The ponytail man glares at me. Like he knows I am debating whether to speak to him, to risk making him angrier. “Goddamn thing is always breaking down—is it stuck? What’s stuck? Is something caught in the wheel?”
There’s a chunk of ice caught in the spokes of the left rear wheel. I manage to work it loose as the ponytail man curses and fumes in heavily accented English. “Mademoiselle, merci! You are a très belle jeune fille, très capable.” He reaches out to shake my hand or just to grab it. He’s wearing black leather fingerless gloves like bikers wear. Laughing and baring ruined teeth, and giving off a strong odor of whiskey.
Still, the wheelchair is skidding on wavy patches of ice. I volunteer to push the ponytail man along the sidewalk. Where a moment before he was angry, now he’s genial and even charming. Asking where I am from, I don’t sound like New Hampshire.
“I—I’m not from here. I just live here.”
“‘Not from here. Just live here.’ Moi aussi!”
The ponytail man laughs as if I’ve said something witty. I can see that even with his flushed coarse skin and the ponytail straggling down his muscular back, he’s a good-looking man, accustomed to female attention.
A wheelchair is heavy to push! In just half a block my arms are beginning to ache.
“Here we are, mademoiselle! Merci beaucoup—you are so kind.”
The doorway of Saint-Croix Carpenter & Cabinetmaker.
Crow’s father? The ponytail man? He must be.
Roland Saint-Croix! Must be.
And there suddenly is Crow himself crossing the street in our direction. Crow, in leather jacket, jeans, biker boots. Bareheaded and his spiky hair disheveled in the wind. On his shoulders is a toddler bundled up in a snowsuit, squealing with pleasure at the bouncy piggyback ride. Crow, seeing me, the look on my face, laughs.
“Jenna, is it? Hello.”
I am stricken with embarrassment. I can feel heat rising in my face and can only stammer hello.
He knows. Must know. Why I am here.
The ponytail man is saying in a jovial voice, “You know my son Gabriel, you go to the same school, eh?” and Crow says quickly, seeing how uncomfortable I am, “Jenna isn’t in my class, Papa. She’s younger,” and the ponytail man says, winking at me, “But of course the girl is younger! And pretty too, I can see that.”
Crow introduces me to his father, Roland Saint-Croix, and to le petit Roland, who ignores me, squealing and kicking as he’s swung down into Mr. Saint-Croix’s brawny arms. He’s a beautiful child and obviously spoiled. I’ve never heard such shrieks. Passersby on the sidewalk glance at us, bemused. (Could they think we all belong to the same noisy family?) Except that little Roland has fine taffy-colored hair instead of jet-black hair, and he’s lighter skinned than Crow and Mr. Saint-Croix. Still, the family resemblance among the three is almost comical: deep-set eyes, longish nose, strong chin.
Crow says, an edge of exasperation in his voice, “You want him, Papa? Take him inside, it’s cold out here.”
Crow and his father exchange remarks in French, which I can’t follow. Crow laughs, blushing; Mr. Saint-Croix sniggers, with a glance at me. I guess it must be some sort of sexual innuendo. Like, Roland Saint-Croix is in a wheelchair, still, he’s the father of this young child? That’s the joke?
Crow says, “C’mon inside, Jenna, for a few minutes and get warm. See what Saint-Croix père et fils do for a living.”
Père et fils: father and son.
I love the way Crow says this. The pride in his voice.
I try to explain that I have to meet my aunt, but somehow, I don’t know how, I’m inside the cabinetmaker’s shop with the Saint-Croixes, a bell attached to the door jangles overhead. After the snow-bright sunshine I’m stumbling into things. Crow takes my arm to guide me. “This is—what’s it called?—a maze. You could get lost.”
So many things! The interior of Mr. Saint-Croix’s shop is nearly as crowded as the display window. Everywhere, some stacked on top of one another, are tables, chairs, bureaus. There’s a passageway, just wide enough for Mr. Saint-Croix’s wheelchair, that leads to the rear of the shop, where a radio is playing French pop music. Here are open floor space, worktables, a massive cluttered desk, a tattered easy chair, a hot plate and a coffeemaker, and scattered, very dirty carpets. Little Roland’s toys are underfoot. There’s a strong smell of coffee, varnish, and wood polish. Crow takes me farther to the rear to show me a dining room table he’s restoring: “First I removed the gummy old polish, then I sanded the wood, which is cherrywood—very nice, see?—next I will be staining it. This is a table from maybe 1870, Papa says. The owners didn’t take good care of it. See these carvings? Gummed up with dirt. People don’t know the things that exist under their noses.”
Mr. Saint-Croix—who has wheeled himself briskly to his desk, where he clears a space to set little Roland—calls over contemptuously, “The Americans, not all but most, excuse me, mademoiselle, they are cochons.”
Cochons. I’ve never heard this word before, but somehow I know what it means. “Pigs?”
Mr. Saint-Croix is delighted. Crow laughs. Somehow, Jenna knows a little French.
This visit! With Crow and his father! Like the most wonderful dream you can recall afterward only in fragments.
Crow shows me around the shop as if it’s the most fascinating place in the world. (I guess it is. I’m staring at everything I see.) Crow explains the kind of work his father does, what he has learned from him, and how much he has yet to learn. It’s so strange to hear any guy talking about his father like this. Stranger too to see any adult’s actual work that can be touched. (I don’t even know what my father does, I guess. Makes money?) There’s both pride and exasperation in Crow’s voice. The way he glances over at his father, who’s talking loudly and laughing on the phone, I can see that Crow loves his father, but. “Thanks for being nice to Papa, Jenna. He’s a wild guy, eh?”
“He seems very…”
“Like I told you, he was in Vietnam, came back with some medals, which he threw away. He won’t talk about it. Not even with me. He’s kind of hard to live with mostly. He likes you; he’s on his good behavior with you.”
Little Roland has been devouring a jelly doughnut and has made quite a mess. Mr. Saint-Croix hasn’t been watching him, so Crow goes over to wipe the child’s face with a wetted tissue. It’s strange to see a guy like Crow who looks like a biker—is a biker—so patient with a small child. So tender. It’s like Crow is from some other world, not the suburban world I know. In Tarrytown, he’d stand out. The way, when Crow smiles, you can see that his teeth aren’t the smooth white even teeth you expect.
I’m thinking that Crow loves his little brother, a half brother? I want to confide in him that I have a stepbrother. I’ve met Porter only once. I don’t know him, don’t love him, though.
As if he can read my thoughts, Crow asks about my father. I tell him that my father is a businessman—“successful,” I guess—remarried and living in California in an expensive new house. We don’t see each other very much.
“Why’s that?”
“He left us.”
“‘Us’—like your mother and you?”
Why are you asking me these things? Making me want to cry.
Crow says, frowning, “You don’t want to lose contact with your father, Jenna. He is your father.”
“But—I don’t like him.”
The way I say this, both Crow and I start laughing. It sounds so comical somehow.
“‘Like,’ ‘don’t like’—still, he’s your father. That won’t change.” Crow is watching Mr. Saint-Croix as the red-faced man paws through papers on his desk looking for—what? A stump of a cigar, half smoked. Though little Roland is playing close by, Crow’s father doesn’t hesitate to light up. “Like, with my mom too. Last we heard from her, a few years ago, she sent a crate of citrus fruit for Christmas—grapefruit, oranges, lemons. Just a card saying Merry Christmas.” Crow laughs, ruefully.
Sudde
nly the bell above the front door jangles, and someone comes in briskly. Not a customer, the way she’s clattering in our direction. A glamorous girl in stiletto-heel boots, faux-leopard jacket, and skintight shiny leather trousers, her fleshy face heavily made up and her strawberry-blond hair floating in frizzy waves. She’s noisy and exclamatory, greeting Mr. Saint-Croix and little Roland, stooping to kiss the man’s veiny red cheek and to lift the squealing child in her hands. Her nails are as dazzling as talons: at least two inches long, filed blunt at the ends, the color of frost. Little Roland screams, Mama! and the girl coos, nuzzles, and scolds him. Finally she notices Crow on the other side of the room, and me beside him, and stares at us for a weird rude moment without speaking.
Crow is going to introduce us, but the girl addresses him in a sharp teasing voice as if I’m not here: “Eh, Gabriel! C’est qui ça, ta petite amie avec les yeux adorants?” and Crow mutters, “Qu’est-ce que ça peut te faire?” Impossible to tell if Crow is angry, hurt, or embarrassed, his face has tightened like a mask. Seeing that she has succeeded in upsetting him, the girl in the leopard-skin coat turns her back to us, nuzzling little Roland, who has closed a small, jelly-stained fist in her hair.
I’m thinking that this glamorous girl must be Crow’s older sister. Obviously, little Roland is hers. Now I remember Trina saying that Crow’s sister brought a baby home and that Crow was helping out with the family.
Crow says, “Claudette? I’m going now.”
Without glancing over her shoulder, the girl says, “So? Go.”
Mr. Saint-Croix calls over something to Crow, in his heavily accented English that’s almost indistinguishable from French. Whatever is going on in the family, what the undercurrents of emotion are, no outsider could decode. Claudette and Mr. Saint-Croix are chattering in French and laughing in a way that makes me uncomfortable. Are they talking about me? If so, it’s to annoy Crow, who’s scowling and flush faced. There’s bluish smoke wafting about Mr. Saint-Croix, but Claudette doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, even with little Roland clambering about her feet, she’s lighting up a parchment-colored cigarette and exhaling smoke of her own.
Crow says, “C’mon, Jenna. I’ll drive you.”
It’s past five P.M. Aunt Caroline will be waiting for me in the coffee shop. By now she might know that I skipped my session with Dr. Freer. If she doesn’t, I guess I will have to tell her.
For a dazed moment I think that I will be riding on the back of Crow’s Harley-Davidson, roaring along the Main Street of Yarrow Lake in the cold, gusty air. But it’s a battered minivan behind the shop, with SAINT-CROIX CARPENTER & CABINETMAKER painted in red on its sides. I have to haul myself up into the cab, it’s so high from the ground. The interior of the van is freezing and smells of stale cigar smoke and varnish. The passenger seat is ripped, and the windshield is finely cracked. So strange, and so wonderful, to be alone with Crow like this: like a couple. Our breaths are steaming in the cold air.
Stained rags, styrofoam cups, empty beer cans, and cigar butts are strewn on the minivan floor. I want to laugh, it’s like riding in a mobile junkyard.
Crow asks where to? and I tell him, the coffee shop/bakery on Mount Street. I’m so happy to be here, in this smelly, rattling minivan, I don’t want the ride to ever end. I’m too shy to look at Crow except out of the corner of my eye. But I can see his hands gripping the steering wheel: big knuckles, long fingers, dirt-edged nails. I can feel him close beside me. I’m thinking, If Trina saw me now! My best friend would never forgive me.
I wish I could call Crow by his true name: Gabriel. The name he’s called by his family.
Since Claudette came bursting into the shop, Crow has been acting different. He’s edgy, irritated. Not at me. I guess he must be brooding over his sister, who was so rude to us, and his father, who’s been drinking, and little Roland—his nephew?—and maybe he’s also thinking of his mother, who left (when? why?). I would love to ask Crow about his mother sometime.
If we see each other again. If we are ever alone like this again.
Crow gives me a sidelong glance. Like he’s checking me out.
“This van is something, eh? Not what you’re used to.”
“It’s…very high.”
“Yeah, you look down on other drivers. Some drivers. Mostly, driving a van, people look down on you.”
I’m not sure how to interpret this. Close up, I can see nicks and scars in Crow’s face. I remember he said he’s been in a wreck too. (Maybe more than one?) I wonder if, driving, he thinks of the danger. If there is something scary, and exciting, about driving after you have been in a wreck, and lived.
Crow is a good driver, for sure. The van has a stick shift, which he handles with authority. Next year I will take driver’s ed at school. I mean, it’s required. They don’t teach you stick, though. The thought of driving a car makes me feel excited, sickish.
In a car you can lose control. The weight of the car will propel you forward. Helpless.
Crow says, “It’s been a while since I’ve seen you, Jenna. I heard you almost OD’d at Christmas.”
This is a shock! I don’t know what to say.
I hear myself stammer it was a really stupid mistake…
“The mistake is hanging out with Trina Holland.”
“But Trina is my…”
The minivan is lumbering along Main Street. Crow is an aggressive driver but can’t make much headway in this traffic. I am so surprised at what he’s said. That Crow has any thoughts at all about me. “Trina is, like, my closest friend. I thought you and Trina—”
Crow laughs. Runs his fingers through his hair so it looks fierce and spiky, like the feathers of a savage bird. Meaning—what? He and Trina are broken up? Or never were a couple? Or Crow can handle Trina, Trina and her friends are no danger to him?
I’m kind of stunned. For a long time I’ve been thinking that Crow would be impressed that Trina Holland has time for me. Trina Holland likes me! And aren’t Trina’s friends, the guys she hangs out with, mostly Crow’s friends too?
Maybe something happened between them that I don’t know about.
“It wasn’t Trina’s fault, Crow. It was mine.”
Crow shrugs like okay. Whatever I want to think.
“Jax gave me the pill. You know, Jax Yardman…”
Sure. Whatever.
“I made a mistake; I was feeling kind of bad. I guess I wanted to sleep right through Christmas. Just, like, out.”
“Why?”
“Why—what?”
“Why’d you feel bad?”
This is the question everybody tries to ask me. Aunt Caroline, Uncle Dwight, Dr. Freer. But nobody has asked it blunt and in your face like Crow.
“Because I miss my mother. Maybe you know—my mother and I were in a car crash last May. That’s why I’m here in Yarrow Lake. I live with my aunt now.”
“I heard, yeah. I’m sorry, Jenna.”
Damn if I am going to cry. The way Crow says sorry.
This frayed old safety belt I buckled myself into, I’m glad that it’s holding me tight now. I can feel myself straining against it, like something is trying to throw me forward to hurt me.
Crow asks me what happened, and I tell him: It was a head-on collision, on the Tappan Zee Bridge. My mother lost control of her car. She veered into another lane, hit a truck. She and the other driver died. I was pretty banged up, but I survived. It was thought that the setting sun blinded my mother so she couldn’t see, and everything happened so quickly…. “The Tappan Zee is such a big bridge, did you know, Gabriel? It’s three miles long. I dream about it all the time. The Hudson River is really wide at that point; like a nightmare, it just goes on and on….” I’m out of breath, words are rushing from me. After a pause I hear myself say, “I caused the crash, I think.”
“How?”
Crow is so quick and matter-of-fact. Right away asking me how, like he isn’t judging me or trying to convince me I must be wrong.
“I pulled at the whee
l. I panicked, I guess. There was something on the bridge in front of us—I couldn’t see exactly, the sun was blinding…”
My voice trails off. I can’t believe that I have told Crow this, which I have never told any other person.
“What was it, Jenna, you thought you saw?”
“A deer, maybe. A dog…”
I’m waiting for Crow to ask the obvious question: Was anything found on the bridge in the wreck? A deer, a dog?
I’m waiting for Crow to ask: Have you told anybody? Have you confessed that you caused an accident that killed two innocent people?
But Crow says only, shaking his head, “That’s heavy. For you to keep to yourself. Man!”
Later I will realize that I called Crow Gabriel, and it was so natural-sounding, neither of us noticed at the time. At least I think Crow didn’t notice.
“So anything that happens to Jenna, that’s hurtful and punishing, it’s what she deserves.”
Crow says this like stating a fact. Not trying to argue me out of it.
I’m not crying, but my nose is running; I’m wiping it on the edge of my hand like a little kid. Crow pulls a crumpled tissue out of his pocket and hands it to me without comment. He’s used to wiping little Roland’s nose, I guess.
“Jesus! I know what it’s like, Jenna. Accident-prone.”
He has turned onto Mount Street, where traffic is tight. Up the block is Elvira’s Coffee & Bakery, with a gingerbread man sign that creaks in the wind. It’s strange to me like a dream to be here high in the cab of an unfamiliar vehicle staring out at shops and storefronts that look transformed. “I can get out here, Gabriel. Thank you.”
After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away Page 12