All The Ugly and Wonderful Things 20

  

 13

 

WAVY

 

June 1990

 

For a few days afterwards, I could press my fingers up into myself and find the raw spot Kellen had left. The swelling in my wrist went down after a few days, and left a bruise in the shape of his fingers. Then that faded, too.

 

I put the ring away in the velvet box the lady in the jewelry store had given me, because I couldn’t wear it anymore. Kellen had made me keep the ring, but he hadn’t put it back on my finger. That meant it wasn’t my wedding ring. When I pressed it to my mouth it was just a rock. The difference between a meteor falling through the atmosphere and a meteorite lying in the dirt.

 

I didn’t regret kicking my electric typewriter down the stairs. Aunt Brenda had given it to me for my high school graduation, and whether she intended it or not, gifts take up space in your heart. I needed that space now. I finished my Spanish essay on a computer on campus. For the letters I needed to write, I had the manual Underwood that Grandma taught me to type on. It was Army green and weighed almost thirteen pounds. It worked fine, and Grandma didn’t take up any more room in my heart than a floor takes up space in a house.

 

When Renee wasn’t complaining about the sound of me typing, she was hovering anxiously. I don’t know what she thought I would do if she left me alone too long. Get high on correction fluid? Or maybe she thought I would do what I did: write a letter a day to Kellen’s parole officer until his supervisor wrote me back.

 

Dear Miss Quinn,

 

I apologize for the delay in responding to your letters. To answer your questions: the conditions of Jesse Joe Barfoot’s parole were not set by this office. Therefore, we are unable to alter the no contact order. The conditions of his parole were set by the sentencing judge. To have them changed, you would need to file a formal appeal in the district court where he was sentenced.

 

 

 

Sincerely,

James Teeter

 

“What happens now?” Renee said.

 

“Formal appeal in district court.”

 

I opened my accordion file folder, put the letter in one slot, and pulled out a Form J-319-7. Modification to Orders of Protection and No Contact. I put it in the old Underwood and rolled it up.

 

“Wow, there’s a form for that?” Renee said.

 

I’d requested the form, even before I knew I would need it, just like I’d requested copies of Kellen’s final judgment from the district court. I took those out, too, to be sure I got everything correct on the form.

 

It made me sick to see him listed there by the name he never wanted: Jesse Joe Barfoot, Jr. They’d taken away his identity, pressed him back into his father’s mold. Kellen wasn’t the only one who had his identity stripped away in those records. Every place I appeared, I was the minor victim, identified only as WLQ. To protect me, of course, even if I didn’t want to be protected. That was what I put in the very small space provided on the form for me to justify my request to have the no contact order rescinded. I do not wish to be protected by the court’s order, as the defendant presents no danger to me.

 

“Have you considered becoming a lawyer?” Renee said, while I typed.

 

“Never.” I thought of all the lawyers who’d passed through my life, and I didn’t envy any of them the part they’d played.

 

I drove up to Garringer by myself to file the form and pay the fifty dollar filing fee. After that, I waited. Just like I’d been waiting for years. Renee talked about how electronic mail was going to be the next big thing, but the dented mailbox in the front hall of our apartment building was still my god. Every day I prayed that it would deliver up a letter from Donal or from someone who knew where he was. I prayed for it to bring me an answer from the district court.

 

I wondered if that was what it was like for Kellen, after he’d written Liam’s phone number on my arm. When he was sitting alone and bleeding, waiting for me to come back, had it seemed like a month to him? Had it seemed longer? Had it seemed hopeless?

 

14

KELLEN

July 1990

That first week, I slept at the same dive hotel where I’d stayed when Beth’s grandkids came to visit. Most of June, when the weather was good, I stayed at a campground in a tent I picked up from an Army surplus store. Reminded me of sleeping out in the meadow with Wavy, and it was that memory as much as the summer heat that made me give it up. After a couple more nights in a motel, I moved in with Craig, one of the guys at the shop. Him and his wife was expecting a baby, though, and she didn’t like me being there when he was out.

By the middle of August, I was back to another crappy motel, and working as many hours as I could, so I wouldn’t have to be at the motel except to sleep.

I had my head up under the hood of a Toyota when somebody said, “Jesse,” behind me. There was Beth, with her hair dyed this new dark color of red, holding my baseball bat. Wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d swung it at me, but she said, “You forgot this. Thought you might want it. And your winter coat.”

The employee lounge was just a closet with lockers and chairs, but it was kind of private, so I took her in there. I stuck the bat and coat in my locker and counted three hundred dollars out of my wallet.

“Thanks for bringing my stuff. This here’s for May’s rent and electric,” I said.

“You were only there for a week.”

“Yeah, well, I still owe you the rent.”

She took the money and put it in her purse. Then she just looked at me, so I knew she was waiting for me to say something.

“Look, I’m sorry about what happened. I know that was a lousy thing to do to you. If I’d been thinking—”

“Is it over? Are you still breaking your parole?” Beth said.

“No. I haven’t seen her again.”

“If it’s over, you could come back. I won’t put up with you breaking your parole, but if you promise it’s over, we could try again.” I guess I didn’t answer soon enough, because she stood up and put her purse over her shoulder. “Jesus Christ. I can’t believe I came here thinking you might be interested in a second chance.”

“I can’t come back, because I can’t promise anything. If Wavy showed up tomorrow, I’d do it all over again. I loved her the first time I saw her and I still do.”

“Love at first sight, huh?” Beth snorted. “How old was she?”

“Eight.”

“That’s creepy.”

She said a bunch of other shitty things, too. “You should’ve stayed in prison if that’s how you’re going to live,” and, “Nothing like flushing the rest of your life down the toilet over some girl you’re never going to be with.” Like I didn’t wish I was dead most of the time. Like I hadn’t spent some time thinking about where I could buy a gun and solve it. Almost as much time as I’d spent thinking about breaking my parole and seeing Wavy.

After Beth got that out of her system, she asked me to move back in with her. I said yes, but only as roommates. She needed help with the rent, and I needed some place to stay that wasn’t gonna get me in trouble with my parole officer.

It woulda been nicer to live alone, but at least now Beth couldn’t lay there at night and talk me half to death when I wanted some quiet. She didn’t have any business complaining about my deodorant or my haircut or my tattoos. She still did, but I didn’t have to pay attention.

The real difference was that Beth couldn’t put her hand on my dick and say, “Turn off the TV and let’s go in the bedroom,” whether I wanted to or not. I don’t think I could have stomached that. Not when I had Wavy burned in my brain. Some nights, when I came home from work and walked into the kitchen, all I could think of was the way she’d stood on the chair and stripped down to her boots. How she’d run her hands over me. No woman had ever looked at me the way she did, or touched me that way. Like she wanted me, like I was worth wanting.

Most times all I could think of was how she’d come there and given herself to me. I didn’t even have the decency to tell her we couldn’t be together until after. Just desperate to be with her. I was still the same guy who let her give me a hand job when she was all of thirteen.

 

15

RENEE

August 1990

It got to where Wavy wouldn’t even let me check the mailbox. If I went to get the mail, she practically tackled me when I came back, and yanked it out of my hands.

“Good thing I’m not expecting any love letters,” I said, while she rifled through the fliers and bills.

“You don’t need love letters.” She thumped her hand on the kitchen table half-a-dozen times to mimic the sound of my headboard knocking against my bedroom wall, but I knew she didn’t begrudge me the fun I was having with Darrin.

Three weeks later, Wavy’s answer came. Or rather an answer. It was a copy of the form she submitted, with the bottom half filled out by hand. The box next to This matter was not set for hearing had been checked. Below that, where the form said, “After review of the file and evidence, the court orders that the above referenced Protection or No Contact Order, entered on September 9, 1983, shall be modified as follows,” someone had written NO modification. Order remains in force. That same person had signed the form. Judge C. J. Maber.

“The judge said no? He said no? What a fucking asshole!” I was so pissed off, I couldn’t imagine how angry Wavy must have been. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she had torn the form up or thrown her typewriter down the stairs, but she didn’t. She spent maybe a minute glaring at the form and grinding her teeth. Then she sat down, stuck a piece of paper in the typewriter and started typing: Dear Judge Maber.

Contrary to Wavy’s usual habits, it was short and polite, just a request to meet with the judge. When she didn’t get an answer, though, the letters multiplied exponentially. The sheer quantity of them started to worry me, because at what point did it become harassment to send a letter a day to a judge? At least if the cops showed up, Wavy had returned all the illicitly borrowed law books to the library.

I wasn’t home when the letter came, but I knew something big had happened by the way Wavy was tearing around the apartment when I got home from my first class of the semester. She had half the clothes in her closet strewn out on the couch, and as soon as I walked in, she put the letter in my hand. It wasn’t even from the judge. It was from his clerk, and it just said, Judge Maber is available to meet with you on Wednesday, August 15th at 8:00 am. The judge’s court session begins at 9:00 a.m., so please be prompt.

We had less than thirty-six hours to get Wavy ready for her meeting with the judge and the girl owned a closet full of plain-Jane smocks, four pairs of shoes, two pairs of boots, shower shoes, and a pair of tennis shoes for her phys ed requirement that I know for a fact she bought in the children’s department. If I was going to help Wavy look like an adult, we had to start from scratch.

I don’t know if Wavy slept that night, but the next morning, we drove into the city early enough to be there when the stores opened. Within an hour, we had to give up on a business suit. They didn’t make them in Wavy’s size. We settled on a school uniform skirt in navy wool, but there was nothing else in the girls section at Macy’s that didn’t look like it was for little girls. The cashier there suggested what she called a “luxury ladies store” that carried small sizes. The sort of chichi place my mother loved to shop at. Wavy had turned twenty-one in July, so she could write checks off her trust without getting permission from anyone. Otherwise, I could imagine her aunt’s response to Wavy dropping almost four hundred dollars on a silk blouse in an extra-small petite, and a pair of Italian snakeskin sling-back pumps in a size four-and-a-half. My mother once described Wavy as “two steps away from the trailer park,” so I couldn’t wait to tell her they had the same taste in dress shoes.

Back at the apartment, Wavy washed the styling gel out of her hair and I gave her waves instead of spikes. I showed her how to shave her legs, even though she didn’t need it. You couldn’t even see the hairs on her legs.

“On principle,” she said. If adults shaved their legs, Wavy would shave hers.

Then we took the only trial run we were going to get. Skirt, blouse, bra, pantyhose, and shoes. I taught her how to walk in the heels, and once she could manage the stairs and a trip around the block, I officially declared her a grown-up.

In the dark hours of Wednesday morning, we made three attempts at her makeup. The first time, she was nervous about me touching her face. The second failure was a product of how disturbing Wavy looked in full makeup. Like a child prostitute. In the end, we went minimalist: lipstick, eye shadow. By the time she left for Garringer, the sun was coming up, and Wavy looked, if not exactly like an adult, then adultlike.

 

16

JUDGE C. J. MABER

I remembered the case, although it never went to trial. It didn’t hurt that I’d had Barfoot in my courtroom before on two separate assault charges. He left an impression. A giant of a man with a vicious temper, who still managed to look sheepish in court. I didn’t bother to pull the file before I declined to rescind the no contact order.

When the letters started coming, I looked at the file to refresh my memory. I still wasn’t inclined to meet with Miss Quinn, but I knew from long experience that some people cannot be put off. Some of them will persist until I agree to meet with them.

Miss Quinn arrived at my chambers right on time, and I was glad to see she was a serious young woman. I had no patience with the weepers and the screamers. That kind of woman makes me ashamed of my own sex. Miss Quinn was poised and well-dressed, but I couldn’t have guessed her age if I hadn’t already known it. Because Barfoot pled out, I’d never laid eyes on the girl, never seen how small and delicate she was. Honestly, if I had, I would have sentenced Barfoot to more than ten years.

She took the chair I pointed her to and set down a briefcase, which invariably held a photo album, containing pictures meant to tug at my heartstrings.

“Miss Quinn, may I call you Wavonna?”

“Wavy,” she said.

“Wavy, then. May I ask you some questions?” I liked to get at the things it didn’t occur to them to tell me. Most of all, I liked to let them know that they were important to me. To let them know they had value that wasn’t connected to the man they loved. Some of them got impatient, wanting to get to the real matter, but for many of them, I was possibly the first person in authority who had ever really expressed interest in them. Wavy was neither impatient nor starved for attention. I asked her about whether she was in school or employed. Both.

“Astrophysics,” she said, when I asked what she was studying. A smart girl, then.

“I know you’ve come here today to try to convince me to rescind the no contact order I put in place at Mr. Barfoot’s sentencing, but your presence here is proof to me that it was the right thing then and is still the right thing.”

“It isn’t fair.” She didn’t quite interrupt me, but she snuck in those three words while I was taking a breath. “Keeping him away from me was supposed to protect me, but I don’t want to be protected. I love him and I’m being punished even though I didn’t do anything wrong.”

I was struck silent for a moment, not by her words, which I’d heard hundreds of times from hundreds of other women, but by the quality of her voice. Husky and incredibly quiet, but not shy. I could have cut her off at any moment, because that little speech took her half a dozen breaths.

She was quiet for a moment, uncrossing her legs and reaching for her briefcase. As I’d known she would, she sprang her heartbreaking photo album on me. Or at any rate, her heartbreaking photo. It was a picture of Mr. Barfoot, Wavy, and a little blond boy of five or six years. All three were smiling. Mr. Barfoot had taken the picture, holding the camera out in front of them. They looked happy, of course. Familial. That was the point of those pictures.

“This is my family. My little brother, Donal. Kellen. Not Barfoot. My real family. You can help put it back together,” Wavy said.

“I somehow expected more from a girl as bright as you obviously are.”

Her eyes narrowed, so that I could see I hadn’t rattled her so much as I had angered her.

“I cannot even begin to tell you how many women I see like you, Wavy. Women who have fallen in love and think that gives a man the right to do anything to them. Most of them are victims of domestic violence, which I realize was not the case for you. What Mr. Barfoot did to you, however, was equally as harmful, if not more so. These women come to me, sometimes after waiting for years for their husbands, boyfriends, fiancés, the fathers of their children, to get out of prison.

“They come to me and beg me to reunite them with this man they love. This man who has slapped them and punched them and kicked them and sometimes raped them. They blame his terrible childhood, or the drugs, or the alcohol, or another woman, or the war. They come to me with a photo album, just as you have, to show me pictures of happier times, and they ask me to make their family whole again. I am telling you this, because I want you to understand how many times I see this, because I think you’re smart enough to see the rationale behind my decision. To see that I did the right thing by protecting you. And not just when you were a child, but by protecting you from making a mistake now.”

“Were you there when my father did this?” She laid her finger to her bottom lip, where she had an old white scar.

“Of course, no, I wasn’t there to protect you from any injuries your father might have inflicted on you. That doesn’t negate—”

“Kellen protected me,” she said. They always had a story about some kind or generous thing he’d done for them.

“Look at you. You’re in your senior year of college, with the opportunity for a good, successful life ahead of you. If you return to Mr. Barfoot, who not only was willing to exploit you as a child, but who is a high school dropout with a criminal record full of assaults, what do you think will become of that opportunity?”

“He took me to school. For six years. Paid my school fees. Dropped me off. Picked me up. Six years. No one else cared. His money pays my tuition now. He gave me this opportunity,” she said.

“Miss Quinn, I need to get ready for court. I truly wish you the best. Even for Mr. Barfoot. But you would both be better served by focusing on your respective futures, rather than dwelling on the past.” Getting them to leave was always the hardest part. They didn’t want to give up. They wanted to fight. Maybe they thought that was what I wanted to see: proof of how much they loved this man who had hurt them. Wavy, however, stood and picked up her briefcase. As she was about to retrieve the photo she’d laid on my desk, she hesitated.

“Your family?” she said. Before I could stop her, she reached across my desk and picked up the framed picture that I always kept facing myself. It was an old photo, from when my children were small, and my husband and I were both thinner and less gray.

“Yes.”

She shifted her gaze from the photo to me. I was discomfited by the intensity of that look, and I saw it for what it was: an accusation.

“Your family is real, but mine isn’t? Real people with real feelings, but my family isn’t—” She ran out of air and took a gulp. “—real to you. You think. I’m a character. A story. Those women you talk about. Not real people to you. Stupid women. Stupid photo albums. But you. You’re smart. You make smarter choices. For us.”

She was almost panting and, seeing the way the picture trembled in her hand, I rolled my chair back from the desk. Although there had been a few close calls, I’d never actually had a physical altercation with anyone. I always kept the door open so that if things got heated the bailiffs could hear, but Wavy’s anger was so hushed no one had noticed.

“Please don’t upset yourself. I really do have to go to court.” I stood up and walked around the desk. Although she was still holding my family photo, she didn’t try to stop me, so I poked my head out into the hallway and gestured for the bailiff. “Edward, would you please escort Miss Quinn out?”

She put the picture frame down and went with Edward, but as she walked away, she raised her voice.

“I’m real. I’m as real as you are. My family is real like your family,” she said.

 

17

WAVY

I needed to get back to Norman in time for my afternoon class, but when I passed the exit for the old quarry where we raced the Barracuda, the rotation of the Earth seemed to slow. The sun hovered at a standstill in the sky while I turned the car around and drove back through Garringer. I used to think of it as a big city, but now it was gone in a blink, and I was on the road to Powell.

Driving down Main Street, I felt like I was in a ghost story, but I didn’t know who was the ghost—me or all of Powell County. Downtown wasn’t much different than I remembered, maybe a few more storefronts were empty, but the hardware store had the same tools in the window, and the Shop ’n Save had hail damage to their front sign. Off Main Street, Cutcheon’s Small Engine had a yellowed sheet of notebook paper taped in the window. “Closed till further notice,” it said in Mr. Cutcheon’s handwriting.

Kellen’s house was occupied, but rundown. Nobody had painted it since we did, and the carport looked like it was about to fall down. Two dogs chained up in the front yard barked at me as I walked past.

On the drive out to the meadow, I turned off the air-conditioning and opened the windows. The heat and the dust rolled into the car, but the wind in my face was the closest I could get to riding on a motorcycle.

There was a new double-wide parked where Sandy’s trailer used to be, but I think the people living there were actually farming, because there were tractors parked by the barns. Cattle grazed in the meadow, and they turned their heads and watched me with soft brown eyes as I drove past. The driveway to the farmhouse was so washed out, I had to park on the road and walk up, getting gravel in my fancy shoes.

The honeysuckle vines had crawled up over the front porch and collapsed the trellis below the attic window. The screen door flapped in the breeze, and the kitchen door stood partway open. When I lived there, we’d never had a key to the kitchen door, so the police must have simply pulled the door closed. Anyone who wanted to walk in, could, including me.

I hadn’t been inside the house since Donal and I left that July to go visit Aunt Brenda. She never allowed us to come back. The kitchen floor was stained brown from Val’s blood, and grayed over with the dust of strangers walking through. Vandals must have used the table and chairs to build fires in the front room’s fireplace. They’d left behind beer bottles and spray painted the dining room walls. Upstairs in my room, Aunt Brenda had only taken the quilt Grandma made. She took that to Tulsa and packed it away, because it was an heirloom, too valuable to use. She’d left the little black and white TV, and someone had broken out its screen. I could see from the dirty sleeping bag and the condom wrappers that strangers had used the bed where Kellen and I spent so many nights lying next to each other.

I came back down to the kitchen and stood at the spot where Val had died. Just a few feet away from where Kellen kissed me for the first time. I pulled the kitchen door closed as I went out, and the porch floor creaked as I crossed to the steps. Walking back to my car, I followed the overgrown path to the limestone steps, where Kellen had sat after his wreck.

I’d been wrong about the Earth’s rotation slowing. It went on as steadily as always, and the afternoon was long gone. To the west, Venus and Jupiter held court with the setting sun. A few days before, the Magellan spacecraft had reached Venus, and started sending back pictures. Below the horizon lay Orion, resting until autumn, when he would rise over the meadow with only the cows to see him.

I thought then of Voyager 1 and 2, so far away. They were launched the same year I met Kellen, and now they had reached the end of our solar system. Although their programs were being powered down one by one, they traveled on. NASA said that in another twenty-five years, they would exit our heliosphere and cross into interstellar space. In another three hundred thousand years, Voyager 2 might reach as far as the star Sirius, but it would never come home.

That was how I felt, as I walked down the driveway to my car. I was moving forward into space, but I would never come home again.

Hours later, walking up the stairs to the apartment, I still felt like a satellite untethered from gravity. Above me, Renee opened our apartment door.

“Wavy! Oh my god, where have you been?” she shouted.

When I reached her, she was a star, pulling me into her orbit.

“Judge Maber called. She said, ‘Tell Miss Quinn that she was right. She is just as real as I am.’”