“Everyone’s outside,” he says.
“I don’t care,” I say, and I don’t. For once, when his lips find mine, it’s like they’re blotting out the past, blotting out the memory of my grandfather’s slime-smack, and if I concentrate on the dark wet feeling of his tongue in my mouth I can make everything else go away. It’s like dancing, the way I wrangle the past that night—first the feeling of Dima, then the past, then I turn in his arms and it’s him again. Every me I’ve ever been is in the kitchen, pressed up against the cold hard smooth white surface of the fridge. The girl I was at six who would come down to the kitchen at night and talk to her father, knowing she couldn’t say the only thing she really needed to. Then the girl I am at nine, when I come to the kitchen to refill my grandmother’s glass of water. I take a plastic ice cube with a bug resined in it from the freezer—it’s a trick we’re playing, my siblings and I, in love with whoopee cushions and handshake buzzers and a squirting plastic flower pin that never fools anyone—and plop it into my grandmother’s glass. Suddenly my grandfather is behind me, his heavy breath, and I whirl around, not wanting him to see the glass and ruin the joke. But it’s not the glass he’s looking at but my body, staring frankly. Through the window, gliding over Dima and me as we move to the floor, come the voices of people I’ve known my whole life. For a moment I feel on a precipice between now and some future when this will all be over, when this house is no longer my world, when I create something new and unknown for myself and—I will, finally, I will—get away.
The sex we have on the kitchen floor is exaltation. I should stop us, I know; I should care whether someone walks in and sees us there on the linoleum of my childhood, my dress hiked up around my waist, my teeth on Dima’s shoulder. But I am watching us as from above, the way our limbs splay against the floor as if we’re swimming, and I know, somehow know, that nothing will hurt us tonight. Not when so much has. This is me getting away, finally. This is me throwing off the past.
Give me normalcy, that’s what I want. Anything else can burn.
Seventeen
Indiana, 1986
Ruth’s phone rings just past eleven at night, when she’s already out of bed but still in her pajamas, not yet changed into her white nursing assistant uniform, and hasn’t yet started the coffeemaker. She must consider, briefly, not picking it up. No one calls casually this late. No one calls with good news. But the phone’s rattling away in the kitchen, and she crosses the tile floor and makes her way to the receiver.
“Yes?”
“Aunt Ruth?”
She doesn’t recognize Ricky’s voice at first. She and Bessie aren’t close. She’s barely met Bessie’s children. On the stand eight years from now, at his first trial, she’ll say she met Ricky only once before that night in 1986 he showed up by surprise, and then have to correct herself and say, why, yes, she guesses she must’ve met him when he was growing up, the few times she went to visit Bessie over the years. He must have been one of the children hanging around in the yard. But you have to understand, there were so many, with Luann always taking in kids. And Ruth was never one to notice children. Her sister Bessie was the one who wanted that life: a husband, kids. Ruth back then was just fine with living alone. Money was beyond tight, working midnight shifts at the hospital and moonlighting days when she could pick up a shift as a home health aide, but she made enough for her rent and the electric and even a car. She was good at working. She loved the feeling of supporting herself, only herself to look out for.
“Yes?”
“Aunt Ruth, it’s Ricky. Bessie’s son. I’m—” he sounds like he’s gulping, trying not to cry. “I’m in Indianapolis. At a filling station, downtown.” The boy—she can’t remember how old he’d be now, maybe twenty? My God, are she and Bessie old enough for that? “Could you come pick me up?”
She’s so surprised the words just fly out of her mouth. “I’m due at work, Ricky.” She winces. She hadn’t meant to sound harsh.
“Please.”
So she does it. Dresses in a hurry, pulling on her white tights in the pitch dark. Skips the coffee. Gets in her car and turns on the headlights and drives half an hour through vacant streets to the filling station he’s described, wondering the whole way how he’s turned up here and whether her sister knows. Last she telephoned with Bessie, Ricky was in Georgia visiting his sister Francis. The buses don’t leave off at the filling station. Did he hitchhike all the way here? But she must remind herself not to wonder too hard. Wondering is how you get mixed up in other people’s troubles. When she reaches him, I see him huddled under the station overhang, his gray hooded sweatshirt dripping wet from the rain, carrying only a single small duffel bag. He opens the car door and starts to get in.
“Wait,” she says.
He pauses.
“You got a towel?”
He doesn’t, so she makes him take a T-shirt from his bag and spread it across the seat first. They don’t kiss hello, they don’t embrace. She doesn’t ask what he’s doing here. She stops in front of her apartment and gives him the key. “I’ll be back at eight,” she says. If she hurries, she’ll still be on time for work.
*
He stays with her for a couple of months. She and Bessie may not be close, but that doesn’t mean she can turn family away. At first, he’s just sitting in the house, staring at the television and running up her electric, but then he finds a gig at the racetrack for the Indy 500. It’s temporary—three weeks, tops—but soon it’s all he can talk about, the race cars and the guys at the track. He’s so proud of his polo shirt and assigned cap you’d think it was a military uniform. Maybe she starts getting up a few extra minutes early to iron the shirt for him, just to see the delight on his face. He can be like a child, so proud and excited so easily. Like her, he’s a night owl, doesn’t seem to sleep, so he’s still up sometimes when she gets in from her shift. He makes her a cup of coffee, sits with her, and they chat about the coming day.
She likes him. That’s what surprises her most, maybe. How much she likes having him around.