Francie's Got a Gun, page 14
“Wonderful,” said David. “We can drive together.” Relief flooded his system. The task would be complete. Was this how other people felt all the time? Awash with unsupportable certainty?
The woman stepped back, inviting him inside. “Do you know”—her voice dropped to a whisper—“do you know my son, then, do you know him well?”
What was this? The pleasure of certainty evaporated. David neither recognized the tone nor understood the question.
“You didn’t know Luce was my son?”
“I’m sorry…” He barely stopped himself from asking, Who’s Luce? If Sally were here, Sally would be putting the pieces to this puzzle together without even trying, the arbitrary, the nonsensical, Sally’d be making leaps to unforeseen conclusions, but David couldn’t process the unexpected so efficiently (and, frankly, lackadaisically). David needed to step from one proven equation to the next.
Thankfully, the woman didn’t seem to fathom the depths of David’s ignorance. “Francie’s in the bathroom,” she said. “I don’t know what her mother told her over the phone, but it would be best not to speak about any of this with her in the room.”
Here came Francie, though David struggled to recognize her. She looked different to him. Out of the context of his own house, in the absence of his daughter, she seemed a stranger. Her hair floated around her head, staticky, like fur, and her shoulders slumped, her eyes seemed vacant and dull. He began to worry, or, more accurately, to experience distress, which manifested as confusion. He’d never worried about Francie before, she’d seemed self-sufficient, boisterous, pluckier than their own daughter.
He’d never understood why Sally didn’t like the girl.
“Hurry, this nice man has been waiting long enough,” said the woman—Francie’s grandmother, of course, earlier she’d addressed the woman as “Grandma,” David remembered. He tried stacking the connections, one atop the next.
“Hurry!” the woman said again.
She picked up and folded a blanket and set it back on the sofa. She dithered out loud over whether to bring along some soup she’d made earlier in the day.
Francie was wearing a backpack and sneakers. She stood near David, observing her grandmother’s frenzied activities; they stood in silence. At last the woman was ready, pushing them before her out the front door, clad in a bulky sweater, carrying the blanket she’d folded, her purse, a large bag crafted out of what looked like juice boxes (intriguing), a pair of fuzzy slippers poking out the top. She was also juggling the soup in an ice cream container and two sets of keys. She wouldn’t let David help, not even with the soup.
David was parked behind her car, so he led the way—they didn’t discuss the arrangement. A procession of two departed into darkness. The house, with one lamp left on, vanished behind them.
David tried to adjust his speed to hers. He didn’t want to lose them. The interior of his car was quiet.
Lonely.
Such a venture was better made in the company of friends, companions, allies. He could tell himself that the two of them, behind him, were fellow seekers on the same journey, but their fates were quite separate from his own. And there was nothing David could do about it. He’d dragged them out into the night, urged them from their relative safety into the unknown, and that was his role; soon they would part ways. David looked at the stars fixed behind fast-moving clouds, the tips of trees and wires cutting the sky. When they glided inside city limits, and the street lights took over, he felt something akin to disappointment. On the whole, it was safer, on the whole, more boring.
The GPS voice announced his destination. David didn’t know what he’d been expecting. Not this. He gunned the tiny box up a steep driveway and parked, wondering how he’d get out, with Francie’s grandmother blocking him in.
The house looked like a stick drawing of a house: inverted V roof, door, window.
He unpacked himself from his Smart car (silly car, foolish car?), came around to the rear door of Francie’s grandmother’s sedan and opened it. Francie had been asleep, the blanket bunched around her. Seat belt on. She looked up at him, her face full of complicated emotions and tones, and he wondered, How could anyone claim to know what anyone else was feeling or thinking? Ever?
Yet people did, all the time.
Baffling.
David wanted to help her, but he didn’t know how. He reached to fix a twisted strap on the backpack over Francie’s shoulders and handed her the blanket, which had fallen on the ground.
The house was lit in a blaze of electric light, the only house on the block sending out a distress signal. Francie’s grandmother walked away from them up the driveway, her arms laden with the things she’d brought along, just as Marietta—that must be her—burst from the side door, light spilling out. “Thank you, oh, thank you, David! How can I repay you?” She waved for him to come closer.
David obeyed.
Marietta held a baby on her hip. The baby looked very awake, gnawing on a banana, cheeks shining with saliva and mashed fruit. David had forgotten there were other children involved, if he’d ever known. It was entirely possible he’d never known. He was learning so much tonight! And what use was any of it? He tried to store away facts that Sally would appreciate hearing, to please her.
“Come in and have a drink!” Marietta said rather wildly, and David understood she was still talking to him. Come in, David, and have a drink! A drink of what, he could not fathom. It would be no ordinary drink: maybe something like mate, the warm infusion his parents so enjoyed, which Sally said tasted bitter, and anyway wasn’t it unhygienic, to pass the gourd from person to person, everyone sipping through the same metal straw? It wasn’t a drink to be taken alone, and just now David felt the loss of that ritual, a terrible sinking gape which he pushed back against. It’s just a drink.
Seeing Marietta up close, David questioned whether he would, in fact, have recognized her in a grocery store. She seemed quite out of control, almost out of her head, her voice sharp and dangerous, calling attention to whatever was going on here. In short, this encounter was enticing and awkward, it put a person off balance. How to engage?
David didn’t know where to look.
But his eyes, his attention, kept being drawn to her, to Marietta.
“He’s exhausted, poor man,” said Francie’s grandmother. “Don’t be silly, Marietta, this isn’t an occasion for drinks. Thank you for your help, and go on home to your bed,” she directed David, who accepted that he didn’t know how to ask the woman to move her car. It felt right not to ask. He would walk home. It was a perfectly reasonable solution that he would take care not to mention to Sally.
David lifted one hand and waved a formal goodbye. He could come back in the morning to get the car, or the next day, or whenever, really. Or even never. He didn’t particularly need the car. People were always looking at it, pointing at it, asking him questions about it. In this moment, David could believe that the car was one of many things—possessions, material and immaterial—that he did not truly need, or desire, or want. Never wanted.
All the things I never wanted, David said to himself, as if he were composing a list. But instead, he thought of the opposite: how he wished he’d said yes to the drink. He imagined it as fortification against his own complicated emotions, which rose in him unbidden, impossible to arrange into order.
He paused at the end of the driveway and watched Francie walk into the house, dragging the blanket on the ground.
One of the women closed the door.
All the things I never knew I wanted: David started a new list, beginning with Marietta’s offer, but that was as far as he got, his mind turning to the exploration of the unknown and appealing interior landscape that her offer had sparked.
Best not to mention this part to Sally, either.
ELEVEN
Gun Run
Francie looked at the balled-up socks on the other side of the fence. The dog was barking, it would find her. Dogs were smart, smarter than people, dogs knew things. Smelled things. Like fear. “Dogs can smell fear,” Dad said. Which made sense to Francie, that fear would be a scent, sharp but also rotten, a real stink. If fear had a colour, it would roll off your skin streaked with yellow. But fear was invisible. It was inside you, and it came out and dogs could smell it. Which made the other thing Dad said make no sense at all: “Don’t let them know you’re afraid.”
But what if I am afraid?
Francie looked at her socks in the tangled weeds on the other side of the fence.
All you need is just one thing.
There.
There it was, waiting for Francie as she looked up from her socks: a tree. Taller than all the other trees in the woods, maybe the tallest tree in the whole wide world. It was standing apart from the other trees in the woods, on the edge of the field, on the other side of the fence. She looked up at its dark-green branches spreading thick and heavy against the clear blue sky.
Just one thing.
She got herself over the fence, balled up and squeezed out like the socks. The wires bent and swayed as she let go and fell into the weeds on the other side. Rust on the hand that wasn’t holding the gun, rust on her jeans, on her favourite cat t-shirt.
One thing.
She was done with running. The tree seemed to invite her to come and hide, its lowest branches brushing the ground. She crawled under on her belly, onto a carpet of dead needles that was thick and soft, softly orange, and smelled so good. Not like fear at all. Like the opposite of fear. She rested her cheek against the soft needles and she looked at the gun, and it wasn’t stuck in her hand anymore. She squeezed right against the tree’s trunk, sat up between the branches, and pulled off her backpack. After a moment she unzipped it, and slid the gun in beside the rainbow pony lunch box.
With the sandwich crusts and sawdust cookies.
With Grandma’s money, too.
Now, Francie had Grandma’s money in her lunch box, and a gun.
One problem had become another problem, a bigger problem, which was the way it went, Dad said: “You fix one thing, and the bastard grows another head.”
But what if you didn’t fix anything? What if everything you did just made everything worse, and worse and worse?
The morning after Dad crashed his car, Mom said Francie didn’t have to go to school today. Francie didn’t even know she’d slept late. When she came into the kitchen in her t-shirt (nightgown!), Grandma and Mom were there drinking coffee, and Mom smiled at Francie and she said: “I’m taking the day off and so are you.” Mom never smiled like that, like someone was watching, it made Francie feel strange, like they were both standing on a stage, performing.
Grandma stood up and put her purse over her shoulder. She said she would go to the hospital.
Mom said she wasn’t going to start arguing now.
A little while later, after Grandma drove away in her car, Mom left too. She was going out for a walk, is what she told Francie, except Francie saw Mom climb into a red pickup truck waiting in the street at the end of the driveway, and the truck reminded her of Dad’s friend Mikey. The windows were up even though it was hot, and she couldn’t see through them. Mom didn’t notice Francie watching, maybe, even though Francie was standing in the driveway holding Sam.
Francie didn’t want to stay home from school. She wanted to give the stolen money to Mrs. G and buy the tickets and then it would all be fixed.
Too late now. Francie went inside to get herself dressed; Sam, too.
How Francie wished she’d never shown Grandma the order form for the tickets. When Grandma got an idea in her head, she wouldn’t let it go, she was like a pit bull, Mom said—and Grandma had gotten an idea in her head. Like how she’d gone to the hospital, even though Mom said don’t go! And later, when Grandma got back from the hospital, as soon as she’d parked and stepped out of her car, she called over to where Francie and Sam were digging in the dirt, and said she’d stopped at a bank machine to get cash to buy tickets to Francie’s concert!
“How many should we buy? Where’s the order form?”
Francie shaded her eyes against the sun, looking up at Grandma.
She and Sam were digging in the dirt where the gold and the jewels were buried. Grandma locked her car with her key, and frowned, as if she was seeing the two of them for the first time.
“Where’s your mom?”
Well, not here. Francie shrugged.
“This is unacceptable, your mother leaving you two home alone!” said Grandma. She was fumbling around in her purse, frowning. She found a packet of tissues and handed it to Francie, told her to wipe Sam’s mouth, he looked like he’d been eating dirt (he had been).
“Where’s my dad?” said Francie. “Did you see my dad?”
Grandma didn’t answer. She slid her purse over her shoulder, and tried to go inside through the front door, and for some reason Francie didn’t stop her or warn her, she just watched. Grandma turned the handle and pushed, and the door made an awful grating sound.
Francie and Sam stayed where they were, beside the stoop, watching Grandma inspect the half-open door.
Grandma said: “What’s wrong with this door?”
“Nothing,” said Francie, and then: “Maybe you broke it.”
“Come inside!”
“We’re playing,” said Francie. She spat on a tissue and she wiped Sam’s face till he howled.
Grandma’s lips pinched thin.
But she didn’t forget about the tickets! She made Francie take the order form out of her backpack and sit with her at the kitchen table while Sam took his nap, and together they filled out the form, purchasing three (3) adult tickets, and one (1) for children. Thirty-five dollars. Grandma counted out a twenty, a ten, and a five, and attached the bills to the order form with a paper clip (from her purse), and she watched while Francie put everything into her backpack.
Three tickets for adults: Mom, Grandma, and Dad.
Did that mean Dad was okay, Dad was coming home?
It was the middle of suppertime, and they were eating Grandma’s soup, when Mom came walking in through the side door. Mom said, “Why is the front door hanging open?”
“It’s broken!” said Grandma. “Apparently I broke it.”
Mom laughed.
Grandma stood and came up close to Mom’s face. “Have you been drinking? Are you drinking alcohol?”
Mom untied Sam from his chair. “Alcohol would be a good idea right now, but that’s not my thing. I don’t have a thing, Irene.”
Grandma tried to wrench Sam from Mom’s arms, or maybe the two of them were arguing about something else and Sam was just the object in between, Francie couldn’t tell.
Grandma won. But only temporarily.
Mom went to the front door and began slamming her shoulder against the wood, to try to close it.
Grandma said: “Is there someone we can call? Marietta? Someone you could call for help?”
Mom crashed against the door. She said: “Things are going to be just fine around here. It’s all under control!”
Sam stuck his fingers into Grandma’s mouth. Grandma slapped them away, and Sam burst out crying, which made sense. It’s what Francie wanted to do too.
“Keep your hands off my babies!” Mom said, and other things. Francie was sitting at the table, her arm frozen in the middle of lifting a spoon full of soup toward her mouth, and she started to giggle, helpless rolling giggles spilling out of her, shaking the soup off the spoon, making her pee her pants a little bit.
Everything else stopped. Mom stopped yelling. Sam stopped crying.
Grandma stared, then said, “Don’t laugh at your mother!” and Mom turned on Grandma, “Don’t tell her what to do. Look at me, I’m pathetic, Irene, I’m a madwoman. Look at my hands, I can’t stop them.”
They all looked at Mom’s hands trembling, trembling.
Grandma said: “Marietta. You need to calm down.”
“I think I’ll feel better when you leave, Irene.”
“But what about the door? You can’t stay here alone with the door broken like that.”
The door had sprung back open.
“You didn’t break the door, Irene, Luce did. Luce did. Luce broke everything.”
Grandma said, softly: “Like I told you that he would.”
“Go!” Mom grabbed Sam back.
Grandma’s juice-box bag was beside the sofa, where she’d spent the night. She moved like a bird, fluttering and hopping, gathering up the things she had brought with her the night before (forgetting the blanket, which was on Francie’s bed now), and she walked out the broken front door without saying goodbye. Her eyes were staring and bright and wide. Francie followed and stood on the stoop. The air outside smelled like cigarette smoke and diesel. Two cars were parked in the driveway, but not Dad’s. A bus rattled to the stop where strangers waited, strangers who knew nothing about what was happening inside this house. Francie wanted to be a stranger, but also she wanted to know—to know what was happening.
As soon as Grandma’s car was gone, Francie said: “Where’s my dad?”
Mom had set Sam down, she was examining the door. She sighed deeply. “I think if we do this together, we can get it jammed shut again. And then I’ll prop a chair under the handle.”
Mom was hiding something. But Francie was hiding something too. So was Grandma, definitely Dad. They were all hiding things except for Sam, Francie thought, and then she thought, Maybe he’s hiding something too.
Mom said: “Come inside. Your dad is safe in the hospital, where the doctors are going to make him better. I promise.”
* * *
