Mercy Train

by Rae Meadows

  “Hi, Samantha. It’s your dad. Marie and I are headed your way, and we’d love to stop by and see you. If that’s all right with you kids, of course. In two weeks or so? We have a few more stops up here in Canada before making our way down. Well, okay then. Give me a call when you can. Kiss my granddaughter for me.”

  Sam blew her cheeks out with a sigh. She had lost years with her father, for reasons that no longer held much weight. She would call him in the morning. It was a start.

  After changing Ella’s diaper and suiting her up in footed dinosaur pajamas, Sam placed her in a plastic rain-forest-themed monstrosity called the Jumparoo and finally took off her coat. Ella chewed on a plastic toucan and bounced up and down in the bungee-attached seat.

  Jack arrived a few minutes later, his chestnut curls spilling over his ears, a stain on the front of his sweater—pea soup? His eyes were tired, but when he walked in the door they brightened at the sight of Ella jumping away. Sam felt the warmth of familiarity, but it was more than that. She had missed him.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said, setting the takeout bags on the table and shaking off his coat, which he hung on the back of a chair. His lips were cold as he kissed her cheek. He went to Ella and swooped her up, tossing her in the air until she giggled. “How are my girls?”

  “We survived,” Sam said. “Ella did great.”

  “And you?”

  “I couldn’t do it.”

  Jack’s eyes were dark and gentle, the way she used to see them so long ago. Her heart beat like a cornered animal as she gathered her nerve.

  “I’m going to cancel Franklin’s commission.”

  Jack dropped his chin in disappointment.

  “I’ll call him tomorrow and apologize,” she said.

  He pursed his lips but then nodded. “Okay. You got to do what you got to do.”

  He set Ella down on the carpet, and she crawled off to retrieve a stuffed bunny.

  “I’m just not ready,” she said.

  “It’s a process. It’ll take time. You took a hiatus to make a life.”

  Yes, she thought, I made life. And I have also taken it away.

  “Maybe that phase is over, I don’t know.” She didn’t quite mean it, but she wanted to taste the idea, roll it around on her tongue.

  “Phase?”

  “Clay. Pots.”

  “Since when is your art a phase?”

  She smiled at him, thankful. “You’re right. I’m just being defeatist.” Ella gave a high-pitched scream, experimenting, and smiled at Sam. “Before I forget, I talked to Ted today.”

  “Any morsels for me?”

  “His father was a scientist at Los Alamos. The hydrogen bomb.”

  “Nice. Wow. Hippie Ted with a bomb-maker dad. Good one.” Jack picked up Ella and put her on his lap. “Are you hungry? I couldn’t remember what you wanted. So I punted. Just got a bunch of stuff.”

  She felt a momentary pique—she ordered the same thing every time—but, as she reminded herself, this was not the stuff of tragedy. It did not have to be symbolic or weighted or tucked away to add to a pile of resentments. It was just dinner.

  “Let me put Ella to bed,” she said.

  “Good night, my little pumpkin.” He kissed her all over her face as she smiled and squirmed. “I missed you today. Sleep well. Let Mommy sleep tonight.”

  * * *

  The dark room was a warm cocoon, shades drawn, and the soft rush of air from the humidifier hushed out the sounds of the house and noises from outside. Sam rocked in the glider chair that had been her mother’s, as Ella nursed, sleep near. As her eyes adjusted, Sam could just make out the letters of Ella’s name on the wall, which Jack had bought and mounted in an arc above her crib.

  “Do you want to name the baby after your mother?” he had asked quietly, in bed one night, a few weeks after Iris had died.

  “No,” she had said quickly. “Iris was Iris. I like our name.”

  “Me too.”

  Sam picked up Ella and switched her to the other breast. The elephants of the mobile above the crib spun aimlessly in the parched air blowing from the heating vent. She closed her eyes and listened to the faint clank of plates as Jack set the table for dinner.

  * * *

  “What’s all this?” Jack asked, palming a clay apple she’d made in kindergarten.

  “A box Theo sent. Of my mom’s. My dad found it in his garage. He took it by accident after the divorce.”

  “Your early work?” Jack raised his eyebrow and held out the apple.

  She smiled and took an edamame pod from the container, squeezing out the beans with her teeth. He put the apple on the table next to other mementos she’d looked through earlier.

  “I’m almost finished going through it. I wish I could be more like Theo and just let it all go.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “No, I don’t.” She sopped up soy sauce with a piece of a spicy tuna roll, sucking the salty liquid from the rice. “So,” she said. “Congratulations.”

  He smiled and shook his head. “It’s nuts, isn’t it? Not that it’s anything yet. But I’m pleased.”

  “Me too.”

  “Unfortunately I have a huge stack of papers to grade tonight,” he said, standing and stretching.

  “Jack?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Nothing. We can talk about it later. Go do your work. It’s been a long day.”

  He kissed the top of her head.

  When he was gone and she was once again alone, Sam pushed away the Styrofoam containers of food. She opened the small Bible and ran her thumb along the edges of the gossamer pages, hoping for something else, some other clue. The pages opened to a folded square of light blue paper, stained yellow in its crease, with a piece torn out near one of its edges. She held the delicate paper up and turned it over, but all that appeared to be on it was a very faint handwritten number 8. She flipped through the Bible again but found nothing else tucked inside.

  Sam gathered up her grandmother’s recipes, which she’d left in a messy pile after she’d discovered the letter. She stacked the cards one by one and, sure enough, after Peach Chartreuse there it was: Pound Cake. The measurements were in cups, which would have helped, and the recipe called for ten eggs. She’d been close. A note at the bottom of the card read, Add vanilla and pinch of mace. From her grandmother, to her mother, to her. Sam smiled, feeling a sense of rightness in that simple continuum. She ran her finger over her grandmother’s handwriting and set the card aside.

  She tipped the last of Iris’s keepsakes onto the table, spilling the contents in a small dusty heap. Of course she had wanted to find some talisman or diary or telling residue of her mother’s life in the box, and of course she had found none of those things. But neither could she part with what remained. A few centimes and franc coins rolled and spun. A cracked postcard from Zurich, the writing faded to an illegible shadow. A photograph of Sam—age four, she guessed—in a polka-dotted dress and saddle shoes, and an adolescent Theo, his hair feathered over his ears, in front of a Christmas tree, and another of all four of them, Iris’s face turned away from the camera, and Glenn in a candy-cane-striped tie. A photograph from sometime in the fifties of her parents—they must have been newly married—in the living room of the old farmhouse Iris had grown up in, his hand on her knee. And another, from a later time, of Theo, ten or so, in brown corduroys and a turtleneck, laughing as he bent toward a pig behind a fence.

  The last picture was of her grandmother standing in front of a plowed field, a swaddled infant—Sam—asleep in her arms. So I have been to Minnesota after all, she thought. She pulled the picture closer. Her grandmother’s face was hardened, worn, squinting into the sun. A utilitarian woman. A farmer’s wife. For almost sixty years she took care of the house, a husband, a child, the chickens, the canning. Who was she before she was Mrs. Olsen, when she was just Violet? Sam flipped the photo over: Mother and Samantha, September 1967. The picture warmed something in Sam. It spoke of history an
d continuity, of life lived and of life still to live. She pulled the letter from her pocket and slipped it under a magnet on the refrigerator along with the photograph.

  * * *

  “Well, you sound pretty normal,” Melanie said. “From what Sarah told me I thought a madwoman had come and picked up Ella.”

  “Sorry. It was a big day for me, you know.”

  “I know. I don’t really get it, but I know. God, it’s frigid in here. Hold on. I’m turning the heat up to seventy-eight.”

  “Let me guess, Doug’ll secretly turn it down and you’ll turn it back up again.”

  “Bingo. But he’ll give up first. I can’t believe it’s cold again. Just the thought of my neighbors’ rosy-cheeked cheer while they shovel their cars out of two feet of snow is enough for me to break out the vodka.”

  “Thanks for today.”

  “Really, it’s nothing. I’m selfish, remember? I’m just waiting for the right moment to order new place settings from you. So, should I tell Sarah she’ll have Ella during the week or what? Sarah loved her. She said she could handle both kids, no problem.”

  Sam bit her cheek. “I need to think about it. Maybe one morning a week?”

  Melanie laughed. “Don’t go too crazy, Samantha.”

  “Baby steps.” In the background Sam could hear Rosalee saying Mama, Mama, Mama. “So what can we bring to dinner?” Sam asked.

  “When do they start taking care of themselves?” Melanie said. “Nothing. I’m getting food from Harvest. You didn’t think I’d actually cook, did you? Okay, must go tend to child.”

  “See you soon,” Sam said.

  * * *

  Sam imagined a vessel for her mother’s ashes. Something simple, subtle. At first she felt the creak of effort, thinking of a familiar form, an old design. But then her synapses revved up, pushing into new territory. A small lidded jar, small enough to fit in the palm of her hand, full and round like the body of a bird. The lid, sunken and flush with a round knob handle. She would carve vertical lines through the layer of dark slip from the opening of the jar to its base, exposing the white porcelain underneath, giving the piece depth and texture. An allover stony matte glaze. She sketched and sketched until she saw on paper what she had envisioned in her head.

  * * *

  She slid in under the covers next to Jack, who was reading the New Yorker.

  “I’m sorry about the gift for Franklin,” she said.

  He finished the paragraph he was reading before he turned to her, and she wondered if he had always done this or if it was just that now she noticed.

  “It’s okay. I don’t think it’ll bring down my academic career.” He smiled and smoothed her hair off her face.

  “My mom was on my mind so much today.”

  “Grief doesn’t run in a straight line,” he said, laying the magazine on his chest and lacing his fingers. “It can loop around. Come and go.”

  “I want to go to Minnesota,” she said. “To where she grew up. Where my grandparents lived. Can we go there sometime?”

  “I would like that. Our first family trip. In the spring?”

  “In the spring.”

  She picked up her mother’s library copy of To the Lighthouse, which had been on her bedside table for a year, and opened it to the first page.

  * * *

  Sam couldn’t sleep as Jack snored beside her. She got up and went into the bathroom for her robe; the floor, buckling and losing tiles and no longer charmingly antique, was cold against her bare feet. It was fall, after all, and despite the pumping furnace, the heat quickly seeped out from the ill-fitting windows and poorly insulated walls and gapped floorboards of the old house.

  The studio floor was unyieldingly cold, like the marble floors of a cathedral in winter. She flipped on the light and winced from the flash of brightness, blinking until her eyes adjusted. She went to her bulletin board and tacked up her sketch. It wasn’t bad, she thought, tracing her finger along the line of the body, but going from idea to actuality seemed monumental.

  She took a breath and worked open the knotted bag of clay, the smell pungent, earthy, and familiar. The gray-white porcelain had little give, but she plunged her fingers into its surface, wet with condensation. It was smooth and malleable, the possibility of its forms infinite. The feeling of the clay began to jog the memory in her hands, stirring the desire to create—that elusive fire—and she knew she would be back in her studio again soon. She pulled her hand out and tied the bag closed.

  Ella’s cry was faint from this distance. Sam felt adrenaline speed up her heart before her ears registered the sound. She wiped her hands on a towel and padded up the stairs to the nursery, where she found Ella sitting up, holding on to the crib. Sam lifted her out without a word, silently moving to the glider chair. It must be around one thirty, she thought, one of Ella’s regular intervals of waking to be nursed back to sleep. It was a choreography of need and soothing, expectation and fulfillment, one that Sam had come to rely on for a certain satisfaction. She closed her eyes and counted to sixty in time with the rock of the chair, then switched breasts and started again. She inserted a pacifier into the sleepy mouth, carried Ella back to the crib, and laid her down. She went back to the rocker and covered herself with a blanket, a cream-and-rose-checked afghan knit by her grandmother.

  In a span of months she had been present for birth and for death, the wondrous first breath and the horrible last. But wasn’t it an honor to be there at the end of a life as well as the beginning? To mark the extraordinariness of a lifetime, to bear witness to its completion? Could she ever convince herself of that?

  The last time she and Jack had gone to Paris, over dinner at the lively Chez Janou tucked behind the place des Vosges, they had agreed it was time to have a baby. Sam had felt the bubbly aftereffects of that giddy decision. She smiled, and he smiled back. They drank more wine.

  “What’s cuisses de grenouille?” he asked, pronouncing it badly and pointing.

  “Frog legs,” she said. “Or, I guess, more precisely, frog thighs. Ribbit ribbit.”

  He stuck out his bottom lip and shook his head in disgust. “Don’t say they taste like chicken.”

  She laughed, feeling light and lucky. “Hey, what’s it called when a word is used that’s related to the thing to represent the thing.” She lowered her voice. “Like calling the French frogs.”

  “Isn’t that an epithet?”

  “No. I mean, I guess it’s derogatory. But like they eat frogs so they’re called frogs.”

  “Metonymy?”

  “Yeah, metonymy.”

  “Like the crown for royalty.”

  “Or suits for executives,” she countered.

  “Madison Avenue.”

  “The White House.”

  “Mother tongue.”

  “Wall Street.”

  “Houston, we have a problem.”

  “Whoa. That’s advanced,” she said.

  They drank more and ordered, he the seven-hour lamb, she the confit de canard. They held hands across the table.

  “Roof,” she said, which took him a moment to realize she was back at it. “As in a roof over our head.”

  “If you want to get technical,” he said, “I think that’s synecdoche. The same idea, but when you use a part of something to represent the whole.”

  “Okay, smarty pants. Ivories for piano,” she said.

  “Threads for clothes.”

  “Mouths to feed.”

  “All hands on deck,” he said.

  “White-collar criminals.”

  Jack spun his wine and bit his cheek, not ready to lose a language game.

  “Give us this day our daily bread.” He raised his hands in triumph.

  “No. Really? Merde. I’m out.”

  The escargots bourguignonnes arrived, shiny with butter in their delicate spiral shells.

  “It’s weird you’ll eat snails but not frogs,” she said.

  “I guess there’s no accounting for taste.” He had p
opped his tiny fork into the rubbery meat.

  “I like the name Charlie,” she said. “If we have a boy let’s name him Charlie.”

  The memory felt like fireplace warmth to her now. It didn’t make her long for what had been lost. The first baby, her mother, a blithe marriage, a steadfast desire to create, a life before Ella when her fears were containable—she had fingered those worry beads enough for one day. Instead it was synecdoche that stuck with her, how a part might stand for a whole, how it might, in fact, let you tap into something larger. How a day could represent a lifetime, a snapshot of humanity that wouldn’t exist without all that came before it. It comforted her to think this way. Sam dozed in the chair, awash in the humidifier’s lulling hum. But then she thought, Enough of this, and forced herself to get up.

  She slipped back into the cold sheets beside her sleeping husband and tried to hold on to her newfound clarity. She scooted her body next to Jack’s, molding to his familiar curve.

  “Jack,” she said, shaking his shoulder. “Wake up.”

  VIOLET

  “I’ll do it,” Violet said to Frank. “We’ll hop out at the next stop.”

  Frank looked terrified. “Do you think they’ll come after us?”

  “What do they care? Two less to worry about.” She relaced her boots and shoved her Bible under the seat.

  Mrs. Comstock dozed at the front of the car, her head cocked against her shoulder.

  “We got to get lost from the rest. Go up to a different car.”

  “You mean now?” Frank asked.

  “I’ll go. You follow in a minute.” Violet jumped up.

  Patrick grabbed her arm as she passed. “Where you off to, huh?”

  She jutted her chin toward the front of the car.

  He laughed. “Well, ain’t you the adventurer.” But he didn’t offer to come along, resignation having deflated his bravado.

  She slipped by Mrs. Comstock, and all of a sudden she was outside in the deafening space between cars, a new quickness in her feet. She pushed through the door into the next car, sparsely filled with riders who didn’t turn to look at her as she made her way up the aisle, running her hand along the backs of the seats. Frank finally appeared, nervous and shifty, hunched over, with his hands hiding in his pockets.