Back Roads

by Tawni O'Dell

  “Can they start to think that it’s okay? Morally okay?”

  “Did you think it was okay for your father to hit you?”

  “This isn’t about ME,” I stressed again.

  “You can still answer the question.”

  I let out a shaky breath. I didn’t want to lose it. I didn’t want Betty running off to get me a Styrofoam cup of water. I didn’t want to have a BREAKTHROUGH. I wanted it to be lunchtime tomorrow.

  “I didn’t think it was okay,” I said bluntly, “but I thought it was normal.”

  I could tell she was going to ask me to explain my comment further so I rushed ahead with another question. It was a hard one to ask. I had to concentrate on something else and let my voice say the words without me understanding them.

  “What about sexually abused kids?”

  I watched one ME after another land on the windowsill, all packed together, making a colorful cluster like feathers in an Indian headdress.

  “Can they think that it’s okay?”

  “Okay but not normal?” Betty asked.

  “No.” I shook my head in frustration. “Can they think it’s normal? Can they think it’s right?”

  “Are you talking about Misty?”

  Her question hit me like a sucker punch. I struggled to find my voice and then control it. “What do you know about Misty?”

  “Very little since I treated her for such a short time,” she replied, frowning.

  Misty and Jody dropping out of therapy was a sore spot with Betty; but it got too hard. I couldn’t get time off work to drive them to their appointments plus they both hated going. Misty used to disappear into the woods, and I used to have to carry Jody kicking and screaming to the truck.

  Amber wanted to go to her sessions. She even made arrangements with friends to drive her and pick her up afterward.

  Betty went on, “But in the few sessions we had, I did get the feeling Misty believed your father’s abuse toward all of you was warranted. She felt it was right, if you want to call it that.”

  I fell silent, and Betty tapped her pen on her notepad.

  “Who was sexually abused, Harley?” she asked with the detachment of a person filling out a form.

  “None of us,” I answered, startled.

  “What about Amber?”

  “Amber?”

  My throat clamped shut the way it used to when I saw Dad listening to Mom’s day.

  “They were never alone,” I protested. “When she was home, she made sure someone else was always in the room with her. She was terrified of Dad. She hated him.”

  “What about at night?”

  “Amber hated him,” I said again, ignoring her question.

  “Did she?”

  “Yeah,” I answered, amazed she could even ask.

  “How do you know? Have you ever talked to her about it?”

  “I don’t have to talk to her. I was always there when he hit her. I saw.”

  “How did you feel toward your father when he hit Amber?”

  Tears filled my eyes. I couldn’t figure out where they had come from. “I felt sorry for him.”

  Betty moved forward in her chair. “You felt sorry for your father, not Amber?”

  I nodded.

  “How did you feel toward Amber?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did you get mad at her? Did you think she deserved it? Did you want to help her?”

  “I wanted to make her feel better.”

  “How do you think she felt when she saw your father hit you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Her questions felt like rocks being thrown at my head. I covered my face with my mangled hands. The salt from my tears stung the gouges I’d made with my pocket knife.

  “She probably didn’t like it,” I cried into them.

  “Do you think she wanted to make you feel better?”

  Six seconds. The scientist on TV had said the sky would light up like a thousand suns and by the time we turned to look at it, it would have hit with the power of ten thousand Hiroshima bombs.

  I saw it coming, rushing at me. My head filled with a harsh white light obliterating the image behind it. I didn’t have a chance to recognize it. To know if it was a memory or a dream. I was blind but I could feel. Amber. Her soft weight against me. Her surrender. The smell of watermelon Lip Smacker.

  It hit before I could figure it all out. I came to huddled on the floor, trembling and sobbing, but I had survived, and like any survivor of a Doomsday strike I thought I was lucky. No one could have convinced me that I would have been better off dying instantly.

  Betty was kneeling in front of me. I couldn’t make out her face through my tears, but I saw her young eyes. I saw her whole young life in them. She was glad she was old now. She was relieved.

  I felt her hands on my arm.

  “It’s all right, Harley.”

  Did Dad have six seconds? He didn’t know it was coming. Mom snuck up behind him and let him have it. She didn’t have a choice. It was a big gun. She couldn’t have whipped it out and surprised him. She couldn’t have faced him down either. If she had tried, she would have stood there with the gun shaking in her hands, and he would have walked right up to her and taken it from her like it was one more bill they couldn’t pay.

  “It’s all right,” she said again.

  I got up from the floor and stumbled blindly around the room looking for my hat and a ME.

  “Harley, please calm down. Don’t go rushing off again.”

  I grabbed my hat off the table. I couldn’t find a single ME.

  “You need to talk about this.”

  “No, I don’t,” I cried.

  “It will make you feel better.”

  “I don’t want to feel better.”

  I bolted for the door.

  “Please, don’t go, Harley,” she called after me.

  But I was gone, and this time I knew better than to look back.

  Yee’s had three customers, the busiest I had ever seen it. Jack Yee didn’t look as glad to see me as he usually did. The customers didn’t look too glad either. Jack’s wife glanced up from her newspaper, then buried her face in it again without waving.

  I ordered Misty’s egg roll and got myself an order of General Tso’s chicken. I was supposed to be saving money—I still needed a hundred dollars to finish paying our taxes—but I couldn’t shake the Doomsday feeling I had had in Betty’s office. Every meal could be my last and I didn’t want it to be hot dogs and mac and cheese.

  Jack Yee went back in the kitchen and packed up the order himself. I had to ask him for Jody’s fortune cookie and umbrella. On my way out, I checked myself in the front door glass to see what everyone had been staring at. I could have used a shower and a shave and a good night’s sleep but other than that, I was still ME.

  I got back in my truck and ripped into the chicken box right away. He had given me six plastic forks, three sets of chopsticks, and about twenty packets of soy sauce and sweet and sour sauce. I could almost smell his nervousness in the greasy-bottomed bag.

  The chicken was good but not great. I was sure Callie could do better. If I was married to her, she would cook for me all the time too.

  I finished eating and crushed the box before tossing it on the floor. It bounced off the Chicago Art Institute book and landed next to Mom and Dad’s wedding picture. I had never thought about it before but it was pretty pathetic if that was the best photo they had from their wedding: Mom sick because she was pregnant with me, Dad falling down drunk because she was pregnant with me. I had always assumed Dad was grinning at a buddy. Now I wondered if it was Uncle Mike, and Uncle Mike already knew it was a bad idea. Or was he looking at Grandpa? Was he saying, “Look at me, you nasty old cocksucker. I got a job and a wife, and you were always telling me I’d never get either?” I was going to keep the picture buried there in the trash for the rest of my life. It was too fucking symbolic to mess with.

  I took my time driving. I wasn
’t in any hurry now that I had a full stomach, and I definitely didn’t feel like seeing the girls.

  I hadn’t seen any of them that morning. I didn’t get home from the mining office until five. Elvis went nuts in the front of my truck where I had locked him so his barking wouldn’t wake them when I left and when I got back.

  I let him out, gave him a good scratching, and took him inside with me. We shared the leftover sloppy-joe meat Amber had left sitting out on the stove from the night before.

  I didn’t even bother trying to catch an hour or two of sleep. I went for a drive and counted Madonnas. They looked best at breaking dawn, gazing peacefully at the dew-soaked grass around their feet. They were always surrounded by a bunch of crap—ceramic deer with chipped noses, birdbaths, lawn jockeys, a kaleidoscope of reflecting balls, ducks with windmill wings, wooden cutouts of women bending over showing their underwear—but they always seemed to be standing alone.

  I counted seven. The only old-fashioned plastic one belonged to the Shanks. On the way home from Yee’s, I slowed in front of their house like I had done in the morning and admired her sky-blue robes and petal-pink lips. She was the only one of the Madonnas who had the nerve to look up at God, and she was happy with Him. Her smile gave me hope.

  Driving up Potshot Road made me feel even better. The trees made a quiet leafy tunnel. Shafts of sunlight poked through them, striping the air and covering the rutted dirt road with white spots of dancing light. Freaking out with Betty faded into the furthest reaches of my mind. Everything did. My full belly, the bouncing of the truck, and the green calm almost put me to sleep.

  I drove slowly as I neared the crest, hoping to see a deer bound away or the shimmer of a pheasant’s tail. What I saw was a pickup truck parked in our driveway. It wasn’t Uncle Mike’s. The only other people who ever came by our place were either sent by a government agency or drawn here by Amber’s ass.

  A kid with two-tone hair wearing three earrings, a hemp bracelet, and a beaded choker sat on the hood drinking a can of Red Dog and smoking a cigarette. He looked in my direction but didn’t nod or smile or acknowledge me with a wave. I considered that impolite.

  I hadn’t noticed Jody and Misty on the porch. When I got out of my truck, Jody tore across the yard, her face streaked with tears, and threw herself at my legs. Misty didn’t follow her, but she stood up and allowed our eyes to meet which was the most contact we’d had since the day I took the money.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, putting my hands on Jody’s shoulders but staring at the kid on the truck.

  “Amber’s running away,” Jody bawled.

  “Who the fuck are you?” I yelled at him.

  He slowly took the can away from his mouth. He had the stale eyes and rehearsed smirk of someone who spent a lot of time in dim, smoky rooms thinking about himself.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he yelled back.

  I started toward him but Jody had wrapped herself so tightly around my legs, I couldn’t move.

  “Don’t let Amber go,” she cried. “Please, Harley. Don’t let her go.”

  “Don’t worry, she’s not going anywhere,” I said.

  I pried her off me and stalked over to the kid. “I asked you who you are.”

  He finished his beer and tossed the can in my yard. “I’m a friend of Amber’s,” he answered, poking the cigarette back between his lips. “You must be her brother the bag boy.”

  I waited for my hand to explode from my side like it had been doing lately but nothing happened. I stared dumbly at it.

  “Don’t hurt him, Harley,” Jody said, coming up beside me.

  “Hurt me?” The kid laughed.

  “Just make him go away.”

  “Hurt him,” Misty shouted from the porch.

  The front door slammed open and Amber stepped out lugging a suitcase and carrying her pillow. She stopped when she saw me. All the blood drained from her face and her eyes turned black from some unspeakable outrage brewing inside her.

  “Come on,” the kid yelled at her. “I’m hungry. Let’s go.”

  I walked toward her, without thinking. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m leaving you.”

  “What did you say?”

  “You heard me.”

  I grabbed her arm with my throbbing hand. She ripped it away.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said, savagely.

  “Amber, what’s going on?”

  “I won’t live with you anymore,” she turned around and hissed at me. “You’re disgusting.”

  Jody came and squeezed in between us. She hugged Amber around the waist. “Don’t go,” she whimpered.

  “I’m sorry, Jody. I don’t want to go but I have to. It’s all Harley’s fault. Be mad at him.”

  “What did I do?” I cried out.

  She grabbed up her stuff and took off running for the kid’s truck. He didn’t make a move to help her. He should have been carrying her stuff. He should have been comforting her. He should have been opening the door for her. He was blowing smoke and watching her tits bounce.

  “You know what you did,” she turned around and screamed at me.

  “Harley.” Jody tugged on my arm. “Shoot his tires,” she pleaded.

  “It’s okay, Jody.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  Amber threw her suitcase in the back and climbed into the cab with her pillow. She slammed the door shut and bowed her head, crying. Her friend took his good old time getting down from the hood.

  “Stop her,” Jody begged.

  “She’ll be back.”

  “No, she won’t.”

  I put my arm around Jody’s shoulders. She was crying so hard, she shook.

  “That kid wants one thing from her and once he gets it, he’s going to dump her in a parking lot somewhere.”

  “Does he want her pillow?”

  I looked down at her, at all the love and trust shining in her eyes. I was never going to have a kid. I had too much respect for them.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Will you go get her in the parking lot?”

  “Yeah, I’ll go get her.”

  “Okay.” She sniffed. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  She plunked down on the top porch step. “This is all Misty’s fault,” she grumbled.

  Misty was standing at the far end of the porch. She didn’t show any sign that she had heard Jody. I told her her egg roll was in the truck. She didn’t show any sign that she had heard me either but then she walked to the porch railing, swung herself over it, and started across the yard.

  I didn’t want to ask Jody what she meant. I had survived one Doomsday strike. I wasn’t ready for another. But I made the mistake of checking on Misty. She had the bag from Yee’s in her hand but all I saw was the cheap sparkle of the fake pink stones around her wrist. It struck me that I couldn’t remember seeing her without the collar since the day she had put it on.

  She came walking back. She handed Jody her fortune cookie and pink paper umbrella and took the rest of the stuff inside. Jody cracked open her cookie.

  “ ‘Good news will come to you by mail,’ ” she read, and wrinkled up her nose. “That’s a dumb one. Confucius didn’t say that. They didn’t even have mail when he was alive. They only had voices.”

  “I think you’re right,” I said, sitting down next to her. “I don’t think Confucius wrote all the fortunes. Just the good ones.”

  She kept it just the same. She folded it in half and carefully slipped it into a pocket in her jean jacket with the Pocahontas fringe.

  I still didn’t want to ask about Misty but I saw the collar in my mind, sad and ugly in its necessity like a bad wig. She was my responsibility now.

  “Why did you say Amber leaving was Misty’s fault?”

  Her eyes turned thoughtful and she studied one of Amber’s clunky sandal footprints hardening in the mud.

  “She told Amber something today when Amber got home from school and it made her really
mad. The kind of mad where you cry.”

  “What did she tell her?”

  “I don’t know. They went into her room and closed the door. It was about you though. I heard your name a bunch of times.”

  She stood up all of a sudden and walked over to where a tulip was sprouting from the ground like a purple bullet. She knelt down and bent her head toward it like she meant to kiss it.

  “I asked Misty to tell me but she said it was a secret,” she told me, walking back to the steps. She sat down with a big deflated sigh. “Misty keeps secrets better than anyone. She told me I wouldn’t be able to keep it.”

  “You kept the secret about Mom’s money,” I reminded her.

  “Misty said if I told, Mommy and Daddy would get in the biggest fight ever and get divorced.”

  She glanced up at me. People always commented on her Sleeping Beauty hair, but her eyes were her most striking feature. They were a soft, downy gray and gave everyone the benefit of the doubt.

  “Do you think I should’ve told?” she asked me.

  “I don’t think it would’ve made any difference.” I leaned back and stretched out my legs. I crossed them at the ankles, doing my best to appear casual. “Have you kept any other secrets for Misty?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You know, when Misty tells you you can’t tell anyone, she’s not talking about me.”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “She tells you not to tell me?”

  “She tells me not to tell anyone. You’re anyone.”

  “Did she ever ask you to keep a secret about getting lots of blood on a shirt?”

  “You mean the night Mommy shot Daddy?”

  One of my hands jumped at my side. The surprise started my heart thumping too fast.

  “She got blood on her shirt that night?” I asked, conversationally.

  “Yeah, but it wasn’t a secret. Mommy knew.”

  I stood up. I could hear my heart pounding in my ears. I could feel it in my throat. My fingertips quivered. Six seconds. TICK TOCK.

  “How did she get blood on her shirt?”

  “When she hugged Daddy. She told me he was going to be okay, but I saw him and I knew he wasn’t okay.”

  “Misty never hugged Daddy,” I said cautiously. “The ambulance had taken him away by the time the state trooper and me brought her back from the mall.”