Windfalls: A Novel (12 page)

“Wow—I guess I didn’t realize he had his license yet.”

“He doesn’t,” Sally said grimly. “But he does have a girlfriend, and he thought it would be a really nice idea to sneak out at midnight and take her for a little ride.”

“Oh, my God.” Anna gasped and clutched involuntarily at Lucy. “What happened?”

“We got the call at two this morning. My Chrysler was in a ditch out on Hodge Road, and Jesse was being held at the police station until he could be released into our custody.”

“Is he okay?” Anna asked. Panic begin to rise inside her, and she was bewildered that Sally seemed so calm. “How about his girlfriend?”

“Everyone is fine,” Sally answered. Her voice was bright and sharp, more angry than relieved.

“He must have been terrified.” Anna said. She felt Lucy’s slack, warm weight against her chest like a gift. Like a given, Anna thought, soaking up the feeling of her daughter, grateful for the way Lucy’s flesh served as a comfort and an anchor, even now.

“Jesse wasn’t terrified.” Sally laughed harshly and turned to face Anna. “He was teenful. On the way home he had the gall to yell at me because he claimed we’d treated him like a child in front of his girlfriend.” Her voice went shrill with fury. “Of course we treated him like a child. He is a child. Do grown-ups run around stealing each other’s cars? I told him we’d treat him like an adult the minute he started to act like one, and not a goddamn second sooner.”

To escape the blast of her older sister’s rage, Anna bent her face and pressed her lips to Lucy’s head. Beneath her down-fine hair, Lucy’s scalp was damp with sleep. When Anna pulled her mouth away, Lucy’s hair clung to her lips, as weightless as light. She asked, “What are you going to do now?”

Sally shrugged. “What can I do? The police are still deciding whether or not to press charges. It’s out of our hands.”

“Yes, but, I mean—”

“He’s grounded, of course, and he’s lost his allowance until Christmas.”

“Aren’t you going to talk with him?”

“We told him he’d better not ever pull a stunt like that again.”

“But don’t you want to find out why he did it?”

Sally looked at her sister strangely. “He did it to impress his girlfriend.”

“Maybe in the short term, but—”

“But what?”

“He’s fifteen,” Anna answered, groping. “Don’t you think he’s trying to figure things out?”

“Figure things out?” Sally scoffed. “Like where the clutch is?”

“Like how to live, what matters, and what it all means? You know—the same stuff we were trying to figure out back then.”

“Not Jesse,” Sally said acidly. “He’s convinced he’s already got everything figured out. Besides, trying to talk to Jesse is like trying to talk to a sack of turnips.” She made her voice drop an octave, “‘I dunno. Yeah. Fuck, no’—that’s the extent of a conversation with Jess. Living with an English professor hasn’t done a thing for
his
vocabulary.” Glancing over at Anna, Sally added darkly, “Just wait. Your time will come. Before you know it, little Lucy there will be joyriding around the countryside with a beer in one hand, a joint in her mouth, and a boy groping her thigh.”

Not Lucy, was Anna’s instant thought, Never Lucy. She knew that utterly and instinctively, but she could find no way to say it that didn’t sound either smug or naïve, no way to say it that wouldn’t make her sister scoff. “Maybe,” she said reluctantly. “We’ll see.”

“You’ll see, all right,” Sally said, tearing open a package of sea sponges with her teeth.

Sally’s face was stark. Her eyes above the package looked so bereft, it startled Anna. This wasn’t the first time she’d seen Sally struggle with Jesse, though always before, her anger had seemed like the logical conclusion of her love. But today it was as though some elemental thing had changed, as though some essential part of her connection to her son had ossified or soured, like a marriage gone bad. She’s given up, Anna thought with a shiver.

Sally dipped a sponge into the mustard-colored paint and then pressed it nearly dry against the side of the tray. “This had better be right,” she announced grimly. “Yarrow on barley. But it always looks different when there’s a whole room of it.” Methodically she began to daub the sponge against the wall. It left a mottled pattern on the cream-colored surface, like a dappling of light or a crayon scrubbed across concrete.

“How’s that?” she asked, stepping back to study the effect.

“It’s nice,” answered Anna, more heartily than she felt. She wanted to beg Sally to do something, but she had no idea what to suggest. She wondered if she should maybe try to talk to Jesse herself, but then she was afraid that Jesse would resent it as much as Sally and Mike probably would if she tried to interfere. Besides, Jesse was no longer the creamy-faced boy who used to love to visit Eliot and her at the ranch. In the past few years he’d grown sullen and reluctant, resentful of all adults. It might not be as easy as she imagined to reach him now.

“This’ll take a while,” Sally was saying as she dipped her sponge back into the paint. “But it should be worth it. This room has never been cozy enough,” she muttered as she turned back to the wall.

In Anna’s lap, Lucy made a little moan. Arching her back, she stretched one soft fist above her head and squeezed her face into a waking grimace. Her eyes opened, and she looked around solemnly, giving equal attention to everything in her line of vision—the door frame, the ladder, the glowing maple leaves. She’s like me, Anna thought with an odd shudder of pride and fear.

She lifted her shirt and opened her bra, and Lucy began nursing, her dark eyes staring gravely out the sunlit doorway, one small hand resting light as a breath against Anna’s stomach, her fingers scrambling gently over Anna’s skin. Flesh of my flesh, Anna thought, reaching down to stroke her daughter’s arm.

She looked up to see Sally studying them, the sponge poised in her hand. There was something clinical in her look, but something wistful, too, as though she were hearing a far-off music that triggered an even more distant memory. “I once got kicked out of the Chicago Art Institute for nursing Jess,” she said.

“Really?” Anna asked. “I don’t remember that.”

“It was the summer Mike was finishing his dissertation. Jesse and I used to spend every Tuesday at the Institute, because on Tuesdays it was free. It was air-conditioned, too.” She replenished the paint on her sponge and began to dapple a new patch of wall. “Anyway, I was sitting in front of one of Gauguin’s bare-breasted Madonnas, and suddenly a guard came up and told me I needed to go to the bathroom.”

“Go to the bathroom?” Anna puzzled.

“At first I didn’t get it, either. But when I finally realized what he meant, I asked so loud that everyone in the gallery could hear, ‘Do I look like I need to take a crap that bad?’”

“You’re kidding.” Anna’s laughter made Lucy give a startled jump and pull away from her breast. For a moment she looked around perplexedly, and then, catching sight of her mother, her face bloomed in a milky smile.

“I was pretty brash,” Sally said, pride and rue mingling in her voice. “Back then.”

Anna smiled down at Lucy. “Not unlike Jesse …,” she suggested gently.

“Unlike Jesse,” Sally answered with surprising fervor, “I never stole my parents’ car. I never drove without a license. That little bastard could have killed himself. He could have died. And his girlfriend, too. He could have killed that girl, and I would have been stuck trying to explain to her parents what my goddamn son had done.” Sally had stopped sponging. Her voice was high and loud, and her eyes glittered. A streak of mustard paint decorated her cheek like a fading bruise. “I just—” she began helplessly, and then she stopped and gathered herself. “It’s hard,” she muttered. Turning to Anna, she said, “I suppose I should have warned you.”

“Warned me?” Anna asked perplexedly.

“About having kids.”

“Oh, no—” Anna began, clutching Lucy as though she might even now be taken back.

Sally studied her sister dispassionately for a moment and then, with a bitterness that broke Anna’s heart, she added, “Maybe you can do better than me.”

“But, Sally,” Anna began fervently. “It’s not too—”

“Or maybe I should just shut up. I’m sorry,” Sally said. “I’m not being fair. You don’t need me to tell you all this right now. You need to just enjoy things while you can.”

I’ll enjoy them forever, Anna answered inside her head. But looking at her sister standing in the warm autumn light, her handsome face stiff with anger and grief, she was suddenly gripped by a fear so fierce that for a moment she couldn’t remember how to breathe.

* * *

W
HEN
C
ERISE ENTERED THE
W
OODLAND
M
ANOR DINING ROOM
, T
HE
morning sunlight was slanting through the tall east windows. Great rectangles of brightness lay on the linoleum, and the whole room seemed as peaceful as a chapel. The kitchen staff had already cleared the dishes, though the tables and chairs were littered with clots of oatmeal, shards of toast, soggy paper napkins. “We eat family style,” Cerise must have heard the director announce a thousand times as he paraded potential residents’ relatives through the dining room.

She parked her cart inside the double doors and got to work, spraying cleaner in swift arches, wiping the tabletops and the seats of the chairs and then piling the chairs on the tables. Her sneakers squeaked on the linoleum. She paused to push a wisp of hair back from her face with her forearm. She planned to take her break as soon as she finished the dining room. If she hurried, she might have the staff room to herself, and she could call home and see if Melody had managed to get to school. When all the chairs were off the floor, she took the broom from the cart and began to sweep. As she bent to chase a pile of toast crumbs and egg scraps into her dustpan, she wondered how many times she had cleaned that floor since she’d started work at Woodland Manor.

She knew she could figure it out—five days a week times fifty weeks a year times nine years, minus the days Melody had been too sick to stay at home alone, and the few days Cerise had had to take off for herself, to see a doctor at the health clinic that time when her back was so bad, to go to the dental school when her molar got abscessed. She could figure it out, she thought, as she tipped the gatherings from her dustpan into the trash bag on her cart, but it would only make her tired.

The door from the kitchen swung open. An aide came out to get the coffee urn, and a thick steam of meat and starch and bleach wafted toward Cerise, triggering the queasiness it seemed these days she always carried with her, as if her worry about Melody were another pregnancy pushing its constant nausea against the back of her throat. Her stomach lurched as though she might be sick when she thought of Melody as she had been that morning, sprawled across the sofa in a stupor so deep that none of Cerise’s questions or pleas or warnings could cause her to do more than flop a limp arm and mutter, “Go away.”

When the dining room was mopped, she pushed her cart down the hall to the staff room and peeked inside. It was empty, and she entered with a sigh. Usually she was able to resist the invitation of the soft-drink vending machine that purred next to the time clock by reminding herself of the generic diet sodas she kept in her refrigerator at home and rationed out to herself—a can a day—after work. But today, after only a moment’s struggle, she dug through her pockets, found three quarters, and fed them to the machine. She made her selection, and a can of Diet Coke thunked down onto the shelf.

Standing in front of the grubby microwave, she pried the pull tab open, took the first sip, felt the icy carbonation bite her mouth, let its sweetness widen like a little gift inside her. She sat beneath the wall phone on one of the vinyl-covered chairs that edged the room, and when her can was half-finished, she lifted the receiver and called home. The phone rang, steady and lonely as the beating of a heart, until Cerise hung up.

Two dozen limp magazines—mostly parenting and fashion, a few on news or travel—were strewn across the coffee table in the center of the room. Gazing from their covers were an assortment of women as lush as tree-ripened peaches. These days Melody scoffed at her mother’s dream of modeling. “Get real,” she’d said last week when Cerise had suggested they enter her picture in a contest for modeling classes she’d seen advertised at the Rite Save pharmacy. “Do you remotely think I’d have a chance? Besides, it sucks, all that crap.”

Melody claimed that modeling was bullshit. She said what she really wanted to do was be an artist, but Cerise could see no future in that, even if she believed that what Melody did could be considered art. Melody seemed to have inherited Cerise’s old knack for drawing. In the past few years she’d discovered she could copy pictures and even sketch the things she saw so that they looked as real as the originals. But instead of using her talent to draw pretty things—things that might soothe people or cheer them up—Melody made drawings of lizard skulls and road-killed rabbits, sketches of used lipstick tubes and crushed soda cans.

Last fall for the school art show she’d collected a bag of trash from the side of the freeway, spray-painted it gold, piled it on a pedestal, and called it
Harvest
. When Cerise protested that it was just a heap of junk, Melody had rolled her eyes and tossed her hair and groaned as though it was hopeless to even try to get Cerise to understand.