Freedom [262]
“So where are you getting your money?” Walter said. “Are you working?”
Mitch leaned over somewhat unsteadily and opened a tackle box in which there was a small pile of paper money and maybe fifty dollars in coins. “My bank,” he said. “I got enough to last through the warm weather. I had a night-watchman job in Aitkin last winter.”
“And what are you going to do when this runs out?”
“I’ll find something. I take pretty good care of myself.”
“You worry about your kids?”
“Yeah, I worry, sometimes. But they’ve got good mothers that know how to take care of them. I’m no help at that. I finally figured that out. I’m only good at taking care of me.”
“You’re a free man.”
“That I am.”
They fell silent. A small breeze had kicked up, casting a million diamonds across the surface of Peter Lake. On the far side, a few fishermen were lazing in aluminum rowboats. Somewhere closer, a raven was croaking, another camper was chopping wood. Walter had been spending his days outdoors all summer, many of them in far more remote and unsettled places than this, but at no point had he felt farther from the things that constituted his life than he was feeling now. His children, his work, his ideas, the women he loved. He knew his brother wasn’t interested in this life—was beyond being interested in anything—and he had no desire to speak of it. To inflict that on him. But at the very moment his telephone rang, showing an unfamiliar West Virginia number, he was thinking how lucky and blessed his life had been.
MISTAKES WERE MADE (CONCLUSION)
A Sort of Letter to Her Reader by Patty Berglund
Chapter 4: Six Years
The autobiographer, mindful of her reader and the loss he suffered, and mindful that a certain kind of voice would do well to fall silent in the face of life’s increasing somberness, has been trying very hard to write these pages in first and second person. But she seems doomed, alas, as a writer, to be one of those jocks who refer to themselves in third person. Although she believes herself to be genuinely changed, and doing infinitely better than in the old days, and therefore worthy of a fresh hearing, she still can’t bring herself to let go of a voice she found when she had nothing else to hold on to, even if it means that her reader throws this document straight into his old Macalester College wastebasket.
The autobiographer begins by acknowledging that six years is a lot of silence. At the very beginning, when she first left Washington, Patty felt that shutting up was the kindest thing she could do both for herself and for Walter. She knew that he’d be furious to learn that she’d gone to stay with Richard. She knew that he’d conclude she had no regard for his feelings and must have been lying or deceiving herself when she’d insisted she loved him and not his friend. But let it be noted: before going up to Jersey City, she did spend one night alone in a D.C. Marriott, counting the heavy-duty sleeping pills she’d brought along with her, and examining the little plastic bag that hotel guests are supposed to line their ice buckets with. And it’s easy to say, “Yes, but she didn’t actually kill herself, did she?” and figure she was just being self-dramatizing and self-pitying and self-deceiving and other noxious self-things. The autobiographer nevertheless maintains that Patty was in a very low place that night, the lowest ever, and had to keep forcing herself to think of her children. Her pain levels, though perhaps no greater than Walter’s, were great indeed. And Richard was the person who’d put her in this situation. Richard was the only person who could understand it, the only person she didn’t think she’d die of shame to see, the only person she was sure still wanted her. There was nothing she could do now about having wrecked Walter’s life, and