Shout Down the Moon (20 page)

“Mama, stop.”

“Everybody loves the little princess.” She leans against the door frame. “Go on, take her.” She turns to me. “I don’t want you in my house no more.”

She always threw me out—that’s how our fights ended. It was as if getting rid of me was the solution to some problem she couldn’t name. The problem of her inability to love me, it seems now. The problem of having a child you can’t stand to look at, much less care for.

I’ve been trying not to look at Rick, but when I turn away from her, he catches my eye. I look in his big brown eyes, just for a moment, but it’s enough. This is what he knows about me that no one else does. This is the thing we’ve always had in common—the ugliness at the root of our families, the lack of love, the hopelessness.

“But you don’t get to have my grandbaby, too. You got everything, you always have, but you don’t get him!” She moves right next to me. Her arms are thrust out. “Give me my boy.”

I keep blinking, wishing so badly to see her standing up straight and saying she doesn’t mean it. She doesn’t just care about my father or my son; she cares about me, her daughter.

The other reason I’m blinking is so I won’t be blinded by tears.

“Daddy,” Willie mutters, half asleep, pointing his chubby finger at Rick. He’s just showing me he remembers, but it feels like fate.

I know it’s a mistake even as I grab the diaper bag and Willie’s beagle. It’s a mistake, but that doesn’t mean there are any other options.

Jonathan was wrong, that’s all there is to it. It isn’t a script and it never was. It’s my life.

T
he first thing I feel is his fingers on my ear lobes. He’s flipping them back and forth. His voice is higher than usual, excited. “Waked up, Mama. I gots to show you.”

“What?” I say, and yawn. My chest hurts, but then I realize why: he’s sitting on it, bouncing up and down.

“Toys,” he shouts.

“Hold on,” I say, but he’s crawling off me, dangling his legs over the side, scrambling off the bed. “Come back here, buddy,” I yell. No response. “I mean it. I want you where I can see you.”

The room is light even though the curtains are pulled closed. It’s so tiny I feel like I could reach both walls if I stretched my arms out. At the end of the double bed, there’s a green plastic lawn chair with a pair of jeans and a faded gray T-shirt hanging off the back. The closet door is half open. I can see a pile of Rick’s clothes stacked on the floor.

Willie peeks through the doorway and grins. “I in here, Mama. The toy room!”

I manage to sit up and then stand, but I feel like a limp rag. I must have slept all of an hour last night. But I make my way into the next room, and I can’t help smiling. He’s sitting in the lap of a gigantic white stuffed bear. It has a large red bow around its neck; Willie’s head doesn’t even come up to the bottom of the bow. On his left side, there’s an expensive-looking wood train set, a racetrack, and at least fifty little cars. On his right, two more bears and a stuffed elephant, a Fisher Price garage set, a blue ball as big as he is, and a bunch of action figures.

The toy room is what it is, all right. There’s a twin mattress in the opposite corner but no other furniture, not even a chair.

“I wike this motel!” he shouts, as he jumps up and grabs a truck from the pile of cars.

“We need to change your diaper, buddy. Let’s see if we can find some.” The diaper bag had only one diaper. Mama must have taken the rest out, God knows why.

Willie ignores me, but that’s okay. I need to use the bathroom, get a drink.

The bathroom is off the bedroom I came from. It looks clean, but there’s only one towel and no paper cups. I run the faucet until it’s cold, scoop up handfuls of water to drink. I’m splashing my eyes and cheeks when I hear Willie screaming.

He stepped on the wooden caboose; he has it clutched in his hand and he tells me he hates it now. He’s not wearing shoes or socks. The bottom of his foot is angry red but not bleeding. After I get him calmed down, I convince him to come with me, explore this place. What if there are other toy rooms?

He takes my hand and puts on a goofy, mysterious grin. “Spies,” he says, and I nod.

It doesn’t take long. The house has a kitchen, but there’s nothing in it but cabinets, an old stove, and an even older refrigerator. The living room seems much bigger than Mama’s, but maybe it’s only because it’s empty, too, except for what looks like a brand-new TV sitting on the floor, next to the radiator. There’s another bedroom with nothing in it but a few empty U-Haul boxes.

What Willie really wants to explore is the outside, but I tell him we can’t until I find his shoes. From the front door, the outside seems as big as the house is small. The yard, as Willie calls it, is an immense woods. I can hear a creek, but I don’t hear any cars. If I didn’t see tire tracks in the dirt path, I wouldn’t believe Rick had driven us here.

It’s Rick’s new place, the one Boyd told me about. To get here, we had to go through Kansas City, then Lewisville, then maybe ten miles north on roads I didn’t know. Rick promised he would just drop us off and leave, and he kept his word. He opened the door, pointed us back to the bedroom, and then disappeared, after saying he’d see us in the morning.

I didn’t expect it to be so beautiful. The air feels cold and still, and the smell is clean, woodsy. Most of the trees are still green, but one of the oaks has a solid orange band of leaves at the top, like a hat; another has tiny splotches of red on each leaf, as though it rained paint last night instead of water. If it wasn’t so cold, I’d leave the door open. I do push back the curtains in all the rooms, hold Willie up to the window in the bedroom so he can watch the squirrels scrambling up the branches. His diaper feels like it’s soaked up a swimming pool. When Rick gets back, I’ll have to ask him to get some. All our exploring turned up nothing in the way of diapers or clothes.

But he thought of it already. He also got breakfast. A few minutes later, he comes in holding a grocery sack in one hand, a McDonald’s bag in the other. The food smells wonderful, but I don’t say anything as I take the sack from his hand, get out a diaper from the pack of toddler Pampers.

Willie is still in the bedroom. He has the giant teddy on the double bed and he’s telling him a story. He fusses while I’m changing his diaper, but when I’m finished, he goes right back to the story. It’s “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” or what he remembers of it.

Rick is on his knees, spreading napkins on the living-room floor. He lays out a sausage biscuit and hash brown patty for each of us. When he turns around and looks at me, I go to Willie, tell him breakfast is ready. He says he’s hungry, but when he gets in the room and sees Rick, he throws himself on my leg.

“What is it, buddy?” I ask, as I pick him up. “You know who that is, don’t you?” I turn around so he’s facing Rick, but he won’t look, he pushes his face against my shoulder. “Remember?”

“Daddy,” he sputters.

“That’s right. And Daddy got you a sausage biscuit. Your favorite.” His little arms are glued around my neck. “Let’s sit down. You can be on my lap.”

“No,” he yells, and points back into the bedroom.

Rick is staring at us, but I shrug. “I have to see what’s wrong.”

Willie won’t tell me until I shut the door. Even then, he wants me to hold him on the bed. And he’s whispering. “Daddy is wike Shredder.”

Shredder is the bad guy on the Turtles cartoon. I wish I could laugh. “Your granny told you that, didn’t she?”

He nods, and then it all pours out. Not about Rick though, about me.

Granny told him I was going to leave him forever and run away with Daddy. And he didn’t want me to go. He wanted to be with me. He cried and cried, but Granny told him to be quiet. Granny told him good boys don’t cry. He wants to be a good boy.

I want to scream.

“I was just at work, baby. Your granny misunderstood. I would never, ever leave you.” I pause, take a breath. “And you know who bought you all those toys out there?”

He shakes his head.

“Your daddy.”

While he’s thinking about this, I lift up his shirt—the blue-and-yellow-striped one with the juice stain. I wish I’d thought to grab some clothes. “He also brought us here last night, so I could give you a big belly kiss.”

He’s laughing now. After a moment, I say, “You want to eat?” He’s at the door trying to open the knob before I’m even off the bed.

Rick looks relieved. He’s already finished his food, and while we’re eating, he talks to Willie about the toys. Obviously, he wants to make the same point I did, because he mentions that he’s bought a couple of toys every week for the last month and a half. Since the middle of August. Since the last time he saw Willie, in the trailer in Omaha.

I can feel his eyes on me, but I look straight ahead.

Willie has a mouth full of hash browns when he asks Rick why he doesn’t have any chairs to sit on. He thinks it’s funny. “You gots a TV but no chairs or tewaphone.”

“I just got this place a few weeks ago. I planned to fix it up before you saw it, but I didn’t get a chance.”

This seems to satisfy Willie. He picks up the little plastic cup of apple juice and asks me to open it for him. Then he babbles about the toys, trying to figure out which is his favorite. When he runs off to look at them again, Rick starts wadding up the napkins and food wrappers and talking about the house. He says he knows it needs work, but he plans to paint it, inside and out. And he’s going to put down carpet. “It’ll be better for Willie.” He smiles. “Softer if he falls on his little butt.”

I stand up and walk to the window, put my palms flat against the glass. It still feels cold even though it has to be mid-morning. Everything about the last twenty-four hours seems like a nightmare. We’re supposed to have a rehearsal today, our first in the studio. Fred said he was putting us with the best sound people in town. The guys were so excited on Saturday night, when Fred made the announcement. Even Jonathan didn’t flinch when Fred said he was going to bill us as “Patty Taylor and Jonathan Brewer, popular jazz.” “Popular?” I asked, and he just smiled.

Rick comes up behind me and says he figured the country would be good for Willie. And it’s only ten miles from his job. The drive isn’t bad. I turn around, look at a deep scratch on the floor. “I appreciate you helping me last night, Rick, I really do. But it doesn’t change—”

“I have to show you something.”

He starts down the hall, and I think he’s going to the toy room, where Willie is. But instead he goes into the other bedroom, the one that has nothing except for the U-Haul boxes. I stand in the doorway, watch as he picks up one of the boxes and moves it to the middle of the floor. I can tell from the way he lifted it that the box isn’t empty, after all.

“Look,” he says.

I walk closer, but I’m still not close enough to see inside. He must know I don’t want to be too close to him, because he takes a few steps back. Now I come forward, and on the top of the box, I see our old straw welcome mat.

I can’t help it; I kneel down and pull it out. Underneath, the box is full of bundles of newspaper. I pull out a chunk and unwrap a ceramic salt shaker in the shape of a cow.

“Is the pepper in here too?” I say, grabbing the next thing.

“I’m not sure,” Rick says.

I take another bundle and unwrap my Campbell’s soup mug. I got it from the company for free. I had to save labels for almost a year.

I pull out one thing after another, line them up on the floor. Glasses and cups and plates. The cow pepper shaker. The snowman cookie jar I bought for our first Christmas together.

I haven’t seen any of these things since the night Rick was arrested.

It happened after midnight, in Kansas City, down by the river. Of course I didn’t know anything at the time; I didn’t even realize he hadn’t come home yet. When the cops came banging on the door, screaming that they had a search warrant, I was asleep. They wouldn’t tell me what Rick had done or where he was. They cuffed my hands behind my back and forced me to the floor.

I had to lie face down in only my T-shirt and underpants. They told me not to say a word, and I didn’t, not even when they ran a knife through my stuffed Snoopy, the only thing from my childhood I’d been able to sneak out of Mama’s house. I remember thinking it was like being in a war, so much screaming, so much noise. I heard breaking glass, crashing dishes, the rattle of pans bumping across the kitchen tile. The dresser drawers cracking as they smashed them on the ground. A perfume bottle shattering when they dropped it in the bathtub. An explosion when they turned over the stand with the television.

It lasted at least two hours, and it felt like years. When they were finished, our apartment looked worse than if it had been hit by a tornado. A tornado is a random act of nature; it usually spares some things, but this was the work of determined, angry men. Nothing had been spared here.

This is what I always thought anyway. I never went back there. After the police were done questioning me at the station, I went to Mama’s, and when she threw me out about a week later, I went to the Lewisville shelter, and a few weeks after that, I ended up downtown, in the Catholic home for unwed mothers, where I stayed until Willie was born. I knew the police had turned the apartment into a crime scene, but that wasn’t the only reason I didn’t go back. I was afraid if I had to look at all those things I loved broken to pieces, it would break me.

I’m picking up the cows when Rick tells me how he got these boxes. One of his friends went through the apartment, packed up everything that wasn’t damaged, and put it all in storage. It’s been there the whole time he was in jail, and last week he rented a truck to pick it up.

I’m still too stunned to say anything. In these boxes are three years of my life. All of my life with him.

Willie is yelling that he’s ready to show us his favorite toy. He runs into the room, then over to me and pulls on my arm, but he really wants Rick. He’s looking at him, but he’s too shy to ask. “I bet I know your favorite,” Rick says, walking towards him. “The train.”

Willie shakes his head, but he lets Rick take his hand, lead him across the hall. I hear him giggle and say, “It’s a surprise!”

I walk to the doorway, listen as Willie tells Rick why the elephant is his favorite. Rick is looking right at him, nodding as Willie runs around, talking about one toy after another.

I’m still holding the cows, remembering the day I got them at a garage sale. Rick was out somewhere with his friends, and I had the Lincoln. I had finally gotten my driver’s license, at seventeen. I was still nervous about driving alone, but I had to get out of the house for a while.

When I told the old woman running the sale that I wanted those cow salt and pepper shakers, she asked if I cooked much.

“Not really,” I said. “But I’m trying to learn.” I felt bad because I knew I wasn’t trying very hard. I would find a recipe in my cookbook, buy the food, and then let it spoil. Part of the problem was that Rick was almost never there at dinnertime. I kept thinking I’d cook for myself, but then I’d just eat crackers from the box and watch TV.