26. Beau #2
“My mother left when I was nine. Walked out of the kitchen on a Tuesday afternoon. I was on the floor with a coloring book. I remember the color. I was using the burnt orange, the ugly one nobody picks, and she said she was running to the store and she took her good coat with her and she didn’t come back. ”
My jaw sets. I let it. I don’t say anything, because everything I’ve got to say in this second is about me. How it lands in my chest, what I’d want to do about it. None of that is what she needs from the passenger seat.
“She’s in Arizona somewhere now. I don’t know where. She sends a card most Christmases. Signs it ‘Diane’.” A pause. “Not Mom. Diane. Like we met once at a thing and exchanged numbers.”
“The one in October,” I say, careful, because there was a card in October, she’d had it in her coat pocket for a week and never opened it where I could see. “That was her.”
“Came to the wrong mailbox, even. Took the building three days to find me.” Sloane’s hands are folded in her lap, dead still.
That’s the part that gets me. She’s laying out the worst of her life in the same voice she’d use to read me a parking sign.
“Said ‘thinking of you, sweet girl’. First time she’s put the word girl near my name in about a decade.
I keep meaning to throw it out. I haven’t. ”
I want to do something. That’s the honest part.
There’s a list building in the back of my head.
The town, the man, the things I’d say, the things I’d do.
It’s not a good list and it’s not a useful one, so I set it down.
What she needs is the truck between the lines and my mouth shut and room to get to the end.
So that’s the job. It’s the hardest easy thing I’ve ever done.
“My father stayed,” she says. “Which sounds like the better outcome.”
She lets it sit.
“It wasn’t. He drinks. Has my whole life.
He’s a mean drunk and a worse sober one, because sober he remembers to aim.
” She says it plainly, to the glass. “After Danny got out, it was just me in that house with him. So I got very good at reading a room before I stepped into it. What kind of night it was. Where the edges were. Turns out that’s a marketable skill.
They call it acting now. They gave me a scholarship for it. ”
I press my thumb into the heel of my palm, hard, on the wheel, where she can’t see.
There’s a kid version of me that wants to put a fist through the door panel, and a captain version that knows the play here is to hold the line and not make her manage my face on top of everything else.
I hold the line. I keep us at seventy. I keep my voice exactly where she left hers.
And somewhere in there it clicks, a moment late, the way it always clicks for me.
What I watched happen in my mother’s kitchen.
The way she went still when my dad offered her the lake like it was nothing.
I thought it was nerves. It wasn’t nerves.
It was a person who learned at nine that the floor isn’t attached to anything, getting handed a key to a house, and not having anywhere in her body to put it.
I don’t say that. I just file it where the rest of her is now, the parts I’m allowed to keep.
“Who’s Danny?” I ask, keeping my voice level.
For the first time her voice changes. Not a crack. A loosening.
“My brother. Half, technically. Same dad, different moms — his came before mine, he’s eight years older.
” She turns her head a little, toward me, then back to the window.
“He enlisted the week he turned eighteen, which was the week he graduated, which tells you everything about how bad he wanted gone. He’s Army. Stationed in Germany now.”
“He get out clean?”
“As clean as you get.” A pause. “He calls me every Wednesday. Five-thirty my time. Eleven-thirty his — middle of his night — and he calls anyway. Has since I was ten. He started it the year after Mom left, because somebody had to, and it was never going to be the adults.” She breathes.
“He’s the one person from back there I kept.
Everybody else I put down and walked off and didn’t look at again. Danny I kept.”
“What’s he like?”
Present tense. I do it on purpose. Most people would’ve asked what he was like, like the good stuff’s already behind her, like she’s the last of her own people. He’s hers and he’s still here, so I ask what he’s like.
She looks at me. A full second this time, not a glance. Then back to the window.
“He’d like you,” she says. “That’s the highest thing I’ve got, and I don’t hand it out, so. He’d like you. He’d give you a hard time about the truck and then he’d want one.”
“I’d let him drive it.”
“I know you would.” Quiet. “That’s the problem with you.”
I let that one go by. I think I know what she means and I’m not going to poke it and make her take it back.
“I changed my name at eighteen,” she says.
“To Beckett.”
“To Beckett.” A breath. “Picked it myself. Off a spine. Samuel Beckett — I was eighteen and dramatic and I’d just done Endgame, and I thought, there’s a man who knew nothing was coming to save you and wrote it down funny.
” Something almost like a smile, at the window.
“Sloane Beckett doesn’t exist in any system back there.
No school record. No church roll. Nothing my father can phone up and ask after when he’s three drinks in and feeling sentimental.
Nothing my mother could look up if she ever got curious between cards.
I built a person they can’t find. Then I went and got into Whitmore as her.
So.” She shrugs, one shoulder. “Working as designed.”
And there it is. The whole thing. She built a self out of nothing, named it off a bookshelf, and made it un-findable, and she’s spent two years walking around campus inside it, past her roommates, past me, where nobody knew there was a kid on a kitchen floor underneath, holding the ugly orange crayon, learning to read a room before she walked into it.
I drive for a minute. I don’t fill it.
“I like your name,” I say.
It’s not the right size for what she handed me.
I know that. But it’s true, and it’s mine to say, and I’ve worked out by now that the big response is for the person giving it, not the person getting it.
Sloane doesn’t want big. Big would make her sorry she said anything.
So I give her the small true one and let it be small.
“I like it too,” she says, to the glass. “Took me a while. But I do.”
“For the record,” I keep my eyes on the road, “you didn’t tell me any of that to get a reaction out of me, and I’m not going to give you one you have to do something with. But I heard all of it. And it doesn’t move anything. In case some part of you was running the math on whether it would.”
Quiet. Then: “I wasn’t.”
“Okay.”
“I was a little.”
“I know,” I say. “It didn’t.”
When she’s all the way done — when the quiet’s gone soft instead of sharp — I take my right hand off the wheel and put it palm-up on the console between us. I don’t reach for hers. I just leave it there. An offer, not a grab.
She looks at it. Then she fits her hand into mine, and I close mine around it, and I put my eyes back on the road, and we don’t talk for a long time, and it’s the good kind of not talking.
Track eleven, somewhere in there. The one Britta made for the fog.
I’m going to have to tell my sister she was right, which I will never do.
We hit the Haven line a little after seven, with the dark come all the way down. The arena’s lit off the highway, the practice lights, white over the trees, and I get the dumb happy pull I always get coming back to it.
I run the weekend back one more time. My mother and the Tupperware.
My dad holding the shake a second long. The twins deciding she was theirs before lunch.
Sloane with her boots on my dash, telling the window the worst of it because she’d decided, finally, after two years of deciding the opposite about everyone, that I was safe to do it in front of.
She gave me the whole key. Nobody else has the whole key. I’m holding it right now, with her hand still in mine on the console.
She’s quiet next to me, watching Haven come up out of the dark, and I figure it’s the good quiet.
The emptied-out kind you get after you finally set a heavy thing down where someone can help you carry it.
I pull onto our street. Every light in the Raven House is on, because nobody in that house has turned off a light in the history of the house.
I cut the engine. The place glows. Sloane sits a second before she reaches for the door, and she turns and looks at me, and there’s something in her face I decide is just tired from the drive.
I lean over and kiss her forehead.
“That was the hard part,” I tell her. “We already drove through it. Whatever’s left, we did the worst of it back there on the Pike.”
I believe it all the way down. I’m happy in the flat, total, stupid way you only get to be a handful of times in a life, before you learn better.
I don’t know it’s the last easy thought I get for a while.