Mockingbird (32 page)

“Oh.”

“Look, I'm still pissed off at you. It wasn't my idea to come by today. Carlos made me.”

“Carlos?”

“He says he isn't getting in a car with me until I make things right with you. He says you're thick with Momma and
los duendes,
and I better treat you nice or there's going to be shit for peace in our house.”

I laughed.

“It should have been me the Riders wanted.” Candy shrugged. “It should have been me Momma gave her curses to. But it wasn't. And for that, I guess I owe you, Toni. I was jealous, but I was glad, too, that you were there to take care of me. Again. As always.”

Tears starting coming down my cheeks. Ever since Momma died I could not seem to stop this wretched dribbling.

“So what are you doing?” Candy asked.

“Painting.”

“I see that. Why now?” I didn't answer. She looked at the door trim, which I had finished, and the fence, which I was starting. “Yellow around the door, white on the f—” She looked at me. “The Little Lost Girl's house.”

“Want to help?”

“Okay,” she said. “Yeah.”

“Grab a brush. It's probably crazy to paint this fence. I should replace it first. But I woke up this morning
knowing
I had to get this done before the baby came. My own little spell,” I said. “Dad's drilling the swing for me. Where do you think we should hang it, inside the fence or outside?”

“Outside,” Candy said. “The Little Lost Girl can see it easier.”

I nodded and slapped more paint on the fence. “I guess you think I'm crazy.”

Candy picked up a brush. “Actually, Toni, this is the first sane thing you've done since Momma died.”

I laughed, but I was crying too. “She was the little lost girl all the time,” I said.

Candy looked at me. “You never knew that?”

I shook my head and winced as another contraction hit. They'd been coming all morning, slow but steady. Now they were nine minutes apart. I stopped painting for a moment and tried to breathe through the tears and the pain. These weren't like the clenching feeling of the Braxton-Hicks. These were like being stabbed in my lower back. “This means business.”

“I'll be there,” Candy said. “Angie gave me some coaching on what not to say.”

“Like?”

“Whatever else I do, I'm not supposed to say, ‘Don't worry, honey, the
baby's
doing fine.'”

I laughed. “And the other one?”

“‘I know how you feel.'”

“Good advice,” I said.

I picked up my brush, but before I could lay on another stroke Candy put her arms around me. “Hang on, big sister,” she said, smelling of cinnamon. “Everything is going to be all right.”

Just before lunch we hung the swing from a limb of the live oak tree. Shortly after three o'clock I went into the hospital, and nineteen hours later my daughter, Grace Ellen, was born.

I wish so many things for her.

I hope, I pray, I will be able to give her the gifts which have been given so richly to me all my life. Here I bless her with these blessings. I give her Greg's sly wit and taste for miracles. I give her Bill Jr.'s appetite and hope she too can order a Peachy Keen without blushing when she wants one. I hope she can be as smart as Rick Manzetti, as careful and as principled.

From Mary Jo, the great-aunt she will never know, I give her hard truths and the strength to abide loneliness, and a great power for friendship.

From Uncle Carlos I give her careful wisdom and a love of fine cars and the ability to believe a thing without needing to say it. I have to say I hope she gets her brains from her mother and her looks from her aunt, but if she has even one thimbleful of Candy's joy for life, she will be blessed.

From Daddy I give her slow patience and a knowledge of the strike zone. From him I learned the cost of love, and saw that he was willing to pay it.

I give her the Riders, the Preacher in the strength of his convictions, and Sugar in the fullness of her desires. May she have Mr. Copper's power to claim what she wants, and the vigilance of the Widow to watch her and keep her. I bless her with Pierrot's luck, if not his temperament, and hope she can laugh, even in the darkness.

As for me? I will give her everything, even my failures, because a mother can do no less. She can have my brains and my wariness and my bitterness and my love, I can't deny her anything. She will take what she needs from this strange mixed blessing, and God willing, she will find her own uses for it.

I used to think that there was only one true person living in a body, one truth surrounded by a pack of lies. Now I know I was wrong. We are all of us a hundred different selves, mothers and daughters, busy professionals and lazy housekeepers, zealous reformers and incumbents on the take. And each of these women is true in her turn. Each of us is a mockingbird.

In the time since Grace was born no visions have come to me and no Rider has mounted me, except the Mockingbird, who I have called, and who has come to me every day of this new part of my life. Did you ever really think this was my voice alone, telling this story? Me with the degree in math and a deep knowledge of the General Mortality tables? I could never do it.

But Momma could.

It is Elena's voice, I think, that fills these pages. Or say rather, it is Elena's song, and I am the mockingbird who sings it. I don't think I will ever be able to separate my mother from myself. As long as I live, then part of her lives too; and the same will be true for my daughter, and hers, and hers.

We are all singers, in this family, and we are also songs.

M


Houston

In the summer of
,
my wife got a job in Houston, Texas. By the end of that summer I had largely finished
The Night Watch
(or so I thought—hubris, it turned out) and was on the prowl for the next novel. Why not take advantage of my surroundings? There is always a shock of the alien when you first experience a place, but I knew that in six or twelve months the things that seemed so strange to me (the way the little man on the American

symbol leans forward like an icon of Bustle, as opposed to his staid, upright Canadian counterpart, for example) would begin to fade into the background. So I decided to set a book in Houston, and see what came of it.

This also fit in with another project.
The Night Watch
had benefited, I thought, from the chance it gave me to revisit childhood turf; I figured the same would be true for Texas, in spades. As a child I had spent my summers in Dallas and San Antonio, living with my Texan relatives, unbuffered by my mother, who remained behind in Canada to work. In theory I would have the perfect writer's angle of vision on Texas, insider and outsider both, and should put it to use.

The Sub-Tropical Novel

Once I committed to Houston as a setting, I began to think a lot about what I suppose seems a rather eccentric question: what would be the features of The Sub-Tropical Novel? How would a
sub-tropical
book be different from its temperate or arctic brethren?

Houston is a swampy sort of a place, with the same climate as New Orleans: steamy and lush, a kingdom of mud, plants, flowers, crawdads, mosquitoes, and tree roaches the length of your thumb. Things grow there. It seemed to me, retrospectively, that Passion Play was what you might call a Northern novel: spare, remorseless, a bit bleak. A Sub-Tropical novel, on the other hand, should be unexpected. Things should flower from unlikely beginnings.

Mockingbird
, then, is the first Texas book, and my Sub-Tropical Book. I had in mind something that would ‘fit' with
Resurrection Man
, but with the quantities of light and dark reversed; a scary comedy, as it were, rather than a brooding novel with occasional jokes. But unlike
Resurrection Man
, in which much of the action turns around the slow unraveling of a family mystery, I decided everything in Mockingbird would happen faster than the reader expected. I wanted to be lush with the plot, so that the big mystery that might normally be the climax of a novel would come at the end of about chapter

(which it does) . . . after which new and unexpected stories would sprout forth.

Useful Women

The very fine writer Maureen McHugh had a big hand in this book. First, she believed that it would be really neat-o, and backed up that belief by being available for long telephone conversations of the “But, like, so, if this personal voodoo god takes over your head in a shopping mall, how much of that do you remember?” sort. She and my friend Michael Stearns also pointed me to Maya Deren's useful book
Divine Horsemen,
about Haitian voodoo, which was good inspirational reading and provides an excellent description of what it's like to have a god annihilate you and take over your body for a couple of hours before giving it back.

In the “You've come a long way, baby” department, it strikes me as noteworthy that I talked to several experts while doing research for this novel: a doctor, a commodities broker, an actuary, and a specialist in oil-well drilling and exploration. All four were women.

Obviously, and as always, my wife Christine was the key contributor.
Mockingbird
follows the main character, Toni, from the time her mother dies to the time her new baby is born, so I finally had a really good use for two pregnancies' worth of stories. Much of the pregnancy material in the book is taken from life, including Christine's nightmarish evening of attempting to conceal morning sickness while being taken for an expensive dinner at a fancy . . .
revolving
. . . restaurant.

First Person Female Narrator

I had this feeling that I should write about men more. So I thought, it's hard to see the forest for the trees, being a guy and all. Well then, I concluded, if I have a woman as the point of view character, it will free me up to look at men more analytically!

Only, it turned out that men just weren't all that important in Toni Beauchamp's life. Come to think of it, there may be a sobering truth lurking in there somewhere. . . .

I guess a question has to be asked about the point of writing this kind of story at all. It's an odd novel. A lot like a “woman's book” (you know what I mean, Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood, Anne Tyler and so on) only, um, sunnier. And with more Zombie Frogs. It could have been much, much darker: the plot elements could almost make
Bastard Out of Carolina
or
Beloved;
one of those absolutely wrenchingly painful novels. I didn't do that. To do that felt…presumptuous somehow. Inappropriate. Or perhaps I just lacked the guts or imaginative empathy. I hope that wasn't it.

I think for me, in those months after finishing
The Night Watch
, tragedy was a cold thing, a spare and lonely thing. I wanted my sub-tropical novel to be different, to be green and growing and full of light.

Perhaps I was just glad to be warm.

—
Sean Stewart

Davis, CA

I owe a big debt of gratitude to Maureen F. McHugh, who believed in this book and backed up that belief with much solid advice. Hamd and Joanna Alkhayat patiently talked me through Commodities Trading for Dummies and, better still, made it sound romantic. Everything right about oil-field exploration and financing is owed to Laurel Holmes; the mistakes, of course, are mine. Sage Walker and Sarah Charlesworth gave freely of their medical and actuarial advice, respectively. Dawn Bryan and Karin Fuog head a long list of Other Excellent Readers; I thank you all.

This book is dedicated to the Texan women in my life—a mess of aunts, cousins and friends, and especially my grandmothers Vivian Stewart and Jeanette Thornton. Most of all I thank my mom, who will never fully escape the Lone Star State; my wife, who couldn't avoid it; and my daughters, who have coped with it so very gracefully.

Sean Stewart is the author of two short stories and the novels:
Perfect Circle, The Night Watch,
Galveston, Passion Play, Nobody's Son, Clouds End,
and
The New York Times
Notable Book
Resurrection Man.
He was the main writer for the search operas associated with the film
A.I.
and ILoveBees.com. His novels have received the Aurora, Arthur Ellis, Sunburst, Canadian Library, and World Fantasy awards. He lives in Davis, CA, with his wife and two daughters. His website is www.seanstewart.org.