Windfalls

by Jean Hegland

  “I don’t get a check,” Cerise whispered, though the words rasped in her throat like sandpaper, and she suddenly feared she’d be told to leave because she didn’t have a check.

  “Me, neither,” the woman said complacently, as her hook darted in and out. “Goddamn state made it so hard to play their game, I told the lady she could play with herself instead. Ha!” she added in a harsh burst of humor. “That’s cutting off my nose to spite my face, I know. State don’t give two farts in a shithouse if old Barbara freezes to death on the streets. But fuck ’em.

  “Butt fuck ’em, I mean,” Barbara went on, pleased with her pun, “Someday the truth will out, someday they’ll know the plain, pure, unadorned truth about our lives, and then they’ll get down on their knees and beg us for forgiveness.

  “Homeless,” she scoffed while her fingers kept up their twist and dance. “The homeless. What kind of dumbfuck word is that, anyway?

  “What’s the opposite of homeless?” she asked.

  “Homeful? Homed?” she went on when Cerise looked bewildered. “Homemore?” She cackled, “Used to wish my old man’d be homemore.

  “They have a ‘no home’ box on the food stamp application,” she said. “When I saw that, I told the lady we’ve been institutionalized. They count on us, see, the feds do. They need us to make this great country what it is.”

  She shifted her thighs on the seat of her chair and paused in her crocheting to dig a fist into the small of her back. “But what the holy fuck do I know? My mama said it, a million times, ‘If you’re so goddamn smart, why ain’t you rich?’”

  A towheaded toddler in blue overalls lurched past them, pausing for a moment to steady himself by clasping Cerise’s knee as casually as if she were a piece of furniture. She caught her breath and tried to empty her mind of everything, tried to hold herself still as stone even as his touch scorched every cell. The wad of yarn in Barbara’s left hand had diminished to a final tail. She smiled benevolently at the baby, and then with a grunt she leaned down to reach into the shopping bag that sat on the floor beside her.

  The toddler turned as if he’d heard a voice he knew in all that noise, and his face bloomed into a grin. Cerise glanced in the direction he was looking, saw a young woman kneeling down, her tattooed arms stretched out toward him. He grinned and pitched joyously toward the woman, and Cerise felt so dizzy she wondered if she would faint.

  Barbara was tying one end of a cantaloupe-size ball of brick red yarn to the yellow tail. “Little fucks,” she said, her voice round with good humor.

  Cerise croaked, “What?”

  “Well, they are. No matter how much some might want to deny it, we’re all sex acts of some kind or another. Came from sex, got sex wired in us. You got kids?”

  The question tore Cerise’s entrails and seared her lungs. The question took her answer away.

  Barbara went on, “Me, I don’t have kids. Couldn’t. Though I sure tried,” she cackled. “Had a grand time trying. Hell, I still try a little every now and then, give me half the chance.

  “I should of had me a kid,” she said in a different tone, her eyes looking inward and her face going soft, “and that kid could of grown up and saved me from all this crap. No kid of mine would stand it for a minute, for his own flesh mama to have to live like this.”

  She made a little movement with her hand as though she’d just caught herself doing something foolish, and when she went on, her voice was loud again, public, as though she were speaking to more people than just Cerise. “But see, I tried so hard for babies all those years, I guess I come to thinking they’re all my children. I could just kill people who hurt ’em. Hurt the whole world when you hurt a kid. All the kids here, all the kids you see, all the kids you’ve ever seen, all those little fucks are mine, and people better damn well treat ’em right, or they’ll have me to say so.

  “What’s your name, honey?” Barbara asked, looking at Cerise.

  Cerise sucked breath, but her name wouldn’t come. Barbara was looking at her, waiting for her to answer the world’s simplest question.

  What’s your name, honey? echoed in her head, and all she could do was repeat the echo, to offer it up and let chance name her.

  “Honey,” Cerise said, fast and flat.

  “What?” Barbara asked sharply.

  “Honey.”

  “That your name?”

  When Cerise nodded, Barbara gave her a shrewd split-second glance. “You mean I knew it before you said it?”

  “Honey Johnson,” Cerise said stubbornly, though inside it felt as though she was abandoning the person she had been even as she was shielding that person from whatever happened next, like protecting an organ by lopping off an arm.

  Barbara said, “I always knowed I was a goddamned prophet. Honey Johnson—what the fuck.” She shook her head, her shoulders heaving with laughter. Holding up her blanket, she gave it a brisk shake. The colors clattered and crackled against each other.

  She asked, “This make you laugh?”

  Cerise heard the sounds of forks scraping plates, the gleeful shouts of children running around the tables, more scraps of talk. She looked at the blanket and shrugged uneasily.

  “I try to make my blankets funny,” Barbara went on, “like big jokes. To cheer up people. It’s fucking cold out there, in the goddamn rain.”

  Barbara chortled and then made her voice high, her words mincing, “‘Why don’t your colors match?’ the lady said.” Then she let her own voice boom out again, “Colors match, heck—I mean fuck—colors match? Match what, I’d like to know. Match your Goodwill jacket and your Salvation Army slacks? Match the goddamn ground you’re sleeping on? Way I figure is, if it exists—if it’s a color in this world—it matches. If it’s a color, we need it, just like in the right world we’d need every person, too.

  “Look,” she said, raising the blanket to her lips to bite off the red yarn in her teeth and speaking to Cerise out of the corner of her mouth, “you take this blanket and tell me tomorrow if it makes you laugh.”

  “Oh, no,” Cerise said, startled. “I—”

  “You sleep warm last night?”

  “No, but—”

  “But’s for assholes. You think it don’t mean something that I was finishing this up just when I met you? Or what—you want me to give it to one of those losers over there?”

  “I’m a loser,” Cerise whispered.

  “Well, shitfire, Honey. Course you are. You don’t eat here if you’re on a winning streak. But there’s losers and losers. You know that.”

  Cerise shook her head. “You don’t know,” she said.

  “Course I don’t,” Barbara said, grabbing the handles of her shopping bag of yarn and rising with regal difficulty to her feet. “No one ever does.”

  When Cerise left the soup kitchen, she carried Barbara’s blanket folded in her arms as carefully as an American flag. That night, in order to keep her new blanket clean and dry, she found a square of cardboard to sit on and rigged a roof of plastic between the Dumpsters. Toward dawn she even managed to sleep a little, and when she woke she felt the weight of Barbara’s blanket anchoring her to the world.

  AFTER MONTHS OF DUST AND BRITTLE LIGHT, AT FIRST THE RAIN SEEMED like a miracle. The night it began, Anna woke from another dream of home to the sound of water murmuring on the roof and the scent of wet earth sweeping in their open window like a blessing. Lying beside Eliot while their daughters—for once—slept peacefully in their beds, she thought that maybe things would be easier, now that a new season had finally begun.

  But after four weeks of unremitting rain, it was clear her late-night hopes had been in vain. Lucy was still plagued by nightmares more nights than not, and she hadn’t mentioned making any friends at school. Anna’s darkroom was finally plumbed and wired, and the counters and shelves had been installed, but the winter light was so thin and wan that she’d given up even trying to find anything in California to photograph.

  And then, the Sunday after Thanksgivi
ng, as she was on her way downstairs to fix breakfast, she stepped in a patch of soggy carpet on the landing at the top of the stairway. Cold water oozed between her toes. Looking up, she saw an ominous stain spreading across the ceiling, dirty water dripping from the center of it. Abandoning her plans for pancakes, she went back to wake Eliot.

  While she set out buckets and tried to sponge the water from the carpet, Eliot climbed onto the roof in the rain to make an emergency patch with plastic sheeting and mastic. He came inside an hour later, dripping and looking glum. “I think that’ll keep the worst water out for a while, but we’ll have to get a new roof before next winter comes.”

  “A new roof?” Anna asked, handing him a towel. “Where can we possibly find that kind of money?”

  Eliot shook his head. “Rob a bank, maybe, or sell one of the kids.” But all afternoon, as Anna raced through the rainy city running errands, she worried about where the money could come from. She and Eliot had used their savings to make the down payment on their leaking house, and still their mortgage payments were twice what they had been in Washington. Moving to California and installing her new darkroom had edged their credit card to its limit, and they were spending every penny Eliot made just to reach the end of the month. Christmas was coming, the transmission on the Subaru was getting loose, the washing machine wasn’t emptying properly, and Lucy’s dance class—which these days was the only thing she seemed to love—cost a hundred dollars a month. Driving from the hardware store to the grocery store to the drugstore to the bank, Anna sorted and resorted that same set of facts as if she could find the extra money hidden somewhere behind them.

  It made her hot and nauseous to think of taking out a second mortgage or asking her parents for a loan. It made her weary to think of having to take the kind of job an unemployed professor of fine arts could find, and it broke her heart to think of having to be away from Ellen all day just for the sake of money.

  It wasn’t until she was driving home through the dark, wet city, the car loaded with groceries, nails, plastic sheeting, and an electric space heater to dry the clammy carpet, that she realized where the money could come from. At first it was a shock as sickening as cold water on her bare soles, an idea nearly as appalling as selling a child. But it made sense, too, she thought grimly. It made sense, and maybe it was the only way.

  Her field camera was worth nearly half a year’s salary. If she sold it, they could reroof the house and fix the car and pay off their credit card. Maybe then, if they were very frugal, she could manage to wait until Ellen was talking before she found a job. She might as well sell her camera, she told herself as she turned down their street, since she wasn’t using it, since owning it only filled her with regret.

  She parked the car, loaded her arms with groceries, and dashed through the rain toward the back door, opened it to find Lucy sprawled on the kitchen floor, drawing. Her chin was propped on one hand, crayons were strewn in a wide fan across the floor, and she glanced up listlessly when Anna heaved her damp bags onto the counter.

  “Hello, Sweetness,” Anna said, forcing cheer into her voice as she shrugged out of her jacket. “How was your afternoon?”

  “It was okay,” Lucy answered, her hand hovering above the sprawl of crayons.

  “What did you do?” Anna asked.

  “Oh, just a bunch of things,” said Lucy, choosing green.

  On the stove the stainless steel pasta pot was steaming. Three crimson tomatoes, a head of romaine lettuce, and a sheaf of leeks sat on the cutting board, and a loaf of crusty bread waited on the countertop beside them. Eliot had got that far, at least, with supper.

  “Where’s your daddy?” Anna asked, opening the refrigerator to put away the milk.

  “On the computer,” Lucy answered absently.

  “How about Ellen?”

  “She’s still having her nap.”

  “She is?” Anna glanced at the clock above the sink and winced to think of the price she’d pay tonight because Eliot had let Ellen sleep so long. To Lucy she said, “What are you working on?”

  “Homework,” Lucy answered, putting down the green crayon and taking up a red.

  “Good for you.” On the stove the water had begun to boil. Anna salted the bubbling water, rummaged through the bags of groceries until she found a package of fettuccini. When the water had recovered from the salt and risen back up to boiling, Anna emptied the pasta into the kettle and gave it a quick stir with a slotted spoon.

  She was crossing the room to put the canned goods in the pantry when she noticed Lucy scrubbing wild spirals of red across her drawing. She said, “You don’t need to press so hard, Lu. The crayon just flakes off the paper if it gets too thick.”

  “But there’s a lot of blood.”

  “Blood?” Anna asked, stopping in the middle of the kitchen, the bag of cans lumpy in her arms. “Why blood?”

  “Because,” Lucy said firmly.

  “Because why?” Anna asked cautiously, looking down at Lucy.

  “Because the girl got hurt.”

  “That’s too bad,” said Anna, peering at the drawing. Scribbles of red were curling across the page like crimson smoke, nearly obliterating the stiff-looking figure lying prone on the green ground. “Who is that girl?”

  Lucy shrugged, “Just the girl in my picture.”

  “How did she get hurt?”

  “The man that napped her hurt her.”

  “The man that napped her?” Anna echoed.

  “You know—like Andrea.”

  “You’re doing this for your homework?” Anna asked incredulously, setting the bag back down on the counter.

  “I did my math already.

  This is extra credit.”

  “Extra credit for what?”

  “For stranger-awareness class.”

  “Ms. Ashton asked you to draw a picture of Andrea?”

  “Ms. Ashton asked us to draw pictures that would teach kids how to be careful about strangers. The best picture in the city will be made into a poster, and then there’ll be a pizza party for that whole school. If I win, then everybody will be my friend.” Lucy scrubbed the red crayon resolutely.

  “I’m not sure,” Anna said carefully, “that I like Ms. Ashton making you draw pictures like that.”

  “She didn’t make us,” Lucy answered. “This is extra credit. Besides, they’re pictures to help keep other kids safe. She said,” Lucy quoted solemnly, “that some children didn’t understand about strangers, and that if we drew our best pictures, we could teach them.”

  “Ms. Ashton told you that?” Anna asked.

  “It’s true,” Lucy answered indignantly.

  “But it’s—kind of sad,” Anna said. “For kids to have to think about.”

  “Kids have to think about it,” Lucy said staunchly. “Or else they might get gotten.” She choose a yellow crayon from her heap and began to fill a corner of the sky with a circle of sun.

  Anna said, “Maybe kids should think about it a little, but not a lot. Not so much they worry.”

  “Kids shouldn’t worry about it?” Lucy asked.

  “Well, not too much. They should be prepared, maybe.”

  “That’s what we’re doing,” Lucy announced triumphantly. “Being prepared. She said it’s good for everyone to work together and help. She said if everyone helped, there wouldn’t be a problem anymore.”

  “Well,” Anna said vaguely, “I suppose that’s true.” She looked down at Lucy’s bleeding girl and cringed to think what bedtime held in store.

  Diligently Lucy began to draw rays from her yellow sun, sending them across the page in all directions so that they seemed to battle with the billowing blood. Suddenly she looked up at her mother, and for the first time that evening, her voice sounded animated. “I know, Mommy,” she said. “You could help, too.”

  “Me?” Anna asked.

  “You could make a photograph to help save children.”

  Anna could hear the pride rising in Lucy’s voice, could see a n
ew light growing in her face, and she felt a little stab of yearning. But then a thought hit her gut, although her brain clamped shut before she spoke it: Photographs can’t save children.

  “Will you make a photograph?” Lucy asked eagerly, and out of a swirl of awful questions and inadequate answers, Anna chose the most meager and least cruel. “That’s a nice idea,” she said. “I’ll think about it. But right now it’s almost time for dinner. Go tell your daddy.”

  BY THE TIME A PLACE OPENED UP FOR HER AT THE REDWOOD WOMEN’S Shelter where Barbara was staying, the final scraps of scab had sloughed off Cerise’s palms. The skin beneath was shiny and pink and pulled like fabric that had been stretched too tight, and her palms felt both numb and tender, as though they had been borrowed from someone else.

  “It’s about time we got you in here,” Barbara said to her after supper that first night. “Life’s gonna be easy street from here on out, you’ll see. Breakfast and supper and a bed for three months while they help you find a job. A job,” she cackled. “Sweet Jesus and hot goddamn.”

  It was mid-December by then, and that night when Cerise lay down on her cot in the warm sleeping hall, it seemed so strange to surrender herself to sleep without worrying how she might be wakened that she kept thinking she was forgetting something or doing something wrong.

  She sank into the richest sleep she’d had for weeks, but she woke past midnight, wracked with nightmare. She lay awake for a long time then, listening to the snores and moans of the women around her, listening to the whimpers of the children who slept on wobbly cots beside their mothers and clutched hand-me-down toys that smelled of strangers’ houses.

  In the morning, after a breakfast of coffee and day-old doughnuts, the residents all had to leave the shelter until dinnertime, because, as the director had explained, being out helped them to keep active, encouraged them to continue looking for work and permanent housing.

  “Being on the streets all day helps to get you off the streets,” Barbara cackled under her breath to Cerise as they all filed out of the shelter into the rain. “That’s the kind of brilliant dumbfuck thinking that made this country what it is today.