by Chris Fabry
Only one thing kept her going.
She was at the table, clipping an article from the Herald-Dispatch and placing it in a pile on the plastic tablecloth dotted with coffee cup rings and stains from a thousand forgettable dinners.
Her husband, Leason, walked through the front door with another newspaper. He smelled wet, like an old dog that had just run through the dew-stained grass of the yard. “Here’s you a fresh one,” he said, plopping the newspaper on the table beside her.
“I thank you.” She sipped her coffee.
She waded through the news like seining for minnows, her net the pair of scissors that seemed attached to her right hand. A man shot in Huntington. Police had released few details. A wreck of a church bus in Wayne County. Repairs on a bridge over the Ohio were going to cost more than originally planned. Vandalism in Ritter Park.
He went to the refrigerator and opened it, grunting as he bent over to see shelves crammed with food and Tupperware containers. She was one to toss things, but he would not, and his choices were either a gastronomic paradise or a ticket to Cabell Huntington’s emergency room, depending on which container he chose. Some jams and jellies in the door hadn’t been opened since Kennedy was shot.
“I put one out over on the counter,” Mae said, still staring at the headline, “Top Girl Scout Cookie Sellers to Be Honored.”
Leason shut the door, then found the grapefruit, still cool to the touch, on a plastic cutting board. She’d put it out there for him to slice with the knife he’d sharpened the day before. Like always, he held half of the fruit to his nose, taking in the ripe citrus smell. The grapefruit spoons were in a dirty silverware drawer that went off the track when opened. She’d asked him a hundred times to fix it. He took the sports section from the new paper before he sat and tipped a generous dash of NoSalt to the grapefruit halves.
“See anything?” he said.
Mae sighed. “Not much. Not what I’m looking for.”
Leason attacked the grapefruit, not noticing he was sending showers of juice across the table, all while checking the box score of the latest Cincinnati game. Another abysmal season, but Mae knew there was something to be said about loyalty to a team. Not like the players who jumped from one league to another simply because somebody gave them a million or two more. Leason had talked about the days when it wasn’t the money that drove a team toward the pennant but just a passion for the game. He read the box score every day through the prism of that memory, then grabbed the life section and headed down the hall.
Mae shook her head. I could set my watch to that man’s bowel movements.
She knew he would spend the next half hour in there doing the word jumble and reading the comics. Same time every day, rain or shine. She wasn’t sure whether to be disgusted about it or to thank God for the regularity.
A half hour later the water chugged through the rusty pipes and the toilet gurgled into the septic tank, and the old man walked back through the kitchen, his belt askew and the varicose veins on his legs showing blue, and threw away his spent grapefruit.
Mae put her paper and scissors down and sat back, her coffee at arm’s length, toying with the handle back and forth. “You think I should just give up, don’t you?” she said, studying his face. “You think I’m crazy, still looking through the paper every day.”
Leason leaned against the stove, wiping his hands on a paper towel from the dispenser he had mounted under the cabinets. “I never said that.”
“I didn’t say you said it. I said you think it.”
He tossed the wadded-up towel toward the paper bag that served as their trash. Not even close. “If it helps you to keep looking for things that might give an answer, I don’t care if you take a shovel and dig all the way to China. And you gotta do what you need to do. You don’t need anybody telling you whether it’s a good idea or not.”
“You’re supposed to support me in this.”
“I just brought you the paper, didn’t I?”
“I don’t mean that. I mean support with your words and your thoughts.”
“How in creation do you know a person’s thoughts? Mae, you’re not making sense. No sense at all.”
Mae ran her hand across the tablecloth. Spreading the crumbs was all she was doing, but it still made her feel like she was doing something. The sound of his voice was both a comfort and a wound. She longed to hear what he was thinking, but every time she coaxed a few words out, it only reminded her of what she was missing. His words were a long, cool drink on a hot day, and over the years the drinks had become few and far between. “You think she’s gone for good.”
“I think the best time to find her was the night she disappeared. After that the trail goes cold. And with all the sickos out there these days, it’s hard to tell. It’s just hard to tell.”
“What you’re saying is, after seven years, there’s no use to what I’m doing.”
He crossed his arms like an umpire listening to a coach’s tirade. With as much heartfelt compassion as he could muster, he said, “I don’t think we’re ever going to know for sure what happened. I could be wrong. Something could turn up.”
She closed her eyes tight and held them that way, as if doing so could bring the past into greater clarity. “There’s something we’re missing. There’s something we’re not seeing about this whole thing.”
Leason spoke quickly. “What we’re not seeing in this whole thing is that your daughter knows the truth—”
“Now don’t you go bringing Dana in,” she interrupted. “She’s been tied up in knots about this ever since it happened.”
“She sure has a funny way of being tied up.”
He spoke about Dana like she wasn’t his daughter. Always had. There was some disconnect between the two of them, and Mae had always felt in the middle.
“She shows it different; that’s all,” Mae said. “Look at you and me. I’m here clipping the newspaper almost seven years to the day, and you’re ignoring it like you did from day one.”
“I never ignored it. How dare you say that.”
“You acted like it never even happened.” Mae felt the tears coming and she turned away. This was the most they had talked about it since the anniversary two years earlier, and every time they did, it was like opening up some old wound that had barely scabbed over.
Leason stared at the empty birdcage by the refrigerator, his jaw set. He could say a lot more, she knew that, but he just stood there like a fifth head on Mount Rushmore, stone-faced and easing away from the fight. A few months after Natalie went missing—it was in the fall after the leaves started turning—Dana did the same thing, running off with some guy for a week or two and then returning and losing her job. Mae chalked it up to her grief, but she knew Leason didn’t believe it. He thought Dana knew more than she was telling. He thought the sheriff was right in bringing her back and talking, the trail getting colder.
Leason swallowed something, perhaps his pride, and mustered the courage to break the silence. “How is it I could support you better?”
Mae let the question hang there in the air between them. She rested her forehead on the palm of her hand. “If I’d have known it was going to turn out like this, I never would have had children.”
“You can’t know how things are going to turn out. And you can’t choose somebody’s life for them. You don’t have the power.”
Mae folded, and she could tell Leason was watching. It happened like this around every anniversary. She’d go into her shell, and she wondered how Leason viewed these episodes. Theirs was not a great marriage, nothing for the ages, but it wasn’t bad. And it was certainly worth saving.
She knew he still hurt because of the suspicion on him. He’d been a suspect in those early days when people were looking for anyone to blame, though Dana had said a white man with a leather jacket had stolen the car with Natalie in the back.
“I remember when I was a kid and we were moving up this way from the coalfields,” Leason said. “We had this black d
og that found us in the hollow down there. Just a mutt. We never even knew where he came from. Just showed up one day. Times were hard and Daddy said we didn’t have enough to feed the rest of us and we couldn’t keep him. But I felt for the little thing, so I used to find scraps from the table, crusts of bread and things, and put them out the back door when nobody was looking.
“That dog stayed with us. Made his home with us. Went out and scavenged the dump for food or caught a grouse and then came back and slept under our porch. He never got an invite from any of us except for me, but he was about as faithful as they come.
“After the war, Daddy decided to get out of the mines because of the machines and the dust and the black lung. He packed everything we had on a wagon and sent the rest of us over the mountain to come up this way. I don’t know how he ever got that thing all the way here with those two plow horses he had, but I remember the day he showed up at my grandmama’s house. Just sitting on that wagon, smiling from ear to ear, our stuff still tied on the back.
“I asked him where the dog was, and he acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about. Then he said the dog fell in the river, and I knew he’d probably kicked it in or thrown something at it to get it to stop following him. And I cried like a baby about that dog and kept begging God to let me have him back. I’d tied this sea grass string around his neck as a sort of collar and cut a hole in a piece of leather and burned his name in there. We called him Percy. I don’t know why. It seemed like a good name for a dog to a little kid.
“I dreamed about him one night, walking past hobo camps, coming through the woods, and escaping danger. Rainstorms and floods and all these adventures.
“About a year later—it was in the spring when everything was starting to bloom and the worms were coming up and the ground real soggy—my little sister started whooping out on the porch. Mama tried to get her to be quiet because she was sure the neighbors could hear. But what she was screaming was ‘Percy, Percy, Percy!’
“Daddy was making breakfast in that big iron skillet, the eggs sizzling and popping, and he stayed there watching out the window while us kids ran out to see about all the fuss. Then I saw that old dog. From a distance it looked like Percy, but I wasn’t sure. He came up real slow, like he wasn’t really sure it was us. And then when he saw me, he took off running and I saw that sea grass string around his neck.
“I drove back down that way once just to take a look around, and I hit the trip meter while I was still in the driveway. When I pulled up next to where that old house had been, it was more than eighty-seven miles. That dog walked more than eighty-seven miles to come home to us. It took him a solid year and you could tell he was worse for the wear, but he made it. I don’t know how in the world he found us, but he did.”
Mae had been watching his hands as he told the story. She took a big swig of the tepid coffee. “Is there supposed to be some point mixed up with that?”
“I hope to say there is. When something you love gets lost, it will usually find its way back. It may take a while, but if it’s out there, it’ll return.”
“She’d be almost nine now,” she said. “Her birthday is coming up.”
“The other point is, you have to let it go. You have to release even the chance that whatever you love is going to come back. That’s where the power comes.”
She turned to her husband. “That girl is alive. I know it just as sure as you and I are here talking. She’s alive.”
He nodded. “All right, then. I’ll support you until you find her.”
“I’m not giving up.”
“I didn’t think you would.”
“Everybody in this town is going to eat their words about her being dead and buried. She’s coming back here, and I’m going to raise her like she was my own.”
Leason licked his lips and found an errant piece of grapefruit stuck there. “I’ll be the first to drive you both to the mall.”
Someone drove up the gravel driveway and Leason turned his head. “Wonder who that could be.”
Mae stood and looked out the front hallway, past the Hummel figurines and family pictures and decorative plates and handblown glass swans and paperweights on a shelf in the entry. The two lights on top of the car were all she needed to see.
“Oh, dear. What’s happened now?”
4
Sheila said her house wasn’t that far away, but the tow truck driver didn’t seem too happy about taking the RV back into the trees and up a couple of steep hills and around some winding roads. I was lost as soon as we pulled out of the parking lot. The driver fussed about how much gasoline cost and how he probably wouldn’t break even this month, and I just listened, sitting in the middle seat with my dad on the right nodding and saying, “I know what you mean.”
We finally made it to the address, but the man drove past the driveway and had to back up. Then he cussed when he saw it had tall pine trees on either side and was as winding as a snake to the house.
“If I hit one of these trees, you’re going to have more trouble than replacing an engine part,” he said.
My dad got out and walked the driveway, then guided the man until he got to a level place by the garage. “Sheila said to put it right here.”
First thing I noticed was the barking coming from the garage. A big throaty bark like some kind of monster was in there. Lots of scratching at the door too.
While they got the RV unhooked, I went exploring. The house was red on the outside, the color of the wood used to build it. There was a wooden porch with some chairs set up real nice and a fireplace built right out in the yard. There wasn’t a house I could see next to hers until I ran out a ways and looked through the trees. That’s when I found the barbed-wire fence. Where there’s a fence there’s usually some animals, and when I saw a horse barn my heart went pitter-patter all over again.
I ran down the hill and stumbled onto an old basketball court where I could ride my bike, and there was a wire running from one huge tree all the way past the house that I later learned was called a zip line. You grabbed hold of a handle attached to a pulley and rode down.
I saw this beautiful horse standing by the barn, and it was all I could do not to climb right through the fence to go over and say hello. And when I saw that my dad and the tow truck guy were still trying to get the RV situated, that’s what I did.
I have a long history with horses, and I like to draw them in my journals. One time there was this carnival where you could ride a pony around and around, and it was about as close to heaven as I ever hope to get down here. Just the feeling of riding on its back and holding the reins made my insides feel like they were about to burst. I closed my eyes and pretended I was out on the range, just me and my horse, with nothing but empty spaces, and I could choose any which way I wanted to go. It’s kind of like the feeling of living in an RV, only you don’t have to put gas in a horse.
When I made it close enough to reach out and touch the horse, my dad yelled. His voice spooked the animal and the thing reared up and I fell. Another horse came around the barn and ran near where I was—so near I could feel the ground shake. I turned over and pulled my legs up to make myself as small as I could. It wasn’t something I did on purpose; it just happened.
Next thing I knew I was in the air over my dad’s shoulder, and he set me down on the other side of the fence and crawled over it. There were six horses, not two, and for the first time I felt like we had hit the jackpot in life’s lottery.
“You need to respect other people’s property,” my dad said, breathing hard. He pointed to a sign on the fence that I guess I should have seen. “You can’t go wandering into somebody else’s place. You could get in trouble or hurt or both.”
“Yes, sir.”
The tow guy had a sheet my dad had to sign and then pay him, which I’m not sure how he did. I sat by the fence and watched the horses run. I already had names for two of them—the one with the white spot above its nose was Giselle, and the black one that shook the ground w
hen he walked was Goliath. My dad doesn’t believe in naming animals or cars, which I think is just a lack of imagination, or maybe he wasn’t allowed to do that kind of stuff as a kid.
“Can I ride my bike?” I said as we walked back to the house.
“Not on that road. Car comes around that corner and you’re a goner.”
“I just meant on that court over there.”
“Okay, I’ll get it down.”
He had secured the bike on top of the RV with a bungee cord, so he climbed the ladder on the back. He’s not much of a talker, but he sure is strong because he brought it down with only one hand. Then he carried it over to the court.
“How long we gonna stay?” I said as I got started.
“Hard to say. That part should be in any day.”
“Do you like her?”
“Like who?”
“You know who.” I laughed. “Sheila. I think she’s pretty.”
“You just like the horses.” Dad walked back to the RV and then around to the porch, staring at something.
I let the bike fall and ran to him. “What are you looking at?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Come on. Let’s take a walk around the place.”
Brown pine needles crunched under our feet. The grass was old scrub grass that grew in clumps, and in lots of places there was just the red dirt—not like the sandy clay you see in Alabama but a dusty red, like there are rocks everywhere just waiting to stick up from the ground. Dad says the wind and water make little rocks out of big rocks and then it makes dust blow around and I could see that on every window in the house. Dad says that’s why every windshield in the state has a crack in it—because of the little rocks on the highway that kick up.
“Did Indians used to live out here?”