I Mean You No Harm

by Beth Castrodale

  Layla made no effort to wipe away her tears.

  “Can you do that?”

  “Yes,” Layla said, feeling like an impostor.

  And she did stay, until Alice settled back and closed her eyes, until her smile faded into sleep.

  When, after Alice’s death, Layla found herself with more time for her art, she did what she’d almost always done when trying to figure out a direction for new work: she spent hours sketching whatever rose to the top of her mind, things concrete and abstract, hoping something worthy of more lasting attention would come forward. At first, nothing did, and the sketching felt like just a way to occupy her hands.

  When the alien dreams started, Layla sketched the figures from them, hoping she might make some sense of things, if not identify the messages that Kiki believed the dreams held. She started with representational drawings of the toast maker, the vacuumer, the baby cuddler, others. She even committed a couple of the aliens to canvas. But the sketches and paintings didn’t help her make sense of anything, much less start her down some fruitful new path in her work. The paintings looked like the worst kind of carnival prizes, and they made the aliens seem smaller, less consequential than they’d been in her dreams—and penned in, like caged animals.

  Then that memory of Alice returned—or, rather, it refused Layla’s attempts to push it back into the darkness, to refuse its pain and sweetness. When she opened her sketchbook to the memory, the drawings came quickly, one after the other, soon followed by the studies that, eventually, became the painting she’d submitted for the juried exhibit: Sara, Staying.

  Alice was the subject of the painting. Sara was the shadow that fell across her, and the hand that held on to Alice’s; the rest of her was invisible, standing in for the viewer. A silver-onyx bracelet circled Sara’s wrist—the bracelet that was now in Layla’s jewelry box but that she could never bring herself to wear.

  The painted Alice was the same age the real Alice had been when she died, eighty-two. But her eyes were their old clear blue, unfogged by dementia. Although she wore one of the nightgowns that had become her round-the-clock clothing, she reclined on the family’s old plaid picnic blanket in Whitfield Park, where Alice and Grandpa Roy had taken Layla, and Sara before her, for years of Fourth of Julys and other occasions. Though an approaching storm darkened the background, sunlight filled the foreground, glinting a silver object at Alice’s side—the only real heirloom of the Shawn family—a baby rattle that had been passed down, mother to daughter, through five generations.

  For Layla, producing these sketches and studies, and then the final painting, didn’t help her make sense of anything, didn’t solve any problems. Where her mother was concerned, both of those things were an impossibility; Layla had never expected otherwise. The gift of this work was the process of creating it, the way that made her feel closer to her mother and grandmother, even as it took her out of herself. When the painting was done, she faced the grief of having ended that process, a grief gentler than she was accustomed to, and mingled with the sense that she’d changed, just slightly and for the better.

  A chiming sounded to Layla’s right: her phone alarm. She shut it off and checked her texts: nothing from Unknown, thank God.

  Yesterday’s message troubled her a little less now, maybe only because she’d had a good night’s sleep. Quite possibly, the text had been sent in error or by some religio-bot that was broadcasting Bible verses far and wide, hoping to save humanity. Either way, she was going to try not to take it personally, unless another text would give her reason to.

  Climbing from bed, Layla caught a whiff of bacon and something cinnamony—sweet rolls? scones? She couldn’t remember the last time she’d awoken to the smell of a breakfast prepared by someone else. She was grateful to the cook and grateful that for as long as she and Bette were on the road, she wouldn’t be alone with her worries.

  Chapter 5

  I-70 West, Near the

  Indiana Border

  “Wait. What? How could one person have that much, uh, output?”

  “I never believed it was one person.” Bette checked the rear-view mirror, then pulled into the passing lane. “I suspected a cabal, and I wasn’t alone.”

  “A cabal?”

  “Think about it, Layla. First these guys got screwed on unionizing. Next came the cuts in their pay and benefits. Then came the layoff axe, and they saw it was only a matter of time before it started swinging for them.”

  Layla sneezed into her shoulder.

  “Bless you.” Bette surged right, back into the travel lane. “Add to that the fact that ninety-nine percent of the managers were assholes.”

  “It was that bad?”

  “It was that bad. So, it wasn’t hard for me to imagine the inciting line: ‘Hey. Guys. How about shittin’ in the inventory?’”

  “Ugh.” Layla pictured a warehouse worker looking left and right, then dropping his pants. “Were you able to catch any of them?”

  “Nope. Those bastards were either damn smart or damn lucky. Me and one of the other security guys went through hours of CCTV footage, and it was either Dullsville or bursts of static, like someone destroyed the incriminating stuff. We did more foot patrols, but that didn’t help either.”

  Layla spotted the sign ahead, a study in red, white, and blue: “Welcome to Indiana – Crossroads of America – Lincoln’s Boyhood Home.” For a man born long before the dawn of the Interstate Highway System, he sure got around.

  As they crossed the state line, Bette’s gaze lingered in the rear-view mirror, then returned to the road.

  “Listen,” she said. “I’m not heartless. I’m all for power to the people and the rights of working stiffs. But whenever a shift manager spotted a pile of turds at two a.m., guess who got called? Not the president or CEO. Not any of the other powers that be. No, it was another working stiff: me. The only difference being that I was wearing a ‘Security’ shirt and badge. It was on me to file a report and clean up the mess.”

  That responsibility seemed especially onerous for Bette. As Layla remembered from their road trip with Vic, she was a borderline germaphobe, and her neatnik tendencies seemed to have stayed with her. Unlike Layla’s Corolla, which Kiki had dubbed “the roving landfill,” Bette’s truck was so spotless that Layla had wanted to wipe her feet before climbing into it. It didn’t have that new-car smell or a cleaning-product smell. Instead, there seemed to be a clean-room absence of any odor, the kind of environment that would allow single-molecule detection of bad breath, B.O., or farts. For the duration of the trip, Layla would have to be on her best behavior when it came to personal hygiene.

  “I’m sorry you had to deal with that,” Layla said.

  She fought a second sneeze, sure that her allergies were kicking in. The pollen count had been through the roof lately.

  “Don’t feel too sorry. It was a job and paycheck, which is more than a lot of people have. And honestly? When the axe finally fell on me, it was really an act of mercy, and it wasn’t a week before I got this new gig at the hospital, a pretty good one.”

  Bette went silent a moment, then glanced at Layla. “I feel bad bitching, given your current situation.”

  The previous evening, Layla had told Bette about losing her job at the insurance agency.

  “You shouldn’t. We all need to vent. Anyhow, I may have a line on another job.” It was another admin job, this one at Blue Circle Gallery—half the hours and less than half the pay of the insurance gig. Practically the only checks in the plus column were that it would give her more time for her own work, and maybe some helpful connections.

  “That’s great,” Bette said. “I’ll be hoping it comes through for you.”

  Layla thought of the growing distance between herself and the velvet box of money, which remained in Bette’s attic. “It won’t be going anywhere,” Bette had told her just that morning. “If you need it, it’s
yours.” The if was feeling more and more like a when.

  In the silence that fell between them, Layla considered how strange this familiar stretch of road now seemed. Before things got bad with Alice, she’d driven it to Indianapolis countless times, for art or rock shows, for fuck-fight-fuck sessions with Cooper, the only ex she thought of with any regularity, though it had been nearly three years since their end.

  On this road, Layla was used to being a driver, not a passenger, used to her only companion being the radio or silence, and the space these gave her to sing or scheme or let her mind go as blank as the pavement. Now, in the passenger’s seat of this unfamiliar vehicle, next to this unfamiliar person, Layla felt slightly trapped and off kilter. And there was no chance of her mind going blank. It kept wandering back to Vic’s funeral and to her conversation with Bette in the attic.

  “There’s one other thing I meant to ask you the other night,” Layla said. This was perhaps the hardest question of all. “Did Vic believe my mother killed herself? I mean, did he ever see anything in her that suggested she was suicidal?”

  Bette stayed quiet for so long it felt awkward to Layla. She fought an urge to fill the silence.

  At last, Bette said, “I’ll never know, because he hardly ever talked about her, as much as I tried to get him to.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Bette smiled in a private way. “You remember how I was back then.”

  Layla did, all too well.

  “I pulled the usual adolescent shit on him, tried to get under his skin. At some point, for some reason, I got focused on your mom and kept asking about her, like ‘What was she like?’ ‘Why did they split?’ On and on. Part of that, I’m sure, was that I was pissed off at my own mom at the time. I knew she’d hate what I was doing.”

  “And he wouldn’t say anything?”

  “Never. Well, almost never. Whenever I asked about her, he’d get this look in his eye, this distant, sad kind of look like, like—” Bette spun a hand as if trying to reel in the right words. “Like he was still in love with her.”

  “Do you think he was?”

  Bette shrugged. “Who knows? But that was the feeling I got. I also sensed that ending the relationship wasn’t his idea.”

  It wasn’t. Layla knew as much from her grandparents and from her mother’s diaries.

  “You said he almost never talked about my mom. What do you mean?”

  Bette seemed to be thinking through what she wanted to say. “One time, he was sitting in the living room with a game on, and the TV was loud enough that he couldn’t hear me coming up behind him. I crept up close, hoping to give him a scare, and I saw that he was holding a picture. A drawing of himself, a younger version of himself.”

  Layla wondered whether it was the drawing Sara had talked about in her diaries, the one she’d done soon after Vic first came into the diner. She’d described him as “a black-haired Willem Dafoe.”

  “Then he heard me and jumped, got after me for scaring the shit out of him. When I asked him who drew the picture, he wouldn’t tell me, so I kept pushing. Finally, he yelled, ‘Sara! Okay?’ That was one of the few things I knew about your mom, that her name was Sara, and that she was a good girl—in other words, unlike me. Anyhow, before I could ask for a closer look at the drawing, he shoved it back into his pocket.”

  Bette took another glance at the rear-view mirror. “For some reason, the memory of him looking at that picture stuck with me.”

  “Why?”

  Bette stayed quiet a moment, thinking. “I don’t know. I mean, it didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. But it was like it got magnified over the years, maybe because I got my own heart broken a few times, and I felt like I kind of understood more about what might have been going through his mind. I felt like he was maybe trying to reconnect with something he’d lost, something he really missed.” Bette laughed. “Or I got this totally wrong, and he was just remembering the good old days, when he was a looker.”

  Layla thought of the swollen-featured Vic from the funeral home, the stage makeup fooling no one.

  “So, that’s all he said.”

  “Yep. I wish there was more to it. And I wish I had the picture to give to you.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “I have no idea. Haven’t seen it since that day.”

  The drawing of Vic reminded Layla of the other drawing that was still very much on her mind: the one her mother had done of the suspicious-looking guy from the diner. The Wolf. From the start, Layla believed the odds were long that the sketch would help her find her mother’s killer, but they’d never felt longer than they did today. Maybe because she and Bette were driving so far away from home, on this other mission.

  Another sneeze—an ear blaster—pulled her out of her thoughts.

  “There’s Kleenex in the glove compartment,” Bette said. “Help yourself.”

  Layla popped the latch and opened the door. Then she froze. Atop the Kleenex box, nestled between a package of SaniWipes and a bag of trail mix, was a black pistol.

  She closed the compartment, wiped her nose across her sleeve.

  “Sorry,” Bette said, catching the look on Layla’s face. “I should have warned you.”

  “Is it loaded?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  Layla swallowed hard. “Do you always travel with a gun?”

  “No. I mean, not usually. Usually, I keep that baby at work, lock it up there before I leave. And honestly? Marla would kill me if she knew I had it with me now. She hates guns.”

  Layla wasn’t so fond of them either.

  “But I inherited this little thing from Dad, something he called ‘road anxiety.’ Whenever he hit the road for more than a day, whenever he was going someplace new and unfamiliar, he always took a gun.”

  A sign ahead promoted the next exit’s amenities: fast food, gasoline, motels—suggestions of ordinary civilization, to which Layla could return at any time. It felt good to remind herself of that.

  “Why? I mean, what was he so anxious about? What are you so anxious about?” Again, Layla wondered whether there was more to this trip than picking up that art stuff for Jake.

  “I wish I knew. I can’t—”

  Layla waited, but Bette stayed silent. “You can’t what?”

  “I can’t speak for Dad. But for me, that bogeyman most kids are afraid of—the one who lives in the closet or hides under the bed at night—for me, he’s out there.” Bette gestured toward the driver’s side window. “And the farther I go beyond the boundaries of my usual life, the more I sense him, or the threat of him. Crazy, right?”

  It didn’t sound as crazy to Layla as it might have before the creepy packages started arriving, about six months ago. Since then, the thought of getting a gun had crossed her mind more than once. But that felt like inviting more danger into her home.

  “I wouldn’t say crazy. But do you actually feel like you need the gun, or is it more like, you know—a security blanket?”

  The stupidity of this remark embarrassed Layla, but Bette seemed to be thinking it over, taking it seriously.

  “A little of both, I guess.” Again, Bette’s gaze drifted to the rear-view mirror, lingered there, then returned to the road. “But let me reassure you. For the purposes of this trip, that gun’s one hundred percent security blanket. All comfort, no action.”

  “Good.”

  Looking into the side-view mirror, Layla spotted a white car a good distance behind them. From the passing lane, a black truck gained on them, then sped ahead and out of sight.

  Bette glanced her way. “You ever shot a gun?”

  “A few times.”

  “Really?”

  “Not enough to be any good at it.”

  Always, it had been someone else’s idea of fun.

  The first time, when Layla was in mid
dle school, her grandpa helped her shoot a twelve-gauge at a sheet of target rings nailed to a tree. The bullet hit the tree on her third or fourth try, but never the sheet.

  The second time, in college, she went skeet shooting with a boyfriend and missed every single clay pigeon launched into the sky. It wasn’t even close. She wondered what happened to the bullets that sailed into oblivion, fearing that she’d unknowingly killed tiny woodland creatures, or that something even worse went unseen.

  The third time, during their early, honeymoon phase, Cooper took her to meet his “weird-ass” cousin (Cooper’s words) at a firing range. “He’s an ace with a pistol,” Cooper said, “and he’ll show you some tricks of the trade.”

  The cousin did. Between rants about “quantum spirits,” between swigs from the flask in his tactical vest, he coached her in firing stance and “target picturing.”

  One of her shots hit dead center. But all the others (ten? fifteen? twenty?) landed beyond the target rings.

  “Get that target in the front sight; forget about the rear one. Pause your breath as you fire. Don’t hold it.” The cousin gave advice like this, with increasing impatience, after most of her failed shots. In the end, as he packed up the gear, he told her, “With time and practice, you’ll reach quantum level. I can see it in your eyes.”

  She never got clear on what he meant, and she never saw him again.

  “I bet you’re better than you think,” Bette said.

  “That’s very kind. But I wouldn’t want anyone’s life to be in my hands. Not where guns are concerned.”

  Bette grabbed more potato chips from the bag on the center console and crunched them down, not dropping a crumb. Her appetite had returned, and then some, and Layla was feeling more confident that she’d not need to use the slip of paper that Marla had handed her on the sly.

  “My number,” Marla said. “Just in case.”

  Just in case what? Layla had wondered, until she remembered how concerned Marla had been about Bette making the trip.