Hometown

The dreams that Jon had been having had gotten worse recently, and he feared that it was beginning to show in the lines of his face.  Even Talia, who was normally too absorbed in the craziness of her own life to look beyond herself or those subject matters which directly concerned her, had commented on his appearance.  “You need to sleep, Jon,” she had told him.  “You look like shit.”  

Jon rolled over and stretched his arms, his limbs spilling well over the edges of his childhood bed and reaching toward the floor.  He was six-foot-four, and his twin-size-bed, which was too small for him even in his teen years, now seemed comically so.  His bed frame creaked as he sat up and planted his feet on the ground, his joints groaning as they bore progressively more of his weight.  

He checked the time on his tablet.  It read 7:12 AM; bright and early, he thought.  Vaguely groggy and still feeling the effects of the various intoxicants he had shared with his high school friends the night before, he stumbled out of his room, pushed open his bedroom door with more force than was his intention, and found his way to the bathroom sink that he was sharing with his parents, his cousin, and his sister, Helene.  Looking down with mild disgust, he noticed that the sink was streaked with toothpaste and stained the fluorescent blue of Helene’s mouthwash.  He suspected, in fact, that a majority of the mess was Helene’s making, and the result of her chronic absentmindedness.  

He turned on the faucet and let the water run until it was hot.  His parent’s house had been built in the 1850s, and while the plumbing system and electrical configuration were perfectly modern, it could still take the better part of a minute before the water in the showers warmed enough for someone to bathe comfortably.  As the water ran, the faucet emitted a faint but high-pitched hissing sound, which Jon had always thought of as oddly comforting.  It was the whine of waking up and facing a new day, the whine of preparation.  After some time, he bent forward and splashed water on his forehead and cheeks, letting it drip down to his lips.  It was hot and his hands burned from touching the flow of the water.  
As he stood, eyeing himself in the mirror, he could vaguely make out sounds of life coming from down the stairs.  He could hear his mother—who hated sleeping in and cited menopause as her reason for waking up hours before Jon deemed it sensible to do so—laughing faintly, her voice rising up from the poorly insulated floor and giving the place the distinct feeling of being lived in.  He had grown up in this house and never thought it would feel unfamiliar to him, but for a reason he could not quite place, it did now.

 

He exited the bathroom, swiping with the end of his shirt sleeve at the steam that had condensed on the mirror.  He passed by the open door of his parents’ room and glanced into the converted study, which was being occupied temporarily by his cousin, Talia, and had been since she had gotten into a fight with her parents many weeks prior.  He had been at his apartment in New York when he heard about the fight from her.  She had called him crying—which surprised him, because she cried only on very rare occasions—but her tears had been of anger rather than of sadness. She was younger than he was, but her comportment was such that a stranger would never guess it.

She lay sprawled across her bedspread, her mouth open wide and the gentle drone of her snoring the only audible sound. Jon grinned as he passed by her and walked toward the top of the staircase at the far end of the hallway, running his hands along the smooth, cold metal of the banister as he made his way down to the first floor.

 

His mom was sitting in the same worn, green felt chair in which she always sat—facing away from him as he entered the study—but she turned in her chair and smiled at him as he entered, pointing at the tablet she was holding to her ear to indicate that she was otherwise disposed.  He smiled back and walked to the kitchen, which was colder than the rest of the house on account of the fact that it was the only part which had not been completely gutted or otherwise partially repaired since the home was first constructed.  The glass in the windows testified to its age:  The sheen of the glass looked greasy, as if a translucent film coated its surface.  Jon knew that its appearance was owed to the fact that, over time, the glass had oozed down into the sill, its base now noticeably thicker than its highest reaches.  The 200-year-old windowpane forced him to acknowledge a fact that he intellectually knew to be true, but which was of little practical importance to Jon and against which his intuition rebelled: glass was a liquid, and as such, flowed downward, pulled by that same inexorable force of gravity that causes water to fall and man to stand on solid ground.  He pondered this for a moment, before shaking his head in an effort to clear it of the fog that was muddying his thoughts.  Maybe I’m still high, thought Jon, explaining away his ponderous, window-related thoughts by chalking them up to his rapacious smoking habit.  

He flicked a switch and an old coffee maker sputtered to life.  He could hear it gurgling—the sounds of some mechanism therein initiating its coffee-making process—as he turned and descended the four stairs it took to reach a side door which was situated between the first floor of the home and the basement.  Pulling on the door handle, he walked outside and folded his arms against the wind and chill of late November.  He squinted up at the muted late autumn sun before it got too bright for him, and he looked away.  He had walked outside to make sure that he and his friends had not discarded any beer cans or half-smoked joints along the path leading from the sidewalk to the door on the side of the house.  While Jon normally hated wasting good weed—and would never choose to throw away an unfinished joint—in the exuberant extravagance of being drunk, such an act of profligacy (a cardinal sin to him while sober) was a real possibility.  
Satisfied that there was no such refuse on the ground—and now much colder than he thought he would be from the minute or two of outdoor exposure—Jon walked back in and slammed the door against the pull of the wind.  As he rubbed his hands together and climbed the few stairs back up to the kitchen, he was pleased to detect the faint scent of freshly made coffee thawing out his frozen nostrils.  

He had a habit of entering and exiting through the side door—though it remained largely unused by the other members of the household—as though his everyday activities were a secret matter, which were to be preserved through his covert entrances and exits.

His mom was off the phone when he walked back into the living room.  

“Mornin’, mom.  How’d you sleep?”

“Fine, honey.  How ‘bout you?”  She smiled up at him.  

“Fine,” he replied, although this wasn’t expressly true.  He couldn’t remember the last time that the quality of his previous night’s sleep could have been reasonably characterized as “fine,” and his expression soured slightly in recognition of that fact.

“What did you and your pals get up to last night?” she asked.  His mom was nosy in the good-natured way of moms the world over.  She delighted in hearing of her children’s activities and pried for information whenever she could.  Helene was decidedly less forthcoming with such information, so she pried it out of Jon whenever she was able.  

“Oh, just out to the Head,” he replied, casually.  The Head was the name of one of the three bars in town, and by far the most popular.  “Andy was feeling a bit sick, so we called it a night pretty early.”  

That, at least, was true, although Jon had omitted the cause of his friend’s feeling ill.  Nevertheless, Jon was quite confident that his mother—who knew Andy and his drinking habits—could guess as to the nature of his “sickness.”

“Oh, that boy,” said his mom, ruefully.  “When will he learn,” she continued, though her words were directed at no one in particular.  She picked up, but did not look at, the newspaper which she had laid, folded, in front of her upon Jon’s entry into the study.  “Cindy knows it, too.”

Cindy was Andy’s mom and one of Jon’s mom’s closest friends.  The two (Jon’s and Andy’s moms) went on walks together to the clay cliffs just outside of town and had a habit of talking excitedly about the flaws of their mutual friends’ and their friends’ children.  “Yeah,” was about all Jon could think to reply.  He was sure that Cindy knew of Andy’s predilection for drinking, though Jon was also sure that she didn’t care, and she certainly was in no position to judge.  In high school, before he and Andy were old enough to even want to drink, Jon had watched Andy tuck his mother into bed when she would pass out on the couch, her face peaceful, and her outstretched arm pointing to a bottle of wine which she had set on the floor next to her.  Sometimes it would be upright; sometimes it would be on its side, a trickle of blood red liquid seeping out from the lip of the bottle and adding to the already-stained carpet.

Back then, Andy had proclaimed that he would never drink.  He meant it at the time, but at some point, during college, Jon had noticed him change.  And now, at twenty-six, he was well-known by the staff of all three bars in town.  The thought (Andy’s change, that is) was sad to Jon in some ways.

There was creaking coming from the floorboards above them, and a gentle mist of dust floated down from the ceiling. Jon could hear the sound of bare feet padding above him and he glanced over at his mom, who wore an unusual expression of serenity.  She was proud of her home and took a special pride in being able to care for Talia, who was the daughter that his mom had always wanted and who behaved in all the ways that Helene—her biological (and actual) daughter—did not.  By way of superficial example, Helene owned four pairs of hiking boots and Talia owned three pairs of platform heels.  Talia had gotten caught shoplifting perfume at thirteen whereas the worst crime Helene had committed was accidentally leaving a Leadership depot with a potted plant and neglecting to pay for it.  

While the two were immensely different, the intense expressions they wore when facing down a challenge were the same.  And this similarity was known, and notable, to Jon only because the two had a habit of finding themselves in rather challenging situations.  

Talia worked at a concierge desk at the only hotel in town.  “The Albemarle” was not only the classiest establishment in Albemarle but afforded the best lodging anywhere along the southern Maryland coast, outside of Annapolis.  Its chipped, white-painted façade whispered romantically of a time in which the region was a hub of commerce and played a role in national politics by virtue of its thriving economy.  Jon’s house was built in that time of prosperity, too, and he always thought its shape was more hopeful than the houses adjacent, all of which were constructed more recently.  He didn’t know why his house remained the relic, while Albemarle had changed around it—but he wondered, in his more philosophical moments, as to what events his red brick bungalow, a vestige of a time he could not imagine, had borne witness.  

Talia worked part-time at the hotel in order to finance her lifestyle of partying and baking.  Aside from drinking, her one passion lay in the culinary arts, and Jon had to admit that she was damn good at her craft.

Helene, on the other hand, was a well-regarded but singularly aloof climatologist at one of the only scientific establishments not owned outright by the Leadership.  Jon considered her to belong to that class of people who never fully lived on planet Earth—“that girl’s head is in the clouds,” his dad had always said, with a smile.  

Growing up with Helene—penetratingly intelligent, headstrong, and unusually successful at anything and everything she did—was hard for Jon, and in his weaker and more self-indulgent moments, he resented her for it.  What’s more, he resented himself for resenting such an otherwise kind and fundamentally good person, and, in turn, this directed his resentment back to Helene for fueling this cycle—all of which, to Jon’s thinking, caused in him a profound sense of self-loathing, which he felt often and combatted through vigorous avoidance of his feelings.  

It was not that his parents picked favorites—they didn’t—but it was simply hard to not be in awe of Helene.  She was brilliant; she was beautiful in a careless way; and she was aloof, which only seemed to underscore her brilliance. Observers of hers who knew her well explained away her aloofness by assuming that she was off in the world of her own mind, tackling the answers to important questions they themselves were too unimaginative ever to ask and too dull ever to contemplate.  

Helene also possessed the unusual habit of wearing the same thing every day.  Many years ago, when she and Jon were still in high school, she had purchased seven identical pairs of light blue shirts, shorts, pants, socks, underwear, and hair bands, and wore them every day.  Her favored shade of blue was a hue akin to a robin’s egg.  She would float into a room, her head cocked to the side as if in thought, her skin a delicate white under a symphony of pastel blue—the color of a clear summer sky—and then drift away.  The effect this had captivated men and women alike.  

Not to belabor the point, but Talia was of a different sort of person.  Two weeks ago, Talia had been in a bicycle crash, and her right arm was still set in a brace to support her recently dislocated shoulder.  She had not gone to work since her accident, which Jon had thought was curious until Talia explained herself to him.  

She had confided, after swearing him to secrecy, that she had been caught crying by her manager on her break for an issue she had since forgotten.  Concerned, her manager had asked her what was wrong, and Talia, seeing an opportunity to skip out on the job she hated—but which necessarily financed her lifestyle—told him about the fights she had been having with her parents.  She didn’t link the condition of her arm to her fights with her parents explicitly, but she knew that her manager was seeing a picture of her father in his head.  She could tell he (the manager) was picturing her father—an ugly, brutish man and well known in town for one particularly hostile outburst he had directed at the vicar in the St. Calliope’s Episcopal Church of Albemarle the year before—spitting in anger at his daughter and inflicting some unspeakable act of violence upon her.  

Talia went home after her break and had not gone to work since.  She had heard nothing from her boss in that time, but her paycheck had arrived two days ago nonetheless, and as a result, she was feeling quite happy with her work-life balance for the moment.

Helene, as it happens, was recently in an accident, too.  She had pretty badly fractured her tibia while dismounting from an electric scooter.  She had been holding it by its handlebars and had picked it up to be set in one of the rows of stands which “Dorado”—an e-scooter rental firm which had inexplicably and quite insensibly chosen Albemarle as a town in which to beta test their new fleet of vehicles—had recently installed.  The accident proceeded in the following way: the bottom section of the scooter had pivoted along its metal frame, and its own weight had sent it crashing into her ankle. Then, according to a neighbor boy named Daryl, who had witnessed the incident, she immediately dropped the scooter and yelped in shock, clutching her ankle.  Daryl (according to him) apparently had sauntered toward her to offer his assistance when, steeling herself (and in a display of sheer athleticism) Helene had elevated herself onto the palms of her hands and walked the remaining two blocks home, supported only by her arms.  

It cannot be overstated the extent to which people were in awe of Helene and the extent to which she was fully deserving of their awe.

Jon shook himself from his thoughts, bringing himself back to the present moment.  His mother sighed, and Jon turned to study her face, marveling at the look of poise which had always seemed to come so effortlessly to her.  Her graying hair now fitted her face, her older features seeming to imbue her with a wisdom borne of her more advanced age, and served to emphasize the words of advice which she would dole out unexpectedly—and almost always unsolicited—to anyone who would listen to her.  For a moment, the two remained as they were—Jon watching his mother and she with her eyes closed, leaning back in apparent ease against the fraying felt of her armchair.  The stillness between them was comfortable, as it always was.  

The sounds of multiple people begrudgingly getting up from their sleep broke the silence, and Jon could make out the recognizable footsteps of Talia.  This was easy, since though not a particularly large girl, she had a habit of putting her full weight into every step she would take—as if every individual footfall was premeditated and every movement was one taken with supreme intent.  He heard her crash down the stairs, hastening down two at a time for whatever task she needed to address at 7:30 in the morning.  

Christ, how is she so energetic, Jon asked himself.  He stifled a yawn as Talia burst through the hinged door which separated the first-floor hallway from the study.  She looked in, wild-eyed, at Jon and his mother, who sat facing her upon her entry.  

“Oh, my god, it smells like burning shit!” she cried, gesticulating wildly with her unbroken arm and jerkily waving the brace which supported and protected her broken one, as if the smell had caused her to lose her ability to control her limbs.  “This fucking place,” she muttered, as Jon and his mom watched her, him with amusement and she with a look that read as, “I am obliged to look sternly at you, but I’ll let your attitude slide.”  

To be fair to her, Talia had a point:  the whole area sometimes stunk something awful.  Six miles to the north, there was a paper mill—one of the last vestiges of the formerly industrialized Chesapeake coastline—nestled between the water and the town of the more northerly Farrow’s Neck.  Farrow, as it was known, had started as a home base for the mill workers and had expanded greatly over a century ago due to a burgeoning crab industry and on account of the infrastructure which the managers of the mill had installed in and around the town.  Now, Farrow boasted a handful of shops along a beat-up road and a few homes leading up to an imposing wall of clay to the west.  It, like Albemarle, now survived principally by serving tourists who stopped on their way up to the coast to look at the cliffs or desired to explore the network of interior waterways and channels lined with Beebalm and Red Maple and Sweetbay Magnolia and suffused (as Jon always thought of it) with the scent of vigorous life.

The USGS had built a facility at the base of one of the most beautiful stretches of cliffside before the governmental organization had been closed for good.  Scientists from the Leadership—which had partially renovated the facility—now operated a small outfit which dated and performed tests upon the diatomaceous earth in and around the cliffs, which Jon knew was home to a host of fossils.  As a child, Jon had frequently gone to the cliffs to explore and search for them himself, and he had collected hundreds of shark and crocodile teeth, mollusks, foraminifera, and gastropods.  He even had a partial mastodon femur, which he prized and kept with him at his apartment in New York.  

Wringing her hands as if to rid herself of the smell, Talia stomped into the kitchen and hurled open the fridge.  The bottles of condiments and iced tea rattling in the fridge door from the force with which it had been opened.  She fumbled around with its contents, muttering to herself unintelligibly, before slamming the fridge door and coming back with a mug full of grapefruit juice.  The mug on it read “Congratulations, Graduate,” with a smiling picture of Helene from her high school days emblazoned on the front.  Her smile was warm, but her eyes were looking away from the camera, at whatever was making her smile, somewhere slightly up and to the right of the camera.  Beneath her chest, in smaller type, read “Class of 2056.”  

“I don’t know how that,” she pointed somewhere, to indicate the source of the smell, “is legal.  I really don’t!  It must violate some sort of Environmental Protection regulation or some fuckin’,” she paused, searching for the words, “public decency provision.  There are hundreds of those!  Jon, you’re the regulator, what sort of shit can we stir up until someone does something about that mill?”

“That’s not really,” Jon paused, “not really my regulatory area of expertise.”  

“What do you mean it’s not your ‘area of expertise,’” Talia asked sardonically, “I’m asking you specifically about regulation.  You do regulate, don’t you?  Isn’t that, like, all you do?”

Jon thought, attempting to distill his job functions into the fewest number of words necessary to convey his set of duties to her.  “I know about, like, taxes and intellectual property.  So, for example, if the mill failed to report all of the sources of their income to the Leadership, we could call in an anonymous tip and they could get shut down.  That happened, actually, in a case I was working on last year.”

“Well, did the mill fail to report?” Talia asked him, wide-eyed.  “I don’t know how anyone could be so bold as to lie to the Leadership, though,” she added as an aside, shaking her head.

Jon answered, “Oh, I mean, I don’t know, I was offering that more as the sort of thing that could happen.  I don’t know how much sway we, as private citizens, have over whether the mill stays open.”

Talia rolled her eyes and sat down on the couch to face them (Jon and his mother).  It emitted a soft “whump” as Talia on it.  “Useless.  You’re useless.”