Windfalls: A Novel (11 page)

She felt a little twist of sorrow, thinking of her darkroom. She hadn’t developed a sheet of film or made a print since before she conceived. At first, she’d tried to appease her need to work by exposing film, even though she knew she would have to wait until the baby was weaned before she could develop or print it. But after a while she’d given up. It had been half a year now since she’d even exposed any film, and though she still yearned for the way her work scrubbed and sharpened her, the way it left her open and awake and made her whole life feel valuable and right, she had also begun to wonder if, once the baby was finally weaned, she would have the time to teach and be a mother and make photographs, too. Sometimes that question made her feel vaguely desperate, as if she, too, were trapped inside her womb, though at other times it was almost appealing to think that her life could be complete without the work of making art.

Outside, the light was returning more and more texture to the world. Earlier in the week there’d been a Chinook wind, and now the land the dawn revealed was bare of snow. Down in the yard her grandmother’s dormant roses huddled like heaps of sticks beneath their blankets of cold straw. Across the raw hills Anna could make out the merest mist of green—the billion tiny blades of winter wheat waiting to be woken by the longer light of spring. Her grandmother had once longed to let that wheat grow through her bones, and now, looking out on the strengthening morning, Anna remembered how learning of her grandmother’s loss had given her a way to face her own.

It would be ten by now, if it had been—that wisp, that ache, that pearl, that seed of light. Even now it sometimes hovered just beyond her inner sight, like a star before the fall of evening brings it into view. It was still an emptiness too precious to be dissolved by words. She’d never spoken of it to anyone, not even Eliot. She’d never told anyone, and she had not forgotten. For ten years it had been her talisman, her charm, her reminder of all she owed the world.

Not in spite of, her grandmother had said; Because. And the next day Anna had taken her camera from the trunk of the little Subaru she used to drive. She’d exposed three rolls of film before sundown, hungrily shooting everything she saw—the rough heaps of beets, the filled canning jars gleaming like secrets in the dim cellar, the grain-covered hills rippling with the pattern of the wind, the tousled roses, her grandmother’s long-veined hands. Because, she’d thought like a mantra or a blessing or a plea each time she pressed the shutter release. Because.

The squeeze of her uterus began again, slow, insinuating, growing until she felt a bite of hurt. Two years ago at harvest time she’d made an exposure with her field camera looking out that very window.
Because,
she called it, and now a print of it hung in the Whitney in New York. She liked to think of the strangers who paused in front of it. She liked to think that perhaps some few of them understood.

Her belly continued to tighten. The pain was sturdier this time, wicked, unexpected. A whiff of her dream returned. She felt a spike of panic, remembered the hook, the table, her mangled heart. The pain drove deeper, widening inside her, climbing up her spine, filling her pelvis, seeping down her legs. It pushed from her a moan, low and guttural, a near-growl that fit perfectly inside her throat. She heard in her own voice the sound that had appalled her in the hall of Salish Hospital, but she understood it now and answered it, let that same moan pour out of her.

I am having a baby, she thought in astonishment as the contraction began to ease. Despite her pain, elation blossomed in her chest. She remembered Eliot’s sleepy answer, You have the baby already. Looking out the window at the morning, she felt shivery, thin with excitement, entirely alive. I asked for this, she thought as the next contraction came.

M
RS.
S
ONNEGRAD HAD DIED IN THE NIGHT, SO
304
WAS EMPTY
. T
HE
mortician had already come for the body; the aide had stripped the sheets and left the window open so the summer heat could bake the smell of death from the room. Now it was Cerise’s job to pack up Mrs. Sonnegrad’s things and prepare the room for the next resident. It was a chore she’d had to do dozens of times in the nearly seven years she had worked at Woodland Manor. Even so, she entered 304 cautiously, though once she was inside it was hard to see the threat lurking in that quiet room or in the dresses and knickknacks Mrs. Sonnegrad had left behind her.

Cerise got to work, spraying the plastic mattress cover, wiping it down, and then horsing the mattress off the bed so she could clean the frame. It had been less than a month since the last time she’d disinfected 304, so it was an easy job, not like other times, when the residents who died had been there for years, and along with the dust on the mattress springs, she’d had her own sadness to deal with. Cerise had only a fleeting image of Mrs. Sonnegrad, a shrunken woman lying silently between the raised railings of her bed as her gray-haired son leaned over to hold her hand.

She tore a plastic trash bag off the roll on her cart and began placing Mrs. Sonnegrad’s things inside. It seemed so strange to think that Mrs. Sonnegrad was gone when her nylon underpants and her pink hearing aid remained. Cerise tried to imagine where Mrs. Sonnegrad was now, and she felt as though she were standing on a high tower, looking down into endless space. She shuddered and went back to work, sorting and folding Mrs. Sonnegrad’s clothes, tucking her terry slippers together heel to toe, setting everything neatly at the bottom of the billowing trash bag. On top of the pile of folded clothes she laid the things from the bureau—a pocket calendar, a color portrait of two red-haired toddlers, a black-and-white photograph of a mild-faced woman in a beaded evening dress.

The final item on the bureau was a figurine, a little fawn made of dime-store china, and Cerise paused to study it before she added it to the bag. It looked so cute, with its wide eyes, splayed legs, and dappled sides, but when she turned it over in her hand, she saw that it had once been badly broken. Its legs were marred with yellowing lines of epoxy, and one had been set a little crookedly. Her heart gave a sudden clench of pity, to think that someone had valued that little thing enough to fix it, to think that of all the knickknacks a woman like Mrs. Sonnegrad must have owned, that little dime-store fawn had stayed with her to the end. It seemed important, somehow precious, and she hated to think of shutting it away inside the dark plastic.

In all the years she had worked among the feeble and the senile, handling their watches and wallets and wedding rings, she had always taken a stubborn pride in the fact that she had never stolen or broken anything. But now she imagined she might save that fawn. Suddenly she felt an impulse to tuck it in her pocket and take it home—not for herself, but as a gift for Melody.

Thinking of Melody, she felt as though she were standing back on that high tower, looking down. Melody was nearly twelve now, and almost as tall as Cerise herself. In the last few months it seemed as though a whole new person had taken up residence inside her gawky body. The pudgy nubs of breasts were swelling on her chest, and lately she’d begun to turn her back to Cerise when she undressed. Even her smell was changing, growing sharper and earthier and more complex, no longer the clean animal scent she’d carried in her hair and on her skin the year before.

Over the summer Melody had taken to sleeping on the sofa in the front room instead of on her mattress at the foot of Cerise’s bed. On the weekends, rather than coloring with Cerise or letting Cerise fix her hair, she wanted to go ice skating or to the movies, wanted to hang out at the mall with her friends, and when Cerise said No, she had to stay at home and do her homework, or Sorry, they had no money for skates or Cokes or movies, Melody rolled her eyes in disdain.

The women’s magazines Cerise picked up in the Woodland Manor staff room claimed that preteens could be sulky and private, and warned that parents needed to use good communication skills and set limits now, before their kids became real teenagers. That made it seem like Melody was a time bomb that must somehow be disassembled before she exploded, but although Cerise wanted desperately to do whatever she could to make things right, she had no idea where to begin. Recently it seemed that being nice to Melody was like pouring water into sand, while insisting that Melody clean the kitchen or do her homework or not talk back only made things worse.

It seemed like only yesterday that Melody had vowed she’d never leave Cerise, and now it felt like she was already gone. Now when Cerise looked back along that chain of days that led from Melody’s birth to the present, it seemed they were linked not by the firsts the staff room magazines were always talking about, but by hundreds of unnoticed lasts. She could remember when Melody got her first tooth, could remember when she took her first step. She could remember Melody’s first word and her first day of school. But somehow those milestones were not nearly as significant as all that Cerise could not remember—the last time they’d colored together, the last time Melody had let Cerise fix her hair, the last Saturday breakfast they’d eaten side by side.

Cerise gazed at the trinket on her callused palm and imagined teaching Melody the tricks she’d learned in her own childhood, imagined showing Melody how to clean the little fawn with a damp washcloth so the epoxy wouldn’t give, and helping her to dress it with scraps of fabric. She imagined Melody talking to the fawn, and inventing little stories about it, imagined Melody snuggling up beside her and telling those stories to her, too. No one would ever know, she told herself, if she rescued the fawn for Melody. And even if they did, why would they care? She envisioned the gray-haired son opening the sack that held his mother’s final possessions and tossing the broken fawn into the trash.

But suddenly she saw how worn and grubby and faded it was. With a knowledge so swift and certain it sucked her breath away, she realized that Melody wouldn’t want something that old and ruined. Melody liked mall things—slick, brand-new, and bright. At best she would be indifferent, distantly polite. “Thanks, Mom,” she might say, and stuff the figurine into the back of her underwear drawer. But at worst she would ask coldly, “Where did you get that thing?” and then Cerise would have to choose between the disgrace of lying to her daughter and the humiliation of telling her the truth.

Her shoulders slumped. She wrapped the fawn in a wad of facial tissues, set it on top of the little pile in the depths of the bag. Shutting the bag with a twistee, she placed it, tidy and hapless as a hobo’s bundle, on the disinfected mattress and headed down the hall to 306.

* * *

S
ALLY KNELT ON THE CANVAS DROP CLOTH THAT COVERED THE FLOOR OF
her family room and pried the lid off a gallon of paint with a screwdriver. “I learned a new word last night,” she said.

Beneath the humor in her sister’s voice there was an unexpected sharpness that reminded Anna of sandpaper or vinegar. “A new word?” she asked, gingerly shifting her position to avoid waking the baby sleeping against her chest. Lucy. She bent her neck, buried her face in the down that crowned Lucy’s head, and inhaled. The scent of her infant hit her brain like a pheromone, like a necessary drug. Lucy, she thought gratefully, and her eyelids fluttered closed for a second of near-ecstasy before she opened them to fasten a questioning glance on Sally.

“Being married to an English professor’s a real vocabulary builder,” Sally answered dryly. Lifting the can in both hands, she tipped it so that a column of mustard-colored paint poured down into the tray that sat on the floor beside her. Then, giving the can an expert twist, she cut the flow of paint without spilling a single drop.

“What was last night’s word?” Anna asked. It was a brilliant afternoon in mid-September, and Sally had propped the door to the backyard open for ventilation. The air that entered the room carried with it the musky tang of falling leaves. From her place on the draped couch, Anna looked hungrily out through the door to the light-drenched maples that rimmed Sally’s yard. Even as she soaked their loveliness deep into her bones, she was calculating camera angles and shutter speeds, imagining how she might shoot them. It had been fifteen months since she’d been able to make a print, but in the six months since she’d had Lucy, she had used her field camera to expose another thick stack of film sheets. It was as if Lucy’s arrival had given her yet another set of eyes, and though she still had to wait until Lucy was weaned before she could develop and print that pile of negatives, thinking of it made her warm with promise, as though she were hoarding secret riches or gestating something new.

“Teenful,” Sally answered, hammering the lid back on her paint can and giving Anna a glance that held as much grimace as smile. “Last night’s new word was teenful.”

“Teenful?” Anna echoed doubtfully. “As in, full of teen?”

“Teenful, as in ‘causing trouble or sorrow, vexatious, wrathful, malicious, injurious, spiteful,’” Sally recited angrily. She pushed a thick strand of steel-colored hair from her temple with the heel of her hand. Sally was already forty—seven years older than Anna. Over the last few years it had seemed to Anna that Sally’s face was somehow growing younger beneath her prematurely graying hair, but looking at her now, Anna noticed a tight new strain around her mouth, a kind of hardened resignation in her eyes.

“Is everything okay?” Anna asked. It had been a while since she’d stopped by for a visit, and she wondered belatedly what had been going on with her sister while she’d been so absorbed in Lucy.

“Everything’s fine,” Sally answered, her voice brittle. “It’s just that Jesse borrowed the car last night.”