by Kyoko Mori
“I’m going to buy them both,” she says. “When I get home, I’ll decide which one to keep. I can always give the other one to my sister. Her birthday is in September.” Every morning between now and September, this woman will stand in front of her mirror, unable to decide which scarf to keep.
The woman who was in the dressing room comes up to the counter with a black skirt.
“I didn’t see you try that on,” Maya says.
“I didn’t today. I saw this one last month and tried it on then. None of the dresses worked out, so I might as well get this instead. I’m glad you still had it.”
In a month, this woman will come back to look at some fall coats, and maybe that’s when she will buy one of the dresses from today. Wrapping and ringing up the two women’s purchases, Maya finds it oddly comforting to be in this business. Like a reverse purgatory, a boutique allows a person to make wrong decisions, delayed decisions, or no decisions at all and still not fall out of the circles of contentment. She imagines her years of solitude as a priestess of this peaceful purgatory. It isn’t a bad life.
* * *
The phone rings shortly after the two women have walked out to their cars. Casper, who has just come down and sat on Maya’s lap, scampers up the stairs again.
“Maya, is that you?” the caller asks. She doesn’t recognize the man’s voice: high, a little nasal. “Didn’t you get the message I left?” he continues. “I left you two messages last night.”
“Who am I speaking to?” Maya asks. The only message she found on the answering machine down here was from Yuko, who is in Asheville with her band. She played a short riff on her bass and said, “Did you know they have the annual UFO conventions in Asheville? The mountains are beautiful. There are a lot of galleries downtown. Maybe we can come here together next spring.”
“This is Nate,” the caller says. “I’m calling you from Chicago.”
“Oh, of course.” He must have called Jeff’s house last night. He still wouldn’t know that Maya wasn’t living there. Unless Jeff changed the greeting, all it says on the machine is their number, not their names.
“So didn’t you get my messages?” Nate asks again.
“I think so,” Maya lies, before she realizes how stupid that sounds. “I was going to call you back,” she adds. “But it kind of slipped my mind. I’m sorry.”
“Well, I’m calling you from the hospital. Your mother was in a car accident last night.”
“What?”
“She made a left turn in front of an oncoming car and got side-swiped. That’s why I called you and asked you to call me back immediately. I said it was very important. I gave you two numbers.”
“Was she badly hurt?”
“Luckily, no. But she could have been. The other car caught hers in the back on the passenger side, and she ended up crashing into a stop sign. She broke her shoulder and got banged up a little. She’s sleeping now.”
“You didn’t say she was in an accident before, did you?”
“Of course not. Why would I say something like that on an answering machine? I was waiting for you to call me back, which you never did.”
Maya can’t think of a good explanation. “How long will she be in the hospital?” she asks instead.
“Just today.”
“Should I come to see her there?”
“It’s up to you,” he says, in a tight voice.
“Did she say she wanted me to come?”
“Maya, your mother’s been sleeping most of the time since they took her to the emergency room and worked on her shoulder. She’s pretty shook up. She’s in pain.”
All the years they spent together in Minneapolis, Kay shut herself in her room when she was ill. Bill had to sleep on the couch in the living room. “Don’t fuss over me. I only want to be left alone,” Kay would hiss if anyone came near, but maybe she’s different about that now. “I’ll come down as soon as I can,” Maya tells Nate. “Give me the directions.”
He doesn’t know the names of the streets, but he gives her long lists of gas stations, restaurants, and strip malls she must steer by. “And if you go over the bridge to the country club—I can’t remember the name of the place but you’ll know when you see it, it looks unmistakably like a country club—then you’ve missed the last turn and gone too far,” he finishes. She stopped writing anything after the first sentence.
“All right. I’ll be there in a couple of hours.” She hangs up, gets the number of the hospital from directory assistance, and says to the hospital receptionist, “I need directions to your hospital. I’ll be driving down from Milwaukee.”
Next, she calls Peg on her cell phone.
“Peg, I need help,” Maya says. “My mother was in a car accident. I need to go down to Chicago to the hospital.”
“Is she all right?”
“Her husband says she is. She wasn’t hurt too badly. But I should probably go see her.”
“Of course. Stick a note on the door and leave. I’ll get there as soon as I can.”
The door opens and four women come in, laughing in the middle of some anecdote one of them has been telling.
“Some people just walked in. I can wait. The accident was last night and she’s all right, so it’s not an emergency.”
“I’m in my car downtown. I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” Peg says. “Hang in there.”
When the four women leave, Maya still has one of their charge cards in her hand. She runs out to the parking lot. The women stop when Maya holds up the card.
“I’m sorry,” she apologizes, as one of them reaches out of the passenger window.
“Don’t worry. Maybe I should thank you for keeping me from spending more money.”
Her friend in the backseat chimes in. “No kidding. Alice always says she isn’t going to buy anything, and then she gets more than the rest of us combined.”
The others are nodding. They all laugh as they drive away. These four women have visited the store many times before; they are schoolteachers from Indiana, one or two of them recently retired. They’ve been vacationing together for years, leaving their husbands and children behind for a couple of weeks every summer. Walking across the gravel lot back to the store, Maya wonders if Kay has any women friends in Park Ridge. She has never heard of her mother going shopping or having lunch with another woman. Kay seldom says anything nice about other people, and the few she’s spoken of with begrudging admiration were always men. For women, she has nothing but contempt. “That woman, she’s just a housewife,” she would declare, “so we have nothing in common.” The women she worked with, on the other hand, were all backbiters and brownnosers, according to Kay. “Men are better,” she said. “At least, they’re more straightforward and honest even when they’re selfish.” Very few men, unless you are related to them, would visit you in a hospital. If she had been seriously hurt, Kay would have had no one to take care of her except Nate—no woman friend who would come calling with flowers or food and spend hours entertaining her with talk.
Inside the store, Maya puts away some clothes her customers left in the dressing rooms. The white summer jackets hanging overhead, with their empty sleeves spread out, remind her of the white crosses put up along the highway to mark the sites of fatal accidents. Peg’s doll, Wilbur, looks like a crash-test dummy. Maya can almost see her mother’s shoulder hitting the dashboard or the driver’s window. It must have hurt.
Kay must have sat in the car in shock, unable to unhook her seat belt or open the door. Maybe help was slow getting to her, late at night in a suburb. Sitting in the car with her broken shoulder, Kay might have gone over all the things that were wrong in her life—people often do that in the middle of some predicament—and if she did, any thought about Maya would have aggravated her. Stranded in the middle of the street, she might have remembered the humiliation she’d felt at that restaurant in December when she realized Maya wasn’t coming back. If she had died, her last thought of Maya would have been a complete disappointment
.
After another customer comes in and leaves, Maya runs up the stairs to her loft. Casper is sleeping on the couch, his back rounded, his front paws covering his eyes. She sits down next to him and calls his name. Even asleep, he begins to purr. Still, as she looks around the loft with her loom and worktable, her futon folded and pushed against the wall, Maya suddenly wishes she had never left Jeff’s house. The loft is meager and cluttered—the opposite of Jeff’s bedroom, with the white pillow shams and a matching skirt around the bottom of the bed, the lacy summer cover his mother had crocheted. Jeff always slept on his left side, his cheek squished against the pillow and his mouth slightly open. In her memory, his face seems so familiar and dear. Their life together was ordinary and calm; there was no room for nightmares or bad memories. How could she have left him and come to live alone in a drafty barn, spending the next decades of her life missing someone she won’t see again? Jeff could never hurt her much. The worst she got from him was like a surface wound.
She can hear Peg’s footsteps downstairs. Maya gets up from the couch and leaves the loft, closing the door behind her.
“Casper’s upstairs with the door closed,” she tells Peg, who’s hanging the rest of the clothes from the dressing rooms. “He won’t be able to bother you.”
“Do you want me to go with you instead? We can close the store. People will come back another time.”
“No, that’s okay. I’ll be all right alone.”
“Give your mother my best wishes, okay?”
“Thanks.” Maya grabs her directions and her keys and runs out to the parking lot.
* * *
In Chicago, Maya has no trouble finding the hospital, but, once there, she has to drive around, looking for the right parking garage. Some have gates that require special permits, and others have signs saying EMERGENCY ONLY, OUTPATIENTS, STAFF. Finally she finds a visitors’ ramp, parks on the top level, and tries to retrace her steps to the hospital’s main entrance.
The building seems to go on forever without any doors. The only entrance she comes across is for ambulances only. Her palms are sweaty and her stomach in knots as she continues to walk. When Nate first told her about the accident, she wasn’t all that worried. Because he said right away that it wasn’t serious and then sounded so irritated, she felt more defensive than anything, but now that she’s outside the hospital—unable to get in—she can’t stop thinking of broken bones, bandages, needles, lots of pain. The last time she was at a hospital was a year ago, when Jeff cut his palm open with a Swiss Army knife. That time, she had the presence of mind to run and get a clean towel first. Even though he was bleeding a lot, she could remember enough of her anatomy class to know that the cut wasn’t anywhere near a major artery. Driving him to the emergency room, she kept assuring him that at least the wound wouldn’t get infected because it was bleeding so much. Blood, she said, was the body’s own cleansing system. The worst that could happen, she thought, was that he would pass out and she would need help dragging him from the car when they got to the hospital. Now she’s picturing Kay wrapped in bandages like a mummy.
She must have gotten turned around when she came out of the ramp. The main entrance she saw from the car is nowhere to be found. When she finally sees a set of doors, it’s near a different parking area. Next to a glass booth, a security guard in his blue uniform is talking to someone who must be equally lost.
At her approach, the guard turns away from the man he’s been talking to. Maya is about to apologize for interrupting when the man calls her name. Ten steps away from them, Maya realizes that Nate has gotten a haircut. His hair was long enough to touch his shoulders. Now it’s all but shaved, giving his head a bulletlike appearance. He’s wearing a purple golf shirt and khakis. “Oh, Nate,” Maya mumbles, “I didn’t recognize you. I’m sorry.”
A wheelchair is parked inside the glass door of the building. Nate takes her by the elbow and steers her through the door. The woman in the wheelchair is wearing an old sleeveless button-down shirt and baggy shorts, both in a pale cream tint that looks as though the color got there by mistake. She has a neck brace, a cast that covers most of her left shoulder and arm, bandages around her left knee. The right side of her face is marked with abrasions—a raw red rash covers her swollen eye, cheek, and jaw. There’s a white bandage on her nose, too. Maya kneels next to the wheelchair. Her mother is clutching an orange plastic bag with black lettering—PATIENTS BELONGING’S—the words placed inside quotation marks with the apostrophe in the wrong place. Jeff would have been upset. “How come people don’t know how to use apostrophes anymore?” he would have complained. “And why in quotes? Do they mean, the so-called or alleged belongings?” The bag drapes over Kay’s right knee, which looks oddly raw because it’s not covered with a bandage like the rest of her.
“Mother, I’m sorry,” Maya blurts out. “I didn’t know you were so badly hurt. Nate told me it wasn’t very serious.” She is on the verge of crying, kneeling in front of the absurd plastic bag.
Kay stares at her. The neck brace makes her look as though she were stretched out and hung from something. “I’m not badly hurt,” she says, but her voice is hoarse and whispery. “I want to go home,” she croaks.
“Come on, Maya, get up,” Nate scolds. “This is no time for personal drama.”
As soon as she stands up, Nate’s hand is on her elbow again. He’s leading her outside. “You’re going to help me find the car.”
“What?” Maya pulls away so he has to drop his hand.
“Your mother’s been sitting out here for an hour because I couldn’t find my car. You can help me. It’s the least you can do.” He grimaces. “The parking is insane. I was in the lot for forty minutes and couldn’t find my car. That guard thought I was in the wrong one, but maybe the whole thing’s just poorly set up.”
“You didn’t look to see where your car was before you left it?” Maya asks.
“How could I?” Nate leans forward with an ugly scowl on his face. He reminds her of the high school boys who taunted her and her friends when they were in middle school. She can’t trust someone who suddenly cuts off his hippie hair and starts looking like a skinhead. “I was preoccupied. My wife was in a car accident and her daughter wouldn’t return my call.”
Maya doesn’t say anything as they walk around the building back to the ramp. On the first floor there, she presses the button for the elevator, but nothing happens. The elevator seems to be stuck on the fourth floor.
Nate is already opening the blue door marked for the stairway.
“My car’s on the top floor, in section F-Five,” Maya tells him. Following Nate into the stairwell, Maya almost gags on the smell of stale sweat and urine. After the first flight of stairs, Nate begins to talk. He doesn’t bother to turn his head back toward her, so his voice echoes on the walls and bounces around as though he were shouting at her from inside a boat while she was underwater. She feels slightly motion-sick.
“Anyway, that was no way to talk to your mother.” He pauses.
“What?”
“Telling her how bad she looked. You were scaring her. You should have said she didn’t look so bad. That would have been more reassuring.”
“I didn’t mean any harm by what I said.”
“You should be more mindful. You should think twice before you say anything to your mother.”
“I do think twice, actually,” Maya retorts. “I think three, four times before I open my mouth in front of her. That’s the truth. So don’t tell me I don’t think enough. You have no idea.”
“You can think all you want and do no good because you’re not paying attention to the right thing. You and your mother. You have several lifetimes’ worth of debts you keep passing on to each other. You’ve been together forever because neither of you knows how to forgive and let go. One life, she wrongs you; the next life, you wrong her. You’ll have to keep going on like that for centuries until one of you decides to stop.”
“I don’t know what you�
��re talking about.” Maya can scarcely keep her disgust out of her voice, but Nate doesn’t seem to notice or care.
“Karma. No doubt you’ve heard of it.”
“Of course I’ve heard of it. Only I don’t believe in all that nonsense.”
“I think some people are addicted to their bad karma just like alcoholics and heroin addicts are to their poison. Denial is a big part of addiction.”
Maya doesn’t say anything for a while. The stairways Escher drew had no beginning or end. They kept going around and around, branching out and then connecting back to themselves, and hordes of people were climbing the steps, believing they were going somewhere. Maybe, in his head, Nate pictures Maya and Kay trapped in an endless stairwell moving through history.
“Tell me something,” Maya says, as she and Nate start climbing up the last flight. “Do you say the same things to my mother? Do you tell her that she’s been wronging me through history?”
For the first time, he stops and turns to her. He’s taller than she, and he’s three steps above her. He towers over her, his thin bony face twisted with a big frown. “No,” he spits out. “That’s not my mission with her. Your mother is a beautiful soul who’s been hurt a lot—by you, mostly, but by her other husbands too. My job is to protect and nurture her, not criticize her and make her feel worse. I’m her peacemaker. I was sent to see her through to the next level. She can spend her next lives in the light, with me, instead of repeating the same bad karma over and over with you and those other men.” Whirling away, he runs to the top and pushes open the door.
Stepping out of the staircase after him, Maya is momentarily blinded by the sunlight. Nate is no different from Billy Graham and the multitude of other TV preachers who ask people to leave their seats in the stadium bleachers or on their living-room couches, stand up, and accept Christ as their personal savior. Like them, he believes that a single once-in-a-lifetime action can change a person’s destiny forever. But fanaticism is math that doesn’t make any sense: the bigger the eternal doom, the simpler the action that brings about salvation. Nate must stay awake worrying that he won’t be able to save Kay from her bad karma. He will move on to the next level of existence after this life since he’s been careful to put a stop to his debts. He’s afraid Kay won’t be allowed to go to that place with him, she’ll be kept back because of Maya and her previous husbands. Nate wants himself and Kay to move together for eternity like a pair of stars in the same constellation, but time is running short. They only have twenty or thirty years of this life left together. If he succeeds in saving her, he’ll be able to possess Kay through life, death, and into all the next lives; if not, he will lose her forever. His belief is enormously hopeful and desperate at the same time.