I Want to Go Home

by Frances Lockridge

  “I think he’s as much at sea as the rest of us,” Meredith said. His voice was far away, scratching faintly. “Mother’s getting an idea somebody’s trying to poison her.”

  “Nonsense!” Lockwood said.

  Again Meredith waited an instant before replying.

  “Of course,” he said. “A delusion. It’s very—distressing.”

  Lockwood merely waited.

  “I suppose nothing’s been heard from Jane?” Meredith said. “You haven’t heard anything?”

  “Why would I?” Lockwood said. “She left California. She’ll get in tomorrow on the Century. Why would I hear?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know, John,” Meredith said. “The Century, you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “One of us should meet her,” Meredith said. “You think that too?”

  Lockwood paused this time. Then he said, slowly, that he was tied up.

  “I feel I shouldn’t leave here,” Meredith said. “Could you ask someone? From your office?”

  “Wearing a red carnation?”

  “Now John,” Meredith said, and his voice held merely dutiful amusement. “I imagine you can describe Jane. Sufficiently. I feel that she should be met, John. I’m sure you will, when you think about it. Hurrying home to her aunt’s side, you know? Family rallying around?” His voice noted the cliché.

  “All right,” Lockwood said. “I’ll tend to it.”

  “Good,” Meredith said. “I thought you would. Will you be out this evening?”

  Lockwood said he might.

  “I thought you might,” Meredith said. He hung up. Lockwood looked at nothing for a moment. Then he flipped a tumbler on a box on his desk and said, “Miss Roy, will you come in please?”

  Nurse Bishop brought the tray in a little before six that evening and opened the draw curtains a little wider, letting light into the room. The old woman watched her, her black eyes bright. As the nurse came back toward the bed, Susan Meredith pulled herself back against the supporting pillows and began to shake her head.

  “Now,” Barbara Bishop said. “Now, now, Mrs. Meredith. Just wait until you see.” She lifted the cover from a plate. “See what we have,” Barbara said, very brightly. “A lovely lamb chop!”

  The old head moved on the pillow; the black eyes were wide and bright—terribly aware.

  “No,” Susan said, and the aged voice was unexpectedly strong. “No. No.” She seemed to shrink back. “No,” she said. “I’m afraid.” She looked up at the nurse. “There’s something wrong with it,” she said. “Something wrong.” There was a kind of desperation in the old voice—a kind of questioning desperation. Nurse Bishop felt there must be some answer she could make, but she could not think of it.

  Captain Heimrich of the State Police had not gone back to the Hawthorne Barracks, as he had planned. He was still in the barracks near Brewster. He was sitting at a desk, looking up at Sergeant Forniss. Forniss stood in front of him, looking as if he had always been there, would never move.

  “The kid’s persistent,” Heimrich said. “He telephoned this time. The old lady was sick again, you know.”

  Forniss did not say anything, or move.

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said, “there is nothing we can do. In view of what the doctor says. There’s nothing to do anything about. Just a tired old woman, and a worried kid.”

  Forniss nodded, this time. He nodded once.

  “Nothing to go on,” Heimrich said, and shook his head. He looked at Forniss, or through Forniss. “But I wonder. I wonder whether the Merediths have been having any trouble with pilferers, sergeant? There’s been quite a wave of that around here—tool sheds, garages, that sort of thing. You know?”

  “We can ask,” Forniss said.

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said. “We can always ask, sergeant.” He looked at, not through, Sergeant Forniss. “Not you, sergeant,” he said. “One of the boys.”

  Seven

  There was strength, resistance, in Jane Phillips’ slim body, and now she was needing it. Now, after not more than an hour of walking, now while she had not yet got back to Route 40, pains were beginning to reach into her calves, into her thighs. Little pains, feeling their way along nerves. It was the shoes, of course; you could not walk in shoes like these, your body so often off balance, subject to hundreds of little strains. But you could not, certainly you could not, walk along a gravel road without shoes. And you could not sit, waiting, doing nothing.

  It had been strange to find her topcoat. She had come out of the little side road down which she had run—run with terror running beside her, taunting her—and all along that road she had walked crying. She had reached the graveled road, which had a meaningless letter and numeral marking it, and turned to her right, going back the way they had driven from U.S. 40. She had walked along it, the gravel moving under her feet, large pebbles twisting her off balance when her high heels struck them, for perhaps a hundred yards. Then she had found her coat, lying beside the road in a drainage ditch. She had picked it up and gone on. About that time, she had quit crying. It was half an hour or so after that that the sun came up from behind low hills. She was alone, in the center, in what seemed the center, of endless, gently rolling fields. There was corn standing in long rows, but it was bleached to a kind of yellowish red. In the next field, the corn stalks had been cut and stacked, so that the field was dotted, regularly, with what looked a little like Indian teepees. There was nobody else in the world that she could see, except far off across fields, and apparently on another road such as the one she walked on, there was a cluster of farm buildings and, from the house, a faint streamer of smoke.

  The house was too far away to mean anything to her, and there was nothing to do but walk on toward the big road—to walk on, feeling the little pains, and try to straighten things out in her mind.

  There are two things, she thought. Either I am the one the man wanted, the one all these people wanted, or I’m not. If I’m not, it doesn’t help now, but it’s a mistake. But if I am, there are people—several people, in Los Angeles, on the train, in Kansas City—who want to do something to me. But what is it they want to do?

  I must try to work it out as if I’m really the person they’re after, she thought, because the other way there is nothing to get hold of. They want to do something to me, Jane Phillips, this Jane Phillips. They wanted me to miss the train, they wanted me to get off it and get left, now they’ve made me get off and get left. But they haven’t hurt me; even this last man didn’t hurt me. He didn’t even rob me. All he did, really, was to bring me out of my way. And then she realized that all of the things that had happened fitted into one pattern—a pattern of delay. They—this incomprehensible, only now reluctantly believed-in “they”—were trying to make her late, and, since she was going home, they were trying to make her late getting home. That was all, so far. They were not making it impossible for her to get home. They were merely making it slow, difficult. She was walking, one step, another step, instead of riding at speed, without effort, on the train. And then she thought that they were doing this with an odd obliqueness, and with a kind of caution.

  Actually, she thought, until this last, nobody has done anything which was really tangible. Until this last man, nobody did anything even against the law. And this man—this short, broad-shouldered man in Kansas City, had done as little against the law as he could and do what he had done. He had got her off the train on a pretext, he had threatened her with a gun, he had kidnaped her. That was a good deal. But he had not hurt her, he had not robbed her—he had not really kept her from going on!

  If he had robbed me, she thought, I would have had to wait until somehow I got money to go on, and then I would have had to go to the police and—waste time. More time. This way I can, as soon as I get somewhere, go on, and if I go to the police I’ll only be playing into their hands, because they want me to be late and that will make me later. They—“they” as distinct from this last man—stood to gain either way, she rea
lized. The man himself, as one of them, gained directly if she did not go to the police. “They,” although not the man himself, gained even more if she did. And probably the man himself wouldn’t lose much, she thought, because even if they caught him (and how could they?), I would have trouble proving that things happened the way they did; a lot of trouble, because what happened is so meaningless.

  Already, when finally she came to Route 40, she knew that she was going to try to go on—going to try to get home. Because—and she realized she had known this for some time before the actual knowledge formed itself into words in her mind—something is going on at home that I’m supposed to miss, to be late for.

  The road ran east and west. She turned into the sun; it blazed in her face. She walked near the edge of the concrete, but on it, because it was a level surface. There were pains in her feet, now, and pains ran up her back between her shoulderblades. The sun beat on her face and the coat on her arm was too hot even to carry so. She let it drag behind her, held in her right hand.

  The big road was as empty as the little roads had been. No, it was not quite as empty. Far ahead, coming toward her, was a truck. It came fast, or seemed to. When it was still some distance away she saw the men in it staring at her. The one on her side leaned out of the cab to look; he freed a hand and pointed, for the others. The truck began to slow, and the men began to yell, and one of them whistled.

  “What yuh say, babe?” the man at the wheel yelled. “What yuh say?”

  She did not say anything. She did not look at them. And, all over again, she was afraid. But this was not the same kind of fear.

  “Did he make you walk home, babe?” the driver said, and laughed loudly. “Make you walk home?”

  The truck was going very slow, but it did not stop. She did look at the men, nor answer them.

  “The babe’s mad,” one of the men said. “See, the babe’s mad.”

  “She won’t play,” one of the other men said. “She’d rather walk home.”

  Now the truck was past her, but she would not let herself look back. Then one of the men yelled, “So long, babe!” and the sound of the truck motor increased. After a moment, then, she did look back, and the truck was receding down the road. The man at the wheel put a hand out and waved at her, and the gesture was oddly friendly.

  All right, she thought, I am mad. All right, I will walk home. If I have to. They won’t get me again.

  That was a new thought to repeat itself over and over in her mind as she walked, to match the rhythm of her steps. After a time, as she grew more tired, as she began to feel weak, oddly relaxed and hollow, this “they-won’t-get-me-again” became a kind of drum beat to march to. She walked to it for an hour or more, while the sun beat in her face, while the little pains became steady aches, extending almost everywhere in her body.

  Eventually, she realized, she would have to come to something. One of the necessities was that she come to some place where she could get food and, in the end, some means of getting on. She could walk a good ways; she had walked a good ways. But she couldn’t, actually, walk home. The best chance would be a bus, of course. There would be buses on a road like this—big, rumbling buses, hurling themselves across the State. She would have to find some place where such buses stopped.

  She looked back over her shoulder, almost expecting to see a bus, wondering if it would stop if she signaled it. There was no bus. But, coming over a rise in the road behind her, there was a car. It was a small car, not, apparently, coming very fast. She stepped off the concrete and began to walk on the shoulder of the road. She could hear the car now; it was coming up behind her. Then she realized it was slowing down. She was going to be offered a lift, she thought, and, just before the car came even with her, she turned and looked at it. It was a small, old car, and there was one man in it. She had never seen the man before, and he was smiling and she had started to smile back before fear swept over her. Fear said “no! no!” in a kind of scream in her mind, and the smile which had begun on her face froze into a kind of grimace and then she was shaking her head wildly and, almost before she knew it, was off the road and was half sliding, half scrambling, away from it, down the side of a steep embankment.

  The car had stopped and the man was looking at her with his mouth open, as if he had started to say something and the words had been frozen on his tongue by astonishment. He merely sat in the little car and looked at her. When she was at the bottom of the embankment, she stopped and looked up at him.

  “Hey!” the man said, then. “What the hell?”

  She did not answer, but shook her head again. Her blond hair shook down around her face with the movement, and she pushed it back so she could watch the man.

  “What’s the matter with you?” the man said.

  He was a thin man, with a corded throat, with a long, weathered face; he looked toughened, but almost old. For a moment she thought that a man who looked like that could not be one of them, but then the fear came back. You couldn’t tell who was one of them.

  “Go on,” she said. “Go on. Please!”

  He looked down at her, and now he shook his head.

  “What’s the matter?” he said again. “Sheriff after you?”

  “No,” she said. “Oh—leave me alone. Leave me alone.”

  “Hell,” the man said. “Suit yourself.”

  He looked angry—angry and confused.

  “Suit yourself,” he repeated, and now his voice was angry. He started the car, noisily, and drove on down the road. After she was sure he was gone, Jane Phillips climbed back up the embankment. It was gravelly, the gravel and earth slipped back under her feet and hands, and finally she had to go on her knees. When she got up to the road again her stockings were torn and one of them was hanging down, and earth was ground into her powder-blue skirt. She tried to brush it off as well as she could, tried to push her hair back and make it stay.

  Far down the road ahead of her the small car was now a tiny car, climbing another rise. It seemed to poise a moment at the top of the rise and then, as if it were stepping off into a lake, it began to disappear. By the time it had disappeared entirely, Jane was almost certain that she had been a fool—that the man in the car had meant her good, not harm, that there was no reason why she should not be in the car and over the rise ahead, instead of plodding up the gentle grade. I can’t go on being afraid of everybody, she thought. But how can you tell who to be afraid of? She could not, at the moment, think of any answer to that.

  She went up the grade and reached the top of the rise and then, after walking for another half hour or so, came to a place where the road—still running straight ahead of her—sloped down. And then, far down, on the right, there was a considerable cluster of buildings, with cars around them. She wanted to run, then, but she was too tired to run, and too certain that the treacherous shoes would twist under her if she ran. So she walked down the long slope, into the sun, dragging her coat behind her, thinking the distance would never shorten, thinking she would never reach the end.

  She was still some distance away when she made out a big sign, shaped like an arrow, pointing off to the right, saying “Columbia.” Columbia is a town, she thought; this road goes past it, missing it. These buildings are out-riders of the town.

  There were several of them; a big eating place, a garage, beyond—on the other side of an intersecting road—another eating place. She was still a quarter of a mile away when she made this much out, and it seemed that that final quarter of a mile would never shorten. I’ll walk up the steps of that eating place, I’ll sit down—that will be the present and this moment will be the past, I will remember thinking, back here, that I would be there, and there would be a new present, and I will take one more step and one more step and they won’t get me again, they won’t get me again. … And after what seemed an incredible time, she did walk up the steps and into the eating place, and did sit down on a stool at a long lunch counter. There was nobody else on her side of the counter. On the other side th
ere was a young man reading a book, and he put it down reluctantly and came toward her. He looked across the counter at her and his eyes widened.

  “Say,” he said, “what happened to you?”

  His tone was entirely friendly and interested. She looked at him and his face was also friendly and interested, and a little worried. She looked beyond him to a mirror behind the counter and said, in a shocked voice, “Oh!”

  Her face was smeared with what was, presumably, the soil from her hands. Her hair hung in a tangle around her face and there were pieces of what looked like straw in it, and one side of her suit jacket was even dirtier than her face. She pushed at her hair and then everything seemed suddenly so hopeless that, quietly enough, she began to cry. She tried to stop crying; she tried to think, I’m a grown woman. I’m not a child, I’ve even been in the Navy and I don’t cry. And she kept on crying.

  “There,” the young man said. “There, there.” He looked at her anxiously. “Don’t cry,” he said. It was a kind of entreaty.

  “I won’t,” she said, and kept on crying. “Really, I won’t.” He was younger than she had thought at first; he could hardly be more than twenty. He was very much upset. She felt that she was an unfair problem to confront so young a person so early in the morning. “I’ll be all right,” she said. “I—I must have fallen down.”

  “Sure,” he said. “That’s it.” He seemed relieved. “You ought to have some coffee,” he said. “Coffee?”

  “Please,” she said. “That would be wonderful.”

  It was wonderful. Scrambled eggs and bacon were wonderful, toast was wonderful. The young man did not return to his book. He stood across the counter and regarded her companionably. He got himself a cup of coffee, and stood across the counter and drank with her, and somehow that made her feel like crying again. But now she was able not to cry.

  He poured her a second cup of coffee out of a glass coffee maker and, when she opened her purse and started looking in it, took a package of cigarettes out of his pocket and shook one toward her. She took it and smiled and he held a match for her. Then he lighted a cigarette of his own and said, still quite conversationally, “Feel better?”