Carry Yourself Back to Me

by Deborah Reed

  She’s collected a mouse-size clump of Detour’s fur from the rug by the time he comes into the kitchen across from her in his rumpled clothes. He pours himself coffee. It can’t possibly taste good after brushing and gargling, she thinks, but those thoughts are as thin as the skin of a peach. What did she say? What does she want? What are you doing here?

  He holds his mug and squints into the living room at the tree and then the fire. He doesn’t look at her.

  “I just went out and got the tree from Smiley. Not bad for five bucks. It’ll probably be the only sale of the day, too. Look outside.”

  He cleans the sleep from the corners of his eyes and peers through the oval glass in the door. “Jesus. Tess wasn’t kidding about the snow.”

  Tess. Annie squeezes the fur inside her hand.

  He drinks his coffee and smacks his lips and walks into the living room. “How does the Land Cruiser handle in it?”

  “Fine,” she says, passing him on her way into the kitchen with her cup and a fist full of fur, which she throws into the trash beneath the sink. She sets her cup down and turns around and leans into the counter with crossed arms. “What are you doing here?”

  He sits on the sofa and stares at the tree. The lights reflect in his face and mug, and then his back gets taller when he glimpses her guitar on the stand. “How are the new songs coming?” He coughs but it doesn’t sound half as bad as yesterday. He still doesn’t look at her.

  She lifts her cup and sets it back down without drinking. “I asked you a question.”

  He stares into the fire. “There’s a million reasons and none at all for me being here, Annie.”

  “Let’s start with the first.”

  “Calder,” he says without hesitation, and she feels the coffee in her stomach slide to a place she didn’t know was there.

  “Calder,” she repeats.

  “Yes.” He glances back at the hallway as if thinking of the phone and Tess, still fresh in his ear, his head, his heart.

  “Look at me.” She walks toward him.

  The muscles in his jaw tighten. He doesn’t turn from the fire.

  She kneels on the floor in front of his knees and places her hand on his arm. The fire and tree lights reflect in the red of his eyes.

  “Look at me and tell me why you’re here.”

  “I never wanted to leave.”

  “I didn’t ask you that.”

  “I felt like I had no choice.”

  “You act like I threw you out.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “What then? Look at me.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “You’re making it complicated.”

  “No, Annie. It’s complicated. Trust me.”

  “Why should I trust you about anything?”

  He finally meets her eyes.

  “Why are you here?”

  He leans into the sofa and blows air from his lips. Then he bends forward with elbows on knees until his face is only inches from hers. He’s about to say something, then seems to think better of it and says something else. “I made a mistake.” He sets his mug on the coffee table and touches her face with his warm hand.

  “I shouldn’t be here,” he says, and she thinks, That’s your mistake? Coming here? And then he leans all the way toward her and kisses her softly on the cheek. His lips don’t leave and she slides hers toward his, wanting nothing more than to feel him on her mouth. “I don’t want you to get sick,” he whispers and turns slightly away and squeezes her hair and works his fingers up the back of her head, removing her hair band so that her hair falls free. He always liked her hair down. “Let it go,” he’d say and she’d let it whip her eyes raw in an ocean breeze just to see what she could of his smile, those white, sexy-crooked teeth, his full lips edging between her choppy strings of hair.

  So many pleasures rush in that she couldn’t stop herself if she tried. And yet Tess is there like a worm, twisting inside. Annie wants to tell her she deserves this for snatching him away. She deserves every little detail of what is happening here, whispered in her ear for the rest of her life.

  There’s no stopping something this long in the coming, and she kisses his face and draws in the smell of him and feels her whole body pull him into her as if on its own. He comes down off the sofa and begins unbuttoning her shirt, and even though she’s waited all these months for this day to come she can’t wait a moment longer and so she helps him with the buttons and her jeans and before she knows it they are stripped of clothes and his eyes are taking in every part of her. He’s no longer the stranger on the bed.

  She knows him so well. Well enough to see a look seize his eyes. A look so slight it would have gone unnoticed by someone else, but not her. Something has shifted. And the longer they gaze at one another, the more she feels a bitterness inside her chest. She wants to believe that all the waiting hasn’t changed the way she feels about him, that all the months spent wanting what she finally has only makes it that much sweeter. But what about the humiliation? What about the pain? How could he have left her the way he did? Why on earth has she let him back in? The heat from the fire intensifies against her shoulder and her temples sweat and she’s filled with an unbearable urge to slap him in the face.

  And then she does.

  It cracks like the sound of fire and he rears back, looking more hurt than angry. Then he takes her wrists and holds them on the floor next to her head. She thinks he will hit her, too, and she wants to say, “Go ahead, you son of a bitch,” but then he buries his face in her neck and she’s pretty sure he’s crying when he slides between her legs.

  The tree sparkles behind them and the snow falls all around them and she hears herself scream out so soon and he moans a bit louder and then breathes heavily against her throat as she breathes into his ear and it’s over and the longer they lie there with their skin moist and sticking to one another, the more he starts to feel like a stranger again.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Annie needed to find him. She called information for a Pinckney listing in the Tampa area but there was no listing, and she assumed Joshua’s aunt had changed her name but then she realized his aunt probably wasn’t a Pinckney at all, of course she wasn’t, but instead his mother’s sister. She thought of dialing variations on the last two numbers that’d been smeared away, but she knew enough to know the possible combinations were greater than one would think for just two numbers, and she gave up before she even got started.

  She floundered for days, consumed by distraction—the memory of his hand lifting away, the dream that was so real where they kissed before he drove off in his own car. She’d paced to and from her mother’s bedroom door, wanting so badly to knock, to pull her out, to ask her about swimming in a sea of strange feelings.

  One week after Joshua had stood on her porch with the poinsettia, she finally got up the nerve to call the Pinckneys.

  Gabe answered and she nearly hung up.

  “Who is this?” he asked when she didn’t say anything.

  “I’m looking for Joshua. I know he doesn’t live there, but I was wondering if you could give me his number in Tampa.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Rebecca.”

  “Rebecca who?”

  “Washington,” she said. Rebecca was a quiet girl from school who was in a lot of Annie’s classes, but she didn’t know Rebecca any more than she assumed anyone else did, including Gabe.

  “Hey, Rebecca,” Gabe said. “I miss seeing that little mole on your back right above your underwear.”

  Annie had a mole just above her underwear. Not only did he know it was her on the phone but she realized with a sick feeling that the kids in school must have seen the mole every time she leaned forward on her desk, and she was doubly horrified.

  “Come on, Annie. What’d you do? Lose the number he gave you?”

  She sucked in a mouthful of air and slammed the phone down and sat on her bed staring at the poinsettia she’d made sure to water every day
since Joshua gave it to her. The thought of him talking about her to Gabe made her sick to her stomach. Was he playing some game? Was this all a trick to get back at her, finally, for the beating she’d given them? Had he kept her alive that day just so he could hurt her in some other way?

  She stomped outside with the poinsettia and flung it in the garbage can. Layers of anger and hurt caved in her chest. She got so worked up that the smell coming out of the can was all it took for her to lean forward and lose the fish sticks she’d eaten for dinner. Then the smell of that caused everything in her to escape, and she was no better than her mother on a binge, puking till it came out green. She spit the taste from her mouth and kicked dirt over the mess to hide it from possums and coons. When she turned to come back inside Calder was watching from the kitchen window, and by the time she reached the door he was there.

  “You all right?”

  “I was wrong about him,” she said. “You were right, I was wrong.”

  “Wrong about who?”

  “Joshua.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He’s a Pinckney,” she said, and felt herself slowly rise above it all.

  She brushed her teeth and closed herself up in her room and put everything she had into her guitar. For the first time in her life she felt the scope of what she knew and loved about music, and it began to feel limitless.

  Within days Joshua Pinckney was slipping his hand in her pants, and every time he went away she put her own there and wished it were his.

  It began the Saturday after her conversation with Gabe. Joshua got a driver’s license just like in her dream. He borrowed his aunt’s car and made the two-hour drive to visit Annie.

  She slammed the door in his face.

  He rang the bell and Calder opened it back even when Annie asked him not to. “Stay the hell away from my sister, Joshua Pinckney,” Calder said, and she felt good about him being able to say that.

  Then she heard Joshua around the corner from where she stood. “I’m sorry. Did I do something wrong?”

  “We don’t have enough time to go over all the things you’ve done wrong,” Calder said.

  “I just want to talk to Annie.”

  “Well, that’s not going to happen.”

  It was quiet and Annie assumed Joshua was staring Calder down and she suddenly feared they would break into a fight over her; and so she stepped out from the corner and said, “I don’t think we have anything to talk about”; and the breeze lifted his aftershave to her nose and she’d meant for everything to end right there, to close the door and walk away but she stood a second too long staring at his mouth on the verge of speaking. He licked his lips and swallowed, and when she looked into his eyes it felt like they were seeing all the way inside her to the place that ached.

  “What did Gabe say to you?” he asked.

  “What do you want with me?”

  “Gabe’s an idiot. If he said something that hurt you, tell me.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with Gabe,” Calder said. “My sister wants you to leave.”

  “Do you?” Joshua asked Annie.

  “Yes.” She held the corner of her bottom lip between her teeth and darted her eyes toward the car.

  “I’m sorry.” He hesitated, looked around as if confused.

  “Leave,” Calder said.

  Joshua glanced from Annie to Calder. “All right.” He wasn’t angry. “I’ll go.” He started to leave and then he stopped and said, “Listen, Calder. I just want to say one thing. I don’t expect you to forgive me for all the stupid things I used to do. I didn’t understand things the way I understand them now. I’m not making excuses. I’m just saying I know that I was cruel and not a little dense and I made both your lives miserable and I’m sorry as a person can be for that.”

  More than anything it was embarrassing. He was acting like a grown-up. Annie didn’t know what to say.

  “My life was a living hell back then,” Joshua continued. “It’s changed now, but back then I didn’t know any better than to take it out on you two, and I’ll have to live with having been that sorry bastard, no better than my own father, for as long as I live.”

  It was quiet for too long. Just when Annie couldn’t stand it any longer, Calder held out his hand and shook Joshua’s the way Joshua had shaken Annie’s in Lukeman’s that day.

  Annie was sure they were all thinking the same thing—Annie’s and Calder’s lives were now the ones that had become the living hell. They’d become the angry kids, the dirty kids, the suspicious kids, kids angry at a world that’d left them behind.

  The handshake dissolved without words, and Joshua gave a curt smile but it wasn’t directed at Annie. He turned and headed for the car. Calder walked off into the house, and Annie stood abandoned in the doorway.

  By the time Joshua opened the car door she was at his side.

  “Is this a game?” she asked.

  He let go of the car door and inched close enough for her to see the honey-colored tips of his lashes.

  “I just want to hear it from you,” she said. “That this isn’t some kind of game, your coming around like this.”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed. “I understand. OK. I don’t blame you for asking that.” He blushed and it caused her stomach to stir.

  “After everything I’ve done I don’t expect you to believe me. I mean, after everything you’ve done I don’t exactly understand it either,” he said, scratching the scar near his eye. “But I like you, Annie Walsh. I like you a lot. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I gave you my number and waited every day for you to call.”

  “There was water in the plant. The number got smeared away.”

  He slapped his forehead and laughed.

  “Since when have you liked me?”

  The smile slowly disappeared from his face. “Since the day in the grove.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh,” as he leaned in and kissed her gently on the mouth. He let go, slightly, and then he kissed her again with more intention. She had no idea that a kiss could travel throughout a whole body like that. The tip of his tongue found hers and hers found his and she leaned into him for support, but touching only made it feel more like she was falling. Falling off the edge of the world.

  They stopped to catch a breath, and he closed the car door, and she searched the windows of the house for Calder or her mother and felt a warm thrill at finding neither.

  They held hands through the loblolly pines that filled the whole forest with the scent of gin. There were turkeys in the scrub and sometimes hunters who shot them, and there were bobcats and cackling birds so big they shook the branches when they lifted into flight, but they saw none of these things. Annie showed him where she often sat and played her guitar inside a natural cove created between the scrub. They sat down and he told her why he used to run away, about his father and the beatings. She told him about her own father, how she missed him more as time went by, and then her mother disappearing in her own way and how Annie felt like a runaway herself, taking care of everything on her own. He said when he was younger he used to dream about razing his whole farm to the ground and starting over with a place that was so clear and real inside his head that he could still see the seams of wooden beams laced together in the corners. He said he still thought a lot about building things from the ground up, and she said that was exactly how she felt about music, making something out of nothing at all.

  “That reminds me,” he said. “I brought you something.”

  “It’s not another poinsettia, is it?”

  He grinned and reached into his pocket and pulled out a pen. It was a real pen, shiny and silver with a cap that made a pleasing click when he snapped it open to show her the sleek black tip inside.

  “It’s for writing your songs.”

  The sun slanted through the trees as if all of nature was shining a light on them, and it was there on the soft bed of needles, swallowed in the scent of gin, that everything good she’d lost came flooding back to her in
waves.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  When Calder picks up the phone and the screen comes on, the face looking back at him is familiar; but it still takes a moment to sink in, partly because the face has aged over the decades since he’s last seen it, but mostly because it’s so out of context. He can find no reason in the short span of time he has to think for why Joshua Pinckney should be holding that phone to his ear and smiling that unassuming smile of his through this screen.

  “Calder?”

  The Haldol doesn’t stop Calder’s shoulder from pumping, or his body from shooting up behind his chair. He grips the chair back and draws in a heavy breath. Ms. Thompson has warned him to stay cool. He takes another breath and nods his head and lowers himself back into the chair. “What the hell,” he says into the phone.

  “Believe me, I’m as surprised to be sitting here as you are.”

  Calder’s eyes get carried away in a fit of blinking, and suddenly he hears Joshua from back in the days when he was still Josh. You jerking around like that cause you’re a retard or what?

  “Well,” Joshua says. “You mind if we talk a little?”

  Calder blinks without end.

  “I want to talk to you. Do you mind?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know.”

  Joshua turns away. He turns back. “It’s important.”

  Calder bangs his knees together to keep his eyes still. He has trouble looking Joshua in the eye and so he focuses on his expensive-looking shirt, a dress shirt, the color of sage. Small pearly buttons shine beneath the lights. Calder finally glances up into his face. There’s no question that he’s changed. When Calder describes him to Annie he’ll say that it’s more of a feeling than a look. An air coming off. You get the feeling he’s a traveled man. A man who’s been through plenty and come out the other side. “I guess I couldn’t hardly let you leave at this point without finding out why you’re here,” Calder says.