Eli the Good (22 page)

I looked away. I could never remember Nell jumping on me for anything. “I was just worried about her,” I said, which was only half a lie.

Nell was fluffing her pillow. “Maybe you were, but you were also listening when she wouldn’t have wanted you to. And that’s wrong.”

I rolled over and faced the screens instead of Nell. I could feel her disappointment standing in the night air between us. Even if it wasn’t a big falling-out, I still couldn’t stand the thought of not having her full respect.

After a time I realized that Nell had gone to sleep — her breath caught in the back of her throat, causing little halfhearted moans to escape each time she exhaled — but I lay there a long while, listening to the night sounds, wondering if Edie was doing the same.

T
he cry of a morning cicada, high and shrill, like a tiny scream that climbed until it contained a note of pure panic in announcing the day’s heat. A moment of blinding light as my eyes came open. And then I saw Edie sitting on the glider, eating from a bowl of Froot Loops while she studied me.

“You sleep like the dead,” she said, talking around the cereal.

“What are you doing?”

She nodded toward her house. “Waiting. Loretta went over there to talk to Daddy.”

“What about?” I rubbed the sleep from my eyes. It had taken me a minute to remember that something stood between Edie and me now. But she was talking to me in her normal tone, at least. It was as if she had decided to pick up our friendship again. Maybe she appreciated the fact that I had seen her at her lowest and hadn’t made fun of her, the way some people might have done. I’m sure that I would have not been big enough to forgive her if she had said the things to me I had said to her.

“I guess she’s lining him out. She said he needed help, that he was depressed.” She swung her bare feet, one time a piece. “But he’s just a drunk.”

“He misses your mother,” I said.

“Last night, before he passed out, he told me he was going to cut down my willow tree.” She let her spoon fall into the bowl with a small clank. I could see the milk in there, turned a sickly pink by the few remaining circles of soggy cereal. “I said if he did I’d leave and never come back. I told him I’d hitchhike to Atlanta. Or kill myself.” She turned the bowl up and drank down all the pink milk, then wiped her mouth on her forearm. “I’d never do that, but he doesn’t know that.”

“He was just talking out of his head.” I was trying to think of the right things to say and I didn’t know whether I was succeeding or not. Her face did not reveal her feelings. She looked out at the garden, where Stella was hoeing her green beans.

“I’d sure never go to Atlanta. I hope I never see her again.”

I sat up, threw the sheet off, and let my bare feet come down hard on the porch floor. “You want to read some more of Daddy’s letters?” I said. I had run out of comforting words and didn’t know what else to say.

“No,” she said, without further explanation. “But we could go swimming, after he leaves and I can get my bathing suit.”

I was getting braver. Or maybe stupider. My mother always said there was a fine line between the two.

Braver because I had snuck into my parents’ bedroom while Mom was at home. She was out on the porch with Edie and Nell, explaining to Edie that her father was having a hard time accepting her mother leaving and that he was going to try to do better. I watched her from the door a long time, then said I was going to put on my cutoffs. After I did, I skipped into her bedroom, opened the box — a great wash of cedar scent rushing up over me — and grabbed the stack of letters from within. I took them into my room, put aside the ones I had already read, and stuffed the rest into my canvas bag that I sometimes strapped to the back of my bicycle. I was very careful with them, afraid I might bend or harm them in some way, so before putting them into my canvas satchel, I had sealed them in a plastic sandwich bag I had lifted from the pantry.

I hung my satchel on a high hickory limb so that our splashing wouldn’t reach the letters that lay within like a promise. Then I took a high-stepping run and pressed my toes against the sandy rock, pushing my body up into the air before I pulled my legs up, latching my arms around them so I could make a perfect cannonball. I hit the water and plummeted down until my feet touched the bottom of the river. The ground there was so cold that it sent stints into my legs.

It’s miraculous, the wild places that exist in hiding. All the secret places of the world that are able to remain cold despite the hum of a blazing summer.

I sat down there as long as I could, holding on tight to my nose before exhaling all of my breath and letting the bubbles peck against my face. I thought about how it would be to die and thought this might be how it felt. A comforting but anxious feeling. All darkness and the sound of water. The thought of death was too much, though, and made a large, expanding feeling rise in my chest. I put my arms out and allowed myself to float back up.

Edie had jumped in, too, and as soon as I wiped the water from my eyes, she started splashing me. By the time we had been swimming for a few minutes, it seemed we were back to our old selves again. I suppose children are able to do that, although I’m not sure whether adults are. But I believe that Edie still thinks about the hot words I said to her that night. I certainly do. But that day we were just pleased to be swimming and together, and for a little while, at least, all was forgiven.

When our hands and feet were wrinkled from being in the water so long, we lay on the rocks and let the sun bake us. The sun broiled on the sky, a living thing that pulsated and grew larger. The heat bugs seemed to call out with the fury of the sun, screaming in the weeds lining the road. We lay there like dead people, our legs slightly apart, our arms straight down at our sides. If I had moved my little finger a half inch, it would have touched Edie’s. We breathed in rhythm and didn’t speak for a time, thinking only of how the sun felt on our wet skin.

After a while I got up and snatched the satchel from the limb. I made sure that my hands were completely dry and free of sand before I pulled the letters out of the sandwich bag.

“You shouldn’t’ve done that,” Edie said, sitting up. She held a hand at her brow, unused to the bright sun after having her eyes closed for so long, and looked down at the letters.

“She won’t know,” I said, but as these words escaped my mouth, I could picture my mother going into her bedroom and lifting the lid of her cedar box, peering in to find it half empty. Part of me thought my mother knew all things.

“It doesn’t matter if she knows or not,” Edie said. “It’s not right. They’re not yours to read.”

“My daddy wrote them, didn’t he?”

“He wrote them to
her.
” Edie stood and grabbed her shorts from the outcropping of limestone. She stepped into them with two hard stomps, then pulled her
Jaws
T-shirt over her high-necked green bathing suit. “Don’t you feel bad?”

“It happened again, the night before last,” I said.

“What?” she said, and leaned against a low-hanging branch from a mimosa tree that burst out of the riverbank.

“He had another nightmare. He hollered out in his sleep like someone was killing him.”

“Did he do anything to Loretta?”

I shook my head. “But he jumped out of the bed and knocked everything off the dresser. He felt along the wall while he screamed and raked all the pictures off. Broke them. It took Mom and Nell both to get him calmed down.”

“Well, reading them letters won’t help you figure it out, Eli,” she said. She was so sure of herself, so confident. I wished I could be like that, wished I could really feel that way deep down instead of just occasionally mustering up the strength to act as if I felt that way. “But I’ve got to go on home anyway,” she said. “Daddy took off work today. I guess he wants the Father of the Year Award or something now.”

She didn’t leave, though. She stood there, looking down at me as I took one of the letters from its envelope. “He’s taking me to the Tastee-Freez,” she said at last. “You want to go?”

“Nah, you all should be alone.”

“Yeah, I guess,” she said, skipping a rock across the river. It glided along, touching down five times before sinking. “Why don’t you come over later and watch
The Waltons
with me? And
Hawaii Five-O
?”

“I don’t know. Mom likes for us to all watch
The Waltons
together.”

“Well, I’ll see you then,” she said, quiet, looking away. Before I could say more, she had slid onto the path and was folded up by the woods. I had wanted her to at least stay with me while I read the letters. I didn’t know what I might encounter. At the same time, I liked being alone with the letters. I held the flimsy stationery out from me so that the glints of sunlight on the river shone through the paper. It was so light and thin that if I had let go, the letter would have drifted away on the breath of air that was stirring. The pages would have separated reluctantly and winged just above the surface of the river, dipping and rolling over on itself, drifting away like a paper bird. So I held tight, my thumbs on one side, pressing onto my forefingers on the other side, and read:

On this one he had signed his last name, which I thought strange. By that time they had been married six years. But maybe he was trying to hold on to himself. I thought that maybe he repeated his own name to himself over and over, the way he had once said my mother’s name — Loretta Loretta Loretta — in a sort of prayer to save himself.