Mercy Train (6 page)

“Lord, no,” she said.

Iris rubbed her arms, aware that in her chic black sheath she looked profoundly out of place, yet that was part of it, wasn't it? To be the city girl, returned. She looked out at the grassy field of newly sown winter wheat behind the barn, owned by the Jensens now, and she was sorry that she didn't feel a loss for the land itself. It was shameful, she thought.

“I think the guests would like to make their condolences,” Iris said.

Her mother shrugged. “They'll live.” She unlatched the metal gate. “Here, hold this. I'm going to let Elmer back in.”

The mottled pig had made a low grumble and heaved itself onto its tiny feet. Iris had held the gate, unsteady in her high heels, trying to spare her dress the filth.

“You look like you're cold, Iris,” her mother had said. “Why don't you go on in. I've got this. Get yourself some tea. I'll be fine.”

*   *   *

Iris folded her book and set it down on the floor, her arm shaky with fatigue. Her mother was always fine, even when she wasn't, and Iris had never bothered to distinguish between the two. It had been easier to believe in her mother's stoicism than to risk a glimpse of her vulnerability. I'm thirty years too late, she thought, rolling onto her side.

Through the window she could see patches of sky through the shifting clouds, the air warmer now, the rain forgotten. She slid her feet off the couch and onto the floor. Get up, Iris, get up, she told herself. Don't wallow. Don't waste the day. I'm a dying woman, she answered. I'm allowed to do as I please.

 

SAM

She would start by making the pound cake. With Ella breast-feeding, Sam could easily eat the whole cake by herself. She could not eat enough these days. By the time Jack got back from campus, all that would be left would be a nondescript, homey baking smell, enough to make him wonder at the source but not enough to ask about it.

She pulled out the flour and sugar and then checked the refrigerator. She had a little less than a pound of butter and nine eggs. How was she to weigh eggs? Or flour and sugar, for that matter? She closed her eyes hefting the butter in one hand and the eggs in the other. Close enough.

She rummaged through a cupboard for the bread pan she inherited from her mother's kitchen, along with the Mixmaster and the velvet-lined chest of silver that had begun, the last time she had looked, to tarnish. Sam had dumped the rest of her mother's belongings into boxes and delivered them to the Salvation Army in Fort Myers, along with the furniture, the seascape paintings, and the driftwood frame mirrors. She had saved only a yellow glider chair and a white dresser that were both now in Ella's room, along with a few other odds and ends she carried in her bag on the flight home. When Sam's parents had divorced, her mother had gotten rid of all the antiques she had spent her married years collecting, the refinished chests and colonial rocking chairs and iron beds. She had left Chicago, moved to Florida—to Sanibel Island—and bought a condo, where she had lived until her death last year, four months before Ella was born.

The pan wasn't anywhere. How could that be? Sam thought. She'd last used it to make pumpkin bread for some English Department thing. She bristled. Jack must not have brought it home. Domestic details were not part of his frame of vision. She was pretty sure that in the five years they had been married he'd never once bought toilet paper, garbage bags, or laundry detergent. Or soap. Or toothpaste. You chose to put your baby's needs and the home first, she said sometimes, to calm herself. But she knew it wasn't really a choice. Sam still felt at the mercy of her biology, and sometimes she quietly raged against not having a say about the intensity of feeling she had for Ella. It was like she had given birth to one of her own vital organs, requiring a subversion of her self that was instinctual, non-negotiable, complete. “You're postpartum, Samantha,” Melanie had said. “Obviously.” Maybe she was right. Or maybe everything was just different now.

Sam grabbed her keys and pulled the front door shut behind her, nearly tripping on a box on the landing. She wondered where it had come from, given the hour. But then again, she hadn't received a FedEx package since moving to Madison. By the blocky left-handed scrawl of the address slip, she knew it was from her brother, Theo. Something for Ella, maybe, though that would be uncharacteristically thoughtful. He left such duties to his wife. Sam slid the box closer to the door with her foot—what in the world could be so heavy?—and went to the car.

They lived on the Eastside near the north shore of Lake Monona in a funky-shabby neighborhood of old Victorians and Craftsman bungalows, a few blocks from a food co-op and a vegan coffee shop, a soup kitchen, and a single-room-occupancy residence. The area had gentrified, its dilapidated skid-row roots smoothed over, but it still retained a leftover seediness that Sam appreciated. She was glad to live away from the university and the too-pretty and suburban Westside.

She didn't miss a lot about New York, but she missed the color and the grit. At her old shared studio space in downtown Brooklyn, she'd loved to look down from the seventh-floor balcony—the cold air a relief from the kilns' oppressive heat—and watch ebullient crowds coming in and out of Junior's and the lights and honking and Spanish and Arabic and luggage stores and cell phone hawkers on Atlantic Avenue. At times she even missed the sad and sinister mall she had to pass on her walk to the subway, the
R
burned out of the Toys R Us sign, the beauty supply store with its cracked window, the parking garage that seemed dangerous at any hour of the day. She missed the dark and light created by millions of people bumping up against one another.

Her cell phone rang: Theo. She ignored it.

Her brother was a lawyer at a big Washington, D.C., firm, the mergers and acquisitions arm, and his wife, Cindy, with her shellacked blond pageboy, was an interior decorator whose traditional style bordered on the rococo, with an overabundance of toile and stripes. She had a thriving business along the Potomac and the Chesapeake Bay. Sam found their Georgetown townhouse pristine and gaudy at the same time, and a spread in
Town & Country
—sent to her by Cindy—did little to disabuse her of that impression. Theo was ten years older than Sam, and they had never been close. He treated her with older-brother condescension, which in turn made her petulant and defensive, as if they were forever twenty-six and sixteen. In the last year, they had spoken more than they ever had because of the multiplicity of details to decide upon, from the large (coffin or cremation) to the mundane (the font of the memorial service handout) to the ridiculous (“Mom's hairdresser claims she was promised a jade ring”) necessitated by a parent's death.

Their mother, Iris, had had breast cancer. The double mastectomy and removal of lymph nodes and radiation had not been quick or thorough enough to contain all of the stealth cancer cells that had taken root in her body and come roaring to fruition six months later. In the end, to Sam's dismay, her mother decided against the ravages and slim odds of chemotherapy. Iris played neither victim nor martyr, but she had always been stoic. It was her Scandinavian genes—her father had come from Norway—she liked to say. When Sam tried to get her to move to Madison, Iris chuckled and said she'd rather die where it was seventy-five and sunny, thank you very much. So Sam went to her instead. She left Jack and moved to Florida for what turned out to be only a three-week stay. Iris had died on her seventy-second birthday. Theo and Cindy had finally shown up a day too late.

She turned onto East Washington, the commercial strip that ran down the isthmus between Lake Monona and Lake Mendota, from the Capitol to the interstate, peppered with check-cashing outlets, fast-food places, liquor stores, and a 24-hour X-rated shop, which, she had read, had been robbed five times this year. Out of habit she glanced in her rearview to check on Ella, and the empty car seat panicked her heart before her brain could catch up. She drove past the Lotus House, a massage parlor tucked in near Highway 30, a strip club, and the low-slung Admiral Motel, rooms $31.95. HBO and in-room phones! Astroturf lined the area around the motel office, and a brown broken-down Monte Carlo camped in front of the first room, where it had been for months. Another room door gaped hopelessly open. She'd been surprised the first time she had driven this stretch. She had expected Madison to keep its vices midwesternly hidden away.

As she drove, she tried to isolate why she was so quick to get angry at Jack. For being able to go about his day unhampered by worry about the baby. For not knowing the right type of wipes to get. For wanting her to snap out of it. For everything and nothing. He was a convenient outlet. She breathed deeply through her nose, and then caught a glimpse of a spot of drool and a smear of sweet potatoes on her shirt. Now that Ella was eating food and nursing less, Sam's once-robust breasts were sadly flattening. Somehow this was Jack's fault, too.

When she'd been pregnant, Sam had loved the feeling of giving her body over to something else, and, for the first time since adolescence she had not been concerned about what she looked like, had not wondered if she should eat the extra donut, had not cared that her thighs strained against the seams of her sweatpants. It had been a revelation—so much time she had wasted—to be happy about how her body was working, nourishing life, fecund with purpose. And how quickly this had faded after Ella was born and she began to care that the extra skin on her stomach bunched, that crooked, silvery fingers of stretch marks striated her hips. In baby swim class she eyed the bodies of the other mothers as they sang “Wheels on the Bus” and spun their babies through the water, calculating how her flaws stacked up against theirs, while she knew she should have been enjoying Ella's squeals and kicking little legs. The return of her vanity was a disappointment to her.

Inside the drugstore her post-baby brain—shrunken four percent, she had read—sputtered and groped to recall the reason she was here. She walked the aisles. Baggies? Batteries? While standing next to the Wonder Bread she remembered.

At the checkout line, Sam set the loaf pan on the counter behind a skinny girl with bad posture, not much older than twenty, dwarfed by her hooded sweatshirt and a pink nylon miniskirt hanging off her hips. The girl's hair was scrunched shiny and covered half her face, as if she were trying to obscure her prominent nose. She wore heavy makeup, a thick layer of cheap powder that didn't quite match her skin, blue eyeliner, and metallic berry lipstick.

“These are expired,” the middle-aged clerk said too loudly, sighing and handing two coupons back to the girl. “And you can only use one per item.” She handed back another.

“Sorry. I didn't notice,” the girl said to the floor, shoving the coupons into her pocket.

Sam looked down at what the girl was buying: shampoo, soap, Skittles, Lean Cuisine, and then a bag full of small packets that had already been rung up. Condoms, individually packaged, thirty or so. And then she saw the girl's shoes, Lucite platform heels. She is a prostitute, Sam thought, feeling instantly sorry for her, sorry for having seen the condoms, sorry for the scorn of the clerk. She wanted the girl to look at her so she could smile to say, I'm not judging you. We do what we can to get by. Things will get better.

The girl dragged her bag off the counter and slunk off, shoulders hunched, as the clerk shook her head. Sam would not look at the clerk, not collude; she would punish her for being rude.

Outside, the sky was opening up enough to promise the rain was past. The breeze was cold and smelled of damp leaves.

But as Sam started the car she looked up and saw the girl again, sitting in a dented, rust-edged white sedan one row over, plucking her eyebrows in the sun-visor mirror. Did she work during the day? Or watch TV until the appointed hour? Where did a prostitute live in Madison? What did her life look like?

Sam waited. The girl backed out. And Sam followed her.

She kept a little distance between her car and the white sedan as they turned west on East Washington. She knew she was acting foolish—or downright weird—by following a stranger, but she didn't care. She didn't want to go home.

The girl signaled left, and Sam did the same. They turned into the Sunrise Inn. It was not as rock-bottom as the Admiral, but it was decrepit and shady, with a whiff of illicitness about it. Through hazy windows was a dank indoor pool, a sure repository of germs and STDs. The motel was only a short strip mall away from the massage parlor. Sam pulled in next door in front of a dingy day-care center called Kidzone, its painted sign chipped and faded, the window glass cloudy yellow.

When the girl got out she looked even more furtive than Sam had remembered, her possum-nosed profile wan, her narrow shoulders rounded as she struggled with a large soda and her drugstore bags. She worked the key into the doorknob, jamming it in and shimmying the handle before the door bucked open. She turned then and looked straight at Sam, who froze, hoping she was obscured by the windshield. The girl went in and the dark room swallowed her up, the door banging closed behind her.

A large black-haired woman in sweatpants and a tube top, despite the cool temperature, sauntered out of another room smoking a cigarette and leaned her back against the balcony. She sniffed her armpit without reacting. Her shoulders were acne scarred, her elbows ashy. A boy in a Batman mask peeked his head out the door. Sam had the flash of thought that he was the age her son would have been, and she felt the prickly heat of guilt. She had never allowed herself to mourn him. She didn't deserve to.

The woman yelled at the boy and pointed with her cigarette to get back inside.

Sam shook her head. What am I doing? she thought. She played her brother's message.

“Sammy. It's Theo. You should have gotten a box I overnighted you. I've been trying to sort through the last of Mom's stuff and I thought you might want to look through some of it. Faded photos, this and that—keepsakes, I guess you'd call them. All in some old wooden box. I don't know. Not to sound cold or anything, but I don't want any of it. It'll just sit in the basement. You were always more sentimental. And you have Ella now. Call me.”