Shelter Us: A Novel (4 page)

Too late, I realize that I have slowed to a stop in the middle of my turn. The car behind me, a large Lexus sedan, swerves to try to avoid the collision but hits us anyway. Izzy starts to cry from the shock of the impact. Oliver, who has been singing to himself and staring out the window, begins to cry, too, though I’m not sure if it’s from the bump or not wanting Izzy to get all my attention.

“Shit.” I look in the rearview mirror and pull over. The bad word from my mouth stops Oliver’s crying. He’s on alert for more. The driver of the Lexus pulls over behind us. He turns off his engine, steps out of the car, closes the door, and beeps it locked. In my mirror I see him survey the damage to his car, then the surroundings that this dumb woman driver put him in. I open my door and tell Izzy and Oliver, “I’ll be right back.” I walk to the back of my car to see the damage.

It’s not pretty, but I can drive it. I see the woman with the stroller walking in our direction. I can’t tell if she’s homeless. If I saw her in another setting, would I think so? But what else would she be doing here in the underpass? Something looks off. She stops, goes around to the front of the stroller, puts her face close to her child and says something. Then she moves back to her position behind the stroller, resumes her slow, deliberate steps.

“You stopped in the middle of the street!” says the Lexus man.

“Hold on,” I dismiss him. I open my trunk, fumble past diapers and wipes, and find Oliver’s lunch box, packed with snacks. I grab it, lock the car again. I call to the woman, who has just passed us, “Excuse me? Excuse me, miss?” She turns around.

I can’t tell how old she is. She could be in her mid-twenties. Her
complexion is similar to mine, a deep tan at the peak of summer. Her eyes are cappuccino brown, while her straight hair is black coffee. She could be a mix, like me. It’s hard to tell. She wears jeans and a sweatshirt that says S
TANFORD
. It crosses my mind to tell her Robert went to Stanford. As if she bought her sweatshirt in the Stanford student store and not at Goodwill. Well, maybe she did. What do I know? She could be taking her child to the car show, too.

“Miss, I don’t have all day!” the Lexus man shouts at me.

“Just a second,” I say to him, then turn back to her.

Aware that I will be making a total fool of myself and humiliating her if I’ve misjudged the situation, I hold out the lunch box and ask, “Excuse me, would you like this?” I’m not sure of the etiquette. She doesn’t look offended, so I continue. “There’s a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, some crackers and apple slices. And juice boxes.” I sound like a waitress. The woman (I see now she’s practically a girl, maybe twenty years old) looks at it. It has a red race car and the words L
IGHTNING
M
C
Q
UEEN
—K
ACHOW!
on it. Its handle is grimy with six months of spills I couldn’t completely wash off.

“Thanks.” She blushes as she reaches for it, then turns and keeps walking.

“You’re welcome.” I feel like I have jumped a motorcycle over a line of twenty buses and landed successfully on two screeching wheels, exhilarated and relieved. She stops in the doorway of a closed sewing machine–repair store, then kneels in front of the stroller and opens the lunch box. I fight my urge to watch her feed her child and go back to exchange insurance information with the Lexus man. He has calmed down a bit; maybe he regrets shouting at me. While he talks, I steal glances in her direction. She breaks off small pieces of the sandwich and puts them into the child’s open mouth.

“You ought to keep your eyes on the road,” he lectures. He looks like my father the last time I saw him—graying sideburns, expensive tailored suit—which is another strike against him.

Having no retort, I turn to watch the woman. They are drinking the juice now.

“Miss, if you don’t mind my saying, you ought to be thinking more about your own children and their safety.” His words wound, hitting their mark dead-on.

We finish our transaction and I storm back to the car. I get in and buckle my seat belt. “Well, you ought to think about someone else, instead of your precious car,” I say.

“What did you say, Mommy?” Oliver asks.

“Nothing.”

“What did that man say to you?”

“Nothing.”

“What did you say to that lady, Mommy?” Oliver does not miss a thing.

I think for a moment, then turn around and look him straight in the eyes. I feel like this is a critical moment in his life. I want to say,
Pay attention. This is the crazy world we live in
. “Well, she looked like she might not have enough money for food. I thought her baby might be hungry, so I asked if they wanted some of our food. And she said yes.” I keep looking at him. I think I said it right. Not too much, not too little.

He is silent as he processes this information. The Lexus man pulls away, tossing me a disapproving look. Then Oliver’s face transforms as he figures it out. “Did you give her my lunch box?” He waits for my answer, his face shimmering with injustice as he begins to understand his unwilling part in this encounter.

I try to keep my cool. Try to remember that he is a child and that I’ve given away something of his without asking. “Oliver,” I say with all the patience I can muster, given that I’ve just caused an accident, been yelled at, and touched the surface of something tragic that I do not understand and cannot fix. “Oliver, that little baby didn’t have any food, or any money to buy food. We had food, and we can get more, and—”

I’m interrupted by the eruption from his throat. “But that was MY lunch box!” His face contorts and turns tomato red, and tears saturate his cheeks. The silky, light brown hair above his ears darkens with moisture as his little hands wipe the tears off his face.

I am taken aback by the strength of his reaction. I grasp for something to distract him, try to reason with him: “Oliver, I’ll buy you a new lunch box! You can have pizza at the car show!”

“I HATE pizza!” he screams.

This is how I know we are beyond reason. I take three deep breaths.
You are fine. No one is hurt
. I start the engine. For a fleeting moment I consider turning around and going home, but I fortify myself and continue to the car show, ignoring Oliver’s tantrum. He’ll tire eventually. We’ll walk into the caverns of the convention center and a Ferrari or a Lamborghini will catch his eye. We will stand in line to sit in the driver’s seats of cars that cost more than most houses in America. And out there somewhere, on the streets of downtown, that woman and her baby will be rolling, circling, waiting for the sky to darken and a bed to be found, until the next morning’s sunrise starts their cycle again.

I
nside
the convention center we join a jungle of humanity: testosterone-amped, car-obsessed men; research-hungry, prudent-shopper couples; and parents escorting young children with vroom-vroom fantasies, like us. Suburban cowboys from Anaheim to Valencia have all come from their far-flung amusement park cities to see The Cars.

Sure, Robert “forgot” about his meeting.

Above us, massive signs with carmakers’ names and insignia hang on chains from rafters forty feet high. Honda, Toyota, Acura. Mercedes, BMW, Porsche. People swarm in all directions, holding maps and looking at guides. A man with a black-and-red Chevy baseball cap and a black Chevy leather jacket zipped halfway up his chest stops in front of us and shouts, “Hey, Larry, where’s the john? I gotta take a leak before I get in another fuckin’ line!” Lovely.

“I want pizza,” Izzy says from his stroller. I lean down closer so I can hear him in this chaos. “Are you hungry?”

“Pizza,” he echoes.

“Okay.” I did promise.

“Can we get chocolate milk, too?” Oliver senses an opportunity that doesn’t come often.

“Fine.”

We spend $25 on two child pizzas, two chocolate milks, and a bottle of water. We look at the cars, and take our turns sitting in some, and then I look for the exit. I am sure that Robert would have turned
this event into an all-day circus of wild fun; they’d have come home with cotton candy and balloons and funny stories. But at least I got us here. Baby steps.

We go to our own car, admittedly uninspiring after the spectacle we’ve just left. I inspect the damage again. It’s not as bad as I thought. When everyone is buckled, we go. I make a few unnecessary turns down Flower, up Figueroa, slowly scanning the sidewalks for the mother and child with Oliver’s lunch box. No sightings. We head back to paradise.

When Robert gets home, he asks about the car show and gets Oliver’s minimalist report: “Good.” I want to tell him all about the lunch box exchange, the wretchedness of it still flowing hot through my veins, but I’m less than eager to explain the accident that made the exchange possible. No matter. He pours himself into playing with the boys until bedtime, to make up for missing this morning, so I’ll have to wait until later for unbroken conversation.

Bedtime is a sacred time of day—the putting away of children, the receiving of kisses and hugs. Robert tells them a story and kisses them good night. I stay in the room until they fall asleep. Sleep comes fast to the boys tonight, and the sound of their peaceful breathing triggers the relief of another day brought to a safe conclusion. I check their sheets and remind myself that they are old enough to make it safely through the night. I go downstairs.

Robert is making tea.

“Want some?” he asks. “I’m starting to get a sore throat. I just can’t get sick.” He clears his throat to emphasize the point. “I’ve got so much on my plate.”

“Sure,” I say.

He gets me my favorite mug from the cupboard—one that was my mom’s, saved all these years. It’s heavy, and chipped in just the spot where my mouth fits. It’s a kiss on her lips with each sip.

We sit together on the love seat in the living room. It was the first
piece of furniture we bought together. Its upholstery—dark green vines twining through deep burgundy flowers—hides a history of spilled wine and spit-up. We sink toward the middle, one of the few moments of contact we get in a day. I think back to our honeymoon, when we never stopped touching, when my skin needed to feel his skin every moment, even if it was just our fingertips as we walked through a cathedral. When we returned home from the trip, it was agony to spend hours apart at our respective offices day after day. I leaped into his arms when we reunited in our apartment every evening. I know those feelings are there still, buried under the scar tissue life has left on us. I rest my head on his shoulder now.

“So, how was your day?” he asks. “The kids like the car show?”

Funny how we have become inextricably merged—me, the kids. My life swallowed by theirs. I start by describing how Izzy “drove” a Maserati while twenty grown men waited in line to do the same, how Oliver is learning to read by sounding out the names of all the makes and models. He smiles at the images I paint for him. This is part of my job now: to re-create for Robert his children’s lives. I wouldn’t trade places. True, I didn’t plan on being a full-time mom, didn’t expect my maternity leave to end in an abrupt resignation. But now that I have them, I wouldn’t give up these days with my children, no matter how trying of my nerves and patience they can be. I should remember this feeling the next time Izzy throws a fit because I’ve sliced his sandwich the wrong way, or when I envy Robert’s pristine law-school setting, where the young people in his charge respect his opinion, listen to every word—
take notes, for Chrissake
—and let him use the bathroom in private.

“It sounds like fun. I’m really sorry I couldn’t make it.”

“That’s okay. We did fine.” I sip my tea and prepare to tell him the bigger story, what happened before we even got to the car show. But I am ambushed by an unexpected wave of sadness. I try to swallow it down with the tea and I end up choking and spitting out some of the tea on my shirt.

“Are you okay?” He pats my back.

“Yeah.” I shake my head. “Well, no.” My temples start to pulse. My throat freezes up, and I squint to hold back the tears.

He shifts to see my face. I have his attention. “What’s wrong, Sarah?” He sits up straighter, puts down his mug, places his hands on mine. “What’s going on?” His eyes focus, widen. His brow wrinkles. He is wondering how bad it is, how dark we’re going. I am aware that the longer I go without speaking, the more worried he will become.

“Everything’s fine,” I squeak.

“Sarah, tell me what’s going on.” He rubs my arms to soothe me.

“I’m okay. Everything’s okay.” I catch my breath. I am ready to break the news of the car, eager to get it off my chest. “This morning, on the way to the car show, we had a little accident.” I hate that word.

“Were you hurt? Were the kids hurt?”

I squeeze my lips and eyes tight and wait until I can talk without a shaky voice. “The car got a little banged up; no one was hurt . . . well, I think maybe Izzy bumped his head, but it didn’t bother him at all after.”

“What happened?”

I open my mouth to tell him about the woman and baby, but no sound comes out. I practice the body-relaxation trick I learned long ago in therapy and feel my throat ease. “We were almost at the convention center, and as we turned onto Olive, there were all these people sitting there, decaying on the sidewalk. I don’t know why—maybe because I wasn’t expecting it—but it completely shook me up. And then there was a young woman pushing a stroller with a baby . . .” I think I see Robert’s jaw tense at the word “baby.” I continue. “I froze in the middle of my turn. The car behind me kept going and hit us.” I feel a little better now that I have said it. I have transferred my heaviness to Robert, the transitive property of communication.

“While we were trading insurance information, that young woman walked past. I gave her the boys’ snacks. I watched her feed her baby. They ate everything.”

A photo on the bookshelf catches my eye: my mom on her wedding day. I gaze at her, wishing I could ask her what she would have
done today. I have memories of sitting in the backseat of her car and seeing her reach into the glove compartment for a granola bar to give to someone who was begging at a stoplight. And of how, when we had leftovers from a restaurant, she wouldn’t let us go home until we found someone to give them to, because we had already eaten. Mostly I remember the way she talked to people. Everyone was her equal. What would she have done about a homeless mother and baby? Give them a lunch box and then leave them?