Highwire Moon

by Susan Straight

  Elvia looked at the rounded writing. “Sándoo. Wash. Cu-shu. Sleep. Yoo-oo. Moon.” Her chest tightened like when she’d inhaled the smoke from Michael’s wild tobacco cigarette, and then she felt a couple of hesitant pokes against her left hipbone.

  Was it because she was finally sitting down? Or because she was scared again, this time scared that she was ready to give up on her mother? Did the baby come alive only when fear made her blood sound different in her veins, in the sac-thing around its head? Elvia put the lid on her box, pushed it across the comforter.

  Sandy sat down on the bed again. “You know what? Every one of these kids was different. What their moms ate, what they did—all that was in them. Look, your baby’s already getting fingernails and eyelashes and bones from you. And from the father. Does he want the baby?”

  Elvia said, “No. I think he wants me to—” She didn’t want to say the word. Abortion. “He’s scared about Pampers and Cahuilla stories and songs. And he acts like tweaker tribe now.”

  Sandy held up her palms in confusion, and Elvia knew she wouldn’t know tweaker, fader, sketcher—all the words for people using speed. She added, “He’s only halfway around. He likes to stay high. I left him your number. His name is Michael. If he calls.”

  “Okay,” Sandy said. She pulled her hair into a tighter ponytail, her wristbones showing like marbles under her skin. “What do you want? Here?”

  Elvia stared at the face she’d seen whenever she tried to conjure up her mother. Blue eyes darker than Callie’s, eyelids lightly purple, forehead with freckles like sand. She had wanted a quiet room, food, and the washing machine. Sandy’s voice. Home. “I don’t know,” Elvia said.

  “So if your mother’s not here in Rio Seco, I’m just the backup mom? Food and a bed?”

  Sandy had read part of her mind, as always. “No. I—I wanted you to tell me what to do.”

  “Okay,” Sandy said, bringing out a home pregnancy test from the bathroom. “Pee on a stick. One minute. Blue stripe.”

  “Why?” Elvia swallowed nervously. “I already know it’s true.”

  “Yeah. But I want you to pee on the stick and get started with the official, gross, undignified part of being a mother. You get pee tests and blood tests. You go to the doctor. Everything hurts from now on. It’s not mystical or romantic. It’s not about drinking tea or dreaming.”

  Sandy doesn’t know anything about dreaming or being Indian, about the desert or my mother or Michael. She has a box with my baby teeth. That’s it. Elvia grabbed the test and went into the bathroom. She peed on the plastic wand like the directions said. She felt way past stupid. She carried the stick out to the kitchen. “Here. It has pee on it.”

  “Pee doesn’t scare me. And it better not scare you.” Sandy didn’t glance at the stick yet. “What scares me is teenagers—” Sandy made her voice high and girlish. “We were just kissing and something happened. I don’t know, whatever.”

  “You’re old. How would you know what they say?”

  “I’m thirty-eight. I know cause I said it. I got pregnant with Rosalie. Everybody knows what happens. They kiss you and it feels good. End of thinking. But not end of story.”

  Elvia looked away from Sandy’s reddening eyes. “That’s why you and Ray got married?”

  “Yeah. And he didn’t understand the icky stuff, didn’t want to do it.” Sandy pointed. A blue stripe had appeared on the stick. Under her pee.

  Elvia stared at the window screen, filled with evening blue, the black branches waving past. Doctors and tests and hospitals. She bent and cried on the counter, smelling the Formica, the remnants of onion and garlic. “I can’t do this. I can’t.”

  “You’re already doing it,” Sandy said calmly, her hand on Elvia’s shoulder. “You didn’t get high. You tried your best.”

  “I could still—” Elvia cast about for words, her breath ragged. “Girls talk about getting it taken care of—”

  Sandy whirled and went to the porch. When she came back, her face was pink, the cords standing out in her neck. “You have two choices if you don’t want a baby. You think I’m gonna tell you about conception and life, all that. No. It’s your life I’m worried about. If you think you’re five months pregnant, you can’t even have an abortion. And if you’d tried to have one, you might never have gotten over it.” Sandy rubbed the hair from her forehead. “Damn, Elvia, it’s the one thing in life you can’t change. Ever. Your other choice is to give the baby away. But you were pregnant once, you had a baby in there, and you’ll never change that.”

  “My mother changed it,” Elvia cried. “She left!” She remembered the numbers on the curb, the dusty yard where her footprints had been erased a thousand times.

  “So you want to give the baby away?”

  “I don’t know.” Elvia couldn’t lift her face from the gold sparkles.

  “Elvia, you don’t even want to talk about it. How are you going to love it?”

  “That’s what Michael said,” Elvia murmured finally. “How am I gonna know how to be a mother if I don’t even have one.”

  “You do. You have two. She’s out there. Your mother has never forgotten you. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Never. Mothers can’t forget.”

  Elvia washed her face in the sink. She stared at the blue-striped stick. No abortion. No erasing the geode, pulling it out like a hollow sparkly shell. A baby. A person. Getting bigger and bigger, moving more and more, with a brain that knew something, even inside. No choice now. She had to have the baby. Whatever happened, she would never forget.

  Sandy said, “I’m right here. You feel okay?” She bent down to lift Elvia’s face.

  Elvia felt only the smallest stirrings now, down by her bladder. You don’t have fingernails yet? Not yet? She stood up, unable to meet Sandy’s eyes, wondering if the vanilla and sugar and flour were still in the cupboard near the stove. With sprinkles for all the birthday cakes.

  “We can call a social worker on Monday. My friend Les. See what he says about looking at your file, trying to find your mom.” She paused. “I know you were found at St. Catherine’s.”

  Elvia opened the cupboard and touched the spindly birthday candles. “So you want me to find her? You don’t want me to stay here?”

  “Oh, Elvia, you know I’d be happy if you stayed here.” Sandy lifted her chin to the window. “But we can’t just pretend . . .”

  “Pretend somebody left me in your driveway?” Elvia said bitterly. “Not now. I’m too old.”

  “Your father still has—”

  “I can be sixteen. I’ll be an emancipated minor.”

  “Impressive term. I’ve heard it. But we don’t even know—” Sandy sighed. “I gave you that August birthday. Remember? You don’t even have a birth certificate. Even your father doesn’t know when you were born.” Sandy folded her arms. “But you’re his kid. Still.”

  Elvia was silent. She took out the green bowl where she’d watched lumps dissolve into batter when she’d first sat on this counter and touched the gold sparkles, where she’d heard her mother’s words disappear in her head like poured honey, falling in ribbons and melting into itself without a trace.

  She slept on Saturday morning, the heavy light in the bedroom wrapped like a blanket around her legs. She woke once with the word nunī echoing in her head. She hadn’t taken her candle from her backpack. She wished she could pray to a corn goddess. Maybe her mother’s tribe had a corn goddess. Maybe her mother was Maya, like Hector joked. He said, “Now there’s more Maya in LA than in Mexico.” She’d never find someone in LA.

  When she went outside, Sandy was sitting on her two steps, staring across the field.

  Elvia said, “I never know when I’ll fall asleep, or wake up.”

  “I remember. Once when I was pregnant with Rosalie, I was watching Ray work on a car.” She pointed to the driveway. “He was putting on glass pa
cks. They make the exhaust real loud. And he revved up the engine over and over. I sat here dead asleep for about two hours. I woke up and had little dots of oil on my legs.”

  Elvia said cautiously, “I always wanted to ask you. How come you only had Rosalie?”

  Sandy stood up and brushed off her robe. “Because that’s how life went.” She went inside, and Elvia stared at her father’s truck, a pale hulk beside the house.

  Suddenly she felt so tired that she leaned against the same wall where Sandy said she’d slept. Sandy always knew what she was doing. She knew how to be a good mother. Elvia felt her way along the wall back to the bed that already smelled like her, and she lay there thinking of Callie and Tina Marie. Where were the babies? They were better off without their mothers.

  Late in the night, she heard a powerful engine, and she thought it was her father, there to pick her up. Pressing her face to the screen so hard she smelled the rust and dew, in the same spot where she’d rubbed her forehead years ago, she saw Ray, his wide shoulders and brown hair slicked back, shiny. He stood in the glow of a streetlight shining onto the driveway. “Whose truck?” he called softly, and Elvia heard Sandy’s voice from the porch steps.

  “Somebody’s visiting me.”

  He nodded. “Yeah? That’s a hell of a truck. A ’62 Ford. Seems like I’ve seen it before.” He stood with his hands in his pockets, his head still bobbing slightly.

  “Maybe,” Sandy said finally.

  “Just came to pack up some more tools. I’ll be out of your way in a minute. You and your guest.” He walked down the driveway, and Elvia heard the garage door sliding open. Sandy wanted to make him jealous? He couldn’t have been gone that long, if he still had things here. She listened for Sandy’s shoes on the gravel, too, but she heard the front door close.

  Before dawn on Sunday, she couldn’t sleep any longer. St. Catherine’s—people would be around on Sunday. She left Sandy a note and backed the truck out, hearing the screen door slam. Sandy was on the porch. Elvia didn’t look back. This was it. The last chance.

  Rumbling down the street, she passed a yard where a woman stood like a ghost in a white robe, holding a coffee cup, her light brown face contorted with tears. Elvia took in a ragged breath. Was the woman Mexican? She saw a black bun when the woman turned away.

  The orange groves were deserted, the long green hallways where she and her sisters used to run, pretending the irrigation furrows were racing lanes. She saw more groves across the city, on the eastern hills, and the river bottom laid out in a dark swath far below her. Fog clung to the eucalyptus and palms, where Michael might still be sleeping in the mist-filled branch room. Or he might be anywhere—just like her father, her mother, everyone else.

  When she saw the white tower of the Spanish-style church, in a panic she thought: Who taught me that finger thing? Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the doors, look at all the people. A foster mother. The big lady with the broom hem.

  She jostled over the speed bumps and parked the truck near a hedge of oleander with dusty leaves. She ran her hands along the bristle-trimmed top of the hedge. Here?

  The big front door was open, and the sanctuary was cool. The stained-glass windows were bright as kaleidoscopes on one side, dark and indistinct on the other. Someone was humming.

  An older woman was replacing the water in the bouquets near the altar, her gray hair floating and bobbing like a cloud. Elvia said, “Excuse me. Can I talk to the—priest?”

  The woman turned, startled, her lipstick bright red, her brows penciled black. “Oh, honey, he’s not here right now. It’s too early. I’m just getting everything ready for mass.”

  “Do you know—is he the same priest that was here like, twelve years ago?”

  The woman shook her head. “No, Father Mulcahy left, well, I think nine years ago? He went to Louisiana. Father Parks has been here since. We had an interim priest for a short time and . . .”

  Elvia wouldn’t cry. She nodded and went back outside. Near the street was a statue, a woman with her hands outstretched and limp, like the begging women back at the border. The same curve of finger. Elvia touched the cool white tip of a thumb.

  She stared at the hedge, imagining her tears floating around the baby like pearls. Pearls weren’t real rocks. They were collections of calcified oyster spit around an irritation, she told herself calmly. An irritation in the belly.

  I’ll tell Sandy I give up, she thought, driving up the street. Now what? Now you really want me to stay? She hesitated on the porch, hearing voices through the screen even though she saw no social worker car. A woman said, “All week I think about the stuff I’ll get done when he’s gone, and then I take him to his dad’s and I miss him so bad I have to sleep with his pajamas.”

  “For the smell,” Sandy said.

  “Yeah. It’s one night, and I wander around like a zombie. I can’t even breathe right when he’s not there. Bugging the hell out of me.”

  When they’d finished laughing, Elvia opened the door. The ghost-robe woman Elvia had seen down the street sat at the table, sipping from a coffee cup, her hair still in a bun, her face carefully made up now. Sandy said, “This is my friend Enchantee. This is . . . this is Elvia.”

  Not your daughter. Not your friend. Somebody who just showed up one day. Elvia went into the bedroom, listening to their voices float down the short hall.

  “A new shelter?” Enchantee said.

  “No. She was one of my kids for years.” Elvia heard Sandy sigh. “Broke my heart when she left with her dad. I haven’t had anyone stay that long for a while. Because everything’s so unsettled with the separation.” She paused. “Ray got a condo with Bonnie the blonde. And I guess she doesn’t like oil stains, because he rented a warehouse to work on his cars.”

  “Damn. All those Chevies, the Impalas, all the low riders and classic cars Demetrius and his brothers sold. Always some guy waiting for them to finish. The perfect engines, right?”

  Elvia remembered Ray and a guy named Demetrius, a brown-skinned man with a ponytail and broad back, working in the garage on a pale blue car with fins that looked sharp enough to cut. So Enchantee’s husband was gone, too.

  “Yeah. All their hoods up like those cheap clip-on sunglasses. I used to look at the engines. The hoses were all tangled up like those pictures of your small intestines, and then you had—I don’t know, oil filters or bigger things that looked like stomachs and livers.”

  Enchantee laughed. “You’re crazy, Sandy.”

  “Of course I am. I had oil and grease outside, poop and pee in here. All my kids and their stomachs sticking out, the way you could see tangled-up veins in their foreheads and wrists.” It was quiet, and then Sandy called, “Come get some breakfast, Elvia.”

  Elvia got a glass of orange juice. “Good,” Sandy said. “Calcium for the baby. You think all this we’re talking about sounds frightening?”

  Elvia didn’t answer. She stood near the window, eating toast.

  Enchantee smiled and shrugged. “Teenagers always think if they pretend something isn’t there, it disappears. Like dirty dishes.”

  Elvia slammed the cupboard door. “I don’t need a lecture. I’ve been taking care of a little boy practically by myself. I saved a little girl’s life.”

  Like they’re gonna scare me, she thought. Hell, no. She stayed in the bedroom all day, staring at the dresser drawers where her things used to be. She slept, hearing crows, dreaming about one circling over her. She woke breathless, her scalp prickled with sweat, more fear than she’d ever had deep inside her breastbone. But no one kicked her, or even shivered.

  When she walked into the kitchen that night, she said, “Sorry I was rude to your friend. And you.” Sandy nodded. Elvia said, “But I went to the church and the same priest isn’t even there now. And you guys were joking about poop.”

  The smell of lemon oil floated around her.
Sandy said, “Okay. Do you want to stay?” Elvia nodded. “Then we have to talk to social services. And you have to do something about that truck in the driveway.”

  Elvia was so surprised she hiccuped. “Why? Because Ray saw it?”

  Now Sandy looked surprised. But all she said was, “Because you’re driving a vehicle that could be considered stolen, your dad is a scary guy, and I can’t get in trouble with the county.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Elvia said, stung. “More fuck-up kids might show up. He gave me the truck.”

  Sandy blew a little air out when she laughed. “Right. I guess you forgot. The biggest rule in this house was no lying. Remember why? I don’t think you do, because back then I wouldn’t have put it to you this way. I’d have just said because it’s wrong, because it’ll hurt you later, because I said so. Now that you’re going to have your own baby, I’ll tell you straight up: because it insults me. And I’m a short woman who’s never done anything except raise kids, cook, clean, and wash, so people insult me all the time. I don’t need it at home.”

  “No one’s here to insult you now,” Elvia said. “Maybe Rosalie got tired of hearing about laundry.”

  “Yeah. There’s just me—today anyway. And you. And your baby.” Sandy paused. “Tomorrow, we can make a doctor appointment. Then go down to social services. My friend Les can see if your mother’s in the system. Maybe she’s had other kids, maybe she still lives here.” Sandy paused. “Then we can return your father’s truck. I know he’s not the easiest person in the world to talk to, but we can tell him—”

  Suddenly Elvia couldn’t stand Sandy’s patient tone, her almost-bandage voice, as though she felt sorry for Elvia’s pitiful life. “My dad’s probably in Florida.” She stood up. “I heard Ray talking to you last night. You sounded like you wished he’d come back. And I don’t want to mess up your life more than it already is. An illegal fuck-up foster kid.” She headed for the bedroom that used to be hers.

  “You’re not a fuck-up. I said it, okay? Look, you don’t even have a driver’s license, do you?”