Call Me Home (2 page)

For a while, we stayed in touch. Her emails were so smart and entertaining that I wished them to be published. Her writing was great – crazy great. Nobody should be able to write that well so young. She had such talent, such charisma, that I almost feared for her. I didn't want things to move too fast. I didn't want her to be swallowed up by the sheer force of herself. I felt matronly and protective toward her – toward her talents, really. I was always warning her to find her discipline, not to spin off on us, to keep at her labors, to steady herself down, to find her foothold. I was kind of bossy and stern about it. I wrote her long lectures about honoring her potential. I couldn't help myself; I had become invested in her.

Then I didn't hear from her for a long while. I didn't know where she had gone to, and I worried. I feared she might have quit writing. I feared she had not risen to meet her considerable gifts.

I needn't have been afraid.

Megan Kruse showed up in my life again just last year with the manuscript to
Call Me Home
, and suddenly it was very clear what she'd been doing during those vanished years: She'd been
working
.

What she has produced is this beautiful, haunting, elegiac novel. I happen to know that, in her travels and wanderings over her adult life, Megan has seen much of the world, but to tell this tale she returned home to her origins – to the raw, hard, stark, ravaged environment of rural Washington, where she had been raised. Kruse once described her homeland to me as “the country where the mudslides happen,” which works as a descriptor on many levels. The landscape of this novel seems to be a mudslide in process – people slipping, lives slipping, whole towns on the brink of sliding away forever into poverty, despair, and violence. To return to that sort of world and to try to describe its dark power is to scramble for a handhold in the mud, but she has found that handhold, and her prose holds on for its dear life.

Call Me Home
is not merely a story of place but also a story of family – particularly a story of siblings. I would say that, in a way, it is more about kinship than about family (two very different ideas when you break it down). It is almost about twinship, actually. The brother and sister in
Call Me Home
are not exactly twins but might as well be for all the power of connection that thrums between them. They might as well be conjoined twins for the ways their souls and fears and hopes are bound together. Certainly, nobody will ever understand anyone more than these two understand each other – for better or for worse. In the mudslide, in the miasma, in their own individual distractions of sexual desire and yearning, they reach for each other across the dark and grip tight. When they are separated, the grip still holds. The grip always holds. Their grip
held on me, as well, long after I finished reading the manuscript. I can still feel their hands on my wrists.

In introducing her own manuscript to me, Megan wrote, “And so I think that in some ways the novel became a love letter and an apology. An acknowledgement that I am inextricably a part of where I came from, and that you can't actually weigh what is precious or ugly; it is itself, and so are we. What became important as I grew older was the inventory of what might be lost: the way my father would run backwards through the yard to make us laugh; the steep banks and creeks that filled in winter, where my brother always lost his shoes; my mother's jewelry strewn across a dresser.”

That inventory is this novel, and it gleams with a dark radiance. It contains
everything
. Megan Kruse has met her promise, and I am glad.

ELIZABETH GILBERT

Frenchtown, NJ,
2014

CALL ME HOME

1.

The Pig

Lydia

Tulalip, Washington, 2006

THE SUMMER I WAS NINE, MY FATHER CAME HOME WITH
a pig in the back of the truck. The pig was big, with thick bristles along his spine, and he scratched his back against the barbed wire. “We're going to fatten him up,” my father said. He threw food into a long trough and then stood back and crossed his thick arms. I followed Jackson to the pen but I wouldn't touch the pig. Jackson was fourteen and braver than me. He let the pig eat from his bare hand, but I held tight to a long stick. That night I put a piece of bacon on the windowsill to warn the pig to stay away.

My mother had a broken arm that summer. Each day while my father went to work, she got up and cleaned the house, and I helped her until my hands were raw from Ajax. When I heard my father's car pull into the drive I would run to Jackson. We would wait to hear our father's voice, to know if he was angry. Sometimes, if they fought, my mother would come to my room at night, sit on the edge of my bed, and whisper. “You must be brave, Lydia,” she would say. “You must trust me.”

All summer long the pig kept rooting under the fence, and my father kept rebuilding it. I thought it must mean something that the pig kept escaping, that maybe it hated my father. That maybe it had powers. I tried to have powers, too. If I counted my steps in threes, I promised myself, if I saw two birds on the roof of the house, if the rain came by four, then my father would be kinder. My father would be new.

In June, while my father was at work, we put clothes into
bags and put them in the car. The pig watched us as we drove away. My mother took us to a hotel, but my father followed us and brought us back. He made dinner and danced my mother around the living room, but I felt afraid to let them be alone. I sat up late into the night with Jackson, listening, waiting. I held tight to his hand and he didn't let go. The next day, I took one of my father's beer bottles into the shed and smashed it to pieces with a rock until it was half dust. There was a dark empty hole in the wall behind my bed, down by the floor, where I kept secret things. I kept the bottle back there, or at least what had been the bottle, wrapped up in an old rag.

“You must be patient,” my mother had told me. “You must believe in me.” I was patient and I did, but every night when I was in bed I reached down to the floor, into the dark space, and felt for that rag.

There was quiet for the rest of June. It got to the point where I stopped reaching for the rag in the dark. I let the pig eat a slice of apple from my hand and wasn't scared at all. On the Fourth of July, we went to Marysville to watch the fireworks. My mother looked so beautiful, and the fireworks were bright blooms in the sky above the water tower. What happened between that hour and the next? My father drove the truck home over the rutted road too fast and when he pulled up to the house he pushed my mother out into the dirt. Jackson took my hand and we jumped out of the truck, ran to the edge of the pasture and crouched there. The pig came to us and pushed his head through the fence, and we all waited in the dark until it was over. I touched the pig's nose. “Shh,” I said, and the pig stayed quiet.

The air was quiet and mean after that. The longer it lasted, the farther my brother and I ventured into the woods, across the property lines that were deep in fireweed and salal. At the end of July, when the brush was thick and dark, we followed the creek until it ended at a pile of trash. We opened one of the trash bags and things came spilling out – eggshells, torn paper, orange peels. Jackson held up a broken wicker basket. It had plastic eyes and
was made to look like an owl. We brought it home, and I kept it hidden under my bed. I thought we might be caught, and so later I walked to the edge of the woods and threw it as far as I could.

We played with the pig every time our parents fought now. His bristled back scratched my palms. I fed him scraps from the table and wanted to be good, to do right. If I could be only be good enough, I thought, surely it would count for something. Surely things would change.

AT NIGHT I
lay awake and listened to my parents talking. Not the words, just the sounds: “I love you, I hate you, I'm sorry.” Jackson was in his room all the time, listening to music on his headphones and drawing in his notebook. Now that he was fourteen he kept his door shut all the time and wouldn't let me hear his music, but still he let me come in and sit by him. I stared into the snowy tunnels of the blankets. On weekends he'd take me with him to Randy's house, and while he and Randy smoked pot I would hold a lizard, let it crawl up my arms and around my shoulders.

In August, the pig escaped again and my father called the butcher. I was sad but didn't say it. I stared at the square white packages, lined up like coffins in the freezer. I held one in my hand until it burned with cold. I tried not to look at the empty place in the pasture where the pig had been.

When my father broke my mother's nose, I made his sandwich out of the bacon I would never eat myself. My hands were shaking to touch that bacon. I carried the sandwich to my bedroom and brought the rag out of the dark space behind my bed. I poured the glass dust into my hand and looked at it shining, and then I laid it between the mayonnaise and the meat. It was the perfect sandwich. It was the worst thing I'd ever done.

I stood in my bedroom and looked at the sandwich. I tried to pick up the plate, to carry it to my father. I counted to ten, and then I counted to ten again. The plate was heavy as the moon; I couldn't move.
Now
, I thought.
Do it now
.

When I heard my father's boots in the hall, I couldn't breathe.
He was coming toward me and all I had to do was hold it up. It was a gift for him to take, but I ruined it all. I ran past him with the plate in my hands, out the back door and into the woods behind the house, where I buried the sandwich in the dirt by the creek. I threw the plate into the underbrush and no one ever knew.

Now I think that if I had told Jackson it would have been different. He would have helped me be brave. He would have understood how badly I wanted my father to disappear, and what happened later might not have happened at all. But I thought Jackson already knew. … He was the one beside me in the grass outside trying to keep me from hearing them. The pig was nowhere, but still he held me there in the grass, scratching the dirt, saying low, low, “Listen, you can hear the hooves, listen.”

Amy

Tulalip, Washington, 2010

SHE KNELT BY THE OLD METAL STORAGE LOCKER IN THE
torn-up garden plot, and the water soaked the knees of her jeans. She could see the house through the dark winter brush. She could hear the hard crack of the axe and the sound of the rain dripping from the trees, a soft and intermittent staccato. The storm last night had taken down a tree on the slick steep drive. The old winch had jammed months ago, and they hadn't replaced it, so Gary had gone to town and rented one to drag the tree up to the house, where he was splitting and stacking it for firewood.

He would have to return the winch by eight. She moved quickly, opening the storage locker, pushing aside the rusted trowels and feeling through the loose seed packets until she found the one she wanted. She slipped the cucumber packet deep into her pocket and started toward the house. Her ribs hurt and she held her arms tight at her sides. The wind was whipping her face, cold and wet, and she could smell chimney smoke. January. It had been nineteen years since she'd left Texas with Gary and moved out to Washington. Nineteen years that she had lived with him and raised their two children. She ran her fingers over the envelope in her pocket, emptied of seeds, and packed tight with the money she'd stolen from her husband.

Inside the house, she opened soup cans for dinner, stirred their contents together in a saucepan on the stove. She had put plastic over the window after he pushed her through the glass, and she could hear the rain tapping against it. The sound of it made
her sick to her stomach, thinking of how her children had watched him push her.

Six o'clock. Half an hour for dinner, she thought, and then Gary would return the winch. She called down the hall for Jackson and Lydia to set the table, which they did, quietly, Jackson passing the plates to his little sister.

After the four of them had eaten, still quietly, and after Gary had pulled away in the truck, she turned to Jackson. “Get the things you and your sister need,” she said. “Now.” She handed them two garbage bags and took one to her bedroom. She pulled things out of drawers without really looking at them, and they put all of the bags in the backseat of the car – the shitty, unreliable one. She said a quick prayer to no one that it wouldn't break down before they made it to town.

They were all silent as she drove. Lydia ducked down in the backseat; Jackson looking out the window. She took the back road around Marine View Drive and then the freeway to Everett. Gary would be at the other end of town, turning in the winch, collecting his deposit. Everett wasn't far enough away, she thought, but that was the point. It was a shell game. He would think they'd try to get farther away, so she'd stay close. She drove the car up and down the dusky streets, not looking at where she was going, until she found a motel that looked abandoned. The parking lot was walled off from the street. A burnt-out sign read The Starlight.

Jackson and Lydia brought in their backpacks and the garbage bags of hastily packed clothes. She watched them, holding her arms against her broken ribs. Here were her children. Jackson at eighteen looked delicate and beautiful and older than the other boys his age, the ones she sometimes saw milling around the high school parking lot. Lydia was small for thirteen, always with a worried look on face. Her children, blinking dark and light in turns, striated with the things they let her know, what she inferred, what they kept from her. Never again, she thought, will they see Gary put his hands on me. Never again will they worry their days, stringing minutes into hours, listening for footsteps, for raised voices.