Call Me Home

by Megan Kruse

  Because he was seven, because he knew the power of possessions, it did not occur to him to wonder what it all meant. He was scared, only, and he understood that his father’s ownership over them, over even grief itself, was absolute.

  His mother did not stand. He lifted his hand and struck her across the face. Her lip split and she stopped crying but she did not say a word. She would not look at him. In the back of the house, Lydia started to cry.

  His father put down his hands. He pressed his face to Amy’s breastbone for a long time, and then he stood and led Jackson to the truck and together they went out to town. And so, Jackson thought, he had been complicit all of his life. He couldn’t explain why, but he had the same feeling now.

  He drifted through a light and restless sleep, sick to his stomach, the clock blinking through two o’clock, three o’clock, four. He was half-angry, and half-hating himself. His heart darted around in his chest. When he finally heard steps outside the door, the fumble of the key card in the door, he kept his eyes closed and his face turned into the pillow. Jackson heard Don come into the room, but he didn’t say anything. It was four thirty? Five? The light was just this side of dark. “Jack?” Don whispered.

  Jackson didn’t want to talk, or ask, or know anything. He heard a bottle smash out in the parking lot. What had he told his wife to get away so soon, at such a dead hour? A supply run? Had he told her nothing, just slipped back out again?

  Jackson thought of the Garth Brooks song, the famous one, where the woman is pacing in her flannel gown, waiting for her cheating husband to come home. He’d put Eliza in the gown since he’d first learned of her, and now it was him, had maybe been him all along.

  Don sat lightly on the edge of the bed and was touching his back, lay down beside him and Jackson could feel Don’s cock hard against the backs of his bare thighs. He let Don kiss his neck, his back. He didn’t turn around.

  Finally, he rolled over, suddenly and onto his knees. He pulled Don over onto his stomach and undid his jeans, pulled them down, sucked his own fingers and pushed them slowly into Don’s ass. Don groaned and pushed back against him and Jackson pulled his hand back, pushed his own hard cock in. Was he angry? He didn’t know. He was hard, his whole body ached; he wanted Don, but he didn’t know why or how, wanted him like this, down on his knees. Don was touching himself, groaning. The window blinds let in only small gray swatches of daylight, and Jackson pushed himself in and out slowly, holding Don’s hips. He wanted to cry and at the same time he just let it wash over him, the sweetness of being wanted, that warm, wanting body beneath him. Don groaned again and shot off against that terrible plastic comforter, and then Jackson was coming, deep inside Don, and the whole room was still – a place, Jackson thought, built for stillness, for secrets, a place alone, for those parts of your life that could just as easily be beautiful or shamed.

  Amy

  Tulalip, Washington, 2009

  SOMETIMES SHE WOULD DO SOMETHING ON PURPOSE TO make him angry. She could stand whatever Gary did more easily than the anticipation of it, the way the air hummed tight as a wire. When he had done it – broken the window, or pushed her down in the dirt, or kicked her until her ribs felt splintered – there were weeks or even months of respite, of his remorse. She could imagine they were any family. Always, though, the rooms grew close again. They began to walk more softly.

  She put Jackson and Lydia on the bus for camp at the end of May. It was a weeklong program for the middle school and high school, an approximated summer camp during the school year. Leadership games, night hikes, teachers patrolling the cabins, keeping the high school students in their own bunks. In the school parking lot that morning, she watched Lydia climb the bus steps with both arms around her sleeping bag. Lydia turned and looked back at her and Amy waved, smiling as wide as she could. One of the other mothers stood beside Amy, waving at a face in one of the bus windows. “I just worry,” she said to Amy. “I’m just a mom, I worry. What if they get homesick? What if something happens?” She rubbed her folded arms against the chill; it was a gray morning, ruthlessly cold.

  Amy wondered what it might be like to be that woman. To sink into a week of occasional worry for her children and relief at the time alone. Amy did feel relief but for a different reason. Things had been building for weeks and now that the kids were gone, she knew. The wave would break over her at any moment, but then it would be over. Jackson and Lydia would come home and it would be over, for a while. She smiled pleasantly and nodded at the woman, watching the bus pull slow as a barge out of the school parking lot. Take me with you, she’d wanted to say. At the same time she wanted to run after the bus, knock on the windows, remind them: Be children. For five days and four nights, be children.

  Jackson was hardly a child. He was seventeen; beautiful, moody, defensive. He was still easy with her, kind and caring, always looking out. In the moments when he did lash out at her, it was worse than any physical pain Gary could have inflicted. Lydia was twelve, and Amy worried about her. She was quiet, vastly internal, smarter than she let on. Amy worried that Gary might turn on her. With Jackson, it was different; the things that put him in danger in the outside world kept him safe at home. He’d come home one day with a broken cheekbone that he wouldn’t explain, but it was as clear to her as if she’d been there – someone wanted to teach him a lesson, for being the way that he was. For the same reason, Gary wouldn’t touch him, talk to him. Jackson existed in a cold and separate circle from her husband, and for that she was grateful.

  That night, browning hamburger over the stove, she asked Gary how work had been.

  “Fucking Lou is talking about layoffs again,” Gary said that night, pouring four fingers of whiskey into a glass. Without the kids, he would be hiding his drinking even less than usual.

  “Layoffs,” she said slowly. “What does that mean?” She knew what it meant, and what it meant on top of the lost job, the tight money – long weeks of Gary at home, pacing the house, watching her.

  “What the hell do you think it means?” He wrenched open the refrigerator and took out a can of beer. “No fucking work.”

  “There’ll be something else.”

  Gary didn’t say anything. He pulled the tab off of his beer and flicked it hard against the wall. It clicked on the linoleum.

  She breathed slow and deep. Get it over with, she told herself. Just let it be done. She took another breath, and said quietly, “Why can’t you even take care of your family?”

  If there was a moment between her words and his response, she didn’t hear it. The pain was red, with blue edges behind her closed eyes. She let it roll over her. She pictured herself running, far out of reach – branches and wet leaves slapping her face, plummeting between trees, rock, the dark of the sky against the darker leaves. The explosions of silver sparks seemed to come from somewhere deep inside of her.

  It was the clavicle, the doctor said. He’d wrapped her tightly in a sling while the nurse looked on. She was waiting for her prescription when the nurse slid the linen curtain back open. She was young and blonde with a square jaw and a nervous look. They’d given Amy a shot of something and there were shivering halos around the lights, around the nurse’s yellow head.

  “Listen,” the nurse said. Her voice was unsteady. “If someone did this to you – you, you should call the police.”

  She knew it was the drugs that made it seem funny, but she wanted to laugh. The police? They were so far from town. The time between dialing the number and the police showing up on the gravel road – what could happen in that much time? But more than that, she understood – she had always understood – that if anyone else was involved, if she said anything, then all deals were off. Gary had never touched the children, but she knew, without him ever saying, that they were a card up his sleeve; if she gave him reason enough, she was certain that he was capable of hurting them to destroy her.

  “Has it been happening for a long time?” the nurse asked, high and pleading. How could Amy even answer th
at question? It had happened so slowly at first that it had taken her a while to notice. Why would they need friends, especially out here, where everyone was gun toting and paranoid? Her parents would only be sad that they couldn’t afford to visit; why call them? Even the play dates – those other children were only setting bad examples. The walls shifted closer.

  Other small things – the pig Gary had brought home that hoofed desperate ruts in the pasture and tried to break the fence; the steer that whiled away its miserable hours licking a cube of salt. The work kept her away from town, and with a freezer full of meat there was no need to go, anyway. “Plant a garden,” he said. “We have all this land.” It seemed idyllic from the outside – back to the land, back to nature. Instead, her ties to the outside world grew more and more tenuous. Amy imagined that woman from the school parking lot. “I dream of a garden,” that woman would sigh. How could Amy explain that each of these things moved her a step farther from town, from the everyday reasons to leave their land?

  “If –” The nurse was blinking fast, running her thumb back and forth over the prescription. “You can take him to court for this,” she said. “Send him to jail. You don’t have to live like this. You don’t deserve it.”

  The halos of light were waxing and waning and Amy concentrated on them until the nurse’s voice seemed to shrink. She made it sound so simple. Amy watched a medical chart on the opposite wall, a figure latticed with pink muscles. An empty urine specimen cup on the clean white counter. Stainless steel tools on a stainless steel tray.

  “Listen,” the nurse said. “I’m just going to say this. I can’t help it.” Her mouth was shaking around her words, her thumb rubbing the paper faster. “There was a woman, last spring. Maybe you heard about it.” She took a breath. “Her boyfriend shot her kids. In front of her. He made her watch.” She looked at Amy and Amy looked away. “Take him to court,” the woman said. She put one hand on Amy’s cold arm. “Please.”

  Her skin prickled. This woman didn’t know her, and didn’t know her husband. She took the prescription and eased herself off the table. She didn’t look at the nurse. She concentrated on the glow of the green arrows pulling her toward the waiting room.

  THAT NIGHT, AFTER Gary was asleep, she went to the kitchen and poured some of his whiskey into a glass. She sat in the dim light of the kitchen stove, looking out the dark window, listening to the steady thump of rain. Right in front of her. She drank quickly, letting the liquor erode the edges of the pain. He made her watch. She imagined the other women out there, in their own dark houses, living the way that she was.

  She knew it as clearly as she knew her children’s faces: if she called the police, if she took him to court, if she fought him, that is when he would do something irreversible, something to hurt her more than any physical pain ever could. That is when she had to be truly afraid. This way the pain was dull but it was over, she thought. He wouldn’t touch her again for a while.

  She watched her own face waver in the slick black glass, the beads of water running down it, dividing her reflection. “The Devil is beating his wife,” her mother would always say, holding her palms up to catch the rain. All of those wives, the constellation of lights from their midnight windows. All of them making their own bargains with God, all of them wide awake.

  Lydia

  Tulalip, Washington, 2009

  THE SCHOOL SENT JACKSON AND ME TO CAMP FOR A week. He was with the high school, but I was with the sixth grade, on the other side of the field, under a stand of trees. “You need anything,” he said, “I’ll be in cabin two, okay? Just ask someone to come find me.”

  I nodded. Marta liked me that week. She was standing beside me and she looked at Jackson and put her hands on her hips. “Cabin two?” she asked, smiling her school picture smile. I elbowed her.

  Jackson smiled. “Don’t get into any trouble,” he said. “At least not too much.” I watched him walk back to join the rest of his group.

  That night Marta and I stood at the steel sink in the corner of the cook shelter, brushing our teeth. I balanced the butt of a flashlight next to the soap dish. The water tasted like rust and smelled like tinfoil. The beams up above us were lacy with spider webs.

  In the cabin, Marta showed me a picture of her boyfriend, who went to the high school and played the guitar for her youth group. The rubber mattress made our legs sweat even in the cold. The boy in the picture was tall, wearing a Yankees cap over hair gone dark with grease. “He’s going to be a mechanic,” she said. “He already rebuilt a car. A Cadillac. He got it from his grandfather.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Your brother’s cute,” she said. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to think about Marta liking my brother.

  “Have you ever been kissed?” Marta asked.

  I thought about walking away but that would be worse; then Marta would know that I hadn’t. Finally I said, “Oh, sure.”

  “Who was it?”

  I wanted to cry. “Oh, just some guy,” I said. “It was no big deal. A couple guys, actually.”

  The flashlight lit Marta’s face from underneath. The shadow of one eyebrow was raised. “Must not have been very good then,” she said. She went to her bed and spread her sleeping bag out. “I’ll probably have dreams about him tonight,” she said. “Your brother, that is.”

  In the cabin that night I couldn’t stand it. Rain on the roof; Marta’s face in the cook shelter. I imagined Marta with the boy in the baseball cap, her hand in his, his thumb rubbing a circle into her wrist. There was an ache in my chest that felt rock hard, like it might never go away. I thought of the boyfriend leaning over the hood of the Cadillac. Of Marta, pulling the burnt skin from a marshmallow, holding the raw center back in the flames until it was just a coal-black lump. From outside, I could hear a dog barking, far off. I thought of home and in that second I knew: if I don’t get home right now, something will happen. It was a weight on me, holding me down, and I pushed against it and put on my shoes. I have to go home, I thought. I have to get Jackson, and we need to go home. Something is wrong.

  I left the cabin in the dark and no one saw me go. I had my flashlight and I followed its yellow path toward the high school cabins pushing through the sword fern and salal and into the field. The flagpole was a long silvery arrow pointing to the sky. “I’ll be right here waiting,” my mother had said, and when I turned and she smiled at me it was like a stone sunk inside me. Something bad was coming.

  My light from my flashlight touched the top of the cabins and they were colorless, all the same. Which one was cabin two? I wanted to cry. Where was he? That morning, eating our eggs in the little dining hall, he’d said, “Have fun with your friends, Lydia. Don’t worry about home. Don’t worry about anything.” I stopped at the fire circle. It was piled with charred logs and there were empty cans in the ash. I sat on one of the benches beside it and looked down at the flashlight. I couldn’t go back to my cabin. I couldn’t go anywhere.

  I heard the branches cracking; there was a tunnel of light, a weak yellow beam. I shut off the flashlight. Don’t look at me, I thought, but already someone was moving toward me from out of the woods.

  “Who’s there –?” I knew that voice, I thought, and there was Randy, with his flashlight lighting up his face. I wanted to run to him but I stayed on the bench.

  “Randy,” I whispered.

  “Lydia? What are you doing out here?”

  “What are you doing out there?” I asked.

  “Just checking out some stuff,” he said, shrugging.

  “Ghosts?” I asked. Randy looked like a ghost himself, in his long black coat, his face floating, big and wide as a balloon. He smiled and I didn’t mean to but I started to cry.

  “Hey!” Randy said. “Lydia – hey, it’s okay. There’s no sign of ghosts out here, I promise. I would know if there was.”

  “It’s not that,” I said. “I need to go home. I can’t stay here, Randy.”

  “Hey,” he said again. “Come here.�
�� He sat on the bench beside me and put his arm around me. I put my head against his coat. I imagined it was a curtain I could crawl behind and stay.

  “Please,” I said. “I want to go home.”

  “Do you know what I do?” he asked. “When my dad is drunk and I’m afraid I won’t be able to wake him up?”

  I looked up at him. I had never thought of Randy’s dad before, of where he lived, and why he lived in the basement alone.

  “I think of what my own house is going to look like one day. What I would put in each room.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like in one corner there’s going to be a chair. A recliner. It’ll be by the window, and my radio will be next to it.”

  “How come?”

  “I like it. I want to sit there and watch TV and listen to the radio. Now you do one. What do you want?”

  I thought of the things I wanted, but none of them seemed important. “A dog,” I said finally. It would sleep on my bed, which would be so soft. It would bark if anyone came near.

  “You’re funny,” he said. “You’ll grow up and you can have anything. A dog or a mansion or anything.”

  I felt bad for Randy. He was thinking about a chair and a radio. At least I had Jackson, and my mother. “Randy,” I said, “you’ll get those things.” He put his arm around me and we kept sitting there in the dark. I made a determination right there to see the week through.