Back Roads

“Every morning on my way to work, I drove past a yawning group of bare-legged ones in shorts and miniskirts waiting for the school bus with Donny the stump. In the past, I would’ve slowed down and watched from my rearview mirror until they disappeared around a bend in the road, but lately looking at girls shredded my nerves. It was a big part of becoming a man: discovering there was a difference between wanting sex and needing it.”

Harley’s obsession with sex appears to be typical teenage thoughts at the beginning of the novel, but even in this early chapter there are indications that Harley’s attitude toward sex is unusual. Harley’s uneasiness around girls the same age as Amber foreshadows his revelation that Amber sexually abused him when they were younger.

“The house was dark when I got home. No one had thought to leave the porch light on for me, but I didn’t care. I remembered once getting into an argument with my mom about her not leaving the light on for my dad on the nights he stayed out drinking. I told her a man driving up to his own house at night deserved to see a light burning no matter what he had done. She said if the man had done something that needed forgiving, a burning porch light was the last thing he wanted to see.”

This passage speaks to both Consequences of Adult Responsibilities Too Young and Parental Abandonment. It offers a window into Harley’s sense of guilt for failing to protect his sisters from his father’s abuse, something he has struggled with for a long time. Harley has taken on a parental role in the aftermath of his father’s death and Bonnie’s imprisonment, but his sense of responsibility toward his sisters didn’t begin with his legal custody of them.

“Misty started to ask me again what I was doing but fell silent when a ball of yellow flames roared up from the cushions. The blood drained from her face, making her freckles stand out against her skin as dark as coffee grounds. She flashed me a furious look and ran inside with angry tears spilling from her eyes. I don’t know why. It was a shitty couch.”

Harley’s response to catching Amber having sex is to burn the family couch. The fact that the couch is connected to their father hints at the unusually close emotional attachment Misty felt to their father, and her motives for attempting to kill her mother.

“Prison was a reflection on real life, and it had always seemed to me that once a woman had a kid nothing else mattered about her. Being a dad might describe a man, but being a mom defined a woman.”

Harley’s reflection on how parenthood changes a person fits in with his later insistence that an unwanted pregnancy changes a girl’s life more than a boy’s. This reflection also underscores Harley’s sense of abandonment by his mother because he feels motherhood defines her, yet she failed to protect her children from abuse and abandoned them in a time of need. Harley’s discovery of the truth later in the novel will confirm his suspicion that his mother was never as protective as she should have been.

“The voice was what got to me. I could convince myself I was looking at a stranger or being held by one. But the voice was the only voice that had ever been kind to me without wanting anything in return. I had absorbed it into my consciousness before I had even formed ears.”

Harley’s response to his mother’s voice shows that he loves Bonnie despite his anger at her. It also reveals his sense of abandonment and isolation. This moment not only shows conflict within Harley but also shows the child that still exists inside him despite the Consequences of Adult Responsibilities Too Young.

“After my visit with Mom I decided my biggest problem in life was getting rid of that piece of pipe in the yard left over from Dad’s satellite dish, not ACCEPTING.”

Harley’s obsession with getting rid of the pipe from the satellite dish shows his deep desire to protect his sisters, particularly Jody. However, this moment also suggests that Harley distracts himself from bigger issues with smaller ones. Betty is pushing Harley to talk about finding closure with Bonnie, but Harley makes the conscious choice to focus instead on a comparatively trivial problem. He is not yet ready to confront the unpleasant truths in his life.

“‘Why is your mother more concerned about your sisters than she is about you?’

‘There’s more to be concerned about,’ I said.

‘Such as?’

‘They can get pregnant.’”

Harley’s belief that his mother is more concerned with the girls than him shows his tendency to belittle his emotions and needs, which is strongly tied up with his sense of masculinity. This moment also touches on Harley’s fear of Amber becoming pregnant, which can be traced back to his repressed memories of her sexual abuse.

“That night Amber had a bad dream. She came and crawled into bed with me instead of Mom and Dad. I couldn’t get back to sleep with her snuggled up next to me. I lay there until dawn, thinking about Dad, and feeling the same useless frustration I had felt the first time I had seen him piss on a sparkling white drift of pure new snow.”

Harley remembers the first time their father hit Amber, and how she got into his bed. These memories will ultimately lead to the revelation of Amber’s sexual abuse. His description of the snow, with its connotations of purity, suggests that he feels his father corrupts pure things.

“She put one of her hands on my leg and moved toward me. I let her kiss me. It wasn’t much of one on my part. She pulled away, mildly stunned, and fixed me with the straining, empty eyes of someone who had been recently blinded.

I pushed her away. Maybe too hard. She crashed into the passenger side door and gave a small wounded cry when her naked shoulder hit the window handle. She stayed perfectly still in the corner, staring at me, frozen not by fright but by glaring disbelief.”

Harley has been focused on having sex since the beginning of the book, but when he is given the chance, he panics and pushes the girl away. This response is contrary to Harley’s nonviolent character and shows a fear that is unexplained at this point. The fact that Ashlee is the same age as Amber likely has a lot to do with his reaction and shows that although he has suppressed memories of Amber’s abuse, a part of him still remembers.

“I opened up the note and showed it to Amber.

ESME SES THE BABYS WILL BE DEFEKTIV.

Amber crinkled her nose. ‘What is that supposed to mean?’

I shrugged.”

Jody’s notes reflect her childish understanding of incest. The notes also indicate that Misty knows that Amber and Harley have this incestuous relationship, something even Harley doesn’t fully understand, and she’s using it to control the household in her own way.

“You’re supposed to take care of me too.”

Amber’s plea to Harley after attempting to seduce him reveals a new side to her behavior. Amber is struggling with her sexuality. For Harley, however, who doesn’t yet remember Amber’s sexual abuse, this moment is disturbing and confusing, and he sees it as an indictment of his inability to care for his family.

“Was that how life worked? Was that nameless, faceless trucker from my mom’s past responsible for me getting smacked every night? Or was it the fault of a great-grandfather I never knew staring at me from a black and white family photo with eyes like my own? Of did I need to go back further, hundreds of years, tracing dozens of generations, back to the first guy who hit his kid, back to the first random act of God that made a child an orphan?”

Harley’s thought process here is important because it is the first time he doesn’t blame himself for his parents’ marriage and the abuse that took place in his home. Harley shows a moment of insight that marks a step toward healing. However, the moment is fleeting as Harley remembers Amber’s behavior and his night with Callie, pushing him back down into the darkness of repressed memories.

“We survived the year without anybody’s help, and I was proud of us. Amber passed ninth grade. Jody started talking again. I paid our bills. At our lowest moments, I got my strength from concentrating on the anger and terror I had felt coming back from the bank when I realized we had been forgotten.”

The sense of isolation and abandonment that Harley feels is highlighted here by his recollection of how no one would help them the first year after their mother went to prison. This moment also shows how determined Harley is to defy the odds. Strikingly, Harley used emotion to get him through the difficult times. This is at odds with his current coping mechanism, which is to avoid troubling emotions at all costs.

“I scraped off some of the dirt and smoothed it out a little. It looked familiar, but it looked too big to be Jody’s and too small to be Misty’s. The stain was huge. It could have been chocolate or paint, but I knew blood when I saw it.”

The discovery of the bloody sunflower shirt changes everything for Harley. Harley struggles with the reality of what he has found, and consequently his mental health begins to deteriorate at a faster pace. In the end, the shirt proves to be evidence not only of Misty’s crime but also that their mother really did abandon them in favor of protecting herself from Misty. The shirt also helps trigger Harley’s recollection of Amber’s sexual abuse.

“Betty would have told me to ask her. She would have told me to ask Jody what she saw the night Mom shot Dad and to ask Amber why she hated me so much. She would have told me to drive over to Callie Mercer’s house and burst in on the amazing dinner she’d be serving to her banker husband and her perfect kids on her glasstopped table on her polished stone floor and ask her why she fucked me. She was always telling me to ask Mom why she did it.

I could never have CLOSURE until I got the answers.”

This moment of reflection goes back to the theme of Sexual Abuse and Trauma, showing that although Harley has repressed the memories of Amber’s abuse, he still senses them on some level. At the same time, Harley mistakes Amber’s desire to be cared for by him as hatred. This train of thought simultaneously reveals Harley’s desire for and fear of closure.

“I thought it was going to be different this time. I wasn’t hysterical tonight. I wasn’t stupid with need. But it was the same. My hands crawled blindly over her body, trying to hold her, but she kept sliding through my fingers like she was made of oil.”

Harley’s description of sex with Callie touches on his feelings of abandonment. Callie is an older woman, and this may explain why Harley is able to be intimate with her when he couldn’t be intimate with a younger girl—Callie doesn’t remind him of Amber. Yet he can’t keep Callie close to him, drawing a parallel with his own mother. Harley continues to feel isolated and even during sex cannot make a connection with another person.

“We didn’t get to light the cherry bombs. I dropped the matches in a ditch of standing water, and Skip bitched me out for days about what a fuck-up I was. I never bothered telling him I did it on purpose.”

In another memory of an attempt to kill Donny, Harley reveals his true nature. Skip was the one who wanted to hurt Donny; Harley was the one who sabotaged the truly dangerous plans in order to protect the younger boy. This memory reiterates that Harley is not violent and would never murder anyone, despite the police’s suspicions of him in Chapter 1.

“It didn’t matter if I loved her. From what I had seen of marriage, the woman had to love the man but the man only had to love what the woman did for him.”

Harley reflects on his relationship with Callie and again questions whether he loves her or not. Harley’s embittered view of marriage reveals how he saw his parents’ relationship. The fact that he believes his mother loved his father foreshadows the moment Harley realizes that his mother never stood up for her children in the face of their father’s abuse, and stayed with their father for love of him, not love of her children.

“‘I can’t even look at you. You make me want to throw up.’

The door slammed shut. I waited a second to see if she was going to add anything. Amber’s fits were the closest I would probably ever come to seeing live entertainment.”

Amber’s anger with Harley after learning of his affair with Callie is exposed in this moment. Harley doesn’t know what Amber is angry at, so he makes light of it. At the same time, this moment shows how Harley is capable of ignoring things that are right in front of him, foreshadowing the revelation of his repressed memories from childhood.

“‘Harley. Misty didn’t want your father dead. She wanted to be with him.’

‘Is that why you said you did it? So it wouldn’t be on the news?’

‘Harley,’ Mom screamed. ‘She was aiming at me.’

Mom’s face changed shape, blurred, and fell away from me into a depthless hole of writing GROOVYs.

‘She was trying to kill me,’ I heard her explain. ‘Your dad accidentally got in the way.’”

Bonnie’s confession not only reveals the truth of Harley’s father’s murder, it also implies that she took the fall to escape Misty. It could be interpreted that Bonnie thought she was helping Misty, but the way she puts the emphasis on Misty’s attempt to kill her suggests she was running away. This shows her choice to leave was calculated for her own protection and not for the children. At the same time, this moment reveals more of the symptoms of Harley’s impending mental break as he sees his mother morph into the word “GROOVY.”

“‘What about Misty?’

‘I had suspicions. That’s all they were. Suspicions.’

I broke free from him.

‘Are you lying to me?’ I yelled at him. ‘I’m sick of everybody lying to me about my own life.’

‘I’m not lying.’

‘You never saw him do anything to her?’

‘Jesus, Harley. I would have shot him myself.’”

Uncle Mike’s response to Harley’s questions is in line with the behavior of all the adults in the novel. Uncle Mike suspected Misty was being sexually abused, but that wasn’t enough to encourage him to do anything about it. This is the same answer Bonnie gives to Harley. These words temporarily soothe Harley’s fears, but the evidence from both Misty and Amber’s behavior suggests otherwise. Once again, the adults have let Harley down and left him isolated and abandoned.

“I melted into her. Her body was the liquid I breathed. Her fingers were flickers of underwater flame, scorching and soothing my unborn skin. She moaned into my ear. Once. Softly. A silver-pitched gasp. A sound that thrilled and saddened like the bittersweet howling of a penned dog.

I rolled over and took her from Him. She was my gift. Mine. And I was her penance.

Then I remembered, I didn’t dream anymore.”

Harley believes he’s dreaming of a beautiful woman making love to him but wakes to find Amber in his bed. This moment confirms the suspicion around Amber’s behavior and the notes Jody has left around the house. Harley compares her touch to a “gift” from God but feels horror when he realizes the truth. This moment is the catalyst that leads to Harley recovering his suppressed memories.

“Her eyes were a bruised violet in the dark. A tranquil fear like the realization of painless death spread through me. All I could give her was what I had left. What I had left was under my skin.”

Harley confronts Amber after she kills Callie, but he isn’t angry. Like before, Harley takes the guilt of what has happened and accepts his role of protector for his sister. Not only does Harley not express his anger with Amber, he finally gives her what he’s been resisting the entire novel.