Sugar Run: A Novel

by Mesha Maren

  They’d driven south from Texas and at some point the white crosses they were taking had lost their peak and Paula started crushing up the Dexedrine, first to snort and later to shoot. Jodi was sick with fear the first time they shot it—the headlights of passing cars raking across the dashboard as Paula mixed the hit and drew it up through a cotton ball. That first time, she couldn’t look at the needle or at Paula’s face but soon it was all a part of the rarefied joy of it, the anticipation coming on in a rush from the moment Paula ties off her arm.

  Jodi reaches into the backseat and opens their carpetbag; all their belongings are stuffed inside that orange caterpillar—clothes and shoes and, somewhere among the jumble, a little leather purse with Effie’s .38 tucked inside. The pistol frightens Paula, which makes Jodi smile just a little. It keeps Jodi company too; she polishes, cleans, and oils it during the long nights of poker games when Paula is gone and she is alone in the backseat of the car, sweating and zipping along her own brain highway.

  She folds the ten-thousand-peso bill in beside the pistol and, slipping the purse over her shoulder, climbs out of the car and follows a dirt path along the edge of the building and on past a wooden sign that says playa. The heat rests in layers around her, shifting as she moves through the smell of something burnt and something deeper, the musk of too-ripe fruit.

  The crisp disk of the sea meets sand that is as clean as sugar. Unbroken except for one tan woman with a shock of bronze hair and a boy under an umbrella with a table of coconuts, cigarettes, and bottles of blue and white liquors.

  Down at the water’s edge the salt breeze spins around Jodi. Lifting her arms high, she feels the weight of the leather purse against her hip and closes her eyes, listening for Paula to call her name. Love with a capital L. She needs to hear those words over and over again. Every time that Paula says them, the hunger-wound inside her ebbs away a little. Still, she is unsure how to picture their future. She has never felt that she could properly see herself. There are the basics—her age and weight and schooling—but Effie was the only one who could ever really see her. Her parents couldn’t, she is sure of it; otherwise why would they have left her? She seems out of focus to herself most of the time; only now, with Paula, do things feel a little clearer. The way she sees it, she is always staring out from her own center but she is yet to master the trick of looking in. If she could just line up the way the world must see their love with the way this all feels, then everything would come into clearer view. If she could push back the words—dyke, queer—then everything would make sense and turn out all right. Sometimes, though, the terror of it grips her, the knowledge that she is not seen at all, or seen only backward and out of focus. It is a feeling she is sure will crush her someday.

  A sound that was at first a bell—an alarm, a car horn—reached Jodi and she startled. The phone rang out loudly from the small table beside her, barely visible in the shadowy room. She grabbed the receiver.

  “Your name’s Jodi?” a woman’s voice shouted.

  Jodi held the phone a few inches from her face.

  “This man keeps calling the front desk, saying he needs me to tell you to come over to Alister’s. I didn’t patch his calls through ’cause he don’t know your last name or room number.”

  Jodi stared at the earpiece of the phone where the woman’s voice leaked out.

  “You’ve got to go over there and tell them to quit calling.”

  Outside, the parking lot still held the heat of the set sun, and Jodi walked as if she’d never left her dream, the air all the same except that it lacked the salt of the sea.

  Before she even opened the door, she could feel the beat of the bar, a packed bass rhythm of Friday night, a shift in chemistry. Alister looked up as she walked in and pointed down to the end of the room where Miranda stood on a table, spinning, the edge of her skirt skimming the tops of three men’s heads. Jodi felt a panic rise inside her at the sight of Miranda’s skin. She thought of her, naked in the motel bed, the arch of her back and her heavy breasts.

  “Hey.” Alister motioned Jodi over to the bar. “Miranda’s feeling wild tonight,” he said. “I thought maybe you could hang out with her for a while. She was asking around for you earlier.”

  Jodi rolled her eyes. She barely knew this woman and already it seemed she was somehow responsible for babysitting her. But the truth was, she’d been happy for the phone call, happy that there was someone in this world who would bother trying to find her.

  “Hey, Randy,” Alister called out over the bar. “Your friend’s here.”

  Miranda stopped spinning and her dress fell down to her legs. One man ran his fingers up her thigh, catching hold of the skirt, but she flinched and pushed his hand away. “Hey,” she said to Jodi. “Why’d you leave?”

  “Why did I leave?”

  “I come by your room this afternoon, looking for you.”

  Jodi shook her head but helped Miranda down and led her toward the bar, holding her hand high and light as if she were about to curtsy to the crowd.

  “What happened to going clean?”

  “I’m not taking the pills anymore, it’s those pills that distract me.” Miranda widened her eyes. “Hey, baby,” she called out to Alister. “Pour me a good one.”

  She clinked their glasses together and when she leaned her head onto Jodi’s shoulder Jodi felt a humming inside her, a special current of electricity.

  “God,” Miranda said, “I’m so glad you’re here. I love you.”

  Jodi laughed. “Yeah, right, me and every man in this bar.”

  “No,” Miranda said without lifting her head. “You.”

  Jodi laughed again but she did not pull away. Miranda’s overfamiliarity felt strange but also somehow comforting. She looked down at the blonde head on her shoulder, smelling of sweat and coconut shampoo, and she wondered when exactly those words had lost their meaning for her. Those sparkling declarations of love turned as bland as unsalted butter. She heard her own voice, clawing and begging with those same words. I love you. God, I love you so much. And Paula’s passive face. You’ve got to quit saying that. You know those phrases stop meaning anything when you repeat them like that. But how else to explain that instant, dizzying bond?

  “What’s his name?”

  Jodi swallowed and focused on Miranda.

  “Your friend. Alister said you couldn’t find your friend today.”

  Jodi was tired and already too drunk. She gripped the bar, trying to remember exactly how much she’d had to drink. The bottle back at the motel was nearly gone but how many hours ago was that?

  “You didn’t find nothing?”

  Jodi shrugged. “His mother told me he worked at some music museum but there are no museums here and—”

  “What about the Folk and Country?”

  “Folk and Country?” Jodi shook her head.

  “Over in Delray, the Georgia Folk and Country Musicians Museum. They’ve got a big Lee display.”

  Jodi narrowed her vision, tunneled it in on Miranda’s flushed face. “Why didn’t nobody else tell me about this?”

  “Well, it’s over in Delray.”

  “You’ll take me there?”

  She nodded.

  The room swayed unevenly. Jodi gripped her glass of bourbon. Miranda was still talking but Jodi was only half-listening.

  “I knew when I met you,” Miranda said, “we had a special connection.”

  Jodi shook her head. She wanted to laugh off Miranda’s gushing “I love yous” and “special connections” but at the same time she wanted desperately to believe in them. Despite herself she liked Miranda’s high-pitched reactions, the way she poured it all out so openly. It reminded her of a painting she had once seen through the window of an art gallery in Dallas, layers of pink and ranges of corals and roses that were globbed onto the canvas in thick streaks, growing darker until, in the middle, they formed a gash of raw-heart red.

  “A meteor fell from the Alabama sky once,” Miranda said. “Hit a woman
in her sleep.”

  The noise of the room seemed at once too close and very far away. Jodi got half her shot down and felt a little steadier.

  “A meteor what?”

  “Out of all the places in the universe it could’ve hit, it came through the roof and landed on her hip.” Miranda pushed her empty shot glass across the countertop. “Talk about coincidence, now that’s a coincidence.”

  Jodi smiled, watching the green glass lamplight play over Miranda’s shiny hair and the cigarette smoke building in layers above her. She turned slowly, fresh drink in hand, and Jodi pictured her as a bright ball hurtling through the universe and coming to land, violent and precise, on someone’s sleeping skin.

  “Where is this music museum again?” Jodi leaned against the bar.

  “Over in Delray, same fucking place where Lee’s got my babies.”

  They drove through Hazeville, Tifton and Willacoochee, nothing but one-pump gas stations and single-story ranch homes with cotton growing right up into the yards.

  “My boys were all born in the afternoon,” Miranda said, taking one last drag on her cigarette and flicking it out the car window toward a billboard that cautioned for the great day of his wrath shall come and who shall be able to stand?

  “I read in an astrology book once all about birth times. I think being born in the afternoon gave my boys a head start. They’re all smarter than most kids their age.”

  Jodi lit one cigarette off another and repeated Miranda’s boys’ names like a newly learned prayer.

  “Kaleb, Donnie, Ross—”

  “You really only have to find Kaleb,” Miranda said, lifting her hair up off her sweaty neck and piling it on top of her head. When she took her hand away the hair fell down again, tumbling across her shoulders. “He’ll be out there by the bus, and if he don’t already have Donnie and Ross with him, just tell him to fetch them.”

  The air smelled of gasoline with a sugary undertone of Miranda’s bubblegum. The heat and lack of sleep weighed on Jodi. They’d stayed at Alister’s until closing again, spitting stories at each other—Jodi enthralled by the coincidence and the smallness of the world and Miranda shrugging it all off. Jodi still had not told the whole truth but she’d explained that Ricky was Paula’s brother and she had said the words dead girlfriend and gun accident.

  Truth or no truth, it hadn’t mattered to Miranda; she wasn’t really interested in Jodi’s past. What she wanted to talk about were her own experiences with Lee, long stretches of hot LA streets, seven-hundred-dollar dresses, and bare feet. It wasn’t until Jodi spoke of the land in West Virginia that Miranda had paid attention. Could she and the boys come stay there for a bit, she had wondered out loud. We just need somewhere to rest for a while, somewhere outside of all this, so we can live together the way we’re supposed to, away from Lee and his aunt and their judgment.

  Jodi had closed her eyes. Her heart picked up at the request but she knew she ought to say no. This was in no way part of the plan but here was this girl with her pretty little face, the soft apple scent of her skin—her knowledge of where Ricky might be and a car that could drive them all out of the state. And somehow she seemed to understand precisely what the land in West Virginia was for, exactly what Jodi and Paula always dreamt it would become: a refuge from judgment.

  “You gotta guess.” Kaleb rattled his Toy Story lunch box for emphasis. “If you don’t guess how many steps, Ross won’t walk.”

  “One million two hundred and thirty-seven trillion, eighty bajillion, kadillion, ten thousand and one!” Donnie shouted.

  He was already almost half a block ahead of them, throwing his Spider-Man backpack up the sidewalk and then running to catch up. But Ross hung back, standing on the corner, staring down at his shoes.

  “Not like that,” Kaleb pleaded. “A for-real guess. He knows when it’s not real.”

  The boys had been together in the bus line when Jodi found them, Kaleb carrying his own lunch box and backpack along with Ross’s. Ross was tiny, even for a six-year-old, tired and stunned looking with Donnie bouncing constantly beside him. Jodi had waited for the teacher to do a last count before she’d approached.

  “Where is Mom anyway?” Kaleb glanced back to the redbrick school and long line of yellow buses.

  “Right up here.” Jodi pointed. “Just like four blocks up here.”

  She’d gotten them to cross the street by telling them that their dad had sent her to pick them up and take them to eat ice cream with their mom. You know Dad? Kaleb had said, and Jodi had smiled big and nodded, feeling the lie lodge tightly in her chest.

  “Where’s your car?” Kaleb looked up the road and then back again, toward the playground with its shining sheet of metal slide and empty swings.

  “Two hundred and four steps,” Jodi said. “I bet you a double-dip ice cream that it’s just two hundred and four steps.”

  Ross smiled and started walking fast, mumbling numbers under his breath.

  Jodi pressed her hand to Kaleb’s back and hurried him, pushing him almost on top of Ross. She swore she heard sirens, shouts, and concerned voices trailing them, and looking at her hand there on Kaleb’s red T-shirt, covering the entirety of his small shoulder, she wondered what the hell she was doing. The idea of helping a mother reunite with her children had sounded good—and Miranda claimed up and down that she still had custody—but now the whole situation felt rumpled and dirty. Three days out of Jaxton and already her life was careening.

  “Donnie, sweetie!” Miranda’s voice pitched out from the alleyway and up through the buzz of afternoon traffic.

  In the gravel lot next to a boarded-up car wash the Chevette sat with all four doors open and beside it stood Miranda, grinning. At the sight of her smile Jodi let her mind unclench; it was a smile so pure and huge that it rang out from every inch of her body.

  Miranda held Donnie to her, his legs dangling just inches above the street, head tucked under her chin, but he was gone from her arms in a second, backpack abandoned as he vaulted himself into the backseat.

  “No seat bets,” he yelled. “There’s no seat bets!”

  “Belts,” Kaleb said, more to himself than anyone else. “Seat belts. There have to be seat belts, it’s a car.”

  “Rossie!” Miranda squealed, bending toward her son.

  Ross kept moving without looking up until his nose touched the maroon metal of the Chevette door.

  “Four hundred and thirty-six steps,” he announced.

  “Ross, baby, come here.” Miranda squatted and pulled him toward her but he held his body stiff.

  “Wrong,” he said, looking back over his shoulder at Jodi. “It was four hundred and thirty-six steps. You were wrong.”

  “Uh-huh, yeah, let’s get in the car.” Jodi pressed her hand against Kaleb’s back but he wouldn’t move.

  “Hi, Mom,” he said, turning toward Miranda. “Neenee says we’re not supposed to go anywhere with you.”

  Miranda blinked. “Hey,” she said. “Nice to see you too.”

  Donnie was right. There were no seat belts in the backseats.

  “That’s not safe,” Kaleb said.

  Jodi nodded. “Come on, just climb in,” she said, glancing over her shoulder.

  “I love you guys so much.” Miranda settled herself into the driver’s seat, studying her boys’ faces in the rearview mirror.

  “I scream. ICE CREAM. I scream,” Donnie chanted as Miranda drove.

  Kaleb practiced his protective reflexes, throwing his arms out across his brothers’ bodies every time she braked.

  “Where are we going?” he asked. “We can get ice cream at the Freez-E. It’s on the way to Neenee’s house.”

  Miranda shook her head and turned the radio on. Stock prices rose today by 1.3 . . . Crimson and clover, over and over . . . Unidentified arsonist in downtown Albany . . . And the Delray Church of Christ Choir took top spot in the state championship today. . . .

  “Neenee says it’s cheaper to buy in bulk,” Kaleb said. “We cou
ld get ice cream at Walmart and eat it at her house.”

  “Don’t worry, it’s my treat,” Miranda said.

  “That way Neenee could have some too.”

  “I’ll eat Neenee’s ice cream,” Ross offered.

  “I’ll eat Neenee,” Donnie yelled, rocking his head back and forth, hitting his face against the window.

  Kaleb slashed his arms across his brothers’ stomachs. “Watch out,” he said. “We might have to stop real fast.”

  At the Dairy Queen, Miranda seemed to panic. “You don’t want ice cream?” she said, turning to Jodi.

  “I gotta go look for Ricky.”

  “Yeah, but you could still eat with us.” Miranda spun around in the seat to face her boys again. “You guys want Aunt Jodi to come eat ice cream with us, right?”

  “Jodi?” Ross cooed, squishing his body into the corner. “Who’s Jodi?”

  Donnie grabbed the door handle and pushed his way out of the car.

  “Get back in here.” Miranda stretched her arm over the seat as if she could simply reach into the busy lot and snatch him back to safety.

  Kaleb slid out the door and grabbed Donnie by the hem of his shirt. Miranda let her hand droop but did not move to follow them, and Jodi wondered again what exactly she was doing here with this child-mom and all her problems. She’d let the convenience of the car and blonde brilliance of Miranda’s beauty get to her.

  Effie would not have approved. Effie said you had to take note when God threw you curveballs and you had to be quick on your feet and get out of the way. But Miranda had a force about her, an urgency that could bring the Ricky plan up to date and pull them all into the present; and Jodi had a fear, or maybe more than a fear, maybe it was knowledge of a real and possible danger that if she and Ricky were to do this thing alone, they might slip through the fabric of time and get trapped somewhere between dream and memory.