“I am Manprasad,” he said.
“Manprasad,” I said. “What are your children’s names?” Again I cringed, for thinking both that maybe it was rude to ask something so intimate of a stranger as the names of his children and that I was pathetic for making up such possibly insulting things about Indian culture, which I suddenly regretted not having read more about at some point in my life. Twenty-plus years as a reader’s reader, I thought, and not a page about India. It’s only one of the most important cultures on the planet, I thought. I’ve read libraries full of books about Enon and New England and next to nothing about the experiences of the vast majority of other souls on this planet, who have never even heard of New England, never mind this insignificant self-important spot of a village, as I suddenly thought of it. I imagined how this guy would have never heard of Enon when he’d been a kid, either, and yet it had always been where he was going to end up, stuck behind a cash register, scrounging for enough money to be with his family. I wondered what the opposite would have been like for myself—what obscure little village somewhere in the middle of India waited for my miserable and astonished arrival? None, of course, I thought, since what had always awaited me was the loss of my daughter and the suffering afterward.
Manprasad leaned forward and ducked his head under the cigarette rack and pointed up at the picture of his son. “That is Swapnil.” He pointed to the picture of his daughter. “And that is Anandita.”
“What beautiful names, Mansaprad,” I said.
“Manprasad,” Manprasad said.
“Argh! I mean, Manra—”
“Manny,” Manprasad said. “I am called Manny.”
“Manny,” I said. “Your children have beautiful names.” I finished filling the last of the cups and brought them in pairs to the counter. “Can I have three soft packs of Reds, too?” Manny pulled three packs of cigarettes down from the rack. I was about to ask Manny more about his kids, but I felt strange, as if he might wonder what my motives were. I wanted to show him that I was just interested as a fellow parent. Before I thought it out, I said, “I have a daughter a little older than your daughter’s age.”
Manny said, “That is very nice.” He tapped the prices of the coffees and the cigarettes into the cash register.
“Well, had,” I said, wanting nothing more at that moment than to be safely back on my couch, smoking, savoring the flood tide of the next dose of pills, savoring the anticipation of narcotic peace. “I had a daughter. Kate. But I lost her about a year ago. About”—I counted—“about seven months ago, actually.” I was shocked that it was only seven months. It felt like years already, like I’d been in mourning for years.
“I am sorry for your loss,” Manny said.
“Ah, it’s all right—” I almost called him “man” again, which seemed as if it could have been a further contraction of his name in a different life—Manny truncated to Man after, say, years of cordiality had deepened into a real friendship between us. The image of Manny and me sitting on milk crates across from each other, behind the cash register, playing cribbage all day and talking in the shorthand we’d settled into over the years, and laughing and breaking whenever he had to ring up a customer.
“That is thirty-one dollars and fifty cents,” he said, and instead of the picture of us being friends and him helping me get through the grief of losing Kate and me helping him wait out the arrival of his wife and children, I found myself irritated at his reserve. Good for you, Crosby, I thought. So now he’s the inscrutable Indian. All the better; he’s not even that kind of Indian. You’ve managed a two-for-one special on bigotry. I pulled the plug of old, dirty ones and fives I had in my pants pocket and started to count out the money. I felt awful for ruining both of our days. What knowing creature, passing overhead, able to see the two of us through the roof of the Red Orchard, standing there, face-to-face, exchanging money and coffee and tobacco, wary, suspicious, provoked, could look down and see us for our better selves?
I had only twenty-two dollars and thirty-five cents.
“I’m sorry, man—Manny,” I said. “I thought I had more. Or the stuff would be less. Um, how much are the generic cigarettes, the red ones?”
“Four seventy-nine. Five for twenty.”
“Okay, I need to give you these other smokes back and can I get three of those?”
“Yes, very well.”
I noticed the piles of newspapers. I realized I had lost track of all current events—local, national, international, all of it. Next to the Boston papers was the latest copy of Enon’s weekly newspaper, The Daily Bread. The cover story was about the prizewinning garden owned and tended by a local woman whose yard I had taken care of for a brief time several years earlier. Her name was Wallace. I had the urge to study the paper, to read all of the local tidbits and details about town meetings and library events and bake sales and the police blotter—all of the current village minutiae, attached to familiar names. I took a copy of the paper and put it on the counter.
“This, too,” I said. “And can I get a box or something to carry the coffees in?”
“Yes, they are there by the counter,” Manny said. I hurried to the counter and picked up one of the flimsy cardboard coffee caddies and snapped it open and put the coffees in each of its four corners. I gave Manny the money and put a pack of cigarettes in each of my back pockets and wedged one in between the coffees. Tears started out of my eyes and I wiped them off with the back of my shirtsleeve.
“Phew,” I said. “I’m, ah—I’m just sorry for bothering you today, man.” I slid the box of coffees off the counter and cradled it onto my forearm. The bottom of the box was too thin to support the coffees and they wobbled.
“You have not bothered me, Mr. Crosby,” Manny said. “Let me get the door for you.” He came around the register and opened the door. He didn’t say anything about the fact that neither my supposed coworkers nor their pickup truck were anywhere to be seen.
I wiped my eyes and my nose and said, “Argh, my crew must’ve gone on to the job. Nice guys. It’s just up the street, though.” I lifted my chin in the direction back toward my house. “Little walk back will do me good. A few deep breaths.”
“Yes, Mr. Crosby, a few deep breaths will be quite good, I think,” Manny said. “And thank you for asking so kindly about my family.”
“I do hope they come soon, Manny,” I said. I stepped off the curb in front of the door, onto the parking lot. “Okay. Have a good day.” Manny nodded and went back into the store. I walked across the lot, the coffees tipping in different directions. Halfway back to my house one of the coffees tipped out of the box. Instead of letting it drop, I tried to catch it and all the coffees dropped onto the sidewalk. Three of them popped their lids when they hit the ground and the coffee spattered across the sidewalk and steamed in the cold. The fourth cup stayed sealed and coffee pulsed out of the small opening in the lid, the way blood would come out of an animal or a person, I thought, because it looked like it was being pumped through the hole, as if by a heart. I stooped and picked up the cup, which was still three-quarters full, and the pack of cigarettes I’d stuffed between the coffees, which was soaked but which I figured I could dry out by putting the cigarettes on a cookie sheet in the oven, if I could find one, if they’d gotten wet with coffee. I left the other cups and the sodden box and the spilled coffee steaming on the sidewalk and walked back to the house as fast as I could without breaking into a run.
9.
IT IS THE CASE IN PARTICLE PHYSICS THAT WHEN TWO PHOTONS are collided together in a particle accelerator, new particles are created in the collision. As I marched home along the old railroad tracks in the western part of Enon Swamp one freezing dawn, after another night of labored and aimless roving, I thought about Kate on her bicycle and the car hitting her. Instead of her and the bike being pulled up underneath the car and mangled, I imagined an explosion and a burst of light out of which three cars and three bikes clattered, and three Kates tumbled, too, each dressed in the same
cutoffs and polo shirt over the same bathing suit, wearing the same Red Sox cap. One Kate somersaulted onto the sidewalk. Another sailed into the brush. The third vaulted over one of the newly minted cars and landed on her back across the hood of another. Each girl lay dazed for a moment, then sat up and looked around, frowning at the scene, fizzing with electricity.
Then the Kates saw one another. They gasped and said in unison, “Kate?”
The girls approached one another, this one limping, that one nursing an elbow, the other patting a goose egg on her forehead, and met in a circle. It looked like a girl in a fun-house mirror except that all three images were really girls, not reflections. They touched one another’s faces, and patted one another’s hair, and asked if the others were okay, and said, “I guess so, but who are you?”
Instead of the woman who struck Kate on her knees, wailing, and her three kids screeching in the back of the minivan, there were three of her and twelve kids rioting all over the road at seeing one another’s mirror images stampeding around them. There was mayhem when the police and ambulances and fire trucks showed up, but eventually all the Kates checked out and, after agreeing with the cops what a bizarre coincidence it was that identical triplets with identical kids driving identical cars had struck identical triplets riding identical bikes, we all went home, where I was able finally to distinguish the original Kate from her two new selves, because both new Kates still had the moles on their chins that the real Kate had had removed. I imagined us laughing and joking about bunk beds and how money was going to be really tight now, but how wonderful it was to have three daughters.
“My embarrassment of Kates!” I imagined myself saying.
If you stood the three Kates in line, the original Kate first, and looked at them left to right, you’d see that their eyes went from nearly stark white to anthracite black, in an even gradation, from eye to eye, girl to girl. The original Kate’s iridescent right eye had no color in it except for the faint shadows created by the traceries of its iris and glowed when reached by even the slightest source of light. Her left eye was mostly white as well, with just a reflection of blue in its leftmost curve. The next Kate, we called her Katie the Second, had a right eye the color of a robin’s egg, with speckles of moss green and brown in it. Her left eye was brown but for a speckling of blue along its right rim. Katie the Third’s right eye was dark brown with a grain or two of gold, and her left eye was pitch-black. It seemed as if either the original Kate’s white eye was a shooting star with a white-and-blue-and-green-and-gold tail trailing across the girls’ eyes back to the blackness of space, or as if Katie Number Three’s obsidian eye was a black hole pulling all the color and light toward itself through the others.
When the three Kates came home, we turned on the radio and danced in a circle around the living room and sang and cheered at our great fortune. By the next morning, though, there were signs that something was wrong. The girls awoke with headaches that got worse by the hour. They began to have nosebleeds. The original Katie was cold all the time, even though it was summer. She sat by a sunny window wrapped in wool blankets. She made me turn the heat up to ninety and spent the morning shivering and sipping hot, milky tea. I found Katie Number Two in the kitchen eating spoonfuls of salt and sucking on a handful of coins she’d scooped from the change jar. Katie Number Three could not stand the heat or the light, and I found her in the basement, lying in the deep freezer, which she had lined with a sheet so she wouldn’t stick to the frost. All three girls died as the sun set, and instead of mourning one daughter, right away, I gained a night of fraudulent joy at the cost of losing three the next day.
10.
IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF APRIL AND I HADN’T BEEN ABLE TO FIND Frankie for two weeks. I was nearly out of drugs. I had only a dozen painkillers left and a few muscle relaxants. I could string along what was left with whiskey, but even being as parsimonious as I could manage, I would be out of stuff within two days. My hand no longer hurt, I just wanted the drugs. The only solution I could think of was to go out that night and see if I could find houses without alarms and maybe some prescription bottles on kitchen counters or bedroom dressers or nightstands. It occurred to me that Mrs. Wallace, the woman whose lawn I’d cut and whose award-winning roses I’d read about in the Enon Daily Bread, might have drugs in her house.
Mrs. Wallace and her husband were a prosperous, retired couple, the parents of five prosperous grown children, three of whom, according to the article, were lawyers, like their father, the other two consultants. The children lived variously in Manhattan; Washington, D.C.; London; and on Beacon Hill in Boston.
I had tended the Wallaces’ yard for a summer, when Kate must have been eight or nine. Mrs. Wallace was then already fully wrapped in a serene counterpane of Valium more or less every waking moment. Her youngest child, a daughter named Libby, had moved into a townhouse Mrs. Wallace and her husband had purchased for her in Georgetown. I knew this only because, even though my impression was that the family had never been what I would have called close, Mrs. Wallace had had some sense that the family had always been so, and that the departure of the last of the children she had borne marked the end of something vital and essential in her life, and she managed to convey this indirectly during one of a handful of lectures about my poor landscaping skills, which culminated in her firing me at the end of the summer, before the fall leaf cleanup season (right when I stood to make good money from her, since her property consisted of eight acres, on which there grew twenty-six mature maple trees, a nice mix of sugars, which dropped their leaves early, and silvers, which always held their leaves anywhere from a week to three weeks later than the sugars and always meant a second cleanup). On the afternoon when I realized she was on some kind of sedative, she was chastising me for not mowing the lawn short enough.
“I don’t like my lawn to look like a shag carpet, Mr. Crosby,” she said. “For reasons that I should think you might find obvious.” She had the plodding humorlessness of someone who got what she wanted through sheer will rather than intelligence or grace. I scarcely ever saw her smile or heard her laugh, and when she did laugh it had a tone of mirthless superiority. She was dressed in what I always called to myself her yard-work clothes, which consisted of an immaculate white, short-sleeved sort of oxford shirt tucked into a pressed pair of high-waisted women’s khakis that ended above her ankles and a pair of old, scuffed brown leather loafers. She was a slight, trim woman and had let her hair go white. She also wore a pair of white gardening gloves and as she lectured me, she had one hand on a hip; in the other she held a fistful of zinnias she had tugged up from one flower bed or another, surely to the dismay of Suki, a Japanese guy who took care of a bunch of gardens in Enon at the time, including Mrs. Wallace’s. (It was said that Suki had been a fisherman in Japan but had jumped ship during World War II, somehow ending up in Stonepoint, and that he lived in an old tackle shed next to a pier under the Stonepoint Bridge. I don’t know if any of that was true. He spoke no English, although he must have understood some, and absolutely refused to have anything to do with us landscapers. The most I ever managed to get out of him once, when I needed to know if I could spread fertilizer on a patch of lawn I’d reseeded near some especially delicate-looking flowers, was “Fucking Yankee!” and I left it at that, because that made me like him.)
I said, “Certainly, Mrs. Wallace. I usually keep the grass a bit longer this time of the summer, because it’s so hot and there’s so little rain and the grass can end up burning out.”
Mrs. Wallace stared directly into my eyes and hesitated a moment before answering me, and that was when I realized she was on some kind of prescription that, as the guys in the crew used to say, smoothed out the choke.
“I had the idea that it was your job, Mr. Crosby, both to keep the grass short and to make sure it did not burn out, as you put it.”
The article in The Daily Bread had quoted Mrs. Wallace as saying that it was going to be hard for her to tend properly to her flowers because her
husband was coming home from the hospital. If she still used Valium, and if her husband had had surgery, which no doubt meant a prescription for painkillers, theirs would be a likely house to visit. And even though it had been several years since I’d tended their lawn, I knew the property and I knew that they did not have any sort of a security system, that that was something in which they’d have taken pride, since their home and their village were places where one did not need such things. This was a sentiment shared by many of Enon’s older citizens. And it was true that no public transportation ran to or through Enon, nor any major roads (and there were no signs on those roads indicating Enon’s existence), and that no one from outside the village—and, in fact, not many inside it—would even be aware of homes like the Wallaces’, which were not visible from the street nor indicated by mailboxes. The way to their home was a seemingly untended dirt road at an opening in the woods along a country lane off Main Street. I realized, too, that I could approach their home from the back if I went through the woods that began past Wild Man’s Meadow.
I set out at midnight. It was Thursday. I dressed in black jeans and a dark blue hooded sweatshirt and wore work boots. I brought a pair of orange rubber dishwashing gloves so there wouldn’t be any fingerprints, a nearly corroded can of 3-in-One oil from one of my grandfather’s old toolboxes, for oiling hinges so the doors wouldn’t squeak, and a roll of duct tape for taping up deadlatches. The night was damp and chilly, but mild for April. Pools of ground fog had formed in the depressions in Wild Man’s Meadow, and mist flowed across the road between the field and the swamp. There was salt in the pith of the wind. I climbed over the stone wall bordering the field along the road and walked abreast of it, toward Cherry Street. The wall and the branches of the white pines planted at intervals of fifty or so feet along its entire length gave me cover in case any cars passed. Only one vehicle—a truck—drove by, very slowly, and in the fog its headlights made it seem like a submarine probing along the floor of a black ocean trench, searching for signs of life at such unsettling and inhospitable depths. For a moment, I was a frowning fish with a mouthful of serrated teeth, straining for a better look at the metal animal pushing along behind its starry lamps.