Julia Pierpont - Among the Ten Thousand Things

“What happened to you? Have you been outside?” Because she had on her shoes.

She got her into a chair and brushed soil from the scrape on her knee, inwardly ransacking the bathroom cabinet, if they had any bacitracin in the house.

“Where else does it hurt?”

“No place.” Kay leaned over her red-glistening knee. “Don’t touch.” She’d fallen twice on the way home.

“Baby, you have to tell me what happened.” She squeezed Kay’s waist, her shoulders, as though she could feel a break if there was one. “Where were you?”

“Don’t!” Kay’s hands threw fists when she felt Deb trying to touch her.

“Honey,” Gary knelt down and held her by the wrist. “You’ve got to tell us.”

“Both of you, please! Stop yelling at me.”

“We’re not!” Deb shouted. Then, calmer, “Honey, we’re not. Okay? This isn’t yelling. Gary, go get Simon please.”

“He’s not there.”

“What do you mean?”

—

Her mother carried her back. On foot was the only way Kay could remember how to get to Teagan’s house; Gary took his car and kept at an even crawl behind them, wheels crunching the graveled ground.

Kay hadn’t been carried in forever. She faced the opposite direction, arms gripping her mother’s neck, the road bobbing and blurring, Gary’s low beams catching her eyelashes and the ends of her mother’s hair. At corners Deb prompted, “Straight?” Kay sometimes nodding into her mother’s shoulder, sometimes turning her head to be sure, saying, “That way.”

They were coming up the block when Deb saw her son, very small, walking their direction. He seemed actually to be strolling. Dillydallying.

“Which is the house?” she shouted, thirty feet away.

He stopped, then jogged to them. “What the hell — what are you doing?”

“You don’t ask me anything right now. Where’s the house?”

Kay twisted her head. “He’s here. We found him. We can go home.”

“Simon, which house?”

Kay yelled, “You said we were just going to find him!”

“I want to talk to that girl’s mother.”

“But you said!”

“Katherine, quiet.”

“Okay,” Simon said, “what the fuck is going on?”

“Fine, don’t help. Just like him.” Deb charged ahead, surprisingly quick under her daughter’s weight.

“Just like who?” Simon hurried like a small dog after them. “Just like Dad?”

“Put me down,” Kay pleaded.

“Here, is this it?” Deb had stopped in front of the wrong house. Both Simon and Kay hesitated. It would be the only thing worse. Deb could tell from their faces it was wrong and moved on to the next one, which she could tell was right.

“Here, Simon, take her.”

“Mom, this is insane.”

“I can stand!”

“She hurt her leg. Take her.”

Simon did, awkwardly, Kay passing like an orangutan between them. Deb pulled her sleep shirt down over the short shorts that had been the only thing handy when she was blind angry and they were leaving. Gary killed the engine. Dark and quiet as she climbed the porch.

“I don’t know what you did,” Simon said, like a threat, into his sister’s ear. They let a little go of each other, his arms loosening and her legs drifting down toward the pavement. Kay slipped quickly off her brother, and he didn’t try to stop her. She ran with her head down and crumbled on the curb two houses away.

Teagan answered the door. “My mother’s asleep,” she said when Deb asked to speak with her.

“Please wake her then.”

Simon saw Teagan see him before she disappeared into the house. “Mom,” he said.

They waited.

The woman Teagan brought back did seem to have just been sleeping, except she was fully dressed, in cutoff jeans that showed where skin sagged in bridges over her knees.

“Hello, hi,” Deb started, “Mrs.—”

“Dignam. Deirdre,” she said, sounding tired. “What is it? What’s the problem?” She was thin everywhere but her stomach, which pooched out under a flower-printed top with frills.

“The problem is I have an eleven-year-old girl out there who came home in the middle of the night — hysterical, bloody — and that she was here.”

Teagan’s mother stepped out into the floodlight, her blond hair flat and sheer against her small skull. “I don’t understand, tell it to me again.”

“Just look at her!” Deb waved an arm behind her but only Simon was there, feeling his weight stacked in heavy columns over his feet. “Look, I don’t— The reason she was here is, she was following my son.”

“What the hell was he doing here? I don’t know your kids.”

“What? No, I know. It’s just,” Deb looked back toward the car, touched her face. “I’m sorry. You have me confused. My son and your daughter were seeing each other. I guess you didn’t know that.”

“Seeing each other?”

“Yes, you understand? And they were together tonight, and, I guess they agreed to meet, you know, secretly, in your house.”

“Just a minute”—suddenly shouting—“to get this straight. You can’t keep your kids at home and that’s my problem?”

“I’m not looking to cast blame. You misunderstand—”

“Your shit stains are sneaking into my house and that’s on me ?”

“We didn’t know she was here.” Teagan held her arms, steeling herself against Deb, or the night.

“And you!” her mother yelled, turning. “You think you can do whatever you want?” She pushed her hand into Teagan’s chest, backing her up in increments. “Is that what you think?”

“Hey, hang on,” Deb said. “All I’m saying is we should both, you know, do a better job monitoring our children.”

“You had this boy in your room?” Her shirt’s elastic shrugged higher around her waist. “After everything you put me through the last time, you learn nothing?”

The car door snapped open. “Deb, you need help?” Gary called.

Teagan’s mother put one hand against the wall of the house and leaned on it as though each were holding the other up. For a moment everyone was quiet, but the silence was filled with other things.

The light was on in the upstairs window of the house next door, and Simon could discern two figures in the picture it made. The neighbor across had come out to watch, too. Looking up and down the block, he saw people appear like new stars, dotting the block. All those eyes and no one had noticed yet, that the eleven-year-old on the curb had been for some time gone.

Whom would you have had her call? There was their grandmother, there was Ruth, who would have come on the next train, but Deb had to stop turning to her mother, who was older now — who bought senior tickets at the movies now — and who shouldn’t have to worry. And Gary was here, but Gary was still too much a stranger, would have required too much catching up.

And don’t say no one. Deb was going to have help.

On the phone he asked mercifully few questions. As much as their history together was the problem, it was also what made things easy, the way it meant he knew when to shut up.

—

Deb reached him late; she reached him early. She reached him at La Guardia baggage claim, almost two A.M., where Jack was waiting very upright between Delta-blue columns. The longhorns had just made their triumphal way down the ramp. In so much bubble wrap they could have been a whole person, or a canoe. They failed to clear the first turn, jamming the procession of swollen Jansport duffels and tufted black Samsonites. He was glad to see them. He’d taken an evening flight out of Houston and had to change planes in Atlanta. It had been raining, and they’d held them at the gate an extra eighty minutes. He’d bought a two-dollar apple. He was tired.