Ivy laughed. “Why would you possibly care what he thinks?”
Jane looked down at her current choice of clothing: sandals, blue shorts, a white tank top that complimented her already darkening skin. She couldn’t explain her need to see this man, to have him see her looking decent. It was an indecent urge, she was sure. “I don’t care,” she said. “Never mind.”
“It’s no big deal,” Ivy said. “His house is on the way.”
The origami bird was shoved into Jane’s pocket, and it poked her hip as she strode forward. They turned the corner and were nearing his house, but she couldn’t hear the shouts of his daughters as she had yesterday morning. Even though it was the man’s daughters who had the names of muses, and she knew the man’s name was Rex, Jane had begun to think of him as “The Muse” in her mind, imagining he had some creative pull on her, though if asked, she would have been unable to explain what, exactly, this meant. She had dreamed about him last night. He floated on his back in the pool, white hair streaming out behind him, the origami bird perched on his chest. She had gotten into the water and walked toward him, and the bird had lifted and flown away, its wide green wings still made of palm fronds. She woke with the certain knowledge that The Muse had made the bird for her. Of course he had.
They slowed in front of his house now, and Jane looked at the empty yard and driveway. The chair was gone, as was the stack of palm fronds. Or maybe Jane had imagined them? She had not yet confessed to Ivy who she believed was behind the bird.
Through the large front window Jane saw movement: a woman with short black hair walked into view. She was wearing a cap-sleeved red dress that nipped in at the waist, then floated out in the style of a 1950s party girl; she picked up a stack of mail from the table and leafed through it. The Muse was nowhere in sight. “His wife, I think,” Ivy said, continuing to walk.
Jane realized she had completely stopped and gave the stroller a push to catch up. “I didn’t imagine her looking like that,” Jane said. “I thought she’d have that white fairy hair too.”
“I guess you’ll have to show him your nonnightgown look another time.”
Jane laughed, embarrassed, and changed the subject. “You don’t really hate it here, do you?” she asked, looking around at the clean, empty street, breathing in the dry air.
Her friend shrugged. “It’s just a little lonely. That’s the main problem. I can’t find any people I like here.”
“Do you think Ramona will be upset we left without her?”
“We left a note. She’s taking forever.”
Jane nodded and looked ahead to Rocky who was running in a serpentine pattern half a block ahead.
“Faster, please,” Fern’s disembodied voice called up to her through the awning.
Ivy picked up her pace immediately, and Jane hurried to catch up. She had brought along a travel mug of coffee, and they were now going too fast for her to reasonably take a swallow without spilling. For some reason this began to fill her with irritation—with her daughter for ordering them to speed up, with Ivy for instantly obeying. She lengthened her stride and looked around the neighborhood, willing her good mood back into place.
The homes they passed were now smaller versions of Ivy’s, the front yards and gardens all that served to differentiate the owners’ personalities: gravel and decorative boulders; an ornate cactus garden, complete with pathways and statues; lush grass, broken only by a young mulberry tree.
They reached the end of the street and turned right. To Jane’s surprise they were done with the neighborhood. The street ended, and over a low concrete barrier the base of the Black Mountains rose up before them. Garbage collected along the edge of the wall—an empty bag of Doritos, two beer cans, a purple brush—but beyond this the slow rise was clean and inviting, crowned with green bundles of sagebrush, rocks, and low, spiny cactus. Rocky had already jumped the barrier and begun to run up the hill. Ivy and Jane parked the strollers and Jane unlatched Fern, who leapt to follow her brother over the barrier. Ivy fitted Lucky into his sling, then gently stepped over the wall, cradling her baby with one hand.
Jane was the only one left on the other side of the wall, and she hesitated, watching Rocky pick up a rock. Fern squatted beside him and peered underneath. “Be careful,” Ivy called to them. “Sometimes there are scorpions under rocks.”
Jane turned to look at the street behind her, the asphalt beginning to lightly steam with the increasing heat of the day. There was something so inviting about the emptiness, about the clean, straight lines of the new road. She imagined The Muse and his wife in the kitchen, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper before she left for work. Jane wondered what the wife did for a living and guessed it was something professional from her smart dress. Jane felt an ache of longing for her old cubicle, the view from her second-story window of the side lawn and parking lot where she liked to watch people arrive and step out of their cars as she pulled together the strings of her interviews until a story rose up, fully formed.
Her flirtation with the crime editor had begun in that very cubicle. It was not a place she should remember so fondly. Jane shook away the image of him, leaning over her shoulder to read her lead. He had always smelled of Earl Grey tea and mints to hide the cigarettes he smoked during breaks. She had never been able to figure out why someone not particularly attractive or even all that interesting had lit such a fierce craving in her bones.
They hiked up the hill, over a rise and down, then back up another easy slope. Lucky fell asleep against Ivy’s chest and the kids were tireless, running ahead, then looping back to show Jane and Ivy what they’d found: a smooth red rock, a handful of cicada shells, a stick shaped like a Y. The street and houses were out of sight now, and the sky had turned the washed-out blue of noon. The sun bore down, and Jane began to feel sweaty and out of breath. “I think I’ve lost my heat legs,” she told Ivy. “I’m dying.”
“I bet it’s not even eighty-five degrees,” Ivy said. “The Midwest has made you wimpy.”
They sat down on a large boulder, and Ivy pulled a bag of snacks from a large pocket on the sling. Grapes and crackers were handed out, and Jane retrieved the two water bottles she’d put in her small backpack and passed them around. Ivy pulled an elastic band out of her back pocket and looped her long hair into a makeshift bun at the nape of her neck just as Lucky woke up, whimpering slightly. Ivy pulled him out of the sling and passed him to Jane while she extricated herself from the contraption.
He started to cry in earnest the moment he was in Jane’s arms, so she stood and put him over her shoulder, patting his back and bouncing lightly. He wailed louder, and Jane felt as if she might begin to cry herself; she was so awkward with this baby even though she had two of her own. How was it that she had even managed to make it this far? Adam had done much of this part, Jane recalled now. He had perfected a swaying rhythm that calmed Rocky, and a bouncy energetic walk that Fern liked.
“Here,” Ivy said, taking Lucky and settling down on the rock where she lifted her shirt and attached the crying baby to her breast. The silence that followed was sweet and absolute. Jane sighed and plopped down on the rock across from her.
Her friend looked like the Virgin Mary herself, sitting there nursing her baby, the sun creating a glow in her hair and over her soft skin, dewy with a sheen of sweat. Over the years, Ivy had become the undisputed beauty among them. In high school, she had been too scrawny, with eyes too big for her head and unwieldy hair that never quite looked right. Now, however, she had been made curvaceous, almost plump, by motherhood, and had grown into her too-large eyes; their luminous brown drew you toward her. Her hair floated in long, brown waves over her shoulders, and she had a look of innocence, of saintly purity that drew you in. You wanted, Jane thought now, not only to look like her, but to think her thoughts, to feel the grace she must inhabit.
“I could really go for one of those sweet potato purses right about now,” Ivy said, looking up from Lucky.
“Or a minicupcake.�
�� Jane glanced over at the kids. Rocky was drawing a circle on the ground with a stick several yards away, and Fern was trying to sit inside it. “You hired him for the party, right?”
Ivy nodded. “We’re meeting to plan the menu tomorrow.”
“So what’s it like spending time with Jeremy again?”
Ivy shrugged, looking up to the pale sky as if for guidance. “It’s nice. I’m surprised, but it feels good to be around him. I know you guys—well, Ramona at least—think he’s a jerk, but I think she’s wrong. He’s always been good at the core. I don’t care anymore about the other girls or everything else that happened. He’s just an old friend now.”
“You two looked like more than friends yesterday when he brought out those cookies. I think they cast a spell on you.” Jane smiled. “He used to make you cookies after your mom left—that’s it, right?”
“He didn’t cast a spell,” Ivy said dismissively, but she looked down at Lucky and stroked his hair, appearing to avoid Jane’s gaze. Her tone had hardened when she spoke again. “And yes, he did used to make those for me after my mom left. That was something really kind that he did for me, and it affected me a lot. Not many people were doing kind things for me then, you know?”
“Okay, I know, I understand. No need to get defensive. I like the guy.” Jane tried to recall whether or not she’d shown particular kindness to Ivy when her mother left. She had been her friend the same way she always had been, but nothing more. It now seemed she had been remiss, had failed Ivy when she could have buoyed her somehow.
Lucky pulled away and Ivy deftly pulled down her bra and shirt then sat him up on her lap and patted his back. The baby’s expression was dreamy now, and Jane reached for him. Ivy passed him over.
“Sorry,” Ivy said, then stood up and stretched her arms over her head. “I used to have to defend Jeremy all through high school to everyone—my father, Ramona, even you sometimes—and now look at me, doing it again, and we’re not even a couple. I don’t know if I’d even call us friends.”
“You’re loyal.”
“Or stupid.”
“No,” Jane shook her head. “Definitely not stupid.” The baby leaned his back against her chest and kicked out his pudgy legs. His happiness seeped into her so that she felt a momentary infusion of pleasure. The air smelled so familiar out here, of sand and some type of plant she couldn’t name—maybe creosote, she thought, or sage? She rose and walked over to see what the kids were looking at in the sand. At first she thought it was a stocking or a gauzy scarf they were prodding with sticks, then Jane registered the pattern and realized it was the cast-off skin of a rattlesnake. She looked around on the ground quickly, as if expecting the skin’s owner to be nearby, but there was no movement on the sand.
“Who found this?” Ivy asked.
Rocky raised his hand, tentatively, as if he might be in trouble.
“They say that if you put a rattlesnake skin in your pocket, you’ll have good luck. Or if you tie it around your neck, it will ward off illness,” Ivy said.
“Really?” Rocky asked.
“It’s true.” She handed the skin to Rocky and he glanced up at Jane, who nodded at him.
He rolled the skin into a ball then gently slid it into the large side pocket of his cargo shorts.
“Let’s head back,” Ivy said, taking Lucky from Jane and settling him back into the sling.
The hike down the mountain seemed longer, now that the sun was higher in the sky. Also, Jane was getting hungry, and she was sure the kids were too.
When they finally reached the concrete barrier by the street, Ivy stepped over the wall, then swung her stroller around and frowned. Placed in the seat of green cloth was a present the size of a shoebox wrapped in baby blue paper and topped with a silver bow. She picked up the package and looked at Jane. “That’s strange.”
“Any card?”
Ivy inspected it, then shook her head.
“I want to open it,” Rocky called out, leaping over the barrier and holding out his hands to Ivy.
She passed it to him and he ripped into the paper with glee to reveal a Nike shoe box. Inside, there was a piggy bank, white porcelain with black letters and a red heart on the side: I LOVE NY. There was no note inside the box either.
“A gift for Lucky?” Jane suggested. “From a secret admirer?”
“Who gives a baby a piggy bank?” Ivy asked, taking it from Rocky and turning it over in her hands.
“Do you know anyone from New York?”
Ivy shook her head.
“Maybe it’s a bomb,” Rocky said.
Jane turned to him and frowned.
“I don’t hear any ticking,” Ivy told him, holding it to her ear. She set the piggy bank back in the box on the ground, then got Lucky into the stroller and handed the gift to him. He inspected it closely, then cradled it to his chest as if it were a real creature, a pet pig.
They discussed possibilities on the way home. Ivy seemed to think it was from Jeremy, or maybe a woman she knew named Mia who lived around the corner. Jane agreed that Jeremy was a good possibility but didn’t see why he wouldn’t want credit for the present. There was no need for him to be secretive with a baby gift, was there?
“No, but he just likes being secretive. That’s how he is,” Ivy said.
“Maybe there’s a plane ticket inside the pig for you to meet him in Acapulco. Or a hotel room key. Or maybe just the key to his apartment. I guess he wouldn’t need to get a hotel room to be with you since he lives alone.”
Ivy laughed, then stopped the stroller, gently removed the pig from Lucky’s hands, and shook it. “Empty.”
“What if there was a key inside, just hypothetically? Would you use it?” Jane asked.
Ivy shook her head. “No way. I’d never cheat on Frank, especially now.”
“Why especially now?”
“Well, because of Lucky. Now anything I do to Frank will hurt Lucky too, don’t you think?”
Jane considered this. “I don’t know. I guess you’re right. For some reason I like to still think of myself as a separate being.”
“Well, you’re not anymore, so get used to it.”
REX
He was in the dining room, crouching to retrieve the arm of a Barbie from behind a chair when he saw Jane again through the slatted blinds, pausing in front of his home with a stroller, and her friend, the one who lived behind the crazy red door. He’d noticed the friend on several occasions—she was too pretty not to notice—but it was the sight of Jane, pausing and peering toward his house, shading her eyes with her hand, that sent a tremor of feeling through him. The feeling was two parts lust, but one part a simple desire to talk to her again, to remind her of her strange outfit at the Mormon dance all those years ago.
He would have gone outside and said hello, but Kristina was here, rifling through her mail in the front room and collecting a few more of her things, a slow, drawn-out process that he imagined might last several years. This time, she was seeking an alleged vase she’d bought in La Jolla one summer. He couldn’t remember any vase from La Jolla, but she was intent on finding it and she probably would because that’s the way she was: efficient and thorough with a flawless memory.
With the Barbie’s arm clenched in his fist, he returned to the kitchen, got out the superglue, and reaffixed the arm to the doll waiting on the kitchen table. The girls were in the backyard, filling up the baby pool, and he watched them from the window, relieved to have them back here with no visible wounds from their trip to the desert. He was waiting for Kristina to leave so he could ask them more about the trip.
“Found it,” she said, coming into the kitchen with a vase so pale blue it was almost white. He reached for it and she handed it over. It was cool to the touch, the size and shape of a small gourd. Turning it over, he tried to remember buying this with his wife. It seemed essential that he recall that moment on their long-ago trip to La Jolla.
“It’s from that shell shop,” she told him. “We had calam
ari at that place, the little one with the weird drip candles, then we walked down to that shell shop and bought this.”
Calamari. Drip candles. He couldn’t picture any of it. It sounded like a scene from a bad novel. He handed back the vase and shook his head. “Wow, I’m getting old,” he told her. “My mind’s a blank.”
She shrugged. Their shared memories were no longer of importance to her. Color striped her cheeks and nose from the recent trip, and she wore the red dress that had always been one of his favorites. He considered touching her then, just on the shoulder or lower back, but a voice inside told him this was a bad idea. “You’re going to be late for work, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Yep,” she said. “I’ve gotta take off.” She stepped outside and kissed each girl good-bye, then was through the house again and gone. Gone.
Rex went into the backyard and checked his small garden. He watered the basil and pulled out three weeds surrounding the serrano peppers, then coiled the hose and set it on the patio. Polly and Callie were in the baby pool now, laughing about something, and he walked over and asked, “So how was the trip, really?”
“Fun,” Callie said, looking up at him. “Mom’s friend Peter showed us how to find scorpions.”
So his name was Peter. It had been almost too easy to unearth the first detail. “I could have shown you that. Pick up a rock, and there might be one underneath.”
“Well, there’s a certain kind of rock to look for,” she explained. “And you should use a stick to lift it. We didn’t see any scorpions though.”
“I ate cactus,” Polly offered. “At the restaurant. It was gross.”
“Why would you order cactus?” he asked, his stomach roiling at the thought.
“I just tried Peter’s. I had a quesadilla for my own dinner.”
The image this evoked—a strange man offering his older daughter a forkful of cactus across a table—filled him with a sudden rage. “Oh, all right,” was all he could bring himself to say. He turned away from them, so they couldn’t detect his anger, the tight fire of it burning his insides, so that he could almost feel the skin over his chest blackening from within.
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