The Lauras

by Sara Taylor

  It was a girl. She lived for three hours.

  Ma went to visit quite a while later, after Michigan, and that was when Tony told her the details, how Marisol refused to let go of the still, blue body, how she screamed at the doctors that they’d killed her baby, how they’d had to sedate her. They hadn’t even named the child yet, hadn’t been able to agree on who it was being named for, so the little casket of ashes they’d given him had been marked with Marisol’s family name.

  They’d tried to keep going as they had been, even tried for a second baby—the mistake that had made them run away from home had become a blessing that they desperately wanted. Marisol hadn’t been able to handle it. About a year after the baby died, Tony came home to find a letter on their kitchen table and all of her things gone.

  They’d both gotten occasional postcards from Marisol over the next decade, supposed that chapter of their lives was over and she’d be OK from then on. She’d gotten pregnant again, three or four years after I was born, and everyone involved had held their breath. There wasn’t really a dad in the picture; she’d wanted a baby, not a boyfriend. This time it lived, thrived, was sent home from the hospital with a clear bill of health, and they let that held breath out. Everything had seemingly fixed itself.

  Then one morning Marisol let her three-year-old go outside to play, had been about to follow her out to keep an eye on her but had paused to pour another cup of coffee, had dropped the coffee and paused to make another pot. She’d known there was something wrong because of the silence, went outside and found that her daughter had drowned in the rain barrel under the downspout. She’d dropped a plastic truck in and in trying to fish it out had slipped head first into the water and hadn’t been able to pull herself back out. Her mother dragged her out, called the cops, stayed calm as they tried to resuscitate the girl, gave her statement, went to the hospital. She’d stayed calm, and when they brought her back home she made herself a cup of tea, wrote some letters, washed her hair, then went into the bedroom and killed herself.

  Her daughter was given to its father’s family to be buried, but Marisol had requested cremation for herself in one of the letters, which she’d addressed and left on her kitchen table, pinned down by the freshly washed coffeepot. She had also requested that her ashes be sent to Anthony Panagopoulos. The letter that went with them contained nothing but the chorus from a song that had come out the summer they spent together, that they’d heard over and over until they caught themselves humming it as they sailed into the Gulf at sunrise, that they’d sung at the top of their lungs the night they drove out of town to watch the meteors; it reminded him of every promise he had made to her.

  CHAPTER XIII

  We gave the old man a ride back to his house, and though Ma walked him to his door, told him goodbye, gave him a hug, he seemed absent, detached, as though now that we’d done what we’d come to do we didn’t really exist anymore. We returned to the fast-food truck and bought far too many burgers, then drove out of town a ways until we found a stretch of empty field where we could pull over just past a yellow-orange glowing streetlight and spread out for dinner. We took our shoes off, even though the grass was dry and prickly under us, spread our knees wide to let the orange grease drip between and onto the crisped earth. There was some sunlight still, the sky dark almost completely except for the nail paring of indigo at the western edge, the stars like freckles spreading to flaw the blackness.

  “We used to do this a lot, at the end of the day. Eat cheap food at the side of the road and watch the stars come out.”

  “Was this a happy place, then?”

  She finished a burger and swallowed thoroughly, washed out her mouth with bottle soda before answering, “Yeah, it was a happy place, once I learned to be happy here.

  “If I could do one thing for you, kiddo, I’d make it so you didn’t want. Not that you had everything that you could want, but that you never felt the feeling of ‘want.’ That you could get along without it.”

  “Life would be boring then.”

  “It would also be pretty close to painless.”

  I mulled that over for a while, but before I had an answer I heard her soft-edged snore, the one that she made when she was really asleep. It was a rural road; we’d been passed by maybe one car, two cars, in the whole time we’d been sat there munching, so I didn’t know whether I should wake her up so that we could go find a real place to sleep or if she was planning on sleeping right there in the half-dead grass, well onto the shoulder but nevertheless still on the side of the road like a bum. I didn’t have much time to think about it; I fell asleep too before long, the grass tickling the back of my head and the heat of the earth seeping up into my hips.

  Sometime in the night she must have woken up, wrestled my limp body into the passenger’s seat, kept going west until she found someplace for us to park just off the road. I only found this out though when—déjà vu—a cop knocked on her window around 6.45 in the morning. It was a much more civil exchange than the one we had with the cop on the second morning of our liberty. This one was more concerned than anything, welcomed Ma’s explanation that she’d started nodding off at the wheel and had pulled over to rest rather than cause a car crash—or a cow crash, as was more likely in that location. I wrestled on my shoes as he asked her if she felt safe at home, whether she would be interested in the addresses of some local women’s shelters, and I thought how different I was from the last time a cop had stopped us, how much older I felt, and not just because we were only a few days shy of my fifteenth birthday. I was more sure of myself than I’d been then. I’d stopped being scared. I’d stopped being a kid. I was still being dragged on my mother’s wild expedition, but when I told myself that it was only because I wanted to, that I could leave at any time and go home to Dad, I believed it.

  We cleared life with the deputy—and asked where to find something decent but cheap to eat—and started up again, our backs to the slowly rising sun, me with my boots on the dash, Ma with her cigarette trailing a fine streamer of white behind us, the country singer on the radio playing us out of Mississippi.

  Welcome to St. Tammany Parish flashed by on a green highway sign, and I wondered why they used the God-awful worst shade of green in existence. A while later came Welcome to Louisiana in English with French beneath it and a fleur-de-lis between them in case the two versions wanted to get frisky. We rolled through construction on highways that didn’t look so different than the highways in Virginia, except the trees still looked odd. That was I-12: trees and trees and buildings here and there and billboards saying you should stop for a burger or something, on and on and on. As we passed through Baton Rouge I realized that we were no longer following the highlighter path that she’d drawn across her private map when she’d first bought it in West Virginia. We should have started heading northwards, shooting for California on I-49; instead she was continuing west, towards Houston and central Texas on I-10.

  It was in one of those wild places where we passed into Texas. I almost missed it. We were crossing the Sabine River, and Ma had turned off the radio for the sake of telling me about the Rape of the Sabine, which I wasn’t sure if she was making up or not. Still green, still hot and somewhat tropical looking, still not so different to home. Nothing looked that much bigger to me. I dozed through Houston, woke up as we were driving through a scrubby nothing place, grass and some trees, now and again a billboard, a low-slung house, power lines. It was a lonely place, and I was glad that I wasn’t the one doing the driving. It wasn’t unlovely, but the flatness bugged me.

  Ma’s mood had perked up; I could see the happy on her face and the weight was rolling off her shoulders like stones, a destination at a time, and it looked like she might start singing at any moment. If she’d been the kind of person that sang. Really, she’d be more likely to start spontaneously handing around shots of tequila as an expression of happiness, but singing sounds better.

  Time felt funny then; maybe it was the constant forward motion. I felt
like we’d been in the car for years, not days. Maybe it was like being in a rocket, aging at a different rate to everyone on earth. The blacktop rolled away under us and I felt time rolling away with it, diffusing into nothing. Minutes and hours had no meaning anymore, even though Ma had entrusted me with the copiloting, told me to take out the road atlas and keep us going in the general direction of Three Rivers, Texas. I could measure the distance with my fingers, calculate our average mileage, figure out how far it was, but we had lost the blind urgency that had driven us. When we hadn’t stopped for bathroom breaks before we now stopped for sunsets, fresh vegetable stands, flea markets and jewelry shops even though we never bought anything, restaurants that looked really good even though we could have kept going for a while, so that what should have been a pretty direct undertaking turned into a multi-day wander, and I didn’t care. I hadn’t had any privacy since we’d left Florida—not the kind of privacy that I’d gotten used to while we were living there, at least, but though I still wrestled with strange dreams of a night, was still hit now and again with an acute awareness of my more sensitive parts and an overwhelming desire to do something fun with them, I’d learned to ignore them, just like I’d learned to ignore all of the other primal desires that had to fall by the wayside when we were on the move—like being able to piss whenever I needed to, or sleeping stretched out flat with a real pillow, or not being constantly just a bit hungry but also just a little nauseous. I wonder if that’s how all the great explorers felt, hungry and a little sick and just hoping that they could find some land so that they could get that boiling-hot, fit-your-whole-body-in-at-once bath they’d been madly wanting. For the time being my senses were sated in other ways—the hugeness of the sky, the saturation of color, the heat, the landscape.

  We had odd, drawn-out conversations around the songs on the radio: I’d say something during a commercial break, and then neither of us would speak while the music played, and a man left his wife and a wife found her husband and a dog did any number of doglike things, and then in the next break or if she got tired of the song Ma would respond, one sentence, and then a few minutes later perhaps another sentence would follow, and then eventually I would get around to answering.

  She was being cagy about why exactly we were in Texas, and I was wondering a little bit if the gun would be making a reappearance. We were off the highlighter path, but according to the map there was a Brainwashed broodmother somewhere near the middle of the state. But she seemed too cheerful to be on her way to deal with anything as serious as brainwashing, even if she was a bit preoccupied, a bit meditative.

  “We going to stop here for long?” I asked in between songs.

  “Don’t intend to,” she said. “I’d like to make this as quick as we can.”

  “Make what as quick as we can?”

  “I’ll tell you when I know—I haven’t made up my mind completely as to what we’re going to be doing. Depending on how things pan out, we might have some company for a little while.”

  That was when fate—or God, as we would later be insistently told—intervened.

  Rural Texas was rolling by below us and above us and to either side of us, and the warm breeze through the open window made my head feel thick and the sun made me feel sleepy. We were both quiet, Ma driving slow and not smoking or drinking coffee for once, me leaning my head against the window half asleep, something relaxed and instrumental on the radio. Then I saw a wheel roll off like a thrown hulahoop, on a break towards the horizon and freedom. I had enough time to think, Hey, that looks like one of our—before there was an almighty bang, the front of the car pitched forward, and the world started to shake apart.

  We grated to a stop on the sandy shoulder of the road and sat for a terrified minute, breathing deep and too surprised to talk, the music going on quietly in the background like nothing had happened.

  “I think it was just a flat,” Ma said. “A big flat.”

  “Nu-uh,” I said, “I think the wheel came clean off.”

  “Don’t be silly. How would the wheel come off?”

  She climbed out and walked around to the sunken corner—my corner—to see, and I followed her out her side because my door wouldn’t open.

  The wheel was gone. The axle had bent sharply when it hit the highway, and the nose of the car had cut a rut in the dirt as we scraped to a stop.

  “Alex, where did you see the wheel go?”

  I walked back along the road to the point where the drag marks started, found the rut the escaping wheel had made and followed it out until we found it on its side in the dead grass. We stood it up on end and rolled it back to the car. Two of the bolts were missing, the rest had sheared off.

  Back at the car Ma stood for a few minutes leaning against the trunk, thinking, looking at the wheel that wasn’t where it needed to be. There was no using the spare, not with a bent axle and no bolts.

  “Get your backpack, kid. We’re going to have to thumb it for a bit.”

  She shuffled around in the trunk after her own bag, and I saw her stick the gun down her pants. The wheel got shoved in the back seat; she pinned a white T-shirt in the window to indicate distress, then joined me on the shoulder with her thumb out. I was scared now, maybe of what might happen to us or of what might happen to whoever picked us up if Ma decided to use the gun, but I didn’t need to be. A purple eighteen-wheeler with Jesus Saves! painted on the doors and mudflaps and pretty much every inch of the front and back in reflective white rolled to a stop just beyond us, and the long thin man in the driver’s seat leaned over and opened the door so that we could climb into the cab.

  “In a spot of trouble, missy?” he asked her, and you couldn’t get offended by the “missy” because you could tell that was what he called every woman he’d ever met.

  “Are we ever—lost a wheel.”

  “There’s a mechanic’s a ways ahead, I can give you and your—” he looked at me a moment, settled on—“kid a lift. There isn’t much else around here.”

  “If you could put us down there, I’m sure we can figure it out. They tow, don’t they?”

  There was gospel on the radio, but I kept my hand on the door latch just in case. Even holy rollers can have psychotic breaks. Ma seemed comfortable, though, chatted about the picture of his wife and kids on the dash, asked how he’d gotten into trucking, putting him and herself at ease until we saw the sign for Ted’s Tow, Trucking, and Repairs and glided to a stop on the side of the very much not-busy road.

  Ma thanked the trucker extensively while I stood awkward on the shoulder, then she hopped down and slammed the door. The air fell quiet as the sound of his engine faded, and our feet crunched too loudly on the gravel as we walked towards the mechanic’s. I was still nervous, even though we had nothing, really, to worry about: nowhere to get to, no time limit on how long we could take getting there, probably enough money in our pockets to get us out of this fix quick and easy. But I didn’t have the child’s blind trust in the omnipotence of parents anymore: I had eaten the apple, knew that Ma was no different from me, that she probably didn’t know what to do right now anymore than I would, that her only advantage was a rapidly narrowing gulf of experience.

  A bell over the door jangled as we went into the mechanic’s lobby, but there was no one behind the counter. It was a small room, the walls dingy and the countertop chipped and yellowed from the sun. Three plastic chairs were lined up with their backs against the wide front window, with two more facing them, flanked by a vending machine with half its spaces empty and a hot-drink machine on an overturned milk crate, with a coffee table covered in old magazines and eviscerated newspapers in the middle. The ceiling fan rocked on its mooring, made a tak-tak-tak sound as it spun. I hung back as Ma wandered first behind the counter, then through the back door into the shop, calling out a careful “Hello?” as she went.

  They were in the garage, one under a dented sedan up on a lift, the other filling in paperwork at an oil-stained worktop. The one under the car came forward,
shook her hand, led us back to the front office and got her a cup of coffee from the little push-button machine before asking her what the trouble was.

  He nodded slow as she explained about the wheel flying off, then said, “I can haul it in for you, easy, but if the axle’s bent it might cost more to fix than the car’s worth. Might be best to trade it for parts and start clean.”

  “I can’t afford a new car, not right now.” Ma’s voice had gotten thin and high. “We’re living on savings till we get to my sister’s in California.”

  This was news to me—I assumed that she was making it up.

  “I’ve got a used station wagon out back just waiting on a radiator, should be turning up Wednesday, Thursday. I could have you out of here Friday afternoon the latest—probably the best offer you’re going to get unless you plan on hitching the whole way.”

  We slid into the front of the tow truck with him; on the ride back Ma was silent, thinking, about what I wasn’t sure but I hoped that she had a plan for getting us out of there. I didn’t want to spend the next four nights camped out beside the mechanic’s, living off our peanut-butter crackers and dried fruit.