by Lauren Wolk
Judy Sanderson had fallen into the habit of walking around barefoot as she packed up and prepared to move house. Her husband laughed about it—“Barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen,” he said every night when he came home from work and found her cooking without her shoes on, her belly nice and big. She did not tell him why she no longer wore shoes in the house. He thought that her feet had begun to swell.
She was standing at the kitchen sink, washing potatoes, her feet on the cool linoleum, humming something unawares when she looked out into the backyard and wondered if maybe there was something going on between Mary Beth and Rusty. They were only thirteen, but that was plenty old. Then again, maybe they were just friends, as they had been for as long as she could remember. She watched them standing out there in the sunlight, throwing a baseball back and forth, back and forth, her daughter with a good arm, lean, tall for her age, going to be beautiful someday soon. Perhaps Rusty had seen that, too.
And she was watching carefully, through the window she’d washed that morning with vinegar and water (her husband had asked her, “Why you washing the windows when we’re moving next Tuesday?”), when she saw Rusty throw Mary Beth a high one, saw her daughter backing up to catch it, laughing. Judy put down the potato in her hand, saying out loud in the kitchen, “Watch out for the tree, Mary Beth,” and then saw her tall, sweet, lovely girl start to sink right down into the ground, her face changing, dust coming up in a cloud around her, dust and smoke, heard her screaming now, all of it happening so quickly, then racing out through the back door in her bare feet and feeling the heat coming up through the ground as Rusty grabbed at Mary Beth’s hand, the hand all that was left showing, fingers stretched out taut like an exotic bloom, and then Rusty falling through the ground, the earth sinking away with him. And Judy stood there screaming, screaming while the soles of her feet began to scorch and the smoke coming up made it impossible for her to see if Rusty, too, had completely disappeared under the ground.
She lay down on solid earth where there was still grass showing, trying to lie flat on her big, hard belly, to reach her arms out and into the smoke, but she couldn’t do it, she was shaking all over and so terrified that she could no longer hear herself screaming. But she was aware, suddenly, that her neighbor, Farley, was scrambling through the huckleberry bushes that grew up between the yards, pulling her to her feet and away from the smoke and the soft ground. Farley was fat and he was getting old and he hardly ever left his house these days, or even the old chair in front of his television, but he threw himself flat along the ground and plunged his arms into the hole where the smoke was billowing, began to yell and roll frantically, trying to scramble up onto his knees without letting go of whatever he had in his hands. And then, suddenly, Angela was there and Rachel right behind her, and they grabbed Farley’s legs and pulled him away from the smoke as if he weighed nothing at all. And it seemed to Judy as if she were watching a birth, for as they pulled Farley away another figure slid up out of the ground as smoothly as a snake from its skin, covered with filth and spitting gobs from its mouth, and bawling and screaming, and choking there on the ground. And she could see that it was not her Mary Beth, that it was Rusty, that he was alive, and that he was alone.
“Get her out!” Judy screamed. “She’s still down there! Mary Beth!” she screamed at the hole in the ground, at the smoke, as if her daughter might answer, “I’m coming, Mom. My foot’s stuck, is all …” But although Farley plunged his arms back down into the ground until he, too, began to slide under and his arms came out bleeding, Mary Beth was gone. Rachel came running back then from the street where she’d gone for help, to fetch a bulldozer or some other almighty machine, but she was alone.
They took Judy inside and first called the fire department, then her husband, made sure the other children would stay wherever they were for a time. Then they tried to take her to the hospital, to make sure she was all right, but she would not go any farther from Mary Beth than her kitchen window.
Farley stayed with her, his sleeves in tatters, while Angela wrapped Rusty in a blanket, gently wiped the dirt from his eyes, and Rachel ran up the hill for her truck. She could hear the sirens as she ran.
Rusty fell asleep on the way to the hospital, but he never stopped crying even so.
“He’ll be all right,” the doctor in Randall said. “We’re doing a few more tests, but there doesn’t appear to be any real damage, although he must have breathed in an awful lot of carbon monoxide. But if he was only down there for a minute or two, well, I guess he was lucky.”
“Lucky,” Angela muttered, her face terrible, once the doctor had left. She began to pace back and forth along the hospital corridor, wringing her hands. “I almost lost my boy. I almost lost my boy.” She looked at Rachel, who stood watching. “You hear me, Rachel? I almost lost my Rusty. That good enough for you? You gonna go now? God almighty. I’m taking Rusty away as soon as I get him out of here. The very minute.”
“Of course you are,” Rachel said. “Of course you are. I understand.”
“Jesus Christ, Rachel, you don’t understand a thing. I’ve tried to be patient and open-minded, but enough is enough. You’re obsessed. I see you looking at what’s happening, but you don’t do a goddamned thing. You act like there’s still something in Belle Haven worth staying for. But I can’t for the life of me figure out what’s got such a hold on you.”
“I know,” Rachel said, leaning her back against the wall. “I know I must seem crazy to you. Joe thinks I’m out of my mind. Sometimes I lose sight of everything, and I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. Everything’s all mixed up: things that happened years before the fire even started, things that happened hundreds of miles from here, things that happened this morning. But you’ve got to try to understand, Angela. Nothing seems important when I compare it to Belle Haven.” She put her head into her hands. “What’s so wrong with wanting to keep my home?”
“Nothing’s wrong with that. I want to keep my home too. But I can’t. It’s not up to me anymore. And I do have things that are a lot more important than Belle Haven. One of them is lying on a table down the hall.”
Rachel closed her eyes. “I’m so sorry this has happened,” she said. “I never thought it would get so bad.” She opened her eyes. “But I don’t have a little boy like Rusty or a mother like Dolly. All I have is my home.”
“Which you are clinging to like it’s some kind of paradise. Jesus, Rachel. What do you think it will be like when we’ve left? I always thought you loved Belle Haven because of the people who lived there. Me included. And my mother. And Rusty. And Joe, for that matter. But you’ve made it clear that when we leave, you’ll be staying on.” She threw up her hands. “For what?”
Rachel closed her eyes. Tipped back her head. “For all kinds of reasons.”
Angela took out a cigarette and held it in her trembling hand. “Name one.”
But Rachel couldn’t. Everything she loved about Belle Haven was changing. “I can’t,” she said. “I don’t know why, but I can’t imagine leaving. It seems wrong.” She put her hands over her face again. They were filthy. There was powdery grime in her hair and on her clothes. “I can’t explain it.”
“I think I can,” Angela said. The sight of Rachel so confused and unhappy made Angela sorry for what she was about to say. She was tempted to put her arms around her friend, but there were some things more important than comfort.
Rachel lowered her hands.
“I’ve been watching you for a long time now, Rachel. I used to worry about you when you were a kid. You were so … selfless. You never took a step out of line. I used to think you were going to explode. I remember hoping you would.”
“Hoping I would explode.”
“Yes.” Angela shrugged. “Most people would say bloom, I guess. Come of age. But the way you tamped yourself down all the time, I figured you weren’t likely to do anything so gradual. I figured it would come all at once. An explosion. But I was wrong.”
Rachel
waited. She knew there was more.
“You went off to college instead. Which I thought was a good thing at the time. I figured you’d grow out of your”—she searched for the right word—“your self-control. Throw out the script you’d written for yourself.” She put the cigarette back in its pack.
“College was good for you, Rachel. Anybody could see that. You’d come home so relaxed. And confident. That’s when we became friends, you know.”
Rachel frowned. “I thought we’d always been friends.”
“Uh-uh. You were always my friend, but I wasn’t always yours. You were way too tense for me, like you might break if you weren’t careful.”
Rachel looked like she was going to cry. “Is there a point to all this, Angela? Because if there isn’t, I think I’d like to stop talking for a while. The doctor should let us in to see Rusty soon.”
Angela took out the cigarette again. She held it between her fingers. “The point is that it would have been better if you’d exploded. Being a later bloomer would have been okay, too, if you’d been able to finish what you’d started. But you had a couple of lousy experiences at school, right around when your parents got killed … and you stopped.” She tapped the end of the cigarette against her wrist. “You’d opened up to the point where you started to take some chances and put yourself first. But you were only halfway there, Rachel. The place where you stopped wasn’t where you were meant to end up. You went from being a mouse to a lion. If you’d kept going, I’m sure you would have found your place somewhere in between the two. Somewhere less deliberate. Less … calculated. Where you weren’t always reacting to something, or someone. But you stopped.”
“What are you talking about?” Rachel didn’t know how much more of this she could take. “You sound like a goddamned shrink. I know I tried too hard when I was a kid. You think I don’t know that? I know I was naïve. Jesus, Angela, I’m not stupid.” She thought of Rusty somewhere down the hall, what it had done to him to lose his father. What surviving Mary Beth would do to him now. “Everybody reacts to everything,” she said. “Everybody. Including me. Christ, look at Joe. How come you’re not having this little talk with him?” Rachel waited for Angela to pick up this new thread. Follow this new road. But she didn’t. So Rachel continued on down the one she knew best. “Everybody changes as they grow up. Which is all I did. What’s wrong with that? Why try so hard to be … to live up to everyone’s expectations when nothing around me came close to living up to mine? Except Belle Haven. That was the only thing that didn’t let me down. I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t been able to come home after everything went so wrong.”
“You would have gone on!” Angela cried, holding out her arms and letting them fall at her sides. “You would have survived. That’s what people do.” She almost said, “That’s what I did.” But this wasn’t about her.
“I did go on. I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Yeah, you’re here all right. But you’re not telling the whole story, Rachel. Why are you still here? That’s what I don’t understand.”
Rachel felt like she was hearing an echo of herself asking Joe the same question so many months earlier.
“Fine. Then you tell me where I should have gone. According to you, I’ve still got a long way to go before I’m entitled to make up my own mind about where and how I live. I’ve got to finish blooming first. So tell me. Where should I have gone? Where should I go now?”
“Shit, Rachel, I don’t know. I’m not saying you should do what I or anyone else thinks you should do. That’s what got you in this mess in the first place.” She pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead. “I know this is going to sound terrible, and I’m not sure I ought to be saying it, but even though your parents dying was a horrible thing, and it wasn’t something you would ever have asked for, it gave you a freedom that you really needed. You—”
“Jesus God, Angela!” Rachel flinched as if she’d been singed. “My parents were everything to me. You think their death was something I should be thankful for?”
“No, Rachel, of course I don’t. But I don’t think it was something you should feel guilty about either.”
“I don’t feel guilty about it!”
“Then why, when you were finally coming into your own, did you quit school and come back home instead? Why haven’t you ever taken advantage of your freedom, whether you asked for it or not? Why are you acting now like it’s your duty to stay where you are, even if it means risking everything else, including Joe, including Rusty—” She bit her lip. Rachel had not asked them to stay in Belle Haven. It wasn’t her fault that Rusty had nearly died. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You weren’t the one who risked Rusty by staying here. I was.”
But Rachel knew she had played a part. She began to weep. Her tears mixed with the ash on her face. Her hands left black smudges across her cheeks. “I’m so confused, Angela. I miss them so much.”
“I know, baby. I know.” She stroked Rachel’s hair away from her face. “You don’t want to leave them, do you?”
Rachel pictured her parents’ ashes dissolving in the water of the creek. She told Angela that she had not buried them in Belle Haven after all.
“Then what is it?”
“What is what?”
“What is so important that you can’t leave it behind?”
Rachel grabbed her head in both hands. “I don’t know. I wish I did, but I don’t.” She dropped her hands. There was a streak of dried blood on one of her palms. She closed her eyes. “Joe said something to me once. He said it wasn’t the place that was important but what it meant to us. He said we should be able to take with us whatever mattered most about the places we loved.” She opened her eyes. “And that makes sense to me. It really does. But if that’s true, why am I so afraid to leave?”
Angela looked at Rachel and, for the first time since her son had gone nearly to his death, began to cry.
“Maybe because by staying here you’ve been honoring your parents, immortalizing them, insisting that your life here with them was always perfect. Somewhere along the way, you’ve convinced yourself that running away from Belle Haven means confessing to all the people you love, and who love you, and who have known you since you were a child that you might have been far happier somewhere else.”
When the doctor called to her, Angela ran down the hall and into the room where they were dressing Rusty’s burns. For the rest of her life, Rachel would wish that she had not followed. But she did, for staying alone in the too bright hallway that still rang with Angela’s words seemed worse by far.
“It was so terrible. So terrible,” Rusty was saying when Rachel walked into the room. Angela was leaning over the table where he lay, stroking the hair away from his face. “I was hanging on to some tree roots. There’s a great big oak right there where we went through. I was hanging on to those roots with my face pressed into a hollow spot between them, and the dirt was coming down over my head and it was awfully hot and all I could hear was a sound like the wind howling down below me and there was screaming from up above. And it all happened so fast that at first I didn’t realize that something was hanging on to my leg, and then I could feel that it was Mary Beth. I could feel her hands slipping down my leg and grabbing at my shoe. And I was trying to pull us up out of the hole. And then somebody grabbed my wrist and I thought I was going to be torn in half.” He stopped and opened his eyes, turned to look at his mother. “And then she let go of my foot and I started to come up out of the hole. I could feel the dirt sucking down under my feet as she let go and slipped away. Do you think she was dead already?”
Angela thought for a moment that he sounded like a much younger boy asking the kind of impossible question that little children always ask. Why is the sky blue? What am I going to be like when I grow up? Did you know that some people get old and die?
“I’m sure that she was, Rusty,” was all she said, laying her fingers on his lips.
But Rachel was not so sure.
>
She was still thinking pretty clearly when she left the room, remembered to call Ed Zingham to come over to the hospital to drive Angela and Rusty home, her truck too small to give Rusty room to lie down. But as she pulled up alongside her house, she realized that she could not remember driving home, not at all. When she took her hands off the wheel, they began to shake, and her legs, when she put her feet down on the ground, nearly gave way.
The sight of her house in the evening sunlight sickened her, hurt her eyes, so she walked around it and through her backyard, straight into the woods and up the gently sloping hill toward the tree house.
Joe was sitting on the little deck, his legs hanging over the edge, carving a small nugget of wood, when Rachel came out of the trees into the clearing below with signs of fire on her face and hands.
She opened her mouth, and a croupy sound came out, as if she had swallowed acid. She tried again but managed only a louder sound, much the same, and Joe dropped the knife in his hand, let the half-done swallow fall into the leaves below, nearly falling out of the tree himself in his haste to reach her.
She could not climb to the tree house, so he gentled her down to the leaves and sat down beside her, cradling her in his arms, holding her head tight against the side of his neck. Her whole body was limp and cold, though he could feel her shake minutely with every breath, and her fingers sometimes jerked as if she had fallen into an unsettled sleep.
Something terrible had happened. When Rachel finally managed to say a word, it was “Rusty,” and Joe’s arms tightened around her so she could barely breathe. “He’s all right,” she managed, realizing she had to tell him now, as quickly as possible, what had happened.
When she had finished, Joe stood up and began to walk around the clearing, panting. Then he took her by her hands and pulled her to her feet.
“Do I have to say it?” he asked her.