At the End of the Road (19 page)

That’s what he did. He wrapped both his hands around the gearshift and yanked like hell. There was a loud crunching sound and an immediate deep-throated grunt, and the car took off. Kyle rolled. He rolled right into the closed door. The sudden acceleration had slammed the door shut. His left arm was pinned between the seat and the door from the way he had rolled. By the time he righted himself, Kyle felt the front bumper bite violently into the granite slab. Then the car was in the air. He was surprised at how far out the car sailed. It seemed like it just floated there in midair. And when it hit the water, it wasn’t very loud at all. It just sat there in the water, gently rocking, the engine dying. Kyle tried the door, but the water outside put up too much resistance. He was trapped.

He looked at the busted-out passenger window. Water was cresting over the opening. Kyle scrambled across the seat to crawl out the window, but his shoe got tangled under the parking brake. It was wedged tight. Kyle pulled, but it just wouldn’t come free. Finally, he was able to slide his foot out of the shoe. When his foot was free, the water was gushing through the window. A nearly solid rectangular column of water. Kyle couldn’t fight his way past it; the inward motion of it was too strong. The force of it swept him up and over the front seat. He was lodged up against the rear window in a pocket of air. The car was sinking nose first. Then it was underwater.

Everything was still and quiet, just the sound of the water lapping gently inside the car. Kyle was fine. He could breathe easy in the air pocket. He could stay just like he was and be fine, but he knew the air would run out after a while. He could feel his clothes weighing him down in the water. He could kick his shoeless foot with ease, but the other one dragged, so he pulled off the other shoe. He had to get back down to the front of the car and swim out the window. The air pocket was growing smaller and smaller, so pretty soon Kyle wouldn’t have a choice. He could see air bubbling out around the seal of the rear window. The change in the pressure was causing the car to tilt over, to fall flat to the bottom. The interior would be completely full in just a few more seconds. Kyle held his breath as the car floated lazily toward the bottom. The weight of his clothes made it nearly impossible to swim, but his bare feet saved him. He propelled his body through the window, curved up, and broke through the surface.

Up top, crickets chirped in the dark night, and in his mind, Kyle could hear the paralyzed man laughing.

thum-thum. Thum-thum-thum-thum-thum-thum thum-thum. Wonder Womaaaaan!” Grace danced around her room, singing. Her little girl’s voice carried down the hall, and into the kitchen, but her mother did not hear it. Her mother was preparing a chuck roast for that night’s supper, but she wasn’t thinking about the roast or enjoying the sound of her child’s singing, as she once would have. And Grace knew it.

Grace missed her Wonder Woman doll. She didn’t think of the doll as Wonder Woman, but as Diana Prince.

She had made up her mind to get the doll back. Kyle had told her that the bad man had it, the paralyzed man; and Kyle said he was going to get it back for her. But it had already been a long time. She believed in Kyle, but she just couldn’t keep waiting forever. He spent all his time at the bad man’s house, doing things for him. And now, not only had Grace lost her doll; she had lost her only other friend, her brother Kyle.

“Thum-thum-thum-thum-thum-thum thum-thum. Thum-thum-thum-thum-thum-thum thum-thum. Wonder Womaaaaan!”

Kyle didn’t look right when he came back from that house. His eyes looked funny. There were dark circles under them and he just looked empty somehow. He used to talk and play and cut up with Grace, but not anymore. Sometimes he would just lie in the bed and do nothing. Just stare at the ceiling. He could pretend in front of Mama and Daddy pretty good, but Grace could tell that that was all it was—pretending. He just wasn’t Kyle anymore. She didn’t understand how Mama and Daddy couldn’t see that he wasn’t Kyle anymore, that he was just pretending to be Kyle. But a part of Grace realized that Mama and Daddy weren’t really Mama and Daddy anymore, either. They were just pretending too. Mama still cooked dinner and gave Grace her bath, and made sure she brushed her teeth, but it was like a robot had replaced her mother. She was just doing those things out of habit. To Grace, it felt like her whole family had been replaced with robots that looked the same, but had no emotion.

Grace lay across her bed and sang softly now. She had made herself sad. What would Diana Prince do? What would Wonder Woman do to save her brother? Grace stood up, extended her arms, and began to spin. She imagined thunderbolts and a halo of ethereal light engulfing her body, transforming her. Grace imagined that she was beautiful like Diana Prince, with lustrous black hair and straight white teeth. And a big swollen chest like Diana had. She saw the way her older brothers looked at Diana Prince on the TV when she transformed into Wonder Woman. The way they stared at her bosom. Daddy stared at Mama like that too. Or he used to. Grace wanted men to look at her like that one day.

She went out to the laundry room, climbed on top of the humming dryer (it seemed like Mama did clothes every day), and found a roll of duct tape on the utility shelf. It was hard, but Grace used her teeth to tear off two small lengths of the shiny silver tape, and wrapped a piece around each of her wrists. Grace decided that the silver tape was made from Amazonium. Amazonium straight from Paradise Island. These bracelets would protect her from any force, no matter how great. They could even deflect bullets.

She returned the roll of tape and rummaged through the crowded shelf until she found a length of clothesline. Grace gathered the rope into coils. This would be her Golden Lasso. Her Lasso of Truth. She would throw it around the paralyzed man and make him tell her what he had done with Kyle.

tracked Kyle like this. He wouldn’t have let her. But she spied on Kyle as he rummaged through Daddy’s tool chest in the garage. She saw him take a little metal saw blade, tuck it into his sock, and cover it back with his jeans leg.

The sky was a blue true dream overhead as Grace followed Kyle into the cornfield, under the barbed wire, and to the green pond. He just sat at the green pond, throwing a rock into it every once in a while. Then it was back through the corn and emerging onto Eden Road directly in front of the paralyzed man’s house. Kyle sat with the paralyzed man on his front porch, swinging softly on the porch swing. It looked like a boy spending a quiet summer morning with his grandfather. After a while, the paralyzed man drove his wheelchair through the door, and Kyle followed him into the house.

Grace wanted to see what they were doing inside the house. She looked at her duct tape bracelets, slammed the bracelets together, and believed the action formed a protective force field around her. She cut back up through the corn and emerged again in front of the Sewell house just as she had seen Kyle do last week. From the Sewells’, Grace snuck through the remnants of the pole beans, over the muddy patch where the county had run the waterline, and up to the side window of the house. The window looked into the kitchen. The blinds were drawn, but they were cracked and in disrepair with plenty of gaps to peek through.

Inside, Kyle pulled something out of the refrigerator. It was a shot—like the kind they gave at the doctor’s office. Kyle poked the needle high up on the paralyzed man’s leg, and squirted whatever was in the shot inside the paralyzed man’s thigh. Grace winced in empathy. She hated shots. After that, Kyle took a little glass bottle out of the refrigerator and filled up nine or ten of the little needles with the stuff from inside the bottle. He laid the needles out on a towel inside the refrigerator. Then Kyle took a Coca-Cola out of the refrigerator and reached down a pack of crackers from one of the cabinets. The paralyzed man said something to Kyle and pointed his finger at him while he said it. Kyle disappeared through an arched doorway, carrying the soda and crackers with him.

The paralyzed man sat there by himself in the kitchen. After a minute, he reached down into the little side satchel on his wheelchair. Grace saw something peeking out of the satchel that shocked her. It filled her with delight. Peeking out of the top, Grace saw the rich, glowing black hair of Diana Prince. Wonder Woman was in the satchel! She was right there! Grace was literally only a few feet away from her doll. But she might as well have been in another state. There was simply no way for her to walk in that house, reach into that satchel, and retrieve her doll. Not without being caught. But then something happened.

Fate, or maybe something more sinister, intervened. What happened next would set forth a sequence that would alter the course of Grace’s life.

The paralyzed man pulled out and placed in his lap a dog-eared Bible, a very small pistol, even a pair of yellowed partials, before his hand found what it had been rooting around for: a small, sloping plastic jug with a wide mouth on top. When he pulled the jug out of the satchel, the wide mouth caught on Wonder Woman’s leg and the doll tumbled out of the satchel and onto the floor. Grace’s heart skipped a stitch. The paralyzed man hadn’t noticed the doll. She was sure of it.

He pulled down the zipper on his pants and stuck his hand in and pulled out his wee-wee. It was wrinkly and white hairs sprouted out around it. He pushed his wee-wee inside the sloping jug. Grace saw that the mouth of the little plastic jug was made wide for this very purpose as it filled with the paralyzed man’s dark urine. Grace had never before seen pee that dark. When he was finished, he held up the jug and inspected it before pouring it into the sink. One-handed, he rinsed out the jug and put it back in the satchel. He smoothed down the sparse strands of white hair on his head, and then he drove his wheelchair through the arched doorway toward the rear of the house. Wonder Woman lay unnoticed, faceup on the dirty linoleum floor, staring blankly at the ceiling.

respect for the paralyzed man, she was a girl, who, unlike her older brother Kyle, had no real fears. Sometimes she acted like a scared little girl, but that was mostly and usually an act for Kyle’s benefit or to gain her daddy’s attention. Ultimately, she was not prone to needless worry and agonizing indecision. Even at this young age, she was already growing toward a maturity that would have been marked by a tendency to action rather than planning. To her, the paralyzed man was like a snake or a spider—something best avoided, but she did not lie awake at night worrying about snakes and spiders.

Grace did, however, believe in hedging her bets. She banged together her duct tape bracelets—three times in rapid succession. And then she stole onto the front porch and carefully opened the door to the kitchen.

of worrying herself to death about it, Louise had finally got up her nerve to ask Boyd for a divorce. And he had hit her. In seventeen years of marriage, Boyd had barely ever raised his voice, and now this. She still couldn’t believe it. He had actually hit her.

Louise looked at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. The eye was swollen about as much as it was going to, but the bruising had just set in. She had raised three boys, so she knew that it was the second and third day when a black eye looked its worst. She took out a tube of concealer and dabbed little blobs of it under her eye. She worked it in carefully and followed up with some foundation. She noticed that her hand was shaking. She realized that she wasn’t sure if she was shaking out of fear or anger. The makeup worked—for now. When the bruising really set in, there would be no hiding it. But she just needed to get through tonight. She just needed to feed the kids their dinner and get them in bed. Without them realizing that something was wrong. She didn’t want this affecting the children any more than necessary. But in the morning, after Boyd left for work, she was taking Grace and Kyle and she was leaving. Five minutes ago she had got off the phone with the apartment complex manager. If she brought cash with her, he had a unit she could have on the spot, no waiting. Louise had the cash. The phone service couldn’t be turned on until next week, but the electric company could have a man out there tomorrow, and as long as Louise could pay the deposit on the spot, they’d get her power turned on. She assured them she could pay on the spot. She’d been saving for this moment well over six months. She had never imagined that it would happen like this. She had hoped that it would be more civilized, like it happened on
All My Children
or
As the World Turns
. It was always a sad situation, fraught with emotions running high, but it always ended in civilized acceptance. A scandal, not a crime.

Other than Jeannie, nobody she knew had ever gone through one, so Louise could only relate to divorce through books, movies, and soap operas. And country songs. She remembered Joan Crawford in the movie
Mildred Pierce
, and how Joan Crawford had divorced her husband and became rich by opening a chain of restaurants. And Mildred had affairs with rich handsome men. Men who wore suits and smoked cigarettes. Not men who worked for the post office and shoved a glob of Vaseline between their wives’ legs on Saturday night after taking them out to eat at McDonald’s.

Louise worked the foundation outward from her eye, blending it, wincing as she worked it outward in larger and larger circles. Then she remembered that everything hadn’t come up roses for Mildred Pierce. The children. Mildred’s daughters. The youngest had died of pneumonia. And the older girl, what was her name? Veda. Her name had been Veda. A sweet, cute girl. Loving and devoted—until after the divorce. Then Veda had become ugly and mean natured. Running wild with boys. Faking a pregnancy to blackmail one boy. Then Veda ended up sleeping with her stepfather. Louise could not imagine a future in which it was possible for her sweet little Grace, her sweet little Wonder Woman, to end up in such a way.