Backseat Saints

CHAPTER


12
I POINTED THE BUICK EAST, and I took all fifteen hours of driving straight up, neat, like a shot of Jack. The wind was behind me, and I felt it as wolf breath, hot and stinking of old meat, raising the hairs on the back of my neck.
I pulled off the highway only when my tugboat of a car needed another tank of gas. The Buick was a guzzler. I fueled up on these stops, too, on black gas station coffee as fumy and potent as the brew the car was drinking. I bought Gretel some kibble and got a jar of peanut butter and some crackers for myself, but I was scared too sick in the pit of me to eat much. I started off driving as fast as the Buick would let me, but I made myself drop to eight above the speed limit. I wasn’t sure which ID to use if a cop stopped me; I didn’t want to swap to Ivy so close to home, nor did I want a ticket in Rose Mae’s name, pointing out my trail.
Gret sat up in the passenger seat beside me, snuffing my hair and jamming her wet nose against my ear, worried and vigilant and driving me bat crap. Once we got out of Texas, I opened the passenger-side window for her. She poked her face out through the narrow crack to huff the air of Arkansas, a mix of larch trees and armadillo poop that kept her attention all the way to Tennessee. There she finally calmed enough to sleep with her big head in my lap, making a drool splotch on my jeans.
By the time I hit the Alabama State line, I hadn’t slept in close to thirty hours, and that had been some fitful dozing on a library sofa in Chicago. My joints were aching, and I had a dry, rattling cough that hurt all the old cracks in my ribs whenever it got away from me. All the caffeine I’d dumped into my empty stomach made me feel like my eyeballs were jittering in their sockets; the road looked like a drunken state worker had painted the yellow lines in slightly wavy. My peripheral vision was shrouded in fog.
In Arkansas, I’d decided that if I was running, Birmingham was my best bet. It was a big enough little city to get lost in. I could sell the traceable Grandee Buick for some cash as Rose, then leave the city as Ivy to sully my trail. I could go anywhere then, maybe down to the Florida Keys. I’d get a waitress job serving drinks made with key lime and coconut, invest in flip-flops and a red bikini. If I was running.
By the time I crossed into Alabama, I didn’t think I was.
On our second date, I’d told Thom my father was dead. Daddy was so dead to me by then that it didn’t even feel like a lie. Thom knew my mother had left me as a child, so Fruiton was the second or third place he would look for me. He’d certainly comb Amarillo first, and it was a good-odds bet that Kingsville, the town where we met, might pull his attention next.
Going to Fruiton gave me solid lead time and the home field advantage. It was my best shot if I was going to lay a trap instead of running.
The air grew warmer as I went east, and the Buick’s AC was for shit. I drove into my old hometown with all four windows mostly down. Fruiton already smelled like a small-town Alabama summer: hot asphalt and secondhand fry grease, overlaid with deep green pine. Pollen hung in the breathless air, giving every outdoor surface a thin yellow glaze. When I’d lived here, Fruiton’s singular air had been so familiar that it was invisible. I’d forgotten the feel of it dusting up my nose.
I pointed the car toward my old house, Gretel awake and back to sticking her boxy head out the window, her tongue collecting dust. My car hadn’t had a working tape player in years, so I had the radio on a gospel station. In Fruiton, the only music choices were gospel or country music, or I could swap to AM talk and get a bellyful of angry men hollering about politics or Jesus or both.
I was so tired, I needed both hands on the wheel now just to keep the car going straight. My route took me right past the old Krispy Kreme that Jim and I had frequented. It was working hand in hand with the Church’s Chicken next door to oil the air. Looking at it gave me déjà vu, which was stupid.
Of course I felt like I’d been here before. I had. A thousand times. But this was ten years later, and Bickel’s Drugstore had turned into an Eckerd. The empty lot was now a Tom Thumb with three newfangled gas pumps. It was enough change to make me feel like I was being reminded of a place instead of actually being in the place.
The last time I’d been down this road, I’d been walking to the bus station. I’d worn someone else’s shoes, like now, with a hand-me-down blouse and Levi’s much like the ones I had on. I had probably been cleaner, though.
Another five minutes and I passed the entrance for Jim’s old subdivision, Lavalet. It had seemed right fancy to me back then, with a pool and a clubhouse and the name spelled out in curly metal letters on a low brick wall beside the entry. I opted not to turn in, heading instead for my own old neighborhood. I had no desire to ring the doorbell and say to his mother, “So, Carol, you ever hear from your youngest again?… No? Not even at Christmas?”
I doubted they still lived there, anyway. No sane person would choose to stay in a house that reminded them every minute of someone who’d left and not ever once looked back. Normal people moved away from sorrow as soon as they could. Folks less whole, sanitywise, took my daddy’s route. Daddy had raised me in the house my mother had abandoned, drinking until his vision blurred too much to focus on all the bare spaces where my mother wasn’t standing. He drank so much, some days he had to furrow up his brow and squint to aim his fists proper at me.
There was a chance, small but real, that if he hadn’t drunk himself to death, he would have stayed on in that house after I left, too. Now that I was heading toward him, I was surprised at how vague my visual memories of him were. It seemed the people that I remembered most clearly, every tick of expression and cadence of speech—Jim Beverly, my mother—were the ones who had left me.
My father was mostly a shape in my memory, short and broad with wide hands. I remembered his craggy Irish face and angry eyebrows from pictures, not from real life. The clearest things were the sour mash smell of him, the hard, fast feel of his fists, and his low and burring voice.
Still, Thom had no idea my daddy was alive, much less that he was meaner than a snake, tougher than boot leather, and better with a gun than any man I’d ever seen, Thom included. My daddy was as bad as Thom, and he owed me. And there was no danger I would stay on with him, the way I would with Jim Beverly. My nicer memories—shooting with him, piggyback rides, pushes on the tire swing—were buried under the ten years after my mother left us. He’d beaten any chance at auld lang syne right out of me. If he was still around, I was the bait, and he was nothing more to me than the steel jaws of a trap. Thom would surely look for Lolleys in the Fruiton phone book as a way to find me, but he would not expect to find his way to me blocked by a no-longer-dead daddy, much less my daddy’s arsenal.
A mile past Lavalet, I crossed Bandeer Street and left the mall-and-Olive-Garden side of town. Fruiton had no railroad, but even so, this side of Bandeer was the wrong side of the tracks. I turned left at a run-down strip mall that still held a Salvation Army thrift store and a Dollar General. Another left put me onto my old street.
All the houses on Pine Abbey had been built in the sixties: low ceilings, one central bath, a harvest gold or avocado stove and fridge set in every galley kitchen. The houses squatted low, as if they thought they were down on Mobile Bay, in hurricane country. I went a mile down the road, to what in a nicer neighborhood would have been a cul-de-sac.
Not here. Pine Abbey simply ended, blunt as the eraser end of a pencil, with a dirt track cutting through the middle of the wild back lot. The track began just over the curb and disappeared into the woods. Daddy used to drive me down through on Saturday afternoons to do some shooting.
The branches would scrape the car’s paint when we shoved our way down that track. It didn’t matter. Daddy bought beater cars and applied duct tape, spit, and cussing till they ran for him. He would drive one until the engine fell out, then sell it for scrap and get another. The track ended in a sloping meadow. We would stand at the lowest point to shoot, setting up our targets so they had the hill behind them. We shot at two-liter soda bottles rifled from the trash of our Pepsi-drinking neighbors. We drank only Coke, and Daddy wouldn’t shoot a Coke bottle. He said that for a southerner, blasting away at a Coke bottle was close to sacrilegious.
Daddy filled the bottles with water to weight them. Our bullets tore through them and then spent themselves safely in the dirt of the hill behind. We’d take turns shooting until they fell into plastic rags.
The first time he let me shoot a real gun, I was maybe five years old. It was a sunny afternoon, and the warm brown whiskey smell on his breath was light. His mood was good. He watched me taking careful aim with my pellet pistol, and he said, “Rosie-Red, I believe you’re ready to try something a touch mightier.”
He loaded a .22 for me and talked me through the kickback. He tucked in spongy orange earplugs for me, and I sighted on the Pepsi bottle. I squeezed steady, pressuring the trigger toward me until the gun bucked in my hands like a live thing. The shots rang louder when I could feel them. The .22 seemed powerful and sleek, yet it did what my hands said. I could feel the reverb of it in my whole body, and I squeezed again and again and again. I felt bullets moving out from the pit of me, down my arms, and then out the barrel. I held steady and shot till the gun was empty.
Daddy wove his way over to the Pepsi bottle and held it up. We watched water streaming out of several holes.
“Shit, baby. I think you nailed it. Three, maybe four times,” he said, admiring. “If you wan’t so pretty, I’d say it was a shame you wan’t born a boy.”
“Who would wanna be a boy,” I said, and spit.
Daddy laughed and said, “Dead-Eye Dickless.”
I laughed, too, though I didn’t get the joke. I only got that this was a good, good day. My mother was at home, making us lasagna, and my daddy was pleased with me.
Here at the dead end of Pine Abbey, my red brick cube of an ex-house sat on the right, the last in the row. The house across the street was its mirror image, except the trim was cream instead of brown and they had an old VW Beetle rusting away in the carport.
The carport of my old house was empty. Maybe he’d wised up and left the haunted place where his two-person family had abandoned him one by one. Or maybe he really was dead.
Now that I was here, it seemed ridiculous to think that my actual father was sitting inside on the sofa. It was like expecting the copy of Watership Down I’d set on my bedside table a decade ago to still be there, facedown and splayed open to the chapter where the rabbits first meet Woundwart. But at the same time, I couldn’t imagine him making a checklist and packing boxes and renting a U-Haul. If he was alive, this was the only place I could imagine him existing. The empty carport might only mean he was off working or between cars.
I wondered if he would recognize me, and I felt my ab muscles go tight on the strength of memory and instinct, as if prepping for his welcome-home blow. A blast of hot red temper came steaming up my throat from my belly. If he was here, he f*cking owed me.
“Sit tight,” I told Gretel. I turned off the car and rolled up all the windows to half-mast to keep her in but leave a cross-breeze going.
I got out of the car and marched across the patchy lawn, chin up, shoulders set. My eyes burned, full of sleep-sand and dry from staying open way too long. Even so, I walked tough, like a kid going to touch the front door of the neighborhood’s spooky house on a dare. I jumped up onto the concrete slab that served as a porch, out of breath from just this short burst of angry movement. I had to breathe in short pants to keep from activating the dry cough that was waiting in the bottom of my lungs. I bypassed the door, going instead to kneel by the living room’s open window. I put my face against the screen and cupped my hand around my eyes to block the sunlight, so I could see into the living room.
A little girl, maybe eight or nine, sat on the floor with her dark hair hanging in strings around her face. She felt my gaze and looked up, staring back at me with her big, glossy eyes. She didn’t seem surprised to see me, or particularly scared. She put a finger up to her lips and said, “Shhh. Daddy’s sleeping.”
For one crazy second, I thought I must be looking back into the past, seeing my young self, warning grown-up me away. I knew from science-fiction movies that if I touched her, we’d both melt or burn up or explode the world.
I blinked hard, twice, and put one hand up to my aching forehead. Looking around, I realized that the room was a right-now place, not something from my past. There was nothing in it that I recognized. A long, puffy green sofa sat against the wrong wall of the den. Ours had been brown with dark gold flowers, and it had been against the front wall, between the window I was looking through and an identical one farther down the porch. The coffee table was different, too, flanked by a vinyl wingback chair and a stack of cardboard moving boxes. There was a big TV in a hutch, showing a Bugs Bunny cartoon with the sound off. We’d had a smaller TV on a sanded plank table.
The little girl had a slew of Barbie outfits scattered across the floor. She was working a naked Barbie’s long legs into a spangled tube dress.
“Hello,” I said, quiet through the screen.
The girl’s hands were still working to clothe her doll, but the dress stuck at Barbie’s flared hips. She said, “I’m not s’posed to talk to people I don’t know.”
“I’m not a stranger,” I said. “I used to live here when I was your age. This is the house where I grew up.”
She got curious then, tilting her head sideways. She set Barbie down topless and stood up and came over to peer at me through the screen. “Then what’s your name?”
“Rose,” I said. “Rose Mae.”
She nodded like I’d passed some test and said, “You made the marks.”
“Marks?” I repeated.
“On the wall,” she said. “Daddy’s mad about it. I know you made them because it says your name.”
“You have marks on your wall that say my name?” I asked, and when she nodded I said, “Can I see them?”
She tilted her head the other way, considering. “You’d have to come in.”
“Yes,” I said. “Can I come in and see them?”
After a thinking pause, she shrugged and said, “I don’t mind it. It’s got your name, anyways.”
I stood up and met her at the front door. She swung it open for me, and there was a squeak of hinges at the end that was so familiar, it made my teeth ache.
I stepped inside. The carpet had been changed. When I was growing up, it was a dark gold, so thin in places that I could see the woven plastic matting glued to the floor. Now they had a mottled khaki Berber. The little girl pointed at the front wall, where our sofa once sat. A crudely wrought chest stacked with three more moving boxes filled the space.
“Daddy painted when we first moved in, but they’re all floating back up through,” she said, pointing at two words and a host of dark marks on the wall. “Like ghosts, Daddy said.”
The writing was all contained in an invisible square, exactly under the place where my mother’s big framed print of ships in a harbor had once hung. The lines were thick, drawn on with a laundry marker. If the print had still been hanging, all the writing would have been hidden perfectly behind it.
At the top, someone had written my name, “ROSE MAE,” in all caps. Underneath my name were long horizontal lines that ran from one edge of where the frame had been to the other. The higher horizontals were covered end to end in tick marks, thousands of them, all made of four vertical lines close together, then a diagonal slash drawn through to make five-packs.
Some were deep black, and some I could see only faintly as they worked their way up through the paint.
I said to the little girl, “This was done with a Sharpie, and that stuff will come up through paint every time. I’ve seen it come through wallpaper, even. Your daddy needs to prime the wall with this stuff you can get at Home Depot. It’s called Killz.”
“Killz,” the little girl repeated. “I’ll tell him.”
I reached out one hand and set it flat on the cool wall, cautious, as if the marks had been scorched on and were still smoking. They were as mysterious and unreadable as flattened Braille. I slid my hand down, counting horizontal lines.
There were nineteen. The top line was about one-third covered in tick marks. I started counting across by fives, moving my hand over them.
The kid said, “It’s a hundred and thirty-eight on that row. I counted before.”
I kept going. She was right: 138. There were even more ticks on the lines under. They filled every line, until they stopped midway through the eighth line. The last ten lines had no ticks at all.
“I think my mother made these,” I said.
The little girl said, “Mine works in a doctor’s office,” as if we were trading facts about mothers. “And she’s in school to be a nurse.”
“That’s a neat job,” I said absently.
My mother had kept my name and a strange count not five feet away from where my father’s recliner once sat, angled toward the TV. The air was thickening around me, and it was harder and harder to breathe.
“I’m not going to be a nurse,” the little girl said, confident. “I’m going into space.”
“That’s a neat job, too,” I managed to say.
The little girl said, “My Skipper doll has on a nurse outfit. Want to see?”
“Sure,” I said, but the pit of my stomach had gone sour. My eyes burned, and the vision in the corner of my eyes had grayed out farther. I was peering at the marks now through a tunnel of fog. The lines on the wall seemed to flicker, as if the lamp was putting out candlelight.
The girl trotted over and held up Skipper-as-nurse, too flat-chested to fill up Barbie’s uniform.
“That’s awesome,” I said, already up and moving. “I have to go.” It was true. I couldn’t breathe the air inside this place for one more second.
“Bye,” she said.
I hit the front door at a dead run, the squeaky hinge I remembered squealing at me like it was laughing. I bolted to the center of the small yard, dizzy again, gagging, but I had nothing in my belly to throw up. I coughed instead, hacking so hard that it bruised my throat. Gretel was standing in the passenger seat, her head thrust as far out the half-open window as it could go. She loosed a long, houndy noise, halfway between a bark and a howl, worried.
“Hush, Gret,” I told her when I stopped coughing. I was still bent over, my hands on my knees. The grass was thin with spots of black Alabama dirt showing, just as I remembered. Leprosy lawn, my mother had called it. A decade had passed since my feet had walked off this browning patch of grass, yet it still hung on in the same state of wretched decay. The grass, at least, hadn’t changed.
My stomach flopped inside me like an air-drowning trout. I hung my head down low to get in a good breath. The little girl might have come after me, but when I looked up, I saw her across-the-street neighbor had come outside. He’d already left his porch and was standing on his own tiny leprosy lawn, facing us.
He was a skinny old man with big, down-tilted eyeballs. His lower lids had sagged down so much that they’d bagged and gapped open. It seemed to me that if he bent down to get his paper, his eyes would roll right out of his head, dangling down on their stalks. He was bald on top, with strings of grayed-out hair in a straggled ring around his head.
He looked at me and his mouth dropped open.
“Holy shit!” he yelped.
I glanced behind me. No one. He pointed at me. His mouth stayed open. A thin string of drool came out of it, running down his chin and hanging free with a droplet of weighty water on the end. My stomach lurched again.
He came at me, moving across his lawn in a galumphing lope. He sped up as he came, arms spreading wide. His fingers splayed, and he staggered toward me like the mortal remains of some long-dead former love, reanimated. He hollered again, but his words were drowned out by Gretel’s sudden chain of warning barks.
I was already dancing backwards, scrabbling in my purse, my fingers closing first around my lipstick, then my keys. He was still coming at me, drooling, a zombie crossing the asphalt to embrace me, maybe get a bite. Gretel was thrusting at the window, trying to shove her too-big shoulders through and get between him and me.
The man passed my car, coming onto the lawn in a herky bound, and at that moment, as if I knew desperation magic, my hand closed perfectly around the cool metal cylinder I’d been seeking. This time, I remembered to flick aside the safety with my thumb. Just before he touched me with those big, splayed hands, I lifted the pepper spray and blasted him right in the face.
I sidestepped and kept moving backwards, almost falling, avoiding blowback the way Thom had taught me when he gave me the spray. The neighbor stopped abruptly and blinked, and then he screamed. He screamed like a woman, high and shrill. He dropped as if all his bones had suddenly been teleported out of his body. His hands came up to scrub and scrub at his face. He flopped onto his back, and his heels drummed the lawn. Gretel barked and barked in a deep-chested flurry of angry sound.
I stood over him, no idea what to do next, as he screamed again and then again. I looked at the teeny can, impressed.
“Are you okay?” I asked him, loud, so he could hear me over my dog. The question seemed inadequate.
He ignored me, kicking his legs like a shot deer. His scream changed, going longer, until it was an endless keening. I took that for a no.
“Stay put,” I told him, then put my hand on my pounding head. The guy was obviously not going to pop up and trot to Hardee’s for a chicken sandwich. “I mean, hang on. I’ll go on in your place and call for 911.”
I went first to the car and put my hand on Gret’s head to calm her. “I’m fine,” I told her. “I’m fine.” She panted and chuffed, staring at the man, her back fur standing straight up. I was pretty damn impressed. When Thom and I fought, she went under the bed till it was over, same as she did in thunderstorms, the coward. I’d never had occasion to see her react when I was threatened by a man outside her pack.
“What the f*ck?” another man’s voice said behind me. I looked over my shoulder and saw a bare-chested fellow in stripy pajama bottoms standing up on my old porch. Behind him, the little girl stood in the doorway. “What the f*ck?” he repeated.
“Daddy said a Word,” the little girl said to me, awed.
“He came at me,” I said. Gretel was bristling at the new guy now, and I said, “Easy, girl,” in the most soothing voice I could muster.
I looked down at the neighbor. He’d stopped kicking, and his keening had thinned to a whine. He was just about out of air. He took a long, choked inhale. He tried to sit up, peering at me through his fingers.
“Got-dammit, girl,” he said.
I knew him then.
He took his hands down from his egglike eyes. The whites had gone hot pink, bright as Barbie’s tube dress, and tears streamed out of the corners. His nose had two lines of clear snot running out of it, and his body was thin and frail, an old man’s form. He didn’t look much like his old self. But I knew him.
“Hi, Daddy,” I said.
“I mean, got-damn,” my father repeated. He put his palms against his eyes, pressing and snuffling. “I thought you was your mother. I thought you was Claire.”
The guy in the pajama bottoms came down the step, barefoot, picking a careful path across the lawn.
“Mace or pepper spray?” he asked me, tilting his head toward the can.
“Pepper spray,” I said. I looked at the can still clutched in my fingers as if I was surprised to find it there. I flicked the safety back on and dropped it into my purse.
“That’s a mercy,” the guy said, then added to my father, “You got any Maalox?”
“Naw, Bill, I don’t,” the skinny shadow of my daddy said, sitting flat on his butt in the grass. “I got Tums. You can go get you some if your got-dammed pizza lunch is bothering you while I sit here going blind.”
Bill ignored that and said to me, “Help me get him up and to his house, will you?”
“I am not f*cking touching him,” I said, my tone very mild. My daddy was a wreck. He’d gone and withered himself up, and the hands he used to claw at his face trembled and were thin and wasted. He was no match for Thom Grandee. Hell, at this point he’d been no match for me. I wanted to kick him for it while he was good and down. I said, “Why don’t you go blind. We’ll see how you like that,” directly to him in that same mild tone. I was panting, and each breath felt like something sharp, poking me low in my lungs.
My father said, “That don’t even make sense.”
“Well, good, then,” I said, and that didn’t make sense, either.
“Okay!” Bill said, businesslike, and the little girl and my daddy and I all turned our faces toward him, as if he’d called everyone on the eternally dying lawn to order. He had a rounded chin and full cheeks that made him look younger than he probably was. He had good, broad shoulders and a sprinkle of dark hair on his chest. The beginnings of a beer belly lapped the top of his pajama bottoms. He walked past me and helped my father to his feet, calling to his daughter, “Hey, Bunny? Go get the Maalox out of the medicine cabinet, can you? Bring it across the street to Mr. Lolley’s house?”
“Umkay,” Bunny said, and disappeared from the doorway.
Bill drew one of the sticks that used to be my father’s meaty arms over his shoulder and walked him back toward the other house.
“Don’t you go nowhere,” my daddy yelled at me as they walked away. His voice came out burbled and thick, as if more snot was filling up his throat, getting behind a host of other snots that were lining up to head on out his nostrils. Bill wrestled him across his lawn and onto the porch. As they went in the door, my father was still hollering over his shoulder, “Don’t you disappear! Don’t you go!”
I paused, shaky and panting, my hand on Gretel’s head and my heart pounding away in my chest like it was trying to get out and follow him. I stood like tacky lawn art and the Alabama sun blazed down and it seemed to me like I was hotter than that sun. My eyes burned as if I’d pepper-sprayed myself. I pressed my hands to my forehead, and they felt like lovely blocks of ice.
Bunny trotted back out with an economy-size bottle of Maalox. I opened the car door for Gretel, who positioned herself at my ankle and walked in time with me like a sergeant, hackles at half-mast. The two of us followed Bunny across the street. The front door floated open, wavery, and my cheeks were so hot.
Gret and I stepped inside, and when I crossed the threshold I passed back in time, ten years or more. I got instant vertigo. I put one hand out to steady myself, and it landed on the key table beside my mother’s old blue vase, still filled with her dusty, plastic tulips. I pulled my hand away like the table was made of human bones, gaping all around me. It wasn’t our old house, but the floor plan here was the same, and my father had laid all our things out exactly as I remembered.
“Where are you?” my father bellowed from the kitchen. “Where’d you go?” He sounded desperate, almost plaintive.
I couldn’t answer, goggling through fog at all the furniture and knickknacks of my childhood. Everything in the room was ten years older than the last time I had seen it, and looked it. The center of the brown and gold sofa sagged, as if it had been used for such an endless string of disreputable purposes that it had given up and bent beneath them.
“Bunny? Bring the Maalox to the kitchen,” I heard Bill calling over my daddy’s yowling. Bunny trotted obediently toward his voice.
My mother’s ship print, so sun-faded that it looked like a photocopy of itself, was hanging in its designated space above the sofa. It had a ruined patch in the bottom corner. Daddy must have used the wrong kind of cleaner to take off my dog-shit good-bye note. Daddy’s recliner was still angled toward the TV, looking as lumpy and ill used as the sofa. The plank table was there at the other end of the room, and on either side stood my mother’s bookshelves. My father had made them for her back when they first got married, and she’d filled them top to bottom with her favorites. Less beloved books rotated in and out of a box in the coat closet. I turned, helplessly drawn, and opened the closet. I smelled mothballs and old paper. Sure enough, there was the same wooden liquor store crate, old books stacked three deep under the hanging coats.
I walked across to the shelves, and the carpet felt like the floor of one of the ships in the picture, pitching and roiling under me. I grabbed the side of the shelf to stay upright. My mother had kept her books arranged by author, hardbacks and paperbacks jumbled in together. The top of each row humped up and down in uneven squares, like a row of poorly carved jack-o’-lantern teeth.
I trailed my hand along the fourth shelf down. Nine books in, my fingers came, as I knew they would, to Rudyard Kipling. I pulled out the book club edition of Just So Stories with the plain black cover I remembered, the title embossed in gold leaf on the front.
My father hollered from the kitchen. “Hello?… Hello? Don’t you disappear!”
I put the book back and followed his howling call back to the kitchen, Gretel trotting close and anxious by my side.
Bill, still barefoot in his PJs, had my daddy bent over the sink. He was washing Daddy’s eyes out with what looked like a thin gruel of Maalox and water. He nodded to me, calm and firm, holding my daddy’s face down in the sink with one solid arm. Daddy was struggling a little, but he stilled when I came in.
“There you are,” Daddy said. “Oh, there you are. Don’t go away. I have a speech I want to say for you. I have it on a paper. I been waiting so long.”
I ignored my father entirely and made my eyes click dryly in their sockets to look at Bill and only Bill. “How’d you know to do that? With the Maalox?”
“I was a med tech. Army,” he said.
“Thank God you didn’t leave,” Daddy said to me, bent over, his blue T-shirt riding up his back. I could see two sharp knobs of spine in the space between his shirt and his jeans. He was so thin, his very skin looked worn down and sheer, like any minute the bones would press up through it. Thom could break him in one hand. He was useless. “I been waiting here to say my speech. Can you go get my paper? I wrote it all down in a paper in the drawer over yonder. The drawer in the phone desk.” He aimed his words down into the sink, and his voice still sounded thick with snot. I could hardly make him out.
“I’m Bill Mantles. I’d introduce you to Mr. Lolley here, but I take it you two know each other?” Bill asked me, all ironical.
“We’ve met,” I said.
“Can I pet your dog?” Bunny asked. She was at the other end of the galley kitchen, sitting in front of the built-in desk, in my mother’s old chair. She’d turned the chair around to watch her dad, and she was swinging her feet back and forth. They were too short to reach the floor.
“She’s a little het up,” I said to her. “Give her a sec.”
Bill kept rinsing, and my father kept talking into the sink, asking me to go get the paper out of the desk drawer so he could read me his speech. Even his voice had aged and gone thin, and his ropy-looking arms had deep blue veins bulging up all over them. He looked like a photocopy, too, as bleached out and ruined as the print of the ships hanging in the other room. I tried to let his voice run past me and go down the drain the same way the running water was going.
“The army gave you a class on pepper spray?” I said to Bill. I spoke loud enough to drown my daddy out.
Bill nodded. “I had chemical weapons training.”
“My daddy was in Desert Storm,” Bunny said, proud. The chair’s ladder back blocked the drawer my father was asking me to open. Her feet swung back and forth, back and forth.
My father saw where I was looking and said, “Yes! That drawer! That drawer!”
I stayed put. Daddy could go to hell and read his speech to Satan. If I stayed here, Thom would come and give him the chance sooner than he might like. “You still work in the medical field?” I asked Bill, like I was making small talk at a church social, like I couldn’t feel each heartbeat like a gunshot in my aching head.
Bill’s cheeks flushed a faint pink, and he kept working on rinsing out my father’s eyes, not looking at me. “I’m not working right now.”
“Daddy’s home with me,” Bunny said, and the prideful tone had gone to defensive. Little tiger, I thought, staring at me from the chair with her eyes gone fierce. “He takes care of me.”
“You’re lucky. I wish I’d had that kind of daddy, growing up,” I told her, and she looked away, mollified. “I wish I had one like that now.” It came out heartfelt, the truest thing in the room.
Daddy said, “Rose Mae? Ain’t you gonna get my speech?”
I didn’t answer. Bill let go of the scruff of my father’s neck, but Daddy stayed bent over the sink, dripping. Bill said, “Okay, Gene, take a swig of this Maalox. Rinse it around and then spit it out. Do that a couple times. You might want to swallow some, too. How do your eyes feel? Are they— Wait a sec. Your name is Rose Mae?”
I nodded. “Rose Mae Lolley.”
Bill said, “From my wall?”
Daddy finally stood upright. He took the bottle and tilted it back, mercifully plugging up his word hole with it. He swished the Maalox around a couple times and spit it out, then said to me, “The bank called my loan on the house. Bill and them have had it, what, six months now, Bill? It was empty a long time. This place is a rental. I took it so I could watch out the wind-er for you and Claire.”
I’d forgotten that, how he always said “wind-er” for window. It was strange because he said words like meadow and follow properly, but window had always ended in his mouth with an -er.
“Wait a minute,” said Bill. “What?”
“Bill wants to know how your eyes feel,” I said.
“Good,” my daddy said. He turned to Bill. “Good.” His nose was still running. Bill handed him a paper towel to wipe it, but his eyebrows had puzzled up and his brow had creased.
“You should thank Bill,” I told Daddy.
“Thank you, Bill,” Daddy said, obedient, then he turned back to me and added, “Look, Rose Mae, everything is the same.”
“You used to own my house, is that what you meant?” Bill asked, putting it together.
Daddy was looking at me, though, speaking only to me. “I knew you’d come. I watch our old house alla time, when I’m home. I put the TV on for noise, and what I do is I watch for you and Claire right through that front wind-er.”
“That’s kinda creepy, Gene,” Bill said. The kitchen seemed crowded now that Daddy was standing up. Too many hearts beating in the room, too much carbon dioxide. My vision was down to a pinhole now. My lungs rustled in my chest like dried-up leaves. I kept my eyes on Bill, and Daddy was a thin wraith in the fog beside him.
“I watch for you when I’m not working,” Daddy said to me. “I have a good job now, Rose Mae. At the Home Depot.”
“I hear they have good benefits,” I said. Someone had told me that recently. I turned to the girl. “Your name’s Bunny?”
She was still sitting in the chair, pulling my gaze with the tick-tock swing of her pendulum feet. She giggled like I was the silliest thing she’d ever seen.
“My name’s Sharon.”
I blinked, confused and swaying.
“Hand me my speech out that drawer, won’t you, Sharon?” Daddy said, and then to me, “I’m not good at talking things, so I wrote it down exactly, what I need to say.”
Someone said, “I do not want to f*cking hear it,” really loud, gunshot loud, in the quiet kitchen. The someone was me.
“I think we should head on home, Bunny,” Bill said.
Sharon hopped out of the chair and threaded her way past Daddy, to her father.
“Nice to meet you,” Bill was saying. “Sort of.” He put one arm around Sharon and they went past me, out of the kitchen.
Now there was nothing in front of me to look at but my father. I said to him, “What do you mean, everything the same?”
“I’m in the program, Rose. I got my five-year pin in January, but I been stuck on step nine, waiting for you and Claire. Please won’t you let me read it to you?”
“Every little thing? Exactly the same?” I said. The air was thin and hot in my dry lungs. I was panting louder than Gretel. I followed Bill and Sharon into the living room, listing hard starboard as if my feet were borrowed or brand new. My father came after me. My body felt as unwieldy as a bag of sand, but I went straight to the sofa and made my heavy body climb up onto the cushions. I grabbed my mother’s faded ship print and jerked it off the nail. I slid it down behind the sofa, leaning it against the wall.
Bill and Sharon were at the front door. I heard Bill’s sharp intake of breath, and then he said, “Holy crap. You did that to the wall? At my house, too?”
He meant my name and the black tick marks. My father had reproduced them here exactly, only fresher and darker. These had never been painted over.
I said, “My mother did the ones at your house.”
At the same time, my father said, “Claire made them ones at your place.”
“You ruined my damn wall,” Bill said, more aggrieved than angry.
“It was Claire,” my father said, and then added, surprised, to me, “You knew these were over there? You knew she wrote your name?”
I was trying to count the marks on the first line, to see if he got it right. There should be 138. But the lines kept waving and changing places with each other. I had to start over before I got to 50.
“You have flat ruined that wall,” Bill said. “Bunny, we need to get out of here before Daddy loses his temper.”
“Killz,” the little girl said to him, seizing the moment to pass on my message about the paint primer.
Bill misunderstood her. “Not that mad, silly,” he said.
I only got to 35 this time before the lines shifted sideways and tricked me and made me lose my place again. I started over, but now the lines were broadening in front of me, each black mark spreading into a puddle and blending into the next.
“Rose Mae,” Daddy said, clambering up onto the sofa beside me, “you don’t look so good. Bill, hold up.”
The lines met, and the whole wall was black. A rich darkness, thick like velvet, spread and unfolded over everything around me. I fell down into all that darkness and was lost.