Carry Yourself Back to Me

by Deborah Reed

  It fell quiet for too long, and Calder began mouthing the air like a fish.

  Then her father dropped the paper into his lap again.

  Her mother slowed with her cleanup.

  “Y’all know I used to ski,” he said.

  Her mother frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  “Water ski?” Calder asked.

  “Snow ski.”

  Annie looked at her mother. Midway through she’d quit scraping cold gravy from one plate onto another. Annie turned to her father. “Really?”

  “You know your fingers get so cold they burn when you heat them up again,” he said.

  Calder asked if that was true.

  “I got to where I was kind of partial to it,” her father said. “The frozen bones, and then the warm fire afterwards where everything thawed out and stung a little bit.”

  Her mother studied him closely.

  “It’s true. And the big steps it takes, like the abominable snowman, stepping through knee-high snow.” He lifted his bare feet off the floor and let them drop one by one. “I loved the smell of snow.”

  “What’s it smell like?” Calder asked.

  “Well, that’s the thing. I think it’s different for different people. For me it was like brand-new upholstery.”

  Annie and Calder glanced at their mother and laughed, reluctantly.

  “I’m serious.” He winked and said, “It was during a trip up to New York with my mother and daddy when I was ten years old that I saw my first mountain and snow. Mother’s cousin was dying up there of tetanus. A saw had sliced clear through his hand. Our intention for going was the funeral.”

  “What exactly is tetanus?” Calder asked, as if he’d been thinking about it all day long.

  “It’s a bacteria that poisons the body,” their mother said in a slow, faraway voice. She watched their father. “Your jaw locks up and your throat closes.” She brought her hand to her own throat. “Sometimes you can’t breathe.”

  Calder asked if it could kill a person and she said that it could.

  “The funeral was going to be up there in Utica where the cousin lived,” her father said.

  “My people are the ones who live in Utica, honey,” her mother said.

  Her father tilted his head to the side and stared at her with puckered lips.

  “Kearney?” She placed the stack of dirty plates back onto the table. “I had a cousin with tetanus when I was young. That was me.”

  He turned to Calder and started again from the place he left off. “After two days of waiting on Henry to die and listening to my mother’s people go on about his stiff jaw and the pain he was having swallowing a glass of water, my daddy finally said, ‘I’ve had about enough of this,’ and clapped his hands together and rose up off the sofa and he and Mother and me all piled into Daddy’s Two Ten station wagon and drove up to Lake Placid.

  “So we got there and Mother takes one look at the mountains and says, ‘Lord, Daddy, I don’t believe I will.’ She stays in the base lodge reading Life magazine and drinking her hot cocoa. Daddy goes down the Silver Shoot bunny hill just once and decides he’s cheated death well enough and there’s no use in pushing one’s luck. So he gets him a steady stool over to the oak bar and holds on like a hen shittin a goose egg.”

  Calder and Annie burst out laughing.

  “Kearney!” Her mother picked up the stack of dirty dishes and carried them to the sink. “That sounds like a movie. Wasn’t that from a movie or something?”

  “Now I, however, took to the bunny hill like a jack rabbit. Then I took the, what do you call those things, the gondola to the top of some mountain, and imagine this, I zigzagged my way back down that sonofabitch like a ball bearing in a wooden shifter contraption.”

  Annie laughed until her stomach ached. Calder laughed, too. They stole looks at their mother between breaths, and even she had cracked a smile. Then she tied a yellow apron at her back in a hurry and Annie realized the smile had been for her children. When she brought her hands around they were shaking.

  “I swear to God,” he continued. “I went back up again for several more tries before I took to, what’d they call that, I don’t remember what, but it was over four thousand feet tall, I’m telling you, this is the God’s honest truth. I was a natural. Aside from landing on my ass a few times, I believed I’d found my life’s purpose.”

  “Kearney,” her mother said.

  “Imagine coming from Florida and finding out you’re a natural born skier,” he said.

  Goose bumps rose on Annie’s arms. The smile dissolved from her face. She looked at her father, at the tiny black and gray flecks of stubble poking from the skin around his mouth. There was something, she didn’t know what, but something to what he was getting at, even if none of it was true.

  “I came back home after that trip and felt like I was trapped on an island where all the things I needed to keep me alive didn’t exist,” he said.

  A breeze sucked the white curtains against the screen, and Annie’s goose bumps lifted the tiny blond hairs on her arms. The idea he was getting at seemed vague and bigger than she knew what to do with, but somehow she understood. People got misplaced. She had always wanted to live in children’s books where girls wore fat mittens and woke to snowy skies. She wanted to live where leaves painted streams of red and orange across hillsides. There was nothing she hated more than the heat, her shoulders always burned, peeling in raw patches, molting like a yellow rat snake. She hated swollen fingers in the summer. She hated mosquitoes sucking the life out of her when the grass was too high. Lizards in the bathtub when she pulled the shower curtain back. Somewhere in the world there was a place just for her, an exact place where she belonged. But what if she never found it? What if it turned out to be the coast of Lake Michigan? Or a place she would probably never go, like Iceland or New Zealand?

  “Kearney,” her mother said, as if to draw the truth, the real story from his mouth. Her hands slid down the front of her apron.

  “I went back several more times as a teenager,” he said. “But the snow was never quite the same. The winters seemed to get warmer every year.”

  “Kearney.”

  “The disappointment turned me sour,” he said. “I’m still trying to put to rights my love-hate relationship with Northern skies.”

  “Kearney.” Now barely a whisper.

  The table was now empty of everything except biscuit crumbs, the fold of newspaper on the death penalty, and the remains of a biscuit in Annie’s hand.

  Her mother leaned her back into the sink, placed her arms in an X across her chest, and squeezed her shoulders.

  “Did the man ever die?” Calder asked.

  “What’s that?” her father said.

  “The cousin,” Calder said, as much to their father as their mother. “Did he ever die of tetanus?” He gripped the edge of the table in a clear attempt to keep his legs from swinging underneath.

  Her father’s sights crept back along the frame of the kitchen window behind her mother, whose arms fell as she walked over and hugged Annie’s father’s neck. She rubbed the length of his arm as she kissed his hair above the temple, her lips frozen in that spot for the longest time.

  “Was he really your cousin, Mom?” Calder’s voice began to strain. He held on even tighter to the table as if he meant to anchor it to the floor.

  Annie shoved the last piece of biscuit in her mouth. She focused on a dark knot in the pine and smeared a rigid finger back and forth across its cracks, wearing away the polished surface until it squeaked.

  Her mother took hold of Annie’s hand and squeezed. She smiled the saddest smile on earth, and it felt like a stream of heat rushed in to fill the empty space between them.

  “Yes, Calder,” she said. “Yes.”

  A woman’s voice on the radio sang long and slow, like a cry, over having sweet dreams.

  “Emmylou,” her father said, as if Emmylou Harris were at the window. “Listen to that, Annie. That could be you
someday.”

  TWELVE

  Annie feels the weight of her lids from all the crying. Cold gusts of air bite her raw eyes. She closes herself inside her car in Uncle Calder’s driveway, turns up the heat, and waits until she’s sure her voice is steady again.

  Icy rain ticks the hood. She opens her cell and dials Mrs. Lanie.

  “The rest is done for, honey,” Mrs. Lanie says. “I appreciate you trying. But the front steps are already solid ice, and they’re up here next to the warm house. You can imagine the state of the grove out there.”

  Annie opens her mouth. A puff of white drifts from her lips.

  Most of the tangelos go to a children’s home in Altamonte Springs. She doesn’t want to think of those kids going without, or receiving apples from up North as further proof that a person can’t count on anything.

  Anger snaps inside her. Hotter and deeper than is called for. This is her secret worry. That it’s only a matter of time before everything is gone. Mrs. Lanie’s daughter is a realtor whose business card reads Abigail Lanie, Platinum-Diamond member of the Million-Dollar Club. Annie knows because she’s given her one. Twice. And every time she sees Annie in the driveway she asks if she’s ready to sell and get rich, and every time Annie wants to tie her to a Longleaf pine and force her to take in a long view of open space until she appreciates the true meaning of rich. Mrs. Lanie’s trees and corn and open field make up most of Annie’s view from her porch.

  “Those trees might be mature, but I don’t think they’re hardy enough to survive what they say is coming down the pike,” Mrs. Lanie says.

  Annie pictures the country club culture of shopping and golf bleeding across the open land, stopping only when it reaches the theme parks. She pictures giant parking lots and boxy home improvement stores. An invasion of dead-end sandstone culs de sac.

  “Fuck it,” she says. “Fuck it all to hell.” She whacks the steering wheel.

  “It’s all right,” Mrs. Lanie says, apparently unfazed. “Just a sign of things to come, I suppose.”

  The wind seems to have entered the phone, swirling and bending in place of their voices.

  “You ought to go and see your brother now,” Mrs. Lanie says. “You ought to. If you think you can manage the streets.”

  Annie treads carefully up the wooden steps outside Calder’s condo. The cable railing feels like a rope of ice in her hand. She doesn’t know if anyone is bringing in Calder’s mail or looking after his plants or has thought to leave on a light, but has decided in the time it’s taken to get here that if not, it isn’t asking too much for her to do these things. She half expects to find yellow tape draped across the red door. But the door is undisturbed, and as she opens it with her spare key she’s hit with the familiar scent of grassy shoes, bamboo and cork flooring, the rough sawn beams high above her head. She places her shoes by the closed door and sniffs her runny nose in the quiet.

  The air is noticeably cool. Someone has turned down the heat. She makes her way toward the kitchen and considers flipping on the switch for the small gas fireplace in the living room. She decides against it. It’s not as if she plans to stay.

  Jade glass tiles glisten on the kitchen walls. Their transparency draws the light inside, then launches it back out. A red dishtowel is folded around the oven door handle. Everything looks tidy, orderly. The zinc counter reflects her hands. The stainless steel appliances are polished the way her brother likes to keep them, though a few of the walnut drawers have been left ajar, most likely from the police search. The garbage can beneath the sink is missing, as is the tin box from the side counter where Calder keeps bills, important reminders, keys.

  It’s only now that she sees the bundle of mail someone has left on the counter.

  She massages her temples, surprised at how ropey they feel. She slips out onto the balcony in sudden need of air. It feels a lifetime since she was here. She rubs her arms in the cold and peers across the courtyard. Solar panels line the roofs, and down below the landscape is cut in staggered layers of green and red foliage, arranged in a way she doesn’t exactly understand that will allow for the correct flow of rain, minimum erosion of the soil, things Calder explained to her even though he must have known she was only half listening.

  She shivers in the cold. Winding jasmine pokes through the cable rails, and several tiny white blossoms flutter and strain to hold on. Potted palms veer in an arc above her head. A trumpet vine weaves above the glass doors. She decides to drag the palms into the kitchen, hoping the trumpet vine is close enough to the building to survive the drop in temperature.

  The living room’s big-leafed houseplants hang and stand, bend and twist toward the large windows whose wooden shades are closed. She pulls the heavy cords, and as the shades rise she can almost feel the plants sucking on the dim bands of light.

  Everything looks the way it always has, simple lines and natural toned furniture and walls. Lots of green. His place has the feel of a Japanese forest in June, though the eye is always drawn to the exception, the red splash of an abstract painting above the fireplace.

  The bedroom door is open and she’s surprised to find the bed messily undone. The coffee-colored sheets and blankets are thrown from a corner of the bed. Calder seems to have jumped out of bed quickly, tossed the sheets off, and ran. Of course. The police at the door. He would have never left the bed like this if he weren’t forced to. She thinks of him in his cell, blinking and grunting and jumping every time he remembers this unmade bed. She thinks of him holding a pillow like Chief, only it’s not someone else’s face he wants to press it into, it’s his own.

  A small photograph is wedged in the corner of the black-framed mirror above the dresser. Annie knows immediately that it’s Sidsel. Blond, straight hair and a colorful scarf coiled around her neck. She’s sitting in a garden bistro chair in what must be Denmark, her elbows propped onto the ironwork of the small table. She’s smiling, her chin resting atop her hands. Behind her is a white half-timbered house with red and white floral-painted shutters. A thatched roof slopes downward like a neatly carved haystack with spotty layers of bright green moss along the edge. It makes her think of the Grimm Fairytales her mother gave her several years after Disney World opened. Annie was ten years old. “These are the original tales,” her mother said, and even though Annie had understood the intention was to show her all the whitewashing Disney had done to them, Annie was still surprised to find stories where children were locked up and punished, the big bad wolf’s belly cut open, and not everyone lived happily ever after. Each story was made up of stark lessons for naughty children. Each one seeded in an undertone of darkness.

  She places the photograph back in the mirror. She lifts the sheets and blanket off the floor and smells Calder in the puff of air. There’s a faintly sweet smell. Sidsel’s perfume or shampoo, then another that is stale and earthy, and she knows it is the two of them, together.

  Annie pulls the sheets and blankets as tightly and evenly as she can.

  She turns to leave and a wayward cricket chirps from behind a row of cacti in the windowsill. “Listen to that,” Annie whispers. A memory has pulled the words from her mouth.

  “Listen to that,” Calder had said of an unusually forceful chirp of a cricket. It was June. They were sitting in lawn chairs in the middle of Annie’s yard, far enough from the lights of the house to see the night sky poked full with thousands of stars. Her guitar lay across her lap. She was about to play Calder something she’d finished writing that morning. Owen was working late in the studio.

  “Sounds like that cricket is chafing his wings for some cricket lady love.”

  “I didn’t know that was why they did that.” She strummed her guitar. “They’re serenading the girls?”

  “Yeah. But not the way you think. When one guy gets his song going, the others nearby stay quiet. It’s like an invisible wall goes up and shuts them down. Only one act beneath the porch at a time.”

  “They have to wait till his wings get tired before they ca
n give it go?”

  Calder laughed. “That’s the sweet part. Or the sick part, depending. The quiet ones actually sneak up and snatch the females while they’re lost in lust for the singer. They’re like teenage boys taking advantage of girls who’ve been staring at Tiger Beat all day.”

  “Tiger Beat. Jeez you’re old.”

  “I swear. The females are so full of cricket lust they could care less. And that ain’t the worst of it.”

  “Don’t let Mom hear you say ain’t.”

  “The sorry bastards that sing all the time are short-lived. They’ll die off long before the silent types who steal their women.”

  “That is the saddest, sorriest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said, laughing a little at the strangeness of it. “I don’t want to know about the world working that way. Next time leave me in the dark, so to speak.”

  Calder cleared his throat. It looked and sounded more like a tic than a need to clear something away, and though she’d thought to ask if something was the matter, she was idly strumming her guitar and accidentally caught the rhythm of a melody she’d been trying to work out all day. “That’s it,” she said, and her whole body felt charged, her fingers plucking away while the moment of her asking him what was the matter passed into the song Calder had come to hear her sing.

  The wind whips the stringy trumpet vine against the glass doors in the kitchen. Annie needs to get home to Detour. He doesn’t like it when tree branches scrape the side of the house. She doesn’t think she’s left any lights on at home. Detour’ll be whining, hobbling from room to room if he can find the strength.

  Without thinking, she flips open her cell and dials her mother.

  “I’m going to get him an attorney,” she says.

  “Have you seen him yet?”

  “No. But I’m going to.”

  “You said that last week.”

  “Do I have to make an appointment at the jail? Who do I call?”

  Yes, she’ll need an appointment. Her mother explains what she can and can’t wear. What she can and can’t bring. All of which seems obvious. Trench coats, firearms, knives, loaves of bread in which to hide the above. “You remember that scene in that movie,” her mother says, “where he hid a giant file in that loaf of bread,” but Annie is thinking of the steak knife hidden in her pocket when she was twelve.