Windfalls

by Jean Hegland

  It would be ten by now, if it had been—that wisp, that ache, that pearl, that seed of light. Even now it sometimes hovered just beyond her inner sight, like a star before the fall of evening brings it into view. It was still an emptiness too precious to be dissolved by words. She’d never spoken of it to anyone, not even Eliot. She’d never told anyone, and she had not forgotten. For ten years it had been her talisman, her charm, her reminder of all she owed the world.

  Not in spite of, her grandmother had said; Because. And the next day Anna had taken her camera from the trunk of the little Subaru she used to drive. She’d exposed three rolls of film before sundown, hungrily shooting everything she saw—the rough heaps of beets, the filled canning jars gleaming like secrets in the dim cellar, the grain-covered hills rippling with the pattern of the wind, the tousled roses, her grandmother’s long-veined hands. Because, she’d thought like a mantra or a blessing or a plea each time she pressed the shutter release. Because.

  The squeeze of her uterus began again, slow, insinuating, growing until she felt a bite of hurt. Two years ago at harvest time she’d made an exposure with her field camera looking out that very window. Because, she called it, and now a print of it hung in the Whitney in New York. She liked to think of the strangers who paused in front of it. She liked to think that perhaps some few of them understood.

  Her belly continued to tighten. The pain was sturdier this time, wicked, unexpected. A whiff of her dream returned. She felt a spike of panic, remembered the hook, the table, her mangled heart. The pain drove deeper, widening inside her, climbing up her spine, filling her pelvis, seeping down her legs. It pushed from her a moan, low and guttural, a near-growl that fit perfectly inside her throat. She heard in her own voice the sound that had appalled her in the hall of Salish Hospital, but she understood it now and answered it, let that same moan pour out of her.

  I am having a baby, she thought in astonishment as the contraction began to ease. Despite her pain, elation blossomed in her chest. She remembered Eliot’s sleepy answer, You have the baby already. Looking out the window at the morning, she felt shivery, thin with excitement, entirely alive. I asked for this, she thought as the next contraction came.

  MRS. SONNEGRAD HAD DIED IN THE NIGHT, SO 304 WAS EMPTY. THE mortician had already come for the body; the aide had stripped the sheets and left the window open so the summer heat could bake the smell of death from the room. Now it was Cerise’s job to pack up Mrs. Sonnegrad’s things and prepare the room for the next resident. It was a chore she’d had to do dozens of times in the nearly seven years she had worked at Woodland Manor. Even so, she entered 304 cautiously, though once she was inside it was hard to see the threat lurking in that quiet room or in the dresses and knickknacks Mrs. Sonnegrad had left behind her.

  Cerise got to work, spraying the plastic mattress cover, wiping it down, and then horsing the mattress off the bed so she could clean the frame. It had been less than a month since the last time she’d disinfected 304, so it was an easy job, not like other times, when the residents who died had been there for years, and along with the dust on the mattress springs, she’d had her own sadness to deal with. Cerise had only a fleeting image of Mrs. Sonnegrad, a shrunken woman lying silently between the raised railings of her bed as her gray-haired son leaned over to hold her hand.

  She tore a plastic trash bag off the roll on her cart and began placing Mrs. Sonnegrad’s things inside. It seemed so strange to think that Mrs. Sonnegrad was gone when her nylon underpants and her pink hearing aid remained. Cerise tried to imagine where Mrs. Sonnegrad was now, and she felt as though she were standing on a high tower, looking down into endless space. She shuddered and went back to work, sorting and folding Mrs. Sonnegrad’s clothes, tucking her terry slippers together heel to toe, setting everything neatly at the bottom of the billowing trash bag. On top of the pile of folded clothes she laid the things from the bureau—a pocket calendar, a color portrait of two red-haired toddlers, a black-and-white photograph of a mild-faced woman in a beaded evening dress.

  The final item on the bureau was a figurine, a little fawn made of dime-store china, and Cerise paused to study it before she added it to the bag. It looked so cute, with its wide eyes, splayed legs, and dappled sides, but when she turned it over in her hand, she saw that it had once been badly broken. Its legs were marred with yellowing lines of epoxy, and one had been set a little crookedly. Her heart gave a sudden clench of pity, to think that someone had valued that little thing enough to fix it, to think that of all the knickknacks a woman like Mrs. Sonnegrad must have owned, that little dime-store fawn had stayed with her to the end. It seemed important, somehow precious, and she hated to think of shutting it away inside the dark plastic.

  In all the years she had worked among the feeble and the senile, handling their watches and wallets and wedding rings, she had always taken a stubborn pride in the fact that she had never stolen or broken anything. But now she imagined she might save that fawn. Suddenly she felt an impulse to tuck it in her pocket and take it home—not for herself, but as a gift for Melody.

  Thinking of Melody, she felt as though she were standing back on that high tower, looking down. Melody was nearly twelve now, and almost as tall as Cerise herself. In the last few months it seemed as though a whole new person had taken up residence inside her gawky body. The pudgy nubs of breasts were swelling on her chest, and lately she’d begun to turn her back to Cerise when she undressed. Even her smell was changing, growing sharper and earthier and more complex, no longer the clean animal scent she’d carried in her hair and on her skin the year before.

  Over the summer Melody had taken to sleeping on the sofa in the front room instead of on her mattress at the foot of Cerise’s bed. On the weekends, rather than coloring with Cerise or letting Cerise fix her hair, she wanted to go ice skating or to the movies, wanted to hang out at the mall with her friends, and when Cerise said No, she had to stay at home and do her homework, or Sorry, they had no money for skates or Cokes or movies, Melody rolled her eyes in disdain.

  The women’s magazines Cerise picked up in the Woodland Manor staff room claimed that preteens could be sulky and private, and warned that parents needed to use good communication skills and set limits now, before their kids became real teenagers. That made it seem like Melody was a time bomb that must somehow be disassembled before she exploded, but although Cerise wanted desperately to do whatever she could to make things right, she had no idea where to begin. Recently it seemed that being nice to Melody was like pouring water into sand, while insisting that Melody clean the kitchen or do her homework or not talk back only made things worse.

  It seemed like only yesterday that Melody had vowed she’d never leave Cerise, and now it felt like she was already gone. Now when Cerise looked back along that chain of days that led from Melody’s birth to the present, it seemed they were linked not by the firsts the staff room magazines were always talking about, but by hundreds of unnoticed lasts. She could remember when Melody got her first tooth, could remember when she took her first step. She could remember Melody’s first word and her first day of school. But somehow those milestones were not nearly as significant as all that Cerise could not remember—the last time they’d colored together, the last time Melody had let Cerise fix her hair, the last Saturday breakfast they’d eaten side by side.

  Cerise gazed at the trinket on her callused palm and imagined teaching Melody the tricks she’d learned in her own childhood, imagined showing Melody how to clean the little fawn with a damp washcloth so the epoxy wouldn’t give, and helping her to dress it with scraps of fabric. She imagined Melody talking to the fawn, and inventing little stories about it, imagined Melody snuggling up beside her and telling those stories to her, too. No one would ever know, she told herself, if she rescued the fawn for Melody. And even if they did, why would they care? She envisioned the gray-haired son opening the sack that held his mother’s final possessions and tossing the broken fawn into the trash.

  But sudden
ly she saw how worn and grubby and faded it was. With a knowledge so swift and certain it sucked her breath away, she realized that Melody wouldn’t want something that old and ruined. Melody liked mall things—slick, brand-new, and bright. At best she would be indifferent, distantly polite. “Thanks, Mom,” she might say, and stuff the figurine into the back of her underwear drawer. But at worst she would ask coldly, “Where did you get that thing?” and then Cerise would have to choose between the disgrace of lying to her daughter and the humiliation of telling her the truth.

  Her shoulders slumped. She wrapped the fawn in a wad of facial tissues, set it on top of the little pile in the depths of the bag. Shutting the bag with a twistee, she placed it, tidy and hapless as a hobo’s bundle, on the disinfected mattress and headed down the hall to 306.

  * * *

  SALLY KNELT ON THE CANVAS DROP CLOTH THAT COVERED THE FLOOR OF her family room and pried the lid off a gallon of paint with a screwdriver. “I learned a new word last night,” she said.

  Beneath the humor in her sister’s voice there was an unexpected sharpness that reminded Anna of sandpaper or vinegar. “A new word?” she asked, gingerly shifting her position to avoid waking the baby sleeping against her chest. Lucy. She bent her neck, buried her face in the down that crowned Lucy’s head, and inhaled. The scent of her infant hit her brain like a pheromone, like a necessary drug. Lucy, she thought gratefully, and her eyelids fluttered closed for a second of near-ecstasy before she opened them to fasten a questioning glance on Sally.

  “Being married to an English professor’s a real vocabulary builder,” Sally answered dryly. Lifting the can in both hands, she tipped it so that a column of mustard-colored paint poured down into the tray that sat on the floor beside her. Then, giving the can an expert twist, she cut the flow of paint without spilling a single drop.

  “What was last night’s word?” Anna asked. It was a brilliant afternoon in mid-September, and Sally had propped the door to the backyard open for ventilation. The air that entered the room carried with it the musky tang of falling leaves. From her place on the draped couch, Anna looked hungrily out through the door to the light-drenched maples that rimmed Sally’s yard. Even as she soaked their loveliness deep into her bones, she was calculating camera angles and shutter speeds, imagining how she might shoot them. It had been fifteen months since she’d been able to make a print, but in the six months since she’d had Lucy, she had used her field camera to expose another thick stack of film sheets. It was as if Lucy’s arrival had given her yet another set of eyes, and though she still had to wait until Lucy was weaned before she could develop and print that pile of negatives, thinking of it made her warm with promise, as though she were hoarding secret riches or gestating something new.

  “Teenful,” Sally answered, hammering the lid back on her paint can and giving Anna a glance that held as much grimace as smile. “Last night’s new word was teenful.”

  “Teenful?” Anna echoed doubtfully. “As in, full of teen?”

  “Teenful, as in ‘causing trouble or sorrow, vexatious, wrathful, malicious, injurious, spiteful,’” Sally recited angrily. She pushed a thick strand of steel-colored hair from her temple with the heel of her hand. Sally was already forty—seven years older than Anna. Over the last few years it had seemed to Anna that Sally’s face was somehow growing younger beneath her prematurely graying hair, but looking at her now, Anna noticed a tight new strain around her mouth, a kind of hardened resignation in her eyes.

  “Is everything okay?” Anna asked. It had been a while since she’d stopped by for a visit, and she wondered belatedly what had been going on with her sister while she’d been so absorbed in Lucy.

  “Everything’s fine,” Sally answered, her voice brittle. “It’s just that Jesse borrowed the car last night.”

  “Wow—I guess I didn’t realize he had his license yet.”

  “He doesn’t,” Sally said grimly. “But he does have a girlfriend, and he thought it would be a really nice idea to sneak out at midnight and take her for a little ride.”

  “Oh, my God.” Anna gasped and clutched involuntarily at Lucy. “What happened?”

  “We got the call at two this morning. My Chrysler was in a ditch out on Hodge Road, and Jesse was being held at the police station until he could be released into our custody.”

  “Is he okay?” Anna asked. Panic begin to rise inside her, and she was bewildered that Sally seemed so calm. “How about his girlfriend?”

  “Everyone is fine,” Sally answered. Her voice was bright and sharp, more angry than relieved.

  “He must have been terrified.” Anna said. She felt Lucy’s slack, warm weight against her chest like a gift. Like a given, Anna thought, soaking up the feeling of her daughter, grateful for the way Lucy’s flesh served as a comfort and an anchor, even now.

  “Jesse wasn’t terrified.” Sally laughed harshly and turned to face Anna. “He was teenful. On the way home he had the gall to yell at me because he claimed we’d treated him like a child in front of his girlfriend.” Her voice went shrill with fury. “Of course we treated him like a child. He is a child. Do grown-ups run around stealing each other’s cars? I told him we’d treat him like an adult the minute he started to act like one, and not a goddamn second sooner.”

  To escape the blast of her older sister’s rage, Anna bent her face and pressed her lips to Lucy’s head. Beneath her down-fine hair, Lucy’s scalp was damp with sleep. When Anna pulled her mouth away, Lucy’s hair clung to her lips, as weightless as light. She asked, “What are you going to do now?”

  Sally shrugged. “What can I do? The police are still deciding whether or not to press charges. It’s out of our hands.”

  “Yes, but, I mean—”

  “He’s grounded, of course, and he’s lost his allowance until Christmas.”

  “Aren’t you going to talk with him?”

  “We told him he’d better not ever pull a stunt like that again.”

  “But don’t you want to find out why he did it?”

  Sally looked at her sister strangely. “He did it to impress his girlfriend.”

  “Maybe in the short term, but—”

  “But what?”

  “He’s fifteen,” Anna answered, groping. “Don’t you think he’s trying to figure things out?”

  “Figure things out?” Sally scoffed. “Like where the clutch is?”

  “Like how to live, what matters, and what it all means? You know—the same stuff we were trying to figure out back then.”

  “Not Jesse,” Sally said acidly. “He’s convinced he’s already got everything figured out. Besides, trying to talk to Jesse is like trying to talk to a sack of turnips.” She made her voice drop an octave, “‘I dunno. Yeah. Fuck, no’—that’s the extent of a conversation with Jess. Living with an English professor hasn’t done a thing for his vocabulary.” Glancing over at Anna, Sally added darkly, “Just wait. Your time will come. Before you know it, little Lucy there will be joyriding around the countryside with a beer in one hand, a joint in her mouth, and a boy groping her thigh.”

  Not Lucy, was Anna’s instant thought, Never Lucy. She knew that utterly and instinctively, but she could find no way to say it that didn’t sound either smug or naïve, no way to say it that wouldn’t make her sister scoff. “Maybe,” she said reluctantly. “We’ll see.”

  “You’ll see, all right,” Sally said, tearing open a package of sea sponges with her teeth.

  Sally’s face was stark. Her eyes above the package looked so bereft, it startled Anna. This wasn’t the first time she’d seen Sally struggle with Jesse, though always before, her anger had seemed like the logical conclusion of her love. But today it was as though some elemental thing had changed, as though some essential part of her connection to her son had ossified or soured, like a marriage gone bad. She’s given up, Anna thought with a shiver.

  Sally dipped a sponge into the mustard-colored paint and then pressed it nearly dry against the side of the tray. “This had bet
ter be right,” she announced grimly. “Yarrow on barley. But it always looks different when there’s a whole room of it.” Methodically she began to daub the sponge against the wall. It left a mottled pattern on the cream-colored surface, like a dappling of light or a crayon scrubbed across concrete.

  “How’s that?” she asked, stepping back to study the effect.

  “It’s nice,” answered Anna, more heartily than she felt. She wanted to beg Sally to do something, but she had no idea what to suggest. She wondered if she should maybe try to talk to Jesse herself, but then she was afraid that Jesse would resent it as much as Sally and Mike probably would if she tried to interfere. Besides, Jesse was no longer the creamy-faced boy who used to love to visit Eliot and her at the ranch. In the past few years he’d grown sullen and reluctant, resentful of all adults. It might not be as easy as she imagined to reach him now.

  “This’ll take a while,” Sally was saying as she dipped her sponge back into the paint. “But it should be worth it. This room has never been cozy enough,” she muttered as she turned back to the wall.

  In Anna’s lap, Lucy made a little moan. Arching her back, she stretched one soft fist above her head and squeezed her face into a waking grimace. Her eyes opened, and she looked around solemnly, giving equal attention to everything in her line of vision—the door frame, the ladder, the glowing maple leaves. She’s like me, Anna thought with an odd shudder of pride and fear.

  She lifted her shirt and opened her bra, and Lucy began nursing, her dark eyes staring gravely out the sunlit doorway, one small hand resting light as a breath against Anna’s stomach, her fingers scrambling gently over Anna’s skin. Flesh of my flesh, Anna thought, reaching down to stroke her daughter’s arm.