by Jean Hegland
Lucy’s mother was like no one else Cerise had never known, although she reminded her just a little of the woman who’d been her mentor teacher. She liked how Anna looked pretty without appearing perfect. She liked the way Anna treated her daughters, as though she were both amused and pleased by them, and she liked the way Anna treated her, too, as if the world were a thing they shared. She even liked the clothes that Anna wore, and the simple way she fixed her gleaming hair. She liked Anna way too much to disappoint or contaminate her, too much to risk exposing herself to her.
“Please,” Lucy pleaded, as though Cerise were a candy bar or another ride at the fair. “Oh, please, please, please, please.”
There was a long pause while Cerise stood with her head bent, waiting for Lucy’s mother to say the hard words that would free them both. But instead, after another moment, Anna said, “I’m not sure I have any work for you right now, but maybe you’d like to come and spend a few hours with us on Wednesday afternoon? I know Lucy would be thrilled to have you visit. And Ellen, too,” Anna added, as she lifted the baby from the swing.
Cerise didn’t want to have to spend more time with Lucy, with her funny way of talking, her million moods, and messy clothes. Even though Lucy’s eyes were brown instead of blue, and she wasn’t anywhere near as beautiful as Melody had once been, Lucy made Cerise think of Melody, her body the size of Melody’s, her hair as soft as Melody’s, her voice the ghost of Melody’s voice back before everything went wrong.
And Cerise didn’t want to have to be with the baby most of all. She was afraid that if she touched Ellen, she would never be able to let her go, afraid that if she held her, her hands would somehow twist to claws. She was afraid that in Ellen’s presence, she would start to cry and never remember how to stop.
“Please?” Lucy asked turning to her. Her voice was sweet and urgent, as insinuating as Melody’s had once been. “Oh, please?” And standing beside the little fountain in the tender purple twilight, the only word Cerise could find was, “Sure.”
ON TUESDAY MORNING, ANNA DROPPED ELLEN OFF AT MRS. CHAUNCY’S half an hour early and drove to the Redwood Women’s Shelter. It was a low, dull building in a tired neighborhood close to the city center. She parked in front of it, locked the car, and then surreptitiously double-checked the doors. A knot of women were loitering on the sidewalk with their cigarettes and bundles, and as she passed through them, she smiled sympathetically into the middle distance.
Inside was a reception area with a chair-lined wall, a graying carpet, and an office desk on which sat a telephone and a Rolodex file. It all seemed so startlingly normal that Anna realized she had unwittingly been imagining the etchings she’d seen of Bedlam, with wild-eyed women lolling in the straw.
A voice said, “We’re not open now.” Anna jumped and looked around to see a woman coming toward her down the hallway. She was short and plain, and her glasses were taped at one corner with black electrician’s tape.
“I’m sorry,” Anna said, “I just need … are you … do you work here?”
“I do,” the woman said, entering the room. “And I’m afraid we’re full right now. We can’t even take any more applications until our waiting list shortens a little.”
“Oh, I’m not—I mean, I have a place to live. I just wanted,” Anna stammered, “some information about someone who’s staying here.”
The woman had been looking pleasantly at Anna, but suddenly her worn face hardened. “And who are you?”
“I was thinking of inviting one of your—Honey Johnson—to my house. And maybe even having her watch my daughters.”
The woman pushed her glasses up on her nose. She said, “I’d be breaking confidentiality if I told you anything about any of our residents.”
“I know,” Anna said, “It’s just, I have a responsibility, to my—”
The woman’s eyes suddenly softened. “You don’t want to endanger your children by helping Honey.”
“No. I mean, yes. That’s—”
“In that case I’ll tell you a little more than I should, though I don’t know much.”
“I’d appreciate whatever you can say.”
“We have to have a lot of rules here,” the woman began. “We can’t help everybody, so we have to concentrate our energies on those with whom we might have a real chance. If a woman can’t follow our rules, we have to ask her to leave, to make room for someone else. It’s hard,” the woman shrugged, “but there it is.
“Now Honey’s never caused a bit of trouble,” the woman continued. “She watches out for people, does extra chores, doesn’t complain. She’s great with the kids—and some of the children here have good reason to be a handful.”
Anna said, “What about her—background?”
“Most of the ladies want to talk, to tell their stories. But Honey’s never said a word about herself, at least not that I’ve ever heard.”
“She told me she lost her home when her trailer burned.”
“If that’s what she said, I don’t see why we should doubt it. She must trust you, to reveal that. Honey’s quiet,” the director went on, “but seems sturdy, like a real survivor. She’s certainly kind. Her stay with us is almost over, and we’ll miss her when she has to leave.”
“Why would she have to leave?” Anna asked.
“Three months is the limit any woman can stay with us—three months, as long as she can follow all our rules.”
“What are your rules?”
The director adjusted her glasses once again. “The women have to look for work, and when they find a job, they have to do their best to keep it. They have to do chores and maintain their personal hygiene, they can’t fight or use obscenities, and they have to stay drug-free and sober.
“I don’t think Honey has any dependency issues,” the woman continued. “We do drug testing. One dirty catch, and you’re out. I’d trust my own kids with her, if I had any.”
She paused for a moment, and then she said, “It’s good of you to take an interest in her. It’s what all these women need—a bridge back. It’s communities that make people homeless, and only communities can help them regain what they’ve lost.”
“The government—” Anna began.
But the woman interrupted her, “—is an abstraction. These women …” Her voice trailed off as though she’d reached a dead end, but then her thoughts seemed to take a different turn, and when she spoke again, her tone was resonant and firm, “‘Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.’”
Anna asked, “Who said that?”
“The Bible, of course. Saint Paul, in the book of Hebrews. It isn’t always easy,” the woman added, “to try to help. But then it isn’t easy to be homeless either, to be stripped to just a life.”
“No, though I’d think—I mean, there must be some way….”
The woman gave Anna an appraising look. “There’s another thing I try to keep in mind,” she said. “It’s a legal phrase, oddly enough.”
“What’s that?” Anna asked.
“‘The right to folly,’ “the woman answered.
“Oh,” Anna said, though for a moment she was not sure whose folly the woman meant.
IT HURT NEARLY AS MUCH AS STARTING HER JOB, TO HAVE TO GIVE IT UP. When Cerise woke on Tuesday morning, the whole day loomed uselessly in front of her, as eternal and immovable as a mountain.
“Have a good day at work,” the director said to her as she filed out onto the sunny streets with the other women, and though Cerise nodded and mumbled, “Thanks,” inside she winced as if she’d been slapped.
By midmorning she missed the kids so much, she thought she might sneak back anyway, thought she could lurk around the playground or maybe hide in the hall in hopes of stealing even a peek of them. But as she neared the schoolyard, she veered away again, afraid that someone might notice her and call the police.
She spent the rest of the day wandering the Santa Dorothea that people with jobs and homes and
destinations never see—the alleys and weedy lots and vacant buildings, the dank or dusty hiding places, the thickets and wild pockets, the places that could only be reached by crawling or surreptitious climbing.
They were the only places left where she belonged. She’d wanted a place she could go where people would be glad to see her, had wanted a room of her own where she could retreat to pursue her encounters with Travis. But now she saw that she would never have those things. She’d done her best, and she’d lost her job, and it was proof of how little she’d belonged there to begin with that she would do again the thing that made her lose it.
“They say I gotta look for work or leave,” Barbara had muttered as she’d packed. But the bars and restaurants hadn’t wanted Cerise, the motels and nursing homes hadn’t needed her, and even if she could find another day care foolish enough to hire her, she couldn’t bear having to start over one more time. “Get real,” she remembered Melody scoffing. “Do you remotely think I’d have a chance?” And now Cerise wondered why she’d ever thought she had.
“Where there’s life, there’s hope,” the shelter director was always saying. But hope was a hoax, just a way of trapping people into staying alive. Hope was a mirage, a trick. Hope meant nothing, and still life ground on, still Cerise combed the streets for nooks and hidey-holes, still she went to the soup kitchen at noon to eat cheap food and scan the crowd for Barbara. Forking mealy potatoes into her mouth, watching the others eat, it seemed their only purpose was to fill forbidden toilets with their homeless turds.
When the shelter opened, she slipped inside and snuck the blankets from her cot, took her bag of toiletries and her extra clothes from her shelf, helped herself to a handful of shriveled doughnuts from the pantry, and then stole out the kitchen door before anyone could notice. As dusk came, she made a bed for herself in a stall in a livestock barn at the fairground, sweeping off the wooden floor planks as best she could with a half-rotten grooming brush, spreading a layer of old newspapers along the back wall, arranging her blankets in a tidy rectangle on top.
A little wind skittered through the empty building, stirring trash and dust and then moving on. Otherwise the only sound she heard was the distant growl of the freeway. After the bustle of the kids at after-school care and her crowded life at the shelter, the wide silence of the fairground seemed oddly welcoming, as though it had been waiting for her, as though there were a place inside that silence that was just her shape.
It was a relief to be unknown and unencumbered once again, to be committed to nothing more than caring for the unfortunate pet of her own body. It was a relief to leave the little worries and the heartrending sorrows of other people behind. While the last light seeped from the room, she took off her shoes and crawled between her blankets. Travis, she thought expectantly. She stiffened her body and held her breath, willing herself past the torture of his death to the place where he still lived. Lying beneath her collection of blankets, she waited for his scent, his voice, his smile, to possess her. But this time, though she missed him with a longing so strong it might have severed atoms, she couldn’t seem to find him in her mind. She could remember parts of him—the hollow at the back of his neck, his cushiony cheeks and sturdy legs—but those parts kept shifting, refusing to become a whole boy.
No matter how hard she tried to conjure him, he never came. She could remember a million moments with him—changing his diaper, feeding him his dinner, giving him a bath. But she couldn’t seem to find her way back inside those times. It was as though her memories were becoming set and flat, like the photographs in the albums that Rita used to have, the little snapshots whose color was slowly seeping out of them, leaving their images pale and yellow-tinged, like fading bruises.
Out on the fairground a lone frog began to sing, its call tentative and plaintive in the dark. A moment passed, and it was answered by a lush chorus. Lying on her paper bed, Cerise let herself be lulled a little by the frogs, let time pass until finally she felt almost used to the awful ache that was her life.
She woke much later to the sound of footsteps and hushed voices. Stiff with adrenaline, she lay in the darkness, pressing her spine against the back wall of her stall and holding her breath, willing herself to disappear, willing her eyes to see through the dark.
“In here,” a male voice said, and she was desperately trying to gather a reply when the intruders passed her stall and entered the one beyond it. She heard a girl’s giggle and the man’s low answer, and her panic ebbed a little.
Terrified of giving herself away, she lay not six feet from where they embraced, trying not to listen and yet unable to hear anything else. At the sound of their shifting bodies, their cozy moans and murmured answers, she almost envied them the little transports she imagined they had in store.
But a moment later the girl gave a whimper. “No,” she said, “Oh, please,” her voice tight and small and scared as though she’d suddenly become a child.
“You’ll like it,” the man answered. “Just wait a minute.”
The girl made a little cry, a muffled word that sounded, almost, like Mommy, and Cerise felt an awful shadow cross her mind. Sick with anxiety, she lay in the darkness, hating herself and helpless to stop a thing, unable to even to put her hands over her ears for fear of making too much noise. She remembered her own introduction to sex, how the bludgeon of Sam’s penis had appeared so unexpectedly between her legs, as startling and insistent as a truck bearing down, how she’d been a mother before she’d really understood what Sam was trying to do.
When the thrusts and whimpers ceased, frog-song poured in to fill the silence. After a pause the girl’s voice pleaded, “Do you love me?”
But the only answer Cerise heard was an impatient grunt and the quick growl of a zipper being closed.
Long after the couple had left and the frogs had ceased their calling and the stalls were once more silent save for the intermittent wind, Cerise lay awake, tormented by the thought of all she’d been unable to change or stop or save. Before she finally managed to fold herself back inside a thin sleep, she thought she heard, far beyond the distant freeway hum, the incessant ringing of an unanswered phone. Listening to that sound that was so muted it might only exist inside her mind, she felt an uneasy flicker of longing. It’s too late for that, she told herself, and pulled her blankets over her head.
She woke to a barrage of birdsong and the thin light of dawn. The air was cold against her face, and the stall smelled of dew and hay and old manure. She huddled beneath her blankets for a long time, watching the slow advent of morning, listening to the chatter of birds and the increasing roar of traffic on the freeway.
She had no reason to rise. She couldn’t return to the shelter now that she’d lost her job and stolen one of the shelter’s blankets and broken the rule about staying out all night, and there was nowhere else she could think to go. She lay on her newspaper bed and wondered how she could possibly endure the waste of hours that lay ahead before she could lose herself in sleep once more.
The shelter director had said everyone needed plans. She’d said that plans were the ropes you used to pull yourself into the future. But Cerise had no use for the future. The future was only the present stretched out forever, like rubbish scattered along an endless freeway. And yet she knew she couldn’t remain forever in her stall. Sooner or later someone would find her and make her leave. Sooner or later her greedy body would drive her into the world.
The rectangle of light the rising sun opened on the floor had almost reached her before she remembered that it was the day she had promised to visit Lucy and her mother. It doesn’t matter, she thought, staring dully at the nails angling through the cobweb-covered boards of the ceiling of the stall. They probably hadn’t really expected her to come anyway. Lucy’s mother would no doubt feel relieved, the baby would never know, and if Lucy were disappointed, she would get over it soon enough. Sitting up, Cerise put on her shoes and then stood to shake and fold her blankets.
But as she stacke
d the newspaper in the corner of the stall, she kept remembering Lucy’s woeful face on the day they found Andrea. She remembered how still Lucy had sat, her whole attention focused on the stroking of Cerise’s brush. She remembered how solicitously Lucy had passed Cerise’s brushstrokes on, and she remembered how tender the girls had all been with each other, how caring and careful. She would go to Lucy’s house, she decided abruptly. She would go to Lucy’s house and say good-bye. She didn’t have to go inside. She could just stand at the door and explain to Lucy that she couldn’t stay. She could say that she was sorry, but she didn’t have time to come in, that she was going away, and wouldn’t be able to come back for another visit later. And after that, Lucy’s disappointment would not be her problem any longer.
It was a long walk from the fairground to Lucy’s house. Cerise passed first through neighborhoods where the houses all had grated windows and sagging doors, and broken toys were scattered across their unkempt yards. Worn-looking people sat on the front steps and nodded or scowled as she passed. She walked through the city center, with its thick traffic and slick buildings and grim-faced shoppers, and then through neighborhoods that seemed like different worlds with their wide streets, white sidewalks, and velvety lawns. The brass eyes of sprinklers dotted the grass, and tidy signs warned that the houses were being guarded, day and night.
When she finally reached the right address, in a neighborhood where a street of older houses edged the top of a steep ravine, Lucy came dancing out to greet her even before Cerise turned up the walk.
“You’re here!” Lucy cried, circling Cerise like a gleeful puppy. “You’re here. You’re at my house!”
“Hi, there,” Cerise said gruffly. “Look. I came to say good—”
