“Daddy promised me he’d go back to work,” she said. Mom cleared her throat, her eyes still fixed on her own hands. “Mama, I’m sorry if I hurt you,” Nina said, as if more words could change the ones that the walls of this room had heard and taken as their own. She scuffed to the sink and poured cold water over her cigarette, then flicked it in the trash.
“No need to be sorry for speaking the truth.”
“Then look at me, Mama, please, because I have to go.”
Finally my mother raised her head. Her eyes caught no more light than dust on the road. “There now,” she said, “I’m looking.”
Nina kissed the top of her head and said, “Oh, Mama,” into her hair.
“How’re you getting back?”
“Hitching down to Rovato Falls. I’ll catch a bus from there.”
Mother didn’t make any offer to drive her or fuss about the hitching because all three of us knew this was one of Nina’s small lies. And I believe my mother didn’t want to know for sure, didn’t want to be told straight out that Nina had called a boy, that for all her talk about having her own life, she was wrapping some kind of rope around her neck again.
I said, “I’ll walk you to the highway.” I don’t know why I said it. Maybe I wanted to be alone with her. Maybe I just needed to get out of that house full of all the words that could be spoken only at night. But I was thinking at that moment that I wanted to make damn sure she really left town.
I carried her bag and we didn’t talk. The drizzle touched my cheeks like tiny fingers, tender and probing; I was a leaf bud they wanted to open, and I lifted my face but my heart remained stubborn, a fist in my chest, forever closed.
Rafe Carson was parked on Main Street, right in front of Elliot Foot’s burned-out bar. Rafe, the only boy left in Willis for Nina to call. Rafe, the boy who would never hurt her because he knew the sorrow of being forced to his knees. I thought of the day they raised the sign above this bar; I had a vision of the gutted building being fixed up again, and everything starting all over. Rafe’s yellow Volkswagen gleamed, glazed with rain, the only bright spot on the gray street.
Nina trotted now, fast and sure. With her escape in sight, she couldn’t get out of Willis soon enough. She said, “You won’t tell Mama,” her words a statement, not a plea.
She tugged her bag out of my hand and tossed it into Rafe’s car. “Fancy meeting you here,” he said. And she answered, “Yes, just imagine.”
Nina turned and hugged me quick, so I didn’t have time to hug her back or pull away. “How’d my baby get so tall?” she said, then climbed in the bug and rolled down the window. “Take care of them for me, Lizzie.”
I have been, I thought, all this time—for you, because of you. I stood and watched the Volkswagen buzz down Main. The fine rain fell through the open roof of the Last Chance Bar, fell on the steps of the Lutheran church and on the street in between, that street like a river, carrying my sister away again.
I thought, At the end of the day the rain will still be falling. My father will stand alone at his bedroom window. My mother will sit at the kitchen table. All the lights will be off when dusk comes, and dark. And the doors will be open, and the wind will blow through our house.
The little yellow car disappeared. I wondered how far Rafe Carson would drive her. I wondered if he would be able to leave her at that dingy bus station in Rovato Falls, or if somewhere along the way he’d say, “I might as well drive you to Missoula; I’m not doing anything else today.” And I wondered if he’d stay the night or the week, a year or half a life. How strange that she’d chosen him, a boy she’d taunted back in the days when she was a beautiful girl. But they’d grown alike somehow, both of them living on the borderline, trying not to step across. They might hold on to each other for a while and be safe; maybe the best kind of man for Nina was one who couldn’t afford to judge her.
I thought she was brave in a way, taking all the credit and all the blame for her own life. I didn’t know whom to admire—Nina who cut herself free or my mother who took her life just as it was. I only knew that I wanted my own life someday. I wasn’t going to wait on the road for some trucker to take me north. I wasn’t going to settle for some redheaded boy whose misery and humiliation matched mine. Someday I was going to leave this town. But when I did, I was leaving by myself, and I was going to decide where I was headed before I got there. Standing on Main Street in the rain, my own life was the only thing that seemed worth having.
Epilogue
YOU COULD play the days of August forward or back and it made no difference: in the beginning Nina was gone and in the end too.
Father did return to work, just as he’d promised her. He didn’t talk much about Nina. You could see he held her clutched inside him, in a place no one else could touch. The snake that had curled in his chest for so many years finally disappeared, leaving only its own skin behind. Nina’s forgiveness freed him.
Seeing my father step so close to death had made me fear him less. When he yelled at me for skipping school or threatened to slap me for talking fresh, I wasn’t afraid. I was too big to paddle, too fast to catch. This knowledge disappointed me in a way, and I felt strangely alone. Neither he nor God watched over my life. Neither could punish or protect me.
So my father and I accepted each other in our silent, uneasy way. He never looked at me as he had looked at Nina or Miriam Deets, eyes opened wide, hands trembling. I was just as glad. I didn’t think I could bear to have him need that much from me.
I can’t say Mother was happier, but I believe she was less sad. She started painting on her eyebrows again, and the high, thin arches made her look more like her old self: bemused and wise. Sometimes I caught her at the window, staring at nothing in particular. I turned quickly, careful not to startle her, wanting to allow her this small illusion of privacy. I stopped being afraid of her wish to leave us. She had had her chance and she’d stayed. In my selfish heart, I was grateful.
Mother no longer wondered if she could have changed Nina’s life with some magic words. Nina had chosen her own life, just as she said. For all of us, it was better to imagine her pulling drafts in a noisy bar, to see her sleeping in a dank basement room, than it was to envision her lost in the desert, blinded by wind-blown sand, or to see her face wavering behind glass at the bottom of a lake.
People asked what else could go wrong in Willis. It’s not that so much happens in a small town. Very little happens really. It’s just that everything touches someone you know. The quiet fall settled into a still, long winter and the days of August became a legend, a myth about the devil visiting our town, hiding smoldering coals in dirty rags and setting fire to Main Street, sucking a plane down in Moon Lake, tying a knotted shirt around a man’s neck and kicking the chair out from under him. In death, Myron Evans was finally accepted. I suspect he would have laughed to hear folks speak of his small kindnesses, and that laugh would have been bitter and full of blame.
Elliot Foot was never accused of arson. He and Joanna returned to the Lutheran church, to bland sermons and calming prayers. Elliot talked about building a cafe where the Last Chance Bar had been. I don’t know if Joanna let him stuff his shoes under her bed or not. I don’t know if he cared.
Lyla Leona got back to business. When her neighbors reported that Bo Effinger was her best customer, I was sorry for both of them. I’d expected their promises to be more permanent. I no longer admired Lyla’s independence. She relied on men after all. She was a wife three times a night. She had to smile when her head was splitting and remember not to talk too much about herself.
Minnie Hathaway fell off the wagon fast and hard. Most days she was drunk by noon and the oaths spewed from her lips with new force; all those months of holding back gave her renewed energy. Children teased her on the street, just as I had when I was young. Once I saw a pack of them prancing in a circle around her. She spun so fast, looking from one to another, that she fell to her knees. The hooligans scattered and I ran to help her; she curs
ed me as I lifted her to her feet. Her whiskey breath hit my face, and she called me a string of names, mistaking me for one of the cruel children. Her crippled fingers pinched my arms, and I saw her white gloves were soiled from her fall. I offered to walk her home, but she only snarled. I was relieved, to tell the truth; I could endure her rebukes but not the sight of those dirty gloves.
Lanfear and Miriam Deets left town after Myron hanged himself. I was glad to see them go, though I knew Miriam had no hold on my father now. Still, I didn’t wish to pass her on the street and see her look at my mother with pity. She knew nothing of our lives, not really, but Daddy’s gifts had entitled her to indulge in this false intimacy, this superior sense of mercy.
Caleb Wolfe left too; every morning when he woke, he saw Myron Evans in his jail. The dead man accused him for falling asleep, or so Caleb Wolfe believed, and I thought how strange it was that the only person who had shown Myron kindness in the last hours of his life should be the one to bear the guilt.
In late November the Rovato Daily News reported a story about a blind woman preacher in Idaho who had led her followers to a secluded valley, a valley of darkness, to wait for the second coming of Christ, which, according to her, was due any day. She had seen the signs: fire and drought, men and animals going mad. They built shacks and stashed a store of rifles for the great battles that would come in the final days. They claimed to grow their own food and hunt, but farmers in the area reported stolen chickens and sheep, missing bushels of potatoes, and too many footprints in the yard. Arlen, of course, knew someone who knew someone else who had a daughter who joined the group and later escaped. The preacher woman she described—six feet tall and bony as a starved mule—could not have been anyone but Freda Graves. She was still wearing mirrored sunglasses and telling the story of how the wickedness she’d seen made her put out her own eyes; that is how deeply she grieved for those she knew had fallen away. I knew now she had not blinded herself. I knew there was no daughter, no misshapen grandchild.
Red Elk stayed at the mill for a few months and had no trouble with my father. Daddy knew the big Indian had brought his Nina home, and he knew that a different kind of man might have killed him the night of the fire. After Caleb Wolfe left town, some folks urged Red Elk to run for sheriff, but he refused: he wanted no part of our law.
I thought about the big Indian a lot. He had saved our family three times. He saved my father by keeping Lanfear Deets alive, and he spared me from damnation when he rescued Zachary Holler. He gave us all a second chance the day he found Nina. This man whom Father once chased from our town did not weigh good and evil. He did not live by the laws of our God: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. He did what he thought was right, and never stopped to ask himself if we deserved his mercy.
I wanted to live by his code, but I had enough trouble just trying to be good, keeping myself from saying nasty things to Marlene Grosswilder, or leaving surprises in her locker. I made an effort not to speculate on exactly what Eula and Luella Lockwood did in their tub for four hours every day, but it was difficult to keep my mind from wandering and stop my tongue from flapping. I kept seeing Myron gripping the pencil, writing: I try to be good, but sometimes I can’t help myself.
Of course I knew that my bargain with the devil was nonbinding. He was never going to knock on my door, looking to collect his due. The devil didn’t want me, and God hadn’t even noticed my father’s passing illness. He hadn’t heard the frenzy of my pleas and confessions. If it was true that the devil who loved attention went after only the best souls, he probably recognized me as one very much like himself. My soul was not prime territory. I was no saint, no martyr. I never had the gift of speaking in a tongue only God could understand. I babbled worthless gibberish. I wasn’t one of the chosen any more than Myron Evans or Minnie Hathaway was. We were hungry. That was what we shared. It was only the depth of that hunger that set us apart for a time. We weren’t marked for goodness, but we weren’t lucky enough to be extraordinarily bad, either.
I was alone, all of us were. God had created the world and let it spin. The Father of the rain took no notice of our daily struggles. I finally accepted my mother’s god, the god with no mouth to whisper answers in the night, the god with no ears to hear the cries of the living or the drowned, the god with no hands to raise me up or beat me down.
If I managed to do something right in my life, it would be small and have entirely earthly dimensions. I was bound to make a lot of mistakes and cause grief to others, probably those I loved best. And when I did, no great hand would strike my head in retribution, not my father’s, not the Lord’s.
One more person left Willis that summer: Ruby Holler disappeared before Zachary’s hands healed. As Nina said, it wasn’t surprising when women ran away, it was only surprising that so many stayed.
At school I looked for Gwen. I thought I might say something kind to her and she might say something back. But she didn’t come to school that fall, and I thought maybe she’d gone after her mother. If she screws, I’ll be right behind her, she said that summer night so long ago when we’d slept in her trailer. I got up the nerve to ask Zack, but I couldn’t find him at school either. So it was Coe Carson I cornered in the schoolyard one blustery afternoon in mid-December. He didn’t have a hat and his ears burned a brilliant red. I said, “Hey, Coe,” and he looked at me as he always did, blank as ice, not knowing me from one month to the next. “Lizzie Macon,” I said, “Gwen’s friend.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, kicking the snow, “I remember.”
“I’m looking for Zack.”
“You won’t find him.”
“Actually I’m looking for Gwen.”
“Won’t find her either.” He thrust his bare hands in his pockets and hunched against the wind. It was only four o’clock but almost dark.
“They leave town?”
“Not exactly.”
“Well what—exactly?”
“I can’t tell you,” he said, backing away. I grabbed his coat sleeve and he jerked free, spinning and sprinting across the crusty snow. I broke out after him; he was long-legged but I was strong. If I caught him, I meant to tackle him and hold him down till he talked.
But Coe couldn’t keep running in the cold. He stopped and turned, panting, his breath a white cloud in front of his face. “They don’t want to see you,” he said. “They don’t want to see anyone. They won’t answer the door. They won’t even answer the phone.”
He’d told me all I needed to know. Gwen was still in town. I jogged toward the Hollers’ house. At the very least, I was determined to look at her, to see if there was still anything between us. I knew her house as well as my own; all I had to do was get inside. The back door was locked, and I wasn’t bold enough to try the front—I thought I’d have to take her by surprise. I walked around the house a dozen times, looking up at every window, hoping to find one cracked open, but there were no open windows in Willis in the middle of December.
Finally I did see a woman’s shape behind the blinds of the upstairs bathroom, but it couldn’t have been Gwen. I figured Gwen’s father already had some big lady living with him, some ugly woman grateful enough to mend his jeans and wash his pants, some poor widow with a nasty disposition who made Gwen ashamed to come to school and answer people’s questions about her mother leaving town.
The wind died down and left the clear sky whirling with stars. My stomach growled. I decided to come back and try the next day and the day after that and the day after, until one day a careless hand left the back door unlocked. Then I remembered the door inside the garage that led to a back hallway. I had one last chance.
I stumbled in the dark, through the clutter of bikes and boxes until I held the cold knob in my hand. It gave and I ducked inside, safe and terrified. I flattened myself against the wall and listened. There was no pounding on the stairs, no shouts or slamming doors.
I darted through the living room, where the air hung thick with dusk. Any minute I imagined all the
lights would blaze and I would stand like a fool, blinking and blind, staring down the barrel of some tough boy’s rifle with no way to explain myself. But I made it to the other side of the house and up the stairs without Zack or Gwen or the swaybacked lady in the bathroom hearing me. Now I stood at Gwen’s door, my hands flat on the smooth wood, knowing I had no right to enter or even knock, knowing she might spit in my face; I was nothing more than an intruder, a burglar with only a girl’s privacy to steal.
I tapped, lightly, thinking she might not hear me and I’d be free to go. Maybe that lady would come galloping after me, her flesh quivering, and run me out of the house. If she stopped to ask Gwen who I was, Gwen would deny she knew me and the woman would boot me down the stairs.
But Gwen did hear my knuckles on her door, and she didn’t ask, “Who is it?” Instead, softly, she said, “Come in,” expecting no strangers, no former friends.
She looked up as I opened the door, and I was the one too stunned to speak. I squeezed my eyes shut; but when I opened them, the girl on the bed still looked the same. The fat lady in the bathroom was Gwen, and here she sat, her belly bulging, her face swollen, her stringy hair unwashed and uncombed.
“Close your mouth before you catch flies,” she said. “It’s me.” I stared at her bare feet; even they were fat. “None of my shoes fit,” she said. “Dr. Ben says that some of the things that make the baby grow make parts of me grow too. Look at my hands.” She spread her fingers under the little lamp near her bed. The lampshade had dancing teddy bears and red rocking horses. I inched closer to study her hands. She said, “Don’t be afraid. You can’t catch it, not from me.”
Then I knelt beside her and took her hands in my hands, lightly, running my fingertips along her palms, feeling the knobby joints of her thick fingers, one by one.
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