Backseat Saints

by Joshilyn Jackson

  I think he threw me then. I hung in space for one cool, unrippled moment, and then a wall rose up and stopped me hard and I slid down it.

  I couldn’t find up, but from sideways I saw how he ran at me and kicked out. I folded around the jackhammer of his foot. Something stabbed me in my side, as if his shoe had been tipped with a white hot blade. My chest was burning. I couldn’t breathe. I heard my screams stop, and all I heard was whooping bird noises as I gulped at air and got nothing and whooped and got nothing. He kicked my shoulder, and my head snapped back into the wall again, and I was falling into some black and airless place where there was only someone small and lost, done playing, hurt, wanting her mother to come and get her.

  Choose him, the gypsy had said. She had flipped the cards for me, and I had done it wrong. She was saying something else, something urgent, telling me to pray to Saint Cecilia, but all I could hear was Thom’s voice saying, “Dammit, Ro… Ro? Dammit.”

  I couldn’t answer either of them. I could only make that awful bird noise again, that whooping. I recognized the sound. It was the sound of me not breathing. Not breathing was a hazy place, and pain was a box of kittens who had curled up all around me. I could feel warm, furry pockets of them pressed into my ribs and back and hips and belly where his fists had touched. Still more nested in my hair and wrapped around one shoulder like a stole.

  “Ro?” I heard him calling to me from far away. His hard voice had unraveled. He was ready to let his fingers drift gentle down over me, searching under my skin to see if my bones had cracks. He wanted to kiss the hurt places, and his eyes would be full of sorry.

  I couldn’t answer. I had no breath, even to say I hadn’t pushed, that this day was on him, only him. I felt an airless coiling in the space where there had been spent peace before. It was Rose Mae Lolley, saying they were my cards after all. She remembered crouching in the ditch at Wildcat Bluff. For a moment she had owned my hands, and if she’d had another second and a half to aim, we wouldn’t be here now, not breathing. She raged at me for failing. I tried to hold myself still, to stay there in the woods and be Rose Mae, to do it over, to claim the cards as mine, to choose him and not me. I tried to stay. It went black anyway, and I was gone.

  I woke up smelling antiseptic and the fermenting tang of yogurt.

  “There you are,” a woman said. I knew the voice. Even more, I knew that strawberry-vanilla breath.

  “I fell downstairs,” I said to the ER nurse I hated very most. The words came out creaky, automated.

  I heard the cluck of her tongue, and I managed to slit one eye to see her lavender scrubs and her moistly sympathetic eyeballs, too close to my face as she bent over me. I heard the tick and beep of some machine.

  “You could have died, you know,” she said. “He’s getting worse. He’s come pretty close to killing you before, but not this close. You should let me call the cops.”

  I tried to nod, but it hurt too badly, so I said, “Okay. Have them arrest the stairs.”

  Her nostrils flared. “This isn’t what love feels like, Mrs. Grandee. One of your ribs snapped and stabbed you in the lung. It collapsed. Your shoulder’s dislocated, and your scalp’s a bloody mess. You married a set of stairs that’s too damn big and too damn angry. Next time, he’ll send you here in a zipper bag. The cops will come then, believe it, but it will be too late for you.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “And that’s all right with you?” she said. Now she sounded angry. “You’re going to let him kill you?”

  I didn’t answer. I let my eyes drift shut. The thing I’d tried not to see was in the front of my head now, and I was Rose Mae and Rose Mae was me, and neither of us wanted to unthink it.

  An hour-long blink later, and Thom was there, holding a huge bright spray of wildflowers. His nose was swollen, and I felt instantly, savagely pleased. He looked at me with sorry, bad-dog eyes, ready to pet his Ro, as if she was still spread thick as putty over Rose Mae. He should have known better. We’d been married five years. I wondered how he could look at me, limp in my hospital bed, and not see he’d beaten his girl clean off me. I was Rose Mae Lolley, almost alone in a hospital bed, waiting to be released.

  “Hey, baby,” he said.

  “Hey back,” I said, and my voice came out rusty and weak. It didn’t sound like the me I heard in my head. Thom heard my weakness as permission. He set the flowers down and came to sit in the chair by my hospital bed.

  I’ll never unlove you, Jim Beverly had said to me, once, twice, a thousand times. I saw my whole plan now, out loud in my head, and I accepted it, as easily as I accepted Thom picking up my limp hand and holding it.

  Thom looked at me and I looked at the white pebbled ceiling until he asked, “Want me to put the game on?”

  “Okay,” I said. He let go of my hand to get the remote, and I slid it under the covers to hold its mate. He kept the sound down low. I lay in the bed, feeling how slowly time unfolded around us, feeling how little time mattered.

  It hadn’t even been ten years since Jim had last said those words to me. I’ll never unlove you. I found I still believed him. Thom turned and smiled at me, hesitant. I smiled, too, a glowing thing that made Thom’s empty hands flex.

  “They got you on the morphine, huh?” he asked.

  I didn’t answer. I was smiling at Jim Beverly. I would track him down. I would remind him.

  Thom said, “So we go ahead. With the plan.” He still looked hesitant, almost timid.

  “Oh, yes,” I said, absent and smiling, not sure what plan he was talking about. I had my own. Jim Beverly had promised me long ago that he’d kill before he’d let anyone hurt me again.

  “We’ll talk about it when you’re off the morphine,” Thom said, turning back to the TV.

  Nothing to talk about. Him or me, and I had chosen. I would find Jim Beverly, and I would see if his offer still stood.

  PART II:

  THE GIRL LEFT IN THE TOWER

  Amarillo, Texas, 1997

  CHAPTER

  7

  I WAS FLAT ON MY back in a hospital bed for three days, pressing the button to flood my veins with morphine every time the machine counted down to zero and let me. The drug was pumped into my bloodstream through a tube, but after I pressed, it was as if I could see it coming down from the ceiling in icy chips of soothing white. They built up and blanketed me. I lay still and cool underneath, like a creature with no heartbeat, healing and waiting to reanimate.

  Long before the timer worked its way down to zero and allowed me a fresh dose, the pain would sharpen, and I would sharpen with it. It took all my concentration in those clear and aching moments to hold my wounded body still. I wanted to rise up, to smite the glass that covered the fire ax in the hall and take it up by the wooden handle. I would use it to lay waste to Thom’s hale body and then hack my way through the wall of my hospital room and leap away into the blue like some teeny, slighted pagan goddess. I longed for the lovely echoes of the thunk that ax would make when it met flesh, for the feel of something rendable between my teeth.

  I had to make my body rest, because right then, breathing in and out was painful. Leaping and smashing, hell, even standing up straight was beyond me. I hunched and crept my way to the bathroom and back. I would fail, not out of sentiment and weakness, as I had when I was laying for him in the ditch at Wildcat Bluff, but simply because I didn’t have the juice. Even wholly healed, my five-foot frame could not move so openly against him. So I waited and pressed the button for more morphine to hold myself at bay.

  While the drugs force-rested me, my mind wandered in an endless loop around and around one subject: How would I find Jim Beverly?

  I didn’t think about the why. I knew the why with a lovely, black clarity that was chafing hard at poor old Ro Grandee. She was in shreds and strings around me, a web of desperate tenderness for her Thom, trying to rebind me and hamper all the ways I was going to move. It was Ro who had given him a final out on my second day in the hospital.

>   I was quieted by drugs, blankly watching Thom’s broad back as he walked away after his lunchtime visit. He was heading back to work. Ro’s remains were sorrowing after him with every speck of energy she still possessed.

  I heard myself say, “We should call it quits, Thom.” The words fell out in Ro’s soft tones, deliberately pitched to let him decide to hear or not, as he chose.

  In less than a second he was back, bent over me with one huge hand on either side of my head, flattening the crackly hospital pillow, pushing into the mattress so my head tilted back to stare directly into his face. Half his mouth was pulled down, like he was stroking out, and the surface of his eyes looked so flat that I couldn’t see myself reflected in them.

  “You will not start this shit again,” he said. One hand moved to encircle my throat and he leaned in even closer, so I could smell coffee and sweet milk on his breath. “We’re married. I will fucking end you.”

  He shoved himself up and away, using the pillow and my throat as launch pads. I watched him cross the room in long, loping steps. My mother’s cards had told me plain that it would come to this. Him or me. One day soon, his rage would break its chain and come to kill me. If I slipped back inside the skin that was Ro Grandee, I would stay and waffle and find excuses for both of us until I was dead.

  I listened to the stomping footprints as they moved down the hall and died away, and then I said, “I’m gonna choose you, baby.” It came out loud and clear, a declaration to myself and what was left of her.

  Then I watched the numbers on the machine count down, time leaking away. When they said zero, I pressed the button. For a few hours, morphine boxed up the whole mess of my marriage and put it away like a never-to-be-finished jigsaw puzzle. It pressed me lower and lower, into my loop of endless longing. How to find Jim Beverly? I didn’t think beyond that, not even to what Jim would be like now and what methods would best win him to my cause and what harm he might actually inflict on Thom, who had four inches and forty pounds on the boy Jim had been the last time I had seen him.

  I didn’t even think about where I might go after, and whether Jim would be there with me. I did not imagine us holding hands and skipping into the muddy sunrise of a rainy morning. This was choosing, not romance. Jim was a tool, much like my Pawpy’s gun, and I’d find a way to aim him when the time came. Guns and men had always been the things I worked best. Guns had already failed me.

  I concentrated solely on looking for a way to track a boy who had disappeared himself so thoroughly that his own overdevoted mother and the state cops had failed to find him. He’d left me near the end of our senior year, during a week when we’d been technically broken up. Ever since the night Jim and I had shared stolen whiskey, trying to understand what fueled my father’s love affair with drinking, I’d refused to be with him if he had even a sip of something alcoholic. It wasn’t only that I wouldn’t be his girlfriend. I wouldn’t be in a room with him.

  He used the days when we separated to catch up on the benders that were his right and privilege as a star quarterback in Alabama. I suspected he got caught up on his rightful share of tail, too, but I never asked. Jim drinking was not the Jim I wanted, and those days did not belong to me.

  His last night in Fruiton, he got crazy wasted at a party. I was at home, trying to be small and good and quiet, a mouse in the house, so as not to rile my daddy. In two days or three, I fully expected Jim to show up at my house with his head set to a cocky angle. He’d say, “Hey, Rose-Pop,” like nothing had happened. I’d say, “Hey yourself,” and look mad until he scuffed one foot in the dirt, sheepish, and said, “Aw, hell, Rose, I got out of hand. Come on down off the porch, and let me buy you a cherry Coke? A root beer float? Hot cocoa? Nothing says I’m sorry like a beverage with a lot of sugar in it.” I’d shake my head with fond exasperation, come down, and take his hand. We would be us again, and that would be that.

  Instead, sometime after midnight, Jim crashed his Jeep into a pole. He walked away from the accident, leaving a trail of beer foam and angry footprints stamped deep into the dirt as he made his way back to the highway. A couple of passing drivers saw him hitchhiking, his thumb pointing away from town. He disappeared himself, a brilliant magic trick, emphasis on trick, and it had been played on me.

  I couldn’t make sense of it. I wandered Fruiton High blind and naked as an unearthed mole, uncomprehending. Then it had come out that Jim was failing his senior year and would lose his scholarship to UNA. He’d lost almost everything, and he’d walked away from me, the one thing he should have been certain of, the one thing that was still his. Not forgivable. The day after I turned eighteen, I had done the Greyhound bus version of Jim’s hitchhike out. I’d disappeared, too, never to be found.

  In the lovely, morphine-covered landscape where I lay, looking for a path to him, it dawned on me that I hadn’t disappeared, after all. I’d tried, but I had been found. My mother had found me.

  Her presence at the airport was not merely a hideous coincidence. She had come to Amarillo specifically because I lived here; she’d come to put her eyes on me. She’d sat low in the coffee shop across the parking lot to watch me pimp Joe Grandee’s guns, or crouched down in a rented car on my street, watching me bend and dig in my garden. She could have been making Amarillo pilgrimages for years now. No way to tell. The only certainty was that she knew I was there long before I caught her at that airport. The proof was at Cadillac Ranch. She had left a message on the cars a day before our eyes had met.

  I did love you, Rose. Pray to Saint Cecilia!

  She’d left it to soothe her conscience and invoke her favorite saint in a place where she could be 99 percent certain I would never find it. But in coming to my city, she’d left a speck of working room for whatever minor saint was in charge of chance meetings and graffiti. He was on my side, no doubt tittering on my shoulder as he brought me to the airport in perfect time to catch her leaving me again.

  The only question that mattered now was, how had she found me? Because if I could be found, then so could Jim Beverly.

  The hole my own slivered rib had stabbed into my lung resealed itself. The hospital pulled my pretty morphine tube, and I started a new, less intense romance with Percocet. I was still bad off, but I could breathe, so they released me.

  Thom drove me back to the house, bracing me in the seat with pillows and taking it easy on the curves. Once we got home, he put one arm close to his own side and bent it at the elbow, so his forearm was a ballet bar I could cling to as we made our way from the car back to our bedroom. I creaked my way down the hall like a granny, trying to walk in a way that favored my hurt places. There weren’t enough working pieces of myself to take up the slack, so I had to favor Thom.

  He helped me lower myself into the bed, plumping up a ridge of pillows behind me so I could see the TV if I wanted. He gave me the remote, the book I’d been reading, and another pill to wash down with a cool cup of water from the bathroom. He reached to smooth my long hair away from my face, but something in my gaze paused him. He took his hand back. Wise move.

  “I’ll tell my dad you’re still under the weather this week. He can get Kelsey to cover your shifts,” he said, sweet as sugar cereal. He was treating me like something breakable, which is different from how you treat something you yourself have broken.

  I let my body lie in our bed like it was a hole-covered log, waiting for squirrels and spiders to find it and nest. Only Gretel came, flopping down with her spine a solid line of warming comfort against my calf, my faithful napping partner. Thom brought me hot cereal and scrambled eggs in the morning, Cup-a-Soups with crackers and sliced cantaloupe at night. Invalid food, with Percocet for afters. I ate it without tasting, mending through the tick of each long second, and my mind spun in a circle like a lazy Susan with a single idea on it: How did my mother find me, a thing that deliberately went and got itself lost?

  When Thom came to bed, we lay on our own sides, both flat on our backs. My cold will was a ridge of Puritan pillows ru
nning in between us. But the fourth night, my body had healed enough to turn and shift without pain waking me. I fell asleep, and Ro Grandee crept over, seeking her husband’s heat. He came to her as he always had. We woke up face-to-face, our pieces tangled and tucked around each other. I unwound my limbs and took them back without looking at him. He let me go.

  Thom posed little threat in these days. He was ashamed and yet so sated that it was like a bloat, making him sweet as he tended to my body, his favorite toy. He worked to heal it, same as I was, readying it for rough play. I was safe with Thom; right now, Ro Grandee was the danger.

  I was back in her house, with the pretty ocean blue coverlet and sheers she’d picked, her willow-patterned china in the kitchen, the remnants of her light perfume tainting the air of the bathroom. I’d lived inside her familiar, comfortable skin for years, until it was me, until I had no choice in it. But to let myself be Ro again now was suicide, the only irrevocable sin. The drugs that held me back in the hospital were holding me too still in her territory. I felt her as a creep, growing on back over me like fungus. It could not be allowed.

  When Thom brought my breakfast on a tray, I handed him back the Percocet and said, “Could you bring me a couple, three Motrin, please? And a great big cup of coffee?”

  I downed the coffee and ate every bite of my cheese eggs. Thom left for work, and I could feel myself waking up, truly waking, as last night’s pill spent itself in my bloodstream and was replaced by the caffeine. The first thing I realized was that I was filthy, covered in a waxy coat of my own mank. My hair was limp and greasy. I creaked to my feet and took a long shower, scrubbing myself so hard that it was like being peeled. I made the water scalding hot. When I got out, I was pink under my fading bruises.

  I opened the closet and got an eyeful of Ro’s swirly skirts in springtime colors. Sweet flats with bows and buckles and embroidered daisies. Clingy lightweight sweaters, all long-sleeved. I slammed the closet door, as repulsed by these things as if they had been hand-sewn from human skin. I went to my dresser instead and dug out a long-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of the old Levi’s that I wore on heavy cleaning days.