The Parallel Apartments (5 page)

“Justine?”

Justine raised her feet so the witch couldn't see them under the door.

“Quiet in there,” said the witch. “Trouble tinkling? Let me turn on the water.”

The Air Jordans turned and went to the bank of sinks. The sound of
running water, the velvety, aerated water peculiar to public restrooms. She returned.

“Justine, I know this is a terrible surprise, I'm so sorry. It was quite a shock to me, too, when I came here, to the doughnut-hole shop one day, weeks ago, April 15, actually, and there behind me while I'm in line, the cry. The crying. Unique. Like a thumbprint. Unchanged, except deeper, more mature, womanly. But the same cry, terrible and magnificent, as when you were my baby. My cry. Our cry, Justine.”

Graffiti shallowly lacerated the liver-colored metal cube. One, scratched in an arrow-pierced heart, read:
its not the fall that kills you its the sudden stop.
Justine giggled.

“You're laughing again,” said the witch quietly. “I'd never heard you laugh till today.”

“Shouldn't have given me away!” shouted Justine.

A long silence. The water
thhhhed
.

“Oh, Justine, I didn't. Don't you see? Thanks to my husband,
they took you back.
”

Justine suddenly missed Franklin. She missed Valeria. She missed Troy, and she missed Gracie. She missed Texas. Austin. She missed her grandmother. More than anything, she missed Dot.

Justine studied the graffiti. She took out her keys, located a couple of barren square inches of wall, above and to the left of the big transparent plastic toilet-paper wheel, and scratched
are you for eighty six?
into the gizzardy paint. Not very original—she'd read the numeric rebus in the
Voice
months ago and it was only today imbued with meaning.

The witch tapped on the door again.

“Dear?”

Justine reached into her apron pockets and felt around for the pills she'd stolen from Midgie.

She stopped.

“What,” said Justine, her hand still dunked in the pocket of her apron, “do you mean ‘back'?”

“What do you mean, baby Justine?”

“You said ‘back.' What do you mean they took me
back
? And who's ‘they'? And don't call me baby Justine.”

From the witch there was no sound. Her feet did not move.

Justine did not want to call her ‘Mother,' so she said:

“Hey.”

Then Justine peed mightily. She must have some beta bladder, a reserve of tinkle ready for expulsion in times of shock and indecision.

“Hey,” Justine said again.

The feet moved away. They stepped into a little puddle on the tile, then disappeared out the door.

“Hey. Wait.”

Justine tried to stop in midstream, but she'd never been able to do that, even though Franklin had always urged her to practice whenever she found herself sitting on the toilet—he'd assured her she would gain superb vaginal control and consequently improve both their sex lives and thus their stability as a couple.

At last she finished. She grabbed her apron, yanked open the metal door, and ran back into the coffee shop.

Through the big picture window Justine saw the witch on the street between two parked cars, waiting to jaywalk. Justine ran outside.

“Wait.”

The witch started to run across the street. She moved like Big Bird. When a large white Toyota delivery truck with the single word
FISH
crudely stenciled on one side raced by, her canvas poncho flew up over her head. She put her roots out in front of her and continued her way across the street, a huge trick-or-treating kid lost under an eyeless sheet. A tired-looking black limousine skidded to a davening halt a foot away from her. She made it to the other side, but tripped on the curb and ran into a
New York Post
box. Her poncho came off from over her head.

“Hey!” Justine shouted across the street, now perilous with hurtling traffic. The witch did not seem to hear; she turned and began to trudge down Ninth Avenue.

“Momma!”

The witch stopped. A rock-star tour bus, black and mirrored, came between them, groaning, laboring down the street, as though filled with slag iron. When it finally passed, Justine and the witch were staring at each other through a great purple billow of bus exhaust.

“No,” said the witch, loud without shouting, bright and clear as tearing foil, “
I
adopted
you.
Your mother, Livia, gave you to me. A year later, my
husband gave you
back
to Livia. Back. He said I was bananas and took you away, and sent me to a jail-hospital. I thought you always knew.”

The traffic thickened and sped.

The witch made a strange, dark face, like a hole in a tree.

“You never knew I even existed,” said the witch, touching her face with her roots.

“Why?” Justine mouthed the word.

The witch smiled, her eyes lit like skyscraper windows.

“Let's steal away,” she said. “Just us.”

A light changed. Traffic began to gush between them. Justine could no longer see the witch. When the grinding, sawing conveyor belt of Ninth Avenue again came to a stop, the witch was gone.

Justine walked quickly toward home, holding her apron shut with one hand. She reached their apartment building, ran up the stairs to the fourth floor, stopped in front of their door, held her breath, wiped away her tears, and listened. Then she quietly let herself in.

“Franklin?”

On the little table in the hall the little craquelure bowl, into which Franklin emptied his pockets when he got home, was empty.

Justine stripped on the way to the bathroom. She showered, scrubbing and rasping. She
erased.
As she dried herself off she stuffed a couple of Macy's bags with panties and nightgowns and a whole bathroom-closet shelf of cosmetics and hair clamps and materia medica. As she dressed, she called Middling Car Rentals on Tenth and Thirty-Ninth and reserved a Chevy Meagre. Her voice was calm but colored with a fauvist palette of rage, dolor, and conviction; her throat, wrecked from crying, felt like it was coated in iron filings.

“And how long will you need the car, ma'am?”

“I don't know.”

There would be no more Franklin. There would be no more New York.

There would be Austin.

Justine had always loved the way the entire building trembled when she slammed her apartment's heavy oaken door.

II

May 2004

Livia Durant locked the door to her house, an old, drafty bungalow on Forty-Fourth Street in Austin, climbed into her Nissan pickup, and drove the half block to her mother's house.

She parked in Charlotte's gravel driveway and turned off the engine. She stared at the dashboard clock, only the second hand of which worked. She held her breath for 120 seconds. This always calmed her nerves, especially when she went to Charlotte's, which was at least once a day, more on weekends. But this time she hadn't seen her mother in a few days—Livia had been in Marfa on a mini-vacation with Archibold Bamberger, her boyfriend of sixteen years, and had gotten home late last night. While in Marfa, she had not thought often of her mother, who had begun in the last several weeks to behave oddly, more so than usual. She smoked more, kept and slept strange hours, grew contrary over small things. She took cabs late at night—Livia'd heard them honk and wait, engines idling, dispatch radios sputtering, until the familiar slam of her mother's front door. Livia's vacation to Marfa had been less about spending time with Archibold than it had been about not spending time with her mother.

Livia felt guilty when she and Archibold got home. So when Charlotte called her at work this morning to ask if she'd leave early to take her mother—who, since retiring from bank-tellering the year before, had refused to drive—to a doctor's appointment, Livia leaped at the chance to assuage the guilt, which had been sharp enough to prevent her from concentrating on debt-collecting anyway.

…four, three, two, one. She let her breath out, and went into the unlocked house that Charlotte had lived in since 1951.

“Hello, Mother,” said Livia as she came into the kitchen, a little blue from breath-holding.

Charlotte Durant, Livia's mother, who was sitting at her kitchen table smoking Belairs and fashioning inch-high, red, white, and blue garden gnomes out of clay, jumped.

“Me,” said Charlotte, touching her neck under her chin as she always did when startled. “Why, Liv, you frightened me. What are you doing here in the middle of the day?”

“Mother. Dr. Gonzales. Remember?”

“Oh yes. Did you lock the doors to your vehicle? What if a Reviewer sneaks in the backseat and garrotes you with concertina wire?”

“The Reviewers don't attack people, just things. And concertina wire… oh, never mind.”

The Reviewers, a group of unidentified Austin fundamentalists who broke into houses and businesses to destroy things like sex dolls and bongs and
Necronomicons
and anything else they found that ran counter to their ideas of morality, had so far not hurt anyone.

“How do you know they won't start breaking into cars to garrote immoral people?”

“Are you calling me immoral?” said Livia.

“No, I'm not calling you immoral. I just know the Reviewers are a bad gang, capable of anything, like the Blips and the Cruds.”

“You mean… oh, never mind.”

“So. Is your car locked?”

“Yes, it's locked,” said Livia. “
Your
front door was unlocked, though, just now. You've been doing that a lot lately.”

“Yes. Well. Bring your mother a bicarb and a Tuborg.”

“I will bring you ice water. Why are you so red-faced and contrary?
And you're… aggressive. You are not an aggressive human being.”

Charlotte smiled but did not answer. She turned to the big picture window that looked out over her backyard, a monkey-grass-smothered eighth-acre staked with half a dozen unoccupied birdhouses on twenty-foot poles.

Livia found a butter knife, opened the freezer, and began to chip away at the massif of ice that filled the interior. She vaguely recalled that someone had once euthanized a hamster doomed by intractable wet tail in this freezer. Justine, probably. Conducting a mercy killing in the same chamber that housed the Tater Tots was the sort of revolting act her daughter had often felt called on to perform. Probably still did; not the kind of thing a person outgrows.

“There's a corner of a chicken pot pie poking out of the ice here,” said Livia, shaking her head to fling off the memory of Justine. “I can't imagine what else there is inside this floe. Maybe it's time you defrost.”

Livia swept a small accumulation of ice chips into a glass. Some of the chips missed the mark and landed on the linoleum, skidding this way and that.

“When my gnomes are done, we can go.”

“I've never seen you play with Play-Doh before.”

“It is not Play-Doh, which is a child's sculpting medium. This is Fimo clay, a substance for adults, which I acquired at the Kaplan estate sale this morning, along with a spokeshave and a wedding gown.”

“Mother, are you going to tell me why we're going to the doctor?”

A snuffling pug-type dog raced into the kitchen and endeavored to eat the ice chips on the floor. Unable to gain a purchase on any of the pieces with his inefficient mouth, he simply selected a single chip, nosed it into a corner, and went to work licking it away.

“Dartmouth, go,” said Charlotte, gently punting the pug dog back toward the living room.

Dartmouth came to rest at the kitchen doorjamb, which he reflexively marked with a jet of tinkle. All vertical surfaces in Charlotte's house Dartmouth had at one time marked with like jets, creating a kind of house-wide urinary bathtub ring.

“I have no idea,” said Charlotte, scratching at her chin with a pinkie, a gesture Livia knew meant her mother was concealing something. “That's what I'm going to ask Dr. Gonzales.”

Livia put the glass of ice water in front of her mother, stepped back, and regarded her with severity.

“What I mean is, what are your symptoms?”

Her mother slid an ancient, blackened aluminum baking sheet ranked with imperfectly constructed garden gnomes across the table toward Livia.

“Please place my gnomes in the oven at 275 degrees and set the timer for fifteen minutes.”

“These aren't ready to go into the oven yet, Mother. You need to anchor the heads to the bodies with toothpicks, or the heads will roll off your gnomes and into the bowels of your oven.”

“How did you become such an expert, Miss Fimo USA? Please do as I ask.”

Livia did. “Now, are you going to tell me what your symptoms are?”

Charlotte waved her hand in front of her nose and returned to survey her birdless backyard.