“Stroud,” said a familiar voice to the sound of road and radio in the background.
“Hello Stroud, it’s Spring,” I said.
It got quiet on the other end when he turned off the radio.
“Hey,” he said. “I didn’t recognize the area code.”
“It’s Hawaii. You probably don’t drive there much.”
“Never been.”
We were quiet again.
“Hold on. I’m going to pull over,” he said.
He set the phone down on the seat. I could hear his blinker, then downshifting and air brakes. My phone battery was getting low. I was really roaming. His engine finally shut down and he picked up the phone again. He always sounded like he was smiling.
“So you’re in Hawaii,” he said. “I wondered.”
“At the moment I’m in the parking lot at the G&S. Your sister just cleaned me out of my last dollar.”
I told him the story.
“Sounds like her,” he said. “So two kids? You married?”
“Yes and yes. And a grown stepdaughter. Why did she do that? She doesn’t even know me.”
“She used to babysit Leeann when she was little. You’re lucky she didn’t call the cops.”
“I didn’t do anything to Leeann.”
“She thinks you came through with your fancy car and caused problems for Leeann and me.”
“Since when is a broken down Prius a fancy car? If anyone caused problems for Leeann, it was you. Were you two always together?”
“Yeah.”
“You said you weren’t. Why’d you do that? I imagined us having children.”
He was so quiet; I could hear traffic buffeting his truck as it passed him.
“Look around you, Hannah. Would you have been willing to live there?”
I looked out the window at the rundown diner, the flickering sign, and the truckers in heavy boots and bandanas. At the mud flaps with chrome nudies, stickers for the NRA, and homemade bumper stickers with what sounded like treasonous threats directed at the President. I looked at Chance in his grungy but still nice jumper with the country club crest, and at Meggie with her flowered sundress and whale with the pink ribbon tied around its neck. My blonde babies.
“I had a good job,” I said.
“I’ll have Leeann bring you some money,” he said. “You can send us a check.”
“I thought Leeann hated me.”
“Joyce hates you. Leeann got over it. She’s fine. She’s not worried about me anymore.”
“How’d she find out?” I asked.
“She read our texts.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Does she have reason to be worried about you now?”
“No. So who’d you marry? The boyfriend?”
“You mean the boyfriend I didn’t lie about? No. He found out about us via a hundred condom wrappers in my trashcan. It got ugly.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. Did you always love her?”
“I suppose I did,” he said.
“Then why?” I asked. “I trusted you.”
“It was one of those things. I was surprised. You were willing.”
“That was it?”
He was quiet. It was all so depressing. I had tumbled his memory all those years over nothing.
“Was that it?” I asked again.
“No, Hannah. That wasn’t it. Not then. It is now.”
“I didn’t come here looking for you,” I said.
“That’s good. I went looking for you once. Some guys were living in your place. You were in India.”
“Why’d you look for me?”
“Just to see you.”
“Sex?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
I considered telling him that I’d burned up Margaret. About Jon. I let it all go. I’d shared plenty with him and it hadn’t mattered.
“You want me to call Leeann?” he asked. “She can be there in ten minutes.”
“Where are you?”
“Outside Fresno. I still haul bees this time of year.”
“No. I’m okay. I’m heading out as soon as Chance finishes nursing.”
“Chance? That’s a good name.”
“It means luck in French.”
“Res secundae in Latin,” he said. “He’s a favorable thing.”
I looked down at my favorable thing. His Jon blue saucers were watching me, as his suckling got intermittent. He was in his own dairy country.
“You teach any biology now?” I asked.
“I tutor at the high school when I’m in town. I should get going. The bees are cooking in the back. Call me back if you run into trouble.”
“Okay.”
“Take care, Hannah. I’m glad you called.”
I disconnected Chance. He was just toying with me at that point, men must learn that early. Meggie had never done that; she’d been all business.
I strapped him in his car seat and started out of the parking lot with Joyce watching me through the front window. I headed back up the road and called Jon to let him know where we were; it went to voicemail. I had enough battery left to say, “Hi Jon, it’s Hannah,” before it cut me off.
I was exhausted. Building walls to contain painful revelations takes energy. I knew I’d feel better after I worked on it for a while. Tumbled it around. For the moment, I felt hard and numb.
FIVE
The road stayed open as I headed for my grandmother’s grave. I pulled up the street in an old residential neighborhood in Altadena and stopped at the cemetery office. It was locked up, so I took a plot map from the holder by the front door. Her grave was all the way in the back, in an old family plot in the original area from the late 1800s. She was buried alone. Her husbands were buried where they’d dropped.
I’d loved my grandmother. She lived to ninety-eight. Like my mom, she’d had to start over with young children. She’d come from wealth and even went to college. Her first husband died young, leaving her to chafe at the trappings of widowhood in their tight-bodice society. She used money inherited from her father to buy a coalmine in a remote North Dakota town.
My grandfather owned the only store. Like most eligible men on the frontier, what he lacked in formal education he made up for with native intelligence, reading, and rolled-up shirtsleeves. I always asked them how they met. She said he wooed her with sugar and salt. He said he wooed the widow with sugary words and salty shenanigans. She always said, “Oh Charles.” He always winked. They had a long, happy marriage and two daughters, Jackie and Judith. My mother chose to ignore the fact that she was the product of salty sweetness between strangers. Strangers who, when their mine caught fire, sold the store and moved to a big city where all the kids could get a good education.
Grandma had gone out in small town fashion. Her hearse broke down on the way up from the mortuary in San Diego, and Stroud ended up bringing her in the back of his John Deere. He was passing through on his way to our first night together. We all figured it was a great way for a miner lady to travel. Well, everybody but Bettina; she thought it was beneath her. Like anything is beneath you once you’re dead. That’s a concept for the living, though I wasn’t sure it had much value for the living either.
Stroud recognized that my family and friends would consider him beneath me. After talking to him, all I felt was that somehow I wasn’t enough, even for him. I hadn’t been enough for Steve. Okay, I knew that was stupid. I hadn’t been enough for my husband; he never gave up his old girlfriend. And now Jon still needed Celeste.
Meggie ran across the grass while I set up Chance’s new bouncy thing under the trees by Ella Minerva’s headstone. I lay down in the grass next to him and stared up through the trees to check out his view of the world. It was certainly optimistic not to see the road ahead, just limitless sky. I tried to whip myself into a good cry, but I felt dried out, tired, and confused. I couldn’t see the road forward and I didn’t see how I could go backwa
rd. The sky didn’t look limitless, it looked empty, until Meggie appeared over me holding flowers she’d raided from a grave.
She smiled and hopped away to raid more graves. I started to drift off, and then jerked awake and jumped up looking for her. Finally the setting sun lit up her bobbing yellow curls over the top of a headstone three rows over.
It was a child’s grave with a very old headstone sculpture of an angel with a lamb at its feet. Five flat markers with the same last name were laid out in a hasty jumble. Someone had lost five children in one year. It wasn’t a fire; their deaths were spaced out a few months apart. I didn’t know my epidemic years, but I would bet TB or influenza had swept through the family of angels and lambs. Meggie had made a pattern with flowers at the head of the lamb. She petted it and offered it bits of grass.
∞
It was so late by the time I got them packed in the car, that the exit gate was chained shut. I drove around to the service entrance, locked. I tried all the office doors and knocked on the windows assuming there must be a security guard, or a phone to summon help for the occasional grief stricken heart attack. I couldn’t raise a soul.
The gate was set far back from the street. I yelled. Someone would call the cops. Nope. I honked the horn for a while, but a honking horn in L.A. is meaningless.
I wound slowly around the perimeter, looking for a way out. Light dusted a spot on the top of the wall so I pulled the car up on the grass and parked as close as I could. I did my best to dodge headstones in the twilight, but I might have run over a few people with those flat markers. Sorry people. I hoped they’d take American Express for damages.
I climbed up on the hood and looked over the wall. There was a house about ten feet away with a small grassy yard between the wall and a bed of fuchsias under the kitchen window. A woman stood at her kitchen sink washing butter lettuce. My stomach growled. We’d never had a meal. Her husband came out with a platter of meat to put on the BBQ.
“Excuse me,” I said.
He almost dropped the platter, speaking of heart attacks.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m stuck in here.”
“Everybody’s stuck in there,” he said. “They don’t usually call over the wall.”
I burst out laughing. I was laughing so hard I almost slid off the hood of the car. Probably hysteria aggravated by zero blood sugar. He called his wife outside. She said they just lock it up. The only time there’s a night watchman is around Halloween. With all the zombie shows, people had started using the place to party.
“Would you call them for me? My cell battery is dead.”
“We can, but they’re going to charge you five hundred dollars to come let you out,” he said. “You’re not the first.”
“Do they take American Express?”
“Probably. Why don’t you climb on over? I’ll get a ladder. You can have some dinner while you wait,” he said.
“That’s very nice, but I have my children with me.”
“You have children with you?” she asked.
“Two. They’re six weeks and four.”
“Honey, you’re not going to sit locked in there with babies,” she said. “We’ll get a ladder, you can hand them over. We’ll put on another steak.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure we’re sure.”
“Would it be okay if I charge my phone a little, too?”
“Of course. Come ahead.”
So that’s what we did. First I threw over a small bag with diapers and my phone charger. I put a sweater on Meggie and passed her over, screaming. Whoever she ends up with needs to know she will not be a candidate for clandestine border crossings. Once she hit the ground and met their Aussie, she was golden.
I handed Chance over. He didn’t let out a peep; he was going to grow up to be a full-blown stoic. Then I hoisted myself over. I admit I got a rush of energy from the whole thing. It was fun. It reminded me of my job: problem solving on the fly.
The husband, Bob, had found the number and left me with a phone to call the people in charge. His wife Sherry swooned over Chance; Meggie swooned over their dog, Gus.
The deal was, they would come let me out for five hundred dollars cash, or I could wait until morning and just drive away, no harm no foul. They said to call back when I had the cash. My car was a captive.
“You can spend the night here,” said Sherry. “We have plenty of room. There’s no reason to waste five hundred dollars unless you have to be somewhere tonight.”
“I’ll call a friend to bring the money,” I said. “We can be out of your hair in a few hours.”
I was adding the eighty-dollar pit stop to the five hundred dollar cemetery lock down and thinking about the number of light bulbs Jon would have to change just to break even with my day of cash-obsessed humans. I needed to get a job just to pay for my escapades, and it wasn’t over yet.
“You’re welcome to stay,” said Sherry. “Have some supper, get a fresh start in the morning.”
It was such a wild suggestion, I accepted. I called Karin and gave her the second installment on my day. I asked her to tell Jon in case he called.
“In case he calls? He has me on robo redial. It was every twenty minutes, now it’s down to every two,” she said. “I think he might be losing his mind. His voice has gotten so low it’s hard to figure out what he’s saying. You left him a message that was cut off and now you don’t answer. He thinks you’ve been abducted, or you’re with Stroud, if that’s who he means by the guy guy. No way in hell is he going to believe you’re staying with Bob and Sherry of Altadena, whoever they are. I’m not sure I believe it. Are they weird? They live next to a cemetery. Who does that?”
“They have quiet neighbors,” I said. “Except on Halloween.”
“Are you being held hostage? What’s my son’s nickname?”
“The Little Dick. He knows what you mean, by the way. I’m not the first person this has happened to. They open the cemetery at 7:00 so people can stop in on their way to work. God knows why. I’ll be at your house before you leave for the studio.”
“I’m going to have Jon call you before his hair turns white.”
“Well, don’t even joke about your hostage scenario, or he’ll have the SWAT team and K-9 units blowing through their front door.”
Bob and Sherry were two of the most comfortable people on the planet. Sherry already had Meggie at the kitchen table with colored markers. Gus was licking her toes. He might need extra vaccinations. Bob was poking at steaks, holding Chance well out of harm’s way. Chance studied Bob’s face while Bob schooled him on the fine points of broiling dead bovine.
I had a fantasy that Bob and Sherry were my real parents, that I’d been switched at birth. A long shot since they were black, but whatever. Genetics can be tricky. The phone rang. Sherry sang into it.
“Hold on, Jon, she’s right here. You have beautiful children.”
I took the phone out of earshot. Sherry went back to making homemade French fries. She’d asked Meggie her preferences. I was sure ketchup was on the menu.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi. How you doing?”
“I’m fine. It’s been kind of hectic. My phone battery died, that’s why the message was cut off.”
“Karin told me.”
“It cost me eighty dollars to find a potty for Meggie. I didn’t want her to go in the bushes. There were used condoms. She’s just a baby.”
“Karin told me.”
“How are you? Did you talk to Chana again?”
“I don’t want to talk about me, or Chana.”
“The kids are fine. Meggie is drawing. The dog is licking her toes. Poor dog. Chance is learning how to BBQ. You know how he always smiles when he goes to sleep? Now he smiles when he wakes up too. I think he might be an optimist. Well, an optimistic stoic, or stoic optimist, I can’t remember how it goes.”
“Optimistic stoic,” he said.
“You want to talk to Meggie?”
“No. Don’t disturb her.”
“I talked to the guy guy today. His name is Alan Watts.”
“I don’t want to hear this right now,” he said. “I just want to hear that you’re okay.”
“I’m okay. He never loved me. It was always her. Like you and Celeste. He offered to loan me money though.”
“No. No. No. Do not even think about saying another word about this right now, Hannah. Not now.”
“I understand,” I said. “I’m not enough for a whole marriage. I get it. But I’m not giving up my children. I’m not, Jon. I’m not Celeste. I know how stubborn you can be. You’re like a mule. I don’t care how you think this is going to play out. I can support them.”
Bob came through the screen door butt first, Chance in one arm, a platter of steaks in the other.
“I think these are perfect,” said Bob. “Chance was a big help. Boy can really stare down a steak.”
“I need to go, dinner’s ready,” I said to Jon. “Meggie’s hands are scary. I had to kiss her hurt finger today. I probably picked up some epidemic disease. We saw a whole family of children who died in the cemetery today. Well, you know what I mean. They didn’t die there today. All in one year, a long time ago. Their family stone was an angel with a lamb. Meggie tried to feed the lamb grass. It broke my heart, Jon. All those babies dying.”
“Nothing is going to happen, Hannah. Nothing has happened. We’re all fine. Our babies are fine. Call me after you get them down.”
∞
Sherry had set the dining room table in honor of their guests. She lit candles and turned down the lights. The room was muffled red and green wall covering in an old Craftsman home with cleaned and oiled wainscoting. The quarter-sawn oak had darkened into an organic brush painting of whorls. The candlelight animated the smooth luminous gold burled into the red. It looked like water rushing around rocks. Sometimes I saw the red as the water, sometimes the gold swirled. I was tired. The cemetery crickets rubbed their skitchity legs in the summer heat.
Mary Ellen Courtney - Hannah Spring 02 - Spring Moon Page 9