After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away (15 page)

I escaped before Crow glanced up. Not that Crow was aware of me in the slightest.

“I wish.”

What do I wish? I don’t know. My brain feels like broken glass is being shaken inside it. I can’t even think of Dr. Freer waiting for me, and I don’t show up, and it’s the second week I don’t show up, so she’ll call my aunt, she’s concerned, she’s wondering where I am, where the girl who’d OD’d on Thorazine on Christmas Eve has run away to, the thief who stole her beautiful glass paperweight when her back was turned.

I tried to explain to my aunt and my uncle I didn’t want to return to Dr. Freer. But they were upset, saying they thought I’d been making progress. Saying I had promised, hadn’t I?

I guess. Maybe.

Jenna, this isn’t like you. Jenna, what is happening?

I promised them, after my stomach was pumped, I would never try any drug again, never, never again. Since classes started in January, and I’ve been hanging out with Trina and her friends, I haven’t exactly kept that promise.

I won’t make any stupid mistake ever again. Never wind up in the ER with a tube down my throat like a boa constrictor sucking out the contents of my stomach, never, never again.

I’m remembering how I bicycled out to where Crow’s family lives on Deer Isle Road. Especially when I feel lonely, I think of this. I haven’t been back since, but I remember the ramshackle farmhouse at the end of the rutted lane and the swaybacked gray horse and the shaggy black goat in the front pasture
baaa
ing at me. Hilly countryside that people like Ryan Moeller call trailer-trash territory.

Nobody seems to be inside Saint-Croix Carpenter & Cabinetmaker. A few pedestrians pass behind me on the sidewalk, but no one stops. Sometimes a reflection looms up behind my reflection in the front window, but it’s no one, nothing. I think,
This is not a movie or TV, only boring life, where nothing happens
.

I’m halfway up the block in the direction of the coffee shop when I see a man in a motorized wheelchair approaching on the icy sidewalk, having some trouble with the chair. He’s a beefy, heavyset middle-aged man with a scruffy beard and black hair streaked with white that’s thin at the crown of his head but pulled back into a straggly ponytail. It’s so weird—you see half-bald guys with ponytails and you’d think their wives or kids would tell them how they look. This man in the wheelchair is wearing a soiled Windbreaker and work pants, and his breath is steaming, he’s angry about something. The wheelchair is lurching and skidding. He’s cursing in some foreign language. I’m hesitant to ask if he needs help, not just because this man’s face is flushed but because you are supposed to be very tactful with handicapped people, not to hurt their pride.

The ponytail man glares at me. Like he knows I am debating whether to speak to him, to risk making him angrier. “Goddamn thing is always breaking down—is it stuck? What’s stuck? Is something caught in the wheel?”

There’s a chunk of ice caught in the spokes of the left rear wheel. I manage to work it loose as the ponytail man curses and fumes in heavily accented English.
“Mademoiselle, merci!
You are a
très belle jeune fille, très capable
.” He reaches out to shake my hand or just to grab it. He’s wearing black leather fingerless gloves like bikers wear. Laughing and baring ruined teeth, and giving off a strong odor of whiskey.

Still, the wheelchair is skidding on wavy patches of ice. I volunteer to push the ponytail man along the sidewalk. Where a moment before he was angry, now he’s genial and even charming. Asking where I am from, I don’t sound like New Hampshire.

“I—I’m not from here. I just live here.”

“‘Not from here. Just live here.’
Moi aussi!
”

The ponytail man laughs as if I’ve said something witty. I can see that even with his flushed coarse skin and the ponytail straggling down his muscular back, he’s a good-looking man, accustomed to female attention.

A wheelchair is heavy to push! In just half a block my arms are beginning to ache.

“Here we are, mademoiselle!
Merci beaucoup
—you are so kind.”

The doorway of Saint-Croix Carpenter & Cabinetmaker.

Crow’s father? The ponytail man? He must be.

Roland Saint-Croix! Must be.

And there suddenly is Crow himself crossing the street in our direction. Crow, in leather jacket, jeans, biker boots. Bareheaded and his spiky hair disheveled in the wind. On his shoulders is a toddler bundled up in a snowsuit, squealing with pleasure at the bouncy piggyback ride. Crow, seeing me, the look on my face, laughs.

“Jenna, is it? Hello.”

I am stricken with embarrassment. I can feel heat rising in my face and can only stammer hello.

He knows. Must know. Why I am here.

The ponytail man is saying in a jovial voice, “You know my son Gabriel, you go to the same school, eh?” and Crow says quickly, seeing how uncomfortable I am, “Jenna isn’t in my class, Papa. She’s younger,” and the ponytail man says, winking at me, “But of course the girl is younger! And pretty too, I can see that.”

Crow introduces me to his father, Roland Saint-Croix, and to
le petit Roland
, who ignores me, squealing and kicking as he’s swung down into Mr. Saint-Croix’s brawny arms. He’s a beautiful child and obviously spoiled. I’ve never heard such shrieks. Passersby on the sidewalk glance at us, bemused. (Could they think we all belong to the same noisy family?) Except that little Roland has fine taffy-colored hair instead of jet-black hair, and he’s lighter skinned than Crow and Mr. Saint-Croix. Still, the family resemblance among the three is almost comical: deep-set eyes, longish nose, strong chin.

Crow says, an edge of exasperation in his voice, “You want him, Papa? Take him inside, it’s cold out here.”

Crow and his father exchange remarks in French, which I can’t follow. Crow laughs, blushing; Mr. Saint-Croix sniggers, with a glance at me. I guess it must be some sort of sexual innuendo. Like, Roland Saint-Croix is in a wheelchair, still, he’s the father of this young child? That’s the joke?

Crow says, “C’mon inside, Jenna, for a few minutes and get warm. See what Saint-Croix
père et fils
do for a living.”

Père et fils
: father and son.

I love the way Crow says this. The pride in his voice.

I try to explain that I have to meet my aunt, but somehow, I don’t know how, I’m inside the cabinetmaker’s shop with the Saint-Croixes, a bell attached to the door jangles overhead. After the snow-bright sunshine I’m stumbling into things. Crow takes my arm to guide me. “This is—what’s it called?—a maze. You could get lost.”

So many things! The interior of Mr. Saint-Croix’s shop is nearly as crowded as the display window. Everywhere, some stacked on top of one another, are tables, chairs, bureaus. There’s a passageway, just wide enough for Mr. Saint-Croix’s wheelchair, that leads to the rear of the shop, where a radio is playing French pop music. Here are open floor space, worktables, a massive cluttered desk, a tattered easy chair, a hot plate and a coffeemaker, and scattered, very dirty carpets. Little Roland’s toys are underfoot. There’s a strong smell of coffee, varnish, and wood polish. Crow takes me farther to the rear to show me a dining room table he’s restoring: “First I removed the gummy old polish, then I sanded the wood, which is cherrywood—very nice, see?—next I will be staining it. This is a table from maybe 1870, Papa says. The owners didn’t take good care of it. See these carvings? Gummed up with dirt. People don’t know the things that exist under their noses.”

Mr. Saint-Croix—who has wheeled himself briskly to his desk, where he clears a space to set little Roland—calls over contemptuously, “The Americans, not all but most, excuse me, mademoiselle, they are
cochons
.”

Cochons.
I’ve never heard this word before, but somehow I know what it means. “Pigs?”

Mr. Saint-Croix is delighted. Crow laughs. Somehow, Jenna knows a little French.

This visit! With Crow and his father! Like the most wonderful dream you can recall afterward only in fragments.

Crow shows me around the shop as if it’s the most fascinating place in the world. (I guess it is. I’m staring at everything I see.) Crow explains the kind of work his father does, what he has learned from him, and how much he has yet to learn. It’s so strange to hear any guy talking about his father like this. Stranger too to see any adult’s actual work that can be touched. (I don’t even know what my father does, I guess. Makes money?) There’s both pride and exasperation in Crow’s voice. The way he glances over at his father, who’s talking loudly and laughing on the phone, I can see that Crow loves his father, but. “Thanks for being nice to Papa, Jenna. He’s a wild guy, eh?”

“He seems very…”

“Like I told you, he was in Vietnam, came back with some medals, which he threw away. He won’t talk about it. Not even with me. He’s kind of hard to live with mostly. He likes you; he’s on his good behavior with you.”

Little Roland has been devouring a jelly doughnut and has made quite a mess. Mr. Saint-Croix hasn’t been watching him, so Crow goes over to wipe the child’s face with a wetted tissue. It’s strange to see a guy like Crow who looks like a biker—is a biker—so patient with a small child. So tender. It’s like Crow is from some other world, not the suburban world I know. In Tarrytown, he’d stand out. The way, when Crow smiles, you can see that his teeth aren’t the smooth white even teeth you expect.

I’m thinking that Crow loves his little brother, a half brother? I want to confide in him that I have a stepbrother. I’ve met Porter only once. I don’t know him, don’t love him, though.

As if he can read my thoughts, Crow asks about my father. I tell him that my father is a businessman—“successful,” I guess—remarried and living in California in an expensive new house. We don’t see each other very much.

“Why’s that?”

“He left us.”

“‘Us’—like your mother and you?”

Why are you asking me these things? Making me want to cry.

Crow says, frowning, “You don’t want to lose contact with your father, Jenna. He is your father.”

“But—I don’t like him.”

The way I say this, both Crow and I start laughing. It sounds so comical somehow.

“‘Like,’ ‘don’t like’—still, he’s your father. That won’t change.” Crow is watching Mr. Saint-Croix as the red-faced man paws through papers on his desk looking for—what? A stump of a cigar, half smoked. Though little Roland is playing close by, Crow’s father doesn’t hesitate to light up. “Like, with my mom too. Last we heard from her, a few years ago, she sent a crate of citrus fruit for Christmas—grapefruit, oranges, lemons. Just a card saying Merry Christmas.” Crow laughs, ruefully.

Suddenly the bell above the front door jangles, and someone comes in briskly. Not a customer, the way she’s clattering in our direction. A glamorous girl in stiletto-heel boots, faux-leopard jacket, and skintight shiny leather trousers, her fleshy face heavily made up and her strawberry-blond hair floating in frizzy waves. She’s noisy and exclamatory, greeting Mr. Saint-Croix and little Roland, stooping to kiss the man’s veiny red cheek and to lift the squealing child in her hands. Her nails are as dazzling as talons: at least two inches long, filed blunt at the ends, the color of frost. Little Roland screams,
Mama!
and the girl coos, nuzzles, and scolds him. Finally she notices Crow on the other side of the room, and me beside him, and stares at us for a weird rude moment without speaking.

Crow is going to introduce us, but the girl addresses him in a sharp teasing voice as if I’m not here:
“Eh, Gabriel! C’est qui ça, ta petite amie avec les yeux adorants?”
and Crow mutters,
“Qu’est-ce que ça peut te faire?”
Impossible to tell if Crow is angry, hurt, or embarrassed, his face has tightened like a mask. Seeing that she has succeeded in upsetting him, the girl in the leopard-skin coat turns her back to us, nuzzling little Roland, who has closed a small, jelly-stained fist in her hair.

I’m thinking that this glamorous girl must be Crow’s older sister. Obviously, little Roland is hers. Now I remember Trina saying that Crow’s sister brought a baby home and that Crow was helping out with the family.

Crow says, “Claudette? I’m going now.”

Without glancing over her shoulder, the girl says, “So? Go.”

Mr. Saint-Croix calls over something to Crow, in his heavily accented English that’s almost indistinguishable from French. Whatever is going on in the family, what the undercurrents of emotion are, no outsider could decode. Claudette and Mr. Saint-Croix are chattering in French and laughing in a way that makes me uncomfortable. Are they talking about me? If so, it’s to annoy Crow, who’s scowling and flush faced. There’s bluish smoke wafting about Mr. Saint-Croix, but Claudette doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, even with little Roland clambering about her feet, she’s lighting up a parchment-colored cigarette and exhaling smoke of her own.

Crow says, “C’mon, Jenna. I’ll drive you.”

It’s past five
P.M
. Aunt Caroline will be waiting for me in the coffee shop. By now she might know that I skipped my session with Dr. Freer. If she doesn’t, I guess I will have to tell her.

For a dazed moment I think that I will be riding on the back of Crow’s Harley-Davidson, roaring along the Main Street of Yarrow Lake in the cold, gusty air. But it’s a battered minivan behind the shop, with
SAINT
-
CROIX CARPENTER
&
CABINETMAKER
painted in red on its sides. I have to haul myself up into the cab, it’s so high from the ground. The interior of the van is freezing and smells of stale cigar smoke and varnish. The passenger seat is ripped, and the windshield is finely cracked. So strange, and so wonderful, to be alone with Crow like this: like a couple. Our breaths are steaming in the cold air.

Stained rags, styrofoam cups, empty beer cans, and cigar butts are strewn on the minivan floor. I want to laugh, it’s like riding in a mobile junkyard.

Crow asks where to? and I tell him, the coffee shop/bakery on Mount Street. I’m so happy to be here, in this smelly, rattling minivan, I don’t want the ride to ever end. I’m too shy to look at Crow except out of the corner of my eye. But I can see his hands gripping the steering wheel: big knuckles, long fingers, dirt-edged nails. I can feel him close beside me. I’m thinking,
If Trina saw me now!
My best friend would never forgive me.