The girl looked up from her split ends with a look that I could read. I was the weird one here.
“I used to work at this one, this very store,” I said. “One time I dropped a bag of malt and the powder went everywhere, coated everything white. One of the other kids tried to snort—”
“Did you want an application or something?”
Got it. “No, thanks,” I said, and took my shake back to the truck.
An application. I couldn’t laugh it off entirely. How long would our savings last? We’d have to stop jumping around so much, stop paying first month and last month, stop leaving mattresses behind. Stop wasting money. Stop wasting time.
I sat behind the wheel, the malt melting, unwanted. I had to stop wasting time, no matter what happened.
I swept past a trash can on the way out of the Dairy Bar’s parking lot and threw in the malt.
Stop acting as though I knew what to do. Stop acting as if I had any confirmation at all that I had ever known what I was doing.
Stop—everything. God, couldn’t the world just stop for a minute? I had to catch up. I had to find Joshua. I had to find Aidan. I had to find a way to start over. Forgive and be forgiven and start over.
Do-over, as the kids in my neighborhood used to yell when a game hadn’t gone their way. I was nearing that place now, the school, the houses lined up behind downtown on tree-named streets. I turned in and rode up and down the shady, parallel lanes. A friend in elementary school had lived here. I’d been allowed to go to a birthday party in fourth grade there. The library. The school. The jungle gym where I’d played with friends until the sky turned dark one night and I grew afraid to go home. I climbed to the top of the tallest slide and tried to hide as the other kids peeled off toward home when their parents called for them. Mine didn’t. They didn’t come for me at all. A woman who lived nearby finally shooed me home. I knew I would never talk to those kids again. We didn’t live in the same world.
Stations of the cross. I was beginning to feel loose, like my bones had slipped out from under my skin. I knew that I could not avoid the places we had once lived. That I would choose to see these places, like a punishment.
The first was easy: in town, a run-down one-story. Inside was a room that was probably not still yellow. Two streets away, a ranch-style trying to return to the earth.
I couldn’t remember where all of the houses were, but found four in town before striking the main street and taking it south. I passed Greenhouse Lodge Road, where Theresa’s family had had their place. Probably still had their place. I hadn’t asked. So many things I hadn’t asked. What would it mean to settle down in a single parcel of land and watch your life flower out around you?
And then the worst of them all: the old motel restaurant where my parents were eking out their existence when I’d left town. The motel’s strip of rooms had been torn down long before we had to live there. Now the building had graffiti-covered boards on the windows. The cement stops from the motel’s parking spaces were still lined up facing the woods beyond, but no one had visited in a long time. This was it—the last place. As far as I knew, this was going to be the place where my father breathed his last. He owned it, some kind of auction deal. All the apartments, all those years, but he owned this dump.
I got out of the car and looked the place over. Inside, I knew, was a smoky kitchen, torn booths, a long, stained Formica counter. A storage room with a single mattress on the floor, home sweet home.
Joshua had no idea what a terrible life was. Standing here, I was so angry at him. He was gone, and the empty space he left was like a deep sore, every move I made scraping at it, keeping it raw. He thought moving from town to town was difficult. Try staying in one place. One awful place with no one looking out for you. I had never run. Not, at least, until I had to.
I circled the motel parcel now. I couldn’t stand this story I was compelled to tell myself. Because I had put up with abuse and ugliness, I was somehow better than my son? He’d taken matters into his own hands far earlier than I had. He was the smart one. I couldn’t even be angry with him anymore when I thought of myself at the same age, the mousy girl afraid to make a sound. If it hadn’t been Ray, wouldn’t it have been someone else? Whose fault was it that I expected and accepted so little?
But I wouldn’t take this one on myself. This was not my fault.
I kicked at the loose gravel at my feet. The house had been left to the rats and the vandals. My dad, the architect of my ruined life, was in an institution, kept by a stranger; my mother’s brittle bones were reduced to ash in my truck. And here I was: home. I laughed out loud. The laugh gathered strength, rolling downhill toward hysteria until my ribs hurt and anyone who saw me might have believed me to be just who I was. The heir to this mess, this empire. Finally. I choked for breath. Finally we have a place and I am its queen.
I crouched in the dust and coughed myself into tears, then sobbed until I was dry, and the sparks caught flame. I was angry enough, at last, to go see the devil himself.
Chapter Thirty-six
It would not be a reconciliation. More like a visit to the zoo—to see the beasts.
I rose from the ground, dusted off. An RV heading out of town slowed down to get a good look.
“Damn tourists.” Which made me laugh a little more, but I didn’t want to kill the red coal that burned in my belly. I had to go see him now, before I discovered a secret store of pity and talked myself out of it.
The road to Sweetheart Lake was lovely in the afternoon light. I’d driven it four times since my return and could finally see the trees as trees instead of omens, the hints of lake behind the trees as water and not memories. I drove through town again, and this time nothing about it surprised me.
Riverdale was where it had always been, even if the town had remodeled the building completely and rerouted the roads all the way around it. I navigated my way through the new configuration, off the main road and onto a narrow access road, and into the complicated parking area. I threw the SUV into park and sat there regarding the building, which was not a haunted house at all, but a sprawling, squat box of medicinal glass.
The double doors swung out and a wheelchair emerged in front of a white-uniformed orderly. The chair held a person. Probably a woman, collapsed upon herself with age. She was aged to the point of agelessness—she could have been seventy or she could have been one hundred seventy.