All the Roads That Lead From Home (14 page)

Nina has
heard each story before. It’s Ted, recalling his own time in military school
after his father sent him there, then never called, never wrote, saying this
would make a true man of him. Even the words are the same. When Joshua rebels
against his own fictional father and challenges his poor opinion of him, he
writes
I am one cocky son of God! I am filled with the purest wind!
That’s
what Ted shouted one summer night when he lifted Nina from the soft grass and
twirled her until her hair flew.

Nina is
stunned.
What are you thinking?
she asks more than once.
Were you
going to pass this off as real? Don’t you know how fast someone would see
through it?

He denies
wanting anything of the kind. He says it’s just a symptom of his own
frustration, a necessary outlet.
The further I went, the more sense it made.
And it was so easy to think my way into that place and time. Why can’t you
understand that, Nina? Why?
Because she doesn’t like what’s fake or
pretend, and never will.

***

The Arizona morning is
soft and clear. The heat that will rise later in the day is not yet felt on
Nina’s bare skin. This is the calming time. No diary, no memories of Ruth. She
lifts her arms to the sky, then bends to touch her toes, and when she is
upright once more a man stands across the road, watching her. The home behind
him has been vacant, cars on the road are heard long before they’re seen, which
has made Nina feel secure in being there early each morning, naked.

Her body
is not beautiful. It’s long and bony, and her posture, always poor, gives her a
slumped, lazy stance. Even so, her breasts are firm, and the muscles on her
arms and legs are hard. She watches the man watch her and doesn’t blush or turn
away. He calls, “Good thing it’s too early for the rattlers to be up and out!”
He removes his cowboy hat before he speaks, and Nina is surprised to see a fine,
thick head of iron-gray hair. She doesn’t mean to smile, but she can’t help
being completely delighted at being found like that by a man she doesn’t know,
who is brave—or rude enough—to stand and grin right back. The embarrassment
comes when she turns away, because she is particularly unhappy with the
appearance of her small, boyish butt. The man’s long, soft whistle sends a
shiver down her knobby spine and at last she is blushing, and feeling warm,
too, between her legs.

The toilet
flushes down the hall, and Nina quickly puts on the robe she left on the
kitchen counter. Ted appears, barefoot, in a T-shirt and shorts. He looks at
the coffee maker which Nina turned on before going outside. She thinks again
about the man across the road. She peeks slyly through the crack in the drapes.
He’s still there, taking things out of his pickup truck—boxes, a bag of golf
clubs, a rocking chair.

Ted pours
her a cup of coffee. The first sip burns her tongue.

“That
story last night,” he says.

“Yeah?”

“I’ve been
wondering why it occurred to you.”

“I don’t
know. I just think about her sometimes.”

“Yeah, but
why that particular story?” Nina brings the cup to her mouth, then remembers
the burn and stops.

“Maybe
because it was the last time Ruth and I did anything together. She left for
school right after that.”

Where she
got even worse. Some days she refused to leave her bed, other days she’d leave
the grounds at dawn, and roam around the little nearby town until someone went
to bring her back. Or she’d be anxious, clingy, needing constant reassurance as
she did that last day when she called home so much that Nina unplugged all the
phones in the house.
Grow up
, Nina had thought.
Learn to deal with
crap on your own
. Ruth’s way of dealing was to sleep, so she took her pills
and lost count of how many she’d taken. The family didn’t learn of her death
until two days after, when a police officer came to the door.
Something must
be wrong with your phone
, he said. Nina had not put the lines back in their
jacks, and her parents, always fairly reclusive, hadn’t had to make a single
call out.

“And then
she died,” says Ted.

“That
first winter.”

“Sucks.”

Nina nods.

“Well, at
least she got to meet Jimi Hendrix. Probably the highlight of her life,” says
Ted.

Ruth
hadn’t been quite as excited as Nina described. She’d held back, and Nina was
the one to pull her forward.

Ted
crosses the room and pulls open the curtain. The room explodes with light.

“Another
sunny day,” he says. “Imagine that.” Ted hates the desert. Arizona was Nina’s
idea, on the theory that a complete change of scene would return him to the
here and now. So might any of the activities she’s introduced him to there,
golf, cooking classes, a membership at a gym, biking, horseback riding, even
hot-air ballooning. That was the worst. He held the rail in rigid silence and
glared down at the receding ground as if it had no right to pull away like
that. Nina had loved the freedom of drifting nearer the clouds, seeing their
shadow lead them along like a wiser, silent version of themselves.

“You going
to get that?” Ted asks when their phone rings.

“You.”

It’s
Nina’s father, and Ted is glad to hear from him.

“You’re
kidding,” Ted says into the receiver. “He
didn’t
get tenure. Oh, that’s
too bad. Helps my chances though, doesn’t it?”

At the
window Nina watches her neighbor take a box out of his truck and carry it into
the house.

“Great,
we’re doing great,” says Ted says.

The story
they told was that Nina wanted a break from Dunston for a while, maybe to find
a new direction, and Ted would take the semester off, come along, and work on a
book he was writing about Union troops in the Southwest after the Civil War,
though he has yet to do any actual research.

“You sure
can, hold on.” Ted gives Nina the phone.

“How are
you, Dad?” Nina asks.

“Old,
Honey. Old.” He sounds like his mouth is full of glue, which means he’s on
whiskey number three or four.

“How’s
Bip?”

“Fine. Bit
fuzzy around the edges. Covers the same ground a little more than she used to.
Remember the ring? Got that one twice last week.”

“God.”

Bip once
had a lovely diamond solitaire—marquise-cut, one-and-a-half carats, a gift from
her wealthy husband before he did nothing but drink. Her story was that she
lost the ring in a card game, which was true, but not by a wager as one would assume.
She’d removed the ring from her hand that was swelling from salted nuts, the Florida heat, and liquor. Later it couldn’t be found, although the house was searched high
and low, and Bip knew her hostess quietly relieved her of it while Bip
assembled her full house.

“What
about Mom?” Nina asks.

“Still at
it. Going great guns, in fact.” She’s begun a series of paintings adapted from
family photographs. One of Nina and Ruth, when Nina is ten, is in the works.
From the ones already completed, Nina knows her mother will change the
background from winter to summer, and give Ruth a smile she didn’t show the
camera, and while she knows there’s a lot to be said for staying occupied, she
can’t see the point of taking one reality and then inventing another. The
conversation ends as it always does, with her father saying she should just
hang in there, that everything will settle down and be just fine.

***

“So, my old lady, she
says to me, she says, ‘Jud, you don’t have it any more, and that’s all I can
say about that.’”

Nina’s
neighbor sits by her on his patio, which is just a square of unset bricks big
enough for two folding chairs and a plastic cooler. They are shaded by a large
umbrella wedged between two tires and held in place by elastic cords which pull
in opposite directions, the way trunks of newly planted trees are kept upright.
The cords are attached to two cinder blocks. It’s an effective device, if not
particularly pleasant to look at.

Jud is on
his third beer. “She wasn’t talking about sex, that’s for damn sure.”

“What,
then?”

“Dunno.
Whatever she needed to keep her in love, I guess.” He belches softly. The
lenses of his sunglasses are like mirrors, impossible to see behind, and Nina
doesn’t know if he’s looking at her or the hills beyond her. It’s over ninety
in the shade, and yet Jud wears jeans and cowboy boots. His one concession to
the heat is a bright white tee-shirt whose collar doesn’t quite meet the
leather string around his neck, and the four brilliantly blue turquoise stones
it runs through.

“So, you
folks liking it here?” asks Jud.

“I do, Ted
doesn’t.”

“Not too
friendly, is he, if you don’t mind my saying.”

Ted has
refused Jud’s invitations, rejected his overtures.
Jesus, Nina, the guy’s
got dipshit written all over him. Why can’t he just leave us alone?

“He
retired or something?” asks Jud.

“On leave.
He’s a professor.”

“Huh. What
do you know about that.”

The hem of
Nina’s sundress lifts in a lazy gust of wind, and fine grains of desert sand
rise and drop away.

“Can I ask
you something?” she says.

“Sure.”

“You ever
believe something that isn’t true?”

“You mean
a lie?”

“Something
made up.”

“Like
Santa Claus?”

Nina
laughs. Jud is so real, so down to earth. He’s talked a lot about his days with
the Arizona Border Patrol chasing “illegals,” staking them out, and waiting,
always waiting, for the next one to try his luck.

The beer
she sips has warmed in the bottle from being held too long. She sets the bottle
on the brick beside her chair and watches a hawk circle above the peak before
her. The sun is so intense on the hillside that the saguaro seem to tremble.

“No,
something you made up yourself. A fantasy. A dream. Maybe just a tall tale,”
says Nina.

“Not me,
but I’ll tell you about this guy I knew, Raoul.” Jud takes a long drink of
beer, puts the empty bottle on the ground, clasps his hands behind his head.
“Now, this dude came over on the sly like so many do, then managed to stay, get
a green card, a job, and eventually became a citizen. Worked for the Border
Patrol as a translator. Most of the agents spoke decent Spanish, but once in a
while some young guy would go on duty who didn’t know a single word, which is
where Raoul came in. At first all he did was explain the arrest process, a very
one-way conversation. But then he got chatty and asked people questions, like
where they were from, and what they were leaving behind, and then telling the
agents all about it. Now, there’s this one woman, a girl really, coming in all
on her own with nothing but this little bag of stuff—a rosary, a picture of a
man on a horse, and a comb, that’s it. Well, Raoul takes himself a fancy to
that old gal, and he tells the agent on duty, ‘We have to help her, she’s under
threat of violence if she returns home to her village, some man wants to marry
her and says he’ll have her whether they make it legal or not.’

“So, the
agent, this big dumb guy name of Clyde gets a soft spot and says okay, he’ll
see what he can do with the INS, maybe go to bat for her. And Raoul takes
charge, finds her a place to live, gets her a job as a maid in Scottsdale, where the signora happens to speak lovely Spanish and quickly finds out that
her Guadalupe wasn’t fleeing anything of the kind, at least not the way Raoul
described it. She was just looking for a better life, like they all are.”

“Why did
he lie?” Nina asks.

“He didn’t
really lie, he just stretched the truth a little. Yeah, there was a guy who had
his eye on her back home, but there was nothing improper about it. Raoul was a
romantic, is all. Likes to give everyone his own bit of drama. Made up tales
about quite a few of them, I understand. Didn’t get him in as much trouble as
you might think, a reprimand, and an unpaid vacation. Spent it back home in Juarez, and you know what? He stayed.”

Again,
Nina laughs. He’s very charming. He’s never mentioned seeing her naked that
morning three weeks ago, and she’s never raised it, either. It’s there all the
same, like his interest, which fueled by a little beer, makes him lean in and
kiss her lightly on the cheek.

“You can
slap me now,” he says.

“I’m not
the slapping kind.”

“You the
kissing kind?”

“Maybe. If
the time is right.”

The heat,
the beer, and her bold words make her feel like a balloon that’s rising away,
out of sight.

“I’m
sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,” she said.

“Hey, I
kissed you and I’m not sorry.”

“I have to
go.”

“Okay.”

She
stands, and gives him her empty bottle. She’s reflected in his sunglasses—two
tiny blushing Ninas.