• • •
“Good morning, everyone!” said a bright, cheery voice.
It was the kind of voice that I’ve always hated, coming from people full of false hopes and hidden agendas. I stirred a little under the blanket and tried to open my eyes, but they were too heavy.
“Hey, Sergeant, look what I have for you!”
There was an excited whinnying above me, the sound of crunching and the smell of pulped apples.
“Sergeant,” the voice said with sudden impatience. It was a candid tone, truly unhappy, sincerely irritated. I liked it a lot better. “Honestly, boy. Why do you keep throwing your blanket on the ground?”
Brisk morning air hit my face, sunlight stabbed red through my eyelids. There was a long silence, then the twittering of a far- off bird, the nearby screech of a blue jay. Wood creaked above me, and Sergeant huffed apple breath into my hair. I tried to say something, but it came out as a groan.
“Oh, my god.” I heard her whisper. Feet went crunching through the hay. A faucet ran from somewhere, and I heard the feet return. A cold, damp cloth swiped gently at my cheeks and eyes. I cracked my eyes open to see a thin-faced woman leaning over me, a dark-stained rag dangling from her fingers.
“Ouch,” I said.
“Are you all right?” the woman asked then shook her head.
“No, course, you’re not. Don’t move, okay? I’m going to call an ambulance.”
“No!” I reached out and grabbed her wrist, grasping it with shaky fingers. “Please don’t call anybody.” I struggled to sit, yanking awkwardly on her arm until she slipped a hand under my shoulder and set me upright against the wall. I leaned against the wood blinking hard, trying to see past the funny black spots hopping around in front of my eyes.
“But you’re hurt,” she said, scooting back a bit.
“I think I bumped my head,” I told her waving a hand in front of my face to shoo the spots away. “Please, just let me sit here for a minute. I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
She looked at me doubtfully. “It’s not just a bump, lady. You have huge gash on your forehead.”
“Lady?” For a moment, I wondered if I had worn the wrong clothes. Maybe I was sitting in a pile of hay on the floor of some stranger’s barn in a cocktail dress. But, no, I remembered, I hadn’t packed any dresses. I looked down at myself, still wrapped in scuffed muddy leather, minus a big chunk from my left knee where the skin underneath was raw and red. I ran my fingers through my hair, still short and spiky, and waggled my feet, watching the scraped toes of my boots sway back and forth. At least everything moved. I scratched gently at an itchy patch of dried crust on my cheek and looked at my fingernails at flakes of old blood and dirt.
“If you don’t get that stitched, you’ll have a really bad scar,” she was saying.
I thought that she might have said something before that, too, and I wondered what I missed, but it was hard to concentrate on her words when there was such a sing-songy lilt to her voice. She talked funny, too, like there were too many vowels in her words.
I blinked at her. “I’m sorry, what were you saying?”
She frowned and dabbed at my cheek with her rag. “Your head, you need to get it patched, or you’re going to have a scar.”
I raised a hand to my eyebrow and prodded gingerly. It felt like it was much larger than it should have been, and it hurt. In fact, the whole left side of my face hurt. I thought about it for a second and decided that my entire left side hurt, so I shrugged my right shoulder instead. “What’s one more scar?”
The woman sat back on her heels, hands dangling loosely between her knees, looking at me curiously, like maybe she was wondering where else I had scars on my body and just how I got them there. I wasn’t talking about those kinds of scars, but it seemed too complicated to explain, and I was too busy staring at her. Her face was almost familiar, not like I knew her from somewhere, but like I’d seen her look before and it meant something good. Something about her felt very comfortable to me or, at least, non-threatening. Maybe it was the way she was dressed in her faded blue-jean jacket, white-button down shirt and old cowboy boots. She had a really bad haircut and pale squinting eyes that made her look like a female version of a young John Wayne. Much prettier, though.
“Listen,” I said, “can you help me? I need to find my bike and get it off the road before someone sees it.” That wasn’t quite what I meant to say, but I wasn’t thinking clearly. My head felt a little lopsided, and the world seemed more monochrome than it should have been. “I mean, I wouldn’t want anyone to run over it. I don’t think it’s very far from here.”
She jerked her chin at me. “Your head got a pretty good whack, there, hon. I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be lifting anything heavy right now, and you definitely shouldn’t be riding.”
“The bike’s not very heavy. Please. It’s all I have. Everything I own is inside the saddlebags.” I thought about the money, my driver’s license with my real name on it, and the two pairs of clean underwear that I still had left and would just hate to lose. Everything else in there was disgusting.
“Well.” She paused to study me with intense eyes. She shook her head, and her face softened a little, though the corners of her eyes didn’t lose their little crinkles. “I have a trailer that I use for hauling hay. Maybe we can get your bike on that. We’ll have to get the blood off your face first, though, or you’ll be scaring people.”
I relaxed a little. If she could joke about it then it would be all right. “Thanks.” But, then again, that might not have been a joke.
She nodded and stood. She seemed very tall from where I was sitting, leggy in her blue jeans. Her blond flyaway hair, long in the back, short in the front, stirred even in the light currents drifting through the barn. She held out her hands. I stared at them, at their roughened redness, at her short round nails, at the smear of dirt in the crease of her palm. They were working hands, hard, callused, honest hands. I grabbed them, and she hauled me to my feet. I managed to stand successfully, swaying only a little with her fingers clamped firmly around my elbow. She had a strong grip and her hands were warm. When I leaned against her, she seemed a very solid woman. I let her take more of my weight, leaning harder with my arm draped across her shoulders. I blinked at her eyebrows.
“I’m taller than you,” I said stupidly.
She looked at me with a slight tilt of her chin and the ghost of a smile. “Why, so you are,” she said and shuffled me out of the barn.
It took a bit of shoving to get my bike onto her trailer, with her doing most of the shoving and me panting hard, trying not to faint or lose my lunch. The bike was pretty roughed up on the left side, just like I was. The paint was scraped and the tank dented, the windscreen had a crack running through it, the turn light was broken, and the mirror dangled from a thin wire, but I thought it probably looked a lot worse than it was. I wasn’t much of a mechanic by any stretch of the imagination, but it didn’t look like anything major was broken, nothing that I couldn’t patch with a little duct tape and ingenuity.
I’d always been good at fixing things, toys, book bindings, loose buttons, jammed Mont Blancs, but it wasn’t something I was encouraged to do. My father paid people to fix things for him, and my mother never seemed to realize when something was broken, but I liked to know how things worked. It seemed to me that the better you knew how something was supposed to behave, the less likely it was to surprise you, so I made a point to learn a little something about motorcycles and four-stroke engines. It was one of the only times that I disobeyed a direct order from my father, who believed that mucking about with mechanical things was not acceptable behavior for girls in general and especially not for girls like me. His rage had been an awesome thing, and I trembled to think of it.
My hands were still shaking as we drove back toward the barn in her ancient pickup truck that smelled of old leather and leaky exhaust, its blue paint faded almost to white. A jumble of crushed Coke cans rattled musically on t
he floorboards as the trailer bounced along behind us.
“It looks like I’ll have to make a few repairs,” I said with my hands folded tightly across my middle. “But nothing looks seriously broken. The mirror is a special order part, but I can tape it into place. It just needs to stay on long enough to get me . . .”
I shut my mouth. As far as I had come, that was still the biggest question. I poked my toe at a can that tumbled across my foot. To get me where? Where was far enough, or was there any such a place?
I saw her glance at me curiously, but she didn’t ask. She had the funniest eyes I’d ever seen, large and round, of a hard-to-define color, a pale ice blue in the sunshine that turned a dark storm cloud gray in the shadows. I remembered the way she looked at me in the barn and found their intensity a little disturbing. I looked out the window instead.
We turned off the road onto her gravel drive, and I noticed a small sign by the entrance that I had completely missed last night in the dark. Laurelvalley B&B it said in slightly faded, nearly professional looking letters.
“Your house is a bed-and-breakfast?” I asked turning my head gently to look at her.
She sighed slightly. It was a tired sound, like the tail end of a long story. “I pretend that it is. It’s a very old farmhouse, a homestead that some ancient branch of my family built in the mid eighteen hundreds. There’s an interesting history to it, how it survived the Civil War and all, but, truth be told, I’m so far off the beaten path that no one ever stays here, at least, not often. I just get the occasional artist who comes through to paint the mountains or a honeymoon couple who don’t intend to leave their room anyway.” She smiled at me a little sheepishly. It was a sweet smile, and it took me by surprise. It made me smile back at her, one of my rare honest smiles. She blushed and turned away. That surprised me, too.
“In the fall,” she said staring over the top of the steering wheel, “people from the eastern part of the state come to see the leaves change color. They only stay the night and then they go home. It doesn’t bring in much, but sometimes it’s nice to have people around. All the rest of the time, this is just a regular old farm. I grow a few things now and again, and there’s a good-sized apple orchard over the hill there.” She waved her hand in the air in no particular direction.
I could see the house through the truck’s pockmarked windshield. It sat on top of a gentle swell of earth, bright white against the soft green of the new spring grass. Its sharply peaked gables pointed red tin into the sky and the faded gray of a barn was visible a little ways behind. Soft blue shadows of mountains, still capped with the morning’s mist, rose over the treetops. I could see why an artist would want to paint here. It made me wish I had a camera.
“Do you have any guests now?” I asked.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s still too early in the spring. The weather’s nice most of the time, but it’s unpredictable. We might get one day of summer temperatures and then two days later it’ll be snowing. It stays chaotic all the way through until May before it finally settles into summer.”
I chewed on my lower lip for a while as I counted my options. One. I shifted a little in my seat. “Do you think I could stay for a few days? Just until I fix the bike. I’m sure it won’t take long, only a day or two. I can pay you something.”
She turned her head to look at me with her funny colored eyes full of concern. “I still think you should go to a hospital or at least see a doctor.”
I turned away from her again. “I can’t.”
“No insurance?”
I gave her a quick, tight smile, but I didn’t say anything. I rubbed at a sore spot on the back of my neck and looked out the window, hoping she’d take my discomfort for embarrassment. My whole life had been a lie of one sort or another. I was tired of it and had no desire to begin twisting a new tangle, especially here in such a beautiful place.
“Well,” she said after only a slight hesitation, “I don’t see why you can’t stay at least one day. You probably ought to get some rest anyhow. You’re looking a little green around the gills.”
I gave her a puzzled glance. “What does that mean?”
She glanced back at me unsmiling. “You look like you’re going to be sick.”
Of course, as soon as she said it, my stomach gave a lurch and my skin went cold and clammy. Thankfully, we’d just pulled up to the house. If we had kept moving just another hundred yards, I would have thrown up all over her Coke cans. I must have overdone it trying to help her move the bike. When I stepped out of the truck, my vision started going spotty again, and I was a little unsteady on my feet. She came around to my side, grabbed my arm and threw it around her shoulder. She wrapped her other arm around my waist and helped me climb the porch steps. The front door was unlocked and we staggered through it, into a small foyer. A quick turn to the left and we were in an old-fashioned parlor. I collapsed onto her couch, sinking into the velveteen cushions. She knelt beside me and tucked a pillow under my head, brushing a stray fringe of hair from my forehead.
“We’re going to have to do something about that gash, you know,” she said with a curious tilt of her head.
“Couple of Band-Aids. It’ll be fine,” I mumbled at her. My lips felt thick and tired. I closed my eyes and felt her hand warm against my cheek.
“Stay here, okay? I’ll get the saddlebags off your bike.”
I didn’t want her to do that. There were too many secrets in those bags, things that would be dangerous for her to know, buried under a thin layer of smelly socks. “Hey,” I lifted my head and called out after her, but she didn’t answer. My head felt too fuzzy to get up from the soft, comfortable couch, so I let it go. Maybe the socks would stop her from digging. If not, then the dirty underwear surely would.
I closed my eyes again and wondered where I was, exactly. I’d just been driving. My maps had been soaked to a pulp and then dried with the pages stuck together. The motel phone numbers were ink smeared and unreadable, or no longer in service, but that hadn’t mattered. My cheap cell phone died after the first downpour I drove through, in Arizona of all places, where I nearly froze to death in the desert. After that, I just followed random signs that said east, more or less thinking that I’d eventually reach the Atlantic Ocean and then maybe I would try to get across it somehow. I had no idea how far the ocean was from here, wherever here was, exactly. I wondered about the John Wayne woman with her sharp-planed face and intense staring eyes. I wondered how she got to be here, living alone on a farm it seemed, and what kind of breakfasts she served. I was hoping for pancakes. Somehow, with all the fuzz between my ears, it never occurred to me to wonder what her name was.
She made me a ham and cheese sandwich and poured me a glass of sweet iced tea then kept me awake all day long asking inane questions about the days of the week, what year it was, the name of the president, and did I remember what color wallpaper there was in my kitchen. I didn’t recall having ever been in a kitchen, so I couldn’t answer that one, and I wouldn’t answer any personal questions. That seemed to bother her a great deal. She kept mentioning doctors and hospitals until I rattled off the names of ninety-nine of our currently elected senators and what states they represented. I could have told her what committees they were on, the names of all their spouses and what sort of graft they preferred, but I didn’t want to upset her any more than I already had. I didn’t want to upset myself either.
She gave in finally and put me to bed with a pair of borrowed pajamas in a smallish room with wide, chestnut floorboards. The furniture was plain but glowed with a deep patina of age and good care. She helped me into a bed with a simple knotty-pine headboard and tucked a checkered quilt up under my chin. My saddlebags sat on the cedar chest at the foot of the bed, unopened. She bathed and bandaged the road rash on my knee, tucked it under the covers and then moved higher on the bed. She sat next to me and began swabbing my forehead with cotton balls and peroxide. The cold tickling foam stung my cut, itched at my brain and kept making
me want to sneeze. When she finished swabbing, she dabbed lightly with a towel and started sticking little Band-Aids on me, one after another, in a neat row of X’s that ran from my temple to just over the bridge of my nose. It hurt where she had to pull on my skin to make the ends meet, but I didn’t whimper too much.
“Thank you for helping me,” I said, watching her rip open another Band-Aid package. She added the torn wax paper to the pile on the nightstand. “Hey, what’s your name? I’m sorry I forgot to ask earlier.”
“My name is Meri,” she answered, carefully sticking on the last Band-Aid to the end of the long row. “Meri Donovan. That’s M-E-R-I, as in happy. It’s French.”
“Je pense que non. Le mot est joyeux. Parlez-vous français?”
“No, I don’t.” She flushed slightly, unstuck a strand of my hair from underneath the edge of the last Band-Aid and combed through my bangs with her fingers. “I think that will help a little, but you’re still going to have a bad scar.” She lightly traced the swollen line of my eyebrow with her thumb. “You have a pretty face. It seems kind of a shame.”
“Are you?” I asked.
She blinked at me with that funny little tilt to her head. “Am I what?”
“Are you happy, as in M-E-R-I?” It was an impulsive question. I don’t know why I asked it. Her state of mind shouldn’t have meant anything to me. I had no business being there at her house, and I certainly wasn’t going to stay for very long, but still, I found myself hoping she would smile at me and say yes. She didn’t. Her face shut down faster than a door slamming shut. She scooped the pile of Band-Aid wrappers into her hands and crumpled them into a ball.
As Far As Far Enough Page 2
