One Breath Away - Heather Gudenkauf

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in Revelation and seeing her grandchildren, Marlys could no longer hold back the emotion. She gathered the stunned children into her arms, pushed them back from her at arm’s length after a moment to get a good look, then pulled them back to her.

      “We’re your grandparents,” she cried through her tears. “Oh, aren’t you beautiful?” she said to Augie, whose mouth lifted into a wisp of a smile. “You look just like your mother did at your age. And you.” Marlys turned to P.J., lifting his chin with one work-worn finger. “Aren’t you a handsome young thing?” Her tears dripped down her wrinkled cheeks and plopped onto P.J.’s upturned face. The boy didn’t squirm away or wipe the moisture away from his forehead, but looked in awe up at his grandmother and then cast an unsure glance at his grandfather, who shrugged as if to say, I don’t know what she’s doing, either. When Will turned his gaze to Augie, hoping to share in the levity of moment, he was met with an accusing, suspicious glare. Holly had already filled his granddaughter with the tales of her childhood. The backbreaking work, the isolation of the farm, the battles over curfew, the unfairness of it all. While Marlys preened over the children, who basked in the attention, Will stepped back and busied himself with finding a nurse who could give him some information about the condition of his daughter.

      Now, two months later, he was no closer to breaking down the wall that separated him from his granddaughter. God knows he had tried. He understood how hard being away from her mother must be for Augie and he tried to give her space. He waited one full week before telling her that chores were an essential part of living on the farm, that she needed to contribute. It had been easy with P.J., who followed his grandfather with rapt attention. Augie, on the other hand, would retreat to her room, Holly’s old bedroom, each day after school and wouldn’t emerge until the next morning. She answered any questions in monosyllabic grunts and refused to eat with them. Claimed to be a vegetarian, scowled and scoffed at the fact that he was a cattleman, that he raised animals for food. He knew better than to argue with Augie, tried to be patient. Though at times he thought he would explode with frustration, he vowed to try and educate her gradually, if not a bit gruffly. But she certainly didn’t make it easy for him. She still glared at him with disdain and took every opportunity she could to argue and disagree with what he said. It was like raising Holly all over again. But the thing was, over the years, after his relationship with his daughter had disintegrated into far-flung memories of when she was little and thought he hung the moon, he swore if he had the chance to do it over again, he would do things differently. Now the opportunity had presented itself in Augie, a clone of his daughter, and damned if he still couldn’t get it right.

      Holly

      Once again I woke up to another morning in the hospital. I’m beginning to think that I’ll never be able to leave this place. I want to rip the IV from my arm and run away screaming. My entire life I’ve been trying to get free, first from my folks and from Broken Branch and all its small-town hokeyness. Then it was from my marriage to David and the way being tied to one person, or maybe it was just him, suffocated me. So first I severed ties with my Iowa family, leaving them behind without a hug or a kiss, just an I’ve gotta get out of here or I’m going to die, and not once did I ever look back. Ran away to Colorado with a boy who I grew up with. We got sick of each other after only a year, so off I went to Arizona where I ended up going to cosmetology school. There I met David; we got married and had Augie. That fiasco lasted an entire seven years. He tried to get me to stay, said he wanted another baby, wanted to grow old together. I told him I couldn’t live this way anymore, that I would die if I had to wake up one more morning looking at the same god-awful flocked wallpaper or listen to our next-door neighbor go on and on about how the neighborhood was going to hell.

      “We’ll take off the wallpaper,” David had said. “We can move,” he promised. So we took down the wallpaper and I got pregnant. But he knew. He understood that it wasn’t the wallpaper or the neighbors. It was us. Really me, who couldn’t stand being there, being married, being trapped in the suburbs, which isn’t all that different from small-town Iowa. David looked so hurt, so wounded, when he watched P.J. People tended to regard me that way after they’ve been around me for any length of time. First my mother and father. Especially my father. How I took private glee in the look on his face when I told him that living on a farm was like hell on earth, that spending one more minute in Broken Branch was a minute wasted, thrown away, never to be retrieved. My older brothers called me selfish and ungrateful. My mother cried. I felt bad about that. But it didn’t make me want to stay. My father actually helped carry my suitcase out to the old Plymouth Arrow I had saved up for by detasseling corn every summer since I was thirteen.

      “You are seventeen years old, Holly,” my father said. “And I know you think you’ve got all the answers, but what you are doing to your mother is inexcusable.”

      “I can’t spend another day here,” I told him, not able to look him in the eyes, instead staring over his shoulder out at the acres and acres of ankle-high seed corn. “I can’t explain it.”

      My father was quiet for a minute. His green John Deere hat perched on his head, pulled low so that his eyes were shaded. But I already knew they were looking at me with disapproval. He leaned against the back hatch of the Plymouth, his tan arms folded across his chest. “You’re ashamed of being the daughter of a farmer? You think you’re too good enough for this life? Is that it?”

      I shook my head, mortified. “No! That’s not it.”

      “Well, from where I’m standing, it sure appears that way. I understand you wanting to travel, see the world, but there’s no need to leave this way, like you’ve waited your whole life to get away from your mother and me.”

      But I have, I wanted to say to him, but didn’t. “I just can’t seem to stand myself in my own skin while I’m here,” I tried to explain, knowing that I was failing miserably.

      “You think that’s going to change when you drive away from here? You think your skin is going to fit you any better?”

      “Yes, in fact, I do,” I said, shaken that he had pegged it exactly. I was terrified that wherever it was I ended up I would feel the exact same way. That I needed to leave.

      “You’ll be back,” my father said with a sureness that made my chest hum with anger. “You’ll come back, and when you do, you owe your mother an apology.”

      “I won’t be back,” I spat back. “I’m never coming back here, ever.”

      My father shook his head and laughed a little. A light chuckle. “Oh, you’ll be back.” He reached out to give me a hug but I stepped past him. “Well, I guess you’ve been through about every boy and man in the county, not much left to stay for.” I just climbed into my car without even saying goodbye. As I pulled away from the farm, I looked in my rearview mirror and there was my father, already turned away from me, surrounded by the dust and gravel kicked up into the air from my tires, heading toward his cattle that never seemed to disappoint and certainly never talked back to him.

      I was true to my word. I had never returned, not once, to Broken Branch in the eighteen years since I left. But I wonder if I did the next worse thing by sending my children there.

      Mrs. Oliver

      Mrs. Oliver hardly dared to look away from the stranger standing in front of her, but the cries of her students pulled her gaze away from the man who looked vaguely familiar.

      Sixteen of the seventeen children were helplessly staring up at Mrs. Oliver, some with tears in their eyes, waiting for direction as to what to do. The monthly tornado and fire drills had done nothing to prepare them for this. Not even the Code Red Lockdown drills could have readied them for the surprisingly calm, albeit slightly manic-looking man dangling a gun from his fingers. Only one child, P. J. Thwaite, the son of one of her former students, Holly Thwaite, was peering raptly at the man, scanning his face, not as if he knew him, but as if maybe, at one time, he had seen him somewhere before. The man stared back at P.J., his expression flat and unemotional, which unnerved Mrs. Oliver even more.

      As a classroom teacher Mrs. Oliver couldn’t begin to count

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