Sway

by Amber McRee Turner

I checked to make sure the coast was clear before crossing back over to The Roast. But the coast was not clear at all. In fact, just a stone’s throw away stood Dad in the parking lot of the Econo Lodge motel, where he was talking to a woman pushing a maid’s cart stacked high with towels. Nervous I’d be caught not holding down the fort, I hid myself behind the mailbox like a spy and watched as the woman handed Dad a plastic bag. Dad nodded a thank-you and walked off, disappearing into the Huddle House.

  What in the world was he doing? I waited there wondering that very thing until I could see Dad through the window of the restaurant, waiting in line to pay. Then I ran back to The Roast and got myself all settled at the coffee table, pretend-reading a magazine by the time he opened the door.

  “Sorry for the long wait,” he said, setting each of us out a plate of everything anyone ever thought of mixing with hash browns. “The Huddle House was standing room only.”

  He twisted the Econo Lodge bag shut and set it on the floor between his leg and the couch as he sat.

  “I bummed us a few mini-shampoos off the maid,” he explained, then raised his cup of orange juice to the ceiling, and waited for me to do the same. We clinked our cups together in the best way Styrofoam knows how to clink.

  “Here’s to making a splash tomorrow,” he said, sloshing a little juice over the edge.

  “And here’s to Sway,” I said, trying to make another toast; but Dad, totally preoccupied with shoving the hotel bag under the couch with his heel, left me waiting way too long with my cup in the air.

  After dinner, within minutes of patting the hash brown grease from his beard, Dad fell asleep sitting straight up. I let him be and retired to my room, where I was thrilled to find an almost full, perfect-for-noodling moon beaming into the little back window of The Roast. Careful to tilt each Sharpie so it wouldn’t make a squeak on the wall, I rooted and branched my tree like crazy for almost an hour, until a fresh rustling around from the other side of The Roast startled me so, I dropped my marker cap at my feet. It sounded as if Dad was right there, outside my curtain, rummaging through the rolltop desk for something. I held my marker and my breathing as still as I could to listen.

  “Cass? You awake?” he whispered, and in response I made the most realistic sleep noise I could conjure. After Dad stopped calling to me, there wasn’t another peep from him, other than a little bit of shuffling around the RV and some page-turning here and there.

  As I carefully pressed the Eiffel Tower flat against the wall and taped the bottom corners onto their spots, I noticed that I’d accidentally noodled beyond the borders of the poster. Pieces of tree crept out from under it in all directions. I’d have to put off making a plan to keep that hidden, though, since capping the Sharpie was the most pressing task at hand. To aid in my search for the missing cap, I dangled upside down off my bed and fumbled around on the floor for a good while, until I was totally distracted by a small spot of light glowing right through my tablecloth curtain. I watched the little light flit to and fro for at least a minute before I talked myself into stepping up onto my box-bed and steadying against the back wall of the RV to have a better look.

  I stood teetering on my toes to see over the curtain. There was Dad, in a torn undershirt and some cutoff sweats, sitting quietly at the rolltop desk. On his head he wore a sweatband with a tiny flashlight stuck down through the side, and the light shone down on a lap tray made from our Scrabble box. The rolltop was wide open, and inside it were the scattered tools of a manicure kit. An encyclopedia volume lay stretched open across the desktop.

  Dad covered his eyes with his left hand, like he didn’t trust himself to just plain old shut them. Then he made his right hand into a fist with one finger pointed, circled it in the air above the book, and lowered it in a mini-twister. When his finger landed on the page, he peeked from behind his hand to see where he had landed. He cocked his head just right, to aim the weak flashlight at the page, and leaned in close to the book. From so high up, I couldn’t begin to tell what he was reading, but then I saw his lips say and say again, almost without a sound, “‘Thomas Edison, American inventor, developer of many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting electric lightbulb.’”

  And then he repeated, like he was memorizing for a test, “T E…Thomas Edison…inventor of the light-bulb…T E…Thomas Edison.”

  My legs stuck together as I stood there watching, and sweat beaded on my dad’s brow. Closing the book ever so quietly and still saying “T E, T E, T E” to himself, Dad leaned as far and low as he could to grab something from off the floor. He came back up with the plastic Econo Lodge bag, turning it upside down by its corners real slow and careful, like he didn’t want the little shampoos to make a racket. But what poured out of that bag was definitely not shampoos, and I had to rub my eyes to believe what I was seeing. It was soap, and a whole pile of them, all blank and white as my own face. No way no way no way, I thought. There’s got to be a good explanation for this.

  Dad grabbed a pair of tweezers from the manicure set, picked a small soap from the pile, and laid it gently on the Scrabble box in his lap. Softly in the background, Gordon Lightfoot sang about feeling like he’s winning when he’s losing again. My dad laid down the tweezers, grabbed the nail file, and with the edge of it shaved the soap down to a sliver. And right there, in the glow of his tiny spotlight shining down, with the sharp point of the file, Dad scraped the letters T E into that soap sliver. When he was done, he blew on the soap, blasting the shavings onto the floor and shoving them beneath the desk with his sock foot. As he stood to carry the box lid over to the couch, my tummy growled and almost gave me away. I squeezed on my gut so tight to shush its growling, baby stars danced in front of my eyes.

  I hoped hard that my late-night hunger was making me imagine things. Or maybe that I’d dangled upside down too long looking for the marker cap, and now my mind was playing tricks on me. But when the growling stopped and the stars cleared, I looked again to see my dad pop the latch on the MBM suitcase, open it wide, tilt the Scrabble lid up like a slide, and send the newly carved soap sliver sledding into the case. Suddenly, my hope and my joy and my legs all failed me at the same time, sending me sliding down the back wall of The Roast. As I sunk to the floor, a lightbulb of understanding zutzed on and off above my head, with a different cruel flash of thought each time. It’s all fake. The soaps. The case. The suit. Everything.

  I crumpled myself into a ball next to my bed, in a spot right between the beauty box and my backpack, and right on top of the lost Sharpie cap. Then, from my pack, I felt with my thumb for the sharpest pencil in there, pulled my curtain tight, and poked the biggest hole possible right through it. Sitting with my back to the big shoe box, I watched my dad squint, point, and carve, again and again. Every time, it was the same. He’d grab a fresh encyclopedia, flop it open, and do an eeny-meeny-miny motion until he found a name, any name. Then he’d pick up a blank soap from the desk, shave it down, carve the initials right in, and slide it into the suitcase. When he scraped, some of the soaps would bust in two, and with his fingertips, he crumbled those into tiny crumbs and piled them on one of the napkins.

  The whole time I watched, it felt as if I, Dad, The Roast, and everything in it were tumbling down a mountainside, like all things good and nasty deafeningly clanking against each other. All I could imagine were flicker-flashes of the faces of people helped by our so-called magic; memories that had suddenly become tangled in sickening questions. How could he? How did he? Had he fooled me? Had he fooled us all?

  After closing and shoving the case back into place for the last time, Dad stepped gingerly past the desk and into the bathroom, grabbing the napkin full of broken soaps on the way.

  And in one big flush, the crumbles…and Sway…were no more.

  “No-good, sticky-fingered, kid-cheatin’ con man!”

  When I was six, this is what my mom yelled at the ice-cream man as she chased his truck
three whole blocks because I’d paid for my push-up pop with a five-dollar bill and come back with no change. She ran on her heels, cotton balls separating her freshly painted toes. I mostly remember having to help her hold a bag of ice on her raw heels while my pop melted in the sink.

  Now, in the RV, as Dad snored on the other side of the curtain, I lay across that old trick box that was my bed and realized for the first time ever how miserably uncomfortable it could be. I felt like a magician’s assistant being cut in half for real, my insides hurt so bad from the Sway snatched right out of there. I thought about Syd warning me once that if you say a word out loud enough times, it will totally lose its meaning, and how I sure didn’t have to do that with Sway now that Dad had just trampled the meaning right out of it for me. Then I considered all the things that M. B. probably really stood for. Like Major Bunk. Or Mister Bull. Perhaps Mondo Bamboozler. Something befitting a no-good, sudsy-fingered, kid-foolin’ soap scum.

  I closed my eyes tight while all the lies Dad had told elbowed and kicked each other around in my head. The soaps, the suit, the list, the attic, the limitless inheritance. And then I remembered the certificate. The certificate. I’d forgotten all about that thing, and I had to see it again right away. Careful not to wake Dad, I reached around the side of my curtain, opened the fridge, and slid the cold paper out from its frosty spot. I unfolded the paper and held it up to my little window, hoping against hope to feel some of the magic again. Like maybe Dad’s carving thing was all some kind of weird misunderstanding. I mean, I’d seen with my own eyes what Sway had done for all those people.

  But as the full moonlight shone through the document, there, plain as the zeeyut on my face, was something I’d missed before, something very telling in the bottom left corner. On a spot not quite as burned off as the other edges, I recognized the mascot’s cartoon foot from the Olyn Middle School stationery. And as if that weren’t enough, I could even smell the blackened edges of the paper, which made me instantly picture Dad burning it over the sink with the flick-flick-flick of a lighter. That thought alone made me so furious, I folded the paper again and again and stuffed it into the can it! box, which was now far beyond full—paper corners poking out of every side. How dumb could I be for not learning from Mom’s SMART certificates that a document doesn’t give you authenticity.

  Overcome by the realization that I couldn’t even trust my own smarts, or my own eyes, for that matter, I began to wonder: Had everything important in my life been nothing more than imaginary? Not just soaps and the comfort they seemed to give people, but maybe even the biggest stuff…even my own parents’ love for me?

  My heavy thoughts and the sobs they squeezed out of me made it harder by the minute to keep silent, even with my face muffled by my pillow. I’d heard from Brother Edge about God not letting people suffer beyond what they can bear, but what I was feeling was surely as close to unbearable as it gets. In three weeks’ time I’d been up, down, and all around. And now there was nowhere left to go but out.

  Dad was so sprawled out across his space, there was no making it to one of the RV doors without getting caught, so I leaned beyond my curtain just far enough to grab the brown suitcase. Then I dragged my bed to the middle of my room, one little jerk at a time, and stood on top of the box, hoping hard that it wouldn’t break underneath me.

  The bed put me high enough to reach the moonroof, and as I worked to pop open its latch, my hands got all nervous and uncooperative, like they’d never even met each other before. When the door finally gave way, I lifted the suitcase above my head and pushed it out, slow and easy, where I let it rest on the roof to wait for me to join it. After that, I raised my arms and wriggled myself up through the opening. Once my top half was out, I had to slide on my belly along the roof until my legs were free as well. Suitcase in hand, I climbed down the back ladder of The Roast, stepping soft as I could; and as soon as my feet hit the ground, I ran.

  I ran harder than I’d ever run before, even in a thousand races against Syd. I ran so hard, the taillights, the weeds growing up through the asphalt, the moist thickness of the air, everything that passed me was a swirly blur of smells and sights and sounds. I ran so hard that a million night bugs flecked me in the face, a whole new one for each terrible thought that passed through my mind. Like how cruel it was for heaven to assign two rotten-hearted parents to one girl. And that paper cuts caused by fake certificates are by far the most painful kind. And how I wished on all the crooked cucumbers in the world that I could dive to the bottom of that blue mailbox and get Mom’s stupid, worthless postcard out of there.

  When I couldn’t move fast enough in my flip-flops, I took them off and carried them. Though a fresh cover of clouds kept the moon’s light from guiding me, I felt like I could very well close my eyes and let my fury steer my feet. The loose pavement on the shoulder of the road was warm and smooth enough on my skin, and even smoother when it changed to just hard-packed dirt underneath me.

  Even above the noises, which had turned from the whush of trucks into the fuss of crickets, I could hear myself panting like a dog, and my right leg itched where the suitcase pounded it with every stride. The blood in my cheeks made me feel like my face would catch fire, and I was sweating like I hadn’t ever sweated before. Even so, it was like my body and soul were hardened and in full agreement, like my legs wouldn’t get tired of running and that was okay because my heart didn’t want them to anyway. Unfortunately, though, legs can be a lot more wobbly than hearts sometimes. Much like the wobbling my own did right before I came to a dead stop.

  The way I saw it, though, my stopping just made for a good opportunity to deal out some revenge. So, best as I could while still holding it, I unlocked the brown suitcase and let the bottom drop open like a trapdoor, sending an avalanche of useless soaps tumbling onto the ground. After that, I took the open case into both hands and summoned what was left of my energy, shaking hard to loosen the stubborn, clingy slivers. In my head, I seemed to imagine a thundering sound that made the perfect companion for the disposal of such a heap of wrength.

  Only, the next time the thundering happened, it came with a sharp flash of lightning and a tremble of the earth below me. Then, sudden as spit, the bottom dropped out of the sky, and huge, relentless raindrops smeared my vision. Between the drops, I took a good overdue look at my blurry surroundings.

  And that’s when I turned scared. Really scared.

  It seemed in all my muddled rush, I had left our parking lot and even the main highway far behind, and nothing at all was familiar anymore. The night bugs had stopped their attack. Even the road under me was little more than a path, made by who knew what kind of wild Tennessee animal. If I was even in Tennessee anymore. It seemed I’d run so far, I could very well be in California. Only, I had a feeling it didn’t rain this hard in California.

  Just one yellow light hanging from a splintered pole poorly lit the scene around me. To my right, there was a rickety fence with rusty barbed wire across it. To my left, there was a ditch already filling with water. Behind me was a narrow woodsy clearing growing darker by the second. And the way I’d come from was merely a slick of shiny brown mud. Or was that even the way I’d come from? I wanted so bad to turn back, but I didn’t for the life of me know how. Starting off in one direction and then the other only made me more confused.

  Just when I chose a direction and began to walk that way, something suddenly made me slip and fall hard to my knees. As I struggled to free myself from the soaked overgrowth on the ground, there in the mud all around me floated the melty remains of dozens of little slick soaps that had made their own revenge. When I was finally able to pull myself up by a loose root, the soapsuds clung to a whole mess of scrapes on my shins, making them sting something fierce.

  Feeling a braided chain of regret and fear cinch tighter around my gut with every breath I took in, I held fast to the nearest fence post, like an imaginary storm victim clinging to an imaginary church steeple in the midst of a not-so-imaginary flood. And
just when it seemed the world didn’t have enough oxygen for even one girl, I heard a voice.

  “Cass!” Dad screamed, loud as the thunder, from somewhere way too far away. “Castanea!”

  I let go of the post and scrambled toward his voice so desperately fast, I fell to my hands and knees again, with no regard for the scrapes and the mud. All I knew was every call of my name was louder and more comforting.

  “Cass!”

  “Dad!” I yelled, still running toward him.

  Then finally, up ahead, the main road came into view.

  “Cass!”

  “I’m here!” I said.

  Within a matter of seconds, The Roast appeared, taking a Biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig Leeeeeeeeeft that almost sent it tipping over on its side. When Dad stopped, the RV hung off into the thicket by the side of the road, all leafy and twiggy like it had just busted through a wall of hedges.

  I stopped in my tracks and stood firm between the cockeyed headlight beams, waiting for Dad to get out. He tried and tried to fight his way past a branch that slapped through his window, to push what he could of his face out through the leaves. I wondered if he’d be relieved that he’d found me, or mad that he’d had to come looking at all. Then, soon as I caught sight of Dad’s face, I silently cursed how very instant tears can be, and how the sudden slowing of the rain sure did make them hard to hide.

  “Cass, baby, are you all right?” he said.

  “Not really,” I answered. “How did you even know I was gone?”

  “Your curtain,” Dad said, all out of breath like he’d had to power The Roast with his own feet. “It was blowing like crazy from the wind through the moonroof.”

  “But how did you find me?”

  Dad held up a familiar flip-flop. I didn’t even realize I had dropped it.

  “I found this at the turnoff,” he said.

  My ears itching like never before, I lifted the other flop up to the light so he could get a good look before I threw it hard on the ground in front of me.