by Amber Foxx
No. You are not seriously getting involved with him. “Decide what?”
“Don’t tell anyone. Please. About ... about us.”
Mae wanted to tell Dana to just decide against him. She didn’t need a psychic for that. “You don’t have to decide about him right this minute.”
“Soon, though.” Dana’s urgency stayed high. “You need to see him where he is, not when he gets back.”
“No. I can see the past, too.”
Dana sounded hopeful, curious. “You could see his past?”
“I’m not prying into that for you.” What a thought—poking around in Charlie’s past. The idea both scared and repelled Mae. “I meant that I don’t just see what’s right now, I can trace things back—if I decide to do it. And I doubt I will.”
Why don’t I just say no, now? Bernadette. What if Charlie was harassing her? Did Mae need to know? Would doing this be right or wrong? It felt like both.
The familiar groaning sound of the school bus as it stopped in front of the house interrupted her thoughts. “Sorry, I gotta go. My young’uns are getting off the bus.”
Ending the call, Mae walked out to the front of the house, relieved to get away from the dilemma. She didn’t even want to think about getting involved in the spirit world with Charlie.
“Happy Birthday, Mama,” Brook and Stream shouted in near unison as they ran across the front yard to meet her with hugs. Brook said they’d made her birthday gifts in art class today, and they dropped their bags in the lawn, eagerly unpacking their creations. Grateful that Joe was finished at Ronnie’s, Mae sat in the grass with them and let them cover her with sequined construction-paper necklaces. She would face the card from Daddy—and the decision about Dana—later. This was the best part of her birthday. She had lived to be here for this.
After dinner in the big formal dining room at the Ridley farm house, Mae blew out the candles on the homemade carrot cake.
Brook asked, “What’d you wish, Mama?”
“Can’t tell you, sweetie.” She looked again at the gift Hubert had given her. She hadn’t wished for that. Barefoot running shoes. He’d given her what she’d given him, given her what he wanted, and looked so pleased with himself. Those shoes might be good for you, but a snake could bite right through them. And they were ugly—pink and orange, and he’d wrapped them in pink paper. She slipped her fingers into one shoe’s toes, trying to seem appreciative. “Won’t come true if I tell.”
Stream twisted her mouth and frowned, then brightened. “If it was my birthday, I’d wish I could drive.”
Brook elbowed her and giggled. “I’d wish I could fly.”
“She wished, I’m sure,” said Jim, standing to slice the cake, “that Joe Broadus would get laryngitis and that all the snakes in Tylerton would kindly go next door.”
Stream asked, “Why should Mr. Joe get lar—What is that?”
Sallie walked into the dining room from the kitchen, bearing the coffeepot. “It’s when you lose your voice,” she said. “And it’s a joke, because Mr. Joe talks too much.”
She walked around to each of the adults’ places, pouring coffee into the thin china cups with delicate floral patterns and fragile gold-painted handles. For Mae's birthday, all the best things came out. The silver cake plate and server, the white tablecloth. The Ridleys had enough antiques to make a homemade dinner and cake look like a meal in a five-star restaurant.
“When are we old enough to drink coffee?” Brook asked, leaning over Hubert’s cup and sniffing. “That smells good.”
Hubert playfully pushed her head away, leaving his hand on her hair for a moment, then let her go, still smiling. “When you’re old enough that I can stand to have you up all night.”
When Jim and Sallie had finished serving and sat down, everyone pulled candles out of the frosting and tasted the cake, murmuring their praises. Setting her gift out of the way, Mae felt strange about her wish. But she meant it. They had to get out of here. The only thing she’d miss would be running in the fields. Growing up here, who were these girls going to marry? What kind of work would they do? What kind of lives would they have? Mack’s words haunted her: I’m buried here.
“You didn’t open your card from your father yet, hon,” Hubert said, breaking the eating silence.
“I know.” Mae took another bite of cake. She wanted time alone with the card, in case it said more than Happy birthday. “It was a crazy day. I’ll get to it tonight.”
“You feeling all right? You’re awful quiet.”
“Yeah. Thinking a lot, that’s all.”
“Getting older’ll do that to you,” Jim said. “Next thing you know, it’s all you do. Think.”
“That snake didn’t scare you that bad, did it?” Hubert persisted. “I never took you for the kind to get all faint and weak-kneed about something like that.”
“Hubert,” Sallie snapped, “she saw Joe stick a knife in it.” She turned to Mae. “I’m amazed that he helped you.”
“He thinks I was doing some kind of witching with it and messed up, and he caught me in the act. He thinks all his talk is helping to keep me in line. Did you know that? Like he’s the early warning system on witchy-woman activity.”
“So that’s going out by Joe-mail now.” Sallie looked at the chandelier, then jerked her head down with a loud exhalation. “Damn.”
“We’re not supposed to say that,” Stream whispered.
“Then you’d better take your cake into the little dining room,” Sallie said, “because your grandmother’s gonna say a whole lot more.”
The girls looked at each other, then at Mae and Hubert. “Go on, that’s a good idea,” Hubert said. “Your Granma’s a little steamed up.”
As the children carried out their cake, whispering to each other, Sallie clenched both fists on the table and scrunched up her face, as if trying not to let all the steam out at once. She breathed out another forceful sound, then looked at Mae. “Did you talk him out of it?”
“No. You can’t talk that man out of anything. You know that. Folks that believe that stuff probably aren’t gonna vote for you, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“If you’d never gone and told Ronnie Farmer that you were psychic, Joe never would have had the first word to say. There’d be no fire if you hadn’t lit it.”
Mae felt her patience with Sallie snap. “I could say something like that in Virginia Beach and people’d pay me money and thank me. Got a lady up there begging me to come back to work, and I had somebody call me today to find somebody—because she knows I’m good at this. I am psychic, and I’m sick to death of living in some backwater little town where you can’t be different.” Mae could see Mack and how in some awful way he still fit in, folks saying it was so sad, a beautiful old Tyler boy gone tragic. There was a pattern for that—but not for her. “Folks here want you to fit a mold.”
“It's not true. I don’t fit a mold,” Sallie said.
“Doesn’t matter. They make one for you. If they like you, you’re the liberal environmentalist local foods organic hero. And if they don’t like you, they use all the same words like it’s dirt.”
“Excuse me.” Jim rose and picked up his cake and coffee to carry out. “I'll leave you to it. I believe I’ll have my dessert with the children.”
“Oh God, Jim, I’m sorry,” Mae said, “I didn’t mean to get into a fight here. You made me such a wonderful birthday—I’ll shut up.”
But Jim kept going and disappeared through the hallway into the kitchen.
“This town has its problems,” Sallie said, “but I’m trying to fix them. And you’re not helping, tearing it down like that. I hope you don’t talk that way to anyone outside this house.”
“Seems like I’m not allowed to talk about anything except the weather. What do you want me to be?”
“You could be more like Hubert. He fits in just fine being different. Nobody minds him being himself.”
Mae knew what Sallie meant—Hubert making jokes and
lightening up political talk at Buddy’s, the likeable face of the liberal left warming up the doubtful right. Being so nice to people that they’d say, he’s a real Christian, even when he didn’t go to church.
“Being him,” Mae said, “isn’t being myself.”
Hubert looked down into his coffee, then at Mae. “Hon, let’s not get into this—”
“You like it here. You don’t have to hold your breath and squeeze into some space where you don’t fit.”
“Is that what you’re doing?” His eyes darkened, and Mae could see some deep wound she’d struck in him slowly deepening from hurt to angry. “Then don’t let me hold you back. You need that bad to get out of here, I guess you’d better go.”
“I meant us get out of here, not me.”
Sallie glanced at Hubert as if to deliver a message, then stood and left the room. In the silence, Mae could hear Sallie in the kitchen, putting dishes in the sink, then heard her steps move further, into the small dining room where Jim and the children chatted cheerfully as if nothing were breaking and crashing in here.
“Doesn’t work that way.” Hubert snapped a birthday candle in half and twirled one of the pieces between his fingers. “I leave here, I’m not me. There’s no difference between who I am and where I am.”
“To me there is. I love you. I hate this town.”
“I love you. And this town. I’m not leaving it.”
“You’re saying I’m stuck?”
“No.” His voice grew husky, and he stood and walked to the far side of the room. “I’m saying you choose.”
“Hubert—don’t do this to me.” She spun on her chair, talking to his back. “You’re the one that’s choosing.”
“When you married me, you knew who I am and what I love.” He turned to face her. “I haven’t changed. You have. I won’t have you living with me and complaining that you’re trapped and squeezed and can’t be yourself. What kind of life is that?”
Their eyes met.
“I don’t know,” she said, barely able to speak. “I don’t like it either. It’s not what I want.”
After a pained silence, he opened his arms to her, and she stood and walked to him. They held each other, hard and close. The feel of him, so many years of loving and touching him—she couldn’t let this go. It would pull her apart, yank her heart out by the roots. And the children. She couldn’t leave them. She’d never adopted them, so she’d have no rights at all, not being their natural mother. But the thought of raising them in this narrow place, where you either fit in or got buried alive, hurt her too. She’d stay for them, but those would be years of her and Hubert trying not to fight in front of the girls, years in which Brook and Stream would know, as Mae had with her own parents, that this wasn’t a happy family.
“I love you,” she said, feeling her tears fall against his cheek, not sure if they were only her own.
“I love you, too, hon. Always will. Doesn’t mean we’ll work it out, though.”
The drive home was filled with Brook and Stream’s noisy games in the back seat. Mae welcomed their silliness and at the same time felt it tear into her. Was this how her father had felt, before he left her? It had to have nearly killed him.
At home, she told Hubert she needed some time alone, and he allowed it easily, saying he’d get the girls ready for bed. Almost like he was ready to be a single parent again. He sent Brook and Stream to fetch their pajamas and said he’d get their bath ready.
“I’m going up in the attic,” Mae said.
“Mae, that’s silly. You can sit where you like. Just tell me, and I’ll leave you be.”
“No.” She felt like Mack taking his addictions down to the churchyard because they weren’t allowed in his uncle’s house. She needed to be herself, and it might mean something Hubert wouldn’t accept. “I need to feel no one’s looking at me or walking in. You don’t have to get it. It’s what I need.”
She went into the living room, picked up her father’s card from the coffee table, and returned to the hallway. Hubert was already in the bathroom running the water, sitting on the edge of the old claw-foot tub and feeling the temperature.
“Don’t get unfriendly on me,” he said. “We don’t have be all cold war about this.”
Brook and Stream emerged from their room with pajamas and slippers in hand. Mae didn’t answer him, knowing the truth would be worse than this evasion, and bent down to kiss the girls goodnight. “You’ll be asleep by the time I’m back downstairs. I love you, sweeties. Sleep tight.”
As she climbed the stairs and opened the attic door, she heard one of them asking Hubert, “Why’s Mama going in the attic?”
The bare light bulb overhead glared down on the shiny paper of the card. Mae sat in a chair with a hole in its woven seat, the sharp straws of its interrupted surface poking her bottom. The cover of the card showed a baseball turned into the moon. It was the strangest picture, surreal, a ball floating over a nighttime landscape. Daddy picked this out? He’d been so conventional, always got her the standard “for a girl on her eleventh birthday” kinds of cards. Or maybe Rhoda-Rae had picked them out. The cards had been from both of them. Maybe he’d never been himself.
Mae opened the card. Pictures fell out, and she bent down to pick them up from the floor. One showed a water tower with art on it—Indians on horseback and turtles. Another picture showed a red, rocky mountain above a brown river. Another showed a small adobe house with two cars in its driveway, a work building of some kind beyond the cars, and a sculpture that seemed to be made of old machine parts standing in the yard. There was no grass at all; the yard was dirt. And the door of the house—Daddy’s house—was purple. Red shutters framed the windows, and the low adobe wall around the yard was randomly embedded with old tool parts and broken ceramics. Bizarre, not exactly pretty, but something that made you look and think.
Two cars.
Of course he had someone by now. Maybe the person he’d left Mama for. Did he explain who she was in the letter?
Dear Mae,
I thought you’d like to see where I live. If you look at a map of New Mexico, you’ll find T or C near Las Cruces, the big city in the bottom of the state. If Santa Fe's the City Different, we’re the little town different. One of my neighbors likes to say, ‘we’re all here because we’re not all there.’
On one side of town you can see what I call the Apache water tower. Truth or Consequences used to be an Apache healing place because of the hot springs, and right up into the fifties or so, they still came here for that. Used to camp on the ball park.
Mae thought of healing and baseball mixed together and wanted to go. Then she thought of Bernadette. This must be near her home reservation. Bernadette might be with Charlie somewhere right now ... Halting this distressing train of thought, Mae brought herself back to her father’s letter.
On the other side of town is Turtleback Mountain. And this is my house. For your birthday I'd like to buy you a trip out here when you can get some time off, bring your husband and kids. I never had a chance to spend any money on you, to do all the things I wanted to, like send you to college and all that.
Her heart ached. Bring your husband and kids. For how much longer could she call them hers? What were the chances this would ever happen? And the wish that he could have sent her to college—Mae felt a pain of both longing and anger. If her mother had only let them get in touch, hadn’t put up that wall, she could have gone to college. She would never have gotten stuck here. Never married Mack.
Or Hubert.
Please call me. It’ll be so much easier to talk than to write. I’ll explain everything. I just need to know you, know how you think, if you’re like your mama or if you’re more your own person. I expected you’d be your own person, and even saying it this way, you know that’s what I believe of you.
Happy Birthday to my baby girl. Hope it’s a good one.
Love, Daddy
A trip to a place where it was okay to be different. She wanted to jump
on a plane and fly to him. Go through that purple door and ... meet who? Besides Daddy? Why didn’t he say?
She had an inkling. She almost knew. It was something Mama would think was evil and sinful, and though it startled Mae to think it of her father, that good old boy country coach, it was all right. Something Granma couldn’t heal him of because there was nothing wrong with him. Not because the healing didn’t work.
If she’d guessed wrong, it could hurt him, but if she’d guessed right, then she could spare him the anxiety of trying to tell her. Using the sight, she’d be sure of the truth. No more wondering if Daddy had a dark secret, or only a secret Rhoda-Rae thought was sinful. But if she found out something he hadn’t wanted to tell her—there would be no undoing the knowing. Or the seeing.
She looked at the box he had sent of Granma’s crystals, then back at his letter. When she’d come up to the attic, she’d known in the back of her mind she might make this choice, but hadn’t been willing to admit it to herself. She was still afraid to reclaim her psychic gift. And afraid to call Daddy. Torn, she listened to her thoughts and feelings spinning.
Trust him. Don’t do this.
No, do it. He could have got in touch before me and Mama moved. And he didn’t. He didn’t even say goodbye. Why?
He can tell me.
But he might not.
Please, God, or whoever is out there, I just want to know my guess is right and call him. I just want peace and my Daddy.
Holding the big amethyst that had been her grandmother’s in one hand, Mae held the card with the baseball moon in the other and closed her eyes. She visualized catching that ball in the outfield of the night sky, catching the moon. The energy that reached her heart through the hand that held the card felt both tender and angry, and the tunnel of psychic travel drew her in.
Its end opened to show their old home in Boone, a little brick ranch house. It looked like an autumn night, with the leaves half off the trees in the yard. Her father was coming out the front door to the driveway as her mother’s car pulled in and cut off. Silence.