Family of Origin Read online

  * * *

  ——————·

  This was the day that, according to collective tri-parental belief, everything first went wrong. Perhaps Keiko and Ian and Ingrid fixated upon the day the children went into the woods because none of them was present—and so, this plausible First Moment of Badness lay blame exclusively with the children.

  Perhaps this was also why Elsa and Nolan were skeptical of the designation.

  The Greys agreed that there’d been some apple-from-the-tree moment when all the good possibilities of their lives gave way to the unremarkable shit they lived in now. What the Greys disagreed about was when, when precisely, this had happened. When their lives had gone so wrong.

  It was Nolan and Elsa’s favorite fight, the greatest of their greatest hits, and the issue was never resolved because they were always finding the rot in different apples.

  Where was that smell coming from?

  Even now, the grown Grey children had the habit of counting their years backward, searching for a time when they’d been happy and the world turned the way it ought. Determining the moment wouldn’t make them happy again, they knew that, but at least then they’d know who to blame.

  The Greys were scientific about their misery.

  I

  The Island

  The men of Earth came to Mars.

  They came because they were afraid or unafraid, because they were happy or unhappy, because they felt like Pilgrims or did not feel like Pilgrims. There was a reason for each man. They were leaving bad wives or bad jobs or bad towns; they were coming to find something or leave something or get something, to dig up something or bury something or leave something alone. They were coming with small dreams or large dreams or none at all.

  The Martian Chronicles

  Ray Bradbury

  Leap’s Island

  In the marina there were houseboats and private fishing craft, and it felt like a tailgate, music and barbecue smoke drifting from multiple small decks as half-naked people shouted back and forth. The Greys’ grocery bags snapped in the weak wind off the Gulf. On their way from the restaurant, they’d bought seven days’ worth of supplies.

  Elsa watched Nolan lope down the dock in search of their lift, a postman who did a weekly mail-and-supplies run to the island. She was surprised Nolan had managed this. Surprised that, from this distance, she could mistake his receding figure, trim and efficient, for an admirable stranger’s, not Nolan at all.

  Elsa wanted to hide in one of these friendly boats so she wouldn’t have to go to the island and talk to all these people who’d known her father. So she wouldn’t have to spend a week alone with Nolan. Mostly, she wanted to go back home, because Elsa had better things to do. Two months ago, she’d received the letter from Mars Origins saying she’d made the second round of cuts. Elsa was one of the six hundred and sixty potential colonists being considered for a one-way ticket to Mars. The first-ever manned expedition.

  Most people thought Elsa was joking when she told them she was going to settle Mars, but she didn’t care. Mars Origins had sent her a plane ticket to interview in the Netherlands and that was real enough for her. The interview was more than a month away, but Elsa wanted to spend the summer preparing. Training, maybe. She desperately wanted them to pick her. Needed them to.

  Elsa waited for Nolan outside the marina convenience store. Rafts and inflatable animals were tethered to the shop’s awning, and she circled until she stood beneath a pink inflatable tiger raft with orange stripes. Above her head, one of his paws went thunk thunk thunk in the wind as he tried to escape the roping. He smelled cleanly of vinyl.

  The tiger had a long mouth of teeth and narrowed purple eyes, and he was bound by ropes across his neck and midsection. It looked as if he were being punished for something he’d once done, though his face suggested that, if you untied him, he wouldn’t hesitate to do it again. You’d have only yourself to blame. Who would trust a tiger twice?

  She paid eight dollars to the man in the store, who gave her a cardboard box and said the tiger was inside. Elsa studied the box, disappointed. Elsa wanted to release the tiger from the awning, that tiger, she said, and so the little shopkeeper with his horseshoe ring of hair carried a step stool outside and spoke softly to himself as he unknotted the tiger from the awning.

  Elsa! Nolan called. He was loading their groceries onto a small boat, at the helm of which a man in a postman’s gray uniform shorts was smoking a cigarette. Elsa deflated the tiger against her ribs as she went to them.

  Soon they were on the water.

  The postman was cheerful and said he enjoyed the hour ride across the Gulf to the island and back. Normally, he brought a radio with him for company. No cell reception out there, he said. No internet. They don’t like it.

  But how do they work? Aren’t they scientists? Nolan asked.

  The postman shrugged. Not that kind. People are always asking me about them. I’m one of the few folks who goes out. But it’s hard to describe. You’ll see.

  The tide was low, and whole blankets of reeds washed in one direction under the water. Soon, the bottom deepened. It got colder, and Elsa watched the marina grow smaller as she hunched over her knees. Nolan slid his sunglasses down his face. He looked like a young man about to go on an expensive beach vacation, and Elsa could not help but think of him as the New Baby. It was what Ingrid had called him when Elsa was small. It’s hard for your father with the new baby and all. He’ll visit soon. It’s a lot of work taking care of a new baby.

  Leap’s Island had been a hump on the horizon, but as they drew closer it resolved itself into a wooded place with an irregular coastline. Divots and inlets and coves. One side of the island was grassy, and they saw a large lodge. The other half was quite rocky, and a ways off from the rocks was a clustering of small shacks on stilts. They seemed to have popped up irregularly, like mushrooms, no neighborhood-y order to them at all. Elsa had expected a kind of colony, but as they drew closer, it seemed more like there just happened to be people living on the island. Like each scientist had set off to start her own village, ignorant of the rest.

  Leap’s was a private island, fifteen square miles, owned in its entirety by the Townes family for more than three generations. In the early sixties, it had been intended as a high-end hotel for beachgoers and birdwatchers, Leap’s Retreat—Grand Hotel and Paradise Spa, but Townes had died before the project’s completion. The following Townes had established a commune in the half-built hotel rooms and pools. Twenty-five “Leap-Backers” practiced farming and free love and preached the gospel of the “Darwin Walking Backward,” a bastardization of Darwin, who served as a kind of patron saint for their belief that the world’s best days were behind them. Their only hope, the Leap-Backers believed, was to get back to “idyllic preindustrial times.”

  Mitchell Townes owned the island now. Raised a Leap-Backer, he’d given up his father’s commune values, rejecting the sloppy spiritual nature of his childhood and supplanting it with sloppy science. It was Mitchell who had installed the Reversalists on the island, declaring it a station for field research.

  They pulled into a small cove and the postman tied off the boat. Elsa climbed out, and Nolan passed her the grocery bags while the postman unloaded his boxes of deliveries for the islanders and took his sack of mail over to a set of numbered wooden cubbies with a Plexiglas front panel.

  I’ll be back next week, he said. He was slotting the envelopes into the cubbies rapidly. Likely won’t find anyone to take you back before then. You’ll be okay?

  Do we have a choice? Elsa said.

  It’s only a week, said Nolan.

  Trapped a whole week, Elsa said. She turned to the postman. Do you have any mail for Dr. Ian Grey?

  Shack Seven, the postman said. He handed Elsa several envelopes. Labs in Louisiana, Georgia. She tucked them into the side pouch of her pack alongside the interview
letter she’d received from Mars Origins. She would tell Nolan soon. He would be so jealous it would kill him. It was exactly the sort of thing their father would have loved.

  * * *

  ——————

  They followed a path through the woods to the lodge they’d seen from afar, a place the Reversalists called the Lobby. Nolan focused on keeping pace with Elsa’s pack bobbing in front of him. At the Lobby, they would meet a woman named Mariana Gates, who would take them to their father’s shack.

  It was the policeman who’d called Nolan back in San Francisco to tell him Ian was dead, who gave him the island phone number. Don’t know if they’ll pick up, he’d said. But it’s worth a shot. Nolan had dialed that same afternoon, not knowing what to expect. The woman who’d answered—Leap’s Island Institute for Reversalism—sounded huskily irritated. Mariana Gates had softened once he said he was Ian’s son.

  Nolan had told her they wanted to come to the island to collect their father’s effects, and talk to the residents—

  The researchers, Gates had said.

  The researchers, Nolan had corrected. They wanted to speak to some of the researchers, Nolan said, and ask after memories of their father.

  They won’t know much about his research, Gates had said.

  It’s not really his research so much, Nolan said. It’s more a matter of how he seemed? Before the accident.

  Gates had made a sound that made it clear precisely how stupid she thought it was for the two of them to care about anything other than research and then launched into a list of all the things he could not expect the island to provide for them: cell-phone service and internet, regular electricity or private bathrooms. As Gates performed this defensive recitation, Nolan found his hand drifting into his pants, sneaking past the waistline, to cup himself. He wasn’t turned on, exactly. He just sensed Gates was a woman who did not approve of many people, and Nolan felt that if he could be the sort of person who could earn her respect, he might feel something like relief.

  The path to the Lobby was well tended, mulched over. It had rained, and the mulch was damp, and where the sun fell between the branches it steamed. Elsa’s pack brushed the low needles of a pine, and last night’s rain shook into her hair. Nolan touched a drop that hung by her ear, letting it spill onto his fingers. Elsa smacked his hand.

  Nolan knew Elsa would have had too much dignity to come all the way to Leap’s had he not asked her to do it. But frankly, she owed him. In the cosmic order of things, she owed him more than this.

  They had not seen each other since his mother’s memorial, three years ago. Before that, it had been almost a decade since they’d broken the family—ten years since the two halves had treated each other like kin.

  Keiko’s service had been held in the succulent house at the San Francisco Botanical Garden, because she’d loved it there and often sat reading inside the greenhouse’s eighty-degree climate in shorts and sandals in midwinter.

  Elsa and Ingrid had both come. When she’d found Nolan, hiding between two cacti large enough to feel like bodyguards, Ingrid had squeezed him so hard that for one moment Nolan felt his alarm at her strength replace the woolly pain that had muffled him since Keiko died. Ingrid released him.

  Elsa stood behind her mother wearing a black dress with long sleeves that she gripped in her palms.

  Hi, Elsa said, and then waved at him, from two feet away.

  Waved at him.

  Elsa seemed intent on avoiding any sort of physical contact at all. And Nolan understood that. With their parents there, with Keiko everywhere, it would have felt wrong, or dangerous.

  Hi, he’d said, and waved back across those impossible two feet.

  He wished she would have risked it.

  Nolan had hoped Ingrid and Elsa might come back to the house afterward, but when the memorial was through they’d fled the earthy warmth of the succulent house and returned to Minnesota. Ingrid was expected back at the hospital, they said.

  Sometimes, it felt as if Nolan spent his entire life trying to get Elsa to just sit down with him. To look at him and admit that what had happened, happened and that it mattered. These days, whenever Nolan tried to do something grown up, whenever he tried to imagine himself getting married or living in a house or, Jesus Christ, having children, there was a part of his brain that said, But Elsa. It was an excuse, he knew. Nolan didn’t really want to do any of those things, he didn’t think. Not yet. But all these years, it was as if a question had been posed and he still had not answered it. But Elsa.

  They walked on. The woods around them rustled and squirrels tore across the ground. Then the path moved sharply to the left, and the walls of the forest buckled to reveal a clearing. In it was the Lobby.

  The lodge-style building hulked tall and had a peaked roof covered in solar panels. A wraparound deck ringed the upper floor. From the pale blue Adirondack chairs on the deck, Nolan imagined, you could see the Gulf, but every chair was empty. An ascending flagstone path led to the Lobby’s main entrance: an ostentatious rotating door made of copper. As Nolan and Elsa climbed the steps, the door spun slowly, as if they had just missed someone.

  Elsa stepped sideways into the rotating door, to fit her pack, and Nolan waited for a new slice of space to spin around for him so Elsa would not smack him again.

  It was clear that Leap’s Retreat had been designed as a stately hotel. Inside the Lobby, the building was open all the way to the roof’s peak and the deck was mirrored by the second floor’s balcony, thirty feet up. Two wood-and-iron spiral staircases descended on either end. It was steamy inside too, as if the Lobby had its own climate. Banks of vegetables grew in wooden planter boxes on the main floor, and the basin of a tiled fire pit and abandoned fountain were filled with black potting soil, sprouting rows of leafy shoots. Beets, Nolan thought. Or turnips. There were signs for a kitchen, a locker room, a laundromat, and a sauna. The main hall smelled like laundry. The hot, family smell of dirty sheets forgiven in bleach.

  There was no one inside.

  There was a grouping of armchairs and couches in the center of the room, upholstered in what must have been considered a very jazzy fabric in 1963, when the hotel was meant to have opened. Elsa sat down in one, slinking out of her backpack. Nolan sat down across from her, his knees knocking into hers, and Elsa noticed that he smelled the same. It was a smell she had not known she remembered until there it was. A warm smell, like a good leather wallet just pulled from a pocket.

  Had it been 1963, they might have been a couple drinking cocktails to ease their way out of their regular lives and into their freer, vacationing selves at this island hotel, which promised a suspension of the normal rules of engagement for nice young men and women. They might have let their knees touch, leaned in to ask for sips of each other’s drinks, pressed their mouths to the same place on the martini glass.

  A honking interrupted them, the sound of birds bickering among themselves, and the Greys followed the sound to a pair of frosted plate-glass doors propped open on the west side of the Lobby, one of which had a jagged chip missing from it. Elsa went in, but when she saw that it was a swimming pool, she hesitated on the threshold and Nolan pressed in behind her.

  Come on, he said, giving her a little push with his knee in the back of her thigh.

  The Greys approached the pool.

  Elsa stood by the edge, and Nolan knelt down next to her on the yellowed tile. He trailed his fingers in the water, which was green and murky. In it swam dozens of slow, gray-eyed fish. And drifting in the pool was a family of ducks, chortling to each other as they swam in endless loops. Undowny buffleheads. The source of all the trouble.

  One hundred seventy-five years since Darwin, Nolan said, looking up at her, and along comes the undowny bufflehead, fucking everything up.

  It’s not their fault, Elsa said. It’s the people who tell stories about them.

&nb
sp; The ducks’ heads were very round and their eyes were located at the precise point where three different colors of feathers met. The females were warmly brown and gray, but the males were showoffs. A ruff of iridescent green, like shards of broken bottle, tapered into a darker cape along their backs, and a rosy sheen illuminated the space between. The rosiness dabbed inward to touch the round, black eye. There was a white cap on the back of their heads, and their bills were the color of slate, short and perfectly formed. They had pure, white-feathered bellies, smooth and sealed together at the breast, rumpled where the water permeated.

  Nolan cupped some water in his hands.

  That’s probably filthy, Elsa said.

  Nolan looked at her, wiggling his fingers as water spilled from his palms.

  Don’t— Elsa began, but Nolan, dirty water dripping from his fingers, grabbed Elsa around the ankles and shook her, groaning, Graaghh! like some B-movie Swamp Thing from the deep, ready to pull Elsa into the pool. Elsa considered Nolan’s hands around her ankles.

  Nolan had kissed her cheek on the Landing. Their knees had touched in the Lobby. He’d grabbed her ankles. It was stupid to keep inventory, but how long had it been, really, since they’d seen each other? Before Keiko’s memorial, just the once, when she’d driven out to Carleton when Nolan was a freshman and always calling her in the middle of the night—more than a decade ago. In the time since they’d been teenagers, Nolan had mostly existed as a voice on the phone, the safety of hundreds of miles between them.

  Let go, Elsa said. She stepped back, her ankles wet.

  This could have been a nice place, Nolan said, admiring the tiled mosaic work around the pool as he wiped his hands on his pants. Just then, he caught sight of something rushing his way and turned in time to see a large dog. Nolan yelped and stood up. The dog raced around the shallow end of the pool, snapping at the ducks, who scattered, quacking as they waddled away in loose formation. Satisfied, the dog trotted back out to the hall, where she sat at attention.