[extreme environments]

Jane Morton

Unknown Caller

Outside there is a girl walking. As she walks she listens, the night sounds filling her mind, displacing what was there before like water, low at first then rising, rushing out in every direction, pushing what it can out of its way.

The girl is not me and she is not you either. As she walks she leaves things behind; gladly she leaves behind what the night displaces. The heavy, charred smell of the air in the house, the air that tightens and snaps as she moves through it, a cord that runs the distance from her to her husband. She is a girl but she is married, yes. He is the kind of man who laughs when he is angry; who runs his hand over his head when he is angry; who, when he is angry, won’t stop moving.

The girl passes from the edge of town to the edge of the highway, a long straight stretch across the state line if you follow it far enough. She walks on the edge of the highway, along the shoulder, propelled by the insect sounds and truckers passing by.

If a trucker stops, she’ll get in with him. She’s decided this. But none will stop. No one sees her in the dark or if they do they don’t believe she’s really there. She is seventeen, walking on the edge of the highway.

-

When her mind comes back to her it does so out of order. Often – because this happens often – it is her grandmother who she thinks of first, the details of her house, the drawer full of foil scraps, the drawer full of flour, loose, with a cup measure buried in it. Her grandmother’s hands in the flour.

Her grandmother’s was the last house she lived in before getting married. Her grandmother had loved having her there. She had been like another chance, a second chance at a child.

But she had been supportive of the marriage.

-

The girl had known she would marry him ever since the first time they met. It was like a premonition. She’d written it down in her journal – by next year I will marry him. The words such a potent magic she fears them now, and says little.

Because you can say so many things without knowing what it is you’re saying. What it means. You can do so much and not know it.

-

She’d first met him at the church where her grandma brought her every week. He was from their town – he’d gone to her high school, and though there’d been no overlap, he said he recognized her. He used to come to church sometimes back then, but she’d been too young to be looking at boys.

Not that it was ever encouraged that she look at boys, no. But when the right one looked she might look back.

-

It had been fun; he had been fun. With him, permission was no longer an issue. From her grandmother. The power to give permission had been transferred, just like that. And he would give anything. For her. He told her so.

-

Anyway, there are rules wherever you go. And that had been fun too – figuring out what the rules were, with him. Figuring out how things worked, where the edges lay. How to press up against them. She’d learned quick.

-

When the girl stops walking she is a half-mile from the Walmart. She continues moving along the shoulder of the highway and soon she arrives.

The indoor lighting hurts her eyes. She takes a pair of sunglasses from a rack and wears them, finds the restroom, washes her hands. It treats her like a criminal, this light.

On each stall door is a sign: It Is Not Funny, It Is A Crime, No Shoplifting.

She needs to borrow a phone. She wonders, if she calls from the store, who will it say is calling?

-

Most often, the landline at the house gets Unknown Callers. At her grandmother’s house, her great-aunt had called every evening at 4:30. At her house now – the house her husband’s mother left – the calls are erratic. Often the phone rings not at all, for days. Sometimes it seems to ring endlessly. Persistently. And her husband wants to know who is calling.

At her grandmother’s house, she had been allowed to use the phone. From 6-8:00 she was allowed, and she could call anyone she liked. She could tell anyone she liked to call her at that time, and she could answer.

Her husband, before he was her husband, called outside of these hours. He was not a high school friend. He was an adult, and he’d chat a bit with her grandmother before asking her to pass the phone along.  

-

When she disappears like this, there is no one he can call. She is not a runaway. She has not been kidnapped. She is not a child. She is a woman old enough to marry, though it’s true she is a girl still, very much a girl. These antics.

He can’t call her grandmother, though he knows that she would wake to answer his call.

-

What miracles might be allowed tonight?

From the Walmart, the cell phone borrowed from the boy pushing carts in the parking lot, she will not call her grandmother, though hers is the first number in her mind.

She wants to divine a number to call. Some combination of her birthday and the number of miles she is from home, her grandmother’s address. Something with power, that might sweep her out of this place, sweep all of this away in the rearview. She looks through the contacts of the boy’s phone – Cutter, Momma, Sugar. She wonders where these, any one of these would bring her.

-

When the phone rings he knows right away who is calling.

Unknown Caller the phone reads, but he knows, he is certain, who it is. Often he knows things like this – instantly, he knows what is going on. A flash of insight he can’t explain and doesn’t need to, because he is right, he knows he is.

And he is right: her voice on the line saying honey. Asking can he pick her up from the Walmart.

Often he has these flashes; he can read things, situations he can read as if they were language. The frustration he felt, waiting, thinking who he might call to try and find her, the fear he felt – though he would not have called it fear – hardens now. There was a time when it would have softened, pooling warmth inside him.

Now he is in his truck driving fast but aimless. He will go get her. He knows that and she does too. But, for just a while, he will take his time. Pretending to decide what he will do.

Yes, often he has these flashes, messages he receives wordlessly. The truth he finds always to be more so before it is spoken, words somehow corrupting their own meaning. Leading to misunderstandings, arguments, fights. More words and more confusion, the message farther with each sound spoken. He knows, for instance, she will ask him again to get a phone for her, her own phone, a cell phone. She will insist; she will demand; she will yell. And he will have to explain, again, how that could only make things worse. Or—worse—she will be silent, offering neither excuse nor apology. And then it will be him who is yelling.

-

Later, seen through the window of the house, a small yellow shotgun house with the back and front doors almost perfectly aligned, a mark of bad luck, bad energy flow, the back door opening to the kitchen, the front door to the living room: they are shouting, both of them, the man and the woman, both very slight, the man with his boots unlaced, his jeans scrunched up over top of them, the woman in stockings, they are shouting and moving their arms, wildly above their heads and against each other they move, swaying with their mouths wide open, or they are singing, dancing to some music so loud you can’t hear a thing over it. The doors are open, both of them. You could walk right in if you wanted to.

-

When the girl becomes pregnant the man knows before she says a word about it, before she takes a test. He receives this truth wordlessly, holding her arms behind her back. She is crying, her arms thin and fine as a bird’s bones beneath the feathers. There will be bruises but this is not his fault, he tells himself, he will not concern himself with fault in this, how fragile she is, how breakable, and then, suddenly, he knows. He is right to not let her walk through the door, out into the night. Because she is carrying their child, his child, and he should have a say in this, the safety of their child. He will have a say in his own child’s life.

-

When the man was not a man but a boy, he had a father. For a brief time, it seemed, he had a father. Then he was gone. Still, the man remembers his father as he saw him then, as a boy. He does not think of him often but always he is there, in the back of his mind, in his flesh, behind his eyes.

There is nothing a man must learn to become a father; if he is a man that is enough. If he has learned to be a man. If he is grown. This is something he learned from his father, when he had one. For a woman it is different. He tells his wife these things, all the things that she must learn, thinking, this is how you’ll spend your days now. And everything would be then how it should.

The man remembers his father and all the things he learned from him, just by watching. Just by hearing his voice, before he even knew what words meant. When he could only hear them, the meaning behind them, the pure meaning of their sounds.

His wife did not have a father, she never had one. This is part of the problem, he knows. He has said this before—she is fatherless, fatherless—a word he flings like spit in her face. He will not have his child raised like that.

But he loves her grandmother. She has done the best she could do. He tells her that, on the phone, he tells her they have done the best they can do, she has and he has, and he is doing so still, his best. He tells her about the child; he is the first to tell her. They are happy, but there is also something else.

-

The story progresses, inadequate to explain its outcome, to absolve anyone. The girl gives birth to a healthy child and she is not sure what to do with it.

She wonders about love, what it is supposed to mean and if it is even real, if it is a real thing. At the same time she knows it to be tangible. Here it is—embodied in flesh taken from her own. This is love: this child. This is the outcome of love, the expression of it. And still she can’t quite say just what it means.

This child does not need to ask such questions. There is something hardwired in him. It seems to function flawlessly at first, faltering only after years of steady use. But there’s no need to skip so far ahead.

-

As the days go on the girl’s uncertainty warps, shrinking down to something hard and ugly, unrecognizable to her. She tosses it away. Those questions—she forgets them entirely; otherwise, she would swear they came from outside her. This is life. This is her own life, held to her chest, small and warm as a loaf of bread. Her own life. And it is always just beginning.

-

When the girl was just a girl and not a mother, not a wife, not missing, she dreamed of horses. They were not nightmares exactly, but they were terrible, terrific the way an angel is. The horses were large as angels and muscled and light poured off their great flanks, their shoulders rough and soft at once, pure animal. And she would run with them. And she could not keep up, but she could try.

-

The girl picks up her life and begins again.

It is the afternoon, the middle of the day, and she is walking. The sun presses down on her, warm and firm as hands on her hair. The baby’s face shielded by his blanket.

She has left behind his stroller. She has left behind his crib, his toys. These things she has deemed inessential. Her body provides all that he needs—he can sleep there, he can eat there, his head against her chest.

The girl is walking in the afternoon, the sun beating down on her hair. Cars rush past her and she can see the people inside of them. Mostly it is men who are driving. She watches the men rush by, meeting her eyes sometimes through the windows. If she waved, she is certain, they would stop. She is waiting for the right one to wave to. She will know, she is certain, who the right one is.

When the car stops she will climb in. Most men are eager to help a woman, or a child, fatherless and seeking direction. The exact direction they were driving in. She will climb into the car, pull the seatbelt across her chest, the child still bundled there against her.

Later, she will call from a payphone. She will not say where she is calling from.

Kaitlin Miller