Lilac Mines (35 page)

They fold the 17-inch braid they've freed from its moorings into a manila envelope that Tawn has addressed to an organization that makes wigs for kids with cancer. “I'm so glad I wasn't a kid with cancer,” Tawn says, shivering. “Can you imagine wearing someone else's hair?”

“I hope they streak it with purple and give it to some little punk-rock girl,” Felix says. And then they send it off into the world.

By February, Felix has sewn two pillows and a drawstring satchel. She has taken a Teaching Assistant job at Lilac Mines Elementary. The pay is low, but she likes working with second-graders. They are at an age when all subjects are art projects: coloring pie charts and making paper-doily Valentines and singing “Oh my darlin', oh my darlin', oh my daaarlin' Clementine.” It will do until she opens her own boutique. Or at least until she learns how to sew something with a zipper.

It is a sleepy, gentle winter, full of nights-in with Tawn, wrapped in her naked limbs beneath thick piles of blankets. There is a newness about her whole body—her lack of cellulite and her black, never-waxed pubic hair. Felix loves running her hands down Tawn's spine, reading her vertebrae like Braille.

But there is a hovering blueness in Felix's life as well. She tries to name it. Regret? Winter? Nothing fits. It's not the angsty-empty feeling of her L.A. life. Is it possible for something to be heavy and missing at the same time?

“I can't believe you talked your aunt into trying online dating,” Tawn says. She's setting the big oak table in her dining room for five.

“I didn't, it was her idea,” Felix says. “All I did was write her profile. Writing about eyeshadow for a living really teaches you how to capture the intangible in concise but enticing prose. It was nice to put my training toward a good cause.”

Anna Lisa had worried, “What if no one responds? What if someone
does
respond? What if we go out and she's completely disappointed?”

“Either way, you'll be fine. You always have been,” Felix had assured her.

Someone had responded, a woman named Kim, who used a bit too much Wiccan-esque vocabulary for Felix's taste but seemed decent otherwise. Anna Lisa had been wracked with nervousness; finally Felix had proposed a group date, which seemed to calm her aunt slightly. And so Kim is coming for dinner at the Twentymans' creaky mansion tonight, which Felix expects a Wiccan-esque woman will appreciate.

“I think I made too much food,” Anna Lisa says, setting a plate of pita and hummus next to the homemade samosas. With one new cookbook, she has transitioned from casserole cuisine to 21
^st
century fare. “We probably didn't need two appetizers, did we? That will just prolong the meal, and if things don't go well, it'll be agony.”

“Anna
Lisa,
stop it,” Felix says for the millionth time.

“My grandpa will be here,” Tawn reminds Anna Lisa. “If there's an awkward silence, he'll just launch into some long story. He'll probably do that even if there aren't any awkward silences.”

They're all dressed up, playing old-fashioned/new-fashioned family dinner: Felix in mermaidy dress and silver heels; Tawn in her newest, blackest jeans; Luke in a tie; Anna Lisa with a dab of gel in her hair. Kim (Felix is happy to see) wears no crystals, just a small silver K around her long neck. She is in her late 40s maybe, or early 50s, with coarse ripples of gray-blonde hair and a black skirt that swishes around wide hips.

A Midwestern accent lingers in her vowels as she answers all of their questions politely. Chicago, originally, then the Bay Area for a long time. No, she didn't go to Berkeley, her grades weren't that good and she needed to earn a living. Engaged once, then came to her senses. She pays thoughtful attention to Felix and Tawn and Luke, but more to Anna Lisa.

“More curry?” Anna Lisa offers, and Kim passes her plate for a second helping.

When Anna Lisa goes to the kitchen to make coffee, Felix follows her. “So?” she demands.

“See if you can find something to serve the pie with, would you?” Anna Lisa's skin is shiny-peachy. A coffee mug dangles jauntily from her crooked finger. “Oh, I don't know. It's far too soon to tell anything. But it's a rush to be out there. It's like… it's like the first rescue of the season.”

“Hey,
I'm
the first rescue of the season,” Felix reminds her.

Anna Lisa frowns again. “Oh shit, Kim's probably a tea person, don't you think?”

“She said she would love some coffee, you heard her.”

“But maybe she just said it to be polite.”

“Anna Lisa, stop it.”

They return to the dining room, where they eat pie and drink coffee beneath the watchful glass eyes of a dusty moose head. Talk tumbles out like beads from a jar. Crazy patients. That new Pepsi commercial. Flooded roads. Solstice. When Luke tells stories, it is to keep a good night going. He turns toward Felix during dessert. “You find your gal?”

Felix blushes and looks at Tawn. “Um, yeah. Well, I guess she found me.”

“No, not that gal. Lilac.”

“Oh.” Felix looks down at her apple pie. The blueness is back, that little cloud in her peripheral vision. “No, I didn't. I kind of stopped looking. I'm sorry, I wish I had something exciting to report. I guess I decided to, um, focus on the present?” She glances at Anna Lisa, who is studying Kim. “Or at least the recent past. The part that's knowable.”

“Old mysteries can be solved,” Luke says. “Richard III, for example.”

“Gramp's reading this book called
The Daughter of Time,”
Tawn explains.

“He was innocent, most likely. Whole societies out there devoted to proving it. They dress up in old English garb.”

Before Luke can begin recounting evidence in the king's favor, Tawn jumps in. “When I was little, I used to go looking for our ancestors. You know, the Indian ones. A girl in my fourth grade class called me a half-breed when I beat her at tetherball, and it kind of made me want to figure some things out. I mean, I didn't really know anything beyond the guys who fed the pilgrims. I found these round, skinny holes in some of the flat rocks further up the mountain. I decided they were grinding rocks, where our people or whoever used to grind corn. I would mash up my Cheetohs in them after school. It sounds dumb, but it was kind of magical.” She points at her grandfather with her fork. “Until Gramp told me that they were dynamite holes. Until he spoiled it for me.”

“I was just telling you the facts.”

“And I'm saying the facts don't always help.” She turns to face Felix. “I hadn't been back to my grinding rock in years. It just seemed fake and embarrassing. But you wanna know the first time I went back? It was right after you started at Goodwill. After you told me all those stories about the people and their clothes.”

“Seriously?” Felix blushes, self-conscious and proud.

“I went back there and I remembered how real it used to seem. I think I even found an orange Cheeto stain on one of the rocks. Which means now it
is
real. It was
my
grinding rock, at least.” Beneath the table, her hand brushes Felix's thigh, light and anxious. “The truth will only get you so far.”

“Who is Lilac?” Kim wants to know. “You mean, as in Lilac Mines?” She has driven over from Murphys.

Felix looks around the room, at her girl and her aunt, the detective and the stranger and the moose. They look at her expectantly, waiting for her story. The blue at the edge of her brain fades to ghost-white. “Well, I can tell you who I think she was.”

They don't know it, but they watch each other. Lilac watches Calla be good, and Calla watches Lilac be bad. Lilac has to pass the post office and newspaper office on her way home from school, except usually she doesn't pass it, she stops there and stays as long as she can.

“Any mail?” she says to Mr. Crabb, the postmaster. Her eyes drift through the big open doorway that connects the post office to the loud, inky room where the Hogans print the
East Beedleborough Examiner.
The oldest girl Hogan wrestles with the printing press like it's some sort of biblical beast. Her sleeves are rolled up, and she straddles as wide as her dress will let her. The late afternoon sun shines through the front window and traces a silhouette of her legs against thin calico.

“You must have a suitor, you're in here so frequent,” Mr. Crabb says. He wears what is supposed to be a fatherly smile beneath his wheat-colored mustache, but Lilac thinks he's lecherous. She would tell her father so, but he would just tell her to stay away from the post office, leave the mail-getting to him.

“I do have a suitor,” Lilac says. “He lives in Milwaukee and sends me jewelry by post.” The oldest Hogan girl finishes her work and, dragon slain, rolls her sleeves down to her wrists and buttons them. She smoothes strands of hair back into her bun. It's a color Lilac has heard called dirty blonde, but everything about Calla Hogan seems clean to her, even the spot of ink perched like Miss Muffet's spider on her cheek.

“Funny, I can't remember seeing any packages from Milwaukee for the Ambroses lately,” Mr. Crabb comments. “Or ever, now that I think about it.”

Lilac is vaguely annoyed that Mr. Crabb is going to press her for details. She likes lying—the way it speeds things up and rescues her from trouble—but she expects her audience to help her out.

“How'd you meet a man in Milwaukee anyhow?” Mr. Crabb demands.

“My people are from there.” This much is true. She was born in sin there: her railroad worker father and her prostitute mother did their thing in a smelly room behind the train station, the same thing Gertie Zaide did with lots of men. But by the time the new branch of tracks was laid, Gertie's flat belly had grown like a white mushroom after the rain. When she stood in the doorway of her room, between her unmade bed and the sweaty summer, the only one of her men she could see was Harry Ambrose. She told him the baby was his, and then she went back to Berlin, thinking of the little black ducks that glided along the Spree. People expected Harry to leave the child—which was noisy and female—with his sister or at the orphanage. But he bundled her up like a potato and took an already-built train and two stagecoaches west, to a place where the mountains had silver skeletons and everyone assumed his wife had died.

To Lilac, Milwaukee is a very useful word. Its truth can be tightened around her father's neck. It can be rattled off in an authoritative lie, tracks that send the Mr. Crabbs of the world puffing into the wilderness. And it can be hummed beneath her breath, a song marking the dusty walk between school and home. Finally Mr. Crabb stops bothering her and hands her a book her father has ordered. Probably one of his Westerns. Lilac doesn't understand why needs to read about the west when he already lives there.

Calla Hogan is nowhere to be seen by the time Lilac leaves. She sighs. The walk back to her tiny house at the base of the mountain is so long, with only jackrabbits and tumbleweeds to entertain her. It is June and already so hot that Lilac has to pull her bonnet forward like horse blinders. She wishes she had a hat, like a real lady. As she trudges up Moon Avenue, her book bag pulls on her right shoulder. There are three books inside: history, arithmetic, and the Bible. The Bible is the thickest, but it has thin pages and good stories about people sinning. History is the heaviest. She looks around. The street is empty. She spots a large shrub in front of a white house with gingerbread trim. She darts behind the bush and buries
History of the Western World
beneath a quail nest. In the book, “west” means England. She'll be out of school in a few weeks anyway, and then what need will she have for it?

When she looks up, she sees two angels on the porch: That's what they look like. Calla Hogan and a smaller, blonder girl shaking out a white sheet. It puffs up, then deflates like a wistful sigh. Then the girls come together, the corners of the sheets still between their fingers. They are dancing with it, some new kind of waltz. Lilac can't hear what they're saying. Her thighs hurt from squatting. She feels small and evil and left out.

Two little children, a boy and another girl, burst out of the house and come running in her direction. At first their chins are tilted up toward the road, but something catches their focus. Soon they are standing right over her. Lilac freezes.

“Meggie, come back! You are not going anywhere with your hair in a tangle like that!” Calla shouts. This Lilac can hear. Her voice is smooth as pudding on the stove. If she lived in a city, she could be a singer.

“Calla, there's a girl in our bush!” announces the little girl gleefully, as if she has just discovered a nugget of gold. She has a turned-up nose with blotchy freckles on it. Big loops of hair have escaped from her white-blonde braids.

“Meggie, what are you talking about?” Calla laughs. She's getting closer. There's nothing to do now but stand up. Calla is just a few feet away. She smells like a sheet that has been waving in the sun. Lilac suddenly wonders how
she
smells. Like sweat and schoolbooks, probably. She feels grimy, childish.

“You're the girl who was in the post office earlier today,” Calla says, extending her hand. “How do you do?”

Lilac loves her, then, for acting as if Lilac is not crouching in someone else's front yard at all. As if the world is full of good, upstanding people doing perfectly reasonable things.

“Howdoyoudo,” Lilac mumbles. “I dropped my book is all. It was so interesting that I just had to read it on my way home from school, but I wasn't watching where I was going.”

Calla nods. The two youngest children chase after the quail family, which is bobbing frantically toward the road.

“Final exams are in three weeks and I want to make straight A's,” says Lilac. She has three C's and one B as things stand right now. She talks too much and never helps the younger children with their work.

“You must be a very good student,” Calla says.

Lying to Calla Hogan, Lilac is surprised to discover, is not nearly as much fun as lying to Mr. Crabb. “Actually,” she says. “I'm a terrible student. The books were making my back hurt, so I thought I'd dump one of them once and for all.” She brushes the dirt off
History of the Western World.
“Something happened in 1066, that's all I remember.”

“I'll bet lots of things happened in 1066,” Calla offers. She has pink lips that make Lilac think of the Valentine Jack Gundersen gave her last year, which she tore up. There is a small brown mole on her chin, and another near her left ear. Lilac can't quite figure out if she's a girl or a woman. Woman, Lilac decides, because Calla knows so much: “You're Lilac Ambrose. And you
do
have trouble with history, though you're not so bad in arithmetic.”

“How did you know?”

“You look like you've seen a ghost. You don't remember? I went to school with you for a year.” When she sees Lilac's confusion, she tries to save both of them from embarrassment. “I sat in the back, though. I was pretty quiet, I suppose. And it was only a year. You'd just moved here. Then I finished up and started helping out my folks at the paper. But you kept things entertaining, that's for sure. Like when you filled Jack Gundersen's gloves with glue.”

Calla says she's just about to make lemonade, and would Lilac like to join her? Lilac thinks that if lemonade were a person, it would be Calla. They're about to go inside the house when they hear the clatter of hooves and the slap of reins. Moon Avenue is a quiet street at the edge of town, so it's worth sticking around to see who might be coming down the street. The hooves belong to mules, a gray one and a chocolate-colored one. They pull a dead, spotted mule who doesn't make any noise at all on a buckboard behind them. The afternoon holds its breath as death intersects the meeting of two young living girls.

“Do you think they know?” Calla asks in a hushed voice. “When the mules go down in the mines, do you think they know that there's no way all of them can survive down there?”

The team passes by them with a gust of hot animal air. Lilac has seen plenty of mules. She has seen the black substance that lurks in the creases of her father's skin, no matter how hard he scrubbed during his Saturday night bath. But there is something about this dead mule. Its eyes are open, its big head facing them. It stares at Lilac and Calla from beneath long, girlish lashes. Daring them. The other two just trudge along, because what is there to do but trudge along?

Lilac grabs Calla's hand. It is soft and cold. Calla squeezes Lilac's palm:
I know.

Until this summer, Lilac has never noticed how
new
East Beedleborough is. It's not so different from the other towns she's lived in—Reno and Angels Camp—just higher in the mountains and more hastily erected. Wherever she's lived, she's always been sure that real life takes place elsewhere. Lady So-and-So in her discarded history book might get beheaded, but she would never have to pull apart a chicken and a rooster who were noisily ensuring that there would be spots of blood in her fried eggs.

But this summer East Beedleborough sweats possibility from every pore. Maybe it's because Calla works at the newspaper, and Lilac is suddenly privy to all the curious things happening around town. Lilac watches her set the individual letters backward in thin metal trays. THGIF ENIM NI DERUJNI NAM, LLAH NOSKRALC TA WOHS NOIHSAF 'SEIDAL,
ENIAM
EHT SEGNEVA TLEVESOOR. And the editorial headlines, written by Barrett Lyman under a variety of pseudonyms and meant to stir up just enough controversy: ?YRUTNEC TXEN EHT FO LATEM SUOICERP EHT REVLIS SI, ?NIS FO NED RO NUF SSELMRAH: RETAEHT DRIB REVLIS. Barrett, a red-faced man whose nervous energy makes Lilac want to curl up and take a nap, hovers because he doesn't want Calla to mess up. Lilac hovers because she likes watching Calla's long fingers spell out their secret language.

The town at this moment is a rattlesnake, shaking its tail as it gets ready to shed its skin. Anyone who doesn't heed its warning will be bitten or left behind as the snake slithers into the 20
^th
century. The whole town quivers: hammers pound new buildings into being. Pickaxes carve out the inside of the mountain. Trees fall. Hooves tap out an irregular rhythm.

As soon as school ends—for good, since Lilac is 16 now—she spends every free moment with Calla at the newspaper office. Lilac watches the younger Hogans—Eva, Robert and Meggie—while Calla sails smoothly through her typesetting, pausing only to rub her sinewy forearms. Calla's stepmother appreciates the break, and Calla works diligently and flawlessly despite Lilac's presence, so no one complains except Barrett Lyman, who frequently hints that proper young ladies don't hang on someone else's family like a mosquito on a mule.

“Are you calling the Hogans mules?” Lilac says sweetly, in front of Calla's father, who is Barrett's boss.

Calla usually finishes making tomorrow's news by the late afternoon. There is a two-hour gap before she has to begin helping her stepmother with dinner, and she and Lilac like to see how far they can travel during this golden-pink time. To the school, the Silver Bird Theater, the church. They walk farther each day, pushing against the sinking sun that marks Calla's curfew. One day they make it all the way to the edge of town. They stop and stare at each other, then begin to laugh.

“We don't have to stop here,” Lilac says. There are just a few miners' shacks among the sugar pines and tough shrubs. They are all empty—the miners spend their whole lives in the dark, and most of them don't have families.

“Where's your house?” Calla asks. “Is it nearby?”

“Further up the mountain,” says Lilac.

“We ought to go there. I'd like to see it.”

“There's nothing to see,” Lilac says, not for the first time. Calla lives in light: in a whitewashed house with a yard perfumed by jasmine, on a street that the city promises will be lit by real gas lamps within a year. Lilac likes leaving her small, dark house to visit Calla there.

“Does it look like this?” Calla points to the nearest shack. It is built of plain brown boards, with two droopy-eyed windows looking out over a small porch. A second room has been tacked on the back, so maybe this particular miner does have a family.

“Actually,” Lilac admits, “it looks almost
exactly
like this.” The curtains in the window are made of mattress ticking, just like the ones Lilac sewed for the house she shares with her father. There is a pile of silvery tin cans at the side of the house, a shiny inside-out mountain. This, too, matches the Ambrose residence.

“It's odd, don't you think?” says Lilac. “Almost as if there's only so many ways of being in this world. Some nights I go to bed, listen to the coyotes yap at the moon, and I feel so lonely. But probably two houses away is some other girl thinking the same thing.”

“Or at least a couple of miles away,” says Calla with her half-smile.

The sun turns the forest into a checkerboard of light and shadow at this time of day. Calla is sliced into pieces by the shadow-branches of a young black oak: a hollow cheek, a sliver of eyelet, a curve of bustled breast. Lilac wants to gather up all the pieces in her skirt and carry them inside the house. “Cal?”

“What is it.?”

“Let's go inside.”

“But why? It's not our house.”

Lilac can't say why. To determine whether she has a double? To see if Calla will hold up in such a scruffy structure or crumble to gold dust? To escape the ticking sun? “Come on, let's just pretend it's our house… please? It's so hot out here.”