South of Elfrida (13 page)

“I'm serious!” Miriam says, her voice thready. But they get it. The ocean is everyone's dream. Some even belong to the Neptune Society, an organization that will come for your ashes, wherever they wind up, and take them out to sea.

“Bon voyage!” Miriam's friend calls. “I hope I never see you again.”

“I should be so lucky!”

“You two are sounding like an old Jack Lemmon movie,” Nina says.

Five miles along, they get stuck in traffic on the way to the I-10.

Miriam says, “I'm thirsty.”

Nina remembers Miriam saying her bladder is the size of a pea. She says, “No water until we get somewhere.”

Miriam laughs.

They spend a night in a motel in Yuma. They can hear dune buggies buzzing most of the night. Driving west again, between pleasant silences their conversation is sketchy. Nina asks, “Do you want a new set of sheets when you move? I can get the ones with flowers if you like.”

“No. Too cute. Get something else.”

“I brought an elegant taupe for the camp-out.”

“Goody,” Miriam says.

Over the Laguna Mountains, past splashes of daisy-like yellow wildflowers: “Are you going to miss the tapestry sofa?” Miriam's assisted living suite will be smaller.

“I bought it after the divorce. I thought it had class. What did I know? I've hated it for years.”

“You didn't tell me.”

“You had a busy life.”

Frank again. “Yes,” Nina says.

Traffic jams in San Diego, the sky a gauzy blot, tail lights for miles: “From the sounds of it, you didn't choose much in life.”

Miriam snorts. “Life happens. Then one day you choose the ocean.”

Nina manoevres around another moving truck the size of hers. The whole state is restless.

“I didn't choose to live in a room with my name on the door, either,” Miriam says. “In case you're wondering.”

They stay in a hotel on the ocean, one that Miriam says is “fancy.” They eat filet mignon and scallops for dinner. The meal makes Miriam's digestion uneasy, but she says the taste was worth it. She trots to the toilet so fast her walker barely touches ground. The next morning, room service brings breakfast and Miriam is back to plain oatmeal, albeit garnished with a nasturtium.

Nina carries the heavy oak chair, propped against her hip, to where foam fans the beach. The air is tangy with hints of seaweed. Miriam waits at the U-Haul, tucked along a gravelly spot in a cove. When Nina returns, Miriam leans on her and moves toward the sea, groaning, which hurts Nina's heart. Miriam settles in the chair, the breeze catches her thinning hair and the surf swirls around her bare ankles. Soon her feet are buried in sand; she makes a squat silhouette—a perfect photo if you were standing far enough back—and out beyond her, a generous but ordinary orange sunset, smeary due to haze and smog.

Later, Nina and Miriam lay side by side, mattresses on the ramp, their heads on goose-down pillows. Miriam settles with a sigh, bony fingers caressing the wonderful sheets. The last gulls cry, stars glisten. They hear the rhythmic rumbling of waves. “Thank you,” Miriam says. The jaw lets go its grip. Miriam letting go causes Nina to lie awake, tears drying on her cheeks. She adores her mother's whistling snores. Frank would love this story.

Back at the retirement complex, an audience has gathered to see Miriam in her new digs. She's down to one room and a bathroom. “New wing, new view, less housekeeping,” Miriam says. She's in her chair, salt stains on its legs, and behind her, on the shelf, her prized blue and white Ming-style vase. She is dressed, as she would say, to the nines, her hair freshly permed. Nina is serving tea on
TV
trays. She's brought chairs for the guests from the nearby dining room.

“You don't look transformed to me, kiddo,” says one of Miriam's friends.

Miriam pauses to look around the room, her chin raised. Gradually people hush each other and turn toward her. Miriam makes her announcement: “I have seen the green flash.”

Nina raises her eyebrows.

“It was a miracle, a sunset to end all sunsets.” Miriam's lips may slide over consonants, but in her unwavering gaze is the glory of the green flash captured at long last. An old man wants to know what in tarnation a green flash is.

Nina says, “Well, it's refracted light—” Miriam coughs into the back of her hand. Nina stops talking and passes a bowl of oatmeal cookies. Eager hands reach out. She locks eyes with her mother. Miriam gives her the thumbs-up.

Nina hands the bowl with what's left of the cookies to the old man. His eyes blink with pleasure. She walks around so she can stand behind Miriam's chair and places her hands on her mother's shoulders. She clears her throat. “It was unbelievably lucky,” she says. “We parked in the perfect cove and had plenty of time to get out to where the sand meets the waves.” Then, to satisfied murmurs and munching and sighs, Nina paints the scene. Describes a gull wrestling with a saltine wrapper, pelicans at dusk in formation above the dappled sea, and the moment the sun, the rich, deep colour of a tangerine, dropped from sight, a miraculous spark of green flashed on the horizon, like a wink.

Driving on a freeway in central California amid cattle trailers and freight trucks bound for Sacramento, Mary noticed a softening in her chest, the only warning that tears were on their way; one of her crying jags was coming on. She missed her mother and, incongruously, missed her mother's ancient cat, with its ratty, patchy fur. By the time Mary moved back into her mother's house—her mother preferred to be called Mrs. Garrity—to look after her when the Alzheimer's became incapacitating, the calico tabby (never in the best of moods even as a kitten, as Mary recalled) had become grouchy and cantankerous. After Mrs. Garrity died, the cat had hissed at Mary as though it was her fault. Mary's intervention hadn't made a life-changing difference to her mother or the cat; they carried on, as usual, their mutual complaints like a moaning Greek chorus, a backdrop to Mary's cheery, high-strung helpfulness.

She signalled, batted her arm around in the hard wind out the window for emphasis, and pulled over, the brakes on the travel trailer squealing. A smell of burnt rubber rose up. She crept along the shoulder to the rest stop, where she slipped in between the big-rig cargo trucks. She was exhausted and had let herself run out of propane—without propane the fridge and stove wouldn't work. The rest stop had the basics, restrooms and snack machines.

Yes, she was glad her mother was gone; Alzheimer's takes a terrible toll. But whenever she had told anyone, whenever she had spoken that simple truth out loud, heat rose to her cheeks and the words felt reprehensible, as though her time in the pit—her two years of dealing with the bathing, insults, tantrums, and doing her best—didn't count.

Mary lay on the bed strewn with open state maps and a Woodall's camping guide, and cried and blew her nose. Whenever she managed to focus on precisely where she might be, the sobbing would begin again.

After two Snickers bars, a 7UP, a bag of chips, five hours of listening to the whine of generators keeping produce cool, and the screech of air brakes as trucks drove in and out, her tears dried up and her vision cleared. She was staring at an
RV
map of central California when she realized that down the road a few miles south, a stone's throw away, an
RV
camp awaited, a camp situated on the Sacramento River.

It was a hallelujah moment. The nature of suffering—she had worked her way through two boxes of tissue—is that you can't see beyond it. Misery exists to make you truly miserable. Thinking these thoughts, she climbed back onto the freeway, joined in the flow, and pulled off a few exits later. She drove under the freeway and onto a country road lined with sycamore and eucalyptus trees, with fields beyond. She followed the signs, made a wide turn, and took a small road down a hill. At the bottom was a little clapboard office that needed paint.

Outside, a tall man pruning the bushes laid down the clippers, wiped his brow, and sauntered over to her window. “Welcome.” He introduced himself as Ben Erickson, camp manager. He had tousled brown hair and, to her surprise, a missing incisor. She had seen plenty of missing teeth in eastern Oregon and other rural areas but never in California. Mary had to hold back tears because he was so friendly despite her being red-eyed and dishevelled—even her nose felt swollen. He filled her propane tanks and then she went inside and signed the register, handed over her credit card. She bought a bag of peanuts and two frozen dinners, not a great nutritional start, but a start.

Apparently she'd arrived at a lucky time. Any earlier and he wouldn't have had a space for her, but a spot right on the river had just opened up. He was putting her next to a Sundance. He warned her that the couple that owned the Sundance was here due to their twenty-four-year-old lad who'd been in a skateboarding accident and was now in a coma in hospital. “You seem like a respectful sort of person,” Ben said.

Mary backed into the spot assigned her and did the hook-ups quietly. She set up her awning, laid out the patio mat and a couple of folding chairs. Over the next few days the couple from the Sundance came and went, driving an old Dodge. Sometimes a girl, the girlfriend of the skateboarder, Mary learned, went with them.

Mary was outside cleaning her binoculars when the couple dropped by. “We'll look after our Nicky, no matter what,” the mother told Mary. “If only God will let him live.” She had especially big eyes—a thyroid problem, Mary guessed—and the boy's father, a small-boned man, wept quietly, his eyes spilling tears. Mary said she understood. They got in their car and drove away. A blue heron flew down the wide river, the colour a seasoned sage green, the current strong and steady. The fisherman who was out with his rod when she first arrived and on other afternoons, a fat, freckled man fly-casting from the shore, tried again. Every afternoon the man nodded at Mary and she would raise her hand, give a cautious wave back.

By then Mary knew that the girlfriend was named Tammy. The girl, Mary noticed, would pace around the Sundance and sometimes farther afield, but always within one section of the camp, as though confined by an invisible fence. Sometimes, when the parents weren't there, she turned the
TV
up loud.

One day she stopped by Mary's and asked, “How long you going to stay?”

“Dunno,” said Mary. “This is a nice place.”

“We might be here forever.” Tammy looked like a waif, thin with bony little fingers. She had tattoos of rose vines up both arms.

“Have a seat. Want a beer?” Mary handed her a Miller from the cooler.

Tammy sat on the camper step. “I was gonna leave him. Just before the accident.”

“Oh, no. Now you're stuck.”

“Looks that way.” Tammy's stringy yellow hair had a fading ruby stripe running through it. “I sort of thought it was him,” she said. She meant the man she was waiting for, the one who wanted something better than Yuba City, the man who would take her to Frisco. Now, she wasn't sure which way to pray. “About him. You know. Nicky. Should he get better? Or, uh, the other. He might be, well, in bad shape.” She'd given up her job at a restaurant called Weatherbee's and moved out of the apartment she and Nicky shared with another twosome.

In Mary's world, there weren't many available men, though occasionally she had fantasies that one would come along who would find her compact, nearly sixty body, with its easygoing, ample boobs, appealing. “Listen.” She took aim at the girl. “If you don't love this guy enough, get out now.” The words sounded harsh, and hearing them, Mary felt her cheeks redden.

“You think?” Tammy ducked her head, glanced over at the empty Sundance, the faded plaid curtains at the slider window tied back tidily. The cottonwood trees shifted overhead; raucous cries of mating green herons competed with the fast, wide river coursing beneath a slight wind. The fat man cast his line again. “They're nice to me,” Tammy said of her boyfriend's parents.

“Yep.”

“What do you mean?”

“They're going to need help changing the diapers.” Mary thought back. Her mother had come down with senility as though it was a cold that would pass. Some sputtering attempts at finding words, asking which way to the bathroom, and a peculiar incident, the cans of tamales hidden under her bed. Then it seemed to blow over. Mrs. Garrity recovered, so Mary thought, until she asked about the tamales. “I ate tamales when I was pregnant with you. I ate them cold out of the can; I was addicted to the texture of the cornmeal and the slippery red grease. The social worker caught me. I said, ‘Protein,' and she said nothing, just backed out of the house. The house was a rental in Florida. I can't remember the name of the town. I didn't think loving tamales was that strange, but you never know what other people think. She had a clipboard in her hand, and I never saw her again.”