Indelible

by Adelia Saunders

  Perhaps. I am willing to admit that it is possible that Inga Beart and I never came face to face—that on the day she came back to the ranch to see us I stayed hidden under my Aunt Cat’s kitchen table. But she did come back. However much she might have tried, my mother did not leave me behind entirely. It’s the one thing I’ve been sure of all these years. Because when I close my eyes I see a double stitch just below her anklebone, then three stitches more and the straps begin, crossing left over right on the right foot and right over left on the other. They buckle on the outside and cinch at the fourth hole, but there is a crease just below the third, a little light wearing to show that she must have worn her red shoes a little looser for a while. It’s a detail I never thought about when I was young. But later when I heard a pregnant woman tell her friend her feet were swollen, I started wondering if those little creases in the leather hadn’t been my addition to my mother’s life, my mark on her.

  I was surprised to find that the girl with the suitcase was still standing there on the sidewalk. I had the sense that she was waiting for me to say something, though I couldn’t remember exactly what we’d been talking about.

  Most of the other stores on the street weren’t open yet, but at the back of the shoe repair shop I could see the shopkeeper already at work, threading an old hiking boot with new laces. Beside him a pair of red shoes had been polished and tagged for pick-up. They had an old-fashioned look to them, but the color was too bright and the straps were wrong.

  The girl was still studying me, as if she wasn’t entirely satisfied that we were strangers to each other. She was about the same age as my son. I kept looking in the window of the shop, trying to think of something to say.

  On a ledge above the sewing machine was a collection of figurines, clever little things all done out of pieces of shoes. The owner of the shop had clearly made them himself as a way to show his skill with a bit of leather and thread. Crusaders carried lances tipped with cobblers’ tacks, and a child’s insole had been fashioned into a tiny boat, with shoelaces for rigging and a buffing cloth for a sail.

  I turned to the girl. “Aren’t these something?” I said.

  “What?” she said.

  “Here,” I pointed to them. “These figurines in the window. See how they have the little suits of armor? My son would get a kick out of that.”

  “Kick?” she said.

  “I mean he’d like them.”

  “Yah,” she said. “They are cute.”

  Her eyes were on the tiny Crusaders in the window. The rose in its plastic cone had begun to droop.

  “We used to make things like this when he was little. Castles and knights, and I remember a catapult—do you know what that is? We built one out of Popsicle sticks and a wooden spoon.”

  “Yah?” the girl said.

  “That was a long time ago,” I said. “My son is in college now. But he’s studying history.” I nodded to the knights. “Just this sort of thing.”

  In fact, I’d had the idea that this trip to Paris might be something my son and I would do together. With his high school French I could have used his help and he would have liked the research—we could have made an adventure out of it. I’d imagined that he’d be the one to find it: a picture of my mother hidden away in the Paris archives all these years. A photograph Carter Bristol never looked too closely at because her face was blurry while her feet were clear. Or maybe a snapshot from a garden party at someone’s chateau: a country brook, a dark-haired woman with eyes like flecks on the negative, the flash a second too late to catch her smile as she leans and dips one toe. Her arms held out for balance, in one hand a pair of shoes with straps that cross, two creases each where the buckle bit the leather, one deep, one only faintly there. And my son, Wow, Dad. Just like you said.

  The girl was looking at me again, closely. Then she smiled. “So you are here together?”

  “My son? No, no, he’s not here with me. I’m afraid I’m on my own,” I said.

  “Ah, okay, I’m sorry,” she said. She didn’t quite meet my eyes. After a moment she said, “So you come for—reunion?” and she put a slight emphasis on the last word, stretching the syllables and mispronouncing the u.

  “A reunion? No, did I say that?”

  The girl half-laughed to apologize. “Yeah, I have thought you said something. Like something about reunion with the family.”

  “Well, I probably did,” I said. It wasn’t the first time I’ve caught myself thinking out loud. I hadn’t meant to embarrass her, so I said, “It’s funny how those things slip out.”

  “Sorry?” she said.

  “It’s just that you’re right, actually.” The long flight or the sudden switch of hemispheres must have jostled my subconscious, because, though I couldn’t remember ever calling it that, even inside my own head, a reunion was exactly what I’d pictured: my son and I searching through old documents for a glimpse of his grandmother. Finishing a day’s work at the archives, comparing our notes on Inga Beart’s life in Paris over a glass of beer as evening set in. The three of us, reunited, somehow, across time.

  The girl was still looking at me, so I said, “I’ve come to do some research. Family research. And my son, he likes all that. I thought—a trip to Paris. It was going to be a present. For his birthday.”

  “Yah, that can be nice,” the girl said.

  Of course, when I called my son to suggest the trip, the conversation didn’t go at all as I had planned. “Be reasonable, Dad,” was what he really said when I started to explain about Carter Bristol’s footnote and the possibility of finally finding a photo that includes her shoes. “Memories are wrong all the time,” he told me. In the end I never got around to asking if he’d like to come with me to Paris.

  “But you know, these things,” I said to the girl. “Sometimes they don’t work out.”

  “Yah,” she said. “Things usually can be like this.”

  The girl’s expression, which a moment before had seemed so intently focused on the details of my face, was all politeness now—after all, she’d simply asked me for directions. I was probably making her uncomfortable going on like that.

  “Here,” I said. I took out the map I’d bought at the airport and gave it to her, flustered. “Maybe you can ask someone else about the station.”

  She gave me a brief smile. “For me?” she said. “Okay, thanks.”

  She glanced down at the map, then tucked it under her arm and turned to look in the window of the shoe repair shop, cupping her hands to block the glare as if something inside had caught her eye.

  I picked up Aunt Cat’s suitcase but I hesitated a moment before going on. There was something indescribably non-American about the girl’s cadence, and the particular way she’d said yah and okay reminded me of someone, an Eastern European lady named Diana who used to come help out around the house. I wished I’d thought to ask the girl where she was from, though I realized how ignorant I would seem to her. We get so few foreigners out our way, I suppose to me most of them sound about the same.

  Still, the thought took me back to certain afternoons after Diana finished the housework, when I’d drive her back to town and we’d get to talking. Sometimes I’d take her out to lunch. I stopped calling her after Uncle Walt passed away last fall, because to be honest I didn’t like the idea of her cleaning up after me alone. I thought of asking her over socially, except, of course, the house was a mess, and pretty soon her visa was up. Before the holidays she called to tell me she was going home and we made a rather elaborate plan to exchange gifts anyway—our kids are both over in England and Diana thought it would be a shame not to have them meet. But Christmas came, then spring, then summer, and by the time I left for Paris I still hadn’t heard whether she’d received the little things I’d sent for my son to pass along—and no package to me from Diana ever arrived.

  The girl with the suitcase was still looking in the shop window. She’d clearly forgotten all about me. I didn’t want to startle her by continuing our conversa
tion, and it would have embarrassed us both if I’d tried to explain the little pang I felt at the sibilance of her t’s. But just then all I could remember was the way Diana’s laughter had its own accent, so that even when she was laughing you could tell she was a foreigner. I wished I had something funny to say to the girl, something that would make her turn around and laugh out loud, just to hear if hers was the same.

  Instead I counted to myself again, one-one-thousand two, to clear my head. I got a better grip on Aunt Cat’s suitcase and nodded toward the girl, who was still intent on the window, and I walked on down the street a little more quickly than I needed to.

  It wasn’t long before I regretted giving the girl my map. I had the instructions for how to get to my hotel, but I couldn’t seem to find the street. I took another wrong turn onto a busy avenue. Traffic was heavier now; young people on scooters raced their engines at traffic lights—or at me—as I hurried across.

  I thought I’d better head back toward the spot where the shuttle bus had dropped me off, to see if I couldn’t start all over. But I’d gotten turned around, and on top of that the street names kept changing, even when I was sure I’d been going straight in one direction. My arms ached with the weight of the notebooks and papers I’d packed and suddenly I felt tired and very far from home. I turned down another street, then another; I didn’t have the heart to stop and take stock of where I was, much less try to find an English speaker and ask for directions.

  I was on my way to being truly lost when I remembered an old cowboy trick from my childhood. It was probably something I read in a Louis L’Amour novel: Look back as you ride and memorize your landmarks from the return direction. Somehow the thought of those dimestore Westerns made me feel better. The jog in the sidewalk was a bend in a riverbed—I remembered that—and the shops and restaurants that all looked the same were just another kind of sagebrush wilderness.

  I retraced my steps until I found my first wrong turn down the walled-off street, then continued on through narrow canyons of expensive-looking shops, enjoying the thought of my lost cowboy tethering his mount and ducking inside one of them to buy a packet of macaroons. Soon the canyons opened into a construction site around an old church tower. The shape of the tower under its layers of scaffolding was familiar; it might have been the core of an extinct volcano rising from the plains.

  Sure enough, in a block or two I was back to where I’d started on the boulevard de Sébastopol. Another airport shuttle bus was coming down the street. I even recognized a stained spot on the sidewalk near where I’d knelt to open up my suitcase. Again I found myself wishing that my son was there with me. He could have groaned in forbearance at an English teacher’s sort of joke: so many lost tourists in Paris, walking in circles, certain they’ve seen the place before. No wonder we borrow from the French when we say déjà vu.

  {NEIL}

  London, May

  By the time Neil bought a bus ticket to Swindon the Christmas presents he was supposed to be delivering were already five months late. On the morning he was supposed to go he woke up on the couch. He’d been dreaming that he was eating the baling twine that used to sit in a pile in front of Nan and Pop’s barn. If dreams meant anything, this one foretold a hangover. So did the empty glasses and cartons of discount wine that covered the kitchen table and part of the floor. Someone, possibly Neil, had started cleaning up the night before and there were bottles filling the sink. Neil took out a few to get to the faucet; he could feel the dream-fibers still stuck to his tongue. He turned on the water and drank some out of his hands.

  From the kitchen he could hear Veejay, his roommate, turning in his sleep and mumbling. Under the mumble was a beeping sound, because Neil hadn’t turned off his alarm. He stepped carefully between the glasses to get to their room. It smelled like feet. Veejay, who had been all over a girl from the film school the night before, was now, mercifully, sleeping alone, with only Neil to see the way his eyes didn’t close completely, leaving little white crescents in the gap between his eyelids. It was spooky, and if Neil weren’t feeling so like the undead himself, he might have gotten out his camera. For some reason Veejay denied that he slept with his eyes open, like he denied that he got a huge Indian accent when he was on the phone with his parents. Neil switched off the alarm.

  Back in the kitchen he started putting the bottles in plastic bags, as quietly as possible. Nothing would wake Veejay up, and Alex’s door, like always, was closed, but the clink of the glass gave Neil a bruised feeling behind his eyes. No more parties at their flat, he thought, not for the first time. No more wine and cheese parties with the girls next door that started out with the girls bringing over bottles of something bubbly and ended up with Neil and Veejay running to Tesco for cartons of wine and everyone sitting around watching Arsenal play on TV. Neil was a lousy drinker. Starting now there would be no more pretending otherwise. He didn’t even like football, and he was tired of trying to remember to call it that in front of the girls, who thought Americans were boorish if they didn’t take a frenzied interest in a sport where the score was almost always tied at zero.

  It was on mornings like this that he envied Alex, who never went out—not even when going out meant joining the party in the kitchen. Alex, their vampire roommate without any friends. Who knew what kind of dreams Alex had, but right then Neil would have given anything to be asleep with a clear head on the black sheets that Alex washed twice a week, a habit that caused their shitty British washing machine to inch its way out from under the counter and across the kitchen floor during the spin cycle. Sometimes he and Veejay placed bets on where the washer would end up, and there were pencil marks on the floor, recording its various journeys.

  Neil wondered, dully, why he was awake, but it wasn’t until he was out on the street, wincing with each crash of broken glass as he pushed the bottles one by one through the rubber flaps of the big recycling container by the park, that he remembered the bus ticket. Which explained why he’d set his alarm for today, which was a Sunday, and was normally reserved for rehydrating and finishing the reading he should have done on Saturday. Swindon. Fuck, he thought. He’d have to call what’s-her-name again and go next week. This was the third time he’d canceled on her, and it was starting to get embarrassing, although it wasn’t like what’s-her-name ever volunteered to come to London. And why should she? The whole thing was ridiculous.

  The exchange of presents must have been what’s-her-name’s mother’s idea. Neil’s father barely even remembered Christmas, he would never think of doing something like this. If he had wanted to send a present, he would have put it in the mail like a normal person. It wasn’t like her country didn’t have a postal service. No, this was some sinister plan by what’s-her-name’s mother. Probably the daughter was supposed to try to seduce Neil to get a green card. It was going to be embarrassing.

  Neil pushed the last bottle into the recycling container. Swindon. His father almost never asked him to do things, but he had sent Neil a package back in November, saying that his friend’s daughter was also living in the UK, so he and his friend had decided to swap presents through them. It’ll be a way for you to meet someone new, Neil’s father had said. He always wanted to know if Neil was meeting new people, which was sort of funny, because Neil was pretty sure it was a hereditary awkwardness passed on to him through his father that kept him from meeting new people, and that, when he did, kept him from saying the interesting things that would make them want to be his friends.

  From the shape of the gift, Neil could tell that it was one of the miniature handcrafted bow-and-arrow sets his father liked to buy from the Ute ladies, who sold them for surprisingly high prices outside the Conoco at Christmastime. The present had sat under Neil’s bed since then, and every time he planned to take the bus to Swindon—which it turned out was a long way from London—something came up or he forgot, and he had to call what’s-her-name (what was her name?) and make up some excuse. Okay, iss okay, she would say. You come next week okay?

/>   One of the bottles hadn’t been entirely empty, and Neil’s hands were sticky with wine. He wiped them on his jeans. It would be nice not to have his father’s package under his bed anymore, reminding Neil of home every time he looked for his sneakers. It was wrapped in the same Santa Claus paper Nan and Pop had always used. Nan used to tuck a dollar bill, new from the bank, into the paper as an incentive not to tear it, and each Christmas Neil and his cousins dissected their gifts, slicing Scotch tape with their thumbnails and sliding out whatever was inside. Nan would scoop up the paper and smooth the creases out of Santa’s beard to use again next year—it became a family joke, since obviously she could have just saved those dollar bills and bought more wrapping paper. Neil had put his father’s present under his bed in the first place because it was depressing. When he turned the package over he could see that one edge of the Santa Claus paper was cut in a sawtooth pattern and there was a bit of yellowed tape where it had been attached to the cardboard cylinder, showing that his father had finally used up the last of the roll. Nan had died when Neil was about to start high school and now Pop was gone too, but somehow Neil hadn’t imagined that even the Santa Claus wrapping paper would come to an end.

  The clock was just striking ten. If he hurried, he could probably make the bus. After he’d delivered the Christmas present he would call his father and tell him that Professor Piot had picked Neil to be one of his research assistants for the summer. Neil had found out two weeks earlier and it was a big deal—Professor Piot was practically famous. Plus he got to go to Paris for the summer. Neil had almost called his father with the news a couple of times already, but didn’t. Neither of them was very good on the phone, and the last time they’d talked, back in January, they’d had what was almost an argument and Neil had said some unnecessary things. He knew he should have called his father back and apologized, even if it wasn’t really his fault. But with the present still under his bed he’d put it off, knowing his dad was sure to ask whether he’d made it out to Swindon.