Come In and Cover Me (24 page)

“I just don't.”

“But why?”

“I'd like to see something other than Indiana.”

“You could always transfer. We'd love for you to stay around another year or two. You wouldn't even have to live at home. But it would be nice to know you were close.”

“We'll see,” Ren said. “I've got a list made up already. You're supposed to apply to several.”

She thought her mother would ask her to name the other places, but she did not.

“Do you think you'll go into medicine?”

At some stage in elementary school, Ren had wanted to be a pediatrician. “No,” she said. “I was thinking I might go into history. Or anthropology. Or psychology. Or sociology. I don't know.”

“Like social work,” Anna said.

“Not that kind of sociology. But big schools like Arizona have a ton of stuff I'm interested in.”

“But why do you want to go so far away?”

Ren didn't answer.

“Why?” repeated her mother. She was toying with her scarf.

Ren shrugged. She felt something shoving itself up her esophagus, threatening to make her gag. She desperately wanted her mother to stop asking her, not to make her say the words that were crowding into her throat, and she also desperately wanted her mother to ask again so that there would be no guilt in answering her. If her mother asked three times, then surely, surely, whatever Ren said would be justified as an answer she was forced into giving.

Her mother did not ask again.

A week later, maybe two weeks later, Ren did not know that the thoughts that had gagged her were still lodged in her throat. She did not know it until her father walked into the den while she was watching
Wheel of Fortune
. Her father, who had taught her how to plant flowers and how to spread pine straw and how to jump in raked leaves. Her father, who had once let the pain in his shoulders flow into the ground and sky. Her father asked her the same question. He had obviously been talking to her mother, which surprised Ren. She didn't think they had conversations.

He held a crystal tumbler in his hand. The alcohol was beautiful as it rolled in waves from side to side.

“Why do you want to go so far away, Rennie?” he asked.

His face was relaxed and kind, and she'd forgotten whether that was how he used to look or whether it was the whiskey. She watched as her mother drifted in from the kitchen, appearing just behind her father's left shoulder. She couldn't see her mother's mouth, but her eyes seemed to be smiling.

“Because I feel like I might kill myself if I stay here with you,” Ren said.

Her mother's eyes did not change. Her father did not say a word, but his entire expression shifted. He stared at her, and she thought of martial-arts movies where someone was beheaded in one stroke with a sword, but it took a moment for the head to fall off the neck. The look on his face was the look on one of those heads' faces. Severed.

She turned back to the television. He left the room. A second later, so did her mother. They made no noise. She kept staring at the television. The puzzle was a PLACE, and it had a T, two M's, and two O's.

Vanna turned over one S. Then one N. There was no P.

She had not meant to hurt them. It hadn't occurred to her that it was possible.

The tall red-headed guy asked to buy an A, which was ridiculous, because the answer was clearly Mount Rushmore. Ren considered that she hadn't ever thought she would kill herself. That was wrong, and she shouldn't have said it. What she had thought was that she might already be dead. That she had been in the car with Scott that day, and the reason her parents forgot about her was that she was a ghost, too. Or that she was somewhere in between living and dead, and that as long as she was in this house, she was stuck in limbo. She had to get out or she would fade into nothing like those dead or dying animals left in the middle of the road that somehow vanished from the asphalt after a day or two.

She and her parents never talked about what she'd said. She saw her father the next afternoon, pouring a glass of water, and he smiled and called her “my girl” and seemed to have forgotten about their conversation. They were all good at forgetting. It was in October of her sophomore year in college that her mother called her and said he had died suddenly. He had been driving home from work and crashed his truck into the side of a bridge. Her mother said he had had a heart attack while he was driving.

Ren wished she had told him she was sorry. She wished that she could have gone back to when she was six or seven and, as the girl she had been, talked to the father he had been. She had adored him once, and then he had disappeared—he disappeared so gently, while her mother disappeared so glaringly—and then he had been gone for good. He had been gone already, but she was surprised—inexplicably—by how different death felt.

Once she had gotten in an argument with a limp-haired little girl at school about whose parents were better. That girl's parents, it turned out, were both doctors. And they could ski. Ren had come home and told Scott about the argument, and he had said, without looking up from a stack of cards he was shuffling, “Nobody's parents are better than ours. Don't tell them I said that.” Then he looked up and smiled, and they both knew this secret that was only theirs: That they loved their parents and were pleased by them but that it was not the sort of thing they would ever actually admit. And she knew Scott, and he knew her and she imagined she could actually see through his head into his giant-coiled-worm brain and it thumped like a heart and expanded in a great gray hello to her. That's how well she knew Scott in that moment.

Ren went to her father's funeral. It was her first funeral. After the ceremony was over, she and her mother and her grandmother and a preacher and two friends of her mother's stood by the graveside and watched as the coffin was buried. It was a metallic gray-blue color, with black handles, and Ren watched it, wondering what Scott's coffin had looked like. She also watched the buttons on her mother's navy blue blouse, which were silver and shaped like small crescent moons. Her mother's hand was on her shoulder, resting at first, and then leaning harder. Ren felt the weight increase, the pressure from her mother's palm forcing her to slope to one side, and she wondered if the buttons had been polished, because they gleamed like mirrors in sunlight, and it was an overcast day. Her mother bowed her head, and Ren saw a drop land on her mother's chest, right where Ren could see the outline of her mother's bra through the fabric. Then another drop landed, soaking into the material and spreading. As her mother cried, Ren watched her blouse.

And then she looked toward the sky with its wispy clouds and the ground with its neat green grass. The dirt was rich and dark where the casket was being lowered inch by inch. The ground was damp under her feet, and she saw blades of grass stuck to her black heels. Her grandmother was leaning forward onto the balls of her feet, keeping her high heels from sinking like golf tees. Her shoes were beige with a white stripe across the toe, and her legs were remarkably attractive for a woman in her seventies. There was a sneeze and several discordant coughs and her mother's soft crying.

Her mother used to call and call Ren at college to ask why she didn't visit more, why she didn't come by, why she had left. After the years of silence, all these words came pouring out over the phone. The same words, over and over again. Often Ren did not answer the phone. When she did, she would listen and nod and make agreeable sounds. She went home at Christmas only. She would not go home more often, and she would not answer her mother's questions, because she remembered the severed look on her father's face. No good came of talking.

Then one day, as Ren sat on her bed, listening to her mother's questions, she looked down at the phone and took a tally of herself. She decided that she wasn't angry, she wasn't sad, and she didn't feel anything at all.

So she told her mother, “You left first,” in a calm, kind voice.

And then her mother stopped calling.

eight

Anthropologists have glossed over the mechanisms through which knowledge comes to our awareness. That is, we have studied what the knowledge is, but not how it is received and processed. Although we know that humans experience their world through many ports.

—From “Perceptual Anthropology: The Cultural Salience of Symmetry” by Dorothy Washburn,
American Anthropologist
, September 1999

Driving made Silas think of his father, of road trips when his father would bark for the boys to be quiet in the backseat. His father loved to hear the sounds of the car. Silas, too, liked the hum of the engine, the clunk of ruts in the road. He liked the rhythm of it.

He and Ren had been on the road for more than an hour, headed back to the Crow Creek site. He was still mystified by the turn of events: Ren had gotten a phone call less than an hour after he'd asked to see her notes on the site. There'd been flash flooding, and a chunk of the cliffside along Crow Creek had washed away, exposing more walls. The owner had thought Ren might want to come take a look at the newly uncovered rooms. She did, of course, and so did Silas, no matter how bizarre the coincidence seemed. Ren had not acted surprised at all. She'd had another restless night, and he was beginning to think her insomnia was catching. His eyes were red and dry from lack of sleep.

His father believed strongly in keeping his hands at ten o'clock and two o'clock on the steering wheel, and Silas had his hands in those automatic positions. He looked away from the road and studied Ren, thinking that he enjoyed her face more now than he had that day he heard her speak in Albuquerque. Or the day she'd stepped out of her truck at the bunkhouse. He had a flash of her at the Cañada Rosa, talking about lava flows, chewing her lip as she pointed to the streaks down the canyon walls. Just as she was chewing it now while she looked out the window. She had a small straight scar along the line of her cheekbone—from hitting the edge of a glass table when she was four, she said—that enamored him. The insides of her thighs were incredibly soft.

He cataloged this list of her virtues in hope of smothering his growing frustration with her. She had been edgy throughout the drive—really, he thought, she'd been edgy for the last day or two. Something had clearly rattled her. She kept watching him. It was a different kind of watching than usual. He liked her typical watchfulness, the warm weight of her attention as he worked or talked or slept. She let him know she enjoyed looking at him. But this new watchfulness wasn't admiring. He felt like she was assessing him from a safe distance.

Now, as he drove, her eyes would flicker toward him, then away, slippery and unsettled. Her hand was steady on his leg, but he felt the energy running through her, crackling in the air around her.

“What is it?” he asked finally.

“Nothing.”

Her shoulders were tense, and her back was straight.

He ran his tongue over his teeth. A few breaths later, he reached over and brushed his thumb along her jaw before returning his hand to its two-o'clock position. It seemed as if he was perpetually reaching for her, always trying to close some distance while she stayed frozen in place. They both listened to the sounds of the truck for a while.

“Are you ever going to tell me what I said that bothered you so much?” he asked. “You can't blame me for what I say when I'm asleep. It's my subconscious working out issues.”

“You didn't say anything.”

“Come on. Tell me.”

“No,” she said.

That's how it works, he thought: I ask you to talk to me, and you give me one syllable. One negative syllable. He didn't like the bitterness of the thought. He reached for his half-full Dr Pepper, popped off the plastic lid and straw, and dumped soda and ice into his mouth. He swallowed the soda and began to crunch the ice. Loudly.

“Fine,” she said, after maybe one minute of chewing. He stopped crunching, rolling the ice over his tongue. Although she hated it when he sucked the ice, too. She said she could hear it bumping against his teeth.

“You said,” she started. She licked her lips and started again. “You said, ‘I love you, Esmeralda.'”

He glanced at her, unamused. “Funny. That is not what I said.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Seriously, what did I say?”

“‘I love you, Justine'?”

“I'm not joking, Ren. Something's bothering you.”

“‘Clementine'?” she tried again. “‘Lucille'?” She was smiling, but her eyes still slipped and slid toward him. He did not smile. He focused on the road. They drove on.

“My head hurts,” she said.

He looked over, and her eyes were closed.

“My mother used to rub my temples like this.” She lifted her hands and demonstrated. “She said the best thing was to go into a dark room and close your eyes. And if that didn't make it better, get in a cool bath. She would make me lemon tea while I was in the bath, but it had juice in it, too. Orange juice, or maybe apple. Last year I had a terrible migraine, the first I ever had, and I went through all that stuff she told me to do. But I couldn't remember what was in the tea. I guess it didn't matter—I couldn't have gone shopping for ingredients, anyway. But I'd like to have the recipe. It would make me feel better.”

She opened her eyes. Silas didn't want to say anything, hoping if she forgot he was there, she would keep talking. She didn't.

“Ask her,” he said.

“She said to have a spoon of honey, too,” she continued. “She thought honey was good for everything.”

“Parents know things like that,” he said. “My dad always said for a headache you should dunk your head in a sink full of ice and water.”

Silas had dunked more than his head in icy water. When he was eleven, the newspaper proclaimed January 4 to be the coldest day in a hundred years in Silver City, New Mexico. The creek by the house froze still and hard. Silas and Alex started by tapping a toe on the ice, pressing gently. The surface stayed smooth and opaque. They slowly shifted more and more weight onto their feet. Then they began creeping, inch by inch, onto the smooth expanse. Finally they concluded that the creek had frozen solid.

This led to a new game. The boys would take turns getting a running start and throwing as much weight onto the ice as possible. It was a long jump onto the ice, a tumbling pass. It was a test of brute force. They would see what it took to break open this unnaturally solid thing. They would crack it open and see its insides. (His memories of Alex always came back to action and doing. There didn't seem to be any memories of talking, no late nights huddled under the covers, whispering or plotting. His brother had their father's miserliness with words. Even now, Silas and Alex discussed sports, watched sports, and occasionally—with knees and backs permitting—played sports. Alex did not have heartfelt conversations. Silas remembered wanting to sometimes crack open Alex or their father, not to hurt them but just to see what they were thinking, to know what thoughts churned around inside their heads, never to be released. He craved words and stories and talking and laughter, and his mother, at least, helped fill the silence of the house.)

Both brothers soon forgot it was even conceivable for the ice to break. Silas found large, flat rocks and tied them onto the bottom of his sneakers with his shoelaces. He stomped across the ice. Alex retrieved a hammer from their father's off-limits tool shed, but the hammer barely nicked the gray glass of the creek. (Silas wondered now what Alex remembered of that day. He felt sure that if he asked him, Alex would talk about the bitter cold and the satisfying thwack of the hammer against the ice and how much he had wanted to beat Silas. Silas wondered why they had been so drawn to breaking things, why games were always about crashing and banging and knocking things—including themselves—to the ground. He could remember many times as an adult when the sight of frozen bodies of water had been blindingly beautiful, but he remembered no sense of the creek's beauty or any sense of the magic of the snow. He remembered wanting to blast snowballs against the walls of the house. Maybe an appreciation of beauty came along with puberty, timed with facial hair and the smell of sweat. But even now, these were the kinds of thoughts that his brother—and father, too?—would surely never have.)

They grew tired of the game and drifted back to the house. The next day, Silas was outside by himself; Alex had gone to town with their mother. Their father was chopping cottonwood for the fire, so Silas wandered down to the water by himself. It was early afternoon, and the sun was bright. The cold air bit into his skin, and the creek appeared solid. He followed its mild twists and turns, looking for signs of fish or other animals trapped in the ice. He had visions of fish stuck mid-swim, of water snakes frozen in S-formations. But he saw nothing other than clouded gray. When he stopped walking, he was nearly a mile from the house, far from the spot where he and Alex had played the day before. With no other entertainment presenting itself, he decided to have another go at the creek. As he left the ground, pushing off from the bank, his foot slid onto the ice. He knew he was in trouble then—he could feel that the ice had some give to it—but he was already in motion, in the air. He landed in the middle of the creek, and the ice gave way with a crack. There was the slightest pause, and then he was falling, like one of those clowns at the fair who plunge into a barrel of water when a baseball hits the right target.

He lost his breath to the cold, even with his head still above water. Then he was completely underwater, unable to move, feeling his feet hit bottom. He managed to push off, out of reflex, and his head broke the surface. It was not a deep creek, and he could surely stand up, but he couldn't make his feet and legs work. Burning, burning cold. He took a long second to try to breathe, only his face above the water. Then he fought his way out. He had a few feet to get to the creek bank, and the ice broke away from his hands when he tried to boost himself onto it. So he whacked at it with numb hands, knocking chunks away as he stepped heavily through the water, his jeans heavy weights. His could hear his teeth.

At the bank, he heaved himself out and lay sprawled on the dirt and weeds and pebbles. He was soaked, and he suspected the strands of his hair were starting to freeze. The day before, it had hit twenty degrees—it must be closer to thirty degrees now. Right around freezing, since the sun had thawed out the creek. But he thought he might not be able to walk back to the house. He could barely move, his skin was blue-tinged, and his shivering made it difficult to think.

As he inhaled, he could feel a sheet of ice forming on the inside of his throat, spreading down to his lungs.

Still, because there was no choice, he stood up. He took one step and then another, hunched over slightly, arms wrapped around himself. He tried to jog, to warm up, but he didn't have enough coordination for it. He stuck his fingers in his armpits and took short, measured steps. He tripped over a log and fell down, slicing his right palm, barely able to get his hands out so he wouldn't land on his face.

He found a rhythm and tried to think about anything but the cold. His parents would be panicked. They would rush him to the hospital, and that would be where the news cameras would find him. His father would hug him and ruffle his hair like Silas remembered from when he was very small. His father would probably say how proud he was, especially if there were newspaper headlines. He wondered if they would be able to get him on the six-o'clock news that night. He imagined telling the whole story to his teacher, Miss Whisenhut, who had blue eyes and black hair to her waist. He would tell her how he couldn't feel his fingers or his feet and how he thought his lips had frozen shut. He imagined Miss Whisenhut's arm around him and the curve of her breast possibly brushing against his head.

There—his house. The plain brown walls of it and the dirt driveway. He saw his father, still chopping wood. He nearly laughed with relief. He made the last few steps to his father, close enough to feel the warmth rising off his father's wide back.

His father looked up from the wood. He did not put down the ax.

“Fall in?”

“Yessir.”

“Better hurry with your shower. Your mother'll need help with the groceries.”

“Yessir.”

“Take your shoes off before you go inside.”

“Yessir.”

Silas walked into the house without another word. He took a shower, changed his clothes, and was rubbing a towel over his hair when his mother pulled into the driveway. He told her about the creek, but in his story, the fall through the ice and the walk home were only amusing things. He said he had imagined newspaper headlines: “Boy Narrowly Escapes Frozen Death” or “Boy Saves Own Life with Death-Defying Trek.” His mother laughed, which was what he'd intended. Once the warm water had steamed away the chill from his skin and his blood and his bones, he could see that no one should brag about falling into a thawed-out creek. There was nothing heroic to it. It had been stupid and childish, and he had seen that written across his father's face. He hated to see the onset of his father's disapproval—he could see the lines forming, the forehead wrinkling and narrowing of the eyes and tightening of the mouth, before any of those small shifts had even taken place. He waited for the displeasure to take shape.

His father was a capable man whom other people flocked to if they needed help with tools or equipment, but he was an unflinching pragmatist. When it was time to kill the lambs, Silas's father used a pocketknife. He could lift a two-hundred-pound calf without making a sound. To treat poison ivy, he skimmed a razor across the entire length of his leg, cutting the top off the rash, then poured bleach over the open wounds. He expected competence from his sons, second only to his expectation of good judgment. “You'll grow up, and you'll be a good man or a bad man,” his father had said. “There's nothing in the middle.” Silas very much did not want to be a bad man.