Mockingbird

by Sean Stewart

  I shook my head and changed the subject. “So, have you proposed to Carlos yet?”

  Her face fell. “Almost. Very nearly. We were supposed to go out last night, and I was going to do it then.”

  “He cancelled?”

  “No, I did.” She grimaced. “Jeez, Toni! I’m not supposed to have to do this! He’s supposed to go through the whole humiliating down-on-one-knee thing. What if he says no?”

  “He won’t say no.”

  “Then what if he says yes!” she cried. “You know what that means, don’t you? I’ll be married! To Carlos! I’ll be La Hag’s daughter-in-law!”

  George the bartender finished polishing a couple of glasses. “I think those beers should have nicely hit room temperature, Candy. You can deliver them any time now.”

  “Kiss my banana-flavored butt,” Candy yelled over the music. Two patrons volunteered. “Shit, I gotta go or we’ll both be looking for work.” She kissed me quickly on the cheek. “You’ll be all right. The Widow is looking after you and that kid, you know. The old bitch will take care of you, whether you like it or not.”

  As soon as I got home I went to sit out in the garden. After the roar of Slick Willie’s it was very quiet. The temperature was back up around 60° now, but there had been a frost the night after Sugar possessed me, and ferns lay dead everywhere. The banana tree had been pruned back to an ugly stump. So winter came, even to Houston. Even here.

  I was pregnant. On some mad whim I had conceived this child. I had no father for my baby. I had lost my job and God only knew if I would be able to find another one with training as specialized as mine. Maybe I should have been like Momma after all. Maybe the real money was in fortunetelling, palm reading, casting the Evil Eye and blessing little children.

  What was I going to give my baby? What kind of love could she expect from me, the hatefulest child who ever was? Maybe we could sit down and work out mortality tables together. That would be fun, wouldn’t it?

  Or maybe, a little voice whispered, you will mother in the only way you know how. You will be another crazy Beauchamp woman, driven half-mad by Riders, only this time there won’t be any Daddy to shelter your baby. It will have no protection from you at all. You used to be sane, you used to be in control. But now the Riders can get into you. Maybe Sugar will whore you out next time, or the Preacher will beat your child for its sins. You are out of control, Antoinette. You’re no safer than Elena now.

  I closed my eyes and squeezed them tight, trying to cry, but no tears came. I couldn’t even do that right, I couldn’t even cry.

  Her name was Mary Keith. She was a secretary in an insurance office in Phoenix. She had stepped off the roof of an office building with her six-year-old daughter in her arms. The little girl’s name was Kirsten.

  The story had haunted me since the first report on the TV two nights before. The door to the roof of the building should have been locked. God, I had lain in bed with my hands over my still-flat belly obsessing about it. Had Mary known the rooftop door was open? Had she taken her daughter up there, knowing what she was going to do? Or had it been pure chance that they had wandered up the wrong stairway?

  Was it something the little girl said, or did, that made Mary Keith snap? Was she on medication, had she just lost her job, was her husband leaving her? Or was it “only” depression: a black animal that ate at her and ate at her, as it had always eaten at Momma. Only Momma was too tough to kill, she was a tough bitch and not even her gods could break her. Not everyone could be so strong.

  We had this secret, Mary Keith and I, this bond, because I was going to be a mother too, and she needed someone to defend her. That’s why I was mad at Bill for passing judgment on her. Because there is no way of knowing whether that black moment will break you until you are in it. You can’t ask everyone to be like Momma. You can’t ask every woman to be so strong.

  Thinking of little Kirsten, her first-grade photo on the nine o’clock news, I remembered a fragment of one of Momma’s stories. In it Sugar says, “Now tell me again, honey-child, how did you come to be on your lonesome?” And the Little Lost Girl says, “My momma sent me to the store to buy a sweet potato for a sweet potato pie, but she give me the wrong directions. I did what she told me, but there weren’t no store there. So I went on a piece, looking for another store, but I couldn’t find one that had a sweet potato in it, and when time came to go home, I couldn’t find my way back.”

  “Now wait a minute,” Sugar says, and she puts her hands on her hips. “That ain’t the same story you told me last time. Last time you said she dropped you at a movie and didn’t pick you up. And now I come to think of it, I recollect one time you said she took you to a softball game and went for a soda pop but never came back. Now, how can you be lost all these different ways?”

  The little girl looks up at Sugar with big, solemn eyes and says, “I been lost pretty bad.”

  Poor Mary Keith. Poor Kirsten. Sweet Jesus, protect my baby.

  I sat in a wrought-iron patio chair trying not to think about Mary Keith, trying not to think about being fired. I had eaten nothing since throwing up in the Hyatt Regency bathroom, and though the day was not cold, I was starting to shiver. I shivered and shivered, I couldn’t stop. As I sat shaking in my chair, a mockingbird dropped down from the live oak and landed on the stump of the banana tree. It perched there and it stared at me. It stared at me for the longest time, and then it opened its beak and rang—a long, trilling dingle. It must have chimed three times, opening its beak to let out the sound, before I realized that the rings were coming from the telephone in the kitchen.

  I scrambled out of the chair and made it to the phone on the fifth ring. “Hello?” I gasped.

  “Oh—I was just hanging up.” A woman’s voice on a long-distance connection.

  “Hello?”

  “Ah, is this the…Bow-shawmp residence?” There was no trace of a Texas twang in the caller’s accent, nor anything of the South.

  “Beech-um, yes, that’s us. Sorry.”

  “Ah, yeah. Beech-um? Okay.” There was a pause. “Look, I know this is going to sound kind of strange, but I think we might be related. My name is Angela Simmons. I’m calling from Calgary, Alberta. That’s in Canada.”

  “I know.” Calgary was another oil town; lots of Houstonians had been there in the course of business.

  “Oh, okay. Ah, when the lawyer contacted me about Elena’s will—that was her name, wasn’t it? Elena? Anyway, I hired a detective to find you. Shit, I’m starting in the middle, aren’t I? My mom and dad came up here when I was real little. He had a job in the oilpatch. Only my mother didn’t stay. She went back south. Elena. That was her name, Elena Beauchamp.”

  “Oh my God,” I said.

  “Yeah.” The woman on the other end of the line laughed. “Kind of a shocker, eh? Are you one of her kids? The detective said she had two daughters. Two besides me, I mean. So I guess you and I are related. Half-sisters. All my life she would send me money. I’m thirty-seven, by the way. My name is Angela Simmons. Actually it’s Angela Jarvis, but only until the papers come through, then it’s back to Simmons. I’m just finishing up a divorce. Anyway, a few weeks ago this lawyer calls to say my mother has died and left me a bequest. That’s when I hired the detective. He found this number…Hello? Hello?”

  “Yes?” I whispered.

  “Look, I’m kind of embarrassed here. Have I got the right place? Did an Elena Beauchamp used to live there? Did she ever talk about having a daughter up in Canada?”

  “No. Never.”

  “Oh. Well. I must have the wrong—”

  “Oh my God no. No, you don’t have the wrong number.” Everything was falling into place for me. The scenes and the drinking. The way Momma went over to Mary Jo’s to cry sometimes. The way we never had any money, even in the years when Bill Sr. was good to us.

  Now the tears that wouldn’t come when Momma died flooded into my eyes, and my throat cramped. I couldn’t see and my whole body was shaking. “My G
od, my God, you see? You are the Little Lost Girl,” I said. “And your name is Angela. You are the Little Lost Girl. Only now you’ve found home.”

  FIVE

  I talked to Angela several times over the next few weeks. I kept the calls short, not wanting to put more weight on our relationship than it could stand. But I really liked her. She was tough and funny and she laughed at my jokes. Finally I asked if she would like to come and stay with me and Daddy for a few days, just to visit. She said she would. She had a divorce to finalize, she said, and a daughter named Monica whose high-school graduation she really ought to attend. School in Calgary didn’t get out until the end of June, but after that Monica could stay with her father for a couple of weeks while Angela came down, maybe sometime in July.

  Wanting her to come, I did not dwell on what the weather would be like in Houston in July.

  “The only thing wrong with Angela is that Momma left her all our money.” I said that to Candy the night we played pool together at Slick Willie’s. She was stone-drunk at the time because of what had happened with Carlos, but I’ll get to that later.

  Candy had just beaten me for the fourth consecutive time. “Make his head,” she said, which was her way of telling me to rack the balls up so she could break.

  “Sorry, Carlos,” I murmured, and racked for Candy. I finished and she exploded his head into fifteen rolling pieces. My sister has a howitzer break and she was really outdoing herself.

  “Speaking of money—” Candy said.

  Had she been sober and paying attention, she would have known this was the last topic to bring up. “No!” I said. “I can’t lend you just a few twenties until you get your paycheck, or cover your last parking ticket, or make the payment on your Visa card.”

  Candy blinked. “What the shit?”

  I stalked around the table pretending to look for a shot. “I’m so sick of you hitting me up. Don’t you get it, Candy? I got laid off. I bought eight hundred dollars worth of stuff for Sugar in the Galleria and spent six hundred more on that stupid jacket and shoes. I made a thirteen-hundred-dollar downpayment on a baby, remember? I’ve got responsibilities of my own to look after. Only that isn’t all. Now I’ve got all of Momma’s responsibilities too: I’m supposed to look after Daddy and Mary Jo and my little sister who at twenty-six years old still can’t live on a budget like an adult.”

  Candy looked at me. “Shoot the three. Or else the ten for the side pocket. Do you think a quick couple of beers would really hurt your baby? Because you could surely use them, Toni. Don’t go postal on me here. I’m the jilted drunk, remember? You’re supposed to be holding my hand.”

  “Were you going to ask me for some cash? Were you?”

  Candy didn’t answer.

  “I swear, Candy. Giving money to you is like pouring water in a lace bucket.”

  “Yes, Momma.”

  I grunted and shot at the three so hard the cue ball jumped the rag and went rolling under the table next to us. “That would be a scratch,” Candy said.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. That night at Slick Willie’s happened when my panic over money had become crippling. In the first days after Angela’s call I wasn’t thinking about money yet; I was grappling with the idea that suddenly, at the age of thirty, I had inherited an older sister.

  Momma had married before she finished high school, a man named John Simmons who worked for Texaco. Together they had a daughter, Angela. John was transferred to Calgary when Angela was only three months old. He went to work downtown; Momma stayed home to look after the baby. Two months later John Simmons came home to find his daughter in the care of a next-door neighbor. Momma had paid her twenty dollars to watch the baby for the afternoon, saying she had some shopping she needed to do. She never came back.

  She did not lose touch entirely. From time to time, Angela said, an envelope would arrive, stamped with a Houston postmark but no return address. There would be cash inside, or Treasury bills; never a check or anything listing the sender’s name. Momma never wrote letters, but sometimes in the envelope there would be drawings in charcoal or soft pencil, or watercolor paintings of cats or ponies or shells. These kept coming long after Angela was grown; her daughter, Monica, had grown up with Momma’s pictures in her room. Like gifts from a fairy godmother, Angela said.

  Ever since I was a teenager I had despised my mother for drinking up our money. I didn’t know exactly how much she took in from old Mr. Friesen, but I knew it was more than we ever saw. I blamed her for the weeks Daddy had to stay on the road for American Express instead of being home to look after us when the Riders or the booze mounted Momma’s head. Now I knew where the money had gone.

  It hurt, oh it hurt to find out there was another little girl she had loved more than us. Well, maybe not more, and maybe it was guilt, not love; but suddenly Candy and I weren’t so central to Momma’s life as I had always believed. My whole notion of my childhood was adrift. At fifteen I thought I understood my mother to a T; now at thirty I found I hadn’t known her at all. Not really. She hadn’t been daydreaming, those long afternoons at home when she told me to hush and cried to herself. She had been looking north to Canada. It was Angela far away she was thinking about, not Candy and me playing quietly at home.

  I always thought things would be better if Momma would only go away. But when Angela said, “I spent my whole life wishing she would come back,” I was filled with a strange, aching jealousy and confusion, and could not speak.

  (I am holding my mother and patting her on the back while she sobs in my arms. She is crying because she has hit me. I am fourteen. “I never wanted to be bad to my girls. I never wanted to. I’m so sorry.” She cries with the crazy abandon of an actress on TV. Her guilty tears make me strong and I feel nothing for her but contempt.)

  Except now I know those tears weren’t all for me; they were for the Little Lost Girl most of all.

  I went to Daddy with Angela’s story. “Your mother didn’t much care for the cold up there,” he said.

  “So you knew. You knew about this all along.”

  He got a Dos Equis out of the fridge and brought it back to the kitchen table. “It was January. Thirty-five degrees below zero, she said. She couldn’t take the baby outside in that. So she was all day, every day, trapped in that apartment. You can imagine how well that set with your Momma. The sun didn’t get up till nearly nine and it was dark again by four. One day she was feeling pretty sick, and the baby was fussing and fussing, and finally she went to attend to it…Next thing your Momma knew, she was waking up on a Greyhound bus at the border.”

  He looked at his bottle, not at me, but I heard the story he wasn’t telling. I saw Momma half-crazy with boredom, crying and lonely in her little box of an apartment in a cold, alien land, the baby wailing, and maybe Momma hit her, or picked her up to shake her, or maybe she started to take her up to the roof of the building, as Mary Keith had. Except something had stopped her.

  “The Widow,” I said. “The Widow drove Momma out. She put her on the bus back home and she never let her see that child again.”

  Daddy said, “I can’t speak to that.”

  “But why?” I asked. “Why would Momma never tell us? My God, to all the time be thinking of that baby she had left behind…” A foolish thing to say. As if she hadn’t told us every day of our lives, with her tears and drinking and slaps and lies.

  Daddy looked into the garden. “She was afraid you’d think poorly of her.”

  Daddy drank a little more beer. “I hear you’re bringing up a rookie.” He glanced at my abdomen.

  “Candy told you? That little brat. Don’t you worry, I won’t make you raise it. I’ll handle it on my own.”

  “You and yours are always welcome in this house.”

  “You’re not mad at me, are you? Please don’t think I’m crazy. I worked it all out, and I’m not going to be like—I mean…”

  Daddy held up his hand. “Seems to me like the organization could use a little fresh blood,”
he said. I looked at him with my eyes wet and grateful. “Where you figure on playing this rookie in the line-up?”

  I laughed. “Oh, lead-off, I expect.”

  He nodded. “Let’s hope this ’un can learn to take the occasional base on balls. The last lead-off hitter we had through here,” he said, looking at me, “got on base all right, but led the league in Hit by Pitch.”

  “Ouch,” I said.

  “‘Worry never climbed a hill, worry never paid a bill.’” Candy, this was, drunk as a skunk that night at Slick Willie’s. She had just won her sixth game of eight-ball. She was quoting one of Momma’s favorite slogans. “Don’t worry, Toni, as soon as I sober up, I’ll start missing shots.”

  “Easy for Momma to say. She never even balanced a checkbook.”

  “‘Ooh, baby, who sewed those pleats between your eyebrows, Antoinette?’”

  “Shut up, Candy.”

  Candy burped and laughed. “‘Who tacked your mouth down at the corners?’”

  (“Here come the scissors,” Momma would say, and then she would tickle me under the chin with her long red nails and I would shout “No!” and squirm to get away.)

  Momma never worried, least of all about money. She grieved and she despaired, but Momma’s problems were always in the past. The future did not trouble her, the future was a place not yet marred by her mistakes.

  I always thought the future was my only hope of heaven. I needed it to be perfect there. I spent all my time worrying and working for some distant tomorrow. The only thing I knew about happiness was that it was still a long way off. I meant to build me a bunker there, in the future. In it I would stash financial security, a decent house, and at least one healthy child. A doting husband and a winning Astros team would be nice ornaments, but were not essential. And when I had this bunker ready, I would crawl into it and slam the door, while life’s war raged overhead.