A Parallel Life (13 page)

“Alex!” Simone said. She pushed back her soaking wet hair, lifted her chin, and met his eyes, “How nice of you to come out to greet me!”

“There is no pleasure involved,” he said. “Someone has come to see me, someone you should take into consideration.” He stepped aside and let her pass him and walk into the hall.

In the living room, on the edge of the Aubusson rug, stood a small birdlike woman in a much-washed flowered dress. She stood beside one of the long windows facing the lake, a hand placed lightly against the glass.

“Oh, dear God . . .” Simone said.

“You do know who I am, don't you?” the woman said. Her voice was low, and she spoke slowly, as if control were important and a great deal at stake.

Simone nodded. “Yes, I know.” She raised her hands as if there were something in them that she could offer and then let them drop to her sides. “I'm just sorry.” She brushed past Alex, and walked back the way she'd come. A moment later the engine of the Packard started and Simone pulled away from the house. She still hadn't put up the top.

She didn't return until the next afternoon. She'd had her hair done and she was wearing a new dress. She wore new sunglasses too, which she didn't remove. Alex was waiting for her at the top of the steps.

“I'm relieved to see you, Simone.”

“I don't seem to be able to do anything but apologize these days, Alex. I'm sorry,” she said and gave him her hand, which he took and held as if it were the only part of her he could hold on to.

“I'm sorry too, Simone. I called everywhere. Where were you?”

“I drove to Mississippi.” She sighed, a long exhausted sigh. “And to be perfectly honest, Alex, I have no idea why. I didn't pass a damn thing on the road but snake farms, Holy Roller tabernacles, and gas stations with albino sharecroppers selling white lightning out of the trunks of cars.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don't know. I really don't.” She took her hand from his and went into the kitchen, where Ophelia was slowly breaking the ends from green beans.

“Let's take a ride, Ophelia. I want company. Let's take us a little ride.”

They drove along the lake where clouds were building again in the south, gray clouds that pressed down. There was no breeze. They drove to the dredged-out bayou and up to the house on pilings. Any cars that had been there before were gone. The sign that said F
RANCINE
'
S
B
EAUTY
S
HOPPE
was gone.

Ophelia stumbled up the steps after Simone, who pushed open the door. In the front room was a hair dryer, a mirror, a basin, and a beauty-parlor chair. The floor was linoleum and scarred. Pink paper decorated with poodles, balloons, and scenes of Paris covered the walls. The paper looked newer than anything else in the room, as if once, fairly recently, someone had tried for a fresh start. Bottles and magazines and combs and curlers and clothing were scattered everywhere. A wind might have been blowing through that room for days. Behind was a kitchen with dishes in the sink and food on plates and a bag of rotting garbage by the rear door. In the bedroom the double bed was stripped and empty hangers dangled in the closet.

“I never wanted things to turn out like this,” Simone said. She took Ophelia's hand to prevent her from touching anything as they walked through the rooms, almost as if Simone expected some future inventory in which the whole scene would need to be exhibited unviolated. “You have to believe that.”

A few minutes later Simone pulled the Packard into the driveway of her own house. “Go on back in,” she said. “Your mother will be expecting you.” She waited while Ophelia got out and trotted up to the house. As soon as she could see the girl on the porch, Simone drove away.

A fine rain began to fall as she rounded the bend that marked the final mile. Ahead, the arching bridge rose, its crisscrossed wooden timbers white against the green trees beyond.

She was gathering speed so that when she hit the railings, the car broke through as if on course, as if the railings were part of the way it had to travel. The Packard left the bridge and found nothing but air beneath its tires. As the car waited in space, Simone, still at the wheel, hovered with it, suspended for an instant. Then car and driver plunged into the water.

Instead of sinking immediately, the Packard floated downstream like a gay blue boat until it filled and disappeared. A man in a skiff pulled Simone from the river.

“What were you trying to do?” he asked.

“I just wanted to hang there,” she said. “I never wanted to drown.”

L
INDA MARTIN SIPS
her second beer of the afternoon and watches the brown pelicans fly in a staccato line across the eastern horizon. Right before they get to a large rock that juts out into the water, they break file and dive, bringing in their wide wings and dropping like stones.

“Are you sure you're all right—comfortable?” her husband Bob asks. He has finished leveling their travel trailer on the spot she has chosen on this Mexican beach.

“I'm an indolent, not an invalid,” she says from her folding lounge chair and lifts her Dos Equis in a toast to him.

“Don't you want a pillow or your bird book or your binoculars?” he asks.

“No, thank you. They're pelicans—brown ones. I can see that from here.”

“Are you sure that everything is fine?”

“Yes,” she answers, smiling. “I'm really fine.”

He shrugs and smiles back, as if he's not completely convinced, and then begins to do what he always does when they arrive at a new beach in Mexico—clean up. Out of the corner of her eye, Linda sees him, shirtless and tan, and only slightly paunchy in his old cutoffs, bending over and over again, picking up litter and placing it in one of his large green plastic bags.

Past Bob, beyond a spill of rocks, toward the curving arm of the little bay, a figure walks with a dog along the water's edge. Because of the distance and the failing light, Linda can't be sure if the two are coming or going. She
turns her attention back to the pelicans. She remembers reading that only a few years ago they were threatened with extinction. The
E
word. Now they are back in numbers. It is something to be happy about, this return from the brink. She toasts them! Lucky survivors.

As the sun slides down behind her, lighting only the tips of the dusty palm trees, she faces the Sea of Cortez and tries to imagine that she is Eve, landed in some pristine Eden. She makes an effort to believe that the litter and the mangy, possibly rabid dogs that lurk just beyond the pale of beer cans, plastic bottles, used batteries, and disposable diapers do not exist.

She is not as good as pretending as she once was, a discovery she has recently made about herself—one of many recent discoveries. Ever since that doctor in an office as glossy and impersonal as an airline terminal told her that she had not passed the clean-bill-of-health test, Linda has felt that she's on a runaway train, plowing through all the little fictions she'd erected and assumed would endure. The first to collapse was the notion that she was in control of her own body.

“We can offer you several alternatives, several options,” the doctor had said. “We will not remove so much chest muscle . . . take fewer lymph nodes . . . less discomfort . . . reduce the possibility of swelling in your arm . . . radiation . . . chemotherapy.”

The words were a litany she knew he had chanted many times. His voice rose and fell implausibly and his eyes never met hers. Then the nurse came in and he went out.

“I'm only forty-five,” she said to the nurse. “Does this happen often?”

“It happens,” the nurse answered.

That night she slowly took off her clothes in front of the hospital-room mirror, touching her body cautiously, as she would touch the body of a stranger she'd been asked to undress. The next morning she went into surgery.

Bob returns dragging a full green sack. He ties it up and then opens the storage compartment of the trailer, where he keeps the inflatable craft.

“Will you be needing help with the boat?” she asks.

“No,” he replies. “I got this model so I could do it alone.” As soon as he says this, he looks stricken, realizing it's too late to call back the words. “You know what I mean,” he says lamely.

She waves her hand as if waving away a fly. “Not to worry. I never did like boats anyway.”

The boat is new. Bob had wanted one like it for years, but only last month, after they had spent two awful weeks camping in the parking lot of a clinic in Tijuana, could she finally persuade him to buy it. “Listen,” she said, “I don't believe in this damn laetrile business, and I know I don't want to spend my last days sitting around with a lot of other dying people. Let's do what we always said we'd like to do,” she begged. “Let's explore Baja, camp on the beach—fish! For God's sake!”

So here they are.

“What are you using for bait?” she asks. Even though she honestly doesn't like boats, or throwing out fishing lines, or fooling with hooks, the little subtleties of fishing intrigue her. She has enjoyed catching insects on the banks of rivers, seeing what their hatch is and trying to imitate it with various bits of colored fluff.

“If you promise not to tell those purists back home,” he says.

She crosses her heart and holds up her Girl Scout fingers.

“Live bait!” he grins. “I'm into serious meat hunting tonight.”

He drags the boat to the water's edge, pumps air into it, and mounts the motor. A stray pelican lands a few feet away and waddles tentatively to the bait bucket. Bob reaches into the bucket and throws a fish to the pelican, who catches it. Linda claps and Bob bows as if he's part of a clever act. Then he pulls the boat through the small surf and heads in a southerly direction. The motor makes an optimistic noise. The orange boat looks jaunty and indomitable.

The figures down the beach grow larger. A woman with short, curly blonde hair comes toward her. A large German shepherd is at her heels. The woman waves like someone flagging a car and Linda reluctantly waves back. She has been almost happy watching the little orange blob bounce across the water and she doesn't want to encourage company. But her answering wave is enough. The woman approaches.

“Hi there, neighbor!” the woman says boisterously, walking right up to Linda. The dog, an old one with milky eyes and a failing hip, settles down at the woman's feet. “Mind if I sit?”

Linda shrugs. She saw it coming. It's too late now to object. “Sure, have a seat.”

The woman sinks onto the other lounge chair. “I saw you guys heading in. I was watching you get your trailer down that rocky little road. I'll bet you didn't see our RV over there in that palm grove until you got all the way down.”

In fact, they hadn't. Linda and Bob thought they would have the beach to themselves.

“We've been here for a week and we're ready for company,” the woman says. She kicks off her red plastic sandals and puts up her feet. “My companion gets bored so easily. He's a Libra, you understand. I think they're sort of shallow. I'm a double Scorpio myself, and you know what that means.”

“Well, really, I don't. I'm a little vague about astrology,” Linda says. She badly wants another beer, but to get up and get one without offering the woman something would be rude.

“I never get bored,” the blonde woman continues. “I have my psychic studies.” She moves her lips in a way that might be a smile. She has large teeth that overlap in a tiny mouth. Her features are small and seem to float on a round, almost-pretty, face. Linda decides that the woman is about her own age—but looks younger. She smiles back and lets her eyes fall to the woman's breasts, which are tan and firm and full above the low neckline of a pale blue tank top. As soon as she realizes she's staring, Linda forces her eyes back up to the woman's face.

“I'm just fascinated by psychic phenomena,” the woman is saying. Her eyes are bright, like miniature Christmas tree lights.

“I've never given it much thought,” Linda says, and stands. Her thirst has gotten the better of her. “I have some beer in the fridge. Would you like one?”

“Sure, honey, whatever you're having. I'm a tequila girl myself. Te-qui-la!”

“Right!” Linda calls from the doorway. What the hell! Have a beer. The country from whose borne no traveler
returns. Or something like that. What had the doctor said? He'd been vague. A year . . . more or less . . . who knows. And when had he said it? Thanksgiving. She cooked a turkey with all the trimmings and the children had dutifully come home from school, but neither she nor Bob could really talk to them. She just stuffed them with food and cried after they left. Now it is March. She flips off the bottle caps. Foam pours out of the narrow brown necks and over her fingers. “Tequila!”

Linda holds a cold beer in each hand and does a little dance step on the sandy linoleum, then goes out.

“Sorry, no tequila,” she says, handing the woman the beer. “Tomorrow in Loreto we'll pick up some tequila.”

“And limes,” the woman says.

“And limes.” Linda wants music. She goes back into the trailer and slips a cassette into the stereo and comes back out. It is Neil Young singing about how rock and roll will never die.

“Shit! I love that song,” the woman says. “I grew up in Anaheim. Rock and roll was religion. That was before Disneyland.”

“Right, Anaheim. We drove through Anaheim,” Linda says, and sits. “So tell me about this psychic business. What have I been missing?”

“I used to be a handmaiden in the Court of King Arthur. I wore these big gold bracelets. I saw it all in a hypnotic trance years ago.” The woman stretches out her arms, turning them in and out as if looking for the missing bracelets.