The Accidentals

by Minrose Gwin

  Then the elevator binged. As it climbed, I quickly sprayed the lower part of the mirror and wiped it down. Then I remained on my knees but didn’t spray again. People want mirrors to sparkle, but they don’t want to see the labor that goes into it, the filthy rags. They don’t want to inhale the cleaner.

  When the woman gets on, I try not to stare, which is impossible since the elevator is all glass, nothing but reflection.

  This visitor to Darcy is as non-Darcy as you can get. First off, the woman’s a shade of burnished copper. She glows. I think she might be Spanish or Greek. Second, she has blond hair, maybe a wig, it’s hard to tell. Third, her outfit’s to die for: the tiny gold miniskirt, orange blouse, bright green jacket, with a necklace, jade maybe, gold earrings, and a thousand bracelets that tied all those colors together perfectly. A big woman and shapely, her lips candied apples, her nails shockingly chartreuse. She looks like a giant parrot.

  And she’s singing. Not loud, but definitely singing. And not words, but a kind of backup sound: ba, ba, ba, boom, baby, baby, baby.

  I’m still kneeling, my heel pressing into my private part, one hand holding my cleaning rag, the other my bottle of cleaning spray, as if I’m about to spray and wipe down the woman’s legs. As the elevator descends with a thump, I look up at the woman, up the woman’s skirt to her girdle and garters to be precise. My heel shifts as the elevator hits the ground floor, and I feel a throb, strangely familiar. What’s this?

  The woman looks down at me. “Sure wouldn’t want your job, girl. People can be pigs.” Her voice surprisingly deep.

  Suddenly I feel a bit irked, a bit like a country hick. What a nerve! “It’s not so bad,” I say, “better than cleaning rooms, taking out garbage. What do you do for a living?” I’m surprised at myself for asking such a question. It never paid to be pushy with the guests. Doug conducted meetings about what he called employee etiquette. Pushy was a word he used often.

  The elevator doors open. The woman presses the Hold button, then leans down and stares me in the eye.

  In the mirror, I see my face flush. I shrink down. I need this job.

  “I’m a vocalist,” the woman says. “Used to work at the Blue Note in Chicago till it closed. Now I drive up and down the highway singing wherever there’s the moola to pay me. Was heading north to Indy but can’t see my hand in front of my face in this bitch of a fog. Now I’m out a gig and stuck in this shithole. Where are we, anyhow? Where can a lady go for a good stiff drink?”

  “This is Darcy, Indiana,” I say. “It’s a dry county. You have to go to the bootlegger.”

  The elevator has begun to buzz angrily. The woman slams her free hand against my clean mirror. “Oh man, this place’s all fucked up.”

  I sit back on my haunches. The elevator buzzes nonstop now. “Shut up,” the woman says to the doors. She props her backend up against one, which bumps against her hips. She lifts the pointy toe of her shoe and levels it at me. “Girl, you need to get off your cute little ass. Get yourself out of this godforsaken place.”

  I remain frozen on my knees before the woman, as if she’s some sort of queen who requires homage.

  “You got a brain in that head of yours?” she continues. “Don’t be a damn fool. Use it.”

  Then she’s gone, clicking across the lobby floor, popping her umbrella open at the exact moment her high heels touch the mud-splattered mat and the automatic doors open onto the fog, then close behind her as if she’d never existed, as if I’d conjured her up.

  The doors of the elevator close, though it doesn’t move. Inside, I feel suddenly entrapped. I turn in a circle. Everywhere I look I see a drab pigeon where there’d been a parrot; staring back at me from every side an ash-faced, mousy-haired girl in a stained navy-blue uniform. A stringy ponytail. Then, flash forward, and it’s as if my whole life has become a reflection of myself in that moment, a reflection of a reflection. In the mirror I can see myself at Nancy’s age, then Elsa’s, then older than Elsa, my upper arms loose-skinned, swinging as I work, hair dingy as old snow.

  That night I write a letter to my father, my first. (Somehow, I’d never gotten around to telling him where I was, that I was doing just fine.) I say I’m ready to come home. Slut and whore still ring in my ears so I don’t say I’ve missed him. It isn’t that I’ve forgiven him or June. It’s just that I see my father as the Open button to my life, a life far away from Darcy’s everlasting fog. (Is there a seed of coldness in that calculation?)

  Dad wrote back in return mail and sent a one-way plane ticket to New Orleans. He would pick me up the following Thursday, October 25, at 8 P.M. In the letter he said he wanted me back, I had a good mind, I needed to finish high school so I could go to a good college, I needed to come on home. I cried a little over the letter, then straightened my shoulders and started to pack.

  The night before I was to leave, Elsa and Nancy and Grace had their own little farewell party at the Best Western. We sneaked up to 312 for old time’s sake. Nancy, who’d taken the night off and gone to the bootlegger, came in with a jug of Mogen David and a six-pack of Pabst. We propped ourselves on the beds, put our feet up, and drank until three in the morning. I’d bought a Polaroid for the occasion, and each of us took pictures of the other two and then passed them around, laughing wildly at our images, until all the film was gone. When we finished, first the wine, then the beer, we lay down and went to sleep fully dressed, Nancy and I on one bed, Elsa on the other. We slept well, having not watched television and therefore not knowing that two world leaders were playing chicken with the planet, that the three of us, along with everybody else, were about to be toast.

  The next day I gave Elsa the old Ford and my payment book, and Elsa drove me to catch my plane in Indy. When we said goodbye at the airport, Elsa didn’t cry but I could tell she felt like it. Her head throbbed, she said, and it wasn’t just the wine. She’d never gotten used to children leaving; she’d lost her two to the pleasures of water, one to the Atlantic coast and one to the Pacific. She forced her big motherly smile and tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear. She told me I’d always have a home, all I had to do was show up.

  Elsa had saved my life and we both knew it, but she never asked for anything back. In time, she said, my memory of that year would dim and after a while it would seem insignificant in the greater scheme of things. “Just a blip, honey.”

  Elsa was right. I never wrote or called. We would never talk again, never lay eyes on each other, though I thought of her every single day for the rest of my life.

  THAT LAST WEEK in October the whole Midwest was ablaze with color. As the plane took off from Indy, the spent soybean fields were a sea of gold in the morning sun. How they glowed as I peered out the window, how full of promise they seemed!

  What I found remarkable, though, and what I’ll remember my whole life, is the shadow of the plane on the ground. I watched it all the way to New Orleans and it gave me the sensation of somehow watching a trace of myself, something, someone (not me, but somehow tethered to me) down there, someone whose predilections, whims, and longings moved surely along with mine, remaining at once remote and intimate. My own baby girl, who might have been but was not sleeping in my arms, at that very instant shooting upward, right past my window, rising from the slosh and trickle of what our story might have been, her little life locked in an endless orbit around mine.

  I closed my eyes. There’s a smoothness to sleep, an ease in the going under, followed by a terror, a struggle, then a deeper ease. A bubble in the water, a flash of silvery scales, then the long dive into dark.

  The attendant woke me, bringing me the Coke I’d ordered. I savored the Coke, not having had one in a while. And as the plane began its descent, the shadow, first against the muddy brown of the lake, then the green Delta land, drew closer and closer until, in the split second before the wheels touched down, it reattached itself and I took my last sip.

  18

  June

  WHEN DAD BROUGHT GRACE HOME FROM THE AIRPORT
in New Orleans, it was past eleven and the Russians were camped out down in Cuba about to blow us all up. I’d been watching TV all night to see when I would need to go to the basement and shield myself against nuclear holocaust. Dad had told me to keep up with the news, he wouldn’t be long, three hours at the most. I pointed out that it wasn’t the most opportune time for my sister to get on an airplane, but he was intent on getting her home, it was all he could talk about. He wanted the three of us to be together again, come what may. He’d even called Frances to see if she wanted to come down to Opelika. She told him he was being silly, life had to go on, people couldn’t be running down to their basements at the drop of a hat.

  Dad told her she was a fool and an idiot, whistling Dixie while the world was on the brink of annihilation. For days he had been in a frenzy of preparation, grimly lugging a zillion jugs of water and cases of Beanee Weenees and Chef Boyardee and bunches of carrots down the basement stairs. Carrots? I’d said (carrots were not my favorite vegetable), but he said raw foods were good for you and carrots were good for the eyes, plus they kept indefinitely. The earth would be poisoned by the Bomb, who knew the next time we were going to get anything fresh. He sent me out to our spent garden to dig potatoes. He’d papered the insides of the window frames with aluminum foil and duct tape so that the basement was black as pitch without the one bare lightbulb, which he said would go off once the Bomb was dropped, leaving us in total darkness. He’d stockpiled candles, matches, flashlights, and batteries galore, plus a Geiger counter so he could measure the radiation outside. I pointed out to him the obvious: that if he stepped outside to measure it, the radiation, if there were any, would kill us all. He looked at me and rolled his eyes as if I’d said something very stupid instead of something very smart. He looked out the kitchen window at our garden plot, the former site of his bomb shelter, and sighed with regret.

  When the phone call came, I’d gotten sick of looking at the trench between Walter Cronkite’s eyebrows and gone to bed. I’d turned my light out, not because I was sleeping but because I was afraid, and not of the Russians but of my weasel of a sister. I hadn’t heard word one from Grace since she’d sashayed out of the hospital and gone on the lam for eight months. The last time I’d seen her, at our pitiful little Christmas gathering in Frances’s living room, she’d looked through me like I was a piece of air. I’d hoped she would stop being mad and write me long heartfelt letters with lots of details about being pregnant and giving birth, what it was like, how much it hurt. I imagined pregnancy as a constant state of pain and affliction as you mutated into a human rubber band. I wanted to know what to expect when it came my time so I wouldn’t be afraid. I saw my sister as a pioneer in the dark wilderness of reproduction. She’d hack out the thorny path, and I’d glide along behind.

  After Dad had taken her to New Orleans to live with Frances, I’d opened the mailbox each afternoon with a flutter of anticipation, hoping for a letter in the familiar loopy handwriting. Over the months the box had for some reason become a gathering place for a colony of tiny black ants. They ran in frenzied circles atop the mail we did get, and I’d have to knock them off every letter and flyer I pulled out. It was almost as if Grace had sent them, a notion I found so deeply disturbing that I gave up on fetching the mail altogether.

  Nonetheless I worried when my sister up and disappeared. I’d heard of people kidnapping babies from hospitals but never mothers. Still, the world being what it was, I begged Dad to hire a detective, file a missing person’s report, do what people normally did when a girl of sixteen vanished into thin air. I pictured her spread-eagle in some back alley off Bourbon Street, blood pooled beneath her ponytail. But Dad said no, we needed to wait. Grace had walked out under her own steam, that’s the way she needed to come back. She had two feet and a brain, though not much of one.

  When the phone rang, I about jumped right out of my skin. As I ran down the hall to answer it, I wondered if Grace’s plane had been shot down, like that U-2 spy plane, parts of her scattered in a million pieces over several states.

  When I answered, a woman asked to speak to Dad. I said he was unavailable. He’d taught me never to say he was gone when I was home alone.

  “Is this Grace McAlister?” asked the woman.

  I hesitated a second; then, without batting an eye, I up and said yes, it was, yes, I was Grace McAlister.

  The woman cleared her throat. “I’m calling from St. Vincent’s Infant Asylum in New Orleans. I’m so sorry to inform you there’s been a terrible accident.” She sounded like she was reading the script from a play.

  My head began to swim. Was it Dad? Had there been a wreck?

  “The baby, at the orphanage,” she said, her voice catching. “The one waiting for adoption. Your baby girl.” She faltered, then went on. “She slipped in the bath and, I’m so sorry, but she drowned.”

  I sank to the floor. Grace’s little child still in an orphanage? When Dad told me Frances had reneged on the plan to adopt it, I’d been glad. I’d thought maybe it stood a decent chance in life, having been given up to a big beautiful world of possibility. Now I felt like I’d reached into the chicken coop for an egg and come out with a rattlesnake. A little girl! Why hadn’t she been adopted? And here she was dead? I flushed with anger, and something else: the shame of it. Here we were, my father and I, her grandfather and aunt, her one and only family, sitting down here in Opelika one hour away going about our ordinary lives and that little baby girl without a home! My father had to have known this, known our own flesh and blood needed us. She must have been eight months old. Now she would always be that age; she would never be anything else.

  “Are you all right?” the woman asked.

  I said I’d tell my father. I said he would call. I didn’t recognize my own voice.

  WHEN DAD AND Grace got in, I was lying in my bed with the lights off, bug-eyed, on fire with rage. I’d cried a little for Grace’s baby girl, but it’s hard to cry for someone you don’t know. When I heard Dad ask Grace if she was hungry and the familiar voice murmur, No thanks, my throat closed and my eyes stung. Earlier that afternoon I’d made an apple cobbler and set it out on the kitchen counter where she’d see it first thing. I hadn’t touched a bite so it would stay pretty and fresh, and I’d made sure Dad had picked up some vanilla ice cream on his way home from work that afternoon. I’d left a note saying, Welcome Home, ice cream in icebox (smile) and put a big spoon beside the cobbler for her to use when she dished some out for herself.

  I listened for the opening of drawers, the clatter of silverware, the squeak of the freezer door, signs that she’d changed her mind and was settling down to some cobbler and ice cream. Before the phone call I had been poised to leap out of bed and throw open the door to my room and go galloping down the hall. I had been prepared to butt into her giraffe-style, the way I used to do, and throw my arms around her and bring her home, back to herself, and to me, her one and only sister.

  Instead I heard her go into the bathroom and then a while later into her room. Yesterday morning I’d changed the sheets on her bed, turned it down to look welcoming. I’d put some late blooming mums in a vase on her dresser. I wanted her to know I’d gone to some trouble for her return. Dad would have never in a million years thought of the cobbler or the fresh sheets and most certainly not the flowers. I was hoping she’d come across the hall and open my door a crack the way she used to, to see if I was still up, and when she saw I was, come on into my room and plop herself down on my bed and tell me about the outside world (Indiana of all places, it might as well have been the moon!), what she’d done there, how she’d lived.

  But Grace stayed put, quiet as a mouse, a line of light snaking its way under her door and down the hall to my room. I imagined her unpacking, putting her things in the closet next to her old clothes. When she’d left for New Orleans to have her baby, she hadn’t taken much in the way of clothes. She’d thrown a few things into Mama’s old suitcase, Dad rushing to get her out of town, not being able to stand
the sight of that belly of hers. During the time she’d been gone, I’d tried on every single garment in her closet and drawers, some of it several times. I’d look at myself in the full-length mirror on her closet door and squint my eyes so that sometimes I’d look a little like her. Once I wore one of her outfits I particularly liked, a powder-blue skirt and blouse, to school. All day I was a nervous wreck, dreading the moment I’d drop food on it or tear it or otherwise damage it. When I got home that afternoon and hung it nice and neat and unspotted back in her closet, I heaved a sigh of relief.

  Dad had stopped at her door and was saying something to her through it. I didn’t catch his words but his voice had a different tone than when he spoke to me. Talking to me, his words trudged along a steep, narrow path on the side of a deep canyon; with her they flapped and fluttered, then lifted off. Back in my bride of Christ days, I’d studied the parables. As I lay in bed listening to Dad speak through the door and Grace answer, their exchanges sounding so oddly intimate, what leapt into my mind was the prodigal son, that slouch who threw away his inheritance and then came home and got the fatted calf and the rings and fine robe, et cetera. The good son, the one who stayed home and worked hard and helped his father, well, guess where he was left. High and dry, that’s where.

  When I heard Dad’s voice across the hall, all that goodness and light rolling off his tongue like melted butter as he spoke through the door to her, the daughter who’d made such a mess of everything over the past year and a half (and obviously well before that), who’d left without a word, abandoning not only us but her own little child, I wanted to murder them both in cold blood.

  AFTER THE HOUSE got dark and the only sound was the murmur of news on Dad’s radio, I went into his room. I went in without knocking. He was sitting up in bed and staring at the wall, a peculiar smile on his face.

  When I told him about the baby, he just shook his head, not looking particularly upset or surprised. Then I asked him why. Why hadn’t she been adopted? Why was she languishing in an orphanage? I pictured her in a crib in a large room of screaming babies. I didn’t know much about babies then, but now I know that at six or seven months, they are sitting up and trying to scoot across the floor. They are old enough to know their people, to recognize a dear face, old enough to know what they’re missing.