Meteors in August (31 page)

“Well, there aren't too many places for a girl like me to go.”

“You told me once you'd be right on your mother's tail if she ever split.”

She patted her stomach where the thin cloth of an old flowered housedress pulled at the buttons. “I couldn't run fast enough to catch her. Besides, she left on account of me. All these years I thought it was just Zack and my dad she couldn't stand, but you should have seen her when I told her I was pregnant—held her breath so long I thought she'd go blue and faint. Called me a little bitch in heat and said didn't I know how to control myself? Said I should get married and be a burden on some stupid boy instead of her. I told her no way. I told her I didn't even like the boy anymore, and he didn't like me. ‘Who gives a damn?' she said. ‘Just tell your daddy who he is. He'll take care of it.' I told her to forget it. I wasn't going to do it. I told her I'd give the baby up for adoption, and she said, ‘Oh fine. And I'm supposed to stick around and listen to people talk and hold on to you while you puke every morning? No thanks. I've been sick enough mornings of my life without looking after you.' I guess I gave her that push she needed. Zack wasn't out of the hospital yet. She didn't even say good-bye to him.”

She smoothed out the blue comforter next to her. The old spread was splattered with faded dusty roses. “Sit down beside me,” she said. “No one sits beside me. I know I'm not too pretty, but my father treats me like a leper.”

I sat close, our shoulders and thighs touching, and I thought of the girl I'd kissed in the tree house, how her lips frightened me, her mouth as fragile as butterfly wings, and mine dangerous as the clumsy, clutching fingers of a child. I stroked her matted hair and said, “You should take care of yourself, you'd feel better.”

She leaned against me, her head resting on my chest, so there was nothing I could do but put both arms around her and hold her tight. “I knew you'd come,” she said. “I knew you'd be the only one.”

I said, “You shouldn't stay cooped up in here. You need to walk. You need fresh air.”

“My father won't let me out of the house. That's the deal. He says I can stay here but I can't disgrace him. He feeds me. He pays Dr. Ben. I have to follow the rules, but I wish he didn't spit every time he sees me. There's nothing unnatural about it, you know. No reason to be afraid of people seeing me. What could they say? ‘Gwen Holler's having a baby'? Then they'd be done with it. And what's so terrible about that? I'm not the first. He doesn't even let me come downstairs when he's in the house. Zack brings me breakfast and supper.”

I found this difficult to imagine: Zachary Holler acting as nursemaid, carrying a tray up the stairs to his sister, fetching it later and doing the dishes. Gwen said, “You wouldn't know him. He's not so proud, not since the fire. His hands are scarred and the left side of his face got burned too—it's speckled pink and still peels. He thinks he's even worse to look at than I am. He's ashamed. He told me something else too. Remember that night when Myron Evans offered him five bucks?” I nodded. “That night Zack snatched one of Myron's cats and choked it; broke its neck with his own hands. Just like what Myron did to himself. Zack has this crazy idea that he was the one to put the thought in Myron's head.”

“That was more than a year ago,” I said.

“Yeah, but something else happened later, just before the fire. Zack took his money. You know what I'm saying? He took his money and he didn't run with it. He let Myron do what he wanted, right out there in the vacant lot—my brother and Myron Evans.”

I didn't tell her that I already knew. I remembered standing next to Myron, how he grinned when Zachary was inside the burning bar. I saw him piss on Freda Graves's window and heard the words:
That boy took my money and God didn't stop him
.

“He acts like he killed Myron just like he killed that cat,” Gwen said. “He's afraid someone will find out; he thinks someone might have seen them together. He never wants to go outside again. I told him that if anyone's responsible for Myron Evans hanging himself it's that little fool Miriam Deets, making a big deal out of nothing, like she'd never seen a guy's dick before. Maybe ol' Lanfear only did it in the dark.”

I said, “We're all to blame for Myron, you and me too, chasing him, making his life a misery.”

A door slammed downstairs. “The warden's home,” Gwen said. “You'll have to fly out this window or pay Zack to sneak you out of here.” She giggled. “No, better not offer Zack money.”

I held her hand tight. I didn't feel much like talking. I was thinking about all that had happened to us, to everyone in this town.

I saw a man slip five dollars in a boy's pocket, and I saw that man's white-footed cat lying limp in his arms. Now the man huddled over a tiny pad of paper, scratching out his last words.

In a hot room, a bony woman pulled another man's hands toward the flame of a candle. And the flame exploded and torched all our lives in a single summer night.

They hauled Jesse from the lake on a windless summer day. Nina leaned over him, put her mouth on his with the fervor of a lover; her hair brushed his face, and she wept and pleaded, but he was far beyond the cry of human voices, and his open eyes mocked her.

Years we spent learning not to fear that lake until the day one more boy heard the irresistible call of water and aimed his plane toward the blue surface. Looking for freedom, he found death. Bubbles poured from his lips as the plane plunged deeper and deeper along the rocky ledges of a trench. On his lover's forehead, a purple bruise the size of an egg would tell her story to the men who dragged her body to shore and stood around her, each one praying that his own daughter might be spared the wrath of love.

In a dream my father had, the girl behind glass at the bottom of Moon Lake had my sister's face. And this might be true because the girl who came home looked nothing like my Nina. But in my dreams I saw her in a burning building, her golden hair aflame. I stood mute, too scared to grab her hand or even call her name.

My father and I, for all our love, could not bring Nina back. Only my mother was brave enough to face a yapping yellow dog and a white woman with a gun; only she had enough faith to trust the big Indian my father hated. Daddy had to pretend Nina was unchanged, and I swore she'd never come home. But Mother allowed her to be who she was; Mother sat in the terrible light of the kitchen while Nina's words fell across her neck and shoulders, hard as hailstones dropping from the summer sky.

“Will you do something for me?” I heard my sister's voice but knew it was Gwen who spoke.

“Anything,” I answered.

“It's hard for me to wash my hair,” she said. “I can't lean over far enough in the tub to get my head under the faucet. Do you think …?”

“Of course.”

“I won't repulse you?”

“I don't know.”

“You can close your eyes.”

“Yes, I can close my eyes.”

She waddled down the hall in front of me, her back arched, her bare feet slapping the wood, her hips swaying with the weight of her belly. I carried the towels.

When she stripped, I kept my eyes open and gazed at her full and drooping breasts, wondered at the suddenness of age, the white lines under the skin where flesh had stretched too fast; I touched her hard stomach and jumped back when the baby kicked my hand, then laid my hands on her again, amazed.

“Look at my arms,” she said. “I've grown all this extra hair—everywhere.” She lifted one leg to show me the dark hairs sprouting along her shins. “It's weird. I feel like I'm living in someone else's body. Dr. Ben says it will go away when the baby comes. I'm going to shed.” She smirked, disgusted and amused.

We ran the water till the tub nearly overflowed. I poured pitcher after pitcher over her head, scrubbed her hair three times with shampoo, soaped her back and between each toe, all the places she couldn't reach. Then I dried her too, and wrapped her head in a towel so she stood, naked, like some great-bellied princess in a turban. I dried her thick ankles and her dimpled knees; the coltish legs of the girl were bloated beyond recognition—her limbs had filled like bags of water. I rubbed her thighs with the rough towel, patted her dry in the soft triangle where droplets beaded in dark curls. I followed the knotty joints of her spine, neck to buttocks; even her back was covered with an unfamiliar downy fuzz, the soft growth of hair that made her feel her body had bloomed in strange, unwelcome ways. I brushed the towel lightly along the high ridge of her stomach, making small circles, then bigger and bigger, until I traced the whole great globe of her yeasty, risen loaf. I rubbed her like a magic bottle till she shook, weak with laughter, wobbling on her watery knees.

She was clean and sweet-smelling despite the rage of hormones, sweet and grassy as she was when we stood at the crest of the gully where she kissed me, the first time.

She had a woman's hands now; I told her so as I dried each finger. “Hands to tell stories,” I said.

Hands to hold a child if you change your mind, I thought, but I dared not whisper these words.

She said, “Will you come see me again?” And I said yes. The dirty housedress was the only thing she had that still fit, so I told her I'd bring something the next time I visited. “Tomorrow?” she said, and made me promise:
Yes, tomorrow
. “I'll tell Zack. He'll let you in.”

“He won't be embarrassed?”

“He has to let someone look at him sooner or later. It might as well be you.”

Yes, I thought, it might as well be me. And if I could see the wonder of Gwen's misshapen body, then surely Zack's scarred hands and peeling face would not startle me or make me turn away. I knew now that this was how Jesus healed the lepers, by not being afraid to look at their ravaged flesh, by sitting down beside them. Yes, at last I understood one small thing in this world, that to look at people as they were, without fear or shame, was a kind of healing, sometimes the only kind that mattered.

But I wasn't ready to face Zack tonight. Tomorrow was soon enough.

I don't know why I changed my mind. It seemed I was always turning my back on someone. What had I learned from Red Elk? What had I learned from my mother? I was still running, leaving Nina in the truck with my drunken cousins, moving too slowly to stop Drew Grosswilder's pals from yanking the pants off the Indian boy. I was afraid of Joshua Holler; I was afraid to look at Zack. But I wondered how Gwen could stand even one more night locked in her room.

So I turned around, knocked on her door again. I said, “Come on, we're going to my house,” and she didn't argue. She found a pair of heavy wool socks.

“Shoes,” she said, “I don't have any shoes.”

“We'll take your dad's galoshes.”

Josh Holler tried to stop us at the door. “Where the hell do you think you're going?” he said.

“Outside,” I told him. He barred the door with his thick body. “There's more than one door to this house,” I said. “You'll have to knock us both flat to keep us from leaving.” He lurched forward to threaten me, but I didn't budge. Zack watched from the hallway, half hidden in shadow. I thought his loss of beauty would free me from desire; but no, scars or not, he was unchanged, and I longed to touch his face, to say:
It doesn't matter now, none of it matters
. I felt a strange, exhilarating power, knowing I was strong enough to forgive. He grinned at me, glad to see someone stand up to his father, and I grinned back, trusting Zack Holler for the first time.

Joshua moved away from the door. He wasn't going to hit a pregnant girl or another man's daughter; he wasn't going to chase us from the front of the house to the back. “I want you home at nine,” he said, and Gwen nodded, generous enough to let him still believe he had some hold on her.

I knew my parents would be surprised to see Gwen Holler this way, her body swollen, her skin dull. They were already in the kitchen. My father's ears reddened when he looked at Gwen, but he said, “Have a seat,” and he tried to smile. Mother touched Gwen's shoulder, lightly, just as a mother would touch her own child. Gwen said, “It smells good in here. It's been so long since I smelled real food. Zack only knows how to cook scrambled eggs and chipped beef with creamed peas on toast.”

We laughed, though it wasn't funny. I could see Daddy's struggle as he looked at the pregnant girl. I imagined he was wishing he had let Nina stay all those years ago, let her sit at his table, let her pat her huge stomach in her distracted, absent way. But the best a man can do is to make the right choice when he gets a second chance. We sat down together and joined hands. My father bowed his head. “Father, we thank thee,” he said, “for these mercies.…”

I was proud of my mother and father just then. Until that night, I had never said those words to myself. Gwen scraped her plate clean, and Mom gave her more macaroni and cheese, another heap of green beans. “You need your vegetables,” Mom said. I saw what a mother's concern meant to Gwen. She rubbed her eyes with her napkin. And I was thankful to my friend, realizing how much more difficult it is to accept kindness than it is to offer it. After dinner, Daddy went out on the porch to smoke a cigarette in the dark. I washed the dishes while Mother sat with Gwen, drinking pale tea.

Just before nine, I walked Gwen to her house, kissed her cheek and promised I'd bring her oranges and chocolate when I came tomorrow. I turned and ran down the block. Night had broken clear and cold. A touch might have shattered the frozen sky if human arms could reach that far. Above me the thick stars of the Milky Way spun in the blue-black air, all the eyes of lost children, of those missing and those dead. My eyes on them murmured a prayer that had no words. Soon there would be one more child in this world, a child Gwen meant to give away before she could be tugged and bound by love. And this child too would disappear from our lives and become a star to watch over us without pity or judgment. This child, his eyes locked in Heaven, would see us night after night but would not ever find a path to lead him home.