Bones & All (14 page)

“Do you get home often?”

“Not often, no.”

“How long have you been on your own?”

“Left when I was seventeen.”

“How old are you now?”

“Nineteen.” He paused and looked me over like he was seeing me for the first time. “What are you—fifteen? Sixteen?”

“Sixteen,” I replied stiffly. Looking younger couldn't be a good thing when you were out on your own. “What's your sister's name?”

“Kayla. She's a good girl.” I could almost see him weighing the facts in his head and separating them into piles—what to tell me, what not to. “We got different fathers,” he said finally. “My mom, well … she's like that.”

“Why did you leave?”

“Why d'you think?”

I leaned forward and lowered my voice. “I can't see how you were a danger to them.”

“Doesn't matter. I know what I am.” He downed his coffee, raised his eyebrows, and tilted his head toward the door.

We paid our bill and climbed back into the truck. Lee switched on the radio and fiddled with the dial until he found a song he could drive to. “You like Shania Twain?”

“Sure.” It was a bright sunny morning now. We passed field after field of freshly turned soil, the air filled with the peaceful drone of a tractor. The world felt new again. I thought of Barry Cook's baby daughter and hoped her mother wasn't always that angry. I hoped she'd find another man, a nice man, somebody who didn't drink too much and curse at strangers in the candy aisle.

We were into Illinois when Lee decided it was safe to stop for a new tire. We parked at a service station, and he went inside.

I kicked at an empty pack of Marlboros and looked around the inside of the truck. Disgusting, of course. Not only had Barry Cook been King of the Fast-Food Drive-In, he apparently couldn't tell the difference between his truck and a garbage can. Every time he finished a meal he tossed the take-out bag on the passenger's-side floor. The only nasty thing I couldn't blame on Barry Cook was the white and blue Walmart bag stuffed under the driver's seat.

It looked like we'd be spending the better part of our days in here, so I figured I might as well tidy it up. I scrounged up a plastic bag and started collecting the cigarette packs, McDonald's burger wrappers, and empty soda cups. I'd gathered three bulging bags' worth by the time I got out of the truck to toss them in the Dumpster along with the remnants of Andy's clothes.

Lee came out and suggested we go for some necessaries while we were waiting on the mechanic. From a hardware store across the road he bought a ten-gallon water canister, and the owner let him fill it at a pump out back. There was also a Dumpster brimming with wood scraps, and while the canister was filling up, Lee peered inside and fished out a big piece of plywood.

“What's that for?”

“Truck bed.”

“Huh?”

“You'll see.”

When the mechanic was finished, Lee took out Barry's wallet to pay the bill and we went back out to the truck.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Did you change the license plates?”

“Got them changed, for an additional fee.” He laughed a little. “Otherwise we can't keep driving it.”

I raised an eyebrow. Lee looked at me and laughed again. “And just who crowned
you
queen of all that's good and proper?”

*   *   *

By nightfall we were two hours into Kentucky. “How do you feel about sleeping out of doors? There's a state park entrance not too far from here. It's safe. I've slept there before.”

“What do you do when it's cold out?”

He smiled. “Head south.”

We took the turnoff for the state park, but I didn't see any signs for campsites. Lee pulled into a small lay-by in front of a signboard of the local flora and fauna, with blue arrows along the various walking routes you could take to appreciate them. “Do you have a tent?” I asked.

“Don't need one. We can sleep in the back.”

When he'd said
truck bed
I hadn't realized he meant it literally. “What if somebody finds us?”

“They won't. We'll be gone first thing in the morning.”

“Why plywood though?”

“Even in the summer the metal can get pretty cold at night. No sense buying a piece of foam—it'll fall to pieces in no time and it's not that much more comfortable anyway.”

“You think of everything,” I said, and he shrugged.

“Once you find yourself out and alone without the things you need, you get practical pretty fast.” I watched him draw all sorts of useful things out of his rucksack: a sleeping bag and a spare blanket, a flashlight, a tin pot, a fistful of Bic lighters (“Mementos,” he said with that twist in his lip), and a tiny propane camp stove. “How's bean soup sound for dinner?”

“Perfect,” I said. Like magic, two tin cups, two spoons, and a packet of soup mix appeared out of the rucksack, which was still quite full. Lee laid everything out on an old picnic table scarred with the initials of people who were, most likely, no longer in love. The forest was alive with the hum of the cicadas. In the gathering darkness my new friend cooked our meal while I grabbed his flashlight so I could write in my journal.

“Lee?”

“Yeah?”

“What were you doing in Iowa?”

“Do you always ask this many questions?”

“Pretty much.” I paused. “If you ever feel like ditching me, will you please just say so?”

Lee cocked his head. “What kind of a question is that?”

I told him about Samantha, hoping he'd say he'd never feel like ditching me. He only said, “I don't like people who go back on their word,” but that seemed as good as a promise.

Once it was good and dark we settled onto the flatbed—Lee gave me his sleeping bag, folding the spare blanket into a pallet for himself—and for a little while we talked about things that had nothing to do with a lost father, or the hazards of hitchhiking, or things that weren't meant to be eaten. He held up a finger to trace constellations he made up as he went along—a giraffe, a blimp, a chocolate-chip cookie—which reminded me of Jamie Gash, and it was my fault our conversation petered out into awkward silence. Again I was the first to fall asleep, not that I slept well, and again Lee wasn't beside me when I woke up. My brain jangled inside my head from lying on the plywood all night.

Lee was sitting on the picnic table, boiling water for coffee on the camp stove. He handed me a steaming tin cup and we drank quickly, in silence, before we got back in the truck and hit the road. I looked up at the brightening sky and thought of my dad. Francis Yearly was out there someplace—somewhere behind us, but not for long. In that moment I knew for sure he'd only left because he believed I'd be safer that way. “Did you ever go looking for your father?” I asked.

“Nope. No way to find him even if I wanted to.”

“Don't you ever think about it though? Like if there was some way to find him—would you do it?”

“Nah. If we ever met he'd only end up dead.”

I laughed, and so did he, but his laughter fell away into a pensive silence. “Do you think your mom was afraid of you?”

My stomach turned over. I stared at him.

“Sorry,” Lee said. “Maybe I shouldn't have asked that.”

The next time we stopped for gas I locked myself in the mini-mart restroom. The floor was filthy and I couldn't bring myself to sit down, so I squatted on my heels, wedged my face between my knees, and cried.

The truth is like the waiting jaws of a monster, a more menacing monster than I'll ever be. It yawns beneath your feet, and you can't escape it, and as soon as you drop, it chews you to pieces. Of course it had sort of half occurred to me that my mother had been afraid of me, but it felt way more likely to be true now that someone else had put the words around it. She'd never loved me, had she? She'd felt responsible for me, like everything I'd ever done was her fault for having brought me into the world. Every kindness she'd ever shown me had come out of guilt, not love. All that time she was only waiting until I was old enough to get by on my own.

I jumped at a knock on the door. “Maren? Are you all right?”

“Yeah.” I grabbed a wad of toilet paper. “I'll be out in a minute.” I blew my nose a few times and looked at it. No matter what happened, no matter how things fell apart, I always felt better looking at my own snot.

When I opened the door Lee was standing right outside. “You have to go?” I asked.

“Nah.” He was still looking at me, arms folded, brow furrowed. For a second I thought he was going to give me a hug, but then he turned around and strode back to the truck. When I opened the passenger door I found a can of Coke and something wrapped in aluminum foil waiting for me on the seat. “Figured you'd be hungry,” he said as he bit into his sandwich. Roast beef.

“Thanks,” I said. I couldn't even taste it. Mama had kept me fed, but all along she'd been wishing she could lock me in a cage. It wasn't dinner she made me each night—it was a sacrifice.

“Look, I'm sorry if I upset you,” Lee said. “But I'm not gonna tiptoe around your feelings.”

I shrugged and looked out the window.

We got to Tingley late that night. Lee pulled to the curb in a neighborhood of narrow two-story houses that seemed to be clinging to the memory of middle-class respectability. The windows and doors in one or two of the houses were boarded up, and it was so quiet I could hear the hum of the fluorescent bulbs in the street lamps. We got out of the truck and I followed him down the sidewalk, passing a few houses before Lee turned up a driveway. It was a sad-looking house, with weeds growing tall in the flower beds along the front walk.

“Whose house is this?” I whispered.

“Nobody's anymore.” He glanced up at me as he bent to retrieve a key from under a weather-beaten welcome mat. “Oh, relax. It used to be my great-aunt's. She died two months ago, and nobody wants to buy it.”

“I'm sorry for your loss.” I felt stupid for saying it, but I couldn't say nothing.

“Yeah, well.” He shrugged as he turned the key in the lock. “We can stay here tonight. Then I have to find my sister in the morning, and after that we'll head back to Minnesota.”

Lee's aunt hadn't kept her house as well as Mrs. Harmon had. The air was stale. It smelled of sickness and disuse. I reached for the light switch, and Lee put up a hand to stop me. “Nobody can know we're here. Just try not to bump into anything.”

“But I can't see!”

“You'll get used to it.”

We were in a tiny kitchen. From the streetlights I could make out a glass lamp hung over a round table to our right, an L-shaped counter along the wall to the left, and a refrigerator. Suddenly I thought of food. Lee must have had the same idea, because he opened a cabinet over the stove and peered inside. “Oh, good. There's still some soup and beans in here.”

He laid the tins on the counter, opened another drawer, and took out a can opener. We had microwaved soup, and afterward I took out my journal and the flashlight. “You're always writing in that book.”

I shrugged.

“Can I look at the pictures?”

I handed it to him. “Don't read the writing, okay?”

“Sure.”

All the Scotch tape around the pictures made a crinkling sound as he turned the pages. He stared at the etching I'd found in a library book called
Weird and Wonderful Legends of Scotland.
The caption read:
The constabulary discover the lair of Sawney Beane and his cannibal clan.
There were piles of bones in the corners, limbs hanging from the ceiling, dozens of faces leering out of the darkness, and a bubbling cauldron attended to by an old hag who could only be Sawney's wife, her fangs bared in the firelight. At the mouth of the cave was a row of men in uniform, gaping in horror at the evidence of decades' worth of carnage. Sawney himself was lifting an ax against the intruders.

Before today I couldn't have pictured myself in that cave. Now it looked almost cozy.

“Sick,” Lee said finally, then turned the page to the photocopy of
Saturn Devouring His Son.
He laid his finger on the space where the baby's head should have been. “I saw this painting in a book once. Made me wonder if he was one of us.”

“Who, Goya?”

“Is that his name?” He closed the notebook and slid it across the table. “It's like a book of monsters,” he said.

I ran my fingers over the marbled black-and-white cover. “It makes me feel less alone.”

He got up and rinsed out the dishes. “I'm gonna sleep on the couch in the living room. You can take the bedroom up those stairs and to the right. It has the best bed. Just don't turn on any lights or open the windows. The neighbors notice everything.”

It felt a little like being back in Mrs. Harmon's house, except not as comfortable because I hadn't been invited. On my way up I pointed the flashlight at the framed family pictures on every wall and dresser, but I didn't see any pictures of Lee.

The mattress was old, and the bedsprings dug into my ribs. For a long time I lay awake, the air in the room weighing on my chest like a gremlin, and when I finally fell under I dreamed I was racing down long, dark corridors that zigged and zagged. There were words on the walls in big, dripping letters. I knew my dad had painted the words, but I didn't know how to read them. You can't smell anything in dreams, but I could tell they were luring me with the scent of dinner.

 

6

I came down in the morning and found a note on the table:
Driving lesson, be back soon.
I was afraid to leave the house in case anybody saw me, but I felt almost as uneasy staying inside. What if a real estate agent showed up?

Nothing I could do about it, really. So I took out Mrs. Harmon's yarn and needles and tried to cast on again. Knitting, or trying to, made me feel normal. I turned on the TV and watched
The Price Is Right
. When I heard the door slam I switched it off and tiptoed into the kitchen.