Walk Me Home (38 page)

She opens the door into a linen closet, closes it again. Opens the door into a dirty bathroom, with the toilet running. Closes that, too.

The third door opens into the garage.

Carly squints at the unexpected brightness.

Strung from the ceiling are fixture after fixture of long, bright, full-spectrum grow lights, gleaming down on about two hundred young marijuana plants.

Carly closes the door again. Leans her forehead against it.

That explains so much, she thinks.

She leans there, eyes pressed closed, until suddenly Teddy is back. Much sooner than she expected.

She turns around and absorbs the look on his face. Abject panic.

“Carly,” he hisses, barely over a whisper. “You looked in the garage?”

“Don’t worry. I won’t tell.”

“We have a full-scale disaster on our hands,” he whispers.

“I’m not going to tell, Teddy.”

“There’s a cop here looking for you.”

The words are a cattle prod to her lower abdomen, lighting her up with a painful jolt of electricity. Leaving her unable to breathe properly.

“A cop? What’s a cop doing here? How did anybody know I was here?”

“I have no idea, Carly.”

“Did you tell him I was here?”

“No. I told him you weren’t. But he flashed a badge and insisted on coming in. He wants to look around for you. So I decided you’re here after all.”

“I’ll go out the back.”

“No!” he says. Too loud. He winces at his own volume. “No. Then he’ll search the place. Get out there and see what he wants.”

“You know what he wants, Teddy. He’s going to put me in foster care.”

Teddy grabs her hard by both shoulders. Looks straight into her eyes.

“Honey, I’m sorry. But you were going there anyway.”

Just for a moment, Carly hates him. It’s a strange feeling. A thing too far out of place to be possible.

She yanks her shoulders out of his grasp.

She takes a deep breath and walks into the living room, her heart pounding so hard she can hear and feel it in her ears.

There, in the middle of the room, is Alvin. Holding his hat in one hand.

“Alvin?” she says.

Alvin looks at Carly, then at Teddy, over Carly’s shoulder.

“Thought you said she wasn’t here.”

“Yeah,” Teddy says. “Funny story about that. Turns out I just temporarily misplaced her.”

It’s clear by the look on Alvin’s face that he doesn’t find that story funny. He turns his searing gaze back on Carly.

“You look like you been through a war. Thought I could trust you to stay put.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“You have no idea how worried I was about you. Especially after I saw this.” He pulls a folded sheet of paper out of his shirt pocket. Waves it in her direction. As if she’ll instinctively know what it is. “I was making inquiries all along, you know. To help you. Not to make trouble for anybody. To see if I could find this guy for you. Then I go into the office one morning and get this on my fax machine.” He waves the paper again. “And I go tearing over to Delores’s to tell you not to go near him ever again. And I find out you’re already gone. Took off in the night like a thief, after lying and saying you wouldn’t. Can you imagine how worried we all were about you?”

Carly is so struck by his worry that it bumps her curiosity about the paper out of its rightful place in line.

“You drove all the way out here because you were worried about me?”

Teddy says, “Wait a minute. You two know each other?”

Nobody answers him.

“Don’t know why that’s so hard to believe,” Alvin says. To her. Not to Teddy.

Carly doesn’t know how to answer. It’s in there. But not in words.

“What is that? That paper you’re waving?”

“It’s his arrest record. Or, actually, this is the report the police took from the victim and her family last time they arrested him.”

“For…”

“Child molestation.”

“Wait. My mother had him arrested?”

“No. She did not. This was someone else’s mother had him arrested for child molestation. He did twenty-two months in the state prison at Chino for it. And I’m still having a little trouble getting all the particulars…but…it doesn’t appear to be a first offense.”

The room goes silent except for an irritating buzzing Carly can’t identify. A second later she realizes it’s the sound of blood rushing inside her own ears.

“I can’t believe that,” she says.

“Try this on for size, then.” Alvin shakes the paper by the top edge until it unfolds, then reads aloud to her. “‘Victim says the suspect appeared in her bed in the middle of the night and woke her up with one hand over her mouth. He told her he wouldn’t hurt her, but she had to be quiet.’ That sound familiar at all?”

Carly sits down hard in the wing chair. She looks across the coffee table and its sea of beer bottles to Teddy’s face. He’s slumped back on the couch now, the fresh open beer in his hand again. She tries to look into his face, but he averts his gaze. Then he sets the beer bottle down and drops his head into his hands.

“Teddy. You lied to me?”

No answer. He just rubs his face with both hands.

“You looked me right in the eye and lied to me?”

“I didn’t want you to think that about me.” His voice is faint. Teddy is getting smaller and weaker. Carly is getting bigger and stronger. She can feel it. “I didn’t want you to think I was somebody who would do a thing like that.”

“But you are!” she shouts, half rising to her feet with the unexpected force and volume. Even Alvin jumps. “How could you do that?”

“I was drunk, Carly. Can you understand that? I’d just found out Jocelyn was actually sleeping with that guy I was hoping she was only flirting with. I was upset, and I got too drunk. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

Carly looks down at the full bottle of beer sitting in front of him on the coffee table.

“Then stop
drinking
!” she bellows.

On the word
drinking
, she draws her right arm back and then slaps the bottle off the table with the back of her hand. It hurts. A lot. The bottle bounces off the wall but doesn’t break. It lands on the carpet, beer foaming as it soaks into the dirty gray pile.

“How can you sit there drinking at nine o’clock in the morning while you’re telling me you’re not responsible for what you do when you drink?”

Teddy never answers. He just goes to tend to the spilled beer, picking up the bottle and carrying it into the kitchen. When he emerges again, he’s holding a towel.

“Am I under arrest for something here?” he asks Alvin. “I did my time for that thing you’ve got in your hand. There’s nothing new, right? You came here to get Carly because you think it’s not even safe for her to be around me. So could you just take her now and go? If there are no specific charges, I’d just like to be left alone now. Please.”

Carly looks at Alvin, and Alvin looks back.

“Ready to go home now?” he asks.

Carly nods. Though she thinks it’s an odd use of the word
home
. As if Carly has one. Sometime she’ll have to ask him about that. But for the moment, she just follows him to the door.

Before it closes behind them, Teddy says, “I loved you, Carly.”

She sticks her head back in.

“What?”

She heard, though.

“I loved you. And I loved Jen.”

Carly notices his use of the past tense. But she doesn’t mention that.

All she says is, “Then how come you didn’t ask me where she is?”

No answer. Which doesn’t feel all that surprising.

Carly follows Alvin through the yard like a puppy who’s just been punished with a rolled-up newspaper. The gate is hanging partway open, and she follows him to the road, expecting to see his blue pickup. Instead he walks to a car, silver and two-door, with a convertible top. He unlocks the passenger door and holds it open for her.

“Why does everybody have so many cars?” she asks, knowing it probably won’t make much sense to Alvin.

“This is Pam’s car. I think it’s impractical as all hell, but she loves it. And she has a long drive to work, so who am I to say? Pickup truck bench seats weren’t made for long rides. Have to admit this is a little more comfortable.”

“Is Jen…” But then she can’t bring herself to finish.

Alvin is still standing there with the door open wide. And Carly is still not getting in.

“Is Jen what?”

“You know.”

“I don’t. Actually.”

“OK? Is she OK?”

“Just the same as she was when you left her. Looks OK to me.”

Carly plunks stiffly into the soft bucket seat, and he closes the door behind her. Just for a minute she’s flooded with relief. Because Jen is right where Carly left her. And because it’s a long drive back to Delores’s. Maybe two days. Maybe more. And somebody else is in charge now. Carly doesn’t have to be the one to figure out what comes next.

South of Eureka, on one of the many bridges where the Eel River snakes under the highway time after time after time, Carly breaks a long silence.

“How could I have been so stupid?” she asks Alvin.

“Really want me to answer that?”

“Probably not. But go ahead.”

“Way I see it, you’re one of those people with set opinions on how you want the world to behave. Always trying to bend the world to fit your liking instead of the other way around. So then, once you make up your mind how you want something to be, you start losing the eyes to see what it really is.”

“I believe what I want to believe.”

“That would be the short version. Yeah.”

“Jen always tells me I believe what I want to believe.”

“It’s not stupidity. In my opinion. I think you’ve got a good mind. Your trouble is, you think you know the difference between a good thing and a bad one. But you don’t.”

They’re over the bridge and moving into a forested area now. Carly stares out the window for a minute, waiting for what he said to make sense. It never does.

“Everybody knows the difference between a good thing and a bad thing.”

“Wrong. Hardly anybody does. You thought Teddy was a good thing.”

“Well. Yeah. I was wrong about that, but—”

“And you thought the night you stumbled onto Wakapi territory and ran afoul of Delores Watakobie was one of the worst nights of your life. You may not even know yet how wrong you were about that. But you will. In time.”

She waits for the old Carly, the old indignation. That natural sense of something in her gut rising up to champion her worldview. When nothing happens, she searches for it. And finds only emptiness. That old Carly is either dead or just too wounded and tired to defend itself.

“It was good for Jen,” she says.

“Because Jen
let
it be.”

They don’t talk for a long time.

Then Alvin says, “You must have at least tried on the idea that it was true.”

“Not really,” Carly says.

“Not even once?”

“Not really.”

“Can you explain to me how a thing like that works?”

“Not really,” Carly says.

All she knows is that it probably won’t ever work again.

Carly wakes up in the passenger seat and looks around. The highway is two-lane here and twisty. Alvin has to slow down for the curves.

“Welcome back, sleeping beauty,” he says.

“I have my days and nights all turned around. Where are we?”

“We seem to be…just about exactly in the middle of nowhere.”

She’s struck again with disbelief that Alvin would care enough about whether she lived or died to drive twelve hundred miles to fetch her back. But she still can’t get words around that.

So she says, “I’m sorry I lied and said you could trust me to stay put.”

“Did you know it was a lie when you said it?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry.”

“Would you be sorry even if you never got caught at it? Even if you never had to answer for it?”

“Yeah. I would. I know I would. Because I already felt bad about it. This woman who gave me a ride in her motor home had a big road atlas just like yours. I told her my friend had one just like it. And then I felt really bad. When I said you were my friend. Because I wasn’t a very good friend to you.”

Silence. Maybe he’s just pausing to see if there’s more.

Then he says, “If you’re waiting for me to argue that point, I hope you brought something to read.”

It’s a glimpse into how angry he is with her, and it feels lumpy in her stomach, an icky sensation. One she can’t quite shake.

“So you got a ride,” he says. “I was wondering how you got there so fast. You must’ve been awful lucky with rides to get there so quick. I thought I had a good day or two before you’d show up. If I’d thought you could beat me there, I’d have called the Trinidad police so fast…”

“I’m surprised you didn’t anyway. Just to save yourself the long trip.”

“They’d have turned you over to child protective services.”

“I know it.”

“I’ve been trying to get you a better ending to your story than all that. In case you hadn’t noticed. Because I know you’re scared they might not keep you and Jen together, and I know how much that means to you. Tried to tell you so. But you didn’t believe me. You didn’t trust me to give a damn about you.”

“No,” she says.

“Why not?”

“Because nobody else ever did.”

“And because you always think you know better than everybody about everything.”

“No,” she says. “I don’t. Anymore. Used to, I guess. But I couldn’t think so after everything that happened. That would be impossible. Now I think I don’t know anything about anything.”

“That’s good,” Alvin says.

Carly snorts. “How is it good to know nothing?”

“It’s good to
know
you know nothing. You don’t know any less than you did before. But now you know what you don’t know. That’s an improvement.”

She chews that over for a minute. Then she says, “Maybe. Yeah.”

They drive in silence for a few minutes. Now and then Carly sees yellow warning signs that show the outline of a truck tipping
over on a tight curve. It reminds her of the overturned logging truck.

Just as she thinks that, she sees a loaded-up logging truck sweep by in the opposite direction. Northbound. The trailer is just two steel brackets on wheels, to hold the giant trunks of trees. Maybe eight trunks on this load. Carly wonders how many they can cut before all this beauty is gone forever.