Bones & All Page 20

  “Hi,” I said. “This is Maren—Lee’s friend? At your aunt’s house that time?”

  “Oh yeah,” she said slowly. “I remember.”

  “I wanted to say hello to you that day, but…”

  “Yeah,” she said. “It’s okay. Is my brother with you?”

  “You mean he’s not there?”

  “He hasn’t been back since that time you were here.” She paused. “Is he all right?”

  “I’m sure he is. We … sort of had an argument. I guess I just wanted to come back here and make it up to him.”

  “Did he tell you he was coming home?”

  “Yeah. But he probably got tied up somewhere. Maybe he found some work.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.”

  There was something else I wanted to tell her, but I didn’t know how to begin. Fortunately she saved me the trouble. “I have to leave for work now, but do you think you could meet me there later and we could talk? I’m done at eight.” She paused. “If you want, I can probably get you a free ice cream cone.”

  I smiled at the receiver. “Thanks,” I said. “That would be great.”

  * * *

  True to her word, Kayla met me in the parking lot at Halliday’s Ice Cream Parlor with a double scoop of peanut butter fudge. She got in the passenger’s seat. Between licks I asked, “Did you pass your driver’s test?”

  She nodded. “I had to borrow my friend’s truck, so I was a little nervous, but I did all right. Remembered to stop at the stop sign and all that. Lee said if I could learn to parallel park with a pickup truck then I’d be good to go, and he was right.”

  I smiled. “That’s great.”

  She pulled down the sun visor and looked at herself in the mirror. “I see you passed yours too.” I shook my head, and her eyes went wide. “You mean you drove all the way here without a license?”

  “Never got pulled over or anything. Your brother’s a good teacher.”

  She flashed me a sad smile and watched me slurp down the ice cream. Once I’d swallowed the last bite of waffle cone I was ready to tell her the other reason I’d come back to Tingley.

  “Lee said he wanted you to have a car,” I said. “So I want you to have this one. Just get Lee to replace the plates for you the next time he’s home.”

  Kayla stared at me, her mouth wide open.

  “Just please don’t ask me whose car it was. I didn’t steal it, and that’s all you need to know.”

  * * *

  In the morning she poured two bowls of Count Chocula, and we ate on the front steps. “You could stay here awhile,” Kayla said. “Wait ’til Lee gets back. My mom wouldn’t mind.” Their mother hadn’t been home since I arrived.

  “Thanks,” I said. “That’s really nice of you. But I don’t think Lee would want me to.”

  She made a face. “I don’t think he would either. I just can’t figure out why.”

  “He loves you more than anybody. He wants to protect you.”

  “Protect me from what?”

  I sighed.

  “It has to do with Rachel, doesn’t it? Did he tell you about Rachel?”

  I nodded.

  “I liked Rachel,” she said sadly.

  “Lee said she’s still in the hospital.”

  “I tried to go see her once, after it first happened,” Kayla said. “They wouldn’t let me in.”

  “My dad is in one of those places.” I stirred the chocolaty milk at the bottom of the cereal bowl. “A place called Bridewell, in Wisconsin.”

  Kayla set down her bowl and patted me on the shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

  I showered and changed into a spare set of her clothes. I wanted to ask for a black T-shirt, but I thought better of it.

  She drove me back to the interstate, and I got out carrying Travis’s backpack filled with food, another change of clothing, and two Madeleine L’Engle novels Kayla had scrounged up for me.

  Kayla turned off the engine. “Are you absolutely sure you want to give me your car?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I guess I’ll make my way back to Bridewell.”

  “To visit your dad? And then what?”

  I shrugged. Going back to Wisconsin felt like climbing into Sully’s open jaw, but I didn’t know where else to go.

  “When Lee comes home, I’ll tell him to meet you there.”

  I smiled as she got out and came around the front bumper to embrace me. It was kind of her, but I knew there was no point hoping he’d follow through.

  * * *

  This time, miraculously enough, I had no trouble hitchhiking. The second day I made it as far as Oberon, Kentucky, where the middle-aged couple I’d been traveling with treated me to a meatloaf special and a hot fudge sundae at an all-night diner. Thanks to Travis, I stayed at a motor inn, took a long hot bath, and fell asleep with the television on.

  The next morning I went for a walk in the hills. I crossed a covered wooden bridge over a trickling river, passed laundry on the line outside a ramshackle farmhouse here and there. I didn’t know where I was going, but for the first time in weeks I felt no anxiety. Being with Kayla had made me feel better about a lot of things. If I never saw Lee again, it was all the better for him. Travis had gotten what he’d asked for, and if Sully wanted to finish me off, then let him come. I would be ready.

  I came to a bend in the road and paused to admire the view. An ancient red barn stood at the edge of a meadow—a field, really, but it hadn’t been tilled for years—and beyond it, all around, was a dense tract of pine trees rising to a crest in the near distance.

  The barn belonged to a farmhouse across the road. The house and yard were enclosed by a white picket fence in a shoddy state of repair, and the house itself was no better off. Some of the windows were broken, and there was a water-stained condemned notice stapled to the front door. No one had lived here for years.

  I lifted the latch on the little wooden gate and walked around the building. There was a covered well in the backyard and a small lean-to stocked with rusting tools. I drew out a hatchet and hefted it in my hand. A modest garden plot, encircled by chicken wire, still yielded a spray of basil or rosemary between the weeds and wildflowers.

  I went across the road to check out the barn. The latch on the door was still secure, and when I opened it a few nesting birds made their protests from the rafters. Though the stalls were empty, the room still smelled sweetly of hay and cow manure, and the ladder to the loft seemed sturdy enough to support my weight. I climbed up and looked out the window into the trees. I couldn’t have asked for a better hiding spot.

  I walked back down to the highway and picked up a tent, a sleeping bag, a gallon of water, and a few other necessaries from an army and navy store near the motor inn. This time I remembered the can opener.

  * * *

  For weeks I lived on canned beans and the remnants of the kitchen garden, sleeping in my new tent in the loft with the hatchet at my side. In my dreams my father came to me and smiled as he held out his hand. I opened my mouth and he put his hand inside. I ran down the winding corridors, the walls stained with words, and one by one I found them, each of them, waiting for me in the dark. Even Sully, slumped on the ground with his back against the wall, taking me in with a weary glance before offering his neck.

  I walked down the highway to a drugstore and bought two big bottles of Listerine, and that night I drowned in an ocean of cinnamon-flavored mouthwash. When I woke up I could even feel the burn in my nose.

  Some afternoons, as I sat on the barn roof looking out over the road with Troubling a Star splayed on my knee, I would spot a rusted red pickup turning the bend in the road, and I’d forget what I’d dreamed and feel my heart suddenly stuck in my throat. Other times I imagined going on living like that forever, doing no harm to anyone or anything as I said hello and goodbye to the sun each day, and made up my own patterns between the stars.

  Then, of course, it would rain all day, or
I’d find a dead frog in the well, or some neighbors would draw uncomfortably near, and I’d think better of living there indefinitely. There were no secondhand bookshops along that little stretch of highway, and the farmhouse yielded nothing beyond a candle, a stack of decade-old newspapers, and a box of matches.

  So the last week of July I packed up my things and climbed down the ladder for the last time, leaving the hatchet on the floor of the hayloft. It had made me feel safe, but I couldn’t hitchhike with an ax in my hand.

  * * *

  A woman trucker—a Beatles fan who pretty much lived on Red Bull and those little packages of orange peanut butter crackers—dropped me off in Tarbridge three days later. I walked up the road to Bridewell, hoping the black truck would be there but feeling sick with certainty that it wouldn’t be.

  It wasn’t there.

  It wasn’t there.

  And then it was.

  I found him dangling his legs off the edge of the flatbed, Barry Cook’s Stetson shading his eyes from the afternoon sun. He held a can of Pepsi in one hand and a magazine in the other. I came around the back of the truck, dropped my backpack on the gravel, took one look at him, and hid my face in my hands.

  “Hey.” I felt his hands resting gently on my shoulders. “Hey. It’s all right. I knew we would find each other again.” I wanted him to put his arms around me, but I had to settle for his fingers on my hair, stroking and smoothing as if I were a downhearted child.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “What were you doing?”

  “Oh, you know. Making myself useful.” He flashed that wry smile of his. “Found a mechanic who needed a bit of extra help, so I stayed with him for a couple weeks.” Lee looked down at my new bag and frowned. “What happened to your rucksack?”

  “Lost it.”

  “And everything in it?”

  I nodded.

  “Even ET?”

  “Even ET.”

  He shrugged. “Oh well.”

  I wiped my eyes with the heels of my hands. “So was this perfect timing, or what?”

  “That’s what you think,” he said, but he was smiling. “I’ve been sitting here every day for a week. Didn’t even have my knitting to keep me company.”

  He sat on the flatbed, and I hopped up beside him. He opened another can of soda and handed it to me. “I’m not knitting anymore,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  I thought of the woman in the wheelchair at Bridewell, and of Mrs. Harmon’s yarn and needles stuffed in Sully’s cabinet of other people’s things. “Long story.”

  “Thank you for giving that car to Kayla. That really meant a lot to me.”

  Of course it did. That’s why I’d done it. “Sure,” I said. “Did you get new plates for it?”

  He nodded. “Where’d you get it, anyway?” He looked at me pointedly. “Or maybe you’d rather not say?”

  “I didn’t eat him,” I said.

  “Then who did?”

  Instead of answering I took a sip of soda. “Did you ever go back to Sully’s cabin?”

  He shook his head. “You?”

  I nodded. “I wish you had.” Then I told him everything.

  “I told you family’s overrated,” Lee said at last.

  I stuck my fists in my jean pockets and kicked at a stone. “I’ve been really clueless, haven’t I?”

  Lee shook his head. “I’m just glad you’re all right.”

  “For now, anyway.”

  “How long has it been—a little over a month? Don’t you think he’d’ve been able to trace you in all that time? He didn’t have any trouble finding us at the carnival.”

  “Are you saying … are you saying I might have killed him?”

  He shrugged. “You can definitely kill a person if you hit ’em hard enough on the head. It never occurred to you?”

  I shook my head and drew an unsteady breath.

  “I wouldn’t feel too badly about it, if I were you. It was you or him.” After a pause Lee asked, “Are you going to visit your father?”

  I didn’t answer him right away. I looked at the man behind the little window at the security gate, and up beyond the fence at the three endless stories of barred windows. I thought of my father sitting in that chair with the ghost of his right hand hidden under the blanket, getting his face mopped by some other orderly who didn’t care about who he was or the kind of life he might have had. I’d come all this way back to Bridewell, and yet I’d never had any intention of going in there again.

  Lee looked at me and nodded.

  11

  We drove to Laskin National Park. It was getting to be prime camping season, and because there were so many people around, sleeping in the flatbed was less appealing than just paying the fee for a campsite like everybody else. At night, alone in my little tent, I closed my eyes and saw the snapshots from my parents’ perfect summer flipping by in the darkness. I wished one of us owned a camera.

  Then, toward the end of August, we said so long to Barry Cook’s pickup truck.

  That morning we’d decided on a trip to Door County for some fishing, and we were only a few miles out of the park when the engine made this weird coughing noise, and Lee had to pull to the side of the road. He spent almost an hour bent under the hood, and when he finally told me what was wrong I didn’t understand any of it. Whatever it was, he couldn’t fix it on his own, and we couldn’t call a tow truck for more reasons than one. “It’s not your fault,” I said as we took our stuff out of the back for the last time. Still, he was prickly, and didn’t say much as we walked.

  Lee held out his thumb to every passing car, but it was half an hour before someone stopped. The car pulled over ahead of us and a blonde in magenta sunglasses stuck her head out the driver’s-side window. “Hey there. You guys break down or something?”

  We came up beside her and Lee cast a doubtful glance through the backseat window. There were clear storage boxes stacked to the ceiling.

  “I’m driving back to school,” she said. “It’s all right, I can make room. Where you headed?”

  Lee said, “We’re headed wherever you’re headed.”

  She got out of the car and flashed her teeth. “Now that’s what I call easy to travel with.”

  He introduced us both to Kerri-Ann Watt, incoming senior at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She hardly looked at me, and her handshake was as limp as a lasagna noodle. If it had been only me she would’ve kept driving. Which is why I found myself packed in the backseat while Lee sat in the front. He kept giving me sympathetic looks over his shoulder. Kerri-Ann asked him all sorts of personal questions, and I had to put my hand over my smirk every time he lied.

  * * *

  We got to Madison just after four o’clock, and Lee and I waited in the car while Kerri-Ann checked into her dorm and got her keys. Everywhere there were students in T-shirts and ball caps with badgers on them, everybody laughing and calling to one another across the parking lot, lots of hugs and high-fiving. “You guys don’t have a place to stay, do you?” Kerri-Ann asked when she got back. “You can stay with me tonight, if you want. I have a single.” She grinned at Lee. “You just have to help me move in.”

  “Sure thing,” he said. “It’ll take no time at all between three people.”

  We carried everything up the stairs and into the room. I’d never been in a dorm before, but I guessed this one was pretty standard: painted cinderblock walls, gray linoleum floors, fiberboard furniture. We waited while Kerri-Ann hung up her posters—Lee rolled his eyes every time she pulled out another one, Tom Cruise in Risky Business or Right Said Fred—and then we went to the campus pizzeria for dinner. Kerri-Ann walked ahead of me along the lakeside path, next to Lee, and touched him on the inside of his arm every time she wanted to point something out. This was getting old. Tomorrow morning we’d have to figure out what we were doing next—and whatever it was, it would have nothing at all to do with Kerri-Ann Watt.

  “You’re so good with your hands, Lee,”
she said when we got back to her room. “Would you mind setting up my loft bed? It should only take a few minutes. While you’re doing that I’m going to unpack all my girly stuff. Maren, you want to help me?”

  Kerri-Ann closed the bathroom door behind us and began laying out her toiletries and cosmetics along the counter. “This is my favorite part of a new school year,” she said. “Setting up my vanity.”

  “You have a lot of makeup.”

  She laughed. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  “I don’t know what you need it all for. You’re already pretty.”

  She didn’t thank me for the compliment, she just kept arranging all her pots and wands and bottles. I watched her, and in my mind I curled my fingers around her nail scissors.

  After a minute or two she was satisfied, and looked me over appraisingly. “You know, you could be attractive if you made an effort.”

  I folded my arms and met her eyes in the mirror. “And now you’re going to tell me I shouldn’t wear black all the time, it makes me look pale and sullen and deeply unhappy, and nobody is going to want to be my friend.”

  “Well, if you’ve heard it before then don’t you think there’s something to it?”

  “Lee’s my friend. He doesn’t care what I wear, or what I put on my face.”

  “Mmm.” Kerri-Ann pulled at a wisp of my hair and tucked it behind my ear. “That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out.”

  “Lee doesn’t like me like that.”

  “So you say. But guys and girls can’t be friends.”

  “Nothing’s happened. He thinks I’m a baby, anyway.”

  “Why, how old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  Kerri-Ann laughed. “And how old is he? Twenty?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “That’s all right,” she said as she drew out a little plastic pot, dipped her finger, and dabbed the pink goo on her lips. “I like them a little bit younger.”

  Lee was finished setting up the loft bed when we came out of the bathroom. The clock on the nightstand read 11:33. Here we were, hurtling toward bedtime, and I had no idea where I was going to sleep.