Meet Me in the In-Between

by Bella Pollen

  The next day I found myself wandering through the barn, wistfully picking up objects as though each represented moments of joy that were gone forever. This was nonsense, of course. A fair amount of these things had been collected in periods of stress and anger, but when I carelessly allowed one to drop—an old painted Donald Duck figurine that I’d given Mac as an anniversary present—I wept so hard anyone would think I’d chucked out our marriage along with the splintered pieces.

  It turned out the toe episode was only the beginning. Next it was my shin, whacked on the corner of a plate drawer. Later that afternoon I sliced through my finger with a knife stacked lazily in the dishwasher. In the witching hours of early morning it was my cheekbone meeting with the kitchen’s wooden beam, “which is weird, you know,” I said to the pack of frozen mince I held to my face, “because I’ve never sleepwalked in my entire life.” Awake after that, I amused myself by writing a review for the soon-to-be-finished book. The world she created was brutal, yet filled with humour and moments of almost transcendental beauty. Then, aware of the dull throb in my cheek, I turned it into an epigraph: Her world may have been one of transcendental beauty, but it was filled with slapstick and moments of painful reality.

  By morning I’d understood the problem. It wasn’t that I was suffering from cabin fever—it was the cabin that wanted to be rid of me. My vapid self-recriminations were evidently getting on its nerves. The splayed toe, the dented shin, the sliced finger, and now the bruised cheekbone were all a warning message: Get out of Dodge, girl, before we hurt you for real.

  “Fine,” I said to the empty air. “Fuck you too.”

  Winter had sneaked into the valley and stolen the leaves from the aspens. Their silver trunks lined up on the distant slopes like an installation of huge darning needles. The air was threaded with sulfur, the ground glittering with frost. Odd, I thought, that with all the time spent staring out the window, I hadn’t noticed the change of season. I rolled down the road, admiring an elk grazing on the first bend. After twenty miles I reached the junction to the main road and stopped. To the right was the canyon where John and Emily lived. The four of us had become close over the past years. Turning right would mean warm desert air, John’s slow-cooked lamb, and Emily’s ob-gyn story of the hour. On any given day her patient load might include a 420-pound Navajo in for a hysterectomy, a dwarf for a smear test, or a Mormon girl wanting advice for her wedding night. After dinner John and Emily would sleep hugga-mugga in the world’s narrowest bed, and I’d spend the night counting stars through the tall curtainless window of their spare room.

  I turned left towards Telluride, a town that, despite its genuine Butch Cassidy credentials, I was apt to pompously denounce as fake. Telluride was full of well-heeled hippies and creative types, but something told me that this was no time to avoid people just like myself. I wound dreamily along the road, giving in to the landscape, passing the tiny mining community of Rico, the hunched muscular shoulders of Sheep Mountain, and the turn-off to Ophir, a scar of a mountain road cut through scree and so steep that the only time Mac and I had braved it we’d burned out the brakes on the truck. Time passed and I soon found myself approaching the electronic speed sign outside Telluride, whose dots and dashes had heralded Dylan’s outdoor concert a year earlier with the endearingly insulting WELCOME BOB DILLAN.

  The streets and shops were full of Norman Rockwell folk with rosy cheeks and bobbled hats. I matched my smile to theirs, trying to slip back into the world of people, but the strands of human connection take time to reattach, and I felt dejected. It was as though, imprisoned in a cave for years by dark forces, I’d finally escaped only to discover that no one had missed me in the first place. In the bakery I ordered hot chocolate with whipped cream and flirted with a shop assistant, whose exquisitely matted hair smelled of weed. After a few hours, my automatic settings locked back into place. “I am no longer overwound,” I said to the parking meter. “Just a clock whose tick was fractionally off.” At which point I remembered the broken watch on my wrist. There was no obvious place to get it fixed, and besides, it was time to go home. Being lonely was romantic when not actually lonely.

  A few miles out of town, my phone buzzed into life on the bucket seat of the truck. I hesitated. Mac’s and my long distance conversations made us feel less connected than if we hadn’t spoken at all. Neither of us understood why. The trick was not to bring your sadness to the table. Wasn’t that the English way? To hide behind politeness and manners? Say what you ought, not what you mean, and sign off with “love you” either way. If we were constructing barriers around hurt, Mac was building his out of formality, while I was building mine out of kilometres and miles. A lump formed in my throat. I grabbed at the phone but it stopped ringing. I placed it carefully back on the seat, noticing that the sky had sprung a leak and the blue was draining fast.

  The storm came out of nowhere. Clouds thickened and began to spit snow, which a rough wind quickly stirred into a blizzard. I wondered whether to turn around. Even on a good day the pass was nothing more than a squiggle of tarmac with a thousand-foot drop to reward those who disrespected its curves. At least she died doing something she loved, I imagined Mac’s dry addendum to my obituary—i.e., daydreaming.

  I crawled on. Every so often a mass of fog flew at me in the glow of the headlights and I shivered as the truck passed through its spectral body. My gas was down to a quarter. I frowned at the road. My lousy sense of direction was a reliable source of amusement to Mac, who had a compass in his brain and a fondness for an alley short cut.

  On the same Australian trip when I’d gone so ruthlessly AWOL, I’d called him in desperation from the core of the Outback. It had been middle-of-night UK time, but I’d been contemplating death from a circling buzzard, and it had been the most comforting thing when he’d picked up and steered me remotely to the nearest town.

  On whim I snatched up the phone but the device showed no service. The world was now in white-out, the road hollowing through it like a sound-insulated tunnel. Maybe I was already dead. Ice on the road, the skid into oblivion . . . But that didn’t answer the question of where I was heading. At a pinch, I supposed, some mid-level tier of purgatory. I was too lousy a wife to be allowed through the red velvet rope to heaven.

  Like the storm, the glow of brake lights appeared out of nowhere. I ratcheted up my speed, calmer now that I had a sensible objective. Follow that car! I did so assiduously, until it rounded a switchback and vanished as abruptly as it had appeared. I stared through the windshield but the road ahead was empty. My head began to throb. Could it have driven off the cliff? I stopped the truck and, elbowing open the door, sank my feet into the virgin snow. The sky had been a hard blue when I started down the mountain, and I’d not thought to bring anything more robust than sneakers. Gingerly I picked my way to the edge. No skid marks but then there were no tracks at all. It was as though a magician’s broom had swept away all proof of existence. I stood stock-still, feeling the bite of the wind against my face. Watching snow fall was as mesmerizing as watching fire burn, and I found I couldn’t move. These spells of nothingness happened to me sometimes. Freeze-frame moments that were hard to shatter. I felt like a flake of snow myself, weightless and insignificant.

  Suddenly the blizzard parted like curtains, and I spotted, tucked into the overhang of the mountain, a small café, its bright red roof raised on a lumpy foundation as yellow as chicken feet.

  Curious. In all the years I’d driven this road, I’d never noticed a café. Like a toadstool, it appeared to have pushed its way up through the soil overnight. I rubbed at my eyes. Smoke wisped from the chimney. Dancing inside the cabin’s window, bright neon spelled out THE FAMILY CAFÉ and, written underneath, the equally seductive message COME ON IN!

  The café was small, eight tables, set with ketchup and jaunty plaid tablecloths.

  “Anyone at home?” I called, unable to summon a more original greeting. A piece of paper fluttered as the door shut behind me. Pinned to the w
all was a torn section of newspaper, an article about wolves being reintroduced to the Southwest. I gave it a cursory glance, drawn inside by the sweet fragrance of apple and cinnamon. A pie was cooling on the high melamine bar at the back of the room. Not just any pie but a dome of golden-brown pastry with a viscous moat of juices around its crenellated edge. Steam puffed through a blowhole in the crust. Next to the pie sat a solitary plate and next to the plate, a lone knife.

  “Hello?” I called again, but this time for show only. I knew already I would eat this pie. It smelled like happiness or some equally difficult to source ingredient and I was sideswiped by my hunger for it. But even as I stretched out a hand, the swing doors to the kitchen flew open and an old woman in a wheelchair burst forth and swiveled dexterously towards me. She had sharp little eyes and a mouth dipped slackly to one side, the result of a stroke, or Bell’s palsy perhaps.

  “Whaddaya waitin’ for?” she cried, seizing the knife. If her lower body was wasted, her arms were tight with muscle. “You want some or not?” Without waiting for an answer, she broke through the buttery crust with two quick-angled thrusts, then cranked a full quarter of the thing onto the plate. “Go on,” she instructed. “Take it to the table. I’ll sit with ya.”

  Close-up, the checked tablecloths were overlaid with the sheen of ancient spills, the cutlery flecked with desiccated food. I thought about wiping the fork but the sleeve of my flannel shirt was arguably dirtier, and besides, it felt offensive.

  The woman dodged her wheelchair around a couple of carelessly parked stools before settling opposite. “Call me Mother,” she said.

  “Is this your place?” There were flecks of salt in the pastry. Greedily, I forked up a second mouthful. “I like the name ‘Family Café,’” I mumbled. “It sounds . . . comforting.”

  “I got eight kids,” the old woman replied. “All home births. The first six were good. Two was brain-damaged.” She pointed to a framed portrait of a boy in naval uniform above her head. “That there’s Cody, the youngest. He’s decent.”

  “He looks nice.”

  “You ain’t from round here, are ya?”

  “England.” Christ, I’d never eaten pie this good. Never.

  “England, you say?” Mother paused as if the significance of this required careful digestion. “You got schooling?”

  As it happens, I’ve always had a chip on my shoulder about not having gone to university. Chasing down heroin and casual sex in a flat in Earl’s Court instead of sitting final exams turned out not to be the key to getting admitted anywhere. I’d worked every day of my life since I was eighteen, but whether I’d learned anything was another story. I flirted with a quip. I come from the school of hard knocks. But in this department it was obvious I was facing stiff competition.

  “Some.”

  “Melody!” Mother hollered, and instantly the doors of the kitchen swung open. A flaxen-haired girl appeared, pretty as a fawn, with red lips shaped in an O as if the world she encountered was a perpetual surprise.

  “This one’s from England,” Mother said, inclining her head towards me.

  “You’re shittin’ me!” The girl’s expression recalibrated to astonishment.

  “I just said so, didn’t I?” Mother’s voice sharpened. “So go ahead. Ask your question.”

  “You don’ mind?” Melody asked.

  “Not at all,” I said, praying it wouldn’t belong in the genres of general knowledge or geography. Mac had once come up with Nagorno Karabakh for N during another family car game and I’d accused him of cheating.

  “Well, see . . . what I was wondering was this. If I was to steal a couple of kids and take ’em to England, would that be OK?”

  “I’m sorry?” If anything, I’d been expecting a question about the royal family. “What do you mean exactly?”

  “Oh, uh, like . . . is there some kind of deal with your country and my country? Would they, ya know . . . try to bring me back?”

  “Extradite you, you mean?”

  Melody nodded.

  “Yes, I’m afraid they probably would.”

  “Well, shit. That’s what I thought.” Mother pivoted her wheels in the direction of the kitchen. “Brer!” she hollered.

  A man in a trucker cap swung through the kitchen doors and approached the table with a syncopated swagger. There was something familiar about him, though I couldn’t for the life of me work out what.

  “Brer has a bail bondsman after him,” Mother said, by way of introduction. Brer threw himself into a chair and kicked out long legs. His T-shirt rode up to reveal a potbelly melting like soft cheese over the rim of his jeans.

  “Bad news, son,” Mother said heavily. “This one’s from England. She says they’ll bring Melody back.”

  Brer thumped the table. The ketchup bottle tipped over and belched out tomato.

  “Jolene!” Mother yelled. “Fetch a cloth, would ya?”

  This time when the doors opened, two boys and a girl filed out. I now had a vision of an immense pine tree growing in the kitchen, its roots anchored around the cabin’s plumbing, its tip breaking through the ceiling, and all its branches laden with children instead of Christmas decorations. The boys were twins, moving in sluggish tandem, hair orange as a bonfire. The girl between them had a dark monk’s tonsure—without the central shave—and a squint magnified by owlish glasses.

  “Red, Warren, Jolene,” Mother counted as they approached. The twins acknowledged me with the hostile eyes of poker players recently stripped of their aces, but dropping her cloth on the ketchup spill, Jolene stretched out a small timid hand. I extended my own, but Jolene’s bypassed it and kept on rising until it reached my cheek, where it stayed, quivering against my skin like an affectionate vole.

  “Don’t mind her, she’s funny,” Mother said. “So, what you’re saying is—England’s not an option. The authorities would haul Melody back?”

  “Yes, I believe so.”

  “Ireland and Scotland too?”

  “Well, it is sort of illegal to steal children,” I said apologetically.

  “The kids are mine, ya know.” Melody absent-mindedly touched a finger to a small red patch on her mouth. “He took ’em from me in the first place.”

  I frowned at Brer.

  “Oh, not Uncle B,” Melody giggled. She whipped off Brer’s trucker cap, releasing greasy bangs, then kissed the top of his ear.

  I squinted at my plate. Uncle?

  “Her ex has got ’em,” Brer said, catching the girl’s wrist and deftly twisting her onto his lap.

  Melody settled into him like a kitten. “How was I to know a restraining order meant don’t run him off the sidewalk?” she said.

  “So, your ex-husband has been given custody?”

  “He says I’m unfit.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true.” I tried not to stare at Melody’s lip, which now looked puckered and raw with sores.

  “Tell that to the state,” Melody said hotly. “You’ve any idea how easy it is to lose your kids?”

  My hand went unconsciously to the tortoiseshell links of my wristwatch. “You’re saying social services took them?”

  “Workin’ hard don’t mean I’m neglectin’ ’em!”

  “Of course it doesn’t!” But suddenly I wasn’t sure about this. “I’m sorry, really I am.”

  “Melody could use some help turnin’ things around,” Brer said.

  “You know any doctors?” Mother fixed me with her small bird eyes.

  Only a few days earlier Emily had rung to tell me that a ranching couple had brought in their daughter, who had eaten a dead mouse. “The kid hadn’t just eaten it,” Emily said. “She’d made it into a sandwich with Miracle Whip!” I considered giving up Emily’s number, but I had a feeling she wouldn’t thank me for the referral.

  “See, meth ain’t real good for the new baby,” Melody said, pulling Brer’s head down to the hilly contour of her belly.

  So she was pregnant! Dear Lord, please let “Uncle” be a cute
lovers’ nickname. “Well, that pie was excellent,” I said, “but I really ought to be going.”

  Mother gripped my wrist. “So can you help her?” Close up the woman’s hand operated more like a raptor’s talon than a human appendage.

  “I’m really sorry, but I don’t think I can.”

  “You’re selfish, ya know that?”

  I felt a sharp pain in my stomach, as though something important had ruptured.

  “Selfish,” Jolene parroted softly. Her small pink tongue poked in and out of her mouth.

  “Maybe a lawyer?” I stammered.

  “Lawyers cost more than doctors,” Brer snapped.

  “What are you doing here anyways?” Mother asked, a belligerent edge creeping into her voice. “You ain’t one of them rich European people living up the valley, are you?”

  “Our valley, Ma?” the twins singsonged in duet.

  It dawned on me then that I must be in the company of the notorious Rubio clan, whose ancestors filled up the forlorn little graveyard close to the barn. Theirs, too, had been the deserted cabin in the woods where passing horses tended to nicker in fear. This latest generation was reputedly responsible for a number of thefts up and down the river. Keep well clear, local warnings ran. The Rubio family was drunk and violent, with an extra special interest in kiddie porn. No one had mentioned anything about the exemplary baking.

  “Oh, no, I’m just passing through.”

  Mother wheeled in closer. “No husband with ya?”

  “He’s waiting for me in town.” I spoke quickly, surprised to discover how much I wished he were.

  “He must be wonderin’ where you are.” The old woman left the statement in the air so long it dried into a question.

  “Yeah, how ’bout we tell him you’re gonna stay a little while longer?” Brer said.

  My skin prickled. I hadn’t been aware of the twins moving, but suddenly there they were, right behind me, as if soundlessly rolled into position by dolly.