Mercy Train

by Rae Meadows

  She didn’t miss a lot about New York, but she missed the color and the grit. At her old shared studio space in downtown Brooklyn, she’d loved to look down from the seventh-floor balcony—the cold air a relief from the kilns’ oppressive heat—and watch ebullient crowds coming in and out of Junior’s and the lights and honking and Spanish and Arabic and luggage stores and cell phone hawkers on Atlantic Avenue. At times she even missed the sad and sinister mall she had to pass on her walk to the subway, the R burned out of the Toys R Us sign, the beauty supply store with its cracked window, the parking garage that seemed dangerous at any hour of the day. She missed the dark and light created by millions of people bumping up against one another.

  Her cell phone rang: Theo. She ignored it.

  Her brother was a lawyer at a big Washington, D.C., firm, the mergers and acquisitions arm, and his wife, Cindy, with her shellacked blond pageboy, was an interior decorator whose traditional style bordered on the rococo, with an overabundance of toile and stripes. She had a thriving business along the Potomac and the Chesapeake Bay. Sam found their Georgetown townhouse pristine and gaudy at the same time, and a spread in Town & Country—sent to her by Cindy—did little to disabuse her of that impression. Theo was ten years older than Sam, and they had never been close. He treated her with older-brother condescension, which in turn made her petulant and defensive, as if they were forever twenty-six and sixteen. In the last year, they had spoken more than they ever had because of the multiplicity of details to decide upon, from the large (coffin or cremation) to the mundane (the font of the memorial service handout) to the ridiculous (“Mom’s hairdresser claims she was promised a jade ring”) necessitated by a parent’s death.

  Their mother, Iris, had had breast cancer. The double mastectomy and removal of lymph nodes and radiation had not been quick or thorough enough to contain all of the stealth cancer cells that had taken root in her body and come roaring to fruition six months later. In the end, to Sam’s dismay, her mother decided against the ravages and slim odds of chemotherapy. Iris played neither victim nor martyr, but she had always been stoic. It was her Scandinavian genes—her father had come from Norway—she liked to say. When Sam tried to get her to move to Madison, Iris chuckled and said she’d rather die where it was seventy-five and sunny, thank you very much. So Sam went to her instead. She left Jack and moved to Florida for what turned out to be only a three-week stay. Iris had died on her seventy-second birthday. Theo and Cindy had finally shown up a day too late.

  She turned onto East Washington, the commercial strip that ran down the isthmus between Lake Monona and Lake Mendota, from the Capitol to the interstate, peppered with check-cashing outlets, fast-food places, liquor stores, and a 24-hour X-rated shop, which, she had read, had been robbed five times this year. Out of habit she glanced in her rearview to check on Ella, and the empty car seat panicked her heart before her brain could catch up. She drove past the Lotus House, a massage parlor tucked in near Highway 30, a strip club, and the low-slung Admiral Motel, rooms $31.95. HBO and in-room phones! Astroturf lined the area around the motel office, and a brown broken-down Monte Carlo camped in front of the first room, where it had been for months. Another room door gaped hopelessly open. She’d been surprised the first time she had driven this stretch. She had expected Madison to keep its vices midwesternly hidden away.

  As she drove, she tried to isolate why she was so quick to get angry at Jack. For being able to go about his day unhampered by worry about the baby. For not knowing the right type of wipes to get. For wanting her to snap out of it. For everything and nothing. He was a convenient outlet. She breathed deeply through her nose, and then caught a glimpse of a spot of drool and a smear of sweet potatoes on her shirt. Now that Ella was eating food and nursing less, Sam’s once-robust breasts were sadly flattening. Somehow this was Jack’s fault, too.

  When she’d been pregnant, Sam had loved the feeling of giving her body over to something else, and, for the first time since adolescence she had not been concerned about what she looked like, had not wondered if she should eat the extra donut, had not cared that her thighs strained against the seams of her sweatpants. It had been a revelation—so much time she had wasted—to be happy about how her body was working, nourishing life, fecund with purpose. And how quickly this had faded after Ella was born and she began to care that the extra skin on her stomach bunched, that crooked, silvery fingers of stretch marks striated her hips. In baby swim class she eyed the bodies of the other mothers as they sang “Wheels on the Bus” and spun their babies through the water, calculating how her flaws stacked up against theirs, while she knew she should have been enjoying Ella’s squeals and kicking little legs. The return of her vanity was a disappointment to her.

  Inside the drugstore her post-baby brain—shrunken four percent, she had read—sputtered and groped to recall the reason she was here. She walked the aisles. Baggies? Batteries? While standing next to the Wonder Bread she remembered.

  At the checkout line, Sam set the loaf pan on the counter behind a skinny girl with bad posture, not much older than twenty, dwarfed by her hooded sweatshirt and a pink nylon miniskirt hanging off her hips. The girl’s hair was scrunched shiny and covered half her face, as if she were trying to obscure her prominent nose. She wore heavy makeup, a thick layer of cheap powder that didn’t quite match her skin, blue eyeliner, and metallic berry lipstick.

  “These are expired,” the middle-aged clerk said too loudly, sighing and handing two coupons back to the girl. “And you can only use one per item.” She handed back another.

  “Sorry. I didn’t notice,” the girl said to the floor, shoving the coupons into her pocket.

  Sam looked down at what the girl was buying: shampoo, soap, Skittles, Lean Cuisine, and then a bag full of small packets that had already been rung up. Condoms, individually packaged, thirty or so. And then she saw the girl’s shoes, Lucite platform heels. She is a prostitute, Sam thought, feeling instantly sorry for her, sorry for having seen the condoms, sorry for the scorn of the clerk. She wanted the girl to look at her so she could smile to say, I’m not judging you. We do what we can to get by. Things will get better.

  The girl dragged her bag off the counter and slunk off, shoulders hunched, as the clerk shook her head. Sam would not look at the clerk, not collude; she would punish her for being rude.

  Outside, the sky was opening up enough to promise the rain was past. The breeze was cold and smelled of damp leaves.

  But as Sam started the car she looked up and saw the girl again, sitting in a dented, rust-edged white sedan one row over, plucking her eyebrows in the sun-visor mirror. Did she work during the day? Or watch TV until the appointed hour? Where did a prostitute live in Madison? What did her life look like?

  Sam waited. The girl backed out. And Sam followed her.

  She kept a little distance between her car and the white sedan as they turned west on East Washington. She knew she was acting foolish—or downright weird—by following a stranger, but she didn’t care. She didn’t want to go home.

  The girl signaled left, and Sam did the same. They turned into the Sunrise Inn. It was not as rock-bottom as the Admiral, but it was decrepit and shady, with a whiff of illicitness about it. Through hazy windows was a dank indoor pool, a sure repository of germs and STDs. The motel was only a short strip mall away from the massage parlor. Sam pulled in next door in front of a dingy day-care center called Kidzone, its painted sign chipped and faded, the window glass cloudy yellow.

  When the girl got out she looked even more furtive than Sam had remembered, her possum-nosed profile wan, her narrow shoulders rounded as she struggled with a large soda and her drugstore bags. She worked the key into the doorknob, jamming it in and shimmying the handle before the door bucked open. She turned then and looked straight at Sam, who froze, hoping she was obscured by the windshield. The girl went in and the dark room swallowed her up, the door banging closed behind her.

  A large black-haired woman in sweatpants and a tub
e top, despite the cool temperature, sauntered out of another room smoking a cigarette and leaned her back against the balcony. She sniffed her armpit without reacting. Her shoulders were acne scarred, her elbows ashy. A boy in a Batman mask peeked his head out the door. Sam had the flash of thought that he was the age her son would have been, and she felt the prickly heat of guilt. She had never allowed herself to mourn him. She didn’t deserve to.

  The woman yelled at the boy and pointed with her cigarette to get back inside.

  Sam shook her head. What am I doing? she thought. She played her brother’s message.

  “Sammy. It’s Theo. You should have gotten a box I overnighted you. I’ve been trying to sort through the last of Mom’s stuff and I thought you might want to look through some of it. Faded photos, this and that—keepsakes, I guess you’d call them. All in some old wooden box. I don’t know. Not to sound cold or anything, but I don’t want any of it. It’ll just sit in the basement. You were always more sentimental. And you have Ella now. Call me.”

  The pointed reference to Ella felt accusatory. He and Cindy had tried for years to conceive, then Clomid, five attempts at IUI, and six rounds of IVF at $15,000 a try. Sam, unfairly she knew, thought Cindy, a closet purger and compulsive exerciser, had been too thin to get pregnant. When Cindy turned forty-two, they had finally stopped trying. The one time Sam had raised the issue of adoption, Theo had quickly shut her down.

  “We want to have our child, not someone else’s,” he’d said. “End of story.”

  Sam had a friend Mina in New York who’d been a gestational surrogate for her gay brother and his partner. The magnanimity of such an offering, and the beatification it had bestowed upon Mina, appealed to Sam, but she didn’t think she loved Theo or Cindy enough to even broach the topic with them. Not that they would want her to carry their child anyway, to always feel that they owed her. It was all too intimate, and intimacy had never been a family strong suit.

  * * *

  When Sam had gone to Florida she had steeled herself to find her mother emaciated and sickly, and she’d feared she would have to avert her eyes. But Iris had picked her up at the airport looking remarkably unremarkable. Her brunette hair was newly cut in a smart bob, and she wore a white linen tunic and khakis, her large sunglasses perched on her head. In a hug her smallness was disconcerting, her prosthetic breast inserts firm and high, but her face was sun-touched and Sam was, on the whole, relieved. Perhaps there would be more time. Her own pregnant belly had emerged, a taut low mound, and Iris patted it with a little smile.

  But the illusion of Iris’s wellness dissipated quickly. By the time they arrived at the condo, Iris had used up all the energy she had put into her first impression, and she was exhausted. She needed her daughter’s help just to get up the few front steps. And it was later, when Sam helped her with a bath, that the frailty of Iris’s body came into devastating relief. When had she last seen her mother naked? She remembered as a girl seeing Iris—who must have been in her late forties then—after a shower unself-consciously hanging up the towel that had been wrapped around her body, exposing her womanly rounded hips and full breasts and the pouch at her stomach.

  Now there were no more curves, no more softness around her bones. Her skin was slack, dry, and thin. Two ragged diagonal scars angrily crossed her chest where her breasts once were.

  “I made it easy for them,” Iris said, “since I wasn’t getting reconstruction. Quick and dirty.” She shrugged. “It wasn’t that big of a loss, really. Though the scars really itch. That I could do without.”

  Iris gamely kept her tone light and Sam tried to comply, running a washcloth over the remains of the body that had given birth to her. Sam’s pregnancy made the bath an awkward dance, each movement recalibrated to fit her changed shape.

  “I like your haircut,” Sam said, and they both laughed.

  “Someday you will understand how hard it is for me to have you here,” Iris said, as if Sam didn’t already have a pretty good idea.

  “I’m glad I could be with you, Mom,” Sam had said. “I wish you would stop seeing it as some kind of sacrifice.”

  “I’m sorry for what I will have to ask of you,” she had said.

  * * *

  In front of Sam’s car a group of children, three little girls with short black hair and pierced ears, toddled out of the door of the day-care center ushered by a tiny old woman in a black stovepipe hat.

  They were Hmong, most likely, a Southeast Asian ethnicity Sam hadn’t heard of before moving to Madison. She’d first seen Hmong people at the farmers’ market, petite in body with wide lovely faces, their ordered produce cheaper than that of the other stalls. During the Vietnam War, the CIA had recruited them to help fight the “Secret War” in Laos, and when the United States withdrew from the region and the communists took over the Lao kingdom, the Hmong were singled out for retribution. Hundreds of thousands fled, and many of those refugees ended up in Wisconsin.

  How could I ever have the nerve to complain about anything, Sam thought. The first Wisconsin winter for the Hmong must have felt like banishment to a frozen hell.

  One of the little girls was crying, snot running down into her gaping mouth, but the old woman ignored her. She marched her charges—not dressed warmly enough for the chill, Sam thought—through the parking lot out toward the commercial strip. Sam watched in her rearview as the miniature group trundled in a row along the busy street. After a while the bobbing black hat was the only thing visible. Sam had never seen public housing in Madison, but she knew it was close by, tucked behind the fast-food restaurants and the tire stores. Was that where they were headed? Should she have offered them a ride?

  A hard knock on her window froze her breath. It was a policeman, his radio a loud litany of static, chirping, and a garbled voice of a female dispatcher, as Sam rolled down the window.

  “Is your kid in there?” he said, pointing to the center.

  “No. She’s with … I was just. Sitting here. Thinking.”

  “You’re loitering. At a child facility.”

  “What? Oh, no. Really. I’ll move.” She straightened up and reached for her ignition.

  “Hold on a minute. You’re not going until I say you’re going. License and registration, please.”

  As the officer walked away with Sam’s documents, she saw the reflection of her car in the Kidzone window and had the awful realization that he was checking to see if she was some kind of pedophile on the registered sex offender list. She was molten in embarrassment, sweat dripping down her sides, at a loss even about what to do with her hands, finally hooking her fingers on the bottom rung of the steering wheel. The cop returned and handed back her license and registration card.

  “I’m sorry I caused any concern. I’m a mother,” she said, as if that exempted her from suspicion.

  “Move it along, ma’am,” he barked, quickly taking his leave.

  She started the car, her hand quivering, and backed out in front of the cruiser. She wanted to wave and smile, to erase any doubt the officer had, but she refrained, not trusting herself these days to know how to appear normal. In the last year she had lost the conception she used to have of herself, as if her internal filter had been knocked askew. But when she shifted into drive and looked up, there was the girl she had followed, standing in the doorframe of the motel room eating from a large bag of Skittles, her hair in a ponytail now, accentuating the sharp trajectory of her nose. Her lips were wet with purple lip gloss, her feet bare, one foot perched on the inside of her knee like a flamingo. She was someone’s daughter. A few wrong choices and here she was. Surely Sam could talk to her, reach out to her in some way, couldn’t she? Who are you trying to convince? Sam said to herself. You can’t even talk to your husband. She could see the police officer in her periphery, and she slowly moved forward.

  She knew she was losing her grasp on the day, and she had to get to work. The thought that her output was now absurdly tied to Jack’s career made her eyes ache. She drove ba
ck to her familiar neighborhood, trees afire, sun high, Tibetan peace flags and bicycles on porches, lawn signs sprouting from overgrown yards—THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS CLEAN COAL, NADER IS MY HOMEBOY, WHERE ARE WE GOING AND WHY AM I IN THIS HANDBASKET?—scarecrows and elaborately carved pumpkins on stoops, and the purple moose head mounted on her neighbor’s front door.

  When she got out of the car, she felt the odd freedom of nothing to carry but a nonstick loaf pan—no groceries, no diaper bag, no baby. She reveled in the buoyancy of being an unencumbered body. But as she approached her small white house, she could see the box waiting for her on the front steps. Dread replaced lightness. Perhaps it would be better not to know any more about her mother. Didn’t she already know enough?

  She hoisted the box up to her hip, carried it inside, and plunked it down on the kitchen table.

  VIOLET

  Violet led her mother by the hand from Madam Tang’s, through Chinatown, and back into more familiar territory, where they settled into an easy stroll down the sunny side of Park Row, part of the late-day stream of hucksters and shoppers spilling over from Chatham Square. As they made their way around the street’s curve, ahead of them rose the towering Park Row Building that, when completed, would be the tallest in the world.

  “His name is Mr. Lewis, and he is a prosperous gentleman,” Lilibeth said. Her mother was dreamy, her hand on her throat as she talked about her latest boyfriend. Violet warmed to her when she was like this, felt less vexed by Lilibeth’s mercurial moods.

  “He’s a loan officer at the bank,” she said, as if she had already forgotten that she was married.