by John Hart
I was there when Jean laughed her last laugh. I’d told a really bad joke, something about three lawyers and a dead body. She gave me her small laugh, the one with the hiccup. Then her husband came in and said that he was going to run the baby-sitter home. None of us knew they were sleeping together. So she kissed him on the cheek and told him to drive safely. He honked on his way down the driveway, and she smiled when she told me he always did that.
The accident happened at the rest stop two miles up the interstate. The car was parked. They were naked in the backseat, and he must have been on top, because the impact sent him through the windshield but left her in the car. He suffered a broken jaw, a concussion, and lacerations to his face, chest, and genitals, which seemed about right. The girl never regained consciousness, which was an absolute tragedy.
The state trooper told me that a drunk driver took the exit too fast, lost control, and slammed into their parked car. Just one of those things, he’d said. One of those crazy things.
Jean stood by her man for two months, until the paper announced that the comatose seventeen-year-old girl was pregnant; then she crumbled. I found her the first time she tried to kill herself. There was bloody water running under the bathroom door, and I dislocated my shoulder breaking it down. She’d kept her clothes on, and I later learned that she did that because she knew I’d find her and didn’t want to embarrass me. The thought of that broke my heart beyond repair.
Ezra refused to commit her. I begged, I argued, and I yelled, but he was resolute; it would look bad for the family. So Jean stayed with him and with Mother, the three of them alone in that big house.
When her husband left, he took their only child. Too depressed to care, she let him. He presented her with custody papers and she signed them. Had it been a son instead of a daughter, I suspect that Ezra would have fought him over it. But it was a girl, and so he didn’t.
That night, she tried again; this time it was pills. She wore her wedding dress and stretched out to die on our parents’ bed. After that, she was institutionalized for eight months—Alex Shiften was her roommate. When Jean went home, Alex went, too. We never learned a thing about her. The two shared a conspiracy of silence. Our questions, which began politely, were politely ignored. The questions grew more pointed, as did their reactions to them. When Alex told Ezra to fuck off, I thought the bottom would drop out. We stopped asking. None of us knew how to handle them, and in our discomfort we pretended everything was all right. What a ship of fools.
As I drove away from that ragged dead-end street, I thought about laughter and how it was like breath; you never knew which would be your last. And it saddened me that Jean’s last laugh had been such a small one. I wished I’d told a better joke.
I tried to remember my last laugh, but all I could think of was Jean and that snot bubble. That had been grand. But memory can be like a floodgate, once opened hard to close, and as I drove, images and feelings marched upon me like waves. I saw my mother, broken on the floor, then Ezra’s safe, his cold smirk, and Alex Shiften’s triumphant smile. I saw Jean as a child, and then grown, floating in a bathtub, her diluted blood a translucent shroud that shimmered across the floor and spilled down the stairwell. My wife’s hands, cold upon me, and, inevitably, images of Vanessa Stolen—the sweat on her face and on her thighs, her high breasts, which barely moved as she arched her back off the damp flannel sheets. I felt her eyes, heard the stutter in her throat as she gasped my name, and thought of the secret that for so many years had kept me from giving myself to her. And of how profoundly I failed her in that deep dark place where both our lives changed forever.
But some things are stronger than doubt or self-recrimination. Need, for instance. To be accepted. Loved without judgment. Even when I couldn’t reciprocate. Time and again, I had returned to the one place, the one person who had never failed me. I’d done this knowing the pain that lingered in my wake. I’d taken all and given nothing. As for something in return, she’d neither asked nor demanded, though hers would have been the right. And I’d tried to stay away; I’d tried and failed. I knew also that I would fail again now. My need was too great, an animal inside me.
So I turned off the road, turned off the world, and drove slowly down the cratered track that was Stolen Farm Road. It felt like a switch had been flicked in my head. Pressures fell away, concerns, too. I could breathe, and so I did, like I’d been long underwater. I passed through the shade of tall oaks and narrow, feathered cedars, and gravel crunched beneath my tires. I saw a shrike with a fence lizard in its claws and felt elemental, as if I, too, belonged here. It was a good feeling, though false, and there were no whispers beyond the wind.
I rounded the last bend and saw Vanessa’s house. She stood on the front porch, shading her eyes, and for a moment I believed that she’d felt my approach. My chest tightened and I felt a stirring of body and soul. Even more than this place, this woman did things for me. She was farmwork-lean, with flaxen hair and eyes that shone like sun on water. Her hands were rough, but I loved them for the things they could do. I liked to watch her plant things, those hands in dark earth. It reminded me of what I knew as a child, that dirt is good and the earth forgives. Her breasts were small above a flat stomach, and her eyes were soft where tragedy would have made others hard or indifferent. Small lines cut the corners of her eyes and mouth but were inconsequential.
Looking at her, I felt my weakness. I knew this was wrong, knew that I could never give her what she so richly deserved. I knew it and for an instant I cared, but only for that instant. Then I was out of the car and in her arms, my mouth on hers, my hands no longer mine to control. I didn’t know if I was on the porch or still in the drive. I didn’t remember moving, yet all was motion. She rose into me and I was lost. No fear or confusion, just this woman and the world that spun around us like colored mist.
I heard distant sound and recognized my name; it burned in my ear. Then I felt her tongue cool it. Her lips moved over me—my eyes, my neck, my face. Her hands found the back of my head and they pulled my lips back to hers. I tasted plums, kissed her harder, and she weakened against me. I picked her up, felt legs around me. Then more motion and we were inside, up the stairs and onto the bed that knew so well the force of our passion. Clothes evaporated, as if burned away by flesh too hot to bear them. My mouth found her breasts, the hard, ready nipples, and the soft plane of her stomach. I tasted all of her. The dew of her sweat, the deep cleft of her, her legs like velvet bands across my ears. Her fingers clawed at my hair, tangled, and she pulled me up, said words I couldn’t possibly understand. She took me in her roughened palm and led me into her. My head rocked back. She was heat, fire; she cried my name again, but I was beyond response, lost and desperate never to be found.
CHAPTER 8
I drifted for what felt like hours. Neither of us spoke; we knew better. Peace like this came rarely and was as fragile as a child’s smile. She nestled against me, on her side, one leg thrown across my own. Her hand trailed lazily across my chest, down my stomach. Occasionally, her lips brushed my neck, and they felt like feathers.
I had my arm around her, my hand pressed against the smooth curve of her lower back. I watched the ceiling fan spin, brown blades against her creamy white ceiling. A breeze passed through the window, stroked us like a penitent breath. But I knew it couldn’t last, as did she; it never had. We would talk, and as the words came, so, too, would the steady push of reality. I knew the pattern. It always started small, a vague itch in the mind, as if I’d left something undone. Then the face of my wife would make its silent, swift invasion and the guilt would follow on tiny feet. But it was not the guilt of the adulterer; that had passed years ago, soon after Barbara’s smile.
This was a different guilt, born of darkness and fear in that stinking creek so many years ago—the day we met, the day I fell in love and the day I failed her. That guilt was a cancer, and under its assault the cocoon would crumble and I would leave, hating myself for again using the only person in thi
s world who loved me, wishing that I could undo the past and make myself worthy. But it was the one thing that I could never do, for if this guilt was a cancer, then the truth was a bullet in the head. She would hate me if she knew. So in time I would leave, as I always did, and already I was dreading the hurt in her eyes when I told her I’d call, and how she’d nod and smile as if she believed me.
I closed my eyes, let myself sink beneath the blanket of this momentary joy, but inside I was hollow, and cold was a fist around my heart.
“Penny for your thoughts,” she said.
It had begun, but that was okay. I’d missed the sound of her voice.
“You wouldn’t like them,” I said. She rose up on an elbow and smiled down at me. I smiled back. “They’re dark, horrible thoughts.” I kept my voice light.
“Give them to me anyway. A present.”
“Kiss me,” I told her, and she did. I would give her my thoughts, those that she could bear. “I missed you,” I said. “I always miss you.”
“Liar.” She cupped my chin in one hand. “Filthy rotten liar.” She kissed me again. “Do you know how long it’s been?”
I did—seventeen months and just under two weeks, each day an agony and an exercise in longing. “No,” I told her. “How long?”
“Never mind,” she said. “Let’s not dwell on it.” I saw the pain in her eyes. The last time I’d been with her was the night my mother died. I could still see the reflection of her face suspended in the windowpane as I stared into the night. I was searching then, looking for the strength to give her the truth. But her words had stopped me. “Don’t think about such nasty things,” she’d said. So I had not.
“Ezra’s dead,” I told her. “They found his body two days ago.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I truly am.”
She would never have raised the subject. Just one more way that she was unlike every other. But she’d always been like that. She didn’t push or pry, didn’t care for details. Vanessa lived in the moment; I’d always envied that about her. It was strength.
“How’s Jean taking it?”
She was the first person to ask me that. Not what happened. Not how I was handling it. Her thoughts were of Jean because she knew that would be my biggest concern. I shuddered at the depth of her understanding.
“I’m scared for Jean,” I said. “She’s gone far away, and I don’t know if I can get her back.” I told her about my run-in with Alex. About Jean on the porch. “She’s left me, Vanessa. I don’t know her anymore. I think she’s in trouble, but she won’t let me help her.”
“It’s never too late. For anything. All you have to do is reach out.”
“I have,” I told her.
“Maybe you just think you have.”
“I told you, I have.”
I felt the force of my words as they passed my lips, and I didn’t know where the anger came from. Were we talking about Jean or Vanessa? She sat up in the bed, cross-legged, and stared at me.
“Take it easy, Jackson,” she said. “We’re just talking.”
Vanessa had never called me Work. She used my given name and always had. I’d asked her once why that was, and she’d told me I would never be work for her. I’d told her it was clever, and about the nicest thing I’d ever heard. I could still remember the way she’d looked. Sunlight flooded the open window and I’d noticed for the first time that she was not the young girl I’d once known; time and hard work had left their marks. But I didn’t care.
“You’re right, just talking. So how have you been?” I asked.
Her face softened. “I’m growing organics now,” she told me. “Moving more and more of my production in that direction. Strawberries, blueberries, whatever. People are into that these days. It pays.”
“So you’re doing okay, then?” I asked.
She laughed. “Hell no. The bank’s still after me every month, but I’m ahead of the curve on this organics thing. It will make a difference. This farm will never leave my hands. That, I promise you.” She talked more about organic farming, about her aging tractor and the truck that needed a new transmission. She talked about her plans and I listened. At one point, she got up and brought two beers from the kitchen.
To me, Vanessa was a breath of fresh air. She moved to the seasons, touched the living earth every single day. I knew when it was raining, but not until I got wet.
“You know, time’s a crazy damn thing,” she said, handing me a beer. She slipped back onto the bed and put a pillow in her lap. A strand of hair hung over her left eye. I asked her what she meant. “I was thinking of our families,” she told me. “The rise and fall of family fortunes.”
I sipped at my beer. “What about them?”
“It’s just crazy is all. I mean, think about it. Where was your family at the end of the Civil War?”
She knew exactly where my family had been; we’d talked about it many times. Five generations ago, my ancestor was a foot soldier from Pennsylvania who had the misfortune to get most of his foot shot off. He was captured and delivered to the Confederate prison in Salisbury, where he lingered several weeks before dying of dysentery and infection. He was buried in one of the four trench graves that eventually came to hold over eleven thousand Union soldiers. That was at the end of the war. His wife learned of his death and, pregnant with his unborn child, traveled to Salisbury. But he had no marker; his bones were lost among the thousands of other nameless souls. Word is, it broke her heart. She gave her last dollar to the physician who delivered my great-great-grandfather and died two weeks later. I’ve often thought of that ancestor, and wondered if her death drained the last true passion from my family.
She died of a broken heart. My God. What a thing.
Her son was passed around the county and spent most of his life shoveling manure on another man’s plantation. My great-grandfather delivered ice in the summer and stoked rich men’s furnaces in the winter. His son was a worthless drunk who beat my father for the fun of it. The Pickenses were poor as dirt and treated like shit in this county until Ezra came along. He changed everything.
The Stolen family was just the opposite. Two hundred years back, this farm had been over a thousand acres, and the Stolens ran things in Rowan County.
“Lot of history in this bed,” I said.
“Yep.” She nodded. “Lot of love, too.” I said nothing, and the silence spoke volumes, an old tale. She loved me and on good days understood that I loved her, too. Why I could not admit that was the problem. She didn’t understand and I was too ashamed to explain it to her. So we existed in this horrible undefined state, with nothing to cling to when the nights were cold and endlessly successive. “Why are you here, Jackson?” she asked me.
“Do I need a reason?” I replied, feeling cheap.
“No,” she said with feeling. “Never.”
I took her grasping hand. “I’m here to see you, Vanessa.”
“But not to stay.”
I remained silent.
“Never to stay,” she continued, and I saw tears in her eyes.
“Vanessa . . .”
“Don’t say it, Jackson. Don’t. We’ve been here before. I know you’re married. I don’t know what came over me. Just ignore me.”
“It’s not that,” I said.
“Then what?” she asked, and I saw such anguish in her face that I lost my voice. I was wrong to have come. So very, very wrong.
She tried to laugh, but it died halfway. “Come on, Jackson. What?” But I couldn’t tell her. She stared into my eyes for a long second and I watched as the fire burned out of her face and the resignation settled in. She kissed me, but it was a dead kiss.
“I’m jumping in the shower,” she told me. “Don’t you dare leave.”
I watched her as she padded barefoot and naked from the room. Normally, we’d be in the shower together, her body alive under my soapy hands.
I drained my beer and lay weakly, listening to the birds outside. I heard the shower run in the bathroom and pi
ctured Vanessa’s face upturned to water straight from the well. It would taste fresh on her skin. I wanted to wash her hair, but instead I got up and went downstairs. There was more beer in the refrigerator and I carried one to the front porch. The sun felt good on my naked skin and it dried my sweat. Farmland stretched to the distant tree line and I guessed I was looking at strawberries. I leaned against the post and closed my eyes to the breeze. I didn’t hear Vanessa come downstairs.
“Oh, my God. What happened to your back?” She moved quickly onto the porch. “It looks like somebody beat you with a bat.” She put light hands on me, tracing lines of my bruises.
“I fell down some stairs,” I told her.
“Were you drunk?”
I laughed. “A little, I guess.”
“Jackson, you need to be careful. You could have killed yourself.”
I wasn’t sure why I lied to her. I just didn’t want to tell her the whole truth. She had enough problems. “I’ll be all right.”
She took the beer from my hand and sipped. She was in a towel, her hair still wet. I wanted to wrap her into me and promise that I’d never let go. I wanted to tell her that I loved her, that I would spend the rest of my life just like this. Instead, I put one inadequate arm around her shoulder, and even that felt like a stranger’s arm. “I love this place,” I told her, and she accepted my words without comment. It was the closest I could come to sharing the truth of my feelings for her, and in some small way she knew this. Reality, however, had never been so simple.
“Are you hungry?” she asked, and I nodded. “Let’s go to the kitchen.” We went into the kitchen and she pulled a robe from the laundry room on the way. “Go put your pants on,” she told me. “You can do anything you want naked except sit at my table.” She popped me on the rear as I passed by.
