Windfalls: A Novel (45 page)

“Oh, no.” Honey’s voice was swift and shocked. “Except,” she added remorsefully, “running out here, I made her cry.”

“Okay,” Anna said, the coldness draining from her voice so that her words sounded only weary. “I’m sorry. It was wrong of me to react so fast. It’s just—you scared me. If you’re ever a mother, you’ll know. You always worry about your children first.”

“I know,” said Honey raggedly. She swayed as though she were dizzy and hid her face in her disfigured palms.

The final color was fading from the sky, the smoke had vanished, and in the barrel the fire had diminished to a flickering mass of sparks. Anna hugged Ellen and watched Honey rock back and forth, her face pressed into her palms, her shoulders heaving silently.

Suddenly Ellen reached toward Honey. “Deedee?” she asked. Anna moved a step closer so that Ellen could pat Honey’s shoulder with her outstretched hand.

A second later, when Anna reached out to hug Honey, she detected no trace of booze or dope in Honey’s smell, and the scent of Honey’s cheap shampoo and sturdy body was already familiar from all the times Anna had received Ellen from Honey’s arms.

C
ERISE COULD NOT REMEMBER EVER HAVING BEEN HELD BY A WOMAN
, and at first she longed for nothing more than to rest forever in the comfort of Anna’s arms. For a time they huddled together, Ellen sandwiched between them, their breaths warming the little pocket the three of them made in the chill, new night. But as her shock wore off, she became aware of how she loomed over Anna’s head, and grew so embarrassed about how she feared she must smell that she could not keep from edging out of Anna’s embrace.

Slowly Anna led her up the yard toward the house, her free arm still supporting Cerise’s back. In the kitchen she handed Ellen to Cerise, turned on lights and boiled water and made tea, brewing it in a pot covered with painted roses and pouring it into cups as light as bubbles, adding cream and sugar until it tasted as warm and sweet as human milk.

“Are you okay?” Anna asked when they were both sitting at the kitchen table, Ellen back in Anna’s lap and their cups in front of them on porcelain saucers.

Cerise could feel both Anna’s probing and her concern. Looking into her cup, she answered quietly, “I’m okay. I’m sorry to be a trouble.”

“You’re not a trouble,” Anna said. “Don’t think like that.”

They sat in silence, sipping their tea, feeling the steam bloom on their cheek as they put their lips to their cups’ rims to drink.

“I would like to know what happened,” Anna finally said, though now her voice was calm and tender. “I might be able to help more, if I knew.”

A long time passed, in which Cerise struggled inside herself. At last, in a voice so raw it seemed certain that the words would come out bloody, she said, “Please don’t ask me that.” She cast a quick glance at Anna, but instead of the anger she’d expected to find on Anna’s face, she was startled to see that Anna looked stricken, her expression so inward and remote it was as though she were hearing voices from another time.

“I’d like to tell you,” Cerise said pleadingly. “I wish I could. I’m sorry,” she added in a whisper.

There was a silence so long, it sent a sizzle of warning down Cerise’s back. She knows about me, Cerise thought, poised between yearning and terror at the thought of what Anna might say next. But when Anna finally spoke, it was not about Melody or Travis. “I had an abortion,” she said, and then she stopped and took an extra breath and gazed into the memory that seemed to fill the space in front of her. “Years ago. I had an abortion. I never told anyone,” she went on, her voice brimming with sadness and fierceness and a kind of wonder. “Never. You’re the first person I’ve ever told.”

Cerise bowed her head and let Anna’s words flow through her heart.

“It’s mattered,” Anna said. “All this time. It’s traveled with me. It’s not a thing I’m glad or proud of, but maybe it’s helped me in a way, to stay on course.”

This time, when Anna broke the silence, it was as though she were speaking to Cerise again, and not to the ghosts that seemed to have gathered in the room. “I don’t know what happened to you,” she said, and Cerise could feel Anna’s gaze against her downcast head. “I’d imagine that it’s harder than anything that’s ever happened to me, so I probably don’t have a right to talk. But maybe—whatever it is—there’s a way that it could help you, in the end.”

Sitting with her palms curled inside her fists and her fists clasped between her thighs, Cerise could only look into her lap and shake her head.

“Anyway,” Anna said after another minute of waiting, “I promise I won’t ask you again. Someone once let me keep silent, and now I’m passing that gift on to you.”

Cerise answered awkwardly, “I’ve never had—a friend like you before.” After she’d spoken, she cast a quick glance up at Anna to make sure she hadn’t said something wrong. But Anna was regarding her steadily, and when Cerise’s eyes met hers, she answered, “And I’ve never had a friend like you.”

Later, after the teapot was empty and just before Lucy burst through the kitchen door Anna asked Cerise one final question. “Should I cancel our plans?”

“Our plans?” Cerise asked, casting about inside her head to try to remember what plans they’d made.

“For tonight? Would you rather I just take you home instead?”

“Oh, no,” Cerise said, startled.

“Are you sure?” Anna was studying her hesitantly. “It won’t be too hard on you, staying with the girls?”

“I’m sure,” Cerise said doggedly. “It’ll be okay.”

A
NNA SAT IN THE CAR AT THE BOTTOM OF THE DRIVEWAY WITH THE
headlights off, listening to the drone of the engine and gazing back up at the house. The lights from the instrument panel made the interior of the car seem both anonymous and intimate. But despite the calm inside the car, Anna was still brimming with emotions, so many emotions she was unable to release the brake and drive away.

A warm light poured from the kitchen window, melting a small hole in the night and silhouetting the cuttings Eliot had growing on the windowsill. Anna caught a glimpse of Lucy, practicing for her dance class, her arms outstretched as though she were hugging the air, her ponytail bouncing behind her like a friendly pet. She saw Honey moving in and out of view.

When she’d first met Honey, Anna had dismissed her as a person whose life was small and simple, whose little troubles were nobody’s but her own. But Honey had done amazing things for Anna and her family. Safe in the darkness of the purring car, Anna remembered the surge of pleasure she’d felt that morning as she’d talked with Carole Laughlin about her work, how after she’d hung up the phone, she’d looked around her living room and realized that what she saw looked like home. She thought of how healthy Ellen was now, and she remembered Lucy bursting into the kitchen that afternoon, her face so radiant it was hard to believe there’d ever been a time when she’d been afraid to go to sleep, ever a time when she’d had no friends. Somehow Honey was connected to all those changes, and yet why and how and what she’d done was still a mystery.

So many mysteries. Anna remembered Honey’s voice on the phone, raggedly asking the emptiness,
Melody, is that you?
She thought of how Honey had stumbled like a zombie from the house, how the firelit tears had trembled on her chin. Anna knew in her bones that her daughters were safe with Honey, but she had no idea who Honey really was. Gazing at the glowing window, she saw what was always the case—the closer you got to someone, the nearer you came to the mystery at their core.

She thought of the mysteries of her daughters—those strangers, those guests, those dear and unexpected friends—who had somehow tumbled through her into their own separate lives. She thought how near they were to her, the pitch of their voices and the touch of their hands so familiar, their flesh and breath more precious than her own. And she thought how distant they were, too—their souls inviolable, their secret selves eternally apart from hers. She thought of how much she needed them, how crucial they were to who she was, how even her art depended on them.

She closed her eyes and saw, through the dark tears that welled beneath her lids, the other mystery that she had borne, that long-vanished bit of tissue that had never claimed a sex or risen to a face but that had lived inside her nonetheless, that had somehow helped to shape her with its absence. She remembered swallowing milky tea and telling Honey what she’d never said before. It had faded the shimmer a little to tell, but she was glad she had.

She needed to get going, she thought as she sat. She needed to pick up Eliot, to drive out to the Laughlins’ along the tangle of dark roads. She imagined the fine dinner they would enjoy there, the good wine and exotic food, imagined how, in the room that held photographs by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston and Alfred Stieglitz, she would open her portfolio and spread her work across the mahogany table, imagined how her broken trees would shine on the polished wood. But still she sat in the car, too full to drive away.

She remembered a snip of conversation she’d had with Honey a few weeks before. “What’s it like?” she’d asked, “living in the shelter?” She’d been merely curious, and was surprised at the dismay that flashed across Honey’s face, although when she answered, she’d sounded as placid as ever. “It’s okay,” she’d said, adding like an afterthought, “They talk a lot about God.”

“What do you think about that?” Anna had asked. It had been a long time since she’d discussed religion with anyone, and she wondered if the faith the shelter had to offer was like the faith her nephew Jesse professed, wondered what a person like Honey would think of Jesse’s God.

Honey had shrugged, “It’s a help to some of them, I guess.”

“How about you?” Anna persisted.

“I don’t see as how it could ever be much help to me,” Honey had answered, and her voice had sounded hard, more nearly angry than Anna had ever heard it.

Now, sitting inside the dim capsule of her car, an odd idea began to grow inside her head, though as it grew clearer, she realized it was what she had wanted her photographs to be saying all along: maybe life created God—and not, as Jesse’s church would claim, the other way around. Maybe what made God was life, all of life—every single birth and every death, and all the struggle and delight sandwiched in between. Maybe life made God like a baby made a mother, so that just as it was the baby’s coming that turned a woman into something greater than herself, so it was that everything in the world turned the emptiness that had preceded it into God.

It was all so large and hard and lovely, all so strange.

Here we are—alive—she thought, gazing at the light that spilled from the kitchen window, gazing until the light blossomed and smeared, gazing until she began to grin at the craziness of it.

She hoped that Honey would be all right, hoped they all would. Bless us, she begged the darkness and the light. She sat in the humming car for a moment longer, watching the window where Lucy had resumed her dance. She waited until her eyes regained their focus and her grin subsided and her mind felt clear. Then she put the car in gear and drove away, following the path her headlights opened in the dark.

A
FTER
A
NNA LEFT
, C
ERISE BOILED PASTA AND HEATED TOMATO SAUCE
and shredded cheese while Ellen watched from her high chair and Lucy twirled in circles in the middle of the room.

Working in the kitchen that was not hers but that she knew as well as if it were, she cut a rib of celery into sticks. She sliced bread and buttered it, poured milk into two glasses and a sippy cup. She set the kitchen table with two plates, placed another plate of cut-up pasta and sauce on the tray of Ellen’s high chair. After they had eaten, she gave Ellen a bath to wash the orange sauce stains off her cheeks and out of her hair and from between each chubby finger. Kneeling beside the tub, she watched while Ellen chortled and splashed, and then she lifted her dripping from the water, dried her and dressed her in a doubled diaper and a flannel sleeper, and rocked her until she fell asleep.

Then she played three games of Old Maid with Lucy, retrieved Lucy’s favorite nightgown from beneath her dresser, reminded her to throw her dirty clothes down the laundry chute, and watched as she dabbed her face with water and scrubbed her teeth until the toothpaste foamed down her chin. After Lucy scrambled into bed with half a dozen stuffed animals and twice that many books, Cerise turned off the overhead light, turned on the night-light, and bent to kiss her.

“Good night,” Cerise said, trying to keep her voice light and smooth.

“I love you,” Lucy declared, rearing off her pillow to throw her arms around Cerise’s neck.

“Me, too,” Cerise said, giving Lucy’s hand a gentle pat before she disengaged herself and hurried from the room.

Downstairs in the kitchen, she put away the leftover food, rinsed the dishes, and set them in the dishwasher. As she wiped the table and the counters and Ellen’s high chair and swept the kitchen floor, she tried to hold herself apart from everything but the chore that she was doing, the dishcloth wiping its damp arcs across the counter, the broom straws pushing breadcrumbs toward the dustpan.

Finally, after the dishcloth was spread to dry and the broom was back in its closet, she turned off the light and sat at the table in the dark kitchen, staring at the black window and waiting for what would come next. Thoughts drifted and darted through her mind like fish inside the glass walls of an aquarium: It was nice of Anna to make tea for her. She should start the dishwasher soon. Tonight Anna would insist on giving her a ride to the shelter. She hoped her bundles had stayed hidden in the ravine. She didn’t want to lose Barbara’s blanket. She wished she’d drawn a special picture for Lucy. She wished she could say to Anna what Anna had given her. Maybe there had never been a battery in the smoke detector. Maybe it didn’t matter if there had.