The Lauras Page 6

  I kept to the brush; the miles melted beneath my feet, and anxiety melted my stomach lining. The hours melted by faster: in the late afternoon I came to the edge of what my long walk had made in my mind “Our City,” and I wasted nearly an hour misreading bus timetables before I found a line that would take me to the central hub and then out to our general neighborhood. I was leggy and skinny and very fourteen—a birthday had passed, blessedly unremarked upon, while we were living in the mountains—but still prepubescent looking, big eyed and non-threatening. I asked women with kids for bus fare, people that looked like they would sympathize with whatever parent was waiting for me. The tears that overwhelmed my lower lids added to the poignancy of my request, and I fell asleep in both busses in part to escape the searing embarrassment of begging.

  I didn’t recognize the gas station that I passed every day on the way to school until we turned the corner and I saw two of the kids from social studies walking home. At the next stop I stumbled out, legs stiff from sitting and sore from walking. I didn’t care now what Ma said or did to me, all I wanted was sleep. Sleep and a hot shower. And food. French fries. Doughnuts. Scrambled eggs and roast turkey and macaroni and cheese and potatoes and everything hot and thick and filling that I could shovel in until the soft warm feeling of it made me fall asleep at the table. These images dragged me to the motel: our car was parked at the foot of the rusting white stairs. Fear leapt in my empty stomach.

  The railing rocked under my hand. I fumbled out my latchkey, leaned into the door, and was dragged off my feet and into the room by my mother’s blind, grasping hands. I saw her white, terrified face for a moment before she crushed me to her chest so tightly that I couldn’t breathe. She put it away before she let me go, but I had seen it, had seen that her fear, waiting in that room for me to get back, had been so much greater than my own.

  She warmed up leftovers on the hot plate while I leaned against the tiled wall of the shower and thanked God I lived in an era that featured water heaters. She asked if anything had happened to me, and between forkfuls I said nothing had, because in my mind, at the time, it hadn’t. No one had knifed me, drugged me, kidnapped me, or touched me in any of my personal places: nothing had happened that was bad enough that I had to tell her about it. Then she asked the harder question: what the Sam Hill had I done, anyway, that took me away for two goddamned days and left me as hungry as a fasting Pentecostal?

  I started to tell her that I’d gone beach walking and just kept going until I ran out of beach, but that didn’t wash. She had called the school only hours after I left—the pre-four a.m. exit was the tip-off; I was never up that early of my own free will—and been apprised of my situation re teeth extraction. She had covered for me and asked to pick up my homework assignments later that night, figuring that the forged note was proof enough that I was just being an idiot rather than a kidnap victim.

  She watched the stories I wanted to tell her be born and die on my face: a free concert in Jacksonville, an all-night rave, a bonfire party with all the friends I did not have, a really long trip on some drug I’d never tried but she probably had and would recognize the moment that I tried to describe it that I had no idea what I was talking about. I was too used to telling people the truth they wanted, or the truth that they didn’t want but were more likely to believe than the actual way of things—reality is so often complicated and far-fetched to the point that most people are quicker to believe a lie. For once she waited until the real truth came to the surface.

  “I didn’t want Dad to worry but I didn’t want them to know where we were. So I took the Greyhound to Alabama and sent a letter from there. But I took longer than I should have getting back because I had to hitchhike since I lost my ticket.”

  Her face flickered in a way that I couldn’t understand, but now that I’ve passed the age she was then—and realized just how young she was—I recognize the retroactive horror. She had, apparently, given more weight to my natural reticence and tendency to obey without question than to the determination that we shared to make it through at all costs, taken it for granted that if I made a bad choice it would be of the stay-up-too-late-eat-too-much-candy variety. And her misassessment scared her: while her back was turned I’d stopped being a child, despite my occasional tendency to childishness. I was, unexpectedly, old enough that she didn’t have to worry about me wandering off with strangers anymore, but that didn’t matter because half the things I might get up to of my own volition could get me killed. She couldn’t protect me from the world anymore and she knew it.

  She let me eat in silence after that revelation, drawing a paper towel through her fingers like beads in a rosary, then screwing it tightly around her thumb, then picking it birdlike into shreds, her face flickering all the while with unspoken words. I slowed in my hasty forking. Something was up.

  “Don’t worry about your dad,” she said abruptly as I was spreading the last of the mashed potatoes out on my plate and dragging my fork tines through them, in imitation of a Zen rock garden. “I’ve been talking to him, off and on. Promised I’d keep you in school and let him know how we were doing every few months if he’d stop trying to find us.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you called him?”

  “I did—you didn’t seem to take much interest in it.”

  “No, you didn’t!”

  “Same way I never tell you anything, right?” she asked, and I felt myself go red. She’d taken to doing imitations of me that were intensely embarrassing, even though there was no one there to bear witness to them: in her own voice, announcing she was going somewhere or about to do something or asking if I wanted to eat dinner at the bar; then, with her hair in front of her face in fair imitation of me, a sullen grunt of acknowledgment, followed by an equally fair imitation of my wail, “You never tell me anything!” I was aware that she often spoke to me while I was preoccupied with books, television, or my own sticky daydreams, and I brushed her off, but try as I might I couldn’t break the habit, and I’d figured anything as important as having spoken to my dad would warrant a little more effort on her part.

  I squashed potato and didn’t look at her, still suspicious that she hadn’t told me she’d talked to Dad, but knowing that it was pointless to argue.

  She offered an olive branch. “Well, I got your attention now, so listen good—we’re clearing out at the start of summer.”

  Given the amount of school that still stood between me and summer, this seemed like a date so woefully distant as not to be worth contemplating.

  “By the time classes are over I should have enough cash to get us to the end of the road, if we’re careful how we spend it. Won’t know exactly when we’re leaving until closer to the time, but be advised—it is happening.”

  In the interest of honesty, let the record stand that I managed to retain this information for exactly as long as it took me to finish eating, investigate the household dessert situation, and get ready for bed; the next morning I once again took the eighth grade, that beach, and our residence in Florida wholly for granted. My mother had a point about both my attentiveness and my tendency to remember important details.

  As I scraped the plate clean she asked who had picked me up as I went, who I’d met, what I’d told them. So I made it a story, stringing the people and places together until I felt my father’s slow, honeyed voice buzzing in my own chest, and my mother asked me no questions, just listened. But I did not tell her about the second man, the one who had punished me for my youth and helplessness, the gall of my outstretched thumb, and for his own self-hatred. Shame, possibly, was why I left him out, or guilt. I didn’t want her to know what I had done, as though by refusing to describe my degradation it was somehow undone. She guessed, probably, not then but after, that I had left something out in my telling. Luck is finite, and everyone, sooner or later, meets a bully from whom they cannot run.

  She never asked, though, probably could not even trace the blank in me to that event; she did not know what question to a
sk, and if she had I did not know how to answer, not until I was older, had learned to borrow other people’s words to fill in for the things I could not say.

  Though our habits while we remained there didn’t change we were more aware of each other in that time, of the rhythm of coming and going, and I was more aware of her giving me my space, letting me ease into and suss the shape of my growing self. Perhaps she came home less often with the scent of strange men clinging to her skin, though I doubt it. I did not want to think then that that was her third means of employment, making men like her, take her home, pay her to kill their loneliness and keep their vices secret. My light-fingeredness, and the willingness to use it, must have come from somewhere. She was probably proud of her skill for survival, as was I.

  My strike out into the wilds of the world could have made me more adventurous, more willing to explore the city, make friends. Instead I became more preoccupied with the world inside my own head. My erotic fantasies grew elaborate, absurd, surreal, only tangentially related to normative sexuality, barely probable or biologically possible, but the more wild my desire and outlandish my thoughts, the more likely I was to be suddenly overwhelmed by the smell of warm man and cinnamon chewing gum, the feel of a rough knuckled hand, the taste of salt and pennies.

  Then I would stop abruptly, mind blanked with shock like falling into cold water, frightened, ashamed, overwhelmed by something I did not quite understand. There was no real cure for this; once it happened the rest of the day was done for, spent in restless shifting irritability, preoccupied with nothing and tender as a skinned peach. The only thing for it was to wander down to the beach and fling myself into the water, which was likewise saltily reminiscent but nonetheless burned me clean, blank my mind and swim against the current until I was too exhausted to think.

  On one of those days, lying on the burning sand after, rash guard feeling like it was painted on and my muscles stretched-out rubber bands dripping lemon juice, without the energy to drag myself to my feet and walk home, a boy in his mid-teens stopped and bent over me.

  “You OK, squirt?” he asked, and I dragged my face, one half crusted with sand, up enough to squint at him.

  He was golden: hair bleached tawny, skin burned caramel, so that if he lay down face first on the sand all you would see would be the electric blue of his swimming trunks and the paleness of his untanned palms, as though he cupped handfuls of salt. The others were behind him, different shades of tawny, cinnamon, dark sienna browns, their scraps of clothing—bikinis, trunks, shorts—bright on them. I recognized them as the group I’d watched on the morning when we’d first arrived, realized that this was their beach, that they’d probably been coming to this selfsame spot since before they could walk.

  “Yeah, I’m OK,” I said, but didn’t get up. My limbs were full of lead, immovable after the magical buoyancy of the water.

  They had surfboards.

  “Want a drink?” he asked.

  My throat was full of salt. He pulled me up.

  “We saw you in the water. We were placing bets on whether you were trying to drown yourself or just stupid.”

  “I swim all right,” I said in between sips of the water, which was so cold it hurt my teeth. A few of them had gone out, just beyond the breakers, stood with their palms on their boards watching the water roll as if they were scrying in its oily, foam-ringed surface. “Maybe I do want to drown.”

  “Don’t say it and it won’t happen,” he said. “You all right now?”

  “Whatcha guys doing?”

  “Surfin’ a bit, if the right wave comes.”

  “Teach me.”

  My balance was bad, my courage slightly lacking, but I was willing—so long as they promised to pull me out of it if it looked like I was drowning—and they found me endearing, or just entertaining, so by the end of the week I’d become a sort of mascot. They thought of me as a kid, probably took it for hero worship when I stared at their tight, sunned bodies.

  When I was in the water time ceased to matter, the hours sliding past like quicksilver. On evenings when the weather was good and we didn’t have school the next morning we lit bonfires, roasted cheap hot dogs and ate them rolled up in slices of Wonder bread, drank beers that had been stolen from parents’ garages and refrigerators. On those nights the others grew bolder, laughed louder, tickled and play-wrestled and teased each other across the sand, and I felt myself growing too tight for my skin; I thought I could smell sex in the air.

  It was after one of those nights, indistinguishable from all the other times I’d walked home smelling of bonfire smoke in the pale half-light in the hour before sunrise while fabricating an elaborate fantasy with which to get myself off, that I realized as I drew close to the motel that the car illegally parked at the foot of the rusted white staircase was my mother’s, and that the trunk was open. Our front door was as well; all of our things were in boxes and bags in the center of the room, and she was sitting on the bed, an unlit cigarette between her first and middle finger, looking over the road atlas.

  “What are you doing up?” I asked. She was dressed in her jeans and undershirt, boots on her feet. “Aren’t you going to work today?”

  She smelled like ginger and coffee under the cigarettes. She smelled like herself again. She wouldn’t get any tips dressed like that.

  “Nope. Gave my notice two weeks ago, kissed everyone goodbye last night. We’ve got enough cash to get us where we’re going, and the entire summer to get there.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked, bewildered by exhaustion and need. I refused to believe that she wouldn’t be putting on her short skirt and heels at any moment, that she wouldn’t be leaving me and my imagination to ourselves.

  “Get your good shoes on. As soon as I’m done with this thing we’re rolling out.”

  “Can I wash the salt off first? My skin itches.”

  “Make it quick. I want to get out of here before sunrise.”

  “What about saying goodbye to my friends?”

  “I told you months ago that we’d be leaving when school let out, and I told you two weeks ago that move-out day was June fifth—you should have done it before.”

  “No, you didn’t!”

  She gave me a flat, dead-eyed look that was the equivalent of a bucket of ice water in the face, and I dropped it.

  I locked myself in the bathroom and turned the water on as hard as it would go. For a moment I leaned my forehead on the tile and felt the water flowing down my back, sleep fuzzing my brain and desire tingling other places.

  My mother’s knock startled me awake.

  “Move it, Alex. We’ve got to get going, you can sulk in the shower later.”

  “Almost finished!” I shouted, but I had only just decided to indulge the more expedient craving when she knocked again.

  “I mean it, Alex. If you don’t get your ass out here in the next three minutes, I’m coming in there and I’m taking you out myself.”

  “Fine!” I bawled back, annoyed. I squirted a glob of shower soap into my palm and rubbed it into the salty mess of my hair and down my body and legs, let it rinse off, and stepped out unsteadily, everything from my navel to my knees pulsing, throbbing, aching. I toweled off, then wrapped up in it, carrying my dripping swimsuit and rash guard. “Did you pack all my clothes?” I asked.

  “They’re in the top of the duffel bag. And put some underwear on, kid. It’s OK to forget for a day or two, but we’re not going to be washing jeans for a while, and those are going to get nasty.”

  She took the first load downstairs, and I dropped the towel and began throwing clothes on as soon as she was gone. There wasn’t enough time, but I was still tempted to try to finish, was convinced that I would go crazy if I didn’t, but she was back before I’d found my socks.

  The urgency gradually abated, but the ache remained as we pulled out of the parking lot, and I sat in cranky sullenness. Ma didn’t seem to notice. Or she was ignoring me. I sulked more pointedly, stared out the window with my
arms crossed, trying to make my silence project “not talking to you.” But I could only resist the effects of a day of swimming and a night awake for so long. My eyes closed before we hit the city limits, and I dreamed naked people, naked me, and hands all over me, all the way to the Panhandle.

  CHAPTER VII

  Ma met the second Laura in a group home in New Jersey when she was fourteen. She’d been put there by Social Services just after—and if she recalled correctly, to some degree because of—her running away for the sake of a long walk along the Appalachian Trail. Laura was already living there when Ma showed up, had been living there for a while. She was dark haired and dark eyed and grim faced, didn’t speak so much but would shriek out of nowhere like someone had pinched her, ate off plastic and was given crayons to write with because she threw things, indiscriminately and without warning. But Ma didn’t know that when she first arrived; it wasn’t until later that the other kids told her that Laura was crazy and a liar and swore that little green aliens had kidnapped her when she was a baby, that people came into her room after lights out and felt her up, made her do things.

  “Because everyone is just dying to touch up a psycho—you think you’re so hot that no one can keep their hands off you? Come the fuck on, you’d be so lucky.”

  They all ate together at a long table, and on her first night there the place that was left empty was the one next to Laura at the far end. Ma didn’t think anything of that, took the seat without asking questions. As the plates were being passed Laura leaned towards her, whispered into her ear, “Hey, what’s red and bad for your teeth?” Ma had barely registered that she was being spoken to, barely registered the question, when Laura continued: “A brick.”