Carry Yourself Back to Me

by Deborah Reed

  She stared at the note from across the room. How long did it take him to do all this? To pack his things and write the note? He must have been planning for days, weeks, months. She dropped the groceries to the floor and stood in place as it all tumbled from the paper bag. Detour crept forward and licked the damp cellophane around the meat.

  She made her way toward the note. Floated? Materialized? Thinking back on it later she could never picture exactly how she had arrived, remembering only the jangle of the tambourine as it hit the floor.

  My dear, dear, Annie,

  This is the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life. Rest assured I’ll be sorry for as long as I live, though I don’t mean that as any kind of reparation. I know there’s no atoning for something like this. I swear I never thought I’d do this sort of thing, I never pictured our lives ending up this way, but they have, and that’s the part I can’t claim to understand the way a man who’s decided to go and do something like this ought to understand it. I’ve been involved with someone else. I’ve made a big mistake, and I’m afraid leaving seems to be the only way to put it right. “I’m sorry” probably has no meaning here. But Christ almighty, I am to the bone. And I know it doesn’t make any sense, it doesn’t help anybody to write that I’ll always love you, but it only seems fair to state that truth in the face of so many lies.

  Always,

  Owen

  This was all the explanation offered. Words plucked from his head in a state of hurry.

  What she felt was dumb, numb shock. A blackout, really. And once that passed, the baby. What about the baby?

  By the time she thought to take the test, she’d been crying for half an hour. She’d read the note and threw it away again and again, until she finally set fire to it in the sink.

  Her mind remained cool and distant when the lines turned pink. She walked the rooms of the house and thought about raising a child by herself. She entered each room, picturing her baby in the tub, at the kitchen table, in the small bedroom that was perfect for a nursery. The baby, she imagined, had waves of chestnut hair just like Owen. In fact, the baby looked exactly like him, and this was where her thoughts began to twist, and the distance her mind had afforded her, closed in until it felt like a pillow on her face. Her days would begin and end with a child who reminded her of the day she was standing in right now. A child didn’t deserve a burden like that. Children sense things. Like the way she had sensed there was something wrong with her father. The way she had sensed the truth about Uncle Calder.

  Calder wasn’t answering his cell. She got back in her car and looked everywhere for him and Owen. No one had seen or heard from either one. It was evening before she found Calder slung over the counter at Hal’s. “I need to talk to you,” she said, her hands and voice trembling. He focused hard on her face. He took her hand and she pulled away. “You don’t want to know how young she is,” he said, drunkenly, as if to himself.

  Back home she stumbled through a fog, in and out of sleep for nearly twenty-four hours with very little to eat. When the phone rang she checked the caller ID but didn’t pick up. It was never Owen. Or Calder. She kept thinking something would come to her. Some explanation, a solid plan she would know to follow. She picked up her guitar but found she couldn’t sing. She couldn’t stand the sound of minor chords. She grew weaker, and sicker.

  Two days later, just hours before Calder showed up to get his Bobcat loader from her backyard, a violent sickness took over. A dull ache gripped her lower back. She felt dizzy and warm. Her forehead beaded with sweat. It wasn’t until something wet slipped between her legs that she understood what was happening.

  She walked her fingers along the hallway with the smiling photos of Owen. He mocked her unsteady steps toward the bathroom where the slightest trace of his aftershave still clung to the shower curtain, bath mat, something.

  Stevie Wonder. It was Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely?” The song he’d written in the seventies for his daughter. “Isn’t she lovely/Isn’t she wonderful/Isn’t she precious/Less than one minute old.”

  She rushed to the toilet just in time. She closed her eyes and saw green and yellow. She opened them and saw the same thing. The pain in her back went from dull to hot, to knives piercing bone. She continued to throw up until there was nothing but bile, and then finally there was nothing left of that. Her arms and legs shook as the cramping bore down. The part of Owen inside her was cutting itself loose. She was relieved. She was mortified and heartbroken, though it no longer mattered what she was. She could no more stop the blood from slipping between her legs than she could make things with Owen go back to the way they were.

  The pink and white mucousy blood in her underwear frightened her. She peeled them off and sat on the toilet and allowed herself to drain. She couldn’t help but look down to see what was coming. Clots and mangled strings of dark blood. Bright, nearly clear red drops in between. Nothing that looked anything like the beginnings of a baby.

  The bathroom smelled of vomit, and now the metallic smell of blood. She could no longer smell Owen’s aftershave, and she wondered if these new smells would linger, too, the way his aftershave had, taunting her for days.

  After a while the cramping began to lessen, and this is when she wept. Long, quiet, snot-filled cries. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, though she wasn’t sure what for or to whom this was directed.

  She pulled a stream of toilet paper from the roll and blew her nose and wiped her face. After that came a burst of anger. It sparked and steamed and made her eyes ache. You prick. You rotten sonofabitch.

  Another cramp took her by surprise. Her breath caught behind her ribs. “Son of a PRICK!”

  She should call someone. Couldn’t a woman bleed to death this way? She needed to call someone. But the only someone she wanted near her right now was Calder, and from what he’d said at Hal’s the other night he’d known all along about Owen cheating on her. Did he know Owen was planning to leave her, too? Right then it didn’t matter. When the next cramp seized her insides, her forearms and feet, every part of her body tingled with the release of sweat, and without thinking she screamed her brother’s name. She screamed it again until it echoed off the bathroom walls and came back to her. It was Calder’s hand she had wanted so badly to hold, his long arms she’d needed for comfort after the bleeding finally slowed and she’d stood for a time under a hot shower, and then walked back down the hallway with the photographs on either side like a procession of strangers smiling nervously over all that had gone on in the bathroom.

  And all of this happening just hours before Calder had stood in her driveway on the day she’d told him to leave and never come back.

  “Squirt?”

  Annie glances at the door. The thought of going home brings tears.

  “Aw, squirt.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says, but allows herself to cry.

  Uncle Calder puts his arm around her shoulder and draws her close. “Ever since you were this big you couldn’t help but take it all in. And every little thing seemed to break your heart.”

  She cries harder, thinking how he himself once broke her heart. She becomes a child again in her uncle’s big arms. She sobs uncontrollably against his scratchy sweater, unable to apologize for getting it wet.

  “You see there?” He laughs a little as he squeezes her. “You’re not fine, squirt. You’re stubborn, that’s for damn sure. And you will be fine again. But you’re not fine right now.”

  It feels as if she’s made of nothing but tears.

  “It’s all right there. It’s going to be all right,” he says, patting her back.

  She finally pulls away and wipes her eyes. “What’s going to happen to him?” she asks between breaths.

  “Nothing. This thing isn’t even going to make it to trial.”

  She wants to ask if he thinks Calder could have done such a thing. Of course she can’t ask him that. Not that. So she says nothing, and by saying nothing he seems to feel the need to fill the silence.<
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  “He didn’t do this, squirt. I know what you’re thinking.” He stares at the tree and tosses a handful of peanuts in his mouth. He offers her the bowl and she shakes her head.

  “I know why you think he might have,” he says when he’s finished chewing. “But he didn’t. Look at me. You’ve got to trust me on this. There’s plenty more I need to say here. I want you to think about putting to rights you and your brother.”

  She turns away.

  “You want to hear what I have to say or don’t you?”

  She smiles, just a little. “Not particularly.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  She barely gets out a sigh when he says, “I tried for months to talk him into going over there to see you in spite of you telling him to stay away, but he insisted on abiding by your wishes. He’s been waiting all this time to get some kind of sign that you’ve forgiven him. It was me who told him to go over on your birthday and put things right.”

  “He told me he was in love with this man’s wife, Uncle Calder. He said he couldn’t imagine living without her. And then he said the only problem was that she had a husband named Magnus.”

  Uncle Calder stares at her, through her. “I know all that. He told me, too. I see where you’re going with this.”

  “What am I supposed to think?”

  She has only seen Uncle Calder angry one time in her life. The time her mother had refused to open her bedroom door and he’d hit it with his fist and then slid to the floor, yelling in a fusion of anger and, more than anything, misery.

  He’s angry now. Wiping his stiff mouth with the back of his hand and clearing his throat and taking in a breath so big it makes him cough a phlegmy cigar cough. “Listen here.” His voice is steady, controlled. “Things aren’t always what they seem.”

  “I know that.” Boy, how she knows that.

  “That Rollator in the corner. Seems a harmless thing, but like you said,” he says, coughing again, and whether he forgets what it is he’s going to say next or decides against saying it all together, Annie doesn’t know. Either way, the coughing dies down, but Uncle Calder is finished talking. And so is she.

  PART TWO

  ELEVEN

  Annie’s mother had a way of clicking her tongue when she read the paper, adding sighs and chuckles at the end. Sometimes she read passages out loud to no one in particular, the way she was doing now.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” she said. “We’re rolling back to the Middle Ages.”

  It was Sunday morning and the house smelled of cooked bacon and coffee and warm buttered biscuits. The family was gathered around the breakfast table, Annie’s father to her left in a white T-shirt and red pajama bottoms. Her mother to her right, already dressed in blue shorts, her copper hair pulled into a ponytail that lay across her striped sleeveless blouse. She was the pretty center from which everything else seemed to flow. Food, plans for the day, the news of the world around them. Newspapers were splayed across both of their now empty plates.

  Calder sat across from Annie reading the funnies. He hadn’t looked at her the same since the Pinckneys the week before. He hadn’t been acting the same, period.

  “Those boys get into fights all the time,” she’d said after the first day of the silent treatment. “Are you afraid we’re going to get in trouble? Because we aren’t. Everybody knows their daddy has a regular schedule of beating them. He won’t be able to tell his own handiwork from someone else’s. Besides, do you really think they’re going to say a girl put those bloody knots on their heads?” This seemed to shut him out even more.

  “Reinstating the death penalty!” her mother was saying. “My God. How can any sane nation…It says here…” She scanned the page, mouthing words as she searched.

  Calder’s eyebrows jumped up and down at the funnies. Annie swallowed her juice and chewed bits of pulp between her teeth.

  A man’s sad singing voice sifted from the radio’s gold fabric speakers. The second pot of coffee gurgled through the percolator.

  “That’s Waylon Jennings, Annie,” her father said from behind the paper. “Mark my words. He’s going to be big.”

  Annie bit into a flaky, buttered biscuit coated in grape jelly. She listened to the smooth, baritone voice, and in that moment forgot about everything except the music and the biscuit, its crust lodged against the roof of her mouth. She freed it with her tongue, and her whole body relaxed into the sweet warmth.

  Her mother clicked her tongue. “Here,” she said. “This Justice Stewart! Quote, ‘This function may be unappealing to many, but it is essential in an ordered society that asks its citizens to rely on legal process rather than self-help to vindicate their wrongs.’ End quote. What does that even mean?” she asked. “That we’ll all just go around killing people who break the law if the government won’t kill them for us?” She groaned and took a sip of coffee. “How did they pull this crap over on us? We’ve been asleep at the wheel, Kearney.” Her eyes never left the page, but her arms rose into the air. “It’s 1976 and we’re killing people to show killing is wrong. Am I the only one who sees the irony here?”

  Annie felt Calder’s eyes on her. She focused on her mother, feigned interest in what she was saying.

  Her father drew the paper down as if he had something urgent to add. Her parents played off one another, each layering the conversation until they painted a single, agreed-upon picture. They were a set. Kearney and Miriam. Salt and pepper. Sun and moon. Shoes. One misplaced without the other. But now her father eyes glared across the room toward the sink and then up, with a tilt of his head, around the kitchen window and back down in little jerks as if he were following the trail of a skittish mouse. He didn’t add anything to what her mother said.

  He’d stared like this before, if not at the curtains in the breeze, then the doorframe, an African violet, a line of scuff marks on the floor. No one was exactly sure what to make of it. Last week her mother had found him on the patio, staring into the yard at the empty tree swing for who knew how long before she led him to the sofa and put a cold cloth to his head and told him to lie back and relax. He worked too hard she said, six days a week was too much. After a moment he’d jumped to his feet and said, “Goddamn, my head hurts,” and he’d turned on the television with the wet cloth tumbling from his head to his lap to the floor.

  Two evenings after he’d said that about his head, her mother whispered, “This is serious, Kearney,” while they were reading beneath the lamplight on the living room sofa. Calder and Annie lay on the roped rug at their feet eating Pop-Tarts and watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest on Betamax.

  “Look at me, Miriam,” her father had whispered. “I’m fine. I probably work too much like you said. Why don’t I take some time off and we’ll all go someplace? We can drive over to Homosassa Springs for a few days. Get a look at some manatees.”

  “All right,” her mother said, and by her soft tone it was clear she wanted to believe him. But then she added, “I still think it’s more than that. Why don’t you just go see someone?”

  “Because I’m working so much,” he said with a laugh, and Annie turned in time to see him kiss her mother on the cheek.

  Her mother’s hardcover book clapped shut when she tossed it onto the cushions. She stepped through Annie and Calder’s legs on her way out of the room, and the tip of her cool toes skimmed Annie’s calf.

  Now, her mother released the paper. She set her palms flat and quiet on the table and watched Annie’s father.

  Annie swallowed at her plate. She didn’t want to think about anything other than the fact that she loved Sundays—the way they all lingered at the table, her parents telling stories of customers and fellow teachers, the funny things people said and did. One woman needed a new hutch because her father had shot at her husband from across the dinner table and hit the hutch instead. Not only was the glass busted out but the frame on the door was split clean in half and the backside looked like it was hit with buckshot the way the hole spra
yed open, according to this woman. “You couldn’t fix it if you tried,” the woman told Annie’s father as she shopped for a new hutch in his store. “What about your husband?” he’d asked, and the woman shooed him like she was chasing away birds with her hands. “He’s beyond fixing, too,” she said, and Kearney was afraid to ask just exactly what that meant. Annie’s mother’s stories always unraveled from the same tangle of women. Fussy young teachers looking for husbands, and more often than not, finding the same kind of man who, in the end, didn’t want any of them, which gave the women another day to bemoan having to teach forever. This seemed about the funniest thing Annie’s mother had ever heard. “Having to teach, she said. Forever. Can you imagine? Then again, maybe Suzette should get her snaggletooth fixed so I wouldn’t have to gag through her Charlie perfume and cigarettes in the teacher’s lounge every morning.” And on they went until everyone was hungry again, sandwiching bacon between leftover biscuits and drinking down the rest of the lukewarm juice for lunch.

  “He’s one ornery sonofabitch,” her father suddenly said. “I’ll say that much for him.”

  “Kearney!” Her mother jerked her head left and right at Calder and Annie. “Who are you talking about?”

  “Well, Miriam. It’s the truth.”

  The sun glowed orange in the white bowl of cantaloupe and peaches. Her father returned the paper to his face. Her mother stood without a word and cleared food and dishes from the table.