Mockingbird

by Sean Stewart

  “I didn’t think Momma could do it to you.”

  “Do what?”

  “I hoped you would escape. I hoped you could believe that something beautiful was true. That not everything real was ugly.”

  Candy said, “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  She was not alone in her opinion that the Riders were not to be trusted. Expecting to get a big hug and a coffee-stained smile, I had gone to Mary Jo in triumph with the news that Mr. Copper had come through with the money to fix her roof. I had been disappointed. Immediately she began to fret at the thought of workmen cracking her little home open and letting the light into its dim corners. The morning the crew arrived from Sears, Mary Jo refused to open the door for them. I had to drive over and unlock her house using the spare key Momma kept on a hook above our kitchen sink.

  Mary Jo was huddled in her bedroom with the blinds drawn, refusing to speak. I talked to the Sears guys and then brought Mary Jo to our house, where she spent the next four days, sleeping in Momma’s bed while Daddy slept in a cot on the first floor. I felt sad to see her so upset. With Momma gone, the spark seemed to have fled from Mary Jo. I wished, helplessly, that I could be the friend to her that Momma had been, but that could never happen. Elena and Mary Jo had been blood-sisters, cronies, conspirators and accomplices. When Mary Jo’s husband left her, Momma had been there, offering to put a curse on him free of charge. When her son, Travis, had left home to wander America, sponging off relatives rather than finding an honest job, Momma had listened to Mary Jo explain how he really wasn’t a bad boy at heart. Chain-smoking, she had looked at baby pictures and nodded as Mary Jo tried against all the evidence to imagine a future in which her boy might make good.

  At best I was Mary Jo’s grateful goddaughter. I am ashamed to admit I was a little bit glad when the work was done and she could return home.

  When Momma died, Mary Jo lost her last link to life outside her little house. She had some money coming in from her pension, some from Social Security, and some from a part-time job stuffing envelopes. Taken together, it was enough to buy her loaves of Wonder Bread and pay for her cable TV. If Momma had kept her promises and put Mary Jo down for some meaningful dollars in her will, things might have been different. She was bitter about that, but not surprised. Mary Jo had known my mother too long to be surprised when her promises broke like soap bubbles in the sun.

  On the twelfth of July, Mary Jo called to complain about one of her dizzy spells just as I was heading out the door to pick Angela up at the airport. “What it is, is that new roof,” Mary Jo finished. “I think there’s some radon or asbestos or something in those new shingles, got my head in a whirl.”

  “Mary Jo, I have to go now. Angela is visiting from Canada. I have to pick her up at the airport and I’m fixing to be late. Maybe you should call a doctor about this dizzy spell of yours.”

  “What? Oh. Oh, sure then.” Another long pause. “Your momma’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “Yes, ma’am. She is.”

  “Yeah.”

  Another long pause. “Mary Jo, I have to go. Promise you’ll call the doctor, all right? This isn’t like you. I’ll call when I get back to see how you’re doing.”

  “It’s just a dizzy spell, dear. You don’t have to call…Tell you what, you get Travis to give me a call,” she said with a sudden burst of bitterness. “You get that boy to give me a call and I’ll tell him how I feel.”

  “Call Dr. Richmond, Mary Jo. You like her,” I said, glancing at the clock on the kitchen stove. I was ten minutes behind schedule.

  “You know, I still think he would amount to something if he got himself a good wife. If he knew what was good for him, he’d come back home and marry you, Toni Beau-champ. You’re a good girl, Toni, but you could use a bit of a spark. One thing about Travis, he’s lazy but he’s got a spark. Just like his daddy.”

  “I’ll call you later,” I said, and I hung up the phone before I could hear her say anything else.

  (Momma is lying on her chaise three months before her death. “They should rename this the Grandmother State,” she says. “We’re always hip-deep in hunchbacked little old ladies who never complain. That’s horseshit,” she says to me. “Don’t be fooled. Getting old is hell. I just wish my brain had given out first. I don’t think I’d mind dying so much if I were senile. God damn, but there’s a lot of things I would be glad to forget.”)

  I promised myself I would call Mary Jo when I got back from the airport and prayed her dizzy spell was a temporary thing, brought on by the sweltering July heat. I had been in her house many a summer afternoon, and without air conditioning it was a furnace.

  At least my mother had been spared the humiliation of losing her mind. At least she had gone to her grave with her wits intact.

  As I grabbed my purse and dug around for my car keys I found my hands were shaking and I was on the verge of tears. The sound of Mary Jo’s voice, and the memory of my mother, shaking and bald in the chaise longue on the patio…Lord, I wished I could have made life easier for my mother. For all my resentments, I could see now how hard it must have been for her. How hard. Gods whispering inside her head and a little girl lost in the cold cold north. And me, who should have been some comfort to her. But instead I was the hatefulest child. And no way now to make it up to her.

  I arrived just in time to catch Angela at the gate. We had exchanged pictures, but I would have recognized her without the photograph, so much did she look like the mother I remembered from my childhood. It took my breath away. Angela spotted me and her smile broadened as our eyes met. She strode past the other passengers, purse bumping at her hip, and stuck out her hand when she got to me.

  “My Lord, do you ever look like Momma,” I said. She was leggy, like Momma had been, but instead of Momma’s long skirts, she wore jeans and not much makeup. She was lean and looked fit. I sure wouldn’t look as good when my daughter was seventeen.

  Angela blinked. “Hello to you too.” She had Momma’s low voice, but without the bourbon and cigarette huskiness to it, and instead of Momma’s lazy drawl, Angela talked in an accent that made her sound like a TV anchor on the national news.

  “Forgive me. It’s just so…The set of your shoulders, the way you walk, it’s exactly like Momma. It’s amazing.”

  “Hunh. You know I’ve never even seen a picture of her?”

  “I’ll show you some, if you like.” I felt myself beginning to flush. “Look, can I carry something for you? Is this all you’ve got?” I asked, looking at her purse and attaché case.

  “Nope. Two suitcases to claim. I haven’t learned how to travel light. I just ditched Darth Vader; if I let go of any more stuff, I’d float into the air like a balloon.”

  “Welcome to Houston,” I said, picking up the attaché.

  Once I got over the shock of how much Angela looked like Momma, I liked her just as much in person as I had on the phone. She was funny and energetic. “Hey, look at that!” “What?” “The Walk sign. In Canada, our little stick men stand straight up and down, very proper. But here, look at that little guy leaning! Go Go GO!”

  Or, “So whose idea was it, anyway, to base health care on the profit motive?”

  “Insurance companies,” I said. An actuary knows the answer to that one.

  Or, as we were nearing the house, “What is it with you guys and street signs? Five blocks back the streets were spelled out in tile on the curb. Three blocks ago the names were, like, etched in these little concrete pylons. Now they’re regular metal signposts, only they’re being strangled by vines. It’s all higgledy-piggledy.”

  “Um, never noticed that. I guess it goes with being the only city in North America with no zoning laws.”

  “No zoning laws? No zoning laws?”

  “None. Our next door neighbor has a convenience store in his garage. A few years ago someone moved into a mansion in River Oaks and opened a strip club on his second floor.”

  “What about the neighbors? Didn’t their property va
lues drop?”

  “About three hundred thousand overnight. Yep.”

  Angela cackled. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of young butt.” I parked in front of our house and then levered myself out of the front seat. Sigh. There was no doubt that I was pregnant now. I could no longer bear the feeling of anything across my tummy, not in the sweltering damp July heat, so the last of my maternity shorts with their elasticized panels had gone into the closet for good. It was knee-length granola dresses from here on in. Yuck.

  I put her suitcases up in my room and fixed a pitcher of decaf iced tea and a mango for us to eat on the patio. I prepared the mango the way Momma taught me, cutting the two halves away from the stone, then scoring a grid into the flesh with a dull knife and popping the skin inside-out so the flesh stood out in raised rectangles. Angela had settled into one wrought-iron chair and I maneuvered myself into the other with the wary awkwardness of a hippo on a trampoline. The day was wretchedly hot, the sun a glaring spangle glinting through the live-oak limbs, but we were in the deeper shadow under the broad leaves of the big banana tree. A mockingbird sang to us, hidden, and the gulf breeze lazed through the ferns and monkey grass.

  Angela rolled up the sleeves of her white blouse. Damp stains showed at her armpits and the sweat had beaded up on her forehead. “It’s hot! Whew!”

  I drank some tea. I had put wedges of lime in the glasses, and the fresh green smell cut through the lazy heat a little. Angela followed suit and drained half her glass at a swallow. She looked at me, and smiled. “Kind of like dating, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “This. Talking. You and me. Hard to know where to start.”

  “So, Angela, what’s your sign?”

  “‘Stop!’” she said. “Or was it ‘Beware of Dog’? Monica—that’s my daughter—Monica would love this place. She thinks Calgary is boring. She thinks we’re boring. So did her dad, come to think of it.”

  “Ouch.” I thought of Mary Jo, afraid to leave Chester and then ditched by him anyway, and wondered if the same thing had happened to Angela.

  “At least Darth Vader is helping to pay for Monica’s college. We were very particular about that. Neither one of us wanted me taking his money for myself.”

  “Did you know that in the year after a divorce, the average American man’s standard of living goes up by forty-three percent?”

  “And the ex-wife?”

  “Down seventy-three percent,” I said. “Some people remember TV theme songs. I remember statistics.”

  She tried the mango. “Hey! This is great. Kind of like a peach wearing sexy perfume. Just remember that stats aren’t everything. You know the old line about lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

  “Mark Twain,” I said. “You’d be amazed how many times you hear that joke when you’re an actuary. Usually from people trying to buck the odds.” I thought of Bill Jr. frantically drilling for oil in the Hill Country. “It’s true odds aren’t everything. But they’re still the way to bet, you know. Not many casinos go broke.”

  “I suppose not.” After another drink of tea she said, “Did Elena’s death cost a lot? Because if it did, if you’re in debt—”

  “No, no problem.” I didn’t mention the IRS. Candy would call me foolish, but I wasn’t going to start out with my half-sister by begging for money.

  We finished the mango, and the heat drove us inside to the cool tile floors and the ceiling fan. Angela asked what I had been working on, so I lumbered upstairs and showed her my transactions book and the CNBC ticker and tried to answer her questions as best I could.

  “Fantastic!” she said after fifteen minutes. “I want to make a trade.”

  “I’m very new at this, Angela. I would rather not—”

  “I’ve got the money, okay? We’ll just let something run for ten minutes: one scroll on the ticker and I’ll cash out, win or lose. Okay?”

  Reluctantly I nodded. In the three and a half weeks since Mr. Copper made thirteen thousand dollars for me, I was up four hundred bucks. Better to be up than down, no doubt, but $100 a week was not going to send my daughter through medical school. The G squirmed in my womb and gave me a little kick in the bladder for emphasis.

  Angela flipped through the brokerage handbook. Her sweaty hands left fingerprints on the pages. “Twenty thousand pounds of frozen orange products,” she said. “Buy some. In this heat, the idea of owning twenty thousand pounds of frozen orange juice sounds divine.”

  I laughed. “You want to go short or long?”

  “Um…long. It’s too hot for the price to drop.”

  I grinned and phoned in the order. A moment later the brokerage called back with the exact entry fill price and Angela watched me note the trade down in my book. “Now what?” she said.

  “We wait for it to come by on the ticker and see how you did.”

  Angela stared at the screen. The CNBC types were talking about Mexican opposition to NAFTA. Down below they were listing NASDAQ stocks. “Doesn’t this waiting kill you? Is this what the big traders do, sit and watch TV?”

  “No, they have second-by-second price updates coming in by satellite to computer setups. I can’t really afford to take that much of a plunge.”

  “What would it cost?”

  “Maybe five thousand for the computers, and another five hundred a month or so for the service. Two thousand dollars for the software. That would get me an Omega Tradestation.”

  “You want one?”

  I laughed. “Like Candy wanted a Corvette when she was seventeen. Prices can change so fast that ten minutes is an eternity. If I had a full-service broker, oddly enough, I wouldn’t need the setup so much, because then at least I wouldn’t have to recall my stops every day.”

  “Stops?”

  “When you leave instructions with the broker to sell as soon as your contracts hit a certain price. Stops are how you keep yourself from taking a really big loss.”

  “I see.” Angela looked at the TV. “Okay, I can’t just sit here. Let’s go where it’s cooler and get some more to drink.”

  “More iced tea?” I said, when we got down to the kitchen. “Or maybe some orange juice?”

  “OJ. Definitely OJ. Hey—there’s a message on your answering machine.”

  “I must not have noticed it earlier.” I punched the replay button. The machine hummed and whined for a moment. Then came a crackle of static. Then a terrible voice, strained with desperate effort, like the voice of someone with MS or a stroke. “TO-NNNUH! Tone, z’mar! Mrjuh. Uhl!” The voice gasped, hoarse and ragged. Momma’s breathing had sounded like that, in the last hour before she died.

  “Mary Jo,” I whispered.

  A bang and another rush of static. The phone had fallen. Mary Jo must have dropped the receiver. I could see it hanging there in the dim pantryway between her kitchen and her back door, bumping against her ancient washing machine. A long scrabble, squeaking linoleum, the receiver banging against the washer. Mary Jo called out my name in that strangled voice, grunting, strangely faint most of the time, but shot through with sudden loudness, as if she were getting her mouth near the receiver only for instants before it swung away. “She’s lying on the floor,” I said. “She’s lying where she dropped the phone.”

  The machine beeped, cutting off Mary Jo’s message.

  “Jesus,” Angela said.

  My fingers were shaking as I dialed Mary Jo’s number. The line rang busy. “Oh shit. Shit. I’ve got to go.”

  Five minutes later I was fumbling for the lock at her side door. I opened it and a wave of hot darkness rushed from the house, smelling of mold. I ran inside into the kitchen. The drapes were all drawn tight and I couldn’t see a damn thing. “Mary Jo? Mary—shit!” I said, tripping over a chair. It had been left in the middle of the kitchen floor. I fell down hard, hurting my right knee. It was hot, dark and burning hot inside Mary Jo’s house.

  “You okay?” Angela said behind me, voice tense.

  “No. Hold the door open.” Enough d
aylight came in for me to find the light switch by the front door. Mary Jo was sitting on the kitchen floor with her back against the refrigerator. She was staring at the cabinets in front of her and her head did not turn as I ran in. I scrambled across the kitchen floor. “Mary Jo!” Her eyes were wide open, alert and terrified. I could tell at once that she recognized me. She was barely breathing: shallow, curiously slow breaths that caught in her throat. I held her hands. “Mary Jo, what’s wrong? What’s wrong?”

  “Call an ambulance,” Angela said. She stepped over me and Mary Jo, hung up the phone and then dialed 911.

  I gave the ambulance directions and handed the receiver back. “Okay, honey,” I said to Mary Jo, “the ambulance is on its way.” I took her hands. They were completely unresponsive. “Can you move your fingers?” Nothing. A moment later, Mary Jo’s feet twitched on the linoleum. “Good. Good. Now, can you move your hands, Mary Jo?”

  Nothing.

  “Stroke?” Angela said.

  “I don’t know. Mary Jo, I’m here, it’s Toni. Listen, the ambulance is on its way. I’m going to take care of you, okay? I’m going to make sure everything is okay. Got that?” I tried to smile into her terrified eyes.

  She stopped breathing.

  “Shit! Mary Jo, don’t quit on me here. Come on, breathe, sweetie. Breathe. Breathe.” She did not breathe. Her feet kicked and rattled against the cabinets. “Breathe!” I shouted. I put both hands on her chest and shoved hard. Air pushed out of her in a soft, painful grunt, but when I pulled back, her chest stayed still. I had forced the last air out of her, and no new air was going in. “Angela!”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know!”

  “What should I do? Oh God—” I tipped Mary Jo sideways and laid her on the floor on her back. Putting one hand behind her head, I covered her mouth with mine and blew, soft and steady, as if I were trying to fan an embering campfire. I heard a faint sound and felt a little current of air on my cheek.

  “Her nose. Pinch her nose shut,” Angela said.