“I sort of dig you,” he said, and laughed when she mock hit him in the chest.
“You’re lucky that I sort of dig you right back,” she said, and then she stopped and leaned against him.
“Thank you,” she said. Her voice was thick and heavy with her sincerity. “Thank you, Kelly.”
He hugged her, tucking her body protectively against his, and it felt right. This was how it was always supposed to be. He knew it, had known it since they were children, when she would flee through the trees to his house in the middle of the night, afraid of her mother and her father, of the screams and new holes in the wall. She didn’t want to stay in his room, but asked him to come stay beside her out in the trees.
“Remember when I’d pull my blanket out through my window?” he asked her. “And we’d go back by the woodshed to sleep? We were safe there.”
“How could I forget, Kelly? It was the only time I slept. You said you’d keep watch, that you’d be the last one awake, watching so my father wouldn’t find us.”
She was speaking into his shirt, burying her face into him like a newborn kitten.
“I loved you then, did you know that? Always, always. If my daddy found us, he would have killed us. But you still came.”
“You were always there for me, too,” he said. “You know it worked both ways. You were there whenever I needed you, and that was an awful lot.”
She pulled away and looked at him. He saw himself reflected in her irises, realized that she saw him and through him and made him even more him than he actually was. She saw someone strong and safe and dependable, an eight-year-old boy who turned into an awkward almost-man, but he was enough for her. He was everything, and his heart felt strangely light and happily strangled at the same time.
“I’ll always come for you,” he said simply, and the flurry of kisses on his face made him smile, made him laugh with the purity of being, and then they were walking hand-in-hand by the side of the road again, and even when night came and they were forced to sleep outside, without Kelly’s blanket, it wasn’t frightening. It was childhood, just like old times, and the scent of her hair and the cut grass was what heaven would smell like, he was sure of it.
#
Joy had nightmares during the night, but each time she would twist and cry out, Kelly would whisper, “I’m here,” and “you’re safe,” and “I love you.”
The I Love Yous didn’t come as natural as he would have thought. They were still unsure and sounded a bit grandiose, but they were real and sincere, and it pleased him that each time he whispered this, she quieted and turned toward him.
That’s what love was, he thought. Being the warm blanket for somebody else. Being the rain that brought their parched roots back to life. It was being their tether so they didn’t float off into space. It was growth and pain and responsibility. Love was a crematorium that lit you up and burned you out at the same time.
Joy woke up with sticks in her hair.
“I’m hungry. Are you?”
“Starved,” he answered.
They walked until they came to a filthy old gas station. “Dilapidated” came to Kelly’s mind, possibly for the first time in his life. They used the restrooms and washed up, then bought prepackaged sandwiches and drinks. They counted their folding money with an intensity that made the attendant behind the counter take notice.
“Where you headed?” the attendant asked.
“Nowhere in particular,” Joy said. “What’s around here?”
“Not a thing.”
Joy was biting her lip a bit too hard. The attendant watched this, too.
“Where do you live?” Joy asked, and both Kelly and the attendant were taken back by this.
“About two miles up the road.”
“Where’s the nearest city?”
“Probably Macon.” He pointed.
“Goin’ there anytime soon?”
Her voice was breathless. Hopeful. This is what hope sounded like. It sounded like a young girl asking a stranger for a ride to the city.
“Nah.” The attendant’s gaze narrowed. “Whatcha looking for in Macon?”
“Work. You’re sure you’re not going that way?”
“Nope.”
Joy shrugged.
“Too bad. Later.”
The bell dinged as she pushed her way out the door. Kelly was right behind her.
“What was that? That guy gives me the creeps. He’d rob us blind and leave our bodies in a field somewhere before he’d help us. What did you do that for?”
Joy kept walking, fast.
“Because he scares me, Kel. I knew he wouldn’t help us. But now if he’s looking for us, or wants to tell my daddy where we went, if there’s a reward, he’ll be looking in Macon. And that’s exactly where we won’t be.”
“Where will we be?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care. But not anywhere close to here. We’ll go somewhere wonderful. Somewhere just for us. Any place you’ve always wanted to see?”
There were people who dreamed of Egypt and Turkey and Thailand and other exotic places. Kelly had never done that. He assumed he’d be working right in town, or pretty close to it, all of his life. Just like his daddy and his daddy’s daddy. There wasn’t any shame in it.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Never thought of it. You?”
“Anywhere,” Joy said, and that was it.
Anywhere. He was pretty sure they’d make it.
She smiled up at him, blonde hair blowing in her eyes.
“Keep your expectations simple and you almost always get what you want,” she said, and squeezed his hand. “Then everything else that happens, well. It’s just a gift.”
He wanted to tell her that she was his gift, but it was too hokey to say. Maybe if he thought it hard enough, she’d hear it.
“I never thought I’d get you,” she said simply. The honesty cut through his teenage bone and sinew. He flushed, and she laughed when she saw it.
“You’re my wish,” she said, and jumped up to ruffle his hair. “I’ll always take care of you. Always.”
#
As they walked, the heat, the humidity, the car exhaust, and the long Southern grasses crowded in on Kelly’s lungs, making them smaller and fuller and unable to work. The air was all dust and dirt and pollen and his lungs sucked it in, shrieking for oxygen, but each breath had less air than the last. He collapsed on the ground, gasping, pulling in dirt and bits of weeds into his body, into his throat, and he felt them lodging there, making a home, taking root.
“I have you, baby. I have you,” Joy said, but words alone couldn’t make him well, and they both knew it.
Joy left him lying there, sprawled on the ground with his duffel bag as a pillow, and she ran to the road.
“Help!” she screamed, waving her arms, and a pretty young thing radiating hope and desperation in the Southern sunlight would make anybody stop. A car slowed down immediately, and she leaned in the passenger window.
“I think my friend’s having a terrible asthma attack. Could you help us? Please?”
The driver seemed doubtful, but Joy’s eyes sparkled with tears, real tears, honest-to-goodness tears, and the driver realized he had a chance to be a hero. The time for heroics seemed long past, left someplace back in the war, but here was a woman who needed help to save a person she cared for, and this driver was just the one to help them.
He hopped out, grabbed a backpack from his trunk, and followed the girl through the weeds until she stopped at the side of a tall, lanky boy, just this side of manhood. He’d curled up into the fetal position and was breathing in dirt with every gasping breath.
“This won’t do,” the driver said, and he pulled the boy up, cradling him.
“You need to sit up,” he told Kelly. “And you need to take deep breaths. Deep ones, son. Darlin’, open that bag and hand me the inhaler, would you? My stepson uses one. We keep one in every vehicle.”
Joy’s hands shook, but she unzipped the bag and
did what he asked.
Kelly was gasping, taking in half a breath, less than that. Joy watched his face, reaching out to briefly touch his blue lips.
“This boy needs a hospital,” the driver said. He started to pull Kelly to his feet. Joy helped him.
“We can’t go to one,” she said. Kelly was draped over her, and she kissed his cheek over and over as she and the driver pulled him to the car. “We don’t have any money. And they’ll take him away from me, that’s what they’ll do. They’ll bring him back home. We can’t go back.”
The man looked at both Kelly and Joy, and then sighed.
“Okay. Fine. Let’s do what we can.”
Joy hopped in the back seat and pulled Kelly in beside her. The driver leaned in and checked Kelly’s eyes.
“Good, you’re back with us. Keep breathing, boy. In and out. Good air filling your lungs. Hold on to that pretty girl next to you and I’ll get you someplace safe.”
Kelly rested his head on Joy’s shoulder and closed his eyes. He felt her hands run across his face. He remembered those hands holding cotton candy at the state fair last summer, beautiful and graceful even though two of her fingers had been broken and bandaged.
“Are you okay, baby?” she asked him. Her voice was as sweet as honey. “Are you okay?”
“Okay,” he managed, but any more words were too hard to say. He breathed in and out, in and out, for what seemed like a very long time.
The car stopped.
“Just a second,” the man said, and stepped out.
Kelly struggled to open his eyes but they were too heavy. “Is he…?”
“He brought us to a motel. I don’t think he’ll tell anybody.”
They didn’t say another word until the driver opened the back door.
“Come on, kids,” he said. “I’ll help you.”
“I can walk, sir,” Kelly say politely, but unfolding himself from the backseat took more energy than he expected.
“I know you can,” the man said, “but let an old man feel useful.”
They made their way up the metal steps and the man opened the door with a keycard. The room was small and dingy, but clean enough. It had a bed, and that was all that mattered to Kelly.
“I’ll just lie down for a second,” he said, and was asleep immediately.
The driver filled a plastic cup up with water and handed it to Joy. She pulled Kelly’s shoes off his feet and then took it.
“What are you going to do now?” the driver asked.
Joy drained the cup in two gulps. The driver refilled it and handed it back.
“Guess we’ll rest up for a day and then head out again. Thank you so much, sir.”
The driver sighed.
“I don’t like it. You know I don’t. Asthma is scary at best, fatal at worst.”
Joy paled, but the man continued.
“But I can see how stubborn you are about not going back to wherever you came from, and from the looks of you, you actually might be better off. So stay. And take this. He should keep it on him. Just in case.”
He dropped the inhaler onto the cheap motel table. Then he slid a couple of soft, worn bills there, as well.
Joy’s lip trembled.
“We won’t be able to pay you back.”
The man smiled.
“You don’t have to. I get the sense you’ve had a bad time of it. Not everyone is out to get you. Get yourself into the city and away from all of this dust. You seem like good kids.”
He nodded his head, stepped out of the room, and quietly pulled the door shut behind him.
Joy looked at the money on the table. She looked at Kelly asleep on the bed. She kicked off her own shoes and curled up next to him. She watched him breathe for a very long time, in and out, clean breath after clean breath, careful not to fall asleep until she was certain he was safe.
#
Kelly woke up with sunshine in his eyes and an ache deep in his lungs. He groaned and stretched out. His stocking feet were hanging off the short bed. He could see his big toe sticking out of his right sock.
“Baby?” Joy was right there, her eyes wide. Her hands were baby birds, fluttering here and plucking there. She tested his arms and chest and neck and collarbone as if she was afraid he had shattered apart during the night.
The way his body and head felt, perhaps he had.
“Hey,” he said, and that was all he got out. A simple “hey” and then he was breathing in her hair as she flung herself at him. He was choking again, going under once more, but this time it was a glorious thing.
“I’m okay,” he assured her, and he very nearly thought of sitting, oh yes he did, but it felt so good to lie there, rest his weary body, and simply take a second to bask in the experience that was a happy, relieved Joy.
“Never again, never again,” she told him. “We’re not walking in those weeds any more. Look, the man from yesterday gave us some money and we’re not too far from a bus station. That’s what we should do, Kel. Buy two tickets and go as far as the money will let us. But maybe breakfast first. Are you hungry?”
Was he hungry? His stomach had more teeth than a barracuda. He could eat everything ever cooked in the world. Yesterday, he swore that if he walked past one more cow chewing its cud, he’d leap over the fence and bite the animal right on its haunches, he was so hungry.
“I could eat,” he said politely.
Joy looked at him. She looked at his face and his body that housed his traitorous lungs. She looked at his one pale toe poking out of his stupid sock. She looked hard and then she covered her face and laughed. She laughed so much that tears slid out from under her fingers. She laughed and then she was sobbing, and then she was laughing again.
Kelly didn’t know what to say. He laid his hand on her knee and waited until her breathing had righted itself.
“I’m sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes. The bruise was starting to heal up some. That made Kelly happy. “I don’t know why that was so funny. I just…. I need you, Kel. You’re my North Star and the thing that always sets me to rights. You’re something special. What would I do without you?”
He struggled to sit up.
“Feed me and you’ll never have to know, bunny. But if I don’t eat soon, I’ll waste away to clear nothing, and that will be the end of me. Then you’ll be alone.”
“Don’t say it.”
He grinned.
“Alone and forgotten.”
“Don’t you say that!”
He tickled her, and her pale hair in the sunshine was the prettiest thing he’d ever seen.
“Alone forever and ever and ever, unless you feed me right now!”
She laughed and this time he laughed with her. They tickled and fought and kissed, and then they kissed some more, this time with more intensity. Joy pulled the curtains, and the sun prowled around outside, wondering why it wasn’t allowed in. Years from now, when he’d think back on his last truly happy moment, this was the one that would come to mind.
#
The money was carefully tallied and bus tickets were purchased. After walking through the weeds, the bus felt like a grand thing, a chariot of the finest paint and steel. Kelly sat in the window seat with a freshly showered Joy asleep on his shoulder. This was how it was always supposed to be.
The woman in front of Kelly turned around in her seat.
“Where ya from?” she asked.
Kel’s mind stopped, a rabbit frozen at the sight of danger. This danger was wearing a kerchief and had sparkling eyes, but danger all the same.”
“Um. Utah.”
She raised one eyebrow. “You’re going the wrong way for Utah.”
Kelly shrugged. “I want to see everywhere.”
“And your girlfriend. She from Utah, too?”
Kelly felt his face change. It went dark, pulled itself into an expression he didn’t know his face muscles could make. He briefly imagined that he looked at the woman through slitted pupils like a cat, or a venomous snake. He tighten
ed his arm around his sleeping Joy.
“You have something against Utah?” he asked, and the woman turned herself around.
Kelly leaned his head against the window. His limbs still felt heavy from yesterday, the brush with fragility, the way that his body took in new flora and fauna and rejected it. At home he mowed the lawn and ran outside without issue, but this was somewhere different. All of this was…different.
Kelly wondered about his mother, who would be beyond hysterical by now. He bet she lit up the phone tree at home, calling all of the neighbors. He wondered if Joy’s dad was one of them.
He shuddered, and Joy made a small sound in her sleep.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he whispered into her hair. “It’s me. I’m awake. I’m watching over you.”
They rolled closer into the city and Kelly tried to keep his soul from crumbling in despair.
“We can do this,” he whispered to Joy. “We can.”
The city was gray sky over gray cement over gray pavement. Rain shimmered down and pasted the wet garbage to the street.
“Joy,” Kelly said, and nudged her. “We’re here.”
They grabbed their bags. They grabbed each other’s hands.
“We made it,” Joy breathed, and Kelly bit back his desolation.
She turned to him. Her eyes shone with tears that had nothing to do with broken bones or terrified humiliation. “He’ll never touch me again,” she said, and Kelly could hear Joy’s heart sing. It was a cheerful melody in C Major.
“Never,” he agreed. “We won’t let him. He’ll never find you.”
He had always read about happy tears, but he hadn’t ever heard them until now. They sounded sweet. They sounded like horror. Kelly and Joy strode away from the bus station like two people who had purpose, but this was a lie.
They never had such little purpose in their lives. After the bus tickets, they had only enough money to grab a fast food hamburger two times.
Twice.
At home, Kelly would be downing burgers and spaghetti and milkshakes and whatever his mom would place in front of him. She understood lank teenage boys with hollow legs and grumbling stomachs. But here, food was harder to come by. After five days and two hamburgers, things felt dire.
Lullabies For Suffering: Tales of Addiction Horror Page 24
