The air in the car is close, as close as that hand reaching through the stream of metal and glass. Trembling, she opens the glove compartment, claws through it. A spare pack of cigarettes, unopened. Bills for repairs, a book on maintenance, a penlight whose batteries are dead, and no matches, not one. The forest tightens, pressing closer: a vision, long buried, of Christmas trees bent in a blizzard, stretching for blocks; the headless ghosts of nurses, soldiers, weaving between them. The screaming wind: a baby crying…
Abandoned, weaving back to the chapel, she feels her way inside. The walls are the colour of dirty snow, but, curling inwardly, furled like a bud, she lays herself out in the pew. The worn wood is fallen rubble.
If only, the voices mock—a trinity: Harry’s, Mama’s, and that tiny, childish, barely-formed one, Helena’s. Elinor’s? No! If only she’d been more patient, and good—like Holy Mary?—and with the forgiveness of Job kept those tiny, creeping fingers locked in hers.
20
HEADLIGHTS AND A RACING ENGINE rouse her. Beams swinging in: searchlights illuminating splintery wood and water stains. The shock of voices, Jewel’s loud one. “Ma—you still here?” As if she’d hiked or flown away. “Jesus, there you are.” His mutterings, as if she’d got lost or something had eaten her. “Saving on power, or what?” he teases as a stranger in a ball cap shines a flashlight. “Holy water musta kept her going, what?”
He hands her a paper cup of coffee, which barely warms her hands. Explaining that it took a dog’s age, finding buddy here. “But you’re okay, Ma?” Even in the darkness he looks exhausted but relieved. She stays put while they change the tire in the glow of the fellow’s headlights, the motor revving. The coffee’s weak but sweet, and tastes like more. But now that she’s been found she has trouble moving. Wiping his brow, Jewel slips into the pew beside her, as if she means to stay. “Beds are kind of hard, aren’t they Ma, and they don’t have cable. Let’s go.” But silence has enfolded her like a quilt and she hates to leave it for the wildness outside. Of all things, she asks if he’s seen her purse.
“It’s not in the car? Oh, right. I forgot,” he teases almost feverishly. “You’re shopping.” Under her touch his wrist feels sticky and hot. Helping her up, he sways over her, his chin jutting in the flashlight’s beam. Her hand trembles as she asks for a dollar bill; “Never mind,” she thinks aloud, poking it into the bottle.
Their journey back is silent, like falling down a shaft, the bobbing tail lights of the truck ahead their only guide. Rushing in through the window, the chill is laden with an earthy smell. Before long the truck slows, a dog howling at its wheels, and the fellow waves them on to the highway. It’s as if she’s been on the mountain for weeks. She longs to be home, but it’s too late to even think about driving back.
“Damn,” Jewel mutters suddenly, remembering Rebecca’s bottles, empty. “She’ll have my head.” Smiling wearily she pats her purse with the Aspirin bottle wrapped in a tissue, as a transport truck shoots past, trailed by a Winnebago towing a car. In the distance a light blinks weakly—a motel backed by the dark mountain. A painted rock welcomes them, and a sign advertising vacancies and dew worms. The café next to the office looks dead except for a TV blinking inside, but before they can drive on, a woman waves them in. The kitchen’s closed, but she can make them a sandwich; there’s one room made up, a twin. “We’ll take it,” Jewel says.
The café has fishnets hanging from the ceiling, starfish and a buoy caught in them. The walls covered with rusty tools. Jewel glances around nervously for a phone, saying he’d best check to see how they’re making out. Rebecca and Harry. The thought sends a shiver down both her arms. Having strayed from her mind since sunset, it stirs a chilly gnawing. “Everything’s copasetic,” Jewel announces, sitting down again as the woman brings rubbery cheese on Holsum bread. “Dad’s like a pig in poo.” Eyeing his sandwich, he crams it in. Lucy takes a long drink of water, which tastes suspiciously like the spring.
“She remembered his pills?”
“Sure. Sure she did.”
It’s as if they’ve landed the Apollo; while the terrain is different, their feet are the same. Until it dawns, what a small thing her absence is, and yet huge, having little to do with distance. A feeling of removal, freedom, she’d never dared expect.
The room is clean enough and has two of everything, narrow beds with faded spreads, and lamps that remind Lucy of molten lava. Despite the ache in her knees, she goes around inspecting things, slipping into the bathroom to put on her nightie. In the long, spotted mirror, the nylon clings to her crinkled thighs, and her knees resemble knots in a tree. She rubs on some of Rebecca’s Avon, some “fountain of youth” concoction that smells of cucumber, and despite her weariness lays tissue over the seat before using the loo. She’s forgotten her robe, another of Rebecca’s gifts, deep mauve and fuzzy—Marryatt written all over it.
Fussing with the broken blinds, Jewel fiddles with the TV but nothing happens. “Imagine, roughing it like that.” On the mountain, he must mean. “Like Bucky, and all that ‘back to the land’ crapola. He could go over to your place any time, Ma, and weed the garden.” It’s as good as an invitation to mention the money. But underneath her the mattress gives like bread, and all but her memory on the mountain evaporates. She feels almost giddy confined here in this little room, roped in yet free, thinking crazily of the driver in a hot-rod race they’d seen once on TV, pulling ahead to finish first. Glancing at her purse propped there with the Aspirin bottle inside, she’s almost dizzy.
The sheets keep sliding off. “How was the bed?” she imagines Rebecca’s concerned voice asking, and she longs now for something solid: the dryness of the garden’s dirt, or her kitchen floor. Stretching out on his bed, Jewel leaves the light on, saying to kick him if he snores. The last time she’s slept anywhere near him a lifetime ago; with a pang she pictures his room when it was still his, his photos, the ones from the war she’d stumbled across. As if there’s an urgency, and she needs to grasp his childhood, his youth, and hand it all back. Digging out the Aspirin bottle, she gives it a shake, holding it up to the grimy fixture. Flies inside the shade make dark spots, like spots on an X-ray, spots on a lung. “Do you remember, darling?” she murmurs, choosing her words. The old place, she means, when they’d go for walks. “Up by the Big House, the barn,” she prods, but he shrugs, and this dredging of memory, this probing, has nothing to do any longer with what she needs to know.
Propped against the pillow, he downs the dregs of his pop. “Where Babineau and them used to get lumber? Becky might, why?”
Nothing, dear, it’s nothing, she says. What she wants to ask is about Miss Van Buskirk, but a second later he’s snoring. Rising stiffly, she moves the pop can. Without her glasses, his face looks softer, a bit less craggy; when she squints it’s her little boy lying there after being sung to, lullabies that once swung together in a tuneless singsong. Leaning down, she cups his face in her hands, as if he’ll wake and pull away. His skin feels clammy under the scrape of beard, as cool yet stale, somehow, as the air in the room. Her heart a jellyfish filling and emptying, she kisses each of his cheeks till his eyes fly open, mortified. “Ma? What are you doing?” An embarrassment—of riches, the notion glides through her as they close again, his arm around her shoulder. Sliding out from under it, folding herself once more between her slippery sheets, she hunkers down. Now I lay me, a part of her yawns, an opening. A pinhead of brightness that for years has been distant enough as to not exist. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.
IN THE MORNING JEWEL DOESN’T stop to shave, going to load the car. For breakfast there’s tea and oatcakes—sawdust cakes, he calls them. Across from the motel lies water as smooth and blue as the Holy Mother’s robes, with pale hills in the distance, serene. It only feeds her need to get home, but up ahead is a tannery, where Jewel buys a sheepskin. Its edges curl like the hide of that gutted pilot
whale she’d seen once with her father, long, long ago, the fleece like blubber. Dad, she thinks as it floods back: her four-year-old hand in his, the creature hanging from a gaff, its entrails steaming on the dock. The best thing for somebody bedridden, to prevent bedsores, Jewel keeps saying. Which reminds her: has Rebecca remembered to turn Harry? But, having made a point of getting down on all fours, inspecting the muffler, huffing and spluttering, now Jewel seems in no hurry to get back, hell-bent on sightseeing. “Is that what I think it is?” He points to something, a bald eagle—or a vulture. Since when was he a birdwatcher?
Gulls do loop-the-loops as they cross to the mainland, the water satiny smooth on one side of the causeway and rough on the other, she makes the mistake of commenting, and Jewel backs up traffic watching for a spot to pull over. If there’s a problem with the car, it can’t be too important. “Not like we do this all the time,” he says. She laughs, but that pain has started in her belly again: worry, like a virus.
Without warning, Jewel veers off onto what must be the scenic route. Next they’re winding along a dirt road beside a wharf; she can’t hide her jitters. “Will Robert be helping his mom?” It’s the first time she’s mentioned him. “Harry’s not easy to move, you know.” Admiring a fish plant, he slows to a crawl. “Don’t worry. Becky’s got help.” But then he coughs. “It’s just that, when I called last night? They had a bit of an emergency.” A plumbing one, he quickly adds. Harry’s waterworks? Oh, Dinah! She tugs at her flattened curls. Reading her mind, perhaps, he says something about the old pipes from the bathroom.
It takes forever to reach the place he promises will connect them with the highway, a town she recognizes. But as they follow the signs, there’s a clunk, the racket of metal beating the pavement. Creeping down the tree-lined street the car makes noises like the noon gun, but they make it to a garage. It takes another age to have it looked at; they sit outside watching traffic move past what were once stately homes, now slightly run down, used for businesses. A hairdresser’s, where ladies can get their ears pierced—with an ice cube and needle, she wonders, or a fancy little gun? Jewel slouches there, rattling his newspaper, sweating. In a proper snit, he is, all this damned expense and bother. His face red, his breath coming in snorts. He lights a cigarette, but stubs it out. The worry worm inside her gets worse when she recognizes a big grey house down the block; it has to be the same place, though Mrs. Edgehill must be long gone, the lovely leaded panes replaced with sliders. As Jewel wheezes with impatience, it all comes back: that proper woman and the sightless child with her pink ribbon.
At last the mechanic comes out, wearing a greasy cap otherwise like a surgeon’s, and says it’s ready. The car smells of grease when she gets in, Jewel shuffling off to pay. He’s awfully poky; maybe they don’t take Chargex? She starts to fret again about how long they’ve been away, and what’s waiting when they get there. What’s taking the boy so long? The boy, she catches herself. Jewel. He’s being silly, putting up a stink about “highway robbery.”
The attendant raps at the window, looking cheesed off, no, alarmed. “You’d better come,” his voice is a slur, saying he’s not sure what’s happened. Inside, Jewel slouches on a chair, his legs splayed, his face drained. The Chargex card’s on the floor, and the receipt. His meaty hand rests against his shirt, its damp knit.
She claws at him, claws at his buttons, her choppy breath melting into the sweaty afternoon as someone calls an ambulance. As everything inside her stops, or seems to, the day, the station a heat wave, a greasy stream moving forward without her. In the back of her head, a burning instant, snagged forever. A single raspy breath comes from Jewel: she hears it. No no no. It stops too. The pallor of his skin, the graze of stubble under her sweaty palm, her heart beating through her skin, beating through the pores and creases. Her love. Her boy. One small line, a tiny crease below her baby finger, one of two creases: her babies, her fortune. Her mind falls backwards, refusing, refusing, to lurch forwards into now. The now of his not breathing. Briefly his eyelids flicker. Light! As if this has been a joke, a prank. Fooled you, Ma. Like the time…“Ma,” she hears it, and he smiles, yes. A smile from the dark, though, from the past and the not to be. Ma. Her mind closes around it, a bell capturing sound, shaped forever around the echo.
No no no, she hears her own whine, a child’s, whined into the dampness of his chest, the still-warmth of his cheek. His body slumped there. Somewhere on the wall, a clock twists and judders: five o’clock? There’s a fragrance, grease on cooling skin. Something dribbling from his pant leg to the floor. Gently, a medic presses his stethoscope, tries to find a pulse. Gone. Her treasure, her reason for putting one foot in front of the other, for turning her back on the icy waves of all those years. The howling little face of mercy.
There are channels that have to be gone through, arrangements made. But she’s fallen out of time, can’t make a phone call. Can’t drive. More stubborn than she ever realized, she can’t leave her son, can’t leave the tiny hospital where they take his body. Finally someone puts her on a bus, and it’s on the bus that she feels herself crumble, her heart of granite being ground into sand. A beach, minerals. Salt pouring down her face as the tears come.
The cab driver ferrying her from the bus depot asks what’s wrong. No words, no sound. She can’t speak, getting out. In the yard, the fence doesn’t look any different, the night a thin place as she climbs the steps. Music wafts down to the veranda, and a strange laugh, a little like a donkey’s. Jewel nowhere but everywhere, a pressure on her skin, her spirit. You put one foot in front of the other, that’s how you do it, baby boy! Baby steps: Jewel learning to walk. Who knows how she makes it inside.
Rebecca grins from the landing, her face flushed, beaming. It falls even before she asks. Where is he? ringing inside the bell of Lucy’s brain. She doesn’t have to speak, Rebecca knows something’s wrong, crumpling on the stairs. Somehow, somehow, Lucy makes it past her to Harry’s room. She’s known all along who will be there, helping. Miss Van Beeswax—Elinor—perches on the edge of his bed, her arms spread wide, the Don Noble in mid-jiggle. “Für Elise” is the tune, it comes to Lucy belatedly, a tune she recognizes from before, from Mama playing it on the piano, gloomy, except it’s speeded up. Jubilant. Elinor, her own—Helena—and the urgency, the recognition she felt on the mountain, as black as coal melting into the cracks and bubbles of concrete, cools like something volcanic, the volcanoes she’s seen on TV. And now there is Harry to think of, his weakness, his heart. They could be inside a foundry, that wrecked one years ago, with its smoking wall a reminder of death, and in the middle of it, in the middle of her, the hardening blackness around her Jewel.
Never mind that the stranger, the lost and now the found, has come into the house and turned everything upside down. Coming to tidy, at first, then gotten carried away. Cleanliness is next to godliness as she looks into Miss Van Buskirk’s, Elinor’s, eyes and mutely slips past her, curling into Harry. Even as she finds words to tell him—Gone, gone—something inside her sprouts, the shoot of a beach pea pushing from sand. For now I see as through a glass darkly, but then face to face. Even as the weight of Jewel presses down. If I have faith to remove mountains, but not love, I am nothing. And what is love? The heat at her throat is no different from the flashes she’d gone through. The change of life, the change—the changes—of heart.
Miss Van Buskirk is an oddball, all right, like Jewel said. Her dress a vision of the jungle as she sets down the ’cordine and moves from the bed. The dusky mountain rushes back, and the steamy garage and her boy slumped there, Lucy’s memory of them liquid now, molten: the warmth of Helena’s tiny, slipping fingers, and his big rough ones.
“Poor sweet darling,” she hears herself murmur into an ear, not Elinor’s but Rebecca’s. Rebecca’s face is wet; her tears taste of hair-spray. A flood.
“MISSUS,” HELENA-ELINOR-HELINOR MURMURS, HER STRANGE, leathery hands fussing, stroking. She’s good at this, has
had practice, it seems. Still, there’s a coolness to her eyes, an unknowable blue, the skin around them crinkling. Somewhere in the dark, across the Arm, a train rumbles as the woman rubs her back. Rebecca sits there staring, mute. But it’s as if little kids are singing in Lucy’s head. Tiny ones hardly old enough to talk, yet knowing all the words. Someone’s in the kitchen with Di-nah, someone’s in the kitchen I know-woa-woa-woa. The tunes slur into one: London Bwidge is fawing down. Down down down lady-o.
Helena’s hair is held back now with a pink plastic butterfly, instead of a rag. The sound Harry makes is terrible, a hound weeping. “There, there, Harry,” Helena comforts him in her country drawl. As if they’re alone, though, and have known each other for some time—until she moves a chapped hand to her mouth and nervously bites a nail. There’s a scar by her thumb, Lucy sees, a tiny crater the shape of a vaccination mark. When Helena asks if they want tea, her voice seems far away, like Robert’s used to be inside his cardboard Sputnik when he’d pretend to be a Martian. What she hears is Harry yelling: Lucy? Something’s burning! and the sound of crying upstairs, her tiny daughter, and herself shouting, Coming! The milk in her arms half-froze from sitting out there on the stoop, cream pushing out the top of the bottle, and her thinking how it would taste. The cravings she’d had, pregnant—cream and brown sugar—a wonder she and Jewel both hadn’t ended up butterballs. Put that in your cup and drink it, Harry. The effort of climbing stairs. Dolly, when she’s not teething, she’s scratching! Helena’s chicken pox. Jesus Murphy, where did those cufflinks go? The milk on the counter, eggs sliding into a boil. Find them yourself. Her own angry voice. Danger! Hot! Slap.
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