Windfalls

by Jean Hegland

  “It’s hard to tell much until they heal,” the woman said. Her voice sounded round and full, as though there were more people in the clearing than just Cerise. “But what I see is promising. Your palms say you are an important person. They tell me you have a long journey ahead, and that you’re smarter than Socrates.”

  The woman paused, waiting patiently until Cerise croaked, “Who?”

  “A stubborn, ugly old man who had inklings about the soul,” the woman answered. “It’s his blood you’ll find on the hemlock stem.” Despite her tangle of words, her hands were cool and gentle.

  Then she fell quiet, bent above Cerise’s hands for so long that Cerise found herself staring at the little figurine, watching the flicker of the candle, listening to a wind she could not feel as it ran like a distant river through the treetops. Abruptly the woman said, “I think you should go north.”

  “I don’t really believe this stuff,” Cerise said, finally reclaiming her hand.

  The woman smiled and nodded, as though Cerise were a student who had just given the right answer on a quiz. “Excellent,” she said. “You’re making boundaries. You can’t keep them, of course, but you’ve got to have them to start from. And don’t might be better than do or even want for you right now. Don’t is probably what you need to keep going,” she said while Cerise stared past her to the darkening forest.

  “You and your daughter parted unhappily,” the woman continued. “You’re still angry with her for her life choices. You think she’s made those choices to hurt you. You don’t yet see how much she learned from you, how much she needs you, even now. And you need her, too—though not in the way you imagine.”

  Some of her words snagged Cerise’s awareness, and a protest rose up in her throat, though when she tried to speak, it sounded like another sob.

  “Justice is the business of the Goddess,” the woman said, her voice ringing in the clearing. “Healing is the human task. Your job is to heal. You need to find a new way to align yourself with the intention of the universe.”

  “I—” Cerise tried.

  “Later, if you find you truly can’t, you know what hemlock looks like. It doesn’t take much,” the woman went on. “And it’s easy to harvest. The whole plant is toxic, though probably the roots are most effective.

  “First find your daughter, that’s my advice. Find her, and then decide if you’re still hungry for hemlock. It’s always in season.”

  She gave Cerise a sad, steady smile. Then, frowning, she twisted her wrist to check her watch. “I’ve got just time enough to bandage your hands, and then I really have to fly. Can I give you a ride back to the city?”

  Cerise shook her head. For a long moment the woman watched her, studying her as though she were trying to balance something in her mind. Finally she said, “I’ll worry if I leave you here.”

  Cerise shrugged, and when the woman continued to wait, she whispered, “I’ll be okay.”

  The woman nodded. Spreading her arms wide, she tilted her face back to the patch of pale sky still left above the dark weave of soaring branches. “Earth, wind, fire, and sea. As she says, so mote it be.”

  Taking gauze and a pair of tiny scissors from her basket, she wrapped Cerise’s hands until they were as shapeless as clubs and only her thumbs remained uncovered. Then the woman returned to her car, rummaged through the trunk, and returned with a pile of clothes. “Here’s a clean shirt,” she said. “And a jacket. It’ll be cold tonight. There’s a blanket, too, though I’m afraid it smells a little doggy.

  “This is my card,” she added, slipping a stiff rectangle on top of the heap of clothing. “I know some rituals that could help you, and I also read tarot and do a little channeling. I work on a sliding scale.”

  Her voice shifted again, grew clear and resonant as she reached out to lay a hand on Cerise’s head. “May Isis and Osiris guard you in all the empty places through which you must walk,” she said, and then she removed her hand and turned her attention to packing the things from the table. Cerise watched numbly as the woman snuffed the candle with a silver snuffer, wrapped up the cup, replaced everything in the basket, and folded up the cloth. Finally the woman picked up the figurine of the goddess and, cradling it in her arm like a doll, nodded at the dog, who crawled from under the table to follow her to her car. “Merry meet and merry part and merry meet again,” she called out the window as she drove away, leaving Cerise alone in the darkness while the scent of exhaust and incense lingered in the cooling air.

  Cerise slept that night beneath the picnic table, wrapped in the blanket and jacket that smelled of dog hair and fabric softener. When the birdsong began, she rose before the campers could build their morning fires, and though her bandaged hands were as awkward as paws, she managed to change into the woman’s shirt. Then, bundling the blanket in her arms, she headed north, dropping the woman’s card and her own milk-sodden clothes into a garbage can as she left the campground.

  All that morning she walked through the state’s forests, impervious to the splashing streams, heedless of the redwoods’ soaring height and the flit and twitter of birds, unmoved by the meadows of wild oats that whispered in the breeze and caught the sunlight in their empty bracts. Hawks sailed in the wide air, a doe halted like a momentary statue to watch Cerise approach, but she ignored them all and kept on walking.

  It was a relief, finally, when the woods gave way to homes, when the winding roads yielded to the freeway and she could stumble along the edge of the cyclone fence, assailed by the endless traffic roar, breathing carbon monoxide and dust, tripping over scraps of tire tread, burger wrappers, and the shimmering loops of gutted cassette tapes, stumbling past empty cans, shards of glass, and the desiccated bodies of little animals, past the fluttering pages of old magazines and the tatters of a million plastic bags.

  Mile after mile she walked, passing car lots, prisons, and strip malls, passing factory outlet malls, golf courses, and sleek office buildings, passing beneath billboards and by a thousand gas stations and fast-food restaurants, passing new developments with their miles of raw studwork and scraped earth, and sad old neighborhoods whose backyards were crammed against the freeway.

  Twice cars swooped to a stop ahead of her and waited until she trudged up alongside them. Past caring about her fate, she climbed obediently in and then sat in silence, waiting patiently until, after twenty or thirty minutes, they pulled over again, and she gathered her blanket and her jacket in her bandaged hands, got back out on the shoulder of the freeway, and continued walking as though the rides had been only an interruption in her work.

  One of the drivers offered her a bag of chips. Another gave her a bottle of warm water and a dry sandwich, which she drank and ate mechanically as she trudged. Hour after hour she walked, walked until she couldn’t remember how to not walk. When night came she kept on walking, stumbling alongside the current of traffic, oblivious to the blast of exhaust, the urgent sweep of headlights, the cold night air. She out-walked exhaustion, outwalked thought, walked until it seemed impossible to be in the world without taking the next step, without pushing on, step by step by step, alone beside the whining, growling, roaring traffic.

  IT WAS STRANGE TO BE ALONE. WITHOUT THE GIRLS BUCKLED IN THE backseat, the car seemed preternaturally quiet. Anna felt empty and adrift, as if she’d left some essential thing behind—her purse, perhaps, or her keys, or even an organ or a limb—though at the same time she could sense some cramped part of her unfolding to fill the space where her daughters had been.

  She was flying down the freeway, her foot firm on the accelerator, her hands easy on the steering wheel. The window was down, and a warm wind bashed in at her, slapping her hair against her face. Her field camera rode beside her, the squat, unwieldy box of it filling the passenger’s seat like a vaguely remembered alter ego. But despite its presence, and despite the luxury of being the only person in the car, she saw nothing that sharpened her desire, nothing that made her want to stop the car.

  It seemed po
intless to be doing what she was doing, cruising a countryside she did not love, looking for images to harvest. But Eliot had insisted. “You need a break,” he’d said. “You’ll feel better once you get back to work.” She’d wanted to tell him it was not that simple, but when she tried to express her doubts in words, they’d sounded either too tenuous, too spoiled, or too shrill.

  She reached for the radio, and the Rolling Stones surged into the car, Mick Jagger drawling a dirge to lost love. She had passed beyond the southern edge of the city and was driving now through a wide valley ringed by pale ungainly hills. Dark trees were spread across the hills like scabs—oaks, she guessed. She missed the glisten of pines and their clean, uncomplicated lines. She missed the elegance of the land around Salish, missed the rhythm of the hills, their generous curves and sensuous textures.

  The traffic had thinned, although the cars were moving even faster. She passed a golf course. She saw a travel trailer in an open field, bare-chested men milling around a smoky fire. An exit sign appeared. She tried to look ahead, to get an idea of where that road might take her. She wanted a road that wandered among the hills. She wanted to get lost, wanted to find something that stirred her enough to stop the car. She hoped that Eliot was managing to get the kitchen cleaned, hoped that Ellen wouldn’t cry the whole time she was gone, hoped that Lucy was doing her homework so that they wouldn’t have to struggle about that at bedtime, too. There’d been no news about Andrea for several weeks, but still Lucy was afraid to go to sleep, still she woke up screaming in the night.

  Anna was nearly abreast with the exit. She glanced at the watch on the dashboard and then swerved onto the off-ramp, spilling out along with several other cars onto a two-lane blacktop road that led east toward the oak-studded hills. It was good to escape the push of the freeway, but the road felt wrong somehow—too sleek and congested to drive slowly, too narrow to drive fast. She missed being the sole car on the road, missed the grip and slide of gravel beneath her tires, missed being in a land she knew how to look at, and how to love.

  The Stones song ended and was instantly replaced by a blast of advertising. She turned the radio off, tried to focus on the landscape she was passing through. The road led past new vineyards staked and wired in strict rows, and then past a field covered with pale tarps that shimmered like sinister water beneath the lifeless sky. As she neared the hills, she passed brand-new houses looming above raw expanses of dirt. A good eye can find a good image anywhere—semester after semester she’d stood in front of her classes and made that proclamation. But now, when she considered stopping to shoot those staked vineyards or tented fields or soulless houses, it only made her weary.

  Even after she entered the hills, a film of resistance like a sheet of plastic kept her separated from all she saw. She passed oaks the size of houses, their branches twisting in the air like tortured filigree. She passed an upright wooden church, its windows boarded over, its gravel parking lot paved with weeds. But she’d seen those images already, in other people’s work.

  Her car crested the top of the hill, and she found herself in another valley. It was filled with weeds and ragged trees. These trees were smaller than the oaks had been, crowded together and nondescript in their brokenness. The sky above her was flat as a floor, the light inert. For a moment she wished her daughters were with her, missed them for the distraction they would have provided, for the way they could have shielded her from herself. She reached for the radio again. The final bars of a commercial filled the car, and then the announcer came on. Even before she realized what he was saying, she was aware that his smooth voice sounded shaken. “We’re just getting news that hikers in the eastern Sierras have found an abandoned car that appears to be connected to the Andrea Brown case. Neither Andrea nor any suspects have been located, although according to police, a nightgown that her parents have identified as belonging to Andrea was recovered in the trunk, and there is evidence of violence both inside the car and in the surrounding—”

  A ragged gasp escaped her, and Anna snatched blindly at the radio. But even before she turned it off, she knew she was too late. More clearly than she’d seen anything all day, she saw that scene inside her head—saw the wadded nightgown, saw the damp dirt of the little-used road, and the solemn rock and tangled forest, saw the wide seats of the sedan, the car’s ripped headliner and cracking dash, saw the burger wrappers and soda cans scattered on the floor, saw the blood. In an instant her eyes were so hot and thick with tears that the road in front of her was nearly washed away. She twisted the steering wheel desperately to the right, and the car lunged off the road, coming to rest almost by luck alone on a dirt track that headed off through the weeds and trees.

  She was already sobbing by the time she stopped the engine, crying in great raw gasps that tore her insides out and ripped her throat. She leaned her head against the steering wheel and cried—cried for Andrea and for Andrea’s parents, cried for their fear and their despair, cried for the ugliness of the car and the emptiness of the forest where it had been found. She cried as though Andrea were her own daughter. She felt the lonely sting of milk rising in her breasts, and pressing her palms against them to staunch that flow, she cried for her daughters, too.

  She cried for how tired she was, how homesick, how worried and sad, cried because she had lost her ability to fall in love with light. She cried until her eyes grew dry and her face felt tight and itchy and the light was beginning to leach from the flat sky, cried until she began to feel foolish, sitting alone in her car in the middle of nowhere, weeping for a child she would never know, weeping for her own privileged life. There are people really suffering, she thought sternly.

  She rubbed her face with her hands, blew her nose on a paper napkin she found tucked between the seats, and raised her eyes to look out the windshield at the place where her car had come to rest. She had managed to pull off onto a faint road that seemed to lead through the scraggly trees. The trees were little more than snags, but as she studied them in the gathering dark, she saw that they had once been arranged in rows. She was in an orchard, she realized—or what must have been an orchard, long ago, though now all the trees she looked out on were dead, their trunks splintered like weathered bones, their broken branches draped with lichen instead of leaves. It’s a graveyard, she thought, a cemetery of trees.

  She thought about setting up her camera and trying a shot or two. But it was a stunted, busy landscape, with nothing strong to hold the eye, and the light was already long past its feeble prime. Instead she turned the key in the ignition. The car leapt to life, and she backed onto the road, left the dead orchard to the thickening darkness. Driving home through the hills without having exposed a single sheet of film, she felt a sour triumph. The headlights of approaching cars stabbed holes in the evening’s shadows. As she came down into the valley, she could see Santa Dorothea spread out below her, its lights vulgar as a carnival, so much light it extinguished all the stars.

  It hurt her, all that ugly light. Looking down on the festering glow of the city, she thought of the photographs she’d seen of the earth at night from outer space, every continent outlined with light, all the cities glowing, the whole world lit up like an all-night supermarket. Alone inside the dark capsule of her car, she felt an inordinate sorrow to think that in spite of all that unrelenting light, Lucy was afraid to go to sleep, and Andrea was still lost somewhere in the darkness.

  THE PLACES CERISE PASSED THE NEXT DAY ALL CAME TO LOOK THE same, the drive-ins and gas stations repeating themselves like late-night reruns on TV. The crowded houses, the overpasses and cloverleafs, all seemed so similar they might have been paper scenery scrolling past. Only the green signs above the freeway changed, proclaiming places Cerise had never been, a jumble of cities whose names she’d heard but whose distance or proximity to each other had no order in her mind.

  Finally, when it seemed impossible that she had not walked far enough, she began to think she had missed Arcata entirely, to worry that maybe she’d taken a
wrong road and was headed to Nevada or Mexico instead. Just south of Santa Dorothea she stopped at a freeway exit gas station to ask how much farther to Arcata.

  “Maybe two hundred miles,” the attendant shrugged. “Two-fifty, one-fifty, something like that. Why?” He chewed at the edge of his mustache and watched with minor interest when, in response to his offhand words, Cerise’s face began to twist and lurch.

  “Car break down?” he asked. When she didn’t answer, he added, “You wanna call a tow?”

  She shook her head and stumbled off, carrying her tears with her like a final possession.

  The exit was one that seemed to exist only to feed travelers and refuel vehicles. After she fled the gas station, she found herself on a wide, little-used frontage road. It was separated from the freeway by a concrete sound wall lined with oleander bushes still studded with dirty white blooms.

  She followed the road away from the freeway services, walking until she spied an opening in the hedge. She had to go down on her knees to enter it. A weave of branches scratched her arms, and spiderwebs broke against her face and against the blanket and jacket and water bottle that she carried. Inside the oleanders it smelled musty and private, though the roar of the freeway still filled the air. She pushed on until she found a little open place tucked up against the sound wall, a hidey-hole strewn with dried leaves and trash.

  Heaving herself into that space, she leaned against the oleander trunks and let the last tears come, tears of anger and frustration now, hotter and sharper than before, with sobs that tore at her throat and ripped her guts. They were ugly, useless tears, and when they were spent, she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, stared at the mesh of leaves, and tried to gather herself for the final push to Melody.

  Straining until the leaves melted into a mass of green and her stomach cramped with effort, Cerise focused her whole being on Melody, concentrating until the vision that filled her mind was so real her burned hand twitched to touch it. She saw Melody bent over a coloring book, her smooth braid tied with a velvet bow, and when Melody raised her head to look in Cerise’s direction, her face broke into a smile so brilliant that for a whole moment Cerise smiled back. But then she yanked that image from her mind and slumped to the ground as though she’d been punched. She lay curled like a pill bug in the oleander duff while her feet swelled from not-walking and the truth she’d tramped down with every step ballooned inside her: the Melody she longed to see was gone.