Always You

by Roxie Noir

  Finally, we turn off at the Trail of 100 Giants, bump down the rough paved road, and finally park in the gravel lot. We’re alone there, since it’s midday on a week day.

  “There,” she says, yanking up on the parking brake and looking over at me. “You guessed right.”

  “I didn’t guess this exactly,” I protest.

  “You guessed big-ass trees in the mountains.”

  “I just guessed the mountains,” I say, and lean in toward her. “You supplied the big-ass tree part.”

  I put my hand on her face and kiss her. I don’t know how she knew, but the second we drove into the forest I knew she was right: this is what I need.

  Just a little while with her, nature, some big trees, and nothing and no one else. With my lips on hers I can feel the past couple days begin to melt away, to feel like something that happened to some other poor bastard, somewhere else.

  “C’mon,” she says, finally pulling back. “I planned a whole picnic, sort of.”

  Darcy did forget drinks, though luckily there’s a water fountain near the parking lot. We grab our sandwiches and head along the easy trail.

  It’s a sequoia grove, as the name might have given away. These trees are fucking massive. Somewhere around here, some enterprising soul carved a tunnel through one big enough to drive a car through.

  Trees big enough you can drive through them. They’re some big-ass trees.

  And we just stroll, talking about absolutely nothing. We hold hands and speculate about whether birds like sequoia trees or think they’re too big, about why the pinecones are so small if the trees are so enormous, about whether Nigel will freak out if he finds we took an extra day just for fun.

  Darcy offers to guilt-trip him about ‘the whole dead brother thing,’ and even though it still feels so fucking heavy, I can’t help but laugh.

  We find a picnic table, sit, and eat our sandwiches.

  “So, are these trees big enough?” she teases, dangling a tomato slice between two fingers.

  “These aren’t even the trees we visited when I was a kid, you know,” I tease back. “Those were just big regular trees.”

  “I didn’t even have to do all this?” she grins, chomping on the tomato. “I could have driven for like thirty minutes less, pointed to something out the car window, and been like, ‘good enough, let’s go back to the Holiday Inn’?”

  “I didn’t say this wasn’t better,” I point out.

  Darcy chews on a bite of sandwich for a moment, thinking.

  “You were visiting your mom’s sister, right?” she asks suddenly.

  I just nod.

  “She didn’t come to Eli’s funeral?”

  I stare into my sandwich for a long moment, like maybe roast beef and horseradish will tell me what the fuck to say to that.

  And then I think: it’s Darcy. You can’t surprise her.

  “I didn’t even know how to contact her,” I admit. “I tried. I looked up every Darlene Wright in a five-hundred-mile radius, but I don’t think I found her. My mom didn’t have her number any more. I don’t know if that was even still her name, because if she’d been divorced and remarried a couple of times since the last time I saw her, I’d believe it.”

  “That bad, huh?” Darcy says softly.

  I half-laugh.

  “You know my family,” I say.

  “I don’t, really,” she says.

  “You know how Eli was,” I tell her, putting my sandwich back down on the paper, looking away at a huge reddish tree. “I loved him, but he was how he was. My mom stayed married to a man who beat the daylight out of her once a week for twenty-five years, and she doesn’t like you because she thought you were rude to come to the funeral.”

  Darcy turns faintly pink, but I just shake my head at her and go on.

  “She took my dad’s side after I finally hit him back,” I tell her. “It was their word against mine, and when we got to court Eli wouldn’t testify.”

  “He wouldn’t testify...?” she says, slowly.

  I raise one eyebrow.

  “When my father pressed charges against me for hitting him back,” I say.

  Darcy’s eyes are white saucers with a blue dot. She’s already put her sandwich down on the paper, one hand covering her mouth as she chews quickly and swallows.

  “He pressed charges?” she says, incredulous.

  I blink, staring at Darcy, and Darcy stares back, because I’m almost positive I’ve told her the story before. I’ve told her everything, and this is pretty fucking important. It’s how, despite everything, I became the outcast in my own family.

  “I’ve told you all this, right?” I ask, slowly.

  Maybe I haven’t. Maybe I just think I have because I’ve told her everything else.

  She shakes her head slowly.

  “I don’t think so,” she says. “And I remembered about the trees...”

  “Oh,” I say, looking at the table. “Fuck.”

  “You don’t have to,” she says quickly, putting one hand on my arm. “Trent, it’s okay, you can tell me whenever you want, it doesn’t have to be now...”

  I just laugh, shaking my head.

  “I can’t believe I didn’t tell you years ago,” I say. “You sure you want to know this?”

  Darcy just rolls her eyes.

  “Fucking of course,” she says.

  Eight Years Earlier

  The door slams, and it shakes the whole trailer. Eleven at night on a Tuesday, and Eli and I look at each other across the bedroom because it’s never a good fucking sign when he’s home early. Means he got kicked out of somewhere and he’s likely to be in a worse mood than usual.

  I look back down, turn up the volume on my battered Discman. It’s old as fuck and every CD skips like crazy, but lately it feels like the only thing that’s been getting me through.

  Sidewinder screams in my ear, so loud that Eli glances up at me again. I’ve got a battered copy of To Kill a Mockingbird open on my lap, and he’s at the beat-up desk we share with a math textbook open, but we both know we’re not finishing any homework tonight.

  The shouting starts. I half-wonder what it is this time, but I also know it doesn’t fucking matter, and I lean my head back against the headboard of my twin bed, trying to ignore it, listening to the rough, choppy melodies, thrashing guitars.

  There’s a clatter. Sounds like something got knocked off the stove, but my mom doesn’t even scream. Deep down, I know I should be more scared. That I should have some kind of reaction beyond oh, this again, that I should go get involved.

  But I’ve fucking called the cops. More times than I can even remember. Enough to figure out that it doesn’t fucking matter if I call the cops, because even if they take him away, he’s back in a couple of days and then he’s pissed at me.

  I’ve learned my lesson. Stay out of his way, keep working part-time at the grocery store, graduate Low Valley High in June and get the fuck out of this house.

  Something shatters, and this time my mom yelps. My eyes fly open, because that’s unusual, usually she’s quiet as a mouse and goes down fast, because she’s learned that if she stays on the floor, he’s less likely to bend down and hit her and probably doesn’t have the balance to kick.

  And then she screams. I grind my teeth together, my fists in balls, and I try to turn the music up again but it’s already all the way up so I have to fight the impulse.

  You won’t do anything, I tell myself again and again. This is just what happens. There’s no changing it.

  Heavy footsteps, sounds like from the kitchen to the living room. Coming closer, the whole trailer shaking, the metal walls rattling. My eyes still shut, and he roars something fucking incomprehensible, even over the music.

  “Stan!” she screams, and she’s closer too. Like he’s got her.

  I’m fucking seventeen years old but I want to hide under my bed right now. Build a blanket fort or some shit, go somewhere small and safe where I don’t have to hear any more. Except that p
lace doesn’t exist, so I just sit there, on my bed. Trying to breathe.

  “Stan, don’t,” my mom sobs, and I swear my heart catches in my chest. I hold my breath.

  Eli slams his textbook closed, and my eyes fly open.

  He scrapes back the folding chair we use to do homework in. Throws his pencil on the desk, onto the nearly-blank piece of paper he was using.

  “Fuck this,” he mutters, stomps out of the room.

  I’m up in half a second, throwing my headphones on the bed, To Kill a Mockingbird in a pile on the floor.

  “Don’t,” I call after him, but I can tell it’s too late.

  The trailer’s fucking tiny and before I’m even out our bedroom door, he’s running into the living room, shouting at the top of his lungs. Past him, our father’s got Mom by the hair, and she’s on the floor, conscious but practically a rag doll.

  “The fuck is wrong with you?” Eli shouts, stopping a couple of feet away. “Do you get tired of hitting people who can fucking hit you back? You get your ass kicked at Downtowners tonight so you had to come home and take it out on her?”

  He’s fifteen, skinny, though he’s on the football team this year. Gets into dumb kid fights, but he’s never fought a full-grown man like our father, someone who gets into drunken brawls at least once a week.

  “Eli,” I say again, forcing my voice calm. “Leave it.”

  I’ve fucking tried this before, tried talk him down, get him to stop, but my father’s got a trump card: he’ll hurt his own child. I think he fucking likes it. Neither of us stand a chance.

  “Fuck off, Trent,” Eli spits over his shoulder. “I can’t take this anymore, why don’t you—”

  He takes a right hook to the jaw and stumbles sideways, caught by complete surprise. He holds one hand to his mouth and comes away with blood, his face astonished, but before he can even process it my father’s dropped my mother’s hair and he’s on Eli. Another punch to the gut, my kid brother doubled over.

  I have to do something. Fuck, I have to do something and I don’t know what, he’s already broken my nose once—

  My father shouts again and now Eli’s off his feet, in the air. Held up by two big hands around his neck, against a wall, clawing at them. My mother is on the floor, not even watching, and in one sickening moment I know I’m not getting out of this, that I can’t avoid it any fucking longer.

  Our bathroom’s to my right, the mirror dirty and cracked and a ring around the shower that no scrubbing will ever get rid of.

  On the toilet there’s a pipe wrench, because something’s always fucking broken and leaking, and without thinking for even a second I lean in and grab it.

  He’s still roaring. Eli’s gasping, kicking, and I feel the weight of the heavy wrench in my hand and I close my fist around it, step into the living room, and I swing it like a baseball bat, right at his fucking temple.

  There’s a thud. It’s surprisingly soft, and they both go tumbling to the floor. Eli’s gasping, choking, heaving for breath as he gets onto his hands and knees. My father’s unconscious or maybe dead, one leg bent under him oddly.

  My mother just looks at me, and I know she saw the whole thing.

  I drop the wrench. My hands are shaking, but I talk myself through it, slowly and calmly. I cross the room. I call 911. I haul Eli up off the floor, and we go sit together on the tailgate of my father’s pickup in our shitty dirt driveway, and we wait.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Darcy

  Present Day

  I knew. I mean, I didn’t know know but I knew there was something and I knew I’d never quite asked for the full story.

  I’m sitting on the table, Trent on the bench, leaning back against me as I stroke his hair. We’re facing yet another giant tree, both watching it.

  “I really thought I’d told you all that,” he says.

  “Not like that. Not as a whole story,” I say. “I knew the bits and pieces, but I didn’t know the story.”

  Trent sighs, tilts his head back, looks up at me.

  “So you know the rest, right?” he asks. “Dad pressed charges, Mom sided with his version of events. Eli sided with me but wouldn’t testify, I think because he knew he was going back there no matter what he did.”

  I bite my lip and look away. I’ve learned my lesson not to say bad things about Trent’s family, but Jesus Christ do I want to right now. Hell, I want to drive back to Low Valley, dig up Eli’s body, and feed it to the dogs.

  I want to find his old house, the trailer, and fucking set fire to it. I want to stop payments to Gwen’s assisted living home and let them kick her out onto the streets.

  Trent could never do any of that. Somehow, he came out of there the way he is, fucking kind and gentle and caring despite everything, but I could fucking do it. I could fucking do it to all of them.

  “But I got lucky with a judge who took several years of domestic violence calls as evidence, and gave me three years of parole instead of sending me to prison,” he says. “I moved out, stayed with friends in a fucking filthy apartment where the rats ate the cockroaches. Got my GED. Became a bouncer, picked up a guitar, and you know the rest.”

  I kiss the top of his head, because the rest isn’t simple either but it’s the part of the story I know. A couple years later, Stan finally got into a drunken fight with the wrong guy and died in a parking lot. Eli did the shit that he did, and despite fucking everything, as soon as he could afford it Trent paid for his mom to live where she does.

  “I’m glad I didn’t know that story before I met your mom,” I say quietly.

  “Now you know why I don’t care that she doesn’t like you,” he says, his voice rumbling through my body. “She’s got absolutely shit judgement. Fuck, it’s probably a good sign that she doesn’t like you.”

  We sit there. I run my hands through his hair, and neither of us says anything. I’m not sure there’s anything left to say, but I can tell that right here, right now, Trent’s at peace for once.

  Everything’s not fixed. He’s not fixed and I’m not fixed. Someday his mom’s going to die, too, and something like this will happen all over again, but that time I won’t fuck it up. He puts out my fires — literally — and I put out his, and it’s the way it’s been for a long time and the way it’s going to be.

  “Want to keep walking and looking at trees?” he finally asks.

  I kiss the top of his head one more time, and for a split second, I thank every deity I can think of for this moment.

  “Of course,” I say.

  The next day, we drive the two hours to LAX and fly from there rather than deal with the Bakersfield airport. Trent takes his rental car back, puts his luggage into mine and climbs in.

  As I drive south, out of Bakersfield, he’s oddly quiet.

  “How much time have we got?” he suddenly asks.

  “Before we need to be at the airport?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Three hours.”

  There’s a long, long pause. I glance over and he’s looking out the window, so I take one hand off the wheel and put it on his.

  “Would you mind driving through Low Valley?” he suddenly asks. “It’s on the way.”

  “I can do that,” I say. “Why?”

  “Because I want to know it’s the last time I’ll ever see it,” he says. “Eli’s gone, my dad’s gone, my mom is... how she is, and I’ve got no fucking reason to ever go back, but I kind of want to see it one last time, just to say good fucking riddance.”

  I get it. I go back to Madison, Wisconsin every so often to play shows, and sometimes I walk around, remembering being a teenage runaway and living half on the streets, half on the floors of older punks, anyone who would give me shelter for a night. And if I think I could never go back, I might.

  He only speaks to give me directions. All the roads here are flat, straight, and dusty; all the corners ninety-degree angles ruled only by stop signs. If it weren’t for the smog and the golden glow of the air itself, I’d be
able to see forever.

  And then, suddenly, a green sign on the side of a two-lane road announces LOW VALLEY, Population 13,093, even though nothing else changes. One side of the road is dusty and fallow, the other has low green plants baking in the sun.

  “Here we are,” Trent says.

  “Where to now?”

  “There’s not much to see,” he says, but we drive anyway: past a small high school with a single athletic field, past a few trailer parks, past low-slung abandoned houses. Past two blocks of downtown, where half the storefronts are boarded up, a couple are tattoo shops, and only one seems to be open and selling anything.

  I think it’s about what I expected from what he told me, but it’s so odd to suddenly be here, in the exact place that Trent’s hated for as long as I’ve known him.

  “Has it changed?” I ask as we roll past cracked tan stucco, an abandoned gas station.

  “Not really,” he says. “I got busted once by the owner for stealing gum from that store. Guy nearly broke my arm. Back behind there is the lot where we used to skateboard, though there were always a couple of us sharing one board.”

  I look over and he cracks a smile, just barely.

  “Adam Laredo was a fucking skateboard hog,” he says. “Wonder what happened to that kid. Right there’s where I got this fucking awful dragon tattoo, and I’m probably lucky I didn’t get hepatitis, too.”

  Then it’s over. It’s not a big town and we just hit the end, from dried-out buildings to the dried-out fields. For some reason, I pull off the road and park.

  “What, you want more?” Trent asks.

  I turn my head, look through the car’s rear window.

  “You’re not kinda sad to leave it behind?”