Give, a novel

by Erica Carpenter Witsell

  Emma turned abruptly and headed for the barn, her back burning with all their eyes.

  “Everything all right, ma’am?” she heard the big man ask, and at the kindness in his voice Emma felt her tears come. She quickened her step, keeping her face turned away.

  “Emma, what’s wrong?” Laurel called after her. “It’s okay that we’re selling Raisin, isn’t it?”

  Emma’s steps faltered. Of course it wasn’t okay. Surely Laurel knew that. But what if Emma said so? Would the man lift Raisin back out of the truck bed, pieces of hay still half-chewed in her mouth, and return her lead rope to Emma’s hand? Would Laurel return his wad of cash and apologize for his trouble? Even at seven, Emma knew when a deal was done. Answer a question that did not want an honest answer, and she would be made, not just a cry-baby, but a fool.

  She didn’t answer, but started to run instead, suddenly desperate for the darkness of the barn.

  “Emma? Don’t you want to say goodbye to Raisin?” Laurel called after her.

  “Just leave her alone, Mom,” her sister said sharply. “Can’t you see it’s hard enough?”

  The following Saturday morning Emma was awake in her twin bed, the soles of her feet resting on the sloped ceiling above her head, when she heard Laurel calling from across the hall.

  “Jessie? Emma? You girls awake? Come see this.”

  On the other side of the attic room they shared, Jessie swung her legs to the floor. She had slept in her ponytail, but half of her long, brown hair had come loose during the night, and she brushed it from her face with both hands.

  “You coming, Em? Let’s go see what Mom wants.”

  Beneath their bare feet, the rough-hewn floor boards creaked with each step. Across the narrow hallway, the door to Laurel’s room was ajar. Inside, a dresser stood against one wall, a dozen perfume bottles arranged on top. A black bra hung from the knob of one of the drawers, and Emma stared and then looked away. Laurel was in the large bed pushed against the adjacent wall. Her legs were hidden beneath a tangle of sheets, but her chest was bare. An electric fan whirred on the bedside table.

  “Look, girls,” she said, putting a hand to her breast. She squeezed one broad, brown nipple between her thumb and forefinger, and a bead of yellow milk formed on the puckered skin. “See that? That’s the milk you used to drink, Emma.”

  Emma cringed. “Me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why not Jessie?” she said.

  “Oh, Jessie had milk, too,” Laurel said. “But she’s older, so she was first. This—” She coaxed another drop of milk from her breast. “This was your milk, Emma.”

  Emma looked away quickly, her stomach churning. She hated the thought of having suckled those hanging breasts, hated its insistence on some old intimacy between them, a bond to which she would never have agreed.

  “But how?” Jessie asked, puzzled. “Mom . . . Sarah, I mean. She used to give Jay momma’s milk too, but now he’s bigger she doesn’t have any left. Mom . . . I mean, Sarah. She says it goes away when the baby doesn’t need it anymore.”

  Laurel raised one eyebrow.

  “Well, I guess your father just isn’t interested in that kind of thing,” she said archly.

  “What kind of thing?” Jessie insisted. “Dad isn’t interested in what kind of thing? And what does Dad have to do with that?” She gestured, clutching at her throat and sticking out her tongue, at the bead of milk now dripping down the side of Laurel’s dimpled breast.

  Laurel wiped the milk away with her finger, and then leaned back against the pillows, so that her large breasts splayed out to either side of her body.

  “Well, I’m not going to spell it out, Jessie,” she said. “But you’re a smart girl. I’m sure you can figure it out.”

  Emma watched her sister’s face. She saw the moment when her sister understood.

  “You mean Cactus . . . Gross.”

  “Not only Cactus, Jess. But yes.”

  “What?” Emma asked Jessie quietly. Cactus was Laurel’s boyfriend, but what did he have to do with this? “Not only Cactus what? What’s gross?”

  Laurel grinned. “Why ‘gross’? It’s just milk, isn’t it? You drink milk, don’t you?”

  Jessie made a face. “Not milk for babies. And not from there.”

  Emma did not say a word. She suddenly darted from Laurel’s side, crossed the narrow hallway between their rooms, and climbed back into her twin bed, pulling the covers over her head. Her stomach felt queasy. When she and Jessie had first begun to visit Laurel in Baymont, Laurel had been married to a man named Kent. Emma had only been five, then, but she remembered him. He’d had a tattoo of a snake on his forearm that would wriggle when he clenched his fist. She didn’t like him. Once, when he sat next to Laurel on the couch, his fingers on her bare leg had looked like the hairy appendages of an animal, and Emma’s skin had crawled.

  Cactus was better; even Laurel agreed.

  “Why do you call him Cactus?” Jessie had asked Laurel a few days ago, as if it had just occurred to her to wonder. “That’s not his real name, is it?” Jessie was standing at her mother’s dresser, choosing a perfume for Laurel, while Laurel rummaged in her drawer for underwear.

  Emma, lying on the bed, had opened her mouth to answer. She knew. She had asked Cactus himself once, and he had taken her hand and rubbed it against the shorn hairs on his crew-cut head.

  “Prickly, isn’t it?” he had said, smiling.

  And it was, sort of, but soft too, not like a real cactus at all.

  “Because his head—” she began.

  But Laurel had cut her off. “No, not his head,” she had said, laughing. “Let’s just say a certain part of his body—” She paused, slapped her thigh, and laughed again.

  “Well, you could say his head, I guess,” she said, chuckling. “His head is very prickly.”

  Emma felt her face go hot, remembering. Already she was too warm with the covers over her; she could feel her breath crowding out the air. She didn’t like it when Laurel laughed at her and she didn’t understand. And she didn’t want to see Laurel’s stupid milk, either. She lifted one hand to make a window with the sheet and moved her mouth in front of it to breathe the cooler air.

  Soon she heard the door open, her sister’s footsteps on the creaky floorboards.

  “Em?” Jessie said. “Are you under there?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why’re you under there then?”

  “I just feel like it, okay?”

  Jessie sighed. Emma could see the blue fabric of her sister’s pajamas through the gap she had made in the sheet.

  “Want to come down and have breakfast?”

  “Jessie,” Emma said. “That is not my milk.”

  Jessie was silent for a moment. “Well, I guess it must be, since you were born last. But it doesn’t matter. Come on.”

  Emma pushed the sheet from her head and looked at her sister.

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Actually—”

  “Jessie, it isn’t. It’s not my milk if he . . . If Cactus . . . No, Jessie, it’s not. It’s . . . It’s so . . .” Emma grasped after words. “It’s so gross,” she said at last, knowing it was Jessie’s word, that she had said it first.

  Her sister was silent for a moment. “Yeah,” she said at last. “It is. But come on out, Em. Please. Let’s have cereal and then I’ll let you ride Summer if you want.”

  Summer was Jessie’s horse in Baymont; Summer hadn’t been carted off in a pickup truck for seventy-five measly dollars. But Emma was sweltering under the covers now, with the morning sun streaming in the dormer windows, so she threw off the blankets and followed her sister down the stairs.

  CHAPTER 21

  Emma

  Laurel lived in Mendocino County, in an old, two-story house that had belonged to her grandparents. As a young man, her grandfather had logged the redwoods in the forest around the house; the w
oods there now were mostly second-growth, but a few of the ancient trees remained. A logging road, now little more than a trail, still snaked its way up through the woods, but after about a mile both road and woods came to an end.

  Emma never stopped being surprised by this: how one minute she could be standing in the cool shade of the redwoods, the forest lush around her, and the next she would be looking out on miles of sun-bleached hills, dotted with the stubby shapes of bay laurels. Laurel’s grandfather had named the place Baymont after those trees. And many years later, his daughter Pearl, homesick for a place that was no longer home, had named her own baby girl after the same trees: Laurel.

  Emma could not picture Laurel outside of Baymont. She knew that Laurel had come to Bakersfield once, when she was very little, and had taken her sister and her to an amusement park. But the only part of that visit that she could remember was a ride she had gone on, a pirate ship ride that had gone on and on while Emma had sat hunched over in fear, clutching at the metal bar that crossed her lap, too scared even to scream. Emma knew that she had gone on that ride with Laurel, because she had been told that that was true. And she was not surprised, because the dry-mouthed, tangled-belly unease of that memory was exactly how she felt every summer when she stepped off the plane in the Sacramento airport and saw Laurel, waiting to take her and Jessie to Baymont.

  Baymont itself, Emma couldn’t help but love. She loved the damp, piney smell of the woods, and the sunbaked, spicy scent of the hills. She loved the green, spring-fed pond near the house, and she loved the golden pastures where the horses grazed. Once Laurel had overheard her call them that—“the golden pastures”—and had laughed derisively.

  “They aren’t always ‘golden,’ you know,” she had said, making the word sound ridiculous even to Emma’s ear. “Just come in the spring sometime and you’ll see them green. A green like you wouldn’t believe.”

  But Emma and Jessie did not go to Baymont in the spring. They went once a year, as soon as school let out for the summer. Laurel waited for them there, with that shrill, mocking voice that Emma dreaded. Emma, although shy, did not feel herself to be a stupid child. And yet as soon as she arrived at Baymont, she became one. Laurel spoke words that Emma understood, and yet so much of what she said seemed to have a meaning Emma could not grasp.

  At Baymont, Emma grew used to withdrawing inside herself, Laurel’s voice a high-pitched buzzing in her ears. She grew used to the feeling that the true Emma was hiding inside her—a smooth, impenetrable nugget—while the outer, Baymont Emma did what she would. The Baymont Emma would start the summer saying “Laurel” but end with “Mom,” the betrayal of it sour on her tongue. During the first few weeks at Baymont, Emma would cry for her true mother and beg, long distance, to go home, but it was only a matter of time before Baymont seduced her. When that happened, the Baymont Emma would forget for long hours, days even, how much she longed for her parents, how much she hated those summers away from home.

  But the true Emma remembered her loyalties. She did not belong to Laurel, not at all, no matter what worn memory Laurel fished up from her infancy. She was Mommy’s; she was Dad’s. Laurel had not wanted her when she was a baby; she could have no claim to her now.

  But even the true and loyal Emma understood how the Baymont Emma could be seduced. Because Baymont was Baymont, after all. There were the woods and the horses. There were gallons of blackberries waiting to be picked, and endless miles of lonely hills. On weekends, Laurel would take them on all-day rides through countryside so beautiful it made Emma’s throat ache.

  Laurel with the horses was easier; Emma could almost love her then. Laurel had taught them both to ride, spending hours in the sand in the middle of the ring, while Emma and Jessie circled her on their ponies.

  “Touch your mount between the ears. Now above the tail. Ok, trot on. Touch your right toe. Keep trotting, Emma. Now your left toe.”

  At Baymont, Emma learned to post while trotting, learned to keep her seat while bareback riding, learned how to urge her mount into a canter with a gentle squeeze, a simple cluck, cluck, cluck. She learned to pick hooves, to use a curry brush, to pull a mane, to slip a bit into a horse’s mouth. In truth, she hardly learned these things. At Baymont, Emma was a horse girl—they were just the things she knew.

  Even with Raisin gone, Emma loved the horses. She began to ride an old paint mare named Penny, and although she could never love her as she had loved Raisin, still she could appreciate the softness of her muzzle against her hand, the prehensile ears that flicked at every sound.

  Laurel would often sing in the saddle as they rode, and the songs seemed to capture a longing that ran deep in Emma. Let me straddle my old saddle underneath the western skies, wander over yonder ’til I see the mountains rise . . .

  In Mendocino, such lonesome freedom seemed so close—there were the mountains rising, and there the dusty roads to wander under deep blue skies. At home in Bakersfield, Emma had to conjure up such wildness, seeking it out in the empty lots of their suburban neighborhood, where it was always unbearably hot and the flies would not leave her alone. At home, Emma kept imaginary horses in the grassy, irrigated patch in the backyard, groomed them with a cleaning brush she had found beneath the kitchen sink, and galloped them around the cul-de-sac at the end of their road. But none of that could hold a candle to Baymont. At Baymont, it was real.

  How Emma loved the barn at the end of the day, Penny’s sigh as she uncinched the girth and pulled the saddle from her sweaty back. How she loved tending to her afterwards, watching the crusts of sweat dissolve under the stream of water from the hose, the damp imprint of the saddle slowly fading until her whole coat gleamed smooth and wet. Most of all she loved the moment when it was all done, the tack returned to the barn, the hooves checked for stones, the thanks whispered into soft, quivering ears. The pasture gate would squeak as it opened, and the horses, invigorated by their freedom, would toss their heads and head for a bare spot on the hill.

  “One hundred, two hundred, three hundred,” she and her sister counted, as the horses rolled on their backs in the dust. Laurel always said you could tell a horse’s worth by how many times it rolled over all the way. Only when the last horse had risen and gone to graze would the sisters head inside for lemonade.

  But that was not every day. Monday would come, and so would the babysitter, and Laurel would go to Ukiah, the nearest town but still twenty minutes away, where she worked the desk at a walk-in clinic. The babysitter’s name was Candace, but everyone called her Candy. Candy was fifteen when she started watching them, the first summer they spent in Baymont. She was long-limbed and smooth-skinned, with dark, permed hair that hung just below her jaw. The moment Laurel’s car rattled away, she turned the television on. The morning news was followed by The Price is Right, Family Feud, As the World Turns, All My Children—a gauntlet of daytime television that would leave Emma feeling woozy and hollow-headed. She and Jessie escaped as soon as they could.

  The sisters picked berries, explored the woods, waded in the pond. Forbidden to ride without Laurel, they would visit the horses in the pasture, bringing them carrots and apple cores. Better yet, they would slip through the barbed wire at the bottom of the lower pasture to visit the consignment sales, first seeking out the animals waiting in their pens, then scouring the ground under the stands for discarded bottles and cans. While the auctioneer chanted away above them in his thrilling tongue, they would lug their loot to concessions and trade them for an order of fries or a Snickers, which they ate together, sitting in the stands. Emma loved to watch the silent ranchers, how still they sat, so that the slightest motion of a finger was a flag waved, and then the auctioneer’s voice would rise and pulse and carry on.

  Those were the good days, the days Emma needed no one but her sister, the days Mendocino was nothing less than magic. But there were days enough when Emma felt her longing for home just beneath the surface of her skin, days when she would have given up all that Baymont offered just to have her m
other near.

  And yet it was not Sarah’s absence in Baymont that was the worst of it, although Emma missed her painfully. The worst part was the knowledge that Sarah was at home, with her father and her little brother, that life in Bakersfield simply carried on without her.

  Emma loved her brother; this she did not doubt. At home, she would help him push his trains down the floorboards in the hallway, or put on little plays for him with his stuffed animals. She loved his lopsided smile when she made his bears and lions talk, the way he clapped his chubby hands together. But when she was in Baymont, a terrible envy rose up in her, so that she had to swallow hard to choke it down: Jay was home. He had her parents all to himself; he was getting all the good love. When she thought of her brother by himself in Bakersfield, it was her own absence that she saw: at the table, in the bath, in the backseat of the car. She should have been there with him, but she wasn’t, and the aching emptiness she felt was almost more than she could bear.

  CHAPTER 22

  Two Years Later

  Emma

  “Hell, yeah,” Candy said, hanging up the phone in the kitchen. She brushed her hair back from her perfectly tanned shoulders. Candy was seventeen that summer and liked to lay out on the deck, her bikini top unfastened in the back, while her new Like A Virgin album spun on the record player in the living room. She had grown out her hair that year and cut her bangs, which she wore hair-sprayed in a donut above her forehead. She patted them gently with her palm while she looked around for the girls.

  “You two wanna go swimming?”

  “Yes!” They were not supposed to go swimming in the pond alone, but if Candy came . . . The girls raced upstairs to get their suits.

  “I thought you didn’t like the pond,” Jessie said, pulling her T-shirt back on over her one-piece.

  Candy laughed. “Not the pond. A lake.”