No Defense

by Rangeley Wallace

  “Let’s go inside,” I said dully. I inserted the key in the lock, turned it, and pushed open the front door. “Come on in, Jessie.”

  Jessie leaned back as far as she could in the rocker, then rocked forward forcibly and flung herself out of the chair.

  I shook my head. “You’re gonna fall right smack on your face one day, young lady.”

  She ran past us into the apartment.

  Eddie hadn’t moved from his spot in front of the mailbox. He took a drag on his cigarette and looked at me, not a trace of feeling in his eyes. “I give up,” he said.

  “Oh, Eddie, come on. You’ve only tried two syndication groups in two years. You can’t give up-you’re too good and you know it.”

  “Maybe not,” he said. “Maybe they know something I don’t.” He leaned against the wall and stared out at the street.

  “The City Paper loves you, and you have a fan club of devoted readers,” I said. ‘Just because Universal Media doesn’t appreciate you proves they’re stupid, that’s all.”

  “Stupid or not, it means I have to get a second job just so we can stay even. And ‘even’ isn’t exactly where I’d hoped to be by now. I noticed in the Sunday paper that they’re looking for people to do caricatures out at Six Flags over Georgia.” He grimaced.

  “We’re not that desperate, are we? Come on, that’s like a joke job, Eddie.”

  “Maybe I am a joke,” he said.

  “You are not, but you’re acting like a martyr. If you’re so worried about our future, then we should just go ahead and move to Tallagumsa.” I regretted raising the subject again but pushed ahead anyway. “You can write there as well as here. The paper doesn’t care where you are, they’ve told you that before. You could use the top floor of the house as a studio. Oh Eddie, you’d have the time and the peace and quiet to concentrate on your work. You’re always complaining about both. Why won’t you at least think about it?”

  “Because I don’t want your father to determine the course of my life,” Eddie said. “That’s why.” He stomped out his cigarette on the porch as if he wanted to kill it.

  “Then I guess I can look forward to many more years of crappy, low-paying jobs and crummy apartments and never finishing my degree. And Jessie and her siblings can look forward to being brought up in day care. I’m thrilled.”

  “Your father is managing to make me look like the bad guy here. Don’t you see that, LuAnn?”

  “All I see is …” I stopped myself before I said what I was thinking. “Come on, please, let’s go inside. It’s been a long day.” I took the bands out of my hair, unwound the braid, and shook the hair loose, ready to go to sleep as soon as I saw our bed. Then I picked up the cigarette butt, as well as the items I’d deposited in the rocker, and walked inside the apartment behind Eddie.

  “It looks so clean,” he said, surveying the room. “You didn’t clean this morning before we left, did you?”

  “You know I didn’t,” I said. I looked around. It only took a few seconds for me to figure out what was wrong. “It looks clean because it’s empty. Our stereo, our TV, and the two lamps Mother gave us aren’t here.”

  “Shit,” Eddie said. “Jess! Come here!”

  She ran back into the living room, responding to the urgency in his voice.

  “Let’s go outside for a minute,” he said.

  “Why?” Jessie asked. “We just got here.”

  “I want to see if Violet’s outside, sweetie,” I said, even though I knew Violet and Iris Ann were in Augusta all week. “I need to tell her something.”

  I lied to Jessie because I didn’t want to tell her what had happened. How would she react when she learned that someone had come into her home and taken her family’s belongings? Most of my life--and certainly when I was her age--I’d had an unshakable sense of safety and security. How dare someone take that away from her?

  We walked through the side yard single file, well trained by the Crawfords not to step on their carefully planned perennial borders.

  From the vantage point of our backyard I could see that the back door into the mud room was wide open. We tried the back door to the kitchen. That door too was unlocked.

  Biting on my lip, I walked out toward the swing set Daddy had given Jessie last year. I sat on one of the two U-shaped plastic seats and began to cry.

  “What’s the matter?”Jessie stood in front of me, her hand on my left knee.

  No one answered her.

  “What happened, Mommy?” she insisted.

  Because it would be impossible to keep the burglary a complete secret from her, I tried to cushion the blow. “Somebody took some things out of the apartment without asking first,” I said. I wiped the tears off my cheeks with a tissue from my pocket.

  “We think,” Eddie said.

  “Oh Eddie, what else could have happened?” I asked. “There’ve been a bunch of break-ins around here, we leave town for the day, and our stuff is gone. How would you explain it?”

  “Well …” he said.

  “Were they bad guys?” Jessie asked. Her eyes grew larger. “Are they inside?”

  “The Crawfords must have seen something,” Eddie said.

  “They’re in Augusta, remember?” I said. “Oh, no! I guess you’d better check their house.”

  Eddie trudged from our yard to theirs and pulled on their back screen door. It didn’t budge. He went around the house, tried the front door, and checked all the ground-level windows. There were no signs of forced entry. That at least was good news. It was unpleasant enough to imagine the reaction of Violet and Iris Ann to our loss, but I knew they’d be heartbroken if anyone had stolen their silver, one set of which Iris Ann claimed her great-grandmother had hidden from the Yankees during the War Between the States.

  Jessie turned her hand into a gun and ran down the path between the two houses. “I’ll shoot the bad guys,” she said. “Bang! Bang, bang!”

  “Where did you learn to do that?” I asked, shocked. I’d never seen her pretend to shoot a gun. She played house, dress up, horse show, and tea party, but never guns.

  “At day care,” she yelled.

  “Terrific. Maybe we all should go get real guns,” I said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, LuAnn,” Eddie said. He kicked one of the thick wooden legs that balanced the swing set. “I don’t understand why, when their house is full of silver”-he waved in the direction of the Crawfords’-”and enough rich people live around here, why in the world did they choose ours? Anyone can tell we don’t own anything valuable. Did you forget to lock the door this morning?” His tone was accusing. “Or maybe you arranged it to make Tallagumsa look better to me.”

  I glared at him from my swing seat.

  Jessie solemnly handed me a bouquet of the Crawfords’ treasured pink and yellow tulips she must have gathered from their garden.

  Under the circumstances, I couldn’t reprimand her. “Thank you, sweetie. Why don’t you go play in the sandbox, Jes,” I said instead. I didn’t want her to listen to how furious I was at Eddie.

  “In my dress?” she asked, astonished at this breach of my own rule.

  “It’s okay, this one time.”

  She ran off. Normally I wouldn’t have allowed her to play in the sandbox dressed up. Sand would be embedded in every seam of the sailor dress, under her shoe insoles, and in her tights, but by that point in that day I didn’t care.

  “You’re right, Eddie,” I said, my voice rising. “Those seemingly innocent busboys at the Steak and Ale are really criminals. I promised them all my tips if they’d pull off the job. Who’s being ridiculous now? Goddamn you! I didn’t know Daddy was giving us the Steak House until-”

  “You, you mean,” Eddie interrupted. “He gave you the Steak House.” He pointed at me menacingly.

  “But it’s for all of us! And I didn’t know about it until today, at exactly the same moment you and everyone else found out. You act like there’s a conspiracy between Daddy and me or something. There’s not. I was a
s surprised as you were. But you’re right: Tallagumsa looks better all the time!”

  “See? You’ve made up your mind.” He paced back and forth in front of the swing set. “I know you have.”

  “I really haven’t, I swear. Would you please just think about Daddy’s proposal? That’s all I’m asking. We can discuss it later, rationally, calmly.”

  “You’re just humoring me.”

  “Oh, stop! I don’t want to argue with you while we’re standing outside our burglarized apartment, you’re furious at the whole world, and Jessie is nearby.”

  “Why shouldn’t I be furious? The world sucks,” he said.

  Jessie suddenly jumped up out of the sandbox, ran over, and grabbed my arm. “Did they take Lily Lee?” she wailed, referring to her favorite doll.

  “I’ll go in and check on her and everything else,” Eddie said.

  “Get Jessie and me a jacket too,” I called. With the setting sun’s waning warmth blocked by the tall row of cedars in our backyard, the temperature had dropped to the low sixties.

  Eddie walked in the back door of our apartment.

  “What if Lily Lee is gone?” Jessie worried.

  “I promise they didn’t take her,” I assured Jessie, confident no one would. Lily Lee was the ugliest, rattiest doll I’d ever seen, and Jessie adored her. When Jessie received Lily Lee at the age of four months, Lily Lee was a lovely little baby doll. Since then, though, she’d been colored and painted on, thrown up on, and glued on and to various objects. After every abuse, I’d done my best to restore her, but some of her hair and most of her eyelashes had fallen out, and the blue of her eyes was smeared across her plastic face. Lily Lee was safe from even the least discriminating burglars.

  “The vacuum, the radio, the blender, those are the only other things I noticed missing,” Eddie said when he came out of the apartment. He carried a beer in one hand and Jessie’s jacket and doll in the other. I didn’t worry him about my jacket.

  “Sounds like they needed home furnishings,” I said. “Maybe they were newlyweds.” I smiled at the absurdity of this notion. “Is Lily Lee all right?” Jessie asked.

  “She’s fine, honey,” he said, handing her the battered doll and the jacket. “So are all your Barbie dolls. I called the police, LuAnn.”

  “The police!” Jessie cried. She pointed her finger gun into the air again and ran around shooting it. “You’re dead,” she yelled. “Bang, bang!”

  “I think I’ll check with Adrienne, see if she saw or heard anything,” I said. “Why don’t you swing with Daddy while we wait for the police, Jes.” I thought I’d better warn Adrienne, who wasn’t particularly careful about keeping her drugs-a lot of pot, some acid-out of sight.

  I held out my hands to Eddie. “Ooh!” I yelped as he helped me up from the swing. My hands automatically reached for my stomach.

  He looked at me quizzically.

  “It’s nothing,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure what the sharp pain meant. Maybe the contraction was different from those I’d felt over the last month, maybe not.

  Focusing on my body and the pregnancy for the first time in hours, I realized how incredibly exhausted I was. The day had made more than its fair share of emotional and physical demands: the trip to Tallagumsa, the dedication, the gift of the Steak House, the trip to the tree and the memorial, Eddie’s rejection letter, and now our house burglarized. Enough! Enough! Enough! I wanted to pull a cover up over my head and forget about everything for at least twenty-four hours, but instead I walked slowly around to the north end of our front porch and rang the side-door bell.

  I could hear Adrienne walk down the stairs to her front door. When she opened the door, two cats rushed past, under the hem of her billowing floor-length skirt. She didn’t seem to notice them. She was high. Very high. Her eyes were all pupils, dilated as fully as they could be, perfect black circles. Her pale freckled face was framed by naturally curly shoulder-length strawberry-blond hair. She looked otherworldly, a wraithlike Orphan Annie with a joint.

  “We’re back,” I said. I gave a little wave. “Just wanted to let you know and say hi.”

  “I didn’t know you left,” she said. Another cat walked slowly out the door past us.

  “I told you yesterday, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. She showed no signs of concern about her flagging memory, only curiosity. “Where’d you go again?”

  “Tallagumsa, Alabama,” I reminded her. “And someone broke in our place while we were away,” I said. “They stole some things, the TV, the stereo, I don’t know what all.”

  “Wow!” she said. Her expression reminded me of Jessie’s when I’d arrive at day care with a surprise toy or cupcake.

  “You didn’t hear anyone or anything odd?”

  “I was at work. Then Bryce was here and”-she shrugged and grinned-“we were busy, you know?”

  “Eddie called the police,” I said. “They’ll be here soon. Maybe you ought to go over to Bryce’s for a while.”

  “Thanks,” she said. She opened the door and left, walking down the street without her purse, her shoes, or a care in the world. I could hear her singing “Sugar Magnolia” as she turned the comer.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  At the sound of police sirens approaching our apartment, Jessie dragged the toes of her new patent-leather shoes in the dirt beneath her swing and came to a standstill. She let go of the swing ropes, covered her ears, and squeezed her eyes closed until the police car stopped out front and the sirens wound down and jerked to a stop, then she ran around the side of the house to greet the policemen.

  A sharp pain gripped me, filling the silence. I reached for my stomach. Again, my abdomen was as hard as stone. According to my watch, fifteen minutes had passed since the last contraction. Although it didn’t necessarily mean anything-during the last months of both pregnancies I’d had lots of contractions off and on, some almost as piercing as the last few I’d felt-I knew that I should go to bed or at least sit down in the living room and prop my swelling ankles on the footrest.

  I stared at the back door to the apartment as the last vestiges of the warm sunny day disappeared and darkness engulfed us. I just could not bring myself to go in there. After all my worrying, Jessie didn’t seem to be particularly bothered by the burglary, but it had shaken me and left me feeling unusually vulnerable. Waiting right where I was in the backyard took all the energy and courage I could muster.

  Jessie ran back around the side of the house. “Two police are inside,” she announced as she climbed back into her swing.

  I pushed her back and forth. Her long golden-brown hair flew out behind her when she went up in the air, and her shoes pointed to the stars. My eyes followed in that direction. I looked for the familiar constellations of my childhood. Only the brighter ones, like Ursa Major, Leo, and Gemini, were visible thanks to the uninhibited growth of downtown Atlanta, which was leaving in its wake a dull haze that increasingly interfered with a clear view of the night sky.

  When I was not much older than Jessie, before I’d learned to read, my father and I had studied the night sky most evenings after dinner on the side-porch swing, while Jane and Mother sewed or worked on some church thing or other at the kitchen table inside. I could easily imagine Eddie and Jessie on the same porch in the same swing, “star hopping,” as my father had always called it.

  Eddie was wrong, though. I hadn’t made up my mind about moving. I was being pulled in that direction, but I had doubts and reservations. If anyone had asked me a few years ago whether I’d ever return home to live, I would have laughed. Plain and simple. As much as I loved my family, Jolene, who’d helped raise me, my horse, and my old friends, Tallagumsa belonged to my past, not my future.

  But my future was not falling into place quite the way I’d imagined. I had always assumed I’d finish graduate school and teach or do research, Eddie would be a respected political cartoonist, his work appearing in every major newspaper, we’d buy and renovate an historic home
, and then, perhaps in our early thirties, we’d focus on children and raising a family. In my future, we lived happily ever after.

  It was hard for me to believe that my dreams could be worn away by reality in much the same way the sand castles Jane and I had built together as children were worn away by the tides. During family vacations in Florida, Jane and I often spent our mornings constructing elaborate sand structures. In the afternoon, after high tide had destroyed our work, I was shocked to find that a lump of sand had replaced that day’s masterpiece. Jane (or “Sis,” as I called her back then), older and always the pragmatist, took the loss in stride. I, on the other hand, stubbornly refused to accept the inevitable.

  One such occasion had been preserved for posterity by a photograph Mother took during a Gulf Coast vacation when I was five and Jane eleven. In the picture, Jane and I are standing on the beach in our bathing suits. I am sobbing, my head on her shoulder. Her arms are wrapped around me, consoling me. Next to us are the remains of the castle we’d worked so hard on, and in the background is the tide, rushing in to take even more of our creation away from us and out to sea.

  Could the Steak House be just another sand castle?

  With the next contraction, I felt something inside me give. A rush of warm liquid flowed down my legs. Ready or not, my future was here to claim me.

  As I had before giving birth to Jessie, I focused on this moment, after which my life would always be different. This time around the scene before me was one of moderate chaos. Jessie was swinging and laughing, giddy from lack of sleep. Eddie and the two policemen, one a small black man, the other a fat white man with a thin black mustache, were huddled outside the back door, talking. The stillness was periodically broken by the squawking and screeching of the police radios. More stars had appeared, though not enough to suit me. I shivered and touched my sopping-wet pants leg. Yuch.

  In contrast, the day preceding Jessie’s birth nearly four years ago had been slow-moving and quiet. Eddie and I had been sitting in this same backyard reading, the summer sun hot and wonderful overhead. I had marked my place in Dog Soldiers, Eddie’s favorite novel of the year, closed it, and willed myself to know the look and feel of the moment because I had understood that very soon our lives, Eddie’s and mine would be transformed forever by the birth of our first child.