Dinner was canned split pea soup heated on the stove, and crookedly cut bread. Tammy had a way to go before becoming a domestic goddess. We opened the stove door and pulled the couch up to dine in comfort. We ate silently until Tammy was wiping the inside of her bowl with a hunk of bread. She wouldn’t have been caught dead doing that six months ago. A new Tammy, the tentative beginnings of a new life. But there were still a few threads from the old that needed to be dealt with.
“You’ll have to call Dornan sooner or later,” I said. “You should have called him days ago.”
“I know.”
“What will you tell him?”
“What will you tell him?”
“That I found you in SoHo and brought you back. Anything else is up to you.”
She nodded, and we watched the tiny, captive flames.
It’s a thousand-mile drive from Asheville to the Arkansas River Valley; I would have liked an early start, but I slept like the dead in the prewinter quiet and woke late, and then it took three hours to make the trailer ready for a long drive. And when all that was done, I found myself still unwilling to leave.
“If you decide to go,” I said to Tammy over one last cup of coffee in the cabin, “make sure the place is clean, and leave a note so I know where you’ve gone, and when.” I didn’t want to be worrying that she had got herself into trouble again.
“Or I could just call,” she said.
“Yes,” I agreed, but I knew she wouldn’t. Notes left to be discovered were easier. She shivered. “And don’t stint yourself on firewood. There’s plenty. And if you need anything else, I’ve left some money—”
“In the top drawer of the dresser. I know.”
Then there was nothing to do but wash the coffee mugs and climb into the truck. As before, Tammy directed me out so I didn’t end up in the ditch. The truck pointed down the track, the trailer was straight behind me, Tammy waved. I waved back, then leaned out of the window.
“Call him, Tammy.” She nodded noncommittally. I wound the window up and put the truck in gear.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I headed west on I-40 at a steady sixty-five miles an hour, through the rounded hills of Tennessee, and the town names tolled in my head—Knoxville, Crossville, Cookeville. Before I got to the country-western smugness of Nashville I began to wonder if -ville was a not-so-secret indicator of poverty and a particular lack of taste, or at least zoning control, as evidenced by billboards crowded up against the interstate like long-legged cockroaches swarming a line of molasses.
“Ah, Tennessee, it never changes,” Julia said from the passenger seat. She looked around, shook her head, faced me. “So, what’s the plan?”
I squeezed the steering wheel. “Just like that, what’s the plan?”
She tilted her head. “You sound angry.”
“Yes.” And I was, and it frightened me, because I was angry with her. “You left me. And when you come back, instead of helping me, you say I’m a borderline, not a real person inside.”
“I didn’t call you a borderline—”
“ ‘Who does he remind you of?’ you said.”
“—I asked you to ask yourself, honestly, how you used to see yourself, before you met me.”
“Before you came along and worked your magic and turned me into a real human being?” It came out sounding half angry, half desperate.
“You know better than that.”
“I don’t know what I know anymore. I’m so… Everything’s changed.”
“You’ve changed. That’s what I wanted you to realize the other night.”
“What if I want to change back?”
Her smile was sad. “Doesn’t work that way.”
She reached out as if to touch me, and for a second I thought I felt her fingers on my cheek, then realized I was crying. “It’s so hard, without you.” Help me, I wanted to say, stop this terrible ache.
“Road,” she said, and nodded at the CAUTION signs and the grooved road where the surface had been ripped off to prepare for a new layer of asphalt. Tires roared over the striations. I had to concentrate to keep the trailer in its lane.
“Why did you bring that thing, anyway?” she said.
“Cheaper than motels.”
“Since when have you worried about money?”
I just shook my head. The roadworks ended and we were now on velvety new blacktop. The wheel noise faded to a smooth hum.
“So,” she said. “Tell me what the plan is when you get to Arkansas.”
“I won’t know. Not until I see how they—the Carpenters—are treating her.” I made an effort. “As far as I know, she’s not on anyone’s radar. No one is looking for her, no one even knows she exists, except the Carpenters and whoever placed her with them. If I decide to take her out of there, no one will complain.”
“So what will you do with her, if you take her?”
I hadn’t the faintest idea.
“Would you keep her?”
“What for, target practice?” Silence. “No, I wouldn’t keep her. Not even if she was a normal, well-adjusted child—and what she’s been through has probably left her essentially broken. Broken people, as we both know, don’t mend.”
She studied me for a moment. “Pull over. There’s a rest stop ahead.”
When the engine was quiet I rolled down the window; it was cold. A hardy chickadee sang from the pines alongside the rest stop. The place smelled of freshly sawn wood. She swiveled to face me.
“Self-pity doesn’t suit you.”
“No?”
“You are not broken.”
“Normal people don’t hurt others in elevat—”
“Let me finish. You’re not broken, you’re grieving. You’re grieving because you can feel. No, your mother didn’t love you, and yes, you pretended you didn’t care, but pretending doesn’t make it true.”
“Then—”
“Don’t be dense. You were protecting yourself. You wrapped yourself in armor and pretended to be invulnerable. Growing up inside that armor twisted you a bit out of true, but it doesn’t matter. The essentials are all there.”
She searched my face.
“The armor’s getting too small, Aud. You have to choose.”
Tennessee had not exactly oozed wealth, but when I pulled off the interstate west of the river for something to eat, eastern Arkansas under the winter-pale late afternoon sun—the gas stations, the shacks with TV antennae, other vehicles on the road, even the dirt—sighed tiredly with poverty, worn and faded as though it had been through too many summers without shade, too many growing seasons without replenishment, too great a workload with no relief. Perhaps it was my mood, but I felt heavier just driving through it.
Once I was back on the interstate, the road became bland and boring. Towns like truckstops punctuated some fallow farmland and a few plowed fields. A hundred miles west of Memphis, the towns gave way to the river valley. I left I-40 twenty-five miles past Little Rock and wound west through backcountry roads, where settlement grew a little less dense and the countryside hillier, shrouded here and there with clumps of pine. For a seven-year-old fresh from the color and noise of Mexico City, it must have looked bleak.
But seven-year-olds are plastic, almost endlessly adaptable. Perhaps Luz no longer remembered much about Mexico; perhaps she no longer spoke Spanish; perhaps she was dull and content to follow her fate. Perhaps I should have stayed in North Carolina instead of driving out here in what was probably a hopeless cause.