by Mesha Maren
“Oh, shit,” Miranda said.
Jodi bent and helped Miranda gather him up and carry him to the bathtub, his screams blasting so loud now they blotted out all other sound.
“Oh, shit,” Miranda cried again, turning on the faucet. “Oh, God.”
Donnie flailed, choking on snot and blood.
The cut was deep. Small but deep and pulsing.
“Let’s get him down to the car,” Jodi said.
Miranda thrashed her head back and forth. “I can’t take him to the hospital,” she said, her own tears distorting her voice.
“What do you mean?” Jodi leaned over the tub as Miranda held Donnie’s face under the faucet. He bucked and squealed, his screams building up and then bursting out in wet gasps.
“Uh-oh.” From the other room Kaleb’s voice rose over the TV. “Let’s call Neenee.”
Miranda wiped the blood away and pressed the edges of the cut together. It looked to be a little longer than half an inch and the edges met just fine but blood rushed up to part them almost instantly.
“Talk to me,” Jodi said. “Are you lying about having custody?”
Miranda inhaled. “No, but this won’t look good,” she said, and the fact hung there, loud and indisputable in the too-warm air.
Jodi stepped back and watched mother and child wrestle at the edge of the bathtub. As the bright blood built and pooled down across Donnie’s jaw, dripping off his tiny ears, she remembered her father’s calloused hands, one palm pressed against her baby brother’s chest, pinning him to the kitchen table, and the other hand working carefully, stitching closed his busted lip. People waste a lot of money paying doctors to do this, he had explained to six-year-old Jodi, but as long as the cut ain’t too big, all you really need is a steady hand and a clean needle.
“Hey, just hang on a minute,” Jodi said as she turned away from the frantic scene. “I’ll be right back.”
When she reached the front office it was empty. Just a glass room, fogged from the rain and smelling of cigarettes and chlorine.
“Hello?” Jodi yelled.
Her voice echoed and mixed in with the drip of water from the drainpipes.
“Shit, fuck,” she said, turning away just as a face appeared in the doorway behind the desk, a pretty brown face framed by long black hair.
“Oh, Jesus, thank God, I need a first-aid kit.” Jodi leaned across the counter.
The girl set a stack of towels on her cleaning cart and stepped toward the desk, then drew back, eyes big. Jodi looked down at her own hands and saw the bright trail of blood there, smudged from her fingers onto the countertop.
“Oh, shit, sorry.” She wiped her hand across her pants. “It’s no big deal really, just a small cut.”
“Nine one one?” The girl said, her words heavily accented.
“No.” Jodi’s voice came out fast and breathless. “Uh, no, we just need a first-aid kit or whatever you’ve got, really. A sterilized needle would be great but a butterfly bandage would help.”
The girl shook her head. “No,” she said, “no English.”
“Oh . . .” Jodi closed her eyes for a moment and concentrated. “Ayuda.” The first word came easy but the rest tumbled just out of reach at the back of her brain. “Ayuda. . . . Necesito . . . ayuda.”
The girl’s mouth opened just a little and she blinked and then nodded. “Sí.” She moved quickly toward the desk and grabbed the phone from its cradle. “¿Quiere que llame una ambulancia? ¿Y policía, señora?”
“No, no.” Jodi stumbled and reached across the counter as if to snatch the phone from the girl’s hands. “Telefono no. No,” she repeated helplessly. “I just need, oh, shit, I need . . . ¿una venda ?”
The girl continued to hold the phone even after she understood that what Jodi wanted was a first-aid kit. She retrieved the white box from a shelf, snapped it open, and pushed it across the counter. Jodi glanced at the plastic-wrapped packages, nodded, and then looked at the phone in the girl’s hand.
“No telefono,” she said again, hoping she sounded firm and not pleading.
Back in the room she found Miranda on the floor, cradling Donnie between her legs and holding a washrag of ice against his chin.
“Blue jean, baby queen,” she sang.
Jodi spread the contents of the first-aid kit across the dresser. Everything inside was yellowed with age but apparently untouched, the needle still sealed in its plastic pouch. She thanked whatever there was out there to thank, the universe, she guessed, and poured out three bourbon shots. One she drank, another she passed to Miranda, and the third she mixed, three parts whiskey to one part flat Coke, and poured down Donnie’s throat. He twisted and bucked and tried to spit it out but Miranda pressed his mouth shut.
“It’s just juice,” she cooed. “Good juice.”
They laid him across the floral bedspread.
“Just two stitches,” Jodi said. “Just keep his arms and legs down while I get in two stitches.”
She gripped his small jaw with one hand and tried hard not to look into those wild green eyes. A steady hand and a clean needle, she thought. She wanted desperately to be the kind of person who could handle a situation like this but her heart was jumping erratically and her hand was not feeling particularly steady. She took a deep breath and wiped the wound with a sanitized towelette.
The needle met the skin and slid through with an ease that turned her stomach and Donnie screamed. Our bodies, Jodi thought, doubling back and stitching once more for good measure, oughtn’t be so pliable like that. From the inside the edges of your own skin seemed so firm and sealed but that’s all it took, a little pressure, and you were open to the world.
She snipped the string and stepped back. “Done,” she pronounced, staring at the dark thread that marked the little chin.
The moment they let him go, Donnie’s hands flew to his face and Miranda scrambled. “No, no, no, don’t touch it,” she said, bending close. “Put your hands down here, sweetie. Remember, you’re a seal!”
He tossed his head back and forth. “Nuh-no-o,” he choked out. “I . . . I . . .”
“He’s a guppy,” Kaleb reminded them.
Miranda settled Donnie and Ross in one bed with her, and Kaleb in the other with Jodi. Watching her set up the sleeping arrangements, Jodi thought of Miranda’s tears and insistent kisses and the expanse of her naked body in that motel room in Chaunceloraine. She wondered just how drunk Miranda had been that night and how much she could even remember. Last night they had slept and cuddled in the bed together and the night before that—Jodi swore, although maybe she’d just dreamt it, but no—she had woken up naked, she knew that for sure, and now she felt a stinging shock at the thought that Miranda, in all her lush beauty, could ever have wanted to be with her.
She lay in the dark and concentrated on the soft breath of the boys and told herself it didn’t matter, she didn’t need anyone like that right now; but half an hour later when Miranda tiptoed over and carried Kaleb around to sleep with his brothers, Jodi’s pulse tripled. Miranda slid into the warm place where Kaleb had lain and drew close, fingers cupping Jodi’s hip, and Jodi tried to quiet her heart, careful not to lean too far into Miranda’s embrace and careful not to stay too stiff.
“I’m scared,” Miranda whispered.
The heat of her hand pulsed like a bull’s eye on Jodi’s hip.
“Donnie’ll be fine.”
“No, it’s not that. I feel . . . I don’t know if I can stay off the pills and take proper care of my boys. I don’t know, I . . .”
“Of course you can,” Jodi said. It felt good to comfort someone else; she could muster a certainty about Miranda’s future that she could not claim for her own yet.
Miranda nuzzled her chin against the back of Jodi’s neck and they listened to the rain dripping on the metal railing outside.
“You know,” Miranda whispered, “when I was little I thought the universe had an order that was waiting for me. I thought there was a space, a me-shape
d space, and when I found it I’d know it. Like when a key fits into a lock, I’d click into place and move through into a new future. There were hundreds of millions of spaces, I thought, holes in the universe, and you had to find the one that was right.”
Jodi let her body relax into Miranda’s embrace, and her eyes moved over the lumpy shadows of the room, the bedside table, the alarm clock leaking cherry red up toward the ceiling and there, where the curtains were parted, the liquid light of reflected puddles dappling the fabric.
“After school I used to go on these walks,” Miranda said. “We lived in this subdivision, one of those with the houses with fake shutters glued up beside all the windows, and they were always building new homes. But down at the end of my road everything turned into fields, just big, blank, muddy fields. And I used to walk. I’d go to the dead end and find a leaf or grass. I’d hold it up and let the wind take it, and whatever direction it blew, that’s where I’d go. I knew if I kept walking long enough, eventually I’d feel it. Something would click and I’d fit.”
Jodi let Miranda’s words roll over and around her, and there, in that dark anonymous room, she knew that what Miranda said was true of her too. I’d fit, she thought, and pictured the land in West Virginia, the smell of wheat in the field and sunlight scissoring through the trees, the way the rhythms of the days and even the air around her had always felt right there.
August 1988
Paula drives the car up into the yard and Jodi is silent, too hot to talk. The whole world is trapped inside a fever haze, the air thick and drowsy. The cabin, only five months empty, is already a husk. And so small, Jodi thinks. It seems impossible that those three rooms once held her father, mother, two brothers, Effie, and herself.
She climbs the stairs, the tin roof popping overhead. There is no lock. A stack of plates sits on the drain board, pile of cookstove wood in a basket by the door, can of coffee on the shelf, and there, in the center of the table, a wren’s nest woven from horsehair, dry grass, and a single blue ribbon.
Under Effie’s bed she finds the .38. She hadn’t thought to take it with her before, but then, she’d hardly thought to take anything. It had all happened so quickly, first the stroke that twisted Effie’s legs, leaving her limp and depressed in a wheelchair, and then the second stroke that stole her voice. Jodi had argued that she could care for her, that Effie would rather die than leave her land, but Jodi’s father and uncle had signed the papers and moved her off to the county home, and only three days later a nurse’s aide had found her slumped in her wheelchair, wrists slit.
The pistol needs oiling but it feels good in Jodi’s hand, smooth and compact with a certain magnetic kind of weight. She carries it into the back bedroom where Paula is napping on the dusty mattress.
“What you got there?” Paula turns and blinks.
“Effie’s .38,” Jodi says, spilling the gun and bullets onto the bed.
Paula sits up quick and scoots back to the edge of the mattress.
“What?” Jodi laughs.
“Why are you bringing that gun in here?”
Jodi tries to tamp down her smile but her lips twist. “You’re scared?”
Paula shrugs and narrows her eyes.
“Come on,” Jodi says, “you’re really telling me you never shot a pistol?”
Back behind the cabin there is a dump pile, generations’ worth of glass jars. Jodi and Paula select the prettiest, the old teardrop perfume bottles and liquor pints printed with pheasants. They carry them out to the cemetery, where they arrange them across the tops of the family stones.
“It’s all about keeping your mind with your body,” Jodi says.
“What if I hit the stone and the bullet bounces back?”
“Well, don’t aim that low,” Jodi says, delighting in Paula’s uncertainty.
The wind hush-hushes all around them.
“Keep your eyes and body connected. You’ll feel it.”
The first bullet flies high over the gravestones, and Paula looks back at Jodi. The second bullet is no closer and Jodi’s hands itch.
“Here,” she says, “let me see it for a second.” The wooden handle is smooth under her fingers. She narrows herself, breathes out, and the bottle explodes, shiny fragments of blue quivering through the dry grass.
July 2007
By the time Jodi arrived at the museum, Ricky was digging his nails into his arms and leaving half-moon marks on his skin as he paced the front of the room. Jodi glanced about to see if he’d brought a suitcase or bag with him but she saw nothing.
“Hey,” she said, “I got you something,” and from her back pocket she produced a pack of Winstons. “For you.” She held them out.
“I can’t be trusted,” Ricky said, but when he looked up he was smiling.
They stood silently under the awning out front, lighting cigarettes and staring off across the street. The rain had stopped in the night and the sky was clearing.
“You ever left this state?” Jodi asked. Ricky glanced at her, then brought his eyes back to his cigarette. “You know.” She leaned toward him. “Paula always talked about the places she wanted you to see. She said when she got the money saved she was going to take you to the mountains, and the desert and the ocean.”
Ricky dropped his cigarette and stepped on it. “That’s your friend’s car?” He gestured toward the Chevette.
Jodi nodded and drew on her cigarette.
“What’s your friend’s name?”
“Miranda Matheson,” she said slowly.
“I met her.” Ricky eyed Jodi. “She come in a while back with her boys, said they belonged to Lee Golden. But then she come back again and when I asked after them boys she said he’d taken them away.”
Jodi exhaled a blur of smoke. “I helped her find them again,” she said, a flicker of pride in her voice.
Ricky reached for another cigarette and nodded his head toward the car again. “There’s room for me in there?”
Miranda woke to Kaleb softly patting her arm. She stirred and was surprised to see his face, so serious there beside the bed. Jodi was gone. Miranda closed her eyes again.
“It stopped raining,” Kaleb said, “and Donnie and Ross are hungry.”
For as long as Miranda could remember, Kaleb had separated himself from his brothers. She worried what the future could hold for a skinny boy who always put the needs of others before his own.
“Okay,” she said, lying there and watching her boys through half-closed eyes. Sunlight washed in through the front windows and turned the room all soft. Donnie and Ross were jumping on the other bed, their laughter swirling up with murmured words. Snake-eyed cheese monster—you old blooty-fatooty—naw-uhhh.
“Hey, be careful,” Miranda mumbled. “Don’t jump, you already busted your chin.”
Kaleb watched his brothers with his arms tucked across his chest. Miranda wanted to touch all of them, Kaleb’s bony seriousness, Donnie’s rolling giggles, and Ross’s silky, still almost baby skin. She was delighted just at the simple joy of being there in a room with them again, like the feeling after recovering from a sickness, that brief time when even the tiniest moments of normal life are treasures. Some of Jodi’s sincerity, her earnest straightforwardness, had rubbed off on her, Miranda thought, and anything seemed possible now. She pictured Jodi’s freckled face, her slightly gapped teeth and big eyes, and she felt sure that taking the boys to West Virginia was the right idea. She knew almost nothing about Jodi and what little she did know—something about a gun accident and recent prison release—was not perhaps the most heartening but more than anything Miranda needed to believe in fresh starts and any second thoughts she’d had disappeared when Jodi so confidently stitched up Donnie’s chin.
These past few months Miranda had been waiting, for what exactly she didn’t even know. For Lee to grant her a divorce and give her custody? That, she saw now, would never seriously happen. In the eyes of the law she was not stable enough but what she and the boys needed was just a little t
ime together, time to reconnect. Mother and sons, out in the country, somewhere pretty. Anything was possible. You just had to put your mind to it.
“Hey,” she called to her boys, propping herself up on the pillows, “come here and snuggle.”
Kaleb held back, sitting on the edge of the other bed, swinging his legs impatiently.
Miranda tucked Ross’s head under her chin, breathing in the smell of his soap-scented curls, while Donnie burrowed under the blankets by her feet.
“Hey, Kaleb, honey, come here.”
Kaleb’s legs swung faster, thud-thudding against the mattress.
“Hey, Kale, baby.”
Thud-thud, the swinging pendulums of a sped-up cuckoo clock.
“All right, okay, I see.” Miranda rolled off the bed, holding Ross tight to her chest. “We just need a little sound track for this party.”
She shifted Ross to her hip and made her way around the bed, past piles of dirty clothes and snack wrappers, over to the clock radio. She sped the dial past BBC News, Bible talk, a rupturing bass-filled rap song, and when it hit on Barbara Lynn’s trembling If you should lose me, Kaleb called out, “Stop.”
The horns lifted under Barbara Lynn’s voice. Kaleb had quit thumping his legs and was watching Miranda intently. She walked over and reached a hand out toward him and he took it, staring up at her while she swiveled her hips, Ross’s drowsy head bouncing on her shoulder.
When the boys were little babies and cried constantly—Ross, colicky; Donnie, teething—and Lee was gone all the time, Miranda used to get Kaleb to put the radio on and turn it up loud. It’s a party! she would scream, smothering the baby cries with classic rock and swooping Kaleb up for a dance.
If you should lose me, oh yeah, you’ll lose a good thing.
Miranda lifted Kaleb’s arm high over his head and he spun in a clumsy circle and she smiled. The sweet self-righteousness of the lyrics mixed up in her mind with Kaleb’s unswerving eyes and she felt weak with emotion.