Authors: Megan Kruse
“Has it been happening for a long time?” the nurse asked, high and pleading. How could Amy even answer that question? It had happened so slowly at first that it had taken her a while to notice. Why would they need friends, especially out here, where everyone was gun toting and paranoid? Her parents would only be sad that they couldn't afford to visit; why call them? Even the play dates â those other children were only setting bad examples. The walls shifted closer.
Other small things â the pig Gary had brought home that hoofed desperate ruts in the pasture and tried to break the fence; the steer that whiled away its miserable hours licking a cube of salt. The work kept her away from town, and with a freezer full of meat there was no need to go, anyway. “Plant a garden,” he said. “We have all this land.” It seemed idyllic from the outside â back to the land, back to nature. Instead, her ties to the outside world grew more and more tenuous. Amy imagined that woman from the school parking lot. “I dream of a garden,” that woman would sigh. How could Amy explain that each of these things moved her a step farther from town, from the everyday reasons to leave their land?
“If â” The nurse was blinking fast, running her thumb back and forth over the prescription. “You can take him to court for this,” she said. “Send him to jail. You don't have to live like this. You don't deserve it.”
The halos of light were waxing and waning and Amy concentrated on them until the nurse's voice seemed to shrink. She made it sound so simple. Amy watched a medical chart on the opposite wall, a figure latticed with pink muscles. An empty urine specimen cup on the clean white counter. Stainless steel tools on a stainless steel tray.
“Listen,” the nurse said. “I'm just going to say this. I can't help it.” Her mouth was shaking around her words, her thumb rubbing the paper faster. “There was a woman, last spring. Maybe you heard about it.” She took a breath. “Her boyfriend shot her kids. In front of her. He made her watch.” She looked at Amy and Amy looked away. “Take him to court,” the woman said. She put one hand on Amy's cold arm. “Please.”
Her skin prickled. This woman didn't know her, and didn't know her husband. She took the prescription and eased herself off the table. She didn't look at the nurse. She concentrated on the glow of the green arrows pulling her toward the waiting room.
THAT NIGHT, AFTER
Gary was asleep, she went to the kitchen and poured some of his whiskey into a glass. She sat in the dim
light of the kitchen stove, looking out the dark window, listening to the steady thump of rain.
Right in front of her.
She drank quickly, letting the liquor erode the edges of the pain.
He made her watch.
She imagined the other women out there, in their own dark houses, living the way that she was.
She knew it as clearly as she knew her children's faces: if she called the police, if she took him to court, if she fought him, that is when he would do something irreversible, something to hurt her more than any physical pain ever could. That is when she had to be truly afraid. This way the pain was dull but it was over, she thought. He wouldn't touch her again for a while.
She watched her own face waver in the slick black glass, the beads of water running down it, dividing her reflection. “The Devil is beating his wife,” her mother would always say, holding her palms up to catch the rain. All of those wives, the constellation of lights from their midnight windows. All of them making their own bargains with God, all of them wide awake.
THE SCHOOL SENT JACKSON AND ME TO CAMP FOR A
week. He was with the high school, but I was with the sixth grade, on the other side of the field, under a stand of trees. “You need anything,” he said, “I'll be in cabin two, okay? Just ask someone to come find me.”
I nodded. Marta liked me that week. She was standing beside me and she looked at Jackson and put her hands on her hips. “Cabin two?” she asked, smiling her school picture smile. I elbowed her.
Jackson smiled. “Don't get into any trouble,” he said. “At least not too much.” I watched him walk back to join the rest of his group.
That night Marta and I stood at the steel sink in the corner of the cook shelter, brushing our teeth. I balanced the butt of a flashlight next to the soap dish. The water tasted like rust and smelled like tinfoil. The beams up above us were lacy with spider webs.
In the cabin, Marta showed me a picture of her boyfriend, who went to the high school and played the guitar for her youth group. The rubber mattress made our legs sweat even in the cold. The boy in the picture was tall, wearing a Yankees cap over hair gone dark with grease. “He's going to be a mechanic,” she said. “He already rebuilt a car. A Cadillac. He got it from his grandfather.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Your brother's cute,” she said. I didn't say anything. I didn't want to think about Marta liking my brother.
“Have you ever been kissed?” Marta asked.
I thought about walking away but that would be worse; then Marta would know that I hadn't. Finally I said, “Oh, sure.”
“Who was it?”
I wanted to cry. “Oh, just some guy,” I said. “It was no big deal. A couple guys, actually.”
The flashlight lit Marta's face from underneath. The shadow of one eyebrow was raised. “Must not have been very good then,” she said. She went to her bed and spread her sleeping bag out. “I'll probably have dreams about him tonight,” she said. “Your brother, that is.”
In the cabin that night I couldn't stand it. Rain on the roof; Marta's face in the cook shelter. I imagined Marta with the boy in the baseball cap, her hand in his, his thumb rubbing a circle into her wrist. There was an ache in my chest that felt rock hard, like it might never go away. I thought of the boyfriend leaning over the hood of the Cadillac. Of Marta, pulling the burnt skin from a marshmallow, holding the raw center back in the flames until it was just a coal-black lump. From outside, I could hear a dog barking, far off. I thought of home and in that second I knew:
if I don't get home right now, something will happen.
It was a weight on me, holding me down, and I pushed against it and put on my shoes. I have to go home, I thought. I have to get Jackson, and we need to go home. Something is wrong.
I left the cabin in the dark and no one saw me go. I had my flashlight and I followed its yellow path toward the high school cabins pushing through the sword fern and salal and into the field. The flagpole was a long silvery arrow pointing to the sky. “I'll be right here waiting,” my mother had said, and when I turned and she smiled at me it was like a stone sunk inside me. Something bad was coming.
My light from my flashlight touched the top of the cabins and they were colorless, all the same. Which one was cabin two? I wanted to cry. Where was he? That morning, eating our eggs in the little dining hall, he'd said, “Have fun with your friends, Lydia.
Don't worry about home. Don't worry about anything.” I stopped at the fire circle. It was piled with charred logs and there were empty cans in the ash. I sat on one of the benches beside it and looked down at the flashlight. I couldn't go back to my cabin. I couldn't go anywhere.
I heard the branches cracking; there was a tunnel of light, a weak yellow beam. I shut off the flashlight. Don't look at me, I thought, but already someone was moving toward me from out of the woods.
“Who's there â?” I knew that voice, I thought, and there was Randy, with his flashlight lighting up his face. I wanted to run to him but I stayed on the bench.
“Randy,” I whispered.
“Lydia? What are you doing out here?”
“What are
you
doing out there?” I asked.
“Just checking out some stuff,” he said, shrugging.
“Ghosts?” I asked. Randy looked like a ghost himself, in his long black coat, his face floating, big and wide as a balloon. He smiled and I didn't mean to but I started to cry.
“Hey!” Randy said. “Lydia â hey, it's okay. There's no sign of ghosts out here, I promise. I would know if there was.”
“It's not that,” I said. “I need to go home. I can't stay here, Randy.”
“Hey,” he said again. “Come here.” He sat on the bench beside me and put his arm around me. I put my head against his coat. I imagined it was a curtain I could crawl behind and stay.
“Please,” I said. “I want to go home.”
“Do you know what I do?” he asked. “When my dad is drunk and I'm afraid I won't be able to wake him up?”
I looked up at him. I had never thought of Randy's dad before, of where he lived, and why he lived in the basement alone.
“I think of what my own house is going to look like one day. What I would put in each room.”
“Like what?”
“Like in one corner there's going to be a chair. A recliner. It'll be by the window, and my radio will be next to it.”
“How come?”
“I like it. I want to sit there and watch TV and listen to the radio. Now you do one. What do you want?”
I thought of the things I wanted, but none of them seemed important. “A dog,” I said finally. It would sleep on my bed, which would be so soft. It would bark if anyone came near.
“You're funny,” he said. “You'll grow up and you can have anything. A dog or a mansion or anything.”
I felt bad for Randy. He was thinking about a chair and a radio. At least I had Jackson, and my mother. “Randy,” I said, “you'll get those things.” He put his arm around me and we kept sitting there in the dark. I made a determination right there to see the week through.
On Friday afternoon, Jackson and I stood in the school parking lot waiting for my mother to pick us up. There was a rash on my legs and bracelets of nettle sting on my ankles. My father's truck pulled up and my stomach hurt. I knew something was wrong. I tried not to think of it. My father didn't ask how the camp was, and I didn't ask where my mother was, but the question beat hard inside me. Jackson's hand was on the back of my neck so tight and I tried to concentrate on it, to think
She's okay. She is waiting at home for us. Smiling.
It was only May, but it felt like we were driving away from summer. I thought of the lake where I could see the reeds moved slowly underwater, and the grace rolling down from the mess hall.
Back of the bread is the flour, back of the flour is the mill.
I would not look at my father.
Back of the mill is the wind and the rain and the Father's will.
He stopped the truck in the driveway. I thought of the creek down there, how dark it was, and moving fast. For a minute there was no sound, just the press of the house against the slope, and whatever was waiting inside.
THE WEEKS AFTER MONTANA. THE OVER-THE-WATERFALL
rush of bright dry July into brown scorched August. He'd never done this before. Nothing he ever felt for someone else had ever picked up weight and speed like this. The infatuation with Chris had been dead in the water, no pun intended. Eric â that was a business agreement, and anything Jackson felt he set carefully aside, filed away as a blunder, a consequence of intimacy. Now the days were hot and vivid, streaming like movie clips. Something was scaring him. One half elation, one half desperation. The scenes upon scenes:
Late July. Don at the job site, dusted up like a chimney sweep. A pocketful of nails, a tool belt, Don's throbbing cock â even though Jackson couldn't see it through Don's coveralls, he knew it in his mind, in his mouth. There were more and more nights in A-frame B, nights when Don pulled from a handle of vodka, hungrily, slurping. On those nights, they drank until the night was a soapy lens to squint through, and when Don fell asleep, a desperate ache would begin in Jackson's chest and throat. Don would sleep with his mouth open, the snoring drunk. Wake up, Jackson would think again and again. Wake up.
A night in early August. It was late, more morning than night, and in the eerie purple dawn Jackson began to talk about Lydia. He did not tell Don that what happened was his fault. He told him that they left him, Lydia and his mother, and that his father didn't want him. His mother was wearing an old coat, he told Don, and Lydia
was carrying her little green change purse when she ran away from him at the mall. When he went back to the house, he found that his mother had left him twenty dollars and no note. Don was sympathetic, sweet. Don kissed his eyes and said the right things, which were wrong. Jackson thought about the moon-shaped scar on Lydia's left temple, left there during a night they spent on Firetrail Hill. Twenty dollars, an old coat, a green purse. He wanted a drink. He wanted summer to be over.
Another morning and he was ill again, nauseous and impatient and angry. Whose darkness was it that was dogging him? He had the feeling that he was in his own shadow, that it moved across him.
And then it was August twenty-second, his birthday, though he didn't tell Don or anyone. He was nineteen. He should have just graduated high school, in some other life. The collage of possibilities that seemed equally impossible: carrying boxes up to some jailhouse college dorm, or moving into an apartment with a scrapped-together group of friends from high school, or setting out to some new city. Or, he was here, the lake a cool silver coin, and Don was somewhere just out of his reach.