I fell asleep before Dulce was out of the bathroom.
I woke up crying. She heard me. Maggie, she said, are you okay?
I couldn’t stop crying. I sat up and folded over, my head in my arms, and sobbed. I was afraid I would wake Stevie, but I couldn’t make myself stop.
She said, why don’t you come over here, and talk to me?
It must have been a dream, she said. Don’t you remember? Dreams only make you cry when you push them down inside too far.
I was calm again. In the dark, with the light from the grounds seeping through the curtains where I hadn’t quite pulled them shut, the room, done in rose and gray, was a soft dark neutral color. The air conditioner hummed. I took my pillow and propped myself up in her bed. She took my hand.
I stayed in a motel like this once, I said. A nice one. As soon as I said it, I knew what I had been dreaming.
Tell me, she said.
Someone my mother was seeing took us to Reno. I was nine, almost ten years old. I remember my mother saying the motel was too expensive, he shouldn’t have, that sort of thing. He said motels were cheap in Reno.
I don’t remember anything at all about him, not if he was tall or short, or dark or blond. I remember he had a gruff voice, but he was nice to me. He bought candy bars for the car, and he kept asking me, did I need to stop? In the front seats, he and my mother talked in low voices, and, once we had crossed over into California from Oregon—it seemed the most spectacular vista in the world to me—I dozed much of the way into Nevada. The motel was sprawling and glitzy, with lots of lights. He took a room with a sitting room, where they brought in a cot for me. He said I could order room service and watch TV, and they would be back.
My mother called me once that night, to ask if I was all right, and I said I was. I didn’t go to sleep until two in the morning.
When I woke, they hadn’t come home. I waited, with the TV on loud, and at noon I ordered a cheeseburger and a Coke and fries and asked them to bring it all to my room.
The whole day passed. I never left the motel room. I ordered food again in the evening, and turned up the volume on the TV. By then I had begun to cry, sporadically, like a spring rain.
The second morning, the office called to ask if we were checking out. I couldn’t say anything at all; my throat constricted so tightly it ached. Shortly, someone from the office came to the room and knocked. I called out Who is it! the way my mother had taught me, and I wouldn’t open the door.
That afternoon a lady came. She said she was from child welfare. She asked me a lot of questions, but I didn’t know the answers. I didn’t know why my mother and the man had left me in the motel, or where they had gone, or if they were coming back. I wondered what this woman would do to me.
That night I stayed in a house in Reno. It was a family house, with a mother and a father and a girl a little older than me. They were very nice to me. We went out for pizza.
In a few days another lady came and got me, and drove me back to Oregon, to my aunt’s house. Then someone from child welfare there came to talk to me, and I still didn’t know anything. I thought my mother was dead, but I didn’t cry.
My aunt had a baby, and her husband, who worked in the woods, had no work just then. He was always in the house, and he didn’t like having me there, but when they had a fight about it—I could hear everything through the wall—she reminded him that they were getting money for me. I tried to help. I picked up any little thing that fell to the floor. I played with the baby. I tried to do the dishes. I knew I wouldn’t get to stay; I was waiting for someone to come again, from child welfare, and move me to a new place. I wanted to call and ask when she would come, but I didn’t know how to call. One night, while my aunt was bathing the baby, her husband sat by me on the sofa to watch TV. He moved close. He put his hand on my leg. He was drinking beer. He leaned down and whispered in my ear.
He said, you’re just a little twig off your mama’s tree, ain’t you. My face was burning, and my ears were ringing, and I made myself think about the mountains I had seen on the way to Reno.
In time, someone did come and take me to a new family’s house. When my mother returned, she came to see me there. She said she wanted me to come home with her, but they wouldn’t let me. She said it would take a while. She didn’t tell me where she had been.
She had cut her hair and bleached it, but she was still my mother. She had gained weight, too. Her breasts strained against her old blouse, and her jeans were tight. She called me Dolly and Angel and said I’d come home soon. She had found a new job, in a Mexican restaurant. She was sorry, she finally said. She thought he would work out for us, but he didn’t. She never told me where she’d gone.
I was waiting for Dulce to ask where my father was. I had been asked that so many times, growing up. I didn’t know. I guess my mother didn’t know. Welfare wanted to find him. It terrified me, I thought they would send me off to him somewhere, a stranger, but now I know they wanted to find him and make him pay something for my care. They didn’t have anything to go on, though. He never had to pay.
Dulce said, You’re a good mother, that’s what matters now. She said this fiercely, a way I’d never heard her speak.
Then she asked: What happened to your mother after that? Did she leave again?
I couldn’t speak. She turned toward me, and held her arms so I could slide into her embrace.
I thought about the people who had ever held me close. My mother, too long ago to remember. Polly, the way a mother does. Gretchen, her leg lying dead weight over mine, her arm flung across my waist. Mo.
Then I slept. We all slept late, even Stevie. It was good we did. I wasn’t prepared for west Texas. The vastness, the emptiness, terrified me. I couldn’t imagine we would ever come out on the other side.
January 1977
Maggie’s mother, Angela, lived in the same town she’d grown up in. She’d gone away once, to Portland, but she hated the city more than she hated the boredom back home. Another time, she lived for a year in Eugene. She came back pregnant. Her own mother had moved on years before, first to Washington, then to somewhere in Utah.
When she was a little girl, she used to go in the good weather down to the river and play on the rocks. You had to cross the bridge to reach the town. In early summer, when the water was still high, boys jumped off the bridge. It was low enough they could cannon-ball and swim ten yards and be in shallow water. Their legs would be bright red from the impact. The girls would watch, and giggle.
It had been raining for a week, and then the temperature fell suddenly, overnight. In the morning, all over the county, cars skidded on black ice. A school bus went off the road, but nobody was hurt.
Maggie wanted to know what her mother did that day, but there was no one to ask. Maybe she slept late, then watched soaps, had a little something to eat. She called Maggie after school, but she had nothing special to say. Maggie tried so hard to remember, but she couldn’t. They were stiff with one another; their lives were separate. Maggie was living with a high school teacher’s family. She was studying, getting good grades; she was learning to sew.
The little town was very dark at night. There was only a sliver of moon, and even that was obscured by clouds. While Maggie slept, her mother Angela walked down to the bridge, dressed in jeans, a heavy pullover sweater, and short boots.
It was so dark, when she leaned over the bridge, she probably didn’t see the water at all. She didn’t leap into the river; she leaped into the night.
Maybe she fell. She heard something; she had had a few beers. She leaned over, she wondered what the sound was, the bridge was slippery, she fell.
At last, we drove into green and hilly country. We’d thought we would reach San Marcos for dinner, but the boys were too hungry to wait. We stopped to eat tacos. Dulce called ahead to let her mother-in-law know how we were doing. She came back to our booth and said that the Quirartes said they had plenty of room; we could all spend the night. Aw, it’s not that far go
ing on to Austin, Mo said, but I said I thought we should. The children were worn out; so was I. And I thought it would be better to arrive at Mo’s Austin place earlier in the day, so that we would have time to adjust a little, all of us to one another in a new place.
Mo asked Dulce what she thought of the tacos. She said they were good—the pork was roasted, the salsa was fresh—but she still liked them with soft tortillas, the way her mother made them, back when her mother still cooked.
In the car again, she told me she thought he was cute. I had to laugh.
He’s little, I said. But I guess he is cute.
She said she liked small men. I know you Anglos like these giants, taking up a lot of space in the world, but I like a more compact man.
And Gustavo? He’s cute too?
He’s beautiful, she said. I thought about her dream.
Will you be with him? I asked. Will you live with him again? Could you go back to Oregon?
She was wearing her hair in a long braid that hung over her shoulder. She stroked it as she spoke.
I’ll stay at his parents’ house at first, she said. He’s living with his brother’s family. I’ll help his mother with the house, I’ll see what I can learn to do there. There’s a college in San Marcos. I’d like to think about that. I’d have to find out if I’m smart enough, if it’s not too late. I think Gus needs this, though. In Oregon, there’s just me.
But Gustavo, I insisted. You love him, don’t you?
I have to take care of Gus, and take care of myself, and then I’ll see about loving him. I have to think about how we’ll live.
It might be easier the other way around, I said. Loving, and then finding a way. I knew I was talking to myself; I’d read enough novels to figure out the way a line of dialogue like that works. I know characters tell other people the things they themselves need to hear. Or novelists make them speak feelings they have, or wish for.
I haven’t seen him in five years, she said. The last time I saw him he was behind a glass panel in a gray room, and he told me I should make my own life. He didn’t know if he would make it. He had nothing for me. I went back to the house where I was staying—I had been staying with a cousin of his from Texas, she begged me to go to his parents’ but I wanted my mother—and I packed and took a bus to Oregon. I haven’t thought I would live with him since then.
But you dream about him. I had to say it.
She finally smiled. If he is wearing a bandana, I won’t be able to resist. If he has his hair long, like the first time I saw him. If he’s proud of Gus, of what I’ve done.
So there’s hope, I said. She let that stand. She probably knew who I was talking to.
I wanted to ask her about Gustavo’s mother, but I remembered that she had never met her. I wondered if she would like me.
I thought Jay would like to see the animals on the farm. And cheese in a wheel. We wouldn’t have to hurry, leaving.
The Quirarte farm came into view as we pulled over a hill and rode toward a deep blue sky. It’s really pretty, I said.
I was thinking about the dream you had about me, I told her. I was thinking while we were driving, and I could see it: me at the window of a house, looking out over the yard. I think—I think that down there, in the yard, there would be people I know, Polly and my friends, and Mo, and the kids, of course, but other people, too, like the Safeway checker and the pharmacist. And you.
A daydream, she said.
We had pulled up into the yard near the house, and dogs were barking and people were running out to greet us. I reached over and squeezed her hand. I wanted to wish her well; I wanted to make everything work out, but all I could do was wish for myself the very thing she’d dreamed.
I’ll tell you something, I said before we got out of the car. I’m sure I was happy. In the dream. I don’t know why, exactly, but I think I’ll know, sooner or later. All of it could be true. I could be happy.
Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank Joan Kalvelage, Jane Barry, Patty Wixon, and Tod Davies for their essential insights; Judy Shepard for her apt and delicate editorial hand; Bonnie Comfort and Jan Gregory for all the phone calls; and Kre Kalvelage, Penny Colvin, Janice Gabriel, Leah Ireland, Barbara Davidson, Jan Mahoney, and Nancy Peterson for information and ideas I used in my own arbitrary ways.
s.s.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1993 by Sandra Scofield
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1204-1
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