This Time Might Be Different

by Elaine Ford

  Let the devils go out from my mother, Molly prayed. Let them go back wherever they came from.

  September 1999

  Marty saw a girl down at the end of an aisle, next to the shelves of adhesives and sealers. Her hair, the pinkish silvery color of raw wood, caught his attention. She was tall, big-boned, wearing a faded T-shirt. He felt that he’d seen her before, and more than once, but couldn’t recall where.

  As he passed she stared at him, her hand on the hip of her jeans. His scalp prickled. Had she purchased an unsatisfactory product here? Or been shortchanged and blamed it on him for some reason? The impression that he knew her reminded Marty of the way especially vivid dreams keep sliding into your waking hours the whole of the next day.

  August 1999

  At two in the morning Molly woke and realized her mother’s bed was empty, the sheet dragged onto the splintery floor. Finally she found her down by the road in her nightgown, trying to hitch.

  Where are you going, Ma?

  To work. I’m late for work.

  You don’t work anymore, Ma.

  I do. I’m going to be late.

  Where do you work, then?

  Fear belly sin. Fly bite sting.

  What are you talking about, Ma?

  I’ll let him down if I’m late.

  Who, Ma? Who?

  I can’t let him down.

  That’s when Molly began to figure things out.

  November 1990

  Lengths of white plastic pipe, wooden dowels, poster board, sandpaper, duct tape, all manner of odds and ends covered the card table set up in the middle of the front room. Teresa picked up a little round mirror and looked into it, but the person she saw wasn’t herself. “Is this a trick mirror?” she asked.

  “Trick?” Molly leaned over the table, cutting into a length of pipe with an old saw she must have found in the shed. Strong hands she had. Big bones. Teresa didn’t know how she managed not to bang her hand against the wall whenever she put her arm in her jacket. Only twelve years old, but she was like Jack’s beanstalk, growing so fast you couldn’t guess where she was going to end up. “It’s convex,” Molly explained.

  “Oh. What’s all this for?”

  “My science fair project. I’m making a model of the space telescope.” The pipe came apart into two, and Molly started sanding the rim of one of the pieces. “It sends pictures to Earth, pictures of things no one’s seen before.”

  “Like what?”

  “Planets, galaxies, nebulae. Whatever’s up there.”

  Picturing those mysterious things swirling overhead made Teresa feel weirdly dizzy, like too many trips on a merry-go-round. Scared she was going to faint, she went into the kitchen, pulled a chair away from the table to sit, and dropped her head between her knees.

  November 1990

  Denia’s head hurt and a stitch worried her side. “You go on,” she said. “I’ll wait for you here.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course.”

  For a moment she watched Marty hurrying to catch up with the others, his long legs pumping, his rear end urgently clumsy as he negotiated the rough trail. Silly fool, pushing fifty, just asking for a broken ankle or a heart attack. She turned her back and sat on the bench, huddled in her old goose-down parka. This vista overlooked a cove, where icy saltwater licked shale. Stunted jack pines leaned precariously from the cliff. Decaying vegetation in the woods behind her gave off an unpleasant smell, something like dog shit.

  Insane, this spur-of-the-moment expedition into the wilds of Quoddy State Park, a misguided impulse to show off the splendors of Maine to Marty’s cousin and his wife up from Billerica. Denia had drunk too much the night before and then awakened at five, hours before dawn, jittery and sick to her stomach.

  She felt the chill of the wood bench through her pants and began to regret her decision to stay here, where the path looped back on itself. The others would be hiking through the wilderness for an hour or more. She wasn’t happy in their company, hated their stupid chitchat, but the truth was, she was even less happy in her own company.

  How spare and unrelentingly dull was the landscape, how unforgiving. Not even a hint of sun behind low clouds. She stared down at the stony, seaweed-strewn beach fifty feet below, trying to empty her ears of voices—theirs, and also her own.

  For warmth, Denia dug her hands into her pockets. She became aware of something in one of them, a scrap of paper. A grocery list from some previous time she’d worn this coat, could have been last winter or the year before, even. “Milk,” it said in her own absentminded scrawl. “Bread. Eggs.”

  A simple diet, easily digested, rich in nutrients. A diet for a pregnant woman.

  After the last miscarriage—or spontaneous abortion, as the doctor called it—Denia refinished all the floors in the house, the electric sander screaming in her ears, the dust clogging her lungs. Then down on her hands and knees, her back aching like crazy, breathing the fumes of stain and varnish. The house was upside down for months on end, and she barely paused even to eat. Marty made himself scarce. When the floors were finally done she couldn’t enjoy them. She knew where the flaws were, the places the sander scoured too deep, the smudges in the finish.

  She couldn’t enjoy anything, in truth, hadn’t for a very long time. Nothing worked out the way she intended—there were always complications she hadn’t prepared for, hadn’t counted on. Like the bedspread she began to crochet, but the yarn kept tangling into knots, and the pattern turned out to be fiendishly complicated. To this day, in the back of her closet lurked a bag full of that expensive, unused yarn.

  There was the boutique she opened on Water Street. She’d gone to so much trouble to find hand-woven scarves and hats, wooden toys, crackle-glazed pottery. But people around here didn’t care about owning such things, even if they had the money. Sales to tourists hadn’t even paid the rent on the shop, and she ended up reducing the merchandise to half price and having to swallow three months’ rent on the lease.

  Another year she took a still-life class on Wednesday nights at the high school, imagining that she could be an artist. The fruit she’d carefully chosen and arranged rotted before she could make it look right on the canvas.

  Sitting there on the bench Denia thought about all that wasted fruit, pears and melons and plums and nectarines. Their cloying odor seeped around her. She couldn’t get the fruit out of her mind; it was like having a fever and being tormented by images and smells that won’t go away. She gagged. Her stomach in turmoil, she lurched from the bench and threw up such a quantity of thin yellow fluid that it seemed nothing could be left inside her. “Please,” she whispered.

  When at last she was finished Denia crouched at the edge of the cliff, her head pounding, her stomach muscles sore, her throat raw with the sour bile. Below her, the tide was receding, leaving glistening flat rocks in its wake.

  Then she felt better. She used her foot to cover the mess with dead leaves and returned to the bench. The old grocery list, she realized, was still crumpled in her hand. Eggs, bread, milk. Biblical in their simplicity. Denia was aware of a powerful yearning for her life to be that uncomplicated, that pure. The air seemed warmer now, and dryer, and the sky had begun to glow with a faint pearly luminescence.

  After a while Marty came stumbling down the path. “I was worried about you,” he said, laying his big hand on her shoulder, “left here all alone.”

  “I’m fine,” she said, and she prayed it was true.

  August 1978

  Teresa set her suitcases on the floor and looked around. The place wasn’t so bad. Hot, though. She reached over the kitchen sink and forced up the window, which screeched in its corroded aluminum frame. No screen. She guessed she must have ended up somewhere near the sea, but all she could see out there was high grass and weeds. The sink enamel was stained, worn right down to the rough brown s
urface underneath. She turned on the tap and air spurted. A trickle of rusty water ran out of the faucet.

  The fridge was unplugged and when she opened it she smelled mold. Black spots in there. Didn’t matter, the food she’d brought wouldn’t need refrigeration anyhow: crackers and peanut butter, packets of dried soup. Sure could use a cold drink, though. She found a jar on a shelf, wiped out bits of dead insect with the hem of her blouse, and let some tap water run into it. Ugh. Metallic-tasting, but better than nothing.

  Teresa felt the pain creeping up on her and she sat down in a kitchen chair. 3:19 in the afternoon by her watch. She knew she was supposed to time them, but then what? Her understanding of how this was supposed to go was fuzzy, because she hadn’t really believed it would happen. Something would put an end to the situation before it got this far, a tumble down a flight of stairs or a car crash. Yet when she woke up this morning she found the bloody smear on her nightgown, and here she was.

  Packing her suitcases, she’d heard about the pope’s death on the radio. She remembered being a kid and eating tuna fish on Fridays and pondering Limbo, and bread turning into Christ’s body, and venial sins, and mortal sins, and the fires of hell, and eternal damnation. During Mass, silly words would pop into her head: Pious Pope Pius’s sow has psoriasis. A miracle lightning didn’t strike her dead right there in St. Joe’s, but for His own reasons God took that pope instead, and then the fat jolly one, and now today the tall skinny sour one with the bushy eyebrows.

  Her brother Ed, up in Houlton, mailed her the key to the trailer. His directions were like a treasure hunt. Left at the landfill. Right at the sign for bloodworms and crawlers. Another right at the house that’s nothing but a cellar with a roof on it. Straight for a mile, past a giant half-dead oak. Left at the fork where the road becomes dirt. The beater of a car she came in she owed to Ed, too. Last spring Ed picked it out at a used car lot and tinkered with the engine until it ran.

  Ed said in his letter she should go to the hospital, he’d find a way to help her with the bill. Of course she couldn’t do that, because if you went to the hospital they’d ask you all kinds of questions and print your name and your baby’s in the newspaper, rubbing your nose in your shame like a bad dog’s in its mistake.

  She didn’t want anybody else to know about it. Especially him. He’d count back, begin to worry. He was a nice guy, and none of this was his fault.

  The trailer was all right. Ed’s friends used it for hunting in the fall, but she wouldn’t be here that long, just until she could figure out a place for her and the kid to go.

  The pain came again. The pains weren’t the way she’d thought they would be, not like when you cut your finger and accidentally vinegar got into it. That kind would have been better. This was more like being wrenched apart with a crowbar, or having something pumped into you that sooner or later was going to make you explode. Sweat ran into her eyes. This pain lasted a long time, and she could feel the muscles in her thighs jerking out of control.

  When finally the pain eased Teresa walked to the rear of the trailer and into the tiny bedroom, where she found a mattress on the floor. She went back to the suitcases and opened one and took out two sheets. She’d brought clean towels, too, and the knife from the kitchen, and a bar of soap still in its wrapper, and a hank of twine. At least she knew to do that much. She made up the mattress as well as she could and took off her blouse and drawstring pants and underwear, piling them neatly on a straight-backed chair in the corner of the room.

  Between the pains she slept a little, dreaming in snatches. She felt so hot. She couldn’t budge the window in the bedroom, and she thought of dragging the mattress into the kitchen area, but another pain came, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to manage it. She went and lay, naked, on the linoleum floor. Grit stuck to her. Flies had come in the open window, and she listened to them buzzing. Sometimes they landed on her and crawled on her damp skin.

  Desperate for some kind of relief from the pains, she returned to the mattress. Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with Thee, she murmured automatically, but she wasn’t really counting on any help from the Virgin.

  Sometime later she felt a hot sea of liquid spill from her, bathing her legs, drenching all the bedding. After she dried herself with one of the towels, Teresa went to the kitchen for a drink of water. The sun was low in the sky. Through the open window she smelled salt air. A light breeze cooled her.

  Soon afterward, her baby came in a burst of slime and blood, clotted with something like cottage cheese. It cried right away, and Teresa found that she was glad, after all.

  November 1977

  Marty stared at the inventory sheet. Two hundred thirty-nine bags of bone meal in the warehouse. Bone meal didn’t move the way it used to, people wanted the cheaper chemical fertilizers. He pictured those bags in some dark corner, draped with cobwebs. The figures blurred out of focus, and he took off his reading glasses and rubbed his thumbs into the corners of his eyes. The phone rang. Marty reached for the receiver and said “FBS,” but although the line was live no one spoke—a mistaken dialing by some person too stunned by their error or too polite to hang up on him, he assumed. Anyway, it was closing time and he didn’t want to deal with questions about kerosene heaters or radial arm saws at this hour, even if there really was an actual customer at the other end, so he replaced the receiver. He thought about Denia at home, relentlessly grieving. Everything he did to try to comfort her only made things worse.

  He headed for the back room to retrieve his coat and was startled to see Teresa in one of the aisles, on her knees, dusting under bottles of Black Flag and rearranging them on the shelf. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “You should have been gone half an hour ago.”

  She glanced up, her eyes pale. Her hair was pale, too, a very light blonde that when she first came to work here he’d thought must be fake, but then realized must have been God-given, because she wasn’t the sort of person who would go to a beauty salon or even choose a color in a drugstore. The hair hung limply on her shoulders. She was small and angular and she dressed badly, maybe out of poverty or maybe because she didn’t know any better. The stock-girl—or stock-woman, when you looked closely you realized she must be in her thirties—had been slipping into his dreams lately, or her ghost had, strange and silent. He could never quite remember these dreams when he woke, but her presence lingered in his mind, troubling him.

  “I’m about to lock up,” he said.

  “Okay,” she replied in a voice so soft he could hardly hear her. She folded the dust cloth and stood.

  In the back room he helped her into her coat, a ragged parka from Kmart or somewhere, and wisps of her hair brushed across his hand. “See you Monday,” he said and let her out the rear door, turning the deadbolt. He shrugged into his own overcoat and walked through the store, making sure all was in order, then set the alarm before exiting through the front door. Cold out, and windy. Gritty flakes stung his cheeks. A film of new snow covered the sidewalk, making the footing slippery. Either the weather guys hadn’t predicted snow, or he hadn’t been paying attention.

  The big FBS sign on its wooden stilts planted in cement shuddered in the wind. FBS was short for Fickett Building Supply, but Fickett’s heirs had long since sold out and departed Maine for gentler climes. The business had been dealing in general hardware and other related lines for so many years that few people remembered what the initials once signified.

  Marty rounded the corner of the store and entered the parking lot. Surrounding it, stacks of building supplies lay hulking under tarps. To his surprise, he saw that Teresa was still there, looking uncertain. The only car in the lot was his own. “Do you need a ride?” he asked, hoping she’d say no, that she was waiting for somebody to pick her up. He had the impression that Teresa lived way back of beyond, with some relative or other. Reluctant though Marty was to go home, he felt even less like driving around the countryside in the sno
w, accompanied by this woman who had been invading his dreams for some reason he could not fathom.

  “That’s okay. I can call a cab.”

  But either he’d have to re-open the store for her, disabling the alarm and all that rigmarole, and wait while she phoned, or else let her cross 1A and make her way down the road to the strip mall, where there was an outside phone next to the pizzeria. He doubted she could afford a cab, especially to the hinterland, and maybe she had no intention of calling one. Marty imagined her hitching partway, walking the rest. Under the harsh security light Teresa’s hair glittered with snowflakes. Sighing, he unlocked the passenger door of the Escort and said, “Get in.” At first she hesitated, then did as she was told, and he shut the door after her.

  He started the engine, waiting for it to warm up, and adjusted the defroster. “You Light Up My Life” was playing on the radio. Nowhere on the airwaves could you escape it. He switched the radio off and listened to the directions Teresa gave in her whispery voice: back through town, left at McDonald’s, straight on Route 1 for a few miles and left at the gravel pit, then . . . “It’s too far,” she said suddenly. “I don’t want to make you do this.”

  Knowing he was in for it, he put the car in gear and turned on the wipers. Once on the road they were quiet for a while. Then Teresa said, “I heard Fred talking this afternoon, by the coffee pot.”

  “Fred Dunphy? The accountant?”

  “He said the owners are planning on selling. If they can’t find buyers, they might shut the place down. Think it’s true?”

  “Who knows? They don’t share their plans with me.” The possibility was something Marty had tried to avoid contemplating. But Thanksgiving was almost upon them and no cartons of Christmas tree lights had yet arrived from the supplier. Inventories of the more popular items had been dwindling, and some merchandise seemed to stay on back order for months on end, until he’d begun to suspect orders had been mysteriously cancelled. Everyone hired in the past year or two was part-time and minimum-wage, Teresa included. They came and went in a hurry, as if the store had acquired a curse they were fleeing from. “What will you do if it closes?” he asked.