Where the Heart Is (16 page)

“Oh.”

“Novalee, is something wrong?”

“Well . . . not really. I just need to talk to you.”

“Come on over now. What time do you have to be at work?”

The line was quiet for several seconds.

“Novalee?”

“Huh?”

“What’s the matter? What’s going on?”

“I think I might be pregnant.”

Lexie lived in low-income housing at the edge of town, a complex that had, years before, been a motel. Four units surrounded a pool, which the tenants called the toxic tub. The grounds, patches of bare earth and a half-dozen stunted cedars, were littered with rusted tricycles, airless inner tubes, trash can lids and chunks of bricks. Two skinny hounds licking at a greasy spot in the parking lot were undisturbed when Novalee pulled in behind them.

The door to Lexie’s apartment, number 128, was decorated with Santa and Rudolph and Christmas bells. Halloween was just a week away.

“Hi, Nobbalee,” Brownie said. “I have roy-rolla. See?” He pulled up his Mutant Ninja pajama shirt to reveal a rash across his belly.

“Does it hurt?”

“Yes, but I’m a big boy,” he said as he strutted back to the television and Wile E. Coyote.

“I’m in the bathroom, Novalee,” Lexie called. “Coffee’s on.”

Novalee went to the kitchen, but settled for a glass of water. She didn’t need coffee, but that was partly because her stomach wasn’t ready for chocolate chip mocha, Lexie’s coffee of choice, and partly because of the brightness. Lexie had painted everything with Glidden white glossy enamel, a garage sale bargain at fifty cents a gallon. On bright, sunny days the glare was blinding. The rooms were so shiny, so brilliant, that Praline, the blondest and fairest of the children, wore an old green velvet hat with a black veil to protect her eyes when she first woke up. That’s when Lexie called her Madam Praline and served her milk in a dainty china cup.

Lexie sailed into the kitchen wearing another of her garage sale purchases, a filmy chiffon gown that she said was exactly like one Marilyn Monroe wore in Some Like It Hot.

“Tell me everything.”

“Okay.” Novalee took a sip of water, then ran her tongue across her lips. “The guy I told you about . . .”

“The one who works in the garage.”

“Troy Moffatt. Well, I went to bed with him . . . and Lexie, I’m scared to death I’m pregnant.”

“Didn’t he use anything?”

“No.”

“Did you?”

“No. Yes. I mean, I’m on birth control pills, only . . .”

“Then you don’t have anything to worry about.”

“But I’ve only been on them a little while.”

“That’s probably why you’re late then. They can throw you off schedule the first couple of months.”

“I just don’t trust them.”

“How late are you?”

“Well, I don’t know if I am.”

“What do you mean?”

“See, it’s not time for my period yet. I’m not due to start for another couple of weeks.”

“Then how pregnant could you be? I mean, if the pills didn’t work, how far along could you be? Two weeks?”

“No.”

“A week?”

Novalee shook her head.

“How long then?”

“Nine . . . ten hours.”

Lexie smiled, squeezed Novalee’s hand, then got up and poured herself a cup of coffee. “Honey, I think it’s a little early to start worrying.”

“No . . . it’s not! It’s exactly the right time to worry. Now! When maybe I can do something about it.”

“You mean an abortion?”

“No, not that. Not like that.”

Lexie looked puzzled. “Like what?”

“Well, I don’t know. That’s why I came to you.”

“Me?”

“You work in a hospital, so . . .”

“Novalee, look who you’re talking to. I have four kids. Four! You think if I knew what to do . . .”

“But there are ways. I’ve heard . . .”

“Oh yeah. I’ve heard that stuff, too. The first time, I took quinine pills. A girl at school told me that would take care of it. It didn’t. My God-fearing folks kicked me out of the house because I’d sinned and

‘brought shame on them’ and a few months later, I named my first baby Brummett.”

“Brummett?”

“Well, I called him Brownie because that’s what I craved the whole time I was pregnant.” Lexie sipped at her coffee, then she said, “The second time, I tried sneezing.”

“I never heard about that.”

“Well, I hadn’t either, but there was a newspaper story about a woman who had a miscarriage because she couldn’t stop sneezing.

So, I figured if it worked for her, why not me? I sniffed black pepper, red pepper, cayenne pepper. I tickled my nose with feathers, cotton balls, weeds. I plucked out eyebrows till I almost didn’t have any left.

And it worked. I sneezed and sneezed and sneezed. And nine months later, I had a baby girl I called Praline.”

Lexie stirred another spoon of sugar into her coffee.

“Now the third time, I jumped.”

“You jumped.”

“There was a Gypsy woman lived down by the Willis Bridge. I heard she had some kind of magic. She did. She said, ‘Girl, if you jump backwards nine times before the sun comes up, you’ll lose that baby.’

So I jumped. But just to be on the safe side, for extra insurance, I jumped backwards for over a mile. All the way from Parrish Road to the quarry. I had blisters, stone bruises, shin splints, a dislocated kneecap . . . and in May, I had twins. No, honey, I don’t know of one thing you can do but wait and see.”

“How about one of those kits . . . a pregnancy test?”

“I don’t think that’s going to tell you anything after ten hours, but . . .”

They turned toward the kitchen door as Praline, wearing a Minnie Mouse nightshirt and her green velvet hat, shuffled into the room, her eyes puffy from sleep.

“Oh, oh. Madam Praline’s up.”

As Praline crawled into Lexie’s lap, she said, “Nobbalee, I got the rolly-rolly.”

“I know it, honey.”

Lexie adjusted the black veil over Praline’s face. “Would you like to have a cup of juice?”

“Yes, and . . . and . . .” Then Praline sneezed—twice.

“Bless you, Madam Praline,” Lexie said. “Bless you.”

Novalee spent the next two weeks trying to avoid Troy Moffatt.

He came to the front of the store several times a day, but she managed to stay too busy to do more than say hello. When he called her at home, she found excuses not to talk.

She had little appetite and didn’t sleep more than a few hours at a time. She got out of bed three or four times a night to go to the bathroom, certain that she knew the cause of the pressure on her bladder. Sometimes when she got up, she felt sick and dizzy, the way she had when she was first pregnant with Americus.

Then one morning, sometime before dawn, when she was just at the edge of sleep, Novalee felt the familiar wetness between her legs and it was over. She was free again. She was who she had been . . .

without quinine, without vinegar or aspirin and Coke . . . without sneezing or jumping. She had been lucky this time.

She remembered something then, something from a book she had read about India, about women of the Untouchable caste, women who aborted their pregnancies by burning themselves with iron rods heated in burning coals.

Suddenly, Novalee sat straight up in bed, sleep no longer a consideration.

She got up, turned on her light and started pulling books out of the stacks on the floor beside her bed. When she found the one she wanted, she flipped through it until she saw what she was looking for, then read again a poem about a black woman who aborted her child.

Novalee picked up another book, ran her hand across its cover. It was the story of an Arab woman who had, when she was young, put spiders inside her body, spiders whose bites, she had been told, would cause her to miscarry.

Novalee lifted a small book from the bottom of a stack, a book she had just finished reading, a story about a Jewish girl named Brenda who got a diaphragm because her boyfriend asked her to.

Novalee looked around her at a room filled with books. Books stacked in corners, standing on her dresser, crammed into her headboard, pushed into a bookcase. And in the library, Forney’s library, there were more. More books . . . more stories . . . more poems.

And suddenly, Novalee knew—knew what she hadn’t known before.

She wasn’t who she had been. She would never again be who she was before.

She was connected to those women she had read about.

Untouchables. Black women. Arab women. She was connected to them just as she had been to girls in seventh-grade gym classes and to make-believe women named Brenda and to real ones named Lexie.

She remembered then the first day she met Forney, her first day in the library, when he had swooped up and down the aisles, plucking books from shelves . . . reading from one, then another . . . holding books, talking to them as if they were live . . . talking about trees and poetry and paintings . . . and she hadn’t understood then, hadn’t understood any of it. But now she was beginning to, and was sorry she had to wait for morning to see Forney . . . to tell him that she was finally beginning to understand.

THE WHITECOTTON PLACE was a mile off a rutted dirt road, a county road, but it had been two years since the blade of a grader had touched it. The land, cleared for pasture half a century earlier, rolled toward a shallow creek dotted with scrub oak and bois d’arc.

Novalee turned the Toyota into the graveled drive shaded by sweet gum trees, their leaves already turning wine and gold. The house was a dignified two-story with a broad screened-in porch and wide steps lined with pots of geraniums.

Moses stepped out the front door as Novalee maneuvered Americus from her car seat.

“Have any trouble finding us?” Moses asked.

“No, not once I crossed Sticker Creek.”

Americus squealed and held out her arms to Moses before Novalee had reached the top of the steps.

“Miss Americus!” he said as he lifted her to his chest.

The porch, dark and cool, was a jungle of moonseed vines and snakeroot, Algerian ivy and butterfly weed. A half-dozen fishing rods leaned together in one corner and work boots toed the edge of newspapers beside the door.

Two heavy easy chairs sat arm to arm in the middle of the porch, but it was several moments before Novalee noticed that one of them held a tiny gnarled man.

“Novalee, this is my father, Purim Whitecotton.”

The old man smiled at her with the side of his face that still worked, but the broken side, the side with the hooded eye and sagging lip, had shut down on his last birthday, his eighty-third, when he bent to blow out candles on an angel food cake and a blood vessel exploded in his temple.

“Hello,” Novalee said.

His left hand, defective . . . useless, fingers twisted and curled toward his palm, lay in his lap like some long-owned geegaw . . .

worthless, but too familiar to throw away. He offered his good hand—

palsied, warted and scarred, discolored like bruised fruit—but good.

Veins, intricate purple skeins, webbed across the back of his hand and his skin, cool and soft, felt like fine, creased silk. And when Novalee touched it, she heard the lines of a poem she had read.

. . . ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

For a moment, the words seemed to echo and Novalee thought she might have said them out loud.

“Daddy, look here,” Moses said. “Look at Miss Americus Nation.”

Purim Whitecotton’s good eye narrowed as it found and focused on Americus. Then he tried to speak, tried to make his broken lips Where the Heart Is

speak, but a sound somewhere back in his mouth, a strangled sound back of his tongue, was all he could manage. But Moses had learned his father’s language, knew what he wanted, so he stepped closer and when he did, the old man reached up and put one thin trembling finger to Americus’ cheek. She held very still, hardly seemed to breathe until he lowered his hand—and then she smiled at him.

Novalee turned toward the swoosh of the screen door as a tall woman in blue linen stepped onto the porch.

“Well, I declare,” she said, “I didn’t know our company was here.”

“Novalee, I’d like you to meet my wife, Certain,” Moses said.

Certain Whitecotton had a halo of silver hair, and copper-colored skin, unblemished except for a dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose. When she smiled, her eyes, just a shade lighter than sage, caught the light and shimmered like clear glass splashed by rain.

She took Novalee’s hand and closed it inside her own, then held it still as if they were sealing a promise.

“Moses been saying some nice things about you, Novalee. So nice, I thought you might be a fairy tale.”

“I’m pleased to meet you.”

Then Certain turned to Americus, still in Moses’ arms. “So! Here’s the lady who stole my husband’s heart.”

Americus was clearly happy to be at the center of their attention.

“Can’t imagine how,” Certain said. “Unless it’s that smile spread from here to St. Louis.”

Americus ducked her head, pressed her face into Moses’ shoulder

. . . a brief flirtation with shyness.

“Oh, yes. That’s a powerful smile,” Certain said.

“What smile?” Moses asked. “I never saw no smile.”

“Novalee, has Moses offered you something to drink? We have cider.”

“Thank you, but I’m not thirsty.”

“Well, I know you two want to get out back, so I won’t try to keep you here with small talk or cider.” Though Certain seemed to be talking to Novalee and Moses, she was looking at Americus as she spoke. “But when you finish, we’ll have us some pie and coffee and get better acquainted.”

“Don’t let her kid you, Novalee. She wants us to leave so she can get her hands on Americus.”

“Me? Now who is it standing here acting like an old fool over that baby?”

“I was speaking truth and you know it.”

“Moses, give me that child and get on out of here.”

“Now Mother . . .”

Then it was over. Certain slipped Americus from Moses’ arms and into her own. But as she did, as she and Moses touched, something passed between them . . . something dark and sad that made him lower his eyes and caused her to turn her face away, as if each could not bear to see the sorrow of the other—as if the handing over of a child could break their hearts.