Never Coming Back(15)

I put the shoebox with the three photos of me in it back into the cabin. The last photo, the one of my mother in her pretty shirt, I took with me into the Subaru, and out into the night we drove, me and my young mother, seeking calm and steadiness on the winding Adirondack roads.





* * *





It took a long time to find calm, if calm is another word for the kind of exhaustion that comes after outdriving your own mind. Call it calm, call it exhaustion, the Subaru and I were north of Long Lake when my brain finally stopped buzzing and I turned the car around. We hugged the curves of the road, headlights on high because so few others were out. A small bar appeared around the bend north of Inlet—a bar I’d passed but never been to, a twinkling-lit bar—and I put the blinker on and pulled in.

Jukebox and conversation and dinging register, the bartender busy with bottles and glasses and shaker, one server maneuvering around the tables and stools with her tray lifted high. Where did bar-in-the-middle-of-nowhere people come from? Did they live nearby? Were they just passing through? Had they come upon this place like me, out of happenstance and chance?

“Gin gimlet, please,” I said to the server when she made her way over to me.

“Ice?”

I shook my head and she nodded and wove her way back to the bartender. I watched him make it, the way he upended the bottle without even looking, the way he shook and then strained it into a martini glass and placed it on the server’s tray. His fingers were long. Piano player’s hands, if it were a requirement that piano players all have long, slender fingers, which it wasn’t. Then the server was back with the gimlet. She put it on the table and tilted her head, squinting at my pushed-up sleeve.

“What’s your tattoo?” she said, and pointed at the thin, black spiraling line.

“Wire,” I said. “Holds me together when things fall apart.”

I smiled so that she would think I was joking, even though I wasn’t. I had gotten the tattoo seven years ago, when Asa died in Afghanistan.

“Huh,” she said. “Do things fall apart a lot?”

I shrugged in an ask-but-not-answer way. Unimpartable information. I nodded at her own tattoo, black words I couldn’t read on the underside of her arm. “What’s yours say?”

She twisted her arm so that half the sentence was visible.

“‘Everything was beautiful,’” I read, “‘and??—’”

“‘Nothing hurt,’” she finished. “It’s a quote from a Kurt Vonnegut novel.”

“Why that particular quote?”

She shrugged in the same way I had—I see your unanswer and I raise you mine—and threaded her way back through the tall barstools to the bartender, who was waiting for her with a new tray of drinks.

A slice of lime floated in the gimlet as if the gimlet were a tiny swimming pool. I pushed it, just enough to get it sailing. Enough of this dead man’s float, little lime. Time to swim on your own. Push. Push. Now it was bobbing around the perimeter of the glass. Good job, lime. Remember to breathe.

I looked up to see the bartender smiling. Had he been watching the lime and me and our swimming lesson this whole time? Probably. That was the kind of look he had on his face. An I know exactly what you were doing kind of look. I quit talking to the lime—the bartender had ruined things and now the little lime would never progress beyond dog-paddling—drank the gimlet and then began mushing the lime into pulp with the tiny red straw. Death by drowning. Death by pulverization. The server started in my direction once the glass was empty but the bartender said something to her and she shrugged and he came around the end of the bar.

No tray, no order pad, just him and a black T-shirt and jeans and boots like the boots my high school boyfriend used to wear. Don’t look at the boots, Clara. Look up. No, don’t look up. Look at the empty gimlet glass with the mushed-up lime pulp. Don’t say anything. But the bartender was as good at silence as I was. He knew its power. He knew I would break eventually, and eventually I did. I dragged my gaze up from the drowned-lime pulverization at the bottom of the glass and looked him in the eye.

“Another one?”

I nodded. He picked up my glass and went back behind the bar and mixed and shook and strained and poured. Bartenders were dancers, dancing three-square-foot, tightly choreographed bartending ballets. Then he returned with a bowl of buttered popcorn and the drink, two slices of lime this time. The limes could keep each other company in their gimlet swimming pool. They could sink or swim together. They would not be alone either in life or death. I didn’t try to smile or talk. I didn’t do anything other than be what I was, a tired gimlet-drinker who wanted to sit on a high stool and prevent a lime or two from drowning.

“Long day?” he said, and I nodded. The bartender gave off the same feeling as the bar itself had when it had appeared, twinkling-lit, around the curve of Route 28. Kind. Was that the word? Warm. The photo of my bright-eyed mother with that look I had never seen before on her face rose up in my head, my mother who was never coming back. Everything I had not said to her, everything she had not said to me. Yes, a long day. A pushing-back-the-lump-in-my-throat day. A willing-myself-through-it day.

The bartender put his hands on the tabletop, just the fingertips. As if the tabletop were a piano and he was getting ready to play a prelude. A soft, slow prelude. Maybe a Chopin prelude, the one I used to play to myself late, late at night in college to end practice, in one of the soundproof piano rooms in the basement of the music hall. Me and the piano and lamplight and the heavy door with the small, square-paned Triplex-glass panel. Sunshine and Brown knew where to find me late at night, if I wasn’t in my room and no one had seen me. Me and my piano and my piano hands, smoothing the keys up and down, one foot keeping the beat. The bartender’s hands reminded me of those days. They reminded me of my own hands.