Backseat Saints

by Joshilyn Jackson

  Now Mrs. Fancy’s shoulders shook, and she paused and breathed deep in and out. Ro would have gone and hugged her and soothed her into silence with pats and there, theres, but I stayed where I was, smelling useful information and almost hating myself for it. At last she said, “Ivy lived four months. Janine thought she was in the clear. We all did. One night, Ivy stopped breathing. She stopped everything. To this day, no one knows why. Babies sometimes do that.

  “Janine didn’t leave him. I couldn’t make sense of it. They’d married because of Ivy, and then there wasn’t any Ivy anymore. He was hell, and I was sure his fists had something to do with the baby coming early. Still, she stayed. I couldn’t fathom it. Now I see you, no babies to hold you, staying and staying. You’ve stayed years now, so there must be parts of it that are sweet. There must be other parts that are so regular to you, you’ve come to think this is what life is like. You can’t see there’s other ways to live.” She turned away from the window and looked at me, and I could see the whites of her eyes had gone red, but she wasn’t quite crying. “Ro, I’m telling you. There’s other ways to live.”

  I held myself still. I had no answer I could say to her.

  She said, “My Janine, she cut her hair all feathery down the sides when she was pregnant. Before, it had been all one length, with bangs. She got heavy with the baby, too, soft in her belly and legs.

  “After, she stayed with him, but she started growing the layers out of her hair. She took the baby weight off, too. Slowly, walking every day, eating more salad. One day, I think she looked in the mirror and saw how she was back to being herself. Her same long hair. Her same flat tummy. She looked like the girl she’d been before she got stupid in the back of his car after a dance.” She sighed, a private sound, telling the story with her face to the pansy plants. “That’s when she left him.”

  “Mrs. Fancy,” I said, to get her attention. When she turned and met my eyes, I said, “What you said doesn’t sound like shrink talk. It sounds like good sense. That’s all I’m doing. Trying to remember the girl I was before him, and be that girl again.”

  That seemed to make sense to her in a way my stolen Oprah explanation hadn’t. She blinked twice and then said, “Fine. If using my phone helps, come over and use it. If I’m not here, you have my spare key. Just know that I will drive you to my church’s safe house the very moment you are ready.”

  She turned, suddenly brisk, and walked to the door. I could see her wanting out of the room where Ivy’s things were secreted in a shoebox, where she’d said Ivy’s name.

  I said, “If you want to try to get to your book club, don’t let me hold you.”

  She checked her watch, then nodded. “We read A Prayer for Owen Meany. That book has a lot of God in it, but it was quite dirty.” She gave me a slight smile. “I’d like to catch the last half. You can stay here and finish going through the closet, if you like. Take anything that suits you.”

  She left me there, alone in the room with a box that held a perfectly good birth certificate. I was pretty sure I had seen a Social Security card, too, among the relics. It had been unlaminated, soft around the edges. The certificate and the card, to me these were the only mementos that mattered.

  With these things, I could get a new driver’s license. Ivy Wheeler. The name went with my new haircut, maybe with these clothes. I could travel under this other name and leave no trace of my comings and goings. If Thom became suspicious, there would be no trail for him to follow. When I found Jim Beverly, and then when something untoward befell my husband, the police would find no tattling bus route or plane ticket.

  First I got my roll of bills out of the zipper pocket of my handbag and put them in what I thought of as my shoebox, nestling the cash up next to Pawpy’s gun. The bills would come to smell of gun oil, like the money at Joe’s stores always did.

  Then I slid Mrs. Fancy’s box out from its place in the stacks, and I toted it back to the guest bed. I set it down on the flower-covered comforter by the stack of blouses. Phil, in the automatic inconveniencing way of cats, had moved. Now he was nested on top of the blouses, shedding.

  I felt a faint reluctance when I reached to open the box. I’d looked at Mrs. Fancy through the filter of Ro’s kinder eyes. She’d pushed my hair out of my face with such sweetness, and though she hadn’t been able to look at my bruises directly, she had spoken of her daughter’s husband in a clear response to their presence in the room. I wondered if this shoebox really was Mrs. Fancy’s. Perhaps this was Janine’s box, too painful to have close, but too close not to have. I wished I believed it. I’d have no problem stealing from Janine.

  I turned from the closed box to the phone on the bedside table. It was easier to pick up the receiver and dial Information. When the connection was made, I said, “Fruiton, Alabama,”

  “What listing?” the operator asked in a bored voice. I said the first name that came into my head. I heard the clack of keys, and then she told me that there was no Lawly Price in Fruiton. I gave her another. She had plenty of Presleys, but no Charles. Not even an initial C. The football boys had moved on.

  “What about Shay?” I asked the operator, who was already tired of me. “You have a Rob or Robert Shay?” I spelled the last name for her.

  The operator said, “No, ma’am. Is that all?” in an exasperated tone.

  I said, “No, ma’am, yourself, that’s not all. Look for a Carson Kaylor.”

  “I do have a C. Kaylor in Fruiton.”

  “I’ll take it,” I said.

  Car picked up on the second ring. He sounded sleepy, like I’d woken him up. He coughed, then made a throwaway “Heh,” sound, so short that it was almost swallowed, and the “lo” stretched itself out long, tilting up into a question at the end. It was pure Alabama, and hearing that accent washed off whatever coat of sticky sugar Mrs. Fancy had put on me. I was Rose Mae Lolley, the prettiest damn girl from Fruiton High. Boys like Car Kaylor had always been as malleable as Play-Doh in my hands.

  “Car! I swan, I’d know your voice anyplace,” I said, and flipped the lid off Mrs. Fancy’s shoebox with two fingers.

  There was a pause, and then Car said, “Holy smoked hell. This can’t be Rose-Pop Lolley?”

  “Right first time,” I said. It gave me a little shiver. No one but Jim had ever called me Rose-Pop. “I was lying around thinking about old home folks, and I thought I’d see if I could find you.”

  Talking to Car felt like a good kind of creaky; marriage to a man as jealous as Thom had held my flirty girl muscles still for too long. Now I was stretching them, remembering the moves.

  The folded birth certificate was right on top, and I lifted it out and set it aside. I looked down into the box. A rattle. A square of pink cotton, maybe cut off a swaddling blanket? A soft rabbit with a bell inside him.

  I gave the contents a stir while Car yapped about his job laying floor for Home Depot, but it didn’t unearth the Social Security card. Car was telling me about his job’s great benefits package, but I nudged him off the now, asking about his old high school girlfriend. I was casting about for a crafty way to bring up Jim, but I didn’t have to. Our star quarterback’s vanishment was the single largest event that happened in my class’s four-year run. Car brought it up himself.

  I poked around in the box, hunting that card, and made the kind of interested, admiring noises that encourage men to talk more. Car had only the dimmest recollection of running into Jim on his last night in Fruiton, though he confirmed Jim had been at Missy Carver’s party. “Truth told, I was wasted, Rose Mae,” he told me. “I think Jim was hanging with Rob Shay and Jenny.”

  “I don’t remember Jenny,” I said. I found I’d taken my hand out of the box so I could poodle one finger around in my hair, just as if he could see me. I dropped my hand and moved the belled rabbit out of the way. Underneath him I found a teeny book with a picture of a pink rattle on the front. I knew if I opened it, I would see someone’s best penmanship listing Ivy’s date of birth, weight, and inches.
Maybe a page to record her first smile and another for the first time she rolled over. After that, the pages would be blank.

  “Sure you do, pig-faced blonde. Pig-faced in the cute way,” Car said. “Jim was wasted, too, at that party. And he didn’t stop drinking there. I remember they found beer cans busted open all over his wrecked Jeep. You never did hear from him?”

  “No,” I said. Jim had last been seen on the side of the highway, pointing his thumb away from me.

  “If you was my girl, I would have called you at least before I took off,” Car said. “Oh, wait. Weren’t y’all broke up?”

  That irked me instantly, for no rational reason. I moved the baby memory book and flung it, harder than I needed to, out of the way. I still didn’t see the soft, unlaminated card I’d clocked before, and this was irking me as well. “Just for a day or two. We’d have gotten back together,” I said, trying not to let my sudden wash of red temper color my voice.

  “Still, that’s probably why he didn’t call you, Rose Mae. Y’all was broke up,” Car said. He sounded now like he was explaining a very simple thing to someone who was maybe not too bright. All at once, I wanted to reach through the phone and slap him sideways. Back in high school, he’d had these meaty, round cheeks that were already yearning downwards, hoping to become jowls. I could imagine exactly what my palm would sound like, smacking hard against one.

  “We always broke up when he was drinking,” I said, quiet, trying not to get sharp.

  He laughed. “Shoot, you musta ditched his ass three, four times a year. Rob Shay had a nickname for you, did you know that? He called you ‘Delicious Hitler,’ because you were hot, but you gave Jim righteous hell if he so much as licked the dew off a beer can.”

  “That ass,” I said with forced cheer. I’d always liked Rob Shay, but the red wave of angry I was trying to squelch had put a shake in my voice even so. I couldn’t help but add, “We always came back to each other, Car. Us breaking up didn’t mean a thing.”

  “Well, it meant he didn’t feel like he had to call you afore he went off,” Car said. He still sounded doggedly overreasonable, pushing me past my desire to slap and deep into throttling territory. His tone changed to coddlesome, and he added, “What about you? You still single? You still fine? You was so fine, Rose Mae.”

  “Naw. I turned gay and got super fat,” I said. “You take care, Car.” I hung up. I was breathing hard, like I’d taken a sprint across loose sand.

  I picked up the folded birth certificate and felt the slickness of the paper between my thumb and index finger. Official paper. Legal. A paper that meant something in the world outside my closed front door, if I could find the card that went with it.

  All at once I realized how shortsighted I had been: If I took these things, I wouldn’t need to find Jim Beverly at all. I was dumbstruck by the simplicity. With a new name, with a new identity that clipped four years off my age, with real ID, I could truly become a different person, a person Thom Grandee would never find.

  “Ivy Wheeler,” I said. I didn’t know who that was, but I’d bet she had a razor-sharp bob and never wore ballet flats. The real Ivy and I already had at least a few things in common. She’d been a southern girl with a shithead for a father, just like me. I picked up the plushy rabbit with my free hand, wobbling him back and forth to make his tummy bell jingle. I could see Ivy, living somewhere green and unfamiliar with a few hills and a cool breeze. Fig trees and lemon groves.

  Dammit, it was California. Again. I gave the rabbit an angrier shake, but all he had in him was sweet, light bells, muffled in his stuffing. Ivy’d also had a mother who couldn’t stand to leave. Even after Ivy died, her mother couldn’t bear to leave the man Ivy had come from, couldn’t leave the rooms where Ivy had breathed and cooed and slept.

  “Wonder what that’s like,” I asked the rabbit. He had an earnest, cream-colored face; this was not a rabbit who got sarcasm. I tossed him back on the bed and kept digging, looking for that Social Security card. Screw California. If I was Ivy, I could go anywhere. Thom could search for his Ro, angry and ready to end her, but I would have ended her already. He could live out his life in Texas, free of me, with his big red heart still thundering away inside him.

  Ro Grandee wanted this last part so badly: the simple fact of Thom alive and in the world. As soon as I recognized this longing, this deep yearn of hers to leave Thom breathing, I understood the reason.

  Ro Grandee wanted something to go back to.

  I pulled my hands out of the box as if it had suddenly gone heated. How long could I stand to be out on my own? After Jim, heading west from Alabama all the way to Texas, I’d always found myself a man. Patently bad ones, happy to give me a ride off the edge of the world since they were heading that way anyway. I’d traded them out the same way I traded out cities, never learning how to trade up. Thom was the best of the lot, the only man since Jim that I had loved.

  I had a few hundred bucks and an ancient revolver to my name. I’d be broke and dead lonely in a strange place, trying to scratch a shallow, safe hole in the chalky dirt. I was getting close to thirty years old, and that would still be true, no matter what Ivy’s ID would say.

  How long until a dark night came when I longed for the devil I knew so badly that I let Ro Grandee creep up over me and call him? She would tell him where I was. She would say, “Thom. Come and get me,” and let him decide what that meant. The gypsy had told me there was no simple way out of this marriage, that it would come down to him or me.

  I couldn’t find the damn card anyway. I tossed everything back in the box. Stealing from Mrs. Fancy, especially after how she’d treated me today, felt flat wrong. Tracking Jim, that was the main thing. I put the lid on and picked up the box to put it away, but Phil had slithered off the bed without me noticing. As I stepped toward the closet, he threaded himself between my legs, pitching me forward. The lid flew right back off and everything inside the box went airborne, arcing across the room.

  The booties separated and dropped, and the birth certificate sailed sideways like a paper airplane that had been badly folded and thrown all wrong. The silver cup pinged off a baby spoon and rolled until the wall stopped it. The rattle and the belled bunny plopped down side by side in a chiming patter. Everything hit the floor in a second, two at most. Except one thing. Ivy’s Social Security card must have gotten stuck inside the baby book, hiding, but now it fluttered out as the book dropped. It caught the air exactly right and fell slowly, slicing back and forth, riding the air like a moth wing.

  As it fell, I had time to think the words coin toss.

  Then it landed. I dropped to my knees, already gathering objects, but I was looking toward that card. It landed writing-side up. My hands stopped their busy tidying. The day I’d seen my mother in the airport, she’d been tensed to bolt from the moment our gazes met. She was grabbing her things to run when she fumbled her tarot deck. The cards slid and scattered, and almost all of them fell facedown. Every card except one fell facedown.

  That one card had told her that she had to stay. She’d refused to tell me which card had shown itself and paused her, but its message had changed her course and then mine. Now Ivy’s Social Security card had fallen faceup, as if it too had something to say.

  I knee-walked to the card and looked at it, really looked at it, for the first time. When I had opened the birth certificate before, I’d skimmed the name Ivy, taken in the birth date, but then my gaze had gone right to the words Janine Fancy Wheeler and stayed there. I hadn’t read it carefully. But here the message was, plain and obvious, no mysterious swords or burning towers. The card’s top and bottom were edged in red-and-blue scrolling. Sandwiched between the curlicues were nine numbers, dark against the white card, and three words in plain black type: Ivy Rose Wheeler.

  Janine had named her baby Ivy Rose.

  I left the card where it was and reached instead for the Ziploc bag. I opened it and carefully lifted out the tuft of baby hair. It was clipped into a pink bow barrette with t
iny teeth, made to hold fine strands. It was dark hair, but a lot of babies are born with a head full of dead black hair. It lightens as it meets the sun, or it falls out altogether and brown or blond or red stuff grows in under.

  This tuft didn’t look like that. It was a true dark brown, as rich and glossy as mink. I tilted my head forward so the wings of my bob closed around my face, and I held Ivy’s little tuft up against my own hair. Ivy’s all but disappeared, so close were they in color.

  Half an hour ago, Mrs. Fancy had reached to tuck my hair behind my ear, her fingers lingering in the strands as she told me all the good things she wanted for me.

  “Oh, shit,” I said to the room.

  I packed up the rest of Ivy’s baby things with the reverence they deserved, putting the hair back and getting all the air out of the Ziploc bag, checking the silver cup for dings. I saved out the Social Security card and the birth certificate, and then I put the box away.

  I put Ivy’s papers in my purse. I would go to the DMV tomorrow and get Ivy a driver’s license. I’d need to find a family of local Wheelers and lift some of their junk mail for proof of address. That would absolutely be a felony, but it would be my first, because taking these from Mrs. Fancy wasn’t stealing. She’d said, “Take anything that suits you,” and Ivy Rose could suit me to a tee.

  But only if I first made damn sure Ro Grandee had nothing to come back to.

  I would use the ID to travel invisibly, to find Jim, and I’d be Rose Mae long enough to get him to burn my bridges for me. With Thom gone and Jim beside me, I’d be ready to rebuild myself into someone nicer. With nothing to go back to, Jim and I would be entirely free.

  CHAPTER

  9

  I FOUND HIM.

  It took ten long days. Every night, I played my own version of Scheherazade for Thom, 1,001 pieces of tail, taking the tension out of his broad shoulders when he came home from Grand Guns. It eased me, too, this endless, brutal sex that left us both as spent and wasted as a beating, but only an eighth as sore. He did hit me once, but only a glancing backhand. Another day, after a run-in with his daddy, he shoved me into the wall. These were squalls, though, over before they truly started.