Wildwood

by Drusilla Campbell

  At the age of six or seven Ingrid’s favorite book had been Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. Peter returned home and found the window barred and bolted and saw his mother with a new baby in her arms. Ingrid asked to have the chapter read aloud to her again and again and sobbed as if she would die—then put herself to sleep planning revenge on Peter’s behalf. Ingrid would hate Hannah for leaving home and would dream of retribution. Eddie would make her a stranger and be sure she had never loved him, from the beginning.

  Flying down the highway, she heard their baby fists rap on the tightly closed car windows and their voices begging to be let in.

  Liz ran down Casabella Road, daring the rain to come. Her joints creaked and her muscles stretched like old bubble gum. She had woken in a slough, glum to her toes. Running sometimes helped. The sky was low and gray and misty on the edges, spilling down the hills like water over rocks.

  She detoured left on Las Robles. It had been an oak-strewn hillside sloping down to Bluegang when they were kids. Now manorial edifices of stone and brick rose on quarter-acre lots, surrounded by bright green lawns despite the water shortage. I’m not against new houses. I’m not against change.

  Nothing is forever, Liz thought as she skirted a place in the road dug up for underground power lines. Everything dies eventually, and friendships sputtered out from inattention, dishonesty and cowardice. The incident at Bluegang comprised but a fraction of a day in childhoods otherwise rich in light and laughter; no wonder she and Jeanne and Hannah had believed they could coast through the years on what they had agreed to remember. Their complicit silence had been a way of denying time and change. If Liz had not been visited by nightmares blacker than any secret, if Gerard had not been there to counsel her, if she had not come back demanding that they talk about Bluegang, if she had not come back to get an abortion—so many contingencies, so many opportunities to reconsider or turn back—they might have floated on down into old age reminiscing like codgers in a sentimental movie. But she had returned to Rinconada and now, while Liz hoped she and Jeanne might have taken their first tentative steps outside the box and begun to truly see and know each other, she and Hannah were estranged as never before.

  She recalled the fierceness of their childhood fights, always them against her and rarely over anything more important than a whim: notes passed around her, snubs and giggles and whispers and Liz left in the dust as Hannah and Jeanne rode off on their bikes. Two in the box and one outside longing to be invited in. A classic pattern and, inevitably, Liz so hated being left out she would apologize even if she didn’t always know what she’d done. She’d make something up and say how sorry she was and please, please, please would they be her friends again? The apology always satisfied Hannah and Jeanne and they magnanimously forgave her and moved over and let her snuggle back into her own warm corner of the box. She had wanted to be Hannah, to be Jeanne, to be anyone but who she was and her place in the trio had been based on that. Recalling now her willingness to play the timid underdog, her heart ached for the girl she had been.

  The visit to Rinconada had taught Liz some things. For one, being Liz Shepherd suited her fine and she wasn’t timid anymore, not a bit of it. She had become a woman brave enough to confront the shame of her past, sure enough of who she was and what she wanted to make a painful choice. Proud enough to ask that others see her as she really was. But she had not dreamed the cost of self-knowledge could be so high. Was it worth the loss of Hannah? The question jabbed her in the ribs, and knocked the air out of her.

  Down Hernandez now, a long straight downhill where the houses were old again and most of them in some stage of remodeling. She got her breath back. Her legs were strong, her strides long. In front of Miss Rigby’s house the sidewalk buckled over knots of oak roots. Liz stepped off the curb and onto the road where the surface was smooth underfoot and she flew like a girl, her joints lubricated now, her muscles warm.

  In Belize City there were fortune-tellers everywhere, and Liz had been to a half dozen of them over the years until she settled on Divina who also sold lottery tickets and knew where to score good ganja. Divina said relationships to people and places carried over from lifetime to lifetime. So maybe Liz and Hannah and Jeanne had been friends in another life. Maybe sisters. If so it didn’t matter that she and Hannah couldn’t make connections anymore. They would come together again in the next life. Or the one after that.

  This was not a comfort to Liz.

  Angel woke, crying again, and Hannah was glad for the distraction from thoughts of Dan and the children. They were at Morgan Hill. She checked her watch. It was almost forty minutes since she’d left Resurrection House. Soon Betts would begin to expect her back. After an hour she might send Maryann to the park to see if something had happened to delay them there. Maryann would look around for the Volvo and report it gone; and Betts—clever Betts—would see the stroller still in the closet and figure it out in a second.

  Hannah said to Angel, “You’re a hungry girl, aren’t you. Mommy’ll give you a bottle in a few minutes.”

  Hannah left the freeway and drove west, crossing old 101 and continuing into the hills. She rolled down her window to vent Angel’s shrieks. Here, on the leeward side of the Coast Range and far south of the Bay, the effects of the drought were most apparent. Leaves lay thick around the woebegone gum trees and their bark spiraled off in sheets. A patina of velvety, smoke-colored dust lay over everything. Three or four miles into the mountains, Hannah came to a little roadside park: a pair of cement picnic tables and a blue portable toilet under sycamores beside a dried up creek bed. She stopped the car, got out, went around to the passenger side and opened the door. When Hannah unbuckled the seat belt restraints Angel thrashed and screamed louder.

  Hannah had expected this.

  She gathered Angel into her arms and tried to hold her close. The feel of heart beating against heart could soothe a crack baby’s distress. “Hush, my baby girl,” she crooned. “It’s going to be all right, all right.” Angel did not want to be held close; she twisted her torso and kicked into Hannah’s breast.

  “You’re starving.” Hannah laughed because it was simple when you knew what you were doing. “Just a minute now, hold your horses.”

  She sat Angel in the car seat. She closed the door and went to the trunk, opened it and brought out the bottle she had made early that morning and placed in the cooler. Angel was not going to like the cold milk at first, but it wouldn’t hurt her.

  Angel’s screams rose a decibel. Hannah rushed around and peered in the window at her. She was not strapped in and had managed to twist her body sideways and stretch herself across the little seat. She kicked against one side and arched her back over the other.

  Hannah ripped open the door and gathered the screaming baby into her arms. She hurried to the rear of the car where she had left the bottle perched on top of the closed cooler. The bottle fell from her shaking hands into the dust and rolled under the rear end of the car.

  “Shit.” Hannah dropped to her knees. The bottle lay between the rear tires and beyond her reach. Angel kicked against her ribs and inches from Hannah’s ears, her cries scraped like a surgeon’s saw.

  “Shut up, Angel, for Chrissake.”

  She went back to the front of the car and put the baby in the car seat. This time she buckled a strap across her middle. Down on her hands and knees, she still couldn’t reach the bottle. She lay on her side and scooted under the car. Her fingertips touched the plastic and closed around it. She looked up and saw through the space between the front tires that she was not alone in the park. A teenage boy stood under one of the sycamores near the creek, watching the car.

  Jeanne asked, “Where did you sleep last night?”

  “My office,” Teddy rubbed the small of his back. “Either we kiss and make up, or I buy a new couch.”

  Jeanne tilted in her desk chair. Her mind was empty.

  Teddy’s voice took on a teasing, caressing tone. “What can I say? What do you want me to sa
y? I drink too much, I get a little . . . you know.” Teddy smiled. “I like women, Jeanne. You know that. But I’m better than I used to be. That’s true, isn’t it?”

  How strange. Your husband as good as admits he screws around and you find you have nothing to say. Jeanne stared out the window behind Teddy, but she did not need to see the mounding gray and violet clouds wounding the sky to know heavy weather was coming.

  Teddy sat on the edge of her desk. When this familiarity did not break the silence, he moved off and lounged on her couch under the window. On the credenza the bell-curve clock ticked. A gust of wind threw a handful of barbed oak leaves against the window screen.

  Teddy knelt on the couch and closed the glass.

  “You better announce we’ll be on rainy day schedule,” Jeanne said. “I’ll ask Jorge to move all those folding chairs out of the old rec hall. We can have movies.”

  “And we can quit schlepping gray water.”

  “It’s been a good exercise for the boys.”

  “Some positive feedback from the parents.”

  “And Mr. Ashizawa says the roses are as healthy as he’s ever seen them.”

  A bell rang. Jeanne glanced at the clock. “Do you want to take lunch or shall I? It’s fried chicken.”

  “I’d just as soon pass.”

  Jeanne pinched her lips. “Suit yourself.”

  “Look, Jeanne, I really am sorry about coming on to Liz.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.

  “Simon Weed will be here tomorrow,” she said.

  Teddy looked as if he were about to say something else then shrugged. “So I heard.”

  “And I called about the fence.”

  Teddy sighed and sat back. He ran his fingers through his hair, acting the role of the beleaguered husband, principal, whatever.

  “Adam’s been going down to the creek every chance he gets. Edith says there was manure on his shoes, which means he’s been visiting Hannah’s.”

  “Tell her to get fifty thousand dollars’ worth of chain link fence.”

  “His mother was a rider. They raised Appaloosas.”

  “So?”

  She would not be drawn into explanations. “The contractor’ll be up here next week to measure for an estimate.”

  “So this is how I pay? I let you drive the school into bankruptcy?”

  She laughed, reached back and undid her knotted hair. It fell across her shoulders and she felt something let go inside.

  “Do you have any idea how expensive—”

  “I don’t care what it costs.” Jeanne combed her fingers back through her hair and stood up. “I won’t let a boy get hurt down there because you’re—”

  “At least this means I get to sleep in my own bed again, right?”

  “There’s plenty of room in the house. Use the guest room. No one ever visits us and there’s a new mattress on the bed.”

  “Is this Liz? Has Liz been filling your head—”

  “I just know I don’t want to go back to the way it was. I can’t.” She sat beside him on the couch and took his hands. “This is my life, Teddy. The only one I get. And I don’t like it.” She gestured toward the far wall. “Look.”

  There was a faint outline above the clock where her forged diploma had hung.

  “Wait a minute,” Teddy said, instantly on the defensive. “I’m not taking the blame for that thing. I never forced you to quit school.”

  “You persuaded me to want it for myself.”

  “That makes it my fault you don’t like your life?”

  “And you persuaded me to give James away.”

  “Jesus-fucking-Christ.” He started to stand up but Jeanne held him.

  “I’m not blaming you, Teddy. Honestly, I’m not.” She wanted him to understand this because it was more than important, it was the heart of the whole conversation. “I let you persuade me. The actions were mine and now so are the consequences.”

  “So are you through with the school? Through with me? Christ, Jeanne, what are you going to do? Sell out to the monks, change your name and join the Peace Corps?”

  Her thoughts danced off, distracted by possibilities.

  “In case you’ve forgotten, California’s a community property state.”

  She stood. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe this is the end, maybe it’s the beginning. How does anyone know these things?”

  Hannah stared at the boy and she was sure he stared at her. She scrambled backwards on her knees and rose, brushing the dust from her sweats with one hand. She rinsed the baby bottle in the icy water that had accumulated in the bottom of the cooler. She looked up and saw that the boy had not moved.

  Hannah sat in the backseat with Angel cradled in her arms. The baby rejected the nipple at first, tossing her head from side to side. Cold milk dribbled out over her lower lip and got lost in the pleats of flesh under her chin. Hannah wanted to shove the nipple into her mouth and felt instantly ashamed. If Hannah, who had made a study of crack babies and worked with Angel for months, could lose her patience, how much more difficult it would be for Shannon. She concentrated on relaxing and counted her breaths, making them deep and even. Angel began to suck.

  Through the space between the front seats Hannah observed the boy. He wore Levi’s, a T-shirt and heavy black boots like a biker. She was sure he had moved a little closer to the car. Now she could make out the design on his shirt. A cobra and skulls.

  The memory of Billy Phillips, his all-but-forgotten face, blew threw her mind and was gone.

  This place is dangerous.

  She took the bottle out of Angel’s mouth. Her small face pinched and the tears began again. Hannah got out of the car and rested the bottle on the roof against the luggage rack. She strapped Angel in the car seat, closed the door on her tears, rushed around to slam the trunk of the car, took her place behind the wheel and locked her seat belt. In a spray of gravel, she pulled onto the road and drove west, deeper into the hills. She did not look at the boy in the rearview mirror.

  She passed a side road, braked, backed up, and peered at the sign. The old Cutter Dam Road would take her up to Mt. Madonna Pass.

  “I can get over to the coast this way.”

  The sound of her calm and sensible voice saying calm, sensible words restored her confidence as it soothed her nerves. She looked at her watch. After noon. By now Betts had probably called the police and alerted the CHP.

  “But no one will ever think of looking for us on Cutter Dam Road.”

  She felt clear-headed and confident again as she reached over to smooth the hair off Angel’s damp forehead. If only she would stop crying everything would be perfect. Her screams ricocheted around the interior of the Volvo; the four sides vibrated with neon sound.

  At a fork in the road Hannah braked and stopped. The wind was high now and buffeted the car, weighted with leaves and grit and occasional raindrops. The road to the right led back to Rinconada by a circuitous route. Hannah took the narrower left-hand road that wound toward the Mt. Madonna summit. A sign said WATSONVILLE, 48 MILES. Fifty yards later another sign warned of hairpin curves ahead.

  At the first wide spot after the second sign, Hannah stopped the car again and got out. She smelled dust and damp and darkness on the cold wind that cut through the weave of her sweat clothes. Around her the coast redwoods rose in stoic dignity. Even on a sunny day the woods would be dark, but today their dim silence held the heavy air in stasis and time hung in weighted suspension. It seemed to Hannah that she had taken a wrong turn from the real world into a shadowy realm. A voice in her head told her Go back, Go home.

  “I can’t. It’s too late.”

  She opened the trunk to get Angel’s bottle from the cooler, but it wasn’t there. She searched the trunk, she looked under the front and backseats and on the floor. And then she remembered placing it on the roof of the car, wedged snugly against the luggage rack so it would not roll off while she buckled Angel into the car seat. The bottle was on the road s
omewhere. Perhaps that boy had watched it drop and picked it up out of the dirt. A pink plastic bottle in the shape of a bunny . . .

  Hannah got back in the car, into the noise, and reached across Angel to the side pocket in the passenger door where she kept maps bundled together with a rubber band. She sorted through them until she found one for Northern California. After a minute, she located Cutter Dam Road. With her finger she traced it all the way to Watsonville on the coast, hoping to see some other town along the way but knowing that she wouldn’t. The south end of the Coast Range was wild as it had been for hundreds of years. A drop of rain hissed as it exploded on the warm hood of the Volvo.

  She felt a shiver of relief.

  Angel cried louder and threw up on her Snugglies. A line of mucous spread from her nose across her red cheek. The reek of urine and feces filled the car.

  I have to think about this.

  She could go back to Morgan Hill but the CHP might be watching for her. She had to think of another alternative.

  But the noise made it nearly impossible.

  Stupid.

  That boy had made her run and now everything was getting messy when it should have been easy.

  What have I done?

  What she had to do.

  She slammed her safety belt in place and drove with furious care, hunched over the wheel like an angry little old woman. Her head ached and a sibilant ringing in her ears would not stop. The atmosphere inside the car was thick with the smells of urine and sweat, baby shit and milky vomit. She opened the window again and rain gusted into the car. Her hair, wild about her face, dripped moisture down her cheeks and neck. She cranked the window up halfway and turned on the windshield wipers. She applied her brakes and the Volvo’s tires skidded on the oily road.