“Hi,” she said, setting her books carefully on the floor and collapsing into an orange plastic chair.
Moose was standing at his desk, backlit by a few feelers of sunlight that had made the long descent into his office, shy emissaries of the brightness above. He wore an uncharacteristically seasonal ensemble: khaki pants, a pale yellow shirt open at the neck, a blue-and-white seersucker jacket that tugged noticeably at the shoulders. An artifact of Moose’s old life, it looked like.
“Charlotte,” he said, beholding her. “Charlotte. Charlotte,” uttering her name with such resonant clarity that she felt as if this were the first time she had ever heard him say it.
“You’re happy,” she said.
“It’s a beautiful day,” her uncle said, smiling at her. “It’s … it’s summer.”
“Hot,” she sulked, crossing her arms.
“Oh, it’s not so bad. But it’s gloomy down here. It saps the spirit, being underground! Let’s get outside, let’s get up into that …” He pulled down his shade, choking off the light, then patted his pockets for keys. “… that beautiful sunshine.”
“Sure,” Charlotte agreed. She was eager to escape the basement, to shake this sudden weight of sorrow. For the first time in days, she pictured herself in Michael West’s empty house, where there was no card, no note. Where her many proofs had come to nothing.
They climbed the stairs, Charlotte carrying the books. Stupid, she thought, as they stepped together from Meeker Hall into the tacky air—why bring the books outside? But it seemed too late to turn back, to resist her uncle’s cheery momentum. Hundreds of yellow dandelions flecked the grass. They looked delicate, bright. So alive. Moose pounded over them in his big black shoes, leaving juicy prints as he flattened multitudes. Charlotte wished he would be more careful, but then, what did it matter? Dandelions were weeds.
They reached the athletic field, wide as a lagoon, white skeletal goal posts tottering in the heat, bald patches at the baseball diamond. More of those yellow dandelions, thousands of them. Her uncle stamped onto the field, buoyed by the restless vigor that had come to seem his permanent demeanor, each of his jouncing steps leaving Charlotte weaker. He was whistling. And now she stopped—stopped to watch him walk. Stopped to rest. The books felt like an anchor in her arms; she wanted to set them down in the grass but was afraid they would get lost, or wet—that the sprinklers would detonate without warning. Moose charged on, swinging his arms, trouncing dandelions, until finally (and it was odd, she thought, how long this took) he noticed that she wasn’t beside him, and stopped.
He turned. He was alone in a field of weedy summer grass, alone and filled with a nearly indomitable urge to laugh. To sing! Leap! Sob! Because at last, at the outermost margin of almost too late, he had managed to impart the essence of his vision to another human being! Moose had known it the moment he’d heard Charlotte’s despairing voice on the phone two weeks ago, after she didn’t show up at his office.
He’d been afraid, of course, that she would never come back. In the days after her call, Moose had subsisted in a state of nearly lethal anxiety, pacing his living room unable to so much as read. But Charlotte had phoned this week, sounding much improved, at which point Moose’s fear that she would bolt in response to what she had seen was supplanted by a more fundamental doubt (had she really seen anything?) and a new spate of anxiety had thus commenced, until Moose lay limp, spent, helpless upon his couch.
Only just now had his doubts been dispelled. Charlotte looked changed. Tired, pained, older (in a span of two weeks!), her features newly delineated, some darkness around her eyes, as if the vision had shocked her into a more final version of herself. To Moose, these changes amounted to a sudden radiance—beauty, even—and this impression took him aback.
Charlotte watched her uncle notice she wasn’t beside him and turn. He looked back at her for what seemed a very long time, and then slowly he lifted his arms, raised them over his head so the seersucker jacket splayed open and spread out on both sides of him like a pair of pale blue wings.
“Come in,” he called, arms aloft. “Come in, come in—the water’s fine!” sun on his teeth, and he was the old Moose again, waving to Charlotte from the wheel of a speedboat, arrayed in his splendid musculature, coaxing her into the Rock River’s mysterious depths.
And then he wasn’t anymore. He was just her uncle, standing in a field of dandelions.
Charlotte proceeded toward him, still carrying the books. She walked into a river of dread, felt it closing around her, an apprehension that tightened with each step. It wasn’t her uncle she feared; Moose had never looked more benign, more welcoming. It was her own clear thoughts.
“Uncle Moose,” she said, when she reached him. “I—I have to tell you something.”
Moose took a long breath, the yellow shirt straining at his chest as he inhaled mightily, herding oxygen into his lungs until Charlotte marveled at their sheer capacity. “I know,” he said, exhaling with evident relief.
Charlotte looked up at him, a broad silhouette against the sun. In her uncle’s face she saw an urgent pulse of pain, some naked suffering she’d never seen in him before, or not directly. “Do you really?”
“You mustn’t be afraid,” Moose told her.
“But I am,” she said. “I’m afraid you’ll be hurt.”
Moose came to Charlotte and embraced her, something he’d never done before, enfolded her in a clumsy, lumbering hug, girding Charlotte and even the heavy books she was holding with his arms and chest and seersucker wings, a hug that smelled like pizza and medicine and dust. She breathed this smell of her uncle, who was all around her, blocking out the world so nothing could touch her and at the same time hoarding her, saving her for himself alone—all this Charlotte sensed, and understood that it was love: this, more than anything else she had known. This was what love felt like.
Like this. Like this.
“You don’t understand,” he murmured, arms still tight around her. “I see it, too—every day of my life. It’s terrifying, I know. But the blindness is worse.”
His voice broke, and now Charlotte began the tortuous process of departing the warm enclosure of her uncle’s arms, extracting herself blindly, fumblingly from among the folded wings of his jacket and the dusty smell of his love to look at his face. It was tense, euphoric, some ecstasy crushing him from within. “I’ve waited so long,” he whispered, peering into her eyes. “My whole life.”
Now the dread poured back around her, dread mingled with confusion: What was he talking about? What was he always talking about when he looked at her with that weird knowing? Still, Charlotte felt an old quickening in her uncle’s presence. A single tear ran from each of Moose’s eyes; he wiped them away with the backs of his fists and she waited, looking up at him, half believing the moment had come when at last her uncle would reveal himself.
When he didn’t speak, she blundered on. “I need to take a—a break from studying. With you.”
Moose nodded, shoving his hands deep inside his trouser pockets. “I understand,” he said, “and that’s a perfectly reasonable wish.”
So he did know. Knew and understood. Charlotte rushed on, relieved. “I mean, I’ve learned a ton, but.” Moose nodded, eyes still wet. “I want to spend more …” The sun bit her face, the books felt so heavy in her arms. She shut her eyes, swaying a little in the heat.
“Of course,” Moose told her softly. And then, with a kind of apology, “But there’s no going back, exactly. It isn’t like that.”
Her eyes jumped open.
“I’ll take care of you,” Moose pledged in that same soft voice. “You won’t be alone, the way I was.”
“Wait, what do you mean I—?”
“It’s too late.” He spoke these words with a terrifying mildness, the mildness of doctors, oncologists talking to children. “It’s done, Charlotte. Nothing that happens now can change that.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” Charlotte said sharply.
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“Wouldn’t I have walked away years ago, if that were possible?”
“Walked away from—?”
“You’re strong, Charlotte,” he exhorted, with glittering eyes. Never had he said her name this many times; the effect was incantatory. “Stronger than you think! Stronger than I am in so many ways!”
There was a certainty in her uncle’s voice that frightened her. Something had been decided, something to her disadvantage.
“Uncle Moose. Listen to me,” she said, raising her voice. “I don’t want to study with you anymore. The Rockford stuff. I want to take a break from it.”
Moose nodded. Empathy, pity, sorrow—she saw it all in his face.
“I want to do other things instead,” she insisted, but the words emerged plaintive, quavering, as if she were begging her uncle’s permission. “Things with my friends.”
“And you can!” Moose rejoined eagerly. “And you should, for as long as that’s still possible.”
“Stop talking like that!”
Her uncle leaned forward, his face very near to Charlotte’s, and once again she was silenced, trapped in the vise of her lingering fascination. “It’s a gift,” Moose said, with a faint tinge of reprimand. “I’ve given it to you, Charlotte, no one else. In all these years.”
“What kind of a gift?” she asked, tentative again.
“I think you know,” Moose said. “Or have a sense.”
He was looking into Charlotte’s eyes with impatience, with appraisal, and again she felt a brush of fear, as if she were begging her uncle for her very life. She pictured herself and Moose marooned together, surrounded by maps, far from other people and without hope of escape.
“I don’t want to be like you!” she said, recoiling. “I want to be like everybody else.”
“Not true,” Moose objected, and something caught in his voice. “You don’t want that.”
“I do!” Charlotte shouted, angry now—the anger rammed her, knocking her awake, restoring her strength. She flung the books on the grass. “I want to be like other people, like normal people,” she cried, crabbing her hands into fists.
“It’s too late for that,” Moose insisted, a flicker of anger, or possibly fear, now active behind his creamy patience, and something moved in Charlotte then, some apparatus of control slipped her grasp and suddenly she was shrieking. “I don’t want to be like you, I don’t! I’d rather die. I’d rather kill myself!” the words heaving from her in a kind of mass, without logic or sense. “Leave me alone,” she screamed. “Stop talking to me.”
She doubled over, crumpled among the scattered books, sobbing for the first time in months, the first time since she’d sobbed in Michael West’s kitchen, letting despair and helplessness shake her. It felt good. For a while it felt good, but with time, her uncle’s silence bore down upon Charlotte, asserting itself in anxious increments that made her draw out her crying a bit longer than she needed to, rather than face him. But eventually she did. She stood upright and looked at him.
“I see,” Moose said. He sounded disoriented. He was gazing somewhere to her left. “Yes, okay, I—you’re right. Yes. I think that’s something different.”
And although his voice was flat, robotic almost, Charlotte noticed minute changes to her uncle involving his color, his posture, the hands trembling at his sides, the leakage of sweat into the fabric of his festive yellow shirt, which was rendered translucent, a cloudy yellow window onto whorls of dark chest hair that Charlotte couldn’t stand to look at; the shuttering over of her uncle’s eyes and slackening of his mouth—changes that amounted to a prolonged and cumulative collapse. She was afraid he might be dying, that she’d given him a stroke or a heart attack or made something burst inside his brain, and this enraged her yet again. Stop doing that! she wanted to scream as she watched her uncle founder before her, but she was done with yelling, done with crying—she wanted nothing but to flee this man who had given her the power to destroy him without her even knowing. I can’t, she thought, I can’t do this anymore, and she turned and walked away, leaving the books splattered on the grass, her uncle standing amidst them, she turned and she walked, and immediately Charlotte felt relief—the promise of it. So quickly. She could walk away and not think about Moose anymore, forget him as she already was forgetting Michael West, wiping the thoughts from her mind. She walked away and felt calmer instantly, the way shutting a window cuts off a sound.
At the perimeter of the field, she turned and looked back. The density of dandelions made her uncle appear to be standing in a golden field, a bright yellow sea. He was watching her, but when she lifted a hand, he didn’t respond. Nor did he look away. His eyes never moved, as if he were unconscious behind them. And Charlotte realized, then, that her uncle had not been looking at her after all. Not really. He was watching something else, something Charlotte couldn’t see—something behind her or above her, beside her, maybe. She didn’t know where. It didn’t matter. She left him there.
Chapter Nineteen
48
It began, like so many disasters, with something very small. So small that I don’t remember what it was. Or when it happened, exactly.
I was at the wheel, and everything was more or less all right. Then the mood turned. It started to rain. And things began to go haywire.
I found it disorienting to read my own words, or something like my words—not my words at all, actually, but a ventriloquism of Irene’s that for some reason even I believed—typed neatly onto a page, like a document. I was resorting to it now because the alternative—that hundreds, thousands, even hundreds of thousands (according to Thomas) of computer-fondling strangers should read this stuff without my having done so first—seemed immeasurably more awful.
The trip began spontaneously. “Do you have a car?” Z asked. It was late at night. We were in a club. He was talking from one corner of his mouth, looking somewhere else. Pretending not to know me.
I do, I told him.
It was an excellent car. New. A blue BMW convertible. Extracting it from the parking garage of my building at that hour was not easy. I feigned an emergency. Thrust a massive tip at the sleepy attendant.
Z and I got in laughing. The sheer adventure of it.
“So,” I said. We were heading south in the long, empty chasm of Second Avenue. “Where?”
“America,” he said. “The heart. I haven’t seen it.”
I considered. New Jersey. Rhode Island. Upstate New York. “It’s a big place,” I said. “America.”
“Chicago. Where you come from.”
“Wow,” I said. “Now that’s a drive.”
I’d brought nothing with me. Not a toothbrush. Barely a purse. Z had an attaché case, I noticed. It sat at his feet, one of those strong cases people hurl from airplanes in movies. Later, someone finds them, still intact. Full of contraband.
And then I understood. This trip was not spontaneous at all. He’d had it planned.
A story was unfolding.
“I’m not
Thomas Keene tapped on the window of the Grand Am, and I buzzed it down. “Char, we need you out here a second,” he said.
Since his arrival in Rockford two days ago, Thomas had begun chummily abbreviating my name, as if seeing a person’s hometown were like seeing her naked—an intimacy that allowed for subsequent endearments. I nodded coolly and finished the page.
“I’m not from Chicago, exactly,” I said.
“Ninety miles west,” Z corrected himself.
He had an excellent memory.
I set the manuscript aside, flipped the keys to turn off the air-conditioning and stepped from the car into the raucous heat. The Grand Am was parked on a yellow dirt road that began at a right angle to I-90 and led up a slight incline through miles of shimmering, iridescent corn. It was the very field where my accident had taken place ten months before.
I looked for Irene and spotted her up the road, cupped around her cell phone. Talking to her husband—something she’d been doing more
and more as our trip dragged on into its second week. Thomas stood at the edge of the road, looking through a sixteen-millimeter camera mounted on a tall, spindly tripod anchored to a metal frame. In his droopy khakis, sand-colored boots and pale blue baseball cap, he appeared to have been dressed by a stylist from Patagonia. But dressed for what? What role was Thomas Keene to play, here in Rockford, Illinois? This question had dogged me throughout the drama of his arrival: his debates with Irene by phone over the merits of reenacting climactic moments of my story on film (a staple technique of Unsolved Mysteries); the multiple bulletins concerning his travel; finally, his incongruous appearance at the Sweden House wearing khakis and cap, his facial pores and nasal hairs more exposed, somehow, beneath this broad midwestern sky.
Yesterday, he’d driven Irene and me in his rented Saturn to visit the farmer of our chosen field. I had expected one of those famished red barns you saw languishing along I-90, but the farm compound was ultramodern: a metallic barn that looked like a hangar, a vast aerated vegetable garden that the farmer’s rabbity son controlled by computer. While Irene and I drank coffee from mugs imprinted with the words “Lead me, O Lord, to Thy Heavenly Kingdom,” Thomas negotiated a price for removing a single row of corn and digging a long narrow trough in its place, as well as clearing a twelve-by-twelve-foot square of field on which to build a bonfire.
“Darnedest thing,” said the farmer, a twinkly man with hands the size of pork loins. “Young lady rolled her car off the interstate just last year, landed right there in that same field, bit farther down. Oh, but it was a mess. Like the Fourth of July, all those emergency lights. Believe she passed away, God rest her soul.” And some communal shock, or shyness—some confusion as to which of us should correct him, followed by a sense that we’d waited too long (as the farmer moved on to a lusty diatribe against the Monarch butterfly and foes of genetic engineering), kept any one of us from imparting to him the happy news of my survival.