Backseat Saints Part 24

"Oh, they all must have," I say in arch tones. "You're pretty irresistible."

"Don't be mean," he says, grinning. "More like five, maybe six, depending on what you'd call a pa.s.s. Two of them while my wife was still alive, which was... awkward. Ginny was really sweet about it. She felt sorry for them, and she knew I was her guy. The others happened long after Ginny. I wasn't thinking about dating. But I was missing the company of women, as they say."

And now I have to ask, "So why did you say no? To them, not me."

"Oh, I slept with them," he says. My eyebrows rise, and now I am thinking my mother is really quite a fine liar. He thinks I am reacting to him, because he's slightly on the defensive as he says, "Not all of 'em."

"How many?" I demand.

"Two. The first one, I wasn't attracted to her, and she was a wreck. Wanted to hurt her husband, I think, more than be with someone." He waves it away with one hand. "But then this blond girl, freckles, long legs. Funny and pretty and really, really crazy. It'd been more than two years. h.e.l.l, I'm not a saint. We were together for a week or so. Then she went back to her husband. I thought, I'm not doing that again."

"But you did," I say.

"Yeah," he says, rueful. "Have you looked at Lilah? It'd be hard to find a single man who wouldn't."

"Lilah," I say, but I'm not surprised. She was lovely, even weeping with half her face smashed in. It would would take a saint to resist her if she came in close and said "please" with her thick black lashes all damp and matted up. take a saint to resist her if she came in close and said "please" with her thick black lashes all damp and matted up.

Parker says, "Just once. I think she wanted to see what it was like with a nice guy. Any nice guy. On my end, it felt like a sneeze. It only made me sad. It only made me miss my wife."

There could be something here, but after tonight, it will never be safe to cross my own old paths again. The best I can hope for is that kissing him has set my mouth for something sweeter down the line, even though it didn't work for Lilah. "Let's leave it," I say. "You're welcome and I'm welcome and we're both thanked."

I start to stand up, but he catches my hand and pulls me back down. The gap between us has closed by a couple of inches. "I'm not done. You want to test-drive a nice guy? Get divorced and then go find one. Decide if you like nice guys in general, but don't come kiss me unless you like me in particular.

"I'm lonely, Ivy. I like how you look, and I like how you do things I don't expect. If your marriage is over-when it's over, I'd like to sit up on the roof with you sometime. I don't want to start like this, with you in hiding, still married. I don't want to be your salad."

I nod at him, because it sounds nice, these things he is saying, like something I might want, too. It is time to stop talking about it. No sense in making leaving harder. No sense in making leaving hard in any way.

"It was a pretty good kiss, though, huh?" I say.

He grins. "It was a h.e.l.luva good kiss."

"Pax," I say, and I stand up. This time he lets me.

"Pax," he answers back. He gets up, too, and walks to the door with Gret on his heels, gazing up at him all adoring, like a groupie.

He opens the door, and I say, "Bye, Parker." Gret and I watch him leave. It's a nice view.

After that, the day drags. Gretel smells my restlessness and asks to go out a hundred times. She doesn't understand why I keep calling her back in, and she follows so close on my pacing heels, whining and worried, that I finally shut her up in my room.

My mother does not appear. I suspect she does not want to say good-bye to me, and that suits me fine. When Saint Cecilia comes, I want my mother to open the door in silence and hand me over like a parcel. Nothing moist. No hugs.

I am repacked, all my clothes now neatly folded, my blue cloth bag by my bedroom door. About six, I make myself eat some toast and an orange. I hear my mother stirring in her room, so I go to mine. Gretel squirts out past me as I enter and trots downstairs. I go in and shut my door to spend my last hours curled in the reading chair finis.h.i.+ng The Bean Trees The Bean Trees. I can hear Gret and my mother rattling around downstairs.

She comes up at eleven-thirty. Gretel is following her, tags jingling. That's unprecedented.

She taps on the door as a courtesy before pus.h.i.+ng it open. Her eyes are circled in brown shadows. She's carrying a mug of something hot. I can see steam rising. Gret stays beside her, her nose pointing at my mother's pocket. Also unprecedented.

My mother sees my raised eyebrows and says, "We've made friends."

"Really?" I ask, skeptical.

"No. But I put cheese in my pocket, and to a dog that's almost the same thing." She pulls out a cube of cheddar, and Gret takes it delicately from her fingers. I am smiling in spite of myself at this concession. It's the kind of good-bye gesture I can stomach.

"Did you eat?" she asks, and I nod. "Good, that'll help. How are your sea legs?"

"My what?" I ask.

"I think you're going up or down the coast on someone's boat," she says. "The Saint Cecilia didn't tell me that, of course, but she suggested you take Dramamine." She comes over and hands me the mug. It smells like chamomile and honey. She pulls a white bottle of drugstore motion sickness pills out of her cheese pocket and shakes two into her palm.

I nod and uncurl from the chair. I sit up straight to take the pills, was.h.i.+ng them down with a sip of the hot tea. Even with the honey, I don't care for it. I set the mug beside me on the table.

"May I wait with you?" she asks in formal tones. I nod, and she sits on the bed. She must be out of cheese, because Gretel does not join her. Instead she goes and lies down on the area rug in front of the dresser.

The minutes tick past in uneasy silence. Finally I say, "Want me to strip the bed?"

"Why?" she asks.

"Fresh linens," I say. "For the next girl."

"Heh," she says. I am not sure if the noise is a snort or a laugh, but either way, it is a no. "Do you really think, Rose Mae, that there will ever be a next girl?"

I don't know how to answer that.

"I can't stay," I say. She says nothing, and I say with more emphasis, "You're the one who told me all along that he is coming. I have to go."

"We've covered this," she says, her tone brisk, almost bored. But she has such haunted, awful eyes. They seem to have grown two sizes larger in her face.

I think, This is the only parent I have left alive now This is the only parent I have left alive now, and it makes me sick and dizzy to think that, so I stop. I want to ask her to leave, but it is right for her to be here, for her to give me away. If we'd had a good family, the kind I've read about in novels, she would have given me away eventually. I would have had a sober daddy to stand beside her in a chapel and hand me to a better man than Thom Grandee. When the priest asked, "Who gives this woman?" he would have said, "Her mother and I."

We were never them. But she's called Saint Cecilia for me. She has given my dog a cube of cheese. She seems to understand I will not stand for any sort of tearstained, loving parting, so she made me tea.

I pick it up and drink it, as a gift to her, the best I have to give back. It is too hot to be swallowed this quickly. It scalds my throat, and I remember Thom Grandee on the night we met, drinking hot chocolate and my spittle, taking me in. My throat closes and I stop. I set down the mostly empty mug.

My mother and I sit in our separate spots. I feel the tick of each second like a heartbeat. I am listening for the doorbell. I still feel a little dizzy. I should have eaten more. My mother stands abruptly, dizzying me further. I hear the clock in her room, chiming midnight for the gla.s.s animals. Saint Cecilia is late.

"Are you all right, Rose Mae?" my mother asks. Her voice sounds very distant.

"I don't know," I say.

"I think you might be having an allergic reaction," she says. "Have you ever taken Dramamine before?"

I shake my head and the room swims slightly, like it is full of water that needs to slosh the furniture around to catch up to my head shakes.

"You'd better have some Benadryl," she says. She comes to me, and now she holds out a pink pill. I take it with the last inch of the cooling tea. The dregs are bitter. I drink them anyway.

My mother takes the mug from my heavy fingers. She sits on the bed, and a minute pa.s.ses, or maybe it is longer. Time has changed. I can't tell how long I've sat since the pink pill. Now I am looking at my dog. My dog is rosy. My dog glows with holy goodness. Her goodness is a light in her that outbrights the lamp.

"You are a good dog," I say, and I hear how my voice slurs and catches on the vowels. My bright dog stays snoring heavily on the rug. "Gret," I call. Nothing. "Gretel? Good dog? Big fat? Dogly?" I say. She snores on, though all of her names have now been called.

My eyes are made of lead. I can feel them sinking backwards down into my skull as I turn them on my mother.

She watches me with dead-eyed, clinical interest.

I stand up, too, and the floor tilts under me like the floor of a boat, but I know now there is no boat.

I call, "Momma," as if she is very far away. She teleports to stand beside me, holding me up, and the skin of her on my skin is cool and smooth.

"You gave my dog cheese," I accuse her. I try to say, "Unprecedented," but it is too many syllables, and my tongue gets tangled up in them. The doorbell is silent, and I say, "You didn't call in Saint Cecilia."

"Of course not, baby," my mother says.

She lowers me down onto my back on the wood floor. It feels as slick and cool as her inhuman flesh. I stick to it. I can't get up.

"Gret," I call, but Gret snores on.

I should have realized. I should have understood. I was close to realizing today. I try to say, "Parker's d.i.c.k works fine, and you are a fantastic liar." I'm not sure how much of that she understands. It's like a long slur of mumbled vowels.

"Sleep now, baby. You know that I can't let you leave."

My mother looms down and puts her gla.s.s hands on me. She is bending me. I am folded on my side into an S-shape on the hardwood floor, and she lies down by me and slips her shoes off. She turns her feet to me. I am so waterlogged and heavy that I cannot move away from her feet.

The feet push at me, moving me along the floor, toward the bed. I slide along the slick wood. The world turns sideways for me as I move, so now I feel that I am sliding down a wall. The crack under the bed opens below me. It is a hole in the world, and she will bury me there and trap me so I can never leave. I must stay like a plug and fill this hole of a room. Her feet push me down. The room is a pit trap, just as Saint Sebastian showed me, but it is not Thom Grandee sitting at the lip of it, closing me in. It is my mother.

The crack of light s.h.i.+ning from the top is blocked then. My mother's inexorable feet are pus.h.i.+ng my drugged dog down into the pit on top of me, like a hairy lid.

Gretel eclipses the lamplight. It is so dark that I do not know if my eyes are closed or open. I don't know anything at all.

A long gray time later, I come to understand that I am not in any hole. I am five years old. I am under a bed, my bed. My spine presses against the wall. I smell hound and hear a doggish rumbled breathing. Leroy has crept down under with me. We are hiding. I hear my daddy, and he is very, very angry. He has a voice like a big storm.

Under his voice, I hear my mother. Her voice is angry, a hiss, goading him. I wait for the sounds that will come, although I do not want to hear them. That thunderous boom of his voice will stop, and when it does his hands will talk for him, talk to her flesh in hard tones while I hide here. In the morning she will move very, very slowly as she makes my eggs. He might take her face away again, leave her with a monster face, purple-black and almost eyeless. Then we won't go out. He'll bring home groceries to say sorry, and she will creep slow around the kitchen to make the groceries into dinner.

"Ivy," Saint Cecilia calls.

"Shhh," I tell her. I am five, and we must be very quiet now. My mother is a fantastic liar, and Saint Cecilia doesn't know my true name. Saint Cecilia will not bring me to a boat.

"Rose Mae," Saint Sebastian calls. It is harder to ignore him. He made me win the race. I wrap my arms around myself. I can feel the softness of my own b.r.e.a.s.t.s, full for my small frame; my spine may be against the wall, but Saint Sebastian and my b.r.e.a.s.t.s do not believe that I am five. I have not been five for a long time.

"Rose Mae," he says again, and my name reminds me who I am. I do not hide under beds with dogs and cry and hope someone will come and make it stop. I am all grown now, and I will make my daddy stop. It is only fair that he should stop now that he is dead.

I push with weak hands at my dog, and I can't move her. My Gretel is a fat, wide wall.

"This way..." Sebastian's voice sounds somewhere near the top of my head. I crane my neck back and see there is a crack of gray light at the bed's foot. It is the light of a foggy morning. I creep longwise, leaving Gret where she snores, until I am out from under the bed's end by the door. I stand up, but the floor is so tilty that I have to lean on the wall. Now the silver morning air seems blinding bright, and the air is full of prisms.

Downstairs, Daddy is so angry, and how he can be angry when the light is this pretty is a mystery. I creep along the wall like a clever little creepy thing, trying to walk soft in Ivy's clompy boots. I will make him stop before he hits her. I have left my gun in Mrs. Fancy's s...o...b..x, but I can tell him no, because I am Daddy's favorite. My mother told me so, and I think this may be true, though G.o.d and Saint Sebastian know my mother is an excellent liar. Even so, I will stop him with my giant head that is hard and weighs a thousand pounds. I tote it like a great and wobbling weapon on my Silly Putty neck. I grab the banister and hand-crawl myself down the steps, stair by slippy stair. At the bottom, the closed front door ripples in its wriggling frame.

I come down full of mighty, like I came down when there were bad sailors. At the bottom, I grab the banister post to turn myself away from the front door to look at the back of the room where my mother is standing. Her smile is smug and goady as she leans with her b.u.t.t against the edge of her reading table. He is loomed up over her, taller than I ever remember him being.

His hair is bright and yellow like wheat.

This is not my daddy.

This is not the sailor.

I hold myself up with the banister post. I know this man. My mother sees me, and her smug face changes to despairing, and her mouth is shaping words-"No! G.o.d, no!"-and the man who is not sailors or my daddy turns, and he is Thom and his dead eyes kindle to see me there. He is Thom come to kill me, and he smiles his wide bright monster smile with his teeth so white, and he says, "There's my girl!"

He puts one big palm on my mother's chest without turning and he pushes her, hard, so that she falls and flips back over the table and disappears. I am alone with him. He is walking toward me, his big hands empty and flexing at his sides. I spin around, and the room keeps spinning as I open the front door and stumble through it, out onto the porch, which is tipping and tilting like a fun-house floor.

The sunlight slaps my eyes. Lilah stands by the gate, hands kneading the fence top. When she sees me, her wide mouth stretches to make an O.

"Run," I say to her. The word is a roaring in my head, but it comes out barely a whisper. She stands still, making her O mouth, and I can't run, either.

I tumble straight off the porch and fall into a loamy flower bed, crus.h.i.+ng the dahlias. I crawl away as fast as I can. It is early morning, and Lilah has a host of fresh new bruises and wide eyes, round to match her mouth, and I know she must see Thom behind me.

I flip onto my back to see how close he is. He is standing at the edge of the porch, fifty times taller than he has ever been before. I crab backwards.

"She called you," I say to him. "My got-d.a.m.n mother told you where I was."

He nods. He is done yelling. His face is restful now and set because here I am in front of him, too weak to do more than keep creeping backwards. My head hits the fence and I am far down from the gate and I can't make my legs stand up and take me through it anyway.

"Both your parents have been very helpful," he says, smiling his dead smile. His big hands flex, and he jumps lightly down onto the ruined flowers I tore up with my crawling. He says, "Let's finish this, hey, Ro?"

"I am calling the police!" screams Lilah, standing phoneless and unmoving behind me at the fence. He doesn't even glance at her. She does not matter. Nothing matters to him but that I am here in front of him, and his big hands fold and unfold and he steps out of the flower bed and crosses half the small s.p.a.ce in between us in only two big steps.

A great calm takes me. I see that this is finished now. We are about to be finished. Only seconds stand between us. There is only one thing that I need to know.

"The card," I say, and he pauses, as if he wants to hear the last words I will say to him. "The one that fell faceup in the airport. I guessed right, didn't I? It was Justice."

"I don't even know what that means, babe," Thom says, stepping toward me once again. His open hands come toward my throat, but I wasn't asking him.

I was asking my mother, standing behind him with Pawpy's .45 pointing right up at the base of his skull.

"Yes," my mother says, and pulls the trigger.

I see Thom's face go away, his forehead, that Roman nose I always liked, the whole top of his face folds open like a bright flower. I am washed in red before my eyes can close, before I even hear the boom, before Lilah begins her long, unceasing screams.

I crawl sideways, three feet away, before I dare look. He has landed mercifully, mercifully, on his belly. The hole in the wheat-bright back of his head is small, almost tidy. Lilah is still screaming, loud and strident, and now her scream is words, and the words are, "No, Mirabelle! No, Mirabelle, no!" Her face is speckled in bright crimson, and under her cries I hear the rising sound of sirens coming.

The porch fills up with nervous dogs, all milling. Cesar adds in barking, so the yard is a cacophony of ugly sounds. I lean forward, crawl a few feet to get my mouth closer to Thom's ear.

"Baby?" I say. "Baby?"

There is no answer. There is no Thom.

"Shut up, Lilah," my mother says, and then more harshly, "Shut up, dog!" Lilah obeys, but there is no stopping Cesar. I look at my mother because it's better than looking at Thom. A thousand times better. My mother says to me, over Cesar's noise, "I couldn't have you leaving, Rose Mae."

"Now you'll have to leave," I say.

"Oh, that's all right, then," she says. "I'm used to that."