Byrd (19 page)

She has to wait. There's another woman in her seat, a tall woman with white hair and perfect posture. The woman is perfectly calm, even when she hits a four of a kind. She plays the way Elle never learned to—as if she's used to winning.

The Reno post office is a big stone building, cool as a tomb. For Elle, picking up the mail is more than a routine errand. She's intercepting evidence: late notices, collection letters. Today, two yellow envelopes with glaring red past-due stamps. Also a pale blue envelope addressed to Roland. The return address—Raleigh, North Carolina—is unfamiliar. The handwriting is a woman's. Small, delicate, controlled.

She puts the letter in her purse to read later. For now, she has more important business. She is going to see her aunt and uncle. She's going to tell them the trouble she's in. They won't be happy but they will forgive her; they're forgiving people. They won't let anything happen to Dusty.

It's a hot day. She's sweating all over, even her hands and feet. She rolls down her car window. Is this what it means to be brave, to do the thing you're most afraid of? Reveal the thing you're most ashamed of? She feels dizzy, buoyant, the way you feel when you're in the deep end of the pool and you've just touched bottom and you're starting to come up for air. You can see the surface, the light above the water.

When she arrives at her aunt and uncle's house there's no car in the drive, no answer at the door, no note on the kitchen table. Is she supposed to know where they are? Did they tell her; did she forget?

She drives home in a daze. Her house, she knows, will be empty—Dusty is at school, Roland at work. She turns into the driveway, presses the remote for the garage door, and pulls in.

The garage has always made her feel rich—the metal door that closes behind her, the automatic overhead light. She parks and sits for a minute, savoring these little luxuries. The car is idling, the window still rolled down. The blue envelope is sticking out of her purse. She opens it and reads the signature first.

Roland's North Carolina girlfriend. The woman she had to move out for. It was New Year's, the year before Dusty was born. They were living in Venice Beach. She had to move in such a hurry she forgot things—record albums, liquor, her favorite blouse.

Remembering that time makes her head ache. She is suddenly tired. The heat in the garage is suffocating.

The letter looks intimate, two pages filled to the margins with tiny blue script. She can't read it word for word—the words are too small and crowded and she is too hot and tired. Something about a class reunion.
But you didn't come
.

Roland never mentioned a reunion. Did he know about it?

Pet would have told him, surely. She would have offered him plane fare home. Anything to get him back.

The garage light blinks off; the garage goes dark. Elle puts the letter down, leans her head against the back of her seat and takes a deep breath. There's almost no air in the air, only heat. She's drowning in heat.

But you didn't come. Why?

Roland didn't go. He stayed home with her. He chose her.

Her car is still idling; she's forgotten to turn it off. Her window is open. The blue letter is in her lap. She has that feeling again, of being under water, coming up. She's near the surface. There's light above. If she closes her eyes, she can see it.

Statute of Limitations

Addie had been certain he would call the minute he got her letter, or the next day, or the next.

It's been a month now, and still no word.

She can't sleep. At night she paces. During the day she is curt with customers. She argues with Peale, badgers the mailman. She fires Vivian—twice—and rehires her.

Everyone is afraid of her. Everyone avoids her.

Sometimes when she is alone in the store, she throws books—cheap paperbacks. Sometimes she screams. The screaming, finally, is what scares her into calling the lawyer again.

“What's he thinking?” she says. “What can he do?”

“You understand I bill for phone consultations at my regular hourly rate,” the lawyer says.

“Of course.” She is on the edge of screaming again.

“So let's start with, what do you
want
him to do? What do you want from him?”

“Nothing. Just to talk—I want him to call me. Talk to me.”

“But
legally
, what do you want? I'm a lawyer; what advice do you want from me?”

“Here's what I want. I want him not to do anything that could hurt our son. I read about a case where a birth parent was able to undo an adoption.”

“You're thinking of the Clausen case from Michigan. It made all the papers. Different jurisdiction, and a completely different situation. That child was much younger; her adoptive parents basically kidnapped her. Your son—Burt?—is ten. His adoptive parents came by their rights legitimately. They're the only family your son has ever known. Unless they've been bad parents, no sane judge would uproot the child now, even if the father did challenge the adoption. Which in my opinion is extremely unlikely.”

“It is?”

“Yes. Any lawyer is going to tell him the same thing I'm telling you. He can't win. He'd just be throwing away money—a lot of money—and possibly disrupting the life of his child.”

Addie pictures the lawyer in her red power suit, her wall of diplomas and plaques—was there a trophy on her credenza? But no family pictures anywhere. A family lawyer with no family.

“What about me?” Addie asks her. “Can he do anything to me?”

“You mean sue you?” The lawyer laughs. Her laugh, like everything else about her, is quick and sharp. “Only if by not telling him earlier, you somehow damaged him. If he's like most men, you probably did more damage by telling him the truth.”

“I didn't mean to.”

“I know, I know.” The lawyer softens. “Ms. Lockwood, there are a thousand possible reasons you haven't heard from your child's father, most of them innocent. Maybe he just doesn't know what to say. The important thing is, you did what you needed to. Did you send the letter certified?”

“I couldn't. That's not the kind of relationship we have.”

“So you don't know for sure that he got it.”

“No.”

“Can you at least call him? Ask if he got your letter. Ask what he's thinking. Make notes.”

“I'm worried,” Addie says.

“I'm telling you: don't be.”

“If he did want to sue me, how long would he have?”

“Three years. Three years from when he first learned about the child.”

“Three years is a long time.”

“Not so long,” the lawyer says. “You've waited a lot longer than that to tell him.”

Words

Dusty's suit is too small. It makes him itch. His collar pinches his neck. In his right hand he's clutching a fistful of ashes, not soft ashes like from a cigarette, but gritty. They cut like sand. When his father nudges him, he holds up his hand and lets go and a gust of wind comes along and blows most of the ashes away. A few stick in the sweaty creases of his palm.

His mother. The last of her.

She had pale yellow hair and partly chewed-off pink fingernail polish and a tiny blue ladybird tattoo on her neck. She fell asleep in her car. Now she is ashes in the desert.

He and his family are standing in a big scrubby field next to a road that has no traffic. He has been on this road before, when his parents took him fishing at the lake. The road where his mother's parents died. The sun is a giant white ball.

“Don't stare,” his father says. “You'll go blind.”

His mother had swimmy eyes. Sometimes she sang.

His grandmother from North Carolina pulls him aside. She is tall and old and thin and her nose looks like a beak. He has always been afraid of her. She squeezes his hand so hard he can feel his finger bones rubbing together. “I want you to remember something,” she says, bending down so that her face is close to his. “What happened was not your fault.”

Which is when it first occurs to him that it might have been.

He remembers the day his mother left their groceries in the store. How she marched him out to the parking lot, holding his hand as hard as his grandmother is holding it now, and talked to him in a low, scared voice. “Don't tell anyone,” she said. “You hear me? Especially not your father.”

He wonders if he was supposed to tell anyway. Sometimes grownups mean the opposite of what they say.

Things can happen so fucking fast. In an afternoon. You can come home from work and turn on the TV and fix your kid a snack because your wife hasn't made dinner yet. You go looking for her. She isn't in bed like she sometimes is. She isn't in the shower. She isn't in the yard. She isn't anywhere. It occurs to you—who knows why?—to check the garage. And that's where you find her, along with the mail, in the front seat of her car, which has run itself out of gas.

Dear Roland, you have another son and you owe money everywhere.

She didn't leave a note. Just the letter in her lap and the bills in her purse. Her face was tilted to one side. Her cheeks were red; she looked sunburned. His first thought was to lean in and touch her, but he was afraid of hurting her somehow. Even though she was already dead.

He kept Addie's letter to himself. No reason Elle's aunt and uncle should know about it.

Pet decides not to place an obituary in the local paper. This is one small thing she can do to protect her grandson. If anyone asks, she will say Dusty's mother died in a car accident.

She calls Roland every night and tries to talk him into moving back to Carswell. “A good place to raise Dusty,” she tells him. “It would be good for you, too. You need your family.”

“We're
with
family,” Roland says. He and Dusty have moved in with Elle's aunt and uncle. People with, as far as Pet can tell, no background.

“At least get out of Reno,” she insists. “Try someplace new.”

“I'm tired of new places,” Roland says. “Besides, Dusty likes it here, and I'm letting him call the shots.”

“He's nine.”

“Yeah, well. He can't fuck up any worse than I have.”

“Roland. Language, please.”

It's late. Roland is lying on the bed with his clothes on so that he can get up whenever he feels like checking on Dusty, two doors down. Dusty has stopped talking again. He sleeps curled up in a ball.

Across the hall, Elle's aunt and uncle are watching TV. This is how they spend their nights, propped in front of the tube with the sound turned up. Roland can hear thick, dull laughter from some late-night show.

He leans back on his pillow, arms crossed behind his head, and stares at the wallpaper. This is Elle's old room, her bed, her slippery chenille spread. He thinks maybe he will feel closer to close to her here.

“Write me a song,” she used to ask him.

“I'm no good at rhymes,” he would say.

“The words don't have to rhyme.”

“I'm no good at
words
.”

After a while she stopped asking.

Now he has words—rhymes, even—but no guitar and no money to unpawn it.

He imagines a backbeat. A low, breaking, Waylon-like voice.

“Country?”
Elle would say. She wouldn't believe it. Him, the bluesman, writing her a country song.

The words in Dusty's head are so loud he's afraid to say them, he's afraid his voice will explode. He writes in his memo pad instead:
I'm sorry
.

Some things they will never know about Elle:

As a child she was slow to talk. She learned by watching the Patty Duke show. She called her father Pop-o, like Patty, and said bah-ee for bye like Patty's British cousin.

As a teenager, after she'd moved in with her aunt and uncle, she often went exploring in neighbors' houses while the neighbors were at work. In those days, in that neighborhood, no one locked their doors. She never took anything, only looked—in closets and dresser drawers, under beds, in medicine cabinets, laundry hampers, kitchen pantries, refrigerators. It was a game, to figure people out by the contents of their houses. She learned more about those people than anyone would ever know about her.

Some things she never knew:

She was right about Roland. He'd chosen not to go to his reunion, though he sometimes missed Carswell, those people.

She was right about Pet offering to fly him back to North Carolina, and Dusty, and Elle, too, if she wanted to come.

“Too expensive,” Roland had told his mother. “If you're going to spend that kind of money, give us cash. We're saving for a house.”

Roland has not been able to call Addie. He's afraid of what he might say. Still, he can't keep ignoring her. They have a kid—how did
that
happen? And why did she wait so long to tell him?

Bigger question: After ten years, why fucking bother?

He's in the car, leaving work. He stops for gas and a six-pack. While the clerk is ringing him up, he pulls a postcard out of the rack by the register, a picture of the Reno arch. “Biggest Little City in the World.” Twenty-five cents.

Driving home, he imagines what he'd like to write.
Dear Addie, my wife read your letter and killed herself, and now my son, the one I'm raising, the one I've known since he was born, doesn't have a mother. Thanks for getting in touch
.

Almost

On the day her store is robbed, Addie is away at an estate sale, buying a rare set of Sandburg Lincolns. She also picks up a grab-box for William. She doesn't open it. She wants to be surprised along with him.

She remembers the grab-box John Dunn gave her when she came home from the hospital without the baby. It had a set of shrimp forks, three crocheted doilies, a dead chrysanthemum, and—the treasure—a pair of worn-out bedroom slippers, an old woman's dirty terry-cloth mules, fastened together with a plastic thread, no doubt by the tagger at the sale, but John Dunn pretended the fastener was the original, that the old woman had never bothered separating her slippers. “It was the shoes that killed her,” he said, and slid his big feet into them and imitated the old woman shuffling around her house, her tiny steps unable to keep up with the rest of her body. He pitched forward, flailed his hairy arms, and landed in a heap.