It was well past midnight when we turned into my cousins’ drive. The truck was still a truck and the footmen hadn’t turned to mice. But the beautiful girl was in tatters. Our bodies seemed to expand as soon as I opened the door of the truck, and suddenly there was no room for me on the seat. I nearly fell on my butt but caught the handle in time.
The boys pulled Nina out. I wanted to run inside, but I was afraid they wouldn’t walk my sister to the door. She might sleep where she fell—in the gravel of their driveway or the pricker plants in their unmowed lawn.
Justin kept kissing her, sucking her mouth into his. Marshall took his turn too, and their hands never stopped moving, up and down her body; they rolled her between them, and I watched, too dumb to speak, too scared to take her hand and lead her away. I thought of Lewis Champeaux, how I’d watched the other boys steal his pants. I could have helped him sooner, spared him his humiliation. But I didn’t speak—not then, not now. I told myself this was different. The Indian boy was afraid. But Nina didn’t care.
I like to think I would have stopped my cousins eventually. But I can’t be certain. I might have turned my back on my sister, marched across the yard, and climbed the stairs of my dark house. I might have pulled the covers over my head and hidden in the hot tent of my bed, where I could pretend I didn’t know what the boys had planned. I’d tell myself they wouldn’t fling her into the truck bed. I’d hum louder and louder, drowning her muffled cries, blotting out the image of their dirty hands over her mouth.
But I didn’t have to face my own cowardice. Nina saved herself. Her limp body stiffened; her back arched. She whirled. Vomit sprayed against the truck, splattering yellow bile on the three of them. Marshall and Justin were too stunned to miss the first heave; but by the time she arched again, they were halfway to the house. Nina and I squatted in the drive, and I held her from behind while this night and countless others like it were torn out of her. She spewed them out on the sharp stones that cut into her knees. She retched herself dry and still she heaved till she was too weak to stand. I made her drape one arm over my shoulder and clutched her wrist tight. I wrapped my other arm around her waist and lugged her home.
She collapsed on the couch and drew her knees up to her chest. I wiped the vomit from the corners of her mouth, washed the dirt from her legs, and covered her with a sheet. As I climbed the stairs, I felt her weight still on my shoulders.
27
I WOKE to the smell. My fingers revealed me: mute witness, betraying sister. Just once, I wanted to believe in something enough to risk my life; I wanted to be as brave as Red Elk, ready to leap into flames to save the life of a foolish boy. The big Indian’s faith in himself kept him alive. I wanted to love someone enough to plunge a plane into a lake. But I would not leave her. I would swim down and down into the dark trench and free her.
I was afraid to face Nina, to see her on the couch, her red silk blouse encrusted with spittle, her glance an accusation I deserved. And later her steady stare would demand the whole truth. Perhaps some small piece of the night had lodged in her brain, a shard of glass; she would recall my silence, the way I inched backward, ready to turn and flee. When she saw me today, the glass might splinter in her skull, and the night would pierce her a hundred times.
But Nina was not twisted in the sheet. She sat in the kitchen, smoking. “I’ve been waiting for you,” she said. “I thought you might fry up some more of those fine potatoes.” She was a devil to be hungry after last night. She’d washed and changed her clothes. Even Nina couldn’t have ignored the bitter taste in her mouth, but perhaps she was more accustomed to it than I imagined.
My shame boiled up and turned to rage. What if I had left her? What difference would it make to a girl who could forget anything—a girl who could leave home for five years and not weep or plead for our forgiveness? She cut her own head from our photographs. She left us to imagine her death day after day. And still she was not sorry.
Nina couldn’t be satisfied. For breakfast she had three scrambled eggs, four slices of toast and the rest of those potatoes swimming in ketchup. She was ready for lunch at eleven and dinner at four. That gave her time for an extra meal at the end of the day. After each meal she fell asleep: on the porch swing, on the couch, in the bathroom, at the kitchen table. But she refused to lie down on a bed.
Somehow she managed to get Daddy out of his chair, and she walked him up and down the hall twenty times or more. By evening she had persuaded him to come downstairs. She brought him out on the porch to trim his hair. It was the only time in his life I’d known him to let someone else take a pair of scissors to his head. Their chatter rolled in through the screen door, mumbling through the living room. Nina said, “I never noticed what big ears you have.” And Father answered, “The better to hear you.” Their laughter bubbled into the kitchen, where Mother and I peeled vegetables in silence.
I saw Nina as a child of twelve, standing on Daddy’s feet as he waltzed her around the room. They bumped into chairs, shook the cabinet of china. I had to dodge them, and Mother ran from the kitchen with a spatula still in her hand. She slapped at the air and told them to stop that nonsense before they broke her teacups.
But they didn’t stop. They giggled just as they did now. Everything amused them today. “Oh dear,” Nina said, “I nicked you, Daddy.” And he laughed. I will never understand why. Then they whispered. Who knows what they said.
“It’s hot today.”
“Yes.”
“You have such coarse hair, Daddy.”
“Not like yours.”
“Mine’s so dry it breaks off when I brush it.”
“You used to have such pretty hair.”
“Yes.”
“Bound to break sooner or later.”
“My hair?”
“The weather.”
Perhaps that was all they said. But why, why did they have to whisper?
It was on the fourth day that Nina had another visitor, “another gentleman caller,” Mom said as she and Nina and I sat on the porch, and I thought of my gentleman cousins.
At first I believed the boy in the yellow Volkswagen across the street was Coe Carson, and I sat smug, thinking how surprised they’d be when they realized a boy was calling on me, not Nina. But this was a foolish thought. No boy had ever knocked on my door. No lover had thrown gravel at my window or sung to me in the dark.
My mistake was simple enough. The boy in the car was Rafe Carson, Coe’s older brother, one of those boys in the trees during the long summer before Nina ran away, the boy in the woodshed with his hand stuck down Nina’s bra, one of the dozen or so she left behind to pine for her, to imagine her golden hair in a hundred damp and hopeless dreams.
Rafe was almost as skinny as Coe, saved only by the fact that he wasn’t as tall. His red hair was cropped close to his skull. His cheek and chin showed a sparse fuzz, a futile attempt to grow a beard. He wore a white T-shirt, yellowed at the pits, and faded jeans.
Mom tried to scoot me inside, but I sat on the porch swing, smack in the middle, staring at the two wicker chairs. If at some later time Rafe and Nina decided they wanted to sit together, they’d have to ask me to move my ass. Nina shot me a look, an old look that spun through the years to a time when I would have done anything to please her—would have stood on my head in a corner till my face turned the color of a ripe tomato if it would make her happy. That look had sent me scuttling to my room night after night so she could be alone with some boy or another, but this time I just looked back at her with the blank eyes of a cow.
“Hey there,” said Rafe, putting his foot on the bottom step and waiting for an invitation.
“Hi yourself,” said Nina. She twisted a brassy curl around her finger.
“I heard you were back,” Rafe said, shading his face with his hand.
“Yeah, I’m back.”
“How long you staying?”
“Long as I want.”
“Mind if I get out of the sun?”
“I
don’t mind,” she said.
He took the chair to Nina’s right, giving her a quick, sideways glance.
She rubbed her bare arms, and Rafe stared, his longing simple: he wanted nothing more than to touch those arms. Nina said, “Lizzie, honey, I’m about to drop from this heat. Be a sweet girl and get me a cool rag.”
I knew her, but how could I refuse?
When I returned with the damp cloth, it was just as I expected: Nina had moved to the swing. But Rafe still sat rigid in his chair.
Nina reached for the rag and read my mind, moving one leg onto the swing so I couldn’t plop down with her. I had to take the chair next to Rafe, bound like him to watch Nina wash her throat and the back of her neck. She dabbed at her arms. Rafe Carson had to sit on his hands to keep himself from begging her to let him wash her knees. She made each part of her body precious, then closed her eyes, oblivious to the suffering she caused this boy.
“I can’t remember a time I was ever this hot,” she said. “It wasn’t this hot when we were growing up, was it, Rafe?”
“No, ma’am,” he said, “it wasn’t.”
“Ma’am? Ma’am? What am I, your mama? Or some old woman on the street?” She leaned forward and the neck of her dress gaped, exposing a smooth white place the sun hadn’t touched.
“I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean that at all. You’re still the prettiest girl who ever lived in this town.”
“That’s not saying much.”
“In this county.”
“Thanks again. I feel like I’ve just been crowned Hog Queen at the state fair.”
Rafe Carson squirmed, thinking through his short list of compliments, tortured by his lack of words. “You know what I’m trying to say.”
“I’m tired of guessing what boys mean.” She stretched out on the porch swing; her eyes were slats. I wanted to warn Rafe that he’d better keep talking because Nina was apt to fall asleep the minute she got comfortable.
“I’m no good at talking to girls.”
“Well, it’s time you learned.”
“I haven’t had much practice.”
“What have you been doing for five years, living in a hole?”
“Something like that.”
“A monastery?”
“Not exactly.”
“Join the Army?”
“They wouldn’t take me.”
Nina sat up straight, truly looking at Rafe Carson for the first time. “They let anybody in the Army. Unless he’s some kind of cripple. Are you deformed, boy?” Something in her tone made me think she liked the idea and wouldn’t mind seeing a humpback or a clubfoot for herself.
“I’ve been in prison.”
“You mean that boys’ school, that country club for delinquents? That was ages ago. I didn’t think they even put stuff like that on your record.”
“They didn’t. I’ve been in a real prison. Over in Washington. Three years for armed robbery.”
“Three years? That’s all?”
“Well, the gun wasn’t loaded. Actually it wasn’t even a real gun, but the kid thought it was, crapped his pants, literally, said so in court. That’s why they gave me three years if you want to know the truth, three years for scaring the shit out of some pimple-faced kid.”
“Another gas station?”
“Seven-Eleven.”
“How much you get?”
“Nothing. Damn fool wouldn’t open the register. He was gonna die for minimum wage. How do you find a kid like that? Fifty lousy bucks, that’s all I wanted.”
“What for?”
“I was trying to get across the border before anybody got the bright idea of drafting me.”
“Why’d you go to Washington? You could have walked to Canada from here.”
“I had to throw my father off my trail. He wanted me to enlist. He would have tracked me all the way to the Northwest Territories if he knew how yellow I was. He’d rather kill me with his own hands than have people in this town call one of his boys a coward.”
“He’d rather have a convict than a coward?”
“Yeah, he would—as long as I don’t let on I didn’t have a real gun.”
“Well, you got out of it,” Nina said. “You didn’t have to go to Canada or Vietnam.”
“What a lucky guy.”
“I’d say so.”
“I missed a lot. I’m still missing it.” He stood up and paced. His face was dry and red, and he couldn’t look at Nina. “I feel like I got my arms cut off. You don’t know what it’s like, being locked up, looking at men every minute, never seeing a woman, never being alone. And then one day you’re staring at yourself in the mirror and you see there’s some guy behind you, and he’s watching you too because you’re skinny and the youngest one on the block, and he knows he can have you. He puts his hand on your shoulder, moves it down your spine. And you let him.”
Mom stood behind the screen door with a pitcher of lemonade and three glasses on a tray. Rafe yelled at her through the screen, “Do you know what I’m telling you?”
Mom said, “How about some nice lemonade?”
“No,” Rafe said, collecting himself, remembering his manners, “no, thank you, ma’am.”
“This heat can make a person crazy if you don’t get enough to drink.”
Rafe shook his head. This had nothing to do with the heat. As he walked away I imagined his shirt sleeves hung empty, flapping in the hot wind.
“That poor boy,” Mom said, pouring the lemonade. “I had no idea.”
Nina grunted and slumped down on the swing. She leaned back. Before I’d finished my drink, her lips fluttered and she snored like an old man.
“It’s all those cigarettes,” Mom said. “I don’t think that girl can breathe right anymore.”
I didn’t care if she could breathe or not. I thought there was something more seriously wrong with her than too much smoke if she could fall asleep after a man told her he felt as if he had no arms. A man with no arms can’t hold a woman. A man with no arms can’t break his fall.
That night Daddy came downstairs for dinner—the first meal he’d had at the table since the night of the fire. He even dressed himself, but his pants had grown baggy and he had to cinch his belt up two notches. His blond hair was beautiful, combed back, trimmed perfectly over his big ears, delicately curved on the neck. Mother set an extra place for him and acted as if this were nothing unusual. Nina sat beside Daddy. She let him hold her hand while he said grace, the old grace that he hadn’t said since we were children: “Father, we thank thee for these mercies.…”
Arlen showed up just as we finished supper. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she said. “Lazarus has risen. A walking miracle. No, I stand corrected, a sitting miracle.” She cackled, and I thought this might send my father skittering back up the stairs to hide in his room for another three weeks, but Nina truly had worked a miracle.
“How are you, Arlen?” Dad said, as if he’d seen her just yesterday.
“Better than you. You look like a starved rat.”
“How’re Les and the kids?” Dad said, not taking the bait.
“Fine, they’re fine.” For once Arlen was short on words.
Nina said, “What have you got there, Arlen?”
“Oh, this. I almost forgot. I made pies today, apple. Thought you might like one.”
“Course we would,” said Nina.
I could see it now. Nina would wolf down half the pie and fall asleep with her head on the kitchen table.
That’s just how it happened too, except that she didn’t eat quite half the pie because Daddy was chewing even faster than she could. Later he shuffled out to the porch. Weeks in bed had made him lame; he’d spend a month shaking old age out of his legs. He said he smelled the wind changing. We were in for a cool night. But in the kitchen where Mom and I cleared dishes around the sleeping girl, the air was close and hot.
I heard the lone coo of an owl. It reminded me of the old days when there were always boys whistling in the gr
ass. But tonight’s cries went unanswered; the girl slept, the food in her stomach heavy as a drug, a drug that kept her safe from the story a boy with no arms wanted to tell.
28
MOM AND I sat on the back steps in the dark. My father was right: the wind was changing, blowing the stars out of the night, leaving the sky heavy with yellow fog. In the kitchen, Nina cried out. I ran inside and flicked on the light. She jerked straight up in her seat as if to pretend she hadn’t been out cold for the past three hours. We heard Daddy limping up the stairs, on his way to bed.
“I guess he’s better,” Nina said.
Mom was right behind me. “Because of you,” she said.
“All I did was be alive.”
“That’s no small thing.”
Nina stretched her arms over her head. “Is there any more of that pie?”
“Your father finished it.” Mom reached for Nina’s hand, but Nina stood up to shake off sleep and the dream that had made her yell.
“I hope you can forgive him,” Mom said.
“For eating the pie?”
“For what he did before.”
“You mean for telling me he never wanted to see my face again? You mean for nearly breaking my jaw? You mean for calling me a piece of trash and a worthless slut and no daughter of his from that day forward?”
Mom nodded, ashamed, as if they were her words, not my father’s.
“Hell,” Nina said, “that was nothing. I don’t blame him. I could have let him cool down for a month or two and shown up on your doorstep. With my belly the way it was, he never would have hit me. I chose my life. Nobody ruined me and nobody’s gonna save me, either. Shit, I bet Rafe Carson blames his father for wrecking his life, making him run away. But Rafe didn’t have to steal no fifty dollars. He could have earned it in a week. He was looking for an easy way and you can see where it got him.”
Meteors in August Page 21
