Call Me Home (3 page)

They locked the motel door and pulled the curtains. Jackson turned on the television and they sat in its blue light for a while: a news report she didn't hear, a sitcom, noise. She would talk to Jackson and Lydia more in the morning, but for now she just wanted them to rest. They'd done this all before, anyway: the constant television drone, the dim light, the uncertainty. When they had climbed into the flat, rough beds, she let herself imagine it. She allowed herself a faint, warm hope that she would never see her husband again. That he would not find them and they would be free. Nineteen years ago, she thought, and still she remembered it like it was yesterday. She and Gary had barely pulled off the interstate and bought a newspaper when they found the ad, a plot of land going cheap; they drove there the same day. It was on the edge of the Tulalip Reservation, five acres that needed a well, needed to be bulldozed again. It was a good half an hour from Marysville, the nearest town.

They'd pulled up in their pickup after driving the long days from Texas, where they had both grown up. The backseat was full of stuffed garbage bags and suitcases. The ninth of January 1991. It was a cold Wednesday, bone chill and damp, a dark little new year. Even now she could remember the day because of the way it felt like a beginning, like her whole life was about to start. Even in the dead of winter the brush was thick and green over the little plowed road. The owner had led them around, picking over the fallen blackberry, copses of alder, around stands of sword fern, and Amy had taken in the dark loam, the overgrown ghosts of the dozed paths, the flat area at the top of the hill, where the house should go. She wasn't sure what she was supposed to feel. It was so different from anything she had known – but it would be theirs, she thought. Surely it would not take long for it to begin to feel like her own.

When they'd seen the whole of the property, walked from corner to corner, sighted and nodded at the orange flagging tape, Gary had said, “We'd like it, sir,” and the owner had smiled, and they knew he would sell it to them. It would be more than five years
before Gary hit her for the first time, and ten before her love for him dissolved into a sharp bead of fear in her side, her stomach, her heart. They had stood together under a maple, beneath the dripping pavilion of its leaves.

And now, in the dim room at the Starlight, Amy thought of all the things her eighteen-year-old self had left behind all those years ago – her kind, worried mother; her father, who had come back from Vietnam when she was only an infant, but never really came back at all; her best friend, Jennifer, and her old dog, Sam; the streets of Fannin, Texas, the brisket smell, the bad bars and tire-ironed windows of the shops on the outskirts of town. Now, in the Starlight, her children were sleeping, and she tried to sleep herself, tried to dream her dreams into them, to dream a new life again, to will it to be coming for them even now.

Jackson

Portland, Oregon, 2010

THE LAST TIME HE SAW ERIC WAS A SUNDAY, AND BY THE
time Jackson knocked on the door he felt like he might fall down or, worse, that Eric might send him away. He was thinking about that Greyhound bus to Silver, Idaho, and if he was going to do it. It was dancing around in the back of his mind. There's something to be said for starting over, Jackson thought.

He stood outside of Eric's top floor apartment, his boots crushing soft crescents in the white carpet in the foyer. There was a knocker shaped like a lion. He hung onto it for a second. He felt sick. His nose had been bleeding, off and on, and he hadn't been able to find an open bathroom to wash his face. “Come in,” Eric called, and Jackson opened the door on the clean white hall with mirrored hangings on either wall. It reminded him of a woman's throat, her glittering earrings.

Jackson went to the bathroom; Eric had left a towel, a new pair of underwear in Jackson's size, and a white undershirt folded on the edge of the bath. This had become their routine, the comfortable confines that Eric had established for them. “Why don't you get ready for dinner?” he would ask, and Jackson would go. It seemed easier for Eric to pretend Jackson wasn't hustling, and maybe it was easier for Jackson, too. On the counter was a bar of French soap wrapped in the miller's ribbon.

He looked at himself in the mirror. He'd lost more weight, and his eyes were bloodshot. He looked like shit. His hair was dirty, hanging in his face. He tried to imagine that maybe he looked
glamorous in a rough way. All those movie stars and musicians with long, stringy hair, ripped jeans falling off their hipbones, stubble. Stubble, he thought, that was a laugh. He could wait forever but that ship was not coming in. He didn't even have to shave. He looked at his chest, narrow and bare. He looked like a poor man's Kurt Cobain, he thought. A very poor man. He turned the water as hot as it would go and stood in the shower for a long time.

Eric was in the kitchen, as usual, when Jackson came out of the bathroom. He was pouring wine, and Randy Travis was playing. “On the Other Hand.” Jackson had a memory of Travis on a record cover – his skinny sorrow, his melancholy eyes. All of Jackson's first loves were country singers or people he could imagine that way: wistful, tight jeans, drinking problems. Jackson's mother loved Randy Travis.

“For you,” Eric said. He handed Jackson a glass of wine. Eric wasn't a county singer, or even close. He was nearly sixty, big in a way that seemed natural, not bad looking. But there was something about his money that made him ugly. In a restaurant Jackson imagined him sending the entrees back and talking loudly about the waiter.

“Tell me how you've been,” Eric said, laying one hand on Jackson's knee. The routine was to pretend Jackson had been living somewhere, with roommates, maybe. That he wasn't sleeping in the gutted house on Forty-seventh, or in the park, or in one of the shelters if the temperature dipped too low. That he had money, and that Eric wasn't paying him.

It only bothered him when he really felt like shit – nights when he was eating gut rot dumpster food, listening to fifteen-year-old runaways tell their war stories. Then, he thought, it didn't seem right. He wanted Eric's money, but it still didn't seem right. Once, Eric had given him a twelve-hundred-dollar watch, a Movado. Jackson tried to pawn it, but no one bought watches for anything close to what they were worth. He kept it, but he couldn't stand to wear it. There was something terrible about that watch.

“I've been great,” Jackson said, in his earnest voice, the
voice he used with Eric. He drank Eric's wine, sitting on the stool in those expensive boxer shorts and the clean white undershirt.

“Work has been hard,” Eric said. “Busy. There's a new property I'm flying out to look at in Georgia, and we're hiring in the Clackamas office.” Eric was the president of a real estate company that bailed out foreclosing apartment complexes, forcing the owners into high-interest loans. Jackson guessed he had been a fat and unpopular kid and that he had learned to covet all of the things he'd been excluded from. Eric wanted to buy a life, a personality, significance. It disgusted Jackson and turned him on, the idea of fucking this man who cared only about money.

At first, he'd taken what he could get. The men in the shadows downtown, up against a brick wall outside of a bar. Wandering around the video store up on Burnside, until someone asked him if he wanted to watch a video. The first time a man had asked, Jackson had nodded and followed the man downstairs and into one of the dark little booths. “Fifty,” Jackson had said. The man nodded quickly. That was his first cock and he gagged on it. When the man came, Jackson spit the man's cum out onto the floor, took the money, and left.

That night, stepping out of the video store and into the soaking rain, someone tapped on his shoulder and he stood against the side of the building, the water dripping from the gutters down his neck, and jerked the man off, over and over, but the man didn't come. Finally, the man grabbed Jackson's hand. “Okay,” he said, “okay.” He handed Jackson what little cash he had. Fourteen dollars. He went to a bar and his face felt bruised and his eyes hurt. He had a drink, and then another. He made himself imagine that it hadn't happened at all.

With Eric, it was easier – the shower, the wine and dinner, easy sex, and then the envelope of cash that Eric left on the bureau. When Jackson took it, Eric would pour a glass of water or go to stand at the window, looking at anything else. It seemed like such a simple transaction. It had been two months – a short time in the world of houses, running water, and groceries on Friday. Here, two
months was a little lifetime, and he didn't feel guilty. Most of the time, he didn't feel much of anything. Eric's bed was a soft shell to lie in. The stupid little luxuries, the wine, the soap, the heavy cotton sheets, tipped the scale after a week of otherwise scrounging in the cold, hungry and hung over. Sometimes he hated himself; sometimes he hated Eric. Often, though, it was enough.

IT HAD STARTED
with the Starlight Motel, two months ago – February. Except it hadn't just started there; that was too simple. A broken window, tire ruts crossing an empty road, the stale smell of his own dirty clothes. It had all been set in motion a long time ago. The Starlight was only one of the louder notes of that song.

At the Starlight, his mother didn't look like his mother. She looked cheap and sad and old, dying her hair in the little motel sink. She'd always been a brunette, pretty but not in a prominent way. She was tall and she had broad shoulders. A crooked front tooth that she tried to hide, pulling her top lip down when she smiled. As a blonde she looked like someone else. Like someone playing dress-up, trying too hard.

She combed her hair out in front of the mirror, watching herself. Jackson sat behind her on the arm of a chair. She caught his eyes above the sink. “Do you like it?” she'd asked. “Is it the new me? The new and improved Amy Holland?”

Lydia was on one of the double beds, on the paisley bedspread, vinyl-covered batting. “I like it,” she said. “You look pretty, Mama.”

Jackson didn't say anything. He stood up. “I'm going out,” he said.

“Jackson –” She turned from the mirror and looked at him. There were narrow rows in her hair from the comb. She sighed. “You be careful.”

“I am,” he said.

The motel was on the ground floor, a shitty pay-by-the-week place. Jackson in one bed, Lydia and their mother in the other, watching daytime television and eating hamburgers from
the Burger King across the parking lot. Jackson felt like he was losing his mind.

Jackson took a left on the street and began walking. He had half of a cigarette in his pocket and he lit it. Everett was bigger than Marysville or Tulalip, a real metropolis in comparison, stretched out along I-5. To the west was the Sound, and to the east the highway that led you out to Snohomish and then over the mountains. He stood for a minute on the gravel outside the Burger King watching the constellation of city lights until the cigarette burned out and there was nothing to do but go back to the motel.

They'd left four times already. Twice in cabs to motels paid for by Volunteers Of America, where a woman ten years younger than his mother came and spread her sheaves of paperwork on the desk for his mother to sign:
I will not disclose my location. I will join a support group. I will eat Ramen noodles and Hot Pockets and stare at daytime television because there is nothing else to do.

Every time, his father had found them. After a day, a week. But this time was different. He could feel it. After his father pushed his mother through the window she was wound tight as a wire, disappearing into the garden for long periods of time. It was three days before his father let them out of sight, and the moment he did, his mother's voice was quick and low in his ear: “Pack your things. Get in the car.” He couldn't say exactly why this was different but he knew.

By the end of the first week in the motel, Lydia had painted her fingernails and toenails with magic marker. Their mother had filled out job applications for Shari's, the Royal Fork Buffet, the Fashion Bug. She wrote her name as Amy Merrick, her maiden name, instead of Holland. Their new life was going to be full of salad bar sneeze guards and ladies' fashion separates.

The caseworker was supposed to come out the next day to do another intake. Jackson hated the intakes. The woman would stay for hours, asking the same questions in a hushed tone, as though he and Lydia had no idea why they were vacationing at a roach motel. They left bags of holiday coloring books for Lydia, no
matter what the season, and no matter that she was thirteen and hadn't colored in years, and something for Jackson – a dusty package of tube socks with yellow fade lines on them, or a Western novel with the cover torn off.

Jackson couldn't stand the idea of being there when the woman came this time. He already felt like he was going to crawl out of his skin. Lydia had one of his feet on her lap and was coloring his toenails with a purple marker.

“I think I'm going to take the bus back to Marysville tomorrow,” Jackson said slowly. “I'm going to see Randy.” He had some money of his own. Not a lot, but enough to get back north.

His mother looked at him. “Jackie,” she said. She picked at the fleece pills on the hotel blanket.

“And Chris,” Jackson added. If she didn't know, she guessed. Chris was the star of the high school swim team, and someone had seen them leaving the pool together once, long past closing. People talked.