Shelter in Place by Alexander Maksik Page B

the judge. “I am no more insane now than I was that day.”
    Meanwhile I did nothing at all.
    I still hadn’t spoken to her. I waited and I watched the news. Local. National.
    Piece by piece, my father sold his workshop. Then he put our house up for sale, got into his Wagoneer and drove.
    â€œJoey,” he said when he called to tell me, his voice full of tin, “I rented a little place. Not far from the beach. I wish you’d come up. It’s where I live now. Where we both do. Me and your mother.”
    I was looking at Tess’s chair.
    â€œJoey?”
    â€œYeah, I’m here,” I told him. “I’m here.”
    â€œCome up?”
    â€œI will, Dad. I’m on my way,” I said. “I’m nearly there.”
    â€œWinter’s coming.” He was half-drunk.
    â€œIt’s only just fall.”
    â€œI can feel it in the mornings,” he said.
    I left Tess in front of the motel. She was alone in the parking lot watching me go. A bright day. Cool. We’d made promises, but the farther along that highway I drove, the more certain I was that I’d never see her again. She must have been relieved to be rid of me. It was too much. All that weight. All the joy gone. I’d stolen it. Me and my family.
    If I were Tess? I’d have been thrilled to watch Joey March drive away. Thank God. Good fucking riddance to you and your crazy, murderous family and your fucking bird. Your
bird.
Who
cares
? Stand up and live. Enough with your whining and your moping and all your boring sadness and your exquisite sensitivity and your lunatic mother and your selfish sister and your pathetic father all alone in his prison-town dump. Good riddance, asshole. I’d have been dancing on the bar.
    No matter what she saw in me, or what she said, how could she not have thought,
Good riddance
?

26.
    A nd if she didn’t then, she certainly has since. Days and days when I have been inert, pinned to the floor, unable to see. Days throughout our years, throughout our homes—Cannon Beach, White Pine, Seattle, and at last, here, in our house on the coast of our clearing. Days when all Tess wanted was to play, to go wandering our beaches, our woods.
    â€œPlease, Joe.”
    When she wanted to laugh, when she wanted to fuck, when she wanted to wrestle, when she wanted to sing. Get up and do something about it, whatever
it
is, whatever people do.
    But all I’ve ever known to do was run until my heart pounded it from my veins, or talk to Tess.
    Or, in my way, to Claire.
    It’s the only medicine I’ve ever wanted.
    Tess said, “Please, Joe.”
    This is Seattle, years after moving there from White Pine. Years after abandoning our war, after we’d become adults, bar owners, earners. It is morning and I have woken up so heavy that I can feel it in my lips. From bed I watch Tess singing to herself, naked, packing her bag.
    It has been difficult lately. We are working too hard. We’ve gone a little numb, lost so much of our former selves. And Tess wants to be away. Everything is arranged. We have a cabin on Whidbey Island for the weekend.
    It has been a long time since I’ve seen her so light.
    I want nothing more than to make her happy. I want nothing more than to leave with her, to stand and pick her up and spin her around.
    But I cannot.
    I will not do what she asks. I do not want the advice or medicine of others.
    And when she sees my face, she closes her eyes and takes a long breath. I know the expression. She is out of patience. She is out of sympathy.
    â€œPlease, Joe,” she says, beginning to cry.
    But I cannot.
    And this time she goes anyway. Without me.
    As well she should.

27.
    S o I left Tess in that Cannon Beach parking lot and drove on with the image of her in torn jeans and that black sweater she loved.
    And I was sorry to have done it to her. I was sorry to have drawn her down into our ugly muck. I was ashamed. I felt I had done her some