When We Get There

by Shauna Seliy

  "You're worked up about a coal mine? Thought it was a movie theater or something. You sure you aren't mental? You won't catch me getting worked up over a coal mine. We don't live too far from the mine in Luna. That's why I have to smoke this cigarette. I miss all that smoke when I'm away from it. This is, like, portable. Billy used to say that all the time. He made perfect cigarettes, rolled them himself, no kidding, just like a machine. I still have one he gave me before he went away. He left me a whole batch, but I smoked about all of them, couldn't help myself. I saved just the one. It's a good one though." She opened up her pocketbook and pulled out a lipstick case with big Chinese flowers painted all over it. Inside was the cigarette. She smiled. "See, his fingers touched this." She looked at it for a long while. "Anyway, I'm Helen," she said. She closed the case up and put it back in her purse. "Helen Jameson."

  "I'm Lucas Lessar."

  "That's a good one. I like that alliteration." She looked over toward the fields. "They grow pigs down there," she said. "Like on a real farm."

  "What's alliteration?"

  Someone shouted inside the building. A door slammed. She stood up straight. "That'll be Mum," she said. "Every so often, she gets seized with the idea that we should come out here and spring Dad. Only it's the state that put him in here, so it's going to have to be them that lets him out."

  "The state?"

  "The state, you know, Pennsylvania." She smiled. "How old are you?"

  "Thirteen."

  "Thirteen? I thought you were older. You still got to get through high school. You're better off checking yourself in here, if you ask me. I just graduated last year. Mum made Billy and me go to the Catholic high school in Brilliant with the monks. I had the creeps the whole time. I had the creeps for four whole years. But I learned how to speak French and read Latin. Isn't that nice? Isn't that going to get me far in Luna?"

  "What do you mean the state put your dad in there?"

  "Well, who put your friend in there? Or whoever it was you came out here for."

  It got colder all of a sudden. I put my hands in my pockets. "I don't even know if she's in there."

  "Is she cracked?"

  "No."

  "Why would she be in there then?"

  "I don't know. Someone said she might be."

  "You're supposed to come on Sundays if you want to visit."

  "I'm here now though."

  "You are." She looked at me for a minute. "You want one of these cigarettes, Lucas Lessar?" She took a pack of cigarettes out of her purse. It was a new pack and she spent some time packing them, knocking them against her leg. A tractor started up in a field nearby. I watched it work its way across the field.

  "You know," she said. "I been in there about a thousand times. Dad started cracking up two minutes after we found out about Billy... What's your friend look like? Maybe I've seen her."

  "She's like a regular lady, with dark hair."

  "She nice-looking? Or is she a big mean steam engine like Mum?"

  "I don't know . . . My dad, other people, they used to say she was pretty, and that she looked like Hedy Lamarr."

  "Who's that?"

  "She was a movie star. In old movies."

  She turned around. The guard was standing outside the big doors. She shouted to him. "Hey, Red, you got anyone in there looks like Hedy Lamarr?"

  "Don't I wish," he said.

  She tapped a cigarette out of the pack and handed it to me with her lighter. "You know what you're doing, right? You're not going to drop dead or anything are you?"

  I'd smoked cigarettes before, though not the kind she was smoking. I said, "I know what I'm doing." I lit it and took a few breaths from it, but then I started coughing. I coughed and coughed.

  She shook her head. "What are you doing, Lucas Lessar? You said you wouldn't die on me."

  I looked away from her. I could feel my face turning red. I held my breath to stop the coughing.

  "Billy didn't like these kind of smokes either. He just rolled straight tobacco from the grocery store. I'm talking about him so much, I'm starting to sound like one of those girls that's practically in love with her brother. I wasn't like that before. I mean, I liked him all right. He was always trying to do something kind of big time. I liked that about him. You know, like he was saving up so that me and him could go over to France and talk it to some actual French people instead of to some dumb monks from Pittsburgh . . . How do you know her anyway?" she said. "The dark-haired lady?"

  It was hard to talk without coughing. "I just know her."

  "You know, Red is kind of a bleeding heart. He let Mum bring a record in here one time to play some old ugly song for Dad. Wait here."

  The cigarette was still burning in my hands. I tried smoking it some more. It was the middle of the day by then. More people were coming and going, the smell of meat boiling was stronger. A group of patients came out of a barn and went into a door on the side of the big red main building. The patients, all of them, wore the same kind of outfit; the men were in dark blue jumpsuits, and the women were in dark blue dresses that looked to be made of the same material.

  I'd choked my way through the whole cigarette by the time Helen came back. I threw the butt over the fence.

  "You didn't get any pleasure out of that, did you? Waste of a perfectly good smoke." She lowered her voice, "Red over there said he might be able to help you out. I sold him a big story about you. Said you walked all the way out here in the freezing cold from Banning looking for this lady, and that she was the love of your life. He says he can't get at the record book, the names, but it's lunchtime. You can get a look at a whole slew of them."

  From the cigarette, the inside of my head felt like it was lined with sparks. "Okay," I said.

  She held her hand out for me to shake. "I have to go see how Mum's doing, how deep she sunk her teeth into that nurse."

  She held on to my hand for a while. "So long, sailor," she said, walking away.

  I followed Red into the same side door where the patients from the barn had gone. A couple of swinging doors later, we were in the kitchen. It was crowded with big ladies in hairnets and men in tall white chef's caps, and huge pots, and tubs of mayonnaise and spaghetti sauce as big as beer kegs. "Who's this?" one of the ladies said, pointing at me.

  "Can you believe it? My nephew. Had some wrong idea to visit me at work."

  He asked after her family, and her headaches, and her new shoes. While he was talking, he pulled one of the chef's hats down off a hook, handed it to me, and pushed me toward a door. I turned around and looked at him and he nodded. I went through it.

  The room had green walls and big windows and spreads of long tables. Patients in the blue uniforms leaned over their trays. A couple of people stared at me. I put the hat on. They looked away.

  I walked around the room, close to the wall. It smelled of boiled meat and cleaning chemicals and restrooms. A lot of the patients looked just like anyone you'd see at the store or walking on the sidewalk, going about their business; other people had waxy skin and empty stares; and others couldn't seem to help fidgeting with their food or their hair or their clothes. A few people seemed to be so tired that they couldn't pick up their feet when they were walking; they slid them along the floor.

  It was the place itself, though, more than any one person, how big and strange smelling it was, that made me feel that Marko couldn't have been right about her being there. When we went out to eat, she would pick a diner if she had to, but she liked best a nice place in a department store with quiet music playing and ladies in smart shoes coming and going, carrying shopping bags with creased edges and tissue paper sticking out the top.

  I wanted to find her more than I wanted anything, but when I was looking around the room, with each face I looked at and saw it wasn't hers, I felt relief running all through me. As much as I needed to know where she was and that she was safe, to find her there would have meant that she'd changed so much she would practically be a different person.


  I felt someone tapping my shoulder. I spun around.

  It was Red. "Oh," I said. "Hi. The guy who said she was here was wrong about it, I guess."

  "No Hedy Lamarr?"

  I shook my head and handed him the chef's hat. What I had to do, I knew, was listen to the note she'd left me. Stop looking for her. Trust that she would be coming back like she said. Take care of my schoolwork. "I got to get back," I said.

  "All right. Hold on a minute—I need to talk to one of these nurses real quick," he said. He went away and came back a few minutes later with one of the student nurses. He nodded for me to follow them.

  We walked out of the dining room and down the hall through a set of doors, and then another set. I saw a sign for the office; we were headed back that way, toward the exit. It was all I could do not to break into a run to get out of there. Just as I was about to make a list in my head, like my dad used to do to settle down, the word California slipped into my mind and hung there like a stubborn wish. I whispered it to myself, and I kept my eyes on the nurse's cape, waving like a flag in front of me.

  We turned a corner, the nurse stepped over to the side—my head was still swimming a little from Helen's cigarette, and for a second, I had the feeling that the floor had moved so that I'd stepped out over a piece of empty air.

  There was my mother, sitting in a chair next to a window, smoothing her dress.

  Chapter 18

  When I saw her, I remembered something that happened after my father died. The two of us had taken charge of his tomato patch. He'd always worried about keeping the deer away. His last idea was to put hair out there. The deer weren't supposed to like the smell of human hair, so they would sniff it, he thought, and slink back into the woods. He told us to ask whoever cut our hair if we could have it when they were through with us. He was really the only one that remembered to do it though, so the bag was full of his hair, and just a little of my mother's. We had a pretty-good-sized bag of it by the time the tomatoes started to come up, but by then he wasn't living anymore. One night, after we'd seen a ten-point buck walking around in the yard, my mother said we should put that hair out in the garden. I said we should cut up a hose into pieces instead; the deer would think they were snakes. I told her I thought that would work better, but that wasn't really what I thought. I just didn't want to touch his hair.

  I watched her from inside the house. The porch light was on and it lit up the garden. At first, she went at it slowly, being careful about where she put it. Then she got impatient and started to throw it around, tossing it up in the air, letting it stay wherever it landed. When she came inside, she poured herself a glass of water and sat down at the kitchen table across from me. Under the lamp, I saw that all over her shirt were short pieces of black hair.

  She saw me looking. "What?" she said. "What?" She looked down at her shirt and then back at me.

  At Bedford, seeing her, I had the same feeling I did then. I should have thought to get rid of that hair, or thought to keep her from worrying over those deer, or thought of something to help her—but up against her grief, I was always outsmarted.

  "Your friend here's come for a visit," Red told her.

  My mother stood up and grabbed my hand. The student nurse pulled up a chair for me. "A visit. Not even Sunday. That's nice, isn't it, Mrs. Lessar?" she said, like she was talking to a baby. I didn't sit down. My mother looked at me and looked at me and looked at me.

  Red leaned over and whispered in my ear, "I'm going to have to escape you from here before the head nurse shows." He backed away but stayed nearby. Someone down the hall called for the student nurse and she left us there staring at each other.

  Finally, I said, "I know you told me not to go around looking for you . . . " I ran out of breath. I wasn't sure what I was going to say anyway. I looked at the floor.

  She put her arms around me. Then she stepped back with her hands on my shoulders and looked at me again. She touched my coat, ran her hands over the inside of the hood, and looked at the tag. Her hands weren't like before—they felt tiny, light, like small birds. She said, her voice cracking, "So where'd you get this?"

  I had a lump in my throat that I had to work to swallow down. She ran her hand over the scar under my eye and said, "Tell me everything."

  I tried clearing my throat. It didn't help much. It was hard to talk. I said, "Why are you here?"

  She stepped away from me and sat down. I sat down too. We didn't say anything for what felt like a long time. I wondered if there was a way to ever get enough sleep to fix how tired she looked. Her hair wasn't floating around her head like it usually did, like it was supposed to. It was hanging flat, and looked almost wet, greasy.

  I said, "I got it out of the closet at the farm, this coat. Greatgrandfather said it used to be Benci's . . . " I cleared my throat again. "The animals went away from there, even the dogs. Great-grandfather says I got to do something, have to fix it, but I don't know what to do. I don't know anything about farms or animals or—"

  "Remember when Frank D'Angelo quit the police and moved into that lawn chair in his yard?"

  I nodded.

  "I went over there one time and said to him, 'You can't do this, Frank. You're giving my son wrong ideas about it being okay to act like this—'"

  "You coming out of here with me? I figured out all the buses—"

  "I would always think—when I saw him over in that chair—I would think, I would never let that happen to me. I would never fall apart like that in front of the whole town..." She took a deep breath and said, so quietly I could hardly hear her, "But I guess I did."

  "What do you do in here?"

  She pushed a couple of tears away with the palms of her hands. "I take some pills. I talk to the doctors and nurses."

  "The state put you in here?"

  "No, no, honey. That's what I'm trying to tell you. I put myself in here. Slats and I came out—"

  "I knew it! I kept saying so. I knew she knew. Why wouldn't she tell me? Why didn't you tell me?"

  "I told her not to. I didn't want you seeing me like this. Or her. I told her not to come back here after she brought me up . . . It's like when my dad died, I wouldn't go to the viewing. I didn't want to remember him like that, stiff as a plank with his arms at his sides. I wanted to remember him how he was when he was mowing the lawn, or laughing at a joke, or . . . I don't want you to think about me in this getup . . . I didn't want you to know. I told her not to tell you. I'm sort of surprised she was able to keep it to herself for so long. Must be a record for her . . . But if she didn't tell you, how did you know?"

  "Marko."

  "Marko? How'd he know? She told him?"

  "He didn't know for sure. He doesn't know for sure. He kind of—he guessed it."

  "Marko," she said. "Well, he always did know me and Jimmy all the way through."

  Red stepped closer to us, "We got to think about making a break for it."

  "When are you coming out of here?"

  She didn't say anything.

  After a few minutes, Red tapped my arm. "You're going to get me in some trouble, and yourself too. They might not let you come back."

  I got up to go. She reached out and squeezed my arm at the elbow and stood up. Red pulled at my shoulder and then we were walking down the hall away from her.

  "About the farm," my mother called out. "Talk to Eli, maybe talk to Eli."

  "But he's not a farmer."

  She held up her hand in a wave, held it still.

  I turned around at every step to look at her.

  Everyone always said she was beautiful. I guess, looking back, it's possible that I only heard the good things they said about her, or that people might be likely to say that kind of thing to a young boy in a small town. But I don't think so. I didn't really know it until I was watching her disappear as I got farther away down that hallway at Bedford, but I think they said those things because they meant them. They were right—she was beautiful.

  By the time I got the whole wa
y back to Banning, it was almost dark. Walking to Slats's house, the line of streetlamps ahead of me started to flicker. I stopped to watch them pull themselves all the way on, and then I saw it—a long green car with a black top crossing from one side of the street to the other—the Skylark.

  Chapter 19

  Zoli told his friends at the Plate Glass that the night he decided to come back to Banning, he woke up thinking his pillow was on fire. He was sleeping in the back seat of the Skylark. It was bone cold. Frost was gathering on his windows, but waves of heat were pulsing all around him, like a flame coursing over his skin. He got out of the car and made a few laps around it to make sure it wasn't smoking. It was so cold he could see his breath, but his clothes were soaked in sweat.

  The first thing he saw coming into town was a column of smoke. He thought the pear tree was still burning, that maybe it was some kind of magic tree after all, like Mirjana's grandfather, that crazy old Russian, had always claimed. Then he thought no, it wasn't that, it was a fire at the Plate Glass, the wires in the front wall finally burned up like he always said they would. Then he decided it wasn't a fire at all; it was just a mirage, just a fear left over from waking up with that heat on him.

  He said that when he finally saw it, his house burned to the ground, the firemen standing around talking to each other, he wasn't surprised. He wasn't anything. He sat on the hood of his car and watched them walk through the soaking and blackened ruins, kicking things over.

  He'd parked back in the woods and listened to the firemen. They didn't know he was there. "She's all cashed in, this little house," one of them said. "Someone's going to pay. From what I know of Zoli. Even if he started it up himself."

  When they were through, they rolled up their hoses and drove away. Zoli came out of the woods and walked through his place. It was a little blackened bit of a house now. Everything was smashed. He found a few pieces of broken plates. He picked them up and carried them to his car. At the Plate Glass, he spread them out on one of the big tables at the factory and showed them to everyone.