Universal Harvester(56)
It’s not that nobody ever gets away: that’s not true. It’s that you carry it with you. It doesn’t matter that the days roll on like hills too low to give names to; they might be of use later, so you keep them. You replay them to keep their memory alive. It feels worthwhile because it is.
*
What will you do now? Lisa asks Sarah Jane, off camera.
I guess I’ll just go back home, Sarah Jane replies.
You were putting the house up for sale, says Lisa.
No serious buyers, says Sarah Jane. The agent says it could take months.
Lisa’s throat convulses when she tries to stifle her sobs. Sarah Jane’s face, in the frame, shows compassion, empathy, and hurt. Her time with Lisa will seem like a strange dream of middle age in later years: some people take their savings and travel to Europe when they feel restless, but it costs so much to travel, certainly more than the monthly income from a single video rental store.
It’ll be all right, she says. We’ll both be all right. She reaches out with her right hand, but Lisa does not reach out to take it.
Lisa’s voice is desperate, lost.
Thank you for trying to help, she says.
Of course, says Sarah Jane, rising, walking with her arms open toward the tripod and then past it. If you look close you can see from the gentleness of her stride that she would have made a good mother.
The copy of Burnt Offerings onto which this scene was transferred is at the Goodwill in Ames next to the Hy-Vee on Lincoln Way. It was left there in the late summer of 2002. It sits on a shelf now next to several dozen other movies like it, back near the books; it’s an early VHS, housed in an oversized black plastic shell that’s grown old and is cracking along the edge. No one is ever going to take it home and watch it. It will probably be there forever.
*
There was no RV park in Tama; the nearest one was Shady Oaks, in Marshalltown, and people who parked there had no need to venture further than a highway stop for supplies. So Lisa was surprised to see the Greener Pastures coming, advancing steadily down the street. She stood at her window on the second floor and she watched; she couldn’t make out the faces of the people inside, but she could imagine them, how they probably looked. The vehicle itself, in the slow pace of the straight line it followed and the cheery tan and yellow of its camper shell, appeared like a seeker after something, certain of its quest but unsure of the path.
Inside the cab they were still arguing. “What exactly are you going to say?” Abby asked for the third time since leaving Collins.
“I’ll figure it out,” said James. “I figured out Jeremy Heldt.”
“I don’t know what you figured out,” Abby said. “He told you to leave him alone.”
“He knew where she was,” James said, and though his timing was in their usual fraternal block-and-parry mode, his tone was soft, nurturing. He was guarding something, Abby wasn’t sure what. “That’s the giveaway.”
“He told you not to come here,” she said.
“And then he copied and pasted the address from someplace on his hard drive right into the e-mail.”
“It’s right up there,” Ed said from behind the wheel, pointing. They all looked at the house: it was in a nice neighborhood, full of houses that had been built long ago, more ornately decorated than the farmsteads outside Collins or the red-brick duplexes that lined the new streets of Nevada. This one was yellow with brown trim.
“I wouldn’t trade the farmhouse for this,” Abby said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with people.” She looked through the passenger’s-side window of her father’s RV with her brow knitted, scrutinizing the little yellow house like something excavated from an archaeological dig. I wished I could have made it last forever: the great hulking machine drawing up to the curb, parking so slowly, not wanting to scrape up the hubcaps, aligning itself and then correcting the angle and finally coming to a stop; the young woman looking out the window, fixing her gaze; and then the whole family, spilling out into the daylight like moles from a hill blasted open, blinking in the bright sun, looking expectantly toward my front porch and then upward to where I stood, happy to have company, smiling and waving like a little girl.
From the window, I couldn’t hear what they were saying, of course, but I could see their lips moving. As a child I developed a habit of watching people’s mouths when they spoke. In restaurants, for example, with too much ambient noise to make out the words without some visual cue, my father busy with the menu, keeping his idle inventory of which towns called them hotcakes and which ones held firm at pancakes; but my eye would be on the old woman with her grown-up son two tables away, her eyebrows rising a little as she tried not to telegraph her worry. You should get a vacation, she was saying, I was sure of it. You can’t miss a word like vacation.
Our lives, of course, were in some ways like a vacation that never ended; Dad would find work at the local bank and diligently put in his forty hours, but as soon as he picked me up from school we’d be off on our expeditions: to the shelters, to the hospitals, to the college campuses and the storefront churches. When the options were all exhausted we’d just move on; there are banks everywhere, and if the bank didn’t need another accountant, the grain elevator might, or the hog lot, or the fish hatchery.
Wisconsin was where we stopped heading east: we’d spent time in Missouri, and in Kansas, and in Colorado and South Dakota. From there we’d tried Minnesota; Dad had word that the group was active around St. Paul. But Mom wasn’t in St. Paul, and she wasn’t in Rochester, and while Madison had looked promising—so many Jesus people on the college campuses back then, their feet bare in spring, long hair down to the middle of their backs—the trail had grown cold.