Winter Loon(59)

I knew the cracks and warts of that house, the gurgles in the pipes, the droop and creak in the hallway outside the bathroom where leaking had warped the floorboards. I’d grown accustomed to heat that didn’t always work in the winter and the damp, medicinal smell of mold in the summer. The freight train rattled my window twice a week, always on schedule. What did any of this matter to me? What was keeping me with these people? Wherever they went next, I didn’t have to go with them. I didn’t owe them anything. In that envelope on the floor, next to my mother’s knife, was freedom or a coffin nail. I picked up the knife and left the envelope on the floor.

Ruby’s voice shot down the hallway from inside the bathroom. “He gone?”

I nodded, though she couldn’t see me. “He’s gone,” I yelled back.

She scuffed up to me, her slippers dragging more than usual. “Give that to me.”

I bent to pick up the eviction notice.

“Not that, stupid. The knife. That don’t belong to you. Give it to me.”

The anger came back at me in a wave. I turned on her like she’d broken a twig in a still forest. I held the knife up, then pointed it at her. “What? This?”

Her eyes twitched back and forth, her lips puckered. She folded her arms across her chest.

“Who was she afraid of?”

“Don’t you got school?”

“Not going. Who was she afraid of?”

Now it was her turn to push past me. I followed her to the kitchen. She reached into the refrigerator and pulled out two cans of beer. Every bone in my body quivered. I pulled out a chair, eased into it. I set the knife down in front of me, careful to line it up parallel to the edge of the table, to make it neat.

She sat next to me and popped open the beers, pushing one to me. It was nine o’clock in the morning. She tilted her cigarette pack toward me in question.

I shook my head. “Just tell me.”

She lit up. “God, that girl.” She sucked in a mouthful of air, scratching at years of exhaustion cracked into the flesh between her eyebrows.

“I told him to leave her be.”

“Who, Ruby?” I knew. I needed to hear her say it.

She put her elbows on the table and looked at me straight, searched my face. Then she went back to her beer can, back to her cigarette. “Gip,” she said. “That lemon smell of hers. All over him. Made me sick to my stomach.” She rocked in the still chair, back and forth, a rhythm of confession rolling out of her.

Say he snuck in at night, while Ruby was asleep in the next room. Or maybe she was awake and watched him go. Maybe she sat in a dark kitchen lit only by a burning ash and watched the shadow at the end of the hall open and close the door. Say she tiptoed down that hall and opened the door a crack. Did she see the hulk of my grandfather mounting the bed? Did Ruby listen for grunts like the ones I heard through paper-thin walls? Did she hear protests, whimpers? Did she ever raise a finger to protect my mother? I set the beer can down on the table with shaking hands. Ruby’s words buzzed in my ears. Gip’s smell fouled the air. “Why didn’t you stop him?”

She rocked away. “I tried to catch him. I did. Then I found out she was gonna have a baby. I thought Gip might have done it. ’Course she was running around with Moss by then. She swore up and down it was him got her pregnant and it was me who was disgusting for saying otherwise.”

As much as I tried, I could not stop the tears. I picked up the knife, touched the tip to my palm, imagined running it through the bone gaps. “What’s that got to do with this?”

“You seen the way he looked at it. I know you did. Like another hand was holding it. Oh, he knows that knife alright. I put two and two together, is all.” She sucked down the rest of her beer and let her eyes rest on the long hallway. “She cooed at babies like they was puppies, even when she was a little girl. She’d stop ladies anywhere—the street, the market—and get right down into the stroller, real close. Made some of them uncomfortable, this stranger touching the little fingers and toes.” Ruby’s face shifted and crumbled. Her crying came out more like a gasp, a thing long denied. “I didn’t want to lose her. I thought Gip might take her away and they’d both be gone.”

I finished off my beer and got up from the table. “I have to get out of here.”

Ruby grabbed me by the arm. “Don’t go. Don’t leave me.”

A chill froze me in place and I knew for a heartbeat that feeling. I would not be dragged down.

“What kind of people are you, anyway? Who does that to a child?” I grabbed the weapon between us. “This belongs to me now.” I was on the edge of something. If I had been up high somewhere—on a bridge, a cliff, a building—I would have jumped, been done with blankness for good. I stuck the knife in my back pocket and grabbed my coat from the hook.

I couldn’t get away from her fast enough.



TO NO SURPRISE, I FOUND myself on the sidewalk in front of Jolene’s house. Dry snow covered the ground in a pilled flannel sheet. Wind whipped the trees, clacking branch against branch like locking antlers. The sky was smoke gray. I stared at the house as if it were an apparition, conjured from a time before when I’d felt I almost belonged there. Now it looked shut off, cold as my bare hands. Troy appeared from around the side of the house.

“Wes. What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be in school?”