The Year We Left Home (25 page)

“Jeez, chill,” Chip said. He bent down, placed the knapsack on the porch, opened it, and held up a mud-colored rock. “It’s just my opals, man. I told you I’d be back for them.”

“Soon as you pay me the four hundred you owe me.”

“You mean two-fifty.”

“Nice try.” Otto turned to regard Ryan. “Who’s this joker?”

Ryan kept quiet as Otto looked him over. Ryan guessed he was afraid, but it didn’t feel like fear. He was just very, very interested in what was happening. Otto kept moving the gun from Ryan to Chip and back again, eenie meenie miney moe.

“Hey,” Chip said. “Leave him alone. He’s my cousin, he’s from Chicago.”

“Cousin,” Otto repeated. He had small, squinting black eyes and a heavy gut hanging over the waistband of his jeans. “What, a whole family of dirtbags?”

Ryan said, “I think we should just leave now.”

No one seemed to hear him. Otto looked him up and down. “The two of you don’t favor.”

Chip said, “You have to imagine me all cleaned up and with a real classy wardrobe.”

The gun had a small black mouth. Otto brought it up to Ryan’s nose. “It would be a privilege to shoot any family member of yours.”

Ryan said, “Don’t.” He couldn’t come up with any better argument or reason not to get shot. It was going to end up the last dumb thought he ever squeezed out of his brain. Don’t.

Chip said, “You’re overreacting, Otto. You’re a classic overreactor.” Chip sounded aggrieved, as if having a gun pointed at him was just one more of life’s unfairnesses.

“Shut up or I’ll shoot you first.”

“You don’t want to start shooting people, Otto. Bad things can happen.”

“Don’t tell me what to do, Tesman. Every time you open your mouth, this whole parade of bullshit comes out.”

“I guess we’ve reached a real crossroads in our friendship.”

“Just shut up.”

“Say the word, we’re gone. Like you never knew me. Like I’m a—what? Figment. Figment of your imagination.”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” The sound of Chip’s voice seemed to infuriate Otto. Chip shrugged and leaned against the screen door, as if to say he’d given it his best effort. Otto hadn’t moved the gun from Ryan’s face. “Turn around.”

Ryan felt the Coke he’d swallowed rising in his throat. He turned so that he faced the car, leaning against it, his legs no longer doing the job of keeping him upright, the sun balanced on the top of his skull like another bullet about to drop, the heat of the car’s roof against his bare arms, the gun speaking, CRACK.

Somebody screaming but it wasn’t him. “GODDAMNIT FUCKING ASSHOLE SHIT SHIT SHIT.”

Ryan turned around. Otto rolled on the ground, clutching at his shoulder, his T-shirt filling up with blood. Chip stood over him and kicked the gun away. He held his own gun, smaller, silver-plated, palm-size. Chip said, “Oh, come on, Otto. You’ve hurt yourself worse having a good time. These tough guys,” Chip said to Ryan. “I get so tired of their big bad act.”

“FUCKER YOU FUCKIN SHOT ME.”

“Well sure I shot you, what do you expect? Was I supposed to think you were just playing some dumb game?” Chip stepped over Otto so that he had one foot on either side of him. “You want a towel, maybe? Ry, look around and see if there’s anything like a towel around here.”

Ryan went to Otto’s truck and looked into the front seat. There was a pile of clothing on the floor; he found a gray sweatshirt and brought it back to Chip. He’d propped Otto up against the wheel of the Dodge.

“CHUNK OF SHIT FUCKHOLE.”

“Otto, seriously, you should save your breath. Here, put some pressure on that hole.”

Otto groaned. Ryan tried to say something but thought had gone clean out of his head, like the empty balloons over a comic character’s head, like the comics Chip used to collect back in Iowa a hundred years ago. Chip said, “You want a ride someplace, Otto? We can give you a ride if you’ll agree this was all a big accident. We were messing around target shooting and my shot went wide.”

“We need to get him to a doctor,” Ryan said, recovering the power of speech.

“Maybe. But first Otto has to get with the plan.”

“SCREW YOU DICKFACE.”

“Just as well. You don’t want him making some big stupid bloody mess in your car. They’d probably charge you extra, you know, for cleanup.”

“Say, Chip?”

“Ray.”

“Ray. I think Otto is actually very sorry that things got out of control. I bet he’s actually trying to apologize, but it’s just not coming out right.”

Otto groaned again and showed his teeth. Blood was beginning to seep through the wadded gray sweatshirt he was holding to his shoulder.

They started back, Ryan driving, going as fast as he could without hitting any bumps, because the bumps made Otto scream. Chip sat in the front seat, turned around, the silver gun in one hand, cigarette flipping up and down in his mouth. The knapsack with the opals on the floor at his feet. He seemed to be in a good mood.

He said, “Tell me this isn’t more exciting than some old convention.”

“This is more exciting than a convention.”

“You can go back and tell everybody that you had a chance to see the real West.”

“If that’s what you say it is, Ray.”

“Sure it is.” Chip took the cigarette out long enough to exhale and reposition it. “Just like in the movies, except Otto wound up all shot.”

Ryan drove through the landscape of the real West. Although it didn’t look any different from the way it did a couple of hours before, he didn’t trust his eyes.

Chip was still pleased with himself, still tickled by his own wit. “I guess old Otto thought he was Charles Bronson or somebody. What do you say, Otto, would you like to be in the movies? You could be a cattle rustler, or a saloonkeeper. You could be the guy who gets hit and falls down and doesn’t get up. That have any appeal for you, huh?”

“COCKSUCKER RATFUCKER.”

She had
six grandchildren now. Six! It was bewildering to think how everything changed, fast and slow all at once. She couldn’t get her mind around it. If only you could grab hold of time like the end of a string, follow it along, roll it up into a ball until you got where you needed to be. Baby pictures of each grandchild hung in circular frames over the fireplace in the family room. Anita’s two and Blake’s three and the newest, Ryan’s little girl. She stared at them and they stared back. Six wrinkled baby faces looking out at the world in perfect incomprehension. Of course most of them weren’t babies now. Matthew was twelve, and Marcie and Kyle were nine, and so on down the line. Or maybe Marcie was ten. She hadn’t thought about it in a while and it was possible that some birthday had slipped past her. Who would imagine you could forget a thing like that, your own granddaughter’s birthday?

But she did forget. She didn’t always pay attention to everything that people assumed you paid attention to. Sometimes she just got tired. So many things piled up in a life, after a while you felt them as a weight. So many babies, hers and everybody else’s! They took too much out of you. All the excitement and worry of their arrival and the suddenness of their needs. She must have felt all the right things at
the time, happy and fond and anxious. But looking back, she couldn’t remember feeling them. Some part of remembering, or feeling, had been blotted out in her.

People said,
I don’t know how you manage it,
and you told them that you just did the best you could, day by day, which was what they wanted you to say. They didn’t want you to say that sometimes you locked the door to your room and stayed in bed all day and it didn’t matter if there was screaming on the other side of the door, screaming and kicking and swearing, you did not get up.
Fuck fuck shit, shittin cunt whore.
Where had her daughter learned such language, and why was it one of the things she remembered?

Some days were sad days and they cried together, as if all the salt tears in the world could change a thing.

Some days were good days when Torrie sat quietly, looking at magazines. She liked
National Geographic
s best because of all the pictures. Jungles with tiny, vivid, poisonous frogs perched on leaves. Bedouin on camels, frozen waterfalls, beaches with frills of turquoise water, with sea turtles and sharks and puffins. At such times Audrey watched her and wondered if her daughter was still in there somewhere, in a far country. Or was she lost inside the pictures?

How is she doing, is she doing any better now?
And Audrey always said
Yes, thank you, she’s a little better,
and people were
So glad to hear it,
because then it meant they didn’t have to do anything else.

Better because the emergency surgeries were long past, better because there would be fewer and fewer reconstructive surgeries. Better because the swelling of her face and head had gone down, better because her hair had grown back. Better because Audrey no longer had to change the catheters and urine bags. Better because her shattered pelvis had healed. Better because she was able to use a wheelchair, and after the hip and knee surgeries, a walker, and later, a cane. When she walked now there was a good leg and a bad leg. The good leg went first and the bad leg followed.

The doctors were always encouraged, encouraging. There had been so much progress already, there would continue to be progress. Not as
much, or as quickly, as you might want, and not 100 percent, certainly not back to the way she’d been before the accident. That was a doctor for you. They lifted you up with one hand and shoved you down with the other. She hated doctors now.

In the first terrible hours and days and weeks, they had been told not to get their hopes up, no one was sure if Torrie would even live. They kept waiting for someone to give them a real answer, remove the dread. But with doctors, Audrey understood now, there was no such thing as being entirely out of danger. There was only one more day when the patient had not died.

People sent cards and brought casseroles to the house. The church bulletin requested prayers on their behalf. But now it had been almost ten years. There was no longer any crisis, only life and time, which made everything unremarkable.

So that her beautiful, willful daughter had been stolen away and replaced by this changeling creature, a furious and oversize baby who had to be taught all over again how to eat with a knife and fork, toilet herself, tie her shoelaces. Once a week she had physical therapy and speech therapy at the clinic in Des Moines. The therapists were encouraging, like the doctors. They measured out hope on graphs and charts, inches and syllables.
Thatagirl, Torrie! One more time! Great effort!
It was in their self-interest to say that people got better, because otherwise there would be no need for them. So Torrie lifted weights, stacked blocks, blew into tubes, said
A
EE I O YOU,
said
see bee tree
and everyone agreed she was making slow but steady progress.

Audrey didn’t tell them about the days when Torrie refused to put on clothes, or lit all the stove burners when Audrey was in the bathroom, or cursed at the television so that they hardly ever watched anymore. Commercials in particular seemed to set her off, those inconsequential dramas of people choosing Coke over Pepsi, Ford over Chevy. “What is it, Torrie, what’s the matter?” And Torrie made a motion with her hands that looked as if she were trying to wash them and said, in a tone of accusation, “Everybody too happy!”

That was what the commercials wanted you to believe. Buying
things made you happy, and buying the superior brand made you happy. All of it was exaggerated to the point of stupidity and everybody understood that. Maybe Torrie didn’t anymore. Maybe she couldn’t tell when the world didn’t mean what it said, what was real and what were brightly colored lies.

The brain, Audrey had been told, was complex, subtle, fragile. If it was bruised, insulted, torn, it still kept trying to do its job, its neurons firing and looking for connections, short-circuiting and sparking. The brain was the boss of everything. There were the autonomic functions, breathing, the beating heart. Gross and fine motor control. Whatever could be sensed, touched, seen, smelled. Language and speech. Logic, memory, behavior, judgment. It had been explained to her many times that there were some things Torrie could practice so that simple repetition convinced her brain to follow a certain pathway. Other functions might be like a highway that no longer led anywhere.

Insurance only covered part of the enormous bills. They would never pay them off. Randy had planned to retire by now. Instead he went to the office every weekday and sometimes on weekends too. He didn’t always have to work, but who would want to be here if they didn’t have to be?

If you followed the string back far enough, she was no one’s mother. But you could only go forward, and so she would always always always be the one who cleaned up the messes, coaxed and threatened and soothed, loved them no matter what they did except when she didn’t. It wasn’t one of those things like breathing.

“Eat, Torrie.” Torrie sat at the kitchen table, a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich cut in quarters on the plate before her. At least there was no more of the strange eating, or not eating, that had gone on before the accident. The things they had found in her room! The food she’d hidden away in drawers and closets, only pretending to have eaten it. It had all gone bad and drawn bugs, so that in the middle of everything else they’d had to clean and scour the room down.

Now Torrie no longer had such secrets. Only the enormous one of who lived inside her damaged head.

“Eat, Torrie.” If it was a bad day, she fussed about what was on her plate. Fine then, don’t eat, Audrey wanted to say, except that it would be her fault if Torrie got constipated or lived entirely on sugar. “Drink your milk, please?”