in the hills. I watched opossums scurry along the roadside ahead of the car, and when they turned to stare into the headlights, their eyes flashed like metal discs. Jogging through an industrial park one night as I delivered papers to multiple businesses while the car idled in the lot, I stumbled upon two raccoons ransacking a garbage can. They spun to face me, annoyed by the interruption, and then scampered grudgingly into the darkness, trading outraged bits of chatter. I saw plenty of squirrels and owls as well, and once even saw a wildcat dash into the roadside undergrowth. I thought Olivia would like to have heard about the animals, even if she wouldn’t actually have been able to picture most of them, since the only animals she really knew were cats and dogs. But it wasn’t something I would have been able to make her understand over the telephone.
14
What I thought would be Sara and Olivia’s two-week holiday had quickly become four, and then four became eight. On the telephone, Sara and I took turns telling each other the story of our life together. It turned out that though we were using the same characters, we were each telling a different story, and between our competing installments, we offered each other updates on events in the present. In Sara’s story, for instance, I’d said I would do many things that I actually hadn’t, so I seemed either deceitful, hapless, or both-and also, she and Olivia had found a playgroup right in Sara’s parents’ neighborhood. In my story, I was working like hell to pull through a tough time, but I was finding a conspicuous lack of support-I had also shaved five minutes off my record delivering time the previous night. In her story, there was an entire thread devoted to thoughts on what love was and what it looked like and how it was demonstrated, and her parents had fixed up a room for her and Olivia to stay in. In my story, the characters had definite goals, and it was important to establish what they each respectively and realistically wanted to get out of life, and then to analyze whether the current situation was really going to help them achieve those goals, and also the last week had been so hot that I was sleeping in the basement. One thing our stories had in common were monologues devoted to doubts about whether the stories we were telling even raised the most important issues, and if not, what the most important issues might be, and if we couldn’t figure out what the most important issues were, if it was possible that the important issues weren’t even definable, that they were intangible and invisible but had real effects, like changes in atmospheric pressure, or the erosion of stone. At the end of one particularly confusing evening of competing stories and traded theories, Sara said, “Well, at least Olivia’s having a nice summer vacation.”
15
A hazy, half-realized scene of my wife and daughter backing out of the drive in the car began repeating on a short loop in my memory. I couldn’t even remember if I’d kissed Olivia before they left-I could just see her strapped securely in her car seat, looking at me as I waved to her through the side window. What remained clearest, the thing my memory rendered with the finest, most delicate detail, was the confused expression on Olivia’s face. The memory didn’t include the expression on my own face, of course-how could I see my own face?-but since children are such skilled mimics, maybe my daughter wasn’t actually confused, but was simply mirroring what she saw in my own expression. Or maybe both of our expressions were authentic, and the same. It’s a tough thing to unravel, the origin of an expression.
16
The next time I saw the boy, I was glancing through the screen door as I always did, my eye scanning the bright rectangle of light. The adults were there as usual, smoking cigarettes and watching television, but standing at the door was the child in his sleeper, looking back at me.
After I drove away from the house and accelerated back onto the highway, I found myself so angry that I had to pull the car to the side of the road to try and compose myself. I stood on the gravel-covered shoulder and watched a freight train roll past until its whistle pierced the air for no apparent reason, and then I climbed back into the car and waited for a logging truck to go by. Its trailer was filled with the trunks of felled trees stacked eight or ten high-strings of wet, pendulous moss hung from the trunks, swaying heavily in the breeze as the truck roared away down the road. I pulled back onto the highway to resume my route, but the image of the boy in the doorway stayed with me. The night was one of the warmest of the summer, and though I was sweating profusely, I also felt chilled. I opened the vial in my console to retrieve another pill, but my fingertips found nothing, and I became confused, unable to decide whether the vial had simply gotten low without my noticing, or if I’d lost track and had accidentally taken too many pills. I felt jittery and anxious, and almost started laughing as I watched my hand shake when I reached to turn on the car’s heater. By the time I threw my last paper, a bitter nausea had risen in my stomach, as if my intestines had become entangled within some slowly winding gear.
17
I made it back to the station and into the bathroom in time to disgorge the contents of my stomach into the dirty toilet. After spitting the last of the humid brown stew from my mouth, I sat on the bathroom floor, my back against the wall. When I looked up a few minutes later, the Deadhead was standing in the doorway. “Your car’s running,” he said.
“I’ll be out in a minute.”
“You need anything?”
“I’m just a little sick,” I said. “If you could just leave me alone for a few minutes…”
I closed my eyes, but I could sense him standing there, studying me. “What’s your problem?” he said.
“For Christ’s sake,” I said.
“What’s going on, Dale?” I heard Carl ask, and when I looked up he was standing next to the Deadhead, looking at me like I was an animal that had wandered into the station.
“He’s sick.”
“Is his route done?”
“It’s done,” I said.
“You can’t spend the night here.”
“I don’t want to,” I said. “I just need a minute.”
Carl disappeared from the doorway, but the Deadhead, whose name was apparently Dale, remained. “Why are you even doing this?” he asked.
“Why are you bothering me now?” I said. “Why at this moment?”
“Because this is a shitty job I do because my life is fucked up. You walk around here like you’re better than us, which makes you an asshole. But you’re probably right. So what are you trying to prove?”
I hoped that if I ignored him, he would go away, but he didn’t.
“You should at least take better care of yourself,” he said.
“Especially since you have a kid.”
“How do you know I have a kid?”
“You were just talking about her last night. Or can’t you remember last night?”
“Listen,” I said as carefully as possible, “I don’t need your help right now.”
“You just puked into that shitty little toilet and now you’re laying on the floor, but you don’t need help. I used to say shit like that too.”
“So then you probably know how much I wish you would leave.”
