The From-Aways (21 page)

My stomach drops out. I want to rush to Henry, but I freeze—because what
was
that he said? And the
way
he said it, all shot through with bitterness and anger, I didn’t know Henry had that inside him. Sad old stories? Those stories are what I fell in love with. And so I look at this man, who has said these things, who is bleeding from his nose, and the truth is he looks like a stranger to me. So I stay where I am. I don’t go to him, this man who cannot possibly be Henry.

Jethro is standing there, heaving, his shoulders moving up and down, in a rage, ready to swing again. And then, in the greatest act of beauty I’ve ever seen from Henry, his body turns on its axis like a discus thrower’s and he hits Jethro back. Like his body has always been made and built to do this.

After that it is too hard to tell what is happening. Carter tries to find a way between them to stop them and the line is yelling and the black-windowed SUV stares dumbly on. I hear a whoop then, like a boy playing Indian, and Billy has charged into the fray, arms swinging. He charges between Jethro and Henry, who are too busy swinging to notice. I hear Joseph Deep say, “Billy, no!” But it’s too late and there, between the two men, Billy intercepts a swing, and maybe it’s Jethro’s and maybe it’s Henry’s, but Billy is down on the ground.

There is a shuffling of feet as the men back away from each other, confused by what has happened. Billy is a heap of bird bones in too-big clothes. Henry and Jethro stand with their arms held out, as if by keeping their hands away from their bodies, they will be made blameless for what has happened.

“BILLY!” Rosie shouts. She runs and falls onto Billy and he’s awake again. One socket is red and his lip is split and his eyes are squinched shut as if Billy knows that to open them will only usher in a whole long experience of pain he’s not ready to greet yet. “Motherfuckinggoddamnsonsofwhores,” he says.

Rosie wraps her arms around him. She tries to lift him up. Henry reaches down to help because Billy’s just too heavy for her. “Here,” he says, and Rosie says, loud but not a shout, “You leave him alone, Mr. Lynch.” The way she calls him Mr. Lynch . . . it sounds like an invocation of the Father and the Holy Ghost and the Son who is Henry all at once. It stops Henry. He lets go.

Rosie heaves Billy up herself. Billy says, “All right, I’m all right, okay,” and he leans on her as they shuffle back to the car line.

Henry wipes his sleeve across his face, and when he drops his arm to his side, there is a long rusty stain streaked across it. He looks at me, holding his arms out a little, like,
Yeah, here I am.
A jolt of fear spikes in my chest. I am terrified. Terrified for Henry, who is hurt, and in trouble. But also terrified, because how did I not know that Henry could fight like that? That he felt this miserable way about Menamon? What other secret parts of my husband are still waiting, unexploded?

Quinn looks at me with her teeth bared and says, “Are we remaining fucking impartial now?”

A joke, I think. Everything will be okay if I can just make a joke. So I say, “Oh, I just thought you were a yellow coward.”

“Fuck you,” Quinn says, and drags me with her to the car line, going after Rosie. I let her take me, turning away from Henry.

The SUV windows are dark enough that I can’t see the Dorians except for their silhouettes. There is a sort of dumb show happening inside and I think perhaps Elena is pleading with her husband or yelling at him. She has realized that we are the thing she was so afraid of. Knows she will not be able to keep us out of her house. Not with deer fencing even. We are trickier sorts of animals than that.

“Leah,” Henry says, calling me back. And when he says my name like that, I love him so much it hurts. At our wedding, at city hall, he said he would love me until I died, and I said I would do the same, and I meant it. I want to be the woman who’s going to make him feel like a man and not a fool. That is what he needs right now and so I think that I will go to him and slip my arms around his stomach like a sailor’s knot and grasp him and cry onto his dress shirt and say I am sorry and I love you and I am so, so sorry, just please take me home right now.

But then I hear the two blasts. The train whistle.

“Eleven forty-two,” Rosie says, because that’s a girl who has the train tables ticking away inside her. A girl who wears no watch because she’s never been out of the range of the regular blow of it.

Not so far in the distance the engine is wheeling through Menamon. I hear the bells clanging at the crossing. I imagine elderly diners at the Stationhouse squinting against the dust kicked up, children covering their ears and looking big-eyed at the bright pieces of silverware hopping across the table, everyone pausing together for a moment as the train, headed south, headed anywhere but here, rattles the building down to its foundation.

And here, in our own pause, I see that Henry’s jaw is swollen and there is blood on his neck. Actual blood. Because he is real, this Henry. He is here on
business
. There is a large black car full of clients behind him. He is trying to improve his hometown in the most practical way he knows, and is willing to dismantle his father’s legacy to do it. He is trying to support his wife and establish his landscape-design reputation and he has struck the fisherman’s son by mistake. He knows how to throw a punch, and now he is bleeding, and he
needs
me, but who
is
this man? I am frightened by my own ignorance, and cowardice, and I cannot make myself go to him.

So I do what is easy. What is so very much the wrong thing to do it is almost a joke. I go to Billy. I say, “Come on, we should get you cleaned up.” I smack him on the back in a way I’m sure hurts but spares his pride. This is what I should be doing for Henry. He is my job to take care of. Someone else will deal with this boy and no one else will take care of Henry.

Everyone is silent, watching Henry in his shame and me in my wrongdoing, and when I can’t stand their anticipation another second, I shout out, “MARKS! Are you going to give us a ride somewhere or what?”

There is a commotion. At first I think everyone is yelling at me for betraying my husband and I cover my face with my hands. But then Quinn grabs on to my arm and yanks me away and I open my eyes and see that it is the Dorians causing everyone to run and shout.

They are driving toward the line of cars.

As we run away from the car line I see what they are trying to do. At the end of the barricade, between Jethro’s truck and a pine tree, there is a gap just wide enough that a car
might
be able to get through. Indeed, someone
might
be able to leave through that gap, and cut over to the harbor road, and drive away from all us crazy people.

While everyone else is yelling and scrambling away from the accelerating SUV, Jethro runs toward it. The Dorians drive their car, faster and faster, and as they try to fit the SUV through the too-small gap there is a screeching, crunching sound. They push the car forward and through, scraping and caving in the cab of Jethro’s truck as they go. And then they pull out on the other side of the line, and we watch them drive away, down the harbor road. Jethro reaches the line too late. He bangs on his ruined truck and yells after them. Yells and bangs. Yells and bangs.

24

Quinn

E
veryone in the line received a two-hundred-dollar fine for disrupting the peace. We were just standing around by then, tending to dumb-ass Billy, trying to steer clear of Jethro, mumbling to each other about
those fucking people
.
What kind of fucking people think they can do a thing like that?
Then some pissy little state trooper drove up in a Victoria with his siren on. I didn’t get a fine because I was reporting, not protesting, but I wanted a fine so bad I almost begged the guy to give me one. Even fucking Leah got a ticket. Jethro all but dragged the officer over to his truck. The officer took down his report, Jethro screaming his head off and pointing at his busted truck like it was a dead child, the officer nodding and jotting like he couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

Leah was standing there like she didn’t know whether to run or fall down dead. Rosie elbowed me. I shouted, “Hey, Leah. Come with us.”

I’
M SPLAYED ON
Rosie’s bed like one of our gravel angels from months ago and she’s sitting at her desk, looking in a mirror just big enough to shine her face back at her. She’s taking a zillion bobby pins out. Her hands flutter about her head, materializing pins, which, when she drops them on the desk, make a plinking sound so soft I shouldn’t be able to hear it. As more and more pins come out of her hair I start to fear that Rosie might just come apart at the seams like a rag doll. She might crumple over in her chair, a bunch of calico and stuffing, leaving me all alone in the apartment, swearing she was real just a second ago.

I may be losing it.

Leah’s waiting for us in the living room, but I just want to stay here, watching Rosie, for as long as I can.

“So Billy’s gonna have a shiner, huh?” I say.

“Yes,” Rosie says. “It’s unfortunate. But maybe it will be good too. Make people see.” What if it had been her, I can’t help but think, who got hit instead? On the way home in the car I kept squeezing her hand until she said, “Everything’s fine, Quinn. Nothing bad happened.” And she was right. But when she got yelled at, and when she ran to Billy, and when the SUV crushed past Jethro’s truck, all those things were carving out a space in my mind, the way a river moves through mud. The space is the story of how something bad
could
have happened. And when you’re in love, once you believe in the possibility that something bad might have happened, it’s almost just as bad as if it actually did.

“Rosie,” I say, “if someone ever punched you in the face, I would kill them.”

She laughs a tinkly little laugh that means she’s not taking me seriously. She obviously wishes she could take it back as soon as it’s out because she claps her hand over her mouth. After a moment she lets her hand drop. She shuts her eyes. “How?”

“What?” I say.

“How would you kill them?”

Rosie’s got most of us fooled into thinking she’s America’s sweetheart, but this is a girl with a morbid streak a mile wide. And maybe she’s not the one doing the fooling. If I, if everyone, looked closer, maybe we’d understand that Rosie, abandoned by her parents, working regular double shifts, living in a shitty hometown she won’t be able to afford much longer, might not be all sunshine and light after all. But no one wants to look close.

I say, “Oh, you know, I would kill him with a sword, I guess.”

Rosie laughs a dark lady’s laugh. She tackles me on the bed.

“How very chivalrous,” she says. “Now come on, we have a guest.”

25

Leah

Q
uinn is intent on her guitar. She sounds good. She is not good at the news, but this is something she knows about. Rosie hands out cups of whiskey and sits on the couch, leaning forward onto her knees. Her arms are plump like a child’s and her stomach has a soft curve to it.

Rosie sings along with Quinn’s playing: “
What bird is at the window? A sparrow or a lark? Not an owl for sure, no. It’s hours past the dark
.”

“You don’t have any harmonies in you, Leah Lynch?” Quinn says. She slugs some whiskey. “Tell me a song, Leah, and I’ll play it for you.”

I look at Rosie and she nods at me. I am trying to come up with a song but all I can think of is what tonight would have been like if I’d just stayed in the car with the Dorians. I think about how Quinn came raging from the sidelines when Rosie was in trouble and wonder why
I
didn’t have that much loving snarl in me. I failed to rush to Henry. Didn’t want to know that ugly, difficult part of him I’d never seen before. I don’t know what I can do to fix myself so that when I go back and tell Henry I won’t ever hurt him like that again, it will be the truth.

“Leah?” Rosie says. “Can’t you think of a song?”