Windfalls: A Novel (17 page)

“We might have to move,” Anna answered, squandering every other future and looking directly at Eliot as she spoke. To Lucy she added gently, “We don’t yet know.”

Lucy asked, “Who will live our lives, if we move?”

“They’ll always be our lives,” said Anna, infusing her voice with more certainty than she felt. She wiped her hands on a dishcloth and reached her arms around Lucy. “We’ll take our lives with us, when we go.”

In that moment she felt a kind of triumph, a surge of hope. She promised, “As long as we’re all together, everything will be all right.” But then Lucy squirmed out from under Anna’s hug to stand alone in the center of the room. “Noranella won’t go,” she said.

“Why won’t she?” Eliot asked, reaching for Anna’s empty hand.

“Noranella won’t leave her home,” Lucy answered.

“Oh, Lucy,” Anna begged foolishly. “You could make her come.”

“I can’t,” Lucy had answered with great dignity. “I would not never do such a increnulating thing to Noranella.”

“Lucy,” said Eliot wearily, “people can feel two ways about a thing.”

“Not Noranella,” Lucy answered, folding her arms like a grown woman and turning away.

Now, alone in the bathroom, Anna raised her head from the cradle of her hands and looked around the room. She saw the collection of Eliot’s starts and cuttings that lined the windowsill, saw the piles of bath toys and the towels hanging crookedly on the rack, but no meanings for those things registered in her brain. The plastic wand had appeared so innocuous when she’d taken it from the package, like a child’s toy or a game piece, like a baby’s rattle. Thinking of it now, she felt an odd little tug of temptation, like a strain of far-off music. She resisted the urge to dig through the trash, find the box she’d buried there, and look at the wand again.

It was all impossible.

It would be impossible for her to have a baby if she couldn’t take time off work to care for it. But it would be impossible for her to ask for a leave of absence from the university now that her job would soon be their sole support. It was impossible for her to finish the photographs for her Los Angeles show if she couldn’t work in the darkroom, but it was impossible for her to work in the darkroom without exposing a developing embryo to poisonous chemicals and heavy metals. It was unthinkable to cancel such an important show, but it would be impossible to finish it if she were pregnant.

If Eliot were miraculously offered another position somewhere, she could not ask him to turn it down just because she didn’t want to move, especially since Eliot was already battling such brutal failure. But she could not imagine moving with a newborn, could not imagine having another baby without the support of her family and friends.

It was all impossible. It would be insane and irresponsible and wrong for her to bring a baby into the world right now. So she had to stop it. For the good of their family—for Eliot’s sake, for Lucy’s, and for her own—she had to send that little possibility back to where it had come from, like a misdelivered letter, like a message that had been meant for someone else.

It would take courage and some contriving, but she thought she could manage it so that no one else would ever have the burden of knowing what she’d had to do. She could make the necessary appointments for times when Eliot was at work. She could schedule the procedure for an afternoon when she had no classes to teach, could arrange for Lucy to go home from kindergarten with a friend that day. That evening she could claim she’d come down with the flu and go to bed. With the work and stress of all that was facing them, it wouldn’t be too difficult to keep from making love until she’d healed. Later, she promised herself, when things were more settled, they could have another baby—just not right now.

But before she could stop herself, she was thinking about babies, was remembering how delicious newborns were, at once so goofy-looking and so wise. She remembered Lucy as an infant and as a round-cheeked toddler, remembered her imp’s grin and her wide-open eyes. She thought of Lucy now, how utterly herself she was, how inevitable she seemed, and how crucial, and she felt the lust for a baby rise up in her, that craving that defied all logic. Suddenly and beyond all reason, she wanted a baby’s flesh, a baby’s scent, wanted the promise and comfort of a baby.

We could make it work, she pleaded with herself. Pressing her palm against her abdomen, she let herself imagine the bean-sprout-size embryo hidden there, let herself wonder what kind of person was rising toward the world. She remembered the drifting bit of tissue she’d allowed the doctor to excise, remembered how lovely it had been, and how lorn, and she felt a surge of mother-worry to think of the long hours she’d been spending in the darkroom, of the dektol and selenium that little sprout had already been exposed to. Stop it, she thought sternly—remember how impossible it is. But already, in some far-off, treacherous corner of her being, she was aware of an inordinate delight. She felt a welcome widening inside her, and also a splinter of reckless thrill, to see the future veer so far from her control.

C
ERISE FOUND A TWO-BEDROOM TRAILER AS CLOSE TO THE COMMUNITY
college as she could afford, in a little pocket of a trailer court crammed with weeds and dust and broken cars. She packed their things in grocery sacks and liquor boxes, and Jake came up in a borrowed pickup to help her move. He brought a dozen red roses for Cerise, a bottle of light-sensitive fingernail polish for Melody, a half-rack of Bud for himself, and a battery-operated laser power blaster for Travis, who spent the afternoon in amped-out ecstasy, pulling the trigger and shrieking gleefully each time lights flashed inside the plastic barrel and an electronic voice announced
Attention. Drop your guns. Fire. Target.

Cerise felt a twinge of sadness to leave the apartment that had been their home, though as she rode through Rossi for the final time, crammed into the pickup cab with Jake and Travis and Melody, she looked out the window at the new malls and dirty palms, and it seemed strange to think she had ever lived there at all.

The trailer was half the size of their apartment. The appliances in the kitchen would have fit inside a playhouse—the refrigerator with a freezer that couldn’t hold a quart of ice cream, the stove with its two burners and its doll-size oven. Cerise let Melody have the bedroom at the back, and she and Travis shared the one in front, although it was so small that her mattress and his crib were only a few steps apart.

At the drugstore where she went to buy diapers and toilet paper and shampoo she found flower seeds on sale, ten cents a package. She bought a dollar’s worth and planted them below their bedroom window, studying the directions on the envelopes and then breaking up the hard dirt with a hand trowel, patting the seeds carefully beneath the soil, and watering them with pans of water she carried from the kitchen sink. She caught Travis trying to dig them up again the next day, but by midsummer a few of the sweet peas had begun to bloom, and one of the zinnias had developed buds that looked like thick green thumbs.

The first time she went on campus, she kept waiting for someone to realize she shouldn’t be there and tell her she had to leave. Weathering Melody’s scorn, she dressed for her first class even more carefully than she’d dressed for her dates with Jake. But even so her hands felt as slick as if they’d been in rubber gloves all day, and she kept her elbows pressed to her sides to try to hide the perspiration that steeped dark circles into the armpits of her blouse. Unsure of where she was going, she hurried along the crowded sidewalks, her new textbooks pushed against her breasts as though she were twelve again.

But she managed to stumble into the right classroom. And she managed to come back the next day. Slowly her terror began to ease, and she even started to think that maybe her program counselor was right—maybe anything was possible, if you only tried hard enough, if only you wanted it with all your might.

What she liked best about school were the hours she spent with the preschoolers in the on-campus day care. Once the children got to know her, they ran to greet her whenever she arrived, lifting their arms and faces to her like clamoring sunflowers. They filled her lap at circle time, showed her their invisible owies, told her rambling stories about the dreams they’d had and the videos they’d seen. And halfway through the summer her mentor teacher said Cerise must be some sort of magician, the way she could get them to settle down at naptime.

Despite how angry Melody had been about the move, she also seemed to be doing a little better that summer. She watched Travis while Cerise was in school and found an evening job at a fast-food restaurant not too far from where they lived. She made new friends—not, this time, with leather-clad kids who owned loud cars, but with a pack of dreamy teenagers in ragged clothes. These new friends went barefoot, wrote poetry, and wore their pale hair matted into dreadlocks, though some of the girls shaved their heads and some of the boys wore skirts.

Melody said their goal was to save the earth. She said they wanted to live the way people were meant to live, at one with nature, in tribes. They called themselves the Lost Children, which made Cerise think of the movie
Peter Pan,
though when she mentioned it, Melody reminded her scornfully that in the movie it had been only boys.

By the Fourth of July, Melody said she was in love with one of them, a willowy boy with raven-colored ringlets that Melody called Tree. He owned an old school bus that Melody helped him paint, covering it with sinuous flowers and dark-eyed animals and geometric patterns she said had sacred meanings. Tree also had a tattoo gun, and he sold tattoos at concerts and street fairs. Melody told Cerise that sometimes Tree used her designs for his tattoos, and she claimed she was going to start her own business soon, airbrushing those designs on T-shirts and silk scarves and canvas bags.

One night in mid-July, long after she’d gotten Travis to sleep, Cerise was scrunched on the sofa, so engrossed in studying that she barely looked up from her textbook when the front door opened and Melody came in.

“Hi,” Cerise said, pausing to highlight a section about maternal-infant bonding before she added, “How was work?”

“Work sucked,” Melody answered. “But—check this out.” She tossed something on the sofa next to her mother.

“What is it?” Cerise asked, glancing up from her book to see what Melody had thrown. Her first thought was that it was an ornament for some weird Christmas tree, but when she picked it up she saw it was a grapefruit, although its coarse pink skin had been decorated with a sinuous, many-pointed star.

“It’s Celtic,” Melody said, pointing at the star. “It’s very magical. Tree says I’m learning fast,” she added proudly. “He says I’m almost ready to try a real tattoo. I just have to get my depth a little more consistent first.”

“Try a real tattoo?” Cerise asked warily.

“There’s lots of money in tattooing. If I get good at giving tattoos, I can make way more money than I’ll ever make selling burgers at McVomit’s. Even teachers and bankers want tattoos these days. Tree says my designs are deeply cool.”

“Just as long as you never get one yourself,” Cerise said, studying the star embedded in the grapefruit’s sallow rind and thinking of Melody’s perfect skin. She remembered the tattoos on the flaccid biceps and wrinkled forearms of the men at Woodland Manor, the blurry purple anchors and flags that had always reminded her of the mimeographed worksheets her teachers used to give her back in grade school. She said, “If you get a tattoo, you can never get rid of it. You’re stuck with it, your whole life.”

“That’s the point,” Melody answered primly. “It’s important to have things that will be in your life forever. But don’t worry—if I ever get one, it’ll be small and easy to hide. Tree says tattoos are sexier if you have to hunt for them. Some people practice on chickens,” she went on, “but I’ve quit eating meat.”

“Quit eating meat? What? When?”

“When I met Tree.”

“Why?”

“Do you have any idea the kind of poisons they pump into meat? Hormones and drugs and crap like that? Besides,” Melody said, retrieving her grapefruit and examining it proudly, “Tree says its bad karma to eat someone else’s flesh without getting their permission first.”

It made no sense for Melody to quit eating meat, especially because for every shift she worked, she got a free Quarter Pounder and a large drink and a fries. And it made Cerise sick to think how even a little butterfly tattooed on Melody’s ankle or her shoulder blade would deface her lovely daughter. But at least Melody had a job. At least she wasn’t coming home drunk, though sometimes Cerise thought she recognized the scent of marijuana in her hair. At least the clothes Melody wore were her own, or were so flimsy or tattered it didn’t frighten Cerise to wonder where she got them. At least Tree didn’t carry a knife or suck bruises into Melody’s neck.

And once or twice after that, on nights when Travis went to bed on time and Melody happened to be home from work, nights when Cerise was too tired to even try to study, they found some old movie on TV, made popcorn, sprinkled it with the cheese powder packet from a box of macaroni and cheese, and sprawled together on the collapsing sofa, watching the movie in companionable quiet, the popcorn bowl between them, and only their jaws moving as they gazed at the screen, their fingers occasionally brushing when they both reached for popcorn at the same time.

But before August was half over Melody got fired for helping the Lost Children picket the restaurant where she worked with signs that said “Unfair to Animals” and “Eat Your Own Meat.”