Thursday, June 10, 2010

Runaway

Runaway – the National (listen in new tab)

Maura sits on her couch in her apartment. Her hand hovers in front of her, holding her cell phone. It is heavy, silent and portentous in her palm.

She looks around. In the last hours, she’d cleaned everything. She hadn’t realized what she was doing until she started folding shirts into her faded and stained travel backpack. The bag, swollen with necessities sits beside her like an awkward prom date. It waits to be carried off.

But first, she has to call K. Saturday he’d shown up and she’d told him to wait. That was four days ago. It is now Tuesday. 6:30 PM. The sixth day since she slept a full night. She is dulled to a blunt edge. Her mind is a dam that is quickly becoming a colander. So she sits on her couch with her bag packed. Phone in hand.

But, she can’t think of what to say or how to start to say it.

Sunday, she’d gone to Aunt Jenny’s grave and sat there in a light rain (god, just like the movies). She’d brought a mickey of the whiskey, the kind Jenny kept in a cupboard in the kitchen. Jenny was always ready to pull down two glasses and grease the wheels of conversation.

Maura poured some out onto the new grass. She asked questions in the cliché way people in grief and fear always ask them. “What the fuck should I do?” Maura really meant: “How do make my life right again?’

The rain pattering on her nylon jacket roared silence. Of course, Jenny said nothing. The dead have lots of advice, but share it unevenly. Jenny was always like that. Ready to show Maura something she needed, rather than say it. Jenny had the sort of intuition that knows somehow which connections are required. She never seemed to do things without a reason. She had a body that moved with adumbrate purpose, even when she made tea to talk over.

“You’re a lot of help, right now.” Maura patted the soft, wet soil. She looked at the dirt clinging to her palm and then at the drops congealing on the granite headstone.

Years ago, Jenny was there at the airport when Maura finally came back to Canada. Maura, the last of the wandering O’Bairds, tired and sore, practically a foreigner, was pulled roughly to Jenny’s chest.

When she came back, Maura was tight and red-eyed. Sore from sitting and unused to the August smog that hung heavy over Pearson Airport. They didn’t go to Jenny’s boxy little condo, that kingdom of cats. Instead, Jenny took her out of the city. Along the 401 and then Highway 7. North and then east.

It was night when they arrived. Stars above. The air was damp with moisture caught in the rustling crooked arms of the trees. Their leaves shone bright white in the headlights.

The last thing the O’Baird family owns outright is the old stone house near Lakefield. Titus’s dad had built it before he sold the family’s warehouses and retreated from the sweeping changes of the 20th century. Sturdy, if a little squat, the house carries the weight of a century on the collected thickness of its walls.

Maura has been to older places. One night in Cairo, she and a random friend had snuck past guards to climb a pyramid. The yellowed stones, chiseled and worn, made her fell disconnected. They had nothing to do with her. She was an interloper.

Standing in the Kwartha’s night air, Maura ran her hands along the mortared rocks, her ears filled with the incessant chirping of crickets. The stones as they bled the day’s heat, exhaled something so deeply familiar that it shattered the rough lies she told herself. She was indicted, lovingly.

That first night Jenny helped Maura, exhausted and truculently weeping, into bed. The next day they worked. Cleaning and fixing. Clearing old paths and fighting the encroaching forest.

After a few weeks, Jenny went back to the city. She returned on her days off to check up and talk. Meanwhile, the weather cooled. Maura would cut firewood and cook on the woodstove. She’d bike ten kilometers to get a newspaper. Otherwise, there was only the radio and an old eclectic library.

In October, Maura was almost out of money and started serving drinks at one of the bars in town. As the winter got harsher, Uncle Titus loaned her an old white Tercel for the drive to work and for groceries.

That stone house grew around her, as she made a small life in the forest. For years she had been running, and she wasn’t sure what had made her stop and come back. Fatigue, maybe. Something more deeply attenuated than tired. Surrounded by the old growth fur on the back of the Canadian Shield, she slept unassailed. The family’s home breathed around her (an affect of the weather, but she dreamt of warm lungs more than once).

Maura came back to Toronto and slowly added more and more of a life around her. Until now. She was back to essentials crammed into a backpack. All the life you can carry with you. She looks around. Than back at the nylon bag beside her. It’s not much. Or enough.

There is a knock at the door. It’s unlocked and Uncle Titus slides in. “It’s dark in here.”

Maura shrugs. “I hadn’t noticed.”

Titus rubs his chin. Maura can hear the small scratch of his fingers across his grey scruff. He digs into his pocket. He pulls out a set of car keys and tosses them over to her. “She runs as bad as ever. Which is to say she runs. Do you need help with your bag?”

“Nah. I can carry it.”

“Right. Did you call K?”

Maura smiles despite herself. “You’re as bad as your sister.”

He scratches his head. “Maybe so. Jenny said he’s pretty much in love with you.”

“When did she say that? K hasn’t said so.”

“Not everything is said out loud or to you. Have you said anything like that to him?”

“Are you drunk?”

“I own a bar. Anyways, you have to drive me there. It’s unguarded, except for Miguel.” Titus twirls a finger next to his ear. “You know how he is.”

“I’ll be down in a second. I’m going to call him now.”

Titus knows this is his cue to leave, but first he darts in and grabs Maura pack. He closes the door behind him.

Maura looks at her phone, taps in K’s number with her thumb instead of fishing him out other contacts list. She’s sorry to disappoint Jenny’s machinations.

* * *

K and GT are at Cymbeline’s having a celebratory breakfast-for-supper. GT is a free man, cut loose from his long hated job, and he knows K needs to be distracted. GT watches him fidget with his cell phone. K twirls it in circles on the table. It goes in and out of pockets.

GT: “I don’t know. She’s gonna call.”

K waves the phone at him, looks at it with contrition, places it on the table. “How’d you guess?” He frowns and scratches the back of his head. “I know she’s messed up, right now. I just wish she’d let me, I don’t know, in. The longer this takes… I just don’t know. Things were going well, right?”

The question has to wait. K’s phone vibrates loudly against the white Formica. It shakes in waves, as if it’s too weak to sustain more than few seconds. It startles them both. K looks down, waits for the third ring, then picks it up.

“Hello?... Yeah, I know it’s you. Call display, baby… Oh… Yeah… I… um… Are you sure?... Ok… No… Will you call me?... Listen, you’re ok, right?... Ok. Take care. I umm… Just take care, ok?” K hangs up. Puts the phone down.

GT knows what is happening before the call ends. He waits a moment. “Did she just…”

K: “Yeah. She’s leaving town. Doesn’t know for how long. She said she’d call. But…” He struggles to make eye contact with GT, but can’t do it for long.

GT’s hand is in the air, flagging down the waitress. “Miss, we’ll need a couple beers. Anything cold, sweetheart.”

* * *

It’s midnight. Maura’s car bumps along the old road to the O’Baird Lakefield home. She watches the road carefully. As she pulls up, she can tell it has been a while since anyone’s been here. It is the character of these old stone houses that they can wait for you longer than you’d think.

She’s too tired to make a bed and isn’t sure about the sheets, so she decides to sleep on the couch tonight. Lying on the couch, she pulls a picture of her and K at Café Ulysses out of a novel she’d stowed in her purse. She looks at it for a long time before placing it carefully back between the pages and the book on the dusty coffee table. She falls asleep staring at the painted wooden beams in the ceiling.