Sing Them Home

by Stephanie Kallos

  She considers ingesting Lindie’s note—that’s what a proper spy would do—but decides instead to tear it into tiny pieces and flush it down the toilet. She flushes three times, just to make sure.

  She waylays Gaelan on his way to third period.

  “We’re coming down with the flu,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Rub your head and complain about feeling like you’re going to throw up,” she says. “I need to skip school tomorrow.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll tell you later. Just act like you’re getting sick the rest of the day.”

  “Okay, but with Dad, too? Tonight?”

  “Dad’s not gonna be home. The Prohaskas over in Odell are having their twins any second now and he’s staying over there until they do. She’s high risk or something. Anyway, just act sick and I’ll explain it all later. Now go! You’re gonna be late.”

  “Okay,” Gaelan says, his brow furrowed. “Actually, I have been feeling a little nauseated.”

  Larken calls the clinic when she gets home from school. After she puts Bonnie to bed, she tells her brother about her plans.

  Gaelan pulls a thermometer out of his mouth and sits up. “Geez, Larken.” He’s been languishing on the living room sofa in front of the TV since after dinner. “Who’s the guy?”

  “You don’t know him,” Larken says. She barely knows him either, but she isn’t quite ready to divulge the extent of her sexual misadventures to her brother. He’s still a baby in so many ways. “Move over.”

  “Does he know?”

  “The guy? Hell, no. He’s just some jerk.”

  “Where’d you meet him?”

  “It doesn’t matter. He’s nobody.” She could add—but won’t—that he was a backseat fuck in the parking lot of a strip club just over the Kansas state line.

  Larken has discovered that, in the right social circles, being fat is no obstacle to getting male attention. In fact, she’s sure that a lot of the men she has sex with think they’re doing her this big favor. She’s such a pig, they have to be thinking, she must be soooo grateful. So they come whenever they feel like it, pretend they don’t know she’s under-age, tell their friends about that porker from over the state line who dresses like a guy, in jeans and flannel shirts, has a voice like a bull dyke’s, blows you for a pitcher of beer, and goes all the way for a plate of nachos. They’ve got no idea. Larken is grateful all right, but not for the reasons they think. And who knows, maybe somebody from Emlyn Springs will show up some night. It could happen. The word would get out then and no one would have any more illusions about Little Miss Emlyn Springs.

  Gaelan shifts uncomfortably on the sofa. He pretends to watch TV for a while. “So you’ve been, like, doing it?”

  “Hand me the chips. Mind if I change the channel?”

  “For how long? Why didn’t you tell me? I mean, geez.”

  “You’re still a virgin, aren’t you,” Larken says.

  “Well, yeah. Of course. Bethan and I have gone pretty far a couple of times, but never all the way.”

  “Good. Don’t. Give me that.” Larken shakes the thermometer and sticks it back in Gaelan’s mouth. “You’ve gotta leave it in for more than two seconds.”

  They watch a few minutes of a movie-of-the-week. They’ve both seen it before.

  “Dad won’t call,” Larken says, “but in case he does, you’ll cover for me, right?”

  Gaelan grunts, nods.

  The doomed hero and heroine are falling in love. They look pretty good for two people who are supposed to be dying—at least, dying of cancer. (Hope was dying too—that’s what everybody said—but she never looked like it.) If they wanted them to look so good they should have given them another disease. It would have been way more believable.

  “I really miss Mom,” Gaelan mumbles.

  At the commercial break, Larken retrieves the thermometer. “You actually do have a little fever,” she lies, “so it’s good you’re gonna stay home tomorrow. Lie back down.”

  “How’s Bon getting to school?”

  “I called the McClures and she’s gonna walk with them.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?”

  “I’m positive.”

  “Why not? It’s just a little fever. I’m not that sick.”

  “What if Bonnie needs somebody during the day? Besides, I’m not sure how long it’s gonna take, and one of us has to be here when she gets home from school. You’ll have to make her a snack. She’s always really hungry after school.”

  “Call before you leave Omaha, okay? And be careful driving. Joe Dinsdale says it’s supposed to rain all day tomorrow and most of the night.”

  “I’ll be fine, Gaelan. Really. It’s no big deal.” Larken grabs another handful of potato chips. “I hate this movie,” she says, getting up. “I’m going to bed.”

  “So,” Trixie concludes. “Any questions?”

  “I’m still sure,” Larken answers.

  “All right then.” Trixie slides the consent forms across the desk. After Larken signs and initials in the appropriate places, Trixie goes on. “Okay. I’m going to explain the procedure and tell you what to expect. It’s called a dilation and curettage. ‘D and C’ for short.”

  Trixie visibly relaxes now that she’s stopped using the words abort and abortion. She barely has to open her mouth to say “D and C.”

  “A deenSEE …,” she begins, and she describes the procedure in a blur of barely differentiated language. Clearly, now that Larken has formalized her decision, words have lost their preciousness. Only evacuate and scrape step forward as noteworthy. Overall, Trixie’s speech is like a broad wash of color that has no significance in and of itself, but is background maybe, for whatever the real subject will be.

  Larken makes a point of looking at her watch. She doesn’t want to hurt Trixie’s feelings, but it’s already afternoon. She has to get this over with so she can get back to the house in time to fix dinner.

  Trixie drones on, sounding like an especially proficient farm auctioneer—not catching on to the ways in which Larken is trying to signal her increasing impatience and anxiety: by shifting in her chair, clearing her throat, jiggling her leg, nodding her head, chewing her lips.

  “I get it, really,” Larken finally interrupts, sounding bitchier than she means to. She backpedals to a more polite tone and adds, “I know quite a lot about medicine, actually,” but that comes out sounding snooty.

  Suddenly Larken wants to confide all sorts of inappropriate things to Trixie, like, The reason I know so much about medicine, in case you’re wondering, is partly because my father is a physician. He taught me when I was really little that the word doctor is inaccurate because dentists are doctors too, and so are professors sometimes, and of course there are medical specialists like neurologists and psychiatrists and anesthesiologists. There are even doctors of divinity, which I don’t quite get, it’s such a weird concept, don’t you think? … Or, The other reason is that my mom had MS—multiple sclerosis, sometimes they call it demyelinating disease—and I was the person who mostly took care of her for the last two years of her life until she got carried up by that tornado we had last year, just outside Emlyn Springs, which is where I’m from … But she catches herself.

  “Okay, then.” Trixie is all business now. Larken can almost hear her thoughts: This girl doesn’t need anything in the way of a patch job. She isn’t leaking anything but attitude. “I’ll let the doctor know you’re ready. Let’s get you into a gown.”

  The deenSEE proceeds without complications. It officially concludes when the obstetrician/gynecologist holds out a petri dish for Larken’s inspection and says, “Would you like to see what we took out of your body?”

  It’s late when Larken drives up. She is instantly relieved; Dad’s car isn’t here. It wasn’t at Viney’s either so he must not be back from Odell yet.

  Her brother is waiting for her in the kitchen, doing bicep curls. It’s warm inside and smel
ls like a citrus grove; the kitchen table is covered with orange peels. “Hey!” Gaelan says when he sees her. “It’s almost ten o’clock.”

  “Sorry,” she says, shaking rainwater off her coat before hanging it up. “The drive was hell. Is Bonnie asleep?”

  Gaelan nods and starts to unpeel another orange. Ever since he began reading muscle magazines and working out, oranges are his favorite food. All bodybuilders eat oranges when they get hungry, he tells Larken. According to Arnold, oranges are the perfect food.

  “So everything went okay today?”

  “Yeah. How about with you?”

  Larken shrugs. She fills a glass with tap water from the sink and downs two more Pamprin. “Did Dad call?”

  “Yep.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “You and I have the flu. We stayed home from school. We’re fine.”

  “Good.”

  “Want some of this orange? It’s really sweet.”

  “No, thanks.” Larken pulls a can of pop out of the fridge.

  “We had tuna casserole for dinner, if you’re hungry. I saved you some. It’s in there.”

  “Maybe later.” Larken closes the fridge and opens the freezer. “Did the Prohaskas have their twins?”

  “Not yet. Dad said by morning, though, for sure.”

  “Shit,” she mutters, “no ice cream.”

  Gaelan eats his orange. Larken feels his eyes on her as she opens and closes the cupboards.

  “We had steamed carrots, too,” he goes on. “They were really good. I’ve been learning a lot about cooking lately. Steaming vegetables is the best way to preserve their nutritional value. It’s really easy, too, and fast. I can show you how.”

  Larken starts moving toward living room, but Gaelan gets up, effectively blocking her way. How did he get to be so big?

  “I’ll get your plate and heat it up for you.”

  “Gaelan, stop. If I wanna be fat, I’m gonna be fat. If I wanna eat crap, then I’m gonna eat crap. If I wanna drink, who the hell cares?”

  “I do.”

  “It’s my goddamned body. I can do whatever I want with it.”

  “Sis.”

  Larken turns away from him and bangs open the pantry door.

  “I mean I’m really happy for you, really,” she says. “I think it’s great that you’re addicted to this whole health-food thing and becoming Mr. Junior Universe or Little Mr. Arnold or the Teen Hulk or whatever but please just leave me the hell out of it.”

  Larken stares at the pantry contents, each shelf a phalanx of unappetizing dry goods. She starts rummaging around for whatever it is that she’s craving. She’ll know it when she finds it.

  “Larken.”

  “Don’t you ever do this to a girl, you understand?” she says, bullying her way past the front lines of corned beef hash and condensed milk, toppling boxes of Rice-A-Roni and Hamburger Helper. “Wear a fucking condom and make sure she wears a diaphragm, too.” Larken finally locates a large bag of barbeque-flavored Corn Nuts on one of the uppermost shelves—Gaelan probably put it there—and rips it open. Corn Nuts explode out of the bag and scatter like buckshot all over the kitchen floor. “God DAMN it!” She gets down on her hands and knees and starts chasing the Corn Nuts around, using her hands to sweep them into a pile. Gaelan helps her.

  Neither of them speaks, but both of them are thinking about the same thing: how familiar this feels—kneeling on a kitchen floor, dealing in silence with a spectacular mess.

  They’ve only retrieved about half of the Corn Nuts when Larken’s cramps come back. She curls up on the floor and closes her eyes. Galen keeps on working. The Corn Nuts hit the side of the metal trash can as he pitches them in—an indoor hailstorm—while outside the rain has finally stopped, just like the weatherman said.

  The next thing she knows Gaelan is wrapping her in his arms; they feel hard and soft at the same time, and even though Larken can’t call up a specific memory to support the feeling—childhood seems so far away—she’s reminded of being a kid stretched out on a new-mown lawn in the spring. The way the earth holds you then when the grass is tender, before it goes all bleached and prickly the way it does in late summer.

  Gaelan lifts her off the floor and carries her to the couch. She used to be able to outmuscle him in all things, but no more.

  She doesn’t want him to grow up. She wants to go back to the time before he knew the nutritional value of oranges and steamed carrots, before she learned the meaning of phrases demyelinating disease and compromised reproductive system, before she was charged with holding secret the knowledge that Bonnie’s body would probably never let her make babies.

  Gaelan brings hot tea and a heating pad. They sit on the sofa, listening to Bruce Springsteen records, guarding their baby sister as she sleeps, waiting for their father to come back. They listen and keep watch and wait all through the night while Larken bleeds out the last of her little one.

  Larken reaches toward her purse, which is open and sitting on the floor in front of the passenger seat. Never taking her eyes off the road, she fumbles around for her bottle of ibuprofen—locating it easily among an archaeologically complex and layered jumble of handbag contents—and pops it open.

  Hope trained her for this: Let’s play Six Blind Men and the Elephant! she’d say, filling a small paper sack with objects—fork, hairbrush, spool of thread, candle, pocket mirror, corkscrew—and then have Larken reach inside and identify what her fingers saw. Then they’d glue the objects together and give their creation a name: Spooluhpphunt!

  Once the pills are on her tongue, Larken realizes that she’s got nothing to down them with. She regards Esmé’s dandelions, which have deteriorated even further and look unbearably pathetic. Time to put them out of their misery. She picks up the coffee cup and slurps what little water is left. The taste is noxious: teeth-gratingly bitter and gritty. Larken smiles, imagining the possible range of her brother’s reactions when she tells him she washed down her Motrin with distilled dandelion juice.

  The landscape is changing; mounds of grass-covered earth begin to arise here and there on either side of the road. After their mother starts reading them stories of Paul Bunyan and his giant ox, Larken and Gaelan start calling these mounds Babe’s Meadow Muffins.

  Immediately adjacent to the road, and on both sides, the earth is gouged by deep drainage ditches.

  There are lots of underground springs around here, Daddy used to say.

  Larken wants to ask how he knows this, because in retrospect it’s an odd thing for a physician to remark upon with such authority. Who told you about underground springs? she longs to find out. And why do you believe them? Why should I believe them?

  She realizes that, implicit now in every unexplained thing her father ever said are questions that can never be answered. Embedded too in each question is regret: Why wasn’t she a more inquisitive child? Why didn’t she say, Go on, Daddy, tell me more. Tell me about underground springs and what they are and why they’re here and how they are formed.

  But children never question anything spoken of in a sure, proclamatory way by their parents. If mothers and fathers don’t know everything, then the world is in terrible danger. So there is nothing for Larken to do but accept it as fact: There are lots of underground springs around here.

  When the weather warms, cattails and verbascum and milkweed flourish in the mysterious spring-fed ditches flanking the road. They provide cover for pheasant and quail then, but they are dying now.

  Up ahead on the right, a stand of hundred-year-old red cedars marks the south boundary of the Vance farm. Only someone familiar with local history would know that, since 1978, this stand has been one tree short. The location of that tree’s whereabouts is part of a story that will be told again and again (Larken knows this for a fact) over the next few days.

  Babe’s Meadow Muffins start giving way to small hills, and in the near distance, low, grass-mantled bluffs arise, cutaways in the landscape revealing layers of what Lar
ken assumes to be sand, limestone, shale: monochrome parfaits tinted in places with rust.

  The road starts to curve, shaping itself against bluffs that at first are only slightly above the level of the road but soon begin to grow taller. The effect is of sinking, diving. It’s as if the road isn’t man-made at all, but the remnant of a dried-up, down-flowing river that used to wind through this landscape—and maybe it was. Larken doesn’t know anything about geology or the hydrologic cycle. She doesn’t come from farming folks, whose business it is to know such things.

  The last significant landmark on her journey is about half a mile up ahead, where the road takes a sharp turn and cars have to sling-shot around an especially high bluff.

  Small, white wooden crosses, signs, and scatterings of cheap, sun-bleached plastic flowers start cropping up. MICKI AND MIKE, WE MISS YOU! one of the signs reads. The i’s are dotted with bloated hearts that look so much like Lindie Critchfield’s that it’s not hard to believe she lettered the sign herself—although it could just as easily been done by one of her daughters. Three of Lindie and Matt’s five kids are girls.

  At the top of the bluff, there’s a brick-red, wood-sided house, its driveway sloping down to the highway at the curve’s apex. The house can’t be set back from the road by more than about seventy-five feet, but the combination of hairpin turn and hill makes the driveway completely invisible to drivers coming from both directions.

  Blind driveway! Going-Away-Daddy calls out, Clover-Leaf-in-Sunshine. He honks the car horn as they approach and drive past, a long, prolonged honk—a heraldic trumpet!—which delights them all because, even though the gesture is meant to keep them safe and they always know it’s coming, it has something of recklessness and spontaneity to it.

  Blind driveway, Daddy says when he’s Going-Home-Gray, but only sometimes. Sometimes he just honks, and even the car horn sounds sad and defeated.

  Larken is considering the best way to memorialize her father—honk or stay silent?—when she spots a white van coming up fast in her rearview mirror, zigzagging dangerously, the first vehicle she’s seen in an hour.

  Crazily, the van is honking and flashing its lights, trying to pass her just as the road boomerangs, where the double yellow lines reinforce what everyone knows: This is no place to pass. It’s a shoulderless road, there’s nowhere to turn out so all Larken can do pull as far to the side as possible—slowing to a stop dangerously close to the drainage ditch—and pray that there’s no one coming from the opposite direction.