by Jean Hegland
The light from the bulb above the door lost itself in the blackness of Melody’s hair. She stumbled against the door frame and mumbled, “Nothin’.”
A few moths battered their soft bodies against the lightbulb above their heads while the realization of what it was that each of them was facing seeped through Melody’s daze and Cerise’s exhaustion. Finally Melody flicked her hair back from her face in an awkward parody of the gesture she performed effortlessly a hundred times a day, and said in a thick voice, “Oh. You’re up.”
Cerise stood in the doorway, counting her words before she spoke them, checking under each for land mines.
“Where were you?” she asked.
“At the library. You mind turning off the tube? I wanna go to bed.”
Melody pushed past her to tumble down on the sofa, and Cerise smelled the gluey-sweet scent of alcohol in her wake. She groped for the light switch on the wall beside the door, and a harsh brightness scoured the room. Melody squinted and gave a lopsided scowl. When she bent over and began to wrestle with her new boots, Cerise saw long gashes scratched into the leather of their shafts.
“What happened?” she asked, teetering between fear and anger. “Your boots are ruined.”
Melody yanked a boot loose and almost lost her balance. But when she lifted her head to face her mother, her voice was tight with impatience. “You mind?” she said. “I’m tired. I wanna go to bed.”
On Melody’s neck and chest beneath her misbuttoned blouse, Cerise saw bruises, red bruises like crushed roses where someone had sucked her daughter’s blood to the surface of her skin. She said, “It looks like you’ve already been to bed.”
The TV screen was suddenly filled with a woman’s face. Her brow was crowned by the tiniest frown, her mouth curved in the tenderest smile. Between her lips, her teeth were smooth as well-kept fingernails. Then she vanished, and in her stead a car sped along a road that hugged an ocean cliff. Light glinted off the car’s bumper and rear window, off the surface of the road and the distant waves. For a moment mother and daughter were lost in that image, traveling together up that sleek road.
“What?” said Melody, as she tried to twist out of her jacket. “Wha’d you say?”
“I said, It looks like you’ve already been to bed.”
That time the words reached Melody. She craned her neck to check her chest and clutched belatedly at the collar of her shirt as though she might still hide the love bites from her mother. But then she shrugged. Facing Cerise defiantly, she asked, “So?”
“Have you been sleeping with someone?” Cerise asked.
“What do you think?” Melody asked from beneath the screen of dead-black hair as she bent to battle with her other ruined boot.
“Who?”
“Back off, okay? It’s my body. Jus’ because nobody wants to sleep with you.”
“Melody. You’ve got to listen. I—”
“I—I—I. Fuck you.” The boot gave, and Melody jerked backward. She raised her face to glare at her mother. “What the fuck do you know? At least I know about birth control. When you were my age, you were pregnant.” She spat the word out like a curse.
“I was older—”
“By what—twelve months?”
“—and I was pregnant with you, goddammit. I was pregnant with you.”
“So? What’s that supposed to mean? You’re saying that makes it okay? Or you wish I hadn’t been born?”
It was so hard to match feelings to words, like trying to pick lottery numbers, to somehow choose the winning combination that would open the world wide. “I loved you,” Cerise said. “I mean, I love you. You saved my life. I’ve told you that. You were the best thing that ever happened to me. But it’s not like it’s been easy. And you—your life doesn’t need saving.”
Melody tossed her hair back with a deftness that defied her drunkenness. Her eyes hard as ice, she met Cerise’s gaze and asked, “How do you know?”
THE SUMMER LUCY WAS FOUR, HER BREATH SMELLED LIKE CEDAR AND her skin was as smooth as the petals of her great-grandmother’s roses. Her hair glowed like polished teak, and the fuzz on her tanned shoulders and arms and her knobby knees glimmered as though she’d been dusted with light. The summer she was four, she woke at dawn, ate Cheerios and just-picked peas for breakfast while the light grew in the kitchen until it blazed across the Formica and linoleum, stinging Anna’s eyes like a kind of joy. The summer Lucy was four, she sang songs about spiders and whales and stars, belted out the alphabet, counted to twenty a thousand times. The summer she was four, she forgot to wear underwear, hated to wash her hair, made dolls out of the hollyhocks that grew behind the shed and pets of the frogs she found in the birdbath beneath her great-grandfather’s spruce. The summer she was four, her shoulder blades angled from her back like sprouting wings, and her flanks and slender spine flooded Anna with a sensation of such helpless sensual love that it bordered, almost, on lust.
Sitting on the porch with her parents after supper, Lucy heard the insects humming and said, “The stars are purring.” She watched the wind moving across the darkening fields and said, “The wheat is dancing.” She twirled on the lawn like a dervish fairy, her dress ballooning from her suddenly skinny legs, her arms out-flung to grasp the spinning world, and when she tripped and sprawled akimbo on the lawn, she lay unmoving on the dense green grass and said, in a voice round with awe, “The world is breathing me.”
She had been a lovely toddler, pert and fat and wide-eyed, but the summer she was four, that time was still so recent that what Anna most remembered of it was a blur of sleepless nights and unfocused days. She was not yet far enough removed from that time to wish it back again, to yearn for buttery baby-flesh or wordless love. Instead she marveled at how capable Lucy was, how interesting and entertaining, now that she could dress herself and feed herself, now that she could say where it hurt or explain why she was happy.
The summer Lucy was four seemed perfect even as they lived it, the bright days and broad evenings, the silken nights. In their test plots, Eliot’s wheat crosses were thriving, and his plans for the future were firm and certain. Each morning he left the house at dawn, and every afternoon when he came home, his purpose had been leavened once again by his pleasure in his work, by the promise that he saw in it. On Independence Day, when Sally’s husband Mike asked him how his research was going, Eliot lifted his beer to the sky and said, “It’s getting closer all the time. It took one hundred years to turn wild emmer into domesticated wheat. If we can develop a perennial strain in half that time, it’ll be nearly as miraculous.”
That summer Eliot came home early so that Anna could work on the photographs for her Berlin show while he and Lucy tended the garden and fixed supper. Every afternoon the two of them looked so content—spraying rainbows of water across the yard or pawing through the pea vines for ripe pods—that it was hard for Anna to leave them for her darkroom in the cellar, with its musty air and stiff electric light. But once she managed to pull herself away, their very happiness allowed her to forget them. Alone in the amber-shadowed darkness, she became all mind and hands and huge-pupiled eyes. Swearing like a mechanic, muttering like a witch, she counted out seconds by the moon-round timer while the hours slid by unnoticed.
She was making prints the size of her kitchen window that summer, projecting the eight-by-ten-inch negatives from her field camera onto sheets of photographic paper so large she had to thumbtack them to the darkroom wall when she exposed them, and had to develop them in plastic garbage cans. In her prints every cloud and stalk of wheat and clod of dirt looked as God might see it, everything equal and exact and luminous. It was the way the world appeared to her that summer, each thing blessed and precious, each thing utterly itself and intrinsically connected to everything else. Alone in her sour-smelling darkroom, she could feel the gathering thrill of what she was doing, that knowledge that she was on the verge of something fine.
And when she was finished for the day, she hung her huge prints to dry on the
clothesline her grandfather had strung decades earlier beside the shelves where the last of her grandmother’s preserves still held some long-past summer’s light inside their dusty jars. Then, climbing the stairs her great-grandfather built before the First World War, she emerged, blinking and squinting, to the lucid light of a summer evening and supper on the table.
“Thanks for us,” Lucy said, throwing back her head to proclaim the grace she’d made, and Anna was suffused with such gratitude and easy joy that it seemed impossible that the future could ever be anything but a continuation of those shining days. The summer Lucy was four, Anna’s life felt seamless, the whole of it enriched by all its parts. Spooning green beans onto Lucy’s plate, passing the sliced tomatoes, helping Lucy with her drumstick, Anna thought that whatever it had cost to reach that time, and whatever hard times might be yet to come, they were all worth it for the riches of that summer.
Sometime in the deep middle of the summer Lucy announced that she wanted to sleep outside in the backyard, alone.
“Are you sure?” Anna asked, but Lucy nodded her head so vigorously that Anna had to take her seriously. “What if you wake up in the night?” she wondered, and Lucy answered, “I’ll count all the stars till I go back asleep.”
Anna kissed her sour-smelling hair and said, “Can Daddy and I sleep outside with you?”
“Uh-uh,” Lucy answered, shaking her head so firmly that her eyes closed and her hair fanned out from her ears. “It’s only a agventure if I do it all alone.”
“What about the dark?” Anna asked, hesitant to suggest a fear that might not already exist, and yet reluctant to leave Lucy to discover it herself in the middle of the night.
Lucy said, “The dark will keep me safe.”
“It will?” asked Anna in surprise.
“The dark keeps the light safe till day,” Lucy said matter-of-factly. “It will me, too. I want to sleep in my red sleep pig bag.”
That night, when Lucy was settled on the lawn, it gave Anna a pang to see how little of the red sleeping bag her body filled, to see how small her head looked against the white pillow, and how dark and cold the grass seemed all around her. But when Anna slipped out to check on her at midnight, her face in the moonlight appeared almost ecstatic, although she was so deeply asleep that even when Anna kissed her, she did not stir. She seemed so remote, in that cool light, so utterly inside her own life, her closed eyes as bland as eggs, her breath a tiny whisper in the night. She was a person apart from Anna, and kneeling beside her, Anna was bathed in the strangeness of it all—how Lucy had begun inside her, how she had opened Anna to get out. Gazing down at her smooth-faced daughter, Anna felt again the great stretch and push of Lucy emerging. In the vast silence of the brilliant night, in her own backyard, she was struck almost to vertigo by the unfathomable fact of life.
“How was your night?” Anna asked in the morning, when Lucy stumbled into breakfast with grass prints on her cheek.
“My night was nice,” Lucy said solemnly.
“Were you warm enough?” Anna asked. She was shelling peas still chilled from the garden into Lucy’s blue bowl, where each pea landed with a little musical ping.
“Yes,” Lucy answered.
“Did you get lonely?” Anna asked, torn between wanting Lucy never to feel lonely, and wishing she might be missed.
“I had Noranella,” Lucy answered, reaching for a pea. “I couldn’t never get lonely with Noranella.”
“Who’s Noranella?”
“Noranella is my friend.”
“Your friend from preschool?” Anna asked, puzzled.
“No,” Lucy answered, placing the pea on the center of her tongue like a Eucharist wafer.
“From where, then?” Anna asked, racking her brains to remember a child named Noranella.
“She lives here,” Lucy said, chewing.
“Here, on our road?”
“Here, in our house. She lives in our house because I unvited her and she has long blonden hair and she eats dirt and noodles and her mommy never makes her wash her hair.”
The summer Lucy was four, there was a permeable membrane between reality and story, between what she wanted and what was. Later that same week, as she ate ice cream on Sally’s newly tiled patio, she proclaimed, “I’m pertending this ice cream is ice cream,” and after she’d buried her face inside her bowl and licked it clean, she announced, “Noranella needs some ice cream, too.”
“Lucy,” Anna said with mock sternness.
“Oh, it’s just ice cream,” said Sally, rising from her wicker chair beside the new fountain and reaching for Lucy’s bowl. “We might as well indulge her while we can.”
After Sally brought out another dish and Lucy had eaten it for Noranella, Sally said, “Run on now, sweetie, and show me how you can do a somersault or something.” And once Lucy left the patio, Sally lowered her voice and told Anna that Jesse had been arrested the night before for painting graffiti inside the fountain at the Seattle Center.
“Oh, no,” Anna gasped.
“Oh, yes,” Sally answered. Her voice seemed tinged with a grim satisfaction, as if she’d been right about something, after all.
“Where is he now?” Anna asked.
“In Seattle,” Sally answered crisply. “In jail.”
“Oh, my God,” Anna said. “Do you want Dylan to stay with us while you go get him?”
“He’s eighteen,” Sally said with an angry shrug. “He’s old enough to face the consequences of his actions. He knows that Mike’s in London, doing research for his book, and that I’m in the middle of a big decorating job. I’ll be damned if he makes me sacrifice my life for his one more time.”
“But—” Anna stammered. Out on the lawn Lucy had spread her arms and was beginning to twirl.
“But what?” Sally said sharply. In the sunset’s lurid light the lines in her face were harsh and deep.
“Maybe he needs you,” Anna offered feebly.
“Of course he needs me,” Sally said acidly. “But he won’t admit that for a million years. And where does that leave me?”
He’s your son, Anna wanted to plead. She gazed at Lucy, staggering in joyful, ragged circles on the lawn, and answered cautiously, “Maybe if you helped him now, things would be better, later.”
“What am I supposed to do?” Sally asked, her voice tight with suppressed fury. “Tell my client her house won’t be ready in time for her daughter’s wedding? Leave Dylan with you guys while I race to Seattle, make Jesse’s bail, and drive him home—reminding him all the way about the dangers of paint fumes and freeways and gangs and criminal records? Install him in his old bedroom, feed him, buy him new clothes, and then, when I ask him to take out the garbage or to tell me where he’s going with my car, listen to him tell me that he’s eighteen and doesn’t have to take that shit from me anymore? No, thank you. I’ll cut my losses right now.”
Lucy’s laughter floated across the yard to them, its sound twining with the lilt of water in the fountain. The last time Anna had seen Jesse was at the party Sally had thrown in honor of her new patio. Anna and Eliot had arrived early, and while Eliot and Mike barbequed mountains of jumbo shrimp and Sally organized the trays of hors d’oeuvres, Anna had worked out on the patio, arranging sunflowers in tin buckets for Sally to set around the fountain. She’d been surprised when Jesse had come up to her, looking as angry and awkward as ever in his enormous pants and his green-tinged hair.
“Wanna see one of my pieces?” he’d asked almost sullenly.
“Sure,” she’d said, looking up from the sunflowers in surprise. In the last few years Jesse hadn’t spoken more than a dozen words to her. “Pieces of what?” she asked, trying to keep her voice easy, though it suddenly occurred to her he might be talking about a gun.
“I’m a writer,” he’d answered shyly, digging into his deep back pocket and pulling out a rumpled photograph.
“A writer?” she echoed bemusedly.
“An aerosol artist,” he’d explained gruffly. “Y
ou know—graff stuff. And I thought, well, maybe, since you’re an artist, too …” His sentence trailed off, and he’d jammed the photograph at Anna, who took it in surprise. It was a snapshot of a huge sound wall covered with a colorful tangle of letters that made a word she could not read, all arrows and angles and pillowy curves.
“You did this?” she’d asked, glancing from the snapshot to his baggy pants and slumped shoulders, looking at his still-pudgy face beneath the green hair.
“Don’t tell my folks,” he’d said quickly, and before anyone joined them, he’d told her about what it was like to paint in the dark, about how he chose his colors and modified the nozzles of his cans. He talked about a technique he called can control, and described how he might work on a design for months, sketching it over and over again before he finally decided it was ready to execute on a wall. He told her about the hot thrill of being an illegal artist, and how it felt to look at his work afterward, to see his art so anonymous and so public. Gazing at the vases of sunflowers, he’d said, “It’s like flowers, I guess, or fireworks, or something. I don’t know. Even when you’re doing it, you know it can’t last. But still, you gotta make it as perfect as you can.”
He’d been as earnest and passionate as any undergraduate who’d ever sought her out in the halls of the art department, and Anna had recognized a similar hunger in his eyes—that great want to make a thing that mirrored the ache and awe inside him. She’d thought, Why didn’t I see this before?
“Have you ever thought about art school?” she’d asked, but just at that minute Sally had appeared on the patio with her exquisitely decorated trays, and Jesse’s face had gone hard and blank and he’d crammed the snapshot back into his pocket and turned away. For the rest of the evening she’d been on the lookout for him, but he must have slipped out of the house, for despite her vigilance she hadn’t seen him again.
Since then, lingering in the back of her mind had been a kind of half-resolution that she would get in touch with him, maybe invite him out for lunch, or take him to an art show up on campus, or even to some galleries in Spokane. But all summer she’d been so busy, had been so happy, had been reluctant to risk trouble inside the family. And now Jesse was in jail in Seattle.