But that’s a story my mother tells me later, one that becomes family lore, her face always looking slightly bewildered as she tells it, her tone always a little too light. What I remember from those years is standing next to my bed, the smell of spring grass clippings and the growl of my father’s mower coming in through the open window, sunlight that feels far away filtering in through the glass. I climb onto the mattress and stand tall on it, something I’m forbidden to do. I push my bare feet into the soft blanket for balance. I ball my small hands into fists that I jam into my sides, arms cocked out akimbo, imagining myself a fighter, and in this pose I swear allegiance to myself. I’ll never fall in love, never do any of that froufrou stuff all the girls I know seem to want. I won’t lose my edge. Not ever. I hardly know what I am promising myself except this: a different life. I carry this knowledge of what I am heading for like a secret inside me, a debt privately carried, a future owed.
To hold it doesn’t seem strange. All around me are unspoken secrets. Beneath what can be said is still the thrum of a world that belongs only to darkness. My sisters and I do not talk about the nights of the past five years, which have vanished as though they never happened. If at night, my father sometimes wails and throws himself on the bed, I understand that this is a life separate from the one my parents live in their office at the center of town. If at night, when I come down to the kitchen he’s not sweet anymore but angry, angry at me or angry at life, and he curses me or tells me he wants to die, I understand that that has not happened, nor have the nights the wheels of his car spin out of the driveway as my mother stands at the front door in her bathrobe and sobs. Always, the next morning, when I find my mother darkening her eyebrows at her vanity table with the bulbs all around that light up her face, she says, “I’m sure your father didn’t say that.” Or “You must be misremembering.” I am, I understand, to be as expressionless as the careful face I arrange for myself when the doorbell rings on Saturday afternoons and it’s my grandparents, dropped off on the porch as my father finishes parking the car in the driveway. If at night, sometimes I can’t sleep because I watch the crack of light around the door and listen for the creak of the stairs, I know better than to mention this in the morning. At twelve I still wet the bed, and though I don’t have the words to say why, if I did I would say that it makes me feel safe. That when I feel the bed all warm and wet around me I know: Nothing will come for me in the night. Nothing will want to. In the morning I scoop up the smelly sheets, fold the mattress cover over the wet parts so they won’t touch me, turn my nose away and carry the bundle down to the basement steps, where I can throw it into the air and let it fall to the foot of the steps, where the maid my parents have hired will deal with it. She is the one who, in the morning, cleans up the empty wine bottles and ice cream wrappers my father has left at the kitchen table. Each morning, through careful ministrations taken while my family slumbers upstairs, the house is erased and begins anew.
So maybe this, too, is why I come to love the objects in my father’s office: Whatever secret they hold locked inside can’t be erased. The evidence is there, solid. Waiting for the future to come looking.
Thirteen
Louisiana, 1965–1983
After the crash, the house the young family makes for itself is a haunted one, but it lasts. Bessie stays in the hospital for months after Ricky’s birth. Then she is allowed to come home, and she and Alcide live with Lyle and Luann in their two-bedroom house. Luann tends to the four children, Lyle brings home his pay, and Alcide goes out on the road for his trucking job. Nights he’s home, Lyle and Luann sleep in the living room, giving Alcide and Bessie their marital bed. It’s a hard arrangement. They were used to living on their own in California. Now Luann has an opinion on everything where the children are concerned, and who can blame her when she’s the one raising them? It’s all Bessie can do to navigate the house on her crutch, navigate the day through the layers of pain and the shots Luann helps her with. It’s easier not to chafe. Bessie’s always been wilder than Luann, but now she bends to her Pentecostal ways. No music. No television. No booze. Luann fills the silence by talking of God. She must smell the alcohol on Bessie’s breath; she must guess at what Alcide carries back for her from his stops on the road. But Luann tries, too. She bites her lip to keep herself silent, turns her cheek the way the Bible tells her to. The women will never be friends, but in silence they make it through.
It’s harder on Alcide, maybe. At twenty-seven, he wants to provide. The care Bessie gets at Charity is subsidized, and the trucking company’s good work, but what’s left of the bills still eats up Alcide’s pay. They’re guests in Lyle’s house, barely contributing to their keep. He tries not to let that burn him. He goes silent, too. He waits. Puts aside what money he can. Tells himself they’re young still, that there’s time ahead for a new beginning. When he stops for coffee on the road, the pamphlets of lots for sale that every truck stop diner has in a rack by the door must catch his eye. He must take the pamphlets to his booth and flip through them as the waitress refills his coffee. “You all right here, hon?” she asks. He nods at her distractedly, peering at the tiny grainy photos of rural lots, his mind already off somewhere else, into an imagined future. Maybe that thirty acres out by Moss Bluff, with long crabgrass and a creek running through the back. For a minute he pictures Bessie sitting by the creek. Not Bessie as she is now, braced against the crutch, her face in the grim line of pain, but Bessie as she was ten years ago, a girl of sixteen with hair the color of river reeds and teeth as bright as her white cotton dress. A smile that always made him remember laughing with his brothers when he was a boy. Or maybe this other ad—a small shotgun house in New Orleans, persuade Bessie to give city living a try. For an instant he has a flash of Bessie’s trying to make it from one room to the other with them all in a row like that. He can’t know yet that in a few years the doctors will amputate her leg, but even now it is constantly infected, hard for her to walk on. He sighs and puts down the flyer. Swigs back his coffee, feels the dregs’ bitter splash against his throat, swallows, puts down the empty mug. Fishes a dime from his pocket, slaps the coin down on the table, stands to go. The doctors say three operations a year are ahead, and already the pain’s like a fog over Bessie. Pain or grief, who can say. It’ll be a long time before he gets his wife back. If he ever gets his wife back. He puts the trucking company’s hat back on and gathers the pamphlets in his fist. Leaves them on the rack, a little crumpled. Let some other man dream.
So it’s a relief, it must be, to swing himself up into the cab of his truck, start the great growl of the engine, and ease the truck out of the lot. High in the cab, he lets the miles of black tar clear his mind. No past behind him, no future ahead. Only road. His only responsibility to go forward, clear as the bright white lines of the lane markers. Sometimes, maybe at night when there’s no distraction, or maybe when the afternoon sun is high and bright overhead, and the glass windshield again concentrates the heat until he sweats and he feels the hard nubs of the wheel go a little slippery beneath his palms again, sometimes then the crash must come back to him. The hot choked memory dream of that afternoon. His hand reaching up to wipe at his forehead. The concrete rushing at him through the windshield, as though it were the thing hurtling itself toward collision, not him. Not the car. Not his family. Then Bessie’s scream. The shock of the impact entered him through the wheel, up through his bones. The smell of burning. His last sight of Oscar.
But Alcide is a pragmatic man, proud of and defined by the way he can keep going. A skill learned young, after his brother’s death in the motorcycle crash. A skill he needs now.
So most days, he’s all right. He goes on the road; he makes his deliveries; he comes back when he can and he kisses his wife on her forehead and sits in Lyle’s house at Lyle’s table to eat the meal Lyle’s wife has made. When the grief comes, and when what the grief feels like is anger, he takes one of Bessie’s whiskey bottles and swallows the silence down. He remembers to kiss his d
aughters and he remembers to love his broken-down wife and he remembers to hide the empty bottles so Luann won’t see. These years are hard, but they have a kind of hope to them. He waits to make his new beginning. He waits to start anew.
* * *
Then Ricky turns four, and he can. There’s a new baby, Jamie. A son whose life has nothing to do with the crash. The doctors had to cut Bessie open again to pull him out, and Jamie will turn out to be blind in one eye and hard of hearing, but the child is perfection. Two boys, three girls, a raise that puts a little money in his pocket finally. Alcide sends away for the housing kit catalog, and he and Bessie choose the only kit they can afford. It’s nothing fancy—four rooms on a foursquare frame, no flourishes—but it will be their home. That fall is clear and bright, good weather for building. He’s not naive or reckless enough to think they can move far away. No longer does his head fill with thoughts of California. Someone has to take care of the children through Bessie’s operations. But they can get next door, at least. He’ll build on Luann and Lyle’s lot.
Alcide is still strong—the muscles in his broad shoulders will never leave him—just starting to go soft around the middle from the trucking. He and Lyle work long hours in the sun, laying down the frame for the house, building up the walls. With each wood beam, with each nail he drives through it, he is laying down the bones for their new life.
When I imagine him there, kneeling at the frame of the house, a nail gripped between his teeth, him hammering on a board while the broad sun beats and sweat runs rivulets down his forehead and his back, I see my father, a sawhorse erected in the backyard and one of the house’s repairs under way. I hear the din of an old boom box playing a ball game, the batter’s hit and the crowd’s responding roar. I stand at the edge of the grass, the blades coming up itchy yet soft between my toes, and it’s how Ricky would have stood, watching Alcide hammering in the heat. The eldest son. At four, Ricky is a normal-looking child. A little big-eared. A little skinny. But he laughs when Darlene or Judy tickles him. And he’s a big brother now.
Ricky pads over to Alcide, who must look up and see his son haloed against the high afternoon light. On the radio Waylon Jennings has just finished crooning a lonesome line, the strum of the guitar fading out to an audience’s applause. Ricky’s shy around his daddy still. He just stands there, waiting. Alcide has a flash of Oscar at four, the way Oscar used to run to greet him at the door and how he would fall to his knees to catch him and wrestle.
Now Alcide pinches the nail from his teeth and holds it out to Ricky. “You going to help me with this, Son?”
Ricky nods. He bends forward and takes the nail, his face serious and watchful.
“Hold it right there,” Alcide says. He gestures to the board. “That’s right. Just like that.” The child toddles closer.
Alcide brings the hammer down to the nail slowly and taps, careful not to clip Ricky’s fingers. “Good, good. Go get the next one, you hear?” He’ll have to go back over this later, driving each of the nails deeper into the wood. But for now the sun is high and the beer is cold and the music is good and he’s here with his son, his living healthy son. He waits for Ricky to fish another nail from the box. The afternoon could last all day. Alcide wouldn’t mind. Let the afternoon last right into a new life.
Alcide pounds the final beams into the frame of the house. He and Lyle dip brushes into sealant to protect the wood from the Louisiana humidity. As they stroke the vinegary liquid over the boards, and the sun begins to sink in the sky, bringing the afternoon to its close, and as Ricky heads back into the house to Bessie’s call, how much of the past are they sealing in? How many of the memories Alcide holds have made their way into this house he builds, how much has seeped in through its doors? Think what you will about the drink, about how lately it can’t hold back anger, grief slips out of him and blindsides Alcide. Those times he catches himself just as his fist slams into the table, aware, suddenly, of the vein in his forehead, of the rage in his throat, of Ricky cowering in the doorway, small and trembling. Think what you will about the way Bessie sometimes closes herself in the bedroom and sobs, and he doesn’t have to ask her why: Oscar’s smile ripples through Ricky’s, Ricky’s voice is an echo. The fact is, the same newspaper that printed the articles about the crash that might have killed this family will print notice of Bessie and Alcide’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. A haunted house, maybe. But they survive.
* * *
The ghost comes to Ricky in a dream, and Ricky, five years old now, has no choice but to take her hand and follow. Into the night sky they fly, the stars of Orion’s Belt and Perseus sparkling above them, the only town Ricky has ever known sleepy and dark below. From this high the roofs are pitched in rows like the tops of crypts in Louisiana graveyards, the distance turning houses for the living as small and perfect as the houses for the dead. The ghost and Ricky fly for what seems like a very long time. Ricky can’t see her face, only sense the way her white robes blow in the wind, and though Ricky is scared and tired in the dream he doesn’t dare let go of her hand, not with the ground so far away. They fly for a longer time still, the air cold and whistling around them, and on the ground below he sees pink and purple flowers that are somehow lit up even in the dark. He knows they are the flowers his mother remembers from California, the ones she speaks of in her stories of a happier time.
They keep flying.
Then he sees, far below on the ground, a man sitting cross-legged by the side of a highway road, cradling something in his lap as he rocks back and forth over it. His father, Alcide, is a young man, younger than Ricky can remember ever having seen him, with a full, dark head of hair and a trim body. Next to him is a long brown station wagon, its front end smashed in like Ricky has seen in cartoons, all around it broken glass glittering like the stars.
His father is cradling the head of a boy, singing to it. Brown hair like Ricky’s, dark eyes like Ricky’s, a ring of blood where the neck has been severed. He knows, somehow he knows, that the boy is five years old like him. But the boy is not dead—the head turns and the boy’s brown eyes open and look into Ricky’s and the boy smiles. He smiles at Ricky as if Ricky is his friend.
For a long time, the dream confuses Ricky. He’ll remember it even thirty years from now and tell it to a room of corrections officers. At five he thinks on it and he thinks on it, and then one afternoon when he wakes up from a nap, he asks Bessie who the boy is. The boy with the brown hair, like him.
* * *
When I was growing up, my mother kept a white filing cabinet in the long playroom my siblings and I shared. The rest of the room was ours, unmistakably the domain of children, its floor serpentined with mazes we’d built from blocks. Bits of Play-Doh crusted between the floorboards lent the air a faintly salty smell. In one corner sat a piano my parents had purchased in the hope that at least one of the four of us might turn out to be as musical as they were not; it was always going out of tune because we banged on it so hard. High up on one wall hung two laminated maps: one of the continents and the other a close-up of the United States. Whenever we returned from a family trip, we children would gather beneath these maps and tilt our small, satisfied faces up to watch as our father traced where we’d been in black grease pencil, plotting our ventures into the wider world.
The playroom was conquered land, ours and ours alone. Yet I knew without ever having been told so that the white metal filing cabinet was not. It belonged to my mother, to some other home and some other life, a life before the fact of us. The cabinet was a steely, shiny white, cold to the touch and stubborn, with a single drawer that had to be braced and then jerked. I watched my mother perform that move with the palm of one hand. What she put in never came out. Copies of our medical records, report cards, copies of our birth certificates, and, most commonly, the photographs we’d smiled for just days before were all shoved in, to be swallowed by the cabinet. My father often told us stories of his childhood, but my mother rarely did, and I felt about the cabinet as I f
elt about my mother’s past. It was a thing guarded from me, and held both the allure of anything forbidden and a kind of silence as solid as stone.
So when, one rare afternoon that I was alone in the room, I mimicked my mother’s flat-palmed lift and was rewarded with a hospital chart that I slowly realized wasn’t referencing me or my sisters, but another girl, I didn’t tell anyone. I hadn’t been looking for the chart. I hadn’t known it existed to be looked for. But there it was: proof of a baby, proof of the sister now gone.
* * *
Bessie braces her hand against the door frame and leans hard against her crutch. The rooms are small but clean, the wallpaper new. She’s been making up the beds in Darlene and Ricky’s room, and the effort, the balancing, has winded her. The baby Jamie is down for his afternoon nap. The girls and Ricky are home from school. Ricky has fallen asleep on the couch in front of the television and when he wakes up he runs to her and pulls at the corner of her housedress. She knows the look on his face, spooked. He must have had the dream again. “Mama,” he says, “who’s the boy?”
She’s just about to tell him that the dream isn’t real, just a dream, and the boy’s not real either. Neither she nor Alcide has spoken to the children about the crash. But when she speaks, different words come out. “Follow me, sweetie.” Who knows why the past comes through in the moments it does; who knows why a secret suddenly becomes too much to keep? She’s never talked to the children about Oscar. The afternoon stretches dangerously before her, all those yawning hours to fill. Maybe time lets it in. Or maybe she’s always planned to tell them. Maybe she’s planned so privately she’s kept the plan a secret even from herself.
The Fact of a Body Page 10