Lilac Mines (28 page)

“We're not taking over, we're just working, same as you,” Jody says, but she's seen this look before. It's a no-turning-back look. Tom's hands are shaking. He's had to work up the courage to be mean, and now that it's turned him into something else, he will run through the forest, biting.

Jody can bite back. She knows how to let words like Tom's blow past her like a wildfire, just hot enough to singe her skin and get her mad, not close enough to burn her. She gave Zeke Espey a fat lip that made him lisp like a sissy. But tonight she doesn't have the energy to fight for the same thing she always fights for, which is nothing at all. Not with quiet, distraught Tom Barratucci. Tonight she is 36 years old and her shoulder hurts. “Never mind,” she says. “See ya around.” His snarl follows her out the door.

Jody makes her way through brown snow-sludge to her Edsel. She has never been as riveted by Lilac as others are. She went to Petra's ridiculous séance in the woods a few years ago because she knew Jean wouldn't be able to stand being the only butch there. But the past has never seemed particularly useful to Jody. It's either painful or pointless, stuff for college professors to debate as they polish their thick glasses.

Now, though, she wonders why Lilac got a whole town and Calla—if she was really Lilac's friend—just got one street. And what she died of. Jody wonders why the northern bark moth is worth saving, but the western sugar moth is just a pawn. She thinks of environmentalism as another hobby for people with too much free time, but on a logical level she wonders: if the western sugar moth is
not
endangered, but they keep chopping down the trees it naps in, will it
become
endangered? Will the western sugar moth be punished for surviving and reproducing and not complaining? Except it won't be, because it's masquerading as the northern bark moth. It's pretending to be something more precious, and whoever decides these things has decided to save it.

Anna Lisa comes home late from her hospital nursing internship at Saint Julian's. She chose the hospital after her classmate Letty Quintero told her, “Saint Julian the Hospitaller is the patron saint of travelers and hotelkeepers and murderers and clowns.” It has proven to be a good choice, leaving her too tired to think at the end of the day.

Terry is late too; he's grading tests again. Two years ago, he sold The Quill Pen and started teaching elementary school. He just had to take a couple of exams, having minored in primary education in college, a fact Anna Lisa didn't know until he announced his career shift. He took on 25 fifth graders and stopped bothering Anna Lisa about having a baby. She was relieved, of course, but also saddened. She missed him having hope in her. She takes a TV dinner out of the freezer and puts it in the oven and waits. The house is quiet. She wishes she had a dog. Outside a layer of thick Valley mist muffles her May flowers. There are ten minutes left on her meatloaf in the oven when the phone rings.

“May I speak with Anna Lisa Hill?” The woman's voice is deep, and awkwardly formal.

“Speaking… Well, it's Kristalovich now, but, yes, that's me.”

“Al?”

“Meg?” The voice on the other end of the line is not Meg's, but this is what Anna Lisa says, as if she's playing the word-association game that terrified her in Psychology 100.

“Did you hear, then?” says the woman.

“Hear what?”

“About Meg. Al, it's Jody Clatterbuck.” As if there might be other deep-voiced Jodys in her life these days.

“Jody! Wow, are you still in Lilac Mines?”

“Yeah, but not for long. The mill closed in March, and no one here has any money. Imogen and I are gonna look for a place in San Francisco. It'll be weird to live in a real city, but I dunno, maybe it'll be okay. Everyone's getting outta here. Even Petra… the girl is stubborn, but she ain't strong.”

“Who's Petra?”

“That's right, she came after your time. Anyway, Al, I called because Meg… so you didn't hear?”

“No, hear what? Who would I have heard from? Meg and I haven't talked in years.”

“Right. Well…. Um…. God…. ”

Anna Lisa watches the clock above the oven. In six minutes her meatloaf will be done. The green beans, the nubbly corn, and the chocolate pudding that will burn her tongue because she'll try to eat it first. Except in six minutes she might never feel like eating again.

“Al,” Jody says quietly. “She killed herself.”

Because there is something growing inside of Anna Lisa. It was planted a long time ago and Jody's words are a bullet, puncturing the bulb and releasing the thing that wanted to grow. It fills her stomach and climbs her throat. She makes a choking sound into the mouthpiece of the phone.

“She hung herself. We should've seen it coming. I mean, sometimes she was fine and all, but…” Jody's voice is full of anger and regret. But it's the “we” that Anna Lisa hears. There's a group of them, out there in Lilac Mines, to hold each other up as their limbs turn to liquid, to keep each other from washing down the mountainside.

“When did it happen?” Anna Lisa says finally. This seems important. She cannot grasp certain things right now, not yet, so she will focus on the details.

“Last week. Thursday night, we think. We would have called you sooner…” Her voice trails off. Meaning,
but no one thought of it.
Anna Lisa had been gone almost eight years. What was five more nights? Anna Lisa works backward. Last night she studied for her cell biology exam. Sunday night she and Terry ate seven-seas casserole in front of the TV. Friday and Saturday nights she spent assembling wedding decorations with Suzy, who is in town for her wedding to an engineer named Martin Ketay. And Thursday night Anna Lisa stayed late at the hospital, hanging bright prints she'd found at the Salvation Army on the walls because she thought the place could use a little cheer. During each of those activities, Meg was already dead.

“What time?” Anna Lisa asks. She wants it to have been when she was doing something meaningful. She wants to have felt a chill in the hushed hospital corridors, or to have been hanging a picture Meg would have loved.

“No one knows,” Jody says. “We saw her at Lilac's on Wednesday. She was her regular self, kind of drunk and quiet.”

Except this is not Meg's regular self, as far as Anna Lisa is concerned. Meg is talkative. Meg dances.

“Essie went over there, 'cause, well, actually Meg and Essie had sort of been getting together. They weren't a couple or anything—Meg would only go for butches—but Essie got this haircut a couple of weeks back and, who knows, maybe Meg started to look at her different. Anyway, Essie went over there Friday morning. She had some zucchini bread that Linda made. She could hear some music inside, but Meg didn't come to the door. So she opened it. Meg never locked it—we always told her that was stupid, living alone in the mountains. So Essie found her—” Anna Lisa doesn't know who Essie is, or Linda.

Jody's voice trips over itself. It has been trotting along on the details, but now it slows, as if climbing a steep trail. “Hanging from… you remember that wardrobe she had? I guess she tied a rope… somehow… and she was… stiff. Essie said her face was blue and her neck had… Anyway, we think it happened Thursday night.”

The timer on the stove buzzes. An alarm going off in another world, where time still exists. Anna Lisa lets the vibration bore through her as she stands still, feet rooted to the linoleum, hand gripping the yellow receiver. All these years, she's pictured Meg as she was in 1965. A fitted dress made of some slightly rough material that might make Anna Lisa's skin break out if she touched it. Wavy brown hair begging to be mussed by sex. Bessie Smith spinning. Pulp novel splayed on her soft patchwork quilt. Meg frozen, not at absolute zero where molecules stop moving, but a commonplace sort of frozen, where they buzz about but don't really change. It occurs to Anna Lisa that, in this way, she has already killed Meg. Made her hover there, a memory.

“Was there a note?” she asks. She wants to hear that there were pages and pages addressed to
My Darling Anna Lisa.
She'd accept the guilt in exchange for proof of her own existence.

“No,” says Jody. “No note.”

And what happens now? Anna Lisa is moving through something thick, like water or a dream or smoke. What do people do when someone removes herself from time?

Anna Lisa chokes, “Funeral?”

“A funeral? No. I mean, we had a little service for her here at the colony. Sunday night. But Petra got a hold of Meg's father—they grew up in the same town, you know—and her… body was shipped back there.”

Anna Lisa thinks of Meg flying over the thawing mountains, Midwestern farmland, places Anna Lisa has only seen in pictures.

“I guess they'll have some kind of funeral for her there. She hadn't talked to her father in years. Petra said he yelled at her, as if she was the one who made Meg come out to California. Even though Petra was in fucking junior high school when Meg left.”

“And what did you do at, uh, the colony?” Anna Lisa asks.

“Oh, it was nothing, I'm sorry we didn't call, Al, really. God.” Jody pauses. “This woman, Athena, sang. I hate her songs, actually, they're sissy songs, all about flowers and peace. Meg would have hated it.”

Jody's voice is pulling Anna Lisa through a burning building. She has to keep calling “Marco” to Jody's “Polo” as her lungs fill with smoke. “And you… you're moving? You and Imogen?”

Jody takes this as a cue to return to a tougher cadence. “Yeah. She's sadder about it than I am. Her heart was more in the colony. But no money is no money, you know? At first the city tried to make all these little improvements—new street signs and stuff—but then I guess the Clarksons decided it would be easier to just start over somewhere else. There was a fire at the Lilac Mines Hotel a couple of weeks ago. People are saying someone did it for the insurance. Who wants to stick around Lilac Mines now anyway?”

A small voice inside Anna Lisa says,
I do.
“Could I visit you and Imogen?” she asks. She says it humbly, but she's sure that Jody will say yes. It will be as it was a dozen years ago, Jody's strong, thick arms welcoming her, initiating her. “Either at your new place or before you go?”

There is a silence. The thing in Anna Lisa's stomach and throat pushes and pushes. Jody says, “I don't think that would be a good idea.” Anna Lisa recognizes it as the voice Jody used to talk to men at the mill, the ones she feared and did not respect.

“But it's been so long,” Anna Lisa protests. “You can't still…”

“Al. You
left.
You left Meg and Lilac Mines and us. That's fine, okay, I mean, that was your decision.” Jody pauses. “Anyhow, I thought you should know what happened. I'm calling all Meg's exes.”

And so while Jody has stayed the same gruff nurturer in Anna Lisa's mind, Anna Lisa sees that she has changed in Jody's. She arrived in Lilac Mines an innocent, the victim of a world that never even gave her a word for what she was, but now she has Meg's blood on her hands. Jody is calling to fill her in on a part of the story she has missed, out of respect for Meg's past, but she's not inviting Anna Lisa to join the next chapter. Shakily, Anna Lisa puts the receiver back on its hook. She waits to begin breathing again.

When she finally takes her dinner out of the oven, it is small and hard and black, and the gust from the oven is so hot she thinks her eyelashes are melting. She is disappointed, in a way, that the smoke is a result of something so mundane. That the world has not bent and burned as a result of Meg's departure from it.

She eats two slices of plain bread. Although she can't quite taste them, she marvels at how the chewed up food slides down her esophagus. It seems as if her throat should collapse, in sympathy. But all the proper valves open and let it into her stomach, where it sits patiently, waiting to be broken down by a pond of yellow bile. All these functions work, as if Meg is not dead. She keeps waiting for the world to end. While she waits, she flips through pictures of eggs and bunnies in
Woman's Day.
She turns the TV on and then off. She makes a wobbly list of names on a crumpled supermarket receipt: Gertrude, Isabella, Persephone, Carmen, Natasha. She goes to the bathroom and vomits her chewed-up food into the toilet. Terry is still at school. He stays and stays. Until 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock.

Anna Lisa studies the picture of Meg that she keeps between eggplant and bell pepper in
Jewels on the Vine: Exotic Vegetables that Anyone Can Grow.
She took it that day they drove all the way to Columbia. They drank sarsaparilla at the old-fashioned soda fountain, then whiskey at a biker bar. It was happy hour, but almost empty. Anna Lisa had to pee on the way back, so they pulled over to the side of the road. She found a tree skirted by tall, soft new plants. Then she found her camera in Meg's trunk and took the picture. Meg smiles brilliantly into the mountains. Not at Anna Lisa. Not then, not now.

Maybe,
Anna Lisa thinks,
the world is not ending because it is waiting for me to end it.
If she carries on like usual, Meg will never be dead; she'll just remain another thing Anna Lisa is deprived of. It would be so easy to keep Meg at her cool, back-of-the-mind temperature. But for the first time the thought of carrying on like usual seems unbearable.
Why should Meg have all the fun and all the tragedy?
she thinks bitterly. She cannot let the world progress without her any longer. More than she needs to be part of the gay world or the straight world, she needs to be part of the turning world, the one that spins and shakes and explodes under the weight of history. A surge of energy replaces her bread-and-magazines numbness. She begins to pull clothes from her closet. Jeans and tops and coats and scrubs. The blouse with the billowy collar that Terry loves, the mannish brown button-down he hates. The sea-foam bridesmaid dress she's supposed to wear at Suzy's wedding next Sunday. She piles them on the bed like dozens of flat, sleeping bodies. In the back of the closet she finds a duffel bag, crumpled and dusty from years of not traveling.

Ending the world means finding the end of the world. Going to it: the mining town that's always threatening to slip down the mountain. It is running to, not running away. She will no longer hide in the world's crevices, where she is dry and safe but so constrained that her bones have grown to match the shape of her cage.

It's just after ten when she arrives at her parents' house. Suzy answers the door with her hair half straight, half curled. She is wedding-thin, dressed in a bright pink, flowered nightgown. She manages to radiate maturity and youth at the same time, the trick of a 27-year-old bride.

“Oh, hi,” Suzy says. “I'm worried my hair won't hold the curl long enough to take pictures and everything. What do you think?” As if there's nothing strange about her sister showing up unannounced so late at night. As if the hair gods heard her prayer and summoned an advisor. Anna Lisa pushes past her and into the living room, where Martin is tying bows on bunches of dried flowers. Weddings are like funerals: the flowers and the expensive cloth and the longing.

“Hey, Anna Lisa,” Martin says, his face displaying a resigned sort of surprise.

Anna Lisa sits on the arm of the couch. She doesn't want to let herself get too comfortable. “I came by because, uh, remember when I lived in Lilac Mines all those years ago?”

“Sure.” Suzy wrinkles her eyebrows. She's just beginning to take in Anna Lisa's puffy face and mish-mash of clothing: pink nursing pants, Fresno State sweatshirt, snow boots.

“Well, I just got some news. My… my girlfriend, from back then, she died.” She said it. Girlfriend and Died. The good thing that led to the terrible thing that could, maybe, lead to another good thing.