The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Meline

  Marten Knockers

  Meline

  Marten Knockers

  Mrs. Mendelbaum

  Jocelyn

  Meline

  Marten Knockers

  Meline

  Marten Knockers

  Meline

  Marten Knockers

  Meline

  Jocelyn

  Mrs. Mendelbaum

  Meline

  Marten Knockers

  Meline

  Jocelyn

  Meline

  Marten Knockers

  Meline

  Jocelyn

  Meline

  Marten Knockers

  Jocelyn

  Meline

  Marten Knockers

  Mrs. Mendelbaum

  Marten Knockers

  Meline

  Jocelyn

  Meline

  Jocelyn

  Meline

  Jocelyn

  Meline

  Jocelyn

  Meline

  Also by Polly Horvath

  Copyright

  To Claudia Logan, my best friend

  MELINE

  IT WAS A DARK NIGHT when I left my home in Hyannis Port. A social worker came to the door for me. My twenty-four-year-old babysitter, Tiffany, blond, recently dropped out of college and at loose ends, not terribly bright, but well heeled like most of the girls in this town, was too excited by it all to leave. She stood behind me while the social worker told me that my parents had been killed in a train wreck in Zimbabwe along with my aunt and uncle. That Jocelyn, my cousin, had survived and was on her way to my Uncle Marten’s house in British Columbia. That he had been named legal guardian for both of us. Jocelyn was sixteen and I was fifteen, and he would take us in until we were old enough to go to college.

  “Or whatever,” said Tiffany, who had decided to join in at this point, shrugging. Up until that moment she had been breathing on my neck adenoidally with her mouth open. Her breath felt as if it had condensed there, and when I put my hand up unconsciously to wipe off my neck I accidentally hit her in the mouth. She didn’t yelp with pain or take a step back but continued breathing loudly as if in a trance, completely mesmerized by the recent developments and my sudden misfortune. I had a feeling that when she got home she would phone all her friends and say, “It was so cool, her parents were, like, wiped out, and this woman came and, like, totally took her away. And like, I get paid now from the estate. Isn’t that totally weird?”

  You would think that when you have just found out your parents have been killed, you wouldn’t be thinking things like this, catty thoughts about your babysitter, that you would be beyond noticing, but although it’s as if some part of you is suddenly unplugged, all your old responses stand you in good stead. You continue to be yourself, to think the sorts of thoughts you have always thought. Mean Meline.

  The social worker had a kind face. She deftly got rid of Tiffany when she realized she wasn’t going to be a comfort to me. She walked me through my options, letting me know that everything in the apartment was mine now. That my parents’ lawyer would be taking care of details for me, along with my uncle. That she was only here to get me to British Columbia and that this could happen whenever I liked. Right now, in fact. She had looked into flights. We could fly tonight to join my cousin, who would be arriving in Vancouver the next morning, if that seemed like a good idea. Or I could stay on a few days in Hyannis Port. That I could take anything I liked or decide what I wanted shipped to me later. The rest the executor would arrange to have sold. I looked around the apartment. How did I know what to take into a future I didn’t understand?

  “Of course, your uncle has a house full of furniture. I have spoken to him. He has a bedroom already furnished for you. But if you’d prefer your own things…”

  I saw the rocker that I’d squeezed into with my mother for as long as we could both fit. I looked at my bed, just a piece of foam on a small platform. Then I thought of my mother’s plate collection. How she’d hunted down Fiestaware. How she said over time it would increase in value. And her grandmother’s silver in the drawer. What would she want me to save? Would she still think any of it was important in light of recent developments? All these things that were precious heirlooms. All these things that were here when she no longer was. All these things sheltered, kept safe, to be passed on, our history, I saw how they had no value at all. Everything that my parents had earned money to buy, that seemed so important, now just secondhand junk to be scattered, sold, thrown away. They hadn’t marked my parents’ place on earth. They hadn’t been a parking space or an anchor. Because my parents, when they were gone, were gone.

  “I don’t want any of it,” I said and packed a bag and we left. We walked silently to her car and drove through the rain to the airport. While she bought tickets for us I thought that my father was right. He never talked about growing up. When I asked him questions he would say, “Why? What does it matter? The past is the past. People’s lives are in chapters. This is the only chapter I want, this is the chapter I want to last forever and ever, the one with you and your mother.” My mother said it was a family quirk. That Jocelyn’s father, Uncle Donald, when asked said the same. “Oh, I don’t want to talk about that. Haven’t we got enough to think about trying to keep our heads above water in the present?”

  “Those boys,” said my mother, shaking her head. To her, my father and Uncle Donald would always be boys. I wondered if Uncle Marten was a boy, too. I’d never met him. He was the mysterious uncle. The rich uncle. The family iconoclast. The one who never visited. He had been the source of a lot of entertaining speculation around our dinner table on winter nights.

  We’d light a candle and put it in the middle of the kitchen table. My father would drink a beer and my mother would knit and they’d tell stories. They both liked to speculate about Uncle Marten.

  “Even though he was older than me and Donald, his head was always kind of up in the clouds, so we never expected him to be able to cope with the world at all, let alone get rich,” said my father. “We were always a little ashamed of his eccentricities, preferring books to girls or sports or the normal things boys did growing up where we were.”

  “In a foster home,” I said, hoping to prod him into telling me more, but he wouldn’t talk about that.

  “Some of the time. Marten wasn’t going to be a farmer or a fisherman or a pilot like me and Donald. Instead he surprised everyone by breezing through college in record time with several degrees, including an M.B.A. and a Ph.D., and becoming a stockbroker and making a huge amount of money. Then, when he was at the height of his powers and fortune, he quit selling stocks, which he always called a stupid profession, and bought an island off the coast of British Columbia and built a huge Victorian mansion, which none of us have ever seen or are likely to.”

  But now I would. I’d like to tell my father this. For a long time I thought of things I wanted to tell my father or my mother but couldn’t. There was nothing more final than that.

  We boarded the plane and flew for a short time, then got on another and flew for a longer time, and as dawn came up got on a third. I looked out the window into early morning nothingness, and the social worker quietly turned the pages of her magazine, as if she
must muffle even the noise of that so as not to disturb me. But I wasn’t aware of grief so much as of the constant whirring of the plane. And I thought if I could keep that whirring going, I’d never have to be still, and if I never had to be still, none of it could land on me.

  * * *

  My social worker checked us into the hotel in Vancouver. I almost fell asleep in the cab from the airport, but even through my fog I knew the hotel wasn’t in a very good part of town. We went into downtown, bright and shining with mountains surrounding the watery edges of the city. The harbor sparkled, people trotted along looking busy, purposeful, alive, healthy, prosperous, right-thinking. Then we left that area and drove east and the buildings became derelict and dingy, and although we were still close to the water the prosperity took a nosedive. There were bodies in all the doorways: panhandlers, drunks, druggies, homeless. All of them slumped against buildings and doorways. As if legless. The social worker’s nostrils swelled and she checked the address on her slip of paper twice when the cabbie pulled up in front of our hotel.

  “Oh dear,” she said. “I think Marie—that’s the social worker escorting your cousin, she made the reservation—she must not know the city very well. I’m afraid she put us all up in a very bad part of town.”

  I didn’t care much at that point; although my room was musty and mildewy, it seemed a minor point, considering, and I fell into a deep sleep and didn’t wake up until dinnertime. The plan was to join Jocelyn and Marie for dinner, and then our social workers, their jobs done, would escort us to the helicopter pad where Uncle Marten had a helicopter service that he apparently used all the time. Sam, the pilot, would take us to Uncle’s island, Marie explained as we all got back into a cab, deciding to check out and go to dinner with bags rather than return to this neighborhood.

  “I’m so sorry,” said Marie when we had all seated ourselves self-consciously in the cab. “All the big hotels were full because both the boat show and the marathon are this weekend. The hotel looked okay on the Internet. I didn’t know how scummy the neighborhood was. You’d think they’d do something about getting those people off the streets. It’s a disgrace having to thread your way among them.”

  “Oh well, never mind, it was only to catch our breaths,” said my social worker. Her name never registered with me. The only reason I caught “Marie” was that my social worker was one of those people who have been trained to use people’s names in every other sentence until you want to shriek, “Stop it! That doesn’t work on me! I see right through it.” They never seem to get that it doesn’t come off as friendly or kind, just technical.

  I tried to smile at Jocelyn, whom I hadn’t seen in six years. But she looked at me as if smiling had been a very peculiar thing to have done, and turned her head. I began to wonder if her social worker wore such a pinched expression because she had spent the last few days with Jocelyn. Over dinner Jocelyn said all the right things: “Please, thank you, yes, I imagine the salmon here would be very good.” Even given that the two of us were in a state of shock still, there was a cold collected reserve about her that our parents’ deaths didn’t account for. It was too practiced to be recent. It was too easy and natural. And, I thought, at a time like this it seemed to serve her well. It was like putting your emotions in an icebox, along with that severed head you told everyone you’d just found lying there. I studied her through dinner, searching for chinks, but could find none. The way she looked at me was the way you are always afraid someone will on those off days when your hair is dirty and your clothes seem particularly tatty and you can’t think straight. And there was no giving you the benefit of the doubt. This, her look seemed to say, is who we both know you really are. But, of course, she had not expected any better from you, so it needn’t ruffle her calm. I think it gave the social workers the creeps, and they fell enthusiastically upon each other and spent the rest of the meal talking animatedly, just the two of them, and leaving me to Jocelyn. Which is to say, leaving me to silence.

  After dinner we took another cab to the helicopter pad in the harbor, where it seemed to take forever, the four of us standing around in the windy cold, waiting for the helicopter to come to pick up me and Jocelyn. It was odd to have made such an intimate and important journey with another human, a life-changing journey, to be more deeply changed in twenty-four hours than I had been my whole life, and then just to nod goodbye to this witness, no hug or kiss or acknowledgment of a shared experience because, truthfully, there hadn’t been one. It had been mine alone. Hers was just a job. It underlined my sudden aloneness, that although people might help me if it was how they earned their living, there was no longer anyone out there who really cared who I was or what happened to me.

  I dithered about how to say goodbye in such a situation and was thankful for the chaos of noise and whirling blades. Finally, we were inside the helicopter and waved our goodbyes, Jocelyn’s an irritatingly polite and composed white-handed stiff wave, as if she’d been taught at her mother’s knee how to wave goodbye to social workers at helicopter pads. My wave was no better. I began it tentatively and took it back several times in indecision, and I could feel the sickly smile on my face as I made it, coming and going the same, but it didn’t matter anyway because the social worker had already turned, her head bent toward Marie as they made their way off the pad without looking back.

  I tried to distract myself from the view as we flew along, all those lights so far below the seemingly flimsy door, so easy, it seemed to me, to fall out or be sucked out by a passing breeze. Before yesterday I would have calmed myself, saying such things never happened, but now I knew such things did happen and sometimes they happened to you and there would never be comfort in that thought again.

  I wanted to ask Jocelyn what had really happened that night. After all, she had been there. The social worker had given me no details at all. Just that there was some civil unrest in Zimbabwe and there had been a train accident. But I knew it was like putting your tongue on a sore tooth. You knew it was unwise, but you wanted confirmation of what you only suspected. You wanted to know for sure that there was pain there, but then you were sorry that you had. It seemed the height of folly. Then, when your tongue was off, and the throbbing had subsided, you wondered again if the tooth was really sore, so you put out your tongue again. Once, with such a toothache from a cracked tooth, I had done this so often I actually made the crack worse, and the pain was overwhelming until I got to the emergency dentist, and I swore never to do it again. It was better not to know. It was good to have had the tooth experience because I remembered it now and kept my mouth shut. Jocelyn seemed always to keep her mouth shut. I wasn’t sure if she knew anything about toothaches. But then, I reasoned, she had the events in Zimbabwe seared in her imagination forever. Or perhaps not. Perhaps she had seen nothing, known nothing, been whisked off in the dead of night, only told about her parents, only told about mine. It was my tongue circling again.

  When my parents had informed me that Jocelyn would get to go with her parents to Zimbabwe while I had to stay behind in the company of Tiffany, even though I understood, even though I knew this wasn’t a vacation for my parents, that they had musician friends there who were helping them look for property and they were checking out the political climate—that seemed like a bad joke now—I had still been jealous. I knew fairness had nothing to do with anything: Jocelyn’s parents could afford to take her, mine could not. And my mom and dad and I would have the rest of our lives in Zimbabwe if we wanted, on our own farm with our own guesthouse if my mother could scout out a property and, with the help of friends there, buy it. So there was no sense being resentful or whiny.

  But now I held it against Jocelyn that, as it turned out, the little time remaining to my parents belonged to her and not to me. What did she care about my mother or father? Yet she was the one who got to spend their last days with them. Again, I knew she hadn’t done this on purpose, but it felt as if she had grabbed the last piece of cake, eating it alone, when not only was it t
he last on the plate, but cake had disappeared from the planet and would never be made again. And instead of apologizing for this, or even seeming a little guilty, she sat next to me in the helicopter, dispassionately watching the lights below disappear, unmindful of this transgression, or uncaring, as we crossed the ocean. Half the time on the ride I felt like this, poisonous and full of loathing for her, the other half I felt lucky that whatever there was to see on that horrible night she had seen and I had been spared. That there were some things you never wanted in your memory bank. Seeing the unseeable, the unthinkable, hearing things I didn’t want to hear, being pulled away from the bodies I most wanted to stay with, when all my instincts would say to stay, don’t leave. I so tortured myself with these two ideas that they consumed me silently for the entire ride, and by the time we got to the house on the island I was staring as blankly and unseeingly as Jocelyn and we must have crossed my uncle’s threshold like two zombies. Sam landed the helicopter—an anomaly I didn’t at the time appreciate. We took our bags down under the whirring blades and he was off like the social workers, like my whole previous life, without a backward look.

  My uncle showed a great deal of immediate sense, I thought at the time, by hardly speaking to us but showing us our rooms and the bathroom and where the extra towels and blankets were and bringing us each a box of cookies and a mug of hot chocolate and then leaving us alone. Later I found out that only the making of the hot chocolate and bringing it to our rooms was uncharacteristic. The rest, what I took to be his sensitivity in remaining quiet and not forcing on us a bunch of sprightly chatter, had nothing to do with deference to our traumatized sensibilities. It was just who he was.

  * * *

  Almost immediately I had a closer relationship to the island than I had to either my uncle or my cousin. The island with its wind and waves and pounding rain seemed alive. I wasn’t so sure about Uncle Marten or Jocelyn. They were remote in different ways. Jocelyn remained cold and contained and Uncle Marten was never around except at dinner. We ate dinner every night at a long table that sat twenty. I sat at one end, Jocelyn in the middle, and my uncle at the other end. Uncle Marten made the same thing every night, hot dogs and mac and cheese. We ate silently in the drafty dining room with the roar of the fire in the large hearth in the living room, the sound of the ubiquitous wind in the eaves and the rain hitting the windows. Jocelyn cut her hot dogs up with her knife and fork, even the bun, and ate them in tiny, neat pieces. She wiped her mouth on her paper napkin between every bite. My uncle always brought a book down to the table and would read and take notes and then wish us good evening and go to bed. I wasn’t sure if he thought that he was being tactful, allowing us the luxury of silence in our grief, or if he regarded us as birds that had accidentally landed in the house and about which he was too distracted to do anything. If Uncle Marten was disturbed by his brothers’ deaths he didn’t seem to let it interfere with his work. I was surprised then on the third night when he looked up from his book, turned to Jocelyn, and said, “Motoring vacations are all very well, but you can’t read in a car. At least, I can’t. Nothing worse for motion sickness. That’s why I was so pleased when I found out you were taking the train through Zimbabwe. I know Donald said that your mother was afraid of crocodiles.”