The Unforeseen Read online

  I guess if I was looking for a metaphor, the moorage would be the thing—all of us afloat on the dark depths, floorboards rocking under our feet. But you’ll need to know about living in a “floating home,” as the real estate people like to call it. How it makes for close neighbors, all the houseboats lined up along the riverbank with a floating dock like a long front porch and everybody’s backyard being the river. This is a small moorage, sixteen houses, so we’re always running into each other coming and going along the dock, hoofing it up the ramp to the parking lot and the mail boxes, hauling trash up to the bins, bringing groceries down in a cart, that sort of thing, which is how Mike and I first got acquainted, passing each other on the dock, each of us holding the same book, Golden Days, I think it was. That’s the kind of coincidence you can’t get away with in fiction these days.

  • • •

  I’ve never met anybody who loved to read more than Mike. He was into the cerebral stuff—he had made it through Ulysses, so help me—but he wasn’t snobby about it. He’d ask me what I was reading and whether it was any good, and then if he hadn’t already read it he’d have read it by the next time we talked. And he’d have an opinion. I got him hooked on the Swedish who-done-its and Stranger Things Happen. He got me started on Whitehead, who I wouldn’t have tried except Mike knew my fondness for the weird stuff, and he told me Zone One had a zombie apocalypse hiding in Whitehead’s fancy literary language. We argued about Murakami. He thought Kafka on the Shore would be right up my alley, but I couldn’t get through it, couldn’t take all that winding around into cul-de-sacs and asides, with no clear path though the plot.

  • • •

  He was always sort of a mystery man, Mike was. I knew him for twenty years, but I can’t say I really knew him. If you were chatting with him by the mail boxes or down on the dock, talking about anything other than books, you’d see his bartender personality coming out—you’d end up learning little or nothing about him, while spilling private stuff from your own life. Which is how he came to know about my writing back when I was just getting started, still keeping it a secret from everybody else on the moorage. Back then, if I said I was a writer the next thing people wanted to know was whether I was published, and when I said no or not yet they’d start looking around for somebody else to talk to. But not Mike. He asked questions about my “writing process,” and he wanted to read what I’d written, and when I finally showed him a story, he had things to say about it, as if my work was worth the same serious attention he would have given Whitehead or Murakami. He got me through some early rejections, for sure, and he was a good first reader, a good sounding board for me. It’s not like I’ve got a lot of other people I can talk to about books and about my work, so I miss that. Miss talking with Mike about what I’ve been reading, what I’ve been writing.

  • • •

  He wasn’t a total mystery. Over the years I picked up a few things about him. I know his mother died early of Alzheimer’s, and his dad died just a few years ago after lapsing into some kind of dementia himself. And Mike had a brother who was basically blind from birth, which Cindy said the mother denied for years—but how do you deny a child being blind, I wonder?—and he had an older sister who was, as Cindy said, a big mucky-muck down in California, something to do with the insurance business. She was the only one in the family who had done well for herself, and I’ve wondered if this bothered Mike—whether it made him conscious of not getting his life going in a constructive direction. I don’t know if it did, but I know he wasn’t close to his sister. Or for that matter, his dad and his blind brother.

  Those two lived together at the coast somewhere around Waldport. Mike used to go down and see them a couple of times a year, but after the dad died he quit going because by then he was sick himself, and the long drive would have taken it out of him. Cindy could have driven him—I think she had met the brother and the dad a few times—but after Mike’s first surgery she had enough on her plate, taking care of him. Or anyway, that’s what Mike told everybody—that Cindy had too much on her plate. Also he must have thought, since the brother had gotten along without his help all the time their father was losing his faculties, he could go on managing without him. I don’t know what reason he gave his brother for not visiting, but I know he never told him about the surgeries or his cancer. I guess that’s just the way their family dealt with things.

  Before Mike got sick, he and Cindy used to go antiquing, and Cindy has boxes and boxes of Christmas decorations, old collectibles she always would put out right after Thanksgiving and take down the day after Christmas. This year she didn’t decorate at all, which I can understand. The other change I’ve noticed since Mike died is that she’s given up reading the newspaper or following politics on television. They were big lefties, both of them, and they watched all the news shows, watched Maddow every night. Now she watches only one channel, the Golf Channel, even though she never played golf. My mother-in-law did that too, in her last years. She was ninety-six and having trouble tracking, and golf was such a quiet, slow-moving story she could follow it without losing the thread. I don’t know if that’s Cindy’s reason, or if she just can’t bring herself to watch the news without Mike there to kibitz. She used to be a reader, too, not as much as Mike, but still, a reader, and she gave up books almost entirely after Mike’s last surgery.

  The big thing about Mike, in terms of this story, is what he called his “inklings.” When I showed him a story I’d written about a woman who called herself an intuitionist, we got talking about whether we believed in that sort of thing ourselves, intuition, ESP, all the slightly woo-woo stuff, and when I said I did, or anyway that I leaned that way, he let slip that he had always had what he called inklings, where he would know something before it happened, like if somebody was about to get bad news, or if somebody was having an illicit affair, things like that. He said he’d had an inkling about Cindy’s daughter getting in touch, right before her call came out of the blue. And this—the inklings—had led to him working as a fortune-teller for a while in a second-rate casino off the strip in Reno. This was before the bartending, before he met Cindy. I tried to get him to tell me more about it—I said I wanted to use a fortune-telling character in one of my stories—but he would only say it hadn’t worked out, and he’d left Reno after just a couple of months.

  As to fortune-telling, Mike predicted that Trump would be President clear back before the primary stuff started. I poked fun at him but he swore he knew this was coming. I wish he’d lived to see it. Or no, I guess I don’t wish that, but I wish he could have known he was right, after I gave him a hard time about it.

  So back to the cat. The whole point about the cat.

  Mike had wanted a dog but Cindy wouldn’t let him have one. He was slightly lame on one foot from some sort of misadventure in his twenties—you couldn’t get him to talk about it—and Cindy didn’t feel he could walk enough to keep a dog happy. But that cat followed him everywhere just like a dog. Up and down the moorage ramp, over to the mail boxes, wherever Mike went. He would whistle for it to come instead of calling kitty, kitty or anything like that. When we stood on the dock talking about what we’d been reading, or a story I’d been working on, the cat would nuzzle Mike’s foot, trying to get his attention, and then start mewling, complaining about the delay, but after a while he’d sit down, gazing off at the river, waiting, the way a wife waits when her husband runs into a colleague from work and they’re talking about people she doesn’t know. Polite but bored. When Mike would finally start back down the dock the cat would keep sitting, staring off into distance, until Mike whistled for him. Then he’d make a point of getting up slowly, stretching slowly, before he ambled after Mike. That’s a cat for you.

  So just at the end of Mike’s life, after he’d been in a coma for two or three days, he just suddenly opened his eyes, looked around at all of us in the room—it hadn’t been a vigil, exactly, but four of us had come up from the moorage to keep Cindy company at the hospice for
a couple of hours—and he said, “What are you all doing here? Is somebody dying?” And he winked, which was totally Mike, totally himself, as he hadn’t been for weeks. Then he looked at Cindy, smiling slightly but dead serious. “I’ve been worrying about the cat, honey. You know I’m counting on you to take care of him after I’m gone.” Maybe he had had an inkling about it? Or maybe not, maybe he just knew he had reasons to worry. Cindy hadn’t ever seemed to care all that much about the cat, and to be frank she hasn’t been herself the last year or so. I don’t know if it’s her COPD or the beginning of some sort of dementia or what, but I’ve noticed it, and Mike had watched both his parents go down that road so I know he had seen it too. He was worried Cindy would forget, or just not care enough, to bring the cat inside at night, to feed him, to clean his litter box.

  Then he said, still smiling, “I’ll be checking up on the two of you after I’m dead. You know I’m not kidding about that, Cindy.”

  She flushed a bit, but then she nodded, like she knew what he meant and she was just taking him at his word, you know I’ll be checking up on you after I’m dead, which I thought at the time was a little bit strange. And now I’m thinking, geez, maybe she knew something weird about the guy, something beyond just the fortune-telling and the inklings, and when I tell her about that phone call she won’t be a bit surprised about Mike calling her from beyond the grave.

  • • •

  Okay, last night after I fed the cat I came back here and wrote down these notes in case I might want to turn this into a story—what Mike would call my “process”—and then this morning things kind of got derailed. I went up to the hospital to visit with Cindy and I told her about the message I had overheard on the phone. I didn’t say it was Mike—I wasn’t ready to go that far—but I told her the voice had given me a shock, and the cat too, both of us thinking it sounded exactly like Mike. I said whoever-it-was had asked how she was doing, or not her, but “both of you.” Then with a laugh I said, “So I guess it must have been Mike checking up on you and the cat, like he said he would.”

  She was taken aback for a minute—gave me such a startled look—but then I could see her working through it, and she said, “Oh, I’m pretty sure that was Mike’s brother.” Turns out, when Mike died Cindy had phoned the sister in California to let her know her brother had passed away, and she had asked the sister to break the news to the blind brother—“Two birds with one call,” she said, which is classic Cindy.

  They hadn’t been in touch since that one call, but on Thursday when Cindy went in the hospital she had phoned the sister to ask a question about insurance, some problem she was having with her coverage, and it had come out that the sister hadn’t ever told the blind brother about Mike’s passing. He’d been sick, the sister said, and she just hadn’t known how to tell him. Anyway, now he was dying himself—the hospital in Waldport had phoned her with this news. He was at death’s door, really, in a coma for days, and not expected to live more than another day.

  So Cindy figured both of you meant Cindy and Mike, inasmuch as the brother didn’t know Mike was dead. And of course I knew, we both did, that sometimes a person at the end of their life can have a lucid day, can wake up and carry on a normal conversation. Cindy thought the brother must have done that, must have woken from his coma yesterday, just as Mike had, and then picked up the phone to call his brother and wish him Merry Christmas. She said she was sorry to hear about the call—sorry she hadn’t told him about Mike—but maybe it was for the best, and anyway now it was too late. Likely by this time he was dead.

  Now I’m wrestling with the whole thing. Wondering how I can ever turn this into a story, one of my weird stories. I thought I had something, which was me listening to Mike’s voice message, thinking it must be Mike calling to check on Cindy and the cat, just as he’d said he would on that last lucid day of his life, and the cat perking up, happy to hear from him after so long. I thought I could write it the way it happened, hardly anything magic about it, just goodbye and then the cat jumping up to nuzzle the machine, meowing the way cats do when they’re complaining or asking for something.

  But I went back over there tonight to feed the cat and I listened again. It was a pretty sad message—I guess I haven’t said that yet. To tell the truth I wish I could stop hearing it, stop hearing that mournful, rumbly voice, haven’t heard from you in a while, miss you, love you, and just before goodbye something about dying of lonesome, or maybe dying is lonesome, something to that effect. I keep thinking of the story Cindy told me, the blind brother in a coma, dying alone in a hospital room, waking up alone with nobody standing around his bed, just him in that permanent darkness, waking up and wondering why his brother hasn’t called him in months, hasn’t checked up on him, hasn’t wished him well at Christmas. Picking up the phone but not able to reach anybody at the other end.

  But then I come back to the other story, to what it would mean if it really was Mike on the phone, what it would mean if you went on being lonesome even after you’ve died, what sort of story that would be. Dying is lonesome. Thinking if it really was Mike, well, that might be too real for me.

  So I’ve been wrestling with it, trying to find a story that makes some sort of sense. Or not sense, but meaning. I keep coming back to the cat. How he was so sure it was Mike, and so happy to hear from him again. How tonight, the second time we listened, he jumped off my lap after the message ended, went and sat by the patio door and was still sitting there when I left, staring out at the river, his eyes out of focus, faintly bored, just like he was waiting for Mike’s whistle.

  Little Hills

  IN THE NIGHT, AND IN the snow, they gradually lost the road. The humped ground went away in all directions, without landmark, featureless white in the darkness, and by the time they were sure of being lost, surer of being stuck, there was no way to know how far they had come from the pavement. They were both, or had been, Montana people, and this was no blizzard, only a snow that fell straight and thick through the cones of the headlights. They were perhaps a little more annoyed than frightened.

  Lyle pulled up the collar of his coat and stepped outside briefly, tramping behind to the trunk, to the old pieced quilt folded up there beside the jack and the jumper cables, and then back to sit beside Claire, close together under the quilt in the front seat of the car. They had brought a suitcase for what would have been the overnight at the house of the eldest child. In a while they opened it, put on cardigans beneath coats, doubled stockings inside shoes.

  They spoke, at times, of other snows, other landscapes, and only once of the children, who were no longer children, who would begin to worry soon, waiting, looking out through the living room windows into the darkness. Claire remembered, with sudden and unaccustomed clarity, that they had begun to carry a quilt in the car when the children had been still babies, for the going-home-late times with all three sleep-sweaty, legs tangled, in the back seat of the Ford. She thought of saying that to Lyle. But of the two of them, he was the more sentimental, the more prone to long, nostalgic remembrance, and she had a dim, unreasoned dread of that tonight. She said finally, “It’s good we had this old blanket,” and he made a small sound of agreement, not remembering the reason they’d begun to keep it in the trunk.

  Eventually, in the darkness, and without discussion, they climbed over onto the back seat to lie down together under the quilt. “Oh for Pete’s sake,” Claire said, and lifted one elbow to fend his hand from her small old breast. She used a tone of exasperation that had been worn down over years to ritual only. He said, with innocent surprise, a ritual voice also, “Oop. Sorry dear, didn’t know I had my hand there.”

  He shifted his weight in the darkness, turning sideways on the narrow bench seat and drawing up his knees. She nested behind him, pressed against the back of the seat with her knees tucked behind his.

  “Spoons,” he said, reaching around to pat the rise of her hip. “We haven’t laid like spoons since you bought that damned big bed.” In the little pause aft
erward, she could feel him trailing out to the end of the thought. “Can’t catch you . . . hell, can’t even find you in that damned bed.”

  “That’s not the bed’s fault, you dotty old goat.”

  “Too much pepper,” he said, grumbling. “I read that once. I’m cutting back on my pepper.”

  She had one arm around his soft middle. Her other arm, pressed under her own body, her bony hip, already had begun to numb with the loss of circulation. She wriggled it out, tried to find a place for it parallel between them without contorting her shoulder. Her neck ached a little too, without a pillow. Finally she bent the arm up, put it under her head. In a moment the hand slept, needling. She pulled it down again.

  “What . . . ,” Lyle said. By the furred edge of his voice she thought he probably, irksomely, already had dozed off. He slept anywhere, like a child, she not at all without a good firm mattress and a pillow, sheets, a blanket.

  “I’m seventy-two years old. This is not a comfortable way for me to sleep. That’s what.”

  He edged away from her wordlessly, making room, until she was driven to clasp him tighter—he would have fallen or lain down on the floorboards.

  “Damned little foreign car,” he said, without annoyance.

  “That one was your idea,” she said.

  They slept little or not at all. Lyle occasionally looked at the digital display of his watch, and Claire occasionally asked for a report of the time. Frequently they found new positions, sitting, lying, sitting again. When finally there seemed a little thinning of the darkness inside the car, Lyle rolled the driver’s window down and pushed against the vertical pane of snow with a flat plastic folder of car papers from the glove box. The little white wall fell out and away, and a colorless daylight came inside with them.

  “Roll up the window, Lyle, for heaven’s sake.” The light—or the opened window—had made the space inside the car seem suddenly much colder.