“I’m sorry,” he apologized again, his eyes wider than I’d ever seen them. I didn’t like to see him that way so I just looked down at the dirt instead.
“Nothin’s changed about how I feel for you. You know that. You’re still my girl, right?” He sounded like he was begging.
“I’m no one’s,” I said. Maybe I meant to say I’m no one.
“Who did this to you?” His voice was hot lava.
“You should go,” I said as I rubbed the lump in my throat and felt the scabs on my neck again. He looked wounded and I felt sad for him through my numbness. This wasn’t his fault. All I kept thinking of were Donnie’s words, “I’ll kill him too.” I needed to let him go, to free him of this obligation he had to the girl I used to be two days before.
“I’m not the girl you loved anymore, not the same at all. She’s gone now.” I looked away from him as if I was looking for where that girl might have gone.
“I’ll wait. Forever if I have to. You’ll get better. I can help.”
“I don’t want you to.” He deserved better was all I could think. He was so perfect and I was so dirty now. I disgusted myself. “Look, I won’t see you again, Dillon. Just go and live a happy life.”
“I won’t force you, Sadie.” His voice sounded louder now, his fists clenched, with the pain right at the surface. “You’re my best friend. I’ll never love anyone but you!”
His volume caused me to turn and check on Missy. She wiggled from her back onto her side but was still asleep.
I looked back out the window and just shook my head at him. “You shouldn’t say that.” He would move on someday. He would be okay. This was protecting him, too, like throwing rocks at a dog so it wouldn’t come with you and get hurt. He had no idea.
“I have to go,” I said, as I started to close the window. He put his hand out to me but stopped at an imaginary line between us.
“Please, don’t shut me out.” He was panicked now, his voice like red silk waving in a wind storm. I couldn’t look at him anymore. I had to let him go.
“Goodbye, Dillon,” I said and I slowly shut the window on him. He stood there for a long while, stunned. I was behind the curtain but it was see-through enough so I could watch him illuminated by the moonlight. I wondered if it went both ways if the lights were on in here and it was dark out there.
Suddenly, his knees buckled under him and I heard him cry out as he punched the ground with his fist. The sound made its way through my cloud of emptiness and echoed around like a lone wolf howling in a low holler. That sound will never leave me.
I watched his hunched-over shape silently writhing in pain. His dream of me, of the girl I was and the wife I could have been to him, must have died right then. He was mourning that girl, the one who went into that shed, not the one who came out twenty minutes later.
He could never love her. No one could. No man ever has.
Chapter Four—Goldenseal Roots
Before I take the slight turn at Kanawha Avenue, I stop at the little corner store with a name entirely made of initials and the word grocery. I know I’m just stalling but I go in anyway. The clerk behind the counter speaks with a heavy accent that summons mine whenever I hear it. I ask for the restroom with a native twang and she obliges.
In the mirror, I stare at the woman before me. She’s not much different than the girl who lived in Ansted, West Virginia. I’m still about 5’5”, my hair, still long but a darker reddish blonde, more managed, more sleek. I smooth my fitted denim pants tucked into suede boots, and straighten my white linen blouse, cinched with a belt around my slim waist. I have my grey scarf on today—the vintage Schiaparelli silk in three shades of grey. It covers my scars nicely.
I look like an author—a person who has it together. There’s a glow coming from my skin that comes from good makeup and the reality of financial security. But the eyes—my eyes are dull. I’ve stood in front of the mirror I don’t know how many times and tried to make my moss-green eyes look alive again.
To compensate, I practice smiling by taking my natural grim expression and forcing the corners of my mouth up making my cheeks look like little apples. It’s amazing how a smile fools everyone—even me. I wash my hands, smile at the clerk, and make my way back to the car.
I know I’m close to home as Gauley Mountain comes into view. The road tilts dramatically upward. My ears pop, and I feel my back press into the seat. I drive right by the Mystical Gravity Tunnel, a new spooky attraction made of rusty shards of metal with a plastic wolf guarding the entrance. This place ‘defies the laws of gravity,’ it says. Then the road abruptly straightens and I’m here. I’m in Ansted, my town with my people. I unexpectedly feel delight glowing from my pores.
The town looks different, foreign. It’s as if it’s dressed for an occasion. The buildings have new paint and there are new stores. It’s a tourist town now. Missy told me, but I hadn’t imagined it right.
There’s a new auto dealership, and Tudor’s Biscuit World Restaurant looks spiffy and dignified. From the light posts hang green signs with little red birds on them that welcome one and all.
I hold my breath out of habit as I make my way over New River Gorge Bridge. I’m nearly home.
A left at the bent tree. A right up the rocky hill. I don’t need the GPS voice that I’ve set on British mode to tell me how to get here. My tires crumble the rocks as they climb up my childhood driveway.
That’s it. The house looks nice. But smaller, I think. Wait, it’s brown. I thought it was beige. Maybe it just wanted to be brighter in my mind.
Before I can think too much about it, I kill the engine and open the car door. The familiar scent of the trees, the dirt, and the clean mountain air fills my lungs. The long grass gets pulled to the side by the wind. It stirs something in me. An emotion I can’t deal with is right on the edge of my perception. I push it away like swallowing a big hard pill stuck in my throat as I walk slowly, timidly up the steps to the porch.
I realize that it has felt like this place really didn’t exist until right this moment. Maybe as a coping mechanism, I’d turned my house into a figment of my imagination. But, here it is. It’s real, just like all the rest of the things in my head I wish weren’t.
Before I can knock, Missy opens the door and squeals. She pulls me into her long, slender arms and hugs me like nobody’s business.
“You look great!” she croons. “So fancy!”
“You, too!” She’s wearing a pretty, loose dress over her thin frame. Her light hair is shorter now. It’s cute on her. As she smiles, there are fine lines around her eyes that didn’t used to be there.
She stands back and looks at me. “You’re too skinny,” she decides. “I’m gonna have to fatten you up while you’re here.”
“Well, I’m only going to be here just today and tomorrow. I don’t know how much fattening you can do in that amount of time,” I say dryly.
Her mouth goes into a thin line. “Sadie Jane! You are not tellin’ me you are a’ leavin’ tomorrow. Your momma’s been waiting on you. She’s dying, Sadie. You have to stay ‘til she does and that’s that.”
“I can’t possibly...”
“Why not?”
“I can’t just drop my life.”
“What? You too busy to be here when your only momma dies!”
I stand here like an errant child as I kick the back of my left boot with my right toe. She’s right. I can’t let my fears over Dillon or his devil-spawn brother disturb me so. She’s my momma, after all.
“No. You’re right, Missy,” I say with my head down. “I’ll stay, until the end.”
“All right, then. Let me fix you some lunch.”
“Well, I’d like to see momma,” I try.
“Oh, Lord Jesus! I nearly forgot. You got me all flustered. Come on.” She grabs my arm and pulls me through the front room and promptly up the creaky stairs. Momma and Daddy’s room was upstairs with the room the babies shared. Downstairs was Missy’s and my room.
&nbs
p; “The house looks exactly the same as I remember. Except smaller. Maybe I’m just bigger now.”
“Well, you’re probably used to that fancy place you got over there in Cal-i-forn-ia.” She says the last word almost mockingly.
Outside the door to momma’s room, she stops. “Now, I want to warn you, Sadie. Momma looks different. She don’t talk much no more, neither. She’s sleepin’ now but I’m gonna wake her up for you. She’d be devastated if I didn’t.”
I realize my mouth feels like a dry cotton ball. I nod yes.
As I walk in the room, it smells like a medicine I don’t know. It must be evaporating out of momma’s skin and being released into the air.
Missy walks over to the old metal bed and taps momma’s shoulder. She leans down and announces me in a loud voice. Momma opens her eyes and they dart around the room until they settle on mine. She motions for me to come closer, so I do.
“My baby,” she croons and softly grabs a hold of my right hand. Her hand feels light and fragile like a broken bird wing in mine.
I sit in the chair next to her. That’s all it takes for the tears to force their way out of my eyes. I have different types of cries: the ugly cry, the loud cry, the surprise cry, the whiny cry, the knot in the throat cry. This one is the stinging cry. My eyes will sting without the knot in my throat and they won’t stop stinging until I’m over it. Usually the stinging cry comes when I’m particularly saddened—usually reserved for things and people I love a lot. Sometimes it takes all day to go away—I just tell people I have allergies.
Momma looks so old, so weak, as if her body is being sucked up from the inside and her skin couldn’t keep up.
“Sadie,” she says, breathlessly.
“Yes, Momma.”
“I want ya to go up the mountain and get me some yella root for my skin and fer these sores in my mouth. It. Soothes. Me,” she says, painfully.
“Of course.” I look at Missy who shrugs her shoulders.
“Go, please,” she begs, dismissing me.
I’m so confused as I get up from the chair. But then again, I can’t really expect momma to be rational. She wants me to go up to Gauley Mountain and dig goldenseal roots. She might be perfectly lucid. Okay. Fine. I guess I have to go out after all. What harm can come of that?
Chapter Five—Jerky Jake
“Eat this,” Missy says, as I come out of the bedroom we shared as children. I’m wearing the clothes Missy threw at me out of a box in our old closet. It feels like I’m wearing my old skin in this well-worn black t-shirt, some washed out jeans, and my old, faded brown boots. The ones that were hers and she’d given me when my feet grew big enough for them. The ones I was wearing when...No. I can’t go there right now. But, as I wiggle my toes inside them, I wonder if I can find traces of my blood embedded in the old leather like they do on CSI. Stop! I tell myself. This is sick.
She’s made me a plate: fried chicken, greens, and potato salad.
“I’m a vegetarian,” I explain as I slide into the heavily waxed chair around the old, knotted wooden table.
“Of course you are,” she decides.
I run my hand along the arm of the chair. It’s just as I remember except there may be a few more layers of wax now. I smile at the familiarity.
This table reminds me of all the ways I used to hide meat so I didn’t have to eat it. Sometimes I pulled the meat off into strips and hid it under the rim of the plate, or I’d drink all my juice and hide it in the plastic cup. Sometimes I fed it to my dog, Nancy, under the table.
That reminds me, she died on the side of the road after being hit by a car when I was thirteen. She was so funny. She’d get mad at momma when, come summertime, momma buzzed away her thick mane of peach-colored fur. She’d hide under the house for days, and walk around with her nose in the air after that for another week or so. She used to sleep in the bed with me and Missy. She’d press her little body against my side, reminding me she loved me with little pink-tongued kisses on my arm. She was a love.
I close my eyes and let these things come back to me. It reminds me that not everything about being here is bad. It’s just one bad thing happened, and somehow that painted all of the past with a darker hue. Like a line got drawn in my memories that wouldn’t let me through to all the good that rests on the other side of fourteen and a half. You know what; I’d love to get another dog someday. But, what if it makes a mess, or pees on the floor? I need things clean, orderly. I need things to be in control.
As I think about the pros and cons, I eat the greens Missy gave me even though I suspect there may be some bacon fat in them or something, and the potato salad. I leave my chicken-friend remains on the plate as Missy glares at me. I gulp down the sweet tea. I shrug my shoulders and she stares at the chicken, back at me, and then she frowns as she picks up my plate in defeat.
“You guys shouldn’t have let me hold ‘em when they were hatched, let me name ‘em and then cut their heads off in front of me.”
“That’s just the way life is, Sadie,” she explains. “How were we supposed ta know you’d be so...sensitive?”
I shrug my shoulders.
“Are you goin’ to drive over and walk a little ways or take the walkin’ trail over yonder?”
“Drive, but couldn’t I just go buy some goldenseal in a jar? She won’t even know.”
“Momma wants you to get it for her, from the ground,” she says, her mouth in a grim line. She rummages around in the pantry behind me as I stare at the kitchen walls, the pictures, the knick-knacks. Memories are just being held back by my purposeful blankness.
“Here,” she says, as she hands me a thin sack made from the leg of some old britches.
I look inside and find a root digger and some cheesecloth.
As I hold the digger, it tugs on a little string tied onto a memory in my brain. The wooden end feels so familiar. I run my hand up and down the soft edge and realize this is the very same one Momma had taught me with. She said she’d found it in a ginseng patch when she was a little girl, obviously discarded accidentally by a veteran digger. It had been sharpened into a perfect claw. Slowly, I put it back into the old britches.
I bet they were daddy’s, I think as I run my fingers over the soft fabric. I hadn’t come back when daddy died three years ago—he’d had a heart attack. I just sent a really ornate, probably gaudy, flower arrangement from Ansted Floral & Gift. I couldn’t come. I can’t tell anyone this but I’d never wanted to see daddy again—not even dead. I know Missy doesn’t want to talk about him right now. Her memories of him are different than mine.
“Where are the babies?” I ask before I turn to leave.
“Elise is at school, Sadie. And little Joe’s takin’ a long nap. You’ll meet ‘em later,” she says, proudly.
“What about Dale?”
“He’s on a run ‘cross country,” she explains. “He’ll be back in four days.”
“The life of a trucker’s wife, huh,” I joke.
“Yep. We put up with a lot. You’d better go, Sadie, or you’ll miss dinner.”
“Okay, bye,” I say. She waves me out. She seems a bit busy.
When I step on the front porch, I remember—I think my horse Monty is still in his stable. He’s, what? He’s got to be about twelve years old. Missy never said anything about him dying like Frosty did; and I know the boys like to ride the horses so they didn’t sell him—I don’t think.
I walk slowly down the trodden path toward Monty’s stable. The familiar scents in the air tug on memory after memory. I try to swallow them down but they feel like they’re choking me. My throat swells with that hard lump again. I hate this feeling. That lump in my throat had stayed for almost a year after...I was raped.
Why is it so hard to say the word rape in my head? I wince. I wonder if the lump will just stick itself in my throat the whole time I’m here. It doesn’t hurt but it’s annoying. It feels like I’m going to cry but even if I pinch myself until I do, the lump stays put.
I’m
distracted from my throat when I catch sight of my horse. He’s standing behind the fence in the pen. His back leg is bent and his tail is swatting a fly buzzing around his hind end. He whinnies when he sees me like he’s looking for something. Slowly, in a trance, I walk up to the fence separating us.
“Monty Montana,” I croon, a huge, real smile planted on my face. He nickers and his back shakes while he stays still, his black eye assessing me—his other one is covered by his thick mane. I reach down and pick some grass and hold it out. He walks gracefully over to me, grazing his lips over my palm to retrieve his treat.
“The grass is always greener where you can’t stick your muzzle, huh, boy,” I whisper to him and pat his forehead and his long face. He makes the blow-sound as he exhales with his mouth shut as if to say, “Hello, friend!” His scent is intoxicating. There’s nothing like the scent of a horse to get rid of a lump in the throat.
His front hoof scratches the West Virginia dirt. Then he neighs, his voice sounding every bit as beautiful as when he was a youngster. It’s then that I notice he has grey fur mixed in with the black. He hops once and then goes into a full gallop around his pen. He rears up on his hind legs, neighs in his throaty way looking at me with his one uncovered eye.
“Haven’t seen him do that in a long while,” says a voice from inside the stable. It’s dark in there so I can’t see who it is.
“Hello?” I say with my hands steepled over my forehead to block the light. That’s when a teenage boy walks out from the shadow.
“Seth?” I say, surprised.
“Na, I’m Jake. The younger one,” he says, to clarify.
“Oh, Jake!” I reply, unsure of how to greet my little brother. He was only two when I left.
“So, what are you doing home? I thought you’d be at school.”
“I ditched,” he says, matter of factly.
I don’t say anything. I just nod and stick out my bottom lip in contemplation while I pretend to kick something that’s not there on the ground. I wonder if he does this a lot.
Sadie's Mountain Page 4
