The Call Page 19

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Yeah, well, we have a rabbit and nobody’s cleaned the cage in days, and the rabbit cage stinks, so why do you think these kids are going to remember to clean a rat’s cage? No, I would end up having to clean the rat’s cage, Jen said. Maybe going to space would not be such a bad idea after all, she said. There I would not have to clean the rat’s cage. I would not have to carry wood. I would not have to cook the meals, pick up the dirty socks, the wet towels …

  WHAT WE DID: We attacked the wife. We all ran up to her and hugged her. I kissed her where I could, she was shaking her head so much, not wanting to be kissed. I felt generous. I wanted to give her whatever I could, the way I gave my kidney away. I felt I had evolved, and up to the task of unquestionably helping fellow mankind. A lung. Could I give her a lung? Could she breathe deeply then, relax, love being touched? Sarah tickled her sides. Mia kissed her on the belly. The wife began to laugh. Leave me alone, Jen yelled, laughing. Oh, going off to space without us, we said. No way, we said. We’re going, too. We half picked her up and half pushed her out the door. We stood in bright sunshine right outside the door, slipping on the melting ice dirty and matted with New-foundland hair from where the dogs sometimes sat and kept watch, looking down our driveway and out over our field to the pond. We managed to get Jen over to the field beneath the apple tree, where there was still a patch of snow. We threw her onto it. We landed on her. The dogs joined in, barking and grabbing at our sleeves with their tails wagging, wondering if they should stop what was happening or let it continue because it was fun. The snow wasn’t so soft, but more like gritty crystals that stayed in Jen’s hair as she lay, still laughing, on the snow. Sunlight came through the branches of the apple tree and the children, breathless, lay back on the snow beside Jen and let the sun hit their faces. I lay back too and we all closed our eyes. What I heard was the sound of Bruce and Nelly panting as they lay next to us, and farther away I heard the sound of a car driving on the slick muddied road, its tires sending up the top layer of brown water and making a splashing sound.

  We were quiet for the longest time. Even though the windows were closed I could hear the cluster flies in the house buzzing in the corners of the window frames. They were active and happy with all the solar heat circulating in our rooms that faced south. I let my thoughts wander. I thought about gravity again—how it wasn’t really a force and how its effect was caused by the curvature of space—objects inside of space spun in the same way a marble would spin inside the curved sides of a bowl, always going down. I thought about Einstein, how only twelve people were left alive who understood his theory of relativity, and I thought how I would devote the rest of my life to understanding it, just so there would be thirteen. I felt grandiose. It would be my debt to society to understand it fully. Jen and the children might someday come to understand why I would do it. Why I would give up on the calls, why I would give up on the substitute teaching, why I … and then Bruce licked my face. It was horrible. His breath stank. His tongue was huge and slobbering. He then moved to my ears, using his front teeth very gently to nibble and clean out whatever wax embedded in my conch-like swirling cartilage he could find. Besides being horrible, it tickled. I laughed then, too. I could not help myself. I tried to push Bruce away, but the more I did, the more he pressed his 150 pounds into me, intent on my ear. When I caught my breath, I said, Damn you Bruce, get away!

  WHAT DRIVES UP THE DRIVEWAY WHEN I AM AT HOME ALONE WITH SAM: A loud pickup truck.

  WHAT COMES OUT OF THE TRUCK: A man.

  WHAT I SHOULD DO: Go outside and greet the man, but I already know what the man wants. I already know who the man is the way his eyes are cast down, the way his wife remains in the truck, staring straight ahead. I already know who he is by the way he knocks quietly on the glass of our front door. This is the man who shot my son.

  WHAT I DO: I open the door and the man tells me who he is. I am Jason Lane. This is my wife, Carol, in the truck, he says, and he motions toward his truck. I know who she is. I have seen her before in the post office. She has retrieved her mail from a box that is right next to mine. We are postbox neighbors.

  Jason Lane has a mustache whose top hairs are lighter than the rest, probably bleached by the sun. He is a man who has spent most of his days outdoors. Jason Lane shakes his head. Even in coming here it’s like I’m doing it for myself, doing it because I can’t stand the guilt, he says. He smells like chain saw oil. I haven’t hunted since then, he says. I won’t hunt again. It’s not enough for you, is it? It would not be enough for me if I were the father of your boy.

  WHAT I THINK IS FUNNY: That for so long I wanted an apology from this man and now I don’t want to hear him say anything more. His wife in the car, Carol, looks out over where our garden grows in warmer weather. Jason Lane nods his head. It sure would not be enough, he says, and then he says, Call the police now. His eyes are bloodshot and blue, the kind of blue that either goes right through you or the kind you think they are so clear blue there is nothing behind them, no intelligence in the man. Or I’ll call them, or she will, he says, nodding his head toward his wife. So where is the phone? he says and he makes his way past me into the house. Bruce and Nelly are on him in a second, wagging their tails, getting in his way, slobbering on his coat front because to them everyone who walks through our door is a friend. Then Sam comes downstairs. Sam is tall for his age and is strong from all the swimming he has been doing. His shoulders are wide, and he does not look like he has spent time in a hospital bed cocooned in a pale blue blanket with legs that were once as skinny as arms.

  This is Jason Lane. This is the man who shot you, I say to Sam. Sam holds out his hand. I’m Sam, pleased to meet you, he says, and I know how Sam has a strong handshake, I have felt him practicing it on me before and I have felt the bones in my hand grinding against one another when he does it.

  Jason Lane shakes his head. This is all wrong. This isn’t the way I planned. If you’d just give me the phone, I could get this over with the way it should be gotten over with. I could turn myself in, he says.

  How did it happen? Sam says, excited by a hunting story. Did you hear the grouse first, did you lead your gun just by hearing where it was he flew up from and then there I was sitting in my camo in the tree stand?

  Yes, that’s how it was. I lead the grouse right after I hear them, they are so loud when they beat their wings. I’ve been hunting all my life. I know just the right amount of distance to aim in front of them, he says.

  Then Carol, his wife, is at the door. I open it for her but she does not look at me. She looks at her husband. Did you do it? she says to him.

  Yes, he’s made the call, I say to her. Go on home now, I say to Jason Lane.

  Go on back to the car, he says to his wife and she leaves.

  Jason Lane turns to me. There is more he wants to say to me, but I don’t want to hear it. The day is warming up outside. Sam and I could take the dogs through the fields, we could breathe in the smell of last summer’s grass melting beneath the snow, warming up in the sunshine, and we could breathe in the smell of a milder wind blowing through the needles of the pines.

  Go home with your wife, I say to him, and then he leaves and the smell of the chain saw oil is gone, too. I am glad to be free of the smell. It was the smell of a machine and there is nothing mechanical taking place. What is taking place is as layered as something in nature. I won’t ever be able to figure it out. It is the pond surface rippling, the meandering grooves of bark on a tree, the tall grass and milkweed leaning over in a strong wind looking like the form of a man lying down in it, only there is no man.

  CALL: My wife, in summer. I can hear her voice. She is calling us into the house while the kids and I are by the stream. Sam, in his shorts, stands in the shallow water trying to catch trout in his hands, and laughing because he can’t, because Bruce and Nelly have bounded into the water with him, muddying the water, scaring the trout away, making them dart up under the shadows of the shore. Sarah is low on the bank, pe
ering into the dark places between piles of brush, calling to foxes or voles, any creatures she hopes live inside. Mia rides on my shoulders as we head back to the house and my big hands fit all the way around her thin sun-warmed ankles. “Watch your head,” I say to Mia as we enter the house and Nelly and Bruce, wet from the stream, push their way past us, to be first through the door. Jen serves us casserole made with zucchini fresh from the garden and while we eat I look out at all of them, happy to see their faces, the steam rising off their plates making me want to wave it away, making me want to always be able to see them as clearly as I can.

  About the Author

  YANNICK MURPHY is the author of the novels Signed, Mata Hari; Here They Come; and The Sea of Trees, as well as two story collections and several children’s books. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and a Chesterfield Screenwriting Award. Her work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She lives in Vermont with her veterinarian husband and their children.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  PRAISE FOR Yannick Murphy

  THE CALL

  “A triumph of quiet humor and understated beauty… Murphy’s subtle, wry wit and an appealing sense for the surreal leaven moments of anger and bleakness, and elevate moments of kindness, whimsy, and grace.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Yannick Murphy’s beautiful new novel is a stirring example of what a real writer can do with form and feeling. The Call is sly, funny, scary, honest, wonderstruck, and, most of all, intensely generous.”

  —Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask

  “This book delights with its discrete structuring… The pieces snap together in odd juxtaposition, surprising, making a picture more sturdy and dependable than the seamless whole. It has the power of good old Byzantine mosaic.”

  —Padgett Powell, author of The Interrogative Mood

  “Yannick Murphy’s The Call, about a family dealing with the consequences of a tragic accident, explores marriage, parenthood, small-town life, medicine, and hope with a sensitivity, skill, and fearlessness that will rattle your bones.”

  —Ben Greenman, author of Celebrity Chekhov and What He’s Poised to Do

  “The Call is an enormously affecting and lovely exploration of ordinary and extraordinary love. In prose that is as grand, startling, and particular as the new England landscape that inhabits her characters as much as they inhabit it, Yannick Murphy tells a story that will break and repair your heart.”

  —Chris Adrian, author of The Great Night

  SIGNED, MATA HARI

  “Murphy is an extraordinarily gifted fabulist. [Signed, Mata Hari is] completely original… [A] beguiling evocation.”

  —Liesl Schillinger, New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)

  “Yannick Murphy, while being one of our most daring and original writers, is first and foremost an exquisitely attuned observer of human behavior. Her characters are so richly imagined and believable that when you’re finished with … her book, you expect to find her characters’ names in the phone book. Murphy’s work provides pretty much unexceeded reading pleasure.”

  —Dave Eggers, author of What Is the What and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

  “Unself-consciously sensual and achingly beautiful, [Signed, Mata Hari consists of] short, exquisite, though never precious, chapters refined almost to a sequence of prose poems. [This] is a profound and profoundly beautiful novel, one that forcefully renews literary fiction’s claim to be a laboratory of the human spirit.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “[An] alluring novel… Hypnotic [and as] softly poetic as it is insistent, [Signed, Mata Hari] entices the reader from the first lines to give Mata Hari what she always craved: not the secrets that are the currency of a spy, but the rapt attention that is oxygen to a performer.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “In the fictionalized confessional Signed, Mata Hari, Yannick Murphy reincarnates the legendary seductress who was accused of being a double agent in World War I, giving her a lyrical voice and an irrepressible vivacity… Most of the twists and gyrations take place on the page, not the stage, [and by] the time her last morning arrives and she walks out to face a French firing squad—sans blindfold—we feel as besotted with this passionate, provocative woman as were the rest of her hapless admirers.”

  —Elle

  “[Mata Hari’s] often-overshadowed life provides the emotional core of Yannick Murphy’s wondrous novel, Signed, Mata Hari. Zelle’s death was merely the tragic end of a tragic life, and here Murphy, through exquisite and lush fiction, creates as fully drawn a portrait of her as any biographer could have done.”

  —Boston Globe

  “In Signed, Mata Hari, Yannick Murphy once again treats us to her luscious signature lyric style, its whispers and perfumes, in this time-and space-bending tale of the famous dancer and accused spy.”

  —Janet Fitch, author of Paint it Black and White Oleander

  “In this atmospheric novel of seductively brief chapters, Murphy reimagines the many blanks of Hari’s sexed-up history. This compelling mix of erotic poetry, bio, and thriller makes a sympathetic case that Hari was less a spy than a busy courtesan who opted to bed both German and Allied officers.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “The events leading up to [Mata Hari’s execution] still remain shrouded in mystery, but in the intoxicating new novel Signed, Mata Hari, Yannick Murphy imaginatively fills in the gaps. The result is a sympathetic portrayal of one of the twentieth century’s most vilified women: Murphy’s Mata Hari is not a callous femme fatale but an ordinary mother forced to do extraordinary things to survive.”

  —Time Out (New York)

  “Brilliant in its structure, beautiful in its language, rich in its characterization, Yannick Murphy’s new novel, Signed, Mata Hari, also happens to have at its center one of the most fascinating figures of the early twentieth century, a woman who ached deeply and searched intensely for an identity. In Murphy’s masterful hands, this quest is tenderly and movingly rendered.”

  —Robert Olen Butler, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

  “The life of the legendary French dancer and femme fatale is brilliantly captured in this impressionistic novel. [A] compelling portrait … [and] mesmerizing read.”

  —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “Murphy has devised a persona who is willful, dreamy, convinced of the validity of her own perceptions, sexually generous, and incorrigibly naive. The life of the senses coats these pages: textures, smells, flavors… I found myself rushing through the final pages—to an ending that satisfies, opening out into a kaleidoscopic tribute, at once tender and wise.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Murphy’s third novel considers the circumstances that galvanized [Mata Hari’s] legend, while ruing upon larger issues of womanhood, the burdens of perception, and societal abuse. Murphy has glued together a fine porcelain novel.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Floating along on the exotic current of Murphy’s language and imagery… The tragedy of Mata Hari’s life—and Yannick Murphy’s ambition—pinned me to the couch and kept me there until the story was done.”

  —Oregonian

  “Murphy writes like a dream, with vivid sensory descriptions. As for [the question of whether Mata Hari was a spy], the alchemy wrought by both the author and her heroine is so persuasive that you probably won’t even care.”

  —Dallas Morning News

  “Captivating… Murphy seduces readers with her prose. This elegantly crafted novel keeps you guessing until Mata Hari’s last moments.”

  —Sunday Express (London)

  “Murphy [writes with a] lyrical tone and imaginative flair… [The novel’s] strengths are its beautiful language, love of minute
details, and focus on different types of love and loss.”

  —Time Out (London)

  “Compelling.”

  —Financial Times

  HERE THEY COME

  “This is a hell of a book. You might not be able to finish Here They Come in one sitting, but it will haunt you till you do. What detail! What characters! I can imagine both Jane Austen and Raymond Carver poring over this masterly novel.”

  —Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes

  “Yannick Murphy is a uniquely talented writer who manages to turn everything on its head and make dark, funny, shocking, and beautiful prose out of the detritus of growing up poor, fatherless, and cockeyed. She is fearless.”

  —Lily Tuck, author of The News from Paraguay

  “Yannick Murphy’s long-awaited Here They Come is a unique combination of rare linguistic lyricism with brutal and brilliant prose. It is an unrelenting portrait of family, terrifying for its honesty, its willingness to be ugly and elegant. Haunting.”

  —A. M. Homes, author of The Safety of Objects and Music for Torching

  “Told by a precocious unnamed thirteen-year-old girl who bends spoons with her mind, Murphy’s gorgeous third book of fiction recounts the story of a poor family’s coming-of-age in 1970s New York. In thick, poetic prose that edges toward stream of consciousness and is peppered with slightly surreal details, Murphy creates a world as magical and harrowing as the struggle to come to grips with maturity.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Yannick Murphy creates a narrator with a unique, sometimes shocking perspective. Murphy’s startling language and imagery accumulate great power as they hurtle toward the reader.”

  —People

  “Murphy flawlessly captures a child’s-eye view of a battered society and a battered family. The spare elegance of her prose contrasts so jarringly with the sordid physical landscape that it inspires an unsettling sense of disconnect, which is almost certainly the point. Most impressive of all is Murphy’s remarkable use of language, the expressive way she puts together ordinary words and images to create surprisingly lovely and moving metaphors.”