Boonville (31 page)

“I haven't decided yet,” Sarah answered, seeing they were the only two in the main house. “Where is everybody?”

“I think they went to the waterfall,” Mom said. “Marty and Raven were watching the movie but they got bored.”

Sarah saw the video boxes on the coffee table next to a bowl of popcorn, a bag of carob-covered raisins, and a half-smoked doob. Mom had rented
The Rose, Looking for Mr. Goodbar
, and
The Turning Point
. She held a wine glass in her lap, hunkering down for a triple feature of depression. On the screen, Diane Keaton was also having a drink. Sarah identified the movie as
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
, far from a feel-good crowd-pleaser. Nobody but Mom had any desire to revisit these films. Watching the credits was enough to bum you out.

“I think you took me to see this in Ukiah when I was twelve,” Sarah said, putting down the iron.

“It's a classic,” Mom said. “They don't make films like this anymore.”

Thank God, Sarah thought. Maybe we are evolving as a species.

But she had the feeling that if she came back in twenty years, Mom would be doing the same thing, getting high, drinking wine, taking inventory of her anger, acting out her own version of
An Unmarried Woman
. Mom hardly went out to the movies anymore and rarely art films because she didn't get down to San Francisco except to shop for clothes. Museums and galleries had been crossed off her list. She had the money to travel, but outside of flying to Bali in the winter, where she sat on the beach and read whatever paperback the Poobah recommended, she didn't go anywhere. To Mendocino for dinner, that was it. Boonville, to the hotel. Ukiah, for self-help books. No bars, no men. She used to make the scene, cavort and carouse. Sarah didn't know if Mom saw her friends
outside of their healing circles anymore. This wasn't menopause, this was a conscious decision to stop.

Mom turned from the television, glancing at Sarah's lucky red hat, then at her stomach. If she didn't believe the rumors before, Sarah thought, they had been confirmed now. She could tell Mom wasn't taking it lightly. Her distress was coming from somewhere other than their last conversation at the waterfall or Sarah wearing the lucky red hat, which Mom hated because it had Dad's name on the front and Sarah relied on it as a source of Higher Self, calling on some aspect of her father that Mom couldn't tap into and failed to inspire in Sarah. It couldn't be the coming abortion; Mom was pro-choice. She had made the same decision herself, before and after Sarah had been born. And she couldn't have known about Sarah's appointment at the clinic, not even intuitively. Nobody's radar was that good. Sarah concluded that Mom's problem was that she couldn't stand the thought of anything else having Dad's name on it. If Sarah were to have a baby without a father, it would bear the last name McKay. Another scotch-guzzling potato eater. Charming and unreliable. But there was no way she was going to raise a child in this X-rated carnival atmosphere. No absent fathers. No pot-smoking, alcoholic, hippie, agoraphobe grandmas influencing her children.

“I guess you heard I'm moving to San Francisco in about ten minutes,” Sarah said. “Squirrel Boy said you had something for me.”

“You know, hon, I don't know when we stopped being friends,” Mom said, reaching for the remote and pausing the movie.

Sarah didn't know when they ever had been friends. And was the point of having children to be their friends? Find someone else to tell your troubles to and borrow money from.

“I miss you,” Mom continued, Diane Keaton frozen behind her. “I used to think it was you and me against the world. I look at you now, and I see myself at your age. I don't know where all the time went.”

Sarah didn't care where all the time went so much as where all the time was going, the next few minutes in particular. Up the hill, down the hill. Listening to Mom lament. Same old shit. She was ready to establish her own clock and punch in overtime without Mom.

“It doesn't seem fair. I'm not that old,” Mom said. “My life can't be coming to a close. I'm not through with it yet.”

You're not even 50, Sarah wanted to point out, but instead crossed her arms, trying to guess what Mom had swallowed recently other than a carob-covered raisin. She could hear the fear of a drug crash in her speech, the paranoid arc of too much speed coupled with the fatigue of being awake too long. But her voice wasn't racing, her pupils weren't dilated. It definitely wasn't dope or wine, unless one or the other had been laced. Mom was riding something unknown to Sarah, something from the medicine chest cut with the stimulus of isolation, old videos, and her daughter's imminent departure.

“I wish we could talk,” Mom said, and the heaviocity in her voice was gone, stripped to a tone Sarah remembered hearing as a girl in San Francisco when they ate peanut butter and jelly on crackers in the park and Mom pushed her on the merry-go-round, reciting her own made-up song that delighted them both no end, “Here we go round on the merry-go-round.” One line repeated until their sides split.

“I don't know what happened,” Mom confessed.

Sarah looked at her, trying to find that woman in the park somewhere inside this middle-aged hippie lying on a $5,000 couch in a self-made funk of booze and bad vibes. Nothing was sadder than a dropout who had sold out and then been passed by.

“Here we go round on the merry-go-round,” Sarah said to herself.

But maybe Mom had swallowed a truth serum and was speaking from some distant place in her heart that was dormant but not yet dead, smothered by smoke and denial, choking on the remnants of pills and regret, but still fighting for a kind of release and sobriety. The Poobah could have mixed a batch of sodium pentothal in his lab for kicks. Sarah knew residents of the Waterfall, Mom included, would take anything if they thought it would alter their state of consciousness.

“I really wish we could talk,” Mom repeated.

Sarah's head seemed to be coming apart at her temples. She didn't want to have this conversation. She thought this might be her nineteenth nervous breakdown. Hers, not Mom's. Mom was well into the hundreds, severe depressions not included. Sarah could feel her body revolting against her mind. Mom knew how to
manipulate her worse than a snake charmer working a cobra. Soon she would be dropping words like “home” and “family” and Sarah would become defenseless, seven years old again. The strain of standing in the same room with Mom was becoming too much. Sarah thought she might hurl, but didn't know what she had left inside of her to come up. She knew anger was the way out. Focus on everything that had been fucked up. No forgiveness. But she wanted to believe Mom so badly, wanted to play the traditional roles of mother and daughter for even an hour to see how it felt, that whenever Mom threw down bread crumbs, Sarah followed the trail not knowing which one of them was more lost.

“I wish we could talk, too, Mom,” Sarah replied, wanting to know if having one parent who cared about you was asking too much. “But I'm on my way out of here.”

“Wait, I do have something for you,” Mom said, reaching for a small box on the coffee table. “A going-away present, I guess.”

It was a ring box with the name of a jeweler stamped on the felt exterior, gray with silver trim. Sarah had never seen it before and she had gone through all of Mom's drawers at one time or another, including her metal strongbox in the back of her closet. The ring box reeked of yellowed letters and birth certificates. Sarah wondered if it had been purchased at a pawn shop or if the box held something other than its original contents. Neither of them wore jewelry, except for earrings and the occasional necklace. They were that rare breed of hippie that didn't go in for beads and bracelets. Too gauche for Mom's taste, who even in her hard-core days snuck peaks at
Mademoiselle
down at the market. The only ring Sarah had worn was her wedding band, which she still wore, but on her friendship finger. Mom's fingers were bare as the day they headed north, when she had made a pit stop at China Beach – the same spot where Dad had proposed to her with the Golden Gate Bridge behind him – and Mom tossed her wedding ring into the waves, claiming she was as likely to find that ring again as she was another husband.

But when the box was in Sarah's hand, she knew what it held. It was the same feeling in a cemetery that draws you to a family grave. There was a heat emanating from the box like she was holding one of the biscuits Mom used to make before cooking became identified as part of the conspiracy against women. “Careful, don't burn yourself,” Mom would caution and Sarah
would take a big bite anyway, the taste of milk and butter filling her mouth. Dad chirping, “That's my girl.” But maybe that never happened. Maybe there never were drop biscuits and happy family dinners. Maybe she invented them to have something to long for, telling herself another convenient lie for survival. Sarah was more afraid now to open the box than she ever was to burn her mouth on one of those biscuits. She swore to God, Mom used to bake.

“You might not believe this,” Mom said, waiting for Sarah to accept her present, “but having you was the best thing I ever did.”

Sarah snapped open the jeweler's box and stared at Mom's wedding ring. Of course Mom didn't throw it away, she wasn't nearly the revolutionary she wanted to be. How could she toss ten years of her life into the ocean and pretend they didn't happen? There wasn't enough water to cover it up.

“It's hard to peak when you're twenty,” Mom told her. “Knowing you'll never create something as beautiful ever again.”

Sarah was going to start crying, and not stop.

“I was happy once, you know,” Mom said, and Sarah knew she hadn't invented anything, there were simply different versions of the same facts. “As delusional and short-lived as that happiness may have been, there were days in my early twenties when I didn't have to think, I just was. That's what happiness is, not having to think. Doing everything right on instinct. But when the time came for your father to be the bullfighter and for me to feel like a princess, it didn't happen.”

Goddamn, Sarah hated goodbyes.

“Take it,” Mom said. “It's yours.”

Sarah's first instincts were to shut the box and return the gift. But she knew there was more to it than that. She decided whatever bad luck followed the wedding ring was a spell cast upon the world and it could be broken by the promise of the hope and strength of the original giving. She slipped it on, remembering how she had cried the day she and Mom left for the Waterfall, knowing it was truly over between Mom and Dad, and the day she herself walked down the aisle and how Mom's tears mussed her mascara. The ring fit snugly on her friendship finger, up against Daryl's offering. A true marriage.

Mom put down her wine and stood. Sarah was unable to remember the last time they had hugged. There was a distinct smell to Mom's flesh that Sarah recognized as being not unlike her
own, masked slightly by stale dope smoke and the leather couch. It was important to Sarah not to cry and to be the one to release her hold first. Mom clung to her after she had stopped squeezing. Sarah focused on a spot beyond the walls of the main house where she would soon be living the rest of her life.

“I love you, hon,” Mom said.

“I love you too, Mom,” Sarah said, breaking from her grip, “but I've got to go.”

Before she knew it she was inside her truck, driving the winding road she had traveled a zillion times away from the Waterfall. Go, go, go, she told herself, the sun powering the heat of an Indian summer that couldn't quite get rolling, one of those days twenty degrees cooler than you thought it was when you looked out the window. It would become hot soon after this cold front left, but until then leaves were beginning to turn and it was the start of another fall. Sarah's favorite season. She opened the window to feel the air against her face, temporarily relieving her nausea, and pushed her Cowboy Junkies tape into the cassette player. It was always fall in San Francisco, cool and a bit damp. “Put on a sweater if you're cold,” Mom used to say, but Sarah didn't want to remember any of that now.

Don't look back, she reminded herself.

But she should have been looking forward with more care. As Sarah approached Boonville, near the Anderson Valley Way turnoff, she didn't see the lamb that had wandered into the highway and she hit it squarely in an explosion of mutton and wool before it could bleat a defense. The wheel jerked in her hand. She applied the brakes with a rush of adrenaline. She could feel the animal's life force rushing through her. She turned off the music. When she backed up to the lamb, she saw it was dead. There was nothing she could do. It wasn't her fault. Dumb fucking animal. It should have stayed in its pen. She was too rattled to get out of the truck for a closer inspection or to assess the dent that would be imprinted in her bumper. She'd wait until she had to stop for gas in Santa Rosa or made it to the St. Francis before she checked the damage. She couldn't look the sheep in the eyes. The sight of blood would make her puke. It was a bad omen.

I'll stop in town and tell Hap or someone at the hotel, she thought; the lamb probably belonged to Hank. He should check his fence before the whole flock got out, stupid goddamn redneck.
If the leader had got loose, the rest would follow. Sarah wasn't certain she would stop. She wanted to put distance between herself and Boonville, not go back on any of her decisions. But when she reached the turnoff for Manchester Road, there was a traffic jam and a mass of sheep milling within the sporadic movement of cars.

It was a sign.

She knew it was a sign even before she saw the first squirrel nailed to one of her crosses. And then the next one. And the next. And the next. And realized there was a row of them on each side of the street as far as she could see. People were inspecting them, causing more of a delay. Hank had his big rig and was trying to round up his livestock, causing more congestion. Sarah spotted Billy Chuck and Kurts laughing at him from the back of their truck. Cal's cruiser was parked nearby and he was explaining things like there was an answer other than the end was near and the Messiah was walking amongst them. Sarah could see a group of angry motorists calling for the messenger's head, giving Cal an earful. Franny was standing next to him with Pensive Prairie Sunset and Ms. Manly Mike of the Albion Nation, smiling at the commotion. Sarah was certain that Franny was somehow involved with this, but the others, although capable of deviant behavior, who knew why they'd become a part of this spectacle? Franny waved at Sarah but she didn't acknowledge him, more determined than ever to find her way through this maze.