by Riley, Peggy
When her father was home to tuck her in, she wasn’t afraid of the dark. When he was home, the closet didn’t make noises and coyotes didn’t howl. Sometimes he would sit and smoke in her room and tell her stories about how he ran away to the circus, how he ran away to sea. But he never wanted to tell her how her mother ran away.
On her first night of marriage, she slept in the back of her husband’s van, parked along a dark stretch off a two-lane highway at the state border. She had never left her own state before. He lit votive candles and set them across the dashboard, like some makeshift altar. He told her they would be home by tomorrow night at the latest. He took off his suit, draping it carefully over the back of the driver’s seat, and knelt on the futon mattress on the van’s floor. “Pray with me,” he said.
She wished she had a bottle of something—anything. Her dress felt tight, suddenly, cheap and childish. She wished she had something frilly on beneath it, something lacy and white, or the blue that tradition said she was meant to have worn for the wedding. She yanked the zipper of her dress down and stepped out of it. She kicked it away to stand in her old bra and underpants, their elastic frayed. She took those off, too, as he watched her.
“Come, wife,” he said, and smiled, as if the word was sweet in his mouth.
“Husband,” she said, trying it out.
He patted the futon. He held his arm out to her and she knelt, desperate for alcohol. It was all that she could think of. She shut her eyes against the want for it. She felt his hands find her skin. She breathed in the scent of his van, its gasoline and upholstery, and of him, wood smoke and the patchouli-oil smell of his hair. She told herself that this was home now, wherever he was. He would be home.
“I thank God for you,” he told her. She swallowed, thirstily, and let him pray.
She loved his van, as she had loved her father’s car. She loved anything that could take you away. She knew that was what her father loved best about his car, too. There were a number of rituals that let her know when he was going. Grandmother’s Deepfreeze would be stocked full of TV dinners. Library books would be swapped by the bagful. Just before he left, there would be some trip away for them, just the two of them, to the dry lake bed where the turkey shoots were, or into Barstow to look at the trains. Once, he took her to a ghost town’s silver mine and laughed when she said they should go in and steal what was left, so he wouldn’t have to go away to work. “Millions of dollars, just sitting there,” he said. “And it’d cost more to mine it than it’s worth.”
“That’s not fair,” she had told him, and he had laughed at her.
“Life’s not fair. That’s one thing you might as well know now.”
It wasn’t fair that she got left behind, and when she was ten, she decided she would go with him. She knotted her clothes and her Barbies in a pillowcase. She snuck into his backseat to hide. He was nearly to town, hard rock on the radio, before he reached around for a can of Coors and found her. Then he slammed on the brakes and spun the car around, back for home.
“I want to come with you,” she whimpered.
“I want a lot of things,” he said. He dropped her off and watched until she had trudged to the house, checking each step for scorpions. When she opened the door, he sped off again, wheels churning sand. Then she jumped on her bicycle and pumped hard on the pedals to follow him, skidding into the ruts he’d made, where packed sand had given way. She thought if she could reach him before the road turned to asphalt, he would have to stop and let her in. She rode as fast as she could behind him, following his taillights. The asphalt road was just ahead. He stopped and swerved, jumped out of his car. “Go home!” he shouted.
“I hate it here.”
“You don’t know what hate is. You don’t know what I hate.”
She held her breath. If he hated her, the world would end. It would stop its spinning. It would be snuffed right out.
His voice came soft then. “You can’t take kids where I’m going.”
“I’m not a kid,” she whined. “I’d be so quiet. You could just leave me in the car. No one would know.”
“I’d know,” he said. “And I need you here, to take care of your grandmother. I need you here, waiting for me. Now go.” He waited until she picked up her bicycle. Then he slammed his door and drove.
The sky above her was inky black, punctuated by stars and planets and constellations, a sickle of moon. A whole world above her, around her, that told her that the whole of her life wouldn’t be this small and mean, this rocky, this sandy, this quiet. The Milky Way twisted above her like a road made of diamonds. It told her she would leave, too, as soon as she could.
On the first day of their marriage, they drove out of California, heading north for Oregon, for Idaho. She had only seen desert and freeways. She had never seen such unbound green, such an expanse of old trees, of silent roads and forests, where waterfalls tumbled beside the van and nobody stopped to photograph them.
Amaranth was accustomed to things being fake, being mocked-up and make-believe. She had lived for the last several years in a world of fantasy lands beneath a fiberglass Matterhorn, which towered over the city and its acres of hot parked cars. For Amaranth, the structure guarded a privileged and secret world, hooped by the elevated concrete track of the futuristic Monorail, alive with the sounds of a steamboat’s lonesome whistle and the nightly crack of fireworks exploding in the sky. It was a world she couldn’t afford to visit, surrounded by cheap, worn-out streets where everything was themed. Motels were alpine, space-age, or Polynesian. Diners served triple-blob pancakes in the shape of mouse ears. Each and every business added “land” to their names, to join in on the fun, to flog their wares and services to unsuspecting tourists in such locales as Camperland, Liquorland, and, Amaranth’s workplace, Tacoland, a Mission-themed stucco building in a cracked asphalt lot lined with palm trees, whose packets of salsa made her think of her father. Vents poured out heat and the scent of grease. Her car smelled of deep-fat-fried tortillas and her arms were sticky from pouring jumbo Cokes into fiesta-striped bucket-size cups. She thought she knew what boredom was in the desert, but she didn’t know about the mind-numbing tedium of fast-food service and a three-dollar-an-hour job. She was seventeen and it was the best job she could get.
She had been working for two years before she met her future husband. She had served every item on the combo menu, in every combination. Employees had come and gone in a loop as endless as the restaurant’s mariachi Muzak. Zachariah had leaned into the tile-arched ordering window and asked her where the nearest church was. He laughed when she told him it was the circus tent next door called Melodyland. “Have you heard the good news?” he asked her.
“Here?” she scoffed. “You want good news, go find a happy hour.”
He had laughed and told her she was cute. She called him a letch and he’d laughed again, delighted by her. They got all sorts at all-night fast-food establishments like Tacoland. She had seen it all—college boys on spring break from the Midwest, hoping to score with a California girl; middle-aged sleazeballs, thinking she could be bought with cheap wine and a meal. Sometimes she could.
She found him asleep in his van in their parking lot when she arrived to open up and fire up the fryers. “You can’t sleep here,” she told him, but a few months later, she would be sleeping in the parking lot herself, having run out of sofas and fast friends made over a cheap bar buffet.
A year later, when he came back to the parking lot, he would find her in her car, the doors open and her purse gone. She had been drunk again, drunk out of her mind. “Have you heard the good news?” he asked her, and then, leaning in to her, said, “My God, are you okay?” She was not okay. Not at all.
When they reached his land, he turned up a gravel path, tight between white pines at the base of a gray-rock mountain studded in conifers. Three women stood before a house, rough-hewn wood with hay-bale foundations. It was painted a bright, fresh yellow. There were raised beds overflowing with bean plants and
vines in full flower, lettuces, and bushy herbs.
She looked at him. Who were these women?
“You must be Amy,” the first woman said with a smile, pulling open the van door and holding out a freckled hand to help her down. Yellow paint striped her arm. “I’m Hope.” The other two women had gone straight to his driver’s-side door and squealed like girls to see him. They were not girls. They were older than Hope and significantly older than Amaranth. They were bone-thin, in faded overalls, and their teeth, when they smiled their hellos, were long and brown at the gums. She watched them each kiss his mouth.
Hope took Amaranth by the arm. “Let’s get you inside. Such a long drive you’ve had. Come and meet Mother.”
Amaranth looked back at him. Whose mother? He had no family. It was the one thing they had in common.
Hope opened the door and took her through a piney entryway into a gloomy parlor, the small windows hung with heavy curtains. “Here’s our Amy,” Hope called into the murk.
An ancient woman sat shrunken in a needlepoint chair, dwarfed by a tasseled lamp. Hope switched it on above her and the light made the white tufts of her hair glow in a holy aureole. She lifted a knobby-knuckled hand, veined and spotted, and Amaranth took it, warmly. She thought of her grandmother and her final days in her bed, when she seemed to shrink into the rind of her own skin. She thought of how mean her grandmother had become.
The old woman’s fingers explored her own, twisting the loose band she wore. She held her hand out, palm down, as she had seen other women do when showing off their rings. Before she knew it, the old woman had snatched it off.
“Oh,” she said to Hope, embarrassed. “She’s—taken my ring.”
“Has she?” Hope said. “I’ll get her pills.” Her husband came in with the two other women and she told him how the old woman had taken her ring.
“It’s her ring,” he said. He held his hand out for it. The old woman cocked her head, opened her mouth, and slid the ring into it. Amaranth grimaced: the horrible vision of her wedding ring in the sagging, wrinkled mouth of the crone, the sound of it clicking against dentures. “Is she mad?” she heard herself whispering. He glared at her. “She’ll choke on it, is all.”
Hope entered with a handful of pills and a glass of water. “Come, Mother,” she said.
The old woman shook her head and pursed her lips, but no one shouted or threatened, as Amaranth would have done. Her husband only put his hand on her, his bride, and smoothed the fabric across her belly, as if he could show them all the tiny bean inside her, though she was not showing yet. The five women each made a noise: Hope a gasp, the two women tandem “oh”s, Amaranth an embarrassed laugh, and the old woman a pop as her tongue slid out with the ring on it, wreathed in spittle. He dried the ring on his trousers and slid it back onto Amaranth’s finger, still slightly damp.
He took her up the stairs and along a landing to a back bedroom, sloping under the house’s pointed roof. The gray mountain hung in the small frame of the window. They sat, back-to-back, on opposite sides of a small double bed heaped with the quilts that spoke of hard winters and no heating.
“Who are these women?” she asked him.
She heard the bed frame squeak as he bent to unlace his shoes. He slid them carefully beneath the bed. She kicked her own shoes off and slung them under the bed, knocking something hard. When she bent over, she found a porcelain chamber pot. She sat back up and tried to pull him around to her by his shoulder. “You told me you had no family. Who are they?” Someone had put wildflowers in a jam jar by her bedside. Was it her bedside? Where did all the women sleep? “Did you lie to me?”
He turned around to her. “What?”
“What’s going on here?”
“I did not think I should take a wife,” he said.
Her eyes stung. “Fine,” she tossed out. “Take me back.”
“No,” he said. “You misunderstand. I thought it was selfish, to raise one woman above others. To raise you above all.”
When she spoke, her voice was small. “Then why did you?”
He came around the bed to kneel beside her. “I never thought to have a child.”
“Then you shouldn’t have slept with me.” She wanted to hurt him.
“But I loved you and I wanted you. And I could see how lost you were.”
She choked on a sob. She had nothing and no one and he had been her one last hope. He promised her a home and a new, clean life. If she left, she would be going back to nothing: no job, no car. She had sold all she had for money she had already spent on a dress and secret liquor. And then there was the pregnancy. “Who are those women?” she asked him again.
“Women who were lost like you,” he told her. “Women I love, but not like you. I love you, Amy. I always will. My heart has set itself on you.”
She thought of her mother, who married the moon. She thought of her grandmother, dying. “Not the moon,” her grandmother said. “I never said moon. I said Moonies.”
She looked down at him and made her choice. She knew that she could run away, as her parents had, and raise a child alone in an absence of family, of love, or she could stay. She could just stay, to see where his love would lead them.
Part IV
SEPTEMBER
36
Driving Back
Mother drives, but there is no looking backward, no scanning behind to watch what they have left. She stares ahead, hunched and humming, and it is Amity who looks back now, turned around in the front seat of the burned truck to watch the gas station and the road recede.
Mother jostles a tire in a pothole. “Okay?” she asks.
Amity nods and faces forward. Her hands are bound and outstretched before her as if she is holding an invisible tea tray. “Oven gloves,” the old man called her. Whenever the road is rough and her hands hit the dashboard, Mother cries out, but Amity says nothing. She cannot feel it. Her hands are two boiled hams on the hocks of her wrists.
Four days they will drive, to get where they’re going. Home.
There are no signs to look for now. The end has come.
37
Ash
Amaranth slows to watch for their turnoff, the thin path between the pines that is so easy to miss. Deliberately, intentionally so. The red firs stand, heavy with cones, and the tamarack turns golden, ready to throw down its needles for fall. She brakes and puts her arm across Amity, to hold her back as the truck swings off the road and into the dip that leads to their land. Headlights sweep the bark. Gears grind. She thinks of Bradley.
“I could come if you wanted,” he said as she was leaving, standing over her, head resting atop her own. “But who’d mind Pa? Who’d put rape in for winter? Take twice as long, with Dust gone.” He turned his head to kiss the parting between her twists of braids and then her forehead. “You’ll come back, if you’ve a mind to.”
She nodded. She wanted him to tell her to stay. She wanted him to promise her that it didn’t matter, all this damage they had done to his food stores, his land, his crops. She wanted him to tell her it didn’t matter how crazy her daughter was. “I’ll have your truck. I’ll have to come back.”
He turned away when she started the truck and belted in Amity. Only when she pulled away from the gas station could she see him looking after her, then waving behind her, waving as the red dirt road stretched between them, taking long, loping steps to walk behind them to wave some more. She wanted to slam on the brakes, fly out of the car, and run back down the road to him, to ask him if he would be there if she came back—when she came back. Because she was certain that as soon as she was gone, he would pick his house up, tuck the fields into his pockets, and vanish. She would follow the red dirt road back to find a red dirt hole.
It had been a hard, hot summer, undoing the work of Sorrow. Bradley harvested the shepherd’s-crook stalks of the sunflower seed heads and turned over the remnants of the sorghum, unharvested and ruined. He worked in silence and alone while she emptied the rest of his food bins, r
ubbed menthol into his father’s chest, and salved Amity’s burns. In the kitchen garden, flowers bloomed and no one saw them.
Now, headlights urge them through the dark and the lodgepole pines. She can smell them, hear them scrape the truck’s sides. Goats bleat, far across black fields. Up the path, high beams catch what is left of the temple, surrounded by a fluttering of faded yellow caution tape, marking it out as a crime scene. Her daughter stirs and she drives past it, so she will not see.
The front of the farmhouse is black with smoke. Beds that once stood filled with beanpoles and edible greens sprout dried weeds. A lacy curtain waves through a broken window like a white flag.
She unbuckles Amity and takes the flashlight, lighting their faces like moons in the cab. She cuts the truck’s engine and all the world about them is dark.
“She will be here,” Amity says. “Won’t she?”
Amaranth reaches across her to open her door, and Amity slides down off the seat to land.
The front door of the house stands open.