by Billy Coffey
Zach looked up from the board, the smile on his face fading. “What’s wrong, Daddy?”
“Not a thing.” (smile) “Just gotta sit a minute.”
Kate took my arm, feigning a hug so Zach wouldn’t be frightened, and guided me to the battered upholstered sofa in the middle of the foyer. I sat and winced. She reached behind my back and laid Bessie on the coffee table in front of us. Zach went to the small bathroom off my office as Doc March went for the leather bag on Kate’s desk. His gaunt, wrinkled face fell into a look of worried determination.
“What’s wrong?” Kate asked.
“Nothing. Almost fell asleep on the road. Shook me up a little. Fine now.”
Zach returned with a Dixie cup filled with his panacea for everything from bad dreams to beestings.
“Here, Daddy,” he said.
He lifted the cup to my mouth and turned it upward, spilling water down the front of my shirt. I coughed and thanked him.
Kate said, “Zach, why don’t you take Bessie out back for a little while. Daddy’s fine, just tired is all.”
I nodded to him. My voice came out dull and cracking: “Just mind her like I showed you.”
Zach hefted Bessie and made a slow walk from the sofa to the open back door, carrying the tomahawk like it was a live snake. He stopped at the gun rack by Kate’s desk and offered a lingering look back. Kate nodded. Zach continued on.
Doc March strapped a blood pressure cuff and the business end of his stethoscope on my arm and told me to hush before I could tell him not to bother. He asked how I felt and where and if I hurt. All I could do was nod. I’d been dreaming of Phillip every night, sometimes as soon as I fell asleep, other times a few hours later. Always stacking those rocks, most times running from the butterflies. And even though a part of me knew those dreams weren’t real, I still felt tired after I woke. Tired and scared. Not just because I didn’t sleep either. My shoulders and back felt like tight knots. My arms hurt. It was as if I’d really been lifting those stones along the riverbank, one right after the other, trying to lay my memory to rest.
Doc said, “Jacob, your pulse and blood pressure are both high’s the moon. I need you to take some deep breaths. Slow down.”
I nodded again. Kate took my hat off and put her hand to my head. She kissed me there.
“You’re still not sleeping?” Doc asked. “You should have called me, Kate. And, Jake, you should have let her. You and your fool pride. Runs in the family. Any other symptoms? Loss of appetite? Depression? What’s that bandage on your arm?”
I mumbled, “Just a scratch.”
“He had a bad dream last night,” Kate said. She caught my stare, but I suppose by then she’d passed the point of tolerating such childishness. The doctor needed truth. If my foolishness couldn’t part with it, Kate would do it for me. “It was worse than ever. When he woke up, his arm was bleeding.”
“Just from thrashing about,” I said. “Must’ve caught it on something.”
For proof I pulled the tape on my arm and let the bandage fall. The scar was still there, but the cut was gone. Even the few drips of drying blood that had been there when Kate had wrapped it had disappeared. She looked at me, eyebrows scrunched.
“I can’t make you better unless you’re forthright with me, Jacob,” Doc said.
“Just a dream,” I told him.
The old man sighed and nodded his head. “Fine, then. But I’m going to up your medication nonetheless. Maybe we’ll try something stronger. I’ll pick up the prescription myself and bring it by.”
I started to tell him no and thank you, but Kate interrupted and said, “We’d appreciate that very much.”
Doc nodded and gave me a grandfatherly pat. “I’ll be going, then. Pharmacy closes at noon on Saturdays. I’ll drop your medicine by later and set it on your desk. Mind my advice to rest in the meantime, and you’ll be fine. Zach too. Just make sure he covers up next time before throwing that right hook.”
“Won’t be a next time,” Kate said.
The doctor laughed, thinking Kate should know better. “The boy’s a Barnett, Kate.”
He shuffled his aging frame away to the door and paused to remind me to take it easy. Kate smiled and promised I would. She waited for the faint click of the latch before her grin disappeared.
“Tell me what happened, Jake. What really happened. There’s no one here but me now.”
“Just what I said,” is what I told her, but Kate wasn’t convinced because I couldn’t look her in the eyes.
“Then why are your clothes so dirty?”
I looked down and flicked a bit of dried mud from the leg of my jeans. Picked up my hat. Studied my boots. In the end I couldn’t lie. I’d done that enough over the years, and in a way that had made me more tired than Phillip ever could.
“I went to see Jenny,” I said.
“Jacob Barnett, are you serious? Is this so you can sleep?”
“Just supporting the local economy.” I smiled. Kate didn’t. “I don’t know what else to do, Kate.”
“Doc March is getting you more pills. Why don’t you go talk to Preacher Goggins again?”
“Pills and praying don’t work. I’ve tried both.”
Kate reached down and took my hands. When she spoke, there was a pleading in her eyes. “Well, how about you talk to me about it, then? We’ve always shared everything, Jake. Good and bad. Why are you keeping this from me? What are you dreaming about?”
Butterflies. White ones.
“What about them?”
I looked at her, my eyes widening in one blink and narrowing in the next. I thought I’d spoken those words to myself, but Kate must have heard them. I shook my head and told myself that I was a good man for holding my silence. Because telling Kate of my dreams would only lead her to Phillip, and that was someone I wanted to keep as far from her as I could. Kate had spent too many years trying to get her distance.
I said the one thing I thought would steer our talk into a more favorable direction—“Zach called, said you went for a name”—but wasn’t sure if it would work. For a moment it didn’t. Kate didn’t waver. Then, slowly, she did.
“Her name’s Lucy Seekins. Her and her daddy bought the Kingman house.”
“I remember hearing that someone bought that old place,” I said. “Don’t think I know them.”
“I visited her. Not really what I normally do, I know, but then Lucy isn’t the sort of person I normally help either. She’s rich, Jake. Not much I can do for rich folk. But Timmy wanted me to go, and she’s hurting, so I wrote her name down.”
“Well, good then.”
From the open back door came the soft thunking sound of Bessie against the wooden target I’d built long ago. It was regular, soothing.
“Dandelions,” Kate said.
“Mmm?”
“Your butterflies. Maybe they scare you like dandelions scare me.”
“Maybe so. Why is that?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Just one of those silly things, I guess.”
Kate said no more of Lucy Seekins, nor did I say anything of Zach answering the phone when Justus called. That still angered me, but I understood why Kate had to go down to the Texaco that morning and why she had to go alone. I understood that more than anyone.
She kissed the sweat from my lips. I squeezed her hand and smiled, Nothing to see here. Kate smiled back, I know better, and yet she asked no more. I loved her for it. We’d always shared everything, yes. But we both believed the real glue that held two people together was often the things that went unsaid.
8
The great battle that often raged in Lucy Seekins’s mind was whether it was worse to have a dead mother or a father who was never home. Most times that answer depended upon whoever happened to be closer at the time.
Her father had been in China for the last five weeks. On business, of course. Always that. A start-up or a shutdown, a merger or an acquisition. Lucy didn’t know which because she cared for neither. A
ll that mattered was that he was on the other side of the world and she was in backwater Virginia alone. In those times she missed her father most.
But when Lucy looked at herself in the mirror as she did now, she missed her mother more—longed for those small things they would never do together. Things like showing Lucy how to keep her hair nice and how to paint her nails. What to say to a boy to make him love her. Lucy had been forced to learn these things on her own, and it had been a hard education.
That was Lucy’s answer, then, at least for now—it hurt more to not have a mother at all than to have a father some.
The small digital clock by the sink gave notice that her father was already twenty minutes late, which meant it would only be an hour or so before he left again. He’d called from the airport to say the China thing had gone well but the Atlanta thing had not; someone there had jumbled something, flipped a switch instead of pushing a button maybe, and The Boys were sending him down there that evening. That’s what Lucy’s father called his bosses—The Boys. Lucy imagined them as pinstripe-suited old men who lit fat cigars with twenty-dollar bills and golfed at the country club when they were not moving her father around the world like a pawn on a chessboard. Yet he loved them, even if Lucy did not. To her that was one more shaky bridge over yet another yawning gulf between them.
Her brush moved in smooth, practiced strokes from the top of her head down to the right. The result was typical—good but not great, all Lucy could do. Her father would like it, though. He always did. You have your mother’s hair, he’d always say, and then Lucy would grin and he would call her Smiles because that’s what he’d called the woman he buried eighteen years before.
She ran a hand through her hair once more and caught a whiff of Johnny’s cologne. The scent was not unlike antifreeze—old and cloying, something no doubt swiped from his father’s medicine cabinet—and yet the sensation gave Lucy a shiver of ecstasy. She closed her eyes and felt Johnny’s closeness once more, remembered the way he’d loved her. He had not said those words exactly. None of them ever did. But Lucy had discovered early on (and without her mother’s help) that boys covered their hearts well. They liked to play their games, pretend they were men. But they always became animals when there was nothing but skin and breath, and that was when they said anything Lucy wanted. There was a great power in that, so much so that she often reveled more in the feeling of that power than in the act itself. It rekindled an ember long snuffed. Lucy supposed that was why the boys always said they loved her. Inhibition had never been a problem for her. She did not mind baring herself. Fate had brought her into the world stripped of what it gave other children; naked she’d remained.
Another glance at the clock—half an hour late now, and in this the constant pendulum inside her swayed once more, this time back to her father. Moved there by the sudden notion that being without someone hurt more when one knew the person who was missing. Her father was a hard man gone spoiled by the turns his life had taken. What goodness had remained in him since Lucy’s mother died lay starved and shriveled, but he had provided.
Lucy curled the ends of her hair and winced at the split ends she found. She picked up a small pair of scissors next to the brush and trimmed carefully, not wanting to damage the one thing her mother had left behind. The blades worked open and closed in soft snips. She heard the front door open, followed by a long pause and her name being called.
“Coming,” she said to the mirror, and there was a wide beam upon her face. She laid the scissors down and leaned in for one last look, hearing but not remembering the faint pop of the piece of paper in her pocket as it brushed against the sink.
She left the bathroom and bounded down the stairs two at a time. Her father stood in the middle of the living room, hands behind his ample back, looking as though the world had pressed down on him so long that the only choice he had was to grow out. Lucy hugged him as tight and long as she had all the times before. She kept him close, still believing in that little-girl way that her father couldn’t leave again as long as she held on.
One arm came around her back and rested lightly there. The other remained clenched into a fist just inside Lucy’s hands. Her nose filled with the stale scents of airline seats and rental cars woven into his suit. There, too, was a heavy reek of alcohol. He never drank on his trips away, so he said and so Lucy believed. Which meant the only time he needed to be drunk was when he was home. With her. Lucy’s hug weakened only a little at that smell. His hand guided her away.
“Hi, Dad,” she said. “It’s about time you got here.”
He looked at her, face covered with what looked like dark clouds, and said, “Hello, Lucy.”
Only that. No Hey, Smiles or, I’m so glad I’m home, Smiles. He just stood there in the middle of the room, hand still behind his back, jowls quivering.
“I don’t have long,” he said. “Flight to Atlanta leaves in a couple hours. Thought you might need some money for groceries and gas, though.”
Something was wrong. That much was plain. And Lucy could not escape the feeling that for whatever reason, that something was her.
“I think I might take some time off when I get back,” he said. “That sound good to you, Lucy?”
Again—Lucy.
“Sure,” she said. “That sounds great.”
“Really? You don’t think me being around will put a damper on your social life?”
Lucy smiled and said, “I don’t have much of a social life, Dad. I have to keep the house, remember?”
“Oh. Right.” He looked around the living room and nodded. “Looks fine. Clean up this morning?”
“Sure.”
“Vacuum?”
“Yes.”
“You missed this.”
He brought the hand from behind his back. Lucy’s eyes barely had time to register the small plastic square hurtling toward her. She flinched when one of its corners hit her in the cheek. She looked down at the carpet. Three shiny words written in bold blue stared up at her.
Safe and Effective!
Hot air filled the room, breaking Lucy into a sweat so complete that it made her toes curl. They were both silent—him waiting, Lucy trying to will the wrapper at her feet into the ether. A low crack shuddered through the walls. For not the first time, Lucy wished the house would fall down upon them both.
“Who is he?” her father asked.
Lucy shook her head and tried to speak, but all she could manage
(Safe and Effective! She thought, Very effective, oh yes, but not safe)
was a long string of syllables and half words.
The dark clouds on her father’s face swirled, cutting her off. He roared, “Tell me who he IS.”
“Johnny,” she cried. “His name is Johnny.” And then, as though it would make any difference at all, she added, “He loves me.”
Her father moved forward in a rush. Lucy retreated until her back met the cold living room wall. The hands she had wrapped around him in love just moments before were now raised to fend off his anger.
“How could you do this, Lucy?” he boomed. “What would your mother say?”
She almost said, I don’t know, Dad, how could I, she never told me anything and you don’t tell me anything and please call me Smiles because don’t you understand I’m naked? But then Lucy saw in a moment of perfect clarity that the man in front of her wouldn’t understand at all. Not because he was never there or because he had no idea how to raise a girl on his own, but because he was just as bare. He was a man hollowed out by the sudden turns of his life, forever running away under the guise of his job so he could be spared from contemplating what he’d lost.
“You’re drunk,” Lucy told him. “I think that’s what my mother would say.”
The anger in his eyes flamed, then fell. He moved slowly and eased Lucy against the wall, embracing her in breath that was neither beer nor liquor but something other. He said it was his fault for not being there and her mother’s for leaving so soon. Lucy waited for
him to include her own guilt in the fracturing of what their family could have been, but no blame was given. She felt his large body pressing against her and thought at least there was that. And when Lucy’s father said he couldn’t quit drinking and didn’t know why, Lucy knew for him. He had fallen into alcohol for the same reason she had fallen into boys—because such things hid the smallness inside them. And they both stank for it.
He loosened his hold and took in Lucy with sodden eyes. Ran his fingers through the strands of her dark hair. She met his gaze and saw in her father a sadness and a longing that tilted the pendulum back to her mother with such force that Lucy feared it would never sway back.
“Your mother had hair just like this,” he said, the last words slurring into juzzlitethizz. “I loved her hair. Used to stroke it every night. I think I miss that the most.” He held her again. “I miss her more now. Do you know why, Lucy?”
She shook her head.
“Because now I know you’ll never be like her.”
Her tears came in long sobs that stained the front of her father’s shirt. He held Lucy as long as he could bear and then released her. He walked to the coffee table and laid down fifty dollars and whatever silver he carried in his pocket. On the way back, he stepped onto the wrapper. It made a crinkling sound that turned Lucy’s stomach.
“I think it’s time we talk about sending you away,” he said. “Somewhere you’ll have some supervision. I thought I could trust you, but I can’t.” He moved to the door and opened it, pausing with one foot on the porch and the other in the foyer, half in Lucy’s life and half out. “I know there’s only a couple months of school left, Lucy. And I know you’re of age. But I’m still your father, and you will still obey me. If not?” He paused. “Well, I guess if you want to act like an adult, I’ll have to treat you as one. That means you’ll be responsible for your own home and your own money. College included. You will not see that boy again, Lucy. You make sure of it or I will.”
