Slipstream

by Leslie Larson

  “I want to live there,” Rachel said.

  “That’s why I’m making it. Look, here’s where they wash clothes. And the old people, they live here. They take care of the kids when their moms and dads are at work. Here’s the garden where they grow food. It’s organic.”

  She pointed excitedly to everything, even though she could see the poor kid was getting bored. The problem with her project was that it was too detailed. She got all wrapped up in deciding how many cupboards there’d be in the kitchen, where the shower heads would go, and what kind of paving stones to use on the patio. In the meantime she was so behind she’d be lucky to finish it by the due date.

  “It’s a utopia,” she said. “You know what that means?”

  “My eggs is all gone.”

  “It’s where everything is perfect. It’s like paradise—”

  “All done!”

  Jewell gave up. “Okay, that’s a good girl,” she laughed. “You want to play now? Sit here and play while I do some work?”

  “Play what?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever. Color or something. Play with your Barbie.”

  “Barbie’s on vacation. She won’t be back for a long, long time.”

  Man, this kid. She and Jewell had a stare-down. Rachel furrowed her brow and asked, “How come you’re living here with my Mimi?”

  Jewell choked. “Good question,” she fumbled, even though she knew you shouldn’t say that kind of thing to a four-year-old.

  Rachel just stared.

  “We love each other,” Jewell ventured in what she hoped was a soothing, convincing tone. The way normal people talked to their children. “We want to be together.”

  “Like her and my mom?” Rachel shot back.

  Who programmed this kid? Jewell grabbed Rachel’s plate and glass off the table, bolted into the kitchen, and slammed the dishes in the sink.

  “Let’s take a bath,” Rachel called sweetly from the dining room.

  “Your mom didn’t say you should have a bath,” Jewell shouted. She ran the water full force, blasting the egg from the dish just like she did at the cafeteria. Where was Celeste, anyway? She should have been home by now. Maybe she and Dana were taking advantage of their sucker babysitter so that they could spend some quality time together. Maybe they had gone back to Dana’s empty house and—

  “Yes, she did!” Rachel shouted.

  When Jewell stepped back into the dining room, Rachel gave her a shove.

  “No, she didn’t. And don’t push.”

  Rachel fixed her eyes on Jewell’s face and nodded solemnly. “She did. She told me to tell you.”

  The kid was frightening. Jewell laughed, but when she inhaled, a tender pain throbbed in the pit of her stomach. For the first time she realized she loved Rachel, too. Oh God, when did that happen? Queasiness overtook her. She grasped Rachel by the hand and led her to the bathroom, where she stuck the plug in the bath and cranked on the water.

  “Okay, get undressed.”

  “Make it deep. I want to float,” Rachel commanded as she stripped.

  “You ever hear of the water shortage?”

  Rachel scrambled over the side of the tub. She was so skinny you could see every knob in her spine. If Jewell kidnapped her, she’d have to flee to another country. She imagined the two of them ten years from now, herself a famous architect in Italy; Rachel a self-possessed teen. This dingy little rental would be a distant memory. She tested the water and added more hot.

  “Deeper!” Rachel cried.

  “No, you’ll slosh water on the floor. That’s deep enough.”

  “You get in, too.”

  “No, I’ll sit here on the floor. Don’t splash.”

  “Okay, watch.”

  Rachel held her nose and slid down on her back so that her head sank underwater. She lay faceup, as rigid as a mummy, her huge, wide-apart eyes staring at the ceiling. Seconds ticked by, then what seemed like minutes. Jewell wondered if Rachel could see her through the water.

  “Okay, that’s enough,” Jewell shouted. “Come up!”

  Rachel didn’t blink. Jewell gestured frantically. Finally she plunged her arm into the water and jerked Rachel’s head up.

  Rachel laughed like a maniac. “I can hold my breath a long time!” she yelled, water streaming down her face. “I can keep my eyes open underwater! Did you think I was dead!? Did I fool you!?”

  Jewell’s jaw trembled. She didn’t know which she wanted to do more: burst into tears or shake Rachel until her teeth rattled. “Don’t do that anymore,” she said between clenched teeth. “You scared the shit out of me.”

  “That’s a bad word,” Rachel said. Now she looked ready to cry.

  Jewell sighed and let her forehead rest on the edge of the tub. “I’m sorry. But you scared me.”

  Rachel patted her head. “You can hear a lot down there,” she whispered close to Jewell’s ear. “Whales, and lots of fish.”

  “Can you really?”

  Rachel nodded. “Are you going to leave?” she asked.

  It wasn’t the first time Jewell had felt some strange telepathy with Rachel. Still, it took her by surprise. “Oh, Rachel. How could I ever leave you?” Jewell croaked. “I’m going to stay right here. I promise.” She paused, wrestling with herself. Her better instincts lost, as usual, and she added, “Why do you ask?”

  Rachel patted the surface of the water and avoided looking at Jewell.

  “Rachel?”

  “What?”

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  “No,” Rachel said brightly.

  “Why did you ask me if I was leaving?”

  Rachel grimaced. “My mom said you were,” she finally mumbled.

  “What did she say?” Jewell demanded.

  Rachel shrugged coyly.

  “Which mom are you talking about?”

  Rachel became absorbed in a drop suspended from the faucet.

  “Your mom Dana or your Mimi Celeste?”

  “Do the waterfall!” Rachel cried, grabbing the plastic bucket from the corner of the tub and thrusting it at Jewell.

  Jewell forced herself to take a deep breath. It wasn’t right to interrogate Rachel like that, but she had to know. “Rachel?” she prompted. “What did she say? Was it Celeste? Who said what? Tell me and I’ll do the waterfall.” She took the bucket and held it up enticingly.

  “That you were leaving,” Rachel whined. Her curls had started to dry and were springing back up on the top of her head.

  “Who? Dana or Celeste?”

  Rachel lunged for the bucket, but Jewell held it out of her reach. “Which one? Tell me, if you want the waterfall.”

  “Dana.”

  That bitch Dana. Too bad Jewell couldn’t murder her. She was choked with rage, too mad to think. “Okay, get ready,” she rasped grimly, filling the bucket. “Hold your nose and close your eyes. Tight!”

  She dumped the bucket of water over Rachel’s head and watched it run down her clenched eyes and puckered mouth. Rachel sputtered and gasped. “Again!” she yelled as soon as she got her breath.

  “Niagara Falls!” Jewell screeched. She dumped bucket after bucket over Rachel’s head, giving her just enough time to get her breath. When she stopped, Rachel was laughing hysterically.

  Jewell was exhausted. She’d like to climb into the tub herself. Lie on her back as Rachel had, and feel the warm water close over her face.

  “Wash,” she told Rachel. “Use soap.”

  Rachel washed dramatically, closing her eyes and stretching her arms toward the ceiling as she lathered, the way she’d seen on TV commercials. “Tell me about my house,” she said. “The one with the pool.”

  Jewell sighed. It would be nice to be with an adult instead of sitting there on the bathroom floor watching a four-year-old pretend to shave her armpits. She’d like to go away with Celeste, drive up the coast to San Francisco for a romantic weekend. The bay, the fog, the Golden Gate Bridge. When they’d first gotten together, just over a year
ago, they’d talked all night, night after night. Their faces inches apart, whispering. Jewell had never known she had so much to say. She herself listened with amazement to the story of her own life: how she always got shuttled around to whoever would take her when her mother was having one of her freakouts. Once Jewell had lived with her father and his second wife, Stephen’s mother, a high-strung hypochondriac who had cut off Jewell’s beloved braids, permed her hair, and forced her to wear dresses, white ankle socks, and shoes with buckles. Call me mother, she had instructed Jewell, who had finally escaped by setting a series of small fires in the house. In the meantime her real mother had gotten her act together—at least temporarily—and landed a job as a live-in cook for a movie producer who raised Dalmatians as a hobby. Jewell was allowed to sleep with a pack of dogs in her bed, wear her bathing suit year-round, and grow her hair as long as she wanted.

  Talking to Celeste, it had occurred to Jewell for the first time that her childhood would strike a lot of people as strange. “It’s amazing that you’re as normal as you are,” Celeste had said. “Not that you’re all that normal.” They talked long past the time when the noise of the freeway died down, until the only traffic sounds they heard were the night buses grinding up faraway hills.

  “Hey!” Rachel shouted. “Anybody home?” She knocked on Jewell’s forehead.

  “It’s time to get out now,” Jewell said. “Stand up and let’s dry you off.”

  “Tell me about the house you’re going to make for me,” Rachel insisted.

  It was an old game, one that Rachel—and Jewell, too, for that matter—never got tired of. “The house I’m going to make you has a pool in every room,” Jewell began as she wrapped the towel around Rachel. Her body felt like a skinny cat, all sinew, bone, and muscle. She was feather-light to lift out of the tub. “When you wake up in the morning, you dive out of your bed and swim to the bathroom. But instead of a bathtub, you have another pool. This one is as big as a lake. It’s full of pretty fish and has a waterfall and a diving board.”

  “And a slide,” Rachel interjected. She pretended her teeth were chattering from the cold as Jewell dried her.

  “And when it’s time to eat your breakfast, you swim to a table outside, where there’s another pool with starfish and dolphins,” Jewell said.

  Where was Celeste? She should have been home long ago. Jewell wondered how Celeste would feel if she came back to the house and found no trace of Jewell and Rachel. Just a few drops of water in the tub and a damp towel.

  “Now we wrap you up like a big taco!” Jewell said, passing the towel around Rachel’s body. When she picked her up, the phone rang.

  “Ah, Jesus. Who is it this time?”

  “Jesus Christ,” Rachel swore with alarming facility.

  “I don’t know if you should say that,” Jewell said as she carried Rachel to the phone.

  “You said it.”

  “Too bad you’re so smart.”

  “It’s Mama,” Rachel said as Jewell picked up the phone.

  “We’re at La Palma,” Celeste said. “Dana and I stopped by for something to eat before we came home. You want me to bring you something? How’s Rachel doing?”

  All that stopped Jewell from kicking over the table where the phone sat were Rachel’s legs clamped around her waist. She listened into the phone as though listening down a well. In the echoing, black silence of the open line she heard the whispered conversations of everyone attached to the thin filament that webbed the earth. Pick up a sixer on the way home hell yes I gave it to him what do you expect send someone over my toilet’s overflowing I’m afraid you tested positive I swear baby that’s what happened they’ll be gone the whole week that’s our chance I love you but I can’t stay. People telling lies, plotting crimes, saying good-bye.

  “Do whatever you want,” Jewell said, her voice dead with cold, white rage. “I don’t care.”

  “What’s wrong?” Celeste asked.

  There were no restaurant sounds in the background. No conversation or clatter of dishes. Jewell could hear Dana in Celeste’s voice. She was standing there beside Celeste, listening. Jewell could see them rolling their eyes at each other, Celeste shaking her head.

  “I’m here with Rachel,” Jewell rasped. Her mouth and throat felt as if they’d been swabbed out with fiberglass. “I’ve been here all afternoon.”

  “I’m sorry, Jules,” Celeste said.

  She did sound pained, truly sorry. She wasn’t apologizing for what she’d done, Jewell realized, but for what she was going to do. Not for dumping Rachel on Jewell or leaving her a few hours too long, but for everything that was going to happen, from that moment until they parted ways.

  12

  Inez decided to make meatloaf instead of hamburgers, even though Rudy might not like it. She beat eggs with a fork, chopped onions, and crushed saltines with the rolling pin. Instead of spreading frozen French fries on a baking sheet, she washed three russets to bake. She hoped he didn’t mind. She grated cabbage and carrots for cole slaw. Rabbit food, he called it. But there was cholesterol to think of. Fat and high blood pressure. Plus, she and Vanessa liked it. For dessert they’d have vanilla ice cream with fruit cocktail on top.

  Seven hundred nineteen dollars and thirty-seven cents. Using a solar-powered calculator that had come free in the mail, she had counted up every penny of the orders from that day. A record. That put her plan on the fast track, and as she mixed mayonnaise, vinegar, and sugar for the salad dressing, she allowed herself to add a few more details to the house that she’d begun to imagine for herself and Vanessa. She would go to Oregon, she had decided after watching a show on small towns in the United States. The place she had in mind was surrounded by trees. There was a Main Street with a post office and grocery store, a coffee shop where each customer kept his very own mug, and a church with a white steeple like on calendars. Things were on a smaller scale. Everybody knew everybody else. It was far enough away that no one would know her and Rudy would never find her, but not far enough to be foreign or to require a lot of money to get there. When the time was right, she and Vanessa would go there on the train. Later she’d learn to drive.

  She stabbed the potatoes with a fork, greased them with Crisco, and put them in the oven. She pictured a bar chart showing how much money had piled up in the bottom of the cedar chest. When it hit a certain notch, she’d be ready to go. They wouldn’t need a lot because they’d be starting over, she thought while she mixed the meatloaf with her hands, squishing it between her fingers. Starting from scratch. Everything new, everything hers. She formed the mixture into a loaf and covered it with a layer of catsup. It was all she’d ever wanted from the very earliest time she could remember, from the time she was in foster homes when everything came to her from someone else, clothes and beds and rooms that had already belonged to strangers. In her plan she saw the house as if it already existed, waiting for her. Brand-new, with clean white walls and empty, quiet rooms. When she got there, she’d be home.

  Vanessa came in and leaned on the counter next to her. Such a good girl. She’d taken a shower and changed her clothes after coming home from gymnastics practice. Her wet hair hung down her back, sending up a strawberry smell. It was hard not to tell Vanessa her plans, to let her know that they wouldn’t always be living there with Rudy. He, Vanessa called him. Him. Avoiding his name like she avoided his eyes. She was too good a girl, too nice a daughter, to tell Inez how she really felt, but Inez could tell. It won’t be forever, she wanted to say now, excited as she slid the meatloaf in next to the potatoes. The oven was missing one of its racks. The door didn’t close all the way; she had to prop it with a broomstick. Just wait, she wanted to say. It won’t be long now. Pretty soon we’ll be starting our lives. Our real lives. Our own.

  “Ground beef’s disgusting,” Vanessa said. “You know what’s in there? They just grind up all the cows together, sometimes two thousand of them at once. Isn’t it sickening to think that there’s parts of that many animals in that on
e ball of meat? Plus they feed them things like pigs’ guts and cardboard.”

  “Is that what you learn in school?” Inez asked sharply.

  “I read it in the paper.”

  “So, what now? You want to be a vegetarian?”

  As if in answer, Vanessa picked up one of the stubs of carrot Inez had grated and nibbled on it. She was so smart, and pretty, too. Good in science and math, especially for a girl. She went to church with Inez every Sunday, did her homework after school. It was hard for Inez not to reach out and stroke her hair, to wrap her arms around her. But those days were over. Vanessa’s face had a strange, grown-up stillness to it. It was impossible to know what went on in her mind.

  “He’s not home yet?” she said.

  Inez shook her head. It was she who insisted Vanessa call him Daddy. Sometimes she felt bad about it, but they all had a part to play. Out of the corner of her eye she watched as Vanessa went to the sink and washed her hands. Vanessa was almost the age Inez had been when she’d met Vanessa’s father, her real father, and seeing how young her daughter was—how little, really, she knew about life—Inez was beginning to see her own life in a different way. At the time she had thought she had a choice with Vanessa’s father, that she was in love with him. Fernando. His name sounded unfamiliar because in truth she had never thought of him by that name, had never—painful as it was now to admit—thought of him as anything other than Mr. Vanta. She had only been sixteen, after all, and he was almost thirty years older. The only time she’d spoken to him was at church, with everyone around. He was a respected man, a deacon, so why should she distrust him?

  This feeling comes from God, he had told her, pressing his hand against her body through her clothes. He means it to be this way.

  Two times, that was all! Two times they had been together. She didn’t often allow herself to think about it. But sneaking a glance at the dreamy look on Vanessa’s face as she dried her hands on the dish towel hanging on the oven door, Inez realized more clearly than ever before how Mr. Vanta had tricked her, had forced her, pushing her further and further, taking little liberties—stopping in a deserted parking lot on the way home after Bible study, pressing her hands to his crotch in the supply room at the church—until he could threaten her with the things they’d already done, using them to push her a little bit further. She remembered how the oily smell of his cologne had clung to her neck after the first time, how terrified she’d been going back to the house where she lived with her adopted family.