“Kellen.” I put my hand on his cheek and brought him back to me. When I pointed up to the North, he turned his head to look. “Cassiopeia. Andromeda. Perseus. Cepheus. Cygnus. Ursa Minor.”
With the sun gone, we could see all the stars, and the planets, too. Mercury, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, Mars, like stairs from the moon down to the meadow. I kept naming them until I heard a car coming up the road.
After Liam and Butch took Kellen away, I thought about how he left spaces for me when he talked. If I saw him again, I decided I might put words in those spaces.
5
KELLEN
August–October 1977
I woulda gone the next day to see the girl in the meadow, but the bike wreck about turned me into hamburger. I ended up with a concussion, a dislocated shoulder, three busted ribs, a twisted ankle, and my arm broken in two places with the bone poking out. After I spent a week in the hospital, it was another two months before I could do any work for Liam. Two months cooling my heels at Cutcheon’s Small Engine. The old man was decent to me and I liked the work. You spend the day putting engines together, you go home feeling like you done something worthwhile.
Once I was healed up enough to be any use in a fight, I did a few runs for Liam. Me and Butch took this slicked up Monte Carlo to Des Moines, trunk full of meth. Good money.
The summer was near gone before I made it back up to the farmhouse. Nobody answered when I knocked, but the door was unlocked. Soon as I walked in, the stink of dirty dishes hit me. The kitchen sink was full of them, with flies buzzing on rotten food. All these bowls and glasses with mold growing in the bottoms.
“Hello? It’s Kellen, from down the hill. Anybody home?” I hollered.
Nobody answered, but in the bedroom off the front hall I heard somebody snoring, just a little louder than the fly-buzz. I poked my head around the door frame and whoever was in bed rolled over. This thin, white leg and a patch of dark hair poked out of the covers. Liam’s wife? I took a step back, so I couldn’t see her.
“Mrs. Quinn? I was looking for the little blond girl. Wavy?” It was fuzzy as hell in my head. More than a couple times in the hospital, I thought maybe I’d dreamed it.
“She took Donal somewhere.”
I didn’t know who Donal was, but at least the girl was probably real, since Liam’s wife didn’t say, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Do you need anything, Mrs. Quinn? You okay?”
“Who are you?” she said.
“Jesse Joe Kellen. Uh, I work for Liam.”
“Fucking asshole.”
“I’m gonna go. I’m sorry I bothered you.”
I beat it back down the hallway, hoping real hard the whole deal wouldn’t get back to Liam. Had my hand on the doorknob, on my way out, when the mess in the kitchen pulled me up short again. Was the little girl living there in that filth?
* * *
It was the end of October before I went by the house again. Every time my arm twinged, whenever I did any work on my bike, I thought about the way the girl laid her hand on my cheek and said my name. I spent years trying to get people to stop calling me Junior, but damned if that wasn’t the first time I really felt like Kellen was my name.
After I got the bike back in running order, the first place I took it was the road up to Liam’s house. The gas tank still being primer gray made me old-lady cautious, easy on the throttle going up the drive to the house. The kitchen door was unlocked again, and when I swung it open, the girl was there. She stood next to the table, her hair combed smooth, no leaves in it. There was a baby, too, clutching at her dress, and just like that I recollected the reason I’d been sent to the house the night I wrecked. A bag of groceries. Ricki had gone to the store, but she couldn’t take the food up to the house, what with her being Liam’s girlfriend and his wife probably not liking that. So Butch said, “Run it up there, Kellen, before the milk spoils.”
Now that I could see the girl was real, I didn’t know what to say. Maybe that was all I needed. She stood there, holding the little boy by his overall straps and not saying a word.
“Hey, Wavy,” I said. I thought that was her name and the way she looked at me, like she was surprised I remembered; it musta been.
She straightened up and let go of the baby. “I didn’t kill you?”
“Not even close. I’m as good as new. Wasn’t your fault anyway.” I said it real quick, not wanting her to feel bad, but she frowned. “Only I wasn’t expecting to see you out there. When I hit that gravel and the front tire skidded, I over-corrected. Spilled the bike like an idiot. Not your fault. Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks for helping me.”
That was what I wanted for as long as she was looking at me, but when she looked past me, what I wanted more than anything was for her to look at me again. Most people look at you like nothing, but the way she looked at me … it was like we were in the meadow again. Like I was important. People don’t usually look at me like that.
“Is that Donal? He your brother?”
She cocked her head and frowned. Out from the road, I heard this familiar rumble I couldn’t place. I’d been just looking at her face. Her hair and her eyes. Then I looked at all of her. She was wearing a coat, with a backpack over her shoulders.
“You going somewhere?” I said.
“School.”
As soon as she said it, I felt like a dope. That was the bus she’d been listening for and it was gone now.