HE HAD a headache and acid-hot adrenaline running through his veins.
Bell had yet to release her iron, double-fisted grip on the steering wheel, even after they’d made it back onto Highway 59 without further incident. She was jumpy and nervous and, something he’d never seen before: scared. And disappointed by the turns this case had taken. When she’d first reached out to her son about Sera Fuller, she thought she was asking a man who had the heft of the Texas Rangers behind his name. She had no idea it was going to lead to this kind of ham-fisted carrying-on, she said. Else she might have saved them both the bother. She seemed angry that he had no badge on him, no real power, an irony that she failed to appreciate in her current state.
She could hardly steady her breathing.
For all her tough talk of having grown up with rough and rowdy brothers with a taste for lawbreaking, having a gun pulled on her by a boy whose behind she might have cleaned up after, if she still had a job, had rattled the tiny, fragile thing inside her rib cage. Darren told her to turn off the highway, and a few minutes later they pulled into an RV park off 59, stopping between a white-and-black teardrop model trailer and a wooden shack that had a painted sign that read MAIN OFFICE. Darren looked at his mother and said, “You were right.” He served himself a large plate of crow and ate it cold. Everything that had happened at the Pi Xi house made clear that something significant had gone down at the party or an after-party someplace in the national forest — the one where Rey had taken those pictures, likely, where he said he’d found her bloody shirt — an event so potentially violent and violating that those boys thought lawyers might show up at any moment, that they could very possibly get kicked out of school.
He took a deep breath and went over the bits and pieces they’d picked up from the frat boys and from what Michelle had told Bell earlier. “Sera had too much to drink,” he said. “And who knows how her medication interacted with alcohol. Michelle reported that she wasn’t in her right mind. And she was worried enough about Kelsey’s predatory behavior, a pattern she had of using her boyfriend as a tool to hurt girls she didn’t like, that she tried to get Sera to leave the party and go back to the Rho Beta house.”
He ran through the possibilities of what this all meant.
But came back over and over to the possibility of sexual assault.
“You were right, Mama.”
“Darren.”
“Sounds like something went down out there. And it led to Sera threatening to tell on Brendan, on the frat, maybe Kelsey too. I can imagine Kelsey launching some kind of campaign to get her off this idea, which is maybe where the bullying came in. But we need to get to Rey somehow, get him to show us where he found the —”
“Darren,” Bell said. She’d grown plaintive, soft-spoken, and pensive as she looked out the window at the countryside. “About what I said earlier…”
Did she want him to make a show of her being right, make a song out of it?
“I see it now,” he said. “How the party might tie into what happened to Sera. I mean, who knows if this Brendan kid and Kelsey tried to exact some kind of revenge —”
“What I said… about not wanting you.” She was still shaking from the brush with deadly violence. It made her confessional, somber and penitent.
“What more is there to say?”
“I didn’t mean it the way it came out, son.”
He wanted to snatch the son from her lips.
“You didn’t want me. I think that’s pretty clear.”
“It’s not that simple, Darren.”
He chanced a glance in her direction, saw the pain on her face, the regret.
“But it’s what you said.”
“I said that’s the way I felt when I sat in that church on that one day. But I had you, son, and like I said, I didn’t take a drink for nine full months with you inside me.”
Which was quite literally the least she could have done, he said.
“No, Darren, you ain’t got no idea how hard that was. I was gon’ have to drop out of school, first in my family to step foot on a college campus. But I was sick all the time, up all night, your little butt turning my body inside out. And without Duke, I got scared. He was the one who held up my dreams with me. I was good at math. I had an eye on getting a government job maybe. But without Duke cheering me on, I was just a poor girl, knocked up and alone.”
The air in the car had grown stuffy. The sun had come out after the rain, and it was warming every inch inside the Nissan, puffing up the air with the smell of the dirty laundry. Darren pressed on the button to let down his window, enough times that Bell got the hint and turned over the car’s engine so Darren could roll down his window. The air was thick outside too, but the smell was sweeter. Pine and damp earth, plus the cedar chips arranged around the steps to the front door of the teardrop model trailer. The RV park had set out a few potted plants, a half dozen red petunias.
“What changed your mind?” Darren said softly, dipping a toe in dark waters.
He thought of the watercolors in the halls of his uncle Pete’s house, the prayers Bell had put down on paper. Zion Hill Baptist, a warm, sticky morning in 1973. It was hard to picture his mother as a young girl, a teen, but the paintings caught something, a hang in the light, a moment suspended in time. She could go left, or she could go right.
“I got used to carrying you,” she said. “It was like having a little piece of Duke with me while I was studying, trying to get as much schoolwork done as I could before I got too big. And I talked to you, and it seemed like you became like a friend, kind of, keeping me company, making me think I hadn’t dreamt up my time with Duke. That we had been something real. It had all been real. Somebody had loved me once.”
She took a breath and looked out the driver’s-side window, eyes tilted up toward passing clouds, new and weighty and gray. Darren contemplated the wisdom and folly these pines and their ancestors had seen over centuries. “And he did love me, Darren, he did.” She shot a glance at him and there were tears in her eyes, making them glassy with emotion and tender feeling. It changed her countenance, made her beautiful in a way he’d never seen. She bit her lip and then smiled at some private memory.
Darren felt a shiver run up his spine, felt something ride in on the air coming in through the car window. The car felt more crowded suddenly, and he was too embarrassed by the hoodoo of it to admit to himself what he was thinking: that his father had joined them in this little blue Nissan. It was crazy, and yet it felt true.
He grew heated again. His mother was hiding behind a dead man.
“He wasn’t alive. But you were,” he said. “Why did you give me up?”
Bell pinched her lips together. Darren saw her eyebrows knit, a look of pain or shame washing over her face. She lifted her eyes so that they met his and then, without a hint of apology in her voice, she said matter-of-factly, “Let me ask you something, Darren. Have you ever wanted for anything? Missed a meal? Didn’t you go to a fancy private school in Houston? Didn’t they pay for a place for you to stay out there? College. Law school. Everything in this world I might have wanted for myself one day. Well… we both couldn’t have had it.” The bitterness he’d known from his mother his whole life had crept back into her voice, crusted over the dulcet kindness of the past few days. “It was you or me, and I felt I owed it to Duke to at least give his son a shot at the kind of life he would have given you had he lived. I gave you life, yes, but I also gave you a life.”
Darren sat for a second, listening to the whoosh of cars on Highway 59 behind them, feeling the car shake just the tiniest bit whenever an eighteen-wheeler went past. He was running her story through his mind, panning for bullshit. “But you didn’t do none of that stuff no way,” he said. “You gave me over to Clayton and William and then proceeded to do absolutely none of the shit you said you wanted to do with your life.”
“I told you, I ain’t have Duke around to make me think I could.”
“You could have taken me back then. You could have raised me.”
“I told you, Darren, I didn’t have nothing for you,” Bell said. “You had a good life with your uncles. They raised you to be a good man, full of your own faults, sure, but none that you ought to be too ashamed of. Ought to be proud of what you did being raised up under them.”
She sniffed a little and looked out her window again.
“What did you want for, son, really?”
Darren ran his hand across his face, before leaning his elbow on the open window’s door frame. He let out a doleful sigh that caught both of them by surprise. “The fact that you can’t imagine the answer to that question is ultimately the reason why you’re right,” he told his mother. “I was better off without you.”
