A Room on Lorelei Street
Page 18
Opal stops, her caftan lapping at her ankles like a gentle tide. Her head tilts in her comfortable birdlike way and she smiles. “Some things,” she says. “Like why you can’t take the room off the porch. A little cramped, sure, but the view is fine and the free rent’s even better.”
“You’ve already done enough, Opal. More than you know. And I’ve already stayed here long enough without paying rent. I owe you. I will always owe you.”
“No, Zoe Beth Buckman. No owing.” She cups Zoe’s face in her soft wrinkled hands. “I took as much as I gave. Truly. Now, you can read that in my eyes, can’t you?”
Zoe looks, reads, nods. “Yes,” she answers.
Opal sits on the bed and pats the bare tuftness next to her. Her hurrying is gone out of her. “Sit with me,” she says. Zoe does. She has the time. Except for the stuffed pillowcase in her hand, her bags are all packed in her car.
“I’ll miss the tennis matches,” Opal says. “So will the Count.”
“Me too,” Zoe says. But in an odd way, she is mostly relieved. It makes it simpler. Being kicked off the team makes her other decisions easier. It’s less to hold on to. Almost freeing. She thinks of Grandma, holding so tight, trying to keep together what has already come undone. So much like herself. She smiles. Like Mama. Like Daddy. And now it seems, like Grandma. Parts of them, all a part of her, too. A thought like that would have made her crazy a week ago, but now she can hold it like a harmless bug in her palm.
“You’ll be okay, Zoe. I feel it in my bones.”
“If your bones say so, it must be true.”
“That room is always here, though. Just so you know.”
Zoe nods. “And the knowing is enough.”
Opal reaches into her pocket and pulls out a large round apricot. “It’s a record! One for the books!” she says, and places it in Zoe’s hand. “Never had one last till the first week of October before. Hung on just for you. Odder than a June bug in July. What do you make of it? Think it’s a sign?”
Zoe turns the apricot in her hand, feeling the delicate velvet of the skin. “I suppose it’s fate, Opal. Fate, pure and simple. And maybe a sign, too. A season that’s late in coming is finally here.”
Opal nods agreement, and they share the silence, a connection like arms holding them together.
The doorbell buzzes, and Opal becomes a flurry once again, shushing the Count, who is bellowing in the hall below. “Quick!” she says as she jumps up and runs out the door, “Should I stick with Opal’s Lorelei Oasis? Or should I try something new?”
Zoe smiles. “Oasis worked just fine for me. But why don’t you wait and see? It might come to you the minute you look in her eyes.” Opal claps her hands together, delighted with the possibility, and nods her good-bye.
Zoe leaves down the outside stairs, her overloaded pillowcase bumping along each step. She takes in each thump, each creak, each scent, each sight, like she is memorizing time, like it is all new and she is overcome with what she might have missed. She glances over her shoulder, back at the garden. The tops of her rutabagas are spiky green tufts now. She won’t be here when they are ready to dig up, but Reid said he would come. Was it the drama? Like the final act of a play that made him offer to do it? Or had he forgiven her? He didn’t say as much, but she thinks that was it.
She unlocks her trunk and then stops to look down the shaded street, dappled light pocking the sidewalks and cars. Lorelei. A street she never knew existed three months ago. What will she discover three months from now? She almost missed the chance to find out. It’s been over a week since she was at the aqueduct, but she can still feel the chill of that night on her arms. She relives it every day. How close. How terribly close….
Voices pushing her but then saving her, too. Her own voice, finally, speaking louder than the others. Chopped-up conversations with Zoe as their beginning and end.
Never far enough away.
The possibility came to her. Of her own making. Far enough. Pieces of possibility that gathered together in a tight strand.
No matter what had happened, what had brought her to the aqueduct, the wondering was worse. She knows that. Slipping into blackness would leave Kyle with the same wondering that Daddy left her. The wondering that can never be satisfied.
For Kyle. And the wondering that eats. She opened her eyes. She couldn’t leave him with that.
And then on the heels of the chopped-up voices there was a whisper on a moonless night, a whisper as crisp as a cold breeze. Special, Zoe. Stars, Zoe. Whispers Daddy left her that meant something, too.
Zoe.
Full of life.
You can’t flush away life.
Mama didn’t. Mama made a choice.
So could she.
Fate…so much pushing it can’t happen any other way
unless you push back to make it not.
It was then her arms rose for balance and fear held every cautious step. The night was blacker, the beams narrower, the distance as far as forever, but she worked her way to the other side and fell into the dirt with gulping breaths.
She sat there in the dark, afraid to move. Shivering. Shamed. But alive. Never far enough away, but maybe a place far enough for now.
And then, amazingly, Grandma’s chopped-up words last of all as she searched in the dark for shoes she never found.
Be a good girl, Beth. Let’s put all this behind us. Start fresh.
Yes, Zoe thought. Fresh. Maybe not the fresh Grandma had meant. But fresh in her own way. Maybe the kind of fresh Aunt Nadine had to find.
Chopped-up voices. Bits and pieces. All a part of her now. Forever splintered into her for better or worse. But the choosing, the choosing is what Mama gave her. Not a peanut growing all on her own, after all, but something of Mama, too.
Bits. Pieces. Endings. Beginnings. And choosing.
She throws her pillowcase into the trunk and looks up at the room one more time. She sees a hand slip the For Rent sign from the window. A momentary fear skips through her, but then she shakes her head. Opal’s bones always know. She has to believe that. They always know. She gets in her car and drives the quiet Sunday streets of Ruby to Mama’s and parks at the curb just behind Mr. Henderson’s pickup. She gets out and pauses at the gate.
The weeds have grown thicker; the summer blooms are all gone. She stares at the house and imagines it with daisies crowding the porch. She imagines a cool, lazy sprinkler and open, breezy windows and a lawn that is almost green. She imagines a young woman sitting on the steps weaving daisy chains into her hair and a man chasing a little boy with a hose.
It used to be a house, she thinks.
You could almost have called it pretty.
The chain-link gate groans as she passes through.
She stops at the steps and looks down at a faded doormat that once said “welcome.” She reaches into her pocket and pulls out the last apricot in Ruby, maybe the last one in the universe, and sets it on Mama’s doormat. She takes a step back and looks at it. An apricot out of season. Mama loved apricots. Loves apricots. Zoe hopes she sees it.
Fifty
One hand drapes Kyle’s shoulder, and the other opens the door of the Thunderbird. Kyle’s shoes scrape the gravel like a puppy, digging to find a safe place. He looks at the overloaded car, bags and pillowcases filling the back seat. “Where you going?”
“Brownsville.”
“Where’s that?”
“About as far as you can get from Ruby and still be in Texas. It’s where Aunt Nadine is.”
“You going to live with her?”
“For a while. Maybe. If there’s room. But if there isn’t, I’ll find another place.”
“But why there?”
“I don’t know. I’ll ask Aunt Nadine. Maybe she knows.”
But some things have no words, Zoe thinks, no grand explanations that can be puzzled together. They come together in fits of time and circumstance, and the lines melt away until it is simply a new life. Not too far away. But far enough. She
won’t press Aunt Nadine.
“Grandma says you’re running away. Stealing the car and running away.”
“Look like I’m running to you? And Aunt Nadine said I could come. Besides, if I was stealing the car don’t you think Grandma would be the first one here stopping me? That’s just her grumbling. And what did I tell you about that?”
He peels out a slow whistle and says, “Let it breeze right on by.”
She rubs his head with approval. “I love you, Kiteman. And if you can, someday…you come and see me, okay?”
“Won’t you be coming back here?”
She looks down into his light blue eyes, the child eyes she never had. “I don’t know. But I think probably not. I think…no. Only for funerals or weddings. You getting married soon?”
He laughs and kicks at the ground. She gives him that, the laughter on their parting, to ease his worry. She fills him with it so he can go back to his eleven-year-old life and she can leave with the worries all her own. She gives him that because she can and she always has.
“What’s that?” he asks, pointing to the front seat.
“What’s it look like? A big, mean, fat-ass bulldog. Buckled in tight because he’s my copilot. No one’ll mess with us.”
“But it’s stone,” he says.
Zoe looks at the bulldog and nods. “No potty stops, either,” she says and erases the last crease of worry she sees in his face. She squeezes his head to her chest one more time before she gets in her car and pulls out of the drive. Gravel rasps under her tires, and Kyle waves madly, waving until he is only a speck on Aunt Patsy and Uncle Clint’s green double-wide oasis.
At the stop sign before the highway she opens the glove box and pulls out a map. She spreads it out on the front seat. The paper crinkles—crinkles with a sound she is sure must be the sound of possibility—and her finger slides along a black curvy line to Brownsville.
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Copyright © 2005 by Mary E. Pearson. All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pearson, Mary (Mary E.)
A room on Lorelei Street / Mary E. Pearson.—1st. ed.
p. cm.
Summary: To escape a miserable existence taking care of her alcoholic mother, seventeen-year-old Zoe rents a room from an eccentric woman, but her earnings as a waitress after school are minimal and she must go to extremes to cover expenses.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-0436-4
1. Freedom—Fiction. 2. Family problems—Fiction. 3. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 4. Alcoholism—Fiction. 5. Lodging houses—Fiction. 6. Texas—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.P32316Ro 2005 [Fic]—dc22 2004054015