Call Me Home by Megan Kruse

Author:Megan Kruse [Kruse, Megan; Gilbert, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780990437031
Publisher: Hawthorne Books

Lydia

Fannin, Texas, 2010

ON HACKBERRY STREET, AT THE BACK OF THE WOODEN house she grew up in, my mother and I shared a yellow bedroom. “Maybe we’ll get our own place,” she said, “when things settle down.” She smoothed the pink roses on the bedspread with the palm of her hand, back and forth. “For now, we just need to get used to our new lives.”

Our new lives. The yellow bedroom, the Purple Heart on the wall, the floor that drove a splinter into my heel. A window with dotted curtains, and through it the bare yard. There were twenty-three steps between the front porch and street. I sat on the porch in the dry air. I watched the sun sink into the scrub grass. The day slipped by, and then another after it.

“Don’t you love this blue sky?” my mother asked. “Don’t you love the sun, the river, this blue?” She kept asking, but it didn’t matter. I was busy remembering, making a list in my mind of the things I didn’t want to forget. The things I did want to forget, but knew I needed to remember, though I couldn’t say exactly why.

In Washington, I told myself, we lived on Firetrail Hill. It was a mile to the mailbox and a half-hour’s drive to town. It was a mess of gravel potholes and pasture grown over. The trees were sewn to the sky.

In Washington, the house was a double-wide mobile with off-white siding that arrived in halves on the bed of a truck, when my mother was just eighteen and still believed that my father was a good man. It was set on the edge of a slope and below was the creek, and the old rowboat, and every fort I ever built. I remember that I sometimes thought of following that creek off our land, to the ocean, to a lake or the sea, and how if I went missing police dogs would drag their noses along the creek bed; the lit windows of the house would glow like searchlights.

And the small things, too, I listed: The stacks of firewood swaying in the woodshed. The pits dropping from the cherry tree, and how they split with frost. The hiss of spit on the woodstove, the way the window glass shattered around my mother before we left for the Starlight Motel, my father’s boot on her back. The way, when my father yelled, no one but us and the sinking ground could hear.

Even as I hung my clothes in my new closet, even as my grandmother said, “You’re home now,” even as my mother and I walked to town and stood at the front desk of the Fannin Junior High and my mother signed the papers with my new name, I was thinking of Washington.

And if they forget, I thought – if my mother slips out of that old life so completely that I am the only thing she recognizes from it, if Jackson lives as though he never knew us at all – it doesn’t matter.

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