North of Nowhere, South of Loss (21 page)

“Oh dear,” she says. “What's wrong with it?”

“Robert E!” Zach calls.

“What?” comes Robbity's voice from under the Chevy.

“I think we might have a cracked head here.”

“That the lady you towed in?”

“I didn't tow her, I jump-started her, but I think we got potential problems here. What I want is for you to check everything out and do what's necessary.”

“Right now?”

“Right now. I'm going to take Miz Nicholson on to Charleston.”

“But no,” Alma protests. “How will I get back for my car?”

“Sounded like you got hotel reservations in Charleston.”

“Yes, but I could cancel.”

“And you want to get back to Columbia Sunday.”

“Sunday afternoon,” she says. “I have to work Monday morning.”

“Can't drive it anywhere right now. But we can have it ready by Sunday. I'll come to Charleston to pick you up.”

“That is incredibly kind of you,” Alma says. “But I really can't let you do that.”

“No trouble at all,” Zach assures her. “Got to go to Charleston for parts in any case, so no trouble at all.”

“If you're sure,” she says doubtfully.

“My son is in Israel,” Zach says. In Magnolia's, he feels uneasy. He would have preferred the Lobster Shack.

“Yes,” Alma says. “So you said. Do you miss him?”

“Yes and no,” he says. “He doesn't approve of me, so it's, you know … He's become very orthodox.”

“He makes you sad.”

“He won't eat with me. I'm not kosher.” He corrects himself. “Not kosher enough.”

“Children grow up and become stranger than strangers,” she says quietly. She is turning the stem of her wine glass round and round in her fingers. “It happens a lot. It happens more than anyone knows.”

“I'm a disappointment to him,” Zach says.

“You have your work,” she says. “You love your work.”

“I do,” he says, surprised.

She smiles. “It shows.”

“How does it show?”

“Well … ” She turns up the palms of her hands, like someone who is placing her last chip on a roulette table. “You'll know for sure I'm crazy if I tell you, but you have …
colours …
coming off you when you do things with cars.”

Zach can feel electricity zipping along the surface of his skin. He can feel pins and needles in the groin. He leans forward across the table, close enough to notice that she smells of cinnamon. “I do go a bit crazy with cars,” he says. “I love the smell of gasoline, motor oil, I guess you could say I get high on them in a way. And fixing broken things, making them tick like clockwork, that gives me a high. Whenever I'm really down, I work on rebuilding an engine. I just stop thinking about anything else when I'm doing that.”

“That's a lot,” she says. “That makes you one of the lucky ones.”

“I've got three wrecks sitting on their axles in my yard. I could show you, if you like.”

“Doing something you love,” she says. “Something that makes you forget who you are. That's as good as it gets.”

He gropes for his linen napkin on the floor. He pleats and unpleats it. “Your American soldier was a Southerner, I suppose.”

She raises her eyebrows. “No, he was a Yankee. We lived in Maine.”

“But now he's down here?”

“He lives on the west coast now. At least, I think he still does. I think he's still selling insurance.”

“So what brought you to the Deep South?”

She studies a palmetto tree through the window. The palm fronds move languidly, scraping the wall with a papery sound. “I'm from the south of France originally,” she says, without looking at him. “I like a warm climate.”

“That isn't why,” Zach says.

She looks at him then. “No,” she says. “That isn't why.”

“My daughter lives somewhere in Charleston,” he says. “I think.”

For a long time, they do not move, do not eat, do not even sip wine. Their eyes, hesitant, sometimes meet, sometimes study the tablecloth.

“I think she's still alive,” he says. “I hope so. Her name's Miriam.”

Alma reaches across the table and rests the palm of her hand lightly on the back of his.

“She is starving herself,” he says. “No one seems to be able to stop her. She looks like a refugee, skin and bones. Sometimes I drive around Charleston for hours, looking for her.”

“And when you see her?”

“I haven't seen her for over a year.”

“When you are completely alone,” Alma says very quietly, “and when there is something about which you cannot bear to speak, you need strangers. You need to live among strangers.”

“That is why you came south.”

“That is why I came south. When you are very foreign, people leave you alone.”

“I've lived in St Jude all my life,” Zach says. “But I'm still a foreigner. And no one there knows about Miriam.”

A waiter appears at their table, concerned. “Is everything all right with the food?” he wants to know.

“It's perfect,” Alma says. “I'm just not hungry, I'm afraid.”

“Me either,” Zach says.

On a bench on the esplanade, looking across the harbour toward Fort Sumter, Alma says: “I saw my son this afternoon.”

“The one who lives in France?”

“I saw my mother too, though she died a long time ago. And I saw a girl I used to walk to school with when I was ten. They took it in turns to walk beside me. We spoke in French.”

“And your son?”

“He was walking on the other side of the road, from the other direction, with his wife and children, my grandchildren. At first, I wasn't quite sure, because the pines cast such a deep shadow. I haven't seen them for a long time, but it
was
my son, and I was so happy. I called out and waved and I started to run.”

She leaves the bench and walks over to the sea wall. She leans on the railing. The wind whips her hair about her face. She seems so frail that Zach is afraid she might be blown out to sea. He fears that her wrists, which hold tightly to the railing, might snap.

“Alma,” he says. He wants to offer himself. He stands behind her, his body against hers, and he grips the railing with both hands, sheltering her in the rampart of his arms.

“When they saw me,” she says, “when they heard me shouting and waving, they all stopped. And then my son turned away, and he took the little ones by the hand, and they all turned and walked back the way they had come. They walked very quickly. The little ones kept looking back over their shoulders, but my son never did. I ran but I couldn't catch up.”

Zach can feel the tide rising.

“Then I saw the rainbow and your shop,” she says. She turns around inside his arms. She touches his cheek.

“Each year, on Miriam's birthday,” Zach begins to say, but the words turn into great juddering sobs and the wind carries them off with the gulls.

At the Shelter in Columbia, when the women ask Alma where she is from – and the new ones always ask, the first day, the second day, they always ask – Alma will pause at oven or sink and say, “Nowhere, really” and then she will dust her hands on her apron and offer hot fresh bread or soup. For the children, there are always cookies, still soft and warm. She smells of cinnamon.

No, but really, the women say. Where's your funny accent from?

“Bits and pieces from everywhere and nowhere,” she says.

You mean
Not from South Carolina,
the women say. Her foreignness reassures them for a reason that Alma understands. She can detect an ease in their breathing, though only for two beats, three, a minute at most. Their vigilance is extraordinary.

“I can't bear it sometimes,” she confesses to Zach. “How little it takes to set them off. And how little it takes to make them weep with gratitude.”

She has tried to describe to him the scraps they live on, the thinness of their hopes. This gets to him too. “Let me help,” he says. “Let me fix their cars”

“It wouldn't work,” Alma says. “They're so scared of men, especially the children.”

“But they'd get used to me. They'd feel safe. That's important,” he says.

“We can't let a man near the Shelter, that's our strictest rule. When we accept them, we make a contract with them. If any friend, any family member visits, even their mothers, their fathers, the location of the Shelter must not be revealed. We drop them off at a McDonald's a mile away. The visitor meets them there. If they break that contract, they're out.”

Even so, Alma tells him, they have a constant problem with the stalkers. They have to move to a new location once a year.

“Let me help with some of the heavy work,” Zach begs. “The laundry. Can't I help you with that?”

She has told him that night after night, in the laundry room, she and the housekeeper never say a word to each other. They feed the sodden bedding into Maytags, they add powder and bleach, they add fabric softener, perfumed, to mute the rank ammoniac smell. It is a silent routine. The sheets stink of sharp cries in the night.

“Half of them go back to the batterers,” Alma says, “because they aren't able to imagine anything else. The laundry's nothing compared to that. That's the part I find hardest to bear.”

“Why don't they move out of state?”

“Because they can't imagine living anywhere else. Their world of possibility is so small.”

Now and then, the women speak of large expeditions beyond the state line. “I went to Savannah once,” Zarita says. “I had an aunty there and she kept me one summer when I was six.” And Delilah tells her, “My daddy took me to Charlotte one time.” But when Alma presses them, the memories are either distant and fabulous or troubling. In general the concept of
not South Carolina
is opaque though possible, as God is possible. As another sort of life might be possible – but for other people, not for them.

“If I could save one child,” Alma says. “If I could save Zarita's little girl, Luanna.”

“We could take her to Charleston. We could take her out to Fort Sumter on the ferry.”

“She screams when her mother leaves the room. All the children do.”

“Can't we take them both? Luanna and her mother?”

“We could try,” Alma says. She brightens and smiles. “Yes, let's try.”

“White trash,” Robbity Lee McGonigal whispers to Billy. “If ever I saw it.”

“This is Zarita,” Zach says. “And this is her little girl, Luanna. And this is Robert E. Lee … and Quintus … and Joshua … and Billy the Cub.”

Zarita blows smoke rings into the air. Her hand trembles. “Nice to meet ya, fellas,” she says.

Luanna clings to her mother and watches them all, wide-eyed. She is very solemn.

Quintus pulls a peppermint candy cane from the pocket of his shirt. He squats down on his haunches and offers it to Luanna. “I've got a little girl,” he says, “just about your age. I bet you're five.”

Luanna edges back behind her mother's stretch pants. Her eyes never leave the candy cane.

“You like peppermint?” Quintus asks.

Very solemn, she nods her head, but when Quintus holds it out to her, she does not move.

“Maybe Luanna would like it later,” Alma says. “I'll look after it for you, shall I, Luanna? Thanks, Quintus.”

“Pleasure, ma'am,” Quintus says.

“We're taking the big Pontiac,” Zach says. “Look after the shop, Robbity. We'll be back tonight.”

After they leave, Billy says to the shop at large: “Zarita.
Shish!
Figures. I know her type. You think Zach's gone nuts? You think he's bonking her?”

“Shut your mouth,” Quintus says.

“Zach is looking for trouble,” Billy says.

Not until after the picnic lunch, when they take Luanna and Zarita for a ride in a horse and carriage, does Luanna smile. The horse clip-clops along the esplanade, the harbour on one side, the grand old Charleston houses on the other. Luanna sits on her mother's lap, and her mother's arms are tightly around the child's waist. The wind buffets them and a gull, coasting on the air-slip in the wake of the carriage, seems to float alongside. Luanna flinches and leans back into her mother, but when the gull suddenly lofts itself upwards on a great sweep of wing, Luanna gasps with surprise and delight. Spontaneously, she spreads her arms and banks her body into the wind.

Later, in Battery Park, she runs into a cluster of gulls, arms extended. She raises and lowers her wings, giving herself to thermal updrafts, swaying like an acrobat on planes of air, caught up in a rapture of the body. She believes she can fly. Her laughter is high and excited.

Zach takes a photograph.

“It's a start,” Alma says to him over the wind, her eyes shining. “She knows another life is possible now.”

“Hey, Zach,” Billy calls. “The blue Peugeot's here.”

It's almost dusk, and as soon as he sees her frail against the light in the great open end of the shop, Zach knows something is terribly wrong.

“What?” he says, running to meet her. “What's happened?”

Her face looks drawn and haggard. “Zarita's gone back to her boyfriend,” she says. “She's taken Luanna.”

“Shit,” Zach says. He balls up his chamois cloth and hurls it against his truck.

“I just wanted to stop in and tell you. I'm driving down to the coast. I need to walk up and down the Battery in the wind for a couple of hours.”

“I'll come with you,” Zach says.

“No,” she says. “I need to scream and sob and shout curse words. It'll be better if I'm all by myself. You don't want to see me really deranged.”

“You think you're the only one needs to scream? Let's go.”

But less than a mile from the shop, before they get to the Interstate, the purple martins come. Zach pulls off the road as a cloud, dark indigo, swoops over the windshield like a cape. The cape makes three passes and banks to the left and returns. High up, from over the Interstate, another formation unswirls itself like a bolt of dark cloth and falls toward them.