The Sound of Gravel

by Ruth Wariner

  “No, we don’t,” Matt finally answered. “We’re not sure exactly where she is right now. She called us from a pay phone … somewhere.”

  “How long has your mom been gone?” asked the two of them in unison.

  “It’s been maybe two days,” Matt replied. The woman began scribbling on her pad. “Not that long.”

  “Has anyone else been here to watch over you or cook for you?”

  “No, but we’ve had something to eat every day.” Matt sounded proud, as though he were solely responsible for this achievement. But the woman just put down her pen and looked at the man.

  “Do you know when your mom will be home?” asked the man. “We can’t leave you here without an adult. You might have to come with us.”

  The second he said that, I began to shiver; my Wicked Witch suspicions were right. I expected to feel the Kansas wind stir and to see her face turn green. The two adults seemed to detect my fear, and I could feel them struggling to maintain a gentle demeanor.

  “Surely you must know a grown-up who lives close by,” the woman said, “someone who can take care of you till your mom gets home.”

  There was a long pause. I heard a car start outside, its motor purring, and felt Aaron fidgeting beside me.

  “We do,” said Matt. I gave him a puzzled look. “Mom’s friend, Gary,” he said to me, emphasizing friend. We couldn’t say he was Lane’s brother. That might lead them to ask about Lane. “He has a little grocery store.”

  After a few minutes of searching in the kitchen, the man found our phone book, and Gary’s name inside it. He picked up the receiver, stared at it in hesitation, then dialed the number.

  No answer. Matt’s face turned red with frustration and fear. The man dialed the number a second time. Nothing. “I think you’re going to have to come with us,” he said to Matt, then turned to the rest of us. “You kids go ahead and get some clothes for a few days. We’ll try calling your mom’s friend one more time before we leave.”

  Matt and Luke left for their room and Aaron and I for ours. Just as I’d feared, the floor was littered with clothes, and I quickly sorted through them, separating the lightly dirty from the filthy. In the closet, a plastic garbage bag filled with clothes was indeed sitting next to an open flame, just as the man had said, and I yanked it out of harm’s way. After going through a few dresser drawers, I was finally able to cobble together some outfits for Aaron and me.

  “Here.” I handed my brother a button-up shirt and pants. “Change your clothes.”

  “No.”

  I turned to look at him.

  “I don’t like buttons,” he said calmly.

  “That’s all we have that’s clean.”

  Aaron looked at me, his arms folded defiantly across his chest. I threw both the shirt and pants at him, but he didn’t move. They fell back to the floor where I’d found them.

  “Those pants have snaps on them,” he said.

  That my voice rose surprised both of us. “We don’t have time to keep lookin’. Those people are ready to take us now!”

  “I’m not wearing those clothes.” Aaron stamped his foot in the pile of clothes.

  “Yes, you are, you little shit!” I yelled.

  Aaron’s mouth fell open with shock. “I’m gonna tell Mom when she comes home you said the S-word,” he whispered.

  “I don’t care what you tell her! Just change your clothes.” I noticed my brother look at me with fear for the first time in his life. I grabbed his shoulders and lowered my voice. “Look, do you get what’s happenin’ here? These people are from the government and they’re taking us away from Mom. We have to be good or they won’t bring us back.” I felt my throat harden and my eyes well up, but I knew I couldn’t cry. I picked up Aaron’s clothes and shoved them into his folded arms. “Now, put these clothes on. Right now.”

  Afterward it would seem to me that I crossed some sort of threshold that day, that I’d been merely a sister in the morning, but by afternoon I was something else altogether. As Aaron glared at me and then slowly began to exchange his T-shirt for a button-up, all I could think about was the danger we were in. Without another word I helped him button his shirt, then I stuffed some jeans, shirts, and underwear into a brown-paper grocery bag.

  We all met back in the living room, and I had the distinct feeling that the man and the woman were dreading what was about to happen as much as we were. They looked at each other forlornly, and the woman walked into the kitchen to try Gary’s phone number one last time. I looked down to see my fingers trembling, and then up again when I heard the woman speak.

  “Yes, hello?”

  Thank goodness. After the woman had apprised Gary of the situation, he agreed to take charge of us while Mom was gone, and a half hour or so later we heard his car pull into the trailer’s parking space. He entered without knocking. His dark brown hair had been carefully combed behind his ears. I’d never seen him wear the white, button-up shirt he had on, or those plaid pants or white leather shoes. He looked as if he’d been playing nine holes at the country club when the social workers called, but Gary didn’t play golf.

  He told the social workers that he had already reached Mom by CB radio, and she was on her way home. Satisfied, the pair gave Gary their card, told him that Mom should call them right away, and left.

  An awkward silence followed. Gary hardly knew us and was as uncomfortable as we were. “Let’s go to the movies,” he suggested.

  We passed a few hours there, and when we walked out of the theater, it was dark outside. A full moon, golden and forbidding, was in a periwinkle sky. I stared heavenward during the drive home and then up at the ceiling for hours once I’d gone to bed. Still, I found myself comforted by the sound of Gary readjusting his body on the couch in the living room, and by Aaron’s slow breathing on the bunk below.

  Eventually, I heard an engine out front. Truck doors opened and closed, a key turned in the front-door lock, and at last I could hear Mom’s and Lane’s muffled voices in the living room. I crawled out of bed, climbed down the wooden bunk, and made my way down the hall. There she was, my mother, looking more tired and pale than she had when she left, with Meri slumped over her shoulder asleep. Mom paced nervously back and forth between Lane and Gary, who sat on the couch explaining the situation.

  I couldn’t help myself; I ran into the living room and threw myself at her, wrapped myself tightly around her legs, and squeezed them as much out of despair as relief. Mom patted my head with her palm and ran her fingers through my messy hair; and as she did, the worry on her face seemed to dissolve into a smile of relief. In the next moment, she leaned down, wrapped her free arm all the way around my upper back, and pulled me tightly against her. She seemed to feel as wretched as I did.

  The next morning, Mom phoned the man and the woman, set up an appointment, and later that week visited their offices. When she came home, she said she had been warned by the social workers never to leave us alone again. To ensure that didn’t happen, they had placed her on probation for the next two years, during which time we would not be allowed to move out of the El Paso area and could expect unannounced visits from the department at any time.

  Mom was incensed. “People in this country think they’re free, but they’re not. The government has their fingers in all our business. I just can’t believe this.”

  Mom was angry, but as a result of her probation we were forced to live in one place for a longer period than we ever had before. I found a new kind of peace in being settled, in not being abruptly taken out of school or being forced to get used to new surroundings every few months. For that, I was grateful to the US government and its tyranny, even if the peace didn’t last much beyond the probation.

  22

  Later that week, Mom was washing dishes with her back to the TV when the evening news reported that the man known as the Mormon Manson—my uncle Ervil—had died of a heart attack in a Utah prison. Mom spun around, wiped her hands on a kitchen towel, and hurried into the living room
. There, she watched with a pale, stunned look on her face as the reporter recounted Ervil’s infamous crime spree. Mom counted on her fingers the number of years that had elapsed since my dad died; it had been almost nine years since he’d been executed.

  “I can’t believe it,” Mom mumbled, her face taking on an eerie glow as she searched the screen for further explanation. “After all the heartache that man caused … He should have suffered in prison for a lot longer than he did.” She took off her glasses, leaned forward over her swollen belly, put her head in her hands, and began to sob. Her shoulders jerked up and down as if the news had shaken loose an old and long-buried sadness.

  Given her attitude toward the US government, Mom didn’t find the same peace that I did in being forced to stay in El Paso, but she tried to make the best of the situation. She took us on road trips on the weekends and during the holidays. That Christmas, we visited Grandpa and Grandma in Strathmore and took a side excursion to see Audrey at the state hospital. Eventually, doctors diagnosed her with schizophrenia, a disease that had afflicted several members of the LeBaron family, including two of my father’s siblings.

  That Christmas was the first time I’d seen her since the day Mom had taken her away, and although it had only been a few months, she was a changed person, and not for the better. She was fourteen and heavily medicated, her upper eyelids red and droopy, her cheeks sunken, her personality almost completely unresponsive. She had teeth marks on her pale, bruised arms, and the nurses explained that she had been in a fight with another patient. We weren’t surprised when the nurse said that Audrey had started the brawl. The doctors told us that at times they still had to feed Audrey intravenously, and that the drug cocktail they gave her was the only thing that kept her from being violent toward herself and other patients. I thought my sister looked barely alive, although she seemed to remember all of us.

  The hospital allowed Audrey to come to our grandparents’ house and spend one night with us, although her presence in the outside world only highlighted how she no longer had a place in it. At my grandparents’ with Audrey, Mom’s face became etched again with its familiar helplessness. She wore that look all day long; right up until the moment she took Audrey back to the hospital.

  We returned to El Paso just after New Year’s, when it was time once again for Mom to give birth. She had already decided to have the baby at the hospital in Casas. She wanted a natural delivery and couldn’t find a doctor in the entire state of Texas who would allow a woman who’d had two past C-sections to deliver naturally. Mom took the trip with Lane in the second week of January. Because we knew Social Services would be checking in on us regularly, Lane asked his wife Alejandra and her family to stay with us in El Paso for the week.

  Having overnight guests in our tiny trailer was no small feat, especially as Alejandra brought along seven of her and Lane’s ten children. The two youngest were a pair of barely one-year-old twins, Alex and Lane Jr. Seeing them confirmed that Lane’s description had been accurate—they looked nothing alike. Alex had brown eyes and his mother’s dark hair and complexion, while Junior’s skin was olive, his hair sandy blond, his eyes light blue. They were the unlikeliest and the cutest pair of twins I’d ever seen. Alejandra spent most of her time in the trailer on the couch, alternately nursing a blond or a brunet while Meri lay limp on a pillow in the corner.

  Given her icy relationship with Mom, I expected Alejandra to treat me harshly, but she didn’t. She always smiled at me, and her gold-capped tooth only added to the warm effect. I liked having her around. Most of our communication was nonverbal as she spoke little English, although her children were always ready to step in and translate. They were all perfectly bilingual. Alejandra made her own flour tortillas for the elaborate and delicious Mexican meals she prepared for us three times a day. It was the best food I had ever tasted.

  I shared my top bunk with Alejandra’s daughter Maria. She was just as kind and friendly as her mother and had a self-assuredness and poise that I had never seen in a woman, much less a girl only two years older than me. I found her fascinating. Maria was a carbon copy of her mother, with long, lustrous hair that she parted in the middle and wore in braids. She loved to sew and spent hours making blankets and dresses for her Barbie dolls. While it was not an unusual hobby for girls in our community, Maria’s attitude toward it was.

  “I’m gonna be a fashion designer when I grow up,” she said to me one day. “What are you going to be, Ruthie?”

  The question left me at a loss for words. I was taken aback by the confidence with which she predicted her future life, a life that had no place in our world of marriage and birthing babies. I had no idea that girls had a choice in what they would do with their lives. That Maria thought she could choose her own future seemed like a radical notion to me.

  Maria had three brothers who were close to Aaron’s age, which meant that our trailer was descended upon by a wild pack of boys who never seemed to tire of running up and down the hallway while Maria and I cleaned up after them. One day after school, Maria had finished her chores while I washed the dishes. As I scrubbed, I became more and more frustrated. I just couldn’t take the sound of all the boys playing while I worked. I turned off the faucet, dried my hands, and joined Alejandra and Maria in the living room for an afternoon of Mexican soap operas.

  Unfortunately, the pile of dirty dishes was twice as big after dinner. I was sprawled out on the floor with everyone else, watching The Dukes of Hazzard, when Maria tapped me on the shoulder. “Ruthie,” she whispered, “my mom said that she’s not gonna let you go to bed until the dishes are done. She says you’re acting spoiled and lazy.”

  Feeling like Cinderella, I slowly and dramatically rose from the floor with a sour expression that I made sure Alejandra saw. I stomped into the kitchen. Suddenly it seemed to me that Mom had been right not to like Alejandra, and I couldn’t wait for Mom to come home. I spent the rest of the evening in the kitchen, scouring it from top to bottom while the Dukes’ stock car rumbled in the background. I don’t think our kitchen had ever been cleaner. The trailer smelled like Ajax and Pine-Sol for days.

  On the fifteenth of January, Mom delivered her fourth boy, and two days later, she and Lane brought home Micah. Newborns always generated excitement, and Micah was no exception. My brothers and I fought for the chance to hold the tiny creature that stared up at us through a bundle of blankets. Micah’s dark blue eyes scanned the room with intense curiosity; he had an alertness that I found comforting. His skin was so thin it was almost see-through, but it glowed, as if he were lit from within, the blue button eyes providing the only contrast. I thought he looked like the son of a snowman and half wondered if he might melt away when summer came.

  Alejandra and all her kids were packed and ready to go well before we even heard the sound of Lane’s truck in the trailer park. Alejandra waited in the kitchen during the excitement of Micah’s debut, and she and Mom pointedly ignored each other; their iciness seemed out of place on such a happy day. As soon as the truck was loaded, Lane and Alejandra each lifted a twin to their shoulders and headed straight for the door. “Gracias,” Mom said as they walked past, her straight-lipped smile obviously forced. Alejandra, her head hidden behind the blanket of her baby that she held over her shoulder, didn’t respond. The door rattled shut behind them.

  The sky was overcast, and the air in the trailer cold and damp. Mom took in a deep breath and smiled as Lane’s truck pulled out of our driveway as if she was relieved to finally be home. Micah’s birth must have been a great confidence booster to her, in part because the natural birth was uneventful, as she had predicted it would be, and in part because the doctors pronounced Micah normal and healthy.

  Mom handed the baby over to Aaron, who asked to hold him first. She moved slowly, as if still in pain from the delivery, and her breathing was louder and heavier than normal. She sat next to Aaron on the couch, leaned forward, and placed her forehead in her palm. Meanwhile, my five-year-old brother held Micah in a f
ragile embrace, as if the baby were made of glass. It wasn’t difficult to imagine the two of them a few years down the road—wrestling together on the carpet, playing freeze tag, fighting over what to watch on TV. Aaron grinned from ear to ear, his red cheeks glowing in excitement as he stared at his brother.

  Mom scanned the room with tired eyes. “Ruthie, I need you to make spaghetti for dinner,” she said as she pulled herself slowly off the couch and limped into the kitchen. “And sweep the floor in here.” She picked Micah up from Aaron. “Matt, you wash the dishes and help Ruthie feed Meri.” Then Mom retired to her bedroom, now more cramped than ever with the two cribs, one for Micah and one for Meri. We wouldn’t see her again until the next afternoon after school. “Ruthie, have you seen Lukey since you got home from school?”

  Mom’s voice startled me. I’d been lying on my top bunk, engrossed in a teen magazine, trying to hear myself think as Matt’s music blared from the next room, vibrating through the thin plywood walls. I looked up at Mom, puzzled.

  “Have you seen Luke?”

  For a second time I didn’t hear the question, distracted by how rested she looked. After just one good night’s sleep, Mom seemed back to normal, with her usual pink cheeks and lips. “He ate a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and watched cartoons with us,” I said as I sat up and opened the magazine flat on my lap to mark my page. “I didn’t see him after we turned off the TV.”

  Mom pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose with her forefinger, silently turned, and loudly asked Matt if he knew where Luke was. He didn’t.

  She shook her head in disappointment. “You kids need to keep a better eye on him. You know he likes to leave when no one’s watchin’.” She shook her head again. “How am I supposed to do this all by myself?”

  She waited for a bit in silence as if she expected an answer, but I didn’t know what to say. A moment later, I heard the front door fly open. Mom stood on the wooden steps and shouted Luke’s name. When there was no response, she turned and headed back in the house. The door clanked shut and woke up Micah, who began to cry.