Windfalls: A Novel Read online

  “What’s that say?” Lucy demanded the first time she noticed it, posted in the side window of the Volvo stopped next to them at a traffic light. As always they were in a hurry, late for Lucy’s school and Ellen’s doctor’s appointment. Now Anna was driving impatiently, her foot pivoting from accelerator to brake as she glanced at the dashboard clock, tried to remember what was on the grocery list she’d forgotten at home, tried to decide whether she had time to stop at the store before Ellen’s appointment or whether she should wait until afterward, when Ellen would be tired and fussy and ready for a nap.

  Lucy spoke again, “Mommy, what does that say?”

  Anna glanced to where Lucy pointed and answered absently, “It says, ‘missing,’ ‘reward.’”

  “That girl is missing her reward?” Lucy’s voice was puzzled.

  “I guess so.” Anna silently cursed her heedlessness and imagined all the things she might have told Lucy instead to forestall the coming conversation.

  “That’s not fair,” Lucy said indignantly. “She should get her reward. Is that picture to make her get it?”

  Anna felt a wisp of relief. “I suppose so,” she said, trying to keep her voice light and noncommittal. “I don’t really know.”

  The light changed. As they pulled away from the beaming paper girl and entered the bright haze of exhaust left by the car in front of them, Lucy asked one final question, “What is her reward?”

  The girl’s name was Andrea. The newspapers said her father was a lawyer, said her mother stayed home with her younger brother and her baby sister. Andrea was on the soccer team. She sang in the church youth choir. She had friends, grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins, who loved her. All her teachers liked her, too. She had lived at the center of a charmed ring meant to keep her safe, but the earth had swallowed her. Since her abduction the news each night was choked with editorials, police reports, pleas from her distraught parents, but no clues.

  Those poor parents, Anna thought, remembering the days after Ellen’s birth, how excruciating hoping had been, how the waiting had flayed her. She was driving through the center of the city, and she looked with repugnance at the sound walls and overpasses that surrounded them, at the trash that flapped up from the roadbed like maimed birds in the traffic’s manufactured wind. Billboards flashed past her, and bumper stickers—a montage of anger and desire that made her glad Lucy hadn’t yet learned to read. The brake lights on the car in front of her came on. Her foot found the brake pedal, her car slowed, and she watched helplessly as her rearview mirror filled with the grille of yet another big rig.

  She sat in the unmoving traffic, watching a dark cloud of exhaust billow from the pickup in the next lane. Even with the windows of the car rolled up, she could taste rubber and carbon monoxide. She wondered what it was doing to Ellen’s tender lungs, to have to breathe that air. She wondered what Andrea was feeling at that moment, what kind of loneliness or terror or despair. She wondered where on earth Andrea was, while the whole city searched for her and her parents wept on the nightly news. She wondered how they could possibly survive, if they never saw their daughter alive again.

  The cars began to creep forward, though by the time Anna reached her exit, she was gripping the steering wheel so tightly her arms were aching. She turned down the street that held Lucy’s school, and the instant she pulled up in front of the flagpole, a buzzer began to sound.

  “Oh, no,” Lucy cried, tearing at her seat belt, “I’ll be late.”

  “Tell Ms. Ashton it was my fault.”

  Lucy cast her mother a withering glance. “She knows it’s your fault. It doesn’t matter. Late is late,” she said, ramming her shoulder against the door to open it.

  “It’s okay, sweetie. Slow down.”

  “We get red circles on our good citizen stars if we’re late.”

  Leaving the engine running, Anna got out of the car to help Lucy gather her backpack and lunch box.

  “Watch out for Noranella’s ghost,” Lucy commanded as Anna leaned into the backseat. “You’re squashing her!”

  “I’m sorry,” Anna said, trying to adjust her arms to avoid Lucy’s wraith. “Is she going to school with you?”

  “No,” Lucy said, hopping and twisting with impatience as she watched the playground of children converge at the doors of the school. “Noranella’s ghost feels too sadful at school, but she waits on the swings and plays with me at recess.”

  “Does anyone else play with you at recess?” Anna asked, and held her breath.

  “No,” said Lucy flatly. “Everyone else already has a friend. Bye,” she added, gearing to dash away.

  “Wait!” Anna cried. She bent to hug her, but Lucy squirmed out from under her embrace. “I’ll be late!” she cried, and sped off after the flock of vanishing children, leaving Anna to stand empty-armed beside the throbbing car.

  “Bye,” Anna called after Lucy’s running heels and streaming hair. “Have a good day. I love you,” she added, though only the air was there to hear.

  Another bell rang, and Anna watched as Lucy vanished among the final throng of kids, the doors closing behind them with the finality of possession. Anna stood on the asphalt, smelling her car’s exhaust blending with the freshness of the morning. She had an impulse to snatch Lucy back from behind those closed doors and spirit her away so they could spend the day together—just the pair of them—giggling and snacking and napping in each other’s arms. But it wasn’t easy to reschedule appointments with Ellen’s doctor, and besides, even if Anna could somehow convince Ms. Ashton and the principal that she needed Lucy back, she wasn’t sure that it would be good for Lucy to take her out of school.

  Out on the playground, the empty merry-go-round continued to circle, and the vacant swings arced back and forth with the momentum of their final occupants. Anna thought of Noranella’s ghost, waiting there until Lucy came out for recess, and for a second she considered returning with her camera to shoot those empty, yawing swings. But when she examined that image most closely in her mind, she saw how easily it could become mundane, and when she thought of all the work that getting out her camera would require, she dismissed the whole idea. Behind her in the car Ellen was beginning to fuss, and by now Ellen’s appointment was so soon that Anna didn’t dare to even stop to nurse her. In the end there was nothing she could do but climb into the car and race back down the freeway.

  SOMETIME THE NEXT AFTERNOON, IN THE BURN CENTER IN SAN Francisco where Travis was transferred as soon as he was stabilized, the attending physician described what they were doing for him.

  “Burn wounds evolve over the first few days,” he told Cerise, “especially in children.”

  “He’ll be okay?” Cerise pleaded.

  “As I said, it’s hard to predict. We’ll do our best.”

  He went on to talk about respiratory insufficiency, about analgesics and debridement and sepsis, about eventual grafts and possible donor areas, but Cerise could not listen to his words. Instead her gaze clung to his eyes. She stared at his eyes as though he were her lover, as though she were waiting for him to promise her the world.

  His eyes were dry and veined, and the skin surrounding them was etched with a network of frail lines. He described the respirator and the monitor and the heat shield, told her what those machines were doing to save her son. But as he spoke, an image bullied its way into her mind, and she couldn’t help but see the doctor’s face in flames. With a jolt of horror she realized it was not the machines that were keeping Travis alive, but people—men and women—and that people were really nothing more than weary-eyed animals. Animals were trying to save her son’s life, animals whose minds grew tired or anxious or confused, animals whose bodies were only containers for their own future pain.

  The attending physician left, and a nurse came to bandage Cerise’s hands. She held them out obediently, and while he cleaned her palms, she tried to soak up all the pain he caused, as if any hurt that she could feel would be that much less for Travis to endure. As the n
urse was taping gauze pads across each palm, he nodded at Cerise’s chest and asked, “What happened there?”

  She looked at him in astonishment, assuming, for the tiniest of instants, that he was interested in her body. In bewilderment she followed his gaze, bending her neck to look down at herself, and saw the dark spread of fluid across her shirt, a wild bull’s-eye centered above each breast.

  She said, “I’m leaking.”

  “Leaking?”

  “Milk,” she whispered, futilely trying to cover the wet spots with her arms.

  “You have a baby somewhere?” the nurse asked in alarm.

  “Only him,” she whispered, looking at the bandaged boy pumped alive by the whooshing respirator. “He’s my baby.”

  Jake came. He’d brought a remote-control race car for Travis—a toy for a boy four times Travis’s age whose price could have bought Travis’s diapers for a month. It was the first time she had seen Jake since she’d moved. He seemed subdued in the way she remembered hangovers subduing him, his brashness momentarily leached away by pain. She tried to remember the pain he had caused her, how hard it had been for her to give up on him when she had been so hungry for what she thought could be a family. But despite his height he seemed so insubstantial now, so colorless and flat. She looked at his blunt hands, at the bunchy muscles of his biceps and the rim of pale skin she could glimpse above the sleeves of his T-shirt as he stood, stiff-faced and wary, at the foot of Travis’s bed. It was odd to think she had ever laughed with him, had ever drank and danced with him, had ever let him inside her. It was odd to think that Travis was his boy, too.

  “Where’s Melody?” he asked, holding the toy car in front of him like a shield.

  “With friends,” Cerise answered, staring at the bundle that was her son, sedated so he would not fight the respirator tube, dwarfed to almost nothing by the gleaming machines and long white bed.

  Later that evening after Jake had left to get some sleep, two nurses arrived to change Travis’s dressings, sending Cerise out to wait in the hall.

  Standing like a sentinel outside his door, she heard him moan, and her vagina contracted at the sound. She remembered his birth, the feel of him moving through her, remembered the triumphant moment when she’d pushed him into her hands, and suddenly her whole being needed a baby, needed to hold or smell one, or even just to look.

  Leaving her post outside Travis’s door, she roamed the bright corridors and impersonal stairs until she reached a hall cut off by a set of locked doors. A sign said “Nursery—Buzz for Admittance.” But when Cerise pushed the button and asked to be let in, the voice beyond the door asked her who she wished to see.

  “A baby,” she answered, speaking into the grating of the intercom. “I wish to see a baby.”

  “Name?”

  “Cerise,” she said.

  “Last name?”

  “Johnson.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” the voice came back. “There is no infant with that name here. Are you sure you’re at the right hospital?”

  “No. I mean yes. I’m in the right hospital. That’s my name. Cerise Johnson is my name.”

  “What is the name of the infant you wish to view?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Mother’s name?”

  “My mother’s name?”

  “The name of the mother of the infant you wish to view.”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know any of the babies there. Please, I just want to see one. Any one. I need—There’s been an accident, my boy—”

  “I’m sorry. Hospital procedure will not allow unauthorized strangers to view the babies.”

  “Oh, but please—”

  “It’s a policy of security. I’m sorry.”

  And as Melody had so often pointed out, I’m sorry was just a bullshit way of saying no.

  AT BEDTIME LUCY SAID, “THAT GIRL WAS STOLEN.”

  She was lying beneath soft blankets and white sheets, and her nightgown was on inside out. Anna had just read a book to her and one to Noranella’s ghost, and now she was sitting beside Lucy on the bed, lingering one final moment before she said good night, switched off the light, and turned her attention to Ellen and the dozen other details that had to be addressed before she, too, could go to bed.

  “Did you hear me, Mommy?” Lucy said, reaching over to tap her mother’s leg. “I said, that girl was stolen.”

  “What girl?” Anna said, trying to keep the caution from her voice. “What do you mean?”

  There had been another lead. The evening paper said that two boys playing in the woods along the highway had found a roll of electrician’s tape, a corkscrew, and the pillowcase from Andrea’s bed. Reading that, Anna had been struck by all the sickening uses her own bland mind could suggest for electrician’s tape, a corkscrew, and a pillowcase.

  “The girl in the pictures,” Lucy said. “She wasn’t missing her reward. She was stolen, from her bed.”

  Stolen, Anna’s mind gulped, like a jewel or a purse.

  “Who told you that?” she asked.

  “Everyone. Ms. Ashton says we all have to be extra careful.”

  “Well, you know you’d never get in a car with a stranger.”

  Lucy shook her head so violently her hair splayed across the pillow, and for a second Anna allowed herself to wonder if the parents—perfect as they sounded in the newspapers—weren’t hiding something.

  Lucy was saying, “Ms. Ashton says if a stranger stops to talk to us, we have to scream and run.”

  It’s like a war, Anna thought, as she laced her fingers through Lucy’s glossy hair, only now the enemy was everywhere and nowhere, like one of those movies where aliens infiltrated the bodies of honest citizens, and suddenly the mail carrier, the old lady at the end of the block, even members of your own family, might be a threat.

  It was because they were in California, Anna thought bitterly. There were too many people in California, too many cars, too much dirt and noise. No one knew anyone, and because of that, no one mattered. Everything was crowded and hurried, everything greedy and ugly and out of control. Even the weather was unnerving—still as hot as midsummer, though October was nearly over.

  To be fair, she had to remember that the weather wasn’t typical, even for California. The newspapers said that the whole country was in the grip of the hottest fall in history—another proof that global warming was a reality. But tonight that only increased her panic, to think she was stranded in a place that was not her home while even the weather went awry.

  “Brianna says that girl is dead,” said Lucy, watching Anna carefully.

  “Oh, no,” Anna answered, pumping conviction into her voice. “Lots and lots of people are looking for her. They’ll find her, and everything will be okay.”

  In the tiniest possible voice Lucy said, “I don’t want them to find her.”

  “Oh, Lucy,” Anna said. “Why not?”

  “’Cause then I’ll be next.”

  “Of course not. Why would you say that?”

  “That man that took her will need someone else.”

  “The man that took her will be in jail,” Anna answered.

  Lucy said, “He’s not in jail now.”

  “No. But he will be, very soon.”

  But it seemed as though he were in the room with them already, as though Anna were fighting him for Lucy as she spoke.

  Lucy said, “You couldn’t stop him.”

  “Why not?” Anna asked, feeling her blood rise, imagining the satisfaction of tearing into him with her teeth and nails, the pleasure of destroying him for what he could do—was doing already—to Lucy.

  “You’re not big enough.”

  Anna offered, “There’s Daddy.”

  “Maybe he’s not big enough, either.”

  “Lucy, there are policemen, and dogs, and lots of other men—good men,” she added hastily, “like Daddy and Uncle Mike. There are lots and lots and lots of people to make sure that bad man doesn’t hurt anyone, ever
again.”

  “Mommy?”

  “What?” Anna could hear Ellen beginning to cry downstairs with Eliot, could feel the tension gathering along her temples.

  “I’m afraid to go to sleep.”

  Anna took a deep breath, for balance, for forbearance, for inspiration. She said, “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  “If I go to sleep, he’ll get me. What will he do to me, Mommy, after he gets me?”

  “He won’t do a thing. I mean—he won’t get you. You’re safe. And now,” Anna said, infusing patience into every word, “it’s time to go to sleep.”

  “I can’t sleep. If I go to sleep, he’ll get me.”

  “No, he won’t. Of course not. You’re safe at home.”

  “Andrea was safe at home.”

  “Yes, but that was random.”

  “What’s ‘random’?”

  “It means it was an accident—just bad, bad luck. It could never happen here.”

  “Why not, if it was just bad luck? We could have bad luck, too.”

  “We won’t,” Anna promised, though it felt feeble as a lie.

  “Why not?” Lucy persisted.

  “Because I love you,” Anna blurted before she could think.

  “Love won’t keep you safe,” Lucy said.

  The image of Ellen’s livid face and limp blue body crowded into Anna’s mind, and it was all she could do to keep from telling Lucy that she was right, that the world was dangerous and life too risky to ever relax into.

  “He could come in right there,” said Lucy, pointing at the window.

  Crossing the room, Anna rechecked the window and pulled the curtains tighter. “He can’t come in. The window’s locked. Besides, we’re on the second floor. We’d hear him if he tried to climb up.”