Issue 27 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

i58
that I was here with him, I wanted to ask him questions, but the
words had left my mouth. My tongue was dry.
We drove through more fields like those surrounding our
house—grass always waving, and trees standing close together,
dark spots in the middle of all that open space. Fences of barbed
wire strung between posts followed the dirt road. I studied this
country I'd never seen, this country exactly like what I saw from
the house, but different because it was outside. The mothers saw
it when Roy took them into town, and again when they came
back. They must have known every tree and rock, must have
counted each fencepost until they were back home, inside our
house. Now I tried to save everything for later, this grass, this
gravel road, the hardness of the wheel I had held in my hands.
I wanted to ask Jenny about this country, ask her again was it
like this everywhere, or was it really different as she'd told me
many times, with the high mountains and desert flats and waves
pounding on rocks. I watched for her, hoping to see her sitting
on a bank, or running along the road ahead of us. She was a part
of outside, I knew—her strange words and stories, the things only
she had seen. That was where we'd find her.
Roy coughed next to me, the sound low in his throat. He
looked at me again, then back at the road. The sky ahead of us was
black now, though I knew it was not yet night, that behind those
clouds the sun was still burning.
Roy slowed the truck and we stopped in the middle of the
road. Dust whispered and hissed against the windows, trying to
find a way in. Only a few big raindrops still fell, smacking the roof
of the truck.
"We're not going to find her here," Roy said. "She couldn't
have come this far." He turned the wheel all the way, and the
truck screeched as we moved in a circle. He backed up and moved
forward again, then pulled the truck into the grass on the side of
the road and turned off the engine.
"Come on," he said. "She's somewhere out there."
Jenny didn't tell me about the outside, about where she'd been
before she'd come here, until she and Lily had lived with us for
longer than a year. She knew to keep quiet, she had seen what
we'd done to the blue-eyed boy, his eyes like twin skies, like pieces
of crystal, so different from our own.
We knew Jenny was different from us, but at first we didn't
know how.
I realized it one day while Jenny and I kneeled in the garden,
pulling up weeds. For a long time the only sound was the snap
the roots made when we ripped them out of the dirt. I heard the
wind in the grass and the noises the swallows made to each other
as they skimmed over the fields. Finally Jenny started to talk.
"I don't think it's any better here," she said.
I yanked out another weed, the leaves coming off in my hand.
"Better than what?" I said.
She didn't say anything for a moment, and I thought we
would go back to working in silence. Finally she threw a handful
of weeds on the pile we had made, their pale roots still clutching
clumps of dirt.
"Better than living in a car, and him hitting," she said. "And
there's still not enough to eat."
"Who hit?" I asked.
"My father."
"Where's your father?"
"I don't know," Jenny said. She looked down at her hands.
Dirt rimmed each fingernail and lined the creases in her
knuckles. "Why do you think we came here?"
I couldn't think of an answer—I didn't know what there was
to come from, what that other world the mothers wouldn't talk
about was like.
Jenny looked into my face, studying my eyes, waiting for me
to speak. But I didn't. I studied her too—her long hair, dark like
Lily's, her pale skin, her eyelashes. I had never known anyone who
had a father. None of us had. I couldn't imagine what one was
like—and why, since she had one, she had lost him.
Side by side we walked into the fields. Roy held one hand to
the top of his head, as if trying to keep an invisible hat from
blowing away. We bent our bodies into the wind, and let it push