Mercy Train (12 page)

In Sanibel, Sam would sit her mother in the sun on the balcony on a chaise, a blanket around her fragile legs, and they would have tea and scones from the nearby bakery each morning, and they would talk as if she weren't dying.

“You don't know that I've become a reader in my old age,” Iris said. This woman whom Sam had only ever known to read magazines was reading
To the Lighthouse
, the plastic-covered book in her lap. “I never had the patience before, but it's as close to meditating as I'll ever get.”

“What made you choose Virginia Woolf?”

Her mother pursed her lips. “I suppose I should have solicited advice from your husband. But a nice young man in the library recommended this book. And I liked the idea of a family at a summerhouse, even if the initial cheeriness is deceptive. I hope I finish it before I kick the bucket.”

“Mom.”

“Have you read it?”

“In college, I think.”

“Well, it's wonderful. Maybe you should take it with you. I don't think the library will track you back to Wisconsin.” She laughed and then had to rest a little to regain her breath.

Sam found herself unable to tell her mother those things that she thought impending death would spur, like admitting that she had aborted the first baby. Why couldn't she tell her? Now, of all times. If her mother said it was okay, that Sam had made the right decision, she might feel absolved. But Sam could not trust postdivorce Iris to say what would make her feel better. She could not trust that Iris would act as her mother.

“You're looking at me like you want something,” Iris said. “I've got nothing for you. No platitudes. No great wisdom. You don't need anything more from me, Samantha.”

She opened her book then as the sea air lifted her dark hair a little from her face, now gaunt and bluish but smoothed with an unfamiliar contentedness. The baby had rolled over and Sam had felt utterly unequipped for both the birth and death that were coming.

“You know what my mother used to say?” Iris had asked. “People think too much. And I've come to agree with her.”

“Mom?”

“Why don't you pick yourself out something to read. There are some home décor magazines on the coffee table in the living room.”

*   *   *

Sam's neighbor Ted, who lived next door in a tottering Victorian with a chicken coop in the back, approached the front door with his usual springy jog, and she was glad she'd put her shirt back on. Ted wore his white hair in a bowl cut and favored flannel shirts and bleached-out jeans. He'd gone to college at the university during the smoldering late sixties and never left Madison, now teaching math at the local junior college. Raking and shoveling were the usual occasions for conversation—Ted was an obsessive shoveler who made sure his sidewalks were iceless and perfectly edged—and Jack particularly loved to get him going about October 18, 1967, when Ted was one of hundreds of students who protested recruiters from Dow Chemical, the makers of napalm.

“We blocked the Commerce Building and then the cops rolled in. Motherfuckers whacked us with clubs. It was a bloodbath,” Ted had said, waving his hands in the air, the first time they'd met him. “Have you ever been tear-gassed? Well, avoid it if you can. It's really scary. Awful. You can't open your eyes, and it feels like you're choking. Fucking cops.”

One of the things Jack liked most about Madison was living next door to Ted. He'd go out to shovel, and an hour later, when he came back in raw-cheeked and sniffling, he'd impart some new nugget of information, some new shading to the portrait of his neighbor.

“Did you know that Ted used to be a Teamster?”

“Did you know that Ted has a twenty-seven-year-old daughter who lives in Poughkeepsie?”

“Did you know that Ted's hair went from brown to white in one year?”

Ted was a never-ending source of mystery. Why did he keep his TV on all day and all night? What happened to Mrs. Ted? What did he do with all that space in his large house? Sam and Jack loved to fill in their narrative about him, speculate, hypothesize, and always they would laugh, not out of mockery but of a shared mirth about Ted's curious humanity. This was when Sam and Jack were good together. They didn't laugh much anymore, or she didn't anyway. Sam imagined Jack at work, charming it up in the English Department, relieved to be away from her. How could she blame him?

Ted cupped his hands to the window and, when he saw Sam, gave an animated wave, his eyebrows raised and his mouth smiling wide and open.

“Hi, Ted,” she said, opening the door.

“Howdy. Can you believe it's fall already? Man, I swear it was just the Fourth of July. Where's the kiddo?”

“She's at a friend's house.”

“That's good, that's good. Sorry to interrupt.”

“Oh, don't be silly. Come on in,” Sam said, meaning it, happy to see him.

“Just for a second. Just for a second,” he said stepping inside the door. “I just wanted to tell you that you're parked on the street-cleaning side. Didn't want you to get a ticket.”

“I totally forgot. Thanks so much. I really appreciate it,” she said.

“Sure, sure, no problem. I don't want anyone to fall victim to those overzealous parking nazis. I circulated a petition a few years back to change the signs since it's not clear in the winter when you're allowed to park where. Got twenty-one hundred signatures.”

“Wow. Whatever happened with it?”

“Nothing much. But I got to meet the mayor.” Ted danced a bit in exuberance, his white hair flopping. “You look like you're in the midst of a project.”

“I was going through a box of my mother's things from years ago.”

Ted puffed out his cheeks and shook his head. “When did she pass?”

What a funny euphemism, Sam thought, as if her mother merely walked by the window, out of sight.

“A year ago,” she said.

“It's an adult rite of passage, isn't it? My father was a hoarder, can you imagine? He had twenty years of
Sunset
magazines stacked from floor to ceiling. And a whole room full of coffee cans. I'm not joking.”

“What did you do with all of it?” she asked.

“At first I went through it, piece by piece, looking for clues, you know, something to help me make sense of the man.” He laughed. “But after two days I realized there was nothing there for me to find. I wouldn't know if I came across something important without him to explain it and give it meaning, right?” He gave an exaggerated shrug, with bent elbows, his palms up to the ceiling. “So I rented a Dumpster.”

“Where was that, where your dad lived?” Sam asked.

“Los Alamos, New Mexico. Where I grew up. He worked on the H-bomb, but I didn't know about it until years later. You can imagine we never quite saw eye to eye.” He clapped his hands once. “Okay then. I'll let you get back to your business. It sure is a random collection, isn't it? The stuff that remains after a life.” Ted pulled open the door and stepped onto the porch. “Just wacky,” he said, shaking his mop-top head. “Okay then, see you! I'm off to teach.”

Sam waved and smiled. Some gems for the Ted file. She was warmed by the idea of presenting her new findings to Jack over dinner. Maybe she would make linguini carbonara and arugula salad and act like things were as they used to be. But then she remembered he was getting takeout and there was the looming commission for his colleague that she couldn't start, and she wasn't sure what being normal was anymore. She used to think she knew herself, but in the past year her certainty had fallen away.

The tree-roots guy. She'd forgotten. While she had been staking out the Sunrise Inn, he had come and gone.

*   *   *

How many opportunities there must have been to detect her mother's cancer. It was already metastatic stage four when Iris was diagnosed. Cancer cells had spread from the original tumor in a milk duct to the axillary lymph nodes to what the doctor referred to as
distant organs
, in this case her bones, where they continued to grow and multiply, eventually taking over her liver and lungs. Months, years even, when she could have noticed a lump, gone to the doctor, taken care of it with a straightforward lumpectomy. Sam tried to block the persistent insidious thought that Iris had waited too long on purpose.

She shoved the laundry into the washing machine, making sure Ella's tiny socks were at the bottom so one wouldn't float out and clog the drainage tube again. She started the wash and then surveyed the basement.

One thing, she told herself, just do one thing, and the will to create will self-perpetuate. The clay trap she'd installed on the utility sink was full and black, the caught particles from rinsing her tools and sponges had turned into moldy sludge, so she squatted and unscrewed the plastic jar. But she'd forgotten to empty the spigot, so water and ooze splashed down all over her hands, a fetid pool that trickled toward the floor drain with the rank smell of organic decomposition. She had to laugh. After a cursory mop-up, she emptied the trap of old clay and washed her hands.

The ring of the phone jolted her into panicked mother mode—Ella, Ella, Ella—and she ran upstairs to get it.

“Hello?”

“Everything's fine, don't worry,” Melanie said.

“Ella—”

“Is asleep in the Pack 'n' Play like you were sure would never happen. I checked in with Sarah ten minutes ago, and she had nothing to report, other than Rosalee saying
shit
when she spilled applesauce into her lap.”

“That's great,” Sam said, trying to sound convincing. “I mean about Ella.” Part of her had wanted this babysitter experiment to fail, she realized. She had wanted Ella to miss her too much. Sam had wanted to be summoned, to swoop in, to prove to everyone that she wasn't crazy for not wanting to be apart from her daughter.

“You don't fool me, Samantha. I know you were hoping you would
have
to come get her. But that's the rub, isn't it? They can actually exist without us.”

Sam could hear the
click click
of Melanie's laptop keyboard. She wedged the phone between ear and shoulder, and looked into the refrigerator, grabbing a half bottle of Riesling—where it had come from she couldn't say—and then a glass from the drying rack. She took them both to the kitchen table.

“I'm glad it's working out,” Sam said. “I am. I mean, okay. I wanted to be missed. But now I'm glad. I swear.”

“How's it going over there?”

“I couldn't even manage to open a bag of clay.”

“That's okay. I spent the whole morning reading celebrity gossip blogs and playing online Scrabble with my mother.”

“I'm stuck, Mel.”

“I know. The first year kicks all our asses. Go get a massage or something. Today is not the day to launch back into making stuff.”

Sam was thankful, then, for her friend, to whom she never gave enough credit. She pulled her favorite mug—a large egg shape glazed in a lustrous celadon—from the cupboard and poured herself a glass of wine.

“So the real reason I'm calling: we want to have you guys over for dinner next week. With Kelly and Michael. You met them at that barbecue we had over the summer. Thursday?”

“That sounds great. Let me check with Jack—”

“He's clear. Doug already asked.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“But with one caveat,” Melanie said. “You can't bring the baby. You have to get a sitter. If you don't have one I'll get you one. I mean it. If you bring Ella, she'll be spending the evening on the front porch.”

“It's a deal,” Sam said, hoping she could actually follow through.

“Okay, I'm going to try to write something. See you in three hours.”

Sam had forgone alcohol for a year and a half of pregnancy and breast-feeding, which had not been much of a sacrifice, but sipping the cold sweet wine now, in daylight no less, was an unexpected thrill. She closed her eyes and let her shoulders drop, and then she remembered that she'd forgotten to move the car, even after Ted's reminder.

There was no ticket tucked under the leaves on her windshield, to her relief. She U-turned and parked on the other side of the street. Looking back at the empty car seat, she felt a ribbon of ache encircle her chest. She missed her rose-lipped baby, that open-mouthed smile, that extra-large head, those elbow creases and fat knees, that dimple on her torso, that outie belly button on a balloon-shaped tummy. It was going to be a lifetime of Ella slipping away, of her not needing Sam a little more each day.

Jack was calling, but she let it go. She couldn't admit to him that she hadn't gotten started yet.

The day had turned beautiful, the sky a high light blue, the sun deceptively strong, though the emptying trees were a clear enough reminder that winter wouldn't be forestalled. Through her windshield she could see that Ted's TV was on—
Judge Judy
—even though he wasn't home. The old man in a red windbreaker from one street over—a row of bowling balls on posts in his front yard—walked his Corgi dog as he did at the same time and on the same route twice a day. He had always seemed like a lonely soul to Sam, and she had tried to be extra friendly, but he had let his dog shit on their yard once as Sam watched from the window, and she had yanked back her compassion for him. A young woman she didn't recognize pushed a baby in a $400 stroller along the sidewalk. A nanny, most likely, maybe for the new people that built the mishmash of a Tudor mansion—nicknamed the Castle by the neighborhood—on Lake Monona. As the woman neared, talking on a cell phone, Sam could see that she was pretty, with a pouty mouth and cheeks with Slavic angularity.

And then Sam thought of the prostitute eating her Skittles, waiting to walk over to the Lotus House or, worse, heading off to see who would pay at one of the gas stations near 51 or 94 or the Admiral or the parking lot of Red Light Entertainment.