“She died.”
A long silence. One even Linda Litnipski doesn’t dare fill.
“She died?”
“She went out for a drive with that idiot. Wade. And now she’s dead.”
Another long silence. Carly can feel the fog creeping into her joints and bone marrow.
“God, I’m sorry, Carly.”
“But…” Linda says.
“But…” Teddy says. “…what are you doing here?”
“I came to find you.”
“Me? Why me?”
“Why you? Teddy. I had to find somebody. Who else could I find? Who else do I even have to find?”
Carly hears waves land on the rocks in the silence that follows. Something is forming in her gut, against her will. A clear sensation that this is not how the moment was supposed to play out.
Linda Litnipski is the one to break the silence. “If you think for one minute this kid is coming into my house, Ted Thackett, you got another thing coming. Tell me you know better than to think a thing that.”
“Would you just chill a minute? We’ll get her someplace to stay.”
“Yeah? With whose money? I don’t see you bringing anything in.”
Carly watches them and listens to them and thinks, Why would Teddy be with somebody like that? Then it hits her: Carly’s mother was somebody like that. Carly’s mother treated Teddy just about like this. Not quite as harsh. But somewhere in the same neighborhood.
“I have money,” Carly says. “I can get a room for tonight. I have eighty dollars.”
“Eighty dollars?” Linda says. Like she’s sneezing on something that belongs to Carly. Like she’s saying twenty cents. “You’re on the ocean, kiddo. You can’t get much for eighty dollars.”
“Now wait,” Teddy says. “Wait. Let’s just go to the cheapest place we can find and see what they charge.”
“And who makes up the difference?”
“Stop!” Carly shouts.
Everybody does. Everything stops. It makes her feel braver. So she goes on.
“Stop talking about me like I’m not here. Stop arguing over me. Fuck it. Fuck this. I’ll be fine on my own. Just stay out of it. But I need to talk to Teddy. I’m not leaving town without talking to Teddy.”
Carly waits for something to happen. Nothing happens. She really stopped the woman cold. She never dropped an F-bomb before. It felt pretty good.
“Teddy,” Carly says. “When can I talk to you?”
“Come on, get in the car,” he says. “We’ll find you a place to stay.”
“My car?” Linda asks.
Teddy sighs deeply. “Fine. Not your car. Fine. Carly, can you just sit tight and wait right here? I’m going to walk home and get my car. And then we’ll find you a place to stay.”
“Take my car,” Linda says. “Who cares? I was just saying. I was just pointing out that you might want to ask my permission first.”
Teddy sighs again. “Linda, mind if I use your car?”
She fishes around in her purse and then tosses him the keys. It’s a wild, drunken throw. They land in the dirt a few feet away. Then she turns on one high-heeled red cowboy boot and teeters back into the lounge.
Carly looks at Teddy, and Teddy looks at her. She sees the beginnings of a smile form around his mouth and in the crinkly places at the corners of his eyes. But it’s an unbearably sad smile.
“This is really off the wall,” he says. “This is really out of nowhere.”
What she thinks is, It wouldn’t be. If you had told me where you landed. Like you promised you would.
What she says is, “Sorry. I didn’t know where else to go.”
Teddy retrieves the keys.
“Jocelyn died?”
“I wouldn’t make a thing like that up.”
“I know. I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just hard to take in.”
“Tell me about it. I think that asshole killed her.”
“You tell the police this?”
“No. What’s the point? He killed himself, too. Too late to put him in jail even if I’m right. Drove them both off a cliff. Only question is whether he did it on purpose. I guess we’ll never know. But she was leaving him. So I think he did it on purpose. I can’t prove it. But that’s what I think.”
“Jesus,” Teddy says.
He puts an arm around her shoulder and leads her over to Linda’s car. It’s an old vintage Jaguar XKE, perfectly restored. She has money. Linda has money.
He opens the door for her, and she plunks into the deep, low bucket seat.
“Ow,” she says, as her thigh muscles have to try to support her weight.
Teddy walks around and gets in. But he doesn’t start the engine. He just sits there, both hands on the steering wheel.
“Jocelyn always did have a broken picker. Everybody said so.”
“She picked you.”
“I rest my case.” A long pause. Then he looks over at Carly. Studies her. “What happened to your face?”
“Which part of it?”
“I don’t know. Start anywhere.”
“Well. The scrape on my chin was from when I took a header into some gravel jumping off a freight train. The sunburn blister scars are from walking halfway across Arizona without a hat after we ran out of sunscreen. And the scratches are from some berry vines where I slept last.”
Teddy sits another minute, then starts the engine. It has a beefy sound, a sort of growly rumble.
He does not appear to want to address anything she just said.
“I apologize for Linda. She has this thing about the house. She’s very…private. Doesn’t like anybody in the house. Or even near the house. And she’s a little gun-shy on the subject of my exes. But she’s not as bad as she came off back there.”
“Didn’t figure she could be,” Carly says.
She’s gone beyond the need to be polite. It’s a relief.
He pulls out of the parking lot and heads out Patrick’s Point Road, away from town.
“There’s a place down here that has good rates. If it’s more than what you’ve got, I’ll cover the difference. Not that it’s really my money, but I’ll take the heat for that. She’s going out of town tomorrow morning. So I’ll come by where you’re staying, and we’ll talk. OK?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
She’s just too tired now. As if she’s been hanging on to one skinny vine to keep from plummeting off a cliff. But she’s been hanging on too long. It’s worth the fall just to let go. It feels good to let go. She really couldn’t have held on even a minute longer. Everybody has a breaking point. Especially if you’re going to fall sooner or later anyway.
“If it was my house, it’d be a whole different story. I’m really sorry, Carly. If it were just me, what’s mine would be yours. Hell, what’s mine is yours. Only trouble is, that’s pretty much nothing. But we’ll talk tomorrow, I promise. I’ll come by first thing. I don’t know what I can do to help, but if I can, I will. OK?”
“Why can’t we talk tonight?”
“Please, Carly. Wait till she goes out of town. If I don’t get right back there, I won’t get a moment’s peace tonight. I’ll come by in the morning.”
He pulls into the gravel parking lot of the Redwood Inn. The sign says, BEST RATES IN TOWN. It also says, VACANCY.
Teddy walks with her into the office.
An old man with just a fringe of hair looks up from a loud TV show.
“Hey, Ted,” he says.
“What’s the cheapest room you can give my young friend here?”
“Well, seeing as it’s you…that’ll only be forty dollars extra. No, I’m kidding. Eighty-five, and that’s a little better than ten percent discount.”
“She’ll take it.”
Carly tries to go into her pocket for the cash, but Teddy grabs her wrist and holds it still.
“You hang on to that,” he says. “In case you need it later on.”
He pulls a credit card out of his wallet and pays for the r
oom.
Carly’s heart goes in two distinct directions at once. Teddy is taking over, taking care of things. Like she knew he would. That’s one direction. But then there’s the other direction. The one where he’s telling her all her problems won’t be solved after tonight. Which she was pretty clear on already.
He pulls her into his arms, and she buries her face in him. Wraps her arms around him and holds on tight, her eyes pressed closed. Breathes in that warmth. It’s been away for so long. Or she has. Or both.
“I’ll come by first thing in the morning. I promise. I have to get back now. But as soon as she leaves tomorrow, I’ll come straight here.”
He kisses the top of her head. Pressing his lips down hard and leaving them for a long moment.
Carly can feel the imprint of them long after he walks out the door.
Carly takes a long, hot bath and washes out her dirty clothes in the sink.
Her room is small but nice enough. She can’t see the ocean, but she can hear it. Even with the doors and the windows closed. But she can hear it much better if she sits out on her little scrap of patio. So she wraps herself up in both blankets—the one from the bed and the one she finds folded in the closet—and sits outside for most of the night.
It’s too foggy to see the moon, but she can see where it is in the sky because the fog is brighter right there.
She doesn’t sleep much, and she doesn’t think much. No more than she can help.
She does have two clear thoughts, though. At about three a.m. it occurs to her that Teddy never asked where Jen is.
That kicks off another thought. It’s not completely new. It flitted through her mind when she chose to keep hanging on to the back of that freight train and not go back to Jen. But it’s been held at bay for such a long time that it almost strikes her as something unfamiliar.
The original plan was to walk off the Wakapi reservation, down that paved road from Delores’s dirt road all the way to the I-40. And to make a careful note of that intersection. So she could find the road back again. Instead she jumped a freight train in the pitch dark.
Now Carly’s not even sure she knows where Jen is herself.
TRINIDAD, CA
May 21
Carly lies down on the bed at about seven in the morning and falls asleep without meaning to.
At ten after eight, the phone blasts her out of sleep.
She sits bolt upright, her heart pounding. It takes her a minute to remember what a phone is. What she’s supposed to do with it. While she’s sorting this out, it rings again, making her jump a second time. It’s a loud ring. Loud noises spell trouble in Carly’s mind. Like sirens. Like the way the police knock on somebody’s door when nobody’s going to like what happens next.
She picks it up. Doesn’t even speak into it, because she’s that unsure.
She hears an unsteady “Hello?”
“Oh. Teddy. It’s you.”
“Did I wake you up?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Look. Curveball, kiddo. Just as she’s walking out the door, she tells me we’re expecting a very important delivery and I have to be here to take it. It’s really important. If I miss it, she won’t just kill me. She’ll kill me, skin the corpse, and set my entrails on fire. And let’s just hope it would be in that order.”
Carly rubs her eyes. As if that will help.
“You’re not coming?”
Before she can even say “You promised,” Teddy intervenes. But she definitely would have said that. Given a little more time.
“I know, I know. I promised. So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to take my life into my hands and let you come here to the house. But don’t ever tell her. And don’t drop anything or leave fingerprints or look around too much or…”
“Can I breathe?”
Silence.
“I know this is hard, Carly, but work with me here. Help us get through this.”
“Why do you always end up with women who push you around?”
The silence feels prickly. But she’s not sorry she said it. Not at all.
“You’re not supposed to ask questions like that.”
“Why not?”
“Because grown-ups don’t know the answers. Look. Can you walk down here? It’s about a third of a mile.”
“Gosh. I don’t know. A third of a mile. That’s an awful long walk.”
“OK, fine, but stand out on the road—”
“Teddy. I was kidding.”
“Oh. Right. I forgot. You walked halfway across Arizona. I guess we’ll get to that part when we talk. So, just…gather up your stuff—”
“That shouldn’t take long.”
“—and walk out to the road and make a left, away from town. I’ll stand out in the road. You’ll see me. If anybody from town is out and around, we might have to abort the mission and try this later.”
“OK.”
She stares at the phone for a moment, wondering if she should say good-bye. Then she puts it back to her ear. Teddy is already gone.
It’s like a dream. A little too much like one.
In a dream, she’d see Teddy standing in the middle of the road in an impossibly green forest of perfect, giant trees. And of course she’d be walking. Because when you walk fifteen or twenty miles a day, you dream about walking. And he’d seem too far away for too long, like Carly just couldn’t make enough progress to reach him.
In a dream, something would happen before she got to him. He’d disappear, or the scene would change suddenly.
Apparently, this is not a dream. Because Carly walks right up to him and looks into his face. He averts his eyes. Then he looks all around and rushes her through the gate, locking it behind them.
Carly takes in the surroundings.
It’s on the ocean side. Just like she was hoping it would be. But then she wonders why it matters. Since apparently she doesn’t get to live here anyway.
It was a nice house, once upon a time. Natural brown wood shingles to blend in with the redwoods. Perched right on the cliff. But it’s in bad repair. And there’s junk everywhere. Old mattresses and a couch rotting outside, and bed frames and something under a blue tarp. And a tractor. Why would anyone need a tractor on this little lot? And old fencing. Why don’t people just throw away their fencing when they tear it down?
The classic Jaguar is sitting in front of the garage, along with a newer Mercedes and Teddy’s Firebird.
“This could be a nice house,” Carly says. “Why doesn’t she clean it up?”
“You’d have to ask her. But don’t. Because you were never here.”
“Why don’t you clean it up?”
“She would not appreciate that. She doesn’t like people touching her stuff.”
“It’s trash.”
“She doesn’t like people touching her trash. Now come on inside. We can still be seen from the gate if we stand here.”
He opens the front door.
It’s a little better inside. The furniture is a bit run-down. A coffee table in front of the saggy couch is covered with eleven beer bottles. Carly wonders briefly why he didn’t just sweep them off into the recycling bin before she got here.
Then her eyes are drawn out through the big picture window. It’s spotted with sea spray, so she walks closer, as if that will help her see through. Below her is an ocean not unlike the one she saw when she first came into town. Except without the boats anchored. Rocks the size of buildings, with waves foaming around their bases. One rock is so big it has trees on its crown, like an island.
Carly can’t take her eyes off the scene.
Then she sees an old car fender on the cliff, marring her view. And she wonders again how people live like that, and why. If this were her house, she’d clean it up right. And wash the windows.
She reaches out and almost touches the tips of her fingers to the glass. Then she remembers Teddy telling her not to leave fingerprints. Maybe he was kidding. Or half kidding. Then again, maybe not
.
She shoves her hands deep into her pockets.
“What did she go out of town in?” she asks, still looking at the sea. Still trying not to look at the junk fender. “Her car is here.”
“She has three cars.”
“Why doesn’t she keep them in the garage? They’re so expensive.”
“Because…there are other valuable things in the garage. Look, this is why she doesn’t like people around. I’ll level with you. She has some things in this house that are worth money. That’s why she’s so weird about having people around.”
“She thinks I’ll steal from her?”
“No. I mean, she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know you. But she doesn’t think everybody’ll steal. She thinks everybody’ll talk. And then, sooner or later, somebody’ll steal.”
Carly listens to the surf, in the pause, when there’s nothing else to listen to. She looks around at Teddy. He’s sitting on the saggy couch, faced away from her. She can see the top of the back of his head. That bald spot looks a lot bigger. Or maybe it’s just that he’s keeping his hair shorter now.
“Where did she get a house like this? Where does she get all her money? What does she do?”
“That’s an awful lot of questions, Carly.”
“Just three.”
“That’s an awful lot.”
“Pick one, then.”
“Her father left it to her when he died.”
Maybe that explains why she doesn’t take care of it. Maybe people only take care of things they had to work hard for. Maybe they don’t take care of things that landed in their life for free.
She looks over her shoulder at Teddy just as he takes a long swallow from a half-empty bottle of beer.
“If you had a house like this, would you leave it to Jen and me when you died?”
“You’re forgetting I have a daughter.”
“Oh. Right. I did forget that. But you never see her.”
“But she’s still my daughter. Linda’s father hadn’t seen her since she was six. But she was still his daughter. There’s something about blood. It lasts forever.”
Carly watches out the window in silence, feeling the trajectory of those sentences as they settle into a place in her gut. Like bad food. Something that will need to come up and out later. So she can keep moving. Keep living.
Walk Me Home Page 28
