TAYLOR ANTRIM
Pilgrim Life

FROM American Short Fiction

 

BY THURSDAY I STILL hadn’t said word one about the accident. My roommate Rand would be the guy, and this would be the moment: he and I sitting on our narrow balcony, legs shot through the railings, nighttime, glittery San Francisco laid out below us. September 22, 1999. “Know what Hardar Jumpiche says about giving away good feelings?” he asked.

Took me a second to realize who he meant: the author of Today’s the Day. That and Buddhism for Dummies had appeared on the back of the toilet after Rand sold his startup to WestLab. The incubator’s stock had since been on a tear—up 6 percent this month—which had left Rand worth, more or less, $12 million. Twelve mill-ion. Twelve million. It was like trying to speak French. Rand of the Quiksilver backpack, the weed habit, the SAE beer-opener key chain.

“Shed the ego and feel what’s left,” Rand said.

Tell him.

But I’d just burned my mouth on a molten marijuana brownie, so I didn’t—and maybe, I suddenly thought, don’t. The rudiments of a different plan came together as I stood to collect that backpack from where it lay on the floor of the apartment.

“Breathe out the ego and breathe in, what is it . . . ?” Rand asked when I returned to the balcony. He sat bolt upright, a palm open on each knee—a fair approximation of Jumpiche’s author photo.

I’d read a few pages of Today’s the Day in the bathroom. “Charity,” I said, tonguing the stinging roof of my mouth, building out my idea. A loan was too humiliating; Rand had been carrying the rent since July. But what about an investment? “You said 3rdBase is sitting on some dough? Research and development?”

“Charity,” Rand repeated, pondering the word.

Rand had run down the problem for me a few nights before: Two million in a Wells Fargo money market doing no one any good. WestLab had delivered the funding, earmarked for R&D, just as Rand’s ideas guy, Stanford summa cum laude, went missing on what was supposed to be a weeklong sex vacation to the Philippines. Rand needed to phone somebody—the embassy?—but just as pressing, in his view, was spending that two million. WestLab wanted new ideas by the week. Baby startups like 3rdBase had to shovel money out the door. “Shows people you’re serious,” Rand had told me.

“What’s the latest with your mom?” he asked me now. “Home from the hospital?”

I didn’t want to talk about it. “Listen.” I conjured a pitch: the Wine Gazette could create a subscription site. “Wholesalers, restaurant and retail buyers. Chomping at the bit to get access to our wine ratings. Nothing to get it started. A few hundred thousand.” What I was looking for in his backpack was his laptop, to which we could connect the DSL cable and perform some online banking transactions. What I found, quaintly, was a company checkbook and a pen.

“You don’t want to talk about it. Totally understand. Let the thoughts go and feel what’s left,” Rand said.

I meditated with him a moment, both of us sitting there inhaling and exhaling like monks. The colors in our two-bedroom soaked and bleared. I’d eaten two brownies. I would spend the night huddled under the covers, wondering if I’d ever see Claire again, recalling the man she’d hit, his puppet legs, his body jackknifed around a boulder. The accident.

Tell him.

Below us the J Church shrieked along its rails, following its oxbow turn. The apartment’s air tasted lightly of cocoa and sugar—brownie mix. The plastic checkbook cover felt like buttery calfskin. “Mom’s depressed,” I said, because this was the latest, via voicemail, from my brother.

“She’ll make it.”

“Could be big,” I said. “The Wine Gazette dot-com. And what do you say about money?”

“Speaking of—you never told me how you and Claire made out at Stateline.”

His startup’s logo appeared in the check’s upper-left corner, a miniature Louisville Slugger knocking the leather off a baseball. I was going to drop his shovel-it-out-the-door line, but at the last minute changed course: “Like a shark, you said. You said this to me during Shark Week.”

Sort of heartless, mentioning Shark Week: his sister was that pro surfer who’d lost her arm to a tiger shark in Maui two years before. She was an inspiration, still competing, still winning, but Rand had taken the incident hard. Whenever the Discovery Channel rolled out the great whites for a ratings boost, he logged sick days in front of the TV, stoned and weeping.

He gathered his hands into his lap; his frame shook with bottled feeling. I felt bad. Rand was nice to me. The rent. The parties he invited me to. He was, face it, the reason I had a social life, the reason I met Claire. He genuinely wanted to know about Mom’s cancer. But Rand’s money would get Claire the best lawyer in San Francisco, get her to return my phone calls, vanquish my recalcitrant guilt. How much? I closed my eyes and let a number take shape in the ether. I made the check out to myself and handed him the pen.

 

A check! A $500,000 check! My degree in comp lit told me it was just one more unreliable signifier along a chain of Late Capitalist meanings, but when I folded the slip of paper into a dart-shaped airplane, then an origami swan, then gave myself a nasty cut on its edge the next morning, it felt like the thing itself: as intrinsically precious as buried gold.

Ten A.M. sharp and I was stepping through the door at the Gazette, where I earned $23,000 a year as an assistant editor with zero health insurance. Just a half-hour earlier, in the shower, I’d doubled down on my plan: the Gazette really did need a pay site, so why not play rainmaker for the magazine, secure a raise, maybe a Kaiser Permanente card, and get Claire the best lawyer in town? Handle this right, I told myself, striding through the railcar space lined with scalloped wine racks, hearing my boss, the associate publisher, at his desk, behind his pair of folding Chinese screens. Handle this right, I told myself, and in three months that guy Claire hit might still be in a coma, and no way would we be together, but my guilt over making a bad situation worse would fade, and I’d be free to achieve dharma, bodhicitta, serenity—one of those versions of paradise in Rand’s books.

“Big news,” I said, sliding the check out of my wallet and placing it on Marv’s keyboard. My boss gave me an arrowed look. Breakfast for him was three boiled eggs and a chocolate creatine shake—lunch was a bucket of lo mein from the joint down the street—but the retrovirals he popped like breath mints kept the meat off of him. His face was cadaverous; I could pinch his cheekbones between my fingers.

I pointed at the well-creased check, but he wouldn’t look at it. “Know a Detective Sanchez?” he asked.

“Who?”

“South Lake Tahoe Police Department. Wants your phone number. You’re, apparently, unlisted.”

“Did you give it to him?”

“I said I wanted to speak to you first.”

“Go ahead. I’m no lawyer, but how’s the guy in the passenger seat guilty of anything?”

“You’re no lawyer.”

The words had just dropped out of my mouth. Passenger seat.

“Lewis, have you committed a crime?”

“Marv, do you want the whole sordid story?”

“Jesus, no.”

Marv reported so many details about his life, major and minor—how he liked to unwind in the evenings (low-volume porn on his plasma, the Wall Street Journal, a tumbler of pizza wine), his HIV status, what he ate for breakfast every day, his abusive father, the electrician he’d fucked on Saturday night. Were we friends? I wanted us to be—he was the age my father would be if he’d lived past twenty-five (I never knew the man)—but I got the queasy sense he’d tell this stuff to anyone he shared an office with.

“You remember Claire, right?” I asked him. “The pourer from Grief Vineyards I’ve been seeing?”

“So I told Sanchez all I had was your cell phone.”

“I thought you wanted to speak to me first.”

“Why don’t you take a day or two off? Settle this?”

The Sheetrock walls were thin. I heard the game developers we shared the floor with clacking away on their keyboards. I heard their coffeemaker gurgling.

And then I was staring at the copy of the 3rdBase check still lying there on Marv’s keyboard. Up until that moment, I hadn’t noticed the overlong signature, the way it spilled past the line and piled up at the check’s edge. Rand had signed it How stoned do you think I am?

My cell phone buzzed—a blocked number. I pressed the green button, still feeling hopeful enough to say “Claire.”

But it wasn’t Claire.

 

About six weeks ago I hit on Claire Baldessari while watching her place her plastic knife and fork at the four o’clock position. Table manners! What a turn-on, especially given the setting: a potluck dinner in a Dolores Street apartment of a friend of Rand’s, dim lighting, Chinet plates on laps, Indian-style seating, and three different cannabis-laced casseroles (tuna, zucchini, eggplant) on the menu. I couldn’t place Claire, though I knew I’d seen her before. College friend? I’d gone to a small, extremely expensive private college in Washington State because it was situated in the opposite corner of the country from my hometown, because it had a friendly-sounding name, because it was that or Florida State—everywhere else rejected me—and because I could afford it, thanks to the education trust fund my grandmother left me in her will. I’d even stayed there an extra year to collect my master’s. And now here I was, living three-figure paycheck to paycheck. Whenever I thought of that emptied-out trust, I doubled over in pain.

“Come here often?”

“You’re the guy who brought the bad wine?” Claire asked. I nodded. The Gazette received a flood of California, Oregon, and Washington reds and whites; every other month the tweedy, bespectacled Master of Wine editor in chief flew out from New York and convened a panel of local sommeliers to sample and rate the best of it; the bottles he refused to taste went to me. I’d become reasonably popular in Rand’s circle by arriving at every social event clutching four by the neck in each hand.

“How do you know the wine’s bad?”

Claire told me she did a bit of marketing and all the appointment tastings for a small winery in the East Bay. Boring job, she said, but check this out: “Nineteen ninety-four Contra Costa Petite, ninety-year-old head-trimmed vines, ultra-low yield, cold-soaked, hand-punched, one hundred percent new French oak.” The assistant winemaker who’d hired her was a scratch golfer, so in addition to all that, he’d tutored her in the names of a good twenty or twenty-five top players on the PGA tour.

“Grief Vineyards?” I asked. Kind of a niche category, East Bay wineries. Grief had these dourly memorable all-black labels.

“Wine’s not really my thing,” she said, nodding. “But I’ve tasted enough to know what’s bad.” She had lank brown hair and a beauty mark on the left side of her chin. I asked for her number, and she hesitated for a moment and then wrote it on my wrist. I’d never been over to Grief; I realized where I’d seen her before—at a birthday party for one of Rand’s 3rdBase partners. On a dare, she and another girl had stripped to their bras and done an interpretive dance to some dirge-y Arab Strap song on the kitchen table. I took a chance and told her about it. “You were really sexy,” I said.

“Yeah, I guess I’m trying to get my life together now,” she said, not at all embarrassed. She took a small bite of food, put her plastic utensils at four o’clock, and I went hot.

The question is: what kind of snob gets turned on by table manners? Trust me, I’m not. In a room of blue bloods, I’m so intimidated I can’t speak. I grew up in a Pensacola split-level, my single mom supporting my brother and me on an elementary school teacher’s salary and a bit of grudging assistance from Grandmother. But my mom was raised rich, so she kept us from putting our elbows on the table, reaching for the ketchup, or chewing with our mouth open. You’re Pilgrim stock, she liked to say. She proved it at the public library, with birth records, and one or two times she dragged both of us off to some Mayflower ancestry association lunch in Florida. At the last one, over Christmas, my paunchy lawyer brother played the prince, chitchatting his way around the room, shaking palsied hands, helping the geriatrics into chairs. I slugged five glasses of sherry (all they had) and asked the caterer to give me a hand job in the bathroom.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I make bad decisions. In a tight spot, I lose perspective. All of the sudden I’m behind the wheel of a rented Mazda, flooring the accelerator, a body in my rearview.

Mom says the Plymouth Colony Pilgrims were brave and fair-minded and industrious and that they were searching for spiritual freedom. The last part feels like me—at least since I started reading my roommate’s books, warming to their foggy, upbeat slogans. Our deepest fear is that we’re powerful beyond measure; the present moment is the only moment that ever is. But brave, fair-minded, et cetera? That’s not me at all. Maybe Mom’s gilding the lily. After her cancer came back, I logged a little library time myself, thinking she might like talking on the phone about our ancestry. (By the way: the San Francisco Public Library? A homeless shelter with bookshelves.) The part about the Plymouth Colony that grabbed me had to do with their justice system. Even before the Puritans in Salem kicked off their famous trials, the goodhearted denizens of Plymouth would tie a girl up, throw her in the water, and if she managed to get herself untied before she drowned, she was a witch. If she drowned, she was innocent. Trials by ordeal, those pretty little travesties of logic were called.

So—some of those brave, fair-minded, and industrious Pilgrims were messed-up cowards like me. I didn’t drift into the shoulder and hit the guy, but I talked Claire into the shotgun seat, and I slid behind the wheel, and I got us racing downhill on Route 50 again. I told her I loved her and that not one car had passed—as if either of those facts mattered. I wasn’t that drunk, but negotiating the downhill grade and S-curves took all of my concentration. By the time I finally hit a straightaway, I had more happy-ending nonsense prepped and ready. But when I turned my head, Claire was nodding toward a Shell station, saying she had to throw up. I pulled in. She entered the mini-mart, spoke to the clerk, and pointed back up the dark mountain.

 

“Son, did you know leaving the scene’s a category B felony?” Detective Sanchez asked in his rich, movie-actor voice.

“I was hoping you were someone else,” I said, back at my Gazette desk, cell phone warm on my ear. September sunlight angled through our small-paned windows and pooled around wine bottles I’d unboxed yesterday, now waiting to be logged in. Why bother? It was Central Valley cabernet, cheap stuff the New York editor would never consent to taste.

“Talking about in-car-ceration.”

I touched Rand’s check with my finger, feeling hopeful, wistful—and then seriously foolish.

“Who were you hoping I was, son?”

I told him. “But she didn’t leave the scene. Or only to use a pay phone.”

“You were there?”

“Nope,” I said, and then helplessly, plaintively: “Claire won’t return my calls.”

A faint thunk, and then a crackle on the line. Was Sanchez recording the conversation? Passenger seat: I might say those words to him as easily as I’d said them to Marv. But if I put myself in the car, I might expose Claire as a liar. Unless she’d already told Sanchez that I’d been with her and that it had been my idea to drive away. Impossible to know without talking to her first.

In-car-ceration.

I hadn’t seriously weighed jail time, for either of us. In fact, I still routinely heard the animal thud-thud along the door and thought deer. In the darkest corner of my brain, well away from wherever my conscience lived, I still believed Claire had hit a deer, and the man around the rock had been sleeping or passed out drunk. I hadn’t investigated very carefully. I’d simply opened the door, stood, got a glimpse of his bearded chin, his unlaced boots, and shards of a bottle glinting in the gravel, saw his chest rise and fall with breath, and thought, back in the car.

“Son, let me ask you something.”

“Call me Lewis,” I said.

“You want to see your pretty girlfriend do five to twenty?”

My desktop monitor’s screen saver became a scarlet funnel opening in the center. “She couldn’t get cell coverage. She went to the nearest—”

“Were you there? Yes or no,” Sanchez asked.

“No,” I said, knowing how unconvincing I sounded.

And full of guilt. Because I’d gone along with Claire’s plan. It’s cleaner if I leave you here and go back up alone. She said this to me after dialing 911 from the pay phone attached to the side of the Shell station.

“Has he died?” I asked Detective Sanchez. Tuesday’s Sacramento Bee (I bought it at the newsstand near the courthouse) reported an unidentified hitchhiker, fifty-four, in a coma at a local hospital after a collision on U.S. 50. One sentence, in the police blotter. And nothing on Wednesday or Thursday.

“Better hope he don’t. You have yourselves a disagreement that night?”

I clamped my lips shut. Sanchez was doing his detective thing, shaking me down a little.

His laugh had tinny menace, like a handful of gravel flung against a screen.

I wanted to tell him yes. I wanted to tell him that I’d kept my mother’s cancer from Claire because I loved her and because I was afraid she didn’t love me and would force me to go to Florida. Sanchez wouldn’t care about any of that, would focus on the one thing—my driving away—and call that a criminal act. Which I suppose it was. But here’s my perspective: I’m twenty-three, stalled out, stuck between the middling student I’ve been and the adult I’m meant to become. That night I was on a mad comet of feeling. I wanted to sling us off that mountain and into the innocent, waiting dark.

I had to get off the phone. I had to talk to Claire, find out what she’d told him. Claire lived in a Mission District three-bedroom with two other girls. She rode the BART to and from work. She said she didn’t care about money—but she was lying. Everybody cares about money. So if I told her voicemail I had a half-a-million-dollar check and that I wanted to give her the money for legal fees, or whatever, just give it to her, surely that would win me a callback.

I apologized to Sanchez: I was at work and had an important meeting. Could we talk later? No, he started to say, but I hit the red button and set the phone down.

 

Out on Brannan, veils of fog had moved in, spoiling an otherwise perfect blue-sky September day. I shivered through the hanging wet, walking west, past an empty conference hall, past a bail bonds storefront, past a no-sign restaurant with blacked-out windows that Marv told me was a leather bar. It was still early; if Claire was working at Grief today, she wouldn’t have left yet. I tried her cell.

“Hey, it’s me.” Voicemail. “Look, I—” Traffic stacked up beside the sidewalk, in the right-hand lane that led to the U.S. 101 ramp. I increased my pace, letting my gaze trip past one stuck, solo driver after another. “Just received some distressing news. My mom’s got—well, she’s sick, and I need to go see her in Florida, but I’m not leaving, obviously, before I know what’s going on with our situation.”

I held my phone away from me and instructed myself: No, Lewis. No. How low can a person sink? I thought: Re-record that sucker. Just say you love her and you want to take your share of the blame. I forced my thumb to the pound key.

Then I walked into this no-coverage pocket, Brannan at Eighth—the city was full of them—and my phone dropped the call.

 

Here’s the story: Back in July my mom’s breast cancer returned after a fifteen-year remission, and my brother Brian called to put in this request I couldn’t quite deal with—come home and help him take care of her.

“I just don’t think I can this minute,” I told him.

“Why not?”

“Did you even actually sprain your stupid ankle?” I asked. That was his story: he had injured his ankle scrimmaging in his lawyer soccer league and couldn’t drive, and Mom needed rides to and from her chemo appointments; she needed someone to pitch in with the shopping and cooking.

“Mr. California would prefer we hire a nurse?” Brian said on the phone.

“I can’t just leave. I have a job.”

“Allegedly.”

I didn’t take the bait; I suspected Brian, single, living in a carriage apartment above Mom’s garage, envied my life out here and wanted to spoil it, even though he’d never admit that.

“Guarantee my firm lets you paralegal for double whatever you’re making now,” he said. “Dude, look.” He softened his voice. “Mom’s depressed. She took three sick days in a row last week. Gully had to scramble for subs. She won’t tell him what’s up.” Mom taught fourth grade at the elementary school we’d both gone to. Principal Guthrie, “Gully,” smoked brown cigarillos and wore a ruby pinkie ring and those glasses that tinted automatically when he walked outside.

Brian and I were less than two years apart and had never gotten along. We’d been opposites in school: me—zitty, introverted, painfully self-conscious; Brian—jockish, confident, varsity soccer captain. In high school I went along with Mom to all his soccer games, sat in the buggy heat on folding camp chairs and helped her count his assists and goals. When I made cross country, she did drag Brian to one of my meets, but I cramped and finished tenth, and Brian proclaimed it a loser sport, and she never made him come again. I’d gotten better grades, but he’d gone to law school—FSU—and taken a job at a small law firm in Pensacola. He was constantly tan, drove a jacked-up Blazer with a dancing bear sticker on the bumper, and walked around with a Deke baseball cap carabinered to his belt loop. And he was telling me to grow up.

Actually, I should feel sorry for the guy. On my last visit to Pensacola, over the holidays, we spent most of Christmas Day sitting on Mom’s back stoop, watching carpenter ants munch away at the rotting picnic table in the palm-shaded yard. It was as close to a fraternal moment as we got: I asked him how things were going, even though I could pretty much tell. He’d gained at least twenty pounds and was maybe some kind of alcoholic. All morning he’d been taking nips from a Sheetz to-go mug filled with Wild Turkey. “I can tell you this,” he said. “Twenty-five and living in Mom’s garage ain’t the end of the fucking rainbow.” He dropped his chin, dug a fat knuckle into his eye socket, and spat into the crabgrass.

Move out, I’d thought. But all his life he’d stuck by her, and she by him. In high school, for instance, he told the soccer team I was gay, wrote poetry, and had tried to kill myself. When I complained, Mom helpfully pointed out that the poetry part was true. That was why I’d gone to college so far away—to shake this feeling that they were arrayed against me, that I was the family’s third wheel.

I hung up on Brian, and called Mom. Nothing to worry about, she said. They’d caught it early, and the chemo would be mild. She’d be absolutely fine. Mom was using her authoritative voice, the one that could silence a room of hyperactive nine-year-olds. Visit at Thanksgiving, she said, not sounding the least bit depressed. The Florida Mayflower Society was doing a dinner; we’d go.

 

And then a couple days later, I met Claire Baldessari at that potluck and got her to write her phone number on my wrist. We went out, and she wore this clingy, long-sleeved yellow top and her hair in a pair of girlish braids, and after dinner in a dark corner of a bar on Mission, I moved to kiss her, and she let me but also said, into my teeth, that she had to take things slow. “I’m in a weird place,” she said. I nodded as if I understood and snaked my hands up underneath that tight top. We had sex back at my place on our second date, and afterward she told me that she’d been dumped by a forty-something Venezuelan restaurant owner who’d been busted by the cops for a cinder-block-sized brick of cocaine in the trunk of his Porsche. He’d posted bail and taken off for Mexico, but not before knocking Claire up. After the abortion she’d checked into a clinic in Marin with serious depression: “a bad time,” her words. Abortion, depression. Four months before. She said all of this with her back to me, sitting on the edge of my bed, hunting on the floor for her bra. She was trying to warn me off, but I was a late bloomer, girl-wise, finally losing my virginity during junior year in college, and at twenty-three I thought about sex all the time. And Claire had this way of seeming detached and unattainable—she didn’t look at me, even as she let me pull her back into bed for another round.

I forced myself not to call her as much as I wanted to. We went out again, and then again, and like that, we were maybe dating, and I was happier than I’d ever been in my life—I couldn’t read, watch TV; I couldn’t focus on my work. I’d be logging wines into the database and close my eyes for a moment and see Claire on my balcony tip her head back to exhale a column of smoke straight up. I’d imagine biting that smooth, vulnerable length of her neck. She smoked, she said, to keep from eating, to lose the weight she’d gained on lithium. What weight? I wondered. And what softness there was—around her hips, the back of her thighs, her breasts—that was where I loved to grip and squeeze and suck.

We hadn’t had a talk about being exclusive or anything, but when she went over to the house of the guy she worked with, the guy who’d taught her about golf—Chad—to watch Tiger Woods edge Sergio García for the PGA tournament, I was insanely jealous. And, plus, she sort of seemed to be holding herself back in bed. The Prozac blunted her libido, she said, but her libido seemed fine to me. There was something else getting in the way. I’d go down on her—I loved doing that—and she’d start breathing heavy and strain against me. But then she’d hoist me up like she didn’t want to come. “Makes me dizzy,” she’d say, by way of apology. Dizzy good? Dizzy bad? With Claire I felt the opposite—the still center of a turning world, the frictionless bearing inside a rotating axle. As far away as I could be from some impetuous act. I wanted the rest of my life to be like that.

Brian kept calling, but I didn’t want to talk to him. By this point I was trying to get Claire to go away for a weekend—a big step for us. Rand’s friend owned a house near South Lake Tahoe, not far from the casinos over the border in Stateline. Claire liked blackjack, and she said a trip up there sounded like fun, but we hadn’t set a date, and I feared it would never happen. One thing was for sure: this young, knock-kneed relationship wouldn’t survive my leaving for Florida.

I didn’t tell Claire about Mom. She adored her mother, an ex-hippie who ran a couple of baby-wear boutiques in Portland—no-bleach-cotton jammy pants, seven brands of African-style slings. They spoke every day. And when I let drop at a taqueria one night that I’d moved out to the West Coast to sort of get away from my mother and brother, she gave me a look of disappointment that made me wish I hadn’t said anything at all. Claire had been a total terror to her mom for years—but guess who’d come through for her when she’d needed help getting an abortion and some time at a psychiatric clinic? “Mom pretty much saved my life,” Claire told me, gravely, reaching across the bowl of pickled carrots and peppers and taking my hands. It was the first time I noticed the jagged, arrow-shaped scars pointing up her forearms. “That’s what mothers do,” Claire said.

Meanwhile, my brother’s messages were these mini-lectures about family responsibility, about time to grow up. I laid it all out to Rand, who had family trouble of his own—a dad in Phoenix constantly asking him for money, a born-again mom who called only to beg him to get saved. We were in the apartment, watching the Giants get roughed up by the Dodgers, 5–0, bottom of the fourth, middle of August.

“Is your mother going to die?” he asked flatly.

I passed my hand through the air—as if the question was a bug or a bad smell. When I was in fifth grade, a few rounds of chemo had wiped her cancer out; she’d said there was nothing to worry about. I told him I didn’t actually know.

With two on and a full count, Jeff Kent struck out looking. Rand grimaced, hit mute, and said we should sit on the floor and meditate on the question. So we sat Indian style, and I closed my eyes and breathed deep and slow. My first thought was about all those reassuring miles between San Francisco and Pensacola. Then I thought of the scars I’d seen on Claire’s arms. Then I asked myself a question: apart from college tuition and a hard-on for table manners, what had my family ever given me?

“Dude,” Rand said. His back was rigid, his hands splayed open on his knees, and his face had turned white. He whistled air through his teeth.

“What? Are you okay?”

He shook both hands as if trying to dry them in the air. “Some powerful energy, amigo.”

“You look really freaked out.”

Rand snapped the TV off and stood on shaky legs to go into his bedroom. He came back rolling a joint, eyes wide. “Like, this solid wave of premonition.” Twice previous he’d experienced the same—right before his sister got her arm bitten off and days before WestLab had made an offer on 3rdBase. “So it could be a positive or a negative thing.”

“Could be Mom dying?”

He shrugged, exhaling smoke. “So totally out of your control. The forces of the universe, my man. You and I? Mice. Plankton.”

Rand was a good guy, but he smoked a lot of pot. And the Giants rung up the Dodgers for eight in the bottom of the ninth that night—a crazy-unlikely come-from-behind victory that Rand wouldn’t shut up about for days. A couple of nights later over takeout sushi (his treat), I asked him if that could have been what his premonition was about. He stared at me, apparently stunned by the idea.

He said he’d put $5,000 on the Giants through his bookie.

“You have a bookie?”

“I have a problem,” he said, stuffing his mouth with ahi.

 

A squad car passed by on my walk between work and Claire’s apartment. And then another. And then another. Later I’d realize—of course—it was the same one, circling around, but I didn’t look closely because I couldn’t have imagined at the time that I was, in fact, being tailed. I’d discover later that Sanchez had interviewed the Shell station attendant who’d told him that Claire had been with a young man that night, and that they’d split up, and the guy had set off down Route 50 on foot. SFPD tipped him that Claire Baldessari’s boyfriend was a wanted money-laundering Venezuelan drug dealer, thought to be residing in Rosarito, Mexico. Possible fatal hit-and-run was already a big case for Sanchez, but nabbing an international fugitive could get him serious press attention. He’d put a couple of SFPD street cops on me Tuesday morning, received word that I didn’t match the Venezuelan’s description, but Sanchez stubbornly decided I was the man in question, or if not, Claire had a taste for bad guys, and I was some other brand of criminal. Bottom line: I’d hit the guy; I’d sped off the mountain; she was protecting me by claiming she was responsible. In-car-ceration.

It would be a mess my lawyer (well, Rand’s lawyer) would have to sort out. At that time, 11:15 A.M. or so on a Friday, I blamed my repeated sightings of slow, sharking cop cars on the neighborhood—the pastel-painted South Van Ness housing projects and the Muni Plaza at Mission and Eighteenth, with its encamped homeless and open-air drug deals. I gripped my phone, expecting it to ring any second, expecting Claire to speak sympathetic words into my ear about my mother, even as I was ashamed of having told her. The fog banked away, and the blue bowl of sky came into view, the sun, hot and huge, shining down on me like a spotlight. The warmth felt so good and calming that I stood there with my face turned up, blocking sidewalk traffic.

“Fuck out of my way.” This solid-framed black guy wearing a Warriors tank threw his shoulder into me and flicked a pair of scratch-off lottery tickets into my face. One flapped harmlessly off the side of my nose, but the other caught me corner-on in the eye.

A couple of seconds basking in a private ray of sun and see what you get?

 

This is the hardest part for me to tell.

Rand’s friend’s Tahoe house was an A-frame enclosed in a grove of trees, overlooking the boat launch at Fallen Leaf Lake. It had been a long, grueling drive from San Francisco, and Claire had been strangely noncommunicative the whole time, so I was drained and tense. I really wanted this weekend to go well. And when I stepped out of the car, saw the house, caught a view of moonlight flashing on the lake below, and breathed in the crisp, weightless mountain air, I felt certain, for the first time, that it would. I even started fantasizing about staying past the weekend—turning a two-day getaway into a new and better kind of life. You could grow hillside zinfandel on the ferociously sunny, cool slopes of the Sierra, a thousand feet or so below us. We had enough wine-world contacts; we could get some land, plant vines, make a little name for ourselves, and live up here where the air tasted so good and no cell phones worked.

When I gave a little fist pump of pleasure, Claire broke into her first smile since San Francisco and kissed me and told me she was glad she’d come—as if she’d been debating the question.

Inside, I slept a hard, dreamless ten hours under scratchy sheets and heavy camp blankets. In the morning, first thing, I wanted to hike a trail above the house, and so we climbed to a rocky ridge and lay together on a flat table-sized rock in brilliant morning sunshine. Claire pulled her T-shirt up to her armpits to get some sun on her stomach, then took the shirt off completely. Her nipples stood up through the sports bra. I brushed the back of my hand against her thigh, but she gently pushed me off. Someone might see us, she said.

She was fast and strong getting back down the trail, and misinterpreting this as horniness, I half-jogged after her, excited, bursting through the door and lifting her to the kitchen counter. Claire’s lips were warm, her neck salty, and I clutched her to me hungrily. She flattened her hand on my chest. “Breakfast,” she said. “There’s nothing here.”

Apart from half a box of Ritz crackers and a six-pack of Sierra Nevada, that was true. So sex would have to wait for a grocery store run into the town of South Lake. As I crossed the Safeway lot, my phone found a signal and beeped with a stored voicemail message from Brian. If I even cared, he said, the doctor says Mom has to lose the breast. She’d go into the hospital next week. Maybe now I would come home?

Bacon, Goldfish, two cans of tuna, and multigrain English muffins went into the shopping cart. I got back to the house; Claire looked in the bag and asked me what the hell was wrong with me.

Taking her in my arms, I told her I was distracted—the truth. I buried my face in her hair, kissed her beauty mark. I pulled down her shorts and smacked her plump butt. She yelped and arched her back, and so I did it again, harder, a blow that stung my hand.

“Easy,” she said.

I ran my fingers into her hair and bunched it in my fist.

“Stop,” she said, breathless. “Stop. Lewis.”

It was cool in the house, but sweat had broken out along her brow and in the hollow of her neck.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, with a severity and an impatience that surprised me.

She turned her body away from mine, ran the tap, and cupped water into her mouth. She’d been talking to her therapist, she said, about how her ex had treated her. Her therapist had said it was important to maintain a sense of serenity; gentleness was what she needed.

So we did it in the bed, and I was slow and careful, and she brought herself off with her fingers. That fucking guy, I thought the whole time. I hadn’t been in a fight since seventh grade, but I wanted to teach the ex in Mexico a lesson. Knock him over. Get in his face.

I calmed down after I’d come and eaten a bacon sandwich and taken a shower. Claire was out on the deck, reading some Robin Cook paperback she’d found by the couch and smoking a cigarette. I munched Goldfish and watched her tip her head back to exhale. I remembered that fight in seventh grade: a gang of eighth-graders—Brian’s friends—who’d pulled me into a stand of magnolia trees and held me down and rabbit-punched my arms and legs until they were numb. Not so much a fight as a beating.

 

The plan was cocktails, slots, blackjack—goofy, sleazy fun! But Stateline is a sad place: four shabby casinos squatting on the Nevada side of U.S. 50. Pulling into Harrah’s—the least depressing-looking of the four—idling behind a jumbo bus disgorging a parade of seventy-somethings, Claire and I considered driving back to our cozy house in the woods, lighting the gas fire, and drinking that six-pack.

But we’d come all this way. So in we went and straight to the buffet, where a stump of prime rib, steam trays of crusty mashed potatoes, and traffic-cone-colored mac-and-cheese put us off dinner. Claire led me back to the casino floor and squeezed in between two old men in cowboy hats at a $5-bid table. I brought her a gin and tonic, got myself two, and watched Claire turn $60 into $300 and then into $40, at which point she pushed back from the table and suggested quarter slots. I kept thinking of how she’d looked on the flat rock under the blue sky, her skin white as paper. I was drinking more than I should—because the gin kept the depressing chill of Harrah’s off me, and because drinks were half price, thanks to a mess in the middle of the gaming floor: a chandelier had come down on a roulette table, and there was yellow police tape around the debris. Wires dangled out of a jagged hole in the ceiling.

Over at the quarter slots, I worked through $20 in about six minutes—all I wanted to spend. Claire hit a few times: spinning lights, a siren, and a clattering waterfall of coins. Staring at her half-full bucket, I thought of how, when we were kids, Brian used to savor his bowl of ice cream after I’d plowed through mine, and then would taunt me with how much he had left. I was feeling resentful that Claire had brought up her ex. I could feel my poor judgment take over, like a powerful muscle, a delicious feeling of coiled intent.

I rattled the single quarter in my bucket. I swiveled on my slot machine stool and said, “If this one hits, you have to marry me.”

“You’re on,” Claire said. She shook her own bucket of quarters and blew her bangs straight up. She’d had a few drinks herself.

“I’m infatuated with you.”

“I know. It’s really sweet.”

“Every time I think my life is falling apart—boom, there you are.”

“Boom,” she mimicked. “What do you mean falling apart?”

I stuck the quarter in, pulled the knob, and came up Bar, Lemon, Cherries.

“Lucky guy,” she said, teasingly. “You know, there’s a wedding chapel upstairs. I would have held you to it.”

That got me down on my knee.

“You’re cute,” she said, and then a sad awareness spread across her face.

“Claire Baldessari.” I took her hands in mine and looked into her fearful brown eyes.

“Lewis, stop. You’re not thinking.”

“You don’t know what I’m going to ask you.”

“Seriously. I’ll say no.”

By this point I’d attracted a little audience, a pair of old ladies in matching pink blouses and mesh cowgirl hats. A guy running a floor waxer, who snapped off the noisy machine to see what I was going to say.

“I’ve been in touch with him,” Claire blurted. “He wants me to come down there.”

“Who?” And then: Oh.

She stared gloomily at the slot machine. She drank her gin and tonic in one long go. “Sometimes I think I’m getting better,” she said. “Other times?” She wiped her chin.

The cowgirls turned their heads. The guy switched his waxer back on.

 

I drove us back to the A-frame in silence. I opened the door and kicked off my shoes. Claire said she had to pee, and after ten minutes or so, she hadn’t returned. I went into the bedroom to look for her.

“What are you doing?”

She was packing her bag. “I don’t want to have to in the morning.”

I tried to find the lake through the bay window, but it was a cloudy night, and the view was a texture map of trees and leaves. “Maybe we should just go now,” I said. “Go home.”

I didn’t mean it. I was tired. Neither of us was equipped to drive the five hours to San Francisco, but Claire nodded, evidently relieved. She said she’d take the first shift at the wheel.

 

She rode the shoulders, straddled the center line through the S-curves. I didn’t see him. I heard Claire’s cry of alarm and felt the car fishtail sideways.

Thud thud. Deer.

Claire’s hands hovered above the wheel. I got out of the car and saw a man sprawled face-down behind a rock, legs splayed. Couldn’t see his face, only a glimpse of bearded chin. Boots, no laces, one half off, revealing a dingy wool sock. Unconscious, breathing—not dead. Shards of a bottle winking at me in the gravel. Blood? I didn’t actually go look. The highway was dead still.

Call it a trial, and twenty-three-year-old me with a choice to make. Except I didn’t see the choice. Untie the rope, pull for the surface. Back in the car.

 

At the Shell station, after calling 911, Claire told me what her story to the cops would be: we’d had a fight back at the house in South Lake, and she’d taken off in the car without me. She’d driven away after the accident only because her cell didn’t work, and she needed to call for help.

“That’s crazy,” I said. “I’m going back up there with you.”

She shook her head. I’d never seen her so calm and settled. There was a roadside motel less than a mile away I could walk to, she said. Get a room for a few hours’ sleep, and if she could, she’d pick me up in the morning—or better probably just to call a Sacramento taxi service and catch a bus back to San Francisco on my own. She had no idea how long this would take.

“C’mon,” she said. “I’ve got to go.”

No, no way, I said, but she looked at me as if I knew as well as she did that this was the best plan. Still I said no, but the forcefulness dropped out of my voice. Eventually I exited the car, and Claire arranged herself behind the wheel, hitched the seat forward, and started the engine. She reversed the car—no visible dents anywhere—then blew me a kiss through the open window and told me to take care of myself. “Take care of yourself, Lewis,” like that, and a long, consoling smile—a final goodbye if I’ve ever seen one. But I was slow on the uptake. I simply thought: big fine, license suspended. The guy had practically been standing in the road, on the downhill shoulder of a four-lane mountain highway, at midnight. The word manslaughter looped through my head one or two times, but I chased it away.

I caught a ride all the way to Sacramento with an old Mexican guy in a Ford F-150. Thankfully, he didn’t want to talk. I camped out at the Sacramento bus terminal and bought a ticket for the first Greyhound to San Francisco.

“You’re home early,” Rand said when I came through the door. “Did you win rent?” He was sprawled on the couch, wrapped in a sleeping bag, watching the 49ers lose and drinking orange juice straight from the carton. The look on my face made him wince. “That’s a joke. Look, no pressure. I know you’re good for it. Want some of this?”

I went straight to the bedroom to charge my phone. It had been dead for hours, and I was sure it was stacked with voicemails from Claire.

I lay on my bed and stared up at the water-stained stucco and thought of my mother and brother in Pensacola and how contemptuous I could be about their small, provincial lives. A line of ants climbed a stack of magazines beside the bed. There weren’t any messages. I felt homesick for the first time in five years.

 

By the time I’d reached Claire’s apartment on Dolores Street, my eye still hurt, and my vision was watery and out of focus. I climbed to her doorbell, punched it, and heard heavy footsteps inside—unmistakably male. I could have turned around and taken cover down the block, but I didn’t, and the door opened, and I was facing a sandy-haired guy in his late thirties with a leather cuff on his wrist and grapevine tattoos on his arms.

Behind him, up the interior stairs, were Claire’s legs, just a glimpse of them, her shins and the base of her right knee.

“Hey, brother,” Chad the golfer said. He smelled like her perfume. “Can’t let you in.”

“Claire?” I called past him.

Chad stepped through the door and pulled it closed behind him. “You want to help her? Tell the police you were in the car, tell them whose idea it was to drive away.”

“What’s this?” I asked, wiping my eye. “Are you two—what?”

“She’s messed up in the head. Cops are threatening her with felony leaving-the-scene ’cause they think she’s covering up for Mr. Venezuela. And she won’t put you in the car. She thinks this is what she deserves for treating you the way she did,” Chad said, in a reasonable voice. “Felony, brother. Girl is sinking into something.”

“You’re her new boyfriend?”

Chad just gave me a bewildered look. He had lines around his eyes, a shell necklace. I swayed on my feet, and he put a hand on my arm. I was oddly grateful for the contact and support. “Talk to the police, and it’ll be better for both of you. You want to do the right thing, don’t you?”

“Claire!”

Success! The door started to open, and I readied myself to charge past Chad, scoop her up, and carry her off. But what I saw stopped me. It’s not like I’d been having a great week, but at least I’d been eating, bathing, venturing outside. Claire, on the other hand—her face was rinsed of color, her hair matted, her legs spindly and frail; she squinted and lifted a trembling hand to shield her eyes from the sun. Fresh bandages on her forearms.

“Heads up,” Chad said, nodding over my shoulder.

The squad car that had passed me three times on the way here had pulled to the curb, its lights spinning. A single whoop of siren got my attention.

 

In Pensacola the sun stays low through the short January afternoons, and the light skims across the gulf. From the office where I now work, I watch pelicans hang hungrily in the air. I watch them gather themselves and bomb into the drink.

My job is to create payment spreadsheets and invoices for the lawyers at Brian’s firm. I’m basically a secretary, but guess what? McMillian, Yates, and Brewer is in fact paying me twice what I was making at the Wine Gazette. Overpaying me actually, given how baggy my days are, how much time I have to stare through the homey gingham window treatments near my desk and watch the action (Jet Skis, sailboats, seagulls, those pelicans) on the gulf.

Mom’s doing okay. Not great. She lost the breast, and now she’s on a new cycle of chemo because the doctor found another small tumor. He thinks the chemo will take care of it, but that’s what he said before the mastectomy. She’s lost most of her hair and is tired all the time, but likes having her sons close by. Brian or I will try to help her off the sofa, and she’ll wave us off. “I’m hardy,” she’ll say, hauling herself up. “Pilgrim stock.” Brian’s glad I’m here, though he won’t admit that. I know because he’s got a girlfriend, a tattooed cocktail waitress named Sally, who told me. She comes over and cooks chowders and oyster stews mild enough that Mom can eat them. Surprisingly, Mom likes Sally, and Brian seems to be laying off the bourbon, has dropped some weight, and is playing soccer again.

We don’t talk much, Brian and me, though I catch rides with him to the firm. I like to walk home along the water. It’s two or three miles to our house, but I enjoy the exercise. I ask myself why I fell so hard for a girl who didn’t fall for me. Why I proposed to her. Why I left an injured man on the side of the road. Sometimes asking these questions makes me think I’ve changed—grown up a little—and then I’ll see boat masts tipping back and forth in the harbor like metronome needles, and I get this overwhelming urge to try to steal one of them and set sail for, like, Havana.

Amazing: Rand actually invested $250,000 of WestLab money in www.thewinegazette.com—specifically Marv’s subscription database. After my community service hours were done, and before I left San Francisco, I helped Marv write a proposal and business plan and hand-delivered it to Rand, who stuffed it in his Quiksilver backpack. Long shot, I told Marv. But Rand emailed the other day to tell me the news and to offer me a consulting fee of $5,000. Yes, please.

Samuel Gaerig came out of his coma; his broken ribs and broken leg healed. Rand’s lawyer, who took my case (pro bono), got his name for me, and I’ve been calling the halfway house in Sacramento where he’s supposed to be living to see how he’s doing. Not well. Gaerig is a drug addict (heroin and crack), as well as an alcoholic. He had dementia before the accident. He keeps running off, disappearing for days. Claire is the liable party for any injury suit Mr. Gaerig brings, but Brian says given his mental problems, she could get out of it with a good lawyer. Claire pled no contest to the felony hit-and-run but avoided jail. She lost her license, got two years supervised probation, and a $1,000 fine. This news came to me via my lawyer.

I pled guilty to misdemeanor failure to lend assistance and spent ninety hours dressed in a green jumpsuit in Golden Gate Park, wielding one of those pincher tools, picking up soda cans, junk food wrappers, and more used condoms than anyone wants to hear about. Did your time, Brian says. Put the whole thing behind you.

But I have these nightmares—not about that night on Route 50, about small stuff. A couple of papers I’d plagiarized in college. This lie I told my mother to get her to send me $500 (trip to dentist, three fillings needed). A six-pack I stole from the corner store near my old apartment in San Francisco. I wake up, jaw tight, covers and sheets thrashed to the floor, desperate to tell someone, anyone, I’m sorry.

Rand’s latest email had an attached news story: five westerners suspected of sex tourism gunned down by an Islamic group in an alley behind a hotel in Manila. He thinks his ideas guy was one of them and wonders if I want to come back to San Francisco to be his new number two. It’s easy, he says. Mostly just reading CNET and Fast Company and Red Herring and writing memos about possible avenues for expansion. “You don’t even have to write the memos,” he writes. “Just keep shoveling the money out the door.”

I haven’t emailed him back. I don’t know what to do. I know this: if I leave Pensacola, I’ll never come back.

Boom-splash. The pelicans take these kamikaze plunges into the water. The way they hit, not one should survive—but of course, they all do. They come up with their beaks full of fish.