Windfalls: A Novel

by Hegland, Jean

  “You wouldn’t hear him. You’d be asleep.”

  Downstairs Ellen’s cries were escalating, and it was as though Anna’s brain were a machine that had suddenly seized up. She could feel her sympathy start to drain away, could hear the impatience begin to rasp in her voice when she said, “Lucy, it’s bedtime.”

  “I can’t sleep,” Lucy whimpered, curling into a ball and looking up at her mother with an expression so pathetic it almost seemed calculated.

  “Look—you’re in your own room. In your own house. The windows and doors are locked. I’m here, and Daddy’s here. Your night-light’s on, and I’ll leave the light on in the hall, too. Tomorrow is a school day, and now it’s time to go to bed.”

  Lucy’s shoulders began to shake, and although it seemed theatrical, it still squeezed Anna’s heart. Part of her wanted to stay and gain a kind of courage from comforting Lucy. But Ellen’s cries were growing urgent, and Anna could feel her evening unraveling if she could not get Lucy to go to sleep. Besides, she was afraid that if she gave in now, tomorrow night Lucy would expect the same treatment, and the next night she’d want more, in exactly the way the books and magazine articles all warned. She stood to go. “Okay, Lucy. I’ll give you a kiss, and then I’m going to leave. I love you, and you’ll be fine.”

  But when she bent to kiss her, Lucy rolled to face the wall, her back stubborn as living rock.

  Anna asked, “Don’t I get a kiss?”

  The shiny head shook no into the pillow.

  “Okay. Good night.” Anna crossed the room, pausing at the door to turn off the light. “I love you,” she said. But there was no answer from the white bed.

  IN THE FINAL FLURRY OF TRAVIS ’ S DEATH, PEOPLE CAME HURRYING FROM all over the hospital—doctors, nurses, even the housekeeper. At first they pushed Cerise out into the hallway, but later, when all their efforts to keep the life trapped in his little body had come to nothing, they let her back in the room, left her alone with what was left of him.

  Tears already racing down her face, she gazed at him. He was so impossibly small beneath the white sheet. The monitor and respirator were still, and a raw new silence clung to everything. She grabbed the railing of his bed in both bandaged hands, squeezed until her arms shook and the blisters tore beneath the gauze. But the bed held, the building did not fall, his tiny chest did not rise. She threw her head back on her neck and howled.

  She had never thought that he could actually die. In all those awful hours she had never thought he would really leave her, had never for an instant believed he would not live. From the moment Travis had first entered the world, it had been inconceivable that the world could exist without him. Now it was inconceivable that she could remain after he was gone.

  Someone was speaking from the doorway. It was the young nurse, the one who’d called Travis “Cowboy.” Timidly she said, “We’ve called Travis’s father, Ms. Johnson. And sent for the social worker and the chaplain. They’ll be here any minute, to talk with you. Is there anything—should I stay with you until they come?”

  Savagely Cerise shook her head. She didn’t want the nurse to stay with her, didn’t want to have to see Jake or the chaplain or a social worker, didn’t want to have to do any of the things words were used to do—explain, defend, excuse, or soothe. She wanted to be as alone in the room as she was in her anguish, wanted only to scream and howl and moan.

  But the nurse’s question had diminished her to silence. Tentatively, mutely, she reached to touch Travis with an unswathed finger. Part of her was still aghast at how the fire had hurt him, though another part was afraid, even now, of making it hurt worse. She bent to kiss him, but the thought came that she was kissing him good-bye, and her body convulsed, propelling her back from that abyss.

  She turned and stumbled from the room, Travis for once unprotesting at her departure. She walked down the halls like a purposeful zombie, the tears already so familiar it never occurred to her to wipe them from her face.

  She passed hurrying nurses, passed clusters of families standing awkwardly in the hallways with their cones of flowers and their Mylar balloons. She entered the lobby, passed the registration desk where, at some point in the last two days, she’d had to remember the numbers and recite the facts that summed up her right to claim care for Travis. When she reached the entryway, the hospital’s main doors slid apart, and she stumbled outside.

  It was not until she stood on the street that she realized she had nowhere to go. “Totaled,” the fire chief had said, as if their trailer were a car, as if she’d been traveling instead of sleeping when it happened. When he’d said it—with Travis still breathing—it had been only an annoyance, a fact as inconsequential as the flies that slipped through the torn window screens in the afternoon or the mosquitoes that hummed in their bedroom at night. But now, standing dazedly on the sidewalk in the feeble sunshine, Cerise had no idea what she should do next.

  At Woodland Manor the routine of death had been simple and immutable, her part in it clear. But now it was as though death were a test she hadn’t yet had time to study for. There were things she should do—she was sure of that—things that were expected of her. But when she tried to think what they were, her thoughts skittered off like spit on a hot iron.

  She began to walk, her footsteps thick with shock. A mean wind stung her cheeks with grit. She was shivering, her shoulders and knees shaking, her teeth chattering unstoppably. A carload of teenagers careened past. She felt the throb of their music, heard their reckless laughter. Other cars passed. In some of them were children, living children.

  Her feet slapped the concrete. She was walking past a row of restaurants. Their warmth and smells assaulted her. People brushed by her, laughing and talking, as oblivious of her suffering as if she were a ghost or another druggie or a drunk. They did not realize it was they who were ghosts, the food they ate already turning to shit even as its flavors lingered in their mouths, their laughter fading like smoke as it left their rotting lungs. She looked at them, and images swarmed unbidden into her mind. She imagined them burning, saw how their clothing would flare and how their skins would char. She could not help but hear how they would scream.

  The hospital Travis had been taken to was in a part of the city Cerise did not know. For many blocks it had not occurred to her to wonder where she was going, but gradually, as she pushed down the unfamiliar streets, she realized she was heading north, toward the bridge. In a campground, Melody had said, on the mountain. It was impossible to think, impossible to plan. She made her feet keep walking. Small details snagged her awareness—a pink rose bush blooming in a pot beside a doorway, a whole banana rotting in the gutter, a poodle yapping behind a gate. They seemed significant, but when she tried to understand what they meant, her mind slid sideways.

  She was moving up a street lined with pastel-colored row houses whose windows and doors were decorated with curls of iron grating. She could smell food cooking, could smell the scented steam from someone’s shower. She tripped over a toddler’s riding toy abandoned on the sidewalk, and felt a surge of rage against all that domesticity, against all the smug happiness she imagined those iron gratings were intended to protect.

  The thought came to her that she had been wrong to leave the hospital. She’d made another awful mistake, like in those dreams she’d begun to have after Melody left, where in her hurry to board the bus on time, she forgot Travis on the sidewalk, and then, no matter how loudly she screamed, no matter how hard she pleaded and pounded the closed doors, the driver of the bus either failed to hear her or refused to stop, and she had to watch in frantic helplessness as Travis grew smaller and smaller until at last he vanished out of sight.

  Surely Travis was still alive. Surely he was sitting up in bed by now, yanking at his IV lines and respirator tube and calling for his mama, crying because she was not there to comfort him. She stood paralyzed while her mind raced back along the sidewalks, across the streets, and through the hospital corridors, back to the room where she had
left him. But then she imagined the faces of the nurses looking up at her in surprise. She saw the solid bodies of the orderlies, felt the judgment of the doctors, slammed back again into the fact that Travis was gone.

  For a second she wanted him so savagely she was ready to return anyway. But when she tried to imagine freeing his body from its tangle of lines and tubes, she realized how impossible it would be to claim even that husk of her boy. Standing on the sidewalk, she remembered Jake’s sorry helplessness in the face of Travis’s suffering, and odd words came to her from somewhere, perhaps a movie she’d seen but could no longer remember—a horror movie, maybe, or one of those old dramas she and Melody used to watch together late at night—let the dead bury the dead.

  It was almost evening by the time she neared the northern edge of the city. In a broad plaza overlooking the bay, clusters of people were laughing and pointing, gnawing on ice cream bars or pizza wedges. Standing alone or intertwined in groups, they posed for photographs, and unwittingly Cerise pushed her way into their pictures. Ahead the bridge loomed. She raised her eyes to the towers that soared above the crowded roadway, saw the cables swooping between them, and suddenly everything shifted into focus. She began to walk with greater purpose, following the sidewalk that led out of the plaza and across the eastern side of the bridge. Traffic passed less than a yard from where she walked, and yet already the world was growing distant. People pushed by her—joggers, clots of tourists, loud groups of teenagers—but she moved among them inside a charged stillness, conscious only of the promise of the bridge and the hammering of her heart.

  She ran her bandaged hand along the rib-high railing as she walked, and when she was halfway across, she paused to look down. At the level of the roadbed a steel ledge jutted an arm’s length from the bridge. But beyond the ledge there was only a waste of open air, and beyond that, the distant water. Her cheeks were stiff with the residue of tears. The wind tore her hair from her face, molded her clothes against her body, chilled her leaking breasts. A bird flew beneath her. She thought of Travis crawling over the lowered railing of his crib to try to hide from the heat and flame. She imagined crawling over the railing of the bridge, imagined swooping down to meet the water, imagined filling her arms and lungs with ocean and finding Travis in that embrace. With her teeth she tore the gauze and tape from her hands, flung the bandages over the railing, watched them flutter toward the water. Lifting her arms high as she could reach, she grabbed a steel cable, and, gritting her teeth against the pain of her seared palms, she tried to scrabble up the railing.

  When hands clasped her waist, she thought at first that they were the hands of angels, come to help her over. But instead of boosting her up, they held firm, not yanking her back but simply steadying her, as though they were only there to help her keep her balance until her feet touched the sidewalk once again.

  She released the cable and wheeled around to face whatever it was that had interrupted her. A man stood chest-high in front of her, his hands already quietly by his sides. He was an Asian man in tidy clothes. He spoke to her in his language, a phrase that sounded like a question. When she did not respond, he shook his head gently as though he were reminding a child of some small mistake. He said something more, and his eyes were friendly and curious and calm. Cerise stared into them, and for a moment it seemed so simple for him to save her.

  But a thick shame rose in her. In that instant she was aware of the press of bodies as separate people, of the traffic-roar as the roar of many cars. She realized that hundreds of people had watched her scrabbling at the railing, and suddenly she was certain they all knew why she wanted to die. She knew they could see the guilty, howling woman inside her, who, when she turned and began to run, seemed to spill an ugly trail of blood behind her. She ran until she reached the north end of the span. Panting and sobbing, she made her way away from the crowds and beneath the deck of the bridge. When she found herself in a weedy parking lot on the ocean side, she stopped, gasping, and looked around, trying to make sense of where she was.

  She had assumed that crossing the bridge would bring her to Melody. But instead of the forested mountain and the campground Melody had described on the phone, Cerise saw only looming hills, empty of everything but windblown grass. Behind her, the freeway still roared its condemnation, but at the far end of the parking lot a road led up into the empty hills. She began to trudge along it, her head bent to face the gravel and weeds. A pair of bicyclists flying down the grade in the thickening dusk shot her looks of curiosity as they swept by, though the cars, their headlights newly lit, passed within inches of where she walked without slowing.

  By the time she neared the top of the hill, it was almost dark. Next to the road was a gravel pullout with an information kiosk. Posters advertising campfire lectures and flyers warning about rattlesnakes and poison oak shook in the wind beside a wooden map routed with a web of trails and roads. In the failing light she tried to decipher it, though her mind was as stiff as her tear-roughened face.

  A car slowed to a stop beside the pullout. Its driver leaned across the passenger’s seat. Rolling down the window, he asked, “Where ya going?”

  She ignored him, and he asked again.

  “The campground,” she answered over her shoulder.

  “Going camping?”

  Her eyes on the map, she shook her head as though his voice were a mosquito whine she might chase from her ears.

  “Come on,” he said. “I’ll take you there.”

  She started toward the car, but when she saw the driver’s leer and the jumble of blankets and beer cans in the backseat, a final scrap of caution made her veer away instead.

  “Get in,” he commanded, reaching across the front seat to open the passenger’s door. At the sound of his voice, she turned from the road and began to run up the hillside. Cursing, he slammed the door and the car tore away, gravel spitting like shot from beneath his tires.

  Lungs burning, she ran uphill in the waning light. She was accustomed to pavement, and her feet slid and twisted on the chert and sage. When she finally sagged to a stop, she was beyond the crest of the hill, overlooking a valley more barren and uninhabited than any place she had ever seen. The first stars pricked the sky overhead. A moon slender as a shard of glass hung low above the opposite hill, while all around her the wind continued, stealing her breath and savaging her hair.

  She staggered down into the empty valley, calling for Travis, screaming his name to the broken moon. Sobbing until her guts heaved, she lurched and stumbled through the darkness, collapsing finally beneath a lone tree to sleep outdoors for the first time in her life, to sleep on the dirty ground below a sky filled with an appalling multitude of stars.

  SOMEONE WAS SCREAMING.

  At first the screams came from such a great distance that it was possible for Anna to sink deeper into her sleep and pretend they could not reach her. But rapidly they grew louder and nearer and more urgent until each cry was a knife hacking her awake, leaving her aching and prickling and thick with confusion—the same sensation of unbearable interruption she felt when one of the girls woke while she and Eliot were making love. The black room spun, and Anna struggled to reconstruct herself inside its spinning. Even so, she was out of bed and running before she could find the reason why.

  She was running toward the screams, running to meet the trouble because she recognized the screams were Lucy’s, and when at last she reached the open door of Lucy’s room and saw that Lucy was still there—unbroken and unbleeding—sitting up in bed and sobbing beside her bunny night-light, a little of Anna’s terror left, though she rushed to grab Lucy as if she might still be stolen.

  “What is it?” Anna rasped. “What’s wrong? What happened?” In her arms Lucy’s body seemed so small, her bones so sharp and frail. Trembling like a sparrow, Lucy cried, “He killed her!”

  Ellen, Anna thought like a shot, and her heart surged toward the baby’s room, but before she could leap from Lucy’s bed, her voice croaked, “Who?”
<
br />   “Andrea,” Lucy sobbed. “He killed Andrea.”

  “It was a dream,” Anna said, relief gushing through her. Pressing Lucy against her, she added, “You had a bad dream.”

  But Lucy pulled away to stare in horror at the shadowed wall. “It’s true,” she cried. “It’s true. He cut off her head.”

  “Whose head, sugar?”

  “Andrea—Andrea’s head.”

  Anna felt a prickle of premonition. “Of course not,” she said firmly. Gathering Lucy deeper in her arms, she insisted, “It was just a dream.”

  “It’s not,” Lucy sobbed. “It’s true, it’s real. The grown-ups said.”

  “What did they say?” Anna asked. She tried to make her body big and calm, tried to make her flesh a protective barrier between Lucy and the world. She felt the press of Lucy’s elbows, the bones of her shoulders, her sweet, sharp chin. She wanted to murder Ms. Ashton, with her safety rules and her stranger awareness program. She said, “Tell me what the grown-ups said.”

  “They said he had Andrea. They said—” Lucy paused, looking puzzled.

  “See?” Anna murmured, making her voice smooth as cream. “See? It was only a dream.”

  “Things are wrong,” Lucy persisted, bewildered.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” Anna murmured, stroking Lucy’s head. “Everything is fine. Go back to sleep.”

  But instead of relaxing into her mother’s words, Lucy sat up straight and stared at her with horror. “I can’t do that,” she gasped.

  “Why not?”

  “He’s waiting for me there, inside my dreams.”

  “Of course not,” Anna said. She thought, I love this child too much to be her mother. Casting wildly for inspiration, she offered, “Noranella’s ghost will keep you safe.”

  For a moment Lucy looked confused, and then her whole being seemed to deflate. “Mommy,” she said, a mask of desperation stiffening her face, “this is real.”