It’s just a house, Angie. It doesn’t mean anything.
Just a house?
You know what I mean.
Is that what we tell her? Sweetheart, it was just a house? It didn’t mean anything?
She stood before Sean’s door at the end of the hall. Her impulse was to knock, and she shook her head at that and opened the door on a fantastic scene: military airplanes swarming in outer space. The sun’s last rays flaring along wings and stabilizers against a backdrop of stars.
He strode before the wall-sized map like a little explorer, Here’s Polaris, Mom, the North Star. Here’s Andromeda.
Just above her in diving attack was a fighter plane with its wicked shark’s smile. It banked and shuddered at her touch.
She shut the door and took a few steps and stood before her daughter’s door. Her hand on the knob.
You don’t have to, Faith said.
I know.
She turned the knob and stepped inside.
Posters. Pictures from magazines in the way of young girls since there were magazines. Wild-haired crooners at the microphone, one shirtless guitar player, but mostly athletes, caught in one marvelous instant or another, the unbelievable physiques.
The white girlhood vanity stood as Caitlin had left it. Scattering of makeup. Books, CDs. Small gifts from friends: a rubber heart with legs and arms, standing on clownish shoes and waving hello. An open jewelry box holding mostly hair bands. Pictures of family, pictures of friends. Lindsay Suskind and three other girls in the air, in casual stances, as if levitating.
Angela saw her movement in the mirror but did not look, her gaze landing instead on the silver brush, a thing she’d always loved. The rich weight of it, the raised cameo of a young woman on the back, head slightly bowed as if to receive some blessing. Burnished by generations of young girls’ touching. Our family hair-loom, Caitlin called it when she was little. It rested on its back. After a long moment Angela reached and touched. Fine lacings of hair deep in the bristles. Hairs still eighteen and silky. Hairs that would never age.
Here were her trophies in a fine dust. Here the layers of ribbons, so many of them blue. The handsome small Christ on his cross. The neatly made bed. The pillows. A stuffed ape with gleaming eyes, a lapsed, shabby bear of countless washings and dryings, propped like a couple, just as she’d left them.
Dusk had come into the room. She was so tired.
She slipped the tote bag from her shoulder and set it on the bed and reached into it for her phone, the bottle of water from the market, the amber vial, placing each of these with care on the white lamp table by the bed. Then she moved the ape and the bear and lay down with her hands over her stomach, over her womb. The room slipped into darkness. Heat breathed in the vent. The dog began yapping in the backyard, mad little Pepé, tormented by the neighbor’s fat gray tom. In the metal building a blade hummed to life and went singing into a length of hardwood—oak, maple perhaps—Grant calling to Sean to feed it smoothly, smoothly, and any moment now the front door would swing open and her gym bag would drop from the height of her hip to the floor with a joyous whop and she would be so hungry, she would be famished, my God, Mom . . . when do we eat?
17
In the bleary daybreak the boy passed a gas station just beyond the off ramp and drove into the little town the deputy had told him to stay out of. He took Main Street at the posted speed, parked among the spaces, and fed two of his dimes, and a third, into the meter.
The cafe door opened with a disturbance of small bells and he stood a moment in the warm, ancient reek: ages of coffee, ages of bacon. The quiet tink tink of knives on chinaware. A girl said, “Anywhere’s fine,” and he went to the row of stools at the counter. She came around and poured him a coffee and handed him a menu. She had the black hair and round face of a native people, although native to what he didn’t know. He ordered an English muffin.
“That’s all you want?”
“With butter and jam, please.”
She looked at him more closely. He seemed all bone and muscle under his denim jacket, and with that limp she’d first thought rodeo, but the boots were wrong and he wore no hat. He looked as though he’d slept on a rock. She imagined touching his yellow hair, dirty as it looked.
She played the thickness of her ponytail through her fist and held his eyes. “Douglas back there pours a humongous flapjack, and it only costs a dollar more than an English muffin.”
The boy glanced at some men behind him, their jaws working at their meals.
“No, thanks,” he said, and with a sigh, with an air of having done all she could do, the waitress left him. A minute later a toaster popped and she placed the muffin before him and stepped away to the cash register.
“How was breakfast, Gabe?”
“I reckon I’ll live.” The man winked a leathery lid at the boy and slipped a twenty from his wallet. The drawer rang open with a rich slosh of coins.
MORE DINERS CAME IN and the waitress carried loaded plates along her forearms. On one trip a plate appeared before the boy, the great flapjack steaming. When she returned to the counter it hadn’t moved. She inched a small china bowl toward him.
“Real maple syrup,” she said.
The boy popped the last of the muffin into his mouth. “Thank you. But I won’t eat it.”
She made a birdlike motion with her head. “Why not?” Behind her in the pass-through a man appeared. Large man stooping to look. Toothpick in his lips. One dark eye looking at the boy and the other wandering off into the world.
“I ate that muffin and that’ll do me,” the boy said.
She looked at the man in the pass-through until, muttering to himself, he went away, and then she turned back to the boy and collected the plate and turned again to upend the flapjack into a bin, and with each turn of her head her ponytail swung like a girl on the move, like a girl in a race, that thick and fitful, that alive.
He left the diner and walked along the sidewalk until he came to a Laundromat. He cupped his hands to the glass and then stepped inside. He thought he was alone but he wasn’t—a dwarfish round woman turned and blinked small black eyes at him and then turned back to monitor the portal of a dryer, her head cocked as if listening for some false note in the thumping heartbeat of it. The air was humid and sharp with the ammonia stink of piss. He went to the back by the soap-dispensing machine and stacked his quarters on top of the pay phone and pulled the slip of paper from his wallet and stood looking at it. He’d stopped calling her cell phone months ago because of the way she answered, and because of the way she sounded when it was not the call she wanted.
He got a cigarette to his lips and dropped two quarters in the slot and dialed the number and a voice told him to deposit more money and he did so and then lit his cigarette and waited.
“You can’t smoke in here.”
It was the woman, the dwarf monitress, torn from her vigil.
He nodded and showed her the receiver at his ear.
“This here’s a nonsmoking facility,” she said. “Says so right there.”
The ringing in his ear ended and he turned from the little woman as a voice said thinly, electronically, over the miles, “Hello? Hello . . . ? ”