The baby wiggled more than usual. She could feel his hands flapping around behind her. When the baby started to coo, Jet turned to see what he was looking at. A couple of tables away sat a man with short brown hair, a dark suit, and a plump squarish face. He looked so much like Ed that Jet’s heart jumped to her throat and tears started to well in her eyes. She hadn’t even realized she missed Ed. Worse, she hadn’t realized that the baby would miss him. Jet paid her bill and got up to leave. In her arms the baby struggled to reach the man. When they left the building and he was out of sight, the baby burst into tears.
Though the baby had stopped crying long before they reached Steward’s flat, Jet still felt awful. She gave the baby, who had exhausted himself and fallen asleep, an extra squeeze and laid him on the bed, flanking him with pillows, so she could sit on the balcony.
Jet looked toward a church courtyard with a fountain surrounded by birds and people. A little girl scooped up handfuls of water, and let it drip through her fingers. Her parents sat talking on the fountain’s steps. Jet watched the family and fought back her tears. She thought she might be second guessing her decision, but then she wasn’t sure she’d made any principled decisions in the first place. She’d told her husband she needed time to think. About what? Her happiness? Their contributions to their marriage? Jet wondered what Ed was doing. She imagined a beautiful woman approaching him at a bar. A woman with the type of good manners and confidence wealthy parents impart. Jet shook the thought out of her head and tried focusing on the people in front of the church.
Chapter 15 Dracula
Though she lived in a mansion, Mrs. Mae would have been quite comfortable in a studio. She took an elevator from the garage to her room which functioned as bedroom, lookout, and office. This night it was her dining room too, as she’d had dinner brought up to her. Her plan was to watch the windows in the south tower. She was suspicious and scared and she intended to prove that there was nothing to worry about by looking hard and finding nothing.
Luisa was reading on her couch when the phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Right now?”
“I’ll be right there.”
Luisa hung up the phone. Mrs Mae had surprised her by sounding meek and scared. Luisa set her book on the coffee table, adjusted her shawl, and headed for the elevator. Mrs. Mae was standing right outside the elevator doors.
“Mrs. Mae, are you all right?”
“The other tower,” Mrs. Mae said, pointing out the window. “This is the second night this week.”
“The second night for what?”
“I’ve seen something crawling around out there.”
“What?” Luisa asked, repressing all thoughts related to Dracula.
“I don’t know. If I knew, I wouldn’t have called it something. The first time, the night was very dark, and I was very tired. I decided I was just seeing things. Tonight, though, I waited and watched. I saw it moving across the face of the tower and then it,” she paused to find the best word, “slithered over the windowsill.” Mrs. Mae flattened her hand and demonstrated a slow slither.
During the last week of brighter weather Luisa had all but banished her ideas of living in Castle Dracula, but now Mrs. Mae returned Luisa’s childish fear in a single blow.
Chapter 16 To Liverbrush
“It’ll be okay. I’ll help you find them,” Bud said. “She can’t be too far. I mean, she could be difficult to find, but she couldn’t have left the country, or anything like that.”
“Why not?”
“She can’t take the baby out of the country without a passport, and you can’t get a passport for someone who doesn’t have a name. And here I thought putting off naming your child was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard.”
Ed was looking at the table and didn’t seem cheered.
“What is it?” Bud asked, certain he didn’t want to hear the answer.
“The baby has a passport,” Ed said. “Don’t you remember? We took him out of the country when he was a few weeks old. I had to travel on business.”
Bud’s face fell. He rolled a pencil Marley had left on the table between his thumb and forefinger. “Just out of curiosity, what did you use for the baby’s name?”
“Same as his birth certificate.”
“Which is what?” asked Bud, raising an eyebrow.
“Undecided.”
“And his middle name?”
“Undecided.”
“You named your child Undecided Undecided Mae?”
Ed didn’t respond.
If anyone else that Bud knew had been reduced to a stunned lump of flesh when their spouse disappeared, Bud wouldn’t have had much sympathy. However, Bud knew that Ed could withstand loneliness and abandonment. He’d done it before. He’d lost his dad. He’d survived being left by Steward. This time, though, seemed different. Bud wondered if Ed was reaching his breaking point. Or maybe already had.
First, Bud made a call to Ed’s bank pretending to be Ed.
“Nothing since the San Francisco Airport? Okay, thank you.” Bud hung up and looked at Ed. “Well, I guess if she took money out at the airport she isn’t very close. What about Jet’s parents? Have you talked to them?”
“I’ve never even met them.”
“You guys have been married for more than two years and have a baby, and you never met her parents?”
Ed didn’t say anything because he realized that did seem odd and he didn’t have much of an explanation. Why had Jet never taken him to meet her parents? Had he never found the time?
“Do they live far away? Maybe Jet went to visit them?”
“No. She would have driven. They live in Liverbrush.”
“Liverbrush? Terrible name. Never heard of it.”
“I think it’s up the coast a couple of hours.”
“Do you know their phone number? Maybe Jet told them where she was going.”
“I don’t think they have a phone. I think they use their neighbors’.”
“What?”
“I don’t think they have a phone, or a television.”
“Are they sane?”
* * * * *
The next morning Bud, and Ed went to Ed’s house and found some mail from Jet’s parents, but it turned out they had a post office box. Ed looked crestfallen. Bud patted his back and tried to exude ease and optimism. “Ed, it’s okay, we’ll just ask around in town. I’m sure someone can tell us where to find them.”
Bud drove them north in his favorite car – a black convertible. He was having so much fun driving on the winding country roads that he didn’t even mind heading off into nowhere with no plan. When Ed and Bud arrived in Liverbrush they ate lunch at the town restaurant, which was attached to the town gas station. They asked the waitress if she could tell them how to find the home of Maggie and Sam Jefferson. She gave them directions, which Bud copied onto a paper napkin.
“Okay,” he said. “Let me make sure I’ve got it. Left onto a dirt road at the green church, drive over three or four cattle grates, and look for Maggie’s Palm Reader sign.” Bud looked up at the waitress. “And, we can’t miss it from there.”
She nodded. Bud and Ed climbed back into the car.
Chapter 17 Generations
When Augustine Mae arrived on the West Coast of the United States he was horrified by the lack of infrastructure. The thinly spread population. The uncivilized nudity of the newborn country. In New York he’d missed The Old Country, but now he felt adrift. He needed layers of history around him, the way that some people need heavy layers of blankets in order to sleep well at night.
Augustine’s family had been amassing art and artifacts for generations. He built his new home to display this collection, to surround himself in a world of culture and history. He’d been a casual collector all of his adult life, and now that he lived in a lonely, coarse land, collecting became a compulsion. When he traveled, he brought home furniture, tapestries, and strange, beautiful objects. He purchased works of art as
they came up for sale, but these works comprised only a small portion of his collection. He, or others working in his place, traveled the world via Mae Shipping, searching for items that would suit his needs.
When likely items were found, they were purchased. Augustine faced a problem that earlier art collectors in his family had also faced– one cannot always find the correct people to pay. Who, for example, owns the contents of a tomb or a temple? Distant relations or Gods? Who owns a statue plowed out of a field? Generations before Augustine, his family had learned that a farmer needs to receive very little to make him part happily with a broken piece of marble or a dirty bronze. A parent with hungry children will ask only a small amount to turn their back as a holy site is looted. Who’s to blame? And if the patrons of a temple have had a few consecutive years of drought and poor harvests, why wouldn’t the temple god ask the priest to sell an artifact in order to feed his people?
Chapter 18 Mummified Cat
As a child, Steward often lost himself to fantasy in the south wing of his family home. He might stop first in the room full of ancient Roman art, where he could fill his pockets with coins. Then he would inspect the pictures, turn the coins in his palm, imagine transactions they might have been involved in, and the people who might have held them.
Sometimes, he would climb onto a chair and pretend to be a powerful emperor. He’d order imaginary people to bring him his robes and a glass of water. He’d reward their service with a coin or two. Then he’d imagine himself as poor man walking down the street. Suddenly he’d spy a coin on the ground. He’d cover the coin with his foot and wait and watch the people on the busy street to see if the true owner was searching for it. He was poor, but very honest. After waiting a respectable amount of time, he’d stuff the coin into his pocket and then return home to show it to his wife and children. They would cry with happiness, “Bread tonight. We’ll eat tonight.”
Sometimes Steward would find that he’d wandered into the room that housed the Egyptian artifacts. He’d hear a dusty meow. His back would stiffen, and he’d turn on his heels toward the mummified cat. The cat would meow again, and Steward knew it wasn’t saying hello. It was calling its owner. Steward could hear the feet of the cat’s mummified owner scraping across the floor. He would run. But no matter how fast he went, the cat kept up, leading its owner ever forward.
A problem with possessing a fantastic and entertaining imagination was that Steward could also imagine the horrible. He could picture the tomb which would be his prison in excruciating detail. He could see the paintings and dishes. He could see the mummy and the mummified cat looking at him. He could see himself standing on display in the corner. An exotic object from another time and place. A decoration that declared the wealth and power of the Pharaoh.
He would run out of his home and into the woods where he’d collapse on the loamy earth, lean against a tree, and breathe the breeze, the living air. Each time he escaped the mummy, he’d sit very still and make deals with him. He’d promise that, if the great Pharaoh allowed him to live, he’d return the cat.
Chapter 19 Witch and Drug Dealer or Ma and Pa
Bud turned left at a palm reader sign and continued down a dirt road that cut through grass taller than his car. He was contemplating turning back when he saw another palm reader sign at the head of a driveway. He parked in front of a final sign next to a house. This sign instructed customers to “Walk to the back and holler.”
They followed a path lined with pieces of white quartz and abalone shells. The entrance to the house was shaped and sided with redwood bark to look like the stump of a giant tree. Set into the stump was a door painted a rich lapis blue. Just before the door, the path they were following split, and Bud and Ed headed to the back. When they reached what they thought was the back, Bud yelled, “Hello?”
“Hello,” said a woman. “Come on up. There’s a ladder on the side of the house.”
Bud found a wooden ladder leaning against the edge of the low roof. He climbed up. Ed followed. Once on the roof, they found another ladder. This one painted with red sides and orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple rungs. They climbed the rainbow ladder onto the highest section of the roof and found Jet’s mom, Maggie, sitting in a chair upholstered in an iridescent fabric that was either more blue or more purple, depending on where the fabric was strained or relaxed. In front of Maggie stood a little round table covered in a mosaic of shells and pebbles and bits of beach glass. On a shelf at her side sat a huge glass jug of sun tea and some mismatched glasses. She was looking up into the trees.
A dog with long messy black, white, brown and yellow hair lay at her side. It had wedged its nose under her chair and fallen asleep. As Bud and Ed approached, the dog opened an eye to look at them, let out a long sigh, and fell back to sleep.
“Hello,” Maggie said. “Take a seat.” She pointed at some old aluminum lawn chairs leaning against the wall. They each took one and sat down opposite her. “Where’s Jet?”
Ed had never met Jet’s parents nor had he spoken with them. It surprised him when Maggie knew who he was. He tried to get a good look at his mother-in-law. He wanted to find some semblance of his wife there, but she had sat directly between Ed and the sun becoming a silhouette radiating light.
The absence of Jet and the baby where Ed had hoped to find their likeness created in Ed a keen need for comfort, family, and love. He squinted at the featureless, haloed woman before him and found what he needed, because he needed it. He found a parent who could guide him to what he wanted most, his wife and child.
Bud, who looked at Maggie from a different angle, saw a woman who bore little resemblance to Jet, except maybe for the way she moved her mouth. She wore a brown, yellow, black and white speckled sun dress. Bud wondered if she shopped to match her dog.
She offered them sun tea, which Ed gulped, and Bud gave a skeptical look to. She leaned toward the men and fingered the mosaic with one eye opened wider than the other. She spoke like she was trying to teach Bud and Ed their first words. “Where is Jet?”
“I don’t know,” Ed said.
“You’re the fortune teller,” said Bud. “We came to ask you.”
Maggie looked at Bud. “I read palms. If I had access to future certainties, I wouldn’t need advertising. I’d have a lot more money already.”
Bud shifted in his chair and pretended to be discrete about rolling his eyes. Ed was out of his chair and hugging Maggie before either she or Bud knew what was happening.
Ed squeezed Maggie hard, then held her at arms length to look into her face. “Mom,” Ed gasped, “she’s gone. She left. She left me this note. I need to find her.” He pulled the note from his shirt pocket, holding Maggie’s arm with the other hand all the while. He handed the note to her, nodding imploringly as she opened it.
Maggie took the note and read it. There wasn’t much there. Her daughter had injured herself and run away. She felt Ed’s grip on her arm, and looked at him. Who was this big, white man her daughter had married? Jet had never introduced him. And now, he stood on her roof giving her the most pathetic and expectant look. It was difficult to not want to help. But Jet had left him. Maggie opened her mouth to tell him to go home, but a breeze blew in from over the ocean. She shivered and looked over a low point in the roof line behind her. Dark clouds over the water.
She suggested they go inside and the two men followed her leaving the dog on the roof. She brought Ed and Bud down the ladder, in through the back door, and through a room that held a washer and dryer, broom, tools, and batteries for the solar panels.
She showed them to a room with a couch covered in so many blankets it had lost a definite shape. Bud sat on the amoeba-like couch and Ed flopped down on one of the big pillows on the floor. Different colors of cloth were pinned to the ceiling around a light like the petals of a huge flower. She brought them new glasses of tea, this time warm, and told them she was going upstairs to look west and that she’d be right back. Ed stared at the ceiling. Bud tried to imagine gr
owing up in the middle of nowhere with a palm reading mother.
When Maggie returned, she told them they were having tofu stir-fry for dinner and that there was no way they’d be able to leave tonight because a storm was coming in. Bud was about to object when the front door opened and a man built like a mountain ducked through the door and walked around the light hanging in the entry. He glanced at the men in the living room, turned to Maggie, and said, “Storm’s comin’. Gonna be big. Won’t be able to drive the road for a day.” Sam took off his hat and rubbed at his head, shaking loose a wild mane of big curls.
“Dad,” Ed said.
Sam turned his head and studied Ed before asking his wife. “Dudgy on the roof?”
“Yes,” she said. “Hurry, I bet she’s getting scared.”
Sam ducked out of the room and they heard the back door open and close.
“Dudgy only lets Sam carry her up and down the ladder,” Maggie said. “I’ll start dinner. Make yourselves comfortable.”
Once they were alone, Bud kicked Ed’s thigh to get his attention. “Well, what’s the plan?”
Ed looked at him.
“We aren’t really going to stay here. Are we?”
“Oh. Of course,” Ed said. “You need to get home to Sally and Marley. They’ll be worried.”
Bud moaned. “Oh, don’t look so concerned. I didn’t want to tell you because I was afraid you might drag this visit out, but they’re visiting Sally’s parents. They won’t be worried. They’ll just think I’ve got my nose buried in my work.”
“Well, great then. We’ll stay the night with mom and pop.” He turned back to the ceiling. “Do you think this is supposed to be a flower or just a shape? And why do you think this part hangs down lower than that part?” Ed pointed with both hands.
“I couldn’t tell you, Ed. I really couldn’t tell you.”
Mending the Past Page 6
