The Ninth Step

by Barbara Taylor Sissel

  Cotton hunched his shoulders and kept walking. He slid behind the wheel of the Mercedes and drove away from the curb. He really thought he was going to Dove Lake to the Latimer’s, but he never made it. Instead he went back to the scene where the accident occurred.

  The intersection.

  He had to see it again. He guessed he’d known that he would have to ever since the day he’d left it six years ago.

  #

  He stopped south of where the roads converged, set his foot on the brake, letting the engine idle. The headlight picked at the centered line of yellow reflectors leading his eye, drawing it inexorably to the stop sign that marked the south corner, the corner he was facing. The sign was canted at an angle that leaned away from the road. He didn’t remember that from before, that it had been bent. He was cold and he cut off the A/C, rolled down the window. The damp summer air crawled over his scalp, pushed clammy fingers down the neck of his shirt. Above the low growl of the car engine, he heard the whirr of insects. A possum snooted through the roadside trash that was netted along the fence line. This was it; the hell of his nightmares, the scene of his crime: Two country roads and a four-way stop in the shitend of nowhere.

  He’d wakened that rainy morning, the morning of his wedding day, with the mother of all hangovers. He’d worn it like concrete. It had soured his mouth, hurled itself against the walls of brain. How could he go to Livie in that condition? On the day they were to be married? She would be so disappointed in him. She would say she had warned him not to let it happen; she would say a hangover was no way to start their life together. When a hot shower and three Advil didn’t put a dent in the symptoms, he’d made himself a Bloody Mary. A light one . . . that timeless cure . . . and brought it with him. Somehow the glass had tipped and in the moment, the single moment it took him to grab for it--bam. The noise had been god-awful; it had gone on forever. And then nothing. No sound at all and somehow the silence had been worse. It had deafened him, paralyzed him, sucked out his breath, then he was half falling, staggering from the truck. He’d gone first to check on Nikki and then he’d knelt beside her mom, but when he realized he couldn’t do more for them than call 9-1-1, he’d waited to hear the squeal of sirens and then he’d driven away. Driven blind into a setting sun.

  The hours that followed were a blank. Cotton rubbed his eyes now. The next clear memory he had was of a gas station in Dallas, some guy passing by the front end of his truck and yapping something about what a damn shame it was.

  “Whadd’ja hit?” he’d asked.

  Cotton had walked around to look and stood staring stupidly at the damage. Eventually, he moved his hand into the broken cavity that had housed the headlamp. He passed his palm over the crumpled front quarter panel, the jacked-up hood. The truck was new, a glittery, jet-black, Ford F450, double cab, loaded. His pride and joy. Cotton remembered kicking the tire and calling the truck a fucking piece of shit. Like it had run the stop sign and wrecked his life all by itself. He remembered thinking: Somebody’s dead on account of this truck.

  When he looked again at the wrecked front end, he swore he saw blood and he almost went to his knees. He had to get rid of it; he had to wipe out every shred of evidence that tied him to it, the VIN number, plates, the pile of maps and old receipts in the glove box--all of it had to go. That was Cotton’s immediate plan and hard alongside it was an urgent need to get hold of Scott. Cotton wanted--needed his big brother.

  Of the two of them, Scott was the smart one, everyone said so. Scott had made sure they ate when Delia was too drunk to remember she had kids. Scott was the one who’d forged Delia’s name on school permission slips and report cards. He’d figured out how to keep the TV cable turned on. Scotty was the one who knew everything about women and sex and cars. Mainly cars. Remembering all of this had helped Cotton focus. Scott was an ace mechanic; he’d know how to lose the truck. But Scott was way to hell and gone in Seattle.

  Okay, Cotton told himself, so he’d go there. Getting to Washington would be his whole purpose, his brand new reason to live.

  Hours later, the Lubbock, Texas skyline was floating like a mirage on the horizon when the highway patrol car roared up behind him. Cotton froze, eyes glued to the rearview. The cop wheeled around him, flipping on his lights and the siren, pouring on the speed. He shot by in a blur and kept going. Cotton watched him disappear through a sweaty haze of panic. He didn’t know how many miles he traveled before he recovered his heart rate, a sensible train of thought. But it wasn’t long afterward that he ditched the truck, nosed it as far as he could off a country road into a mesquite-choked ravine near the Texas/New Mexico border.

  He hitched a ride into Portales and caught a bus west. And he drank. Beer at first, then half pints, whatever he could get on the cheap. He went across the country watching store clerks slip the cans and bottles into tight-fitting brown paper sleeves and he thought he was getting away with it, getting ahead of it. He wrote the postcard to Livie in care of Nix advising her not to look for him, that he wasn’t worth finding. It was all about the destination, getting to Scott. Cotton was convinced Scott would help him.

  He couldn’t have been more wrong.

  When Scott opened his door and saw Cotton standing there, rank smelling, booze-soaked and jittery after five days on the road, he backed up.

  Cotton was too overcome with relief to notice. He wanted to grab Scott and hang on like he was a life preserver thrown down in an act of mercy. But they weren’t huggers; they hadn’t ever been. Reluctantly, Scott stood aside and let Cotton come in, but once he’d heard what had happened, he almost stroked out. How could Cotton have done it, walked off the scene, left a woman dead, a child alone and possibly injured. “What in god’s name were you thinking?” Scott demanded.

  Cotton said he didn’t know and then afraid his knees might give, he found his way to the sofa and sat down, carefully, on its edge, because by now he was sensing something of Scott’s disgust. He said he’d called 9-1-1. He dropped his head into his hands and said, “I’m so damn scared, Scotty.”

  “Drunk. Drunk is what you are. You have to tell the police.”

  “I’ll go to jail.”

  “Hell is where you’ll go if you don’t turn yourself in.”

  Cotton raised his face. “You aren’t going to help me, are you?”

  “I’ve got a life here, Cotton. I’m with a good woman. Sharon was raised right, in the church. She has two little girls and she’s trying to raise them right, too. The church means something to her and she and her kids mean something to me and I can’t let you come in here, shitfaced, dragging all this trouble back into my life and wrecking everything for me.”

  “I don’t want to wreck it for you, Scotty, but we always said we’d be there for each other. I’ve got nowhere else I can go, no money, nothing.”

  “Look, I quit drinking when I left Texas. I quit all the crazymaking Delia garbage. I just can’t--”

  “Forget it. I’m happy for you.” Cotton paused at the door before letting himself out. “I was alone with her after you took off. Do you know what it was like? I was fourteen--”

  “I was eight the first time I went into a bar after her.”

  Cotton bowed his head. There was nothing he could say. It was true. Almost every day after school, while they were growing up, Scott had gone after their mother, brought her home and tried to sober her up before their dad got there. In the end it hadn’t made a difference. Their old man had split anyway and two years later, he’d died.

  “You should turn yourself in,” Scott said.

  “Yeah, maybe you’re right.”

  “We’ll pray for you, Cotton. Sharon and I.”

  “I’ll be seeing you, Scotty,” Cotton answered and he’d left, closing the door gently behind him. And he’d gone on drinking, for six years, as if he could drown what he’d done and what he’d lost and who he’d become.

  But it was all still here, caught in the tunnel of his headlight, waiting for him. Waiting to see what he
’d do, if he’d man up, do the right thing.

  Pretty soon Cotton keyed the ignition and made a U-turn.

  #

  Although it wasn’t yet ten o’clock, the windows of the small house where he’d grown up were dark, but when he went around back, Cotton found the extra key under the porch mat where it had always been kept. He let himself into the kitchen and the smell took him by the throat. It was visceral, the way it slammed him back into the past. It almost dropped him to the floor. Her cigarettes and gin, the dust, a faint tang of cooking grease . . . the undercurrent of her perfume.

  What was it called? Blue something. Blue Grass . . . yeah, that was it. He and Scott had used to pool their money to buy it for her for Christmas back when they still went through the motions, when she could still make them believe the screwed-up mess she called their family was normal.

  He walked into the living room and in the television’s flicker, he saw her slumped in one corner of the worn yellow sofa. Old Goldie, Scott and Cotton had dubbed it. Old Unholy Goldie. The ever-present, heavy-bottomed cocktail glass she preferred sat empty on the table next to her. Looking at her, he felt swept with disappointment, a sense of futility. The undersides of his eyelids burned and he was angry at himself, that he was still stupid enough to believe things could change. He pinched the bridge of his nose, considered leaving. Instead, he called to her.

  “Delia?” and his voice was startling in the silence. She didn’t move.

  He went to her, shook her shoulder. “Ma, wake up.”

  Her eyelids fluttered and her brow scrunched into a funny frown, making her appear comical, almost childish. “Cotton?” she whispered. “Am I dreaming?” Her hand rose, wavering toward his face, but he backed away before she could touch him.

  “Scott? Is Scotty here?”

  “No, it’s only me.”

  Delia struggled to sit upright, pushing at her matted hair, smoothing the front of her shirt, working her tongue over her lips, still looking half-bewildered. “I wish you’d called, oh, but I knew you’d come.” Her words were threaded on a fretful, slurried whisper. “I knew you would eventually, I told them.”

  Them who? Cotton wondered. There wasn’t any family left and as far as he knew his mother had never had any friends.

  She switched on the lamp, making them both blink, and brought her cupped hands to her mouth, staring.

  He felt devoured by her gaze, eaten alive by it. He plowed his hands over his head. “So, how’ve you been?”

  She shifted her gaze, picked up her empty glass, forgetting him, he knew, in that moment. “What time is it?” she asked. “It’s not that late. We should celebrate.”

  He watched her lever herself to her feet using the sofa arm. How many nights had he and Scott pulled her up off that damn thing, led her stumbling to bed? Looking back, he didn’t know why they’d been so insistent. Eventually, they’d learned to leave her wherever she passed out.

  Her smile now was coy. Her hand trailed along his cheek like bird tracks. Her smell made him flinch for all that it was familiar and that he found it in some insane way comforting.

  She didn’t seem to notice. “You are such a sight for sore eyes, you just don’t know. . . .” She stepped around him, swaying slightly. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll make us a drink. We’ll talk like we used to. It’ll be like old times.”

  He followed her, reluctant and bitter, and suddenly now there was a memory out of nowhere of a long ago afternoon. He’d been maybe four and Scott around seven. Delia had taken them on an outing to Lake Livingston north of Houston. She did that from time to time, packed them up and took them on short day trips. Sometimes they went to Herman Park where they could ride the train or they went to Galveston. She’d make a picnic and bring along her easel and paints--painting was something she’d done sporadically--and after they’d had their lunch, she’d set up her easel. On the afternoon Cotton remembered, he and Scott had finished their sandwiches and, while Delia painted, they’d gone to play near the water’s edge. They’d brought a kite and late in the afternoon, she’d helped them fly it and afterward, when they asked, she’d led them to a bench and shown them what she’d worked on. It had been a portrait of Cotton and Scott against a suggestion of shoreline, a fluttery ruffle of lake water, and above all the pretty innocence, a troubled rendering of sky. Cotton remembered not liking the picture because of the sky.

  Even then, before she was a steady drinker, while she was still playful and fun, he’d sensed the misery in her. It was always there like a bruise that ruined an otherwise perfect piece of fruit. He would be nearly grown, and his heart would have hardened toward her, before he would know the cause. When he was just a kid, it had scared him, the way she could be laughing one minute and bawling the next. That day at the lake, she’d soaked her face with her tears. They’d dripped off her jaw, down into her shirt collar and when she’d caught him looking, she’d lifted his hands and pressed them against her wet cheeks as if she meant to print his palms with her pain.

  He’d tried to take back his hands; he had wanted to run. He wanted to run now, but instead he sat down at the table.

  And she smiled as if she were pleased, as if she’d won something. “It wasn’t all bad, was it? We had some good times, didn’t we? You, me and Scotty.”

  Cotton didn’t answer.

  At the kitchen counter, she poured gin into each of two glasses, then picking one of them up, she extended it a little way toward him. “Ice?” she asked gaily.

  Chapter 9

  Charlie brought the small woven basket into the kitchen and set it on the island.

  Livie looked inside. “Eggs?”

  “Appears to be.”

  “Where did you get them?” She cupped the basket between her hands, turning it, admiring the contents. There were six eggs in all nestled in a bed of fresh straw. Three were shades of pale blue, two were soft green and one was as delicately tinged with pink as the furled edge of a baby’s ear.

  Charlie said he found the basket on her porch. “They’re Araucana eggs, aren’t they? I don’t know anyone around here who has those, but you.”

  Cotton, Livie thought, and rued the warm sharp thrill of anticipation that radiated from underneath her ribs.

  “This is twice now, in what?--four or five nights, that this--whoever--” Charlie’s emphasis left no doubt that he believed it was Cotton too-- “has left something. Has there been any more email?” Charlie poured his coffee.

  “No.” Livie set the basket on the counter next to the sink. She didn’t know what to make of the gift, how to feel about it. Cotton knew how she delighted in the Araucanas, in finding their colored eggs that were unique to their breed. He’d said she was like a child on an Easter egg hunt. She’d said it was silly, she knew. He’d said he loved how the simplest things made her happy. Maybe he had brought her the basket filled with eggs to show her how closely he had paid attention to what she loved. But what did it matter now?

  After all this time?

  She wanted to know what had happened. She wanted to know how Cotton’s feelings, his dreams of making a family together, could have seemed so genuine only to collapse so suddenly, so heartlessly, for no apparent reason. Livie wished that instead of eggs the basket held answers, but even more, she wished she didn’t care.

  Charlie finished his coffee, brought his cup to the sink and said he had to run into Houston and get a load of lumber. “I’m stopping by the sheriff’s office.” He dipped his chin at the basket. “JB should know about those.”

  “They’re eggs, Charlie, not hand grenades,” Livie said.

  #

  “I was afraid you’d call and say we weren’t having it like last time.” Stella walked ahead of Livie to Livie’s car. She meant their girl’s night out and sleepover that Livie tried to make happen once a month. She loved their time together as much as Stella. Her borrowed child. Borrowed motherhood.

  “Blame Dexter French,” Livie said.

  “How come?” Stella wanted t
o know.

  “He found an Italian urn, an antique, you know those things with big ears.” Livie demonstrated.

  “Like the ones Mom has by our front door?”

  “Uh-huh. He wanted me to set it up in one of the gardens as a fountain, but he couldn’t decide which garden.”

  Stella climbed into the passenger seat.

  Livie tugged the seatbelt, handing it to her. “Buckle up.”

  “That’s what took so long?”

  “Yep. He made us cart that silly urn all over the place.” Livie blew out an annoyed puff of air as she checked the rearview mirror and pulled into traffic. “We’re going to the mall first, right?”

  “Can we?”

  “Absolutely. I don’t know why men always say it’s us women who can’t make up our minds, do you?”

  “’Cause they’re simpleminded.” Stella was unperturbed. “But what happened? Did you find where to put the urn?”

  “No. I finally told Mr. French he could wear it on his head for all I cared.” Livie grinned at Stella. “I told him I had a date that wouldn’t wait.”

  Stella giggled.

  At a kiosk in the mall aptly named Utter Nonsense, she fingered dangly earrings made from glass beads and peacock feathers.

  Livie shook her head.

  “How come?” Stella asked. “I have my allowance.”

  “They’re forty dollars and anyway, they’re too old for you.”

  Stella pursed her lips, pouting, looking so much like Kat that Livie laughed. “C’mon, little diva,” she said.

  At an upscale boutique for girls, they settled on a pink baseball cap with a rhinestone initial S scrolled above the bill. Stella put it on in the car and pulled her ponytail through the back opening. “Now, I look just like you when you go to work.” She grinned at Livie.