by Sara Hosey
I nodded and slid out of the booth. My legs were wobbly still, but I could walk.
Angel did look scared, watching the door with an arched back, her tongue hanging out her mouth. She cried out and wagged her tail when I opened the door, and when I leaned down to untie her she was panting and I could smell her fear. I kissed her head and led her into the bar.
She set right to lapping at the bowl of water the bartender placed on the floor near the booth. I sat back down and drank more of my coke.
The bartender had returned to the bar to take care of the paying customers but then he came back to the booth and sat down across from me. “My mom died when I was a kid,” he said. “I guess I’m saying I know how it is, sort of. In a different way. If you know what I mean.”
I nodded. “Thanks for being so nice to me. We’ll get going in a minute. I think I just need to sit a little longer.”
“You sit as long as you need to,” he said, and I started to cry, to weep, because this tough old pot-bellied bartender was being so kind and because my dog had been worried that I left her and because I might be pregnant and that was totally insane and because Corinne had gone back to Henry and because Anthony was gone too and because, in the end, my mother wasn’t dead, she hadn’t been dead, she wouldn’t be dead. She might even, I thought, come back to me.
Chapter 35
The rest of that night, I waited, sleeping fitfully, waking to review the new realities.
I resolved to go to Monticello. Eventually. I knew Anthony would be back in a few days and I would tell him what happened, that I had to wait, just a little longer.
I would find my mother.
I would go to the doctor.
And after that, someday soon, me and Angel, we would go with Anthony and live in Monticello.
So, I was waiting. Waiting for Anthony and waiting for my mother and waiting, too, for Corinne.
The next morning, I spent some time leaving notes. I left notes for Corinne, going to our spots and tying little pieces of paper to branches and twigs. “So much to tell you! Find me by the bookshelves” and “We miss you! We are in our spot.” Walking around the park, collecting my stuff, writing little message for Corinne, wondering if I would ever get to see her again, get to tell her about what had happened.
I thought about leaving a note for Ann, who had left me another note, telling her I would meet her again soon, but I didn’t do it. I didn’t want her to worry, but I couldn’t leave the park. Not yet. I couldn’t leave now and never know.
It was the next night when Angel sat up and gave a bark. I reached for the gun next to my head. But then I heard a weak sound, like a whistle, and I knew who it was. It was Corinne. She had come back.
I unzipped the tent. “Iffy,” she rasped, standing there.
In the half darkness of the city, I could tell she was a mess, from top to bottom.
She had cut off the braid-dreads and there were clumps of her blond hair missing. Two black eyes, a broken nose, swollen lip. Who knows what else was broken underneath all the bruised and bloody skin on her face. One of her ears was nearly half off. There were bruises on her neck, on her shoulders and her arms. I think she had a broken finger. She was bleeding. Even her feet looked bad.
As I looked over her body and wounds in the lantern light, I kept saying, “You’re okay.” I whispered as I held her, as I got out the supplies, as I touched her face, her head, her neck, “You’re okay.” And then that changed and what I was saying was “You’re going to be okay. You’re going to be okay.”
“I know. I just want to go to sleep,” she would reply. “Just let me lie down.”
I did as much as she would let me, putting peroxide on her ear, above her eyebrow, trying to turn over her arms, pull up her shirt. She began to push my hands away. “Please, Iffy, we can do this in the morning. I’m just so tired.” She literally began to crawl, on her hands and knees, to the tent.
“You’re going to be okay,” I said again, standing there, uselessly. I couldn’t help myself. And then I changed it again, following her, crawling into the tent after her: “We’re gonna be okay, Corinne. We’re gonna be okay.”
In the tent, she cried silently, not hiding her face. “I’m so glad you were still here,” she said.
I held her in my arms and I told her about my mother. I told the story over and over again. Even after her body was calm, after she started slightly snoring, a low rhythmic wheeze from her broken nose, I kept telling her. Over and over again.
“I went to this bar, the All Saints. I saw that guy Dougie. He knows her. I told him where our camp was. I passed out and fell on the ground. He stole my photo. I think she’s gonna come, Corinne,” I whispered to her. “I think she’s gonna find me.”
And then I was sleeping, too, and then I was awake again and Corinne looked awful in the yellow light of the tent.
Angel and I slipped out to wait.
When Corinne finally stuck her head out of the tent, she squinted in the sunlight. I stood and solemnly handed her the sunglasses, the same ones Lizette had given me. That seemed like years ago now. It seemed like another life.
Corinne put on the glasses and crawled out.
She looked worse in the daylight, her skin waxy and her neck and arms and face covered in blue bruises that promised only to darken with time. Her right ear looked terrible, deformed, and I was right about her hair: clumps of it were missing.
But there was something else. It was like she was broken in some other way too. She wasn’t herself; she wasn’t funny or sarcastic or wry or even angry. She just seemed sad as she took the granola bar I offered, winced as she tried to wedge it between her swollen lips. “Water,” she said weakly and handed me back the bar.
I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything for a long time and we sat there, outside the tent, Angel panting on the ground between us.
Corinne sighed. “I don’t even know if I should go to a hospital or what. I hurt all over, Iffy.”
I looked at her face and then back at Angel.
“Don’t cry, Iff,” she said.
“I’m not,” I said, but my voice broke.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Corinne put her face in her hands and then she was crying too.
More time passed.
“You have to go,” I said finally. “You have to go back to your mom’s.”
She looked at me blankly.
“Corinne. Listen to me. I called my stepbrother and told him where I was.”
“Your stepbrother? Why’d you do that?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t answer that question. “I don’t want you to be here when he finds me.”
“Iffy,” she said.
“I’m gonna kill him,” I said flatly. “Or maybe he’ll kill me. Either way, I don’t want you to be here. You need to go to your mom’s.”
She nodded, resigned.
“I’m gonna go,” she said, gingerly wiping her face. “But you come too, Iffy. It’s too dangerous to stay here.”
I shook my head.
“Iffy, I can’t leave you here. We’d do better if we stuck together. Screw him—you don’t need to get revenge. Just leave, disappear with me. You’ll never have to think about your stepbrother again.”
“No,” I said, my mind swirling. “That’s not true. I have to be here. And my mother … I’m so close, Corinne, to finding her. I really am.”
She looked at me doubtfully.
“I think it’s a good idea for you to go to your mom’s,” I repeated. “In case I wasn’t clear.”
“Oh yeah? Trying to get rid of me?”
I made a face. Her attempts at joking were heartening, but also a little heartbreaking. She made a little noise and shrugged.
“God,” she said, into her hands over her face. “When is it all gonna get easier?”
Ch
apter 36
And then she was gone again. She promised to go straight to her mother’s and then to a hospital.
I gave her most of the money so she could get the subway and then a train. She gave me her mother’s address and phone number, said that if she didn’t hear from me soon she would come looking for me. (“And for god’s sake, Iffy, please don’t make me come back here if I don’t have to,” she added). And I hugged her and held her and we said goodbye.
And so I went back to waiting.
Who would come next?
It was like playing a bizarro game of Russian roulette. I had given out my location to a number of people. To Anthony. To Dougie. To my stepbrother. It’s possible, too, that Henry would be in the park, looking for Corinne. And I’d never left a note for Ann. Was she going to come storming through with her gang of nuns? So, which one would come? Would it be no one at all? All that build up and it would be nobody? That, I thought, might hurt more than anything.
I couldn’t even read. It was like when I’d first arrived in the park. I was jumping at every crack of a branch, every squirrel darting by. But another day passed and I started to settle down in a resigned, numb kind of way. I imagined myself here for the rest of my life: an old smelly bag lady, reading the same page of Watership Down over and over again in the summer sun and then in crisp autumn, then looking like a snowman in the winter, and thawing out again in the spring, still stuck on the same page, faithful dog beside her, still just waiting.
But I knew it was all coming to an end. And even though I hadn’t gone to meet Ann, I knew she was right about not wasting time. Because ever since I’d said it out loud, I started to know it was true. Something was happening to me. Something was done to me and now something else was happening to me.
And I needed to stop it if I could.
It was dusk on the next night when I realized I was hungry, that I had been forgetting to eat. I dog-eared a well-dog-eared page, tossed the book toward my tent, and stood, resolved to dig out one of the last cans of beans, force them down my throat. Angel stood and wagged her tail. I felt a little sick and sad, realizing she was probably hungry too.
“Sorry, girl.” I patted her head and she tagged along behind me as I took the two steps over to the tent to get us food. When I turned back around and looked up, there was a skinny woman standing a few feet away, staring at me.
I screamed a little. That kind of weird, startled scream.
“Sorry,” the woman said.
Angel stayed next to me, let out a quick bark.
“It’s okay. You just scared me.”
We stared at each other.
She had a thin face, sunken cheeks. The kind of face that doesn’t have a whole lot of teeth to hold it up. Her long, dark hair was pulled into a dirty and tangled ponytail. She was wearing a gray tank top and track pants and flip-flops. Her arms were skinny and rangy and scarred.
But she had the most beautiful face I had ever seen.
“Mommy?” I whispered.
One side of her mouth twisted up in a smile. “Iphigenia? That you baby?” she said. “You been living here, just looking for me?”
I didn’t say anything. We stood.
She looked old, so much older than I ever would have imagined, and so terribly fragile. She looked so old, but she made me think of a newborn baby. She was changed, but I still knew her, knew her in some way beyond just what someone looks like. My heart recognized her. Like when you go somewhere you haven’t been since you were a kid, a little baby, and you somehow instinctively know the place, know your way around. That was how it was. I knew every inch of her. I knew her even though I didn’t.
I started to feel weird, dizzy again, like I had felt at the bar, so I sat down on the ground, straight down from where I was standing.
She walked over and knelt next to me. She put a palm on the top of my head.
“I was worried you wouldn’t come,” I said.
At first I looked at the ground, but then when I looked at her face I couldn’t stop staring at her and she kept looking away. It felt so good to look at her face. Angel nudged my elbow so that my arm was flung over her neck. I slowly let my head down until my cheek rested against the top of Angel’s and my mother’s hand fell to my shoulder. We sat for a long time and I watched, as the dusk grew darker, as the shadows grew longer.
Still, she didn’t say anything.
I was trying to feel it, to understand it. I was with my mother. My mother had come. I was trying to appreciate it, the way you do when you wake up a few minutes before the alarm clock goes off and you remember to enjoy being warm and half asleep. But you can’t really, knowing your comfort will be short-lived, that you’ll have to spring up in a moment. Just the feel of her hand on me, her body next to mine. I wanted to be aware of it.
Because I knew it couldn’t last.
My heart hammered. Already, in those first moments, I sensed something wild about her, something unpredictable. But also something hard, something guarded. I was afraid, really, that she would be cruel to me.
When I finally did talk, it was the words that had been waiting there all along: “You came.”
She didn’t answer.
“I’m so glad you came. I thought, sometimes, that I would never see you again.”
I wondered if she hadn’t heard me at all. Then she grunted, softly, and said, “Maybe that woulda been better.”
Her voice, like the rest of her, sounded familiar and strange at the same time.
I didn’t say anything and again we sat for a long time. It was hard for me not to look at her. I would stare into the distance or at the ground and then cut my eyes back to her.
She shifted a bit and she said, finally, “I can’t take care of you, Iphigenia.”
My heart sped up and I felt panicky. “I don’t need you to take care of me,” I said, stealing a look at her.
“Then why you showing up here, looking for me?”
I shook my head. “I’ll take care of you. Let me try to help you.”
She put her arms around me. She smelled rotten, but I didn’t care. I leaned into her and put my arms around her too.
“Mommy,” I said.
She put her lips to my ear and breathed into it. “You’re just my little baby,” she said. “You’re just my sweet little baby.”
The tears streamed down my cheeks. “I don’t know why you left me,” I whispered. I made a noise—a crying noise—that I had never heard myself make before.
“I left you ’cause I was sick, baby,” she said. She mumbled something that I didn’t understand.
“Please, Mommy,” I said. “Please let me take care of you.”
“You can’t, baby.”
“I know a lady, a teacher, she has a place near here. I can take you to her.”
“No thanks, baby. I can’t do that.”
“Please. She’s nice. For real. And I’ll come with you.”
“Nah,” she said, dismissing me. “I’m here with you now. Isn’t that enough?”
“It isn’t.”
“What do you want from me?”
“I want you to let me take care of you.”
I wanted to claw at her, crawl all over her, pin her down and curl up on top of her. I wanted to wrap my arms and legs around her, bite her, squeeze her head against my chest.
She pulled away a little from my grasping hands. “You know, I checked up on you. You know that?”
I sniffed, rubbed my hands, hard, across my cheeks.
“That’s right, Iphigenia,” she said pointedly. “I didn’t just forget about you. I used to check on you all the time.”
I let out a fresh sob. I felt out of control. I felt like all the crying that had never happened before was happening now.
She seemed unbothered by my hysterical wailing. She nodded and continued. “Oh,
yes, I did. PS 37 and then IS 227, that school with the big mural over the front door. I used to go over there, see you walking out the gates with all the other kids. Don’t know where you are now, though. What school are you at now?”
In between gasps, I got out a garbled, “Not anywhere right now.”
“But it’s true, though,” she continued. “I was always checking to make sure you were okay.”
I inhaled deeply. “But I wasn’t okay.”
“What?”
“I wasn’t okay.”
She didn’t ask, but again descended into silence. I was still hiccuping, unable to catch my breath, but I was calming down, at least a little bit. She reached for me and squeezed me tightly and then let me go.
It was fully dark when I was able to breathe normally, finally. After a while I stood up and got out the lantern.
“Don’t need that,” she said and I flicked it off again. “You got any cigarettes?” she asked.
I crawled into the tent. When my head was inside, when she couldn’t see me, I felt my face writhe into a grimace of pain. I wanted to scream and sob some more, but I couldn’t. I was afraid my need would scare her away. And so I held it in and held my breath.
I returned to the deepening darkness and handed her the pack and a lighter.
Her face illuminated briefly as she lit the cigarette. In that light, she looked like herself again, if only for a moment. She looked beautiful.
She scratched her head, sucked her lips. “I didn’t know that. I didn’t know you weren’t okay. I thought he would take care of you. But what do you want from me? I wouldn’t have been any good for you either. Maybe you shouldn’t have even been born.” She shook her head. “I don’t mean it like that. I just mean that I couldn’t take care of you no more. I couldn’t even take care of myself. I always had problems, Iphigenia.” I wanted to record the sound of her voice saying my name. “My whole life I always had problems.” She took a drag on the cigarette and considered. “I could never get along with anyone. My family. Even before I met your father I could never get along with them. They didn’t … they were always …” She exhaled a plume of smoke. “But then it got worse when you was born. I got the depression. And they say I’m, what you call it,” she waved her hand, and I could tell she was only pretending to have to search for the words. “You don’t have to worry about all my di-a-noe-sees.” She said it like she was making fun of an immigrant, someone who didn’t know English. She smoked and stared off into the woods. “That’s all a bunch of bullshit really. I know I have problems, but my situations weren’t good either, you know what I mean?” She snorted and wiped her nose on the back of the hand she held the cigarette with.