While He Was Away (4 page)

David nods like he sees it too. He extracts his arm from Linda’s grip.

“I’ll be thinking of you,” she says.

I’m on my knees on the bed now. I fling the quilt against the floor.

Linda won’t look at me. I can smell her, even through David’s scent lingering on my skin. She smells like Red Earth—food, coffee, beer. She smells like herself too, when she smells like a hot, sweaty restaurant manager. Linda has smelled better, and she knows it. She wants to toss her uniform into the laundry and slip into some soft, comfortable pajamas. She wants a drink, an easy dinner.

Instead of doing any of these things, however, Linda leans against my wall like she’s becoming one with it. She takes a deep breath and says, “Good luck, David.”

David gives me one last look. Then he slips past Linda and out the door.

“Let us know what we can do,” Linda calls. “Anything you need.”

David doesn’t reply. He’s too busy running out of the house. His footsteps rattle the pictures in their frames on the hallway walls—pictures of me at every age, pictures of Linda and me at every holiday. Only me. Only Linda. Only Linda and me, mother and daughter, forever and ever, amen.

I bolt past Linda and down the hallway. I reach the front porch as David jumps on the cycle and starts it.

“Wait!” I shout. “I’ll see you again before you go, right? I’ll see you tomorrow?”

But David is already driving away, lost in the dark.

And tomorrow is today.

“‘
We?
’” I storm back to my bedroom. “‘Let us know if there’s anything
we
can do?’ Like
you
actually give a rip.”

“I give a rip.” Linda gestures vaguely at my state of disarray.

My room is way too small with Linda in it. I grab Plum Tumble from the bed—avenger’s cape, magical shield—and sling it around my shoulders. Through gritted teeth I say, “He’s leaving for
Iraq
.”

“It’s nearly the end, honey.” Linda shrugs. “That conflict is all but resolved. He’ll be back.”

I want to scream. Instead I laugh—a tense bark. “You think?”

Linda sighs her answer.

“So like you to oversimplify,” I say. Linda’s face twists, but I continue, “In Current Events, our teacher said
that
conflict
isn’t going anywhere. Even the withdrawal will be bad.”

Linda folds her arms. “My point is when someone goes away like David—”

I snort. “When someone goes away like my dad, you mean. Or your mom. Isn’t this really all about you?”

“Good Lord.” Linda yanks the band from her ponytail. Her hair tumbles in graying, coppery waves around her shoulders, a clash of cool and warm tones. She really needs to break out the Nice ’n Easy. She just never seems to have the time. “Don’t you ever give up?”

“Don’t you?” I clutch the quilt.

“No.” Linda shakes back her hair, triumphant. “That’s the point! That’s why we have a life. Finally we have a fresh start, a fighting chance.” She lets out a breath. “Sometimes you have to let go of people to keep going, Penelope.”

“Oh sure,” I snarl. “You’re the perfect model of rugged individualism.”

Linda wavers like there’s a strong wind blowing, about ready to push her over. Usually she looks about ten years younger than her forty years. But suddenly she looks about ten years older, shoulders sagging, chest caving in. Linda looks lost. She looks like she needs protecting, and I’m the only one she’s got to do just that.

I have to bite my tongue, literally, to keep from apologizing or placating her.
“Forget what I just said.” “I know you did the best you could.”
I could say those things. But I don’t. I say, “When will you get it? I’m not you. The guy I love won’t abandon me. I won’t get pregnant.”

Linda straightens her shoulders. There she is, her fierce self again. I’d know this stance anywhere—stiff as a board, nose in the air. Linda’s readying herself to carry on in the face of adversity the way she has always carried on. The way she carried on when her mother left what apparently felt like a sinking ship, casting off two-year-old Linda like some kind of water-soaked wreckage. The way she carried on when her father sank ever deeper into his boozy depths, pissing on the walls of this very house and leaving Red Earth to the care of his employees.

And the way she carried on when she finally fled her father and Killdeer at age eighteen—my age now!—and drifted around the country, trying job after job, squat after squat, guy after guy, but never settling for anything until the age of twenty-two, when she got pregnant with me and that guy ditched her, never to be heard from again—my pops, some hero.

Linda carried on then yet again for me. She carried me in her strong arms. We drifted together—“Flotsam and jetsam,” she always said. We drifted through good times and bad until one day we got the call from an old friend of her father’s, his executor. And we found ourselves here in Killdeer. Carrying on.

Linda unpins the golden name badge emblazoned in red cursive from her polo shirt:
Linda
Weaver, Manager
. She pockets her name.

“I think it might be wise for you to consider letting tonight’s good-bye be the last good-bye, Penelope,” she says. “It’ll just be worse tomorrow.”

The
last
good-bye? Did she just say that?

For a moment I think the cries are coming from inside me. They are whirling in the air above our heads—faint, high-pitched pipings, desperate sounds.
I’m terrified
, I realize.
I’m terrified of what’s next. I didn’t know I felt this frightened. But—listen to that sound—of course, I do. The only guy I’ve ever loved, who’s ever loved me, is going off to war. He feels terrified of what’s next too. That’s his fear beating against a wall.

Then I realize my mouth is clenched tight. I’m not making those sounds. Those sounds are coming from something else above. Something trapped in the attic.

•••

I yank the cord. The narrow trapdoor in the hallway ceiling drops open, just missing Linda’s head, and then the rickety ladder to the attic clatters down and strikes the floor at our feet. The sounds in the attic seem even louder and closer now. Whatever it is thuds against wood.

“Sounds kind of big,” I say.

Linda nods. “Raccoon, maybe.”

“I told you that window is broken.”

Linda glowers.

I gesture to the ladder. “Ladies first.”

Linda hesitates only a moment. Then—I have to hand it to her—she sets her foot on the bottom rung and slowly, carefully ascends. The ladder sways and creaks beneath her. The frantic cries are louder now.

I clear my throat. “I thought that wasn’t much more than a crawl space.”

Linda cranes her neck, peering up through the attic opening. “That was just an excuse. I hate attics.”

Her head and shoulders disappear into the shadows then. I can only see her from the waist down. Her black pants are wrinkled from work and splashed with something that looks like gravy. Her black clogs are scuffed, and her bare ankles are wobbly with nerves. Any minute, looks like, she could fall.

“Doing good!” I say grimly.

“Thanks.” Linda’s voice is equally grim. And then, “Oh, crap. What was I thinking? Penelope, find a flashlight. Fast. I can’t see a thing up here.”

I run around the house searching and finally remember that I was the one who last stuck it on a pantry shelf. It’s still dead from when David and I went out on a walk a couple of nights ago. We went swinging at the playground. We went on the teeter-totter too. Just like we used to all last year, even on a couple snowy days. Only this time there wasn’t so much laughter or talking. When I asked David what was wrong, he shrugged and said, “Guess I’m not a kid anymore.”

As we walked home, the flashlight dimmed, then flickered out. David wanted me to replace the batteries right when I got in the door. “It won’t be ready when you need it otherwise,” he said, sounding practically middle-aged. I chalked this up to post-OSUT stress.

Now I have to scrounge through three kitchen drawers before I can find two Cs to do the job. I insert them. The bright beam flares in my hands. It bobs and skitters up and down walls as I run back to Linda, who has descended the ladder for her own good.

Linda grabs the flashlight and looks at me with a level stare. “You’re going to be right behind me.” Then she climbs back up there.

I chew at my lip and watch her disappear.

A moment later, when the thing hits the attic wall again, Linda yelps and I do too.

Silence.

Then Linda laughs.

“Penelope, get up here! And bring a blanket, will you?”

I go for Plum Tumble.

•••

I blink several times, astonished. But still, yes. There it is.

I state the obvious. “A killdeer. I’d know it anywhere.”

“Me too, with all that research you did for that mural,” Linda mutters.

We’re crouched on the attic floor, staring at a bird that’s trying to play injured in the corner. There the black and white wings, the black-capped head, the two black bands encircling the throat. The bird trembles in the flashlight’s cone of cold, white light. It flops around, ruffles and puffs its feathers.

“Who’d think something that size could make so much noise?” Linda says. “It’s not much bigger than a robin.”

“It’s in distress, or it’s distracting predators from its nest.” I must have watched that Internet clip about fifty times, fascinated by the bird’s survival efforts—the way it fluttered and flailed away from the nest it had built by the side of a lake, acting all wounded to save its chicks. I gather Plum Tumble to my chest. “You think there are babies too?”

“We would have heard it earlier if it had been setting up housekeeping.” Linda nods at the—sure enough—broken window. “I think it got itself trapped tonight. That’s all.”

Then Linda begs me to do it. “I went up first. It’s your turn now.”

So I creep across the uneven attic floor, struggling not to snag my feet on the rough wood planks or trip on the quilt. I whack my head against a low roof beam. I get a god-awful mouthful of spider webs, and I let out a scream. Spider eggs string a necklace at my throat. I keep screaming.

“Good grief!” Linda screams, nearly as loudly. “You’re going to give me a heart attack!”

I bat at the sticky mess, but it clings to my hands. In the moonlight the eggs look almost like pearls in their silvery casings. I claw at them and cast them to the dusty floor. I creep some more. Finally I’m close enough.

The bird must be paralyzed with fear. It doesn’t even move as I throw the quilt over it and carry it to the broken window. No glass on the floor that I can see, but if I could, I would levitate.

“Great job,” Linda says.

I hesitate. “I think it’s in shock.”

“Let it go,” Linda says.

I remember what she said earlier about David. “‘If you love something, let it go…’” My voice is bitter with the worst of clichés.

“You have to let it go, Penelope,” Linda says.

“It must be in shock.” I stand there at the window, the ball of quilt and life in my hands. Even through the cotton, I can feel the bird’s heat. I can feel its beating heart. David’s heart beats hotly when I hold my hand to his chest, though not nearly as fast as a bird’s, of course. This fast would mean death for David.

“Penelope!”

“What if it falls? What if it can’t remember how to fly?” I sit down hard on the attic floor and cradle the bundled bird in my lap.

“It’s a bird, Penelope.”

“What if it has a broken wing?”

“It doesn’t. It swooped over my head before, right as rain.”

“What if—”

Linda is by my side then. She lifts the bundle of quilt from my hands. She funnels the bird out the window. For a moment it drops like a dark ball of lead into the night. Then its wings flare. We watch the little shadow of it, darting away through the honey locust tree.

“See? Right as rain,” Linda says. “Just had to let it go. That’s all.”

I will myself not to look at her. I won’t give her that satisfaction.

•••

We’re making our hunched way back across the attic to the ladder when I whack my bare toes on a loose floorboard and nearly fall flat on my face.

Linda’s the one who lets out a yelp. “You okay?”

I’m hopping on one foot, clutching the other. Linda blinds me with the flashlight, and I go down.

“Sorry!” Linda cries.

I don’t answer. Now my tailbone kills too. Wincing, I run my fingers along the end of the floorboard that tripped me up. It’s really loose—there are no nails anchoring it in place.

I look up at Linda. “Shine the light down here, will you?”

Linda steadies the beam so I can see. I tug at the floorboard. It lifts away.