Painted Dresses

by Patricia Hickman

  “Did you tell him what Truman’s done?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What about Deputy Bob?” she asked quietly. “Is he onto me?”

  “Braden didn’t say. When he comes, ask him.” I did not have the strength to juggle Delia’s legal problems and Truman’s secrets. The thought of getting back inside the Embraer now had me obsessing over plummeting into the Wal-Mart garden center.

  “What are you going to say to Truman, Gaylen? I want to slap him. Will they let you do that in prison, just walk right up and slap a man if he deserves it?”

  “Truman doesn’t know that we know. Jackson says he’ll never confess. If he knows we know, he’ll clam up. Think of the lie he told already about his daddy.”

  “It don’t matter. We’ll make him confess,” she said, making a fist.

  “I want to hear the truth from him,” I said. I did not believe that men like him ever apologize. But I had lived with the nightmares and the hair pulling all the way back to when I was a baby. I grew up believing that I was turning into my mother or father—not sane. Now I was discovering a new thing, that after all this time, there was a good chance I wasn’t like them. “Delia, I haven’t had a nightmare since I realized the truth about Truman.”

  “It’s your psychic self adjusting,” she said.

  I imagined a long string of bewildered children between North Carolina, Texas, and Louisiana. That sweet smile of his and his deep brown eyes could charm. Had he charmed me? Was that the thing my mind would not let me see? Sex is a mystery to a four-year-old. If he made it something else, like a game, would I have known what was going on? Or did I realize late? Did I scream or tell him to stop? In my nightmares, I could not move, but I did feel terror. Was that me as an abused baby? I could not breathe. My heart was pounding so hard I could hear it like a drumming, banging inside my skull. My arms, legs, and torso were paralyzed, and all that came out of my mouth was the shriek of a wounded being. I felt detached from my body, tormented and begging for rescue. Did my mother walk in and think that I wanted it to happen? Did I look guilty or ashamed, not knowing about sex but recognizing the look of horror in my mother’s eyes? “Delia, Truman is a devil,” I said. My right hand was shaking.

  “Turn on the TV to CNN. Get your mind off it,” she said.

  We unpacked only our nightclothes so that we could rise early and leave. Noleen made oatmeal and coffee. I had no appetite for breakfast. Jackson drove us to the Dallas airport. Braden told us to meet him outside the US Airways terminal. Delia and I checked through security and then found our departing dock. We had to walk out onto the strip lugging our suitcases, down where the parties meeting private planes were allowed to board.

  When I saw him standing out on the landing strip, the cold winter wind shuffling his hair around his ball cap, I burst into tears. I don’t know why I cried. But his impassive stare warmed to my tears. He held me, and I could smell the faint musk of the flight cabin still in his clothes.

  “I knew this’d be hard for you. You think you can fly again?” he asked.

  I never was one to cry in Braden’s arms, but for that moment, I allowed it, and so did he. He wheeled my luggage up to the storage section of his plane and helped Delia board. I had gotten on without him the past few weeks, but depending on him to ferry me to Louisiana seemed like a crossing of light beams. I was surprised that we did not explode right there on the runway, but truly glad. Braden, even at his drunken worst, was never ugly and to most women a good looker. He looked like a kid standing in the cold, his nose the color of wine. He had a small brown bit of bristle on his chin, shaven clean in a square, a bit of beard that reminded me of the Wilmington students who meet for darts and beer down in Myrtle Beach.

  “I’m not going to be stupid about getting back into a plane,” I said. “There’s a day of facing your own shadows. Today I’m getting on this plane, and tomorrow I’m meeting my personal nightmare.”

  Braden helped me inside, up from the last step and forward into the cockpit. He was never one to splash on much cologne; more of a soap and deodorant man, but his soap smell permeated the plane. “It’s cold out here,” he said, and locked the door behind us. He looked startled by Delia but mumbled a greeting that sounded weak and awkward. He told me once she looked like a wild woman to him, like a girl who would throw herself off a ledge but take three people with her.

  Noleen had made us bags of traveling snacks: Christmas cookies and smoked almonds. I gave them to Braden. “Merry Christmas,” I said.

  He looked stunned. “It doesn’t seem like a holiday, does it?”

  I agreed. I felt more hollow than holy.

  16

  DELIA PULLED A BLANKET from under her seat and wound it around her legs. I dragged a blanket to the copilots chair. Braden handed me the headset. I passed on it. We had come to know many pilots, but few of them flew as a married pair. But what we had held in common now alienated us.

  “No, thanks,” I said. The Embraer smelled new from the newly recovered front seats. Braden listened to the control tower’s chatter. “We’ll get clearance to leave shortly,” he said, mostly to Delia.

  She tore open a bag of cookies and unzipped a pouch of sliced apples, arranging the food on the seat beside her.

  Goose bumps dotted my arms and legs. The cockpit warmed quickly though.

  “Where’s my coffee?” he asked.

  I offered him mine, but he turned it down, laughing.

  “There’s a cranky bit of cloud cover, but once we cross the state line, there’s a clear sky the rest of the trip,” I said.

  “I’m taking you two straight in to New Orleans. You didn’t say how many days you’ll stay. Three days enough?” he asked.

  “Hmmph!” said Delia in a half-stupor. She curled up to sleep. “What’s to do in Louisiana?” Her brief foray into travel was turning her into a road diva.

  “We might need four,” I said, “but I’ll know by tomorrow.”

  “Did your brother invite you?”

  “Truman’s in Angola,” I said.

  Braden got clearance. “Prison?” He prepared for takeoff. “Your family always did win all of the prizes.” When I did not respond, he said, “I don’t know why I said that.”

  Telling Braden about my family brought out more of the bear between us.

  “I remember your mother said he was once convicted of stealing cars,” he said. “That was way back, though. What do you say to a brother you don’t know?”

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t know what I’ll say to him. I don’t know what he looks like.” I imagined him tall, sort of gaunt, with a shaven head, standing in a row of others like him, like men in an egg carton. I now knew his father was a tall man. But in his only school photo, Truman had my mother’s eyes: sad, brown, and fitted into deep sockets.

  “What made you decide to see him?”

  “He’s a monster,” said Delia. She turned sideways and pulled the blanket up covering her face.

  “Mother told me he ran away from home,” I said. “But it wasn’t true. I want him to tell me why he left.”

  “What’s he in for?”

  I recalled how Jackson’s face clouded into a look of inexpressible horror. I felt responsible for both Jackson’s expression and the uncomfortable change in his mood. “We’ll find out for sure soon.”

  He took off his gloves. The traffic controller asked Braden to confirm when he had taken off. He had not commenced taxiing.

  “Lets get in the air,” I said.

  After a thirty minute wait, the Embraer rolled down the Dallas airstrip and lifted into a cloud mist. The sky unrolled like shredded paper behind us as we nosed away from Dallas and aimed for Louisiana airspace. The ground was barely visible, ribbons of colorless plains interrupted by squares of subdivisions and tiny womb-shaped lakes carved into the land. The lake water looked black from our clouded
perch, staring up at us in the middle of the cold day, dark eyes aching for sunlight and summer.

  Braden did not speak until we crossed over into Louisiana airspace and a clear winter sky swallowed the Embraer. Blue sky had that effect on all pilots. It was the endless expansion of blue that soothed the eyes. As the plane veered over Shreveport, the sun came up fully like a big cosmic watch lighting up the nose of the plane.

  “I remember you once said you were curious about your big brother,” he said.

  “He sent a letter to Delia and me asking for money.” I imagined waiting nervously in an Angola visitation room until a gruff voice said, “Baby sister.”

  “Gaylen, think about it. Your parents have both passed. Is this some deep-seated need to reconnect with your family?” he asked.

  “He’s a convict. Why would I want that?”

  “Why even go?”

  “Reasons I can’t explain.”

  “Why do you think he’ll see you?”

  I had reason to believe Truman would talk. “In his letter, he sounded like he wanted to reconnect.”

  “Don’t give him any money.”

  “Mother said she didn’t want to leave him anything, so he won’t get money.” I remembered her mailing Truman boxes of cigarettes for Christmas. She liked the way that I wrapped gifts, so the lot fell to me to wrap Delia and Daddy’s gifts. But she wrapped Truman’s herself, the brown-paper grocery bags cut out and measured to fit the cigarette boxes. She anxiously taped and cut paper bags in a day when security allowed home-wrapped gifts.

  “What was he like back then?” asked Braden.

  “Not around.”

  “What is he, a lifer?”

  “In and outer. His counselor said we could access his court records. Should I do that first, before I see him?”

  “Yes, yes, get the goods on him. I don’t have a good feeling about this.”

  Braden was right, as he so often had been in the past. But the same imperceptible rope that pulled me into the path of a milquetoast college teacher was pulling me into Louisiana. I was mad at my mother. Daddy, I wasn’t so sure about. When he put Truman on the bus, he might have believed that Truman was a victim of a beating. If Mother told him, though, what it meant to me was even worse than death. Not only had my mother known about Truman, but also my father. What else did I not know about the pair who had reared me?

  That thought came back of slamming their headstones until they coughed up the truth. Then I felt guilty again. I looked back at my sister who softly snored. From the time that I was aware of the fact that I was pulling out my own hair by the handfuls, I believed that the obsession rested with me and my gene pool. Then, realizing the unstable nature of James and Fiona Syler, I did the math, assuming I would end up slurping applesauce through a straw and playing bingo with guys named Napoleon and Zeus.

  The last conversation I had with Daddy, he roasted me over the fact I had moved out of Boiling Waters. I spent my whole life learning to two-step around his temper. Sometimes I would try to appease him, but I often made him worse. It was when I finally fired back, “I’m an adult, and it’s time you speak to me with respect,” that I seemed to jolt him into the present. I felt strangely justified, as if I had finally conquered his demons for him. Then the next trip into town, I heard that he had gone around Boiling Waters telling first one person and then another that I had back-stabbed the family. I went to him asking what I could have done differently, and that sent him into another rage. Until James Syler slipped quietly into a coma, he rose and fell in my conscious mind, my emperor one minute, my gatekeeper the next.

  “What do you want to prove?” asked Braden.

  “I’m not crazy after all.”

  “You’re not like them, Gaylen. You rise above it,” said Braden. He turned on his CD player. He sang very badly the lyrics to “The Parting Glass.” It was an Irish funeral song.

  “Braden, did we know that we would fall apart and then for so long?”

  He pulled his earphones from around his neck and laid them on the control panel. “You never let me in.”

  I knew what he meant, but suddenly the need to confess collected in my mouth and jammed down my throat. It was a well-known fact that Sylers neither confessed nor apologized.

  Braden stared ahead, saying, “I once flew for a real estate broker who had a problem with the homeless breaking into one of his high rise tenement buildings at night. They slept in the stairwells and cost him money. After a lot of expense, he figured out a way to lock them out. He had special doors made that no one could penetrate. I mean, like an army tank would have to blow them open. He said he watched on the building monitors as a homeless man ran round and round his building trying to pry open those special doors.” There was a hint of relaxation in his voice for the first time since he had picked me up. “Finally, the homeless guy stripped down naked and stood out in the cold until the cops came and arrested him.”

  I laughed.

  “He decided that if he couldn’t get back to that familiar stairwell, he would settle for jail. Gaylen, I understand the homeless man. You’ve got these special doors on you that no one can break down. After a while, I just gave up.”

  I bit my lip for once.

  We flew over Alexandria. The town looked evacuated from our height. It was odd to me that we could never see people. That was the loneliest part of flying, feeling like the only human that remained along the black stretches of earth.

  “I don’t know how to read you,” he said.

  Maybe his metaphor was some sort of emotional segue, but it lay like a gag in my mouth.

  With Braden, I was forever on the cliff of something new. He was a good son; he flew back to see his parents when his brother crashed his motorcycle and smashed his face on a guardrail. He sacrificed his time for the Boatwrights. But I had felt the sliding flux of instability since one week after our wedding. He could put to ease the travel problems of clients from corporate pools, but a new idea would come to him and our stability evaporated. Like the time he tried to compete with FedEx. If all of his ideas had worked, he would be rich. But in the middle of developing one of his ideas, he would lose interest and then momentum. Monotony to him was the day-today function of poring over bills that collected on every table surface or mailing off monthly statements. Maybe his ideas were intoxicating. But the worst monotony, it seemed, was my need for safety. When he got mad, I cried. Rather, I sobbed, the same as when Daddy lost his temper.

  “You haven’t called much,” I said. “What I assumed was a lot.”

  “Last thing I want to do is rehash why I haven’t called.”

  I didn’t cry. It was through dead-on determination that I didn’t.

  Finally, he confessed. “A man will take drastic measures to keep warm.”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “I cheated.”

  “No more.” I did not want Delia to hear.

  “I don’t love her.” He stared ahead as if he were talking to himself. A calm settled over him. “It’s nothing.”

  I didn’t want to know her name. But numbly my mouth opened, the rope pulling me into the next minute of a painted-over life. “Who is she?”

  “It won’t help.”

  “Just say her name.”

  “Kimberly. Your leasing agent.”

  Delia stirred in her sleep. “Mmmph.”

  “She’s a kid,” I said.

  “Not really.”

  “Shut it, Braden!” I unclamped my seat belt, crawling out of the copilot’s chair to get away. Kimberly was barely of age. I recalled an edge in her voice that seeped through and the detectable erosion evident in her respect of me.

  “Gaylen, where are you going? Back with Delia?”

  “She’s not so bad, you know. She grows on you.”

  “I want you to know why I’m telling you.”

 
; I knew why. The awful play that had cast me as the pathetic heroine needed a final tragic ending. But hiding places being at a minimum twenty thousand feet in the air, I sat back down. We flew over Baton Rouge and then across Lake Pontchartrain.

  The landing gear dropped down, jolting the plane.

  “I couldn’t go through with it,” he said, “I’m telling you now so we can both come clean.” The confession brightened his appearance; he was buoyant, like the first time I saw him.

  The New Orleans control tower broke through. A storm was headed up from the Gulf. Braden wanted to fly out before sundown. “Call me when you’re ready to leave, Gaylen, and I’ll be back. Do you need any money?”

  Delia laughed in her sleep.

  “We’re fine,” I said. Braden knew that my father was a hoarder when it came to his money. But matters being what they were, I had not disclosed to him the full amount of the estate. “My father’s cousin Jackson and his wife, Noleen, want us to stay over in Garland for Christmas. Could you come back?” I asked.

  “The folks are expecting me. They’re in Florida for Christmas,” he said.

  “If you change your mind, let me know.”

  “I’ll give it some thought.” Braden sounded as if he meant it. He set the plane in a holding pattern until we could get our clearance to land. “When you come back, I’ve got more to say,” he said, glancing toward Delia.

  Inside the New Orleans taxi was frigid. Cold rain sloshed the windshield, running down the glass in rivulets. The cloud cover made the noon hour seem like dusk. The cab driver scarcely spoke English and kept glancing in his mirror nervously at Delia. She got off the plane and into the taxi in a state of agitation.

  “The last thing I thought we’d be doing, Gaylen Lee, is walking into a men’s correctional facility to confront a petit four.”