Backseat Saints

by Joshilyn Jackson

  “Lilah can’t come back here,” I say. It is not a question. I’ve gotten a good feel for it now. “She broke one of Mirabelle’s rules.” Parker nods, and I add, “The girl I met at the library, she told me I’d be fine as long as I followed the rules.”

  I come closer and sit on the other side of the steps, my blue bag a chaste wall between us.

  “Yeah. Lilah went back to her husband,” Parker says. “I’ve never seen Mirabelle take a woman in a second time if they go back to the husband or the boyfriend.”

  I look at his feet as he talks. I don’t approve of men wearing sandals, unless they are the kind for rafting. Open-toed leather shoes are girly. But I like his feet. They are very long and narrow and pale, like tusks of ivory.

  “Are there a lot more rules?” I ask.

  Parker looks surprised. “Your driver didn’t tell you?”

  “My driver?” I ask.

  He shakes his head, confused. “You’re pretty far west, Virginia. You had to come in with a Saint Cecilia?”

  Everything in me goes still. “I don’t know what that means,” I say, careful to keep my tone even, to not let my expression change.

  “The underground railroad?” Parker says, like he’s reminding me.

  “Underground railroad?” I repeat. “You mean, what? Like Harriet Tubman?”

  “Yeah, like that. Only the Saint Cecilia railroad is for women in very bad situations. Mirabelle is one of ’em.”

  “Mirabelle is a Saint Cecilia,” I parrot back, but he doesn’t seem to notice I’ve turned into a shocked echo.

  Parker nods. “I drive for her sometimes. Mirabelle will get a call, and she’ll send me to pick a woman up in a public place and drop her fifty miles away at a mall or a library. I never see who brings the woman to the meeting place or who picks her up after me, so there isn’t a trail. Mirabelle’s houseguests are either local, or they come through Jane at Safe Harbor, or they’re moved here by the Saint Cecilias. If you didn’t come here with a Cecilia, then how did you end up way out here, Virginia?”

  I’m floored enough to speak the simple truth. “I met Mirabelle in an airport. She told me I was welcome.”

  He nods and falls into a small, comfortable silence. I sit beside him, trying to keep my expression plain even though my heart is racing. Back at Cadillac Ranch, I’d dismissed my mother’s message as meaningless, even heartless. But she had left me the directions I craved, after all. On the same car, under her past-tense love note and her insulting instructions to pray, I’d noticed silver letters telling me, The Fun’s at RODEO! I’d assumed that was the gay men for peace, but now I’m wondering what would have happened if I’d put it together, if I’d thought to call that bar and ask to speak to Cecilia. Would I have been offered the chance to disappear?

  My chill heart almost warms a speck toward my mother, but in its next beat I realize that if I hadn’t run into her at the airport, I never would have known that message was there. Even when I found it, it was so obscure that I hadn’t understood it. It wasn’t really for me. It was for her. A balm to her conscience, a way to tell herself she’d drawn a path for me and put it in fate’s hands.

  I’m breathing too hard, and the silence feels strained to me. It doesn’t seem to be bothering Parker, though. He is stretched out on the steps with his face to the sun. I try to shake it off. So my mother has made an asshole move; by now, this should not surprise me.

  Finally I turn to Parker and say, “So you have house rules—”

  “No, no,” Parker interrupts. “It’s my house, but definitely Mirabelle’s rules. I’m not really much of a rules guy.” That’s so obvious it makes me smile, even through my anger. He grins back, but when he speaks again he sounds serious. “I’m sure she’ll tell you. I know you spend the first seven days inside. She kicked one girl out for being on the porch.”

  I snort, and I have to work to keep my tone mild. “Mirabelle’s kind of a bitch, huh?”

  Parker shrugs. “It’s hard-core, but it makes sense. That girl’s boyfriend was driving all over Berkeley with a harpoon gun, looking for her.” I catch him stealing a glance at my left hand. I have no tan lines, but the skin at the base of my ring finger has a faint indentation where my rings used to sit. I fist my hand and sneak a glance at his. No sign of a ring there. “After a week, even the maddest man quits looking. Or at least they are less likely to come in swinging.”

  I nod. In seven days, a temper-driven man cools off. If only Thom Grandee were running on temper instead of something so much colder. What Thom is carrying around is practically immortal: a pure desire to put me in the earth. I have a sudden snapshot memory of his dead-eyed face at the gun shop, all his layers stripped away and only the reptile left, cold-blooded and foreign.

  I remind myself he’s looking for a girl who no longer exists. Even so, my hand jumps to the top of my bag, pressing in to feel the comforting hardness of Pawpy’s gun.

  “That makes sense. Any other big rules I should know?”

  Parker shrugs. “The usual stuff. No drugs or weapons, like that.”

  My hand is pressing Pawpy’s gun, and I startle when he says no weapons. He catches it, and his eyebrows rise.

  “I have some chunks of an old gun,” I confess.

  Parker sits up straight. “You have a gun?” He says the words with the same vehement disbelief I would use to say, “You have a rotting snake carcass?”

  “I have pieces of gun,” I say. “Pieces can’t shoot.” Technically that’s true. Pawpy’s gun can’t work until I load the barrel and slot it into place. But anyone who knows guns, my mother included, could have this revolver ready to fire in thirty seconds. Still, if this fella has ever touched a gun, I’ll eat my boots. I open my bag and dig it out to show him.

  His eyes are wide, watching me unfold the T-shirt I’ve bundled around the gun. I hold it over for him to see, resting my hands on the top of the bag.

  He says, “I’m not sure Mirabelle likes people to have pieces of gun. I’m not sure I do.”

  “Not a shooter, huh?” I say. “I kinda guessed that from the shoes.”

  He looks at his own feet, then over to Ivy’s scuffed cowboy boots, then back.

  “What about my shoes?” he asks.

  “They’re pacifist shoes,” I say. “You ever see a soldier wearing mandals?”

  He laughs at that. “Okay, Boots, so your feet are saying you’re an expert marks-lady-person?” He sounds more interested now.

  I meet his eyes, direct and steady, and I say, “Oh yes. My boots say I’m fantastic.”

  His floppy awkwardness is dropping away. He’s gone all comfortable inside his wiry body. Sandals or no sandals, now I am sitting with a man, the kind that Alswan might not so easily dismiss.

  He leans in toward me. “Why would you want to be a fantastic gun shooter?” It’s not rhetorical; he really wants an answer.

  “It’s fun,” I say.

  He shakes his head, doubtful, and says, “I’ve never had to fight off a ‘fun’ urge to go shoot Bambi in the face.”

  I say truthfully, “Oh! Me neither. Not that I have a problem with it—my daddy hunted to feed us. I went with him dove hunting, but I didn’t shoot, and if he was after deer or rabbits, I stayed home. I can’t eat an animal once I’ve met it all up close and fuzzy.”

  “So you’ve never shot at anything alive?” he says.

  I picture Thom Grandee rising over the slope on the running trail at Wildcat Bluff, his Roman nose centered in my sights, but I meet Parker’s gaze and do not blink or hesitate before I say, “Of course not.” I have not lost my facility for lying to men, thank God. “Anyway, rifles don’t do much for me. I’m a pistol girl, and I purely love to target shoot. As for these pieces, this gun used to be my grampa’s. All I have left of him.”

  “A sentimental gun? That’s bizarre.” He reaches over and rolls the loose barrel doubtfully.

  “Chunks of sentimental gun,” I say. His fine-boned finger touches the barrel, which touches t
he shirt, which rests in my hand, and he puts out a spark strong enough to travel through all that and reach me. I feel it like a buzzing in my palm. “Maybe sometime when I’m out of quarantine, I’ll take you to a range to try some shooting.”

  “Ha!” he says, like the very idea is absurd. He takes his hand away, but then he rubs his fingers together, as if he’s setting the feel of the cool, slick metal into memory. After another ten seconds he says, “Maybe.”

  The door on the far end of the porch swings open. We both jump, as if we have been caught out doing something naughty. I rewrap the gun and stuff it down under a few of my mother’s old clothes.

  A well-dressed middle-aged woman in pricey shoes comes out. Parker stands up and slouches off sideways so she can use the stairs. Flirting over guns is my oldest and most comfortable territory. While we were there, I forgot to be angry and sick with nerves, and he forgot to be nonthreatening. Now we are back where we began.

  The woman nods to Parker and me as she passes us. The dogs have been tussling in the side yard, and they come running around the house in a pack to investigate as she steps around my bag and walks down the steps. They’re covered in each other’s suck and hair and look like they’ve been rolling each other through dirt and dead leaves. She takes one look and dashes out through the gate before they can leap on her and coat her in a filthy greeting.

  “I should just go in?” My voice comes out shaky.

  “Take it easy,” Parker says. “She’s expecting you. It’s going to all be fine.”

  I have good radar for when a man’s attracted to me, but now there’s nothing but vague, innocuous friendliness. Shaggy-Doo is back. He stands up and puts a hand down for me. His fingers are cool, and he lets me do all the gripping and pulling as I stand up. He steps back from me at once, the second I am on my feet. This is a man who has spent a good bit of his time around women who are, as Alswan put it, gun-shy. He nods good-bye and shambles to the center door, going into his part of the house.

  I pick up my bag and walk to the other door. I hesitate, raising my hand to knock, then putting it down. I square my shoulders. I live here now, after all. This is my mother’s house. I will not stand by the fence like Lilah, wringing my hands. I will not knock to beg entry. I put my hand on the knob and it turns, unlocked.

  Gretel is suddenly beside me, jamming herself in front of my feet to stop me from going through a door without her. I let us both in. My mother stands in the center of a large parlor. She is facing the door, waiting for me to walk through it. I do. I close it behind us.

  My mother looks much the same as she did in the airport, in shawls and multicolored layers with her hair unbound. There’s a knot in the hem of her floral overskirt, holding it up to show a blue skirt under. She’s too old to wear her hair so long and all one length. It hangs straight down like Witchie-Poo hair, drawing my eye to all the places where her skin is beginning to sag. I set my bag down. We look at each other, holding silence between us. I am breathless.

  “You brought your dog,” she says. She would probably sound more pleased if I had brought in the Ebola virus. “Where did her leg go?”

  Gret starts sniffing her way around the unfamiliar room, and I say, “I shot it off.” My mother blinks, and I add, “It was an accident.”

  She does a faint double take. “I had a blouse like that.” I touch the lace-trimmed edge of her old hippie shirt and she says, “And I had jeans like…” She stops, doing math in her head. “Those are my jeans.”

  “Yes.” I pull at the waistband. I can’t believe this is the conversation she is choosing. It fills me to the rim with instant bitchy. “I’m a little thinner than you were.”

  “Well, you never had a baby,” she snaps, bristling up.

  “I still have time,” I volley back.

  We stare at each other, surprised at ourselves, and she says, “This is absurd.”

  It is. She’s right. But I can’t think of a light conversation we could have that would not be absurd and that would not enrage me. If she mentions the weather, I will have no choice but to slap her. We can’t talk dogs and jeans, not with all the history between us.

  “So you went back to Fruiton. I assume not just to raid my closet. Was that wise?” she asks. Behind her, Gretel has found an open doorway at the far end of the room. She follows her nose through it.

  “Probably not,” I admit, and I can’t resist adding, “Daddy says hey.”

  My mother’s eyes narrow and then go all the way to slits as I reach into my back pocket and pull out his rumpled piece of paper, now folded neatly into a closed quarter sheet. It’s been partially ironed by the pressure of my butt as I sat on it to drive. “He sent you a note.”

  She stares at the paper with a chain of fleeting expressions flashing across her face, as if I have first pulled a live rabbit out of my pocket, and now it is peeing on her floor.

  I hold it out, and she says, “I’m not reading that.” She sounds affronted by the very idea.

  I shake the paper at her, rattling it. She makes no move toward it, so I look for a place to put it. It’s a big room, done all in ocean colors, fifty shades of blue and a sandy beige. Behind my mother is a good-size wooden table with chairs on either side. Her tarot cards sit on top in a neat stack, flanked by lit candles. I am standing in what looks like a mini-store. By the front windows are delicate display shelves full of jewelry and gift books. Directly ahead of me, a staircase with a heavy banister leads up. Beyond the stairs, in the middle of the room between the mini-store and her reading table, a love seat is grouped with footstool and a small recliner. The wall opposite the stairs is lined with overflowing bookshelves. I cross the room to them and set the folded note down in front of what looks like a full set of Austen’s novels.

  “I told him I would give it to you,” I say. “What you do with it now is not my problem.”

  I don’t tell her about step nine or how badly he wants her to read it. If she’s tempted to open it at all, that information would stop her cold. Knowing how badly he wants me to read it has certainly stopped me, for days and nights and thousands of miles. I have not so much as peeked at the salutation.

  I suspect it will be different for her, though. If it was a note from Thom Grandee, even if it was given to me ten decades from this moment, I’d have torn into it already. Marriage is complicated, and Daddy’s note is working on her in some underhanded way. Now I can see, under her layers and between the dark curtains of her hair, some vestige of the woman who tucked me in each night. The one who made my bologna sandwiches with extra mustard, just as I liked them. That woman’s gaze flicks to the note and then away.

  “He’s fine,” I say, as if she has asked and I am answering her question. “He got his five-year pin. AA.”

  Her eyebrows rise, and then she passes one hand across her forehead, as if manually wiping any interest away, pulling the expression right off her face. But I can see my mother coming more sharply into focus with every piece of history I invoke.

  I say, “I saw where you wrote my name on the wall. I saw the marks you made, behind the ship painting.” I’ve surprised her yet again, but she remains silent. I say, “I know, Momma.”

  That final word undoes her. It hits me, too, this awful name I have not uttered now for more than twenty years. She can’t look at me. She’s gulping air in little pants, trying to get it down into her lungs.

  “What happened?” I ask, because it is time. This is the question that has pulled me all the way across the country. There’s plenty more I want to know. I want to know how she found me and when she started spying on my life in Amarillo. I want to ask about the Saint Cecilias and the impossible-to-decode exit strategy she spray-painted onto the car out at Cadillac Ranch. I want to know which tarot card fell faceup at the airport, stopping her when every line of her body told me she was going to run. But this first question eclipses all the others.

  It’s all I’ve thought of in the car on the drive over, building scenarios in my head that could
explain her sudden departure, each more soap opera silly than the last. I imagined that she hit her head and got amnesia, or witnessed a Mafia killing, or was abducted. I never came up with a single explanation I believed, and now that I am here, this is all I want from her: a reason I can understand. I say, “You hardly took anything when you left Fruiton. I even found your money, eighty-two dollars, left behind in your old black boot. What happened? Why did you go without me?”

  She stares down at the floor. Time passes. Whole minutes, one after another after another.

  Gret comes back in the room and her tail goes down. She gives my mother a wide berth and slinks low-bellied past her. She comes to heel and sits down looking worried. Fat Gretel, who would face-lick Attila and play Frisbee with Jack the Ripper, does not like my mother. My mother’s downward gaze is drawn to my dog, and I can see it’s mutual.

  My mother stares at my dog, pressing one open palm to her chest, and I watch her slowing her heart with her strong will. She takes a deep breath, like she’s about to start yoga, and then another. When she finally meets my eyes, hers are as empty and shiny as marbles. My mother looks right at me, and she lies to me in a voice as flat as window glass.

  “I went to mass that day, and I was visited by a saint. It was… a vision. She told me I had to go.”

  It’s like a slap. This is the question I’ve come to ask, three thousand miles. Instead of an answer, I’m getting a metaphor, and a shitty one at that. I’ve already figured out that she must have had help from the Saint Cecilias, but she sure as hell didn’t learn about them through some mystical vision, and the metaphor can’t explain how she could let them spirit her away sans child.