Ghost Country (21 page)

By the time Becca got home she had forgotten both her fight with her mother and her airy lie about going to Northbrook Court.

“I got Aunt Luisa out of jail. And she’s in the hospital, so don’t worry, she isn’t coming here.”

A furious Karen demanded the whole story. By the time it came to an end, Becca was grounded for three days. She stalked to her room, haughty, a princess among commoners, then raced to call Corie and Kim, to show off what a heroine she’d been.

W
HEN MARA WAS
small, she hid clean underwear in her doll’s crib, along with nickels saved from her allowance, so that when she felt especially hurt and misunderstood she’d be ready to run away. She actually fled as far as the corner once, the first summer Harriet came home from college, when her efforts to dress up in front of her grown-up sister led Grandfather to hold Mara under the kitchen sink while Mephers scrubbed her face. Later, while they were fawning over Harriet, Mara rode down the service elevator on her trike. Raymond, the doorman, phoned up to Mephers, who caught Mara as she was starting to cross North Avenue.

Mara had imagined running so many times that she packed quickly when the moment came: a few clean shirts, socks and underpants, tampons, toothbrush and deodorant, her passport. Instead of the nickels from her allowance she’d need real money. She’d saved over a thousand dollars from her job at the Pleiades, but she’d never had to pay bills, she had no idea how much or how little twelve hundred and forty-two dollars could buy. When she looked at apartments for rent in the paper, she was appalled by how much even the simplest place cost. She’d need to take a sleeping
bag, so that she could sleep in the parks, her small flashlight, and a few other camping necessities.

She tried to write to Harriet, started, deleted, started again, and finally abandoned the attempt. In the kitchen, her backpack over her shoulders, she helped herself to fruit and a few staples. Down on the street she joked with Raymond, who assumed she was heading on a camping trip, and teased her about running away. She wondered if she would ever see him again, and pressed a five-dollar tip in his hand, although she turned down his offer of a cab.

She hadn’t figured out where to spend the night. Her first idea was Hagar’s House, since she was among the homeless now, even with her twelve-hundred-dollar bank balance. But Patsy Wanachs would only report her to Grandfather and Harriet. Cynthia had said, absolutely do not come to my place, and anyway, she couldn’t stay overnight with Rafe Lowrie and that prize creep Jared.

The thought of the Westinghouse box near the crack in the wall passed through her mind, but she cringed from the memory of the previous night with Luisa and Madeleine, the arrest, the humiliations of the day. Luisa drunk … if that was what Beatrix had been like … of course, Grandfather probably made that up, he made up lies about Mara, probably about Beatrix as well. If Beatrix had defied him … but then why hadn’t she taken baby Mara with her? Harriet said when she lived with Beatrix after her father’s death, they lived on Spam and Bloody Mary mix. Mara wasn’t like that, not really, she got high out of misery, not out of the craving for alcohol that gripped Luisa, squeezing her until she turned mad with desire.

Mara would go to Iraq and find out the truth about Grannie Selena’s death. What if Grandfather was lying about that, too, and Grannie Selena was really still alive, unable to come home because the doctor refused to send her airfare, or maybe had denounced her to the State Department as a spy for Saddam Hussein.

Mara had read books about women who disguised themselves as men and traveled through Middle Eastern countries. Would those large breasts of hers lie down quietly beneath a man’s white tunic?
She was sharing coffee in a desert tent, the men laughing at her jokes, as she quickly became fluent in Arabic. And then a telltale red stain destroyed the white quiet of the sands. She was stripped, and her breasts tumbled out like swollen cantaloupes.

At a travel agency on Michigan Avenue she was surprised to learn that she couldn’t even go to Iraq, Since the Gulf War no one from any country in the world could go there, except as part of some special medical mission.

“But my grandmother is in Iraq; she’s disappeared and someone has to find her,” Mara said.

The travel agent didn’t care about Mara’s grandmother, what she might have done to be stuck in the Middle East. She tried to interest Mara in Israel or Turkey instead, but in face of Mara’s escalating fury, told her to go to the State Department, and gave her directions to the federal building downtown.

Mara climbed onto a southbound bus—unlike Harriet she knew the buses, rode the L, part of her feeble effort to set up an identity separate from her sister. It was rush hour. People glared at her as she squeezed into the aisle, her backpack bumping against glasses and shoulders. She could see herself as larger than ever, her body ballooning across the aisle until it seemed as though her arms were touching the windows on either side.

Finally escaping at Adams Street, trying to pick her way carefully through the crowd, stepping on feet, bumping a man with a briefcase who swore at her, all that misery only to find that the State Department offices closed at four.

She began to believe her own story, that despite the newspaper report she’d read when she was fifteen, certainly despite Mephers’s tight-lipped assurances that Selena was most definitely dead, her grandmother was still alive. Maybe her mother, too. After all, Beatrix’s death had not even been in the paper at all.

If she could find Grannie Selena, everything would be all right. Mara’s body would assume a proper shape, her life a real direction. She took a train to the University of Chicago, down to the Oriental Institute, the museum where she’d done her research on Great-grandfather
Vatick. That was as close as she could get to her grannie tonight, but it was better than returning to Graham Street.

Behind the museum lay landscaped grounds for the university chapel, a stone Gothic building as big as a cathedral. Among those bushes and plants she could set up her sleeping bag unnoticed.

She wandered the streets until dark, the backpack cutting into her shoulders, her hair and clothes matting with sweat in the close air. She hadn’t thought about how she might keep herself clean on the streets.

Students passed, talking about grades and class requirements, couples went by with baby carriages or dogs. Mara felt more and more isolated, with no friend to call on for help, no relatives. She felt as though she’d come unbound from the planet itself.

The midwestern summer does not ease at night. When dark came and Mara unrolled her sleeping bag near the chapel, the air pressed around her, warm and wet. Even so, she zipped the sleeping bag up to her chin, as though its thin down could keep the bigness of the night from crushing her. She lay stiffly, heart pounding, unable to relax. A furry shape brushed against her face and she gasped with fear. Her hands trembled so much she could hardly use them, but she managed to find her flashlight. A cat stared into her light with impersonal malignancy, then spat at her and ran.

O
VER THE NEXT
several days, Grandfather kept commenting at dinner on how wonderful Hilda—Mrs. Ephers—looked, and how pleasant it was that Mara had chosen to go away for a few days, to let Hilda settle in again. When Harriet wanted to tell Mephers the truth, that Mara had run away, Grandfather ordered her not to: the less Mrs. Ephers has to worry about right now, the better.

It troubled Harriet that the doctor showed no interest in Mara’s whereabouts. Perhaps it was age: he couldn’t take histrionics, so he gave an indifferent shrug, oh, she’s gone to join Beatrix on the road to perdition. That’s what he said to Harriet in private when she suggested reporting Mara’s disappearance to the police, or hiring a detective to trace her.

Mephers never asked where Mara was, or even mentioned the episode that had precipitated her heart attack. Infarct, Grandfather called it, heart attack is an unnecessarily dramatic expression and not descriptive. Infarct sounded vaguely obscene, Harriet thought, evoking bodily functions she couldn’t associate with the housekeeper’s iron posture.

Mephers had lost fifteen pounds in her time away, but otherwise seemed unchanged. Despite her age she suffered no lessening
of her powers, except to need a longer nap in the afternoons. In the mornings, after she’d overseen the start of the household for the day, she went to the rooftop pool and swam for half an hour. Dr. Stonds forbade her to do any heavy work, but it was clear to both him and Harriet that running their home was essential to Mephers’s well-being. Barbara, the woman from the agency who took care of their fifteen rooms, their food and laundry, without supervision during Mephers’s absence, quit the third day after the housekeeper’s return. Mexican, Mephers said with grim satisfaction. No work ethic. And made the agency send her a Pole.

Harriet was surprised to find she wasn’t as happy to have Mephers at home as she’d expected. She kept wanting to ask about the letter Mara claimed she’d found, and the photograph of a man who looked like Harriet. Did you have a letter to Mother from France? Did Beatrix give it to you? Or did you intercept it in the mail and never show it to anyone?

Harriet had argued with Mara, told her she was only imagining the photograph. Now she found herself wondering why she’d never noticed Mephers’s secretive air of triumph as she surveyed the apartment. Selena was gone, Beatrix was gone, Mara had disappeared. Only Harriet remained between Grandfather and Hilda Ephers. She began to feel vulnerable, as she had when she was seven: she needed to be on her best behavior or the two of them would make her leave.

Harriet had phoned Cynthia Lowrie, hoping at some unconscious level to hear a friendly voice discuss her sister. Since it was Wednesday night, Cynthia was at Hagar’s House, distributing Bibles. Lowrie’s son, Harriet couldn’t remember his name, told her that with an unpleasant sneer in his voice. He grudgingly agreed to leave a message for his sister.

At the shelter, Cynthia was watching the study meeting with a pained, anxious face in case any of the homeless women challenged or contradicted Rafe. Last week, after Luisa had disrupted the Bible class, Rafe yelled at Cynthia all the way home: you useless moron, I’ll never get you off my hands, what man would ever want to
marry someone as lazy and stupid as you, Jared’s right, you look like a retarded cow, the kind of creature I buy and sell futures in all day long, you’re pathetic.

Once inside their own door she’d tried to run to her bedroom, but he grabbed her and shoved her against the doorway, so hard that her right cheekbone was cut open to the bone. Cynthia stayed home from work the next two days, but didn’t try to see a doctor.

Cynthia was starting to hate the whole idea of Jesus, since worshiping Him and praising His name brought her so much personal misery. On Bible study nights before going to the church she couldn’t eat. What’s in these potatoes that you’re not eating them, ground glass? that from Jared, home from college for the summer. Of course on your best days your cooking is kind of poisonous but I thought you were immune to it. By the time she and Rafe left for church she was usually on the verge of tears.

Tonight’s session had been calm, calm for the setting, that is, for one of the women fell asleep in the middle of Rafe’s homily, while LaBelle kept crying over the fate of the dismembered concubine in Judges, refusing to believe that the passage was merely allegorical: the twelve pieces standing for the twelve tribes of Israel, who didn’t listen to God, and forfeited their place at His right hand to the twelve Apostles.

Rafe repeated this allegorical meaning to LaBelle over and over, but she kept wailing, it almost happened to me, my boyfriend cut on me so hard I thought he was going to cut me into twelve pieces; I almost died, they had to put two hundred seventy-three stitches in me, the doctor, he said he never seen someone cut on so bad and still living.

But tonight no one challenged Rafe’s authority outright. Despite Cynthia’s fears he felt a pitying superiority to the cut-up woman, rather than anger over her cries, so the ride home wasn’t marred by his hoarse shouts.

When they got in, Jared, watching the White Sox on TV in the family room with his girlfriend Tamara, yelled, “That snooty sister of your friend Mara phoned for you.”

“Hu-Harriet?” Cynthia gasped, looking at her father. “What—what does she want?”

“How should I know? She doesn’t talk to peons like me.” He assumed a phony British accent to characterize Harriet: “Oh, could you take a message for me? Ask her to call Ms. Harriet Stonds when she returns.”

Tamara, trained in obedience to Jared’s whims, laughed at his imitation and patted his thigh. Tamara was a nervous young woman, inclined to anorexia; Cynthia felt little jealousy of her glossy dark hair or skinny prettiness, since Tamara often sported more bruises than Cynthia herself.

“Oh.” Cynthia looked at Rafe. “Do you mind—I wonder if something’s wrong—is it all right if I call?”

“Suit yourself.” He opened the refrigerator in the family room. “We’re out of club soda in here, Cynthia: can you check the supplies occasionally, instead of spending your life mooning around? Go ahead and call Harriet Stonds, but don’t imagine I’m letting you go on any outings with them, because the answer in advance is ‘no.’”

Cynthia brought a six-pack of club soda from the kitchen pantry down to the family room. She waited until Rafe had poured himself a bourbon and soda and settled in front of the game with Jared and Tamara. The Sox were behind by two runs, she noticed, wishing they would start scoring before Jared and Rafe got too upset.

When she phoned, from the kitchen extension, her whispery breathlessness irritated Harriet. What possible attraction did this dreary creature hold for Mara? After a prolonged catechism, Harriet got Cynthia to reveal the substance of Mara’s conversation with her that afternoon. (I know she called you, Cynthia: you two have spent the last ten years encouraging each other to imagine you were ill-used at home, Harriet’s cold voice making Cynthia teeter once more on the brink of tears.)