Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [148]
“Something just came up,” he said. “I just have to do something back home.” His father was on the futon, pretending not to listen. Jude couldn’t say what he wanted to say. “Don’t worry—I don’t think Teddy’s dad is going to go through with the adoption.”
“Why not?”
“I talked to him.”
“I don’t get it,” she said. She sounded baffled, but resigned to, even fond of, her bafflement. She seemed to have learned that it was the prevailing wilderness in which she would have to exist. “When am I going to see you again?”
Jude unwound the phone cord, then wound it again. Through his bag, he could feel the weight of the glass canister against his ankle.
“You want to come with me?”
“Back to Vermont?”
“Just for a few days. Tell your mom I’ll get you home safe. Way before the baby’s born.”
Eliza sighed. Sixteen, and she had the sigh of a forty-year-old woman.
“I know you’re tired,” Jude said. “Just one more trip.”
When he hung up, his dad came into the kitchen. Jude took McQueen’s case out of his bag and handed it to his father, trading him for a wad of cash.
“If you change your mind, the loft is yours. Davis is going to be out by September one.”
Jude put the cash in his pocket. “I’d have to learn to get used to living off drug money.”
“A straight edge kid like you—that’s a moral conundrum.”
For some reason, Jude’s conscience, ready to fire, sent up an image of Hippie. The next generation of Lintonburg pot seller. The picture was of Hippie hobbling off the high school lawn, his glasses lost, as blind as Teddy, and Jude decided that, if for no other reason than to clear his karma, he would finally return to Hippie the money in his pocket.
Les hauled Jude’s bag up from the floor. “I’ll walk you to the van,” he said.
Twenty-Three
The van was parked in the alley in the morning. When Harriet saw it through the window above the kitchen sink, she dashed in her robe and moccasins up the stairs, past the bathroom, where Prudence was singing in the shower, past Prudence’s open door, where the great mass of a bald Eliza was passed out across the trundle bed like Rousseau’s sleeping gypsy, up to the third floor. Jude didn’t stir when she pushed the door open, or when she sat on the edge of the bottom bunk. It was when she touched the cut on his lip that he bolted awake. He sat up and looked at her, at the bedroom around him, at the lemony light drifting through the curtains, then lay back down.
“Fuck,” he said. “I was dreaming I was driving.”
Had his voice deepened, or was it just hoarse with sleep? “You guys must have gotten in late. You want to tell me where that cut on your lip came from?”
“Born with it.”
“What about that black eye?”
“Doesn’t matter anymore. Bridge over troubled water.”
Harriet fought the urge to touch the bruise under his eye. “Water under the bridge, you mean?”
“Whatever. I don’t know your hippie songs.” He yawned. “Hey, Dad said my name isn’t from that hippie song. He said it’s from the saint.”
“He did, did he.”
“It’s not?”
She reached for his hands, weighing them in hers. “I guess it’s both. But really we gave you the name because of what it means.” His burn was twisted with scar tissue, healed to a muscley pink, and on the other hand, the X had healed, too. “When they brought you to me, ten days old, I couldn’t believe you were finally mine. I was so grateful. You were like a little bundle that had just fallen from the heavens. And I thought, Jude. In Hebrew, it means ‘Praise.’ Or ‘Thanks.’ ”
Harriet gave his hands a squeeze, and Jude, his blue eyes swimming back—or ahead—to some memory or dream she might never know about, squeezed back.
He had come home, and he would leave and come home and leave and come home again, with new scars and tattoos, but now he let her hold on to his two fragile arms, the limbs that might have been broken had he been home last Saturday evening, when five boys had knocked on the front door. Most were thick-necked football players in their jerseys. One was