by Ruth Ozeki
Cass looked at Yummy.
“Fine,” Yummy said, clenching her jaw. “I’ll stay.”
aftermath
I knew that Cass was thinking I might go after my son with a horsewhip or something. “Don’t worry,” I told her. Not that I wouldn’t have liked to.
When she left, I poured some of Geek’s rum into a large glass and added some Coke, then went upstairs. I could hear Phoenix in the attic, but I wasn’t going up there. Poo and Ocean were both asleep, but Ocean stirred when I pulled up her covers.
“Mommy?” she said. Her voice was fuzzy. I sat down next to her and rubbed her hot back. How could I feel so tender toward one child and so hard toward another? I watched the sleep clear from her face, and then the awful moment when she remembered and her face crumpled and she started to cry. Poor little thing. She couldn’t understand how all these people she loved so much could just vanish, one after another, like bubbles bursting. “Where do they go?” she sobbed.
I wished I could give her some simple comfort, offer her God’s heaven or some other divine and beneficent plan to make sense of all these earthly misfirings, but I couldn’t. I did my best.
“They go back to the beginning, Puddle.”
“Beginning of what?”
“Of everything. Of life. Where things start.”
“What things?”
“Well, people, for one. And seeds. And potatoes. That’s what Tutu Lloyd told me just before he died.”
She looked up at me with those clear blue Fuller eyes. Tears clung to her lashes. Her gaze flickered past me to the ceiling and the stars. I remembered the light in my father’s ruined old face when he told me his dream, and I lay down next to Ocean so she wouldn’t see that I was crying, too. I hugged her for a while until my voice started working again, and then I whispered in her ear.
“Grandpa told me that the beginning was very beautiful, and everything he loved was there. Can you imagine a place like that?”
“No,” she said, still sniffling.
“Sure you can. Let’s try, okay? Close your eyes. Tell me something you love.”
She shut her eyes, took a deep breath, and promptly said, “Mommy,” which was exactly the right answer, so I gave her a big kiss on the forehead to reward her for her vast intelligence.
“And Phoenix and Poo,” she said. “And Grandma and Grandpa. And Geek and Chicken Little and all the Seeds. The flowers and potatoes and the big sky . . .”
“What about things in Hawaii?” I asked her. “The mangoes and frangipani . . .”
“And yummy pineapples . . .”
“And the ocean and the black sand beaches . . .”
We took turns listing until she fell asleep. Then I finished my drink and watched her for a bit longer, feeling thankful that I had a child who still trusted me enough to be bamboozled with a story. Poo was sleeping soundly. His cheeks were smudged with dirt and sticky glaze from the ham. I licked my thumb and tried to rub some of it off, then stopped when he began to grunt. I let him be. Ocean. Poo. Two out of three. I thought of Phoenix, lying awake in the darkened attic, listening, and I felt my face flush with anger.
I went back down to the kitchen and poured more rum, then stared out the window. The carcass of the Spudnik was still smoldering in the dark, but I could make out only the faintest outline. I thought about calling Elliot. He couldn’t be responsible for this. I turned away. My eyes were still burning from the smoke, and sleep was out of the question. I got the broom and started sweeping the house, not caring how much noise I made. Ocean and Poo would sleep through it. The floor was streaked with mud and cinders, so I started in with the mop. I mopped and drank and smoked one cigarette after the other until the place was spotless and the rum and cigarettes were gone. I ate some leftover potato salad, then dug into the ashtray and smoked the last few butts. I still wasn’t ready for bed. There was a twenty-four-hour gas station with a convenience store up at the entrance to the freeway. I lifted my car keys off the hook in the kitchen. My footsteps crunched in the gravel. When the Pontiac engine roared to life, I looked up at the house. I kept my eye on the rearview mirror as I bounced down the driveway, waiting for the light to go on in the attic window, but it never did.
To get to the gas station I had to drive by the motel. The low cinder-block building hunkered down in the shadows. The parking lot was full, and the neon sign said NO VACANCY, which surprised me, until I remembered all the funeral guests. I gunned the engine. I’d come out to buy cigarettes, not to go visiting. The convenience store shone brightly on the hill, looking over the dark town. I made the U-turn too fast and left skid marks on the pavement.
Number 6 was unlocked. The room was dark, but that didn’t stop me. I knew the layout of the Falls Motel quite well by now, knew how many steps from door to bed, from bed to bathroom. I crossed the room and sat down hard on the edge of the mattress. I started shedding my clothing. I pried off a boot.
“Yummy?”
The boot went flying into the television set.
Elliot sat up. He sounded alarmed now. “Is that you?”
“Sure. You expecting someone else?” The other boot took off after the first one.
“That’s not what I meant.”
I pulled off my jeans, crawled across the bed, and straddled him. “I never know what you mean, Elliot. Let’s fuck.”
“Yummy, wait.” He peered at me. “Are you okay?”
“Fine.” I pushed him down against the pillow. I didn’t want him in my face. “Listen, I don’t have a whole lot of time. I gotta get back before the kids wake up. They’ll kill me if they find out I’m here.”
“What are you talking about?” He sounded confused. Poor man. I ran my hand down his front, kneading his balls, then leaned over and nuzzled his ear.
“My kids?” I said. “You know I have kids, right? The ones that hate you? At least the two big ones do. The baby doesn’t know how yet, but maybe he’ll learn.”
“Stop that, will you?” He took me by the wrist, pried my hand away from his crotch. “I’m sorry to hear it.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Why am I sorry?”
“No. I can imagine why you’d be sorry. I mean why should I stop? You want to fuck me, right? C’mon, let’s go.” I peeled off my shirt.
“Yummy, I want to talk to you.”
All the hard, twangy, boozy energy was coming to a head now, and I twisted my hand from his grip and pushed him back down. Then I started shoving him, sort of bouncing him into the springy mattress. “Well, that’s just tough, Elliot. Because I don’t want to listen.” I could hear my voice getting loud, and before I knew it, I was punching and slapping him, too. “I don’t want to listen, because nothing you say is true, and you’re a lying piece of shit and I hate you!”
He held up his hands to shield his face. He was bigger and stronger, and he could have stopped me, but he didn’t. He let me go on and on, pummeling and pounding him with the pent-up force of twenty-five years, and when I was finally done, I felt strangely calm. I gave him one last shove and let my hands drop. I was still very drunk, but the fervor was gone. I looked at my watch. It was time to go home. I slid toward the edge of the bed and felt around for my jeans. They were somewhere on the floor, with my boots.
“Yummy? Can we talk now?”
I got down on my hands and knees to look for my pants. “Not a good time for talking, Elliot.” I located the jeans and pulled them over my feet. The legs got all tangled up, so I rolled onto my back and tried to kick them straight. “Bad time for talking.”
He turned on the bedside light. I was lying on the floor with my pants half on and my legs in the air.
“Turn off that fucking light!” I yelled.
But he left the light on and came to sit beside me on the floor. He gathered me into his arms. “Poor Yumi,” he murmured into the top of my head. “Yumi. You. Me . . .”
He was rocking me back and forth, and I started to relax in spite of myself, to soften into the familia
r warmth of his chest. I was worn out from all that punching.
“Are you too drunk to hear me?”
I nodded.
“Try,” he whispered. “We need to talk. About us . . .”
I opened my eyes, but the idea failed to register.
“About the future,” he said, looking down at me. “Our future. Together.”
His face was too close, and his eyes started to drift, moving apart so that at first there were four eyes, then merging again until there was only one. I shook my head to clear it. I hated being this drunk. He was still talking. I stared into the one eye in the middle of his forehead and concentrated on not getting sick. The potato salad had been a mistake. One mistake. Of many.
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” he was saying. “About what happened back then. What we did. We took a life, Yumi. From the universe. And the way I figure it, we owe one back. You and me. Life is sacred. I want to make amends.”
“Huh?” I struggled to sit up.
“I thought we could get married first. . . .”
The meaning of his words began to penetrate the rum fog in my brain. “What?”
“Then I want us to have a child.”
I pulled away and stared at him. At a distance his eyes held still. “Oh, my God. You’re serious!”
“Perfectly.” He stood up and went to his bedside table. When he returned, he took my hand and placed something in the center of my palm. I looked down. It was a ring. He was on his knees now, in front of me.
“Yumi. My life has been . . . well, I won’t say it hasn’t been fun, but being with you after all these years, and seeing you with your kids, I had this feeling—” He stopped. “I don’t know how to put it. . . .”
I held my breath.
“Like I may have missed something.”
That was it. Granted I was very drunk, but this struck me as hilariously funny and I started to laugh. I doubled over, clutching my stomach, and gasped for breath. “I think I’m going to be sick,” I said, and toppled onto my side like a roly-poly fetus. Finally, when the laughter subsided, I wiped my eyes.
“You’re a fucking piece of work,” I said. “You know that, Elliot?”
“Yeah?” he said. His face lit up as he cocked his head hopefully.
But the laughter had sobered me up. I pulled my jeans on the rest of the way, then buttoned them. I found my boot and stuck my foot in it.
“So,” he said. “What do you think?”
The truly bizarre thing was that I could actually picture it. Through my alcoholic haze I could see the two of us, what? Returning to Pahoa? Moving to San Francisco? We could buy an old Victorian and paint it pretty pastel colors. Pastels were big out there, layers of peeling pinks and tawdry blues.
Maybe he felt my hesitation. Recalling it afterward, I think he probably did. I hope he did. I hope he believed, for one wild moment, that I would agree, that our two hearts would align with a click and we would live happily ever after. It was a moment of delicate equilibrium. His hopes had finally caught up with the ones I’d discarded some twenty-five years earlier.
I looked into his face, searching for a trace—but it was all gone. He was just an aging businessman, out of a job, and for the first time in my life I felt sorry for Elliot Rhodes. I didn’t care if he had used me or lied to me. I didn’t want to know. I rocked forward and stood, straightening my knees and tugging on my jeans. He looked up at me, still grinning, still believing.
“Well?”
“Forget it, Elliot. Not in a million years.” I looked down at the top of his head and briefly rested my fingertips there. “You had your chance,” I said, giving his brainpan a hard little tap. “You blew it.”
His grin, the last remnant of his confidence, lingered on his face. I walked to the door and was just about to sweep through it, when a vertiginous upswell of remembering stopped me dead. It’s terrifying how that happens, how you can completely blank out on something so big and awful, and when you recall it, you feel like the solid earth has vanished from under your feet. There was only one thing he could tell me that I truly did want to know. I turned back and took a deep breath.
“Elliot, you didn’t by any chance hire someone to spy on the Seeds and plant a bomb in their Winnebago and blow it up and kill Charmey, did you?”
“What?” He looked at me, aghast.
“Because that’s what happened. She’s dead.”
For the first time ever, Elliot was struck dumb. That was enough for me, at least for the moment.
“No,” I said. “I knew you were a creep, but I didn’t think you’d do something like that.”
choices
The phone rang once.
“Cass?” His voice was thin and distant in the dark.
“Who is this?” Cass struggled to sit up. “Phoenix?” She held the receiver and turned her back to Will, whispering so as not to wake him. It was cold. She shivered and brought the covers up. She listened, then asked, “Where’s Yummy?” And then, “I’ll be right there.”
She slipped back the covers and fumbled for her clothes. Will rolled over and flicked on the bedside light.
“Thanks,” she said. She stepped into a pair of sweatpants.
“Who was that?”
“Phoenix.” She pulled on one of Will’s sweatshirts. Wearing his clothes made her feel strong. “Poo is throwing up. Phoenix thinks he ate something. I’m going over.”
“Where’s Yummy?”
Cass grimaced. “Don’t ask.” She sat on the edge of the bed and tied her sneakers.
“You want me to come?”
“I’ll take the cell phone. I’ll call if I need you.”
He nodded. “She doesn’t deserve to have those kids. She’s an unfit mother.” Somehow he managed to sound both angry and wistful.
Cass leaned over and gave him a kiss on the forehead, and then she ran out the door.
The Pontiac was parked in the lot of the Falls Motel. She spotted it on the way to the hospital, but she didn’t stop. At the emergency room there was a slight delay in admitting Poo because she wasn’t his mother. Finally the doctor pumped him out, extracting a frothy soup of curdled earth and grass, chunks of ham and pineapple and stomach acids. A kind of thin adobe gruel. Termites could build nests with it.
“He eats dirt,” Cass explained weakly.
“Geophagy,” said the doctor. “I see.”
“What’s that?”
“What you said. Eating earth. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s basically what you get when you take an antacid formula.”
“Antacid?”
“Sure. Kaolin. Or calcium carbonate. Accounts for that chalky taste. We’ve been practicing geophagy for as long as we’ve been human. It’s the earth that isn’t what it used to be. Dirt isn’t clean these days. Where did he eat this, do you know?”
Cass shook her head. “Could be anywhere. No, wait. There was grass? Then it was probably up at the cemetery. He was playing on a grave.”
The doctor raised his eyebrows. “That’s not good.”
“We buried his grandpa,” Cass explained, but the look on his face stopped her short. “Oh, no! You mean, because there’s dead people in it?”
The doctor gave a grim little smile. “Decomposing bodies are the least of the problem. I’m talking about the lawn.”
“But it’s a nice lawn.”
“And it takes a lot of nice lawn chemicals to keep it that way. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a problem unless you ingest it. Or feed it to a baby.”
Poo was sleeping, spread-eagled on his back, draped in a white sheet. His dark cheeks were tear streaked and smeared with dirt.
“Is he going to be okay?” Cass asked.
“He’s going to be fine. I’m going to let you take him home, but I want you to keep a close eye on him.” He paused. “Oh, right,” he said. “You’re not the mother.”
“What kind of a mother are you?” Cass said. She wasn’t yelling. Phoenix and Ocean were in bed, and Poo was a
sleep in the living room, so she was being careful not to raise her voice. In fact, she was whispering. But the effect was the same as if she’d been yelling at the top of her lungs. She watched Yummy flinch.
“I just went out for cigarettes . . .”
“That’s a lie!” Cass said. “I saw the Pontiac in the motel parking lot.”
“I didn’t mean to go there. It just sort of happened. I didn’t stay long.”
“I know. I called the motel from the hospital. They wouldn’t let me admit Poo because I wasn’t his mother. I talked to that creep, and he said you’d gone. At least if you’d still been there, you could have come.”
Yummy shrugged. “Damned if I do and damned if I don’t.” She stood up and went to the fridge. “I need a beer. Want one?”
“You do not!” Cass said, surprised at her own vehemence. “It’s morning. You don’t need a beer at this hour. You drink way too much and . . . well, I think you’ve just got to stop.”
Yummy stopped. Her hand was on the refrigerator door. “Excuse me? I don’t think you have any right to tell me what I should or shouldn’t do.”
“I have every right. As a human being concerned for the welfare of your children, but even more as your friend.”
Yummy didn’t say anything. Cass waited, but Yummy just stood there watching, and her eyes were so expressionless they made Cass shiver. Her stomach felt suddenly hollow, as if it had been pumped out, too.
“Fine,” she said. “Maybe we’re not friends. I always thought we were, but maybe we’re not. That’s beside the point. What’s important is your kids, and I just think you’re being a really lousy mother to them right now. The way you’ve been carrying on, it’s like you forget they even exist. You don’t know how lucky you are, and I just can’t stand to watch you treat such a blessing with such . . . such carelessness.”
She tried to continue, but her voice was choking, so she stopped.
Yummy left the refrigerator door closed and came back to the table. “Oh, please,” she said. “Don’t start crying, okay? I’m sorry.”
