by Allen Eskens
“Jeremy won’t do well in a motel room. You know that. Don’t take him down there. It’s a bad idea.”
“No, it’s a great idea. You’ll have a couple days to study in peace. I’ll get to hang out with my brother, and Jeremy won’t have to go to work. It’s a win-win-win.”
“Just think about it before you take him down there. Sleep on it, and if you still want to take your brother to Buckley, I won’t stop you.”
“I’ll sleep on it,” I said. “But it’ll be okay, I swear.”
Lila simply shook her head.
Chapter 21
That night I made spaghetti, and it brought me back to the first meal that the three of us ever shared, back when I was turning cartwheels to get Lila to notice me. She was my neighbor back then, and the source of most of my distracted thoughts. I’d done my best to open a door into her world, but my efforts went largely ignored. It wasn’t until Jeremy came to stay with me for a few days that I was able to persuade Lila to join us for a spaghetti dinner. I’ve never told her this, but sometimes I made spaghetti for dinner just to relive a small piece of that night. Back then, I wanted nothing more than to have Lila in my life—if only for a meal. Over the years, that memory had grown distant and small, but I still made spaghetti; I still longed to go back to that place.
Lila remained in our bedroom, studying, as I made supper. When she came out, we ate in near silence, Lila going through flash cards and mumbling her mnemonics, Jeremy focusing on eating the spaghetti without dripping sauce on his shirt, and me watching the two of them, wondering whether we’d make it through the summer. Money had always been tight, but now I had no job and the line between success and failure for our little family seemed as thin as piano wire. To calm my blood pressure, I thought about the money just beyond my reach. That would be our saving grace, I was sure of it. That’s why I had to go to Buckley.
After dinner, I packed clothing and toiletries for Jeremy, being careful not to make a big deal out of it. I didn’t want to reopen the issue with Lila, and Jeremy didn’t need to know about the upheaval coming in the morning. I made sure to pack movies that I could play on my computer, something to keep him preoccupied so I could get some work done. I also had him choose a couple books to read on the drive. He chose his two favorites, Dumbo and Bambi.
About the time the sun set, I guided Jeremy through his bedtime routine and saw him to bed. I peeked in on Lila, who was deep in her own head, memorizing terms and cases, so I went to the couch to watch television. I normally watched news programs, but that night, I turned to the Travel Channel. I had never watched the Travel Channel before because—well, why would I? It would be like a starving refugee flipping through pictures in a cookbook.
As I sat there watching a show about Norwegian fjords, it dawned on me that in the six years that Lila and I had been together, we had never gone on a trip, at least nothing that required booking an overnight stay. We didn’t think that Jeremy would do well in a hotel. Jeremy was my brother and a big part of my life, but there were times when he seemed to block out the sun. For his sake, our vacations, if you want to call them that, consisted of going to local parks and attractions.
I remember our first such trip together was to Minnehaha Falls, back when Lila and I still lived apart. Jeremy had never seen a waterfall before; for that matter, neither had I. I think I found it more impressive than he did, because he looked at the falls like it was just another picture in a book.
For my part though, I wandered down to a cave behind the waterfall, leaving Jeremy with Lila while I moved in close enough to feel the power of the falls—the concussion of air hitting my chest, the spray of water in my eyes, the smell of mud and moss filling my nostrils. All I could hear was the violence of the water slamming into the pool below, pounding it so hard that no other sound could get through.
When I came back to the path where Lila and Jeremy waited for me, Lila had a black-eyed Susan in her hand. “Look what your brother gave me,” she said.
“Are you trying to steal my girl?” I joked.
“No,” Jeremy said, utterly serious. “Maybe Lila said she loves you.”
It was an innocent comment, Jeremy’s way of disproving that he was trying to steal my girlfriend, but at the same time, his words were huge. Lila had never told me that she loved me before.
“Jeremy?” Lila said, her voice lifting with embarrassment. “That was supposed to be our secret.”
“Oh,” Jeremy said.
I had told Lila that I loved her, maybe four or five times by that point in our relationship, without ever getting those words in reply. Lila and I became a couple when I persuaded her to help me with an English assignment, an interview with a dying man that brushed the dirt off of a cold-case murder and nearly got us both killed. Because our relationship had been forged in that crucible, we never really discussed the merits of our love story. We came together, we fit, and we didn’t question it. I always believed that she loved me, but I had just about given up on hearing those words.
“You love me?” I asked.
Lila handed me the black-eyed Susan and said, “Of course I do.”
That was how Lila Nash told me that she loved me for the first time. She had always been very guarded that way, protective of the deep wounds left behind by a tragic childhood. She kept much of that past to herself, but every now and again, she would let a thought slip, a hint of what had happened to her, and I began to see figures and shadows but never the full details of her nightmare—until one night when she told me what happened.
We were in bed, watching a movie about a girl who had been molested. I was barely paying attention, but at one point, I looked at Lila and saw a tear etching its way down her cheek. I asked her what was wrong. At first she stayed silent, and I thought this would be like all the times before, when we would reach the edge of the summit only to turn around and walk back down the mountain. But this time she talked.
She told me about an uncle and his horses. She loved his horses, especially a mare named Elle, and Uncle Gary would let her ride Elle all on her own, despite her mother having forbidden it. That would be the first secret they would share. Kissing would be the second. She had been seven when it started and ten when it ended. Lila didn’t look at me as she told me her story. This strong, amazing woman trembled in my arms as she opened up to me, her breath faltering at the darkest parts of the story. But she kept going.
She finished by telling me how her Uncle Gary warned her that no one would believe her if she told on him. And he was right—at least at first. Her mother went so far as to ground her for telling lies. That’s when her Aunt Paulette, the youngest of her mother’s siblings, came forward to say that Gary had molested her when they were children.
Lila said, “It wasn’t until Paulette said what Gary did to her that they finally believed me. If it weren’t for her, I’m pretty sure I would have killed myself.”
She said that statement with the resolve of someone who had given the calculation a great deal of thought. After that, I had a better sense of why her path had turned so dark: the thin scars on her shoulder left by a razor blade, the drinking and promiscuity that stained her teen years. Knowing the hole that she climbed out of, the hell she had overcome to get to where she was, made me love her more.
My show about Norwegian fjords was rolling its credits when I stepped out of my reverie of Lila and her past. I shut the TV off and went to the bedroom, expecting to find Lila still hard at work studying. Instead I found her asleep, her flash cards lying loose where they had fallen from her hand. I lifted the covers from my side of the bed and pulled them over her. She looked so peaceful. I wanted to kiss her and hold her. I wanted to crawl into bed beside her and fold myself around her the way I’d done a thousand times before, but that would wake her.
I sat on the edge of the bed and tried to remember the last time I told her that I loved her, or when she had last said those words to me. Two months? Four? I couldn’t remember. It had gotten so hard lately.
It would get better after the bar exam. It had to. And then when Toke’s money comes.… We just had to hold on for a little longer.
I shut the light off and went to go sleep on the couch.
Chapter 22
Jeremy didn’t question why we left the apartment carrying suitcases that next morning. I told him that he didn’t have to go to work, and that was good enough for him. It wasn’t until we were leaving the city, heading south, that he raised a question.
“Where are we going?” he asked, in his slow, measured way.
“We’re going on a little adventure,” I said.
“Maybe we’re going to Mom’s house?”
That caught me off guard. The last time he was in the same house as Kathy had been the night of the big fight, yet her name seemed to come to him without a second’s hesitation, as if time and events had not passed in his world.
“Jeremy, why would you think we’re going to Mom’s?”
He looked at the book on his lap, Bambi, and didn’t answer.
“Jeremy, buddy, what’s wrong?”
He kept his head down, his eyes on his book. I waited, hoping he might say something, and he did. “Maybe Mom is not there,” he said.
“Maybe Mom’s not where?”
Jeremy stared at the open pages of his book and didn’t answer.
“Buddy, talk to me. What’s the matter?”
“Maybe when Bambi ran to the thicket his mother wasn’t there.”
I looked at Jeremy’s book and realized where he was in his story. I’d heard Jeremy read that page aloud many times. Bambi’s mother hears the hunters and tells Bambi to run to the thicket. Bambi runs, and when he gets there, he says, “We made it, Mother!” But Bambi’s mother didn’t make it. She had been shot by the hunter. She wasn’t there. “You think Mom is…” I stopped myself before I said the word dead. If I was wrong about what he was trying to say, I didn’t want to put that thought into his head. But that had to be what he was thinking.
Jeremy didn’t look up, but I could see his eyes drop and his lips tighten, the way he sometimes did when I’ve guessed his thoughts.
“No, buddy. No. Mom’s not—. She’s just…she’s very sick. It’s a kind of sick that never goes away, and she can’t take care of you.” My lie was weak, I saw that. I had made it up on the fly, and I had my doubts that it would work. But how do you tell someone like Jeremy that their mother is poison? What I did—ripping him away from that woman, keeping him away from her—it was for his own good. But he might never understand that.
I waited for Jeremy to respond, but he remained quiet and went back to reading his book. What he said made me wonder if somewhere, deep down, he was trying to tell me something by bringing Dumbo and Bambi on this trip: one book about a child ripped away from his mother when she was imprisoned, the other book about a child left motherless in the aftermath of a hunter’s bullet. What old memories curled through my brother’s mind? What feelings hid behind those expressionless eyes? I had been so wrapped up in my emotions at the time that I never stopped to think about how Jeremy might feel. Had I done the right thing by taking my brother away?
I shook off that thought. Of course I did the right thing. I brought the guardianship action to save Jeremy. To my mother, he was little more than a meal ticket, and given her spate of legal troubles, I honestly didn’t expect her to show up for the hearing. But show up she did, and when she walked in, she looked…well…respectable. She still had a few small scabs on her face—residue from the meth use—and her cheeks were thinner than I remembered. But she walked with a straight back, wore clothing appropriate for court, and didn’t hiss at me when she walked past to take her seat at the counsel table. This was going to be quite the performance, I thought to myself. Still, I remained confident, because I knew the chaos that lay just behind that thin veneer.
Lila and I scraped up enough money to hire a lawyer named Sherri Knuth, a very nice person and, as far as I could tell, smart as a whip. Kathy, of course, didn’t have two nickels to rub together, so she had to go it alone. My attorney told me that the assault I committed on Larry might be a problem; Kathy would use it to paint me as volatile and dangerous. The way I saw it, I was acting in self-defense, and Larry got what was coming to him.
Sherri and I presented our case to the judge first. I thought it would be easy to testify against my mother, but sitting on that witness stand, I had to look her in the eye as I told the judge about the monster that lurked behind the makeup, and despite my best effort to remain focused on my mother’s faults, I couldn’t avoid the torrent of what-ifs that came flooding in.
At first, Kathy sat quietly in her chair, her face made of plastic, lest she give away her true self. But the more I talked, the more I could see crumbling around the edges, where the dried clay of her facade was too thin to hold up. When I told the judge about the time that I had to use my dwindling college money to bail her out of jail for a DUI, Kathy’s lip curled up into a snarl. I was getting to her.
“And that’s when she took up with Larry Hogermiller,” I said.
She had to know what was coming, yet she twisted her face into an expression of bewilderment as I explained how she and her new boyfriend left Jeremy alone for a weekend so they could go gamble. Jeremy nearly set the apartment on fire when he tried to heat up a piece of pizza in the toaster. Then the crack in my mother’s false respectability opened wide, and she let loose her first interjection. “Why don’t you tell him how you beat Larry up that day?”
“Ms. Nelson,” the judge snapped. “You’ll have a turn to ask questions later. If you have an objection, state it succinctly, but there’ll be no outbursts while Mr. Talbert is testifying.”
“I object,” she said. “He’s not telling you everything that happened.”
“Ms. Nelson, that is not a proper objection. Overruled.”
My attorney had prepared me for this, so I went on. “Yes, there was a confrontation between Larry Hogermiller and myself.” I spoke in words that painted a sympathetic picture, just the way Sherri taught me. “I had discovered that Jeremy had a bruise on his back that day. When I asked Jeremy what happened, he told me that Larry…I mean, Mr. Hogermiller, had hit him with the TV remote.”
“That’s not true,” Kathy yelled.
“Ms. Nelson, I thought I told you no outbursts. You’ll have your turn.”
I continued. “When I confronted my mother about the bruise, Mr. Hogermiller came at me. I defended myself by putting Mr. Hogermiller in a hold that a police officer here in Austin once showed me. All I did was to stop him from attacking me.”
Kathy huffed but kept her words to herself.
I told the judge about the day that Larry punched Jeremy in the face, how I went to my mother’s apartment to get Jeremy, to rescue him, and how Larry tried to prevent me from leaving. “I kicked at Mr. Hogermiller and caught him in the knee. I wasn’t trying to hurt him; I just wanted to get my brother out of there.”
Kathy was about to come up out of her seat at that one. I finished my testimony by telling the judge about the year and a half since the night of the big fight, about how Kathy never once tried to get Jeremy back until she got busted for possessing meth and wanted to use him to garner sympathy in her criminal case. I had the letter to prove it.
When it was Kathy’s turn to ask me questions, she opened with, “You’re a lying little shit, aren’t you?”
“Objection,” Sherri said.
“Sustained.”
“Admit it. You’re nothing but a backstabbing, ungrateful lying little—”
“Ms. Nelson!” the judge hollered. “When I sustain an objection, it means that you can’t ask that question. If you have another question to ask, do so. If you’re just going to sit there and call your son names, then none of what you want to say will be permitted into the record. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Your Honor,” she said. “You broke Larry’s leg, didn’t you?”
“I was told that I tore his ACL.”
> “Same thing. He had to be on crutches for months. He lost his job.”
“Is that why he started selling meth?”
“He wasn’t selling. It was a possession charge.”
“And because of that, the man you chose to be with—over your own son—is now in prison.”
“You can be such a hurtful prick, you know that?” I could hear a tremor in her voice.
“Mr. Talbert! Ms. Nelson!” The judge’s voice boomed across the room again. “I will not have this hearing devolve into a mud pit of name-calling. Ms. Nelson, you ask questions and, Mr. Talbert, you answer them. No extraneous arguing. Am I clear?”
Kathy lowered her head into her hands.
I felt stupid for how quickly I had become the snarky kid I had been in high school. I cleared the anger out of my head and awaited her next question.
She didn’t look up at me when she asked it. “When did you stop loving me?” she said.
I wasn’t prepared for that one. I struggled to find an answer. Finding none, I said, “I don’t know.”
Chapter 23
I pulled into the Caspen Inn and parked in front of room eight, telling Jeremy to follow me as I got out, but he remained in his seat, his hands on his lap, the fingers of his right hand rubbing the knuckles of his left. I went around to the passenger side, grabbed his bag from the backseat, and opened his door. He didn’t move. I unbuckled his seat belt. He still didn’t move.
“Jeremy, come on.” I gave his biceps a light squeeze, and that was enough to convince him that I wouldn’t be changing my mind.
As he stood up, I heard gravel crunching as a car pulled into the lot. I looked up to see Charlie’s Lexus ease into the lot and park a few feet away from us. Charlie had his window open, a cigarette in his mouth, the sides of his lips arched up in this strange Machiavellian smile. He stepped out of his car, looked at Jeremy, and his smile grew bigger.