My Year Abroad Read online

“What kind of name is that?”

  “I don’t know. My mother gave it to me.”

  “Was she a boat person?”

  “You mean like a refugee?”

  “I’m making a joke.”

  “Right.”

  “So you know what we do, Tiller? At the VA.”

  “Look after old soldiers?”

  “Soldiers, sailors, all servicemen and -women. They don’t have to be old, either.” He flashed me an ID card but not long enough for any inspection. “We take care of their families, too. That’s my department. We’re trying to do more outreach these days. I was supposed to meet with the widow of a recently fallen hero, to make sure she knew about all the benefits and support that she’s entitled to. Unfortunately, she wasn’t home.”

  “Maybe she was too bummed to answer the door.”

  He weakly smiled, on the fence about whether he should appear offended.

  “Yeah, maybe. Anyway, it was a long drive here for me and I thought before I left I should try to connect with any veteran families in the area. I can’t connect to the department server, so I can’t look up who’s around. I guess you’re not part of one. A veteran family, that is.”

  “Nope,” I said. “Both my folks work at the Chicken Hut.”

  “Good for them. But you don’t happen to know of any, do you?”

  “War widows?”

  “They could be widowers, too. But we don’t like to call them that. But yeah, mostly families, that, well, have a dad away on duty, or is deceased.”

  “Single-mom households.”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s like half the houses in this neighborhood.”

  “No kidding?”

  “But there aren’t dead army dudes that I know of. Just deadbeat dads.”

  Todd Brown laughed. He bummed another smoke. Then he asked me if the high school girls around here were cute and I told him if they liked me they were cute, and then even cuter if they didn’t. He laughed like he’d been there and smoked some more and then gestured for me to lean in.

  “Listen, you seem like a knowledgeable kid. A smart kid. So I think I can trust you. In fact, I know I can.”

  “I wouldn’t know why you’d want to.”

  “See, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. You’re no dope. Besides, I know I’m not fooling you. I’m not fooling you at all, right?”

  I shrugged like it didn’t matter whether he was or not, which only satisfied him more.

  “I’m sort of with the VA,” he said, letting his cigarette butt drop to the curb. “I do contract work for them, to be honest, as an investigator. Can you guess what I’m looking for?”

  “Nope.”

  “I bet you can. Come on, Rudder, take a guess.”

  “My name’s Tiller.”

  “Sorry. Tiller. I think you already know.”

  “I really don’t.”

  “Try.”

  So I took an earnestly trying breath.

  “Fraud?” I ventured.

  “Bingo!” he shouted, and I could tell just by the way his voice instantly and lethally sharpened that Todd Brown (or whatever his real name was) was schooled in the ways of hurting people. Sometimes snuffing them, too, Bingo being the last dumb word they’d hear.

  “People take benefits they’re not eligible for, like saying they were married to a serviceperson when they weren’t, or getting remarried and hiding it, or falsely claiming dependent children. I’m looking into a number of people in this area. I got a whole book of them.”

  This is when Todd Brown showed his hand, which he might have only done to some random bored teen or bored lady with a Pekingese, for despite how blatantly lame his whole deal was, guys like him can depend on most of us being indifferent to everything, totally not caring if something isn’t directly affecting us right now. Before this last year I was like that, maybe I’d say I gave two shits about the plight of others or the doomed planet but my genuine condition was that there was no way I could do anything about it, because I had no clues about how.

  But I have some now.

  “See?” he said. He had a thin ring binder of clear plastic folders inset with pictures of various people, most of them obviously downloaded off the internet and home-printed, each sticky-labeled with a bogus address—there were way too many streets with tree and presidents’ names.

  “I have locations, but many keep moving and we don’t know where they went. Take a peek.”

  “Nobody likes a snitch,” I said.

  He winced, something stirred muddy at the core of his perp morality. He pushed his sunglasses up the crooked bridge of his nose while his other hand gripped the steering wheel, the leather of his glove getting shiny as it stretched. I could feel how angry he suddenly was, lasers shooting out from his eyes and getting greenhoused behind his shades, building up all this pissy heat. He wants to bring me pain, is how I read him, and had we been in a nighttime urban alley instead of an exurban development on a bright spring afternoon, I’m pretty sure he would have tried.

  Instead he tightly replied, “Just say if anybody looks familiar.”

  I flipped through the pages, two or three headshots per, pausing for effect whenever someone had curly hair, just to keep him in limbo. I went through the binder, viewing several pages twice, and then gave it back to him.

  “Sorry, Todd,” I said, instructing my lungs to flatten, my heart to slow, “but I don’t recognize anyone.”

  He grunted Fine and tugged the folder back and rather rudely powered up the window. I saluted him but before he could pull away I quickly pedaled in front of the SUV and then around the passenger side toward the back, where I pulled out the faithful companion to the smokes I always carry, the little folding knife with a blade I keep razor sharp. As I drifted by I flicked it out and made a shallow foot-long incision in the SUV’s rear tire, deep enough to compromise the sidewall but not enough to let out any air. At least not just yet. Temperature and speed and pressure would take care of that.

  I gave a tap to the back window to send Todd Brown on his way. He couldn’t know that later on he’d end up being a filler item on the local eleven-o’clock news, a nasty one-car wreck on the interstate. Driver transported to regional hospital. I admit I don’t want Todd Brown to recover. I am almost certain he is a bad fellow. He squealed a little rubber as he shot down the street, swerving out of the neighborhood and onto the county road, heading north toward the highway. I pedaled back to Val’s the long way, just in case he decided to double back, but he didn’t, and as I rode up the driveway the neighbor kid, Rafe, was standing there with his hands out in a WTF splay. Rafe’s a junior-high stoner and normally we would have bullshitted for a while but I just coasted his bike to him and shaka’d and went into the house. My chest was busting back and forth like a woofer. I wanted to be with Val. Seeing that tinty picture of her and Victor Sr. in Todd Brown’s loose-leaf, both of them mugging for the camera with their hair windblown and with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background, taken in no doubt happier times, somehow crushed me. Not because I was jealous but because I wished for Val that she could go back there, I wished she could have stayed in that moment forever. Of course she couldn’t. No one can. They tell you to live in the moment, not to constantly look ahead or backward or try to add it all up but to taste the full ripe fruit of the now. But if you really did you’d stay there, stringing yourself along like some kind of addict, jacking yourself in until all that sweetness couldn’t do anything else but turn rotten.

  So what should we do?

  Inside, I found Val pedaling on the stationary bike—we have a mini-gym setup, so we don’t have to leave the house too much—and I surprised her when I touched my forehead to her back. I held her slowly pivoting hips—her pace is more a river bike tour in Europe than a shouty spin class. Still, her sport top was damp but smelled good any
way and Val, just like she would, only barely paused and then kept on going, the blendering whirs of the machine tuning through her densely fleshy body. Her steady rhythm quelled most of the leaping inside me. It amazed me how she always generated just the right amount of delicious heat. Soon enough she dismounted and plucked out her earbuds and turned to me with a flag of worry in her eyes and she said, “What’s up, kiddo?”

  “Not much,” I told her. “I just missed you.”

  “Well, I missed you,” she said, gently squeezing my earlobe. “Should we think about ordering some dinner?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “What do you feel like? Vito’s? Phoenix Garden?”

  “You decide,” I said. “My treat.” I was already thinking about what Victor Jr. might enjoy, his fingertips shimmery with grease, when Val kissed me, not just a peck, her lips warmed from the light exercising.

  “What’s that for?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “There’s something going on with you.”

  “Is it a good going on?”

  She blinked, whether yes or no not really mattering. She smiled.

  “You know, you’re an amenable young man.”

  “I’m still a boy,” I said, knowing the whole truth.

  “Then you’re an amenable boy.”

  Then we kissed some more, and more. And, Yes, I thought, that’s pretty much right. An amenable boy.

  2.

  So where was my home before this home of Val’s in Stagno? Technically it was my dad’s house in the historic town of Dunbar, New Jersey. The historical part has to do with the Revolutionary War, a famous battle taking place in a huge field that’s a quick traipse through the woods from my parents’ backyard, and where I used to do tequila poppers with my high school semi-friends on the limestone plinths of the ruined classical-Greek-style monument that’s perennially sticky and stained because of partyers. It always smelled pretty nasty, too. When I was young I often peed behind the weather-worn Doric columns, having sprinted there for what seemed forever from the other end of the open pasture. The grass was irregularly mowed so it was often tough sledding for a little kid, like running knee-deep in shredded office paper, and I remember once tripping and falling hard on my face and letting out a draft of whiz that made a creeping blot on my tyke’s overalls. I got up with grass in my mouth and was crying with self-revulsion as I ran again for the monument, the shameful warmth down there an oddly comforting sensation as it marinated my mini-junk.

  My mother was still around then, and though she scolded me for holding it in too long when I got back to her where she was reading on a tartan-plaid blanket, I remember how she lifted the blanket up and curtained me so I could peel off my soggy underpants, then fan-dried the overalls with a magazine before sending me off to play again. She was always reading something, piles of novels and magazines littering the kitchen and the screened porch and the car, and she was always sipping water from a refillable sports bottle that I’d take feverish gulps from between my rounds of play, the muddy, oily taste of her lipstick on the nozzle staying with me for a long, long time.

  I can still taste it.

  At some point I’ll say more about her and my dad Clark and how our nuclear family all kind of precipitated out and got scattered and blown away. But for now let’s just say that up to last year, I pretty much always lived in Dunbar. I was home again for the summer after attending a second year at my small expensive college, which small expensive college in particular doesn’t matter, and was set up for a semester abroad program in another place that doesn’t matter, except to say that the college and the semester abroad program were one and the same in terms of people and anticipations. Namely: we were generally well-off and generally bright and generally interested in the things worth being interested in like sustainability and creativity and equality and justice, but also generally keen on hooking up and cool beaches and cheap authentic-enough ethnic restaurants and making connections with people who might offer opportunities for cultural and professional experiences that were life-changing but hopefully not too much. We would return to the rest of our junior year and bear down and party that much harder in reward but also for being deeply anxious about the future, a future others before us have definitely ruined but that we would be responsible for, whether we wanted to be or not.

  I never wanted to be responsible. Even if it meant freedom, even as I grew up with my single-parent dad Clark, who didn’t get home until the early evening, stepping into the house from the back door after his walk from Dunbar Station and calling out in his commute-weary croon, Hey, Til, I’m home. Which is when he’d heat us a quick frozen pasta dinner from a box or take us out for a burger or burrito. We made the rounds around Dunbar like a lot of other lonesome father-child duos, there were plenty of our kind in our divorce-rife town, and when I was younger I could sometimes score a free soda or a side of fries with a glum overbite, the waiter or waitress feeling sorry for me. I never made dinner, nor cleaned the house, just stayed up in my room doing homework or playing games online. A nice lady from Poland came twice a week to vacuum and do laundry, a landscaping crew weekly to cut the lawn, but otherwise I was reposing solo. Clark’s one rule was that I never unlock the front door, that I never open it unless there was something like a fire or child molester drooling after me and it was the only way out. None of this makes any sense, you’d better lock the back door first, if not all of them, but he was fixated. This was obviously more psychological or metaphorical than anything else, which even as a middle-schooler I understood to be important to him. And so this was the prime directive for me, not that I not have friends over or that I stay out of the liquor cabinet or not try to cook anything on the stove. I didn’t do any of those things, even though I sometimes wanted to. It’s not that I was afraid of something bad happening, or my dad finding out. As noted, he wouldn’t have freaked out. It was that I had zero interest in being the presiding party, because being the presiding party means you have to retain order and sometimes holler at people and keep an eye out for trouble and be the responsible one, all of which is a total drag.

  The thing is, I am responsible now, and in a way I never imagined I could be. Not just by taking care of things, not by way of being the type who’s steady and maintaining, but by understanding the need to alter the moment, whether directly or indirectly, and then decisively doing so, and not worrying about what the future might bring. For example, I don’t know for sure if it was Todd Brown’s SUV that was involved in the crash, and if it was, whether another person associated with him will soon be loitering in the neighborhood again. I don’t know what would have been a good, better, or best action for Val. I don’t know how any of this will ultimately affect me. All I know is a video of me slicing that tire wall kept popping onto the screen of my mind and I gave myself over to it like the most enthused bride, a response I can only credit to my time away, which was most definitely abroad, if not so wide.

  But I’ll explain.

  It was midsummer and I had a few weeks to kill in Dunbar before I was to fly off for my official study abroad program and as usual I had to make money to help cover the room and board for the year. Clark has been a salaryman for a well-known global financial services firm and we live in Dunbar Village and not sprawly new Dunbar Crossing just on the other side of Route 111, so people assume we’re just as One Percenty as most of the other folks around here but really he’s one of the countless midlevel managers in a huge back-office facility that’s not even in NYC but in postindustrial New Jersey though right on the train line, which is why we can live way out here. Clark prefers not to drive. He earns just enough that he pays almost the whole tuition for my definitely not selective enough liberal arts college but because his sister, my beautiful aunt Didi, is the way she is, and will reside for the rest of her life in her nearby group home for autistic adults, and has no one else but him to look after her, we have to be careful about our spending.
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  So while my Dunbar friends rode air-conditioned coach buses to sleepaway camps in Maine and then in later years flew to summer enrichment programs at Oxbridge and Stanford, I’ve worked every summer mowing neighbors’ lawns or walking their dogs and then, from the time I was old enough, scooping ice cream and bussing tables in a number of the many town eateries. I didn’t mind not going away. I would’ve despised summer school and felt sorry for the zombie instructors burnt out from the regular year but desperate to make extra bank. I would have enjoyed camp, for sure, because most kids do, but even a totally gross job like dishwashing can be worthwhile, if not for the usual reasons. Sure, you can’t help but develop some grit in the face of being shat upon hour after hour, and come to realize how exploited most people are, but the main thing you learn about yourself and everyone else toiling away is how much of your mental activity and chatter is about dreaming of doing something else, whether noble or debauched or downright silly.

  Most Dunbarites, adults and kids, are already doing what they imagined, or at least believe they are. Growing up in Dunbar and attending a private college where the kids might casually say things like “I feel like treating myself to a snowboarding and spa weekend” and actually mean it, you’d think I’d be inured to this kind of privilege. Truth is, I never much cared about the swank life. It did bug me that I never got off the waitlist to be a tagalong for a friend’s family trip to Cozumel, or to some dad’s corporate box at MetLife Stadium, or the Sweet Sixteen birthday bash at a Michelin-starred sushi place in the city. I heard details so exhaustive of said junkets that I could practically feel the powder spray of the off-piste at Vail, wipe my chin of the buttery Wagyu grease they kept jawing about, but never actually went on anything special unless you count getting invited by Isaiah Pan and his family to Six Flags and getting those skip-the-line passes, which made the day great. Clark was too old-school sensible and frugal and dad-clueless to offer hosting any such outings, and it never occurred to me to ask.