A Room on Lorelei Street (4 page)

Zoe shifts her weight. Her right foot aches. She has been waiting in line at the utility office for ten minutes, and the line hasn't moved. Four people are ahead of her. Every time the door opens, a breeze wafts in, enveloping her in the scent of the man behind her. Without looking, she guesses he probably doesn't believe in bathing or else he pumps septic tanks for a living and she considers letting him go ahead of her in line, but she really doesn't want to wait through one extra person either. She holds her breath the next time she hears the bell on the door ring.

The utility office is in the heart of downtown Ruby, sandwiched between Yen's Donuts and Grueber's Gun Shop. It's small, she supposes, since most folks pay through the mail. But a few, like her, have to pay in cash. Their checks and promises are no good. She listens to the lady at the front of the line now, swearing she mailed them a check and if she pays now they better not cash the check, too, or it will bounce for sure because she is not made out of money, ya know, and maybe she just shouldn't pay at all since it will probably come tomorrow and it was probably their mistake in the first place. She is convincing. Zoe almost believes her. But like the clerk behind the counter, she has heard a lot of excuses, too.

Before Zoe left for school this morning, Mama promised that she was going to the beauty shop today. She pressed the final notice and a twenty-dollar bill into Zoe's hand and said, “Take care of the rest of this, sugar, will you? I'll pay you back. Things are just a little tight right now.”

Zoe wonders where the twenty came from, if the man with the hairy legs was so appreciative he chipped in on their electric bill, too.

It's not as if Mama has no money. Grandma manages it and doles out a monthly check from the insurance and settlement money they got when Daddy died. Five thousand from the painters' union and twenty-six thousand from Best Deal Motel where he died. One year's wages was settlement enough for his life, they figured. Grandma made Mama pay off the mortgage first thing. “Only sensible thing to do with a windfall like that,” she said, and then added under her breath so Mama couldn't hear, “Something good finally came of a Buckman.” But that still left almost eight thousand dollars. Grandma righteously doled it out in small amounts each month like she was giving communion, and Zoe never heard Mama squeak. For the care of Daddy's “surviving minors,” Mama also got a small Social Security check each month, but even though Kyle lived with Aunt Patsy and Uncle Clint, Mama kept all the money. All together, with Mama working at the beauty shop, there should have been plenty of money to pay the bills. But Mama didn't work much, not more than a few days a month, if that, and usually just doing shampoos. Zoe guessed that Sally looked for jobs that Mama could still do. Sally had always been good to her and Daddy. Mama hasn't worked in three weeks now. Until Mama promised to go to work this morning, Zoe thought she might never work again.

“I'm growin' moss back here,” the man in front of her yells.

“Me too,” someone farther back in the line calls.

“Same here,” Zoe adds.

The lady at the front turns and glares at the restless hecklers, and the clerk shuffles the paperwork nervously. Zoe wonders if having a gun shop next door adds to her anxiety. The lady counts out the cash, gets a receipt, and stomps off.
Only three more to go,
Zoe thinks, and then the bell rings and she holds her breath once again.

Zoe's car jostles on the loose gravel road as she drives out to the aqueduct. With no tennis practice, no homework, and no shift to work, she has time to fill. She doesn't want to go home yet, and she won't let herself go see the room again. The only landmarks to mark her passage are occasional oil pumps. They dot Ruby like little anchors to hold down the paper-flat landscape. Enclosed by chain-link fence, a lot of the pumps in the heart of town are painted to make them more attractive, most often to resemble a katydid. With their angled arms of steel, they do look like an insect poised to hop, but Zoe has always thought of them as wild horses rounded up from the plains and forced to work in tiny chain-link corrals. Their brown coats are streaked with rust and grime. Their blunt heads raise and lower, straining against iron reins for freedom. As a child she thought if she could just pull away the fence they would turn back into the beautiful horses they really were and escape to the open plains. She had had hope in that power. She grunts now at the childish notion.

She pulls off the gravel road and parks beneath a huge stand of mesquite. She was hoping to see other people. The twins, maybe, or Carly or Reid. Or anyone. She can usually count on someone to come out after school and unwind with a six-pack on the hoods of cars in the shade of the mesquite. And then where the aqueduct travels over the wash and is supported by beams, they walk down to cool their feet in the trickling pond below it, always fresh with water leaking from above. Or, if it's one of those days that weighs on her, she walks on the crossbeams lying on top of the aqueduct. She doesn't know what compels her to do it, but she thinks today is one of those days. She gets out of her car and looks back toward Ruby. No dust trail churns up the dirt road yet. She wonders if she missed everyone because she wasted so much time at the utility office.

She walks up the small incline to the aqueduct, the sandy red soil rasping under her shoes, whispering,
Not today. Not today
. But she can already hear the low rumble of the water, her blood is thin, rushing, and she is pulled to the first crossbeam. She kicks off her sandals and places her left foot on the six-inch metal beam, one foot…one foot…one step at a time she tells herself. That's all it is.

She looks down at the black-blue water, deceptively calm on the surface, a few ripples and nothing more. But she knows the danger, the bodies that have been found miles downstream where the aqueduct widens again. No one who falls in ever survives; the current is too strong, the pull to the bottom unforgiving. She spreads her arms out for balance, and her right foot steps ahead of the left. Another step. And another. The water rumbles, vibrates, her heart beats madly, and a breeze lifts up from the rush below, tossing her hair across her face. She smooths the wisps back so slowly…so gently…and extends her arm again. Another step, and another. Eleven steps across to the other side and then she follows the next zigzag back. And now across again. She stops midway. Lowers her arms. Listens. Feels the frightening power of the water below her…
and she closes her eyes
.

Just for a second—or a few. She isn't sure.

Closed just long enough that up melts with down and light mixes with dark. Closed just long enough to know how totally alive and frightened she is. So she can feel her breaths, fast, her heartbeat, the sweat trickling at her temple, her shirt clinging to her back, the tingling of her fingertips, her muscles trembling, tensing, the adrenaline pulsing, so she feels with stark clarity the wild rush that she is alive. Alive. And it could all end with the slip of a foot, the rush to become blackness, the chaos, calm, just with the passing of a few seconds. Her lungs filling with a pint of liquid and it is over.

That's how fast it could change.

She opens her eyes, steadies her arms, and continues across, two more beams, measuring, concentrating—

“Zoe.” The voice comes hushed, careful and pleading. She can't turn around.

“Zoe,” it calls again. “Come off.”

She takes two more steps. “I'm fine, Reid,” she calls. “I'm fine.” She reaches the end of the beam and turns around. There is Reid standing on the dirt near the edge of the aqueduct, frozen, as though a sudden movement, even from his eyes, could push her from the beam. “Besides, I'm a good swimmer,” she says. She sees Reid isn't amused. His face is pale against his coal-black hair. He says nothing else, like there is no breath left to carry his words. She pauses for a moment thinner than a wisp, sorry she has made his brows pinch together and his pupils turn to pinpoints, but at the same time it makes her feel giddy with power.

She completes the eight-beam zigzag walk, and when she steps back onto the soil on the other side of the wash, she screams with her hands over her head in triumph. “Zoe! Queen of the beams! Queen over water! Queen over death!” The power intoxicates her. Five minutes of control seems like a lifetime. She runs down the wash to the other side and to Reid.

Reid walks to his truck with her sandals in his hand and opens the back gate. “You're crazy, you know.”

She scoots back on the gate and hugs her knees to her chest. “Not really. People do crazier things than that every day.”

“I'm not talking about the stuff in the papers.”

“Neither am I.”

Reid pulls a beer from a grocery sack and flips the tab. He doesn't offer one to Zoe. He knows she doesn't drink. She's tried it. The taste isn't bad, but she can't get past the smell. It is always beer and vomit. That is all she smells.

She lights a cigarette, inhales deeply, and forcefully blows the smoke back out. “Where's Carly?” she asks.

Reid makes the sweeping gestures that Zoe expects. He is part of the drama crowd at school. “Am I my sister's keeper?” he asks.

“Usually.”

Reid grunts. “Not today. She's in deep shit, and I'm keeping my distance. Don't want peripheral grounding.”

Zoe smiles and shakes her head. Grounding. So foreign to her. It sounds so young. “Very gallant of you,” she says. “What happened?”

“Speeding ticket. Her second one. No keys for Carly for a long time.”

“Shit. Where did it happen?”

“The usual. The stretch between Gorman and the refineries. They were right behind the last row of trailers at Sunset Gardens. She asked for it. They're always there.”

Zoe shakes her head. That's where they got Carly the last time. Why didn't she learn? But who is she to judge Carly on faulty memory. It seems to be a Ruby staple.

She lies back in the truck, and Reid erupts with a long dramatic belch, then smiles and bows. Zoe tweaks her head to the side and feigns disgust but can't restrain a smile. She loves him like a brother, but she can't forget he was the last one. Carly doesn't know. It still shames her when she thinks of it, and it continues to hang between her and Reid, thin, like a ghost, barely seen in fleeting glimpses, in the shadows, but always there in awkward pauses, brief moments of remembrance—how it was, the intimacy that is now a hazy dream.

“I'll give her a call later,” she says.

“Nope. A hundred-and-fifty-dollar ticket means no phone either.” Reid lies down beside her on the gate. Together they stare into the weave of color over them, a shifting canopy of white-blue sky and quaking leaves of mesquite as the afternoon wind picks up.

“Well, I'll see her tomorrow at school, then,” Zoe says.

“You'll be there? Knew you were suspended today. You were the talk of the school. Everyone's saying they would put up with Garrett all year long if they could have just been in that class yesterday. They're saying they love you in one breath and that you're fucking crazy in the next.”

Zoe sighs. “How many times are you going to call me crazy in one day, Reid?”

“You tell me. The day's not over.”

She doesn't answer. She wonders herself.

An awkward silence comes between them, and she is aware of his jeans brushing the side of her bare thigh, his head just inches from hers. She sits up and throws her cigarette down on the dirt, then stands to mash out the fading embers. Reid changes the subject, and they talk about trivial things neither one cares about until finally Zoe looks at her watch and says she has to go home.

But she doesn't go straight home. She can't stop herself. She takes a brief detour—a detour down Lorelei Street—a detour that takes only fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes of dreaming and imagining, a detour that is really, now, her only route home.

The house is silent. She checks Mama's room, and the bed is empty.

She went to work. Like she said. She really went to work.

Zoe goes to the kitchen and puts away the half gallon of milk and Chinese express she picked up on the way home. She clears the table of dishes, newspapers, bottles of antacids and washes away the crumbs, coffee rings, and dabs of grape jelly with a dishcloth that is gray and smells of mildew. The worn but clean Formica tabletop glistens with the dampness of the rag, and that glimmer somehow lifts her spirits. She turns on the radio on top of the refrigerator. Mama has it tuned to an oldies-but-goodies station, and Zoe leaves it there. She listens to Roy Orbison croon “it's over” as she runs hot water to wash a few dishes.

She glances at the clock. Six-fifteen. Mama should be home soon. Sally's closes at seven; the last shampoos are done by six-thirty. It's only three blocks away, which Mama walks now that she can't drive. Zoe pictures Mama's withering legs.
But the exercise is good for her,
she thinks. She finishes the dishes and looks at the empty sink. It is stained and yellowed, but still somehow fresh-looking on this particular evening. She decides she will make sure it is empty every evening and begins drying the dishes. She looks at the clock. Five after seven. She wonders if she should have picked up Mama. She sets her towel on the counter and picks up the phone. She hesitates, then dials. Sally answers on the first ring.

“Sally? Has Mama left yet?”

“Zoe? That you, sweetheart?”

“Yeah. It's me.”

“Your Mama ain't here, honey.”

“How long ago did she leave? I was just wondering if I should have picked her up.”

Zoe notes the pause.

“Your Mama hasn't been here at all today. She hasn't been in the shop for close to a month. Did she say she was coming in?”

Zoe stumbles, not fixing on Sally's voice anymore. “No. I mean, I think I misunderstood her. That's all. Thanks, Sally.” She says good-bye and hangs up.

Not there? Where
…

A familiar fear grips her, then explodes out of her.

“Mama?” she calls as she runs to the bathroom.
Damn!
She didn't check the bathroom.
“Mama!”
she calls again. She stops at the dark doorway, her hand whipping around to switch on the light. The curtain is drawn at the tub, and she jumps forward to tear it away. It's empty.

Only a white tub and nothing more.

Her knees are weak, and she holds on to the towel rack, closing her eyes, taking a breath, and another, feeling her heart beating against her throat.

She hears laughing, talking, good-byes, and then the front door opening. She loosens her grip on the rack and walks to the front room, just in time to see Mama closing the door behind her and then leaning back against it. She sees Mama's mouth moving but Zoe can't put the words together. It is a background jumble, as if she and Mama are moving on two different planes of time. As if her run to the bathroom has jolted her into another dimension. Has it? She feels nothing. She looks at Mama's eyes. They're unfocused, her pupils large, black, watery pools circled with a thin line of blue. Her dress is twisted and hanging off one shoulder, her dingy bra strap exposed. It tugs across her bloated middle, and Zoe sees the lines that have folded into her face since yesterday. Mama lifts her hand to brush her hair from her forehead, her beautiful forehead that Zoe has kissed so many times, but now its soft milkiness is a remembered dream. The planes she and Mama move on converge once again, and she hears Mama's words.

“What the hell you staring at?”

“Nothing, Mama,” Zoe answers. “I'm staring at nothing.”

Mama pushes past her, and Zoe hears her stumbling in her room, drawers slamming too loudly, closet doors swinging too wide. Mama returns in only her slip and settles on the couch with a half-filled glass in her hand. “Hand me the controls, will you, sugar?” There is no talk about Zoe's day, school, or her suspension. No questions.

She hands Mama the control and goes to her bedroom, not bothering to shut the door. She hears the click of the TV and chopped-up conversations as Mama flips through the channels. Chopped-up conversations that sound so familiar to her, like it is the only way people talk, talking but never finishing, finishing where there is no beginning.

She pulls the duffel from under her bed. She fills it. This time the decisions about what to put in seem easy. Her hands move methodically. She does the same with one pillowcase and then another. She hears Mama laugh and then soft whimpering, like an animal that has been wounded. Pauses, coughs, sobs, and the clink of the glass punctuate Mama's pleas.

“Sugar…,” she moans.

“Come here…,” she calls.

“I need to talk to you…,” she sobs.

Chopped-up conversations whose only beginning is Mama.

Zoe takes a piece of blue-lined paper from her notebook and begins writing. By the time she is finished and returns to the living room, Mama is asleep. She tapes the note to the TV screen.

She loads the duffel and pillowcases into her car, and when she drives away, she leaves the chain-link gate swinging open wide.