Windfalls

by Jean Hegland

  Most of the photographs seemed pointless, too. They were only black and white, and one was nothing more than a bathroom sink, one was someone’s neck and shoulder, while another was just shadows stippling a concrete wall. The photograph with Anna’s signature made a little more sense, though it, too, was all in shades of gray. It was a picture of a strange wide land spreading away in waves of hills that ended at last in a row of gentle mountains. It was pretty, she supposed, but it made her feel lonely, the way the hills went on and on, the way the sky seemed so wide and open. She couldn’t understand how a picture like that could make a person homesick, and she wondered if she’d understood Anna right when she’d said that she taught at the university.

  She was still studying Anna’s photograph when Ellen began to whimper. Cerise glanced behind her and saw that Ellen had toppled over and was straining to reach the doorway, her arms flailing while her legs batted ineffectually against the floor.

  “Your mommy will be back,” Cerise said, crossing the floor to stand above her. “It won’t be long.” She felt as though she were looking down on a bomb, and at the same time, watching Ellen struggling on the floor, she felt a pull as strong as gravity, felt a clench in her womb and a twist in her empty breasts. Forcing herself to squat down next to Ellen, she set Lucy’s monkey in front of her and tried to animate it with a little shake. But that meager comfort only made Ellen’s frustration ripen into real distress.

  “Shhhh,” Cerise said, leaning over to give Ellen’s back a cautious pat.

  But Ellen’s cries were escalating, and Cerise was afraid that Anna would hear them and be unhappy with her, too. Reluctantly, she sat down on the floor and lifted Ellen into her arms. She had not held a baby since she’d last held Travis, and as she pressed Ellen against her chest, she held her breath, waiting for the agony to sear her, waiting for Ellen’s cries to shift to screams of terror.

  But Ellen sighed and settled herself against Cerise’s chest as though she were only a baby who wanted holding, and Cerise were only someone who could comfort her. Laying her head against Cerise’s shoulder, she shifted and wiggled a little, instinctively seeking the way their bodies best fit together, while Cerise sat guardedly, trying not to feel Ellen or smell her, trying to touch her as little as possible while still keeping her on her lap.

  Flat thoughts moved through her mind: She hoped that Lucy and Anna were finding a way to forgive each other. If Anna gave her money, she could buy food, which would be nice, since she’d never found a way to cash her after-school care paychecks. If she started to cry, she would frighten Ellen. She wished that Travis had had a stuffed monkey as cute as Lucy’s. If Anna gave her enough money, she could buy soap and deodorant, too. She thought that maybe anger didn’t have to be the end of everything.

  Ellen felt so luscious and cherishable, resting against her body. Ellen smelled of Cheerios and baby shampoo, of Anna’s soap and sweat and of her own sweet baby-flesh. She gave another long shuddering sigh, and her head sagged against Cerise’s breast. A moment passed a lifetime long, although Ellen did not seem to notice that gap in time. Finally Cerise tightened her arms around her, finally unclenched her hands to cup Ellen’s spine and skull. She closed her eyes and felt the sting and tingle in the proud flesh on her palms, like the sensation she’d once had in her breasts when her milk was letting down. But gradually she became almost accustomed to that new ache, gradually almost used to the feel of a baby who was not Travis breathing against her heart. And slowly the density of Ellen’s body changed, until she was warm and loose and heavy, asleep in Cerise’s arms.

  Cerise held Ellen for a long time then, and though her cells did not part to enfold her, though she did not soak the feel of Ellen inside her like a sponge, it still felt good to hold a living baby. She held Ellen until her arms ached and strange needles of sensation plagued her hands, held her as though she could hold the two of them in that moment forever, without the intrusion of Ellen’s future or Cerise’s past.

  AFTER ANNA HAD APOLOGIZED TO LUCY A DOZEN TIMES, AFTER SHE’D forgiven Lucy for ruining her negatives and asked Lucy to please forgive her, too, after she’d hugged Lucy and kissed her and dried her tears, after she’d helped her wash her face and settled her on her bed with a picture book and a bevy of stuffed animals, Anna went downstairs to check on Ellen and deal with Honey.

  She’d decided she would give Honey twenty dollars. She would thank Honey for coming and say they had all enjoyed her visit and wish her luck and tell her good-bye. It wasn’t as though she’d ever promised to befriend Honey or to offer her a job, she thought as she slipped out of Lucy’s room. Honey seemed like a nice person, and Anna was grateful for the help she’d given Lucy, but they were too many worlds apart for there to be a place for Honey in Anna’s busy life. Besides, she was too embarrassed by what she’d just revealed about herself to want to be around anyone who had witnessed her like that.

  Descending the carpeted stairs, Anna felt a spurt of resentment toward the woman who had observed her failure as a mother. She’s homeless, she thought before she could stop herself—and childless—what does she know? But as she entered the living room, what she saw made her pause before she spoke. Honey was sitting on the floor and swaying gently from side to side, humming a tuneless little song to Ellen, who lay fast asleep across her chest. Honey’s eyes were closed, and the look on her face was somewhere between rapture and torture, a yearning so intense it seemed to encompass both. Ellen’s head lolled against Honey’s shoulder, and her hand was hanging open by her side. Suddenly humbled by the tenderness of a stranger toward her daughter, Anna hesitated in the doorway, groping for the phrases she’d planned to use until Honey felt her looking and opened her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” Anna said, entering the room. The words surprised her, they were so far from what she’d intended to say.

  “It’s okay,” said Honey softly.

  Anna gave a self-conscious laugh. “You haven’t caught me at my best.”

  “I’ve seen worse, I guess,” Honey answered gruffly. She sat very still to keep Ellen from waking.

  “I can’t imagine worse.” Anna said, though a second later she added, “I mean, I can. Upstairs just now I could have strangled her. But at the same time—at that very same minute—I swear I’d kill anyone who hurt her. Probably even me,” she added wretchedly.

  “It’s hard,” Honey said softly. “To be a mother.”

  “It is,” Anna answered, startled by how grateful she felt for Honey’s sympathy. “My sister used to say I couldn’t possibly understand what it would be like to be a mother until I had kids of my own, and that’s true, I suppose—I couldn’t. But I sometimes wonder if even mothers can ever understand each other. Even after I had Lucy, I couldn’t understand what my sister was doing with her sons. She seemed to love them so much when they were little, but after they got older, it was like she just gave up on them somehow. But see,” she gave a painful laugh. “I haven’t got there yet. Lucy’s only six. Who knows what it will be like when she turns sixteen.”

  Honey’s silence seemed like an open door. “We’re all so alone, in mothering,” Anna went on, her voice low and raw. “We can talk about how our kids are doing in school and the cute things they say. We can even complain about how they’re driving us nuts. But we can’t talk about how much it terrifies us to love them as we do, or talk about how much we scare ourselves, trying to stay sane while we raise them. We can’t talk about how much they teach us, how much they cost us, how much we owe to them. Or—” She shrugged. “Maybe it’s just me.”

  “No,” said Honey looking down at Ellen and speaking so softly it was as though she were talking to herself. “Most mothers are like that, I think.”

  “Lucy said she wanted to make me happy.” Anna gave another naked little laugh. “I asked her why she ruined my negatives, and she said she was only trying to cheer me up.”

  “She loves you,” Honey said.

  “I know,” Anna exhaled shakily. “More than I deser
ve.”

  A new kind of silence opened in the room. Ellen made a little moan and settled even deeper into her sleep. Anna stood staring down at her in helpless tenderness, and Honey sat gazing at the wall where Anna’s photograph hung while so much time passed that the shadows in the room had shifted before either woman spoke.

  “I could come back tomorrow,” Honey said. “If that would help.”

  “Oh,” said Anna, so startled that at first she couldn’t understand what Honey was suggesting.

  “Maybe,” Honey offered, “you could make those pictures again, the ones that Lucy wrecked.”

  It’s not that easy, Anna answered in her head. The light won’t be the same, the season has changed. And besides, she thought with a terrible twinge of rue, they probably weren’t worth it, anyway. She was trying to find a kind way to thank Honey and tell her not to bother, when Honey spoke again. “It might be good for Lucy,” she said shyly. “She feels so bad right now. And anyway,” she added with a kind of puzzled and desperate courage. “I would really like to help you, with your art.”

  WALKING AWAY THROUGH THE DUSK, CERISE FELT WRECKED AND naked, so weary she feared she might flop down in the street and go to sleep. But at the same time she felt lighter, too, somehow more alive. Lights popped on around her—streetlights and porch lights and lights in the kitchens of the houses that she passed. In house after house she saw the cool blue glow of a television, and it made her long to return to the shelter. She yearned to rejoin the other women in the TV room, to lose herself again in that society, to stay safe and small in the little half-life she’d found there.

  She stopped at a corner market and used the money Anna had given her to buy a bag of food and a bar of soap and a stick of cheap deodorant. When she reached the fairground at last, the floodlights were already on, ripping the darkness open with their glare, making the weeds and dirt look bleached and cold. Skirting the lights, she slipped through the chink in the chain-link fence and stole her way between the long buildings to the barn where she’d slept the night before.

  It was almost like a homecoming, to find her blankets and her bags undisturbed. She had thought it would be safer to move to a different stall, but once she was back inside those familiar walls, she decided she would rather risk staying where she was. She spread her bed in the corner, and then sat on her blankets in the dark to eat her supper. When she had drained her carton of milk, she closed her bread sack, took off her shoes, and lay back between her blankets.

  At first she tried to reconnect with Travis, but when she found that once again she couldn’t reach him, she turned her thoughts to Anna and Lucy and Ellen and what had happened at their house. She wanted to think about the things that Anna had said and about the pictures on Anna’s walls. She wanted to think about what it had been like to hold Ellen, and what had made her offer to return, but she was so tired that for once sleep engulfed her, holding her captive until long after dawn.

  ALONE IN THE CAR WITH HER FIELD CAMERA, ANNA FELT WEAK AND A little shaky, as if she were venturing outside for the first time after a long illness. As she sped north up the freeway, the spring light stung her eyes like soap, so sharp it nearly made her cry.

  I’m doing this for Lucy, she reminded herself. She felt another wrench of remorse to remember how Lucy had cowered while she’d raged at her, and how delighted she had been this afternoon when Anna explained that Honey had offered to stay with her while Anna tried to replace her negatives. She thought about how happily Lucy had held Honey’s hand and waved good-bye to her, though she remembered, too, the odd expression she’d caught on Honey’s face, a yearning so intense and private and stoic it startled her. Driving up the bright freeway, she wondered again at her decision to leave her daughters in Honey’s care.

  When Eliot had finally got home last night, she’d shown him the ruined negatives and watched him wince as he shuffled through them, and then she’d forced herself to tell him about all that Honey had been witness to, and how Honey had ended her visit by offering to help.

  “I didn’t know how to tell her no,” she’d said. “It seemed so generous, so—I don’t know—soul-felt, or something. And I was so embarrassed. I swear I’ve never felt worse. It really was kind of her to want to do something. But now she’s planning on coming to watch the girls, and I don’t know what to do.”

  “I’d let her come,” Eliot had said. They were in the kitchen, where Anna had been packing Lucy’s lunch. Eliot set the stack of ruined film on the counter and began to peel a carrot.

  Anna said, “You haven’t even met her. How can you say you’d let her come?”

  “From what you’ve told me, and from what we’ve seen of how she’s worked with Lucy. I think everything will be just fine. Besides, you won’t be gone for more than what—a few hours? And I can come home a little early tomorrow. I think it would be really good for Lucy to have Honey here, and also I’m sure it would help her for you to redo those negatives right away.”

  “I can’t redo those negatives, you know,” Anna said, and though she’d tried to sound matter-of-fact, her tone had teetered between self-pity and resentment.

  “I know,” Eliot had answered. He’d looked at her steadily for a long moment, and then added, “Maybe these will be better.”

  “Maybe,” Anna had said, still struggling to keep the bitterness from her voice.

  She had decided she would return to the dead orchard first. She would expose enough film to replace the negatives that Lucy had wrecked, and when she got home, she would make sure to appear happy with what she had done. That would appease Lucy, and maybe please Honey, too, and later, if Anna never got around to developing those sheets of film, it wouldn’t be much of a lie to claim she hadn’t had the time.

  She left the freeway on the exit she’d used before, although now she hardly recognized the landscape the road led her through. The winter rains and spring sunshine had carpeted the hills in grass and dotted the grass with wildflowers. A mist of budding leaves hovered in the branches of the oaks, and buttercups shone by the roadside. But despite the exuberance of the season, Anna still felt remote as a ghost, a stranger in a land that wasn’t hers.

  The sun was moving lower in the sky, dark shadows were beginning to stretch across the road, and the light was taking on the dense clarity of early evening. Anna thought of the dead orchard she was driving toward, imagined how the broken trees would look, standing like upright corpses amid the fresh grass. She thought of how once she might have been able to make something of that image, and she felt a longing widening inside her, a nostalgia for all that was now lost to her.

  When she rounded the final curve and caught sight of the orchard, at first she thought she had taken the wrong road, or had somehow ended up in another world entirely. Her foot slipped from the accelerator, and a moment later she groaned—a sound so visceral and pleasure-laden, she recognized it as her voice while making love. There before her were the gnarled trees, their branches still broken and lichen-hung, their trunks still sundered and hollowed, the heartwood all but rotted out of them. Only now those broken trees were all alight, laden with a million blooms that glowed like stars in the slanting sun.

  She pulled blindly off the road, parked, and stumbled like a drunkard from the car. Stem-sap and the spit-homes of larvae soaked her jeans as she pushed through the waist-high weeds and the green scent of chlorophyll filled her nose.

  She had never considered the possibility of flowers, had never thought those trees might be anything but dead. As she made her way into the heart of the orchard, she saw that a few of the trees were truly dead, bereft of even a single petal, although their limbs were still home to a thrumming universe of insects and birds. But most of the trees, however twisted and decrepit, were so filled with flowers that their branches seemed to be floating. It was as if the haggard trees had suddenly broken into song. For a long time she wandered mindlessly, lured deeper and deeper by so much gratuitous beauty. The air was spiced with the tickle of pollen, a smell th
at reminded her more of grain than of perfume. Here and there, an occasional drift of falling petals caught the slanting sunlight as they fluttered toward the earth.

  In a daze of delight, she returned to her car for her equipment. She set up her tripod, loaded the first holder of film into her camera, and as she waited beneath the dark cloth for the right second to open the shutter, she felt a fierce gratitude for her particular life. A moment came when the light appeared the fullest, the shadows as rich as they could possibly be. Pressing the shutter release, she heard the gentle click of the shutter opening, felt her love of the world as it appeared brimming again inside her, and marveled, Where have I been?

  ANNA CAME HOME AT DINNERTIME ALL EXCITED ABOUT AN ORCHARD she’d found—a whole valley, she said, of dead trees blooming. It didn’t make any sense to Cerise for dead trees to have flowers or for anyone to care that much even if they did, but she could see that there was a new light in Anna’s face, and when Anna asked Cerise if she would like a steady job, babysitting Ellen while she was teaching, she could hear an eagerness in Anna’s voice that she hadn’t heard before.

  Cerise knew that saying yes was the wrong thing to do. But she had no idea what to do instead. She needed money if she were to stay alive, and it also felt so good to be wanted—even if the person Anna wanted was not the person Cerise really was. Besides, the thought of spending part of almost every day in the quiet shelter of Anna’s house with Anna’s baby was an allurement Cerise could not pass up.