by Pam Lewis
“Make that kid shut up,” he said, holding his head in both hands, his voice neutral, as if she was going to do what he said, the way she always did. That was what got to her.
That was when Pepper kicked Eddie in the shins. It couldn’t have hurt much. Pepper was too little, and he was barefoot, but you would have thought Eddie had been shot by the look on his face. “You little shit,” he said. Pepper went at him again. Eddie reached out and grabbed him by the upper arm and must have swung him. Carole didn’t see it happen, but she heard the sound, a loud crack as Pepper’s head slammed into the edge of the kitchen counter, where the tiles were chipped and sharp. Blood streamed down Pepper’s face as Eddie stamped out the back door. Carole could hear the trash barrels toppling and rolling as he fled. “Don’t think this is over,” he shouted, and then it was silent.
Pepper started screaming again. Thank God, because it meant he was alive. Rachel was pulling herself up. Carole ran from the room to get bandages, a little tin box she kept in her suitcase. She went by feel, because her pupils had to be as big as pies by then, found the box smelling of rust, went back downstairs, and pressed a wet towel to Pepper’s head, but there was so much blood, way too much. She remembered from her mother that you doused a cut with warm water over and over to clean it and then patted it dry with something sterile, not that there was anything clean around. She used the lapel of her bathrobe, cleaner than anything in the kitchen. She pressed it against his face while she drew out a Band-Aid, pulled the little tabs apart to expose the square of gauze, pressed it to the wound on his cheek just underneath his eye and peeled the tabs back, pressing down to make them stick.
“There,” she said, but Pepper rubbed at it furiously.
“You put it in the wrong place,” he said, and tried to press it higher on his forehead, but it wouldn’t stick, of course. It was so wet. The dark spot had formed on his forehead and was running all down his eye. She reached for it, to correct her mistake, but he pushed her hand away. “You’re so wasted,” he said.
She got the keys and made both of them—Rachel and Pepper—get into the van and then drove them down Stanyan, left on Judah, and up the hill to the medical center, around to the emergency room, where she let them off and parked the van. She was still barefoot and wearing only her bathrobe, which by this time had blood on the front and the sleeves, and in the stark fierce light of the emergency room people stared at her. The linoleum felt bitter cold underfoot. They took Rachel and Pepper into different rooms, and Carole went from one to the other, answering questions about what had happened. Rachel was released, her face painted with red disinfectant, and the two of them sat side by side in the bleak waiting room. Carole felt exhausted and shaken. Her mouth was dry.
“Who was he?” Rachel asked her.
She was so weary, so tired of keeping secrets, and now another lie was called for and she had none. “The devil,” she said, looking away, feeling sick and ashamed.
“‘The devil’ doesn’t exactly cut it, Carole. He almost killed Pepper. He could have. So who was he?”
Eddie, Eddie, Eddie, Eddie. The name hammered at her, daring to be spoken aloud. Lindbaeck, that hateful, ugly name, more hateful because she was so afraid of it. That was the disgrace of this moment. That was her shame. All she could manage was, “He would have left.”
“Not what I asked,” Rachel said, and Carole felt cornered, her defenses at the ready. Every situation has more than one truth, she thought with growing self-justification. None of this would have happened if Rachel weren’t so hot-tempered about soldiers and uniforms and the war. “You’re the one who spat on him.”
“You’re on his side now?”
“Of course not.” Anger felt a lot better than fear. “But you should have let me handle it. I was getting him out of there.”
“I don’t think so,” Rachel said. “You should have seen yourself. You looked scared to death in there. Cornered, is how you looked. He wasn’t about to go anywhere. It’s why I stepped in. You have any more surprises? Anybody else coming to beat us up?”
“Nobody knows where I am.”
“Well, he sure as hell did.”
She didn’t want to think about that. Not even for a second. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? What more can I do?”
“Maybe we can turn him in,” Rachel said. “Call his unit or whatever. Military police. Oh, forget it. You really don’t think he’ll be back?”
“He said he had twelve hours.”
“I hope he gets killed in the war,” Rachel said. “Serve him right.”
Two nurses came out and asked to speak to them, but separately. Carole was taken to a small office. The nurse had forms to be filled out, but Carole couldn’t see them because of her dilated pupils, which angered the nurse. She had to ask each question aloud and write down Carole’s answer. The questions were about where they lived and what had occurred. All Carole said was that an intruder, a man, came in off the street and started a fight. It was clear the nurse didn’t believe her. Then she was sent to another room, where a man in regular clothes interviewed her. What were the conditions of the home? Had the child been hurt before? Where was the child’s father? Which one of them was the mother, and what, exactly, was their relationship? Carole realized they were looking for signs of abuse. “You don’t understand,” Carole told the man, but the way he looked at her let her know he did understand.
They kept Pepper overnight for observation. Rachel slept on his bed, and Carole slept on the floor. Morgan came up late and paced up and down the hall most of the night. When the nurse released Pepper grudgingly the next day, she said she would schedule follow-up visits in the home and that someone would contact them.
Back in the van, Rachel took the wheel, and Carole sat in the passenger seat, with Pepper between them. “Look at that,” Rachel said, touching the line of tiny black stitches that ran from Pepper’s hairline down his forehead to his eyebrow. “They’re butchers. Look how it puckers.”
“We can go back,” Carole said. “They can do it over.”
“They cannot,” Rachel said, as if this were the stupidest thing she’d ever heard.
“There’s a way they do,” Carole said. “They can reopen it. I’m pretty sure.” A girl she knew at Spence had had a scar removed once. “Really, I think we should at least ask,” she said. “It’s right on his face.”
Before all this had happened, Rachel would have listened. You think? she would have said, eager to learn, hear Carole’s advice. But not now. Now Rachel was the only mom. She pulled the van over. “I said no. Listen to me, Carole. You’re not putting him through anything else. You’ve already put him through enough.”
Back at the house, Jaya was in the kitchen, and when they came in, she started in on them right away about how freaked out she was. She’d come all this way from Lakewood, she said, only to have violence in the house of love and peace. It wasn’t fair. Carole set about cleaning up. Nobody had even wiped up Pepper’s blood or put the wine back in the refrigerator. Once she was finished, she went to her room and slept away the day. It was about eight at night when she awoke. She heard voices in the kitchen and went downstairs.
Morgan and Rachel were sitting at the kitchen table, Rachel all tense, with her knees drawn up, swathed in some big India-print garment, and Morgan overly relaxed as usual, his long skinny legs stretching across the top of the table. “You brought harm into our lives,” Rachel said. She’d obviously been practicing with Morgan what she would say. “If it was just me, that would be one thing.” Her hand lifted to the painted bruise under her eye. “But it was Pepper. You brought Pepper into this. We need a meeting.”
A part of Carole rose up in objection again. If Rachel hadn’t spat on Eddie, it wouldn’t have happened. That’s what had started it. Well, Carole may have started it by knowing him in the first place, letting him into their lives. But the spark for the fight, that had been all Rachel. You didn’t mess with Eddie that way. Not with all the macho bullying swagger of his, the un
predictability. But she wasn’t about to say that again. She’d said it once, and she felt ashamed of herself, given Rachel’s bruises and Pepper’s cut. She was answerable, no question. When it came to Eddie, she was at fault.
The three of them went upstairs to the room where Rachel’s consciousness-raising group met. Tinfoil covered the windows, candles and pillows dotted the floor. Rachel lit the candles and invited Carole and Morgan to sit. “We need a cleansing,” Rachel said. “We need to get our feelings into the open.” She sat quietly for a few seconds. “I’m very freaked out about what happened. Also”—she glanced at Carole—“I’m disappointed in Carole. I feel that our home was violated and she allowed it to happen by allowing that soldier to enter our space in spite of knowing how I feel on that subject and without any discussion. Even though she knew him, it was a violation. I trusted her with my baby, with Pepper. That’s all. That’s all I have to say. I feel violated.”
Morgan spoke up. “I wasn’t even in the house. So I’m not going to place blame here. All I can say is, Rachel is unhappy, so I’m unhappy. And my kid has a scar for the rest of his life. I wish it hadn’t happened. But it makes me sure of one thing. We need to get out of here. The whole district is going to hell. Street people moving in. And bad drugs, man. That’s not what we’re about here.”
“I would prefer to stay on the subject,” Rachel said.
“Hey, Rach, it is the subject,” Morgan said.
“Carole?” Rachel said.
Carole took a deep breath. “I’m sorry for what happened,” she said. “I didn’t mean for it to happen. You have to know that about me, Rachel. You have to. You too, Morgan. And as to letting him in, I didn’t do that. He just walked in through the door. People do it all the time, so it’s not exactly fair to say that part was my fault.” She paused. She didn’t want to go splitting hairs about who was at fault for what. And anyway, Rachel would never admit that spitting at him had started the whole thing. “But I’m with Morgan about leaving,” she said, trying to play down her excitement over what he had said. The possibility of getting out of that house where Eddie had found her, moving to where he couldn’t possibly track her down—now that was the real solution. If that happened, then yes, they really were safe. She could promise that.
“I see,” Rachel said, and Carole could tell Rachel felt as if she’d been betrayed all over again. Here was her group, her room, her idea, and Morgan and Carole were changing the subject and running away with it.
“It’s a solution,” Carole said. “We had a problem, and this is the solution. He won’t find me if we move.”
“But who was he?” Rachel was solemn. “That’s what I want to know.”
Carole took a deep breath. She owed Rachel that much. “Remember that day after we saw Bobby Kennedy, we went to the drugstore, and I told you I knew trouble, and you didn’t believe me?”
Rachel nodded.
“That was him, okay? He got the address off one of the letters you sent me. Don’t ask me how. It’s how he found me. And if we move, he’ll never find me again.”
“You promise?”
“Cross my heart,” Carole said.
“Things will just get worse here, Rach,” Morgan said to Rachel. “More dangerous guys coming through that door, unless we keep it locked, I guarantee it. And what about the social worker? Eh? I don’t want to scare you, but those people are dangerous. They come in and if they don’t like what they see, good-bye Pepper, hello California State judicial system.”
Rachel reached out for Carole’s hand as if she were grasping it for life, and Carole took it and held it in both of hers. Then Morgan slid over and took Rachel’s other hand, and the three of them sat in the flickering candlelight, heads bowed in silence.
They were all packed up and on the road two Mondays later. They were headed to Vermont, to a place way up north where they would homestead, Morgan called it, by which he meant, they would build their own house and grow their own food and keep chickens for meat, maybe a cow for milk and cheese down the road. She’d told Morgan that the only place she’d ever been in Vermont was Stowe, and even that felt risky to say out loud, but she had no choice. She had to find out before she got into that van how far it was from Stowe. Morgan made a face like she’d said something about the sewer. He said Stowe wasn’t even Vermont. Stowe was another world. Nothing but tourists and high prices and trendy places, he said. It’s like a suburb of New York. Where they were going was something else altogether. They’d be in the real wilderness. If she was thinking Stowe, she’d better think again. Which was almost all the reassurance she needed.
The land Morgan took them to was a landlocked acre up in Worcester that his uncle had given him. His uncle owned bits of land all over the state that he’d been buying for years. He’d paid peanuts for each piece in the belief that one day the owners of the surrounding land would pay a king’s ransom to own the whole piece. He’d turned out to be wrong, and he’d given the piece in Worcester to Morgan to avoid having to pay taxes on it.
The piece was in the center of a tract owned by someone living in Florida. It came with a contentious right-of-way, a narrow path from the road that snaked through a bog and uphill through a stand of spruce. They’d had to clear the acre first, cutting trees and pulling out brush, then carry the building supplies in themselves. The Florida people wouldn’t let them widen the path even temporarily for a truck to go through. But the three of them had done enough that summer, and by fall the completed dome resembled a large sleeping animal, the color of peanut butter and the texture of leather. It had odd-shaped Plexiglas windows here and there. Inside was a single large room heated by a woodstove at the center, its pipe heading directly out the top.
Carole stayed with them through the summer and fall. They learned the hard way about everything—chimney fires, insulation, and leaks in the roof. They didn’t have running water or electricity that first year. They’d had to bring water in from the stream each day, then boil it on the stove and decant it into jars. They’d had to cut and split wood for the stove. There’d been days when Rachel and Carole would fall over laughing at what had become of them—two girls from New York homesteading on this little piece of land. But underneath it all, Carole had felt so safe tucked away there. No one knew where she was.
Come winter, though, everything took much longer to do. Darkness fell by four-thirty, and with only candlelight available, they’d be in bed by seven or eight. Rachel and Morgan’s “room” was a double mattress separated from the rest of the space by a blanket strung across. Carole’s and Pepper’s mattresses were side by side on the other side of the dome. Often on those nights, Carole would have to cover her ears with her pillow to keep from hearing the muted sound of Rachel and Morgan making love. She would lie rigid, her heart beating, frightened and waiting for the sounds to stop. They filled her with dread. They brought shame.
Most mornings, she woke at five-thirty. She would cook a breakfast of oatmeal and eggs and suggest to Pepper that he might want to go to school that day. If he said yes, and he usually did to her, she would make his lunch and dress him as well as she could against the cold. She went about it this way because Rachel believed that school was entirely Pepper’s decision. She said it was up to the school to keep his interest, and if he didn’t feel like going, she was not going to force him.
Carole and Pepper would walk the long path to the main road, where the yellow school bus stopped. When Pepper got on the bus, there was no doubt that the other children found him curious. She could see all their little faces pressed against the windows to see whether or not he would be there. She knew how strange he would seem to the other kids—a little boy who was absent so much of the time, who didn’t seem to come from a house but from the woods. They must think Carole was his mother.
By spring the half-mile path from the dome to the road was well worn and deep. It ran with snow melt for several weeks before turning to deep mud. She and Pepper forged detours around the boggy parts and bridged th
e worst of it with logs they dragged from the forest. It was the first time she’d ever heard the term unlocking for what went on each spring in Vermont. The ground just let go. You could almost feel it happen. You could smell it. It was as though all of life had begun anew.
One morning in early May, she woke and knew from the soft warmth of the air that winter was over for good. She lay on her mat on the floor, looking up through the window at the apex of the dome to a sky that was, no question about it, a gentler shade of blue. It was still way too early to get up. She felt the optimism that always comes with spring, and then, little by little, she recognized again the sounds coming from the other side of the dome. Rachel and Morgan were taking care to be quiet, but even so, the sounds were unmistakable.
That morning, however, instead of pulling the pillow over her ears, she lay still and listened without anxiety to the sound of the bedclothes, the sharp intake of breath and whispered moans. She felt calm and even a little bit curious. She wondered what it would be like to have the warmth and comfort of another person’s body always available, the way Rachel and Morgan had with each other.
After those sounds subsided, others took their place as Rachel and Morgan spoke in low whispers. She assumed they were talking about the day and what they would do, and with this realization came a new understanding. She knew absolutely what was in store for her if she didn’t leave this place and begin a life of her own. She would become one of the children. Already there were times when it felt as though Morgan and Rachel were the parents and she and Pepper were the children. Just the other day Rachel had said, “Carole, why don’t you and Pepper go out and hunt up some wood for the stove,” as if she were the older sister instead of an adult. This was Rachel and Morgan’s house—their design and their dream. This place was their future, not hers.
That same day she pulled her hair into a ponytail, dressed in the last of her Vassar clothes, and borrowed the van. She drove into Montpelier and applied at the Howard Johnson’s for a waitressing job. It was the only work she knew how to do. She didn’t give her address to the manager. If he found out where she lived, she might never get the job. She made up a post office box number, said she’d just moved, didn’t have a telephone, and that she would come the next day for his decision. Lying about who she was and where she was from came so easily. It was just another disappearance. The manager hired her on the spot.