In Every Way (24 page)

“He cares about you.”

“How long are you going to stay here?” Maria says.

“Without you?”

Maria does not point out that her mother no longer seems to need her. It is something she has yet to truly convince herself of. How the tables have turned, she thinks. It is what for so long she has wished for, to again be the one to be mothered. To cease taking care. But now that the change has come, she wonders if she is being foolish for leaving. Perhaps this is a time she should capitalize on, milking as much as she can out of what time she has left.

“I have to leave,” Maria says.

“My scheduling conflicts disappeared long ago,” her mother says. “I might be here awhile.”

When her mother leaves the room, Maria slowly gets out of bed, proving to herself that she too can operate without assistance. It feels
nice to stretch her legs. In the street a man in a tricorn hat and leather vest shares a cigarette with a second man wearing a braided beard. When a third in a captain's uniform turns the corner, they all brandish sabers, which seem to have been forged from actual steel. Maria is again reminded of Philip and wonders if he is now as disgusted with her as he surely is with men like these.

TWO DAYS LATER
, Maria waves to her mother and Karen with her right arm—her left is held close to her chest in a sling—while she rolls the Volvo away from the curb. She drives in the direction of the drawbridge, then, once out of sight, circles back. She cannot help herself. She nears Philip and Nina's house. The rosebushes along the hedge sag in the late heat. The grass needs to be mown, the yard watered. Maria can't help feeling this failure of nature as her own fault. Philip has not maintained Christopherson's schedule of yard maintenance; that was Nina's chore. If Maria had not entered Philip's life, the yard would now be green, the bushes buoyant and blooming. She can only extrapolate what dying roses might foretell in regard to care for Bonacieux. She wheels forward just a touch and comes in sight of the driveway. The Mercedes is parked in the gravel. Nina has returned. Maria knows now that the grass will regain its color. She knows now that she must continue driving.

Through the open window the wind rushes in. Highway 70 is almost devoid of all other traffic. From time to time, a car passes in the other direction, and once, as Maria becomes stuck behind a slow-moving Caprice, she passes it in the face of an oncoming truck. As she enters the closing aperture between them, the truck honking its horn, she savors the rush of survival. The sun, still low in the eastern sky,
burns brightly in the rearview mirror. Squinting in the light, the road shimmers on the horizon, as if it is flooded at that future spot, a pond of cool water she can follow but of course never reach. Maria adjusts the angle of the mirror so that the sun shines somewhere other than in her eyes, and then she is not sure the bear is even a bear until she is almost upon him. He is walking slowly north across the fast lane, and as she approaches, Maria slows to a halt. The beast has the same white markings on his head as those on the bear Maria sighted that day almost a year ago when she first drove to Beaufort. She cannot believe this thing is still alive and, in an instant, wonders what happened to the little girl standing beside it that day last year. Was she eaten alive? Perhaps all bears in these woods have similar markings, Maria thinks. Who is she to simplify the minutiae of nature? She presses her hand on the horn and sustains a wavering squonk. The bear stops and turns to her, flinging open his mouth as if it has been hung from a broken hinge. He joins her alarm with a cartoonish roar of his own and together their warnings float high into the sky, dissipating into a place where they can scare no one.

Maria takes her hand off the horn. The bear ceases his roar as well, then lumbers quickly into the pines. Maria is left alone, her fingertips tingling, desperate to tell someone about what she has seen. She can think of no one to call, though. Only her mother, but this story would merely instigate panic, and Maria has done enough of that already.

THE FRIENDS MARIA
grew up with have, in the years since graduation, spread across the country. All children of professors, lawyers, and doctors, they viewed it a failure to stay in town. They now populate Hanover, Berkeley, Ithaca, Williamstown. All that remain in Chapel
Hill are the girls Maria used to cruise with: Icy People, Jane at Whole Foods, Dotty who works at Caffé Driade. She does not know quite what else she is returning to.

Maria takes the exit for Chapel Hill, passing a strip mall with a tanning salon and large Chevron that could be anywhere. She does not feel yet that this is a homecoming. Not until she enters Chapel Hill proper does the feeling of home return. She is surprised to find the sensation a pleasant one. The storefronts here are each attached to childhood memories. University Mall, where she would see Santa Claus and where her mother would remind her that the man in the suit was not in fact Santa Claus, but rather just a man in a costume. The Wendy's where she used to park in high school. Whole Foods, where she worked for so long. Jane who still works there. She tries to imagine what locations in Beaufort might trigger such future memories for Bonacieux, then realizes that there will be none. Nothing that has happened in her daughter's life thus far will linger in her memory. All recollections have yet to be formed. They will be attached to the geography of Durham, perhaps, or maybe another town with which Maria is not familiar. Whatever they will be, though, Maria will not be in them.

The house, maintained by neighbors and a couple who was hired to check in two times a week, is a time capsule from another life. The photos of Maria as a baby that line the hallway upstairs and that she always passed without a glance now cause her to stop and marvel at how much she looked like Bonacieux. Her mother's room is that of an invalid. A seated bedpan still stands beside the mattress. A small metal cart, holding a box of tissues and one large container of lotion, stands tucked into a corner. The tableau reminds Maria of just how
sick her mother actually was. Like the memory of pain, it has, in the months since, become hazy and abstract. She is glad, of course, and tries to remind herself that this was the endgame all along. To make her mother well. She is not sure if her mother is in fact well, but she is not worse. Of that Maria is sure. But she is afraid of what will happen to her now. Without Maria. Without Bonacieux.

On the chest of drawers in Maria's bedroom is a copy of
Ina May's Guide to Childbirth
. The coffee tin filled with her vintage sunglasses rests atop the notepad in which, during labor, Jack marked off time between contractions. It all seems drawn from history.

She unclasps her black-and-white checked belt, flings it into a corner, and lifts over her head the white dress she is wearing. She spreads it atop her bedspread, marveling at how worn it has become. Outside Beaufort, the ghosts of baby food and spit-up suddenly now appear as stains across the fabric. There, it was all invisible. She drops the dress into the dirty-clothes bin, in which she is surprised to find an old pair of the large medical underwear given to her to wear in the days after giving birth. Her closet is filled with vintage dresses bought from Time after Time, the tiny thrift store on Franklin Street. She runs her hand across their fabric, each shoulder stiff with a wire hanger. She is thrilled with this new old wardrobe.

She zips on a yellow dress with blood-red trim. She buckles an old leather belt around her waist. It feels odd to have the freedom to be away from a house for hours at a time. Afternoon naptime approaches, and she feels the responsibility to stay inside, to get Bonacieux to sleep. To put her in bed with her mother. She wonders who is putting the child to sleep right now. Her breasts strain at their flesh, filled with milk. She begins to think that perhaps she should email Philip, let him
know that she has left, ask him if they are still interested in open adoption. It was Philip and Nina, after all, who first floated that idea, in the very first letter Maria read. She was the one who opted out. Perhaps it might still be an option, she thinks. It's a desire untethered to reality, but it has momentum nonetheless. Afraid to allow herself to indulge it any further, she leaves the house in a rush.

She returns to Whole Foods and finds Jane behind the deli counter. In her late twenties, an early streak of gray in her bangs, Jane is a lifer. Her boxy white jacket is folded over a soft little body scattered with tattoos, almost all of which Jane says she now regrets. Her only goals in life seem to be to find a boyfriend and to keep this job. She is serially successful at both.

“Little Mama!” Jane says, seeing Maria approach. “Tim!”

Tim, the fish guy in rubber overalls and fluffy muttonchops, looks up and waves grimly from a display of cod on ice.

“My God!” Jane says. “You're tan!”

A stooped old man wearing shorts, white socks, sandals, and a safari hat approaches. His basket is filled with supplements.

“I'll be with you in one second, Mr. Vollmer,” Jane says. “What happened to your arm?”

“I made myself pass out and then fell through a glass table,” Maria says. The man with the supplements glances sidelong at Maria and quickly shuffles away.

“Jesus, girl,” Jane says. “I'm taking you out.”

“No,” Maria says. She does not want to go out. Already she feels like she's reliving an episode from her youth, something she has moved beyond.

“Trust me,” Jane says.

Despite her misgivings, Maria suspects there might be some truth in Jane's advice. Interaction with anyone other than Philip, her mother, or Bonacieux seems necessary at this point for her to achieve something that might approximate good mental health. And so at nine Maria returns to Whole Foods. Jane has changed into oversized grandma glasses and a dashiki. Maria feels like she has missed a fashion epoch in her year away. Without explaining where the Dodge Diplomat has gone—it is not here—Jane follows Maria to the Volvo.

“How's your mom?” Jane says.

The fact that Jane even remembers Maria or her mother surprises Maria and moves her. Her expectations of friendship have fallen so low.

“She's a lot better,” Maria says.

“Better better?”

“Her hair's back.”

“Great. That's great, right?”

“Yeah,” Maria says, laughing, thinking how nice it is to talk with someone her own age. She had forgotten the feel of easy rapport. The confidence inspired by speaking in a shared rhythm. The night swells with sudden promise: a memory of joy.

“What the hell have you been doing?” Jane says. “Surfing?”

“Yeah, right. Babysitting.”

“Good lord. For real?”

“For real.”

“Wasn't that weird?”

“You have no idea,” Maria says. She wants to talk about Bonacieux, but still the secret feels so radioactive, even now, even after the people from whom it had to be kept have already learned it all. “But it was great, too,” she says. “I miss the little girl. A lot.”

They drive west on Franklin Street, past the college bars and into the realm of the townies. Parked cars line the streets. Maria cannot find a spot. It feels like years since she has seen so much nightlife. The search for a parking place brings the sudden progress of Maria's excitement to a halt. Stopping and starting, cutting tight crowded corners, Maria pines for the quiet of Philip and Nina's porch. What she cannot believe is that there are this many people with no one to tend to at night.

“Hopie's bartending at Orange County,” Jane says, as if in consolation. Maria does not know who Hopie is but takes the information to mean that it will not matter that Maria is still three months shy of her twenty-first birthday.

When they finally do step out of the car in the gravel lot behind the Bank of America, the air feels strangely flat as it snakes into Maria's nose. After the salted humidity of the coast, even taking a breath here seems both easier and less interesting. Young people leaning against the wall of the bank smoke cigarettes. One man with a cowboy shirt only half buttoned scratches a leg with the foot of another. His black pants are rolled high, revealing ankles mottled with scabs. A woman beside him has a magnolia tree tattooed across her chest. It blossoms out of a T-shirt with the collar cut off. Maria does not make eye contact. She feels she might have outgrown life as a single townie before she is even of legal age to experience it.

Inside the dark confines of the Orange County Social Club, the jukebox pumps Culture Club atop the raised voices of people Maria longs to look like, people she is simultaneously compelled to make fun of. Bodies swell within the room as if floating in a few feet of dark
water—shifting slightly against each other, seemingly unable to guide the subtle movements of their own flesh.

“Is Jack gonna be here?” she shouts over the din.

Jane shrugs. “What's the deal with you two?”

“You probably have a better idea than I do.”

“That whole thing with Icy People,” Jane says. “What a cluster-fuck.”

In the back of the bar stands the very Icy People in question. She leans over the red felt of a pool table in the light of the low-hanging lantern, illuminated as if by a spotlight. She is the brightest object in the room. Maria imagines Icy People as a baby: crying for her mother, loving a stuffed rabbit, having flesh so soft it feels dangerous to tickle. And Maria is filled with understanding and forgiveness. She has, of course, imagined herself as the mother.