Backseat Saints

by Joshilyn Jackson

  The third time he pauses, he holds for several minutes. I’m exhausted with the adrenaline hangover, worn out from worry, and it is incredibly pleasant to blank my mind and watch a male body move with such deliberate grace. It doesn’t hurt a bit that the body in question has taut coils of muscle in the shoulders and a six-pack.

  The dogs come streaming through the backyard. The big mutts run past Parker, brushing their friendly sides against his legs, but it is as if they do not exist. His gaze is turned inward, and his body moves, releasing measured and unhurried violence on monsters only he can see. Buck and Miss Moogle disappear from my line of sight, lapping the house, but Gretel pauses to watch Parker with her head tilted to a puzzled angle.

  Cesar stops, too, but he’s not interested in Parker. His ears perk up, going on yellow alert. He peers all around until he sees me on the roof. Then that tattling little shit goes right to red, cutting loose with a yappy string of warning barks.

  Parker’s concentration breaks. His hands drop and he follows Cesar’s line of sight up to my rooftop perch. I lift one hand in a wave, busted. Parker shakes his head at me, chuckling, and I can see what he is thinking. He is trying to decide if I am rule breaking, if this counts as outside the house. Parker does not want me to end up another Lilah-at-the-gates. I want to explain, but I can’t call down to him. Mirabelle will hear, and I do not want any more Mirabelle just now, thank you.

  I turn and get on my hands and knees. I crawl my top half back through the window. I lie stomach down on the writing desk, butt humped over the sill, legs outside, and open the desk’s shallow top drawer. I dig out a piece of the blue stationery and a pen and scrawl, “I came out here to pray.” As I back through the window to the roof again, clutching my note, I also grab up a stone cat paperweight from the desk’s top. I wrap the note around the cat to weight it, then toss it gently down in the yard. It’s a testament to my goodwill toward all things canine that I don’t aim at Cesar.

  Cesar and Gret run to my note first and snuff at it, and Parker follows, more slowly. He reaches between the questing dog noses and picks up the packet. He opens it, but he looks at the cat, as if the note is wrapping paper.

  He looks back up at me, puzzled. I shake my head and glare, frustrated with the silence. I blow out my candle and hold it up. I point at the note with my other hand. In the yard below, my good, dim Gret wanders away after Buck and Miss Moogle, still clueless that I am present. Clever Cesar stares up at me, more affronted than alarmed that I am on his roof, a place he knows good and well that people do not belong.

  Parker gets it. He reads the note, then looks back to me, impassive. He hefts the stone cat in his other hand, as if weighing it. He holds up one finger in a “wait a sec” gesture, then he walks toward the house until he disappears from my sight.

  I sit another minute, and he comes back out. He holds up a blue sphere about the size of a tennis ball. I spread my hands and he throws it lightly up in an arc toward the roof. It comes right to my hands as if I’d called it.

  It is a tennis ball, dog-chewed into a disreputable state, wrapped up inside my rumpled piece of pale blue stationery. Under my note he has scribbled two words.

  “Me too.”

  I find I am smiling at him, a wide and foolish smile. Parker raises his eyebrows at me, asking a question. I understand what he is asking, and I feel suddenly shy. This is not something I have ever done with a man. With anyone, really, except my mother when I was very small. Even so, I nod, a shallow head bob that he clocks. Parker walks to his place, and I take up my beads again. His gaze turns inward, and his arms come up and he turns slowly, punching deliberately out at nothing. I watch him as I click through the beads, the familiar words shaping themselves silently in my mouth.

  We are praying together, each in our own way. His movements are still focused, but he is aware of me now. I am included. He is inside my circle, too, as I pray through the beads with every nerve I have attuned to him. Something like longing happens in my belly, and I am not sure what I am praying for now. Some freshness, maybe, a new start, a chance to go back in time, before Thom, and make some better choices.

  This is the strangest date that I have ever been on.

  When I finish my second circuit of the beads, the sun is going down. The temperature is dropping, drying Parker’s sweat. He stops, replete, his arms hanging by his sides. I lift my hand and he lifts his in a silent good night. We hold there for a minute, looking at each other.

  Nothing is solved. I don’t know how to get free enough to be someone different. Even so, I feel comforted.

  I turn and creep back inside, my mind blank. My mother has been in my room. She has seen me praying on my perch and gone away again. A plate is resting on the bedside table, and Gret lies on the foot of my bed with her ears cocked, all her attention on the food. Meat loaf, whipped potatoes, carrots, and a very large glass of red wine. I change for bed and share out bites of cooling supper with my dog. I do not share the wine. I drink the glass down to the dregs. It’s early still, but I’m exhausted and the wine makes me warm and sluggish.

  I climb in between the covers and I fall asleep. I sleep dreamlessly, sated, for hours, before I hear the sound. When it begins, I am dreaming of a sweet-faced, small brown cow. She is being led up a hill to a shed, and I cannot see the face of the man leading her. The noise she makes is fearful but resigned, a mourning noise, and her eyes are huge and brown with long lashes, very human. She knows where she is being led. She knows why the man’s arms end in axes. She goes up the hill with him, lowing out her sorrow at her dreadful coming loss. Her feet thump into the earth, giving tempo as she moans a sound so grievous that it wakes me.

  They are true sounds, the thump and wail, and they are coming from the parlor. The noise climbs up the stairs and gets into my bed with me as if the sound itself is sentient, a messenger to me, but speaking in a tongue I do not know. I sit up and blink, scrubbing at my face, disoriented. Gret lies tense beside my feet with her head lifted and her nose pointing toward the door.

  The noise is so inhuman and unending that it takes me a solid ten seconds before I understand. There is no little cow. There is only one other living creature in this house.

  This noise is pouring from my mother.

  CHAPTER

  16

  I TURN ON the landing light outside my room and head down the stairs, an anxious Gret on my heels. My mother’s sage candles are the only light in the room, except what pours down the stairs from the landing behind me. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to let me see my mother. She kneels beside her bookshelves, rocking herself to some inside rhythm as the terrible noise comes out of her. As she rocks forward, she dips her head so far between her knees that her forehead bangs the hardwood floor.

  My mother’s sound is awful and ongoing, as if she plans to push out every bit of moaning air she’s ever swallowed and then not inhale, not ever again. I haven’t heard a sound like this, so pained and betrayed, since I shot poor Gret up at Wildcat Bluff.

  Gretel’s ears cock forward, anxious and alert. She makes a houndy grumble, a sorrowing harmony weaving in and out of my mother’s keening. My mother’s head comes back down to the floor and she bangs it, hard enough to make that drumbeat noise.

  “Momma?” I say.

  Her sound cuts out abruptly, and she sits up, pulling in a gobbling breath. Gret goes quiet, too. My mother turns her head and looks up at me, and in the stairwell’s light her eyes shine blood red. She’s wept so hard that she’s burst the tiny veins that lace her eyes. Then her face crumples into fury, lids screwing shut, her mouth pulling open and down in a wide, stiff frown.

  “Your first word was Daddy, Rose Mae,” she says in a strangled voice. It sounds like my very name is choking her. I stop at the foot of the stairs, all the way across the room from where she kneels. My mother looks ready to bite. “Dada, more like. You couldn’t say the y. You said it a thousand times a day. Even before you could talk, when you were a colicky, awful piece of sc
reaming luggage, even then, he’d hang you over his forearm and walk and talk, and his very voice would soothe you.” She’s somewhere far ahead of me down a path of thought. I pass my hand over my face, trying to catch up. She asks, accusing, “Do you know what your second word was?”

  My eyes are adjusting to the dimness in the center of the room. I see she is kneeling in a shower of white speckles, as if she has sprinkled herself with bridal rice.

  “No,” I say.

  She brings her head down to the floor again, fast, bang. Then she sits back up and says, “Dog. Dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, every minute your father’s fuckhead hound was in the room. I’m a cat person, did you know? I like cats. You were allergic.” It’s an accusation, irrational and furious. “You learned that fucking dog’s name. Leroy. And cookie. And bird.” Her voice goes up an octave, into a high-pitched, screaming parody of baby talk: “Birt! Birt! Then you learned to say no. That was your favorite word forever. That’s still your fucking favorite word, I bet.”

  Her voice is raspy from the weeping, hard to understand, but now I’ve finally caught up to the conversation. “When did I learn to say Mama?”

  “After no. After cookie, Rose Mae,” she says, and the words are so bitter in her mouth that she rushes through to spit them all out. “After the goddamn dog’s name.” She scrubs at her eyes like an exhausted toddler. “Daddy’s girl, always. You wanted him, riding around the house on his shoulders. Him dead drunk. I thought, He’ll fall and crack her little skull open, see how much she likes him then. You’d just laugh and laugh. Him reeling around in circles. He gave you a BB gun. You were three. Who gives a gun to a baby? Your daddy, that’s who, and he never, never, never hit you. Never. He never did.”

  I stare at her, impassive. I am not going to lie to her.

  “Tell me he never hit you,” she demands. I say nothing. “He didn’t,” she insists. “Jack Daniel’s had a good hold on him even before I fetched up pregnant, but it wasn’t till after you came that I always, always got the shitty end of his stick. The hitting was my share.”

  “When you lived with us—,” I start to say, but she interrupts.

  “You got horsey rides.”

  I change tack but speak as if I am finishing the same thought. In fact, I am. “But then again you didn’t live with us for very long.”

  The specks around her are not bridal rice. They are bits of shredded notepaper. The shelf space in front of Austen’s books is empty. My mother has been kneeling and weeping and lowing like a thousand dying cattle in the remains of Daddy’s note.

  “Before I left—,” she says, and stops.

  I cross the room and squat down in the speckles, a good three feet away from her, out of her reach but where I can see her face. I say, calm and cold-voiced, “I don’t remember a lot of that time, Claire. You talk like it was a family picnic for me. Sunshine days. I’ll tell you what I do remember. I remember creeping under my bed, all the way to the back so I could press my spine against the wall. I could hear him going after you. I could hear you crying.”

  My mother is nodding. “Yes. Yes. He was a terrible husband. Terrible. But you loved your daddy.”

  I shake my head at her, incredulous. “Of course I did. I was eight. I loved him when I was nine, too, and he dislocated my shoulder. What other daddy did I have? I didn’t even know there were other kinds.”

  She wants me to remember a shining father she has polished up in her memory. But I can’t see him that way. It’s like Saint Sebastian. I may have envisioned a kindly Tiggywiggle of a saint when I was little. Later I could only remember him through the film of my mother’s abandonment, when he became a bloody mass of wounded, grinning flesh. I can only see my father through the lens of the decade I lived with him alone, after she walked and left me to him.

  My mother scrapes up a handful of the shredded bits of note. She has torn at it until it is hardly more than paper molecules. She holds them out to me. “This was to you, not me. It was always you.” Still I say nothing, and she throws the bits of paper at me. They catch in the air and then drift down in a cheery shower of confetti. Her arm drops and her hand is open to me, like she’s pleading for something. A few bits of white cling to the palm.

  “So what,” I say. “So the note was to me? Does that mean you don’t get to be the prom queen?”

  She blinks, confused. “No, because…” She shakes her head, trying to clear it, and then says, “I need to know that when he tells you he’s sorry for all those times he laid hands on you, he means after I was gone.”

  “Okay,” I say. “If that makes it better for you, sure. You can have that.”

  Her breath comes out in a sigh, and she is nodding. Her right hand closes and comes up. She holds her fist against her heart. It’s like I have pressed a gift into that hand, a shell or a pebble, and she’s clutching it close to her now.

  She leans in toward me, as if she is going to give me a present back. “You were always Daddy’s girl, Rose. Even so, I swear to you, I swear to you, I thought about coming back for you a thousand times. But each time I’d imagine what you would choose. He was your first word. I came somewhere after dog.” She opens her hand and swipes at her palm, cleaning the last bits of paper off it. They join the others spangling the carpet. She’s calmed now, quite a bit. Something sentient has appeared behind her eyes again. She says, “I thought the two of you might even do better with me gone. Him and me, we never should have been together. We worked on each other like poison, but he loved you. Even now, you’re the one that mattered to him. The note made that crystal clear.”

  I can hear the sick pit of pure green envy in her voice. She left him more than twenty years ago, yet this still eats at her.

  She’ll never explain herself, but I finally know the thing I came across the country to learn. I have my answer, and it is simple and plain and ugly. It’s nothing I ever could imagine when I was building soap opera plots featuring abductions, amnesia, and, most of all, her absolution. The truth is, she tried to stay. The time she marked off on her wall told me that. She left with close to nothing, perhaps because it was all she felt she deserved. But at the bottom of the mystery, there is only, ever this: She left me behind because she didn’t quite love me enough.

  I’m shocked to find I almost understand. I am her daughter, after all. We are very much alike. Other women, to me, have always been the competition. I try to imagine it, bringing a girl your man likes better than you into your own home, bringing her in with your own body. That is the only why there is.

  I stand up, needing more space in between us. I go to her table, where her weathered cards are in a neat deck between the lit candles.

  “When did you find me again?” I ask.

  She stares after me, blinking, and it takes her a good thirty seconds to change tracks and find the answer. She sounds wrung out. “I hired a PI eight years ago. He found you waitressing in Catahoula, living with that mechanic.”

  “Steve-O,” I say, and she waves the name away as unimportant. She is right. I pick up the deck and flip it over, spread it open in a fan.

  “He took pictures. I thought you were with a man like that because I didn’t leave soon enough. I thought you’d soaked it up from too many years of watching my marriage.” Her voice breaks. “Then I wished, if anything, I’d left you sooner.”

  “That’s comforting, Momma,” I say. I don’t know what any of these cards mean—swords and wands, wise horses, maidens in chains—but the art is lovely. Even the words at the bottom of some of the cards, strange words like “Temperance” and “The Hierophant,” are written like calligraphy, with flourishes and scrolls and trumpets.

  “I did love you, Rose,” she says, repeating the first words she spray-painted on the car out at Cadillac Ranch. She isn’t speaking in the past tense, to mean she does not love me now, as I once thought. She means she loved me even as she walked away.

  I find the hanged man with his wolf-head helmet in the deck. I pick him up, examine him by candlelight.
As I look at his placid face, his praying hands, I find I do believe her.

  She did love me; she left me anyway. That one choice has shaped her life into this ruin. She’s been flying across the country to spy on me for years now, never brave enough to speak to me. I wonder how many of my old haunts hold her aborted messages. I suspect she’s left obscure directions for contacting the Saint Cecilias all over Amarillo, perhaps carved in the wood under my table at my favorite coffee shop or hidden in the graffiti-covered bathroom of the place Thom and I liked to go for wings and beer.

  She hid the messages too well because she knew that if I went with the saints that helped her escape, she would never see me again. She told me that herself, that her underground railroad would never deliver me to any place or person at all connected to my past.

  I set the hanged man to the side, faceup, and search the fanned deck for the burning tower. There she is, the abandoned girl forever waiting, framed by a window that already pours smoke. I lay it out beside the hanged man. My mother lives alone in a rented apartment with a guest room that must feel like a gaping hole in the center of her house. That room upstairs is my room, and it always has been, even while a chain of other young women slept there. She’s tried for years now to fill it up with her sad Lilahs, and they have not been enough. The Lilahs, even the ones who got free, got divorced, got saved, they have all failed her. Even the ones who kept her rules have failed her, because none of them were me.

  “I know you loved me, Momma.” I do not add, but not enough. I do not have to add it. She knows her weakness already. Not loving me enough is the essential truth of her life. It’s the thing that has broken her.

  I have my answer, and it should be the textbook definition of unsatisfying. Even so, the inside quiet that I felt upstairs after praying with Parker is coming over me again. My mad is leaking out of me, slow but steady, like I’ve been punctured. Underneath, I find something that feels a lot like peace, and with it, a pragmatic understanding: I cannot stay here.