Sugar Run: A Novel

by Mesha Maren

  Tamara was sweet, telling Miranda she was beautiful and asking her about motherhood. I never even considered having children. I guess my career is my baby. She smiled and tucked Miranda’s hair behind her ear. Good for you, doing both.

  Lee was distant and as the tour continued he grew more so. Slowly the glitz of traveling wore off and Miranda began to notice. The days and places all blended into one another. She was constantly hungry. There was always another drink but never anything to eat. Never enough time to sleep, to bathe.

  In a dark stone city somewhere—Budapest, maybe—Lee filled their room with new friends, a plump bag of coke, and bottles of champagne. Miranda passed out on the couch eventually and woke to a strange man kissing her hair. She pushed him away and stood, blinking, calling out for Lee, but the room was full of strangers. No Tamara and no Lee. She picked her way through the crowd and wandered down the marble stairs to the front desk, where she demanded a different room.

  The air in the new room was thin and blue. She slept deeply until she woke to a sobbing Lee crawling into bed. Don’t leave me like that, baby, he cried, his breath full of warm cognac and cigarettes. You let me fuck her. His cries were jagged, wet holes. Don’t let me do that to you, baby, don’t let me. Somewhere, in a room above them, a violinist was practicing, the notes like a soundtrack to someone else’s dream. Eventually Lee quieted and the music rose, building into something Miranda could make sense of: Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise.”

  In Istanbul they took a wooden boat up the Bosporus. There the seasons had already changed and the wind blew smoke and leaves. On the deck of a teahouse, they huddled close, the wicker chairs creaking as they leaned against each other. They hadn’t spoken of the night in Hungary and both Lee and Tamara acted as if it hadn’t happened and so Miranda preferred to remember it only as a bad dream.

  After their show in Athens they took a break from the tour and split up, Tamara staying in Thessaloniki with an old lover while Miranda and Lee went to Crete. In Heraklion, though, Lee went out alone to the fisherman’s bars, often not returning until morning.

  One night in Barcelona the three of them went to the hotel bar after dinner. Lee and Tamara were discussing some old mutual friend whom Miranda did not know. She sipped her wine and watched a young couple standing by the elevator, their hands running over each other’s bodies. The girl brushed a speck of dirt from the boy’s face, smiled, and turned, bending over her suitcase. Her peach-colored dress slipped up her white legs and the boy placed his hand there, smoothing the fabric against her skin until she laughed and pushed his hand away. Miranda watched the twinness of them, faces so young, the desire coursing equally between them, and something in her ached, a burning lodged behind her sternum. She was seventeen. They were most likely her age but to her their dance-dream of love seemed impossibly, childishly naive.

  “I’m going to buy cigarettes,” she announced, walking out of the bar without looking back. She could have bought them there at the hotel but she needed a moment alone, away from Tamara and Lee.

  Rain began to fall while she was at the kiosk. The season was changing here too, a damp cold leaking in from the sea. Fall, Miranda thought, but the word seemed strange, connected only to some other part of her history. These past four weeks had been the longest of her life.

  The rain fell harder as she ran across the narrow street toward the yellow lights of the hotel. Through the bright window she could see Tamara and Lee up at the bar ordering again, and as she watched, a bearded man approached Tamara. Through the fogged glass, she could see him speaking silently and see Tamara turning, her hair swinging out in a single blonde sheet.

  Miranda clattered in out of the rain and stood, shaking her boots off in the doorway. Behind the bar a waiter polished wineglasses, wiping the huge delicate globes deftly, then holding them up against the light.

  “No, I’m not lying,” Tamara said. She sat on a stool facing the young man while Lee stood behind her, propped up against the bar.

  “But why not tell your audience where the song came from?” The bearded man’s English was strong but accented. “Why not simply say the song is ‘Fear Is the Driving Wheel’ by Cissy Jackson? You wouldn’t conceive of singing one of Bellini’s arias without giving credit to him, would you?”

  Tamara shook her head and ran her fingers through her hair. Lee leaned in closer and placed his hand on her shoulder.

  “No, no, it’s not the same at all,” he said. “With these traditional songs it’s, well, it’s part of a tradition more than an individual. She’s just channeling that—”

  “But it’s not a traditional. Cissy Jackson wrote and recorded that song in April of 1939.”

  “No one can prove that she wrote it.” Tamara grabbed her glass of red by its impossibly thin stem. “She was probably just performing something she’d heard other musicians around her play.”

  “No,” the man insisted, rocking back and forth on his stool. “No, that’s very unlikely, no one has ever heard that song sung by anyone but Cissy Jackson. If it were a traditional song, it would have surfaced somewhere else as well.”

  “Fine.” Tamara set her glass down and the liquid leapt up the sides. “I’m inspired. Her song inspires me, so I sing it.”

  “It’s called art,” Lee said.

  “It doesn’t bother me that you sing it.” The man would not look at Lee but directed his gaze back at Tamara instead. “I just don’t understand why you can’t attribute.”

  “It’s not about where you get your inspiration.” Lee tried again to catch his eye. “It’s what you do with it.”

  “And who’s listening for her name?” Tamara said. “She’s dead. I sing it now.”

  “But the truth in that song is Jackson’s truth, not yours.”

  “Truths don’t belong to any one person.”

  The man smiled and his smile was surprisingly warm. “That’s good but stealing someone else’s truth, even if it mirrors yours, is still stealing,” he said, raising his glass of beer. “Why not do like Hedy West? She has no problem admitting where her lyrics come from.”

  “What makes you such an expert on American music?”

  The man nodded toward Miranda. “Your friend, I believe, is waiting for you.”

  Tamara spun on her stool. “Oh, you,” she said, and she sounded exhausted. “What are you doing?”

  Miranda found herself smiling a little. She didn’t know what to say. She looked to Lee but he seemed suddenly absorbed in his drink.

  Tamara’s eyes narrowed and snapped. “Why are you smiling?”

  Miranda stepped closer, shaking her head. “No, no. It’s just interesting, he’s talking about that song we sing—”

  “‘Fear Is the Driving Wheel’ by Cissy Jackson.” The man nodded.

  “That one she says the universe gave her.” Miranda really was smiling now.

  “Fuck you.” Tamara rose up off her stool. “Fuck you, you little fucking bitch.” She streamed across the room and out of the bar.

  Lee closed his eyes, pressing his fingers against his temple.

  Miranda stared down at the parquet floor and squeezed her pack of cigarettes in her fist. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Lee pushed himself away from the bar and headed out without looking at her. “I knew it wasn’t a good idea to bring you on this trip,” he said.

  Miranda felt her tongue swell inside her mouth, filling up with all the things she couldn’t say. She couldn’t move and she couldn’t say a thing. The elevator doors closed behind Lee.

  “Hey,” the bearded man said. “Sorry about all that. Can I buy you a drink?”

  Their show was in Bordeaux the next night and Tamara and Miranda still had not spoken. Miranda also refused to talk to Lee, who had spent most of the previous night in Tamara’s room comforting her but apparently not really helping because all day Tamara was still sulky, curled up in the corner of the greenroom couch, blue-gray smoke trailing out of her mouth.

  On stage Tamara skipped “Fear
Is the Driving Wheel” and dove straight into “Patchwork Heart.” Miranda stood two steps behind, squinting at the audience—a small and distant hurdle between herself and the end of her night.

  Halfway through the song Tamara’s breath came short, the words escaping only half-formed. She stopped midverse. The band continued for two measures until she sliced her hand across her throat.

  “Bordeaux,” she called out to the audience. “Bordeaux, what do you know of friendship?”

  Her voice was deep and smoky.

  “Do you know who this is?” She was smiling, waving her hand at Miranda.

  Miranda’s heart sped up.

  The audience was nothing but a dark, rumpled mass.

  “You know who this is?”

  Lee’s wife, a small voice called, joined then by a few others. Miranda Golden.

  “Yeah.” Tamara’s voice was strong now. “You know who this fucking kid was when I met her? She could barely sing.”

  Miranda’s head throbbed and the lights burned her eyes. She looked toward Lee.

  “You know who invited her? Gave her a chance?”

  Miranda felt the audience move in. They were invited now, in the conversation.

  “Who trained her and showed her that she had a voice that could sing? Me.” Tamara spat the words out fast and the audience bellowed.

  Miranda watched as Lee turned slowly toward Tamara but did not say anything.

  “And you know how she fucking repays me?”

  The audience was hungry now and Miranda could feel herself shrinking. She should have seen this moment coming, ever since her first interactions with Tamara, the catlike circling and sizing up. It always seemed to happen like this with the women she looked up to; with Bella also, things had suddenly shifted inexplicably. She could feel tears forming, clogging her throat. She could not cry in front of this audience, they would eat her alive. Run, she thought, feeling the heat of the lights shift to the back of her head as she turned. Run, run, she urged herself.

  The backstage was dim and full of movement but Miranda pushed through into the greenroom—a blur of sconced lights and table of half-eaten food—and out the emergency exit. The night was cold but brilliant and the fire escape led down to the back parking lot. The puddles in the lot were scabbed over with thin crusts of ice and Miranda tracked her way between them, crunching the brittle crystals under her heels. At the edge of the lot was a low fence and, beyond that, the highway, glistening.

  She was picked up by the first rig that passed, a Spanish trucker on his way to Santander.

  “You are traveling alone?” the man said, looking at her there in her yellow floral dress in the open doorway of his truck.

  Miranda nodded and took him in—square jaw, bright eyes, and a beer belly. He had a kind face. She climbed up into the cab.

  “You are cold?” he said, pulling the rig back onto the road.

  Miranda shook her head. She was too astonished to feel cold. She liked the comfort of the cab, though, the cushioned seat and spread of dashboard lights, and everything else black, just the trail of the road ahead and, up close, a darkness so complete she could not even see her feet. It comforted her, this bodilessness.

  “You are going where?” The trucker was nothing but a thick voice, his rough silhouette barely visible, reflected spectrally in the glass.

  “I gotta get back home to my baby boy.”

  “In Spain?”

  Miranda shook her head. Though her breasts had quit throbbing weeks ago, she felt a new ache now, a full-body I-must-hold-him-right-now kind of pain.

  “You have problems with your husband.”

  It was not a question and so Miranda did not feel obliged to answer. The statement just sat there between them until the trucker spoke again, quietly.

  “You like France?”

  Miranda let her answers come slower and slower until they were both comfortable with the silence.

  She slept and the seat held her, cupped close, until she woke to a bright spread of outdoor lights spilling across both sides of the road.

  “We stop here,” the trucker said.

  They were at the Spanish border, the Pyrenees rising up around them in the moonlight. The air had turned sharp with cold but the parking lot was full of voices and engines, steam rising off the hoods of the trucks and mixing with the smoke of cigarettes, drivers leaning in to talk close over the grind of gears and blast of air brakes. Outside of his rig, the Spanish trucker looked different, old enough to be Miranda’s father. He wrapped his coat around her shoulders and led her past the diesel tanks and over to a huddle of restaurants. The other drivers hushed as she walked by and the Spaniard put his hand lightly on her shoulder and herded her straight for the building with a blinking red sign that said la sirena.

  “I know a girl here, will let you stay with her. The little sister of my wife,” he said, pointing to the counter inside where a black-haired girl was pouring a huge stein of beer. “Come, first we get a hot shower?”

  Alone and naked in the shower Miranda began shaking. The tiny room was as blank as a cell: tiled ceiling, tiled walls, tiled floor, and a shower activated by coins. Miranda gripped her fist of metal money and shook. The water was warm but something inside her convulsed, wrenched out a jagged, uncontrollable shiver. She pictured baby Kaleb and she pictured the distances, the ocean between her and him, the hundreds of miles between herself and anyone who loved her, if anyone still did. She thought back to those months she’d spent living with Bella, watching and admiring her. She had always wanted a mother like Bella, a woman so shimmery that even her bad choices were beautiful, a woman you could write songs about, like Gram Parsons’s “Brass Buttons,” not a quietly bitter, death-smelling mother like her own. And Bella encouraged Miranda’s adoration until that last week of her pregnancy when Lee had joined them in LA and Bella accused Miranda of stealing her jewelry and, worse, called her cloying and pitiful. Lee, baby, see, look how she follows you everywhere. She does that to me too, nearly smothers me, she can’t do anything on her own.

  When the shower cut off, the noise from outside the room rushed in and Miranda pressed more coins into the slot, focusing on the splatter rhythm of water falling. She used all the coins but she did not wash herself or loosen the grip of her fists.

  When she walked into La Sirena the trucker was halfway through a tall beer.

  “Ah, my American girl!” he called, waving Miranda toward the bar. He slapped the stool until she sat down. “Cristina!” he said, pointing to the woman who was stooped over a bucket of ice. “¡Cerveza!”

  “My American!” he proclaimed as Cristina set down Miranda’s beer.

  Cristina’s lips parted to show a dark gap between her front teeth. She had a soft round face, with huge luminous eyes.

  “She speaks no English,” the trucker said.

  The trucker ordered pork and green olives, eggs and soup and mounds of white bread. Miranda was shaking less but she still could not eat. The trucker insisted, though, pushing toward her a plate piled with cheese, and after the first few bites it went down easily. The room was warm and dim, lit only by a row of small lamps and blinking pinball machines. Business was slow and when the trucker invited her Cristina came around to their side of the bar. She ate quickly, licking her fingers, stuffing her cheeks, and glancing up at Miranda.

  “I tell Cristina you are having husband problems,” the trucker said. “Cristina, she knows husband problems.”

  Miranda smiled and nodded at Cristina and offered her some beer. She took it in both hands and drank, the huge stein nearly covering her entire face, and in the quiet Miranda heard her teeth clink against the glass.

  After his third beer the trucker stood and stepped away from the bar. Miranda moved to follow but the girl called out to her.

  “Espere aquí,” she said, and then to the trucker. “Dile que espere aquí.”

  “Wait here,” the trucker said, bread crumbs trembling in his mustache. “She will take care, just wait here
.”

  Cristina cleared the plates from the counter, disappearing behind a swinging wooden door, and Miranda listened to the pinball machines bleating out some looping tune and, outside, the constant engines rolling like a tide. She was grateful for the fact that she and Cristina spoke no common language, grateful for the easy silence that came with it. She didn’t want to speak anymore, didn’t want to say a word until the next morning when she would call Lee and tell him she needed to go home.

  At 3 a.m. Cristina flipped the sign on the door and took Miranda’s hand. She led the way to her room, a tiny closet around back of the restaurant that reminded Miranda of images she’d seen from monasteries. The single bed was made tight with striped cotton sheets, and the wooden dresser was laid out with a metal washbasin, porcelain pitcher, comb, brush, and mirror. Miranda was overcome with the perfect simplicity of the moment. She wanted to stay there, she thought, in that little room forever, to climb inside this other life and disappear.

  “Venga,” Cristina said, slipping her shoes off and moving toward the bed. “Y cierre la puerta.”

  Jodi woke on the morning of the fourth day of rain to the sound of Ricky’s frantic voice.

  “The tarp’s leaking,” he called from the bedroom doorway. “Water’s coming in.”

  Eyes half-open, Jodi dragged herself up and into the next room to see the tarp hanging above the bed like a giant blue bladder. Miranda had painted yellow stars across the fabric and they quivered now as it drooped from the beams, so low that Donnie could bounce on the mattress and touch it.

  “Hey,” Miranda called to him from the doorway. “Hey, sweetie, no, get down from there.”

  Rosalba helped and together they all hauled the mattresses out and lined them up beside Miranda and Jodi’s bed. While the boys ran back and forth across the one big mass of mattress, Miranda pulled Jodi into the back room. She pushed the door shut and leaned against it, pressing Jodi’s hand up between her legs.