Windfalls: A Novel

by Hegland, Jean

  Only in Cerise’s dreams did the other, older Melody occasionally appear. Sometimes the teardrop on Melody’s cheek had grown to cover her entire face, so that whole continents and oceans stretched and collapsed when she spoke. Other times a huge dream-Melody kept trying to scrabble her way back onto Cerise’s lap. And once Cerise dreamed she was watching Melody pile up great stacks of garbage on an empty plain. “God doesn’t make trash,” Melody explained, looking so deep inside Cerise’s eyes it seemed she was peering into her skull. “That’s why we need a fire, to get rid of all the trash that God didn’t make.”

  Occasionally, very late at night when everyone else had finally settled into sleep, Cerise thought she caught the sound of a telephone ringing from a long way off, ringing and ringing, ringing wearily and unrelentingly, insisting that someone somewhere should answer its call. But before she had a chance to consider what that ringing phone might mean, she came home from work one evening to find Barbara in the sleeping hall, stuffing her clothes and yarns into plastic grocery bags.

  “What are you doing?” Cerise cried. “It’s almost time to eat.”

  “It’s been a fine holiday,” her friend muttered. “But it’s over now. The lady says I gotta look for work or leave. And what the fuck kinda work they think I’m gonna do, with my heart and my legs and my crazy spells?” Her eyes flicked impatiently around the sleeping hall, adamantly refusing to meet Cerise’s gaze.

  “You can crochet,” Cerise offered, dropping to her hands and knees to ferret out the balls of yarn that had rolled beneath Barbara’s cot. “Or teach people how.”

  “Know anyone wants to pay a living wage for crocheting?” Barbara asked, snatching the tangled yarns from Cerise’s hands. “Not in this country, let me tell you, not since Jesus baked the cake.”

  “You can comfort people,” Cerise said, but Barbara only scowled.

  “No money in comfort,” she said. She jammed the narrow strip of the blanket she’d just begun on top of the jumbled yarns.

  “I never had no babies,” she said fiercely, looking askance at a spot beyond Cerise’s shoulder. “But I once was someone’s child.”

  Her crochet hook clattered to the floor, and Cerise asked in panic, “Where will you go?”

  “Don’t like to tell people my address. I’ll be fine. You too,” Barbara added, her eyes suddenly drilling into Cerise’s, her voice a command.

  But a moment later her gaze wavered and slid off Cerise’s face. “I’ll see you,” she said, her voice drifting.

  “When?” Cerise persisted.

  “At lunch,” she answered, heaving up her bags and shuffling from the room. “Sometime. Maybe.”

  But she wasn’t at the soup kitchen that noon or the next, and on Monday when she finally appeared, her clothes were torn and dirty, and her hair was clumped in knots at the back of her head. At the sight of her, standing uncertainly in the doorway while the daylight spilled in around her, Cerise jumped up from her meal. She ran to help Barbara with her bags and to carry her tray through the crowd while Barbara tagged dully behind. When they reached the table where Cerise had been sitting, Cerise dropped one of the bags so that it tipped and hanks and twists of yarn rolled across the floor. Angrily Barbara began to scoop them up, tried to stuff the whole mess back into her bag.

  “It’ll tangle,” Cerise said timidly, “like that.” But when she reached to help, Barbara barked, “You let my yarns alone.”

  “What?”

  “Bad as the rest a them,” Barbara muttered. “Only you got no shame. At least the others wait till dark.”

  “For what?” Cerise asked.

  “Sneak up on me at night and try to mess with my bag. Sneak in while I’m trying to sleep. Make it so now I can’t even rest no more, I got to stay awake to protect my stuff. Won’t let my yarns alone, either—tangle ’em, tie ’em up in mean knots. And now they want to paint my skin.”

  “Paint your skin?” Cerise asked, perplexed and horrified.

  “Got an ink that won’t come off. They want to paint pictures, poison pictures, want to sneak up and cover me with beautiful bright killer pictures and then watch and see how long I last, like human life to them is just some fucking experiment.”

  “Who does?” Cerise persisted.

  Barbara’s eyes narrowed. “You all can go practice your evil arts somewhere else. Won’t let you fuck with me.”

  The whole world felt slippery and tilted, like a ride in the amusement park when the wildest part was over, but even as the ride was slowing down, it seemed the world itself had begun to reel and lurch, spinning on centerless and beyond control. Cerise reached out for Barbara’s arm to steady herself, but Barbara shrugged her hand off viciously.

  “Don’t you come on to me,” she hissed. “You go find someone else to do your slut-work with.” Abandoning her untouched food, she pushed herself from the table, gathered her broken bags, and struggled off, leaving Cerise aching with worry and helplessness.

  FROM HER PLACE IN THE BACKSEAT, LUCY SAID, “THERE’S A NICE TEACHER at after-school care.”

  “That’s good,” Anna answered over her shoulder as she pulled out of the school parking lot onto the wet street. “What’s her name?”

  “It’s a sweet name,” Lucy said absently. “I forget.”

  “Do you like her?”

  “She’s a good drawer.”

  “A good drawer?”

  “She draws good horses,” Lucy said, gazing out the window at the rain.

  “That’s nice,” Anna answered, accelerating to enter the freeway. For a moment, as she navigated the curving overpass, she caught a glimpse of the misty, gray-green hills that ringed the city. Last weekend, during a break between storms, she’d forced herself to return to those hills and make a few exposures of the acres of staked grapes, and a few more of the orchard of dead trees she’d wept in when she heard the news about Andrea’s nightgown. In the orchard she’d managed to catch that magic hour between afternoon and evening when the light was bold and smooth and the broken trees seemed to glisten in the rain-scrubbed air. But hunched beneath her dark cloth with her finger poised on the shutter release while she watched for the perfect convergence of light and cloud and shadow, she’d realized none of the satisfaction she would once have taken in that moment, had felt none of the pleasure that had once seemed kin to prayer.

  “Did you get some good shots?” Lucy had asked eagerly when she got home.

  “I don’t know,” Anna had answered. “We’ll see,” she’d added, sighing wearily.

  “Aren’t you happy?” Lucy had asked, studying her mother with perplexed concern. “Daddy said you would be happy if you ’sposed some film.”

  “Things aren’t always that simple,” Anna had answered, though she’d instantly hated herself for the way the shine fell from Lucy’s face.

  Now, as she swerved onto the downtown exit off the freeway, she wondered when she’d ever get a chance to develop those negatives, though at the same time she cringed to think how disappointing they would probably be when she did.

  “Why are we here?” Lucy asked in her clear, sweet voice.

  “Here, in California?” Anna asked. “Or here, alive?”

  “Here, on this street,” Lucy answered. “This isn’t the way to home.”

  “Oh,” Anna answered, abandoning the half-gathered phrases she would have used to try to explain the move or their existence. “Ellen’s got a doctor’s appointment.”

  The week after Ellen started going to Mrs. Chauncy’s, she’d got a cold that glazed her cheeks with mucus and dulled her eyes, and last night she’d developed a cough that kept her awake until almost dawn. Today, along with her exhaustion, Anna was plagued by the thought that she’d made a mistake to put Ellen in day care. But what else could I have done? she wondered, perilously near tears.

  Ahead a traffic signal changed, the clean red of it glowing through the rain like a color from another planet. When Anna stepped on her brake pedal, she could hear water hiss from
the slowing tires. The lines of traffic came to a stop. In the steamy window of the café they were paused in front of, Anna noticed Andrea’s faded photograph. Neither Andrea nor her abductor had been found, although Andrea’s rain-smeared picture still haunted the city, lingering on windows, walls, and poles. By now her absence had come to seem as inescapable and oppressive as the rain. It was another sad fact the whole city had gotten used to, another common sorrow to be accommodated and ignored.

  The stoplight was a long one. Anna checked her watch and tried to calculate how much time it would still take to reach the doctor’s office, park, and get everyone out of the car. When she realized they would be lucky if they made it to the appointment on time, a cap of tension clenched around her skull.

  The streetlight suspended in the gray air above the intersection changed from red to emerald green, and the lines of traffic began to edge forward. As she pulled the car through the wet intersection, Anna commenced the old catechism. “How was school today?”

  “Okay,” came Lucy’s voice from behind her. When Anna glanced in the rearview mirror, she could see dark crescents beneath Lucy’s eyes, twin bruises that made her seem like someone else’s child. Lucy still wasn’t sleeping well. Last night she had woken shrieking from yet another nightmare, and today she seemed distant and forlorn. They had tried everything they could think of to reassure Lucy or to distract her. They’d put extra locks on the windows, had bought her a special doll and another night-light and a tape of bedtime meditations for children. They had been loving and soothing and firm, and still Lucy wept as bedtime approached, still she woke up screaming in the night.

  Imbuing her voice with cheer, Anna asked, “What did you do in school?”

  “Nothing,” Lucy answered wanly. “Things.”

  “Things like what?” Anna persisted.

  “Cheetahs.”

  “Cheetahs,” Anna echoed brightly, maneuvering past a car stalled in the lane in front of her. “Cheetahs are the fastest animals on earth, aren’t they?”

  “They go faster than a car,” Lucy said.

  “Wow.”

  “There aren’t lots left,” Lucy said flatly. “They’ll probly get extinct.”

  “I hope that doesn’t happen,” Anna said. “They are such beautiful animals.”

  “Ms. Ashton asked us to describe them—that means say how they look,” Lucy said, rousing for a moment from her lethargy. “And I said they had tear streaks down their cheeks.”

  “Oh, Lucy. What a lovely description.”

  “The other kids laughed,” Lucy said.

  “They laughed?”

  “Some of them.”

  Outrage and anguish battled in Anna’s chest. “They shouldn’t have,” she said fiercely. “It was rude and wrong of them to laugh. Even if someone gave a bad description, nobody should laugh. But your description was beautiful.”

  But Lucy only gave a little shrug. “It doesn’t matter,” she said, looking out the window at the rain.

  THEN CAME THE WET FRIDAY IN MID-FEBRUARY WHEN CERISE ARRIVED at work to find that only half a dozen kids were signed up for child care that afternoon.

  “All girls, too,” Ms. Martinez said, studying the schedule. “I don’t think we both need to be here. If it’s all right with you, I’ll go ahead and leave. There’re cornmeal muffins and apple slices for snack.”

  Cerise cringed at the thought of being the person in charge if the principal stopped by or the phone rang. But she said okay because that was what Ms. Martinez was waiting to hear. Alone in the room, she sliced apples and set out tubs of crayons while she waited for the bell to ring and end the school day, disgorging the children from their classrooms and sending six of them to her. She read their names on the signup sheet—Shannon, Kaylesha, Teresa, Lucy, Brianna, Dolores.

  The bell rang, but no girls arrived. Puzzled, Cerise poured juice and waited, anticipating the swirl of secrets and burst of giggles that would accompany them into the room. But when they finally appeared, they came in a silent little clutch, and their faces were flat and small.

  Cerise met them at the door. “Ms. Martinez left early today,” she said shyly. “So I guess it’s just me this afternoon.”

  Nobody spoke. For a moment Cerise thought they were unhappy to be left with her, but then she saw Kaylesha’s trembling chin, and she asked, “Is something wrong?”

  Shannon burst into tears.

  “They found Andrea,” Brianna said.

  Cerise looked at the girls’ stricken faces, and she wanted to swerve out of the way of the world.

  “They didn’t really find her … ,” said Dolores slowly, as though the words she had to say would not fit through her mouth.

  “They found her pieces,” Shannon whispered.

  In that moment Cerise realized she had known from the beginning that Andrea would not be found alive, but still she felt a spasm of horror and disbelief. A throb of thought like an extra heartbeat said, Melody. But she tried to ignore it. Looking down at the cluster of bent heads, she heard their sobs and wished Ms. Martinez would return, wished a teacher would come by and hear the crying and rescue her. She wished she’d never left the oleanders, wished she were there right now, huddled in the rain. It was better to live on the streets, safer to keep to places where the worst news would never reach her, to limit her life to the unavoidable work of staying dry, finding food and going unnoticed.

  She headed blindly toward the door. At least she thought that she was moving, thought she was pushing her way through the group of girls, but she must have tripped, for suddenly she was kneeling among them. Her arms went out—for balance?—and then she was drawing the whole group toward her, holding her hands as wide as she could reach and dragging them all into the safety of a circle.

  There were probably some words, she thought, that she was supposed to say in a situation like this, some way of explaining the awfulness away. But if there were, she could not remember them. She looked at the girls’ bowed heads, the black and brown and blond hair tangled from their day at school, and a memory came to her of the hours she’d spent fixing Melody’s hair, how content the two of them had been with that as their sole task, and how, once the first mean tangles were out, Melody would grow placid as a petted cat, dreamy beneath the stroking of the brush.

  She asked, “Anyone got a hairbrush?”

  Several of the weeping girls looked up in surprise.

  “I thought,” she offered shyly, “that if we had some brushes, we could brush each other’s hair.”

  No one asked why. No one laughed or scoffed or said Cerise was crazy. Instead, the girls all gave themselves up to the little relief of busyness. When enough hairbrushes had been collected, Cerise arranged the girls in a line on the storytime carpet, with herself at the back, behind the dark-haired first-grader named Lucy.

  Lucy’s back was stiff and tiny, her shoulders sharp and hard with grief. At first Cerise barely skimmed her brush across Lucy’s head and down the brief length of her hair, making her strokes gentle as breaths. Lucy, feeling Cerise’s solicitude, copied it, brushing Kaylesha’s hair with equal concern, and Kaylesha brushed the hair of the girl in front of her in the same way, until they had passed Cerise’s care all the way to Brianna in the front, until their strokes were a matched rhythm and their hair was smooth and loose and beginning to crackle with the energy their brushing made.

  For a while their work was punctuated by an occasional sob or hiccup, or by someone stopping to wipe her tears or blow her nose on a tissue from the box Cerise had taken from Ms. Martinez’s desk, but gradually a calm came into the room, a sense of peace, and even, somehow, of gratitude.

  Then Brianna said she wanted to brush someone’s hair, too, and Teresa suggested that she could brush Cerise’s. Dolores found another hairbrush in her backpack, and they curved their line into a circle. When Brianna eased the rubber band from Cerise’s hair and raised her brush to the crown of her head, Cerise winced, afraid the scent of smoke would be released and poison t
he room. But then she felt the tender prickle of the brush, felt the many gentle pulls of individual hairs unknotting. She could feel Brianna’s breath on the back of her neck, could feel the soft hand Brianna ran down her hair after each brush-stroke, and she realized that in all her years of brushing Melody’s hair, Melody had never once brushed hers.

  BY LATE AFTERNOON, WHEN ANNA WAS FINALLY ABLE TO LEAVE THE campus, the news of Andrea’s death was as ubiquitous as her rain-torn poster, and Anna was certain that Lucy must have learned about it in school.

  Anna had planned to pick up Ellen at Mrs. Chauncy’s before she collected Lucy from after-school care. Yesterday the doctor had given Ellen yet another antibiotic to try, and all afternoon Anna had felt a little grit of worry, wondering if it was working, hoping it wasn’t causing any side effects, chafing to be reunited with her baby. But as soon as she heard about Andrea, Anna knew she needed to get to Lucy first.

  Driving through the wet streets on her way to the school, she tried to plan what she would say to ease the horror for Lucy. But it seemed impossible that there were any words that could make things right. As she pulled into the school parking lot, she was reduced to hoping that at least Lucy had been spared the worst details.

  The school, when she entered it, seemed oddly normal, the long halls quiet and empty except for the custodian and a passing teacher. In the after-school-care room Lucy packed up her things and pulled on her rain jacket and boots and said good-bye to the teacher and the other girls so mildly that Anna thought it possible that somehow the news hadn’t yet reached her, after all. At first she felt a sneaky relief, but as Lucy trailed out to the car and stood quietly by while she unlocked the doors, Anna had to admit to herself that she could not shelter Lucy forever. Already, even in the rain, candles and wreaths and teddy bears were beginning to collect on makeshift shrines around the city.

  Anna started the car and pulled out of the parking lot. Glancing in the rearview mirror, she saw Lucy looking out the window at the wet street, her face still, her eyes big and dark and heartrendingly beautiful, and she felt a pang of remorse that all of their most significant conversations seemed to happen in the car—Anna in a hurry, maneuvering through traffic, and Lucy buckled in the back.