Eden took another bong hit. I sat down next to her on the couch. “You want some, little sister?” Larry asked. “She doesn’t smoke,” Eden said. “She’s pretty straight-edge.” “I’m not straight-edge,” I said, “that’s something entirely different.” “How is it entirely different?” Eden asked, half rolling her eyes at me, looking at me like a teacher who knows you are about to say the wrong answer. “Because sometimes I drink,” I said. Eden kind of hiccup-laughed. She coughed on the smoke of her clove and took a slurp of beer.
“Don’t make fun of little sister,” Larry said. “She’s trying to make something of herself in this life.”
The front door opened and another guy came in. He was chunkier than Larry. He wore tan work boots and jeans and a jean jacket. He looked at me and Eden like he was pissed off we were there. “Y’all drinking all my beer again,” he said kind of quietly. Eden suddenly looked upset. “He said it was okay,” Eden said. The guy took the last beer that was still on the coffee table. He sat in the other recliner and pulled the plastic six-pack rings off. He opened the beer and looked at us. “Y’all friends with my cousin?” “No,” I said. Eden elbowed me. “He gave us a ride,” Eden said. “Uh-huh,” the cousin said.
Larry looked serious, like he didn’t want his cousin coming home and being judgmental. Like he was waiting for him to go upstairs to his room and leave him alone. “You girls old enough to be drinking beer?” the cousin asked. “It’s a free country,” Eden said. “That means you’re not,” he said. “Oh, like you didn’t touch a drop until you were twenty-one,” Larry said. “Excuse Mr. High and Mighty here.” “It’s not cool,” the cousin said. “They’re college girls,” Larry said. “That one’s thirteen,” Larry’s cousin said, nodding at me. “I’m fourteen,” I said. “Case closed,” his cousin said. He got up and went upstairs.
“See now, that’s why she’s not drinking,” Larry called after him. “Because younger sis here is only fourteen. And a responsible fourteen at that.” A door closed above us.
“Sorry, didn’t mean for that to happen,” Larry said.
“Can I use your phone?” I asked.
“Why do you want to use the phone?”
“I just want to call home.”
“Your dad knows where you are.”
“I just thought I would call Luce.”
“Why do you want to call them?”
“Because she could pick us up if our dad can’t.”
“She probably went to pick up Dad,” Eden said.
“Yeah, exactly,” Larry said. “’Cause your dad’s car is toast.”
“I just want to leave a message on the machine. She can check it.”
“Luce never checks messages,” Eden said. It was true, Luce never did call in to check the machine. It was our dad doing that all the time from pay phones. He was always so worried he would miss an important call. He tried having a beeper, but he could never figure it out and he ended up returning it. Or as my mom said, “He was probably disappointed that it didn’t beep all that much.” Luce didn’t have an answering machine before she moved in with my dad. She said it was too much responsibility to call all those people back.
“She doesn’t know how to use an answering machine?” Larry asked. “That’s just sad.”
Eden sucked on her clove. “It’s very sad,” she said. She dropped her cigarette butt into her empty beer can and set it on the coffee table. “Got any more beer?” she asked.
“I thought you wanted to eat dinner,” I said, remembering how he was urging us to go because it was late.
“Dinner?” Larry went into the kitchen and came back with the box of Trix and a bag of white sandwich bread. He twirled the bag and let it fly in a loop-de-loop to the coffee table, where it landed, deflated and smushed. He kept the Trix, opened it, and grabbed a fistful of cereal. He held the box by the cardboard tab of its folding lid, like he was sort of debating sharing it with us. “Maybe I got some mustard for that bread,” he said and sat down in the recliner with the cereal box.
“Disgusting,” Eden said.
“Think I’m disgusting?” he asked.
Eden smiled. “Think I’m disgusting?” he asked again, playfully. Eden smiled like she was trying not to laugh out loud. She covered her mouth with her hand like she was still smoking a cigarette. “Yes,” she said.
“I see now,” Larry said. “Have you seen a lot of disgusting things? Or are you a virgin?”
Eden snapped out of her giggly thing. She put on her “I’m tough” face. Her “I know everything” face. I didn’t know if Eden was a virgin or not.
Larry repacked the bong and put it on the table for Eden. Eden didn’t move. Larry leaned forward and pushed the bong a couple inches across the table toward Eden. But Eden didn’t budge. She was good at that. She could be super-stubborn if she wanted to. It would drive our dad crazy. Larry gave the bong another nudge, pushing it with one finger along the table until it got to the edge of our side. “Oh, go on,” Larry said.
“I think I’ll call Luce,” I said. “That way you won’t have to drive us.”
Larry didn’t say anything. He looked at Eden like he was waiting to see what she was going to do. “Fuck you,” Eden muttered. She leaned over and sucked on the bong.
Larry looked at Eden. “I’ll take you to your dad’s,” he said.
“I’m sure Luce can pick us up,” I said.
“No. I’m going to do it. I just needed a moment. To get myself together. To think about things.”
“What did you have to think about?”
“Grown-up stuff. Just needed a little adult time. Also, thought I needed to take a crap, didn’t want to do it at your dad’s. Only on my home turf. I’m peculiar that way. But that ship has sailed. Won’t dock till morning now. So we’re free to go. We just need to give your sister a little time.”
“A little time for what?”
“A little time for dreaming,” he said.
I looked over and Eden was resting her head in her hand with her eyes closed. The heel of her hand was mushing her cheek, making her face look fatter than it was. Her lips separated and she began to drool a bit. I shook her arm. “Are you asleep?” I asked her. Eden slumped to the side. Her arm flopped free and her head rolled onto the shoulder of the couch.
And then everything went black.
12
I drove The Camper over the border of North Carolina and stopped outside the town of Boone, where Luce had lived ever since she broke up with my dad. My mom and I had driven down and visited her a few times. I had grown up with Luce. It seemed I had grown up with most of my father’s partners. Maybe that was why Beth irked me so much. It felt like she was an outsider. Everyone else had been around, had known me and Eden when the thing with Larry happened. But with Beth, my father had to tell her at some point. Thinking about that moment was worse than thinking about them having sex.
Luce lived in a drafty nineteenth-century farmhouse. “It’s not really my style,” she said when I showed up, “but it’s still standing.” The house was painted dull brown and stood across the lane from a bigger, nicer farmhouse freshly painted white. The big house was mounted imperiously atop a sloping meadow. It got all the good light. Luce’s brown house backed into the woods. “It was where the brother of the landowner had lived,” Luce said. “The one who didn’t want to inherit the farm. I think he was a vet,” she said. “I think he drank himself to death.”
The inside of her house reminded me of home. My father liked these quasi-hippie women who threw pots, ran unions, and dried herbs. Luce was a painter and a retired social worker. She had retired from social work when she lived with my father. “All social workers retire before forty,” she once said. “Most don’t make it past thirty.” Luce taught after-school art classes for kids. She conducted art therapy workshops in hospitals. She foraged for mushrooms and ramps in the woods behind her house. She wore her hair long and gray and pinned back at the sides with barrettes, which made her look girlish. I sat
on her old couch, which she had covered with a crocheted blanket to hide the wear.
“I’m sorry I haven’t kept in better touch with you girls. Or your moms. I’m not much of a letter writer. Or the computer.” She flicked her hand at a desk in the corner of the room, which held a chunky, outdated laptop under a pile of papers and bills. “My nephew fixed it up for me. Saves me a trip to the library to do email if there’s weather. I know there’s a way to pay your bills on it instead of sending in a check. Just haven’t set it up yet.”
Luce took a sip of tea from her mug. She uncrossed and recrossed her legs. “I heard about your mom,” she said. “You can always come here, Hope. I’m always glad to see you.”
“Thanks,” I said. When I started driving to Boone, I didn’t give a thought to whether Luce would want to see me or not. I assumed she would. I felt the same with Suriya. I viewed them as extensions of my dad, and therefore I felt proprietary about them and felt I could crash with them, unannounced, at any time. But Luce seemed to be telling me otherwise. That I had misunderstood something about our relationship. That my arrival, my trespassing, was forgiven.
Luce had gotten older. There were lines around her lips and the natural dark circles under her eyes now wilted toward her cheeks. She fidgeted in her seat, uncomfortable, maybe uncomfortable with me, since she seemed to be looking in all corners of the room rather than in my direction.
“I’m sorry,” Luce said. “About what happened.”
“There was nothing anyone could do,” I said, “once it got to her lungs.”
“No,” Luce said. “Not about your mom.” She had crossed one leg far over the other and was sitting sideways in her armchair, practically in profile. “When you were kids. I shouldn’t have left when I did. It was”—she pursed her lips, searching for the correct word—“inconsiderate of me.” She took a careful breath. I could feel the reflex in me to brush it off, to say “It’s okay” or otherwise absolve her, but I didn’t. I never thought about why Luce decided to break up with my dad when she did. I suppose it should have affected me more at the time, but it was right after Larry. It was when Eden left for boarding school. It was when I stopped going out to regularly visit my dad. I just lumped it in with everything else.
“I never had children,” Luce said. “I’d never been a parent other than with you girls. I never wanted to be, really. I had a younger brother I had to babysit all the time as a kid. I didn’t particularly enjoy it. It always felt like a hindrance to me, or to what I wanted to do. It wasn’t a conscious decision. There are women like that. They make a conscious decision not to have children and are very clear about it. And around that time, my era, there was a big push not to have children. To liberate ourselves from our biology. Because we saw our mothers so defined by it. So thwarted by it. Maybe on some level I related to that. I suppose there was no way I couldn’t.”
My mom once said something like this too. One time, maybe I was eleven or twelve, I playfully asked her, “Didn’t you always want a daughter?” And instead of giving a playful response, my mother gave an honest one.
Luce uncrossed her legs. She planted both feet on the floor and leaned forward with her mug between her hands, hunched over her knees. I couldn’t see her mouth, just the deep lines of the furrow of her brow.
“It wasn’t about you girls. That wasn’t the reason. It was that I couldn’t be there for your dad.” She shifted her mug to one hand and gestured with the other. “You know, your father’s a needy person. And he just needed too much. Whatever it was, I couldn’t give it to him. His needs perfectly matched my incapacities. And. That was it.”
Luce sat back in her chair again. The emotional part was over. For her, at least. She leaned her head against the seat back and glanced up at the ceiling. “I don’t know how to say this. There’s no way to say it that will sound right. But in a way, what happened to you girls was good for me. Can you understand that? What I mean by that? I’m not happy about what happened to you. And I wish it had never happened. But I wasn’t in control of that. And if I were in control of it, by some supernatural power, of course it wouldn’t have happened. I’m sorry it happened to you. You know that.”
Luce looked over at me then, for the first time since we sat down. She looked serious. I bowed my head slightly, my eyes closing a little when I did, as if to release her of any remote culpability. Luce gazed toward the upper corners of the room. She favored one corner in particular, then abruptly switched and tilted her head to the opposite side. “What I mean is, it helped me. I realized something about myself much sooner than I would have if that had never happened to you. Maybe I never would have realized it.”
“Maybe you didn’t want to be around us,” I said. I was sort of startled that I said that. I instantly wished I hadn’t. But I felt it wasn’t fair that Luce was doling this stuff out and I was expected to sit here and listen to it. And chime in at some point with something like “At least some good came out of it.” The thought of that being the polite thing to do suddenly made me nauseous.
Luce closed her eyes. The muscles between her brows twitched and then relaxed. She breathed through her nose. She did this for several rounds of air. “Things are more complex than that,” she said with her eyes still closed. Then she took a deep inhale, opened her eyes, and stood up. “Let’s go outside,” she said.
At the kitchen door, Luce kicked off her clogs and stepped into dark green rubber boots that looked too big for her. She reached for the doorknob while still bent over from tugging on the second boot, as if the fresh air would make things easier for her and she wanted to get outside as soon as possible.
We walked through the backyard. It had started to cloud up and the cold air had a mist to it. It felt like it was about to rain. Luce didn’t notice. She curled around the house, fingering tall dead plants, letting them bend with her stride and crushing dead flower heads that broke off in her hand when she let them go. The backyard had a couple of Adirondack chairs and a circle of rocks with powdery remnants of a fire.
Luce headed into the woods. She ducked under a low-leaning branch, walking quickly, distancing herself from her house, and maybe civilization, and maybe me. She stopped when she reached a small creek carved into the ground. She watched the thin current of water percolate over stones and transport a wayward leaf, as if its movement possessed the potential to soothe her. “I own the ground, but not the water,” she said. “Isn’t that something?”
A bird cawed from somewhere in the trees. Luce took this as her cue to move along. Her boots slapped into the mucky dead leaves and pine needles along the creek bed. She grabbed on to a spindly tree sapling on the opposite shore and took a large step over the water.
On the other side, the woods sloped sharply uphill. Luce took long strides, leaning over occasionally and pressing her hands into the tops of her knees for support.
The ground leveled off in a grove of maples. Luce stood upright and breathed through her mouth. She wiped away a little moisture running from her nose. Spigots were drilled into a few trees and some of them had wooden buckets hanging off of them. Luce gave them a pat as she skated past.
“You know, Suriya stayed with me for a while last year,” she said out of the blue. “In the winter before she went to India. She helped me with the Christmas markets. I do a lot of that in November, December.”
We stopped near the top of the hill at a boulder. “Here,” Luce said. “It’s easy to climb.” There were natural indentations for footholds and the top of the boulder was flat. We climbed to the top and had a view of the woods below, and because there were no leaves on the trees, we could make out the farms in the valley.
“I feel safer in the woods,” Luce said. “Sometimes I think I’d like to sleep out here on this rock, but it’s always too cold.” She paused. “It gets windy up here. You’re not protected.” She raised her cheeks in a reluctant smile, realizing her contradiction—she felt safe, yet wasn’t protected. “Huh,” she said.
The wind picked
up. It blew Luce’s hair in strands across her face. She combed them back with her hands and reclipped one of her barrettes, but the wind freed them again. Luce gathered her hair together, twisted it, and stuffed it under the collar of her sweater. She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them, hugging them toward her chest. She reached down and peeled wet leaves off her boots.
“When I was born,” Luce said, “I didn’t meet my father for days. Not because it was a different era and they wouldn’t allow fathers in the maternity ward. They told him I was born and he disappeared. No one knew where he was. No one could find him. Though I’m not sure if anyone really tried. Maybe they sent one of my uncles out to look for him. He didn’t come home for a week. I used to think my mother exaggerated that story; she was in a postpartum haze and simply didn’t remember him being there. Or my grandmother kept him out of the room. Or she confused it with being in the hospital and coming home. But it wasn’t that. He just disappeared. ‘Hi, your daughter’s been born,’ and poof, you take off. Maybe he was drinking, I don’t know. I don’t think so. Maybe he started by drinking in celebration. He wasn’t a drunk. He didn’t go on benders, much less for days. I think he just couldn’t handle it. All that responsibility. Being completely responsible for another person’s life. Completely responsible for the fact that they exist. And for whatever happens to them. And for whatever they do. Whatever they inflict upon the world.”
Luce rocked in place, flexing her heels deep in her rubber boots. She looked down between her knees and closed her eyes. Her rocking stopped and she was still. In the distance someone was hammering something, chopping wood, or doing some kind of work on a house. A distant tapping would start and stop.
Eden Page 13