Heroes of the Frontier (6 page)

The wonderful apex of it all was the email from a woman, another mother, a week later. “Dear Josie, As a service from the school community to our working parents, we've started an innovative program we call All in This Together, whereby each student whose parents can't be at schoolday events is “adopted” by a parent who
can
be. This parent will take extra time with your child, will take pictures at events and post them, and in general give the child the support enjoyed by the students who…” The email went on for another page. Josie scanned to the bottom to see who had been assigned to her children, and found it to be this woman, Bridget, who she remembered being precisely the kind of mother she'd never leave her children with—loony-eyed and fond of scarves.

Josie had chosen this kind of environment. She had left her former tribe, the searching ranks of Peace Corps alums, to go to dental school, to move to Ohio, to come to live in this suburb, among stable people—so stable they were willing to “adopt” her children during the school day—but she remembered her other people, other friends from the other life, those still roaming the planet like the undead. None of the Peace Corps friends had had kids. One had spent a year in bed, her healthy limbs unable to take commands (she'd since recovered). One had moved back to Panama, another learned Arabic and found some mysterious consulting job in Abbottabad and claimed to have watched the bin Laden raid from his rooftop. One was dead of an apparent suicide. A now-married couple ran a llama farm in Idaho, and had asked Josie to come, to move in, to be part of their commune (
It's not a commune!
they insisted), and Josie had almost done it, or had almost thought about considering it, but yes, the rest of the ragged race of Peace Corps people were still wandering, unwilling to stop, unwilling to live in any traditional or linear way.

Only Deena, a mother of a boy in Paul's class and manager of a pet food store, understood, seemed to have any past at all. Josie had mentioned her emancipation to another couple and they had not been able to hide their horror. They'd never heard of such a thing.

“I didn't know that was possible,” the man said.

“I ran away once,” the woman said. She was wearing capris. “I slept at a girlfriend's house and came back in the morning.”

Another time, at Moms' Night Out—no three words more tragic—Josie had mentioned the Peace Corps and Panama, how she'd known someone, Rory, who had managed to become a heroin addict there. Josie thought she told the story in a funny way, an American smuggling drugs
into
Central America, but again there was the chasmic silence that implied Josie was bringing some hint of apocalypse to their fine town.

But Deena understood. She was a single mother, too, though her husband was not a deserter, but dead. He'd been a contractor in the Nigerian delta, was kidnapped, ransomed, freed, and, upon returning to the U.S., died two months later of an aneurysm. Deena's other child, also named Ana but spelled Anna, was adopted, and between that and the dead father, Deena, too, had been threatened with Anna being adopted by the scarf woman from All in This Together.

Josie and Deena talked about being the only people in the school that anything had ever happened to. Josie felt right telling Deena anything, but she hadn't gone far into her own childhood, her parents' broken world. Those were untouchable years. It was one step too strange, so with Deena they left it at the particular absurdities of being a single parent—the making of money to pay children to watch their children so they could make money to pay these people to watch their children. The confiding in their children, complaining to them, lying too long with them at bedtime, telling them too much.

“We should move to Alaska,” Deena said one night. They were at Chuy's, a burrito place where the kids could run around and scavenge and Josie and Deena were free to have their mojitos and take off their shoes. Deena was watching her daughter spill a basket of chips on the floor, pick them up and eat them. She didn't move a muscle to help, she didn't utter a word in admonition.

“Why would Alaska be any better?” Josie asked, but the idea stuck in her mind, in part because Sam lived there.

On the beach, the family in colorful new windbreakers disappeared behind a boulder down the shore, and Josie's relief was great.

Ana approached carrying something carefully with two hands. Paul was right behind her, then by her side, his hands hovering around hers, ensuring that whatever it was they'd found would not fall. Josie stood, hoping to discourage them from dropping it in her lap. “Look,” Ana said with the utmost solemnity.

“It's a head,” Paul said.

And now the stray dogs were among them, sniffing the head. Josie's kids barely took notice of the dogs, and the dogs seemed to have no interest in eating or harming the skull.

“One of dem otters,” Ana said, and waved toward the bay. She had a skull in her little pink hands, and Josie noticed with horror that it had not been picked clean. There was still cartilage on it, and whiskers, and fur, something viscous, too. Josie conjured Socrates and thought of a question. “Why in hell did you pick this up?” In solidarity, the dogs lifted their heads to Ana and Paul, then ran off.

At night they went to a real restaurant in town. Josie retrieved the velvet bag from under the sink, retrieved six twenties, feeling it illogical but inevitable that she would spend most of them that night.

When they hit the main strip, they saw that a cruise ship had docked and Seward was full of identical couples in their seventies, all wearing slight variations on the same windbreaker and white sneakers. The town had been breached, the restaurants had surrendered, and Ana was running through the streets again. Josie and Paul caught her and Josie tried to appease her with a piggyback. No. Her little body, all muscle, moved like a barracuda: bending, twisting, anything to be free, so she let Ana run on the sidewalk. No negatives motivated her. Josie threatened to take away her Batman sticker book. No effect at all; she knew there were others. Josie told her she'd never watch another DVD; she had no sense of the future so she didn't care. But if Josie said she'd
get
something, some dessert, some object, she would toe the line. She was the purest sort of materialist: she wanted things, but didn't care about things.

The restaurant they went to was the cheapest one they could find, but the prices in Alaska were science-fictional. Josie looked at the menu as they were waiting to be seated. Every pickle was twenty dollars. This was what she had tried to avoid. Back home Josie was so tired, so bone-weary of spending money. It crushed the spirit. Every day she found herself at the drugstore or grocery store and always the bill was sixty-three dollars. She would go into Walgreen's for milk and Ana's nighttime diapers and somehow would end up spending sixty-three dollars. Always sixty-three dollars. Sixty-three dollars, three or four times a day. How could that be sustained?

But this menu, in the brightly lit hellhole they found themselves in, wanted more than that for dinner. Josie did a rough calculation and knew she would spend eighty dollars for dinner with her two children, neither of whom would care one way or another if they ate here, or ate mud and grubs dug from shallow holes. Ana, always happy to puncture the pretense of any situation, found her opportunity. After the busboy wiped down the table, Ana wiped it again, with her own napkin, saying, “Oooh yeah! Ooooh yeah!” She made it uncomfortably lewd. Josie laughed, so Ana did it three more times.

Paul, though, was in a contemplative mood. He looked at Josie with his ice-priest eyes.

“What?” she said.

He said he didn't want to talk about it.

“What?” Josie asked again.

Finally he beckoned her closer, promising a secret. Josie leaned over the table and a plate tilted, knocking against the wood.

“Where do the stray dogs go at night?” he whispered, his breath hot in her ear. Josie didn't know where Paul was going with this so said, “I don't know.” Immediately she knew this was the wrong answer. His face crumbled and his eyes, so pale and cold, told her he wouldn't sleep for weeks.

She'd forgotten Paul's thing with strays. Back at home, he'd heard about stray cats—there was some demented socialite in their town who had made the homeless cats' plight her calling, and the ads were all over the buses and in the local newspaper, offering shelter and the
HIGHEST QUALITY MEDICAL CARE!
for these strays—and Paul made Josie put milk out every night for any wandering felines who happened to be passing by their home. Josie had also made up a story about how they often dropped by their house on their way home—there was an Underground Railroad for the strays, she'd explained, and they were one of the participating homes. The fiction lasted weeks, and it was Josie's fault. She'd made up the Railroad, so had to make up the milk-being-available, and had to empty the milk at night, watch Paul check it in the morning, discuss it with him over breakfast, and so how had she forgotten his concern for these wayward animals?

Later, after she'd paid for dinner—eighty-four dollars, everyone involved going to hell—and while Ana ate an ice-cream sandwich on a bench on the boardwalk, Josie clarified some things for Paul while entertaining herself a bit, too. The stray dogs, she said, all live together in a clubhouse. And this clubhouse was built by Alaskan park rangers because the stray dogs, being pack animals, prefer to live together. They're fed there, she said, three meals a day, by the rangers—omelets for breakfast, sausage for lunch, steak for dinner.

Paul smiled shyly. Someone who did not know Paul would assume he knew this was all made up, that his smile acknowledged the absurdity in all this—the silliness of his concern for the strays and the madness of his mother's explanation—but this was not the meaning of Paul's smile. No. Paul smiled because something that was wrong in the world had been righted. Paul's smile confirmed the true north of the moral world: How could he doubt the preeminence of order and justice? His smile confirmed rightness. His smile laughed at his temporary doubt in this rightness.

Ana was finished with her ice-cream sandwich, and handed the wrapper to Josie on her way to inspect, a few feet down the pier, what seemed to be a bloody fish head. They were near the cleaning station, where the fishermen weighed and gutted their day's catch. The boardwalk was pink with watery blood and a last fisherman was finishing his day. Ana stood below him and looked up, then down at the head of the fish, its silver skin stained with bright plasma. She picked it up. She picked the head up.

“This yours?” she asked him.

Before he could answer, she'd dropped the head, and, in an incredible feat of dexterity and fine-motor skills, kicked the head, on the fly, into the dark water below. She laughed, and the fisherman laughed, and Josie wondered just how this child was hers. “What's my name?” Ana asked the frothing water where the head had disappeared. Josie had not taught her this expression, and Paul certainly didn't know it. But Ana had said this before, and had also said “You want this? You want this?” And “What'd you expect?” These confrontational phrases she insisted on yelling to rocks, trees, birds. She often spoke disrespectfully to inanimate objects, and often walked around practicing gestures, facial expressions, like a clown preparing backstage.

The fact of Ana's existence, and her will to live and run and break things and conquer, was all attributable to her birth. After living for a month in a plastic box, and spending her first two years looking like a withered old man, she shed her preemie skin like Lady Lazarus and became a world-ender. Carl had long before abdicated any responsibility. When they first brought Ana home from the hospital, Carl thought it a good time to start training for his triathlon—there was suddenly such urgency to it—and Josie soon gleaned he was not likely to be instrumental in Ana's care. So she deputized Paul. Your sister is very small and not strong, she told him. When she comes home she'll need your help. They talked about Ana's homecoming every night and every night Paul seemed to take his impending responsibilities more and more seriously. One night she found him on the floor with a hand vacuum, cleaning the room waiting for Ana. He was three. Another time he'd found an old greeting card, a burst of balloons on the cover, and dropped it into her empty crib. Josie's intent was to be sure that Paul, a sensitive boy but nevertheless a boy, would be careful not to accidentally smother tiny Ana, or break tiny Ana's bird bones, but instead she created this boy who came to understand his role as something akin to caretaker of the world's most delicate orchid. He slept in her room, on a mattress next to, and then under, her crib. By the time Ana was three months old he knew how to feed her and swaddle her. When Josie or Carl did either he sat nearby, adding frequent notes and corrections.

Ana grew stronger, and by two she was running without fear or limit, though she was still Pinocchio-thin and her eyes were circled in pale blue shadow—temporary evidence, Josie hoped, of her traumatic journey thus far. As she grew in confidence and awareness of her power of ambulation and self-determination, as she became more aware of herself and the world, she became less aware of Paul. He sensed it and felt betrayed. There was a time when she was two and Paul five, when he came to Josie, anguished. “She won't let me hold her,” he wailed. He was on the verge of tears, while Ana barely knew he lived in the same house. Reaching full strength, she had no interest in anyone, really, least of all him. She wanted to see things, to roam, to climb and plummet. She was attracted to the shiny, the moving, the blinking, the rustling, the fur-covered. Paul was none of those things so he held no interest.

But something happened when she turned three, and after that Paul was known. Now when she did something, usually something dangerous, she wanted Paul—Paulie—to watch. Paulie, Paul-ee. Paul! Eee! Watch. Watch. Watch-watch-watch. Paul acted aggrieved by Ana's demands but satisfying them was his life's calling. He loved her. He brushed her hair. He clipped her toenails. She still wore a diaper at night and she preferred that he put it on. When Josie would wrap a towel around her after a bath, Paul would rewrap it, tighter, more carefully, patting it down just so, and Ana had come to expect this.