'Leaving the Canyon House', by Mary Gayle Newton
I plunged out into the dark and damp, determined to walk the twenty miles home. Houses in that neighborhood were big and far apart, sometimes surrounded by high walls, which made visibility bad. Besides the streetlamp on a distant corner, only a few lights gleamed through the fog as I made it to the bottom of the steps and started down the long, curved drive in the wind. It was after midnight.
“Tara!”
He stood on the redwood deck watching me, silhouetted in the glow from the open door.
“I just want to ask one more question. Then I really will drive you home. I promise.”
It had started with an email. This is a voice from your past. Guess who? A correct answer will get you a latte at the old Sea Horse.
I thought this had to have come from Shelley. We’d made up at that cafe, some twenty years ago. I hadn’t been mad at her, much, since then. Anyway, she was the one who’d played guessing games where the prize was some coffee drink. Yeah, it was impossibly long ago. But who else would know about the Sea Horse?
“Sea Horse Cafe, Est. 1948,” is painted on the front window above a white facsimile of the animal, facing north. Inside are blue walls with chipping paint, framed prints of old-time sailing ships. Also scarred wooden booths on either side of an aisle. The middle one, on the right, was our special place when we were seventeen. We liked the Sea Horse because no one else we knew was ever there. So I went there at the agreed-upon time, expecting Shelley.
I’d found someone else in the booth.
*
Hours later, yellow radiance streamed from a door he’d left open at a modernist house on a cliff above the Pacific Ocean. The “canyon house,” as his parents had called their guest house. More light, triggered by motion sensors, lit his face as he stood on the deck.
“You tricked me into coming here,” I said to the face.
“Tricked you? How?”
“First you lured me into meeting you at the Sea Horse, making me think you were Shelley. Then you said you wanted to show me something. I assumed it would be something new, but you brought me here, where I’ve been many times. You also said it would take ten minutes. And we’ve been here for hours.”
“Touché.”
His hair blew in the wind.
“Like I said, I was hoping you’d find being here nostalgic.”
I pulled my jacket close around me.
I thought of Kyle at 16, juggling ping-pong balls, bouncing one off his knee, elbow or foot.
“Kyle, quit playing games. I told Ben I’d be home in a few minutes. That was hours ago and he hasn’t heard from me since, because you’ve made it so I can’t call. By now he must be out of his mind with worry.”
“Come on, Tara. I just want to ask you one last question. And, anyway, aren’t there questions you want to ask me? There must be things that have eaten away at you for years.”
“I’ve already asked you the only questions I find important.”
*
“Why did you email me last night after all this time?” I’d asked him during our latte at the Sea Horse. “And why did you pretend to be Shelley?”
“Something happened that put me in a sad space. And I needed to talk to someone. Someone who’s known me a long time.”
He didn’t answer the question about pretending to be Shelley.
“What put you in a sad space?”
“The passing of Jennifer Rosalind Surdoval.”
I couldn’t say I felt crushed that his mother was dead. She hadn’t liked me. Still, she’d been a powerful presence during the years when she went through his backpack looking for notes from me and tried to keep him from playing guitar in punk bands and acting in plays. And now she was dead and he’d never fix his horrible relationship with her. I understood that, at least.
“I’m sorry. This must be hard.”
I reached across the table.
Kyle held my fingers, gazing at them like they were some stage prop he’d been called upon to evaluate. His thumb caressed my wedding ring, almost curiously, like he wondered what it was made of. We were still on good terms then. It was before he tricked me into going to the canyon house in his car, leaving mine parked in front of the Sea Horse.
“This time I really will drive you home,” he said, in the artificial light of the deck. “If you just answer one last question.”
“No more questions. I have to get home to my husband and kids.”
*
He’d asked me the first question hours earlier, when we first arrived at the house, when his tricking me into being there still felt like one of the pranks he was known for. We sat at the dining-table. I hadn’t realized, yet, that he had my phone. I was looking for it in my purse so I could tell Ben, my husband, why I’d been delayed.
Kyle picked up my sunglasses. I’d taken them from my purse, the better to search for the phone. He put them on.
“Why did you take me back that night when you were twenty-three? Not only had I betrayed you in high school, by taking up with Shelley, but we’d reconnected in an awkward way.”
I remembered waking to the sight of a ribcage. When Kyle slithered through the window, his t-shirt had gotten twisted around his chest. I’d screamed.
“Shhh. Tara. It’s only me.”
He had on black jeans, high top sneakers, and a t-shirt commemorating a band called the Measles. He had a guitar case with him, which he pulled through the window after him.
“Shhh. Don’t wake your roomies.”
He groped in his tee, checking his ribs, which had gotten scraped on his way through.
“What in the world are you doing here?”
“I miss you like hell.”
“What happened to Shelley?”
But I already knew. Shelley had told me about her own breakup with Kyle when we made up over a latte at the Sea Horse.
“I never should’ve broken up with you,” Kyle said. “It was a mistake.”
“Isn’t it kind of late to realize that? It’s been five years.”
“I was hoping you’d give me another chance.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you shouldn’t. But I want you back. Please let me try again.”
“To do what?”
“To not screw up. Please, Tara. I’m a doofus.”
*
“I don’t remember why I took you back,” I lied.
I continued taking things out of my purse, hoping each one would turn out to be my phone. It was just that he’d looked so vulnerable, with those puppy dog eyes. And I’d remembered how funny he could be. How creative. How cute. And how needy, in spite of his family, with their country club and guest house. We’d careened into a second bout that crashed and burned after some eighteen months. That time it had been me who broke it off.
Wallet. Checkbook. Skeleton-shaped green eraser belonging to Guthrie, my 9-year-old. Hairbrush. Two keys. God knows what they were keys to. Forms that would let Chris, my high school son, play football if I signed them. Ben was leaving it up to me to decide if Chris could play this year, but in the past it had made his grades even worse. Plus I was afraid of his dying of a concussion like this kid I’d seen on the TV news.
Adult Kyle wore a blazer and button-down shirt with his jeans. He still had my dark glasses on.
“Very well,” he said. “Question number two. Don’t you want to know why I took up with Shelley?”
And it went on like that.
*
“The only questions I want to ask you right now are ‘when are you going to drive me home?’ and ‘when are you going to let me call my family so I can tell them where the hell I am?’”
I paused in the cold and mist of the driveway.
“I keep telling you I’ll drive you home eventually.”
“I’m sick of playing games.”
I turned my back on him and continued into the cold and mist.
“Tara, it was my mom.”
He’d said that at the table when I was putting the stuff back in my purse, having given up on finding the phone.
“Your mom. What did she have to do with your taking up with Shelley?”
He’d taken my sunglasses off but still held them in his hands, his fingers curling around the frames possessively.
“She forced me to break up with you. Her and my dad.”
I was surprised how much that hurt.
“What was their objection to me? I never understood.”
“That you were the most gorgeous, amazing, creative girl alive. In my eyes. When Mom wanted me to go out with – do you remember Jessica McCollough?”
“No.”
“I’m not surprised. There’s not much to remember. But her parents were in the country club.”
“In other words her family lived in a bigger, fancier house than mine.”
I put the forms back in my purse.
“And she didn’t have any juvenile delinquent brothers.”
Then the green eraser skeleton.
“And her clothes all came from upscale boutiques. Instead of the Belle’s Sea Trunk thrift shop.”
“That was pretty much it.”
“Well, that’s sad. I liked to think people judged me on my upright, or mostly upright, character. So what does this have to do with you dumping me for Shelley a few weeks before graduation? When we’d been together through most of high school? She was scarcely richer than I was.”
“Tara, remember when I applied to colleges? How I fought with my parents?”
Kyle showing up at the door looking depressed came to mind. Kyle across the table at the Sea Horse, staring at his own image, in his spoon, like it was some oracle, full of dire portents.
“I got into the Performing Arts Academy. Which Mom hated. Because it wasn’t law school. But she was willing to let Dad pay for it. Not because it was who I was, and made me happy, but to get me away from you, since it was all the way in New York. I’d told her I wanted to go to Stanford so I could be near you.”
“You never told me this.”
“I couldn’t stand to.”
His hands tightened around the sunglasses.
“They both said if I went to college anyplace in California, I’d have to pay for it myself. So I took up with Shelley like the lily-livered freak I was. It was like, ‘Okay I’ll break up with Tara. But I’ll defy you by going out with Shelley, who’s equally non-country-club.’ They didn’t object to Shelley because they knew I wasn’t into her. That it wouldn’t last. I know, it was inconsiderate to Shelley. But I was ashamed to tell you the real reason.”
This speech struck fear into my gut, even though it was all over and done with. Long ago.
“Your dad was in on it? I always thought he liked me.”
“Yes, Tara. He liked you. But he was spineless where my mom was concerned.”
I put my wallet back in my purse, the teen inside me furious that grown adults with more power than me, who owned things like the canyon house, had contrived the event that broke my heart.
“It was a nightmare,” Kyle said. “They were the two people I’d trusted more than anyone else, all my life. And they wanted me to hurt you.”
His eyes were wet with tears. Which made me forget about my need to get home. To the people who loved me now.
“I should’ve gone to Stanford on student loans,” he said. “I would’ve grown a spine. And I wouldn’t have hurt you. But I’m a clown. You know that. I couldn’t do any better.”
I reached across the table like I had in the Sea Horse, when he first told me about Jenny dying. He took my hand again.
A little clink came from somewhere on his person. Like keys against a glass surface.
“Kyle. Is my phone in your pocket?”
Our eyes met.
“Of course not. How would I get ahold of your phone?”
There was Kyle in 9th grade, making a silver dollar appear and disappear before a roomful of gaping younger kids. High School Kyle juggling glow-in-the-dark frisbees in his back yard. Kyle at twenty-three, standing on one hand with his feet in the air.
“I don’t believe you.”
I walked to his side of the table and plunged my hand into the pocket of his blazer. But his hand was in there, clenched on something. Tightly. He started to laugh.
“You have it, don’t you?”
He stood.
“I don’t know how it got in there.”
He held up the phone. Laughing.
“Kyle, quit bullshitting me. I’m sick and tired of this shit.”
“You just said ‘shit’ twice in the same sentence.”
It had been two sentences, but it wasn’t the time to point that out.
“Give me back my phone.”
I walked toward him. He backed away.
“It won’t do you much good without the chip.”
He extended the phone at me.
I took it from him, but its surface was blank.
“Come back!” Kyle shouted from the deck. “It’s past midnight and you’re miles from your house! Something could happen to you out there!”
“You are something happening to me out here.”
“You used to love me.”
“Kyle, where is the chip to my phone?”
After he handed my blank phone to me, I’d followed him as he backed into the vast room where his parents had given cocktail parties. The lights were off. The rattan tables and the chairs with dull pink Hawaiian-pattern cushions still stood in the shadows. A faint glow from the windows let me see his laughing face in the gloom.
“I don’t have the chip. At least not on me.”
I lunged at him, intending to search the other pocket of his blazer. He grabbed my wrist. We struggled, in the middle of the dance floor. Was this scary? Or just undignified? Either way it was deeply disturbing. My heart pumped furiously.
Finally, he let go.
“Look.”
He turned the blazer pockets inside out.
“Search me.”
He held his hands above his head.
He seemed to forget I’d been with him when he checked that first book on sleight-of-hand out of the school library in 9th grade. Still, feeling like an idiot I inserted my fingers into his jeans pockets. First the right-hand, then the left, while he stood with his hands over his head, like someone getting arrested on a TV crime drama. I even did the back pockets, where I had to touch his butt.
“See? Your chip is nowhere on me. And I didn’t even try to get fresh. Which I could have easily done.”
I was prepared to walk twenty miles through the dark to get to Ben, Chris and Guthrie. Thus, I turned my back on the deck where Kyle stood, and entered a space where trees overhung the drive. It was very dark there, and for a moment I couldn’t see my flimsy pumps on the asphalt as I picked my way through the murk. It was slow going, and Kyle caught up with me just as I emerged from the dark spot.
Moonlight softened the lines in his face, so that he looked almost like the Kyle I’d known.
“I know it sounds narcissistic, but this whole thing’s just as nightmarish for me as it is for you,” he strangely said. “You have no idea what I’m going through.”
“I don’t CARE what you’re going through. You know who I care what they’re going through?”
“Ben,” we both said.
“And my kids!” I shrieked. “And I can’t call them. Because you have the chip to my phone.”
“I gave you an option for getting it back. Why don’t we play ‘find the chip’?’” he’d said, smiling in the semi-dark of the party room. "You find it and I’ll drive you home. It’s the least you can do for me.”
“Do for you? How would caving in to a cruel mind game be doing something for you? And why should I do anything for you?”
“I need you right now. And if you look for your phone, you’ll be here in this house with me. Not on your way to – to other people. And you should do it because you used to love me.”
His pale face shimmered in the dark of the vast room. And his white shirt. The rest of him was plunged in shadow.
“Kyle, just tell me where the chip is.” My voice echoed in the emptiness. “I’ll call Ben and tell him where I am. I’ll tell him you’re in a crisis and need to talk.”
“It’s in this house.”
Kyle gleamed amorphously, like a tree fungus in a rainforest.
“Find it.”
“Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?”
I was aware of sounding like a parrot.
“No,” was all he said.
“So you’re going to stand here and play mind games.”
“Yes.”
I wanted to scream “are you nuts?” but knew it wouldn’t help. Calm, Tara. Stay calm. The worst thing you can do in this type of situation is freak. As if I’ve ever been in this type of situation.
“They still have you,” Kyle said, under a streetlamp. “Ben and your kids. You’ve never gone anywhere.”
“I’m somewhere now. Somewhere weird and horrible. And they don’t know what’s happening to me.”
I stepped onto the suburban road that intersected the drive.
Kyle stepped in front of me.
“Nothing’s happening to you. And if you’d just calm down, and go with the flow, you might not find being here upsetting.”
As if arranged by some studio tech, the yipping of coyotes could be heard in the distance.
Crying, I stepped around him. To my relief, he stood back.
“You’ll never get home on foot.”
The ocean, to my left, made rushing and hissing sounds. If I kept moving toward it, in a downward direction, I’d get to the coast highway eventually.
I walked, Kyle alongside me.
“Don’t you have any shame?” I said. “Because of you, a 9-year-old is lying awake, freaking because he doesn’t know where his mom is.”
“I don’t know where my mom is.”
“Guthrie is nine.”
“I’m forty-three.”
What would happen if I ignored him? I kept walking, wiping my eyes, wondering if Ben had managed to put Guthrie to bed in spite of the crisis where I was missing.
“Good-bye, Tara!”
Kyle’s voice now came from somewhere behind me.
“I was hoping for a different ending!”
Was he giving up? Really? If so, thank God.
I continued on. To my left a low wall separated the asphalt from a sheer drop to the Pacific. In the light of day, a spectacular view stretched there. At night there was only darkness and the sound of surf pounding the rocks below. A keen wind blew salty mist against my cheek, and I brought up the hood of my jacket and put my hands in the pockets for warmth.
There I found a small, metallic object. The chip to my phone.
Slipping it into my pocket must have amused Kyle greatly.
I looked back, wondering if he’d noticed my finding the thing. He was many yards away now.
To my horror he was on the sea wall. |
“For who could bear the stale scones of time?”
He sat with his legs dangling over the precipice.
“The wrestler’s logic; the madman’s costumes?”
Was that a distortion of Hamlet’s suicidal revery?
“Kyle! What the hell are you doing?!”
He stared into the deeps.
“I’m tired of the clown act, Tara. Like most comedians, I’m really a sad kind of a guy. You know that, more than anyone. You always saw who I was. It’s why I wanted you with me during this rite of passage.”
He made a wrenching motion, and I screamed.
However, he seemed to think better of hurling himself to his death. Which seemed to be the ‘rite of passage’ he was talking about.
“Kyle, please come down. We can talk.”
“When I planned this, before sending you the email where I pretended to be Shelley, I intended to use the balcony upstairs. It’s quite a long way down. And I thought of tricking you – perhaps extorting you – into getting in the hot tub with me, before the end. But it would have put a strain on our relationship. Which would’ve ruined the soak for both of us.”
“Kyle, please come down.”
Tears came into my eyes.
“It’s too late. I finally found the brio to get up here. I have to go through with it now.”
He gazed into the roiling surf.
“I know this method doesn’t have the dignity of, say, hara-kiri. But as a friend you should feel honored to be the audience for my final act.”
Desperate for help, I managed to get the back off my phone and put the SIM card in its place. I touched the switch.
“You’re going to make me watch you die?”
This was obviously a long shot, since he hadn’t seemed to care much about my feelings through most of this evening. Meanwhile the phone started its dance of awakening, symbols appearing in its depths.
“It would be a horrible experience for me! Don’t leave me with that memory for the rest of my life. Kyle, we used to love each other.”
“Aw. Why did you have to go and say that?”
The screen with the commands appeared. I hit the phone-shaped icon with my thumb. And dialed 911.
Mary Gayle Newton’s work has been published in The MacGuffin, Evening Street Review, October Hill, Delmarva Review, EuphonyJournal, Night Picnic and Suspended Magazine, among others.
