by Wendy J. Fox
Chapter Twenty-Three
Lucy Estelle
Fall, 1970
In the nighttime, Lucy Estelle feared Larry’s homecoming. She worried he would cruise up the drive, tires spinning, and burst through the window to take Jenny and leave her alone. Not that he would want the child, just that he was prone to poor decisions. She kept her daughter in the room with her—it was easier if she fussed, anyway—and her father’s pistol in the nightstand. She had checked to make sure Larry had not taken it, but he had not taken anything other than the money and his clothes. It was not like there were caches of jewelry and other weapons around the house, but she guessed he was just not ambitious enough to even open a drawer and check. The pistol was old and may not have ever been cleaned. It was unloaded, and there were no bullets anywhere, nor had there ever been. Her father had always believed the threat of a firearm was enough. He had grown up with guns, and had been to Korea, and never wanted to hear the sound again. If they won’t go away with the barrel pointed at their face, he had said to her once, they aren’t going away.
* * *
From the beginning, she had not thought that she could keep Larry. When they had met, the river was high, so the kids crowded onto a narrow flat of mud below where they had parked their beater cars and borrowed pickups. The riverwater had never cleared and still churned with the fecal smell of spring. Hardly anyone had swum or fished all season.
Back then, Larry was handsome, in old jeans and a flannel shirt. He had high, delicate cheekbones, and he had been out of school for a couple of years. Lucy Estelle had heard a few things about him, like that he had been to county jail because he was rowdy.
At the river party, when Larry approached her, Lucy Estelle was talking to her friend Maureen, her best friend, she supposed, now that her mother was gone. He came to her with a freshly popped beer and a crooked smile; one side of his teeth were perfectly straight and the other side, the left, zigzagged. Maureen nudged her forward, arching her eyebrows and turning towards another girl who was with them. Lucy Estelle returned Larry’s greeting when he said hi. She liked his hazel eyes and the way his widow’s peak divided his forehead. He was not the kind of guy her father would have welcomed, she was sure of that, but she had been on her own for a year now already, without them, and it had made the world harder and sharper. She was happy her parents had given her chores like cooking and laundry and chopping wood, happy they had taught her to balance the checkbook. Especially in the first weeks, even when she did not feel like living, it was a comfort to realize she could take care of herself. Her father’s one sister had come to stay with her for some time; her mother was an only, like her.
It was the last time she ever saw her aunt Dot, and Lucy Estelle had heard later that Dot had not even gone back to her family, her daughter Irene and her husband Don, but had just lit out to Kansas, where her people were.
The beer was warm, but she sipped it anyway, and it did not take long before Larry laced his fingers through hers, his hand hot in her hand. When they sat down on a patch of grass, she felt the damp seep through her jeans. She had not ever really been allowed boyfriends, but had always liked boys who paid attention to her, even the bad ones.
That evening by the river, even then, she saw how he kept one eye on her and the other eye on the rest of the world. When they had taken their clothes off under the dim summer stars, she had never seen a man’s body in full, so close. She had never felt so much skin on her skin. They moved to the back of her car—her mother’s sedan, her parents had been driving her father’s truck when the accident happened—and she could hear the party continuing on around them, the clinking of bottles, the low gurgle of the river, and the humming of some other car’s radio. She wished they had a little more space, but they did not, and she eased into being comfortable, with Larry on top of her, with Larry cradling her head against the glass of the wing window.
I think I’m in love with you, Lucy, he had said.
Okay, she said, because she knew he was lying, but she didn’t know why. Later, she collected her clothes and drove home alone, back to the empty house, and took a shower, her body still warm with him.
* * *
On the day of their wedding at the courthouse, Larry was not paying attention, so she signed her maiden name on the paperwork and walked away from the recording clerk before any name-change forms were produced. For a moment she thought about turning back under the guise of having to pee and demanding that everything be shredded, but she did not. They had a reception that was mostly his friends and Maureen, and when Maureen turned to go off with one of them, Lucy Estelle grabbed her elbow. Don’t.
* * *
The day she returned to the courthouse, it was not busy. She was not sure if she needed an appointment, but the clerk told her to wait, and another clerk led her to a room and handed her a clipboard of triplicate forms. She bounced Jenny and said in her nicest voice Please don’t poop, and Jenny smiled the smile that Lucy Estelle was sure was gas, and she set to the forms directly.
The petition for divorce had only a few more questions than the one for marriage, minus the blood test, and the clerk told her they would try to serve papers, and if they could not in six months, everything would finalize with no other action, no custody, no community property. The clerk asked for a last known address, and Lucy Estelle hesitated at first, and then she told her about the keys and the money tin, and the clerk nodded and instructed her to leave it blank.
“It’ll make it easier if we can’t find him,” she said. “It’s better. Sometimes they can get weird.”
* * *
The morning her parents left forever, she had gone to school. When she thought about it, she believed it could have been worse. Her mother had made her a lunch. Her father was already off to work at the feed store, and she remembered him, she was sure she remembered him, kissing her good-bye. He always did this, tiptoeing into her room, smelling of shaving cream and shampoo. He worked the early shift, so later he would have come home, and he and her mother would have had a snack of something from the garden, and he would have had a cold beer. Sometimes when Lucy Estelle would arrive home from school they were not hungry for dinner, and she would rummage in the cabinets, and her father would have a second beer, and her mother just a tiny sliver of pie.
She could not say that there was anything different about that morning. She and her mother did not have words like they occasionally did, and she was grateful for this. Maybe her mother had kissed her, too, one small, wet peck on the forehead. Maybe she folded her in her arms as the school bus pulled up, so that Lucy Estelle was embarrassed in front of her classmates but really wanting to stay nestled between her mother’s elbows and against her soft chest.
That day, her father would have come home and they would have done errands like they always did. The store, the gas man, perhaps the dump. They would have been driving together in his truck, close on the bench seat, and Lucy Estelle hoped her mother’s hand had been on her father’s knee the way it was when she was in a good mood. She hoped that when the last turn came, they were not thinking of her, only each other.
In the house, she turned the dead bolt. Jenny rolled some but stayed asleep. Lucy Estelle had let the garden go, but she still heard the animals, especially at night, scratching and grunting. This was what Larry could not know about her, her secret family, her parents who went off to join the beasts and the other children.
In the mornings, before Jenny would wake, she went to the garden, weedy and overgrown, and looked for the traces of any of them. Her mother’s embroidered handkerchief, snagged on the lilac, her father’s cigarette ash, dropped among the failing peach trees. She was not sure what she believed about the afterlife, but she hoped they all walked there together, hand in hand.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Melanie
Fall, 1988
The first time being on an airplane was like nothing Mel
anie had ever experienced. The power as they took off was sheer and amazing, and the bumps as they ascended into the sky were terrifying. She held her mother’s hand. Melanie had the middle seat, between her mother and Irene, and while Irene would not trade with her, she did not complain about Melanie leaning into her lap for most of the flight so she could watch the plane’s shadow glide across the tops of the clouds.
It was early October, and Melanie was surprised that her mother had agreed to the trip and surprised that she allowed Melanie to skip school. They deplaned in Fort Lauderdale and took a shuttle to a beach resort, Irene leading the charge. Melanie was overwhelmed by the shimmer of heat coming off of the concrete around her and the rows of stucco apartment buildings, layered like birthday cake along the highway. Their hotel was pretty and cool, and there was an uncorked bottle of white wine sweating on a chrome tray. Irene immediately poured herself a drink, while Melanie’s mother told her to change into her bathing suit. Irene went to the balcony to smoke, and Melanie undressed as wisps of tobacco blew into the room.
“See,” Melanie heard Irene call to her mother. “This is what I’m talking about.”
The resort was all-inclusive with restaurants and bars dotting the property. Melanie thought it was amazing that she could go into any of the shops and order a soda and they would give it to her without her having to pay. Ditto for an order of French fries. Her mother and Irene seemed to be spending most of their time in lounge chairs by the water, oiling their bodies and sipping frozen drinks. They looked good in their bikinis. Even Melanie could tell they still looked young. They had grown up in the same small town together, but now that Melanie’s grandparents and Irene’s father were gone, they never went back there.
There were some kid activities she had been signed up for, and she resented these. She was almost always the oldest in the classes. Doing crafts and taking ballroom dancing lessons was not what she had in mind for her vacation. In dance, she was a head taller than any of the boys, and when the instructor told them to pick a partner, she was the only one left without a mate. The rented shoes pinched her feet and her skirt was sticky across her thighs.
The man who taught the class was named Joseph, and he had light brown hair and strongly developed arms. He was different from the guys at Melanie’s school, with their scraggly facial hair and slouching socks, and different from her father, whose hair had begun to recede from his head and sprout from his ears. She was thrilled when Joseph saw her there, uncoupled, and bowed, just barely, his hand extended.
He twirled her in front of the class, using her to help show the other students how to follow the line and follow the music. When he dipped Melanie toward the polished floor, she felt his arm strong at her back, and his face was close enough to feel his breath. Joseph said she had a knack for the steps but Melanie did not think she was actually doing anything. He was leading, and she always felt a half-second off.
On the fourth day, her feet finally felt loose in her shoes, and she almost slipped backward on the waxed hardwood, but Joseph stepped behind her so that she fell against him instead of the floor. Her spine was awkwardly against his chest, they were both warm from the music and the motion, and as he righted her, his lips were on her ear, Stay after class. She was not sure if she had heard right because in the next moment he had her spinning away from him as the song ended. Joseph was clapping for the other students, Good job, good job, and Melanie was breathing hard, her feet sore and her chest pounding. She went to the showers with the rest of the girls, and she washed herself carefully under the pressure of the nozzle and fluffed her hair as best she could. There was mouthwash and deodorant in the locker room, so she used this and then she went to the center of the studio floor and sat down with her legs crossed, and waited.
It was not long before Joseph came. He had counted the children and sent them back to their sun-soaked parents, and he was wearing a fresh shirt. He went to the PA system and selected some music that Melanie did not recognize as one of the songs they had already danced to, but she liked the lush swell of it and the way that the sound echoed in the empty room. Joseph had taken off his shoes, and he padded toward her. He sat down in front of her and moved her hair away from her face.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Why?” she asked. And then, “I’m sixteen,” she said, even though her fifteenth birthday was not for another nine months.
Joseph seemed to be thinking. “You look older,” he said, and she understood that for someone her age this was a compliment, though for someone her mother and Irene’s age it would not be. She blushed and thanked him.
The music sounded like it had gotten louder, and Joseph scooted a little closer to her on the floor, so their knees touched.
“How old are you?” Melanie asked, because she did not know what to say.
“I’m twenty,” he said. “I want to study dance in college, but I need to save so I’m working here.”
“That sounds cool,” Melanie said. The place where her skin touched his skin burned.
When he leaned in to kiss her, she was not sure what to do. She felt his tongue in her mouth, she felt his body lift and push her flat onto the shiny floor. She felt his hand climb beneath her skirt and his chest flatten against her breasts.
* * *
There were only two days left in Florida, and Melanie was floating on her back in the pool wearing the new bathing suit Irene had gotten for her at the gift shop, when Joseph swam up next to her.
“You okay?” he asked. “I didn’t see you yesterday.”
She treaded water. “It’s too hot to dance.”
“It’s never too hot to dance,” he said. “I missed you.”
She considered this. She had not known how to feel so she had skipped the lesson.
“You’re too old for me, Joseph,” she said, but she felt his hands reach for her, through the turquoise water. He shimmied as he held her hips, keeping them both afloat.
She could hardly see his face for the glare of the sun.
* * *
On the last day of class, Joseph was not in the ballroom. A young woman with tight calves and slim pants explained he was ill and tapped her shoes. The music came on. And, one-two-three-four-five-six. Melanie wondered if this was what her father’s money had paid for and followed along, without a partner, her feet tracing the boxy steps, making a parallelogram, a rhombus.
* * *
When Melanie got home to Colorado, she was wondering if she should send Joseph a message, and when she checked her horoscope, it read:
If you have been feeling particularly hurt or rejected by someone whom you have not been able to forget, then take heart from today’s planetary alignment. It will begin to defrost your heart and melt away the pain. A particularly pleasant meeting may just inspire you to start thinking of the future instead of the past, and none too soon!
She picked out a pretty postcard from the drugstore, with a view of the mountains, and sent it in care of the hotel. I am sorry you were sick on the last day, she wrote. I hope you are feeling better. She left her telephone number, and from the minute she dropped the card in the post, she eyed the phone, but the postcard came back to her a few weeks later, marked undeliverable.
She asked her mother to use some more of the child support money to move, and they got as far as Irene’s building. In the courtyard the small pool was circled by mesh lounge chairs, and she would recline and watch the boys her own age clown on the diving board, doing flips and cannonballs and making the sunbathing ladies like Irene and her mother shriek at being splashed. All of the boys were tall and tan, but none of them, she thought, had moves like Joseph. Sometimes she would dive into the water and float for a minute and imagine the way his hand had come through the water to her. She would waltz in her flip-flops in her bedroom, keeping three-four time alone, like the last time in class, with her shadow creating a constant, perfect partner.
Simon
Winter, 1974
The townie cop, Simon Stevens, had been spotlighting the river. No one saw his face when he grabbed the boy’s arm, a cushion of ice, to drag him from the water; no one knew what he had been thinking of. Simon had never wanted to go to Denver, so he had stayed on in the same small constellation of towns dotting the plains where he had been raised, mostly because he did not like trouble. He was generally lenient with the kids, making them grind out their joints and dump their beers, never taking any of them in unless they got nasty or seemed set on driving. The automobile, like the flu, was dangerous, especially to the young and the elderly, he had learned.
As soon as he could get the boy partway to the bank, he started CPR. It was the first time he had done it on his own. He’d been through trainings in his three years as an officer, always with an instructor looking on, coaching. He counted, blew twice, and then again: counted, blew. The boy’s lips were set with chill, and Simon pushed his clasped hands deep into the frozen chest, trying to move the air. Only a little water expelled, murky and cool. In his trainings he had learned a rib could fracture and the heart could bruise during artificial respiration, so he focused on being forceful enough to be effective but careful enough not to hurt, and he kept counting. Between breaths he radioed for help. The boy was not responding, but he thought he remembered that working toward resuscitation could prove useful for up to thirty minutes. He had only been through five cycles, so if his pace was correct, it was only just a little over five minutes. The boy was cold, very cold, but he had been in the water, Simon reminded himself. Surface blood vessels would have contracted to keep the core organs warm. Listening for a siren and the crunch of tires on the crisp gravel by the bank, he thought he recognized the boy’s face, but he put this thought out of his mind. Counted, blew.
The ambulance came, finally, at eight cycles. He knew both EMTs, who rushed with a respirator, and Simon helped them get the boy to the back of the ambulance while one squeezed air and the other took over pumping his chest. Simon still tasted the boy on his lips, metallic.