Snakeskin Road (13 page)

Jennifer signed the letter with love and folded it and addressed the envelope to her mother. Mazy started snoring and Jennifer rubbed her head, turned her a little until she stopped, but kept rubbing, as light as possible so as not to wake the girl.

She was still troubled by the dream memory of her mother’s hand on her face, the blood in her mouth. She had locked herself in her mama’s room and wouldn’t open it, no matter how much Delia walloped on the door and begged.

But when Terry got home, the sun just starting to come up, Jennifer had rushed out, grabbed him, and Delia shouted, “Just do that. Go ahead and hold her instead of me.” Her wrinkles had swollen into pinkish-red bags from the crying, sinking her small eyes even deeper into her skull, and she marched into her room, shut the door, locked it. “I’m the one who’s hurt,” she said.

“I’m hurt,” Jennifer shouted just as loud, waiting for Terry to pull her in, but he just kept his arms up as if someone had a gun to his spine, as if he hadn’t done anything wrong—
See, Delia, see. I’m not favoring Jen
was what he said without saying a word. Too bad Mama wasn’t in the hall to witness his performance. Then slowly he dropped his hands around Jennifer’s shoulders.

She felt them light down carefully, like skittish birds. It left her comfortless.

“What the hell happened?” he asked, and she looked up, gripping his stomach that kept trying to wiggle free.

“Your face—what happened to your face?”

She wanted to shut her mouth, but the skin just tightened and turned numb. And she kept swallowing her own spit—the bleeding had stopped, but her saliva glands had gone berserk.

“We got to a fight, in a fight.” The words sputtered. She kept repeating them until she could say it all in one breath. “We got in a fight because of my arm. Mama thought I cut
myself,” and Jennifer wanted to show him the place on her wrist, but he pushed her back slightly, firmly, adjusting her to a distance, as if she were a letter he was trying to read. “You didn’t, did you?”

“No.” She shook her head. “I cut myself on the kitchen window.” She nodded one stroke toward the kitchen.

He glanced there, then down at her wrist. “What happened to your face?”

“She hit me.”

Terry frowned and went over to the door, started knocking. “Open up, Delia.”

“I don’t think she meant to hit me,” Jennifer said quietly, but a part of her didn’t mean those words—it felt good to have Terry stick up for her, too.

“Honey,” he yelled. Delia refused to answer. “It’s okay. Open up. I’m here now. Don’t shut me out.” He started coughing but managed to relax himself before the cough hastened into a fit.

The silence began to build and build until only the wind outside rose and fell; the television had been clicked on, but nothing from Mama.

“Delia, I need you to talk to me. Tell me you’re okay. You have to tell me that. I ain’t leaving this door.”

“What’s wrong?” Jennifer asked.

He leaned in, started beating on the door with his skinny shoulder until the wood cracked and swung loose of the frame in a whoosh of air. Delia was sitting on the edge of the bed, watching television. Terry went to her and grabbed her, saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay, honey.” She shook and shook in his arms.

Jennifer wanted to hold her mama, too, and wanted to be held. She felt carved up with bruised jealousy and anger. Then gravity pulled all of the jealousy and anger out through her toes, leaving Jennifer light-headed; she no longer knew who to be mad with or who deserved the most pity. She walked into the room, backed up—Terry was
squeezing so tight, she wouldn’t be able to get between them.

So Jennifer sighed as loud as she could and clapped her hands on her hips, stomped to the bathroom and washed the blood from her arm, rinsing the sting from her mouth until the copper taste thinned into water. A yellow towel hung over the mirror. She yanked it to the tile. But the towel didn’t even make a popping noise, just drifted lazily, and her face in the mirror stopped her.

Ravaged
—she thought it, couldn’t bring herself to say it. All the blue places around her lips and eyes were just as swollen as her mama’s. Even some of her freckles, what she had been told was pretty about herself and believed until now; the freckles had stretched in this new swollen skin, her ears red with heat. She saw more of her mama in the reflection than she had before, than she wanted to see ever. Behind those eyes, anger—still churning, rising back up through her toes—that anger hadn’t left after all.
A ravaged face
—she shook her head and her black bangs came undone from behind her ears.
Not my face, not my face
. But there it was.

   An hour later Terry peeled away a side of her rug tent, then a chair, and raised Jennifer to the kitchen counter, so they could see each other mostly eye to eye. He squinted, had to back up. Jennifer frowned and started to tell him he needed glasses, but he’d just wave the suggestion off like he always did and say, Don’t bother me about it. He still smelled like mud, and faintly like cinnamon and chocolate, his hands cold like Mama’s room was cold.

“Jen,” he said, “your mama can’t handle you doing anything to your wrist. Acting this way.” He reached into the drawer for a rag and fished it under the spigot, then started cleaning at her mouth that she had already cleaned. She kicked her feet whenever he pressed too hard.

“I didn’t do anything to my wrist. I got cut on the window,” and Jennifer turned, touched the square hole where the shirts had been.

“Keep still,” he said, wiggling her front teeth.

She yanked her head back.

“Keep still, they’re all right. Your mama didn’t knock you too bad.” He started wiping at her lips again. “Your lips are bleeding like a squished tick.”

“What’s wrong with Mama?” she managed to say.

He just kept wiping, then washed the bright-red off in the sink, but the towel wasn’t as bloody as he let on. He took her arm and rubbed the wet rag over it; her skin prickled with coolness. Only a thin line existed, a hairline where she had cut herself, and the blood had stopped leaking altogether. “Even if it was an accident, Jen, it’s not as bad as you made out.”

He gave Jennifer a sharp look she didn’t respond to, which was as good as admitting that he was right, and a protest bubbled up in her. “She punched me in the face. My lips are bleeding like a tick.”

“Next time, just wait on me, okay? Wait until I get home and can take care of you.”

“But why? Why can’t Mama do it? She’s been in her room for twenty-seven nights. You’re not here and it’s lonely here.”

“Twenty-seven—you been counting on her again? Look, she’s having a spell, but your mama will come out of it. She always does. You’ve been coping with these spells longer than I have. You should know how they work.”

“I’m tired of it. It gets lonely in the house,” Jennifer said. “And she’s my mama. She owes me.”

“Owes you what? Brought you into this world.”

“She shouldn’t have brought me, then,” Jennifer said and kicked at his leg.

Terry jerked out of range before she could get him, but the sudden move started him coughing. She wanted to tell
him to relax, it would be okay if he relaxed. But she said nothing because she was mad at him. Instead, she crossed her legs and tensed them together.

He grabbed the shirts off the floor and stuffed them in the window to stop the wind’s howling and rattling and his coughing died down. Then he came back to her and rubbed her hair, smoothing the flyaway parts, trying to flatten the black patches.

“Your mama’s trying to find reasons to stay alive in this desert,” Terry said, and Jennifer knew then she wasn’t one of those reasons.

“You’re making me an orphan.”

“What?” Terry laughed. “You ain’t no orphan.”

“My father’s already dead, and now you’re telling me my mama doesn’t love me. I might as well run away.”

“Now, girl, you know she loves you. It’s the desert. The desert’s getting to her.”

“Then what’s her reason for living? It’s you, not me.”

This time when she kicked, he buckled and Jennifer squirmed off the counter, but before she could march out like Mama had done earlier, Terry snatched her arm, the one with the scrape.

“We’re both reasons for her living. Sometimes that’s not enough. Don’t you understand? Or you too stubborn?”

Jennifer wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of an answer, but of course she knew. The desert stretched for miles and miles and stretched you out with it, stretched your life into the thinnest, inescapable breath, no matter how many people you loved or who loved you. Those people couldn’t keep you sane and alive any more than they could keep the desert from spreading. She understood because she had no choice—over and over, she confronted the desert. Its annihilating persistence was the one absolute she was made to understand.

“Your mama has hurt herself before,” he said.

“No she hasn’t.” Jennifer didn’t believe it. She had lived
with Delia the longest of anyone and knew her best. If Delia was that vulnerable, then Jennifer was vulnerable.

“She has.” He pressed tighter on her arm. “And you don’t want that to happen. I don’t want that. Understand? Grow up and be more forgiving.”

Jennifer snatched away from him. “She didn’t have to hit me.”

“She didn’t mean to,” Terry said, “she got spooked.” But then he reached up to Jennifer’s mouth still puffed and swollen and made sure not to touch the sore places, set his hand close and touched her skin lightly. “Delia shouldn’t have hit you. I know that. I’m sorry.”

“Not your place to apologize for her. You’re not the one who’s with her all night, walking through this house while she’s locked up in her room. Do you know how lonely I am?”

“Jen—”

“You won’t do nothing about it; I know that about you—nothing,” and she marched off.

   For weeks she waited for her mother to apologize, but Delia wouldn’t do it. The one thing Jennifer had managed was this—her mother no longer stayed holed up in her room. Delia drifted through the small house, Jennifer anticipating her steps, keeping out of their way inside her tiny bedroom or the bathroom, or hours inside her tent of rug-chairs unless she had chores—she didn’t want another fight.

It was as if Delia was open to an apology, had made herself available for one, but it had to come from Jennifer first. And that was the line—pride—that neither one of them dared budge across. Her mama roamed the dining room and kitchen, the hallway, and even the porch some—Terry had bought a rocking chair. She took car trips into town. Jennifer stayed mostly in her room with nothing but clothes to change in and out of, Hot Wheel cars and pieced-together
Barbie dolls she was too old for, but that’s all she had. She took naps. A lot of naps. Traced the dust rising to the ceiling light and dust drifting just as steadily to the ground.

A few times, someone visited and brought a son or daughter along. Hagen Teasdale came over twice. Half his front teeth had gone missing from a baseball bat accident, giving him an odd, mush-mouthed voice. The mining camp dentist, Elliot Sumners, had to order Hagen new teeth from the Saved World.

“Tee coming,” he promised her and nodded and closed his lips tight, so he didn’t have to say more—he knew how garbled he sounded, and Jennifer had no desire to pry that ugly mouth open.

His whole body was wrong-shaped to the point where even standing became a difficult task. He could walk okay, but if he stood for too long, he had to suddenly grab a bedpost or the dresser to keep gravity from swinging him down. It was as if his body had rejected its own sense of balance. Hagen kept near the doorway, fidgeting, and Jennifer sat in the farthest corner, miles of blue shag carpet between them.

“You want some Hot Wheels to play with?” she asked on his first visit. They hadn’t talked for an hour. “I don’t have a TV.”

“All right,” he said, so she gave him six—the ones she threw at Terry during their brawls, and, therefore, the ones with sideways wheels and bodies roughed up the most. It was about the only thing she used the cars for now that she was twelve, mature. But Hagen Teasdale made do with them, kneeling by the door, crashing the cars into one another and making boom noises when they hit until it was time to go.

“Tha you,” he said because his mother made him, standing with her hand clawed to his shoulder.

“Thank you,” Ms. Teasdale corrected.

“I got it,” Jennifer said. She felt bad for Hagen. He
would never have the courage to head-butt Ms. Teasdale in the gut.

And that was it.

“Thank God,” she said to her Barbies once the Teas-dales’ truck drove away. When he showed up four days later, she parceled out the same six cars; they went the whole visit without a single attempt at conversation; and yet, it was nice, Jennifer decided, to have someone in the room.

The swelling in her lips went down, and when Terry came home, the two of them didn’t say much. He had definitely taken Mama’s side. On weekends, they took drives without speaking—Terry no longer asked if they wanted to go for a jaunt; they were going, period. The government had sent down an extra shipment of propane by mistake and he was determined to use up his doubled rations. But their jaunts had always been silent outings, so it wasn’t much different except Terry drove longer than usual, epic drives that threatened to find the end of the desert if only they had more propane tanks in the truck bed, if only they had more time before the sun broke the day open. Driving it turned out was the only thing they could bear to do as a family that still seemed normal.

She was two weeks into her standoff when she realized that she had become her mama’s ghost. She vowed not to talk to herself like Mama did; instead Jennifer mulled over the number of socks in her drawer, matched and unmatched, green—her favorite color—turquoise, red, and white. The whites, in truth, were more gray than white. After two weeks of repeating the same details, the same counting, she was going crazy. She didn’t have that many socks to begin with, or pants, or skirts, or blouses, her mama called them—T-shirts was what Terry called them—or cars or dolls, or bedsheets, or holes in the ceiling tiles. The constant silent procession of bodies—whether it was Hagen by the door, her mother walking the halls, or Terry fixed
permanently in the driver’s seat of his trucks—bodies without voices didn’t help her keep her sanity.