“But you remember him coming back?”
She shrugged.
“Does that mean yes? When was it?”
“A long time ago.”
“How long ago? Last year? The year before?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You were a child. You were barely five years old.”
“That’s not that young. Why don’t I remember seeing him?”
She fumbled around in her pockets for a cigarette.
“Maribeth, no cigarettes! Answer me.”
“You don’t remember because you didn’t see him.”
“Wasn’t I here?”
“You were here.” She started flexing her toes, as if they were tiny fingers she was exercising. “You didn’t see him because I didn’t want you to.”
“You didn’t want me to. What does that mean?”
“It means, Jessie, that you don’t know a thing about your father.” Her voice was flat. “It means that I was scared, and I did my best to protect you, because you were what mattered to me in the world. It means I didn’t know what to expect of him, and I wasn’t going to let him get his hands on you and do one of his good-bye-I’ll-be-right-back acts.”
“You think he would have kidnapped me?”
“Why not? I didn’t know what he was capable of. He left us, didn’t he? He had no scruples about that. He had no right to come back and torture me.”
“Torture you? That’s a crazy way to talk. My father came back, and he wanted to see me, and you—” I stopped. My heart was doing that strange old thumping. “Did he want to see me? Is that why he came back?”
“Let’s let it go.”
“No, let’s not!”
“Okay. I don’t know the answer to that. He didn’t say anything and I didn’t give him a chance. You were in the backyard, playing, and I didn’t tell him that, and I didn’t call you or get you. I told him to leave. That was it.” Her face was flushed. “And I’d do the same thing again, in a heartbeat. If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand much.”
“He was my father, I had a right to see him,” I said. “That’s what I understand. You kept me from seeing him.” I stared at her. “I’ll never forgive you for that.”
TWENTY
Wall of Ice
“My father’s moved out,” Diane said, practically the moment I walked into her house Sunday afternoon.
“Oh, Diane. That’s horrible.”
“He’s living in the Y downtown. I can’t believe he’s really gone.” Her cheeks quivered. “Now that he’s out of the house, my mother’s in a much better mood. She’s not even sad. She keeps saying it’s peaceful now. I feel like I hate her. I don’t even want to talk to her.”
“My mother and I are fighting, too,” I said.
We went into the kitchen and Diane put on a pot of water to heat for spaghetti. I was going to eat supper with her and maybe sleep over. I didn’t want to be around my mother. I could have gone to Meadow’s, it was closer, but I didn’t want to be around her, either. The Jack Kettle thing. My guilty conscience.
“Here, work on this.” Diane handed me a grater and a hunk of hard cheese.
“We’re going to have tomato sauce, aren’t we?” I said.
“Nuh-uh. Olive oil and grated cheese. Don’t worry, it’ll be good.… My aunts from both sides have been burning up the phone wires, trying to get my parents to try again.”
“Diane, that’s great.”
“No, it’s not. I know my parents. If they got together again, it would be, Let’s all pretend nothing happened. Let’s all be nice and sweet.” She dropped a fistful of spaghetti into the boiling water. “They broke my heart, Jessie. They shocked me out of my happy childhood. You can’t do that and then act like it’s nothing. My aunt Essie says this is the real world, and I’m not tough enough. Maybe, but I say it’s my life and I want my parents to respect it, not kick it around like an old shoe.”
She looked at me across the counter. “Are you laughing at me?”
“No! No way, Diane. I understand. I always believed my mother respected me. Now I’ve found out differently. You can’t respect someone if you aren’t truthful with them, Diane.”
I started telling her about James Wells. I was just going to mention him to illustrate what I meant, but the words spilled out. I meant to sketch out the situation, but I ended up saying everything.
We took bowls of spaghetti up to her room and sat on the bed and ate, but I don’t know what I ate. I don’t know if I ate anything. Something had grabbed me, got hold of me. It was as if now that I’d started, I had to say it all. It was like being on a high-speed train, there was no getting off. At one point, Diane leaned her head on her hand and sort of moaned, “Jessie, oh Jessie.” It wasn’t pity, I knew it wasn’t that. It was a heart cry, as if she knew exactly what I’d felt for so long. The absence, the emptiness, the missing pieces. The space in my life where there should have been a father and wasn’t.
“You’re the first person I’ve ever told, Diane.” I put my bowl on the floor and lay limply across her bed, my head and arms dangling. I was as tired as if I’d run a marathon.
“You told Meadow,” she said.
I shook my head.
She pushed her foot against mine. “If your dad knew you, he’d think you were fabulous.”
“And then again, he might just think, Ugh, ugh, who wants an ugly kid like that.”
“Your father wouldn’t think that. If he saw you, he would just fall in love with you.”
I laughed and looked down at the floor. Her rug had a pattern of tiny flowers and leaves. “Oh, sure,” I said.
The shadows of leaves dance on the side of the house. The child comes running. The man kneels down. “Is this her?” he says. “Is this my daughter? … My god, look at her.” He’s fallen in love with his child.…
Later, when Diane and I were downstairs, cleaning up, my mother called. “Do you want me to come and get you?” she asked.
“No.”
“When are you coming home?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe tomorrow, maybe never.”
“How’re you getting home?”
“If I come, I’ll walk.”
“I don’t want you walking at night.”
“Okay! I’ll take a bus.”
“They’re not dependable. I’ll be over in an hour. Be ready.”
“That’s too soon, Maribeth.”
“All right, make it an hour and a half.” She hung up.
In the car, I could feel my mother’s eyes on me. I stared out the window. “Still mad, huh?” she said, as if we’d just had a spat. “What is it that bugs you so much about that business?”
“Are you referring to you not letting me see my father?”
“Right. Would you be a happier person if he had taken a look at you and said, ‘So that’s the kid. Okay, be seeing you’? Because I’m telling you, that’s just what he would have said. If he said anything.”
“That’s not the point. I could have seen him. My whole life might have been different! It would be something for me to have. Like pride.”
“Pride? In him? How about shame?”
“No! Pride! I said what I meant, Maribeth! You, you work, you work three jobs, you do too much, I’m full of pride for you, sometimes I feel like it chokes me, because I don’t do enough back for you—”
“Come on, that’s not right—”
“—and him, I have nothing,” I said, talking over her. “No pride, no shame, nothing.” My eyes smarted. “I want something, I want to know about him. The truth. Not those baby stories you’ve been telling me all my life. Story of my life,” I mimicked.
She pulled the car over to the curb and stamped on the brake, jolting me forward. “James Wells? You couldn’t know him, Jessie, not the way you’re talking, not if you sat and stayed with him for a hundred years. He didn’t give himself to anyone, he wouldn’t tell you anything. Everything bottled up, and you never knew why he was charming you or why he was mad or
why he was anything. You don’t know what it’s like, living with someone like that. Guess why I make so much noise sometimes, why I love to hear you do the same? Because I lived with a man who was like a blocked-up sewer.”
“I don’t want to hear this,” I said. For years it had been the prince with his leather jackets and beautiful car, and now it was sewers?
“No, you’re going to hear it,” she said. “You want the truth, and I’m going to give it to you. I begged him to talk to me, to tell me how he felt, tell me what was bothering him. You think I didn’t try? I tried. Let me help you, let me make you happy, just open up a little. That’s all I’m asking. No. Nobody allowed in. He talked or he didn’t talk, on his terms. Everything on his terms. He snarled or he smiled, and I never knew the why for anything. Nothing I did suited him. I didn’t know how to cook, I didn’t know how to dress, I didn’t know how to talk to people, I didn’t even know how to take care of you.”
We were sitting side by side, but there was a wall between us. Rock and ice. She was on one side, I was on the other. I could barely hear her. I could hardly make out what her words meant.
“Sometimes he left for hours and then came back. Twice he left for days, and I thought he was gone for good, and then he came back and sat there and stared at me and didn’t say a word.
“I was in terror. And I had no words for it. Nobody said things like emotional abuse in those days. I never knew what was going to happen. And then one morning he looked at his watch and said he would go out for a while, and when I asked him where he was going, he said, ‘Nowhere,’ and that was where he went.
“Nowhere. Nowhere I knew about. Nowhere near us, ever again. Why did he leave? Who knows? All I know now is that it’s the best thing he ever did for me. I cried my heart out for three weeks, and then, when I knew he wasn’t coming back, this time or ever …”
“Three weeks?” My mind fastened on that detail. “You cried for three weeks? Why did you lie to me? You always said three days.”
“Why do you call everything I do a lie? Why should I tell a little child that for a while her mother thought she was going to die of a broken heart? What would be the point? You were my life, you were what mattered, and I would have seen him in hell before I let him anywhere near you, even for a second.”
She stuck a cigarette in her mouth and said, “Now tell me I was wrong. Go ahead. Tell me.”
TWENTY-ONE
This Is the Air He Breathed
When I saw Jack Kettle waiting for me on the top step of the library, I almost walked away. I could have. He was looking in the other direction, and he didn’t see me right away. Then he turned and came bounding down the steps. “Hi!”
“Hi,” I said. “I see you’ve changed your headgear.” He was wearing a black cowboy hat.
“Did you have trouble recognizing me?” His face got pink.
“I’d know you anywhere.”
He pushed the cowboy hat back on his head. “Aw, shucks.”
After that great beginning, neither of us said a word. It was embarrassing. Me, who always knew how to talk, suddenly didn’t—because what flashed into my mind was, This isn’t just meeting downtown, it’s a date. What am I doing?
Some girls sat down on the steps behind us and began arguing in loud voices. Jack crossed his arms, then uncrossed them, and I crossed mine. Say something, I ordered myself. I lifted the hair off my neck and got out, “Hot for April.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Last year it snowed on this date.”
“Wow.”
“Two inches.”
“No kidding.”
“But it melted fast.”
“That’s good.”
It was? I decided I’d cut my tongue out before I said one more word about the weather. “Were you waiting for me very long?”
“No. Well, yeah.”
“The bus was sort of slow. Sorry.”
“No prob. What do you want to do?”
“What do you want to do?”
“Anything you want to do.”
“How about a bus ride?”
He looked surprised. “Okay with me,” he said.
“Not just anywhere,” I said. “I want to go to Myrtle.”
“What’s that?”
“Little town north of here.”
“Myrtle. Want to tell me why?”
I nodded. “But not right now.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the bus driver said, “there is no smoking on this vehicle. Please be courteous to your fellow passengers, relax, and enjoy the ride.”
Jack had a pocket chess set with him. He put it on the seat between us and taught me the basics of the game.
Every five minutes, the bus stopped at another tiny place. The stop for Myrtle was in front of a grocery store with two gas pumps. There was a row of houses strung along the road. On the other side of the street were a few more houses, a laundromat, and a feed store with a faded sign flapping in the wind. The air smelled the way Dennis Wells had said it would, like a barn.
“What now?” Jack said.
“I want to walk around and look at things.” I still hadn’t explained myself, why we were here. We walked to the corner. The houses were all small and plain. Washing was hanging on lines strung across porches. Pickup trucks in every yard. Not too far away, I heard the clank of farm machinery.
This is where James Wells lived, I told myself. This is the air he breathed. We passed a tiny park. A metal sign said this was the site of an ancient Oneida Indian village. I wondered how many times James Wells had read this sign. At the edge of town, we saw brown fields and ditches half-filled with snow. The barn smell was everywhere. These are the things he saw, the sounds he heard, the smells he smelled.
“So this is Myrtle,” Jack said.
“Are you sorry you came?”
“No. It’s an adventure. Jack and Jessie’s exciting adventure.” Suddenly he had his arms around me, a big bear hug.
“Give me air,” I said. I wanted to push him away and I wanted to pull him back. We started walking again, holding hands. He had a big hand.
A woman pushing a stroller with a little boy in it stared at me. “Excuse me. Do you know me?” I said. “Do I look like someone you know?”
“What?”
Jack stared at me, too.
The woman bent over the stroller and adjusted the little boy’s tiny baseball cap, then patted him all over, as if she were afraid parts of him were missing.
“Sorry. I’m not making sense. Do you know the Wells family? James Wells? He lived here. I look sort of like him, and I thought maybe you recognized me.”
She straightened up. “I just moved here a few years ago, I’m practically a stranger myself.” She walked away.
“Who’s James Wells?” Jack said.
We sat down on a railing near an empty building, and for the second time, I told someone about James Wells. It wasn’t like telling Diane. Same words, same feelings for me, but it was the difference between going into a room alone and going in with someone you know. Diane had been by my side while I talked. I couldn’t tell where Jack was—he could have been here, or he could have been fifty miles away. He just sat there, looking down at the dirt and sometimes nodding his head.
When I was finished, he said, “Some story.”
“It’s not a story. It’s the truth.”
“Oh, I know that.” He patted my hand.
“I shouldn’t have dragged you here,” I said. “It wasn’t fair of me. It’s not your business—”
“You didn’t drag me. Anyway, I’m glad I’m here. I mean, I am if you are.”
We sat there for a few more minutes. “So you’re just planning on going around, sort of talking to people and seeing what you can find out?” Jack said.
“More or less.” I went into the grocery store and asked to use the phone book. There wasn’t a single Wells in it, and the woman behind the counter said she’d never heard of James Wells.
“I know James
Fortune.” She wore glasses with bright orange frames.
“Wells,” I repeated. “He used to live here.”
The door chimes sounded. A man in green work clothes bought a carton of cigarettes. “You ever know anybody named James Wells?” she asked him. He fingered the stubble on his cheeks, then shook his head. Jack bought chips and soda. A girl came in, but she looked too young to even ask.
“What if nobody knows him?” I said.
“You haven’t asked around that much yet.” Jack gave my hand a squeeze.
On a side street, a woman was hanging up wash in a yard. I talked to her over the wire fence. She squinted at me and said, “I might remember a James Wells.” About a dozen little kids were running around in the yard. She took the clothespins out of her mouth. “If he’s the one I’m thinking about, if he’s that one, he was on the wrestling team in junior high school. Was he a wrestler?”
“I don’t know. What did he look like? Did he have eyebrows like mine?” It sounded ridiculous.
“How old would he be?” she asked.
“About thirty-six,” I said.
“Thirty-six? That sounds right. That’s how old I am.” She gestured to the kids. “You don’t think those are all mine, do you?”
“This is preschool?” Jack asked. “My older sister does that in her home.”
“Amanda,” the woman called to one of the little girls, “don’t you do that to Kevin, or you’ll have to go inside.”
“Do you remember anything else about James Wells?” I asked her.
She snapped a sheet and pinned it to the clothesline. “My girlfriend liked him, that’s why I remember him at all. I wasn’t interested in wrestling, but a couple times we went to watch Jimmy. That’s what she called him.”
“Yes!” I gripped the fence. “That was his nickname.”
“My girlfriend told me he was a foster kid, lived around with a bunch of different people. She had such a crush on him. He never talked to her, never talked to anyone if you ask me, but she almost died every time she saw him—Amanda,” she yelled again. “You leave Kevin alone.”
“Does your girlfriend still live here? Do you think I could speak to her?”
Missing Pieces Page 8