The Lauras

by Sara Taylor

“Thought I’d give up if you sat outside the police station long enough?” Fletcher asked. The kid had stopped, blocking the mouth of the alleyway, but he was still coming towards us, walking casually with his hands in his pockets, like he just wanted to have a chat. He was bigger than I’d realized.

  Ma shoved me downwards, and I was so surprised by it that I hit the ground, the blacktop cutting into my palms and knees. I looked up in time to see her reach into the back of her jeans, saw her pull out what I thought at first was the cap pistol my dad’s parents had given me for a birthday, which Ma had hidden before they even left. Except it was too heavy in her hand to be a toy, too fake looking and at the same time too real. I wondered for a moment when she’d gotten it, how I’d not noticed that she had it. There was a metallic snap far above my head, like someone breaking a toothpick, that I guessed was the safety coming off.

  “Dude, just let us get out of here and there’ll be no problems.” Her voice was steady, which scared me even more. I could feel the gravelly surface of the parking lot through my jeans, the sharp edges imprinting themselves into the skin of my palms.

  “Damn. Would you really shoot me?” he asked, as if he were asking her for the time. “’Cause that is not the way you want this to go.” He held his hands up, as if he were just gesturing to emphasize the “not.” I agreed with him.

  “True, but I can think of a million worse ways it could go.”

  “So you’re, what, going to do it right in front of your kid, or march me someplace out of sight like an SS officer? Listen, I just want to talk. Can you aim that thing at the ground or something? It’s making me nervous.”

  “Guns never made you nervous before,” she said, but she pointed it at the ground, and I heard the click again as she put the safety back on. “Can’t imagine what the fuck we’d have to talk about.”

  I shifted into a more comfortable position, saw that the kid was hugging the wall now, like he didn’t particularly mind witnessing what was happening but was fully intending on making tracks the moment the gun went off. Everything felt fuzzy and underwater, and a distant part of my brain decided that I must be panicking.

  “I’m curious, about why you came back is all. If I’d realized you were this wound up I would have just let it lie.”

  “I can’t imagine why I would be ‘this wound up’ as you put it,” she said.

  “Was I that much of an asshole, you figured you needed to bring a gun with you?”

  She gave him her are-you-kidding-me look, the one I got way too often.

  “It’s been twenty years,” he said. “You thought I was still pissed off about it?”

  “You seemed pretty pissed off when it happened.”

  “Yeah, well, I might have had a bit of a habit of overreacting back then. I’d forgotten about it—and you—until about an hour ago. You didn’t think, when you never heard back from me, that I’d decided to let it slide? That it didn’t matter that much to me?”

  “Well, it mattered to me. For a few years I was mad that you’d given me such a raw fucking deal. Then I had a baby and I got scared, because I realized you’d been able to make me do anything you wanted, were still making me do things even though you weren’t there, and that lasted a long while. But the whole time, from the moment I left, I wondered if I’d look up one day and you’d be there. And I wondered what you’d do to me, do to my kid, and I couldn’t stand it. So I wanted to know for dead certain that I didn’t owe you jack.”

  “I never knew you saw me as that much of a monster.”

  “You didn’t give me much reason to see you any other way.”

  She was still holding the gun, stiff armed, aimed at the ground, and Fletcher still had his hands out, and the kid was still in the alley. I felt sick. I wanted to know how this ended without living through it; I wanted to skip ahead a few pages. Pity you can’t do that, in real life.

  “So did it feel good to punch me like that?”

  “Oh, real good,” she said. “If I thought I could get away with it I’d have done it a few more times.”

  “So would you say we’re square now?” he asked. “I don’t have to worry about you turning up again and smacking me around in public?”

  “You’re one to talk,” she snorted. “Yeah, if I don’t have to worry about you coming after me.”

  He offered his hand, and as she reached out to shake it I felt a stab of fear, the conviction that she was about to shoot him in the face—she still had the gun, in her left hand—that there was no way that she was going to walk away from him, after the story she’d told me, without getting revenge.

  But they just shook. He leaned in close and whispered something into her ear, and she stepped back, laughing.

  “Be honest,” she said. “You loved having a live-in bookkeeper who worked for free, and a regular lay that didn’t kick up a fuss when you fucked around with other people—the only thing you loved about me was that I was both in one.”

  “One way or another, I never did manage to replace you,” he said, and then backed up slowly until his shoulders were against the brickwork of the building that hemmed the parking lot. He waited there as Ma pulled me up and handed me into the front passenger’s seat, then slid in herself, and as we pulled onto the road he gave a nod to the rearview mirror that I’m not sure she saw.

  We’d barely gone a mile before Ma had to stop so I could puke on the side of the road. My stomach did not appreciate adventure.

  CHAPTER XI

  The last Laura was tall, and curving: she carried her weight in her butt and hated it; Ma confessed that she went out of her way to follow her up a flight of stairs.

  My mom hadn’t intended to go to college. College was something other people did. But her social worker didn’t agree. He pushed her to write applications to any school she thought she could get into, and even though she was sure that it was less that he believed in her than that he wanted to look good to his superiors, she did what she was told. When she was given a place—at Hood College in Maryland, which was still women-only then—she was glad that she’d applied, since once she finished high school she couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  She saw Laura for the first time during freshman orientation, here and there and everywhere, still with the leggyness of adolescence and always smiling, laughing, and my mother wanted to know her. Maybe it was fate, or else what she’d told me about the way a name can charm was true; by the end of the year they were companions in studying and stoning and dancing during midnight underwear parties on the roof of the gym.

  When she came back from Michigan, a year later than she should have, Laura started crying when she saw her, ran up and held her tightly.

  “I thought you were dead. No one knew where you were, no one had heard from you, no one could tell me anything.”

  That shook Ma up. She hadn’t realized that anyone cared, that the way she felt about Laura—the blood-fierce fondness not so different from the way she felt about her brother, spiced with a romantic longing that she tried to deny—might actually be requited.

  They both had two more years to go, Ma for psychology, Laura for a five-year dual degree in biology that she wanted to follow with a few years studying technical drawing and a lifetime of illustrating textbooks and research publications. Laura had plans, my mother did not; Laura’s plans were quickly revised to include taking care of my mother to the extent that she was allowed, and in that time Ma did not wander. She spent term time in the lab, in other women’s rooms drinking wine and writing papers and feeling normal, the summers waiting tables for as many hours as she could get and sharing an apartment with Laura, who seemed determined not to let Ma out of her sight again.

  They graduated; Laura moved an hour south to Washington for even more school, and Ma went with her. Laura was seeing a midshipman from Annapolis who they had met in their second year, when he was bussed in with dozens of his kind for a school dance so the girls wouldn’t have to dance with each other. My mother was waiting tables and se
eing my father, who she’d met during the summer before their final year while she was slinging coffee in a diner. And every few weeks, when it looked like work or boyfriend was about to devour one or both of them, Ma would kidnap Laura, drag her into the front seat of the periwinkle Cadillac that she kept running possibly through will alone and drive them to strange places, new towns or beaches or woods where they could forget their responsibilities, find balance again.

  My mother, I think, could have gone on that way forever, but Laura finished school and got married and moved to California for her husband’s profession because her work could be done from anywhere. Ma couldn’t afford D.C. rent on her own, didn’t know anyone she could move in with—except for my father. Laura left in May of 1989 and the next June I turned up, and they could no longer afford Washington. That was probably what the fight that made Ma walk out the day before I was born was about: he wanted to go home to Lynchburg, Virginia, where his parents could babysit and the living was cheaper; she probably wanted to go anywhere but. My debut forced the issue, and we lived with Dad’s parents for the six months it took them to get back on their feet, find jobs and rent the house that Ma carried me out of in the middle of the night thirteen years later.

  Maybe she hoped that being with him would satisfy the odd craving that arose when she thought about Laura kisses and Laura curves; maybe she was still denying that it existed. I guess that after I was born she decided that maybe she was the kind of deviant who would never be satisfied, that she should stop her restless searching and settle into normal life. The resolution wasn’t entirely unsuccessful: she lasted through thirteen years of silent longing before she finally cracked.

  She wouldn’t tell me when she’d gotten the gun, or where.

  “Were you really going to shoot him?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Did you really figure you needed it?”

  “I figured it was better to have it and not need it than vice-versa. And I figured you’d stay in the car, so that whether I needed it or not you’d be safe.”

  We moseyed south, rolled down all the windows and stayed on back roads between massing ranks of corn and grain; everything was green. I could almost pretend that she was taking me strawberry picking, that we were on the way home from a not-very-successful day trip, that everything was normal. The trees, the birds—everything looked like home still, but slightly different, like aliens had built us a terrarium so they could study us but, even though they’d got the idea of trees and birds right, they hadn’t paid enough attention to the little details, to leaf shapes and flight patterns. It was completely familiar and completely not all at once.

  The farther south we went the more relaxed Ma became, leaning back in her seat, leaving her cigarette pack pinched between her thighs instead of dipping for a new one as soon as she’d jettisoned the previous butt, even smiling a little to herself and mumbling along when a song she especially liked came on the radio. I wanted to know more, I wanted to ask about the gun again. I kept falling asleep.

  Ma shook me as we passed the little green sign telling us that we were now in Harrison County, Mississippi. It was early evening on the third day after we’d left Michigan, and I blinked myself awake slowly and tracked our progress as we grew closer and closer to the coast. We were almost out of road according to the map when she parked up behind a laundromat, locked the car and set out on foot down the quiet streets with me following. She seemed to know where she was going, but in a half-remembered way, like she had dreamed the place, or not seen it in a long time. We found the bay, and then we found the quay, a collection of boats bobbing on the water, fancy powerboats and rusting pontoons, sailboats and dirty fishing vessels. Ma wandered a little while I sat on the edge of a dock with my legs hanging over, looking down into the terrifying black water and watching tiny jellyfish flash and sink like coins tossed into a shopping-mall fountain. Then I heard Ma’s voice: “Excuse me? Could you tell me who owns that boat?”

  A rusty voice answered back, unintelligibly, and I pulled myself up and scrambled towards them. She couldn’t be planning on buying a boat. What did she want to do, sail to Cuba?

  I found her as she was stepping off one of the fishier-smelling boats, the older man standing on it squinting at her retreating back. There was a piece of paper in her hand.

  “We’ve probably got just enough time before sundown,” she said as we walked back to the car. She shuffled in the back seat for a map, paged to the index and began looking up the address.

  “What are we doing?” I asked.

  “Looking for someone,” she mumbled as she flipped back through. “Someone that might not remember me anymore, but it’s worth a shot.”

  I followed her back down the winding streets of the town, staying just a little behind, nervous, not sure if we weren’t going to have a repeat of Michigan. The houses were small, battered looking and dirty, every bit of metal red at the edges. It was beach season, but it didn’t seem like a beach place, a vacation place. No tat shops, no trinkets, no restaurants with barkers on the sidewalks calling tourists in to try their fried medley. It was a fishermen’s town.

  I nearly walked up her heels when she stopped, abruptly and in the middle of the street, to study three of the little houses, tight in a row and all the same size and general design, just like all the other little houses on this street, like they’d all come out of a candy box, a matched set made of the same chalky stuff as Conversation Hearts, lawns cluttered with seashells and crab pots and bits of metal so rusted that you couldn’t tell what they’d once been, the cement shells of the houses painted pastel green or pink or yellow, worn awnings stained orange-red in places. All the same, except these three were missing their numbers. They were bracketed by numbers 9 and 36; number 62 was directly across the road.

  “Middle for diddle,” she said after staring for a moment, walked up the yard to the solid grey door of the pastel-green house and knocked, leaving me on the sidewalk, frozen with nerves. After the previous stop I wasn’t so eager to follow where she led.

  She chatted cheerfully for a moment with the older woman who opened the door to her knock, then thanked her and skipped back to the road.

  “Good guess, wrong house. Come on.” She took my hand this time and, ignoring my reluctance, dragged me to the house on the left, pale pink and just as empty-looking as all the others.

  This time an older man answered her knock.

  “Can I help you?” His accent was thick, his curly pure white hair making his tanned skin look even darker.

  Ma answered in what sounded to me like Spanish, but with an odd inflection to it, not quite the accent I’d heard in the classroom in Florida. He nodded, opened the door wide so that we could come in and I followed close behind her, itching with shyness.

  The house was packed with photographs and trinkets, but neatly arranged, like a treasure box. He waved us into a living room and onto a sagging, ancient blue couch that tried to eat me as soon as I sat down, and while they talked I looked around the room.

  There were photographs in nice frames and photographs in seashell-crusted frames and photographs tucked into the edges of the frames of other photographs or taped to random surfaces with Scotch tape so old that it had turned yellow. The people in them resembled each other, wide mouthed and slightly squint eyed, though that could have been from all of the staring into the coastal sun that they did. There were several pictures of the old man with his wife, so that I could recognize the younger versions of them by following the iterations back in time: pictures of them together when they were teenagers, at their wedding, holding a baby, holding a slightly different baby, corralling small kids, dwarfed by their two grown sons and then slowly giving way to time, gaining a comfortable thickness about the middle. Taped to a little statue of Mary in a plastic grotto like the end of an upturned bathtub was a picture of them together not so long ago: she was wearing a hospital gown, and her scalp showed through her thinly curling hair, but they were grinning at e
ach other, that squint-eyed grin that little kids get when they’re so overwhelmed by happy that they can’t take any more.

  There were signs of her around the house, but no her, so I guessed with a sick feeling that she was dead, and I didn’t want to imagine it but couldn’t help it: someone being around all your life, being there even when your parents die and your kids leave and your aunts aren’t speaking to you. And then one day she’s gone, this person that you’ve been with longer than you’ve been without, longer than you were with your parents, longer than you’ve ever been with anyone. And nothing will ever bring her back. It doesn’t matter that you had plans, that there were things that you meant to say to her, or things that you wanted to tell her about. It doesn’t matter that you really need her to be there, really want her to be there. It’s final.

  I caught maybe one word in ten of their conversation as my butt sunk deeper and deeper into the couch and parts of my brain went to sleep. Tonino was mentioned several times, and I gathered that they meant Anthony, the Anthony that my mother knew from the foster home that we’d burned down. Also family and boat, bread, water, wine, the woman, but it could have meant beautiful boat, or the mother, or the Madonna; that was as far as my middle-school Spanish class could take me into their conversation.

  They gestured at me once or twice with smiles, and I smiled back, but otherwise my role was to sit still, shake my head to the coffee he offered us, and study the room until my back teeth and my left butt cheek fell asleep. I had zoned so far out that Ma had to prod me when it was time to go.

  “Come on, kid, we have an errand to run real quick.”

  I followed her out of the house, shaking the pins and needles out of my left leg, and hoped that there was about to be food.

  “Dinnertime yet?” I asked, but she didn’t seem to hear me. “Ma? Can we eat something now?”

  “There’s granola and apples in the car if you’re hungry—we’ve still got stuff to do.”

  “I mean real food. The kind you have to let cool before you eat it. With a fork. On a plate. Sitting at a table. You remember what I’m talking about, don’t you? Failing that, a burger or something wouldn’t be that bad, either.”