Read Online A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain by Adrianne Harun - Free Book Online Page B

right toward the P&P, but left, up Lamplight Hill.

UNCLE LUD
    By the time Bryan dropped us back on the corner of Fuller and James, the day felt more than half spent. I knew Uncle Lud was waiting. Still I would have given anything to linger away the afternoon with Tessa. Fat chance. She had her own clamorous demands waiting at home, and although Tessa would tease and laugh when we were all together, when we were alone, she shifted away from me, sinking quickly back into an inscrutable girl, the girl who would not be hurt by some boy. And I ceased to be her lifelong friend, instead—owing to an unfortunate incident a year or so ago—morphing into another ham-handed guy with itchy fingers. So Tessa would head toward the railroad tracks alone, while I would turn reluctantly in the opposite direction, always pausing to glance back and watch her in her tight jeans and too-big shirt and ratty red sneakers, her arms swinging and chin high until she reached the last corner and her shoulders slumped, her head began to bow.
    Often, I did follow Tessa all the way to her own doorstep, just to make sure she was safe, I told myself. I would watch as her sister’s kids fell upon her, every one of them demanding, demanding, and the old man, her grandfather, began calling out for a glass of wrist-warm tea, a blanket, a hand closing a window. That sister would shriek for Tessa to shut those kids—
her own kids
—up. Tessa, surrounded, bore it all just as calm as could be, but all the bounce and quiet electricity of our time together had vanished as if that bunch had stolen it outright. I could imagine how a fellow might rush in and push them all aside, grab Tessa’s hand, and run in the opposite direction, away from town, away even from the railroad tracks, that constant symbol of escape, until our feet were beating at air and the mountain itself opened to us.
    It’s hard to say, given the troubles visited on us, that Tessa had it the hardest, but still I think we’d all say she had—she did. Her parents had thought they’d discovered ease and good times in drink, and then rebuffed and awakened, they drank even more to blur the trash-filled rooms they found themselves in, those big-eyed children always needing something—a diaper, a shoe, another bowl of cereal. Tessa’s parents’ thirst was legendary and unmatchable, and like most heartbroken people, they were also magnets for trouble, which—it was generously noted—they greeted almost stoically, feigning indifference at the crap that relentlessly came their way through their own doing or not. They didn’t raise much fuss when Social Services came along and collected Tessa, her older sister, and their younger brother and deposited them into a rat’s nest of foster homes in another town altogether, none of them much better than what they’d been rescued from. Tessa and I had been eleven then, and I’d known full-on heartbreak for the first time. A year later, her father had a car accident and died, and the mother sobered up enough so that Tessa and her sister could come home and watch her die too, the grandfather, no gift himself, taking over. The brother was too damaged. He’d been in one raging fight after another and they locked him up in a detention center. Tessa, an ever-laughing girl who’d mastered the hands-on-her-hip look-down in grade four, assessing clueless ten-year-old boys as if they had potential, that high-spirited Tessa came back to her old friends after that two-year absence pinched and quiet with a tough resignation that reminded us of the old grannies. My heart hurt to see her, but the couple of times I’d tried to kiss her, lumbering over her, as we were walking alone together, she’d flown at me in a fury.
    â€œShe should see a therapist,” Bryan said when he asked about the scratches on my face. Bryan’s mother wasn’t sick then, and he fancied himself a ladies’