Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

1. Exacerbate. Make a problem worse. Being a cowardly little bitch only ever exacerbates the situation.

She smiles at her paper and looks up at Anna, still smiling. Turtle thinks, you see, all you have to do is stop failing. She thinks, oh, you’ll like this sentence, Anna. Oh, you’ll like it.

In front of the classroom, Anna says, “‘Recalcitrant.’ Please spell and define and use in a sentence. Recalcitrant .” Turtle writes:

2. Recalcitrant. Stubbornly resistant to authority. I am a recalcitrant student and it’s done me very little good, but elsewhere it has been good for me and that’s made it hard to quit.

For the rest of the test, Turtle writes with focus and pleasure. When they are finished, they trade tests, Turtle handing her paper to Taz, and at the first question, Taz raises his hand. He says, “Anna? I am not sure if this example sentence is appropriate.” He looks at Turtle. “I’m not sure if it works.”

Anna stands at the front, eyebrows raised, waiting to hear it.

“I’m not sure if I should read it,” Taz says.

Anna walks over, stoops over Taz’s shoulder. She laughs. She looks at Turtle. She says, “Yes, Taz. I see what you mean. She’s used the word correctly, so let’s give her full credit, and, Julia, I will need you to stay after class.”

Turtle knows already that she won’t. If she stays, Anna will notice how injured she is.

“What did she write?” Elise asks.

“Yeah,” Rilke says, “what’s the sentence?”

Anna looks up and around at her students, and she says, “Never mind. Next word. ‘Recalcitrant.’ Anyone?” Turtle keeps looking back at Taz to see how she has done, watching as Taz, lips pursed, makes a C for Correct next to each word and, at the top, writes, 15/15. Turtle looks back at Anna, a quick triumphant look, and she thinks, you see, you bitch, you whore, but she stops there because Anna has believed in her the whole way and it was only Turtle who did not believe in herself, and even if Turtle doesn’t like Anna, she will not tell lies about her. Well, she thinks. You were right, I guess, but it doesn’t mean I like you. When the bell rings, Anna collects the tests and walks back to her desk, bent over the stack reading and grinning. With all of the students standing up and dragging backpacks from beneath desks, Turtle stands up and limps into the crush of them and walks out before Anna can stop her.

That night, she lies on the Persian rug in front of the fire, propped on one elbow, reading the next week’s vocabulary words. The fire is the heart of the room, the edges dark to Turtle’s light-dazzled eyes, a two-inch gap between the hearthstones and the floor because the house, on its redwood piers, has drifted away from the fireplace over time. Above her, Martin is staring into the flames. His attention is fixed, his pupils shrunken to pinpricks, his face as weathered as an ancient burl.

Turtle bends again over her spelling work. Then she stops and turns to watch as two brown salamanders, speckled gold, crawl from the fire. They make their careful, clumsy way across the hearthstones, slow and seeming unharmed. Turtle looks once at Martin and then back down to the salamanders. She scoops them up and carries them in wet slithering handfuls out the door and through the fields to the woodpile battened with tarps. She stoops and lays them down among the logs, where they resume their crawling. All around her, in the gulch and in the field, the frogs are chorusing. She looks back at the house, where the firelight plays a dim glow across the window, and she looks out toward the dark ocean and the highway, hidden from her by the curve of the hill.

Turtle finds Grandpa waiting by the side of the school office, leaning against the clapboard, wearing jeans and his little leather slippers with their little leather tassels and his big Carhartt jacket with a bagged bottle of Jack in the pocket. A stream of middle schoolers is pushing past him onto the front lawn, where the buses will arrive. Rilke is making a dash from the library to the bus, attended by cries of “Hey, sugar tits!” Turtle limps over to her grandpa. They stand in an eddy between two buildings. He looks down at her and wraps a hand around her shoulders and pulls her to him. Turtle grimaces in pain, breathes into his chest, his smoky flannel shirt, his long johns. There is a coffee stain on his left breast. In his breast pocket, the butterscotch hard candies he likes. A week has passed since the beating, but the bruises are still there, and Turtle is ashamed of them. He is wearing a trucker’s hat that reads VETERAN and she reaches up and pulls it off him and onto her own head.

“Well, hey, sweetpea,” he says.

“Hey,” she says, looking up at him, smiling, pulling the hat brim up and off to the side. She isn’t surprised to see him, but still, it’s bad. This is what he does when she doesn’t come to the trailer. He goes to the little shingle-front Village Spirits at the base of the hill and then he drives up to the middle school and waits by the wall so she’s got to come past him to get to the bus. He never lets her go very long.

He leads her to his rusted Chevy out in the teachers’ lot. She is limping. Grandpa doesn’t observe it. Rosy jumps up and shows her happy, stupid face in the driver’s-side window. “Oh, you old girl,” Grandpa says, opening the door while Rosy runs around on the bench seat, licking her own face. Turtle climbs in and sets her backpack in the footwell. In the drink holders, Grandpa has a Big Gulp cup of sunflower seeds and a bottle of Tabasco. Rosy scrambles awkwardly into Turtle’s lap, wagging her tail in excitement. Her nails are dirty and untrimmed.

“How is school?” Grandpa asks.

“School’s fine,” she says. Grandpa puts the truck in gear and they pull out and go down Little Lake Road, beneath cypress hedgerows, make a left at the intersection, and start down the Shoreline Highway. Turtle bends forward under the seat and pulls out the jumper cables and old sweaters and under that a .357 revolver in a leather holster. She tosses open the cylinder, spins it, sights down the bore, and tosses the cylinder closed. Grandpa opens his coat and pulls out the Jack in a paper bag, seats it between his legs, unscrews the cap, and takes a drink.

“Did you ever get around to asking that boy out to the dance?”

“No,” she says.

He looks back at her. “No?” he says.

“No,” she says.

“That’s not good,” he says.

“I fucked up,” she says.

They drive out of town, across Big River Bridge, and follow Highway 1 past Van Damme beach. They’re going back to Buckhorn Cove. It’s only four miles—a six-minute drive, but it will take them longer. Grandpa takes the turns slowly, the paper bag gripped between his legs. He always drives slowly when he’s drunk. On the beach, a solitary girl in a wetsuit is dragging a kayak across the shingle and Turtle thinks of Anna.

“Fucked up how?” he says, looking at her.

“Spineless is all,” she says.

“You’re not spineless. You may be some other things, but you aren’t spineless.”

“Chickened out.”

“Is there still time?”

Turtle leans out the window. The dance is in a week. Her hair whips and tangles and hangs back in streamers. She squeezes off three shots at a deer-crossing sign, putting two shots into the buck’s black body and a third near it.

“Don’t fire from the car, sweetpea,” Grandpa says without heat.

“How was Martin when he was my age?” she asks.

“A wild child. Always getting in some trouble or other, and there was no stopping him. I tell you what, though. He loved your mother, boy , he loved her more than anything. This pasty scrap of a girl. Helena. Well, yes. Helena , and everybody called her Lena.” Grandpa nips from the bottle.