The Girl from Charnelle (42 page)

“What are you thinking?” her father asked, his voice surprising her.

She turned to him. “Do you ever think about her?”

“Who?”

“Momma?”

He took a deep drag from his cigarette, seemed to hold it for a long time, and then exhaled it out the window. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “Of course I do.”

“What do you think when you think about her?” she asked.

She wanted him to talk about it, but this was new territory for them both. She tried to read his expression, but it was so dark that she could see only the shadow and silhouette of his face.

“Mainly stuff when you kids were younger,” he said slowly. He did not seem upset by her question. “And before any of you were born, when we were courting. She was such a beautiful woman—with her long blond hair and those thrown-back shoulders and that lovely face that seemed as mysterious as a sphinx. I remember long ago better than more recently. I'm not sure why.”

“Do you miss her?”

“Hmmm. I don't quite know how to answer that.” He took another drag and then stared ahead at the road. “I don't really
want
to miss her, Laura. I try not to think about her. But I do, of course, especially sometimes early in the morning, before any of you get up. Or when I look at you, or when we saw Gloria last summer. You both seem so much like her when she was a young woman. So pretty. Or the way Gene hiccups and the way he looks when he's reading. His concentration, his quietness…it reminds me of her. Lots of things, I guess.”

She smiled, but then they fell silent again, and she found her thoughts slipping darkly toward her mother's disappearance, the nagging whys that she had not wanted to think about but kept thinking about and that Anne Letig had forced her to pick at like a scab that can't be left alone.

“Why did she leave?” she asked.

Again he was slow to answer, glancing over at Laura in the dark. He sucked on his cigarette and then said quietly, “I don't know. None of us
could have predicted that she would just vanish like she did. No one
does
that. But I guess on some level I wasn't totally surprised. I wasn't the greatest husband, Laura.”

She nodded, not to agree with him but to encourage him to continue.

“I guess you're old enough to know that. I didn't always treat your mother right, and so some part of me felt I had it coming. That she did it to spite me, and I deserved it. I believed it was my fault.”

Laura didn't remember her parents arguing too much when they were married, but she did remember the woman he'd brought home a few months after her mother left. And Mrs. Letig had insinuated that there had been other women, that her parents were not happily married. Laura knew there was a longer story here, but she didn't really think it was her business to know it. Parents and children did not need to know everything about each other, she thought. Some things were better left unsaid.

“Do you still think it was your fault?” she asked tentatively.

“No,” he said. “But I did for a long time. And my guilt got all mixed up with my anger. Eventually I felt that
she
was to blame. It wasn't right what she did, to abandon us all. But it especially wasn't right what she did to you kids.”

He paused here and seemed to be remembering something.

“But now…I guess now I don't blame anybody. I don't see the advantage in it. Or the truth of it. We sometimes do things in our lives that seem like deliberate choices at the time, but really, when we look back on them, they weren't choices at all. People do things because they have to do them. It's
in
them already.”

“What do you mean?” Laura asked.

“I think your mother
had
to leave, that some part of her always wanted to leave, to be alone and maybe even to be somebody different. She'd always been mysterious. Always something of a loner. That was why I fell in love with her in the first place.”

Laura closed her eyes and tried to imagine the young woman he'd married, the girl she'd seen in those pictures that Aunt Velma had given her. Was her father right about this? Are our actions always in us? She remembered thinking something similar way back when they were having all those problems with Greta. She remembered watching her mother sitting on the stump staring at the dog pen, and she wondered later if the seeds of the future are always there, in the present, just waiting to bloom. Maybe
that's what her mother had meant when she told her father that it was nature's way. Laura didn't know if she believed this, that our natures were always waiting to have their way. It seemed such a sad philosophy.

“Do you think she'll ever come back?” she asked.

“No, I doubt it.”

“If she did, would you take her back?”

He kept his eyes on the road. She held her breath, and her throat felt tight. She wanted him to say yes.

He shook his head. “This is starting to sound like an interrogation.”

“Would you?”

“That's a big
if,
Laura. But if she came back…well…I'd have to say no. No, I wouldn't.”

“Why not?”

“It couldn't be the same. We could never go back to how it was before.”

“But I thought you said you didn't blame her anymore.”

“That doesn't mean I could forget what she did. And I guess I'd always be wondering when she would leave again. I couldn't take that. Once was bad enough. And I don't think it would be, in the end, very fair to all you kids.”

“Do you still love her?”

He paused again, took a deep, contemplative drag off his cigarette, held it in, and let it curl out of his mouth in a long, white stream that filled the cab.

“No,” he said. And then, “That's not true. And it's not fair, really. I suppose I will always love your mother. Or maybe it's just the memory of her when we both were younger that I love. I'm not quite sure…. That's a hard one, honey.”

They were both quiet then. The wheels of the truck whistled underneath them. What had she expected him to say? Something clear and definitive? But that wasn't the way things really were. She felt a sudden sense of failure sweep through her. She thought about how strange it was to be coming back, in the dark, to Charnelle. Doing what her mother wouldn't or couldn't do. In some way, she believed she was coming full circle, but the idea depressed her. She began to cry, softly at first, just tears welling in her eyes, but then soon she was sobbing.

“Hey, now,” her father said. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to upset you.”

“I miss her,” she said, staring out the window at the dark, flat nothingness of the Panhandle.

“Is that why you ran away?” he asked.

This was such a complicated question, made more complicated by her tears. She had left because she felt that Mrs. Letig was right, that she had helped to bring about their tragedy. Though when she boarded the bus, it was not that clear—just a need to be gone, out of her house, out of Charnelle, to be away from them all, far away, where she couldn't be seen by people who knew her. These thoughts had coiled in front of her, as alarming as a rattlesnake.

“I don't know. Partly, I guess.”

He passed her his handkerchief, then put his hand on her shoulder. She looked out the front window. She could not see Charnelle yet. The gray highway lay ahead of them like a river, leading them back to the town where she had spent her life, where so much had already happened, and where the Letigs, as well as her own family, lived with their grief and their shame. Where Anne Letig hovered before her mirror, pouring more wine and sorting through her options. Where Jack lay in his grave. She was grateful now, despite all that had happened, that she and John had not run away, that her life was still her own. Yet she knew she would always carry some burden of guilt, the knowledge that she had been, for a period of time, at the secret center of the Letigs' grief. For them she would always be the girl from Charnelle, the one they wouldn't mention again but could never forget.

And they, too, had penetrated the secret center of her life. She imagined that she would always think and even dream about little Jack, his eyes closed in the coffin, and then the coffin itself closed and placed in the ground, the hole covered with dirt. Some part of her had disappeared with him, would always be gone, buried deep inside the Letigs' marriage.

“Do you think we're punished for the things we do?” she asked.

He took a last drag of his cigarette and then tossed the butt out the window. He seemed to think about her question for a long time. She turned to him, watched the silhouette of his face in the dark as he stared ahead at the highway, his arm perched over the steering wheel.

“I think,” he finally said, “that we usually punish ourselves.”

Her throat felt thick and tight. She remembered again watching her mother through the cab of this same truck, wondering if she would ever
really know her. It had dawned on her back then that such a connection was almost impossible. Was it only in our cruelty, intentional or not, in our shared pain, that we ever penetrate other lives? Was it only in grief that we ever really touch someone else? She hoped not. She hoped that time would bring, for all of them, less pain, less memory of pain.

“Slide over here,” her father said. She buried her face in his shoulder. His flannel jacket smelled of smoke and something else, a good smell she couldn't quite describe but knew immediately as her father's.

“I love you,” he said. “You know that, don't you? I'll always love you.”

He held her tightly for a few seconds until she calmed herself, and then he let his arm drape loosely over her shoulder. He rolled the window all the way down, so that a steady stream of crisp, chilly air filled the cab.

After a while, he began humming. The melody sounded comforting and familiar, although she couldn't remember the name of it. The rhythm of the tires rolling over the newly patched highway provided accompaniment, as did the steady beat she could hear in his chest. She felt enormously thankful for this small pleasure, and soon she was able to swallow and then breathe again.

“I love you, too,” she whispered, brushing away her tears.

When she looked up again, she could see in the distance the faint glow of Charnelle, little dots of jittering yellow and white lights. She wanted to prolong this part of the journey home, this short time of traveling in the dark with her father. She closed her eyes for a while, listening to him, listening to the wheels beneath them, knowing and yet not knowing this melody he was humming, and hoping, despite the fact that she knew the lights up ahead were growing brighter and more distinct with each mile, that they weren't too close to Charnelle, hoping, even though they were on their way home, that they wouldn't arrive just yet.