Backseat Saints (44 page)

“She called you,” I say to him. “My got-damn mother told you where I was.”

He nods. He is done yelling. His face is restful now and set because here I am in front of him, too weak to do more than keep
creeping backwards. My head hits the fence and I am far down from the gate and I can’t make my legs stand up and take me through
it anyway.

“Both your parents have been very helpful,” he says, smiling his dead smile. His big hands flex, and he jumps lightly down
onto the ruined flowers I tore up with my crawling. He says, “Let’s finish this, hey, Ro?”

“I am calling the police!” screams Lilah, standing phoneless and unmoving behind me at the fence. He doesn’t even glance at
her. She does not matter. Nothing matters to him but that I am here in front of him, and his big hands fold and unfold and
he steps out of the flower bed and crosses half the small space in between us in only two big steps.

A great calm takes me. I see that this is finished now. We are about to be finished. Only seconds stand between us. There
is only one thing that I need to know.

“The card,” I say, and he pauses, as if he wants to hear the last
words I will say to him. “The one that fell faceup in the airport. I guessed right, didn’t I? It was Justice.”

“I don’t even know what that means, babe,” Thom says, stepping toward me once again. His open hands come toward my throat,
but I wasn’t asking him.

I was asking my mother, standing behind him with Pawpy’s .45 pointing right up at the base of his skull.

“Yes,” my mother says, and pulls the trigger.

I see Thom’s face go away, his forehead, that Roman nose I always liked, the whole top of his face folds open like a bright
flower. I am washed in red before my eyes can close, before I even hear the boom, before Lilah begins her long, unceasing
screams.

I crawl sideways, three feet away, before I dare look. He has landed mercifully, mercifully, on his belly. The hole in the
wheat-bright back of his head is small, almost tidy. Lilah is still screaming, loud and strident, and now her scream is words,
and the words are, “No, Mirabelle! No, Mirabelle, no!” Her face is speckled in bright crimson, and under her cries I hear
the rising sound of sirens coming.

The porch fills up with nervous dogs, all milling. Cesar adds in barking, so the yard is a cacophony of ugly sounds. I lean
forward, crawl a few feet to get my mouth closer to Thom’s ear.

“Baby?” I say. “Baby?”

There is no answer. There is no Thom.

“Shut up, Lilah,” my mother says, and then more harshly, “Shut up, dog!” Lilah obeys, but there is no stopping Cesar. I look
at my mother because it’s better than looking at Thom. A thousand times better. My mother says to me, over Cesar’s noise,
“I couldn’t have you leaving, Rose Mae.”

“Now you’ll have to leave,” I say.

“Oh, that’s all right, then,” she says. “I’m used to that.”

Sirens and running feet and the endless yap of Cesar are breaking the air. Neighbors are appearing in their bathrobes, coming
to stand in shocked clusters in the street.

I hear running feet behind me, and a man and then a woman come to the gate and yell words. The man says, “Put it down.” And
the woman says, to me, I think, “Ma’am?… Ma’am? Are you shot?”

My mother has Pawpy’s old gun pointed down between her feet, threatening only the flower bed I’ve ruined. I see one of Thom’s
big boot prints in the center of the churned earth.

“It’s fine,” my mother says to the police behind me. “I’m finished.”

She sets Pawpy’s gun down carefully on the porch edge, and the man cop comes running through the gate to grab her and turn
her and chain her bad hands.

The woman kneels beside me. “Is any of this your blood?” she asks. She is searching my body.

“I need to go to the hospital,” I say.

She says, more frantically, “Is this your blood?”

“I think my mother roofied me,” I say.

The woman cop grabs my shoulders, says insistently, “Is any of this blood yours?”

I lift my hand to touch my face in wonder, and it comes away smeared in red.

“No,” I tell her. “I think I lived.”

Nobody is more surprised than me.

I
STEP OFF THE BART train and hear the doors swish shut behind me. I’ve come to understand the train system here, very quickly.
It’s easier to take them than to risk losing the parking place I finally scored for the Bug on Belgria Street. I walk back
toward my mother’s house in the fading Cali sunshine. The salt air is getting chilly on my bare arms and my toes. Ivy’s boots
have been taken away. They are in separate plastic bags in an evidence locker somewhere downtown. I’ve bought myself a pair
of walking sandals.

I see the “bull daggahhh!” shouter coming down the road toward me, his wild braids sticking up in a haggle from his head wrap.
He is a local fixture, and I have come to feel a strange affection for him.

“Hey, Walter,” I call to him. He grunts, but he has no message for me today. As I pass, he stops and unzips, turning to pee
in Mrs. Delgado’s rosebushes. I don’t so much as blink. The Berkeley attitude seems to be that everyone has to pee somewhere,
and I am going native.

Perhaps he is leaving a message for Gretel in the only language she can read. Later I’ll come out walking with her, and I’ll
pack a soft lunch—peanut-butter sandwich, some fudge, a ripe banana—in case he is still around.

I reach the fence around my mother’s house. All along the outside
edge of it there are bunches of flowers, six or seven of them, in various states of decay. It’s like a shrine where someone
died, but I don’t think they are for Thom. I find them there a couple of mornings a week. I leave them be until they are unquestionably
dead, then clear them to make room for the new ones.

Parker is sitting on the porch steps, swamped in dogs. He waves as I come in the gate, and all four come galloping to greet
me, my own Gret leading the charge. I wade through them, patting heads and scratching ears. Even Cesar has decided to be glad
to see me. I ease myself down and sit on the other side of the stairs. The dogs station themselves between us, like a herd
of furry chaperones.

When I was in the hospital, Parker was my first and only visitor. I fell asleep in the ambulance, my mother’s potent antianxiety
and sleeping meds still in my system, but he was by my bed with field daisies and a worried face when I woke up.

“So it’s Rose,” he said. “Not Ivy, huh?”

“They’re both plants,” I told him, yawning. “But I’m a flower, as it turns out. Next time, you should bring me candy.”

He grinned at me, an easy upturn of his lips, and I smiled back at him and thought,
Not now. Not even soon. But there is going to be a next time.
I was glad to learn he’d missed seeing the carnage in his yard. By the time he got home from his job, it was down to yellow
tape, some stains, and a tech in a jumpsuit who told him what had happened and where to find me.

“How is she?” he asks me now.

“Good,” I say. “Jail is not a bad place for an agoraphobic. Where’s she gonna go, right?”

It took a long time, almost a week, before they’d let me come sit in a plastic chair and see my mother through a wall of glass.
She told her lawyer not to bother asking for bail.

“Did you tell her I’m going to come see her on Wednesday?”

I nod. “We met with her lawyer. He’s still hammering out details with the DA, but he told us where he thinks they’ll end up.
She’ll take the deal.”

“Second degree,” he says, and whistles out between his teeth. “That’s a lot of years.”

I shrug. My mother has left me again, but we are both fine with it. She seems to think that we are even. Me, I have a different
take.

I tell Parker, “She doesn’t care about the time, if the DA will agree to send her to a jail that’s close enough for her friends
and me to visit. Neither side wants to go to trial. A case like this, when the deceased is… not the world’s best citizen,
the jury could spook and let her go. On our side, we don’t want them to put first degree on the menu. Juries are crazy.”

“I don’t think they could get first,” Parker says.

I shake my head, less certain. They found me on the lawn, after all, newly baptized in my husband’s blood. Three neighbors
saw my mother gun him down execution style, putting one through the back of the head. More came running when they heard the
shot. Only Lilah, that loyal little liar-pants, was close enough to see he was an imminent threat, and she oversold it. The
Thom she invented was screaming that he’d come to kill me, slashing at the air with a mysterious vanishing knife.

My medical records have helped, my mother’s lawyer told me. My old nemesis, that yogurt-breathed nurse from the Amarillo ER,
was beyond delighted to give a statement. But Thom was unarmed and only walking slowly toward me, according to the neighbors.
My mother did not call a warning or ask him to stop. Not even Lilah thought to invent that.

Most damning of all, some vigorous cop or another checked phone records. He found the late-night call to Thom’s home made
from the West Branch Berkeley library’s outside pay phone. There was a quarter in the change case with my mother’s perfect
thumbprint on it. The DA seems to think that proves premeditation, and a jury might believe it. It’s not a risk her lawyer
cares to take. Not in a death penalty state.

The DA does not know that it was never my mother’s plan to
kill Thom Grandee. Her own lawyer doesn’t know it. Her silence on the subject tells me she believes that I don’t know it,
either.

But I’ve seen through her. If my mother planned to kill him, Thom Grandee would have died before I ever heard them fighting.
My mother called 911 with the cordless phone. She had the connection open, the phone hidden on the chair seat under the reading
table, before he even walked into her house.

My mother planned a murder all right, but not my husband’s. Killing Thom was useless to her. If he was dead, there was still
no guarantee that I would stay. The only murder my mother ever planned was her own.

Her lawyer played the 911 tape for me. It’s pretty clear to me that she is goading him. She’s telling him I’m being hidden
by the Saint Cecilias, saying in loud, smug tones that they took me away on a private boat and he’ll never find me. She is
careful to clearly state his whole name for the 911 operator several times, even once calling him “Thom Grandee of Amarillo,
Texas.” She’s identifying her killer, right before the fact, in case he leaves before the police arrive to catch him with
her body. The 911 tape ends as I come down the stairs. She landed on the phone and accidentally broke the connection when
Thom shoved her over the table.

Her plan is clear to me, though: Thom goes to jail forever. I am free to walk. She is free to never see me leaving.

Her only mistake was in underestimating his travel time. She should have given me more Ativan. I woke up and interrupted before
he had time to kill her.

Parker waves his hand in front of my face, saying, “Where’d you go?”

I blink and shake my head. “I was just thinking,” I say. “I want to put a lemon tree in the backyard.”

He laughs. “You can try. But I doubt it will survive the amount of dog pee it is sure to be subjected to.”

My mother’s lawyer finds it strange that I am still living here in this apartment, after what I witnessed. He doesn’t understand
that I’ve shared space with living violence for most of my years on this earth. I sleep just fine with the ghost of it in
the yard. Besides, this is the least I can give her, a mental picture of me living in her house, filling up that empty hole
of a room.

Really, though, I’ve moved over into hers. It’s bigger and it has a ceiling fan, and she won’t be needing it for years and
years and years. Next week, I plan to cover the furniture and paint the walls a thick, rich butter color. I’ll stay, but I’m
done with all her blue.

As long as she can think I’m tucked into the twin bed she placed just so to hold me, she will sleep perfectly fine in prison.
It’s a gift I am giving her in secret, because I do not think now that we are even. I think the scales the blindfolded gypsy
holds have tilted. I may owe her a little something.

“Want to go get some dinner?” Parker asks.

“Tomorrow?” I say. “I have something to do tonight.”

“Okay,” Parker says. “I should grade papers anyway.” He starts to get up.

“Do me a favor?” I ask.

“Sure,” he says.

“Leave the porch light off?” He gives me a long, level stare. “And maybe lock the dog door once your crew is in?”

“Sure,” he says again.

I sit out on the porch, and it gets cooler and darker. When I go in to get a jacket, I bring Gretel inside for the night.
I want the yard dog-free for when Lilah comes to bring the flowers.

Parker steps back out onto the porch a couple of hours into my vigil, bearing a flat bowl of brown rice and shrimp and stir-fried
vegetables. He sits down beside me and says, “Can I wait with you?”

“I’d like that.” He’s figured out my mission. I hope he doesn’t mind it. I ask him, straight up, “Are you okay with this?
It is your house, and considering the history…”