“Up by the radio towers,” she says. “West of town.”
“I don’t see you,” he says. “You have your lights on?”
“I do now,” she says. She pulls herself to her feet and leans in through the open window to turn on her headlights, illuminating the space around her, the road bordered by spikes of grass and gray boulders. She finds herself shivering, and all she wants at this moment is for Jorge to get here. She’s so tired. She wonders if she hit her head in the accident, but her head doesn’t hurt, just her ankle.
“I still don’t see you.”
“Hold on. I’ll see if I can’t send a map pin.”
While she fiddles with the app, her phone rings again. She doesn’t recognize the number at first. Then she remembers the area code and freezes, unsure what to do for a moment, before she answers it.
“May I speak to Paula?”
“This is her.”
“Oh. I—this is Linda. Williams. Your daughter?”
“Shit,” she says. Her phone is beeping, her call waiting. “I know who you are.”
A long pause. Paula feels something welling up inside her, something she’s struggled for too long to keep down.
“Where are you?” Linda says at last.
“I’m at home,” Paula says. Her throat tightens.
“Where’s home?” Linda asks, her voice growing angry.
“That some kind of existential question?” Paula says.
Linda sighs. “The postcard was from Utah. Is that where you live?”
And before Paula can respond, she finds herself laughing. She tries to suppress it at first, tries to cover it with a cough.
“Nice. That’s nice,” Linda says. “Look, I just wanted—I just thought—”
But Paula is laughing too hard to keep it quiet now.
“You’re going to be a grandma. Again. I just thought you should know.”
And Paula laughs so hard she snorts. So hard her stomach hurts.
“Fuck it,” Linda says, and she hangs up.
Paula is crying from laughing so hard. Then she’s just crying. Then hiccupping. Her phone rings again, and she takes a few desperate gulps of air before she answers.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know why I laughed.”
“What? No, I’m sorry,” Jorge says. “Are you okay? I still can’t find you.”
“Look,” she says, hauling herself to her feet. “I’m flashing my lights. Anything?”
“What about that map?”
“You didn’t get it?” she says. “I’ll send it again.”
“This phone service,” he says in disgust.
She sends him a pin. Before she hangs up, she says, “I love you.”
* * *
• • •
She leaves as soon as her truck gets out of the shop. Her ankle, which was just sprained, is mostly better by then. Jorge wants to go with her, doesn’t want her making the trip alone, but she convinces him it’s something she has to do herself. She drives three days from Utah, and when she gets to Michigan, she stays at the no-tell motel on the highway north of town. There are cheaper places, but not many. This motel is where people live when their credit is too poor to get a lease. It hunches across the street from the diner where more than one of the motel’s inhabitants wash dishes for a living.
Paula calls Linda and asks to meet her at the motel; it’s the least Linda can do, since Paula came all this way. Paula waits for Linda at the window, holding aside moth-eaten curtains. The motel parking lot is pocked with potholes patched and repatched too many times. Rainbow puddles band every parking space, and dead grass borders the blacktop, even though the lawns in the surrounding businesses are still green. Paula sees the car pull up, hears the engine through the single pane of glass. She sees Ernest DeWitt in the driver’s seat. He gets out with Linda and offers to come inside with her; Linda insists that she’ll be fine. In the intervening years, his voice has gone gravelly, but Paula still recognizes it, still remembers him. Before returning to his car, Ernest gives Linda a quick kiss and tells her to call if she needs anything. Then he drives off.
What is Linda doing with that man?
Before Linda knocks on Paula’s door, she pauses in the parking lot and stares at Paula’s truck. Paula wonders whether Linda recognizes it. What is she saying? Of course Linda knows it’s Paula’s, what with the Utah license plates.
“Someday, this’ll be yours,” Paula had told her, the hood popped, her face bent close to the engine. “I’m just making sure it’ll still be running for you.” She’d meant it, too. She’d always had every intention of giving the truck to Linda, up until she left Michigan.
Linda knocks, and Paula has a moment of panic. It’s not too late, Paula thinks. She could refuse to answer. There’s so much she needs to say, to apologize to Linda for. The whole interaction seems hopeless.
“Took you long enough,” Paula says when she finally opens the door. She moves aside to let Linda in the room.
“Really, Paula?” Linda doesn’t enter. She stands in the doorway, peering inside as if the room is infested. As if, by entering, she, too, will become infested.
“Well? Get in here. You’re letting the mosquitos in.”
Linda steps inside. There’s nowhere to sit except a ratty chair, so stained Paula can’t guess its original color. The room reeks of the kind of horrid disinfectant institutions use to clean up all manner of sins. Beneath that is the smell of old cigarettes, even though the sign on the door claims this is a nonsmoking room. Most likely, it had been a smoking room for so long that now everything in it is permanently saturated. The walls are a dingy yellow. The bedspread is a dingy brown. The carpet is a color that Paula can’t name, although it’s surprisingly bright, as if the whole thing has been bleached. She suddenly wishes she’d sprung for a better hotel, that she had something more welcoming to offer Linda. She feels like she should apologize to her daughter for the motel, but she doesn’t know where to start. Instead, she turns defensive.
“How was the drive?” Linda asks, rigidly formal.
“Oh? We’re doing this?” Paula eyes her. “Fine. It was fine. The weather was nice.”
“Here’s the thing,” Linda says. “You don’t get to be belligerent. You left us.”
Paula puckers. Nods. “Want to go get some coffee?”
* * *
• • •
Paula hasn’t been back long enough to know where the coffee shops are. If there even are any. Maybe coffee shops are too hoity-toity for this area. So she drives them into town, to the bar at the Hudson House. Linda lays her purse on the bar. Paula lays her keys.
“Why are you here?” Linda asks. She looks at her mother with her eyes narrowed, like she isn’t sure what she’s seeing, but whatever it is, she doesn’t much like it.
“I wanted to see you,” Paula says, eyeing the back of her hand, her ring. “I wanted to see how you were.”
“Pregnant. You didn’t need to drive here to see it.”
“You’re barely even showing,” Paula says, her eyes sliding down Linda’s tummy. When the girls were growing up, she worried about Linda’s weight. Paige was always thin. Skyla had been a chubby baby, but only slightly. Linda, though, was forever battling her weight. It shouldn’t matter in this world, but it did. Paula knew how people would look at Linda, how they would treat her, how people always treat women whose bodies don’t conform. Paula guesses Linda couldn’t be much more than two months along.
“You look good, though,” Paula says.
When the bartender asks what they will have, Linda orders root beer. Paula has coffee.
“You married?” Paula asks.
“No,” Linda says. “Well, maybe.”
“What do you mean, ‘maybe’? Either you are or you aren’t.”
“Are you married?�
� There’s so much anger in Linda, and it keeps bubbling to the surface before Linda can manage to put a lid on it.
Paula takes a long drink of her coffee. It’s still too hot, but Paula keeps sucking at it anyway, coffee roasted too dark, to the point of burning, and made too weak. It looks watery in the cup, a thin sheen of grease on its surface.
Paula says, “That’s why I’m here. I’m getting remarried.”
Linda leans back on her stool. Paula eyes her ring again, the stone glinting even in this dim bar. Linda looks, too.
“At least he has good taste in jewelry,” Linda says. “Good for you.”
“Don’t be like that,” Paula says.
“How should I be? You want me to hug you? Should I throw you a bridal shower?”
“I thought you’d want to see me,” Paula says. “I didn’t think you’d come if you didn’t.”
“I don’t really care anymore. You’ve been gone so long, I don’t even care.” Linda gets out of her seat, gathers her purse. “This was a mistake,” she says. “Take me home.”
They ride back to the Williamses’ farm in near silence, and when Paula drops Linda off, she doesn’t try to come inside, for Jared is there, quickly getting into his van, pulling out of the driveway to avoid Paula, and Paula is torn between wanting to make things right with her daughter and wanting to follow Jared where he’s going—the hardware store where she’s still part owner, or the bar maybe—to try to convince him to end their marriage. This is what she came here for, after all.
In the end, Paula hesitates too long. Linda has gone into the house. And Jared is just plain gone.
Elizabeth DeWitt
11
I’m invited to a sleepover. Bonfire, hayride, hot apple cider. We TP the house down the street, then stay up late talking, a conversation that turns serious fast. She tells me her parents are divorced, too, that she seldom sees her father, that he raped her when she was eight, and I can’t even believe it, that there is another girl out there with my damage. How can this world be that messed up?
We both lie in the dark, she in her bed, me on the floor in a sleeping bag, staring at the ceiling. After a while, I tell her my story. Even though we have so much in common, I still feel like I might throw up, just saying the words out loud.
NURSE DEREK
I usually avoid the bar, mostly because the bartender, Slick Hudson, likes to give me a hard time for being a nurse. Slick is the name he gave himself. Jerry is the name his mother gave him, long before she died to get away from him. Well, okay, she died of cancer, but I really think if her son wasn’t such a dick, she might have fought harder.
The first time I came into the Hudson House bar, I was twenty-four. I ordered an O’Doul’s, not knowing it was nonalcoholic. Slick let me pay, tip him, and drink the whole thing before he told me through his guffawing face that I’d ordered kiddie beer. Ha-ha, Derek Williams is a pansy. And a nurse. True, nursing is not as manly a vocation as tending your father’s bar, but it pays the bills.
A couple of months ago, Slick came into the ER with a certain fashionable plastic doll inserted, feetfirst and waist-deep, into his anus. The arms of the doll were raised above her head, and she was bent at the waist so that her bare torso hugged Slick’s back. Slick was blackout drunk, and his brother Mike brought him in in the back of his police car, not because Slick was under arrest, but because he needed to lie down in the back. I imagine, if Slick had been sober, he wouldn’t have wanted his brother to help him out of this predicament, but then again, if Slick had been sober, maybe he wouldn’t have had a Barbie doll in his ass. Maybe.
I had to wrestle Slick into the stirrups. He had vomit—presumably his own—on his shirt. Once he was lying down, another nurse had to hold his head to the side in case he puked again. When we got him still, he slurred, “I juss tripped goan downa stairs.”
“Naturally,” I said. “I see this all the time.”
The best part? Slick doesn’t have kids. No doubt he purchased a Barbie doll with the intention of having it in his ass. I removed the doll from Slick’s anus, packed him with gauze. We sent him home with a hefty bill for the imaging we did to make sure he hadn’t ruptured something, and a reminder that they do make adult toys specifically for prostate stimulation; he doesn’t need to improvise. And now I hope I never again have to utter the words slick and anus in the same sentence.
I walk into the Hudson bar this evening, and when Slick sees me, he slaps the counter and shouts, “Well, if it isn’t Nurse O’Doul!”
“Give me a Bud, Barbie,” I say. Slick instantly quiets, his leather-tan face going pale as a cinder block as he fumbles to pull me a beer.
The bar is packed with Mumbly-Joes and witch-haired women, all hunched over pints of light beer. A few parents and their children are having dinner. This is a real Michigan bar, complete with roughhewn walls, mason jar light fixtures, benches in which people have carved their names, and smoothly grooved wood floors. The walls are crowded with memorabilia, like so many sit-down chain restaurants, but the Hudsons have missed the mark. Instead of kitsch, the decor announces a kind of insanity. On a six-foot stretch of wall, there’s a hockey mask, a dirty Cabbage Patch Kid, a child’s tutu, a poster for KISS, a coconut that’s been carved into a monkey head, a backlit stained-glass window. It’s the kind of place where the occasional Chicago couple, lost on their way to Detroit, will stop in for lunch and deem it “quaint,” the wife pulling a pack of wet naps from her purse to clean the table, the husband rolling up his shirtsleeves as he orders a pint. Michigan has some great microbrew, but this is not the kind of place that keeps any of it on tap.
To give a real sense of the Hudson House, Gilmer Thurber used to cook here, right up until he was arrested in June. When Mike Hudson joined the list of people willing to testify against Thurber, the Hudson family was astounded. Somehow, they’d had no idea what that man had done to Mike when he was little. Now the Hudson House has a permanent HELP WANTED sign in the front window; they can’t seem to hire and keep cooks. This place is a job of last resort.
Which I understand. Who would want to work here? It’s tainted. I know it’s wrong, but I look at Mike differently now. Like, don’t they say hurt people hurt people? And what if the guy’s so fucked now that he has no business being our sheriff? And his parents—what kind of person hires a man like Thurber? When Thurber was first arrested, the Hudson House’s business dropped like the place was peddling plague burgers. Business picked up again, though, since this is the only bar in town.
I wouldn’t be here tonight, but it’s the easiest way to track down my dad, and my dad, I figure, is the person most likely to give me information on my stepsister Linda. I tried Grandma, but she wasn’t talking. She never approved of how close Linda and I are. Well, were. Grandma wouldn’t stay and chat, said she was on her way out to the fields, working way too hard for early September, when the corn isn’t even ready for harvest. No doubt she’s avoiding Paula, who, I hear, is also back in town. Which makes sense—why my dad’s making himself so scarce.
Over in a corner, I find him shooting pool with Uncle Steve. Neither of them noticed me when I came in, or heard my exchange with Slick. It would have been nice for my dad to have witnessed me holding my own. My dad owns a hardware store. Uncle Steve is a handyman. Jared and Steve, the best of buddies. They still go hunting together every November. They probably hunt bear. Once they get out in the woods, I’m sure they take off their flannel shirts and find the fall chill exhilarating. My dad’s beard is so thick, it keeps his whole body warm. My uncle drinks extra to make up the heat. They hunt armed only with a flask of whiskey and a bowie knife each. They feed their families all winter on bear meat. So I assume. I wouldn’t know. I’m not worthy of bear meat.
My dad calls a ball into the corner pocket, and shoots it straight in. When Slick hands me my beer, I intentionally forget to tip him.
“Thanks for nothing, jack
ass,” Slick mutters behind me.
“Who’s winning?” I ask when I get to the pool table.
“I am,” Steve says.
“You wish,” my dad says, missing his next shot.
“Check the table,” Steve says.
“You might win this game, but I’m three games up.”
“I’m making a comeback,” Steve says.
“We’re all winners here,” Bobby-Jo, the waitress, says, bringing Steve another beer. He has it half drained before she even leaves the table.
“How you been, Bobby?” I ask.
“Woof. My dogs are barking,” she says. Another table waves to her, and she adds over her shoulder, “Business is good, though, so I can’t really complain.”
Steve lines up another shot, and misses.
“Maybe you want to play Derek,” my dad says, and he and Steve both laugh. “What’re you doing here?”
“Just thought I’d stop in and say hi. You practically live here.”
My dad circles the table, weighing his options. When he shoots, it looks like it’s going in, but it hits the edge of the pocket and bounces back.
“A man needs a place he can relax,” he says.
“You can’t do that at home?”
“The farm has been a little crowded since your sister came back,” my dad says.
“Stepsister. Have you talked to Linda?” I do my best to keep my voice casual, but I feel like I’m being obvious, that any second now he’s going to call me out.
“Why would I?”
“You haven’t noticed she’s never at home anymore? At least not when I stop by. Where does she go?”
My dad leans his pool stick against the wall. “This is news to me.”
Of course it is. He’s never at home, either. I’m sure he only sleeps there. He did this when we were kids, too, started spending all his free time at the bar when my stepmother left. With Paula back in town this past week, he’s been making himself even scarcer. My father’s a champion of avoidance.
The House of Deep Water Page 7
