by Deb Caletti
“Doesn’t your dad play golf?” I asked.
“Of course he plays golf,” Travis said.
He handed me the napkin of food, which was the best thing that happened all night. I ate another queen’s hat and an anthill on a cracker with a suspicious fishy taste. Travis bent down and examined his motorcycle. If he were looking for dust or smudges, he’d be looking for a long time.
He straightened, opened the garage door by punching a keypad on the wall. We ate the rest of the stuff on the napkin, and Travis stuffed the napkin in his pocket. “Let’s go,” he said.
“Come on, Travis. Where are we going?”
“Somewhere you love.”
And I was an idiot. I pictured us walking along the lake, hand in hand, with the houses along the shore glowing with warm light and cozy secrets. I pictured us sitting side-by-side at Mount Solitude, staring at its dark shoulder, imagining what it would feel like to leap off.
“What do I do with this?” I held up my glass. He took it from me, and in that moment I realized I might have made a terrible mistake. I had just given him the chance to down it in one gulp like Courtney had, and then get on his motorcycle with me on the back. I pictured a horrible accident; us splayed out on wet pavement. But he didn’t do that. Instead he placed it in the middle of that pristine garage.
It looked mean there, that glass. Cruel and deliberate, the red the same color left on a cheek after a slap. It occurred to me then that a lot of life was either about wanting and not having, or having and not wanting.
The arc Travis’ motorcycle made out of the Becker drive was delicious. I held tight to his waist. I settled into the feeling, the wind on my bare legs, my head wobbly and heavy from my helmet. It was the coldest ride yet, though, with the clouds full of rain and the sky dark. I was glad for my sweater. We passed Moon Point. The paragliders had a bonfire going, as they did some summer nights, and they were gathered around its warm orange light. By the look of the sky, though, they wouldn’t be there long.
I didn’t know how long we’d be riding, but I didn’t expect to stop after such a short while. No, I didn’t expect to stop right then at Johnson’s Nursery.
He stopped in a parking space, both feet on the ground. “Hop off,” he said.
“Why are we here?” The feathery wings of fear. Just a pulse beat of panic.
“Hop off. Shit, I’m just checking something.”
A wave of relief shot through my stomach. He turned the motor off. I got off, hugged my arms around myself. I hoped no one saw me there. It was quiet, and dark except for the round helmets of the landscape lights around the front of the store. I waited for Travis to check whatever he was going to check. He didn’t get off, though. Instead, he started walking the bike off the parking strip, toward the section of in-ground trees.
“I thought you were checking something,” I said. My relief disappeared as quickly as it came. A thread of fear snaked up my insides and settled in a coil around my heart.
“I am. I’m checking that no one will see my bike.”
“Travis,” I said. “No. I don’t want to be here.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No, Travis, I don’t. I don’t want to be here.”
I heard the threep of crickets. A semi-truck rumbled down Cummings Road and made the air shudder.
He grabbed my wrist. He pulled me toward the path that led to the waterfalls. It was dark there. I thought of the ceramic toads and elves hidden among the plants, watching from the blackness. Libby had set them there, placed them in the ground with her own hands. Travis gripped my shoulders. The moon edged from a bank of clouds and then was hidden again. The light shone on Travis’s face and then was gone. “Tell me where they keep the key to the cash register.”
“Oh, God, Travis, no.”
“Tell me.”
“She keeps it with her.” I shivered. In fact, I was starting to shake. I saw Libby with that cactus garden on her desk. I saw her fleshy arms and her warm eyes. I saw her looped writing on bills and invoices, the way she sighed and said, Thank you, another day is done whenever she locked the door behind her. The plants, her business, her labor of love.
“She doesn’t. I’ve watched her. She always gets it from the storeroom.”
“No.” Tears were building hot behind my eyes. My throat was thickening. “If you want money, she doesn’t have it anyway. She takes it to the bank.”
“Not every day. I told you, I’ve watched her. She leaves it on Saturdays.” He waggled his index finger in the air. “Careless, careless.”
“Travis, I can’t do this.” My chest heaved. I started to cry.
“Ruby, Ruby,” he said. “Come on, what are you crying for? I’m asking you one small question. Where does she keep the key?”
No! Something shouted inside. But it didn’t come out. I didn’t say anything. I only shook my head, a small movement that could barely be said to exist.
“I know what you fear the most. You fear a narrow life more than anything.”
I didn’t say anything. Just stood there, with tears rolling down my cheeks. I couldn’t hurt Libby. Narrow, small. Unknown.
“Isn’t that right? A narrow life.”
He waited. I knew it was my moment of decision. To belong or not to belong. To be visible or invisible. This voice came from me, from the ugliest part of me. This down-deep blackness. I didn’t know I could be so ugly. I whispered. My voice was hoarse. “A hook in the storeroom. Behind the bookshelf with boxes on it.”
He took my face between his hands and kissed me. My lips were dry and cold, my mouth gummy from tears and shame.
“Let’s go, then,” he said.
But I couldn’t do that. At least there was something I couldn’t do.
“Are you coming?” Travis Becker asked. And then, “Fine. Stay there, then.”
His footsteps were soft on the dirt path, and then I heard them crunch on the gravel by the store. I bent in half. Pain bent me in half. I opened my mouth to sob but no sound came out. It was like that time, years and years ago, in elementary school, when I fell off the monkey bars and landed on my back, the wind knocked out of me. I couldn’t breathe. The air in my body was held back somewhere, in some greedy place, as my lungs searched desperately for it. It was that same feeling. Gasping. I crouched on the ground. A ceramic frog looked at me with a gentle expression. I heard the crash of glass. Darkness can make a sound very loud. That was the sound of my betrayal—the shattering clatter of a rock thrown into a pane of glass.
I ran then. My feet crunched down the gravel of the Johnson’s Nursery parking lot. I ran down Cummings Road, headlights beaming at me, feeling the fear of the opossums and not caring. Running, running, until I saw the sign, lit up by the roadside DOG KNOWS WHO YOU ARE. It hit my heart then, hard. I sank to the ground. I could feel the grass, dewy and cold, soak my skirt.
I sobbed in self-hatred and self-pity and anger. The worst kind of anger, the kind you feel at your own stupidity, the kind that sits and stares at what cannot be undone. I was running from the person back there, the one who could say a hook in the storeroom but running, of course, was useless. That dark thing I did—it would sit with me like a stain, a gash, a permanent disfigurement. There are these small things, a few words, a moment in time, a decision yes or no, that are the irretrievable, unforgettable acts. Split-second choices that are as endless in consequence and as powerful as the shifting plates of the earth. One moment. Yes or no?
It started to rain finally. A fine drizzle that covered me like a miserable blanket as I lay down on the hill of grass by the DOG sign. I cried and held my stomach. At that moment, I didn’t know that there was someone else out in the rain that night, her heart wrenching in pain.
Lillian had gotten herself out the door and as far as the front lawn before the wheels of her chair got stuck in the wet grass and the hopelessness of her task overpowered her. The police were called after someone reported hearing what was described as a cry of anguish. When they got there,
they found Lillian with her head thrown back against her wheelchair, her hair and clothing soaked. Her chest racked with silent sobs.
She would not release the book she cradled in her arms. She clung to it, protecting it from the rain with the will of her own small body.
“Ruby? Is that you?”
I was so cold. My hair streaked down my face. What I had done seemed to fill up every bit of my skin.
“Jesus Christ, it is you! Oh, damn, that’s not what I meant. I didn’t mean to say that. Forget I said that. Ruby?”
I felt a hand on my back. There was the breath of someone who had just eaten Italian food, warm and garlicky and somehow comforting. He was crouched down beside me. “What’s going on? What’s happened?”
I shook my head.
“Come on, Ruby,” Joe Davis said. “It’s okay. It’s really okay.” His kindness did me in. I started to cry again. “Come on. Whatever it is, it’ll be all right. Can I take you home?”
I guess I was rocking. I only noticed it because the arm on my shoulders was rocking, too. “We can at least get out of this rain, can’t we?” The arms of the body next to me stretched up, untangled and released a sweatshirt. A moment later, he popped it over my own head. It was warm from body heat. It smelled like cooking smells. I put my arms through the holes.
“Okay, then,” Joe Davis said. He clapped his hands together like he had a great plan. He stood above me for a minute, probably trying to figure out what that great plan actually was.
“Well, heave ho, then,” he said. His arms went around my back and under my knees and I was lifted up. I rested my head against him as we bounced across the lawn to his car. He was breathing a little heavy. But he was big and old and enough like a father to call it good.
I was wrapped in a quilt on our couch like I was a decent person who was sick, and not like I was the horrible person I was. Someone so horrible should not have her mother sitting beside her and Joe Davis making tea in the kitchen and her brother looking on nervously and her dog trying to jump up on the quilt and being swatted off.
I told the couch pillow what happened as they sat across from me. I heard Joe Davis and my mother in the kitchen discussing the need to call the police. It turned out to be unnecessary. The phone rang a half hour later. The police had called us instead. I heard my mother’s concerned tones, questions. She talked for a long time, then was quiet. More questions. Someone had told them we’d been together that night.
“Ruby?” my mother said from the kitchen doorway. Her eyes were worried, but soft. I knew by their softness that something bad had happened. Worse even than I expected. Joe Davis came from behind her. He sat down at the edge of the couch.
“This is a bad night,” he said.
“That was the police,” my mother said.
I buried my face in the couch pillow.
“They want to arrest me or something,” I said.
“It’s not about you,” my mother said. “It’s about Travis.”
I breathed. I dared to breathe. “They arrested him. Fine. Good. I want them to arrest him,” I said.
“He’s been in an accident,” Joe Davis said.
“What?” I sat up. “What?” Oh, God.
“His motorcycle. He was driving very fast. You know how bad Cummings Road is anyway. They think he heard the police coming. The road was slick from the rain.”
“Is he dead? God, is he dead?” That I couldn’t take. That I couldn’t handle or understand.
“No, Ruby. He’s in the hospital. He’s unconscious, but they think he’s going to be okay.”
It was said later that Ron of Ron’s Auto had the acute hearing of a bat—he reported having a restless sleep because he could hear the lyrics of Beatles songs at a party a mile away. Apparently he told police that his old girlfriend’s name was Michelle (and if you think it’s strange that Ron had a girlfriend at all, batlike in other ways as he was, my mother would be quick to say what she always did about such things—Every pot has a lid). The song lyrics of the Beatles ballad had kept him awake and thinking hard. That’s when he heard the sound of glass breaking at Johnson’s Nursery. He knew it was Johnson’s nursery, he had said, because of the slightly southwestern flow of the sound. That night, with the call to Lillian’s house and the accident on Cummings Road, the police had been busier than they had been since Homecoming night five years ago, when an entire city block was festooned with toilet paper and eggs.
I thought about Travis in some hospital bed. I pictured his chest going up and down to the rhythm of some machine. I pictured the cold beeping sound, and his mother’s tears—a birthday gone horribly awry. They were there at his side in their Hawaiian outfits, regretting the cheer of pineapples and palm trees. Mrs. Becker would have thrown a sweater on that didn’t match. As I’ve said, Cummings Road can be a dangerous place.
I felt so much that I didn’t feel anything. Numb and dead, as unconscious as Travis himself. I was sure of only one thing; I wanted to be away from Nine Mile Falls for a while, away from what the Beckers must think of me, and what Libby would think of me, and what anyone else would think of me. If I could have wished for anything right then, it would be that.
I finally slept. I woke up late that morning. I’d been having a dream that I was being hammered into a locked room, a prisoner. My eyes opened and I came back to real life, remembering the shambles I had made of it. The hammering had been real. Someone was hammering in the kitchen. I hoped Mom wasn’t trying to fix something, like the kitchen sink. Every time she tries to repair something, it’s a disaster. She takes everything apart and puts it back together wrong. She tried to fix the vacuum cleaner once, and now it makes a horrible sound, a machine chewing metal. You’ve got to wiggle the toilet flushing handle now too. Every time you flush, the pipes hiss louder and louder until it sounds like the toilet is about to lift up off the floor and become the first toilet in space.
I put on my robe and got out of bed. I was surprised to see the crouched figure of Joe Davis in our kitchen, by the hole. Chip Jr.’s G.I. Joe now sat on the kitchen table with his legs hanging off as if it were a thoroughly absorbing show, something military on the History Channel. Poe sat nearby also, prim and still and showing remarkably good manners. He turned and looked at me quickly and turned back to face Joe again. He couldn’t bear to miss a second of the proceedings.
Joe Davis looked over one shoulder and smiled. His forehead was sweaty. “Morning,” he said. “You won’t be able to use the water right now. I had to shut it off. There was a leak in the pipe right here.” He knocked at a piece of the exposed metal. “Like I told your mom, you were lucky that Poe destroyed the wall. It could have leaked for years, causing all kinds of damage, and you’d have never known. Now we’ll just have to replace a few boards.” I swear Poe looked proud at his now important act. His black lips curled in that smile he had.
The coffeepot was on and two cups sat by the sink. The letter my mother had written to my father that had sat on the counter for days was gone. A tool belt hung over one of the chairs. The funny thing was, I didn’t even feel embarrassed about Joe Davis seeing me in my robe and morning hair. He was a comfortable person. His hair looked pretty funny itself. Unlike the clichéd butt-crack plumber who came to our house once, who sighed and groaned the whole time like an old pier in a strong wind, Joe Davis was easy and happy in his work. He smiled at the hole like they were friends getting acquainted.
“Okay.” Joe Davis got to his feet, opened the back door. I could see some lumber lying on the back lawn. Poe trotted off after him.
Joe turned and looked down at Poe. “Sit,” he said. “Stay.”
And here was the amazing thing: Poe’s little butt shot right to the floor, sure as if it were attached to a piece of string.
“Didn’t you hear all of the commotion?” Miz June asked Peach. “It all happened right next door, and you didn’t hear a thing?”
Harold cupped his hand to his mouth and shouted, “Must be going deaf.” He was one to
talk.
“I am not going deaf,” Peach said.
“I was watching Miami Vice.”
“Is that show still on? The fellow with the pink shirts must be fairly old to be running around shooting and blowing things up,” Anna Bee said.
“Reruns,” Peach said. “Back-to-back Miami Vice on Saturday nights.”
I could picture Peach’s television blaring, her sitting in a chair that used to belong to Henry, one with a footrest that popped out, eating out of a bag of microwave popcorn and not even noticing the red, spinning lights of the police car right outside her house, the two police officers bringing Lillian back inside and calling her daughters. I wondered if Lillian, too, had dreams that night of being hammered inside a room, imprisoned.
“That bitch Delores said they found her with another copy of The Present Hours in her arms. I guess it was too important to her not to have a second,” Peach said.
“She was probably looking for it when she tore the books off the shelf that day,” Miz June said.
“I told you. I said she was looking for something,” Mrs. Wong said.
“Well, it wasn’t on the bookshelf. She must have forgotten where she put it. Delores said that this time Lillian’s cookbooks and recipe box were strewn all over the floor.” I pictured Lillian hiding her heart’s secrets underneath Apple Crumb Cake and Apricot-Glazed Chicken.
