Crossroads by Penny Freeman
Rob understood his brother’s love for the road,
especially, as then, in the dead of night. Like himself, Nate had never been
one for large crowds. On the road, one was utterly alone. The growling four-fifty-four
V8 of Nate’s cherry 1977 El Camino Classic and the steel-belted radials humming
on the blacktop lulled to silence all the demands that sucked the life out of Rob.
They slipped away like the endless blur of the dotted, white line that streamed
beyond the windshield. The highway soothed. Mesmerized. It held life at a safe
distance where Rob could nibble off bits at a time, or ignore it altogether as
the mood suited.
Except, there he was, returning with his brother’s
ashes, hurtling at 75 mph toward the madness: the boss, the job, the mounting
bills and overdrawn bank account. The labyrinth of life with no easy way out. Toward
Annabelle—his own Nan—and
that look of dread in her eyes: anguish that assaulted him and reticence that held
him at arm’s length.
Rob jerked awake,
jolted from a deep, dreamless slumber by something—the baby? He couldn’t
remember. Nan had argued with him, and he put off going to bed until she slept to
avoid a demand to hash it out. He turned in very late, and the fog of somnolence
melded to his brain like his kids’ sticky hands to his skin. Scarcely lucid, he
ignored his transient bob to the surface of consciousness, and surrendered
again to the depths of sleep.
Her voice prevented it,
however . . . a low murmur . . . hesitant . . . wary—scraps of sound distorted by the
cobwebs of his sleep-deprived brain. He rolled over, pried open his eyes, and
forced the numerals of the digital clock into focus. 04:00. Good grief. He had
to be up in two hours. Couldn’t she cut him some slack?
He turned toward the
wall and fended her off with the silence of feigned sleep. He was tired of
bending over backward to make her happy, and for what? No matter how he tried,
he couldn’t figure out what the devil she wanted.
He recoiled from her
touch as she reached out to him. “Rob.” She spoke gently, a catch of tears in
her voice. Blast. He couldn’t do this tonight. This morning. She could sleep
all day if she wanted, but he had to go to work. He moaned incoherently and
pulled the quilt up around his shoulders, blocking her out. The light on her
nightstand shattered the darkness. He swore beneath his breath and dug in. Not
tonight. He’d get his own way for once.
“Rob,” she insisted,
jiggling him. “Baby. Wake up.” She prodded him in the back with something hard.
Pushed beyond his patience, he hurled a glare over his shoulder at her. She
flinched with the force of it but fought to appear unaffected. “Honey, you need
to take this.” Was that pity in her eyes? Pity?
Rob looked from her
face to the phone receiver in her outstretched hand and back to her face. He
felt his stomach drop through the floor. Good news never called at 4 AM. She
blinked back her welling tears, but she could not hide the fear and heartbreak.
That look he knew only too well.
“This is Rob.”
“Mr. Daniels?” the
tinny voice on the other end of the line broke in. “I’m sorry about the hour.”
Rob flung his legs over
the side of the bed, turned on his lamp, pushed the mop of unruly hair back
from his face, and hunched over the receiver. He knew Nan couldn’t help
reaching out. It was who she was. He felt her drawn to him, then hesitate,
repelled by the palpable shield of animosity pulsating around him. Blazes! He
needed some space. He couldn’t breathe.
“Excuse me. Who is
this?”
“The sheriff of La
Plata County, Mr. Daniels—Durango. Durango, Colorado.”
“How can I help you,
Sheriff . . . ?”
“—Gutierrez. Tim Gutierrez. The reason I’m calling you is . . . well .
. . your wife tells me you have a brother by the name of Nathan Daniels?”
“That’s correct.”
“The thing is, yours is the only phone number in the wallet we found.”
“What kind of help does Nate need, Sheriff? I’ll do anything I can.”
“That’s just it, Mr.
Daniels. If what we found is your brother, he’s beyond anyone’s help now.”
Rob pulled off the highway onto an isolated ranch
road, braked to a stop, and killed the engine. His Nikes crunched as they hit
the gravel. The heavy slam of the car door cracked the silence. Out there in
the middle of the desert, the Milky Way blazed across the inky dome of the
night sky, the earth nothing but a lightless void. Out there, Rob understood
the word ‘peace’.
Rob zipped and buttoned his fly, then returned from
the sagebrush to the road. He stood by the car, unwilling to resume his journey.
He wasn’t ready. He needed clarity. His cell phone vibrated in his pocket, triggering
a reflexive response of annoyance.
“Calling it a day. . . . I love you. Y”
Why was it when she said that, it always sounded like
a plea? Even in a text message, he could hear her tone. Aggravated at the
intrusion, he tapped off the screen and pocketed the demonic device. It was too
expensive to hurl out to the scorpions and rattlesnakes where it belonged.
Rob found himself on the hood of the El Camino,
reclining on the windshield and staring up into the vastness of space. Nate
taught him the constellations and so much more. Movies never came close to
duplicating the might and majesty wheeling above him, but he understood their
compulsion to try.
Nate filled his pad
above the garage with the cool stuff Mom banned; a treasure trove for a ten-year-old.
Fearing detection, Bobby pressed himself against the wall beside the door,
hesitating before he sprinted down the steps and away from the fluttering white
curtains of the kitchen windows. However, if he didn’t show up with the
contraband he promised, he’d be branded a chicken and a liar. With one final
glance toward the house, he shoved the stuff up his shirt, took a deep breath,
slipped outside, and scurried down the stairs.
Nate always lit up
behind the workshop—Gere too, that one time they made a rancid sweet sort of smoke from the
tiny cigarette, when Gere was home from the Army. When they caught him
watching, Nate snapped at Bobby to get lost, but Gere laughed and sent him to
raid the pantry for munchies. Nate got angry. He said Bobby was the smart one. Gere
quit laughing.
With a gush of relief,
Bobby ducked around the workshop to where Todd was waiting for him. He never
expected to find Jack there, but Jack was Jack. Like grabbing a can of beer
just as if he’d been invited, then spraying the rotten-smelling foam all over
them when he popped the top. That was Jack. Swigging a mouthful like he had
Pabst Blue Ribbon over his Cheerios every morning—that was Jack. Choking
on his own swagger was Jack, too.
Jack tapped the
Marlboro on its end like they did on TV, put it in his lips, flicked the
lighter, and took a long drag. He looked about to hurl, but Bobby knew the
bully enjoyed watching them squirm. If Bobby or Todd chickened out, Jack would
never let them live it down.
All of the sudden, a
jet of water knocked the cigarette from Jack’s lips. He jumped to his feet
yelling dirty words Bobby had never heard before. From his place sitting on the
ground, Bobby forced himself to look up in small increments: first the scuffed
leather boots, then the faded Levi’s, the choke chain clipped onto a belt loop
and tucked into the back pocket that bulged with a wallet, to the garden hose
in the grease-stained hands and the pressure nozzle shooting water past him. He
looked beyond the frayed denim jacket and dirty work shirt, into Nate’s stern
face. Those fierce eyes peered from beneath a thick hank of black hair and
pretended to see nothing but Jack.
“Cut it out,” Jack
hollered. “I’ll tell—” Bobby wished he could raise one eyebrow like Nate. It shut Jack up.
Silently, Nate turned
off the spigot as Jack and Todd scampered out the back gate. He smashed the
pack of sodden cigarettes in his fist and dumped both cans of beer out onto the
ground before crushing them and tossing them into Old Lady Mitchell’s
collection over the fence. He turned back toward the house and cuffed Bobby
upside the head. “You’re the smart one, dimwit.”
Bobby thought how
Nate’s eyes looked like Dad’s whenever Bobby disappointed him. Bobby scuffed at
the dirt and Nate ruffled his hair. They walked through the garden to the house.
Nate paused at the bottom of the garage stairs. “Hey, kid,” he shrugged. “Wanna
jam on my guitar?”
“You’re sitting on my car.”
Rob eyed his dead brother who lounged next to him on
the hood. Of course he showed. Where else would he be? “So sue me.”
“You’ll ruin the paint. You better treat her right.”
Rob shrugged. “I have to sell her, you know—to pay for that.” He jerked his thumb
over his shoulder at the urn of ashes nestled in the passenger’s seat.
“Damn shame.”
“You should have thought of that before you up and
died.”
Nate grunted. “I want you to have the Stratocaster.”
“That guitar and this car are the only things of value
you own.”
“Muscle cars are a hot commodity. Keep the Fender.”
“Funerals are expensive. Cremation or not, the folks want
you in the plot next to theirs.” Nate didn’t answer and Rob turned his back on the
thought of his parents’ grief. Rather than start down that treacherous path, he
let his mind seep out into the infinite.
Rob stared at the
linoleum with its pattern worn bare in distinct pathways, the antiseptic steel
tables and sinks, the hospital-green walls. Cold. Soulless. Rob examined
everything—anything—to divert his eyes away from the black body bag in the morgue drawer pulled
out from the wall, and the eight-by-ten glossies the sheriff had scattered on the
steel table. Rob could only manage a single glimpse, but it was enough. He had
known from the first it was Nate.
Rob scarcely heard as
the coroner droned on about the results of the autopsy. Rather, he fingered the
large, chained wallet Nate always used. His thumbs explored the worn leather as
his mind wandered through fond memories until, scalded by the jagged feel of
deep canine tooth marks, he dropped it back into the box of his brother’s
belongings. “Did you get all of it?” he asked abruptly.
“That’s everything we
found on his person, Mr. Daniels,” the coroner answered.
Rob wagged his head. “No.
I mean, did you get all of him?” He didn’t want to think about the answer. “I
would like to see where it happened,” he added before the man could respond.
“Murdock thought you
might,” Sheriff Gutierrez answered; “—the rancher who found the truck. He
has to drive out there today and will wait for you over at the diner ‘til ten.”
From beside him on the hood, Nate refused to allow
Rob’s silent contemplation of the stars. “You still haven’t figured it out,
have you?” Rob forced his attention back to Nate’s accusation. “Twenty months
since that day, and you still haven’t got a clue. I thought you were the smart
one.”
“Says the corpse.”
“And you’re not the walking dead?”
Rob had no reply. There were times when he yearned for
oblivion. Nothing matched the blackness that crippled him after Annabelle broke
their engagement, before he figured out what he wanted to do with his life (fat
lot of good that did him), but the occasional bout still festered in his soul.
“Piss or get off the pot, Bobby. Quit doing this to
her.”
Rob slid off the car and fled his brother’s censure. “I
don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t you think she knows?” Nate accused. “You claim she
doesn’t have to say a thing, but you hear her loud and clear. What makes you
think she doesn’t understand you just as well? What do you think those
nightmares are all about? The ones she disturbs your precious sleep with?” Rob
wheeled on his brother, opened his mouth to repulse that acerbic tone, then
clamped it shut and turned away. “Stop living with one foot out the door. If
you’re going to leave, do you both a favor and get it over with.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because she’s my wife! I love her. . . I need her.”
“To wash your shorts and put dinner on the table. To
scratch an itch.”
Incensed, Rob pushed past Nate to return to the car. He
plopped into the bucket seat and leaned his elbows on his knees, his Nikes
still planted in the gravel. “We were in art,” he said at last. “She played some
trick on me—you know. Girls.
High school. We were laughing. She was close—in my space. At that moment, I saw her. I knew she would be the mother of my children.”
Nate chortled deep in his chest. “I bet you did.”
“It wasn’t like that . . . well, there was plenty of that. But,
this was more. My soul knew—like a shaft of light shining down on
her, I knew.”
“Divine revelation.”
“Mock all you like, but I knew. She was barely sixteen,
and I knew.”
Nate amended his tone. “I understand, little brother. Maybe
it’s the jealousy talking.”
“Scared me spitless.” Nate grunted in agreement. Rob scrubbed
at his eyes and growled his frustration. “I can’t live without her,” he moaned
between his hands, “but I’m suffocating. I need air.”
Nate crouched down and tussled his brother’s hair. “Hey.
Knucklehead. Maybe if you pulled your head out of the sand, you’d breathe
better.”
Rob knew where to find
Nate: out behind the workshop, stealing a smoke, sitting in a folding chair. Nate
glanced up when Rob shoved a steaming mug of mulled cider into his line of
sight.
“Kind of crazy in there,” he observed dryly as
he took the welcome warmth.
“Yeah. Sorry. I
couldn’t stop it.”
“Why would you want
to?”
Rob snorted and
crouched down to his haunches beside his brother. “Just getting our family together for Thanksgiving is bad enough, but Nan’s, too? That’s
totally insane.”
“It makes your wife
happy.” Rob sighed. “She’s allowed once in a while, you know.”
Rob flicked at the dirt
with a stick. “Yeah. Right.”
Rob felt Nate’s eyes on
him. “What’s eating you?” Rob refused to answer. Nate stood and ground out his
cigarette butt with his boot. “Nan seems kind of . . . down.”
Rob shrugged. “Pregnancy
will do that. She’s close.”
“You have it all, Bobby,”
Nate said softly after a moment. Rob snorted at the comment. “You do. You have
what every guy really wants.”
“Easy for you to say.”
Nate kicked his
brother’s shoe. “It is easy for me to say because it’s true. You
have a home. You have a life. Why is it so hard for you to see?”
“I’m twenty-six years
old, Nate—twenty-six and living with the folks because of this ‘career change’ forced on me, and
I can’t both feed my family and pay the rent working the night shift at 7-11. And
then she goes and gets pregnant. Again! I have no life. I
never have. Who the devil gets married at nineteen?”
“Then why did you?”
“Because I had to!”
Nate’s single brow rose
as he eyed his brother. “I never thought of Annabelle as that kind of girl.”
Rob jumped to his feet,
provoked at the insinuation. “She’s not! I had to ask her. I had to get free.”
“You were free. She was
seventeen and her mom called off the wedding. Why did you ask her again?”
Rob began to pace. “She
wasn’t supposed to say yes.”
“Closure,” Nate accused, his voice dripping
with contempt. “You wanted closure but meant to make Nan the bad guy. It
backfired on you.” Rob huffed and pushed back his hair with both fists. Nate wouldn’t
back off. “And here you are, shackled to a girl you don’t love and kids you
don’t want, trapped by those pesky marriage vows and hating her for it.”
“I don’t see you
running to the altar.”
“Because Sal refused,
little brother. Twelve years we were together, ten living under the same roof—long enough to be common-law
married. But she never loved me enough to make it official. Hell. She couldn’t
even commit for that long according to several of my ‘friends’. I
would have married her in a heartbeat when I was nineteen, but God saved me
from my own stupidity.”
“That’s more than I can
say.”
Nate huffed in
exasperation. “That’s exactly what God did for you, knot-head.
You’re just too busy feeling sorry for yourself to see it.”
Rob emerged from behind his hands sniffling and
blinking. Nate handed him a Kleenex from a box in the back. “What a baby,” he
taunted. “Blow your nose.” Rob sputtered a little laugh and complied. Then,
squaring his shoulders, he drew his feet into the truck and shut the door. The revving
engine splintered the stillness.
Nate again crouched down and leaned his arms on the
sill of the open car window. “You’re the smart one, Bobby,” he counseled. “Figure
it out. You know and I know that without Annabelle, you’d be me.”
Rob nodded his head, then pulled a knob on the dash. The
headlights flared on, the instruments lit, and Nate receded with the darkness.
The hot desert sun
battering his head and singeing the back of his neck, Rob stood on the dirt
road, surrounded by sagebrush. He stared at the cigarette butts scattered on
the ground around the tire tracks of a large vehicle, accentuated by boot
prints pacing a path in the dirt.
Rob’s mind filled with
images of a broken-down truck parked on an isolated ranch road, miles from the
highway or anywhere else, Nate weak and dehydrated, pacing back and forth and burning
smoke after smoke as he tried to figure out what to do.
Nate bottomed out six
months before but went to live with Gere while he got back on his feet. If
anyone understood Nate, Gere did. He was his twelve-step sponsor. Nate got
clean. He got dry, free of the hard liquor that ultimately destroyed him. But
it took him too long to get that way. Still smoking a pack a day, getting sober
wasn’t enough to save him. Because of the rot-gut, no one knew he bled to death
in this godforsaken desert, at the mercy of the buzzards, the coyotes, and the
sun.
The coroner had it all
worked out. Nate had probably been bleeding from his ulcer for weeks, if not
months, before it burst into a severe hemorrhage and he vomited his life out on
the driver’s seat of his El Camino and the ground outside the car door.
“He was a trucker.” Hopelessness and futility
echoed through the emptiness of Rob’s soul and hollowed his voice. “He was
headed to Chicago and a new job.”
Murdock nodded. “A lot
of big rigs come through here,” he observed. “The 160 gets pretty busy at night.
A man would have to get off the road a fair piece to escape the noise.”
“He just wanted some
peace and quiet.”
The weathered, old
rancher kicked at the blood-clotted dirt, unhappy evidence of one man’s last
hours. “Your brother—he was a fighter, son. His battery was dead, he was sick as a dog, but he
cleaned up the mess he made in his truck as best he could. He found something
to put water in, then went looking for it. He didn’t quit. Not by a long shot.”
Rob looked up and met the man’s gaze. “Come with me.”
Rob allowed Murdock to take
him by the shoulder and steer him back the way they came. Together, they
followed Nate’s distinctive boot prints a mile down the road, until they veered
off into the desert toward an abandoned cabin a hundred yards out into the sage.
“He must have seen that old place on the drive in and came looking for a well.”
They walked until they reached
a barbed-wire fence that had stood between them and the shack. Sharp, new cuts
in the rusty metal opened up a span between two weatherworn posts tipped
helter-skelter in the loose sand.
The area had been
trampled by human and animal, but the deep impressions of his brother’s fall
remained in the dirt. Rob reached down to free a snag of denim from the barbed
wire, then stared at the frayed, sun-bleached fabric and tried to make sense of
the whole nightmare.
“He was all tangled,
son. His boots—the wire—we
found him laying just as he fell. There just wasn’t enough of him left to get
up. Every time I think of it, I could kick myself. Had I
looked into it the first day I saw the truck, maybe—”
Rob looked up, startled.
The man pointed to caves halfway up the butte rising beyond the cabin. “When I
saw that El Camino a week ago, I thought it belonged to folks hunting
arrowheads. We get a lot of them—day-trippers, mostly.” He sighed and again
pushed at his hat. “I only come out this way every three or four days or so. I
didn’t call the sheriff until the other night when I saw it hadn’t moved.”
Rob nodded but stared
at the scene so vivid in his head. “He was so alone.”
Murdock again grasped Rob
by the shoulder. “Come on, son. I’ll buy you lunch. Rita at the diner makes a
mean pecan pie.”
The breeze chased billowing clouds across the sky and
rustled through the trees surrounding the splash pad. Rainbows shimmered with
each gust of mist as the brilliant summer sun glimmered on the dancing jets of
water. Children’s laughter glittered as brightly as the sunshine.
Rob watched Annabelle play with Charlie in the spray,
smiling reassurance as he sputtered and gasped when droplets hit his face. Jake
splashed in circles around her, and Luke chased some squealing little girl in
and out of the fountains. Rob knew then and there that when he thought of joy,
he would always recall that moment. Certainty came like the rays of light lancing
through the clouds, gleaming through her dark hair and setting it afire.
“Without Annabelle,
you’d be me.” Adrift.
Apart. Alone.
So alone, no one knew he had gone.
The sound of her laughter banished Rob’s brooding. She
had never appeared more beautiful than at that moment, loving his sons. He said
a silent prayer of gratitude: for the future, for the past. For the rescue from
his own stupidity.
“Dad! Dad!”
Annabelle looked up, startled by Luke’s call. As she
met Rob’s eye, her relaxed, easy manner stiffened into apprehension, muted
beneath the compelling solicitousness that he at last recognized as
unconditional love. Knowing himself the cause of the anguish in her eyes
stabbed at his heart. It drove away the calm of his own countenance and
replaced it with the tension of guilt and regret. Pushing past it, he smiled
and walked toward her. Luke ran up and tugged his hand.
“Dad! Dad! Come and play!”
“Luke, Daddy’s tired,” she answered for him as she
came. “He’s come a long way.”
Rob crouched down, doffed his shoes and socks, and
cuffed his jeans. “Yeah,” he agreed, glancing up at his wife. “I’m hot and
tired and have been driving all day. That splash pad is exactly what I need.”
He rose and took Charlie from her. She searched his
face for signs of treacherous undercurrents beneath his calm façade. The fear
that he had lost her trust struck deep. Words of hope and despair, desire and regret
surged to the surface, but, she laid her hand upon his chest and met his gaze. Her
looks bespoke such faith in him—in them, his tongue failed him.
Rob grazed his fingers down the tenderness of Annabelle’s
inner arm as they sought, then, entwined her own. He raised them to his lips. Her
eyes shimmered with tears of relief and hope.
“I’m home.”
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