Romeo is Homeless (24 page)

The next morning, August sat at her bedroom window. She’d told them everything she could bring herself to say out loud, and some things she hadn’t meant to. She felt lighter. Perhaps confession was good for the soul after all. But it niggled at her that there were still some secrets. Still parts of her experience – pieces of her – she just wasn’t able to share with them.

“August?” Her mother called through the closed door.

“It’s open.” She sat at the window and stared out into the yard.

Her mother poked her head inside the room. “Can we talk?”

“Sure, Mom.”

Caraleen took a long time crossing the floor, her arms crossed in front of her chest. She sat on the bed and looked directly at August, eyes pinched and serious. She sighed and put her hands on her thighs. “August, did you have sex with that boy? With Reese?”

Her heart flipped. She shouldn’t be surprised her mother had figured it out. She did everything but say “I fucked him, you know.” Had her father seen it too? Heat rose in her cheeks and she looked away, staring back out the window. She nodded once.

Caraleen took one of August’s hands and shook it until she looked her mother in the eye. “August. Sweetheart. Were you careful?”

She couldn’t speak, just shook her head. Then erupted into tears.

Caraleen moved next to her and pulled her into a hug. “I’ll make an appointment with the doctor.”

August rested her forehead against the cool glass of the passenger window and stared out at nothing. She was three hundred miles away, every thought centered on her other, brief life. She had replayed those weeks in the city so many times in her head it became part of everything she did, everything she said, every moment of every day. She’d made some pretty stupid choices, but they were hers to make. She chose to run away. She chose to stay there when she could have made one phone call and gone home. She fell in love with Reese – no choice there. That was way beyond any control she knew how to muster. But she chose to show that love, to prove it to him, through sex. Unconditional. Unprotected. Yes, she made that decision all on her own. Pretty stupid choice.

A pat on her thigh broke her concentration. She gave her mother a weak smile and a prolonged hand squeeze, then released it so Caraleen could have two hands on the wheel. The drive back from town, after a tense and frustrating appointment with Dr. Robertson, was interminable.

“It will take some time to get results on some of the tests,” he had said. “But visually, everything looks okay.”

August cocked her head to one side. “You can tell by looking whether or not I may have AIDs?”

His cheeks were pinker than normal, his eye contact with her non-existent. He flipped through her chart and glanced at her mother once in a while, clearly mortified and disappointed to be discussing sex and disease with her. “No. No, you can’t. Not early on.” He had delivered her at birth, cared for her childhood illnesses, healed her broken arm, was always a kind and gentle man. And she had let him down. “We’ll just have to wait.”

Caraleen guided the truck around the last bend in the highway before the mile-long straightaway to their drive. About fifty yards into the field, her father stood beside the rusty tractor sucking on a cigarette, blue smoke wafting up into the calm summer air.

“Mom, can we stop now? I need to get this over with.”

Caraleen eased onto the shoulder and clunked the transmission into park. She brushed her fingers against August’s cheek. “Let’s go.”

“I think I want to tell him by myself.”

“Okay. I’ll be right here.”

August climbed from the truck and cut across the field, pushing corn stalks aside. Half way, she paused and looked back. Her mother was leaning against the front wheel well, watching with arms crossed. August took a deep breath, braced herself for the conversation to come and strode toward her father, her heart in her throat.

He beamed at her as she approached. “Hi, sweetheart!” he yelled above the rumble of the old tractor engine. He climbed up into the cab and turned it off, the sudden silence ringing in her ears. “Corn’s almost ready, couple more weeks. Early, hey?” He butted his cigarette out on the sole of his steel-toed work boot and pocketed the extinguished end. He never littered in his cornfield. “Where’ve you guys been?”

“Mom took me into town to see Dr. R.” She looked down at her feet, shifting from side to side, her hands tucked into her front jean pockets. Unable to fight it any longer, she started to cry.

Her father gathered her in his arms, hugged her and kissed the side of her head. “Now, now. What’s going on? Why are you crying?”

She pulled back without leaving his embrace and looked into his gentle eyes.

“Daddy,” her voice cracked. “I’m pregnant.”

He didn’t say a word, just stared at her. He wasn’t angry, didn’t look sad. He didn’t seem like he felt anything at all, just gazed at her for at least a full minute. Then he nodded a couple of times and pulled her into him. “Well. All right, then.”

*****

The rest of summer break played out like a never-ending video loop of typical farm life. Awake to the daily argument between Jack and the rooster, slop the pigs, gather the eggs, milk the cows, muck the stalls. Over and over again, same thing day in and day out. August loved it. She had a comfortable bed to sleep in and never had to worry where her next meal would come from. Only one thing was missing. A beautiful boy who had never set foot on a farm.

The week before school started, she finished gathering the eggs and strolled across the yard to the house. Mr. Tugman’s truck rumbled up the drive, kicking up dust in its wake, Sara in the passenger seat. It was now or never - time to mend a fence. She stopped at the doorstep and waited as they exited the truck.

Mr. Tugman strode toward her in his familiar confident and heavy-footed gait. Sara lagged behind, looking at her feet.

“Good morning, August.”

The reverberating bass of his huge voice had always unnerved her, especially knowing that he knocked his wife and daughter around once in a while. But not much unnerved her these days.

“Hi, Mr. Tugman.” She looked past him to Sara. “Hey, Sara.”

Sara came out from behind her father. She looked at the ground then peered at August and offered a weak smile. “Hi. Can we talk?”

She and Sara made meaningless small talk on their way up to her bedroom. Nice day. Beautiful weather. School next week. As soon as August closed the door, Sara started sobbing.

“August, I’m so sorry. I know I broke our pinky swear, but you didn’t call! I was worried sick.”

“I know. I understand. I would have done the same, I think.”

“Is it true? You had a boyfriend there that died? Are you all right?”

Neither of them made any moves toward each other. No comforting hugs were offered. There was no desire to lean their heads together to keep their conversation special or private.

August walked toward the dresser and analyzed her reflection. It looked nothing like it used to. She went through so much, saw so much. It had transformed her. But Sara was still just Sara. How could she find common ground with her former best friend?

She wasn’t angry with her friend for tattling. She would have done the same if Sara had run away. It was the broken promise she couldn’t get past. The trust was gone. She didn’t know if she would ever get it back.

August fingered the hairbrush on her dresser and then wandered to the window, staring out at the pigpen. She missed Amber’s easy friendship, the connection they had, the ability to talk openly about anything, no matter how hard, without judgment. Desperate to have that again she turned to face Sara – and spilled her guts. She started to tell the girl all the things she couldn’t bring herself to tell her parents. She needed to say those facts out loud, offload some of the pain, share the unbearable weight.

She skipped the boring details and went right to what mattered. She told Sara about Reese, about falling in love. About sex.

“So, he was your first?”

“No.” August swallowed and glanced at her feet. “Not him.”

“What, Randy? You said you wouldn’t!”

“Oh, hell no. Not Randy, no way.” She took a deep breath and then told Sara about losing her virginity to the man who paid her sixty dollars.

Sara stared at her and took a step backwards. “Yo
u
you were a prostitute?”

“Just that one time. I needed the money, there wasn’t anything to eat. And I had to do my share if I wanted to be part of their family. To be with Reese.”

“He made you do that? Why would you love someone like that?”

“No, you don’t understand. He didn’t make me do anything. Actually, he didn’t want me to. I didn’t want to do it, but I wanted to – help.” She sighed and pinched her lips together. Sara didn’t get it. “It’s hard to explain. You have to go through it to really know what it’s like.”

Sara’s eyes narrowed and her head shook back and forth. “I’m not ever going to go through that.”

“Yeah, I know. I wouldn’t want you to. That part was horrible.”

She wrapped up her story, an abridged version of what she told her parents. The need to tell it all to this girl had disappeared. Sara had that look on her face. The one that said, ‘I’m better than you, but I’ll be polite just long enough to get the hell away from here.’

“My God, August. You were only gone a few weeks.”

She could feel it in her heart and see it in Sara’s eyes. They’d lost their bond. It was severed by an entire second lifetime she had lived in the city, utterly disconnected from her world at home. She turned away and stared out the window.

“It changed me, Sara.” She stroked her stomach, then dropped her hand to her side. She wasn’t about to reveal her pregnancy. That news was too special to share with someone she couldn’t trust. Someone who wasn’t family. “It changed my life.”

Spring bloomed early in full living color. By late March the side yard was carpeted by white daisies, the corn already in the ground. And babies were popping out all over the place.

There was a flurry of activity in the lambing pen, all the lambs healthy except for the runt of a litter of triplets. He was pushed aside by his bigger siblings, not strong enough to fight his way to his mother’s bulging teats. After one day, the mother rejected him.

August couldn’t bear to see him wander alone in the pen, his pitiful bleat tugging on her heartstrings. So she taught April how to feed him with a bottle. Her sister proved to be a loving substitute mother and the lamb started to thrive. Their father told April they were connected now, she and that lamb – she had saved his life. Saved him. At least one of the Bailey girls knew how to rescue a doomed soul.

The three sows gave birth to a total of twenty-seven piglets, the most she could ever remember. August stayed in the pen with her father during the births, then held the newborns still while he trimmed their soft teeth. Most of them would be fed and fattened and sold for meat, like last year and the year before that. She was no vegetarian, but this part of reality was getting hard to swallow.

Both of the cows’ bellies were colossal with pregnancy. She’d visited them every day in the barn during winter, and then in the pasture when the spring thawed the ground. They would waddle to the fence when they saw her coming and moo their hellos. They were always a little standoffish with her in past, but not this year. Maybe they could sense she was going to be a mother too, they could trust her now. She understood them.

She rubbed their snouts and talked to them, told them how beautiful they were, those huge dark eyes and long lashes. She dreaded the day they did give birth. Like the pigs, their babies would be taken away from them, but after just one night. They would be incarcerated in veal pens, sentenced to be sold at auction and then slaughtered for their tender, young meat. The farm would have fresh milk from the mother’s bloated udders until the next cycle, but those poor creatures would bellow their gut-wrenching despair at the loss of their babies for days on end. Until this season she thought of it as just another sad fact of farm life. This year, it just plain broke her heart.

*****

August sat on the window seat in her bedroom and gazed out into the yard. Like the spring, the weeping cherries had blossomed early, their leafy limbs already bereft of flowers. Decaying petals carpeted the drive, the saccharine perfume from their decomposing bodies filled the air and mixed with the pig stink from the pen just a hundred feet from the house. The perfect rural cologne.

It was a sparkling Wednesday the first week in April, and she started this day like any other – awash in thoughts of Reese. This morning ritual had replaced other, lesser rituals. No more prayers at bedtime. No more grace before meals. Just morning worship at the altar of her grief, her ceremonial devotion to his memory. It was here she analyzed the choices she’d made. Here she realized every day was full of choice. Every choice had consequences. Every consequence, life-changing.

Reese hadn’t had many choices to make. He didn’t choose to be raped, never asked to be beaten, burned, whipped. Even his addiction was thrust upon him. The one horrific choice he did make, to kill his mother, wasn’t really a choice at all. It was a matter of life and death. His life. Her death. He would have died years earlier if he hadn’t done it. Dead either way. Doomed from the start.

Sitting at the window, she played out that last day over and over again. The day she watched him jump in front of that train. The day he sacrificed himself to save her. The day the pain came and wouldn’t go away. That pain haunted her as much as he preoccupied her thoughts. The electricity that passed between them when they touched. The taste of his lips, his tongue, his skin. The wave in his hair, the length of his limbs, the angle of his neck, that enticing lump in his throat. His eyes. Those eyes were ever present. No, he never left her. She was bound to him until the end of days, permanently tethered to a dead man. United in some cruel, heartrending, cosmic marriage.

After each memory ended, she was hollow, her heart vacant. How could she ever be with anyone else? She would never love another like she loved him. She could never love again. She was certain this was true, and yet fating herself to this lonely conclusion, the presumption she would only experience the joy and exhilaration of perfect love in some nostalgic haze, never in the here and now, left her on the brink of emptiness.

Her baby stretched in her belly and shook her from her melancholy fog. She watched as one of his little body parts tried to push the limits of her uterus. She rubbed and poked at her stomach, prompting a flurry of action – a fist punching, a foot kicking. She couldn’t tell which.

A contented smile took over her face, releasing her from the heartache of her memories. How could she feel empty? She was in love with this little person – half her, half Reese – growing inside of her. She was thrilled when the ultrasound revealed it was a boy. Now Reese would live forever through his son. She’d never even considered giving her baby up for adoption or terminating the pregnancy. She would love this child without reservation, guarantee him a home where he would be safe and happy. But he could hurry up and make an entrance already. Her due date came and went two weeks ago, but this little dude had no plans on leaving his warm and comfy home yet. She rubbed her lower back and groaned.

Tires crunched on gravel. The school bus. She watched as her sisters ran down the drive to catch it. June turned to wave at her like every morning. She waved back and blew her baby sister a kiss, then breathed a heavy sigh and hauled herself downstairs to do her chores. Life on the farm didn’t take a break just because she was stupid enough to get knocked up.

Dishes clattered in the kitchen and the nauseating aroma of fresh coffee cut through the sweet putrefaction of rotting cherry blossoms.

At the kitchen threshold she paused and watched her mother clean the breakfast dishes, humming a familiar, off-key tune. “Hit me like a train.” She fought the urge to cry, then tiptoed behind her mother and wrapped her arms around an apron-clad middle.

“Morning, Mom.”

“Good morning, sweetheart. Breakfast is on the table.” Caraleen twisted around and kissed her on the cheek.

August rested one hand on the shelf of her belly and eyed the plate full of eggs and greasy sausage. “If you don’t mind, I’m not up for it yet. I’ll come back after the pigs get theirs.”

She crossed the yard, squinting in the bright sunlight. She slogged through the pen with a heavy pail, watermelon rinds and apple cores floating atop the slurry, her black rubber boots fast becoming cumbersome with mud. She heaved the pail up to rest on the side of the slop bin and tipped it, spilling its pungent contents for the waiting snouts.

A gentle poke in her rear put her off balance. She reached out and grabbed the feeder. The largest sow snorted at her, probably thinking, ‘Ha ha, gotcha again. Don’t you ever learn?’

“Well, good morning to you, too.” August laughed and knuckle-rubbed the old girl between her ears, the thick rough hide and sparse bristles of hair like a rasp against her calloused skin. She grabbed the empty bucket, still not ready to face that greasy breakfast plate, and went to gather eggs.

When she exited the pigpen she doubled over. Pain ripped through her stomach. She turned the pail upside down and sat, throwing one arm around the fence rail for support. Sudden warmth flooded her legs. Her jeans were soaked to the knees.

“Mother!” she screamed. “It’s happening!”

*****

The pain was undulating waves of torture that crested, ebbed, deceived August into momentary comfort and then crested again. Her entire body was slippery with sweat, hair stuck to her forehead and neck. The breathing exercises she’d learned were thrown out in favor of flat-out screaming. How many hours would this go on?

“Breathe, August! Now push!”

She grabbed the hand that patted her arm and squeezed, finding encouragement at her mother’s touch. Rocking forward, she did as she was told and pushed.

“Good girl, August. Keep breathing! There’s the head.”

She flopped onto her back, the vinyl mattress pad crackled beneath the thin sheet. Relief was temporary. Another wave of pain surged through her.

“One more push, August. Just the shoulder and then you’re home free. Come on, you’re doing great! You can do it!”

August grunted. Whoever the cheerleader was could shut the hell up. Then she pushed. The small shoulder squeezing out of her sent fresh pain coursing through her lower back. Then sudden relief and a wonderful tickle as arms and legs squiggled free of their months long confines.

She fell back, gulping for air. A magnificent, indignant wail filled her ears. She burst out laughing, tears streamed down her face.

“Here he is, August. You did great. He’s perfect.”

The doctor laid her son on her stomach. She reached out and touched his tiny hand with one finger.

“Hey, little Reese-man. Happy birthday, baby.” She stroked his gooey little head. A renegade tuft of light blond hair poked up from the darker clumps still sticky with birth.

He blinked his eyes and looked right at her.

Her heart melted. She hadn’t felt exhilaration or joy this intense in months. Maybe never. She laughed again through ecstatic tears and cooed at him when he grasped her finger in his tiny hand. If only his daddy could have seen his beautiful face. Then he would have really been saved.

“Look, Reese. Grandma’s here too.”

Her mother kissed her forehead. Then Caraleen took the umbilical scissors the doctor held out and cut the cord.