Backseat Saints Part 22

I shake my head at her, incredulous. "Of course I did. I was eight. I loved him when I was nine, too, and he dislocated my shoulder. What other daddy did I have? I didn't even know there were other kinds."

She wants me to remember a s.h.i.+ning father she has polished up in her memory. But I can't see him that way. It's like Saint Sebastian. I may have envisioned a kindly Tiggywiggle of a saint when I was little. Later I could only remember him through the film of my mother's abandonment, when he became a b.l.o.o.d.y ma.s.s of wounded, grinning flesh. I can only see my father through the lens of the decade I lived with him alone, after she walked and left me to him.

My mother sc.r.a.pes up a handful of the shredded bits of note. She has torn at it until it is hardly more than paper molecules. She holds them out to me. "This was to you, not me. It was always you." Still I say nothing, and she throws the bits of paper at me. They catch in the air and then drift down in a cheery shower of confetti. Her arm drops and her hand is open to me, like she's pleading for something. A few bits of white cling to the palm.

"So what," I say. "So the note was to me? Does that mean you don't get to be the prom queen?"

She blinks, confused. "No, because..." She shakes her head, trying to clear it, and then says, "I need to know that when he tells you he's sorry for all those times he laid hands on you, he means after I was gone."

"Okay," I say. "If that makes it better for you, sure. You can have that."

Her breath comes out in a sigh, and she is nodding. Her right hand closes and comes up. She holds her fist against her heart. It's like I have pressed a gift into that hand, a sh.e.l.l or a pebble, and she's clutching it close to her now.

She leans in toward me, as if she is going to give me a present back. "You were always Daddy's girl, Rose. Even so, I swear to you, I swear to you, I thought about coming back for you a thousand times. But each time I'd imagine what you would choose. He was your first word. I came somewhere after dog." She opens her hand and swipes at her palm, cleaning the last bits of paper off it. They join the others spangling the carpet. She's calmed now, quite a bit. Something sentient has appeared behind her eyes again. She says, "I thought the two of you might even do better with me gone. Him and me, we never should have been together. We worked on each other like poison, but he loved you. Even now, you're the one that mattered to him. The note made that crystal clear."

I can hear the sick pit of pure green envy in her voice. She left him more than twenty years ago, yet this still eats at her.

She'll never explain herself, but I finally know the thing I came across the country to learn. I have my answer, and it is simple and plain and ugly. It's nothing I ever could imagine when I was building soap opera plots featuring abductions, amnesia, and, most of all, her absolution. The truth is, she tried to stay. The time she marked off on her wall told me that. She left with close to nothing, perhaps because it was all she felt she deserved. But at the bottom of the mystery, there is only, ever this: She left me behind because she didn't quite love me enough.

I'm shocked to find I almost understand. I am her daughter, after all. We are very much alike. Other women, to me, have always been the compet.i.tion. I try to imagine it, bringing a girl your man likes better than you into your own home, bringing her in with your own body. That is the only why there is.

I stand up, needing more s.p.a.ce in between us. I go to her table, where her weathered cards are in a neat deck between the lit candles.

"When did you find me again?" I ask.

She stares after me, blinking, and it takes her a good thirty seconds to change tracks and find the answer. She sounds wrung out. "I hired a PI eight years ago. He found you waitressing in Catahoula, living with that mechanic."

"Steve-O," I say, and she waves the name away as unimportant. She is right. I pick up the deck and flip it over, spread it open in a fan.

"He took pictures. I thought you were with a man like that because I didn't leave soon enough. I thought you'd soaked it up from too many years of watching my marriage." Her voice breaks. "Then I wished, if anything, I'd left you sooner."

"That's comforting, Momma," I say. I don't know what any of these cards mean-swords and wands, wise horses, maidens in chains-but the art is lovely. Even the words at the bottom of some of the cards, strange words like "Temperance" and "The Hierophant," are written like calligraphy, with flourishes and scrolls and trumpets.

"I did did love you, Rose," she says, repeating the first words she spray-painted on the car out at Cadillac Ranch. She isn't speaking in the past tense, to mean she does not love me now, as I once thought. She means she loved me even as she walked away. love you, Rose," she says, repeating the first words she spray-painted on the car out at Cadillac Ranch. She isn't speaking in the past tense, to mean she does not love me now, as I once thought. She means she loved me even as she walked away.

I find the hanged man with his wolf-head helmet in the deck. I pick him up, examine him by candlelight. As I look at his placid face, his praying hands, I find I do believe her.

She did love me; she left me anyway. That one choice has shaped her life into this ruin. She's been flying across the country to spy on me for years now, never brave enough to speak to me. I wonder how many of my old haunts hold her aborted messages. I suspect she's left obscure directions for contacting the Saint Cecilias all over Amarillo, perhaps carved in the wood under my table at my favorite coffee shop or hidden in the graffiti-covered bathroom of the place Thom and I liked to go for wings and beer.

She hid the messages too well because she knew that if I went with the saints that helped her escape, she would never see me again. She told me that herself, that her underground railroad would never deliver me to any place or person at all connected to my past.

I set the hanged man to the side, faceup, and search the fanned deck for the burning tower. There she is, the abandoned girl forever waiting, framed by a window that already pours smoke. I lay it out beside the hanged man. My mother lives alone in a rented apartment with a guest room that must feel like a gaping hole in the center of her house. That room upstairs is my room, and it always has been, even while a chain of other young women slept there. She's tried for years now to fill it up with her sad Lilahs, and they have not been enough. The Lilahs, even the ones who got free, got divorced, got saved, they have all failed her. Even the ones who kept her rules have failed her, because none of them were me.

"I know you loved me, Momma." I do not add, but not enough. but not enough. I do not have to add it. She knows her weakness already. Not loving me enough is the essential truth of her life. It's the thing that has broken her. I do not have to add it. She knows her weakness already. Not loving me enough is the essential truth of her life. It's the thing that has broken her.

I have my answer, and it should be the textbook definition of unsatisfying. Even so, the inside quiet that I felt upstairs after praying with Parker is coming over me again. My mad is leaking out of me, slow but steady, like I've been punctured. Underneath, I find something that feels a lot like peace, and with it, a pragmatic understanding: I cannot stay here.

There is only one card missing from the reading that she gave me. I search through the deck and pull out the two of swords. That's the card I hold up to show her.

"No," she says at once. "You have to stay."

But the reason I could not leave the house earlier is in the room with us. She has said it over and over. She has known it all along.

I set the two of swords down in its place beside my other cards. I can tell my mother and myself that I am Ivy, but I cannot change myself to Ivy in Thom's mind. He doesn't even know I'm trying to change inside my own. That's why my mother was so angry to learn that Thom was still alive. She's seen enough bad men in her life and work to recognize the ruthlessness in my bad man. As long as Thom Grandee is alive, then he is coming. To Thom, I am always and forever his Ro, emphasis on his. I have betrayed him, and he cannot bear to leave me breathing.

My mother is shaking her head at me, an emphatic denial. I say, "I can't be anyplace or with anyone that has even a tenuous connection to my old life. I've left a trail. I found you with a library book, for the love of G.o.d. If I sit here and wait long enough, he'll find me and come to me at his time, on his terms. He'll kill me."

In the deck I find a picture of a girl with long dark hair in windswept loops. Gypsy hair. I pick it up. A strip of lace winds around her head, covering her eyes. She holds a slim sword in front of her, and she has an old-fas.h.i.+oned set of scales in her other hand.

She is readying to weigh my tarnished dime against my mother's reading, to weigh all the girls Claire Lolley saved against the one she left behind. Her scales will never come out even. Everyone in the room knows it, except perhaps my dog, watching me anxiously from the foot of the stairs.

I lay the fourth card down above my cards, and then I turn away from the table. I come closer to my mother and sit down on the love seat. Gretel trots across the room and jumps up on the cus.h.i.+on beside me. She presses close to me, trying to fit the whole of her walrus body into my lap. I push her shoulder, make her settle for laying her head across my thighs.

I scratch her ears, almost a reflex, and she nudges her shoulder up against my hip. The feel of the air in the room has her worried. It is still charged, but this is coming from my mother, not me. I came here with a thousand other questions, but almost none of them matter in the light of the one answer that I finally have.

I am almost finished here. Only one thing is lacking. I feel it as pins and needles at the center of my back, like an itch in that one place I can never quite reach to scratch. Daddy. I promised I would tell him when his note had been delivered. Now it has.

But it is more than that.

Punch buggy green, I think. Thom is coming. My father's car is one h.e.l.l of a bread crumb, and it is parked a few blocks away. I hope the old Grandee Buick is already vivisected into untraceable parts, scattered over Alabama, but I need to know. Thom thinks my father is dead, but the name Eugene Lolley Eugene Lolley is printed plain in Fruiton's slim phone book for anyone who thinks to look for it. is printed plain in Fruiton's slim phone book for anyone who thinks to look for it.

I think I have always known that Daddy is my canary in the mine shaft. I have gotten what I came for here in California. Before I go, I need to know how far along Thom is on my trail, how much of a lead I have.

I go to get the cordless phone from the kitchen, pausing as I pa.s.s to blow out the sage candles. The burned smoke smell of extinguis.h.i.+ng them overpowers the herbs. My mother watches me, sitting in her ruined heap. I bring the cordless phone back to the love seat, but Gretel has flopped around and spread herself out to fill the s.p.a.ce. I perch on the armchair and dial my old friend 411.

The connection makes, and a woman asks in mechanical tones, "City and state, please?"

I say, "Fruiton, Alabama. Home number for Eugene Lolley." My mother's spine straightens, her shoulders tensing as the same neutral-voiced operator-it may be a recording-recites my father's number.

It's not quite four A.M. A.M. on the East Coast. Daddy should be home and sleeping. I dial. on the East Coast. Daddy should be home and sleeping. I dial.

I let the phone ring ten times, but he doesn't answer. I stand up and pace down to the store at the front of the room, my mother's eyes set on me as unblinking and cold as snake eyes. She sways like a snake, too, her top half rising up from her coiled legs, her arms wrapped tight around herself.

I let the phone ring on, twenty times, pacing back to my mother's reading table. Daddy still doesn't answer, and no machine picks up. I hit thirty rings. Then thirty-five. Forty.

I press the disconnect b.u.t.ton, my brow furrowing. I saw my father barely over a week ago, and where the h.e.l.l can he be at this time of the morning?

I call 411 and ask for Fruiton again, but this time the name I give is Bill Mantles, Daddy's neighbor across the street.

"Who is Bill Mantles?" my mother says. I ignore her, but Gret whines and sits up at the tension in her voice.

A woman answers the phone, but it's a grown-up, not Bunny. She sounds sleepy and displeased.

I say, "Is Bill there?" and then there is a distinctly female silence that has no sleepiness left in it and even more displeasure.

"Who is this?" the woman says.

"I'm a friend of Bill's. I-" I stop, because when I hear it out loud, I realize my father is also a "friend of Bill's."

"What friend?" she demands.

I try again. "I'm sorry to wake you, but this is important. Is Bill there?" It's a testament to what I've learned earlier this evening that I try not to sound b.i.t.c.hy.

"Do I know you, friend of Bill's?" the woman asks, and she's making no such effort.

I say, "We haven't met. Your neighbor across the street, Eugene Lolley? I'm his-" With my mother's gaze on me, I find I can't quite say what I am to him. I have not been his daughter for years now. I pause and inhale, and then I say, "My name is Rose Mae Lolley."

"Oh," she says, and then again. By the second "Oh," her voice has gone up an octave, high with urgency and nerves. "I'll get Bill." She sounds sorry for being sharp with me. Very sorry. Too sorry. I hear her saying, "Bill, honey, wake up... Bill?" Then she covers the phone with her hand or sets it down because all I can hear is a wordless murmur of anxious conversation.

I wait for Bill to come on. But I know already. I know it in the pit of me, and I stop pacing. I turn to my mother. She sees my face and rises, coming across the room to me. I feel a hollow ball of nausea curdling in my stomach even before Bill's voice says, "Rose Mae? I'm so sorry. I didn't know how to get in touch with you."

"How," I say. "Just tell me how."

"He got mugged," Bill says.

"Bulls.h.i.+t," I say. "That's not what you mean."

"Yes, it is, Rose Mae," Bill says, and his voice is very gentle, with the sweet undertones I remember him using every time he spoke to Bunny.

"What's happened?" my mother hisses at me.

I want to tell her, but I don't want to say a mugging. That's a lie, and the very word sounds silly. It is harmless words-giggle and clogging and pug dog-that are full of cheery g's. I want to tell her truer than that.

"My daddy got beat to death," I say for her, correcting Bill at the same time. My mother's body does a sudden half bend, sharp and shallow at the waist, but her face doesn't change. It looks like an invisible fist has punched her and she has eaten the blow, as stoic as a spartan wife. "Someone beat him until he died." I feel a scalding wetness on my cheeks, and I have to reach up with my free hand to feel that I am crying. Bill's pause is an affirmation.

Finally he says, "So you heard already. I'm so sorry. I couldn't believe it either." I don't answer. I'm gulping, trying to get air in, trying so hard not to throw up. My mother turns away to face her table. She is staring down at the four cards I have left faceup. Her shoulders begin to shake, and Bill talks on, filling up the silence. "I saw him earlier that same night, drinking down at Chico's." I know the place, I can see it. Ten blocks from his house, a one-room neighborhood bar with neon beer signs in the windows. "I tried to talk him into a ride home, but he was pretty drunk already and mad. I let him be. He had a good bit of cash on him, and I guess I wasn't the only one that noticed. He tried to walk home a couple of hours after I left. Someone-maybe a couple of someones-followed him from the bar. They rolled him too hard, you know? He hit his head on the curb and cracked his skull. He was a tough old guy, but they rolled him too hard."

Behind every word he says, I see the big hands of my husband. Not someone, it was Thom. Thom found Daddy, and Daddy is over now. My fault. I knew Thom would search Fruiton. I knew he would find my daddy and question him, but I should have realized Thom was too angry to save murder just for me in the sickest kind of fidelity. Under the wash of guilt, an ugly self-preserving part of me wonders what-all Daddy spilled under the persuasion of Thom's fists. What did he say before Tom helped the curb rise up and meet his head too hard? Punch buggy green. Punch buggy green.

"When?" I ask. My mother turns to look over her shoulder at me. Her body is still shaking, but her red eyes are desert dry.

"Two days ago," Bill says. "I identified the body, but you'll probably want to come here. There's things need doing-"

"Two days," I interrupt for my mother's benefit. She nods. "Bill, I can't talk anymore right now. Sorry." I hang up, and then I drop the phone and run ten steps into my mother's store and drop to my knees to throw up into a big bowl full of worry beads. When my stomach is empty, I turn and sit flat on my b.u.t.t facing my mother, wiping at my mouth.

Thom Grandee was in Fruiton two days ago. He is close behind, much closer, much faster than I ever would have thought.

"We should call the police," I say, and my mother stares back at me, impa.s.sive. She has picked up the cards I laid out and is holding them in a fan. But which police? The ones in Amarillo? I could tell them they can help close a mugging case several states away, and all they have to do is take on one of the most influential families in the city. Call the cops in Fruiton? I'm not sure how to explain to them who I am and how I know an angry man in Texas rolled their drunk. Thom is no doubt already home and alibied five ways from Sunday by Joe and Charlotte and his middle brother, as loyal and ball-free as a neutered dog. I may only succeed in giving Thom a better bead on my location. "Should we call the police?" I ask.

"They never did me much good," my mother says. "I need to think." I look at her hand, pinching those cards so tight that her fingers are as white as fine china.

Upstairs, I hear my mother's bedroom clock chime one. We have come to the end of the witching hour, and I am wasting time. I have to go, and quickly.

But my mother moves first, walking quickly past me to the front door. Gret starts to climb down off the love seat, but I tell her, "Stay." I don't want my dog out in this dark night when Thom is coming. It's foggy out, and the wind pushes its way across the floor to touch me, misty and cold. It lifts my mother's layered skirts, swirling them around her calves. She looks more gyspy now than she ever did at the airport. More gypsy and less my mother.

"I'm sure we can fix this," she says, firm voiced, stuffing the cards into her skirt pocket. But my daddy is dead, and there is no we. Thom is coming, and there is no fixing.

She turns away from me and takes a deep breath, poised on her toes at the edge of the doorway like it is a diving board. Then she steps off, and she pulls the door closed behind her.

I stand up. I have to pack. I need to be a hundred miles up the coast of California and ready to swap cars by morning. I am at the foot of the stairs before it occurs to me to wonder what other trails of mine Thom might be tracking.

All at once, my heart skips a beat and I run back to the phone I abandoned on the floor and dive down to grab it, dialing a number that I know by heart.

Mrs. Fancy's machine picks up, and her soft voice says, "I can't get to the phone right now-"

I hang up. Mrs. Fancy has even less reason than my father to be out at this hour; book clubs and church committees do not meet pre-dawn.

I find I'm rocking back and forth. This is my fault. My father has taken a beating meant for me, and it killed him. If Thom has given another, mine by rights, to frail Mrs. Fancy... The thought does not bear finis.h.i.+ng.

I dial Information again, thinking that my mother is going to have twenty bucks in 411 charges by the time I'm done. Then I almost laugh at the absurdity of worrying about my mother's phone bill, when Mrs. Fancy is not answering her phone and Thom Grandee is snaking his fast way up my still-warm trail, my father's blood on his fists, hungry to kill me.

Information gives me the number of her one son who lives locally. I dial Daren Fancy, and he picks up on ring four.

"h.e.l.lo?" he says. One word, pointed into a sleepy, angry question.

"I'm sorry," I say, "this is Mrs. Fancy's friend. I haven't been able to get ahold of her, and I am very worried-"

He interrupts me, "No, no it's fine. She's fine. She's here."

I can breathe again. "She's there, with you?"

"Yes. Her house was broken into," he says. "She didn't feel safe staying there alone."

"Oh, that's wonderful," I say, and there is an awkward silence. "Not about the break-in, but that you have her, I mean." When I broke Mrs. Fancy's window to get my Pawpy's gun back, I may well have saved her life. I am babbling now. "That neighborhood is going to h.e.l.l."

"No kidding," he says. "Two break-ins in a week."

My mouth is already shaping a fast good-bye, but at that I pause. "Two break-ins?"

"The first time they only broke a window. I suspect they got interrupted," he says, telling me about my own small crime. "But when they came back, they tore her whole house up. I guess her sugar bowl money wasn't enough. What did they expect, I wonder, a little old lady living on her husband's pension? They took up her knives and gutted her mattress, stabbed open every chair and sofa cus.h.i.+on, smashed her dishes, shredded all her clothes. She couldn't have stayed there even if I woulda let her."

Thom again, this time beating a house to death. I have to a.s.sume he has my notebook, all my notes. He has a name for the phantom other man, now. Jim Beverly. I am trying frantically to remember if I wrote down anything that would point him west, toward California. Into my shocked silence, Daren says, "Could you call back later? My mother is sleeping. We all are."

"Of course," I say, "I am so sorry. I am so sorry." I am apologizing for more than waking him, but he takes it at face value and hangs up.

I leave the phone on the floor and get up. I have to go. I have to go now.

I run upstairs and begin pulling my underthings out of the dresser drawers and stuffing them pell-mell into my mother's old cloth bag. I am working quickly, both so I can go and to keep my brain from thinking about how my independent friend has lost her home and how I've helped kill my own daddy. I've killed the pony ride man I do not much remember, the son of a b.i.t.c.h who raised me hard, and that sad old sorry man I met a little more than a week ago. I've led Thom to them all.

I go to the closet and start tearing my clothes down off the hangers, but it is hard to see to pack; I must have started crying again without noticing. Gret is following me back and forth across the room, worried by the noises I am making.

As soon as I have most of my things stuffed inside the bag, I grab it up by the straps and go running downstairs. Gretel follows. Her leash is by the door, and I s.n.a.t.c.h it. Gretel's tail wags uncertainly. She knows something is bad wrong, but still, in her mind a walk is always a good thing.

I'm about to click the leash to her collar when I notice that the bag slung over my shoulder feels light. Too light.

It is missing Pawpy's gun. I cannot leave without that. Not with Thom's hot breath coming up behind me.

I shake my head, unable to remember where I put it. It was in my bedside table... I remember my mother peeling it out of my hands after the sailors left. I have no idea what she has done with it. I drop the bag to the floor with a thump and let the leash jangle down beside it.