If I Had You Page 18

  BUTLERS BEND from the air was very different from anything Ben had seen from a city airport. Packs of industrial complexes and traffic in line like fire ants. Every roof the same, cul-de-sacs in perfect circles, in-ground swimming pools like blue buttons. But below him here, oh, he’d never known! This place of his life, like a giant’s bedspread beneath him with wrinkles and folds, continuously mussed by people he liked and could see.

  The wind rushed beside his ears. Ben felt exhilarated and free. He knew his heart had lifted off from the ground at the same time the airplane did. Living with Nora and Tess and now Tansy had bound his insides into knots. In this hour, on this day, the Grumman Ag-Cat gave Ben this: his mental strain was soothed. He thought, Can it be this way? That a person doesn’t know what he’s living with until he leaves it behind?

  “See down there?” Ben pointed toward the courthouse cupola that stood like a fancy cake in the center of town. “And look at that!” The Butlers Bend water tower became an enormous egg on a stand.

  The first person he saw was Roy Frakes, shoving at least a dozen grocery carts snaked together across the Food Basket parking lot. Then here was Dolores Jones stepping through the double doors of the bank. Jane Ruckmann and Howard, sharing a bite at What-A-Burger’s outdoor table.

  It now occurred to Ben, as people pointed up at them and waved, that Nora would hear of his whereabouts before he ever had the chance to get home.

  The heaviness settled on his heart again. For years, he had walked on eggshells around her. If he made one wrong move, he had decided somewhere along the line, she would blame him for all of it. Well, I don’t care! Ben thought. Let people tell her. I deserve a little fun now and then.

  Tansy’s head fit just below his jaw as he pointed everything out to her. He loved the way her hair tickled his chin. She waved at everyone who looked her way. Since everyone seemed to be glad Creede had come home for some of his leave, and since Creede was doing a fair amount of barnstorming, that added up to just about the census count of Gilford County. In the pilot’s seat behind them Creede bellowed into the sky, “There’s nothing better. There is nothing better.”

  Ben clasped Tansy tight against him and nestled his face in all her crazy curly hair. Up, up they soared, past the steeple of the church and the baseball field with its steel trumpets of lights and the only bend in the road for at least thirty miles. Butlers Bend.

  “Hey, Creede,” Ben shouted over his shoulder. “Know why the road makes a turn like that?” And that’s when the engine stopped.

  Eerie, deathly quiet. Suddenly they could hear the birds.

  Tansy flagged her hands up over her face and screamed with joy. “Eeeeeeeee.”

  Ben shoved her hands down by her sides and held them there. He pivoted in his seat to have a view of U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Creede Franklin. “Creede?” he asked with a hopeful little smile.

  Nothing but silence. And a breeze. A tiny, lilting breeze.

  Don’t ask, Creede motioned, shaking his head.

  “Grandpa. I can’t . . . can’t even breathe.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I’m going to hold you.” He turned to the pilot behind him again. “Tell me, Creede,” he said, “that you cut the engine on purpose.”

  Creede shook his head.

  Ben knew there were precious few readouts and control dials in this thing. Nothing much to fiddle with. They’d gone from a power plane into a glider. What had Creede said he knew how to fly?

  Ben felt Creede pull the nose up. The propeller windmilled in front of them. Creede tried to start the engine. It growled like something angry, died away.

  “We’re . . . gonna have to . . . ride this thing . . . to the ground.”

  “What can I—?”

  “Just sit tight.”

  “You said you’d get us back—”

  “Number one rule of flying,” Creede announced through gritted teeth. “When the engine goes out, all promises are off.”

  Below them sprawled the members of the Mighty Fighting Armadillo High School Marching Band, which must have assembled for summer camp. Such a great view from up here of their lopsided double-wheel formation. Ben recognized strains of The Theme from Spiderman just before saxophones tilted awry, trombones fell to the ground, and snare drummers took off running.

  The Ag-Cat cleared the rim of Armadillo Stadium. “Made it,” Ben said, his voice cracking. But up ahead was Frank Stoneman in his massive tiller, breaking up his black field, leaving acres of corduroy-textured dirt. Rough terrain.

  “Hang on to Tansy,” Creede barked.

  For seconds, Ben didn’t recognize the warm, metallic taste in his mouth. He licked it, and the sharp pain gave him a hint. His lower lip was bleeding.

  Pecans showered as the plane clipped the tops of trees. Mockingbirds and jays rose, complaining. All Ben could see were shadows, furrows, the propeller blades slicing ahead. What a dumb way to get them killed.

  “Here we—”

  The wheels hit once and tore up the dirt. Hit again, and the plane went toppling. Ben remembered this sensation of flipping from the time he’d lost his balance running through the revolving barrel in the funhouse at the Texas State Fair. He could see nothing, yet he noticed every shadow in the dirt clods, every tendon in his arms. He noticed Tansy’s dark curls springing in every direction from her head.

  EVERY TIME he saw Creede Franklin for the rest of his life, he knew he would think: “That’s just great. You got new seats put in but forgot to put in the new engine.”

  Creede, behind him, was laughing. Laughing. “Gear got stuck in a hole or something. Must of tore off.”

  So there they were, their mouths full of North Central Lowland, their three seatbelts fastened tight, all three of them hanging upside down.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  National Air Transportation Safety Board (NATSB)

  Fort Worth Office

  OFFICIAL ACCIDENT REPORT

  Date: August 10

  Vehicle: Grumman G154 Ag-Cat

  Owner: Pete, Sr., and Creede Franklin

  Cause of Accident: Engine lost power. Engine Assembly Failure Cylinder, Total. Original cylinder cracking caused by fatigue.

  How could you?” Nora stood directly in front of him on the porch. He couldn’t get into their house without walking past her. “How could you?”

  Ben could guess. Caroline Rakes had phoned the minute Jonathan had come barreling in with his convoy of grocery carts. And Jane Ruckmann had been unable to resist using her new cell phone to say, “I’m sitting outside at the What-A-Burger and guess who just zipped by overhead!” Nora had heard from someone how they buzzed the courthouse, from someone else how they spooked Baxton Lance’s entire herd of white-faced Hereford cows.

  Then, on her own, she must have heard the sirens.

  “It sounded like fun,” he said now.

  He saw Nora’s legs give way beneath her. She sat down right on the brick stoop, staring at the Band-Aid on Tansy’s cheek.

  “Why?” she asked again.

  “Why not?” He took Tansy’s hand in his and tried to lead her past her very angry grandmother. “Why not?”

  There she sat, her spine braced against the world, hugging her knees with her arms. “That old airplane, Ben. Of all things, why did it have to be that old, dangerous airplane?”

  “Oh, sorry. Why not the Marsalis Zoo where a tiger could have gotten her? Why not at the church playground where you won’t let her swing too high because she might fall out?”

  “You know how I hate flying. You know how it terrifies me, Ben.”

  “She’s just a little girl, Nora. You can’t protect her from the world. You can’t keep regular things from happening to her.”

  This time of evening even birds stopped singing. He and Tansy’s two-headed shadow fell across the brick in a smudge.

  “Nana, we had a really good time up there. We had a really good time coming down. We crashed.”

  “I’m aware of that.” Nora shook her head at th
e sky.

  Ben finally opened the front door. When it swung wide, though, he didn’t go inside. He gave Tansy a loving pat on the bottom and said, “I have to talk to your nana about something.”

  “Can I have a snack? Can me and Nana have a tea party again?” Tansy asked.

  “No. Not right now.” Another little tap on the backside. “Go find your Little Leap and play with that, okay, sweetie?”

  “We’ll be inside in a little while,” Nora added.

  “Okay, Nana.” Tansy’s fingers curled around the knob and she pulled it. The last thing they saw before the door latched was Tansy’s eye, still peering with curiosity through the crack.

  “You’re making her into a substitute for Tess. You’re substituting Tansy for our real daughter,” Ben said, turning on her.

  Tess, who was so far away from them.

  Tess with her broken soul.

  “I’m not doing that.”

  “Well, the way you’re acting, the way you won’t let her breathe without you worrying about her. You’re making her into a substitute for something.”

  “You think that’s wrong?”

  Ben hadn’t realized what they were doing until he’d gotten up in that airplane. He’d only thought they were plodding along, doing what they had to do to survive. But, no. “We’ve gone rushing ahead, built our lives again on Tansy, not what came before.”

  “Why not, Ben? How can that be wrong? Why can’t we cover up the bad with the good?”

  “I think it makes us hold on too hard.”

  “You think I’mholding on too hard. That’s what you said, didn’t you?”

  “I’m talking about myself, Nora. I’m talking about both of us together.”

  Ben remembered coming out of the bathroom one day years ago, drying off his jaw. He nicked himself almost every time he shaved. There at his bureau, as he stuck tissue against the spot he’d nicked, he found a piece of construction paper propped there—a drawing of a house.

  ON TOP OF MY HART, THAT’S WHERE YOU STAND. LOVE, TESS.

  Tess, the daughter who had broken their hearts.

  Tess, as she’d begun to grow, her angular pale face, her hair straight down in her eyes when the other girls styled theirs and pulled it back. Tess, with Creede Franklin as her first love, who had seemed a different person dressed in cornflower-blue satin the night they’d gone to the eighth-grade dance.

  Tess, who had stood on top of his feet and had grabbed his hands and had said, “Teach me to waltz, Daddy! Will you teach me to twirl like the prince did with Cinderella?”

  Nora spun around to him, tears sparkling like jewels in her eyes. “Isn’t Tansy good for us? Why can’t we just take what’s here and enjoy it? Why do you have to punish me for that?”

  Ben said, “Because I want my wife, Nora. I don’t understand everything. The more you’re holding onto Tansy, the more there is something of you that isn’t there.”

  “I thought you said you were talking about yourself, too.”

  “Well, I—”

  “You always find something wrong with what I’m doing, Ben. Do you know that? No matter how hard I try, you dig deep and find something to criticize.”

  “Nora.”

  With a sharp, gasping cry, “Don’t you know that I miss her, too?”

  “You never talk about her, Nora. You never do.”

  “What if having Tansy was the gift God wanted us to have all along? What if you’re so busy trying to make me do the right thing that you make me miss the blessing?” Nora asked.

  “You never think about Tess. You never talk about her.”

  “What good would it do, Ben? Prolong the misery?”

  “You don’t ever want her to come back.”

  Her words came sharp and hard. “No, I don’t.” Then, “I would never let that girl get ahold of this child.”

  “Listen to yourself. You don’t want your own daughter.”

  “I did once. Don’t you think I did?” Nora squinted up at him. All he could see of her were straight angles, a mouth stretched taut like a rubber band. “Don’t you think I did?”

  “I never see you doing anything except going forward, Nora.”

  She fended him off with her arm, holding it square over her chest so he couldn’t touch her. “Leave me alone, Ben. Just leave me alone. There is more to this than you will ever know.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The dirty sheets that came in at Bunyan Dry Cleaning that day were sorted by the dozen, eleven of them piled inside the twelfth, which was knotted at the corners into a huge sling. Just before two in the afternoon, Tess left the front counter at Bunyan Dry Cleaning. The other girls could handle the rush. More dry cleaning came in on Monday than on any other day. The phone rang more often, too. Bunyan Dry Cleaning did the sheets for three downtown Dallas hotels. Hotels used plenty of sheets on the weekends.

  Tess dumped the two mountainous piles of sheets onto the floor and began to recount, marking the receipt that had come in with the hotel trucks. The soft-press machine was already steaming. After only a few minutes of working on it, her hair frizzed and her cheeks were wet and she never thought she’d be anyplace cool again. As she worked, she swabbed sweat from her face with one wrist.

  One statement that she’d made to her mother all those years ago had proven true. She had said, If I have a baby, a person related to me would exist somewhere. Someone I would have to wonder about. Someone I would have to think of.

  Sometimes at Bunyan Dry Cleaning, a frilly bedspread would come through, or a little woolen coat, or a pair of jeans with pink embroidery. When they did, Tess would catch herself thinking, Maybe Tansy wore a coat like this. Or, Maybe Tansy had something like this in her room. Or, I wonder if she knows what I look like.

  Tess did not know if she would recognize her daughter’s face anymore. She tried to recall the details of her eyes and nose and tiny mouth but she couldn’t do it. I wonder if she knows that Cootie didn’t want her.

  When Tess arrived at the house in the evenings, she was not in the mood to wade through Cootie’s friends. He bragged about it, how this place had become a virtual command post, peopled by high school kids mostly, who admired Cootie and wanted to be like him. Some nights, she felt like she was cooking hot dogs for a hundred people. That’s all they ever had to eat. Hot dogs, eaten by boys who had given themselves new names because they saw Cootie as a hero.

  Tess thought most about these things when the nights grew quiet and she was alone. After darkness fell, the boys would disperse. When they returned, they played their rap and spoke in hushed tones. Were they in fights? She didn’t know. Were they hurting other people? Tess tried not to care. But while they were gone, even the house would seem to whisper of these things. In every creak of the floor and every sigh of the roof, Tess would remind herself that it was Cootie who mattered, not the suspicions she had begun to have about him.

  One night as she sat reading beneath the small circle of light from the floor lamp, she glanced out the window to see a car cruising slowly up the street, its high beams reflecting off the pavement.

  Tess pushed herself up with one hand and her book fell to the floor. She wanted to hide. In that moment, alone and afraid, she knew the lamp illuminated her through the frayed curtains. She shoved the sofa out from the wall so she’d have crawlspace behind it.

  She kicked something with her toe. At her feet, hidden in the space between the furniture and the wall, was a pile of guns. The barrels gleamed at her in the dull light. She knew, from the things Cootie had told her, that he’d put hands on a few people. Tess didn’t know Cootie had guns.

  Shoving the armament aside with her feet, she dove behind the sofa at the same time she heard the door bust open. There she crouched, wedged between the wall and the couch, her breath coming in sharp, horrified gasps. The kitchen floor creaked.

  “Tess?” came Jimmy Ray’s voice. “Where are you?”

  Thankfulness poured over her. It was only Jimmy Ray.

&nb
sp; “Tess?”

  “I’m here.”

  When he walked into the room, he caught her climbing out from behind the furniture. With a discreet toe, she nudged the gun barrels back under the couch.

  “Something scare you?”

  “I heard the car,” she said. “You were driving slow.”

  “I was looking out for people who knew me,” he told her. “Didn’t want anybody squealing to Cootie that I came back here.”

  “Why’d you come?”

  “I don’t much like the idea of him leaving you here alone all the time.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to me.”

  “That why you were hiding behind the sofa?”

  “You caught me.” She grinned back. “Right.”

  The couch was old enough to have fleas. Together they pushed it back against the wall. If Jimmy Ray knew what she had found, he didn’t say a word about it.

  So she asked instead, “Jimmy Ray? Why’s everybody worried this time? Has Cootie hurt somebody?”

  Jimmy Ray hesitated. “Coot don’t talk to you about that stuff?”

  “No.” She followed Jimmy Ray into the bathroom where he ran a comb under the faucet and attempted to flatten his hair. “He’s got plenty of other people to talk to besides me.”

  The comb left runnels in Jimmy’s hair like plow furrows in a field. He didn’t speak.

  “I think I ought to know.”

  He tapped the comb on the edge of the sink and laid it on the cabinet. “He has to be the one to tell you. I won’t.”

  “I don’t like it, if he does.”

  “Why do you think those kids follow him the way they do? He doesn’t have a choice, Tess. He’s going to keep the reputation, he’s got to keep people scared.”

  Tess had tried so many times to make this place look like a home since she’d come back. On the table in the family room, she’d placed a bowl of broken glass she’d picked up along the curb and washed. She’d “borrowed” a candle from a table in the deli next door to where she worked and placed it in the bowl. Now she picked up a match and struck it.