why.”
Sarah Hazelwood and I were sitting on the bench outside Manny’s Dollar $tore. Adrienne and Mr. Hazelwood had driven off to find rooms. I’d directed them to Ko-Z Kabins out by the highway. A longish drive, and the sort of place you apologize ahead of time for recommending, but what else was there.
“I take it you’re all a family.”
“Just like choosing where to be from, Mr. Turner. Families can be chosen too.” She smiled. “I don’t mean to be confrontational.”
“I understand.”
“Dad’s not Adrienne’s father, but she never treats him as if he’s anything else. In some ways, she’s closer to him than I am.”
“You and Adrienne-”
“Half sisters. Mother had her before she married Dad, when she wasn’t much more than a girl herself. Adrienne was raised by grandparents. Then, not long after Mother died, Adrienne came looking for her. This wasn’t supposed to be possible, with all kinds of blinds set up, but Hazelwoods are a resourceful lot. Adrienne and Dad got along famously from the first. She stayed with us for a few days, days became a week, eventually we all understood she wasn’t going to leave. The rest developed slowly.”
Whether to assess my reaction or judge if I needed further explanation of “the rest,” Sarah Hazelwood regarded me steadily.
A huge grasshopper came out of nowhere and landed in the middle of the street. It sat there a moment then leapt on, heading out of town, glider-wings thrumming. Thing looked to be the size of a frog.
“Where does Carl fit in?”
“Mother was along in years when she had me. Her health was never good after. As I said before, where we belong, our families, we’re able to choose those. Mother always said they pulled me out and pulled her plumbing right after.”
A mockingbird swooped down at the grasshopper from behind, realized it didn’t have time to clear Ben McAllister’s truck coming towards them, bed crisscrossed with feed sacks, and flew back up. I waved at Ben, who nodded his usual quarter-inch. The grasshopper emerged from underneath and hopped on.
“One day Dad was out hunting. He happened to pass close by the neighbor’s house a mile or so up the hill and heard a baby crying. He knocked, got no answer, and went on in. The house wasn’t much more than a shack. A man named Amos Wright had been living there for as long as anyone could remember. Then a year or so back he’d suddenly turned up with a wife. No one knew where she came from, or how the two of them ever met. Amos had always kept to himself.
“Dad said he could smell the stench before he set foot on the porch. And when he went in there, the place was full of flies. They were buzzing all around the baby laying in its crib. The baby’s mother was on the floor by the bed. Flies had laid eggs in her wounds and maggots were boiling up out of them.”
“The baby-”
“The baby was Carl. Amos didn’t have family that anyone knew of, and no one knew anything at all about the mother, so my folks took the boy in and raised him, the way country people will. Amos wasn’t ever seen again, and they never did find out anything more about what happened. Some said it was an accident, others claimed someone must have broken in and beat the woman to death, maybe even a relative. A lot of people assumed Amos just up and killed her, of course, then ran.”
“Carl knew about this?”
“Most of it. It was never easy to be sure how much or what Carl understood. Sometimes you’d be sitting there talking to him and you could all but see what you were telling him get… bent. You’d watch it start turning to something else inside him.”
“Troubles came early, then.”
“He seemed all right at first, Dad said. And for a while they shrugged it off. Hill folk have a high tolerance for peculiarities. Later, doctors told them it could have been from those days he was alone there in the cabin without food or water, no one knew for how long.”
“Brain damage.”
She nodded. “Possibly. But he’d had no prenatal care-or postnatal, for that matter. He’d been born right there in the cabin to all appearances. Easily could have suffered insult during birth, deprived of oxygen, too much pressure on the head, causing a bleed. Or he could have picked up an infection, either then or later on, passed on from his mother, carried by insects. Simple heredity? The mother never looked healthy or quite right herself, most said. For all that, my folks brought Carl up the same as me. They tried to, anyway. Not much about it was easy for them.”
“Or for you, would be my guess.”
“I liked having a brother. And it’s not as though he was ever violent, anything like that. He just wasn’t always there. I did have a few fights back when he started school. You know, taking up for him. But pretty soon the others left us alone.”
“He finished school?”
“And got a job, working at Nelson Ranch. We’d moved by then, to the closest town. Called it a ranch, but what they raised was chickens.”
“Takes a small lariat.”
She looked at me oddly a moment, then laughed.
“Carl had been getting worse the past year or so. His mind would wander off and he’d go looking for it, Dad said. He got fired after a month or so. Mrs. Nelson came over herself to talk to Dad and tell him how bad they all felt. After that, he just hung around the house, I guess. I was off at college. At first I wrote to him, but he never answered, and we soon lost touch. We never had much of anything to say to one another the few times I came home.”
“You didn’t get home regularly?”
“I was paying my own way. I had a half-scholarship, but that didn’t go near far enough. Every weekend, most breaks and holidays, most days after class, I was working.”
“Good grades?”
“Good enough that I got my degree in three and a half years. I wanted to go on to law school, but there was no way I could afford it. The cupboards were bare.”
“You’re still young. You could go back.”
She shook her head. “It’s a question of confidence-confidence and momentum. Back then it never occurred to me that anything could stop me. I know too many things that can stop me now.”
For reasons known only to himself (turndown on a date? bad test grade? failure to make the football squad?) a teenager leaning from a passing car shouted. “I’m soooo disappointed.”
Sarah Hazelwood smiled. “Well. There it is. What more need be said? For any of us.”
Chapter Sixteen
Doors slamming shut and locks falling: you never forget that sound, the way it makes you feel. That was something waiting in my own future, something I’d get used to, inasmuch as one ever does. Looking back even now, a familiar horror clutches at my throat, squeezes my heart in its fist.
When the buzzer sounded, I pushed through double doors into Wonderland. Here’s another hall, another birth passage. Up two levels in an elevator crowded with bodies, down a cluttered hall-linen carts, food carriers, housecleaning trucks-to the tollbooth. Nurses in a patchwork of whites, scrubs, Ban-Lon and T-shirts, jeans, slacks. One of them showed me into a double room where Randy, dressed in a jogging suit I’d packed for him, sat on one of the beds. Everything in the room, bedspread, curtains, towel folded neatly on the bedside table, was pastel. Randy’s jogging suit was sky blue.
He looked up at me. “Stupid, huh?”
I had no idea how much he remembered, and asked him.
“All of it. But it’s like a TV show I saw, or a movie. Like it’s not me, I’m standing off somewhere watching:
