Where the Heart Is (28 page)

Hell no, I didn’t forget the film! Someone stole it.

Who do you think you’re talking to? You ever heard of the Greater Southwest Award?

You damned right I’m a photographer! Now give me that film before I cut your throat.

Benny Goodluck broke into a run when the Chevy rounded the corner and he had the door open before the car had rolled to a stop.

“Hurry!” he said. “They just started the music.”

Novalee loaded the camera as she ran for the backyard and she took her first shot as Carolyn Biddle, her pink dress floating around her, stepped out of her mother’s door and into the sunlight of her wedding day.

“Yeah,” Benny said, “but I never knew she was so pretty.”

“They say a woman’s her most beautiful when she’s in love.”

Benny took the last bite of his Chicken McNugget, then licked away a smear of ketchup in the corner of his mouth.

“Well, she never looks that good at school.”

“Here.” Novalee shoved her french fries across the table. “You eat these. I had too much wedding cake.”

Benny took a fry, then paused, waving it in the air. “It just seemed so weird watching my teacher get married, watching her kiss.” Benny’s face reddened.

“I thought it was romantic.”

“Novalee, you think you’ll ever get married?”

“I might. If someone asks me.”

“Not me!”

“Oh, you’ll fall in love someday, Benny, and when you do . . .”

“I don’t know nothing about love.”

“I’ll bet you do.”

“No. I’ve thought about it, but I just can’t figure it out.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, sometimes love seems easy. Like . . . it’s easy to love rain .

. . and hawks. And it’s easy to love wild plums . . . and the moon. But with people, seems like love’s a hard thing to know. It gets all mixed up. I mean, you can love one person in one way and another person in another way. But how do you know you love the right one in every way?”

“I’m not sure, but I think you’ll know. I think if it’s the right person, it’ll be better than rain and hawks and wild plums. Even better than the moon. I think it’ll be better than all that put together.”

“Novalee, do you . . . I mean, are you . . .”

“What?”

“Are you in love with someone?”

Novalee was so still that for a moment Benny thought she hadn’t heard him. But then she moved . . . tilted her face to catch a slender shaft of sunlight . . . shifted her gaze to something the boy couldn’t yet see.

“I think I am, Benny,” she said. “I think I am.”

NOVALEE WAS IN THE KITCHEN sorting negatives when the phone rang, but before she lifted the receiver, the caller hung up. She was almost disappointed. Talking on the phone would have been a lot more fun than trying to deal with the mess in her kitchen.

In the two months following Carolyn Biddle’s wedding, Novalee had shot a family reunion, two birthday parties and a dance recital.

Now she was struggling to conquer the mountains of negatives and prints on the verge of avalanching all around her.

If she got to shoot the Chamber of Commerce banquet and the Miss Sequoyah Pageant, then she’d probably have to build on another room. And if she didn’t reorganize the clutter in Moses’ darkroom, she wouldn’t blame him if he canceled her membership.

She was just beginning to make some headway when she uncovered a picture of Forney, a shot she had taken one evening in her backyard. She had caught him with his dark eyes turned to her and a familiar softness around his mouth, the way he looked just before he smiled.

She ran her finger over the photograph, touching his throat, the ridge of his jaw, his lips. Then, as she lifted the image of Forney’s face closer to her own, the phone rang again and she jumped like she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t.

“Hello?”

No one answered, but the caller was still on the line. Novalee could hear the quick catch of breath.

“Who is this?” she asked.

“Brummett.”

“Who?”

“Can you come over here?”

“Brownie?” Novalee was trying to connect the sound of the boy’s voice with the child who had called her “Nobbalee” since he was four, but this voice didn’t belong to a child.

“Can you help us?” he asked.

“What’s wrong? What happened?”

“We need you.”

“Are you at home?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s Lexie?”

Novalee knew the boy moved the phone away from his mouth.

She could hear him talking, but she couldn’t make out the words.

Then, from somewhere more distant, she heard a girl crying.

“Is Lexie there?”

When he didn’t answer, Novalee pressed the phone tighter against her ear, straining to hear every sound. She thought she heard him say, “hold still,” but she knew he wasn’t talking to her.

“Brownie?”

She heard a door close, then far from the phone he said, “Pauline,”

but it sounded like a question.

“Brownie!” She cupped her hand around her lips, trying to amplify her voice. “Brownie!”

A moment later she heard shuffling sounds, then his breath, thin and uneven, against the mouthpiece.

“Let me talk to your mother.” Novalee tried to sound calm.

“She can’t.”

“Why? Why not?”

“Because . . . because . . .” Something gave way then—a splinter of sound, sharp and pointed, ripped through his voice.

Novalee said, “Okay. I’m coming.” She heard the phone slide across fabric, a stiff crackling like static.

“Did you hear me?” she yelled.

She knew the receiver had hit the floor; she heard it bounce against the tile.

“Brummett?” The connection hadn’t been broken, but there was no sound coming from the other end of the line.

“Brummett, can you hear me? I’m coming.”

Novalee drove the ten minutes to Lexie’s in five, slammed the Chevy into a juniper bush when she parked and jumped out of the car so suddenly she forgot to cut the engine.

The door to Lexie’s apartment was draped in red tinsel and covered with a crayon drawing of the Christ Child even though the Fourth of July was only days away.

When Novalee stepped inside, she squinted against the whiteness of Lexie’s enameled walls. The living room was undisturbed—

magazines lined up on the coffee table, the spread on the couch smoothed free of wrinkles, toys picked up. The room looked just as it should. But something was wrong.

“Lexie?”

The apartment was absolutely silent. No clinking glasses, no flushing toilet, no laughing children. The only sound came from a distance, the whine of an eighteen-wheeler on the interstate half a mile away.

As Novalee started down the hall leading to the bedrooms at the back of the apartment, she nearly stepped on Madam Praline’s green velvet hat. The crown was crushed and the veil torn almost in two.

Suddenly, a figure flashed across the doorway of the front bedroom, a naked child, bare feet slapping the floor as it darted like a dragonfly, then disappeared.

When Novalee reached the doorway and looked inside, she didn’t see them. The bed was unmade and, at first, she couldn’t see them huddled together in the jumble of pillows and quilts. But they were there, the twins, locked in each other’s arms, identical faces pressed cheek-to-cheek.

“Are you all okay?”

They stared, wide-eyed and unblinking.

“What’s happened here?”

Baby Ruth put her finger to her lips, then whispered, “Roger,” and at the sound, they both came crawling across the bed and grabbed at Novalee, wrapping themselves around her legs, pressing their faces into her skirt.

“Where’s Peanut?” Novalee asked, her voice hushed.

Cherry pointed to a lump in the bed. “There,” she said, then she pulled her hand back quickly and twisted it around Novalee’s arm.

With the twins clinging to her, Novalee shuffled to the bed and Where the Heart Is

lifted the covers. The baby, sound asleep, had wiggled out of his diaper and lay in a widening ring of fresh urine.

“Let’s go find your momma,” Novalee said, but as she began to guide them toward the door, they broke away and scrambled back to the bed, back together in the safety of pillows and quilts.

When Novalee stepped back into the hall, she was tip-toeing.

Lexie’s door was closed and if there was sound on the other side, Novalee couldn’t hear it for the pulse pounding against her eardrums.

She started to knock, but didn’t—started to call Lexie’s name, but couldn’t.

When she turned the knob, the door swung open on its own.

“Oh, my God.”

Praline was hunkered in a corner, naked except for a pair of limp gray socks. Her hair was wet, plastered against her face, her eyes vacant and tearless. She rocked back and forth, keening softly like a frightened animal. A string of saliva dripped from her bottom lip onto an old scab on her knee.

Brummett was sitting on the side of the bed trying to work the childproof cap off a bottle of Tylenol.

“This damned thing,” he said.

“Brummett, can you tell me . . .” but Novalee never finished what she started to say because that’s when she saw Lexie.

Someone had pulled the covers up to her neck and someone had put a wet washrag across her forehead, but no one had hidden her face.

One eye was so swollen the lid had turned inside out. The other eyelid was torn open and the eye, bulging from between the ripped tissue, followed Novalee’s movements as she neared the bed.

A clump of hair was matted in the dark mucus seeping from Lexie’s nostrils and a chunk of flesh had been bitten from her cheek. Part of her upper lip was severed . . . a piece of it hung against her teeth.

She made a sound then and her lower lip tried to shape a word, but her chin tilted at a crazy angle as if her face had been broken in two.

“Lexie, don’t. I’m going to call . . .”

Brummett’s head jerked up as if he had just heard Novalee come in.

“You found her hat,” he said.

Novalee was surprised to see the velvet hat balled up in her fist.

“Oh. Praline’s hat. I, uh . . .”

He crossed the room quickly. “Don’t call her Praline,” he said as he yanked the hat out of Novalee’s grip.

He was wearing a pair of white jockey shorts and when he turned away from her, Novalee saw that the seat was smeared with something dark. Blood crusted in the soft blond down on the backs of his legs.

“Here,” he said to his sister. “Let’s put your hat on”

When he touched her shoulder, the girl yelped and twisted away, but he made a shushing sound and smoothed her hair until she began rocking again. He gently worked the hat down on the top of her head, then pulled the torn veil across her face.

“Her name’s Pauline,” he said. “And she’s not a baby anymore.”

WHEN HER SICK LEAVE ran out, Lexie had to go on medical leave without pay, so Novalee emptied the white enameled apartment, moved her things to Moses’ barn and moved the kids in with her and Americus. By the time Lexie got out of the hospital, they were already settled in.

Lexie’s broken jaw would be wired shut for six more weeks and her eyelid and lip would need some plastic surgery later on, if she could ever afford it. She also had a couple of cracked ribs and a sprained wrist, but damaged more than anything was her spirit.

Pain pills kept her asleep most of the first week while Novalee tried to ease them all into a routine without too much friction. As soon as she arranged for ten days of vacation, she got Brummett and Pauline set up for therapy through Human Services.

She worked out a way to get the twins into nursery school for three hours a day and she let the Ortiz girls take the baby to the park every afternoon. Then Novalee tackled the house.

After she rigged up more clothesline in the backyard, she found a rhythm to doing five loads of laundry every day. But cooking for eight instead of two took some practice.

Her garden still had onions, okra, tomatoes, and peas, enough to last for a while. And Mr. Sprock, who always complained of his harvest going to waste, delighted in bringing baskets of corn, squash and potatoes.

Mrs. Ortiz taught her how to make calabazas mexicana, a kind of squash soup everyone liked except Brummett. Forney threw a little of everything in a pot to make gallons of a mystery he called slumgullion and Certain brought boxes of sweet potatoes that Novalee baked in breads and pies.

Lexie lived on whatever could be sucked through a straw, but she drew the line at sweet potato milk shakes. When she began to lose weight, she wrote Novalee a note saying she’d finally found a diet that worked.

Lexie could talk even with the wires in her jaw, but had to contort her mouth into grotesque shapes that scared Pauline and made her cry, so Lexie wrote notes if she had something to say. In a way this was a blessing, for she seemed to find less pain in silence.

Americus fussed around like a five-year-old nanny. She helped the twins get dressed, gave the baby his bottle, and brushed Pauline’s hair without pulling at tangles. She left small treats for Brummett, on his plate or under his pillow, but he usually swatted them away or tossed them on the floor. She gave Lexie a bell to ring when she needed fresh water or wanted to close her door.

When Lexie was able to get up and around, she helped out wherever she could, but she had little energy and tired quickly. Novalee could Where the Heart Is

see the pain in her eyes, but she didn’t think it came from stitches and wires. She waited for Lexie to talk about what had happened, what Roger Briscoe had done to them, but she didn’t push.

Two policemen came by once with a picture for Lexie to see, but it wasn’t Roger Briscoe. When they left, she went to bed and stayed all day. Pauline, who couldn’t bear to be separated from her, went to bed, too.

Brummett stayed away from his mother as much as he could, avoided rooms where she was, spoke to her almost not at all. But he watched her when he was sure she wasn’t looking.

On their first visit to the psychologist at County Mental Health, Novalee drove them over and waited while they were inside. When they came out an hour later, Pauline was crying, clinging to Lexie. But Brummett stomped out alone, then rode home in sullen silence, his body pressed against the door. When Novalee parked in the driveway, he bolted from the car, running toward the woods a block away. He didn’t come back until after supper.