Sycamore

by Bryn Chancellor

  The days moved faster, too, when Maud found a letter. Before she knew it, it was lunchtime. She took her half hour in the shady parking lot of Juarez Autos. She waved to Angie Juarez working in the bays with Luz’s brother Beto, at Rose Prentiss and her daughter Hazel in the front office, but stayed in her truck to eat her PB&J, even though sweat soaked her shirt and shorts. She watched all of them—grown, healthy, their bodies heavier but still taut with youth. She tried to place Jess among them, to re-see her, transform her into an adult. But she couldn’t get the image to crystallize: Would her hair be prematurely white now, like Angie’s? Cut short into a bob like Dani Newell’s?

  “I like your hair like that,” Maud had said to Dani last week, when she’d gone to have blood drawn for her annual checkup. Dani had worked at the medical center for a couple years now, though she’d been in town since she’d failed out of Stanford so quickly. For years, Maud would see her at whatever job she happened to have—the deli counter at Bashas’, stock clerk at the HealthCo—or she’d spot her out shopping or walking or driving. Dani kept her head down, eyes averted, even when Maud waved hello. Maud knew Dani was renting Esther’s guest house now. Everyone in town knew Dani’s story, too.

  “Thanks,” Dani had said, not looking up from her hands as she tied the rubber tube around Maud’s upper arm. She flicked for a vein at Maud’s inner elbow, scrubbing at her skin with an alcohol swab. They sat so close, Maud could see a brown mark on the sleeve of Dani’s scrubs, a mottled red flush on her cheek, a vein thrusting at her throat. Her hands, though, remained steady.

  Dani said, “A quick sting. There. Okay, we’re in.”

  Maud looked away from the tube filling with her blood, her palms sweating.

  “Relax your fist now,” Dani said. When she pulled the needle out, Maud heard her make a sound, a soft moan. She looked up to see Dani with eyes brimming, her jaw locked tight, nose red at the tip.

  “Sorry,” Dani said. “Just thinking.”

  Maud said, “It’s okay.”

  Dani turned away to wipe the tears. Maud couldn’t remember the last time Dani had met her eyes. Dani unwrapped a bandage and stuck it on Maud’s arm, her eyes still downturned. “You’re all set,” she said.

  “Say hello to your mother for me,” Maud said.

  Dani nodded, pulling off her latex gloves, her short hair swinging.

  In the parking lot, Maud wolfed her sandwich, downed some water, stopped in the Juarezes’ bathroom, and then headed to Riverbend, working her way north in an east-to-west zigzag. She reapplied lip balm and sunblock. Cumulus clouds of the monsoon broiled to the east, cranking up the humidity. She tied a handkerchief around her neck to catch the sweat.

  Finally, Maud parked at the end of Arrowhead, her last street. She opened the truck’s hatch. If a supervisor lurked anywhere, all he would see was her loading her satchel with her final stacks. He wouldn’t see her finger the mail for 125 and slide out the letter, leaving it in the tray.

  At number 125, Maud didn’t turn up the driveway, but Laura opened the door and stepped onto the front porch, perhaps because she saw Maud coming. Maud hadn’t seen Laura in several days; in fact, she’d even left a note in the mailbox. Two days ago, the mail and the note were gone, so Maud hadn’t called the police to have them check on her.

  Laura had thankfully replaced her lime-green foam visor with a wide-brimmed canvas hat, but she looked too thin, her shorts bagging to her knees. Divorce, Maud had guessed, or a death in the family, from the way she dragged herself around town in the heat. She had to be Jess’s age or thereabouts, thirty-five, thirty-six. They resembled each other a little, too, although Laura was fair-haired. After a moment, Maud realized she was standing still, staring at Laura.

  “Nothing today!” Maud called, louder than usual, a flush at her neck.

  Laura waved, smiling. She adjusted the water bottles strapped to her waist and pulled on the brim of her hat. If she said anything, Maud couldn’t hear it.

  “Think it’s going to rain,” Maud called and waved back. She heard a voice she both knew and didn’t: You are here. She turned and looked behind her before she could stop herself.

  It was after five by the time Maud swung her sedan into the driveway, a bag from the Patty Melt and her lunchbox with the letter tucked inside on the passenger seat. Her wet shoes squeaked on the brake. The sky had waited to unhinge until after she finished her route, a swift, furious deluge that flooded the station’s parking lot while she wrapped up her tasks for the day. The storm had let up, and the streets were nearly dry again as the water soaked into the parched earth, seeping into the aquifers below.

  She turned off the engine and sat listening to the rain spatter on the hood, watching the steam curl up. The square stucco house looked the same as when she’d bought it in 1991. For years, her parents had wanted her to move home to Phoenix—Come home, Maudly. Honey, come home—but Maud stayed in Sycamore. In the same house. Same address, 825 Roadrunner Lane. Same phone number. Same good old car, now pushing 200,000 miles, thanks to Angie’s miracle working. She’d repainted the house, but in the same Navajo White. When the jacaranda near the breezeway died, she had planted another one. For better or worse, this was home. She could stay here and wait. She could do that much.

  She climbed out, her shoes squishing on the driveway. At the mailbox, she held her breath as she pulled down the little metal door: bills, an ad mailer, nothing else.

  Inside, Maud kicked off her soaked shoes and socks and changed into jeans, a T-shirt, and flip-flops, and then put the kettle on to boil. She ate her hamburger standing over the sink and then scarfed three of Esther’s cinnamon swirl bites. Sipping her soda, she unpacked her lunchbox and held the letter over the kettle’s steam until the flap lifted. Then she took the letter to Jess’s room.

  Maud had left the room the same for a while. Around year six, she had taken down the music posters, filled the holes with spackle, and asked Rachel Fischer to help her paint the walls with a fresh coat of Garden Mint. She had bagged the clothes and books and photos and put them in the storage shed. After all, if—when—Jess came home, she would not be a teenager. She would be an adult, ready to move on to her own space. Maud had replaced the double bed with a burgundy twill sofa sleeper, adding throw pillows, an ottoman, and a small television and DVD player.

  The one thing she had left the same was Jess’s desk, which had belonged to Maud when she was a girl and which sat as it always had under the window facing the street. A simple white cottage desk with three drawers and a hutch, where Jess had done her homework and written in her diaries—her notebooks, she’d called them. Plain black-and-white composition books, their sturdy covers held shut with rubber bands. After Gil Alvarez returned the notebooks, which he and the police had scoured for clues, Maud hadn’t packed them away, storing them instead in the lower desk drawer, along with the old answering machine. She pulled them out sometimes, reading them again even though she knew every word. Couldn’t stop knowing them. Two years’ worth, except the notebook from her last weeks, which she must have had with her.

  She pulled one out now, pressing the spine open with the heel of her hand. She ran her finger over the pen and pencil marks, feeling the indentations. She skimmed the first entry, written the day they’d arrived.

  January 1991

  —So here we are. Sycamore, Arizona. God’s little slice of heaven. The whole place is about the size of five blocks of our old neighborhood. What in the name of all things holy was Mom THINKING? Tells me, We need a change, J-bird. Yeah, so schlep your only daughter to the flat-fuck middle of nowhere? GREAT idea.

  Maud scanned to the end of the entry, to the poem whose stanzas slanted down the page.

  Tonight you watched the universe

  from the pavement

  the sky so black

  it howled

  Or was that you?

  You lifted your finger to find

  your place in space

  X marks the spot

  You A
re Here.

  You: flat-backed

  in the flat-fuck middle of nowhere

  staring at a galactic heart

  nestled in a nest of stars

  Are: the verb to be

  (or not to be)

  Conjugate it:

  I am

  You are

  She is

  When will you finish the sentence,

  fill in the blank?

  Here: A new home

  small and minty

  with salted black hills

  tiny speck on the pale blue dot

  You are here

  Dog-ear the page of yourself

  don’t lose your place

  For god’s sake

  don’t disappear

  Maud could hear Jess’s voice, or what she thought of now as her voice, husky, as if she’d just woken up. She pulled the answering machine out, too, plugged it in, and played it.

  There it was, tinny on the cassette: You’ve reached Jess—and here, Maud’s voice, chiming in—and Maud Winters. You know what to do and when to do it, so do it. Then Jess’s honking laugh, before the beep. Maud rewound the tape and played it again. And again.

  Maud could see Jess sitting there, hunched over the desk, filling the pages with her looping scrawl. Back then, Maud had thought this was normal, a good sign. A teenage girl writing in her diary—thank god. She had believed Jess was working out her anger and hurt about the divorce, getting it down, getting it out. And then came Thanksgiving. Maud could still taste the mouthful of dry turkey she’d been chewing, could still see Rachel’s dark eyebrows pulled tight together, Dani putting her forehead down on the table and retching onto the carpet. Adam, pale as the mashed potatoes. And Jess: hiding her face behind her brown curls, eyes gleaming, cheeks flushed, flapping her hands as if she could shake it away.

  She flipped to the last page, where she’d taped Jess’s final note:

  Mom,

  I’m going out for a walk (it’s about 4:45). I need to clear my head. I’ll be back in a couple hours. Don’t worry.

  Love, J-bird

  Maud closed the notebook. None of it mattered now. None of it helped. No answers, no hidden clues. All suspects with airtight alibis. The prevailing theory: Just another teenage runaway who didn’t want to be found.

  Except Jess wouldn’t have run. Maud knew it. She knew that much.

  The letter was like all the others in the past few years: handwritten address, thin, maybe a sheet or two. Maud never took birthday cards. Never bills or credit card statements or envelopes marked Urgent. Never postcards. She never kept a letter for long, a day or two at most. When she finished, she always resealed it with a glue stick and shuffled it in with the outgoing mail. She always delivered it. It wasn’t stealing in the strictest sense, but it was definitely tampering and a gross violation of privacy; if caught, she would be fired. She didn’t do it for the thrill, or to snoop, or to meddle. She didn’t have bad intentions.

  She did it because after eighteen years, every time she opened her own mailbox, she still held her breath. Every time, she shuffled through the envelopes, looking for the scrawl she knew by heart. Every time, nothing. She couldn’t count how many letters she had carried and delivered throughout her life. She could see the scads of them in her mailbag, feel the rough fibers, their sharp corners as she slid them into boxes. Thousands upon thousands. She wanted only one.

  The letter she had today was addressed to Laura Drennan and was from Mr. and Mrs. Robert and Ellen Drennan. Her parents, Maud guessed; the penmanship was neat, tight cursive—the mother. Maud held it up to the lamp. Looked like one folded sheet.

  As she eased her opener under the loosened flap, she pictured Laura Drennan standing on her porch, wearing those saggy clothes. Her face, in all those times Maud had shouted at her: a bird that had flown into a window, stunned into stillness.

  And Maud remembered Rachel Fischer saying that—“I feel as though I’ve smacked into a window. Flying along fine, and bam.” She’d shown up one afternoon at Maud’s house some months after Jess hadn’t come home, months after Maud had delivered the letters Rachel blasted across town, only later learning their contents: “Dear Sycamore Friends: I write to tell you some news.” In the return address field, she’d used their stamp—“Adam Newell and Rachel Fischer-Newell”—and scratched out his name and her hyphenate with blue ballpoint pen. She hadn’t named Jess, had written only “an underage girl.” Maud had stared through the screen at Rachel, who stood on the step, cradling a bottle of wine and crying so hard she couldn’t speak. Finally, Rachel had said, “I wished bad things for him. For her. But I never wished for this. Never.” Maud had opened the door.

  Now she set the unopened letter on the ottoman.

  She looked out the window. The rain had stopped, the low-hanging sun breaking through unsettled clouds. Friday. Happy hour. She ran her hand over her frizzy curls.

  Rachel didn’t answer the front door. Maud peered through the sidelight window. No movement, no flicker of the TV. No Hugh in the kitchen, with his loud, tuneful whistle even Maud could hear. No one home. Maud got in her car and started to drive home, but at the intersection of College Drive, she took a right instead of a left, toward the District.

  In the Pickaxe’s lot, Maud parked next to Luz’s zippy red convertible and stepped out into the humid evening, her flip-flops crunching on the gravel. She looked at the little red car and some part of her reached back, saw herself at twenty-one, just starting out. Back then, she’d been waiting tables at a sandwich shop near the Phoenix community college where she met Stuart in her Intro to Art History class, tumbling in and out of his bed and marrying him within six months. At the sandwich shop, she’d set down plastic baskets and big red tumblers on the checkered tablecloths, and she’d pause to look at the shining band on her left finger, thinking how lucky she was to find her true love, thinking of her future: they would finish college, get good jobs, buy a little house with a yard, travel the world. Simple, happy. On her and Stuart’s weekend honeymoon in Mexico, in the months before she’d gotten pregnant and taken the civil service exam and started her career as a letter carrier—in her father’s footsteps, as it were, though he’d wished her a different path—she’d stood on a balcony naked and watched the sunrise while her new husband slept. Watching the shimmering expanse of the Gulf, she’d thought, There’s the whole wide world, and she stretched to her tiptoes, reaching for it.

  Now Maud reached for the bar’s door handle, holding her breath.

  Inside the front door, Maud let her eyes adjust to the dimness. Luz stood with some coworkers near the pool table. Luz looked toward the door. “Hey, it’s Maud! Mamí! You came!” She waved her arms as if hailing a ship.

  As Maud walked toward those waving arms, she could not remember the last time she had been inside this bar. She knew it was early on, when they’d first moved to town, and she’d gone on a few dates with that charming Hector Juarez, who up and got cancer the same year. She remembered Hector’s stark white hair—like Angie’s now—but she didn’t remember anything about the dark paneling, the neon signs, the clacking pool balls and murmurs, the muted televisions perched in the corners. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d walked into a place she did not know. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d faced noises and voices and walked toward them. She couldn’t remember the last time she had walked toward someone without an armful of mail, carrying only herself as an offering.

  As she weaved through the tables, Maud thought of a different past, one before marriage and parenthood and divorce, before these years of loss and yearning: those fireflies on her grandparents’ farm. After her terrible fever broke, Maud, six years old, had folded herself onto Granddaddy’s wood-splitting rock near the barn at twilight. She couldn’t hear out of either ear then, and she was weak, disoriented, wrapped in a blanket despite the warmth of the evening. And there they came, flickering up from the grass with a yellow-green flash, hovering around the corners of her vision, lik
e a magic trick she had seen at a fair, a man flicking silver coins between his fingers, like the colors and shapes she’d seen in her fever dreams. The strangeness of it made her clasp her knees, holding tight, as if she might disappear if she let go of herself. As she sat there, the world was both too big and too small, and she wanted all of it at once. She reached out and caught one, and the creature bumped against her palms, tickling. She peeked at its glow through the cracks of her fingers. It was like nothing she’d ever known, as if from another world, one with all her heart she wanted to find. She whispered, “Go,” and opened her hands. And it did.

  Maud left the Pickaxe and drove up Roadrunner Lane to find a police cruiser in her driveway. Her first thought: stolen letter on the ottoman. The second: driving after two glasses of Chablis. It hit her as she pulled next to the cruiser and saw Gil Alvarez standing next to it.

  Maud stepped out, unsteady both from the wine and the fact of Gil. Under the streetlight, his hair looked silver. She blinked and realized it was silver. She hadn’t seen him in person for more than a year, not since his wife’s funeral.