Soil (26 page)

35

Jay felt carved out and hollow all of Sunday, anxious for her to show. Would she be alone? Well, of course, he knew that. And then what would he say to her? Was there a simple answer for all of this or would he have to fight to get it out of her?

The only sure way to know whether or not she was with the deputy would be to look her in the eyes, to study every gesture. Even without trust, they knew each other too well. You're with someone long enough and you graft into one another. Sometimes you have to run in horror when you see the other side of yourself.

Sunday hadn't been as easy with Jacob, whether he was simply tired or still sore over the knife. He'd spent a good portion of the day whining about the empty BB gun, pleading for more ammunition. He just wouldn't let it go. Later he cried when he discovered his mom hadn't packed his handheld video game. He wanted desperately to play it, and when Jay asked him the point of the game, he reverted from a bright and curious boy to a mumbling automaton who couldn't even convey the details, just kept saying, “You're this little thing and you move things around and get things.”

So this was what it meant to live in town, Jay decided. The blessed artifice, the instant cure for want. Everyone was digging themselves deeper, surrendering the key to their being. No one saw the need to redress these things. No one saw how terribly it would all end. How could he send Jacob back there? What kind of father would he be?

He was wondering this alone when he heard tires on gravel. His heart
took cover. He crouched at the window and traced her slow, nervous ascent from the road. He moved to the kitchen window and watched her sitting in the car, waiting for her boys. She finally got out and looked around. He made her wait, let her realize that this was no longer her home. He did this even as it pained him to see her this way.

Before she could knock, he popped into view, startling her a little. She'd cut all her hair off. She looked bloated and drained of life. Something was happening to her too, he realized, and he was seized by a kind of empathy that was still borne from deep love.

Jay opened the door and slipped out in socks as Chipper darted ahead of him. He closed the door carefully behind him.

“You scared me,” she said with a bit of a smile.

He smiled back. “Hey.”

“Wow, you're looking a lot better,” she said.

Clean-shaven, tight hair, and bronze skin, a bit of food filling in his sunken features. “Thanks.” He wished he could say the same about her, even just to be nice. Nevertheless, she had a rosy wounded aura about her, and he wanted to grab her up and carry her inside, tend to her and take from her and never let her leave. If it had just been the two of them living here, would they still be together?

“How was the weekend?” she asked.

“It was perfect. We did a few chores, we camped and fished. We played with Chipper.”

Chipper was standing before her, his neck craned up with a goofy smile and his whole back end wagging.

“It was just what we both needed, I think. I'm glad you made the offer.”

They stood facing, each sizing up the other. They could have come together and embraced and cured everything in that moment but for the oppressive doubt crowding between them.

“How's your dad?” he asked.

“He's still in a coma. Stable but . . .”

“God, I hated to hear it. But I know he'll come out. Right?”

“I don't know, Jay. I think. Maybe.”

He let the coarse silence linger between them, gave her room to confess. He tried to penetrate her thoughts, to convey his knowledge of her disloyalty through the air like a clairvoyant.

“So where is he?” she finally asked.

“Who?”

She gave him a queer stare. There was an innocent confusion there, possibly fear or even a well-played conceit. She was unwilling to confirm anything. “Jacob. Who do you think?”

“He's in there.”

“Well, is he ready? We probably need to get back and start preparing for the week.”

“He's just taking a nap.”

She checked her watch. “It's kind of late to be napping. I don't want him to be up all night.”

“Sandy,” said Jay. “I think he needs to stay here with me awhile longer.”

“No.” She said it as if she'd heard something mildly outrageous. “What makes you say that?”

“It's good for him to be with his father.”

“Yeah, but he has school. How will you get him to and from?”

“I can teach him all he needs.”

“No, Jay. That's ridiculous.”

“Why? What will they teach him in town that I can't teach him well enough or better out here, Sandy? Say? Teach him how to be a stoolie?”

“A what?”

“Rat out his old man?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You think I don't know about this deputy?”

She paused too long, snared in some baited half-truth.

“What are you telling him about me?” Jay asked.

“Who? Jacob?”

“No, the deputy. He's been out here. He keeps coming out to harass me. Did you know that? Did you put him up to it?”

“Jay, I barely even know this man.”

“Oh, of course. Such strangers that he gives Jacob nice gifts and visits you and your dad at the hospital.”

“No, Jay. You've got it wrong. I never asked for his help or invited him anywhere. He just insinuated himself into our lives, and finally, this weekend in fact . . .” She started to weaken, to choke up. “He showed up at the house and I told him to leave us alone. It scared me, if you want to know the truth.”

“So you called him off, just like that? After he's already brought half the sheriff's force out here to search my land, like I'm a common suspect. There's a murder case, Sandy. And I'm forced to entertain his scrutiny and his humiliating implications any time he feels like dropping by. Did you give him a hot tip or something?”

“What?”

“Did you tell him about my grandfather? He seems to think I'm cut from the same cloth.”

“I have told this man nothing. He knew about your grandfather already. He must have been using me to get more information about you, but I gave him nothing, I swear to you.”

Hysteria was finding her.

“Using you? What, did he get more than just information?”

“That's disgusting,” she said. “This is too much to think about right now, Jay. Just bring Jacob out here and let me leave.”

“I said he's staying with me. You won't use our son as leverage against me.”

“This is insane, Jay!” she cried. “You bring him to me right now!”

“Why don't you call your deputy and report me?”

“Jay!”

She was crying now, terrified. It seemed at this moment that all hope for
their family was lost. All that was left was a bitter fight that would leave everyone permanently injured.

“Look what you've done, Sandy. And you thought it was me all along. I only wanted a private life for all of us, but you didn't trust me. It wasn't comfortable enough. Now you've brought strangers in to arbitrate our life. Idiot strangers with their own axes to grind.”

“What
I
have done? You don't even know what you're talking about! It's your usual paranoia!”

“You're damn right I'm paranoid. When a man tries to come between me and my son.”

“Let me see him, Jay! Let me see him at least.”

“Why, so you can bawl and grovel and make him feel guilty for staying here with me? It's what
he
wants, Sandy. It's his own idea.”

“He's a child. He needs to be in school.”

“I said I'd take care of that.”

“Real school, Jay! Not your indoctrination!”

The boy appeared at the door, rubbing his eyes, a sleepy confusion on his face. Jay opened the door and let him out. Chipper licked him savagely, and the boy nudged the dog away. “Mom?”

Sandy fell to her knees and scooped up her boy.

“What's wrong, Mom?”

“I didn't know where you were.”

“I was sleeping. What happened to your hair?”

She clenched him with no intention of ever letting go.

“I told your mom you wanted to stick around a few days longer,” Jay said.

“Can I, Mom?”

She didn't answer for a while, not until she could control her emotions. “Oh, honey, but school starts back tomorrow. Don't you want to come home?”

“No, Mom.
This
is home.
You
should come back.”

Jay looked at her and shrugged. She cocked her eyes at him oddly, tears forming a prism of vacant glare, her mouth tight and quaking. He'd won on
a technicality, but now he felt that he'd boxed her out. There was no way she could stay, no way she could leave with her son.

He crouched down beside her. He didn't feel comfortable with her in this supplicating pose. “We're fine here,” he assured her. “Go and be with your father. He needs you. Let me help. It's what a family does in hardship.”

“Oh, this?” She couldn't help but laugh, ironically, her eyes swollen as sponges.

He was only trying to give her a graceful exit but could tell by the horror on her face that he'd revealed his own worst nature. He'd become someone who didn't stand as a good husband, a person he would never have tolerated or believed himself.

She held the boy in front of her, kissed him on the forehead. She told him she loved him more than anything, more than everything together, and then she stood up and staggered red-eyed and rejected back to the car. She got in and drove out of sight, into the harrowing distance. Father and son stood there in shamed silence, incapable of words, each discovering, either for the first time or all over again, how a woman's tearful surrender can shatter all you ever thought you wanted.

36

Sandy drove home in moving violation, weaving and speeding and slowing, guided by memory or luck through her bleary-eyed view and the spider-web cracks of her marriage, which was totaled now. Nothing could save them. Not even Jacob, who didn't deserve to watch their disintegration. He would learn that all love ends in spectacular cruelty and that you just limp away toward the next fling, always craving more passion and anger.

She awoke from her stupor when she walked into the total darkness of the shitbox. The nights came quicker each day, and she was unprepared to meet it alone. There was a creak at the far end of the house. She fumbled through her bag for the pepper spray and stood in the hallway with her arm outstretched, the canister poised and waiting for someone to appear. But there was no one.

She walked through the house to embolden herself, to beat back the darkness. She had nothing to fill it except noise and light, so she turned on every lamp, fired up the television, and vacuumed the one rug over and over. The more she created this impression of life, the lonelier she felt. It had been this way all weekend, but even more now that the prospect of Jacob had been erased. It was all she could think, that she had forfeited him.

She opted to visit the hospital. Maybe a miracle awaited her there. Instead, the situation was unchanged. Her dad was hooked to the same machines, lying there with the same pursing lips and soft napping eyes. He looked so peaceful that she stopped feeling nervous about him. She even thought it would be nice to switch places and sleep for a month herself.

She took the elevator downstairs and walked the anonymous corridors, past a family huddled in grim teary-eyed vigil, to the cafeteria, where she sat alone in a corner and ate a plate of cold chicken strips and a salad, a baked potato, two ice cream bars, a bag of salty chips. She went back up to the room and kicked out the vinyl sleep chair to its chaise setting, put her feet up and held her father's hand. She turned on a reality show about couples racing across the world, arguing and screaming at each other in airports and rental cars. She fell asleep and was shaken awake by a nurse at 9:30, past visiting hours. She kissed her dad on the forehead, walked briskly through the ominous heat-lamp glow of the parking lot, and arrived back at the well-lit rental house by ten. She made herself a second dinner and sat down on the twin bed where Jacob's scent was trapped in the covers, a balled-up pair of dirty socks under the pillow and a half-empty cup of juice on the nightstand. She watched a movie on the television that starred the actress from the magazine cover, wearing her old pre-pixie haircut, and it looked so much better. She fell asleep in twenty minutes with all the lights on.

On Monday she could barely summon the will to teach. The kids were geared up for homecoming week and couldn't sit still long enough to do their work, so she checked out a video from the library, a documentary about bears. The kids wouldn't even sit still through the film. They insisted on rewinding one scene over and over again, a national park grizzly charging and head-butting a parked car. They cheered the violent impact and laughed mercilessly at the terror-stricken man trapped within.

She went directly to the hospital after work, dined on the same thawed-out fare, caught up on all the local crime and national celebrity scandals. When she couldn't bear to watch any more, she switched off the television and sat on the edge of her father's bed. She confessed to him that she'd lied so long ago when he asked if she approved of his marriage to Miss Sue.

“I was thirteen and selfish,” she said. “I was embarrassed that you were marrying again so soon. I just needed you to be sad with me for a while longer. She didn't deserve to be with us.”

He lay tranquil. His static features betrayed nothing. Her painful admission hadn't made a dent, but she had it off her chest.

The next morning she called in sick, covered the windows, and switched on the horrid daytime television lineup. She raided the cabinets, turned out all the snacks. First she decimated a bag of candy she'd been saving for Halloween, and then the breakfast tarts, the granola bars, the cheese sticks and popsicles. With everything else gone, she found a wax harmonica and was filled with a reprehensible desire to taste it. She had to throw it behind Jacob's bed, into that gulley of dust bunnies and toy cars and old raisins, to keep from devouring it.

In the bedroom she raised the window shade, took off her nightgown, and studied her body in the mirror behind the closet door. She was turning dumpy, just shy of whale. Her haircut was slow to recover. Her cheeks were round and red, her upper arms and thighs had doubled, maybe even tripled in size since she stopped working on the farm. Her breasts were fuller but in an oozing way, and her lap was a woolly nest.

Who was this person? Why would anyone find her attractive? Who would waste their time outside her window with a video camera or beneath her like a dog with his nose in her backside?

She changed into her robe and lay on the couch in flu-like misery, though she hadn't a fever or a sniffle. She had always dismissed depression as a kind of lazy, willful sadness, but she was starting to understand how it got its tentacles around you, pulled you under, bound your muscles with no recourse, dimmed your mind by lack of oxygen. She started to find it physically difficult to breathe and had the phone in her hand at one point, taunting herself to call the ambulance. The only thing that kept her from dialing was the fact that she couldn't abide going back to the hospital. She was consumed with guilt for not being there now with him, but she couldn't imagine walking through those automatic sliding doors again, making that long dreaded trek to her father's room. The smell of the place was permanent in her clothing, she could smell it when she lay down at night. Sometimes when a car passed
by her window, she jerked awake thinking the nurse had come in to check vitals.

She drifted off to sleep and was woken some time later by thumping car stereo bass, shuffling feet, and a man cursing outside. Was it Jay? Danny? He was aggravated, possibly unstable, standing right by the door and probably peeping at her through the rectangle of window. She lay motionless, as if the tormented guest were some wild animal blind to anything without movement. There followed a rustle of paper in the mailbox and a wretched scuffling retreat. She got up and peered out the window, trying to catch a glimpse of her disenchanted caller. Only the mailman. She watched his tragic silhouette in the mail truck, head in hand, hopelessly sorting through the next block's batch of deliveries. Who wasn't completely ruined by life?

She cracked the door and reached out for the wad of letters in the box. Catalogs and advertisements, bills and notices. She unfolded the weekly circular, a page of news and the rest of it ads. On the cover was the photo of a smiling young boy who had drowned fishing at the reservoir. His body had not been recovered. She began to weep for the boy's mother, and it made her miss her own son terribly until she couldn't catch her breath. The world was spinning cruel and her Jacob was out in it. She trembled, or maybe it was only the whump-whump from the parking lot, vibrating over the earth and up through the legs of her chair. Out the back window was the ridiculous tricked-out gold car, the young thuggish driver on his phone. She imagined charging out and ramming her head into the passenger door.

She resigned herself to calling the cops finally. She dug the phone out of her purse and scrolled through the numbers. There, where she'd called him two weeks ago to catch her basement prowler, was Shoals's number. She highlighted the digits and willed herself not to punch it. He would do whatever she asked. She could have this loitering fool put in jail, possibly murdered. At this point, he'd probably even drive out and bring Jacob back if she wanted. Could it be done, she wondered, without involving the whole department or making a record of it? Just have him go out and fetch the son she'd given
away. She hadn't given him up, only protected him from seeing his parents at each other's throats.

She wondered how her father would handle the guy in the parking lot and realized it was none of Shoals's business. It had nothing to do with Jay and his terrified delusions or possible insanity. It wasn't even about dear Jacob. It was about Sandy Messler Mize.
Who are you going to be? Who will you be, alone in the dark?

She gripped her pepper spray and charged out the back door onto the rickety deck and through the strip of backyard. The car sat ten paces from her door, rattling with bass, and she wondered how anyone could find this sound musical. It made no rhythmical sense, was just noise generated by some amateur in a studio playing with the knobs. She leaned down and yelled through the open passenger window, “Move along, or turn that shit off! People are trying to live here!”

The dude turned, startled, and gave a half-nod and a passive wave, rolled up the automatic window and eased forward, right on through the lot and up Waller, simple as that. The renewed silence made way for songbirds and the noise of children down the street. She sat on the deck and listened to the newfound peace.

She could always just drive out and take Jacob herself. Or she could use this time to start packing. They could move into her dad's place, get ready for his return. He'd need help with the recovery. No more of this halfway house, no more quaking bass, no more school. She had to be a mama grizzly.

And then the phone strummed in her hand, a strange number.

“Hello?”

“Sandy—” It was Jay, breathless and far away. “Something's happened. We need to meet.”