Call Me Home (23 page)
Authors: Megan Kruse
He was still standing there looking at the city of trash that ringed that new house when he heard the sound of Don's truck. There was something wrong with the U-joint â that was what Don had said â and when it stopped and started there was a shudder, a heave of metal. He felt it in his balls first. Was that what love was? He turned around and there Don was, his dark hair darker with sweat, hanging half out the window. “Fire ban,” Don called. “You can't burn today.”
“What do you mean?” Jackson called back. He'd imagined his whole day ahead of him, the hot breath of the fire surging in front of him.
“Go sweep sawdust or something. They probably need a handyman on the East side. You have to wait till it's cool and then you'll need a permit.” Don looked him up and down.
Fuck
, Jackson thought. He felt like a brute and a little bitch at the same time.
“The ban's on,” Don said again, grinning at him. Jackson's erection was almost painful against his jeans, and he could see Don looking at his crotch. Fuck you, he thought.
In that moment, Don had everything and he had nothing and Jackson hated it and it turned him on. The truck made that shuddering noise and lurched into gear, and Don was gone, with just his hand â that tight, smooth hand â trailing out the window, leaving him there.
THE HALLS AT THE FANNIN JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL WERE
long and beige, and the things we'd rehearsed I said easily, but they meant nothing. I was nothing. I kept thinking I saw my father slipping behind the library shelves, kicking a ball across a field. I wanted to be erased. A chalkboard smudge. I pulled my coat tighter.
In the gym we sat on the cold floor and waited to be chosen for sides. When the girls came to sit beside me and ask me questions, I told them: I am Lena Harris. I am in the seventh grade. “You talk like a Yankee,” one of the girls said.
“Well, I'm not,” I said. Their faces were blank and blinking. I hated them all.
“You look like a Yankee.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. The eyes were a row of window shades, drawing closed, open, closed. The teacher called a name and when one ran off the rest scattered like a pack of dogs.
The classes were the same: a page of spidery numbers, of snaking words. I pretended I didn't understand. I could see what the Fannin teachers thought, and it didn't matter how I acted. They knew enough of our story to know that we weren't who we said we were. “You're going to be safe,” my mother said. “I promise that I will keep you safe, and so will all your teachers.” When I turned in my math test with rows of numbers that I'd invented, no one said a word.
In the cafeteria I heard them, from two tables away. “Fag,” one of the boys said to another.
In a second, I was above him.
“Shut the fuck up,” I said.
They looked at me. The milk cartons and trays shrank to points. One of them started to laugh. “Oooh,” he said. “Who's this?”
I didn't wait for what they would say next. I smashed my fist into his sandwich. “You go to hell,” I said. I didn't wait to see what he would say. I went out to the front steps of the school. The opposite of life isn't death, I thought. It was this. The sun was orange, burning through the sky, and I looked at it until I could see the burning of it on the back of my eyelids, the same color as I was inside.
The assistant principal caught me by the arm and spun me back inside. She steered me into the armchair in her office and gave me a square note with a line on the bottom for my mother to sign. I didn't care. Lena Harris was braver than Lydia Holland.
My mother was asleep, and I didn't want to tell her what I'd done. My grandmother was in the kitchen, pulling out the jars of flour and sweeping behind them with a rag. A cockroach shot past and was gone. “Shit,” she was saying. “Shit shit shit.”
“Grandmother,” I said, and she turned. The note felt heavier than the paper it was on.
She laughed. “Stop that, please,” she said. “Call me Grandma. Or Linda. Don't make me sound ancient.”
“Here,” I said. “Would you sign it?” I put the note on the counter.
I picked up a pencil from the table and poked the point into the palm of my hand. She put down the rag and unfolded the note. I held the pencil tighter.
“Why don't you tell me,” she said, looking at me, “why you got in a fight?”
I shrugged. I concentrated on the point of the pencil, needle sharp. It left a gray mark deep in my palm.
“Why did you get in a fight?”
I felt angry all of a sudden.
Because I hate that school, and the people in it. Because I hate this place.
“Maybe I got it from my dad,”
I said, and I knew as I said it that I believed it. “You're your father's girl,” he liked to say, dragging his palm across my hair. I remember it felt like a curse.
My grandmother's eyes snapped up at me. I dropped the pencil on the floor and started to walk away. I felt her move behind me and she reached out one hand and pulled me back. She held my shoulders. I looked past her at the wall. There was a picture of my mother, in a yellow dress, when she was eight or nine, and I wished she'd never left this town. I would have been born as someone else, maybe a boy, or maybe a girl who was more beautiful, who never smashed a sandwich in her life.
“Listen to me,” she said. “You didn't get anything from him.”
“It was after I was born,” I said. “It started then.” I'd never said it out loud before. If I hadn't been born, it would have been different. Whatever changed in my father would not have changed, and now I wouldn't have to know that his anger could be inside me, ticking like a bomb.
“No,” she said. “It started in your father a long time before that. It was him, not you.”
“Still,” I said.
“Not still,” she said. “It was him.”
“Once,” I told her, “I tried to kill him.” The glint of glass lit the worst of my dreams, cutting through the dark, a bright and warning knife. How I couldn't do it. How I was too afraid.
She looked at me for a long time. “You need a little place,” she said.
“What kind of place?”
“A place of your own,” she said. “Follow me.”
She led me out of the house, down the gravel road, out toward the river. Against the bank was a little shelter, a lean-to of wood, bleached from the sun. It looked like bones, like a house of ribs. I thought of the fires Jackson and I used to make in our little forts. We tended them so carefully, but in the wet forest they would never take for long.
I looked at her. She didn't look like my mother. I wondered if she looked like me. “Did you build it?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” she said. “But someone did. Some kids, maybe. I can't remember a time when it wasn't here.” She brushed her hair out of her eyes. “If you want it,” she said, “it's here.”
I climbed inside and she followed me, squatting on her heels like a bird on a nest. It was dark and cool inside. I picked up a stone and it felt good in my hand, round as an egg and heavy on my palm.
“You know, I thought about you every single day since you were born,” my grandmother said. “I waited and waited to meet you. I wondered who you would be.”
I felt a tightness in my chest like I might cry, but I wouldn't. If that was true, I thought, she would have come for us. She would have helped us. She would have come. I didn't say anything, just squeezed the egg stone tight in my hand.
“I
did,
” she said. “I hope you'll believe that one day.” She pointed across the river, where a tree dipped its branches low over the water. “I saw a cottonmouth right there once,” she said. “It's why I don't swim. I hate snakes.”
“Will you sign my note?” I asked. I watched the place where the snake had been and the hard shine of the water.
“If you don't fight anymore,” she said. “Let's not tell your mother about the note this time. And I'm still going to call you Lydia,” she said. “When it's just you and me. Is that okay?”
I nodded, but I didn't smile. I knew what she was trying to do. You should have come for us, I thought again.
“Your grandfather,” she said. “He loved this river. He used to swim for hours.” She sighed. “We would come here, when we were young. When we were first together. I'd sit here and watch him and be dumb and in love.” She smiled.
I thought of him in the water, splashing, young as my brother.
“You know,” she said, “your family doesn't begin or end with your father.”
We sat in the slatted shadows for a while. I didn't ask her
any questions. I watched the spot where my grandfather had been, diving and surfacing like a fish, the water beading off of him, not knowing that one day I would be here, and I would think of him.
HE REMEMBERED BEING SMALL AND HOW FIRETRAIL HILL
had seemed impossibly long and treacherously steep, pulling cars like ants slowly skyward until they disappeared into the treetops. Now, standing in the ditch in the dusky light, it felt just as dangerous. Froth of wings in his stomach, vertigo. “Okay,” Randy was saying. “This is base.”
Jackson kept hold of Lydia's hand even though she was getting too old for that. She had wanted to come, and Randy insisted. “She's got a good sense,” he said. “I can tell. She knows things.”
They'd gone to Randy's after school and he'd borrowed his dad's car to drive them up here. Afterward, he'd take them home, but Jackson still felt a buzz of alarm when the cars drove by. It wasn't terrible, what they were doing, but he didn't want to explain to either of his parents why they were waiting in the underbrush for the sun to go down.
“If we want the Society to take us seriously, we have to make sure our methods are sound,” Randy said. He spread out a tarp in the ditch and it rose up in peaks over the tall grass. He stepped on it to flatten it.
“What's that for?” Jackson asked.
“I'm making a base camp,” Randy said. “For the equipment.” Jackson tried not to laugh. The equipment was an old Sony tape deck, a bag of chips, two flashlights, and half a dozen Hostess cupcakes, but what the hell, he thought, wouldn't doubt spoil it? Besides, he liked it when Randy got serious.
“These guys are very experienced in case investigation,” Randy said. “We're talking metaphysicians, engineers, researchers. And sensitives, of course.”
Randy was hoping to gather data that would earn him entry into the Washington Ghost Society, which, from what Jackson could gather, was a bunch of pale and mentally unstable guys listening for poltergeists and wearing tinfoil hats.
“Sensitives?” Lydia asked.
“Psychics,” Randy said. “Mediums. It's necessary. You do everything you can with science, and you combine that with the science we don't yet understand.”
It was Jackson's father who first told him about the Firetrail ghost. “You'll be driving up the hill at night,” his father had said, “just minding your own, and â
bam!
â he's beside you, running. Just running like hell, looking in the window of your car.” Over the years kids at school had added to and amended the story: He was old, or he was young, he had a weathered face, he had sad eyes, he ran beside your car at night, or you'd look in the rearview mirror and he'd be sitting in the backseat. He was looking for the people who'd murdered him, or he was young and lonely. He'd torture and kill you, or he'd put one cold hand on your shoulder. He was good fortune, or death.
“So, what do we do?” Lydia asked, folding her arms. She was wearing a sweatshirt that was about six sizes too big for her, and she kept her hands tucked up in the sleeves, but her tone was all business. Jackson had the feeling that he was the tagalong here, that this was really about Lydia and Randy. Lydia was twelve, young enough to still believe in magic, and Randy saw UFOs in the glow of streetlights; the fog was a ghost whipping her hair.
The objective, Randy explained, was for the ghost to feel at home. To run with them. They would all take a turn, according to Randy, but Jackson had guessed from the start that Randy's bet was on Lydia, that he thought that she would be the one to see the ghost. She was small and wiry, and Jackson understood that in some ways she was braver than him. And it wasn't a stretch to
imagine a ghost wanting to talk to her. She
did
know things, he thought. She didn't get good grades, but it wasn't because she wasn't smart; she just didn't care what people thought. She didn't have any friends, but she knew when things were going to swing good or bad, when to enter a room or when to hang back. She reminded him of a cat, every sense alert, skirting trouble, landing on quick and gentle paws.
“We run,” Randy said. “We do what he does. You start when you press the tape, and if you see or feel anything, you say it. Shout it while you run. That way, we have a record of the time, a record of what you heard, and any noises from the ghost get recorded, too.”