by Summer Wood
“With you? Anywhere.”
Melody reached out a foot and nudged the leg of Willow’s lawn chair. “Come on.”
Willow shook her head.
Wrecker padded closer to her. He stayed a few feet away, as though he needed permission to enter her force field. When he caught her attention he lifted the ivory to show her. His face was earnest and he stood his ground. Melody watched Willow reach out and gently take hold of the tooth. “Nice,” she said. She looked down at her book and sighed, then folded it shut. “All right,” she said. “For a little while.”
They picked the easiest beach to get to. Forty minutes of twisting mountain roads to suffer through, but once there they could park the van and walk directly onto the sand. It was state-run and more developed than the out-of-the-way black sand beaches Melody favored, but it was wide enough for Wrecker and Johnny Appleseed to race along and send airborne the newsprint kite they’d hastily assembled. Melody found herself a drift log to flop against and watched the cheery flyer pit itself against the swells. In a pile next to her Wrecker had deposited his collection of shells and slimy kelp and a fluorescent orange Frisbee with teeth marks all around the rim, and the briny, old-rot smell made her oddly happy.
She pulled her knees to her chest and listened to the waves. Ahead, Willow made her way to the edge of the water. The older woman faced out to sea and twisted her elegant body into yoga poses. No surprise, Melody thought. They all knew Willow could do anything. Speak Russian, for one. Operate a small aircraft. Make a pair of historically accurate breeches for a town production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado two hours before the performance and take her seat unflustered, every hair in place and no trace of sweat or frustration. There were only a handful of people in the world as skilled as she at restoring precious carpets, and her work for international collectors was amply rewarded. But when she turned her hand to the thing she loved best—turning spun wool into weavings that dazzled the eye and caught the heart—something much more vital than competence came into play. It was magic, Melody had to admit. A simple array of colors and textures could remind you of someone you’d loved and lost. It could call out the person you’d once hoped to be. It could make you think (why not? the weavings said; who else?) there was still hope.
But Willow didn’t drive. Melody took some comfort in this. Not that Willow couldn’t, Melody was sure, if she’d wanted to; but to know that there was one thing—for one moment, anyway—Melody could do that Willow did not gave her a cheap thrill of satisfaction. Honestly, it was hard to be around such competence all the time. If she’d been haughty or condescending they could at least ridicule her privately. But she wasn’t. She loved them all, in her way. She loved Len and Melody best. She just stopped short, Melody realized with sadness, of loving the boy.
Melody scanned the beach and found Wrecker a ways off, dragging a piece of driftwood toward a pile Johnny Appleseed guarded. She let her eyes return to Willow. She was sharp-focus, while Melody was all broad-spectrum. Did that just mean lazy? The thought tired her. She had plenty of qualities, but it would take some effort to remember what they were. Better just to curl herself against the log and drift to sleep.
She was deep in a dream when something startled her awake. She blinked hard. Her head felt gelatinous. Willow’s face came in close and unsmiling and she gripped Melody’s elbow. “Get up,” she said, and stood back while Melody pushed herself to standing. “We can’t find the boy.”
Melody rubbed her nose and tried to make sense of the words. “What do you mean,” she said, her heart beating faster as the thought settled in, “you can’t find him?”
“We were gathering driftwood.” Johnny Appleseed came into focus. “I thought he came back here. I thought you had him.”
They all turned to stare at the waves. Collectively, with horror, they searched for a bob of blond hair, for a flash of red sweatshirt. The water looked calm and satisfied, and Willow turned away first. “I can’t imagine he’d go in for a swim,” she said, her voice calm, nearly nonchalant. “It’s too cold for that.”
Melody felt a chill ripple through her body. She wanted to tear Willow’s head off. And then she wanted to reach up and tear off her own. Her legs weakened under her, and she sat hard in the sand. “Oh God,” she said. He could not be gone. The thought filled her mind with a blackness that came on so fast and so thoroughly there was nothing she could do to resist it. She could not stop it from roaring out of her chest.
It involved hours of waiting. It involved Willow’s Zen-like calm and Johnny Appleseed’s steady rubbing of the stone bear talisman he carried in his pocket and Melody’s thoroughly humiliating hysteria. It involved numerous prostrations to the earth mother and the god of the sea and just for good measure several tight-lipped appeals to Saint Anthony, patron of lost things, and some unmentionable promises of exceptionally generous behavior before Wrecker was returned to them. Melody held him tight.
“I ought to wring your neck,” she said, her voice rough as a crow’s caw.
Willow said, “What were you thinking?”
Johnny Appleseed said nothing. He gazed at the boy with the appraising eye of a fellow traveler.
He had walked down the salt river and past the lagoon and beyond the parking area and along the road. He was headed for the highway. An old couple vacationing with their towed trailer had pulled over, alarmed at the sight of a small boy walking alone on the pavement. He was the same size as their youngest grandson. They offered him cookies and wiped the dirt off his face with a travel wipe. They asked him his name and he told them. They asked him where his mother was.
San Francisco, he said, stumbling over the syllables.
And did he mean to walk there?
Yes.
It crashed over Melody like a wave, a sense of what he had lost. The bitter, open ache of it.
They were angry, now, this pair. Righteously indignant. They wanted to know how any mother could be so inattentive as to let her son wander off like that. And at the beach, no less! Wasn’t she watching? Didn’t she know a mother has got to have eyes in the back of her head? They hadn’t raised four children for nothing. They could tell her a thing or two.
Melody felt her anger rise in her like an upward flow of lava, steaming and corrosive. Who were these people? What could they possibly know? But she looked down and caught Wrecker’s blue eyes watching her carefully. Maybe it was the sky that had clouded over, but those eyes had half again as much gray in them as they’d had that morning. Steady on her.
How close she had come to losing him.
She laid her hand softly on the back of his neck. She squatted until they were eye to eye.
Something shifted in her, then. A rock rolled away from a chamber of her heart she had not even known was there. She could not guess what her future would bring but suddenly it did not matter, so long as it held him.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
CHAPTER THREE
Lisa Fay lay in a hospital bed—the smell of antiseptic gave it away, and the faded cotton gown she wore—but could not recall how she’d gotten there. She remembered the green grass of Rolph Playground. Some stabbing pain. A sunset that bled orange behind the lump of Potrero Hill. She remembered crying, and not being able to help it. And she remembered him. Not clearly; just a fuzz of shape and sound and emotion, but enough to make the space between her hips ache hard with its emptiness. In a bed arranged not far from hers, a very pregnant woman moaned and winced through labor. A glass of water stood on the bedside table, and Lisa Fay drained it in one long pull. Her throat felt scraped raw. “Where’d they take him?” she croaked. “Where’s my baby?”
The woman in the opposite bed turned her head toward Lisa Fay. “Call. The nurse,” she huffed, sweat beading on her broad forehead. “Whoo. Get her to bring him.” When the pain eased she lifted a tired hand. “I’m Yolanda,” she said, patting her chest. “Nice of you to finally wake up. It was getting lonesome in here.”
Lisa Fay f
ound a call button wedged against the side of the bed and pressed it. When nothing happened, she pushed it again, hard. “Nurse!” Her voice was a dry rasp that barely carried, and she fumbled for the button to buzz it again.
“Let me do mine,” Yolanda offered. A nurse poked her head in from the hall at the signal. “What would it take for you to get this woman her baby?” The nurse nodded curtly and disappeared. “Don’t hold your breath. It’ll be a little while,” Yolanda said. “This one’s my third. You figure out what to expect.” She cocked her head to one side. Her skin was the same polished brown as the butt stock of the hunting rifle Lisa Fay’s father kept locked in a cabinet back home. “Not that you bothered coming in to have your baby. Went ahead and delivered him yourself right there in a—oh, Lord.” Yolanda was a full-bodied woman who wore her hospital gown like a negligee, and her belly jiggled with laughter that sent ripples along the sheet. “In a public park, girl!” She tried to contain herself. “I heard the nurses talking,” she explained. “Bunch of magpies.”
“What else did they say?”
“Ambulance brought you both in. Baby’s fine, they said. Big. You lost some blood. Don’t you want to call nobody?”
Lisa Fay frowned and looked away. The people she knew didn’t have a telephone.
“The baby’s father? Nobody?” Yolanda narrowed her eyes at Lisa Fay.
The door opened wider and a nurse pushed in a bassinet on wheels. “I’ve got someone here who wants to meet you,” she said, and lifted a flannel bundle out of the cart. She cooed down at the blue lump. “Say hello to your mama.”
Lisa Fay hesitated, her heart pounding, but the nurse went right ahead and placed the warm little package in her arms. She looked down and gasped. Then she loosened the blanket and gaped at the baby in awe. One, two, three, four—ten fingers. Ten toes. Two eyes, two ears, a nose and a mouth in a head the size and shape of a pumped-up Florida grapefruit. “No wonder I passed out. You’re a bruiser.” She couldn’t take her eyes from his wrinkled face. “Hello, boy.” She felt suddenly shy. She had waited for this moment for so long, and now that it was here—now that he was here—she had no idea what to do.
The nurse bustled about with equipment. “Got a name picked out?”
Lisa Fay gazed at the baby’s face in dismay. None of the names she had thought of would fit. He wasn’t a Buzz, or a Jonas; not a Raymond; certainly no Kincaid, a name she’d seen plastered on the side of a bus. And he wasn’t an Arlyn, like his father. Her heart curled in on itself with the pain of that absence, and for a moment Lisa Fay lifted her eyes to the open doorway and willed Arlyn to walk through it. He had vanished, plain disappeared, before she’d had the chance to tell him what they’d made. She squeezed her eyes shut, then forced them wide. She would not cry. She shot a bewildered glance at her roommate. “What’s he look like to you?”
“Baby that big? Ought to call him Zeus.”
Gently, tentatively, Lisa Fay lifted the boy. His head lolled on the stump of his neck. “Zeus,” she said. “Hello. Zeus?” The baby opened his rosebud mouth and started to cry. She quickly brought him down. “I don’t think he likes it.”
“Try Angelo. Or Tyrone.” Yolanda gazed into the distance, cogitating. “James.”
“It’ll come to you,” the nurse said. “Right now, he’ll need to eat.” Lisa Fay looked over, alarmed. “This your first? Don’t worry. He does all the work.” She reached in to free Lisa Fay’s breast from the gown and settled the baby to suckle there. “See?” She tucked the blankets around them. “I’ll be back in to check on both of you in a little while.”
Lisa Fay gazed down in wonder as the baby nursed. His little cheeks flexed and his hand crept up to rest on her breast. It was a miracle, really. Yolanda breathed her noisy way through another contraction and Lisa Fay watched her son suck furiously until his tiny eyelids fluttered closed. It wasn’t the way she’d planned it, losing the basement squat, having her baby outside. She hadn’t planned any of this. She hadn’t planned him—but now that he was here, she would do whatever it took to keep him safe.
To keep him at all. How long would it take for the hospital to find out she had no money and no place to live? They could be checking on her right now. They could snatch him back as quick as that. “Yolanda,” she whispered. She was tired, but there was no time to wait. “I need to borrow your clothes.”
The huffs and moans had settled to quiet whimpers and Yolanda held her in a long gaze, considering. Then she sighed, and tilted her head toward the suitcase at the end of the bed. “Give me that baby while you dress yourself. You got someplace to go?”
“Anywhere but here.” Lisa Fay chose a plaid skirt and a pressed white blouse with a Peter Pan collar and slipped into the bathroom. Steal her baby? They’d have to beat her to it. A minute later she poked her head out the door. “Is it safe?”
Yolanda took one look and guffawed. “You won’t be winning no beauty contests like that, girl. Fit two of you in there.” She gestured to the end of the bed. “Hand me my purse.” When Lisa Fay came around the side Yolanda had scribbled a name—Belle—and an address on the torn back of a card. She handed the scrap and the flannel bundle to Lisa Fay and rustled in her handbag, drew out two five-dollar bills. “All I’ve got right now,” she said, passing them over. “Go by Mama Belle’s and she’ll take you in. You and little …”
Lisa Fay nodded her thanks. Tucked the address and the banknotes in her sock and settled the baby in her arms. “I’ll pay you back.”
“You better. And I want that skirt back, girl. Clean. Don’t go sitting in no grass like y’all do.”
Lisa Fay grinned and saluted. Turned and slid secretively into the hall.
Yolanda’s voice floated after her: “André. Jubilee. Harrison.”
She called him HeyBoy or BigBoy or Beauty; she called him Honey and Sweetie and Champ. For a whole year she called him Luxe, for Deluxe, meaning the best and luckiest thing that had ever happened to her. When she was angry with him she called him Son, and he held his neck stiff and waited to hear what he had done wrong. One day, gazing around at the trail of broken things strewn in his wake, she said, “Kid! Can’t you leave off wrecking things, for once?” And he turned his round face, his plum lips, to her and said, “I a wrecker.” It made her laugh. “A Wrecker?” And he nodded his head, serious, sure, and on that day it was settled.
There was a man on the moon. All across America children sat cross-legged on shag rugs and watched F Troop and Gilligan’s Island, Gigantor, Bewitched. Lisa Fay didn’t own a TV. She worked the swing shift at the Hills Brothers coffee factory on Second Street at a job Yolanda scared up for her, lived in a room with a hot plate and a cast iron bathtub above a Greek grocery, took the bus every weekday afternoon to leave Wrecker with Yolanda’s mother, Belle, in the Fillmore and the late-night bus back to pick him up after work. Weekends belonged to them. Lisa Fay was put together in a marginal way, and anybody could believe that the stress of caring for a baby—a big, rowdy baby like Wrecker—might wear her past the tolerances machined in. Instead, it worked the other way. Lisa Fay took to raising Wrecker like a boat takes to water; he gave her the ballast she needed to ride steady; he was rudder and anchor and sail. Sunday mornings she’d load him in the secondhand stroller and push the boy all the way to the Presidio. Wrecker never missed a parade. He learned to walk and quickly to run and terrorized the ducks in Golden Gate Park. Towheaded, blue-eyed, brawny as the Christ child in a Renaissance oil, Wrecker feasted on delicacies from the Greek grocery below and wore the love of the bums on Townsend—the ones who clustered each afternoon for a hot meal at the Salvation Army—like a coat of armor to shield him from the cruelties of life.
Which cruelties? Lisa Fay didn’t abandon Wrecker as a baby in a trash bin. She didn’t force him to spend long hours alone in a dark closet, nor hold his small feet in boiling water, nor use the sharp end of a safety pin to inscribe his skin, nor forbid him food when he was hungry, nor force him to eat sand or clay or feces. She did
not touch his small body in damaging ways or allow others to do that. She loved her son more than she loved her own life.
But she didn’t always know what to do when he cried. Wrecker was a healthy baby, and still sometimes he cried so hard it made him throw up. Some mornings—once in a while—he woke dull-eyed and coughing and his nose ran green and his forehead and the skin of his arms and his chest were much too hot. Lisa Fay thought she should take him to a doctor but she didn’t know where to find the right kind or how she would pay for it. She fed him the little orange dots of aspirin. Time and the candy-flavored pills seemed to cure him.
Mostly she looked at her son and was delighted to see how strong he was, how happy, how soft and perfect and resourceful. Sometimes she looked at him and was horrified. He grew more or less on his own—his body seemed to know how to form itself, it followed some basic instructions that seemed built in—but what if she made a mistake? No. What if the mistakes she made (of course she made mistakes, how was she to know how to raise a child like this, any child) mounted up and somehow tipped the scale toward bad? What if she made—a monster? It would be her fault. Everyone would know she had been a BAD MOTHER.
Sometimes she thought it was absurd that she was a mother at all. Sometimes—not very often, hardly at all—she left him to sleep in the bed and she quietly shut the door to the rented room, locked it with the knob and the deadbolt, and quietly fled down the steps into the city night. Jazz at the pier and someone to buy her a drink. Remind her. What? Remind her she was a woman. A woman of San Francisco.
Jerry Skink slunk around corners; he moved like a polecat with a hard-on, stunk of sweat and perfume, chased skirts and moneymaking opportunities as long as they didn’t look like much work. He combed his wispy light brown mustache and let his hair flop over his forehead to hide the scars from teenage acne. No one knew how old he was. Forty? Fifty? Thirty-four? He was a wolf in sheep’s clothing; a sheep in pimp’s clothing; a pimp in a waxy body that gave nobody pleasure, not even him. He took it out on everyone around him. He smiled at them and gave them the creeps.
