After making my statement to Officer Benson and Dr. Bakhtiyar both of whom seemed bewildered but not really angry, not really judgmental I finally get Honey back into the car and then back to the motel and I explain what happened to Ivan who kindly opens Alice’s room and gets her things out and puts them in our room and even bless his heart gives us a box of granola bars and two packets of ramen and I feed Honey and me and give us a hot bath and get us into the bed and despite the scratchy white sheets the physical comfort of being so cozy with the rain coming down outside feels obscene. Honey is leaning quietly but alertly against me contravening all of her usual ways and I have the TV on and on the local news there is the blockade and there are Cindy and her friends looking grimly into the camera and there are police cars parked before them and the police appear to be standing around in a clump and the camera cuts to several other blockades, maybe three others around the two states and it’s only a matter of time before it’s national news but I can’t bear to put on CNN Fox News or any of the others can’t bear the thought of their scrutiny on this parcel of the earth.
The phone rings and I answer and Mark informs me curtly that he will be landing in Medford, Oregon, tomorrow at 4:00 and I say “I will pick you up and drive you wherever you need to go, and back to the airport. Whatever you need” and he says “I’d appreciate that. And I just really want to get to the bottom of what happened” and I say “Of course, I can’t imagine what you must be thinking and feeling” and I get choked up and he hems and haws and says “Well, we’ll get everything sorted tomorrow.”
I pull Honey to me and kiss her head over and over again and prop her against the pillow and get up and get Alice’s hard-backed suitcase and hoist it onto the foot of the bed. I click open the two snaps and on top of neatly folded clothes there is a folded paper reading “In case of emergency” and I think Jesus Christ and I unfold it and it is a piece of stationery from the Wagon Wheel motel and on it are written two phone numbers and below that in a crabbed cursive it just says “I’m not coming home” and her little day-by-day pill box with today’s pills untaken and yesterday’s too and I lie down next to Honey and cry like my heart is breaking.
DAY 10
One of the State of Jefferson guys was shot by the police early this morning when they moved to retake the interstate here at the northernmost point of the fifty-first State of Jefferson. He fired and then they fired and now he is in “stable” condition in the hospital, probably the same one as Alice, probably having his life saved by Dr. Bakhtiyar who, if I had to guess, is probably the only doctor for a hundred miles and who if I also had to guess is probably not the person the wounded man pictured sharing his new state citizenship with not to mention having his life saved by. The blockading groups were apprehended pretty quickly after that and the roads are clear but one group of five has moved into the national forest along the border and is claiming to be hunkering down for a long siege. I wonder if Cindy is in the forest or in jail. I wonder whether she made common cause with the Cunt after all. I hope I never see Cindy again.
Honey is sitting on the floor leafing rather deftly through a Gideon Bible that she found in the drawer which she herself opened. I have already smoked a cigarette out of the motel window this morning while she slept so my parenting is not off to a good start in any case.
Last night while I was trying to fall asleep I thought about kinds of death. I shooed my father my mother Ellery out of my mind and I tried to empty everything but Alice out in the wood. I pictured her walking across the clearing and turning toward the trees on some mission of communion. I saw her moving with certainty across the uneven forest floor while I was laboring in futility with Cindy and her coconspirators. Under the forest canopy the rain would have taken on a new sound, not the pounding of water against the defenseless grass but something gentler and hushed, a sound like an expectant audience whispering in an amphitheater at dusk. And maybe her foot slipped on a root and then she was on her back in a divot of earth looking up at the trees. I pictured her lying in the divot just the right shape to cradle her with her face up to the sheltering canopy. Maybe she felt the pine needles under her hands and made a tentative move to try and stand and she couldn’t get anything to cooperate and she was dry and more or less comfortable and she closed her eyes. I closed my own eyes and clasped my hands under my body. Please God, I say to myself. Let her be out of the Abode of Pain. Let her be with her husband and her babies.
I will pick Mark up at the airport in Medford this afternoon at 4:00, and then I will take him to the coroner and then I guess and hope he’ll take over from there. I take a photo of Alice’s note in case they’ve decided to sue me or arrest me which I guess is not outside the realm of possibility. I hate the lizard part of my brain that made me avoid saying anything like “I feel responsible” to Mark, but I somehow also feel that Alice knew a sucker when she saw one and that sucker was me and when I think back there’s not really one particular thing I would have done differently and whether I should have done something differently has not yet revealed itself.
I watch a commentator on CNN interviewing a man in camo and there is a graphic of a map of the State of Jefferson, and there within it, unmarked, is Paiute County, Altavista, Deakins Park. I open the laptop and I look at my Institute in-box and think about all the things I have to do and I open my Tasks spreadsheet and start to make a list and then I look at Honey who is tearing pages out of that Bible like a heathen and I think about Engin and the culture of my family and the brevity of life and how you could spend fifty years missing someone who is gone and never coming back and I close the spreadsheet and open Skype and it rings and rings and rings and there is no Engin and I will have to trust that he is not dead not with another woman and I don’t want to lose this feeling while I wait for him to call so I open WhatsApp on my phone and write “Aşkım sana geliyoruz” which is “My love we are coming to you” which is pop-song corny but just what comes to mind and like that it’s decided, at least assuming they let me out of here. And then I close the computer and get off the bed and look down at Honey and she looks at me with her father’s eyes and my eyebrows and her very own look of self-reliance and determination and I say “Well, Miss Honey. Shall we go have a look at this Wildlife Safari?” and she scrambles to her feet and reaches up her arms to her mama.