JEPTHA DROVE HOME slowly, wanting to be as close to fully sober as possible when he begged Lucy to forgive him. He drove out into the open countryside, where farmland was broken only by the occasional gas station and churches with their well-meaning signs lit twenty-four hours a day, a fluorescent ministry for wayward souls. “If God feels far away,” one read, “who moved?” He knew the answer.
When Jeptha pulled into his farm’s driveway, his heartbeat quickened as he saw that every light was on in his trailer. It was 10:00 p.m. Lucy was usually asleep by now. Although her car was parked out front, he knew something was wrong. He ran as fast as he could to the trailer. They were close to, or—Shit, he thought, skidding to a halt at the bottom of the stairs—at her due date now. Her due date was today. He cursed himself, ran up the stairs, and jerked open the door.
There were bloody towels trailing into the kitchen and several discarded blue gloves. His heart beat faster. Small puddles of blood led from the kitchen to the bathroom. A pit opened up in his stomach.
“Lucy!” he yelled, but there was no answer.
He walked to the bathroom, fear tingling his fingers. It was empty except for a bundle of bloody towels beneath the sink.
“Holy shit,” he whispered to himself. That same bucking sense of frantic fear that Crystal Gayle had shown the night she’d died flooded Jeptha. He bolted back down the hall and out the door.
From the corner of his eye, he saw something white flutter down to the porch. He bent to pick it up, and his finger caught in the peppermint stickiness at the back. He held the note toward the full moon. “At hospital,” it read.
Jeptha jumped off the porch, his left ankle bending underneath him and scraping against the hard leather of his boots. He limped as quick as he could to his car. All he could think was Please God, let her be okay, over and over again. If there had been time to write a note, maybe things were all right. But, the blood—there was so much.
He roared down the driveway and into the street without even looking to see if a car was coming. He was five minutes down the road before he realized he didn’t have his lights on. Once he got on the highway, Jeptha drove ninety miles an hour toward the soft glow that the huge chemical plant cast over Kingsport. He prayed as he drove, asking for three things: one, that he not get pulled over for speeding; two, that his wife be okay; and three, that he get there in time to see the baby be born.
In keeping with the general pattern of his life, God only granted one of Jeptha’s wishes. When he finally got to the hospital—having talked Rick Mullins out of taking him to jail for going double the speed limit only because he kept insisting that Lucy was having his baby—he ran through the hallways in search of her but stopped short at the door of her room.
She was plainly okay, sitting up on the hospital bed and smiling down at their baby, who lay on her legs. She rubbed his cheek with the back of her hand and kissed his forehead. Jeptha had never before seen his wife so purely happy, so full of joy. His stomach curdled as he watched Lucy fall in love for the first time.
Jeptha knew then that he had lost her, and for good this time. In his few short moments on earth, his baby had managed to create more of a bond with Lucy than Jeptha had in all the years he’d known her. It was excruciating to watch. He would never see that face of Lucy’s, the one that looked lost in love, turned to him. It was all he had ever wanted, and now that he saw what real love was, he knew it was plainly, impossibly, out of reach. He thought for a minute of walking away but instead crossed the room to Lucy’s side.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here,” he whispered.
“I wasn’t either,” Lucy said, not lifting her eyes to his.
“What do you mean?”
She looked up at him then. Jeptha fought hard to keep his face from crumpling when he saw love fall away as she stared at him, rather than the baby. “I had him in our bathroom with half the fire department.”
“Are you serious?”
“It went so fast. I didn’t realize that was it.”
“I’m sorry. I should have been there. Today was your due date. I should have been home.”
“It’s okay.” She stared at the baby, his hair fuzzy and his face squashed—Jeptha hoped temporarily—from being born. “I was thinking we should call him Jared. What do you think?”
“It’s perfect. How is he?”
“He’s perfect. Do you want to hold him?”
She scooted up toward the head of the bed, wincing with each shift of her bottom, and held him out to Jeptha.
Jeptha cradled his son awkwardly in his arms and watched him sleep. Tiny blond eyelashes wisped against his cheeks, fluttering up and down with each breath. Jeptha recognized miniature versions of his ears and Lucy’s upturned nose. Jeptha held his son’s head, the soft skin of the baby’s scalp against his palm like nothing he’d ever felt, and wondered at how such a tiny thing could make him feel such a terrifying responsibility.
“He’s so little,” he said, with a smile.
“But cute,” she yawned. “They’re going to take him up to the nursery soon.”
“I’m so sorry, Lucy. I can’t believe I wasn’t there.”
“It’s okay,” she said again.
Jeptha could see that she meant it. It was truly okay with her that he had missed his own son’s birth. There was no measure for the hurt he felt, for the pain he’d brought on himself. He quickly thumbed one of his tears off of Jared’s forehead, hoping he had been fast enough to escape Lucy’s notice. Jared’s eyes opened slightly from the pressure of Jeptha’s touch. He stared up, his eyes unfocused, still shiny with some sort of medical goop. Jeptha wondered if his son was disappointed to meet this grizzled, sour-smelling man who was his father. He leaned down to kiss him between the eyes, and his son’s eyelids closed again in sleep.
“He is perfect,” he whispered.
“I know,” she said. Jeptha thought she had never looked more exhausted or more beautiful. It was a moment he would remember for the rest of his life.
“You ready for me to take him up to the nursery?” a nurse asked from the door. Jared’s face pursed with every squeak of her footsteps on the floor. Jeptha tightened his grip. He didn’t want to give his baby, his only connection to Lucy, over to a stranger.
“That would be great,” Lucy said. She nodded at Jeptha, like this was no big thing. He squeezed Jared and kissed him one more time between his eyes. When he saw the pinched look on his face relax into sleep, Jeptha carefully handed the baby over to the nurse and watched her every move as she settled him in the small plastic bed and pushed him with quick steps out of the room.
“Guess I …” Jeptha said, stopping to clear his tear-clogged throat. “Guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you had him on your own. You’re about the strongest person I know.”
“Well, it wasn’t easy. But I didn’t have much say in the matter.” Lucy yawned and laid her head down on the pillows. “I’ve got to get some sleep. I’m sorry.”
“I’ll stay, wait ’til he wakes up.”
“You should go on. I’m going to sleep for as long as he’ll let me. You look like you could use some sleep yourself.”
“You sure?” Jeptha asked, hating himself for the hope he heard creep into his voice, hope that she would want him to stay, beg him not to leave.
“It’s fine. You should go on back. Come back later this morning,” Lucy said, sleep already beginning to slur her voice.
“Okay,” Jeptha said, his voice cracking. “I love you, Lucy,” he said, kissing her on the forehead.
“Mmmm.”
From the doorway, Jeptha saw that her eyes were closed, and her breathing was already moving into that steady territory of sleep. His heart, his body, his everything wanted to lay down beside her and never leave. He wiped his tears away, glad she could not see them. Finally, he whispered “Bye,” knowing she wouldn’t hear, and walked down the hall. The same nurse who’d taken his son gave him a sad smile from the nurse’s station. Looking away from h
er, he saw another father stretched out in the chair beside his wife, their hands on their baby in the plastic bassinet between them. He stopped, almost returned to Lucy’s room. But the image of her, staring down so contentedly at Jared, came to him. Lucy did not need him. She never had.
When he got home, he sat on his porch steps, elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. The sun was rising over the farm to the east. He waited for Crystal Gayle to rest her head on his leg but then remembered he’d never feel that comforting weight again. Two weeks ago, he’d sat in this same spot and felt an overwhelming and unfamiliar sense of contentment and happiness, like life would be okay. He should have known better. Since then, he’d killed his dog, gotten himself fired from his job, acquired a kid, and lost his wife. He’d have thought it was a country song—a bad one—if he didn’t have the freshly dug grave, an empty wallet, a baby bearing his last name, and the miles of regret on his heart to prove it.
PART TWO
18
“MAMA! MAMA! MAMA!”
Lucy groaned and rolled over to look at the clock. Five a.m. Better than yesterday. But still not as good as the seven a.m. Jared had been doing for several months before his teeth came through. She’d thought the first three months of having a baby had been hard. But now that Jared was ten months old, it wasn’t any easier. With a groan, she pushed herself up out of bed and walked down the hall, squinting her eyes against the sun.
In the kitchen, she saw Jeptha’s keys on the counter. Then she saw his boot hanging off the edge of the couch and his arm trailing the ground. He had come home after all.
“Mama!” Jared squawked from the crib, which, by necessity, was pushed against the wall of the living room, a few feet from Jeptha’s head. He didn’t stir. Lucy hadn’t heard him come in the night before, but given how comatose he seemed, she guessed it was late and he was drunk, as usual. Better than the car, she supposed, where she’d found him passed out too many times to count in the last ten months, but still, she’d rather he came to bed. It’d be way better to wake her up than the baby, who wasn’t nearly as heavy a sleeper as his drunk father.
Lucy sighed as she studied Jeptha’s face. When she watched him like this and saw Jared’s face in his contours, her stomach unclenched a little. Despite her low-grade, constant anger with him, she had a softness for her husband—love, of a sort, she guessed—that she cursed herself for on a daily basis. She remembered his sober self, his desire to be better, and the steady pleasure of those months. She wished sometimes that she had given him more in return for his effort—maybe he would have stayed that way if he’d found more reward from her in it. She missed those moments on the couch, tucked beside him. There had been a safety, a rootedness there. One baby and so much alcohol later, she saw Jeptha and still wanted to save him—wanted to see that man, the one with whom she had imagined building a family, again.
“Hey there, Mister,” Lucy said to Jared, whose face lit up when he saw her.
“Mama,” he said. Lucy broke into a smile. She couldn’t help it. She knew every parent thought their kid was the cutest, but Jared really was, with his mess of white curls and his big three-toothed grin. She loved how he had one word and used it for everything—whether he meant her, or milk, or a toy, or his lovey. He never tired of saying her name, and she never tired of hearing it. She had been incapacitated by love for him there in the bathroom when he was born, and that feeling had only grown over the last ten months. From the outside, she knew her life didn’t look good—Jeptha fallen completely off the wagon, her working sixty hours a week. But Jared made it all worth it. She had never known that the kind of love she felt for him existed in the world.
“Couldn’t sleep, huh?” she said, hefting him up by his armpits. “You ready for your bottle?”
Lucy set him down on the floor in the kitchen. She grabbed a bottle off the dish rack, scooped one full spoon of formula into it, and scraped out another one from the dregs of what was left. This was the last formula in the trailer. She’d forgotten to pick it up at the Walmart yesterday, so tired on her break that she had actually sat in the break room and closed her eyes for twenty minutes until Teresa had come in yelling at her for having been five minutes late that morning. She had texted Jeptha asking him to get some since he wasn’t doing anything else. She looked on every counter and opened every cabinet, slamming the last few doors as she realized he hadn’t done it. She’d have to run out and get more on the way to drop Jared off at Marla’s. Lucy looked with fury over at Jeptha’s slumbering form.
Out of the corner of her eye, Lucy saw the cord to the living room lamp within Jared’s grasp. She usually kept it tucked behind the table where he couldn’t reach it, but Jeptha, in his drunken attempts to turn on the lamp, must have undone all her hard work. She was moving before Jared even reached his hand up to it, but she wasn’t fast enough. The whole lamp crashed to the ground, narrowly missing Jared’s head and glancing off his arm. He burst into loud, angry tears. A dead man couldn’t have slept through it.
“What’s going on?” Jeptha asked, rubbing his eyes.
“Your son is destroying the house. And I need to shower, get him dressed, and leave in less than ten minutes, so we can go get more formula. That’s the last of it in the house,” Lucy said, pointing at the bottle she had given to Jared.
“Oh shit. I was supposed to get more.”
“Yeah, you were,” Lucy said.
Jeptha didn’t answer. He rubbed the beard that had grown in over the last few months. It was no wonder Jared cried every time Jeptha picked him up—he looked like a moonshiner and smelled worse.
“Want me to take him?” Jeptha asked.
“No. It’ll make it worse.”
She whipped Jared up off the ground and took him into the bathroom with her. She slammed the accordion door shut behind her. But it jammed and came off the track, gaping open about eight inches. She put Jared down on the floor and handed him his bottle. She took three deep breaths while holding on to the sink, her hands exactly where they had been when she pushed Jared out of her. She shook the anger out of her hands and slowly eased the door back on its track, closing it. A minute later, she heard Jeptha trudge by, followed by the sound of the mattress collapsing under his weight. He hadn’t even stopped to take off his boots.
Even though she knew it would make her late to work, she eased her head under the water, sighing as the hot water hit her scalp. She portioned out a tiny dot of her favorite shampoo, a hotel sample from a trip to Knoxville three years ago. It smelled of oranges and honey. She peeked out at Jared every few seconds, but he was happily playing with an empty Safeguard soapbox and drinking his bottle. She stuck her head back under the water, blocking out all sound and feeling nothing but the water beating down on her. Under this cascade, with the scent of orange in her nose, she could pretend that nothing existed outside of this moment. Under the water, there was no deadbeat husband, crying baby, or relentless job. There was a nice, clean apartment, where a happy, smiling Jared had his own room and a fun, reliable baby sitter. The sun streamed in through bright kitchen windows, and Lucy played with Jared in the mornings and went to class in the afternoons. Under the water, for a few minutes each day, she could imagine that was her life.
Something hard bonked against the wooden doors of the sink vanity. Lucy held her breath, but a few seconds later, Jared began to wail. Lucy counted to ten, hoping he might stop on his own, and she could go back to that vision. But then she remembered she had to get formula before going to Marla’s. She pulled her head out, turned off the water, and poked her head out of the curtain.
“You’re okay, Jared,” she said as cheerfully as she could. He wasn’t, of course, but like her, he would have to make do.
LUCY BRIGHTENED WHEN she looked up from the register and saw Ethel Slocum standing at the head of the belt. She had been about to turn her light off and pull out her cash box, but Ethel was worth staying open for.
“Hey, Ethel,” she said.
“Hey, L
ucy! I been walking up and down the aisles for five minutes trying to see if you were here.”
“Well, ain’t that sweet!”
“You’re still open, right?”
“You’re my last. About to head out to pick up Jared.”
“Aw, how’s he doing?”
“Getting so big. Scooting around, pulling up on everything. Says Mama like crazy.”
“I’ll still never forget that phone call from LouEllen.” Ethel shook her head. “I was so worried about you.”
“Well, it all turned out all right, thanks to you getting the EMTs out there.”
Lucy bagged up Ethel’s purchases. She heard the older woman inhale a few times as if she was about to say something, but every time Lucy looked up, Ethel was silent.
“Fifty-two, thirty-eight,” Lucy said.
Ethel opened her mouth one more time, but then dug in her purse. She counted out the cash, giving Lucy exact change from the pocket on her wallet. When Lucy turned to drop the change in the drawer, Ethel finally spoke.
“Is Jeptha all right?”
Yep, Lucy thought. If all right is drunk, jobless, and home sleeping.
“I think so,” Lucy said. “Why?”
“Well …” Ethel said, shaking her head. “No. I shouldn’t say nothing.”
“Shouldn’t say nothing about what?”
“It’s just, he was supposed to come over and help Dick out with the addition yesterday, and he never showed.”
“He didn’t?”
“No. We called him, but no answer. He’s not sick or anything, is he?”
“I think—I think he wasn’t feeling great yesterday. Real feverish,” Lucy lied.
“Oh, well, that’s okay. We wouldn’t want him to work like that,” Ethel said, nodding. “But listen, we got to get that addition done. Dick had mentioned it to another guy before Jeptha said he could get back to it. Anyway, when Jeptha didn’t show, Dick called him yesterday and he came on out. So we are probably gonna keep on with him, since he’s done started.”
Holding on to Nothing Page 21