Lilac Mines

by Cheryl Klein

  “I know… ”

  “Jean and Sylvie broke up,” Meg says. She’s quiet for a minute. “Jean and I have been talking, finally. I mean, really talking. At Lilac’s,” she clarifies.

  “Oh,” says Al. She watches her reflection in Lola Felix’s window. A shaggy-haired, boyish girl superimposed over a landscape of barber’s chairs and photos of movie stars with perfect curls.

  “Are you trying to make me jealous?” Al hears herself say.

  “Probably.” Al imagines Meg twirling her ponytail. Then she imagines her sitting down on the edge of the bed, in that hard, resolute way she sometimes does. She realizes she can’t remember the color of Meg’s bedspread.

  “I want to come home. To my real home, with you. I really do, but, well Suzy’s leaving soon to go back to Los Angeles and…”

  “Do you? Because you could. You left once. You could do it again.”

  “It’s not that easy,” Al protests. “My family needs me.”

  “I need you, stupid.” Meg’s voice cracks. Even so quiet, even over the distance, it’s unbearable. Al holds her breath. “I’m not going to beg you,” Meg says finally.

  Is the quilt blue? Maybe a couple of the patches, but that’s not the predominant color. Al wants to summon that world, the feeling of watching Jody and Imogen dance, the hard work of the mill, the curve of Meg’s hips. But all she can see is herself, lamp-lit, half-formed beneath the red FELIX’S arcing across the glass.

  Fine, she thinks. If she can’t summon it, she will make it go away. This limbo is too much. She’ll fold Lilac Mines into a little black ball, like the unsent letter in her pocket.

  “Fine,” Al stutters, “m-m-m aybe… maybe…” Maybe she can get on a bus. She’ll run to the bus station and sleep on one of the hard benches until it opens in the morning.

  “Just say it, Al,” whispers Meg. And because Al has to say what Meg thinks she’s going to say, and what her family—if they knew—would want her to say, she says it.

  “Maybe I should stay here. Maybe we should… call it off.” Her words are blurry. Her nose is running.

  “That’s what I thought. You are a sorry butch, Al.” Meg is sobbing and coughing. “I love you, but I can’t have all the courage for both of us.”

  Al is crying too, but she makes no noise. She’s always been this way, a tears-on-pillow crier. As a child, when she would emerge from her bedroom after what she thought was a tantrum, people would look up and say, Oh, where were you?

  Where am I? Al wonders now.

  There is a long silence. Finally Meg says, “Good-bye.”

  And Al tries to say, “Good-bye,” but it’s just her lips moving in the window.

  THE IDIOT OF 2002

  Felix: Lilac Mines, 2002

  It’s after 9 p.m. by the time Felix gets back to Lilac Mines. Instead of heading north toward Juliet Street, she makes an abrupt right on Washoe Street, feeling a pang as she passes Coffee - Cold Beer - Ammo and Nora’s Unisex Salon. She dials Anna Lisa’s number to tell her she’s going to run an errand before returning, but her cell phone is devoid of signal bars. Service in the mountains sucks.

  Washoe Street meanders past a row of semi-restored houses and a small cinderblock church. Is this the church mentioned in the article? From what she can see in the glow of the streetlights, the architecture is ’70s: modern and brave when new but quickly fades to drab.

  Nevertheless, Moon Avenue is the next cross-street. Most of the “houses” here are trailers with sagging awnings and astroturf lawns. Felix looks for numbers. The lots have been divided up, but 423 (the Hogans’ house) is still standing, more or less. It appears to be a small house in the process of being eaten by a large house. A second story and a garage bloom out of the old house beneath. The total is painted yield-sign yellow in a determined attempt to foster unity.

  Felix parks her car by the side of the road and gets out. She looks around carefully, checking for suspicious shadows beneath other parked cars. There is no sidewalk. The wind blows furiously. Just walking into it makes her feel courageous.

  The house is dark. She makes a U around the front and sides of the building, taking in the ragged scars where past has been stitched to present: the wood-framed downstairs windows and tin ones upstairs, wood shingles versus shake, green-patinaed doorknob versus Qwikset.

  Calla lived here, she thinks. Her brand new ghost. She has decided Calla was the Hogans’ daughter, young enough to be a fairytale heroine, although of course she could have been a sister, a maiden aunt.

  She makes her way toward 501, Barrett Lyman’s house. She finds another diaspora: 501-1/4, 501-1/2, 501-3/4. Airstream and Bounder and Winnebago. For some reason she’s happy that Calla’s house has survived and Barrett’s hasn’t, as if this is a small triumph for feminism.

  The street is steep. She’s just a few blocks from the eastern edge of town, which means the second mine entrance is nearby. She charges up the street, hardly noticing the cold. When she reaches the top spindle of Moon Avenue—which feels like the moon, bald and icy—she decides she needs a flashlight. After a quick trip to her car, it’s back to the edge. The road tapers off and she’s in the nighttime wilderness.

  The trail is easy enough to follow, even in the dark. It’s just a few feet across, a pebbled scar running across a ruddy skin of dried weeds and shrubs. It has to lead to the mine eventually. Where else is there to go?

  Here, on the moon, the bad movie plot lines that plagued her at the soda fountain begin to fall away. What if Lilac is nothing like a Law & Order victim? What if she’s like Felix, or Anna Lisa? Felix thinks about what she wants for Lilac—truth and redemption, yes, but she also wants, in a strange way, to be friends with her.

  The path curves around scrawny trees and bumps in the mountain. Felix can’t see much past her flashlight’s beam. She is surprised to come upon a pile of wood. She is even more surprised to discover that the pile is a house. A fallen door and cracked windows float on the splintery beams like a carrot and a coal-smile in a puddle of snowman. The wind whistles over the rubble.

  She sits on a miniature pile that might have been a chair, once. She is fairly sure it’s too cold for snakes tonight, but she’s less confident about spiders. She covers the rips in her jeans with her freezing hands. Sitting in the deconstructed house, she wonders if Lilac traveled this same path on her way to the mine. Did she stop here? With someone? Barrett Lyman is the obvious choice, with his house perched scandalously at the edge of Moon Avenue, but Felix craves the not-obvious.

  There’s a cracked bottle at her feet. Felix picks it up and examines it beneath her flashlight. It’s sun-purpled like the ones in Anna Lisa’s window. Did Anna Lisa walk through these ruins too, salvaging artifacts? It’s some kind of soda bottle, Felix guesses, but she doesn’t know whether it belongs to Lilac’s era or her aunt’s. With her car key, Felix hollows out the dirt-choked neck of the bottle and tucks it beneath her jacket. Maybe she can make it into a gift for Anna Lisa—a funky lamp or something.

  Lilac, did you drink sarsaparilla from a glass bottle? she asks the star-salted sky. Then, to her surprise, an image appears in her mind like a treasure map unfurling: two girls, one with long brown braids, one older and blonde, making their way up the mountain. Two hands hold capped soda bottles that sweat in the record heat. Their free hands hold each other.

  That’s it: Lilac and Calla. The words themselves belong together, five letters, la-la syllables like a Christmas carol. The girls knew this. They heard the truth in their names, whispered like a secret code, passed from Lilac’s salty tongue to Calla’s sweet one. But it was 1899 and no one else spoke their language. They went looking for a country that did, in the hot, delirious hills, in the cool refuge of the mine.

  And when they didn’t come back, the town went looking for them. The Hogans, who ran the newspaper, published a story about just one lost girl. History would condemn Lilac to loneliness. Their ink-stained daughter would fade to lemon juice on paper. Some of the townspeople
would try to remember Calla, naming the city’s biggest street after her. But the Hogans pushed down everything they could push down, their shame and their sadness, until people weren’t sure whether Calla was the name of Lilac’s lover or the type of lilies that filled her empty coffin.

  It’s too cold to sit for long, so she gets up and keeps walking. The wind dies down as she makes her way up the mountain, but the night has lost all of its heat-memory, as if daytime is a myth. She aims her flashlight at her watch and is surprised to see it’s almost midnight. Shit. Anna Lisa will be worried. She’ll have to turn back and save the mine for another day.

  She’s retraced a good stretch of the trail when it occurs to her that Anna Lisa might not be worried; she might have gone to bed hours ago after enjoying a quiet night without her annoying niece. Felix has walked another half-mile (mile? two miles?) when it occurs to her that the collapsed house is nowhere in sight. She should have passed it 20 minutes ago. Thirty? Time seems as frozen and jagged as the air.

  Her heart begins a small, nervous flutter. Is she lost? She hasn’t strayed from the trail, but the only other explanation is that the house was a ghost-house, performing its ghost-house show for a weary traveler, then retreating to the shadows.

  I’ll just travel downward, Felix thinks. If I head down the mountain, I’ll end up on Moon Avenue, or at least close. She abandons the winding path for a direct, downward tromp through the chaparral. Almost immediately, this seems like a stupid idea. Twigs nip through the holes in her jeans, and she’s pretty sure that being away from the main trail will make her harder to find, if it comes to that. What did Anna Lisa say? Every year some idiot thinks he can go hiking in the off-season, that it’s some well-kept secret. Felix wishes she’d paid closer attention to her aunt. She doesn’t want to be the idiot of 2002.

  It’s 1:13 a.m. Now the night is so still that Felix feels like she’s dropped off the Earth and out of time. There is no atmosphere on the moon. She curses her flashlight’s myopia. It illuminates manhole-sized circles or narrow beams quite nicely, but it doesn’t do anything about the big picture. Her downhill strategy isn’t working. She may be angling east, when she wants to head southwest. But when she shines her flashlight in the direction she thinks is southwest, she can’t see anything different. No buildings, no lights. Don’t panic, she tells herself.

  There is a store in West Hollywood by that name, Don’t Panic. It sells things like rainbow paperweights and Billy: the Out and Proud Gay Doll. The concept seems absurd now, as if the biggest problem gay people face is a lack of pride-related tchochkes.

  She jogs in place, trying to keep warm without getting more lost. Her fingers are numb inside her pockets. She pulls her T-shirt over the bottom half of her face, but that leaves her belly bare. Her bomber jacket only warms the parts it covers, which aren’t many. She blows on her hands and rubs them together. Something cold hits her momentarily-warm skin. It is small and light. Snow.

  And soon it is snowing, not just the noun but a powerful verb, something the whole sly sky is doing. It accumulates on her shoulders like dandruff. It makes little crunching noises beneath her boots. She pictures it covering her, suffocating, as she becomes the casualty of a perfect Christmas card.

  She needs to find shelter, but there’s nothing bigger than a scrub oak in this part of town. She has two choices: 1) keep looking for her snow-blue New Beetle, with its heater and defroster and the granola bar she’s pretty sure she left in the glove compartment; or 2) find the only other safe spot out here.

  But how to find a dark hole in the dark? The mine entrance, the other one, the one where Lilac vanished and Anna Lisa blossomed, has to be nearby. Finding it seems impossible. At the same time, it seems like Felix’s only chance. So she heads uphill. If nothing else, she will try to keep moving until morning. She can’t feel her feet—they are just two empty boots she watches with removed interest as they hit the ground, one-two, one-two, 20, 100, 1,000, up the steep incline. She tries to think warm thoughts as her eyes follow her flashlight’s wimpy revelations. Fires in fireplaces. Just-baked pie. Tabasco sauce. Koreatown in August. Lilac Mines in August. The scared, sweaty grip that unites Lilac and Calla. Flat tires.

  Flat tires? Her flashlight frames a deflated tire clinging to a rusty wheel. Strewn over a span of 50 feet or so, her flashlight has found a steering wheel. A seat that is a skeleton of springs. Something that looks like a canteen but is probably a muffler. It looks like the whole car is here, except for the actual body, the skin that held it together.

  Felix forgets about her own car and puts the pieces together. Anna Lisa said there was a rotted car near the second mine entrance. She swings her flashlight upward and starts jabbing the light madly at various spots on the mountain. Chaparral. Chaparral. Nothing. It is the exact nothing she’s been looking for, the dark space that will protect her. She runs toward it on her frozen feet, tripping twice.

  Mountain lions be damned, she thinks as she pries off a loose board with her numb fingers. One of her fingernails bends backward in the process, but she doesn’t even feel it. Don’t mountain lions hibernate in the winter anyway? Or is that bears?

  She climbs inside. It’s not warm, but it’s out of the snowfall, and if the wind kicks up again, it won’t cut through to her bones. She looks at her watch. 3:27 a.m., a few hours until sunrise. For the first time in hours, her shoulders unclench.

  “Lilac, you saved me,” she whispers into the dark cave. But that’s not quite right. “And Calla,” she adds, “I have to give you credit, too.”

  She curls into a soybean shape, thinking of sleep, but the cold and the hard ground make her side hurt. Maybe she should do some stretches. She hasn’t been to a gym since she left L.A. Her body feels old and stiff, and, since the night it proved its uselessness, she’s done her best to ignore it. All the kickboxing classes in the world aren’t going to help her fight off the gangs of Cynthia Street. She does a creaky downward-facing dog, a few jazz pliés. Then she leans into one of the worn-smooth wooden beams that hold up the mountain and stretches her calves.

  Her fingers touch grooves in the wood. Almost like… letters? She picks up her flashlight, but this time, when she clicks the switch, nothing happens. Shit shit shit, she thinks. Now she is really, truly stranded. Now she is officially waiting for someone to rescue her. She doubts there are 20 people in Lilac Mines willing to look for her. She despises feeling so lost and pathetic and hungry.

  Felix forces herself to focus on the carvings. She’s worried that they’re worm tracks, that the mountain might collapse if its weak skeleton gives way. But the half-centimeter-wide lines in the wood are too straight—some of them, at least—to be the meandering work of worms or insects. She Brailles them out, pretending she’s post-scarlet fever Mary Ingalls. They’re definitely manmade, definitely letters. The first one, she’s pretty sure, is an L. She thinks of her postcard and is struck by a tiny bolt of excitement. The next letter is a vertical line sandwiched between two horizontal lines. An I.

  Her fingers speed up, anxious to get to the last page. Be objective, she tells herself. Don’t read ’Calla’ if it’s not there. But, while some of the letters are jagged and indecipherable, there’s definitely a C followed by a roundish letter that could be a lowercase A. They were here and they left me a message. They are inviting Felix into their secret language, turning it over to her like a sacred sword endowed with ancestor spirits. Tears cut warm paths across her nearly numb face. She wills herself to return to her stretches, to do a few pushups on the black ground, and wait for the light.

  When she can see her watch again, it says 5:47. Blades of dusty gold light are filtering through the boards covering the mine entrance. As soon as it’s light enough to read by, she checks on her 100-year-old girl graffiti.

  LET’S GeT OUt oF Here. A + M Forever

  Her I is an E. Her C and A are a G and E. A and M are not Lilac and Calla. Felix wilts, as if this is proof that she won’t be found. Her ancestor spirits won’t fly her out
of this place. She’ll just rot like Lilac did, like Calla did or did not. She thinks of Gary Schipp, riffing on the letter L. Andrew plus Michelle. Aaron plus Mandy. Alison plus Mike. Ann plus Myron. Al plus Megan.

  Or… is it possible?… Anna Lisa plus Meg?

  This time, instead of a single scrap of ancient evidence, she has two pieces of 40-year-old evidence. Hell, she’ll take that. She knows, she knows now. She had pictured it like a slumber party, but now she knows: her aunt and Meg had sex in here.

  And that’s who has saved her. Not Lilac or Calla, but her own sweet, boring aunt. Felix has come to think of Anna Lisa as something of an anti-role model, the person to watch if you want to see where a life of silence will get you. But there’s more. Anna Lisa was once a young woman with her hand in someone’s pants, deep in the middle of nowhere. She might not be the warrior Felix wanted her to be, but she might know something about survival.

  The morning is covered in unbroken snow. Without any trees, Felix feels like she is standing on the train of a giant wedding dress. But she can’t see any buildings, and she certainly can’t find a trail. Maybe winter is beautiful precisely because it is dangerous. She kicks the snow off a rusty lump of engine outside the mine and sits down. The sun is a pearl earring in the blamelessly blue sky.

  She waits. Anna Lisa must be looking for her. Right? But maybe she thinks Felix spent the night at Tawn’s and then went to work. She hasn’t always been forthcoming about her plans. It could be another eight hours before anyone is sure she’s missing. By then it will be dark again. Felix’s chest clenches at the thought of another night in the mine. Her mouth is pasty and waves of acid crash in her stomach. Her muscles feel anything but muscular. She won’t be doing any pushups tonight. Even if she knew which direction to walk in, she’s not sure how far she’d get.

  She alters between panic and boredom as the earring moves across the sky and the snow shrinks into the shadows. A small brown rabbit hops by, leaving lucky footprints in the mud. It’s a jackrabbit—she saw a stuffed one in the Visitors Center. Despite its name, it’s actually a hare, the plaque said. Its legs are so muscular that if it kicks while being held, it can break its own spine. It seems strange that nature would design something so strong and delicate at the same time.