Hush Little Baby (20 page)

There are cars in driveways and living rooms blue with television light. I smell a cigar, and it reminds me of my dad, and my chest tightens.

He doesn’t know where I am. I never even said good-bye. I wonder if my mom will tell him the truth or spare him and make it better than it is.

In another window, a glass chandelier hangs above a dining room table that holds a bouquet of sunflowers in the center.

I’ll never have that again—a house, a new car, furniture, a vase filled with sunflowers on a dining room table. Above the door, a sign reads, “Welcome—The Brown Family.” Never again will I have my name. I can’t fill out an application without lying. I’ll never again be an architect or hold a job of any standing. Everything I’ve worked for and struggled for is gone.

And why? I was a good wife. I fought to make it work, overlooked Gordon’s indiscretions, concealed his insanity, endured his abuse. And this is what I get?

As we walk, the satisfaction I felt from my new job, from protecting Addie and Drew for another day, transforms into despairing self-pity muddled with homicidal anger so strong that I’m certain if Gordon were in front of me and I had a gun, I would kill him.

He’s robbed me of my name, my identity, my accomplishments, my family—and he’s robbed Addie and Drew of their futures. How will they go to school, go to college?

I loved him, trusted him, believed him when he told me we wanted the same things. The first days of our marriage were the happiest of my life.

That was nine years ago.

The bell jingles as we walk into the general store and I paint on a smile. The kids run to the candy counter. Fred crouches in the bread aisle restocking the loaves.

“Evening,” he says warmly. “You staying in town?”

“Goat hired me to work at the restaurant.”

“God has a strange way of working,” he says. “Shani had her baby last week, leaving Goat shorthanded, and along you come to take her place.”

I want to believe there’s some divine plan in everything that’s happened, but I’m having a hard time keeping the faith.

“Looking for something in particular?” he asks.

“Do you have any books?”

He leads me to the back of the store. In the corner, beside the charcoal and the lighter fluid, is a crooked stand with a handful of cheap romances and two murder mysteries at least a year old. I sigh through my nose so Fred won’t know my disappointment and remind myself to be grateful. This is my new life.

“You like to read?” Fred asks.

“It’s the best way to know we are not alone.”

His head tilts, and his grin frowns.

“C. S. Lewis said that.”

“I thought Lewis’s first name was Meriwether.”

“It was,” I say, switching gears from
Narnia
to Lewis and Clark and giving up on literary chatter.

This is my new life, devoid of literary reference and worldliness and intellectual discussion and debate. Devoid of any hope for it to be more than it is—no identity, no future, no house, no furniture, no pretty chandelier.

At the counter, Addie and Drew argue about whether to each buy their own treat or whether they should share two treats. I told them two pieces were all we were buying.

I browse the slim selection of novels.

Glass shatters, and my heart fires in my chest as my eyes dart around like a mad woman’s until I realize it was only a jar of jelly.

Gordon’s not here
, I remind myself.
He doesn’t know we’re here. We’re safe.
I repeat the words over and over until my heart stops pounding.

A woman enters the store. She wears a denim skirt that barely conceals her panties, a purple tube top, and a pair of heels two sizes too large.

“Evening, Clem,” Fred says.

She smiles a lipstick grimace around teeth that lilt to the left, buys a pack of cigarettes, and leaves.

Through the storefront, I watch the girl smoke and smile at a lone car that drives down the street. From this distance, she looks vaguely like Claudia.

If I had two calls I could make, the first would be to my dad to try to explain, the second would be to the woman who thinks she’s in love with my husband and is about to make the biggest mistake of her life. I’d warn her, though I know she wouldn’t listen.

Women are stupid when it comes to love. We want to believe the fairy tale, though every episode of
Oprah
,
Dr. Phil
, and
The Simpsons
disproves it.

I was warned, but I didn’t listen. All the warning did was make me hate the person who delivered it and love Gordon more.

A month before I married Gordon, I met Gordon’s dad. It was the first and only time I would meet him.

He was dying, and he told me not to marry his son.

Too many cigarettes and too hard a life had put him in the hospital at the age of fifty-eight. Gordon and his dad hadn’t seen each other since Gordon had joined the Marines ten years earlier.

They looked alike, though Gordon was young and strong and his father was decrepit and dying.

The scene was surprisingly tender. Gordon hugged his father, who didn’t have the strength to hug him back, and when he pulled away, both men’s eyes were wet. Gordon introduced me as his fiancée, and his father nodded but offered nothing else—not approval or disapproval or congratulations or good wishes. Beyond the introduction, the men didn’t talk, and I remember liking that, thinking words would have trivialized the moment. An hour later, I found out the truth.

Gordon left to speak with the doctor, and I remained in the room.

“Don’t,” Gordon’s dad rasped, startling me from my daydreams.

“Don’t what?” I scooted my chair closer.

His parched lips parted less than a shadow. “Don’t marry him.”

The effort caused a convulsion of coughing and phlegm that made me want to leap back, while his betrayal made me want to attack.

Had he not been dying, nothing would have stopped me from wanting to kill him for his treachery against his son, but his eyes were closed and he didn’t appear to be breathing, so instead, I took his hand and did what as a Catholic I’d been taught to do. “I forgive you,” I said.

His hand gripped mine with more force than I thought was possible, and I tried to snatch it back, but he held tight, and his eyes bulged. “He’s not who you think he is,” he rasped. Then his hand released, and I ran from the room and away from the coughing and the sickness.

Hours later, as I waited in the lobby for Gordon to sign away his father’s body, my anger was overcome with a profound sadness. Had Gordon met my mom under the same circumstances—with limited tomorrows and no belief in heaven or hell—it’s possible she’d have said the same thing about me, that she’d have told Gordon he was making a mistake.

The debate at the candy counter has escalated to shouting, and I move toward it, but Fred gets there first.

“Guess what, kids?” he says. “There’s a special today. Two candies for the price of one, so you can each pick two.”

I roll my eyes at him and mouth the words “thank you,” as the kids grab the two pieces they each wanted.

He offers a sweet smile. He has a nice face, not especially handsome, but still young and touched with hope.

I may not have a name, an identity, a future, a glass chandelier, or a bouquet of sunflowers, but in the last twenty-four hours, I’ve been introduced to some of the kindest people I’ve ever met.

I pay for the candy and for a book titled
Witness Seduction
, and I wonder how long it will be until I go insane, desperate for a conversation of substance, a colloquy about something other than the weather, tomorrow’s menu, or where the best place is to fish.

We walk back toward the Flying Goat, and I want to scream at the people behind the pretty brick houses, to warn them.
It can all be taken from you. Everything you think is yours, everything you think you’re entitled to because you earned it, worked for it, all of it can be destroyed. Look carefully at the person you think you love, be wary of your husband or your wife, because, if they choose, they can destroy you.

My crime was loving Gordon and trusting in the love he vowed back.

I wish life had an undo, that I could turn back time, and this time do it differently, this time listen to the warning. Addie offers me an orange JuJu Fruit from her box because she knows the orange ones are my favorite, and she smiles Gordon’s smile, and my heart fills with regret over my thoughts. I just wished she didn’t exist.

Addie’s choice of JuJu Fruits also makes me want to cry. I wonder if she remembers it was Nana who loved them with her first.

*  *  *

We walk home to the serenade of crickets and mosquitoes, the night song of the forest.

On the bridge that crosses the river and leads to the restaurant, Paul leans against the rail with a beer balanced beside him and a fishing pole held lazily over the edge.

I stop, and the kids run down the bank to try to find the frogs who are croaking in the muddy grass below.

“Evening,” I say.

He toasts me with his Coors, then lifts his line and drops it in a different spot, letting it sink a little farther.

“Fishing for something in particular?” I ask.

“Actually, nothing at all. That way, if I catch something, it’s a bonus.”

I smile at his lack of expectation.

I wish I could be as content. I stare at his veined forearms with their arbitrary etchings—a rose, a snake, a skull. I could never have a tattoo—the decision is too permanent: What if trends changed or simply my taste? To ink something indelible on my skin, I’d have to be absolutely sure I wanted the image forever, and I could never be that certain of anything. Yet Paul doodled on his body without a second thought, with a capriciousness that matches his lack of expectation.

I envy him.

“Mommy, look, the bugs glow.”

Addie points to the lightning bugs flashing in the blackness beside the trees.

“Fireflies,” I say. “Papa used to tell me that they fly to heaven, touch a star, and fly back to earth bringing the star’s fire with them.”

Addie and Drew both look at the sparkling heavens, and all of us think of Papa. I wonder how long it will be before they forget him, until he’s reduced to a legend in the stories I tell.

I glance again at the riddled ink on Paul’s arms and think perhaps my tattoos are simply less obvious, that I’m as marked as he is by my young, impulsive choices—a rushed romance followed by quick nuptials. I was thirty-one and ready for the next stage of my life to begin, afraid if I waited or hesitated, Gordon would choose someone else.

Three months later I was pregnant. My choices don’t brand my skin, but instead, scar my life.

“Okay?” Paul asks beside me.

“Just something in my eye.”

With the heels of my hands, I press on my sockets. I can’t erase the mistakes I’ve made, but if I press hard enough, maybe for a moment, I can forget them. And as my eyes blur, the past shifts to the present, and I begin to imagine the mistakes I’m making now or that I’m going to make that will doom us in the future—a fingerprint taken for a library card, a broken taillight that causes a ticket, a tourist at the Flying Goat who recognizes me.

I can’t change my past, and I can’t outrun it. Gordon will never stop pursuing us, and we will always be hunted, nameless, scared. And as certain as I am of my love for my children, I’m certain he will find us.

“Want to give it a try?” Paul holds out the rod. I take it from him and drop it into the blackness below and let out the line.

I’m amazed we’ve made it this far. No money, no plan.

I feel a pull on the line, and excitement lifts the hair on my neck as I reel in whatever it is I’ve caught.

Paul smiles beside me.

The hook comes up empty, and I’m filled with disappointment. Too much expectation; whatever I thought I had is gone.

“Next time,” Paul says.

And having faith in his words, I drop the line again, hoping this time I’ll be lucky.

45

I
t’s a warm day, the warmest it’s been since we came to Elmer City over a month ago. I sit reading the paper on the front porch. I wear a pair of shorts I bought at the Salvation Army store in Omak, where I went to buy bathing suits and a few more clothes for me and the kids. Across the butt of the shorts are the letters “UCLA,” which is why I bought them. Gordon’s a fanatical USC fan. It’s the first time I’ve worn shorts in six years, the first time the back of my legs and my thighs don’t bear the marks of Gordon’s abuse. If you look close, a faint yellow patch peeks from below the short line, but it’s very light and only the memory of the pain reminds me what it is.

The unfriendly man with the long braid who sat next to me at lunch our first day at the Flying Goat walks toward me. His name is Boris, and he’s the only lawman in Elmer City, a part-time sheriff who, when not dealing with the minor infractions of the small town, runs the post office. He’s also a grandnephew of Goat and the brother of Isi. Every day he eats his breakfast and his lunch at the restaurant, and like his sister, he doesn’t have much to say.

But today is different.

It’s two hours after the restaurant closed. Paul and Drew are fishing, and Addie’s in the kitchen helping Goat. Every afternoon, Addie spends hours with Goat prepping for the next day. Today’s lunch, a tri tip sandwich with caramelized onions, was served with double fries and Addie’s special sauce, a barbeque ketchup concoction she created that was delicious.

“Afternoon,” Boris says, causing me to lift my head. Unlike his sister, Boris’s voice is a deep baritone that ruminates from his thick body as though his vocal cords are in his stomach rather than his throat.

“Afternoon, Boris.”

“Do you have a minute?” His wide, dark face is serious, and my stomach turns cold. Of the members in Goat’s family, Boris is the only one I’m not fond of. His eyes follow me too long, and the taunts and insults he slings at his relatives, while similar to those of Paul and Goat, are delivered with too much veracity.

He sits beside me on the steps, removes his straw cowboy hat, and hangs it on his knee.