Call Me Home

by Megan Kruse

  He would grasp, then, when he shook his head a little and the dog became a rangy mutt or the carpenter straightened with his arms full of tools, just what exactly he was going to lose – his mother’s past, her present, all of it. The times that had so captivated him as a child – the times before he existed at all – were even farther from him. Somewhere far from him, she was going to grow old. He wanted so badly for her to materialize, to come out of the woods in that old dress, the one he remembered from when he was young, the one he had maybe even created in his mind. He would tell her, he thought, that he had been wrong, more wrong than he could have ever imagined, and instead of acknowledging that he had done her in, had not treated her as a son should treat his mother, but more like an enemy, and she would just lean against that truck and smile.

  “Oh, well,” she would say, “we go on, don’t we?”

  The woman kept walking; the wind picked up. He kicked through the leaves to the work site, to the day that was waiting for him. The day he was late to. He tried to imagine, for a minute, that Don didn’t exist at all.

  Amy

  Fannin, Texas, 2010

  AMY STOOD OUTSIDE ON A GRAY TUESDAY HANGING LAUNDRY on the frayed line. The back door of the little Fannin house opened onto the same thatch of grass, the gravel road leading out to the same sparse field. Had anything changed in the years since she’d left and come back? There was a line strung from an eyehook above the door to a narrow, anemic tree just over the wall. It was cutting through the bark, bleeding a weak sap down the trunk. Slips the color of flesh; her mottled, threadbare bathrobe; Lydia’s shirts housed the wind, arms lifting and dropping. The wind was pinning leaves to the siding. The smell of hot stone in the air, a match struck – somewhere a neighbor was burning leaves. When she turned, her mother was standing in the doorway.

  “Will you come in here?” her mother asked. “I need to talk to you.”

  Her mother was the same and different. She seemed content, Amy thought. At peace, in a way that Amy had never seen her before. She had welcomed them home, brought them in as though it had only been days since Amy left. Amy put the clothespins down in the grass and followed her mother. Inside, there was a stack of old spiral notebooks.

  “I want to give you these,” her mother said. “They were your father’s.”

  Her father’s old notebooks, the pages marked in even lines, fading pencil: “500 yd dash, 2 mile run, short sprints to Pancake House. Build new fence, 5′ × 12′. Stop smoking. Become a better person.” He must have been what, she thought, nineteen? All of these tiny wants, these good intentions.

  Her father. The storied boy. “He was brave, very brave,” her mother had told her when she was a little girl. She imagined him, swinging like Tarzan through the jungles, the tangled vines. And when that war started to assemble in her mind, she imagined blood, and noise – noise everywhere, even the silence growing loud, weighted with what might be coming. They were lucky, everyone said, to have him home. Only later did Amy start to wonder what it must have meant for her mother. To spend thirty years shaving your husband’s face with a straight razor in Fannin, Texas, far from the cities where people stood and waved signs against LBJ and Vietnam, and then against the next war, and the next, and to look your neighbors in the eye when they called your husband a hero, to wave and smile when they went back to their own homes, far from the shaving cream and straight razor and everything else that waited for you.

  “You never showed me these before,” Amy said.

  There were so many other things she meant to say: I’m sorry. I love you. I loved him, and I’m sorry I wasn’t here.

  “Amy,” her mother said. “You need to make a life again.”

  She thought of her mother’s life, how small it had been. Did her mother wish she could have done it differently?

  “Do you wish you’d left Daddy?” she asked.

  “No,” she said. “He kept his promises to me. I did the best I could. I don’t wish that any different, but I wish I’d come for you.”

  “I wasn’t here,” she said. “When Daddy died.”

  “You have to forgive yourself,” her mother said. “Start with this.”

  “I don’t deserve to be forgiven,” she said.

  “You didn’t invent feeling that way,” her mother said. “Did you think you invented it?” It didn’t sound angry, just a question. Did you think you invented it?

  Amy lay on her back on the floor and looked at the ceiling. She thought maybe she had.

  She went the next week to see Jennifer. “You should go see her,” her mother had said. “She lives in Lockhart. I’m sure she’s in the phone book.” She drove her mother’s car. She still needed to trade their old car – she couldn’t believe she hadn’t done it yet. There was something safe about being in Fannin that she hadn’t counted on. All of this time, she had thought it was the last place she should go.

  Lockhart was the same as she remembered it – barbecue joints, the ornate buildings like Viennese cakes facing the square. Jennifer’s little apartment was across from a city park with a gazebo. There were kids on a patch of concrete shooting baskets. It was nice, Amy thought. She tried not to be nervous.

  The door swung open before Amy could knock. “Holy fucking shit,” Jennifer said. She’d gotten heavier but she was still pretty. Her hair was still big, Amy noted. She still smelled like lilies, like cheap perfume. “Let me look at you!” Jennifer put her hands on Amy’s shoulders. “You’re so thin, you bitch,” she said, leading Amy inside.

  The house was compulsively sunny – the kitchen was painted yellow, bordered with a parade of sunflowers – and it smelled like burnt coffee. There were photographs everywhere, on the walls, framed and propped on the counters. The mirror in the living room was wedged full of snapshots. Amy walked around the room, picking out things she’d forgotten: she and Jennifer at homecoming, when they’d worn matching dresses patterned with black and white triangles and pinned three-pound mum corsages to their waists to stop the mums from dragging down their décolletages; Jennifer drunk at the Watermelon Thump in Luling giving the finger to a parade float. There were wedding pictures of Jennifer in a waterfall of white lace, Scott in a blue suit with a pink carnation in the buttonhole. I should have been there, Amy thought.

  “Janie’s in her room,” Jennifer said, gesturing down the narrow, wood-paneled hall. “Janie! Come meet my best and oldest friend.”

  The door opened and the girl flounced down the hall. She was Jackson’s age, Amy thought, maybe a year or two younger, sixteen or seventeen. Her dark hair was chopped short on one side and she’d lined her eyes with black liquid that was smudged at the corners. She was beautiful, Amy thought. She looked like Jennifer. It was like looking at her old friend, twenty years ago.

  “Hey,” Janie said. “Nice to meet you. Mom, I’m going out.”

  “What, you’re not even going to ask?” Jennifer said. She tilted her head toward Amy. “You see what kind of a mother I am,” she said. “She just does whatever she likes.”

  Amy smiled. She watched Janie pick up a little beaded purse from the counter. “Be back later,” she said, and went out the screen.

  Jennifer went to the pantry. “Well, now that she’s gone,” she said, pulling out a bottle of wine, “let’s stop being old.” She pulled down two coffee mugs from the cabinet. “Take a seat,” she said, waving one hand at the kitchen table with its sunflower placemats. She opened the wine and tipped it into the mugs.

  “Where’s Scott?” Amy asked, taking one of the mugs from Jennifer.

  “Oh, God, don’t even say his name!” she said. “I just call him The Motherfucker. He doesn’t even call Janie.” She sipped from her cup and winked at Amy. “I told you I’d have a girl and name her Jane. You would not believe some of the shitty names people come up with these days. Not me.” She picked up the ends of her hair and assessed them for split ends. “That bastard ran off with some skank in Luling. Whatever. He called and wanted me back, but there’s no way
I’m going near that, especially after where it’s been. But I’m sleeping with two guys now.” She leaned forward. “And one of them has a horse dick, hand to God.”

  Amy laughed. She felt a pull toward Jennifer, the easiness of it, as though no time had passed. At the same time, her other life, what she thought of as her whole life now, was still there, heavy inside of her.

  She tried, as best she could, to tell Jennifer what had happened. She couldn’t, though, not completely, but she tried. It felt good, Amy thought. Never, in all those years, had she talked to anyone about Gary.

  “I worried about you,” Jennifer said, holding her coffee mug between her palms. “I told myself: Amy is either very happy or she is in trouble out there, but I’m going to say she’s happy, because what the hell else can you do?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t even know where Jackson is, and Lydia is so sad, Jennifer. I can just see it on her. What all this has done to her.”

  “The best thing you can do for your daughter is to get yourself a life, girl. You’re a good mama,” she said. “But get a life!” Jennifer laughed. “For God’s sake.”

  Amy laughed. Nothing was right, she thought, but in that moment, across from Jennifer in the butter yellow kitchen, it seemed like she might be able to make something of what she had and start to try to live.

  IT WAS ALREADY dark when she pulled up; she was later than she’d meant to be. “Mom?” she called. “Lena?” The house was too quiet. “Lydia?” Maybe they’d gone out to dinner. She went to the kitchen and turned on the light.

  There was a note. “L. didn’t come home – DO NOT WORRY, I’ve gone to look for her in town. Wait here in case she calls or comes home.”

  Somehow she made it to the sink before she started to retch, the pounding behind her eyes just No. No. No. No. She ran out onto porch and looked out at the field. She was dying, she couldn’t breathe, she was dying. If he had come back. If he had come back. She was dying. She retched again. She knelt on the ground with her hands in the dirt.

  Lydia

  Fannin, Texas, 2010

  I HAD THE FEELING AGAIN THAT MY FATHER WAS THERE. The page in front of me, the smell of chalk. I bit the eraser of my pencil and tasted the old taste, the house back around us, the sounds rising up. Go, I thought. Go now, and it was easier than I’d imagined. I followed the halls, and the lockers were soldiers with cold eyes. The gym was empty, and then I was out those heavy double doors.

  It was worse outside. Every car on the main street was his car. Every corner was a corner he would know. When my father was drunk he would sometimes tell the story of how he met my mother. “The ranch where I lived was just a stone’s throw from the town where your mother lived.” His eyes would be glassy, and I knew that at any moment his smile might turn mean. “A ranch hand and a small-town girl, what do you think of that,” he would say, and in my mind the ranch was a dark place because it had made him. And now it was a stone’s throw from where I stood outside – was that a mile? Ten? I imagined the ranch was calling my father back. It was whispering to him that we had come back, that we were nearby for the finding.

  I closed my eyes as tight as I could and wished for Jackson. Jackson, who knew the rest of everything that happened to us, the parts that belonged to him. I opened them again and the cars were dragging past, heavy as train cars.

  I started toward home but thought, They’ll send me back. Once I watched Jackson stick out his thumb like it was a long rope that pulled a car right to him, just for a ride down the road. But where would I go? The cars were loud and grinding, and in each one was another face that might recognize me.

  In the end, I went to the river. I walked up and down the shore. I dragged my hands along the ground and picked up as many rocks as I could, and I waited there. I don’t know how long I waited. The sky turned pink, and then it turned red. I was waiting for him. If he came, I thought, I would kill him before he killed me.

  MY GRANDMOTHER WOKE me. My mouth tasted like aluminum foil. I was in the fort, and the rocks were still in my hands. She had a flashlight and she shone it across me. I had not dreamed of him. That was something.

  She pulled me up against her, the flashlight in my eyes. I was so tired. She shook me. “You’re all right,” she kept saying, “You’re fine – you’re fine –”

  “I thought he was here,” I said.

  “Who, baby?”

  “My father.”

  Her arms were looser around me now. “No,” she said. “No, I promise you, no.” She was colorless in the flashlight. It seemed like I could see the veins running through her. “I looked for you everywhere,” she said, and her voice was quiet and slow. “I looked all around town. I looked and I looked, and then suddenly I knew – you’d be right here, so close to home.” I leaned against her. “When you’re older,” she said, “you’ll be able to go wherever you want, and no one will stop you. No one will hurt you. And if they try, you’ll have people around to protect you, just like you do now.”

  “What if he finds me?”

  She put her arm around me. “He’s haunting you like a ghost,” she said. “But you’re safe here. And one day, he’ll be nothing but ashes and dust. He’ll be gone for good.”

  “None of it was your fault,” she said. “And everything you felt, she feels it to.” She sighed. “She needs you. Lydia – she is a person, too. She isn’t just your mother.”

  I was so tired, and she was warm against me. I followed her. I let her take my hand and lead me back up the gravel road from the river.

  The light from the house looked warm and safe and I felt sorry. How long had I been gone? My mother was at the kitchen table crying. She was crying and her makeup was running down her face, and she held me so tightly that my ribs felt like they were breaking beneath her arms. Finally, she let me go. She pressed her cheek to her knee. She didn’t ask me where I had been. “I’m sorry,” she said, again and again. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  She tried to wipe her eyes but she just sobbed again. “You do these things,” she said, “you do these things you think you’ll never do because you think you have to –” I left my arms around her and they weren’t my arms, they were someone else’s. Through the screen, the prairie was dark and it did not end. “And there is another answer, I’m sure, but you don’t know it,” she said. “And then it’s done –” She was crying again, and I let my arms drop. She was gasping, hardly breathing.

  And it was Texas fall, still hot, and I wanted to tell her I understood and I couldn’t. I couldn’t say anything. I wanted to tell her that I knew, that her life had been before us and would still be after, and what should she have done? I wanted to say it but I didn’t, and she said “I’m sorry, Lydia. I’m so sorry,” and she stood and left me on the porch and went out the screen door and onto the road.

  I wanted to run after her, but I just kept sitting. I wanted to tell her I knew. I pressed my cheek to the porch screen. I thought of my father beating my mother, the broken glass, and Jackson, with his hands reaching out to me as I left him behind. My mother was nowhere in sight, and I wanted to call after her. You do these things because you have to. I knew what my grandmother had said was wrong. It’s not that you are still yourself. You are never yourself again. Your heart will break and break, and your children may be lost to you, but in the end you are still a mother.

  Amy

  Fannin, Texas, 2010

  “YOU DO THESE THINGS,” SHE SAID TO LYDIA, “YOU DO these things you think you’ll never do because you think you have to –” I’m sorry, she thought. I’m sorry for all of this, because I knew. Somewhere in me I knew.

  It is a Sunday afternoon, and she is searching the house. It has been less than a week since Gary came to the Starlight, since he brought them back home again. He is sweet and attentive, but she imagines a calm surface of water, the fish darting and frantic underneath. She is full of a terrible pain for her son, for what he has done, for the way she understands that Gary has that power, to hurt Jacks
on, to draw out of him such anger that he would do what he did, would tell Gary what he wanted to know. She is searching deep into the backs of the closets, under the heating grates, behind the washer and dryer. Somewhere Gary has hidden the children’s birth certificates, and though she has long given up on finding them, it makes her feel like she is doing something, anything. She imagines herself as someone else might see her, pulling things from dark shelves, shaking out the winter coats, sweeping the dust from the corners. Someone who doesn’t know her, who might just see a simple effort, a small happiness: the search for a misplaced glove, a spring cleaning.

  When she has turned every stone inside, she moves out to the shed. It smells stale, and it’s full of junk – appliances they meant to fix, scrap metal, dusty canning jars. There were always mice. It would make a good hiding place, she thinks.

  It’s dark in the shed and she pulls box after box into the light, watching the time, flipping through old papers and junk, scattering mouse droppings, looking for anything he might have hidden, anything that might help them when they go.

  Beneath stacks of old paper, receipts, a broken answering machine, she sees it. The leather is old and smooth in her hands, and the sickness starts to come over her before she can say why but she knows. It has been eighteen years since she has seen Sam. She would know that collar anywhere.

  “I’m sorry,” she kept saying. “I’m so sorry.” A shard of glass, a fingerprint bruise. Afternoons when Jackson and Lydia hid in the back of the closet with winter coats around their heads so that they wouldn’t hear. She’d known. But there was this other side of their father, too – his hand on Lydia’s bicycle seat when he taught her how to ride, the galloping cant of his shoulders. Once, he ran backwards across the lawn to make them all laugh.

  For as long as she can remember she has been saying to her daughter, “You have to keep dreaming your life. You have to keep dreaming the life you want.”