by T. Greenwood
She had no idea how Wilder expected to find anything in these thick woods, but all of a sudden he pointed and then rushed over to a large willow tree. It was split down the middle, like it had been struck by lightning. He searched all around the trunk of the tree and then, incredibly, pulled a piece of paper out of a deep crevice in the wood.
“Holy shit!” Twig said. “Is that it?”
“I don’t know,” he said, gingerly unfolding it.
“What does it say?” Elsbeth asked.
He studied it, and she watched as the paper crumbled in his fingers. Elsbeth felt suddenly heartbroken. Of course, it was a miracle that he’d found it at all, but now that he had, she wanted more than anything to know what it said. As it crumbled, she felt herself crumbling. Something inside her turning to ash.
“I can just make out her name,” he said, peering at the faded letter. “That’s it. Just Dear Betsy.”
As Wilder recounted the story of the accident for Twig, Elsbeth thought about Betsy Parker, about the baby she had inside her when she died. That poor baby growing up without a mother.
“Oh my God,” Twig said. “That’s the saddest story I ever heard.”
Wilder nodded. “I thought I might be able to find this to give to my dad.”
Elsbeth’s throat swelled. She tried to imagine Trevor and Gracy without her. What would happen to them if she just disappeared?
“I need to get back,” she said. “Gracy will be up from her nap any time now.”
When they pulled up to the dock, she could see Mireya holding Gracy on her hip. Gracy’s face was bright red and her cheeks were streaked with tears. Elsbeth scrambled out of the boat, feeling the effects of that second cocktail and the sun. Trying to right herself, she ran up the dock until she got to the shore. Her legs felt wobbly, and she was nauseous. She wasn’t sure whether it was from the vodka or from the boat ride.
“Oh, honey,” she said, reaching out for her. Gracy shook her head and clung to Mireya, burying her face in her shoulder. So much for stranger danger.
“Gracy,” Elsbeth said sternly, feeling like somebody had sucker punched her in the stomach. She pried her out of Mireya’s arms and squeezed her tight. She felt Gracy’s body resist and then, slowly, soften.
“She was crying. I hope it’s okay I got her,” Mireya said.
“It’s fine. Thank you,” she said, wishing Mireya would just leave now.
“I had a bad dream, and I couldn’t find you. Where were you, Mumma?”
“I’m sorry, sweetie. I shouldn’t have left,” she said and started to walk back up to the camp with Gracy snug on her hip, leaving Mireya behind.
“Promise you won’t leave me anymore,” she said.
“Never ever,” Elsbeth said, feeling like she might cry.
Down by the water she could see Twig lying down on a lawn chair, Wilder sitting next to her. Mireya flitted down toward them like a butterfly, then took his hand and pulled him up from the chair. Elsbeth’s stomach twisted and tightened as she watched them walk to the water, holding hands. Acid rose in her throat as Mireya glanced back up at her, smiling like she’d just won something. What a fool she’d been. What an idiot.
“Listen, sweetie. How about we go home?”
“No firecrackers?”
“I think Daddy has some sparklers,” Elsbeth said, trying to smile.
“Aren’t those dangerous for kids?”
“I’ll make sure you’re safe,” Elsbeth said.
Back at the house, Elsbeth found Kurt in the kitchen. She wanted to let him know, needed to let him know, how sorry she was. How confused she felt. How much she needed him. She went to him, hugged him, pulled back, and gave him a kiss.
“Have you been drinking?” he asked, pulling away from her, his eyes widening.
She caught her breath, raised her eyebrows, looking at him in disbelief. She’d expected him to hug her back, to hold her. “We had such a great time,” she said, ignoring him. “It was gorgeous. We took the boat out, and Gracy had a root beer float. We went swimming.”
“How much did you have?” he asked.
She couldn’t believe he was interrogating her like this. “Just a couple. Jesus, it was hours ago.”
“And you drove? What the hell were you thinking?” Kurt’s voice was loud; he was yelling at her.
Elsbeth’s eyes widened. “I am not drunk.”
“I can smell it, El,” he said, and she wondered if it was possible that he was right. They were pretty strong drinks, but she would never have gotten in the car if she didn’t think she was okay.
“What if you’d gotten pulled over? Jesus. You had Gracy with you.” He looked disgusted with her. This wasn’t what she’d wanted at all. Maybe she should have just stayed at the lake. No one there was judging her. No one there was accusing her.
“Oh, so now I’m some sort of horrible mother?” she said, and then she remembered the terrified look on Gracy’s face when she found her with Mireya. She thought about Trevor, about how he’d raged at her that afternoon.
Gracy was in the living room watching videos; she could hear Dora the Explorer singing, “Backpack, backpack.” Elsbeth knew she should end this now, not let it escalate into something bigger than it needed to be.
“How was your day?” she asked, rubbing her temples, though she honestly didn’t care anymore. She didn’t even want to know. Her forehead was tender to the touch. Burned. She felt like she might explode.
“Pretty damn awful,” he said. “I spent the whole afternoon looking through Pop’s boxes for some legal papers Pop thinks are in there. Nothing but trash.”
Elsbeth looked past him, out the kitchen window.
“I think we should go away,” she said to no one.
“El, please don’t start with me on this again.”
“Let’s just go. We don’t have to fly. We can just pack up the car and drive. We can stay at campgrounds. We can pack a cooler so we don’t have to eat at restaurants. We don’t have to go to Disney World even, we can just go to the beach.”
Kurt was shaking his head.
“There’s a place in Florida with a live mermaid show, these ladies swim in mermaid costumes under the water,” she said, her heart beating hard in her chest. “Gracy would love it. Please, Kurt, let’s just go.” She felt desperate, drowning.
“Stop,” Kurt said.
Elsbeth realized that her words were coming hard and fast, tumbling. But she couldn’t stop. “We never go anywhere,” she said, feeling her voice getting louder. “We never do things like normal families do. It’s no wonder Trevor is so messed up. He hasn’t gotten to do anything that other kids do. Spending all his time at the goddamned junkyard ...”
“I said stop it, El,” Kurt said.
“... lurking around, taking pictures like some sort of Peeping Tom. It’s not normal. None of this,” she said, gesturing wildly, toward the box of Pop’s papers on the kitchen table, “is normal.”
Kurt slammed his fist against the table then, startling her. She felt like she was going to be sick. “Goddamn it, El. Shut up.”
She thought about Twig yelling at Ollie barking and barking and barking. Was that what Kurt thought of her? That she was just some annoying, yappy dog? Elsbeth felt tears coming to her eyes and wiped them away. She was suddenly at a complete loss for words. She wanted to storm out, to take off in her car, but as pissed off as she was about his accusations, what if he was right? She shouldn’t be driving. She wanted to walk out the back door and just sit out on the back steps to cool off, but the steps were covered in Pop’s shit. She was trapped. Trapped inside this house, inside this life, and she felt like screaming.
Kurt stared at her without speaking, but she could see the muscles in his jaw tightening. His fists clenching.
She got up and stormed through the living room, not looking at Gracy because she knew if she did she’d lose it. She went to the bathroom instead and slammed the door. She pulled off her clothes, tore off the bathing suit, and shoved i
t in the blue plastic trash can with the spent tube of toothpaste and the empty toilet paper rolls. She turned the shower on as hot as it would go and stepped into the steam. The hot water pounded at her sunburned skin, made her entire body feel as though it were on fire. She closed her eyes and put her face under the stream. She felt ignited, ablaze. She would burn anything she touched.
After Elsbeth fell asleep, anger pulsed in time with Kurt’s heartbeat in his limbs, and he couldn’t lie still enough for sleep to come. And so he got dressed and quietly left her alone in the bed. He was still furious with her, and he hoped that she’d be hungover in the morning. He couldn’t understand this, any of this. Elsbeth had always been a good mother to Gracy. This was something he’d been able to count on. She and Trevor had their problems, but the way she was with Gracy more than made up for any failings she had. But now, as he watched her sleep, he wondered if he could trust her anymore. And worse, he worried that there were other things he should worry about.
Someone down the road had been setting off firecrackers all night, and the air stank of their burnt remains. He could also smell the hints of a coming storm, feel the tight electric promise of thunder and rain. Still, despite the warnings from the sky, his legs insisted on moving, and so he walked.
Kurt wondered what would happen if he just kept walking one of these nights. If instead of making these ever-widening circles through town, looping back home, he just kept going. What would happen if, instead of traipsing endlessly through the woods and along the river, he just walked out onto the entrance ramp to the interstate and headed north? He wondered how long it would take him to get to the border, any border, how long to walk out of this life and into a new one.
Elsbeth thought he didn’t understand, but he did. He knew what it felt like to want to flee. To escape. To leave everything behind. She thought she was the only one who wanted more than this small life. But he also knew that a man has responsibilities, obligations. A father to his children. A son to his father. A man to his wife. You can’t just run away. He wasn’t Billy.
Thunder rumbled in the distance, but the air was dry. Electric. He shoved his hands in his pockets and kept moving. After about fifteen minutes, he came to the place in the road where the two crosses were. He climbed down the steep embankment to them. They looked ominous in the dark, pale reminders of how very precarious things are.
He wondered about these kids sometimes. The boys who died here. He imagined them saying good-bye to their parents that night before they headed out. How their parents might not have even looked up from what they were doing (their mother with her casserole, their father with the nightly news), how they might have been distracted, their minds on other things. He tried to imagine what they must have felt, then, later when they were awakened by the phone call telling them that everything they thought they had was gone now. That all those things (the football games and school dances, the grass-stained clothes and messy rooms) they’d taken for granted had now been taken, irrevocably, from them. That life as they knew it was over.
He brushed both dusty crosses off with his sleeve, straightened the one that was always listing to the right, and looked up at the ominous sky. Heavy storm clouds were moving across the moon; it looked like a painting, like something both real and unreal at once. When thunder rumbled again, he knew he should head back to the house, that if he stayed much longer, he’d be walking through a storm the whole way back. But he couldn’t move. His legs were, for some reason, suddenly remarkably still. Even as the rain came down and the sky was severed by a streak of lightning, he was paralyzed. And with the next shock of light, he realized:
Elsbeth was going to leave him. The revelation was like the dull ache of the flu coming on. Maybe not tonight. Maybe not even this year. But her unhappiness, her discontentment, was beginning to swell. It was like a cancer, some poisonous thing that was growing, and he worried there might be nothing he could do about it. She was teetering at some terrible precipice, but instead of grabbing hold, pulling her back, he’d been standing there dumbly watching her, waiting for her to fall. He knew he needed to do something.
The sky had warned him, but he hadn’t heeded its admonishment. And so now, as he walked the two miles back to the house, the wind and rain were merciless. Punishing. By the time he walked into the midnight kitchen, his flannel shirt and jeans were heavy with rain. His hair was drenched, and his shoes were soggy. He peeled off his wet clothes and dried off as best he could, but as he crawled into bed with Elsbeth, the thunder scent of him (of the sky he carried in, in the anger that still thrummed in his chest) woke her.
“Kurt?” she muttered. “Were you walking again? In the rain?”
But instead of answering her, he just pressed his body against hers, enclosed her. Held on tight.
He dreamed about a train. About the bright headlights of a train racing toward him, about his legs once again failing him as he stood paralyzed straddling the tracks. The ground rumbling under his motionless feet. The whistle screaming in his ears. He dreamed the blinding light and deafening sounds.
“Kurt, it’s your phone,” Elsbeth said, pulling him from the tracks and back into the soft nest of their bed.
His heart was pounding in his chest as the world came sharply into focus. He grabbed the cell phone from his nightstand, and struggling to focus on the screen. It was Maury. It was five A.M.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Kurt, you better come over real quick. It’s Jude.”
He listened to Maury explain what had happened and then Kurt hung up and got out of bed, yanking on his pants, which were still wet from his walk in the rain.
“What’s going on?” Elsbeth asked, sitting up.
“Pop’s in the hospital,” he said. “He’s had another stroke. Maury found him this morning. He was lying on the bathroom floor since yesterday.”
Trevor planned to tell his mother he wasn’t feeling well, that he might even throw up. It was true. Every morning for weeks he’d woken up feeling like his guts were tied in knots. But today especially, his stomach was cramped and angry. There was no way he could go to swimming lessons today. No way he could deal with one more morning of Ethan and Mike taunting, teasing, the girls in his class giggling, the small new kid, Rudy, laughing at him. The chlorinated sky even seemed to be mocking him with its brightness, its smug placidity.
He knew that whatever was going on with his stomach probably had to do with Ethan and Mike. It was like all the anger in him was turning his intestines into a knotted fist. And the longer he let them harass him, the tighter the fist inside him became. He knew that eventually something would have to give. He was a head taller than both of them; he was stronger. He could hurt them if he wanted to. He could hurt them really badly. And without Mrs. Cross around to put her foot down, without someone to stop him, he was afraid of what he might do.
It was early, just past seven, and his father was backing an old trailer into the backyard. As the sun rose, Trevor watched his dad carefully maneuvering the trailer into the spot where the oak tree used to be. Pop had been in the hospital for two weeks but he was getting out today, and he would be staying at their house. Well, not exactly at their house, there wasn’t room for that, but in this trailer on their property. Until a spot at the nursing home opened up anyway. He knew from his parents’ hushed discussions at night that until somebody at the home moved or died, Pop would be living in their backyard. Like white trash, his mother had said when she thought he wasn’t listening. And Trevor thought about all the work they’d done on Pop’s house, all the trash they’d cleared away only to have this happen.
He’d heard his parents arguing every night for the last two weeks. He’d covered his ears with his pillow, but still, somehow their words found their way in. Ever since Pop’s stroke, and his father announced that Pop would be staying with them, she’d been acting crazy. She was always, always angry now. Not just at him. She was mad at Kurt. She was mad, even, at Gracy.
Earlier that morning, G
racy had reached across the kitchen table for the sugar bowl, and she’d knocked over her glass of orange juice. It spilled all over the newspaper, and all over his mom’s pocketbook, which she’d left there. It dripped down onto the floor, under the table, where it made a puddle around the legs of the chair.
“Jesus Christ!” she’d screamed, startling them both. “Why do you have to be so clumsy? You have to pay attention, Gracy. Watch what you’re doing.”
Gracy, who Trevor was pretty sure had never been scolded before in her life, crumbled. Her face fell, her lip quivered, and her shoulders shook. He didn’t know what to do. He wanted to hug her, to let her know that the world was just upside down lately, that his mother hadn’t meant it. But this expression was so new, so horrifying and strange, he quietly grabbed his camera (which had escaped the flow of orange juice) instead. But when his mother realized what he was doing, she’d yanked the camera out of his hands and slammed it down next to the sink.
“Just stop it!” she screamed. “Goddamn it. This isn’t normal. You shouldn’t want to take pictures of this. If I catch you doing that again, I’m getting rid of the camera. I will take it away. Do you understand?” Her voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. “If you do anything, anything at all, it is gone.”
Trevor nodded and tried not to think about how much her words hurt. Normal. What was wrong with his pictures? Mrs. D. had said he was an artist.
“Do you have your suits on?” she asked them. They both nodded. Gracy’s eyes were red, and snot was running from her nose. “Your towels are in the dryer. Gracy, come here so I can wipe your face.”
“I don’t feel well,” Trevor tried, as his mother dabbed at Gracy’s nose with a paper towel. “I don’t think I can go to swimming lessons today.”
His mother turned on her heel and glared at him. “Christ, what’s the matter with you now?”
He felt his whole body aching. His stomach was lurching inside his body. What was the matter with him? If he could figure that out, then maybe he could change it. Make it better. He shook his head.
