Sound Of Gravel, The (20 page)

“I can’t believe it,” Mom mumbled, her face taking on an eerie glow as she searched the screen for further explanation. “After all the heartache that man caused … He should have suffered in prison for a lot longer than he did.” She took off her glasses, leaned forward over her swollen belly, put her head in her hands, and began to sob. Her shoulders jerked up and down as if the news had shaken loose an old and long-buried sadness.

Given her attitude toward the US government, Mom didn’t find the same peace that I did in being forced to stay in El Paso, but she tried to make the best of the situation. She took us on road trips on the weekends and during the holidays. That Christmas, we visited Grandpa and Grandma in Strathmore and took a side excursion to see Audrey at the state hospital. Eventually, doctors diagnosed her with schizophrenia, a disease that had afflicted several members of the LeBaron family, including two of my father’s siblings.

That Christmas was the first time I’d seen her since the day Mom had taken her away, and although it had only been a few months, she was a changed person, and not for the better. She was fourteen and heavily medicated, her upper eyelids red and droopy, her cheeks sunken, her personality almost completely unresponsive. She had teeth marks on her pale, bruised arms, and the nurses explained that she had been in a fight with another patient. We weren’t surprised when the nurse said that Audrey had started the brawl. The doctors told us that at times they still had to feed Audrey intravenously, and that the drug cocktail they gave her was the only thing that kept her from being violent toward herself and other patients. I thought my sister looked barely alive, although she seemed to remember all of us.

The hospital allowed Audrey to come to our grandparents’ house and spend one night with us, although her presence in the outside world only highlighted how she no longer had a place in it. At my grandparents’ with Audrey, Mom’s face became etched again with its familiar helplessness. She wore that look all day long; right up until the moment she took Audrey back to the hospital.

We returned to El Paso just after New Year’s, when it was time once again for Mom to give birth. She had already decided to have the baby at the hospital in Casas. She wanted a natural delivery and couldn’t find a doctor in the entire state of Texas who would allow a woman who’d had two past C-sections to deliver naturally. Mom took the trip with Lane in the second week of January. Because we knew Social Services would be checking in on us regularly, Lane asked his wife Alejandra and her family to stay with us in El Paso for the week.

Having overnight guests in our tiny trailer was no small feat, especially as Alejandra brought along seven of her and Lane’s ten children. The two youngest were a pair of barely one-year-old twins, Alex and Lane Jr. Seeing them confirmed that Lane’s description had been accurate—they looked nothing alike. Alex had brown eyes and his mother’s dark hair and complexion, while Junior’s skin was olive, his hair sandy blond, his eyes light blue. They were the unlikeliest and the cutest pair of twins I’d ever seen. Alejandra spent most of her time in the trailer on the couch, alternately nursing a blond or a brunet while Meri lay limp on a pillow in the corner.

Given her icy relationship with Mom, I expected Alejandra to treat me harshly, but she didn’t. She always smiled at me, and her gold-capped tooth only added to the warm effect. I liked having her around. Most of our communication was nonverbal as she spoke little English, although her children were always ready to step in and translate. They were all perfectly bilingual. Alejandra made her own flour tortillas for the elaborate and delicious Mexican meals she prepared for us three times a day. It was the best food I had ever tasted.

I shared my top bunk with Alejandra’s daughter Maria. She was just as kind and friendly as her mother and had a self-assuredness and poise that I had never seen in a woman, much less a girl only two years older than me. I found her fascinating. Maria was a carbon copy of her mother, with long, lustrous hair that she parted in the middle and wore in braids. She loved to sew and spent hours making blankets and dresses for her Barbie dolls. While it was not an unusual hobby for girls in our community, Maria’s attitude toward it was.

“I’m gonna be a fashion designer when I grow up,” she said to me one day. “What are you going to be, Ruthie?”

The question left me at a loss for words. I was taken aback by the confidence with which she predicted her future life, a life that had no place in our world of marriage and birthing babies. I had no idea that girls had a choice in what they would do with their lives. That Maria thought she could choose her own future seemed like a radical notion to me.

Maria had three brothers who were close to Aaron’s age, which meant that our trailer was descended upon by a wild pack of boys who never seemed to tire of running up and down the hallway while Maria and I cleaned up after them. One day after school, Maria had finished her chores while I washed the dishes. As I scrubbed, I became more and more frustrated. I just couldn’t take the sound of all the boys playing while I worked. I turned off the faucet, dried my hands, and joined Alejandra and Maria in the living room for an afternoon of Mexican soap operas.

Unfortunately, the pile of dirty dishes was twice as big after dinner. I was sprawled out on the floor with everyone else, watching
The Dukes of Hazzard,
when Maria tapped me on the shoulder. “Ruthie,” she whispered, “my mom said that she’s not gonna let you go to bed until the dishes are done. She says you’re acting spoiled and lazy.”

Feeling like Cinderella, I slowly and dramatically rose from the floor with a sour expression that I made sure Alejandra saw. I stomped into the kitchen. Suddenly it seemed to me that Mom had been right not to like Alejandra, and I couldn’t wait for Mom to come home. I spent the rest of the evening in the kitchen, scouring it from top to bottom while the Dukes’ stock car rumbled in the background. I don’t think our kitchen had ever been cleaner. The trailer smelled like Ajax and Pine-Sol for days.

On the fifteenth of January, Mom delivered her fourth boy, and two days later, she and Lane brought home Micah. Newborns always generated excitement, and Micah was no exception. My brothers and I fought for the chance to hold the tiny creature that stared up at us through a bundle of blankets. Micah’s dark blue eyes scanned the room with intense curiosity; he had an alertness that I found comforting. His skin was so thin it was almost see-through, but it glowed, as if he were lit from within, the blue button eyes providing the only contrast. I thought he looked like the son of a snowman and half wondered if he might melt away when summer came.

Alejandra and all her kids were packed and ready to go well before we even heard the sound of Lane’s truck in the trailer park. Alejandra waited in the kitchen during the excitement of Micah’s debut, and she and Mom pointedly ignored each other; their iciness seemed out of place on such a happy day. As soon as the truck was loaded, Lane and Alejandra each lifted a twin to their shoulders and headed straight for the door.
“Gracias,”
Mom said as they walked past, her straight-lipped smile obviously forced. Alejandra, her head hidden behind the blanket of her baby that she held over her shoulder, didn’t respond. The door rattled shut behind them.

The sky was overcast, and the air in the trailer cold and damp. Mom took in a deep breath and smiled as Lane’s truck pulled out of our driveway as if she was relieved to finally be home. Micah’s birth must have been a great confidence booster to her, in part because the natural birth was uneventful, as she had predicted it would be, and in part because the doctors pronounced Micah normal and healthy.

Mom handed the baby over to Aaron, who asked to hold him first. She moved slowly, as if still in pain from the delivery, and her breathing was louder and heavier than normal. She sat next to Aaron on the couch, leaned forward, and placed her forehead in her palm. Meanwhile, my five-year-old brother held Micah in a fragile embrace, as if the baby were made of glass. It wasn’t difficult to imagine the two of them a few years down the road—wrestling together on the carpet, playing freeze tag, fighting over what to watch on TV. Aaron grinned from ear to ear, his red cheeks glowing in excitement as he stared at his brother.

Mom scanned the room with tired eyes. “Ruthie, I need you to make spaghetti for dinner,” she said as she pulled herself slowly off the couch and limped into the kitchen. “And sweep the floor in here.” She picked Micah up from Aaron. “Matt, you wash the dishes and help Ruthie feed Meri.” Then Mom retired to her bedroom, now more cramped than ever with the two cribs, one for Micah and one for Meri. We wouldn’t see her again until the next afternoon after school. “Ruthie, have you seen Lukey since you got home from school?”

Mom’s voice startled me. I’d been lying on my top bunk, engrossed in a teen magazine, trying to hear myself think as Matt’s music blared from the next room, vibrating through the thin plywood walls. I looked up at Mom, puzzled.

“Have you seen Luke?”

For a second time I didn’t hear the question, distracted by how rested she looked. After just one good night’s sleep, Mom seemed back to normal, with her usual pink cheeks and lips. “He ate a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and watched cartoons with us,” I said as I sat up and opened the magazine flat on my lap to mark my page. “I didn’t see him after we turned off the TV.”

Mom pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose with her forefinger, silently turned, and loudly asked Matt if he knew where Luke was. He didn’t.

She shook her head in disappointment. “You kids need to keep a better eye on him. You know he likes to leave when no one’s watchin’.” She shook her head again. “How am I supposed to do this all by myself?”

She waited for a bit in silence as if she expected an answer, but I didn’t know what to say. A moment later, I heard the front door fly open. Mom stood on the wooden steps and shouted Luke’s name. When there was no response, she turned and headed back in the house. The door clanked shut and woke up Micah, who began to cry.

“Both of you get up and go look for him right now,” Mom commanded, rushing down the hall to attend to the baby.

Matt and I didn’t feel the least bit worried about Luke. We just put on our shoes, dragged wet combs through our hair, and headed down the street for Safeway. While Luke was wandering off more and more often, he tended to end up in the same places—the grocery store or the bus-stop bench in front of the Dairy Queen. His face always wore the same blank expression when we found him, his tongue sticking straight out of his mouth while his eyes nervously followed traffic.

The dark, forbidding skies of the day before had given way to plump, white clouds and a gentle sun, but I walked lazily with my head down and my shoulders slumped inside my purple jacket. Sure enough, as soon as the sliding glass Safeway doors parted, we saw Luke.

In those days, Luke was obsessed with anything made of paper, especially such things as junk mail, newspapers, and magazines. He carried a stack of papers and colorful pamphlets under his arm and used the hand on his opposite arm to hold up his jeans, hand-me-downs from Matt. They were still too big for his skinny body, and he never remembered to wear a belt.

Looking at him there, seeing him before he saw me, it struck me how much he looked like a normal boy. He wore his baseball cap a little bit crooked, but then boys sometimes wore crooked caps. At least one of his shoes was always untied, but all boys walked around that way from time to time. He barely showed any signs of his disability.

“Hey, Lukey,” Matt called across the store. Luke looked up, but not in our direction, as if he’d heard something but didn’t know where it was coming from.

“Luke,”
Matt called out again. This time Luke’s eyes darted toward us. He looked surprised to see us. “Bring your papers and let’s go home.”

Luke reluctantly shuffled our way, but not before he added one more circular to the pile under his arm. His pants inched farther down past his white Hanes underwear with every step. At last he reached back and pulled up his pants.

“What are ya doin’ here, Lukey?” Matt asked.

“Huh?” Luke replied, confused. “Yeah, I’n doin’ fine.” His voice was loud enough for the entire store to hear.

Matt laughed good-naturedly. “No, why are you all the way over here, buddy?”

Luke just shrugged. “I’n not sure.” Then he blinked and turned toward the exit.

“We’ve been lookin’ for ya. How come you didn’t tell Mom where you were goin’? She’s all worried about ya. Let me see those and make sure they’re all free.” Matt pulled the pile of papers out from under Luke’s arm and quickly rifled through them. Luke could never tell which publications were free and which weren’t and had been stopped for shoplifting.

On that day, Luke had only collected free stuff, so Matt handed the papers back to him and we walked home. Luke went straight to his bedroom to study his new stash and to add it to the pile of periodicals, pamphlets, and hundreds of pieces of junk mail he had already collected.

As the years passed, it began to seem as if Luke’s mind had been frozen in time. As Matt entered his teens and began teasing us relentlessly, Luke remained the same. As Mom’s voice took on a permanently raspy quality and the creases on her forehead grew deeper, Luke remained the same. He even seemed to stay the course as things went from bad to worse for the rest of us. Strangely, his stagnant mental development became a source of comforting constancy.

23

In late November, not long before Micah turned a year old, Mom found out she was pregnant again. No one was surprised, and life went on as usual until 1983 rolled in with a spate of bad weather that brought us thick, dark rain clouds for weeks. The conditions were particularly awful one Friday afternoon in mid-February as my brothers and I walked home from school. Aaron had started the first grade by then, so the four of us braved the lightning, thunder, and slanted rain that day, the four of us arriving home soaked and weather-beaten.