Motherless Child

by Glen Hirshberg

  Had Sophie spoken, until that moment? Had either of us? If they had, Natalie hadn’t noticed. Had only let herself glance over at her friend a couple of times. Mostly, Sophie seemed to be looking down at her chest. Into the empty sling, which was still hanging there. Occasionally, she was staring out the window. Or turning up the heat, because despite the late-evening warmth, neither of them could quite get comfortable.

  But now, for the first time since they’d fled their lives, Sophie turned right to her. “Pretty sure back went thataway,” she said.

  “Music,” Natalie snapped. “Sophie, please.”

  And Sophie brightened. “Your wish…” she said.

  “Shit,” said Natalie. “I forgot my CD cases.”

  “Ahh. Good thing I’ve got my magic backpack.”

  “Oh, no.”

  But Sophie was already reaching under her seat. Pulling up the pink, ages-old pack Natalie hadn’t even seen her grab from her Kia. Before Natalie could do anything but groan, Sophie had pulled out a cassette and fed it to the GTO.

  For a second, as that first inane guitar arpeggio finished, then repeated, Natalie just stared at the radio display. Mouth open. The dreadful, dripping organ started to pump.

  But not until Sophie nodded her head, said, “Oh, yeah,” opened her mouth wider, Jesus Christ, to fucking sing, did Natalie punch the eject, rip the tape free, roll down her window, and hurl the cassette sideways into the long, black grass as they hurtled past.

  “Hey!” Sophie barked.

  “‘Seasons in the Sun’? Are you kidding?”

  “Natalie, you turn this car around this instant. You go out in that grass and get my tape.”

  “That song? You’re thinking that song is right for the mood?”

  “What? We had some joy. And fun. And—”

  “Children, Sophie. We had some children.”

  “We still do.”

  Turning harder than she had to, Natalie swerved the car off the asphalt, where it fishtailed momentarily in the gravel as they slid, down the sloping shoulder into the grass. There they sat, Natalie gripping the wheel, Sophie against her door where the skid had shoved her. The second Natalie shut off the engine, silence rushed down the hillsides and over them. And for a while—Natalie had no idea how long—they just drifted in that. Suspended, like some broken-off section of a sunken ship. Sinking toward bottom.

  “So, maybe some Foreigner, then?” Sophie finally said, unpeeling herself from the door. She shook her shoulders, rolled her head around her neck. “How about a little ‘Cold as Ice’ action?’”

  And Natalie whirled, ready to growl something, and saw the smile on her best friend’s face. Right where it had always been. Soaking up moonlight, dashboard light, any light there was. Refracting it everywhere. Natalie’s hands sank off the steering wheel to her lap. She sighed.

  “Foreigner and Terry Jacks. Have you learned nothing, all these years with me?”

  “Like, that music matters?” Sophie said.

  “Like, which music matters.”

  “Oh, I get that well enough. I’m just not sure why mattering matters.”

  “Because it does.”

  “Not if it keeps you and me from singing ‘Seasons in the Sun.’”

  Natalie doubled forward, arms against her chest. Listening to the grass. The wind in the grass. Which wasn’t even a sound, really. More a furrow in the air. Empty space inside empty space.

  Eddie, she screamed, inside her own head. Held tight. When she straightened, eventually, Sophie was glaring at her.

  “We still have children, Natalie. Let’s go get them.”

  “Sophie. We can’t.”

  “Why not? What do you—”

  “Why not? Because we’re never going to see the sun again. Because we are dangerous people. Because there is something inside us that’s going to drive us to do things, that isn’t us.”

  “Sounds like most people I know,” Sophie murmured.

  “Because we’re going to hurt people.”

  “You mean, according to the psychopath in the hat who did this to us? I can see why you’d trust him over yourself. Or me. You want to tell me exactly what he said, now?”

  Natalie looked up, straight into Sophie’s round, wide-eyed face. The skin still kissed by the memory of sun. Hair yellow-gold with the moon behind it. Too bright. Like a doll’s.

  “The thing is, Sophie,” Natalie whispered, “I know he’s right.” She felt tears well in her eyes. Let them come. “I can feel it. Tell me you don’t feel it.”

  And still, Sophie sat. Half-smiling. Still glowing.

  “Sophie.” Natalie was pleading, now. Letting herself hope, just one moment longer. Because maybe she was wrong. “Tell me you don’t feel it. I’d be so happy if you told me that.”

  Sophie’s half smile stayed pinned in place, neither widening nor melting away. Her hands remained folded across the empty sling on her chest.

  “I feel it, all right,” she said.

  Kicking open her door, wrenching free of the seat belt, Natalie left the car and bolted straight up the nearest hill. The wind in her face less a moving thing than a force, liquid cement, slowing her. She still couldn’t hear it, but she could feel it in her ears, pushing past her mouth, pouring down her dead lungs as though into a cistern. Whistling through her ribs and around them and out. Disturbing nothing. Leaving nothing. When she hit the top of the first hill, Natalie considered stopping, or turning for Sophie, or screaming. Then she just plunged ahead, down, down, grass whipping at her ankles as she flung her arms wide to the dark like aerials, as though they could bring her a signal. Sounds from home. A single cry from her mother’s trailer.

  Where neither my mother nor my child live anymore. If my mother listened. Somehow saw, the way she so often seemed to. And knew what was good for her.

  There were dunes ahead. Scraggly, grassy things, white against the black of the night, with tendrils of sand streaming off the tops of them like hair in the silent wind, and Natalie had a memory, now, from tenth-grade science class, about the way dunes walked. Tumbled, in slow motion, over one another, for thousands and thousands of years. She could just lie down at the foot of one of these dunes and wait. And before long—long being a relative term, now, her experience of the world closer to dune-time than person-time—the sand would spin down and surround and enfold her. Lift her up. Take her tumbling and sand-walking through the meaningless years, while her son lived his life and died, somewhere. Someday. She could just stay buried beneath the beach, safely hidden, like one of those little crabs. Until and unless someone scratched at her hiding place. Revealed her.

  It was sound that finally stopped her moving. A blissful thundering and shushing. Waves slamming down. Sliding back.

  Ocean. Not once in her conscious life had Natalie seen the ocean. Not so she could remember. She stepped between the last two dunes, and then she just stood. Watching. Waves flinging themselves up, like hands to heaven. Collapsing back into themselves. Bubbling across the sand, the sound a composite of thousands of sounds, wondrous in her ears. Drowning out the whistle. Which was still in there. Inside her head. She couldn’t seem to get it out.

  When Sophie appeared at her side, stopped to stare at the water, Natalie grabbed her around the waist. Sophie grabbed her back. They stood together. Held each other. Moonlight pouring down them. The world at their backs.

  “What do we do, Sophie?” Natalie finally asked.

  Sophie let go. Brushed windblown sand off her shirt, freed her kinked hair from its ribbon to wave in the sea breeze. There were tear streaks on her cheeks. She shook her head. “That’s my line. Remember? I ask. You lead.”

  “Not tonight. I can’t. Sophie, I’m so—”

  “Oh,” Sophie said, turned, and startled Natalie to silence with her smile. A willed one, sideways and strange. But a Sophie-smile, all the same. “You just meant tonight?”

  “What?”

  “Because overall, like what do we do for the rest of eternity? I�
�m counting on you. But you were asking what we do right now. Right?”

  Staring at her friend, Natalie once again fought down the howl that had been building in the back of her throat. That was perpetually building. That would never again stop building, ever. Until she unleashed it. Carefully, she let herself nod. “Sure. Let’s start there.”

  “Well, that’s easy. Sand castles.”

  So they built sand castles in the wet, warm sand that wasn’t warm enough, until chills rippled up both of them, then returned to the car, drove fast through the hills until, just at first light, they hit a town, a shit motel.

  “We’re going to need cash,” Natalie said as they hurried their scant belongings out of the fast-dawning day into a tiny room and drew the curtains across the window.

  “Don’t you have a card?” Sophie asked. “I thought you had a card.”

  “I don’t think cards are a good long-term plan.” Natalie threw herself down on one of the twin beds, drew the single bedcover, which stank of bleach, to her chin, and spent the rest of the day shivering. Not sleeping. Or maybe sleeping, very occasionally. For just a few perfect, blank minutes.

  On the second night, they stopped three times. The first, a little after midnight, after driving nowhere in particular for hours, at a Denny’s. “That looks good,” Sophie announced as soon as Natalie parked. “Good call.” She popped open her door, stood up, and the yellow light from the restaurant windows rolled out to meet her.

  “What looks good?” Natalie asked, though she’d gotten out, too. Joined Sophie at the front of the hood of the GTO. They stared together through the glass. Hardly anyone in there. A white-haired older couple sat at the counter and sipped soup, reading newspapers so crumpled that Natalie guessed the couple had found them on the seats of a booth. A dark-haired, fifty-something manager guy, Hispanic, with grooves in one cheek that could have been scars or some weird birthmark, moved fast down the row of tables, coffeepot in one hand, water jug in the other. He was the one who saw them first. Just glanced, really. He didn’t stop until his second pass, when Natalie accidentally locked gazes with him.

  He didn’t drop anything. Or leap at the glass like a bird. He just lowered pot and jug to his sides, spilling just a little water onto his shoes and the shoes of the white-haired woman, who barely even looked up.

  “Aww,” Sophie half-sang. “Somebody likes you.”

  “Huh,” said Natalie. “Eye contact. That seems to be the thing.”

  “The thing?”

  “That makes … that happen. Or … makes it happen more. It was happening in the Waffle House before we left, too, remember? Remember that dad you got all over in that booth? Eye contact’s the key.”

  “Always was,” Sophie said. More sadly than Natalie had ever heard Sophie say anything, and she started to reach out a comforting hand when Sophie said, “Whoops.” And giggled. While inside, manager man—who’d linked glances with Sophie, now—finally went ahead and dropped the coffeepot, gently, to the floor. Then turned to the front door and started toward it.

  “Nope,” Natalie said, spinning back to the GTO. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

  “But he looks so friendly. And lonely. And … warm…”

  The door to the Denny’s had opened. Natalie had the GTO’s motor gunning. But she actually had to honk, start to back up, before Sophie finally climbed in beside her. Laughing.

  “Come on, you’re saying that’s not a little fun? That it can’t be fun? Flirting like that? Getting someone’s whole attention? How many times in your life have you had someone’s whole attention? Other than mine. It’s—”

  “Sophie, look at him.”

  “Oh, I’m looking.”

  There he was, in their mirrors. Just standing, with one hand half-raised. Mouth a little open, yellow glow pooling in the night-manager bags under his eyes, above the scars in his cheeks. Tired, sad, and pitiful guy. Responsible, manager guy. Just gazing, not chasing. The way people watch the moon from their porches. As the GTO pulled from the lot, Sophie stuck her head out the window and blew him a kiss.

  Their second stop was for gas, at a truck stop on the South Carolina border, where the pumps stood safely out of the light from the TravelCenter across the lot, which was half-full of truckers and drunkards and teenagers. Natalie paid with her debit card, then cracked the card in half. Cracked it again. Dumped the pieces into the plastic trough of windshield-cleaning fluid.

  “We’ve got to figure out this money thing,” she said, while Sophie climbed out of her seat, stared across the lot, through the misty night toward the TravelCenter. The pine trees beyond looked weirdly formless, wrapped not only in shadow but kudzu and kudzu-shadow. Which made them look more like tree-shaped blobs than trees. A forest a child would draw.

  “Don’t you want a coffee?” Sophie said.

  Surprised out of her own thoughts, Natalie considered that, then said, “Not even a little. Do you?”

  “How about someone having a coffee?”

  “Sophie, that is not funny. That is so completely not funny, I can’t even believe you—”

  “To talk to, Natalie. Do a little more of that eye-contact thing with. Maybe just a bit of touching? Under the table, all secret-like? I find myself wanting that. Oh, stop giving me that look. God, talking to you right now is like talking to a plug.”

  The pump clicked off in Natalie’s hands, startling her. She stared down at it. Dead, metallic thing. No more fluid funneling through it. “What does that even mean?”

  “No, not a plug. That’s wrong. The thing you plug in. Wire. That’s what I mean. All sizzly-noisy-buzzy, waving around, buzz-buzz-buzz-blat.”

  And in spite of herself—and the fact that Sophie had put her sling back on across her shirt tonight, and that the ache in her own chest seemed to be swelling to fill the empty space where Eddie should have been, not lessening, not that she ever expected or wanted it to lessen—Natalie found herself grunting. Falling into Natalie-Sophie rhythm.

  “I do not blat. I have never once blatted.”

  “Blat blat blat.”

  Sophie was gazing toward the TravelCenter again. Natalie let her own eyes follow. To the light in there. People in there.

  “Maybe we can get jobs. Eventually,” she said.

  “Ooh. Night jobs. Security guards! No, not enough people-contact. We’re going to need people-contact, Natalie. I can tell. How about—”

  “Never mind,” Natalie mumbled. Shook her head. “Won’t work. We’d have to stay in one place. That definitely seems like a bad idea.”

  “So … bank robbers? Can we get those Nixon masks? I want to be Nixon.”

  “Yeah, that’s us, Sophie. Bank robbers. Good plan. I was just … Did you really say ‘Nixon’? You’d want to be Nixon?”

  Sophie raised her hands to either side of her head. Stuck up two fingers on each and jiggled. Her shirt waving around her. Flowing and shadow soft as the dune grass from the previous night. “Because he’s not a crook. Also, he’s kind of jowly. Like one of those dogs, you know what I mean?”

  Abruptly Natalie was crying again. Sophie, too. They looked at each other.

  “Well, this sucks,” Sophie said.

  “Fuck, yes.”

  “Natalie, we have to go back and see our—”

  “Come on,” Natalie said. Gently. Reaching her hand across the roof, and Sophie took it. Squeezed, once. “Let’s go find something that doesn’t suck.”

  They’d been driving a good five minutes, in dead silence, before Sophie said, “Like people.”

  And Natalie didn’t tear up. Didn’t tear up. Pointed them south. Hit the gas.

  It was after 3 a.m., the moon gone, the mist solidifying into clouds that bleared the stars, before Natalie saw the signs for Columbia and realized where they were going. She said nothing to Sophie, who was looking out her own window and humming something Natalie didn’t even want to acknowledge, that really might have been “Mandy,” and instead followed the increasingly familiar road back
into civilization. Traffic lights, gas stations, housing developments, low, brick buildings. Streets she knew. Blocks she’d walked. She parked in an alley around the corner from the shop where she’d once worked. Had practically haunted in late high school, early college.

  Haunted. Almost funny, that.

  “Now, see, if I were like you,” she said to Sophie, “I would have said what I just thought aloud.”

  And Sophie, who’d once again spoken no words as they’d crawled through town and offered no comment or even met Natalie’s gaze in the mirror, turned. Tear-trails on her cheeks. Sophie-smile playing over her mouth.

  “Bad news, Nat. You’re sounding more like me with every passing second.”

  Natalie popped open her door, stepped out. The mist had cooled the night, and a chill floated over her skin. Coated it. Natalie shivered and pulled her useless denim jacket close around her.

  “Where are we going?” Sophie asked, standing.

  Natalie glanced at the pink backpack full of cassettes just visible under Sophie’s seat. “This is for your own good,” she said, and led her friend to the mouth of the alley.

  “Wait,” Sophie said. “Record shopping?”

  “Oh, yes yes yes.”

  “You’re still a snot, Natalie.”

  “How do we get in there? Come on, Nixon, think.”

  They peered down the street. No cars. No people, not even the homeless who usually hung out on this block on summer nights. Lots of streetlights. Lots of second-floor apartments with drawn curtains. No lights in any of them. Plenty of sleeping people, though.

  “Not that way,” Sophie murmured. Glanced back toward the GTO. Natalie did, too. They saw the fire-escape stairs together. “Hey.”

  “Skylight?” Natalie said.

  Seconds later, they were on the roof. Hunching low. Cat burglars over South Carolina. Scuttling across the cement. The stone barriers at the edges of the roof cold to their touch. Driving the chill deeper inside them.

  “I know what we should shop for tomorrow,” Sophie said, tucking her hands into the baby sling. Shivering. Glancing down at her clenched palms.