by Jean Hegland
And who was listening anyway, she wondered, as out on the lawn, perfectly dressed strangers drank amazing wine, and down in the valley, anonymous workers toiled beneath the sun. What did it matter that someone had once cared enough about a corner of the world to make a photograph? What did they mean, those patterns of shadow and light trapped in silver halide?
When she reached the entryway again, she forced herself to turn back and face the room one last time. She saw each photograph hanging in its pool of light, silent as a tree falling in an unpeopled forest. She heard the sounds of the guests outside, their gusts of laughter like a fickle breeze, and for a moment, standing in the doorway, she felt like sobbing.
CERISE SOON LEARNED WHICH OF THE BATHROOMS OFFERED THE BEST amenities, which of the Dumpsters were most apt to yield food, what times of day she was least likely to be seen. Furtive as a timid ghost, she spread her needs among the half-mile of gas stations and restaurants that clustered round the exit and tried to evade the service workers and freeway travelers who swarmed there, too.
She was as continually exhausted as she’d been when her babies were newborn, so woozy from broken sleep it was as though she were neither asleep nor awake but had instead entered some new state that shared qualities of each, a waking dream in which things loomed and shifted and made no sense. She tried not to let her mind touch on her children, and yet there was never a moment when she was not encompassed by the loss of them. But even so, she learned to make detours inside her mind to avoid thinking of them directly, and sometimes she could evade a little of the pain that way.
The bandages on her hands grew raveled and black, and one day she roused from a doze and rubbed her eyes and was startled to discover that her palms did not hurt. It was an emptiness as surprising as if the freeway roar had suddenly ceased. She tore at the dirty gauze with her teeth, and when she had bitten the bandages off, she saw that tender skin was beginning to form around the edges of the scabs on her palms. It was another defeat, that she should heal. Staring at that fickle pink skin, she hated her own hands for their dumb insistence on living.
Perhaps time passed, though in her efforts to avoid both the past and the future, the present seemed endless, and it was hard to tell. The roar beyond the sound wall never stopped, but one night she woke to find water on her cheeks. At first she thought she had been crying in her sleep. But a second later she remembered rain, heard the winter’s first rain filtering through the leaves, felt the splash and roll of raindrops on her face.
Rain changed everything. The oleander droppings became a wet mat beneath her sodden blanket. Inside her damp clothes, she shivered and shrank into the smallest corner of herself, and all the food she found that day was soggy. She tried to rig a roof of salvaged plastic sheeting over her head, but the plastic ripped and leaked, and all night the oleander leaves tipped little loads of water down on top of her.
At dawn, when the rain finally eased enough that Cerise could leave her nest in search of food, she found a woman waiting for her next to the Dumpster behind Denny’s. The woman wore a short brown polyester dress covered with an orange apron, and her bare arms looked almost purple in the early morning light. “Here, look,” she said, her words appearing as puffs of pale mist. “You need to leave before something happens. Some of the others’re starting to say you’re not good for business. Don’t you know there’s places for homeless people—soup kitchens and shelters and stuff—downtown?” She shoved a flyer toward Cerise. “It tells right here where you can go.”
It startled Cerise that someone would choose to speak to her, and it was hard to follow what the woman was saying. It baffled her, to have her plight reduced to the lack of a house. She remembered the homeless people she’d seen back in Rossi and in the city, with their shopping carts and old coats and missing teeth, and it seemed strange that there was a name that simple for what she was. She took the flyer the woman offered and tried to read its numbers and letters, but they wouldn’t clump together into meanings. She tried to speak, but her throat felt seared shut.
The woman shifted impatiently and shot a glance toward the back door of the restaurant. “My shift’s over in a few minutes,” she offered. “I’ll drive you downtown.”
It felt wrong to leave her hole in the oleanders, but Cerise’s bones had grown hollow with shivering, her hands were rigid with cold, and the threat and compunction of the woman’s concern made it impossible for her to stay. So she waited, huddled beneath the overhang in back of the building, until the woman returned, a jacket slung over her restaurant costume.
“I got some food for you,” the woman said, holding out a bag cautiously, as though she were offering something to a feral dog, “and some clothes, too.”
She drove an old sedan, its seats and floor littered with fast-food bags and broken action figures. As she drove, she talked, a quick barrage of complaints about her old man and her job and her kids that clattered around Cerise like a bucketful of Ping-Pong balls while Cerise huddled in the warm car and tried to remember how she was supposed to answer all those empty, bouncing words.
The center of Santa Dorothea was such a wet confusing wilderness of streets and strangers it made Cerise long for the privacy of her oleanders. She missed the bugs and birds and lizards and the constant anonymous sound of traffic. In the city, the people weren’t all hidden in their cars. Instead they pushed past her so closely that even in the rain she could smell their sweat or their perfume. At first she felt exposed and raw among them. She expected that she would be noticed, that her grief and guilt would be as conspicuous as her filthy clothes, and she cringed and looked for places where she could hide. But she soon realized that if it weren’t for the fact that no one ever bumped into her, she might have been invisible, for her presence registered on no one’s face.
There were seconds as she wandered the unfamiliar streets that she panicked when she realized Travis wasn’t with her. Each time, her first thought was that she’d been negligent or forgetful and that somehow she’d let him wander away. A moment later, when she remembered the reason for his absence, her relief that he was not lost and scared and crying twisted back into such agony that she tried not to remember him at all.
In the windows of the stores and malls, pilgrims and turkeys competed with Santa Clauses and reindeer, but the approach of the holidays barely registered in her mind. Instead, on every wall and pole, she was haunted by the same picture of a girl, the words Missing and Reward blaring below her rain-worn, smiling face. Each time Cerise saw that girl, a fleet thought of Melody crossed her mind—the young, dear Melody who could never be found, that smiling child whom no one would ever see again.
In a chilly restroom in a wet little park she changed into the blue sweat suit the woman from Denny’s had given her. The knees of the pants were threadbare and the sleeves of the shirt were too short, but it was warmer than what she’d been wearing, and it was clean and dry. As she shed the shirt the woman in the campground had given her and pulled the new sweatshirt over her puckered skin, she had the dizzying sense that she was fading into a stranger. After she’d completed her change, she stood for a long while in the little cubicle, staring at the obscenities scratched into the wall and trying to understand what was left of her.
At noon she entered the soup kitchen reluctantly, her head down so that she could see only the grimy floor and her own torn shoes. She was so terrified that the whole roomful of strangers would recognize her as the mother who had no children that only the fierceness of her hunger managed to force her through the door. It was strange to be inside a building. The air was warm and damp and thick with the steam of heavy food, a smell that made her stomach clench with the nausea of hunger.
A line of people straggled along one wall, and Cerise claimed a timid place at the end of it, took a fork and a paper napkin when the person in front of her did, got a tray from the stack and then slid it down the aluminum tubing of the counter, watching as the strangers on the other side assembled plates of food. When it wa
s her turn, she took a plate in her tender hands and gave a ragged nod of thanks.
Long rows of tables filled the room. She found a place at one with empty chairs on either side of her, and as soon as she sat down, she bent her head over her tray. It was a gift she kept waiting to be snatched from her—food that hadn’t come from the trash—a scoop of macaroni salad, a pile of brussels sprouts, a bun covered with a circle of pink bologna and a square of orange cheese. The food reminded her so much of Woodland Manor that when, halfway through her meal, she raised her eyes timidly from her plate, she felt a moment’s confusion because the faces that surrounded her were not all old.
A few were elderly, and some looked as grim and weary as she, but others appeared no different from people who might be eating at the food court in the mall. There were women in well-kept outfits, men in clean T-shirts and jeans. Children threaded among the chairs, and several families clustered together, eating intently. Across the table from Cerise a man sat with closed eyes and a half smile, as though, amidst the clamor, he was praying. Beside him, in front of a well-cleaned plate, was a large dark woman in bright clothes. Her hands were busy beneath the table while she studied the room with unmasked curiosity. When Cerise sensed their eyes were about to meet, she glanced away as though she’d just ducked a blow.
She spent the afternoon wandering the damp streets. Toward evening, as the light above the buildings began to seep away, she found two Dumpsters at the end of an alley and tucked herself between them, sat with her legs folded against her chest and her arms wrapped about her knees while the night city throbbed around her.
Because her life was a scrap she would gladly do without, the shouts and sirens did not frighten her. But after a while, beneath or beyond those sounds, she thought she could hear the sound of a telephone ringing—maybe in an apartment where no one was home to pick it up, or maybe in an unlit room where someone sat ignoring its plea. On and on it rang, echoing relentlessly through the darkness, begging someone to answer.
Huddled between the Dumpsters, Cerise could not help but think of the stranger named Melody and the phone call she would surely make, calling home again to brag about her new life. She wondered when Melody would place that call, and she wondered what would happen when she did—would Melody hear the ringing of a phone that no longer existed, or a message announcing that the number she’d called was no longer a working one?
Sitting on the cold asphalt, Cerise tried to ignore the endless ringing that seemed to fill her head, tried not to imagine Melody’s call groping toward the heap of ashes that had once been their home, tried not to see the person who was no longer her daughter shrugging and turning away from the phone. Shivering in the darkness, Cerise tried only to endure till dawn.
THEY WERE STOPPED AT A LIGHT ON SANTA DOROTHEA AVENUE ON their way to Lucy’s dance class when Lucy caught sight of the woman standing on the traffic island next to them. It was raining, and the woman’s hair was clumped with water, her face so slick and chilled and expressionless that it reminded Anna of Ellen’s birth face. The woman was wearing a torn raincoat, and she held a tattered square of cardboard with a crayoned message scrawled across it.
“What’s that say?” Lucy asked from the backseat, and Anna winced in anticipation of what was coming as Lucy slowly sounded out the words on the woman’s sign, “‘Home-less. Bad Heart. Will work for food.’”
“That’s good reading,” Anna said lightly. “You’re really learning fast.”
“What’s a bad heart?” Lucy asked, staring out the window at the immobile woman.
Cautiously Anna answered, “I guess it means her heart’s sick.”
“Heartsick means sad, like homesick,” Lucy said.
“Sometimes. But she’s probably saying that her heart doesn’t work as well as it should.”
“She’s not sad?” Lucy asked, studying the woman whose stony gaze was lifted above the roofs of the cars toward the flat gray sky.
“She might be sad,” Anna answered. “I don’t know for sure.”
“What does homeless mean?”
As gently as possible Anna said, “It means that she doesn’t have a home.”
“How could she not?”
“Some people don’t. They lose their homes, somehow.”
“They lose their homes?” Lucy sounded astonished.
“Not like misplacing them,” Anna explained. “But maybe they don’t have enough money to pay for them, so they have to move out.” She felt a sudden complicity, as if her very explanation was turning people out into the streets.
“Where do they sleep?” asked Lucy.
The light finally changed to green. Anna stepped on the accelerator and pulled into the intersection, leaving the woman standing motionless as a weary statue. “Under bridges, maybe, or in deserted buildings. I don’t really know.”
“Like camping?” Lucy asked, twisting her head to get a last glimpse of the woman.
“Kind of, I suppose. Though they probably don’t have tents.”
“In the rain?” Lucy persisted.
“If it’s raining, yes,” Anna answered reluctantly.
“Oh,” Lucy said in the smallest possible voice. A minute later she asked, “Why does she want to work for food?”
“I suppose she doesn’t have any money to buy food. And she’s hungry.”
Anna glanced in the rearview mirror at Lucy’s expression, saw the horror of a new understanding creep across it.
“She’s hungry?”
“She could be hungry, if she wants money for food.”
“Why doesn’t she have any money?”
“Well, I doubt she has a job.”
“Why doesn’t she have a job?”
“I really don’t know. Lots of reasons, maybe. Sometimes people have problems that keep them from being able to work.”
“We could give her a job,” Lucy said brightly. “She could work for us.”
“We don’t have anything for her to do.”
“She could clean my room.”
“You need to clean your room.”
“She could take care of me and Ellen so you could work in your new darkroom.”
Anna felt a jolt of alarm. Carefully she said, “I’m not sure that lady would make a very good babysitter.”
“Because of her bad heart.” Lucy nodded knowingly. She looked worried for a moment, and then she brightened. “I could give her some of my food, Mommy, couldn’t I, if she’s hungry? Couldn’t I give her some of mine?”
For a moment Anna considered turning back. She imagined handing the woman a few dollars or giving her the package of rice cakes and the apple she’d managed to grab from the kitchen for Lucy to eat after her class. But they were on a one-way thoroughfare. To turn back would cost at least ten minutes. They’d be late for Lucy’s class if they turned back, and then it all got complicated so quickly—because what if the woman were drunk or belligerent, what if she started crying, or begging for more than Anna felt safe to give? How was Anna to know if her sign was the truth, that her heart was truly bad? How could she be sure the woman would really spend Anna’s money on food? How could she encourage Lucy’s generosity and appease her worries without lying to her, or adding to her fears?
But as they pulled into the parking lot outside the dance studio, it was Lucy who asked the hardest question of all. With a kind of astonished horror in her voice, she said, “Is the world bad?”
“Oh, no,” Anna replied. She turned off the ignition and fumbled an answer about love and beauty and the goodness of people while the rain dashed the roof of the car and the windows fogged with the steam. She talked about the importance of hope and tried to explain how there were reasons for bad things to happen that human beings couldn’t always understand. But even as they unbuckled their seat belts and raced across the parking lot to Lucy’s class, she knew that nothing she could say would erase the woman standing in the rain.
THE NEXT TIME CERISE WENT TO THE SOUP KITCHEN, IT WAS SO CROWDED that there wa
s no place for her to sit where she could put a chair between herself and the person next to her. For a moment, as she clutched her tray and faced that mob of diners, she considered leaving without eating. But she couldn’t think how to abandon her untouched meal in a way that no one would notice, so she pushed herself blindly into the first empty chair. Snippets of conversation battered her as she ate.
“The whole city blames me. But I came here with a bank account. I came here with good in my heart, with democracy, and caring for others—”
“—give you a bag on Mondays, but it’s always moldy.”
“That’s where I place my faith, in God the—”
“—condemned to life—”
“—the prettiest wedding. I’d grown all the roses, too.”
“If I could just talk to a lawyer—”
“Packed, ain’t it?”
It took a moment before Cerise realized the words were meant for her, and when she did, she jumped and bent her head further over her food. A second later she ventured a quick glance at the person beside her, and recognized the woman she’d noticed across the table the day before. Her wide lap was piled with an afghan whose colors were as loud and variegated as the lights on a carnival fairway. In one hand she wielded a crochet hook that flashed like a fishing lure, while a length of acid yellow yarn danced between her dark fingers and the accreting rim of the blanket.
She said, “Know why, doncha?”
Cerise kept her eyes on the silver hook and yellow yarn and made her head shake no.
“End of the month. Plus rain. That’s what drives ’em to this restaurant. Your check must’ve run out, too. I’ve only seen you here once before.”