In the end Jameson pulled through. Children die of cancer every day and yet the black-hearted Jameson was permitted to carry on with his alcoholic drinking and pursuit of underage girls. I used to use this fact to fend off the Jesus freaks at school, who occasionally got so desperate for souls they decided to slum it and came trolling for mine.
Shelton did a year, and nearly fifteen months later—walking through the cold with Jenna bundled in my arms—I still wished John Jameson would have died. I wished it more than ever.
“I don’t know where she could be,” I said. “Mama.”
“You’d do better not to think about it at all.”
“Her car was right there at the farmhouse.”
“Well,” Portis said. “She was never one to stay put.”
“I keep thinking she’s froze to death, buried out here in a bank of snow.”
“She’s not frozen anywhere,” he said. “Your mother’s just off somewhere stoned. Like always.”
I put my light on the river and I could see the water moving low and fast between the frozen patches. I could see the big trunks of the pines around us and the open spaces where the snowmobile trails cut through and it was clear why Portis wanted to get us across. It was going to be a long, hard trudge, but we needed to find some cover.
He was right about the river and he was probably right about Mama. She had a knack for surviving things she shouldn’t, but more than that I knew I would have sensed it somehow if she were dead. I picked up calling her Carletta from Starr, but I still called her Mama, too. We were bonded like that, by blood and bone, by spirit, and I would have felt it the moment she fell away from me. It would have brought me straight to my knees.
Jenna was asleep and I watched the thin mist of her rising breath. I was glad she was resting but did not like the way her limbs hung loose in that carrier. I thought of how bad skinny she’d looked in her diaper.
“She’s too scrawny,” I said.
“Babies supposed to be fat,” said Portis. “The fatter the better.”
“She’s malnourished.”
“And that’s a goddamn shame,” Portis said. “I believe I could kill somebody, leave a baby alone like that.”
“I don’t even want to think about it,” I said.
“The irony is,” he said. “It happened to you just the same.”
“Hardly.”
“You don’t think?”
“I never got left in a meth house, Portis. Not like that.”
“Don’t get too hung up on the details,” he said.
“Details?” I said. “Or facts?”
“Child ain’t the one supposed to be chasing after the mother,” he said. “Supposed to be the other way around.”
I felt myself tense, but fought the urge to fire back. Portis would never budge on Carletta and there was little profit in arguing the subject with him further. Besides, he’d never seen Mama sober and had no idea how good she could be when she was clean.
Just that summer she’d put together five weeks off of everything and I’d never seen her look so good. There was color in her cheeks and her hair thickened and bent into the curls I remembered brushing out as a girl. I wished Portis could have seen her, picking little blooms from the spit of weeds along our drive and tucking them behind her ears.
She made breakfast every morning and I’d sit at the table and drink my coffee while we idled away that lazy time before we both had to leave for work. Mama is from South Carolina and she was always going on about the ocean.
“I never thought I’d miss anything about the South,” she said one day. “But I do miss the ocean.”
“You like the ocean better than the lakes?”
“A lake isn’t anything to the ocean,” she said, and laid out some bacon strips on a paper towel. “A lake might look big from the shore, especially if you don’t know any better, but you stand at the edge of the ocean and you’ll see the difference. You’ll feel it, too.”
“Feel it how?”
“It’s hard to describe. But it kind of makes you feel empty and all filled up at the same time. And after you leave the ocean, it sort of knocks around inside you. Like an echo. I haven’t been back in fifteen years and I can still see it as clear as anything. I can see the piers stretching out and the storms coming in black above the water.”
“I wouldn’t like the salt.”
“You’d take to the ocean the same natural way you take to everything, Percy. Which isn’t to mention that the ocean is in your blood. You and Starr both.”
“I’d like to go sometime,” I said. “To South Carolina.”
“We’ll go,” Carletta said. “My cousin Veronica still has a place down there. She’s right on the beach, too.”
Deep down I never believed we’d actually make it to South Carolina, but it was good enough to sit there for a few minutes and think that we might. To see Mama smile as she dumped some eggs into the bacon grease and worked them with the spatula.