CHAPTER
8
THE NEXT DAY, as soon as Thom left for work, I gathered up Ro Grandee’s floaty skirts, her sheer, fitted cardigans, and her lace-trimmed blouses and bundled them into the washer. I added a packet of red Rit fabric dye and started the machine. Heavy-duty. Hot water. Extra spin cycle. I left Ro Grandee’s wardrobe to ruin itself and walked over to Mrs. Fancy’s in my Levi’s and the shirt I’d worn to Artisan.
I was lifting my hand to knock when the door sprang open. Mrs. Fancy let out a peeping yip noise and hopped back. Ro would have jumped back, too, like a moving echo, but I didn’t so much as twitch. I lowered my arm and waited. Mrs. Fancy put one hand to her chest, breathing in, then covered her mouth. Her eyes got bright and her shoulders shook, and I could tell she was laughing behind her hand.
“Lordy, Ro, you like to give me a heart attack,” she said when she could speak. “Look at your hair. I didn’t even recognize you. Why, you’re lovely all bobbed.”
I’d been missing morning coffee for more than a week now, but she didn’t ask. She never asked. It had made her Ro Grandee’s perfect friend, but it made me angry now. Angry enough to feel just fine about all the ways I planned to use her. Even angry enough to steal from her.
“You’re going out?” I asked.
“I was heading to my reading club up at church. Did you—” She stopped talking and peered at my face. “Did you need something?”
“I need to borrow your phone,” I said.
“Oh, has your phone gone out?” Mrs. Fancy asked. She peered around the door frame to look at my house like a concerned owl, blinking against the morning sunlight.
“No,” I said. “I need to make some calls, long-distance. I’ll pay you for them, of course, it’s just not something I want Thom to see.”
“A surprise?” said Mrs. Fancy.
“Oh, yes,” I said, utterly truthful. “I’m planning a surprise.”
She leaned back, and her sparse eyebrows came together. “Come on in,” she said. Her papery hand closed around my wrist, and she towed me across her threshold. Her living room had a square of parquet by the minifoyer, too, but the carpet surrounding hers was blue. We stood on the fake wood island, and now she was looking at my clothes. “Spring cleaning day?”
I shook my head, trying to sound sorry instead of triumphant. “A pair of Christmas socks got in my laundry.”
“Oh, honey!” she said. “What are you going to do?”
I waved it away. “Trinity Methodist runs a good secondhand store downtown. I’ll get some things.”
She tutted and said, “That store is run by a bunch of dirty hippies. I bet those clothes are full of lice.”
“I’ll wash them,” I said, impatient. “May I use your phone while you’re at book club?” I came down hard on the last two words, reminding her she had someplace to be.
“You’ll want to use bleach, or a color-safe bleach alternative,” Mrs. Fancy prattled on, completely unreminded. “Lice eggs are so hardy.”
“Mrs. Fancy,” I said, “I know how—”
She grabbed my arm and interrupted, her gaze bright. “You know, we’re of a size. I bet I have some things you could wear!”
That derailed me, the idea of heading into my gun store shift later in one of her old-lady pantsuits, stretched out in the bum and with matching sweaters that had three-dimensional, sequined scenes of forests in the fall and snowmen at Christmas.
It must have showed on my face, because she started laughing. “Not what I wear now, you silly. I’ve kept my favorite things for years now. You’d look darling in my old peasant blouses or my mod minidresses. I see girls your age in outfits like the ones I’ve saved all the time. The stores call it vintage, but that’s only so they can charge more.”
She seemed perfectly content to natter on about fashion until I grew old and withered up too much to wear a minidress.
“I’d love to try your things on,” I said, and I grabbed the edges of my shirt and pulled it off over my head. She stopped talking. Her gaze flicked to my soft cotton bra, then lower, taking in the slow-fading patterns, olive and mustard and palest sunrise blue, that were still mapped across my breasts and belly.
Her gaze skittered off me sideways, and she put one hand to her throat. I half expected her to close her eyes and loudly chant a recipe for fruited Jell-O mold or tell me how to get wine stains out of the carpet, some small, domestic spell to ward away the ugly story my skin told.
Instead she said, “Come away from the windows, or you’ll be giving the postman a treat.”
She walked away from me, through the den and down the hallway that led to the bedrooms. I followed in my jeans and bra, my old T-shirt crumpled in an angry ball in my left hand, saying, “You’re missing your book discussion.”
“Never you mind,” she said, and went on into the guest bedroom. Phil came in with me, and he jumped up on the flowered comforter. He yowled at me, sensing the tension that Mrs. Fancy was delicately ignoring.
She opened the closet and started pushing things aside. “I haven’t saved much of anything from the last ten, fifteen years. My knees put me in ugly shoes about then, and I stopped caring. Anyway, eighties fashion is like jumbo shrimp or pretty ugly—what do you call those things, where it can’t be both? But the seventies, that was a fun time for clothes. Look at the colors! I have quite a few dresses from the fifties and sixties, too.” She flipped through the hangers until she came to a row of brightly colored blouses. She pulled out a poet’s shirt in bright blue floaty cotton and turned to me. I reached for it, but something on my face made her hug the blouse to her chest.
“You’re different, Ro.” It was more than Ro Grandee’s own husband had noticed, even when I was naked and riding him. Points for that, at least.
I steeled myself, and then, more for expediency than for Mrs. Fancy’s own sake, I pulled Ro Grandee’s face on over mine, blanking my eyes and upping the wattage of my smile. My body curved into her good-girl’s Catholic posture. Immediately I felt the mistake. I could not empower her this way. Ro was suicide, and slipping her skin on was as delicious and fatal as the first drag off a cigarette after days of being quits. If I did it enough, I would no longer be able to help it.
In a single moment of looking through the tissue-thin filter of Ro’s eyes, I recalled what it felt like to love Mrs. Fancy. I could see how each thing she had felt regularly had put lines in her face, all her favorite feelings permanently remembered by her skin. Now her eyes crinkled up, and the vertical creases around her mouth deepened. These particular lines were so fixed that she must have made this face at least a million times before I met her. It was concern, tempered with such love and ready mercy that it had to have originated for her children. She was making it for me now.
I shook Ro off me, fast, and said, “Let me try that shirt on.”
She took the blouse off the hanger and held it out to me, but she did not let go. We stood joined by it, each holding a shoulder.
She searched my face, and then she said, “You’re leaving your husband.” She spoke quietly, but her tone was plain: She was crowing.
“Do you see me packing?” I said. Good Lord, what an awful choice of words. “My things, I mean. I am not packing my things.”
But Mrs. Fancy’s mind was not on guns and double meanings. Her fingers clutched her half of the blue blouse and she said, “Who are you calling that you don’t want him to see, long-distance? Someone you can go to? When you leave him?”
“I’m not leaving him,” I said, but her eyes were as bright and round and hopeful as a spring robin’s. “I’m thinking things over, is all.” Her reaction made me ashamed to be taking advantage of her. But not enough to stop me. A lie came to me then. It wasn’t a lie I’d planned. I’d heard something like it on Oprah once, and it tumbled down out of my memory straight into my mouth. I opened wide and let it out. “I want to talk to some people back in Alabama, the ones who knew me before I met Thom. I want to remember who I was before.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “That sounds like shrink talk.” She didn’t sound like she held with that. She probably didn’t hold with Oprah, either.
I said, “I don’t have the money for a shrink. I’ve been… talking to my pastor.” The pastor at the Grandees’ church was a wobbly-necked fellow who dyed his hair shoe-polish black. His office smelled like tuna fish and ranch dressing, and Joe and Charlotte Grandee’s tithe paid a goodly piece of his salary. He was a social club Presbyterian whose sermons were written to butter open the wallets of his wealthier congregants; a drunken barn cat could fart out better advice than I would expect to hear coming out of the other end of that man.
Still, I could tell Mrs. Fancy liked this idea, even though she said, “Are you sure your pastor hasn’t been talking to a shrink?” She still held tight to the blouse with one hand. The hanger dropped from her other hand to the floor, and she didn’t even notice. “At least there’s some God behind it. I don’t trust that muddled-up Freud stuff. Such a pervert! Ladies wishing they had penises. Why, I never heard of such. The only penis I ever wanted was properly attached to Mr. Fancy, where I could get some good use out of it.”
A muffled squawk of laughter got out of me. She’d surprised me for the second time in as many minutes, and she didn’t look a bit sorry. She had a sly smile pulling up one corner of her mouth. She leaned in and smoothed back a piece of my hair, tucking the end behind my ear so she could look me directly in the eye. My surprise held me still for it.
“I had a good marriage, Ro. In all ways good, and it made everything else good, too. I’m not ashamed of that. It’s what I want most for you.” She petted back the other side of my hair, her fingers lingering as she tucked it behind my other ear. “Leave him. Today. My church works with some people that would hide you. They run a facility for women in… your situation.”
“Women in my situation, huh?” I said, wry, shaking my head at both the idea and her delicate phrasing in a room where my bruises were so loudly displayed. I breathed in deep, through my nose, and smelled her baby powder and mothballs and the drifted-down scent of yesterday’s baking. This was Mrs. Fancy’s territory, and until this moment, I’d assumed only Ro Grandee had a place here.
In the house where I grew up, the kitchen had belonged to my mother. The air said so with vanilla and cinnamon, the same way the orange blossom soap in the bathroom made that place hers, too. The den was Daddy’s. He filled it with the smells of salt and beer and the angry sweat that comes from watching your team lose hard at baseball. The bedroom smelled mostly his as well, and the hall where he’d worn down the carpet pacing and drinking on the bad nights. My room was mine, so it smelled like me, which registered in my own nose as nothing.
The day before she left, my mother had gone into her kitchen and packed a PBJ and red grapes into my brown paper lunch bag. She should have put a hunk of mutton in, or sliced kiwi, feta cheese, some strange food I’d never seen, to prepare me for her long-planned disappearing act.
She gave me only my usual lunch, my usual quick kiss good-bye, and I ate that lunch. I brought home the bag to reuse the next day. My faith that there would be a next day’s lunch was so basic, I didn’t even think of it as faith.
Maybe she had gone to a shelter. She’d been a woman, as Mrs. Fancy said, “in my situation.” I had no way to know. She’d gotten out of a bad marriage, but she hadn’t taken me with her so I could learn the route. She hadn’t even dropped a trail of bread crumbs for me to follow. She’d only set my mouth, giving me her taste for called saints, good books, and angry men.
My throat felt closed. I couldn’t open it to answer Mrs. Fancy. I’d come here to steal from her, but now a connection formed in my head, sudden and complete: I would steal from Mrs. Fancy and go to California. It felt true. Predestined, even, as if my mother had left me a secret something else: her ability to see the future, so mighty a gift that I didn’t need cards.
I tried to keep my face still, to not let my expression show Mrs. Fancy a map that she could read. Not California, I reminded myself. I had no reason to believe Jim Beverly had landed there.
Mrs. Fancy was waiting patiently for me to answer. I said, “A shelter won’t take Fat Gretel.”
“My son could take Gretel. He has a fenced yard and a lonely German shepherd,” Mrs. Fancy answered promptly, like she’d thought this out years ago and was five steps ahead with arguments and logic front-loaded to shoot down my objections.
I looked down at my feet and said, harsh and raw, “I only want to borrow your phone.”
She looked like she wanted to say something else, but she read the mulish shape of my mouth correctly and settled for, “Try the blouse on.”
I pulled it on and turned to the mirror hanging over the old-fashioned dresser. The shirt was soft cotton, long, but it gathered at the waist with elastic and showed my figure. It had a drawstring neck and bands of pale yellow ribbon and embroidered flowers near the ends of the sleeves, the conservative side of seventies hippie wear. My mother’d left a closet full of clothes like this in Fruiton.
Wearing it, I could see that the new haircut hadn’t given me high cheekbones, it only showed them off. They were hers, like the down tilt to my mouth and the sharp-etched line of my collarbone. I blinked, long enough for it to be more like closing my eyes against the sight of my mother’s child. Still, it was better than seeing Ro. At least my mother had gotten out of her marriage alive, something that was utterly beyond Ro Grandee.
“This will work. Thank you,” I said.
Mrs. Fancy was already flipping through hangers, pulling out peasant blouses with angel-wing sleeves and button-down disco shirts with nipped-in waists. She laid them out on the bed in a pile, six or maybe seven of them, then added a couple of pairs of embroidered belled jeans and three minidresses in bright, mod patterns.
“What about shoes?” Mrs. Fancy asked.
“I’m good on shoes,” I said instantly. The last thing I needed was for Mrs. Fancy to go digging in her old shoeboxes. One of them would feel way too heavy and rattle with loose bullets when she lifted it. I felt my gaze flick to the box that held my Pawpy’s gun. I willed myself to look away, but not before I realized a couple of the shoeboxes on that side stuck out an inch or so beyond the rest because I’d stuffed my mother’s library book behind them.
Mrs. Fancy did not notice, though. She was caught up staring at her own box of secrets on the other side. Her head was down, and her body had canted itself slightly toward it. I didn’t much want her thinking hard on that box, either, since I was planning to loot it.
I said, “Help me carry this stuff back to my place. I’ll make coffee?” trying to pull her away, but she didn’t move.
When at last she spoke again, her voice had changed to something small and strangled. It didn’t even sound like hers. “Did you know that my daughter, Janine, had another child? Before she had little Robert, I mean. Years ago. She had a baby with that bad man I told you she had married.”
I’d guessed this. I’d also guessed that it had come to no good end. Mrs. Fancy’s box held mementos from a babyhood and nothing more: booties and a clip of hair, but no first attempt at ABCs, no child’s ballet shoes, no dried flowers from a pressed corsage. If my mother, out in California, had boxed up souvenirs from my childhood, then hers would end with a bag of baby teeth shaped like shoepeg corn and a five-sentence book report on Beezus and Ramona.
“I didn’t know,” I said.
She turned and walked away to the other end of the room. She twisted open the blinds and looked out the window that faced the backyard, her back to me and the closet. Our houses were called starter homes, but there were more retired folks in our neighborhood than young couples. Ender homes, more like. The backyard had a flat space near the back windows where a swing set could go. Mrs. Fancy had a birdbath there with a pansy patch around it. She said, “That’s why she married so young, hardly more than a baby herself. Ivy came too early. Poor little thing. Poor little both things.”
Her voice was steady now, loud enough for me to hear her even with her back to me. Each word came out formal and precise, like she’d been invited to speak to the Rotary Club six months ago and she’d been practicing this talk in her bathroom mirror.
“The baby’s lungs didn’t hardly work, but that sweet thing tried very hard. She’d twine her fingers around my pinky and clutch on. That’s why Janine named her Ivy. She was born with that fierce grip.”
Now Mrs. Fancy’s shoulders shook, and she paused and breathed deep in and out. Ro would have gone and hugged her and soothed her into silence with pats and there, theres, but I stayed where I was, smelling useful information and almost hating myself for it. At last she said, “Ivy lived four months. Janine thought she was in the clear. We all did. One night, Ivy stopped breathing. She stopped everything. To this day, no one knows why. Babies sometimes do that.
“Janine didn’t leave him. I couldn’t make sense of it. They’d married because of Ivy, and then there wasn’t any Ivy anymore. He was hell, and I was sure his fists had something to do with the baby coming early. Still, she stayed. I couldn’t fathom it. Now I see you, no babies to hold you, staying and staying. You’ve stayed years now, so there must be parts of it that are sweet. There must be other parts that are so regular to you, you’ve come to think this is what life is like. You can’t see there’s other ways to live.” She turned away from the window and looked at me, and I could see the whites of her eyes had gone red, but she wasn’t quite crying. “Ro, I’m telling you. There’s other ways to live.”
I held myself still. I had no answer I could say to her.
She said, “My Janine, she cut her hair all feathery down the sides when she was pregnant. Before, it had been all one length, with bangs. She got heavy with the baby, too, soft in her belly and legs.
“After, she stayed with him, but she started growing the layers out of her hair. She took the baby weight off, too. Slowly, walking every day, eating more salad. One day, I think she looked in the mirror and saw how she was back to being herself. Her same long hair. Her same flat tummy. She looked like the girl she’d been before she got stupid in the back of his car after a dance.” She sighed, a private sound, telling the story with her face to the pansy plants. “That’s when she left him.”
“Mrs. Fancy,” I said, to get her attention. When she turned and met my eyes, I said, “What you said doesn’t sound like shrink talk. It sounds like good sense. That’s all I’m doing. Trying to remember the girl I was before him, and be that girl again.”
That seemed to make sense to her in a way my stolen Oprah explanation hadn’t. She blinked twice and then said, “Fine. If using my phone helps, come over and use it. If I’m not here, you have my spare key. Just know that I will drive you to my church’s safe house the very moment you are ready.”
She turned, suddenly brisk, and walked to the door. I could see her wanting out of the room where Ivy’s things were secreted in a shoebox, where she’d said Ivy’s name.
I said, “If you want to try to get to your book club, don’t let me hold you.”
She checked her watch, then nodded. “We read A Prayer for Owen Meany. That book has a lot of God in it, but it was quite dirty.” She gave me a slight smile. “I’d like to catch the last half. You can stay here and finish going through the closet, if you like. Take anything that suits you.”
She left me there, alone in the room with a box that held a perfectly good birth certificate. I was pretty sure I had seen a Social Security card, too, among the relics. It had been unlaminated, soft around the edges. The certificate and the card, to me these were the only mementos that mattered.
With these things, I could get a new driver’s license. Ivy Wheeler. The name went with my new haircut, maybe with these clothes. I could travel under this other name and leave no trace of my comings and goings. If Thom became suspicious, there would be no trail for him to follow. When I found Jim Beverly, and then when something untoward befell my husband, the police would find no tattling bus route or plane ticket.
First I got my roll of bills out of the zipper pocket of my handbag and put them in what I thought of as my shoebox, nestling the cash up next to Pawpy’s gun. The bills would come to smell of gun oil, like the money at Joe’s stores always did.
Then I slid Mrs. Fancy’s box out from its place in the stacks, and I toted it back to the guest bed. I set it down on the flower-covered comforter by the stack of blouses. Phil, in the automatic inconveniencing way of cats, had moved. Now he was nested on top of the blouses, shedding.
I felt a faint reluctance when I reached to open the box. I’d looked at Mrs. Fancy through the filter of Ro’s kinder eyes. She’d pushed my hair out of my face with such sweetness, and though she hadn’t been able to look at my bruises directly, she had spoken of her daughter’s husband in a clear response to their presence in the room. I wondered if this shoebox really was Mrs. Fancy’s. Perhaps this was Janine’s box, too painful to have close, but too close not to have. I wished I believed it. I’d have no problem stealing from Janine.
I turned from the closed box to the phone on the bedside table. It was easier to pick up the receiver and dial Information. When the connection was made, I said, “Fruiton, Alabama,”
“What listing?” the operator asked in a bored voice. I said the first name that came into my head. I heard the clack of keys, and then she told me that there was no Lawly Price in Fruiton. I gave her another. She had plenty of Presleys, but no Charles. Not even an initial C. The football boys had moved on.
“What about Shay?” I asked the operator, who was already tired of me. “You have a Rob or Robert Shay?” I spelled the last name for her.
The operator said, “No, ma’am. Is that all?” in an exasperated tone.
I said, “No, ma’am, yourself, that’s not all. Look for a Carson Kaylor.”
“I do have a C. Kaylor in Fruiton.”
“I’ll take it,” I said.
Car picked up on the second ring. He sounded sleepy, like I’d woken him up. He coughed, then made a throwaway “Heh,” sound, so short that it was almost swallowed, and the “lo” stretched itself out long, tilting up into a question at the end. It was pure Alabama, and hearing that accent washed off whatever coat of sticky sugar Mrs. Fancy had put on me. I was Rose Mae Lolley, the prettiest damn girl from Fruiton High. Boys like Car Kaylor had always been as malleable as Play-Doh in my hands.
“Car! I swan, I’d know your voice anyplace,” I said, and flipped the lid off Mrs. Fancy’s shoebox with two fingers.
There was a pause, and then Car said, “Holy smoked hell. This can’t be Rose-Pop Lolley?”
“Right first time,” I said. It gave me a little shiver. No one but Jim had ever called me Rose-Pop. “I was lying around thinking about old home folks, and I thought I’d see if I could find you.”
Talking to Car felt like a good kind of creaky; marriage to a man as jealous as Thom had held my flirty girl muscles still for too long. Now I was stretching them, remembering the moves.
The folded birth certificate was right on top, and I lifted it out and set it aside. I looked down into the box. A rattle. A square of pink cotton, maybe cut off a swaddling blanket? A soft rabbit with a bell inside him.
I gave the contents a stir while Car yapped about his job laying floor for Home Depot, but it didn’t unearth the Social Security card. Car was telling me about his job’s great benefits package, but I nudged him off the now, asking about his old high school girlfriend. I was casting about for a crafty way to bring up Jim, but I didn’t have to. Our star quarterback’s vanishment was the single largest event that happened in my class’s four-year run. Car brought it up himself.
I poked around in the box, hunting that card, and made the kind of interested, admiring noises that encourage men to talk more. Car had only the dimmest recollection of running into Jim on his last night in Fruiton, though he confirmed Jim had been at Missy Carver’s party. “Truth told, I was wasted, Rose Mae,” he told me. “I think Jim was hanging with Rob Shay and Jenny.”
“I don’t remember Jenny,” I said. I found I’d taken my hand out of the box so I could poodle one finger around in my hair, just as if he could see me. I dropped my hand and moved the belled rabbit out of the way. Underneath him I found a teeny book with a picture of a pink rattle on the front. I knew if I opened it, I would see someone’s best penmanship listing Ivy’s date of birth, weight, and inches. Maybe a page to record her first smile and another for the first time she rolled over. After that, the pages would be blank.
“Sure you do, pig-faced blonde. Pig-faced in the cute way,” Car said. “Jim was wasted, too, at that party. And he didn’t stop drinking there. I remember they found beer cans busted open all over his wrecked Jeep. You never did hear from him?”
“No,” I said. Jim had last been seen on the side of the highway, pointing his thumb away from me.
“If you was my girl, I would have called you at least before I took off,” Car said. “Oh, wait. Weren’t y’all broke up?”
That irked me instantly, for no rational reason. I moved the baby memory book and flung it, harder than I needed to, out of the way. I still didn’t see the soft, unlaminated card I’d clocked before, and this was irking me as well. “Just for a day or two. We’d have gotten back together,” I said, trying not to let my sudden wash of red temper color my voice.
“Still, that’s probably why he didn’t call you, Rose Mae. Y’all was broke up,” Car said. He sounded now like he was explaining a very simple thing to someone who was maybe not too bright. All at once, I wanted to reach through the phone and slap him sideways. Back in high school, he’d had these meaty, round cheeks that were already yearning downwards, hoping to become jowls. I could imagine exactly what my palm would sound like, smacking hard against one.
“We always broke up when he was drinking,” I said, quiet, trying not to get sharp.
He laughed. “Shoot, you musta ditched his ass three, four times a year. Rob Shay had a nickname for you, did you know that? He called you ‘Delicious Hitler,’ because you were hot, but you gave Jim righteous hell if he so much as licked the dew off a beer can.”
“That ass,” I said with forced cheer. I’d always liked Rob Shay, but the red wave of angry I was trying to squelch had put a shake in my voice even so. I couldn’t help but add, “We always came back to each other, Car. Us breaking up didn’t mean a thing.”
“Well, it meant he didn’t feel like he had to call you afore he went off,” Car said. He still sounded doggedly overreasonable, pushing me past my desire to slap and deep into throttling territory. His tone changed to coddlesome, and he added, “What about you? You still single? You still fine? You was so fine, Rose Mae.”
“Naw. I turned gay and got super fat,” I said. “You take care, Car.” I hung up. I was breathing hard, like I’d taken a sprint across loose sand.
I picked up the folded birth certificate and felt the slickness of the paper between my thumb and index finger. Official paper. Legal. A paper that meant something in the world outside my closed front door, if I could find the card that went with it.
All at once I realized how shortsighted I had been: If I took these things, I wouldn’t need to find Jim Beverly at all. I was dumbstruck by the simplicity. With a new name, with a new identity that clipped four years off my age, with real ID, I could truly become a different person, a person Thom Grandee would never find.
“Ivy Wheeler,” I said. I didn’t know who that was, but I’d bet she had a razor-sharp bob and never wore ballet flats. The real Ivy and I already had at least a few things in common. She’d been a southern girl with a shithead for a father, just like me. I picked up the plushy rabbit with my free hand, wobbling him back and forth to make his tummy bell jingle. I could see Ivy, living somewhere green and unfamiliar with a few hills and a cool breeze. Fig trees and lemon groves.
Dammit, it was California. Again. I gave the rabbit an angrier shake, but all he had in him was sweet, light bells, muffled in his stuffing. Ivy’d also had a mother who couldn’t stand to leave. Even after Ivy died, her mother couldn’t bear to leave the man Ivy had come from, couldn’t leave the rooms where Ivy had breathed and cooed and slept.
“Wonder what that’s like,” I asked the rabbit. He had an earnest, cream-colored face; this was not a rabbit who got sarcasm. I tossed him back on the bed and kept digging, looking for that Social Security card. Screw California. If I was Ivy, I could go anywhere. Thom could search for his Ro, angry and ready to end her, but I would have ended her already. He could live out his life in Texas, free of me, with his big red heart still thundering away inside him.
Ro Grandee wanted this last part so badly: the simple fact of Thom alive and in the world. As soon as I recognized this longing, this deep yearn of hers to leave Thom breathing, I understood the reason.
Ro Grandee wanted something to go back to.
I pulled my hands out of the box as if it had suddenly gone heated. How long could I stand to be out on my own? After Jim, heading west from Alabama all the way to Texas, I’d always found myself a man. Patently bad ones, happy to give me a ride off the edge of the world since they were heading that way anyway. I’d traded them out the same way I traded out cities, never learning how to trade up. Thom was the best of the lot, the only man since Jim that I had loved.
I had a few hundred bucks and an ancient revolver to my name. I’d be broke and dead lonely in a strange place, trying to scratch a shallow, safe hole in the chalky dirt. I was getting close to thirty years old, and that would still be true, no matter what Ivy’s ID would say.
How long until a dark night came when I longed for the devil I knew so badly that I let Ro Grandee creep up over me and call him? She would tell him where I was. She would say, “Thom. Come and get me,” and let him decide what that meant. The gypsy had told me there was no simple way out of this marriage, that it would come down to him or me.
I couldn’t find the damn card anyway. I tossed everything back in the box. Stealing from Mrs. Fancy, especially after how she’d treated me today, felt flat wrong. Tracking Jim, that was the main thing. I put the lid on and picked up the box to put it away, but Phil had slithered off the bed without me noticing. As I stepped toward the closet, he threaded himself between my legs, pitching me forward. The lid flew right back off and everything inside the box went airborne, arcing across the room.
The booties separated and dropped, and the birth certificate sailed sideways like a paper airplane that had been badly folded and thrown all wrong. The silver cup pinged off a baby spoon and rolled until the wall stopped it. The rattle and the belled bunny plopped down side by side in a chiming patter. Everything hit the floor in a second, two at most. Except one thing. Ivy’s Social Security card must have gotten stuck inside the baby book, hiding, but now it fluttered out as the book dropped. It caught the air exactly right and fell slowly, slicing back and forth, riding the air like a moth wing.
As it fell, I had time to think the words coin toss.
Then it landed. I dropped to my knees, already gathering objects, but I was looking toward that card. It landed writing-side up. My hands stopped their busy tidying. The day I’d seen my mother in the airport, she’d been tensed to bolt from the moment our gazes met. She was grabbing her things to run when she fumbled her tarot deck. The cards slid and scattered, and almost all of them fell facedown. Every card except one fell facedown.
That one card had told her that she had to stay. She’d refused to tell me which card had shown itself and paused her, but its message had changed her course and then mine. Now Ivy’s Social Security card had fallen faceup, as if it too had something to say.
I knee-walked to the card and looked at it, really looked at it, for the first time. When I had opened the birth certificate before, I’d skimmed the name Ivy, taken in the birth date, but then my gaze had gone right to the words Janine Fancy Wheeler and stayed there. I hadn’t read it carefully. But here the message was, plain and obvious, no mysterious swords or burning towers. The card’s top and bottom were edged in red-and-blue scrolling. Sandwiched between the curlicues were nine numbers, dark against the white card, and three words in plain black type: Ivy Rose Wheeler.
Janine had named her baby Ivy Rose.
I left the card where it was and reached instead for the Ziploc bag. I opened it and carefully lifted out the tuft of baby hair. It was clipped into a pink bow barrette with tiny teeth, made to hold fine strands. It was dark hair, but a lot of babies are born with a head full of dead black hair. It lightens as it meets the sun, or it falls out altogether and brown or blond or red stuff grows in under.
This tuft didn’t look like that. It was a true dark brown, as rich and glossy as mink. I tilted my head forward so the wings of my bob closed around my face, and I held Ivy’s little tuft up against my own hair. Ivy’s all but disappeared, so close were they in color.
Half an hour ago, Mrs. Fancy had reached to tuck my hair behind my ear, her fingers lingering in the strands as she told me all the good things she wanted for me.
“Oh, shit,” I said to the room.
I packed up the rest of Ivy’s baby things with the reverence they deserved, putting the hair back and getting all the air out of the Ziploc bag, checking the silver cup for dings. I saved out the Social Security card and the birth certificate, and then I put the box away.
I put Ivy’s papers in my purse. I would go to the DMV tomorrow and get Ivy a driver’s license. I’d need to find a family of local Wheelers and lift some of their junk mail for proof of address. That would absolutely be a felony, but it would be my first, because taking these from Mrs. Fancy wasn’t stealing. She’d said, “Take anything that suits you,” and Ivy Rose could suit me to a tee.
But only if I first made damn sure Ro Grandee had nothing to come back to.
I would use the ID to travel invisibly, to find Jim, and I’d be Rose Mae long enough to get him to burn my bridges for me. With Thom gone and Jim beside me, I’d be ready to rebuild myself into someone nicer. With nothing to go back to, Jim and I would be entirely free.