The Lauras

by Sara Taylor

  When we hit land once again she continued to sit, braced for impact, until the ferry had mostly emptied out, then went slowly down to the auto deck and drove us out into the cloudy light of Canada—which looked suspiciously like the cloudy light of America that we had presumably just left.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  “Not as such,” she answered.

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “Depends on who you ask.”

  “Do you know where we’re going?”

  “Does anyone?”

  We rolled slowly through streets lined with shops to a more residential part of town, the houses wide spaced, or appearing so because of how small they were, how precisely the gardens were laid out. She squinted at the house numbers, got to the end of the road and doubled back, stopped in front of one of the smallest. The paint was peeling slightly, the house itself looked vacant. The garden was why we’d passed—a hedge of overleaning cypress trees, so that the house had a tucked-in, leave-me-alone look to it, as if we weren’t supposed to be looking at it, as if the residents didn’t want to be seen. We sat on the shoulder of the road, Ma not looking at the house but rather at her hands on the wheel. She pulled the keys out of the ignition and rolled out of her seat. I didn’t want to go with her, but I followed.

  The path to the door was overgrown; there was one of those cutesy ceramic plates next to the bell that said, Cypress Cottage, 42, that we couldn’t see from the road. Ma stood for a few minutes, studying the door, the dark window, then pressed the bell.

  The held-breath waiting went on too long, then we heard footsteps inside, slow-stuttery footsteps. Ma had tensed to walk away. She looked old to me, tired and frayed at the edges, and at the same time so young, so hopeful, so scared. A key rattled in the lock, and the door opened on a chain, showed a slice of a hollow-chested woman, her skin yellowed and papery.

  “Hey, don’t let me bother you—” Ma croaked.

  The door slammed shut, metal rattled on the other side.

  She flinched like she’d been hit.

  Then the door slammed open, the woman shot out like an arrow into my mother, knocking her back not very far because she was so thin, the two of them hugging and crying, and I knew that our journey was over.

  CHAPTER XXII

  Her husband’s affair had been going on for seven years when she was diagnosed with cancer, so he’d had somewhere else to go. She’d come home one day and everything he owned was gone, along with most of the furniture: there were gaps against walls, spaces where things should have been, dark oblongs in the paint and wallpaper haloed with sun bleaching. Laura’s voice was merry as she told us about it—she had a habit of running her hand over the short grey hair that frosted her scalp that made me feel that it was OK to look at her directly. I was silent as they talked, hoping to be forgotten. Ma hadn’t known about the cancer when we left Virginia, or we would have probably come straight here, as quickly as possible.

  The letter she’d gotten with the almost casual aside halfway through of and Phil left me for his mistress had been the thing that actually made her leave, had made her decide, right in the middle of one of her endless fights with my father, that she wasn’t going to spend another moment of her life shouting back and forth in that kitchen with him.

  “It doesn’t do any good to just run away from something, you’ve got to be running to something,” she said when I asked why she’d waited so long. She’d been planning on leaving, in the right way, at the right time—the backpack that she’d taken with her, which had sat with the shoes all through my childhood, had held her green card, my birth certificate, our passports, all of the papers that she would need to start her life over—but life kept getting in the way. First she’d had me, and at every stage of my growth there had been another reason for her to postpone leaving, until one day she just did. As we’d traveled she’d continued getting letters from Laura, but it wasn’t until Reno that the second bomb was dropped.

  “So I have no ovaries and no eyebrows now, but I’m in remission and not entirely bankrupt. I should be celebrating, I guess, but it feels a bit like a massive anticlimax. I mean, I had cancer, and now I don’t. What do you do after that?”

  Ma hadn’t waited around long enough to respond properly to the letter, just dropped a postcard in the mail that said she was on her way and gave her notice at the bar where she worked. We’d been meaning to go, sooner or later; she’d thought we’d hang on until I was out of school for the summer, but the news made her re-evaluate: “remission” didn’t mean the exact same thing as “cured.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me at the beginning? I would have come sooner, I could have helped.”

  Laura was quiet for a long time. A bottle of wine had been opened, and we were perched on high stools around the end of the kitchen counter, them drinking and me with a soda, over crackers and cheese and containers of leftover olives and marinated vegetables from Laura’s fridge scattered across the granite, half a fancy hors d’oeuvres party and half the random mess of teenage girls just home from school with every possible snack laid out as they chatter all the stopped-up words of the day. The kitchen was nearly empty of furniture, but that made it feel light; in that house the few objects that remained had a special weight to them. Her husband had taken the heirlooms that had come from his grandparents’ houses, left only the things that were truly hers.

  Ma plucked at a cigarette, looked at Laura.

  “You don’t anymore—do you?” she asked.

  “Well, I shouldn’t, but—” Laura looked at me. “If you’re not going anywhere, I could skin up . . .”

  “I thought—”

  “Got back in the habit recently. It helped with the nausea.”

  The smoke flowed in heavy ribbons from their mouths, and in that moment she was all of them: the white-haired old artist that had taken my mother in, the street-smart young girl whose kiss she couldn’t forget, the one that got away and the one that she’d run away with, and still the little girl who stole dimes from her mother’s purse and shared cigs behind the hedge with the damp ground slowly soaking the seat of her pleated wool skirt. They were old and young at once, outside of humanity, the way that lovers always are.

  And there we stayed, I don’t know for how long exactly. There was a gentle quality to the days, as if time weren’t passing, as if there was nowhere that I needed to go. As if I’d come home. Then I started to feel a tingle in my bones. An itch. And I tried to ignore it, but then the question started sounding in my head: whose child are you?

  It was Laura who set me free.

  She and I were sitting one evening in the sunroom at the back of the house—we had already made a habit of sitting there together, her of telling me stories about her own life and about my mother’s life. Ma was cooking dinner, banging pans around and far enough away so as not to hear, and Laura said:

  “If you go, we’ll be here when you get back.”

  “I never said I wanted to go.”

  “You haven’t said that you want to stay, either. If you’re itching to leave, go. And then come back.”

  “Why do you think I want to leave?”

  “By this point I know the signs. Birds before they migrate become disturbed. They cannot settle. If you were to confine them they would beat themselves to death on the walls of their cage, trying to follow the pull. When the travel urge comes, they have to leave. They know it—any sensible person watching knows it. They grow more and more agitated, and then the moment comes, and they fly.”

  She dug in her pocket, handed me a key on a braided leather band.

  “That’s in case you want to go out for, I don’t know, ice cream in the middle of the night and we’re not awake when you get back. But you get to choose how you use it.”

  I waited three days, until the fizzing I felt, the odd, anxious itch in the back of my head and down my spine, could no longer be ignored. Neither of them said anything, but I could tell by the way they looked at me that th
ey knew, that my mother saw in me herself at my age, and the fact that she didn’t say anything, that she didn’t try and stop me, I took to be her blessing. That, and when she brought me a pile of clean laundry a few days later my passport and birth certificate and a little pile of money were stacked neatly on top of them.

  I packed mostly dry, light food, thick socks and spare underwear, put the money I had hoarded and my passport and the key in a zippered pocket close to my skin, and disappeared. I should have left a note, perhaps at the spot at the kitchen counter where my mother sat when we ate dinner. Left a drawing of a bird in flight, at Laura’s spot. I didn’t, didn’t think to do it until I was already on the ferry, watching the line of coast recede, a different line of coast approach. I trusted that they would understand.

  Thirty years on and what I remember is more likely to be not what I said, but what I wish I had said, putting words more polished into my past mouth. We don’t have memories as we like to think of them: perfectly preserved snippets, here’s-what-happeneds, certainty and clarity. All we can really have are mythologies, fragments pieced together and made to cohere, to have pattern, to explain life so that, even if we can’t feel good about it, we can believe we understand it.

  I get to tell this story because I’m the last one standing. Even in her final months, when all she wanted to do was sit and remember, Ma would not remember for me the details of our journey. Whatever I told her had happened, she seemed content to accept as truth. Laura was the one who told me that it was my story now, that I got to decide how it all happened, that I was the only one who could tell it.

  It is strange to think that all that’s left of her on earth are the stories that she told me, and even then, they aren’t the stories that she told me, but her stories as I remember them. For years I blanked over that part of my life, glossed it, pretended that I’d forgotten the time when we were on the move. If I’d never had to put her in the ground, I may never have come back to it, never thought again about that time except in moments when some smell, some sound, called up an unwilling memory, dropped me for a breath back into that awkward, anxious adolescent body.

  Now that she is gone I want to send my teenage self back to her, settle the person who I was happily into Laura’s house with her, make myself content with stillness. But who I am now does not negate who I was then: I have to admit that, at the time, I wanted more than anything to be back on the road, to find the way back to my father, to fly, and there is no shame in that.

  EPILOGUE

  Sitting on the ferry surrounded by people with shopping and kids and luggage and screaming babies I was more alone than I’d ever been before in my life and fairly thrumming with the possibility of it, the freedom to do what I wanted, to go where I chose, and the responsibility of living with the consequences of those actions, whatever they might be. Surrounded by the consequences of my fellow passengers’ decisions in stereo and Technicolor I had the time to reflect on just how far it was, one side of the country to the other. I had turned sixteen while we were in Canada—there had been a cake, which surprised me a little bit, and a night out at a cult movie house, which surprised me even more—a few years older than my mother had been when she ran away from home and hiked the Appalachian Trail, not so much younger than when she’d gotten pregnant with my sister. It was a long way, but I figured that I could make it. I’d done it before, after all, albeit not on my own, and it had taken a damn long time. I reckoned I could do it the second time quicker.

  The ferry hadn’t even cost twenty bucks, and when I put my feet back down on solid land I found that the bus left from mere yards away, so I gave in to impulse and bought a ticket for Seattle, managed to keep my insides on my insides for the three-hour ride, got directions to the Greyhound station from the driver and dropped the money I’d expected to spend on the ferry on a ticket to California, to go and do what my mother couldn’t do, before my nerves failed me.

  There was plenty of time for nerve failure in the four hours I had to wait to be able to use the ticket, though. I went looking for cheap painkillers but found first a packet of motion-sickness pills that the pharmacist wouldn’t sell me because I was too young, then an adult willing to buy the pills for me because there was no way I was getting on a bus again without them, then a discount bundle of grocery-store sandwiches, then three thrift-store paperbacks, because if I was going to have the option of reading while in transit opened up to me by the magic of the pills then I was going to damn well take advantage of it.

  It was an overnight ride, made somewhat longer by the fact that the guy who sat next to me between Tacoma and Portland decided that I of course had a burning interest in the saga of his love life, and that my raised book was mere politeness that should not prevent him from telling me in detail about all of the bitches and whores that had done him wrong and turned his kids against him. The pills worked, but knocked me out, which was a small price to pay for not being sick. After the talker left I dozed, waking each time we stopped, and people shuffled past me getting off and then getting on, dropping back off as the gearbox ground and we got on the road again.

  At half past six the next morning I staggered off the bus in Sacramento with an hour to burn before the next bus, bought a cheap breakfast that I ate slowly because my stomach felt touchy even with the pills, and considered my situation. It felt odd still, being on my own; I couldn’t shake the feeling that Ma should be coming back any moment, that she had just gone to the women’s room, just gone to pay the bill, was about to turn up next to me with the news that it was time to get back on the road. It didn’t make me as anxious as I’d thought it would, though: she wasn’t there to make sure I was all right, she couldn’t fix my mistakes anymore, but she also wasn’t there to see them when I made them, wouldn’t be disappointed in me when I inevitably proved how foolish and young I still was.

  After the food I poked around the bus station, read the timetables, bought some discounted sandwiches for later, then picked out a postcard.

  Ma—

  Banking on the possibility that we breed true. I’ll let you know how I’m getting on, and when I come to roost for a while I’ll send you the address. Let me know if you all do any relocating; I’ll be back sooner or later. Hug Laura for me. I love you.

  —Me

  *

  I found Carla as she was leaving the avian lab that afternoon and followed her for a bit, trying to decide on an appropriate place to talk, the best way to approach her. Ultimately I didn’t have to: she turned down a side street that wound up being a blind alley, was waiting behind the corner when I turned down it after her, got me face down on the ground with her knee in my back and both wrists held before I could figure out what the hell was happening.

  “Why the fuck are you following me again?”

  “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I just need to talk to you a minute!”

  “The hell you do. I’m calling the cops.”

  “Just five minutes. I’ve got to tell you something important.”

  “Tell it to the judge, you pervert.”

  “You were adopted.”

  “Fuck you.” She was rummaging in her bag, for either pepper spray or a phone.

  “Your mom—the lady I was with before, the one with the wallet—she was seventeen when she had you. She gave you up because she didn’t have any other options. She wanted to tell you herself but she was too scared, and if you’ll let me go I’ll give you her name, address and phone number and leave you alone, I swear.”

  She paused in her rummaging.

  “What the hell. Seriously. What the hell?”

  “I know, it’s weird. She only found out who you were and in what city you lived in the last year or so.”

  “Is this some sort of prank or something?”

  “I promise it’s not.” She hadn’t let me up yet, but she’d let go of one of my wrists to grope in her bag, and I took the opportunity to pull out the piece of paper that I’d written Laura’s address and phone number on, handed it
up to her. She hesitated a moment before taking it from me.

  “How do I know this isn’t some kind of weird scam? I figured out I was adopted a few years ago—I’ve been trying to find out who my birth mom was. How do I know that you didn’t find that out somehow and now you’re trying to scam me?”

  “You figured it out?”

  “Blood types.”

  “Ah. I guess you can’t know, really. If you’ll let me up I promise I’ll walk away and never bother you again. You can call that number or not, chase it up or ignore it, it’s up to you.”

  She was quiet for a minute, then took her knee out of the center of my back, let me roll over and get slowly to my feet.

  “I guess that makes us half-siblings or something. I’m sorry I had to tell you this way, but I thought you deserved to know.”

  “How do I know you’re not lying?” she asked. “That you’re not a pair of psychos that want to make my bones into wind chimes?”

  “Who knows? Hell, half the time I don’t know if I’m telling the truth or not. You’re the smart one. I bet you can figure out a way to check out my story, meet up with her somewhere safe, and find out whether or not she’s your mother. You don’t lose anything but time checking it out.”

  I left her in the alley; I looked back once and saw her holding the paper and looking after me. I wanted to keep talking, convince her to call our mother or just get to know her because I wanted to be a person with a sister, even a sister I never saw. But I kept my head down and kept on walking.

  She was the one who got to decide whether she wanted to be part of my story.

  North America is wide. It’s easy to forget that, when you look at a map or sit in a car or get in a plane and watch it all whip past. I walked and thumbed, and this time I knew what to do to people that tried to take advantage, knew what the more subtle forms of trying to take advantage looked like. I was careful now about where I slept and whom I rode with through the Midwest to the other coast. I wanted to stop and kiss Simon one more time and ask again if he would let me go farther, to see how Anna-Maria was getting on, see if the Michigan nightclub was still in business, go down to Florida and dip my face in the sea and catch a wave with the people I had known there, but I couldn’t: they were not my mission, and I was afraid that if I paused, if I deviated, I would never get where I was going, that the part of my makeup I’d gotten from my dad would take over and I’d find myself wedged in, unable to leave. There would always be the opportunity to go looking for them after I found my father.