We leave no mark.
Evenings, I took solitary meals in diners and talked to Gran on the telephone—tranquil gossip about the old folks in the home mostly, empty of anything real. Afterwards, I drank Iron City and watched cable movies until I got drunk enough to sleep. I ignored the news as best I could, but I couldn’t help catching glimpses as I buzzed through the channels. All around the world, the dead were walking.
They walked in my dreams, as well, stirring memories better left forgotten. Mornings, I woke with a sense of dread, thinking of Galileo, thinking of the Church. I had urged Burton to engage this brave new world, yet the thought of embracing such a fundamental transformation of my own history—of following through on the article in the Post-Gazette, the portents within my dreams—paralyzed me utterly. I suppose it was by then a matter mostly of verifying my own fears and suspicions—suppose I already knew, at some level, what I had yet to confirm. But the lingering possibility of doubt was precious, safe, and I clung to it for a few days longer, unwilling to surrender.
Finally, I could put it off no longer.
I drove down to the Old Public Safety Building on Grant Street. Upstairs, a grizzled receptionist brought out the file I requested. It was all there in untutored bureaucratic prose. There was a sheaf of official photos, too, glossy black and white prints. I didn’t want to look at them, but I did anyway. I felt it was something I ought to do.
A little while later, someone touched my shoulder. It was the receptionist, her broad face creased with concern. Her spectacles swung at the end of a little silver chain as she bent over me. “You all right?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am, I’m fine.”
I stood, closing the file, and thanked her for her time.
I left Pittsburgh the next day, shedding the cold as the plane nosed above a lid of cloud. From LAX, I caught the 405 South to Long Beach. I drove with the window down, grateful for the warmth upon my arm, the spike of palm fronds against the sky. The slipstream carried the scent of a world blossoming and fresh, a future yet unmade, a landscape less scarred by history than the blighted industrial streets I’d left behind.
Yet even here the past lingered. It was the past that had brought me here, after all.
The nursing home was a sprawl of landscaped grounds and low-slung stucco buildings, faintly Spanish in design. I found Gran in a garden overlooking the Pacific, and I paused, studying her, before she noticed me in the doorway. She held a paperback in her lap, but she had left off reading to stare out across the water. A salt-laden breeze lifted her gray hair in wisps, and for a moment, looking at her, her eyes clear in her distinctly boned face, I could find my way back to the woman I had known as a boy.
But the years intervened, the way they always do. In the end, I couldn’t help noticing her wasted body, or the glittering geometry of the wheelchair that enclosed her. Her injured leg jutted before her.
I must have sighed, for she looked up, adjusting the angle of the chair. “Robert!”
“Gran.”
I sat by her, on a concrete bench. The morning overcast was breaking, and the sun struck sparks from the wave-tops.
“I’d have thought you were too busy to visit,” she said, “now that your man has won the election.”
“I’m not so busy these days. I don’t work for him anymore.”
“What do you mean—”
“I mean I quit my job.”
“Why?” she said.
“I spent some time in Pittsburgh. I’ve been looking into things.”
“Looking into things? Whatever on Earth is there to look into, Robert?” She smoothed the afghan covering her thighs, her fingers trembling.
I laid my hand across them, but she pulled away. “Gran, we need to talk.”
“Talk?” She laughed, a bark of forced gaiety. “We talk every day.”
“Look at me,” I said, and after a long moment, she did. I could see the fear in her eyes, then. I wondered how long it had been there, and why I’d never noticed it before. “We need to talk about the past.”
“The past is dead, Robert.”
Now it was my turn to laugh. “Nothing’s dead, Gran. Turn on the television sometime. Nothing stays dead anymore. Nothing.”
“I don’t want to talk about that.”
“Then what do you want to talk about?” I waved an arm at the building behind us, the ammonia-scented corridors and the endless numbered rooms inhabited by faded old people, already ghosts of the dead they would become. “You want to talk about Cora in 203 and the way her son never visits her or Jerry in 147 whose emphysema has been giving him trouble or all the—”
“All the what?” she snapped, suddenly fierce.
“All the fucking minutia we always talk about!”
“I won’t have you speak to me like that! I raised you, I made you what you are today!”
“I know,” I said. And then, more quietly, I said it again. “I know.”
Her hands twisted in her lap. “The doctors told me you’d forget, it happens that way sometimes with trauma. You were so young. It seemed best somehow to just… let it go.”
“But you lied.”
“I didn’t choose any of this,” she said. “After it happened, your parents sent you out to me. Just for a little while, they said. They needed time to think things through.”
She fell silent, squinting at the surf foaming on the rocks below. The sun bore down upon us, a heartbreaking disk of white in the faraway sky.
“I never thought they’d do what they did,” she said, “and then it was too late. After that… how could I tell you?” She clenched my hand. “You seemed okay, Robert. You seemed like you were fine.”
I stood, pulling away. “How could you know?”
“Robert—”
I turned at the door. She’d wheeled the chair around to face me. Her leg thrust toward me in its cast, like the prow of a ship. She was in tears. “Why, Robert? Why couldn’t you just leave everything alone?”
“I don’t know,” I said, but even then I was thinking of Lewis, that habit he has of probing at his face where the acne left it pitted—as if someday he’ll find his flesh smooth and handsome once again, and it’s through his hands he’ll know it. I guess that’s it, you know: we’ve all been wounded, every one of us.
And we just can’t keep our hands off the scars.
I drifted for the next day or two, living out of hotel rooms and haunting the places I’d known growing up. They’d changed like everything changes, the world always hurrying us along, but I didn’t know what else to do, where else to go. I couldn’t leave Long Beach, not till I made things up with Gran, but something held me back.
I felt ill at ease, restless. And then, as I fished through my wallet in a bar one afternoon, I saw a tiny slip of paper eddy to the floor. I knew what it was, of course, but I picked it up anyway. My fingers shook as I opened it up and stared at the message written there, Call me sometime, with the address and phone number printed neatly below.
I made it to Laguna Beach in fifty minutes. The address was a mile or so east of the water, a manicured duplex on a corner lot. She had moved no doubt—five years had passed—and if she hadn’t moved she had married at the very least. But I left my car at the curb and walked up the sidewalk all the same. I could hear the bell through an open window, footsteps approaching, soft music lilting from the back of the house. Then the door opened and she was there, wiping her hands on a towel.