Call Me Home (12 page)

She was drinking her beer, holding its cool neck with her finger and thumb, talking to Scooter Jenkins. “Amy,” Scooter said. “You feel like going down to Corpus with us next weekend?” He nudged his beer bottle against hers and clinked it softly. “It's too cold to swim, but we can party.”

She looked at him. He was tall with a round moon face, a bobbing sunflower boy. She smiled. “Maybe,” she said, even though she and Gary would be halfway to Washington by then. She'd hated the idea of going to the beach with anyone from Fannin in the days before Gary, when everyone piled into someone's car with cases of beer and three dirty sleeping bags, a half-dozen threadbare bath towels to share on the sand. Now, about to leave Fannin for what she imagined was for good, she felt a kind of loneliness for Scooter Jenkins and all of those boys who would spend the next sixty years right here at the Legion, marrying and divorcing one another's wives.

She was talking to Scooter for a while, maybe – the time wasn't clear, and she'd thought Gary was at the corner table, talking to someone he'd known from a junk salvage job he'd done in Luling. But when she stood up and looked for him, he had disappeared.
She looked up and down the rows of card tables, toward the bathroom, out on the porch. “Have you seen Gary?” she asked the group of old-timers at the front, World War II veterans who took their posts very seriously. “That tall guy I was with? The dark hair and the beard?” They clucked at her and shook their heads; someone brought her another beer. The string of Christmas lights over the bar that hadn't been taken down yet burned out as she watched.

Gary's truck wasn't in the parking lot, so she'd given up. Maybe something had come up, or he'd run to the gas station for cigarettes. It was her last night in Fannin, and the worry slipped away. She danced with Lawrence, who'd known her father before Vietnam. He worked for the railroad. “Now, that's a pension,” he said. “You want to be guaranteed your old age in peace, get a job for the railroad.” He kept one hand on the small of her back and rested his rough cheek against hers. “I'm proud of you, Miss Amy. I'm sure your father's real proud, too. I never did travel much myself.”

“Watch out for my dad, would you, Lawrence?” she asked. For a minute she thought she might cry, but instead she let Lawrence spin her, and when the song ended she fell into a folding chair, lit a cigarette, and listened to the laughter around her. She let it buoy her up like a wave, all of that simple happiness.

Walking home, her last night in the old house, she heard the truck before she saw the headlights. The engine sounded like a jet taking off. She stopped, listening, and then lights were coming toward her, fast. She jumped back from the street and tripped, falling on one knee in the ditch, scraping her leg in the scrabble of dirt and stiff grass.

Gary jumped out, lit up by the headlights. He'd roared out of the night like a god and he was manic, pacing back and forth.

“I drove my truck out to the bridge.” His voice sounded strangled. “I stopped and I looked down at the water – Jesus, Amy, do you know what I was thinking about? That's how much you mean to me. That's how much I hated seeing you with that fucker.”
He looked at her and let out a little cry. He slammed his fist against the side of his truck.

She didn't say anything for a long time; he paced, opened the truck door, slammed it closed again. “God, god,” he kept saying. “God, I love you, how could you?” He ran toward her and put his hands on her arms and squeezed, as if to shake her. It didn't hurt but she let out a cry. She was drunk. Very drunk, actually, and she felt like she had been dropped into a movie at the climax with nothing to do now but wait for the pieces to come together, to pick up the beginning from the end. She had hurt him, badly; that thought was coming to rest inside her, becoming more real, and as she watched him storming up and down the road, she slowly began to wake up, to understand, and the sorrow, the regret, and the wanting to undo rushed toward her. She began to apologize, to beg him. “I didn't know,” she said. “I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.” He raged at her and cried, and finally he quieted, covering his face with his hands. “Please, Gary,” she said to him. She kept saying it. “Please.”

When he moved his hands, he was calm again. He walked toward his truck and climbed back in. “I hope we can get through this,” he said. “I really hope we can.” He turned the key, started the truck, and left her there to finish walking home in the dark.

Long into that night, in her twin bed, she'd cried. What had she done? She felt sick with sorrow and frustration. She woke up the next morning and remembered and cried again. The feeling stayed with her for the next few days; she couldn't stop crying. She cried with relief when Gary's truck appeared the morning they left town, cried while she said goodbye to her mother, feeling a guilty relief for both the fact that her mother didn't know what had happened and that Amy appeared so convincingly heartbroken to leave.

After they'd loaded the truck and pulled out onto I-10, the tension had finally seemed to fall out of Gary. He squeezed her hand in his, pulling her close to him in the cab of the truck, kissing her head. And the relief she felt! Never again, she thought. Never
again will I ignore this person who I love so much, and who loves me so fiercely in return. She'd let that night escape from her mind, existing there only as a quiet warning: do not forget your power, do not take for granted all that you have. Driving away from the Lake Goodwin bar, then, six years later, she was confused at first. Why? Why bring this up now? She watched the speedometer, the bright and comforting lights of the dashboard, and steered as carefully as she could. And then, slowly, it began to dawn on her what was happening. She thought, he's picking a fight.

“Gary,” she said slowly, the headlights sweeping the undersides of leaves, “that was a long time ago. I said I was sorry.” She felt too drunk. Don't do this now, she thought. She just wanted to get them home.

“You aren't, though,” he said. “You
aren't.
” He was leaning toward her; she could smell the alcohol on his breath. His voice was soft but it was mean.

She
had
been sorry, she thought. And hadn't she paid for that? The way she'd spent the night crying, and her last hours with her mother were not about her mother at all but the storm of regret and fear still bearing down her.

“You aren't,” he said again. It felt like he was poking her. All those days of being careful and quiet, of not wanting to piss him off, were swelling in her chest. She was so fucking careful all the time. She was so fucking
tired
of feeling like she was doing something wrong. She wanted to scream but instead she gripped the wheel tighter and made the turn onto Firetrail Hill. She just wanted to get home. She pressed her lips together and willed him to let it go, to not say anything. They were supposed to be having a fun night. They were supposed to be being in love.

He was quiet for a moment and then he leaned toward her again, one hand on the console. “You were never sorry,” he said. He reached out and ran one finger across her cheek.

Her throat tightened. She was holding the wheel so tight her palms stung. “Fuck you,” she said. She had never sworn at him before. “Fuck you, Gary.” The lines on the road were weaving
in front of her and his face was close to hers. “What is wrong with you?” he was saying, his breath hot and mean, and she leaned away from him and he grabbed for the wheel as it jumped her hands, but the branches were slamming up against the windshield, and then there was a long, loud crushing sound and the truck slammed back.

Her nose was bleeding, but where had she hit it? Gary was beside her, moaning. She needed to call an ambulance. Someone needed to call someone. Please, she thought. Please. The windshield, the slap of the leaves against it, the dark inside of the car, the silence. How long did they sit there? “I'm sorry,” she kept saying. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.” She opened the door and ran out onto the road, one of her shoes slipping off on the gravel. Later she would find little pitted cuts on the bottom of her foot. There were no cars. The bar was four miles one way, the house four miles another.

Gary followed her out, crashing through the bushes, looking at the truck where it had plowed through the underbrush and into a pine tree. He reached for her and held her by the arms, the same way he had that night on the Fannin road.

“Listen,” Gary said, “you listen to me. You're going to get in the car and drive us home before the cops show up and take your drunk ass to jail. You understand me, Amy?”

She did understand. She nodded and picked her way over the brush and climbed back into the driver's seat. There were branches coming up off the grille and one of the headlights was busted out. The truck shuddered a little as she reversed it onto the road. She held her breath. She put it back in drive and she drove them home.

When she pulled the truck up the gravel drive she sat there in the dark while Gary went in and paid the babysitter, and then she went in and held Jackson beside her on the sofa while he drove the babysitter home. Thank god it was dark and no one would notice the banged-up truck. She didn't look at the girl and she didn't let herself think about how Gary was drunk, too. She kept
holding Jackson long after Gary had come back in and gone silently to bed. She whispered into his hair and he slept slumped against her while the guilt washed over her hotly, the relief and the shame.

She was sick the next morning. The drinks, she thought, and the stress, but she was sick the next day, too, and then she was pregnant with Lydia all along.

It began after that, the change in Gary. Later, she would see how simply those events had fallen in line in her mind: her error at the Legion, so long before. The accident and everything that had happened beforehand – how cruel she had been to him. He looked at her differently now: she who cursed him when he was weak and wanting, who could have ended both their lives, orphaned their child. How simple it was for her to believe that these things were connected by the thread of her mistakes. How simple it was for him to make her believe she was to blame for the way he looked at her now, for what she began to believe was his hatred of her.

She never feared for Jackson, but holding Lydia, something stirred in her, a suspicion about that night. That they were complicit, in Gary's eyes: behind the wheel, her baby smaller than a seahorse and her own unsteady hands, and that for the rest of her life she would pay for it, and her little girl would possess for him a darkness that Amy would spend her life trying to hold at bay.

NOW, IN THE
shelter, the bright New Mexico moon drove its light through the glass and wire windowpanes, through the wooden slats of the blinds. They would stay here for two months. An eternity, she thought. Long enough to make Gary believe they had disappeared completely. Long enough to change their names, to trade the little car in for something else before they went back to Texas, before they tried again to start a life without Gary. They would stay with Amy's mother, in the house Amy had grown up in, and Amy couldn't imagine what it would feel like to be back there. What would it be like, to go home? And her father was gone; when Jackson was eleven and Lydia five there had been the call that he was dead. The only call from Amy's mother she'd had in Washington – her
mother didn't believe in long distance, in the same way she didn't believe in cabs or airplanes or designer clothes. The luxuries of the rich. Amy had answered the phone, and when she hung it up again she had been afraid to tell Gary because she was afraid to tell Gary anything then. He had been uncharacteristically kind when she did tell him. She wondered now if her mother would forgive her – for leaving, for never calling, for receiving the phone call that her own father had died and still not coming home. Amy wasn't sure if she deserved to be forgiven.

Amy lay on the hard, narrow bed in the shelter watching the rise and fall of her daughter's back, turned away from her in the bed across the room. She imagined her mother standing by the dusty windowsill in Texas looking out on her own small kingdom, that square of scraggled Fannin land. There was her mother, here was her sleeping daughter, and somewhere, far from her, was her beautiful son. She thought, Please. Please, this night, later, all your life, believe me that I've done what I can.

Lydia

Tulalip, Washington, 2005

WE BUILT FORTS. WE BUILT LITTLE HOMES FROM BLOW-DOWNS
in stands of alder. We sat crouched in nests of sword fern eating red huckleberries. We took off our shoes and wrapped maple leaves around our feet like moccasins until they tore, and then we walked barefoot through the black piney loam and leaf-fall. Our skin stung from nettles and the air smelled of skunk cabbage and rain.

We followed the creek and knew each of the ponds that pooled beside it. We ruined our shoes. We collected sticks and handfuls of dry pine needles from the pockets beneath roots and rocks, where they were shielded from the rain. We made rings of stones and tried to light fires with the sticks, the dry needles, the paper and lint in our pockets. The fires smoked and our old hall passes curled under the lick of flames and then went dead.

We used our thumbnails to split the blisters on the trunks of pine trees so the pitch spilled out and stained our palms. We told stories, about the wolfboy who lived in the woods and the Firetrail ghost who would run beside your car and grab you in the dark. We told secrets.