The mural was moving. The Kid opened his eyes again after he didn’t know how long and in the murky blue light he could see the mural shifting, the sea waves churning, the dingy tossed on the waves, the pirate ship bearing down on the two doomed figures in the little boat. Water rushed around the slanted streetlights and telephone poles. The houses and buildings were burning, his own house was burning, red and orange woodcut flames sprouting out of the roofs of the neighborhood, licking at the ceiling of the room.
Darby drove with the gun on the seat beside him, the pain in his nose and the back of his head, his face wet, his shirt wet. He drove out of town, bypassing the freeway entrance, asphalt to dirt road to desert, the sunlight fading, fluid in his mouth, the gun a possibility, the gun an option on the seat beside him.
She was there, standing over him, his mom, looking just like he’d remembered, her crooked smile, her glasses, and all of a sudden The Kid was scared and embarrassed, worried about his smell, his bad breath and B.O., all the disgusting things that had driven her away in the first place, but she kept her smile and shook her head and when she spoke he could hear the tape hiss, the cassette-tape crackle behind her voice.
Darby walked from the truck, from what was left of the road, out into the dust and scrub brush, the sky purple as a plum, his shirt red and ruined, the gun in his hand.
He had wanted to make an even exchange, but there was nothing to give. He had wanted to hear Greene’s story, but there was no story, or no story he would recognize. When he met the real Greene, the Greene he had created fell away into dust.
Greene’s gun in his hand, hard and cool within his fingers, like a thing taken from a dream.
The cops stood on the front porch, hats in their hands. They showed him her license, her picture. He had the license at home, he remembered this now. He kept it in an envelope in a drawer in the garage. He hadn’t looked at it in over a year.
He was crying and he was grunting to keep from crying, to push it back into his throat. Moving like a wounded animal, dragging himself across the desert. Every few feet the sobs forced him to stop and kneel and gather his strength before he could walk again.
They had lost the things she’d left. Whoever had cleaned the motel room where she’d been found. She’d taken two pictures from the bulletin board over her desk back in the house that last morning, a picture of Darby, a picture of The Kid, and these things had been lost, the last things she’d looked at, the last things she’d seen. These things had been misplaced, thrown away, burned. There were blank spaces on the bulletin board now, the things she’d taken with her that they never got back.
He’d thought he could keep them safe. The things he’d taken from the rooms. But those things were gone, those things were lost now too.
He stopped and looked around. Nothing but sand, the outline of the truck in the far distance, the black hills beyond. He missed her so much he wanted to leave his body behind. He missed her so much he wanted to fade back into the desert.
The gun in his right hand, The Kid’s initials on the knuckles of his left. Their son, home alone now, maybe. Their son and his talk show. Their son and his notebooks. Every day he would look more like her. Darby knew this. Every day he would see her more and more in his son’s face.
Greene’s gun in his hand. It would only take a second. It would only take a moment, the same moment in all of those rooms.
A man in an apartment, a girl in her bedroom. A woman alone in a motel room with an orange door. Her son at school. Her husband at home, in bed, asleep.
He missed her so much. But there was something else, there was something more. He knew this now and it was like a blow, it was like a fist to his chest.
He missed his son, too. He missed The Kid.
He left the gun for the wind to bury, for the desert to devour. He walked back toward the truck, his hands heavy, his feet heavy, his nose leaking fluid that he called by its true name, the word entering his head for the first time in years.
The Kid was standing in the room. He’d been in some kind of achy not-quite-sleep and now he was standing in the room looking up at the angel. She was almost to the hole in the roof, up and away from the burning city. He could see the inky black sky above, the woodcut stars turning in the night. The angel stuck her head up through the hole and breathed deeply, sighed. Her cowboy boots dangled down into the room. Her skin glowed, her wings glowed. Her hands rested at her sides.
She spoke and he had never heard anything like the sound of her voice, would never hear anything like the sound of her voice, a thousand brass bands, TV talk-show bands, the fanfare of a million charged moments before the host steps through the curtain to greet the audience and the camera.
“An angel is someone who is gone, someone who is dead,” she said. “An angel is someone who is not coming back.”
And then she was gone, up through the hole in the roof, out into the sky, gone.
It is a cool, clear morning. The heat broke overnight, finally, leaving an autumnal snap in the air. She stands at the kitchen counter, making a peanut butter sandwich for Whitley’s lunch. David sits at the table, back from a job, drinking coffee to wind down. His pale bare feet stick out of the bottoms of his jeans. She asks him what she always asks him, where the job was. Not what it was, how it went, but where. Hawaiian Gardens, he says, down by the casino. He looks overtired, over-worried. He rubs his eyes, tries to block a yawn. He looks like a little boy.
She hasn’t slept in she doesn’t know how long. She has lost track of the time since she last slept peacefully. She and David have been up late for the last few nights, talking on the front porch, at the kitchen table. Crying, arguing, compromising. David pleading with her, offering to do whatever he needs to do to get her help.
She cuts the sandwich in half, wraps it in wax paper, packs it in a brown paper bag. She is surprised by how well she is able to do this, how well she is able to function. She is amazed by how normal it all seems, this day of all days. David finishes his coffee, puts his mug in the sink, shuffles back to the bedroom. Upstairs, Whitley’s alarm blares to life.
She rinses the dishes, walks back into the dark bedroom. David is already in bed, sheet pulled up tight to his neck, eyes at half mast. His jeans and undershirt lie in a heap on the floor. She sits on the edge of the bed, lays a hand on his cheek. Her hand is shaking, and he looks up at her, so she takes her hand away. She leans in and kisses him on the forehead, on the lips. She closes the door behind her when she leaves.
They walk the three blocks to the corner, she and Whitley. He totes his oversized backpack, she pulls her plastic rolling cart full of textbooks and notebooks and ungraded essays. He says a few things, not much. He is still chastened by her outburst, when she dropped the olive oil. She asks him questions, and when he replies with one- and two- word answers, she just talks anyway, she fills the space with sound. She finds herself telling him about her students, the kids in her classes, the questions they ask, the progress they’ve made. She tells him their names, their interests. She wants him to know them. She feels it is important that these things don’t get lost, that he know these things about them.
They stand at the corner. He looks out at the street, the swelling traffic. Goodbye, Mom, he says, and turns away, starts toward his school. Hey, she says, stopping him, turning him around. She wants to run to him, touch him, his hair, his face. But she says nothing when he looks back, she just forces a smile, a wave with her free hand. She lets him go, lets him turn and keep walking.
She waits for the bus at the corner. She takes it as far as the drug store. She buys what she needs, stuffs the bag into her rolling cart. She waits for the bus again, takes it as far as the motel. She has seen the motel a hundred times from the window of the bus on her way to school. The low, tidy brick building with a row of orange doors.
The manager sits behind the counter in the office, an older black woman, her thin hair graying at the temples. A younger black woman in a maid’s uniform is dusting the desks
and tables, spraying surfaces with lemon-scented cleaner and wiping them dry with a blue cloth.
Lucy pays for a room, asks that someone come by around 3 or 4 o’clock to do a quick cleaning, to change the sheets on the bed. The manager tells her that the room has already been cleaned, and Lucy says that sure that it has but that she’s just particular. The manager frowns, but the maid gives her a little smile and nod from behind the manager’s back.
She measures her life by fear, blocks of fear, their severity and duration. A block when she was six, a block when she was ten. A block from thirteen to fifteen, from seventeen to twenty. A block at twenty-three, a block at twenty-five. A block from twenty-nine to thirty-three. A block last year, the worst yet, a six month block starting when she received the call from her mother, telling her what had happened to her father, what her father had done. Her life as a checkerboard, black-red, black-red, alternating blocks of fear and anticipation of the next block of fear.
When she was a girl, she would lay in the backyard in Chicago and press her hands against her ears, squeezing her head, trying to keep it away. That dark thing that she thought came in through her ears. In through her ears and into her head. She lay in the grass and squeezed as tight as she could, writhing with the effort. The blue sky shaking above. Her mother came out the back door, across the grass toward her. Embarrassed, looking back and forth into the neighbors’ yards, worried that someone would see. Her mother grabbing her elbows and lifting her off the grass, hissing, What are you doing? What are you doing to yourself? Her hands came away from her ears and that dark thing crawled in through the opening. She wanted to scream at her mother for pulling her hands away, but it was too late. She shook her head as hard as she could, trying to shake the thing out, but it was too late. It was inside, again, and another black block had begun.
For years she covered her ears when she felt it approaching, but she never succeeded in keeping it out. It always came, through any opening it could find. Lucy in her bedroom, Lucy on the school bus. Lucy in her dorm room, in her car, in her apartment on the night of her first date with David. Lucy in the old house she and David bought, one of the things she thought would help keep it away. Lucy locked in the upstairs bathroom reverting to her old tricks, sitting against the toilet with her hands pressed to her ears.
This is no way to live. She knows this. This is not how people live.
The air in the motel room is still, lemon-scented. There are two double beds with white bedspreads, a small round table with two wooden chairs, a TV on a dresser. A sink stands at the far end of the room beside the door to the bathroom. She parks her cart in a corner, empties the drug store bag onto the second bed. Two bottles of vodka, a bottle of orange juice, a roll of scotch tape, a package of razor blades. A curled receipt for her purchase. She opens the curtain on the front window, stands in the early morning sunlight. The parking lot is empty. The light is warm on her face, on her neck. Dust swirls around her hands. She wants to sit on the edge of the bed, turn on the TV, watch the morning news shows. The comfort and company of familiar voices. She can see herself sitting here all morning, until the game shows come on, then leaving the room, leaving the things on the bed, taking the bus home, crawling into bed beside David. She can see stopping this, going no further with this.
She has dreams where she’s not afraid. She has dreams where she loves her husband, her son, her job, and that is enough, that is all she needs. In the dreams, she lives a life washed with relief. She is happy, she is free. When she wakes, the disappointment is crushing, the sense of loss for that other life. When she wakes, the fear doubles back on her, bears down on her with a vengeance, even stronger than before.
She closes the curtain. She takes a bottle of sleeping pills from her purse, sets it on the bed. She locks the front door.
The bathroom is small and clean. White tile on the floor and walls. She runs hot water in the tub. In the bedroom, she takes her wallet out of her purse, her license out of her wallet, sets it on the bedside table. She takes a plastic cup from the counter by the sink, peels off the cellophane wrapper. Pours orange juice into the cup, vodka. Spills much of it onto the counter, into the sink. She takes a drink. The warmth spreads down her chest, through her limbs. She opens the pill bottle, shakes the pills into her hand, swallows them two at a time, emptying her plastic cup. Pours herself another drink, less juice this time.
She checks the level of water in the tub. She tears a blank page out of her planner and takes a pen out of her purse and looks at the blank page. She sits at the table by the front window, the closed curtain. She writes across the page, Call the police. Please do not open the bathroom door. Please call a cleaning service, but please do not call Everclean Industrials in Glendale. She holds the pen over the page, reads what she’s written. Thinks of the maid back in the motel office, her smile and nod. I’m sorry, she writes. I’m sorry, again. One more time, a third instance at the bottom of the page. Something to break up the blank space. She feels that she can’t write it enough. She pulls strips of scotch tape from the roll, tapes the note to the front of the chair. Sets the chair in the middle of the room, facing the front door, where it can’t be missed. She finishes her drink. She takes her cell phone out of her purse, turns it off, sets it next to her license on the bedside table. She smoothes out the spot on the bedspread where the vodka and juice bottles sat. She does not want to disturb anything that she doesn’t have to disturb.
She turns off the faucet in the tub. Steam swirls across the surface of the water. She undresses, folds her clothes and sets them on the toilet seat cover. She does not look at herself in the mirror as she passes back into the bedroom. The rough carpeting under her feet. She takes the package of razors from the bed. She takes two photographs out of her purse. Before she left the house, she’d pulled them from the bulletin board above her desk. She sets the pictures on the rim of the tub. The first is of Whitley, standing on the porch the previous Halloween in a costume she’d made, an overstuffed bag of groceries. The second is of David in the booth at that all-night diner on their first date.
She’d barely made it through that evening, the beginning of another black block. The fear had been so great. But there was something about him, a physical presence, an internal solidity that made her feel safe. A kindness in his light green eyes. She looked at the tattoos running up his arms, disappearing under his short sleeves. Two days before, she would have clutched her purse if he’d passed her on the street. Now she couldn’t stop looking at him.
At one point he got up from the booth to use the restroom and she almost called out to him, she almost said his name, just to hear it in the diner, just to ensure that he was coming back. A few minutes later, when he sat back across from her, she was so relieved that she took his hand on the table and held it tight, smiling like a fool, rambling nonstop again, making noise to block out the fear.
She’d pulled her camera out of her purse and snapped a picture before he could even register what she was doing. She’d smiled like it was no big deal, like it was just an impulsive act, but this was an important thing, recording this moment, his face in the booth. If she never saw him again, or if she saw him for a few weeks or months and then never saw him again, she knew it was important that she have some physical proof, that she could always see his face in this moment and remember when she felt safe.
She opens the package of razors, takes one out, wraps the rest in toilet paper and places them in the wastebasket. She pours herself another drink. No juice this time. She closes the bathroom door. She steps into the tub. The heat passes up her legs, the tiny hairs standing to attention. The room is rubbery, inexact. The pills and vodka rushing through her system. She sits slowly, carefully, easing herself into the water.
She rests her head back against the tile wall. The tops of her knees, her toes break the surface of the steaming water. The two pictures sit down by her feet. She leaves her glasses on so she can see their faces. Her glasses fog in the steam and she wipes them with her
thumbs. She lets her arms slip under the water, her skin warming, softening. She looks at their faces. She is sure that she is crying, but she can’t feel anything anymore. Everything is numb. She sees David sitting at the kitchen table, his bare feet sticking out of his jeans, looking like a lost little boy. She sees Whitley at the street corner, looking back when she called to him, and she sees him as he will be in a few years, as a teenager, as a man.
She wishes that she were stronger. She wishes that she were someone stronger. She is so scared and so tired of being scared. She is so sorry. She could have covered that note with apologies, she could have filled the page, but there was nothing more to say.
The razor cuts cleanly and quickly and she takes off her glasses and closes her eyes and submerges herself in the water and lets go.
The Kid felt a hand on his arm. He opened his eyes and saw Matthew’s face hovering above him.
“I thought you were dead,” Matthew said.
Matthew led him out of the burned house, over the wall, onto the sidewalk. He carried The Kid’s backpack over his shoulders. Matthew said that he’d seen The Kid talking to Michelle after school and then running in the direction of the burned house. He was worried, so he’d snuck out of his house just before dinner to look for The Kid. He said he’d probably be in big trouble when he got home, but there wasn’t too much he could do about that one way or the other.
They walked out of the neighborhood, The Kid feeling nauseous and unsteady. He threw up in a row of bushes near Gift 2000 and felt a little better. Not great, but better. He didn’t know what time it was. Looked like prime-time TV time, televisions flickering in the windows of the houses and apartments they passed. Matthew said that they should go back to his house so Matthew’s father could take The Kid to the hospital but The Kid just wanted to go home. His hands and feet tingled, like they had been asleep for a long time. Matthew held onto his shoulder as they walked. The blue star on The Kid’s arm was now just a dark, sweaty smudge.
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