Carry Yourself Back to Me

by Deborah Reed

  Calder winces.

  “I’m just telling you like it is. She’s a bloodthirsty woman. The women in the DA’s office joke that she keeps a python just so she can throw bunnies at it.”

  Calder looks around the room trying to keep still. “I need some medication for the tics. You need to get me some Haldol.”

  She writes on her legal pad.

  “Listen. Sidsel’s no black belt in karate. She couldn’t protect herself against Magnus,” he says, though he pictures her graceful hand barreling through a block of wood and it seems possible that she could do or be anything she wished.

  His eyes burn to blink. His shoulder itches to jump. He refuses to let go but cannot control the steady bang of knees.

  “It’s all true what I just said. I only added the python to see for myself what happens to you under stress. We can’t let this get to court.”

  “I didn’t do it and neither did she,” Calder says.

  “I’ll get you the Haldol by five.”

  SIXTEEN

  Streams of sunlight bent through the leaves, reflecting the amber glow of ripe peaches. Annie clung to a ladder high inside the tree and grabbed hold of peach. Her fingers sank into the overripe flesh, and there were other moist patches of brownish orange where the insects had gotten there first.

  Two rows over Calder was singing “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” by Elton John and Kiki Dee.

  “I couldn’t if I tried,” Annie sang back, and Calder laughed at the way she exaggerated the drawl.

  She was about to toss the peach into the “rotten” bucket when a bee landed between her finger and thumb. She was aware of more buzzing in the trees. Mr. Peterson always warned them not to swat. “They’ll come back after you,” he’d say. “You’ll get turned around and they’ll come back after you from behind just as sure as I’m standing here.”

  Annie had never been stung. Not once in all this country full of lush growing things and the equally rotting dead, had she ever been stung.

  She shook the bee gently to the side, but it clung like it was glued. She watched as its head dipped into the moist insides of the peach without leaving her skin. She thought to lean her hand and release it like a ladybug against a branch. She thought it would simply walk off. But when she reached her hand out toward the branch she jerked back and nearly fell off the ladder at the sight of Josh Pinckney’s wispy hair on the other side of her tree.

  “Don’t go breaking my heart,” Calder sang out.

  A sharp sting between her fingers drew her head down. She slapped at the bee and dropped the peach. The stinger poked like a splinter from her yellow-stained skin. Pain seared through her hand. “Hey, Kiki!” Calder yelled. “What’s going on over there?” Pain spread to her wrist. She couldn’t think of what to do next. She didn’t remember climbing down the ladder but she must have because the next thing she knew she was surrounded by the inescapable smell of peaches spoiling in the heat.

  She sat on the ground and rocked the ache deep inside her arm. Flies buzzed her head. The grass beyond the grove confused her. Everything seemed out of place. She didn’t know how long she was sitting there. All she knew was the sun was hot on her scalp when she quit moving. Her eyes itched and puffed as if her face were filling with water.

  “Hey!” She finally thought to holler for somebody, anybody. Her voice sounded like it came from somewhere else.

  The bee sting was the cause of all the pain. She knew this. But she kept seeing Josh Pinckney’s face above the tree, his hand waving, his hair flopping in the wind as if he was the one who had done this to her.

  Her throat felt lined with cotton. She coughed and dug at the stinger stuck in her skin. Her hand was so swollen it no longer looked like her own.

  “Cal-der!” she yelled, though it didn’t sound like much. She could feel someone near, sense him coming toward her. She couldn’t see clearly. Her skin turned cold and her bare legs shook. “I got stung between my fingers,” she said. Her hand lifted like a balloon.

  She lay back onto the ground, her face to the sun, her hair in withered, rotten peaches. The air seemed too thin to make a difference to her lungs. It became even thinner when the silhouette of Josh Pinckney took shape above her head.

  Rain ticked the hospital glass and the smell of wet soil seeped beneath the windowpane. Annie opened one eye and saw Calder glancing at the large round clock on the wall. The three o’clock rain was coming down hard enough to bypass gutters and soak every living thing to the root. Annie was thirsty. She closed her eye and imagined the rain saturating the earth. She felt Calder on the end of the bed, heard the pages of a small book flipping, flipping, flipping.

  Then she smelled minty soap and cigar and knew Uncle Calder was there, too. She sensed him leaning toward her and sighing from his chair. He touched her arm lightly before he sat back. A moment later he did it again.

  She slowly opened both eyes and tried to sit up but couldn’t.

  Uncle Calder stood and patted her leg. “I thought I told you to stay out of trouble.” His big fingers brushed the hair from her eyes.

  “You’re a war hero,” Annie said, as if he had just rescued her. She closed her eyes again. There was laughter in the room, and she realized she must have been dreaming of the stories. She often did back then. Uncle Calder punching sharks in the face. Uncle Calder lifted onto a lifeboat, handed a drink of fresh water, a pretty purple medal on a stage.

  Her eyes opened wide. Her uncle and brother were like big and small versions of the same person.

  Calder slid up next to Annie. “You’re awake.”

  She blinked.

  “You all right, squirt?” Uncle Calder asked.

  “I feel sick,” she whispered.

  Calder placed the book on the bed. A field guide to insects. He drew his hands behind his back, but she could see that his forearms were blotched purple and red with cuts and bruises. “They’ve been giving you all kinds of stuff in that tube,” he said.

  She peered at the bottle hanging from the pole. She examined her arm and hand, connected to a tube and wrapped in gauze the size of a boxing glove. She gave a slight motion of her head in the direction of Calder’s arms. “What happened to you?”

  He looked down at himself. “I fell out of the tree,” he said, but his tone didn’t ring the way it should. She must have raised her eyebrow like her father. “What?” Calder said. “I fell out of the tree.”

  Annie turned to Uncle Calder. “Where’s Mom and Daddy?”

  Calder started bouncing on the bed.

  “Get off,” she said, and swallowed to calm her stomach.

  He got up and stood at her side and held his hands behind his back.

  “Your daddy’s not feeling so good,” Uncle Calder said. “But don’t you worry about him right now. He’ll be fine.”

  The truth escaped through his eyes.

  Calder blinked several times and then blurted the news. “He was in here but you were sleeping. Then I don’t know what happened. He started talking crazy. Saying stuff about catching rats in steel traps, using peppermint candies as bait. The doctor took him out. Mom told me to stay here. Then Uncle Calder showed up.”

  “How long have I been asleep?” she asked.

  “A couple hours.”

  She looked around the room trying to take it all in. Walls the color of frosted glass. Everything white. The small table, curtains, and bed. Silver and white. Only Uncle Calder’s chair was black patent leather with wooden arms and legs as if it’d been brought in from another room to accommodate him.

  “Listen. You’ve got enough to deal with, squirt,” he said. “Don’t worry about your daddy. He’s in good hands.”

  She slowly shifted her head on the pillow. She ran her fingers through the back of her hair. It was matted with small clumps of peaches she imagined must look like a head wound. On a wave of nausea she thought of the Pinckneys. She smacked her dry lips and burped.

  Calder shrugged his shoulders at least five times. “Mom poke
d her head in here a minute ago and said they want to run some tests on him.” He rose up and down on the balls of his feet. “At least she finally got him to the doctor. That’s what she said.”

  Annie glimpsed the wet window. A quick bolt of light flashed through the room. A second later thunder rolled. Calder rubbed his hand along the surface of his bruises.

  “I can’t believe you’ve never been stung,” Uncle Calder said. “You’re allergic. That’s what’s happened here.”

  She looked at her swollen hand. She looked at Calder.

  “You’re a lucky girl,” Uncle Calder said.

  “Rat bait?” she asked.

  Calder shrugged in quick succession. “I’m wondering if he’s going nutty like old Mrs. Peterson did when she came knocking on our door that time, saying she had ants under her skin.” It wasn’t a joke. His bottom lip quivered. He grabbed it between his teeth.

  “Come on, now,” Uncle Calder said, pulling the toothpick from his mouth. “It’s not like that. Your daddy’s sharp as sawgrass.”

  Annie struggled, and then managed, with the help of Uncle Calder, to sit upright. She untangled the IV and reached for Calder. He came and sat on the bed next to her, laying his head against her shoulder. She wrapped her arms around his back and felt his spine beneath her open fingers.

  Then his back started shaking and it took her a moment to realize he was crying. Her stomach felt sicker. It was all she could do to keep from throwing up. She stroked his bony shoulder blades and gently shushed him the way she’d done so many times when he was little and constantly scraping his knees on the gravel driveway.

  “He’s going to be—” Uncle Calder never finished. He patted Calder’s shoulder and cleared his throat and left the room.

  Annie held Calder to her chest until the rhythmic jerks of his shoulders gave way to the random jerks of his tics. She squeezed him once more before letting go.

  She wiped his face with the corner of her stiff sheet. She looked at his arms and a scratch on his temple. She touched it lightly with her finger. He was lying and she didn’t know why. “What’d you do?” she asked. “Fall through the whole tree?”

  “Yeah.” He sounded just like their father when he said, “Like a ball bearing in a wooden shifter contraption.”

  The Pinckney house was less than a mile through the woods from Annie and Calder’s backyard. The first thing she and Calder spotted was the rusty rooster weather vane atop the barn, spinning in a squeaky circle. The air fanned the sour smell of pigs. The same smell that came off Josh and Gabe. There was no one outside when Annie and Calder came snooping along the far end of the split-rail fence.

  The great door of the barn stood open to both sides. Annie was still a little weak from the bee sting two days before. She rested her hands on her knees and looked in.

  “What do you think they do with that thing hanging over the beam in there?” Calder asked.

  “The cable pulley?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “I don’t know. Something bad or something stupid,” she said.

  Calder blinked several times. “You want to go look in there?”

  “Inside the barn?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What for?”

  “Maybe we can figure out what they do with that pulley.”

  “What are you up to?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “I’m asking you what.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Calder Walsh. Who do you think you’re talking to? You’ve never once in your life gone looking for trouble.”

  “I ain’t looking for trouble.”

  “Don’t let Mom hear you say ain’t.”

  “I ain’t.”

  Annie gave him a sidelong glance. “Then why’d you want to come snooping around out here so bad? This was your idea.”

  “Don’t act like I twisted your arm,” Calder said.

  The weight of her body sank her heels in the sand. She thought of her mother at home wringing her hands, her red eyes staring at the phone, all the sighing and distraction, fussing in the kitchen while she waited for the doctor to call about her father in the hospital. It was hard for Annie to know what to do with herself at home. She couldn’t get a clear breath in any of the rooms. It was summer when they were normally free to do as they pleased once they finished picking peaches, and a part of her resented feeling so much restraint.

  The pigs in the sty to the right of the barn squealed and rolled in mud. “Look over at the house,” Annie whispered.

  Josh Pinckney was framed inside the kitchen window, no more than fifty feet away from where they stood. He was leaning over the sink, washing dishes in the sun. His mother’s big apron hung loosely around his neck.

  “Just seeing that is worth any bit of trouble,” Annie said. They ducked behind the side of the barn and couldn’t keep from laughing.

  “You think he’s wearing her house slippers, too? The ones she wears into town?” Calder asked.

  The mention of Josh’s mother’s shoes brought back a sliver of memory. In the peach grove Josh’s face had leaned over hers, and now, for the first time, she remembered the feel of his fingers lifting her hand. She remembered his smell. She remembered his shoe near her face.

  “What was he doing when you came up on me in the grove?”

  “Who?”

  She nodded toward the kitchen window.

  “What makes you think he was there?”

  “Wasn’t he?”

  “I didn’t say he wasn’t. I just thought you were out of it.”

  “I was. But I saw him there before I passed out.” The memory came to her in pieces like a dream. “He leaned over me. He was doing something with my hand.”

  Calder shrugged once, and then his shoulder kept jerking at his ear. “I didn’t see anything. I just called for old man Peterson.”

  “What was he doing, Calder?”

  “What do you mean? I told you.”

  “You’re the worst liar in all of Seminole County.”

  “I ain’t lying!”

  She grabbed him by the arm.

  The door to the house slammed shut. She let go of Calder and motioned him into the back of the barn where they could no longer see the house. The door slammed shut again, and Annie figured that someone had either come out and gone back in, or two people had come out and stayed. She glanced up into the rafters. Plywood was gathered across the crossbars and nailed, creating a platform like the early makings of a fort. This must have been what they used the pulley for. She looked around for a ladder. There was none. She couldn’t figure how they got up there and didn’t have time to consider it before she heard what sounded like Gabe and his daddy.

  Annie and Calder crouched in the corner, halfway behind a stack of wooden chicken crates.

  “I didn’t see it,” Gabe said.

  “It was right where I told you it was,” his daddy said. “Why do you bother to go to school anyhow? What the hell they teaching? How to make your daddy do all the work around here?” Annie could hear what sounded like the man’s hand striking Gabe. Gabe yelled for him to stop.

  The breeze took a turn and swooped through the center of the barn and lifted the smell of something dead. Annie plugged her nose and looked up to the side. A row of skinned rabbits hung from a beam, each by their ears, and she thought it was as bad as stringing up a row of babies, the way it sickened her. Their taut muscles glistened with dark blood. Bits of fur clung to their ears, but their feet were sawed clean off. Annie lowered her gaze and caught sight of the skins laid out across the railing of an empty stall. Next to that a row of rabbit feet were lined up like seashells on a windowsill.

  “Jesus.” Calder gazed upward with a plugged nose. “What do they want with those?”

  “I don’t know.” She recalled the sound of an animal being skinned. Uncle Calder once dressed a deer in his garage. It was like duct tape tearing off the roll, getting stuck, then tearing again. Uncle Calder didn’t seem to mind
it. Annie had covered her ears and shook at the thought of losing her own skin. She thought of how only hours before, that buck had been running through the forest with other deer, eating grass, breathing fresh air, completely unaware of what was about to happen.

  She felt a little sorry for the Pinckney boys just then. It was like they were forced to hear the skin peeling off an animal every day of their lives. A person was bound to get ornery and mean if they had to work in a pigsty and get slapped in the head for no good reason and live in a house with holes in the screens and dead rabbits hanging in the barn. She thought of how she’d added to their misery by beating them in the head with the branch. This was their life. They had no choice but to get up and live it every day.

  Annie felt a sharp ache for her mother. Her jasmine perfume, the touch of her fingers in Annie’s hair, the way she sent Annie off to class by squeezing her and telling her to go teach those people something.

  The door to the house slammed again and they waited. When nothing came they crouched low to the ground and hid first behind the tractor in the dirt yard, second behind the old pickup with flat tires and a wooden tailgate, and third behind the row of scrub palmettos along the woods that led to home.

  Sobs could be heard all the way into the kitchen. Then a wail so thick it lingered in Annie’s head for days afterward.

  Her father hadn’t been home for days, but it was only then, as Annie and Calder came in from the Pinckneys’ farm, that Annie felt the fullness of his absence. It was everywhere, and it was final.

  They found their mother sitting on the edge of her bed, facing the wall with her head down. She held a wadded tissue in her fist. She turned to the sound of Calder bouncing on the balls of his feet.

  Annie filled with an ache so deep and powerful her arms and legs began to tremble.

  “His voice,” her mother said as if she were midway through a conversation. Her face was wet and swollen, altered in a way Annie had never seen. “I was always so taken by that voice of his.”