Bloodroot (43 page)
But I didn’t go see her until Hollis had that aneurysm in 1996. I took a week off of work at the motel and went to Millertown to visit his grave. I knew it was time to look for Myra, too, while I was back down south. By then I didn’t want revenge for what she did to me, even though seeing her locked up would be the next thing to seeing her in hell. All I wanted from Myra was to look in her eyes one more time before I died.
It turned out I had to stay around Nashville longer than I meant to, since there was only certain visiting days. When it finally came time to see her, my guts was churning all the way up the road to the asylum. There was stone pillars marking the entrance and behind them I saw the shape of the building through a piece of woods. At first it looked like a big brick mansion, but closer up I saw how old and shabby it was, one or two trees shading a little patch of grass in front of the door. The parking lot was half empty, like the patients didn’t get many visitors. I could see why. I knew as soon as I passed through the steel doors it wasn’t a place I wanted to hang around long. It stunk like piss and bleach and I nearly gagged just walking to the nurse’s booth. When I went up the stairs to the third floor, there was crazy people everywhere. It was a din of shouting and laughing and crying and begging. One woman was slumped against the wall with her hair
hanging in her face and I had to step over her legs on my way down the hall. Another one kept asking if I had brought her cigarettes. I liked to never shook her off of my arm.
When I found the room they told me was Myra’s, I tapped on the door with my good hand. It was quiet in there but seemed like I heard something moving, so I opened the door and went in. There was two beds and somebody curled up on their side in one of them, under the cover so all I could see was a half-bald head with a few strings of white hair. I thought surely that couldn’t be Myra. Then I saw her sitting in a plastic chair pulled up to the radiator under the window, looking down at a concrete path in the grass out in front of the asylum. It was a jolt to see how short her hair had been cut. I guess it was hard to take care of, as long as it used to be. It was limp as a dishrag and just a streak of black here and there left in it, even though she wasn’t no more than forty then. She had on clean pajamas but they was buttoned up wrong. When I came in she didn’t even turn her head. I walked over and stood in front of her and she still didn’t move her eyes. Then I knelt down beside of her chair and she turned away from the window with a pleasant look on her face, like she was coming out of a good dream. She might have been doped up, but I don’t think so. I looked in her eyes like I had been wanting to for so long. They was still blue, but not the same kind. I thought of my life in Rockford, how I’d stare across the empty lot behind the motel remembering her hair on the pillow and her legs under the sheet and forget what she did to me, wishing things had turned out different.
“It’s John,” I said. “I didn’t die.” It sounded stupid, but it was all that came out.
“Are you really here?” she asked. She didn’t seem afraid of me.
“Yeah,” I said. I couldn’t get over the shape she was in. I’d never seen nobody so skinny except in pictures. “Lord, Myra. I used to think I wanted to see you like this.”
She smiled a little but didn’t say anything.
“How do you stand it in here?”
She looked back at the window. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“I might.”
She turned back to me. Her eyes gave me shivers. “I can be anywhere I want to. Even home on the mountain.”
I cleared my throat. “You’ve been here a long time. Why ain’t they let you out?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
We both got quiet. It was a four-hour drive from Millertown to Nashville, plenty of time to figure out what I wanted to say to her, but all of a sudden my mind was blank. Finally I came up with something. “I heard you had a baby after … after we was through.”
She nodded. “Twins. A boy and a girl. I don’t think they’re yours.”
I felt my face get red. “Yeah. Well. Don’t they ever come and see you?”
“No. But I’m waiting.”
“What if they don’t ever come?”
“They will.”
“How do you know?”
“They can’t help it. We’re bound together.”
“I guess I couldn’t help it either,” I said. “But we was bad for each other.”
She nodded again. “It’s a shame we’re not the only ones who got hurt.”
I looked down at my bad hand. “Like Hollis. You might have heard your boy set fire to the store several years back. He rebuilt that place but it took a lot out of him. He never was well after that. Back in July he had a blood vessel to bust in his head. That’s what I’m doing down this way. I came home to see his grave. Lonnie claimed there wasn’t many at the funeral. He never got married or nothing. It’s kind of pitiful.”
We both got quiet again. I looked around the room to keep from looking at her face. The ceiling was high with cobwebs in the corners. I figured it was drafty there in the winters. There was flowered wallpaper but it didn’t do nothing to brighten up the place. I seen there was a desk between the two beds, bare with a layer of dust on top. It made me think about how long she’d been in there. She wasn’t acting all that crazy but I could tell something wasn’t right with her. I had the feeling if I’d come another day, she might have been different. I pictured her slumped against the wall with her legs sticking out, or maybe like one of them that shuffled around screaming and crying. My skin crawled, imagining her strapped down to a bed and put in a straitjacket and getting shock treatments. Then she asked, “John?”
I looked back at her eyes. “Yeah?”
“Why didn’t you come after me sooner?”
I tried to smile. “I’ve not come after you.”
“I thought you would come after me. I kept waiting. Why didn’t you come?”
I thought about it for a second. “Because I loved you once.”
She looked away. “Maybe. But it’s like you said. We were bad for each other.”
I couldn’t think of nothing else. I thought surely there was more I could say after driving so far and waiting so long, but I was tapped out. Then all of a sudden Myra reached out with her bony hand and touched my jaw where she had broke it. I quit breathing for a second. Her fingers moving over them lumps and scars done something to my heart. Nobody had touched me that way since I seen her last. It hurt me just about too much to take. I grabbed her fingers to stop them but once I had ahold of her I couldn’t let go. I closed my eyes and we stayed still for a while, me holding her hand on my ugly face. Finally she took it away and it was like losing her all over again. “I’m tired, John,” she said. “Please don’t come back.” I was relieved. She didn’t have to tell me twice. I never went back. But I know me and Myra will never be shed of each other. It don’t matter what I saw in that asylum, she’s still in my head with that long, long hair and them heaven blue eyes and legs that are always running away from me. I love and hate Myra Lamb now the same as I did then. There’s some things the years can’t do nothing about.
After I left Myra’s room I went and stood for a minute beside of the front doors under a tree, not feeling like driving. The wind was stirring up a whirl of leaves and the sky was turning stormy. I never thought much about God before what happened in them next few minutes. Some nights I still lay in the dark and doubt I ever saw or felt anything at all. I go back to figuring my life and all that’s happened in it has been an accident. But times like this morning, seeing that newspaper, I know it was real and no coincidence.
Standing in the shade beside of the asylum entrance, I looked out at the parking lot and saw them walking toward me from several yards away. They must have just got out of whatever car they had come in, a boy and girl that favored so much they had to be twins, with black hair
and eyes like every other Odom’s down through time. Myra said they wasn’t mine but that boy was like an old picture of me come to life, only a different me that got out of the hills and made something of myself. I could tell by the proud way he carried hisself that one day he’d shake the dust of the mountains off his coat and walk away from there without looking back, if he hadn’t done it already. The girl was like a plainer version of Myra, pale with long hair blowing out behind her. There was a yellow-haired baby on her hip, stretching his arm up over his head to grab at the leaves fluttering down. It was easy to see by the way she smiled at him what kind of a mother she was. When they finally got near enough, that baby looked over and noticed me standing under the tree. His eyes was the same blue as Myra’s used to be. Then the hand that was grabbing at leaves reached for me. I wanted more than anything to touch him but I couldn’t move. I watched him disappear through the doors and stood there feeling like all that mattered in the world had left me behind. I felt the closeness of another life I might have had.
I used to think I was born worthless, considering the people I come from. But when I saw that blue-eyed baby years ago, it made me wonder. I ain’t done everything I wanted to, but looking at the picture in the newspaper today, I know I was right about that boy in the parking lot. He’s carried me and his mama off into the world and that girl has been the kind of mother neither one of us ever had, and who knows what all that baby is capable of. Ever since I seen them three, I’ve had a little bit of peace. The wind don’t sound as much like cries anymore. Knowing they’re out there makes me feel better about all the wrong I’ve done. At least some good came out of the mess me and Myra made. Sometimes I wish the boy and girl had seen me but there’s nothing I can do now to make them stop and turn around. There ain’t no changing what’s already been. I know I’ll never see them again. They passed me by like they ought to have done. But I was there and nothing can change that, either. I’m still with them, whether they know it or not, part of how they came to be. Before I drove away from that asylum, we was all together there like a family for a while. I wonder if they felt the same thing I did in them few minutes, my blood moving in their veins and passing through their hearts.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THANKS to the Greene, Oler, and McCoy families, especially Adam, Emma, Taylor, Mom, Dad, Stephanie, Mickey, Allen, Arela, Carl, Linny, Sis, Earl, Travis, Dena, Justin, Isaiah, Tommy, Cathy, Brittaney, Colton, Julyanna, and Conner, for love and support.
Thanks to Vermont College and to my teachers and professors, Kathy Levine, Bonnie Oakberg, John Cranford, Bernice Mennis, Peaco Todd, and the late Dick Hathaway.
Thanks to the Sewanee Writers’ Group, the Lakeway Area Writers’ Group, and all those who have given feedback and advice, especially Ashlee Adams Crews, Jennifer Dickinson, Marsha McSpadden, Chad Simpson, Hank Grezlak, Leslie Gathings, Cathy Wilson, Brenda Key, Regina King, Gary Hamrick, Sue Regier, and Suzanne Kingsbury.
Thanks to Beth Miller and Sara Sparkes Hill for being best friends and brilliant readers.
Thanks to Leigh Feldman, Robin Desser, and Jill McCorkle for making this book happen.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AMY GREENE was born and raised in the foothills of East Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains, where she lives with her husband and two children.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2010 by Amy Greene
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Greene, Amy, [date]
Bloodroot: a novel / by Amy Greene.—1ST ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59308-5
1. Family—Fiction. 2. Appalachian Region—Fiction. 1 Title.
PS3607.R45254B57 2010
813′.6—dc22
2009019483
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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