The Lauras

by Sara Taylor

  She looked at me gratefully when I’d wriggled out, then collected up packets and picture and cigar box before backtracking to open the third door. I’d been expecting another bedroom, but it led us out to the screened-in back porch: two metal bed frames were set up there, heads against the wall and only a narrow gap between their feet and the screening. A folding card table and a pair of chairs stood at the far end of the porch, and as I sat down I could see into the room behind the fourth door, the one that we hadn’t opened: another dormitory-like bedroom, dimmed by the old glass.

  “What’s in the packets?” I asked.

  “Old things. Jewelry, pocket watches, some money. They were worried about thieves, so she sewed it to the underside of their mattress. I think I’m the only person that knew they were there. I hid under the bed before I knew we weren’t allowed in that room.”

  “Can we open them?”

  “Nope, they aren’t ours.” She sat back and slid open the cigar box, and a strange look came over her face. I leaned in to see, but she snapped it shut.

  “Nu-uh, you have your secrets, I have mine. Now let’s fetch in our junk—we’re sleeping up here tonight and I’m famished.”

  Before we went down she stretched the screen that she had popped out to climb in back into place and carefully pressed the rubber strip into its channel to hold it down. When she was finished you couldn’t tell that it had ever been pulled away.

  We dragged two mattresses out to the bed frames on the porch and laid blankets over the top of them, then went down into the backyard to dig out a half-overgrown fire pit Ma remembered from before. We must have stopped at a store while I was asleep: there was a yellow tin of lighter fluid and kabobs to roast.

  “It’s later now,” I began. “Wanna tell me what’s going on?”

  We had settled in to wait for the flames to die down enough to cook over, and she was sitting across from me, knees drawn up and not seeming inclined to start the conversation herself.

  “When I was here I got to be friends with one of the other foster kids, and when I left I kept up with him. He wrote me a couple months before you and me left Virginia, to let me know our foster mom had died—her husband kicked it a few months later. Their kids are in Canada and New Zealand—one’s some kind of doctor and the other one teaches. They never want to come back here, just waiting for the damn house to fall down so they can sell the land it’s on. I said I’d stop by, pull together the stuff they might want, mail it to Tony so he can send it on to them. They’re perfectly fine with us being here, so stop being jumpy about someone turning up.”

  I began balancing kabobs over the coals. There was probably more that she wasn’t saying, but I kept quiet while dinner cooked.

  “So why do you hate this place so much?”

  “What makes you think I hate it?”

  “OK, hate’s the wrong word. But you were walking around inside like you thought all the pictures were going to come to life or something.”

  She rearranged the skewers before answering. “This was the first foster home I landed in, after we came to America. Didn’t have my brother. Didn’t understand the ways of Americans or Baptists—which I still don’t—and got smacked quite a bit for it. They really believed in ‘spare the rod, spoil the child.’ I was eight years old and I hadn’t figured out how to get on in homes yet, how to forget about whatever rules there’d been in the last place because the new place had different rules, how to make friends. And I was completely terrified because none of the adults would explain what was going on. My parents and my brother could have been dead, for all they told me. Guess it left an impression.”

  “Why’d they keep sending you different places, if they could’ve just put you back here where you already knew people?”

  “My parents moved a lot. Either my dad was looking for a new job or the last job was backfiring on him—sometimes they needed to cross state lines to keep the cops from finding them. And the social workers thought that was the best way to do it, back then. Move the kids around a bunch so the people taking care of them don’t get attached. The system’s changed a lot since then.”

  We ate dinner as the sun went down, the dying coals still hot on our faces. I watched Ma and Ma watched the memories playing out on the inside of her head, until it was dark and the air had cooled. Then we raked through the ashes and took ourselves to bed.

  There was a breeze on the porch, gentle and fresh and perfect, but I was still wide-awake from my daylong nap. It was dark and we didn’t have a flashlight, so we groped our way to the beds, rolled into them carefully, eyes still dazzled by the dying fire. It was a long time before I fell asleep, and I knew from her breathing that, even after driving since sunrise, it took Ma a long time to fall asleep as well. I wondered what she was thinking about as she lay there, wondered what she was remembering.

  There were stories that she couldn’t tell. Everyone has them; most people pretend that they’ve been forgotten. How you dropped your baby sister down the stairs and she nearly died. How you got into a fight that got out of hand and were nearly sent to juvenile detention. How someone did something to you that you still think is your fault, no matter how much you know that there wasn’t anything you could have done to keep it from happening. There were stories that moved behind her eyes that she hadn’t told me, that she couldn’t tell me because the words to get them out just didn’t exist. I knew because I had stories drifting in the same way behind my own eyes, like dust and pollen spinning on the current of dark water. But they were her stories, and if she told them it was her right to decide when and who and how. If she had been a different kind of mother she might have insisted I tell her mine, said that she had the right to know, and I am eternally grateful that she never did, that she let me choose my own time and place for things.

  Even if I had been able to say those words, I would have never been able to get them all out at once, to describe every facet of the experience. Memory is slippery, not even like a fish but like an eel, like an ice cube, like a clot of blood whose membranous skin can barely contain internal shifting liquidity. It’s something that, the firmer you try to grasp it, the weaker the hold you have on it, the less trustworthy it becomes. But it doesn’t matter what really happened, does it? Reality matters less than how it is perceived, that edge or feather or scale that you catch onto as it flickers by. And after a year or ten in a dingy pocket who can say if it was a lizard’s scale or a dragon’s in the first place?

  CHAPTER IX

  When I woke up the next morning, Ma was already sitting at the little table at the other end of the porch, sipping at a steaming cup of bad instant coffee and poking gently through the cigar box.

  The morning air was light and cool, but there was a thick feeling at the base of my skull that meant that it would probably rain later. The pale leaves glowed, casting dappled shadows across my legs, and I lay there for a bit, sinking deeper and deeper into the mattress and wanting to never stand up again. Then my hips started getting twitchy and I had to.

  “Good sleep?” she asked.

  “Once I actually fell asleep, yeah.” I stretched. “Is there breakfast?”

  “Trail mix and apples—that’s what we’ve got until we hit civilization again.”

  I sat down across from her and picked up the photograph she’d taken down yesterday. You could see the shadow of the photographer on the grass and up the children’s legs. There were five of them, three girls and two boys arrested in motion, their hands on each other’s arms like they had just been play fighting, or were scared of being pulled apart, with the bared-teeth smiles of children that haven’t learned how to appear happy on demand. The youngest looked six, the oldest twelve, with my mother in the middle. She looked straight out, eyes serious and big, and at first I didn’t recognize her. All of the girls wore smock-like dresses, and I wondered if they were all taken from their homes too quickly to pack their own clothes.

  “Why’d you pick this picture?”

  “It’s go
t Anthony in it.” She reached over and tapped the boy standing close to her. “I don’t have any pictures of him.” She killed her coffee and stood up. “Come on, there’s breakfast and work to get on with.”

  We found a wooden crate down in the kitchen and she filled my pocket with trail mix, and as I munched I followed her around. The contents of the house were more scant than minimalist, all of the furniture cheap and warped, the floors uncarpeted. It looked like all of the money they owned had been spent buying the land and building the house, and then it had been finished and furnished from a refuse heap: free to a good home. But there were a few nice things, and these she took and put into my crate: a stained-glass butterfly hanging in front of one of the downstairs windows, a statue of Jesus made from cherry wood, a woven wheat-straw cross from over the kitchen door. Some of the things she took were less logical. All of the oddly shaped magnets on the antique refrigerator. The large wooden cooking spoon that, for some reason, sat on a sideboard in the living room next to a mass of resin angel figures, rather than with all the other utensils in the kitchen. A plastic snow globe with half the water dried up from the windowsill over the sink.

  We went up to the master bedroom last, and there she hung in the doorway, pensive, arms crossed and one leg wrapped around the other. She took a step into the room, then stepped backward, pulled out a cigarette and played with her lighter.

  “I can get things, if you tell me what to get,” I finally suggested, as she showed no inclination to enter the room.

  “Good idea. Start with the pictures on the wall.”

  Her voice was hoarse as she guided me through the dresser drawers, through the shoe cupboard, through all the little places a person could hide something important. There wasn’t much, but even so, I went through each drawer, over each surface, picked out the things that my mother told me to and added them to the crate, even slipping my hands into the shoes in the closet and disturbing the array of pantyhose and girdles in one of the shallow pressboard drawers, just in case something had been hidden there. Through it all Ma stood in the doorway, turning the cigarette in her fingers, tense but not impatient. When I had finished she told me to peel the patchwork quilt off the bed and fold it up, leaving cheap cotton sheets through which the blue stripes of the mattress showed, and when I stepped out of the room with my arms full she closed the door firmly behind me.

  Then we went back through the house a room at a time, taking down all of the photos and piling them on the large kitchen table. There was a dated wedding photo, the dress cheap looking and the groom ugly, then pictures of the young couple with a first baby, with groups of people, black-and-whites of previous generations. And, of course, the series that trailed up the stairs. Many of the children appeared in only one photo, while others appeared in handfuls, and the two that I took to be the natural children remained in all.

  We sat at either end of the kitchen table, prying out the staples that held the photo backboards in place with butter knives, piling the cheap frames together in one stack and the backing material in another, separating the photos with waxed kitchen paper and sliding them into a large Manila envelope Ma had found marked TAXES Documents 1973 HOUSEHOLD RACEETS. The packet slid neatly into the crate with everything else we had collected. It seemed sad that a couple could have left so little worth taking.

  “Oh, wait a moment,” Ma said as I picked up the crate to take it to the car. She scurried to the dining room and shuffled about, then came back again with a thick Bible—the only book I’d seen in the whole place—its covers floppy and corners worn. “If they want to burn this, they can do it themselves.” She wedged it into a space in the jumble.

  We carted our own stuff and the things that we had collected down to the car, wedged it all in the trunk, then sat for a bit on the back bumper while she smoked a cigarette and stared contemplatively up at the house. Dark clouds had gathered overhead while we were inside.

  She flicked her cigarette butt away, and breathed deep. “There’s only one way to do this,” she said, more to herself than me, then rummaged in the back seat of the car and strode purposefully up to the house, a familiar yellow tin in her hand. I followed at a trot, but she didn’t seem to notice that I was there.

  We went back in the front door, up the stairs and paused again in the doorway of the master bedroom. She let the door swing open, leaned as if to go in, but kept her feet rooted to the carpet of the hallway. She held the tin out, red nozzle first, at the full length of her reach, and flicked her wrist to squirt neat ribbons of clear fluid across the floor, the bed. It made looping lines on the white sheets, seeped through so that the blue stripes on the mattress became clearer, so that rusty-brown stains began to show. She put down the tin carefully, checked her hands and arms for drips, smelled them to make sure.

  Then she pulled out a cigarette and placed it between her lips, bent her head to her cupped hands and lit it with one stroke of her lighter flint, and dragged deep. The tip glowed. Then, like a girl at a county carnival throwing laundry pegs into milk bottles, she lined her toes up with the carpet seam that demarcated the border between the bedroom and the hall, leaned her body forward ever so slightly and tossed the cigarette onto the middle of the double bed. We stood there, watching as the tip glowed, and then the cloth began to smoke and blacken. Then came the lick of flame, and the lighter fluid caught with a snap like wet fabric in high wind. She crouched to pick up the yellow tin, and turned away.

  “Time to make tracks, kid.”

  We thundered down the stairs, and she locked the front door from the inside and pulled it closed after her. I was still fumbling with my seat belt, not sure of what I had just seen, or the implications of what I had just seen, when she flicked on the engine and pulled away. It wasn’t a panicked sort of urgency, but an intense desire to be gone, to not be there anymore, and as it drove her back down the pockmarked driveway I twisted in my seat, trying to get another look back at the house, to be sure of what had happened because, even with the remove of just a few minutes, I was questioning my memory.

  As we pulled back onto the main road it came into view: a column of dark smoke, small but growing, hard to make out against the gathering clouds. Ma glanced up at it, then settled back, let up on the accelerator for a bit.

  “Didn’t you want to watch it burn?”

  “No. Just didn’t want to have to wonder if it was still there for the rest of my life.”

  *

  It was when her parents came back to Sicily to take her and her brother to a city full of immigrants in a country whose language they didn’t speak that Ma started running away in earnest. Before then she had often wandered away, gone up into the hills around their village early in the morning to swim in the abandoned Roman baths and play hide-and-seek in the olive groves with other local kids, rarely coming home before dark. Something about coming to America, or the time in the orphanage before she came, changed her.

  When she told me about the group homes and the foster homes, places she’d been and things she’d done, I asked where her parents had been, why she and my uncle had been taken away.

  “My parents were horrible at life. We kept getting evicted or having the lights or water shut off because they forgot to pay the bills. Not that they couldn’t afford to, but that they forgot. The winter Danny was seven I stole shoes for us because ours had worn out and neither of them could get it together enough to go to the store and buy new ones—they never noticed that we had new shoes. They forgot to feed us, they forgot sometimes that we existed, didn’t come home for a day or two and just left us there like cats. And their English was bad and they didn’t understand how America worked—there were so many times that if they’d known what to say or what to do or asked the right person we wouldn’t have been taken. Then, when I started running away and actually getting somewhere with it, not being dragged home by neighbors in the evening but actually going missing for a while, the social workers got involved. So from when I was fourteen it was my fault, really.” />
  Somewhere around when she was seventeen or eighteen her parents vanished from the stories, so that “home” became the front seat of her battered station wagon, the sound of radio music fading in and out, whatever cigarettes were cheapest that week. I asked, once, where my grandparents lived now, what they were doing now, when she’d seen them last. She’d been silent for a few minutes, then said with an exhale of smoke, “Don’t know,” and turned the radio louder.

  We turned our backs to the chapter of my mother’s childhood that was going up in flames and continued on the road north, taking a slow pace by the back roads, crossing into South Carolina and then North Carolina. We stopped there at a campsite, still some hours before dusk, and pulled into the trees away from the water hook-ups for mobile homes and the handful of people already in situ. Ma was quiet, more quiet than normal. She built a fire and then told me to keep an eye on it while it burned down to coals for cooking; she needed a walk so that she could clear her head.

  A few minutes after she walked away I heard again the crunch of her feet on the dirt: she went to the car and pointedly dug out the cigar box and tucked it under her arm, then walked back into the woods before she could see me blush. Finding the box in the jumble of the trunk had been difficult, and I’d just started poking through the oddments inside when I’d heard her returning footfalls and jammed it back into place.

  The box contained a pewter figure of a knight about one inch tall and bent crooked on his base, so that when I stood him up he listed to the side as if he were drunk, or walking in high wind. There was also a red silk ribbon of the kind that my mother liked but never wore, and a handful of different marbles stuck together by a half-used lipstick (the end of the tube said it was “Nutmeg Dust”) that had popped open and gone melty on them. There was as well a thread bracelet, a scattering of old coins, a picture of a young couple (who I assumed to be my grandparents since I recognized the two kids with them as my mother and my uncle from other pictures I had seen), stones and shells and stamps and single earrings, and a badly carved wooden elephant; a slender plastic periscope that telescoped neatly in on itself to become pocket sized completed the flotsam. I couldn’t imagine why she wouldn’t want me looking at what was apparently a collection of childhood treasures, wondered if she were trying to pique my curiosity about the box as a way of keeping me from looking for other, more important things that she’d hidden among our varied cargo.