Call Me Home

by Megan Kruse

  Anita laughed. “I sure feel it,” she said. “How old are you, now? Just a baby.”

  “I just turned fourteen,” I said, “two days ago.” On the night of my birthday, my grandmother made tamales, wrapped in corn husks and foil, and my mother poured me a glass of wine thinned with 7-Up, and we kept toasting to nothing, to Fannin, to fourteen, to the best tamales this side of the San Marcos, to the San Marcos.

  “Oh, these are the salad days,” she said. “Don’t ever get old.”

  I kept sifting through the sawdust, passing eggs to Anita. She was stooped under the chicken wire, puffing a little from the walk, and I felt brave. “Didn’t you have any kids?” I asked.

  “Ah,” she said quickly. “No, no.”

  Lie, I thought. Anita looked flustered. She dropped an egg and crouched down to pick it up. “Ah, never mind me,” she said. “Always clumsy.” She had a dark face when she said it. She ducked out of the coop and brushed herself off. “That’s about how many we need, isn’t it? A dozen for you and a few for me.”

  I followed her back to the kitchen and she put the full crate into a grocery bag.

  “How much are they?” I asked, and she shook her head.

  “Oh, nothing,” she said, waving her hand. “A birthday present. And for keeping an old woman company.” She turned to the counter, where there was a bowl and a jar of mayonnaise. “I’m making a crab salad, if you and your sister are hungry.”

  “I said I’d be home for dinner.” Another lie.

  “You sure are pretty,” Anita said. “You have those nice dark eyes. I’ve always loved dark eyes. I wanted a daughter.”

  “Why didn’t you have one?” I asked. My mouth shook around the edges of the question.

  “Oh, honey,” Anita said. “Me and my husband –” She stopped for a minute, holding one of the eggs in her hands. “Me and my husband – he’s out working now – a place like this will just work you to death. We did have a son – I don’t know why I said that, just now, that I didn’t – you just caught me off guard. He was the joy of my life, and then – he just went away from me. He and his father – they were just oil and water to each other, and as he got older he was so angry, just mad at the whole world. Something changed in him.” She wasn’t looking at me, just holding the egg. “It broke my heart.”

  I could see the kitchen fan pointed at me, its purring blade, but I couldn’t hear a sound. Sweat ran down my back. “What happened?” I asked.

  Anita looked tired. “I sure don’t know, honey. I’ve asked myself that and I’ll keep asking myself that every day that I walk this earth.” She opened a drawer and shut it again. “The delight of my life, and then he turned thirteen, fourteen, and it was like he was gone from me.” She looked at me and then away. “I’m talking too much,” she said. “You don’t need to hear an old lady’s sob story.” She shook her head.

  I smiled. I wanted to say something important. I wished I could give her something but I didn’t know what, and she was opening the drawer again, turning away, looking through the cupboards. “Thank you for the eggs,” I said finally.

  “You come back,” Anita said. “And remember, keep your eggs three days old. People talk about putting them in the icebox, but don’t listen.”

  It was in her voice, in the way she talked and talked. A sadness like that is as clear as your name.

  “WHAT ON EARTH do you need a dozen eggs for?” my mother asked, but we made the cake that night, with a recipe from my grandmother’s Betty Crocker. I felt happy. Lighter, even if I didn’t know much more than I had before. My grandmother Linda had pulled out a cardboard box of old photographs and she was going through them while we baked, holding up one photo and another. “Just look at this,” she would say. “Look at what a doll your mother was. And your grandfather! That was back when men were still handsome.”

  While the cake cooled, we sat at the table and looked close at the photos. When we lived in Washington, I thought of my parents as coming from nowhere, as though they had grown straight out of the woods, out of the little house, and their lives had not begun until Jackson and I were there to watch them. Now, in Texas, my mother’s life before me was all there, in the photographs: My mother when she was a chubby baby, with her feet dangling in the river, held up by my grandmother. Sitting on her father’s lap with her fingers in her mouth. I stared long at my grandfather’s face with the carved out space in his jaw. He was my grandfather, but the scars on his face made him look like a monster, and I felt bad for the man he could have been. Pictures of my mother in her prom dress, her hair sprayed above her head and still in her face like a bride’s tall veil.

  I waited until my grandmother had gone back to take a shower, though I didn’t know why. “What did Dad’s parents look like?” I asked, and my mother leaned back in her chair.

  “Would you believe I never met them?” she said. “He didn’t like to talk about them. He said they weren’t close, that they were always fighting. It probably seems crazy, that I never knew them, but it always seemed like talking about them made your dad angry, and I was so young – I let it go. I kept thinking that as you kids got older he’d make up with them and we’d all meet them together. It does seem crazy now. And then it was too late, and I didn’t know if they were safe or not.” She sighed. “We were married so quickly.” She picked up a photo of herself as a baby lying on her back on a blanket and put it back down. “It does seem crazy now,” she said again.

  “I think they were safe,” I said. I thought about Anita gathering the eggs, the look on her face when I asked her if she had children. It was the look that my father left behind, of something made dark and ruined. It was the way the honey tasted. The look of the field when the fire went out. One day, I thought, I’d tell my mother what I knew. Not yet, but one day.

  “It’s nice to think that, isn’t it?” my mother said. She pulled out a roll of foil. “Let’s go down to the river. We’ll take the cake.”

  It wasn’t dark yet, but there were clouds. The evening sun shot through them and made the leaves on the trees glow silver and bright. We sat on the rocks next to the river where my grandmother had told me that my grandfather used to swim before the war, before the scars, when they were young and in love. If you followed it, it would cross my little fort. My mother sat right in the rocks and scrubby grass. I wasn’t angry at her anymore, just at my father. He was a sharp bead that I carried in my pocket, and I couldn’t stop turning it over at the same time that I tried not to touch. It might always be that way, I thought, but I could also imagine it growing less sharp. I could imagine that one day I might not be afraid of turning into him.

  “I love this river,” my mother said. “When I hear the word river, this is what I think.” She unwrapped the two ragged pieces of cake and handed one to me. A snow of crumbs fell down her wrist and onto the ground. Everyone belonged to a place, I thought. It didn’t matter if you’d gone forever. You might never come home, but it was still inside of you. Texas was wound inside my mother like a tight bright string. And Washington was inside me, I thought. On the backside of my skin were the branches of trees. The darkness, the mountains hidden behind forest and silver sky.

  “Do you know what I mean?” my mother asked.

  The cake was sweet, light as clouds. I remembered being five or six, standing at the kitchen window in Washington and pointing to the place where I would put my own mobile home. I was so small and already I was aching for that place, even while I was still there, even with all of the bad things, or maybe because I knew that those things meant that one day it would all end. I will live here forever, I told myself then. At night I lay in the bunk bed built from two-by-fours, eyes clenched shut, my teeth against the pillow. I will be here until I die, I promised. I remember I touched my lips to my hand, to my ring finger.

  “Yeah,” I said, leaning against her. In the green of the river there were tiny fish scattering, streaming by like stars.

  If you said it and kissed your left finger, it meant
forever, if you said it until the promise inside you was loud as your heart, and I did.

  Jackson

  U.S. 30 East, 2010

  THEY WENT TO THE DRY CREEK CEMETERY IN BOISE, FIRST, and stood on the edge of the canal, high on the cliff, listening for the sounds of a horse that was supposed to be running. The only sound was the wind, but Jackson tried; for Randy he leaned into the bitter cold air, trying to hear a whip, a clopping, and by the time they climbed back into the car and pressed their ice fingers to the lukewarm vents, he couldn’t say for sure he hadn’t.

  They had a list: Kimama old town, where a woman sang whispery notes in Russian in the dark. Ammon Park in Pocatello, to find the ghost girl in a blue dress on the four-in-the-morning swings. Maybe they’d go down to Alcatraz, or east to Nebraska, where a man in Nebraska City had hung each of his sisters on the different hills outside of town, on to Ohio, the Athens Lunatic Asylum.

  It seemed like Randy’s world was bigger than his own, like Randy himself was bigger for all of the strings that tethered him to the world, filaments shooting from the Internet, mailing lists, letters he wrote. Randy was good at having friends, Jackson thought. Jackson didn’t care much about any of the places they were going, but the sum of it was something. He had the feeling that it would mean more if Randy wasn’t alone. If Randy wasn’t the only one in the world this was important to.

  They parked outside Pocatello as the sun was coming up. They’d been drinking in the park, waiting for the ghost girl in the blue dress, and now they lay side by side with the car seats jacked back, the bottle of whiskey wedged between the parking brake and Jackson’s seat.

  “An Easter dress,” Randy said. “Baby blue, with white lace.” He reached for the bottle. “God, I can’t believe we didn’t see her. Or hear the swings or anything.” He took a drink and spluttered a little. Randy didn’t drink much, but Jackson could tell it was a point of pride to make it seem like he did. “Brown hair,” he said. “Shoulder length.”

  Maybe he was drunk, too, but Jackson was glad they hadn’t seen anything. It was the brown hair, maybe: he kept imagining it was Lydia in that dress, and he didn’t like to think about it. How strange, even imagining that if something happened to her he wouldn’t know. No one in the world to tell him. Or no one for his mother to tell. He took the bottle from Randy. “So, what about what you said?” he asked. “About them?” He took a drink, held it in his mouth, swallowed. It burned. “I mean, finding them.” He didn’t want to bug Randy about it, but at the same time he didn’t care.

  “I’m working on it,” Randy said. “I need the Internet, man. We’ll need to stop the next time we can.” He sighed. “Shit, though, I can’t believe the swing didn’t even move.”

  With his index finger, Jackson cut a line through the condensation that had gathered on the inside of the window. “Maybe she got scared off,” Jackson said. “We smell like shit.”

  Randy laughed. “Maybe we should get a motel tomorrow,” he said. “Or truck stops! They have showers there.”

  Jackson had the feeling that Randy had money but that in Randy’s mind motels weren’t part of all of this. The idea of a truck stop shower turned Jackson on, made him feel like a pervert. All those big dirty men soaping up next to each other, fumbling for quarters when the water went out.

  “And they have waitresses,” Randy said, and Jackson laughed. It was all the same and different. The truck stop was never just a truck stop.

  “And truckers,” Jackson said. Even with Don, he wouldn’t have said something like that. It occurred to him that he and Don hadn’t said much to each other. Not really.

  It was quiet for a while, and then Randy said, “I’ll never get laid.” Even though Jackson knew, of course he knew, that Randy was a virgin, it still surprised him to hear the words hanging in the damp, close air.

  “No way,” Jackson said finally. “There’s going to be tons of girls.”

  Randy snorted. “Right,” he said. “Who are you talking to, here? I’ll never – be in love.” He took another drink from the bottle. It was so dark in the car, but Jackson could see the faintest light on the bottle, hear the whiskey pour into Randy’s mouth. It felt sexy, to be in the car, talking about love, the whiskey smell around them, Randy’s mouth open, the liquor dripping in.

  “I’ll never be in love,” Randy said again. “I mean, I’m sure I will, but – but, no girl will love me.”

  “Hey,” Jackson said. He wanted badly, all of a sudden, to tell Randy that someone would love him. He believed it, too. He imagined that Randy would live alone, but that certain girls would love him terribly. “That’s not true,” he said.

  They were quiet for a while. Jackson wasn’t sure if Randy was asleep. “You will,” he said after a while. “And they will.” There wasn’t an answer, but he said it one more time.

  IN A LIBRARY in St. Louis, Randy turned up published lists of name changes, pages upon pages scrolling across the beige computer monitor, but nothing was right. He tried to find recent title transfers on cars that matched the one Jackson’s mother had been driving. They stayed in St. Louis for three days, and Randy asked Jackson questions: “Would they go north? South? Warm or cold weather? How likely was the car to break down? How many miles did it have on it?”

  “I don’t know,” Jackson kept saying. The country grew bigger. There were more and more corners that his mother and sister might have slipped around. More places they might have gone to become strangers.

  They pulled out of St. Louis early on a Tuesday afternoon heading across the Mississippi and past the burnt-out edges of East St. Louis. What kept occurring to him was loneliness, how lonely it had been, and how it was only going to keep on; he had been without his family for months now, and it was still only the very beginning. It was that thought, the wish for someone in the world who knew his mother or Lydia well, that made it occur to him. There was one person, though he’d never met her. He imagined himself going to her and talking with her, and the possibility of it was such a relief; but her name, he thought – what is my grandmother’s name? In a moment of grace, from somewhere deep in his mind, he remembered: Linda.

  They had been driving silently, Randy defeated and Jackson fighting off the loneliness. “Linda Merrick,” he said to Randy. “Can you find that name? Somewhere outside of San Antonio?”

  Randy didn’t take his eyes off the road. I-70 East unspooled in front of them. “Do you know how old she is?”

  “I can guess,” he said.

  What did he know of his grandmother? He remembered being very young, and hearing his mother talk about her. Grandma was a shimmery idea in the back of his mind, someone kind and unformed, and absent – someone who hadn’t come for them. Still, he thought. She might have tried and his father would have kept her away. And maybe she looked like his mother. Maybe she looked like him. It seemed like his best answer – to find her. She’d know something important that would lead him one day to his mother, or she would know him, somehow, in some secret blood way.

  It was still humid in late fall, but the wind was picking up; it seemed like it might storm. The library they found in East St. Louis was surrounded by heaps of brick. People milled outside smoking. It took Randy twenty minutes on a desktop to find the number. 830-963-2314. “Landlines – listed landlines!” Randy shook his head and laughed. “It’s like going back in time.”

  Jackson’s shitty phone that he never used was dead again and stuffed somewhere in the back of the car, so he took a handful of sticky coins from the glove compartment and went to the pay-phone outside. His hands were shaking and it took too many quarters; it didn’t work, and then it was ringing, and a voicemail picked up after two rings. He hadn’t thought of that option, that no one would answer. Randy was leaning against the car and gave him a thumbs-up. The dumb sweetness of it calmed him down enough to speak, to say, “My name is Jackson, I think you’re my grandmother,” and he read off the number from the sticker on the phone box.

  There was nothing to do
then but wait. He realized how stupid it was, but he couldn’t change it now. He stayed in the phone booth. Randy went into the library, and Jackson was left alone. An hour, he thought, or two; maybe he would leave another message with his cell number. There was a flattened pack of cigarettes in his jacket but he didn’t have a lighter.

  It was only twenty or thirty minutes. He hadn’t thought it would happen, and when the phone rang it was shrill and he was suddenly afraid. He readied himself and reached for the receiver. It was cold on his ear and his voice hardly came out to say hello, but her voice was coming at him, the first voice he’d ever heard. It was his mother and she was crying. He leaned on the silver cord, his whole weight on this phone. Where were they? He was crying, suddenly. “I’m sorry,” he said, and she said, “We’re here, where are you?”

  IT WAS LATE afternoon now, almost sundown. He walked back to the car, his body buzzing and electric. He must have told Randy, because Randy drove them back out of East St. Louis and then they were on I-44, heading southwest. Jackson stared straight ahead, the sound of the phone still ringing out to his fingers. Finally, Randy turned the radio dial with painstaking care, looking for his station. “Better get used to it,” he said. “I have a printout that shows me the stations all the way from here to Texas.”

  Jackson laughed and rolled down the window and gulped the fall air. Heat was still spreading through him. His eyes kept tearing up and he laughed again. He was suddenly unbearably thirsty and he reached for the half-empty jug of water in the backseat and drank it all the way down. He didn’t know what to feel; happiness, he thought was too simple. There were regrets in him that would always be there, and small wonderful things, too. A small thing, to not be thirsty. He opened the glove compartment and took out the map. He unfolded it on his lap. Randy kept fiddling with the radio. Jackson kicked at his backpack at his feet. It was empty, except for the photograph, Eric’s tie, the knife. He had nothing of Don’s. Even the notes he’d drowned in the river. To think of how badly he’d hoped for their life together to be delivered and made real, while Don had been burning in shame.