by Deborah Reed
Her hands shook as she hacked the waxy vegetables, ripped the greens, swung and flailed until the gelatinous insides of fleshy tomatoes oozed like bloody snot between her fingers.
When she stopped, her head hurt so badly that she wondered if she’d accidentally stabbed her own skull. She came to her feet, dizzy and nauseous, one eye closed as she gazed through a peacock-blue tunnel surrounded by swing-back lawn chairs, a stainless steel grill, potted daisies on the brick patio.
She let go the vomit that had been threatening all morning.
Fluke came running. She spit her mouth clean and dropped the trowel, caught her breath, and lifted Fluke to her cheek, felt his quick heart thumping against her bone. She kissed his forehead, placed him back on the grass, and then fumbled her way inside the house and down the stairs into the basement.
Skis and extra lawn chairs passed the edges of her vision like wheat in the wind. She caught her balance on the stacked boxes of Rudi’s childhood paraphernalia—stamp and coin collections, children’s books about giant geese and wolves and a child with scissors for hands.
In the storage room against the wall, Rudi had organized the luggage into rows of neat pyramids, large on bottom, medium in the middle, and small on top. Elin yanked the largest from the bottom, and the rest tumbled to the floor.
The phone rang as she dragged the suitcase upstairs and through the kitchen. Fluke paced between the stools and her feet, then ran to his bowl and sniffed. There was no hand signal she could give him to help him understand.
Elin released the luggage and tottered in place. It was as if she’d stepped into the ocean, waves pulling her one way then another. She lifted the suitcase again but dropped it, the plastic handle hitting the tile with a loud pop. Fluke shot down the hall, and the phone seemed to have stopped ringing and then started again. Elin squeezed her grimy hands into fists before reaching for the handset. “What?” she said, smelling soil, peppers, vomit. “What?”
Her mother’s voice was saying Kate. Hospital. Girls. These girls. Pepsi. A snake.
“I need you to come,” her mother said, her scratchy voice so much like Kate’s, breaking through as if the volume were suddenly turned way too high.
Elin tried twice to say, “No. I’m already going somewhere,” but the words just would not come.
SEVEN
AVERLEE COULD SEE THE BOTTOM was about to fall out of the box her grandmother was lifting off the bed, but she had no time to say so before an avalanche of photographs broke free and spilled to the floor near Averlee’s knees.
“Son of a bitch,” her grandmother said, grappling an arm underneath until she finally gave up and tossed the collapsed box back onto the bed. “Sorry,” she said. “I forgot you two were here.”
She kneeled on the floor, stared at the mess, and then held up a photo for them to see. Her hand was red-knuckled, green veins twisting across the top. She smelled like cigarettes. “Do you recognize that girl right there?” she said. “That’s your mother at the beach with your aunt Elin.”
Averlee studied the picture. The girls were the size of her and Quincy, squinting against the sun. Stringy hair and long towels hung from their shoulders; the ocean filled the space behind their legs.
Quincy leaned in for a look.
Their grandmother leaned, too. She said, “See how Averlee favors your aunt Elin in the eyes and mouth? You see, Averlee?”
It was true, like squinting back at herself. Averlee had never seen a picture of her mother as a girl, and she couldn’t take her eyes off this miniature version, like a plastic figurine from one of Quincy’s shelves. Last night Averlee had poked her mother’s arm at the kitchen table, causing her head to wobble toward the row of orange pill bottles. It was dark, only the street lamp along the curtain’s edge to see what was before her, and Averlee had waited for her mother to move, the refrigerator humming loudly at her back. She did not turn on the light.
“That’s Mommy in this picture?” Quincy asked.
“So you can talk after all,” their grandmother said.
Quincy wiped her nose on the back of her hand.
The air conditioner sputtered and a frosty chill stung the sweat on Averlee’s neck.
Quincy traced their mother’s long hair in the photograph. “I don’t get it,” she said to Averlee. “That’s you in the picture with Mommy.”
“Weren’t you listening? Don’t be silly,” Averlee said.
“I’m not silly.”
“How could that be me in a picture with Mommy when she was little?”
“It looks like you.”
“She says it’s Mommy’s sister.” Averlee gestured a hand toward their grandmother but didn’t turn to look at her.
A heavy quiet lay like a coat across Averlee’s back.
“I prefer ‘Grandma’ to ‘she,’ ” her grandmother said, in a voice so much like her own mother’s, so much like the one she used months ago when, instead of asking Averlee to light a match for her, she tried over and over until she lit one herself at the sink, but never turned to light the candle on the counter. The fire burned down to her mother’s finger, and when Averlee touched her arm, the match flew into the drain and her mother said, “For God’ssssssake. For. God’s…” Her perfume hung in the kitchen long after she’d closed herself up in her bedroom.
“Can we look at all of them?” Quincy asked.
“I don’t see why not,” their grandmother said as she gathered the photographs back onto the bed. She checked her watch. “I need to see if I can get that aunt of yours to answer her phone.” She stood as if waiting for Averlee and Quincy to speak.
They didn’t, and now the room felt strangely empty without their grandmother rattling in the corners. They had been here before. Averlee couldn’t place it exactly, but the mix of cigarettes and coffee, the rose-scented air freshener was familiar. The cookie jar shaped like a clock on the kitchen counter. She had seen it, tasted lemon wafers from inside it. They had been here before they had enough words to remember it by.
And now she’d left them alone. But it wasn’t her grandmother Averlee missed. It was the braided rug in her bedroom at home, smelling like the cherry sucker Quincy broke between her teeth and let fall like slivers of red glass between the seams.
Her grandmother’s voice carried down the hall. “Hospital… Snake… These girls.”
Averlee liked to flop onto her belly and read on that rug. She liked the sound of wasps floating to and from a nest outside her window, sometimes ticking the glass as if the heat were too much, even for them. The book she hadn’t finished was still there, one of the things she’d meant to grab when the police said they had to go, but she forgot as soon as Quincy started to cry. Now she wondered if they were ever going home, if she would ever find out what happened at the end of that series. Neighbors becoming werewolves, cheerleaders turned into vampires, a teacher turned zombie on the weekends. What Averlee hated about those books was what she loved. By the end, none of those things would turn out to be true.
Quincy placed the photographs across the bed until they resembled rooms in a house, some long and dark, others square and bright. Familiar-looking strangers filled each one.
Before today Averlee had never known she’d had other relatives besides her grandmother, who’d disappeared long ago like her father, and her aunt Elin, whom she’d never seen at all. Now their grandmother was back, and Averlee held in her hand a picture of a man who resembled her mother, his hair parted with the same twist and dip, his tooth a little crooked in the same small way in the bottom front row behind the same pouty lip. He swung a girl by her wrists, and her long hair flung through the air, her bare feet flying as if she were a baby, but she wasn’t. She couldn’t have been much younger than Quincy was now. That swinging girl was Averlee’s mother.
“Who do you think they are?” Quincy asked over her shoulder.
The thought of her mother having a daddy who swung her by her wrists caused a sharp pain in Averlee’s head. “Don’t know,”
she said, and lifted an old-timey snapshot of a woman with a baby in her lap. Another of a man with a mule. They didn’t resemble anyone she knew.
Quincy turned over the photograph of the man swinging the girl, pointing out something in pencil across the back. “I can’t read the cursive,” she said.
When Averlee didn’t say anything, Quincy patted her hand the way their mother used to, and just like their mother, she said, “It’s never as bad as you think, Ave.”
Down the hall their grandma said, “Well. That may be. But that was then. What on earth do you expect me to do now?”
“Jackson,” Averlee read to Quincy from the photograph. “And his baby girl.”
Averlee hopped off the bed and imitated her mother’s zombie walk all the way into the living room, a sad-looking limp from when she could at least still walk.
This was the house her mother had grown up in but never talked about. Maybe that was where she sat and watched TV, on a sofa the color of an apricot with matching chairs. Maybe the bubbly light strung on a chain was what she read by. And all those gold-framed paintings of lakes and barns, the ugly brown drapes, the line of glass elephants next to a ball of hairy yarn on a shelf. Maybe all things that her mother had once touched, or even owned.
Averlee shifted her hip, made the bad leg worse.
“Still. You don’t sound right,” her grandmother said into the phone. “Are you having one of those headaches?”
Averlee dragged herself to the front door, where she stared out the window past the screened porch into the yard next door, at the neighbor’s red truck. Then she realized she was pretending with the wrong leg and switched her weight and lumbered to the picture window, pulling her foot across the carpet, which wasn’t quite right but she liked the way the fibers folded into a dark line behind her heel.
“Hold on,” her grandmother said into the phone. “Is something wrong with your leg?” she called out.
Averlee turned.
“What in the Sam Hill is wrong with your leg?”
EIGHT
ELIN COULD HAVE FLOWN TO Central Florida and arrived within hours, but the idea of a road trip held for her a kind of hope, a chance to see some country, to clear her head of love, of the question of love. A journey instead of a trip, instead of a rescue, instead of sticking her dog in a cargo crate and shipping him in subnormal temperatures at thirty thousand feet above the earth.
“Are you ready for our journey?” she asked Fluke, who turned, skeptically, from the backseat window where he’d been peering out toward their house. Elin hit the gas and knocked him onto the pebbled leather.
It took several days on the road for her headache to completely dissolve. But in its place a groggy weight, like a sloshy bladder of wine behind her eyes, tipped her balance if she moved too quickly while rising from the car to fill her gas tank, or use the bathroom, or lean against the car while Fluke ran circles in a patch of grass. Steady, while checking into hotels that smelled of cigarettes and gas station pastries. Careful, while drinking thin, tasteless coffee, heat rising, humidity worming her hair, hands grimy no matter how many times she squirted the pungent minimart cleansers into her palm, but finally, finally, the headache left her alone.
Other than Rudi, she told no one she was leaving, and him by leaving a handwritten note near the phone. Enjoy Poppy was all it said. Of the twenty-two messages Rudi had left on her cell in three days, she hadn’t listened to a single one.
The updates from her mother about Kate had hit a dead end. Kate was awake, this much they knew, but knew only because she was refusing visitors, including her own mother. It was just like her to be so rotten, even at a time like this. The staff wouldn’t release any information, other than to confirm that Kate was still there. It had been three days.
In the meantime, Elin’s life streamed behind her like a kite—answering work emails at rest stops, shipping her ideas into the Oregon ether at her back. The scenery she’d wanted to lose herself in turned out to be little more than a soft smudge at the edge of her vision—from the red mountains of Arizona to the rust-colored Texas plains—but that was fine, just as well, all that beauty made her uneasy. Every spark of pleasure was crippled by a tender torment. Her affection for Fluke drove her mind straight to Poppy. To feel love, even dog-love, was to imagine Rudi in the bathroom with Elin at home, Rudi in the bathroom with Poppy at work. Elin could do without the purple mountains. She was grateful that between the amber fields and sapphire lakes, miles of dull, chaotic sprawl filled the country in.
Her wagon was filthy from Louisiana rain, and by the time she reached the golden sunshine of northern Florida the windows were so spattered with lovebugs that everything inside, including Elin, was cast against dozens of splotchy shadows.
At dusk on the fourth day she pulled into the driveway of the Whistling Willows Bed and Breakfast, just east of Orlando. With her nieces in her mother’s spare room, Elin was free, thankfully, to stay where she liked. Her hips ached and her legs gave slightly as she rose into the soupy air that smelled of oranges and freshly cut grass. She braced a hand against the sizzling car, and drew it back. Crusty insects chipped off beneath her fingers. Their acidic bodies would wreak havoc on the paint.
She’d forgotten how thick and deeply green the leaves grew, how solidly the trees gripped the earth. Everywhere orange and red blossoms were shooting throughout the year.
She wiped her fingers on the rear of her shorts and studied the house—a milky, placid manor hemmed in on three sides by what the Internet claimed was one of the few remaining orange groves in Central Florida. Enormous white pillars of a Greek-revival portico, a long wooden porch shaded by ancient live oaks, all set against the expanse of a manicured lawn. Two weeping willows drooped along the stone walkway. The horizon glowed an unnatural orange-red through dangling oranges, the entire scene a giant mural of the South.
The oval placard at the end of the driveway read PETS WELCOME in fine, loopy script. Beneath that—SMOKERS ARE NOT. It was August and the heat trapped inside the blacktop penetrated Elin’s thin leather soles. She opened the passenger door and Fluke leaped into the grass, where he immediately lifted a leg, peed on a row of bright pink azaleas, and then ventured across the yard. Elin had left Florida nearly a decade ago without any intention of returning, but here was her beloved Oregon dog scratching his back in thick Saint Augustine grass beneath a giant oak draped in moss, and the whole scene so disoriented her that she yanked the suitcase from the wagon just to feel in charge.
“You must be Elin!” a voice called out. The large oak door stood open, and a trim, dark-haired woman, late fifties perhaps, said, “Welcome, welcome, come on in.” She scooped the air above her head as she came off the porch and cut across the yard.
“I’m guessing you’re Marianne Mayes,” Elin said.
“I am just that, but everybody calls me Shug, like sugar, don’t ask me why. Goes back so far I don’t even know how it got started.” Her handshake was strong as a man’s. “You need some help with your things there?”
“No, thank you. I’ve only got the one suitcase. Short trip.” She closed the tailgate. “That’s Fluke, by the way, making himself at home.”
“Hey, boy,” Shug said, patting her thighs.
Fluke stopped and shook his head, before taking off to sniff the next tree.
“Well. Oregon,” Shug said, as if it were Elin’s name.
Elin wiped the sweat around her nose.
“I had a cousin moved out there when her husband wanted to get into the seed-growing business, if you can imagine a notion like that. Didn’t matter anyway cause they turned right back around after six months. Couldn’t stand all that rain. Said it liked to never let up.”
Sweat dribbled down Elin’s scalp and around her ears. Less than five minutes in the heat and already her cotton blouse clung to her chest. “It does get pretty wet in the winter,” she said. “But if you’re patient enough summer comes around like nothing you’ve ever seen.”
“Well,
if you’re patient enough anything’s bound to come around sooner or later.”
Elin released the handle of her luggage and whistled sharply with her fingers. Fluke jumped to his feet and ran to her side.
If Shug was impressed with his training she didn’t show it. She led them into the house and up the winding oak staircase to the second floor. “Here’s your key, darlin’. Breakfast is at eight if that’s all right with you.” She kneeled and scratched under Fluke’s chin. “Righty roo,” she said, and was gone.
Elin rolled her luggage next to the brass bed, where Fluke had already stretched out beneath a spinning ceiling fan. She was surprised to find herself charmed by the Southern kitsch. Handmade dolls on a chest of drawers. Black-and-white portraits of families from another century hung in neat little tiers of lace frames on the rose-colored walls. Ducks, hearts, a doily beneath the Lord’s Prayer carved into a block of wood on the nightstand. Next to that, a frosted bowl of hard candies.
Elin fell back onto the quilt, patted Fluke’s hip, and closed her eyes but felt as if she were still driving, the whole country zooming west to east, traveling back in time. She opened her eyes and the fan made it worse. Not just the movement, but the way it filled the room with the smell of warm cedar windowpanes, so familiar that Elin sat up, recalling her mother at the dinner table, the two of them watching a plate of pork chops lose their steam, a bowl of sweet potatoes curling into their skins. Kate was crying down the hall on the other side of the bathroom door. Fourteen years old, crying that she was going to use a razor. She meant it, she said, she was going to use that razor on herself right now. She beat what sounded like her fists on the edge of the sink. The ceiling fan spun above the table.
