by Sofia Grant
“Lolly, I swear if you don’t—”
“Okay look. I think it’s some weird thing about, you know, you guys trying to get pregnant and then you going to Texas and having this whole, like, finding a whole other life that you never had before, because you know how Liam is, he can be such a child about being left out . . .”
“What did he do?”
She could hear Lolly take a breath. “Okay. Well, I guess he had some thing at work, like a happy hour or something, and he got really drunk, and he called Rex and asked him to drive him home and he was going to leave his car at work and then go get it. Right? But then this morning, he’s such an idiot, he was so drunk he forgot that he left his car downtown and he called Rex up and, I mean, get this, he thought it had been stolen.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Like somehow the mugger had your keys from your purse and he—I mean, it didn’t make any sense, but Liam was freaking out so Rex went over there and—and I’ll just say it, there was a girl there.”
“A . . . girl?”
“Yeah, from work. I don’t know, I guess she’d been at the same bar. Her clothes were all over the living room. And she was in the bathroom, throwing up—I mean, this is the next morning, which gives you some idea of how bad off she was, and Liam obviously wasn’t expecting that; he figured Rex would pick him up and she’d hide in the bathroom and they’d get the car and—well, you get the picture.”
“Liam fucked an intern in my bed,” Katie gasped. “Is that what you’re telling me?”
“I don’t know if she was an intern—”
“And while they were going at it, my mother was texting him! I was leaving him messages! Goddamn him!” She gasped for air. “I could have been dead in a ditch somewhere for all he knew! In Texas!”
“Well,” Lolly said carefully. “I don’t know about that part. But yeah, he’s a dick. Did I ever tell you that I never liked him? I take it back if you get back together with him. Do you want me to come there? I can probably get a flight tonight.”
Katie realized she’d started pacing. She looked over at the truck; Jam was watching her, still glowering. She gave him a little wave. “You’d do that? For real? I mean, you’re not just offering because you know I’ll say no . . . are you?”
“I’m offended,” Lolly said. “I’m your best friend.”
You are? Katie almost asked—and then she stopped herself.
“I kissed someone,” she said. “And you’re my best friend too.”
“EVERYTHING OKAY?” JAM asked, his jaw so tight it looked like it could break glass.
“Uh . . . I think so,” Katie said. “My husband slept with an intern from work.”
“Oh,” Jam said. “Huh.”
“Can we talk about it later?”
“Sure. This is it, by the way. Their house.”
“You only drove a half a block!”
“You said to pull over . . .”
“You pulled over half a block from their house?”
“Women are complicated,” Jam said somberly. “I’ve learned it’s best to accommodate them where possible.”
“Well—are we going in?”
“Give me a second.”
He jumped out of the car and came around to her side. Opened it, and offered his hand.
“Why so formal?”
“Because, if the thing we’re not talking about is true, then it puts things in a different light, maybe. Not that I’m making any assumptions.”
Katie accepted his hand and jumped down, feeling like Cinderella alighting from a pumpkin coach. And also like Linda Hamilton in Terminator. “Let me at him,” she said.
“I think I’ll handle this. Walk behind me, like a good girlfriend.”
The house was a slapdash tract house in a row of a half dozen others just like it, each with a thin strip of lawn and a tiny front porch trimmed in raw lumber painted white. Jam knocked on the door. After a few moments, it opened, and there was Scarlett. She was dressed in a halter top and short skirt and tortuously high heels, her hair blown out stick straight and huge hoops in her ears.
“Damn it, Jam,” she said. Then she saw Katie, and sighed.
“Who is it?” a male voice called from inside the house.
“It’s Brittany,” she called back. “I got to get my stuff out of her car. I’ll just be a few minutes.”
She shut the door behind her and grabbed each of their arms.
“Come on,” she said, dragging them down the street and around the corner, where they were out of sight.
“Look, I’m sorry I took off like that,” she said, not meeting Katie’s gaze. “But I think everything got way overblown. I was . . . it was just the heat of the moment, you know?”
“Sounds about like what you said last time,” Jam said mildly.
“You have no right to—”
“I know, I know,” Jam said. “And I tried to tell her that. But she’s excitable, as you’ve probably noticed. She just wanted to see for herself that you’re okay, and now we’ll go.”
Scarlett’s expression softened and she finally looked at Katie. “Look, I know it seems bad,” she said. “But it’s going to be different now. We’re going in on this together—partners. Merritt’s going to make a contract and everything.”
“You’re selling the house?” Katie asked in dismay.
“Well, I mean, what am I going to do with it? And we can have a lot better return on our investment this way.”
“Scarlett—please. I’m only here for a few more days. Couldn’t you—can’t you just come back with me? I promise I won’t say anything more about you and Merritt. Or if not tonight, tomorrow? I . . . we’re family,” she finished, miserably. “And we just got started getting to know each other.”
“Katie, don’t be like that,” Scarlett said hoarsely. “Don’t make this worse. Look, I’ll try, tomorrow, okay? Only it’s Sunday, and that’s his day off, so . . . it’s just harder. Monday for sure, because he’ll be back at work. Listen, Katie. You’re my cousin and I love you. But you don’t understand this.”
“You’re right,” Katie said, tearing up. “I don’t.”
Scarlett grabbed her in a fierce, fast hug. Then she punched Jam on the shoulder.
“Bye, assholes,” she said, and jogged back around the corner in her towering heels, every step a feat of unlikely grace.
Jam put his arms around Katie, and she leaned into his hard, broad chest. “My mom would have a fit,” she said. “She always said you should never, ever cry in front of a man unless there’s a sure-thing payout.”
“Well, I’m a pretty sure thing,” Jam said. “As long as we’re still talking about you getting into my pants.”
Despite herself, Katie snickered. “Okay,” she said. “Guess I better strike while the iron’s hot.”
JAM LED HER up to his own front door without asking, and Katie didn’t object. Halfway across his living room he picked her up and carried her the rest of the way. He took off his leg, and she took off the dress her mother wore before she was even born, and then they looked at each other in the moonlight for a moment.
“This isn’t a mistake,” Katie said. “I promise.”
“I hope you’re not trying to talk yourself into this.” Jam put his hands on either side of her face. “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
“My goodness,” Katie said, laughter bubbling up from the deepest part of her heart, until he silenced it with a kiss.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Ruby shouldn’t even have still been at school that afternoon,” Caroline said, as Margaret poured her a glass of water from the pitcher the aide had left on the nightstand, and helped her take a sip.
On Friday afternoons, she used to take piano classes at Miss McFarland’s house. But some of the children from her class had been invited to perform for the mothers at the PTA meeting, and Ruby was selected to be part of a Mexican hat dance. She had a darling little dress with a ruffled petticoat, and I had done
up her hair in braids—she was just bursting with excitement.
Because there were so many of us, the mothers and the children who were going to perform, they moved the PTA meeting that afternoon. We usually met in the high school auditorium, but that day we were to hold our meeting in the gymnasium, which was a separate building out back of the elementary school classrooms.
There were maybe fifty of us, sitting in folding chairs. The children were adorable; they’d been rehearsing for weeks. Some of them were dressed up like little Indians, and there was a performance by the rhythm band, and we clapped and clapped for them when they took their bows. After the performances, there were just a few more orders of business—I don’t remember what anymore—and the children went back to their classrooms to get their things and then everyone was going to go home.
The last time I ever saw Ruby, she was walking out with the others in her class. At the last minute she turned around and looked right at me, and gave me this little wave. Her teacher was trying to get everyone to keep moving, so it was quick—she smiled at me and then she was gone.
I had a book that I had promised to loan to Marilyn Beard, and I had seen her come in but lost track of her, so I was looking around the room trying to find her. Everyone was getting their things and starting to go, when there was this—this roar, like the earth was splitting open. No one knew what was happening. The building shook and suddenly bricks and glass were falling in on the floor, like some giant was squashing the building from above, and we all just ran. There was no sense to it, no rational thought—in a moment like that I suppose your instincts take over and your feet carry you.
My ears were ringing with the explosion and the air was filled with dust—there was a gray cloud, a huge chunk of concrete on the walk. Someone yelled that we’d been bombed, and none of us had any reason not to believe it. As the dust began to settle you could see that the elementary school building had collapsed—the roof had been blown clear off of it. But I didn’t trust my eyes—how could my child’s classroom simply be gone? And I turned around in a circle and I saw that the only thing still standing besides the auditorium was part of the junior high school building. But as my eyes adjusted to the sight, I saw something I’ll never forget—a child was caught on the jagged top of the wall, slumped over with blood pouring from his side, just hanging there.
I started running—and I wasn’t the only one. It was a stampede, all of us mothers running toward their children’s classrooms, or what was left of them. Everywhere there were unspeakable horrors, children who’d been thrown clear only to die when they hit the ground, pieces . . . oh God, you couldn’t believe what you were seeing, the little arms and hands and bits, a shoe lying in the dirt, a bloody dress with part of a body in it. Still it didn’t occur to me that Ruby might be one of those children, not really—my mind couldn’t accept the possibility.
Everyone was screaming and as we ran into the rubble I realized I was screaming too. There was a beam that had fallen where the doorway stood and I was trying to lift it, I never had a chance of lifting it by myself but you stop thinking straight in a moment like that. I was pulling and pulling when one of the fifth-grade mothers came staggering toward me, crying out, “They’re all dead, our children are dead!” and another mother just fell on her and started hitting her, screaming at her to stop saying it.
People were running toward the building from every direction. Later we learned that for miles around, people heard the explosion and saw the smoke go up and dropped what they were doing and came. Farmers left their tractors in the field and drivers left their cars, shopkeepers ran out without locking up their stores. I had gotten disoriented and I couldn’t tell where her classroom should have been, and a man—I never did find out who it was—put his arms around me and picked me up and carried me out. I fought him—I could see the dead children, some of them slumped over their desks like they’d just gone to sleep, and I thought maybe there’s a chance, there has to be a chance that somehow she escaped. So I kicked and screamed but it was no use, he carried me out into the yard, where already the first of the firemen had arrived and were trying to help the survivors.
There were children who were buried, some of them still alive, and there was a sort of bucket line of people pulling off the debris. But us—we mothers who could not find our children—of course we were no help. The teachers who survived the blast, and some of the other parents, they tried to help us. Already they were starting to lay the bodies out in rows, and we just stepped over them—looked to see that our own children were not among them and just stepped over them.
It wasn’t very long at all before the men started coming in from the oil fields, bringing whatever tools they had at hand. Torches and pickaxes and shovels. They drove in some trucks and used their winches to drag the huge pieces of the walls and roof. And by then there were parents who were finding their children lying dead on the ground. Everywhere, the screaming just went on and on. Mothers were trying to breathe life back into their children, pleading with them, yelling at them to live, to just live.
I saw children dying. Later on I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking back about what I saw and heard—all those little voices calling for their mothers, begging for help, for water. But at the time I didn’t care. I was angry at them because they were still alive, and I ran back and forth, I didn’t have a plan, I was just calling and calling for Ruby.
Your father came in one of the rig trucks—he wasn’t driving; one of his men brought him. He told me that night that he knew when he first saw the school in the distance, what was left of it, that she was gone. He said they were driving behind a truck carrying a load of peach baskets, and that truck pulled over and the driver started pulling the baskets off and handing them out to the rescuers. He grabbed a basket without thinking about it and ran into the wreckage.
Before long there were more trucks—dozens of them. Some of them emptied their loads right on the ground so they could take the hurt children to the hospital. By the end of it there were children in hospitals in Tyler and Henderson and Overton and other towns too. I remember seeing dozens of loaves of bread on the ground, just lying there in the dirt, and someone said they’d been headed to Kilgore when the driver saw the explosion.
There was a rig man who’d worked as a welder, and he started cutting through the beams with his torch, and I thought—I was out of my mind, and I was begging him to dig Ruby out. Because you see, I hadn’t seen any sign of her yet, so I thought she must be buried underneath. He was trying to work and I was pulling at his shirt and begging him to find her when your father found me. He said my name and I went to him and when I saw his face, how broken he looked, I knew it was true, that we had lost our child.
After that I had no hope left. We waited in the gymnasium, where they had set up a morgue. A lot of us parents stayed there so we could see when they brought the bodies in. Whenever someone identified their child it would start all over again, the wailing. I saw a father pick up his dead son and leave with him. He was out of his mind—he took him home. Some of the Mexican families just took the bodies of their children and left that night; they’d come here with nothing and they left with nothing, it was like they were never here at all.
The last child they found alive, he’d been buried under a desk and that had kept him alive, because there was a space that held air for him to breathe. When they brought him out he was dazed and weak but he could talk a little. But when they carried him past the rest of us, one of the mothers ran out and started yelling at him, because her child had been in the same classroom but had died. She kept saying, “Why did it have to be you? Why are you still alive?”
Those peach baskets that had come off the truck, they ended up being used to carry out the bricks and plaster and pieces of wood as they dug farther and farther in. They worked all night, two thousand volunteers by the end of it. The blast had thrown pieces of the building hundreds of yards in every direction. Sometime toward morning a man came to your father and aske
d him to come along. He told me it was all right, that I should stay where I was. The school librarian, she had been walking between buildings when the explosion happened, and she survived—she stayed with me and held my hand and kept me calm. It seemed to take forever, but when your father came back he had tears streaming down his face, and he just shook his head. She had her little petticoats on, but he identified her by her shoes, that he’d helped her buckle that morning.
After that there was no reason for us to stay, so we went home. I don’t think we said a word between us. Your father opened the front door and we stood there looking through it but it was like neither of us wanted to go in. Once we went in the house, somehow that would make it real—that she would never be there with us again, that house where she grew up. We were so proud of that house, but I remember standing there thinking that it might as well fall to ruins too. Because without Ruby there was nothing for me in the world.
I said to your father, “I don’t think I will.” He turned me around and put his hands on my shoulders and made me look at him.
“Come in now, darling,” he said, and again I told him no. So he put his arms around me and we just stood there for the longest time. I could smell the smoke on him and the dust. He was shaking from exhaustion and shock and the effort of holding me up, and when he asked me again, I felt sorry for him and so I said all right, and I went in with him.
We went up the stairs and your father led me to our bed and told me to lie down. I didn’t take off any of my clothes, not even my shoes. He went out into the hall for a moment and when he came back he said he’d gone to check in her room. He lay down beside me and we were like two little children, curled up with our foreheads touching.
He said he had to make sure that she hadn’t somehow found her way home and into her bed. That maybe the shoes he’d seen hadn’t been hers—the petticoats. But her room was empty. I told him I understood and we held each other until it was light outside.
Alelia came late that day, she had gone to look for us at the school when she heard. By the time she got there, your father had finally fallen asleep and I had gotten up and washed and dressed and I was downstairs at the table. I could tell that Alelia had been crying, though she was trying to pretend she hadn’t, and she started up again when she saw me. I told her, Stop that now, because we had a funeral to plan.
