Windfalls: A Novel Page 6

  “We’ll be okay,” Cerise said doggedly. “I have a thermometer.”

  But after Rita left the apartment, and Cerise was all alone with that strange, limp creature, she felt as raw and scared and awkward as she had the first time she’d been alone with Sam. When Melody began to whimper and suck her fists, Cerise panicked and reached for the phone. It would be easy as going to sleep to surrender her baby to Rita. Rita would put Melody in Cerise’s old room, Cerise could stay in the guest room in the basement, and next fall she would go back to school as though nothing had happened. Even though Rita would complain about the extra work and trouble, Cerise knew that Rita would secretly be glad to have Melody, especially since Cerise was already certain that Melody would be prettier and tidier and more popular than she had ever been.

  But before Cerise could dial the number, Melody’s whimpers blossomed into cries. They weren’t very loud, but they reached inside Cerise like fingers, clutching at her empty womb. She imagined Melody in the room where she’d spent her own lonely childhood, and an objection rose inside her. When the voice inside the phone directed her to please hang up and try again, she returned the receiver to its cradle and fixed a bottle for her baby.

  After the formula was warm, Cerise tested its temperature carefully, pressing the rubber nipple against the faint scars on the inside of her wrist until a few white drops bled out. Then she sat on the sofa and tried to tease the nipple between Melody’s tiny gums. For a while Melody fought the bottle, twisting her head from side to side or butting blindly against the nipple with her cheek. But just as Cerise was ready to give up, she suddenly clamped down on it, engulfing the nipple with such a look of surprise on her little, screwed-up face that Cerise laughed out loud.

  Later, when the bottle was empty, Cerise held the bundle of her daughter against her shoulder. She patted Melody’s back with the palm of her hand until the burp came, and then she pressed her against her aching breasts and held her while the light drained slowly from the room. In the darkness beyond the locked door of her apartment, sirens wailed, car horns honked, and people yelled out greetings or obscenities. But inside the walls of her small rooms, Cerise held Melody while she slept. Suffused with a savage happiness, Cerise sat for hours, sat until her arms tingled from lack of circulation and her back ached and her bladder stung, secure in her bone-deep certainty that nothing would ever prevent her from keeping her baby safe.

  GRADUALLY THE LAST GRAVEL-STUDDED HEAPS OF SNOW DISAPPEARED from the streets, leaving behind little piles of grit like shrines to something no one wanted to remember. Gradually Anna’s bleeding diminished to a few dirty clots and then finally stopped altogether while the spring sun strengthened, the air grew nearly creamy with new warmth, and the semester trudged toward an end. But still all of her work looked vain and pointless. Still all her efforts to find something new to shoot and print and tone and mount and sign and frame dissolved into an overwhelming sense of fruitlessness.

  On Friday of finals week, Anna gathered all her prints and negatives and burned them, hunkering over the pale little bonfire she’d built from the slats of a broken bed frame in the weedy yard behind the house. The air above the flames wrinkled like vision through tears, but she liked the bite of heat and smoke, liked the authority with which the fire claimed her work. As each print buckled and curled, it seemed more alive than it had ever been before. Squatting beside her little blaze, she thought it proved her commitment to art, that she could destroy anything that wasn’t perfect. When all her prints were blackened crusts and ashes, and her final negative had been reduced to a dark little knot like a melted heart, she felt a kind of triumph, felt so purged and proud that she wished there were someone to admire her conviction.

  But a moment later the fire began to ebb and smolder, and she stared at the lace of ash that was all that was left of her work and thought, What now? She had a sudden fear that someone had been watching her. Lifting her eyes from the fire, she scanned the windows of the house for faces, and then peered sheepishly around the yard. But she saw only empty windows, only the battered lawn and the skeletal remains of a bicycle leaning against the back steps, a cluster of stunted daffodils spearing up through its twisted spokes. She saw how the world went on about its business regardless of her little hurts and wants, and a sudden anguish speared her to the core.

  She left the next day to spend the summer living in Spokane with her parents and working in her father’s insurance office. She had no better plan for the next three months, and she needed the money she could save that way, but driving west across the shining prairies and over the gleaming Rockies, it made her want to weep, to be twenty-two years old—young and grown and living her one and only life—and reduced to spending her summer with her parents.

  “How did your semester go?” her father asked the first night as she sat in her mother’s clean kitchen eating things she hadn’t had since her last visit home—herbed chicken, deviled eggs, and lemon pie—while her parents watched her like attentive hosts.

  “Fine,” she answered so brightly she was sure they would hear the lie. Then, trying to strain the rue from her voice, she added, “It’s a good program.”

  “When will you get your degree?” her father asked.

  She hesitated half a second too long, so that in the end she had to say, “I’m not sure.”

  “Not sure?” her mother asked.

  “There’s a lot of factors,” Anna began, but an edge of worry was already building in the room. She saw it in the nearly imperceptible tightening of the lines that framed her father’s smile, and in the careful casualness with which her mother wiped the spotless counter. The moment wavered like air above a fire. For a second she considered saying—what? I had an abortion. I burned all my work. But when she tried to imagine her parents’ response, she realized that no matter how they took it, no matter what they said or did, she could not bear to have to add their sorrow or worry or anger to her own.

  “There are a lot of variables,” she repeated, reaching across the counter for the pie. “But my show’s scheduled for December.” Picking up the knife, she said, “If my committee likes it, I’ll graduate next spring.”

  The moment became solid once more. Her mother nodded quickly, as if she’d known it all along, and although the shape of her father’s expression did not change, he relaxed back into his smile. “Next spring,” he said heartily. “That’s just fine.”

  “How’re the boys?” Anna asked, ignoring the little punch of loneliness in her gut. Placing the point of the knife at the center of the pie, she pressed the blade down through the foamy meringue. “Sally said Dylan is already crawling.”

  She spent the next two months answering phones and filing claim forms and coming home to watch David Brinkley on the evening news and eat her mother’s quiches and pork chops and spinach salads. On weekends she roamed Spokane with her camera, wandering the riverfront and Division Avenue and the Arboretum, seeking something to replace the photographs she’d burned. She hung around the lobby of the Davenport Hotel, loitered past the pawnshops down on Mission, drifted through the Japanese Gardens. But she couldn’t bring herself to expose a single frame. By mid-August, fall semester was looming like an iceberg in a dark ocean, and she wondered—sometimes vaguely and sometimes desperately—what she should do about it. It made her frantic to think of returning to school empty-handed, but when she imagined remaining in Spokane, she felt a despair so heavy it was hard to breathe.

  “You need to visit your grandmother before you leave,” her mother said one night at supper. “She keeps asking when you’re going to come.”

  “I know,” Anna answered contritely. “I meant to go down earlier. It’s just that I’ve been—” busy, she thought, though she anticipated the look her parents might exchange and didn’t say it. Instead, to camouflage the way her sentence failed, she said, “I’ll go this weekend.” Turning to her father, she asked, “Hey, boss—can I have Friday off?”

  That Friday she worked until noon and
then left the office, stopping at a drive-in for a cup of coffee on her way out of town. Just west of the city, she turned off the freeway and headed south on the state highway, following a route she’d traveled all her life. But after the flat Midwest and the forested Rockies, the land she drove through seemed almost foreign. The sky was cloudless, and a late-summer light covered everything with its rich gloss. The fields spread out in all directions like earthen waves, unfenced, treeless, a vast maze of swells and curves.

  Occasionally a breeze rippled through the nearly ripened grain. Once a red-tailed hawk dropped from a telephone pole and swept in a low arc across the road while Anna watched dispassionately. She reminded herself that time was getting shorter, that she had to get to work, but she still could not bring herself to stop the car and take her camera from the trunk.

  Steering with one hand, she raised the plastic cup to her mouth. The coffee tasted bitter, chemical, its harshness like a penance. She thought of where she was headed, of the staid farmhouse alone in the open fields, of her grandmother sweeping the clean front steps or waiting on the front porch with her knitting. She wished she could be ten again, thrilled at the thought of a weekend alone at Grandma’s. She felt guilty for not having gone to visit her grandmother sooner, though at the same time she chafed at the thought of giving up a weekend to visit her now. In recent years it was as though she’d somehow outgrown her grandmother. These days her grandmother seemed too simple and too sweet to understand the person Anna had become, seemed too frail and old and timid to be exposed to Anna’s world.

  Eighty miles beyond Spokane Anna entered the little city of Salish. She drove past the pioneer museum, past the entrance to Spaulding University, where Sally’s husband Mike taught English, past the public pool where her grandfather used to drop Sally and Anna on summer afternoons while he went to the John Deere dealership or to the Grange. Two miles outside of town she turned off the state highway and headed south on a county road. After the whine of asphalt, the crunch of gravel beneath her tires sounded sturdy and secure, a small comfort that did not quite belong to her.

  She passed the Levitt elevator, which loomed like a lone wooden skyscraper above the empty railroad tracks, passed the Hopkins’s place and then the Joneses’, passed the grove of bull pines where she had once seen a fox. As she drove, memories moved through her, intense as the sour candies her grandpa used to bring from the Grange. She remembered perching with Sally on top of a load of grain while the farm truck raced down the road to the elevator, remembered how the hot wind had whipped their hair, how the dusty load had shimmered in the sun, how they’d chewed handfuls of wheat into a glutinous gum and gazed like sunburned princesses out across the golden land. She remembered picking roses with her grandmother and going hunting with her grandfather in his pickup. “Don’t look for deer,” he’d told her as he drove. “Look for where you can’t see field. Sometimes you have to try to find what’s missing before you can see what’s really there.”

  The car began to labor up a hill, and she shifted into second. When she reached the crest, she eased back on the accelerator and paused to look down into the valley that held her grandparents’ house. Amid the golden fields, it sat in a tidy island of green yard, dwarfed by the spruce tree her grandfather planted the year the stock market crashed. Grandpa’s dead, she remembered, and the stab of pain that followed seemed nearly welcome for the way that—for a moment—it thrust all the other emptiness aside.

  She descended into the valley, turned up the drive, parked in the wide shade of the spruce. The front door opened, and her grandmother stepped out onto the porch, one hand shading her eyes in a worried salute. She was wearing a housedress and an apron, opaque hose and solid black shoes. Anna saw how small she had become, how lined and strained and faded, and an odd flicker of anger seared her. For a moment she felt impatient with her grandmother because she had allowed herself to get so old.

  “You’re here,” said her grandmother, coming down off the porch and holding out both her hands toward Anna. Her fingers were stained a deep maroon, and when Anna took her hands in her own, she was startled to feel how smooth they were, as if the lines and ridges of her fingertips and palms had been rubbed away.

  “I didn’t expect you before suppertime,” her grandmother said apologetically. “I’m working on the beets.”

  “The beets?” Anna asked, dropping the smooth, stained hands and reaching out to give her grandmother a careful hug. She felt her narrow shoulders and staunch spine beneath the fabrics of her apron, dress, and slip, smelled lavender and Ivory soap and the earthy scent of beets.

  Her grandmother reached up to pat Anna’s shoulder as though she were a small girl or a good dog. “Irene Hodge brought by a bushel. I doubt I can eat that many, but I hate to let them go to waste. I’ll send some home with you,” she added brightly.

  All that work for beets, Anna thought wearily. She said, “I don’t think I’ve ever canned beets.”

  “No?” her grandmother asked, pulling back from the hug and peering into Anna’s face with a mixture of pleasure and consternation. “My.”

  “But you can show me how,” Anna offered awkwardly.

  “Surely,” her grandmother answered. “Though first,” she added warmly, “I want to hear everything about how you’ve been.”

  It was the world’s most innocent question, but it caught Anna off guard. Hastily she tried to scrape together a response from the stock of answers she had used all summer. I’ve been fine, she thought, looking out across the empty acres of wheat. I’ve been just great. Everything’s going really well. But before she could say those words, other words escaped instead. “Don’t ask me that.”

  Her grandmother shot a quick look in Anna’s direction, and Anna flinched and caught herself, appalled at the rawness in her voice, terrified at the thought of what might spill out next. “Please,” she added, casting a quick imploring glance in her grandmother’s direction.

  The old woman’s face held an expression Anna had never noticed on it before—keen, unflinching, kind, and nearly shrewd. She studied Anna for a long moment, and then she nodded briskly as though she were making—or keeping—some kind of promise. Motioning toward the car, she asked, “Would you like to bring your things in now?” and the moment healed over itself so seamlessly that, except for the trembling of Anna’s hands as she lifted her suitcase from the trunk, it might never have happened.

  That evening, after the mountain of beets had been boiled and peeled and sliced and salted and packed into jars, after the hot lids had been screwed down and the filled jars had been submerged in the great kettle of boiling water and then heaved up, dripping and steaming, and set on the counter to cool, after Anna and her grandmother had eaten pot roast and mashed potatoes and boiled green beans and sipped an inch or two of the sour chablis her grandmother kept in the refrigerator to serve to company, after the dishes had been washed and dried and replaced in the china cabinet and the floor had been swept and mopped and the leftovers wrapped and put away, they went outside to sit together on the porch and try to catch a wisp of evening breeze.

  The sun had just set, and a last ruddy light filled the world, burnishing the fields and illuminating the roses that grew beside the porch railing, deepening the crimson Mr. Lincolns so that they looked nearly black and causing each of the Bridal Whites and the Summer Snows to glow like the core of a flame. But studying them from her seat on the top step, Anna felt only a dim nostalgia for how that light might once have stirred her.

  From the kitchen came the faint ping that announced another lid had sealed.

  “Nineteen,” her grandmother said, her voice almost smug. She sat in a white wicker armchair, a skein of pastel yellow yarn in her lap, her knitting needles flashing in the rosy light. “We accomplished a lot today.”

  “Yes,” Anna murmured, gazing out across the quiet fields. The sound of knitting ceased, and Anna looked up. Her grandmother was counting stitches. Despite her dexterity with the needles, her fingers were b
ent, the knuckles thickened with arthritis. Anna remembered how smooth those hands had felt when she’d held them that afternoon, so smooth she wondered if her grandmother’s fingertips would even leave a print. It seemed as though her grandmother had shed her very identity in the anonymous, endless labor of housekeeping, and now, looking at her grandmother’s hands, she shuddered to think how small and sheltered her grandmother’s life had been. She thought, It’s no wonder we’ve got so little to say to each other.

  “What are you knitting?” she asked, in penance for her thoughts.

  “A sweater for Dylan,” her grandmother said, holding up her needles so that Anna could admire the sweater the size of a tea cozy that was skewered between them.

  “It’s sweet,” Anna answered. “Sally will love it.”

  Another silence draped them, broken only by the little tapping of needles. From the kitchen came the ping of a lid sealing.

  “Twenty,” her grandmother counted.

  Anna murmured a small assent. She wondered if it was too early to excuse herself and go to bed.

  “I have a conceit about canning,” her grandmother said.

  “A conceit?” Anna asked politely. “You mean you’re proud of it?”

  “Well.” Her grandmother gave a quiet laugh. “I expect conceit’s an old-fashioned word. I mean a little idea—a fancy, you might say. It came to me years ago, when the boys were all still babies. I used to spend all of August in the kitchen back then. When I wasn’t cooking for the harvest crews, I was canning everything I could get my hands on. Seems like we needed every bean and berry to make it through the winter.”

  The pale yarn danced and jerked briskly between her needle tips. “It came to me one day back then that what I was really doing was preserving light—the sun’s light, you know, caught in those vegetables and fruits—I was putting up light in those glass jars, saving sunlight down cellar until we needed it, in the dark of winter.” She cast a shy look at Anna. “I expect you’ll think that foolish,” she said.