by Trevor Shane
I’d always known that starting a new life wasn’t going to be easy. I just hadn’t expected every single person that I met to remind me of that. After three days we agreed that you should start looking for work too. I wasn’t too happy about having you out in the world alone, but we needed the cash and you seemed a lot more innocent than I did. You were still less than two months pregnant. You weren’t showing yet. We both knew that changes were going to start happening quick, though. I couldn’t ask you to sleep in the car much longer. It was uncomfortable enough as it was. As your stomach grew, it would only get worse. We needed to find you a bed, even if it was a different bed every few nights.
After you’d spent a couple days looking for jobs, we decided to rent a room at a hotel outside the city. There was a local bus stop outside. The hotel wasn’t extravagant by any standards, but it was still a hit to our dwindling supply of money. The money was running short but we needed the hotel room. You needed to rest. I needed to shower.
You were already in the hotel room when I got home from another day of rejection. I remember putting the key in the door, hearing nothing but silence from inside. I remember thinking that you must still be out, braving the rejection better than I was.
I turned the knob on the door and pushed my way inside. You were sitting upright on the edge of the bed. Your hands were in your lap and you were staring at the wall. The television was off. You didn’t budge when I opened the door. You could have been a mannequin, based on how much you moved. I stepped beside you so that I could get a look at what you were staring at. Behind the television set, above the dresser, was a mirror. You were staring at yourself in the mirror.
“You okay?” I asked.
“No,” you replied, your voice flat, your eyes still dry.
“What happened?” I asked. You took your eyes off your reflection and moved them onto me.
“I don’t know if I can do this, Joe.”
“What happened?” I asked again.
“Who is that, Joe?” you asked, pointing toward your reflection in the mirror.
“That’s Maria,” I responded, taking your face in my hands and kissing you on your forehead. “That’s Maria. That will always be Maria.”
“Then why do I call myself by another name when I meet strangers?” you asked. We had agreed to start using pseudonyms. It was safer.
“The name you call yourself doesn’t change who you are.”
“But I don’t recognize myself, either, Joe. It’s not just the name. I walk down the street and people look at me and they don’t see me. They see someone else.” I knew you were telling the truth. I’d been living with that for most of my life. There were only a handful of people in the world who looked at me and saw me. Everyone else saw a mirage, an illusion. Your life had become that way now too. It hurt me to see it, but to the world, your identity had to be a secret now. To me, you’ll always be Maria.
“They don’t know you, Maria. It doesn’t matter what they see.”
“It matters to me, Joe. Because I’m afraid that one day, I’m going to forget who I am and I’m just going to see what they see.”
“What happened? What triggered this?”
“I was in a store today, a clothing store downtown.” Your eyes darted around the room as you spoke, as if you were afraid someone was watching us. “I decided to apply for a job, to see if maybe they could use another salesgirl. The woman I went to speak with was an older woman. She started asking me some questions, you know, basic job questions about my experience and stuff. Then she looked at me. She took a long, hard look at me. It made me so nervous. I just kept thinking to myself, does she know who I am? Then she smiled and I got so scared.” You looked up at me, your eyes pleading with me to make it stop. Your voice trembled. “Then she said to me, ‘You look so familiar, darling. Why do you look so familiar?’ And all I could think was, this woman wants to steal my baby.” Your whole body started to tremble now. “I can’t do this, Joe. I can’t live like this. That poor kid in Ohio. He seemed so nice. He was so nice to me. He was so nice to me and all along he just wanted to steal my baby. And now he’s dead and I see him in every face that I meet and I don’t feel guilty, I just feel afraid.”
I stood up. “It’s the paranoia, Maria,” I told you. “It’s healthy. I have it too. One of the first things they taught me is that only the paranoid survive. It’s that fear that will guard you. You learn to live with it.” I walked over to the bathroom to wash my face. I walked over to the bathroom to wash the sins off my skin.
“Everything they taught you is insane, Joe!” you yelled at me so that you could be heard over the running water.
I walked back out of the bathroom. I walked over to you and kissed you on the cheek. “Everything but that,” I said softly.
The next day, I found a job.
I found an advertisement in the paper for a carpenter’s helper. It was the eighth ad that I’d answered that morning. The guy who answered my call was gruff and to the point. He liked the fact that I spoke English. He asked me if I had my own tools. I told him that I didn’t but that I was willing to buy them. The job paid ten dollars an hour.
“When do I start?” I asked.
“Six A.M. tomorrow morning,” he answered, giving me the address where I needed to go.
Paying for the tools was pretty much going to wipe out the rest of our savings, but they were an investment. There was no way that I could turn down work. Ten dollars an hour. It would take me two days just to make enough money to pay for the tools I had to buy. But after all we’d been through already, ten dollars an hour sounded like a fortune.
As instructed, I showed up on the site the next day with a brand new tool belt, new hammer, new tape measure, and new cat’s claw. When I went to the store to buy the stuff, I had to ask the guy working there what a cat’s claw was. He showed me an item that looked like a miniature crowbar. “It helps you to pull out nails. You hammer this end under the nail, pull the other end like a lever, and the nail comes out.”
“Fine,” I said, just wanting to get out of there. “I’ll take it.” After spending the money, I knew that we’d be back sleeping in the car for the next couple of days. I’d get paid at the end of the week. One week, and I’d earn almost as much money as we had started with, only this time it would be our money, money we earned. It felt like the start of something. It felt like the start of a normal life.
The job was pretty simple. We were tearing a house down and building a new one on top of the old one’s foundation. It was just two of us, just me and Frank. I showed up at the site twenty minutes early on the first day. When I got to the site, I backed the car into a parking space so Frank wouldn’t see the smashed-in trunk. Then I sat on the hood and waited. The air was cool and damp but I could tell it was going to be a hot day. It was quiet. Then I heard a car pull up.
Frank was about forty years old. He drove a white pickup truck with some rust on the sides. He had a red beard, trimmed short, but covering much of the front of his neck. He wore jeans and a T-shirt. He didn’t bother to look at me when he first arrived. He simply went to the back of the truck and climbed into the truck bed. I walked over. “Take these three barrels,” he said, motioning toward three white buckets, “and carry them over toward the house.” I grabbed the first barrel. It was heavy. I looked inside. It was full of nails. I carried it over toward the old house and found some dry ground to place it on. Then I went back to the truck. I looked in the next barrel. It was full of nails that were about 50 percent larger than those in the first bucket. “No slacking on my time.” The man peered at me when I got back to the truck. “You can carry both barrels at once. We’ve got a lot to do today.” I grabbed the next two barrels by their handles. The third barrel was more of the same, full of nails, this time even smaller than those in the first bucket. I dropped the two buckets off next to the first and returned to the truck bed. “All right, now help me get this thing down,” he said, motioning toward a gas-powered generator that was sitti
ng in the truck bed. He pushed it off the truck and I grabbed it by one end. He grabbed the other and we walked it down toward where I had left the buckets of nails.
Once we’d set the generator down on level ground, Frank stood up. “Name’s Frank,” he said, extending his hand toward me without taking his eyes off the house.
I grabbed his hand firmly and shook it. “I’m Jeff,” I responded. I had been using Jeff since I’d arrived. I liked still having the J in my name. It made me feel like I wasn’t completely forgetting my family.
“Well, Jeff, you showed up on time, that’s something. You look strong and I see you got yourself some shiny new tools.” Frank looked down at my tool belt and laughed to himself. “So you work and I’ll pay for that work and we’ll see how long this thing lasts.”
“So what’s the job?” I asked, eager to get started.
“You’re looking at it,” Frank said, motioning toward the house. “We tear the old house down and build a new one on top of it. We’re going to expand the foundation a bit, but mostly, we’re just building up.”
“Is it just the two of us?” I asked.
“Yup,” Frank answered.
The air grew hot that first day. I don’t know if I’d ever sweated so much in my life. By noon, I had worked harder, physically, than I had ever worked in my life. At first it was just hammering, knocking the old boards of wood off the frame of the house. My right forearm was sore from the hammering. Even when I stopped, I could still feel the bones in my forearm vibrating. But by noon I’d already made over fifty bucks.
At about five-thirty, Frank turned to me and said, “Help me get this shit back on the truck.” I helped him carry the generator, some tools, and the buckets of nails back to the truck and load it onto the truck bed. By six o’clock, everything was packed up again. You couldn’t even tell that we had been there, except that the house that had stood there this morning was now barely more than a skeleton. Before Frank drove away, he turned to me and said, “So you going to be here in the morning?” I think he could see how exhausted I was.
“Six o’clock?” I asked.
“Six o’clock,” Frank responded, nodding his head and driving away.
That night, you told me that you wanted to cook dinner for me, a real man’s dinner, you said. I appreciated the thought but we were sleeping in the car. We didn’t have the money to go out, so instead you made us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and we had a picnic on the hood of the car. You told me that you were proud of me, though, and that was good enough for me.
All I did that first week was work and sleep. On Friday, I got paid. Frank had no problem paying in cash. “It’s your money,” he said to me. “You earned it. Whether you want to give any to the government is none of my business.” I let him think that I was only interested in skipping out on taxes. I never told him the real reason I needed to be paid under the table. After I got paid, we moved out of the car and started staying in motels again. The timing was good. Your back was beginning to hurt and I was glad to get you into a real bed.
The following week, you found a job too. You’d been spending a lot of time at the local bookstore, reading. After four days there, they asked you if you wanted to work the register part-time. It didn’t pay much but the job wasn’t too taxing for you and meant an extra $150 a week for us. With our combined incomes, we were able to start saving some money. I wanted a buffer. We needed the buffer because there was no way to know when we were going to have to run again. It was bound to happen. It was just a matter of time.
As the days went by, Frank started to trust me more and started to give me work that was more demanding than knocking down walls and carrying buckets of nails. Slowly, I started to learn things from him, practical things. First, Frank had me simply measuring and cutting wood. He’d hand me a sheet of paper with a bunch of measurements on it. Six ten-foot two-by-fours. Eight eighteen-foot two-by-twelves. I sat on the pile of wood with a tape measure and pencil, marking the wood and cutting it down with the buzz saw. I tried to remember everything Frank told me, not caring what other information it was going to dislodge from my memory.
“The buzz-saw blade is about an eighth of an inch wide,” Frank told me on that second week before he trusted me to start cutting the valuable lumber. “You can’t make a cut without taking into account the size of the blade. Once you cut, that eighth of an inch is gone. It’s sawdust. You cut, you take wood away, there’s no getting around it.” He took the buzz saw in his hand to demonstrate, lining the blade up along the outside of the pencil line that he’d drawn. “So when you saw,” Frank yelled over the grinding of the circular blade, “you have to cut to the outside of the line or you’ll be cutting the wood too short.” He sawed through the wood so I could see the eighth of an inch that simply vanished. “Don’t cut the wood too short. It’s expensive.” After cutting the wood, I’d haul it down toward the base of the house. I spent days just cutting and hauling lumber.
Each week grew easier than the last. My body started to acclimate to the heat. I was less tired at night. I realized that I could ease the soreness in my forearm by gripping the hammer less tightly. Days went on. Your job at the bookstore was going well. We tried to remember to switch motels every three nights. Sometimes, we let a night or two slide. Things seemed to be going well. One night, when I got home to our motel room, you handed me something in a brown paper bag. It was this journal. You asked me to write for you. You said that you wanted to understand me. I remember looking at you with well-earned skepticism. My life was a secret. That’s how it had always been. That’s how it was supposed to be. Still, you made me promise you that I’d try.
Two nights later, after you had fallen asleep, I opened the journal and wrote about the woman I had strangled in Brooklyn. It was easier to write than I’d thought it would be. It helped that I felt like I was writing about someone else’s life.
The days quickly turned into weeks and then the weeks into months. The days were all the same. The only thing that marked the passage of time was the changing motels and you. Your stomach grew with each passing day. Your body changed. We did our best to keep our guard up. It wasn’t always easy. Sometimes, we had to remind ourselves that nothing had changed. People were still out there looking for us. It couldn’t be this easy. I knew it. Even you knew it. Still, it was often all too easy to forget that we were still running. Sometimes, I only remembered in my sleep. I had dreams, but in my dreams I was never running. I was always the one doing the chasing and the people I was chasing were running for their lives. When I had those dreams, I would wake up in a cold sweat. When I woke up like that, I’d write in this journal for you. I was purging.
You brought a book home from the bookstore that explained what you were going through, what our baby was going through, on a week-by-week basis. We couldn’t afford to take you to the doctor, so we relied on the book. We learned that your blood volume had increased by 50 percent, a fact that just floored me. We made it through morning sickness. Your skin broke out but then cleared up again. Your clothes stopped fitting. We’d have to get you new ones. It was going to eat further into our limited budget. Meanwhile, the baby was growing. It was developing a skeleton, a brain, its own heartbeat. It was becoming a person. Soon we’d be able to feel the baby move. It made everything else so easy to forget.
After about two months of working, I paid to have the trunk of the rental car fixed. We could have tried to trade it in, but without papers, it would have been tough. This way saved us money to boot. They hammered the dents out of the trunk and repainted it to cover the scratches. When they were done, it looked almost new.
I’d started getting into a routine at work. Frank began to loosen up. He taught me so much. He taught me how to measure out and hammer in the studs for the walls in the proper intervals. He taught me where to place my foot when I was angling nails down into the studs in order to keep them flush. We worked together sometimes, making sure the frame of the house was level, pulling and pushing and hamm
ering it into place. I learned some lessons more quickly than others. Frank taught me how to hammer a warped piece of wood until it was flush with a straight piece. You simply lined the boards up together and drove a nail diagonally into the warped piece, hammering the nail through until the warped piece straightened out. Once the nail went through the warped piece and entered the second board, each swing of the hammer would straighten the warped board out. Soon, the two pieces would be forced flush. Sometimes it took more than one nail. If you did it right, though, when you were done, you could barely see where one board ended and the other began.
It didn’t always appear to work. One afternoon, I was working with two boards and I just couldn’t get them to go flush. “Hey, Frank. What do you do when the boards won’t go flush even after you’ve put in a couple of nails?” Frank looked at me. He didn’t say a word. He took his hammer and dropped it into the leather loop at the bottom of his tool belt. Then he walked over to me. He took my own hammer out of my hands. He held it in his hand, measuring the weight. Then he raised the head of the hammer and he swung the hammer down four times, two times on each of the nails that I had tried to use to make the wood flush. In four swings, Frank had done what I couldn’t do in twenty. He handed the hammer back to me. I looked down at the two pieces of wood, now a single solid block.
“Sometimes,” Frank said as he walked away from me without bothering to turn his head, “there are no tricks. Sometimes, you just have to swing harder.”
