She yawned, longing for sleep, and pushed away the ugly memories. She pictured Annalise, strong hands holding the reins, her face lit with pleasure as her stallion carried her away at a gallop. Breathing deeply, contentedly, that long ago Tally watched her grandmother ride out of sight. Then she looked up at the vast, empty sky, feeling the heat of the desert sun. The aroma of roasting meat drifted through the screen door from the kitchen, where Alba was making dinner, humming softly as she worked. Over by the barn, Joe was hosing dirty soap off the pickup, which he washed faithfully every week. ‘Preserves the paint,’ he’d long-since explained to her. ‘Take care of your vee-hickle and it won’t never let you down when you most need it.’ Moondust, the retriever bitch, kept jumping at the spray, trying to get a mouthful of the sun-spangled water. And a small lizard dashed down the side of the barn and disappeared into the scrub.
So enamored was she of the drive-thru that she picked up her breakfast at the McDonald’s window. The food wasn’t particularly good, the coffee was tasteless and far too hot, but she was content to park in a corner of the lot and listen to the radio while she ate her Egg McMuffin and scalded her mouth, trying to wash the greasy food down with the coffee.
When she’d finished, she dumped the trash then studied the map, deciding she’d try to make the Nebraska border by nightfall. She was, she knew, creating meaningless destinations. It didn’t matter if she went a hundred miles or four hundred. But she’d always been someone who had to set goals, no matter how minimal. So today she would aim for Nebraska.
After tucking the map into the door pocket, she reached for another of the new cassettes and began removing the cellophane. Ray Charles and Betty Carter, one of her all-time favorite albums; music her mother had dismissed as mere noise.
‘You have low tastes, Natalie,’ her mother had declared from the doorway of Tally’s bedroom. Permed and girdled, tight and judgmental and unsmiling, she stood fingering her pearls as if drawing solace from their shape and feel. Heaven knew she got no satisfaction, never mind comfort, from her intractable daughter. She stated often and unhappily that if she’d known how unrewarding it was to have such a disobedient daughter, she’d never have had a child – a statement that, in its repetition, served to solidify Tally’s dislike of her mother.
‘Actually,’ thirteen-year-old Tally had replied pleasantly, looking over her shoulder, ‘I have very good taste. Granna’s crazy about Ray Charles. This record’s going to become a classic. Annalise would love this as much as I do, that is why I plan to buy a copy for her.’
Her mother had made a too-familiar noise that Tally had seen written in old-fashioned books as harumph. Close enough. Ivory Rowe Paxton dismissed anything she didn’t like or understand, especially music created by people of color. Her deep-seated prejudices always made Tally cringe. Ivory had married above herself but expensive clothes, a wealthy husband and a lavish lifestyle couldn’t wipe out the hateful predilections bred into her very genes. She was the worst kind of elitist: an ignorant, uneducated one who latched on to whatever was in vogue with her ‘set’ – those well-born, educated elitists whose experiences out in the world were carefully cushioned to keep life’s grittier aspects at a safe remove, and the women who tolerated Ivory only because she was Tyler Scott Paxton’s wife and who were (Tally had overheard their whispered comments when Ivory was out of earshot) privately amused and repelled by Ivory’s extravagant efforts to fit in.
Tyler Scott Paxton was a force to be reckoned with in international banking, but was weak-willed and needy when it came to the icy, big-breasted blonde with the flawless milky complexion and flat blue eyes who held the keys to his psychosexual well-being. ‘He’s a disappointment,’ Annalise had confided to her twelve-year-old granddaughter. ‘But not a surprise, I’m sorry to say. He was a fearful little boy, and your grandfather was not a kind man. I should have heeded my instincts and told Scott to leave the boy alone. I was too young,’ Annalise confessed. ‘I was going by the book, and by the time I realized the so-called book was nonsense, Tyler was as set in his ways as a concrete patio.’
Tally had laughed appreciatively.
‘No, really. It’s as much my fault as it was Scott’s. I should’ve intervened much earlier. By the time I began defending Tyler it was too late. Everything I said and did only seemed to make matters worse. Even after his father died, when Tyler was a teenager, nothing could change the established pattern. I love my son. He has a hidden vein of sweetness that gives me hope for him. But I can’t honestly say I admire the man he’s become. And that’s a terrible thing for a mother to admit. It’s like the worst sort of failure.’
‘Dad’s all right. At least he talks to me when Ivory’s out of the way, and acts as if I mean something to him. Ivory doesn’t love me or like me,’ Tally had said quietly.
‘I am sorrier than I can say about that. Your mother is an absolute horror,’ Annalise had said, making a face. ‘Just know that I love you and like you. I always have. I always will. You’re a girl after my own heart and you’re going to grow up to be a remarkable woman.’
Well, no. She had grown up to be notorious, a world away from remarkable. Still, she knew that Annalise would have understood what had happened, and would have stood staunchly by her. Annalise would have been by her side every step of the way. And everything would have played out very differently. There wasn’t a day when Tally didn’t feel the loss, longing for the sight and sound and smell of her grandmother. It was a wound that had never healed, as if one of Tally’s limbs had been ripped from her body. The resulting damage to the muscles and nerve-endings was permanent.
Once she’d merged into the eastbound traffic on the interstate, she finally pushed the cassette into the player.
There was the hiss of leader tape for several seconds and then Ray Charles’s voice seeped from the speakers.
He sang, and the smooth mellow clarity of his voice penetrated the immense structure inside her that had built itself day by day for more than fifteen years. Suddenly, painfully, it began developing fissures; parts started to fall away, becoming an avalanche. And all at once she was sobbing, blinded by tears that burned like acid. Years of control gone, just like that. Gone. She couldn’t see the road and put on the windshield wipers. With a disgusted yelp, she turned them off, crying so hard that the car was lurching all over the road. Cars in the passing lane honked out their annoyance as they shot by.
Signaling, she pulled off onto the shoulder, threw the shift into Park, and clutched the steering wheel. Shaken by sorrow that seemed to rise from the lowest depths of her body to take flight from her throat, the interior of the car was filled with cries that might have come from some mortally wounded creature in its death throes. She screamed until her throat was raw and only a hoarse barking accompanied the tears, while Betty and Ray sang ‘We’ll Be Together Again,’ and then ‘People Will Say We’re in Love.’
Cars flew past, mere blurs, as her hands pulled at the steering wheel as if she might rip it from its moorings. Everything that had been so carefully stored inside her was gushing out, tearing itself free from its forced containment. Emotions were swirling like invisible dervishes inside the expensive leather interior of this car she’d get rid of as soon as she could. Ivory’s choice: it was tainted. Tally hated this goddamned car.
Growing wearied, her chest heaving in spasms, she let her forehead come to rest on the steering wheel, her hands still fastened to it so tightly that her fingernails were digging into the fleshy part of her palms.
There was a rapping at the window and she gasped, her body jolting upright as her eyes turned to look.
A young state trooper was gazing in at her, signaling to her to open the window.
With an effort, she freed her right hand from the steering wheel and reached to the control on the center console to open the window.
‘Are you all right, Miss?’ the trooper asked, his eyes doing a quick sweep of her, of the car’s interior.
She shook her head, then mopp
ed her face on her sleeve.
‘Can I be of help?’ he offered.
‘Somebody died,’ she said hoarsely, her voice ravaged. It was the truth, after all. Just rather late.
‘Sorry to hear it. You might want to get off the highway ’til you’ve calmed down some. Parked on the shoulder the way you are, it’s not exactly safe.’
His name badge read Brendon O’Neill. He was very young and had a sweetly earnest face.
‘Yes, I’ll get off,’ she said, again wiping her face on her sleeve. ‘It just suddenly came over me.’ Her lips were moving and words came out but she felt utterly removed from the conversation. She was aware primarily of her emptied interior, of feeling eviscerated.
‘I know how that can be,’ he said, with genuine-sounding sympathy. ‘Next exit’s just a few miles ahead. You might want to get off there, maybe get yourself some coffee at the truck stop. Maybe even sleep for a time. You don’t want to be driving, the state you’re in.’
‘Maybe not,’ she agreed robotically. ‘Thank you.’
‘My sympathies for your loss. You be careful now, okay? You’re a long way from California and home. I’m sure your family wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.’
‘No,’ she said, finding that exquisitely ironic. ‘They wouldn’t want that.’ They’d have preferred it if I’d been stillborn.
He touched two fingers to the brim of his hat, then returned to his cruiser where he slid behind the wheel and sat waiting for her to pull back into the traffic.
She had no choice but to drive. And glancing into the rearview mirror to see he was following her, she also had no choice but to take the next exit. Watching as she drove along the off-ramp, she saw him shoot past, heard his siren give a brief wheeep.
Maybe coffee was a good idea, she told herself. That pitiful brew at McDonald’s had been undrinkable and a caffeine lift would help.
She parked at the service station, then went inside to buy a package of tissues and a newspaper. She ordered a coffee, doctored it with cream and sugar, and took a sip. It was good, strong coffee.
Thank you, young Trooper O’Neill, she thought as she felt the warmth soothing her raw throat. Somebody died. She was amazed that those words had come shooting out of her mouth of their own accord. Somebody died. In fact, everyone who mattered to her had died. The only person left for whom she had any feeling was Warren. And Warren was behind her now; not beyond the reach of the telephone, but behind nonetheless – of the past.
She drove just under two hundred miles that day, exhausted by her astonishing breakdown early that morning. By four thirty she was yawning so hard her eyes were watering. Her body wanted to shut down. Surrendering, she pulled off at the next exit and followed the signs to a row of motels, fast-food outlets and filling stations.
She checked into a Howard Johnson’s, dropped her bag, pushed off her loafers and got into the bed fully dressed. When she awakened she had no idea where she was, and turned over to look at the clock-radio on the bedside table. It was coming up to five thirty a.m. She’d slept for more than eleven hours.
Switching on the light, she sat on the side of the bed staring at the carpet and thinking about that mad spasm that had overtaken her in the car the previous day. Had it been her psyche’s way of responding to freedom? Was she now, finally, going to revert to the feeling, reactive person she’d been before?
Doubtful. Swimming in the now-shallow depths of her interior like a tiny fish was her death wish. Biding its time, fed on minuscule flakes of nourishment, it lived on. Like some mutated survivor of her personal holocaust, the little fish swam, and waited. Yes, it had been tossed about by the emotional storm, but it remained, active and unscathed.
She needed a shower, a change of clothes, and food. Then she’d continue on her way east in this altered world of hostile truck drivers, interchangeable strip malls with their McDonald’s and Burger Kings, their Wendy’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets. What she also needed, she decided, was to get to a place without strip malls and franchise fast-food emporiums; a place with old-fashioned stores, and restaurants that advertised ‘home cooking,’ and tree-lined streets. She had in mind four-color print images of places she’d looked at in oversized picture books of New England. White churches surrounded by densely leaved trees, generous clapboard houses with black shutters, populated by families whose accents were as crisp as fresh autumn apples. Somewhere along a sinuous two-lane road, there was a house with a porch and an attic and big kitchen, with land enough for privacy and a vegetable garden. Maybe a lilac tree in the back and a sweeping view from the front porch. She’d know the place when she saw it.
Her ribs tender and her throat still raw, she showered and washed her hair, then pulled on fresh underwear and socks, clean Levi’s, a pale blue cotton button-down shirt and a navy wool cardigan to shield her against the morning chill. After stowing her things in the trunk, she headed for the restaurant. Dismayed as she was by that emotional hurricane that had swept over her, she had to admit that she felt better than she had in a long, long time.
TEN
The traffic on Interstate 84 heading east was heavy. Until she’d crossed over into New York state, driving had, after four days on the road, become a mechanical exercise. With the cruise control set at four miles over the speed limit, she’d listened to her new cassettes, studied the changing landscape, and considered the way the behavior of the people she encountered had grown progressively cooler the farther east she got.
From the overt friendly warmth of the west, to the civil warmth of the Midwest, the interpersonal climate was positively chilly by the time she stopped to get fuel sixty-odd miles before the Connecticut line. No one smiled; people seemed unwilling to make eye contact. She was well accustomed to that. To keep your eyes forward in prison meant you were either crazy or looking for trouble. Since the majority of the inmates believed she was more than a little crazy, she’d never acquired the habit of averting her gaze. There were occasions when common sense dictated she turn away from some scene too ugly or upsetting to tolerate. Otherwise, she’d gone about her business, absorbing facts and details of faces but maintaining always a bland, non-judgmental expression.
Now it seemed to her as if easterners could well be inmates in some gateless prison. Contact was limited to a clipped please or thank-you from people seemingly bereft of curiosity or emotion. Perhaps the east wouldn’t be right for her. But then it was possible no place on earth was right for her. The best she could hope for was to find some area that didn’t have a prison-like feel to it. Vermont perhaps, or Maine. Somewhere remote but beautiful, with distinct seasons rather than the blurry sameness of a year in California or Nevada. And if she saw nothing that appealed to her in the northern New England states, she could keep on going into Canada, a country she’d always wanted to explore. The Canadian population was a tenth of the American but with a far greater land mass, and there were vast stretches of open, scarcely populated territory. Nova Scotia was appealing. So was New Brunswick, or Prince Edward Island. She would go as far east as it was possible to go, and then head north on secondary roads, eyes open for the place that would speak to her, that would invite her to stop, to settle in.
Once over the Connecticut state line, the traffic turned positively crazy, with cars darting from lane to lane without signaling, and traffic pouring incautiously onto the highway from the access lanes. The drivers all seemed to be in a state of blended rage and indignation, as if their rights were somehow being impugned. They all wore an infuriated how-dare-you expression and took extraordinary chances, ignoring the speed limit and cutting in and out of the traffic so recklessly that she held her breath as cars kept narrowly missing the rear-ends of slower-moving vehicles. Keeping close watch on the traffic, her hands grew damp on the steering wheel. She’d never encountered anything remotely like this form of vehicular madness.
On top of all that, she was stuck in the passing lane, and kept glancing over to her right, hoping for a gap that would let he
r shift out of the lane. But most of the cars and trucks were tailgating dangerously. A big sedan was riding her bumper. Were she to apply the brakes, the irate guy she could see in her rearview mirror would slam into her. She could see him swearing at her, his face twisted as he cursed her.
She tried to maintain a decent distance from the car ahead of her but other drivers kept zipping into whatever space she allowed. It was like a demented game and she wasn’t enjoying being a participant. She had to hike up the air conditioning to compensate for her body’s heat, and turn down the volume on the radio in order not to get distracted.
Then, just past the Danbury exits, her lane of traffic began peeling off at a left-hand exit and, unable to get out of the lane, she had to follow the line of cars onto what a roadside sign identified as Route 7 northbound. A quick look in the rearview mirror showed the car that had been tailgating her swerving out of the lane, barely missing the front fender of a vehicle that had to slam on its brakes to avoid a collision.
In the now considerably calmer flow of traffic, she debated taking the next exit and circling back to the interstate. But considering the lunacy she’d just left behind, she decided to keep going. It was early evening, and she was tired after seven hours of driving. Besides, the trees were old and lushly leaved, arching protectively over the road in spots; the grass looked thick and rich, and flowers adorned the gardens of most of the white clapboard houses she passed. They were old dwellings, with deep porches, multipaned windows and red-brick chimneys; houses she’d only ever seen and admired in books.
And all at once, just like that, she wanted to have one of them. They were the antithesis of the San Francisco houses where her childhood friends had lived – those narrow, improbable dwellings that clung like limpets to steeply pitched streets. Her parents’ house had, from very early on, been a source of embarrassment to Tally. Once upon a time it had been some important family’s home, set in imposing grandeur at the apex of a hill and commanding an extraordinary view. It had architectural niceties, like gingerbread trim and fine wood paneling, panes of stained-glass flanking the front door. But that was once upon a very long time ago.
Where is the Baby? Page 10
