Nobody had said a word so far except Natalie.
“You're welcome. Come home with us.” But of course I said this second part to Maria.
She shook her head. “I can't.”
“You had money for the bus? Why didn't you tell me?”
“No. I didn't have any money. I called my sister. And she bought me a ticket.”
“You don't have to go back. Come home with us.”
“No. I can't. I have to go back.”
“Why?”
“I have to go get C.J.”
My stomach cramped painfully at the mention of that name. But then I also started thinking that it probably wasn't Carl. The way she said she had to go get him.
“Who's C.J.?”
She wouldn't look at me. Just kept looking down at the linoleum of the bus station floor. “Carl Jr.,” she said. I still didn't get it, and I guess she could tell. “C.J. is my little boy.”
“You have a son?”
I heard myself asking the question, as if from the outside. Like a voice that sounded enough like mine, but didn't feel connected.
“I'm sorry I didn't tell you. I knew you wouldn't take me with you if you knew I had two kids. I didn't even think you'd take me and Natalie. But I couldn't leave Natalie. But I thought I could leave C.J. But I can't. I have to fight for him. No matter what I think will happen.”
I sat back on the hard wooden bus bench. Felt the cool, smooth wood against the hard knobs of my spine. The conversation under the stars came into my head again. It's weird how something that's already happened can change. Just by keying in some new information.
After about an eternity I said, “Why did you leave a note that made it sound like you were leaving forever?”
Her eyes came up to mine and I saw she was crying. But silently. I hadn't even known.
“Well, I can't just come back and live here with two kids.”
“Why can't you?”
She looked into my eyes for a strangely long period of time. I tried not to squirm.
“ We can't fit four of us in that tiny little place.”
“Then I'll get a job, and we'll get a bigger place.”
“Really, Tony? Two kids?”
“Is this dangerous?”
She looked down at the dirty floor again. Didn't answer.
“Maybe you should leave Natalie here with me.”
For two reasons. So Natalie couldn't get hurt by Carl, or taken away by Carl. And so I knew for a fact that Maria would have to come back to me.
Three reasons. So I wouldn't be all alone in my tiny new house in the waiting.
“She wouldn't stay with you.”
“We like each other.”
“She might cry the whole time.”
“Better that than take a chance on her getting hurt.”
A long silence.
Then Maria said, “Natalie, would you be okay with Tony for a while? I promise I'll come back as soon as I get C.J.”
“When?” Natalie asked.
“About a week, I think. Will you be okay with Tony?”
She didn't answer. Just stuck her thumb in her mouth.
I lifted her gently off the seat beside Maria, and she didn't object. Just buried her face in my neck.
“Please be careful,” I said.
“I will. I'll call you at your grandmother's when I get there. And when I get C.J. So you'll know I'm okay.”
I started getting scared, thinking about what had happened last time she saw Carl. I started thinking that maybe leaving C.J. where he was had been good logic in the first place.
“Maybe—”
“No,” she said. “I have to do this. I have to.”
She dug around in the duffel bag and pulled out a few things. Made a neat little stack on the bench beside her.
Two little dresses.
Three pairs of clean white underwear, unbelievably tiny.
A soft-bristled hairbrush.
A toothbrush with a plastic handle shaped like a teddy bear.
A VHS tape of The Wizard of Oz.
“Why do you have to do this again?”
“So C.J. will never talk about me the way you were talking about your mother last night.”
“Oh,” I said.
I scooped up the pile of Natalie's things. What else could I say? It had been the truth. All of it. It was way too late to take any of my words back now.
GRANDMA ANNIE WAS WAITING FOR ME in the truck, with the engine still running. I climbed in and set Natalie on my lap. Carefully laid Natalie's things on the passenger side floor at my feet. Put the seat belt around both of us.
“It's a long story,” I said.
She just nodded, and then put the truck in gear.
“HE'S GOING TO KILL HER,” I said. “Why did I let her go? It was so stupid. He'll kill her. She'll never make it back here in one piece. I should have gone with. At least tried to protect her.”
I was sitting at the breakfast table with Grandma Annie and my mother, who had joined us silently and without warning. Or permission. I was staring at a glass of orange juice I had no intention of drinking. My stomach felt like someone was squeezing it with pliers and then twisting. I was holding Natalie on my lap, her thumb in her mouth, her eyes shut tight and pressed against my neck. Her usual death grip on the fur muff. I realized too late that I probably shouldn't have said those things in front of her. I was feeling bad about that.
It was the first time I had spoken. And the words had just gone out in general. Just flowed out to fill the kitchen. I had not been speaking directly to my mother. And I had not looked at her once.
Grandma Annie said, “She was right, though. When she said you had to stay out of it. He'd kill you quicker than anybody.”
First there was just a long silence. Longer than a normal lag in conversation. Also quieter than your average silence. I didn't know it was an important silence. At the time. Although I guess in a way I could feel something starting to build.
Then, out of nowhere, my mother said, “He can kill me.”
I only knew it was my mother because it wasn't Grandma Annie and it wasn't me. I hadn't heard her voice since I was seven. I couldn't even decide if it sounded familiar or not.
“What?” I looked up at her. I couldn't help it. It had just been such a weird thing to say. “What does that mean?”
“It means just what I said. I'll go with her and try to protect her. If he wants to kill somebody he can kill me.”
Another long silence. I'm pretty sure no one else knew what to say, either.
Then my mother said, “I better hurry, if I'm going to catch her.”
Grandma Annie followed her away from the table. Out into the hall by the front door. I could hear quiet whispers of their voices. Just a few sentences each. I was about to get up and move closer. I wanted to hear what they were saying.
Before I could, I heard the jingle of car keys as my mother grabbed them up off the hall table. I heard the door open and then slam shut.
I looked up to see Grandma Annie in the kitchen doorway. She looked worried and far away.
I said, “What just happened?”
“You were here as much as I was, honey.”
“But why would she do that?”
“Oh, honey. Use your head.”
I felt insulted. Belittled. But I figured she was just worried, so I worked on letting it go by.
I tried to understand what had just happened with my mother. I really tried. But I still didn't get it. “I'm sorry. Maybe this stuff is obvious to everyone. But it's not obvious to me. I really don't understand. She doesn't even know Maria.”
A long silence. I was beginning to think she would never answer me.
Then she said, “Longer you live, honey, the more you see everybody's just running around looking for a do-over. Chance to go back to their worst mistake and get it right this time.”
I said, “Oh.”
Then I spent the rest of the morning being afraid that Carl would
kill Maria and my mother. But I never said so out loud.
I was so close to being on the bus. Another couple of minutes, and I would have been on already. And then I guess everything would have turned out different.
I was standing outside, where the buses are. In the boarding place, hearing that really familiar roar of the bus engine idling. It fills up your head in a special way. It's something you could almost get used to. And there's a smell to the exhaust from those big engines, also, but that's not as nice.
I had my duffel bag beside me. A guy was throwing people's bags into the space under the bus and I was waiting for him to help me. If it hadn't hurt so much to try to pick up that big bag, I'd have hauled it up to the front of the line myself. Then I would've been on that bus already, and then maybe I never would have heard this lady, this total stranger I'd never met before, calling my name.
That's not usually a good sign, when somebody yells your name. Usually, in my world, when nobody notices me at all that's the good news. When somebody calls me out, that makes my guts freeze up. Makes me want to go the other way. Fast.
But then I looked closer and I started to think it was Tony's mom.
See, I was looking out the window when Tony's mom first drove up. I was looking out because I heard a car come up the driveway, and that scared the crap out of me. I knew Carl could never really find me. But I still had to look.
And even though I hadn't seen her very close up, I saw just enough of what she looked like to be thinking this was probably her calling me.
So I said, “I'm Maria.”
And she came up to me and looked straight in my eyes. Or she tried anyway.
I'm not good at looking in people's eyes. Once in grade school I went trick-or-treating in my building, and I was wearing this Dracula costume, and there was no way anybody could tell who I was. Except three of my neighbors opened their doors and said, “Oh, hi Maria.” And when I asked them how they knew, they said they could tell because I always looked down a certain way.
But I don't mean to get off track.
“Come on,” she said. “Let's go.”
“I can't. I have to go get C.J.”
“I know. That's where we're going.”
She picked up my duffel bag and started walking, so I walked with her. Even though I totally still didn't get it.
She had a not-too-big SUV, real nice and new, and she threw my bag in the back.
I said, “Wait. We're going to New York to get C.J. in your car?”
“That's right,” she said.
“But I have a bus ticket. My sister, Stella, bought me a bus ticket.”
“Why don't you go inside and cash it in?” she said. “We can use the money for food and gas on the road.”
I'M NOT SO GOOD AT TALKING to strangers. I think it goes along with that thing about not looking in people's eyes. Anyway, it was about twenty miles or so before I said anything to her. Maybe thirty.
“Why are you doing this with me again?” I asked. Even though there was really no “again” about it. She hadn't even told me once. But with strangers it's easier to go the long way around a thing than it is to hit it dead on.
“Because it's a lot harder to kill two people than one.”
“So you get that this is probably really dangerous.”
“Oh, yeah.”
A few more quiet miles.
“But you don't even know me,” I said.
She didn't answer right away. Then after a while she said, “If you let go of the idea that I'm doing it just for you … and think of it as something I need to do for myself, too … then it might make more sense.”
It's a long drive from California to New York. So I figured I'd have time to work that one out in my head. And, truthfully, I had some sense of what she meant already.
WE WERE ON ROUTE 40, where you can drive really fast, when she talked to me again. We were close outside Kingman, Arizona. According to the signs, anyway. I had nothing better to do than read the signs.
She asked me if I drove.
“Oh,” I said. “No. I never learned to drive.” Silence. I wondered if she was asking just to make conversation. Probably not. Because we hadn't made much conversation so far. “You know. Growing up in the city and all. We never had a car.”
“Okay.”
“Sorry.” Even though I wasn't sure what I was being sorry for. But I tend to be, as sort of a default mood. “Why?”
“It's okay. It would just go faster, is all. With two drivers. But it just means we'll need to stop more. I'll need to sleep. I was just thinking we could save money on motels. You know, if you drove while I napped. But it's okay. So I run up my credit card a little. Motels on the road will be cheap enough. It's when we get to the city that I'm worried about. It's so expensive in the city.”
“We can stay at my sister Stella's.”
“Oh. That's good to know. That helps.”
Then we were all the way through Kingman before I got up the nerve to say, “Mrs…. Mundt? That's probably not your name anymore. Is it?”
“No. It's not.”
“So … what's your name?”
“Celia.”
“What should I call you?”
“Celia.”
“Isn't that sort of … disrespectful?”
“No. Not if that's what I say I want. What were you about to ask me?”
“Oh. Right.” I had almost forgotten. “You were going to let me drive your car?”
“Well, yeah. If you knew how to drive.”
“Wow,” I said.
That was all the talking we did for Arizona.
THAT WOMAN HAD SOME STAMINA for driving. We didn't stop to let her sleep until we got to Gallup, New Mexico.
Before we could settle in to go to sleep, we had to go find a store so she could buy a toothbrush and some underwear and stuff like that. I guess she hadn't bothered to have any of that with her when she took off to find me.
On the way to find a motel, I was staring at the side of her face. I'm not sure why. I was tired, that might have been part of it. And I guess I felt like I could get away with it because it was dark. I could only really see her when we passed a streetlight.
I was looking at the way she wore her hair back in a loose braid, even though it had a lot of gray in it. I never saw somebody wear their hair in a braid when it had so much gray. At least, not a big loose braid like that. Like the way somebody young would wear their hair. And I was looking at the little lines at the corners of her eyes.
I thought she didn't know I was staring. I don't know how she could tell.
“What?” she said.
I was so tired, I told her the truth. “I was just trying to picture what my mother would look like. If she hadn't died. She would have been so many years older now. I was just wondering how she would have looked.”
“I'm sorry you lost your mother,” she said.
I waited for her to ask me how she died. When she didn't, I was really relieved.
WE ONLY HAD ONE CONVERSATION that made me feel laid bare. On the way out east, that is. Most of the time we talked very small, or didn't even bother.
All of a sudden she looked over at me and said, “You get to know somebody pretty well when you're driving cross-country with them.”
I tried to hide the fact that a thing like that makes me nervous. “But we barely even talk.”
“It's not always about talking. Just watching the way a person functions night and day for three or four days running.”
I took a deep breath. “So what do you know about me?”
“That you're a lot like I was ten years ago. Even though ten years ago I was a lot older than you are now. But when I was just getting out of that horrible marriage, and I had a kid. I was a lot like you.”
“I'm not sure what you mean,” I said after a while. “Because I'm not sure what you think I'm like.”
“Scared. Willing to do anything to avoid a confrontation. Peace at any price.”
“Well
. Peace is good. Right?”
“Real peace is great. But peace at any price is not real peace.”
I thought about that across maybe a few more miles of Ohio before I said, “How did you get from that to what you are now? Because you don't seem scared now at all.”
“I just handle fear differently.”
“Really? You don't seem scared at all.”
“Everybody's scared.”
“Really? I thought it was mostly me.”
“Everybody. If they say they're not, they're lying. Either to you or themselves.”
“You still didn't tell me how you got to here.”
“Just took a lot of time with myself, I guess. After I left that awful marriage. Learned to live with myself and learned something about myself instead of spending all my time figuring out how to live with somebody else.”
“Oh,” I said.
And I guess that was enough serious talking, because we went back to being two people who hardly know each other for the rest of the trip.
“YOU CAN'T DO THIS,” Stella said. “It's suicide.”
“I have to do this,” I said.
Celia said nothing at all.
We were sitting in Stella's living room. The light was starting to fade, and no one had bothered to turn on any lamps or anything. So we could only see each other a little bit, which made talking easier. I was holding Ferdy so he wouldn't rub all over Celia because Celia is allergic to cats. I felt really sorry for her. New York hotel rooms must be awful damned expensive to make a person who's allergic to cats stay at Stella's.
Stella said, “You can't. You have to go through the courts. I wouldn't even have bought you a bus ticket if I knew you were going to do this. It's crazy.”
We all ignored the fact that I obviously got here anyway. Without the bus ticket.
“I have to surprise him. If I just get an attorney and serve him with custody papers, he'll run away. He'll take C.J. and hide where I can't get to him. I'll never find them. And then I'll never have my chance.”
“And this way? You think you're going to beat him in a fistfight? He'll kill you for leaving him to run off with another man.”
I had to wait to answer while she went off to get a box of tissues for poor Celia.
As soon as she got back I said, “I'm thinking maybe he doesn't even know that yet. Because maybe he just watched your window the whole time I was away. And maybe he has no way of knowing I was even gone.”
Chasing Windmills Page 22