The Thread That Binds the Bones (13 page)

“Neither do I,” said Tom. “I’ll help you do whatever you have to.”

“Thanks.”

Maggie slumped against the seat, hugging her knees. She looked at Tom. He put his hand against her cheek, tilting his head to look at her. She closed her eyes and leaned her head against his hand. After a moment he patted her hair and reached for the keys, started the car. “Thanks for not giving anything away, guys,” he said.

“It’s not going to stay like this,” Eddie said as they pulled away from the curb. “What do you think they’re going to say when they find out Miss Laura’s your wife and not your owner?”

“I don’t know. I think everything will change. It already has, even though I thought we could stop it. They’re not happy to have us back.”

“Except Bert,” said Eddie. “But then, Bert’s always struck me as a maverick.”

Tom pulled in beside the bubble-headed gas pumps at Pops’s Garage. “Yeah. Something weird about Bert.”

Eddie got out, cleared a transaction off the Supreme pump, and dipped the nozzle into Old Number Two’s tank. He started pumping gas.

Pops, brought by the ring of tires on the bell-line, came shuffling out of the shop. “Eddie, Eddie!” he cried, breaking into a slow run. “Eddie! Never thought I’d see you again, son!” Then he was hugging Eddie, almost joggling the gas nozzle right out of the car.

Eddie set the automatic feed cock on the nozzle and embraced the little old man. “Oh, Pops. Music to my ears! You’re really glad I’m back?”

“I missed you so much. No one else has your touch with an engine. No one else knows when to laugh at my jokes. No one else made coffee with eggshells in it and acted nice before breakfast. You come back to work for me?”

“Sure did, Pops, if you’ll have me. Just got back from the Hollow, though. The people at the Dew-Drop don’t think I’m safe to have around.”

“Nonsense! Any of those Hollow people come by, I’ll talk to Mr. Hal. He studied automobiles in the shop with me while he was a boy. I thought maybe you found the woman of your dreams and wouldn’t come back. But no?”

“No, Pops. I found Miss Gwen. Or more like she found me, and I was took. She spent a couple weeks playing with me, and that was dynamite, but then she turned me into a dishwasher. I hated it.”

“I should have gone out there to see Mr. Hal.”

“No, Pops. I’m back now. Glad to be here.”

“I kept your trailer clean while you were gone, and ran the Harley once in a while.”

“That’s great!” Eddie gripped Pops’s shoulders and smiled down at him. “After talking to those people in the bar, I thought maybe I’d never feel like this again. Thanks, Pops.”

“You’re welcome. Eddie, people say Arcadia is a strange place compared to the rest of the world. I’ve lived here most of my life and don’t know. But from what I’ve seen on TV, we’re like other places one way—we got all different kinds of people living here. No good to see some people acting one way and decide everybody will act the same, okay?”

“Okay,” said Eddie.

Pops leaned over and peered in through the cab’s window. “Tommy? You the one who got Eddie out of there? Fred said yesterday you took off for the Hollow with Miss Laura.”

“We escaped together,” Tom said.

“You had the transportation. Come anytime for a free fill-up.” Pops topped off the tank, then cleared the pump and hung up the nozzle.

“Thanks, Pops. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome!”

Pops and Eddie headed back into the gas station, and Tom started the car and drove off, jealous of Eddie’s welcome from Pops and grateful for it. Maggie still hugged her knees. Her face was blank.

Tom pulled into Bert’s open garage, two blocks from the service station, and turned off the engine. It ticked in the echoing silence. The garage was dark except for a slant of sunfall from the open doors behind them and dim electric light from the glassed-in office against the left wall. Grease spotted the concrete floor, and the air smelled of exhaust and pencil shavings. Tom opened the cab door. “Come on,” he said to Maggie, “I’ll show you my place.” He glanced toward the office, realized somebody was there, and led Maggie that way first. The door stood halfway open. He peered around it and said, “Hi, Trixie.”

Trixie the dispatcher sat at a big old desk, a fragrant mug of coffee in front of her, a space heater glowing orange to her left, her Adidas-clad feet up on the desk, and her nose buried in the latest issue of
Scientific American
. At Tom’s hail, she dropped the magazine and lunged to her feet. “Tommy?” she cried. She raced to him and hugged him.

Arms crossed over her chest, Maggie leaned against a wall and watched, grinning. Trixie, somewhere in her fifties, was tall, broad-shouldered, and wide-hipped. Her short hair stood out in a henna-red halo around her head. Her clothes were casual, jeans and a cable-knit off-white fisherman’s sweater. She stepped back and stared at Tom, her fists on her hips and her elbows jutting out. She smiled, her eyes narrowing with pleasure.

“Bert said one of those Bolte sirenes ran off with you, too. Like a plague, first Eddie, then you. Closer together than usual.”

“Eddie came back out with me. So did Maggie. Trixie, this is Maggie. Maggie, this is Trixie. Maggie’s going to live upstairs with me. Bert said it was okay.”

Trixie turned and studied Maggie. “Good lord!” she said. “It’s a child!”

Maggie trembled without understanding why. Suddenly everything in her was shaking. She opened her mouth, and a young child’s wordless wail emerged. Trixie took two steps and enveloped her in a hug. “There, baby, there,” she said. “You go ahead and yell it all out. Nobody listening but us.”

It had been a long time since anybody had considered Maggie a child, not since her mother’s death when Maggie was nine. A lifetime. Maggie leaned against Trixie’s safe warmth, thinking about her mother, and felt tears rise that she had swallowed for seven years. She put her arms around Trixie and clung to her, sobbing against her soft breast, feeling the warm strength of her embracing arms. In that unfamiliar haven Maggie thought of all the fears and sadness she had smashed down inside her. Something warm rested on her head, and comfort flowed from it like warm water. The brand on her palm tingled. A strange river glowed golden through her thoughts, bringing her comfort and carrying away debris from the past. Hurts rose in her one by one and washed away on a tide of tears.

When she had cried away as many things as she could think of that she wanted to get rid of, she lifted her face from Trixie’s now soggy sweater front and looked around. The warmth on her head slipped away; it had been Tom’s hand, she discovered. She breathed deeply, smoothing out the sobs until they stopped. She listened to her own breathing in the silence of the early afternoon in the garage. Finally she released Trixie, slid out of her arms, and turned to hug Tom. After a moment he hugged her back. She focused on the embrace, reading the undertones. His hands rested on her back as if that was all they wanted to do, not as if it were a prelude to something else; no arousal pressed against her belly. Warmth, and no desire. She pushed her face hard into his shirt front, smelling wood-smoke and male. She couldn’t remember feeling safe with a man before.

After a moment she let go of him and rubbed her eyes. “Sorry,” she said to both of them.

“Don’t be, child,” said Trixie. “Sometimes crying is the best medicine you can give yourself.”

“I never cry,” Maggie said, hearing the tears in her voice, and the anger. “Crying’s for people who are helpless.”

“Who told you that?” asked Trixie.

“Learned it from looking around.”

“Well, it’s not true. You can’t always judge by appearances. Crying’s a power tool to cleanse the soul, if you use it right. I think you used it right. Do you feel helpless?”

“No,” said Maggie, checking inside to find out what she was feeling; she couldn’t remember the last time she had done that. “Just feel stupid.” She rubbed away a final tear and thought a little longer. “Stupid and kind of light,” she said, frowning. She glanced up at Tom.

He smiled at her. She read untangled affection and kindness in his smile, and she felt an aching warmth in her chest. She straightened. Had to watch that. It always hurt when someone could touch your heart. “Stupid and kind of light, and stuffed up, and like I must look silly,” she said. “Want to wash my face.”

“Come on upstairs. I’ll show you our rest room,” Tom said.

“Tommy, you can’t seriously think the child could live here—and share a bathroom, let alone a bedroom! People will talk ugly.”

“She needs company, Trix. She was out at Chapel Hollow three years, and they did their worst.” Belatedly, he looked at Maggie to see if it was all right for him to share that information. Maggie hunched her shoulders and waited for Trixie’s verdict.

“Oh, you poor child. You come on home with me, sweetie. I’ve got a little guest room—used to be my daughter’s before she moved to Seattle—snug and comfortable. Wouldn’t you like that?”

“But Tom is my protector. What could you do if Mr. Carroll comes after me?”

“Mr. Carroll?” said Trixie. Her face lost color. “Oh, child, what could anybody do against Mr. Carroll?”

“I want to stay here,” Maggie said. She sniffed and looked at Tom, who went into the office and came back carrying a box of generic tissues, which he offered to her. She took several and blew her nose on one.

“If Mr. Carroll comes here—”

“Call me, Trix,” said Tom.

She stared at him. A moment edged past. She blinked and lowered her gaze. “All right,” she said to the floor.

Tom took Maggie’s hand and led her up the steep narrow stairway.

The upstairs hall was dark and smelled musty and damp. Tom reached up and pulled the chain on a hanging light bulb, which lit to show a bare board floor and stained wood walls. He frowned at the chain, realizing it was too high for Maggie to reach; somewhere there must be an extra piece of string to tie to it.

He opened the door to his room and stood aside so she could enter. The room had a window at the far end, its only good feature. A small radiator lurked below the window. Ancient wallpaper with stripes of small fading flowers covered the walls, unpatterned at points by water and other mysterious stains. Against the left wall stood his bed, a camp cot with a foam pad and some blankets on it. Against the right wall was his dresser, a tall, square-edged, substantial piece of furniture painted pink. He also had a card table and a folding metal chair, and a doorless alcove of a closet where several shirts and pairs of pants hung above a neat line of paired shoes.

Tom studied his room as a stranger might. He scratched his head.

“You
live
here?” asked Maggie.

“I spend most of my time in the bar, or working around town. This is just for sleeping.”

“I don’t think your wife’s going to be very happy with this.”

“Neither do I.” He took her down the hall to the bathroom. It had two stalls in it, like a public rest room, and no shower. She went to the large sink and peered into the mirror above it. The silvered backing was flecked with tiny whirlpools, as if the glass lay flat over boiling water, but she could still see herself. Her face looked swollen, her eyes puffy, and her cheeks red. She splashed cold water on her face and turned to Tom. “Where do we wash?”

“I take showers at the high school, up the hill. The custodian lets me in after hours. Hmm. High school. Seriously, do you want to go?”

“Are we going to stay here long?”

“Probably not.” He listened inside, remembering the whispers that had invited him to town, the breathless waiting for something to arrive. The anticipation was gone. Fulfilled, he decided.—Home? he thought.

—Home goes with you, something answered.

“I don’t think we’ll stay. This is no place for you or Laura to live.”

“Don’t want to go to school here if we’re leaving right away. Tom ... guess I think I’m following you. Staying with you. Is that all right?”

He stared at the floor, licked his upper lip. After a moment, he said, “Maggie, I just got married to a woman I only met yesterday.” He looked up. “I don’t know what she wants. If it was up to me, I’d say yeah, you can come with us. I can’t speak for Laura. Anyway, we’re having a baby. You know anything about babies?”

“Yes,” she said. “Had two little brothers and a little sister, and took care of them most of the time, until I ran away. Wonder if they’re okay.” She hugged herself and hunched her shoulders. “Shouldn’t have left them with Daddy.”

He watched the misery twist her face, and said, “Maybe we could—,” then had second thoughts. “I can’t think about this right now, Maggie. Right now I just want to find you a place to sleep. Maybe we can work on your family later.”

“If s not your problem.”

“I don’t think it’s yours either.”

She stomped across the floor, went to the window, and turned. A dark silhouette against the light, she said, “They depended on me, and I ran away and left them.”

“You’re not their mother. Could you have gotten away before this and gone back to them, anyway? Was that your fault?”

“Hitchhiking,” she muttered. “Daddy always told me never to hitchhike. Did it once, and look where I ended up. How could he be right about anything?”

Tom went out into the hall and began opening doors. A moment later Maggie joined him. They found closets cluttered with junk—wheel-less bicycle frames, an old baby buggy with a rotting fringed canopy, a stack of snow tires for a very small car, boxes of old books and random papers, stacks of
Life
and
Time
and
National Geographic
,
a fleet of foot-pedal sewing machines. The air smelled of dust and rust and damp.

“I don’t think any of these other rooms has a window in it,” Tom said, when they had looked at all of them. “Maybe we could punch one through a wall. See a room you want?”

She picked the biggest one—about six feet wide and nine feet deep. Every room seemed to be a closet, although a lot of the walls looked like one-layer partitions put up long after the building had been built. Tom and Maggie cleared all the junk out of her room, dumping things in the room across the hall. Tom got out a broom and dustpan and swept the floor, waking ghosts of the dust of ages. He changed the hanging light bulb in the room to a higher watt bulb. “You need a bed,” he said. “Where are we going to get a bed? Maybe Eddie has an extra.”