Backseat Saints (17 page)

In the lovely, morphine-covered landscape where I lay, looking for a path to him, it dawned on me that I hadn’t disappeared,
after all. I’d tried, but I had been found. My mother had found me.

Her presence at the airport was not merely a hideous coincidence.
She had come to Amarillo specifically because I lived here; she’d come to put her eyes on me. She’d sat low in the coffee
shop across the parking lot to watch me pimp Joe Grandee’s guns, or crouched down in a rented car on my street, watching me
bend and dig in my garden. She could have been making Amarillo pilgrimages for years now. No way to tell. The only certainty
was that she knew I was there long before I caught her at that airport. The proof was at Cadillac Ranch. She had left a message
on the cars a day before our eyes had met.

I did love you, Rose. Pray to Saint Cecilia!

She’d left it to soothe her conscience and invoke her favorite saint in a place where she could be 99 percent certain I would
never find it. But in coming to my city, she’d left a speck of working room for whatever minor saint was in charge of chance
meetings and graffiti. He was on my side, no doubt tittering on my shoulder as he brought me to the airport in perfect time
to catch her leaving me again.

The only question that mattered now was, how had she found me? Because if I could be found, then so could Jim Beverly.

The hole my own slivered rib had stabbed into my lung resealed itself. The hospital pulled my pretty morphine tube, and I
started a new, less intense romance with Percocet. I was still bad off, but I could breathe, so they released me.

Thom drove me back to the house, bracing me in the seat with pillows and taking it easy on the curves. Once we got home, he
put one arm close to his own side and bent it at the elbow, so his forearm was a ballet bar I could cling to as we made our
way from the car back to our bedroom. I creaked my way down the hall like a granny, trying to walk in a way that favored my
hurt places. There weren’t enough working pieces of myself to take up the slack, so I had to favor Thom.

He helped me lower myself into the bed, plumping up a ridge of pillows behind me so I could see the TV if I wanted. He gave
me the remote, the book I’d been reading, and another pill to wash down with a cool cup of water from the bathroom. He reached
to
smooth my long hair away from my face, but something in my gaze paused him. He took his hand back. Wise move.

“I’ll tell my dad you’re still under the weather this week. He can get Kelsey to cover your shifts,” he said, sweet as sugar
cereal. He was treating me like something breakable, which is different from how you treat something you yourself have broken.

I let my body lie in our bed like it was a hole-covered log, waiting for squirrels and spiders to find it and nest. Only Gretel
came, flopping down with her spine a solid line of warming comfort against my calf, my faithful napping partner. Thom brought
me hot cereal and scrambled eggs in the morning, Cup-a-Soups with crackers and sliced cantaloupe at night. Invalid food, with
Percocet for afters. I ate it without tasting, mending through the tick of each long second, and my mind spun in a circle
like a lazy Susan with a single idea on it: How did my mother find me, a thing that deliberately went and got itself lost?

When Thom came to bed, we lay on our own sides, both flat on our backs. My cold will was a ridge of Puritan pillows running
in between us. But the fourth night, my body had healed enough to turn and shift without pain waking me. I fell asleep, and
Ro Grandee crept over, seeking her husband’s heat. He came to her as he always had. We woke up face-to-face, our pieces tangled
and tucked around each other. I unwound my limbs and took them back without looking at him. He let me go.

Thom posed little threat in these days. He was ashamed and yet so sated that it was like a bloat, making him sweet as he tended
to my body, his favorite toy. He worked to heal it, same as I was, readying it for rough play. I was safe with Thom; right
now, Ro Grandee was the danger.

I was back in her house, with the pretty ocean blue coverlet and sheers she’d picked, her willow-patterned china in the kitchen,
the remnants of her light perfume tainting the air of the bathroom. I’d lived inside her familiar, comfortable skin for years,
until it was me, until I had no choice in it. But to let myself be Ro again now was
suicide, the only irrevocable sin. The drugs that held me back in the hospital were holding me too still in her territory.
I felt her as a creep, growing on back over me like fungus. It could not be allowed.

When Thom brought my breakfast on a tray, I handed him back the Percocet and said, “Could you bring me a couple, three Motrin,
please? And a great big cup of coffee?”

I downed the coffee and ate every bite of my cheese eggs. Thom left for work, and I could feel myself waking up, truly waking,
as last night’s pill spent itself in my bloodstream and was replaced by the caffeine. The first thing I realized was that
I was filthy, covered in a waxy coat of my own mank. My hair was limp and greasy. I creaked to my feet and took a long shower,
scrubbing myself so hard that it was like being peeled. I made the water scalding hot. When I got out, I was pink under my
fading bruises.

I opened the closet and got an eyeful of Ro’s swirly skirts in springtime colors. Sweet flats with bows and buckles and embroidered
daisies. Clingy lightweight sweaters, all long-sleeved. I slammed the closet door, as repulsed by these things as if they
had been hand-sewn from human skin. I went to my dresser instead and dug out a long-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of the old
Levi’s that I wore on heavy cleaning days.

The jeans were pale blue and baby soft from a thousand washings, and they sat easy against my bruises. My rib cage pinged
as I shifted, and I could tell by how the jeans fit that I’d gone barn-cat scrawny. Still, I felt whole and ready for movement,
but only from the neck down. My wet hair was a heavy reminder, pulling at my sore scalp. I dried it on cool, then I bundled
it away into a low ponytail and braided it. It still felt like the braid had a barbell tied to the end. I pulled it over my
shoulder, where it hung past my breast, heavy and hers.

I didn’t want it touching me. I wanted none of Ro’s things touching me, and the long hair my husband loved felt like a most
offensive bit of Ro-ness. I strode to the kitchen and yanked my meat shears out of the butcher-block knife rack on the counter.
I
thought I could lop that braid off in one fell swoop, but it was too thick. I had to squeeze the handles open and shut and
saw at it with the blades to get it off of me. Finally the last connecting hairs yielded, and the braid slithered down my
back to the floor. My head felt so suddenly light that it was like being dizzy.

The braided cable of hair looked like a long, glossy pet that had coiled up at my feet. It was sleek and dark, more than a
foot long, so thick that I doubted I could get my finger and thumb wrapped all the way around it. I looked down at it and
felt no remorse. I felt no connection to it at all. It was nothing more than a brown black rope that Thom could damn well
never hang me from again.

I picked up the braid and walked back to the bathroom. I think I meant to put it in the trash, but I caught sight of myself
in the mirror and stopped. I was ten pounds too thin and two shades paler than paper. My shorn hair hung around my face in
a ragged tangle, longer on the right side than the left. I had kaleidoscope eyes, spinning with a hundred different colors
of pure, naked crazy. For the first time in years, I was face-to-face with Rose Mae Lolley. Even my clothes were hers, faded
and ill used enough to have been found in a church box. I was cold all over, predatory, and it showed in my face. Every line
of my body said,
Down to black business, up to absolutely nothing good.

I’d been Rose Mae in accidental flashes over the years, most recently in the ditch at Wildcat Bluff. This was the face Jim
Beverly had seen, I felt certain, that night we got drunk and ran through the woods, and the rustle of ferns and branches
was the crack and snap of tiny bones. Thom knew this face, too. It had been reflected in the mirror of his gaze the first
night I met him, back when I was slinging eggs and corned-beef hash at Duff’s Diner. Stirring spit into his date’s drink had
been a stopgap measure to keep me from boiling half her face off with a pot of scalding coffee. He’d known what he was getting,
same as I had. But those were forays, a creature taking peeks and darts out of its pretty, placid home.

In the mirror I was as ugly and iridescent as a de-shelled hermit
crab, fleshy and exposed. I hadn’t been this nakedly myself since the morning I left Fruiton, Alabama.

When Jim left me, it was as if he’d ripped my skin off and toted it down the highway with him. The very air stung me. I wandered
the halls of my school drugged with loss and rage. I stopped turning in my work. Tests were passed out, and I sat through
them, not even lifting my pencil. It was all I could do to hold myself still with the air and sunshine touching the raw and
blinking object that I was. Graduation came, and I sat home through it, knowing I had flunked and not caring. I sat through
summer like it was a prison sentence.

I thought I might hear from Jim on my birthday. I held myself afloat with the idea: He would call. He would tell me—and only
me—where he was. He would say he’d only been waiting for me to turn eighteen, so that no one could come looking for us.

The day came, and the phone stayed silent. Then my father clocked me a good one for the high crime of walking to the kitchen,
my back to him, when he was thinking he might speak to me. Kidney shot. I lay on the floor where he had put me, and I understood
that Jim would not rescue me. If I stayed in Fruiton, this was my life. This was all I could be. No dear and worthy girl could
be rebuilt under my father’s fists.

I packed a canvas duffel bag and slept a fitful few hours until the Greyhound station opened. Daddy was passed out on the
sofa, dreaming like a dog with his bare feet hanging off the edge and twitching as he chased down rabbits or naughty daughters.
I had a little money of my own, but I decided that final punch would cost him the nine dollars in his wallet as well as the
sacred “whiskey twenty” he kept in his bedside table for emergencies.

There was leftover Tuna Helper in the fridge and half a pan of mac ’n’ cheese, too. It could be days before he ran out of
things to microwave and realized I was gone. I wanted him to realize sooner.

There was a big print of ships in a harbor hanging above the sofa, over Daddy. It had been my mother’s. As a girl, I used
to pretend
she’d stepped into it and gotten on a ship and gone someplace that I could follow, the way Lucy and Edmund had floated across
a painted ocean back to Narnia. I was grown up now, and I understood she left on purpose, through the front door. I was about
to follow her lead.

I looked at the print, all that deep blue water hanging over Daddy’s head. I thought about the gas can in the carport, how
it would slosh, unwieldy, if I lifted it and carried it back here. It was more than half-full because Daddy never fed the
mower. It was cool inside our small brick house in the hour before dawn. A fire sounded nice.

Instead I turned myself, went to his room, and I stole his pistols. I took Pawpy’s both for protection and as a punishment;
it was just about the only thing of Pawpy’s Daddy had. I took both his newer ones to hock, as if they were my rightful dowry.
I’d have taken his deer gun, too, but it didn’t fit down in my duffel.

My last act was to dig a shedding Crayola paintbrush out of my childhood toy box. I took a coffee mug to the neighbor’s yard
and scooped up a generous cupful of the dog crap that had leaked out from their dyspeptic standard poodle. I took these tools
back to the sofa and used them to write, “Later, Gater,” onto the hanging print of ships at harbor. The ships and the docks
were brown, and the sea was a storm dark blue. The words were hard to see, and I wondered how long he would stagger around
the house, hung over and gagging, checking his shoes and sniffing and cussing, before he found my billet-doodoo.

Considering he was passed out helpless, considering that I had a swollen kidney and two loaded guns, considering how raw I
was, he was damn lucky that was all I did. If he had stirred, if he had so much as cracked an eye, he would have seen the
face that I was seeing in the mirror now. If he’d said the wrong word to me in that moment, then as sure as God made all the
pretty fishes, I’d have put a hole in him.

I reached out and touched the mirror, disbelieving. The girl
inside the glass reached at the exact same time, raising her hand on her side to meet mine, fingertip to fingertip. The glass
was showing me an accurate reflection, showing me that she—I—was way too easy to read. I had to camouflage myself.

I rummaged through Ro’s flowered handbag to find the keys to my hand-me-down Buick. I drove downtown, still clutching the
coil of my hair, to a place called Artisan Salon and Day Spa. I knew Charlotte Grandee paid this place a small fortune to
keep her hooves sanded down and her gray covered. I had never so much as stepped inside. Thrifty Ro got her split ends trimmed
at a place called Mister Clips for eight meager dollars. I did my pedicures at home. Artisan wasn’t a place we could afford,
but that one glimpse in the mirror had told me a faked smile and some Maybelline blusher wouldn’t cover half my sins. Damn
the cost; Thom owed me this, and more. Hell, all the Grandees owed me. I circled Amarillo’s small blocks until I found a parking
space that would hold my ancient tank of a car.

I walked into the ultramod reception room, and the lone blonde waiting to have her frosty tips refreshed gasped at the sight
of me and looked away fast. One manicured hand raised itself involuntarily to touch her own thick curls, like she was scared
whatever had happened to me might be catching.

I looked past her to the young man behind the apple green check-in station and said, “Do you take walk-ins?”