“Y’all heard from Boyd? I left her with the army men. But I can’t reach her now.”
“What army men?” Kevin asked.
“The army men on the bridge to your house. Moving a giant tree. She wanted to go home and they said they would take her, so I left her with them.”
Kevin and Lucy Maud looked at each other. “There are no army men,” Lucy Maud said.
Kevin said, “There’s no bridge either.”
Lucy Maud felt a small niggle of worry, now as the rain started again, and as Aunt Fern sat, smiling to herself about something only she could see, as Kevin’s car engine ticked, and as Lou paced the porch. Boyd, separated from all of them, on her own and cut off. Lucy Maud pulled out her own phone and called Carla.
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here
Purple Blazes Mean No Trespassing
This only became law in 1997. But I remember purple paint on tree trunks even when I was a kid, so who knows how long the rule was around before they made it legal.
But here’s the gist: purple paint on a fence post or tree means NO TRESPASSING. The blazes must be fewer than a hundred feet apart in timberland and fewer than a thousand feet apart in open country. Even people who are color-blind can see purple blazes, so no excuses. Technically, the penalty for trespassing falls to the law: Class B misdemeanor, unless you’re armed, and then it’s Class A. In reality, though, everybody knows that a landowner’s not likely to go through so long a process as arrest and prosecution. Everybody knows that the real danger when you pass this boundary is that you take your life into your own hands. You could hardly blame somebody for shooting a trespasser, right?
3:15 P.M.
Boyd stood frozen, trying to decide whether the dog meant her any harm. He yelped once and stood tense, ready to spring, but he didn’t growl. Instead, he watched her, barking every now and then, his legs stiff.
She thought about going around and did try to skirt the house, stepping to the right and walking through the brush. The dog followed her, and it was harder going out here. The scrub Ashe juniper had not been cleared and scratched her face as she walked. Grapevines and thorns pulled at her pant legs, and still the dog followed her.
As she walked, she saw the fence posts painted purple, that color between lavender and royalty that was so familiar around these parts. She saw a windmill, blades spinning, but she wasn’t sure a pump was attached, and on a clothesline hung a single white sheet, heavy with moisture, waving thickly in the wind. The house was two-story, tall and narrow, looking to Boyd as if it were tilting into the mud. An outbuilding, board and batten, double doors closed with a wooden bar. Too big to be a garage, but not quite a barn. A stable. In the mud, hundreds of horseshoe prints. A wide front porch wrapped around the side of the house, and on the porch was a jumble of wood scraps and old furniture. She looked around and realized there was no car.
A whistle and the dog ran away. Boyd turned, and standing on the porch was a woman in a long skirt, her hair piled on her head in a bun. In her left hand, she held a rolling pin, and in her right, something she fed to the dog, who then took up a post by the porch steps. Behind the woman, the door hung open.
“Hello?” Boyd said tentatively. The woman’s clothing unnerved Boyd, and she thought of the boy who had led her across the dam, and how he’d said that all time was the same now. Boyd saw that it was not a skirt but a long dress, made of what looked to be gray lawn, with a thin border of lace at the collar and a few inches above the hem of the skirt. The woman seemed expressionless to Boyd: not curious, not afraid.
Boyd realized that what she had thought was a rolling pin was instead a miniature baseball bat, a foot and a half long, meant for a child. The woman now palmed this bat, a hand on each end, one over and one under. It was a makeshift weapon, meant for self-defense.
“What are you doing here?” The woman’s accent was clipped, vaguely Dutch English. “This is private property.” Boyd remembered the purple blazes and thought she was lucky she hadn’t been shot.
“I’m passing through.” Boyd moved a step closer to the woman, a gesture of friendliness more than anything else. The dog rose to its feet. “I’m”—Boyd pointed in the direction she’d been headed—“going to find a friend.”
Silence as the woman regarded her, then: “That way’s flooded out. But then”—the woman pointed in the direction from which Boyd had come—“it’s flooded that way, too.” Now she took in Boyd’s appearance: the duck boots, the backpack, the jeans wicked with rainwater.
Boyd glanced down at her mother’s boots, wondering about the shoes hidden underneath the woman’s dress. Maybe they were old-fashioned leather with hook-and-eye closures, rising above her ankle. Maybe they were flip-flops. Maybe they were tennis shoes. “I went around the flooded areas,” Boyd said.
The woman nodded. “Indeed.” She dropped the small bat to her side, her skirts folding around it. “Such strange things happening. But I reckon you’re not much of a threat.” Boyd could not imagine that anybody had ever counted her as a threat. “You want to come in for a cup of coffee?”
Boyd felt the urgency of Isaac in the tree pulling her upriver. A tick of insistence, but also a sense that she had not yet reached the part of the journey where she would be allowed to reach him, that she needed to discover something here. “Sure. But I can’t stay long.” She stepped past the purple-blazed pickets, the dog now unconcerned, Boyd having been given the woman’s tacit approval. It raised its black head from its paws as Boyd walked around it. When Boyd was on the porch, the woman turned and went inside, the screen door left open, and Boyd followed, passing the jumble of scrap wood.
It was dim inside, dust floating down through shafts of light filtering through lace curtains. There was no foyer: Boyd found herself immediately in a room she would call a parlor. A Victorian sofa sat in the center of the room, complete with red velvet upholstery, carved legs stained mahogany. A knotted rug on the hardwood floors. A curio shelf, triangular, in the corner of the room, filled with china so thin that Boyd saw the light marbled through it, like mother-of-pearl. In another corner of the room, a console television set, seated on the floor. Boyd’s grandmother had once had an RCA set like this: a piece of furniture in itself, the case wooden and solid.
The television surprised Boyd. She had not expected it, and for a moment, she faltered. She would have been less surprised by a spinning wheel. The world had turned crazy.
The woman stood in the kitchen doorway. “In here.”
Turning in her direction, Boyd saw the kudzu climbing in through the window, snaking across the wall that had been to her back. The vines had entered benignly, fingers exploring, but now the wallpaper puckered under the green.
Boyd’s quick intake of breath made the woman turn back. “Oh, that. That happened yesterday.” The woman stepped over and pulled the vines free, tossing them out the window. Brown spots remained like little check marks, evidence, as if the plant had been a green centipede. “I keep doing this and it keeps coming back.” She shucked the final strand out, her hands sinking as if it were heavy; Boyd thought of an elephant’s trunk, leathery and thick. The woman slapped her hands together, dusting them off. “There.”
In the kitchen, Boyd was even more confused. The woman had no oven, but instead an old-fashioned wood cookstove. The refrigerator was old-fashioned, too, a rounded one with the freezer door inside, the kind of freezer that needed to be defrosted. On the counter, however—really a long farmhouse table against a wall underneath a window—a KitchenAid mixer and a Keurig. The sink was lemon yellow and deep. Already the woman was putting a pod in the Keurig; soon Boyd heard the hiss of the water warming.
“It’s hazelnut.” The woman shrugged. “I like it. I hope it’s okay.”
“Of course.” Boyd didn’t know where to stand, and she put her fists into her pockets because she didn’t know what to do with her arms.
The coffee poured into the mug and the woman handed it to Boyd. “Cream or sugar?�
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“Both.”
The woman fetched a bag of sugar from a cabinet, milk from the fridge, and a spoon from a drawer. She turned back to the Keurig to make her own cup. “I’m Laurie.”
“Boyd.”
Laurie smiled over her shoulder. “Nice to meet you, Boyd. You doing some traveling?” She nodded at Boyd’s backpack, propped against the wall.
“My friend is upriver. I haven’t seen him since the storm started. And I—the bridge to my house was washed out and I—”
Another hiss as the coffee brewed. Laurie nodded and leaned against the counter, as if Boyd’s reason for walking across country wasn’t preposterous. “Weird storm, wasn’t it?” Laurie pointed back through the kitchen doorway, and Boyd could see that the vines had returned to the living room, fingers reaching out into the woman’s house. “And I bet you can’t call her.”
“Him. No, I can’t call him.”
“Ah. Him. You can’t call him.” The coffee was ready and Laurie motioned for them to sit at the kitchen table. “Where do you think he is? What makes you think you’ll find him?”
Boyd watched her, trying to determine the woman’s age. Her face was unlined but something about her seemed older: the hook of chin, perhaps, or the slightly hooded eyes.
“I just will.”
They sipped their coffees in silence, Boyd feeling a pressing need to move on, but also feeling as if she might need something in this house. And not just food, though hunger pulled at her insides, and she wished the woman had offered her a sandwich instead of coffee. In the kitchen window, the tip of a vine appeared, inching across a white sill. “Do you live out here by yourself?”
The woman, after staring into her black coffee for a moment, glanced over her shoulder toward the front room, toward the stairs. “No,” she said at last, and then, a crash from upstairs, something falling to the floor. Three vines on the sill now, one long enough to begin climbing the wall.
Boyd set her feet firmly on the floor, pushing her weight into her toes, ready to rise. She had not sensed another person upstairs; suddenly, she felt exposed and untethered. One hand cupped her mug while the other fell to her backpack, now propped against her chair. Laurie closed hands around Boyd’s left hand, the one holding the mug, and Boyd did not know what to feel: a low-grade terror because something important was not out in the open, mixed with an adrenaline-filled relief at the kindness of the woman’s touch.
“Don’t be afraid. Here, there is nothing to fear.” Laurie dropped her hands from circling Boyd’s and grabbed Boyd’s wrist instead. “I want to show you something. Someone. My daughter. Then I’ll fix you some lunch and you can go find your friend.”
Boyd hesitated. Laurie had said she would show Boyd her daughter, not that Boyd would meet her. Boyd could not get anything from the woman other than a supreme calm, a calm that robbed Boyd of a similar feeling. Yet Boyd, shouldering her backpack in case—in case of what?—followed the woman and stepped over a board where the floor had started to crumble into the white limestone beneath it.
Laurie led Boyd through the parlor, where vines had already started again, and a thin one came in underneath the door. They stepped over this vine and climbed the stairs, Boyd’s hand resting on the deeply polished banister. As they walked, thin puffs of dust rose from beneath their feet, not from outside, but from the house itself disintegrating. Boyd noticed cracks in the risers. It was an old house, after all.
At the top of the stairs was a small landing, and light streamed in through a hexagonal stained glass window, sending amethyst and turquoise darts across the rug. A bookshelf to the right held books with embossed leather bindings and porcelain dolls dressed in pinafores and crinolines. One of them was on the floor, its porcelain hand shattered beneath it. Laurie picked up the doll—was this what they had heard fall?—and put it back on the shelf, unperturbed. “Nobody plays with these anymore,” she told Boyd, and led her into the first bedroom on the right.
Light poured in through three windows; this bedroom was at the corner of the house. High ceilings, a Queen Anne–style wardrobe, a rocking chair with a quilt overlaid. In the center of the room, a hospital bed, a person, a patient, asleep, IV line and catheter running out from beneath the sheet. The patient: pale, puffy but not fat, a shock of red hair beginning to tangle at the skull.
Boyd turned to Laurie. “This is your daughter?”
Laurie, biting the bottom of her lip, eyes wide, nodded. “Her name is Angie.”
Boyd went to the bed and stood beside it. Angie was so pale that Boyd could see veins through her papery eyelids. Her chest rose and fell and rose, and Boyd noted a thin sheen of hospital: anodyne, urine. Angie was an adult—that much Boyd could tell—but Boyd couldn’t say if Angie was twenty or forty. She had the same timeless and worn quality as her mother. The braided rug underneath the bed was threadbare at the wheels. The bed had been there a long time.
“What happened to her?”
“Car accident. Driving home one night after her shift at H-E-B. She hit a deer and drove off the road.”
“May I?” Boyd reached for Angie’s hand, and Laurie nodded.
Boyd took the girl’s hand in her own, her right palm against Angie’s and her left palm cradling the top, enveloping the weak fingers. A fecund, almost tropical warmth traveled up Boyd’s arm: first her wrist, then her elbow, then her shoulder, until it reached the top of Boyd’s head and relaxed her for the first time in a few days. It radiated down now, a sensation almost like a hot shower, wet without being wet, a sultry sort of peace. The girl’s body thrummed.
“How long has she been here?”
“Here?” Laurie moved closer so that she was standing beside Boyd. “I brought her home four years ago. I pay a nurse part-time, but Angie just needs an IV and she has a hep-lock. Before that, she was in a facility for two years, and in the hospital for two months.”
Boyd was silent, turning the girl’s hand in her own.
“She was always just the most extraordinary child. Not smart exactly, but brilliant in a way that I can’t really explain. She knew what you were talking about before you did, almost. She was kind.” Laurie waved a hand toward the window where the stable was just visible. “When she was better, we had all kinds of animals running around here: goats, raccoons, rabbits, even a possum and a feral pig. They just followed her, you know?”
Boyd did. For a moment, Boyd wondered if this was the person she had always suspected was out there, the person who would be able to understand Boyd because she was like Boyd. What if Boyd was finally to meet this person, and the person was no longer the same?
“There’s still hope, the doctors say. There’s always hope. Her brain function is normal. There was no loss of oxygen, no severe trauma. She’s just asleep. She’s been asleep for almost seven years.”
Boyd still held the girl’s hand. She didn’t feel anything but that lush warmth. No thoughts were in that head; the girl had just gone. Yet, here her body lay, and this was not a thing without life; Angie’s hand had a weight that seemed almost like a grip, and her eyelids fluttered as if she were in the middle of some REM dream.
“Most of the time, I just sit up here.” Laurie pointed to the rocking chair and to the stack of books beside it. “I read to her every afternoon. I think she likes it.”
Boyd didn’t know if Angie knew her mom was reading. The separation between body and spirit seemed complete to Boyd, the body an inanimate object, but, of course, Boyd didn’t really know. “I wish—I wish that she would wake up. That you could have your daughter back in some way.”
Laurie blinked, then acted as if she hadn’t heard, as if she had heard similar things from other people. “Sometimes I read her favorites over and over again. She loved Terms of Endearment.” Laurie shrugged. She folded her arms in front of her, resting her palms on her elbows.
“How did they let you bring her home?” Boyd had never heard of a coma patient in an upstairs bedroom.
Another shrug. “I just took he
r home. I have power of attorney for her. It’s no crime to refuse medical care. Even cancer patients can walk out of the hospital anytime they want. I could care for her here, so there’s no neglect. She doesn’t need intubation or anything like that.”
Boyd gave one last squeeze to the girl’s hand, then set it down gently among the bedclothes, clean and bleached white. “I should be going.”
Laurie started. “I forgot! I was going to fix you a sandwich.”
Boyd almost told her not to worry about it, but she was so hungry. After one last look at Angie, they made their way downstairs. Boyd watched Laurie spread peanut butter on white bread. It wasn’t Boyd’s favorite, but then, this wasn’t a restaurant. Laurie wrapped two sandwiches in a paper towel, and Boyd put them in her backpack. Then Laurie handed the third one to Boyd for eating now.
“It’s not much, I know. I’m on a fixed income out here.” Laurie wiped the counter with a dishrag. “It’s so crazy how your whole life can change in one night.” She swallowed and closed her eyes. “It’s lonely out here. I feel—I feel adrift.”
Boyd went to her and hugged her, peanut butter sandwich still in one hand, and over Laurie’s shoulder Boyd saw the kudzu and grapevines, the moss spreading along the sill. In the night, the house would be taken, the woman and her daughter unmoored in time and space, lost to what, for the rest of her life, Boyd would call “the days after the storm.” Laurie in the room upstairs, in her long prairie dress, reading library books aloud to a girl who had been turned loose from her body. Rocking and reading. The dog on the front porch and the horse in the stable the only other creatures.
Tears welled at the corners of Laurie’s eyes. A naked need. Boyd did not want to walk away. But Isaac was in the tree, Isaac whom she did and did not love, and who did and did not love her.
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here Page 11