15

NOLEEN ANSWERED the phone, but right after she started talking, Uncle Jackson picked up. They talked back and forth to each other a lot like Amity and Malcolm did. “Jackson, its Gaylen,” she said, while Jackson talked over her saying, “Let the girl talk, Noleen. Go ahead, Gaylen.”

“I’m Gaylen Syler-Boatwright. My father was James,” I said.

Jackson offered his condolences.

“You say you girls are in Dallas?” asked Noleen.

“Passing through thereabouts,” I said.

“You ought to stop over in Garland. Let me cook you girls a meal,” she said.

I accepted, and Jackson gave me directions to the house in Garland. Delia drove into a rest stop. “You take us into the city, Gaylen. City driving makes me too nervous, and I need a pit stop anyway.” She disappeared into the vending overhang.

The rest stop advertised Dallas maps and sights. I locked up the car and went inside. Tourist claptrap cluttered the aisles, advertising cans of road kill, Lone Star ink pens and flags, and toggle-head dolls wearing Dallas Cowboys jerseys.

Royal Crown Cola bottles chilled inside shiny buckets of ice. I bought two along with peanuts and a pair of white sunglasses that looked exactly like a pair worn by Marilyn Monroe.

Delia pressed her face against the glass. I waved her inside. “I met a truck driver says we’re not far from Garland. He’s a good-looking trucker,” she said.

“Delia, don’t,” I said. “For the rest of the trip, no more men.”

“He said he’d buy us supper in Garland.”

“Noleen’s making supper. You’ll offend her,” I said.

Delia picked up an ice-cream sandwich, and we checked out. She handed me the keys. “Want to drive?”

By the time we got onto the interstate, Delia finished off the RC and the ice-cream sandwich. “Your phone’s ringing,” she said. She fished it out of my pocketbook. After several “uh-huh’s,” she handed me the phone. “It’s Truman’s counselor from Angola.”

The counselor called himself Buddy Fortune. His voice was soft as a woman’s, like a tenor who could be a soprano. I figured that he would not be allowed to answer many questions about Truman. But I was wrong.

“I’m Truman’s sister, Gaylen Boatwright.”

“He listed you as his next-of-kin, Mrs. Boatwright. I apologize for taking so long to answer your call. I’ve been on a family vacation. What could I do for you?”

“I understand my brother is in prison for stealing cars.”

“That’s not correct.” His tone grew a shade harsh.

“Can you tell me, that is, are you allowed to tell me what he’s in for?” I asked.

“Thirteen counts of child molestation, nine counts of sodomy against a minor.”

Traffic piled up behind me. When I hit the brake, the driver of the Beetle directly behind me came down on the horn. Delia tensed and clasped her seat belt into place.

I repeated Truman’s offenses for Delia’s sake.

“That is correct,” said Fortune.

A tightness in my chest caused me to cough. “How long has Truman been in prison?” I asked.

“Thirteen years.”

“How much longer in prison, Mr. Fortune?”

“Eleven more years without probation.”

“Can I obtain court records?” I asked.

“All you want. It’s a matter of public record,” he said. “Just call the parish clerk in Louisiana in charge of criminal records.”

Delia turned around in her seat, pulling an invisible horn to tease a trucker who blasted back at her.

I ended the call. “Delia, get back in your seat belt. Stop attracting attention. You are wanted for questioning. State police get a good look at you and pull us over, I’m not helping you another day.”

She slid back into her seat. “Truman molested,” she said. “All that time Mama said he was a car thief.”

“We don’t know that wasn’t true too,” I said.

“Mama lied all those years and never told us.”

A car cut me off, and I came down on the horn. I kept hitting the horn long after it drove out of sight.

Delia grabbed my wrist, yelling for me to stop. “Gaylen, you done lost it. Stop ‘fore you kill us!”

I could see my mother standing in the doorway of the kitchen. The morning sun came up behind her making her look like a saint in one of Aunt Amity’s paintings. I had asked her about Truman, and she answered with a hint of pepper in her voice, “That boy did things that are unspeakable. I’ll take it to my grave, the things he did.” Just like that her face turned gray, wrinkled, her hair turning coarse and silver. Little pieces of her were fragmented, blowing away, out of my grasp until there was nothing left but dust sifting in the sun.

“I can drive, Gaylen. Pull over, why don’t you?”

“I’m the last to know everything, Delia. But I’m the girl with the brains in the Syler family.”

“How many kids you figure he hurt before they caught up with him?” she asked.

“I’m ordering his court records,” I said.

“You ever met Jackson and Noleen?” she asked. Her mind wandered off, and she was watching again for truckers.

“Once when I was young. Jackson helped Daddy sober up a man, I think a cousin of Daddy’s. That’s all I remember. He seemed cordial.”

She let back her seat and closed her eyes. There was a bit of chocolate left on her lip from the ice-cream sandwich. Sleep overtook her, and she looked like a small girl fallen asleep with not a care in her mind.

My memory summoned the shaven-headed pencil sketch of Truman that Renni left for us in his box of belongings. The photo of the brown-eyed second grader left an impression of sweetness. The shaven-headed prisoner drawing did not reveal anything. Maybe it was because he did not know himself. Or maybe it was because he did not want anyone to know him.

If I ever moved out of Wilmington, and it seemed I would be moving somewhere else soon, I decided that I might consider Garland. The historical town shops restored in ice-cream colors looked like a place cut out of a children’s book. In a downtown block, a big sign advertised Christmas on the Square. Children piled out of a bus, tying shoelaces and pulling on choir robes. The urge to spend a bit of inheritance money might have overtaken me, except that a parking space was nowhere to be found.

“Delia, wake up and wash your face. You have to see this place.”

She roused, pulling herself up to look at the crowds converging on the square. “Mmff!” She finger-combed her hair out of her eyes. She sat up, still in her stupor, and said, “I was dreaming about a place like I never saw, not on earth. Mason Freeman was standing outside a pair of big tall gates trying to get past the gates along with Mama and Truman. Only Truman was a little boy like in the picture. She ’as holding his hand and slapping him and mad at me the same as Mason Freeman. Except I’m inside the gate, and I got the key. I’m running back and forth teasing them all, shaking the keys at them and yelling, ‘You can’t get in! Not without my say-so!’”

I saw a road just like Jackson had told me I would find past the square. I turned down it.

“That would be my heaven, Gaylen. Me holding the keys and letting in who I please and keeping out who I don’t want in.”

“You’d send Mama to hell?” I asked.

“Is there an alternative? Like, seems like standing outside the gates watching everybody partying is punishment enough.”

“Never heard of an alternative hell,” I said.

“Not straight to hell then. I’d make her say she was sorry for the hateful things she said and did. But I felt sorry for Truman, pitiful eyed, like he was trapped forever holding Mamas hand and getting slapped. Maybe because he was little and not like he is now.”

“Help me find Gold Dust Street,” I said. We drove right past it, and I sighed.

“The last place I would expect to be is heaven, now that I think about it,” she said. “Maybe they’s an alternative heaven.”

“You let us miss our street. Now I have to turn around.” I pulled into a driveway. Finally, I headed down Gold Dust. There was the big one story house, the lawn struggling to keep its summer green in the middle of December. Jackson must have decided we needed a welcoming committee. He and Noleen walked out onto the front porch, arm in arm, posed like a couple of tourists in matching red and green outfits.

“Gaylen, is that you?” she yelled. She kept saying that first to me and then Delia until Delia giggled in a low and awkward way.

Noleen set out tables in a glassed-in back porch built by Jackson after he retired from the city of Dallas.

Jackson was big like I remembered, but his shoulders stooped from age. Noleen had dressed him up in a kelly green shirt with red sleeves matching her green pantsuit. “Here we are right on top of Christmas, and lo and behold, the phone rings, and up comes a North Carolina family. It’s a blessing, that’s what!” she exclaimed.

Her hair, frosted at the tips and still clinging to a permanent wave, was swept up on one side and clipped by a mistletoe barrette. When Delia commented about it, Noleen said, “I make these for teachers, women down at the Dalrymple Nursing Center, what-have-you. I’ll get one for each of you girls.”

I did not know what to say.

“He’s got nimble fingers,” she said, not taking her eyes off him.

Jackson blushed.

She took me into her bedroom and showed me a wall of photographs dating back to the ′60s when she and Jackson married.

“The last thing I would expect was for you to show up, and here I am without a single picture of you and Delia. I’ll have Jackson take your pictures before you leave, that’s what. Then I’ll add you to the wall of Sylers.” She talked the whole time, pointing to photographs of her brother who fought in Vietnam, a three-legged pet greyhound that needed to be put down, fifteen or more photographs of her son, Taylor, from birth up, and an equal number of photographs of their daughter who had played soccer and danced ballet.

“Did Jackson grow up knowing my daddy?” I asked.

“Oh yes, girl! They was two peas, the two of them. Jackson called your daddy Puddin’ until he was grown, on account of his love for Jackson’s mother’s homemade banana-cream pudding.”

I had never heard my father called by that name.

She lit a candle under the photograph of her brother.

“I have a cousin going off to war. Tim.”

“Not Renni’s Tim?” she asked. “Pshaw! No, tell me that’s not true. Tim’s grown? Time has flown.”

“You know him?”

“Like I know you. Of course you and your sister were so little back then. Ask Tim if he remembers Jackson and Noleen. He’ll tell you about the time Jackson took him and our son fishing. They hit some rapids, and the three of them nearly drowned. The authorities found them clinging to a rock. Had to take them out of those waters by helicopter and a rope.”

“I thought he was lying,” I said, although I was tired of talking about Tim. Since I had finally found a talkative Syler in Noleen, I wanted to see what she remembered about my mother.

“The way those Syler men tell tales, I can understand your point. But that one happens to be true.”

Delia was laughing in the next room.

I closed the door. “Noleen, if you remember me young, then you remember my mothers son, Truman.”

The sound of my brother’s name set her back. It was the first time she fell quiet since we had landed on her porch.

“What do you remember about him?”

She seated me in an alcove with a picture window looking out over what appeared to be naked grapevines. “Your brother was troubled. Nobody tried as hard as your daddy to bring that boy around. He disciplined him, whipped him, but he couldn’t get him to come around and stay out of trouble with the law. That boy was in trouble far back as I can remember.”

“Truman was in trouble with the law?”

“He worked for a refinishing shop down from your daddy’s place. The refinisher had a boy who was bad news. He was the one taught Truman to hot-wire cars. I always said that was when Truman leaned too far over the rail to bring back. He seemed to get worse and worse after that. First he was sent away to his Daddy’s someplace here in Texas. Next thing you know, he’s back in North Carolina getting sent to Rowan Salisbury Prison. I think that was the name of that place. Anyway, it was a sad day. Your daddy was ashamed of him.”

“That’s when you remember him being sent away?”

“That was the way it was told to Jackson, girl. Why? You know a different story?”

“For a long time, I had nightmares. Since then I’ve been trying to prove what happened to me when I was young.”

She clasped her hands on her stomach. “I don’t follow.”

“I started pulling my hair.”

She gasped and then nodded, remembering. She said, “You pulled out your hair by the handfuls from the time you was a baby. That’s enough to give any child nightmares. Your mama troubled over you, trying to keep your hands out of that pretty silky hair.”

“But what causes a baby to pull its hair, Noleen?”

She laughed. “Your mama said one day you just reached up and found a lock. She said it was curiosity. You yelled, red-faced, as if you didn’t know how to let go.”

Noleen’s voice was grating on me. She laughed like my mother, like women do when they don’t know what to say.

“What is wrong, Gaylen? You come here for more than a Christmas visit, didn’t you? You looking for answers?”

I sat up and shook my head. “Not at all. I heard you made the best enchiladas in the family.”

She cackled and pushed up out of her chair. “That is the honest truth! Now you get yourself in here and let me feed you. Your bones look about ready to break. Who’s been feeding you anyway? Not that sister of yours, I’m sure.” She walked out of the bedroom as if I would follow. I was still in the chair when Jackson, sent on a mission by Noleen, came looking for me.

“My wife about to talk your ears off?” he asked.

“I’m just tired. I’m coming,” I said.

“Don’t rush. She’s still melting cheese and slicing tomatoes. She’s got your sister icing a cake.”

I was too tired to tell him that was a bad idea.

He took Noleen’s chair. “Can I tell you something I remember about you?” he asked.

Why not? I thought.

“Out of all of the Sylers, you seemed like the kid that would rise above your family’s situation. Some kids in your situation, they cry and whine, needy and taking their time about growing up. But you was a strong girl, like no one was going to lead you around.”

“I appreciate you saying that. But I think I lost a little of her back in Boiling Waters.”

“Once Noleen and I took you to church. Delia wouldn’t go. You sat right between us, and Noleen had fun pretending you were her girl. She took you to children’s class, and you came out having learned three Bible verses. You won a chocolate rabbit. I never heard so much smacking. You had that rabbit eaten before we ever got you back to your daddy’s house. I think you was afraid your mama wouldn’t let you eat it.”

“I was afraid Delia would eat it,” I said.

“You remember then?”

“It’s foggy.”

“Don’t go getting old on me. I’m the only one qualified for a senior moment.”

“When you said that I would rise above the family’s situation, what does that mean to you, Jackson?”

He scratched his head, uneasy. “I shouldn’t have said that.” His gaze drifted to the wall of photographs and then back to me.

“It’s like I don’t know myself because I don’t know my family.”

“Your daddy and his brother, Rudy, they had their issues. I always blamed the war. Now Malcolm, he was sane as Lincoln. But Renni, she said those two brothers had the manic-depressive on account of their mama had it.”

“My father? He didn’t tell me,” I said. Neither had Renni.

“Your daddy had too much pride.”

Mother had never gotten help for Delia either. “What about my mother?” I asked.

“I don’t know about your mother or her past. When she married your daddy, those sisters of his told a lot of stuff on her. I never knew whether or not to believe it. But when she and your daddy would tangle, you could hear them all the way out to the pond. But I don’t have to tell you that.”

“Mother could yell so loud, Daddy said she could dust the lamps with her vocal cords.” It was easy feeling guilty over talking about her.

“I shouldn’t be telling you things on your mother.” The two of us sat staring at Noleen’s floral rug, sharing a big slice of guilt.

“The last thing we need to be doing is digging up family skeletons on your folks, Gaylen. They’ve passed on and can’t defend themselves.”

“They wouldn’t allow me to ask any of these questions, though. It was their way.” I pondered why I allowed Mother and Daddy to intimidate me. “I should’ve made them tell me the truth about us and about Truman.” I imagined shouting down into Mother’s grave beneath the hill above Syler Pond. “How could she think I could live a life based on lies?”

“To her, it wasn’t lies. It was protection.”

“But I pulled myself baldheaded, Jackson! I was ashamed. I remember the shame of it. The nightmares, the way that dark man in the shadows would crawl into my bed.”

Jackson handed me a handkerchief. It was embroidered with the initials JCS.

I dried my eyes.

“Gaylen, you didn’t have the best starting gate. But you got so much baggage hanging off you, you’re never going to get any purpose about you until you lay some of it down.”

“It’s the only cargo given to me, Jackson.” I thought, like the top of a train car overflowing with gunpowder.

“Want to know that verse you quoted when you was with us that day at church?”

Jackson was the religious cousin. I had forgotten. “Tell me then,” I decided to be polite.

“Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”

“I don’t remember any of it,” I said.

“You did and two more. It’s good advice.”

“Reaching forward sounds better than looking back,” I said. “But a family secret has shaped me into a stranger.” I knew what I had to do. “I’m going to Angola, Jackson. My brother is incarcerated there.”

“I never heard that. What’s he in for?”

“Molesting kids.”

“What do you think, that he’ll confess all to you? Men like that bury their crimes in lies. He’ll never tell you and you’ll leave even angrier than you are now.” He helped me out of the chair. “The past is all it is, Gaylen. Gone. Who told you that what happened a long time ago could give you the shape of your life today? Forget the past and move on. Closure’s the best thing in the world for you.”

“You don’t know the things that have happened to me, Jackson.” I could not tell him, even though I wanted to tell someone. “It’s like a person I don’t know is sitting in the driver’s seat making my life for me.” Jackson didn’t know me or my family as well as I had hoped. He couldn’t understand something that happened outside of his own skin. It was easy for him to tell me to drop it all like it had never happened. He did not have to live with my painted-over memories.

Noleen called the dining room the red room for good cause. The walls and draperies were red as cranberries. She lit red candles down a buffet, on a serving table, and along a table candelabra. “Every place setting is a Christmas pattern from a different country. Yours, Gaylen, is from Germany.”

“Did you go to Germany?” Delia asked.

“There and Sweden, Luxembourg, Spain, and France,” said Jackson, fishing his billfold out of his back pocket so he could sit comfortably. He deposited the billfold and his eyeglasses on the buffet, much to Noleen’s consternation. But she only gave him a look and then melted when he flashed her his melon-slice smile.

“We got family coming in soon from Biloxi,” said Noleen to Delia and me. “You girls stay on. We’ve got the room. Out back is the cottage we built for Jackson’s mother before she passed. Got a kitchen in it and even its own carport.”

“Biloxi was hit hard by that awful hurricane,” said Jackson. “That’s where our son, Taylor, and his wife and children live now. Noleen and I took our RV down there. Took us three days before they’d let us in. Couldn’t get a phone signal or e-mail. Thought Noleen would faint when they stopped us at the county line and made us set up camp outside the city.”

I remembered watching the news from the sofa, unable to move, the same as when the Twin Towers were hit by terrorists. My family was not one to react when bad things happened. Instead we watched, more like it was a spectacle, like it was a place far off that made us glad to be alive. “What was it like, Jackson?”

“Like a bomb had hit the place. Some houses still set in shambles,” he said.

Delia scooped bean dip onto her plate.

Noleen served up the enchiladas. “So are you girls going to stay over for Christmas?” she asked.

“Might we come back here after we go to Louisiana?” I asked.

Delia blinked. “Huh?”

“I’ve got business in New Orleans,” I said. “But if we could leave Delia’s car here, say, parked in your carport, we could come back in time for Christmas.”

Noleen handed the dish of enchiladas to Delia.

“If you’re determined to go, then at least let your husband fly you there. I’d feel better if you went escorted,” said Jackson.

“Good idea,” I said. The police were looking for Delia. If Braden flew us, we could travel under the police radar.

“Braden wouldn’t, would he?” asked Delia.

“I’ll ask,” I said. “He might.”

Flying on the jet to Texas had not given me pause. But the thought of climbing back into our Embraer brought back the memory of plummeting toward Wal-Mart. Before the crash I saw my mother in the same manner that people who have afterlife experiences see a dead relative sent as a divine escort. She was dressed in a floral cotton shirt tied at the waist and walking shorts. She did like taking walks along the pond. But she was wearing my grandmother’s tall black hat, and she held a key out to me. It was a delicate key, like a diary key that is scarcely able to lock up secrets.

“Gaylen,” said Delia, seated in a rattan chair in Noleen’s guesthouse. “Where’d you go?”

Mother’s image faded. “No place. I was thinking about the crash.” Braden had not answered when I called but phoned back directly. I relayed what he told me. “He’s picking us up in the morning on a trip to Kansas. He asked why Louisiana. I told him we decided to visit Truman and that’s where he lives.”

“Did you tell him what Truman’s done?”

“Not yet.”

“What about Deputy Bob?” she asked quietly. “Is he onto me?”

“Braden didn’t say. When he comes, ask him.” I did not have the strength to juggle Delia’s legal problems and Truman’s secrets. The thought of getting back inside the Embraer now had me obsessing over plummeting into the Wal-Mart garden center.

“What are you going to say to Truman, Gaylen? I want to slap him. Will they let you do that in prison, just walk right up and slap a man if he deserves it?”

“Truman doesn’t know that we know. Jackson says he’ll never confess. If he knows we know, he’ll clam up. Think of the lie he told already about his daddy.”

“It don’t matter. We’ll make him confess,” she said, making a fist.

“I want to hear the truth from him,” I said. I did not believe that men like him ever apologize. But I had lived with the nightmares and the hair pulling all the way back to when I was a baby. I grew up believing that I was turning into my mother or father—not sane. Now I was discovering a new thing, that after all this time, there was a good chance I wasn’t like them. “Delia, I haven’t had a nightmare since I realized the truth about Truman.”

“It’s your psychic self adjusting,” she said.

I imagined a long string of bewildered children between North Carolina, Texas, and Louisiana. That sweet smile of his and his deep brown eyes could charm. Had he charmed me? Was that the thing my mind would not let me see? Sex is a mystery to a four-year-old. If he made it something else, like a game, would I have known what was going on? Or did I realize late? Did I scream or tell him to stop? In my nightmares, I could not move, but I did feel terror. Was that me as an abused baby? I could not breathe. My heart was pounding so hard I could hear it like a drumming, banging inside my skull. My arms, legs, and torso were paralyzed, and all that came out of my mouth was the shriek of a wounded being. I felt detached from my body, tormented and begging for rescue. Did my mother walk in and think that I wanted it to happen? Did I look guilty or ashamed, not knowing about sex but recognizing the look of horror in my mother’s eyes? “Delia, Truman is a devil,” I said. My right hand was shaking.

“Turn on the TV to CNN. Get your mind off it,” she said.

We unpacked only our nightclothes so that we could rise early and leave. Noleen made oatmeal and coffee. I had no appetite for breakfast. Jackson drove us to the Dallas airport. Braden told us to meet him outside the US Airways terminal. Delia and I checked through security and then found our departing dock. We had to walk out onto the strip lugging our suitcases, down where the parties meeting private planes were allowed to board.

When I saw him standing out on the landing strip, the cold winter wind shuffling his hair around his ball cap, I burst into tears. I don’t know why I cried. But his impassive stare warmed to my tears. He held me, and I could smell the faint musk of the flight cabin still in his clothes.

“I knew this’d be hard for you. You think you can fly again?” he asked.

I never was one to cry in Braden’s arms, but for that moment, I allowed it, and so did he. He wheeled my luggage up to the storage section of his plane and helped Delia board. I had gotten on without him the past few weeks, but depending on him to ferry me to Louisiana seemed like a crossing of light beams. I was surprised that we did not explode right there on the runway, but truly glad. Braden, even at his drunken worst, was never ugly and to most women a good looker. He looked like a kid standing in the cold, his nose the color of wine. He had a small brown bit of bristle on his chin, shaven clean in a square, a bit of beard that reminded me of the Wilmington students who meet for darts and beer down in Myrtle Beach.

“I’m not going to be stupid about getting back into a plane,” I said. “There’s a day of facing your own shadows. Today I’m getting on this plane, and tomorrow I’m meeting my personal nightmare.”

Braden helped me inside, up from the last step and forward into the cockpit. He was never one to splash on much cologne; more of a soap and deodorant man, but his soap smell permeated the plane. “It’s cold out here,” he said, and locked the door behind us. He looked startled by Delia but mumbled a greeting that sounded weak and awkward. He told me once she looked like a wild woman to him, like a girl who would throw herself off a ledge but take three people with her.

Noleen had made us bags of traveling snacks: Christmas cookies and smoked almonds. I gave them to Braden. “Merry Christmas,” I said.

He looked stunned. “It doesn’t seem like a holiday, does it?”

I agreed. I felt more hollow than holy.