Windfalls: A Novel (25 page)

She had assumed that crossing the bridge would bring her to Melody. But instead of the forested mountain and the campground Melody had described on the phone, Cerise saw only looming hills, empty of everything but windblown grass. Behind her, the freeway still roared its condemnation, but at the far end of the parking lot a road led up into the empty hills. She began to trudge along it, her head bent to face the gravel and weeds. A pair of bicyclists flying down the grade in the thickening dusk shot her looks of curiosity as they swept by, though the cars, their headlights newly lit, passed within inches of where she walked without slowing.

By the time she neared the top of the hill, it was almost dark. Next to the road was a gravel pullout with an information kiosk. Posters advertising campfire lectures and flyers warning about rattlesnakes and poison oak shook in the wind beside a wooden map routed with a web of trails and roads. In the failing light she tried to decipher it, though her mind was as stiff as her tear-roughened face.

A car slowed to a stop beside the pullout. Its driver leaned across the passenger’s seat. Rolling down the window, he asked, “Where ya going?”

She ignored him, and he asked again.

“The campground,” she answered over her shoulder.

“Going camping?”

Her eyes on the map, she shook her head as though his voice were a mosquito whine she might chase from her ears.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll take you there.”

She started toward the car, but when she saw the driver’s leer and the jumble of blankets and beer cans in the backseat, a final scrap of caution made her veer away instead.

“Get in,” he commanded, reaching across the front seat to open the passenger’s door. At the sound of his voice, she turned from the road and began to run up the hillside. Cursing, he slammed the door and the car tore away, gravel spitting like shot from beneath his tires.

Lungs burning, she ran uphill in the waning light. She was accustomed to pavement, and her feet slid and twisted on the chert and sage. When she finally sagged to a stop, she was beyond the crest of the hill, overlooking a valley more barren and uninhabited than any place she had ever seen. The first stars pricked the sky overhead. A moon slender as a shard of glass hung low above the opposite hill, while all around her the wind continued, stealing her breath and savaging her hair.

She staggered down into the empty valley, calling for Travis, screaming his name to the broken moon. Sobbing until her guts heaved, she lurched and stumbled through the darkness, collapsing finally beneath a lone tree to sleep outdoors for the first time in her life, to sleep on the dirty ground below a sky filled with an appalling multitude of stars.

S
OMEONE WAS SCREAMING
.

At first the screams came from such a great distance that it was possible for Anna to sink deeper into her sleep and pretend they could not reach her. But rapidly they grew louder and nearer and more urgent until each cry was a knife hacking her awake, leaving her aching and prickling and thick with confusion—the same sensation of unbearable interruption she felt when one of the girls woke while she and Eliot were making love. The black room spun, and Anna struggled to reconstruct herself inside its spinning. Even so, she was out of bed and running before she could find the reason why.

She was running toward the screams, running to meet the trouble because she recognized the screams were Lucy’s, and when at last she reached the open door of Lucy’s room and saw that Lucy was still there—unbroken and unbleeding—sitting up in bed and sobbing beside her bunny night-light, a little of Anna’s terror left, though she rushed to grab Lucy as if she might still be stolen.

“What is it?” Anna rasped. “What’s wrong? What happened?” In her arms Lucy’s body seemed so small, her bones so sharp and frail. Trembling like a sparrow, Lucy cried, “He killed her!”

Ellen, Anna thought like a shot, and her heart surged toward the baby’s room, but before she could leap from Lucy’s bed, her voice croaked, “Who?”

“Andrea,” Lucy sobbed. “He killed Andrea.”

“It was a dream,” Anna said, relief gushing through her. Pressing Lucy against her, she added, “You had a bad dream.”

But Lucy pulled away to stare in horror at the shadowed wall. “It’s true,” she cried. “It’s true. He cut off her head.”

“Whose head, sugar?”

“Andrea—Andrea’s head.”

Anna felt a prickle of premonition. “Of course not,” she said firmly. Gathering Lucy deeper in her arms, she insisted, “It was just a dream.”

“It’s not,” Lucy sobbed. “It’s true, it’s real. The grown-ups said.”

“What did they say?” Anna asked. She tried to make her body big and calm, tried to make her flesh a protective barrier between Lucy and the world. She felt the press of Lucy’s elbows, the bones of her shoulders, her sweet, sharp chin. She wanted to murder Ms. Ashton, with her safety rules and her stranger awareness program. She said, “Tell me what the grown-ups said.”

“They said he had Andrea. They said—” Lucy paused, looking puzzled.

“See?” Anna murmured, making her voice smooth as cream. “See? It was only a dream.”

“Things are wrong,” Lucy persisted, bewildered.

“Nothing’s wrong,” Anna murmured, stroking Lucy’s head. “Everything is fine. Go back to sleep.”

But instead of relaxing into her mother’s words, Lucy sat up straight and stared at her with horror. “I can’t do that,” she gasped.

“Why not?”

“He’s waiting for me there, inside my dreams.”

“Of course not,” Anna said. She thought, I love this child too much to be her mother. Casting wildly for inspiration, she offered, “Noranella’s ghost will keep you safe.”

For a moment Lucy looked confused, and then her whole being seemed to deflate. “Mommy,” she said, a mask of desperation stiffening her face, “this is real.”

W
HEN
C
ERISE WOKE, IT WAS AS THOUGH SHE HAD BEEN SUBMERGED IN
dark water, and were now rising toward a small circle of light. At first she only knew that she was cold, and she reached instinctively for Travis, for the solace of his breath and flesh. But instead of his body, she felt the prickle of wild grass, the grit of poor soil. Groping again, she felt the pain burned deep in her palms, and tried desperately to descend back into sleep.

But there was no more sleep.

Sickened that she had ever slept at all, she opened her aching eyes, looked out at the foggy world. Through the blur of new tears, she saw that she was lying against the snag of an old tree. Its lichen-spotted trunk had been split almost in two, and one half was angled along the ground, its branches making a crude curtain that had sheltered her from the worst of the night wind. Using her forearms, she pushed herself to sitting and choked as memory descended like another toxic smoke.

She buried her face in her blistered hands and cried, the rough sobs tearing her chest, the new tears stinging her palms. It was like a sickness, like a fever rising. For whole seconds the horror seemed almost bearable, but in the next moment some new thought or realization would spike, and it seemed she could stand it no longer.

When she finally raised her head from the darkness of her hands, she caught a whiff of past-ripe fruit. Hunger cramped her stomach, although it was followed a moment later by a sweep of revulsion. Spread across the ground was a coarse crop of fallen apples. Most were discolored and swollen almost to bursting. But a few, though bruised and bee-stung, still looked firm. She watched dully as a line of ants swarmed one of them. Finally, filled with self-loathing, she took an apple in her unblistered fingertips, blew the ants away, and ate it in ravenous bites, oblivious to bruises, worms, and fibrous core. She ate another, and then one more.

The fog was growing brighter when she stood. She steadied herself for a moment against the tree, and then set off. It was a relief, almost, to walk, a relief to submit to the mindless conviction that action would accomplish something, though when she tried to think what she was walking away from and what she was approaching, her footsteps slowed in dread.

The fog lifted in shreds and rags. When she gained the crest of the hill, she caught a glimpse of sea, wide and blue and rimmed with a silent white line of surf. In the bottom of the next valley, she saw a green band of willows and weeds. When she reached it, she smelled moist air and heard the murmur of water. Pushing her way through the cattails and sedges, she found a sluggish stream. She knelt in the muck and lapped the algae-thickened water from her cupped hands, its coolness first shocking and then soothing her stinging palms.

Then, oblivious to the hot smell of sage that rose beneath her feet, oblivious to the liquid call of red-winged blackbirds and the tender breeze, she pressed on down the valley. Her body was stiff, and her hands throbbed. Her clothes were scratchy with the seed casings of the million grasses she’d passed through, and her swollen face itched with unwashed tears. Her T-shirt clung to her chest, and her breasts were hard as fists, the nipples chafed raw from the rub of wet fabric. But all those pains were nothing, such tiny hurts compared to what she’d lost.

There had to be a way to get back home, to return to the trailer and her life before the fire. There had to be a way to fix things so the fire never started, or so they both got out in time. If you want it badly enough, you can make it happen, her program counselor had promised, her eyes melting with conviction as she showed Cerise how to apply for yet another loan. You can do anything you put your mind to, her welfare eligibility worker had snapped when Cerise mentioned how hard it was to try to study with a toddler. Now it seemed impossible that need alone would not make Travis come alive—if she only knew how, if she only tried harder. It seemed it was her fault, yet again, that she could not bend time and save her son.

One step. And then another. A snake slithered beneath her feet, a quick, cool rustle across the dirt. Lizards, their heads as erect and grinning as Travis’s plastic dinosaurs, watched her approach and then scurried out of her way. Once she heard a hum, smelled the sweet, thick scent of rot, and looked down to see a fawn’s carcass swirling with flies. She screamed and vomited a hot broth of creek water and apple. Three vultures passed above her, their shadows braiding a pattern on the ground.

It was late afternoon by the time she neared the woods. She had been walking for miles along the top of a high ridge. On her left the hills sloped down to the far-off sea, and on her right they rose up toward the forested mountain. Ahead of her was a dark line of trees that for hours had seemed to come no nearer. She had long since abandoned her fight with the wind and sun, and now she was simply moving in an endless dream of breeze blown grass and thirst.

Once, much earlier in the day, she had been walking along the gravel shoulder of a road when a car slowed to a crawl beside her. Remembering the man at the information kiosk, she’d kept her head down, continued to trudge while the car crept next to her. Suddenly an arm had reached out the rolled-down window, thrusting at her a can of soda so cold it stung her blistered hands like fire. The car sped off, leaving Cerise to pry at the pull tab with swollen fingers. She’d drunk in a daze, grateful not to the people in the car so much as to the soda itself for allowing her its infusion of liquid and sugar. But that had been hours ago, and now her tongue filled her mouth so thickly she could hardly swallow.

She had become so used to the constant wind that when she finally reached the forest, its stillness was like entering a closed room. After the openness of the hills, the air smelled heavy and cloyingly sweet, and already the woods were filling with shadows. She heard the creak of branches rubbing together like old doors being opened.

Being in the woods reminded her of the campground, and of Melody. As she walked along the road that curved between the trees, she tried to plan how she would tell Melody about Travis and the fire. At the hospital, when the fire chief talked with her in the hall outside Travis’s room, his first question was if she had ever inspected the battery in the trailer’s smoke detector. For a moment it had been hard to even understand what he was talking about, and then, startled, she’d had to admit she’d thought the landlord would have taken care of that before she moved in.

“It was empty,” the fire chief said, his voice carefully flat. “There was no battery.”

“Melody!” Cerise gasped, clapping her bandaged hands to her mouth.

“What’s that?” the fire chief asked, his pen poised above his clipboard. But Cerise could only clutch her mouth and shake her head, and when he’d asked her the number of people residing in the trailer, she’d answered, “Just two.”

But all day her need to see Melody had been increasing beneath her shock and grief until it was a sensation even greater than her thirst, a longing as physical as lust for her daughter’s breath and flesh and living bones. A baby, she’d said, I wish to see a baby, and now she knew the baby she longed for was her own. She wanted to gather Melody in her arms for safekeeping, wanted to press Melody to her aching breasts and never let her go. She wanted to lose herself again in loving her little girl.

But along with that need Cerise also felt a growing desire to make Melody suffer. She could not bear to be so alone inside her anguish. She wanted someone to share her torment, wanted to bludgeon Melody with the truth of what had happened. The parenting magazines always said that children must be held accountable for their actions. Melody needed to know—and to acknowledge—the monstrous consequences of what she’d done. Now, as Cerise stumbled on through the hushed and fragrant forest, the only respite she could imagine for herself was the little relief that would come when she confronted Melody with what the fire chief had said.