I slid up on the dresser beside Nora. This explanation was obviously going to take some time.
“Lindy was the youngest,” he said. “All the older ones had done run off. Didn’t nobody even know where they went to. I couldn’t blame them. Wouldn’t nobody have wanted to hang around that house any longer than they had to.”
As much as I didn’t want to, I was starting to feel a little bit sorry for Lindy. I’d never thought of her as a child, only as the neglectful mother I’d known. It sounds awful, I know, but I’d never considered her life before me, what it might have been like or what might have caused her to make the choices she’d made. I’d been too wrapped up in how she, as a mother, had failed me.
In my defense, I hadn’t known anything about her childhood; I didn’t remember her ever talking about it. I never even knew she had older siblings, and all I remembered her ever saying about her parents was that she didn’t have any, to speak of. That was exactly how she’d said it, with a little snort, “I ain’t got no parents to speak of.”
What Mr. Huffman was telling me didn’t excuse what Lindy had done, but it did put it in some perspective. I saw her in a different light, as a little girl in need of love. The image was powerful.
Mr. Huffman coughed. “Dr. Wright, Ms. McIntosh, this is going to take more than a little bit of time to tell. Would it be all right if we all go over to our place for the rest of it? I need some water for my throat and you all might as well settle in and get comfortable while you listen. I think Opal’s got some coffee cake or something over there, don’t you honey?”
Next to him, Opal nodded. “Zucchini bread,” she corrected in a muffled voice. “And Dr. Wright, I’m so sorry. I didn’t—we didn’t—mean to do things wrong. Ms. McIntosh,” she looked at me, “I don’t even know how to make it up to you. We didn’t mean any harm. I hope you’ll believe that. Maybe you’ll understand once you’ve heard the whole thing.”
Nora looked at me, her eyebrows raised. “Do you mind going to their rooms?”
I shrugged. It made no difference to me where we heard the rest of the story. I still didn’t know what their purpose was, but I was fairly certain Mrs. Huffman was telling the truth. They hadn’t meant me harm.
With the matter decided I followed them out, almost locking the door behind me before concluding there was no point, since I was visiting with the perpetrators. Besides, when the guy who breaks into your room holds a master key, what good is a lock?
Chapter 34
As I walked through the door I saw with surprise that their rooms were cozy and bright. Instead of a room with a bath, as I had, their suite consisted of a combination kitchenette and living area with a door, presumably leading to the bedroom and bathroom, off to my right. The apartment was small but spotless, with everything in its place. Nora and I seated ourselves on a red plaid couch and Mr. Huffman sat in a worn leather chair, a roughhewn oak coffee table separating him from us.
“Can I offer you something to eat? That zucchini bread we talked about? Or maybe some coffee or water?” Mrs. Huffman stood wringing her hands in the tiny kitchenette. It was all rather surreal; in the space of twenty minutes I’d gone from thinking the Huffmans might be undercover ax murderers to being offered zucchini bread and coffee in their cheerful apartment. I felt like a child settling in for a bedtime story, but I already knew this one didn’t have a happy ending.
Nora asked for bottled water and I declined, still full from the chocolate cake I’d had earlier. Mrs. Huffman retrieved a couple of bottles from the refrigerator and handed one to Nora, another to Mr. Huffman, before taking a seat in the rocking chair beside him. Mr. Huffman took a long drink and set it aside, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Lindy and me was close,” he resumed his story, “but she wasn’t in love with me the way I was her. I was smitten, that’s for sure. Daydreamed about that girl all the time, just waiting for the day she’d realize I was her knight in shining armor.” He chuckled quietly. “Course, I guess that was hard for her to recognize since what I looked like was a skinny, pimple faced boy with big feet.
“That last summer, when I was sixteen, I was about to be sent up to Morgantown to stay with my grandparents. My mother’s family. They was getting on up in years and needed some work done on their place. The plan was for me to stay on with them for a couple months over the summer, repair the roof, replace the fences, that sort of thing. I was excited about it because I hadn’t ever been away from home like that. It made me feel grown up, like I was becoming a man.
“So I was excited, but I was heartbroken too, because I couldn’t imagine being away from Lindy for that long. On top of all that, I was worried about her safety. Seemed like her momma and daddy had been fighting more that spring, and for whatever reason they always tended to take their frustration out on Lindy. Wasn’t a day to go by that spring that she wasn’t at our house, crying and bruised up.
“Wasn’t like it is now. Back then, you didn’t get up in other people’s business. Wasn’t nobody to call for help, least not so far as we knew, and probably wouldn’t have called, anyway. The thinking was that a man’s family wasn’t nobody else’s business. About all we could do was to give her a place to run to, so we did.”
Nora and I both sat quietly while he took another long drink of water. Next to him, Mrs. Huffman also remained silent, picking at a loose thread on her apron. He set the bottle back on the coaster and sat back in his chair.
“The day before I was to leave was a hard one for Lindy,” he said. “Round about seven o’clock that evening I heard her knocking at the door. She had her own way of knocking to let us know it was her, a little pattern she liked to tap out against the wood. Anyway, I was by myself that evening. Everyone else had gone to a supper at the church, but I’d stayed home to pack my stuff for the trip the next morning.
“I’ll tell you what, I was glad she had come over. I really was. I recognized she didn’t feel the way about me that I felt about her, but it was just about enough for me that she would even consider me her friend. I wanted to be around her any way I could. It pained me sometimes to see her running off with all them boys that come around her house, and I don’t need to tell you what my sixteen year old imagination pictured them doing, but it was me she run to when she wanted a friend, and that almost made up for it.
“All them things was running through my mind when I went to open the door for her that last evening. When I got it open, I seen right away that she was having a rough time of it. That wasn’t no surprise. I was used to seeing her cry; she cried almost every time she come to hide out at our house, but that evening it was worse than usual, and I could see the red outline of a handprint against her cheek where her momma had slapped her.
“She come right in and leaned against my chest. That was something different. Lindy didn’t never touch me, not since we was little kids. She didn’t say nothing, just laid her head against me and cried. Lord, I was so taken by surprise it took me a minute to put my arms around her, but when I did, we just stood there for a bit. I didn’t know what to think. On the one hand I wanted to protect her from anybody ever hurting her again. I could just see myself marching up to her house and telling them not to ever lay another finger on her. I’d done it often enough in my daydreams.
“On the other hand, her stepping into my arms that way was a scene right out of another one of my fantasies. I reckon I was plumb full of fantasies about that girl in one way or another.” He chuckled again. “I was such an inexperienced boy. Hadn’t never had a girlfriend, though God knows I’d tried enough. Anyway, what I ended up doing in the end was standing there waiting on her to tell me what to do.”
He was quiet for a minute, reaching over to clasp Mrs. Huffman’s hand before turning back to Nora and me. “After a little while, Lindy pulled away from me and said, ‘You’re leaving me tomorrow, and then there won’t be nobody to care about me.’ She looked so sad when she said it. I tried to tell her I’d only be gone a little while, but
she shook her head and told me to hush.
“Well, you can see where this is going. She was in a vulnerable state and I was a teenage boy. I wouldn’t never have started anything with her on my own, and I swear to God that is the truth. For one thing, I’d have been too scared to. For another, I wasn’t sure I’d know how, and I didn’t want to look any more foolish than I already did. But it didn’t take much encouragement from her for me to jump right on board.
“She was wild, I’ll tell you that. Angry and rough with me. Hurtful even. I didn’t know what to make of it; I really didn’t. I didn’t know girls ever acted that way. My experience had been that boys was always supposed to try to get to first base, and girls was always supposed to make them stop.
“Here I was in a situation where the girl was insisting on doing things I’d only ever dreamed about, and I reckoned it must be from all them nights she’d snuck out of her house to run off with all them boys. I figured she had more experience with it all than I did and maybe that’s just how it was done.
“I feel awful about that now, have for the last forty-eight years.” To my surprise, I saw tears in his eyes. “Just plain awful. It didn’t take long for me to figure out she hadn’t never done any of them things before, either. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why she had come on that way, why she had insisted with me the way she had.
“Now I can look back and understand it for what it was, a desperate young girl needing somebody to love her and not knowing any other way to ask for it. She just needed to feel like somebody cared, that’s all. And I did; I truly did. It was a terrible mistake, doing what we did. That wasn’t the right way to give her what she’d needed from me; I only wish I’d had the maturity to know it at the time. I like to think if I’d known I was her first, I would have made us stop. I like to think that, but I don’t know.
“When it was all over I asked her, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’” She touched me here on the cheek,” he rubbed his cheek with a forefinger, “and said, ‘Because you wouldn’t have done it if you’d known.’
“I told her I loved her, and she laughed a little bit and kissed me on the cheek. Then she said, ‘I know you do,’ and she stood up to put her clothes back on. She was crying while she did it. Truthfully, I don’t know as she’d ever stopped crying. I told her I’d write her while I was gone, and she told me that would be nice, and then she left, just like that.
“I did write her while I was gone, sometimes every day, but she didn’t never write me back. A couple of times I asked Momma about her, but Momma said she hadn’t come around since I’d left. I had only planned on being gone through the summer, but my grandparents was a lot more poorly than they’d let on. I ended up being gone much longer. I enrolled in the school in Morgantown and finished my junior year there.
“After six or seven months of not ever hearing back from Lindy, I finally quit writing. By the time I was to return home, I’d almost convinced myself it had all been a dream. When I did arrive home, Momma told me Lindy had up and disappeared. Rumor was she’d met a man from over in Huntington and gotten pregnant, running off with him.
“I couldn’t hardly believe that, knowing as I did at that time that Lindy wasn’t all them things folks said she was. I started counting up the months, and that’s when it hit me. If she was pregnant, if she had run off because of that, that baby must surely be mine.”
Chapter 35
I needed a break from Mr. Huffman’s story. The tiny apartment had gone from cozy and quaint to suffocating and oppressive. I was overly warm and longed for a breath of fresh air. I excused myself and stepped out into the hallway, grateful for the momentary escape. The Lodge was quiet and I was disappointed I had missed telling Robby goodnight. I walked briskly through the darkened common area and stepped out onto the porch, drawing in a lungful of the cold night air.
I wasn’t sure how to feel about the things I’d heard that evening; the whole scenario was overwhelming to me. As far as I was concerned, for all intents and purposes my life had begun at the age of thirteen, when I went to live with Billy May. The years before that were largely a blur. I remembered fighting and screaming, I remembered loneliness and fear, and I remembered my mother leaving me. I had done a fairly decent job of blocking out memories of my last summer with Roy, but I knew they were right under the surface.
Hearing about a history that included me but wasn’t incorporated into my own frame of reference was unsettling. Mr. Huffman had used the word fantasies when talking about his relationship with my mother. I had had fantasies too, as a young girl, none more prominent than the one in which my nonexistent father suddenly appeared, charging up the mountain, rescuing me from Roy and sweeping me off into a better world.
In that particular fantasy he was bigger than life, a man strong enough to knock Roy into next week, as Corinne used to say. As it had turned out, that father never appeared no matter how hard I summoned him. Instead, I’d been saved by a tiny woman barely five feet tall who’d not only rescued me, but who had knocked Roy past next week and right out of my life.
I had once wondered aloud if my father might have loved me better than my mother had, had he stayed around. I could still remember Billy May’s answer. Well, honey, it’s his loss that he never met you, and her loss that she left you behind. You seem lovable enough to me. I had liked that, the idea that maybe they hadn’t abandoned me because something was wrong with me; maybe they had abandoned me because something was wrong with them. The idea had never really stuck, my insecurities too great, but it had comforted me nonetheless.
Now that nonexistent father was sitting a few feet away from me on Billy May’s mountain. The cowardly Ares on the land of Athena. The warrior god known for his egotistical cowardice, and the warrior goddess known for her strength and compassion.
The numbness I’d previously felt was quickly giving way to anger. How dare he? How dare he? He wasn’t worthy of setting foot on Billy May’s land. The knowledge of him there turned my stomach. Billy May had cleaned up the mess he’d left behind. He, my own flesh and blood, had chosen to leave me, while she, a stranger, had chosen to save me.
Had he had a good life? Had he known peace and happiness? While Roy had been raping me, where had he been? Enjoying the sun, maybe, or a beer with friends? Maybe he’d been hiking in the mountains, or fishing with buddies. While that humid West Virginia sun beat down on my battered body, mosquitoes sucking the blood from my secret parts, had he been holding up a trout, proud of his catch? Was it captured forever in some Kodachrome photo a friend of his had taken in the excitement of the moment? Much like Roy’s pockmarked face was forever immortalized in my own memory?
Where had he been? Oh, damn him. Damn him to hell. I was overcome with rage, my hands gripping the railing so tightly they began to tingle, the circulation cut off.
Smaoinigh sula gniomhu tu, Billy May whispered in the breeze against my cheek, speaking her father’s ancient language. Think before you act. And then I knew she was with me. Billy May had always been with me. Bí comforted, beag amháin. Be comforted, little one, she said to me, and I strained to hear more, desperate for her voice. The signs are all around you, little girl. Listen to what the universe has to say.
I loosened my grip on the railing and tilted my head back to look at the sky. The night was clear, and as I always had, I marveled at the stars. No place on earth is better for star gazing than Crutcher Mountain on a clear night. Listen to the universe, she had said, and so I did. I took a deep breath and let the presence of Billy May’s voice clear my head, felt the embrace of her in the wind against my shoulders, and at last I was comforted.
Chapter 36
I heard Nora’s voice as I approached the Huffmans’ door. “I can’t guarantee anything until we hear the rest of what you have to say,” she was saying. “Richard, Opal, I believe you when you say you meant Jessie no harm, but we still need to understand what it was you were doing in her room, going through her things.”
I knocked once and
pushed open the door. “Yes,” I said, “we do need to understand that.”
Nora turned to me, “Oh good, Jessie. You’re back. Are you okay?”
I nodded. “Just needed some air. Sorry to have left so abruptly. Mr. Huffman, you have more to tell us?” I took my seat on the couch.
“I do,” he said. “I know how this must seem to you, but I want you to know I did look for you.”
“That’s certainly something I’d love to hear about,” I replied, “so let’s hear it. How did you try to look for me?”
“Mrs. McIntosh,” Mrs. Huffman broke in before he could answer my question. “This must be awful for you. I can’t imagine what you must be feeling right now, but please know that Richard never stopped searching for you. Our whole marriage, nearly forty-three years, he’s been trying to keep up with you.”
“I have,” Mr. Huffman agreed. “When I got back home and starting putting together the pieces I questioned everybody I come across. All anybody could say for sure was that Lindy had run off with a man dressed like a coal miner. Said she’d gotten herself in trouble with him and then run off with him to Huntington. Didn’t nobody even have a name for the man, but I tried to track Lindy down by her maiden name, Lindy Russell.
“I spent near about the whole summer before my senior year taking the bus back and forth to Huntington. I reckon it was a senseless thing to do, but what else could I have done? Wasn’t no internet back then, no technology like there is now. I walked all over town hoping to catch sight of her. I asked everybody I run into if they’d met a girl by that name.
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