Mercy Train (7 page)

The pointed reference to Ella felt accusatory. He and Cindy had tried for years to conceive, then Clomid, five attempts at IUI, and six rounds of IVF at $15,000 a try. Sam, unfairly she knew, thought Cindy, a closet purger and compulsive exerciser, had been too thin to get pregnant. When Cindy turned forty-two, they had finally stopped trying. The one time Sam had raised the issue of adoption, Theo had quickly shut her down.

“We want to have our child, not someone else's,” he'd said. “End of story.”

Sam had a friend Mina in New York who'd been a gestational surrogate for her gay brother and his partner. The magnanimity of such an offering, and the beatification it had bestowed upon Mina, appealed to Sam, but she didn't think she loved Theo or Cindy enough to even broach the topic with them. Not that they would want her to carry their child anyway, to always feel that they owed her. It was all too intimate, and intimacy had never been a family strong suit.

*   *   *

When Sam had gone to Florida she had steeled herself to find her mother emaciated and sickly, and she'd feared she would have to avert her eyes. But Iris had picked her up at the airport looking remarkably unremarkable. Her brunette hair was newly cut in a smart bob, and she wore a white linen tunic and khakis, her large sunglasses perched on her head. In a hug her smallness was disconcerting, her prosthetic breast inserts firm and high, but her face was sun-touched and Sam was, on the whole, relieved. Perhaps there would be more time. Her own pregnant belly had emerged, a taut low mound, and Iris patted it with a little smile.

But the illusion of Iris's wellness dissipated quickly. By the time they arrived at the condo, Iris had used up all the energy she had put into her first impression, and she was exhausted. She needed her daughter's help just to get up the few front steps. And it was later, when Sam helped her with a bath, that the frailty of Iris's body came into devastating relief. When had she last seen her mother naked? She remembered as a girl seeing Iris—who must have been in her late forties then—after a shower unself-consciously hanging up the towel that had been wrapped around her body, exposing her womanly rounded hips and full breasts and the pouch at her stomach.

Now there were no more curves, no more softness around her bones. Her skin was slack, dry, and thin. Two ragged diagonal scars angrily crossed her chest where her breasts once were.

“I made it easy for them,” Iris said, “since I wasn't getting reconstruction. Quick and dirty.” She shrugged. “It wasn't that big of a loss, really. Though the scars really itch. That I could do without.”

Iris gamely kept her tone light and Sam tried to comply, running a washcloth over the remains of the body that had given birth to her. Sam's pregnancy made the bath an awkward dance, each movement recalibrated to fit her changed shape.

“I like your haircut,” Sam said, and they both laughed.

“Someday you will understand how hard it is for me to have you here,” Iris said, as if Sam didn't already have a pretty good idea.

“I'm glad I could be with you, Mom,” Sam had said. “I wish you would stop seeing it as some kind of sacrifice.”

“I'm sorry for what I will have to ask of you,” she had said.

*   *   *

In front of Sam's car a group of children, three little girls with short black hair and pierced ears, toddled out of the door of the day-care center ushered by a tiny old woman in a black stovepipe hat.

They were Hmong, most likely, a Southeast Asian ethnicity Sam hadn't heard of before moving to Madison. She'd first seen Hmong people at the farmers' market, petite in body with wide lovely faces, their ordered produce cheaper than that of the other stalls. During the Vietnam War, the CIA had recruited them to help fight the “Secret War” in Laos, and when the United States withdrew from the region and the communists took over the Lao kingdom, the Hmong were singled out for retribution. Hundreds of thousands fled, and many of those refugees ended up in Wisconsin.

How could I ever have the nerve to complain about anything, Sam thought. The first Wisconsin winter for the Hmong must have felt like banishment to a frozen hell.

One of the little girls was crying, snot running down into her gaping mouth, but the old woman ignored her. She marched her charges—not dressed warmly enough for the chill, Sam thought—through the parking lot out toward the commercial strip. Sam watched in her rearview as the miniature group trundled in a row along the busy street. After a while the bobbing black hat was the only thing visible. Sam had never seen public housing in Madison, but she knew it was close by, tucked behind the fast-food restaurants and the tire stores. Was that where they were headed? Should she have offered them a ride?

A hard knock on her window froze her breath. It was a policeman, his radio a loud litany of static, chirping, and a garbled voice of a female dispatcher, as Sam rolled down the window.

“Is your kid in there?” he said, pointing to the center.

“No. She's with … I was just. Sitting here. Thinking.”

“You're loitering. At a child facility.”

“What? Oh, no. Really. I'll move.” She straightened up and reached for her ignition.

“Hold on a minute. You're not going until I say you're going. License and registration, please.”

As the officer walked away with Sam's documents, she saw the reflection of her car in the Kidzone window and had the awful realization that he was checking to see if she was some kind of pedophile on the registered sex offender list. She was molten in embarrassment, sweat dripping down her sides, at a loss even about what to do with her hands, finally hooking her fingers on the bottom rung of the steering wheel. The cop returned and handed back her license and registration card.

“I'm sorry I caused any concern. I'm a mother,” she said, as if that exempted her from suspicion.

“Move it along, ma'am,” he barked, quickly taking his leave.

She started the car, her hand quivering, and backed out in front of the cruiser. She wanted to wave and smile, to erase any doubt the officer had, but she refrained, not trusting herself these days to know how to appear normal. In the last year she had lost the conception she used to have of herself, as if her internal filter had been knocked askew. But when she shifted into drive and looked up, there was the girl she had followed, standing in the doorframe of the motel room eating from a large bag of Skittles, her hair in a ponytail now, accentuating the sharp trajectory of her nose. Her lips were wet with purple lip gloss, her feet bare, one foot perched on the inside of her knee like a flamingo. She was someone's daughter. A few wrong choices and here she was. Surely Sam could talk to her, reach out to her in some way, couldn't she? Who are you trying to convince? Sam said to herself. You can't even talk to your husband. She could see the police officer in her periphery, and she slowly moved forward.

She knew she was losing her grasp on the day, and she had to get to work. The thought that her output was now absurdly tied to Jack's career made her eyes ache. She drove back to her familiar neighborhood, trees afire, sun high, Tibetan peace flags and bicycles on porches, lawn signs sprouting from overgrown yards—
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS CLEAN COAL, NADER IS MY HOMEBOY, WHERE ARE WE GOING AND WHY AM I IN THIS HANDBASKET
?—scarecrows and elaborately carved pumpkins on stoops, and the purple moose head mounted on her neighbor's front door.

When she got out of the car, she felt the odd freedom of nothing to carry but a nonstick loaf pan—no groceries, no diaper bag, no baby. She reveled in the buoyancy of being an unencumbered body. But as she approached her small white house, she could see the box waiting for her on the front steps. Dread replaced lightness. Perhaps it would be better not to know any more about her mother. Didn't she already know enough?

She hoisted the box up to her hip, carried it inside, and plunked it down on the kitchen table.

 

VIOLET

Violet led her mother by the hand from Madam Tang's, through Chinatown, and back into more familiar territory, where they settled into an easy stroll down the sunny side of Park Row, part of the late-day stream of hucksters and shoppers spilling over from Chatham Square. As they made their way around the street's curve, ahead of them rose the towering Park Row Building that, when completed, would be the tallest in the world.

“His name is Mr. Lewis, and he is a prosperous gentleman,” Lilibeth said. Her mother was dreamy, her hand on her throat as she talked about her latest boyfriend. Violet warmed to her when she was like this, felt less vexed by Lilibeth's mercurial moods.

“He's a loan officer at the bank,” she said, as if she had already forgotten that she was married.

The once-neat waves of Lilibeth's pale hair were mussed, her hairpins crookedly replaced behind her ear. Her dress was white linen and lace, muddy at its hem, and when the wind blew, the slender outlines of her arms were visible through its blousy sleeves.

“He doesn't know about you yet,” her mother said. “I didn't want to scare him off. You understand how it is, Vi.”

Violet understood. There had been a string of men—pawnbrokers, philanthropists, cardsharps, politicians—since they'd arrived in New York City. Lilibeth played up her lilting accent and delicate demeanor, which Violet found confusing at first, and then annoying, and then ignorable. If city people—men especially—wanted to believe she came from a white-columned plantation house, so be it. As her mother spun tales, Violet never let on that Aberdeen—all of Barren County really—was the pits. There was nothing genteel about it: prairies, caves, and sinkholes, rife with muskrats, wild turkeys, and copperheads. Nino said it didn't matter anyway because everyone in the city was from someplace else, and really he'd rather be from Kentucky than Calabria, so she should feel lucky.

Violet didn't like to think about how her mother would have an easier time without her, and she was still willing to believe Lilibeth knew that there was a chance for something more this time. Her mother could have left her in Aberdeen, Violet reminded herself, and she had not.

As they approached City Hall, the pigeons scattered, abandoning the crumbs of an old roll, which crunched under Violet's feet. A group of boys, their pants rolled up to the knees, played toss-penny in the adjoining park. She recognized a thief who worked up on Doyers Street, and Buck, a newsboy with two protruding front teeth. He squinted his rodent eyes at her, always peeved that Nino paid her any mind.

The thief looked up from the game and whistled—Lilibeth usually elicited reactions—and pulled his shirt out in two points. Violet scowled at him, but her mother didn't notice as she floated along, smiling a little at the twitter of starlings in the bushes.

The gas lamps were being lit, and the electric lights of the bridge—a blue-white light every hundred feet that made a chain from Manhattan to Brooklyn—blazed against the veil of dusk, their reflections like dots of fire in the windows of the sooty tenements that skirted the bridge's massive supports.

They reached Water Street, the twilight bringing on an air of glittery possibility and sin. In an alley, a ring of wool-capped men, dockworkers, yelled and jeered at a cockfight. Violet lingered to glimpse the birds, which danced around each other, landing bloody jabs with their chipped beaks and sharpened claws.

“Come on, now,” her mother said. “Stop your dawdling. You, child, need a bath.”

Lilibeth, with the help of Mr. Lewis, had rented a new room in a building near the wharf, a dormered attic with a window and a sink. The ceiling was low but the room was surprisingly airy, and when Violet sat at just the right angle, she could see a tiny triangle of the river flashing in the city lights. She wanted this to be home.

“I have a job,” Lilibeth said, her hand flitting to her hair. She turned from the pot of water on the stove and smiled at Violet, a girlish, pleased smile.

“Really?”

“Some ironing. For the grocer's wife, you know, Mrs. Baker. With the funny squished face. Maybe you'll help me with it?”

Violet nodded, wanting to keep her mother buoyed.

“I won't go there anymore. To the Madam's.” Lilibeth turned away, her eyes glossy.

The air from the open window was cool and only a little fishy. Violet tapped the pane with her finger, forcing herself not to grab for the hope that threw out a new line whenever her mother was her mother again.

“You aren't sorry you came with me, are you, baby girl?” Lilibeth's face threatened to fold, her eyes water-clear, exposed.

“No, Mama,” Violet said. And she wasn't.

Her mother filled bowl after bowl with cold water from the sink and emptied them into a tin tub on the floor. She wrapped towels around the pot and added the boiling water.

“I didn't know they would cut off your pretty hair,” she said, helping Violet pull the dress over her head. “I'm sorry about that.”

The warm water turned Violet's skin pink, and her dirt turned the bathwater gray. She closed her eyes as her mother cupped water over her head. She had missed her mother, an instinctual, wordless ache, no matter how she had tried to convince herself otherwise, no matter how much she did not want to need someone whose eyes seemed permanently cast on some distant shore that no one else could see.

“You look more like your father with your new hair.”

“No, I don't.”

“He was handsome,” Lilibeth said. “In his way.”

When they had married, and it became apparent that Lilibeth could not maintain the cookstove or take care of the chickens or even bake biscuits—“Why should I know those things?” she had said to Violet—Bluford made it known that he felt cheated. Any fondness between them had dried up and blown away like crackled remnants of dead leaves.

“Do you think he misses us?” Violet asked.