Iodine

ISBN 10: 1602834571 ISBN 13: 9781602834576

Publisher: BBC Audiobooks America, 2008

Synopsis

Brilliant, unconventional college senior Trace Pennington has eked out an impoverished, solitary, but highly functional existence in the years since she ran away from her abusive home. But when Trace finds love with a much older man, her life is upended and she is forced to face herself and her past. After recovering a horrific, long-suppressed memory, she discovers that much of her present-day life is a carefully constructed delusion. With equal parts genius and psychosis, Trace copes with the fallout from a brutal, bizarre childhood in a heart-stopping story that explores both the terror and wonder of mental illness.

About this title

About the Author:

Haven Kimmel is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Girl Named Zippy, She Got Up Off the Couch, and Something Rising (Light and Swift). She studied English and creative writing at Ball State University and North Carolina State University and attended seminary at the Earlham School of Religion. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

CHAPTER ONE

Two Dogs

Dream Journal

I never

I never had sex with my father but I would have, if he had agreed. Once he realized how I felt he never again let me so much as lean against him while we watched television. I was never allowed to rest my head in his lap, or hold his hand. We gave up our late-night dancing in the kitchen to his favorite records; we stopped camping together. He took away my old hunting rifle, and when I rode behind him on his motorcycle I wasn't allowed to wrap my arms around his waist anymore. I had to let them lie on my own thighs, even when taking sharp corners.

Colt Pennington, Colt a childhood nickname that stuck. He was tall and leggy and too thin. There's just the one photograph of him as a boy, I think -- he's standing in a dirt yard in Kentucky with two other boys his age. They are all tanned and barefoot and their hair has been buzzed for the summer, and Colt's head is turned, he's laughing at something one of the other boys has said. Just the one picture, and his head is turned. This is a perfect example of, I don't know, I forget, something about...Doors that close? Doors that were already closed before anyone knew they were open? The three of them, Colt and his two friends, don't look like boys today, in the same way child soldiers from the Civil War are foreign looking, so long lost. That is another example but I don't know what the word is.

His Gramaw Pennington swept the dirt yard but no one else did. She was the last of her kind in this family, out there swishing a broom around in the fine, dry soil, making patterns. The Last Dirt Yard Sweeper, right up until she killed herself with ant poison. I'm unclear on the details. Colt's mother, Juna? Hold a broom? No. There are a couple of pictures of her around here somewhere; Colt kept them. Juna was a cliché of the worst sort which I know because her type shows up all the time in books and movies, mostly movies, I guess. The too pretty mother who married young and never took to the whole thing, and in the movies there is her rouge and her stockings and the swirl of her skirt as she flies out the door while her little boy begs her to stay -- he stands in the door watching as she gets in a stranger's car and drives away. But Juna wouldn't have been cast in that movie; she lacked the necessary...refinement. In Colt's photographs she's dressed like a singer at the Grand Ole Opry, the costume party equivalent. All Colt saw going out the door was (I'm guessing) some ratty old shoe and a cloud of cigarette smoke. But he kept those photographs: one where she's holding him, he's about two years old and Juna is so miserable one side of her mouth has collapsed -- she has had a stroke of misery. In the other she is modeling her Opry dress (white) (some predecessor to vinyl) and her white boots, along with her big hair which is black like Colt's and does appear to be leading her out of the frame and into whatever her future was, no one knows.

If only he'd been facing the camera you (I) could see his eyes, which were round, irises so black there was no end to his pupil. Hair from Juna, eyes from his father, Clyde Sr., of whom there are a number of photographs but no one is interested in them. Not much to him, as I understand it -- he was born to be Juna's victim and live in the same house with his widowed mother and give up on raising his only child after the child's mother left,well what was the man to do but walk slumped over every day to his job at the gas station and...am I right -- did his teeth eventually melt? I think so, I think his teeth melted. So Colt let his hair grow long and bought a wrecked 1950 BMW R512, which he worked on night and day in place of a formal education, and was it even running yet when he met L

his hair grew long and he rode that bike all the way from Kentucky, over the Ohio River and through Tell City, up up the middle of Indiana until he landed

a day laborer and then a carpenter but no one ever messed with him or said a word about that ponytail because he was fast as a whip crack, afraid of nothing, he carried a switchblade and walked with a slight left-leaning swagger from a childhood accident, he seemed cool in all ways but he was wound tight. His body rang like a piano string: I could hear him coming from miles away, an A note in an upper register, struck and struck and struck again. His hands were ruined with work and before he stopped touching me he would sometimes run his hand over my back and leave a dozen snags in the material of my shirts,he maybe didn't have fingerprints anymore.

In the winter he drove a '73 Ford truck, an F-100 with a 360, brown -- that specific shade of brown of 1973. The muddy dogs jumped in the front seat, barn boots weren't even wiped in the grass before driving.The floor was littered with every imaginable kind of trash and tool and cast-off work glove (they assumed the shape of his hands),and the bed was scarred from loads of firewood and scrap metal. He thought only about what was under the hood, he took care where it mattered.

Cold had

Colt had me, his truck, his bike, his ruined hands, he had his black dog,Weeds. And cigarettes, which maybe Juna left him or taught him, I don't know how it happens.The Marlboro red pack, more of the music of my life:my father's barely in-tune A note jittering down the gravel road and up to the side of the house, and the ritual gestures. Peel away the silver strip that seals the rectangular box; pull off the upper cellophane.Throw it on the ground, in the bed of the truck, whatever. Knock the box against your forearm three, four times to pack the tobacco. Flip the lid with just your thumb, choose the cigarette in the front, in the middle, put it in the corner of your mouth and light it with your hands cupped around the match or the lighter even if no wind is blowing, even if you're standing in your daughter's bedroom and she wakes up because of the sound of the flame, and she doesn't know what you're doing there but she sees you, she would give you anything, she would fillet herself to keep you there, to take you in under the cheap coverlet. She is the dying, the cancerous, the starved or dehydrated, and you, he, Colt:morphine. bread.water. But he turns and walks away, as if he has prevented a disaster, and he takes the smoke with him, but the slight and fading sound of him remains.

Trace Pennington pressed her tingling hands against her forehead, read what she had just written. She was supposed to be starting a dream journal for the class that began on Monday: Special Topics in Archetypal Psychology, an invitation-only course for senior Honors students who had either majored or minored in psychology. She was also enrolled in another senior seminar, Archetypal Analysis of Literature, available only to English or classics majors. Trace was both. At the last meeting with her adviser, a woman in a wig that had seemed deliberately stripped of color (it looked less like hair than fishing line) and styled to flip up at her shoulders,Trace had been told that in addition to her two majors and the psych minor, she had enough credits to declare minors in humanities and philosophy, and was one class away from a fourth in women's studies.

"So," Trace said, nodding.

"So do you want me to add them? You want them listed?"

"How did they happen, those minors?"

The adviser, Mizzz Birkle, studied Trace over the top of her half-glasses."You took the classes."

"Yes," Trace said, trying to remember the past four years. When had she earned minors in four different subjects?

"You declaring them?"

"Wouldn't I?" Wouldn't she? Trace wondered if there was a rule somewhere, a code she had broken.

She tore the pages out of what was supposed to have been her dream journal and stuck them in one of the approximately two hundred unlabeled file folders scattered around the room she slept in. There were three bedrooms upstairs, all oddly shaped and dormered;Trace had chosen the smallest, the one at the back of the house, hoping it would be the easiest to heat. She had found a kind of plastic sheeting that attached to the windows with double-stick tape, and that one then turned into shrink-wrap with a blow-dryer. Having neither a blow-dryer nor electricity, she'd gone to the slick and overpriced store on campus that sold camping supplies (Daredevil Outfitting) and asked a young clerk,who was striving mightily to look gentle and outdoorsy and daring at once, if there was such a thing as a blow-dryer that used batteries.

"Sure,"he said,walking toward the back of the store. "We've got curling irons, too, but they use propane inserts."

"Can you weld with them?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Nothing -- I'll take the blow-dryer."

It had worked; Trace had turned the dryer up as high and hot as it would go and directed it at the loose plastic, which became tighter at each spot she focused on, until finally the window was completely sealed.There was still the hole in the ceiling, but she'd covered that with cardboard,and in the end she was glad to have the blow-dryer because on the very worst nights she could put it under her blankets and turn it on,warming the sheets just enough that she and the dog didn't shake in the way she hated, the kind of shivering that hurt.

She chose a different notebook to serve as her dream journal. There were stacks available to her, as there were file folders and ink pens and sticky notes and index cards.Working at the campus bookstore for four years had fulfilled her every office supply need. She didn't have to steal a thing: if a box of legal pads came in damaged, she was to take them out to the recycling Dumpster and throw them away, then make a note on the Inventory Loss form, which then went to the higher powers for Trace didn't know what -- tax deductions or refunds or perhaps just regret. But in four years at the store (daredevilly named the Campus Book Store) no one had ever watched her recycle anything, nor had they seemed to care. As long as she made the note o...

About this edition

• Publisher: BBC Audiobooks America
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1602834571
• ISBN 13: 9781602834576
• Binding: Audio CD
• Number of pages: 1