In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [70]
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It is here, in memory, that I shiver with shame: meeting Patti at the track after school, where we shared a cigarette, leaned against the blue mats piled for the high-jumpers’ safe landing; the two of us alone where the ground dropped and flattened, forming a deep earthen bowl, alone because the wind blew cold and the sky threatened rain. Not this, but the sudden call of my name across the oval field.
I looked up to see my mother against the cloud-darkened horizon, her silhouette even darker, the tails of her coat flapping out like useless wings.
“Kim, please. Come home.” Her voice echoed off the bleachers, ringing back metallic and hollow.
“Oh, shit.” Patti stared at my mother’s form jutting up from the depression’s lip. I could hardly believe she had found us. I slid from the mats and ran for the far fence, Patti a step behind. The distance separating her from us was too great—she would never catch me, I knew, but I felt her breath at my neck, her voice still echoing: “Kim, don’t do this. I love you.”
We scrambled down the hill, bent low behind hedges, weaving our way through the glass-strewn alleys and familiar shortcuts, following the same route we took to reach the slough. The last time I saw my mother that day, she was leaning from the steering wheel across the seat, driving slowly by. She might have seen me, crouched behind two cans rank with moldering garbage, so closely did she pass: through the narrow slot between the cans I could see her eyes, puffed and red. I held my breath against the smell, against the belief that even the air in my lungs might give me away.
“Sweet,” said Patti as the car continued on and disappeared up the road. She lit a Marlboro before passing it to me. I inhaled until my heart seemed to beat outside its bony cage, then pushed the smoke out in a noisy rush.
“Yeah,” I said. “Sweet,” and took the lead, my mother’s words a cadence I marched to—Kim come back I love you Kim—lengthening my strides toward Patti’s apartment.
That night, I lay on a dilapidated brown sofa, feeling with my fingertips the cratered melts of cigarette burns. In the next room, a metal bed thumped rhythmically against the wall. I couldn’t make out Patti’s face in the streetlight’s curtained glow. She lay on her own sunken couch across the room; I knew by her carefully controlled breathing that she was only pretending to sleep.
I tried not to listen to her mother’s guttural moans, the man’s slurred cussing. Each time the thumping stopped, I hoped they had fallen asleep or passed out, but then the springs would let out their rusty, pinched sounds, the man’s coarse voice demand some other thing.
Her mother had come home after Patti and I had packed our single paper bag with the pepperoni sticks and cigarettes we had stolen from the IGA. She brought with her a man who fell heavily against the counter, change in his pockets jangling. I’d listened to them mutter in the dark, then watched their staggering shadows as they dragged the TV into the bedroom, where it sputtered and snapped its bad reception, not loud enough to drown out the clacking of the woman’s rings against the headboard.
I closed my eyes against the noise, breathing through my mouth so as not to smell the beer-damped cigarettes and soured dishrags. Where am I? I thought. What am I doing here? In the dark I could not look to Patti, could not see her wise half-smile and find the courage I needed to feel nothing. Shreds of my old self rose up like half-burnt pages from a fire—images of my own home, my mother running the bleach-whitened dishcloth across the counter, stove, table, humming in her broken way a hymn of sacrifice. I gritted my teeth and focused on morning, when we would catch our ride to California and be gone for good, away from the family and town I believed I despised with every bone in my fourteen-year-old body.
The distance between that filthy apartment in Lewiston and the house in the hollow could be counted in miles, in years, but not