Windfalls

by Jean Hegland

  Anna was looking at her fondly. “You’ve helped me so much—you’ve helped all of us. We owe you a great, great deal.”

  It flustered Cerise for Anna to be talking that way. It almost frightened her. But in the middle of her confusion, she mustered up her courage and said, “Could I see them, too?”

  “See them?” Anna echoed.

  “Your pictures,” Cerise suggested shyly.

  “Oh,” Anna answered, looking vaguely bemused. “Of course I’d be glad to show them to you. It’s nice of you to ask.” Glancing at her wristwatch, she added, “I’ve still got a few minutes before I have to leave for campus.”

  Anna led Cerise into the kitchen, where a flat black case lay on the table. It was thick as a book, and so long and wide it would hold an unfolded newspaper. Anna was just beginning to unzip it when the baby monitor on the counter crackled to life, filling the room with fretful mumbles and the little sounds of Ellen shifting in her crib.

  “I guess I tried too early,” Anna said. “Looks like you’ll have to put her back down a little later.” She lifted the top flap of the portfolio to reveal a stack of prints in mat-board frames. “Anyway, you’re welcome to look at them while I get her up.”

  Anna hurried out of the kitchen, leaving Cerise alone with the stack of prints. She felt nervous about touching then, afraid she might accidentally stain or bend them, and she was worried she would still not be able to understand why they meant so much. While the baby monitor broadcast Anna’s murmurs and Ellen’s answering coos into the kitchen, Cerise tentatively lifted the first print from the portfolio. It was about the size of the photograph of Anna’s that hung in the living room, but rather than being a sweeping landscape, it was only a picture of a row of trees. They were not pretty trees, not the smooth symmetrical trees Cerise would have chosen to photograph. Instead, these trees were twisted and disfigured, broken and blackened and near-dead, though despite all their deformities, their branches were filled with glowing flowers.

  One by one, Cerise studied the rest of Anna’s prints, letting her eyes roam and linger until finally her gaze disengaged, turned inward in a kind of aching rapture. The monitor filled the room with the intimate hum of loving voices, but Cerise was unable to tear herself away and turn it off. It seemed as though a limb she’d somehow forgotten was part of her body had fallen asleep and was now tingling, buzzing, stinging with the work of waking. It hurt, the yearning that was upwelling in her, and at the same time it seemed to contain the answer to her longing. Looking at those broken, blooming trees was like listening to the saddest music—it made her almost grateful that she was alive to feel such pain.

  But when she reached the print at the bottom of the stack, her jaw dropped and she clapped her scarred hand to her open mouth to catch her moan. Her brain seized shut as though it couldn’t believe what her eyes were seeing, and still she could not stop staring. It was a photograph of a lone tree on a barren hillside beneath a stormy sky. Sundered almost in two, one half of its trunk lay draped along the stony ground. Of all the trees on earth, Cerise recognized it—though in Anna’s photograph it was ablaze with flowers.

  “Sorry that took so long,” Anna said, entering the kitchen with Ellen riding on her hip like a round-eyed jockey. “I had to change her, too.” She was bending her head to nuzzle Ellen’s cheek when she caught sight of Cerise’s face and straightened up instead. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost,” she said, crossing the kitchen to stand at the table beside her. “Are you feeling all right?”

  Tears were welling so thickly in Cerise’s eyes that for a moment tears were all she could see. “Are you okay?” she heard Anna ask, her tone teetering between tenderness and worry.

  “I’m fine,” Cerise answered almost fiercely. She handed the last print to Anna. Gouging the tears from her eyes, she added, “I’m just—I mean, it’s nothing. I like your pictures.”

  “You do?” Anna asked perplexedly. “Well, thank you. That’s nice of you to say.” She studied Cerise for a moment longer and added, “Are you sure that everything’s okay?”

  IT PUZZLED ANNA THAT HONEY HAD BEEN CRYING. DRIVING TO CAMPUS, she wondered if something had happened at the shelter that was troubling her. Despite herself, as Anna leaned forward to switch on the radio, she remembered Sally’s warning, and a little pall of worry descended in her mind.

  She had almost reached the freeway when she heard the news. An au pair from Paris had killed the toddler she’d been hired to come to America to care for, drowning him in the bathtub while his parents were at work. There was a sound bite from a spokesperson who said the whole child-care industry needed increased regulation, and then the newscaster began a segment about the record-breaking heat. But instead of the sunny street that lay beyond the windshield, Anna saw Ellen, watching happily as Honey filled the bath.

  A thick fear prickled in her chest. There was no excuse for what she had done—opening her home to a homeless stranger, hiring a woman to care for her children who’d lost her job caring for children. There were reasons people became homeless—Anna knew that. In some reluctant recess of herself, she’d known all along that Sally was right, that it must have taken more than simple bad luck for Honey to have sunk so far. She had known, too, that she hadn’t hired Honey in order to help her, hadn’t hired Honey in order to make Lucy feel better about the world. She’d hired Honey because she needed help so desperately that she was willing to take stupid risks. She’d hired Honey so that she could use her, and now she was going to pay for her selfishness.

  She could hear the rill of water filling the tub. In the darkness inside her head she could see the happy anticipation on Ellen’s face as Honey lowered her into the trembling water, could see Honey’s placid expression grow rigid with resolve, and then the image of Ellen’s blue birth-face slammed into her mind. Steering with one hand, she jammed the car toward the curb while she used her other hand to dig in her purse for Jesse’s cell phone. A truck swooped past her, honking. Frantically she tore the phone from its case, opened it, and then jabbed the pattern of her own phone number onto the grid of tiny buttons.

  Her lungs began to burn, and she realized she was holding her breath. But before she could exhale, the phone rang. Honey answered just as suddenly, her voice calm and normal, so loud inside Anna’s head it startled her, “Hello?”

  Anna took a silent sip of air and dizzily tried to scrape together a reason for her call.

  “Hello?” Honey said again. Her voice had gained a little edge of suspicion and impatience that Anna recognized as her own tone when she answered a crank phone call.

  “Hello?” Honey’s voice was louder now, and hard, exactly as Anna would want it to be to scare off would-be burglars and kidnappers.

  “Deedee?” she heard Ellen chirp, and suddenly she was seized with a shame even larger than her terror had been. More clearly than the street in front of her, she saw Honey holding the phone, the small furrow of a frown on her impassive face. She saw Ellen clinging to her as though Honey were a tree, saw the way the sunlight lay across the floor. With a sudden slap of insight, she saw that her call was the only threat to the happiness of their day.

  The wild thought skittered through her mind that Honey would recognize the sound of her breathing and know it was she on the mute end of the phone. Stealthily she took the phone from her ear. But just before her finger touched the button to turn it off, she heard Honey whisper in a voice broken with pain, “Melody? Is that you?”

  CERISE PUT THE RECEIVER BACK AND STOOD WITH ELLEN ON HER HIP, staring sightlessly at the bands of sunlight on the kitchen floor. She’d answered the phone only because she’d thought it might be Anna or Eliot calling home. Even after she’d heard the live silence of an open line, she’d had an eerie feeling that the caller was someone she knew, though the thought of Melody never consciously crossed her mind until she’d heard herself croaking Melody’s name. It had been so long since she’d spoken that name aloud that it felt odd and awkward in her throat, and in t
he instant after she’d said it, she’d been appalled by how much hope and dread she’d dredged up with that one word.

  On her hip, Ellen began to squirm and rub her eyes.

  “It’s time for your nap, isn’t it?” Cerise said dully, pulling Ellen closer.

  Upstairs, she opened the window to let some freshness into Ellen’s stuffy room, and then settled into the rocking chair with Ellen on her lap. For a long time she rocked mechanically, staring at the curtains belling in the breeze, and wondering at how stupid she’d been to think it could possibly be Melody on the mute end of the phone. Ellen made a comfortable little sigh. Glancing down, Cerise saw her eyelids slide shut, watched her hand fall open as though she’d just let a ball roll off her fingertips. She felt so warm and simple in Cerise’s lap, her little weight as calming as a drug. Arcata, the woman at the campground had said—in a tree house, in the woods—and always before it had seemed like one more proof that the first baby Cerise had loved was lost forevermore.

  Now, as she felt drowsily in her pocket for the scrap of tattered newspaper she still carried there, a new thought began to grow in her, a question she couldn’t quite shape. But before it could come to anything, Cerise had followed Ellen into the fold of sleep.

  ANNA LEFT CAMPUS AS SOON AS HER SEMINAR WAS OVER AND DROVE straight home. I’m being silly, she thought as she parked the car, but when she opened the back door, she was met by a silence so dense it filled the house like an ocean fog.

  “Hello,” she called, entering the dim kitchen. “I’m home.” But the house absorbed her greeting and offered nothing in return. As she climbed the stairs she could feel her pulse accelerate. Walking down the hall toward the unlit bedrooms, she realized she was moving stealthily, and the thought flickered through her mind that if she stayed quiet, she might be able to catch Honey at something.

  When she reached Ellen’s room and found them both asleep in the rocking chair, her relief was followed by a wave of fierce chagrin. Penitent, she stood in the doorway and studied the two of them. Ellen was sprawled across Honey’s lap, her mouth open and her arms out-flung. Honey’s legs were akimbo and her head was thrown back, exposing the length of her strong neck and the triangle of tender skin beneath her jaw. Even in her sleep, she was holding Ellen carefully, her scarred palms clasped around Ellen’s torso to prevent her from slipping from her lap. They both looked so vulnerable, so utterly at the mercy of the world, and yet they seemed serene, careless and easy in their sleep. The curtains belled at the opened window, the cool, green scent of springtime filled the air, and the whole room was filled with a tranquillity so keen it made Anna’s heart ache.

  She was still watching them when Honey shifted uneasily in her sleep, muttering and tossing her head from side to side as though she were saying no to something in her dreams. She groaned, and it was a sound so intimate and anguished that Anna suddenly felt like a voyeur. She turned and tiptoed hurriedly down the hall.

  She still had three hours before she needed to pick up Eliot and drive out to the Laughlins’, and almost that long before she expected Lucy home from playing with Kaylesha. In the kitchen she paused to zip her prints back into her portfolio. Flipping through them, all toned and signed and mounted in their window mats, she felt a pleasure robust as bread. But she still had an edgy sense of melancholy, too, to think that the best that could befall them would be to end up in galleries or museums or to win places on the walls of collectors like Carole Laughlin. What more could you possibly want? she asked herself sternly, though she could find no answer to fill that little ache.

  She’d made two good prints of the lone tree so far, and downstairs in her darkroom, she settled in to spot-tone the second one, patiently teasing the white dust spots with her tiny brush until they disappeared into the grain of the photograph. When that was finished, she turned her attention to housekeeping—cleaning tongs and scrubbing trays and sweeping. She tipped the contents of the dustpan into the overflowing wastebasket and then headed upstairs to empty it. Halfway up the steps she noticed, among the failed prints and old test strips and crumpled film wrappers, the negatives Lucy had ruined. She paused and pulled them from the trash. Looking at the lopsided flowers on their milky-dark surfaces, she felt a hot remorse.

  I should keep those, she thought, as a reminder. But suddenly she had an impulse to burn them instead. In the kitchen she found a book of matches. As she backed out the kitchen door with the wastebasket and a newspaper from the recycling bin, the screen slammed behind her, startlingly loud. It was lighter outside than it had been in the house, though dusk was coming fast. Sherbet-colored clouds were heaped in the western sky, and above her she could already make out several stars. The air was cool and verdant, alive against her skin.

  An old burn barrel left by the previous owners sat at the back of the yard just before the land sloped into the ravine. Anna set the wastebasket down and began to crumple sheets of newspaper and toss them into the barrel. She wanted a good blaze, wanted it bright and hot. She liked the thought of burning all her struggles and false starts, of starting clean in a new season. She lit a match, savoring the little whiff of sulfur it released into the fresh evening, though as she touched the flame to the nearest crumple of paper, it occurred to her to wonder if it were even legal to have a trash fire anymore.

  But the fire was already beginning to take hold. For a moment the edges of the paper she’d lit were etched with flickering orange lines, and then suddenly the whole mass was writhing with flame. Tentatively—at first almost playfully—and then with startling intent and speed, fire spread through the pile of newspaper. There was an inrushing of sound like a giant inhalation and flames rose up, fierce and surprisingly loud, pushing her back from the barrel.

  She stood for a moment, mesmerized, feeling the prickle of heat against her skin. Then she stepped nearer. Holding the wastebasket upside down above the flames, she let her trash cascade into the fire.

  WHEN THE SMOKE FIRST FILTERED INTO CERISE’S SLEEP, HER DREAMS recognized it. It was a nasty smoke, the smell of cheap things burning, and for a while her dreams engulfed it, offering weird dream-reasons to explain its presence. When the dreams finally turned to Travis and the trailer, she escaped the horror by waking. A nightmare, she told herself as she fought to find a way out of its grip. But instead of fading as she woke, the smell of smoke grew stronger.

  Opening her eyes, she cast a wild glance around the darkness and struggled to remember where she was—in Rita’s house, or her apartment, or back at Jake’s? She rose, swaying. Clutching the baby to her chest, she stumbled down the stairs, floundered through the dark rooms until she found the door, fought with the knob until it gave, and then burst outside, leaving the door gaping triumphantly as she entered the gloaming with the child she had saved.

  LONG BEFORE ELLEN’S CRIES REACHED ANNA’S EARS OR REGISTERED IN her brain, she felt them slashing through her body. Quick as instinct, she turned from the flame-filled barrel to see the dark shape of Honey burst through the kitchen door, carrying Ellen in her arms.

  “What’s wrong?” Anna cried, throwing down her wastebasket and racing up the yard to meet them. “What happened? Is she okay?”

  But Honey stumbled dazedly past her. She seemed to be headed toward the ravine when suddenly she caught sight of the fire. At first she veered away in fresh alarm, but then she halted as if she were too stricken go on. When Anna reached her, she was staring wildly into the dusk and panting as though she had just run a long, hard way. “What’s wrong?” Anna repeated, grabbing her arm. “What happened?”

  Ellen was sobbing, and Anna held out her hands to take her, but Honey gripped Ellen tighter and pivoted away. “I did it,” she said. “I did it, after all.” Her voice rang with stupefied triumph, but when she looked at Anna, her eyes were blank and hollow.

  “What? Did what? What do you mean?” Anna cried, struggling to reach her daughter. But Honey dodged again, clinging to Ellen as though she were a rag doll that she did not want to share. In the jag
ged light the flames cast, her face was twisted with anguish and exertion and a ferocious determination.

  “Mama,” Ellen sobbed, reaching piteously for Anna.

  “Give her to me,” Anna screamed. Seizing hold of Honey’s arm, she twisted her fingers into Honey’s flesh. “You give me back my daughter.”

  For a moment Honey appeared bewildered, and then she stared down at Ellen as if Ellen were a stranger, as if she had no idea who Ellen was or how she had arrived in her arms.

  “Oh,” she said at last, though it sounded more like a groan than a word.

  “What is going on?” Anna yelled, jerking her arm again as she reached for Ellen with her other hand. “What the hell is wrong?”

  An agony crossed Honey’s face. “Oh,” she said again, and this time her voice was a croak of despair. Silently she handed Ellen to Anna, who took her daughter and held her fast, soaking the feel of her back into her bones, checking Ellen for hurts or frights that could not be fixed by her arms alone.

  “What happened?” Anna gasped, and when Honey didn’t answer, Anna clutched Ellen closer and hissed, “You have to tell me. I trusted you.”

  But Honey only shuddered and bent her head.

  “What’s wrong?” Anna insisted. Honey looked so stupid and lumpen that Anna wanted to slap an answer out of her. “What’s wrong with you? What happened up there?” She glanced back toward the dark house, and then watched in mean satisfaction as Honey flinched and shrank.

  “Okay,” she said finally after Honey wouldn’t answer. “Tell me this—who the hell is Melody?”

  Honey grunted and reeled as though she’d been stabbed. “What?” she gasped. “How do you know?”

  “Who is she?” Anna insisted, digging in. “Who is Melody?” She watched as Honey wrestled with something, watched as her mouth stuttered open and then sagged shut. Finally, her head hanging, Honey answered flatly, “I guess I had a bad dream.”