Backseat Saints

by Joshilyn Jackson

I say, “Why are you lying?”

  My mother keeps talking in that flat, almost bored way. “She told me to leave immediately, and not look back. She said—”

  “Stop fucking lying,” I interrupt.

  She doesn’t acknowledge that I have spoken or that she has stopped. She is perfectly controlled.

  She gives her shoulders a little shake, as if she is shucking off a cape, and walks toward the stairs. She picks up my bag and says, “I’ll show you to your room.”

  “Why did you leave without me?” I demand again.

  She starts up, slow, like her knees bother her, talking over her shoulder at me. “None of my friends know I have a daughter, Rose Mae,” she says. “Please be discreet. I do not want to try and explain you. Nor will I explain myself.”

  I follow her, and Gret follows me, careful to keep me as a wall between her and my mother. I say nothing. There is nothing else to say right now. I don’t even ask if her friends will find it odd to learn she has a strange woman living in her spare room. They won’t. There is always a strange woman living in her house, hoping to escape a marriage made of swords.

  My mother goes up step by step, toting my bag and talking like a bored tour guide. “The kitchen is through that open doorway in the parlor. Help yourself if you get hungry. I usually cook a hot dinner, and I’ll make enough for two if you care to join me. There’s a half bath in front of the kitchen, behind the stairs.” She reaches the top, me right behind her, helpless to do anything but follow. “That is my room.” She points at a closed door at the end of the hall. “That’s the bathroom, between. And this is your room.”

  She opens the door directly at the top of the landing, and she is right. It is my room. Exactly.

  A twin bed, a table, and a lamp sit at the far right corner, opposite the door. They are placed in the spot where the bed and table in my childhood room in Fruiton still rest. The dresser sits across from a comfy chair for reading and a floor lamp, also just the same as Fruiton. She’s even put a writing desk and matching wooden chair against the window, as if she thinks her residents might have homework. The furniture is a hodgepodge of finishes that range from maple down to darkest cherry, and my bedroom set back in Fruiton was all white wicker, but the placement of each piece matches my girlhood room exactly.

  “Holy shit,” I say in spite of myself. “Did you do this on purpose?”

  She looks at me with her eyebrows rising in a question. She doesn’t even realize. I might not have caught it myself if I had not just been home. She and my daddy both are living in shrines they’ve erected to lives they themselves either wrecked or abandoned.

  “Let me guess,” I say. “The saint who came to you in your ‘vision.’ It was Cecilia.” Her eyes barely widen, but I catch it. I go on. “Yes, I went out to Cadillac Ranch. I saw your note. And if I’d gone to Rodeo!—if I’d hooked up with your railroad, I’d have ended up here, wouldn’t I?”

  The room says so. She’s made this room for me, the same way Daddy remade our house for her. But my mother is shaking her head in a cold, vehement no.

  “Never here,” she says. “We would never take you someplace at all connected to your past life. I am the last person we would have brought you to.”

  “Against the rules, huh? Well. I came my own way. Cecilia’s rules don’t apply to me. Your rules don’t, either.”

  She is watching me, wary. “I suppose not. Not really. But Parker and my other friends will find it strange if they see that. As a courtesy, I ask that you at least appear to keep them.” Her formal speech is beginning to bother me. It’s as if she’s given up contractions for Lent.

  “I’ve broken one already.” I set my bag down on the bed and say, “I’ve got Pawpy’s old revolver in here, and I’m keeping it.”

  All at once her eyes go avid. Her blank expression drops away. We have come to the piece of conversation she has been longing to have, while I was wanting to ask her what happened the day she left me. She straightens up and presses one hand to her lips.

  “Pawpy’s gun?” she says, muffled behind her hand. She takes a single step toward me. “Is that the… is that what you used?”

  “What I used?” I ask. She’s failed to give me the one answer I wanted most, and I hope she’s asking something that will let me fail her back. She wants something from me right now, badly. I step in, eager to know, so I can refuse to give it to her.

  “What you used instead of taking the railroad. What you used to end things. With your husband. You used Pawpy’s old forty-five?”

  Now I understand, and I feel a smile coming. I can’t damp it down. It’s almost an exultation, that I can look her in the eye and say with ringing, happy truthfulness, “Momma, are you insane? I didn’t shoot my husband.”

  She tries to swallow and coughs instead. Her face crumples and her hands fist, and all at once she’s furious. “Rose Mae, no! Tell me that man you married is not still walking on this earth.”

  “It’s Ivy now,” I say, so sweet now that she is wanting something and I don’t have it to give. “I’m Ivy Rose Wheeler. You’re the one told me it was him or me. I chose, Momma. I got rid of Rose Mae.”

  Her eyes snap, and now she is beyond angry. Her skin is wax, and her eyes have a fevered glow. Her nostrils flare, and when she speaks, her voice sounds deliberate and deep, each word dredged up from the diaphragm. “Rose Mae, you stupid child, why did you come here? Dear God, you should have gone with the railroad. Do you really think fate can be fooled? That it can be that easy? It doesn’t matter if you keep my rules or not. Nothing you do will matter. Not as long as you are here, and he is breathing.”

  She steps back, out of the room, her hand on the knob. “Your business with Thom Grandee is not over.” Her words are livid prophecy, intoned like she’s Elijah calling bears, and then she closes the door. I am left shaking, alone in a pale blue room she’s made to mirror mine.

  CHAPTER

  15

  I AM LIKE AN ANGRY five-year-old, holding my breath until I am blue enough to match her decor. I am giving her the silent treatment, except I am almost thirty, which means I do not crumble after ten minutes and weep into her skirts. Instead I meander around whatever room she’s in, touching all her things.

  She has appointments all day long, crystal junkies and new age woo-woos coming in for readings. Whenever one rings her wind-chime doorbell, she asks me politely, in formal language, to excuse myself. I’ve toted a Barbara Kingsolver book to my room, and each time I go up and close my door and read in silent, furious obedience. When I hear the client leave, I mark my place and come back down to steadfastly ignore her where she can see me do it.

  She has lots of appointments, and many of her clients are her friends, too. I hear them air kissing at her, the rustle of hugs and cheery greetings as I go up the stairs. None of them are surprised to see my ass disappearing upwards. None of them ask to be introduced. They are waiting, I suppose, to see if I am going to stick. No sense befriending another Lilah. The way my room faces the staircase, sounds travel from the parlor directly up to me. I could leave the door open and eavesdrop, but I am more interested in The Bean Trees than bullshit fates invented by my mother.

  After her eleven-thirty leaves, she turns on the red-palm window sign. Belgria is a busy street. In fifteen minutes, a drive-by supplicant is ringing her bell, wanting a peek at the future. I don’t get to see the walk-in. She won’t even open the door until I am in my room with the door closed.

  Perhaps she is worried that this passing chimer will turn out to be my husband, come to kill me. Thom Grandee in the parlor with the wrench. That’s ridiculous. Thom is looking for his Ro clear across the country. She is not there, and she is not welcome here. If he did know to look in Berkeley, I strongly doubt that he would stand politely on the porch and ring the bell, bearing murderous intentions like a hostess gift.

  During our shared and silent lunch, my mother hooks another true believer with her sign. I am banished back upstairs halfway through my grilled
cheese sandwich. I hear her answer the bell, and after a brief exchange, the door closes again, and there is no more conversation. This second potential walk-in must not have passed muster in some way.

  I open my door and see her coming up the stairs with a basket of fresh laundry. She walks past me without speaking and goes down the hall to her room. She closes her bedroom door decisively, but I follow her and let myself in. She is standing on the far side of her queen-size bed, facing me. She has dumped out a jumble of bright cotton clothing on her wave-covered comforter, and she’s folding it. Her lips thin as I enter, but she does not tell me to get out. Her room is done in the same endless blues as the downstairs. It’s bigger than mine, but not as bright because her windows are covered with heavy drapes.

  I come closer, stand across the bed from her. She has collected a blown-glass and crystal menagerie, and I sort through it, bored. I find sharks nested with seals, lambs cuddled up to lions, and no people: She’s made paradise on the bedside table. I put rough hands on her unicorn, picking him up and flicking his silly garland of blue roses. “You’re out of luck, buddy. No virgins here,” I tell him.

  “Be careful, Rose. That’s breakable,” she says, stern and maternal.

  “I’m Ivy,” I say to the unicorn, and set him down dead on his side.

  Mirabelle’s nostrils flare. She leaves the rest of her blouses in a scatter to wrinkle on her bed and goes back downstairs. I go back downstairs, too.

  She sits down at her table, shuffling her cards. I see my father’s note still sitting on the bookshelf, neatly folded, but now it is directly in front of Persuasion. I’m pretty sure I set it down closer to Sense and Sensibility. I don’t think she’s read it, but she must have picked it up and set it back down wrong, or at least pushed at it with one disgruntled finger. Its presence is eating at her edges. Good.

  I go to the other end of the room to touch things in her small store. A bowl full of polished rose quartz shares a shelf with Saint Christopher’s medallions. Crystal balls are lined up with no irony beside a display of hand-carved wooden rosaries. She sells tarot cards here, too, and books on how to read them. The decks are stacked beside prayer candles with the images of obscure saints frosted onto the tall glass tubes that hold the scented wax.

  I pick up Saint Jude and check the label. Twenty dollars seems excessive, but then again, this is a magic candle. It says so, right on the sticker. A bastardized novena is printed on the glass opposite Jude, something between a spell and a prayer. I set Jude down and paw through the candles, finding a host of less familiar friends: Expedite, Lucy, the Infant of Atocha. They’ve left Mother Church and gone voodoo.

  While my mother sits on her chair and shuffles and watches me, I take up the Saint Lucy candle. The spell on the back is a demand for Lucy to reveal a hidden truth or expose a liar. I hold it up to show my mother, modeling its useful marvels as if I am Vanna White. She stares deliberately away from me. I tuck the candle into the crook of my arm and keep shopping.

  I have just picked myself out a beautiful green rosary with hand-carved wooden beads when the doorbell chimes again. Her next supplicant has arrived. She starts to speak, but I know the drill by now. I am already heading upstairs. I put the candle and the rosary in my room, unpaid for. I rummage around my room for matches and find an old hotel pack in the writing desk, stuck way back behind some pale blue stationery and a veritable host of pens. Even the frickin’ ink in them is blue.

  I follow her rules all day: I don’t go back to my husband. I don’t use drugs or shoot anyone. I don’t poke my nose outside the house. I use the back door in the kitchen to let Gret in and out to play with the other dogs or use the lawnly facilities, piously careful not to let a single toe over the threshold when I open it for her.

  Gret spends the afternoon with Buck and Cesar and Miss Moogle, but at her regular dinnertime, I go into the kitchen and hear her single-footed scraping at the back door. When I let her in, I bend down to ruffle her ears; she smells strongly of curry. She must have availed herself of Parker’s dog door while he was fixing his own dinner. I squat down and scratch her head in earnest, saying, “That’s very naughty.” She pants into my face, and she even has curry on her breath. Parker is encouraging her.

  I eat my own dinner with my mother. She fried catfish in cornmeal, and she serves it with hush puppies and buttered peas. She may have lost her accent, but she still cooks like a southerner. We eat and bristle at each other on either side of the butcher-block table in her blue-and-cream kitchen. We are almost all the way through dinner when I finally realize that she isn’t speaking to me, either. The silence I thought was my choice has, in fact, stretched both ways, and she has been as purposeful about it as I have been. I take a sip of sweet tea to clear my throat. I am now perversely ready for conversation.

  “What really happened the day you left Fruiton?” I say casually, as if these aren’t the first words I’ve said to someone besides Gretel and a glass unicorn in over twenty-four hours.

  Her lips thin and her eyes narrow. She tilts her head sideways and speaks to her peas in an irritating singsong, like she’s saying a catechism. “I went to mass and then confession. I prayed, and Saint Cecilia answered, telling me—”

  I interrupt her with a loud snort, unladylike as I can manage, and say, “Cecilias. Plural. They’re activists, Momma, not deities. You’re telling me your underground railroad doesn’t have kid tickets? You have to be this high to ride that ride?”

  She glares at me and drops the singsong. “I was praying. It was an answered prayer. I had to shake the dust from my sandals and go, right then.” It sounds rehearsed, a thing she has told herself over the years. She hasn’t said it enough yet, though. Not even she believes it. But her voice gains conviction when she changes the subject, saying, “He’s going to find you. He’s going to come here and kill you in my house.”

  I shrug, unmoved. “It’s good that you have hardwood floors, then. Easy cleanup.”

  She slams her fork down. “Stop it.”

  Now I understand why she’s been mad at me all day. This is about Thom. She told me to do something, and I have blatantly not done it. The last time this happened, I was eight and she ordered me to clean my room. I chose to scrunch up in a blanket and reread Charlotte’s Web instead, and when she came and saw I’d disobeyed her, I was grounded. I’m grounded now, too, in a way.

  We finish our meal and go off to bed, reenshrouded in our separate, angry silences.

  A second day passes, much the same, and then a third. Each night at dinner I play Beast to her Beauty, asking my single question, asking why she left me behind. She sticks with her story about being told in a vision to go at once, alone, and my dinners all stick in my craw.

  By the morning of the fourth day, I’ve exhausted all my adrenaline. It’s hard to stay angry when the sameness of every minute nibbles away at my resolve. My mother is waiting for a client at her table, and I am back in her store. I’ve practically memorized her limited inventory. I step to the blinds and stare out into the front yard.

  Lilah is back. She’s beside the gate, begging hands folded over the top of the fence, looking yearnfully toward my mother’s place. I am so desperately bored that I think she might have the better spot.

  “Come away from the window, Rose Mae,” my mother says.

  “Ivy,” I toss over my shoulder. I do not move.

  Lilah sees me, or at least my shape in the window. She straightens, craning forward. “Mirabelle!” she calls, plaintive and hopeless. “Mirabelle!”

  I hear my mother get up from her table and come over. She’s moving quickly, and when she comes up even with me, she grabs the cord and jerks her wooden blinds closed with a clack. We stand side by side, no view but the slats, and we both choose to stare at them rather than each other.

  “You should go talk to her,” I say.

  “Why?” she asks, dry-voiced. “Do you no longer require the room?”

  I make a slit through two of the blinds with my fing
ers. I see Parker has come out, trailing his pack of rowdy dogs. Gretel is among them, tripping along on his left heel. He’s wearing a crumpled button-down shirt, extremely faded, with black cotton pants that flap around his ankles like pajama bottoms. The man should clearly not be allowed to dress himself. He’s crossing the yard to talk to Lilah in that weird Shaggy-style walk, slumped down to be shorter, hands where she can see them.

  “Come away from the window,” my mother repeats.

  I ask, “Doesn’t he have a job?”

  “Who?” my mother says. When I don’t answer, she reaches to make a peeping slit between two blinds for herself. “Oh, yes. Parker teaches anthropology over at Berkeley City College. He keeps odd hours,” she says. We watch Parker standing a good foot back from the fence, talking to Lilah, who is gesturing wildly and weeping. My mother watches me watching, and then she says, “Why do you ask?” Her voice has sharpened.

  “Just curious,” I say. “He seems nice.”

  She laughs, but it is a hard sound, not at all amused. “No, Rose. Just no.”

  “Ivy,” I say.

  “When that man you married comes, he will eat Parker alive,” she says. “From the feet on up.”

  “All I said was, he seems like a nice man,” I say, and she says, almost running over my words:

  “Exactly.”

  Parker leans earnestly toward Lilah. He must be repeating his offer to get her into a shelter because she shakes her head at him, vehement and angry.

  “I’ve never really known one of those,” I say in musing tones, mostly because my interest seems to bother her. “A nice man. I wonder what that’s like.”

  “I’ll thank you not to experiment on Parker. He lost his wife to breast cancer, and she was so young—still in her twenties. They were crazy about each other, too. It was a complete tragedy. He’s had enough hard times without your mess.”

  Lilah is turning away, trailing disconsolately back up Belgria. Parker stays by the fence, calling after her.