Crossing the Tracks (9781416997054)

by Stuber, Barbara

  I feel their ancient eyes on me.

  “You all have been through this kind of thing before, and so…”

  Get the flower book, they say.

  I retrieve the book from Mama’s desk in the parlor, kneel again, and read to myself: Pansy: from the viola family, familiar to people living in fifth-century B.C. Greece. I salute the goddesses and continue. Resembles a human face. Cold-hardy, will survive a freeze even during the blooming period.

  Well, it’s boiling-hot August here, but the hearts involved are frozen, so maybe she’s hardy enough to show her face to Dot.

  Anything else? I silently ask the goddesses.

  Remember, Iris, you are smarter than Cecil Deets.

  I stare at the thin pillar of candle smoke rising, floating out to the goddesses. I let my eyes go blurry so the flame fills my head. “Marie,” I whisper, “that last part sounded more like Leroy talking.” I hug myself. I wonder what he’s doing right now. I look out at the endless night. Is he staring at the star-gods over Atchison, thinking about me? A shimmery feeling floods through me. I take a long, deep breath and hold it.

  I am the Goddess Iris, powerful enough to turn Leroy into the warm, wet air captured inside me.

  CHAPTER 24

  “Your first impression of Olive Nish is paramount,” Mrs. Nesbitt says as I press the brake by her ramshackle house on the edge of Wellsford. The yard backs up to the bluff of a dry riverbed. “We must be positive Olive will help us. We can’t have her blabbering to Cecil how we plan to resurrect Pansy and have her kidnap his own blood child.”

  Between two front-door stoops sits a dusty garden with rusted zinnias and heat-choked pansies. Mrs. Nesbitt clears her throat. We exchange a wary glance.

  “Can’t we just inquire about Pansy without giving the reason?” I whisper fast as Mrs. Nesbitt rings the doorbell.

  “She’ll know we have a reason.”

  I shake my head. “We can’t say there’s a desperate matter requiring Pansy’s attention without…” The door opens.

  Olive Nish makes Mrs. Nesbitt look like the strong woman in a circus. A huge rhinestone clip tugs at the neck of her purple housedress. Her face is tiny, with a beaky nose and papery cheeks that could use some sunshine. She carries a black patent-leather pocketbook.

  “Oh, excuse us, Olive, were you on your way out?”

  “No. Come in and sit.” We face her on stiff dining-room chairs. Her dingy house smells of sour milk and mothballs. She looks me over. “This must be Iris. Condolences about your father and the turmoil with his fiancée—Celeste Simmons, isn’t it? You certainly have had your hands full taming that gal.” She shakes her head. “And with your own grief to bear.”

  So Olive knows all. I glance at her phone, imagine the receiver still warm from her last eavesdropping session.

  She asks after Dr. Nesbitt, the “medical genius” of all Missouri. We exchange other pleasantries. Without warning, and without checking my supposed intuitive gift, I leap right off the forbidden cliff. “Miss Nish, might you know how we could contact Pansy Deets?”

  Olive digs through the pocketbook tucked in next to her. She pops a lozenge in her mouth, sucks it noisily. The telephone rings, but she stays put.

  “There’s a bit of a desperate matter, Olive…” Mrs. Nesbitt says, leaping right along with me.

  Olive cocks her head, points to the wall. “Hear that?” Her eyes narrow. “My renters have a dog.” She shakes a finger. “They know I strictly forbid canines on my property.” She turns to me, looking all the world like a chicken. “That dog wee-wees on my foundation a hundred times a day. Drop by drop he’s soaking it to ruins.”

  I picture Miss Nish seated on her needlepoint settee crashing through to the cellar.

  “A canine, ma’am?”

  Miss Nish studies us. I can almost see the dog trot right out of her mind. “Pansy’s daughter, Dorothy, is expecting,” she states, snapping shut both her mouth and her pocketbook. “She walked past here yesterday and the day before. I saw it clear as day.”

  We stare at each other, stone-faced.

  Miss Nish’s expression turns dark. “Dorothy needs her mother now. Isn’t that why you’re here? Mister Deets is a controversial figure, to say the least. After how he treated poor Pansy…”

  “How did you know about Dot?”

  “It doesn’t require reading apple seeds, no crystal ball needed to interpret a pregnant belly.”

  “So you… ?”

  She thinks a moment. “I can attempt a correspondence with Pansy’s sister in Chicago; she might know her whereabouts. But we three need to stick together… never, ever, even on our deathbeds—swear on a Bible or burn in Hell—will you tell Cecil I had one peep of involvement.”

  Mrs. Nesbitt nods.

  I clear my throat, straighten my back. “We further understand why you can never—cross your heart, shake of salt, thump a banana—ever tell Cecil Deets that Mrs. Nesbitt and I had one peep of involvement either.”

  “Agreed,” she says with a snap of her fingers.

  “Agreed.” I snap back. “We are going to need some of Pansy’s belongings too—preferably something old that Dot would recognize.”

  Mrs. Nesbitt turns to me, bewildered.

  “And,” I continue, “we cannot communicate by telephone for obvious reasons.”

  Olive’s eyes flash. “Dorothy Deets and I already have a silent telephone connection.”

  “Really?”

  She leans in. “The girl calls, then doesn’t talk. It’s happened several times lately. I know the cadence of her breathing.”

  “Why would she?”

  “She’s aware I knew her Mama,” Miss Nish whispers. “It’s a cry for help.”

  “Do you really think Dot phones her?” I ask as we get in the car.

  Mrs. Nesbitt rolls her eyes. “I couldn’t predict Dot, but Olive hears lots of things that aren’t there. Have you ever known someone to carry a pocketbook around their own home?”

  “Do you think her renters have a dog?” I ask, gazing at the crumbling stoop.

  “I don’t think she has renters!”

  I smile. “Well, this will give her something real to deal with.”

  I drive away, imagining Cecil—that lump of evilness—passed out on the floor and Dot, clutching her baby belly, silently panting in the telephone: Somebody help!

  I will spend this afternoon going over Mama’s secretary desk and the things in it, one at a time. I will understand them just the way Mrs. Nesbitt would, as bits of the person Mama was, and maybe who I am too. But I feel afraid to touch the traces of the old me I’ll find inside.

  I’m alone except for the beautiful, poignant portrait of Mrs. Nesbitt watching me from above the piano. I understand how she, too, hesitated at the task ahead of her—grieving for her husband and Morris.

  The front-room windows gleam after our cleaning session. The secretary and matching chair fit nicely along the piano wall. The desk is worn mahogany with a long middle drawer under the writing top. Above are stacks of cigar box–sized drawers, cubbyholes, and two long compartments with sliding tops.

  Divots and dashes, bits of old words and salutations, are etched into the varnish on the writing surface—the tracks of Mama’s fountain pen. I close my eyes and slide my fingers back and forth, but the marks are too delicate to feel. I trace them with her dry pen, study my hand moving the way hers did. I wonder if her fingernails curved like mine. Did she wear more than a wedding band? Did she sit here knowing her life would be cut short?

  I stop my hand, but I can’t stop my tears.

  That was morbid.

  No more morbid.

  The secretary moans like it’s stiff and sore when I open the drawer where Mrs. Andrews let me keep my old Crayolas. I remember wondering when I was little why all eight colors smelled alike—how could yellow possibly be the same as black? The paper is peeled completely off of the violet and blue ones. They are only stubs from all the skies full of robins and angels I ha
ve colored.

  Folded with a paper clip in the main drawer are the six pictures I drew then of Mama—a happy angel floating above the sanatorium, wearing each of her pairs of shoes. Across the front porch of the hospital are flowers and rocking chairs full of patients. It looks like a gay garden party.

  Hi, Mama.

  I turn over one drawing, take a pencil, and before I know it, I start a picture of this desk. It begins okay, but I get bogged down doing the complicated angles and corners. My shading on the cubby holes is wrong and the legs look crippled.

  Damn.

  I try a rubbing of the marks in the desktop, the way people do on old-time gravestones. But none of Mama’s handwriting comes through.

  In my mind I see that same mocking expression of Daddy’s, hear him scoff, Well, Iris, looks like your drawing skills didn’t move with you to Wellsford.…

  Shut up, ghosts.

  I remember being so sure back then that Mama was still real after she died, that she had just moved to the sky. It made as much sense as anything. But really she just floated away from me. Not like a kite that tugs mightily and breaks its string, but slowly—day by day, a little at a time, as she got sicker.

  I look again at my picture, how I’ve colored Daddy and me in our wagon heading home. I always did it that way, with us leaving.

  A thought about her slips into my mind from a new angle, sheds stark light on the picture. How must it have been for her to watch me leave Sunday after Sunday? There was so little we could say or do during the visits, especially with the storm cloud of Daddy there, so impatient to go the second anything got sad. He just would not have it.

  She couldn’t tuck me in, brush my hair, dust me…

  Instead of a healthy, loved angel, I see her in a lonely waiting room for mothers who have lost their little girls.

  I bow my head and sit there for a long while. I still have the side compartments to go through. But not today. In the back of one upper cubbyhole I spot something: a clear paperweight with colored glass flowers inside. Although they are too small, I decide they are irises. The globe feels solid and whole. I warm it in my hands, turn it over. An X and an O are scratched in the bottom.

  I close my eyes and rub my fingers over the etched hug and kiss. Who gave this to her? Daddy?

  What does it matter?

  Mama just gave it to me.

  CHAPTER 25

  It’s been two weeks with no smoke signal from Olive.

  I feel like a walking fishbowl with the Pansy plot circling inside—will Olive find her? Will Pansy cooperate? Will Dot? And Cecil… oh God, Cecil!

  A thousand times a day I think, C’mon Dot, give us another sign. The goddesses are rooting for you. Call Olive and breathe for help.

  But so far, the only change in Dot is that she has stopped calling me a baby and has started calling me a bitch. The double-barrel of her mouth is even more lethal since the Nesbitts cancelled Gladys Dilgert. I’m not plain-old-orphan hired help, a fish without a bowl. I belong here.

  I know it has started a stew of pure jealousy cooking in Dot.

  Lots of people would say, Just let those creepy Deets have each other. But the baby stirs something in all of us. And hopefully, maybe, there is the thin shred of a chance it is stirring something in Dot.

  While reading his newspaper after dinner, Dr. Nesbitt remarks, “You and mother don’t exactly have poker faces… or mouths, for that matter. Cecil’s wily. He’ll sniff something brewing, especially if it’s moonshine—or involves Pansy.”

  Mrs. Nesbitt gives him an exaggerated blank expression. “We know that, Avery. That’s why we’ve both vowed to avoid him—not that it’s any sacrifice. Couldn’t you give Cecil some knockout pills until Dot’s long gone?”

  “Knockout pills?”

  “Well, I don’t know… something.” She slumps, sighs.

  “Actually,” Dr. Nesbitt says, “this plan of yours is so full of holes, it just might work.”

  “Speaking of holes… ,” Mrs. Nesbitt says slowly, turning to me. “I’ve been meaning to ask you, Iris. Do you know how to shoot?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “A gun.”

  “No.”

  Dr. Nesbitt lowers the paper. “Why don’t you show her, Mother?”

  “Any bona fide farm woman should know,” Mrs. Nesbitt says. “Don’t you agree, Avery?”

  “Absolutely. Without the threat of a farm woman with gun skills, a fox could tip his hat to Marie, waltz right into the coop, and exit chewing a chicken leg.” Dr. Nesbitt puts down his paper, picks up the shotgun, and aims it out the back door. He glances skyward. “We’ve still got a few hours of light. Would you please hang our target, Iris, while I back the car into the next county?”

  I pin an old sheet to the clothesline and shut Marie in the house.

  Mrs. Nesbitt is very particular about my technique. She demonstrates proper form by planting her feet just so, raising Henry to her shoulder, and squinting down the barrel of him.

  Dr. Nesbitt hops out of range. “Is Henry loaded?

  “This is called a ‘side by side.’ Two barrels.” He inserts a cartridge in each side, cocks the hammers, and shoots the sheet. Once. Twice. We walk into the yard to study the shot pattern. “We already know you’ve got crackerjack aim with an egg, Iris.” He points to the piercings in the cotton. “If your coyote is unusually tall, say he’s up on his hind legs and he’s got a flaming rear end, you can scare him by aiming high.”

  “Does the predator in question answer to the name Deets?” Mrs. Nesbitt asks, her face wary. “If he knows we helped steal a chicken from his house, don’t we also know he’ll try to steal one from ours?”

  I practice shooting a dozen times—at the sheet, the broad side of the shed, and at cans on a sawhorse.

  “It’s easier than cooking, but I’m still terrible,” I say, dizzy and sore from the kickbacks, the gun powder, and the ringing in my ears. “I suppose if a real coyote came, I’d have to ask him to pose in front of the sheet for me to kill him. Besides, I can’t hurt anybody. Any self-respecting target will know that. They’ll think I look like a fool.”

  “You may surprise yourself.” Dr. Nesbitt turns to his mother. “Right?”

  Mrs. Nesbitt nods. “Remember to aim high. You just want to threaten, to scare. That’s all.”

  Dr. Nesbitt levels me with a grave look. “And Iris, you are anything but a fool.”

  I weigh the envelope from Leroy on my hand as I walk up from the mailbox. Two pages? Three? I position it, still sealed, next to me on the elm tree bench and imagine what’s inside.

  I hope he’s saying he’ll be here in a month for my birthday.

  I swat a grasshopper off my skirt and look around. Sigh. It’s already turning into fall. I imagine the Missouri River bluffs in Atchison painted with red vine. I smell burning leaves and hear my neighbors complain that oaks keep their dull brown foliage clear till Thanksgiving. I picture my old school. I’m through with that now—although Mrs. Nesbitt insists we still have much to discuss on the education topic.

  Inside the envelope are two heavy sheets of paper, but not a single word.

  Drawn on one is an outline of Leroy’s left hand and on the other is his right. I smooth out the folds and arrange them on my lap with thumbs pointing at each other. His fingers are long, the contours strong, almost elegant. No one else has hands like Leroy’s.

  Stars—constellations—are drawn around the outlines in midnight-blue ink. I picture him studying his star chart, drawing them, careful not to smear.

  I place my palms on his. Stretch my fingers and take a deep breath.

  Hi, Leroy.

  Still anchored to the paper, I look into the afternoon sky. The moon is a bleached opal. The brassy sun outshines the Big Dipper.

  I hold the papers against both cheeks. I close my eyes and imagine night blooming all around the two of us. I slide his hands over my lips and down my neck.

  Something flutters by. Oh, God! My eyes snap open. I scan t
he yard. It’s just a curious little dirt-brown bird. “Oh! I just… it’s a letter… I…”

  It blinks at me and hops away.

  I put the papers on my lap. “I miss you, Leroy.”

  I hear him whisper: Send something to me.

  I know immediately what I want to send back.

  “It’s Olive Nish for you, Avery,” Mrs. Nesbitt yells through his office door late Thursday evening.

  We can hear Olive’s voice through the line as Dr. Nesbitt listens and nods. She seems to have a vague but mighty pain in her left lower quadrant that takes her “breath away.”

  My heart sinks. Olive’s sick.

  “Make a house call,” Mrs. Nesbitt whispers to her son. “We need Olive at full steam. There’s nothing of her to wither. We need her probing for Pansy, not suffering with a queasy quadrant.”

  Mrs. Nesbitt and I drink tea to pass the time. I read aloud an article from an old Atlantic Monthly magazine of Dr. Nesbitt’s entitled “Art and the X-ray.”

  Mrs. Nesbitt recalls some of the gustatory medical “payments” her son has received from Olive over the years. “Each one etches its own signature on the stomach.”

  “So he helps her feel better, and she makes you two sick!”

  “Exactly. It’s the unlikely mix of ingredients in her food, the texture… the odd bitter twist to her tomato aspic, her gravelly gravy, her pulpy sweet potatoes…” She shudders. Shuts her mouth.

  Moths bounce off the table lamp. Marie yawns for the hundredth time. Olive’s malady must be serious, judging from the clock.

  Finally Dr. Nesbitt’s headlights wind up the drive. He walks in with a towel-covered metal baking pan large enough to hold hay for a herd of buffalo.

  We hop to our feet. “Well… ? What’s wrong? What’s Olive got?”

  Dr. Nesbitt’s face is dead serious. He whispers, “Pansy.”

  Mrs. Nesbitt holds her throat.

  My heart flutters. “On the phone?” I ask, as stupid as can be.