by Megan Kruse
“Lydia!” he took her by the arm. “What is it? What is it?” She kept her face buried in her hands. “Lydia!” He was yelling but fear was all over him like he’d been splashed with it. His skin was cold and clammy. Randy came up behind them, breathing hard.
“What happened?” Randy asked. “Was it the ghost?”
Lydia took her hands away from her face and there was a shallow gash on her temple. There was gravel in it. “It wasn’t the ghost,” she said. “I just fell.”
“Shit, Lyds,” Randy said. “Oh, shit, her head.”
“Lydia,” Jackson said, “what happened? Are you okay?” He took her face in his hands and tilted her head to get a look at the cut. It didn’t look deep but it was bleeding.
“I fell,” she said.
“It was like something pushed her,” Randy muttered.
“Come on,” Jackson said. “Let’s go.” He helped her up. “Randy, will you take us home?”
They folded the cupcakes, the chips, and the flashlights into the tarp and pushed it all into the backseat of the car. Randy had the tape recorder and Jackson knew he would be up all night, running over Lydia’s scream, listening for the ghost, for a hidden message. Fucking werewolves and spirits. Lydia’s banshee scream. Jesus Christ. He sat in the backseat with her while Randy drove them over the hill, through the lightless corridor of trees, turning down the gravel road that would lead eventually to the little trailer, the squares of light spilling out on the sunken grass.
“Bye, Randy,” Lydia said. “Sorry we didn’t see the ghost.”
Randy smiled. “You’re a hell of a runner,” he said, and she grinned. She looked eerie, with the blood on her face. It made Jackson think of a horror movie.
THERE WAS A fire in the woodstove and Lyle Lovett was playing. It was such a relief, the pure physical comfort, after the dark stretch of Firetrail Hill. There was chicken in the oven, and Jackson could tell it was going to be an easy night. He would get Lydia to the bathroom, help her clean the cut, and nothing would need to be said. Before they were completely inside, though, his father was in the kitchen. “Whoa,” he said. “What happened here?”
“What is it?” his mother called.
His mother cleaned the cut and his father bandaged it. “Kids will be kids,” his father sighed. It was strange, Jackson thought, that when he said she’d fallen, no one asked for more information. The excuse was accepted so easily. It gave him a sick feeling. So many times that his mother had been hurt and no one had said a word about what they all knew. If Lydia was his kid, he thought, he’d want every detail.
“Hell,” Gary said. “When I was a kid, if I wasn’t in a cast, I had a rusty nail in my foot. Kids will be kids.” Jackson wished he’d stop talking. The conversation was giving him a bad feeling.
When Lydia’s cut was bandaged and they’d eaten, Gary pushed back his plate. “We need some dance music, Amy,” he said. He looked like any father, any happy man. His beer was propped beside him on the windowsill, but he wasn’t drunk; he was smiling his big, easy smile, cuffing Lydia lightly on the shoulder, calling her fierce. Jackson looked at him. What would it be like if his father was this person all of the time? If he’d chosen to be a dad, a husband?
His mother had changed the music – Garth Brooks, Randy Travis, George Strait. “The Fireman,” which always made Jackson think about some hot older man, a bear, maybe, wearing a fireman’s hat and slicker, carrying a big hose. Original, he thought. A big hose. His mother was laughing, doing a quick two-step with his father. Lydia was dancing a little, weirdly, but he knew that just to dance was probably a big deal for her. They weren’t exactly living in a haven of approval. He went to her, and spun her, dipped her. He wanted, one day, to be able to say, “We were good sometimes. It wasn’t all bad. We danced.”
His father whistled at them, and Lydia smiled. The corner of the bandage was dipping over her eye. His mother cut in and danced with Lydia, and then with him. She looked happy. They were all flushed from the warmth, from the dancing. Even when he felt tired, Jackson kept dancing; he wanted to hold it, to keep it exactly as it was.
He remembered a night when he was four or five, sitting next to his father, patting his dark hair, telling him how much he loved him. “I love you,” he said over and over, and his father would say, “You, too, son.” Every time his father said it, Jackson would start again. “I love you.” Even then it seemed like the answer might change at any moment. The only thing he could do was to keep vigil. “I love you,” he said again, stroking his father’s hair in the lamplight, a deep sadness in him, as though even this moment was already lost.
Lydia
Tulalip, Washington, 2009
MARTA KEPT ASKING ABOUT JACKSON. IF MY FATHER WAS working in the neighborhood, I rode the bus with her until he picked me up. Jackson stayed after school. “Working on the paper,” he said, but I knew it wasn’t true.
Since the week we went to camp, Marta wouldn’t stop. “Does he have a girlfriend? Have you, like, seen him naked?” she asked. We sat in her pink room across from Jennings Park and she tried on all of her clothes and read out loud from magazines. I looked at myself in the mirror. Marta used a flat iron to make her hair fall straight and smooth. It was movie star hair. My hair was still short. It looked the same as it did when I was seven.
“No way,” I told her. “Gross.”
“I want to have sex with him.”
I didn’t want to talk about sex. It felt like it should be secret. “Stop,” I said. I felt dizzy.
“Whatever,” she said. “He’s cute.”
I knew she was right. Jackson had shaggy hair that looked perfect, like a boy in the pictures that Marta tacked on her wall. His eyes were big and he had long eyelashes, while mine were stubby and pale. “Your brother is a rogue,” Marta announced, the copy of Teen open in front of her. “‘This bad boy is nothing but trouble! Unfortunately, that makes him extra hot! Enjoy listening to his band practice, or sitting around a fire on the beach, but don’t expect him to come over for dinner with the parentals – it’s not his style!’”
I tried to imagine Jackson in a band, or with his arm around a girl at the beach. It didn’t seem fair, I thought. Jackson didn’t even like girls, and girls liked him so much. No boys liked me. Randy was the only boy I knew.
Marta stood up and went to the closet mirror. She pushed out her chest. “What do you think?” she asked. “Am I hot enough to date a junior?”
MY FATHER PICKED me up at six. He reached across the front seat and unlocked my door. He put his big hand on my shoulder and squeezed it. “‘Lydia, oh Lydia, say, have you met Lydia?’” he sang.
“Hi, Dad,” I said. He was smiling and his eyes looked shiny. It was a day when we were being happy.
“ ‘Lydia the tattooed lady. She has eyes that men adore so, and a torso even more so …’ ”
It was already getting dark. Marta’s house in the truck’s mirror was a fire burning far off on that beach, where boys put their arms around girls and the sand was a blanket to lie on. It faded out. My father was still humming, tapping the steering wheel. “I thought we’d get pizza,” he said, wagging his eyebrows. “Let your mother have the night off from cooking.”
I nodded. The school parking lot was empty. Under the streetlights there were rainbows of oil in the puddles. I fixed my eyes on the double doors. I waited. I had this idea that if I could concentrate hard enough, I might be able to catch Jackson coming out and see him as a stranger. I might be able to see him as a person who wasn’t my brother, and it might tell me something about me, whether or not I was beautiful, too.
The truck idled. He was late, and I watched my father out of the corner of my eye. Hurry, Jackson, I thought. He’s singing. And pizza.
I saw Jackson across the parking lot. He was coming from the pool, though, not through the double doors at the front of the school. He didn’t see us at first and I felt a hot jealousy. His face was open like a flower, like the sun.
The truck id
led. Jackson was walking toward the car in the six o’clock gray and his face was light and faraway. He had been somewhere that didn’t include me, where he was beautiful as ever and someone else knew it. If my father saw, he didn’t say. I climbed over the front seat to the little bench in the back. I wished that Jackson and I were connected for different reasons. I wished that we’d chosen to be friends, that it wasn’t because he was my brother. That it wasn’t just because of my father that Jackson wanted to look out for me.
Driving back home, I watched the breaks in the trees where there was still white daylight. My father told a joke about a man from work. Jackson smiled. But like a dark hot fire, the anger was in me. I looked for the Firetrail ghost, but there was nothing. My chest was a nest of bees. It was two months now, since that night on Firetrail Hill when Randy, Jackson, and I tried to find the ghost.
That night, I was running so fast, hurtling through the dark. I had the tape recorder under one arm, and I could see the headlights of a car coming over the hill. I was just slipping through the dark, and then the anger came out of me, at nothing, at everything, as if the night around me was choppy water. I told Jackson and Randy that I tripped that night, but it wasn’t that I fell. It was pounding inside of me, my hands were fists. I wanted to smash something. I wanted to hurt someone. The anger burst in me again and again and I had to give something to it, and then the gravel was slipping under my feet, and I was down in the ditch. And when the pain started, when I was down in the wet grass and I felt the blood warm on my cheek, it did stop.
I felt it coming back now, an edge of that same feeling. Jackson in the front seat, and even his ears were pretty. I made fists so tight they hurt. “You have your father’s eyes,” my mother would say, and I wanted to ask, “What else of his do I have?” Once, when I was seven or eight, he had turned to me. “You’re just like me, Lydia,” he said. “You’ll see. You’re your father’s girl.” The words shivered over me. They hung in the air.
I couldn’t tell anyone, but that night, in the moments before I fell, I wanted to burn the forest down. I never wanted to stop running. I wanted to run until I was someone else, until I knew I would never become like my father. My heart was pounding, and there was a mean and angry voice inside of me, gripping me until I stabbed it out.
Jackson
Silver, Idaho, 2010
THE AIR IN THE TRUCK WAS STALE. JACKSON KICKED aside fast food bags and empty cigarette packs. His back was wet with sweat.
Don didn’t say anything until they were out of sight of the crew, then he reached over and squeezed the back of Jackson’s neck. He angled the truck down a spur road off toward the ironworks. No one went out that way, since the flood sent creeping red rust over everything. Even before then the ironworks must have felt dangerous; the year before, Jackson had heard, a boy from town climbed the old blast furnace and fell.
“They don’t need me on the West side?” Jackson asked.
“I’m leaving Eliza,” Don said. “She’s coming tonight. She’s coming tonight and I’ll tell her. Then you can come stay. Or hell, we’ll rent a room. Together.” He put one hand on Jackson’s thigh.
“You’re going to tell her about me?” Jackson pictured a blonde woman, dark alleys of mascara, suitcases. The specters of everyday destruction.
Don nodded. He looked away. “I want to do this right for you, Jack,” he said. “You deserve it.” He looked over at Jackson and smiled. His front teeth had a tiny gap in them. He was thirty-four years old, but that gap made him look like a little boy.
Jackson smiled back. He wanted to laugh, to open the car windows, to shout something. This is my boyfriend. What was he, twelve? He took a breath. Slow, he thought. Go slowly. “Are you okay?” he asked. He understood that this was tricky. That you couldn’t leap from one person to another, from one life to another, so easily. Sometimes, he still woke up feeling dread like a heavy blanket, hearing the spray from the lawn sprinkler hitting the window, and down the hall his mother crying, his father shouting. Time could slip that way.
“I’m fine,” Don said. He slid one hand from Jackson’s shoulder down his back, into the waistband of his jeans. His warm hand on Jackson’s ass. “You and me, Jack?”
“You and me,” Jackson said. A flash, just a flash, of what it would be like: asleep on the sofa together at night, the television blinking blue, Don’s head on his chest.
“I’ll find you soon,” Don said. He leaned across the front seat and kissed Jackson hard, pulled him close for a minute and breathed into his hair. Then Jackson slid back over to his side of the cab and they drove back to the job site in silence.
HE COULDN’T SLEEP that night. All he could think about was what was happening in Don’s trailer. He lit his cigarettes off of the ends of the ones that came before. Even worse, he had the next day off; a shipment of something had been forgotten. Mike Leary had announced it like a great surprise, this wonderful day of rest, but what did Jackson have to do? He decided to go the next morning to Mary’s, to buy a real breakfast and stop acting like he was still homeless. The leaves were just starting to turn. On the muddy lawn in front of Mary’s someone had erected plastic gravestones and littered small plastic skeletal feet and hands in the dead garden mulch. A cloud of dirty cotton was stretched like a spider web across one window. Halloween. It was only September. Jackson had loved Halloween as a child, but Lydia hated it. There had been that urban legend about the syringes, and she wouldn’t eat the candy. Jackson felt kingly and cruel, sitting in her pile of colored wrappers, eating them alone.
There were a few cars outside of Mary’s – Mike Leary’s F-150 and a dirty little roadster he recognized. He thought he’d get coffee and read one of the terrible county papers. The sad little ads: “Wanted: Old Buttons for Serius Collector”; “Clean Gutters 4 Cheap”; “Photographs in Your Home for Family or Glamour.” Jackson imagined that before the construction jobs started everyone in Silver subsisted on these tiny trades. Remember how I fed you, remember the pig I gave you when yours was lost, remember the time you slept with my wife. Everyone survives, Jackson thought.
The bell over the door rang a dumb little tune. Inside it was warm and Mary was holding the coffeepot. Her husband had tied an apron over his belly and was sweating in front of the grill. Mike Leary waved from one of the barstools, where he had a generous breakfast in front of him, and Jackson sat next to him gratefully.
“How’s it?” Leary asked.
“Fucking great.” Jackson tried a toothy grin.
Leary looked at him. He was a smart man. Jackson guessed Leary probably had some idea about him. If Ida hadn’t told him, he would have guessed anyway. He wondered how Ida was, but he didn’t ask. It seemed like to ask would be breaking some kind of code; he didn’t want to remind Leary that he’d been some street kid, a charity case.
Mary poured him a cup of dishwater coffee and he drank it black. He took the entertainment section of the paper from where Leary had pushed it aside and read the comics, which weren’t funny. Had they ever been? There was an AA meeting on Thursday and a high school dance on Friday. If he was back in Marysville he might have gone to a dance. Or might have been eligible to go, more like. He would have stayed at Randy’s smoking pot and listening to ghostchaser radio.
In hindsight, Jackson had come there to see them. Even not in hindsight. He’d come there just for that. And then they were through the door, and he didn’t even need to look up from Dear Abby, who had long since been replaced by someone else. If there was a way to feel someone across the room, he could feel Don, Eliza, the whole damn breakfast crowd at Mary’s pushing in all around him. He turned a little. His heart was smashing around in his chest. Did he breathe? He reached for his coffee and just rattled it in the saucer. It spilled a half moon around the rim.
Eliza was nothing. She was a negative of a picture of someone’s wife, the pretty girl in high school who got good grades but didn’t put out, the one with a neat list of colleges lined up against the checklist for Letter
s of Reference and Application Due Dates. She had two small shiny dimples where her glasses sat, but now they were pushed up on her head, and she was wearing jeans and a nice sweater. She didn’t look like someone who got drunk and screamed outside of bars. She looked nice. Respectable. Not the kind of woman who’d ever be cheated on, not the kind of woman who’d cheat, but not too churchy, either. Someone who waited for movies to come out on video, who made pancakes late at night and could sometimes loosen up and have a good old honky-tonk time. She was walking toward him, smiling.
And Don! Don looked, Jackson thought, like the worst kind of sweaty, clammy fear. He remembered the first night he’d gone to Eric’s house, before he knew that Eric was just fat and rich and lonely. Before dinner, before the first – okay, the third, counting the drinks Jackson had alone in the parking lot – drink, before Jackson understood that Eric was a good decision and not the last bad decision he’d ever make, he’d felt like Don looked now, gray and sick.
If Leary wasn’t there they might have just pretended not to notice each other, and suffered through a sick and sour breakfast, and then he would have figured out what to do from there. But Leary knew Eliza. He knew Don. He knew them all, and Eliza said, “Mike!” and then they were there. He could smell fishy sweat on Don, which made him think of fucking Don, and he reached for the coffee again and tipped it over. He reached for the napkins and coughed. Graceful. Perfect.
“Mike,” Eliza said again. “How are you?” Her voice was sweet and kind and she reminded him a little of Ida, a little of his mother – even a little of Lydia, the way that Lydia would be one day.
“Liza!” Leary said, and stood up from his stool. Jackson felt a surge of relief as Leary’s wide back shielded him. He mopped up the coffee mess with shreds of napkin that didn’t seem to work at all. “You look beautiful,” Leary said.