by Deborah Reed
“Who knows?” her mother says. “Maybe he’ll be out of there before you even get a chance to visit.”
“Mom. I just want you to think about this. Prepare yourself for what could happen. The man was killed at the same bar Calder was known to hang out in.”
“What are you saying?”
“And then the man just happens to be married to Calder’s girlfriend.” Annie rubs her eyes in exhaustion. Her voice loses its intensity. “Please. Let’s stop denying the obvious.”
“There is nothing to deny.”
“I saw Uncle Calder today,” she says, not meaning it to be a slap in the face. But of course, that is exactly what it is.
Her mother hangs up.
Annie tosses her phone to the counter. The palm she’s dragged in forms an arch above her head, and she thinks of the time she had her picture taken with Calder beneath a peach tree. Her yellow coverall shorts. His cutoffs and rainbow T-shirt. Calder had bought a camera with his own money and they were posing for Mr. Peterson with goofy grins, arms slung around one other as they leaned their heads together. They were inseparable then. Deeply happy in the way children feel happiness. Their father wasn’t dead yet. Not for another two weeks. They had no way of knowing all they were capable of. They had no way of knowing what was to come.
A key jiggles in the lock and the front door swings open. A woman, who can only be Sidsel, fumbles in backwards with a bag of groceries and two bulging pieces of luggage. She mumbles to herself in what must be Danish. There is nowhere for Annie to escape.
THIRTEEN
A giant ball of fire lit up the cloudy back yard with a whoosh.
Moments earlier Annie had seen her father in front of the grill clasping a bag of charcoal briquettes to his chest. He dumped half the bag into the grill and coated the charcoal with enough lighter fluid to fill a dog bowl.
And then he threw the match.
Annie lurched to the edge of the patio, but even there the heat reached her face and arms. She covered her hair.
Her mother ran from the kitchen, screaming her father’s name. Calder jumped out the door behind her with balled fists and blinking eyes and kept on jumping even after he stood in place.
Her father felt around his head and laughed. “Did you get a load of that? Damn near lit up the sky.”
“What did you do?” her mother yelled. Bits of bronze onionskin clung to her fingers. “You could have burned down the house!” She gaped at the flame on the grill and then up into the birch tree. Her eyes followed the line of branches over the roof.
Thunder rolled to the south as if God himself were calling for order. Damp air came in on the breeze and fused with the smell of lighter fluid. Lizards scrambled into the shrubs; mosquitoes buzzed along the patio lights strung from house to tree.
“Kearney.”
He didn’t turn around.
The flame was dying and he placed the wire rack over the coals, closed the lid, and rubbed his hands together.
He turned. “Look here,” he said, and leaped forward and cupped a firefly in his hands. “An electrifly,” he said, lifting a finger to show the glow coming from his hands. But the glow resembled fire and Annie stepped back. She knew enough to know that even grown men had fears, and her father’s had always been fire.
Her mother was crying when she went inside the house.
Uncle Calder arrived ten minutes later.
Annie’s mother buzzed around the picnic table with pitchers of lemonade and iced tea. Ringlets of damp hair stuck to the sides of her forehead. The patio lights reflected a piece of onionskin trapped in her hair. When she saw Uncle Calder she brushed her hair back with her arm and wiped her hands down the front of her apron. Her smile lit up like a fire all its own.
“There you are,” she said. Uncle Calder lifted her in the air with his giant hug. She was nearly fifteen years younger than him, and the way he held her made her look younger still. He put her down and pulled the cinnamon toothpick from his mouth before kissing her cheek. She smiled and leaned into him and patted his big chest with her hand. Then she looked up, and for a split-second it seemed as if they might kiss on the lips. But then they looked in opposite directions as if some noise had suddenly drawn their attention, and Calder unexpectedly pulled his camera out and yelled, “Smile,” and they smiled in time with the blinding flash.
“Smells good back here,” Uncle Calder said.
“It was a bonfire,” her mother said, apparently finishing what she didn’t have a chance to say on the phone. She poured him a glass of iced tea. “He must have used a whole bottle of lighter fluid. He’s grilling the food. It’s like he forgot about the one thing he used to be afraid of.”
Uncle Calder grabbed his toothpick, broke it between his fingers, and tossed it into the yard. “He still refusing to see a doctor?”
“I guess you could say that.” She handed Calder and Annie paper cups of lemonade. “Why don’t you two go practice your song before we eat?”
Neither made a move.
“Go on now.”
Annie kept her ear turned as they crossed the patio.
“Hey!” Her father stepped out just as they reached the door. “Look who’s here,” he said, crossing the patio to Uncle Calder. The two men slapped backs, and her father quickly turned toward her mother and the grill and asked, “What on earth smells so good?”
She didn’t move. “I can’t take it anymore,” she hissed to Uncle Calder. “You need to do something.”
A sick, unsettled feeling billowed in and out of Annie’s stomach. It’d been doing that for the past few weeks. Something bad was about to happen—and the thing that made it worse was the fact that everyone was pretending that it wasn’t.
“Listen, Kearney,” Uncle Calder started to say.
“The grill!” Annie yelled. She handed Calder her lemonade and ran toward her father. “The huge ball of fire!”
He rubbed his forehead and gave a small laugh.
“Annie please,” her mother said. “Go to your room. Go play your guitar or something. I thought you and Calder were going to practice.”
“I nearly lost all my hair wrestling around a campfire when I was a kid. She knows that story. You remember that, Calder?” he asked Uncle Calder. “You were the one who put it out.”
“I remember,” Uncle Calder said.
Her father clasped his hands on either side of his head as if a huge boulder were sitting there. “Goddamn if this sonofabitch isn’t going to bust wide open.”
Uncle Calder helped him to the picnic table.
“You ever have a headache that bad?” he asked Uncle Calder, his eyes squinting as if into a bright light.
“No. Can’t say I have.”
“Go, Annie,” her mother said. “You too, Calder.”
Annie sat next to Calder on the edge of his bed, the neck of her guitar braced between her knees. “What do you say?” Calder asked. When she didn’t say anything, he lifted her hair into his hands and braided it the way she’d taught him years ago when they used to play house and hairdresser and afternoon theater and zoo. She closed her eyes and wished she could sit there all evening with his fingers roping the locks of hair from her scalp, filling her whole body with a soft tingling sensation. But she became aware of herself, aware of his hands as if she were watching from the doorway through someone else’s eyes, and it didn’t look right. It didn’t feel right. They were no longer little kids. He ought not be playing with her hair. She scooted away and her hair unraveled at her back.
“What?” he asked. “Should we get our stuff and go out there?” Before she could answer he was up and digging through his closet.
An ache built inside her chest. She plucked the low E string on her guitar. She stared at the gloomy brown stagecoaches and horses on Calder’s bedspread and traced the wagon wheels with her finger.
“What’s wrong?” Calder asked as he emerged from the closet in his blue cowboy shirt with the pearly snaps and white looped stitching at the front
of the shoulders. He looked silly. He looked like a boy pretending to be a man.
The idea of going outside and singing seemed foolish now. Childish. “You don’t think it’s stupid?” she asked him.
“What?” He turned back to the closet. “You seen my red cowboy hat anywhere?” He tossed the old white shawl toward her, and her fingers caught in the lace. “There it is!” He grabbed his hat from behind a jacket on a hook. “What are you talking about?”
She couldn’t explain the way she felt. It was like walking into someone else’s house for the first time. She was unsure of the layout. Unsure of what to do with herself in the open space. “I don’t know. You don’t think we’re too old for this?”
“What are you talking about? Johnny Cash is older than you and me put together.” He smiled a lopsided smile and plopped down next to her and patted her knee. “What d’ya say, squirt?” He sounded exactly like Uncle Calder. His legs were so much longer than hers, and the way he was sitting there crouched forward with his elbows resting near his knees made him look as if he’d just gone from an eleven-year-old boy to a man.
She wrapped the musty shawl around her shoulders and slipped on a pair of Calder’s big cowboy boots. They walked out onto the patio, and everyone turned and clapped as if they were real musicians in a ticketed show.
Uncle Calder put his fingers to his mouth and pierced the air with a whistle. “Look how cute,” he said of Annie. “Whose boots are those? Those your brother’s boots? Lord God, would you look at this.”
Her mother smiled but her eyes narrowed, concentrated like her mind was somewhere else. Her father gave a thumbs-up, his smile hard to see in the dim string of lights. Her mother leaned in and kissed his cheek, her lips plastered there longer than usual, as if she were stuck, waiting for him to react, to speak, to notice. He did none of these things.
Uncle Calder glanced at the two of them locked together and quickly turned away.
It was then that Annie felt something slip between her legs. Her mother had warned her, had had all those embarrassing talks with her, explained everything in anatomical detail, and still, that night, when the dull cramp bore down on her stomach she thought she was dying. A trickle of something warm slipped into her underwear. She knew it would be a drop of her own blood, and this only made matters worse.
A bead of rain hit her lashes. The storm was so close she could smell the soil on the wind. “You’ll know it when it comes,” her mother had told her. “They call it the change, the curse, the visit from Aunt Martha and all kinds of other nonsense, but it’s your menstruation, honey, your period if you like, and it’s normal. It just means you’re going from being a girl to being a young woman. By the time you become a woman it’ll turn into nothing more than a reminder that you’re not pregnant with a baby.”
Annie lowered her head and pressed her legs together. She squeezed Calder’s hand as they stood against the white siding of the house.
“You nervous?” he whispered.
She squeezed so tightly that he yelped and released her grip.
“What is it?”
She didn’t answer. The night sounds—cicadas, frogs, wind—all disappeared. There was only quiet, a heavy quiet, like waiting for the sound of a giant firecracker to explode.
“Come on. Let’s play. One, two, three,” he whispered, his mouth a small twist of confusion.
Lightening blinked like a light shorting out behind the clouds. Calder took her hand back. His shoulder was jumping now. “We don’t have to,” he said. “Nobody’s going to mind if we don’t play.”
Another trickle of blood, more warmth than wet.
“Tell me what it is,” Calder said.
For the first time in her life she understood how things could be something other than what they seemed, the opposite even, of what a person believed in. Suddenly the whole world was exposed as a lie, the wizard’s curtain pulled back to reveal the barbecue and the storm, the family get-together and the music she was about to play, all made up of layers and layers of something else. There was more to this story. Even her own body was splitting apart on the inside, going straight from a girl to a woman, while standing there looking to all the world like a child.
“I don’t know if I can play,” she whispered.
“Well, I know you can,” Calder said. “Does that make a difference?” He looked at her the way he looked at the row of potted seedlings in his bedroom window every morning, his eyes filled with possibility.
She recalled a fight they once had over the TV set. It wasn’t like them to take things so far, but this one turned vicious with the two of them coming to blows. A down pillow covered in needlework had split open, and feathers floated around the room like snow. The sight of it transported the two of them into stillness, as if it really were snow, something they’d never seen. Their mother marched into the room, and after screaming over what had once been her grandmother’s pillow, she sat them both down and said, “Long after your father and I are dead and buried and all the people in your lives have come and gone, who do you think will be left? Who do you think will still care about you until your dying day?” She looked at each of them. She plucked a feather from Calder’s hair, blew another that had taken flight again near her face. Nothing more needed to be said.
Annie strummed four measures’ worth of D. She watched Calder’s foot tap the flagstones and felt a prickle across her scalp. She switched to G, then looked up and saw a smile spread across his face. “You sing this one by yourself,” she whispered. He nodded that he would, and a pleasant little hum lit her chest.
“I went down to the river to watch the fish swim by!” Calder sang, his body free of tics, his chin in the air, fingers snapping at his side. “But I got down to the river, so lonesome I wanted to die…Ohh Lord!”
Annie stepped to the side to give him room, and when she looked across the patio her father had disappeared into the shadow of the birch, cut away like an image from a photograph. It was then Annie realized how powerless he was making them all feel, especially her mother. Calder and Annie were just kids, rendered nearly helpless by size and inexperience, but their mother was a grown woman. And not just any woman. She was smart and successful, a teacher full of knowledge about the way the world worked. Why didn’t she stand up to him? Why didn’t she insist, for all their sake, that he see a doctor?
“And then I jumped in the river,” Calder sang. “But the doggone river was dry.”
Uncle Calder leaned forward in his lawn chair. He clapped and laughed and choked so hard he had to wipe his runny eyes dry.
They had just enough time to finish the song when the sky cracked open and rain crashed down like ground-up gravel on the patio, the grill, the pitchers of lemonade and iced tea. Everyone scrambled to grab what they could, her mother screaming about her hair and the burgers, Annie screaming about her guitar. Once inside Annie went to the bathroom and stuck the pad in a clean pair of underwear the way her mother had shown her, and before she knew it they were all sitting at the kitchen table with wild hair and blank faces, her father at one end and her mother and uncle at the other with Annie and Calder in between. Everyone chewed their crispy burgers in silence, their faces lit up now and again from the lightning, droplets of rain still glistening on their skin. In all the fuss no one had thought to shut off the string of patio lights. Her father said, “The lights are on out there,” but no one got up to hit the switch. They went on eating in a kind of trance as if they were still listening to music, as if they were only watching the storm outside, but Annie knew it was the grill they were looking at. The dome knocked crooked from the rain, the ghostly steam rising up from the coals.
FOURTEEN
By the time Owen finally arrives at what used to be his home, he’s trembling from what may be a fever. The day has lost nearly all its light. The gas tank is on empty.
Her gate is closed, locked he assumes, behind a line of cars, including a white van from Channel 4 News, its enormous antennae reaching the tops of
trees.
Two men Owen takes for security guards step out of a black Suburban when he T-bones them in. He recognizes one as a guy who did security for some of Annie’s shows.
Owen rises from his car, and the tips of his fingers instantly curl in the cold. He strains to peer down the long driveway. Moss dangles from the live oak, obstructing the view of where the Land Cruiser usually sits.
The men have small black guns clipped to their belts. They have flattop crew cuts and heavy black shoes.
Owen leans around the broad shoulders of the man he doesn’t know but still can’t tell if the Land Cruiser is there. Other than the porch light, it doesn’t look as if any lights are on inside the house.
“Can we help you?” the one with big ears asks.
This is where the photo of Annie was taken for the paper. He feels his shoes dig into the cold gravel. He rubs his hands together. His fingers have turned a whitish blue. “I’m Owen. Pettybone. We’ve met before.”
The man studies him. “I don’t remember if we did.”
“Sure you do. I was at all her shows. I produced Gull on a Steeple.”
“Is that right.”
Owen’s jaw is now quivering. “Is she here? I don’t see her car.”
“Maybe you should have called first,” the other man says. He’s balding but young. They both lean down to look inside his car.
Owen coughs into his hand. “I’m a friend of the family’s.”
“Maybe you should have called.”
Suddenly a microphone and cameraman are lodged at Owen’s elbow.
“You’re a friend of Ms. Walsh’s?” the reporter with the microphone and thick glasses asks.
Maybe this is the same guy who took Annie’s picture and put it in the paper. If it weren’t for seeing her there he might not be standing here now.
