Mercy Train

by Rae Meadows

  Iris picked herself up to retrieve the mail—a sad little stack—and went to the kitchen. Could it be that she actually felt hungry? She wanted peanut butter and jelly. She pulled the jars from one of the grocery bags, still on the floor where she’d left them, and slathered peanut butter, then strawberry jelly on two pieces of soft white bread. Salty, sweet, soft, creamy comfort. Why hadn’t she been eating this for every meal?

  She flipped the bank statement, credit card offers, and Planned Parenthood donation solicitation into the trash—she’d have to pretend to recycle when Samantha was there—and slid open the Lively Arts calendar of upcoming events.

  Community theater performance of West Side Story. Pass. Children’s chorus. Pass. The Ying Quartet: Tchaikovsky. Almost three weeks away, just before her birthday. Surely she could make it that long, now that she’d rediscovered peanut butter. Henry was a sucker for Tchaikovsky. It would be her opportunity to see him again. She dialed the box office and reserved two tickets. Samantha would be her date.

  Iris picked up her book from the counter where she’d placed it earlier. Her run-in with Stephen seemed like days ago. She had noticed in the last week that she was losing control of her sense of time, stretching here, warping there, a gradual meandering off the track. She would have to write herself a note about Samantha’s arrival, just in case. She slid open the door to the balcony and stepped from the dry cool air into a blanket of humid warmth. She eased into a chaise and joined Mrs. Ramsay, knitting a stocking for the lighthouse keeper’s son, after the children were in bed.

  She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of—to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.

  Yes. Iris thought of her mother and believed now that she had welcomed some time alone before she died. And here Iris was, in Sanibel after marriage and motherhood and a last-minute affair, at home in a quiet loneliness. It was not happiness, no. But it was humility. It was acceptance.

  Her eyes were heavy with narcotics, and she set the book down. Her energy had fizzled. Her limbs felt limp, her bones like lead, bearing down on her muscles and skin with each movement. Her head was throbbing again, blurring the edge of her vision with each pulse. Even her lungs ached. As a child she had sometimes fantasized about being bedridden with some serious sickness, her face rosy with fever, her mother and father fussing over her, talking in hushed tones, nursing her back to health.

  How foolish. Illness was so inelegant, she thought, so messy and ugly, so unromantic. Getting to death was going to be awful. This slipping away, this erosion of body and, finally, mind.

  She pulled herself out of the chair to go take her pills. In the kitchen she shook the colorful tablets in her palm. How many would it take to get the job done?

  SAM

  Iris had once said, “You will be a good mother because you want to be a mother.”

  Sam pulled her car into the parking lot behind the Sunrise Inn. She wondered now if her mother’s cryptic pronouncement had meant she had not wanted to be a mother. Or maybe ten years after Theo, Iris had not wanted to be a mother again. But she hadn’t been a bad mother, had she? Distant, perhaps, preoccupied. It’s true that Sam had often felt lonesome as a child. Iris had seemed much more comfortable with Sam as an adult than Sam as a little girl, whom she had looked at with perplexity, as if to say, How did you get here?

  Up close, the beige bricks of the motel were dirt- and water-stained in the exposing light of the afternoon sun. Grim, Sam thought. A young father in low-slung jeans, a tank top under an open North Face parka, herded two little boys, also in puffy jackets, inside a bottom-floor room, and she wondered if the Sunrise, like many of the cheap motels in the area, was used as backup for an inadequate shelter system.

  She couldn’t say why she had returned to this place. Maybe the starkness of the life she imagined for the girl was the dark draw. The fragility of our trajectories, Sam thought, the downward momentum of a few bad breaks. She made fists with her hands to warm her fingertips.

  * * *

  Unlike other pregnant women she had known, Sam had not felt overheated, had not thrown off covers at night or walked around in shirtsleeves as temperatures dipped. Her hands had often been cold. This made her nervous that there was something wrong with this pregnancy, too, despite the fact that the chorionic villus sampling test done at twelve weeks—she would not wait for an amnio—had shown that the baby, a girl, was genetically fine. So she was glad for the soft heat and the blurry humidity of Florida after the early mean freeze she had left in Wisconsin. Despite the circumstances, she was glad to be warm.

  When she and Iris drove from the airport en route to Sanibel Island, they passed a small billboard on I-75 with the smiling moon face of a Down syndrome baby, his almond eyes with the characteristic epicanthic eyelid folds. In childlike writing it said, “I deserve to live!”

  Sam—driving so her mother could rest—shook her head faintly and felt a cold wave creep down to her toes. She had hoped that when she became pregnant again the first pregnancy would somehow reshape in her mind, fading into the miscarriage everyone else thought it had been. She hated that she felt guilt about a choice she had defended the right to make her entire adult life. But it had not been an unwanted pregnancy, and eighteen weeks was not five weeks, and when it came down to it, she had put herself first. She had not wanted the life of taking care of a special needs child, whatever that entailed. She’d immediately thrown out the packet of information on Down syndrome given to her by the nurse, not wanting to know anything. She was selfish and shallow, a coward. Was it really more important to be able to make another set of dinner plates?

  Sam had read an article about a woman who gave her adopted son back after a month because she didn’t feel any bond with the eighteen-month-old and thought it would be best for everyone if he went to a different home. She and her husband had tried for years to have their own child, and what they really wanted was a child formed from their genetic material, a reflection of them. The public outrage had been swift and damning—Sam and Jack had even discussed how traumatic it must have been for the toddler—but quietly she had wondered if this was any more reprehensible than what she had done.

  Jack would say it had been a five-inch fetus, an organism that couldn’t live outside the body. And even if they had had the child, there was a chance he might have been severely disabled, never able to dress or feed himself. She knew all these things, agreed with them, and yet, and yet. Jack might also say she could not let it go because it gave her something to hate herself for, a wound to poke at. That is, he might say these things if she ever talked about it with him, which she didn’t.

  “How are you feeling these days?” her mother asked, eyes closed. “You barely look pregnant.”

  “I don’t?” Sam immediately leaped to worry.

  “Oh, not in a bad way, honey,” Iris said, opening her eyes and perking her head up. “Like you haven’t gained too much weight. I gained fifty pounds with you. I ate donuts and hot fudge sundaes. It took me a whole year to lose it. But boy, was it fun.”

  Sam smiled, looking quickly at her mother, and turned onto the causeway. She didn’t know how long her mother would live. Iris was cagey about what the doctor had said, calling any estimate maudlin and unnecessary. “I’ll die when I die,” she had said. But would it be days, weeks, months?

  “Tell Jack you’ll be home well before Christmas,” Iris had said.

  When Sam had heard this—it was already mid-October—she’d backpedaled, wanting to un-know the time frame.

  “Let’s not talk about it,” she had said.

  If her mother had dated or had a relationship since the divorce, she never shared it with Sam or, as far as she knew, with Theo. And other than an occasional bridge game, she didn’t seem to socialize much in F
lorida. It was as if after all the years of dinner parties and tennis groups and being a wife and mother in the suburbs, Iris had slipped out the back door.

  “It’s so weird you live here,” Sam said.

  “The shell collecting was a big draw,” Iris said, wryly. “It’s warm. It felt new. After your father, I wanted something different. To be away from all that.”

  Sam wondered if her mother wanted not just to be away but to be disconnected. Freed. Even from me and Theo, she thought. To Sam, such buoyancy seemed frightening.

  “You know, the island itself is only six thousand years old? I like the feeling of newness. It feels accidental,” Iris said.

  They drove over the bridge to Sanibel. Sam had visited a few times over the years, but it still felt as though her mother was on vacation. The island was twelve miles long and four miles wide, with over half of it a protected wildlife reserve. Iris rarely left it.

  “I’ve already talked to Susan, my realtor, about selling the condo. You should get a decent price for it. It’ll be a good time of year to sell. The snowbirds will be arriving soon.”

  Sam turned to look at Iris and then back at the road.

  “We’re going to have to talk about the details, Samantha.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “You shouldn’t worry so much,” Iris said.

  Sam, irked, had wanted to say that you really can’t tell someone not to worry. It doesn’t work like that.

  * * *

  Sam pulled the keys from the ignition and tried to focus on what she was doing at this forlorn motel. Maybe the young prostitute’s mother had been unfit, and the girl had drifted without anyone to help her, a dirty and deflated balloon whose string finally got caught on a dead branch. How easily we can be lost, Sam thought. But maybe it didn’t take a lot—kindness from a stranger even—to pull someone back from that vast aloneness. Sam imagined herself knocking on the door, introducing herself, offering her help finding a job, a little money, a call to social services—something. Why was that such a big deal? Because, she said to herself, you are you.

  But she got out of the car anyway, not ready to give up—she’d made this crazy return here after all—wanting one more glimpse into a life that was not hers, to get outside herself and do something decent for someone else. It was too cold to be without a jacket. She’d been fooled by the sun, now on the down slope, already having slid clear of the parking lot. She tucked her hands under her arms, her shoulders raised up toward her ears in an effort to block the wind that was rattling the straggling leaves on the stunted walnut tree saplings at the edge of the motel. She walked around the outside of the indoor pool, empty and swamp green, its glass fogged with condensation and soot from the exhaust of the cars roaring past on East Washington.

  In the front parking lot, Sam looked around and, seeing no one, cupped her hands against the driver’s side window of the girl’s car. The blue vinyl seats were cracked and sun-faded, and electrical tape mummied the steering wheel. On the floor was a Green Bay Packers ice scraper, a torn map of Wisconsin, and a half-empty two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew peeking out from under the passenger seat. A garbage bag of clothes filled the floor of the backseat, a dirty pink towel obscenely spilling out the top. The girl was living out of her car. Sam wondered if she longed to be settled or if settled was what she was running from.

  “Hey!” the girl yelled from the balcony.

  “Oh,” Sam said, startled. She felt wobbly after seeing the girl’s scant possessions, artifacts of impermanence and disconnection. And now the girl was here, looking like a child dressed up as a hooker, her knees knobby, her shoes too big. Sam backed away, with her hands ridiculously in the air.

  “What the fuck? That’s my car, lady.”

  “I know. I mean, I’m sorry.”

  “What?” She tilted her head like a puppy. “Wait, I’ve seen you before.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “The drugstore,” the girl said, her voice rising. “Did you follow me?”

  “No. Well, yes, sort of,” Sam stuttered.

  “What the hell do you want?”

  Sam felt her face flush, her scalp prickle with heat. Say it, she said to herself, do this one thing. “I thought—I don’t know. When I saw you at the store I thought, You’re so young. Maybe I could help you out.”

  “What?” The girl shook her head and crossed her arms in defiance.

  “Okay,” Sam said. “It was a misunderstanding. A mistake. I’m going.”

  The girl slammed the motel door behind her.

  Sam bumbled her way back to her own car, tripping off the curb, and fell heavily into the front seat. What had happened to her? How had she so misjudged? She felt like a lunatic. Why don’t you get your own house in order? she said to herself.

  * * *

  Just before Sam and Jack had moved in, a house on their street had blown up. The man who’d lived there, in his sixties, had opened all the gas valves in order to asphyxiate himself, and then his house exploded, taking out half the house next to it, cracking windows, plaster walls, and ceilings all down the street. He’d managed to make it through the grueling winter, only to give up once spring had arrived—the tree flush, the crocuses and daffodils pushed up, the last patches of snow in the shadows. How lonely he must have been. Three years later the lot was still empty, a now-grassy plot that kids had claimed as a makeshift playing field, orange traffic cones marking the goal posts. Ted had told them that the man had bouts of depression and rarely slept, often taking walks in the middle of the night. He was a high school art teacher but retired early, and since then had never left the neighborhood. He walked to the market a few blocks away, and he occasionally ate a hamburger at the bar around the corner. He didn’t have a car and didn’t take the bus, because, he’d told Ted, there was nowhere he wanted to go. Ted had wondered why someone who’d kept to himself wanted to go out with a literal bang. To Sam it had made sense. The man had been angry about the emptiness, and he’d wanted everyone to know it.

  She turned away from the kitchen window. On the counter was one of her large lidded jars with a milky robin’s-egg glaze. She pulled off the lid with the familiar emery-board scrape of its unglazed flange, impressed anew by the closeness of its fit, and pulled out a tin of roasted almonds. The anticipation of their smoky-salty bite made her salivate. And then it occurred to her that she had no idea what held her mother’s ashes. A cheesy funeral parlor urn? A box? A bag? Theo had picked them up after the cremation, and they had yet to decide what to do with them. She had made a jar for nuts, but she hadn’t even thought to make something to contain her mother’s remains.

  It was two o’clock. Ella was supposed to be napping. Sam missed the sumptuous weight of a baby asleep against her. She never missed Jack anymore, though. And that was the fear, wasn’t it? That she had fallen in love with Ella and the feeling had eclipsed what she felt for Jack. The love was different, of course, it didn’t have to be one or the other, but what she felt for Ella seemed richer, dizzying, and undiminishable.

  Out the window a squirrel sat balanced on the fence, nibbling away the soft green peel of a walnut. Every fall the squirrels encamped in the walnut trees and stripped them bare of fruit, chirping and squeaking, littering the ground below with shells and meat that stained the sidewalks a deep red ocher. The squirrels gorged themselves for a week, and then the feast was over and the trees were bare. Looking into Ted’s yard, she guessed it was still a little early for the squirrel bacchanalia.

  I’ll make the pound cake and give it to Ted, Sam thought. She had made a fool of herself with the prostitute, but she could redeem the day by doing something nice for her neighbor. There would be no one more appreciative. She dumped a handful of almonds into her palm and poured some of them into her mouth, the salt puckering her tongue. But as she crunched, she knew the box of Iris’s wasn’t going away. She switched tack and sat down at the table again, steering herself to at least get something done today, something to show for th
e baby-less hours.

  Her cell phone rang, startling her. Theo again, and, despite her peevishness toward him today, she was glad to see the familiar number.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hey, sorry to bother you,” he said.

  “You’re not. What’s up?”

  “I keep thinking about that box of stuff. I should have looked through it. That was really lame of me.”

  “I never knew you had dramatic aspirations.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Cheaper by the Dozen.”

  Theo laughed. “Seventh grade. I had to wear a fake mustache, and for a week I had a mustache-shaped rash from the glue.”

  “I’ll send you the program.”

  “What else did you find?”

  “No jewels or anything. Stuff from both of us as kids. Recipes. Random scrapbook-type stuff. I haven’t gone through it all yet. It’s both overwhelming and utterly mundane.”

  “It’s depressing to see the remnants of a life in a box. The ticket stubs and report cards. Snapshots. I don’t know. I think I’m feeling my age.”

  Sam felt emboldened. “You and Cindy should adopt a baby.”

  “What?” he asked, annoyed. “No.”

  “Come on, Theo. If you want a kid, have a kid.”

  Theo was quiet for a moment and then exhaled.

  “Are you smoking?” she asked.

  “I started back up again. Just a few a day.”

  “I won’t bring it up again. About adopting. “

  “No, it’s okay.”

  “I think you’d be good as a dad.”

  “Thanks, Sammy,” he said quietly. “Oh, so Dad and Marie are coming your way. Clear out a big parking space.”

  “To Madison?”

  “In the RV. After Canada. In a couple weeks. He’s going to call you.”

  “No way.”

  “He wants to meet Ella, Sammy. Give him a break.”