Sky Bridge Page 5

  “No. They didn’t,” I tell her, which is the truth. They did something else, though, which was to keep me and Tess confused about who was staying and for how long and whether or not they’d like us and how strict they’d be, but that’s not what she’s asking and so I don’t bother. Besides, some things are too hard to explain.

  She runs her finger across the scar that’s down low on her neck and keeps her other arm folded underneath her breasts. “That’s good. Because I wonder what’s inside Tess, buried so deep.” Her eyes go a little empty; they always do that whenever she’s thinking something quiet, and I noticed that about her once, how her eyes are either empty or fierce and there’s not much space in between.

  “She just wanted to leave. That’s all. That’s all it is. She just didn’t want this baby, and she didn’t want to stay with us.” I wish Kay would leave. I hate that feeling of being closed in, of a body pressing into your space when you don’t want it there. It’s hard to shuck somebody off, to say, Look, back off, please.

  “Tess left me a note, you know. ‘Don’t come after me this time. I’m eighteen. I can leave if I want. Don’t worry any, blah, blah, blah.’ Jesus, you girls.”

  “I bet she comes back.”

  “I bet she doesn’t.”

  “She said she was just getting out of here for a while.”

  “She’s gone for good. And that’s too bad, because a kid needs her mother. Needs a father and a mother, but at least her mother.”

  I can tell what’s coming now. Something about her tone of voice has shifted again, and that means that one of her big, long, loopy rants is coming, and I put my head down on the edge of the tub, which is cool and hard, and I keep my hand on Amber and start to zone out.

  “Only a mother can love a kid through all that hard work. Once it took every last ounce of goodness in me not to throw you out the window, Libby. You just kept screaming. You were the damndest colicky baby that ever lived. I was at a hotel. I even opened the window. I even stood there, looking at the sidewalk below. You’ll want to do the same thing.”

  “Jesus, Kay. I will not.” I say this to the white hardness of the tub.

  “Yes you will. When it comes, just don’t do it. Last night, Amber was crying forever and you were so tired and you thought, Man, I hate this baby. Didn’t you? You thought, Maybe I wouldn’t hate this baby if it was mine but right now I goddamn hate this baby. And you thought, I’m going to kill this kid if she doesn’t shut up. I’m just saying the truth. That every mother in the world has thought it. They just won’t say it. Just don’t take the next step. Don’t ever do it.”

  I bite my teeth together until my jaw hurts to keep the tears from coming, the stupid tears from I don’t know what. Being tired, being yelled at, being so hot.

  “This kid’s going to make you tough,” Kay says.

  “You’ve told me,” I whisper.

  “You’re a bit slower than most, that’s for sure. But you still gotta learn that the world is a hell of a lot harder than what you could even imagine.”

  “You’ve told me.”

  “Getting older is basically a process of getting tougher, of dealing with new kinds of pain.”

  “You’ve told me.” I sit there with my eyes closed, my hand underneath Amber’s head. My back is killing me, staying in this position, but I don’t bother moving.

  “Kids will tear you down. Then, if you can, you build yourself back up again.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s not hell, Libby,” she says. “And in fact it can be great. I’m just saying it’s hard. You’re going to break. I just don’t wanna see it happen, I guess—see you break like that.”

  It’s a moment of too much said, too much nice, Kay offering this last bit, and so to make up for it she starts up with one of her usual rants: two dumb daughters, one who won’t leave, the other who won’t stay around, and what sort of daughter runs off, just disappears in a truck with some guy, and how come I don’t know nothing, she’s my little sister for god’s sake. Her voice gets louder and she’s leaning closer to me. How come I didn’t stop her? How come I don’t have the courage and strength to do one goddamn thing right? She ought to call the police, because for all she knows Tess is flopped dead in a field somewhere, and it’s sure as hell going to be my fault when Tess dies. And you know what else, this baby ought to be having breast milk, because it’s the formula that’s causing her to cry all night. And furthermore I got to realize my horsing around days are over and that I’m not going to know what hit me. Two dumb daughters. The two dumbest daughters a mother could ask for. One that won’t stay around, the other who won’t leave.

  Tess used to say: Libby, would you please tell me what you do in your mind all day? You daydream like nobody I ever met. You live in your head more than you live in your life.

  I’d say: Leave me alone, I’m thinking.

  She’d say: About what? A different life?

  And I’d say: No, a different me.

  The last time we had that conversation, she said, Well, sister, it’s Real Life that you need to focus on now.

  She said:

  One, Derek is going to leave you.

  Two, You’re going to have your heart broke. Not by Derek, but by this baby. You’re taking this baby so you’ll have something to love, something that will love you back. But you know what? It’s not going to fill you up, it’s not going to make your life complete.

  Three, You’re going to end up just like Kay. Pissed off that you wasted your time on this earth.

  She said, When we were kids, you’d take me down the road, to get me away from Kay, and you’d play make-believe with me, and we’d pretend to be in other families, in other places. Kids do that because they’re kids. But you never stopped pretending. This is our world. This is it.

  She said, Libby, this baby isn’t going to be like you imagine at all, if you’ve even bothered to try to imagine it real. I feel so sorry for you. But this was your idea, remember that. You got to start thinking, and you’ve got to let go of the idea that you’re something special to somebody, because none of us are, and if you don’t, if you don’t stop dreaming about that, you’re going to end up all snap-snap-snapped to pieces.

  I light a cigarette and say, “All right all right all right already.”

  But it’s not all right, and Amber keeps crying.

  If I could get a word in edgewise, I’d say, Kid, night hours are longer than day hours, that’s an actual fact, and one of the things I could teach you is about how certain truths—sixty-minutes-in-an-hour and all that—just are not the truest truth.

  But she’s hollering so I don’t even try, I just pace around outside with her cradled in the crook of my arm.

  It seems like a few days ago that Kay was yelling at me in the bathroom, but it was just earlier tonight. This night just keeps expanding, and there’s nothing to stop it, and it’s three o’clock in the morning and it’s going to be forever until the sun comes up.

  Crickets are chirping and there’s some animal rustling near the burn barrel—a raccoon I think, because I heard it doing that purr-chatter thing that they do—and the occasional car roars down the highway. But I can only hear these things when Amber pauses for a breath, which she doesn’t do all that often.

  “Blah, blah, blah,” I say to her. “Be quiet. Go to sleep. Please. Because I’m going to drop dead in about a minute.”

  She cries some more, a high-pitched wail that bursts against my eardrums.

  “Look, it’s a good thing Derek didn’t come by, because this ain’t how you should be acting when he does. Would you like him as a father? He doesn’t want to be, though. And I don’t think I want him to be either, although sometimes I wonder if he’d be better than nobody. And that makes me feel like a real shit.”

  I throw my cigarette down and twist it in the earth with my toe and then cart Amber inside to the fridge for a beer, and then back outside. When I’m not drinking it, I balance the bottle on her tummy. When she quiets
down for a bit, I take my turn in the conversation. “Your crying is really damn irritating, that’s the truth,” I tell her. “Listen to this. Once I honked the car’s horn at a deer that was crossing the road and the horn got stuck—this was in an old car of mine. It just kept on honking, and I had to drive thirty miles with that noise, one big long honk, till I got to Derek’s place, and he climbed under the car and cut the wires that lead to the horn, and, kid, you are worse than that. But probably you’re crying because you feel like shit, so I’m sorry. And no matter what, I won’t throw you out a window. Kay’s right about some things, and I guess I’m glad she just says them. I do hate you sometimes.”

  She looks at me like she’s listening, for once, so I take my chance and start talking fast before she decides to change her mind. “Derek and me, we stay together because there isn’t anybody else coming our way. I keep trying to figure out how to love him, but I just can’t. Derek is good. He’s nice. He’s a regular good-guy, and I don’t know why, but I just don’t love him.” I lower my voice and say another thing I’m not sure about, but I want to hear out loud. “I’m not sure I love you, either. Not yet.” She’s spitting up white goo now, and I wipe it from her face with the corner of the blanket. “Maybe I didn’t mean that. Sorry. I’m sorry! Listen, one thing I’ll do for sure is get you braces if you need them. That way, you won’t be ugly like me. You’ll have improved chances. Too fucking much depends on how you look, kid, although maybe by the time you’re grown humans will have grown up about this, although I doubt it. Kid, you seem to actually be listening. Good. Listen up. I’ve got things to tell you. I try to imagine you older, a blond-haired girl with braids and blue overalls, but I can’t picture what your face looks like, or what it feels like to hold your hand, or where we’re living and how things are going for us. It’s hard for me to picture. What do you think about that? I think that’s a bad sign.”

  She’s quiet and looks like she’s listening, so I drink beer and tell her any dang thing I can think of. How Tess was always my best friend, except for Shawny. How I never stopped to consider how much I loved them, because I just did. How I was counting on that to be true with her too, but so far nothing has cleared up. That I’m afraid of the dark, there’s not so many mosquitoes this year, and that those bright things she’s staring at are called stars. How I’m not really fond of the president of the United States, because he seems to have less going for him than even me. How my father’s been gone since I was three and I have no idea where he is. How my parents used to be Baxter’s ranch hands, but then my father left and Kay stayed on. How I spent my whole life wanting out of this brown house in the middle of an alfalfa field and never once did I figure that I’d be raising a kid in the exact same place. How probably I should call social services because she’s not mine legally right now, and that’s something I should take care of. And I would have, except that I didn’t know Tess was leaving. But that maybe I won’t bother because there’s too much paperwork and anyway, according to Kay, all social services wants to do really is follow you around and figure out how to take your baby. How probably I should meet some other moms so that I don’t feel so alone. How I haven’t told anybody how much I’m missing Tess—so much that my heart feels tired from the ache.

  Then I loop back to Derek, because I figure I gotta work this one out somehow. I tell her how we’ve been dating for two years now, and how sometimes he gets out of a nice sleep, drives here, and then gets back up and goes home again, and how he must think what we do is worth all that effort, which I appreciate. I for one wish he would just stay the night, because what could Kay say, given her own track record? But Derek has some weird sort of pride, and he doesn’t want “to be beholden to Kay,” meaning, he doesn’t want to spend the night in the house of someone who doesn’t like him.

  I tell Amber that Derek has never given me flowers or taken me to a show in Denver, and sometimes he’s yelled at me for no good reason and once he said, “Lib, I’m not going to tell you you’re beautiful, because you’re just not,” and when he said that a sudden shock of hurt went blasting through my heart. But one thing he’s done is to come through my window and stay with me. I don’t care if it’s just the sex he wants, which is what he jokes around and says, because it fills me up too. Sex is something to learn about later.

  Although not as much later as she might think. Because I was only four or five when I first understood something about sex—climbing up a swing-set pole and this feeling shooting like sparks between my legs, and I hung on till my arms went numb to keep this new, wonderful feeling there. I thought it was just me until Shawny told me that she felt the same thing if she pressed herself against the top of the footboard to her bed, and I’ve always wondered at that, how kids know about the things a body can do, and the things a body can want, the things a body can desire like crazy.

  A car’s parked out on the highway, between me and Miguel’s place, headlights out. I’ve been watching it the whole time. That’s the truth, of course, that while you’re doing one thing you’re busy noticing another.

  I’m guessing: people making out, out of gas, need to rest, lost. What are the reasons somebody stops a car in the middle of the night? I can’t see the car all the time, not through all that dark. Only when another car passes on the highway—mostly it’s semi-trucks this time of night—I can see a quick glimpse of taillights, the glimmer of glass windows. It’s parked facing away from me, like it’s heading into town.

  Sometimes when I’m at the store, to pass the time I freeze the world in my eyes. And I just try to notice things, like, Martha’s got oranges in her cart, she’s got a band-aid on her pinkie finger, one of her socks has been turned pink in the wash, three jugs of milk are gone, one carton of eggs, Frank’s hair looks softer than usual, Barry is writing his check with his left hand, the plant hanging above Arlene has six dead leaves. I watch the way Arlene’s face flickers with something sad, how Frank is pretend-jolly, how Martha does in fact seem happy, like she’s filled up with a secret joy.

  Then usually I start feeling sorry for myself. I can’t help it. I think, Nobody sees me the way I see them. Nobody even cares to see me. Then I talk myself out of it. I say, Well, that’s okay, you see you, and that’s all you have anyway. And then I think, Yeah, but I’m not enough. I’m lonely. And then I think, Ah, shut the fuck up. That’s the way the real world works, welcome to it. And every other person on the planet is feeling sorry for herself for the same damn reason. Then I replace three milk jugs and one carton of eggs.

  I think I started noticing stuff like that after I killed the four baby ducks. Kay had given them to me—the softest-yellow, cutest things—and I fed them bits of bread and dipped their beaks into water to help them drink. I kept them in a cardboard box at night and took them out to the lawn to wobble around in the day. After about a week, I put them in the stock tank for a swim. Then I went inside for some reason, and I got busy, and I forgot about those ducks. When I came back, their bodies were floating. They’d been too little to jump out, and they’d gotten tired of swimming.

  It makes me sick to think about it.

  I’m so sorry about those ducks, so sorry that they suffered. They were probably peeping that whole time, hoping somebody’d come and help them. Peeping and peeping, getting scared and more scared. Tired and more tired. Jesus. I can’t think about it for long. I want to hold them again and say, I’m sorry. Oh man, am I sorry.

  I don’t know what to do with all the pain in the world. There’s just so much bad, it freezes me up when I think about it. Right now I’d like to scream, Amber-shut-the-hell-up! But the only thing I got going for me is that I never want to add to the meanness that’s already out there. And I want to make sure I see things.

  So I hug this baby to my heart and I watch the car, how the red lights blink, how it swerves back onto the highway. I lean against the doorway and stare into the night and drink my beer and hold her and tell us both that this time I’ll be listening, and watching, and I won’
t forget to pay attention.

  Shawny had a gun, from a cousin who had a whole slew of them. The cousin traded the gun for a kiss. The deal was he got to kiss her for as long as he wanted, which turned out to be a pretty long time, but she got the gun.

  It was an old, scratched-up Colt .38, a quiet soft blue, and it was the color that made the kiss worth it, she said.

  We were alone the night she showed it to me. Kay was at the bar, Tess was with a boyfriend, and me and Shawny had been home drinking seven-and-sevens all night. Shawny was crying off and on, since the night before her boyfriend had dumped her. We’d all been to a bonfire party, and this boyfriend was sitting in the bed of a pickup with another girl on his lap. He’d kiss the other girl and look at Shawny and smirk at her, and she’d look back. She’d just lost her virginity to him the month before and it was killing her to stand there and watch, but she did, and that’s the thing about Shawny, she was strong and sure enough to stare right at hurt and not look away.

  When I came into my room with new seven-and-sevens for us both, Shawny was sitting cross-legged on my bed, holding a gun in her lap.

  “Whoa, shit, Shawny,” I said. “Shit.”

  “I like to hold it,” she said.

  “Shawny, what the hell?”

  She waved her arm at me, pushing my words away. “The safety’s on. Calm down. Do you know where you should point the gun if you’re serious about killing yourself?” She pointed the gun to her temple and held it there, smiling at me.

  “Shawny, put it down.”

  “Everyone thinks it’s here, but no, it’s not,” she said. “Usually it gets you, but sometimes there’s just brain damage and you can live.”

  “Please Shawny, please. Put it down. I’m not joking. We’re drunk.”

  She put it in her mouth, and around the barrel of the gun her words were garbled. “Not here either,” she said. “Same problem.” Her eyes were lit up with a kind of smile, and her teeth clacked softly against the metal. “Do you want to know?”