Tart

by Jody Gehrman

  As it turns out, it’s only another thunderstorm. It doesn’t really matter; I can’t shake the apocalyptic dread that’s lodged itself inside me. I watch the rain hammering ripples into the neglected pool, lit a dingy yellow by streetlights. I wonder for the four-thousandth time if Clay Parker is having sex with his thin, dark-haired mystery girl right now. I wonder what she sounds like when she comes, and what he sounds like, and whether they talk afterward or stare at the ceiling together in wordless communion. I wonder what it means now that my aunt is my mother and my mother is my aunt and my father isn’t my father, he’s a white-socked stranger who got suckered into raising the abandoned daughter of a dead alcoholic.

  I hate waking up in hotel rooms in the middle of the night. It’s like your skin’s been peeled away, and all the dark thoughts you shield yourself from in sunlight finally swoop in to feast on your exposed flesh.

  I finish the first glass of vodka and pour myself another. I smoke my cigarette slowly, savoring the dirty sensation of smoke invading my lungs. I will myself not to think, just to watch the patterns the rain makes in the pool and the shapes the smoke forms as it reaches toward the stars.

  In the morning, I eat huevos rancheros in a little Mexican place Luz recommended and drink strong black coffee that tastes shockingly divine. Since I haven’t eaten anything but Corn Nuts, Sweettarts, beef jerky and shitty coffee for days, this meal is like heaven on my tongue. When I’ve gotten enough food in me to think straight, I open Jessie’s letter. The young, round waitress wearing a hairnet and red lipstick pours me more coffee and I smile at her. Then I skim the first page and the second and the third. It’s the fourth page that makes my heart thump with manic fervor in my chest.

  Mira never wanted you to know, but lately I’m convinced risking her hatred is worth it. I’ve wanted to come clean for years. Now I’ve got so many empty hours and no wine to soften things, and I feel if I don’t tell you, I’ll die. Claudia, I’m your real mother. Mira took you because I was too young. Please don’t consider yourself a mistake. I’ve always watched you with a mixture of pride and pain. You’re everything I’d want in a daughter, and it makes me sick to know that if only I’d been stronger, less confused, less stupid, you could have been mine.

  And later, on page six:

  Your father was a complicated man. He knew how to love—too much, I think. It killed him.

  Finally, on the last page:

  If there’s one thing I desire most in the world, it’s to be, in some small way, a mother to you. I know it will take so much to forgive me, and in writing these things I risk losing the only family I’ve got left: you, Mira, and even Rose. But if I sleep one more night with the secret inside me, I know I won’t wake up in the morning. Please forgive me.

  Your mother loves you.

  Jessie

  I sit with the letter shaking in my hands while tears fall uncontrollably, slipping off my chin to pool on the red Formica. Your mother loves you.

  Which one?

  The waitress comes and takes my plate; I avoid her concerned gaze, stare out the window at a big Ford truck pulling a U-Haul trailer. I consider getting in my car, turning the key and speeding away from this town with its multiple moons and its cleaning lady named Light and its sublime huevos rancheros. I could drive to New Orleans, live in the French Quarter, tend bar in some smoky place where people order hurricanes to go. I could call myself Eva or Jennifer or Daisy and choose a last name by opening a phone book with my eyes closed and seeing where my finger lands. I could. Why not? What’s stopping me?

  Instead, I pay my bill and follow Luz’s directions until I get to the Central New Mexico Correctional Facility. I take a deep breath, put on some lipstick and go to face my mother.

  CHAPTER 33

  Jessie looks bruised around the eyes from lack of sleep, and her graying, curly hair is even more chaotic than mine. I notice for the first time details that escaped me in the past. Her eyes are the exact same stormy-green as my own. There’s a patch of freckles spread across her nose that matches the one I’ve cursed in mirrors since I can remember.

  When she sees me waiting at a picnic table in the visitor’s yard, the joy that lights up her features almost negates the tired pallor of her skin. Though she looks worn and a little thin in her baggy prisoner’s uniform, the two years she’s spent drying out have given her back some vitality. She’s not as bloated anymore, and her complexion’s lost that yellowish tint that always made her look slightly seasick.

  “Claudia,” she says, and pulls me into a fierce hug. My arms are pinned awkwardly to my sides. I can smell the sweet fragrance of cheap shampoo in her hair. She pulls away and holds me at arms’ distance, studying my face. “I can’t believe you’re here,” she whispers. She looks like she might cry.

  All of a sudden she becomes abruptly embarrassed and lets me go. “Have a seat,” she says, gesturing to the other side of the picnic table, overly formal now. “I’m so glad you came.”

  We sit opposite each other. There are other women in the yard, meeting with husbands and lovers and children. A couple at a table in the corner are arguing. The woman’s about my age, and she keeps picking at her cuticles savagely as the man leans in and hisses inaudible accusations at her, his face livid.

  I look back at Jessie and try to smile. “So,” I say, and my mind goes blank.

  “So…” Jessie echoes. There’s an awkward pause. Finally, she says, “You must have gotten my letters.”

  “Yeah.”

  She looks like she wants to say something, stops herself, and asks instead in a light, conversational tone, “Have you heard from Rosemarie?”

  “Uh-huh.” My voice sounds funny. “We’re living together in Santa Cruz, actually.”

  “Really?” Her eyebrows arch in surprise, then she smiles. “That makes me happy. I was so worried about her.”

  “She’s okay.” I nod for emphasis. “She’s going to be fine. I just wish she’d talk about Jade once in a while. She acts like nothing ever happened.”

  “Rose has always been like that,” she says, shaking her head. “She won’t deal with anything until it comes crashing down around her.” She smirks. “Don’t know where she learned that.”

  “Everyone’s a little that way,” I say.

  Another awkward silence. The couple in the corner are getting louder. “They’re your fucking sons, Carla. Wake up,” the man’s saying. “They won’t just go away.”

  I study Jessie’s profile. She’s staring off at a mesa in the distance. It’s getting hotter, and I can feel a trickle of sweat inching down my back where the sun’s burning a hole between my shoulder blades. A slight breeze stirs, lifting several curls from Jessie’s forehead. I can feel my own curls shifting, too.

  “So I guess you know,” she says, still staring into the distance.

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you angry?”

  I swallow hard. My mouth is suddenly dry and I long for a cool glass of water. “I don’t know. More numb, I guess. Confused.”

  She nods. “I would have told you a long time ago. Mira thought it was better this way.” She sneaks a glance at me and our eyes meet briefly. Then she goes back to gazing at the mesa and I watch a young black woman cuddling a toddler in her lap. “I hate living with secrets. I just figured that I owed it to Mira. She did so much for me.”

  “She never really got into the mom thing,” I say.

  “No.” Jessie smiles sadly. “Lavelle women have trouble with that.” She looks at me. “You won’t, though. If you want that, I mean. You’re different.”

  “How so?”

  She shrugs. “You just are. You can do whatever you want. I’ve always known that, since the day you were born.”

  Something long ago frozen in me melts in a rush, like an ice cube in boiling water. There’s a warmth in Jessie’s eyes that pierces all the arctic space in me and liquefies what’s been solid and jagged for years.

  “You really think so?” I say, my voice cracking.r />
  “Absolutely,” she says. “You can do anything.” She looks up at the sky. The clouds have drifted west, leaving a big, vivid stretch of blue above us. “Your father was an amazing man. He was an artist, like you.”

  After that, we talk about other things—when she expects to get out (September, maybe), what she misses most (wine and Brie—though she’s determined to stop drinking), what I’ll do now that the school year’s over (who knows? Maybe tend bar in New Orleans). At noon, the guard comes over and tells us our time is up. In a way, I’m relieved. It’s been hard coming up with things to say, and every time we’re through with one topic, I feel a tiny lurch of fear that an unbreakable silence will descend.

  We hug again before they lead her back inside. This time my arms aren’t pinned to my sides. We’re almost exactly the same height, I notice.

  As the guard hovers nearby, she whispers into my ear, “I’m sorry.”

  I just nod.

  She doesn’t want to let go, I can tell. The guard murmurs, “Come on,” and then she says into my ear with quiet but furious intensity, “I love you.”

  I’m too mute with clogged emotion to produce an answer, and luckily she doesn’t seem to expect one. Anyway, the guard’s getting antsy and takes her by the arm.

  Driving away, a roadrunner scrambles along next to my car, moving with amazing speed. It makes me laugh.

  On the way back to the freeway, every single light I hit is green.

  How do you rearrange the family tree when it’s not some distant cousin you’ve misplaced, but yourself? How do you make peace with that tangle of confused branches? Here’s where I thought I was, here are the people who raised me, and here’s the people I come from. Here’s the dead father, with a radio mike in one hand and a stiff drink in the other. Here’s the man I called father, who organizes his tools alphabetically. My mother is my aunt, my aunt my mother. What do I do with the thirty years I spent begging Mira for the love of a mom?

  Rose is my half sister. I think of the mysterious empathy between us, a love that permeates my memories all the way back to graham crackers and Big Wheels. I always thought we were only children, and that we clung to each other because of it. But we inhabited the same womb, grew inside the same skin. No wonder our hands make sense to each other.

  I stop by the hotel to say goodbye to Luz; it’s Saturday, the sweet-faced boy informs me, her day off. I leave her thirty dollars in a small manila envelope and hand the boy five, which makes him beam. He’s not yet learned the adult trick of pretending nothing matters.

  Studying my Triple A map at a gas station, I decide to loop back through the Grand Canyon. It’s a little impractical, but I’ve never paid much attention to reason, so I figure this is no time to start.

  I consider driving through Truth or Consequences, too; it’s tempting to the poet in me, but since it’s at least three hundred miles in the wrong direction, the poet loses. There are limits to my craziness.

  As I drive for hours on a remote highway dotted with one-gas-station towns, I realize my detour isn’t about sightseeing at all. I’m not ready to go back. California means Rose and Mira and Simon. I’ll be forced to look at their faces and deal with the swirl of unanswered questions. I’ll have to interact with them in some reasonably normal way. They’ve known the facts about me for years. I’ve known for forty-eight hours; I’m having a little trouble catching up.

  At sunset, I pull over in the middle of nowhere. According to my map, I’ve hit the Painted Desert, and the world around me does look drenched in paint; there are miles and miles of color, from crimson to salmon to stripes of lavender. Lumpy earthen hills rise up from the flat earth and soak up the bloody light of the sun.

  I could just stay here, I think. Learn to hunt roadrunners and prairie dogs. Cook them over a tumbleweed fire and drink whiskey under the stars.

  A scrappy coyote trots by casually about ten feet from me. In the distance, his brothers start howling like a demented choir. He looks at me, sniffs the air. I change my mind about whiskey under the stars and get back in my car.

  By the time I get to the Grand Canyon, it’s well after dark. I find a campground and decide to stay the night. My legs ache from so many hours in one position, so I walk in a loop around the campsites, clutching my three-dollar mini-mart flashlight but not turning it on. I prefer the sensation of slipping ghostlike through the shadows, spying on each microcosm of the living as I pass: a family of six roasting marshmallows; a couple putting up their tent with great difficulty, shouting out orders in slurred voices; a big party of French teenagers drinking Mexican beer.

  I’m not exactly prepared for camping. The air is warm, though, and my car is too small to be comfortable, so I wrap myself in the cheap Indian blanket I bought, lie on the picnic table and stare for hours at the stars. I can’t believe how many there are up there. I think of that first night with Clay: the Greg Brown song, the night air perfumed with pine and yarrow, the color of his eyes at the Saturn Café, the silky-hot feel of his naked skin on mine. I kill the sweetness lingering in my chest with the bitter recollection of his arm around that glossy-haired girl. Why do they always fall for the shiny brunettes? Who in the hell suggested that blondes have more fun?

  I lie awake with a troubled montage flashing images randomly: Jessie’s gray curls stirring in the warm desert breeze; the small, wrinkled hands of Luz; Rose on stage as Juliana; the coyote’s eyes watching me suspiciously. I can’t imagine how it all fits together. The pictures just come and go like slides that don’t belong together; one is hardly even visible before it dissolves abruptly into the next.

  Just when I think I’ll never sleep and am considering getting back on the road, the last images give way to a merciful black. There are two things I see just before I finally succumb: myself as a baby, naked and crying, and my own hands as they are now, creased around the knuckles, chapped by the desert air, and strong.

  When I wake, it’s dawn, and the smell of bacon greets me. I roll over and see a little girl of about four watching me from a crouched position in the dirt. She’s trailing one finger in the dusty earth, drawing lopsided spirals. She sticks the finger into her mouth and sucks on it, an impish smile playing on her lips. When she sees my eyes are open, she crouches lower as if to hide. I smile weakly, still groggy, and she starts to wail at the top of her lungs. A middle-aged woman in overalls swoops her up and carries her into an RV.

  I get up and go pee, then wash my face with cold water, trying to ignore the clogged hair in the sink. I drive until I find a small corner market, where I pay an extortionate sum for apple juice, a banana and a bag of chips. After driving a little farther, suddenly the earth opens up before me in an enormous, yawning pit of pink, orange and purple. I get out of my car and walk until I’m so close to the edge I’m dizzy with vertigo.

  I’ve never seen the Grand Canyon—never given it much thought, really. Standing in the cool June dawn with all that pastel majesty carved out below me, I wonder how I could have avoided it all these years. It’s awesome; it makes you nervous, it’s so beautiful.

  I know it sounds bizarre, but I’m struck with the insane certainty that I can fly. I see myself backing up ten feet, then running with full force, hurtling myself over the edge and into the enormous space below. For a second or two, I’ll freefall, and my heart will pound in my ears. The lavender cliffs will blur as I pass them, making me nauseous with regret. But then I’ll put my arms straight out, and my chest will catch on an updraft, and my fall will become a graceful swimming through air. The Colorado River will sparkle like a gold chain beneath me, and I’ll float with feather-light bones in an easy, meandering descent.

  Gazing out over the emptiness, the vision is so visceral I’m starting to scare myself; maybe I’m having an acid flashback. I walk slowly in the direction of my Volvo. Before I get back in the car, though, I turn back, and look one more time at the huge canopy of sky—half pink, half Easter-egg blue—stretched out over the orange-and-purple canyon.

 
; I close my eyes and whisper, “Please.” I don’t know who I’m addressing, or what I’m asking for, exactly, but somehow this syllable makes me feel calmer than I have in days.

  Back on the road, I watch the canyon shrink slowly in my rearview mirror. The sun beats in through the passenger window, and before long sweat is beading on my forehead. Steering with one knee, I wrap my hair in a red bandanna. My throat’s dry, so I drink the expensive apple juice.

  After a while, the sound of nothing but my wheels on pavement makes me lonely, so I reach to turn on the boom box I stole from Simon and spin the dial slowly, navigating the static, until a radio station finally comes in. When I recognize the song, I can’t help but smile. It’s Greg Brown, way out here in the middle of this red desert. With your heart-shaped rocks and your rocky heart, your worn-out shoes and your eagerness to start.

  I’m ready to go home.

  CHAPTER 34

  When I open the door, Rose is there, and her head is completely covered in braids so I know right away she’s been worrying. She grabs me by both shoulders and launches into a breathless monologue:

  “Oh Claudia you’re okay Jesus I thought you were dead for sure and it was my fault because I’m such a selfish girl your mother I mean, Christ, Mira keeps calling and she’s so mad at me for telling you and I was so terrified for you last night I called every police station from here to L.A. and this morning I was going to call the FBI but—”

  “Whoa, whoa. Slow down.”

  “I was sure you were dead in a ditch,” she cries, and wraps me in a hug while at the same time jumping up and down with relief, which jostles me around a bit awkwardly, but I don’t mind. “Oh my God we have to call Mira right this second she is so fucking worried she’s like bitten through all her acrylic nails and smoked half her supply.”