“You sure you have to leave tomorrow?” he said. “It’d be nice to see your face around longer.”
“You sure are pretty,” said Pete.
I did not want to hurt their feelings. They had been so nice to me. And they had spent all that money on my drinks. I felt bad for them, too, that Trinie had left them alone in the woods. Arnold put his hand around my other elbow. They were both treating me like I could not walk at all, but I knew that I could.
“I can walk,” I said. I tried to shrug them off but they would not let me go. “I am fine,” I said. We were almost to my door and I just wanted to get under the covers and go to sleep by myself.
“We’re just trying to help you out,” said Arnold.
“I think you might be a little drunk there, sweetheart,” said Pete.
“I am not,” I mumbled, though I knew I was.
Pete and Arnold rested me against the door. They both moved in closer toward me.
“I just don’t know,” said Pete. “You look like you need a hand to me. Don’t you think, Dad?”
“Where’s your key?” said Arnold. “We’ll get you into bed.”
“I am fine,” I said.
“Just give us the key,” said Arnold.
“I am fine,” I said louder.
“There ain’t no need to yell,” said Arnold. “There’s people sleeping.”
“I am fine,” I yelled.
Pete lifted his hand, and it seemed like he was going to clamp it across my mouth. But he just scratched his head with it instead. Next door a light went on. We all turned. A hand pulled the curtain to the side, and two sets of eyes peered at us. Pete and Arnold took a step back.
“Everything’s fine,” said Arnold.
I pulled out my key and it dropped to the ground and Pete leaned forward to help but Arnold put a hand on him and pulled him back. I picked it up off the snow. My hand burned with the chill of it. I let myself into my room, and when I looked back, Arnold and Pete were just standing there. Arnold’s hand was still on Pete, holding him back.
“You sure you’re okay?” said Pete. It was a desperate whine, like a stray dog looking for food or the touch of a hand.
“I am fine,” I said, and I closed the door. I locked it. I did not take my clothes off or anything. Tomorrow I will be a new me, I thought. I need to figure out how to be a new me. I got under the covers, and when my heart stopped racing through my chest, then, at last, I could sleep.
2
.
M
y cell phone woke me up early, not even 6 A.M. I was miserable, my head swollen with alcohol, the spot behind my eyes tender and on fire. I checked the phone. It was a video from my sister, Jenny. She was standing sideways in front of a mirror, her stomach puffed out, completely pregnant. My heart stopped right there in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Then she pulled out a pillow, showing me the little bump left behind, and started laughing.
Hilarious
, I texted her. She should take that act on the road. She would make millions.
She texted back:
When are you coming home?
I did not reply because I did not have an answer. If I was coming home at all. My phone buzzed again. Jenny had sent me a picture of our garbage can, a mountain of empty beer cans sprouting out of the top of it. Oh Lord, I thought. Our mother’s been drinking more than ever. Still it was not enough for me to turn around home. I could not say one way or the other what I was going to do next, except keep on driving.
Outside the roads were still silent, and the sun rimmed the curtains of the motel room shyly. For a minute I could have been back on the farm, waiting for the rooster to let us know it was time to get up and shake off the night. Some mornings, I would rise before the rooster. But I would let him go first into the day. I did not want to hurt his feelings. There was no one around in the mornings, except me and my husband and the rooster and all his chicken wives. All of us kept close together on that farm. We were not going anywhere.
Then I remembered: my husband had cast me out. No crow to cradle me now. There was a roof over my head, but still I was homeless. The last nine months I had lived in that house it had been a construction zone. Thomas could not wait to spend his daddy’s money on renovations once he died. It was the first thing he did after we moved in, call up his high school buddies and put them to work. Work, if you want to call it that. They were sucking Thomas dry just like they sucked those cans of Budweiser all day long, making noises every hour or so like they were lifting something heavy. Tall, strong men strutting and braying like that cock in the morning, Thomas letting them because they were big men now. They had always been bigger than Thomas. It was not hard.
But it was the place I called home. My marital home. And every bed I had slept in since I would wake up in the night and feel like I was sliding off. I held on to the bed in the motel room in Cheyenne. I grabbed the sheets and pinched the end of the mattress. I was homeless and loveless and all alone in the world.
I allowed myself one more minute of feeling sorry for myself, and then I snapped up out of bed. I had to get rolling. There was nothing for me in Cheyenne except a place to hide.
I showered off the smoke from last night; I could smell it rising in the steam around me. Then I threw away the clothes I had worn. I could not imagine packing them next to my other clothes. The smoke would infect everything. I almost threw up, thinking about the smoke and Pete and Arnold, the crack of heads together, the fall of the ax, the blood on the snow. I felt a clenching deep inside me. If that woman had not looked through the window just then, those two could have been thrashing around on top of me soon enough. Heavy and mean. Father and son taking turns. It was just plain wrong how pushy they had been at the end there. It was all rushing through my brain.
I closed the door behind me and walked toward the lobby to drop off the key, my shoes crunching on the fresh snow left behind from last night’s storm. I was the only one up at the motel. I could see bloodstains mixed in with the snow in front of the bar. I pushed the key through a slot in the front door of the lobby. There was a tiny squeak and then it snapped shut.
I need to be quieter and calmer, I thought. For years I was silent and hidden away on that farm, tending to Thomas’s needs, and now I could not shut myself up. There I was, getting into trouble with strangers, yelling in the middle of the night. What was I doing? I needed to be careful. There might be people looking for me. I began to feel uncomfortable and thick with guilt, even though I did not believe I had done anything wrong. I was worried I was still drunk, but I got in the truck anyway. I cursed myself, and then I started the engine.
Route 80 was still pretty messed up from the weather. Great hills of snow were pushed to the sides like silent guards standing watch. I prayed for safe passage. The land started to change as I drove farther west. It was raining and the snow had melted some and I could see that the land was curvier, more luscious. Everything in my hometown was flat and remained the same, except for the corn, growing, growing, and then gone again. I had never considered the earth could be any other way. Why would I need to think about that? I was never leaving.
The farthest I had ever been away was during my honeymoon, six years past already. We went to a resort town on a lake in Minnesota because that is where my parents went on their honeymoon, and they were paying the bills. They sat us down at the kitchen table the night of our engagement barbecue in the backyard. My dad handed the envelope with the tickets to my mother, who slid them across the kitchen table to us. “We had some magical nights there,” she said drily. “It’s good for swimming,” said my dad. He put his hand on my mother’s shoulder, and she turned her eyes at it and stared dully, until he pulled it back again.
If it had been left up to me and Thomas we probably would have stayed home and snuggled up in bed for a week straight, watching TV, renting movies, me making popcorn and grilled cheese sandwiches. Easy stuff we could eat in bed. I was not even sure we needed a wedding. That seemed like extra to me. But you do not look a gift horse in the mouth, Thomas whispered in my ear later, after they handed us the envelope. And it would be our only chance to see a little of the world. Because Thomas had only ever promised to show me his love.
The resort itself was like a pioneer village. Everyone had their own little log cabin, all of them circling a lake like we were settlers keeping each other company in the wilderness. We had the honeymoon suite so there were fuzzy slippers and bathrobes waiting for us and chocolate roses and a bottle of champagne in the kitchen.
“Ooh la la,” said Thomas, and he popped a rose in his mouth. He did a little dance over to me and said, “Come here and I’ll give you a chocolate kiss.” We put our arms around each other and I let him put his tongue deep into my mouth. It tasted like chocolate but also the peanuts we had been snacking on all day during the drive. I liked the saltiness but it was not what I was expecting. I guess he could tell. He pulled back from me. I could see how wounded he was. I decided not to say no to him for the rest of the seven days and six nights we were there.
Later that night he pushed into me over and over again and I gasped out of love and he said, “Don’t lie,” and I said, “I’m not, it’s good to be next to you, it makes me feel good to have our bodies naked together,” and he pushed in harder, banged up against me. I knew I would be bruised in the morning. He did it like that sometimes when he was drunk. But I let it go, I let him go at it, because I wanted him to be happy.
The next morning, Thomas and I walked down the waterfront to see how we were going to kill the next seven days. I saw a waterslide in the distance, and Thomas pointed out the kayaks on the lake. That was the first time I realized that it was a strange place for us to go on our honeymoon, if we were going somewhere at all. We grew up in a state that was practically dry. What did we care about the water? Sure I liked the community pool in the summertime, but that was all we could do at the resort, roll around in the hay at night, and play in the water during the day. And I think there were supposed to be some hiking trails but I was not much of a walker anymore. I had my truck by then. I just liked rattling along the cornfields. There were no cornfields here. There were thick green trees and the water and the air smelled nice, murky and earthy at the same time, but I did not know what to do with myself for even a second.
Thomas had the answer though. He took my hand and pulled me along to a dock where there were sailboats floating at the end, all tied up next to each other.
“We should rent one of these,” he said. He looked out at the lake, at another sailboat skimming the water like a bird. “We should go sailing.”
“Thomas Madison, I’ve known you practically my whole life and you do not know how to sail,” I said, and I laughed.
He looked at me, and he squinted his eyes. I had done it, pissed him off, on the first real day of our honeymoon.
“I do too know how to sail. My dad taught me. He was in the Coast Guard, and he knew how, and he took me sailing a few times. It was when he and Mom were still together. We went on vacation.” He looked dreamy for a second. “In Wisconsin.”
“All right, I guess I did not know that part,” I mumbled.
“Aw, it’s okay, honey,” he said. He put his arm around me. “Don’t feel bad you don’t know it all yet. You will.” He steered me toward the man renting the sailboats, a rough, red-faced man, with grizzly gray hair covering his chin and racing up his cheeks. Half burned by the sun, half burned by age. He wore a yellow T-shirt that said, “Sunny Day Sailboats” in blue letters.
Thomas and Mr. Sunny Day set to negotiating about the boats. I watched Thomas closely. We never left our town, ever, barely talked to people we did not know. Maybe a few times a year I would meet someone new. Making new friends did not seem important to me then. We had everything we needed. But seeing Thomas out in the world was fascinating to me. How he treated people, at first glance, without knowing anything about someone. I just let him do the talking. I was so young then, I thought that was the way. And it was easier, to let someone take care of you.
So there he was, barking at Mr. Sunny Day, who was asking Thomas what he knew about sailing.
“I trained with my father, a former soldier in the U.S. Coast Guard,” he said. He had his arms crossed in front of him and his short legs were spread squat. “Since I was a kid I been on the water.”
The man backed down a little bit, pulled his body back, kicked the ground with his foot. “Well, I didn’t know that, now did I?” he said. He smiled. “Not everyone knows how to handle a boat.”
“Oh yeah,” said Thomas. “I’m a master tacker.”
“All right, then,” said Mr. Sunny Day. He and Thomas walked off together and started looking at boats. There was some paperwork he handed to Thomas to sign. Thomas did not read it, just signed it. I shrugged. I twirled my wedding ring around my finger. I squinted out at the lake. Two teenage boys paddled next to each other in kayaks. They were laughing. They wore life vests, so I knew they were safe. It looked calm enough out there on the water, a nice place to be a married couple. The water was a dark purple blue and there were all kinds of living things buzzing in and around it. I slapped a mosquito off me. I wondered how deep the water was. I wondered if it was possible to drown if our sailboat sank. Not that my husband would sink it. Because he had been sailing since he was a child. I had just heard him say it.
Thomas and the man shook hands and Thomas motioned me over. Mr. Sunny Day handed us both life vests, and we walked toward the boat we would be renting. The sailboat was a bright fake yellow, stretching to look like sunshine. “We are newlyweds,” I told Mr. Sunny Day, even though he had not asked.
“Are you now,” he said. He held my arm as I got on the boat. Thomas was already untying the sail. “Just like I remember,” he said. I ducked my head down and slid in facing Thomas, who was standing knee deep and then waist high in the water as he pushed us farther out.