Windfalls: A Novel Read online

  “Mom?” the voice said again. “Is that you?”

  “Melody?” she answered. “Where are you? Are you okay?” She clutched the receiver in both hands, careful not to drop it or make any sudden moves, as though Melody’s voice were a feral kitten she might accidentally scare off.

  “I’m fine,” Melody said. “I got a lot of poison oak. But I’m fine. I’m having fun.” The phone-voice laughed, and it was both amazing and appalling that Melody could laugh, could even think of having fun.

  Cerise croaked, “Poison oak?”

  “I was gathering firewood,” Melody explained, “after dark.”

  “Where are you?” Cerise repeated. “Where are you calling from?”

  They were staying in the state park north of the city, Melody said, the whole tribe of them, in a campground on the mountain.

  “It’s so beautiful,” Melody said. “Real woods, with trees and everything. You and Travie should come up sometime, and visit.”

  They slept in tents and on Tree’s school bus. They ate their meals all together. The guys were talking about starting a band, and Melody had seen a deer. She’d found a puppy, a little black one she’d named Circle.

  When Cerise asked how she was paying for food, Melody laughed again. Tree was giving lots of tattoos, she said, and as soon as they got settled somewhere, she was going to start painting murals. She’d realized her artwork deserved a lot of space.

  “Everybody shares their food. We take care of each other,” Melody said, and added with a mixture of awe and pride, “we’re a family.”

  “You left a family,” Cerise answered, coldly enough to hide her hurt.

  There was a silence so long and dense it seemed that Melody had vanished once more. Then she asked, “How’s Travie? Does he miss his Meedee?”

  Of course he misses you, Cerise wanted to say. But I miss you more. She wanted to say she was sorry, wanted to ask Melody to please come home. But she was afraid of how the meanings of her words would be altered once she spoke them, like the nail polish Jake had given Melody that changed color when it was exposed to light. And she was afraid of how Melody might answer, afraid of the hurt she’d have if Melody told her no.

  She said, “Trav’s okay. But we’re late. I’ve got to go. We’ll miss our bus.”

  DURING THE TWO WEEKS THAT ANNA AND ELIOT SPENT ENCAMPED IN the neonatal intensive care unit, it came to seem more like a home than the unfamiliar house they stumbled back to every night. They discovered where the quietest restrooms were, and which foods from the cafeteria were most nearly edible. They learned which babies were the sickest, which families seemed the sanest, which nurses were the friendliest. They learned what all the machines were for, learned which numbers they should hope for when the monitors gave their readings, what words to dread when test results came back. Anna even learned to find a kind of comfort in the corny posters above the nurses’ station and in the row of stuffed animals that adorned their desk.

  Sally left a decorating job half finished to fly down and stay with Lucy, who was too young to be allowed in to see her baby sister. But Anna was so absorbed in her newborn’s struggle, she hardly noticed when Sally arrived. The first three days of Ellen’s life, the alarm on her respirator rang so many times that Anna got almost used to the sickening flush of terror that swept over her each time it sounded. It came to seem almost routine for her and Eliot to be shuffled into the hall until the crisis had passed, almost routine when, after a wait as excruciating as drowning, a nurse came out to tell them it was okay to go back in. Anna grew used to the sight of tears on strangers’ faces, and she became so accustomed to seeing babies attached to lines and tubes that once or twice she nearly panicked when, on her way through the hospital, she passed an open doorway and caught a glimpse of a newborn lying unencumbered in a bassinet and breathing on its own.

  Adrenaline kept her body jangling with unspent tension, but instead of fighting or fleeing, instead of building a palace in a single day or slaying a dragon or separating kernels of wheat from grains of rice, she could only fit the shields of the hospital’s milk pump over her stiff breasts and let it suck her empty. She could only stroke Ellen and whisper that she loved her. She could only wait and hope. But surrounded by sick babies and their frightened parents, she began to wonder if hope were any more than desperation’s twin. After days of incessant hoping, hope seemed like the hardest labor yet, more harrowing and demanding than giving birth had ever been.

  Then suddenly the neonatologist was signing the papers to send Ellen home. “She’s basically a healthy little girl,” he explained to Eliot and Anna as he passed Ellen’s chart to her beaming primary nurse. “But her lungs will still be susceptible to infection for a year or so. You’ll need to try to limit her exposure to viruses. Keep an eye on her, and she should be just fine.”

  “We’ve been very lucky,” Anna answered, gratefully bending to claim Ellen from the bassinet she had graduated to once she proved she could breathe on her own. Anna and Eliot thanked the nurses with hugs and candy, said good-bye to the other parents, and then left, walking out of the hospital into the blaze of midmorning sunshine, the first living light that Ellen had ever seen.

  But surviving a catastrophe meant that life went on. Sally flew home the next day, and Eliot, who had stolen time he could not spare from his new job to keep the vigil beside Ellen’s isolette, vanished into his work.

  “Now you can go back to your normal life,” Ellen’s primary nurse had exclaimed as she hugged Anna good-bye. But alone in a strange city with a weak-lunged newborn and a lonely first-grader, Anna realized she had no normal life to return to. Stranded in a house that did not feel like hers, in a place that was a thousand miles from her home, it was hard for her to keep in mind how lucky they had been.

  On the websites Eliot found about meconium aspiration syndrome, other parents had written that having a sick baby had shown them how truly precious life really was, how they should never take a single second for granted. But instead it felt to Anna as if life were now too precious to relax into, too precious to be enjoyed. Home from the hospital, everything still felt dire and off-kilter, as though another greater crisis were looming.

  “Look at me!” Lucy announced on Monday morning as Anna was leaning against the counter, buttering a toasted bagel for Lucy’s breakfast. She looked up to see Lucy entering the kitchen, wearing the dress Eliot’s mother made for her sixth birthday party instead of the school clothes Anna had set out for her.

  Ellen had been awake since two, and Anna had been awake with her, rocking her and nursing her and trying not to panic when Ellen cried so hard that she began to cough. Now, at seven-thirty, Ellen had at last fallen into a fretful sleep, and Anna had just managed to ease her out of her arms and into the baby seat on the counter. “Shhh,” she said to Lucy, casting a fearful glance in Ellen’s direction. “That’s a lovely dress,” she added softly. “But you can’t wear it to school.”

  “Why not?” Lucy asked, spreading the pink skirt like wings between her outstretched hands and bending her head to study it. A panel of smocking lay across her flat chest, and a wide pink ribbon encircled her sweet belly. Standing in the middle of the kitchen, she was so beautiful, so purely and unabashedly herself, that for a moment Anna was almost able to lose herself in admiring her daughter. But then she remembered that school started in less than an hour, that traffic could be bad on Monday mornings, that Lucy hadn’t yet had breakfast. She remembered what happened the last time Lucy wore a special dress to school, and she said, “You’ll ruin that dress if you wear it to school.”

  “No, I won’t,” Lucy answered passionately. “I love this dress. I wouldn’t never ruin it.”

  “Keep your voice down,” Anna said. She felt thin and gritty and bubble-headed. “You wouldn’t mean to ruin it. But it would just happen. Remember when you wore your Christmas dress to kindergarten?”

  “I was a baby then,” Lucy said indignantly. “And besides, it was a accident.”

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bsp; “It would be an accident now, too,” Anna answered. “Do you want to wear the purple pants I set out for you, or would you rather wear your daisy dress today?”

  “I want to wear this,” Lucy answered, standing in front of her mother like a stubborn pink stump.

  “Lucy,” Anna said firmly. “You still need breakfast, and we need to get you to school on time. You have to go get ready, right now.”

  “I’m already ready right now.”

  “No, you’re not. You need to go upstairs and change your clothes.”

  And suddenly they were embroiled in an argument of such intensity and complexity it made Anna dizzy. Dozens of questions tangled in her sleep-starved mind. Was wearing a party dress to school Lucy’s attempt to make herself feel special in the wake of her sister’s arrival, or was it just another of Lucy’s many whims? Was it a play for power inside the family, or a desperate effort to make herself feel lovely and loved at the school where she still spent every recess by herself? Would it be good for Lucy to see that Anna cared enough to protect her favorite dress, or would it be better for her to feel as though at least some small part of her life were in her control? And if Anna let Lucy have her way today, what would she want tomorrow? What would she demand when she was a teenager? How would she behave as an adult?

  “I want to wear my birthday dress,” Lucy yelled, her chest heaving beneath the pink smocking. In her infant seat, Ellen gave a jolt as though she had just been dropped. Her eyes flew open, and she began to cry.

  “Now look at what you’ve done,” Anna groaned. Between clenched teeth, she said, “You need to go upstairs and change into something else, and you need to do it right now.”

  Lucy’s face crumpled. She fled from the room, and suddenly the whole day was in shambles although it was not yet eight o’clock. Mechanically Anna lifted Ellen from her seat and carried her, wailing, out of the kitchen. Standing in the center of the living room, she swayed with the screaming baby. Croaking a lullaby, she stared dully out the window at the oleander bushes that some previous owner had planted beside the house. They were dusty and lusterless in the late autumn heat, and despite the earliness of the hour, the light that fell on them seemed strained and thin.

  It had been months since she’d seen light that moved her. Back in the never-never land before they’d left Salish, Anna had promised Eliot—and herself—that once the baby was born and Lucy was settled into school, she would split her time between setting up the house and exploring the California countryside for subjects for her new photographs. Back then she had even hoped that this baby’s birth would invigorate her work as Lucy’s birth had done. But now, as Ellen’s crying veered toward another coughing fit, it was impossible to remember why her photographs had ever mattered.

  Life was too dire to include anything as superfluous as art. Jobs could be lost, babies could die, the species in Eliot’s seed bank could all become extinct, and still supper needed fixing, still the laundry needed folding and the dishes needed washing, still the boxes in the bedrooms had to be unpacked. Still behind every image Anna could imagine there lurked her memory of Ellen’s fixed, blue face.

  “I’m ready,” she heard Lucy say over the swell of Ellen’s cries. Lucy’s voice was small and hollow, and when Anna turned to look at her, she looked so little, standing in the doorway in her purple pants. She looked defenseless, so negligible and crushable that Anna had to fight the impulse to beg her to go upstairs and put her party dress back on.

  Instead, she answered as cheerfully as she could, “Thank you, Lucy. I really appreciate it.” Still swaying with the baby, she glanced at her wristwatch and added, “There’s a bagel in the kitchen for you. Give me a minute to calm Ellen down, and then we’ll really have to run.”

  But instead of subsiding, Ellen’s wails intensified, escalating until they echoed off the empty walls, and all of Anna’s love, all her patience and intelligence, all her devotion and desperation, couldn’t do a thing to stop them. Looking into the rigid, red face of her screaming daughter, Anna felt like a stranger, stranded in a life that wasn’t hers.

  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. It was an explosion that finally woke her, a blast that left her unmoored in the darkness, adrenaline prickling her flesh, dread clinging to her bones. A bad dream, she told herself as she struggled to find a way out of its grip.

  Beyond the blackness she heard roaring, a smooth sound like a hurricane wind, punctuated by explosions like bottles hurled against a wall. In a daze she fought with the blankets, struggling to remember where she was—in Rita’s house, or her apartment, or back at Jake’s?

  Swaying and trailing blankets, she rose. Her arms flailed, groping the hot dark. She tottered forward and almost fell. Her hand bumped a door frame, scrabbled lower, and found a knob. She twisted and pushed. The door gave, and she tumbled into a narrow hall, looked down it to a place of searing heat and wild orange light.

  For a long moment she stood paralyzed. The thing she faced was so fierce, so urgent, so huge and loud and frightful and strangely beautiful that it seared even the word fire from her mind. It was like a huge beast bearing down on her. Standing before it, Cerise was small and feeble and awestruck and alone.

  Stop, the shred of a thought finally came. I have to stop it. Now.

  She stepped forward, stretching out her arms as though she could force her way through the fire to its source. But before she could enter it, the awful heat seared her palms, although she felt no pain, but instead a quick sense of pressure, of pulling in. A moment later some instinct—some last scrap of what others might call luck—pushed her out of the fire’s path. She stumbled backward to the door that appeared behind her like a gift. Without pausing to question where it led, she turned and tore it open. Bursting through it, she tripped down the trailer’s back step, landed on the dark grass at the bottom.

  The door slammed shut behind her, and in that instant she remembered—

  “Travis!” she screamed, and leapt to reclaim the door. Grabbing the knob, she turned it and jerked. But it would not give. She tugged and twisted, pulling, pushing, yanking savagely, kicking, but still the door held fast, locked by her own hand before she went to bed to protect them from intruders. Banging her fists against the door, clawing her fingers under the metal flashing, she fought with it as though it were a living thing. “Travis, Travis, Travis,” she shrieked.

  Suddenly the night was peopled. Like the shifting sequence of another dream, lights pulsed, voices behind her yelled and called. Over her shoulder she cried, “My baby’s in there,” and all the while she beat the door.

  A clumsy creature in thick gear caught her in an embrace, pulled her from the door, held her while he yelled, “Which room?”

  “Inside. There’s fire.”

  “Where is he?”

  She understood, cried, “The window!” and tore away, ran barefoot and sobbing through the cold grass to the other side of the trailer, trampling the last of her feeble garden as she jumped to beat at the bedroom window with her fists. It shattered with a tiny, immediate sound, and the firefighter was beside her again, pulling her back from the hole.

  The night pulsed with light, a radio crackled. A ladder appeared and slammed against the trailer. Cerise reached to climb it, but other hands grabbed her, held her back. The firefighter climbed instead. He swept the last shards of glass from the gaping frame with his thick-gloved hand while she watched, struggling to yank her arms from the man who restrained her, and sobbing, “Travie, Travie, Travis. My boy is in there.”

  The man who held her asked, “Anyone else?”

  “What?”

  “Is anyone else inside?”

  “Anyone else,” she gasped, trying to think, unable to focus on anything but Travis.

  “Do you have other children?”

  “Yes.”
/>   But the pulse of his shock got through to her, and she added, panting, “No. I mean, my daughter. But she’s gone. You’ve got to let me get my boy.”

  “You can’t go in there.”

  “I have to. I’m his mother.”

  He wouldn’t let her, though she begged and wept, though she thought she heard above the shriek of the flames the shriek of her son.

  From somewhere came the sound of water, the push of steam, the widening stench of burn. People yelled. Lights swept the night. The firefighter disappeared in the empty window frame, and another one climbed up behind him, stood on the ladder, training a flashlight inside the window. Cerise whimpered, “Get him, get him, please get him.”

  The light changed. There was the sound of an ax smashing, more yelling. A bundle was being passed to the firefighter on the ladder.

  She moaned and surged forward. “Oh, Travis,” she wept.

  “Stay back,” they warned. “Careful. Don’t touch him.”

  “Burn kit!” a voice called. “Sterile blanket.”

  The firefighter gasped, “He was hiding. Under the crib. At first I couldn’t. Find him.”

  A crowd had gathered, a semicircle of strangers. They stood just at the edge of darkness and watched Cerise rave. Her hair wild about her head, her face contorted, her burned hands imploring, she pleaded to be allowed to touch him, to see him, to comfort him.

  But she was only his mother. These strangers knew how to save him. When the EMTs arrived and strode across the grass to kneel around him, the thought flickered through her mind that Travis would love these men, with their sirens and big trucks. But Travis was collapsed under the sterile blanket, unconscious, but still alive—or rather, still capable of being made to live when they caused his heart to beat and his scorched lungs to accept their oxygen.

  THERE HAD BEEN A KIDNAPPING. TWO WEEKS BEFORE HALLOWEEN IN A nice neighborhood on the north side of Santa Dorothea, a twelve-year-old girl had been taken from her bed while her family slept. A week later her photograph was everywhere—on trees and telephone poles, on the sides of buildings and supermarket bulletin boards, alongside the goblins and pumpkins in the windows of all the stores. Reproduced a thousand times, it was an enlargement of what must have been the girl’s school picture. Her gap-toothed face smiled from every handbill as if she were still having fun, though below her in bold letters were the words Missing, and Reward.