Sing Them Home

by Stephanie Kallos

  She continues south, past new shopping malls and subdivisions that keep springing up farther and farther away from the heart of downtown. When she was a child, there was nothing here but farmland. The subdivisions have phony names bearing no relationship to the landscape—Wilderness Estates, Bison Ridge—and the malls all have delusions of grandeur. In Larken’s opinion, the worst kind of American pretentiousness is epitomized by developers who put an e at the end of the word Point and an re at the end of Center. Nobody says pointe or centre in Nebraska—except maybe she and Jon when they improvise conversations in shamelessly nasal, over-the-top, Peter-Sellers-as-Detective-Clousseau accents, a reliable source of delight for Esmé from the time she was six months old.

  At another red light, the pedestrian crossing fills with women pushing the full array of what’s available in contemporary infant transport: double-wides, triple-wides, three-wheeled jogging strollers, collapsible umbrella strollers, car-seat-to-stroller convertibles, retro-Euro-chrome-framed carriages. Small feet protrude from the strollers as they wheel along, mostly naked, some shod, others with one sock off and one sock on, deedle deedle dumpling my son John. The feet exhibit everything from drunkenlike stillness to frantic thrashing. Like pioneers coming across the prairie in Conestoga wagons, the stroller occupants are in the process of casting off cargo that’s become superfluous. One rosy foot forcefully jettisons a teething ring. Pacifiers roll out onto the macadam and bounce across the street like minuscule plastic tumbleweeds. Sun hats and booties are flung to the four winds. A small arm thrusts beyond one stroller’s confines, ramrod straight and punctuated by a tightly closed, chubby fist, as if the arm’s owner is leading a military charge. At the moment it aligns with Larken’s steering wheel, the fist opens explosively, becoming a plump pink spider giving birth to hundreds of Cheerio babies. The mothers push ahead, oblivious.

  “My father passed away,” Larken informs the pioneering mothers and infants. “My father is deceased.” Her tears are replenished, but they are not for her dad.

  She glances toward the passenger seat, where Esmé’s seed heads languish in the coffee cup: frail and ghostly, their stems anemic and hopelessly bowed, they put Larken in mind of the osteoporotic elderly with their degenerating spines and gluey complexions.

  Behind her, a horn sounds briefly. Green light. The pioneers have vanished. On she goes.

  It’s just not real yet, she concludes. It’s like reading the obituary entries in the newspaper, beginning the way obits typically do: So-and-so—born to So-and-so (mother) and So-and-so (father) in Such-and-such a place on Such-and-such a date—has gone home to God, laid down that heavy burden, joined Jesus in heaven … Larken’s heart breaks when she imagines the deceased’s joyful mother and father on the birthday of this child—a child who is now dead, just as they are dead. The obit continues: So-and-so moved here-and-there, did this-and-that, is survived by, etcetera etcetera—all the richness of one life’s experience reduced to a ten-cents-a-word run-on sentence delineated by copy editors’ commas. Her father’s life will be boiled down to an obituary like this, Larken realizes, and it will be sad, but not sad enough to summon any deep feeling.

  What will make it real? she wonders, because she does not feel her father’s absence in any but the most usual way: He is not here, but it stills feels as though he might be there, he might be somewhere. In all events, he surely is somewhere.

  Larken knows that the most reliable place to find someone who is not here but surely somewhere is in the realm of memory.

  She turns on to the highway that will take her most of the way home, a “blue” highway, little traveled, known to few. Her in-breaths expand in response to a landscape unclotted by traffic lights, SUVs, and housing developments. The road ahead is empty and available and waiting. A benevolent metaphor for this country would liken it to stretched, gessoed canvas. Larken’s ancestors certainly thrilled to the emptiness of it, lured by the lack of trees to be felled, rocks to be moved, and by black earth that would grow anything, they were told, anything. And so it did. However.

  No mountains, Daddy used to say when they were in the car and the road opened up like this. Nothing fancy, but it’s home. There was a funny flatness to his voice—a voice known by everyone for its musical beauty in singing and in speech—so Larken understood early on that Daddy’s feelings for this home of theirs were complicated.

  Sometimes Daddy was yellow—not Mommy Yellow (the color of egg yolks in the mixing bowl, prescrambled and paled by lacings of milk, the color of Hope when they were reading together at bedtime) but his own special Daddy Yellow: intense, glossy: the pudding-y filling inside lemon bars served at church te bachs; dandelion flowers after a downpour. Daddy could be yellow going the other way, to the Indian Hills Theater in Omaha, say, or the Stuart Theater in Lincoln, and after that to a fancy restaurant—although his going-away color was usually something Larken described to herself as Clover-Leaf-in-Sunshine. But Daddy was never yellow going this direction: south and then west. He was never yellow going home.

  No, Going-Home-Daddy was a dreary color that Larken has never been able to completely pinpoint, not even now, all grown up and furthermore a person whose advanced degree and profession requires her to analyze and describe color in a minute and specific way, to understand the science of color relationships, the way colors play off one another, react to changes in light. “Gray” was the best she could ever come up with.

  By contrast, Hope’s going-home color was a ribald fuschia, the color of frozen cherries and vanilla ice cream, thawing, melting, mingling. There was something else to Mommy’s color, too, it had fizzy bubbles and bounce, so that Larken always pictured her mother going home downstream, happily nestled in an inner-tube tire, sipping a cherry and vanilla ice cream float made with 7-Up and sprinkled with Sweet Tarts.

  This is how it has been as long as Larken can remember, ever since she was very small, before she had language any more precise than this—Daddy gray Mommy cherry—to describe the dynamic between her parents and the opposing energies that informed their homeward-bound car trips. You could align yourself with either one of them, too: If you wanted to go to Emlyn Springs, you floated merrily merrily merrily merrily on Mommy’s inner tube, and oars were superfluous. But if you didn’t want to go home, you were with Daddy in his cramped rowboat, your chest tight, your breath ragged, your hands raw and oozing with blisters that broke and healed and broke again.

  It is on her father’s energy that Larken travels today: an upstream current that keeps her at the speed limit or below, even though she knows she should be hurrying to her destination. For this sin of reluctance, there is no atonement.

  Larken finds memory on the road of comings and goings like this: She spirals. Her attention, diffuse at first, circles the landscape, big and broad and freewheeling, then moving down, the path of thought no longer restricted to a single plane but plunging and narrowing and tightening with the descent. Raptors do this. So do cardiac surgeons and funnel clouds. And then, something is pulled up, whirled about, turned over, dissected, ressected, torn apart, becoming in this process of hyperscrutiny more than what it ever was before: a symbol.

  This is what Larken tries to teach her students, how our selective and mindful attention gives an enhanced meaning to what we see, and everything, anything, viewed in this way earns significance: A field mouse becomes food, and all that food represents. A diseased heart emblemizes more than the physical body.

  And a billboard in a cornfield becomes a symbol of the road not taken.

  There it is, just up ahead. Fetus means “little one.” The billboard illustrator lacks many basic rendering skills, but clearly he means to convince the uninformed and frightened that a human fetus in utero has the anatomical and facial features of a several-months-old baby, complete with a smiling expression and a full set of teeth.

  And there Larken goes down the vortex of memory, to events surrounding her first lengthy solo road trip, in the fall of 1979.

  The f
ormer Little Miss Emlyn Springs is fifteen, already one year and thirty-two pounds past her title-winning days, a motherless child, and for all intents and purposes a fatherless one, too.

  “You’re absolutely sure that you want to abort the baby?” the counselor asks for the fourth time. She is in her mid-twenties, wholesome-faced and aggressively sympathetic, a kind of sorority big-sister type that Larken is not, will never be. “You’re sure you won’t feel any regrets later about having an abortion? There are other options, you know.” The counselor’s name is Trixie. It suits her perfectly and Larken has never forgotten it.

  “Yes, I know,” Larken replies without hesitation, and “Yes, I’m sure.” She hasn’t once responded with uncertainly, and still Trixie has asked and asked and asked, each time regarding Larken as if she were a radial tire with a small leak that she can’t quite locate.

  “Well, let’s just go over everything one more time,” Trixie says. “There are lots of social service agencies I can refer you to if you have even the slightest doubt.” She is so guileless and unpatronizing that Larken doesn’t have the heart to object. “After all, this is a decision that will stay with you for the rest of your life.”

  Trixie refers to a gray-green sheet of paper with the heading, Before You Decide: ABORTION Is Only One Option. She uses her pen to indicate Options 2 and 3 as she speaks, elaborating on each of them at great length, even though they essentially boil down to:

  Have Baby/Keep Baby, and

  Have Baby/Give Baby Up.

  Larken is not an idiot. She understands that Trixie’s lecture has nothing to do with disseminating information. Larken holds more data than this in her head when she takes a geometry quiz. This can only be about testing her resolve. Trixie’s repeated use of the word baby is so blatantly tactical that Larken has to chew her lips to keep from smiling. Maybe other girls succumb, break down, change their minds, but not Larken Jones. Trixie could use the word baby a thousand times and this girl still wouldn’t change her mind.

  Did Lindie Critchfield have to listen to all this crap? Larken wonders. No way, or Lindie wouldn’t have gone through with it. Larken concludes that Trixie must have been off work that day, at home opening cans of tuna for her twelve foster cats. Or serving lunch at the homeless shelter. Or at the hospital, reading stories to kids with terminal cancer.

  Lindie Critchfield is the reason Larken is here. She’s a senior, a softball star, and president of the Pep Club. She comes from money, so in that sense she and Larken have something in common. Lindie is nice enough for school royalty—she says hi to everyone and doesn’t pretend, like some of the popular kids do, that they haven’t all known each other since they were in diapers—but she’s not part of Larken’s minuscule social circle. (By 1979, Larken doesn’t have many acquaintances, let alone close friends. Her best friend is her brother.) The last time Larken and Lindie spoke more than a few words to each other was in seventh grade, when they were lab partners in Accelerated Biology. They shared a frog.

  Because royalty is always spotlit, and because Larken’s vision is so unique and keen, it is she who notices a subtle dimming of the Glossy Tangerine that has always been Lindie’s defining, baseline color. The loss of light is so obvious and alarming that Larken marvels at everyone else’s apparent obliviousness; she fears that Lindie may have contracted some kind of deadly blood disease—leukemia, maybe, or ana-plastic anemia.

  It’s true: Larken is paranoid when it comes to illness. She’s not hypochondriac, like Gaelan, but having ready access to her father’s medical books has stimulated her imagination to the point where she constantly looks for symptoms, makes erroneous diagnoses, and visits all sorts of imaginary plagues upon anyone who looks the slightest bit under the weather.

  When she starts studying Lindie’s boyfriend, Matt Moser, Larken sees that his color has changed, too: the sunny confidence that has always made Matt universally liked has been replaced with a dark bravado that’s turning him into an asshole. It is a glaring transformation as Larken perceives it, a change that is not just hue but color itself, and texture, and from wholesome goodness to toxicity: sweet corn to antifreeze.

  Larken intuits what has happened. She says nothing to anyone, not even Gaelan, suspecting that her discretion might earn Lindie’s confidence and counsel should she ever need it.

  And she does, a few weeks later.

  Larken seeks Lindie out at the end of a softball practice when she’s absolutely sure that Lindie’s alone. She finds her sitting on one of the low wooden benches in the back of the locker room, a one-person rain cloud wrapped in a dingy gym towel, her long bare feet squarely set in the middle of a puddle that expands with each droplet that falls from her soaked hair. Lindie’s posture—slump-shouldered, bow-backed, chin to chest—makes her look as though she is staring into the cleft between her breasts, although Larken can’t tell from this distance if her eyes are open. She might be sleeping. She might be praying. Even though Lindie has recovered some of her color, it still isn’t the same, and it’s not hard for Larken to imagine that she’s been crying. Maybe even is crying.

  “Lindie?” Larken says, delicately. The tile walls amplify her voice though, and Lindie gasps, reflexively clutching the edges of her towel and drawing it up to her neck, wrists crossed, fists clenched, a perfect embodiment of the melodramatic heroine under siege by the villain. Larken feels a sudden unexpected tenderness toward her.

  “Larken!” she says, when she recovers her breath. “Shit. You scared the hell out of me.”

  “Sorry. I wanted to ask you about something,” Larken begins, noticing that Lindie is nervously looking past her, toward the locker room entrance. “It’s okay,” Larken reassures her. “They’re all waiting for you in the parking lot.”

  Lindie slouches again and starts wringing the water out of her hair. “What’s up?” She sounds really tired.

  Larken sits down on the bench. “I’m—” Her voice is still too loud, so she slides as close to Lindie as she can without getting wet. She feels like a spy in a James Bond movie. “I’m in trouble,” she blurts, sotto voce, inclining her head toward Lindie but not looking at her. “You know the kind of trouble I mean—and I need to get out of it.” She keeps her language nonspecific. If anyone comes in, they can deny everything. “You had one, didn’t you?” Larken whispers.

  Lindie doesn’t speak, but Larken hears her intake of breath.

  “I just need to know where you went and how much it cost and everything.”

  Suddenly, Lindie is on her feet, flinging off her towel, all modesty gone. She starts pulling her clothes on over her wet skin, swinging her long thick hair around and dispersing water like a wet spaniel. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says too loudly, as if she suspects the room is bugged. Slamming her gym locker, she hustles past Larken and out the door, still dripping. “See you tomorrow!” she cheers.

  “Shit,” Larken mutters. Lindie was her best hope of doing this the easy way, and now she’s blown it.

  Larken retrieves Lindie’s towel from the puddle. It’s full of hair. Larken mentally accesses some information from one of her father’s medical books, a list enumerating what women can expect after suffering a miscarriage (a.k.a. spontaneous abortion, clinical abbreviation SPAB): It is common to experience fatigue, depression—some other stuff she can’t remember—and/or postpartum alopecia.

  Larken’s hair isn’t nearly as lush as Lindie’s. Maybe she’ll go bald afterward and have to start wearing hats. If anyone at school notices, she can always say that she has cancer.

  The next day, Lindie and her crowd pass Larken in the hall after first period. Lindie bumps into her, hard, at the same time dropping a balled-up piece of notebook paper on the floor near Larken’s feet. “Hey!” she calls after walking a couple of steps. She picks up the paper and mashes it into Larken’s hand. “You dropped this.” Lindie’s voice has the same jolly sound as always, but her eyes are deadly serious. Larken had no idea that Pep Club presidents were capa
ble of this kind of subterfuge. She vows that she will never again make stereotypical assumptions about high school royalty.

  “Don’t be a litterbug!” Lindie calls out. She and her girlfriends move on, laughing.

  Larken takes the paper into a stall in the girls’ bathroom and uncrinkles it against the stall wall. There is no salutation; the note begins with a frantic barrage of words:

  You should really think about this before you do anything. I’m really REALLY sorry that I did it, it was all M’s idea and that’s the reason we broke up, I didn’t dump him because he’s been playing so shitty that he probably won’t get a scholarship to UN, I know that’s what everybody thinks but that’s not why, we broke up over you-know-what and now I’m afraid I’ll go to Hell. I haven’t told anybody so I don’t have to tell you that this CANNOT get out. I’m trusting you like I’ve never trusted anyone in my entire life. At the bottom of the page is a phone number with an Omaha prefix.

  Lindie uses puffy, lopsided hearts to dot her i’s. They look like balloons in a state of partial collapse, sighing, sighing. Since Lindie is in charge of Pep Club posters and her lettering style is well known to the entire school, anyone who found this note would know instantly who penned it. (Dumb, Larken thinks, reevaluating her opinion of Lindie’s intellect and her aptitude for a possible career in covert operations.)

  Larken takes out a Sharpee and—using her left hand—copies the phone number onto the stall wall. She locates it between an especially offensive obscenity (LJ SUCKS BIG DICKS) and an arrow-pierced heart (Lindie + Matt). She’ll retrieve it later, when she has more time.