by Anna Bailey
THEN
Right at the tail end of August, when the rattlers are still bathing on the hot asphalt, Noah is working the register at the Aurora diner, and in walk four throwbacks to the Whistling Ridge High School basketball team.
Ethan McArthur looks fine in his army fatigues, a little filed down around the edges now, but he still has that bookish air to him that Noah always liked. He waves at Noah while the others cram into the nearest booth—lanky Luke Weaver, back from pissing away his sports scholarship in Arizona; Jaden Tucker with arms that could pop a man’s head like summer balsam; and Austin Traxler, who has managed to grow a beard.
“Hey, man, long time no see.” Ethan smiles as Noah approaches the table to take their order. His teeth are very white, like he’s had something done to them. Noah smiles back with his mouth closed.
“Didn’t realize you were still working here, or we’d have invited you.”
No, you wouldn’t.
Austin Traxler adjusts his thick-framed hipster glasses and makes a show of looking at the menu. “What would you recommend, my good waiter?”
“The waffles are okay, I guess.”
The others snigger and Noah chews on his lip.
“With such a glowing recommendation, I can hardly refuse!” Austin declares in a faux-transatlantic accent. “Waffles it is, my good man. Waffles all around.”
Noah takes his time laying out their cutlery. He makes himself as close to invisible as he can while still being near them, and even though he tells himself he doesn’t care, that it doesn’t make any difference because what’s done is done, he wants to hear them talk about college, to press on that bruise.
“How’s Denver, then?” Ethan asks.
“Oh, you know,” says Jaden. “I’m thinking about staying down there.”
“Jessica and I are looking for a roommate,” says Austin, “if you don’t mind Boulder.”
Luke snorts. “Boulder’s for hippies and snowflakes.”
“You don’t think you’ll move back home, then?”
“Hell no.” Jaden glances at Noah. “I wouldn’t want to be stuck here for the rest of my life.”
Noah retreats to the counter and rests his chin on his hands, watching the teenagers outside sprawled on the benches, like lizards in the heat. In a week or so they will start a new year of school, or pack up and head off to college, and he will still be here in this diner. He thinks, Low-hanging fruit, Jaden.
The bell over the door goes and there’s a tangible shift in energy as Rat strolls in, leather jacket slung over one shoulder, a cigarette propped behind his ear. Chrissy Dukes, refilling the napkin dispensers, gives him a dirty look, but then pulls her blouse a little lower around her cleavage when she thinks no one’s watching. The boys in the booth regard him with a wolfish sort of wariness, uncertain how they should react to his arrogant gait.
“Hey, Blake,” Rat says, elbows on the countertop. “You know what I want.”
Noah stares at him, his heart beating like a little bird trapped in his chest.
Rat grins. “Caramel Frappuccino? Like usual?”
“Oh.” Noah wonders how he can stand to wear his jeans so tight in this weather.
He loathes making anything with caramel because he always gets the syrup all over his hands. He’s told Rat as much, but the guy still comes in every week and orders the same damn thing.
“I hate the way you call it carmel. It’s ca-ra-mel,” Rat said once, real slow as if Noah was dumb. “But I like it when you lick it off your fingers. Makes me want to read you poetry.”
Noah ducks behind the espresso machine and hopes—prays—Rat won’t say anything like that in front of the basketball alumni. Maybe I am dumb, he thinks, but at least I have a sense of self-preservation.
“I’m telling you,” says Luke Weaver, loud enough that they can hear at the counter, “that trailer park is full of gypsies and queers.”
Jaden Tucker sighs. “Man, this whole country’s full of gypsies and queers.”
Noah feels that tapping sensation on his arm again. He knows he should say something—he wants to say something: these boys aren’t Samuel Blake, after all—but he feels like a fraud. Like maybe he’s just pretending this whole gay thing, and wouldn’t it be awful if he made a big song and dance about it now, only to snap out of it later? It’s not worth it, not in a town like this.
When he glances at the counter again, Rat is gone.
Luke drums his fingernails on the plastic tabletop as Noah sets down his plate of waffles. “Hey, you guys want to hear a joke? What does LGBT stand for? ‘Let God Burn Them.’ Get it? A preacher in Phoenix told me that one.”
Jaden snorts and Austin grins into his drink. Noah chews his lip again.
“Come on, man,” says Ethan. “That’s just stupid.”
“Oh, excuse me, did I offend you?”
Ethan rolls his eyes. “I thought college was supposed to make you smarter.”
Noah swallows and thinks about the beginnings of Rat’s disgusting Frappuccino, congealing in a lonely cup behind the counter. He wishes he didn’t stink of milk and bacon grease. He looks at these four boys he used to know and feels as though he hasn’t washed for days.
“It was just a joke.” Luke looks at the others for commiseration. “Everybody’s so sensitive these days.”
* * *
Noah tells Chrissy he has a migraine and leaves work early. It’s been a long time since he was home alone in the afternoon, and it makes the house seem unfamiliar, a little dangerous even. He cranks up the AC and flops down on the couch with an ice pack over his face.
The sunlight makes everything pale and bright behind his eyelids. He didn’t used to feel like this. Four years ago he had a bit of backbone, as his father would say. Before the night Samuel Blake put that hole in the wall, Noah might have said something to those boys at the diner. But if the doubts keep at you long enough, he figures, you come around to this way of thinking: that unhappiness is a terminal illness. Maybe you’ll manage another year, another five, another ten. But eventually everything will get too heavy, and you’ll swallow some painkillers, take the bathroom scissors to your ulnar artery, and lie back listening to the water running over. Something like that. You’ll succumb to it like you would a cancer. Until then, you’ll keep thinking, What’s the point? What’s the point of saving your money, of moving out of your parents’ house, going to college? You’re going to die anyway.
Something taps at the window and he starts, opening his eyes to see the blue spruce brushing against the glass in the sluggish summer breeze. Squatting in the branches, the angel he once made in shop class bobs with the moving tree, but its eyes stay fixed on him. Somehow, although he cannot explain why, he has the sense that if he were to look up now, the dark shape of God would be standing in the doorway, watching him.
And suddenly the memory comes to him. He swears he hasn’t been thinking about that first time, but the very effort of not thinking about it makes it seem sweeter now, like he’s been starving himself and he finally gets to eat. It was the last Sunday in April when Noah first saw him, parking his motorcycle at the Dairy Queen across the street. Rat had called out, “Hey, church boy, where you going?” and stuck his tongue between his teeth when he grinned. Rat had been there the following Sunday, and the one after that, and Noah always kept his head down as he slouched across the church parking lot, only allowing himself to look up once he was settled in his truck and his parents were safely distant in theirs. Then one morning he had found a battered copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass tucked between his wiper blades. Rat was absent but somehow Noah knew he was the one who’d placed it there. “You don’t even like Whitman,” Noah had said to him weeks later.
And Rat replied, “But you knew what it meant.”
The angel sways in the tree. When Noah finally turns to look at the doorway, it’s empty, but he can hear footsteps in the hall.
Carefully, he gets up and pads to the living-room door, peering through th
e gap between the wood and the hinges. He’d thought his father was still at the mill, but Samuel Blake is taking down the big gemstone cross and laying it carefully on the floor, his hands touching the colorful stones with such tenderness it makes Noah ache.
The hole in the wall seems bigger than he remembers it. Noah can taste the memory of blood in his mouth. He watches his father take something from his pocket and place it gently inside the hole, before covering it with the cross again.
22
NOW
Samuel pulls into the driveway with blood on his tires—some shapeless dead animal in the road back from Boulder that had already been driven over too many times for him to tell what it was. He sees the light he left on earlier in Abigail’s room. For a minute he just wants to sit there and pretend, but then he hears Dolly drop something in the kitchen, probably denting the linoleum while she’s at it, and the abruptness of the sound makes him jump.
These support meetings he goes to, down in Boulder, they’re no good. He can admit that, now that Abi is no longer here. She was getting to be as bad as her brother these last four years, not looking at him properly when he spoke, still mad about the hole in the plaster. But he had been willing to make an effort for Abi.
It wasn’t so bad in the beginning. Sure, these veterans’ groups were mostly all me me me: people just wanted to talk about themselves, and they resented the moment when they had to stop and let somebody else take the floor. But Samuel felt it was a relief, sometimes, not to talk. There was some small measure of comfort in worrying about someone else for a little while, but more than that, there was validation.
One man, whose skin was all shiny with burn tissue down the side of his face and neck, said, “We did what we had to do, out in the jungle. We did what we had to in order to get through it.” But in a sense, he was wrong, Samuel thought. Saying they’d got through it implied that somehow they’d come out the other side.
* * *
Her name was Hoa, and she’d lived above what he supposed must have counted for a bar in So’n Tnh. At first he would pay her to take him upstairs to her sweaty little room and ride him deep into her itchy pallet mattress, but after the third time she said she didn’t want his money. She just wanted him.
Of course, that wasn’t strictly true. What she wanted was America, but he would have given it to her anyway, back then: no woman had ever spoken to him the way she did. If only she hadn’t spoken quite so much. If only she hadn’t told him—that night when they were leaning up against the warm metal of the jeep, while inside the men were clinking their glasses together and hollering—that she was carrying his child.
It was as if Constance Blake were suddenly there in the jungle with them. Something like fear gripped him by the shoulders and shook him hard, and all he can remember thinking is, What the hell is Mom going to say?
Constance would never know, in the end. No one would—except for a handful of boys at Noah’s eighth birthday party, who just so happened to catch Samuel Blake when, drunk and surrounded by children, he was suddenly reminded of a child he might have had. Most of the men in his squad who saw it happen—who saw Hoa take off running toward the trees as Samuel drew his rifle—would most likely be dead by now.
Hoa had once told him that her name meant “like a flower,” and sometimes, still, he wonders if there are flowers growing there now, in the spot where she fell.
* * *
Samuel never talks about Hoa or So’n Tnh at the veterans’ meetings. Men talk about sins just as bad, but he can never bring himself to say his out loud. He doesn’t like the thought of how the men might look at him afterward. Not with judgment, but he pities some of them, the things they’ve had to live with, and he refuses to be pitied in return.
He considered quitting back in January. It was a hell of a drive down to Boulder with the mountain roads all iced up, but Abi was just starting to give him the time of day again, so he bought a new set of snow chains. He was almost proud of himself then, felt like he was turning himself around for his little girl, but that was when the guy running the support group went and jumped off the St. Vrain bridge. Samuel had to laugh at that, the support-group manager jumping, but then they got some young fella in to replace him. Had served two tours in Iraq, whoop-dee-doo. Brought in a whole load of new members, and that was when things got bad.
These children—from a different war, a different time—were not his brothers. They wore unfamiliar faces, spoke in terms he didn’t understand about places he didn’t know, and they, in turn, did not know what Vietnam was. Oh sure, they had a peripheral understanding. Some of them had even learned about it in history class—history class, like it was goddamn Ancient Rome or something. But to them it was just this thing that had happened in another time to other people. In the end, in a way he couldn’t really articulate, he hated them.
He won’t go to the meetings anymore, he tells himself now, sitting in the car in the dark. The light may be on in Abigail’s bedroom, but she is gone, so who cares if he keeps going or not? Dolly doesn’t care. She probably thinks he holes up in a bar every Friday evening anyway.
* * *
“Father, we are coping with an empty seat at our table. Be with the one we are without tonight, and help us to trust in your timing, purpose, and great love for us all. We pray for your blessing upon Abigail Eden Blake and the space in between now and when we see her next. Until then, may this food bless our bodies and give us strength to endure what lies ahead. In Jesus’s name, amen.”
After Samuel lets go of his eldest son’s hand, he wipes his palm on the leg of his pants.
“This is real good, Mom,” says Jude.
Dolly nods, prodding at the casserole with her fork. “I didn’t make it. Melissa brought it round.”
Samuel grunts and pops the tab on his can of beer. Melissa Alvarez-Jones is the sort of person he can imagine saying, “Sorry for your loss,” at funerals, and “No good crying over spilled milk.”
“You know I don’t like that family,” he says, thinking: Nothing good ever comes of mixing races.
Dolly’s face is pale and slack. “She was just being nice.”
Sorry for your loss.
Samuel’s too tired to argue, so he turns to a topic he knows nobody will backchat him about. “Face’s looking better, Noah. Your mom fix that up for you?”
His son pokes at his casserole and doesn’t look at him, although little Jude gives his brother a strange sideways glance.
“You do it yourself?” If Samuel sounds impressed, it’s because he is, a little. The swelling has gone down considerably since the night before, and the grazes are scabbing nicely. If he can patch up a face, perhaps the boy isn’t a total lost cause after all.
Noah swallows visibly.
“Who did it for you?” Samuel asks. “Come on now, who cleaned you up?”
Noah touches the tips of his fingers to his cheek, and Samuel thinks, just for a moment, that he sees a flicker of a smile. He opens his mouth, but just then Jude puts his glass down—too loudly, too suddenly—and Samuel starts, his elbow knocking over his can.
There’s a smug glug, glug, glug as his beer leaks over the tablecloth. Dolly says, “Oh, Sam,” and he feels like an old man who’s wet himself in public.
* * *
Emma wraps her hands around her mug. The coffee’s still too hot, but her fingers are so cold she doesn’t mind burning them a little. For a Saturday morning, the Aurora diner is oddly empty, but still rich with the scent of coffee and a greasy sort of aftertaste that Emma can feel on the roof of her mouth. At the counter, Noah Blake nods his acknowledgment of her and Melissa in their spot by the window. The whole right side of his face is covered with little cuts, the way Abigail’s knees used to be.
Abigail. Emma tightens her grip on her coffee mug, even though it’s starting to sear her fingertips now. Her mother knows something about Abigail, some secret that, even now, Emma isn’t allowed to be a part of. Abi knew all her secrets, yet it seems she’d been k
eeping back something of herself. Something it was fine to tell Emma’s mom about, apparently, but not Emma.
“It’s kind of nice, you know, you being off school,” Melissa says. “We don’t see so much of each other these days, do we? Even over the summer, it was rammed at the clinic, and you were off out with Abi.”
Actually, Emma thinks, that wasn’t entirely true. She’d barely seen Abi during the summer, and had spent most of the time binge-watching TV shows or walking alone in the woods. But there was one afternoon when she and Abigail had driven over to the national park, hiked one of the smaller trails around Wild Basin, and Abi had said, “I’ve just been tired a lot lately, that’s all.” She had certainly looked it, her eyes all puffy, makeup crusting over too many popped zits on her chin.
“Your dad been keeping you all up again?” Emma asked. They had stopped to rest on a huge boulder beside an idle stream, taking off their shoes to ease their blisters and stretching out on the sun-hot stone.
“I don’t want to talk about my dad.” Abigail was scratching at her arm again. “My parents don’t understand anything. They’re so stupid it makes me crazy sometimes.”
Emma watched her digging her nails into her skin. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I’m just in a mood, Em. I’m sick of my dumb parents. They’re not like your mom. She gets it.”
At the time, Emma hadn’t thought to ask what it was, exactly, that her mother got. She’d been too busy enjoying the fact that Abigail thought her mom was cool, which meant that, by proxy, so was she. She had scrambled down into the stream, cupping the cold water in her hands and splashing it over Abigail, who had stopped scratching long enough to laugh and shimmy down to splash her back. The conversation had been forgotten in favor of just being girls again, but it comes back to Emma now, as if she were standing in that stream again, and when she hears her mother say, It was rammed at the clinic, something clicks.