Bones & All Page 12

  He laid The Master and Margarita on top of the pile he was making. “I already know about this one. Andy, right?”

  I nodded. We kept on like that until Lee had gone through every book in my bag. He found north with Dmitri’s glow-in-the-dark compass, and then he opened the little brown case to find the tortoiseshell eyeglasses. “What was his name?”

  “Jamie.”

  “You couldn’t leave his glasses,” Lee said softly. “Otherwise they’d have known right away that something had happened to him.” He laid the glasses case on top of the book pile. “Is that all of them?”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t keep anything from the first time.”

  “Was your babysitter the only girl?”

  I nodded.

  “Why is that, do you think?”

  “I don’t know. None of the girls at school ever wanted to be friends with me.”

  “Lucky for them.”

  For a minute or two I picked at the scab on my knee. I couldn’t let it sting me, what he’d just said. Once again, Lee was right.

  He picked up the books and put them back in my pack. “I’ve never been much of a reader.”

  “Didn’t your mother read you any bedtime stories when you were little?” He shook his head. “She didn’t read to you at all?”

  “I told you, she wasn’t that kind of mom.”

  “Then you never made friends with novels.”

  “I guess I just don’t see the point of it. All the things they used to tell us in school, how we should read all these books and do all these things to better ourselves. Like learning bigger words makes you a better person.”

  “It’s not about that.”

  “There’s no point. I can’t better myself.”

  “But that’s not why I read. When I read a book I can be somebody else. For two or three hundred pages I can have the problems of a normal person—even if that person is traveling through time or fighting with aliens.” I ran my hand over The Master and Margarita. “I need the books. They’re all I’ve got.”

  He looked at me then like he felt sorry for me.

  * * *

  I wanted to know more about his sister, and his mother, and what he did for money besides taking it from people who no longer needed any, and what had happened that he had to sneak around his own hometown. I mean, I had a pretty good idea, but I wanted the story.

  I started with the questions he’d be more likely to answer. “What were you doing before we met? How do you get money to live on?”

  “Farmwork, mostly. Sometimes I just stay for a day or two, other times I stick around for longer. Depends on the farm and what they need me for.”

  “And what do you do during the winter?”

  “Last year I went down to Florida,” he said. “I was driving an old Camaro, that’s the car I had before, and I used to park right on the beach and sleep in a tent on the dunes.” He laughed. “Guess that makes me a snowbird.”

  “Were you there by yourself?”

  “I’m always by myself.” I shot him a look, and he added, “Apart from you.”

  Better an afterthought than none at all. “Do you think you’ll go straight back to Tingley after you leave me in Sandhorn?”

  “I guess it depends on what you find there.”

  That was encouraging. “But I mean, after I get my stuff figured out. After I find my dad. Then what?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll go back.”

  “Does she know?”

  “Who? My sister, or my mother?”

  “Either. Both.”

  “My mom doesn’t know. My sister, well … she knows there’s something wrong with me, but I hope she never knows the whole of it.” He glanced at me. “I’m lucky, I guess. It’s easier for me to hide it.”

  “What happened?”

  “I’ll tell you sometime. Not today.”

  “Can I ask you a different question, then?”

  “Depends on the question.”

  “Why did you eat your babysitter?”

  He scoffed. “She was a sadistic bitch, that’s why. She’d ask me questions, and if I didn’t get the answer she’d pinch me hard. What’s the capital of Mississippi? Why does a cow have three stomachs? Shit like that. I called her the Pinkerwitch. I can’t remember her name now, but I guess it must have been Pinker. She lived down the street. I think she was jealous because she couldn’t have kids. Good thing too.

  “I don’t really remember what her face looked like, except that she had really long teeth and I hated it when she pretended to smile. But I remember what she smelled like. It was this stale, sour smell, like she’d been shut up inside a room for years just talking and talking, nothing but evil words, and never brushing her teeth.”

  I felt a little in awe of him. He’d never spoken so long in one go. “How old were you?”

  “Way too young to know the capital of Mississippi. She was always careful to do it in places where it’d look like I’d just fallen on the playground, banged my arm on the monkey bars, something like that. I told you my mom’s done a lot of stupid things in her life, but she’s not that stupid. The last time it happened—the day I ate the Pinkerwitch—I remember my mom kneeling down and whispering in my ear as she was leaving. She said, This will be the last time you have to stay with her, I promise. I couldn’t find anyone else. Kayla was a baby, and she had to take her to the doctor. I don’t know why she didn’t take me with her—I wasn’t the best kid in the world, but I could be good and quiet if she made me understand it was important.

  “Anyway, I didn’t really believe it would be the last time—my mom said stuff like that when she didn’t mean it—so that day something in me just snapped.”

  “What was it like? The first time?”

  Lee exhaled a long, slow whistle. “I got such a rush. Every time I do it, I get a rush. I knew anyone else would think it was wrong, but I still felt like some weird new kind of superhero.”

  We drove in silence for a minute or two before I said, “If I have to be like this, I wish I could be like you.”

  “It’s not that different.”

  I stared at him. “It’s completely different.”

  “They’re different. But you like it as much as I do.”

  I felt a hot surge of anger in the pit of my stomach. “That’s not true,” I said in a small voice. “You’re just saying that because you don’t understand. You only know how it is for you.” But a part of me was running, away from Lee and into the dark.

  He glanced at me. “I told you, Maren. I’m not just gonna tell you what you want to hear.”

  I pressed my fingers against my eyes. I didn’t want to see the words on the walls. “You don’t understand.”

  “I do. You know I do.” He waited for me to admit it, then gave up. “Fine,” he said. “You win. So are we done talking, or what?”

  “No,” I said, but only because I wanted to forget all this. “Go on. You were talking about the Pinkerwitch.”

  “Yeah. Anyway. Even that first time I knew I’d better clean up after myself. When my mom came back she figured the Pinkerwitch had just left me there and gone home. Even when one of the other neighbors came by and told us she was missing, my mom never suspected I had anything to do with it. I guess that’s what happens to bad babysitters. I remember her saying that.”

  “Do you miss her?”

  “My mom? Hell no. Maybe she’s got a good heart, but everything she does drives me crazy. Drank too much with all the wrong guys, never finished school ’cause she dropped out to have me, finally got off welfare and could only get jobs so lousy she never stayed at them long. And her boyfriends, they were the worst part. She went out with some jerk everyone in town knew had gone to prison for beating his wife, and she said I didn’t really know him, I should give him a chance. There were others who were just as bad. I never knew my dad, never knew Kayla’s.” He sighed. “Even without me being the way I am, it just got too hard to be around her. I get so frustrated with her, y�
��know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I always wanted her to pick a good guy, a guy who’d stick around. Other kids had dads. Y’know, guys who actually did stuff with them. Did stuff for them. It didn’t seem like it’d be that hard for my mom to find a guy like that.”

  “But she never did.”

  He shook his head. “What’s your mom like?” When he glanced away from the road he met my eye, waiting for an answer. This wasn’t Lee making conversation. He wanted to know, and he didn’t care that I didn’t want to talk about it.

  “She could type ninety words a minute.”

  Lee whistled appreciatively. “What else?”

  “She didn’t really cook. A lot of the time we had grilled cheese and chicken noodle soup out of a can for dinner.”

  “You could do worse for dinner than grilled cheese and chicken noodle soup out of a can. What else?”

  “She used to bend over the rim of the bathtub to color her hair.” I thought of those nights we’d curl up on the couch under our comforters watching You Can’t Take It with You, her wet hair under a towel turned up and twisted around her head. “And she liked to watch old movies. Singin’ in the Rain, White Christmas, all the Frank Capra ones.”

  “Who’s Frank Capra?”

  “He made It’s a Wonderful Life.”

  “Never saw it.”

  “It’s always on TV at Christmas. It’s a classic.”

  “Nobody wanted to watch that kind of stuff at my house.” He smiled wryly. “Musicals are corny.”

  “So what?” I said. “They’re the best kind of fantasy. All these beautiful people breaking out into song because talking about what they’re feeling wouldn’t be good enough.”

  Lee looked at me like I’d just burped out a goldfish. I reddened, and he smoothed it over. “Go on,” he said.

  “She read a lot, but she didn’t hold on to books once she’d finished them. She could fit everything she owned into one suitcase.”

  “Did she ever yell at you?”

  “No.”

  “Did she ever tell you that you were a monster?”

  “No.”

  “Did she ever see you do it?”

  I shuddered. “God—no.”

  “But you told her?”

  “I had to. She would have found out anyway.”

  “But that’s not why you told her.”

  “No. I guess not.”

  “You wanted her to make it right.”

  “That’s how it is when you’re small. You think your mother can fix anything.”

  Lee smiled. “Not my mother.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sorry.”

  I flipped through the road atlas on my lap. The next morning we’d be passing around Chicago.

  “Hey,” he said. “You want to drive the rest of the way to the park? The traffic’s pretty light, and you can just stay in the right lane.”

  “I can’t. I’m not ready.”

  He shrugged. “You’re ready if you say you’re ready. Sure you don’t want to try?”

  If I turned him down, he’d only think less of me. So I spent an hour in a tense perch behind the wheel, reminding myself aloud to press the clutch before I attempted to shift. A few cars sped by in the left lane, honking their horns. “Don’t pay any attention,” Lee said. “You’re doing fine.”

  We did not get into an accident, nor did we get pulled over by the cops. That counted as a success.

  * * *

  After dinner we lay down in the flatbed, and Lee turned on his transistor radio. At first all we could find on the AM dial were ball games or political blather, and then I tuned in to this:

  “… You know, we are all brothers and sisters even though we don’t often act like it. Everyone in line at the supermarket checkout, everyone waiting with you at the stoplight, everyone you glimpse in passing on your way to work every morning…”

  The man sounded like an old-fashioned preacher, except he was actually making some sense. He had this fierce, trembling, wonderful voice, and I just laid there staring at the radio resting on the plywood between us, listening as if my life depended on it.

  “That colleague of yours who can’t seem to say anything nice to or about anybody: she’s your sister. The thief who broke into your house and emptied out your jewelry box: he’s your brother. We must forgive one another!” I could picture the speaker so clearly: tall and thin, with a long nose and a knobby Adam’s apple, looking very earnest in a gray suit and a crimson bow tie.

  I only realized the radio program was live when a chorus of voices called (faintly, but only because they were so far from the mic): “Amen! Tell it, Reverend!”

  The preacher went on: “And yet we cannot forgive one another until we have forgiven ourselves.” He regarded his audience through thick black eyeglasses like men used to wear in the sixties, and he had a little nick of a scar on one brow where his sister’s ice skate had sliced him at the age of six.

  The audience gave a warm, rumbling reply. “Hallelujah! Forgive and be forgiven, Brother!” They’d driven long distances to be there tonight, no matter how many times they’d already seen him. This was one of those churches where people swayed and trembled and called out in praise of the man who died for their sins. (I had never been able to figure out how exactly that worked.)

  “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? Forgiveness. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it, Brother?”

  “Sure is, Reverend,” called a distant voice.

  I closed my eyes and saw myself at the front of the crowd. The man in the crimson bow tie turned to me and held out his hand in welcome. “And you, Sister. Why are you here?”

  I opened my mouth but someone else answered for me, in a tinny voice on the radio: “To forgive and be forgiven.”

  Lee yawned. “Anywhere you go, anywhere in this country, there’s nobody but Jesus freaks on the radio.”

  “This guy isn’t some ordinary Jesus freak,” I said. “I like what he has to say.”

  “Sure, sure. They lure you in with all that happy stuff about love and acceptance, then after they’ve got you they start telling you they need more money and Jesus doesn’t want you for a fair-weather friend.”

  “… The Lord says, ‘There is no peace for the wicked.’ Don’t we all want to know peace? Yes—yes, I tell you! Even the wickedest man alive yearns for peace.…”

  Lee reached out a hand for the radio dial, and I batted it away. “Do you mind?” I said impatiently.

  He rolled his eyes. “Forgive me, Sister Maren.”

  I turned up the volume to drown out his grumbling. “Now I want to tell you something. We’ve been doing these Midnight Missions all across the country for quite a long time now, and I’ve heard from all sorts of people. They’ve sinned against themselves, and they’ve sinned against each other. They stand up and they say, “Reverend, sometimes it’s just too hard to be good.”

  Lee snorted. “Now that I can agree with.”

  “And I say to them, ‘Let the Lord in. Let Him in and He will show you how to be good.’”

  The audience erupted in applause and reverent exclamations, and then an announcer came on. “The Reverend Thomas Figtree of the Nazarene Free Church will hold his Midnight Mission at Harmony Hall in Plumville on Sunday, June seventh, beginning at ten PM. That’s tomorrow night, folks.”

  “I don’t get why you’d want to listen to any of that,” Lee said as a commercial for auto insurance came on. “It’s not as if any of it applies to us.”

  “How do you know it doesn’t?”

  “It just doesn’t. There’s no place for us in their picture of the world. If they knew what we were, they’d think even hell would be too good a sentence for us.” He rolled over on his makeshift bed and plumped up his meager camping pillow. “Besides,” he said to the flatbed wall, “Jesus wouldn’t want me on my best day, let alone my worst.” A moment later he turned back to face me. He’d heard me paging through the road atlas. “What are you doing?”

&nbs
p; “I want to see how far we are from Plumville.”

  “Oh, Maren, don’t tell me you actually want to go to that thing.” He reached for the radio, and this time I let him turn it off. “Let me tell you something. One time last year my sister got dragged to one of those things by this so-called ‘friend’ of hers. They wanted Kayla to speak, so she got up and said she wasn’t sure if she believed in God because of all the horrible things going on in the world, and guess what happened? Can you guess?”

  I shrugged.

  “They booed her out of the room, that’s what. I bet they’d have thrown rotten tomatoes at her, if they’d had any, and Kayla’s never killed so much as a spider.”

  “Reverend Figtree wouldn’t throw tomatoes.”

  Lee sighed. “Tell you what. If you promise to go into that hall tomorrow night and tell your precious Reverend Figtree exactly who you are and what you’ve done, then I will gladly accompany you.” He shot me a hard look. “Are you willing to do that?”

  I curled myself up in his sleeping bag and didn’t answer. It was stupid even to imagine that somebody could give me absolution without knowing what I’d done.

  “You think you’re looking for the truth, Maren,” Lee said as I tossed and turned, trying to find the least uncomfortable position on the plywood. “But if you’d rather live inside some preacher’s little bubble of sunshine and certainty, then you might as well call it what it is.”

  * * *

  When I fell asleep and the pictures welled up out of the darkness, of course I was at the Midnight Mission. It was in a church, not a hall. There were stained glass windows rising up, up, up into the gloom of the rafters, and inside the windows the martyrs met their deaths in spectacular ways. Lions, dragons, bonfires of gold and crimson. Out of the corner of my eye I saw there were words painted on the stone walls beneath the windows, but I knew I couldn’t read them, so I didn’t turn to look. All around me, the congregation was singing a hymn in a language that didn’t exist.

  I was walking up the aisle. The people touched my arm as I went by, and called me Sister. Kneel down, the Reverend said. There was a hard glint in his eyes, and I was afraid of him. Kneel down for your blessing, Sister Maren.

  I knelt, and he stood over me and laid his palms on the crown of my head. I felt my face getting hot, and all I wanted was to be out of there, gone, back in the flatbed with a friend who would never hurt me. I felt a wave of laughter breaking over the crowd, a thousand strangers smirking behind their hands. Forgiveness was a word that belonged to that other language, the one that vanished as soon as I woke up.