Walk Me Home (24 page)

Alvin sits back and sighs. Folds his arms across his chest.

“Well, we do need to have a talk. One way or the other. I just thought maybe you’d rather do it in private.”

Carly sits still, silent, feeling her skin and bones set like plaster of Paris. Feeling heavier and more dead in that chair with each second that passes. She doesn’t want to move forward into the next part of her life; she can’t move backward in time even if she tries. And she doesn’t much like where she is.

Almost without realizing she’s about to, she jumps to her feet and walks the seven short steps to the door. There she stops and turns around. Alvin is still sitting at the table with his arms folded. Watching to see what she’ll do next.

“Well?” she says. “You coming or not?”

It’s nearly sundown as they scuff along. Not on the road, but in a straight line toward the big mesa, though Carly can’t imagine why. Just right into the heart of nowhere. Alvin is wearing brown cowboy boots. She watches them kick up dust.

She looks up to see a thin, grayish dog with a narrow muzzle loping along through the weeds. The animal spots them, stops, puts its head down. Watches them with suspicion.

“Get on, then,” Alvin shouts.

He picks up what only amounts to a handful of dirt, but when he aims it, the animal spins on its heels and takes off. As if anticipating the hurling of large, painful rocks.

“Whose dog?” Carly asks.

“Dog? That’s no dog. That’s a coyote.” He pronounces it as two syllables. Kie-oat. Without a long
e
at the end. “You never seen a coyote before?”

“I don’t think so.”

It scares her, after the fact. Even though the animal is gone now. But then she remembers that Alvin is here. No coyote would dare come after her when Alvin is here with her.

“Don’t want you and your sister leaving this place on your own,” he says.

So there it is. She knew it was out there. Waiting for her. She felt it. She’s been braced for it, seemingly forever. And now it’s landed.

Carly stops walking. It takes Alvin a step to notice.

“I thought you were my friend.”

The urge to cry bends her lower lip around. Causes it to tremble. But she doesn’t cry. She holds firm.

“I
am
your friend,” he says. “What kind of friend would I be if I let you and your sister go all the way to Trinidad, California, on your own? You know how far that is, girl? I bet you don’t. I looked it up. It’s nearly twelve hundred miles.”

“No way. Couldn’t be.”

“It could be and it is. I looked it up. Can’t drive over the Sierra Nevada. Can’t walk over them, either, in case you were getting any big ideas. So you have to go south to the Interstate 40, then drive all the way into Bakersfield or so. Then you have to go north for the better part of the length of California. California’s a long state.”

Carly’s still rooted to the spot, an odd cross between stubborn and scared.

“I know California’s a long state. I lived in California all my life.”

“Oh, that long, huh?”

She turns away from him and begins to walk back to the relative safety of the pink trailer.

“Hey. Hey. You,” he says, catching up fast.

“What?”

“Notice I never asked you about your mother? I never asked you if you ran away from her. Did you notice that?”

She stops. But she doesn’t look at Alvin. She keeps her gaze leveled at about their boots. Maybe the bottoms of the legs of their jeans.

“What about it?”

“Know why I didn’t?”

“No. I don’t know anything.” It strikes Carly as an expansive statement. Maybe more so than she meant it to be.

“Because a runaway, now that’s a kid somebody wants back. A mother of a runaway, now she goes to some lengths. Provides photos to the police. Calls a million times a day. I checked to see, but there didn’t seem to be anybody wanting you and your sister back. Now a throwaway, that’s another thing altogether. A mother who would do such a thing, you want to make sure not to get kids back into a home like that. Because that mother doesn’t deserve to have them.”

“Unless she died.”

Then she kicks herself for saying it. Hard.

“I see,” Alvin says. “That would be a whole different story. I’m sorry.”

“What are we supposed to do, then? Just stay here the rest of our lives?”

“You’re supposed to give me some time and trust me to figure something out.”

But Carly doesn’t trust much of anybody anymore. Just Teddy. And herself. And she’s pretty sure she was wrong to even begin to trust Alvin. He’ll try one more time to get an address or phone number for Teddy. Then he’ll turn them over to the authorities and let it be somebody else’s worry. That’s pretty much what everybody does when the chips are down. They say they care. Until you get to be too time-consuming. Too much of a bother.

“Fine,” she says. “Whatever.”

She strides for the safety of the trailer.

“That’s not what I wanted to hear you say.”

She stops dead in her tracks. Suddenly. A sundowner wind is coming up, blowing hot on her face and through her hair. Tears are leaking out no matter how hard she clamps down on the seal.

“What do you want me to say, then?”

“That I can trust you to stay put.”

“You can trust me to stay put.”

Then she stomps all the way back to the trailer. He doesn’t seem to be following. Then again, she doesn’t look back.

Without a watch or a clock, it’s hard to know how long she waits for Jen. It feels like three hours. Carly guesses it’s half that.

The longer she waits, the madder she gets. Here she is, sitting in this trailer by herself, while her sister chooses to sit inside with Delores. Are they talking? And if so, what about? What could they possibly have in common? What about all the years she and Jen have been family? What about everything Carly’s tried to do to get them both to safety? Isn’t that supposed to count for something? Isn’t that supposed to be almost impossible to breach?

By the time Jen walks though the squeaky trailer door, one look at Carly’s face stops her in her tracks.

“What?” Jen says.

Carly sniffs the air. There’s a new smell. Jen brought it in with her. For a split second, Carly thinks Jen has been smoking pot. But that’s not quite it. It’s smoky and pungent, but not quite that.

“What’s that?” she asks Jen.

“What’s what?”

“That smell. Like you were smoking something.”

“I wasn’t smoking anything.”

“Then what is that?”

First Jen seems unwilling to answer at all. But Carly just keeps staring. And the weight of her stare seems to be wearing Jen down.

“It’s white sage. But that’s all I can tell you.”

“What do you mean that’s all you can tell me? Who says?”

“It’s just the way it is, Carly. It’s…it’s personal. It’s a ceremony. There’s nothing wrong with it. It just protects me and helps for grief. But it’s between the person who gives it and the person who gets it. And that’s all I can say.”

“So Delores was doing some kind of magic on you?”

“Not magic. More like…religion.”

“Not your religion.”

“Can be if I want it to be.”

“Get your stuff packed,” Carly says. Nice and calm. “We’re leaving tonight.”

“But—”

“No,” Carly says. “No buts. That’s the only way it can be.” She keeps her voice low, because of Delores and her amazing ears.

Carly gets up and begins to gather her belongings. Toothbrush and hairbrush from the counter in what they laughingly call the bathroom—the space behind the partition in the back of the trailer. Her jacket and spare shirt from the tiny half closet.

She stuffs everything in her backpack.

Meanwhile Jen sits down on the bed.

“It’s already dark,” Carly says. Barely above a whisper. “Get a move on.”

“I’m not going,” Jen says.

Then she starts to cry.

Carly walks to the bed and stands over Jen, making herself as big and as tall as she needs to be to get through this. She feels as if it’s somebody else’s body she’s standing in. As if she’s watching a movie. As if the ending doesn’t have to matter so much. Not the way it would in her real life.

“So, you’re splitting us up?” Carly asks. “After everything we’ve been through?”

And, with that, Carly starts to cry, too.

“Stay, Carly. Don’t go. If you don’t go, we won’t have to split up.”

“We have to go find Teddy. Teddy’ll take us in. You don’t know Delores will let you stay here.”

“You don’t know she won’t,” Jen says, sounding stronger.

Carly says nothing. Because she’s suddenly seized with a sick feeling in her gut. Maybe Jen isn’t just making assumptions. Jen’s spent a lot of time alone with the old woman. Maybe these things have been discussed.

“I’m not going back to live with Teddy,” Jen says. “I don’t know why you’re so sure about that. I don’t know why you think that’s such a perfect plan. Like all our problems’ll be solved the minute you get him on the phone. He’ll just drop everything and come save us, and we’ll live happily ever after. He’s not even our stepdad. You keep calling him our stepdad. He’s not. They never got married. He’s just a guy Mom used to live with.”

“I won’t stay here, Jen. You know that. I hate it here. Delores doesn’t even like me.”

“Well, maybe if you wouldn’t be so snotty to her, she would.”

Carly gets up. Picks up her loaded backpack. Makes one final sweep to be sure she hasn’t forgotten anything. Then she walks to the door. Places one hand on the latch. Still crying.

“I mean it. I’ll do what I say. I’ll go. Right now.”

She looks out through the little round window. It’s nearly full-on dark. Just the slightest tinge of light still glows on the western edge of the sky.

All the lights are off in the house. Delores turns in early.

She can hear Jen crying. But nothing else.

“I’ll walk right out and leave you here. Now come on, Jen. This is not a game. This is our life, our actual life. And it’s time for us to move on from here.”

She watches Jen cry. Listens to it. Listens to herself cry. Then she gradually eases the door open.

“Wait!” Jen calls. “Don’t go yet. You have to take this. It’ll keep you safe.”

Jen levers to her feet and runs the three steps to where Carly is standing. She slips something off from around her own neck, something that was hiding under her shirt. A black-and-white feather, three or four inches long, with some kind of symbols painted on in red. It has a thin strip of leather wrapped neatly around the shaft and formed into a loop on top. It’s on a leather thong.

She slips it over Carly’s neck.

“Keep it under your shirt. Against your skin.”

“I don’t believe in that stuff.”

“Maybe it’ll protect you whether you do or not.”

“Or maybe it won’t do anything at all.”

“So it can’t hurt anything.”

Then Jen goes back and sits on the bed. Knees drawn up tight. Arms wrapped around them. Refusing to look at Carly again.

Carly opens the trailer door again. Carefully. Slides through before the part where metal contacts metal.

She’s out into the night.

She walks down the driveway to the road, looking over her shoulder five times. Waiting to see Jen run after her.

She stops at the road. Squats on the balls of her feet and waits.

It’s barely cool, and the dark feels enveloping but not entirely safe. She thinks of snakes and coyotes. Angry dogs. She touches the tips of her fingers to the red dirt, as if for balance. But she’s not really sure that’s why. Maybe more to ground herself. She crouches like that for a time. Long enough for her leg muscles to ache. Fifteen, twenty minutes, maybe. The feather tickles her chest. It’s not an altogether unpleasant feeling.

Jen never follows.

We’ve got ourselves a situation here, she thinks. She remembers those words, in Teddy’s voice. And remembering Teddy’s voice floods her with homesickness. But at no time did she ever actually intend to walk off Wakapi land without her sister. It’s just not a possibility she’s set to accept.

She walks back to the trailer and lets herself inside.

Jen is lying facing the trailer wall, her back to Carly. Carly strips down to her T-shirt and climbs into bed. They lie in silence in the dark for a minute or two.

“I’m glad you came back,” Jen says. Clearly still crying.

“I’m leaving tomorrow night,” Carly says. “I’m just giving you a little more time to come to your senses. Better get to work on that.”

She almost slips the feather necklace off and gives it back. But then Jen might think she really is staying. That’s why she doesn’t. Probably why. Unless, somewhere inside her, Carly’s thinking she needs all the protection she can get.

Neither says another word all night. But Carly sleeps very little. And she gets the impression that Jen is awake for most of the night, too.

Situations are like that. They take up all the time you used to use for working and eating and sleeping. They soak up your whole life like a black hole in space soaks up the sunlight. And then, where you used to have a life, all you have left is a situation.

WAKAPI LAND

May 17

Carly slips out of bed while her sister, Jen, is still asleep. Her eyes are burning and sore, as if she tried to keep them open in a sandstorm. She feels a little sick to her stomach.