A Long Time Gone (22 page)

“I'm fine. I've done this before, remember? The withdrawal effects will be gone within the week. Two at the most.”

Without a word, he picked up my phone that I'd left on the table and pushed a few buttons before handing it to me. “True, but the reasons you reach for a pill will still be there until you confront them. You have my number now. Just call me if you need to talk to somebody.”

I snatched the phone from his hand and tossed it into my purse. “I don't think that will be necessary.”

He followed me out the door, his long strides keeping up with mine. “Hang on; I've got a watch for Tommy. He said he'd have a little time once the planting is over, and I was planning on bringing it when I dropped by with the DNA news.”

I sighed, annoyed that he'd ruined my dramatic exit. All through my growing-up years, I'd been famous for them. I'd even once thought that it meant something.

We stopped at his car and I waited while he opened the glove box and pulled out a silver watch in a Ziploc bag. I opened my large purse for him to dump it inside and we both caught sight of the bottle of pills sitting in the bottom. Before I could talk myself out of it, I pulled out the bottle and handed it to him. “There. Even trade.”

I snapped my purse shut, then got in my car and started the engine. Tripp leaned into the open window of the passenger side. I looked at him expectantly, wondering if he was going to apologize.

“No matter where you go, there you are.”

I pressed down hard on the accelerator and backed out of the driveway with a squeal of tires, just like I'd done when he'd said that to me nine years before.

Almost a week later, I stood barefoot in the garden, dirt and sweat sticking to every part of my body and making me feel like a chicken leg ready for the fryer. Firmly embedded soil clung to my fingernails like polish had once done, and I wore a pair of cutoff denim shorts that could only be described as Daisy Dukes. None of my clothes from LA seemed to be good gardening clothes, and I'd been left to dig through my dresser drawers. The shorts were at least a size too small, and I prayed the zipper would stay up, since I hadn't quite managed to fasten the top button.

My sunglasses kept slipping down my nose, but my eyes couldn't take the brightness of the sun. My tremors had gotten better, as had the nausea, but the insomnia and nightmares seemed to be getting worse, the lack of sleep doing nothing to improve my mood or ever-present headache.

I leaned down to uproot yet another weed.

“Nice jorts, Booger.”

Straightening, I scowled at my brother. He looked worse than me, with dark circles under his eyes, his hair sticking up around his head from him running his fingers through it one too many times, and it looked like he'd worn the same shirt and jeans enough times that they could stand up without him.

“How's the planting?” I asked. I hadn't seen more than his coming or going since he'd started to seed his fields. It was important to get all the fields seeded at the same time so everything was on the same schedule, even if it meant working sixteen- to eighteen-hour days. I'd once thought riding in the tractor next to Emmett was just this side of heaven, the hum and jerk of the motor like being rocked in a cradle. Emmett said it was because I had a connection to this land, because my family had worked it for generations. I remembered that now—
remembered how I'd regarded the long furrows of the fields like the arms of my ancestors reaching out to embrace me. But as I got older, I began to regard them as the arms that wanted to hold me down.

“Not too bad. The weather's holding out. For now.” He looked up at the sky with a frown and I followed his gaze toward the high, thin clouds that Emmett had called mare's tails, and which he taught us always meant a change in the weather. “Breeze is picking up, too.”

“‘Wind out of the southeast is good for neither man nor beast,'” I said, quoting Emmett's favorite phrase.

We both smiled, but Tommy's face remained grim. “I don't think I'll really sleep until harvest.”

“Only five more months,” I said, trying for a light tone. But I couldn't help but wonder which one of us looked worse or needed the sleep more.

“I thought you hated to get your hands dirty—that you were strictly an observation-only gardener.”

“Yeah, well, I needed something to do, and I couldn't stand seeing Bootsie's garden looking so pathetic.”

He nodded. “Where's Mama?”

I jerked my head in the direction of the back door. “Inside with Chloe and Cora. Cora's involved with a homeschool group and agreed to help me get Chloe up to speed so she can finish her school year here. Carol Lynne wanted to join them, and it was okay with Cora. They're supposed to be diagramming sentences this morning. I figure it couldn't hurt. Maybe jog something in Carol Lynne's brain.”

Tommy's face grew serious. “It won't come back, you know. Her memory. Every once in a while you'll see a flash of it, and she'll act like she knows what's going on, but most of the time she's just somebody who kinda looks like our mother and sorta remembers who you are. Or who you were, anyway.”

I grabbed a fistful of grass and yanked it from the earth, scattering dirt like confetti. “Well, isn't that convenient for her. How I'd love it if I didn't have to answer for all of my past mistakes.”

“You think she did this on purpose?” Tommy's voice was low and serious, but lacked any malice or recrimination. It was simply his way of trying to find the truth of things.

I yanked up another clump of dogged weeds. “I don't know,
Tommy. I don't know anything right now except that I can't sleep, the woman they found buried in our yard is related to us, and I've pretty much lost everything I once thought I wanted, and all I want to do is take a pill so it will all go away.”
Yank
. “But I can't, because I promised my ex-husband that I would stop so Chloe could stay here.”
Yank
. “So, no, I don't really have an opinion one way or the other as to whether or not Carol Lynne had anything to do with her own illness.”

He examined the gate with the eye of a carpenter, then spoke without looking at me.

“Before she got sick, she never stopped asking about you, or thinking about schemes to bring you back. It was Bootsie who said you'd have to come back on your own. On your own terms. I don't think Mama ever accepted that. She kept trying to convince Bootsie and me to drive out to California to bring you back. She would have done it on her own, but she'd never learned to drive.”

He paused and I sat back on my heels, searching for something to say that would make him stop. But no words came, like they, too, were prisoners of the same false hope I'd had as a child that had made me rush to my bedroom window every time I heard a car pull up outside the house.

“When she first started with the symptoms, she told me it was important you knew that. Knew that she'd never stopped loving you, or wishing she'd have another chance to show you. You have that in common, you know. No matter how many times you failed at something, you always picked yourself up and tried again.”

Not this time.
“It's too late, Tommy. It's been too late for a long, long time.”

He was silent, and I thought he'd left, but when I looked up he was watching me, his face looking as tired as I felt. “Carrie called me—not sure who gave her my cell, but whatever. She wanted me to convince you that she really needs your help with the archives. The new library opens in October, and she's afraid that the shelves in the historical reference section will be empty.”

I squinted at him, seeing the fuzzy edges of an optical migraine beginning to cloud my vision. “Do you think she's really that desperate or just trying to find an excuse to talk with you?”

He gave me his boyish grin that made him look like the brother who'd taught me how to fish and ride a bike, and helped me not notice
too much that our mama had left us again. “Maybe a little of both.” He shrugged. “Either way, working at the library might give you something to do right now while you're waiting to figure out what's next. And you always liked to write. Carrie said they could really use somebody to write a regular column to get people excited about the opening of the library. Sounds like a win-win to me.”

I'd always hated people telling me what I should do—mostly because my own ideas were usually epic failures. In hindsight I realized they were just trying to save me from myself, but it didn't make it any easier. “I might not be here in October. I'd hate to leave her high and dry.”

“She said she'll take whatever she can get. She sounded kind of desperate.”

The floating worms of my migraine had moved to the outer edges of my sight, obscuring my peripheral vision so all I could focus on was my brother. “I might—if I can find the time. I thought I'd restore Bootsie's garden. I even had a pipe dream that I could get Carol Lynne and Chloe to help me.”

A corner of his mouth lifted. “Yeah, well, good luck with that.”

I turned my head so I could view the garden better, then wished that I hadn't. It all seemed so hopeless, like I was trying to raise a person from the dead.

“I have some of Bootsie's seeds in the shed. They're all separated and labeled and should still be good. I'll go get them if you want.”

“Sure,” I said. “Maybe she'll have some of her magic beans mixed in with the regular seeds so that I can actually get something to grow.”

“You'll manage. You always do.” He leaned on the gate, making it groan. “When I get around to chopping up that cypress, I'll repair this and the rest of the fence. Don't want any of the local wildlife eating my okra and pole beans.”

He waved, and I watched him leave, almost staggering in his exhaustion.

“Nice jorts,” Chloe said from over the fence, Carol Lynne behind her. They both wore braids, and Chloe was wearing one of my mother's floral tops, but still had on her black jeans and heavy black combat boots. Ignoring her jibe, I said, “Are you done with your morning lessons?”

“Yeah, but I'm supposed to read now. And then I'm supposed to
study science with a group of homeschool kids—or Mrs. Smith said I could ride around in the fields with Tommy and write about it. I'll do whichever is less boring.”

“You might not want to mention that when you ask Tommy.”

She plopped down in one of the green chairs, and I noticed she held my copy of
Time at the Top
in her lap. On her left arm she wore what appeared to be a blue enamel bracelet that was nearly buried under all of her braided leather bracelets from another jewelry craze in her recent past.

“Is that new?” I asked.

Holding up her arm, she twisted her wrist from side to side. “It's a watch. I found it in the hatbox in your room that you told me to go through and sort. It doesn't work but it's pretty.”

I nodded, not remembering it from my own childhood days of playing in Emmett's hatbox.

“What are you doing?”

I blinked up at Carol Lynne, who was staring down at me as if she really wanted to know.

“I'm weeding so we can get the garden ready to plant.”

She knelt down in the dirt beside me, her hands resting on the thighs of her jeans. “How do you do that?”

I waited to see if she would laugh to show me that she was joking, but she looked serious. “Do you want to help me?”

She nodded.

“Okay. Here.” I took her hand and guided her to a clump of yellow Indian grass. It was the closest I'd been to her since I'd reluctantly comforted her on the day after the storm. I wanted her to be a stranger, wanted not to recognize the lemony scent of her skin, or the way her hair strands in the sun were hundreds of different colors, just like mine.

Putting my fingers around hers, I squeezed near the bottom of the shafts and pulled, tearing the roots out of the soil.

I let go as she started to clap, spraying clumps of dirt all around us. “That was fun!” she said.

I smiled reluctantly. “Great,” I said. “Then do that to every single thing you see growing in this garden, then toss it in the big garbage bin behind you.”

Turning to Chloe, I said, “Are you going to help?”

She scrunched up her face with a look of utter disdain. “I'm supposed to be reading.”

“Fine. Then read. But read out loud. That's one of my favorite books.”

Chloe gave me a sigh worthy of Hollywood, but opened the book and began to read while Carol Lynne and I dug our hands into the dark earth and began to uproot the weeds in our garden.

Carol Lynne Walker Moise

NEVADA
OCTOBER
1964

Dear Diary,

I miss the autumn. I used to love to watch the sunsets from on top of our Indian mound with Mathilda, and she'd make me describe all the beautiful colors of cypress trees until I ran out of words for red. Now I only know it's October because of all the Halloween candy for sale in the gas stations and grocery stores we can go to only once. Jimmy said that once we steal from a place, we can't go back. People are peculiar that way, I guess.

I'm in the Nevada desert now, where there aren't any trees. Just our campsite and the smell of beans cooking on open fires and the scent of weed that floats over our group. Or merry band of waifs and adventurers, which is how Jimmy describes us. He's always been so creative. The thing with Jimmy is that I only saw his talent and brilliance when I was high, which was most of the time. I think he figured that out, because one morning last month when I woke up, the sleeping bag next to me was empty. I guess he's not coming back.

I don't miss him all that much, except that I'm sober a lot more now. I don't like that feeling. Because then I start thinking about Mississippi and how far from home I am. Sometimes in the morning I wake up and I
think I smell Mathilda frying bacon and then I realize it's just a can of beans in a pot on the campfire. It's all Hiram knows how to cook, and I'm grateful—I am. But what I wouldn't give for Mathilda's fried catfish or Bootsie's corn bread.

Hiram's from Colorado. He was living with Jimmy's brother in San Francisco and has been traveling with us ever since we got kicked out of the apartment for squatting. He had a girl, Mary, but she got sick and decided she would go home. I can't remember where she said that was. Everything's in such a fog. I like that. I think. At least I don't have to remember all the hopes I once had about saving the world. I was in a Woolco stealing aspirin when the man behind the counter turned up his radio and told us all to hush. They were talking about three civil rights workers murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, by the KKK. I wanted to fall down on my knees or raise my fist to the sky for those three men who died doing what I should have been. But instead I just put three more bottles of aspirin in my purse and got high in the back of the van in the parking lot.

I wonder how far from Mississippi I have to get before I forget about the place I come from. My memories of home are like a river, and I spend a lot of time fighting the current that's always trying to take me back.

Two of the girls with us are pregnant, and there are about ten children always running about half-naked, because that's how nature intended. I'm lucky so far, I guess. I was never one of those girls who dreamed of having babies. But sometimes when I see these girls rocking their babies to sleep I wonder what it would mean to pass on all your hopes and dreams to someone, to hold a little person who completely belongs to you. I sometimes wonder if Bootsie ever felt that way about me, or if I was just another one of her plants that needed to be plucked from her garden before the bugs that were eating it destroyed the rest.

NOVEMBER
1964

I'm back in Mississippi. I've had a real bad cough for about a month, and Hiram gave me money for a doctor, but instead I bought a bus ticket. I haven't been sick a whole lot in my life, but when I am, all I want is my bed in my room in my house, with Mathilda and Bootsie bringing me chicken soup and laying cool hands on my forehead. A prissy woman was sitting across the aisle from me on the bus and kept giving me looks every
time I coughed. Or maybe it was because I smelled. I'd been giving myself baths in gas station restroom sinks for a while, so maybe she had a point.

I thumbed a ride from the station from an old guy in a pickup truck going to his brother's funeral in Biloxi, and he didn't seem to mind the smell. He was nice enough and told me to take care of myself when he dropped me off on the highway in front of the long drive that led to the house. I didn't want to give Bootsie any warning. I didn't want her locking the door on me.

I went to my cypress tree first, to see if it recognized me, and when I sat down on its roots I knew I was home. I fell asleep, and that's where Bootsie found me. Emmett carried me to the big black bed in Bootsie's room, and then the doctor came and told me it was pneumonia.

I'll be here for a while, until I'm all better. But I know I won't stay. It's not in my nature. Or maybe because I heard Bootsie crying outside my door when she thought I was sleeping. There's something in the ways of mothers and daughters, I think, that makes us see all the bad parts of ourselves. Or maybe there's a part of me that wants to hurt her as badly as she hurt me. I'd like to think not.

She told me the story again of my grandmother, who was lost in the flood of 1927. She told me that when her mother left she knew the levees had been breached, but she got in her car anyway and told her friend that she had to drive to New Orleans. And then she gave Bootsie to her friend to look after before she drove away. It saved Bootsie's life, but she'd never stopped wondering why her mama didn't take her with her.

I thought of the river bursting out of its boundaries created by men, its strong-flowing current sweeping up everything in its path. I know what that's like, to feel like your destiny isn't really yours but decided upon by things that happened long before you were born.

I tried to tell this to Bootsie, but she just smiled and told me to wait until I become a mother, and then I will understand that my real destiny will be decided by those not yet born.

I know she's wrong. That's why I need to figure it all out on my own. I fell asleep trying to remember what it was I'd been looking for, and what I'd been running from. I didn't come up with any answers, but it seems to me that it doesn't really matter anymore. I need to leave again, if only to show Bootsie that I control my own life, and that I'm strong enough to swim against the current to find my own way.