Lions
Page 20
“Mom?” one of her children says.
“Sweetheart?” Her husband turns around and looks back at her where she is frozen on the sidewalk, a look of wonder, or terror, on her face. In her hand she’s holding loosely the twine handles of a printed paper bag. Inside the bag, a yellow ceramic serving plate carefully wrapped in tissue paper. She drops the bag and both hears and feels the plate crack. What is she paying for these things with but the days of her life? The space between her shoulders burns and the backs of her eyes burn. She feels dizzy, the inside of her head emblazoned with bright white light.
She sees that her young daughter is more beautiful than she, that even as a child, it is the daughter, not the mother, who turns all the heads. She sees that her choice of husband is as good a choice as any reasonably priced purchase she’s made in her life, and that all her choices have amounted to a respectable pile of props in a comfortable game of make-believe.
Before her, her husband and daughter and son are staring, their eyes wide, their hair shining beneath the lights strung among the trees along the street.
First, she’ll leave them for half a day.
Then a long weekend.
Eventually, she knows, she must leave them for good.
She’ll drive east through the unoccupied town, the street overrun with weeds, all the glass punched out of any unboarded windows. She’ll take shallow breaths, and she’ll slow to barely moving as her old house and the Walkers’ come into view. She’ll stop before the shop, holding a hand to her mouth. She’ll walk hurriedly over the hard uneven ground and peer inside to see nothing. No machines. No coffee mugs. The interior swept as clean as the wind gusting outside its sealed-up windows.
She’ll drive north, alone, up higher and higher, as she searches for a tall narrow hut. She’ll look for the white circle of a man’s face flashing like a light among the trees. She’ll look for a blue feather of chimney smoke. She’ll drive five hours, six, ten, searching desperately from behind the wheel, but she’s tried all this before. She’ll find nothing up there. A road sign for an antique junk store that didn’t seem to exist. An old wooden spool.
It will be when she’s dead-tired, long after she’s given up, turned back around, and is on the county road some five miles outside of Lions when she sees it for the hundredth time: a set of silvery, dusty tracks disguised among the stones and gray weeds that run four hundred yards into a field of brush and sage and end at the old homestead.
She’ll turn down the tracks before she knows why she’s doing it, her heart knocking hard, already running, tripping and sprawling out on the dirt and fine gravel and prickly pear. She’ll tear open her palms on the rough ground, split her lip.
That broken little house.
The windbreak of dead trees.
A single chimney pipe.
Unremarkable.
Not a place you’d even notice if you passed by.
Can hardly even see it from the road.
Not unless you’re really looking.
Still, there it is, and there it’s always been.
The door will be locked, but there’ll be a small window, five feet from the ground. She’ll just see inside. Plates of blue light shifting in through cracks in the siding, gaps that years of rain and snow and wind opened in the mortar, now here and there stuffed with rags. A faded G.I. Joe sleeping bag on the dirt floor. An old Coleman lantern, caked with dust. A pile of paperback cowboy books. A single shot glass, opaque with dirt. Dust motes slowly sinking in the light. Behind her, the trees watching from their distant posts.
When the wind and the birds quiet, she’ll press her forehead against the locked door and listen for the sound of breath, of footsteps, of a hand behind the doorknob. Someone’s in there. Someone has to be in there. Over and over she’ll say it, then: I’m back. I’m so sorry. I’ve come back. Please, God. Let me in.
Acknowledgments
Tremendous thanks to Kate Johnson and Corinna Barsan; to Georges and Valerie Borchardt; to the whole team at Grove Atlantic; thanks to Georgianna Pulver, Emerson Perez, and Marybeth Sharpe, and thanks to the many who read and reread these pages and gave me incisive and generous feedback, especially Gregory Blake Smith, Kyla Carter, Katie Cassis, John Thorp, Bryan Hurt, Jeffrey Nadzam, and Jeremy Chignell. Thanks to all of my teachers in Los Angeles. As a fiction writer I’ve taken liberties with history and benefited from the influence of other sources. I am particularly indebted to Willa Cather (whose work inspired the story of the homeless man drowning himself in a water tower), to Jonathan Raban’s Bad Land, to David Lavender’s Bent’s Fort, to Perry Eberhart’s Ghosts of the Colorado Plains, and to Eric Twitty & SWCA Environmental Consultants’ Silver Wedge: The Sugar Beet Industry in Fort Collins