Paper Stones

by Laurie Ray Hill

  Finally he says, “So you’re just like Jenny?”

  I can’t look at him. Kitchen window’s a square of purple blue behind his shoulder. Robins out there singing as the dark comes on. Working overtime to raise up their next generation to fly.

  “Rose?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I was saying you’re in the same boat as what Jenny is.”

  “Was, when I was a kid.”

  “Why didn’t you never tell me this before?”

  I says, “Didn’t want to make you sad about how the world is, Dave. Didn’t want you looking at every kid you seen and wondering if they were going through hell.”

  “You got no business to try and look after how I see the world! That ain’t up to you. You got to just level with me.”

  I heard like an echo. Rose, can you give us an example of something that is not your responsibility?

  So I done my best to level with him. We spent a long time there talking about Dad and Mom and me and Sandra. I didn’t hold back nothing.

  I was thinking, what the hell. This is the last time I’ll ever see him anyways.

  Then Dave, he jumped in with a different topic. Started telling me the whole nine yards on his drug dealing days.

  Me and Dave in the kitchen, screwed up humans, putting all our faults and our shame on the table. We didn’t turn the light on.

  Dave said there was something about the quick buck you can get for weed, eh. He said he’s working steady with Tom now. Likes the work. Pay is fine. Everything’s going good. And yet, he says, a guy he used to know come up to him sideways the other day after work, offered to let him in on something.

  I looked at Dave, sharp. Not that it was my place to say nothing. If he was going to tell me he was backsliding, selling dope again, what was I going to say? Tsk, tsk?

  Dave said he didn’t go for it.

  “You’re better than me,” I says.

  Now, what he was wondering, he says, is whether the way he felt dealing would be anything along the lines of the way I felt sleeping around.

  I can’t believe this man. He’s trying to understand! That’s what he’s talking about this for! He’s trying to understand where I’m coming from, what could’ve made me go and be unfaithful to him. He’s not hitting me over the head with a kitchen chair like maybe I deserve. He’s thinking of how he’s not perfect himself, and he’s trying to get a feel for what made me do what I done!

  I tell him there’s nobody else like him in the world. I tell him I love him dearer than I do another human being outside of Jenny. I tell him he’s the kindest person, even to try and think how to understand, after what I’ve did!

  We sit there listening to the birds’ music.

  “Wanting to sell dope, eh, it’s not even for the money anymore,” he says. He looks down, sheepish, and he says, so quiet I can hardly hear him, “It’s for—I get sort of a buzz.”

  “Yeah!” I says. “Like the air changes?”

  He looks up quick.

  “That’s a way to put it.”

  “Everything’s sharper? Your heart’s pounding?”

  Dave nods, eager. “Yeah. Yeah.”

  “Meredith our group leader calls it ‘heightened intensity.’ Says it’s from adrenaline.”

  It’s pretty near dark. We’re these two shapes, and our two voices are coming out in bursts. Naming what it feels like to get a rush off something bad.

  “It feels real, real good for a minute!”

  “Oh yeah! But then you feel like shit for months.”

  “That’s the truth.”

  We talk about that we want to make good lives. If it’s nothing but adrenaline, some chemical in our blood, that makes us act bad, we don’t want that. We can do without them couple of high minutes. We agree there’s ways to feel good for a long, long time. Like loving each other and Jenny. Regular decent life don’t give us a buzz, but it adds up to a damn sight more in the long run.

  My anxiety red-hot chest is turning hot pink and tingly with hope bubbles. Dave puts his hand on mine.

  I look up, and there’s three stars framed in the window.

  The night Dave got to know the worst about me and still liked me anyways!

  Three stars in the window! Me, him, and Jenny.

  Them stars seemed to come back to me like the chorus of a song because of the three stars Josie showed me, so long ago now, in her picture of her precious town.

  Nine o’clock in the morning, nothing would hold Jenny. She got one look at Dave’s truck out there waiting for her. Bust out the front door like the bronco out of the chute. I’m trying to hang on to her while the foster care lady’s saying goodbye.

  “See yous around five!” I call to her over my shoulder while Jenny’s dragging me down the front steps.

  Dave jumps out of the truck.

  The two of them make a run for each other. It would have did anybody’s heart good to see. He catches her up into the air, with her little yellow sneakers waving. She clamps her arms around his neck fit to choke him.

  He’d have choked to death, cheerful, sooner than loosen her off.

  28.

  SO THAT’S HOW ME AND DAVE got back. I told him a thousand times how I was sorry and wasn’t never going to do nothing like that again. He told me he was sorry for the dealing and wasn’t never going to do that again. We said we could help each other.

  We had a good morning down by the bay with Jenny. She showed Dave how she could skip stones now. He told her he learned from the same old man that taught her. She stood there with her feet planted, looking up at big Dave and trying to take in the idea that he had once been a little kid like her. And old Al was his father!

  When she was tired out playing on the shore, we went home and made pancakes. Dave and Jenny were settling down to read their story. She had to remind him what had been happening when they left off three weeks ago.

  He says, “There was a flood coming, wasn’t there?”

  “No,” she tells him, like he’s slow, “it’s the Australian outback. What’s coming must be a fire.”

  “Oh, fire, yeah,” he says, and he winks at me over her head, as much as to say, so smart!

  He read to her a long time. She fell asleep with her head against him, there on the couch. Fire out of control on three sides and a mountain behind, but she’s safe with Dave. We let her nap.

  We had a lot of patching up to do.

  Dave was awful pissed at Dirk. Wanted to go punch his lights out.

  I says, “There’s no use blaming him any more than we need to be blaming anybody who bought what you were selling. This problem here is between my own two ears. It’s me, Dave,” I says. “I can control this. And if I don’t, it’s my own fault.”

  I told Dave alls I could about it after we’d took Jenny back that night. We went for a long walk. I told him I figured I could handle this type of thing now, if he could give me another chance. I told him I was getting sorted out.

  It felt good to finally find something that was my own fault. My childhood was not my fault. But the thing with Dirk, that was. And I could do better. It was up to me.

  Sunday night come too quick, and Dave was back out in the mud room, sticking his feet into his boots. Took us a half hour to say goodbye. He said he’d come back Friday.

  “You know, eh Rosie, that you’ve hurt me bad.”

  I’m crying. I mumble about being ashamed.

  He says, “My mom and dad always told me there was no harm in being ashamed of what I done wrong. They said that’s how people learn. If you do something that ain’t fit for a good person to do and feel real ashamed of it, that’s how you come to do better next time.”

  “That’s like what Meredith tells us at Group. We’re not to be ashamed of ourselves, only of our wrong actions.”

  Dave says, “That’s righ
t. Nobody says you need to be ashamed of yourself here, honey. Just of what you done wrong.”

  “Oh, Dave!”

  “Same as me. After we had that close one with Brent there and yous had to help me cover it up quick and I lost all that money and could’ve gotten sent to jail… I was so ashamed of that mess! I finally smartened up. I thought, fuck this, I thought, this has came damn close to wrecking my whole life. What if I got sent to jail? What about Rose and Jenny and Dad? I thought, I’m done with this!”

  I hugged him and kissed him, thanking my stars he wasn’t going to be in no jail.

  He says, “I guess you’re still going to that Tuesday night group?”

  “You bet.”

  “Keep on,” he says. “They’ll get yous sorted out.”

  I watched him clump down the stairs, his camo hunting jacket and his ballcap there. He looked back up at me from the downstairs door.

  How could he love me? But it was plain to see he did. My lucky, lucky ticket!

  It was the grace of God, according to Sally on the phone. It was the merciful kindness of the everlasting Father.

  I says, “So, Sally,” I says, “where was this merciful God when we was kids?” We had a long argument on the phone about the mercy of God, which don’t always come when it would do the most good, seems to me.

  Sally, she tells me I ask the wrong questions. She says I’d be farther ahead to accept the goodness that’s coming my way now and thank the Lord for it.

  “I’ll take it,” I says. “And I’m glad of it. But if I thank anybody, it’s more likely Dave and you and Josie, Dave’s dad, Marg, Frances, Meredith, more than God.”

  “Well, who do you figure sends you all them people to love you and help you out and show you the way?”

  “Same place that sends me all the ones that screw me up.”

  “You’re living in outer darkness there, Rose, where there’s going to be wailing and gnashing of teeth,” Sally tells me. But she don’t sound like it bothers her. She’s so glad me and Dave are back on the rails.

  I can hear Dave’s dad in the background, asking questions. Sally tells him that everything’s blessed peachy.

  The rest of them all called too, and I was on the phone half the night, telling my good news.

  I went to see Josie. There she is, in her wheelchair by the window. She turns to me. Smile on her like noon sun on a chrome bumper.

  Give her a hug. No need to tell her nothing. She knows. I just take a seat beside her and sit there, the both of us grinning.

  “Josie?” I says, after a while. “Friday morning, about seven-thirty, I was so worked up about the weekend coming and scared what was going to happen with Dave, I shut my eyes and tried to talk to you. Did you, by any chance, like pick that up…?”

  She reaches down into a carry sack she’s got hanging on her chair there. Takes a snapshot out of a pink envelope. The Strone town fountain in spring with a bed of yellow tulips!

  Between her and Sally, they can just about talk me into seeing the everlasting arms of mercy holding up the world.

  She goes fishing in her bag again. Comes up with a smooth stone. I sat quiet, watching her rub her see-through thumb on the stone.

  Now, how in the world could she know about the tulips? I wondered over it for a few minutes. Then I just give a shrug, the way Josie does herself.

  Her thumb was still running over the smooth stone. In my mind, I started to see bright gold, flickering wave patterns and criss-cross patterns, like light playing on the bottom of a lake. I bet she was doing that to my brain. Few months ago I would’ve jumped out of the chair and shook myself to get rid of the weird feeling, told her to quit messing with my head. But, by this point, so many weird things had happened that I sort of give up.

  I relaxed there, breathed deep, let my body go limp, my arms heavy on the chair arms, watched Josie’s thumb rub the stone, looked at the bright ripples it was casting on the back of my mind, thinking, okay. Don’t care if it’s weird. Don’t care if I understand how or why. Josie was with me some way when I was looking at yellow tulips last Friday, praying for Dave to still love me. Josie’s showing me the bright lake rippling over the gold sand.

  A story Sally likes to tell come floating through my mind. Suffering person come up to Jesus Christ once, begging to get healed. JC’s weird question was, “Do you want to be healed?”

  Such an odd question. And what’s it got to do with Josie’s thumb and the tulips and the lake ripples?

  Didn’t know. Didn’t care. Sat there letting the bright little waves wash over me, thinking, okay. There’s bad in the world, but there is also good. There’s friendship and there’s luck and there’s love. Ain’t my job to figure it all out. Just have to let it be. Okay. I want to be healed. I want to be healed.

  I tried to talk to Dave, before, about what would happen if my sister Sandra went ahead and married Ian. Dave, he never could take it serious. Always said Sandra was going to wake up any minute and call off the wedding. The wedding was getting close now, though. And no signs of her waking up.

  “Call her again,” Dave says, the next weekend. “Set her straight.”

  “I already talked myself blue in the face.”

  “She can’t be really going to.”

  I says, “She is really going to!”

  “No way.”

  “She is, Dave.”

  “You got to tell her not to.”

  “What do you think I been telling her for the last six months?”

  “Talk her out of it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “But, if she marries the prick, they’ll never let her take Jenny back.”

  “No, they won’t.”

  “It don’t hurt to try again,” he says.

  Well it did hurt, as a matter of fact. But I tried. Saturday morning. Dave was standing in the kitchen, in his bare feet, backing me up. Sandra’s phone was ringing. I says to Dave, “I said it all fifty times.”

  “Hello?”

  “Sandra,” I says. “Listen, could we meet someplace?”

  She agreed to that so I went down to the coffee place.

  No Sandra. Waited half an hour, playing with a spoon. I pushed on the bowl end and made the stem end go up and down.

  I’m wasting my precious weekend afternoon. Dave’s hanging around the apartment and here I am sitting here, eh. I’m just about fed up when she shows up. I don’t waste no more time. I start right in and tell her she’s got to leave Ian.

  “What would I have in the world if I left Ian?”

  I says, “You’d be ten times happier, for one thing.”

  “I’d have nothing,” she says.

  “Your daughter is nothing?”

  “I mean,” she says, “that I’d have no love in my life, nothing to live for.”

  “Sandra, he’s not the only man on the planet earth. And even if he was, a man is not the only thing you can live for.”

  “He wants to marry me.”

  “Another one could want to marry you.”

  “Ha!” she says. “Sure.”

  See? That’s the whole thing right there, the way I’m starting to look at it. Self-worth, they call it at Group. Sandra’s got a bad case of low self-worth.

  I sat there staring at my coffee mug. I know every stinking detail of how her self-worth got to be what it is. I looked at her mouth, the way she was chewing on her lip. I could see our old man’s hairy dick shoving into that mouth when she was no bigger than Jenny (bad sights list). Her gagging (bad sounds list). The smell of Dad’s ass (bad smells list). I reached across and tried to take her hand, but she shook me off.

  I was trying to take away the best thing in her life, the way she was looking at it. I was trying to screw up her one chance at happiness.

  There’s other stuff to live for, besides a relationship. I
tried saying that again.

  “There’s no point to nothing if I’m not with him. He makes me feel alive.”

  That alive feeling. The buzz. What a person will do to get that!

  I tried to give her some idea what they do for you at Group.

  Sandra, she said I seemed more lighthearted before I started in with the damn Group.

  “Lighthearted? I was just never talking about nothing serious. I was Minimizing my problems.”

  “Alls that group’s did for you, Rose,” she says, “is it’s made you a pain in the butt. Now you think you know it all and you want to tell everybody else how to run their life.”

  Sandra was mad at me, but she wanted to cry too.

  “You used to just be there for me!” she says.

  “Look,” I says, “I could be home with Dave. He’s got to leave this aft. But I’m sitting here with you.”

  “You won’t even come to my wedding!”

  “I’ll come to your wedding—”

  She looked up quick, but I wasn’t done my sentence.

  “I’ll come to your wedding the day you find yourself a decent man to marry. Not a pervert like what our father was!”

  People was starting to turn around and look at us. I didn’t give a shit. I was started.

  I says, “There’s a woman called Pam at the shelter.”

  Sandra looked at me. She quit chewing her lip.

  I prayed.

  There was this space of time. The sound and the smell of coffee brewing. Clinking of cups and spoons. Sandra looked like her mind could be opening a crack. I’m sitting there trying to haul some kind of mercy into that little space, get some kind of a foot in the door that looked to be opening.

  I didn’t want to say a word for fear it would be the wrong word. I just sat there looking into her scared eyes, praying to Sally’s merciful God.

  If Sandra would please oh please come to her senses, throw Ian out, and take Jenny home, she’d be in a group, doing her sheets and figuring stuff out. We’d be here having coffee, talking about the time she almost married a child molester, shaking our heads over it. She’d find lots to live for, get a hobby, some friends, a job, raise up her beautiful little one the way the robins does, singing.