“I just pay attention to things,” I told her. “That’s all.”
“Yeah, right.”
The baby came right on schedule—threethirty, Sunday morning. I probably would’ve panicked if Annie hadn’t been doing enough of that for both of us. Instead I got on the phone, called Angel, and then saw about helping Annie get dressed.
The contractions were really close by the time Angel arrived with the car. But everything worked out fine. Jillian Sophia Mackle was born two hours and fortyfive minutes later at the Newford General Hospital. Six pounds and five ounces of redfaced wonder. There were no complications.
Those came later.
11
The last week before the show was simple chaos. There seemed to be a hundred and one things that none of them had thought of, all of which had to be done at the last moment. And to make matters worse, Jilly still had one unfinished canvas haunting her by Friday night.
It stood on her easel, untitled, barelysketched in images, still in monochrome. The colors eluded her.
She knew what she wanted, but every time she stood before her easel, her mind went blank. She seemed to forget everything she’d ever known about art. The inner essence of the canvas rose up inside her like a ghost, so close she could almost touch it, but then fled daily, like a dream lost upon waking. The outside world intruded. A knock on the door. The ringing of the phone.
The show opened in exactly seven days.
Annie’s baby was almost two weeks old. She was a happy, satisfied infant, the kind of baby that was forever making contented little gurgling sounds, as though talking to herself; she never cried. Annie herself was a nervous wreck.
“I’m scared,” she told Jilly when she came over to the loft that afternoon. “Everything’s going too well. I don’t deserve it.” They were sitting at the kitchen table, the baby propped up on the Murphy bed between two pillows. Annie kept fidgeting. Finally she picked up a pencil and started drawing stick figures on pieces of paper.
“Don’t say that,” Jilly said. “Don’t even think it.”
“But it’s true. Look at me. I’m not like you or Sophie. I’m not like Angel. What have I got to offer my baby? What’s she going to have to look up to when she looks at me?”
“A kind, caring mother.”
Annie shook her head. “I don’t feel like that. I feel like everything’s sort of fuzzy and it’s like pushing through cobwebs to just to make it through the day.”
“We’d better make an appointment with you to see a doctor.”
“Make it a shrink,” Annie said. She continued to doodle, then looked down at what she was doing.
“Look at this. It’s just crap.”
Before Jilly could see, Annie swept the sheaf of papers to the floor.
“Oh, jeez,” she said as they went fluttering all over the place. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”
She got up before Jilly could and tossed the lot of them in the garbage container beside the stove.
She stood there for a long moment, taking deep breaths, holding them, slowly letting them out.
“Annie ... ?”
She turned as Jilly approached her. The glow of motherhood that had seemed to revitalize her in the month before the baby was born had slowly worn away. She was pale again. Wan. She looked so lost that all Jilly could do was put her arms around her and offer a wordless comfort.
“I’m sorry,” Annie said against Jilly’s hair. “I don’t know what’s going on. I just ... I know I should be really happy, but I just feel scared and confused.” She rubbed at her eyes with a knuckle. “God, listen to me. All it seems I can do is complain about my life.”
“It’s not like you’ve had a great one,” Jilly said.
“Yeah, but when I compare it to what it was like before I met you, it’s like I moved up into heaven.”
“Why don’t you stay here tonight?” Jilly said.
Annie stepped back out of her arms. “Maybe I will—if you really don’t mind ... ?”
“I really don’t mind.”
“Thanks.”
Annie glanced towards the bed, her gaze pausing on the clock on the wall above the stove.
“You’re going to be late for work,” she said.
“That’s all right. I don’t think I’ll go in tonight.”
Annie shook her head. “No, go on. You’ve told me how busy it gets on a Friday night.”
Jilly still worked parttime at Kathryn’s Cafe on Battersfield Road. She could just imagine what Wendy would say if she called in sick. There was no one else in town this weekend to take her shift, so that would leave Wendy working all the tables on her own.
“If you’re sure,” Jilly said.
“We’ll be okay,” Annie said. “Honestly.”
She went over to the bed and picked up the baby, cradling her gently in her arms.
“Look at her,” she said, almost to herself. “It’s hard to believe something so beautiful came out of me.” She turned to Jilly, adding before Jilly could speak, “That’s a kind of magic all by itself, isn’t it?”
“Maybe one of the best we can make,” Jilly said.
12
How Can You Call This Love? by Claudia Feder. Oils. Old Market Studio, Newford, 1990.
A fat man sits on a bed in a cheap hotel room. He’s removing his shirt. Through the ajar door of the bathroom behind him, a thin girl in bra and panties can be seen sitting on the toilet, shooting up.
She appears to be about fourteen.
I just pay attention to things, I told her. I guess that’s why, when I got off my shift and came back to the loft, Annie was gone. Because I pay such good attention. The baby was still on the bed, lying between the pillows, sleeping. There was a note on the kitchen table: I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I just keep wanting to hit something. I look at little Jilly and I think about my mother and I get so scared. Take care of her for me. Teach her magic.
Please don’t hate me.
I don’t know how long I sat and stared at those sad, piteous words, tears streaming from my eyes.
I should never have gone to work. I should never have left her alone. She really thought she was just going to replay her own childhood. She told me, I don’t know how many times she told me, but I just wasn’t paying attention, was I?
Finally I got on the phone. I called Angel. I called Sophie. I called Lou Fucceri. I called everybody I could think of to go out and look for Annie. Angel was at the loft with me when we finally heard. I was the one who picked up the phone.
I heard what Lou said: “A patrolman brought her into the General not fifteen minutes ago, ODing on Christ knows what. She was just trying to selfdestruct, is what he said. I’m sorry, Jilly. But she died before I got there.”
I didn’t say anything. I just passed the phone to Angel and went to sit on the bed. I held little Jilly in my arms and then I cried some more.
I was never joking about Sophie. She really does have faerie blood. It’s something I can’t explain, something we’ve never really talked about, something I just know and she’s never denied. But she did promise me that she’d bless Annie’s baby, just the way fairy godmothers would do it in all those old stories.
“I gave her the gift of a happy life,” she told me later. “I never dreamed it wouldn’t include Annie.”
But that’s the way it works in fairy tales, too, isn’t it? Something always goes wrong, or there wouldn’t be a story. You have to be strong, you have to earn your happily ever after.
Annie was strong enough to go away from her baby when she felt like all she could do was just lash out, but she wasn’t strong enough to help herself. That was the awful gift her parents gave her.
I never finished that last painting in time for the show, but I found something to take its place.
Something that said more to me in just a few rough lines than anything I’ve ever done.
I was about to throw out my garbage when I saw those crude little drawings that Annie ha
d been doodling on my kitchen table the night she died. They were like the work of a child.
I framed one of them and hung it in the show.
“I guess we’re five coyotes and one coyote ghost now,” was all Sophie said when she saw what I had done.
13
In the House of My Enemy, by Annie Mackle. Pencils. Yoors Street Studio, Newford, 1991.
The images are crudely rendered. In a house that is merely a square with a triangle on top, are three stick figures, one plain, two with small “skirt” triangles to represent their gender. The two larger figures are beating the smaller one with what might be crooked sticks, or might be belts.
The small figure is cringing away.
14
In the visitor’s book set out at the show, someone wrote: “I can never forgive those responsible for what’s been done to us. I don’t even want to try.”
“Neither do I,” Jilly said when she read it. “God help me, but neither do I.”
But For The Grace Go I
You can only predict things after they’ve happened.
—Eugene Ionesco
I inherited Tommy the same way I did the dogs. Found him wandering lost and alone, so I took him home. I’ve always taken in strays—maybe because a long time ago I used to hope that someone’d take me in. I grew out of that idea pretty fast.
Tommy’s kind of like a pet, I guess, except he can talk. He doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but then I don’t find what most people have to say makes much sense. At least Tommy’s honest. What you see is what you get. No games, no hidden agendas. He’s only Tommy, a big guy who wouldn’t hurt you even if you took a stick to him. Likes to smile, likes to laugh—a regular guy. He’s just a few bricks short of a load, is all. Hell, sometimes I figure all he’s got is bricks sitting back in there behind his eyes.
I know what you’re thinking. A guy like him should be in an institution, and I suppose you’re right, except they pronounced him cured at the Zeb when they needed his bed for somebody whose family had money to pay for the space he was taking up and they’re not exactly falling over themselves to get him back.
We live right in the middle of that part of Newford that some people call the Tombs and some call Squatland. It’s the dead part of the city—a jungle of empty lots filled with trash and abandoned cars, gutted buildings and rubble. I’ve seen it described in the papers as a blight, a disgrace, a breeding ground for criminals and racial strife, though we’ve got every color you can think of living in here and we get along pretty well together, mostly because we just leave each other alone. And we’re not so much criminals as losers.
Sitting in their fancy apartments and houses, with running water and electricity and no worry about where the next meal’s coming from, the good citizens of Newford have got a lot of names and ways to describe this place and us, but those of us who actually live here just call it home. I think of it as one of those outlaw roosts like they used to have in the Old West—some little ramshackle town, way back in the badlands, where only the outlaws lived. Of course those guys like L’Amour and Short who wrote about places like that probably just made them up. I find that a lot of people have this thing about making crap romantic, the way they like to blur outlaws and heroes, the good with the bad.
I know that feeling all too well, but I broke the only pair of rosecolored glasses I had the chance to own a long time ago. Sometimes I pretend I’m here because I want to be, because it’s the only place I can be free, because I’m judged by who I am and what I can do, not by how screwed up my family is and how dirt poor looked pretty good from the position we were in.
I’m not saying this part of town’s pretty. I’m not even saying I like living here. We’re all just putting in time, trying to make do. Every time I hear about some kid ODing, somebody getting knifed, somebody taking that long step off a building or wrapping their belt around their neck, I figure that’s just one more of us who finally got out. It’s a war zone in here, and just like in Vietnam, they either carry you out in a box, or you leave under your own steam carrying a piece of the place with you—a kind of cold shadow that sits inside your soul and has you waking up in a cold sweat some nights, or feeling closed in and crazy in your new work place, home, social life, whatever, for no good reason except that it’s the Tombs calling to you, telling you that maybe you don’t deserve what you’ve got now, reminding you of all those people you left behind who didn’t get the break you did.
I don’t know why we bother. Let’s be honest. I don’t know why I bother. I just don’t know any better, I guess. Or maybe I’m just too damn stubborn to give up.
Angel—you know, the dogooder who runs that program out of her Grasso Street office to get kids like me off the streets? She tells me I’ve got a nihilistic attitude. Once she explained what that meant, all I could do was laugh.
“Look at where I’m coming from,” I told her. “What do you expect?”
“I can help you.”
I just shook my head. “You want a piece of me, that’s all, but I’ve got nothing left to give.”
That’s only partly true. See, I’ve got responsibilities, just like a regular citizen. I’ve got the dogs. And I’ve got Tommy. I was joking about calling him my pet. That’s just what the bikers who’re squatting down the street from us call him. I think of us all—me, the dogs and Tommy—as family. Or about as close to family as any of us are ever going to get. I can’t leave, because what would they do without me?
And who’d take the whole pack of us, which is the only way I’d go?
Tommy’s got this thing about magazines, though he can’t read a word. Me, I love to read. I’ve got thousands of books. I get them all from the dump bins in back of bookstores—you know, where they tear off the covers to get their money back for the ones they don’t sell and just throw the book away?
Never made any sense to me, but you won’t catch me complaining.
I’m not that particular about what I read. I just like the stories. Danielle Steel or Dostoyevsky, Somerset Maugham or King—doesn’t make much difference. Just so long as I can get away in the words.
But Tommy likes his magazines, and he likes them with his name on the cover—you know, the subscription sticker? There’s two words he can read: Thomas and Flood. I know his first name’s Tommy, because he knows that much and that’s what he told me. I made up the last name. The building we live in is on Flood Street.
He likes People and Us and Entertainment Weekly and Life and stuff like that. Lots of pictures, not too many words. He gets me to cut out the pictures of the people and animals and ads and stuff he likes and then he plays with them like they were paper dolls. That’s how he gets away, I guess. Whatever works.
Anyway, I’ve got a post office box down on Grasso Street near Angel’s office and that’s where I have the subscriptions sent. I go down once a week to pick them up—usually on Thursday afternoons.
It’s all a little more than I can afford—makes me work a little harder at my garbage picking, you know?—but what am I going to do? Cut him off from his only pleasure? People think I’m hard—when they don’t just think I’m crazy—and maybe I am, but I’m not mean.
The thing about having a post office box is that you get some pretty interesting junk mail—well at least Tommy finds it interesting. I used to throw it out, but he came down with me to the box one time and got all weirded out when he saw me throwing it out so I bring most of it back now. He calls them his surprises. First thing he asks when I get back is, “Were there any surprises?”
I went in the Thursday this all started and gave the clerk my usual glare, hoping that one day he’ll finally get the message, but he never does. He was the one who sicced Angel on me in the first place.
Thought nineteen was too young to be a bag lady, pretty girl like me. Thought he could help.
I didn’t bother to explain that I’d chosen to live this way. I’ve been living on my own since I was twelve. I don’t sell my bod’ and I don’t do
drugs. My clothes may be worn down and patched, but they’re clean. I wash every day, which is more than I can say for some of the real citizens I pass by on the street. You can smell their B.O. a half block away. I look pretty regular except on garbage day when Tommy and I hit the streets with our shopping carts, the dogs all strung out around us like our own special honor guard.
There’s nothing wrong with garbage picking. Where do you think all those fancy antique shops get most of their highpriced merchandise?
I do okay, without either Angel’s help or his. He was probably just hard up for a girlfriend.
“How’s it going, Maisie?” he asked when I came in, all friendly, like we’re pals. I guess he got my name from the form I filled out when I rented the box.
I ignored him, like I always do, and gathered the week’s pile up. It was a fairly thick stack—lots of surprises for Tommy. I took it all outside where Rexy was waiting for me. He’s the smallest of the dogs, just a small little mutt with wiry brown hair and a real insecurity problem. He’s the only one who comes everywhere with me because he just falls apart if I leave him at home.
I gave Rexy a quick pat, then sat on the curb, sorting through Tommy’s surprises. If the junk mail doesn’t have pictures, I toss it. I only want to carry so much of this crap back with me.
It was while I was going through the stack that this envelope fell out. I just sat and stared at it for the longest time. It looked like one of those ornate invitations they’re always making a fuss over in the romance novels I read: almost square, the paper really thick and creamcolored, ornate lettering on the outside that was real highclass calligraphy, it was so pretty. But that wasn’t what had me staring at it, unwilling to pick it up.
The lettering spelled out my name. Not the one I use, but my real name. Margaret. Maisie’s just a diminutive of it that I read about in this book about Scotland. That was all that was there, just
“Margaret,” no surname. I never use one except for when the cops decide to roust the squatters in the Tombs, like they do from time to time—I think it’s like some kind of training exercise for them—and then I use Flood, same as I gave Tommy.
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