I'll Fly Away

Chapter Seven: Steal Away

July, 1987

Having Diane with me was fun, at first. I tried to roll five summer vacations up in half of one. We went to the beach, of course. I took her up in one of Stavros' planes. We strolled down River Street eating ice cream. We got pedicures. We took carriage rides and trolley rides through the historic district. We ate Chinese and Indian and Korean and Moroccan food (with belly dancers alongside—not Sherry, fortunately; that would have been awkward). We ate funnel cakes and cotton candy. We went to the aquarium at Oatland Island and waved at the octopus to make it turn white. We went to the movies. We drove down to St. Marys and took the ferry to Cumberland and saw the wild horses. We had a great time.

I let her pick which bedroom she wanted, and pick out her own curtains and rug and bedspread. I took her to the mall; she turned up her nose at the bookstore but pleaded so charmingly with me to let her get her ears pierced that I figured, what the Hell, and said yes. I was sure Mama would be furious, but whose ears were they anyway?

My bank account was pretty well cleaned out when school started, and I was looking forward to a little alone time, as well as more blocks of time when I could predictably be available for the tenants. I was, of course, supposed to be available anytime for emergencies, but there was a good bit of routine maintenance work that needed to be scheduled in advance, so it was good to have that eight-to-three block to draw on.

The first few weeks went fairly well. Diane wasn't as upset as I'd expected at having to repeat sixth grade. She met some girls she liked; she asked a couple of them over and they seemed like nice kids. Several times that fall I woke up at night and heard her crying softly. The first time it happened I tapped on her door and called to her, but she didn't wake up. I went in and shook her gently by the shoulder and she practically fell out of bed jerking away from me, with a look of blank terror on her face.

"Whoa, baby. It's just me. It's okay, you're all right. Just a bad dream," I said.

She sat there shivering and breathing hard for a while, and then she said, in a harsh voice, "You can go. I'm okay. I don't need you to come in. I'm not a baby."

So after that I stayed out of her room. But I still woke up when I heard her, and I couldn't get back to sleep until she'd cried herself out.

Parent-teacher conferences were a shock. Her grades were pretty bad, C's and D's mostly. I sternly told myself that I hadn't been a typical middle-schooler, that school had been my refuge and release, as it obviously wasn't for Diane, that anybody would have a rough time with being taken away from her abused mom and turned over to a sister she barely knew instead. Her teachers were sympathetic for the most part, but they weren't pleased with her behavior; she tended to run with the bad kids, and she was beginning to get a name for picking on smaller, shyer girls.

I tried to talk to her about it, offered to help her with her homework or get her a tutor, suggested she try being kind to people who were already unhappy. She either mocked me or stared sullenly at the floor until I wound down, and then she said, "Can I go now?"

What the fuck did I know about parenting? I'd hardly gotten any myself.

When the nightmares kept on and I was sure it wasn't just homesickness, I made an appointment for her with one of the counselors at Armstrong's family clinic. They charged on a sliding scale, which was fortunate, because no way could I have afforded the market price. I went with her the first time, and she looked bored and gave the shortest possible answers, or just shrugged. After that I just dropped her off and picked her up. The most I ever got in response to my "How'd it go?" was "It was bullshit." After a couple months I gave up.

I offered to take her to church, but she said no, she hated church, it was all bullshit.

Gradually, things got worse. She stopped bringing her friends over; she always went to their houses and she pushed her return time later and later until I grounded her. Then she started sneaking out at night.

I bought her the best clothes I could afford. She stuffed them in the back of her closet, or traded them to her friends for sleazy pleather and ripped jeans, and went around looking like a B-movie streetwalker.

I started smelling smoke on her clothes and hair; she claimed it was just her friends' parents smoking in the car.

Then she started coming home smelling like liquor.

This went on for a year and a half. At Thanksgiving of her seventh-grade year, Mama wrote to her. Daddy was out on parole. He and Mama had gotten a divorce, and he'd moved in with his new girlfriend. Mama begged Diane to come back home. Diane begged me to let her go.

I did. And I'm sure Mama blamed all the changes in her, the clothes, the smoking and drinking and bullying, the bad grades and the nightmares, on me. Probably didn't notice that her cavities had been filled and she was up on all her shots for the first time in her life, either.

I sent them a Christmas card, but didn't hear back.

About that time Clint made a trip back to Savannah to sort through the things that had been left in storage when the house had been sold. He was nineteen, on winter break of his freshman year at UC Santa Cruz. He called me to come and meet him at the Hilton, where he was staying.

He stood up from his table in the hotel lounge, and he was taller than me. I grinned up at him. He gave me a tight half-smile back.

"Sit down," he said. "You want anything? I can't order you a drink, but you can order and I can pay for it."

"No thanks," I said. I glanced at the folder on the table in front of him. The tab was labeled "Clint" in Rachel's strong, graceful script.

"What's that?" I asked cautiously.

"It's the police report on my father's death," he said, flipping it open, and he looked me straight in the eye. "Do you know how he died?"

For a fleeting instant I thought about lying. But I didn't.

"Yes," I said. "James told me."

He glared at me. "When were you planning to let me in on this?"

"I wasn't," I said. "I figured it wasn't my call."

"Damn it!" he said, slapping the folder shut. "What else does everyone know that I'm too fucking delicate to be told?"

"Nothing, as far as I know," I said. "But listen, when I talked to James about this, it was about two weeks after Rachel's funeral. Not long after that they arrested Gilbert. And then for months and months there was all that crap with the competency hearings, and then the trial. When would have been a good time for us to bring this up?"

He turned his glare on the folder. Then he took a deep breath and let it out.

"Okay," he said. "Okay, I can...kind of see that. I just—I don't know what to do with this. Dad's death was never—Mom told me he died in an accident. It was like, oh, well, he's gone, that sucks, but there wasn't any...it wasn't anybody's fault."

"It still isn't," I said. "It was an accident."

"I know. I know. And the robber died in the shootout too. I just—I feel like I ought to do something."

"You still shooting guns?" I asked.

"Sometimes," he said.

"Learn not to miss," I suggested.

He snorted. "Well, there's always that," he said. And he bought me lunch.

We had a nice talk. He asked about Diane; I just told him that she'd moved back to Jesup when Mama had gotten well enough to take care of her. We talked about how relieved we'd both been when the Eleventh District Court had denied Marshall Gilbert's appeal, and the State Supreme Court had declined to hear it. Clint seemed to be enjoying college, and when he spoke about James there was real affection in his tone. I was relieved to see that at least one family wasn't a total clusterfuck.

March, 1989

Diane stayed with Mama till Spring Break, then showed up on my doorstep in the middle of the night with a chipped tooth, a black eye and a lot of scrapes and bruises. She said she fell down some stairs. I called Mama.

"Hello?"

I was shaken by how weak her voice sounded, and by the realization that it had been nearly eight years since I'd heard it.

"Mama, it's Jeannine. Diane's here. I just wanted to let you know where she was."

"Is she all right?"

I hesitated. "She looks like she's been in a fight. She says she fell down the stairs. She doesn't seem to be badly hurt; I'm going to take her to to the walk-in clinic in the morning."

"It was that no-good boyfriend of hers," said Mama fretfully. "Let me talk to her."

I called Diane to the phone and went into the living room to give her some privacy. A few minutes later I heard her rummaging around in the fridge.

"You planning to stay with me for a while?" I asked.

She shrugged. "I guess."

I went and put fresh sheets on her bed while she fixed herself a snack.

The next morning I took her to the clinic. She had her no-big-deal attitude on, but when she came back out in the waiting room she was white as a sheet. I waited till we were in the car to ask.

"What's wrong, honey?"

"I'm pregnant," she spat. She sounded pissed, but looked scared half to death.

At barely fourteen, no way was she physically ready to bear a child, let alone emotionally ready to raise one. But I said I'd support whatever she decided. She looked at me like I was a pile of dog shit and said she wanted an abortion.

We didn't tell Mama. I drove all night to get her to the abortion clinic and I held her hand until it was done. And after we got home she told me she hated me, and I'd ruined her life. I said I was sorry I'd left her alone, that I hadn't come back for her after Mama threw me out. She laughed. "Is that the worst thing you think you did to me?"

And then she told me how Daddy had decided to make sure his second daughter didn't turn out to be a lezzie.

And how Mama had walked in on them and had taken a knife to him, and gotten beaten so severely she had to have surgery to repair her broken hip, and had to stop driving because she had absence seizures.

And then my beloved baby sister spat in my face, and told me to drive her to the bus station so she could go back home to Mama again.

And I did.

And the next day I signed up for taekwondo classes, so I'd have a safe place to hit things and scream. And I told Jackson I was ready to go anywhere Good Measure needed a pilot.

"How about Zaire?" he asked.

"What do they speak there?"

"French and kiSwahili, mostly," he said.

"Good to go on the French. How much time do I have to get started with kiSwahili?"

"Got a teacher lined up, any time you're ready. And Joanna's got an ex-State Department type to brief y'all on history and politics. We figure six weeks prep time, then head out."

"Who else is going?" I asked.

"Elizabeth, for medical. You can be logistics and transport. Do you know Veronica?"

I shook my head.

"She's our translator and our cultural liaison. She grew up there, and moved here with her parents when she was a teenager. And me."

"You'll mess up our hen party."

He smiled and shook his head. "Nah. I'm the snooty buyer. Y'all will be gossiping behind my back and making fun of me and getting better deals on everything than I do."

"Okay."

Just before the end of the six weeks, I got a call from my mother.

Diane was in jail, charged with burglary, and Mama didn't have enough money to bail her out.

I did, barely. I'd saved up almost enough to pay James back.

I wired Mama the money.

Diane jumped bail and was immediately rearrested.

I said "fuck it," and put my stuff in storage, and went to Zaire. I stayed there a year and a half. When I got back, Diane had just been turned down for probation.

I got re-hired at my old apartment manager job. I took a one-bedroom apartment. I started saving again, fifty bucks out of every paycheck. I promised myself that as soon as I'd paid James back, I'd start saving for a plane. I let Stavros and Greg know I was available as a substitute pilot. And I went back to taekwondo; and every night after class I hit the heavy bag until my knuckles bled.

June, 1992

The postcard was ridiculously hyperpatriotic: eagle, flag, dramatic rays of sunlight.

On the back was scrawled:

Hey Jeannine,

Guess who made the fucking US OLYMPIC TEAM?

—R. H.

P.S. I split an arrow in the second round. In the bullseye.

I called him that evening to congratulate him.

"He's out with friends," James said. "But I'll be sure to pass along your message."

"Thanks," I said. "I'm so proud of him. Of how he's turned out."

"Me too," said James. "There were times when it didn't seem likely to work out this well."

"You did a good job," I said.

He gave a short laugh. "Not that much credit due to me, actually," he said. "Listen, I got your check. You didn't really need to do that. I had it to spare."

"Use it to help fund Clint's trip to Barcelona," I said. "Or yours, if you're going with him."

"I wish I could," he said. "But you know, work..."

"Yeah, I know how it is," I said.

I saw Clint on TV, marching in the parade of athletes. He wasn't as tall as his teammates, but he was broad-shouldered and graceful and beautiful, his head held high, his smile bright enough to light up the whole stadium. I got teary-eyed, and I prayed that somehow Rachel and Colin could see what a fine man their son had become.

And then they lit the torch. With a fucking flaming arrow. And I laughed, and cried, and laughed, picturing the look on Clint's face.

I watched the Games every night, resenting the times I got called away by locked-out tenants and stopped-up toilets and loose dogs, hurrying back to the TV as soon as I could. NBC didn't do much archery coverage, but I caught a glimpse of Clint twice. I followed the scores in the paper right up to the semifinals.

Then there was a small item in the sports section of the Morning News:

Barton Withdraws from Competition

U.S. Olympic archer and former Savannah

resident Clint Barton has withdrawn from

competition, dashing U.S. medal hopes.

Coaches had no comment.

I called James. He hadn't heard anything.

After the Olympics, after the team returned to the U.S., James called me. "Have you heard from Clint?" he asked.

"No, why?"

"He didn't come home. I waited at the airport but they said he'd never gotten on the plane."

"Christ. What happened over there?"

"I have no idea. Please, if you hear anything from him, let me know."

"Of course. You do the same, please."

"I will."

But neither of us did.