HOMICIDE SURVIVORS PICNIC by Lorraine M. López
“Why are you wearing my sunglasses?” Ted’s mother asked as he climbed into the backseat of the car, slouching down as far as possible. “Give me those.” She reached behind for the dark glasses that made her look like Jacqueline Onassis, but Ted ignored her. As his mother backed the car out of the garage, he glanced at his reflection in the rearview mirror; the shades made him look a bit like Jackie O. too, or at least a fourteen-year-old boy version of her.
“He’s got my Young Life cap on too.” His older sister Tina, wearing his new gray flannel shirt with snaps that strained to close over her breasts, was a fine one to talk. She adjusted the radio to find a station playing rap music, and leaned to pull out the bandana – a red with white do-rag thing Terrell had given her before he’d died – that she kept stuffed in the back pocket of her Levi’s, and brought it to her nose for a whiff.
His mother pulled the car to the curb right in front of Danny’s house. Ted groaned and sank deeper in his seat. She turned to stare at him. “Okay, Teddy, what’s going on?”
“Ted. Can’t you remember to call me Ted?”
“Ted, then, what’s the matter with you? Why are you wearing that getup and hunching over like that? Are you sick? Do you have a headache?”
Tina rolled her eyes and cranked up the volume on a song in which the vocalist shouted a pulsing series of hoarse accusations. “He’s incognito, Mom.” She folded the bandana in a careful triangle, set it in her lap.
His mother narrowed her eyes at Ted. “Incognito? Why?”
A curtain fluttered in the front window of Danny’s house. The sprinklers shot on and prism-jeweled mist dampened the rust-colored ant mounds erupting on the neighbors’ lawn. “Drive, Mom. Please just drive.”
Tina sighed. “It’s Danny. He’s hiding from Danny.”
“Not that cologne business.” His mother faced front, shifted into drive, and inched the car away from the curb. “You paid for those months ago.”
But Danny (Ted’s former best friend) was still furious. Red-faced and puffing, Danny had cornered him on the basketball court at the Baptist church across the street just the day before. He’d grabbed Ted by the shirtfront, lifting him off his feet and promising to “break every stupid bone in your punk-ass body” the next time he saw him. That Danny hadn’t simply killed him on the spot had been a lucky oversight in Ted’s mind. Now, his neighbor’s burly, neck-less shape emerged from the screened door to stand on the porch and pound a fist into his palm. With a sigh, Ted’s mother steered toward the stop sign at the corner. Did she have to drive so leisurely? Ted was sure that if Danny wanted, he could jog over, kick in the car window, and yank Ted out, without even breaking a sweat.
“All that fuss,” his mother said, cruising with insane slowness onto the cross street, “all that fuss about some pretty awful-smelling stuff, as I recall.”
“Expensive awful-smelling stuff: Aramis, Calvin Klein, Brüt . . .” Tina counted off the brands on her fingers.
How Danny’s eyes had shone in the thick slab of his face when he showed off the dresser top cluttered with ornate, stoppered bottles – all filled with rich amber-colored scent. The sight aroused in Ted a cold, clammy envy that slithered like a snake, an invisible boa gradually coiling up from his feet to his chest before engorging to constrict his lungs so tightly he could barely breathe, could barely utter, “Cool, man.”
That had been the night before he was scheduled to catch a plane for L.A. and to spend the summer with his father, “Evil Visitation Eve,” as his mother called it, superstitiously alluding to the bad behavior that overtook Ted and Tina (back when she still visited their father) just before such trips. But that was in no way connected to Ted’s surreptitious removal of all the colognes from Danny’s bedroom, which he wrapped in socks and jockey shorts so they would not clink in the duffel he brought for his last sleepover before heading west. The desire for what was Danny’s, come to think of it, also had little to do with the squat, well-shaped bottles that ended up breaking in the overhead luggage compartment and making his duffel reek so strongly that he had to throw it away in the dumpster behind his father’s apartment.
“I can’t believe you boys are still fighting over that. Danny’s nearly sixteen, almost ready to drive. You’d think he’d grow up a bit. And you, you’ll be fifteen next month, son. Can’t you go over there, Teddy, and talk to him? Apologize?”
“Nope.”
“Well, I can’t say I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t really like him as a friend for you. ‘Danny’ – what kind of name is that, anyway? It’s shorthand for a thug’s name, a criminal’s name.”
Tina shot Ted a look over her shoulder, arched an eyebrow. Daniel was their father’s name.
“Give me those sunglasses. I can’t see a damn thing.” His mother groped for them again.
Teddy handed her the shades, thinking she drove so sluggishly that she didn’t really need to see where she was going. If she hit anything at this rate of speed, they probably wouldn’t even feel it. Driving was about the only thing his mother did with maddening calm. Usually, she buzzed around the house, doing five things at once – grading papers, drinking coffee, talking on the phone, folding clothes while fixing the vacuum cleaner – and sometimes getting so tangled up in her long wiry limbs that she tripped over herself.
Without the dark glasses, the midday sunlight, even in the car, about blasted through Ted’s eyeballs like laser beams drilling clear to the back of his skull, and he prayed this wasn’t the onset of another migraine. When they struck, he felt flattened, as though he were a cartoon character on which a falling safe or piano had crashed. His mother would have to lead him like a zombie to his bedroom, cranking the blinds shut and settling him in his bed fully clothed, where he would ride out the nauseating waves that pushed him through a dark canal of pain.
Come to think of it, he didn’t remember getting these headaches in California. Since he returned to Georgia two days ago, he found himself making mental notes, pro and con lists, for no reason at all really, except that this summer, his dad had been kind of cool, not all touchy and pissed off like usual. He’d finally dropped the tirades against Ted’s mother, the long monologues detailing her shortcomings that would last until two or three in the morning. He’d even taken Ted to some baseball games, bought curtains and stuff to decorate his room, and played video games with him this visit. And he’d actually once or twice mentioned he wouldn’t mind if Ted moved out to live with him. Ted didn’t have a single headache the whole summer.
California was a heck of a lot cooler than Georgia too. Even if Ted didn’t always get migraines from it, the Georgia sun at noon in late summer felt cruel as a blow as soon as he stepped out of the air-conditioning into it. And the smothering humidity cupped the heat in, making him feel like a fly trapped in a giant, sweaty fist. Headaches, heat, humidity. And Danny, don’t forget Danny.
“Tina, get the map will you?” his mother said. She hunched over the steering wheel, her shoulders set in a grim, determined way. “We’re supposed to find the highway to Conyers somewhere.”
Ted entered another item for the cons column: always getting lost. How many minutes, how many hours, how many days, even years if you added it all up, had they spent roaming the San Fernando Valley and now Northeast Georgia, lost as a trio of lunatics who’d wandered from the asylum to find themselves inexplicably rattling around in a used Toyota Corolla? And Tina in charge of the map? Ted loved his sister, but the girl had trouble navigating the halls of their small high school to find her homeroom. Now, pregnant and in mourning for Terrell, she was even more vague, distractible, and uncommunicative. Practically all she’d said to him since he returned from California was, “Hey, can I borrow that shirt?”
“Let me have the map.” Ted’s temples pulsed in a warning way, and he swallowed hard. “Wait, there’s a sign. Mom, get over to the right. Now, now!”
“Gosh, don’t yell.” Of course, she missed the exit and had to pull into the entrance to J and J’s Outdoor Swap Meet to turn around. An array of weather-battered gray booths and rusted folding chairs stood vacant on a paved slab just beyond the drive. “Hey, didn’t your girlfriend’s parents own this place? What was her name?”
“Jerrica,” said Tina, pushing the map over the seat. “She gave you that cat, remember?” The familiarity of being lost seemed to have a relaxing effect on his sister, who opened up and even smiled. “We should stop so Teddy can say hello.”
“Are you nuts?” Ted leaned forward. “They sold the place months ago.”
“That was one mean kitty.” His mother spun the steering wheel, so the tires lazily sputtered gravel into the wheel wells. “I guess it was the feline leukemia that made him act out. Vet said he was born with it.”
The black kitten, Gregory, had been Ted’s first pet, his only pet. Yes, he’d been a little vicious and strange, prone to pouncing out to bite bare ankles and stealing newspaper to rip to shreds in the laundry room, making sounds like he was wrapping gifts in a fury. Ted raked his memory for a warm remembrance of the tense knot of fur, razor teeth, and needle claws. The one time they’d left the cat alone for a weekend when they took a trip to Jekyll Island, they returned to find Gregory’s food untouched and the cat listless and skeletal, its wide yellow eyes staring in mute accusation.
“Remember how we held him while the vet put him to sleep?” he said at last.
“That cardiac stick.” His mother shook her head. “Ugh, don’t remind me.”
“Poor thing,” Tina said. She had been at track practice the afternoon they took him to the vet, but had heard the story a few times.
That afternoon, Ted had been strolling home with Danny from the Golden Pantry, where they’d lifted two-liter bottles of soda, candy bars, chewing gum, and a few loose cigarettes from the pack open on the counter while the clerk was in the restroom. When his mother found him a few blocks from the store, she already had Gregory in the backseat, trapped in a cardboard box, to take to the vet. With rare tact, she didn’t mention the poorly concealed soda bottles; she just opened the passenger side door for Ted and told Danny they’d see him later.
“Remember how he wouldn’t die,” Ted said. “The doctor injected some kind of sleeping drug, and Greg just wouldn’t go to sleep.”
“He had to get that cardiac stick,” his mother added.
But the vet, young and inexperienced, had missed with that and blood spurted on his blue scrubs, spotting the Formica tabletop. Gregory had stared past the nervous doctor straight at Ted, as if to ask, “Why are you doing this to me?”
“We were all crying by then, even the vet and the vet’s assistant,” she said.
“Not Gregory.” Ted bit his lip. “He was sure tough.”
Tina turned sharply to stare out the passenger-side window. She covered her mouth with the red square of cloth. Ted couldn’t see her face, but her shoulders quaked and he could feel the heat rising from her shoulders even from the backseat.
“Oh, how stupid,” his mother said. “We shouldn’t be talking about this.”
“My bad.” Ted stared down at the map, blurring his vision to imagine seeing it the way Tina did, the way his mother did – a random webbing of vein and artery overlaid with the irregular grid of county lines. But he found himself reading it, finding their location and plotting the next turn. “Mom, you have that address?”
The picnic was held in a small park between the white-domed courthouse and the library in a small town called Centerville, just outside of Conyers, the city where people made pilgrimages to the house of a woman who claimed to have visions of the Virgin Mary. Ted noticed a few bumper stickers in the parking area urging him to “Eat, Drink, and See Mary.” He hoped his mother wouldn’t see these. She had plenty to say on the subject of religious belief, and Christianity in particular, though this was not what most people in small-town Georgia wanted to hear. In truth, Teddy mostly agreed with his mother’s opinions and even admired her for speaking out, but he didn’t enjoy the arguments she started, the hard feelings these sparked, so he had to add religious fights to the bottom of the cons column. His mother pointed her Tupperware bowl of macaroni salad at one of the bumper stickers, already tossing her head in contempt. “Hah!”
Tina meandered at her side, not seeming to notice the bumper stickers, the cars, the parking lot, the heat, or even her mother and her brother. She reminded Ted of a grazing animal, so conditioned to browsing that she shuffled forward almost automatically. As they approached the huddle of picnic tables and clusters of other sad, slow-moving people, he wondered if she would feel at home among them. He sure didn’t. And that banner hanging between two arthritic oaks – did they have to make the lettering so large and clear, for all to see the depressing circumstances that brought this group together?
His mother set her macaroni salad on a picnic table covered with a red and white checked oilskin and laden with buckets of fried chicken, platters stacked with bologna sandwiches on white bread, bowls of potato and fruit salad, peeled hard-boiled eggs, cookies, and deep-fried clumps that Ted couldn’t identify. He made an entry for terrible food in his cons list, well above religious fights. Ted wrinkled his nose at the sulfuric stench emanating from the eggs and the rancid tang of mayonnaise left too long in the sun, and he stepped back, but his mother lingered, eyeing the food in a wolfish way. For a bony woman, she could sure pack it away. But it wasn’t time to eat, and bold as she was in most other situations, his mother was loath to be the first to dive into the buffet.
An older couple beckoned them to join their picnic table, and Ted’s chest grew heavy, his bones tired. Wherever he went, it seemed, elderly people glommed onto him. Ted worked for a short time as a volunteer at a senior center, but he had to quit. It was too much. He felt like a rock star besieged by groupies. The wheelchairs, walkers, and canes surrounded him, cutting off all avenues of escape and making him feel short of breath, confused, feeble, and a touch geriatric himself. He had no idea why they were drawn to him. His mother said it was his smile, an unfortunate habit he had of grinning warmly when he was most distressed and confused. And here he was, beaming to beat the band at this scarecrow of a geezer and his plump, balding wife.
“How’re you doing, sir?” Teddy clasped the old guy’s scaly claw and pumped it a few times. “I’m Ted.”
“Drew Colson,” he said, “and this is my wife, Vivian.”
“Ma’am, pleased to meet you.” He nodded, taking the woman’s puffy hand to shake, but released it when he thought he heard bones cracking, like he was crushing a mouse. “This is my mother and my sister Tina.” Who’d made him the master of ceremonies, he wondered, as his mother and sister shook hands with the couple.
“I’m Elaine,” said his mother, who didn’t like to give her last name.
“You’re all welcome to sit here with us. This is our first time, so we don’t know how these things work,” Mr. Colson said.
“I imagine it works like any picnic.” Elaine sank onto the bench, her pale knees jutting from her khaki shorts, knobby as a stork’s. Tina sat beside her in silence. Ted nodded, grinning at an overweight redheaded woman in neon yellow stretch pants and an oversized red and white striped T-shirt that draped her like a tent.
The redhead took this as an invitation and joined the group. She lowered herself beside Ted, causing the table to dip dangerously with her weight. “Hope you don’t mind if I barge in. I’m Glenda, you know, like the good witch.”
Everyone, but Tina, exchanged introductions again. More people arrived to fill in the picnic tables, and some spread blankets on the grass beside these. A few young children tagged along, but the group was mostly comprised of middle-aged women and old couples.
“So what happens now?” Glenda had a doughy face, blue eyes, and an upturned nose that reminded Ted of Jerrica’s pet potbellied pig, Hamlet, who had broken his neck when Jerrica accidentally dropped him from a top bunk. Ted struggled to suppress the memory, grinning with such force that he could actually see his cheeks bunching below his eyes.
“Well, it’s a picnic,” his mother said, “so picnic things, I suppose.”
“I don’t think we’ll have water balloon tosses and wheelbarrow races under these circumstances.” Mr. Colson shook his head in a slow, sad way.
And this was a cue for Glenda to latch onto Ted’s elbow, digging her fingers into his arm in a painful way. “It was my daughter Sienna, almost a year ago. She had already separated from him. She got a restraining order. I was the one who found her on the basement stairs.” Her eyes filled, the flanges of her nostrils reddened.
“There, now,” Vivian said, putting a clumsy arm over Glenda’s shoulder. Mr. Colson pushed a handkerchief at her. Elaine fixed narrowed eyes on Glenda until the distraught woman let go of Ted’s arm. Tina surveyed the lot of them and yawned.
“I’m okay. I’m okay.” Glenda dabbed her eyes with the handkerchief. “But I just don’t get it. I mean, she had a restraining order. They were separated.”
Unable to come up with anything else, Ted said, “That’s terrible.”
“Yes,” she said, “yes, it is.” She looked to him with relief and gratitude, as though he’d finally explained something she had spent nearly a year trying to figure out. “You know what it’s like. Who did you lose?”
Ted swallowed and tugged at the neck of his T-shirt. “Well, my sister – ”
“You lost your sister?” Glenda glanced at his mother.
“No,” she said, pointing at Tina. “No, my daughter’s right here.”
“My sister’s boyfriend, actually,” Ted explained. “He died a few weeks ago.”
“He was killed, right?” Mr. Colson asked, clearly ferreting out whether or not Ted and his family were at the picnic legitimately, as though he suspected they might be the kind of people to crash picnics for homicide survivors just to sample the tainted potato salad and to keep company with morose strangers – having nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon.
“He was shot in the neck, dragged through the woods, and left there to die by this guy he thought was his best friend,” Tina said in a flat voice. “I can’t talk about it.” She spread the bandana on the table and nested her head in it. In a minute or two, she’d be snoring. This was her newest habit – sleep – at any place, at any time. Ted’s mother refused to let her drive these days, so she was the one to ferry Tina to and from her job at the consignment children’s clothing store, appointments at the midwifery clinic, grief counseling sessions and gatherings like this one that, she confided to Ted, she hoped would help Tina move forward, and prepare herself to care for the fatherless baby she insisted on having. “Because,” she’d said, “there’s no way I’m raising another child.” But she’d said this in such a way that he knew she could hardly wait for the baby to be born, so she could begin doing exactly that. Ted shook his head, as though to dislodge insects, wondering what would happen if people weren’t allowed to speak unless they said what they meant. He imagined a delicious silence unfurling like a beach blanket on sun-warmed sand.
“How terrible for you,” Glenda said, searching his face for grief since Tina had, in effect, folded her hand.
“Well.” Ted hadn’t actually ever met Terrell. Tina saw him at clubs and parties and didn’t begin dating him seriously until after her brother had decamped for California. Outside of reciting the bare facts of his death, so far his sister didn’t talk about him at all. When he’d asked his mother about Terrell, she’d only mentioned that he’d had very thick calves, and, by the way, they had done a pretty poor job of embalming him. It was hard to really mourn the guy with these few details, but Ted was sorry for his sister, and he was lonesome for her too. Before his trip to California, it was like they tramped along together on the same path – here he thought of the Appalachian Trail that he’d hiked during his short-lived Boy Scout days – but when he returned, she’d somehow managed to stumble on a switchback. Now he couldn’t find her. And he was afraid to call her back, to call her name. So he was alone with his mother, who was already hunting down changing tables, high chairs, cribs, and sheets printed with ducklings, lambs, and rabbits at garage sales. “It’s hard losing him,” he said, “because he loved my sister.”
Ted didn’t think there were too many other people in Northeast Georgia at this moment writing messages on helium-filled balloons to dead guys they’d never met. This kind of thing was a selling point for his mother, who liked to brag that she bet that no one else in all of Georgia was raking clay with a fork to make a ceramic box that resembled a walnut or writing a haiku on rice paper in a tree or having tabouleh and lemonade for breakfast or whatever other bizarre thing she’d talk him into. (Ted remembered staring at parsley-punctuated clumps of bulgur and the sweating tumbler of bitter juice and hoping, for the rest of Georgia’s sake, she was right about the tabouleh and lemonade.) She was giving him a look right now, and a wink, as though to say, see, I bet no one else is doing this right now, like it was some kind of a plus, like he should be thrilled to do things no one else in his right mind would do.
The scent of the felt-tipped marker stung his nostrils. He pressed the tip to the white balloon he’d been given by the picnic’s organizers and it popped with an explosive sound. A few people gasped, and someone screamed. “Sorry.” He raised his palms. “Sorry about that.” At least he wouldn’t have to write on the stupid thing, he thought. But Glenda swiftly passed him another balloon, this one as blue as her own weepy eyes. He touched the pen to it, lightly and experimentally; it stayed intact. He’d write something short. His mother had already written her first balloon and was pestering the woman who manned the helium tank for another. Tina, surprisingly, perked up for this activity. Her cheeks were flushed, her hands ink-splotched. She’d covered her balloon’s red skin with sentence after sentence. From where he stood, Ted could just make out the question marks followed by exclamation points she’d scrawled on it.
Someone called out that it was almost time to release the balloons, so Ted quickly wrote: Terrell, I never met you, but I guess you were alright. Sorry you had to die. Ted. Then he glanced over his shoulder to see if Mr. Colson was spying to expose him as an interloper because he’d never known the murder victim. At the toot of a whistle, most people released their balloons, too few for a colorful canopy, but still they bobbed upward in a pleasant way. Tina kept writing in a fever. But Ted’s mother set her second one, the postscript, free with a giggle. How out of place she looked with her bright black eyes, shiny dark hair, and happy smile among these dull-eyed, stunned, even shell-shocked survivors. It was as though she didn’t know any better.
“You’re a cheerful young man, aren’t you?” said Mr. Colson, who appeared at his side as soon as the balloons were lofting on warm air currents towards the clouds. “You and your mother.”
“No, we’re just nervous.” Ted capped his marker with care.
“You remind me of my son. Doesn’t he, Vivian? Doesn’t he remind you of George?”
The pudgy woman peered into Ted’s face. “Why, yes, I can see it. Of course, George had blond hair, and he was tall, over six feet and he’d just turned fifty. But there is something.”
“Was he . . . ”
“He was killed in that Bonus Bonanza Burger in Atlanta. You hear about that?” Mr. Colson asked. “These kids – not much older than you – tried to rob the place. They panicked or something and opened fire in the restaurant.”
“Our son was the manager.” Vivian’s lower lip quaked.
“Now, Mother,” Mr. Colson said, and he produced another handkerchief. “That was a long time ago. There must be healing and forgiveness.” He turned to Ted. “You know, we go to the prison to see him the last Sunday of every month, rain or shine.”
“Your son?”
Mr. Colson shot him a sharp look. “He’s dead, boy. He’s not in prison.”
“He respected the law,” said Vivian in a quavering voice.
“We go see that kid who killed him.”
“We pray with him.” Vivian trumpeted into the handkerchief.
“Every month, the last Sunday, we drive over to the prison and get on our knees and pray with that boy for a couple of hours.” Mr. Colson nodded.
“Sheesh,” said Ted, hugely relieved not to be that kid.
“See, we believe in healing and forgiveness. Even started a ministry at the women’s prison near where we live.”
Ted scanned the crowd to find his mother. This would be a very bad time for her to enter into the conversation with her excited pronouncements on how she is agnostic because she doesn’t have the time these days to devote to atheism, how Christianity is the sure root of all mental illness, and how if there is a heaven she’d refuse to step foot in it if it mirrored the patriarchy that governs churches in this country. She could go on and on making this kind of joyful noise until she nearly got into fistfights over it. But now she was standing at a safe distance with Tina, her arm around her. She seemed to be coaxing her to release the balloon and offering her another, a green one. The helium tank lady, a severe-looking black woman, loomed in the background, glaring at both of them.
Before too long they’d head over to say goodbye and join Ted, so he had to work quickly to change the subject. “And what kind of work did you do, Mr. Colson, before the ministry, I mean, well, before your son died?”
The old man smiled for the first time, his face webbing like the roads on Ted’s mother’s map of Georgia, and he began to tell about the work he’d done for NASA. “You’ve heard of NASA, haven’t you, son?” Mr. Colson had been a scientist; he’d been in the control room when John Glenn had been sent into orbit. Good, thought Ted. NASA, scientist, control room – all perfectly safe topics to discuss with his mother, who had such trouble comprehending where she was on this planet that the idea of more space, outer space stupefied her into rare and beatific silence. Teddy relaxed, idly preparing a few questions about rockets and jet propulsion, though the old man was on a roll, and he probably wouldn’t need any prompting at all.
Over his shoulder, he heard a familiar voice insisting, “And I don’t get it because she’d separated from him. She’d gotten a restraining order . . .
“Well, that was sure . . . ” His mother flipped up the visor and churned the ignition.
“What?” Ted wanted to know her take on that absurd gathering.
“Goddamn boring,” Tina said, burrowing in the bandana. “Don’t bring me to any more of these things, Mom. They don’t help.”
“I thought it was kind of interesting,” Ted’s mother continued as she steered out of the parking lot. “That old NASA guy and Glenda, the good witch wandering around like the Ancient Mariner – ”
“That doesn’t help, Mom. In fact, things like that make me want to puke.”
They drove along for several minutes in silence before Tina cupped a hand over her mouth. “I’m serious. I’m going to chuck. Pull over, Mom, here, here.”
“Use a plastic bag. Ted, give her a bag from behind the console.”
Ted plucked a grocery sack from the tangle of these his mother had stashed probably for just this purpose. He balled it and tossed it over the headrest. Tina coughed and then retched, heaving into it. A thick sour smell filled the car. Ted cranked the window lever before remembering the back windows had jammed permanently shut the winter before last. “Um, Tina,” he said, “how about opening your window a bit?”
She wiped her mouth with the top of the bag, ignoring him.
“Hang on.” His mother turned the steering wheel, and the car crept across two lanes before bumping onto the right shoulder. “Are you okay? Do you want to lie down in the backseat?” She stroked Tina’s bushy black hair from her brow. “We’ll stop here until you feel better.”
Ted threw open the door and practically sprang out. He’d been holding his breath and now gulped lungfuls of hot, soggy, but sweet-smelling air. His mother had pulled alongside a kudzu-filled ravine that thrummed with insects. The late afternoon sun burned more fiercely than it had at noon, glinting on the ticking car and shimmying above the highway. The front doors chunked open, and Tina and his mother stood beside the car blinking as though they’d just emerged from a darkened movie theater. “What do I do with this?” Tina held aloft the knotted plastic bag.
“Here, I’ll put it in the trunk.” Their mother reached for the trunk release lever. “We can throw it away later.”
Tina handed her mother the bag. “I’m going to walk around a little, clear my head. Teddy, you want to come.”
He nodded. “Sure.”
“Don’t go too far, okay?” Elaine opened all the car doors wide and sank into the passenger seat. When Ted glanced over his shoulder as he and Tina strode along the ravine, he could see his mother shuffling through the contents of the glove compartment, reorganizing the many maps she could not read.
“Hey, I know this place,” Tina said after they’d walked some minutes in silence.
“You do?”
“Terrell brought me here one time in that red Eclipse I had. He called me the Eclipse Girl ‘cause he saw me parking in the lot of this club downtown, and he didn’t know my name, see, so he asked some friends of mine who the Eclipse Girl was.” Her smooth cheeks dimpled and her full lips stretched into an unfamiliar smile.
“Why’d he bring you here?” Ted asked. “This is pretty much nowhere.”
“He had some champagne, and we were drinking it in these Styrofoam coffee cups. I had to wipe the coffee out with my T-shirt, so it wouldn’t taste too bad.” Tina stooped, grunting, to pick up a fallen branch. She began tearing twigs and dusty leaves from this, fashioning a walking stick. “He liked to drink. I guess we were driving somewhere. He was driving. I don’t remember where. He got mad about something, jealous or whatnot and he just, like, yanked the steering wheel and we came down there.” She pointed the stick at a mud-rutted slough trailing down into the ravine.
“Wow! What a weird coincidence.” Ted was amazed.
Tina gazed at him, her brown eyes moist, shining. “Maybe this isn’t the place. Maybe this just looks like the place. Anyway, I spilled champagne all over myself, cracked the bottle on the windshield.” She frowned and shook her head.
“What happened?”
“He was still mad, said I didn’t love him, but I told him I did. He wouldn’t believe me no matter what I said. He said I had to prove it and he ran across the highway blind, like this.” She cupped a hand over her eyes. “Cars were honking and swerving. But he got across. Then he shouted for me to follow him. Dude was totally drunk, you know, but he said if I loved him, I’d follow him blind.”
Ted stopped walking, took his sister’s arm. “You didn’t do it, did you?”
She wrenched free and continued to walk, pointing again at the mud rut. “That ruined my car. The battery or something came loose, and that was the last of it.” They came upon a fire ant hill, and Tina prodded it with her stick, causing the mound to ripple and tremble as the insects scrambled to protect themselves. “No more Eclipse and the last of the Eclipse Girl.”
As they continued in silence, Ted struggled to puzzle it out. To him, Terrell sounded a lot like the wreck he’d caused, a guy who could be voted most likely to create misery. His sister was surely better off without him. Yet these days, after Terrell, she moved so gingerly that you’d think she had just come through a major surgery, like a heart or lung transplant, with no great chances of surviving her recovery. “You must have loved him a lot,” Ted said at last, chalking one mystery up to another.
“Is that what you think?” Tina squinted at him in astonishment. “I didn’t love him nearly enough to prove it. Maybe he’d still be here if I did.” She pivoted, heading back to the car, taking long, swift strides.
Ted hurried to keep up. “But that doesn’t make sense. That friend of his killed him. You weren’t even there.” For the first time, Ted wondered what it had been like being led into the woods by a friend, someone who’d been to Terrell like Danny was to him before the business with the colognes, someone he trusted and joked with and punched in the arm when they both said the same thing together, and then an explosion, a burst of light, a gurgling sound from the throat. Ted swallowed hard, touched his neck.
The traffic on the highway had thickened for a Saturday afternoon with semitrucks speeding through, to make up time lost during the week, Ted supposed. Danny’s father drove such a truck for ConAgra, and he said he was always in a hurry on Saturdays to finish his route. The steady whoosh from the highway stirred a warm breeze, and Ted was grateful for it. He stole a look at his sister, who was again pulling the kerchief from her pocket. After hearing about Terrell, Ted wished she would leave it alone. It was exactly the kind of thing the Crips or the Bloods flashed around in South Central Los Angeles to show their gang affiliation. Not something he liked to see his sister sniffing at every few minutes.
This time she pulled its corners in both hands and whipped it into a roll. Then she wound it over her eyes, tying it at the back of her head.
“What are you doing?” Ted asked, his blood drumming in his ears.
She didn’t answer, but bolted from the shoulder into the highway before he could grab for her. Tires shrieked, horns blared, and there was a sickening scrape of metal. Ted was afraid to look, but when he did he saw that his sister had made it to the median, where she’d sunk to her knees in the blue wildflowers and tall grass, the kerchief still fastened over her eyes.
“Tina! Tina!” Ted’s mother raced to his side, shrieking, “What the hell happened? What is she doing?”
The cars and trucks continued whizzing past, not even slowing to look at the blindfolded girl kneeling in the median and shouting something no one could hear.
Ted rolled on the balls of his feet, watching the blur of trucks, all trucks now, for a gap. A cold drop of sweat trickled onto his lip, and he licked it.
“Oh, no, you’re not,” his mother said. “We’ll drive over there from the other side. It won’t take two minutes.”
Ted glanced at his mother. She’d torn her sunglasses off, her cheeks flamed, and her eyes were round with fright. Even if he made it across how would they ever get back? The best he could do, if he made it, would be to hold his sister, hold her there in the flowers while his mother drove around to collect them both.
“Ted, please, please, listen to me.”
Across the highway, Tina swayed on her knees, sobbing now; he could tell by the way she held her shoulders, shuddering and dipping her head like she was begging or praying. His mother clasped his arm, tried to reel him close, but he shrugged free.
“Ted, no. No.” Despite the heat, she shivered, her teeth chattering.
He looked from her to his sister. How did he ever think he would get away? These two were too good at this. They would tear him apart like they said they would do to that baby in the story of King Solomon, and his father wanted a piece too. That was clear from the bland niceness the old man had layered on his temper this summer like a pile of tarps thrown over the mouth of a volcano. Ted only wanted what even an idiot like Danny could have – people who left him in peace, who gave him cologne instead of complaining he smelled like rotting meat, who didn’t even expect him to mow the lawn, let alone step up and be the one to love them more than they bothered to love themselves. Ted couldn’t even take care of a cat, but they kept after him anyway. They wouldn’t let up. He rocked on the balls of his feet, took a deep breath, and then another, wondering what would happen if he just turned his back, stepped away, headed down the highway until he could hitch a ride somewhere, anywhere but Georgia or California. “That might be cool,” he said to himself, then he screwed his eyes shut and he plunged.
Lorraine M. López is the author of Soy la Avon Lady and Other Stories, and There is Lipsoap Lettuce, a young adult novel, both published by Curbstone Press. Her recent work appears in Prairie Schooner, New Letters: A Magazine of Writing and Art, The U.S. Latino Review, The Crab Orchard Review, and The Mammoth Anthology of Short Fiction.