The Distance Home

by Paula Saunders

  * * *

  —

  Leon saw Dr. Harris quite a few times before Al finally came home. It was a Saturday, full-on spring, and Leon, René, and Jayne were all in shorts and T-shirts, just home from ballet class, sitting down to the tuna salad Eve had made for lunch. Al had been gone for months, it seemed, and it was a shock to hear the ring of his cowboy boots coming through the dining room. As he stopped and stood, filling the kitchen doorway, they all went silent.

  “You can sit down and have some lunch, if you like,” Eve said, not looking up.

  Al didn’t answer. He seemed to have arrived from some unfathomable distance, as if maybe, instead of driving the highways, he’d been teleported, with pieces of himself yet to arrive.

  “Hi, Dad,” René called out.

  “Well, hi there,” Al said, finally looking at them, as though he’d suddenly remembered where he was and how he’d got there, as if they’d all, in that delayed instant, just come into focus.

  Then he walked up to Leon and stood over him, examining his bald spot.

  “Go ahead and sit down, Al,” Eve insisted.

  “You’ve been pulling out your hair again, Leon,” Al said, obviously warming up to something. “I can see that.”

  Leon looked up.

  “Sit down, Al,” Eve said brusquely, bringing a cup of coffee and setting it at his place.

  “I’ll sit when I’m good and ready, and not one minute before,” he said sharply, turning his head but keeping his eyes to the floor, refusing to look at her. “And I don’t want to hear another word about it. Not from you.”

  He turned back to Leon. “Leon,” he said, rough but steady, weirdly calm, yet clearly at the edge of something, “have you been pulling your hair?”

  “No, Dad,” Leon said. “I haven’t. I swear.”

  Eve and Leon had just been talking about this before Al came in. Eve had been saying what good progress Leon was making, how his bald spot was filling in a little more each day, how she could see downy hairs nearly a quarter of an inch long, and how she was proud of him for leaving it alone.

  “Don’t lie to me, Leon,” Al said.

  “I swear, Dad,” Leon said. “Honest. I haven’t been pulling it.”

  “Oh, Al, for Chrissakes,” Eve said impatiently. “He’s not lying. Now sit down.”

  “You stay out of this, Eve,” Al said fiercely, keeping his gaze on the far wall. “For once in your life, stay out of it!”

  René and Jayne sat frozen, following the high-stakes back-and-forth that had suddenly erupted in their kitchen.

  “You’re lying to me, Leon,” Al said. “I can see that much with my own two eyes.” He paused and stepped back to look Leon in the face. “If there’s one thing I will not abide in this house, it’s a liar.”

  “Promise, Dad,” Leon said. “I’m telling the truth.” He was almost crying. “I swear I’m not lying. I swear it.”

  “Leon, you can swear and promise and give your word of honor, but I can see that bald spot is bigger than when I left here, and that means only one thing. You’ve been pulling out your hair. And now you’re lying to me. You leave me no choice, Leon. No more choices. I’ve got to do what I should’ve done a long time ago, when all this nonsense first started!”

  “You just cool down, Al!” Eve ordered, perfectly matching Al’s expanding rage. “You come in here after disappearing for weeks on end and start yelling at everybody, causing all this trouble. You just cool down! He’s not lying. I’ve been with him every day. I’ve been watching him.”

  “And no one in this house is going to spend one more dime at that goddamn psychiatrist. You hear me?” Al said, finally looking directly at her, his eyes watery, blazing. “I don’t care where the money comes from!”

  “That’s not for you to say,” Eve muttered.

  “Well, I’m saying it,” Al said, “and everyone around here’s going to listen!”

  Then he turned back to Leon.

  “Stand up and come outside. I’m going to teach you to not pull out your own goddamn hair. That’s right. I’m going to teach you a lesson you will not forget!” He looked at Eve. “Guaranteed!” he said. Then: “Now, Leon! Right now!” And Al walked straight on through the kitchen and out the back door, letting the screen door slam behind him.

  They sat, each one trying to reel back the day, no one taking the slightest breath.

  Then Leon started to get up.

  “You sit down, Leon. You don’t have to go out there,” Eve said, adamant but still. “You just stay right here with me. I know you’re telling the truth, and there’s no need. None whatsoever.”

  Leon set his jaw and stood up. He took the time to push his chair back under the table.

  “Leon, just sit down,” Eve said. “You stay right here.”

  “I’m going out,” Leon said.

  “You are not going out there,” Eve said again.

  “I’m going out,” Leon said, suddenly strangely resolute.

  And Leon walked out, his legs loose-jointed, unsteady beneath him. He closed the screen door softly, carefully, then went into the small detached garage, where Al was waiting for him.

  * * *

  —

  René jumped up and ran to the edge of the sink as Eve plunged her hands deep into the hot, soapy water and started furiously scrubbing dishes. Then Eve stopped and just stood there, leaning forward against the rim, letting the water soak her shirt. René stayed clinging to the sink as the cries went up, uncontrollable hot tears streaming down her face. She stared up at Eve, overcome and confused, gasping, heaving, trying to say, with her eyes, Why are you standing here? Why don’t you go out there? Why don’t you do something? But Eve kept her hands locked in the water and didn’t move. She wasn’t going to stop it. She was going to stay right where she was, motionless, turned to stone.

  And when Eve finally looked down at her—as René continued to grip the sink, her eyes red and streaming, her face contorted and swollen—René could see that all the old inequities, all the injustices, all the favoritisms, all the things Eve figured René had incited from the very beginning that had allowed something like this to happen in the first place, were gathering, circling, as if Eve’s myriad resentments against her were swarming in from all directions, assuming formation, firing on her from every angle.

  Eve narrowed her eyes and glared at René as if to say, You favored. You lucky. You spared, spoiled child. Then she inhaled sharply.

  “What’s your problem?” she hissed. “It’s not you out there.”

  René fell away from the sink and ran to her room. She collapsed beneath her open window and listened all alone to the beating as it went on and on.

  “Please, please. No,” Leon was crying, pleading, howling. “I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it,” he screamed as the leather strap, or whatever Al was using, kept falling and falling, ringing through the bright afternoon.

  * * *

  —

  Many years later, Leon would tell René that Al had beaten him with a wooden board fitted with nail-head studs. Though René couldn’t imagine what this might have been or how Al could have come up with such an instrument, from the sounds filtering through her bedroom window that day—as she lay crumpled beneath the screen, weeping, sobbing, her two arms wrapped tightly around her middle as if to hold her in one piece—and from the pain and fear and heartbreak she could hear in each of Leon’s desperate cries, she could believe it.

  And Al was right about one thing: it wasn’t something any of them was likely to forget anytime soon.

  Part Three

  20

  How Things Get Broken

  Chuck started following some Indians downtown. They’d rented a place up the hill but didn’t have a car, so they’d walk to town every afternoon, “to do some drinking,” Eve said. Chuck was so bored he’d been runn
ing bare circles in the grass around the two scraggly trees in the front yard, “chasing his own tail” was Eve’s guess, “or worms.” So one day when the Indians passed by the house, Chuck tagged along. After that, he was gone all the time. René would imagine him sitting at the corner of Main Street and Mount Rushmore Road, outside the Lucky Spur, neon signs lighting up his muzzle.

  Then one night, when the neighbors were coming home later than usual, likely stumbling their way through the dark streets, Chuck was hit by a car. His rib cage was crushed. Eve got a call from the animal clinic, but by the time she and Leon arrived, Chuck was dead. They went in anyway, said goodbye to Chuck for the last time.

  “No one took care of him anymore,” Eve said when they got home that night. “I fed him, but no one paid any attention to him. He must have started following those Indians just to have some company.”

  Leon went up to his room without a word, but he hadn’t been saying much lately. He might answer if you asked him something directly, but otherwise he was quiet.

  “I know Leon feels bad about it,” Eve said.

  Leon has to feel bad about a lot of things, René thought.

  At ballet, Mrs. G noticed something different about Leon. “It’s like a light went out,” she said, but Eve didn’t offer any explanation. “Do you see it?”

  Eve nodded.

  “Kids,” Mrs. G said. “Maybe it’s just a phase. Right, Eve?”

  “His dog died” was all Eve said.

  “Oh,” Mrs. G said. “Terrible.” She dropped her head, and on the way into class that day, she put her arm around Leon’s shoulders.

  * * *

  —

  Al was gone all the time. He’d come home, change the clothes in his suitcase, and leave again.

  No one said much about any of it.

  “You should just divorce him,” René said to Eve one day when they were out in the garage, unpacking some of Emma’s old dishes for a yard sale.

  “I can’t divorce him,” Eve said. “I have three kids to raise, for God sakes. And there’s rent to pay and groceries to buy. Don’t be silly.”

  “You could if you wanted. We’d get by.”

  “We would not get by. I don’t even have a job, not one that counts, and who’s going to pay me? To do what? Plus,” she went on, “somebody’s got to do the cooking and the cleaning and the driving and the shopping. Are you going to do it? Or am I supposed to hire someone? With all the money I’m making?”

  “Well, nobody loves him,” René said, upping the ante.

  With Al gone, René and Eve had started fighting. As far as René was concerned, Eve had proven herself willing to sacrifice any of them just to hang on to the miserable life she’d happened to put together, a life she hated, a life she railed against continuously. And all of her excuses were cowardly, weak as fluff.

  “Nobody loves him,” René said again, insisting.

  Eve didn’t even look up.

  “So, why not divorce him?”

  “I love him,” Eve said finally.

  René was speechless. It was the most outrageous lie she’d ever heard.

  “I do,” Eve said again.

  “You do not,” René said, letting the plate she was holding fall onto the already unwrapped stack, chipping the rim.

  But no matter how hard she tried, no matter how much she forced herself to remember what he’d done, she, too, still loved him. Every time he came through the door, she was happy and relieved to see him, as if, perhaps, he’d come back from someplace he might well have decided to stay. And, in an awkward contortion of logic, since Al was around only as a kind of gift, showing up now and again just as René was beginning to wonder if she’d ever see him again, it was Eve she hated for Leon’s beating. She hated her because she’d stood there, listening to Leon being battered, and done nothing, because she’d stood there, renouncing her responsibility, breaking her bond without the slightest whimper of remorse, then had followed it up with a steady stream of vitriol just to shuck off any blame.

  And René could see that, from her side, Eve now felt free to unleash all of her resentment over what she saw as the blatant unfairness of things, how everything had been tilted in René’s direction from the very beginning. As far as Eve was concerned, René had been favored, exempted, eager to take whatever she wanted as birthright, no matter the cost to anyone else. Who but René had displaced Leon in Emma’s and Al’s affections? Even now, tendrils of that early favoritism lived and breathed in everything. On Jayne’s and Leon’s birthdays, Emma sent extra presents for René, but was there a gift for Leon or Jayne on René’s special day? Never. Only layers of presents, all for her. According to Eve, René was “spoiled rotten,” happy to assume the royal privilege, demand what others could only silently wish for, all the while complaining and shouting orders like a princess doomed to suffer a rash of peasants. And more than that, Eve was right: it would never have been René out there.

  “Careful, René!” Eve said, glaring at her in the half-light of the garage. “Be careful. And don’t be ridiculous. Of course I love him.” She turned to open another box. “Now go get the broom,” she said harshly. “And hurry up. This garage has to be swept before we can do anything else.”

  Eve kept unpacking as René went inside. But by the time the screen door closed behind her, René had made up her mind; not only was she not going to hurry, she wasn’t going back at all.

  * * *

  —

  René started attending the Christ Evangelical Youth Ministry meetings at the church they sometimes went to on Sundays. There was something about the way God could love you, regardless—regardless of the anger and hatred growing, twisting inside you like a gnarled oak. She thought if only she prayed hard enough, that oak might shrink down instead of taking deeper root. That was the promise. God could do it. And a God who was powerful and true, who could heal and protect, keep her from evil, and would never step away or turn his back, was just what she was looking for.

  When she thought of God, René didn’t imagine Christ on the cross, crying out unanswered, left to suffer the agonies—nails pounded through bone and sinew; lance piercing the side; prolonged hanging from flesh that would support only by tearing away—but Christ risen, victorious, beloved of the Father.

  The youth group took a field trip to see The Cross and the Switchblade, a movie about a gang member who became a preacher. It had everything they’d heard of but never seen: drug addicts, prostitutes, stabbings. Pat Boone, as Pastor Wilkerson, gripped his Bible and told the bad guys God loved them.

  “God’ll get you high,” he said, “but he won’t let you down.” Which to René—trying to forget things she couldn’t admit or explain to anyone, not even herself—was appealing.

  A few weeks later, Wilkerson and his team came to town for a Youth Crusade, and the group went en masse to the high school gym, just down the hall from where René had danced The Nutcracker. The place was packed, folks lined up on folding chairs and filling the bleachers, spilling into the aisles. Wilkerson gave a talk, and there was a slide show. Then members of the audience, young and old, got up to witness, telling stories of being struck by heavenly glory—realizing the powerful presence, the wonder and love of God—while driving home from work, or playing cards, or just sitting at the kitchen table, gazing out at the falling snow. And as the night went on, the crowd began to sway, open palms waving in the air to testify to the depths of pain and the truth of healing, until the whole gymnasium looked like an undulating ocean floor.

  Before long, anyone who wanted to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior was invited to “answer God’s call.” Wilkerson himself would bless you and pray over you, plead with the Holy Spirit to enter your heart and heal your life.

  René watched as people filed up to the stage. They knelt down, and Wilkerson bent over each one, laying on hands and bowing his head to pr
ay. He was powerful and sure, and it seemed that God was raining down blessings on each of them, and on everyone, together. It was then—seeing the gentle touch, feeling the shared blessing in the welcome act of tenderness and caring—that René started to cry.

  She wiped her eyes with her long sleeves and, in a flash like a tracer round, remembered lying in Grandma Emma’s bed—how the colored lights had sparked and whirled in the three-dimensional darkness of her closed eyelids as she’d drifted off to sleep. It had been a magical fireworks show—reds, blues, yellows bursting, falling, shifting in infinite patterns—a profusion of ease, a warm blossoming of happiness. What had happened since then? Somehow the colors had drained, the lights gone out, and she’d fallen into an increasingly dense and frightening darkness.

  “You want to go up?” An older girl, the daughter of their pastor at church, touched her shoulder.

  “No,” René sobbed, hyperventilating.

  The girl sat with her and rubbed her back, which made it worse, but she didn’t say anything, which was noticeably kind of her. And under the gentle influence of her calm, René regained her composure and reconsidered.

  “Maybe I’ll go up,” she said.

  “I can go with you,” the girl said.

  So, like a big sister, the girl held René’s arm as they walked up the aisle. They stayed together until they got to the portable stage set up in the middle of the gymnasium like a raft in floodwaters. Then she let go.

  “Jesus loves you,” she said as René started up the steps. “And I’m proud of you.” The girl smiled encouragement, and looking at her, René felt she was gazing across an unbridgeable chasm. What could her life possibly be like, René wondered, filled with such strange tenderness?

  And she was onstage. She took her place in front of Wilkerson.

  “My daughter,” Wilkerson said, clutching his Bible and looking at her deeply, kindly. And with those two words of love and acceptance and caring, everything went right off a cliff. René started weeping.