Windfalls

by Jean Hegland

  Cerise found she even liked Anna’s husband, too. He seemed almost a creature from another species, when he changed Ellen’s messy diapers without being asked or pulled Lucy onto his lap to read to her or laid his hand so tenderly on Anna’s waist. They were his plants, Cerise learned, that filled the house, his cuttings lining the windowsills. Seeing them, she couldn’t help but think of the garden she had planted with Travis, couldn’t help but remember Travis’s rapture at digging in the dirt—couldn’t help but remember what all Travis’s happiness had come to, in the end. But even that warning was not enough to keep her from promising that she would come back tomorrow.

  And so a strange new routine shaped her days. Each morning at dawn she woke in her stall at the livestock barn, grateful that she had managed to pass one more night undiscovered. Shivering in the raw gray light, she folded the blanket she’d taken from the shelter and the blanket that Barbara had given her and hid them beneath the newspapers that made her mattress. She sponged her face and armpits with night-cold water from the bottle she’d filled the day before at the spigot outside the barn. She changed into a fresh set of clothes, ate a few slices from her bag of bread, and brushed her teeth, swallowing the toothpaste so that she would not leave telltale toothpaste splotches on the ground. Then, tucking her possessions into the darkest corner of the stall, she slipped away before the light grew too strong.

  She spent most of the time she was not at Anna’s trying to stay clean. Washing her hair was the hardest. She’d learned that people thought it dangerous or obscene, if they entered a public restroom, to find her bent over a sink with her soapy head crooked under the running faucet, so she tried to use bathrooms with locking doors, despite the difficulties of having to ask for a key.

  Every few days she went to a laundromat to wash her clothes. While her little load bounced and spun, she breathed the humid, cigarette and soap-scented air and paged through the worn magazines, learning about the successes of celebrity diets, about the ten hottest ways to turn her lover on, about how to use pastels to brighten her breakfast nook and what she should be sure to see the next time she visited New Orleans.

  Anna had offered so often to pick Cerise up at the shelter or to drop her off there that Cerise was sometimes sure Anna could see through her excuses when she claimed she needed the exercise, insisted she really liked to walk. Once Cerise had splurged and taken the bus to Anna’s house, though afterward she decided it was more important to save her money than to spend it on something she could use her own two legs to do.

  Without identification, it turned out to be impossible to cash the paychecks she’d received from the after-school care program, but she carried them with her anyway, zipped safely into the inside pocket of her jacket, and she’d tried to save most of the money Anna gave her, too. She wanted to hoard as much as she could for the room she still couldn’t help but dream she would have someday, the room calm as a shrine where she could go to be alone. Other than staying undiscovered, that room was her only goal.

  She liked Anna more and more, although as time went on, it seemed she had more—instead of less—to hide from her. It was as if all her secrets had somehow rotted into lies. Now that she’d discovered someone she might almost imagine entrusting with the truth of who she was, she could think of no way to explain her life that would not ruin the refuge she’d found. Sometimes Anna invited her to stay for supper, and then, sitting at the table with Anna and Eliot and the girls, passing the broiled chicken breasts and new potatoes, helping to feed Ellen her bananas and her vegetable purees, pouring milk for Lucy and listening to her rhymes and endless stories, she yearned to be the woman they all assumed she was.

  Cerise loved Anna’s children as she wished she had loved her own. She loved them tenderly and patiently, but with a detachment that allowed her to tell Lucy no, that let her listen to Ellen fuss herself to sleep at naptime without her breasts swelling in reply. She loved Anna’s children carefully and without abandon, and Anna’s children loved her, too. Every day when Cerise arrived, Ellen’s face lit up like a Christmas tree, and later, when Lucy came home from school, her pleasure at seeing Cerise made her almost manic.

  Sometimes, while Ellen napped, Cerise continued to study the pictures on Anna’s walls. Standing in front of each of them in turn, she let her eyes flick or drift where they would while she waited for something to strike her—some feeling or understanding. But no matter how long she stood, she couldn’t seem to find her way inside them, or couldn’t find a way to fit them inside her. Once or twice she tried to ask Anna about the photographs, but Anna’s answers never seemed to fit Cerise’s questions. It was as if they were talking about two separate things, when Cerise asked why the photographs weren’t in color and Anna answered by talking about nostalgia and expectation, about the clarity of vision and the purity of line.

  After the hours she spent at Anna’s house, it was always both a respite and a sadness to return to the fairground. Each time she saw that the gap in the chain-link fence had not been fixed, a bit of the anxiety she’d been carrying with her all day relaxed a little, and when she entered her stall and found her bundle of belongings still untouched, she felt another small relief. It was as though her essential self were waiting for her in that empty place, the inescapable Cerise she always came to in the end. She ate her supper, made up her bed, and folded herself inside, hoping once again that she would not be discovered in her sleep.

  It had been a long while since she had been able to find her way back to the other world where it seemed her son still lived, and there were moments when, lying on her newspaper bed, she missed Travis so fiercely she marveled that it did not stop her heart. There were times when she still worried about him, too. She had the drifting feeling that death was just a chain-link fence separating the living from the dead, and she worried that Travis was on the other side, scared and lonely and wondering why she had abandoned him. It made her sick that she couldn’t console him, couldn’t reach through the barrier of death to explain what had happened to him in a way he might understand.

  But there were also hours when Travis traveled with her like a kind of friendly ghost, like another self inside her. In a strange way he seemed older than she was now, and somehow wiser, because he was outside of life, because he knew what happened when you died. She did not forget him, even for a minute, but sometimes it seemed her memories were growing rounder, safer, less urgent, more like pearls than knives.

  For a long time Cerise managed to keep her thoughts of Melody quarantined so that they could not contaminate her other memories or her meager plans. But one evening as she was spreading out the newspapers that made her mattress, a smudged photograph on a back page caught her eye. It was a picture of a slender woman in overalls standing on a ladder with a paintbrush in her hand. The ladder was leaning against the wall of a building on which the rough outlines of a design were just beginning to appear. The woman’s back was to the camera, but something about the shape of her shoulders and the way she held her head made Cerise think of Melody. “Muralist at Work,” the caption beneath the photograph announced.

  Clutching the newspaper in both hands, Cerise hurried to the doorway of her stall. Angling the paper so the article caught the light, she read that the North Coast Arts Council had recently awarded a grant to Melody Painter for a mural to decorate the west wall of the newly renovated Arcata Cultural Arts Center. Saturday Morning was the name of the winning design, which had been chosen out of a pool of over one hundred entries.

  Staring at the grainy image, Cerise stumbled out of the barn into the exposed space between the buildings, scrutinizing the photograph by what light still lingered in the sky. But although she was certain it was her daughter who stood on the ladder, it was impossible to learn any more about what she was painting, impossible to discern what Saturday Morning might mean to Melody.

  Cerise lay awake for a long time that night, relishing the proof that Melody was okay, savoring her pride that Melody’s mural had been cho
sen as the best, and trying to overlook the hurt she felt at Melody’s new last name. She clutched the article like a talisman and remembered those long-distant Saturday mornings and how happy she’d been back then. Closing her eyes, she let herself be rocked by the swelling round of frog-song, let herself imagine that surely Melody had been happy back then, too.

  But when the frogs abruptly quit their calling, startled into silence by a wandering raccoon or a passing owl, her eyes jolted open with a start. Staring up into the darkness from her scanty bed, she made herself admit that her thought about Melody’s happiness was only another hope. And then she forced herself to remember how futile hope had always been.

  SUDDENLY THERE WERE ABANDONED FRUIT TREES EVERYWHERE. EVEN IN the city, Anna spotted them, blossoming in vacant lots and alleyways and overgrown backyards. Outside Santa Dorothea she found other neglected orchards, and she discovered lone fruit trees, as well—flowering among the oaks on the hillsides, or along the edges of back roads, or deep in secluded stands of fir and redwood.

  “Tell me about those trees,” she’d demanded of Eliot the night after she’d first discovered the dead orchard in bloom.

  “What about them?” Eliot had asked. They were in the bathroom, getting ready for bed. But despite her tiredness and the late hour, despite how early the alarm was set to ring, Anna felt right inside her body again, more keen and easy and alive than she’d felt in months. She squeezed toothpaste onto her brush and said, “Last winter I was sure that orchard was completely dead.”

  Lifting his chin toward the mirror, Eliot pulled his razor down through the white foam on his face, leaving behind a swath of clean skin from his cheekbone to his jaw. He said, “Not dead, just abandoned.”

  “But why would anyone abandon an orchard?”

  “It’s worthless,” he said curtly, pausing to rinse his razor.

  “Worthless fruit?” Anna asked, her toothbrush halfway to her mouth. “Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

  “Trees produce less as they age. It gets to where it’s not worth the work of harvesting them. Besides, most of those old orchards grow old varieties. They might taste great, but they probably don’t transport well. Until someone decides to develop the land, it’s cheaper just to ignore it.”

  “But those trees were loaded with blossoms. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many flowers.”

  “They tend to do that, when they’re stressed or dying—set more blooms. And they’ll burst early, in a warm spell.” He gave a bitter chuckle, “You could say it’s just another gift of global warming.”

  Anna asked, “How old would an orchard like that be, anyway?”

  “Hard to tell.” Eliot jutted his chin toward the mirror, stretched his lip up over his teeth, and ran his razor down his taut chin to his Adam’s apple. Relaxing his grimace, he added, “Untended, they can start looking bad pretty fast. Some plum trees’ll live a hundred years or more, though I doubt an orchard big as yours would be that old. Maybe back to the Depression, pre-World War II. That’s a long time, even so.”

  “You know how many trees like that there are around here, once you start to look?” Anna asked.

  Eliot rinsed his razor and tapped it against the side of the sink. “Sure,” he answered. “Lots.” He turned and grinned at her, holding her gaze so long that the irony in his expression had melted into tenderness by the time he added, “There’s plenty of fruit on this planet that goes to waste.”

  It became a kind of quest, to find those trees while they still bloomed. In the bits of time she managed to steal from the rest of her life, Anna roamed the countryside, seeking them. Driving slowly and braking often, she scoured the back roads, searching for the apples and plums and pears and figs that had been planted years ago for the years to come, planted by people who lay in graves long gone while their homes and barns and fields sank back into the earth, until now only those old trees remained, like messages sent by strangers or gifts left by ghosts. Disregarding fences, signs, and dogs, she hiked through the hills and draws as though she owned them, and back in her darkroom, each new print made her hungry for the one that would follow it.

  The last Sunday in March, Anna left the girls with Honey and headed south, wandering down roads she chose at random until she found herself at last in a land far beyond where she had ever been, a windswept place of vacant hills so broad and steep and rocky they seemed almost like mountains. She parked by a break in the barbed-wire fence that edged the road. Shouldering her camera and carrying her tripod, she set off, hiking up the hill beneath a sky filled with massy clouds. When she reached the top, she looked west, down into a land so big and empty it seemed almost unearthly, a place of rocky soil, sparse grass, and solitude.

  The radio had warned that the weather was changing, and she could feel it as she hiked, that gathering tension that meant a storm was coming. She could see it in the creamy strangeness of the light. The terrain was rough, her equipment was heavy, and after a while she became so thirsty that her mouth ached for water. But despite the lack of trees, something drew her on—the desolation of the landscape, maybe, or maybe just the joy of being so alone, of being a solitary body and a single mind wandering through those open, empty hills.

  Late in the afternoon, as the western sky grew smooth and fierce beneath the menacing clouds, she came across one lone tree. Halfway up another hill, it stood exposed to the oncoming storm. Some ancient mishap had split its trunk in two, and one half of it rested like a fallen snag along the ground. The cavity where its heart had been was black and gaping, although the damage was so old, the edges of the hole had healed as smooth as lips.

  Despite every outrage, it was in bloom. Overhead the clouds were heaped and dark, but beneath them the low-set sun burnished the broken wood and set each frail petal afire. There was something so savage about it that it almost frightened her, that lonely tree glowing beneath the threatening sky. She reminded herself it was only a trick of light that caused that doomed tree to blossom one last time, only a trick of light that made it appear before her now like a kind of earthly glory. But even those ironies could not diminish her awe.

  The wind was rising. Her hair stung her cheeks, and her eyes filled with cold tears. She knew a photograph of that tree would never save or change a thing. But she no longer cared. There wasn’t much time. The light continued to deepen, and just as quickly it would be gone. Opening her tripod, she planted it on the rocky soil so that the tree loomed above her, luminous against the roiling sky. She had time for one exposure before the wild light slipped away.

  BY THE END OF MARCH THE FAIRGROUND WAS FULL OF SQUATTERS.

  The first residents had been as furtive as Cerise herself, hiding even from each other, ducking around corners, squirreling their possessions out of sight. But as the days lengthened and the evening air grew balmy and their numbers increased, those new occupants seemed to be gaining an audacity that worried Cerise.

  One Thursday night in early April, after she’d eaten her little dinner and climbed beneath her blankets, she could hear people gathering in the open space behind her barn, and she cringed to hear how clearly their voices carried in the dusk air, shuddered to smell the smoke from their bonfire. She lay beneath her blankets in the last dim light of evening and wished she had the courage to remind them not to call attention to themselves.

  She finally went to sleep to the mutter of many voices, although her sleep was shallow and shifting. Sometime around midnight a crescendo of hard laughter punched her awake, and afterward she lay unsleeping for many hours while the whoops and curses of strangers echoed between the buildings. At first she was only worried that the police would come to rout out the revelers or that the revelers would tire of each other and go looking for people like herself. But as the night dragged on, she finally admitted to herself what she’d been fearing all along—this little haven, too, was coming to an end.

  As soon as it was light enough to see, she bundled up her things and slipped away, gliding past the people sprawled around the
blackened trash barrel. The sky east of the city was reddening with the coming day as she crawled through the fence and hiked into the dawn.

  She devoted the morning to doing laundry and trying to figure out where she could spend the coming night. But when the time came for her to head to Anna’s, she still hadn’t thought of a safe place to sleep. She hid her belongings in a thicket halfway down the steep ravine that ran behind the houses on Anna’s street, and for a moment she even considered sleeping there, but the hillside was too steep and rugged, and she didn’t want to bring her real life that close to Anna’s.

  Anna’s face was glowing when Cerise arrived. “I just put Ellen down,” she said as she let Cerise into the house. “But she isn’t quite asleep.”

  Cerise nodded and followed Anna down the hall. She wondered if Anna had seen her scrambling out of the ravine. But Anna said, “I’ve got good news.” Her voice was bright with excitement. “I just got a call from a woman I met last fall—the wife of the man who had Eliot’s job before he got it. She wants to see my portfolio.”

  Cerise kept her face still and waited until Anna explained, “She’s interested in buying some of my new photographs.”

  “That’s nice,” Cerise said shyly.

  “It is,” Anna answered. “It’d be great to sell something to such a good collection, especially right now, when I’m still half a year away from a new show. I just wish—” A shadow crossed her face, and for a moment she looked as though she were thinking very hard. Then she tossed her thought away with an apologetic shrug and smiled directly at Cerise. “Anyway,” she continued, “I wanted to ask if you would mind staying with Lucy and Ellen while Eliot and I went over there for dinner tonight. I can come back after my seminar, and help you feed the girls before I go. Of course we can give you a ride home afterward.”

  Home, Cerise’s mind gulped, thinking of her empty stall at the fairground, of her blankets in the ravine. “Okay,” she said, to mask the complications in her head.