Carla sat up. Her mother was holding a red velvet cake.
“She said it was an Apology Cake.”
“I don’t want it,” Carla said.
When school started, Carla felt anxious. She started biting her nails. She didn’t know what she would say if Tessa tried to sit with her and Madeline and Jennifer at lunch. Maybe Tessa would accuse her of being a liar. Well, then, she’d just say Tessa was a slut, even though she now knew it wasn’t true. But Tessa didn’t show up on the first day of school. Later that week, Carla went past their house. The station wagon wasn’t there. The shades were drawn.
“They’ve moved,” her father told her when she asked if he knew what had happened to the Coopers. “The mother came and got the car serviced before they left. They went to California.”
Carla thought about them often, how the ride to California must have taken days, through wheat fields, across the desert. Once she got a cookbook and tried to make a red velvet cake, but it was a disaster, all tilted and mushy, and a single bite turned her mouth red. She worried that she was cursed, that her mouth would stay red forever. But it was just the red dye in the recipe. It washed away after she drank some cold water. When the following summer Johnny was killed in a motorcycle crash, Carla was the one who had to clean out his room. Her mother was too distraught. Her father couldn’t bring himself to go over to the house where Johnny had lived since the falling-out in their family. A young man let Carla into the house. She was surprised to see how small her brother’s room was and how neatly he’d kept it. Searching through his bureau she found a packet of letters addressed to Ava Cooper that had been returned to him. ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN had been stamped on the envelopes. She’d heard that Ava had opened a restaurant in San Francisco, that people stood on line on Saturday nights, hoping to get in. She thought her brother had the address right, on Montgomery Street, but that the Coopers most likely didn’t want anything that had been mailed from Blackwell and made sure it was sent right back. They probably never even thought about the Eel River anymore, the way the sunlight fell across the water, the fact that it was one of the wonders of Massachusetts.
BLACK RABBIT
1966
THE MOTT BROTHERS WERE IN TROUBLE from the time they could crawl. Their mother, Helen, had grown up in Hartford, Connecticut. She was a sheltered woman, educated at private schools, known for her sweet temper and lovely singing voice. She’d been engaged to a medical student, but when Leo Mott came tearing through Hartford on a lark with some of his buddies one summer night, Helen fell for him on the spot and moved to Blackwell. She appeared to settle easily into small-town life. But something happened to her during her pregnancy. She seemed unsettled. She kept to herself and didn’t return phone calls. People saw her wandering through town, as if she were lost. One day she started off at a brisk pace as if she could walk her way out of Blackwell and a pregnancy that had caused her to become enormous, a stranger to herself. She might have made it all the way back to Hartford if she hadn’t come face-to-face with a bear on Route 17.
Helen closed her eyes and waited to die. She said a silent farewell to her children-to-be who might never be born and to her husband and to everyone else on earth. She made a vow that if she did happen to survive, if some miracle occurred even though she hardly deserved such good fortune, she would never again complain about Blackwell. When she opened her eyes, the bear was gone, but there was his footprint, huge as could be. Helen ran home, then drove back to the site, having stopped at the hardware store for a sack of plaster of paris and a thermos she hurriedly filled with water so she could set the footprint and bring it home. That way people would believe her.
Every time the Mott boys got into trouble, people said the twins’ fearless nature had been formed during that ill-fated meeting. The boys were named Jesse and Frank before their mother understood that these had also been the names of the notorious James brothers. Frank was dark and intense. Jesse was blond, always the favorite in town. His appearance was so angelic that his antics were usually overlooked. He stole his father’s car at the age of thirteen and drove it into Dead Man’s Pond, but no charges were brought. He burned down the bookstore, but it was declared to be an accident; he was merely setting off a cherry bomb on the Fourth of July, and insurance paid for the rebuilding. Jesse usually got off scot-free, leaving his brother behind to clean up the mess, which Frank did willingly because of his bond with his twin. He insisted that he was the one who’d forgotten to test the brakes of his dad’s Chevy and swore he’d bought the cherry bomb. For as long as they’d lived, the brothers had never spent a day apart.
But in 1966, the year Frank was drafted to go to Vietnam, Jesse Mott ran off to California. He did everything he could to convince Frank to go with him. They would slip out of town in the middle of the snowy midnight, escape from the backwater where they’d never belonged in the first place; even their mother had known that in the months before their birth when she tried to return to Hartford. To Jesse’s surprise, Frank wouldn’t go. He was more stubborn than people might guess. He wasn’t the sort to run away from his responsibilities, even if that meant fighting a war he didn’t believe in or even understand. There was a big blowup between the two brothers at the Jack Straw Bar and Grill. Both men were hammered; they swung wildly and slugged each other. They called each other names, then wound up crying together in the parking lot in the snow.
It took a lot to get Frank Mott to cry, but if anyone could manage to bring him to tears, it was his brother. Some people joked that they were two halves of the same person: the quiet, dependable one, and the one who was willing to do just about anything on a dare. On the night of their fight, Frank held his head in his hands as he sat between two parked pickup trucks. His jaw was throbbing from a good left hook, but that was the least of his problems. His whole world was coming apart. His parents planned to drive him down to New Jersey the next day for his induction. He wished someone would run him over in the parking lot, just mow him down and be done with it.
“We’ll just get out of this fucking town,” Jesse kept saying. He had a bruise rising around one eye and his knuckles were raw, but he sat down beside Frank and threw an arm around his shoulders. “It will be you and me against the world. Come on, brother. Don’t you get it? I’m doing this for you. You’re the one who’s being drafted.”
As for Jesse, he was the one with all the luck. He was a wild man, well known throughout the Berkshires because of the time he’d jumped off a cliff on Hightop Mountain. His friends had turned away after he leapt, too frightened to watch as he careened to earth with no safety net other than his leather jacket, which he held over his head like a parachute. Anyone else would have surely broken his neck in such a fall. Jessie had let out a joyous shout and wound up with a shattered leg.
“Just give me drink,” he’d said when his friends raced to find him in a heap. They took him to the hospital with Frank driving, muttering curses as he broke the speed limit. The girls had gone even more crazy for Jesse after that; his limp added to his mystique. He had half the girls in town in bed before Frank had his first sexual encounter with René Jacob. Frank had felt trapped into remaining in a tortured relationship with René for the rest of high school while Jesse did as he pleased, getting stoned every day, screwing every girl who came his way, making the varsity basketball team despite his limp, even though Frank was the one who had coached him and taught him his jump shot.
On the night when Jesse took off, both brothers were too drunk to drive. Not that that had stopped Jesse before—but this time they actually couldn’t remember where they’d parked their car. Jesse rose from the snowy curb, then reached out and pulled Frank to his feet.
“Last chance. I’m leaving right now. I’m not waiting to be inducted into their war. Come with me.”
Frank shook his head. He was dizzy as hell. He was going to fight in a war that had nothing to do with him; but he knew how his parents would feel if they woke up in the morning to discover both their sons gone.
Jesse walked off into the snow. One minute he was there, railing at Frank, telling him he was an idiot who would miss out on all those beautiful California girls, and the next he had disappeared into the swirl of snowflakes. Frank sat there for a while, in the quiet of the falling snow. He was the one who’d been drafted, but Jesse was taking the opportunity to go AWOL. Frank’s blood was pounding. He could feel his aloneness deep inside. All at once he realized his mistake. He had to get out of Blackwell and out of the army and out of his life. He took off after his brother down Route 17, but Jesse was nowhere to be seen. Frank shouted out Jesse’s name as he loped along, then blinked in the lights of an oncoming car. A drunk driver headed to the Mass Pike skidded out and knocked Frank Mott for a loop. When he woke up in the Blackwell Hospital two weeks later, his memory was gone.
FRANK’S PARENTS SAT by his bedside each day. The nurses spent hours reminding him what year it was and who was president. It was all a blur to him. Friends patiently listed the names of their teachers back in high school, trying to conjure his previous life outside the hospital. René Jacob, now René Link, having married Brian Link, one of their classmates who had been sent to serve in Vietnam, visited the very first week even though they hadn’t spoken in ages. She had a baby girl she’d named Allegra. She pulled up a chair next to Frank’s hospital bed and took his hand in hers as her baby slept in a stroller. In the hopes of jogging his memory, René told him everything about the first time they’d had sex in the back of his father’s car. She described it in such detail, Frank felt himself wanting her. His sudden desire shocked him. Then René bitterly reminded him that he’d broken up with her in their senior year.
“I’m sorry,” Frank said.
“You weren’t then,” René informed him.
Even though she’d known he hadn’t loved her, she’d been crushed. “Remember when I told you I wished you would die?” René said in her soft, pretty voice. Frank thought that he might. Either way he got a chill. “I didn’t really mean it,” René admitted. “I meant I still loved you.”
Little flickers of memory came back slowly. Frank recalled the dog he’d had as a boy, a collie named Cody. He remembered his father teaching him to ski. He had flashes of the past while he was undergoing physical therapy for his shattered leg. Two months after the accident he was transferred to a rehab center. When he swam in the pool there, he’d often get an image in mind—a face, a tree, a cloud, a moment in time. All the same he felt lost, a man without a past, turned out into the world all alone.
THEY LET HIM go home in March when the weather was windy and the sky was overcast with clouds thickening over Hightop Mountain. There was a surprise party for him at the Jack Straw Bar and Grill and everyone in town showed up. Aside from a slight limp, Frank appeared to be perfectly fine. He had a scar under his eye, but that seemed to add something to his appearance, a scrim of daring. Frank thanked his parents for their forbearance and his neighbors and friends for their kindness. The one person he didn’t thank was his brother, Jesse. He didn’t remember him at all.
They showed him photos and told stories of the twins’ exploits, with Jesse always taking the starring role, but nothing came back to him. They said he had shattered the same leg that Jesse had, and wasn’t that a strange coincidence, but Frank merely shrugged off the alleged similarity of their injuries. By now he could remember his math class with Mr. Shannon in high school, but he still couldn’t remember his own brother. He could remember kissing René and wishing she was someone else, just as she’d said. He remembered his neighbors and the names of their pets, the many holidays spent at his grandparents’ house, but his brother and best friend, the person who loomed largest in his life, was gone. When Frank sat in his parents’ darkened living room and watched home movies, he didn’t recognize the boy he had always trailed after and made excuses for. People continued to swear that he and his brother now had matching limps, and that they used to joke about them being two halves of a whole, but he didn’t remember the day he’d rushed Jesse to the hospital or how worried he’d been.
The Mott family’s physician wrote a letter and Frank was excused from active duty due to his brain injury. “It’s nothing to get upset about,” the doctor explained to Frank. “Just some aftereffects of the coma. It doesn’t mean your brain isn’t perfectly good for most things.”
Still, he felt damaged. That spring he let his hair grow long. He spent hours gazing at the trees in his parents’ front yard. He was looking for answers in the way the light filtered through the leaves. He had to have several drinks before he could manage to get even a few restless hours of sleep. He usually had two or three more beers when he woke up as well. One day he drove past an abandoned farm near the Eel River and saw two women with long skirts walking barefoot down the road. They were young, and their hair was long and shiny. The clouds were billowy and the wind was blowing and all of a sudden the rain began to come down hard. Frank pulled over and offered the girls a lift. He had that scar now and his long black hair, and the girls laughed and shouted “Hey, gorgeous!” and got in. They gave him his first taste of marijuana in exchange for the ride. At the end of the road they told him to stop. They were home, they said, even though there was nothing much around but Band’s Meadow, a desolate stretch of scrub grass and brambles under the slate-gray sky. The girls got out, but Frank stayed in his parked car thinking about things he’d never thought of before he smoked the joint. He wondered if it was possible for a person to leave his body, if that’s what he’d done when he was in the coma. When the car was still there after an hour, one of the girls came back to check on him. She laughed when he kissed her, which he did because the dim afternoon was suddenly beautiful and hopeful now that this lovely creature in the car with him raised her warm, moist mouth to his. The girl said, “Go ahead. What are you waiting for?” Since he had no idea what he was waiting for, he had her there in his car, but it was utterly different from those furtive fucks with René Jacob. It was a like a dream, no strings attached, something loose and easy.
The girls were part of a group of young people who’d set up camp in the meadow. They had recently arrived from New York. They’d come to Blackwell to live on this soggy, river-drenched stretch of land, intent on creating a communal farm with one of their members’ inheritance money, not that they knew anything about farming. The men were Pete and Rattler; the young women were Jenna and Simone and Rose. Rose was the one Frank had been with in the car. She was gorgeous, with dark auburn hair and breasts that swayed under the thin fabric of her blouse. The group slept in tents and were trying their best to put up a house, so far without much luck. Pete had nearly cut off most of his thumb with a saw. Since Frank knew how to build things and had nothing better to do, he offered to help them. He drove out every day. When his mother asked where he was going, he said, “Just driving.” Because of his accident she was afraid to pressure him, but Helen knew where he was going. The whole town did.
He wound up moving out there with them, getting stoned every night, sampling mushrooms, peyote, hashish. He took to drugs like an eel to water, but he also took to physical labor. He worked like a madman on building the house, splitting logs in the sunlight with his shirt off, aching from the hard work. He was glad to be doing something—anything—that let him stop wondering about what he had forgotten. He went swimming with his new friends in the Eel River late at night, sinking into the mud and cold water, floating and looking at stars. He took them climbing on Hightop Mountain and showed off the deep, blue view. All three women fell in love with him. He had become that kind of man—edgy, a loner, the sort of mystery man women thought they could save. As it turned out, Rose and Pete were a couple, as were Rattler and Jenna, so it was only natural for Frank to be with Simone. Simone had curly dark hair and a beautiful smile. She had been at NYU before coming to Blackwell and was the one with the inherited money, the main reason she’d been invited along. She didn’t seem to know the others that well. Technically she owned the Farm, not th
at she believed in ownership. Simone didn’t talk much, and that was fine with Frank. He didn’t want to talk. He just wanted to be. There was something wrong with him, some kind of emptiness, as if he had been turned into a shadow on the night of his accident, as if he had snow in his veins rather than blood. He remembered who he was, all right. He just didn’t feel a thing.
People in town wondered if it had been wild Jesse who had kept Frank steady and if in losing the memory of his brother, he had somehow lost himself. When Frank drove into the village for supplies, they could hardly believe he was the same Frank Mott. His hair was down past his shoulders, he was deeply tanned, and his arms were huge and muscular from all that work he was doing out on the Farm. He could lift a two-hundred-pound bag of cement despite his bad leg. He always wore the same jeans and a T-shirt, along with a pair of cowboy boots he’d inherited from Rattler.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing out there?” his father said to him when they met up in the parking lot of the hardware store. Bob Starr, who owned the place, had phoned Leo to give him the heads-up that his son was in town. The loss of both his boys had worn Leo down and confused him.
In response, Frank shocked his father by embracing him. He remembered his father teaching him to ride a bike; he remembered how they would fish along the banks of the Eel River on summer afternoons. He knew that Leo Mott was a good man who deserved a better son.
“Don’t worry, Dad,” he said. “I’m fine.”
It was generally agreed that he wasn’t. He seemed so obviously different it was entirely possible that he’d fallen under a spell. Girls he’d grown up with wondered why they’d never noticed him before. Guys he’d hung out with his whole life passed him on the street without recognizing him. When he brought his new friends to the Jack Straw, nobody talked to them, and a few people grumpily whispered that New Yorkers would be better off in New York. There were little digs about the Yankees, and what a crappy team they were, as if anyone from the Farm cared about baseball or recognized that what was said was meant to be insulting. That’s what they called their commune, the Farm, not that they’d managed to grow a thing out there in that swampy acreage. Rattler got pretty smashed at the bar that night and quickly turned obnoxious, talking loudly about the little people in the world, which he meant to be a compliment to the workingmen of Blackwell, but which really got some folks’ dander up. If Frank hadn’t been a local boy, there probably would have been a fight out in the parking lot.