PART III:
HANGING IVY
Berkeley, California, 1997
CHAPTER
14
MY MOTHER LIVES somewhere in this city, maybe even on the street I am driving down. It is lined with skinny stucco houses, set close, growing like bright, rectangular mushrooms out of the hills. She could be walking down one of these narrow sidewalks, making her way between the houses and the parked cars that line the street.
Gret and I took the drive here in four easy days, going first north to St. Louis, then west through cowboy country. I drove with the windows down all the way. Desert air whirled through the car in a constant cyclone, catching up our hair and rifling through it, blowing all the Alabama off our skins. I wasn’t halfway through Nebraska before even my regrets had been blown clean away. I may have kept a small one for Arlene Fleet’s poor boyfriend. He’d turned out to be a decent fella, but I hadn’t known that until well after I’d kicked his family jewels so hard that I was surprised they didn’t shoot straight out his nose. Arlene had defended him like a miniature tigress, but after she’d calmed down, she’d confirmed everything I’d come to believe about Jim Beverly. Everything and more. I’d seen no point in dwelling, though, as I drove away. I was heading toward my lost mother and the answer to a question I’d been carrying for more than twenty years. I’d had no room for other thoughts inside the little car. I still don’t.
I coast another slow mile through Berkeley, and the houses give way to neighborhood stores; my mother could be one of the shoppers meandering from coffee house to stationery shop to the futon store. It should be easy to spot her, given her penchant for bright and mismatched layers, but her strangeness is eclipsed by a white boy with blond dreadlocks, a six-foot black guy in a red dress, a turbaned girl dancing on a corner to music only she can hear.
Most of the couples I see don’t match up in the usual ways. My gaze is pulled to a tiny Asian girl, straining up on tiptoe to kiss a tall, stooping black man, then a pair of Swedish-looking blond ladies holding hands, then a slim, attractive fifty-year-old Hispanic woman who is walking arm in decidedly unmotherly arm with a bulky guy, his pale head shaved clean and gleaming. He must be twenty years her junior.
My mother is close, perhaps even present, but strange works here as camouflage. I begin to understand how much little ol’ Claire Lolley from Alabama must have changed in order to belong. She has done it, though. It is as if I can feel her heart beating, and it is the same heartbeat that the city has, a thready, strange arrhythmia that shouldn’t work as well as it does.
I will find her. I am obeying the most basic drive there is. New lambs, blind and soaked in afterbirth, go immediately to their mothers. They know, and I know. She can blend into the landscape all she likes. I will find her. Watching for her, I drive right past the turn for the Berkeley branch library and have to go back.
The VW is used to the gentler hills of Alabama. It struggles to crest a slope so steep that I have to pump the brakes to keep the bald tires from playing sled on the downside. The library is a squatty brick building wedged in between an organic food mart and a gas station. It has slitty 1960s windows like my library back home—a little slice of familiarity in a city so strange, I feel like I have left my home planet—but it has no parking lot. The street is lined with meters with a two-hour limit.
I backtrack until I find a tiny half slot open on a residential side street with no parking limit posted. This space would defeat the smallest Honda, but I squeak the Bug back and forth, like I am sawing it into place. I make it.
Gretel and I get out and start walking back to the branch. It’s the best place to start. Claire Lolley may have changed, but I can’t believe she’s changed so much that they won’t know her at her local library. Back in Fruiton, she and I went to the library two, sometimes three times a week.
We are passing an Indian restaurant, and the air has a tangy, sharp smell. My mother had a similar scent, like ginger and other unfamiliar spices. Gretel lifts her nose to snuff. I do the same thing, just as a homeless fella comes up even with me. He is gusty and overripe, and I get a noseful.
He grins, showing me less than ten teeth, and falls into step beside me. He has a ragged swath of braided hair poking up out of the rag he has wound around his head, and his eyes roll around in separate ways. Gretel mutters low in her throat, a warning noise, as he leans in and says into my face, “You a bull daggahhhh!” with cheery relish. I stop, startled, but his message has been delivered, and he keeps walking.
“Just a harmless weirdo,” I tell Gret, who has her hackles up. My voice calms her but not me.
The homeless fella catches up to an older lady in a peacoat who is walking along in front of me. He delivers the same message to her. She smiles at him and digs in a brown paper sack she is holding, then pulls out a sandwich and hands it to him. He takes it and hurries on, eager to tell all the women ahead of us that they, too, have been identified as bull daggahhhhs.
“The weird go west,” I tell my dog. Anyone too strange for Berkeley must walk straight into the sea like a lemming to drown. Or possibly grow gills. If they are too odd for this city, there can be no place for them above sea level.
I hook Gretel’s leash to the bike rack by the library’s front steps and tell her I’ll be right back. Inside, I am greeted by the familiar smell of musty books. There’s a counter with two librarians behind it, and to their right, I see the low shelves and the outdated computers of a typical reference section. The furniture is covered in crackly blue vinyl. They are obviously underfunded, the furniture and technology years out of date, just like back home. The whole building could be swapped out for the library in Amarillo and no one would notice. Not until they looked at the librarians, anyway.
The closest librarian is a young woman, and I automatically skip over her to look at the man at the other end of the counter. He has a sheaf of dark hair falling over his forehead and a pierced nose. His eyes are as black and shiny as oil slicks.
He looks up at me as I pause a few feet back from the counter with my mother’s book clutched close in one arm. He sees me, and his shoulders tuck in and his spine bows slightly, as if a little bit of breath has been pressed out of him by an unseen hand.
A pretty woman is a Christmas tree, my mother told me in the airport. This fella is hanging things on my branches as his gaze sweeps from my face all the way down my body to my hips and then back to my face. Ideas fly from his widened eyes and land on me like teeny, decorative burdens. He is giving me shyness, maybe, some book smarts, and a certain yielding sweetness in the bed. The oil-slick eyes get me, and I find myself hanging a few ornaments myself, giving him deft hands and a sense of humor.
Ro Grandee would go lean over the counter and touch her hair a lot of times, maybe touch his. She’d pinch and wheedle information out by turns. Rose Mae Lolley would simply hop over to his side, get herself a fist full of testicle, and twist until he spilled. I pause, uncertain, and then do the one thing that comes least naturally: I step straight toward the female librarian.
She looks soft, as if she’s been raised in a box and purely milk-fed, like veal. A line of teeny blue butterfly tattoos flutter out from behind her ear, cross her collarbone, and disappear into her blouse. I give her the most friendly, open smile that I can muster, put my hand out, and say, “Hi, I’m Ivy. Ivy Rose Wheeler.”
She takes my hand and says, “All Swan.”
I blink. “All what?”
“All swan,” she says, smiling, then explains, “that’s my name.” She spells it for me, Alswan, then cranes her long neck at me, trying to look like she’s at least some swan. She’s got a good yard of extremely rumpled golden brown hair, wild, like she’s spent the afternoon having cheerful jungle sex with Tarzan in the stacks. Tarzan kept her bra, looks like.
She’s for sure younger than me and maybe prettier than me, which makes her about the last creature alive any of my former selves would go to for help; score one for the new girl. I plant myself in front of her and I say, “I found this book of y’all’s. In an airport.”
I hand over the Stephen King book, and Alswan flips open the cover to read the stamp. “This is ours all right. Thank you.”
“The woman who left it, she also left something in it. Inside it. Something important. Or valuable, I mean.” I’m practically stuttering. I’m not sure what kind of person Ivy Rose will turn out to be, but sadly, she’s a terrible liar. At least to women. Perhaps, I think, this is because I weathered adolescence without a mother to practice on. Something else to put on Claire Lolley’s long, long tab. “I need to get in touch with the woman who checked it out.”
Alswan’s eyebrows come together. “I can’t give out information about our patrons. That’s not… We don’t do that.”
“I understand,” I say, nodding. “But I was hoping you could contact the person and tell her I’m here with the book.” Alswan regards me with a healthy skepticism. I soldier on. “The thing I found, it’s not something she can easily replace. She must want it.”
Alswan’s mouth purses up into a prim wad, as if, under the sex hair and the tats, the spirit of my hometown librarian is rising up inside her. Mrs. Blount once gave me this exact face back in Fruiton, when she caught me reading D. H. Lawrence at thirteen. Alswan clearly has not bought what I am selling, but she humors me and says, “I’ll take a look.”
She turns her monitor, canting it so the back is squarely facing me. She looks back and forth from the book to her screen, typing in the numbers on the spine. She waits, squinting at her screen, while the old computer grinds its way to an answer.
I can’t see the information that comes up, but Alswan says, “Oh,” in such a tone that I know at once she recognizes the name. This girl knows my mother; she softens toward me immediately. As she turns back to me, she looks me up and down, fast. It’s as if she is trying to see through my clothes, but not like her male colleague did. There’s no sex in it. Curiosity, maybe some pity, but no sex. Her voice is considerably warmer when she says, “You’re one of Mirabelle’s girls! You should have said so.”
“Mirabelle,” I say, flat, so it could be a question or a confirmation. My mother’s name is Claire, and as far as I know, I am her only girl. Still, the name goes with the gypsy clothes and long strings of hair, and the first thing people in hiding change is their name. My heartbeat picks up.
Alswan says, “Yes. Our book club meets at her house. Just wait over there, okay? I’ll call her and tell her you are here.”
“Okay,” I say. I blink at her, suddenly short of breath, and she blinks back, all earnesty. I say, “Tell her it’s Ivy Rose. From the airport. Tell her I’m the one who has her book.”
“Don’t worry,” Alswan says. Her smile is now so warm and encouraging that I find it slightly creepy. “She’ll remember you. She does this all the time.”
“Thank you,” I say, wondering what it is my mother does all the time. I have some doubt curling up from my stomach like a growing vine, trying to close my throat. What if this mysterious Mirabelle is not even my mother? Perhaps my mother stole the book from her.
I step away from the counter as Alswan picks up the phone. I do not go far. There’s an “Our Book Club Recommends…” table just to the right, where some industrious soul has set up a display of novels. I pick one up and stare at the cover, straining my ears to pick up Alswan’s soft voice.
“Mirabelle?” I hear her say. “It’s Alswan, down at the branch.” I try to look as uneavesdroppy as humanly possible, but Alswan turns her back to me and I can’t hear what she says next.
After a minute, she turns back to look at me. I pretend to be lost in the book I am holding. I don’t even know what it is. Hell, it could be upside down. I’m listening so hard, I’ve gone half-blind to compensate. I catch Alswan saying, “… five one sounds about right… Ivy… yes, dark hair.”
Alswan turns away again. I wait until she hangs up, and then she’s busy, writing something down on a piece of scrap paper. When she’s finished, she gestures me over.
“Mirabelle’s been expecting you.” The breath rushes out of me in a whoosh, and I realize I have been holding it. My mother is Mirabelle is my mother. “See, I told you she’d remember! Her house is a short walk away, not even five minutes. I put her number down in case you get lost.”
The paper says, “Mirabelle Claire,” and then a phone number. Under that, Alswan has written detailed directions. I skim them. I am less than six blocks away from my mother’s house.
Alswan is still talking. “She says she is about to start a reading, so you’ll need to wait outside. She’s sending Parker out to meet you…” Alswan falters. “That is, I didn’t think. Do you mind a man?”
“Do I mind a man who what?” I ask.
“Oh, you know,” Alswan says, and now she sounds a touch embarrassed. I look at her, puzzled. It’s clear I don’t know. “I thought you might be gun-shy.”
A little Rose Mae Lolley gets out then, and I find myself smiling at her, showing quite a lot of teeth. “I’m not gun-shy.”
“That’s good!” Alswan says, almost as if she’s proud of me. Like I’m two and I just took a brave bite of my peas. She adds in a reassuring tone, “And anyway, it’s only Parker.” She dismisses Parker as a sexual threat with a wave of her hand, and I think this Parker must be eighty-five, or gay, or five feet tall with no arms. Or maybe she only means Parker is taken.
It suddenly occurs to me that Parker might be taken by my mother. She is sending Parker outside to wait for me, so they must be living together. They may even be married. They could have children for all I know, and everything in me recoils at this idea, my mother off in California raising a herd of babies that she liked enough to keep.
“Are you okay?” Alswan says.
“I’m sorry, yes,” I say. I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole. I start to go, but Alswan puts her hand on my arm, stopping me. I freeze beneath it. I’ve never understood girly-girl friendships, all that hugging and squealing and air kissing. Girls can be so touchy-feely with each other. Me, I’m just touchy. But she seems sincere, and I’m so dizzy with hate for this Parker and my mother’s imaginary children with him that I don’t mind it. Much. She says, “You’re going to be fine. I know Mirabelle. All you have to do is follow her rules, and she’ll do anything for you. Anything.”
I nod, solemn, though I haven’t the faintest clue what she is talking about: One of Mirabelle’s girls. Do I mind a man. Her rules. I’m wondering now if my mother has shed her gypsy clothes and become a madam. Or a matchmaker for lesbians.
Outside, Gret is sitting up waiting for me, her nose pointing straight at the doors she last saw me enter. “I didn’t forget you, silly dog,” I say. I unhook her and we fall into step. Alswan’s directions are easy to follow, even with a detour to get my bag from the VW. I could drive the rest of the way, but as hard as it seems to park around here, I decide to leave it and tote the duffel.
We walk down the streets, my feet moving faster and faster. Gret drags. A thousand dogs have peed out greetings onto the strip of green by the sidewalk, and Gretel wants to pause and sniff-read them all. I click my tongue at her, tug her along. I am close. I will see my mother—or at least her house and her maybe-husband—in four blocks. Then in three. Now I am almost running, questions stacking up with every step.
Alswan said she was about to start a reading; I assume this means she has some hapless new age seeker paying her to lay her weathered cards. Hurrying will only mean waiting longer outside with this Parker fellow, but I can’t seem to slow. I am desperate to see the house where she lives, the man who shares it. Even now, accepted and on my way, I can’t quite believe this Mirabelle is my airport gypsy, my long-lost mother.
It strikes me again how small the world can be and how hard it is to get truly and permanently lost. A couple of phone calls gave me Arlene Fleet. A library book is taking me directly to Claire Lolley, though she was all the way across the country hiding under a new name. My spine tingles, and I wonder how thick a trail of bread crumbs I have left for Thom Grandee to follow. I shove the thought away. He’s seeking Rose Mae, and there is no Rose Mae anymore. There is only a girl named Ivy Rose Wheeler, running to her mother, now a scant two blocks away.
Questions from Alabama and Amarillo and new ones from the library are piling up into an avalanche that propels me forward toward her, fast, in spite of my heavy bag. Gret breaks into a cheerful three-legged canter to keep up with me, panting.
I come to Belgria, the street where my mother lives. It’s an actual place, and I have found it, and now I am turning and now my feet are walking down it. I scan the sidewalk in front of the houses for Parker, her nonthreatening quasi man, the lover she’s sent outside to wait for me.
All I see is a young woman, standing about four houses down, facing a sky blue house with a chain-link fence running around it. I’m at number 24, so that makes the blue house number 30. My mother’s house. I slow and Gret tugs at the leash, but I want to study this woman before she notices me.
She’s not looking down the sidewalk, watching for me. All her attention is on the house. She is in profile, her long hair hanging down her back, and she looks part Asian and part a lot of other things. She’s leaning forward like a supplicant, and I read desperation in her tense shoulders. Her hands clutch and knead at the fence top.
As I get closer, I see she’s talking to a man in the yard. Parker. Has to be. He’s standing inside the fence, a few feet in front of the narrow, covered porch that runs the length of the house.
I give Parker the once-over, and I understand at once why Alswan wasn’t worried that a gun-shy girl might get spooked. He’s a long, narrow, pale fellow, his posture so slouchy that he’s the droopy definition of nonthreatening. He’s wearing a long-sleeved jersey over khakis and, God help him, mandals. He has a sharp, attractive face, but his heavy-lidded eyes and laid-back expression say he’s about to carefully catch a porch spider in a Dixie cup and walk it out to the garden. Then he’ll recycle the cup.
He has a couple of mutts lolling at his feet, Lab mixes, both floppy-eared and jet black. A third dog is standing on the porch stairs, a teeny Boston terrier with pugnacious shoulders. The terrier is the fiercest thing in the yard, man included, and he wouldn’t even come to my knees.
I draw closer, trying to get a read on my potential stepfather. He’s young, I realize. Closer to my age than my mother’s. A lot closer. I find my lip curling up, wondering what the hell she’s doing living with a fellow who is young enough to be her— I stop abruptly. Maybe Parker is her son. He looks Irish, with high, flat cheeks and a narrow jaw, his skull so angular that it looks like it has a few extra bones in it.
I come closer, close enough to hear Parker say, “It’s Mirabelle’s call, Lilah.” His voice is set low, as mellow as his posture. He calls her Mirabelle, not Mom or Mother, but maybe children call their mothers Mirabelle in California. As for Claire Lolley, she didn’t like motherhood enough the first time around to keep the job. Maybe the second time she kept the kid but not the title.
“Please,” Lilah says. Her voice breaks in the middle of the word. “I can do it right this time.” She sounds breathless and sorry and eight years old.
Just then Gretel clues in that we are approaching a yard full of dogs, and she jerks me forward, tail wagging.
“I can’t help you,” Parker says, spreading his hands as if he is showing the woman that they are empty. “Let me call Safe Harbor.”
“No!” Lilah says, fierce. “I want Mirabelle.”
Parker raises his hands to his head. His hair probably looks dark brown indoors, but the sun has found a lot of red in it. It’s long, pulled back, and hanging in a tail almost past his shoulders. He’s pressing the sides of his head like his brain is starting to hurt, and then Gretel jerks me forward again, chuffing.
The sound catches Parker’s attention. He smiles when he sees me, raising one hand in an easy wave. The terrier hears Gretel, too, and he starts barking, alerting the Labby mutts. They rise, and the whole pack of them surge like a hairy wave to the corner of the fence closest to us, barking and wagging. Gret tows me to the fence corner, and all four of them thrust their noses through the links to snuff at each other.
When the dogs come running, the woman turns to see what they are racing toward. The side of her face that was turned away from me is mottled in spectacular purple and black, with violet and olive around the edges. Her right eye is swollen shut. The other eye is almond shaped, and its thick lashes are matted and wet. Pale women like me, we get red noses and splotch up, but this girl is a pretty crier, and the unmarked half of her face is lovely.
“Hi,” I say, embarrassed, my gaze skittering sideways to meet her good eye. This is my mother’s house, but this beaten woman makes me feel like I am an intruder here. Meanwhile, my dog sniffs and wags and makes a pack of easy friends, just like that.
Lilah stares at me, her good eye accusing, and she says, “She has my place?” She’s looking at me but talking to Parker.
His eyebrows draw inward. “I don’t think so,” he says to her, then to me, “You’re not Ivy?”
Lilah stares at me, hostile, daring me to be Ivy.
“Why aren’t I?” I say.
“You’re not… not how she described,” Parker says.
I smile and say with almost no irony, “Maybe I’ve changed since she saw me last.”
Lilah snorts. “Good luck.” She is speaking directly to me, meaning just the opposite. “I hope you’re perfect. You damn well have to be, here.” She lets go of the fence and turns her back to me, starts walking away.
“Lilah! Do not go back home again,” Parker calls after her. He comes toward the fence, all the way to the gate. “Let me call Safe Harbor!”
She flips him the bird over her shoulder and keeps walking. I come down the length of the fence, the dogs in step with each other on their separate sides. The Labs are dipping their front ends down, rumps up, asking in universal dog language if Gretel wants to play. She does. Only the terrier stands off to the side, suspicious, cocking one sprouty eyebrow up, then the other. I stop by the front gate. Parker is still watching Lilah walk away. She’s pretty from the back, too, but I can tell from the careful way she’s moving that the bruises on her face have plenty of company.
After she makes the corner, I turn to Parker and say, “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
Parker’s head tilts sideways at the accent. “Where are you from?”
Does he not know about me? The woman he lives with—our shared mother or his way-too-damn-old-for-him wife—is from Alabama.
“Where do you think I’m from?” I ask.
He says, “I don’t know. Someplace south. Virginia?”
“Sure,” I say. “Virginia. Why not.” I say it like an a*shole, my gaze pointy, staring sticks into his skin. He smiles, genial, oblivious, and I say, “So you’re…” I’m not sure what to call her. My mother? The gypsy? I can’t bring myself to say Mirabelle. Finally I settle on a pronoun, anonymous and plain. “So you’re her, what?”
“Whose what?” Parker asks. “Lilah?”
I jerk my thumb at the house, to indicate my mother, and find I also can’t say husband, stepfather, or, God help me, my brother. These words are all distasteful, and I don’t want them in my mouth. I finally say, “You’re her boyfriend?”
Parker looks startled, then laughs. “I’m Mirabelle’s landlord.”
“Oh,” I say, nonplussed. “That’s great. I mean, how great. For both of you, both.” I’ve been so caught up studying the people, I did not look closely at the house. I see now that it has two front doors. The one in the center has a dog door set in the base. The second door is at the far right end of the porch, so I doubt this place is a true duplex. It’s more like the house has a mother-in-law suite with a separate entrance. There’s an unlit neon sign in the window beside the far door: an open hand, palm forward. My mother’s business.
I feel stupid for being so angry, for jumping to so many wrong conclusions. “Is she married?” I ask.
“No,” Parker says, looking me over. His expression is as bland as oatmeal. “She told me you had long hair.”
“I cut it,” I say.
“And she didn’t mention the dog. It’s like if someone has a unicorn tattooed on their forehead. You don’t say they’ll have on a red shirt. A three-legged dog is the kind of thing you mention first.”
“She didn’t know I had the dog,” I say, then remember he’s her landlord. “Is the dog a problem?”
“Oh, yeah. I hate the stinking things,” he says, deadpan, while his mutts drip friendly slaver and try to goozle through the fence holes, jostling each other to be the one touching noses with Fat Gretel. I realize I’m grinning at him, so pleased to know he isn’t any kind of dreadful kin to me. He smiles back and then points from one big mutt to the other and then to the terrier, saying, “Buck, Miss Moogle, Cesar.”
I point and say, “Fat Gretel.”
He squats down and addresses Gretel directly, threading his fingers through the fence so she can smell him. “Are you a good dog?” It’s not rhetorical. She grins and pants joyfully into his face through the links, tail in a mad wag. “Yeah, you’re a good dog. Okay, then.” He straightens. “Come on in.”
I block the entrance with my bag and then my body as he opens the gate for me, and Gretel and I slip in without letting his dogs out. He shuts it, and Gretel and the other dogs are winding all around, each trying to be the first to get a noseful of the other’s butt.
Parker says, “Let her off the leash before she trips you.”
I let Gret go, and they take off in a pack, even the standoffish terrier caught up in the pleasures of lapping the house with a visitor dog. Meanwhile, Parker takes my bag for me and crosses the small lawn, heading to the porch in a shambling, amiable walk that reminds me of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo.
He is talking at me loud, over his shoulder. “The stairs are in her reading room, so you can’t get up to your room without tramping through the middle of her reading. Sorry. Can I get you some water? Or tea?”
“No,” I say. “That woman, Lilah. She used to live here?”
There are three steps that lead up onto the porch, and Parker pauses on the bottom one. He turns toward me to shake his head, rueful. “Yeah.”
“With Mirabelle,” I say. “Before me.”
“Not right before. She was three—no, four before you. She keeps coming back, though.” He sets my bag down on the top step.
“Four before me,” I say, hesitant. Parker seems to have no clue that I am Mirabelle’s daughter. He thinks I am Lilah’s successor, and I am starting to get a feel for what that means. My mother has been taking in stray ladies, the kind who have bad home lives and a lot of bruises. It appears to be habitual.
The three big dogs all come charging around in a pack, streaming across the yard. Gretel is keeping up fine on her three legs. They disappear back around the corner, the stubby terrier trailing behind and barking like mad.
“Safe Harbor is a shelter, for women?” I ask Parker. He nods, and I keep guessing, on a roll now. “Mirabelle works at this Safe Harbor place? This is like an annex?”
“Nah. Safe Harbor doesn’t officially approve of Mirabelle’s… what would you call it? Freelance social work?” There are a couple of wicker rocking chairs with padded seats between the two front doors on the porch, but Parker sits on the wide steps, to the right of my bag. He leans back in the sunshine, stretching out his long legs. His rumpled khaki pants are too short. “But one of their directors, Jane, calls Mirabelle on the sly when all their beds are full, and at least three of Mirabelle’s, er, guests who didn’t work out here have ended up doing really well over there. Not Lilah, though.”
“Lilah can’t come back here,” I say. It is not a question. I’ve gotten a good feel for it now. “She broke one of Mirabelle’s rules.” Parker nods, and I add, “The girl I met at the library, she told me I’d be fine as long as I followed the rules.”
I come closer and sit on the other side of the steps, my blue bag a chaste wall between us.
“Yeah. Lilah went back to her husband,” Parker says. “I’ve never seen Mirabelle take a woman in a second time if they go back to the husband or the boyfriend.”
I look at his feet as he talks. I don’t approve of men wearing sandals, unless they are the kind for rafting. Open-toed leather shoes are girly. But I like his feet. They are very long and narrow and pale, like tusks of ivory.
“Are there a lot more rules?” I ask.
Parker looks surprised. “Your driver didn’t tell you?”
“My driver?” I ask.
He shakes his head, confused. “You’re pretty far west, Virginia. You had to come in with a Saint Cecilia?”
Everything in me goes still. “I don’t know what that means,” I say, careful to keep my tone even, to not let my expression change.
“The underground railroad?” Parker says, like he’s reminding me.
“Underground railroad?” I repeat. “You mean, what? Like Harriet Tubman?”
“Yeah, like that. Only the Saint Cecilia railroad is for women in very bad situations. Mirabelle is one of ’em.”
“Mirabelle is a Saint Cecilia,” I parrot back, but he doesn’t seem to notice I’ve turned into a shocked echo.
Parker nods. “I drive for her sometimes. Mirabelle will get a call, and she’ll send me to pick a woman up in a public place and drop her fifty miles away at a mall or a library. I never see who brings the woman to the meeting place or who picks her up after me, so there isn’t a trail. Mirabelle’s houseguests are either local, or they come through Jane at Safe Harbor, or they’re moved here by the Saint Cecilias. If you didn’t come here with a Cecilia, then how did you end up way out here, Virginia?”
I’m floored enough to speak the simple truth. “I met Mirabelle in an airport. She told me I was welcome.”
He nods and falls into a small, comfortable silence. I sit beside him, trying to keep my expression plain even though my heart is racing. Back at Cadillac Ranch, I’d dismissed my mother’s message as meaningless, even heartless. But she had left me the directions I craved, after all. On the same car, under her past-tense love note and her insulting instructions to pray, I’d noticed silver letters telling me, The Fun’s at RODEO! I’d assumed that was the gay men for peace, but now I’m wondering what would have happened if I’d put it together, if I’d thought to call that bar and ask to speak to Cecilia. Would I have been offered the chance to disappear?
My chill heart almost warms a speck toward my mother, but in its next beat I realize that if I hadn’t run into her at the airport, I never would have known that message was there. Even when I found it, it was so obscure that I hadn’t understood it. It wasn’t really for me. It was for her. A balm to her conscience, a way to tell herself she’d drawn a path for me and put it in fate’s hands.
I’m breathing too hard, and the silence feels strained to me. It doesn’t seem to be bothering Parker, though. He is stretched out on the steps with his face to the sun. I try to shake it off. So my mother has made an a*shole move; by now, this should not surprise me.
Finally I turn to Parker and say, “So you have house rules—”
“No, no,” Parker interrupts. “It’s my house, but definitely Mirabelle’s rules. I’m not really much of a rules guy.” That’s so obvious it makes me smile, even through my anger. He grins back, but when he speaks again he sounds serious. “I’m sure she’ll tell you. I know you spend the first seven days inside. She kicked one girl out for being on the porch.”
I snort, and I have to work to keep my tone mild. “Mirabelle’s kind of a bitch, huh?”
Parker shrugs. “It’s hard-core, but it makes sense. That girl’s boyfriend was driving all over Berkeley with a harpoon gun, looking for her.” I catch him stealing a glance at my left hand. I have no tan lines, but the skin at the base of my ring finger has a faint indentation where my rings used to sit. I fist my hand and sneak a glance at his. No sign of a ring there. “After a week, even the maddest man quits looking. Or at least they are less likely to come in swinging.”
I nod. In seven days, a temper-driven man cools off. If only Thom Grandee were running on temper instead of something so much colder. What Thom is carrying around is practically immortal: a pure desire to put me in the earth. I have a sudden snapshot memory of his dead-eyed face at the gun shop, all his layers stripped away and only the reptile left, cold-blooded and foreign.
I remind myself he’s looking for a girl who no longer exists. Even so, my hand jumps to the top of my bag, pressing in to feel the comforting hardness of Pawpy’s gun.
“That makes sense. Any other big rules I should know?”
Parker shrugs. “The usual stuff. No drugs or weapons, like that.”
My hand is pressing Pawpy’s gun, and I startle when he says no weapons. He catches it, and his eyebrows rise.
“I have some chunks of an old gun,” I confess.
Parker sits up straight. “You have a gun?” He says the words with the same vehement disbelief I would use to say, “You have a rotting snake carcass?”
“I have pieces of gun,” I say. “Pieces can’t shoot.” Technically that’s true. Pawpy’s gun can’t work until I load the barrel and slot it into place. But anyone who knows guns, my mother included, could have this revolver ready to fire in thirty seconds. Still, if this fella has ever touched a gun, I’ll eat my boots. I open my bag and dig it out to show him.
His eyes are wide, watching me unfold the T-shirt I’ve bundled around the gun. I hold it over for him to see, resting my hands on the top of the bag.
He says, “I’m not sure Mirabelle likes people to have pieces of gun. I’m not sure I do.”
“Not a shooter, huh?” I say. “I kinda guessed that from the shoes.”
He looks at his own feet, then over to Ivy’s scuffed cowboy boots, then back.
“What about my shoes?” he asks.
“They’re pacifist shoes,” I say. “You ever see a soldier wearing mandals?”
He laughs at that. “Okay, Boots, so your feet are saying you’re an expert marks-lady-person?” He sounds more interested now.
I meet his eyes, direct and steady, and I say, “Oh yes. My boots say I’m fantastic.”
His floppy awkwardness is dropping away. He’s gone all comfortable inside his wiry body. Sandals or no sandals, now I am sitting with a man, the kind that Alswan might not so easily dismiss.
He leans in toward me. “Why would you want to be a fantastic gun shooter?” It’s not rhetorical; he really wants an answer.
“It’s fun,” I say.
He shakes his head, doubtful, and says, “I’ve never had to fight off a ‘fun’ urge to go shoot Bambi in the face.”
I say truthfully, “Oh! Me neither. Not that I have a problem with it—my daddy hunted to feed us. I went with him dove hunting, but I didn’t shoot, and if he was after deer or rabbits, I stayed home. I can’t eat an animal once I’ve met it all up close and fuzzy.”
“So you’ve never shot at anything alive?” he says.
I picture Thom Grandee rising over the slope on the running trail at Wildcat Bluff, his Roman nose centered in my sights, but I meet Parker’s gaze and do not blink or hesitate before I say, “Of course not.” I have not lost my facility for lying to men, thank God. “Anyway, rifles don’t do much for me. I’m a pistol girl, and I purely love to target shoot. As for these pieces, this gun used to be my grampa’s. All I have left of him.”
“A sentimental gun? That’s bizarre.” He reaches over and rolls the loose barrel doubtfully.
“Chunks of sentimental gun,” I say. His fine-boned finger touches the barrel, which touches the shirt, which rests in my hand, and he puts out a spark strong enough to travel through all that and reach me. I feel it like a buzzing in my palm. “Maybe sometime when I’m out of quarantine, I’ll take you to a range to try some shooting.”
“Ha!” he says, like the very idea is absurd. He takes his hand away, but then he rubs his fingers together, as if he’s setting the feel of the cool, slick metal into memory. After another ten seconds he says, “Maybe.”
The door on the far end of the porch swings open. We both jump, as if we have been caught out doing something naughty. I rewrap the gun and stuff it down under a few of my mother’s old clothes.
A well-dressed middle-aged woman in pricey shoes comes out. Parker stands up and slouches off sideways so she can use the stairs. Flirting over guns is my oldest and most comfortable territory. While we were there, I forgot to be angry and sick with nerves, and he forgot to be nonthreatening. Now we are back where we began.
The woman nods to Parker and me as she passes us. The dogs have been tussling in the side yard, and they come running around the house in a pack to investigate as she steps around my bag and walks down the steps. They’re covered in each other’s suck and hair and look like they’ve been rolling each other through dirt and dead leaves. She takes one look and dashes out through the gate before they can leap on her and coat her in a filthy greeting.
“I should just go in?” My voice comes out shaky.
“Take it easy,” Parker says. “She’s expecting you. It’s going to all be fine.”
I have good radar for when a man’s attracted to me, but now there’s nothing but vague, innocuous friendliness. Shaggy-Doo is back. He stands up and puts a hand down for me. His fingers are cool, and he lets me do all the gripping and pulling as I stand up. He steps back from me at once, the second I am on my feet. This is a man who has spent a good bit of his time around women who are, as Alswan put it, gun-shy. He nods good-bye and shambles to the center door, going into his part of the house.
I pick up my bag and walk to the other door. I hesitate, raising my hand to knock, then putting it down. I square my shoulders. I live here now, after all. This is my mother’s house. I will not stand by the fence like Lilah, wringing my hands. I will not knock to beg entry. I put my hand on the knob and it turns, unlocked.
Gretel is suddenly beside me, jamming herself in front of my feet to stop me from going through a door without her. I let us both in. My mother stands in the center of a large parlor. She is facing the door, waiting for me to walk through it. I do. I close it behind us.
My mother looks much the same as she did in the airport, in shawls and multicolored layers with her hair unbound. There’s a knot in the hem of her floral overskirt, holding it up to show a blue skirt under. She’s too old to wear her hair so long and all one length. It hangs straight down like Witchie-Poo hair, drawing my eye to all the places where her skin is beginning to sag. I set my bag down. We look at each other, holding silence between us. I am breathless.
“You brought your dog,” she says. She would probably sound more pleased if I had brought in the Ebola virus. “Where did her leg go?”
Gret starts sniffing her way around the unfamiliar room, and I say, “I shot it off.” My mother blinks, and I add, “It was an accident.”
She does a faint double take. “I had a blouse like that.” I touch the lace-trimmed edge of her old hippie shirt and she says, “And I had jeans like…” She stops, doing math in her head. “Those are my jeans.”
“Yes.” I pull at the waistband. I can’t believe this is the conversation she is choosing. It fills me to the rim with instant bitchy. “I’m a little thinner than you were.”
“Well, you never had a baby,” she snaps, bristling up.
“I still have time,” I volley back.
We stare at each other, surprised at ourselves, and she says, “This is absurd.”
It is. She’s right. But I can’t think of a light conversation we could have that would not be absurd and that would not enrage me. If she mentions the weather, I will have no choice but to slap her. We can’t talk dogs and jeans, not with all the history between us.
“So you went back to Fruiton. I assume not just to raid my closet. Was that wise?” she asks. Behind her, Gretel has found an open doorway at the far end of the room. She follows her nose through it.
“Probably not,” I admit, and I can’t resist adding, “Daddy says hey.”
My mother’s eyes narrow and then go all the way to slits as I reach into my back pocket and pull out his rumpled piece of paper, now folded neatly into a closed quarter sheet. It’s been partially ironed by the pressure of my butt as I sat on it to drive. “He sent you a note.”
She stares at the paper with a chain of fleeting expressions flashing across her face, as if I have first pulled a live rabbit out of my pocket, and now it is peeing on her floor.
I hold it out, and she says, “I’m not reading that.” She sounds affronted by the very idea.
I shake the paper at her, rattling it. She makes no move toward it, so I look for a place to put it. It’s a big room, done all in ocean colors, fifty shades of blue and a sandy beige. Behind my mother is a good-size wooden table with chairs on either side. Her tarot cards sit on top in a neat stack, flanked by lit candles. I am standing in what looks like a mini-store. By the front windows are delicate display shelves full of jewelry and gift books. Directly ahead of me, a staircase with a heavy banister leads up. Beyond the stairs, in the middle of the room between the mini-store and her reading table, a love seat is grouped with footstool and a small recliner. The wall opposite the stairs is lined with overflowing bookshelves. I cross the room to them and set the folded note down in front of what looks like a full set of Austen’s novels.
“I told him I would give it to you,” I say. “What you do with it now is not my problem.”
I don’t tell her about step nine or how badly he wants her to read it. If she’s tempted to open it at all, that information would stop her cold. Knowing how badly he wants me to read it has certainly stopped me, for days and nights and thousands of miles. I have not so much as peeked at the salutation.
I suspect it will be different for her, though. If it was a note from Thom Grandee, even if it was given to me ten decades from this moment, I’d have torn into it already. Marriage is complicated, and Daddy’s note is working on her in some underhanded way. Now I can see, under her layers and between the dark curtains of her hair, some vestige of the woman who tucked me in each night. The one who made my bologna sandwiches with extra mustard, just as I liked them. That woman’s gaze flicks to the note and then away.
“He’s fine,” I say, as if she has asked and I am answering her question. “He got his five-year pin. AA.”
Her eyebrows rise, and then she passes one hand across her forehead, as if manually wiping any interest away, pulling the expression right off her face. But I can see my mother coming more sharply into focus with every piece of history I invoke.
I say, “I saw where you wrote my name on the wall. I saw the marks you made, behind the ship painting.” I’ve surprised her yet again, but she remains silent. I say, “I know, Momma.”
That final word undoes her. It hits me, too, this awful name I have not uttered now for more than twenty years. She can’t look at me. She’s gulping air in little pants, trying to get it down into her lungs.
“What happened?” I ask, because it is time. This is the question that has pulled me all the way across the country. There’s plenty more I want to know. I want to know how she found me and when she started spying on my life in Amarillo. I want to ask about the Saint Cecilias and the impossible-to-decode exit strategy she spray-painted onto the car out at Cadillac Ranch. I want to know which tarot card fell faceup at the airport, stopping her when every line of her body told me she was going to run. But this first question eclipses all the others.
It’s all I’ve thought of in the car on the drive over, building scenarios in my head that could explain her sudden departure, each more soap opera silly than the last. I imagined that she hit her head and got amnesia, or witnessed a Mafia killing, or was abducted. I never came up with a single explanation I believed, and now that I am here, this is all I want from her: a reason I can understand. I say, “You hardly took anything when you left Fruiton. I even found your money, eighty-two dollars, left behind in your old black boot. What happened? Why did you go without me?”
She stares down at the floor. Time passes. Whole minutes, one after another after another.
Gret comes back in the room and her tail goes down. She gives my mother a wide berth and slinks low-bellied past her. She comes to heel and sits down looking worried. Fat Gretel, who would face-lick Attila and play Frisbee with Jack the Ripper, does not like my mother. My mother’s downward gaze is drawn to my dog, and I can see it’s mutual.
My mother stares at my dog, pressing one open palm to her chest, and I watch her slowing her heart with her strong will. She takes a deep breath, like she’s about to start yoga, and then another. When she finally meets my eyes, hers are as empty and shiny as marbles. My mother looks right at me, and she lies to me in a voice as flat as window glass.
“I went to mass that day, and I was visited by a saint. It was… a vision. She told me I had to go.”
It’s like a slap. This is the question I’ve come to ask, three thousand miles. Instead of an answer, I’m getting a metaphor, and a shitty one at that. I’ve already figured out that she must have had help from the Saint Cecilias, but she sure as hell didn’t learn about them through some mystical vision, and the metaphor can’t explain how she could let them spirit her away sans child.
I say, “Why are you lying?”
My mother keeps talking in that flat, almost bored way. “She told me to leave immediately, and not look back. She said—”
“Stop f*cking lying,” I interrupt.
She doesn’t acknowledge that I have spoken or that she has stopped. She is perfectly controlled.
She gives her shoulders a little shake, as if she is shucking off a cape, and walks toward the stairs. She picks up my bag and says, “I’ll show you to your room.”
“Why did you leave without me?” I demand again.
She starts up, slow, like her knees bother her, talking over her shoulder at me. “None of my friends know I have a daughter, Rose Mae,” she says. “Please be discreet. I do not want to try and explain you. Nor will I explain myself.”
I follow her, and Gret follows me, careful to keep me as a wall between her and my mother. I say nothing. There is nothing else to say right now. I don’t even ask if her friends will find it odd to learn she has a strange woman living in her spare room. They won’t. There is always a strange woman living in her house, hoping to escape a marriage made of swords.
My mother goes up step by step, toting my bag and talking like a bored tour guide. “The kitchen is through that open doorway in the parlor. Help yourself if you get hungry. I usually cook a hot dinner, and I’ll make enough for two if you care to join me. There’s a half bath in front of the kitchen, behind the stairs.” She reaches the top, me right behind her, helpless to do anything but follow. “That is my room.” She points at a closed door at the end of the hall. “That’s the bathroom, between. And this is your room.”
She opens the door directly at the top of the landing, and she is right. It is my room. Exactly.
A twin bed, a table, and a lamp sit at the far right corner, opposite the door. They are placed in the spot where the bed and table in my childhood room in Fruiton still rest. The dresser sits across from a comfy chair for reading and a floor lamp, also just the same as Fruiton. She’s even put a writing desk and matching wooden chair against the window, as if she thinks her residents might have homework. The furniture is a hodgepodge of finishes that range from maple down to darkest cherry, and my bedroom set back in Fruiton was all white wicker, but the placement of each piece matches my girlhood room exactly.
“Holy shit,” I say in spite of myself. “Did you do this on purpose?”
She looks at me with her eyebrows rising in a question. She doesn’t even realize. I might not have caught it myself if I had not just been home. She and my daddy both are living in shrines they’ve erected to lives they themselves either wrecked or abandoned.
“Let me guess,” I say. “The saint who came to you in your ‘vision.’ It was Cecilia.” Her eyes barely widen, but I catch it. I go on. “Yes, I went out to Cadillac Ranch. I saw your note. And if I’d gone to Rodeo!—if I’d hooked up with your railroad, I’d have ended up here, wouldn’t I?”
The room says so. She’s made this room for me, the same way Daddy remade our house for her. But my mother is shaking her head in a cold, vehement no.
“Never here,” she says. “We would never take you someplace at all connected to your past life. I am the last person we would have brought you to.”
“Against the rules, huh? Well. I came my own way. Cecilia’s rules don’t apply to me. Your rules don’t, either.”
She is watching me, wary. “I suppose not. Not really. But Parker and my other friends will find it strange if they see that. As a courtesy, I ask that you at least appear to keep them.” Her formal speech is beginning to bother me. It’s as if she’s given up contractions for Lent.
“I’ve broken one already.” I set my bag down on the bed and say, “I’ve got Pawpy’s old revolver in here, and I’m keeping it.”
All at once her eyes go avid. Her blank expression drops away. We have come to the piece of conversation she has been longing to have, while I was wanting to ask her what happened the day she left me. She straightens up and presses one hand to her lips.
“Pawpy’s gun?” she says, muffled behind her hand. She takes a single step toward me. “Is that the… is that what you used?”
“What I used?” I ask. She’s failed to give me the one answer I wanted most, and I hope she’s asking something that will let me fail her back. She wants something from me right now, badly. I step in, eager to know, so I can refuse to give it to her.
“What you used instead of taking the railroad. What you used to end things. With your husband. You used Pawpy’s old forty-five?”
Now I understand, and I feel a smile coming. I can’t damp it down. It’s almost an exultation, that I can look her in the eye and say with ringing, happy truthfulness, “Momma, are you insane? I didn’t shoot my husband.”
She tries to swallow and coughs instead. Her face crumples and her hands fist, and all at once she’s furious. “Rose Mae, no! Tell me that man you married is not still walking on this earth.”
“It’s Ivy now,” I say, so sweet now that she is wanting something and I don’t have it to give. “I’m Ivy Rose Wheeler. You’re the one told me it was him or me. I chose, Momma. I got rid of Rose Mae.”
Her eyes snap, and now she is beyond angry. Her skin is wax, and her eyes have a fevered glow. Her nostrils flare, and when she speaks, her voice sounds deliberate and deep, each word dredged up from the diaphragm. “Rose Mae, you stupid child, why did you come here? Dear God, you should have gone with the railroad. Do you really think fate can be fooled? That it can be that easy? It doesn’t matter if you keep my rules or not. Nothing you do will matter. Not as long as you are here, and he is breathing.”
She steps back, out of the room, her hand on the knob. “Your business with Thom Grandee is not over.” Her words are livid prophecy, intoned like she’s Elijah calling bears, and then she closes the door. I am left shaking, alone in a pale blue room she’s made to mirror mine.