Good Hope Road (20 page)

“I’m going to gather all that I can and bring them here.” The idea lit in me like a flame in a dark room.

“It’s a good idea,” he repeated.

Dr. Albright was coming in the doorway as we were going out. He was dirty and blood-spattered, red-eyed, wrinkled, and tired now like the rest of us. He looked sad.

He stepped back so that we could pass through the door, and he regarded me with something strangely like admiration. “The pictures are a good idea.” The slightest smile creased his lips. “Sometimes small things like that help patients as much as the medical care does.”

“Thanks.” I met his gaze for a moment, wondering if he really meant it, wondering why he would care about someone like me. “I’m going to bring more when I can. It’s like getting a little bit of our lives back.” I didn’t know why I felt the need to explain to him. Maybe I was afraid he would tell me I couldn’t clutter up his hospital.

He nodded, glancing at Drew, as if he suddenly realized I was leaving. “Do you have a place to stay? There’s room here in the armory, or in the tents.”

His kindness made me stammer. Why did he seem different all of a sudden? “M-my brother’s here. We’re going to the hospital in Springfield. My father and my younger brother are there. They were caught in their truck during the tornado.”

Dr. Albright met my gaze with a thoughtful look I didn’t understand, as if he had something more he wanted to say. Instead he said, “Take care,” stiffened his shoulders, and walked past me, rubbing the back of his neck.

I followed Drew to his pickup at the edge of the parking lot and climbed in the passenger side as Drew turned the key and the engine roared to life, shutting out the sounds of the campground below.

We headed out of town, passing what was left of the convenience store and the Dairy Queen, then driving slowly past neighborhoods where little remained but piles of boards and overturned appliances. People were sifting through the rubble now, picking up bits of clothing and personal mementos. Not much remained.

Looking at Drew, I thought about all the small things I had forgotten about him. He was the one who made me do my homework when Mama was too tired to care, and stuck up for me when Daddy got mean, and did my chores when I forgot, so I wouldn’t get punished. He made sure nobody at school made fun of my clothes. He woke me up in the mornings and fixed oatmeal and irritably told me to eat it before the bus came.

Drew had been my protector. He had been a rock because the rest of us needed him to be. He was a mother and father, protector to Nate and me when Drew was no more than a child himself. He had done a million little things right, and one big thing wrong. He saw a way out, and he took it.

For me, that one big thing had eclipsed all the rest. Now I realized how much the rest had mattered. Drew was the reason we had survived at all. He took care of the place when Daddy was off hunting or drinking. He cooked the meals when Mama was too sick or tired or lost in her own sadness to do it. He was the one who finally stood up to Daddy and said, “You’re not taking that belt to anybody else in this family again. I swear to God, if you do, I’ll go to the sheriff and I’ll tell him
everything
.”

I was ten, and I wondered what
everything
meant. I crouched by the sofa near Nate, frozen, my heart hammering like a caged bird in my chest as I watched this clash of Titans in our living room. Drew was seventeen then, a lineman on the football team, and he made even Daddy look small.

Daddy looked Drew in the eye for a minute, staggered a step backward as if Drew had hit him, then turned and left. Drew waited until he was gone, then moved to the couch and sat down with his head in his hands.

I watched him, amazed at what he had done, afraid we would pay for it later.

“You hadn’t oughta done that,” Nate said, which was interesting considering that Nate was the one about to get a whipping. Nate took a lot of whippings. He was stubborn, and he didn’t seem to ever learn. “Now he’ll be ticked off.”

Drew didn’t look up, just combed his fingers roughly into his dark hair and sat there, hunched over, his forearms pressed against his ears as if he didn’t want to hear anything. “I’m sick of his crap. He isn’t gonna do that anymore.”

Nate shrugged, then stood up and headed for the door. “Heck, it don’t hurt.”

“I’m not takin’ any more of his crap.” Drew’s fingers trembled where he held his hair, the muscles in his arms twitching in steely coils. Staring at the floor, he repeated, “I’m not takin’ any more of his crap. This is the end of it.”

I don’t know if Mama ever knew what happened that day. She was at work, and by the time she came home, Daddy was gone and everything was like normal. None of us ever told her about the fight. We were too afraid to talk about it.

Daddy stayed gone for a week, and Mama was worried about that. In spite of all the ways he was bad, she loved Daddy. She couldn’t see much beyond that. She would have done anything, been anyone, to banish that part of him that drank too much, and got mean, and set off the house like a powder keg.

It wasn’t much of a way to live a life, but you can get used to anything.

Drew glanced at me from the driver’s seat, his dark brows lowered in concern. I realized I was crying again.

“You all right?”

“Yes.” I pulled the visor down and looked in the mirror, wiping my eyes. My face looked pale, tired, filthy—older than just a few days ago.

A picture fell from the top of the visor, and I picked it up, looking into the dark eyes of a little boy, perhaps four or five years old, and a little girl a year or so younger with long dark hair.

“Those are my kids,” Drew said. “That’s Alex on the left and Amber on the right. That picture’s six months or so old. Their mama’s supposed to send me a new one.”

“They don’t live with you?” I don’t know why that didn’t surprise me. It had always been hard for me to picture any of us married, or having kids, or raising families. It was as if the old images were forever burned into my mind, and I couldn’t see us as anything else or anything better.

Drew frowned, watching the road, his face stiff. “Naw. She moved back to a house near her folks a couple months ago. We been havin’ some problems, and she said she needed some time to think.”

“That’s too bad.” I didn’t know what else to say. “Did Mama know you got married and had kids?”

Drew sighed. “We’re not married. That’s one of the problems with Darla and me. She doesn’t like it that we’re not married.”

“How come you don’t just get married then?”

He thought about that for a minute, then sighed again. “Don’t know. I guess I’m worried that if we do, it’ll all turn bad. Guess it seems like I don’t know how to make a right life.”

I understood what he meant. I hadn’t thought about anything beyond getting by for the next two years until Nate was eighteen and out of school. Beyond that, I didn’t know what kind of a picture to paint. “Were things good when they were there with you? The family stuff, I mean?”

He squinted, thinking about it. “Yeah, I guess you’d have to say so. We had some problems—she talks too much, I don’t talk enough, Alex likes to climb on things, and Amber don’t want to poop in the pot. You know, that kind of thing.”

I chuckled. It was hard for me to imagine Drew worrying about a toddler’s potty habits. “Sounds pretty normal.”

Drew shrugged. “I guess. I never took a belt and knocked the crap out of my kid with it. I can tell you that.”

My heart skipped, and an old, sick, nervous feeling washed through me, as if I were remembering not the past, but the way the past
felt
. “You wouldn’t do that, Drew. You’re a good person.”

He tapped his thumbs rhythmically on the steering wheel. “But that’s the thing. I’m never quite sure. All that stuff’s inside me, and I always wonder if someday I’ll just lose it.”

“You never lost it before.” I thought of all the arguments in our house. “Even with everything that happened, you always kept it together.”

He shook his head, his chest deflating with a long, slow breath. “I’ve been closer than I want to be, Jenilee. I’ve been closer than you’ve ever seen.”

I swallowed hard, that familiar, fearful feeling churning in my stomach. The expression on Drew’s face was ominous, dangerous, angry. He looked like Daddy.

I reminded myself that he wasn’t Daddy, that Daddy was far away in a hospital bed.

Drew stared at the road ahead, his dark eyes burning a hole somewhere in the distance. “There’s a lot that you don’t know, Jenilee. Daddy came home from Vietnam really messed up, and he’s still messed up. There’s a lot that happened before you were old enough to remember it, and a lot that you just plain weren’t there to see. You don’t know the trouble there was between me and him before I left for the army.”

“I heard more than you think.”
I heard everything
. That old resentment crept into my mind. The one that said
, If you thought things were that bad, why did you go away and leave Nate and me in the middle of it?

Drew sat shaking his head, and I had a feeling there really were things I didn’t know. When he spoke, his voice was low and emotionless. “I was ready to kill him. I really was. I’d have done it if it hadn’t been for Coach Ellis. He kept up with me that summer after I graduated, when I was just runnin’ the streets getting into trouble. He came to get me out of jail one night, and he signed for me. He took me out to the football field, and he turned on the lights, and we sat there on the bench. He told me sooner or later the fights and the stuff at home were going to land me in prison or dead. He looked me right in the eye and told me I had to get myself out of here. Then he took me to Shawnee the next day and I signed up for the army.” He paused for a moment, then added, “I never could get along with Daddy like you could. I figured that would get you by after I was gone. You always find a way to get along with people.”

Because there is no me. There has been only what other people tell me to be.
“I just never had the guts to stand up for myself,” I said, disappointed in myself. “I never even thought about it until a few days ago.”

“Sometimes it’s best not to dwell on it too much.” He said it as if that would fix everything.

Just don’t dwell on it too much . . . Was that possible
?

Drew’s cell phone rang in his pocket. He pulled it out and answered, looking surprised and worried. “Darla? Is everything all right with the kids? I can’t hear you very well . . . what?” He paused, bracing the phone on his shoulder and covering his other ear with his hand. “The connection’s really bad. What?” He paused, his brows drawing together in the center. “What do you mean, the hospital called you about Daddy?”

I heard the echo of a voice coming through the phone, the cadence hurried, seeming nervous, but I couldn’t understand the words.

“So he’s out of surgery now?” A pause, and then, “He’s stable now?”

I held my breath, watching Drew nod as he listened to the answer to the question. He was silent for a moment after the voice on the other end stopped; then he asked, “What are they doing calling you? How’d they get your phone number?”

He was silent, his jaw clenching; then he slammed his hand against the steering wheel. “Why did you do that? I told you not to go down there.”

Words echoed through the phone again, hurried, the pitch higher.

Drew’s jaw clenched. When he answered, his voice was low, almost a growl. “Because it isn’t any of your business, Darla. It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

The voice rose on the other end.

Drew’s answer echoed through the cab of the truck, ringing in my ears. “Yeah, you’re right about that. I can’t
tell
you
anything
.” He didn’t wait for an answer, just gritted his teeth and added, “Go home, Darla. I told you before, my family isn’t any of your business.” And he disconnected the phone, tossing it hard onto the floorboard of the truck.

I picked it up and set it on the seat, my fingers trembling, a black sense of the past churning inside me. Wrapping my arms around my stomach, I turned away from Drew, laid my head against the seat, and stared out the window, not knowing what to say.

 

 

 

 

 

 

S
ilence hung over us like a cloud as we left Poetry behind, traveling the backroads south, toward the hospital in Springfield. My thoughts tangled in a web of questions, I watched the miles pass as Drew piloted the truck through muddy low-water crossings and over country bridges where streams of thick brown water crashed against the cement guardrails. Closer to the interstate, the roads were clogged with wrecked cars, construction equipment clearing debris, and sightseers gawking at ruined homes.

Everywhere, the destruction was unimaginable—cars overturned in ditches, trees stripped, power lines hanging from broken poles, entire neighborhoods vanished.

We reached the interstate, and Drew exhaled a long breath through pursed lips, visibly relaxing in the seat beside me. “I think we’ll be all right now,” he said. “I came through here this morning. About a mile from here, a tornado went right across the interstate. There are wrecked cars stacked up two and three deep everywhere. The whole road is closed. A mile south of here you hit the line where the tornado left the ground, and just like that, everything’s normal.” He pointed ahead. “Up there, see. You can see where it changes.”

I gazed ahead to where the earth turned from black to green. The metal farm buildings beside the road were barely damaged, just a few sheets of tin lifted from the edges of the roofs.

“It’s hard to believe,” I muttered, but my thoughts weren’t really on the tornado damage. My mind was spinning with questions.
Will Daddy be awake when we get there? What news will the doctors and nurses have about Daddy, about Nate? Will we be able to take Nate home? What will happen afterward . . . ?