The Edge of Juniper (19 page)

“I always thought I’d leave town as soon as I could, for college or anything else.  I just wanted out.  Something about this summer has made me think I can’t leave Abe behind.  There will be time for college later.”

“But Celia, I don’t know.  It doesn’t seem like you should have to postpone your life.”

“I shouldn’t have to.  But s
houldn’t
is a big load of crap, and I do have to.”

I thought of Abe’s big round eyes.  In three years when Celia graduated, he would be fifteen.  “He already has big feet and big knees, and I think by fifteen he’ll be big enough to take care of himself.”

“It’s not like he needs my physical protection, Fay.  There’s nothing of that sort to prevent, anyway.  I just want him to know I’m there, that somebody understands, and that he isn’t in it alone.”

I thought about how Malcolm’s dad said Uncle Todd punched Aunt Donna in the stomach.  He could have misunderstood what he was seeing.  But I wondered, did Celia see it too and was she trying to keep up the façade for my benefit, or did she really believe that didn’t happen?  Did it ever happen behind closed doors?  They’d let me see behind the curtain a little bit, but maybe I still wasn’t getting the full view.

15

“Y
ou’ll stay on
the porch!  You’re not coming in here!” Aunt Donna shouted, her head tilted sideways and her voice aimed through the small gap in the window.  Finished yelling, she slammed the window shut, and locked it.

The racket had pulled me from my bed, where I’d spent the last hour crying over the letter I’d received from my dad that afternoon.  It turned out not to be true that a letter wouldn’t contain anything upsetting.  My mind kept turning over one line from the letter. 
Sometimes change doesn’t match our hopes.
 

Now I stood hiding in the hallway, swollen, burning eyes, trying to understand the scene before me.  I leaned back against the wall, and took stock of the bizarre nature of time.  Had it been only last night when Malcolm and I swam in the pond, telling each other secret things?  Had it been only an hour ago that I’d opened that letter, expecting comfort yet receiving distress?  And now my aunt was screaming at my uncle through the window.  In the span of twenty-four hours, things had gone from amazing to bad to worse.  My body felt odd, sort of fuzzy, as though I wasn’t the one inside of it.

“God, Mom, what’s going on?”  Celia walked into the living room from the kitchen.  She must have just arrived home from seeing Ronan.  As preoccupied as I was, I found myself wondering if she’d broken up with him.

From my hiding spot, I called softly to Celia.  Aunt Donna didn’t register anything we were doing.  She also didn’t register that I’d sent Abe out the back door and over to his friend Jeremy’s.

Celia saw me lurking in the hallway and came over.  She furrowed her brow, looking far too unconcerned, in my opinion.  “What on earth is happening?”

“They’re fighting.  Something about the grocery money.”  I peeked around the corner again.  “Celia, your mom has a meat tenderizer.”  My heartbeat pounded loudly in my ears, and though I was standing still, I couldn’t catch my breath.

“What?”  Celia peeked around the corner quickly, and then slid down the wall, sitting on the floor with her head on her knees.

I swallowed thickly, fear rising at the back of my throat.  I crept down the hall to the kitchen, and grabbed the phone off its charger.  On the way back to Celia, I saw that Donna was facing the door, her forehead pressed against it.  Uncle Todd was intermittently banging on it, and the force of it shook her body.  She looked limp, but then she abruptly reached out and whacked the door with the meat mallet, leaving a dent in the wood.

Celia jumped at the sharp noise, and her face finally reflected the gravity of the situation.  “Okay.  This is okay.  It’s just how it goes.  This will be over soon.”

“Celia, what do we do?”  I gripped the phone, my hand slick with sweat, and slumped down beside her, pressing close against her side.  She was trembling, and I watched my knee against hers, and realized I was trembling too.

She blinked furiously, not letting tears fall, and took a shaky breath.  She smoothed her hands down her face.  “Where’s Abe?”

“Not here.  I sent him to Jeremy’s.”

In spite of her effort to calm herself, Celia’s breathing sped up.  “Good. That’s good.  Should we leave?  It seems like we should just walk out of here.”

“But if we leave, Aunt Donna could get hurt.”

“Or my dad.”

From through the door, Uncle Todd barked out a sob. 
“Donna!”
  Her name from his mouth was a desperate moan, a slurred plea.

“No,” Donna called back, drawing out the word in an eerily soft voice crackling with tension.  “You’re not coming in.  This is the last time you drink away our dinner.”

A roar came from the other side of the door, and a huge thump, as though he’d thrown himself against it.

Celia lurched in startled fear, and I stood up.  “That’s it, I’m calling the police.”

She stood too, and grabbed my arm.  “No!  Fay, stop.  We don’t call anyone.  We leave or we stay, but either way we do
not
call anyone.”

From the living room, we heard glass smashing.  “Get the hell away from that door, Donna!” Todd’s voice dripped with anger, his sobs tucked away for the moment.

I froze in place, staring at Celia.  Her eyes held a fear that went to the marrow.  She didn’t take any more time to think, she just reacted.  She spun around and flew through the kitchen and out the back door, shouting for me to follow her, but I didn’t.  I couldn’t move.

I watched as the screen door banged against the house and then flapped shut behind her.  Without much thought, I dialed the number that had been running through my head.  “Malcolm, can you come and get me?  Right now?”  Then I hung up.  My trembling subsided as numbness took over.

The fury was done trickling in slowly through open windows and cracks in glass.  Now it burst in like a flood, right through the front door.  I stepped around the corner, finally moving on some sort of autopilot setting, just in time to see Uncle Todd grab Aunt Donna’s arm and twist it back.  She bellowed, lifted her other arm, and hit him on the forehead with the meat tenderizer.  It was a wooden mallet, not metal, and, strangely, I wondered if Malcolm had ever made one.

I took a step forward, then stopped as Todd caught my movement.  He hadn’t let go of Donna’s arm.  He stared at me, blinking slowly as if he didn’t understand who I was, but it was Donna who spoke.  “Get out, Fay.  Leave.”

I turned my back on the scene and walked through the kitchen door and around the house, the too-tall grass itchy on my ankles.  I figured Malcolm could definitely make a new mallet for Aunt Donna. He was so skilled; he could probably make a needle out of wood.  I couldn’t figure out why I was thinking about woodworking.  Something was definitely wrong with me.  I had probably gone insane.  Then I remembered that if you think you’re going insane, you can’t be insane, and I felt a little better.

I got to the front sidewalk, and the phone rang in my hand.  I looked down at it, not having realized I was still holding it.  I sat down on the sidewalk, the yelling clearly audible through the open front door and the broken front window, and answered it.  “Hello?”

“Hey Fay, what’s up?”

It was Finn.  “Nothing,” I said, my voice stilted and foreign to my ears.

“Are you okay?  You sound weird.”

“I’m fine.” 
Fine?
  I questioned my sanity again.  I’d just learned, via letter no less, that my parents were unlikely to reconcile.  Then that horror was upstaged by the horror I’d just witnessed—a physical fight between people I loved, who had once promised to love each other forever.  I did not feel safe, and I was not fine.

Malcolm’s truck hurtled up the street, and it was all I could focus on.  I tossed the phone into the grass, with the regretful thought that Finn would worry. Malcolm slammed on the brakes right beside where I sat, and opened his door.

“No, don’t get out, just get me away from here.”  He shut his door, and I ran around the front of the truck to the other side.  I knew I was running, but it felt like I was stuck in tar, I couldn’t make my feet go fast enough.  I was almost to the passenger door when I saw Abe standing at the corner of the house, the opposite corner that I had walked around.  He was stock still, just watching me.  For a moment I thought I must be seeing things, because wasn’t he at Jeremy’s?

Seeing him there unstuck my feet.  I ran for Abe, now moving faster than I knew I could.  I grabbed his hand and pulled him after me.  He didn’t protest, but instead he ran along with me, then faster than me, getting to the truck first.  He hopped in and I slammed the door after us, and as Malcolm sped away I heard my uncle shout, “Get my son out of that goddamned truck!”

The truck flew down a gravel road, a white cloud of dust billowing out behind us. I gripped the handle of the door, as though it would keep me safe if we went off the road, and glanced at Abe.  He looked normal.  No tears, no worry in his eyes, no terror drawn in his face.

“Abe?”

He looked up at me.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he said robotically, almost pleasantly.

I sat back.  I had just said the same to Finn.  I felt my own body surrendering to reality.  I began to tremble again.  It was shock, then, and the shock was wearing off.  Abe must be a step behind me.

“If you don’t mind my asking
, how
are you fine?  Because I’m not fine and I’d like some pointers.”  It was a bad attempt at levity, but I was distraught—it was all I had to offer.  Were my aunt and uncle lying in pools of blood?  Where had Celia gone, and was she looking for me?

I saw Abe swallow, the only betrayal of the feelings he was holding below the surface, as though he could drown them if he could keep them under.  “Worrying won’t keep bad stuff from happening.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, because frankly, I felt certain things warranted a good worry.  “Malcolm, can I borrow your phone?”

“Sure.  Hang on a sec, let me park up here behind the cabin.”  Driving at the speed he was, on this road, required two hands.

I looked ahead.  We were about fifty yards from the tree line, and just past a few trees I could see a small structure.  “What is that place?”

“We’re not that far from the Tates’ pond, actually.  We approached it from the opposite side than you’re used to.  That’s a cabin my grandpa built.  Like with the pond, I have permission to use it.”

He drove his truck off the road and onto some grass by the edge of the trees, and we climbed out.  The sun was hot on the top of my head.  “Malcolm, can you take Abe and go ahead into the cabin?”

“Yeah.  I need to hide something in there anyway.”  Malcolm reached into his back pocket and produced his phone.  I held out my hand, and he leaned close to me as he pressed it onto my palm, and whispered in my ear, “You’re doing the right thing.”

When he and Abe disappeared around the front of the cabin, I stepped into the shade of the trees and called the police. My hand shook the phone as I pressed it to my ear.  After I told the dispatcher the address, she wanted details about what the police would find when they arrived.

I went silent.

“Ma’am?”

“Maybe you should have an ambulance come, too.”

“Alright, Ma’am.  Stay on the line until we arrive.”

“I’m sorry.  I can’t.”  I ended the call and stood out there under a sycamore tree for a minute, hoping I could pull myself together before joining the boys in the cabin.  I wondered how much of his parents’ fight Abe had witnessed.  Would Celia hate me for calling the police?  I took a deep breath and tried to summon my practical side.  My mission right then was to do whatever would be best for Abe.  I was going to aim for distraction, because that was the only strategy I could come up with.  Maybe it would help me too; I could use a little distraction, myself.

I pushed open the front door of the cabin.  I stopped, stunned at the scene before me.  The outside of the cabin, which had been lichen-covered and grayish with saggy front steps, had not prepared me for the visual treats of the inside.

Abe lay sprawled on the most colorful quilt I’d ever seen.  It had a huge peacock design pieced in the center, and was drenched in a sunbeam.  The bed the quilt was spread upon was made of rough logs, with the bark still on.  It looked straight out of a storybook.  Abe smiled at me from the bed, as I spun my head around to take in the rest of the small space.  Wooden furniture—bookshelves, tables, chairs—lined every wall and filled in most of the floor as well. “This place is amazing!  Did you make this furniture?”

He tucked his hands in his pockets.  “Just a couple of things in here.”

“Who made the rest?  This place is stuffed to the gills.  And why do you keep it here?”

“There’s no room at home.  Like I said, the Tates let us use the cabin.  They were going to tear it down, but I asked them if I could store this stuff here.  I guess they felt sorry for a kid who lost his grandpa, so they left it up, and let me keep it how it was.”  He looked around the crowded space, and chuckled when his eyes landed on something.  “My dad made that terrible chainsaw carving of the bear.”

“That’s supposed to be a bear?”

He smiled.  “It was a short-lived phase he went through.  I made that bookshelf.  My grandpop made the bed, and most everything else in here.  He’s the one who taught me what I know about woodworking.”

“So you mentioned needing to hide something?” I teased, trying to keep myself from thinking about what just happened between my aunt and uncle.

“I know what it is!  It’s a surprise for you.” Abe called from the bed.

I walked over and sat beside him, poking him on the side.  “Tell me Aby Baby.”

His mouth gaped open.  “Fay, you promised you wouldn’t say that in front of people.  There’s no way I’m telling you now.”  He crossed his arms over his chest, but I knew it was mock-anger.

“Malcolm’s not people.  He’s one of us.”

Abe looked at my face then, and I watched as he dropped a wall into place behind his eyes.  “No.  He’s not one of us.  You’re barely one of us.  There’s a difference.”

I put my hand on his shoulder, knowing what he meant.  No one could really understand except Abe and Celia.  “I’m sorry, Abe.”  It felt like I was apologizing for the whole world.