by Dianne Emley
The tears flooding her eyes almost blinded her, but she managed to slide the velvet-covered backing from the old frame. She pressed the envelope next to the photograph and tried to replace the backing. It wouldn’t go. The envelope was too fat. She shoved harder and harder as she sobbed harder and harder. Suddenly, the backing slid over the envelope.
She stood the photograph on the nightstand and dropped to the carpet as if everything that held her body upright had failed her. On her hands and knees, she buried her head between her arms against the floor and sobbed, her body quivering.
Iris finally found her and crouched beside her. “Dolly?” She put her hand on her trembling back. “Dolly?”
Dolly didn’t respond.
From behind her, Thomas spoke dispassionately. “She doesn’t know you’re there.”
“But she was fine before. What happened?”
“Just leave her alone. Sometimes she’s like that for hours.”
Iris looked at him with revulsion. “We can’t just leave her like this.”
“Sometimes my father puts her in a cold shower. After that, she goes to sleep. But I don’t think you and me could lift her. Just shine it on. You want to play a game or something?”
CHAPTER NINE
Iris was awakened by her parents’ arguing. She could only make out occasional words unless she put her ear to the adjoining bedroom wall. Eavesdropping on their arguments used to be a fascinating diversion for her, but after learning that all they did was argue about the same things over and over—a curious discovery—she just tried to tune them out.
She folded her pillow over her head to cover her ears, muffling the familiar sound of her mother’s high-pitched, relentless harangue and her father’s terse monotone responses—when he chose to respond at all. Occasionally there was the thud of a small item—a book or shoe—thrown by her mother.
Through the pillow, Iris heard something bang against the wall, possibly the closet door being flung open. Dresser drawers were opened and slammed shut. She hoped it didn’t mean what she thought it meant. She got out of bed, put on her worn bathrobe, spotted with egg yolk and hot chocolate, and slipped on her fuzzy blue slippers. She opened her door, tentatively stuck her head out, and looked at the closed door of her parents’ room.
That closed door had always baffled her. It implied intimacy and closeness and private things. But so little of what went on between her parents was like that, so the closed bedroom door simply seemed like a ruse. Who were they trying to impress? There was sex, of course, but it was hard for her to imagine them ever doing it. It wasn’t so much because they were her parents as because she couldn’t see two people who were so discordant coming together in an act that she had been made to understand was an expression of true love, despite what Paula said.
The door abruptly opened, which was not unusual. Her mother liked to drag the arguments through the entire house and sometimes into the yard. Iris quickly hopped back into bed, still wearing her bathrobe and slippers, and pulled the bed covers over her. Her bedroom door opened and she recognized her father through the slits she had made of her eyelids. He set the suitcase he was carrying on the floor and walked to her bed, where he stood as if he didn’t know what to do. When he returned to the suitcase as if he were about to leave, she startled him by sitting bolt upright in bed.
“You’re leaving?” she asked in a wavering voice.
He scratched his crew cut and frowned at the ground.
“Why?” she wailed.
“Well, Iris. Your mother and I…”
“You’re leaving to go to Sonja. Why don’t you just say it? I know what’s going on. I’m not stupid.”
“I know you’re not.”
“Why do you like her better than us?”
“I don’t, Iris. It’s for the best right now. I know you don’t understand.”
Tears began to roll down her puckered face.
“Ohhh, c’mon, Iris Ann.”
She glared at him, tears streaking her cheeks. “You promised! You promised you’d never leave again.”
“Someday you’ll understand.”
“I want to understand now.”
“I’ll call you, all right? I’ll come see you.”
When he leaned close to kiss her cheek, his whiskers scratched her skin. She wanted to turn away from him in anger. At the same time she wanted to hold him so that he couldn’t leave.
He walked out the door, closing it. She heard him briefly open Lily’s door, close it, then open and close the front door. Her mother was quiet. Iris imagined her following a few paces behind him with her arms tightly folded across her chest and her jaw set. When she did that, it accentuated the lines down each side of her mouth and made her look startlingly old. It frightened Iris.
She heard the engine of her father’s truck turn over, then a whizzing sound as he backed down the driveway. Now the truck would be poised in the middle of the street in front of the house and the transmission would clunk as he changed gears from reverse to drive. She heard the clunk. The tears began to flow harder. The engine accelerated as he drove down the hill, the noise fading at the same time as her heart seemed to be dropping farther and farther into a pit deep inside her, so deep that she couldn’t feel it. She feared it might be there forever.
Suddenly, the front door opened and slammed closed. It opened again, slammed again.
Iris crept out of bed and walked down the small hallway, from which she could see the front door at the other end of the living room. Her mother opened and slammed the door again, leaning into the effort as if the door were heavy. She wore the same slacks and blouse that she had had on that evening, which meant that the argument had been going on for hours.
She opened the door again and this time pushed open the screen door and walked out, disappearing into the darkness. The screen door slowly suctioned closed.
Iris remained standing in the hallway, looking across the dark living room and through the door that opened onto more darkness. Her tears had subsided into convulsive hiccups. Something scraped against the outside of the screen door. It was Skippy, standing outside, pressing his nose against the screen.
She walked down the hallway to Lily’s room, which was at the opposite end from her parents’ room. She opened the door without knocking. “Lily?” she said quietly.
“What do you want?” She sounded angry and fatigued.
“Nothing. Can I come in?”
“I have to get some sleep. I don’t care what Mom and Dad do. I’m sick of them. I’ve got four months. Four months until I graduate from high school and Jack and I get married.”
“Oh.” Iris closed the door. She went outside through the open front door, sat on the cement porch, and buried her face in the ruff of fur around Skippy’s neck. “I don’t care. Let ‘em all go. I don’t need ‘em.”
She went around the side of the house muttering, “Who cares about them anyway?” The dewy grass moistened her fuzzy slippers. Skippy trotted beside her.
The steady sawing of crickets sounded as if the night air was panting. A half moon was bright in the clear sky. The songs of invisible night birds sent fingers up and down Iris’s spine. Instead of calming her mood, the night air heightened it, making it clear and brittle.
She neared the backyard, and heard labored grunting noises. A field lay beyond the small, groomed lawn which was bordered by pruned rosebushes in neat beds. Several fruit trees grew in the field—white peach, yellow peach, apricot, Santa Rosa plum, black plum and fig. Her father’s vegetable garden lay next to the trees. In the moonlight, Iris saw her mother hacking the garden with a hoe.
Iris gasped. She shouted, “Mom!” but her mother either didn’t hear her or didn’t care. She just kept swinging the hoe.
Iris ran across the lawn and through the opening in the fence around Las Mariposas. She kept running. The terrain felt uneven through the thin vinyl soles of her slippers. Skippy ran a few yards ahead, stopped to wait for her, then ran ahead again.
“I’ll show them. They’ll be sorry.”
She passed Gabriel’s dark house and the toolshed. Both spooked her, but she steeled herself against her fears. She kept running. She looked up at the trees, evaluating them, then discarding them as not right for her purpose. At Gabriel’s unfinished wall, she found the appropriate one, the giant’s favorite lemon tree, which had strong branches she could reach if she stood on top of the wall.
The wall, its wooden frame and scaffold, the spilled bags of cement, and the cement mixer remained where the earthquake had left them. The yellow police ribbon that had circled the area now lay like a bright earthworm dredged up by a storm.
Iris climbed the scaffold and worked her way to the top of the wall. Steel supporting rods jutted through the top. She carefully stepped between them and stood up, spreading her arms to balance herself.
“They can’t miss me here.”
She pulled the belt from her robe and tied a loop at the end but it wasn’t right. She tried again, wavering on the wall, almost losing her balance, the bulky slippers providing poor traction. Skippy sat on his haunches at the bottom of the wall and stared up at her with his ears pricked. She eased herself into a sitting position, dangling her legs over the side. She fumbled with the belt again and managed to make an acceptable loop. She slid it over her head and pulled it tight around her neck as a trial. It uncomfortably restricted her breathing. She removed it and felt the soft skin of her neck.
“This is stupid. They’re not worth it.”
She undid the belt and fed it back through the loops of her robe. Throwing one leg over the wall, she straddled it and began searching with her foot for the scaffold, when the earth began to tremble. She frantically waved her leg, trying to find footing, but lost her balance. She grasped one of the steel rods with her right hand but her left skidded down the front of the frame, tearing the sleeve of her robe and embedding wood splinters in her hand. The aftershock continued to rumble and Iris struggled to hang on while Skippy ran in circles and barked. Then it stopped.
She breathed a sigh of relief and began to climb down the scaffold. She spotted car headlights at the top of the spiraling road up to Las Mariposas. The white lights became red as the car rounded the curve and disappeared around the back of the hill. Seconds later, the headlights again swerved as they rounded the bend and again turned red. Soon, she saw no lights but only heard the engine coming nearer. The car had reached the bottom of the hill and would soon pass through the citrus grove on its way to the street. The headlights loomed between the dark trees. It was Bill DeLacey’s yellow Cadillac. Instead of heading toward the street, it jumped the road and barreled toward the wall.
Skippy began barking wildly and prancing back and forth. Iris dropped to the ground and clawed at the weeds and dirt, struggling to get out of the way as the car engine grew louder and louder. There was a din of steel crumpling and wood splintering. The engine sputtered and pinged as if it were in agony, then finally died. The car hissed steam and drizzled fluids.
Iris inched to the car. There was movement inside. She ran to the driver’s door and struggled to pull it open. It finally gave and Dolly tumbled onto the ground. Blood from a gash on her forehead trickled down her face.
Iris leaned over her. “Dolly, are you all right?”
Dolly slowly clambered to her knees. She touched her forehead and looked at the blood on her fingers. She held onto the car door to help herself up.
Iris tentatively reached toward Dolly, who snapped her hand out and grabbed Iris’s wrist. She started to run into the trees, still holding Iris.
Iris ran a few steps with her, then stopped, digging in her heels. “No!”
Dolly’s grip on her wrist tightened. She wrenched her head around to stare hard at Iris. Her eyes were wide—alert and wild like a cornered animal’s. “Run. He’s going to get us. Run!” Iris cried, “Dolly, you’re hurting me!”
“Humberto’s dead! He’s dead! We’ll all be dead if we don’t run!” She tried to pull Iris toward the trees.
Iris resisted, digging her heels, one bare and one slipper-clad, into the dirt. She was pulled along anyway, stumbling and tripping. She clawed at Dolly’s fingers; they were like a vise around her flesh and white with the effort. Skippy snatched at Dolly’s ankles and yipped helplessly.
Then someone grabbed Iris’s other arm. “Let go of her.” It was her mother.
“Run!” Dolly’s lips were drawn back, baring her teeth. Her eyes were feral. “We have to run!”
Tears blackened with eyeliner and mascara streamed down Rose’s face. “You’re going to break her arm!”
Iris looked from her mother’s face to Dolly’s and down to her arm which she was certain would snap in two. Those three things took on a surrealistic presence. They were the only things that existed. Time stopped.
Rose began to shove and kick Dolly. Dolly suddenly let go and Iris tumbled backward onto the ground. Dolly ran into the trees. Skippy followed her, barking.
Rose fell to her knees and gathered Iris to her chest. “Iris, Iris! Are you okay?”
She stared at her mother, dazed and speechless.
“My baby! You’re safe. I knew that if she took you I’d never see you again. My beautiful baby.”
“I am?”
“Of course you are! What would make you say such a thing?”
Iris shrugged her shoulders and stared at her wrist, where purple bruises in the shape of Dolly’s fingers were already starting to form.
CHAPTER TEN
Iris walked through the ranch house looking for Paula, who wasn’t in her room. She left the newer section and entered the old adobe, where the temperature behind the thick walls dropped several degrees.
She guardedly peeked into Dolly’s Spartan bedroom, the hairs on the back of her neck tingling, perhaps from the sudden chill in the air. Dolly was not there and she breathed a sigh of relief. Since that nightmarish night three weeks ago when Dolly had crashed the Cadillac, Iris had kept out of her way. She stood in the doorway and looked at the carelessly made bed. It was not made at all, really. The bedclothes were just pulled over the pillows and nothing was tucked in. The little embroidered decorative pillows that Dolly had made were scattered on the floor.
Iris continued down the hallway, to the room at the end, which Bill DeLacey used as his office. She peeked inside. An old wooden desk stood in the middle. On a corner of the desk was a big lamp with a dingy barrel-shaped shade trimmed with gold braid. Behind the desk, Bill DeLacey sat in an old, high-backed swivel chair. The remaining floor space was piled with newspapers, books, and all manner of things. There was an early cabinet-style television, a manual typewriter, a pull-handle adding machine, and various detached mechanical parts of indeterminate provenance. A radio was tuned to a station that broadcast string renditions of popular songs.
Several prescription containers of pills were lined up on the desk. Iris watched as DeLacey set one container down, picked up another, and flipped the pages of a large book. He tapped his finger on a page and shook his head. “I wouldn’t have prescribed this.”
When he reached to pick up another container, he spotted Iris. “What are you doing there?”
“I was looking for Paula.” She started to back down the hallway.
“Come in and spend a minute.”
Iris tentatively stepped into the room that she had never dared to enter before. She curiously looked around.
“Hear anything from old Les?”
“He called to see how we were doing.”
“Guess you know he quit working for me.”
A blueprint spread across several stacks of newspapers caught her attention.
“Funny thing for a steady man like Les to up and leave everything.” DeLacey smiled, casually leaning back in his chair and crossing his legs in a relaxed pose that seemed calculated to put her at ease. His glossy yellow teeth made him look predatory. “Did he tell you why?”
Iris shook her head. “Is this DeLacey Gardens?�
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“Supposed to be. Just one damned thing after another. Now they want this environmental impact report. Damn tree-hugging liberals. You’d think my investors would understand, but they’re starting to want their money back. On top of everything else, our city councilman tells me he has misgivings about the project.” DeLacey shook his head at the floor and panted laughter. “‘Grave misgivings,’ he says.” He began wagging his finger. “I told him, this is an elected position, friend. I just may run against you. Then you’ll find out how this city should be run.”
Iris stepped backward as if driven by the force of DeLacey’s wagging finger. Her heel scraped against a pile of newspapers. “I guess I’ll go look for Paula.”
“Now wait just a minute.” He leaned farther back in his chair, the old joints creaking, and picked up a large spiral-bound checkbook from a pile of junk behind him. “You’re planning on going to college, aren’t you?”
Iris shrugged.
“Course, with the amount of self-education I’ve done, I should probably have earned a Ph.D. by now. But that’s not the way it’s going to be when you grow up.”
“I might be a teacher. English or something.”
He briskly shook his head. “Computers. In fifteen years, everyone’s going to have a computer in their home. Mark my words.” He wrote out a check, pulled it from the book, and held it face out across the desk. It was made out for a thousand dollars.
Iris’s eyes bugged. She’d never had a check before, let alone that much money.
“You open yourself a savings account and put this check in there.” He pulled the check away just as she reached for it. “Now you know there’s no such thing as a free lunch in life.”
She half nodded and half shrugged.
“That means everything has a price. The price of this check is that you’ll tell me if anyone says anything about Gabriel Gaytan’s murder. Your father, Dolly, Paula, Junior, Thomas, your mother, anyone. Deal?”
“What would anyone say?”
“Well, Iris, people don’t like other people to be successful. People will try to drag you down, any chance they get. I just want a little help watching my back. Is that okay?”