Catherine J.S. Lee
Cross-Country
The three of them are silent as the green Cherokee speeds south through the murky June twilight. Gobbling up mile after mile after mile of Interstate. Putting as much distance as possible between them and what they left back there in Maine. They've hardly talked at all since they grabbed their gear and ran, fleeing something that should be only a bad memory by now. But it isn't. It's still as vivid and present as when it happened.
Emily Hutchence imagines her hands will have to be pried from the steering wheel when this trip is over. For about the hundredth time, she thinks about throwing out the wide wedding band that cuts into her finger as she grips the wheel, but that would be foolish, wasteful. She can always sell the ring if their money runs out, the money she stole without remorse from Murray's secret poker stash. His not-so-secret poker stash, as it turns out.
In the front passenger seat, Emily's step-daughter Jalacy shuffles to another song on her iPod. Her long, thin fingers with their black-lacquered nails keep the beat, drumming soundlessly against her thighs. Her brother, Damon, sits in the back. In the rearview mirror, Emily can see his eyes are closed, his head moving in time as he plays air guitar to his own music.
"We're fugitives now," she whispers, though even if she spoke aloud neither would hear her above the cacophony of their music. "Fugitives. Homeless people. Refugees."
Leaving Murray should have been a simple matter, the ends tied up nice and neat by lawyers. Instead, they're on the run, leaving Moose Island, Maine, like thieves in the night. Running down the east coast before turning west with only one goal in mind, Arizona. The carved landscape Emily never expected to see, not like this anyway, especially not like this. She's never been out of New England, except to neighboring New Brunswick, Canada. This trip might as well be to the beautiful rings of Saturn, so distant and inaccessible Arizona seems.
They were in Boston before she stopped panicking at every set of headlights looming in the rearview mirror. Still, the questions pound inside her skull: Can the money last? And the SUV? And her determination? Yes, that's the real question. Does she have enough will?
Twenty-four hours gone, and already she's missing home. The black sheen of her grandmother's antique woodstove, four generations of family photos framed on the piano, the smell of the sea. She tries to focus on the road, but her mind jerks like a hooked fish. The couple of hours she spent dozing in a rest area off I-95 somewhere in southwestern Connecticut might as well have been five minutes. The adrenaline that propelled her out of her house, her town -- her life -- has faded faster than she could have imagined.
They're passing through Richmond, Virginia, when Damon taps her on the shoulder and points. She slows just enough to read the signs. "I-64 East." And then, "Virginia Beach. The Largest Resort Area in the World."
She changes lanes, takes the ramp. Surely no one but God Himself could find them in The Largest Resort Area in the World.
Emily dismisses the beach, its strip of glassy luxury towers beyond the means of her careful purse. It's stolen money, but it won't be spent frivolously. Some would say they had no right to it, but maybe they do. Maybe it's only fair that Murray pay hard cash for what he's done. There's no other way for him to fix it.
A couple of blocks back from Atlantic Avenue, they find a small, turquoise-shuttered motel with a vacancy sign. We can make do with one room, she says, and the kids nod. She asks the desk clerk how much extra a roll-away will cost, but Jalacy says, No, I can sleep with you. Let's save our money.
The air in the room is stale, so Damon cranks open the casement window. The two double beds have cast-iron mattresses and thin, sad pillows, but Emily doesn't care. Right now, a bed's a bed, and the assembly-line art, the aqua-green water stains in the lavatory, the threadbare rug, none of it matters.
"We passed an all-night deli," Jalacy says. "I'll go get sandwiches."
They haven't eaten since a Taco Bell in New Jersey, hours and hours ago. Emily reaches for her purse, then draws her hand back, clenches and unclenches her fist in indecision. Is it safe? It's a double question. Has Murray somehow followed them after all? Will Jalacy come back, or will she fall in with a horde of street kids and stay out the rest of the night? "Take Damon with you," Emily says.
Jalacy smiles, but the smile goes down at one corner. "Emily, I'm not going to run off. And my father couldn't possibly be here. Stop worrying. I bet he's actually glad we're gone." Her grey eyes slide left, seem to study a water splotch on the floor under the window air conditioner, then look back at Emily. "You know no one could ever want to see him less than I do."
Emily nods her head and shivers, counts out a few bills.
She decided at the beginning of this journey to be organized, to be cool and logical. It's damned difficult, though, this deciding what's best, what will help them reach Arizona with a minimum of fuss and expense. In her whole life, she's hardly ever had to make important, deliberate decisions. Only two: to marry Murray; to leave him.
It had been April, two months before, when Emily decided to go for the divorce. She had married late, at thirty-five, and marriage hadn't been what she'd expected, partners linked by common goals and interests. Murray worked at the paper mill, forty-five minutes away, then came home and drank beer and watched sports on TV, a cliché if ever there was one. Emily would tell herself, At least he comes home, he doesn't go out carousing and chasing women. I guess I can't expect roses, walks on the beach at sunset, dancing in the moonlight. I guess that's storybook stuff.
Then he turned forty, and she saw right away that aging gracefully was not an option for him. He bought a weight-lifting machine, and spent hours in the cellar working out. He began studying his hairline in the bathroom mirror, looking for any evidence of recession or sign of grey.
Her appearance, too, became an issue. Don't knot your hair up like that, it makes you look older. Do you have to wear that dress, you look like someone's granny. I don't want people to think I'm old because you've gotten yourself up like a middle-aged woman.
I'm thirty-eight, she told him. I'm thirty-eight, and you're forty, and that is middle-aged, even if we're planning to live to ninety.
Six months later, the number three paper machine was shut down, and Murray was among the papermakers thrown out of work. She supposed she couldn't blame him for being depressed when he went from union scale wages to what he could earn pumping gas at a friend's garage. The exercise machine sat unused, the vitamins were left untaken. Murray opted out, barely glancing at her when he asked what was for dinner or had she seen his car keys. Such questions were almost his only conversation now. He never asked how her day was, never turned towards her in the night. His silence was the slow-moving glacier grinding across their days, but she knew that inside it was pent-up rage, a slumbering volcano.
A divorce wouldn't be so bad, she told herself, and then one day she made an appointment with a lawyer. She didn't tell Murray.
She came home from the appointment to find him sitting at the kitchen table, drinking Canadian Club and holding a sheet of stationery covered with curliqued handwriting. She recognized it immediately, that script. It belonged to Starr, his ex-wife, a painter, potter, free spirit. They were a complete mismatch, yes, but Starr was still his one true love, and always would be. Emily was sure of that because he'd told her so, many times. His one true love, who'd left him for a photographer twelve years younger than she, a guy barely into his twenties. Murray had never gotten over that, and Emily knew he never would.
He balled up the letter and dropped it on the table. "Kids're coming." His half-closed dark eyes gave no clues whether this was good news or bad.
"For spring vacation, you mean?"
"No. Starr's going to some kind of Hindu retreat. She's putting them on a plane Saturday."
Emily had met Murray's children only once, at her wedding four years earlier. Jalacy had been twelve then, a small slender girl with serious grey eyes and ash-blonde hair springing back from a perfect widow's peak. Damon had been ten, rail-thin and lanky, so quiet he barely made a ripple.
Now, Emily decided, the divorce would have to be put on hold. Not for good, just for the few weeks or months they had the kids. She'd finally married less for the love of Murray than for the desire for children, desire unfulfilled. These two could be her son and daughter for a little while. It was probably as close as she'd ever get to kids of her own.
On a sunny April afternoon, two strangers got off the United flight from Chicago. Jalacy's solemn eyes were rimmed with kohl, her thick chunky hair dyed an attention-grabbing shocking pink. In a black leather motorcycle jacket, denim mini, and four-inch heels, she had more than enough streetwise swagger for the whole state of Maine.
Emily recognized Damon only because he followed his sister. He was tall for fifteen, taller than Murray, his straight sandy hair touching his shoulders. His face was like Jalacy's -- like their mother's in photos Emily had seen -- but harder, leaner, nose jutting narrowly, chin sharply angular. He looked astonished and bereft, like someone pulled into the lifeboat just at the moment he was sure he was going to drown.
Here were her children, then, her instant family. Not the bright beautiful babies of her imaginings, not the class valedictorian, not the Eagle Scout. She felt a slight chill at the thought of their arrival on Moose Island. What would they ever find to do in a small town?
Three more days on the road bring them to Clarksdale, Mississippi. The Birthplace of the Delta Blues. It's a side-trip planned for Damon by his sister. In Virginia Beach, Jalacy began plotting their route. Decisive and streetwise, she doesn't lose confidence or second-guess herself. Emily, the only one with a license, concentrates on the forward progression, taking the turns and exits Jalacy tells her to, secure in the belief that her well-traveled stepdaughter knows the way. The pace is less frantic now that there's little chance of Murray finding them.
In Clarksdale, Emily sells the wide wedding band, not because they need the money, because they don't, yet. Here, though, they enter transition, turning from going south to going west, and that makes it time for other changes. When she sees the sign saying, "Gold Bought," it simply feels like time to sell the symbol of a life that's over now.
She comes out of the shop, finds Damon staring into the window at a rack of used electric guitars. She touches his arm lightly, immediately draws her hand away. "Someday."
He shrugs. "I know."
Maybe if there's enough left in their cash stash when they reach Arizona. A good-bye gift before she heads back to Maine. But what about Jalacy's loss, a loss that no amount of money or goods can ever repay? What about that?
Jalacy reclines in the backseat while they head west towards Arkansas under a wide white sky. Damon slouches beside Emily, stares at something beyond the horizon that she can't see at all. "Do you think you'll like Arizona?" she asks.
"Sedona?" he says after a while, when she's given up all hope of a response. "It don't matter where we go. Don't ever get a choice." He stretches a pale, sinewy arm out the side window. "You know what Ma did to Jalacy."
Emily knows. She thinks of the drawings on the walls of Jalacy's room, pen-and-ink with a watercolor wash, edgy architectural cityscapes and tortured portraits. She remembers Jalacy, slashing a pair of faded jeans into punk high style with an old-fashioned, bone-handled straight razor, saying, "Emily, it was two months. Just nine weeks more. If we'd stayed in Chicago, I would've won the Art League prize. A fat scholarship. But no. I didn't matter. Mother wouldn't wait."
Emily had learned within a week that her new children were self-contained, self-sufficient. It wasn't that they shut her out rudely, or ignored her, nothing like that. They just never talked about how they felt, and when she asked if things were okay, they'd say, Sure, fine. Still, thinking about how she'd feel if she were the one moved around the country without any stability at all, she believed that there had to be wild emotions bubbling beneath the placid surfaces of their lives here on the rural coast of Maine.
When Murray ordered Jalacy to take the part-time waitressing job at his brother's diner, the Drop Anchor, she went to work without complaint, but started teasing her pink hair a little more wildly and wore ripped black hose with the denim skirt and red shirt that was the diner's uniform. In her room sat a gallon mayonnaise jar painted with Maine lighthouses she copied from an old calendar, the word "Tips" lettered in the beam of the tallest lighthouse. The way the money in the jar accumulated, she was doing well despite her outlandish appearance.
Jalacy practiced none of what Emily thought of as normal teenage pastimes. There were no long phone calls or computer chats, no dates, no asking for driving lessons. Friendless, Jalacy drew and painted. She wrote letters, not e-mail, and Emily wondered if that was because letters were more private, harder to pry into than computer files. Letters came for her from Chicago, and from Austin, Texas, but never from Arizona, never from her mother.
With Damon, there were battles over cutting school, battles in which Murray became breathtakingly inventive with invective, and Damon grew so pale and quiet it seemed as though he might just fade into invisibility. He spent his time in his room, which was hung with posters of guitarists Emily didn't recognize. Damon's beat-up old Telecaster, a gift from one of his mother's lovers, was his constant companion. Emily imagined sometimes that it spoke for both of them.
"I used to play guitar," she told him one afternoon. "Acoustic. Folky stuff."
He didn't say anything, only nodded, but after that he'd ask her in to hear the new tunes he was working on. One evening, she was sitting on the windowsill listening to him struggle with a difficult riff when Murray burst into the room. "I have a monster headache, and I'm damn sick of listening to that squawk all weekend long. You smarten up, or your ass is out of here."
Damon hunched closer to the black guitar and went on picking. Blood rose in Murray's stubbly face, the once-handsome features now blurred and coarsened by his daily drinking. One workbooted foot swung forward and crashed into the grille of the portable amp. Electronic feedback became crackling static became silence.
Color rose in Damon's pale cheeks as he muttered, "Bastard."
Murray turned, fists clenched. "What did you say, boy?"
Damon dropped the guitar on the bed and sprang at his father. Murray pushed him away with one muscular forearm. With his other hand, he grabbed the guitar by its slender neck and brought it down against the cabinet of the ruined amp. The sound of splintering wood filled the air as the neck snapped where it joined the body, the faint moan of strings like a creature in pain.
Damon tore the guitar from his father's hands. Emily couldn't believe he had such strength in him. His chest rose and fell unevenly as he gulped down ragged breaths, the guitar held behind him as though to protect it.
Murray made a move as though he was going to try to grab it, but didn't. "You're out of luck now, you son of a bitch. Now I don't ever have to listen to that noise again. You should've quit when I told you to, this might not have happened." He grabbed Emily by the elbow, pulled her from the room. "He made me do it. It was his fault." His fingers tightened on her arm. "You saw how he made me do it."
"You're hurting me," she said, wiggling her elbow until his grip loosened. You're hurting us all, she thought, including yourself. Don't you care, or don't you even know?
A golden afternoon two days later finds them in Austin, Texas. Emily is beginning to feel hopeful. Arizona is within reach now. Soon this trip will end, soon she'll be on her way back to Maine. She's thinking she'll probably sell the SUV and fly home, back to cool breezes and the salt smell of the sea. Back to her parents' home, she supposes, until the divorce comes through and Murray leaves and she can have her grandmother's house to herself again, the picket fence, the overgrown lilacs in the back yard. She's thinking about planting sweet peas when she hears Jalacy say, "Take the next exit."
Emily changes lanes automatically. It's become a habit, taking Jalacy's directions. Then the words sink in. There's no reason to exit in the middle of a city, but she's headed for the off-ramp now, and there's nothing else she can do. "Where are we going?"
"It's a surprise."
"Howard's," Damon murmurs, but Jalacy doesn't answer.
They make so many turns Emily is certain they'll never find their way back to the Interstate.
"Pull in here," Jalacy says, and Emily parks before an aging brick townhouse. "Wait," she says, and then she's up the front stairs and gone.
"You going to tell me about this?" Emily asks Damon.
Damon gets out of the SUV, stands on the wide sidewalk, so Emily does, too. "We lived here once. Ma was with this professor at the University. Another artist." He shakes his head. "It was good here. Just about the best."
Jalacy returns with a small, stocky man in a paint-smeared t-shirt. A tall woman with a silver-frosted brunette bob follows. "Emily," Jalacy says. "Jill. Howard."
"Hello." Emily's afraid she knows where this is going. She's seen the envelopes with Jill Hanover's Austin address on them, the address that must be where they're standing now.
Jalacy opens the tailgate. Howard lifts her backpack and her carpetbag, and Jill picks up the two big black portfolios. "Thank you for bringing her," Howard says to Emily. "Thank you for taking care of these kids." He and Jill carry Jalacy's belongings up the stairs into the house.
"I know you hate goodbyes, little brother." Jalacy gives Damon a quick hug. "Write me. You know Mother won't. See you on TV, when we're famous."
Damon mumbles something, plants a quick kiss on her cheek, then turns away.
"Well," Emily says.
"Well," Jalacy echoes. She touches Emily's shoulder. "You've been awful good to us. Thanks. I...I like you a lot."
"You'll be okay here?"
Jalacy nods. "Mother used to live with Howie. He's a good guy. Never touched me once. And Jill, Jill's great. I'm glad he found someone nice after Mother dumped him."
"What will you do?"
"Go to University. Howie's in the art department. Jill, too. I've actually already been accepted."
"Good luck." What else is there to say to this girl who has already survived more chaos than Emily ever expects to face? They hug each other, hard.
"Here." Jalacy pulls a much-folded sheet of paper from a back pocket of her razor-slashed jeans. "This map'll take you back to I-35. The other side's the directions to Sedona. You look after Damon, okay?"
"I will. Count on it." Emily studies the pen-and-ink map. The ink's dry -- Jalacy planned ahead. Chugging along the map route is a tiny Cherokee with three outsized likenesses, Emily's, Damon's, and Jalacy's, leaning through the windows and waving. And laughing. They are all laughing.
The last evening on Moose Island, Emily realized she'd forgotten the proof for the poster for the Friends of the Library's June Fair and Tea. She could have turned it in the next day, but, proud of the drawings Jalacy had done, she walked the couple of blocks back home to get it.
She was going up the walk when she was assailed by a nebulous feeling that something wasn't right. Through the open window, she could hear the TV tuned to a Red Sox game, and that was as she expected. What she wasn't expecting was to find the front door locked. She went around back, where Damon was listlessly shooting hoops by the garage.
"Why's the door locked?" she asked, but he said he didn't know it was.
She went in the back. The kitchen and living room were empty, and so was the downstairs bathroom, and that was not right. Murray spent every evening moving among those three rooms. She tiptoed up the stairs and headed towards their bedroom, thinking, He's having an affair. There is some other woman in my bed right now. But their bedroom, too, was empty.
She pushed open the half-closed door to Jalacy's room and stopped, one foot on the threshold, one hand still on the door, trying to grasp the welter of images she was seeing. Murray, fumbling for a handkerchief as dark blood dripped from a gash that ran down the left side of his face from cheekbone to jaw. Jalacy, holding the old-fashioned straight razor out in front of her. Her red satin camisole ripped open, held with her other hand. His jeans undone.
"You'll pay for this," he was saying, looking at his daughter, unaware of Emily standing by the door. Blood ran down his chin, down his neck, staining his white tee-shirt. He mopped at his cheek. "Give me that razor, give it to me now."
Jalacy stood motionless, taut, her knuckles white as she grasped the bone handle. "I'll give it to you, all right. I'll fucking cut it off. This is the last time."
"Oh! How could you?" Emily's voice sliced loud and sudden into the room. Murray and Jalacy turned towards her like a pair of sleepwalkers.
Murray's dark face seemed to collapse in on itself. He shook his head, as though to clear it. Blood flew, spattering star-shaped on Jalacy's face and shoulders. "It's her fault. She made me do it. Always parading around here in short skirts and skimpy little tops. It's more than anyone could stand. She made me do it, I tell you. She did this." He held out the bloody handkerchief, like Exhibit A, but Emily didn't look at it. "She knew what she was doing. You bet she did."
Jalacy's lips trembled, but her angular jaw was as firm and determined as ever. Still holding the torn camisole tight across her chest with one hand, with the other she closed the razor against her leg. "You're a perv and a liar," she said. Big kohl-tinted teardrops rolled down her cheeks and dripped off her chin like a slow rain.
And so they had become fugitives. Murray had driven himself to the emergency room to get sewn up, and while he was gone, Emily and Jalacy and Damon loaded her SUV and fled. It seemed the simplest way. Moose Island was so small, everyone knew each other's business as if it were a headline in the local paper. Part of island life, everything out of the ordinary becoming fodder for rumor and innuendo.
If she had known how much she would miss her home, though, how much she would long for the red sun rising over Quoddy Bay, the spangled sunsets behind the ancient elms, the fire in her grandmother's woodstove on chilly mornings, the lupine a white-and-purple carpet unfurling across Kelly's field -- if she had known that, would she have come all this way? Would she have gone to the police? Would she have made another choice, unrecognizable now that this path had been set?
Two more days bring Emily and Damon to Phoenix, where they take route seventeen north to Sedona. Since the departure of his sister, Damon has barely spoken. Silence rains down upon them like the Clarksdale blues. He's resurrected the broken guitar from its case in the trunk, and sits holding it in his lap, sharing its muteness.
At the turnoff to the ashram, Emily pulls the car to the side of the drive and sits for a moment, pondering. This is it, then. Damon reunited with his mother, the cash stash from Murray's gun cabinet grown slender as a thread, Emily alone so far from home.
Home. Right now, she feels as though she doesn't have one, despite the fact that her grandmother's house was in her name before she ever met Murray, despite the fact that they just never got around to having the deed transferred. Lucky procrastination, that, but still she feels without refuge, almost a continent away from all she knows. Is this drifting, empty feeling what Damon and Jalacy felt, strangers in Maine on a spring afternoon?
The ashram is gated, but a slender, white-robed man greets Emily and Damon through the filigreed gates. When he hears Starr's name, he lays his hands together below his chin and regretfully shakes his head. Starr Hutchence left the ashram three weeks before with a young sculptor from Wyoming. There is no forwarding address.
Back in the car, Emily lays her hands on the steering wheel and studies them. The wide white stripe where her wedding band had been has begun to tan over. The past is fading. She glances at Damon, slouched in the passenger seat staring out the windshield. Jalacy's words come back to her. You look after Damon, okay? Wise Jalacy. She'd guessed -- known -- all along.
Damon cradles the fractured guitar. His face is tight, cheeks concave beneath the high, narrow cheekbones. Emily is certain he wants to cry, but she knows he won't, even when he's alone. He continues to stare through the bug-smeared windshield.
"Out there's California, right?" she says.
It takes him a few moments to answer. "Yeah. California."
"How far to Los Angeles?"
"Dunno. Three, four hundred miles maybe. Not so far, for how far we've come."
"I've never seen the Pacific," she says.
He nods. "It's worth seeing." She senses he wants to say more, but he doesn't. She's never known him to ask for anything. Between them, silence blooms like a desert rose. She drives west, no destination, knowing that being on the move has become her only comfort.
Time unspools with the passing miles. The sun starts to dip behind distant California mountains. Damon turns in his seat and lays the guitar in the back. "Once you see the Pacific," he says, glancing at her shyly from the corners of his eyes, "what then?"
"I don't know. I just don't know. I want to go home, but..." But what? But there's a huge bad memory in her grandmother's house now, one that maybe no amount of scrubbing will ever wash clean? But it's easier to keep running than to get things finished up with Murray? "What do you want to do?"
"I'd want to go home, too. If I had a home."
"You'll always have a home with me." She's surprised to hear herself, thought given voice. "I mean it," she says when he turns to her with that surprised, lost look he'd had the day he got off the plane from Chicago, two months and several centuries ago. "You and Jalacy," she says, feeling braver, now that she sees he's not going to laugh at her or turn away, "you'll always have a home with me, no matter what."
"That's pretty amazing. That you would do that. It's cool, it's good."
She takes a deep breath. "I think we should put our feet in the Pacific, then sell the SUV, buy you another guitar, and fly home to Maine."
He nods. "Works for me."
My children, she thinks. Not the class valedictorian, not the Eagle Scout, but none of those old dreams matter any more. My children, she whispers, not daring to say it aloud just yet. It's too new, too fragile. Too close to the heart.
©2008 by Catherine J.S. Lee
