Windfalls: A Novel (46 page)

When she heard a hesitant noise on the steps, she waited until it reached the landing before she stirred herself to ask, “Lucy, is that you?”

“I can’t go to sleep,” Lucy whimpered. “Can I sit with you, for just a little while?” she asked, rushing into the room as though she’d already been given permission.

Cerise sighed, “Come on,” and Lucy scrambled into her lap. She was so small and knobby, perched on Cerise’s thighs, so sweet-smelling and warm, her scant flesh firm beneath her nightgown. Her hair, when Cerise buried her face against the crown of her head, was soft as petals.

They sat for a long while in the half-light that spilled down the stairs, and then Lucy said, “Why are your hands all shiny?” Into the silence that followed she blurted, “Mommy said it wasn’t polite to ask, but I thought you wouldn’t care.

“Do you care?” she asked worriedly, twisting around to peer at Cerise’s face.

“No, I—” Cerise took a breath that felt larger than her body. “I mean, it’s all right. My hands got burned,” she said, exhaling all that extra air.

“Playing with matches?” Lucy asked.

“No.”

“Then what?” Lucy prompted.

“Trying to save some—thing.”

“Did you?” Lucy asked, snuggling against Cerise as though Cerise were going to tell her a bedtime story.

“Did I what?” Cerise asked carefully.

“Did you save the thing you tried to save?”

“No,” she said, her voice dead.

“Oh,” Lucy answered. “Can you get another?”

“No.”

“Is that why you’re always sad?”

“I’m not always sad.”

“Yes, you are—a little. You’re always a little sad. You’re sad like rain,” she added, snuggling in.

“Rain’s not sad,” Cerise said, staring out the window at the dark.

“It is when you’re in it,” Lucy said. “I saw a lady once who was very sad, in the rain.”

Cerise remembered the time she had spent huddled beneath the oleanders while rainwater dripped down her face, the time she’d spent seeking and avoiding Travis on the wet streets. She pulled Lucy against her and answered, “Rain’s only sad if you’re sad already.”

Lucy said, “When we’re dancing and it’s time to stop, my dance teacher says we have to make an ending.”

“Make an ending?”

“It’s supposed to be sadisfying, so you can be glad to stop.”

“Oh.”

“Endings don’t just happen, my dance teacher says. She says you have to make them.”

“Sometimes that’s hard.”

“I know.” Lucy nodded sagely. “That’s why we practice. You have to make them so you feel sad and fied, all at the same time.”

“What’s ‘fied’?”

“It’s when you let the hole be open.”

“Did your teacher tell you that?” Cerise asked softly.

“Nuh-uh,” Lucy answered, shaking her head. “I teached it to myself.”

Lucy lay her head in the crook made by Cerise’s hunched shoulder, and was quiet for such a long time that Cerise thought she had fallen asleep. She was beginning to plan how to carry Lucy up to bed when Lucy spoke again. “What did you lose?” she asked.

The words carved Cerise open, slit her from gut to throat.

“My baby,” she said finally, speaking over Lucy’s head and into the darkness beyond.

“You had a baby?” Lucy asked in wonder.

“I had two.” Cerise stiffened, preparing herself for when Lucy leapt off her lap and ran screaming from the room.

But Lucy, resting tranquilly as ever against her chest, only asked, “Girls or boys?”

“One of each.”

“A girl and a boy,” said Lucy, snuggling in. “What are their names?”

“Travis,” Cerise said, and realized that for all she’d thought of him, she had not once said his name since she’d screamed it in the dark hills beneath the broken tree.

“Travis,” said Lucy. “And who else? What’s your girl’s name?”

“Melody.” The word came alive on her tongue, like a flavor she’d been craving for so long she’d forgotten how it really tasted and could only remember how much she’d longed for it.

“Travis and Melody,” said Lucy contentedly. “Where are they now?”

“Melody ran—Melody grew up. And left. That’s what girls do,” Cerise said to make herself believe it. “They grow up and leave their mothers. She lives north of here,” she added.

“At the North Pole?” Lucy asked.

“No.”

“Why don’t you see her?”

Cerise shrugged. “She’s mad at me. And I—I guess I’m mad at her.”

“Why are you mad?”

“Because of the bad things she did.”

“She didn’t mean to.”

“How do you know?”

“Girls never mean to. Only sometimes it’s just that things turn out wrong, like a accident.”

“Oh,” Cerise whispered.

“She’s not mad now,” Lucy persisted.

“How do you know?”

“Girls don’t stay mad,” Lucy explained. “You have a time-out, and then you start missing your mom. Where’s your boy?”

In the time that followed, Lucy waited patiently while her little question swelled until it grew so big it filled the kitchen, grew so huge it took up all the room Cerise needed to breathe, grew until it crushed against her and forced an answer out.

“He’s dead,” she croaked. The word was a cruel stone, scratching and grating and choking in her throat. But once she’d said it, she saw how small it was, too, just another human sound—nothing at all like the awfulness it meant. And yet she could breathe after she’d said it, as though somehow that word made the sorrow a little smaller.

Lucy echoed, “Dead?”

Cerise nodded, and then she cringed, waiting for Lucy’s horror to set in.

But instead Lucy asked, “How did he die?”

“In a fire,” Cerise said quickly, to avoid being crushed. Tears pricked her eyes and plugged her sinuses and clogged her throat, and Lucy watched Cerise’s lurching face in fascination. “Your fire?” Lucy asked.

“What?”

“The fire that burned your trailer?”

“Yeah.”

“And your hands?”

Cerise nodded, feeling the itch and ache and tingle in her palms.

“He played with matches,” Lucy said knowingly.

Cerise rubbed her tears with her fingers, smearing them across her face. “No,” she said. “It was an accident, in the wiring. It was just an accident, that’s all. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.” The words sounded so simple, so laughably small—an accident—as though Travis had been a big boy and peed his pants. As though there’d never been anyone else to blame. “I tried,” she said. “I tried to save him. But—I couldn’t.” She remembered the triumph she’d felt earlier that evening, running into the gloaming with Ellen in her arms. With a sudden fierce certainty she added, “I would of saved him, if I could.”

Lucy nodded solemnly, as if there had never been any doubt. “When’s his birthday?” she asked.

“His birthday?” Cerise remembered the slick feel of his body slithering out of her, remembered the slight, wet weight of him as she lifted him to her chest, the umbilical cord still trailing between them. She closed her eyes, and the smell of birth flooded her, rich as grain or semen or fresh blood.

Lucy was saying, “When it’s his birthday, me and you can bake a birthday cake. And then we’ll take it outside and light the candles and throw it way, way up into the sky and he’ll catch it, and then he’ll see that you’re okay, and he won’t have to worry about you anymore. Does he like chocolate?”

Cerise thought of Travis in the sky, eating chocolate cake, and though she knew that was not the truth of where he was, it suddenly came to her that wherever he was, he was okay. With a jolt of excruciating freedom, she understood that Travis was no longer hurt or sad or frightened. Wherever he was, Travis didn’t miss her anymore.

She pulled Lucy closer to her, buried her face in the girl’s hair. “Yes, he does,” she said. “He did. Travis liked chocolate.”

Pleased with her plan, Lucy nodded. But then Cerise felt her stiffen with another thought, and she asked in a voice clotted with a sudden new concern, “But won’t he be sad if his sister’s not there, too?”

Later, long after the business of getting Lucy back to bed, Cerise rose from her seat in the unlit kitchen and headed down the stairs. She had never been inside Anna’s darkroom before, and she opened the door warily. Inside it was utterly black, and the first light switch only added amber shadows to the darkness. She groped again and found a real light, though the room it illuminated was not at all as she had imagined it would be.

It seemed more clinical than magical, almost like a hospital with its trays and tools, its looming equipment, cool counters, and vaguely sour smell. At first, when she saw how tidy everything was, she feared she would not find what she’d come seeking. But a second later she saw the print she’d hoped for, sitting on the counter.

When she realized she would have to fold it in half before she could slip it beneath her jacket, she almost changed her mind. But in the end she took it anyway, halving it as carefully as she could, though she cringed at the white scar the crease left on the emulsion. Unzipping the inside pocket of her jacket, she removed the checks she’d received from the after-school care program. She found a pen and endorsed them with the name of the woman who had earned them, and then, adding Anna’s name below her own, she left them on the counter in the place where the print had been.

Upstairs she stood for a long time in the dark beside Lucy’s bed, gazing into her placid face and imagining the baby Lucy had been, imagining the woman she would become. She realized that if they ever met again, they might not know each other, two strangers standing together in an elevator or passing in a park. And yet she was certain that they would always love each other, even so.

She was in Ellen’s room when she heard the car pull up. She bent over the crib railing to breathe the warm steam of Ellen’s baby-dreams one last time before she tiptoed from the room and down the stairs. She was waiting at the front door with her jacket on when Eliot opened it.

“How was your night?” Anna asked.

“It was fine,” Cerise answered. “The girls are fine. But—I have to go.” She looked straight at Anna as she spoke, and Eliot faded back a step.

“It’s late,” Anna said apologetically. “I know. But if you let Eliot give you a ride, I’m sure you can still make it to the shelter before curfew.”

“No,” Cerise shook her head. “I mean, I have to leave here. I won’t be coming back.”

“Not coming back?” Anna said, and Cerise could see a hundred kinds of worry struggling in her face.

“I realized, you—all,” she added, glancing back at Eliot, “helped me see. There’s something important I need to do.”

“What is it?” Anna asked, and when Cerise didn’t answer, she added gently, “If you’d tell me, maybe I could help.”

“I’ve got to do this one the hard way,” Cerise answered. “All by myself.”

“But I—”

“You’ve done so much for me,” Cerise pleaded. “Please do just this one thing more.”

“But what are you going to do?”

Anna sounded so bewildered that Cerise teetered for a moment before she answered, “I need to find out what someone means by Saturday morning.”

“But I’ll miss you,” Anna said, her voice shrill with hurt. “And the girls, you can’t just—”

“I know,” Cerise said. “I’m really sorry. Tell the girls—tell them good-bye.”

“Okay,” said Anna slowly. A grit of skepticism appeared in her tone. “I’ll tell them that.”

“I mean,” Cerise amended, pushing the words out in a fierce hard rush, “tell them I love them. Tell them I won’t forget them, ever. Please,” she added.

Anna met her eyes, and their gaze held. For half a minute they looked at each other, each of them silently pleading and then finally conceding, giving way to the mystery that connected them. Anna nodded, and Cerise pushed toward her, reached out an arm to hug her. For the briefest second they stood together, Anna’s photograph pressed unwittingly between them, and then Cerise broke away, forced herself out the open door, stumbled down the steps and toward the pool of light at the corner of the street. Because she knew that Anna and Eliot were watching, she did not dare look back. Instead she pressed on until finally she was able to turn the corner, and their house was hidden by other houses in the dark.

The night air was cool and sweet and fresh. It touched Cerise’s face like a balm. Casting a quick glance up and down the silent road, she left the sidewalk, slipped across a stranger’s yard, and clambered into the ravine. Clutching Anna’s print to her chest with one hand, she scrambled along the steep hillside, slipping on the twigs and leaves and struggling to stay upright until she reached the place where she’d left her bundles. She patted the darkness until she found them, and then she climbed back onto the road.

Stopping beneath the next streetlight, she dug the worn rectangle of newspaper from her jacket pocket, studied the picture, and reread the words she knew by heart. Then, replacing the scrap in her pocket, she began to walk. Carrying her possessions in her scarred hands and pressing Anna’s photograph against her chest, she left Anna’s neighborhood, walked through neighborhoods filled with houses that loomed as large as castles, houses lit by spotlights and protected by alarms, and when she’d passed out of those neighborhoods, she walked past all-night gas stations and convenience grocery stores, past bars and sex shops and lighted lots where acres of cars were planted in tidy rows like fields of corn, and finally she left the city altogether, following the highway that promised to lead her to the coast.