Lamb

It’s the kind of thing a guy like David Lamb might tell himself again and again, how she’d lifted her head, the little crinkles and puckers in her chin and neck as she looked down at him and that absolutely terrified and wide-open face, white in the dark, and shadows from the oil lamp shrinking and stretching like live arms. And him telling her God, God, you’re sweet, you have freckles everywhere. And how he’d choked up telling her he was so honored to see so many of them, and were they his? Could they say they were his? Such an expensive gift. So dear. And listen to me: he knew it.

Watching her load up the truck the next morning in her miniature parka, he saw her in her purple tube top, pushed around by those stupid girls. All her body and inner world had come awake by his hand. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose were bright pink in the cold. She sniffled and ran her sleeve above her lip.

“Emily Tom. Before we go. Will you lie with me in the deer beds by the water?”

“Okay.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“What.”

“Will you …” He looked down at his hands, and into her face, and down again. “Will you wear your nightgown?”

She looked at her blue jeans and jacket. “You’ll have to keep me warm.”

“I will.”

Eventually our old guy would look to her like a fluke, a mistake, a weird time she survived when she was eleven. In his memory she would become more beautiful, more dear. In hers, he’d be a monster.

All of eastern Wyoming and western Nebraska were hammered by ice and driving wind. The girl shivered in the passenger seat, her lips white, with Lamb sweating beside her, a giant bright orange bottle of cough medicine between them and Styrofoam cups of hot tea from gas stations. Every half hour or so Lamb reached sideways to touch her face and she’d open her eyes and try to smile.

“You look awful,” she’d say.

“You look worse.”

In Grand Island he reached into the back and retrieved the filthy Cubs hat and put it on her head. They stopped for egg drop soup in Omaha and slept twelve hours in a Holiday Inn with the TV on where they were sick and feverish and both their bodies aching. Back in the truck he fed her Nyquil and ginger ale and she slept or spoke brokenly and deliriously until Council Bluffs. By the time they made Des Moines they were both coming out of the fog of medicine and sore throats and splitting temples. Lamb drove them back to the little green motel now bleak with dark wet leaves.

“Did you like me when we stayed here the first time? I think you did.”

“I think I did,” she said.

“How did you know?”

“Just knew.”

“Do you still, Tom?”

“Yes.”

“Even though I’m a liar and a thief?”

She reached out and punched him forcelessly in the shoulder.

“Boy,” he said, “you were a lot stronger on the way out. We need to get you some spinach.”

She grinned.

“Your body has changed since September,” he said. “That part is true.”

“I know.”

He whispered. “Did I change it?”

She whispered back. “I think it was going to happen anyway.”

His eyes filled with tears, the world went all smeary on the other side of the windshield. “You know just what to say.” And suddenly he began sobbing. Really crying, really huffing tears. His whole chest seizing and his face twisted like a little boy’s. What would be left him when she was gone: a hole that she’d once filled with these consoling words. His doubt and his demons, the ones he’d taught her to keep at bay, they’d get him by the throat. And he knew it.

“Promise me something, dear,” he said. Say she’d gotten used to these bursts of crying—say he’d had a few of them. Say even that he’d been having them for a while, in the afternoons and a little bit in the mornings by the fire. “If you discover one day that you hate me.”

“I won’t.”

“Please don’t say that. You might. I have to say this, okay.”

She waited. His voice was scratchy and high.

“If you discover you hate me, that you’re angry with me, that I’ve ruined your life. When I’m ninety. Anytime.” He stopped. She nodded for him to go on. She’d become such a little woman. “You’ll come tell me, won’t you? You’ll buy a pair of steel-toed boots and come and find me all alone and dried up and sick in a nursing home and kick my fucking teeth in. Or whisper to me on my deathbed that I was d—”

“Stop it!” Now she was crying.

“Oh,” he said and wiped his nose with his sleeve then hers and turned her crying face to his. “It’s not true,” he said. “I’m sorry. Nothing I said was true. I’ve had too much medicine. Too much driving.” He took her hands and held them to his chest, to his neck, then his mouth. “Please forget everything I just said. Please promise me you will forget it. Tell me you promise, okay?”

“I promise.”

It was the fever that’d cracked him open. Lamb had wanted to return her to her mother shipshape, twelve on a ten scale. The plan had been to bring her home fast, three days on the road and no time for this kind of slippage, but there it was. Everything was off. He felt ash filling up his chest and throat from the inside, blocking his mouth and thickening his heart and filling up his head, he hoped, blocking it out like the heavy gray ceiling of winter settling in over the plains, so that he would not be able to see into it. Not after this day. Not after this.

By the time they made Rockford he could see they needed to hold out there a day, maybe two days. Until she got well, until he was ready. He pulled into the registration parking space at a Red Roof off of I-90, just across the street from a shopping outlet. He held the steering wheel with both hands and stared hard through the windshield. “Do you want to know what it is? It’s that I can’t let you go.” The girl did not speak. “Does that make you sorry? Like some part of you is anxious to get home?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice was very small.

“You sound scared. Are you scared?”

“No.”

“Because you trust me, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what’s going to happen to me when you’re back in your life, swimming and going to movies and dances? Getting your first job and falling in love and cutting your hair short?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ll do all those things. It’s okay. Tell me you will. Say it.”

“I don’t know, Gary.”

“You will. You’ll throw your tree book in the back of the closet and find it when you’re packing for college. You’ll throw it away. You should let me take that poisonous flower now. I’m the one who’s going to need it.”

“I won’t throw the book away.”

“Do you know how it will be for me?”

The girl said nothing.

“I’m going back to that shop and I’m going to sleep on the floor next to our bunk beds. I’m never going to sleep in them again. But I’m going to leave them up. I’ll be on the wool blanket on the concrete. Every night, all winter, if it kills me.”

“You’ll freeze.”

“It’ll be good for me to feel that cold.”

“Gary.”

“When it’s winter here and the wind bites your face and turns your fingers to glass inside your gloves, I want you to think of me alone out there.”

“Gary, don’t.”

“No. Don’t. Don’t touch me. It’s good for me to cry a little. A man can cry, can’t he?”

She watched him holding the steering wheel.

“You’ll outgrow me,” he said. “You’ll forget everything.”

“No I won’t.”

“I’m going to write it all down. Send it to you. Or no. You’d better just forget all about me. I’ll come back to the city and wander around looking for you, but you’ll be gone. There’ll be a woman in your place and I won’t know how to find you.”

“I can’t help it.”

“I know.” He was really crying.

A businesswoman in a long beige raincoat and purple scarf passed before them and looked into the Ford. She opened the driver’s side door of a blue Chrysler beside the girl, and Lamb wiped his eyes with his shirtsleeve.

“Look at this old guy,” he said, “blubbering like a baby.”

“You’ll be okay, Gary.”

“Oh, you dear thing.”

“I think we should take a nap,” the girl said, “in here.”

“In the truck?”

“In this motel.”

“You don’t feel well, do you?”

“I’m okay.”

“We’re going to stay here as long as we need to, okay? I’m bringing you back healthy. I’m delivering you to your mother hale and whole, right? Our story depends on it.”

“Right.”

In the cool and damp motel room Lamb folded down the bed for the girl and arranged all the pillows while she showered, and when she came out shivering in the tiny white towel he scooped her up, naked and damp towel and all, and set her in the sheets and pulled the blankets over her.

“Now,” he said and handed her the TV remote, “I’m going to be right back.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to get us more nighttime meds and hot soup from the Jewel over there and we’ll just find an old movie or make fun of the news guys till we fill our bellies and fall asleep, right?”

“Okay.”

“Good. What kind of soup?”

“The hot kind.”

“Like spicy?”

“No, please.”

“You want something with noodles in it, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Noodles and cold medicine and pillows and TV and sleep. Who doesn’t want that? And tomorrow, fried eggs and hot coffee.”

“Gary?”

“Yes, my dear.”

“I don’t actually feel sick anymore.”

“We just want to give you a little more soup and medicine and sleep so you’re really strong. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“We don’t want you having a relapse.”

“Okay.”

“Tom?”

“Yes.”

“When I get back”—he pointed to the bed—“can I lay there? In the space beside you?”

“Duh.”

“I didn’t want to make any assumptions.”

She rolled her eyes and grinned. “I’ll find something on TV.”

“Be right back, my dear.”