So Edie filled the tub. “My name is Edie,” she ventured. “You’re—Melinda?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you his daughter?”
“Chaos? Nope.”
Edie considered repeating the name, but she was unsure. “He’s taking care of you, though.”
“I don’t need taking care of,” said the girl defiantly. “We’re just, you know. Going around together.”
Edie didn’t know what that meant, but she left it alone. The girl seemed too young, but what did she know about the man downstairs, or the place they’d come from? She knew things were weird in other places right now, and these two were definitely weird. She thought: I left him downstairs with the boys. But she wasn’t afraid.
The girl unself-consciously stripped off her filthy jeans and ragged, stained tee shirt. The clothes stank; Edie pushed them into the tiled corner of the bathroom and thought about offering the girl something of her own to wear. As Melinda slipped into the tub, her fur billowed out, swaying in the water, which almost instantly turned gray.
“Soap?” asked Edie.
“You got shampoo?”
Edie gave her shampoo and then left her alone, shutting the bathroom door. Downstairs, the television was off, and Ray and Dave were teaching the man—Chaos?—a complicated board game. More of Ray’s hopeless explanations, made worse this time by Dave’s attempts to help. The man looked bewildered. And tired, though she knew Ray and Dave wouldn’t notice that. She saw in a minute that the boys were latching onto this visitor the way they had with Ian Cooley, the way they did with almost any grown man except Gerald, their father.
She went and got two beers out of the fridge and brought them out to the living room. She handed one to the man, and they exchanged a smile.
She tipped hers back and took a big swallow, and when she looked at him, he was staring at her.
“I haven’t had a beer for . . . years,” he said quickly.
The girl yelled from upstairs: “Hey!”
The man and Edie looked at each other. “What?” he called back.
“Not you, Edie.”
Edie went upstairs and into the bathroom. The girl was sitting in the muddy water, bent over and probing between her legs. The gray water showed a little cloud of pink there. Blood. The girl lifted a reddened finger from the bath. Edie thought instantly: he’s a rapist.
The girl looked up and gave Edie a weak smile, and said, “I heard about this.”
“You have your period,” said Edie, astonished.
“I never did before.”
Edie tried to gather herself. She’d lived this moment once, from the other side. Having only boys, she wasn’t expecting to live it again.
The girl swirled the water between her legs, dispersing the stain, and looked up at Edie again.
“I’ll get you something,” said Edie, blushing, feeling idiotic. She would have to show her how to use it, she realized. A girl who didn’t know how to run a shower wouldn’t know how to use a pad. “Are you ready to get out?”
The girl nodded. She stood up in the water and gently shook her fur, starting with her arms and working downward; the spray was remarkably controlled. Edie pulled a towel off the shelf and wrapped the girl in it and began fluffing her dry. The girl let herself be held.
Then Edie sat her on the toilet, still wrapped in the towel, and carefully showed her where the pad went. The girl followed Edie’s instructions, reverent, unembarrassed.
Afterwards Edie got a clean set of clothes from downstairs; a shirt, pants, and socks. She left the girl there to dress, and went back downstairs, glancing at her watch.
Coming in the front door, just as she reached the living room herself, was Cooley.
“A visitor!” he said, too heartily.
“Hi, Ian,” said Ray. “Wanna play Government Man?”
He never isn’t playing Government Man, thought Edie. “I thought we said tonight,” she said acidly.
“Wanted to welcome you to the neighborhood,” said Cooley, grinning, raising his hands as if to ward off a blow. “Suggest dinner. See you’ve got a guest, though . . .”
“Yes,” she said.
“Don’t recognize you from around here,” Cooley said to the man.
“He’s my cousin,” said Edie quickly. “He’s just passing through—”
“Mom,” said Ray disapprovingly.
“Don’t mom me. You and Dave clean up that game and take your bags upstairs.”
There’s only my car parked outside, she realized. Cooley would notice that on his way out.
“Cousin? My name’s Ian Cooley.” He stuck out his hand.
The man turned away from the board game and shook hands with Cooley. “I’m Chaos,” he said. So she’d heard it right upstairs.
“Chaos? Interesting name. Staying a while?”
“Uh, no, like she said, just passing through.”
“Too bad. I’m going north myself this weekend, shoot some ducks.” He hefted an imaginary shotgun and fired at the ceiling. “You like to shoot?”
The man named Chaos looked bewildered again. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Tried to get Edie’s old husband to go, couldn’t get him out of his elevator,” Cooley said, continuing to destroy the ceiling with his nonexistent gun.
“Ian,” said Edie, “he’s tired. Come back another—”
“Okay. So, we’re on for tonight?”
“We never were on for tonight. I’m tired too, Ian. Another time. Please.”
“Know when I’m not wanted! See you boys”—Ray and Dave stopped and waved from the stairs—“and see you, cousin.” He leaned on cousin too hard. “You decide to stick around. I’ll get you all signed up and stuff. And have Edie here tell you about bad luck. She knows all about that.”
“Bad luck?” said Chaos.
“Yeah. Edie’s sort of an expert in that department. Tell the truth, when I first came in, I thought you might be another manifestation. You know, taking in some drifter, lying to cover for him—another one of her wild swerves off the straight and narrow. Good to know you’re actually family . . .”
Melinda came down the stairs, and Cooley’s voice trailed away to a whistle. “Hello. You didn’t say you had a traveling partner.”
Melinda stopped on the bottom step and glared.
“That’s quite a fur coat you’ve got there, young lady—”
“Go, Ian.” Edie moved towards him, actually balling her fists, thinking she would have to drive him out.
“Right,” he said, backpedaling. “Later. Stay in touch, Edie. And out of trouble.” He turned and walked out, across the porch, and back to his car.
Edie discovered she’d been holding her breath.
“I’m sorry,” Chaos said. “We’ll go . . .”
“No,” she said. “Now you’d better stay, at least for a night.” She realized, incongruously, that she was glad; she wanted to know more about them. “If you just walk out of here, he’ll have you followed. Oh, Jesus. We’ll have to find you a car.”
“That doesn’t seem like a problem,” he said. “They’re pretty much everywhere.”
“You can’t just take a car,” she said. “Not around here. They belong to people. I’ll have to drive you out of town, I guess. Tomorrow.”
“What did he mean about bad luck?”
“It’s nothing,” she said. “I didn’t do well on the test, that’s all. It can’t be proved. They don’t really have any proof that the results mean anything at all—”
“Okay,” he said. “It’s not important to me.”
Melinda came into the room, dressed in Edie’s clothes. Her fur looked several shades lighter now that it was dean. She looked up at Edie and Chaos in turn, smiled shyly, and flopped on the couch.
“I’ll give you one of the rooms upstairs,” said Edie. “The boys can have the other bedroom. I’ll sleep down here tonight.”
She felt suddenly exhausted by the prospect of protecting these hopeless people aga
inst Cooley and the government and everyone out there writing tickets and reporting infractions. She would have to keep them in her sight and off the streets. They didn’t know how to act. They didn’t know how the world worked. And they didn’t know how much she herself teetered on the edge of disaster; they’d picked the wrong person as their protector.
No, they had to be out of the house in the morning, one way or the other. She’d be lucky not to get in trouble for letting them stay. And she was never lucky.
The boys came rushing downstairs and switched the television back on. They squirmed up onto the couch on either side of Melinda. “Wanna watch Moving Day?” asked Ray.
The girl said, “Sure. What’s Moving Day?”
“It’s a show,” said Ray. “Like today, when everybody has to move, except it’s about how all the government stars change houses; it’s different from the way we do it.”
“They fight,” said Dave.
“It’s like adventures,” said Ray. “Because the bad guys try to keep the houses. Because where the government stars live is really nice.”
“Government stars?” said Chaos.
“Like movie stars,” said Edie. “It’s not real. I mean, they’re really the government people . . .”
“Like Ian,” said Ray.
“Yes, like Ian. And they’re really moving today, but the rest of it, all the fighting and falling in love, is fictional.”
“Sometimes they’re really in love,” protested Ray.
“What’s fictional?” said Melinda, wide-eyed.
“Pretend,” said Ray.
“Like a show,” said Dave.
“Cooley is a part of this?” asked Chaos.
“He’s a minor star,” said Edie sarcastically. “Very minor.”
“Sometimes he helps President Kentman,” said Dave.
Ray said, “Hey!” and pointed. The show was on. President Kentman and his beautiful new girlfriend or secretary were inspecting the gorgeous interior of his new house.
“Mom is in love with President Kentman,” said Ray.
“She is?” said Melinda, looking with astonishment at Edie.
Edie laughed. “No, I’m not.”
Ray ignored her. “All grown-up women are,” he told Melinda solemnly. “Probably when you grow up, you’ll be, too. Or with whoever’s president then, I guess.”
“I am grown up,” said Melinda.
“So?”
“He looks stupid to me.”
Chaos was staring at the screen, oblivious to Melinda and Ray and Dave. Edie suddenly felt ashamed for the awful show, seeing it through his eyes. She said, “It’s crap. We only watch because it’s all that’s on. All these government shows are just about how great they are, how rich and happy and everything. But it’s nothing but luck. And we’re all supposed to adore them!”
“You like this show!” said Ray.
Chaos didn’t say anything, just sat down on the couch on the other side of Dave and watched. Edie went and sat on a chair a little behind them and watched too. She was piqued but couldn’t say why. She felt drab compared to the women on television.
As the stars went on with their Moving Day, and the complicated narrative line slowly advanced, she was drawn into it despite herself. The fact was, she didn’t know how much of it was true and how much wasn’t. Obviously the government people had to move; everyone had to move. And obviously they had nice houses. But the rest of it, the struggles and triumphs, was that all lies? She couldn’t be sure, and Cooley wouldn’t tell her when she asked. At least Cooley didn’t appear in this episode, not yet anyway, and she was grateful for that. She didn’t want to look at him.
“See,” explained Ray, “if you’re lucky you get a government job, then you get to move into a house like that. Mom always has to work in some stupid store.”
Melinda nodded absently, only half-listening.
“But she worked at the television station that one time,” said Dave hopefully.
“Yeah, back when Dad lived with us,” said Ray. “But when he left, they said Mom had bad luck. She even had to work on a garbage truck once.”
“They were wrong,” she said, hoping Chaos was listening to her and not the television. She couldn’t see his face from where she sat. “Gerald was my bad luck, at least that’s what I think. He was going crazy. You heard Cooley; he lives in an elevator now. I mean, he’s harmless, the boys stay with him on weekends. He’s not really crazy. But I couldn’t live with him. He’s just kind of hopeless. Anyway, all the test really determines is your susceptibility to bad luck, sort of like whether you have the antibodies in your blood, I think. It doesn’t mean you actually come down with it. And I haven’t; I still maintain that. Citations are only a rough measurement. They don’t really mean anything. Just because your neighbor sees that you’re a little late checking in for work or moving out of your house, so what? It’s unfair of them to count it against you. Everyone makes mistakes.”
She leaned forward. Ray and Dave were watching the television, ignoring her. Chaos and Melinda were both asleep in their places on the couch. As Edie watched, Melinda’s head lolled back, her mouth open, then snapped forward. They were exhausted, of course, and had taken the first chance to fall asleep. Chaos hadn’t heard Edie’s babbling. It was just as well.
After the show the boys went outside to explore their new neighborhood, leaving Chaos and Melinda asleep on the couch. Edie went into the kitchen and watched the sun set through the window over the counter. It was desolate and ugly, this street full of brickyards and factories, but she was glad to be out of the middle of town for once, away from the people. For a couple of days she could worry less about someone giving her a ticket.
When Ray and Dave came in, she fed them and took them upstairs to get ready for bed. They were tired too, from the moving and also from the excitement and strangeness of the visitors. Their new room had a poster of a bear, and Dave said it would scare him, so she took it down and put it in the closet.
When she got back downstairs again, the girl was up, looking for the bathroom. Edie took her upstairs and helped her change the pad. The girl, still half-asleep, didn’t speak, and when Edie took her to the double bed in the big bedroom, she fell asleep instantly.
Edie went downstairs and woke Chaos.
“Do you want some soup?” she asked.
He nodded.
She brought him a bowl on the couch, then sat there too, on the far end, and watched him eat.
“Where did you come from?” she asked after a silence.
“Well, I think I’m from here, California, actually. But I was living in Wyoming. It’s hard to remember . . .”
She nodded quickly. She knew about that. “Is that why you’re here?” she asked. “To find out?”
“Maybe. It was just to get away, at first.”
“Get away?”
“I was sort of bogged down . . .”
“It’s different, in other places?” She could see she was rushing him, but it was hard not to be breathless. She’d wanted to ask these questions.
His eyes looked carefully into hers. “Yes. Very different.”
“I suspected that,” she said, not sure how true it was. “But everything you see and hear tells you that it’s the same everywhere. Even if you don’t believe it, it’s hard to remember.”
“I understand.”
“And it doesn’t matter what you think anyway, you know? I mean, this is where I live. I have to get along.”
“Yes.”
“If you stay”—what did she mean?—“Cooley will tell you all sorts of stuff about my bad luck. But it’s not as simple as he says.”
“I don’t care about bad luck.” He smiled.
She pulled her legs up onto the couch and took a deep breath. This of course was what she ached to hear, that her bad luck didn’t matter. He—Chaos—was like an antidote, a glimmer of something, a refutation, however small, of Cooley’s seamless, terrible version of the world.
“Meli
nda,” she said. “She’s . . .”
“Just traveling with me. She left her parents.”
“No, I mean her fur.”
Now he was the one who looked embarrassed. “There was a war,” he said quietly. “It changed a lot of things, in Wyoming.”
“A war?”
“Everyone remembers some kind of disaster. But it’s different in different places.”
“Why?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. People.”
“People?”
“They make it different. Like the ones on the television . . .”
“President Kentman, and the government.”
“Yes.”
“I hate them.” She huddled closer to him, thinking of war. Could it be worse in other places? Less like before? Maybe she was actually lucky. “But you”—now she held his hand—“you’re running away. You got away.”
He laughed softly. “I got here, you mean.”
“Why are you laughing?”
“I’m not.”
“Maybe you should stay here.” Was it wrong to like him—Chaos, she reminded herself, though she still hadn’t said the name aloud—because he represented something to her? He had nice eyes.
“Chaos,” she said, trying it out. Then again: “Chaos?”
He answered her question by covering her mouth with his.
“Well,” she said.
He kissed her again. She gently moved the empty soup bowl from his lap, onto the floor.
“It’s been a long—”
“What, like beer?” she said, amused, but testing him.
“I didn’t mean—I’m clumsy.”
“Okay.”
“Yes.” He laughed again, which she liked now. “Okay.”
“Unless you’re tired—”
“No.”
They kissed, and soon he pushed her shirt and bra up into a bunch under her arm on one side, exposing her breast to the cool air. She hid it by moving closer to him, and by tugging up his shirt and finding his chest to push against. He handled her a little fiercely, as if he was astonished.
That night, sleeping in his arms, she dreamed of him. So soon, she thought when she woke. It was a jealous dream. He was living in a house in the woods with a woman. Really living in the house, not just staying there for a few days. The house was his; she felt it in the way he moved through the rooms, the way he touched the objects in the house; they were his belongings. Odd, too, because of the way he’d left his car on the highway and wandered into her house and opened her fridge; he hadn’t seemed like someone who understood what it was to own things. But this house was his. She was as jealous of that as the other thing, his being with the unfamiliar and beautiful woman. She was jealous, too, of the isolation, the way the house was alone in the woods. No children there. Just trees and water. When she considered the dream the next morning, she felt deeply ashamed.
Amnesia Moon Page 8
