“But you had a father who wanted to raise you.”
“That’s just how they think. Children belong to the mother.”
“Except in my case, apparently. Your father did a great job.”
“Yeah, she gave me that. She still says she’s going to move back there and run the restaurant.”
“She’s not. Phil is training someone for the job.”
“When’s he going to tell her?”
“I don’t know. We’ve been dealing with some other stuff.”
“Anything I should know besides sliding roads?”
“Well, you’ll see. That road really drops off. I get woozy every time I drive it. I don’t think it ends until the bottom of the earth. You need to be careful. Which car are you taking?”
“The Subaru. We’ll be fine.”
We fell quiet.
“Where’s the bottom of the earth?” she asked.
“Isn’t it the South Pole?”
“I don’t want you two to get a divorce,” she said. “I don’t want to lose our family.”
“We won’t. Even if we did, you’ll still have a brother and sister and you’re marrying my nephew.”
“That doesn’t mean I’d see you. You’ll probably marry a famous director and move to Italy. It feels like Adam and I are causing problems.”
“You’re not. If your mother is serious about her stepmother stuff, it doesn’t matter who you marry.”
“She’s always been like this. Dad has never admitted it. He’s always accommodated her. I can’t believe Glen lasted as long as he did.”
“Your dad didn’t want to say anything bad about her. He didn’t want to hurt you.”
“I know, but sometimes it would have helped to have him at least acknowledge what I was going through with her. He always just listened. Mr. Cool Understanding. Everyone thought it was all Glen.”
“I don’t know what to say, CC. I don’t know what the best thing is. He tends to let the people around him come to their own conclusions.”
“I’m his daughter.”
“And now you’re a grown woman with her eyes open. If he’d talked trash about her, you might never have seen her clearly.”
“He’s the one who doesn’t see her clearly. He needs to call and get it over with.”
“Why don’t you call him? Tell him that. He misses talking to you.”
“He won’t listen to me.”
“I think he might today.”
Chance peed at the sky, and it turned into a rain shower for him. He squawked and closed his eyes as his slapstick routine played out. Like the rest of us, he had no idea he was doing it to himself.
“I need to go. Chance is raining on his own sunny day. Call your dad. He’s lonesome for you. He could use a friend right now.”
Talking to Chana was like a get-over-yourself slap in the face. Our family was bogging down under my bullshit. There’d be no toothbrushes in the toilet on my watch. I did a speed pick up around the house, started laundry, got showered and into grown up clothes, then started dinner while Chance played in the sink. I baked Jon’s favorite gingerbread with lime glaze. That was going a little overboard; I’d never been accused of running on regular.
∞
Jon came home to a woman holding up her end of things. He had a bag from the drugstore.
“I made enchiladas,” I said. “Why don’t you go for a paddle or take a nap, you look tired.”
If I’d been wearing my pearls he would have called for an exorcism to drive out the scary 1950s woman standing in his kitchen. Not a role I was cut out for.
“Where’s Hannah?” he asked.
“She left, she was dragging everyone down.”
“Chana called,” he said. “I got my ass kicked, but it was good to talk to her. They’re happy.”
“I know. Big Sur. Go. Tell me later.”
He paddled, and then lay down for just a minute on his way to the shower. He didn’t wake up until after the kids were fed and off to Kaia’s. I got through emails and five hundred baby names before he came out yawning and rubbing his head.
He ate enchiladas and filled me in on his afternoon ass kicking. He was surprised to hear that Chana and Glen talked. Glen thought hiring Celeste was a bad business decision. Getting business advice from Glen, via his daughter, did not sit well.
It also turned out that Glen wasn’t shacked up with a 20-year-old like Celeste had said. She was 30, and a hotshot web designer out of Art Center. They’d met in the bar he opened in Ventura, where she was celebrating with a group of friends after landing a huge project. She could work from anywhere, so they planned to live in Baja most of the year. They were getting married when the divorce was final. Chana and Adam were going down for the wedding.
My heart went out to Jon. He was processing a lot more daughter sharing and other twists and turns than he was expecting when he woke up in the morning smiling about getting kicked awake for sex. We still hadn’t talked about our new wrinkle.
“What did Celeste say when you told her?”
“I haven’t called her. I don’t want to talk to her right now, she’ll just go off about Glen.”
“Do you think you’ll ever call her?” I asked.
“I’ll call her, Hannah. Christ.”
“Chana says she’s always been difficult. That you don’t see it.”
“Chana’s a kid,” he said.
“She’s grown up enough to get married.”
“We should deal with our situation while we have time alone,” he said.
“Which situation? The one where you’re still taking care of an ex-wife who wants my children? Or who we’ll get in to help out for a few days after the abortion?”
“So you’ve made a unilateral decision?”
“Are you serious? You made it,” I said. “I’m going to get the kids.”
Jon sat on the lanai simmering, while I got the kids down. I stuck my head out the screen door.
“I’m going to the library,” I said.
He looked at his phone.
“It’s been closed for an hour.”
“Then I’m going to Walmart.”
“It’s an hour away. I’ll go. What do we need?”
“Not we. I need not to be here now.”
I put on flip-flops, grabbed my keys and got in the car. Jon came out and leaned in the window.
“I want you to stay home,” he said.
“I wanted you to divorce Celeste. Sometimes we don’t get what we want. I can’t stand it here. I can hardly breathe.”
“Then I’ll leave.”
“I’m leaving, Jon. They close at midnight.”
“You’re going to shop until midnight? The bars will be letting loose the first wave.”
“You always work late. I had a whole adult life before you came along.”
“I’m not questioning your adulthood. That road is dangerous. I don’t like you out alone and upset.”
“I’ve spent half my life alone and upset.”
“Come on, Hannah. That’s bullshit. You have a house full of people here who love you.”
He reached in to take the keys out of the ignition but I grabbed his wrist while I rolled up the window on his arm until he had to take it out to save himself from a trip to the ER. I hit the door lock just as he went for the handle. I started the car and rolled forward while he walked along beside it. He wasn’t stupid, he didn’t stand in front of the car. His mouth was moving, probably saying, “Go to hell you crazy bitch.” Though he’d never said anything even remotely rude to me. I opened the window a crack to tell him that I’d be back by 1:00.
“I want the baby,” he said.
“He’s all yours,” I said.
He gave me his scare-Marty look, turned, and disappeared into the house.
EIGHT
The trip took an hour of crappy night driving. My rods and cones were doing somersaults trying to make sense of blasting headlights and blackness. I’d driven the road for years, but it wa
s disorienting at night. I was sweaty and exhausted by the time the store appeared like a mirage. I’d never been inside.
The lot was half full. It reminded me of an Indian casino on an empty desert road; full of people like me, roaming late, trying to escape their lives. That was a seriously depressing thought. I belonged at home, but I was there, after making a big deal about being a grown up.
The fluorescent lighting was oddly flat and dim without a whisper of flicker. Even squinting didn’t bring the visual clutter into contrast. It looked like everything was pink, a color that makes us passive until it makes us mad. Passive must last long enough for people to wander the aisles and buy crap they didn’t know they needed, but not so long that we read about mass murders at Walmart.
Shoppers were slumped over carts that they pushed like walkers. They looked tired and defeated after a long day of washing dishes and changing sheets at the resorts.
I joined the slipstream of sticky handled carts trolling the aisles, and threw in random stuff that seemed like a good idea in some tiny place in my life. A fresh mascara and lip gloss. I rarely wore make up, but I might date again soon. Jon called. I ignored it. I threw in a three-pack of thong underwear. Jon called them butt-crack creepy. They were from Pakistan. I didn’t have a big picture of Pakistani women in thongs, but what did I know?
I grabbed five strips of tattoo decals of suns and whales for Meggie. Meggie. She loved her tattoo and whales. I wondered if the ink really was safe for children. The printing on the package looked like it was from the 18th century and half the words were spelled wrong. I bought her pink flip-flops with jewels on the straps. A thin gold strip on the treaded bottom said, “Made in China.” The strip had some major stick to survive the trip from China on that sole.
It went on like that. Enough toilet paper for a year that we had no place to store. Disposable diapers, I could try those. I looked at nursing kits. I should wean Chance to a bottle; it would free me up for work. He wouldn’t like it; he was having too much fun slobbering around with my breasts. I needed to research formulas.
Why had Jon said that? It’s not like I was driving off to have an abortion. He knew I wouldn’t do it unless he agreed. That was one thing he knew for sure about me. If he wanted the baby, we would have the baby. He was trapping me in my stupid brand of honor, and he didn’t care.
The stuffed baby toys had the sharp smell of fumigated cargo containers. I threw in a package of cotton blankets with pastel dinosaurs instead. They were made in Georgia, probably the Republic of Georgia. I added a teething ring you freeze. Meggie had never liked hers, Chance might. I hoped the gel inside wasn’t poisonous.
I added a kitchen timer, a cheap replica of the old white winder my grandmother had. The tick marks on the dial of my grandmother’s had been filled with years of good cooking grime. Unlike my digital timer with its incessant beep beep beep, Grandma’s timer sent out one great ding and trusted that you were paying enough attention to your life to hear it.
Mom used to take Bettina and me to visit Grandma every summer for my birthday. The year I turned nine, Mom took a toothbrush to the timer and scrubbed it so hard, she scrubbed away all the tiny black tick marks of paint that showed you how many minutes. My grandmother was bewildered when she tried to use it that afternoon. She adjusted her glasses and held it up high under the light over the stove. In the end, she had to fuss back and forth with the oven door and toothpicks to make sure she didn’t burn my birthday cake. It came out lopsided from drafts.
I had taken the timer to bed with a flashlight and the indelible ink pen she used to write on canning labels. I made a blanket tent so the light didn’t wake up Bettina in the other bed, then carefully lined in all the missing tick marks. I tiptoed out and put it back by the stove, put her pen in the drawer, and the flashlight by the back door.
The next day she scolded my mother for making matters worse by trying to undo her scrubbing. My mother denied it, she sounded like a little girl. My stomach contracted with anxiety and my cheeks flamed over my failure to draw tick marks carefully enough.
“I did it. I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll save up and buy you a new one.”
I ran out of the kitchen crying. Bettina mocked, “Hannie thinks she’s an artist.”
“I’ll buy you one, Mom,” said my mother. “They have much nicer ones now.”
“It still works, Jacqueline,” said my grandmother.
My mother had it now. She’d taken it when we moved my grandmother out of her last bastion of self-rule, a one-room apartment with a strip efficiency kitchen. It had gone from being a minor player in the wooden spoon and salt shaker clutter next to her big stove, to being a lone space hog on two square feet of blue laminate.
Mom slipped it into her purse saying they didn’t make them like they used to. It was an aberration in the sleek granite kitchen Arthur designed for her straight out of his former life as an engineer. She left the grime that had refilled the tick marks, but I could still see ink where I’d drawn outside the lines. She said it reminded her of her mother. I didn’t ask which part. It reminded me of picking a scab.
I threw an assortment of wooden spoons in the cart. Meggie had liked to drum wildly on pans. Chance might too. Though I thought his drumming might have rhythm. Chance. Milk was starting to leak through my tee shirt so I cycled back and threw in a box of nursing pads to change in the car.
I was picking out an anklet when they dimmed the lights and announced that the store would be closing in fifteen minutes. All the women in India wore anklets but I’d never gotten one. Chana wore one of coral beads strung on leather. I picked a delicate gold chain, just like an Indian woman. Jon. Jon wasn’t an anklet man, I didn’t think. The tattoo was a surprise. The anklet didn’t have tiny India bells so I picked out a small teardrop shaped peridot charm. Peridot comes from lava, meteorites too. The dinosaurs might have been wiped out, but some things make it through the earth’s test of fire. Hawaiians call peridot the tear of Pele. She was a wild, dangerous and abundant goddess. I needed more Pele in me. Except for the whole abundance thing. I checked out with all the other Draculas.
∞
It took some shoving to get everything jammed into my little car. I hadn’t considered how much space two hundred rolls of toilet paper and boxes of diapers take up when your car already has a stroller, two car seats, emergency baby gear, a partially inflated whale floatie and three bags of stuff to go to the resale shop.
I threw my purse on the floor in front and piled bags on top. I tore open the big package of toilet paper and stored the individual rolls in every nook and cranny in the back.
The store killed the main lights, which left me in a smog of yellow sodium vapor. I took the time to put on my new anklet. It was hard to thread the chain through the mounting ring on the teardrop, in the low light. Guys were laughing in the only other car in the lot. I’d seen them inside buying cans of Hurricane malt. My phone rang under the pile of stuff. By the time I’d dug it out there was a missed call from Jon. I glanced over at the guys; the ringing phone had attracted their glittering eyes. I tried calling Jon back, but it went to voicemail, probably leaving me a message. I said I was just leaving. I put the last few things in the car.
The guys drove by, circling like coyotes. Fear prickled the skin on the back of my legs and told them to get moving. I got in the car and hit the locks. It took an eternity to find my keys and start out of the parking lot. The load shifted around inside the car, something slid off the roof. I hoped they hadn’t thrown a beer can at the car; I’d been careful to keep the paint in good shape in the salt air. I looked in the rear view mirror. They’d stopped. A guy opened his door and it looked like he set an empty can on the ground. So they weren’t can throwers. They followed me out of the parking lot and out onto the highway.
They stayed with me. They got up close and flashed their lights. I was in a pickle between the lights behind me and the sporadic oncoming traffic. I flipped the rearview mirror up but watched them in the si
de mirrors. They advanced and retreated on my bumper. We drove down the road like that. Sometimes it was total darkness in front of me, sometimes light from both directions. I leaned over and searched with one hand through the pile for my phone. Then it hit me. I’d set it on top of the car after I texted Jon. It was my phone that I’d heard sliding off the car. My heart clawed up my throat.
They finally got tired of the game and passed on a blind curve. I edged over to give them more room. They were so close I could see the scars on one guy’s face when he stuck his head out and waggled his tongue at me. It meant only one thing. Another guy got up behind his shoulder and stuck his hand out. He was holding my phone; the screen was lit up with one of my favorite pictures of Jon with the babies, reflections from a pastel sunrise painted across their faces.
Their taillights disappeared around a curve just as the side of my car hit the steep rock face and sent me skidding sideways across the opposite lane. I jerked the steering wheel and a box of diapers flew out of the backseat. Over Jon’s objections, I’d removed the headrests so I could reach Meggie and Chance more easily. The corner of the box stabbed me in the thigh before it dropped down into the well by the passenger seat. I was so distracted by the pain that I over steered and slammed into the rock face again. It doubled the energy for the next trip across the road. The car turned sideways and slid down the other lane, making me a fat target for anyone coming the other direction.
I couldn’t remember which way you’re supposed to steer in a spin. My father always knew. He was fine driving in the snow on family ski trips. It’s hard to understand what to do in a car going backwards. I lost track of what was happening outside the car when the load in the backseat let loose and rolls of toilet paper flew around. The car kept spinning until it hit the low guardrail on the drop side of the road. It had so much energy it flipped up and over the rail and out into space.
Mary Ellen Courtney - Hannah Spring 02 - Spring Moon Page 14