“Can I have an egg white omelet?” asked Ashley.
“Can’t be just the whites—it’s all mixed together,” replied the waitress, perplexed.
“Oh, forget it, just scrambled eggs and toast.” Ashley patted her belly as if preparing it for the extra calories.
Erica plowed into two biscuits as big as baseballs drenched in a plaster-like white substance studded with sausage chunks. She chugged down her third mug of coffee. The biscuits tasted like greasy sheet rock. Her stomach was so uncharacteristically full that she felt leaden and exhausted, as if she could put her head down on her elbows and fall asleep, right there at the table. Which was exactly what Sophia did, her cheek flat against a slippery slice of banana. Erica left her with Ashley for a few minutes while she did a few more lines of coke in the bathroom stall, which made her feel like a rubber doll, her mouth speaking, her limbs moving, everything functioning basically as it should, but not necessarily connected to her conscious brain.
She emerged to find Ashley wiping off Sophia’s cheek and coaxing her to drink a little milk.
“Such an adorable baby,” the waitress cooed as Erica paid the bill. “Poor thang. Does she have a summer cold?”
“Yeah, “Erica said.
“Maybe you should put a heavier sweater on her,” the waitress suggested.
“In this weather?” Erica fidgeted, eager to get going.
“Where y’all from?” asked the waitress.
Erica pressed her lips against Sophia’s warm, moist forehead. The last thing she needed was more clothing.
“New York,” Ashley answered.
“New Yawk?” the waitress said, handing over their change. “I should have figured from your accents. My son wanted to go to New Yawk. He got into NYU, into their film school there.”
“Did he go?” asked Ashley.
“No, it would have cost a fortune,” the waitress said, handing over their change. “He ended up going to the state university. He owns his own photo shop in Charleston. Where are you folks headed?”
“Burkittsville,” she answered. “I have relatives there,” she explained. Sophia leaned heavily against her shoulder. The incessant necessity to engage in polite conversation, plus the thick air, smelling of burnt coffee and scrambled eggs, pressed in on Erica. Her veins swelled against her thin skin, all that blood roiling, that air sharp in her lungs. Her body struggled to contain it.
“All the way from New Yawk?” exclaimed the waitress. Have you got family in the penitentiary?”
“My nephew,” Erica said.
“What’s he in for? Drugs?”
“Clarissa, there’s folks here needing their breakfasts,” a man called from a nearby table.
“Well, I won’t keep you any longer,” said Clarissa. “Have a nice day now.”
Outside, the dense air smelled of grass and cow manure and something industrial Erica couldn’t identify. She didn’t turn on the air-conditioning, for fear of Vince overheating. She couldn’t take a chance of him breaking down on these strange roads. The Tylenol seemed to be helping Sophia. She was babbling, pointing at cows. Erica’s stomach hurt. She shifted in her seat, ejecting the REM tape and scanning the radio, finding nothing except dreadful country music stations and a couple of preachers blathering on about how the end of the world was coming. Ashley drew elaborate spirals on the backs of her hands.
They passed a sign that read, “Burkittsville, population 3100, Home of the Panthers.” To their right stood a series of barracks-like buildings set far behind a wall of barbed wire.
“That must be the penitentiary everyone’s talking about,” Erica said. Which made it seem like it might be exactly the place they were looking for.
“Excuse me—is this the Pritima Center?” she asked a sullen fat guy reading a paperback in a booth adjoining a locked iron gate.
“No, ma’am,” the guy drawled. “This here is Burkittsville State Penitentiary”.
“Do you know where the Pritima Center might be located?” She stuck her head out into the dense air, radiating what she hoped was an ingratiating smile.
He scratched his head. “Do you mean that private school? There’s a school. Down the road a ways. In the old plantation house, lots of gardens.”
“How do I get there?”
“Turn left by the motel, then down Main Street, past the courthouse, and then past the gun club and the rib shack, make a right, you’ll see a fancy white house with columns and rosebushes—that’s it.”
“Thanks,” Erica said. When they passed the motel, she pulled in and parked. Her eyes were closing. Even her rubber doll arms were failing.
She felt Sophia’s forehead. It was still warm and sticky. She opened her eyes, blearily, and then shut them again. “Can you try giving her some apple juice, Ashley?” Erica asked. “I’m going to head on in here and change my Tampax.”
“It’s only nine in the mornin. The rooms aren’t cleaned yet,” said the motel clerk. He was bug-eyed and unusually short; Erica couldn’t decide whether he was a dwarf or just really ugly.
“Doesn’t matter.” Erica yawned. “May I use the rest room?”
The troll-like clerk handed over a key and sent her around the side of the building. She stretched out Sophia’s changing pad over a sink the size of a mixing bowl and snorted a few lines. She was running way too low. She should have brought all of Anders’s stuff instead of leaving it behind, flattened under a jug of fabric softener.
“Have a nice day now,” she told the troll as she handed back the key.
“She took a little of the juice,” Ashley reported when she returned. “And I gave her a couple animal crackers.”
They passed what Erica assumed was Main Street: the rib shack; a small grocery; a drugstore; Felicia’s Cafe (closed); a Laundromat; a resale shop; and something called Feed and Seed. Main Street ended at the courthouse, an imposing-looking white building set back on a dusty lawn. She turned right again, on what seemed to be the only valid road, and passed an elementary school, a couple of churches, and a pawn-and-gun shop, ending up at a T intersection with no indication where to go.
She turned right again—right seemed to be the order of the day—passing small houses, little more than shacks, that seemed to shrink in size the farther she drove from the town center. Chickens pecked and clucked in the yards.
The road narrowed, became gravel, and a few miles down was blocked by a wooden gate. A mild retching sound came from the backseat. Erica turned around; a spatter of spit-up juice and cookies littered Sophia’s chin and pretty pink dress. “Are you okay, honey?” Erica asked, wiping the baby’s chin.
“Mama,” Sophia said. Her face was flushed and hot.
She wiped it with a cloth dumped in some of Ashley’s Evian water and then stood at the side of the car and looked around. An overgrown path led off into a strand of woods. Erica got out of the car and peered around the gate, looking in vain for a big white house. A posted sign warned, “No Trespassing.”
“Mrs. Richards, is this it? ’Cause all this is giving me the creeps, and I’m sweating like hell. And it smells like barf in here.” Ashley spritzed rosewater about.
“I’m checking, I’m checking.” Clusters of mosquitoes buzzed around Erica’s face. Beer cans and piles of cigarette butts littered the adjoining weeds. From the distance, she heard what sounded like a rifle shot. Behind her, she heard a screech of wheels.
A man wearing dirty blue jeans and a T-shirt emerged from a wobbly flatbed truck, hauling piping. He reached in his pocket, and she fell to the ground for protection, like she’d seen on so many cop shows, covering her head with her arms. They’d find hers and Ashley’s and Sophia’s bodies rotting in the sweltering heat.
“Ma’am, can I help you?” the man asked.
“No,” she gasped.
“You sure?” he asked, extracting what was in his pocket, a
bandana to wipe his perspiring forehead. “’Cause I see those kids and those New Yawk plates.”
“We’re okay,” she said, breathing heavily, rising to her knees. “Thanks.”
The man was middle-aged, broad faced, wearing an orange vest. He helped her to her feet. His breath smelled like tobacco. “Better be careful around here,” he said. “It’s pheasant season.”
“D’you know where the Pritima Center is?” Erica asked.
“The reform school place?”
Erica nodded.
“I had a feeling,” he said, looking knowingly at Ashley huddled miserably in the car. “Turn around, go back to town, take your first right past the courthouse and then the next right by the Foursquare Church. It’s about ten miles down the road. You have a good day now.”
Pheasant season. Erica had been served pheasant once, at a Grant Fishel dinner. It arrived on a bed of wild rice, with its little beady-eyed head wobbling about. She couldn’t eat it. The man’s directions were correct, though. She passed a church with a billboard pronouncing, “In the gym meet of life, Lord, please give me a perfect ten,” turned right, and a large white mansion, like the courthouse but bigger, materialized on Erica’s left. It was set well back from the road, behind a gate almost as large and imposing as at the penitentiary. Paved paths threaded through past a center circle, landscaped with magnolia trees, gladioli, and roses. A bench sat under a large oak tree. Outside of the circle, off a ways, she saw tennis courts, a swimming pool, and what looked to be vegetable beds. In front of the gate was one of those telephone gizmos where someone could buzz you in.
“Listen, you can’t come in with me, but I can’t leave you here, Ashley,” Erica said. “Someone’s bound to come out and ask you what you’re doing.”
“I lie real well.” Ashley twisted her silver ring. “I’ve run away twice.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Erica said. She drove down the road a half-mile or so, turned down a dirt track, and parked by a desultory creek, where a thin trickle of water dribbled over mossy rocks.
“Wait here by this stream,” she said, handing Ashley the last of the boxed drinks.
“I hope no one is going to shoot at me thinking I’m a pheasant or squirrel or something.” Ashley shifted from side to side on the uneven ground, flicking away gnats. She’d changed in the cafe restroom and was wearing a silk tank top with a crocheted lace edge, distressed jean cutoffs, and sandals with two-inch heels. “I’m scared,” she said.
“I’ll come back with Jared,” Erica assured her.
She drove back to the gate, and despite the oppressive heat, put Sophia into the front carrier. She couldn’t see breaking Jared free while pushing a stroller. She stripped Sophia down to her diaper, tied a ruffled pink hat on her head, gave her a bottle of apple juice, hoping she would keep it down, and pressed zero on the keypad. “Pritima Center,” answered a voice with the same drawl she was becoming accustomed to but a little more clipped, a little less friendly. “Who is this?”
In answering, Erica took a cue from her mother. “Sound authoritative,” her mother had told her since she was a child. “Sound like you know what you are talking about, and people will assume you do.” This approach had allowed her mother to return a year-old white couch because of stains, exchange pants that had already been hemmed, and no doubt earn her commissions on many West Meadow houses.
“Mrs. Mary Brittaca,” Erica pronounced. Mary Brittaca was Dylan’s fifth-grade teacher.
A buzzer sounded, and the metal gate swung open. Erica walked up the long path, her dress already damp at the underarms, Sophia’s cheeks flushed with heat and fever. A swarm of gnats buzzed about her tender neck, undeterred by Erica’s ineffectual swatting. Both sides of the path were lined with beds of brightly colored zinnias and geraniums, all carefully weeded and watered. She passed a group of teenagers and a man in his early twenties sitting cross-legged under a magnolia, apparently engaged in a class of some sort. They looked at her curiously as she passed by. None of them were Jared.
She walked up a flight of wide white steps and onto a covered porch and rang another doorbell.
“Who is this?” came the same voice through the loudspeaker.
“Mrs. Mary Brittaca,” Erica repeated.
There followed a slight hesitation and then another buzzer. Erica opened the door. Sweat dripped like raindrops from the tops of her breasts down to her belly, soaking her chest under the baby carrier.
Once inside, a waft of air-conditioning sent chills down her body. She walked down an imposing marble hallway. At the end of this hallway an office opened up, with a big-breasted fiftyish woman sitting at a desk, and, standing, a younger, harder looking woman with pixie-cut blond hair, whom Erica immediately termed Miss Peroxide. As Erica entered the office, it became clear that the woman at the desk had buzzed her in and Miss Peroxide wasn’t any too happy about it.
“I’m Mrs. Mary Brittaca, and this is my little daughter, Sophia.” Erica extended her arm.
The woman accepted her hand with a firm grip. “And what agency are you with, Mrs. Brittaca? We don’t typically admit visitors without documentation. Mrs. Lagore here is new and was a little forward in buzzing you in.”
“Oh, I’m not with an agency, Miss Pero—your name?” Erica continued smiling, attempting to channel not only her mother but Jeff Russell, who’d once weaseled their way into a Steppenwolf concert without any tickets.
“Mrs. Olney.” Her voice dripped poisoned honey.
“Mrs. Olney, I’m here to see Jared Lassler. I’m his big cousin, and I’m on my way to visit relatives in Atlanta, and I know he’s been, uh, going to school here, so I couldn’t pass by without visiting him.” Erica gave her best attempt at what she hoped was an ingratiating smile. She wrapped her arms around Sophia, claiming possession.
“What a darling little girl.” Mrs. Olney oozed more honey, and Erica hoped against hope that once again Sophia had rendered her harmless.
“Jared Lassler is on schedule F,” Mrs. Lagore said, consulting a list on her desk.
“I can’t imagine how you got our address. Someone must have broken confidentiality,” said Mrs. Olney. “I’m sorry you’ve driven out of your way, Mrs. Brittaca, especially with a young child in this heat, but I can’t allow you to see Jared.”
“Why not?” Erica tried, unsuccessfully, to keep an edge out of her voice, which sounded harsh and foreign in South Carolina under the best of circumstances. “Actually, his mother hasn’t been well. She’s had problems, as you might know, with a blood condition, and I know Jared is concerned. I could reassure him she’s all right.”
“We have a very well-planned, gradated program here at the Pritima Center. Jared has regular phone contact with his mother, and I’m sure she would share with us any changes in her condition.” Mrs. Olney’s voice was clear and measured. “Visitors are a privilege accorded only to our very highest level students, those who are almost ready to graduate. Jared is nowhere near that level at this time.”
“He’s on schedule F,” echoed Mrs. Lagore.
Sophia reached her sticky fingers onto Erica’s neck and coughed. Erica looked away from the four eyes fixed on her, to a rack of pamphlets. Above them hung a poster featuring a child leaping through a field of daisies. Superimposed over the flowers were the words “Home. Faith. Family.”
“We’re a very close family,” Erica tried again. “Are you sure I couldn’t just say a little hello to Jared?”
“As I’ve made eminently clear, Mrs. Brittaca, that would be in violation of our rules,” said Mrs. Olney, her voice brittle. “Now, if you don’t leave, I’m going to have to escort you out of here.” Mrs. Lagore rose unsteadily from her seat, the shelf of her bosom wobbling. The two women closed in on Erica. She breathed heavily. Sweat trickled down her belly, below the elastic ridge of her underpants.
“Let me escort you out,” said Mrs. Olney and t
hen led her down the hall and down the stone path to the gate.
“I’m sorry to have wasted your time, Mrs. Brittaca,” she said as the metal clanged shut. “Why don’t you and your little girl go get some sweet tea in town? You both look tuckered out.”
Erica watched Mrs. Olney walk up the path and back into the big white house. The group under the magnolia tree had left. Erica walked down the fence a ways, noting that it was just an ordinary wrought-iron fence, not that high, without spikes or barbed wire. At one spot a thick limbed tree abutted the fence. She clambered up the branches like she used to do as a kid, balancing Sophia in the baby carrier. “In the gym meet of life, Lord, give me a perfect ten,” she muttered to herself as she clutched Sophia’s carrier tight, straddled the top of the fence, and swung her way down onto the thick, flat top of a well-groomed azalea bush. She jumped down onto the grass. Brushing off leaves and twigs from her dress, the baby carrier, and Sophia’s hair, with the full assurance of someone who knew where she was and what she was doing, she cut across the lawn to the back of the big white house and kept on going.
Behind the pretty house, the landscape looked shadier and shabbier. The buildings hidden from outside view were barracks not dissimilar from the penitentiary. The grass was shaggier, the flowers limited to dandelions, the paths dustier. She passed an outdoor shower and a collection of buckets. At one of the buckets, true to Hayden’s tale, a girl scrubbed clothes on an old-fashioned washboard. Past the barracks lay rows of limp vegetables, a pen with goats, a chicken coop, a field of grazing cows, and a series of sheds. She passed teenagers picking beans, doing something unpleasant with the chickens, painting a shed, even dumping lime down an outhouse toilet. All of them looked limp, skinny, sullen, and deeply tanned. None of them were Jared.
“May I help you, ma’am?” asked a tall boy hauling a sack of fertilizer. “No, no, I’m Mrs. Brittaca,” she said, wary of any attention. A group of kids emerged from one of the sheds, holding garden implements, led by a man hauling a wheelbarrow. One of the teenagers had a familiarly shaped head, albeit shaved; a familiar long, angular body, albeit painfully thin; and a familiar languid slope of the shoulders. “No, no, no, I see the group I’m looking for,” she assured the boy, who was still lingering at her side. She brushed past him, almost stepping into a cow pie as she lengthened her stride, catching up with the group, gently tapping Jared on the shoulder.
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