Sugar Run: A Novel

by Mesha Maren

  November 1988

  “You know I love you,” Paula says.

  It is a command.

  You know I love you. You have to know I love you.

  Jodi stands before a beveled mirror and stares at her own skinny nakedness and Paula behind her, laid out across the bed. The room is dark but already she hears a rooster crow somewhere down the road and, through the wall, the whisper of Spanish words. She is weightless with alcohol and speed, comfortably situated at the edge of the present moment, watching everything from the eaves.

  “What are we?” she says.

  In the mirror, Paula’s face contracts a little. “You want me to say girlfriend? Is that what you want me to say?”

  Jodi brings her hands up to her own breasts, to feel the warmth of them and the sharpness of her rib cage under tight skin.

  “I mean, what are we doing?” She turns toward the bed.

  Paula lights a cigarette and in the glow her face appears, soft and beautiful, big eyes and that lush mouth. No amount of shit-life can beat that beauty out. Jodi thinks of Paula’s father’s hands on that small face, and her pulse quickens.

  “There’s some part of this plan that’s bigger than us,” Paula says. “There’s something inside us that makes the world treat us like it does but that’s all just training wheels. We’re ready now, we’re building.” She smiles and inhales long. “We’ll make a new family.”

  She slides across the bed, stretches her arms, and reaches out for Jodi. Jodi looks at the bottle of rum in her hand and its emptiness makes her inexplicably sad; in her dead-drunk head it proves something, shows that everything must end. Yesterday, tomorrow, this night. The wooden shutters on the window are latched but she knows that if she opens them she will see that it is already there, the flat, broad heat of another morning.

  “Come here,” Paula says, and Jodi hears the pleading in her voice and she thrills at it. She needs Paula to want her, needs her to keep on needing.

  July 2007

  Over the phone the lawyer’s voice sounded tinny and very far away. “Public auction,” he said. “The land was sold for taxes owed in 1990.”

  Jodi stood in her parents’ kitchen wrapping the yellow phone cord around and around her wrist. She felt the word more than she heard it, sold, slamming like a fist into her face.

  “Went for thirty-five hundred to a Ron Leonards of Jacksonville, Florida.”

  Through the open window she could see her father and brothers tossing horseshoes in the backyard, each one landing in a puff of red dust. She wanted to speak, to say something—anything to stop the flow of the lawyer’s words—but it seemed that someone had stuffed feathers down her throat.

  “Unpaid land tax going back two years,” he added.

  This same lawyer had made out big when he won Jodi’s father’s workplace injury case against the prison and he’d assured Jodi that he’d be happy to take a look at the legal status of the land.

  “You must have received the eighteen-month notice.”

  “My family.” Jodi’s voice barked out louder and angrier than she had expected. “My family has owned this land for five generations.”

  When she closed her eyes, she could smell the dark green scent of cut alfalfa in the back pasture and see Effie’s chickens following one another across the yard, climbing up into the arms of the apple tree, out of reach of sharp fox teeth.

  “The legal notice would have come back in ’89, then, eighteen months later—”

  “You’re saying a man from Florida has my land?”

  For five generations, they’d scrabbled and struggled and fought to keep their land and then Jodi had managed to lose it in a matter of months. It had been gone all this time and she had only imagined it still there like some sort of phantom limb. She felt the anger at herself mixing in with images of her high-cheeked, upright ancestors, their gunmetal bright eyes slashing her with contempt.

  “There has to be something I can do.”

  “When the tax is not paid the land escheats to the state, which then sells—”

  “I was in prison in 1989 and I got no notice. I wasn’t even legally an adult yet.” There was too much self-pity in her voice; she wished it would come out steadier than this spinny, pleading thread of stop, stop, stop.

  “Could argue that the land was bought illegitimately and should be sold back to you at the auction price. But we’re talking eighteen intervening years here.”

  A mosquito bumped dumbly along the wall beside the phone, and through the open door of her mother’s bedroom Jim Morrison urged Jodi to break on through, break on through.

  She stayed there in the kitchen after the lawyer hung up, holding the silent phone and watching her father and brothers out in the yard, her anger ebbing and then spiking back up. A man from Florida? How in the hell did a man from Florida even know to come here looking for land? For so many years the mountains had protected this place, the landscape keeping it safe for those willing to scrape out a life, but now it seemed that a man from Florida could drive up and buy your ancestors’ land on a whim.

  She set the phone back in its cradle. The legal notice had likely been sent to Andy and Irene, for though Effie had left the land solely to Jodi, she had not yet been eighteen. And they had not paid attention to the impending auction, not had the money to pay the back taxes—or not cared? Andy had never been fond of the farm.

  As a child, examining Effie’s few photographs of the older generations, Jodi had imagined that she would have fit in better with them. The black-gowned women and deadly serious men in those sepia prints had reflected her own dark eyes and hair. She was a changeling, she’d thought, slipped through time somehow but better fitted among those dusky-eyed ancestral men who, in Effie’s stories, carried slabs of oak on their backs down off the mountain to the sawmill to build their brides high-backed beds, men who saved newborn babies, keeping them alive in the warming ovens of cookstoves through terrible snowstorms, and men who loved those thin-soiled, hog-backed ridges and tilled at night, planting their acreage by the light of their headlamps after full days spent down in the coal mines.

  That evening, after she got Miranda and Ricky and the boys settled in the cabin, Jodi walked Effie’s land with the new knowledge that it no longer belonged to her. Ron Leonards began to take form in her mind: green polo shirt on a stocky Floridian body, round face, a little like the KFC colonel, no, not like that, more sinister—well oiled, well sunned.

  After the phone call she had asked Andy if maybe official mail had come for her from the state. Back in ’89? He’d shaken his head and said he couldn’t rightly remember how it had all happened after she left. Even if I did get them papers, I didn’t have that kind of money.

  His words mixed in Jodi’s mind with images of Ron Leonards and Officer Ballard’s warnings about parole violations but even these worries couldn’t truly ruin the beauty of the woods as she walked among the sapling locusts until the voices at the cabin faded and there was nothing but the flush of bird wings in the trees. She came out into the back pasture where a family of wild turkeys fed. The little ones were awkward in their new feathers, spilling through the straw at the sound of human movement and their mother chortling a warning, her wings flapping frantically against the high grass.

  The sun set but the evening light stayed on, a smudgy glow draping over the trees, and after walking for a while Jodi looked up and realized that she had no idea where she was. Had she wandered off Effie’s land? There were no points of reference, nothing but two white-tailed deer flickering through the shadows in a spring of muscle and hoof. Jodi stopped short, her heart taut, and in her fear she felt her distance from the land.

  As a child these woods had been as familiar to her as the cabin. Everything else—school and town—had seemed difficult and confusing. From blue dawn, when she stepped onto the school bus, until late afternoon, when the doors opened to set her free, she’d moved in a kind of daze, the way she imagined someone who needed glasses must feel, only to h
er it was not about vision but interaction. She never quite understood the connections among the other kids, the TV shows they watched that she had never seen, their trips to the skating rink and football games. If she’d even half-cared, surely she could have made friends but they all felt like a distraction, a hurdle between her and the hours of long after-school walks: the soft hills of orchard grass, neon toadstools spiking up through rotting stumps, the perfect palm-size smoothness of horse chestnuts, and the celestial patterns of oak leaves in the pond ice that split with a bright cracking sound under the pressure of her boots.

  The teachers had worried. She’d heard them whispering too loudly. Just her and her granny living up there . . . enough to eat? Smells funny.

  She’d taken on the habits of an old woman, early to bed, early to rise, suspicious and quiet, always with some other story playing in her head. She had not gotten her first period until nearly two years after the other girls in school and in that time she had decided she would never menstruate, that her body was already too old, but then it came, all at once, with a smell of iron and wet earth. Even so, she was marked apart, wrapped in a cocoon of wood smoke and damp wool. One morning she’d risen earlier than usual and gone with Effie to help deliver a Hereford calf and then run on down the lane to the school bus. Under the fluorescent lights of the classroom someone pointed out the wine-rust streaks that stained her sleeves and arms. It wasn’t that she was the only girl with farm chores—plenty of them were up before breakfast, feeding chickens and yearlings—but they were careful then to change into clothing that approximated the stonewashed styles of music videos. In the buses and hallways they huddled with siblings and cussed their rural lives.

  One spring, after the Milk River had risen and spilled itself out into Render’s streets and buildings, the middle-school students were tasked with cleaning up the library. The highest shelves were dry but the lower levels were caked with mud and silt. In the back corner Jodi found a swollen collection of Tennyson poems splayed open to “The Lady of Shalott.” She’d wiped the sand away and read about the solitary woman who, from her tower room, captured the lushness of the world around her—Long fields of barley and of rye, / That clothe the world and meet the sky; / . . . Little breezes dusk and shiver / . . . unhailed / The shallop flitteth silken-sailed / Skimming down to Camelot—until one day a man came along and ruptured the lady’s simple life. Something ecstatic entered Jodi as she read those words, some quicksilver reflection of self that she had never experienced before. She tore the pages from the book and carried them with her, chanting the phrases under her breath as she paced the concrete halls of school and the pine-needled paths of Effie’s land. It was not just the slick imagery of the natural world that made her ache in a singsong, melancholic way, though the descriptions of how the sun came dazzling through the leaves and the stormy east-wind straining and the pale-yellow woods . . . waning could captivate her for hours; it was more than that, though, it was about being hidden right in the middle of things, with a sucking hunger inside. It summed up everything Jodi felt but could not name, everything in her high-strung teenage heart. Tennyson was writing about her, she thought. A bow-shot from her bower-eaves / He rode between the barley-sheaves. She ached for someone to enter her life like that and shatter all the simple things that had once satisfied her.

  Miranda stepped onto the sun-bright porch and lit a cigarette. A breeze tickled her nightgown against the backs of her knees. She sat down and stretched out her legs, watching Kaleb push Ross on the tire swing at the bottom of the hill where the shadows of the leaves crisscrossed their skin. Every day here she woke feeling brand new and confused. It wasn’t a bad feeling, much better than the strangling quiet of that lonely hotel room in Chaunceloraine. She just wasn’t quite adjusted yet. The boys’ voices wove their way into her dreams and she would wake for a moment and then turn to fall back asleep but find Jodi there in bed beside her, and opening her eyes wider she’d see the Lincoln log walls of the cabin and hear Ricky’s voice whispering hush up now, your mama’s still sleeping.

  The surprise of it all, of waking in the midst of this rare scene, canceled out her usual self-doubt and internal bickering. The mornings were relentlessly beautiful—mist-filled green dreams that unfurled into sharp yellow afternoons. Fog crept under the tarp roof and hung in the kitchen, wet against the cheesecloth-covered windows, as Jodi prepared coffee and stoked the cookstove.

  The first morning there Kaleb had padded out of the bedroom and asked sleepily what Jodi was doing. “Making breakfast,” Miranda said, showing him the open firebox. He’d approached slowly as if the flame were some skittish animal he might scare off. “Neenee just makes breakfast in the microwave,” he’d said, his face filled with awe. Miranda had smiled and crouched beside him, watching the orange flame as a small persistent joy unfurled inside her. Truth was, she herself felt a childish wonder at this strange place. It was beautiful here in a way she’d never really experienced, a simple kind of green-on-green splendor that was all enveloping. She liked to picture how it would look from up above, an aerial view of blanketing trees with a small clearing carved out and the six of them inside. That first day she’d said Little House on the Prairie but really it was much more Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

  “Mama, mama, lookee.” Donnie was practicing cartwheels in the side yard. He could barely get his feet up off the ground but he seemed positive that his movements must look like pure magic.

  “Watch out for bees,” Ricky called from the kitchen window. “Yellow jackets love to nest in grass like that.”

  Miranda nodded in agreement, though really she knew nothing about where one might find bees. “Careful, Donnie,” she echoed.

  It was so much more fun caring for the boys when it wasn’t just her and them. It was really the way it ought to be done, she thought. No one should live so isolated. She herself had been raised all alone and it had set her up for a life of anxious desperation. Her mother was sick throughout her childhood and then she passed when Miranda was thirteen, and from that point on it was only Miranda and her father and occasional social interactions with his dental hygienists. Her world had been wrapped in plastic, the house sealed to preserve her mother’s things; dust covers encased all the furniture, and blinds were drawn down tightly. She’d have given anything to live like her boys were living here; even with cut chins and probable bee stings, a contagious current of happiness was fairly pulsing out of them.

  And they deserved it with the kind of shit they’d been through. Let the rest of their childhoods be nothing but long afternoons of fresh-cut grass and ice cream. Maybe that could obliterate some of the bad memories. They seemed genuinely unfazed by almost anything, though, and really it was she who carried the weight of memory: their little faces in the window of that hotel room where they stayed while she worked her bar shifts after running away from Lee and, before that, the image of Lee passed out on the bedroom floor and baby Kaleb beside him, playing patty-cake and dipping his chubby toddler hands in a bag of cocaine.

  That was in those flailing years between Kaleb’s birth and Donnie’s, when they lived in an imitation plantation-style house outside Delray—after Bella had refused to let Miranda live in her apartment anymore and before Lee’s career plummeted and he moved her and Kaleb in with his aunt. The house was large and sat on top of a manicured hill with a winding drive but the construction was shoddy and the materials cheap. The sliding glass doors stuck in their tracks; the swimming pool leaked steadily. When Miranda went to replace the toilet-paper roll, the fake gold contraption came loose from the wall and left a hole in the Sheetrock. The jagged mouth of the hole scared her somehow, as if proving that everything were just waiting to crumble.

  They bought a TV for every room (though there were rooms on the second floor that Miranda hardly ever even set foot in), and comfy couches and thick rugs, and then the rest was all just stuff they thought Kaleb would love: bouncy horse, rocking boat, model train, antique gum-ball machine, and a mechanical
bubble blower.

  Sometimes Miranda felt as if she were on a set, like she might turn the corner any minute and see that the house didn’t really exist, or that it existed only inside the lens, only enough wall and window and floor to fill the frame. Bella had let her tag along one time to watch the filming of a commercial she was doing for an age-defying facial cream. Miranda had loved the vertigo feeling she got from watching everything whirling around the outside of the shot, how inside the frame everything was perfect and seemed to extend endlessly. When you saw it on TV, your eye drew out the lines and assumed no edges to the world, but really it stopped right there. Just past the floral curtains there were the giant lights and cameras and cranes. They’d only needed half of a kitchen for the shot, so that was all that existed. Just three feet from where Bella stood, beaming and leaning against the counter, it was nothing but rough cut boards, the jagged edge of that tiny universe.

  The day Miranda came home to find Kaleb playing with cocaine was the same day that she had gone to the doctor and confirmed her second pregnancy. The house, when she returned, was strangely quiet. She found a note from the cleaning lady on the kitchen counter:

  Miss Miranda,

  Your husband told me I was not to clean upstairs today, sent me home early.

  —Julia

  “Lee?” Miranda screamed.

  He’d been fine that morning, giddy in that just-home-from-tour and I-don’t-wanna-be-anywhere-else-in-the-universe kind of way. When she left for the doctor he’d been up in their bed with Kaleb, cuddled into a sea of fluffy pillows, eating Cool Whip straight from the container and watching Ghostbusters. She’d imagined coming back home and crawling into bed with the two of them, telling Lee the news of the new baby and watching his face light up with love.

  “Lee?”

  She could hear Kaleb’s burbling bird voice now. She was racing up the stairs. Their bedroom was at the end of the hall but she didn’t even make it that far before stopping and then lurching forward again. The door was open and it framed a scene that looked like some grotesque distortion of Renaissance painting: golden sunlight across a huge white bed, the shafts of light caressing the yellow curls of her husband who slumped, half-naked, against the mattress and, beside him, glittering sunbeams playing on the perfect skin of her smiling child, hands dusted white.