Stay (20 page)

We drove to Asheville the next morning, Tammy chattering, me answering in monosyllables.

I bought bedding, and a bed, plus armoire and dresser, and a couch, and mirror, shelving, a garbage can, and half a hundred other items.

“You don’t have to do this just for me,” she said, not meaning a word of it, but they were all things I’d need to get at some point.

On the way back we stopped at a car rental place, where I suggested something with four-wheel drive, enough horsepower to carry her up and down the mountain roads, and the weight to keep her safe if the snow came early.

“Why, how long do you think you’ll be gone?”

“I don’t know. A week or two. It’s hard to say.” Hard to say because apart from the fact that I would drive to Arkansas and learn how the girl was being treated, I had no idea what I was going to do. Tammy said nothing but she got that pinched look that meant she was afraid.

“You know people here now,” I reminded her. “Now, how about a Subaru wagon?”

The bed and chest went up into the loft easily enough, but the armoire took some maneuvering up the narrow stairs. Tammy grunted in satisfaction when we lifted it into place. “I’ve never been so strong.” She flexed her right biceps, then looked around. “Needs a rug.”

We stayed up late that night, Coleman lamps burning, while Tammy hammered up shelves and I hooked up the toilet and stove. By the time I carried in a bucket of water and flushed the toilet successfully, Tammy was wiping down the shelves and arranging food and crockery to her satisfaction. The bears would be hibernating about now and wouldn’t cause any trouble.

Dinner was canned split pea soup heated on the stove, and crookedly cut bread. Tammy had a way to go before becoming a domestic goddess. We opened the stove door and pulled the couch up to dine in comfort. We ate silently until Tammy was wiping the inside of her bowl with a hunk of bread. She wouldn’t have been caught dead doing that six months ago. A new Tammy, the tentative beginnings of a new life. But there were still a few threads from the old that needed to be dealt with.

“You’ll have to call Dornan sooner or later,” I said. “You should have called him days ago.”

“I know.”

“What will you tell him?”

“What will
you
tell him?”

“That I found you in SoHo and brought you back. Anything else is up to you.”

She nodded, and we watched the tiny, captive flames.

It’s a thousand-mile drive from Asheville to the Arkansas River Valley; I would have liked an early start, but I slept like the dead in the prewinter quiet and woke late, and then it took three hours to make the trailer ready for a long drive. And when all that was done, I found myself still unwilling to leave.

“If you decide to go,” I said to Tammy over one last cup of coffee in the cabin, “make sure the place is clean, and leave a note so I know where you’ve gone, and when.” I didn’t want to be worrying that she had got herself into trouble again.

“Or I could just call,” she said.

“Yes,” I agreed, but I knew she wouldn’t. Notes left to be discovered were easier. She shivered. “And don’t stint yourself on firewood. There’s plenty. And if you need anything else, I’ve left some money—”

“In the top drawer of the dresser. I know.”

Then there was nothing to do but wash the coffee mugs and climb into the truck. As before, Tammy directed me out so I didn’t end up in the ditch. The truck pointed down the track, the trailer was straight behind me, Tammy waved. I waved back, then leaned out of the window.

“Call him, Tammy.” She nodded noncommittally. I wound the window up and put the truck in gear.

I
headed west on I-40 at a steady sixty-five miles an hour,
through the rounded hills of Tennessee, and the town names tolled in my head—Knoxville, Crossville, Cookeville. Before I got to the country-western smugness of Nashville I began to wonder if
-ville
was a not-so-secret indicator of poverty and a particular lack of taste, or at least zoning control, as evidenced by billboards crowded up against the interstate like long-legged cockroaches swarming a line of molasses.

“Ah, Tennessee, it never changes,” Julia said from the passenger seat. She looked around, shook her head, faced me. “So, what’s the plan?”

I squeezed the steering wheel. “Just like that, what’s the plan?”

She tilted her head. “You sound angry.”

“Yes.” And I was, and it frightened me, because I was angry with her. “You left me. And when you come back, instead of helping me, you say I’m a borderline, not a real person inside.”

“I didn’t call you a borderline—”

“ ‘Who does he remind you of?’ you said.”

“—I asked you to ask yourself, honestly, how you used to see yourself, before you met me.”

“Before you came along and worked your magic and turned me into a real human being?” It came out sounding half angry, half desperate.

“You know better than that.”

“I don’t know what I know anymore. I’m so… Everything’s changed.”

“You’ve changed. That’s what I wanted you to realize the other night.”

“What if I want to change back?”

Her smile was sad. “Doesn’t work that way.”

She reached out as if to touch me, and for a second I thought I felt her fingers on my cheek, then realized I was crying. “It’s so hard, without you.” Help me, I wanted to say, stop this terrible ache.

“Road,” she said, and nodded at the CAUTION signs and the grooved road where the surface had been ripped off to prepare for a new layer of asphalt. Tires roared over the striations. I had to concentrate to keep the trailer in its lane.

“Why did you bring that thing, anyway?” she said.

“Cheaper than motels.”

“Since when have you worried about money?”

I just shook my head. The roadworks ended and we were now on velvety new blacktop. The wheel noise faded to a smooth hum.

“So,” she said. “Tell me what the plan is when you get to Arkansas.“

“I won’t know. Not until I see how they—the Carpenters— are treating her.” I made an effort. “As far as I know, she’s not on anyone’s radar. No one is looking for her, no one even knows she exists, except the Carpenters and whoever placed her with them. If I decide to take her out of there, no one will complain.”

“So what will you do with her, if you take her?”

I hadn’t the faintest idea.

“Would you keep her?”

“What for, target practice?” Silence. “No, I wouldn’t keep her. Not even if she was a normal, well-adjusted child—and what she’s been through has probably left her essentially broken. Broken people, as we both know, don’t mend.”

She studied me for a moment. “Pull over. There’s a rest stop ahead.”

When the engine was quiet I rolled down the window; it was cold. A hardy chickadee sang from the pines alongside the rest stop. The place smelled of freshly sawn wood. She swiveled to face me.

“Self-pity doesn’t suit you.”

“No?”

“You are not broken.”

“Normal people don’t hurt others in elevat—”

“Let me finish. You’re not broken, you’re grieving. You’re grieving because you can feel. No, your mother didn’t love you, and yes, you pretended you didn’t care, but pretending doesn’t make it true.”

“Then—”

“Don’t be dense. You were protecting yourself. You wrapped yourself in armor and pretended to be invulnerable. Growing up inside that armor twisted you a bit out of true, but it doesn’t matter. The essentials are all there.”

She searched my face.

“The armor’s getting too small, Aud. You have to choose.”

Tennessee had not exactly oozed wealth, but when I pulled off the interstate west of the river for something to eat, eastern Arkansas under the winter-pale late afternoon sun—the gas stations, the shacks with TV antennae, other vehicles on the road, even the dirt—sighed tiredly with poverty, worn and faded as though it had been through too many summers without shade, too many growing seasons without replenishment, too great a workload with no relief. Perhaps it was my mood, but I felt heavier just driving through it.

Once I was back on the interstate, the road became bland and boring. Towns like truckstops punctuated some fallow farmland and a few plowed fields. A hundred miles west of Memphis, the towns gave way to the river valley. I left I-40 twenty-five miles past Little Rock and wound west through backcountry roads, where settlement grew a little less dense and the countryside hillier, shrouded here and there with clumps of pine. For a seven-year-old fresh from the color and noise of Mexico City, it must have looked bleak.

But seven-year-olds are plastic, almost endlessly adaptable. Perhaps Luz no longer remembered much about Mexico; perhaps she no longer spoke Spanish; perhaps she was dull and content to follow her fate. Perhaps I should have stayed in North Carolina instead of driving out here in what was probably a hopeless cause.

The yellow lines slipping beneath my wheels dimmed to lemon, then dust, then disappeared altogether. The wheels hissed on loose gravel, and something in the trailer began to rattle rhythmically. Should have run, should have run, should have run. After an hour the pine and white oak grew thick and I was in the corner of a state park. I turned onto the first track I saw, and bumped along at twenty miles an hour until it grew dark enough to need headlights. Then I pulled over and turned the engine off. The forest was still and quiet and smelled of pine needles.

My breath sounded soft and even. I had the overwhelming urge to put my head on my arms and sleep. It wouldn’t solve anything but it would make the questions go away for a while.

Who had the right to choose for a nine-year-old girl? Her parents? There had been no mention of a father, and her mother had already lost her, in all probability had given her away, exchanged her for money—even assuming she was still alive.

Her adoptive father? He had forfeited any rights he might have had. Her foster parents? They were doing it for money. The state? They could offer nothing but deportation or a children’s home, and I had seen jails and psychiatric units and emergency rooms full of the product of the latter. And the girl herself? I had no idea.

I had to go see for myself. And if I saw she was being mistreated, I would not be able to simply turn around and leave and pretend none of this had ever happened. I would always wonder what I could have done, and inevitably I’d imagine Karp on his hospital bed and remember all those things I didn’t want to ever have to think about again.

Luz existed, a responsibility I didn’t want, resulting directly from my own actions. Perhaps my mother had felt the same way. I imagined a little brown-haired girl skipping along the pavement, holding the hands of her parents: me on one side, Geordie Karp on the other.

On the way to the Carpenters’ address, I passed two other vehicles, both full-size pickups. Both drivers stared for a moment, then raised an index finger from the steering wheel in acknowledgment. Big rigs were probably common in this part of the world. I could have been coming from anywhere, heading for anywhere else; I wasn’t worried. The road, graded and graveled by the county, wound through low hills. I saw no more vehicles. The turnoff to the Carpenter place was nothing but a dirt road, marked by a wooden board—their name and an arrow—that looked freshly repainted. I drove past and up a rise, and pulled into a stand of trees.

Some of the Carpenters’ fields lay bare, but judging from the neat rows of stubble, they were hayfields, bales long since sold. Clover and redtop stippled the field nearest the house, which looked tidy and cared for. It was painted light tan, probably three or four bedrooms, the kind of thing families had begun in the twenties and added to when time and money allowed.

From around the side three people—one large and two small, carrying bundles—came into view and climbed into the cab of a pale blue pickup. A Ford. I lifted a pair of field glasses and watched them jounce down the dirt track towards the county road. One adult and two children, all on the bench seat in the front. The early morning sun slanting in from the east and south turned their windscreen to fire, making it hard to be sure, but as they came over the slight rise I thought the one in the middle might be Luz. Yes. She was smiling while the boy on her right, whose face was lower down than hers, talked a mile a minute. It was a good smile.

I couldn’t get in the house because Adeline Carpenter was still there, and you can’t tail a vehicle when you’re towing several tons of fifth-wheel, but tomorrow was Sunday.

The next morning I left the trailer at a campsite and drove back to the Carpenters’, where I parked my truck off the road, just below the rise, invisible from the house. I put what I needed in a pack and climbed the hill. It was a mild day for November, in the high fifties. I unrolled my camping mat, poured tea from the thermos, and opened a Sara Wheeler book about Antarctica. Read, relax, and wait. Everything was planned, every eventuality taken into consideration; I had nothing to worry about. After a while I closed the book and watched the sky.

The sound of a truck engine blew like dust into my daydream of mariachi bands and black-haired, snapping-eyed Mexican girls parading their finery in the town square. I rolled onto my stomach. The field glasses showed four people on the bench seat of the Carpenters’ pickup. Five minutes after they drove by, I was pulling up on the bare dirt in front of their house. Up close, I saw that although the siding wasn’t exactly peeling, it wouldn’t hurt to retouch the paint, at least on the southern side. Pink chrysanthemums brightened the doorstep in tubs to either side. I put on my new gloves; they smelled of leather.

No dogs. I called out, waited. Nothing. The first farm I’d ever been to without animals. The lock took less than a minute. I took my pack inside.

The hallway was wide and warm. An embroidery sampler hung behind glass on the wall opposite the stairs.
Do unto others
… The colors on the lower left had faded, as though it had once hung in strong sunlight. There was no scriptural attribution—something I would have expected in a fundamentalist household—and the unfinished phrase seemed sinister. The kitchen was in the back. Watery winter sunlight glittered on the still-wet white enamel sink; the last time I’d seen one of those had been more than twenty years ago, in a poor town in Yorkshire. Beef and vegetable stew with dumplings simmered in a crock pot next to the stove. A bright red coffee mug stood half full on a large sixties dining table that was topped with yellow-and-blue Formica. It was the kind of kitchen where a lot of family conversations happen. I stuck the first receiver to the underside of the table.

Upstairs, there were four bedrooms, one large and one small on each side of the hallway. In the large one on the front side of the house, a sewing table and Singer were pushed up against the wall under the window. Someone was making a pair of child-sized pajamas from blue-and-white-checked flannel. A long, plain table with two wooden chairs faced another, smaller table and single chair. Home schooling. A map of the world, still depicting the USSR and Ceylon, hung behind the teacher's chair, and the rest of the walls were covered in bright children's pictures. Some were huge, incomprehensible splashes of orange and brown and yellow, but many were careful pencil drawings— a house with a picket fence, a church, a lopsided rose, a cat, a cow—and still others neat, geometric patterns drawn in felt-tip pen, painstakingly colored between the lines. Which were done by which child? There was one painting in the same careful style as the pencil drawings: a river with bright birds in stiff-looking trees and hills with tiny buildings in the background. One of the buildings had the arched windows and big doors, the sloping roof of a Catholic church. So. A bookcase contained several versions of the Bible, and a variety of children’s Christian books.
The Young Lady’s Guide to House and Home. What God Hath Wrought
, which seemed to be an earnest explanation of the Creation. There were also reading primers, and several fiction books with Plaume City Library stamps, such as volumes two and three of the Narnia series. C. S. Lewis seemed a bit exotic for a Church of Christ household. On a high shelf, out of a child’s reach, sat a set of Collier’s encyclopediae. I checked the copyright date: 1961. The first volume seemed to be missing. A small cupboard next to the sewing machine was locked.

Down the hall, with a view of fields, I was greeted in the smaller room by a wallful of cheerful young-boy motifs: cartoon steam trains and cowboys and Indians. The bedside lamp could not be reached from the bed, and a small wire cage made it impossible to tug the plug from the socket. Not the usual precautions for a seven or eight-year-old. The armchair next to the single bed looked old and well used. The drawers did not spill clothes; no toys or gadgets cluttered the floor, no stacked music system or computer sat on shelves against the wall. Poverty, or perhaps just an empty mind. Next door, the parents’ room held a double bed with a mattress that should have been replaced years ago, and an unremarkable, cheap dresser. Like the boy’s room, it was clean and neat, with one of every necessity, but everything was worn, or old-fashioned, and the only luxury was a silver-backed dresser set of hairbrush, comb, and mirror, whose perfect centering before the mirror made them treasured possessions. The design was something from the seventies, perhaps a wedding present. The rag rug was relatively new: handmade. I imagined Adeline Carpenter sitting in front of the mirror, brushing out her hair before bed, talking, and I put the second receiver under the lip of the dresser.

Luz had a tiny room, with a narrow bed that faced the window with its view of scrubby Arkansas countryside and minor road. No chair here for a mother sitting in the dark, watching over her child. On the bedside table sat the fourth Narnia book. The lamp next to them worked. The long nightdress folded neatly on the pillow was made of the same blue-and-white check I’d seen in the schoolroom. The foster daughter may have got the worst room, but she had the first nightclothes. Interesting. I put the third receiver behind the headboard, maybe Luz sometimes talked to herself.

I found the missing encyclopedia under the mattress. A scrap of paper divided
atlatl
(an implement used for hurling spear or lance) from
atmosphere
(the gaseous envelope surrounding the earth). I thought of all the households in this country that would rejoice at a child’s ferocious need to learn, of the fact that this book had been hidden away, and wanted to push Adeline Carpenter’s face into the stew to boil along with her dumplings.

The booster transceiver went in the pot of chrysanthemums by the front door. On the way back to the trailer, I threw the barbiturate-saturated hamburger into a convenience store Dumpster.