Call Me Home (18 page)

Don picked up a handful of gravel and pitched it underhand, a little hailstorm. “We stopped. We don't drink together anymore. But maybe that was all we had in the first place.”

“Maybe.”

They sat in quiet for a while, and then Don said, “So, you've done this before.”

“What, slept with my boss?” Jackson said, just to be a smart-ass, but Don shot him a wounded look and he felt bad. He thought about telling Don about Eric, but he imagined how Don would see him – the little hooker boy, turning tricks. Jackson didn't have two cents' worth of guilt in him for Eric anymore. That had been better, Jackson thought, than Don's empty sex with Eliza. Better than his mother and father. Eric had helped him. It wasn't so terrible. But Don – how could Don not imagine that Jackson must be damaged beyond belief? How to explain that sometimes, in the island of Eric's bed, his mouth full of caviar and once-a-week champagne, he'd been ecstatic with his own ability to survive?

“Sort of,” he said finally. “A little bit. There was a guy from my high school.”

Don laughed. “Jesus, you're young. I forget that.”

Jackson had zero desire to listen to Don comment on his age.
And you're fucking me
, he wanted to say. Instead, he cleared his throat. “What about you? Have you done this before?”

“Nah,” Don said, in a way that made Jackson not believe him. “I mean, I don't know, I just –” He looked at Jackson helplessly. “It's hard. People don't like it.”

“But you have to live the way you want to.”

“Jack.” Don took a long drink from the wine bottle. He looked for a long time toward the rusted blast furnace, its silhouette. “You know what that would mean for me. I'd have nothing.” He sighed, drank again. “It's better this way. You know that. I'd have nothing.”

You'd have me, Jackson thought, but he didn't say it. He understood fear, he understood being afraid of losing everything. But he didn't understand being ashamed. At the bottom – he smiled for a second at his own stupid pun, bottom – Jackson himself wasn't. Jackson wasn't ashamed of wanting men. Sex was equal parts beautiful and messy, slipping bodies, grotesque things that looked ugly, but felt good, no matter who was doing it. If he had pretended to be Good Jackson, Straight But Not Narrow Jack, it would have been just that – pretend. Not some other, problem-free life he could have gathered up around him and lounged in. What happiness was there in a pretend life? Only pretend happiness; pleasantries, secrecy, fear. Maybe he would have saved his father from angry humiliation, Chris from shame, his mother from bearing the brunt of his father's disgust at his not-son-enough son. But he'd still be trapped inside himself; he'd still be the same.

So, no, he couldn't believe Don when he said this was better. Easier in the short run, a tragedy in the long. Maybe this was his modern inheritance, to be able to think this way. He didn't care. He wasn't noble about it. He wasn't self-satisfied. He was just sure that he was who he was.

Suddenly he didn't want to be sitting with Don anymore. He felt stranded, beached in his squat plastic lawn chair, its aluminum legs planted in the dirt. He wished he wanted to tell Don about Eric. About Chris. About his father, or about what had happened that day. The moment he kept repeating, had been repeating in his mind for months now and each time it was worse, because all the better endings he imagined did not actually happen: His father goes to the Starlight Motel, Room 121, to retrieve his mother and sister. It is the morning after he has told his father where his mother is. All night he has stared hard at his own reflection,
his own ghost in the window. And now it is afternoon, and his mother and Lydia are back. They are the same, but not. They are duller, harder versions of themselves. Even Lydia is just across some invisible line. This happens for a week. He wakes up each morning with his blood pounding in his ears.

Then it is Saturday, a week after he told his father. His mother has spoken to him about school, about dinner, about a dress pattern. The Starlight Motel, the moment when his father showed up, have not been mentioned. His mother asks him to take Lydia to the mall, to buy a gift for a birthday party. “Take her on the bus after school,” she says. “I have to finish some things around here.”

On the bus he thinks of asking Lydia about the night his father showed up, about whether his mother is angry. He thinks of telling her he's sorry. At the mall he asks her what she wants to buy but she doesn't know; she just wants to wander, and pick things up, and ask him what he likes. They are in one of those tacky New Age stores, and Lydia is looking at a bonsai tree kit because she read
The Little Prince
last year. He tries to tell her it won't work, that no kid is going to want a tree on his or her thirteenth birthday. She is reluctant, and picks up a tiny package of herbs. He reads it to her – she can read just fine, but this is still a kind of game they play, where she is younger than she is, and he thinks of her that way, and it cuts at him, now – it is a Chinese herb, a tiny little caterpillar fungus, with a handmade tag that reads Winter Worm Summer Grass. The salesman is a white guy wearing a shirt that looks like it's made of hemp, and even though Jackson usually has a sad little hard-on for these kinds of pathetic men, he doesn't this time. The man explains that the little caterpillar root is called cordyceps, and when it grows in the wild it looks like a worm in the winter, and a piece of grass in the summer, and that it heals things, when it is cut and dried and eaten. That he himself has made a soup for his brother with this herb, and that he once spent two years teaching English in a remote Chinese village – he is adding this to show why he is such an expert – and this man has Lydia in the palm of his hand, which makes Jackson angry. “Like magic,” she says, and
the man says, “Exactly,” and Lydia is following him to the counter and spending the birthday present money that their mother has given her on this little dry worm.

They spend some time walking past the shops, the Sunglass Hut, the Frederick's of Hollywood, the arcade, and Lydia keeps asking about the time, and he keeps trying to ask her about this birthday party, and the pathetic son of a bitch kid –
Boy or girl
, and she hesitates and says, “Boy,” though he hasn't known her to hang out with any boys – who is going to get this little magic herb for a birthday present. The tiny dry worm in the pile of CDs and game cartridges, the requisite basketball.

And then when he tells her it is four o'clock and asks her if she wants to head home, she says she needs the bathroom, and he points to it, and she pushes the little plastic bag into his hands and sprints toward it, and turns back once. He paces around, and just when he wonders if she's okay in there he looks up and she is out the double doors, running, looking back at him once guiltily, and he is after her before he can even think of what's happening, running fast but she has a hell of a head start.

Outside the door he sees them pulling out of the parking lot, Lydia turned around in her seat and looking at him, waving sadly, his mother looking at him and then straight ahead, the car filled with garbage bags. They are leaving without him, running without him – from him – and he keeps holding the little root that was for him all along, and for the first time it is completely clear what he has done. And this will be the last he sees of her, and it is still winter, months before he will go to Silver, and even then, when it is summer, the Winter Worm will stay the same, dark and still beside his bed, the flower hidden deep within it.

Suddenly he felt Don's hand on his arm. “Jack,” Don was saying. “Earth to Jack. Come in, Jack.”

Jackson shook his head and laughed. “Sorry,” he said, and shrugged. The sun was setting now, the June heat just fading away, and Don passed him the wine bottle. That day, when his mother and sister left without him, Jackson took the bus to the bottom
of Firetrail and hitched the rest of the way home. By the time he made it to the house, it was dark, and from the porch he could see the yellow light falling out of the windows and onto the dark lawn, and through the foggy glass the figure of his father drunk at the kitchen table. Seeing his father there was like being relieved of a temporary amnesia. His father had only ever hated him, Jackson thought. And hated his mother, and his sister. There wasn't a day Jackson could remember that he hadn't been afraid, that he hadn't known how worthless his father believed him to be. What, Jackson kept thinking, have I done? It wasn't a question he could answer. By the end of the week he had moved into Randy's basement, and by the end of the month he was in Portland, living on the street. They had all escaped his father after all, but with no help from him.

Now, in Silver, Don was squeezing his arm, and drinking again from the bottle, and slowly the present moment settled back down around him. He pulled Don forward, across the space between the shitty plastic chairs, and then they were kissing, and he was willing Lydia away from him. Here was Don, the rough scrape of his cheeks, his eager mouth, and it was that easy, Jackson thought. You remember someone so you can forget someone else.

Lydia

Fannin, Texas, 2010

ON HACKBERRY STREET, AT THE BACK OF THE WOODEN
house she grew up in, my mother and I shared a yellow bedroom. “Maybe we'll get our own place,” she said, “when things settle down.” She smoothed the pink roses on the bedspread with the palm of her hand, back and forth. “For now, we just need to get used to our new lives.”

Our new lives. The yellow bedroom, the Purple Heart on the wall, the floor that drove a splinter into my heel. A window with dotted curtains, and through it the bare yard. There were twenty-three steps between the front porch and street. I sat on the porch in the dry air. I watched the sun sink into the scrub grass. The day slipped by, and then another after it.

“Don't you love this blue sky?” my mother asked. “Don't you love the sun, the river, this blue?” She kept asking, but it didn't matter. I was busy remembering, making a list in my mind of the things I didn't want to forget. The things I
did
want to forget, but knew I needed to remember, though I couldn't say exactly why.

In Washington, I told myself, we lived on Firetrail Hill. It was a mile to the mailbox and a half-hour's drive to town. It was a mess of gravel potholes and pasture grown over. The trees were sewn to the sky.

In Washington, the house was a double-wide mobile with off-white siding that arrived in halves on the bed of a truck, when my mother was just eighteen and still believed that my father was a good man. It was set on the edge of a slope and below was the
creek, and the old rowboat, and every fort I ever built. I remember that I sometimes thought of following that creek off our land, to the ocean, to a lake or the sea, and how if I went missing police dogs would drag their noses along the creek bed; the lit windows of the house would glow like searchlights.

And the small things, too, I listed: The stacks of firewood swaying in the woodshed. The pits dropping from the cherry tree, and how they split with frost. The hiss of spit on the woodstove, the way the window glass shattered around my mother before we left for the Starlight Motel, my father's boot on her back. The way, when my father yelled, no one but us and the sinking ground could hear.

Even as I hung my clothes in my new closet, even as my grandmother said, “You're home now,” even as my mother and I walked to town and stood at the front desk of the Fannin Junior High and my mother signed the papers with my new name, I was thinking of Washington.

And if they forget, I thought – if my mother slips out of that old life so completely that I am the only thing she recognizes from it, if Jackson lives as though he never knew us at all – it doesn't matter. I'll remember it for us, I thought; I will remember all of it; I will leave nothing out. I didn't know why it was important, but it was. I knew that even as my mother and I went out the front doors of my new school and started the walk back to the wooden Fannin house under the silver threads of telephone wire and the hard bright springtime sun.

Amy

Tulalip, Washington, 2008

IT WAS THE FIRST TRULY BRAVE THING SHE FELT SHE
had ever done, to get the train to Seattle. She'd seen the ad for the rally in the paper the month before, and the plans she made were elaborately constructed, a wedding of caution and necessity. She invented a series of tests at the Everett Clinic, something to do with a cyst that was likely benign. A return visit in the afternoon. There was no reason to come home in between, she explained. She would go to the library, and perhaps to the grocery store. It would be a tiresome day, eaten up completely by things that couldn't be helped. She sighed when she brought it up, but her heart was pounding.

It was the end of May; Jackson and Lydia were in school. Jackson's sophomore year, Lydia in the fifth grade. Gary was at a construction job. That morning she parked the car on Pacific Avenue and walked to the Amtrak station. She'd been saving small amounts of money in the pointed, witchy toes of a pair of old heels; the round trip ticket was less than twenty dollars. It was worth the trouble of the train, knowing that Gary might check the odometer on the shitty Geo. Seattle was twice as far as Everett, and Gary was meticulous in his policing. Even if he didn't notice, there might be a problem with the car, and how would she explain where she was? Besides, she liked the vaulted, echoing station, the old world feeling of purchasing her ticket at the glass booth and waiting on the platform for the train to churn to a stop. It was a cool day, breezy and full of light, the best that spring could offer in this part of the country. She watched the old houses in south Everett flip by
and thin out, giving way to the newer developments and the mall. From King Street station she climbed on a rattling city bus bound for Capitol Hill. When she got out, near Seattle Central Community College, the crowd was already bigger than she would have imagined.