Friendswood (8 page)

A
T
R
USH'S HOUSE,
they drank bourbon. Rush's husband, Tom, clownishly scowled in and out of the room the way he always did, the news turned to mute on the large-screen TV over the fireplace. On the other side of the room, there was a lamp whose base was a cowboy boot, and on the wall behind it, a painting of running horses and a collection of embroidered sayings inside picture frames. Lee tended to let her gaze brush over them, but now her concentration landed on that one she disliked—the smug prayer about accepting what you couldn't change and having the courage to change what you could. The needlepoint ended in a flock of birds. As if every anguish was meant to disappear into
wisdom to know
.

Rush pulled her feet up under her on the black leather couch. With her blue minnow-shaped eyes, and her triangular cheekbones, she had a grand beauty and a bawdy, gap-toothed smile. Her breasts were heavy now, in her billowy sheer blouses, her long blond hair always shiny and straight, like her daughters' (there were bottles of shampoo and blow-dryers crowding the shelves of the bathrooms). “You ever see Charlotte anymore? I swear she saw me and walked right past at the school the other day. Her girl Willa waved though.”

“Char's eyesight always was bad.”

“Or it's her manners.”

Lee remembered the last time she'd seen Char's daughter, a sweet-
looking, serious girl with big dark eyes. She'd come in for an appointment with Doc, and she'd been carrying one of those god-awful paperbacks with explosions on the cover that try to get people to think the world will be done with by Christmas.

“At least since she got Christian,” said Rush. “I mean, we all used to be so close. You know what I call her church, that Victory Temple? The way they go on about things, I call it the Viciousness Temple.” She laughed. “You ever talk to her anymore?”

“Not really. I don't think she hates me. She's just waiting for me to be saved.”

“Not going to happen.” Rush pulled at the jade pendant of her necklace, raced it back and forth on the chain. “Hey, Lee, are you alright? Your mouth is doing that thing.”

She wasn't sure how much she wanted to say.

“You've been going out there again, haven't you?” said Rush. “Goddamnit, they buried that poison. And what good does it do you? Probably dangerous even being out there all by yourself.” She stood up to turn on the radio on the bureau.

“I saw something different this time.”

“I bet you did.” Rush flung herself back on the couch, drew her knees up to her chin. “I just feel like I have to trust people in order to live, don't you? I mean, me and Tom aren't moving, and you're not either. I don't want to spend the rest of my life fretting about stuff we can't even see.”

Rush's youngest girl ran in and out of the room, asking for nail polish. Rush addressed her by only slightly moving her head in the girl's direction, and told her not to interrupt adult conversation. She had an imperial way of sitting tall and calm, while the rabble rushed around her.

“Do you want some chips? Or I have some really good Hershey's.”

“No.” Lee savored the bourbon in her mouth. “I'm just saying, there might be news.”

Rush looked away, brought a cigarette to her lips, let it flick upward before she lit it. “Whatever you say.”

“Jack called again yesterday.”

“Honey.” Rush had a way of communicating her disapproval with just a look—as if her thought were too ugly to actually name, and this made it consequential.

“He still likes to talk about her with me. It's his thing. That's why he calls.”

“What it is, is he still feels married to you. I don't care if it's been years. Takes a while for that to go away for some people. I don't care if he has a girlfriend.”

“But for me, it's all gone. Except when he calls. And then I'm reminded. Actually, I kind of depend on it. I think it keeps me sane.”

“Can't be nice for his girlfriend, though.”

Just then, Rush's teenage son, lanky, stiff legged, came in the room. “Bryce, say hello.” Rush's face changed, her cheeks filled out and lifted, her eyes widened, fixed on him. Lee remembered that feeling of brightening and opening as soon as Jess entered the room, everything flowing in her daughter's direction.

“Going over to the Lawbournes',” he said, fumbling through the things on a table and picking up a set of jangling keys.

“Uh-uh, mister. No, you are not.”

Bryce was sixteen, but he looked younger, a smatter of light freckles on his nose, his cheeks smooth. “Are you kidding me, Mom? I can't go out in the middle of the afternoon?”

“That's right. You're grounded. You're not going anywhere.”

Bryce sighed, threw the keys down on the floor, and mumbled audibly, “. . . real pain in the ass!”

“Excuse me?” Rush started to stand.

“I said
whatever
.” Bryce stomped out to the hallway.

Rush flung up her hand and turned back to Lee. “Sorry. Teenagers! They act ugly and then about a minute later, they want something from you. Don't you wish they'd just grow up?” She touched Lee's sleeve. “Sorry. I wasn't thinking.”

“No,” said Lee. “Don't worry about it. You're right.”

Jess had actually been mostly well behaved, except that night during the winter after they moved—just before she started the chemo—when she came home at 3:00 a.m., drunk and stumbling out of a boy's car. Lee watched from the window as Jess wove her way inside, but instead of going to bed, she went straight out back to her tree in the yard and threw her purse over the flowers there. By the time Lee got outside, Jess was practically asleep. Lee rattled Jess's shoulder. “Goddamnit. You're sick. Do you hear me? You can't do this.”

In the dark, her daughter's face looked monstrous, fuchsia lipstick smeared, black running beneath her eyes, one cheek strangely twisted up and scraped. “I can do it. That's the point, Mom.”

And then Lee said the thing she'd regret. “You selfish little bitch. You're stinking drunk, when I'm breaking my neck trying to take care of you?”

“Then don't.” Jess wobbled as she stood up.

“You don't mean that.” Lee helped her inside, and Jess fell over her arm and gagged, but nothing came up. She gagged again, and spit fell from her mouth in a long string. Lee settled her on the couch and put a big black pot on the floor near her head. “Goddamnit, your dad and I love you so much.” She was trying to soften what she'd said before, to take it back, but Jess was already asleep, her mouth gaped open against the silk-upholstered pillow.

Now loud drums pounded from inside Bryce's room. “Good Lord,” Rush said. “He's practicing. Why in the hell we ever said yes to that, I don't know. You wouldn't believe the mouth on that one.” Lee remembered how their families used to gather, the adults playing cards, their children outside riding small, motorized cars around and around the house, Bryce chasing the older girls.

Rush rose from the couch, went over to the radio, and turned up the volume for the Hank Williams outlaw song. “Let me get you some more bourbon.”

That night, Lee couldn't fall asleep, wrestled with something she couldn't quite remember that Professor Samuels had said about the water
table. He'd had a mild stroke a couple of months ago, and she hadn't been able to consult with him for a while, though his wife had written that he was doing okay.

When she finally did fall asleep, she dreamed of Jack and Jess, as she often did. They were floating away in a large boat that was also at times a house, the water turned to land and back to water again. She didn't recognize the house, but it was unremarkable except for the log crashed into its roof, which occasionally caught on fire. She knew how to keep it from igniting, and how to keep the boat from sinking, but the problem was communicating all this to Jack and Jess, who waved to her from the deck or the rooftop, but couldn't hear anything she said. Again and again, she wrote down messages and carefully folded them into paper airplanes that she threw in their direction, but they didn't seem to notice.

D
OC HAD OFFERED
Lee the job, part-time at his office, years ago. Thinking she was broke but not wanting to embarrass her, he'd said, “I just want to keep an eye on you is all.” He let her do her Banes Field “side work” at the office. His sister had lost her home in Rosemont, and Doc believed in her project, but he never would say it publicly.

That afternoon, while Lee was in the back, confirming the appointment schedule, Ash Bernard came to the reception window. He had no hair, but pink scales covered the entire globe of his scalp, with ridges and continents of lighter pink against the oceans of darker red. His ears stuck out from his head, and because they were oddly clear and untouched by the disease, it seemed that he might only have the sense of hearing. Or she wished that, because though his eyes were nearly swollen shut, she was afraid he might see the shock in her face at how bad it had got.

“Hi, there.” He nodded.

“Ash, how are you?” He carried a box of cigars and wore a blue tie with yellow sailboats.

“Hey, pretty lady.” His voice seemed weirdly upbeat. “I've got an appointment. Should be about three o'clock.” His mouth looked like a wound.

“If you could just update these forms for us,” she said, handing him a clipboard through the sliding window. Doc was signaling to her from the back, where Ash couldn't see—that he was running late.

“I sure will.” Ash reminded Lee of a dapper, friendly snake. “Can you tell me, is it safe to park on the street right there or am I liable to get a ticket?”

“Oh, you'll be fine,” said Lee.

Ash went to take a seat in the waiting room. He was one of Doc's regulars, a sad case of acute psoriasis, brought on, she suspected, by women trouble. He didn't always look that bad, though, and if she just focused on his eyes, she could speak to him naturally.

After Ash went in to see Doc, Sandy Clouter called. Though she'd moved away to Memphis, she kept in close contact with her Rosemont friends and often called Lee with updates. Sandy seemed lonely, now that her kids had gone off to college. She clung to the gossip and to the timbre of her own voice a bit too much. “I wanted to let you know—it's real sad,” Sandy said. “Nick Busby has kidney failure too. I'm sorry, but that man was juicing carrots and veggies all the time, racing around on his bike. He should be healthy,” said Sandy. “Shouldn't he?”

Lee told her she'd add his name to the list. There were so many chemicals in Banes Field, the EPA couldn't even name them all—who really knew what the risks had been?

That day the phone rang surprisingly often—the woman with a sensation that felt like “tiny beads rolling up and down her skin,” the man who had a mole as big as a nickel on the top of his head, the woman who wanted to know what Doc could do about the worry wrinkles between her eyes. In the midst of all this, Professor Samuels's wife called. “He wanted me to tell you he can still direct John in the lab and get soil samples read.”

“How is he?”

“Oh, he's getting stronger. Stabilized. His talking's still slurred, but I can understand him. He wants to get back to work, soon as he can.”

Lee had packed the recent samples in a box and put them in the trunk of her car—eight mismatched jelly jars with cheerful gingham on their metal tops and masking tape labels for their locations. “Tell him to just rest and get better,” she said. “And then I've got some photographs to show him.”

At the end of the day, Lee went in the back and restocked the cotton swabs and hand sanitizer. She turned off the lights in the waiting room, gathering up the old encyclopedias and
Texas Monthly
's that had been scattered from the reading table.

She was about to leave when she saw the phone's blinking light in the dark office. It was Mayor Wallen, finally. He said he'd been out to Rosemont, and they'd even sent a few other men out there too—experts—and none of them had found anything.