by Jason Brown
When he arrived home from work, her father cursed and threw his bag onto the kitchen table. “He can’t keep running,” he yelled from the living room where he stood looking out the window toward the river. He said he thought Jeremy had probably hopped the train and gone north, as he had the last time he ran away, to a tiny place called Dennis where he knew people. Her father said he didn’t think there was much up there now, or since the end of the seventies when they stopped driving logs down the river. Maybe abandoned logger’s camps and old farms. Probably squatters.
****
“I remember what I wanted to tell you,” Grandmame said as Rebecca sat up. Rebecca thought it might be something new this time, even though Grandmame often got worked up over things she had just talked about the previous day. Rebecca was the only one who listened, and the only one Grandmame usually wanted to talk to.
“Not long after I was married to your grandfather, we bought this farm from a family who had seen trouble. I forget what kind now, money trouble. We gave them a good price I think, but they needed to sell in a hurry, so I believe we paid less than we might have.”
Rebecca had heard this before and felt annoyed for a moment. The story went along as usual: the family they bought the house from had a daughter who died, and they came to Rebecca’s grandparents asking to bury the girl in the graveyard. Their family had lived on the land for a hundred years. But Rebecca’s grandfather said no.
Grandmame leaned over as if she believed this was the first time she was telling Rebecca. Each time she told it she reminded Rebecca not to tell anyone, not even her parents.
“One afternoon I was working in the garden when I found a patch of loose ground. I dug deeper with the trowel until I hit something hard. I thought it was a stone. That ground was full of stones when we bought the place. But when I cleared the dirt away, it was a girl’s face. There was dirt in her mouth over her teeth, and over her eyelashes. Her skin was half rotted away. The smell was just the most horrible thing I had ever known. I went into the house for a sip of your grandfather’s whiskey.”
Grandmame paused, shaking her head. It seemed like she was catching her breath to continue. Rebecca tried to think of something to say to stop her from going on.
“I covered her up. I put my garden on top of her. What else could I do? If I told your grandfather, he would have dug her up. I’m the only one who knows she’s there.” Grandmame’s face trembled slightly, and her eyes watered.
Rebecca rested her hand on Grandmame’s arm. There was no girl buried in the ground. According to Rebecca’s mother, the story had been circulating around the town for a hundred years, made up by the man who once owned the Valley Journal at the turn of the century as a Halloween tale for his daughter and her friends. It had been written up several years before to mark the anniversary of the paper.
Rebecca dressed and walked outside carrying her shoes. In the field behind the house, the morning light pinched her eyes and seemed to sap her strength. Wet grass slid between her toes; the sky at dawn had been orange, she could tell, from the white haze still on the horizon. The air held still for a moment over the farm, waiting for the late morning breeze to sweep up from the ocean into the valley. Maybe it would be warm, or the clouds might roll back from the coast. She stood there until the breeze came up, sending the maple and oak leaves into a boil. She was waiting, but for what she didn’t know.
The school sat on top of the hill, its windows dark, as if no one were there, though she knew everyone was already in first period, lined up in rooms watching the teachers. Rebecca’s friend Kathleen waited for her outside the front doors, in the usual place. Kathleen didn’t care about being the smartest girl in school, she didn’t even take the SAT, but Rebecca couldn’t be sure how much would change between them now.
“I was about to give up on you,” Kathleen said. “Smartest girl in school and she doesn’t know what time it is.” Kathleen shook her head disapprovingly. Rebecca started to apologize, but Kathleen raised her hand. “I always knew you were smart. Nothing you can do about it.”
Rebecca was relieved that Kathleen thought being smart was a simple characteristic, like having hideous toes, that shouldn’t change anything. And maybe in the past this had been true. Rebecca’s father had told her that Grandmame was extremely smart, though you couldn’t tell now. He described a time when he was young and his father was lecturing Grandmame on what was true and not true in state politics. She had embarrassed him after church by disagreeing with him in front of his friends. They were walking through the church parking lot, Grandmame yanking Rebecca’s father along by the hand as her husband told her what was what. When they reached the end of the parking lot, Grandmame began reciting numbers at the top of her voice. At some point, Rebecca’s father realized that Grandmame was listing the license plate numbers of all fifty cars in the church parking lot.
Rebecca’s English teacher, Mrs. Lucas, called her up front after class and congratulated her, smiling thinly. Several other teachers did the same thing, but none of the students said anything at all. On the surface nothing changed, but people in the lunchroom seemed quieter when she passed, and when she sat down in the corner next to Kathleen, no one looked over at them. It wasn’t what people would say, Rebecca realized, it was what they wouldn’t say—even the teachers—as they tried to act naturally. Even Kathleen measured her words as she told a story about her boyfriend David’s car breaking down. They were afraid now—of what, she couldn’t be sure. Maybe of what she was thinking.
After school, while her mother was out shopping and her father was at work, Rebecca wandered through her parents’ bedroom looking at the old pictures of her relatives, most of whom she had never met. She found a portrait of her grandfather standing outside the old barn in his overalls. Frozen in that single moment. She sat down on the edge of her parents’ bed and looked at a picture of her brother Jeremy when he was five, leaning over the porch with his face covered in jam. In another picture, at their uncle’s wedding, he stood at six years old in a blue blazer and yellow tie, already wearing their father’s face. Five years older than her, he had always done things with her rather than make friends with boys his age. It was more of a problem when she started to make friends of her own, and didn’t always want him around. She felt guilty about that now, and wanted to take each of those moments back.
She remembered once, she must have been six or a little older, when they were down at Boyton’s Market, and Jeremy asked what she thought would happen if their parents both died. She was eating ice cream; it was summer. She didn’t answer, had never thought of this before. Jeremy must have seen she looked worried because he told her not to worry. He had it figured out; they would be fine. He knew exactly what they would need and how they would get it.
“You promise?” she said.
He said of course he promised, and then she made him promise again because he had always said that one promise meant nothing but two meant you couldn’t get out of it.
The first time her brother ran away was after a shouting match with their mother when he was sixteen. He came into Rebecca’s bedroom the night he left and sat on the floor, running his hand down the length of his face. She was afraid to move as he rose on his knees as if he was going to pray.
“I don’t know where I’ll be,” he whispered so lightly she wasn’t even sure he wanted her to hear.
Even though he hadn’t asked her to, she promised she would come find him, and then she promised him again.
A few hours before dawn, it started pouring outside her window. She had gone to bed early with an upset stomach, without eating dinner. She stood and pressed her forehead against the cold glass, looking into the backyard, and was not surprised that Jeremy wasn’t leaning against the well house as the drops thudded against the hollow gutters. She had not wanted to admit for a long time that she knew things others could not know. It wasn’t just about facts anyone could look up in a book. Now that the article had come out in the paper, everyone would sus
pect that she knew too much. When the photo of her grandfather in her parents’ bedroom had been taken in 1955, for instance, she knew he was thinking of China Lake where he had grown up swimming with his two brothers. He was thinking of the lake because it was the tenth anniversary of his younger brother’s death in the war. She knew this from looking into the photograph, into his dark eyes half-hidden behind his sagging lids. And she knew what her father would never admit, even to himself: that he no longer loved her mother; and she knew that her brother was going to die.
She didn’t have the strength to move or say anything when her mother called up the stairs an hour later and then came to sit on the edge of the bed, resting the back of her hand against Rebecca’s cheek.
“You’re burning up,” her mother said. “I’ll call.”
Rebecca knew she wasn’t sick—she just couldn’t stop thinking, which was a sickness no one could fix—but she went along to the doctor’s office where, in the waiting room, her mother flipped through a Good Housekeeping, snapping the pages so fast she could not even have been looking at the pictures. Every time the door to the nurse’s area opened, her mother looked up, startled, until finally she slammed the magazine shut and swore. “Jesus.” She looked at her watch and folded her hands in her lap. Her mother often spoke to herself. She called it her therapy.
Rebecca stared wearily at her mother until her mother looked up and shuddered.
“What?” her mother said. “What are you looking at?” She stood up officiously and came over to sit next to Rebecca and feel for her temperature again. “You’re still burning.”
“I’m not sick,” Rebecca said.
Rebecca followed the nurse to the examining room. When the doctor arrived, his greeting was hollow, echoing across the distance between his lips and his attention. Rebecca had heard him saying goodbye to the previous patient. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth so he could examine her throat, and every muscle in her body seemed to relax.
“You had a fever last night and this morning,” he said. She nodded. His breath brushed her neck as he leaned over to look inside her mouth. He asked her to tilt her neck slightly and she did. He rested a hand next to her leg on the table and pressed his fingers against her neck below her jaw.
He told her she might have a small infection but didn’t think she needed antibiotics, at least not yet. In the car her skin seemed to vibrate where the doctor had touched her, like a trivial memory that would not go away, and when her mother asked, Rebecca told her what the doctor had said. For that, her mother replied, we pay him.
Rebecca’s father had once said of her mother when no one else was around that she would never let them forget she was from Portland.
Rebecca told herself there was no point in going—she could not change what would happen—yet she had to. She waited until early morning. Her father had said Jeremy jumped the train and rode it all the way up until he reached Dennis, so that’s what she would do.
In the hours before dawn, the train moved slowly in the heavy air, the lights from Water Street flashing between boxcars. As she had seen boys from school do, she ran along a granite wall that paralleled the tracks and jumped up on the floor of one of the cars, landing in the cool inside where the clicking of the metal wheels amplified in the empty drum. The train followed the river for ten or twelve miles before crossing over in Gardner and heading north out of the valley into the rich smell of the tidal banks. She leaned against the frame and looked at the black trees in the blue glow of the woods. Only now did she find the tear in the knee of her pants and in the skin underneath, which seemed the only evidence that she had made it this far.
The half-moon passed in and out of the clouds, giving brief glimpses of her white sneakers. The train slowed before each town and sped up as it snaked back into the woods where for several minutes she couldn’t see the tops of her hands. The air in her chest seemed to vibrate with the floor of the boxcar, turning each breath into a gasp. She would not be able to scream if she had to, and even if she could, no one would hear her above the scraping of the wheels over the tracks. Jeremy must have felt, as she did now, that he was in the grip of an iron fist that would not let go.
She fell asleep curled up and woke to see the train stretching through a bend in the mist. The sun just struggling through lit up the rust-red boxcars. At one crossing a man standing with a paper bag took off his hat and laughed when he saw her. She hung out of the door by her arm and looked up the track where tree branches arched over the train. Finally, she saw a green sign for DENNIS. The train wasn’t moving very fast, but it was frightening to jump and roll in the grass when she didn’t know what lay underneath. She rose to her feet and ran for a dirt road, where she turned just in time to see the caboose rocking on its narrow perch.
A half-mile down she thought she saw a gas station and a store on the other side of the road, but there were no people or cars, nothing to suggest a town. Maybe this was the edge of town and she had jumped too soon. She walked in the direction of the gas station, scuffing her sneakers through the dirt. Part of her hoped she did have the wrong place, because if she found him she would have to say something. She never wanted to be the one to speak and hated the feeling of people looking at her, waiting for what she would say, for her thoughts, for what she knew. People were greedy. They pretended not to want things, they pretended not to care, except for Jeremy, who never pretended he didn’t need anything from anyone. He needed her to look for him.
A truck approached from behind, sending up a plume of dust as the driver steered with his right hand on top of the wheel, his chin pulled in. Messy clumps of hair stuck out beneath his cap. She expected the truck to drive on to the store, but instead it took a left and crawled over a driveway toward a low farmhouse once painted white and since worn to a rotting gray. She knew Jeremy was inside. It had been this simple for him: jumping off the train, finding an abandoned house. This was the way he did everything, choosing what was in front of him as if there was no other choice.
She stopped walking several times in order to think more clearly, and once almost turned around, though she sensed with resignation that turning around would lead to the same place, in the end, as going through the open front door of the house. A box of rusty tools sat in the front hall and the air felt breathed and rebreathed by the cracked and buckling plaster. A gas can leaned against the wall. In the living room one of two windows was open to the field behind the house where the tall grass bent under a breeze and pushed up again. It seemed impossible that the world outside, where the air moved through the light, was at all connected to the world inside this house, and it wasn’t right that she had been able to pass so easily between the two. Jeremy lay on a battered couch with his arms at his sides, his eyes closed. She thought he must be sleeping, but then his eyes snapped open and stared at her as if he didn’t know her and she had come to take everything away from him. Small bottles, a plate, and a leather belt sat on an upturned box at his feet. She said his name, but he did not say her name back or change his expression in any way. When he swallowed, a cleft appeared in his chin and the veins of his neck pushed against his translucent skin. His Adam’s apple fluttered as his eyes closed, and his chest rose and fell to the timing of heels clomping down the stairs behind her. When no one appeared, she thought the pounding had come from her own head, but the man she had just seen in the truck stepped from around the corner with his hands in his jeans pockets, the leather cap on his head. He quickly removed his glasses to clean them on his T-shirt. He said he was hoping she would come by.
“How do you know who I am?”
“How did you know which house to walk into?” He put the glasses back on and looked at her. He was probably her brother’s age or a bit older. He sat in the chair next to the couch, crossed his legs, and put on the face of someone trying to look like a college student, with his chin resting on his hand. His sharp lips chopped off the consonants when he spoke, sounding to her like one of the migrant worker’s kids.
“I’m not from around here like my friend,” he said, as if this should explain any questions she might have. He leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head with his elbows in the air.
“You’re not his friend!” Rebecca shouted in what could not have been her voice.
“Whatever you say.” He shrugged one shoulder and glanced over at Jeremy who seemed to see through them. “We’ve got everything you need here to be happy. We’ve got food if that’s what you need, we’ve got money, we’ve got a roof that don’t leak—and we’ve got business coming right down from Canada. This here’s a stop on the Trans-Canada highway.” He looked at her brother for a moment before turning to her and reaching in his jacket pocket to pull out a photo in which she thought she could see her brother and herself when they were younger, but she quickly looked away and shook her head. She couldn’t breathe.
“That’s my favorite picture,” he said, saying it pi-sure, while looking away, as if embarrassed. He sighed and dropped his shoulders into the silence that followed and lasted until he seemed smaller than her. “That’s at Niagara Falls. I’ve never been there, but I want to go, I plan to go. In fact, I could go right now if I wanted to. There’s nothing stopping me.”
“I have to go,” she said and then watched him, waiting to see if he would try to stop her.
“Suit yourself.” He closed his eyes and slid further down in the chair.
Jeremy turned to face the wall, and she opened her mouth to call out to him—if she just said his name, maybe he would come back with her, though of course he wouldn’t. If she said his name, he might explode, as he had that morning at her mother. He didn’t want to attack her—the idea would never occur to him—but whatever pushed from the inside against his rising and falling back hated everything, even her.
