Further Out Than You Thought (28 page)

The song over, he sat looking at the lit window. She heard the squeaking of brakes outside, brakes on what had to be a large truck; she could hear a crane lift a trash can, hear rubbish clatter into the truck's open bin. She thought of the roaches she'd freed and wondered how they were getting on.

Leo grunted and pulled a pillow over his head.

Stumbling out of bed, she tugged her T-shirt down, buttoned up the jeans she must have loosened—but not bothered to take off—in the night. They were snug, snugger even than yesterday, if she wasn't mistaken. Not wanting her bare feet to touch the floor, she took her flip-flops from her suitcase and slid them on. She was so parched she could barely swallow. She found one of the gallon jugs of water, took it into the bathroom and chugged while she peed. She brought the water with her back to the bed, where she sat beside Valiant.

“Did I ever tell you how she died?” he said.

It took her a minute. “Judy?”

“Ms. Garland, yes.”

“It was an overdose, right? Suicide.”

“Accidental, the coroner's report said.”

“That's what they said about my mother.” She heard herself say it, heard the words slip into the bald morning light. So easy. And then they were there—the truth they stood for was there, hanging in the air between them. And it was all right. Somehow it was all right. This was Mexico. What did she have to hide?

He looked at her, searching, she thought, for that part of her capable of lying. She could tell it was something he'd never thought to look for. “What about the cement truck? How she died and you lived?” he said, still doubting.

“The second part's true. And we'd been in the car together the day she died. It was almost Christmas. All that's true. The cement truck was something I made up. It explained things somehow.”

They sat for a while in the quiet. Even the street outside seemed to still, waiting.

“It was pills?”

“A whole lot of Xanax washed down with vodka. My dad was out of town. I found her the next morning.” She stopped herself. She'd never said it out loud, never told anyone, not even Leo. She looked at him. He was breathing deeply, steadily, and had the pillow over his head.

“Go on, dear.” Valiant put a hand on her back; its weight was warm and calm and encouraging.

She shook her head. If she let it out, she might not stop. The chasm would open and she'd tumble into it. Like being on a high-dive, closing your eyes and going headfirst—not a sleek, toes-pointed dive, but more of a tumble, head over heels, like love.

She leaned forward and that was all it took. She was falling.

“The light—it was like this. Too bright through those flimsy white drapes. Vindictive.

“It was late morning and she wasn't up. The house was too still, too cold. I had goose bumps on my arms and this pit-of-my-stomach hollow feeling. I knocked on her door. Nothing. I put my hand on the cold metal knob and let it stay there awhile. I didn't want to open that door.

“I saw her in the mirror first. There was a full-length mirror. It was where she'd do her makeup, where she'd sit on the awful lime-green shag carpet and make herself pretty. I used to be in such awe of her, when I was little.” Gwen wanted to remember her mother's face as it had been when she was alive, when she'd sat watching her work her magic, but she found she couldn't. The face she was seeing now was the face the photographs had captured and not her real face at all.

Valiant took her hand in his and squeezed it. “You don't have to go on,” he said.

But she drew a breath and kept telling the story, trusting it would lead her where she needed to go. “She was facedown in a black slip, her hair spread out, like she'd fallen. She looked so small. Even then. Like a doll. And all around her was her makeup. Open eye shadows and blush and brushes. And the weird thing was, she hadn't worn makeup in weeks, months. Maybe in years. She'd stopped going out and hadn't cared what she looked like. And this was like in the old days, when getting ready had been her own private party.

“When I saw she wasn't moving, wasn't breathing, I screamed. And still she didn't move. I thought she'd move. Thought maybe she was just hungover. I shook her and she was icy. I turned her over. Her eyes were open. Her eyes.” Gwen could see them, not like in any photo. She tried to push the image away. She looked at Valiant, into his dark, wet eyes, so filled with life, but all she could see were her mother's lifeless eyes. “I couldn't look away. They'd gone flat, but I stared, like maybe she'd come back. And then I closed her eyelids, with two fingers, like they do in the movies. And I ran and called 911.”

Gwen listened to herself talking, spilling what had been bottled inside her for almost half her life. The facts. What it was she'd seen and done. She was outside herself, watching and listening from a distance, on the other side of a tunnel, or through the lens of a movie camera. And she wondered why she wasn't crying. She should be able to cry, she thought. If she were directing she'd make sure the actress playing Gwendolyn Griffin let a tear or two slip down her cheek. Silent, stoic tears, tears of relief and recognition. The scene required them.

Valiant's cheeks were shining with his tears. He was right there with her. Or, rather, he was there, standing in that place of grief she should have stood in, going where she couldn't. He gave her hand another squeeze.

“I felt ashamed. Or guilty. Or something. I should have been able to save her. And I didn't. I didn't save her.” It felt strange to say it out loud.

“I'd always thought”—she swallowed—“I'd always thought I could. When she'd cry when I was little, cry so long I thought she might never stop, I'd cry along with her. And when that didn't work, I'd try to make her laugh. I'd stand on my head and make faces. Sometimes it worked, and she'd laugh and hug me like she'd never let me go. But that day, in the car, I don't know why, but it was like I took a huge step back and watched her, and I hated her.” That did it. The ice inside her had cracked. Falling into her own watery depths, she went on.

“I hated her weakness. I hated that she looked on my life like it was her second chance or something, and at that moment I didn't care. I wanted her to be happy, but I wanted to be happy, too. I wanted her to be happy
for
me, not
because
of me or something I did. So I just let her cry. I watched her cry and I didn't try to stop her. I didn't say the things she wanted me to say.

“And then.” She paused. This was the part she'd forgotten. The part she most didn't want to remember. “She swerved into traffic, into the oncoming cars. I caught the wheel and jerked us back. It was a miracle we didn't crash. She'd have killed me and herself and God knows how many other people.”

Valiant hugged Gwen. He pressed her to his chest and held her, and she let go of all she'd been clasping so tightly. “It's okay, it's okay.” He said it over and over, and he smoothed her hair back from her forehead, and she sobbed, messy, choking, snuffling sobs.

When she caught her breath, as if it were a fish she'd hooked at last, this portion of the air belonging to just her, she pulled away from him, wiped her tears and snot on her T-shirt. She saw that Leo had turned onto his side and had his back to them.

“You're the big brother I never had,” she said to Valiant.

“Big sister, darling.” He smiled, and then the smile was gone. His eyes were placid, flat with distance. Like the mountain lion, he seemed to be looking through her to the other side, to that place where he was going. “I'm tired. Really tired. I want to go home.”

“Okay, we can leave now. I'm ready.”

“Not to the Cornell. I want to go home-home. My parents' place.”

“San Clemente?”

He nodded. “I want to stay there awhile. My mother's there, just by herself most days. I miss her chicken and rice. I miss her cool hands and her voice. God, I miss her voice. I've been away so long.”

“Okay,” she said. “It's okay. We'll leave right now. You'll see her in a few hours.”

She excused herself and went into the bathroom, where she splashed water on her splotchy face. In the room she gathered her things into the suitcase. And then she pulled the pillow from Leo's face and sang the little song her mother had liked to sing to her mornings before school.

It wasn't the first time she'd tried it on him, and there'd even been mornings it had made him laugh, but now he glared at her with his one open eye and rolled over.

The dried blood on his sleeve looked worse in the morning light. The stain was darker, bigger than she'd remembered. She pulled the sleeve up and looked at the wound. It was livid, inflamed. She pressed on the skin around it and a bloody pus seeped. She pulled her hand back. “We need to get you to a hospital.”

He held up his arm, gazing at the gash in a detached manner, as though he were assessing a work of art—something he'd made and was proud of. He ran his fingertips over it, and wiped the pus on the bedsheet. “It's fine,” he said.

“No, it's not fine.”

Valiant backed away from him. “It's disgusting.”

“I'm taking you to the emergency room,” said Gwen.

Leo got out of bed. “My mom's a nurse. Apparently our destination is San Clemente,” he grumbled. “We can stop by her place. She'll fix me up.”

THEY WERE DRIVING for the border before the gringos who'd been at the bars the previous night were out of bed. The town was sleepy still, and almost pretty. It had a morning-after feel, hazy, with bright trash flattened on the sidewalk and a few vendors pushing their carts—fruit, tortillas, sombreros.

At the border, there was only one car ahead of them. Leo was in the front seat and Fifi sat on his lap. Her head out the window, she was sniffing the air. “Oh, shit,” Valiant said. “Do they let you bring dogs in from Mexico?”

“What do you mean? She's my dog.”

“We didn't have any trouble getting across,” Gwen said, but her stomach did a flip. “Here,” she said, taking the shock collar from her purse. Leo strapped it on to Fifi. He covered her loosely with Valiant's black jacket and slid her under his legs. They hoped she would look like a shadow on the floor.

She rolled down the window for the agent, who asked if they were American. Gwen told her they were. The woman said she needed to see ID, and Leo and Valiant gave their licenses to Gwen, who handed them, along with her own, to the woman.

When she peered into the car, nobody moved. She was broad-faced, with sharp eyes and thin lips that Gwen found herself wanting to see smile—to see if they
could
smile. She looked at Gwen and then at Leo in his
TODAY I'M MEXICAN
shirt with dried blood on his sleeve and scowled. She walked to a back window and tapped on it. Christ. Gwen felt the blood drain from her face. And then she heard it—the yip like a hiccup from under Leo's legs. Fifi had been shocked midbark. Gwen held her breath, but all was quiet. She could see the woman in her side mirror, her expression unchanged, a good sign. Valiant rolled the window down. She looked at him, at his driver's license photo and then back at him. With his legs crossed and his arm around Mary, he was the epitome of cool, but this was taking longer than Gwen expected. Leo bit his lower lip. His eyes were wide and blank, as if he'd just remembered something.

If the agent found Fifi what would she do? Quarantine her? Gwen wasn't sure Leo had kept Fifi's tags up to date. He'd never taken her to the vet, not as long as she'd known him. Her tags, however old, would make her American, Gwen supposed, and they'd make Leo her owner. That had to count for something.

The agent handed Gwen back the licenses, gave a slight upward nod, as if expression were precious and she meant to conserve it, and she let them drive past. They sighed a communal
oh
of relief. They were on the other side, in America, where the road was a freeway, wide and clean and smooth, where the signs of upcoming cities were big and plain—San Diego, San Clemente, Los Angeles. And Leo pulled Fifi out of hiding, took her shock collar off. He held her on his lap and stroked her head. “Well, Fifi, you almost got to live the dream.”

Was he kidding? No. His face was set as though he meant it.

They were in the desert now, and Gwen breathed it in. Such a particular smell. Creosote. The smell before the rains came. Its musty sweetness brought with it her childhood, a certain idle solitude, that feeling of wanting something and not knowing what it is, or else wanting nothing but an impossible changelessness.

Everyone slept, everyone but Gwen. Gwen the driver. She yawned. A double, a triple espresso—she'd give anything to have one right now. There was a coffee bar in San Clemente, just an hour away. She told herself she could make it.

San Diego came and went. And then there were fields, green and yellow with mustard flowers, and the ocean all misted over. Fog ebbed and flowed over the freeway. She drove slow in the right lane and opened her window. Breathing the fog, she felt clean, new. She shivered, grabbed Valiant's jacket from the floor and wrapped it around her. It stank of smoke and booze, but it kept her warm.

They passed Camp Pendleton, and the giant nuclear tits of the San Onofre power plant, passed the yellow, diamond-shaped warning signs—the family in silhouette, man, woman, and child with their hands linked, running across the freeway—what to watch for, what not to hit. At the border patrol immigration checkpoint, she slowed to a stop and waited for the line of cars to filter through. In the fog, the waiting felt, to Gwen, otherworldly. As if they were all just souls, bodiless souls, and when they arrived at the checkpoint they'd be escorted to the next stage—the officers wouldn't be officers but orderlies in all white, and they'd take them by the arm to the depot where they'd each enter a womb and start a new life. She looked in the rearview mirror at Valiant, his face gaunt, but peaceful as he slept. He looked to her like an ascetic, as though he'd already given up the world. The cars inched forward. Leo yawned and stretched and Gwen thought of telling him—about the souls and the new bodies, about the orderlies in white. Tell a dream and you lose it, she reminded herself, and she kept the vision just that, a vision. At the stop sign the officer no sooner glanced at them than waved them on. No one in the car looked Mexican enough to bother.