Authors: Megan Kruse
Call Me Home (28 page)
I HAD THE FEELING AGAIN THAT MY FATHER WAS THERE
. The page in front of me, the smell of chalk. I bit the eraser of my pencil and tasted the old taste, the house back around us, the sounds rising up. Go, I thought. Go now, and it was easier than I'd imagined. I followed the halls, and the lockers were soldiers with cold eyes. The gym was empty, and then I was out those heavy double doors.
It was worse outside. Every car on the main street was his car. Every corner was a corner he would know. When my father was drunk he would sometimes tell the story of how he met my mother. “The ranch where I lived was just a stone's throw from the town where your mother lived.” His eyes would be glassy, and I knew that at any moment his smile might turn mean. “A ranch hand and a small-town girl, what do you think of that,” he would say, and in my mind the ranch was a dark place because it had made him. And now it was a stone's throw from where I stood outside â was that a mile? Ten? I imagined the ranch was calling my father back. It was whispering to him that we had come back, that we were nearby for the finding.
I closed my eyes as tight as I could and wished for Jackson. Jackson, who knew the rest of everything that happened to us, the parts that belonged to him. I opened them again and the cars were dragging past, heavy as train cars.
I started toward home but thought, They'll send me back. Once I watched Jackson stick out his thumb like it was a long rope
that pulled a car right to him, just for a ride down the road. But where would I go? The cars were loud and grinding, and in each one was another face that might recognize me.
In the end, I went to the river. I walked up and down the shore. I dragged my hands along the ground and picked up as many rocks as I could, and I waited there. I don't know how long I waited. The sky turned pink, and then it turned red. I was waiting for him. If he came, I thought, I would kill him before he killed me.
MY GRANDMOTHER WOKE
me. My mouth tasted like aluminum foil. I was in the fort, and the rocks were still in my hands. She had a flashlight and she shone it across me. I had not dreamed of him. That was something.
She pulled me up against her, the flashlight in my eyes. I was so tired. She shook me. “You're all right,” she kept saying, “You're fine â you're fine â”
“I thought he was here,” I said.
“Who, baby?”
“My father.”
Her arms were looser around me now. “No,” she said. “No, I promise you, no.” She was colorless in the flashlight. It seemed like I could see the veins running through her. “I looked for you everywhere,” she said, and her voice was quiet and slow. “I looked all around town. I looked and I looked, and then suddenly I knew â you'd be right here, so close to home.” I leaned against her. “When you're older,” she said, “you'll be able to go wherever you want, and no one will stop you. No one will hurt you. And if they try, you'll have people around to protect you, just like you do now.”
“What if he finds me?”
She put her arm around me. “He's haunting you like a ghost,” she said. “But you're safe here. And one day, he'll be nothing but ashes and dust. He'll be gone for good.”
“None of it was your fault,” she said. “And everything you felt, she feels it to.” She sighed. “She needs you. Lydia â she is a person, too. She isn't just your mother.”
I was so tired, and she was warm against me. I followed her. I let her take my hand and lead me back up the gravel road from the river.
The light from the house looked warm and safe and I felt sorry. How long had I been gone? My mother was at the kitchen table crying. She was crying and her makeup was running down her face, and she held me so tightly that my ribs felt like they were breaking beneath her arms. Finally, she let me go. She pressed her cheek to her knee. She didn't ask me where I had been. “I'm sorry,” she said, again and again. “I'm so, so sorry.”
She tried to wipe her eyes but she just sobbed again. “You do these things,” she said, “you do these things you think you'll never do because you think you have to â” I left my arms around her and they weren't my arms, they were someone else's. Through the screen, the prairie was dark and it did not end. “And there is another answer, I'm sure, but you don't know it,” she said. “And then it's done â” She was crying again, and I let my arms drop. She was gasping, hardly breathing.
And it was Texas fall, still hot, and I wanted to tell her I understood and I couldn't. I couldn't say anything. I wanted to tell her that I knew, that her life had been before us and would still be after, and what should she have done? I wanted to say it but I didn't, and she said “I'm sorry, Lydia. I'm so sorry,” and she stood and left me on the porch and went out the screen door and onto the road.
I wanted to run after her, but I just kept sitting. I wanted to tell her I knew. I pressed my cheek to the porch screen. I thought of my father beating my mother, the broken glass, and Jackson, with his hands reaching out to me as I left him behind. My mother was nowhere in sight, and I wanted to call after her. You do these things because you have to. I knew what my grandmother had said was wrong. It's not that you are still yourself. You are never yourself again. Your heart will break and break, and your children may be lost to you, but in the end you are still a mother.
“
YOU DO THESE THINGS
,”
SHE SAID TO LYDIA
, “
YOU DO
these things you think you'll never do because you think you have to â” I'm sorry, she thought. I'm sorry for all of this, because I knew. Somewhere in me I
knew
.
It is a Sunday afternoon, and she is searching the house. It has been less than a week since Gary came to the Starlight, since he brought them back home again. He is sweet and attentive, but she imagines a calm surface of water, the fish darting and frantic underneath. She is full of a terrible pain for her son, for what he has done, for the way she understands that Gary has that power, to hurt Jackson, to draw out of him such anger that he would do what he did, would tell Gary what he wanted to know. She is searching deep into the backs of the closets, under the heating grates, behind the washer and dryer. Somewhere Gary has hidden the children's birth certificates, and though she has long given up on finding them, it makes her feel like she is doing
something,
anything. She imagines herself as someone else might see her, pulling things from dark shelves, shaking out the winter coats, sweeping the dust from the corners. Someone who doesn't know her, who might just see a simple effort, a small happiness: the search for a misplaced glove, a spring cleaning.
When she has turned every stone inside, she moves out to the shed. It smells stale, and it's full of junk â appliances they meant to fix, scrap metal, dusty canning jars. There were always mice. It would make a good hiding place, she thinks.
It's dark in the shed and she pulls box after box into the light,
watching the time, flipping through old papers and junk, scattering mouse droppings, looking for anything he might have hidden, anything that might help them when they go.
Beneath stacks of old paper, receipts, a broken answering machine, she sees it. The leather is old and smooth in her hands, and the sickness starts to come over her before she can say why but she knows. It has been eighteen years since she has seen Sam. She would know that collar anywhere.
“I'm sorry,” she kept saying. “I'm so sorry.” A shard of glass, a fingerprint bruise. Afternoons when Jackson and Lydia hid in the back of the closet with winter coats around their heads so that they wouldn't hear. She'd known. But there was this other side of their father, too â his hand on Lydia's bicycle seat when he taught her how to ride, the galloping cant of his shoulders. Once, he ran backwards across the lawn to make them all laugh.
For as long as she can remember she has been saying to her daughter, “You have to keep dreaming your life. You have to keep dreaming the life you want.”
She left Lydia on the porch and went down the road. Her feet were bare and the stones were warm beneath them. If she could dream her children's lives, they would think only of the days that were coming, open curtains, bright streets.
She already said goodbye, long ago. The soup bone, buried in the front yard, the flowers she lay beside it. The night that Gary came to dinner and walked off into the warm night and Sam did not come home. The darkness in her husband had not begun the night of the Legion or after the car accident. It wasn't because they'd had children or because they were getting old. It was not about sex, or housework, or the weather. It was not about her. She holds the collar, weighing her husband's terrible heart. She understands for the first time that all of this was set in motion long ago. What other decisions, she thinks, what other pieces of her life are not hers? What truth is left?
She lays it back in the box. Okay, she thinks. So it is. She calls the New Mexico shelter the next day. She makes the decision to leave her son. To give him his life, just beginning, and to believe he will know
how to use it. But here is her ugliest, most unforgiveable truth: the collar does not surprise her. In some small and secret way, she always suspected. Her Sam, her dog, her one love after her parents and before her own family, had gotten in the way of what Gary wanted, and she had allowed herself to pretend it was otherwise.
She knew her way to the river even in the dark, and when she was there she stopped, standing in the warm dark, breathing, the same air she had breathed twenty years before, when everything was still ahead of her. When she had ignored the voice inside of her that told her to pause, that told her something wasn't right, and instead gone on. For that she felt responsible: she had gone on.
She turned and looked back toward the house, the yellow glow of it in the dark. And you go on now, she thought.
Lydia was still on the porch when she walked back up from the river, and Amy felt the air go out of her, all of it, the guilt, the sorrow. She sat beside her daughter, and Lydia held her.
IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, AFTER HE HAD MET ELIZA
, certain dreams he woke from had the same kind of sadness â nothing he could mourn, not really, because it was already gone. It had never existed in the first place. He worked with a focus. It felt good, to put things in order.
Don avoided the job site for three or four days. Jackson wondered if he was coming back at all, and then, that Friday, the pickup pulled up and Don climbed out. He wandered through, talking to the rest of the crew, shuffling papers on his plastic clipboard. Jackson felt an ache somewhere in the bottom of his stomach.
Don walked toward him. Those hands, with their long fingers and broad nails, the deep creases in the palms. The lines around his eyes. The first night that they had slept together, on the floor of A-frame B, the lake had reflected trails of light on the bare wood floor. Jackson had woken with his heart pounding and the taste of old bourbon in his mouth, a cold fear in his stomach at what they'd done, what it meant for his job and his life, but Don had just pulled him closer and touched his face, kissed his hair.
“Jack,” Don said. He smelled like good sweat and new wood. “How are things?” The boom of his work voice. It used to make Jackson want badly to fuck him, to stand there talking about work orders and storm windows. To know that in a few hours those long hands would be on his cock, his teeth on the olive skin of Don's shoulder.
“Jackson,” Don said. “You've been doing some good work here.”
“Fuck you.”
“Jack,” he said. He looked at Jackson. He held his arm out as though he was going to reach out and touch him, then let it drop. “Jack,” he said, softly this time.
“What do you want?”
“Let me buy you a beer or something,” Don said.
His mouth. His hands, with the rounds of callous on the pad of each finger. At night Jackson could hear the whine of his teeth grinding, feel the muscles in his calves twitching. All of those things that had made Don so alive, so real â and that had been the miracle, that there was someone who he wanted so badly who was
real
. “You see, I would ⦔ Jackson said. He hated how his voice sounded, so high and bitter.
“So, do,” said Don. There was an edge of authority in his voice. Jackson was aware of how everyone around him saw them: contractor and laborer. They probably imagined that Jackson had fucked up, of course he had. Late one too many times, some calamity of bent nails and sawdust. If they knew, he thought, they wouldn't see any of the real things â not Don turning in the cage of his arms, not the slow lap of the new lake against the dock pilings, not the spill of light through the frame of the house in the mornings. Just cheap, he thought. Cheap labor, cheap trick. Sleeping with the help.
Don cleared his throat. “Please?” he said.
Jackson looked at him. “No,” he said. “I have to do something.”
“Don't walk away from me, Jackson.” Don's voice was low. His hands were deep in the pockets of his work jacket and his eyes flashed a warning. His stupid face, Jackson thought. His stupid hands.