Backseat Saints (34 page)

It strikes me again how small the world can be and how hard it is to get truly and permanently lost. A couple of phone calls
gave me Arlene Fleet. A library book is taking me directly to Claire Lolley, though she was all the way across the country
hiding under a new name. My spine tingles, and I wonder how thick a trail of bread crumbs I have left for Thom Grandee to
follow. I shove the thought away. He’s seeking Rose Mae, and there is no Rose Mae anymore. There is only a girl named Ivy
Rose Wheeler, running to her mother, now a scant two blocks away.

Questions from Alabama and Amarillo and new ones from the library are piling up into an avalanche that propels me forward
toward her, fast, in spite of my heavy bag. Gret breaks into a cheerful three-legged canter to keep up with me, panting.

I come to Belgria, the street where my mother lives. It’s an actual place, and I have found it, and now I am turning and now
my feet are walking down it. I scan the sidewalk in front of the houses for Parker, her nonthreatening quasi man, the lover
she’s sent outside to wait for me.

All I see is a young woman, standing about four houses down, facing a sky blue house with a chain-link fence running around
it. I’m at number 24, so that makes the blue house number 30. My
mother’s house. I slow and Gret tugs at the leash, but I want to study this woman before she notices me.

She’s not looking down the sidewalk, watching for me. All her attention is on the house. She is in profile, her long hair
hanging down her back, and she looks part Asian and part a lot of other things. She’s leaning forward like a supplicant, and
I read desperation in her tense shoulders. Her hands clutch and knead at the fence top.

As I get closer, I see she’s talking to a man in the yard. Parker. Has to be. He’s standing inside the fence, a few feet in
front of the narrow, covered porch that runs the length of the house.

I give Parker the once-over, and I understand at once why Alswan wasn’t worried that a gun-shy girl might get spooked. He’s
a long, narrow, pale fellow, his posture so slouchy that he’s the droopy definition of nonthreatening. He’s wearing a long-sleeved
jersey over khakis and, God help him, mandals. He has a sharp, attractive face, but his heavy-lidded eyes and laid-back expression
say he’s about to carefully catch a porch spider in a Dixie cup and walk it out to the garden. Then he’ll recycle the cup.

He has a couple of mutts lolling at his feet, Lab mixes, both floppy-eared and jet black. A third dog is standing on the porch
stairs, a teeny Boston terrier with pugnacious shoulders. The terrier is the fiercest thing in the yard, man included, and
he wouldn’t even come to my knees.

I draw closer, trying to get a read on my potential stepfather. He’s young, I realize. Closer to my age than my mother’s.
A lot closer. I find my lip curling up, wondering what the hell she’s doing living with a fellow who is young enough to be
her— I stop abruptly. Maybe Parker
is
her son. He looks Irish, with high, flat cheeks and a narrow jaw, his skull so angular that it looks like it has a few extra
bones in it.

I come closer, close enough to hear Parker say, “It’s Mirabelle’s call, Lilah.” His voice is set low, as mellow as his posture.
He calls her Mirabelle, not Mom or Mother, but maybe children call their
mothers Mirabelle in California. As for Claire Lolley, she didn’t like motherhood enough the first time around to keep the
job. Maybe the second time she kept the kid but not the title.

“Please,” Lilah says. Her voice breaks in the middle of the word. “I can do it right this time.” She sounds breathless and
sorry and eight years old.

Just then Gretel clues in that we are approaching a yard full of dogs, and she jerks me forward, tail wagging.

“I can’t help you,” Parker says, spreading his hands as if he is showing the woman that they are empty. “Let me call Safe
Harbor.”

“No!” Lilah says, fierce. “I want Mirabelle.”

Parker raises his hands to his head. His hair probably looks dark brown indoors, but the sun has found a lot of red in it.
It’s long, pulled back, and hanging in a tail almost past his shoulders. He’s pressing the sides of his head like his brain
is starting to hurt, and then Gretel jerks me forward again, chuffing.

The sound catches Parker’s attention. He smiles when he sees me, raising one hand in an easy wave. The terrier hears Gretel,
too, and he starts barking, alerting the Labby mutts. They rise, and the whole pack of them surge like a hairy wave to the
corner of the fence closest to us, barking and wagging. Gret tows me to the fence corner, and all four of them thrust their
noses through the links to snuff at each other.

When the dogs come running, the woman turns to see what they are racing toward. The side of her face that was turned away
from me is mottled in spectacular purple and black, with violet and olive around the edges. Her right eye is swollen shut.
The other eye is almond shaped, and its thick lashes are matted and wet. Pale women like me, we get red noses and splotch
up, but this girl is a pretty crier, and the unmarked half of her face is lovely.

“Hi,” I say, embarrassed, my gaze skittering sideways to meet her good eye. This is my mother’s house, but this beaten woman
makes me feel like I am an intruder here. Meanwhile, my dog sniffs and wags and makes a pack of easy friends, just like that.

Lilah stares at me, her good eye accusing, and she says, “She has my place?” She’s looking at me but talking to Parker.

His eyebrows draw inward. “I don’t think so,” he says to her, then to me, “You’re not Ivy?”

Lilah stares at me, hostile, daring me to be Ivy.

“Why aren’t I?” I say.

“You’re not… not how she described,” Parker says.

I smile and say with almost no irony, “Maybe I’ve changed since she saw me last.”

Lilah snorts. “Good luck.” She is speaking directly to me, meaning just the opposite. “I hope you’re perfect. You damn well
have to be, here.” She lets go of the fence and turns her back to me, starts walking away.

“Lilah! Do not go back home again,” Parker calls after her. He comes toward the fence, all the way to the gate. “Let me call
Safe Harbor!”

She flips him the bird over her shoulder and keeps walking. I come down the length of the fence, the dogs in step with each
other on their separate sides. The Labs are dipping their front ends down, rumps up, asking in universal dog language if Gretel
wants to play. She does. Only the terrier stands off to the side, suspicious, cocking one sprouty eyebrow up, then the other.
I stop by the front gate. Parker is still watching Lilah walk away. She’s pretty from the back, too, but I can tell from the
careful way she’s moving that the bruises on her face have plenty of company.

After she makes the corner, I turn to Parker and say, “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

Parker’s head tilts sideways at the accent. “Where are you from?”

Does he not know about me? The woman he lives with—our shared mother or his way-too-damn-old-for-him wife—is from Alabama.

“Where do you think I’m from?” I ask.

He says, “I don’t know. Someplace south. Virginia?”

“Sure,” I say. “Virginia. Why not.” I say it like an asshole, my gaze pointy, staring sticks into his skin. He smiles, genial,
oblivious, and I say, “So you’re…” I’m not sure what to call her. My mother? The gypsy? I can’t bring myself to say Mirabelle.
Finally I settle on a pronoun, anonymous and plain. “So you’re her, what?”

“Whose what?” Parker asks. “Lilah?”

I jerk my thumb at the house, to indicate my mother, and find I also can’t say husband, stepfather, or, God help me, my brother.
These words are all distasteful, and I don’t want them in my mouth. I finally say, “You’re her boyfriend?”

Parker looks startled, then laughs. “I’m Mirabelle’s landlord.”

“Oh,” I say, nonplussed. “That’s great. I mean, how great. For both of you, both.” I’ve been so caught up studying the people,
I did not look closely at the house. I see now that it has two front doors. The one in the center has a dog door set in the
base. The second door is at the far right end of the porch, so I doubt this place is a true duplex. It’s more like the house
has a mother-in-law suite with a separate entrance. There’s an unlit neon sign in the window beside the far door: an open
hand, palm forward. My mother’s business.

I feel stupid for being so angry, for jumping to so many wrong conclusions. “
Is
she married?” I ask.

“No,” Parker says, looking me over. His expression is as bland as oatmeal. “She told me you had long hair.”

“I cut it,” I say.

“And she didn’t mention the dog. It’s like if someone has a unicorn tattooed on their forehead. You don’t say they’ll have
on a red shirt. A three-legged dog is the kind of thing you mention first.”

“She didn’t know I had the dog,” I say, then remember he’s her landlord. “Is the dog a problem?”

“Oh, yeah. I hate the stinking things,” he says, deadpan, while his mutts drip friendly slaver and try to goozle through the
fence holes, jostling each other to be the one touching noses with Fat Gretel. I realize I’m grinning at him, so pleased to
know he isn’t
any kind of dreadful kin to me. He smiles back and then points from one big mutt to the other and then to the terrier, saying,
“Buck, Miss Moogle, Cesar.”

I point and say, “Fat Gretel.”

He squats down and addresses Gretel directly, threading his fingers through the fence so she can smell him. “Are you a good
dog?” It’s not rhetorical. She grins and pants joyfully into his face through the links, tail in a mad wag. “Yeah, you’re
a good dog. Okay, then.” He straightens. “Come on in.”

I block the entrance with my bag and then my body as he opens the gate for me, and Gretel and I slip in without letting his
dogs out. He shuts it, and Gretel and the other dogs are winding all around, each trying to be the first to get a noseful
of the other’s butt.

Parker says, “Let her off the leash before she trips you.”

I let Gret go, and they take off in a pack, even the standoffish terrier caught up in the pleasures of lapping the house with
a visitor dog. Meanwhile, Parker takes my bag for me and crosses the small lawn, heading to the porch in a shambling, amiable
walk that reminds me of Shaggy from
Scooby-Doo.

He is talking at me loud, over his shoulder. “The stairs are in her reading room, so you can’t get up to your room without
tramping through the middle of her reading. Sorry. Can I get you some water? Or tea?”

“No,” I say. “That woman, Lilah. She used to live here?”

There are three steps that lead up onto the porch, and Parker pauses on the bottom one. He turns toward me to shake his head,
rueful. “Yeah.”

“With Mirabelle,” I say. “Before me.”

“Not right before. She was three—no, four before you. She keeps coming back, though.” He sets my bag down on the top step.

“Four before me,” I say, hesitant. Parker seems to have no clue that I am Mirabelle’s daughter. He thinks I am Lilah’s successor,
and I am starting to get a feel for what that means. My mother has
been taking in stray ladies, the kind who have bad home lives and a lot of bruises. It appears to be habitual.

The three big dogs all come charging around in a pack, streaming across the yard. Gretel is keeping up fine on her three legs.
They disappear back around the corner, the stubby terrier trailing behind and barking like mad.

“Safe Harbor is a shelter, for women?” I ask Parker. He nods, and I keep guessing, on a roll now. “Mirabelle works at this
Safe Harbor place? This is like an annex?”

“Nah. Safe Harbor doesn’t officially approve of Mirabelle’s… what would you call it? Freelance social work?” There are a couple
of wicker rocking chairs with padded seats between the two front doors on the porch, but Parker sits on the wide steps, to
the right of my bag. He leans back in the sunshine, stretching out his long legs. His rumpled khaki pants are too short. “But
one of their directors, Jane, calls Mirabelle on the sly when all their beds are full, and at least three of Mirabelle’s,
er, guests who didn’t work out here have ended up doing really well over there. Not Lilah, though.”

“Lilah can’t come back here,” I say. It is not a question. I’ve gotten a good feel for it now. “She broke one of Mirabelle’s
rules.” Parker nods, and I add, “The girl I met at the library, she told me I’d be fine as long as I followed the rules.”

I come closer and sit on the other side of the steps, my blue bag a chaste wall between us.

“Yeah. Lilah went back to her husband,” Parker says. “I’ve never seen Mirabelle take a woman in a second time if they go back
to the husband or the boyfriend.”

I look at his feet as he talks. I don’t approve of men wearing sandals, unless they are the kind for rafting. Open-toed leather
shoes are girly. But I like his feet. They are very long and narrow and pale, like tusks of ivory.

“Are there a lot more rules?” I ask.

Parker looks surprised. “Your driver didn’t tell you?”

“My driver?” I ask.

He shakes his head, confused. “You’re pretty far west, Virginia. You had to come in with a Saint Cecilia?”

Everything in me goes still. “I don’t know what that means,” I say, careful to keep my tone even, to not let my expression
change.

“The underground railroad?” Parker says, like he’s reminding me.

“Underground railroad?” I repeat. “You mean, what? Like Harriet Tubman?”

“Yeah, like that. Only the Saint Cecilia railroad is for women in very bad situations. Mirabelle is one of ’em.”

“Mirabelle is a Saint Cecilia,” I parrot back, but he doesn’t seem to notice I’ve turned into a shocked echo.

Parker nods. “I drive for her sometimes. Mirabelle will get a call, and she’ll send me to pick a woman up in a public place
and drop her fifty miles away at a mall or a library. I never see who brings the woman to the meeting place or who picks her
up after me, so there isn’t a trail. Mirabelle’s houseguests are either local, or they come through Jane at Safe Harbor, or
they’re moved here by the Saint Cecilias. If you didn’t come here with a Cecilia, then how did you end up way out here, Virginia?”