The Girl from Charnelle (33 page)

 

That night, for the first time since they had argued, she slept well—like the dead, in fact, without dreaming, which is what she wanted. The water had purged the obsession. Temporarily at least.

The next evening, when the phone rang after supper, her father answered. “Hello,” he said. “Hello.” He hung up and returned to the set of papers he was studying—more loan applications for his welding workshop. He wanted to make some extra money, maybe eventually go out on his own. He was tired of working for Charnelle Steel.

A few minutes later the phone rang again.

“Hello…. Hey, Letig.” There was a long pause. Her father smiled, and then he laughed hard, as if at a punch line. “That's pretty good.” Another long pause, her father listening, and then looking at her. “I don't know what she's got planned. Hold on.” He held out the phone. “Laura, it's Letig. He wants to know if you can keep his boys.”

“When?” she asked.

“Here, you work it out,” he said, handing her the phone.

She put the receiver to her ear but did not say anything.

“Laura, are you there?” he asked quietly.

“Yes.”

“I have to see you.”

“When?” she said, glancing at her father.

“Tell your dad Saturday for baby-sitting. Can you get out tonight?”

“No,” she said.

“I've
got
to see you.”

“Dad, can I watch the Letig boys on Saturday?”

“Fine with me.”

“Yes, sir,” she said in the phone. “Saturday would be fine.”

“What about tonight?”

“No, sir.”

“Then tomorrow?”

She glanced again at her father. His mind was on his papers. He wasn't really paying any attention to her.

“Please, Laura. I'm going crazy here.” They were both silent for almost a minute. “I love you,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” she said, barely able to control the excitement in her voice. “That would be fine.”

“I'll be at the warehouse by four-thirty,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“You don't have to ‘yes, sir' me,” he said gently, and she smiled. Their old joke.

 

At the barn the following evening, she was nervous. He looked wild. His shirt unloosened from his pants. His hair seemed greasy, unwashed and un-combed, his eyes bloodshot. His breath smelled of peppermints, and she wondered if he'd been drinking and then chewed candy to cover up the smell.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“I'm sorry, too.”

“No,” he said, “you don't have to be sorry. You were right. We can't keep on like this. It isn't fair to anybody, not to you, not to me…to none of us,” he added more vaguely.

“Are you okay?” She was afraid to touch him.

He ignored her question. “You're right,” he said. “We can do it. We
have
to do it.” He stepped toward her and stumbled. She jumped away. “Oops,” he said.

“Are you drunk?” she asked warily.

“No.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“No. Did you hear what I said?”

“What?”

“We need to get away from here. This place is
killing
me.”

She wanted to remain skeptical, but she felt her own expectations rising, a renewed thrill. “Are you serious?” she asked cautiously.

“I am. I want to go…right now.” His voice rose strangely, as if he was asking a question rather than stating what he felt.

“You
have
been drinking,” she said.

“I want to leave now,” he said, moving to her, hugging her. “I mean it. Tonight.”

She pulled away. “We can't do that.”

“Soon, then,” he said and plopped down on the pallet. He took a cigarette from a pack in his pocket and put it in his mouth but didn't light it. “Soon.”

“What happened?” she asked, kneeling by the pallet.

“It doesn't
matter
what happened,” he said too loudly. He tried to get his lighter to flare, but it wouldn't work. He rapped it angrily against the end table.

“Did you have a fight with Anne?”

“This isn't about her,” he said and then shook his head. His eyes were suddenly brimming. She was alarmed. “I'm going crazy,” he rasped.

“John, what
happened
?”

“We could go next week.”

“Next
week
?”

“That gives us plenty of time.”

He dropped the unlit cigarette and the lighter onto the end table and then grabbed her. She could have wriggled away, but she didn't. She felt a little frightened, though. He pulled her close and kissed her sloppily. She had to wipe her face afterward. She smelled the liquor beneath the peppermint. It wasn't just beer.

“A week from Friday,” he said, holding her tightly.

“I don't know, John.”

“It's what you wanted.”

She didn't answer.

He released his hold on her, leaned away so he could see her face. “Are you backing out?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head.

“Good, then.” He kissed her more tenderly, then said, “A week from Friday.”

“Maybe,” she whispered.

“Not just maybe. Say yes.”

“I don't know.”

“Say
yes
.”

She wanted to be thoughtful with whatever she said. She felt wary, but underneath she could feel her own joy swelling. “John, I'm not sure anymore.”

“Please,” he said. “I love you. Come away with me.”

Careful now,
she thought,
careful.
She reached her hand up to his face, ran her index finger over his cheek and around his eyes and down his thin nose to his lips, those lips. She kissed him softly and then put her head against his chest. He wrapped his arms around her.

“Laura—”

“We'll see,” she said.

S
aturday night, after Laura baby-sat the Letig boys, John drove her home, and they worked out the details of their plan. It seemed simple. They would leave Friday morning. His wife was leaving with the boys on that same morning to visit her mother in Borger for the weekend, so Laura and John would have a three-day head start before his wife suspected anything. John would receive his paycheck on Thursday afternoon, so he would deposit it early Friday and withdraw two thousand dollars from his bank account, still leaving plenty for his wife, and she had access to more, he said, from her family. Much more. She would be okay. On Monday and Thursday, when they met, they would bring smaller bags and leave them at the barn, so all of their things would not have to be smuggled out on Friday. She would leave for school on Friday morning, as usual, but instead of going there, she would meet John behind the warehouse, and they would stop by the barn to retrieve the rest of their things and then head out. If they left by ten, they could arrive in Houston maybe by midnight.

Once they got to Houston, John planned to track down the bartender he had spoken to, the bald, bucktoothed one with a brother whose friend worked for Texaco. John would find out if there was a possibility of under-the-table money, work for skilled welders who didn't necessarily want to be on the payroll. John also had contacted an old high school friend of his, who now lived in Louisiana, near Baton Rouge. This friend could create a fake ID for Laura, so there would be no questions until she turned eighteen.

Should they leave notes?
She felt that she needed to leave her father something. She didn't want to disappear the way her mother had, her father not knowing what happened to her, worried that she might be dead or kidnapped or something else terrible. It wouldn't be right to leave her father completely in the dark. It would be hard enough as it was, leaving him, leaving Rich and Gene. John, on the other hand, was adamant that no clue should be left behind, not now. They could always send a letter in a week, after they were far away. John had a friend in Kansas City, someone he trusted to keep his mouth shut. They could send the letters first to this friend, and then he could send them to Anne and to Laura's father from there. That way there would be little chance of their being tracked down. John was worried that her father, and perhaps Anne, too, would come after him if they weren't careful.

“This is still dangerous,” he reminded her.

Yet she felt uneasy about this part of the plan. She didn't want her father to worry. She remembered when her mother had left, how frantic he was, gone for several days searching for her. She'd never seen him that panicked. She didn't want to put him through it again. At least Gloria had written. And what John and she were doing was more like what Gloria and Jerome had done than what her mother had done.

“Here's what you do,” John said. “Tell your father that you are staying the weekend with one of your friends—Debbie or Marlene or whoever. Then you can drop a letter in the mail from Amarillo, and he'll get it on Monday, so he won't have to worry, but it will at least give us a head start. How would that be?”

“Okay,” she said, deflated. “I guess.”

On Monday she wrote out the letter to her father. She went through several drafts, including a long one in which she tried to explain what she was doing, and that it didn't reflect badly on him at all. He was a good father, and she loved him, and she was sorry about this, but please don't
worry. She would be okay. Really she would. But the next day she read it to John, and it seemed too apologetic, too childish, with a whiff, John thought, of weakness that he believed Zeeke might interpret as a signal for him to come find her, to rescue her. She tore up the letter and wrote a shorter one, telling him simply that she had left town with John, that she was fine, he didn't need to come looking for her or to worry, she would contact him later and would see him when the time was right.

She didn't particularly like the letter. It seemed abrupt, cold, with too much left out, but John said it struck the right tone. He also wrote a letter to his wife, which he didn't show Laura. She secretly felt it was unfair that she had shown him the letter she'd written, had even revised it at his request, but that she had no say in his letter to his wife. But after the first wave of resentment, she realized she was simply being selfish. Whatever was between John and his wife was private. It
was
harder for him. And he would have to cope, as her mother probably had, with the knowledge that he had abandoned his family. They would probably never forgive him. So she kept her distance and hoped that while he was writing the letter, John would not change his mind.

And she had her own secret from him. Without consulting John, she wrote a letter to Gloria. John still didn't know that Gloria was aware of their relationship. But she was thankful that her sister knew. Because Gloria had left as well, under similar circumstances, Laura felt that only she could fully understand, even though she might not approve. She wrote a letter to that effect, and she held on to it. It needed special postage. She would try to send it before they left.

 

On Tuesday, after most of her clothes and things had been packed and smuggled to the barn, she felt suddenly unsure about whether she could go through with this. Had she set in motion something too dark and painful for others?

She could see people now only in terms of the effect her leaving would have on them. Rich, for instance, had a nightmare, woke up yelling, tears streaming down his face, pushed their father away, and wouldn't be consoled until she held him. When she tried to lay him back in his bed, he clung to her and would not let go, as if he sensed that she would be gone for good if he released her. Finally she had to put him in her bed, and he held tightly to her, even after he fell asleep. Each time she tried to move him, he
would startle awake and grab her tighter. And so they huddled together, Rich draped over her until morning, and then he followed her around as she made breakfast and dressed, and he looked forlornly out the window of Mrs. Ambling's living room as Laura got on her bike to ride to school.

She went to her classes, knowing that these were her last days. She tried to concentrate, but instead she found herself staring at the other students and her teachers, watching their movements with a nostalgia that made her eyes cloudy all day. Debbie and Marlene told jokes, laughed, gossiped about the Jameson twins, boys they had crushes on. She smiled, tried to join in, but mostly she hung back and observed them, knowing that by Friday she would be gone and that there would be speculation, and then the news would break about what she'd done, and then there would be a flurry of rumors and gossip, and then, a month later, she would be old news. Debbie and Marlene would still talk about her, with a wistfulness she could imagine might last for months, and perhaps a sense of betrayal:
Why didn't she tell us? I thought she was our friend.
But soon enough she would be history.

She felt insignificant. She didn't count, and once she was gone, she would essentially be forgotten. That was how life was. It moved on, relentlessly, back into the ordinary rhythms, and if you fell away, then you…well, you didn't really matter much to begin with.

 

That afternoon she saw Manny and Joannie in the old Ford. They were huddled close, laughing. Joannie pointed to her, and Manny called out, “Hey, Laura, you want to go with us to 4-D's?”

It was the first time he'd asked her if she wanted to go anywhere with him since…she didn't know when, and his smile suggested a genuine desire to be in her company, which shocked her.

She hesitated but then said, “Sure.”

At 4-D's, he offered to buy her a chocolate shake.

She hesitated.

“Oh, come on. When's the next time I'm gonna buy you a shake?”

He laughed at this, and she wondered for a panicked moment if he knew, if he had gone through her things, had found her letters to her father and to Gloria.

“Two chocolate shakes and one strawberry,” he told the waitress.

He smiled again, and it was clearly the smile of the unknowing. It was
just a spurt of generosity.
Why now?
she wondered.
He must know something.
But he didn't. As they sipped their shakes in the booth, Manny with his arm around Joannie, him telling a series of jokes, she again felt a sense of betrayal, how
she
would betray
them
. Her eyes glazed over, and she could feel the egg in her throat as she smiled through his jokes, tried to laugh. She would miss even Manny.

The days were getting shorter, and by the time they left 4-D's the sun was almost down, casting the neighborhood in a golden shroud, and even this dusk, she felt, was designed to make her nostalgic. How could she leave this place, these people?

 

At home, her father reminded them that the first presidential debate was on that night, and so they ate dinner and cleaned up quickly, made popcorn, and sat huddled in front of the television, watching as Kennedy and Nixon squared off. They were civilized and proper, and she had trouble paying very close attention. She watched her father instead, leaning forward in his chair, concentrating hard, his head cocked to one side, his eyebrows knitted.

This was important to him, very important. He had been saddened by Kennedy's win at the convention. He believed that if the ticket was reversed, with Johnson in the top slot, then the Democrats stood a much better chance of winning back the White House. Johnson was the Majority Leader. He was maybe the most effective one ever, especially with a Republican White House, her father argued. He could easily whip Nixon. But Kennedy, with all his good looks and easy manner and Ivy League education, still seemed callow and young, too green, and an easy target for Nixon's barbs about inexperience. And to top it off, the man was an Irish Catholic, which her father didn't personally have any trouble with, except that it promised to alienate a lot of voters. “The senator from Mass” had assumed a new meaning, and Nixon knew how to take the gloves off. Her father recalled with anger the McCarthy hearings and Nixon's nasty role in it all. Nixon was, her father said, a dirty little backstreet brawler when it came right down to it.

So as her father watched intently, she studied him, thinking too about how much she would miss him and how bad it would be when yet another woman from his house, the last one, disappeared. If the Democrats lost as well, there was no telling what might happen to him.

Every time Kennedy spoke, there was a hushed, tense silence in the house, as if they were waiting for him to make a mistake. But he was good, and he looked tan and confident, smiling, relaxed, smart. Nixon sounded good, too, said all the right things, but he looked awful—dark circles under his eyes, a five o'clock shadow, beads of sweat collecting on his upper lip and forehead so that he had to keep wiping his face with a handkerchief, his eyes unsure which camera to look into. He seemed sick. She was amazed that he sounded as calm and assured and intelligent as he did, because it looked like he might throw up at any moment. Manny and her father had made jokes earlier, but then they quieted down and just stared.

She felt sorry for Nixon. She felt more than sorry. She felt like she understood Nixon. The stakes were high for him; this was the most important moment in his life, and he couldn't control his body. She knew that feeling. She had moved through the past few days constantly on the verge of tears, fearful that someone would discover what she was doing, expose her for the fraud that she was. She had thought, more than once, that she was going to throw up.

After the debate, her father seemed happy. He said he was going to the Armory for a beer and asked if Manny wanted to come along. He didn't ask her, which hurt her feelings, especially since she had been the one following the election with him and talking to him about the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, giving him daily updates on Mr. Sparling's lectures. It was just expected that she would stay home and watch the little boys. They left, and she stood by the window for a few minutes and then turned back to Rich and Gene. She played a game of checkers with Rich and then read him a story, tucked him into bed.

Returning to the living room, she asked, “You want to play some canasta, Gene?”

“Huh?” he said, lifting his head, as if from sleep, from one of his Sherlock Holmes mysteries.

“You want to play some cards?”

“No,” he said and dropped his head back into the book.

“Oh, come on, Gene. Please play with me.”

“Not tonight,” he said.

“Please!” she insisted.

He looked at her, surprised by her intensity and a little skeptical.

“Please play with me.”

“Okay, sure.”

 

She almost forgot to meet John on Thursday. She had not slept much the whole week, and she felt weepy and weak from a constant headache. She was at the library when she looked at her watch. It was almost five-thirty. She jumped up, startled, knocking over the textbooks she'd been ignoring. She quickly gathered them into her satchel, ran to her bicycle, and pedaled hard to the warehouse. He was waiting for her. He got out and put her bike in the bed of the truck, and she climbed onto the floorboard, out of breath, panting hard.

“Where were you?” he asked, annoyed.

“I lost track of time. I'm sorry.”

“We don't have much time, you know.”

“I know.”

“Are you ready?”

“Yes,” she said.

They drove the rest of the way in silence. At the barn, they gathered their things, and John went over the plan again, and she nodded, tried to focus. She said “yes” and “uh-huh,” though sometimes she wasn't sure what exactly he had said. But she knew the plan.

“Are you listening, Laura?” he asked.