Motherless Child

by Glen Hirshberg

  “You know,” Sophie said, “this gun? It’s like a Lick Em Stick someone stuck a trigger on.”

  Slowly, with a long, hard sigh, Natalie turned. “What?”

  “The gun.” Sophie lifted it, waved it, put it next to her mouth. “It’s like a Lick—”

  “And there you have it. Congratulations, Sophie. The single most inane thing you have ever said. And I’ve been driving with you all night, every night, for almost a month.”

  “And sharing MoonPies and tent-sleepovers for maybe twenty years before that.” Sophie was smiling, sort of. A dried-out Sophie-smile. Natalie closed her eyes, nodded, opened her eyes. “Not to mention Gilmore Girls reruns.”

  “Yep. And at least two boyfriends. Not counting the Whistler.”

  “I’m trying to block that one out.”

  “By all means. But yet you cannot deny. A gun is like a Lick Em Stick—”

  “It isn’t, though,” Natalie exploded. Gratefully. Almost happily. Just for the distraction. “It’s nothing like a Lick Em Stick anyone stuck anything on. It couldn’t be less like a Lick Em Stick if it were a … It’s not even a stick. It’s not even straight. And even if it were, saying something’s like something else just because it has sort of the same shape—or, in this case, not at all the same shape—is stupid. It’s like saying a brain is like a sponge-blob someone stuck a thought in.”

  “Now, see, that’s just cynical, that’s what that is. It’s worse. It’s nihilistic.”

  “Nihil. Rhymes with bile.”

  “Oh. I thought it was nil. Rhymes with kill.”

  Natalie’s slap rocked Sophie’s head off her headrest into the door. Her other hand flew to her own mouth, and sound whistled from her lips. Wind through dead leaves.

  “I’m sorry. Shit, Sophie. Sorry.”

  “Didn’t hurt,” Sophie mumbled, and sat up.

  Natalie put a cold hand to her friend’s cold cheek. “I really am sorry.”

  Sophie shrugged. “Nothing I haven’t wanted to do to you.”

  “Really?”

  “Are you kidding? Three weeks in a car and you haven’t let me play ‘Sugar, Sugar’ even one time?”

  “Because it’s a horrible song.”

  “It’s the greatest song. It’s what singing is for. ‘You’re my candy. I’m wanting you.’”

  Even as she said that, Sophie seemed to register the words, and she barely whispered the last of them. Natalie thought about slapping her again. And also throwing her arms around her and holding on until the ocean came up the beach, over the dunes, and carried them off.

  She did neither. Unconsciously, she fished in the pocket of her denim skirt and drew a cigarette from the crumpled pack. The second the cigarette touched her lips, she gagged and spit it out the window into the sand. “Well, hell,” she said. “I apparently quit smoking, anyway.”

  “So there’s one good thing already, see?” said Sophie, cheering immediately again. By force of will, Natalie realized, not nature. It had always been will. Knowing that made Natalie love her all the more.

  “We should open a business,” Natalie mumbled. “‘Just one visit from Nat and Sophe. We’ll cure your nasty habit once and for all. No matter what it is. Guaranteed to work.’”

  “Hey! Natalie made a funny.”

  “Shut up.”

  Reedy sand grass scratched against the side of the car. Over the dunes, stars dangled like mobiles.

  “Nat,” Sophie said, her voice falling again into a whisper. “Let’s just go find them. Just to see. We don’t have to go inside or anything, I promise. I swear.”

  “Sophie, I swear, if you don’t stop—”

  “Just once. Just this one time. To say good-bye. God, Natalie, their faces. Their little feet.”

  Twisting the key hard, Natalie gunned the ignition, ground the car into reverse, turned them around, and set them bumping back up the trail. When they reached the asphalt, she fishtailed them onto it, their wheels kicking up a spray of dirt like a JET SKI throwing wake. Then she floored the gas, and they roared off down the road between the pines.

  “You hit some nothing,” Sophie said. Then she lifted the gun off the seat and stuck the barrel back between her teeth.

  * * *

  Sometime well after midnight, Natalie pulled the car into the parking lot of a Waffle House on the outskirts of a town with no other visible lights. Sophie looked up in surprise. The building was low and brick. Teenagers crowded around two booths near the front, and a couple of solitary trucker types sipped coffee at the counter. Through the grime and the flittering moths on the windows, all of them looked yellow.

  Sophie fabricated a yawn. “Where are we?”

  Yawning, Natalie thought. There was something she wouldn’t have expected to miss. “We’re at Waffle House,” she said.

  With a roll of her eyes, Sophie mustered yet another grin. “Thanks, Sparky. Waffle House where?”

  “Waffle House is its own where. No matter where it is.”

  “That’s good. I like that. That should be like their slogan. We’re our own where.”

  “This just seemed … as good a place as any.” And with her hands trembling on the wheel, she turned to Sophie and caught her eye. “Right?”

  It took a moment for Sophie to understand. But only a moment. One of her legs began to bob up and down. Her hands, Natalie noticed, were trembling, too. “Oh, shit, Nat.” Her tongue snuck out onto her lips. “Here? Tonight? You think? I mean … it’s really time?”

  Natalie lifted her hands off the wheel. The shaking, she realized, was at least as much Hunger as panic. Or no. It was more. Almost all Hunger. The realization made her want to weep. But it didn’t make her less Hungry. She twisted her fingers in her hair.

  “I don’t know, Sophie. How do we know? It just … feels like it’s time.”

  “I’m calling your mom,” Sophie said, and before Natalie could even process that, or do anything but gape, Sophie grabbed the stolen cell phone from the glove box and left the car, walking fast across the empty highway into the shadows of the pines.

  Scrambling out of her seat, Natalie stood to give chase, a growl rising in her throat that overwhelmed even the Hunger. But then she just clutched the open door of the GTO and held on, staring at Sophie’s back. She watched Sophie’s fingers pushing buttons. The phone rising to her ear. Natalie’s mother’s phone had to be ringing by now. Wherever she was. Or else her voice was already in Sophie’s ear.

  Or else her son’s voice was.

  Don’t answer, she thought, as tears crept up behind her eyes yet again. Even tears, she noted, felt cold, now.

  And then she was willing her mother to answer. Just this once. Mom. Please.

  Sophie turned around. Her hand with the phone dropped to her hip. “Not her number anymore. That bitch changed her number. And took my Roo.”

  Half-lurching, half-skipping, Natalie moved fast across the road. A smile she didn’t have to muster spread across her lips. Thank you, Mom, she was thinking. Wherever you are. Wherever you’ve taken my son. She grabbed the phone out of Sophie’s hand, held it up, and they both stared at it for a few seconds, as though it were a heart she’d ripped out. Her own, Sophie’s. What difference did it make? She slammed the phone to the pavement and stomped it to pieces.

  When she looked up a few seconds later, she found Sophie looking not at her but over her shoulder. Slowly, Natalie turned and saw the trucker.

  Just a boy, really. A long, lanky southern boy, with skin like a slick summer peach and an alligator smile he hadn’t mastered and didn’t yet mean. “Well, damn,” he said, and then the full force of what he was looking at hit him, and his smile went slack.

  Natalie felt a twinge. A real and painful one. What a good and aching night this was turning out to be. And now it would get so much better. And worse. Stop right there, she wanted to tell him. This boy, who didn’t yet realize where he’d wandered. Turn around. Run.

  But she knew she’d tell him no such thing. Not tonight
.

  “Thelma and Louise,” Sophie whispered by her side, and Natalie jerked.

  “What?”

  “Thelma and Louise. Taking back the night. Look at him. He’s perfect. He wants us to come over there. And there’s no one else here to see.”

  “Sophie…”

  “Look at that little hunting look he’s giving us. Who’d miss him?”

  I would, Natalie thought, knowing that made no sense and probably wasn’t even true, and stepped forward, letting the full glow of the streetlight bathe her. Letting the boy see. Even ten feet away, she could feel him vibrate like a string she’d struck.

  “Well, damn,” the boy said again, swaying.

  “Don’t,” Natalie murmured, and took another step. Then another. He was still five feet away, but she could taste his breath on the night air, bubble gummed and maple syruped and hot with him. She could feel—taste—the condensation on his arms, in the hollow of his throat, against her lips. Could feel the life surging through him. It was as though she’d developed a new shark-sensitivity to every twitching, desperate, useless sensation living things emitted.

  “Don’t,” she said again, and moved closer still.

  “But I want to,” he said. So close, now. His mouth so near. Cheeks no longer yellow, but sweetly tan and red against the dark.

  “So do I,” Natalie said.

  Sophie edged up beside her, hip knocking against Natalie’s like a train car coupling. “Thelma and Louise. Thelma and Louise.”

  With a growl that staggered trucker boy, almost drove him to his knees, Natalie grabbed Sophie by the wrist and yanked her past him, past the GTO, and across the parking lot. She had to pull hard, because Sophie was trying to dig her feet into the pavement, and from her mouth came a mewing Natalie had never heard before. She allowed herself a single glance back, saw the kid staring after them, leaning toward them, his desire unfurling like a sail. She practically had to hurl Sophie into the restaurant while holding the door with her hip.

  For a second, she thought Sophie was going to turn on her, that they were going to have it out right here, once and for all. But then—like a whisper from an angel, a breath from God—Waffle House washed over them. So stupidly soothing, familiar in a way almost nothing else had been, from the moment she’d awoken in the backseat of Sophie’s car the morning after they’d met the Whistler: the fluorescents humming; the jukebox blasting Buck Owens. The dead-eyed, anemic counterwoman halfway smiling, nodding them toward a booth without really seeing them. All they had to do was … act naturally.

  Sophie whimpered. Just a regular whimper, not mewing. She tapped Natalie’s shoulder, pointed at the counter. A few stools down from the nearest trucker sat a woman, head wrapped in brightly colored green and turquoise scarves. Next to her sat her daughter, aged ten at most, busily feeding her mother French fries. Stuffing them in fistfuls into her mouth and laughing. Maps lay spread on the counter in front of them, held in place by ketchup bottles. The woman tucked a stray strand of hair behind her daughter’s ear, sighed, laughed back. Natalie’s mouth formed an O.

  “Well, okay. Hi, y’all,” Sophie said to the teens in the front booth, and Natalie jerked her attention away from the counter.

  The teens were staring, of course. The girls, too, though the wan little redhead in the back seemed to be trying to force her eyes down to the table while she played, pitifully, with her napkin. She looked like a French fry dipped in ketchup, barely noticeable even right in front of you. And she knew it. God, Natalie remembered that sensation. Whole Saturdays traipsing around the Goodwills of Charlotte with her mother, trying to find clothes to bring out the blue in her eyes, the only part of her Natalie actually thought might be attractive. Once, not more than a year ago, sitting half-drunk on lawn chairs in front of their trailer while Eddie gurgled on her lap, Jess had announced, out of nowhere, “It’s so sad. Pathetic. The way none of us realizes what really makes us attractive, until it’s way too late to be any use. Any use that’s good for us, anyway. One more proof of just how much God hates women.”

  It was the acid in her mother’s voice, more than the pronouncement, that had made Natalie look up from her baby. Half-moon bright overhead. Trees bending in the fresh spring wind. A rare work-free evening unfolding in front of her. Baseball on the radio. “How’s that?” she’d said.

  Her mother had just settled deeper into her slump in her chair, eyes too big behind her glasses. A bullfrog on a lily pad.

  “God. Hates. Women.”

  Natalie had lifted her son to her shoulder, burped him, squeezed him tight. “This here,” she’d said. Stroking her son. “This proves otherwise.”

  And Jess just sat awhile. Eventually, she’d reached out, not for the baby, but for her own daughter’s cheek. Then she’d shaken her head. “That proves He loves Eddie.”

  Poor little French fry girl, Natalie thought now. I could make them look at you differently. Just by making you look at you differently.

  Grabbing Sophie’s wrist again, she tugged her to the counter. And on impulse, because the anemic waitress just happened to be standing there, Natalie ordered a double patty melt to go.

  “Hey,” Sophie said. “That sounds so good.” She ordered one, too. Behind them, Natalie could hear the teenagers shifting on the vinyl seats, starting to fall back into themselves.

  Patsy succeeded Buck on the jukebox, “Walking After Midnight.” Sophie grabbed the nearest salt and pepper shakers and started making clip-clops to the beat. “You know,” she said, “a patty melt’s like a dead thing someone slapped cheese and onions on.”

  Natalie’s gaze had returned to the woman and her daughter, just a few stools down. Banter with Sophie came so easily. Like so many things, if you let them. All she had to do was let them. Right? “That doesn’t work at all,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not a metaphor. It’s not even a comparison. It’s just what it is.”

  “Well, there’s the difference between you and me, Nat. You worry about what things mean. I just say what they are.”

  “I think I’ll go throw up, now,” Natalie murmured, and was startled when Sophie leaned close to her ear.

  “Have to eat something, first.”

  Then the woman in the scarves turned and touched Natalie’s hand.

  Natalie was so startled that she almost swatted the woman off her stool. She also thought she might melt, Wicked Witch of the West–style, right here. Nothing left but a pool of ketchup.

  “Oh, honey,” the woman said. “You’re just like me.”

  That stunned even Sophie to silence. Together they stared at the woman’s head, the strands of stringy auburn and gray hair sneaking out from under the scarves.

  “What do you mean?” Natalie whispered.

  “Cold all the time,” the woman said, and rubbed Natalie’s hand between her own. “You’re so cold. I could tell just by looking at you. I can’t ever get warm. Want your fortune read?”

  Natalie glanced toward Sophie, back to the woman. “Huh?”

  “I like her,” Sophie murmured. “She speaks my language.”

  From the other side of the woman, the daughter leaned forward, chin in her palm, sighing and smiling. “Just let her do it. No one’s let her do it for days. No paying customers for a week. She needs the practice. I’m going to the bathroom, Mom.” Hopping off the stool, the girl wandered toward the back of the restaurant.

  The counterwoman returned with their burgers in a bag. Natalie took the bag, turned to go, but Sophie grabbed her shoulders and pushed her down onto the stool.

  “Give her good news,” Sophie said to the woman. “She could use some.”

  Beaming, the woman produced a deck of cards from somewhere in her skirt and shuffled them. “Well, then, let’s find her some. It’s always there, somewhere.”

  For a fortune-teller, the woman proved a lousy shuffler. Partly, this was because her deck clearly had extra cards, was more than one deck. And she’d just fanned a set of ten
on top of the maps on the counter when her cell phone went off. Wincing, the woman reached into another pocket, pulled out an iPhone, stared at the screen.

  “Oy,” she said, and silenced the phone.

  “Not good news?” Natalie found herself asking. The woman had avoided looking right at either her or Sophie. Even once. As if she knew better. Or could help herself? Could any of them really do that?

  With a shrug, the woman pushed some of her hair back into her scarf, smoothed the exhaustion lines in her forehead. “Depends when you ask me, I suppose. Isn’t that always the way with men?”

  Not in my case, Natalie thought.

  The woman gestured at the cards. “Touch two. Don’t turn them over.”

  Natalie did, and the woman set those cards aside, then reshuffled and fanned the cards open again. “And two more.”

  Natalie touched two more.

  The woman smiled, glanced over her shoulder toward the bathroom in search of her daughter. For a horrified second, Natalie realized she’d lost track of Sophie, half-stood, then spotted her friend a few stools down, hunched over, peering into one of the mini-jukeboxes.

  “Good,” said the woman. “Okay. Let’s see what we can know.” She turned over a card. A black ace. She flipped a second black ace. Started to turn the third, then left it facedown. Her fingers drummed the top of it, and her smile twitched.

  Natalie felt her whole body tense. Her voice came out as a bobcat-murmur. “That’s not funny. You have no idea how not funny—”

  “Sorry,” said the woman, rolling her eyes at herself, smiling. “I did it wrong. Forgot to cut. Jesus, I’m out of practice. As my smart-mouth daughter told you. Let me just reshuffle, and we’ll…”