“Take it easy,” she said, reaching for my hands. “I’m not calling you an idiot. I’m just worried. I feel like I sit here watching you set yourself on fire day after day. You’re too proud to admit you’re in pain, so you’re doing more damage instead. Like some kind of—well, penance, almost. Something that only hurts you over and over. How am I supposed to stand back and watch that?”
I pulled my hands away, scowling even as my body cringed away from her, as if it feared what she was saying.
“You have no right,” I began, “no right—”
As I sputtered, trying to get the sounds out without losing control, Dylan upended his cup. The lid came loose, sending a wave of red juice over his arms and legs, the white carpet. Looking at it, and at us, he began to wail.
“Oh, shit,” Beth sighed. “Shit, shit, shit. Sorry, hon.” She touched my shoulder. “Just wait here, okay?”
But I didn’t wait. As she hurried into the kitchen, I stood up and walked out the door.
It was inventory time at the store. I spent my days in the back room, holding a clipboard as I counted the boxes, making note of what had expired, what needed to be ordered, what we had somehow accumulated too much of, like gummy worms. Although I wouldn’t have said so to anyone else, it was almost soothing, this responsibility for categories and numbers, for imposing order on the universe. I kept my mind fixed on the columns of handwritten figures, as if I were holding my breath, thinking about this task and only this task.
Most days, the stranger would invite me up to the game room to play chess during my lunch hour, and in that, too, I was brisk and resolute. I still lost, but my moves were crisp and decisive, and that counted for something, I thought.
Twice, I came home to find the light on the answering machine blinking. The first time I pressed the button, John’s voice emerged, steady and cheerful, telling me he’d gotten the horses, two mares, and he’d be glad if I came over to try them out.
The second time, it was Beth. She was sorry; these things had been on her mind for a long time; she’d wanted to help; obviously the words had come out wrong. After I listened, I stood there for a moment, then erased the message. When I’d hung up, I could sense my grandmother hovering behind me like an owl, blinking, watching me with her watery eyes while she leaned on the walker my father had forced her to get. I turned away and ignored her.
In the store, I combed through the shelves, homing in on dented cans and torn packets, hauling them out to the dumpster until my hip ached and my face was covered with dust. First Loretta Lynn, then Patsy Cline sang out of the cassette player. I warbled loudly along with Patsy as I dragged boxes toward the door, refusing to acknowledge the stinging in my shoulder.
Eventually, I emerged to find Martin standing by the dumpster, eyeing the boxes and trash bags. “Dispensing justice with an even hand, I see.”
“As always.” I wiped the dust from my eyes with the back of my wrist.
“Mind if I bring some stuff down and work on the porch?”
I hefted a box into the metal bin and shrugged. “Do what you want.”
I’ve got your memory…Patsy sang woefully. Or…has it got me? I hit the fast-forward button impatiently; sometimes, the woman sounded like she’d never had a moment of happiness in her life.
Martin’s “stuff,” it turned out, was a bag full of parts for the mystery machine. I paused on my way out the door with a full garbage bag, looking down at the jumble of metal.
“It’s a bicycle,” I said.
He moved down into a squat, holding a washer up to the light. “I’m not saying anything. You’ll just have to wait and see.” Reaching into his back pocket, he pulled out a pair of reading glasses I had never seen, pushing them onto his nose. They made him look worldlier, I thought, almost sage-like.
After watching him for a moment, I sighed and sat down, propping the bag against the wall.
It was the first time I had truly been still all week. I folded my hands and felt my back relax.
The stranger had found a guitar in the game room a few days earlier, and the sound of it drifted down the hill. I didn’t want to tell him he could be heard, although I knew I probably should. The meandering tunes always made me imagine him as a student, just like any other, sitting outside a bar or café in his mysterious city and picking out a tune, surrounded by laughing friends, an admiring future wife, people smoking and drinking merrily around him, beckoning to passersby on the street. There was something about the vision that left me unable to shake the feeling that it was real, that this really had been him in earlier and happier days, the plucked notes floating through the night air, soft and invisible, like seeds from a dandelion.
“What are we going to do about him?”
Martin was glancing over the parts that surrounded him, looking contentedly mystified. “Who?”
I nodded toward the hostel. “Him.”
He followed my gaze, then looked at me over the rims of the glasses. Picking up a bolt, he rolled it between his thumb and forefinger. “You know, I worked in a pet shop once, before everything. We didn’t name the animals, because the theory was that that way we wouldn’t get attached to them.” He seemed to wait for me to answer. When I didn’t, he said, “It didn’t work, in case you were wondering.”
I let this pass, partly because I was still taking in the words “before everything.” Everyone knew about the stretch of years when Martin had left, although no one had ever asked him directly where he had gone during that time. I had been young then, too young to hear more than mutterings or understand what they meant. If anyone had ever tried to press him for details, he hadn’t given any, and he and I had certainly never talked about it.
“I sometimes wish you weren’t so smart,” I said instead.
“And I,” he replied, “am grateful every day that you are.” Reaching for two hollow bars, he held their flattened ends together to see if the bolt would fit through the hole, but it didn’t. He scratched his head and put the bars back down.
“I’m sorry,” I said, looking down into my palms. “I feel like I haven’t been as kind to you lately as you are to me.”
“Well, I tend to agree with you, to be honest. But it’s okay. We all have our rough times, I know.” He sat back on his heels. “Anything you want to talk about?”
“No, I’m okay. But I do want to figure out what we should do about—”
“Danya. Yes, I know.” He found a washer that matched the bolt, but closed his hand around it. “I don’t think there’s anything to be done,” he said after a moment. “He’s an adult, so it’s not like anybody can force him to go anywhere. And I’m not going to kick him out. As far as I’m concerned, there’ll always be a room here for someone who needs it. He’s not much of a burden, and he’s good about helping me out.” He sat back and stretched out his legs. “Sometimes, I’m tempted to ask if he wants to take over the place so I can go riding off into the sunset.”
“I’m serious.”
“Yeah, I know. I just don’t know what else to tell you. Wish I did.” He folded his legs back under him. “We’re all trying to do what we think is best.”
The isolated notes continued to reach us, sliding by as the invisible presence uphill felt around for the tune. I imagined his bowed head and lowered eyelids, the concentration in his face. The pictures, the ones from my searching about Uzbekistan, appeared in my memory, and I found myself looking over my shoulder toward the hill that led to the road, the one that ran past the prison camp. A thought came into my mind, and I turned it over, pondering it without fully understanding its shape yet.