No Story to Tell (11 page)

“No, I don’t.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Well, I think you do. Come on, let me take a couple of shots. Just a few.”

“Elliot, no. Don’t. You’re making me feel dumb.”

“I’m making you feel dumb?”

She nodded, pulled her knees up toward her chest and hid her face.

“A man tells you he thinks you’re beautiful, and it makes you feel dumb?”

She ignored him, stayed hidden. But his opinion of her had not gone unnoticed.

“I have to tell you, Victoria, that is a very strange reaction. A very, very strange reaction.”

“Sorry. Can’t help how I feel.” She turned her head on her knees and looked at him reclining beside her.

“Neither can I,” he countered, offering no apology as he lingered his eyes over her lips then slowly drew them up her face. “Come on.”

He jumped up, took her by the hand and pulled her up toward him, his other hand reaching out to steady her and coming to rest on the small hollow of her lower back. She stood beside him looking out over the valley. She felt the warmth of his hand through her cotton T-shirt. Felt it rise and fall with her body as she breathed. They said nothing, just stood silent as the heavens slowly shifted above them, contemplated neither past nor future. She felt his fingers shift imperceptibly, more of a tingling than a movement, and she stood breathless as he slid his hand further around until his arm half encircled her waist.

“Incredible, hey?” He asked the question quietly, his eyes fixed on some distant place she couldn’t yet see.

She nodded. Wondered if he was planning on taking this further. Wondered if he was going to make a move on her. She’d stop him, of course. That was certain. It was a small town, and she didn’t even want to imagine what would happen if Bobby were to ever find out. But that didn’t mean she didn’t want him to try, because she did.

They stood that way for a long moment, then abruptly he pulled away. His gaze skimmed over the valley as if searching for a place to settle. Taking a deep breath, he released it almost angrily.

“I lied to you before.”

“You did? Why?”

“I don’t know. Because it was easier than telling the truth, I guess.”

A thin pause hung between them like a gate. She could tell that he wanted her to encourage him through it, but she resisted. Right now, he was perfect, and she did not want to hear the words that would see him changed.

Sensing this, he swung around to fully face her and forced himself to continue on. Brittle emotion constricted his words into rigid bricks.

“I guess maybe what I told you was the story of the way I wished things had been. Told you the story I told myself as a kid every time I’d get yanked out of another school that I was just starting to settle into. We did move around a lot. That was true. But it wasn’t because my dad’s job required it. It was because he had a big mouth and a short temper and couldn’t hold down a decent job for longer than a couple of years.”

“You don’t have to tell me this, Elliot.”

“I know. But I want to. I don’t even know why I told you that other stuff. Wanted you to think I was better than I am, I guess.”

An objection rose in her throat, but he continued on before she could speak.

“I was really close to my mom, though. I think it was because we were always moving. Eventually, I just gave up trying to make any real friends, and I think she did too. The only constants in our lives seemed to be the moves and each other. My dad never liked me. Resented the closeness I had with Mom. He was constantly trying to cause trouble between us. But she was too smart for him. She had a way of working things out so I didn’t feel betrayed, and he got to feel he was right. When I graduated and took off for Europe, it was less for the adventure than it was just a way to get away from him.

“Mom wanted me to go. She wanted me to go more than I wanted to go. And I’m glad I listened to her. Europe changed everything for me. It changed me. When I came back home, I wasn’t the same person who’d left. I’d seen and done things that my father would never see or do. And that gave me a sort of power over him. He just didn’t seem so frightening, anymore. He just seemed kind of sad and pathetic and insignificant.

“Anyhow, first week I was back home I was sitting with mom in the living room, having tea and looking at my pictures when he came home from the bar, drunk. He started yapping at me, but I just ignored him. All of a sudden, he reaches down and grabs the album from Mom’s hands and rips it from her, spilling her tea all over her lap. I went at him with twenty years of bottled up rage. And he was so bloody stupid, he thought I was after my pictures, so he swung them up over his head like we were in a game of keep away. Lost his balance and fell down the stairs. To this day, he still maintains that I pushed him. He landed badly. Busted his neck and ended up in a wheelchair.”

“Oh! Elliot, that’s so horrible.”

“Actually, I think it all turned out exactly the way he wanted. Ended up with my mom giving him full-time care and a justifiable reason to get rid of me. After that, I was sort of lost. Ended up doing too many drugs, drinking, wasting my days away just hating him. Then one day I looked in the mirror and realized that I hated myself just as much as I hated him. That I was becoming him. And that was the end of it, right there. I’d always had an interest in art, so I went to work, saved up some money and applied to school. I was totally shocked when I got in.

“But it was the best thing in the world for me. I felt plugged into life. Like I’d just woken up and realized who I was for the first time. And I just sort of went at it maniacally. I studied and painted and traveled like any day it could all come to an end. Then one day I clued in that I was trying to be everything that my father could never be. That paint and knowledge had just become my new drugs. And I realized that I had to make peace with the fact that he’d been a shitty father. Make peace with the fact that my own father hated me. I never actually talked to him about it. There wouldn’t have been any point. But, in my own head, I knew I had to let it go.”

“How’d you do that?” she asked.

“Well, that was the funny thing. Once I figured out that was what I had to do, it was as if it was already done. I just moved on. Bought a little place with some money my grandfather left me and started fixing it up. Sold it and made a profit, and so I did it again. And again. And again.

“I know people around here think I’ve made my money with my painting, but I didn’t. Well, not most of it, anyhow. The houses are my real art. Trying to create a sense of home and stability I never had. Problem is, once they’re done I can’t seem to stay in them anymore. It’s like I don’t fit. Crazy, hey?” He laughed lightly, glancing down at her to gauge her reaction to what she’d just been told. They sat in silence for a moment as his words swirled around them like water without a place to settle.

“So, anyhow, that’s the truth of it. I’m sorry I lied to you before.” He looked at her almost shyly.

She smiled at him softly, and as she viewed him in this new light she decided the revelation of this imperfection only made him all the more perfect.

“Don’t be. I think most people probably have things in their past that they’d rather leave there.”

“Yeah. I suppose. Is that how it is for you?”

She drew back. An alarm thudded deep in her veins. Had his whole confession just been an intentional attempt to lead her up to this moment? A way to disarm her defenses so he could safely ask her such an intimate question? She tried to shrug the suggestion off as ludicrous, but she couldn’t. It didn’t feel ludicrous. And ludicrous or not, that is what he’d achieved, walking in comfortably and asking her a question she would not even have dared ask herself.

She realized suddenly that the air had become cool with the arrival of late afternoon and she shivered. She needed to get back home. She’d ask Elliot to drop her off at the end of the driveway under some pretense of wanting to pick some wildflowers for the table. And when Bobby asked about who’d driven her home, she’d tell him, then concoct some story about how she’d found Elliot Spencer a little bit strange.

“Bobby, you’d better hurry. It’s almost eight o’clock; the boys will be here anytime now.”

“All right, already. Relax a minute, will ya. I’m just gonna have a quick shower.”

“Bobby! You can’t have a shower, they’ll be—” The roar of water crushed her protest mid stream.

Tears stung in her eyes as she whirled around, clenched fists powerless to stop him. Shit! He could be such a jerk. He knew how much she hated it when he came home late on Saturday nights. Hated having to fend off the abrasive, arrogant John Jr., who amused himself while waiting for his friend by tormenting his friend’s wife. Frustration burned up into her throat and spread out to her limbs. She wanted to punch something, break something. Yell. Scream. But she turned her fury in on herself, swallowed her rage as clenched fists drove hard nails into tender palms. Saturday was poker night. No one had planned it that way, it just was. Started the Saturday night of their wedding. Started as a big drunken joke: the boys thinking it would be immensely funny to barge in on the newlyweds at three o’clock in the morning and haul Bobby out of bed to drink whiskey and play poker.

It was not funny, however, and Bobby had sworn vilely into the black bedroom as they thundered on the trailer door demanding in a slurred, howling chorus to be let in. She’d been sure Bobby was going to set them straight in no uncertain terms. She’d even cautioned him to remember that they were his best friends and drunk, and that he should go easy on them. Ignoring her, he’d ripped open the bedroom door and exploded down the hallway like a bullet through the barrel of a gun. But, by the time he’d traversed the short distance to the porch door, his Hyde had turned to Jekyll, and he greeted his friends with good-ol’-boy slaps on the back and an overly loud, upbeat invitation to come on in.

She’d lain awake until morning had pushed itself in around the edges of the tattered blanket nailed across the window. Lain awake listening as the four of them drank themselves into a silent stupor, and then she’d got up to repair the damage. Emptied the ashtrays, picked drowned butts out of glasses, washed the dishes, swept the floor. The first few years she’d even found blankets to lay over the comatose bodies lying inert wherever the alcohol had declared victory and the muscles had failed. The rocker, the bathtub, the floor. After a while she’d just saved herself the bother; they never acknowledged her kindness anyhow, as oblivious to it as though the blankets had just arrived on their own accord. On the good nights, they drank themselves sick before they drank themselves dead, and they could still find their way home again. It was a weekly ritual that played over and over again, like a reoccurring nightmare she couldn’t escape and gradually she came to accept as her life.

Bobby had been repentant, if not apologetic, after the first night. Promised her a real honeymoon once the crops were in. Somewhere exotic. Somewhere neither of them had been, which was pretty much anywhere. But the extra cash was needed for tractor repairs that year and for trailer repairs the next. And each year brought the promise of the next, until she gave up waiting and he gave up promising.

The pounding of water joined her thoughts. Her hands white-knuckled around a carving fork; she stuck it deep into the roast and returned it to the oven. She wiped her hands on her jeans, struggled for a full breath. Elliot was right. She was uptight. Needed to relax, have fun for a change. But relaxing seemed a foreign word to her, partially grasped but not fully understood. Relax. Have fun. Sure, sounded simple off his tongue. But how could she relax when life kept coming undone, the whole damn thing instantly fraying every time she took her finger off the knot.

She tucked her fingertips into the softly rounded groove of the windowpane and yanked at it several times before it finally relented with a resentful crack and let itself be slid open. More and more often now, she found herself opening the windows to escape the claustrophobic closeness that pressed in on her, hoping to replenish the stagnant air that sat thickly in her lungs. Her hipbones pressed against the edges of the faded orange counter as she leaned across it to catch the fresh air stealing in through the window. Her eyes closed as the crisp night touched her face. Her mind floated backward to the day three weeks previous and began to strum serenely over its perfect chords. Pausing occasionally, she tried to retrace each word, each wink, each touch, and she grew irritated by her mind’s inability to recall the vivid feelings, diluting their red intensity into a dull brown.

A slow sucking sound startled her as Bobby opened the bathroom door and emerged behind her. His towel-dried black hair glistened in a spiky disarray that would have looked boyish had it been able to overcome the ferociousness of day-old stubble.

“Hey, Vic, you seen my knife?”

“What knife?”

“My Swiss Army knife.”

“Nope.”

“Sure?”

“Yup.”

“Well,” he said slowly, “that’s strange “cause it seems to have gone missing again.”

Victoria shrugged nervously. “I’m sure it’ll show up somewhere. Hungry?”

She drank one more breath of fresh air, resealed the window and hurried to fill his plate with thick slabs of meat, a mound of potatoes and a forest of vegetables. The whole time she listened to his movements, feeling the air for his mood. She heard the raw scrape of the chair as he yanked it from the table, carelessly crashing it into the wall as he cursed the confines of the trailer. She set his plate in front of him as he lowered himself onto the chair, then smashed a dozy housefly under his fist, flicked it from the table and wiped his hand over his jeans.