Slide - Kyle Beachy [49]
“I don't have any idea what's going to happen.”
“The other day, Potter, just the other day I had the oddest memory of your childhood. Right in the middle of lunch. Someone was saying something about some group of people down in the wine country, and then all of a sudden for some reason I remembered when you were first learning to speak. I was trying to teach you colors, but all you wanted to talk about was yellow. You loved yellow. I think you liked the softness of it. Gentle yellow. Only two colors mattered: yellow and not yellow. Except you pronounced it yayo. I'd point to something and you'd say yayo or not yayo. I held up a banana. Yayo. Outside in the grass. Not yayo.”
As we sat in icy dark, the vents exhaling freezing streams that collided somewhere overhead, then settled downward, I pictured a world in which all things were so wonderfully reducible. By this point I was positive my mother had seen Freddy. The jurisdiction she held over this household, her deep knowledge of its most recessed nooks and crannies, she must have.
“That message on the machine is from Audrey,” she said.
“What? She called here?”
“About fifteen minutes ago. I thought maybe the ringing would wake up your father so I sort of let it go until the machine picked up.”
In addition to trying very very hard not to leap over the couch to get at the machine, I was also working to come up with an explanation for why Audrey would call my home over my cell phone. I pictured her clutching an international phone card, bent over the alien shape of some pale gray or blue phone terminal, handset resting horizontally in that European manner, poking the elaborate sequence of card number, country code, area code, and the final seven digits. She was sad, perhaps. Longing for some connection with a household, the anchor of home. Was she crying as she dialed? She might have been crying. Or laughing, Carmel's fingers tickling her bald head.
“She's in Germany,” my mother said.
It was amazing what this tiny bit of knowledge did for me. Germany, a smallish country, roughly, I approximated, the size of a middle-American state? I could now pinpoint her in a region. This was a problem for us, my habit of not exactly needing, per se, but very much appreciating knowledge of her location. She couldn't stand when I left her messages with not sure where you are, but I'm … or some such passive query. And part of me was pleased that my little habit angered her. It showed that the finer points of our communication mattered, that our words counted in some larger sense. I stood and crossed the room to the little stand where we kept the answering machine. “Here. I'll give you some privacy.” “It's fine,” I said. “I mean you've already heard it.” She settled back into the couch, relieved and heavy, and I wondered if maybe there was something besides milk in her mug.
Hello, Mayses, it's Audrey calling from Heidelberg, this wonderful little German town on this wonderful German river. We're near the Black Forest. Or wait, maybe we're in the Black Forest? Carmel has a family friend at the university, so last night we had this meal, oh my God this meal, and I drank ale from the horn of some creature, some horned beast. What else? There's a castle up on this hill we're about to hike to. Oh man, card's running out. But Potter! People here say there are faeries in the woods around the castle, actual real live faeries that will grant you wishes if you catch. Oh the lady is saying there's no more time. Anyway, Carmel bought this net? Shut up lady! Okay so I hope everything is
End of message. I replayed it once more, then pressed delete and went back to my father's chair. I stared at my toes inside my socks. Carla sipped her mug and held it just below her chin. Never had I so thoroughly appreciated my family's penchant for conversational minimalism. What could my mother think of this girl? Faeries said it all. What was there for her to ask? To answer?