As Jeremiah had always been considered an interloper among Lulu’s kin, his child was by association viewed in the same light, a nuisance at best, but more often made to feel as if she were somehow directly responsible for this upheaval in her mother’s life. Apparently no one recognized it as an upheaval in her life also.
With the loss of her father and, for all purposes, her mother, she was in many ways an orphan. Some of Carmen’s elementary teachers took an interest in her—she was bright and diligent—but it was a limited kind of interest, for at the end of every school day and every school year, she always had to go home, such as it was. At first some of the people from the church she had attended with Jeremiah called and came by, but were soon made to understand from Ida and Effie that their help was neither welcome nor needed. With no one to take her to church, Carmen quit going.
“Were you ever . . . abused by a man?” Julia asked her at one point. From Carmen’s answer to this question, her besetting flaw was clear: She had wanted love so desperately that she had trusted too easily. Either that, or she had carried a sign around that read Take Advantage of Me.
But they were only attempted abuses, Carmen pointed out, not fully realized—a fact she cited as a “blessing.” The first time was when she was only eleven, at the hands of one of the assorted relatives passing through the trailer—a lowlife cousin of Lulu’s they called Jayhawk, who tried to force himself on Carmen when no one else was at home. Though Lulu’s mind was disengaged by this point, her motherly instincts were jarred loose by what she saw that day when she walked in, and as she scrambled to get Jeremiah’s shotgun down from the wall, Jayhawk had time to run. He disappeared, no charges were pressed, and this incident, like others, melted into the background of Carmen’s childhood.
Then there was the science teacher later, in eighth grade, who also tried to take liberties with her, the kind that eventually got him fired. Ida and Effie had little sympathy, were of the opinion that Carmen had probably brought it on herself, and Carmen was so confounded she was afraid they might be right. After all, hadn’t she eagerly gone to his office almost every day after school? Hadn’t she smiled whenever she felt his eyes on her in class? Lulu’s distress after the incident was such that she stayed in bed for a week, during which time Carmen wasn’t allowed to see or speak to her.
Afterward, some of her classmates, especially the boys, called her names that implied she was fast and easy. The science teacher had been a popular one, so Carmen was held accountable for the replacement teacher, a grim moon-faced woman with the unfortunate name of Mrs. Plugg, whom no one liked.
And in tenth grade some of these same boys gathered around her after school one day. They had her shirt off when the janitor came down to the stairwell to see what was going on. They were all suspended for several days and thereafter invented quieter methods of tormenting her.
Julia asked about friends. Carmen shook her head. “Kids don’t seem to like other kids who try too hard,” she said. “I guess I was too different. I didn’t fit in.” It angered Julia to think of it—a beautiful, smart, friendly child, rejected. Children could be as cruel as fate, collectively turning on the appointed outcast, feeding off each other’s meanness. Julia had seen it happen sometimes even among college students.
As time went on, Carmen took refuge in the warm, bright, populated land of books. That, and stories she made up. Sometimes she wrote them down, but more often she simply played them out in her mind. That way Effie didn’t make fun of them and Ida didn’t scold her for wasting paper.
• • •
ONE thing she said landed heavily on Julia’s conscience. “I used to spend hours imagining what you were like,” Carmen told her. “I made up things about you. Told people I had an aunt in South Carolina who wanted me to come live with her. Said you were rich. I sort of justified the lie because of your last name. I told them your husband was a bank president, and he was always buying you things like new cars and diamonds. One time for no reason at all he got you a chocolate Monopoly set.” She shrugged. “I was just trying to impress people. I didn’t really care if you were rich or not.”
It shamed Julia to realize that while her niece was constructing dreams about her, never once had she herself paused to consider what the girl’s life would be like after losing her father or whether she might step forward and help in any way.
“Did he do that?” Carmen asked. “Buy you presents for no reason?”
Julia nodded. It was true, especially during the first several years of their marriage. There were many gifts, though not as extravagant as Carmen’s stories claimed. But Julia didn’t like to think about any of that, especially her ingratitude. “But no more questions from you now,” she said. “I’m not done with mine yet.”
Carmen’s recall of details was extraordinary. She had a keen mind for names, numbers, chronology. She knew about the first letter Lulu sent Julia. She also remembered well the day Julia’s check came in the return mail. She remembered the wrangling at home that day, too, with both Effie and Ida arguing for cashing the check and throwing the box of papers in the garbage can where they belonged.
But she also remembered riding to the post office with Lulu the next day to mail the box to Julia. “Ida and Effie were furious,” she said. “Lulu didn’t buck them very often. Mostly she did whatever they said. Ida and Effie, they made a formidable duo, let me tell you. Relentless and . . . indefatigable. I just tried to stay out of their way.”
With both Effie and Ida taking up permanent residence in the trailer, Carmen was evicted from her bedroom and relegated to the living room sofa, where she slept for six years, until she lost even that with another downward turn in her bleak life: a short, ill-fated relationship with a boy named Tig Henderson, who showed up in Painted Horse the summer after she finished tenth grade. She was sixteen, and he was twenty. She believed everything he said, starting with his promise to love her forever. “I wanted so much to be the most important person in somebody’s life,” she said. Tig was very convincing, told her he had a good job offer from an uncle in Alberta if they could only find a car to drive up there. In Canada, he said, teenagers could get married without a parent’s consent, so that was the first thing they would do when they got there.
“I told him kissing and anything else was off-limits till we got married. Daddy had told me never to let another man kiss me unless he was my husband—that’s what a good girl I was. Dumb, too. Tig played me like a toy drum. Acted like he agreed with everything I was saying. I don’t think he was even interested in girls, really. He just needed an . . . accomplice.”
He laid out a plan to Carmen, and before sunrise one morning, while everyone in the trailer was asleep, she scraped together all the money she could find, including the cash Lulu kept in a mason jar for groceries and emergencies, some five hundred dollars in all. She also took Jeremiah’s old guitar and Effie’s car keys, along with her car, and met Tig down behind the old coal mine. They headed north toward the Canadian border.
She made a face. “So, you see, I wouldn’t kiss, but I would steal—how stupid is that? He didn’t have any uncle in Canada or any job offer. He only wanted to hide out up there. He’d done something he could go to jail for—I found all that out later. That’s why he always freaked out over cops.” She laughed. “He sure had me pegged. Gullible with a capital G. He must’ve had a hard time keeping a straight face.”
Several days later, after ditching the car, crossing the border on foot, and walking for endless miles in the middle of nowhere, Carmen woke up one morning to find Tig gone, along with all her money and Jeremiah’s guitar. “No note or anything,” she said. “But at least he left my backpack.”
Julia had already identified these “at least” statements as an annoying habit, this latching on to a minor point as a ray of cheer in an otherwise miserable situation. As if leaving her backpack could in any way make up for the boy’s treachery.
• • •
THOUGH part of Julia wanted to cover
her ears, another part wanted to hear it all in one sitting. And so after each answer, another question followed. Carmen spoke candidly of the years since Tig, but in a rush of words now, as if she needed to relieve herself of the truth as soon as possible. She began telling the facts more simply, stripped of detail. A CliffsNotes version of a lonely, wretched adolescence.
The exact sequence of events became a jumble in Julia’s mind, mostly because her questions ranged far and wide in no particular order. There was no limit to the ways the girl had been lied to, lied about, rejected, cheated, disappointed—all of them strewn along the road of her short life like miles of wreckage after a collision—yet also interspersed along the way, according to Carmen, were countless mercies: at least this, at least that. A messy plot, with two driving forces—the girl’s literal fight to survive and her quest to find a good man to take her father’s place. But this was Julia’s assessment, not Carmen’s.
She had traveled light, moving about a good deal, by bus, train, hitchhiking, taking whatever work she could get from anybody who didn’t ask a lot of questions. From Canada, she had returned to Montana, then headed to the Dakotas and down to Nebraska and west into Colorado. She slept on cots, couches, concrete floors, bare ground, occasionally in a real bed, but rarely in one place for very long.
One day outside Denver she thought about the trailer in Painted Horse, Wyoming, which seemed like a haven of tranquillity in comparison to her life as a vagrant, so she made her way back there. “But it didn’t turn out exactly like the Prodigal Son story in the Bible,” she said. They wouldn’t let her in. Effie said she was calling the sheriff to lock her up. Lulu came to the window crying and told her she’d made her bed, now go lie in it.
From there she headed east, passed through Kansas City, then St. Louis, traveled north through Minnesota and Wisconsin, lived in the Chicago area for a while, worked at a meatpacking plant in Ohio, and eventually ended up in New England, where she had lived for the last three and a half years. She had done every kind of work imaginable—each job “an answer to prayer,” as she called it. Everything from cleaning bathrooms to babysitting for a family with nine foster children.
She studied her hands as if remembering how much work nine children required. “That was a hard job,” she said, “but I loved it. It lasted only a couple of weeks, though. The parents thought the kids were getting too attached to me.”
“So answers to prayer can fizzle fast,” Julia said.
“But something else opened up after that,” Carmen said quickly. “It always did.” She looked at Julia for a long moment, her blue eyes unblinking. “I guess prayer must sound pretty silly to you.”
Julia said nothing. What need was there to reply? Surely after such a rehearsal of her life, the girl could see for herself how futile her prayers had been.
More questions, more answers. At some point Carmen had started going to church again, wherever she happened to be. She liked small churches best, had met “saints like you wouldn’t believe.” She had even joined a church in Connecticut. “They let me clean on Saturdays and help in the nursery on Sundays,” she said.
Julia almost laughed. How kind of them to let her do their dirty work. She didn’t say it, though.
The questions continued, and Carmen grew visibly weary. Sometimes she answered with a single word. Had she ever finished high school? No. So just to clarify, she had never been a victim of sexual abuse that resulted in pregnancy? A slight pause, then a firm No. Did she have any personal identification? A social security card? No card, but she knew her number. And, of course, no birth certificate? No.
How had her shirt gotten torn? This question seemed to confuse Carmen at first until she understood that Julia had leapt forward in time to her arrival here at the stone house only a week ago. Perhaps sensing that the questions were almost over, she sat up straighter and summarized this most recent misfortune, the one that had left her without even her backpack. “But it was really ratty by now anyway,” she said. Once again it had involved a man, a seemingly nice man who wore gray ostrich cowboy boots with silver toe plates. She had been fooled by the boots since all the cowboys she had ever known in Wyoming were gentlemen, and since Jeremiah had worn boots with silver toe plates. Evidently gullibility was still an issue.
From her brief account, it sounded to Julia as if she had been lucky to get off with only a torn shirt, and she told her so. But Carmen objected to the word lucky. Her explanation: Of the many jobs she had held, one was at a karate school, where she often observed evening classes before starting her custodial work. Evidently she had observed well, for when the man pulled onto a gravel road and made his first move, she took him by surprise. “I think I might have broken his nose,” she said. He doubled over, both hands to his face, at which point she opened the door and ran.
“So God prepared me for that,” she said “by giving me some free karate lessons.”
Julia shook her head at this. If God was so gracious, she asked, why didn’t he spare her the attack altogether? Why didn’t he provide a ride for her with a kind woman who gave her money and a good, warm meal instead of a bad man who turned on her and left her stranded on a deserted country road?
Carmen answered promptly. “He sometimes lets us suffer the consequences of our foolish choices to teach us lessons.” She leaned forward. “And anyway, he did provide a kind woman who gave me food and clothes, and a place to sleep besides. He led me here to you.”
Julia could only stare at her. There was no way to reconcile such simple-minded Sunday school ignorance with the girl’s obvious intelligence and with what she had been through. If one of her students had written a story with a character like this girl, Julia’s criticism would have been ruthless: Are you writing fantasy or realism? Either way, the character is unbelievable. Try for convincing complexity.
So here was another reason she needed to stay—so that Julia could try to adjust her faulty thinking, open her eyes to the real world. She would start out with something very basic. For example, the fact that good things could usually be traced to identifiable causes, such as hard work or natural aptitude, but bad things often happened for no reason. Watch the news any night of the week for proof. In the lives of people as a whole, the ratio of abrupt calamity to sudden good fortune was maybe fifty to one, probably more like a hundred to one, maybe higher.
She would try to help the girl understand the need for bold, positive action in order to make more good things happen instead of depending on will-o’-the-wispy things like prayer.
• • •
BY the time the talk at the kitchen table was done, the sky had gone from blue to mauve. With the overhead light off, the kitchen was growing dim, yet Julia had the strange sense of seeing Carmen in sharper focus. Perhaps it was because for the first time she was allowing herself a long, close, head-on look at the girl.
Carmen was the first to rise from the table. Picking up her glass, she went to the sink and filled it with water, then drank it down all at once. Julia turned on the overhead light and started clearing the table.
Carmen said, “A light that shines in a dark place makes everything visible.”
Julia had no reply for this. She carefully placed the plates and bowls and glasses between the spokes and ribs of the dishwasher as Carmen gathered up the silverware and wiped the table. They moved back and forth slowly, deliberately, without talking. Julia put away the leftover pizza, and Carmen took the empty box out to the recycle bin.
“You probably want me to leave more than ever now,” Carmen said at last. “Now that you know all those things about me.” She was standing in the doorway leading into the living room, the expression on her face guarded. One thing she must have learned, finally, was not to hope too quickly.
In an instant Julia’s thoughts settled themselves into one perfectly clear resolution: She must not suffer again. But just as quickly the truth came to her: I have no power over suffering, hers or mine or anyone else’s. No one does. What will happen will hap
pen.
Julia turned and began wiping the countertops. She spoke slowly. “No, I don’t want you to leave. I want you to stay.”
There was a long silence before Carmen replied. “I’ve been praying you’d say that, but now I can’t think of anything to say back.”
Another silence as Julia absorbed the fact that God was getting credit for her change of heart. Well, no matter.
“I believe in angels,” Carmen said. “Guardian angels.”
“No doubt,” Julia said. She continued wiping the counter.
“If they got paid, mine would be rich, even at minimum wage.”
Julia said nothing. She was wiping the same spot over and over now.
“And if they got overtime, he’d be a billionaire. Or she. Well, it—angels really aren’t male or female, you know. They neither marry nor are given in marriage.”
Obviously, there was no predicting what would come out of this girl’s mouth next. After all the hard, plain words of the past couple of hours, now these frivolous ones.
Julia knew it was her turn to say something. Something wise and meaningful. She imagined an empty dialogue bubble above her head, waiting to be filled in. She knew the girl was still at the doorway, and she turned to face her.
Somehow Carmen had gone from standing up to sitting down, folded up inside the door frame, her back against one side, her feet against the other. Her face was buried in her hands, but she made no sound.
Displays of emotion always embarrassed Julia. She could only be grateful that Carmen hadn’t rushed at her, embraced her, and burst into sobs. She turned back to the sink and took her time rinsing the dishcloth, wringing it out, hanging it over the dish drainer to dry. She looked out the window and cleared her throat. “I noticed that house down by Dr. Boyer’s has a Sold sign on it now,” she said. So much for wise and meaningful.
To See the Moon Again Page 11
