Windfalls: A Novel

by Hegland, Jean

  Engrossed in her own grim thoughts, Anna drove on through the thickening traffic toward Lucy’s school, and it wasn’t until she was merging with the race of cars on the freeway that Lucy broke the silence. “Are day cares like nightmares?” she asked from the backseat.

  “What do you mean?” Anna said, tossing an anxious glance over her shoulder and pressing the accelerator toward the floor.

  “Are day cares the cares you worry about all day?”

  ON MONDAY AFTERNOON, WHEN SHE ENTERED THE BUILDING AND walked down the echoing corridor toward the after-school care room, Cerise felt as strange as her hands still sometimes felt, both anesthetized and excruciatingly raw. She stood for a long time outside the open door, listening to the clamor and laughter that spilled into the hall, and when she finally forced herself to walk into that roomful of kids, it hurt as though she were being skinned alive.

  There were times that first day when she was sure she could not endure being in the proximity of so many kids. Twice she had to run to the girls’ bathroom, where she hid in one of the cubicles beside a knee-high toilet, shuddering and clutching her mouth shut with both shiny hands until her spike of anguish finally passed and she could return to work.

  It was after six by the time the last child left.

  “They wear you out, don’t they?” Ms. Martinez said kindly as Cerise began to sponge the art table. “Especially at first. It was a busy day.”

  “I guess,” Cerise said, smearing the paint into a muddy rainbow and then wiping the table clean.

  “I must say the kids all seemed to like you. I can’t get Lucas and DeLong to pick up that well for me, and I’ve never seen Kaylesha take to anyone so fast.”

  “They were nice,” Cerise said, bending over her sponge, trying to keep the grief out of her voice.

  Despite the flicker of pleasure she’d felt at Ms. Martinez’s words, by the time she said good-bye and left the room, she was certain she could never go back again. Outside it was night, and raining. Blades and shards of light cast by streetlights and house lights and passing cars glinted on the wet black pavement, and the rain came down like hard, impartial tears.

  There was a little park a few blocks from the school. In the dark and in the rain, it was empty and foreboding, as gloomy as a cemetery with its tangle of trees and its looming, rain-smeared swings. Stumbling past it, Cerise couldn’t keep herself from thinking of all the children who would never again play there, couldn’t keep from hearing the emptiness of their silenced voices echoing in the rain.

  That night she was too tired even to try to summon her memories of Travis to console her. Instead, she lay on her cot listening to the drumming of the rain and trying to plan a way to escape the life that was closing in around her. All night, as she skimmed the surface of her sleep, she imagined leaving, just walking off, imagined finding a way to vanish altogether into the web of the world, though when she woke enough to try to plan where she might go, her thoughts smeared like tempera colors beneath a sponge.

  By the time morning arrived and the moans and yawns of the other women rose around her, she was thinking of the spray of freckles across Lucas’s soft nose, was remembering Cara’s knock-knock jokes and wondering whether Jose’s puppy had come back home. All day those children haunted her. At noon, as she sat in the soup kitchen, eating her steamed hot dog and limp potato salad and listening to Barbara’s irreverent patter, she thought of Kaylesha’s timid smile, remembered how Lucy had leaned against her shoulder as she watched Cerise draw a horse. She wondered if Brianna’s cold was getting any better, and by two-forty-five that afternoon, her craving to be near those kids drew her back just one more time.

  THE FIRST TIME ANNA SAW A PHOTOGRAPH THAT MOVED HER, SHE MUST have been eight or ten, and she was sitting in the doctor’s office, waiting for her turn to go in and get a shot. She understood that shots were good for her, knew she was expected to be a big girl and be brave. She realized that when it was over, the nurse would let her choose a sucker wrapped in cellophane and impaled on a white loop of string, but still dread filled her stomach like gelatinous oatmeal. Sitting beside her mother in the doctor’s waiting room, it was all that she could do to keep from crying.

  Her mother was reading Time and another child had the Highlights, so Anna had picked some other magazine at random from the rack. She was riffling through the pages, staring sightlessly at the words and ads and trying not to think of the needle going in, when suddenly she came to a picture that made her stop and stare. It was of a bridge nearly hidden in mist with a few skeletal trees rising up behind it. It wasn’t what she would have thought of as an exciting picture, and yet somehow it pulled her in, made her eyes keep working for longer than she’d thought possible to look at a single picture.

  And when she finally turned the page, there was another photograph by the same photographer—a boy in short pants walking down a street—and after that one was another, so many pictures in a row that she was still busy looking when her mother nudged her and told her it was time to see the doctor.

  Much later, thinking back, she was almost certain that it was Cartier-Bresson’s work she’d found that day, that the magazine she had chosen was Popular Photography, or maybe Look or Life. But at the time those names meant nothing to her. All that mattered was that gazing at those photographs was like falling into a quietness, as if the whole room were suddenly filled with the heightened silence of a new-fallen snow.

  It reminded her of the message posted at railroad crossings—Stop. Look. Listen—only instead of a command, this was an invitation, and behind that invitation was another, so that she kept looking and looking, and each moment she looked, she discovered something more. In some mysterious way, sitting beside her mother and gazing at the rumpled pages, she’d felt as though she were more in the room than she had been before, back when she’d been merely filled with dread.

  The swipe of alcohol still stung. It still hurt when the nurse jabbed the needle into the thin flesh of her bicep, and her arm still ached all afternoon. But those hurts were smaller than she’d feared. Afterward she surprised herself by choosing lime, and the sucker tasted even sweeter than she’d expected. Riding home, chewing on the green-stained sucker strings and gazing out the window at the city she’d seen all her life, she realized she was noticing everything as if it were brand-new—a cat crouched under a pickup, a fence entwined with a ragged strand of ivy, a woman in a belted coat standing at a bus stop—each thing vivid and unique and beautiful in a way she’d never seen before.

  For years, her whole life had been richer and more real because of the time she spent gazing at photographs, the time she spent looking through a viewfinder or studying the upside-down image on the ground glass of her field camera. That had always been what mattered most—what mattered infinitely more than shows and sales and awards—the way her work kept her awake, and open to the world.

  She had thought that her job at the university would be the first step in reclaiming all of that. “This will not only help pay the bills—it will invigorate your art,” Eliot had exclaimed when she’d called him at work to tell him about Martin Lee’s offer. But after her first few weeks on campus, she began to wonder if they hadn’t both been mistaken.

  Her students wearied and annoyed her, with their pink cheeks and pierced eyebrows, with their ardent faith in art. It’s only a trick of light, she wanted to tell them, it’s just another hoax. A photograph is only a residue, a sloughed-off skin. It doesn’t change a thing. But instead she reviewed depth of field and discussed principles of composition, while all her words felt like ashes in her mouth.

  Rather than encouraging her, the kindness of her colleagues made her feel like a fraud. She cringed when they congratulated her on her photographs and asked what she was doing now. Art is only froth, she wanted to answer. There’s a glut of it already in this world. But instead she choked out an answer about the baby and the move and how busy she’d been, and followed it with a lie about how she couldn’t wait to get h
er camera out again.

  On Friday night of the second week, when she finally sat down to dinner with her family, Anna was so exhausted her skin ached. Ellen’s nose was running ominously, Lucy’s mood was manic and brittle, and the weekend loomed ahead like an obstacle course that somehow had to be run by Monday morning.

  Only Eliot seemed unfazed by the demands of their new schedule. “So,” he said, as he set a piece of halibut on Lucy’s plate and began to work through it with his fork. “How’s it feel, to be back at work?”

  “Work, lurk, murk,” Lucy said, watching her father’s progress with her fish. “Daddy, what’s murk?”

  “It’s when things are dark or hard to see,” Eliot answered, casting a glance at Anna, waiting for her response.

  Anna sighed, “I guess it’s harder than I expected.”

  “It’s all still really new,” Eliot sympathized, pulling a bone from Lucy’s fish and placing it on the edge of his own plate.

  “It’s more than that,” Anna answered, serving him some salad.

  “Is someone giving you trouble?” Eliot asked swiftly.

  “No, not at all. Everyone’s been really great.” Anna put salad on her own plate, stared down at the glistening lettuce, the flecks of grated carrot, the nearly invisible grit of salt.

  “Then what?” Eliot persisted, adding another bone to his pile.

  Struggling to keep her voice light, Anna answered, “I keep remembering a teacher I had back in graduate school.”

  “Tool, rule, fool,” interrupted Lucy, grabbing her milk and narrowly missing knocking Anna’s wineglass on the floor.

  “Quiet, Pine Nut,” Eliot said, setting Lucy’s plate down in front of her. “It’s your mommy’s turn to talk.”

  Anna spooned a dab of rice cereal expertly into Ellen’s open mouth and said, “He was a good photographer, but he was a rotten teacher.”

  “Teacher, preacher, creature,” Lucy sang, jabbing her fork in the air while Ellen watched in moon-eyed adoration.

  “Lucy,” Eliot said. “Eat your dinner.”

  “Anyway,” Anna said, tucking another spoonful of cereal into Ellen’s open mouth and then deftly scraping the residue from her plush cheeks, “every semester at the first class meeting this guy told all his students that the best thing they could do for the world was to never make another photograph. He said no one should be a photographer if they could possibly help it, and that he would give an automatic A to anyone who would quit the class in the next twenty-four hours. After that, they were going to have to work like dogs just to get a C.

  “At the time,” Anna sighed, staring at her food, “I thought he was a jerk.”

  “He was a jerk,” Eliot answered.

  Anna said, “I know. But I have to admit that part of me’s been wondering if he weren’t on to something, too.”

  “Seriously?” asked Eliot.

  “Maybe,” Anna answered, poking at the white flesh of the fish on her plate. “I don’t know.”

  “Foe,” sang Lucy gleefully. “Low, woe.”

  “I don’t know,” Anna repeated raggedly. “Sometimes I think I’m right, and sometimes I think there’s just something wrong with me, like I’ve forgotten something important that I used to know by heart.”

  “Heart,” said Lucy under her breath, “art … fart.” She giggled and cast a surreptitious glance toward her parents. But her father was looking at her mother, and her mother was looking out the window at the darkening sky.

  IT BECAME A LITTLE EASIER, IN TIME. TO THE CHILDREN AT AFTERSCHOOL care Cerise was like any other adult, a creature so remote and complete it was unthinkable she might have troubles as keen as theirs. But once they learned that she was a tireless jump-rope turner, that she allowed seconds at snack time, and that she didn’t make the mistake of always believing the first one who reported a squabble, they accepted her as nearly one of them.

  When Lucas told Amanda that the tooth fairy was just your parents, it was Cerise Amanda sought to set things straight, and when Delano fell in the gym and broke his arm, Cerise was the person he ran to first, thrusting himself blindly past the anxious cluster of kids and teachers and pushing his hot, wet face into her solar plexus, trusting her to keep him safe and stop his tears.

  During the hours she spent among those children, she could almost share their sense of her, and she was relieved to be reduced to nothing but Honey, pouring juice or cutting construction paper or mixing paint. Sometimes, as she cared for that roomful of other people’s kids, she felt almost accustomed to her own children being gone, though at other times she was haunted by the feeling that Travis was still back at the Happy Factory, still waiting impatiently for her to get off work.

  Every evening, when the parents arrived to rush their children home, she wanted to stop them, to tell them how utterly precious their kids were and warn them that every minute that passed was one minute closer to the end. Instead, she sorted jackets and helped with sleeves and buttons, found backpacks and library books and homework pages, helped to hurry the children off with their harried moms and dads.

  So a little life had begun to accrete around her, like a shell that both protected and shaped the soft animal that lived inside. No one ever asked about her, where she lived or who she loved or what she did when she was not at work, and as time went on, it began to matter more and more that no one ever did. She came to fear those questions not only because of what they would expose, but also because of how the truth about who she was would destroy the haven she’d almost begun to prize.

  “Can I give you a ride home?” Ms. Martinez asked one evening after work as they were walking together down the hall. “It’s pretty wet out there.”

  “Oh, no,” Cerise said, though she added hurriedly, “I mean, I like to walk.”

  “In the rain?” Ms. Martinez asked, and Cerise cringed, afraid her secret would unravel like one of Barbara’s blankets the moment someone yanked the first stitch.

  Back at the shelter every evening, she ate her supper with the other women, and afterward, while the mothers put their little ones to bed and tried to get their older children to do their homeroom, Cerise sat with the childless women in the TV room and let the TV’s flicker and murmur soothe her tired brain.

  “Notice how there’s never any TVs on TV?” Barbara observed while the rest of the women gazed at the screen and scowled at her interruption. Ignoring their irritation, she went on, “Away back long ago, when the government wanted to kill people, they gave ’em blankets laced with smallpox germs. Now all they have to do is just give us this crap-in-a-box instead. Exterminates us just as fast, but keeps us alive to buy shit, too.”

  Occasionally, beneath the poster of Andrea that hung on the back wall of the room, some of the women would begin to talk about their lives, sorting and re-sorting them as though their pasts were the bags that held their final possessions, rearranging and repacking their troubles until finally they had reduced them to a few words that they could carry with them wherever they went. My breakdown, someone would say. Or, my surgery. Before the car wreck, another woman would answer, or After my relapse. When I got laid off. After my old man left. Since I’ve been clean.

  Sometimes the women cried, and the tears that slid down their tired cheeks and hung from their quivering chins seemed so tiny compared to the oceans of their suffering. Cerise found a kind of comfort in their stories and tears—not because she liked to see more pain, but because suffering was life’s true condition. It made sense that people would suffer, made sense that nothing would stay right for very long. Watching the other women gather round the weeping one to pat her back and wipe her little tears away, Cerise could feel almost kin to the crying woman, almost kin to the women who comforted her.

  The TV was turned off at ten, and then the women wandered off to bed. All the cots in the sleeping hall had long since been staked out like pieces of real estate—the ones closest to the bathroom or in the darkest corners valued more than the ones near the door or in the center of
the room. Cerise’s cot was along the back wall between Barbara’s and Maria’s, and each night it was an exquisite relief to return to it, to lie beneath a roof while the rain came down outside, to sleep on her own bed among other sleeping humans, beneath a blanket that had begun to smell like her.

  Lying on her cot, listening to the bluster of the rain and the murmur of the women settling into their sleep, listening to Barbara’s mumbled curses and Maria’s whispered prayers, Cerise would turn her thoughts to Travis, would try to get her memories of him to come alive inside her mind. Those nights when she managed to find him in that private netherworld between the living and the dead, he was so vivid, so present, and so near that she could almost feel the warm press of his arms around her neck, could almost smell the yeasty scent of him, and she would lie for long minutes, smiling mindlessly up into the darkness while her pillow grew wet with unheeded tears.

  Sometimes she couldn’t help but think of Melody, too—the young, true Melody whom she would never see again. Listening to the murmurs of the children as they tossed in their sleep, Cerise would remember Melody, worming her way between the sheets to snuggle. Thinking back to how she’d watched the kids coloring that afternoon, she would remember Melody, chanting the names of the crayons like a charm. But each time she began to relax into those memories, another memory would shoulder its way into her thoughts—the girl she’d seen in Santa Dorothea, looking straight through Cerise, and then laughing as she turned away.