Even in this, his new life, the first thing Owen thinks of when the coughing fits wake him every morning, is smoking a cigarette. He comes out of his dream with last night’s smoke in the back of his throat, a thousand others coming up from his lungs with every wracking hack. But at least the coughing drives the nightmare from his waking mind: the shrieking brakes; the emptiness before the splashing crash; the gaping blackness of the slough; the cold steel he can’t stop clutching; screams submerging to a bubbling gurgle. Then a silence that has continued through the years. Owen is grateful for the coughing spasms. They pull him out of his fear and get him going, get him up. When the coughing subsides, he can light up for the first time each day. Own is not exactly happy, but he’s glad to be alive.
On these weekday mornings, he no longer gets wake-up calls from Miss Derks. He hadn’t really needed them. He was always up coughing, smoking, boiling Nescafé on his hotplate, before his social worker called. Still, he used to thank her every morning. More than just his social worker, Martha Derks is also Owen’s life-skills coach and the closest thing he has to a friend. He’s proud every day that she trusts him now to live alone. He seldom misses a day at Many Hands, the sheltered workshop where he’s been employed since his last hospital discharge. He doesn’t have to take his crazy pills anymore—just his blood pressure meds—and Miss Derks doesn’t need to remind him like she used to. And he no longer eats the government breakfasts at work with the folks from the group home where he used to live. Most mornings Owen fixes his own cold cereal and peanut butter toast that he eats with coffee and a glass of milk.
At sixty-three, Owen finally feels all the way grown up.
After washing his cup, glass, knife and spoon, and clearing away paper plates and leftovers from the night before, Owen goes out to wait for the van and smoke another cigarette. He enjoys his cigarettes. At work he smokes whenever he can—at break and lunch, out on the lawn jobs, or sorting bottles and cans in the yard. Even though his boss lectures him about all the many ways “Those things are going to kill you” whenever she sees him smoking, he still puffs away. “I’ll be OK, Bernice,” he grin-growls softly through the smoke.
An odd thing that nobody knows—not Bernice, Miss Derks, Dr. Atombomb, the guys at work, or the lobotomy ladies at the group home—none of them—is that when he’s doing his other job, doing his rounds out at the crash sites, Owen never smokes. He doesn’t understand why cigarettes don’t call to him while he’s along the highway, the ridge road, or out where the freeway starts, so he doesn’t think about it much. What Owen does think about, though—every day—is that his trailer, his independent living contract, his newfound ability to skip his meds and still not have crazy spells, all come from God because of the other job he’s made for himself.
He has to keep his job at the sheltered workshop to pay the rent on his trailer, and make money for cigarettes and candy. Many Hands pays half minimum wage for sorting recyclables, brush clearing, and lawn jobs. The Department of Rehabilitation pays the other half. He relies on SSI for anything extra. His trailer is small and the rent is cheap—his landlord gets money from the government, as well. The regional center feeds them lunch at work and he gets food stamps, so he’s got plenty to eat.
When his SSI check arrives each month, and he and Miss Dirks decide how much he can spend, he walks over to the dollar store for cleaning supplies, fake flowers, and other decorations for the crosses and markers he tends. He bought real flowers a few times at first, but he didn’t like how quickly they wilted and drooped. Tuesdays after work, Miss Dirks gives him a ride to the Safeway and helps him shop. Sometimes after the groceries are put away, she takes him out to a restaurant. Those are the only days he doesn’t do his rounds.
On weekdays, he does short rounds after work. He takes a city bus to the edge of town where South Main turns into freeway, does what he can without his bucket of supplies, then catches the last bus home. There’s been a lot a wrecks out there, but you can’t do any real cleaning without supplies. Some of the newer monuments are crowded with signs and messages, strewn with sentimental pieces of people’s lives. He tries to keep each one as nice as it was when it was new, but after work he mostly picks up trash, which he stuffs it into plastic bags from work and leaves in the Safeway dumpster on his way to the bus stop.
Those short days, Owen steps off ten paces from each shrine before he begins, and only picks up trash within that radius. He hadn’t made that rule for himself years ago when he first started doing his rounds. There was so much trash he would forget what he was out there for and pick up everything he found. With all the time that took, lots of sites were getting neglected. One night he lost track completely and ended up so far out of town the police had to take him home. Owen had learned to follow rules a long time ago, when he first lived at Napa State Hospital. Now he’s learned he can make rules for himself, and that if he follows them, he’ll be okay.
On the weekends Owen has all day to get things done. For the first time since high school, he likes weekends better than the work week. On long summer Sundays he takes the bus to the north side of town where the highway winds around the bay. Nobody even remembers all the wrecks there’s been out there. But Owen remembers more than people know—more than his dreams make him want to forget. Now his memories are returning.
The last time Garrett Henderson visited Miranda’s cross was the day of his ex-wife’s wedding, six years ago. He left for a construction job in Montana the next day and stayed on in Billings. Since moving back to the coast to take care of his mother, he’s avoided it by taking the long way into town. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to see the marker—leave some flowers, spruce it up a bit, spend some time thinking about Miranda, and maybe say a prayer if he could muster one up—he just didn’t want to be there where his daughter died. The stain on the road still shows up in his dreams—on a floor, on a wall, in the sky, on someone’s dream-face. Although he saw her actual crushed and torn body that night, glistening in the headlights as he ran to her screaming her name, the image of it only haunts his guarded memory, not his dreams. He is grateful for that. But now that he’s working for the county, his short commute goes right by Miranda’s marker.
Garrett knew all along he would have to face the awful spot someday, and he’s decided. Today is the day.
He pauses at the end of the driveway Friday morning to make the final decision. It’s ridiculous the way you go the long way around, you big baby! It adds ten miles to your commute! Get your shit together, Garrett. He commits himself to turning left at the highway this time and driving straight into town past the accident site. His pickup sprays gravel and he settles in for the morning glide down the valley road. He’ll figure out what to do as he’s doing it. Just drive by now. See how it looks. Stop over after work. Maybe this weekend he’d give it some time, refurbish it, make it a real memorial again. Focus on the cross itself, and think about Miranda—not on the phantom darkness in the road.
At the foot of the valley, Cedar Creek emerges from the redwoods and blackberry hedges, slipping into the slough where Cedar Valley Road tees with the two-lane highway into town. Meandering with the edge of the back-bay, the highway is on a levee that barely holds back the slough at high tide. Where the channel turns to join the bay, the road bridges another creek, climbs through a cut in the bluff, and enters the rural county seat on the headland above the bay.
Garrett feels the pounding of his heart as he turns left onto the highway. Adina had made him put up that white wooden cross, and he remembers it now as he’d seen it last: peeling and listing, sticky with decayed flower petals and bird droppings, with a duff of compost at its base—the leavings of a decade of sporadic mourning.
At fourteen-years-old, a year before she died, Miranda had expressed a strong preference for being cremated and having her ashes scattered at sea—the kind of thing adolescents sometimes do when they realize they’re mortal. Garrett and Adina argued about this in the poison of their shock and grief. Adina wanted to go with Miranda’s expressed wishes. Garrett argued that it was a childish whim, but also there was something about cremating his daughter that he could neither accept nor put into words. Garrett thought she was being irrational and stubborn, but Adina had her own guilty reason for not wanting another grave to visit too infrequently, and she was too ashamed to share it.
The argument quickly turned from irrational to bitter to mean. In a fit of spite and blame, Adina made arrangements for the cremation when it seemed that Garrett was going to put it off, as he had done with so many things in their marriage. With the accident, the coroner’s inquest, insurance forms, lawyers, and the ominous guilt he was trying to keep in check, Garrett was too beaten down to assert himself.
There was a memorial service at his mother’s church, and plans were made for scattering Miranda’s ashes. After the disaster of that day on the boat together, Garrett and Adina could never again come to any decisions. They could barely stand to see each other. It was a no-fault divorce with more than enough fault to go around.
They had photos and memories of their only child, but in the end, stubbornness and guilt denied them of any other permanent marker for Miranda’s life and death—no columbarium niche, no memorial plaque at the high school, no altar in the family home, no grave or headstone. They had only the roadside shrine upon which to focus their feelings of loss; it became the location of key scenes in the breakup of their marriage.
Nearing that otherwise undistinguished stretch of two-lane, Garrett fears he won’t see the cross at all, only the stain of blood on the asphalt—a stain that, when fresh, had been so appallingly large that it spread from the broken center line to the shoulder of the road where the cross now stood. The stain had faded on the road as it deepened in his mind, so that now as Garrett approaches it, he imagines it somehow showing through all the rock and tar put down since Miranda died.
The few times he visited the site with Adina after the accident—when they were going through the charade of holding their lives together, clinging to each other out of terror and habit while they tore at each other’s hearts—he had wanted to suffer. He wanted it to be worse than it was. He thought he deserved it. When he stood at the side of the highway—not crying, not speaking with Adina, not even thinking of Miranda, but numb, anesthetized—he felt like nothing he did would ever be enough.
Approaching the rising bridge over the creek, Garrett sees the flicker of white through the willows before the dreaded mirage can appear. He gasps as the simple white cross comes fully into view. It is not as he remembers it. Braking hard, he sends a tailgater into a honking swerve. He cranes his neck, his mouth agape as he passes. It is pristine. The cross is straight and freshly painted. A bright spray of too-perfect flowers is ensconced below the crosspiece, around its base a miniature fence and an apron of something green that gave the little monument the look of an Easter basket. As Garrett slow-rolls past the place where his daughter died, he twists in his seat so far, he nearly puts his truck into the slough at the foot of the bridge.
“Easy does it,” Owen says, stepping gingerly down onto the milk crate front porch of his trailer. Gaining solid ground, he looks at his Casio. Half his life he struggled to tell time from a clock with those arrows pointing in all directions. Once he got a watch with numbers he could read, it still took him years to remember to keep it on his wrist, to look at it, to think of what it means. Martha could never teach him to use the buttons on the side, but now he knows how the numbers can help him be where he’s supposed to be to get things done.
“The van’ll be here in a few minutes, so don’t wander off,” Owen mutters to himself. “Just enough time for a cig,” he says. Squatting onto a plank between two more milk crates—the only amenity in his gravel front yard—he pulls a pack of Spirits and a disposable lighter out of his grimy jacket. Along with the cloud of smoke, he exhales his daily wish/complaint. “Sure wish I had a real bench er somethin’.”
Owen has learned over the last few years that talking to himself is the only way to remember what he is doing. People give him a lot of funny looks around town, but as Owen often says to Dr. Applebaum, his psychiatrist from the Regional Center, “I’m not one a them crazy ones, ya know!” At the group home and the recycling center, “half of ‘em are bonkers,” emotionally disturbed and “half of ‘em are ree-tards,” intellectually challenged, Trainable Mentally Retarded, TMR, in the parlance of the times. Owen has heard himself referred to as the latter all his life—usually with the pejorative slur.
But all along he kept a pretty picture in his mind of being on his own, with everything he needed, and no one having to tell him what to do.
Used to be that when he was told to do something, he would forget unless someone stayed with him and kept telling him. That was fine at work where there were college kids and social workers supervising, but Owen couldn’t be at work all the time and he used to get in trouble living with “all them freaks” at the group home on Denby Street. He got mad just thinking about it. “Hell, some a them freaks got their own helpers tellin’ em every move to make—waitin’ on em hand and foot.”
Owen had tried and failed at independent living twice before because he couldn’t remember to do the things he needed to. He lost, didn’t read, or didn’t understand the notes the social workers wrote for him. He’d start off repeating the instructions in his head, but then that sick feeling would come over him and he wouldn’t have any idea where he was or what he was supposed to be doing. Wandering around town, he’d need a smoke or get hungry and thirsty and he’d start bothering people. Before he knew it someone would call the cops and he’d spend the night in County General. Sometimes, if he was too upset and fought the cops, they sheeted him—restrained him in a bed with sheets and blankets—until he calmed down. That’s how he ended up in Napa State again those last couple of times.
Eventually Owen learned that just repeating things to himself didn’t work, but that if he narrated what he was doing—talked to himself like he was another person—he did fine. He got his independent living contract by proving to Miss Derks he could stay out of trouble and always be ready when the van came to pick him up for work.
Once or twice a month, Dr. Applebaum calls Owen in from smashing cans in the sorting yard to ask him how he’s feeling. Owen doesn’t talk about his “other work” with anyone except “Doctor Atombomb.”
“I wish nobody noticed me. I don’t like em lookin’ at me.” Dr. Applebaum thinks he understands Owen’s refusal to talk about his “peculiar pursuit” with others—as if everyone around him wasn’t fully aware of it. “But then a couple years ago that lady from the newspaper started following me around and put my picture in the paper. Now seems like everybody knows my business.” Owen tends to perseverate on this perceived breech of his privacy. “I don’t like people knowin’ my business.”
Dr. Applebaum is well aware of Owen’s agitation over his privacy concerning his other job—after all, it was one of his early therapeutic assignments for Owen that led him to his current “obsession” with those little monuments. Though he doesn’t believe he’s helped Owen any more than his other hopeless TMR patients, Dr. Applebaum has listened faithfully to reiterations of Owen’s stories and complaints over the years as if he were hearing each one for the first time, and he takes a certain professional pride in Owen’s success of late. To his further credit, Dr Applebaum doesn’t try to direct him. He listens with convincing intent as Owen vents.
And vent he does. “I know I get pissed off, but I don’t want people bothering me about it! But they honk at me! I stay outta their way, but they honk anyway! And they drive so bad—right there where they know there was a crash! Sometimes it’s like they’re gonna crash right into me!”
So, when Owen is out by the freeway, or on the highway down by the bay—picking up trash, replacing flowers, sprucing up someone’s roadside shrine—and people honk, or just slow down to look as they pass by, he wishes he could do his work in secret, in the dark.
The road rises sharply above the mudflats approaching the bridge. There is no shoulder here, no place to pull over. Garrett hadn’t planned to stop until after work, but now he is so shaken by the unexpected look of the monument, he lugs his engine on the slope of the bridge, unsure of what to do. He and Adina had always parked on the uphill side of the bridge at the turnout, as Garrett had done the night Miranda died, and walked the fifty yards or so down to the cross. Who’s taking care of it? he thought. Adina moved to DC years ago. His mother is housebound. Anyone else who might have cared doesn’t live here anymore. Does the city have some kind of program? Coming nearly to a stop at the bottom of the bridge, another car blaring by, Garrett decides to stick to the plan and come back after work. “Fuck!” he says through clenched teeth. He downshifts and guns it up the hill into town.
The unusual summer heat made work especially hard for Owen this week. Smashing and sorting glass and cans into fifty-five-gallon oil drums for shipping is his preferred job at Many Hands, but there is no shade in the asphalt acre of what used to be the Chevy dealership. Owen never takes his jacket off at work because it’s almost always cool on the north coast, and he doesn’t want to lose it—or his cigarettes.
By the end of the day on Friday, the heat has taken its toll. Owen is far more tired than usual. He decides he’ll hop on the Rehab van and go home early. But at the last minute, the thought of missing his rounds by the freeway causes him to fear some unknown consequence and he changes his mind, telling himself, “Do what you’re s’posed to do and go get on the damn bus!”
Now, letting the bayside breeze flap his open jacket, and with the familiar ease of his routine giving him focus, he is glad he did.
On Fridays, Owen walks all the way to the farthest marker just before the freeway starts and works his way back. He noticed a couple of years ago that he was paying too much attention to the easy markers close to town and wasn’t getting to those near the freeway onramp.
There are a few more markers he’s seen from the bus on field trips that are farther out along the freeway. He worried about them for a while, but the one time he tried to get out to them, walking along the shoulder of the freeway, the cars and trucks roared by so loud and close they shook him up badly. He also had the odd, frightening feeling as he saw them approach that he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from jumping into one of them. He stumbled back to town in the drainage ditch beside the freeway, clinging to the frontage fence.
But today Owen feels like God is smiling on him as he sizes up the soot-gray cross that is the farthest one from home. He is walking against the traffic on the northbound side, the cars and trucks decelerating in his direction as they come down from the last overpass toward the first red light of the small city.
Just as he reaches the cross, air brakes squeal and Owen looks up in panic to see an empty flatbed semitruck fly by, dragging its locked-up rear set of doubles like eight black anchors, screeching and smoking. Startling away from the edge of the road, Owen watches the fishtailing truck come to a clanking stop just short of an old VW Bug, at the end of a line of cars stopped for the light. “See? That’s how it happens!” he shouts as if the truckdriver could hear him. “Everybody’s going too damn fast,” he says, shaking his head.
Regrouping, Owen places the heel of his work-boot against the base of the cross, and begins to step off ten paces. “One, two, three,” he calls, loud and clear and sure, continuing to “Ten!” He pulls the black plastic trash bag from his jacket and polices the area around the little monument, smoothing the graveled verge with his boots as he goes, circling in a spiral to the cross.
On weekends, when he reaches a cross in this fashion and has more time, Owen does whatever maintenance seems required—a Simple Green wipe-down? New flowers? New Easter grass? Replace a broken section of fencing? Sometimes he finds a cross that needs repainting. He doesn’t keep paint and brushes in the bucket, so he states out loud so he’ll remember, “This one’ll take a special trip.” This seems to help him keep track in his mind which ones are in need. He does occasional painting rounds on weekends.
Before he leaves each site, Owen says a prayer. Nothing he has to remember—he just forms the question, “God?” and spends a moment with his hands together and his head bowed trying to think good thoughts about whoever died there. Then he says the “Amen,” like you’re supposed to.
Seated at his desk in the Planning Department as his lunch hour begins, Garrett clicks away the CAD blueprints he’d been working on and directs his browser to the information he gathered at break. When they placed Miranda’s memorial along the highway, it never entered their minds that it might be illegal to do so. After all, one of the CHPs who’d been at the accident site had stayed in touch with Garrett and later helped him dig the hole and set the cross.
The law was all over the map nationally, but in California what they called roadside memorials were clearly illegal. It was also clear that no one enforced the law unless the memorial became an eyesore or a hazard. He had found nothing on local internet sources about efforts to prevent that by doing maintenance.
“We going to lunch?” Lyn, from HR, peeks over the wall of Garrett’s cubicle. She is approaching middle age in the throes of a divorce involving two teenagers while she manages a new career. Garrett, single since his divorce, was polite-but-obvious in making his interest in her known when they’d met six months ago. She gave him an equally polite rain check, but after a few weeks and one uncomfortable date, they agreed they both needed a good friend with potential more than the complications of romance. Since then, lunch was as close they came to another date. They settled into a supportive, work-based relationship with lots of delicious flirting.
Lyn puts an end to her club sandwich by covering the remains with her napkin and shoving the plate away. “Sorry, Garrett, but I never really thought about it,” she says. “I mean, I remember seeing those big shrines all over the place in New Mexico when Mike and I used to go to Santa Fe, but I just thought it was a Catholic thing.” They’re just finishing up at The Jury Box across from the courthouse. “I guess I have seen a couple of crosses out by the freeway, but I certainly never saw anybody, you know, like, maintaining them or anything. Are you sure?”
“Oh, yeah, that marker would have been a decayed eyesore by now. Probably would have been removed. But, no, it looked better than when we first put it up. Somebody’s been taking care of it. Somebody’s gotta know something about it.”
“OK, well, I’ll see what I can find online.”
“Thanks, Lyn. I really appreciate you helping me. Email me if you find anything. I have got to finish those apartment plans and get the papers filed by the end of the day. “
“OK,” she says. Garrett begins to thank her, but she deflects, holding up both hands. “Hey, no problem! It’s not like there’s that much to do in HR anyway. Maybe I can find something in back issues of Vogue while I browse away the afternoon.” They both chuckle at this old saw.
“Well, anyway, I am grateful,” he adds, giving her a look that says much more.
Lyn reaches for her purse, but Garrett is too fast. “No, I got it today,” he says and slips some cash under the check, weighing it down with his coffee cup.
Back at his desk, Garrett is closing the blueprint program for the day when his phone chirps.
“Hey, it’s Lyn. Check your email. I just sent you some interesting stuff. We’ll talk at Hal’s. You’re still going, right?”
“Just for a few minutes. I want to go out to Miranda’s cross like I planned.”
“OK,” she hesitates, then half-states, half-asks, “Maybe I can go with you. I’d love to see Miranda’s memorial. And those newspaper articles are really interesting. You read them and we’ll talk.”
“OK, thanks, Lyn. Yeah, we’ll talk at Hal’s.” Garrett is thinking more about how much he likes Lyn—her sad green eyes and dry sense of humor, the way she touches his arm with the tips of her fingers when she wants to make a point—than about this weird situation with Miranda’s monument.
The email from Lyn contains two links to articles from the North Coast Herald. One is a front page news story with a headline from forty-five years ago:
LOCAL BROTHERS TO WATERY GRAVE
1 Adult, 3 Teens Suspected in Deadly Prank
The other is a human-interest story just two years old:
REHAB A SUCCESS STORY FOR AREA MEMORIALS
Differently-Abled Recycler Pursues “Monumental” Hobby
The news story features a grainy photo of the bridge by the slough with cop cars and crime scene tape. The caption reads: “Police investigate suspicious crash that cost the lives of beloved local athletes, Barry and Gordon Hurst.”
The recent, clearer picture above the human-interest article shows a haggard old man in a bucket hat, standing next to a small white cross. He is holding a scrub brush in one hand and a rake in the other, American Gothic style. It’s captioned: “Owen Morris takes his rehabilitation to the next level to save our roadside memorials.”
Garrett has to reread both articles to put the pictures together.
Owen wakes up Saturday morning hacking his way out of a bad dream, but as soon as he remembers it’s the weekend, he’s eager to get going. He enjoys his cigarettes and coffee, eats his breakfast and cleans up a bit, as usual. Then, unlike on a weekday, Owen packs himself a lunch: a ready-made turkey sandwich, an apple, a plastic pack of peanut butter cookies, and a can of Fanta Orange—his favorite—all from Safeway. When his lunch is tucked away in an oversized brown paper bag, he sets it down on the counter and claps his hands together. “OK, time to pack the bucket and get to it!”
He goes to his tiny closet, pops the trailer-style snap latch and surveys his supplies. He’s already done this several times since last weekend. “OK, I got clean rags and Simple Green.” He speaks to himself in his full, phlegm-gargling voice as he places each item in the bucket. “New flowers and grass, a roll of netting, and some border fence. No paint today. Ready!”
Placing his lunch bag on top, Owen takes the five-gallon bucket by the handle, shoulders his front door open, and carefully side-steps out. “Easy does it, now.” He and his bucket together are too wide for the opening and he took a serious tumble a couple years ago in his weekend excitement.
The aluminum-wrapped foam door to Owen’s trailer is never locked because he lost the key so often, but it takes a good push to open and close it. Turning toward the driveway, he hops back in surprise, nearly falling off the milk crate. Angled on the downward slope of the short gravel driveway is a light blue pickup truck, its passenger door wide open. The driver—a middle-aged man with a round, sad, smiling face—leans toward him across the seat.
“Looks like you need a porch.” he says.
“Yeah, well, “ Owen says. About to reflexively tell this stranger he just wished he had a bench, he stops. “Hey, who’re you?” he says.
“Are you Owen Morris?” the man asks, his eyebrows rising.
Owen steps off the crate and walks tentatively toward the truck. “Yeah, that’s me,” he says. “But who’re you and how come you’re here?”
“My name is Garrett Henderson and I thought you might need a ride. You can put your bucket in back.”
Owen has learned over the years to trust strangers who seem friendly and offer help. He likes the idea of riding in a truck, but doesn’t trust friendly strangers enough to be separated from his bucket. “Okay, thanks,” he says, and climbs into the cab, pulling his bucket in after him. The brand-new truck is spacious inside; plenty of room for his bucket on the floor in front of him.
“Where do you want to go first?” says Garrett as he pulls onto the road heading toward the east side of town.
Owen only has to think for a moment, because he often pondered where he’d go if he had a ride. “Well, there was a big wreck up the hill once—up the top a Laurel there? Hard to get to without a ride. Didn’t happen just now—’bout five years ago it was. Saw it in an old paper at work. I gotta go up there and see. It was a big one. Might be some work to do. Be good to get a ride, if ya don’t mind.”
“OK. We’re already headed that way.”
Owen thinks things over a moment and says, “How do you know me? Are you a new social worker or something? Are you a friend of Miss Derks?”
“No, but I did talk with Doctor Applebaum for a few minutes yesterday afternoon.”
“Doctor Atom–buh, eh, Doctor Ap-ple-bum’s not s’posed to tell our secrets,” Owen says. Dr. Atombomb—as even he calls himself at times—is very clear with his clients about confidentiality.
“Oh, no,” says Garrett, “I just asked him if it would be all right if I visited you—maybe drive you around while you do your work today. He thought it would be a good idea. For both of us.” Garrett is conscious of a condescending tone in his voice. He does not know how to do what he is doing, and isn’t really sure what that might be, but he presses on, trying to sound more casual. “Yeah, so, uh, I read about you in the Herald.”
“Oh, yeah, I remember. I got my picture in the paper.” Owen had been so proud when the folks at Many Hands saw him in the paper. It was the first time they’d heard about his other work. Only later did he begin to resent the notoriety, how it rekindled other things. “That was a while back.” He pauses, remembering those older newspaper stories that he doesn’t want to talk about. He hopes this man hasn’t seen them. “How’d you see it now?”
Garrett tells Owen about seeing Miranda’s cross so well cared-for—how it made him want to thank him, maybe help him. As they approach the top of Laurel Hill, they chatted about their respective jobs, each of them impressed, for different reasons, with the difficulty of the other’s work.
Laurel Avenue comes up the steep side of a ridge and ends at East Street, a busy neighborhood thoroughfare lined with nice homes, and businesses with names like Ridgetop Market, Ridgetop Real Estate, and Ridgetop Cemetery. Garrett parks the truck on Laurel where it levels off briefly before the intersection.
As they walk to the corner, Owen describes the crash. “Yeah, this car full of teenagers thought they could make their car fly up at the top of the hill—like in the movies? They musta been drunk, cuz there’s nothin’ but a cee-ment wall on the other side there.” He doesn’t remember reading about this crash, but as they cross East Street, Garrett sees the evidence of an impact on the retaining wall, cracked top to bottom. He scans the ugly patch material, mortared into the crevasse to hide the damage, and is disgusted by the poor workmanship.
“There were four kids inside. Only one of ’em made it out alive.” Owen feels sadness overtake him, as if someone he knew had died here. His shoulders slump and Garrett sees the emotion on his face. Momentarily visualizing the gore of such a horrendous scene makes Garrett feel queasy.
Owen steps abruptly into the street to better see the yard above the wall, searching.
“Careful!” Garrett shouts, a goose-bump chill rippling across his skin as he glances left and right for cars.
Owen ignores him, bending back and squinting at the top of the wall. “I thought there would be some crosses or something up there on the lawn.” He shrugs and ambles back on to the sidewalk. “Guess not,” he says and shrugs again, somewhat at a loss.
“Don’t you ever set them up yourself?” For an instant the thought of a mural on this tragic wall flashes through Garrett’s mind—a community project in memory of these poor kids—but he forgets the idea immediately. A few days from now, it will resurface.
“Nah, mostly not,” Owen says. He recalls the few times he tried it before deciding that part of the job was better left to others. “That’s for families and stuff. I just fix em up. Keep em lookin’ nice.”
Owen begins to pace, hands in pockets. Garrett, noticing this, breaks in, trying to sound chipper. “Well, where else to this morning?”
Surprised, but accepting, Owen stops pacing and shrugs once more with raised eyebrows and pursed lips as the next task takes shape in his mind. “Maybe you could take me out the ridge road. There’s some out there I haven’t been to in a while.”
“Okay, well, that’s right out East Street here. Let’s go.”
For the rest of the morning, Garrett watches from his truck as Owen steps through his routine at accident sites up and down the winding road—pacing it off, bagging trash, cleaning markers, putting Easter grass under bird netting. Dr. Applebaum had warned Garrett about trying to talk with Owen about his “obsession,” but gave his blessing. “I know he’d like it if you offered him a ride. And if you stay out of his way, he won’t get. . . well. . . too excited.”
Sitting in his truck, Garrett reads again the newspaper printouts Lyn sent him the day before. He begins to think he understands Owen, and is humbled. Owen was the 18-year-old who, along with three other teenagers, caused the deaths of the Hurst brothers. The story of the trial and sentencing was on the front page of the Herald for months. Controversy roiled the bereaved community when the judge sentenced Owen to the state hospital instead of prison while the juveniles all got probation. It seemed to Garrett that Owen took one for the team, and that the judge understood this and didn’t want to see him scapegoated further. “I feel so sorry for him,” Lyn had said last night as they watched the sunset over the back-bay. Garrett felt the same.
Garrett can’t quite name the pleasant, drowsy feeling that comes over him as he watches Owen work.
Owen is grateful to be driven around to sites he seldom gets to, but he has long taken for granted the help he gets from others and is not effusive in his thanks. Mostly, he’s surprised that somebody wants to give him a ride and glad he doesn’t have to walk the narrow shoulder of the ridge highway between the sites.
“Sure glad that guy isn’t out here trying to help,” Owen mumbles, tossing the occasional nodding glare toward the truck. “Gary? Is that what he said his name is? His truck sure is nice. It’s good to get a ride. At least he’s just in there reading or something and not staring at me the whole time.”
Later, Garrett buys them a meal at the Ridgetop Cafe. Owen is gripped by an unnamed fear of wasting his sack lunch, but agrees when Garret inspects its contents and assures him the food will last until tomorrow. Over burgers and fries, they make plans to visit the sites by the slough the next afternoon. Garrett promises to pack a lunch.
The two men sit side by side on the bridge’s concrete footing, gazing at the slough. This concrete, too, has been cracked and patched. Beside them, at the end of the bridge, the two white crosses commemorating the deaths of the Hurst brothers show the results of today’s work: new paint, new grass and flowers encircled by a modest garden border, and a Garrett-lettered “RIP” at the center of each cross.
Their silhouettes contrast in the late afternoon sun: one erect and V-shaped, its powerful construction-worker’s shoulders sloping only slightly, arms drawn in, round head held high, pate shining in the angled light; the other a rumpled lump from which short, thick arms protrude, like a stuffed animal topped with a bucket hat. They speak intermittently, without animation, their heads never turning, as if addressing the life-and-death scent of the bay-bottom, growing stronger as the tide recedes.
“I know they’re not really buried here. I know that now.” Owen bows his head, remembering all those times he’d thought he was praying over real graves. The feeling comes back to him, a kind of shame he’s often felt when he learns things. Ashamed for not already knowing what others knew—for believing what is wrong and stupid. He envies the happiness of the people from his past who never discovered they were ignorant.
“I knew all along they buried them two brothers somewheres else. Fished em out and took ’em to the graveyard.” Owen had carefully revealed parts of this story while they worked together that afternoon. Finding out that Garrett had already read all about him was a relief, since it meant he didn’t have to explain anything. “But I thought people really were buried there… you know, under the crosses. I thought your little girl was there for a long time, you know, under the cross? I know they’re not now. I sorta figured it out. And then I asked people at work and Dr. Atombomb and they all said it was true.”
“Miranda’s out there,” says Garrett, nodding toward the horizon. He feels the untruth and tries to imagine where else his daughter could be, but he cannot. “We scattered her ashes in the ocean.”
“So, this is sorta like her grave.” Owen turns his head toward Miranda’s newly-inscribed cross, glowing gold in the day’s last light, a short way down the hill where the road levels with the slough. Squinting into the glare, Garrett tries to focus his mind’s eye on Miranda’s fading visage, but he cannot see her clearly. He, too, bows his head.
“Sorta like…” he whispers.
“How’d that wreck happen? I never saw it in the paper.” This is something Owen wonders about most of his little monuments. In the silence that follows, the two closer crosses summon thoughts of another wreck—one he had witnessed and remembers all too well—one that was not an accident.
They look out across the salt marsh to the bay. Each man’s feelings hold his tongue. Each allows sequestered memories to surge. Each wonders how much more to tell, how much still to hide, how much is real, how much has eroded and been reshaped by guilt, and how much truth is even possible to share. These questions are wordless thought; the unbidden words that surface create their own truth.
Garrett decides, without realizing it, that he will tell the story of that night in full to this person he has come to appreciate in a way that feels familiar, but that he does not understand.
“Miranda was a teenager. Adina and I didn’t know what to do with a teenager. It seemed like she loved us just a few years before. We had fun together, Miranda and me.” He stops to think of words to match the feelings he remembers. “But at a certain point, it didn’t even seem like she liked us. I mean, she said she hated us often enough, but you know, teenagers get like that, I guess. I know we loved her, of course, but Adina and I were having our own problems, and that’s never good for kids. Especially an only child.”
Owen had expected a short, simple answer, his mind preoccupied with his own night so long ago—images and feelings he had not been able to keep at bay this afternoon as they finished his rounds here at the slough with Miranda’s pretty little memorial and these twin crosses with their own memories. He is unprepared to attend to someone else’s story.
“So, well, at some point during freshman year she started drinking. It was just before she died, really. She never had a chance to get over it like most kids do—like I had to do back in the day.” Garrett pauses again, trying to keep his composure and not just start bawling. He glances at Owen and admires what a good listener he is.
But Owen is just staring—not understanding enough to react or form questions. He tries to listen, but the story has already gotten away from him. He hangs his head down, trying not to look, but in the corner of his eye the two crosses beside him seem to be moving, waving their stubby arms like children demanding his attention. Images from his dreams become memories once again.
“Anyway, that night she was at a party out Cedar Valley Road near my mom’s house—Adina and I lived in town back then. On the phone I could tell she was drunk. She was saying she wanted to spend the night at Grandma’s house, but we didn’t want my mother to see her in that condition, and we didn’t really trust her. We thought she was probably scheming to spend the night with some boy. That was not going to happen. So, I drove out there to pick her up.”
For Owen, trying to keep certain thoughts and visions from his mind makes him feel as if he is drunk, the way his crazy pills sometimes made him feel.
“I had to search through the whole drunken party house to find her. I didn’t know any other way to bring her home. I broke in on a make-out session in a back bedroom. I mean, God! Whatever would have happened to her in that room is way better than what did happen! Why couldn’t I have been a normal, dumb dad and let her have her fucking teenage fun?” he laments to the sky. As a pickup roars up the bridge behind him, his proud silhouette slumps, head in hands, and the remaining speck of sun on the horizon disappears behind the distant dunes. The golds and greens of the marsh darken in the gloaming.
Owen feels like smoking a cigarette. When his dreams wake him up early, that’s always what he does. It helps him forget. But he’s left them at home, as usual on the weekends. He needs one now. The pictures are coming fast.
“I had to drag her to the car. She was fighting me the whole way. I’d never seen her like that. I’m sure I was hurting her wrist where I had ahold of her, and she was pissed at me for embarrassing her, but what the hell was I supposed to do?” Garrett pauses to leave room for a response he doesn’t really expect, then continues. “When we started home, she really unloaded on me. All this shit came out about us being horrible parents and her having no freedom and being so lonely. She harangued me till we got down to the highway, and, well, when she started cussing at me—dropping F-bombs—it really went bad. I’d had a couple of drinks myself that night, and I’d about had it with her. I don’t remember what I said exactly, but I’m sure I was taking other stuff out on her while I was giving her the big lecture. I dropped a few F-bombs of my own. Fuck!” The word rips from his gut through his throat. The tears he’s been fighting begin to fill his eyes. He launches himself from his perch and staggers down the narrow shoulder to Miranda’s shrine.
Owen is startled from his half-listening reverie by Garrett’s anger and, struggling to control the pictures in his head, nearly falls backward off the bridge footing. Instead, he manages an elbow-roll to the end and belly-slides to the ground. He stumbles down the gravel verge after Garrett. He doesn’t know what else to do. Words are taking shape in his mind that he needs to tell this man Gary.
Standing over the monument to his daughter beside the darkening slough, Garrett flings his hands down at the black mud as if to rid himself of something on his fingers. “Why couldn’t I just shut the fuck up and let her vent?” he shouts, turning to Owen, his face a distorted mask of anger and disbelief. Owen, just regaining his footing, does not understand the question.
The sun beyond the offshore fog bank, paints the high clouds red and the ebbing tide’s dank scent submits to a light sea breeze. The road behind them is dark.
“She kept saying, You don’t know what it’s like, Dad. And you know what? I didn’t, and I still don’t, but I didn’t have to lay into her like that.” Still looking for something from Owen, or from the cross, or the slough, from anyone, or anything, Garrett finally notices Owen’s own agitation. “You okay, Owen?” he asks, feeling immediately selfish and ashamed—realizing as he speaks that Owen must be reexperiencing just what in fact he is. “Owen? Are you okay?” Garrett reflects a second. “You thinking about…?” He leaves this question hanging, not sure what words to use.
Owen is bug-eyed for a moment, not prepared for such direct questions. “I’m okay,” he says, but the truth is circling him like a pack of feral dogs. Words waiting just below the surface force themselves out as a series of grunts, punctuated by faint squeaks. “They were bullies, those boys,” he says. “I wanted them to be my friends, but they were bullies. I knew they were and I didn’t care. I wanted to have some friends. It was their idea, pushing that trailer into the road. They tried, and could hardly move it. But I was stronger than all of em. I was the one who pushed the trailer into the road.” He feels the coldness in his hands. The steel. Owen wouldn’t, couldn’t, have done it alone, but he did his part and those brothers died. He knows this and has known it since that night, but he feels like he’s going to explode if he doesn’t tell Gary about it. “We thought the next car would just crash into the trailer frame. It wasn’t that big. But they swerved and went into the water. It was too dark to see. I only heard it,” his last few words a croak so low and guttural, Garrett thinks he’s clearing his throat.
Owen paws at the chest of his jacket. He wants a cigarette. He searches deep in his pants pockets, thinking of his crazy pills, Miss Derks, and Dr. Atombomb. He can see and hear that Garrett is upset. He knows it’s about his dead little girl. He wants to help, but he doesn’t know what to do except keep pretending he is listening. He catches up a couple of breaths, pushes aside his own story and puts a question into words he hopes will help him forget again. “Okay, but, eh, I don’t really get how all that stuff with your little girl caused a crash.”
Garrett pivots on the gravel and looks down the darkened highway. The cerulean glow of the sky reveals the broken center line to the point where it disappears into the black shadows of the willows. “There was no crash,” he says, staring blankly at the middle of the road. “Not really.” His resignation is so complete his knees begin to wobble. “She got run over by a logging truck.”
“Oh,” was all that Owen could muster, his mind’s hands gripping the dream trailer hitch, pushing. He hears the boys’ laughter. And his.
Garrett firms himself up a little and continues, forgetting the concern he’d just expressed for Owen. “We were just coming to the bridge when she opened the door. She was screaming, I’m gonna jump if you don’t stop this fucking car! The wind—there was this big sucking sound and I could see the edge of the road going by—she was pushing on the open door, leaning out, screaming at me to stop.”
The vivid description breaks through Owen’s endless loop of shame. He does not understand how anyone could be so angry at their own father, or how a father could be so angry at his daughter. He never knew his father or been a dad, but he understands cars and danger and death.
“So, I stopped,” Garrett says in a high, questioning voice, sounding and feeling astounded. “She rolled out and slammed the door. I don’t know what I was thinking. Another car almost rear-ended me right there, so I figured I’d park the car on the other side of the bridge and walk back for her. I didn’t think about how drunk she was. I never thought…” Garrett feels his throat catch, his will fail. He crumples beside his daughter’s shrine and gives over to sobs.
For Owen, the sight of a grown man weeping is more affecting than words. He steps forward, drops to his knees, and puts his hands on Garrett’s trembling shoulders. “It’s OK, Gary,” he says. “She’s in heaven now.”
Down the highway, the tunnel of willows begins to glow as headlights approach. Twin halogen spotlights break around the curve and illuminate the roadside tableau of kneeling men. Garrett averts his eyes down to the road and in that instant the black-red stain opens up before him, darker than the asphalt. He turns to the brightening cross, clutching Owen’s wrists, but the pool of blood persists like an afterimage of the sun. He wants to reach out to the cross, to Miranda. Only the firm hands on his shoulders seem real. He clutches Owen’s wrists.
Steadying himself on Garrett’s shoulders, Owen squints into the high beams that brighten with the rising blare of the engine. The light and noise seem to be aimed directly at them. As the machine shoots past not six feet away, the driver lays on the horn. Startled, they leap as one away from the road, and Garrett trips on the netting, bowling into Owen. They tumble down the gravel slope and roll into the mud at the edge of the slough—unhurt, on their hands and knees, face to face in the stinking silt.
It dawns on both of them at once that they are stuck; each extremity sinks deeper into the sludge as it pushes to lift its opposite.
Owen isn’t sure exactly what has happened. There is pain in his elbow and his hip, and he can’t move. “Help me, Gary,” he pleads, panic beginning to set in. Not being able to move his arms and legs reminds him of being sheeted in psych wards. He begins to struggle, increasing the mud’s grip.
Garrett hears the desperation in Owen’s wheezing gasps. “It’s okay, Owen. I got this,” he says before he has devised a plan. He understands what has happened and feels stupid and clumsy. He thinks, This is just what I deserve, but says, “Sorry for knocking you over, Owen.”
Owen’s panic deepens. He begins to push and pull, the ooze sucking at his limbs. His mind flickers with fears remembered; sheets and blankets firm against his effort to escape, sweat pouring from his face. His breath is quick and shallow as he works himself deeper into the mud.
Garrett sees that Owen is panicking. “Owen! Hey! Listen to me.” This stops Owen’s squirming. His physical instincts racing ahead of his thoughts, Garrett says, “Lean your head toward me.” Owen nods slightly and complies. “Okay, now touch your forehead against mine.” Trusting, Owen extends his neck and leans his head toward Garrett, who slowly lowers his own forehead until what years ago had been his hairline is pressed against the front of Owen’s bucket hat. “Okay, now, push!” shouts Garett. For an instant they are head-butted together like two muddy billy goats. “When I say go, lift both your arms at the same time.”
Someone watching from the road would have seen two men rise from the mud like dancers in the dark—pressing together first their heads and then their emerging arms and hands, climbing one another like a Jacob’s ladder until they were statues of mud, hands upon each other’s shoulders.
Owen is so relieved to be able to move his arms again that he nearly comes to tears. Garrett is thinking of their exit strategy. His builder’s eye estimates the distance to the gravel verge and tells Owen, “Okay, I think we just gotta fall over toward the road.”
That same observer would see the two mud statues topple over in slow motion and come alive, wriggle up the shoulder of the road, then softly shake together.
Owen has always had a hard time understanding what everyone was laughing about. He seldom thinks much is funny. But when he and Garrett are in the middle of helping each other skootch and worm their slimy bodies onto the gravel, something about it makes him laugh. Garrett hears the glee rising from Owen and feels his own belly laugh coming on, but manages to hold it until he is sure they have worked their way out of the jam. Then, even as the sulfurous stench surrounds him, thinking of the mud as jam, feeling that it has taken his sneakers, his blackened toes protruding from his muddy pantlegs, the absurdity of their plight strikes him like a punchline, and his laughter bursts out.
A fugue of laughter without words or thought rises and falls in the darkness.
For several moments they quiver in breathless, mud-covered joy next to Miranda’s clean white cross. Owen isn’t sure what is happening, but as his laughter recedes it is replaced by another feeling for which he does not have a word.
What is the word for how you feel when you find a friend?
“Just happy, I guess.”
“What’s that, Owen?” says Garrett. As his breath returned to him, he’d thought about building a bench here with Miranda’s name on it. A nice place to sit together and watch the sunset.
“I’m just happy, I guess,” says Owen.
“Me too, Owen.”
Garret remembers something he was going to say, but remains silent, thinking of things he plans to do.
His new nickname will be Gary.