The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel (14 page)

“You want to get on over to the shop?” he said. “I mean, if you want to we could.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Okay,” he said, giving patience a try, and failing. “What do you want then, Helen? What is it you’d like to do?”

She sighed. “Not this,” she said. Then she said, “I think I’d rather die.”

“
What?”
He held the steering wheel in both hands as if he were driving. “Don’t say that. That’s not funny, Helen.”

“Seriously,” she said. “I want you to kill me.” Even she didn’t know where this voice was coming from. A feeling had somehow hijacked her tongue, and it sounded about right, so she stuck with it. “How about you kill me and stick me into one of these cars,” she said. “No one will ever know.”

“Kill you,” he said. He laughed. He gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white. “I’m okay just sitting here, talking. Or I got a better idea. How about we get out of the car and get some fresh air. That’ll make you feel better.”

The air inside the car was so hot the sweat on her arm burned. Her forehead was glistening. Jonas reached over and placed a gentle hand on her knee.

“How do you even stand to look at me, Jonas?”

“Are you kidding?” he said. “It’s the easiest thing I do all day.”

He started unfastening his seat belt. The sweat flowed down her face now, burning her eyes, and for a moment she couldn’t see. She shouldn’t have left Rachel like that—not because it was any worse than anything Helen had ever done to her before, but because Rachel knew Helen for who she was now, and if she didn’t know for certain, she would, and soon. It had been easier when Helen thought she would never be caught—as long as Rachel didn’t know it was possible for Helen to imagine her own self as the picture of that person she had painted for Rachel. And it was this, more than the darker parts of her own heart, that made her malice so successful, and necessary. Rachel let Helen believe she was better than she was.

Jonas slid quickly across the seat and took her hands in his and brought them to his lips, where he kissed them. He kissed them front and back. “What’s wrong with us today?” he said. “We’re usually thinking the same thing.”

“We’re never thinking the same thing, Jonas.
Never
.”

She said this last part so emphatically that he looked at her like she had just run over his dog and was feeling pretty good about it. His eyes were little pools of pain. He’d become that boy again, the boy she met while he was picking up used nails from the gutters in front of the houses. She’d shown him what she wanted him to do to her and he’d done it, and he’d done it again and again over the years as she kept searching for that feeling, any feeling at all.

She took his hand and placed it on her leg. “But we’re thinking the same thing now,” she said.

“So you’re okay?” he said. “Because it’s fine with me if we just stay here and talk. I mean, Helen, I’ve never said this before, but I—I—”

“I’m okay,” she said.

He smiled. “All right then. Good. That’s all I wanted to hear.”

“Show me the shop,” she said. “Where you work. I want to see it. Maybe . . . maybe you can work on me there, too.”

“Okay,” he said. “Sure. But that’s not, I mean—we don’t have to.”

She winked at him. She hated it when he was this happy, that he could let her make him so. She opened her door; he opened his. But only he got out. She waited until he was well on his way to the shop before moving over to the driver’s side of the car. He always left the key in the ignition. She turned it, the engine roared, and she gunned it backward, sweeping in circles through the dust and the flying gravel, in this parched lot full of rusting corpses, and she was gone. In the rearview mirror she saw him watching her go, not even moving, probably too rattled to know what to do. “Sorry,” she whispered. She took the car back toward Roam as fast as she could drive it, and would have made it in more than enough time had she taken that hill a little bit slower. But she hadn’t. The car lifted up as though it were about to take flight and then came crashing down, and when it did something broke, the engine died, and the car rolled to a stop beside a big tree. Now she had to walk. Now she knew she would be too late. Rachel would be on her way to the bridge by now, and there was nothing Helen could do to stop her.

I
n a town full of sad men, Jonas Whittle was perhaps the saddest of them all. His mother and father had never married—in fact, they’d only seen each other a couple of times; one of the times is when Jonas was made. They were seventeen years old. His father’s name was Mason; her name was Britannica. She was pregnant with Jonas for six months before Mason even found out, and when he did he had a lot of trouble believing it was his, and maybe he never really did. His folks made him promise to marry her as soon as the baby was born, though, and he agreed because his father said he would kill him if he didn’t. But there were complications during the delivery: Britannica bled out and died. When he heard about what happened to her, Mason had a good idea how things were going to spin out, so he tried to leave town that same night—he’d never wanted a child, and he definitely didn’t want one he had to take care of by himself, especially one he didn’t
really believe was his. But his escape was foiled by a rainstorm of such strength and duration that the lowlands around the town flooded, became a sea, and turned Roam into a temporary island. When the water subsided a few days later he tried to leave again, but by this time the hospital was on to him, and the old doctor met him on the road with the baby in a box. He set the box on the ground in front of Mason and said, “He is yours.” Mason thanked him, watched him go; then he took the box out into the woods, placed it in a clearing near a bear den, and walked away. He turned to cast a final glance, and something about how the box began to tremble moved him, cut him deeper than he was able to endure. He picked the box back up and took it home. It was, he would later say, the worst thing he had ever done in his life. Whatever plans he had, whatever dreams, hopes, ambitions—they were all gone now. The rest of his life was over. He named the baby Jonas, because he thought that was the name of the man in the Bible who was swallowed by the whale, and no one told him different.

Mason and Jonas Whittle lived at the far edge of town where the forest was most ferocious, where if you stood in the same place for too long you were likely to disappear beneath a blanket of vines. A lot of time was spent just killing things that were green. Jonas went to school through the third grade. Sometimes his father forgot to pick him up and he’d spend the night with one of his teachers, who fed him whatever strange food they were eating, put him to bed, and took him back to school the next day. The first time a teacher questioned Mason about this, he took Jonas out of school and put him to work. Most of the day the boy was sent out looking for gutter nails—nails you might find in the gutter, used, discarded, but good enough if they were straightened, nails his father used for various building projects. As Jonas grew older, Mason accidentally taught him about cars; he had Jonas hold the hoods up on cars that didn’t have a setter, and as Jonas watched, he learned things. This went on for some time. After
his father died—a car hood fell on his head one day—Jonas took over the business. He was good at it, but with business slowing down the way it was, he fell back on his first skill, collecting nails. He had some run-ins with the lumberjacks. They were so big, so full of life, Jonas looked like a scrawny sapling compared to them. They made fun of him, and he let them. But when they started saying things about his mother—how many times they’d had her themselves when she was a young girl, how (who knows?) anybody could be Jonas’s father—he scrapped with them. He put up a good fight, too. He’d get a few ribs broken, a bone now and again, but he held his own. They couldn’t kill him, hard as they may have tried.
Being left in a box in the woods has its upside
, Jonas thought.
Makes you tough.

Maybe it also helped to have nothing to live for. If Jonas did have anything to live for through those years he didn’t know what it was. He didn’t have any friends. He didn’t know how to read much beyond a stop sign. He had no family at all.

Everything changed the day he met Helen. He was in the gutter outside her house and she was sitting in the porch swing, watching him. He knew that if he thought about it long enough, if he really looked at her, he’d realize she was the ugliest woman he’d ever seen, and maybe the ugliest there ever was. But he didn’t really think about it. Because even he, who knew next to nothing, knew how she was looking at him and what it meant. They didn’t have to say a single word.

He didn’t know what her name was for a week. The first time they did it was against a tree along the backside of the house, her skirt pushed up around her hips, his pants pooling around his ankles. Like animals, really. And he didn’t have a problem with that. The problems only started later, when he actually started to care for her. He couldn’t say exactly how this happened: it wasn’t his plan. He had no hope or dream of it, nor even the idea it was possible. But just being with her
so often over the course of weeks and months and then years . . . well, everything changed for him—though not in a way that he could show or talk about. He had an idea he might have said something today, out at the shop, but he never got the chance. Instead, he watched her drive away, abandoning him in the middle of nowhere, dust from the wheels settling into his eyes as he buckled his belt and kicked at the ground.

S
he couldn’t find her other shoe. On that list etched inside her head—
The Simple Indignities of Blindness
, it was titled—the inability to find the other shoe was at or near the very top. How one shoe strayed from the other was a mystery to her. She removed them at the same time, in the same place, the same as everybody, because who takes off one shoe and then walks half-shoed someplace else? And a shoe without a foot in it couldn’t go anywhere. So where was it? She tried to avoid getting down on her knees, because she didn’t like the way that must look, the blind girl crawling around the living room like some sort of animal. And she was still wet, dripping from the rain. (For someone who couldn’t see, Rachel was very sensitive to
being
seen.) She envied the instant information a pair of eyes must deliver. She had her own sources of information, of course, other senses, but some of what she thought she knew was, by her own admission, partly
imaginary. It was never completely clear to her what was real and what wasn’t. This had its advantages, of course: though she had been told time and time again that there was no bay window in their home, she always imagined a bay window, like the bow of an abandoned ship on the hill overlooking the town.

She held one shoe in her hand as she inched across the living room, letting her toes sweep the carpet ahead of her, hoping to bump into a canvas tennis shoe, her favorite, now held together by tape and string. Such grace, even when looking for a shoe. Even when she was in a hurry.

She had to leave before Helen returned.

Ah!
Here it was, beneath the coffee table, behind the Roam telephone book inserted beneath a leg to keep it level. Her thumb ruffled the book’s cornered edge. All the numbers of all the people who lived in Roam were here, the ink barely raised from the surface of the fine rice paper, but enough so she could feel it. It seemed so odd, when you thought about it, that you could just open this book, pick a number, and call up anybody, even if you didn’t know them at all. Just call them up and say,
Hello. My name is Rachel. To whom am I speaking?

With her shoes on she was ready to go. No need for a change of clothes; no need to pack a lunch. She brushed her hair to a soft shine and slipped on a cotton sweater, then left through the front door as if she were going to the store—confident, quick, almost not really blind anymore. The outside world hadn’t changed the way the world inside her had. The inside had changed in the blink of an eye, knowing what she knew now, knowing what she had to do—but the outside world changed more slowly. She knew it. Walking through Roam was like walking through a painting of Roam. She knew where she was going and how to get there, and had you seen her and not known who she was you wouldn’t have been able to say anything other than that she was a pretty girl on her way somewhere.

In her mind there was a map, a map etched from years of patient practice with Helen. Rachel counted steps as they walked until the town became a series of numbers, a mathematical construction in which the path from the drugstore to the market was not a left on Chestnut and a right on Main, but left 126 steps and right 212. Helen didn’t know she was counting. Helen didn’t know the half of what was going on in her head.

It was late already. She was about to do something reckless. She very well might die. But no single life was made to live forever; each had its own span of days. Were a fly to live for a week he would be famous among other flies for his longevity. Rachel’s own parents lived, all their years combined, for not quite a century, and yet one could say they left the world too soon. Rachel could certainly say that, and so could Helen, for it was upon her the weight of their absence set most heavily. It was Helen who continued living but who each day gave a bit more of her life away without even having lived it herself. Too much. Rachel understood. She knew why Helen had left her alone. She would have done the same. She was saying,
You need to go
.

She was scared but felt free and real.

It was a lovely day. She could feel the dying sun on her cheeks. The trees were crowded with so many cacophonous birds she had to press the palms of her hands against her ears as she walked beneath them. When she did this she could hear her own breathing. She could hear her heart beating. It felt like she could hear the wind blowing through her head.

There was a bridge. She knew there was a bridge. And beyond that?