by Jean Hegland
“My baby,” she said finally, speaking over Lucy’s head and into the darkness beyond.
“You had a baby?” Lucy asked in wonder.
“I had two.” Cerise stiffened, preparing herself for when Lucy leapt off her lap and ran screaming from the room.
But Lucy, resting tranquilly as ever against her chest, only asked, “Girls or boys?”
“One of each.”
“A girl and a boy,” said Lucy, snuggling in. “What are their names?”
“Travis,” Cerise said, and realized that for all she’d thought of him, she had not once said his name since she’d screamed it in the dark hills beneath the broken tree.
“Travis,” said Lucy. “And who else? What’s your girl’s name?”
“Melody.” The word came alive on her tongue, like a flavor she’d been craving for so long she’d forgotten how it really tasted and could only remember how much she’d longed for it.
“Travis and Melody,” said Lucy contentedly. “Where are they now?”
“Melody ran—Melody grew up. And left. That’s what girls do,” Cerise said to make herself believe it. “They grow up and leave their mothers. She lives north of here,” she added.
“At the North Pole?” Lucy asked.
“No.”
“Why don’t you see her?”
Cerise shrugged. “She’s mad at me. And I—I guess I’m mad at her.”
“Why are you mad?”
“Because of the bad things she did.”
“She didn’t mean to.”
“How do you know?”
“Girls never mean to. Only sometimes it’s just that things turn out wrong, like a accident.”
“Oh,” Cerise whispered.
“She’s not mad now,” Lucy persisted.
“How do you know?”
“Girls don’t stay mad,” Lucy explained. “You have a time-out, and then you start missing your mom. Where’s your boy?”
In the time that followed, Lucy waited patiently while her little question swelled until it grew so big it filled the kitchen, grew so huge it took up all the room Cerise needed to breathe, grew until it crushed against her and forced an answer out.
“He’s dead,” she croaked. The word was a cruel stone, scratching and grating and choking in her throat. But once she’d said it, she saw how small it was, too, just another human sound—nothing at all like the awfulness it meant. And yet she could breathe after she’d said it, as though somehow that word made the sorrow a little smaller.
Lucy echoed, “Dead?”
Cerise nodded, and then she cringed, waiting for Lucy’s horror to set in.
But instead Lucy asked, “How did he die?”
“In a fire,” Cerise said quickly, to avoid being crushed. Tears pricked her eyes and plugged her sinuses and clogged her throat, and Lucy watched Cerise’s lurching face in fascination. “Your fire?” Lucy asked.
“What?”
“The fire that burned your trailer?”
“Yeah.”
“And your hands?”
Cerise nodded, feeling the itch and ache and tingle in her palms.
“He played with matches,” Lucy said knowingly.
Cerise rubbed her tears with her fingers, smearing them across her face. “No,” she said. “It was an accident, in the wiring. It was just an accident, that’s all. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.” The words sounded so simple, so laughably small—an accident—as though Travis had been a big boy and peed his pants. As though there’d never been anyone else to blame. “I tried,” she said. “I tried to save him. But—I couldn’t.” She remembered the triumph she’d felt earlier that evening, running into the gloaming with Ellen in her arms. With a sudden fierce certainty she added, “I would of saved him, if I could.”
Lucy nodded solemnly, as if there had never been any doubt. “When’s his birthday?” she asked.
“His birthday?” Cerise remembered the slick feel of his body slithering out of her, remembered the slight, wet weight of him as she lifted him to her chest, the umbilical cord still trailing between them. She closed her eyes, and the smell of birth flooded her, rich as grain or semen or fresh blood.
Lucy was saying, “When it’s his birthday, me and you can bake a birthday cake. And then we’ll take it outside and light the candles and throw it way, way up into the sky and he’ll catch it, and then he’ll see that you’re okay, and he won’t have to worry about you anymore. Does he like chocolate?”
Cerise thought of Travis in the sky, eating chocolate cake, and though she knew that was not the truth of where he was, it suddenly came to her that wherever he was, he was okay. With a jolt of excruciating freedom, she understood that Travis was no longer hurt or sad or frightened. Wherever he was, Travis didn’t miss her anymore.
She pulled Lucy closer to her, buried her face in the girl’s hair. “Yes, he does,” she said. “He did. Travis liked chocolate.”
Pleased with her plan, Lucy nodded. But then Cerise felt her stiffen with another thought, and she asked in a voice clotted with a sudden new concern, “But won’t he be sad if his sister’s not there, too?”
Later, long after the business of getting Lucy back to bed, Cerise rose from her seat in the unlit kitchen and headed down the stairs. She had never been inside Anna’s darkroom before, and she opened the door warily. Inside it was utterly black, and the first light switch only added amber shadows to the darkness. She groped again and found a real light, though the room it illuminated was not at all as she had imagined it would be.
It seemed more clinical than magical, almost like a hospital with its trays and tools, its looming equipment, cool counters, and vaguely sour smell. At first, when she saw how tidy everything was, she feared she would not find what she’d come seeking. But a second later she saw the print she’d hoped for, sitting on the counter.
When she realized she would have to fold it in half before she could slip it beneath her jacket, she almost changed her mind. But in the end she took it anyway, halving it as carefully as she could, though she cringed at the white scar the crease left on the emulsion. Unzipping the inside pocket of her jacket, she removed the checks she’d received from the after-school care program. She found a pen and endorsed them with the name of the woman who had earned them, and then, adding Anna’s name below her own, she left them on the counter in the place where the print had been.
Upstairs she stood for a long time in the dark beside Lucy’s bed, gazing into her placid face and imagining the baby Lucy had been, imagining the woman she would become. She realized that if they ever met again, they might not know each other, two strangers standing together in an elevator or passing in a park. And yet she was certain that they would always love each other, even so.
She was in Ellen’s room when she heard the car pull up. She bent over the crib railing to breathe the warm steam of Ellen’s baby-dreams one last time before she tiptoed from the room and down the stairs. She was waiting at the front door with her jacket on when Eliot opened it.
“How was your night?” Anna asked.
“It was fine,” Cerise answered. “The girls are fine. But—I have to go.” She looked straight at Anna as she spoke, and Eliot faded back a step.
“It’s late,” Anna said apologetically. “I know. But if you let Eliot give you a ride, I’m sure you can still make it to the shelter before curfew.”
“No,” Cerise shook her head. “I mean, I have to leave here. I won’t be coming back.”
“Not coming back?” Anna said, and Cerise could see a hundred kinds of worry struggling in her face.
“I realized, you—all,” she added, glancing back at Eliot, “helped me see. There’s something important I need to do.”
“What is it?” Anna asked, and when Cerise didn’t answer, she added gently, “If you’d tell me, maybe I could help.”
“I’ve got to do this one the hard way,” Cerise answered. “All by myself.”
“But I—”
“You’ve don
e so much for me,” Cerise pleaded. “Please do just this one thing more.”
“But what are you going to do?”
Anna sounded so bewildered that Cerise teetered for a moment before she answered, “I need to find out what someone means by Saturday morning.”
“But I’ll miss you,” Anna said, her voice shrill with hurt. “And the girls, you can’t just—”
“I know,” Cerise said. “I’m really sorry. Tell the girls—tell them good-bye.”
“Okay,” said Anna slowly. A grit of skepticism appeared in her tone. “I’ll tell them that.”
“I mean,” Cerise amended, pushing the words out in a fierce hard rush, “tell them I love them. Tell them I won’t forget them, ever. Please,” she added.
Anna met her eyes, and their gaze held. For half a minute they looked at each other, each of them silently pleading and then finally conceding, giving way to the mystery that connected them. Anna nodded, and Cerise pushed toward her, reached out an arm to hug her. For the briefest second they stood together, Anna’s photograph pressed unwittingly between them, and then Cerise broke away, forced herself out the open door, stumbled down the steps and toward the pool of light at the corner of the street. Because she knew that Anna and Eliot were watching, she did not dare look back. Instead she pressed on until finally she was able to turn the corner, and their house was hidden by other houses in the dark.
The night air was cool and sweet and fresh. It touched Cerise’s face like a balm. Casting a quick glance up and down the silent road, she left the sidewalk, slipped across a stranger’s yard, and clambered into the ravine. Clutching Anna’s print to her chest with one hand, she scrambled along the steep hillside, slipping on the twigs and leaves and struggling to stay upright until she reached the place where she’d left her bundles. She patted the darkness until she found them, and then she climbed back onto the road.
Stopping beneath the next streetlight, she dug the worn rectangle of newspaper from her jacket pocket, studied the picture, and reread the words she knew by heart. Then, replacing the scrap in her pocket, she began to walk. Carrying her possessions in her scarred hands and pressing Anna’s photograph against her chest, she left Anna’s neighborhood, walked through neighborhoods filled with houses that loomed as large as castles, houses lit by spotlights and protected by alarms, and when she’d passed out of those neighborhoods, she walked past all-night gas stations and convenience grocery stores, past bars and sex shops and lighted lots where acres of cars were planted in tidy rows like fields of corn, and finally she left the city altogether, following the highway that promised to lead her to the coast.
Sometimes she thought of Ellen and Lucy waking in the morning, perplexed by her absence and by their parents’ uncertain explanations, and her heart tugged back. It’s when you let the hole be open, she remembered Lucy saying, and though she hated to think of Lucy having to practice that lesson quite so soon, in her heart she knew that Lucy could. Sometimes she thought of Anna and the friendship they had made and she hated that of all the women in the world, Anna was the one she had to hurt. But she hoped that in some final end, Anna would understand.
It was late the next morning when she finally glimpsed the ocean. She saw it first as she crested a high hill—a distant rim of gray glinting with light. For a long time she trudged toward it into the wind, and sometimes the wind pummeled her like a romping puppy, and sometimes it battered her like the waves themselves. Sometimes Cerise thought of Melody and the oceans on the tiny planet she had pricked into her cheek. She thought how big the real world was, how hard it could be to find someone who was lost in it, and she was grateful that Melody wore the earth on her face.
By the time she finally reached the sea, the sun was setting. The road ended on a bluff high above the ocean, abutting the narrow highway that ran along the Pacific, north to Arcata and Canada and south to Mexico. The highway gleamed like pewter in the paling light. Cerise crossed it in half a dozen steps, crossed a field of hissing, flattened grass, and stood at the edge of a precipice, looking down. Two hundred feet below her, the ocean looked dark, though far out its waters were still alight. Facing the full force of the wind, she carved out a home for her self inside it. Gazing at the fire blazing on the ocean’s distant edge, she stared until her eyes teared from wind and cold and light, and the sun popped below the rim of the sea.
She looked down at the water far below her, saw the shadowy white breakers stretching along the shore like an endless crocheted chain, and though she felt their pull like another law of physics, she ignored that invitation. Instead, turning so that the ocean was on her left, she began to trudge north up the darkening, shining road.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the following experts, whose information and insight were invaluable as I worked to shape this story:
Abortion procedures: Lisa Peterson, Six Rivers Family Planning
Dry land wheat farming: Emmy Michaelsen
Firefighting: Ed Leon, Healdsburg Fire Station
Labor and delivery: Renee Baker
Medical procedures: Monika Balsalmo and Chris Winters
Mothering: Wendy Blair, Penny Chambers, Elaine Greene, Elisa Livingston, Stacy McRee, Melinda Misuraca, Gwen Rosewater, Caroline Draper Swift, Melanie Thornton, Connie Wolfe, Molly Wood
Photography: Heather Fisher, Jackie Kell, Tom Leavitt, Jim Lugo, Belinda Starkie
USDA seed storage: Dr. Rich Hannan, Western Regional Plant Introduction Station, Pullman, Washington
They are not responsible for any of the errors that this book may contain.
I would also like to thank my Beloved Readers: Susan Gaines, Ray Holley, and Sean Swift, as well as Rosemary Ahern, Brenda Copeland, Kate Elton, Virginia Hegland, Bill Horvitz, Beverly Lewis, Kate Parkin, Patti Trimble, Elizabeth Wales, Susan Wasson, and Georgina Hawtrey Woore.
Finally, this novel and I owe a great deal to the clients, staff, volunteers, and director (Susan Lowry) of The Living Room in Santa Rosa, California.