Back Roads (27 page)

“Seven, eleven,” she repeated. “You mean the store?”

I nodded at the phone.

“The old one or the new one?”

“The green one.” I sniffed.

“Harley.” She sounded frustrated. “I’m with a patient right now.”

“A real patient,” I said.

“Can you get to me? I’m at my office.”

“Your real office,” I said.

“It’s less real than the one I see you at. It’s 475 Saltwork Street. Between Maple and Grant. It’s a big white house with a bright red door. Do you think you can find it?”

I hung up the phone and started walking again.

I was sweating like a pig by the time I got there. The house wasn’t big. It was huge. The ones around it were big.

The floor inside was a dark fathomless wood polished until it looked liquid. A banister of the same wood wound its way up a staircase in front of me. Paintings of pale pink ballerinas and gem-colored gardens hung on the walls papered in cream. Two old-fashioned chairs with striped velvet cushions sat on either side of a doorway I couldn’t see into.

Holy shit, I thought to myself.

“Hello,” a female voice called. Not Betty’s.

I was afraid to step off the plush throw rug onto the floor for fear of drowning.

“Is somebody there?”

A woman came out of the room I couldn’t see into. She was smiling politely but then her mouth gaped open a little and her eyes grew wide with concern. “Are you Harley?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Come in,” she said. “Dr. Parks is going to be so relieved to see you.”

“Dr. Parks?” I wondered.

“Betty,” she explained.

She made a move to touch me, then thought better of it. “Do you want to take off your coat?”

“No, thanks.”

She told me to follow her and I did to a room at the end of the hallway. Betty was sitting in it behind a bed-sized Heads of State kind of desk, surrounded by shelves and shelves of books. She was on the phone. She hung up immediately.

“Harley, thank God,” she said, and came out from behind the desk.

She had on a respectable skirt the color of toasted coconut, nylons and heels, and a sleeveless cream silk top with pearls. A pair of polished yellow-gold squares on her ears shone through her sterling hair whenever she moved her head.

“It’s been almost two hours since you called. How are you?”

“You don’t need that government job, do you?” I said.

She followed my gaze around the room. “That depends on what you mean by need,” she answered me. “I don’t need it for financial reasons. No.”

The chairs and the couch in this office were too nice for me to sit on so I stood. Even after she asked me to sit. Even after she said please.

She sat in an overstuffed leather chair like a caramel-dipped marshmallow.

“What happened, Harley? You mentioned a she. You never got back to me after your visit with your mother. How did that go?”

I blinked sweat out of my eyes. Or maybe it wasn’t sweat. I remembered eyes are made out of water.

“She . . .” I started up again.

“Yes, Harley,” Betty said pleasantly. “She, who?”

“She . . .” I said again. “She . . . she.”

“Yes,” she urged me. “She.”

I licked my lips, swallowed, took a deep breath.

“She . . .”

I shook my head in frustration.

“I used to,” I tried.

Betty leaned forward. “Used to what?”

“We used to.”

“Used to what?”

I fell to my knees and covered my face with my hands.

Betty joined me on the floor. I felt her hands on my back, I felt them through Dad’s coat.

“Who?” she said.

“Amber.”

Her name finally left me like a tumor carved from my brain-stem. I could think and speak again.

“Used to touch me. When we were kids. I remember. She used to touch me. In bed. She used to come to my bed and touch me.”

“Where did she touch you?” Betty asked.

“You know where,” I screamed at her.

“You need to say it.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do. You need to say it out loud in order to confront it so it can go away.”

“It’s not ever going to go away.”

“It can fade to almost nothing, Harley. It can. I promise you.”

I put my face back in my hands.

“She touched you where?”

I thought about who I was talking to.

“My penis,” I said hoarsely.

“Did it give you an erection?”

I didn’t answer.

“Did it?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ejaculate?”

I buried my face deeper.

“Yes,” I sobbed.

“Did you touch her?”

“No,” I moaned, and looked up at her. “No. No. I swear I didn’t. I never even looked at her. She was behind me. She came into my bed.”

“Why did she come into your bed?”

I started crying harder. I couldn’t stop shaking. Betty put her arms around me.

“Think about it,” she said.

“She was afraid of Dad,” I cried into her shoulder.

“And you let her stay?”

I nodded.

“Why?” she asked, rocking me on the floor. “Think about it.”

“I was afraid of him too.”

“I want you to listen to me very carefully, Harley.”

She let go of me and sat back on her heels. She waited for me to look at her.

“You are not a bad person. You’re not a freak or a pervert. There’s nothing wrong with you or Amber. You were children reacting to debilitating emotional and physical abuse the only way you knew how. By turning to each other for comfort and pleasure.”

I tried to cover my face again, but she grabbed my hands and held them in hers.

“What made you remember? Do you know? Did something happen?”

“I can’t,” I said, shaking my head.

“Yes, you can. What happened?”

She moved away for an instant and came back with a box of Kleenex. She pulled one out and handed it to me.

“She was in bed with me,” I began, haltingly. “I was sleeping.”

“When?”

“Last night.”

“Did she touch you?”

“I don’t know. I was sleeping.”

I wiped at my eyes and blew my nose.

“She didn’t have any clothes on,” I volunteered.

“Did you have an erection?”

A shudder traveled from my toes to the top of my head and back again.

“I didn’t look,” I said.

She sighed again. A weary sigh. I glanced at her. She was
sitting on the floor with her legs tucked behind her. I had left wet stains on her silk blouse. I wondered if I had ruined it.

“How did you react?” she asked me.

“What do you mean?” I shouted at her, getting up from the floor and scrambling away from her. “What kind of question is that? I’m not sick.”

I backed into the bookshelves.

“I’m not sick.”

“I’m not implying that you are.”

She stood up too but didn’t approach me.

“I’m thinking about Amber now.”

“Huh?”

“Amber,” she said again. “I’m concerned about how she must be feeling right now.”

“Amber?” I shouted. “It was all her idea. She wanted to do it.”

“She didn’t want to do it, Harley. Try and understand. Your sister isn’t the villain here. She’s suffering as much as you are. Maybe more.”

“More?” I cried out.

“How did you react to her advances?”

“I threw her off me. I screamed at her. I told her to get away. I ran away.”

“Where is Amber right now?”

I looked out the window. The sun had fallen halfway down the sky. I was supposed to be somewhere, but I couldn’t remember where.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think she went to school. Today’s the last day. They got out early. What’s the matter? She can take care of herself.”

Betty didn’t look convinced.

“Right now you’re feeling repulsion, shame, guilt,” she instructed me. “Amber’s feeling all that too, but she’s also feeling rejection.”

She started to the door.

“Please, sit, Harley. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look so tired in my entire life.”

She walked out. I stared at the couch. It was the same color as the chair but it was velvety instead of glossy. I went over to it and checked the back of my jeans for filth and sweat. I sat down on the very edge, then stood up to see if my soul had left a stain.

She returned with a Styrofoam cup of water. “Sit,” she said, stern this time.

I sat. She handed me the water and I drank it.

“I want you to lie down here and rest,” she said.

“I have to be somewhere but I can’t remember.”

“Work?” she asked.

“Shit,” I said, closing my eyes, and falling back against the couch. Its cushions felt like they were stuffed with mist.

“I’m going to get fired from Shop Rite. I’m going to get fired from Barclay’s too.”

“Don’t worry about that. I can talk to your bosses.”

“Oh, yeah.” I laughed. “That always helps getting a job back. Having your shrink call to say you were too fucked up to come to work today.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she told me again. “Lie down.”

“I can’t sleep anymore.”

“Just a minute.”

She left again. I didn’t want to listen to her but the couch called to me to throw myself into it the same way fresh snow-banks did when I was a kid. I stretched out on it.

I thought about my dirty boots too late. I had been here ten minutes and already messed up her couch and her blouse. This was why she saw people like me in her other office wearing crappy clothes.

She came back in with a refill on the water.

“Here,” she said, handing me a pill too. “It will help you sleep. It’s one of my own.”

“You take pills?” I asked.

She nodded.

“I thought you were well adjusted.”

A small smile passed over her lips. They had red lipstick on them. She never wore lipstick at the other office.

“Define well adjusted,” she said.

I didn’t like it. It bled into the old-lady cracks around her lips.

She stood up and walked to the door, where she clicked off the light. “Try and get some rest,” she said. “I’ll be doing some work in another room.”

I swallowed the pill. I didn’t even think about it.

Enough light came through the window that I could still look around. I had been right about the books. Hundreds of them. A lot of psychology stuff but weird stuff too stuck in between the academic-sounding titles.

The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook. The Art of Walt Disney. What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Mass Media Law. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The 185th Anniversary History of Laurel Falls. Ulysses.
Peterson’s
Field Guide to Wildflowers. Black Beauty. In Cold Blood.

I felt myself dozing off. I threw myself backward into the couch snowdrift and started flapping my arms and legs to make an angel. I kept falling and falling. The snow had no substance then I realized it was a cloud, and the angel I was making was a real one floating along behind me.

She took my hand and we flew to a poor village, tranquil in an endless sea of sand beneath a bright white moon like one of Betty’s pearls. We went from home to home, following a stream of crystal light that flew in and out of windows and went from bed to bed.

It took me awhile but I finally figured out it was God cruising for chicks.

I didn’t understand. He was God. He knew what lurked in
the hearts of men and women too. He didn’t have to search and test for someone willing; He knew.

I asked the angel and she explained that carnal love was the one emotion God couldn’t read, an emotion too human for anyone to understand but Man. She left me then at a window where a darkhaired girl lay sleeping naked on a bare cloth mattress with her lips and legs parted and her slender arms extended in a welcome. The moonlight spilled over her, seeping and gushing into every opening, every pore.

Then I was back floating alone in my cloud drift. I couldn’t get the girl out of my mind. I felt her fear and her bliss. I felt her regret at lost innocence, but I also felt her need to be ruined.

She was a woman. He was God. He could have blinked and made a son, but He had gone to her instead.

I bet it made her glow from the inside out. I bet it lifted her from the bed, writhing and smiling. I bet threads of silver light shot from her fingertips and toes and every strand of her hair.

I hoped so. I hoped and prayed that it was so. It was her one lousy shot at ecstasy before she became the eternal Virgin, and I hoped she got there.

Betty’s office was completely dark when I opened my eyes. It was like waking up inside ink. I rolled off the couch with a thud, then sat frozen on the floor with my heart pounding in my throat. I didn’t want her to come back.

She didn’t. I stood up slowly and got my bearings. A dim sliver of light came from the hallway behind the cracked door. I went for the window instead. It unlocked easily and quietly.

The moon was high overhead, shining brightly but giving off no light. I stared up at it and knew Callie was staring up at it too thinking it was violent in its perfection like a strong, quick stab with a sharpened stick. She was wondering where I was.

The dream had cleared my head. It was good to dream again. I started walking feeling a slapping rhythmic calm beneath my
feet like the tiny waves that finally lap the shore after a distant motorboat has passed by. Betty’s rich neighborhood dissolved around me and I found myself walking a gray town sidewalk past uniform shabby houses pushed together in hedgerows of defeat.

I knew where I was. My dad used to point out these houses whenever we drove by them. He always said how glad he was we had our own little spot in the country and didn’t have to live like this. I agreed. Isolated failure was easier to bear.

It didn’t take me long to get to Barclay’s or maybe it did. I had lost my sense of time. I got in my truck and drove away.

The whole way to Black Lick Road, I was only thinking about the release. Not the sex. Sex was too complicated and mental. I was thinking in vague swirling grays of the mindlessness of INSTINCT and the simple glories of PHYSICAL STIMULI.

I suddenly understood how farm boys could do it with their sheep and daddies could do it with their daughters. They shrugged off their humanness like the shedding of a skin and became something new and raw and beautiful in their own ugly eyes. The only thing separating me from them was the fear that I would find something hideous and mangled under my skin.