herself to declare, at least, what it was that frightened her on the other side of the flap. Was there a congress of rattlesnakes at the foot of her tent? A boar hooving the dust in anticipation of sinking a tusk into her flank? No, she couldn’t say what exactly she feared in the vacated blackness. Did she fear the vacated blackness? She thought of Uncle Misha. Misha would not be afraid. He would be out under the heavenly firelight, pulling shyly on his rolled cigarette, stamping one foot against the other and back. It startled her to remember that Uncle Misha was alive — declining, her mother said, but alive and cursing away offers of help. He was as remote as the firelight in the sky, Uncle Misha — how could Maya have allowed that to transpire? Her uncle Misha. Was it simply the ocean between them, or had she abandoned them all? Why? Did she want America so badly; the Rubins? Was there any reason she couldn’t have both — that was the sole advantage of Ukraine becoming a free country, she could. Or was her tether to the Rubins so frail that it risked breaking with every departure?
The Rubins rarely asked about her family, though they never expressed negative feelings. Her adopted family was not at fault, even as she loved to hold it responsible. For some reason, Maya had decided that the old family could only come at the expense of the new — and allowed it to drift away in ways easily justified by the distance and time. She still spoke to her mother once a week, but it had been years since she had returned to Kiev, and years since Galina had come to New Jersey to visit her grandson, whose adoption she had greeted with more equanimity than the Rubins. Maya felt a sinking regret. The parched moonscape outside was a solace by comparison: to the regret it added butterflies, as if she were a teenager about to be kissed. It was easier to fear than regret. Fear held out the possibility of being unwarranted, regret meant it was too late. She envied the barrenness outdoors; it struck her now as streamlined purpose rather than desolation. She wished to be equally whittled, to carry not one extra grain.
She flung herself through the flap in the tent. In her boldness, she had forgotten that the flap was zipped — it had been virtually duct-taped by Alex against the encroachment of further intruders, reptilian or human — and she nearly sank the entire contraption. But Alex and Max continued to snooze. With a compensatory guiltiness, Maya unzipped the flap an inch at a time.