Windfalls: A Novel (35 page)

“At the time,” Anna sighed, staring at her food, “I thought he was a jerk.”

“He was a jerk,” Eliot answered.

Anna said, “I know. But I have to admit that part of me’s been wondering if he weren’t on to something, too.”

“Seriously?” asked Eliot.

“Maybe,” Anna answered, poking at the white flesh of the fish on her plate. “I don’t know.”

“Foe,” sang Lucy gleefully. “Low, woe.”

“I don’t know,” Anna repeated raggedly. “Sometimes I think I’m right, and sometimes I think there’s just something wrong with me, like I’ve forgotten something important that I used to know by heart.”

“Heart,” said Lucy under her breath, “art … fart.” She giggled and cast a surreptitious glance toward her parents. But her father was looking at her mother, and her mother was looking out the window at the darkening sky.

I
T BECAME A LITTLE EASIER, IN TIME
. T
O THE CHILDREN AT AFTERSCHOOL
care Cerise was like any other adult, a creature so remote and complete it was unthinkable she might have troubles as keen as theirs. But once they learned that she was a tireless jump-rope turner, that she allowed seconds at snack time, and that she didn’t make the mistake of always believing the first one who reported a squabble, they accepted her as nearly one of them.

When Lucas told Amanda that the tooth fairy was just your parents, it was Cerise Amanda sought to set things straight, and when Delano fell in the gym and broke his arm, Cerise was the person he ran to first, thrusting himself blindly past the anxious cluster of kids and teachers and pushing his hot, wet face into her solar plexus, trusting her to keep him safe and stop his tears.

During the hours she spent among those children, she could almost share their sense of her, and she was relieved to be reduced to nothing but Honey, pouring juice or cutting construction paper or mixing paint. Sometimes, as she cared for that roomful of other people’s kids, she felt almost accustomed to her own children being gone, though at other times she was haunted by the feeling that Travis was still back at the Happy Factory, still waiting impatiently for her to get off work.

Every evening, when the parents arrived to rush their children home, she wanted to stop them, to tell them how utterly precious their kids were and warn them that every minute that passed was one minute closer to the end. Instead, she sorted jackets and helped with sleeves and buttons, found backpacks and library books and homework pages, helped to hurry the children off with their harried moms and dads.

So a little life had begun to accrete around her, like a shell that both protected and shaped the soft animal that lived inside. No one ever asked about her, where she lived or who she loved or what she did when she was not at work, and as time went on, it began to matter more and more that no one ever did. She came to fear those questions not only because of what they would expose, but also because of how the truth about who she was would destroy the haven she’d almost begun to prize.

“Can I give you a ride home?” Ms. Martinez asked one evening after work as they were walking together down the hall. “It’s pretty wet out there.”

“Oh, no,” Cerise said, though she added hurriedly, “I mean, I like to walk.”

“In the rain?” Ms. Martinez asked, and Cerise cringed, afraid her secret would unravel like one of Barbara’s blankets the moment someone yanked the first stitch.

Back at the shelter every evening, she ate her supper with the other women, and afterward, while the mothers put their little ones to bed and tried to get their older children to do their homeroom, Cerise sat with the childless women in the TV room and let the TV’s flicker and murmur soothe her tired brain.

“Notice how there’s never any TVs on TV?” Barbara observed while the rest of the women gazed at the screen and scowled at her interruption. Ignoring their irritation, she went on, “Away back long ago, when the government wanted to kill people, they gave ’em blankets laced with smallpox germs. Now all they have to do is just give us this crap-in-a-box instead. Exterminates us just as fast, but keeps us alive to buy shit, too.”

Occasionally, beneath the poster of Andrea that hung on the back wall of the room, some of the women would begin to talk about their lives, sorting and re-sorting them as though their pasts were the bags that held their final possessions, rearranging and repacking their troubles until finally they had reduced them to a few words that they could carry with them wherever they went.
My breakdown,
someone would say. Or,
my surgery. Before the car wreck,
another woman would answer, or
After my relapse. When I got laid off. After my old man left. Since I’ve been clean
.

Sometimes the women cried, and the tears that slid down their tired cheeks and hung from their quivering chins seemed so tiny compared to the oceans of their suffering. Cerise found a kind of comfort in their stories and tears—not because she liked to see more pain, but because suffering was life’s true condition. It made sense that people would suffer, made sense that nothing would stay right for very long. Watching the other women gather round the weeping one to pat her back and wipe her little tears away, Cerise could feel almost kin to the crying woman, almost kin to the women who comforted her.

The TV was turned off at ten, and then the women wandered off to bed. All the cots in the sleeping hall had long since been staked out like pieces of real estate—the ones closest to the bathroom or in the darkest corners valued more than the ones near the door or in the center of the room. Cerise’s cot was along the back wall between Barbara’s and Maria’s, and each night it was an exquisite relief to return to it, to lie beneath a roof while the rain came down outside, to sleep on her own bed among other sleeping humans, beneath a blanket that had begun to smell like her.

Lying on her cot, listening to the bluster of the rain and the murmur of the women settling into their sleep, listening to Barbara’s mumbled curses and Maria’s whispered prayers, Cerise would turn her thoughts to Travis, would try to get her memories of him to come alive inside her mind. Those nights when she managed to find him in that private netherworld between the living and the dead, he was so vivid, so present, and so near that she could almost feel the warm press of his arms around her neck, could almost smell the yeasty scent of him, and she would lie for long minutes, smiling mindlessly up into the darkness while her pillow grew wet with unheeded tears.

Sometimes she couldn’t help but think of Melody, too—the young, true Melody whom she would never see again. Listening to the murmurs of the children as they tossed in their sleep, Cerise would remember Melody, worming her way between the sheets to snuggle. Thinking back to how she’d watched the kids coloring that afternoon, she would remember Melody, chanting the names of the crayons like a charm. But each time she began to relax into those memories, another memory would shoulder its way into her thoughts—the girl she’d seen in Santa Dorothea, looking straight through Cerise, and then laughing as she turned away.

Only in Cerise’s dreams did the other, older Melody occasionally appear. Sometimes the teardrop on Melody’s cheek had grown to cover her entire face, so that whole continents and oceans stretched and collapsed when she spoke. Other times a huge dream-Melody kept trying to scrabble her way back onto Cerise’s lap. And once Cerise dreamed she was watching Melody pile up great stacks of garbage on an empty plain. “God doesn’t make trash,” Melody explained, looking so deep inside Cerise’s eyes it seemed she was peering into her skull. “That’s why we need a fire, to get rid of all the trash that God didn’t make.”

Occasionally, very late at night when everyone else had finally settled into sleep, Cerise thought she caught the sound of a telephone ringing from a long way off, ringing and ringing, ringing wearily and unrelentingly, insisting that someone somewhere should answer its call. But before she had a chance to consider what that ringing phone might mean, she came home from work one evening to find Barbara in the sleeping hall, stuffing her clothes and yarns into plastic grocery bags.

“What are you doing?” Cerise cried. “It’s almost time to eat.”

“It’s been a fine holiday,” her friend muttered. “But it’s over now. The lady says I gotta look for work or leave. And what the fuck kinda work they think I’m gonna do, with my heart and my legs and my crazy spells?” Her eyes flicked impatiently around the sleeping hall, adamantly refusing to meet Cerise’s gaze.

“You can crochet,” Cerise offered, dropping to her hands and knees to ferret out the balls of yarn that had rolled beneath Barbara’s cot. “Or teach people how.”

“Know anyone wants to pay a living wage for crocheting?” Barbara asked, snatching the tangled yarns from Cerise’s hands. “Not in this country, let me tell you, not since Jesus baked the cake.”

“You can comfort people,” Cerise said, but Barbara only scowled.

“No money in comfort,” she said. She jammed the narrow strip of the blanket she’d just begun on top of the jumbled yarns.

“I never had no babies,” she said fiercely, looking askance at a spot beyond Cerise’s shoulder. “But I once was someone’s child.”

Her crochet hook clattered to the floor, and Cerise asked in panic, “Where will you go?”

“Don’t like to tell people my address. I’ll be fine. You too,” Barbara added, her eyes suddenly drilling into Cerise’s, her voice a command.

But a moment later her gaze wavered and slid off Cerise’s face. “I’ll see you,” she said, her voice drifting.

“When?” Cerise persisted.

“At lunch,” she answered, heaving up her bags and shuffling from the room. “Sometime. Maybe.”

But she wasn’t at the soup kitchen that noon or the next, and on Monday when she finally appeared, her clothes were torn and dirty, and her hair was clumped in knots at the back of her head. At the sight of her, standing uncertainly in the doorway while the daylight spilled in around her, Cerise jumped up from her meal. She ran to help Barbara with her bags and to carry her tray through the crowd while Barbara tagged dully behind. When they reached the table where Cerise had been sitting, Cerise dropped one of the bags so that it tipped and hanks and twists of yarn rolled across the floor. Angrily Barbara began to scoop them up, tried to stuff the whole mess back into her bag.

“It’ll tangle,” Cerise said timidly, “like that.” But when she reached to help, Barbara barked, “You let my yarns alone.”

“What?”

“Bad as the rest a them,” Barbara muttered. “Only you got no shame. At least the others wait till dark.”

“For what?” Cerise asked.

“Sneak up on me at night and try to mess with my bag. Sneak in while I’m trying to sleep. Make it so now I can’t even rest no more, I got to stay awake to protect my stuff. Won’t let my yarns alone, either—tangle ’em, tie ’em up in mean knots. And now they want to paint my skin.”

“Paint your skin?” Cerise asked, perplexed and horrified.

“Got an ink that won’t come off. They want to paint pictures, poison pictures, want to sneak up and cover me with beautiful bright killer pictures and then watch and see how long I last, like human life to them is just some fucking experiment.”

“Who does?” Cerise persisted.

Barbara’s eyes narrowed. “You all can go practice your evil arts somewhere else. Won’t let you fuck with me.”

The whole world felt slippery and tilted, like a ride in the amusement park when the wildest part was over, but even as the ride was slowing down, it seemed the world itself had begun to reel and lurch, spinning on centerless and beyond control. Cerise reached out for Barbara’s arm to steady herself, but Barbara shrugged her hand off viciously.

“Don’t you come on to me,” she hissed. “You go find someone else to do your slut-work with.” Abandoning her untouched food, she pushed herself from the table, gathered her broken bags, and struggled off, leaving Cerise aching with worry and helplessness.

F
ROM HER PLACE IN THE BACKSEAT
, L
UCY SAID
, “T
HERE’S A NICE TEACHER
at after-school care.”

“That’s good,” Anna answered over her shoulder as she pulled out of the school parking lot onto the wet street. “What’s her name?”

“It’s a sweet name,” Lucy said absently. “I forget.”

“Do you like her?”

“She’s a good drawer.”

“A good drawer?”

“She draws good horses,” Lucy said, gazing out the window at the rain.

“That’s nice,” Anna answered, accelerating to enter the freeway. For a moment, as she navigated the curving overpass, she caught a glimpse of the misty, gray-green hills that ringed the city. Last weekend, during a break between storms, she’d forced herself to return to those hills and make a few exposures of the acres of staked grapes, and a few more of the orchard of dead trees she’d wept in when she heard the news about Andrea’s nightgown. In the orchard she’d managed to catch that magic hour between afternoon and evening when the light was bold and smooth and the broken trees seemed to glisten in the rain-scrubbed air. But hunched beneath her dark cloth with her finger poised on the shutter release while she watched for the perfect convergence of light and cloud and shadow, she’d realized none of the satisfaction she would once have taken in that moment, had felt none of the pleasure that had once seemed kin to prayer.