She didn’t look long; she had seen him as soon as we arrived and knew who he was to me.
“Does he always wear a suit?” she asked me.
“Only on special occasions.”
She gasped. She held her hand to her mouth as if that could hide it. Only then did I understand how she had interpreted “special occasion.” I began to laugh, harder than I should have.
“It’s not what you think,” I told her. “All we’re doing is driving to Chicago.” When that failed to calm her properly, I promised her that no other special occasion had been planned, or considered.
She moved away from the window. Her hands were confused again, twirling and tugging frantically.
“Is he coming in?”
“I asked him to, but he said he preferred to wait in the car.”
Her instincts for proper behavior were off; she had no system of rules to apply. It was rude not to have him come in, but perhaps it was worse not to know how to respond if he did. I saw her worrying about where to sit and what to say, and how I would feel if she made no effort at all.
“Chicago,” she said.
“It was my idea. I’ve never been.”
“And do you have to go? I’m going to worry every minute about what may happen to you.”
She was breathing deeply, with her right hand clenched tightly in front of her lips as if she was trying to work her way to anger in order not to cry.
I went to close the curtains, afraid of what Isaac would think if he saw us; but he was no longer in the car. I turned and caught sight of him just as his form was coming up the porch. My mother opened the door for him before I knew what to say.
“Welcome,” she said. “My name is Audrey.”
A portion of every minute of Isaac’s life was spent acting, and so I shouldn’t have been surprised that when a performance was needed he could easily fill whatever role was called for. Isaac entered as either the embodiment or a caricature of an English gentleman. He bent slightly forward when he introduced himself, and there was a hint of the accent I hadn’t heard in months.
“My name is Isaac,” he said. “It’s a privilege to meet you.”
I kept from laughing for my mother’s sake and Isaac’s. They were both performing; I couldn’t have asked them to do more than that. Isaac complimented the house; “magnificent” was the word he chose. My mother downplayed the praise and then described the house as late Victorian, a phrase that I had never heard her use before, and which could only have been the result of having Isaac around. The house was as late Victorian as his accent. Only in the shortened history of the Midwest could these affectations thrive.
My mother suggested I take Isaac on a tour of the house while she prepared tea for us. I had lived in that house my entire life and never been asked to give a tour of it. It felt like going through a wedding album while the wedding was still going on: the past was all over the walls, in pictures and souvenirs, but because I was never far away, I rarely thought of them as markers of a time that had ended.
I led Isaac up the stairwell.
“I don’t know why, but every house in Laurel has black-and-white photos by the stairs,” I said.
At the very top were the only two pictures we had of my mother’s parents, both of whom died shortly after I was born.
“We’re the opposite of your family.” I pointed to the pictures, which were shot from too great a distance. “We don’t go back much further than this.”
“Look at the size of this house,” he said. “You’re only just beginning.”
Briefly, I saw the house through his eyes. It was built for a large family, for multiple generations to live together at the same time, and perhaps someday it would fulfill that design, but never with me.
I sent Isaac downstairs while I packed. I didn’t linger over anything in my room, which had grown sparer and sparer over the years as I quietly unwound my attachments, carting boxes of clothes and photographs into the basement, where I knew they were safe, until all that was left was a bed, a bookcase, and a desk that looked out onto a large backyard overrun with weeds. I had never made any serious plans to leave Laurel, and yet long before Isaac, a part of me was gone.
It took me a few minutes to pack. When I returned to the living room, Isaac and my mother had already started their tea. They were hardly speaking; both were focused on getting their cups to their lips without spilling. The act had gone on long enough. I kissed my mother on the cheek and whispered that it was time for us to leave. She held on to my wrist and whispered back: “Helen, please be careful who sees you. If not for yourself, then for his sake.”
ISAAC
When I woke the next morning, Isaac was standing over me, nudging me gently in the back with his foot. The courtyard was littered with still-drunk soldiers, many of whom had fallen asleep with empty bottles and their guns tucked in their arms. I had fallen asleep listening to a group of them debate whether they were revolutionaries or liberators. They seemed to split evenly down the middle until, finally, one pointed out that there was no rule saying they couldn’t be both. “We are revolutionary liberators,” he said, and to celebrate their new titles, they banged their bottles together, finished what was left in them, and then tossed them as far as they could over the hotel walls, to shatter on the road, where most children and many women walked barefoot.
I followed Isaac out of the courtyard. That we were leaving just before dawn, when there were still a few stars left on the northern edge of the sky, gave me hope that he had decided our life of war had gone on long enough. I had a general idea of where we were in the country, and I felt confident that if we had a car we could reach at least three different borders by midday, and that Joseph would be too concerned with his army’s next advance to chase us. I had dreamed of big cities my entire life, but what I wanted for us was to find the smallest village possible — an idyllic, forgotten hamlet, like the ones we had passed in the foothills, but near a river or, better yet, within earshot of a waterfall. There was so much vast, empty space across the continent that I had no reason to believe it wasn’t possible. We just had to find one of the dozens, or maybe even hundreds of hidden pockets where no one cared about borders.
I thought I had found a way to explain to Isaac why we had to leave. I was going to tell him that this wasn’t the fight he expected, and that there were other things that could be done with our lives but to do them we had to get out while we could. I whispered his name as I walked up the main road.
“Isaac,” I said, but, rather than turn around, he held up his hand and continued walking.
I was anxious but not scared. It was the best time to be alone in a village. There were a few signs of early-morning life in some of the houses farther up the road, and it was possible to believe at that hour that life here would go on as normal, that tea would be made and bread baked; men would go off to tend their fields while the women gathered water and dressed their children for school until the sun reached its peak and everyone retreated indoors to wait out the heat.
We continued up the main road in silence, listening to the last roosters left alive cackle at one another, until we reached the bronze fist where Joseph had delivered his speech a few days earlier. Once there, Isaac turned to me and said:
“Now we wait.”
“For what?”
He motioned with his finger for me to stop talking.
• • •
The sun was above the horizon when a man with a small boy and two donkeys trailing behind them emerged from the footpath that branched off the main road.
“This is where we say goodbye,” Isaac told me. I looked at the man and child closely. They were clearly father and son, with the same wide, sloping forehead; on the child it seemed to take too much space, but it gave the man a gentle, almost feminine quality.