Bright Angel Time

by Martha McPhee

  We took turns sleeping on and off and it was cold and I snuck under Julia’s cover and we held each other. She was all bones. “I love you,” she whispered. I knew later she’d be asking me for the details of the fight. She’d be mad she hadn’t been there.

  I thought of Finny waking up in the morning and discovering that we were gone and I wondered if he’d say something then. “Where’s Kate?” He’d want to ask and when he found out that I was gone and that he’d never see me again he’d be sad. I tried hard to imagine this. It made me feel good inside, grand, then it made me feel bad. Then I didn’t care. I thought about all the things I’d charged to our room and was relieved I wouldn’t be there when Anton paid the bill. My eyelids were heavy and my eyes burned beneath them. I had a headache from the champagne. I saw our home, all the lights on, lit up bright, every window glowing in the dark night. Dad standing in the front doorway, waiting. Dad used to scream at us for leaving the lights on. But I saw it that way anyway, with him at the front door screaming at us, “Eve, we can’t run up bills carelessly. Girls, I’ve told you a million times.” Outside, the seventeen-year locusts would be singing up a storm the way they had been when we left. They’d just been beginning then, and their tiny holes poked through the yard as if it had been perforated by some kind of giant perforating machine. During the day you couldn’t see them, but you could hear them. A haunting sound, like that of crickets only with the volume turned up full blast. The last time I’d spoken to Dad at home, he’d said there would be millions of locusts before the summer ended. He said their bodies would cling to the trees like barnacles and at night the noise would be so loud you’d have to plug your ears to sleep. He said when they died their bodies would fall to the ground and there’d be so many of them they’d crunch beneath our feet like eggshells. By that time we’d be long gone to California, but I didn’t know that then. He said that the last time the locusts visited was the summer he’d met and fallen in love with Mom. I wondered about seventeen years from now. I’d be twenty-five. I wondered if we’d still know Anton. I wondered if any of us would be dead.

  ♦

  “Kate?” Mom asked. Jane had turned off the interior lights and now only the dashboard was lit. It was a big dashboard with lots of things to light up. The clock read 2:48. “How much money do you have?” A jolt surged through me and immediately I was very awake. Jane and Julia sat up too. Their eyes beamed at me. I didn’t say anything.

  “About how much, Kate?” she asked again.

  “How do you know if I’ve got any money,” I asked.

  “I know my little Kate.” Mom turned her face away from the road to me. The washcloth bunched over one eye, but the other held me for a second. I thought of Allison’s mother with the Vaseline and the patch over her eye. Mom turned back to the road.

  “What?” I asked. I wanted her to say it again. I pretended I hadn’t heard.

  “I know my little girl,” she said and I could see a smile on her lips. I had $347.57: the $7.57 scrounged from the fountain and the seats and floors of the Eldorado and camper; the hundred from Anton; eighty from Dwayne and the rest from charging.

  “Enough,” I said. “Enough to get us home.”

  Julia and Jane screwed up their eyes and asked a million questions, but Mom told them to be quiet. She didn’t ask any questions and I didn’t tell her how much I had or how I’d gotten it. Then Mom started laughing and so did Jane and Julia.

  “We can sleep in hotels,” I said, laughing too. “And no two-dollar limits. ‘Two-dollar limit, babe’.” I imitated Anton’s drawl. I thought for a moment and a wonderful idea occurred to me. “We can go to the Grand Canyon and stay in the best hotel and eat steaks for dinner!” I said. It was on our way, not too far from where we were now. By tomorrow we could be there. I got excited inside.

  “Fine!” Mom said. We all got happy inside.

  We drove until Mom couldn’t drive anymore, in and out of mountains on some small state road. We stopped at an Esso and parked near the bathrooms, but it was lonelier this time. There were no trucks and it was locked up tight. No Coors or Coke signs flickering. No ice machine churning. No hotels across the road. We peed at the edge of the parking lot. We didn’t brush our teeth. I heard a dog bark, but even that came from far away. The air was cold. We pulled some clothes from our bags and piled them on top of us and nestled into each other. Each breath like a stitch pulled us toward sleep.

  I wondered what home would be like when we got there. I remembered once when we went away to Europe and Dad had forgotten to tell the milkman. The stupid milkman had come every day while we were gone and left the bottles of milk on the front steps. When we came home, over a hundred glass milk bottles stood on the steps with the milk swollen up and exploded, and some of them had broken. Mom had been mad at Dad, but it was such an ugly sight and so smelly with all those bottles oozing sour milk that they laughed. I wondered if someone had remembered to call the milkman. I thought he must have been a pretty stupid milkman to leave the bottles in the summer heat. In my mind I started making a list of the things I’d do when I got home. New clothes for school. Call the milkman. Clean the house. I wanted to do it the way Mom liked, leaving everything shining so you could see your face in it, from the floors to the chandelier. I got so excited I couldn’t keep still. I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to get there right away. Things would be ordinary. We didn’t need Dad. If he weren’t there it would be fine. He could drive us to school. That would be enough. It would be just us again. Jane was right. We needed to protect Mom. Inside me filled, though I was a little scared. I took out my money and counted it even though I knew how much was there. I wondered if Sofia would miss us.

  “Sleep, Kate,” Julia said.

  I wondered if I’d ever see Finny again.

  ♦

  When the first light cracked the east Mom awoke. “Jane,” Mom whispered, and nudged her. The blood had dried and her eye was swollen and would not open. I saw Anton’s hand come down. I couldn’t think about that. My mouth tasted dirty. My eyes weighed heavily and a dizziness made me queasy. “Jane?” Mom asked again. She just said her name. She didn’t have a question. Kind of pleaded her name. She folded her arms over the steering wheel and leaned her head into it. There was an incredible silence like I hadn’t heard in months. Jane held Mom. Mom cried. I’d only seen her cry once. It hurt her to cry. The tears stung the cut.

  “I don’t know how to do it,” Mom said. Jane told her we could do it. Told her how. Julia made a joke about me being the breadwinner.

  “I have enough money,” I said. “I can get us home.”

  Julia wanted to know how much. I loved that she was curious. “Enough,” I said. I was glad that I had the money and not her. She would have charged us interest. “Like a bank,” she’d said. Now with the light I could make out the wound.

  “It’ll be all right Mom,” Jane said. “We’ll drive home. It’s our home, Mom.” And Jane said encouraging things about home and everything being all right and Julia chimed in and then so did I. Julia crawled over Jane to Mom and started cleaning up her eye. She got water from a spigot outside. She rinsed the washcloth of blood. It was cold. You could see your breath.

  “You don’t know what it’s like to be left,” Mom said. Her thumbnail pressed against her lip, rubbing it. “I kept thinking Ian would come back.” I was afraid she’d start getting mad about how he left her. But she didn’t. “I must have been really awful to make him leave his three little girls. He never explained why, but I must have been really horrible. He said I didn’t love him. Perhaps I was too young, I don’t know.” She was tired. Her words came out in one tired string. She broke down again. It was unbearable to see her cry, to see that bruised eye. Her wound was purple laced with veins of red, and it puffed like a small popover. The lid stretched down over the eye and the puffiness, sealing it. She stopped crying. “The thing about Anton is that he knows how to live. Your father didn’t.”

  “We don’t have to think about this now,”
Jane said. “All we have to think about now is getting home.” Jane was excited in a way I hadn’t seen her in months. She loved taking care of Mom.

  “Work, work, work, that’s all Ian understood. With Anton there’s never a dull moment, is there?” She smiled eagerly and looked at us. I couldn’t look at her. My legs were sore and aching as if I’d been running for a long time. I fiddled with the buttons on my sweater and then I felt my holster to check the money. “He’s spiritual too. I like that he’s spiritual. Your father wasn’t spiritual.”

  “It doesn’t have to be a choice, Mom,” Jane said. Her face quivered. Palm in cheek as if to steady it. Then, as if suddenly remembering, “He hit you, Mom. He hit you.”

  I thought of Anton. He appeared in front of me, bending down and kissing us. “You forgive me, babe?”

  “Your father doesn’t enjoy his life. For him it’s work. How could he have enjoyed me? Us? I wanted more. I wanted to be a writer, but he never took me seriously. He didn’t want to share with the raising of the kids. The daily stuff. Changing diapers, feeding.” She used ‘kids’ as if we weren’t her kids. “Equally caring.” She paused. “He never explained anything to me. He never gave me a chance to discuss it. He never said, Eve there’s trouble. Eve, I’m leaving. I’ve fallen in love because you didn’t give me what I needed. He never explained. I never imagined that he’d leave his three little girls. With Ian there was no equality. Our relationship wasn’t about equality.”

  The sun lifted on the horizon and outside turned gray. The Esso station stood lonely, glowing white. Mom said something about it being much easier to be unhappy than to be happy and I knew we’d be heading back.

  “He hit you, damn it, Mom. We can’t turn back. You’re stronger than that,” Jane pleaded. She was almost crying. Mom held Jane, hugged her.

  “It was just his ring,” she said. “If he hadn’t been wearing that ring it wouldn’t have been so bad. I shouldn’t have flirted so much.”

  Blood clotted around her eye. Blood stained her black dress with a darker shade of black. She licked her finger and patted away some blood that had dried on her hand. She put on dark glasses. We sat there staring out the window, thinking what to do. Jane insisted we go home, almost angrily. I thought they’d get in a fight. I saw his hand come down and I shivered.

  “He just had too much to drink and I provoked him,” Mom said. “Anton needs us. Nicholas and Timothy and Finny and Sofia and Caroline, they all need us.” She stared hard into the morning.

  “But we don’t need them,” Jane said. “Think about yourself. Think about us.”

  “We need them too, Jane. I think we should go back, at least for a little while. At least until the end of the trip, just to give him a chance. Everyone deserves another chance.”

  “When’s the end of the trip?”

  “Oh please, Jane. Please.”

  We drove for hours into the darkness of the west and down into the desert again, the air cool from night and the world so empty-seeming, waiting to be filled in.

  We stopped at a diner and I bought us all eggs and Mom a cup of coffee with cream. With the sunglasses on, you couldn’t tell she’d been hit and her face even looked less anxious, as if she knew that Anton would be coming for us. She put on some rouge and lipstick, holding her compact out in front of her. Julia said she was feeling better even though her coloring was white and yellow. Jane said we were making the wrong choice. We all drank a cup of coffee. It was bitter, but good. I felt grown up.

  ♦

  In the distance, in the wet mirage of road, the turquoise camper came toward us. Mom stopped the car and when the camper arrived Anton got out, rising tall with his cowboy hat perched on the top of his head and he came to Mom who’d gotten out of the car to meet him and he lifted her up and hugged her hard.

  “Eve!” Anton screamed and Mom looked so beautiful, hugged there tight in his strong, big arms. His lips pressed gently into her hair. “I love you, Eve!” I thought of the water tower that loomed over town. He folded in half and started crying and watching him cry made me want to cry.

  Mom turned back, looking at us in the car. A smile cracked her lips and her hair blew this way and that across her face. The dark glasses made her glamorous. She turned back to Anton.

  “I’m leaving,” Jane said to Julia and me in the car.

  ♦

  After several days they were engaged to be married. Anton bought her a moonstone from an Indian as an engagement ring. We had a family meeting. All of us, including James and Cynthia – one of us now. She’d paid for the Desert Princess so Anton had invited her to join us. I was glad she’d paid; I knew she’d never notice my charges. Dwayne was gone. Anton had asked him to leave. Mom sighed when Anton told her, sorry she hadn’t been able to be more generous.

  We sat at a picnic table at a roadside stop and Mom and Anton asked our opinion of marriage, if we thought they should marry.

  Nicholas said they fought too much and Sofia asked about their mother. Jane ignored the whole meeting. Caroline said it was a beautiful idea. James said Anton needed to work through his anger first, which I thought would make Anton mad, but it didn’t. And though some of us thought they should not, the matter was decided and we had a small ceremony that night. Anton read a few prayers from his red book and also the marriage blessing, and their marriage was decided. Mom wore a beautiful dress without a bra, the way Anton liked. Some good bottles of wine were opened for the toast.

  “He’s not going to marry her,” Sofia said. “Look at Finny’s mom. You can be sure she wanted to marry Dad. And they had a kid together.” She sucked on the end of her hair and held me with her beautiful eyes. “If Eve’s in it for the money, she’ll be disappointed. You see, if Dad marries he doesn’t get any of Mom’s money.” She looked at me tenderly as if we were in this together. As if I were her partner, on her side. “Dad only gets the use of the money as long as he’s married to Mom. It’s their agreement.”

  A few days later we saw Dwayne hitchhiking again, dressed in his orange robes, and we picked him up. All of us kids ignored Dwayne, tolerating him. But he didn’t seem to notice. He was one of those types who would never notice, even if the whole world hated him.

  Mom said, “Let our home be a haven for those in need.”

  ∨ Bright Angel Time ∧

  A Whole Famlly

  The December after Dad left, and several months before Mom met Anton, Sal and Sam – a novelist and his wife – and four of their seven children had moved into our house. The novelist had been a college friend of Dad’s. His novels weren’t yet successful and he was broke, so Mom offered him part of our house as a way for all of us to cut costs.

  They had arrived in a beat-up old yellow station wagon and took over the house. A baby boy, two girls – one almost my age and one Jane’s age – and a boy Julia’s age. The two girls, Belva and Sala, moved into my room and I moved in with Julia. The parents and the baby, Saki, made a bedroom of the study and the boy, Pursey, slept on a mattress in the dining room. Boxes and suitcases and a strange smell of spices and breast milk overwhelmed the house. Mom was in bed a lot, getting over Dad, but their arrival made her happy. She said she wanted ‘a whole family’ in the house, not ‘a broken family’. She said the house wasn’t a home without ‘a whole family’.

  The novelist had droopy, sad eyes and he always moped around, trying to work, but not working very much at all. He stared out the window, paced, ate, slept and sometimes he cried. His head was balding and terror flooded his light brown eyes. Sometimes just staring at him was enough to spook you. He had the saddest voice, as if the whole world were collapsing in on him. I felt sorry for him. There was nothing in the world as bad as seeing an adult cry. He was short. He dressed in khakis and oxfords like Dad.

  Sam, for Samantha, was the exact opposite: tall and thick-boned with long black hair which she kept tied back in a rubber band she’d pull off the newspapers. She had black, black eyes. Her hands were always on her hips and it wasn’t lo
ng before she started ordering us around as if we were her own children, organizing us with dinner jobs and house chores as if we’d never had them. She kept whole-earth food in abundant stock and tried to teach us to love tiger’s milk and tofu. We were prohibited from seeing Mom while she slept, which was all the time. “Off limits,” Sam would say, guarding Mom’s door. Her mouth opened wide when she spoke so you could see all the pink inside. Her thick tongue ran over her big gray teeth. Only Jane was allowed to visit Mom when she wanted.

  “Jane only has your mother,” Sam would say. It had been a couple months since Jane stopped seeing Dad. Since she’d taken Mom’s side, Sam liked Jane best.

  Julia popped Mom’s lock with straightened-out hangers and knitting needles. She kneeled at Mom’s door, working fast. I kept on the lookout, leaning over the banister to watch the downstairs. The brass chandelier hung in front of me, dangling down from the ceiling, thick with cobwebs. Mom didn’t care about cleaning anymore. A giddy feeling rushed through us. I’d whisper excitedly whenever I thought I heard Sam’s heavy feet marching over the downstairs hall. Julia concentrated, sliding her tools in and out of the lock until it popped and we broke in.

  “Do something, Mom,” Julia complained. At first Julia couldn’t stand Sam. Julia divided the refrigerator in half with cardboard. One side for our creamed chipped beef and normal food. One side for Sam’s weird food. Julia told me she saw Sam lick her baby’s poop off her finger while changing his diapers. We weren’t going to eat any of her food, no matter what. Jane cooked creamed chipped beef for us every night. Sam said our food had nitrates and preservatives inside that would rot our stomachs.

  “She means well,” Mom said, lifting herself to lean against the headboard. Her hair fell all over the place and her breath was bad. Big dark circles formed half-moons beneath her eyes. The room smelled stale. The windows were closed. Outside was pouring rain. Mom always hated when it rained in winter. She felt gypped of snow. Snow made the whole world perfect – the way it fell, so softly and lazily, made her feel there was a lot of time. The rain streamed against the windows as if we were inside a tank.