After that, Rae gave up on Christmas entirely.
Besides, what kind of Christmas would she have even if she had the desire to celebrate? She lived alone, played at the club every night. Karen and Charlene, who owned the tiny apartment she had rented for the past five years, were kind to her and always invited her when they threw a party, but most of the time she politely declined. Spare time, what little there was of it, she gave to writing music.
Rae had never deliberately determined not to have a social life. Sometimes she wished she could meet someone and fall in love, have a real home and a family—that old dream she cherished back in college. But real life got in the way. Taking the stage at Maison Dauphine from ten till two six nights a week tended to eliminate the possibility of dating. And without a partner, a lover, or even close friends to share it with, the holiday season had little meaning beyond the opportunity to work harder and make a few extra bucks.
Her drive to Picayune tonight, certainly, had nothing to do with celebrating the season. A nurse had called from the hospital shortly before midnight, just as Rae was about to begin her second set. Her mother had suffered a heart attack, a bad one, and had been taken to the emergency room. She was stabilized for the time being, but there was no assurance she would make it.
Rae’s emotions as she sped along the deserted road vacillated between sorrow and relief. Sorrow for her mother, that her life had been so empty, so totally bereft of love or friendship or any sort of meaning or purpose. And relief for herself, that once Mama was gone she could finally and forever leave Picayune behind her.
Daddy had died two years ago—wrapped his pickup truck around a telephone pole and never felt a thing. At the funeral Mama had barely spoken to her daughter, and not once did she turn to her for comfort or consolation. Rae had dutifully made the requisite arrangements, stood beside her mother at the graveside, and then, confronted with her own uselessness, had quickly gone away again. Mama had stayed put in the Airstream on the banks of Hobo Creek.
Rae hadn’t set foot in Picayune since the day they put Daddy in the ground. But she could imagine how things had been since her fathers death. Her mother still sitting at the table in the kitchen, smoking and staring into space and tracing patterns in the Formica with a broken fingernail. She could envision the place disintegrating around Mama, the trailer covered with kudzu and gradually being absorbed into the wildness.
A stab of regret shot through her. What a rotten daughter she had been, thinking only of her own needs, the compulsion to extricate herself from the past and its oppressive memories. She had gone straight to New Orleans after graduation, without giving more than a passing thought to Picayune or Hobo Creek or the Airstream that hunkered on its red clay banks. She had made it. She had escaped.
But now, picturing Mama alone in the Airstream, Rae wondered: How was her life that different from her mothers? She sang her songs, wrote her music, played three sets a night, and went home to an empty apartment at two o’clock in the morning. What had she accomplished, really? She had realized her dream, only to discover that a dream fulfilled, when there is no one to share it, can be every bit as empty as no dream at all.
THE BLINDING WHITE LIGHTS of the hospital emergency room loomed up before her. Rae dashed in through the sliding doors, dazed and disoriented by the brightness after the dark womb of the car.
This was a small-town hospital, and at this hour the place was nearly deserted. One old man with a grizzled beard dozed in a chair in the corner. Behind a high counter two nurses in green scrubs talked in quiet voices, their heads bent over a patients chart.
“Lorna DuChamp,” Rae Dawn demanded, raising her voice to get the nurses’ attention. “Where is she?”
One of the nurses came over to the counter and checked a list. “DuChamp. Yes. She was brought in a couple of hours ago. Room 104, down the hall to the left.”
Rae took off down the corridor, rounded the corner, and stopped short. The door bearing the number 104 stood ajar, and from within she could hear ominous sounds—beeps and clicks and a kind of wheezing noise.
She pushed the door open and went inside.
Mama lay motionless on the bed, covered with a pale green sheet and connected by a maze of tubes and wires to an array of monitors. On one side of the bed stood a young woman in a white lab coat—about her own age or a little older, Rae guessed. She had short reddish brown hair and tanned freckled skin, and her eyes, when she lifted her head to look at Rae, were an arresting shade somewhere between hazel and light brown, and very kind.
“You must be Rae Dawn,” the woman said, leaving the bedside to come to her. “I’m Noel Ridley, your mothers doctor. We spoke on the phone.”
Rae couldn’t quit staring at her. The hair, the complexion, the eyes, all combined to give her the look of a young lioness, fiercely protective but with no hint of violence or aggression.
“Y~you called?” she stammered. “I thought—I thought it was a nurse.”
“An easy mistake to make,” the doctor said. She refrained, Rae Dawn noticed, from commenting on the stereotype that assumed a woman to be a nurse rather than a doctor. “I wanted to do it myself,” she said simply. “We’re all so fond of Lorna.”
Rae frowned. “You know my mother?”
“Well, yes, of course.” Dr. Ridley nodded. “Picayune is a small town. Everyone knows her. She has many friends here.”
Rae opened her mouth to respond but could think of nothing to say, so she shut it again. “How is she?” she asked at last.
Dr. Ridley shook her head. “Not good, I’m afraid. It was a massive heart attack, and although we thought at first she might pull through it, she took a downhill turn about twenty minutes ago. Apparently she threw a clot. She’s in a coma. The respirator is keeping her alive, but—”
“But she won’t come out of it.”
“No. I’m sorry.”
Rae Dawn exhaled a deep, ragged breath, and felt the warm weight of the doctor’s hand on her arm.
“Things are pretty quiet around here at the moment,” she said. “Why don’t we go down to the cafeteria and get some coffee and talk?”
“All right.” Rae cast a glance at her mother. “Give me just a minute.”
“Take your time. I’ll meet you there.” She smiled. “Left at the nurses’ station, then all the way down the hall at the end.”
When the doctor was gone, Rae went to the bedside and took her mother’s hand. Her skin, rough and reddened, was cool to the touch—not cold as death, but not warm with life either. It seemed to Rae Dawn that Mama was hovering someplace between the two worlds, waiting for release, and it was clear she couldn’t come back to this one even if she wanted to.
Rae gazed down at her mother’s face. Years of stress and misery and despair had ravaged her, cutting deep lines into her cheeks and brow. And yet now, here, in this waiting place, her skin had smoothed so that the wrinkles appeared as tiny hairline scars instead. She looked … peaceful. Almost pretty. The way she might have looked had her life taken a different direction.
Rae Dawn brushed an errant hair back from her forehead and again that knife-edge of remorse sliced into her. “I’m sorry, Mama,” she whispered. “Sorry for everything.”
She couldn’t remember the last time she had kissed her mother, but Rae kissed her now, her lips lingering on the soft cheek, a single tear running down to salt the kiss. “I’ll be back soon,” she promised. “And then this will all be over.”
RAE DAWN FOUND Dr. Ridley in the cafeteria at a corner table next to the window. She took the seat opposite and focused her eyes on the doctor’s graceful, freckled fingers as they wrapped themselves around a white ceramic mug of steaming coffee.
“It’s regular,” the doctor said, pointing at the carafe that sat on the table between them. “When I’m on nights I prefer the caffeine. If you want decaf, it’s available.”
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“This is fine.” Rae poured herself a cup and took a sip. It was strong but not bitter,
and tasted faintly of the chicory blend she had become accustomed to in New Orleans. “Tell me about my mother.”
The lioness lifted her eyes and held Rae Dawn’s gaze. “The patient, or the woman?”
Rae bit her lip. “Dr. Ridley, I can only imagine what you think of me. I haven’t been a very good daughter.”
“Noel,” she corrected. “Please, call me Noel. It’s funny, I know—especially at Christmastime. I keep hearing my name on the radio.” She drained her cup and pushed it to the center of the table. “Your mother,” she said, “was very proud of you.”
“Excuse me, but how do you know her?” Rae interrupted. “She’s lived in this town for years and never, to my knowledge, had a single friend. She spent her life—” She stopped. No. The way they had lived—the crushing poverty, the isolation, her father’s drunken rages—none of it was this doctor’s business, however kind and compassionate she seemed.
“She spent her life in that dismal trailer?” Noel Ridley finished the sentence, then nodded. “Yes, I know all about it. About your father too. About the way you grew up.”
“How … ?”
“Lorna told me,” she said simply.
Rae felt heat rising into her face, and she put her hands to her cheeks.
“There’s no need to be embarrassed,” the doctor said. “I’m very clear on your family’s situation, Rae Dawn. How you were raised. What your father was like. How your mother buried herself out there, purely out of shame.”
“So what changed?”
Noel shrugged. “Your father died. And your mother came alive. You didn’t know, I suppose, that she volunteered here at the hospital. That she spent Tuesday afternoons reading to children in the library. That she went to church.”
“Church?”
“Yes, she was very faithful. Our paths crossed there too. As I said, she was very proud of you. Talked about you all the time— what a gifted musician you are. How you write your own music and have built a career for yourself at the club—Maison Dauphine, isn’t it? How do you think I found you?”
Rae shook her head. “I didn’t—”
“Listen,” the doctor said. “In situations like this, when a parent dies without the chance to say good-bye, the emotion it most often brings up in survivors is anger. Self-recrimination. I knew your mother fairly well, and I feel I know you too. Don’t beat yourself up, Rae Dawn. Your mother understood why you had to separate yourself from this place. She was proud of you. Proud of who you are. Proud you got away.”
Rae heard the words but didn’t quite believe them. “How can you be so sure?”
“Because she told me. Her only regret for you was that you hadn’t yet found love. She said she always hoped you’d meet the woman of your dreams and—”
“Hold on,” Rae interrupted. “Did you say the woman of my dreams?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I said.”
“But she didn’t—”
“She did know. We talked about it.” Noel chuckled. “In fact, she thought the two of us might be a good match.”
Shocked to the core by the revelation of her mother’s uncanny insight, Rae Dawn almost missed this last sentence. “Excuse me?”
“She wanted to introduce us,” Noel repeated. “Unfortunately, she never had the opportunity—until now.” She stood up and extended a hand in Rae Dawns direction. “If you’re ready, I think it’s time to go and say good-bye.”
IT WAS A LITTLE after three A.M. when Lorna DuChamp slipped quietly from this life to the next. She never woke. Rae stood holding her hand while Noel shut down the respirator and removed the tubes.
“Thank you, Mama,” she whispered. “Thank you for setting me free. I’m glad you found your own sort of freedom in the end.”
And then she was gone with nothing, not even a breath, to mark her passage to the other side. Just a gradual cooling of the flesh, a softening of the lines of her face.
At the end Noel came and stood beside Rae Dawn with one arm around her shoulders. The warmth of her nearness felt right, somehow—familiar and alive and comforting.
“We need to take the body,” she said in a quiet voice.
Rae nodded. Her mother’s organs would be harvested— heart, liver, and kidneys—to give life to nameless others waiting for transplants. What remained would be cremated. It was Rae’s decision, and she made it without hesitation. She would not have her mother buried alongside the man who had made her life a living hell.
“That’s it, I guess.” Rae Dawn sighed when the orderlies had left with the body.
“What will you do now?” Noel asked.
“Go back to New Orleans, I suppose.” Rae shrugged. “I suppose I do need to go out to the trailer, but I really don’t ever want to see the place again.”
“My shift ended at two. I’ll go with you if you like.”
“You’ve done enough already. This is not a doctor’s duty.”
“I didn’t offer as a doctor.”
Rae Dawn looked into the tawny eyes and found them filled with a strange luminosity, burning like liquid gold. She felt quite suddenly as if she could drown in those eyes, as if they were drawing her home. And then, just as quickly, she realized what vulnerability her own gaze must be revealing, and she tried to break the link.
But Noel did not look away. “Let’s go,” she said softly.
THE TRACK LEADING from the main road to the trailer was black as midnight, overgrown and muddy. The headlights of Noel’s car revealed deep ruts in the earth, fresh grooves made by some heavy vehicle. The ambulance, Rae Dawn supposed.
The closer they got, the more violently her stomach churned. Her hands were trembling, and she clenched them in her lap. All the old memories flooded over her—the hungry, miserable days, the terrifying nights punctuated by her father’s rampaging drunkenness and the deafening crack of his shotgun. The resigned emptiness of her mother’s face.
Everything looked so much smaller than it did in recollections from her childhood. The rusted Airstream, illuminated in the headlights, tilted oddly to one side, crouched in its nest of kudzu like some strange and frightened forest creature, its curved haunches riddled with buckshot. Behind and to the right, the shadow of a dilapidated shed, barely larger than an outhouse, leaned precariously toward the bank of Hobo Creek. The air was permeated with the stench of decay—rotted wood, leaves gone to mulch, stagnant water. Rae Dawn’s interior atmosphere, too, smelled of deterioration, despair, and shame.
“It’s all right,” Noel’s low voice murmured behind her.
The door to the trailer stood half open, and on shaking legs
Rae climbed the rusted metal stairs, stepped inside, and turned on the lights. Here, too, the world she remembered had shrunk. The cramped living room where she slept, the meager kitchen with its scarred Formica table, the narrow passageway that led to a tiny bath and a single bedroom barely wide enough to lie down in. Something scuttled along a baseboard.
A wave of nausea gripped her, and for an instant she was sure she was going to retch. She reached for the edge of the table and felt Noel’s strong warm hand supporting her instead. “It’s all right,” she repeated. “Take it easy.”
Rae Dawn sank onto one of the vinyl kitchen chairs and took several deep breaths.
“You okay?” Noel asked.
Rae nodded. “I just—I can’t believe—” She squeezed her eyes shut and slammed a fist down on the table. “How could my father do this to us? He was supposed to love us, to protect us—”
“Get it out,” Noel urged. “All the anger, all the pain. Don’t let it poison you any longer.”
The penetrating compassion in her voice, the innate understanding, nearly undid Rae Dawn altogether. She began to cry— deep, racking sobs. She put her shaking hands up to her face. “I’ve got to pull myself together.”
“No, you don’t,” Noel countered. “Not on my account. Your mother told me everything, Rae. I know how bad it was.”
“I hated him,” Rae said. The admiss
ion felt strangely liberating, cleansing, like the first good breath she had taken since she set foot in the trailer again. “I hated him! I still hate him.” All the rage she had suppressed throughout her childhood came roaring back. She stood up, tipping the chair over with the force of her movement, and with two steps she was standing in the living room. “This place! This terrible, filthy, shitty place!” She careened through the confined rooms, tearing down the ragged curtains, kicking over a chair, pounding her fist into the lumpy sofa cushions. “He sucked all the life out of everything he touched. My mother, me. That’s where I slept,” she said, pointing toward the sagging, mildewed couch. “I didn’t have a room of my own, dammit, didn’t even have a space of my own. Even if we were poor, we didn’t have to live like this. He had a pension; there was a little money coming in. But every last dime went to liquor. I can still smell it—his precious whiskey, his stinking vomit in the rug.”
She lifted her head, caught her reflection in the dirty glass window, and turned, suddenly shamed by her outburst. “I ought to forgive him, I suppose.”
“There’s a time for forgiveness,” Noel said in a firm, quiet voice. “But right now, at this moment, what do you want, Rae Dawn? What do you need?”
Rae wheeled around. In that instant, as she looked into Noel Ridley’s eyes, she saw what she had been looking for all her life. A kindred spirit. Someone who, even though she hadn’t lived it, instinctively understood.
“Matches,” she said. “I need matches. I want to burn this hellhole to the ground!”
Noel pointed toward the stove. On the back ledge sat a large box of wooden kitchen matches, the kind Mama used to light the propane burners.
“Take the car up to the road,” Rae Dawn said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
ABOVE THEM, over the dark country road, a million stars gleamed against the blackness. Rae stood on the gravel, shoulder to shoulder with Noel Ridley, and watched as her childhood home went up in flames.
At first it was just a glimmer of yellow light in the living room window, as if someone had lit a lamp to welcome in a stranger. Then the sofa caught, soaked as it was with old kerosene from the shed, and the fire worked its way through the kitchen to the mattress on the bedroom floor.
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