Carter Clay (31 page)

In the mornings, now, the front hall of the Alitz/Milhause residence (glass brick, white walls, red concrete floor) appears brighter than during its past life. This is because a pale layer of desert dust covers the floor. Dust, in fact, now coats the entire home and all of its objects. Beneath the hall table upon which the family members formerly dropped keys and mail, the husks of a number of dead Indian crickets are almost immured in dust, their features delicately veiled.

M.B. has been fooled. Ruby Hinkey, the woman located by the family lawyer, and paid to keep the house “up,” has not been inside for seven months. Does it make sense to clean an uninhabited house? Ruby Hinkey asked herself this question, and the answer she came up with was
no way.
However, Miss Hinkey does recognize her unearned monthly checks as gravy, and uses them entirely on slots at the Desert Diamond Casino.

The home is a brick ranch built in the late forties on what was once the edge of Seca. It is the only house that Jersey has ever lived in, apart from stays in summer rentals and her time at M.B.'s condo; still, that first morning that she awakens in her Seca bedroom—the ringing of the telephone serves as an alarm—she does not know where she is, and so feels defenseless against the now unfamiliar positioning of walls, and the location of the windows' squares of bright morning light. To complicate matters, she has
been put in the wrong bed. Her proper bed is the twin closest to the windows, not to the mural of
Archaeopteryx.
It is, however, the glossy mural that finally informs her: home.

Home. The mere idea of it makes the girl almost swoon with pleasure. She can smell it: home. When the telephone stops ringing, it comes to her that someone has turned on the swamp cooler: the pleasant, woody odor of wet excelsior fills the air. As soon as possible, she will go out to the back patio where, even before she was born, the roots of trees were shoving up the bricks. The Crocodiles, she called those ridges upon which she had so often stubbed her toes. She will rub the leaves of the Diller orange between her fingers, release their scent—

So Carter and her mother put her in bed? From the looks of the other twin, her mother slept in this room as well.

Did Carter Clay sleep in the bed of her parents, then?

“Mom?” she calls. The wheelchair is propped against the wall, all the way across the room. “Mom? You need to bring me my chair!”

Six Easy Pieces
reads the title of the library book on her bed stand. Katherine had checked that book out for Jersey. They were going to try to read it together. AUGUST 17 reads the crooked due date stamped on the cover. Almost a full year overdue.

“M-om?” She does not like the fakery of calling her mother for help when, in fact, she is calling Carter Clay. She can, however, justify it as a means of maintaining distance from Clay; she is not so sure, however, that she can bear the self-deception that occurs each time loyalty and optimism lead her to call Katherine “Mom.”

“My chair's across the room, Mom!”

Could they be outside? Odd to find herself hoping that Carter Clay is about.

“Mom! I need to go to the bathroom!”

She eyes the floor. Oxblood concrete. True southwestern style. “MOM!” In a fury, trying not to cry, she tugs the top sheet and spread from the mattress in order to make a kind of landing pad of them and her pillow. But how do you do this?

Her first plan—hold onto the headboard, let her legs slide over the edge of the bed—is a fiasco that leaves her sweating and
quaking as she looks over the side of the mattress to the floor. The main problem, she understands, is controlling the speed at which the dead part of herself reaches the floor.

So: head and arms first?

Not bad. But her legs—they follow with a dull slam that she knows was a terrible mistake.

“Ass!” she calls herself. “Jerk! Stupid.”

You were supposed to wet the bed before you did something that dumb.

“Mom!” She does not stop to examine herself for possible damage, but, crying, begins to drag herself across the floor toward her chair.

She is almost there when she hears the front door open, the familiar whistling (“Born to Be Wild”) of Carter Clay.

It is Carter who arrives at the bedroom first. “What happened here?” He hurries to unfold the chair and helps the girl into it. “Are you okay, Jersey?”

“I didn't have my chair!” Used to navigating the rehab center, the retirement condo, stores that cater to a wheelchair-using population, she struggles now to move through the bedroom's narrow doorway and into the hall. “Damn it!”

Behind her, Carter tries hard to guide the chair through the door. “What do you want me to do, Jersey?”

“Get me to the bathroom!”

Carter lifts the girl in his arms, and hurries her down the hall. Just now, please, he wishes Katherine would be quiet, but she follows, saying, “We wen' to get wed-ding license, an, bu' they say you can marry now, if you wan', and we di-
d
!”

“You can't have!” Jersey shrieks, and then, “Oh, hurry!”

“Pant like a dog!” Carter says.

“Oh, damn!”

He flinches as the heat of her urine flashes into his shirt front, then, quick, he recovers and says, “Hey, it's okay.”

“Just—put me in the tub!” she yelps.

Holding all three of them plus their reflections on the mirrored
wall, the bathroom feels crowded, and Carter makes several false starts before he gets the girl properly situated, her back against the slope.

She grimaces up at the two of them. “God,” she says, and begins to weep hard.

He feels like a monster. He pleads, “What do you want us to do next, Jersey?”

For a moment, it seems she is going to laugh, but then she stiffens and says, “Get me clean clothes. My mom can help.”

It is wrong to listen outside the bathroom door, but he cannot stop himself, and worse than any bitterness he might have guessed at is the
sorrow
he hears in Jersey's voice when she asks, “How could you possibly have married him, Mom?”

“Car-er loves me.”

“Mom, you don't even know him! You don't have to go through with this, believe me. It was a mistake—”

“Car-ter brough' us home! You and me. I don't haffa be at Fair Oak, Jers'! Tha's no mis-take!”

Think of marrying Katherine as, like, being a monk.
So Carter told himself as he and Katherine drove to the license bureau.

Seca's dry yards, absence of grass, the ring of mountains blanched by heat and dust—they made him nervous.
This is the day the Lord hath made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.
He shook at the wedding—the old-timer performing the service noticed and kidded Carter—but Carter is still shaking, even after he has changed his shirt and cleaned up in the smaller bath off the bedroom that held the bed that was clearly that of the parents.

The bed of the man he killed.

Is there any way to tell the girl that though he and her mom are now married, they will not be having sex?
Just in case you worry about that. It's not that kind of marriage, see? It's more a friendship kind of marriage.

Smelling of some sort of perfumed soap from the parents' bathroom, he makes his way to the kitchen to wait for mother and daughter. He hoped the kitchen might be book-bare—every nook
and cranny of the house is filled with books—but it turns out that the kitchen, too, features bookshelves that run above and alongside the cupboards, and even those bookshelves hold extra books fitted into horizontal spaces, like mortar.

Through a window he can see the back patio: ancient swimming pool, wilted hedge of oleanders, rim of uninviting mountains. That the house is
not
the mini-resort that some part of him secretly expected is a relief. There should not, after all, be hidden worldly rewards in the deal.

The jiggles and whispers of the girl's wheelchair tell him that she heads his way, and so he makes his voice happy and calls out, “Guess I better pick up some stuff at the store. Any requests, Jersey?”

She stops in the doorway, then backs up to try to align the chair with the frame.

“Let me help.”

“No.”
Her eyes flash before she looks down and adds a more reserved, “Thank you.”

“Just—I'm sorry, again, about this morning.”

When she shakes her head, he continues, as calmly as possible, “I know you don't understand me and your mom getting married, but, believe me, being with you and your mom—”

“And here she is now,” Jersey says.

Jangling a ring of keys, Katherine comes to stand behind Jersey in the blocked doorway. “Es-cuse me!” she cries. She peers over her daughter as if over a cliff, then roughly pushes the wheelchair through the door.

In her hands, Katherine holds, besides the key ring, her black purse and a dusty briefcase. Over the dress she wore to the license bureau, she has donned an old barn coat that Jersey recognizes as Joe's. Katherine's shoes are a pair of gold spike heels that formed a part of her getup for the costume party that she attended in the role of rhythm and blues singer Tina Turner.

“I rea-y to go to work,” she says.

“Won't you be hot in that jacket, though?” Carter asks.

Katherine ignores him, and Jersey—Jersey wheels herself over to the bulletin board that hangs on the door to a closet. She consults a card there, then dials out on the kitchen telephone.

Carter does not hear the message Jersey hears on her Uncle Sam's answering machine—

but he does hear the message that she leaves and its tone of emergency:

Uncle Sam, this is Jersey. Your niece. I'm in Seca with my mom and—she just got married. Please call.

Though you might not know it to look at Jersey as she and Carter and Katherine drive in the van to the Earth Sciences building, there is some joy in her heart. Just to be in Arizona again! To smell the baked dirt and know that the thunderheads along the Santa Ritas mean the chance of a rain. She can almost summon up the smell of rain in the Sonoran Desert, a smell as fine as the smell of the sea: wet creosote bush and something magical that the rain releases from the dirt.

Surely her mother can get an annulment. A friend of her mother's got an annulment once. The friend was a Catholic, but there must be something like that for non-Catholics. There has to be a protection for people like her mother.

People like her mother.
She feels guilty for thinking of her mother in these terms, but also knows that her mother—the mother who raised her—would be proud of her for watching out for this other.