Ann doesn’t speak or even glance at her, but turns the key in the ignition, backs up a little, and pulls around the car in front.
* * *
Jasper goes straight to his room and locks the door when they get home. Wallis didn’t expect him to sit down and watch TV or want to go for a walk in the woods, but after several days alone on the street, she thought he might want to talk. Mom stands in the kitchen, watching him go. He can lock us out, she says, but we can’t lock him in. I don’t know how we are going to live like this.
Wallis putters around the kitchen while her mother makes telephone calls to all the doctors with whom they are friendly. Put himself in harm’s way. Very difficult life. Impossible to control. Mom jots some notes and when she sets down the receiver, she looks relieved. “We have an appointment with Dr. Larson at two p.m. next Thursday,” she announces. “He is supposed to be very, very good. If it weren’t for him, Joanne’s daughter would still be getting her stomach pumped every other weekend.” She sets down her pen and pad and Wallis sees the figure $45/hour written next to his address.
“Children are such hard work, darling,” Mom says with a sigh. “When your time comes, don’t make the mistake I did and assume everything will turn out well. Plan for the worst and you won’t be disappointed.”
She opens the refrigerator and takes out a roast beef she’s been thawing; it’s sitting in a bath of its own blood. “I don’t know whether to cook this or put it on his eye. Run ask Jasper if he feels up to joining us for dinner. Perhaps tonight he’d rather eat in his room.”
Wallis leaves her mother in the kitchen and dutifully climbs the stairs to the bedrooms. While he was gone the house was tense with expectation and dread. Now he’s back and the dread remains.
“What?” he asks when she knocks on his door.
“Mom wants to know if you want dinner.”
“I’m not hungry,” he says.
“Let me in.”
“No.”
“Come on,” she insists. “Let me in.”
After a minute, the door cracks open and Wallis pushes her way inside. The bed is still made, though the bedspread is wrinkled from lying down. Wallis doesn’t know why she wanted to come in; she feels like she does at the zoo, curious and bored at the same time. She stares at Jasper, who stares back at her, and they both might as well start picking at lice and popping them into their mouths.
“What happened?” she asks. “I won’t tell anyone. I promise.”
“You heard. I got jumped, I didn’t get a good look at them.”
“Not that,” Wallis says. “Tell me why you ran away in the first place. Was it because of what happened in the barn?”
Jasper is immediately on guard. “Nothing happened in the barn,” he says. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to press charges,” she says. “You know, for what you did.”
“I should have known you’d turn it back to yourself,” he says in disgust. “Other people don’t really exist for you, do they? No matter what happens to them.”
“Dad says you’re not really in control of yourself because your parents died. Mom’s made an appointment for you with a shrink. Maybe that’ll help.”
“I won’t go.”
“She’ll make you.”
“She can’t. I’m bigger than she is.”
“Threatening a woman? What will your shrink make of that?”
“Go away, Wallis,” he says, rolling over to face the wall.
“We were worried about you, you know. You should think about other people before you run off and do something stupid. How do you think we would have felt if you ended up dead?”
“Relieved,” says Jasper.
“If you stay we’re miserable,” says Wallis, “if you go, we’re guilty. You win no matter what.”
“I win? Even if I’m dead?” he asks. “Do you ever hear yourself?”
Every time she went to the zoo as a child, she’d pelt the monkey cage with peanuts. Here’s some food! and the monkeys would wince and dodge, before cringing over and collecting it. Jasper brings his legs up to his chest and curls around himself and, thinking of those monkeys, for the first time she feels what it’s like to live behind bars. No wonder they piss on everyone who walks by.
Wallis hears heavy footsteps in the hallway and a knock on the door. Her father doesn’t wait for an answer but barges in.
“I got here as soon as I could,” he says. Eddie kneels by the bed—hey, son, hey, hey—but nothing will convince Jasper to roll over and face him. He gently places his hand on the boy’s shoulder.
“Did they hurt you?” Eddie whispers. Jasper squeezes his eyes tighter but he makes no answer. Eddie looks down at the filthy, ripped jeans, the blood in his hair.
“I’m taking you to the hospital.”
“It’s not the first time,” Jasper says to the wall. “I’m okay.”
“You’re not okay,” Eddie says, anguished.
At last Jasper rolls over and opens his swollen eyes on her father. Wallis sees something in his face she has never seen turned on herself—an honest desire to protect Eddie from the truth. He is as calm as Mom. Now is no time to get hysterical, his battered face says. What’s done is done.
“The doctors will call the cops,” Jasper says matter-of-factly. “The cops will throw me in foster care. And none of it will matter because I’ll just run away again. I don’t want another pretend family.”
“It’s not pretend, Jasper,” Eddie says. “We want you.”
Jasper holds her father’s eyes until they falter. Eddie looks so helpless—he knows Jasper needs to go, he knows he won’t. He reaches out to touch the boy’s cheek but Jasper flinches away.
“Mom wants to know if you’re coming down for dinner?” Wallis says, unable to watch any longer.
Jasper shakes his head.
“Come down,” Eddie says, straightening. Wallis has reminded him that there is a life beyond the door to this room. “I bought something for you. For you both.”
“What is it?” Wallis asks.
“Jasper, please,” Eddie says, and slowly the boy rises from the bed, following him downstairs and through the patio door to where Eddie stops before the carport.
“I was going to wait until Christmas, but then I thought you two should be enjoying these last days before school starts—”
At first all Wallis sees is the hearse in the driveway. Then, inside the shadow of the carport, she spies the matching red and blue tenspeed bikes, propped on their kickstands. Frowning, Ann steps out of the kitchen to join them.
“I want you in our family, Jasper,” Eddie says, putting his arm around Ann as if speaking for them both. “I thought you kids could use some freedom. You know, go riding together. It’s what kids should be doing.”
Wallis glances over at Jasper, the boy who has already run away, who is being given the means to keep going. But why is she being sent off with him? To guard him? To keep him company? Why does her father keep sending her and Jasper off alone together? Then the sickening answer comes to her. If it has to be one of us, he is saying with these bikes, better you than me.
Jasper is quiet, looking down at his high-tops. “You didn’t need to do that,” he says.
“Ann and I are working on my résumé,” Eddie answers bluffly. “Something else will come along. We can afford these.”
“You bought two boys’ bikes,” Wallis says.
Her dad glances at the straight crossbeams on both bicycles, different from the sloping Y of a girl’s model. He watches Wallis as she struggles to stride it.
“I can take it back,” he tells her.
“No,” Wallis answers. “It’s fine.”
“Take them for a ride, kids, before it gets dark. Just don’t go too far,” Eddie says, but his voice belongs to someone else. Beside her, Jasper climbs dutifully onto his bike. Wallis finds her balance and pushes off, with Jasper close beside her. She doesn’t look back
until she explodes a cloud of dust at the edge of the dirt road. Her mother has gone inside but her dad is still watching from their driveway, a small and shrinking figure. She waits for Jasper to catch up, he, too, knows what Eddie wants and expects, and in that moment he is beside her and past her, racing ahead, raising a cloud inside the cloud.
They ride for miles without stopping. She wouldn’t think Jasper could ride so hard, hurt as he is, but she works to keep up. He leads her on a long and winding route past the familiar fields of her childhood, the half-acre lots with their dingy ranch homes, plastic sliding boards in their front yards and busted trampolines in the back. Dogs run out to bark at them, they peddle faster. She keeps inside his cloud, coming close enough for the chips of gravel his back wheel throws up to nick her on the shin or cheek. He knows she’s there, is dropping back on purpose, then surging forward when she gets too close. She doesn’t know why she sticks by him, except that it’s easier to have the goal of catching up than to strike off on her own.
The sun has nearly set when he slows his bike. Coasting along the shoulder of the road, their long, attenuated shadows fish out into the green crust of lily pads and the beaver-gnawed pencil points of trees. Jasper was right, the conductor’s lantern was probably nothing more than gas from this swamp. Stories like that, no matter how much you’d like them to be, are never real. Cutting down a path that leads close to the water, Jasper climbs off his bike and parks it against a tree. Her legs shake as she climbs off, too, and she stumbles, coming down hard on the crossbeam of her boy’s bike. Wallis swallows a cry of pain.
To her surprise, Jasper comes around to help her up, leaning her bike against his. They are salted with gravel dust, grimed at the neck, red-faced. He didn’t seem to be winded but she can see now that he trembles like her. They leave the bikes and walk through the sedges of the swamp’s rim where the sinking sun turns a line of dozing slider turtles on a log into an amber necklace. There are snappers in these swamps, tanklike, swimming just under the surface. Sometimes she sees their wake.
A fallen tree, its upended root collar splayed like a lizard’s frill, juts into the water. Jasper steps out onto it as if it were a continuation of the land, walking until he reaches the broken branches of the end. Beneath his dangling foot a prehistoric beak opens and Wallis hears the snapping turtle’s hiss of warning. Jasper looks down at it, his hot violet eyes erupting under the cooler flame of his orange afro. He is a Bunsen burner of a boy. Maybe he really is the mad scientist’s experiment.
“It’s peaceful out here,” he says, turning back to her. “Come join me.”
Jasper has never issued her an invitation that didn’t hurt.
“You come back here to me,” Wallis says.
“I’ll take a step and you take a step and we’ll meet in the middle,” he says, taking a small step toward her to show good faith.
“I’ll come out if you answer a question,” she says, stepping onto the edge. She had expected her weight to raise him into the air like a child on a seesaw, but the wide tree is immovable in the water, waiting to rot there.
He is waiting.
“What happened in the mountains, the night the lights came on?”
Jasper takes another step and she can see he is trying to decide whether or not to tell her. “Take another step,” he says. “So I know I can trust you.”
She does and he is beside her now, with his bruised, beaten face. He leans in and for a second she thinks he plans to push her off, but instead he puts his arm around her waist and presses his swollen lips to hers, slipping his tongue inside her mouth.
He was her first and now he is her second. His hand reaches under her shirt, moves up her back, around and underneath the cup of her bra. He touches her differently this time, gently, with tenderness and desire. She can feel him hard inside the jeans he slept in on the street. He doesn’t even have another pair to change into. His hip bone presses against her and something sharp pierces her leg. It’s the coffin nail she slipped into her front pocket the night she carved their initials.
You are not kissing me, she thinks. You are kissing the man who sent you out here to kiss me. You are doing as he asked and you are punishing him as you do it, by giving him that impossible thing he wants, which is to find a way to keep you. If you can’t have him and you can’t live on the streets, I am all that is left.
“You didn’t answer my question,” she says. Jasper whispers into her mouth.
“I fucked your dad.”
Her cheeks are wet, and when she pulls away, tears are streaming down his own. Hiding his face, Jasper squats on the fallen tree.
Wallis thrusts her fists deep in her pockets. What did Eddie say about all those dead chestnuts fallen in the woods? Their wood decomposed very slowly and fed the mountain streams, keeping dozens of other smaller species alive, but the oaks that replaced them choked the water with leaves that broke down into nothing. Wallis has learned a great deal since the night at the railroad tracks and the childish days spent wearing her grandmother’s clothes as if they would impart magic. She read the walls of Cora’s kitchen, she has seen the hostages on TV. History does not repeat itself directly, she understands. Real witchcraft doesn’t follow a script. It’s not something handed down like a recipe or a blood type but discovered and created anew in every generation. Someone else’s curse, like the story of someone else’s love affair, is meaningless and hollow. Only our own love has the power to damage.
Backlit by the sinking sun, the strands of Jasper’s hair stand out like broken blood vessels in a crazed eyeball. Clouds slant, Venus is bright on the horizon. Wallis steps off the log onto soil so heavy with water it can’t be called earth anymore. She feels it opening up beneath her feet and knows she could sink forever.
She steps to the tree where they parked their bikes, a swamp oak, nothing so rare as a chestnut. None of her spells are premeditated. They come as they come. She fishes out the coffin nail and carves a deep rough oval in the tree’s bark. Two round eyes. A gash of mouth. A drop of amber sap wells up like spittle at the corner. Did she see this face across the divide at Panther Gap or did she create it, now, scoring the skin of the living tree? Jasper looks up, recognizing his own primitive features. She gives him a moment to take it in, thinking of the initials she’d carved into that lid, weeks before. W + J. Stupid, baby magic. Letters and hearts. She feels the humiliation of that little-girl desire, not to be able to think beyond a kiss.
“You were right,” she says. “If you were dead, we’d all be so relieved.”
She reaches down for a stone and with one sharp blow, hammers the nail directly between his eyes. Just below the surface at Jasper’s feet, the turtle snaps its jaws. On the next log, awakened, the amber necklace slides away.
Wallis
NEW YORK CITY
5:00 a.m.
“You didn’t kill him,” Jeff says, leaning up on his elbow. “It was a picture. Some words.”
“I was a selfish, vindictive kid and I drove him to it,” Wallis argues. “Now I write the news—more pictures and words. They have so much power, Jeff.”
Lying in his arms, Wallis sees he finally understands why she is here.
“You don’t want to be comforted, do you?” he asks, sadly. “You’d rather be guilty. You know they made up the idea of original sin not to punish but to console us. When all the incomprehensible shit goes down, we can blame ourselves, it was something we did or didn’t do. Without guilt, we are irrelevant. And that is so much worse.”
“Who is They? Who is this mysterious They that makes up original sin?” Wallis asks. “I’m starting to believe what we call God is just enough people buying into an idea to form a force big enough to create the resistance to itself that can be called the Devil.”
“This is why life evolved sex. So for a few minutes we can be separate and inside each other at the same time and forget about everything in between.”
“Don’t take my guilt away,” she says, trying to smile. “It’s all I have
.”
“I know what you’re doing,” he says, stroking her still-damp hair. “You’re turning me into your confessor, the man you fucked for absolution on the anniversary of that boy’s death. I can’t give it to you. We had a lovely night together but my girlfriend is coming home this week and you are married. I stand behind the camera and I watch you, Wallis. You’re a star, just like your dad. All the wars, trials, suspected biological attacks. The hunt for WMDs. You have a gift for keeping it going, hour after hour of nonnews, finding some new angle to keep us up all night, riding that rush. It’s all just running and distraction from the one breaking story none of us can bear to face. If you don’t want to be scared, stop telling ghost stories.”
This stranger’s face is so close to hers, more familiar than her own husband’s. He has spent all night listening, but now his eyes are weary and closing and she knows she has worn him out. Wallis reaches over the edge of the bed for her skirt, pulls on her panties, and snaps her bra. She buttons her shirt and pulls on her pink tweed jacket.
“Thank you for having me,” she says to Jeff.
“I’ll walk you to the train.”
He tugs on his own clothes, grabs an umbrella, and together they head out into the rain. Eddie loved to tell her how a young girl, just like her, had written a ghost story once, as part of a contest. All the men were much more celebrated writers, but hers was the story everyone remembers, the tale of a bad parent who created a monster he couldn’t control that took its revenge by destroying everyone its parent loved. All Wallis ever wanted was the chance to tell the story. But to whom? Jeff? The insomniacs on the other side of the camera?
Mom and I watched your last show, Dad, from the living room at home, the length of the sofa between us. A week had passed since you sent Jasper and me off on our bikes. When I came home alone I told you Jasper had pulled ahead of me, that I lost track of him. I thought I should come back before it was too late, just like you’d told us. You pretended to believe me and I went to bed while you and Mom waited up. Gone again, I heard her say. Maybe it’s a blessing. Sometime the next day you called the police, and Friday night they came to the door after midnight to tell us his body had been found in the swamp, his stomach full of sleeping pills. Oh, God, gasped Mom. Mine. Terrible shame you have to be mixed up in this, Eddie, they said. We know you tried to help, there’s just no getting through to some kids.