A Ticket to Ride (6 page)

When he was a boy, Raymond had sometimes followed his father out to the small animal barn, wanting to be near him, but
was more often dissuaded by the chickens making their usual racket behind a twisted wire gate. Raymond hated chickens. They were too noisy and moved too suddenly, seeming to rush him. He didn’t like their small, too-alert eyes or the way certain hens sported raw, featherless patches from where they’d been pecked and harassed by the roosters or by other hens. Once Raymond saw a hen balding herself. This seemed to take effort, given the shortness of her neck and how far she had to reach to her hindquarters, but she was intent. After several sessions, each lasting forty-five seconds or more, Raymond could make out a rough diamond shape of pink, human-looking skin pricked with red where the blood came.

“Why do they do that?” Raymond had asked his father, who was nearby, rubbing chicken shit and down and bits of straw from eggs before placing them in a cardboard crate.

Earl had simply shrugged and looked into his egg rag. “Guess something doesn’t quite feel right to her,” he’d said.

Raymond, unappeased, had pressed: “Doesn’t it hurt?”

“Yes,” said his father. “I imagine it does.”

Very early on, Raymond had given up on Earl as a source of attention. If he wanted praise, or to have someone listen to the best bits of a baseball game, or answer questions about his homework, if he wanted, simply, to be touched, he went to Berna. Suzette, on the other hand, was magnetized by what Raymond thought of as Earl’s perimeter—that space around his father that seemed cordoned off by invisible fencing. As Earl sat in the parlor, Suzette, even at two, three, four, would hover around him, either in spite of or because of his seeming not to notice she was there.

After Earl died, Suzette became even more fixated on him as a figure, a symbol, an idea. She wanted to talk about him all the time, wanted a larger picture of him put up on the mantel, though clearly these reminders upset their mother. Suzette
also became inordinately interested in death, what it meant to be dead. What was the soul, exactly? When you were buried, could your soul wake up in the casket and wonder where it was or how it could get out? And could you suffocate that way? Like dying again? When she went to Raymond with these questions, he didn’t know how to begin to answer them. He would have asked Berna for help, but she was in a kind of grief trance and would be for months, sliding past her children in the kitchen or the yard, not seeming to see them or remember they needed supper or baths. She seemed to be sleepwalking.

In the mornings, as Raymond made oatmeal for Suzette, Berna would stare out the window that faced the road. There was nothing out there, just the mailbox, the patch of switchgrass on the slope Earl had been too busy to keep mowed, and the one old Macintosh tree that bore sour fruit every other year. There was nothing to see, but that didn’t keep Berna from standing at the window for hours every day as if her feet were strapped to sandbags. At other times, she boiled water down to nothing on the stove, singed the toast, let milk sour on the table. She lit cigarettes and forgot them on the edge of the sink, where they burned themselves down.

Raymond missed his mother terribly, but there was so much to do in the way of caring for Suzette that he soon found himself drawn into an even tighter orbit around his sister. If he had worried about her before, that anxiety doubled, tripled after Earl’s death, as she began staging mock funerals for the animals on the farm—undead cats and chickens and Earl’s dog Milton who, with heroic patience, let her drape him with a white sheet and tuck weeds around his deaf old head.

“She just has an overactive imagination,” Berna said tiredly when Raymond finally did consult her about how to handle it. “She needs more exercise.”

So Raymond cajoled her out in the yard to play several times a
day. Once there, however, Suzette would begin the long process of embalming Milton, or sketch a clown face in the dirt with her finger, adding fangs and exploded stars for eyes. At school, they both had friends and lives apart from each other. Both got good grades and were well liked, but none of this seemed to apply once they climbed off the school bus. As they went up the dirt driveway, the front porch steps, the creaky stairs to their rooms, the world shrank and closed off, and it was just the two of them again, with Berna busy but distant in the parlor, dusting the already spotless mantel.

At night, when Berna was tucked behind her bedroom door, reading
Ladies’ Home Journal
or sleeping, Suzette would come into Raymond’s room, asking for bedtime stories, by which she meant ghost stories. She was a funny little kid that way, liking to be scared, the palpitations and breathlessness, the moments when she’d have to pinch her eyes shut or cover her head with a pillow. Against his better judgment, Raymond would give in and tell her the one about the escaped mental patient with a hook for an arm, the one about the big horned owl swooping off with the baby—and she would listen transfixed until she was too scared to sleep. Later, he’d hear her whimpering through the wall, or she’d knock on his door in the middle of the night, asking if she might sleep on the floor. And then the next night, she’d want the same. It occurred to Raymond that the eight-year-old who wanted ghost stories wasn’t much changed from the toddler who poked her bottle so she couldn’t drink from it.

Raymond woke to the boat’s manic rocking and the tail end of a half-dream about being pitched from a wheelbarrow. His feet were numb from sleeping in a vee, and he had a crick in his neck. From the cabin, he could smell eggs frying; didn’t Suzette know how to cook anything else? He dressed and maneuvered his way out of the bunk, complaining about his night in the tor
ture chamber. Suzette wasn’t complaining, though she looked even more tired than she had been the night before.

After eating and washing up, they went for a walk along Oxnard’s small and slightly run-down boardwalk. There was a saltwater taffy place and a gift shop and a shop where pink and gray and striped fish lay packed on ice, their eyes glazed and rubbery and unreal. The sun was finally out, making everything, aside from the stiff fish, look cleaner and more hopeful than it actually was. When a little boy in bib overalls ran up with a paper cup full of hermit crabs, wanting to sell them for a nickel apiece, Suzette gave him a quarter for the lot and peered in at them. Half were dead already; the other half were trying to climb over each other slowly, as if drugged or lost. She walked over to where a clot of seagulls congregated around a tar-stained pylon, and poured the cup out. “Here’s breakfast on me,” she said.

At the end of the boardwalk, they stopped at an ice cream parlor and watched through a squeaky-clean picture window as a pretty girl in a pink apron and skirt poured thin batter into a contraption that was like a giant waffle press.

“I work here,” Suzette said. “That’s Marie. She’s Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. I’m Mondays, Wednesdays, and weekends.”

Inside, the air smelled like bubble gum. Everything was glass or chrome and cold-looking. Suzette introduced Raymond to the girl behind the counter, who was also quite pretty, and to her boss, Stanley, who stood to one side in a long white apron smeared with chocolate. He offered Raymond a cone on the house, like some goodwill ambassador of ice cream, but it was too early to eat dessert. Is he sleeping with her? Raymond wondered as he thanked Stanley and declined.

Out on the wharf again, Suzette was too chipper about her job, how nice everyone was, how they each got to take home a pint of free ice cream a week.

“You gotta get out of here, Suzy.”

“What? Why? It’s a good job,” she said. The wind picked up the tips of her hair and blew them across her eyes in a screen. “You’re always getting down on me. I can take care of myself, you know. It’s a good job,” she repeated. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing, it’s fine. Great. But what are you doing down here?”

“Working. Taking care of myself.”

“Why here? You don’t know anyone.”

“John,” she said. “And Marie and the other girls, and Stanley. I know lots of people. And why do you care, anyway? Where do you think I should be instead?” Her face was becoming blotchy, pink islands blooming along her cheekbones and just under her eyebrows.

“Let’s drop it,” Raymond said. “It’s fine. I just want you to be happy.”

They had run out of boardwalk. To the left, there was a horseshoe of damp sand, and off in the distance, a water-treatment plant that looked like an enormous white kettledrum groaned every few minutes. It was an ugly place, which you could forget only if you faced the ocean and refused to turn your head.

“I’ve had a letter from Benny,” she said after some time had passed.

There it was, then. Raymond had been waiting for her to bring up the phone call and whatever it was that had shaken her up so, but didn’t want to force the issue until Suzette was ready. Benny had always been a loaded subject, a radioactive ex-boy-friend Suzette seemed drawn to in a pathological way, like those mice in scientific studies who couldn’t stop nosing electrified tabs in their cages. “How did he find you?”

She looked out to sea. “I don’t know. How’d you find me? How does anyone find anyone?”

“I thought you decided it would be best not to be in touch with him.”

“You decided. I just said okay if you remember.”

Raymond sighed and tried to keep his voice level. “In any case, it’s been years, hasn’t it?”

“I guess so. It doesn’t really matter. What I was trying to tell you is he’s dying.” Her voice dropped dramatically with this last word.

“Benny? What does he have?”

“I don’t think it’s a
disease
or anything.”

Raymond was growing more than a little frustrated with this game, dancing around, trying to ask just the right question so she’d give him the information she clearly wanted to if only he’d work for it first. “What then? How is he dying?”

“I don’t think he knows yet, that’s the thing. He had this dream.”

“A
dream
?” That was the end of Raymond’s patience. “You’re flipping out because Benny had a
bad dream
? He’s crazy, Suzy. You know that, and you’re crazy for taking him seriously. In fact, I can’t even believe you’d read a letter from him. Just burn it.”

When Suzette turned to face him, she had tears in her eyes and looked stung. “You don’t know everything, Ray.”

“No, I know I don’t, sweetheart,” he said, softening. “I don’t if you don’t tell me everything.” But he’d gone too far or she had, and she was crying for real now. He reached out for her arm and she pulled away fiercely, childishly. “Sweetie, please.”

“He’s not crazy. Not any more than I’m crazy.” She was nearly barking at him. People on the boardwalk hurried by them, pretending not to notice. Suzette didn’t care; in fact, she seemed to like the audience. “And he is Jamie Lynn’s father. What, I’m just supposed to turn my back on him when he’s in trouble? Maybe you’re that way but I’m not.”

Raymond knew well and good what was supposed to happen now. He was supposed to back off and apologize, offer her some treat or bribe to get them past this moment, whatever it was
she’d wanted from the beginning, had wanted probably from the moment she called him two nights before. He felt manipulated and exhausted, and he didn’t want to play. That Suzette would even mention Jamie’s name meant the stakes were higher than he bargained for when he got in the car.

She took a deep breath. “I want to go see him.”

This was the card Raymond had been waiting for—and now that it was on the table, he didn’t want to be within striking distance of it. “Go to Bakersfield? You’re not serious.”

“What do you mean? It’ll be fine. We’ll just pass through and make sure everything’s okay. That’s all I want. A visit, I’m saying. What would be the harm?”

“It’s a lousy idea and I have no intention of getting involved in it.”

“You expect me to go alone?”

“I don’t expect you to go at all, but let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you did go see Benny. If he really is dying, what do you think you’re going to do about that? Give him flowers? Hold his hand?”

“I don’t know.” She ducked her head, began to twirl a strand of her hair around a nervous finger. “I hadn’t thought it through.”

“I guess not. And if you’re going to Bakersfield, would you stop by the house to see Jamie?”

“No. I don’t know,” she said again. “What do you think?”

“It’s a small town. Berna will hear about it somehow, and it doesn’t seem fair to drive through and not stop. Besides, it’s been two years at least since you went to visit Jamie.”

“I know. I know. You don’t have to remind me,” she said. And before he knew it, she’d put her arms around his waist and nestled her chin, rubbing her head back and forth against his shirt. “Of course I want to see the baby,” she said quietly. “But Berna makes me feel like shit. She always has. I don’t think I can handle her right now.” Suzette pressed into him more tightly, as if
she thought the wind might pick her up and blow her out to sea. “Just let me get my head together and straighten out this Benny situation. Once I’m feeling better, we can go back and have a proper visit. What do you say?”

There was that “we” again. Who was he kidding? No matter how carefully he’d framed his questions, set up his argument, she hadn’t believed for a second that Raymond wouldn’t go with her if that’s what she wanted. And how had one letter from Benny, no matter how creepy his dreams, made it a “situation,” or anything that involved Suzette, for that matter? Something was going on that she wasn’t telling him, and until she did, he couldn’t with any conscience leave her alone. He also couldn’t say what he was thinking—not about Benny, and certainly not about Jamie, who wasn’t a baby anymore, no matter how she might be fixed that way in Suzette’s mind. She was six years old, a little girl, a person with a story of her own, not a doll placed in a closet for safekeeping. Not a bit of managed history. But Suzette wasn’t capable of hearing this and even if she were, she’d only hate Raymond for saying it. Nothing would be changed or fixed.