Elizabeth Joy Arnold

Bestselling Author of

Pieces of My Sister's Life 

 

Hey Jer!  XOX-Miss you...

 

                                                                                                                                                                                      -3-                    

 

How much can your life change in one day?  Well let me tell you.

Molly-Jacqueline disappeared from the TV screen, replaced by a Tampax commercial.  A young girl spoke earnestly to her older sister, and I actually started to listen to the words.  Of a tampon commercial.  That’s what a state my brain was in.

“But I’ve never–“

Smugly Charmed Chuckle.  “That’s no big deal.  I started using Tampax when I was your age.  Just wait’ll you see how much more comfortable they are than bulky pads.”

I couldn’t listen to my mother, that heavy breathing she got before an attack, like she’d just run up a ten-mile hill.  I knew the pattern.  The first month or two after things got really bad, when she’d decided she’d be best off not leaving her room, I’d dragged her by the elbow each day for just a walk around the block.  Two steps out the door and the breathing had started.  If we were lucky she’d make it to the street before passing out, leaving me to drag her up to bed.

But not today.  Today she could drop dead and I’d ignore her, because for the first time ever, her attack was echoing through me too, and to let her in would kill me.  For the first time I understood the anxiety was more than just terror, couldn’t be muffled by reckoning or reasoning, or breathing into a paper bag.  It was darker.  It was an understanding of life, of the world, that the world would always be this way.

I stood and carried Molly-Jacqueline to the kitchen, but still I could hear Star’s panting, the scritch that came with each quick exhale.  I walked out to the back patio, watched the lit upstairs window of the neighbor’s house, where the neighbor-kid watched me back, bleary eyed.  My stomach lurched as he turned away, and I imagined his squally little-boy voice, “Ma, that baby on TV!  Call the cops!”  I strode back inside.

The panting had stopped.  In the den, sure enough, Star was lying on her back, arms splayed, face pale.  I sat on the couch across from her, holding Molly tight against my chest.  I watched Star’s face and imagined what she’d say if she were a real mother, a normal mother.  I’ll call the cops, tell them the truth.  I’ll get this all straightened out, baby, so don’t you worry.

“Unngh,” Star said, either because she was starting to wake up or starting to remember.  And suddenly, for the first time maybe ever in my life, I had this intense urge to slap her.  I’d been embarrassed of her before, plenty of times, but never angry; I’d never blamed her.  But now the anger, twenty-five years of it, welled so high in me that it took on a life of its own.  I plopped Molly on the couch more roughly than I should have, fell to the floor and whacked Star so hard that we both cried out in pain.   

She gaped at me, hand to her cheek, and I touched my own cheek and broke into sudden, unexpected tears.  “Lai–” she said, “–nee?”

Molly sidled herself from the couch and started towards me in a wobbling crawl.  Her head bumped hard against my leg and she started to whimper, then broke into a wavering cry.  I pulled her onto my lap.  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.  “I didn’t mean to.”

Star pulled up on her elbows, then closed her eyes and lay back down.

Molly snuffled against my shoulder, and I remembered suddenly how Janie had slung Molly over her arm like a rag.  “I don’t want to call the police,” I said.

Star didn’t speak, just lay there with her eyes closed.  I could see the welt my hand had made on her cheek.  I turned away.  “I don’t know what she’s doing, not exactly.  Maybe she thinks it’s the best way to protect her daughter.  And maybe it is the best way.”

“Lainey . . .”

“I have to think what’s best for Molly.”  I set Molly on my knee and watched her face, wishing she could tell me what she wanted and what was right, but she only punched her fist into her mouth and started to tearily gnaw on her knuckles.  “What I don’t get is, doesn’t she think I’ll turn her in?  Or leave the baby at some church or doorstep or trashcan in the middle of the night?”

But no, of course that was the thing, she knew me.  She knew how easily I’d fall in love with her daughter, had some idea what my life was now.  I was probably the only person she could rely on to just fall in love and stay clamped onto that love while I was kicked around.

Star pulled to her hands and knees, trotted out into the hall.  A minute later I heard a gagging choke in the kitchen as she vomited into the sink.  I wiped the flat of my palm against my cheeks.  Damn Janie.  What the hell was I supposed to do? 

I straightened Molly’s headband, nudged her fist out from her mouth.  “Bad for your teeth,” I whispered.  In response, Molly made a choked, defiant noise and punched her fist back in.

Which is when I realized how she really, truly looked like me.  Not just the cheeks, puffy with baby fat, but the crookedness of her smile, the upturn of her nose, her blue eyes and long, pale lashes.  Her ruddy face was more like me than it was like Janie.  Star believed “signs” were everywhere, so wasn’t this a sign?

Okay, it was crazy, I knew that.  But I also knew deep down, in the way you know that you like men, that I was meant to be a mother.  And this, realistically, was my only foreseeable chance at real motherhood, without medical intervention.

And then the noise.  From outside came the sound of an idling engine, a shifting of gears in our driveway.  It was ten at night.  Ten o’clock and a car in our drive.  I fought the urge to hide Molly under the couch, listening to footsteps on the porch, a shuffling at the door.  “You stay quiet,” I whispered. 

I walked to the front door and looked through the peephole, braced myself for flashing lights and the clink of handcuffs.  Instead I saw the retreating back of an old lady, weary looking, shoulders stooped like she was on the verge of toppling.  She climbed clumsily into a gray Lincoln.  The door shut and the car backed away.

I unlocked our door.  Wedged in the frame of the screen door was a folded sheet of paper.  I reached for it, already knowing.

This was a grandparent.  Not Janie’s mother, who had underlings to do these unpleasant sorts of things (“Our people,” Janie used to call them), but the other grandmother, Mrs. McGrath.  The mother of a child abuser.  I opened the paper, and sure enough there was Molly-Jacqueline in living color, a hideous, ridiculous, glitter-purple bow in her hair.  Wearing my smile.

I crushed the page in my fist.  I knew what would happen now.  Either the nosy little neighbor kid would see the picture and tell, or one of the women from Babies ‘R Us would visit the police, give a composite sketch, and there I’d be on America’s Most Wanted until someone recognized me.  She always seemed like such a nice girl, neighbors would tell the media.  Chilling to think of all the times we let our children play unguarded! 

I went for Molly, then to the kitchen where Star was holding a damp dishtowel against her forehead.  “I feel better now,” she said, “I think.”

I filled a glass with water, held it towards her but she ignored it.  “You remember when you first brought Janie home?” she said.  “You were what, seven years old?  And I was watching you two, you’re building houses of cards and Janie’s not good at it, she loses patience.  But you’ve built up a regular card condo, all thrilled because it’s the biggest you ever made, you’re on your fourth deck.  So Janie asks all innocent for a soda and you run to get it, and I’m watching.  Soon as you turn the corner, there goes her hand, swipe-smash and your condo’s gone.  And I knew then about her.  I saw it.”

I remembered that day, I actually did.  Remembered turning just in time to see Janie’s arm pull back and the excitement on her face.  When I came back with the soda, she’d shaken her head slowly.  “The floor shook when you walked away,” she said.  “You should’ve been more careful.”  And me, I’d just shrugged and handed her the glass.  “Guess it had to fall down eventually.” 

“So you’re saying I’m a doormat,” I said now.

“You just felt sorry for her, I realize that.  You knew she didn’t have anybody else, so you decided you’d try to make up for it.  Which she knew you would, that you couldn’t stand to see anyone suffer, so of course she took advantage.  And here you both are, however many years later, doing it again.”

It was true, she hadn’t had anyone else.  Janie’s mother spent all her time trying to be the kind of powerful, botoxed, old-wealth woman you see on daytime TV.  Born into a family with nothing, she’d gotten pregnant by an actual Count in his eighties.  She’d suffered through the few requisite years of decrepitude, wheelchair pushing and closed-eyed lovemaking, looking forward to the inevitable ending.  Which came when Janie was only four, after which a nanny was hired, parties were attended and winter-long trips to the Riviera were taken, and Janie grew up with everything she ever wanted, except, of course, for the one thing she really wanted.

“She never learned what it’s like to care about anybody other than herself,” Star said.  “The only person who really ever cared about Janie was Janie, so she took on the task of loving herself like a full-time job, put everything into it.  Became extremely skilled at it, I have to say.”  Star sank into a chair.  “Get me my cards.  Give me the baby and get my cards.”

I looked down at Molly, her headband already askew.  I was a doormat.  Which was probably the only reason Janie had ever wanted to be friends, the perfect combination, user and loser. 

I handed Molly to my mother and went upstairs.  In Star’s bedroom, I rested my forehead against the wall and closed my eyes, my hands clenched into fists.  At first just wallowing, then irritated, then furious, all within the span of a minute.  I pulled Star’s cards from the dresser and swung them against the window.  The cards scattered; the window didn’t break.  I sat on the floor and gathered the pack with shaking hands, stacked them and folded them into the square of velvet, then stowed them back into her dresser.

Downstairs, Star was cradling Molly, tracing her finger across one scrunched eyelid and across the bridge of her tiny pug nose.  I sat across from her.  “I don’t want a reading, Ma.  It won’t tell me anything I need to know.”

“I know there’s things you can figure out without cards.”  Star squinted at me.  “But in my opinion, risking a criminal record isn’t one of them.”

“I’m leaving, Ma.”

She didn’t answer.  I couldn’t look up at her, knew what her face would say.  She’d realize I didn’t care how foolish this could be, how unrealistic, and then she’d get all scared.  For herself.  Oh maybe she’d be afraid for me too, but her main concern would be for herself, that she might be alone in this house which, for her, had no doors.

I didn’t know how she’d survive it.  I hadn’t thought it through enough to figure it out.  I only knew the need inside me, so strong it was the only thing I could feel.  “I’ll help you out any way I can,” I said.  “But if I stay, they’ll catch me and take Molly away.  And I’m not going to let her dad get his hands on her.”

She sat a minute unmoving, then stood and handed Molly to me, started to the hallway.  But at the door she stopped, turned to face me.  “I did a chart on you when you were born,” she said.  “It was a good chart, said that you’d learn things about yourself and the world that most people never learn.”

I smiled wryly.  “And things would happen to me that seemed like luck or coincidence, right?  But they’re really destiny.  So what’s my destiny, Ma?”

“I don’t know.  I don’t know, you break the law, kidnap a baby and even if you run they’ll most likely catch you.  And as your mother I want to say this is crazy.  How whatever Janie wants it isn’t over yet, not a fairy tale ending.  That’s what I want to say, but one of the things you learn as a mother . . .”  She reached for the glass of water I’d poured for her, looked into it and then set it back down.  “You don’t grab at destiny, it’ll follow you around, Lainey, like a shark.  It’ll bite you where it hurts over and over, until you let it drag you where it wants.”

I rested my cheek against Molly’s head.  “You’re saying this is destiny.”

“What I learned as a mother is not to always say what I think.  That a person’ll make mistakes because she needs to make mistakes, and it’s just a part of becoming something more.  It’s not my job to tell you how to learn.”

I watched as she turned away, listened to her steps up the stairs.  That was the thing about Star, maybe the most important thing.  She’d never fight me, would never even fight to protect me.  She’d hole up inside her home rather than fight her sickness, not just because she was afraid but because she thought it was pointless.  She believed reading cards could tell you what was coming, help you make the right choices and prepare, but it rarely told you how to make things better.  Because the world was always watching, judging, like some divine Mafia.  And if it decided it wanted you dead, well it had too many connections.  There was no way and nowhere you could hide.

*                                  *                                  *

I took care of her before I left, I really did.  Even though it meant bringing Molly to the store, a highly risky move, I knew it was safer than leaving her at home with Star who, when I’d left, had been in the process of gene genocide, an obsessive sterilization of the entire upstairs.

There were a surprising number of people in the store at that hour, night-shifters, insomniacs, an enormously pregnant woman hugging a jar of green olives.  What did the sleepy checkout girl think of me, there with a baby at two A.M., unloading shopping carts filled with frozen dinners, canned goods, Ma’s favorite cookies?  Single mother of five, she probably thought.  Or bulimic.

I’d also picked up a box of hair dye, “Sunsparked Brown,” the brand that looked least likely to induce chronic conditions if used on infants.  All-natural, odor-free, the model’s face bright with the obligatory hair dye box Do I look awesome or what? glow.

Back home I stocked the freezer and shelves, enough food for at least a month.  And when a month was over, well we’d find a way around it. 

I didn’t think it all through, of course.  Didn’t look at the improbability of it all, how yesterday I’d been painting brown barrels on dusty plaster walls, and today I was kidnapping a baby.  How I’d never been away from home for more than ten hours at a time, but today I was trekking Lord knew where for Lord knew how long.  I didn’t think about money, or how a baby needs stability.  But I did think of my mother.  If things went bad I could at least tell myself that.

  I did a patch test on Molly’s skin, and when her arm did not fall off I slicked the brown die over her hair.  And then I held the box against my head.

All my life I’d been blonde, but without help, little-girl-golden-blonde almost inevitably darkens to a mucousy beige, and I’d never cared enough about my hair to give it help.  I looked in the mirror from my face to the box and back, and then while Molly crawled around the bathroom pulling down first towels and then toilet paper, I slid my hands back into the plastic gloves.

After rinsing both our heads, I held Molly up so we could both look into the mirror.  Molly had not enjoyed the rinsing, and her face was pink, eyes rimmed with red.  But with our new Color Number 75R matched hair, we looked indisputably related.

I looked good, I decided.  It was much better than my natural color, which had only emphasized my ruddy skin, making me look perpetually embarrassed.  I tilted my head, tried on a number of expressions: smiling, pensive, exasperated, amused, then moved my lips, pretending to be leading an animated discussion with my reflected self.  Who are you? I thought.  Who are you?  I could become anybody now, a hardened, gum-snapping waitress, a museum-going aesthete, a kindergarten teacher.  A mom.

Molly had fallen asleep, mouth open in a shocked-looking O.  I set her in her bassinet and brought magazines into Star’s room.  I’d bought one of each kind, including tabloids, and the latest Nora Roberts and Danielle Steel.  The weight of them in my arms made me feel a little better.  Reading was almost like having a conversation.  She couldn’t be lonely with all those voices, funny and informative and trashy and romantic, in her bedroom.

I’d thought Star might be asleep, but she was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling.  I set the magazines on the bureau and sat on the bed beside her.  She jumped and then lifted a strand of my hair, studied it.  “Chic,” she said softly.

I took her hand and held it to my cheek.  “Do you think I’m crazy?”

She raised her eyebrows.  “You think I have a right to call anyone crazy?”

I swung my knees onto her lap and rested my head against her shoulder.  She paused like she was debating something inside herself, then began tracing a finger in circles again and again around my knee.  “You’re not crazy,” she said.  “Foolish, yes.  But I know what’s in your head.  I understand it.” 

I put my arm around her, nuzzled my face into her neck.  And I stayed there, holding her, until she fell asleep.

 

                                                                                                                                                                                      -4-                    

 

I drove up to Rachel’s and parked in her driveway, looking up at the dark windows as I called her cell phone.  She answered with a grunt. 

“Hey,” I whispered.

Silence, then, “Who the hell is this?”

“Sorry.  Sorry, it’s me.”

“Lainey?  What’s wrong?  What time is it?”

“Sorry,” I said again.  “I’m actually in your driveway.  Could you come outside?”

“You’re in my driveway?”  Pause.  “Okay, okay, let me get my shoes on.”

She hung up and I hunched forward to rest my forehead on the steering wheel.  A minute later, the passenger door opened and Rachel slipped inside.  “Where we going?”  She glanced down at her pajamas, pale blue and printed with Holstein cattle.  “Should I have dressed better?”

“How long do you have to be with a man before you feel comfortable enough to wear cow pajamas?”

“Wait till you’re married and it’s too late for him to change his mind,” Rachel said, then widened her eyes.  “Your hair!”  She reached to smooth a lock of my hair between her thumb and forefinger.  “When’d you decide to do this?  You have to give me tips, because I’m starting to look like Barbara Bush.  Look.”  She bent her head and pointed at a chunk of gray.

I waited for her to notice the other big change in my life, and when she didn’t I said, “Look in the back seat.”

She turned, stared at Molly.  And then, in the voice of someone who’s caught her daughter stealing gum she said, “Lainey?  There’s a baby in your car.”

“Her name’s Molly, and her mother asked me to take her.”  (I didn’t steal the gum, Ma!  I borrowed it.)

“Somebody gave you her daughter?”

“I’m keeping her safe,” I said, and then I told her the story, watching her face go various shades of pale until she said, “You’re going to get yourself arrested.”

“I won’t.  I can’t, for her sake, so I’m leaving here, and I need your help.”

“You’ll get me arrested.” 

I ignored her.  “I need you to look out for my mom.  Just call her every couple days to make sure she’s okay, see if she needs anything.”  I reached into my purse and pulled out a credit card.  “She might need groceries if I’m gone for more than a month.”

“A month!”

“And actually, if you could use the card every few days for whatever, it might be good to leave some kind of record that I’m still in Akron.”

“I’ll use it at The Sassy Kitten.”  Her voice was tight, wary.  “So when they write you up in the paper they’ll say, Lainey Sterling’s last known location was at a local sex shop, purchasing edible panties.”

“And I need you to get in touch with Janie to tell her I’m leaving.  She should be at the occult shop most days.  You can tell her I’ll be in touch at some point, when I know where I’m staying.”

“If I see her I’m going to want to kick her ass.”

“Then call her instead.  Just make sure her phone’s not bugged.”

Rachel leaned back in her seat to look up at the car roof.  “There’s something really weird about this; I have a really bad feeling.  You know she’s using you.”

“Well obviously she’s using me, but it’s not about her.”  Implying that it was about Molly, that I was sacrificing my life to save her.

But let’s face it.  Leaving my home, my needy mother, with the baby I was already starting to think of as mine, it was just as much about myself.      

*                                  *                                  *

I wish I could say I was all excited, seeing my life split so suddenly and dramatically away from my expectation of it.  But the thing was, it was six in the morning, I’d been up for twenty-four hours straight.  And I had no idea where I was going, except that I was planning to get as absolutely far away as it was possible for my ’97 Tercel to get.

My first thought, although I’m loath to admit it, was Daddy.  Of course “Daddy” was a misnomer; the man was no more than the sperm side of my genetic makeup.  Star had dated him for a whopping two weeks before that sperm penetrated her egg, after which he bade us sayonara without looking back, except to deny paternity.

Star had searched for him the week after my birth, found him in Colorado City, of all places, and subsequently decided he must’ve been a polygamist in the making and therefore not suitable Daddy material.  But as a little girl I’d always dreamed the day would come when I’d need his help.  I’d show up at his doorstep, and he’d be handsome and tall and loving and good at baseball and electrical wiring.  He’d take me into his arms and tell me how long he’d been waiting to meet me; he’d introduce me to his wives–who would knit me sweaters and make me soup–and my sixteen half-brothers and sisters who would become instant best friends.  They’d all surround me with a protective wall of understanding and love, and say they wished I’d found them sooner.

Yes, that was my first thought: Colorado City.  But, no longer being an idiot, I just let the fantasy play until I began feeling sorry for myself, and then looked for better ideas.

Oklahoma, I thought, or Kansas, one of those places you always forgot about when listing states, places I knew nothing about except fourth grade geography, shapes and capitals and major crops.  I drove from suburb down through gawking farmland, mile after mile of it, buried in sameness, talk radio on to keep me awake and Molly asleep, stopping to gape at each fork, which way, which way?  Like those nightmares I had for months after I got lost alone in the Lasker Farm corn maze, voices muffled by the stalks and September sun, each turn corn and more corn.  If I’d been Star and believed in intuition it might’ve been different.  As it was, every decision felt wrong.

WELCOME TO KENTUCKY.  Kentucky seemed to look exactly like Ohio, the ragged grass the same faded green, motor homes evenly spaced in tired rows like gravestones, with sagging laundry lines and white-painted tires planted with hopeful but stunted pansies.  But I’d crossed the state line, which was progress.  Progress and terrifying and suddenly exhausting.  I turned up the radio, drove faster, the wind stinging my driver’s side eye. 

Until there.  A motel, the first I’d seen for over an hour.

It was called the Wee Willie Winkie Inn.  Which you’d picture as something precious, white-stone cottages with purple shutters, knockers on the doors.  But these buildings were gray and flat with broken-tiled roofs, windows long and narrow as scars.  Ugly as hell, but behind the windows would be beds with crisp white sheets, wide blinds to hide the cement parking lot, and flat pillows that crinkled under your ear and smelled like medicinal soap.

“How ‘bout it?” I whispered to Molly, and pulled into the lot.

Inside, the lobby was thick with tarry smoke.  Generating that smoke was a woman, sitting behind the desk with a cigarette, watching Laurence Welk on a staticky TV.  Her brittle graying hair was tied in two braids, fastened with the bright pink bobble-bands never worn by anyone over six years old; she was one of those women who look like they may be seventy, but may just be forty and having a bad day or an unfortunate life.

She barely turned when I entered.  “Help you?” she said, speaking around her cigarette.

The thick, hot air clogged in my throat; my brain suddenly felt like syrup.  I set Molly’s bassinet on the floor, then followed it without meaning to, sat down on the floor with a thump.

“You on drugs?” the woman said, her voice weary and gray, an I’ve seen it all and don’t want to see it again voice.

“No.”  I swallowed back a wave of nausea.  “Course not.  Please, I just need a room.  I’m just so tired.”

The woman narrowed her eyes.  “You sure as fuck look like you’re on drugs.”

I shook my head, slightly shocked that a woman who wore bobble-bands and watched Laurence Welk would talk like a trucker.  “I swear I’m not,” I said.

“Fine.  You pay in advance, you can have the room.  Thirty bucks in cash, another five if you want a crib.”

Thirty bucks.  Oh God, I’d forgot about money.  I’d given my credit card to Rachel, and how much cash did I have?  I rifled through my purse, praying that a fifty-dollar bill I hadn’t known about would magically appear between the folds of my wallet.  “I have twenty,” I said, dumping change into my palm.  “And . . .sixty-eight cents.  I can give you the rest tomorrow?  I swear, I’m good for it, I just need to hit an ATM.”  Could I go to an ATM?  Would somebody use it to track my location?

“I ain’t a bank, lady, or a loan shark.”  She sat back in her chair and frowned at the TV, a frilly haired woman in a pink dress dancing the polka.  “No money, no room, that’s how I operate.”

I glanced at Molly.  She was still asleep, her mouth open at a strange angle, fresh drool gleaming on her chin.  “I have to find an ATM.”  I pulled to my knees but another wave of dizziness hit me and I plopped back to the floor.  I could’ve slept right there on that grungy, ash-smelling carpet.  The kind of sleep like Molly’s, mouth open and drooling, not giving a damn who saw.

And then the tears came just like that, unexpected and unwanted as a charley horse.  The woman stared at me, unblinking, maybe with sympathy or maybe with fear, it was hard to tell.  So I laid it on, and thick.  “Please,” I said.  “I’m all alone with my baby, we didn’t sleep for two days.”

The woman kept staring, so I gestured to Molly, kept laying it on, almost believing the story as I said it.  “See he abused her is the thing, and I shouldn’t have stayed long as I did, but when I saw him put that cigarette to her arm, well it was all I could take.”  I remembered the angry scars on Molly’s back, and without my meaning it to, my voice rose, full of real and somehow gratifying rage.  “He can hit me all he wants, but when it comes to Molly–”

“You’re gonna have to leave,” the woman said, no expression on her face, no expression at all.  “I’m sorry, but I don’t want your troubles here.”

I sat there, my mouth open because my nose was too clogged to breathe, then finally steeled my shoulders.  I pulled myself up, holding the wall, scared I might topple again.  But when my head stayed relatively steady, I lifted the bassinet and started to the door.  Halfway out I turned, the words coming all at once, before I could stop myself.  “You’re a witch, you know,” I said.  The woman blinked at me, and I made a face.  “A total witch and ugly too.”  It sounded idiotic, I knew, second grade-ish, but I thought it would at least feel good.  But no, it just felt moronic.

As I walked into the parking lot, a man pulled from his car, brown hair, a blue Patriots jacket and jeans.  He stopped halfway out to stare at me, and I realized suddenly how I must look, tearstained face and rumpled hair, the paint-spattered clothes I’d worn for twenty-four hours straight.  No wonder the lady hadn’t wanted me in her hotel, and no wonder this man was staring at me like it was blood on my face instead of tears.

But then, he raised his eyebrows.  “Oh my gosh.”

It took me a minute to realize this must be the end.  The game was up and Janie had confessed; my picture was splashed across the papers and on TV.  I shook my head and backed away, then spun around and broke to the car.  “Go away!”  I fumbled for my keys, my breath in sharp pants.

“Whoa there!”  The man jogged up behind me.  “You don’t recognize me, do you.”  His words came fast, sounding nearly frantic with excitement.  

I could hear my heart, jangling like a popped spring.  I turned, forcing myself to breathe, and for the first time actually absorbed his face.  The kind of man who’d never look at me twice, who I’d be afraid to even glance at because it would be too obvious what that desperate glance meant.  The kind of man who, even if he did know me from somewhere, would go out of his way to avoid admitting it.

“Okay, I’m embarrassed as hell now.  You’re looking like you think I’m insane.  Tell me you at least recognize my face.  It’s Haley, right?”  He shook his head.  “Or maybe not.  Am I just imagining things?”

Haley.  He’d looked at me twice because he thought I was somebody else.  He was thrilled, looking near to busting because he thought I was a long-lost-somebody, who had at one time meant something to him.

Okay, it happened that fast, and this is where I had a choice, I realize it, where everything that happened after can be pinned on me.  I could say the names sounded vaguely similar which somehow confused me, or that I was so tired I wasn’t thinking straight.  But the truth is, I was entranced by his looks, that Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch kind of calm authority even behind his excitement.  And after a night of driving, my first taste of freedom after a life that had consisted entirely of the same-old same-old, I was absolutely intrigued to see what might happen next.

I smiled at him.  “Oh wow, sure!  Sure I remember you.  Sorry, it’s just been such a long time!”

“It has, hasn’t it.”  He sounded so elated, I couldn’t help but smile.  He immediately gave a self-deprecating scoff.  “Hell, I sound like some obsessed sixteen-year old, sorry.  I just never forgot, you know?  You were so great to me, despite the fact that you had trillions of friends and I was a nobody.  I had the most ridiculous crush on you.”  He suddenly grinned and bent in an exaggerated bow, one arm at his waist, the other extended behind him.  “And for that, I’m eternally grateful.”

Obsessed.  This man with me.  This was a little scary in a way, and part of me was on the brink of telling him he’d made a mistake.  But frankly, the idea of me being popular and him being obsessed was . . .well . . .irresistible.  “You were sweet,” I said, my voice sounding thin and artificial.

“And now looks like you’re married with children.  Surprised I hadn’t heard that through the grapevine yet.  I’d tell you something like how I always hoped it would be us, but that’d be too pathetic.”

“With child, yeah, but without husband.  We’re separated.”  This was the key to lying, to completely believe in the lie, to feel it.  To become Diana Ross.  Or Janie.  I briefly considered repeating the cigarette burn sob story, but realized how un-Janie-like admitting to that would be.  “As of a month ago, my choice.  I needed something more.”

“I hear you.  Know what that’s like.  So tell me you’re not checking out the very same morning I’m checking in.  Talk about bad timing.”

“I actually never took a room,” I said.  “Just decided to find somewhere else.”

“Is it even worse on the inside than it looks on the outside?  I’ll warn you, though, this part of the country you probably won’t find anything else for miles.”

“I couldn’t pay.  I mean I need to find an ATM somewhere.”

He raised his eyebrows, then reached to his back pocket.

“God, no,” I said.  “Don’t even think about it.  Besides, I insulted the lady at the desk.  She’s not about to give me the room regardless.”

“You insulted her?  You didn’t think that might be counterproductive?”  He started for the lobby.  “Just wait here, okay?  Just a minute.” 

“Wait!  What’re you doing?”

He turned back and touched Molly’s cheek.  “She’s got to be the cutest little thing I ever saw.  What’s her name?”

“Molly,” I said and then, on impulse, “Molly Star.”

The man looked amused, like I’d said her name was Barbra Streisand, but then nodded.  “Okay so here’s the deal, I do you a favor and you let me hold Molly Star for just a couple minutes, okay?  I’ll get you a room, and figure something else out for myself.”  He was gone before I could even answer.

I pulled Molly from her bassinet, smoothed her hair and sniffed to make sure she didn’t need changing.  I didn’t know what was going to happen, but something was.  Maybe something incredible.  And maybe it was like Star said, that there’d be a time in my life when things started coming to me, things that only seemed like luck.  What were the chances anybody besides myself would be checking in at eleven A.M.?  That I could ever look like the kind of girl a man once had a crush on?  So maybe this wasn’t wrong, this lying.  Maybe just a way of opening my arms to destiny.

The man returned a minute later.  “Well when I saw those braids, I kind of wanted to insult her too,” he said, then held out a key.  “Okay,” he said, “let’s trade, a key for a baby.  A deal’s a deal.”

“You really think I’d do this to you?  Take your room?”

“You think I’d leave a woman and her kid out on the road while I took a bed?  Besides, I like sleeping in my car, I’ve done it plenty of times.  It’s like camping out, bohemian feeling.  I even know how to grill a cheese sandwich on the car engine.”

I suddenly imagined it, the pillows, a blanket, a steamy shower.  The sinking into a sleep blank and dark as a newly paved road.  “We’ll share the room, okay?  You take the bed and I’ll sleep on pillows, and I’ll pay you half.”

He gave me the key and lifted Molly, cradled her against his shoulder and whispered against her hair, and Molly began to whimper drowsily.  “You know most guys dream of a son, but I always wanted a baby girl, the kind that tears out your heart when she smiles.”  He glanced at me.  “Okay, here’s my final deal.  You and Molly get the bed, I get the floor, and you even mention paying I’ll be so insulted I may never speak to you again.  Believe me, I don’t need the money.”

I looked down at his worn jeans, the dull, faded paint of his gray Volvo, and knew he might very well need the money.  But I’d buy him breakfast tomorrow.  Buy him breakfast and we’d talk about the old days, how he’d been in love with me.  And I’d catch his eye, say in a flirtatious drawl, I wish I’d known . . .  “Thanks,” I said.  “Guess I could live with that.”

*                                  *                                  *

A description won’t be able to do that motel room justice; it was truly scary.  Plaster chipped from the walls, revealing worn drywall the color of a wet paper bag.  The ceiling, hung with one bare incandescent bulb, was blotched with water stains and curling paint.  A cucumber-sized sliver of the wall mirror was broken off the top right corner, the serrated shard gleaming on the closet floor like some sadistic sex toy.  The knob from the bathroom door was missing, as was the shower’s soap dish and a good many of the tiles.  But there was a bed with four flat pillows, the sheets seemed clean and the dim light from the bare lamp bulb seemed, if not quite romantic, at least atmospheric.

“Well it’s not the Waldorf,” the man said.

“Right now I’m so damn tired I don’t even see it,” I said, then grinned.  “Except man, look at that chair.  I really hope that’s not some kind of bodily fluid.”

“I’m going to take a shower if you don’t mind.  I never felt so grungy in all my life.”

“Go ahead.  Just warn me if you see anything scuttle into the drain.” 

As soon as the bathroom door closed behind him, I strode to the mirror.  Oh God, I looked hideous, he must be blind, my face swollen from crying, my hair on one side feathery as dryer lint, the other side flat against my head like a placemat.  I grabbed for a comb and tried to straighten it, frowning, then hurriedly smoothed makeup on my cheeks. 

In the bathroom I heard the man undressing.  And I wasn’t going to look, I wasn’t going to, but the thing is when I turned, there was that missing doorknob.  Him right behind the empty hole almost like it was planned out, his jeans pulled down, and oh God the muscles of his backside.  And then his frontside and oh God, oh God, there it was.  The first ‘it’ I’d ever seen in real life, and it was beautiful.  It was beautiful and I wanted it.

I wasn’t breathing.  I wasn’t breathing at all as I watched him stretch to feel the running water, bend to arrange a towel on the floor.  As he pulled the shower curtain behind him, he turned a minute to face the door and I was sure he could see me peering through the knob hole.  I fell back onto my rump with a shallow gasp and waited, but nothing happened.  Slowly, I raised onto my knees, slowly crawled closer, slowly lifted my head to look.  The curtain was drawn, his shadow moving behind it.

“Okay,” I whispered.  “Okay, okay, get a grip . . .”  I shook my head quickly, opened Molly’s bag and poured her a bottle of apple juice, then gave Molly her bottle, tipping it so she wouldn’t suck in air.

And then, listening to the splash of shower water, I sat on the bed, pulled out my cell phone and dialed.

“Ma?” I whispered.

“Is it you?  Oh Lainey, you don’t know how I’ve been worrying.  I wasn’t going to do a reading but I couldn’t help it, I’ve done ten of them, I can’t stop.  And they’re all so inconclusive, good and bad both.  I can’t tell anything.”

“Well I’m fine, Ma, you don’t have to worry about me at all, okay?  I’m in Kentucky, at this hotel, a really nice place.  Much nicer than you’d expect for such a hick town.  I’m doing great.”

“And Molly?”

I watched Molly who was taking a break from her bottle, clenching it between her teeth and clapping at it with both hands.  “She hasn’t hardly cried since Janie left, you know?  Hardly ever.  That has to be some kind of sign, don’t you think?”

She didn’t answer, and behind the silence I could hear her breath. 

“So how are you,” I said.

“Oh I’m great.  So totally pampered with all this food, all these things to read, it’s like a spa.”

But it was all too easy to hear the truth under that precariously placed bravado.  And suddenly the homesickness swelled like a water balloon in my chest.  There I was with a naked man in the shower, behind a door with a wide hole made for peeping, and what I wanted was my mother.  “I wish you were here, Ma,” I said.

“No.”  Her voice was deep and clear.  “Listen.  Listen, no you don’t, not really.  I know how you’re feeling, because for me it’s like that every day, like life’s this huge big ocean that could swallow me and no walls or floor to hold on to.  So of course you want to grab hold of whatever you’re used to grabbing, but the thing is, you’re a hell of a lot stronger than me, and a hell of a lot stronger than you think.  And you’re the one going to do all the swallowing, remember that.”  She paused, gave a little cough, then said, “I mean, not of ocean water, that came out wrong, I was trying to be all poetic.  You’ll be swallowing life.”

I nodded quickly, lips pressed between my teeth.

“This is so exciting, Lainey.  I mean illegal, yeah, but you know I feel stronger than I’ve felt for a whole long time because I know you’re out there doing what you’re supposed to be doing.”

I glanced to the bathroom door as the shower water stopped.  “I love you, Ma,” I whispered.

“I know.  I love you too.  And I’m proud as hell.”

I held onto the receiver a minute after hanging up, then turned to Molly.  “Well,” I said.  “That’s that.”

The bathroom door opened, and the man came out wearing pajamas.  Perfectly respectable, but somehow lecherous because I knew what was underneath.  I smiled widely at him.  “See anything scuttling?”  Meaning of course, did you see me see you?

But he just shrugged.  “No, but somehow I feel dirtier now than I did before I got in.  Makes you appreciate home, I guess.”

“Where’s home now?”  I looked through my suitcase, frantically hoping I’d somehow packed my white silk pajamas without realizing.  But no, I’d purposely packed all my most worn and most embarrassing granny nighties, thinking I’d need to feel comfy.  Never thinking, stupid me, that I might spend the night in the same room with Gregory Peck.

“The country, believe it or not.  I mean real country, this hick town called Mendham in New Hampshire, the White Mountains.  Whereas meanwhile you went all the way to Chicago, I heard.  The big city life.”

“Chicago,” I said.  “Right.”  I chose the least offensive nightgown, red flannel with lace at the neck and cuffs.  At least red could be thought of as a sexy color, and maybe, hopefully, he was extremely nearsighted.  With the dim lighting, long as I kept my bra on and held in my tummy, I might avoid looking like the side of a barn.  “Take the pillows, okay?  All of them, I like sleeping flat.  And the blanket.  I can sleep under the sheets”

He smiled.  “Awfully kind of you, ma’am.”

I brought Molly into the bathroom and changed her diapers, washed her with a hand towel in the sink.  I dressed and brushed my teeth, inspecting my reflection in the rusty bathroom mirror.  Maybe it was the rust, but now with my hair combed and my cheeks blushered, my reflection didn’t look all that awfully bad.  Or at least not bad for someone who’d been up all night.

When I turned off the tap I could hear his voice, a whisper.  Who was he calling?  I held my breath and bent my ear to the hole in the door.

“–think so, I’m feeling pretty good about it all . . .Okay, okay, will do.”  He listened and then laughed softly.  “Not a chance.”
            That laugh.  The intimate laugh of a man lying in the dark beside the woman he loved.  He’d never said he was single.  Intimated it, maybe, inadvertently let me ogle his body, but I was stupid to assume.

I imagined the conversation.  “I actually ran into an old friend here, remember Haley?  You wouldn’t recognize her, she’s put on weight and looks like hell, poor thing.  Felt so bad for her I’m letting her share my room.”

I opened the door.  “Love you too,” the man whispered and clicked the phone shut.  He was sitting on the bed of pillows, smiling, legs covered with the puke-orange spread.  The overhead light was off, the bedside lamp switched on to dust a pale halo of light around him.  He covered his mouth, to speak through a yawn.  “I’ve never longed for sleep this much.”

I set Molly on the bed and cracked open a jar of Gerber’s mashed liver.  The bitter scent filled the room, embarrassingly similar to fecal matter.  “If I feed her she’ll maybe let us sleep.”

“That’d be awfully sweet of you, little miss,” he said saluting Molly, then sighed.  “Just talked to my mother.  She’s been going through a tough time.”

His mother.  Unconscionable relief flooded through me, hot and smooth.  I made a small hiccupping sound, hid it by clearing my throat and shoving a spoonful of gunk into Molly’s mouth, then watched him through the fringe of my bangs.  “Mine is too,” I said.  Talking behind the dark gauzy shelter of my bangs made me feel unexpectedly sexy, like the type of person I might watch from afar, admire and wish to be.  I gave a conspiratorial grin, the kind of grin that said, It’s okay, I’ve been known to be pathetic too.

“I told her I ran into you, that we were sharing a room, and unfortunately she remembered how I used to feel about you.”  He grimaced.  “She said to be careful, like I might be tempted to attack you or something.”

I stirred rhythmically at the jar of food, the words chanting through my head, Attack me, Attack me, like the prayer of a masochist.  “You’re not going to attack me, are you?” 

Well look at that.  I knew how too be flirtatious.  After thirty-six years, I still had the capacity to amaze myself.

“Not unless you want me to.”

I gave a high-pitched giggle and shoved more food into Molly’s mouth.  She spit it out, making a motorcycle sound with her lips.  Apparently she did not like mashed liver.  I wiped off her mouth and the front of her dress, spoke to her because I had no idea how to respond to him.  “You get enough?  You full?  You going to let us sleep for awhile?”

“Sorry,” the man said hesitantly.  “I keep meaning to grow out of that habit I have, saying everything that pops into my head.”

“It’s okay.”  I slid under the covers and settled Molly beside me, then turned out the light so he couldn’t see the redness in my face.  “I mean really, it’s okay.”

He didn’t respond.  I lay back and Molly settled into the crook of my arm, making soft da-da-da sounds and playing with her bare foot.  I tried to close my eyes, but all of it, Molly’s crooning, her liver-smell, and most of all the man; who was I kidding, it was the man on the floor beside me that froze my eyes wide and beady, coma eyes.  I didn’t know how to feel about any of this.  After living in one town my whole life, sleeping in one bed, learning nothing new, in one day I’d kidnapped a baby, crossed the state line, seen a penis.  Maybe there was no right way to feel.  Maybe you could feel good and bad and guilty and proud and embarrassed and pleased as heck, all at one time.

Then, long after I was sure he was asleep, the man spoke.  “Do you believe in destiny?’

I opened my mouth.  Tongue flapping.  I’d never really understood how a tongue could flap, but now I did, tongue flapping against the roof of my mouth like I was echoing Molly’s croon: da-da-da.

“Okay, I’m about to speak without thinking again, and didn’t I just say I wouldn’t?  But there I was, completely lost.  Driving from West Virginia on my way to Mendham without a map and going west instead of northeast like a bird-brain.  And I reach Kentucky and somehow I don’t care.  Somehow I have this feeling like the car’s being prodded.  And it’s one, two, three in the morning but I can’t stop.  Until here I am and there you are, and it probably doesn’t mean anything to you, but it does to me.  It does.”

I didn’t say anything, but my tongue stopped flapping and my frozen coma eyes melted.  I closed them against the tears on my cheeks, not sure why I was crying, not sure of anything, only that God, I felt so damn good.  I had no idea what would happen next, but I totally knew I was on the edge of something huge.  I saw it written in bright yellow print like on the Kentucky border sign.  WELCOME TO THE WORLD, LAINEY, it said.

 

                                                                                                                                                                                      -5-                    

 

I woke to the sound of throaty squeals.  I rubbed at my face, totally disoriented, watching the naked baby scramble, dragging a clean diaper between her legs, the man in pajamas crawling behind her, his face pink with suppressed laughter.  It was like I’d been beamed away by Scotty into someone else’s life.

“I was trying not to let her wake you,” the man said.  And what was his name?  Did I really not know his name?

He lifted Molly, swung her in a circle.  “I thought I could figure out the diaper thing on my own, but obviously I’m hopeless.  She’s disowned me.”

It all swam back to me like a secret hug.  I surreptitiously checked my eyes for sleep-sand and smoothed down my hair, then held out my arms.  “Here, I’ll show you.”

He handed Molly to me, watched as I fastened the diaper around her.  “Velcro,” he said, “it’s ingenious.”

I felt a jolt of pleasure, as if he’d paid me a compliment.  “Isn’t it though?”

I pulled back the covers.  My nightgown had slid up around my hips as I slept, revealing my thighs.  I snatched it down again.

“You hungry?  Me, I could go for chicken-fried steak with gravy and a five-egg omelet, but it’ll be hard to find breakfast at five P.M.”

“It’s five?  Jeez, how did that happen?”

“Don’t feel bad.  We should’ve rightly slept till seven, if this kid had any consideration.”

“Yeah, she’s always been inconsiderate.  Fifty-two hours of labor was when I first realized.  Man, I was thinking through the whole thing, What an inconsiderate kid.”  I fought back a wince.  Where the heck had that come from?  Did anybody ever in the history of giving birth have a fifty-two hour labor?  If I was smart I wouldn’t talk again till I had a few shots of caffeine.  “Could you watch her for a few minutes?  I’m going to take a shower.”  I strode to the bathroom before he could answer.

First thing, I searched for a way to cover the hole in the door.  He might not be as desperately depraved as me, but it was all too easy to see, even without meaning to.  I finally stuffed in a washcloth, hoping to God he wouldn’t notice.

In the shower I rubbed the wafer of soap over all of me, cringing at the stubble on my legs and under my arms.  I’d never been good at keeping up with shaving.  There’d never been a reason to be good.  I held my face up to the spray, filled my mouth with water and spit it forcefully at the tiled wall.  Still no reason to take up shaving, silly girl.  Silly, silly girl, but still.  Still, you never knew.

We actually did find a diner offering all-day breakfast.  The man ordered his chicken-fried steak and eggs, and I ordered a salad because I’d read this article that said how men ranked salad-eaters more attractive than burger-eaters two to one.  A salad.  Me.  Miss cream-covered, deep-fried, meat-and-potatoes, but amazingly, salad was all I wanted.  My stomach was fluttering, I was living on barely five hours of sleep, and food just seemed beside the point somehow.

“So what brought you down to West Virginia?” I said, spearing a cherry tomato and spraying its juice across the table and onto his flannel shirt.  “Oh!” I said.

But he didn’t seem to notice.  “My grandmother.  Her funeral.”

“Gosh, I’m sorry.”  I imagined myself reaching to scrub at his shirt.  Was it something Janie would do?

“No, don’t be.  I mean her time had definitely come and gone.  She was in a nursing home for ten years, couldn’t do much of anything except drool and grow a beard.”  He made a face.  “I sound like a cold son of a bitch, I know, but she wasn’t the nicest lady even when her mind was working right, and she only got worse when it stopped.”

I smiled.  “And now she’s spinning in her grave.”

He rolled his eyes to the ceiling.  “Don’t you get too dizzy.” 

“You’re cruel, aren’t you.  I never would’ve guessed.”

 “Just don’t get on my bad side.”  He plugged the top of his straw with his finger, lifted it and let water spill back into his glass.  “So what brings you out to Kentucky?  Where you headed to?”

“Um . . .Kansas?”  I smiled.  “Kansas.”  It sounded so stupid, said aloud.  Who the hell ever headed to Kansas?

“Oh yeah?  What’s in Kansas?”

“Nothing.  I mean my uncle.  Uncle Henry.”  Yes, my Uncle Henry, my Auntie Em, cousin Dorothy and Toto too.  “He has a farm.”

“Aaah.”  The man watched me carefully.  “Look, Haley, this is going to sound awfully intrusive, but here’s the thing.  I can’t help but get the feeling you’re in some kind of trouble.  I don’t know what might’ve happened with you and your husband, and you don’t have to tell me, but you’ve got the look of someone without a place to go.”

“Well no, I mean I’m going to Kansas.”

“From Chicago, right.  And driving through Kentucky was a natural detour.”

I turned away, focused on wiping the scrambled egg from Molly’s fingers.  “I’m not in trouble,” I said finally, in the overly firm pitch of a lie.

“But you don’t have anywhere to go.”

I licked the napkin, wiped at Molly’s face.  What incredibly bad aim she had, egg all the way to her eyelashes.  “I wouldn’t say that.  It makes me sound like a vagrant.  Or like some runaway kid.  It’s not that I don’t have anywhere to go, just nowhere in particular.  I’m traveling the country.”

“Okay, fair enough.”  He reached forward then without warning, and took both my hands.  Not caring about the egg stickiness, the dirty napkin I clutched, just holding tight.

The shock that went through me was so sudden and intense it nearly hurt, the shock of someone who has never been touched before, has lived her entire life locked in a metal box.  A squeak came from my throat, God so embarrassing, crawl into a hole and die embarrassing, showing up at school without your shirt embarrassing.

But he only gazed down at my hands with a softness that looked like adoration.  Like my eggy fingers were something to be cherished.  “I want to propose something to you,” he said.

Truthfully, the only word I heard of that sentence was “propose.”  And all I could think of was that word and the feel of his hands and the look in his eyes, and how they made me want to drop to my knees and say Yes, I will, I will!  “Propose what?” I said.

“New Hampshire.  I mean, as a place to go.  The thing is, Haley, watching you sleep this morning, the way your face got, it was just exactly the girl I knew in high school.  And I felt this surge of nostalgia and longing, and wanting to keep you safe.”

He’d watched me sleep, feeling a surge of longing.  Like a man might watch his lover.  I hoped I hadn’t been snoring.

“And I’ve got this house in Mendham.  I’ve been rattling around in it all alone for the past seven years, and the sound of that rattle is deafening . . .”  His voice trailed off, a sudden melancholy in it like he was remembering something he’d rather not have.  He swallowed, swallowed again then said, “I’d say it’s sad, but what it really is is criminal, me rattling and you a single mother driving with your baby and no home.

The waitress, a girl with big early-eighties hair, strode to the table, tearing off our check.  Anything else for you?”

The man didn’t respond, just pressed my palms together, sandwiched between his like a prayer. 

“You’re asking me to come live with you.”

The waitress flushed and backed away from the table, hurriedly slapping the check on the tray of Molly’s highchair.  “When you’re ready.”

“Okay, I know it sounds weird of me,” the man said, “and sudden, and I know we haven’t seen each other for however many years, so you have no idea who I am.  I swear I’m not usually this impulsive, and you probably think I’m some kind of stalker, or a screwball who lures women into his home and then . . . I don’t know, locks them in the basement.  But the truth is, I’ve been thinking for a long while things have to change in my life.  There’s been a lot of crap going on in the past few years, and I’m sick of wallowing; I could use somebody to take care of besides myself.  Just for a little while, until you decide what to do, get back on your feet and all.”

I tried to pull away, reach for my wallet, but he clamped my hands tighter.  “For Molly Star’s sake.  A baby needs a home, some sense of stability.”

I thought about what Star would say, seeing me here with this offer swimming in the air around me.  How she’d pull out her cards, wearing that glow she got in reading, of excitement and fear.  This is you, she’d say, and this is him, and this card shows the path between you, new beginnings and old endings.  “For Molly’s sake?” I said.  Star would say there was no choice, and she probably wouldn’t even bother with her cards.  If she was here, what she’d do is grin.  Go for it! she’d say.  Don’t stop, don’t think, go-go-go for it!

The man suddenly pulled away, raked a hand through his hair.  “Jeez, I sound pathetic, even to myself.”  He stood and reached for his wallet, and I hoped to God he’d pull out a credit card so at least I could look at his signature, see his name before I made a decision that could maybe potentially change my life.  But he pulled out a fifty and stood, handed it to the waitress.  “Keep the change.  It’s your tip.”

“But that’s a fifty,” the waitress said, blinking rapidly.

He shook his head, started for the door, and it was only then that I realized I hadn’t answered him, hadn’t even looked at him since he’d offered his home.  I reached for his elbow, pulled so hard on his sleeve that I sent him hopping back onto my foot.  “Wait!” I said, rubbing my toes against the opposite ankle.  The waitress was watching; an old couple across the room leaned forward in their seats to hear.  I focused on the tomato juice spot I’d squirted onto his shirt.  “Wait,” I said again.  “See the thing is?  The thing is nobody’s been good to me in a long time; I mean nobody’s gone out of their way.  And I’m just not used to it is all.  I don’t know how to react exactly.”

He reached for both my hands, sandwiched them between his own, and for one tortured second this is what I imagined, tearing off his shirt and then mine, biting at his flesh.  “Say you will,” he said hoarsely.  “Just for a little while.”

The old woman in the corner started to clap, stopped when her husband grasped at her wrist.

“Of course I will,” I said back, then smiled.  Not even hesitating a second to think how crazy it was to travel hundreds of miles to live with some man, when I didn’t even know his name.

*                                  *                                  *

We drove through the night.  Him navigating with my atlas, me following behind, flashing my headlights when Molly needed a new diaper or a feeding, or when I just wanted to see this man’s face, to remind myself this was real.

As night bleached into a colorless day, I studied the back of him in the car ahead, his perfectly trimmed dark hair, the curve of ear to neck, his profile as he turned to the side window.  I studied the parts of him like the instructions to a model airplane, as if they could tell me something about the man. 

So here’s what I learned.  He was beautiful, he was beautiful, he smiled at the sun and sang along with the music from his radio, and he was beautiful.  He slowed to look when we drove across a river and laughed out loud, glancing back at me, when a goose with her babies paraded across the road.  And he was beautiful.

I also learned he was awful at navigating.  He apologized profusely each time we pulled over to study the map.  “You can see how I ended up in Kentucky,” he said.  “I think when God gave out the brains, He left out some microchip.”

“You should file a complaint,” I said.  “There’s more than a microchip missing, looks like it’s the whole damned circuit board.”

We made it into New Hampshire by noon, and as soon as we’d left the highway it was like having made a detour to a different world, a sudden muting like diving underwater at a public pool.  The forest rose around us, ash and pine and white birch, muffling the rattle of my engine, obscuring the sky.  For miles we’d pass nothing but those trees and rock-strewn rivers, and then a single log cabin or a farm with cows and fields of hay.  The mountains rose impossibly huge on all sides, in the rounded shape of breasts and knees, the road twisting in the notches between them.  I opened my windows to inhale the cool breeze, the scent of pine, imagining I was the first to ever have traveled this road.  What would I have thought if I’d seen it however-many-hundreds of years ago?  Yeah, I would’ve thought, I could settle here, dig in my settlement stakes, do some farming, meet some Native Americans, churn some butter.  It felt like a place one could hole up in, cradled by the hills, and compose a symphony or write a novel.  In the winter I’d huddle by the fire and sing the melody or read out loud, and the man would take my hand and tell me it, and I, were beautiful.

I followed him down a tree-lined street, which opened into a small cul de sac, expansive lawns backed by woods, a narrow stream, small cape homes with tidy flower gardens.  He signaled and turned into the driveway of an L-shaped white cape with green-painted shutters, two dormers, a bay window and a wide front porch.  The sloping lawn was bordered by a stone fence and overrun with purple and white wildflowers; a small pond to one side was flanked by two massive spruce trees, and a curving flagstone path led up to the red front door.  I pulled behind the man’s car and stared, almost expecting Disney creatures to emerge from the woods, bluebirds and brown-spotted horses with long eyelashes.

He stepped out and stretched, hands at the small of his back, then approached my car.  “Welcome home,” he said.

“This is . . .” I started, then shook my head.  Beautiful and Lovely would sound stupid, Cozy would sound like an insult.  But it was all those things, what a person might imagine when she said the word ‘home.’  “. . . totally nice,” I finished stupidly.

He smiled.  “Thanks.  It is, isn’t it?  When I bought it, how I felt was like it was a place I could grow old in.  Not realizing how lonely it can be, how there’s no single women and absolutely nowhere to go on a Friday night.  I mean a movie’s a major expedition.”  He shrugged.  “But the neighbors are really nice, and I kind of like solitude.”

He was looking for single women, which meant he must be single himself, and straight.  Which of course was none of my business, but an interesting piece of information nonetheless.  “I didn’t realize places like this existed anymore,” I said, opening the car door.  “I thought developers chomped up land like this and spit out condos and strip malls.”

“Welcome to New Hampshire.  Our shopping options are limited, but it doesn’t matter because here flannel shirts are high style.  You want to pop the trunk?  I’ll get your bags.”

I opened the trunk, lifted Molly from her car seat, and followed him inside.  While he went out for more bags, I studied the entryway, wide-planked pine floors and white wainscoting, a narrow staircase, and a small wooden table holding a silver-framed photo.  I picked up the photo as he returned and plunked the bags on the floor.  “Posy,” he said.  “Did you ever meet her?”

The young woman in the photo (a sister?) looked like a female version of him, slightly thinner, her face more pinched, but the same thick dark hair and slim nose and sculpted jawline.  “She looks almost exactly the same,” I said.

“You think?  Well that was a few years ago, but I guess she hasn’t changed much.  Lives in North Jersey now, near Manhattan.  She got an MBA and she’s a . . . I don’t even know exactly what she is.  A financial something or other.  Completely different world from me.”  He pointed at the three adjoining doorways.  “As evidenced by the tiny den, kitchen, and  dining room.  Come into the kitchen and I’ll make us some lunch.  You hungry?”

“Sure, thanks,” I said, although really I wasn’t hungry at all.  I hadn’t eaten anything but salad and a stale rest-stop-bagel for the past eight hours, but I didn’t feel the slightest need for food.  Maybe my stomach was shrinking.

The kitchen was small: honey-stained cabinets with crookedly hung doors, a bright green stove that seemed like something from the twenties, and a butcher-block countertop.  In my arms Molly started to protest, squirming free, and I set her down to let her crawl across the wood floor as the man opened the refrigerator.  “I need to shop,” he said, rummaging through the shelves.  “Been gone awhile, and most everything here’s in the process of developing new parasitic life forms.  But no fear, I’ll find something.”

He pulled out a carton of milk, sniffed at it and then pretended to gag.  Molly crawled towards him, scooting fast across the floor, but caught the side of her head against the corner of a cupboard.  She stared at it as if trying to understand why it had attacked her, and then her face turned red and she screamed.  “Uh-oh, we have an injury,” I said, lifting her, inspecting her forehead.

The man spun around, alarmed, the look on his face so pained I felt a pinch of affection for him.  “She’s fine,” I said.  “Just scared herself.  Looks like she’s gonna be as much of a klutz as her mom.”

He smiled at this, studying my face a moment before he brought the milk to the sink, and poured it down the drain.  “Why don’t you make yourself at home?  Hang out in the den and I’ll whip something up.”

“Can I help?  Although I guess I should tell you, I’m not that good a cook.”

“Well I am, so don’t worry about it.”  He flicked the back of his hand at me.  “Go on, go on.”

I walked with Molly to the den.  It was a cozy room, painted pale yellow with two worn couches, a brick fireplace and a bay window looking out into the garden.  I gazed out the window at the pines swaying their layered skirts in the breeze.  Maybe this was something I could do to thank him for his hospitality, fix up the flower beds, pull the weeds, maybe even make a vegetable garden.

I wiped my sleeve across Molly’s running nose.  “I always wanted to learn how to grow flowers,” I told her.  “Gardens are another form of art, really, don’t you think?”  Our yard back home was puny, more the size of a lawn troll than of an actual lawn, but here I could create a masterpiece.

I looked around the room, scanning the book spines on the floor to ceiling shelves as I juggled Molly on my hip to stop her crying.  Mostly fiction, the type that won awards, but also books on science and philosophy, and I tried to guess what that said about his personality, other than that he was smart.  Maybe he was the kind of person who spent all his time thinking, trying to figure out the meaning of life.  How else could someone move alone to the middle of nowhere unless his thoughts were so interesting he didn’t need anything else?

There was a dull bronze trophy on one of the shelves with an engraved plaque, and I lifted it.  A name.  Lakewood, GA Championships-1989, MVP Alex Connor.  Alex Connor.  A kind of waspy name.  The name you might imagine for the Prince of York, or the captain of a crew team.  And Lakewood North Carolina must be where they’d met, him and Haley.  Him and me.

“For hockey,” he said from behind me.  “My proudest moment, and I was sure when I got it that I’d go pro, but in the end I guess I valued my teeth too much.  Twenty years ago, and sad as it is, I still keep the trophy in the middle of my bookcase.”

I grinned and turned to face him.  “Oooh-aaah, very impressive, Alex,” I said, trying the name on my tongue, trying to associate it with his face.

“Okay, let’s not tease me.  Come ‘n eat.”

I followed him to the dining room, a small room with a distressed green-painted farmer’s table, mismatched chairs and a white pie cupboard with punched-tin doors.  I sat at the table, Molly in my lap.  “You like sandwiches?” I whispered, and reached for one, broke off a piece.  It was peanut butter, in partially frozen wheat bread.

Alex laughed at my expression and I quick tried to hide it.  After all, I liked peanut butter, loved it even.  There were times I’d been tempted to pay homage to the peanut butter inventors.  “Sorry,” I said.  “It’s just when you said you were a great cook and used the words ‘whip something up,’ I started expecting something pretentiously hideous like watercress and whitefish.  So, thank God really.”  I took a huge bite and chewed heartily.  “This is totally perfect.”

 “Then you won’t mind Yodels for desert.”

“Yodels are God’s gift to mankind.”

“Aren’t they?”  He reached for a sandwich.  “It’s funny, you seem totally different from when we were in school.”

I watched him carefully from under the fringe of my bangs.  “In what way?”

He shrugged.  “Hard to define.  Older, I guess, and I didn’t realize how funny you are.  I like the new Haley even more than the old, I think.”

I bent my head so he wouldn’t see me smile.  And then smiled, wide.

“But you’re also more guarded; you used to always be so open.  Probably a rotten marriage could do that to anybody.  You haven’t said really anything about your life since graduation.”

“There’s . . . not much to say, really.”

“You’ve lived a whole life, got married, had a baby.  That’s a lot.”  He gave a sympathetic smile.  “How’d you meet your husband, anyway?”

I set down my sandwich, pushed my plate away.  “Ex-husband,” I said, my mind racing uselessly.

“Sorry.  That’s way too personal, isn’t it.”

“No, it’s okay.”  I stood.  “I’m going to get Molly some food.  Hold on a sec.”

Alex held out his arms and I handed her to him, then rushed out to the entryway where he’d set our bags.  I grabbed the diaper bag and stood a minute, staring at the door.  Then brought it to the dining room where Alex was jouncing Molly on his lap.

I pulled out a jar of creamed vegetable medley and a spoon, then scooted my chair close enough to feed her.  “So,” I said.  “David.”  I couldn’t look at him.  Instead I kept my eyes focused on Molly’s tearstained face as I unscrewed the jar cap.  “That’s his name, and we were in camp together.  Not dating or anything, just part of the same crowd.  And then we met up again ten years later at . . . a camp reunion, love at first sight, except I guess it wasn’t really love at all.”

“Lust at first sight.  Been there.”

“We got married within five months and he left me right around when Molly was born.”  I filled the spoon and held it to Molly’s mouth, but she sliced her head away.  I set the spoon back in the jar.  “Biggest mistake of my life, because now he wants to take Molly away.  He thinks he can provide better for her, or at least he pretends to think it.  Probably it’s just because he knows it’s the most effective way to hurt me.”

Alex took my hand but didn’t speak.  We sat there a minute, my hand in his, and finally I continued in a whisper.  “But the awful thing is, there’s a good chance he could win custody.  Because he can provide for her, and also he’s rich enough he doesn’t have to work.  But what I think is David doesn’t know what fatherhood is, what love is really.”

“So you’re hiding from him.”  Alex sounded strangely excited.

My fingers needed something to fiddle with, so I picked up a sandwich, started tearing at the crusts.  “Yes,” I said, “I’m hiding.”

Alex watched me, his face flushed with an expression I couldn’t read.  After a minute he rose and hoisted Molly against his hip.  He stood behind my chair and wrapped one arm around me, his chin resting on my head.  “It’s okay,” he said finally.  “If he’s looking for you, I’ll make sure you don’t get found.”

I sat there feeling the weight of his chin and arm and the catch of his whiskers in my hair, and wondered at the irony, how despite having kidnapped a baby and driven hundreds of miles from the only home I’d known, this was the first time maybe ever in my life that I felt completely safe.

*                                  *                                  *

“So you have a choice which bedroom you want,” Alex said, leading me upstairs.  “Although admittedly, it’s not much of a choice.  The smaller room’s my office.  It has a bed already, the one I grew up with actually, but we could move it to the other room if you’d rather.”  He swept his arm towards a room off the hallway.

 The room’s walls were papered in faded purple stripes, gauzy drapes on the large window.  It held a twin bed with a white bedspread, a yellow armchair and a desk with a laptop and piles of papers.  “If you want to sleep here, I’ll move the desk downstairs so I don’t intrude on you when I work.  Or there’s the other room.”  He gestured across the hall.  “Which, to be honest, I never expected to let another human being see, so forgive me if the mess raises your blood pressure.  I can totally clean it out, though.”

The room was crammed with folded blankets and piles of clothes, file cabinets, beat up furniture, and an old computer dangling a tangle of colored wires.  “The room’s bigger,” he said, “but it’ll obviously take more work to make it inhabitable.  This house has a storage problem, in that it seems to eventually disgorge everything I try and pack neatly away in the attic.”

“The smaller room’s fine,” I said, smiling.  “Plus, if the attic’s disgorging junk here, especially heavy junk, this room doesn’t seem especially safe.”

“Or you could each take a room.  Which makes me realize, we’ll have to order a crib and whatever else for Molly.  A high chair?  A changing table?”

I watched his face.  What did it mean that he was suggesting we order furniture?  How long did he expect us to stay?  “It’s okay,” I said carefully.  “Molly’s been fine sleeping in her bassinet, and I have a mat to change her on the floor.”

Molly should suffer because her mom thinks she’s fine?”  He smiled.  “We’ll see what we can find online.”  So why don’t you get yourself all unpacked and settled.  I’m pretty bushed, so I may just call it a night.  You need anything?  Anything I can help with?”

“No, I’m great,” I said.  “This is all great.  I mean really, I don’t know how to thank you, but thanks.”

“Well you’re welcome.  I mean that, Haley.”  He studied my face a moment, then reached forward to kiss my cheek before striding from the room.

I touched my cheek, watching him turn the corner, my skin hot and prickling with the feel of his kiss, and my ears ringing with the sound of someone else’s name.

*                                  *                                  *

I set Molly in her bassinet.  She seemed to be taking to the new surroundings reasonably well, resting her bottle meditatively on her belly, sucking only every minute or two when she remembered it was there.  I went into the bathroom to pee, and then looked into the mirror, running a finger over my cheekbone and then along the line of my jaw.  I’d always thought of myself as completely average in the looks department, but Alex had a crush all these years on a girl who looked like me, or at least the brown-haired me.  I smiled at my reflection and she smiled back, and we assessed each other.  If I’d seem my reflection in the street, I probably would have rated her a seven.  And thought she was better looking than I was.

Back in the bedroom, I sat on the bed, looking around, staring at the papers on his desk and the unopened cabinet drawers.  Then sat on my hands.  Then pulled them out again and gripped the mattress.  “No,” I whispered, “you won’t.”

This was horrible, it wasn’t me.  All the times I’d been left alone painting in the homes of fascinating people, military scientists and authors and the Ohio State Senator, and never had the idea of snooping even crossed my mind.  But . . . confession here . . . this time I didn’t try especially hard to stop myself.  In the end I stood, closed the door quietly, then went to Alex’s desk and started to explore.  Because I realized after my seconds of half-hearted resistance that there’d come a point when I wouldn’t be able to help myself, so there was no point in pretending I was too moral to do such a thing.  I could’ve waited a week, and then I maybe wouldn’t feel so bad.  But eventually I’d end up snooping anyway; it was inevitable, so why put it off?

“Don’t watch this,” I told Molly, and then I started with the papers on his desk.  I was hoping for a letter, maybe from his sister or parents, that said something about his past that the real Haley would’ve known, which I could then use in conversation.  But what I found were articles, social and political commentary from sites like The New Republic and The Huffington Post, as well as pages of literary criticism.  Which probably meant Alex wasn’t just smart, he was S-M-A-R-T.  And leafing through them, ditzy Gawker-and-New-York-Post-reading me, I was instantly and thoroughly intimidated.

I set them back in the pile, then noticed indentations on the blotter.  I tried to make out the words, but when I couldn’t, shedding my last scrap of decency, I fished a pen and an old receipt out from my pocketbook, held the receipt over the blotter and shaded the pen over it.

The reson I wont it is becoz you can make masheens from it and becoz Sam got it too.

I smiled, running my finger over the words.  Was the blotter from Alex’s childhood?  It didn’t tell me anything obviously, but I was the only person who’d read it for probably twenty some-odd years, like an archeologist finding bones.  And I was so pleased with myself discovering this fossil from Alex’s childhood, that I actually considered showing him.  Never mind that taking a rubbing of someone’s blotter was the utmost invasion of privacy, and probably illegal in some states.

There was a thump as Molly’s bottle rolled off her chest and I jumped with a small yelp, then righted it.  I watched her sleeping face a moment and then reached to open his desk drawers.

One held secretarial supplies, various sized envelopes and stamps, Post-Its and staples, all arranged into ridiculously neat stacks.  The other held tax forms (and yes, I looked at his last year’s income–fifty-two thousand dollars–and that he’d given eight-thousand of it to charity), mortgage and bank statements and a small notepad.  I pulled out the notepad and sat with it on the bed, staring at the few scrawled lines.

I’m sorry I yelled at you last night.  I’m just so frustrated that you question almost every promise I make.  I wish you realized you could trust me.  Why don’t you trust me?  I understand why you have a hard time of it, of course I do.  But I’m not like the men who’ve hurt you, can’t you see that?  I’d never hurt you because I love you with all my heart.

On the following pages were several versions, all saying more or less the same thing in different words, some more strident, others pleading, and I read through them wondering what it would be like to be the woman these letters were written to, to be loved this much.  It took all my strength to resist the urge to tear the pages into shreds.

Feeling a sudden wash of homesickness.  I stuffed the pad back into the drawer, then pulled out my phone and called home.  This is what I’d tell Star: that I’d met a wonderful man.  That he lived in a beautiful country home and seemed to be great with Molly.  And Star would understand why I couldn’t come back, why I’d play this out for as long as Alex, and my obviously flawed conscience, would let me.

I listened to the phone ring, imagining the sound filling the house I’d lived in all my life.  The green phone in the kitchen, the cordless in the living room, the white phone in Star’s room muffled by the scarves she’d hung on each wall.  I listened until a recorded operator’s voice helpfully informed me that no one was answering, and then I hung up and tried again, the sound of it somehow hollow like it was echoing against empty walls. 

Had Star actually gone somewhere?  Had she left the house, walked out the door?  And if she’d gone out, was she now lying unconscious on the sidewalk?  I hung up the phone and then tried again.  No answer.

Okay, how long should I wait before I did something?  It was possible she was taking a shower and couldn’t hear me.  Or that she had a stomach ache and didn’t want to get out of bed.  Or that she was dead. 

I shook my head quickly and stood, paced across the beige carpet.  I should’ve bought her an answering machine, and a cell phone so she could reach me if she needed anything.  Everybody in the world had an answering machine and a cell phone.  Never mind that it didn’t make sense to buy them since nobody ever called her and she was always home.  I should’ve bought them just for safety’s sake.  I should’ve realized that occasions like this could happen.

I stood with my back against the wall, staring at the phone.  This is how far my fantasies had gone during the long drive that morning.  I’d seen Star coming here to live with us, pretending she’d named me ‘Haley’.  I’d pictured both of us wearing these elegant black gowns that flattered our waists, and hosting parties where we served mini quiches and meatballs on toothpicks.  I’d seen me and Alex making a grand entrance down the staircase, arms around each other’s waists, the guests whispering at how grand we looked and how very much in love.  But I hadn’t thought how Alex would have to catch onto me eventually.  I hadn’t thought about how Star couldn’t travel a thousand feet from home, let alone a thousand miles.  And I hadn’t thought how dangerous it was to leave her alone, how the panic could seize her like hands around her throat and there she’d be, suffocated and alone.

I dialed Rachel’s number, and got her machine.  “Rachel?  It’s Lainey, you there?”  Pause.  “Okay, listen Rachel, my mom’s not answering the phone.  It’s been about five hours I’ve been trying her, and she won’t pick up.”  I glanced at my watch, saw it had actually only been about five minutes.  But still, Star had never been unreachable even for five minutes.  Especially since she’d know it was me on the phone, because who else would it be?  And I knew Star.  After a full day not talking to me, she’d wade through sewage not to miss my call.

“And I’m starting to get really worried,” I said.  “Would you do me a huge favor and drive over there?  Call up at her window after you ring the bell so she knows it’s you.  You know where her window is, right?  And tell her I’m freaking out and to call my cell phone, okay?  And you let me know after you talk to her.  Okay?  Okay.  I love you.”

I hung up and dialed home again.  When she didn’t answer I hung up and dialed again, my eyes shut.  Answer the phone, dammit, just answer!  No answer. 

Okay.  Enough was enough.  I disconnected, then took a deep breath and dialed information.  When the operator answered, I steeled my shoulders.  “I want to talk to the Akron police,” I said.

                                                                                                                                                                                      -6-                    

 

I told them semi-lies, about my mother’s agoraphobia, that she’d never been left alone, that she’d spoken about suicide.  I also told them I hadn’t talked to her in three days, trying to heighten the sense of urgency.

It took almost an hour for them to call back, an hour of pacing between the bed and the phone, checking the dial tone to make sure the phone still worked and then pacing again.  I imagined all kinds of awful scenarios, a side effect, I guess, of being Star’s daughter.  Choking on a hotdog, armed robbery, stroke, anaphylactic shock from a previously unrecognized food allergy; so many things could happen to a person home alone.  So when the phone rang, with their first words, This is the Akron PD, I had that awful sensation you must get when a cop knocks on your door, and you just know that the person you love best is dead.

“No,” I whispered.

“Lainey Sterling?”

“No . . .”

“We just been to see your mother.  Looks like she ain’t doing so great.”

“Oh God, no.”

“Looks like she ain’t been out of bed for awhile now.  Didn’t come to the door when we knocked.”

She was alive.  At least she was alive.

“We had to break through the door to get to her, and then she starts screaming, locked up her bedroom so we had to break through that door too.”

I imagined Star there in bed, the covers pulled up over her head, with the doors, her only protection from the outside world, lying in splinters on the floor.  “She needs new doors!” was all I could think to say.

“The doors’ll be fine, we just pried the locks.  But what she needs is supervision, I think.  You got any other family?”

I thought I could hear blame in his voice.  Like, how could you leave your own mother?  “Should I come home?  You think I should go home?”

“I won’t tell you what to do.  If I was gonna tell you what to do, I’d say I think she should be in a place where she could be helped, you know what I mean.  If I was to tell you what I think, I’d tell you that.”

I closed my eyes and imagined myself slapping him, the quick and satisfying heat of his fleshy cheek against my palm.  “Well thanks for the advice.  I’ll take that into consideration”

Amazingly, he did not notice the sarcasm.  “Hell,” he said, “I have a mother too, you know.”

After hanging up, I immediately dialed home.  The phone rang, kept ringing.  I should’ve told the cops to check if the phones had got themselves unplugged, or the ringers switched off.  But no, I knew Star was lying there listening, maybe still buried under the covers.  Maybe knowing it was me and wanting to answer, but too scared to pull out her head.

I let the phone ring, my way of telling her I was there, connected by wires.  I curled on the bed, and when a recorded message played and the phone blared a get the hint warning in my ear, I hung up and dialed again.  And then again, dialing through the night, knees curled to my chest and eyes closed, listening to the wordless conversation between us.

*                                  *                                  *

“Haley?”

I opened my eyes to find the sun streaming through the window.  My eyes felt shredded from the contacts I’d forgotten to remove, and my teeth and tongue felt like they’d been coated in refried beans.

“Haley?” Alex called again from behind the closed door.

I rolled over.  My cell phone was off, the battery dead.  And Molly wasn’t in her bassinet.  I jumped to my feet.  “Molly!”

“She’s right here.  Can I come in?  You decent?”

I smoothed my tangled hair behind my ears and looked down at my rumpled clothes.  “Not really,” I said, “but yeah, you can come in.”

The door opened and Alex entered with Molly, smiling.  He set her on the bed and she raised her arms, palms facing me, jazz hands position.  I knelt beside her and gave her my index fingers to grip.  “Morning,” Alex said.  “Just handing off Molly.  I’ll be back in a sec.”

He turned back to the hall, and I quickly pulled my fingers from Molly’s fists and scrambled in my bag for my charger, plugged in my cell phone and checked for missed calls.  There’d been three from Rachel, two last night and one this morning, and one call late last night from my home number.  I closed my eyes and said a quick prayer of thanks.  Then knelt in front of Molly and brought her hands to my mouth so I could kiss her chubby knuckles.

            I’d have to go home.  I was too worried and exhausted to be pissed off at Star for this, although I knew I would be eventually.  I was reasonably sure that after I’d given her a hug and cried with her, I’d get so pissed I wouldn’t talk to her maybe ever again.  But first, I’d hug her.

“Here we go,” Alex said, bumping the door open with his backside.  He set a tray on the desk: a plate heaped with scrambled eggs, bacon and toast slathered with butter, two mugs and a dark carafe.

“Wow,” I said.  “Am I dreaming?  Where’d that come from?”

“I went shopping.  D’you realize what time it is?  Molly woke me up around six this morning, and we snuck downstairs and played for awhile, waiting for you to get up.  But when you didn’t, I left you a note and went out.”  He nodded at the door, a piece of paper taped to it:

8AM—Gone shopping w/ M., back by 9.  XOX.

I stared at the XOX, blinked, then turned back to him.  “Molly woke up and I slept through it?” 

“She was screaming, actually, rattling the walls.  For almost an hour, before I started to get worried you’d run out on us or . . . I don’t know, died or something, and I came in to check.”

“I’m a heavy sleeper,” I said, then shook my head.  “And it’s been a hell of a week, so I guess my brain rebelled and entered a semi-vegetative state.  Sorry, I apparently suck as a mom.”

“Don’t be sorry, we had fun.  Didn’t we, Moll?  We practiced our new diaper changing skills, and then we invented stupid games.  You’d be amazed how many games can be played with a ring of keys.” 

“Very creative of you.”

“Isn’t it?”  He twisted the top of the carafe, and filled the mugs.  “You ever try chicory?  If you hate it I can make a pot of regular coffee, I have both, but this is what I usually drink.  A neighbor of mine, Valerie, cultivates chicory roots and roasts them, so I started drinking it when I needed a break from my caffeine addiction.  Took some getting used to, but I’ve started to like it.  Apparently cleans out the blood, or maybe that’s just something Valerie told me to get me past my first impression.”  He reached for the mugs, handed me one and clinked his against mine.  “Here’s to reunions.”

“Reunions,” I said, smiling.

The chicory was different from what I’d expected, chocolaty, in an ultra-sour way.  Not horrible, but not all that good either.  I could imagine it cleaning out my blood, like Draino.  “Mmmm,” I said, so as not to be rude.

He gave a quick laugh.  “Like I said, it takes some getting used to.  It’s better with food.  You going to eat?”
            “I wasn’t sure this was for me.  Aren’t you eating?  Or . . .”  I picked up the fork and held it towards him.  “Did you want to share?”

“No thanks, I don’t really do breakfast; I made that for you.”

“Wow.  This is enough to feed about ten of me, but thanks.”  I scooped a forkful of eggs into my mouth.  They were delicious, peppery and buttery but still light.  I’d always thought an egg was an egg was an egg, but these tasted like something different altogether, the Dom Perignon of eggs.  I rolled my eyes in a faux-swoon.  “These are incredible.”

“Told you I could cook,” he said.  “The eggs are farm-grown which makes a difference, and the whipping technique makes them fluffy.  All in the wrist.”

“‘Whipping technique’ sounds vaguely pornographic.  I’m picturing you using a leather tassel.  Perhaps wearing a thong.”  I smiled and held the mug to my nose, let the steam flush my face.  “So how’d you ever end up here in a place where you can get farm-grown eggs?  You come to New Hampshire straight after school?”

“I was in New York for awhile.”  He shrugged.  “Went to Columbia and I majored in English, which left me completely unqualified for anything except majoring in English.” 

“Well I majored in art history,” I said, “which basically qualified me to visit museums.”  In fact, I’d only gone to community college.  I had an excuse, the obvious money issue and Star to take care of, but the A.A. wasn’t something I was especially proud of, or wanted to explain to someone who’d gone to Columbia. 

“I’ve always wanted to learn how to do museums right.  I usually just walk around feeling stupid, wondering why I’m not enjoying looking at paintings of Campbell’s soup cans.  Besides, you ended up using your art skills, right?”

“My last project involved painting beans,” I said, “so not really.”

“Well me, I just bummed around for awhile wondering what I wanted to be when I grew up.  I decided to stay in the city because I thought I liked it, mainly because I was only twenty-two at the time, so I had no idea what I really liked.  I waited tables along with all these deluded wannabe actor-models, and then a friend taught me how to cook and I started catering and party planning.”

A friend.  I pictured her, maybe the woman he’d written the multi-versioned love note to, leaning over him to display her boobs while she showed him her thong-wearing, tassel-wielding, egg whipping technique.

“But it turned out I couldn’t deal with super rich people and their dinner party obsessions.  Like they wanted me taking the temperature of ice baths for white wine.  I mean, they’re ice baths!  They’re cold!  And one lady had me measuring the distance between each plate and glass and piece of silverware with a caliper, to make sure it was all symmetrical.”

“Awesome,” I said.  “Not just a perfect party, it’s an anally perfect party.”

“Exactly, and being the least anal person I know, I kept wanting to tell them to get a real life.  So when the urge to tell them off got overwhelming, I realized my choices were to commit homicide or suicide or figure out how to get away from it.  Which is when I started writing.  I got in on the bottom floor of blogging, back when blogs were still called online journals and people had this voyeuristic fascination with them.  My journal was called Things I Like.”  He smiled.  “Except I put exclamation points after each word because . . . I was in my twenties.  So it was called Things!  I!  Like!  and I was writing about basically everything that made me happy.”

Alex reached for Molly, who had slumped forward on the bed like she was attempting to touch her toes.  “Recipes,” he said, “movies, books, shampoo, and I guess people thought it was useful because suddenly they were calling me for freelance work.  And then I wrote a book that got picked up on proposal, which is when I gave up catering for good, and I never looked back.”

“You have a book!  I never met a real author before.”  I smiled.  “Except for this one lady.  I did a mural for her bedroom, and she tried to give me a copy of her self-published poetry as partial payment.  It was called Your Love Tastes Like Saccharine, and the first poem was called, no lie, Sugar Free Gives Me the Runs.”

Alex laughed.  “I love it!  Well that’s a lot more creative than mine.  The book’s called A Hundred Books That Will Change Your Life, and I ended up getting about a hundred letters from people who told me how ashamed I should be for not mentioning the Bible.  But it did okay enough to get me out of the city and into a mortgage in a place that felt as far away from the city life as possible.  I was here with my parents on vacation, back when I was ten or eleven, and I remembered loving being able to wake up to the sound of birds and wind through the trees, so I always had in my mind that I’d come back someday.  And pretty soon after I moved, people who liked the book started hiring me to write book reviews, and that became my job.  So voila.”

“Very impressive.  Now I feel humbled in your presence.”

He rubbed his cheek against the downy fringe of Molly’s hair.  “Not all that impressive.  It’s nowhere near as impressive, to cite a random example, as leaving an abusive husband to become a single mother.”

I felt my face flush.  “Right.  Yeah, thanks.”  I tore off a hunk of toast and stuffed it into my mouth.

I was reaching for another when my phone rang.  I widened my eyes, and then dove for it.

“I’ll bring Molly downstairs and let you talk,” Alex said, standing with Molly in his arms.  “And I’ll make you up a pot of coffee since I see you’re not a chicory fan.”

I nodded thanks, and glanced at the number.  The call was from home.  I flipped the phone open.  “Ma?”

Alex bowed shallowly and backed from the room.

“Lainey!”

“Oh Ma, thank God.  You okay?”

“Just fine.  Cops gave me a scare though, what the hell were you thinking?”

“What do you think I was thinking?  That you were sick or dead or I don’t know what.  Why didn’t you answer the phone?”

“I was out.  At the ABC, I needed some whisky.  You forgot to get me whisky.”

“You were at the liquor store all night.  You don’t leave the house for two decades, and what gets you out is the need for whisky.”

“Shameful, but true.”

“Jesus, Ma, don’t even bother, I don’t have the patience.”

She was quiet a minute, then said, “Guess you’re not reading the papers.  They arrested David McGrath yesterday morning.”

I widened my eyes, shook my head.

“Janie’s been saying he had the baby when she disappeared.  Guess it was his weekend to take her.”

“That was her plan?  To get him arrested?”

“Maybe not originally; she told the cops the baby was stolen at the grocery store.  Which obviously wasn’t too smart, they do have cameras where they can check these things, and when they confronted her she changed her story.  Said she lied because she was scared of David, and then she told them about Molly’s cigarette burns.  She had photos of them, conveniently.”

I shook my head.  “And they believed her?  Nobody can prove she never dropped him off?”

“Except us, I guess.  I’d say she’s assuming an awful lot from you here.  How easy would it be for you to turn her in?”

“But she knew I wouldn’t.”  I clutched the phone receiver, picturing the angry red marks on Molly’s back.  “She knew me well enough to realize I wouldn’t care if David McGrath’s in jail for something he didn’t do.  I’m pretty much glad about it.”

“Actually he’s in jail for something he did do.  They got a search warrant for his parents’ home and they found happiness, of the white-powdered variety, in his bedroom.  So now they got him in for minor drug possession, which I guess was enough to make them believe Janie was the one telling the truth.”

I shook my head slowly.

“So that’s the story, son of a bitch snorts cocaine and abuses his kid, and Janie Strunk cries crocodile tears and there you are caught in the middle of it.  Guess I got a tad upset about it all, but I’m better now.”

I sank onto the bed, my chest tight with sudden understanding.  “Ma, do you know what this means?  This means she wants me to keep Molly, right?  Wants me to keep her forever so they accuse David McGrath of murder, right?  In order to save Molly from him, she sent her away forever.”

“You’re completely jumping to conclusions.  My guess is she got them to issue a warrant knowing exactly what they’d find in his bedroom, and she thought that might be enough to win custody.  Who knows, but she’s obviously not altogether in her right mind whatever she’s pulling, because how’s she going to get herself out of this?”

“What should I do, Ma?  I don’t know what to do now.”

“Where are you?  Still in Kentucky?”

“I don’t even know if I should tell you.  In case you’re interrogated or something.”

“You’ve obviously been watching too many true crime shows.  You’re staying with somebody, right?  That’s what the cards told me, a masculine, imperial sort of presence.”

“Well I don’t know about imperial but yeah, I’m staying with a man named Alex.  It’s weird how it happened, because he thinks I’m somebody else.  He thinks I’m somebody he knew in high school, and when he found out I didn’t have a place to stay, he invited us to his home.”

“I knew it,” Star said softly.  “I knew there was some kind of guardian spirit watching over you to make sure you’d be safe.”

“But obviously I can’t stay here.  I have to come home.”

“You what?”

“Except if Molly’s face is all over the headlines, how long’s it going to take before somebody realizes who she is?”

“Well the photos they’re showing don’t look like the girl you have.  What with the new hair, and they’ve got her wearing red velvet Christmas dresses and Baby Dior, looking completely out of sorts.  Besides, her face is all over the headlines everywhere now, so you won’t be able to find anywhere they haven’t heard about her.  Aren’t you watching TV?”

“There’s actually no TV here.  They need satellite in this area, and Alex decided it wasn’t worth it.”  Alex had told me the idea of installing a dish, infusing his brain with trashy satellite waves, just seemed like the total opposite of what this new life was supposed to be.  I’d thought that was commendable, very Walden-esque.  And also, as it turned out, very convenient.

“If you’re not going to turn Janie in, what good’s coming home going to do at this point?”  Star’s voice was rising.  “You going to give her a talking to?  Apologize to the child abusing junkie?  What?”

“I’m coming home for you, Ma.”

“Lainey…”

“Have you been eating?  When’s the last time you took a shower?”

“You getting complaints from the neighbors that I stink?”

I tried to keep my voice steady.  “Obviously you’re not doing too good on your own.”

“Obviously you’re forgetting that I’m not eight years old.  I’m okay, Lainey.”  She paused, then said, “Listen.  There I was yesterday in bed, covers up around my ears and sure the world was coming to get me and that I was most probably having a heart attack.  Can you imagine how pathetic it made me feel?  You come home and I might as well kill myself now, I mean it.  If I have to ruin my daughter’s adventure because I can’t deal, then I’m just too pathetic to live.”

“I’m worried as hell about you.”

“Well don’t be.  Worrying is my game, remember?  I’ve got dibs.  And this is my one and only chance to prove to myself I can make it.  You’re giving me that chance, and if you screw it up I’ll never forgive you.”

“And if you die of neglect I’ll never forgive you.  I’m calling Rachel to ask her to stop by and check on you today.  If she tells me you’re not up and about and getting stuff done, then you’re not leaving me with much of a choice.”

“Well she was just here last night, and she told me I looked great.  Said she didn’t know what you were making such a fuss about.”

“Please, Ma.  Do you not realize I’m going to actually talk to her and find out what she really said?”

“Don’t trust her, she’s a liar.”

I shook my head.  “You have to prove to me you’re okay.  I mean it.  Answer the phone when I call you, answer the door when the bell rings, make yourself meals.”  I lay back on the bed and closed my eyes, hunched in fetal position.  “I wish you were here, I really do.  Or that I could come there without being scared of getting arrested.”

“That’s because you’re co-dependent.  Tell me something, okay?  Everything that’s going on now, just happening to run into a man who thinks he knows you, who out of nowhere invites you to stay in his home, does it feel like destiny?”

I thought a moment, then said, “I don’t know.”  I remembered how it felt to hold Molly and then pictured, of all things, my view of Alex’s body through the doorknob hole.  “Maybe,” I said.

“So then don’t worry,” Star said.  “This time alone, it feels like destiny to me too.”

*                                  *                                  *

It was beautiful out, skyblue and warm.  And because it seemed like a thing mothers might be inclined to do on skyblue warm days, while Alex worked on the computer that morning I took Molly out for a walk in her sling.  We paraded down the street, both admiring the dogwoods and cherry trees, Molly periodically demonstrating her athletic prowess by throwing her binky at my feet. 

After hanging up with Star that morning I’d talked to Rachel, who’d told me Star had refused to let her in, had spoken to her from behind the closed front door.  But walking with Molly I tried not to think about what she might find when she went back today, not to think about Janie or David McGrath, or about how long I could keep up this lie and live this fantasy.  Star had always told me people should look out at the world with quiet eyes, not naming or thinking, just being.  And that’s what we did, Molly and I, watched with quiet eyes.

We were rounding the top of a hill when we passed a woman power-walking in the opposite direction, swaying her arms and dipping huge, lunging steps, looking rather like a lumbering steam shovel.  She was heavyset, her graying hair frizzing in wild curls around her shoulders, and she had one of those faces you immediately like, round cheeks complete with dimples and crinkly eyes and all. 

When she saw me she paused mid-lunge, then quickly snapped her legs shut, her face turning pink.  “Hamstrings and butt,” she said.

I smiled hesitantly.  “What?”

“You were looking at me like I’m insane, but I’m lunging because I have no hamstrings and too much butt.  Nobody’s supposed to actually see me doing this, just to see the results and be amazed.  But now you have, I hope you’ll immediately erase it from your memory.”  She swiped an arm up her forehead, pushing back her sweaty hair and revealing an unshaved underarm.  “Who are you anyway?  You here visiting somebody?”

I shook my head, then nodded, completely taken aback.  With most people you could tell who they were almost immediately, slot them into one of the various personality-containers you’ve already fashioned in your brain.  But this woman seemed unclassifiable.

“That was rude,” she said, “sorry.  It’s just we don’t see too many new faces here, so I’m out of practice.”  She held out her hand.  “I’m Susie Greer.”

“I’m Lainey.  I mean Haley.  I’m Haley.”  I looked behind me, as if a last name might be written somewhere in big letters on the trees.  “Haley,” I repeated, then turned back and took her hand.  “And I’m staying with Alex Connor.”

“Oh?” she said.  “Oh!  You’re his mysterious lady friend!”  She grinned.  “I have to say, we were wondering if you even existed or if maybe you were…you know, a man.”

I spent a few seconds trying to digest this, then a few more convincing myself it would be wrong to claim that yes indeed, I was his mysterious woman friend.  “No, actually,” I said.  “Just a friend-friend.  From high school.  We happened to be sleeping at the same motel, and he found out I was looking for a place to stay so he invited me and my daughter here for awhile.”

“Aw shoot.  And here I had this story all worked out in my head.”  She grinned.  “That he was keeping you a secret because he had this illegitimate child, which he for some reason thought we’d be offended by.”  The woman looked over the side of my sling.  “She does almost look like she could be his.  Those same porn star lips, which I realize isn’t right to say about a baby, but what can you do?  That’s what they are.  You staying awhile, then?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “I mean I don’t have immediate plans to leave.”

“This is good.  We should do lunch sometime.  I make a mean paella, you should ask Alex.”  She cocked her head and gave me a sly smile.  “So…do you know Alex’s girlfriend?”

“Um, no.”  Molly started to fuss, and I jiggled her in my arms.  “He never mentioned her, but we haven’t talked much yet about that kind of stuff.”

“You should ask.  And let me know if you learn anything, okay?  Everybody wonders about it because he doesn’t seem like the type to keep secrets; he’s so open about everything else, but about her?  He says nothing.  We only know there’s someone because Karen Haines tried to set him up with her daughter, and he said he wasn’t available.  Which we assumed meant another woman, that she was why he traveled so much, but who knows?  Could be he’s had his heart broken so many times it’s closed to new opportunities, or maybe he just doesn’t like the looks of Karen’s daughter.  You ask him, okay?  And we’ll do lunch and you can tell me everything.”

“I’ll see what I can find out,” I said, smiling.  At least recounting this conversation to him would give me an excuse to ask subtly.  I wasn’t asking for myself; it was a second-hand question.

“I like you,” she said, narrowing her eyes.  “You have a very expressive face.”  And then she held up her hand, waved good-bye to me and Molly in the finger-flapping goodbye wave of toddlers, then power-walked down the street.

I turned to Molly.  “That,” I whispered, “was interesting.”

Molly looked over at Susie as she disappeared over the top of the hill, eyes wide as if with shock, like she was saying, “Now I’ve seen everything.”

*                                  *                                  *

Alex laughed when I told him about the conversation, over-dramatizing Susie’s goggle-eyes and childish excitement.  “Out in the middle of nowhere, people can be a little…different.  You’ll see.  Not in a bad way, it’s just that only a certain kind of person wants to live this far removed from civilization.  Which I don’t know what that says about me.”  He shrugged.  “But I like Susie.  You always know what she’s thinking, and she has this kind of innocence about her.”

“Don’t let her fool you.  She’s not that innocent.”  I reached for one of the sandwiches Alex had made, apple and melted brie on pita bread, so I wouldn’t have to meet his eye.  “She told me to try and wean secrets out of you, so I could come back and tell her what you said.”

“What do you mean, secrets?” 

“Well apparently, there’s a mysterious woman friend everyone wants to know more about.  That’s exactly the words she used, ‘mysterious woman friend.’”

“Should I feel flattered they care so much about my business, or disturbed?”  Alex shook his head.  “It’s funny, you know?  Living alone in the city, you’re so anonymous, even to the point you sometimes wonder if you’ve turned invisible.  There were days I used to go buy food I didn’t need, just so I could talk to the checkout person about the ridiculous price of Portobello mushrooms.  And now I’d have to taser my neighbors to keep them from peering in my windows.”

“I think it’s sweet, in a semi-annoying way.  Isn’t it better than being ignored?”  In high school, the prayer I held in my head every morning while I showered and brushed my teeth was, Make them see me.  A boy’s elbow would jostle my arm as he closed his locker door; a girl would pass me papers and her hand would brush against my palm, and I’d snap back into myself, feel the spark of it.  Finally know that I did have a physical presence after all.  That I did exist.

“I wouldn’t say either of them’s better.”  Alex rose to fill his water glass, stood at the sink a moment, then turned to face me.  “What I really want is a family, you know?  Where the people you talk to every day are the people you really want to talk to.  The people who want to know your secrets for the right reasons.”  He smiled at me and shrugged, looking embarrassed.  “It’s why having you and Molly here has been so great, because it shows me a little of how it’s going to be, having a family.”

And there, for maybe the first time in my life, I found myself without words.  Oh I knew that wasn’t what he meant; of course I knew it.  But my brain was racing, thoughts stuttering, and my throat seemed to be blocked by one of my internal organs.  I finally flashed a smile and said, “Me too,” a non-sequitur that would haunt me for days as I replayed this conversation.

I was so overwhelmed with my own ridiculousness that I didn’t realize till much later that he’d never answered my implied question.

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                                      -7-                    

 

Rachel called late that night, while I was changing Molly on the bedroom floor.  She started in without even saying hello.  “Look,” she said.  “Your mom needs help.”

I sank onto the bed, staring at the wall.  “Tell me.”

“I’ve never seen her like this.  I mean, you probably have, and maybe you won’t think it’s so bad, but I’ve always thought of her as this immensely strong and innately happy woman who just happens to have a problem.  But I didn’t recognize her today.”  She paused, as if for effect, then said, “She has things piled against the door, Lainey.  She hadn’t called anybody in to fix the locks, so she’d moved an armchair and a hope chest and all these boxes of books, pushed them against the door.  She had to open a window for me to climb in.”

My eyes filled, and I squeezed them shut.  Mom, I thought.

“Apparently she’d been wedged against the door too, huddled in quilts.  There were plates of half-eaten food where she’d been sitting, and the curtains were all drawn like she’s even scared to let the sun in.  I think she’s been spending all her time doing readings; she was doing them even when I was there.”

I’d done this to her.  Hadn’t I known something like this might happen?  Like five years ago when there’d been an electrical fire in the house down the street, and she’d made me buy extinguishers and smoke alarms for every room, and shut down the central breaker switch every night so we awoke to a dripping freezer and spoiled milk.

“Apparently,” Rachel said, “the readings made her comfortable with the guy you’re staying with–which you’re going to have to tell me more about, by the way.  According to the cards he has problems, whatever that means, but he’ll take care of you anyway and keep you safe, so that’s all good.  But she’s also sure you’re in some kind of colossal danger which, maybe you are.”

“Well of course.  I’m in colossal danger because I’m not under her roof.  The thing about card readings is they’re intuitional, which means you can pretty much interpret them any way you want.  So of course the cards say I’m in danger because Star always thinks I’m in danger.”  I squeezed my eyes shut.  “What do I do?” I said.  “Should I come home?”

 “You want me to tell you what to do?  I’d say you turn your dear friend in.  The baby’s father’s in jail, if he’s been using drugs and abusing her then there’s no way anybody’s letting him out anytime soon, or letting him get his hands on her whenever he gets out.”

“You don’t know that.  Don’t you realize how powerful the McGraths are?  What kind of lawyers they can afford?  They’ll probably make it this big spectacle, televised so everyone can watch Johnnie Corcoran and Robert Kardashian get him acquitted.”

“Um, they’re dead.”

“You know what I mean.  People like that can have their blood and skin and seminal fluid all over a body and still get away with murder.  I feel like I have to choose between my mother and my daughter, and it’s not a fair choice.”

“Your daughter?” Rachel said, then let the words hang in the air before she said, “Look, you want to know how much I love you?  Star can’t stay there alone, we both know that, so I’ll bring her up to you if that’s what you want.  D’you think the guy you’re staying with would be up for that?”

“You’re kidding, right?  She hasn’t left the house in two decades; it’s all she can do to poke out her arm to pick up the mail.  You think she’d get in a car and drive five-hundred miles?”

“Be driven.  Or we’ll fly, whatever.  Give her a double dose of Xanax, knock her out and by the time she wakes up, she’ll be having her panic attacks in another state.  She might feel better anyway, being further from the center of the news coverage.”

I tried to imagine getting my mother into a plane, a piece of thousand ton machinery that hurtled thousands of feet above the ground.  It would’ve been easier imagining her sprouting a pair of gills and breathing underwater.

“Just let me ask her,” Rachel said.  “I’ll tell her you’ll come home if you have to, that you’re absolutely not going to leave her alone in this kind of state, but I’ll also say something about how dangerous that would be.  She loves you too much to let you get into trouble.”

I hesitated, then said, “Tell her I’m happy.  Tell her when you talked to me, I sounded happier than you’d ever heard me.  And tell her I said I finally feel like my life is starting.”

“Do you?” Rachel said.  “Are you happy?”

“Yeah, I really think I am.”  I looked down at Molly, who had gripped onto one of her bare feet as it waved by, and was studying it like it was some sort of strange wild bird she’d caught.  I tucked the phone under my chin so I could reach for her, tickled my nose into the tiny shell of her ear.  People searched all their lives for things that might make them happy, and here I was, a fugitive running out of money, and I’d managed to find it.  Maybe I was lucky, or maybe I was just easy.  Maybe the secret was as simple as that, to have low expectations.  “I don’t think I’ve ever been this happy before,” I said.

*                                  *                                  *

The next morning, I started work on the yard.  I hadn’t told Alex anything yet about my conversation with Rachel.  If Star agreed, and on the off-chance she managed to get herself out of the house and if she actually made it into a car, then I’d bring up the subject.  But until then there were so many very iffy ifs, that there was no reason to test the breadth of Alex’s hospitality.

We drove to a downtown nursery run by Valerie, the chicory root lady.  She was one of those willowy, leathery, ethereal looking older women who look like they might be actual descendents of trees.  She ran to hug Alex as soon as we stepped from the car, then took me in her arms and kissed both my cheeks, European style.  “I heard you had people, Alex!” she said, bending to look in the back window.  “And a baby!  Who I’m sure I will quickly become addicted to.”

“I’m Haley,” I said, vaguely pleased at how easily the name came this time around.  Like I truly was becoming a Haley.  “A friend of Alex’s from high school, and this is Molly.”

“She has very wise eyes.  Like a young prophet; the Dalai Molly.”  Valerie opened the car door.  “May I?”

“Of course,” I said, and Valerie unstrapped Molly from her car seat and lifted her.  I watched her nuzzle against the side of Molly’s head.  Feeling pride.

“So Haley’s gotten into her head that the yard needs sprucing up,” Alex said.  “Increase the ratio of real flowers to weeds.  She’s an artist, so she’s trying to turn my garden into a Monet.”

“An artist!” Valerie said.

“Not a real artist, I just do murals.  I’m not original enough to do real art.”

“Why’re you discounting yourself?  Are the murals real?  Can’t anyone else see them?  Then they’re real art.”

I thought of the days I’d dreamed of becoming a painter; impressionistic, I thought, but with a kind of edge nobody had ever seen before.  I’d covered canvas after canvas with scenes sketched in odd, tilting angles, faces filled with desire or pain or both.  There was nothing better than watching the pictures appear under my brush.  But then, Star got sick.  We couldn’t afford the canvases and pricey acrylics, and I’d had to start making actual money.  We needed food, utilities, mortgage, so I didn’t have the luxury of waiting for people to discover me.  In the back of my mind, though, I’d always thought, Someday.

“Oh!”  Valerie turned to me, her eyes wide.  “I just thought of something.  How would you feel about doing a mural here?  You could paint some kind of English country garden scene behind the cash register desk.  How long do they take to do?  Are you staying awhile?”

“I’m not really sure,” I said.  “Probably not long enough to finish a mural.”

But Alex waved his hand dismissively at this answer.  “As long as she wants.  The longer the better.  And if you have something to keep you busy, Haley, there’s no point in you leaving yet.”

I glanced sideways at him.  I’d somehow kept myself from thinking too hard about what might come next, and how soon that next might be.  Although idling somewhere behind the lack of conscious thought was, of course, the fantasy of an indefinite continuation of this life: meeting new neighbors, intimate conversations over Alex’s gourmet meals, waking as I had that morning, to the sound of Molly practicing her consonants, reaching her arms to me when she saw me sit up in bed.

“Brilliant idea!”  Valerie tapped her head with her index finger.  “What if we did a trade?  The barter system, a mural in exchange for whatever flowers and supplies you want from the nursery.  Plus babysitting services, which I’d give you free of charge anyway.  Would pay you for, actually.”  She nuzzled against Molly’s cheek.  “It’d be more than a fair exchange, in my book.  I’d actually feel like I was getting the better end of the deal.  What do you say?”

In fact, she probably would be getting the better end of the deal.  Murals started from eight-hundred dollars and were usually significantly more.  But still, how could I refuse her?  And the idea of working here, surrounded by these flower tables, the confetti colors and heady floral scents, was enticing.  I didn’t want to refuse.  “Deal,” I said.  “Let me take a look at the space, and I’ll mock something up for you to look at.”

We spent the next hour filling the car with weed killers, bug killers, cedar mulch and fertilizer and masses of flowers, Valerie instructing me on how to prepare the soil, planting depths and required amounts of sun.  And then we carried it all home, Molly in the backseat surrounded by plants, like an Anne Geddes photo.

While Alex finished a book review and Molly napped in her bassinet, I set to work preparing the garden.  To be honest, it was harder than I thought it would be, lugging the spreader in parallel paths over the raggedy rock-strewn lawn and tilling the loamy soil with compost.  The sun, which in the beginning had been intoxicating, by late afternoon had become cloying, and I could feel the sweat trickling down my sides.  But there was also something primally satisfying about physical labor in the outdoors.  I wasn’t usually all that big on nature; earth was dirty, hikes were boring and hurt my thighs, and birds woke me up too early and dropped white crap on my windshield.  But that afternoon, surrounded by the open and still green, I started to understand why a person might want to hug a tree.

“It looks great!” Alex said, walking out the front door.

I looked over the torn up land, the spreader-squashed dandelions, the flowers still in their plastic trays all wilting in the sun.  “It does not,” I said.  “But it’ll be better once the flowers are actually in to cover up the mud, so don’t lose faith.”

He smiled.  “Okay, I’m glad you said it first.  I didn’t want to insult you.  It’s looking like the yard was attacked by giant worms, but if you say it’ll look better soon, then I totally believe you.”

“Well I’m about fifty percent sure it’ll look better soon.  If it doesn’t, I apologize in advance.”

Molly started squirming in her bassinet, so I strode towards her, then noticed the state of my hands.  “No worries,” Alex said, unstrapping her and holding her against his chest.  “You want to get cleaned up?  I’ll get dinner started.  Just grilling up some salmon so it’ll be pretty quick.”

“Oof, more food,” I said.  “I thought all this work might make me lose some weight, but the way you’ve been feeding me, I’m on my way to an early death and burial in a piano-sized coffin.”  In fact, though, I’d stepped on the bathroom scale that morning and found I’d lost three pounds.  Three pounds!  In three days!  Maybe it was dehydration, a loss of sweat and tears, or maybe his scale needed calibration, but still.  I felt different.  Like I’d shed an outer layer of skin.

Alex smiled.  “Please don’t lose weight.  I’ll warn you if you start to become anywhere near piano-sized, but women are supposed to have curves; that’s what makes them female.  You’re absolutely perfect as-is.”

To which I smiled dumbly and said, even more dumbly, ““Well, no.  I’m totally not.”  Waiting for somebody to pinch me awake. 

*                                  *                                  *

I was getting dressed after my shower when Star called.

 “Okay,” she said.  Her voice was hoarse.

I was wearing only a bra and underwear, and I sat on the bed and looked down at my pale thighs, feeling an unexpected punch of fear.  “Okay what?”

“I’m failing.  You’re right and Rachel’s right.  I’m failing in every part of my life, but I’d rather die than keep failing you as a parent.  I’d rather commit suicide, Lainey, so if the trip up there kills me then so be it.  It’s all a wash.”

“Ma…you’re coming?  Really?”

“Let’s not talk about it, okay?  I already made myself sick thinking about it.  I should tell Rachel to bring Craig tomorrow in case they have to actually drag me into the car.  Or maybe he can slip me a rufie.”  Her voice trailed off, and I heard a strangled sob.

“Ma…”

“Rachel’s a saint, you know that?  They should make a Rachel medal.  She had to get me into the shower and dressed today.  How pathetic is that?  What’s wrong with me?”

It was so long since I’d heard her like this; like those days she’d had panic attacks not just when I pulled her out the door, but also when she just imagined the attack she’d have once I pulled her out.  We’d realized pretty soon that there was no point in trying, that it was ludicrous to keep pretending she’d get better.  And at the time, to be honest, my main reaction had been disgust and anger.  Because I was sixteen, a disgusted and angry age, but also because I needed her to be normal.  Needed her to take care of me, when she couldn’t even take care of herself. 

Part of me had never gotten past that anger; it was like a bruise under everything.  Usually just tender but at times, when I needed help she couldn’t give, was forced yet again to be the parent, my need was like a knuckle pressing into the most vulnerable part of the anger, and the bruise was everywhere.  All I could feel.

But now, not only did my new wellspring of contentment make me feel magnanimous; with distance I could understand the immensity of what she was offering.  So I said, “Stop, Ma.  You maybe think you’re weak, but you’re really the strongest, most generous person I ever met.  Yeah, your brain’s screwed up, but leaving the only place you feel safe, it’s like you’re jumping into quicksand to help me.  I love you, Ma, and if it turns out you don’t make it into the car after all, I’ll understand.”

Star was quiet a long time, and I imagined how she must be feeling: gratitude, relief, new resolve.  But when she finally spoke she said, “You little witch, you knew that’d make me feel worse, didn’t you.”

“Honestly, that wasn’t my intention,” I said, smiling.  “But if it takes a guilt trip to get you out of the house, then I’m here for you anytime.”

*                                  *                                  *

That night, over dinner, I approached Alex.

“My mother has problems,” I said.  “I’ve told you some of it, but not all.”  Why was this so hard for me?  I hadn’t talked to anyone about my mother since I’d told Rachel, years ago.  Because Star was embarrassing, because she was a mirror of sorts, making me embarrassing by association.  Because of the day Janie had seen Star in front of the evening news, doing reading after reading for the women and children at Chernobyl, and had pulled me to the next room to whisper, “Your mom’s weird.”

I forked off a chunk of salmon, and then another and another, corralled the pieces into the center of my plate.  “She’s agoraphobic,” I said.  “If she tries to leave the house, it’s like the floor drops out from under her.  Just imagine what that’s like, you step outside and you feel the huge openness of the world, like it’s a mouth trying to swallow you.  A mouth with giant teeth.  And she gets these attacks, these panic attacks.  She’s scared of everything.”

I looked over at Molly who was on the floor, exercising her pincer skills with a tray of Cheerios, and wondered if being here in Molly’s presence would make things better or worse.  “And now, with everything that’s going on with me and Molly, it’s getting so she can’t hardly take care of herself.  A friend of mine, Rachel, she stopped by and said my mom’s piled furniture against the door, piled herself against the door, and I don’t know what else to do.”  I mashed my fork against the shreds of my salmon, then dropped it.  “She can’t stay alone anymore.”

Alex reached for my hand, sandwiched it between both of his.  “You’re not going back there.  It’s not safe, you know that, right?”

“I know that.”  I looked down at our hands.  Even Alex’s fingers were kind; warm, strong, smooth-knuckled.  His face was so concerned, a small crease of worry in his forehead.  He wanted to take care of us.  “I have to ask you something,” I said.  “A huge favor, and honestly if you say no, I’ll completely, totally understand.”

His grip on my hand tightened.  “You want to invite her here?”  His voice was so soft when he said this, no wariness or sign of disapproval, and I felt my eyes fill.  I’d told him the most horrible, unforgivable lies, and he was being kinder and more generous with me than anyone I’d ever known.  Taking advantage of that generosity, what kind of person did that make me?

He was watching my face questioningly but I couldn’t answer, was too ashamed of my own audacity, listening to the argument in my head:

Good Lainey: How can you?

Bad Lainey: He loves you!

I pulled my hand away.  “I’m sorry, that makes completely no sense.”

“It’s okay, though.  I mean of course it makes sense and we’ll work it out.  We have room for her, Haley, I’d just need to clean out the junk room, and I have an old futon that’s actually pretty comfortable.”

“Seriously?”  But then, a panicked thought.  “You never met my mother when we were in high school, did you?  Like over at my house?”

He looked at me strangely.  “I never went to your house.”

“Right, of course.  That’s what I thought.”  I pushed my plate away.  “She probably won’t even make it up here anyway.  It’s actually pretty unlikely; I mean, I used to try to just make her walk down to the used bookstore on the corner, and she’d take a few steps and hyperventilate and pass out.  And now Rachel’s going to get her into a car?  Drive her hundreds of miles?  The odds are a bazillion to one.”

“They’re driving from Chicago?”

Oh shoot.  What had I told him?  Had I told him I’d been living with Star?  Or her with me?  Had I told him she hadn’t left the house for twenty years, which would mean she’d never left Georgia?  Tonight I’d write it all down, fabricate a complete story so I could feed it to Star and Rachel when they came, and we could corroborate each other’s evidence, or whatever.  But for now, this was one of those instances where it would be best not to give an actual answer.  “I’m just so worried this’ll make things even worse,” I said.

“Try not to be.  Getting your mom out in the middle of nowhere might actually be good for her.  Less for her to be scared of, you know?  Not so many holes to fall into.  You’ve already been through so much, Haley, and I really want to do whatever I can to make things easier.”

Yes! thought Bad Lainey, You deserve this!  You totally have been through so much!  And behind it all, hearing the kindness in his voice: We love you too.

*                                  *                                  *

We began clearing out the room that night, after Molly fell asleep, despite my protests that we should wait to see if Star even made it out of the house.  “What’s the harm in it?” he said.  “Worst comes to worst, I’ll have a clean room.”

Access to the attic was through a steep pull-down ladder, so we couldn’t bring up any of the heavy things, the file cabinets, a scruffy coffee table and bookshelf.  But in a flash of inspiration, Alex broke apart the table and set the top over two filing cabinets to make a primitive desk, and we reversed the bookcase, back facing out, to make a wooden headboard of sorts for the futon.  We rolled out a blue rag rug on the floor, tossed an old plaid quilt on the futon, and tacked some slightly wrinkled Ansel Adams posters to the wall.  And then we stepped back, to look at the results.

“Very dorm room-ish,” I said.

“No, I like it.  It’s cozy!  I wouldn’t call it elegant, but I doubt your mom’s a snob, is she?”

I thought of Star’s room, all the time she’d put into decorating it using her Feng Shui books: everything in pairs, the candles for “heart heat,” the pink and red scarves to inspire and intensify her nonexistent love life.  “She’s not a snob, but she’s picky.  She may want to redecorate.”

“Then all power to her.”  He leaned back against the wall, arms folded, smiling faintly.  “This is great, y’know?  For the past few years I’ve been rattling around this place like a bean in an empty can, waiting for something to happen.  To break out of the can, or for another bean to join me.”  He turned to grin at me.  “Really bad metaphor, but you know what I mean.  And now suddenly look!”

“Three more beans?” I said.

He nodded slowly, then took my hand.  “Three more beans,” he said.

 

                                                                                                                                                                                      -8-                    

 

And so, Star came to live with us.  Of course it wasn’t anywhere near that simple; three hours after they’d left I got a panicked call from Rachel asking if it would be okay to give her another Xanax so soon after the double dose she’d taken at home.  In the background I’d heard my mother’s strained breathing and I’d told Rachel yes, give her another, probably healthier for her to be knocked out by medication than lack of oxygen.  Two hours later she’d called to say Star was being sick at the side of the road, and after estimating the proportion of Xanax that might have remained undigested, I told Rachel to go ahead and dose her again.

By the time they arrived that night, they were both pale and shaken.  I’d asked Alex to hide out in his bedroom with Molly till the morning, realizing it’d be best not to introduce Star to him until she recovered a bit.  My thought was that not only might an unfamiliar face set her off again, but more importantly her mind was in too many places to remember how my name, and relationship to Molly, had changed.

Star walked on trembling legs, propped between me and Rachel, sobbing with her eyes closed as we guided her through the door and up the stairs.  “I have to pee!” she said, in a tight wail exactly reminiscent of a toddler fearful of accidents, and so we helped her to the bathroom and then set her on the futon, pulled off her shoes and pants and stretched the covers up tight around her.

“I’ll sleep here with her,” I said.  “In case she needs something in the middle of the night.  Let me show you the other bedroom.”

I walked with Rachel into the hall, and found Alex peeking out from behind his bedroom door, Molly in his arms.  “Everything okay?” he asked softly.

Molly cried out and reached her arms towards me and I took her from Alex, distracting myself with the solid, crinkly weight of her diapered bottom.  “She’s alive, she’s kicking.  We’ll get through this.  This is Rachel, by the way.”

“Hi,” Rachel said, then turned to me.  “He’s cute!”

Alex’s face flushed as he extended his hand.  “Thanks, and ditto.  Can I get you anything?  A drink?”

“And charming!” Rachel said, taking his hand.  “But no, thanks, I’m beat so all I want to do is crash.  I’ve just spent the past twelve hours trying to remind a grown woman that there’s no such thing as monsters.”

“Why don’t I keep Molly tonight,” Alex said.  “She’s in that woozy pre-sleep stage, so I don’t want her to change her mind.  And I’ll probably be up first anyway.”

“Now you’re just showing off for Rachel,” I said, then smiled and rested my cheek against Molly’s downy head.  “Thanks, Alex.  I mean I don’t know how to thank you, really, but thanks.”

In the bedroom, I turned to Rachel.  “There’s obviously no way I can ever repay you for this.”

“Very true,” she said, sitting on the bed.  Her eyes were sunken and bruised with fatigue, but she reached for my hand and squeezed it.  “Look, don’t worry about it.  Look at my life.  The most exciting thing I ever get to do is chauffer my kids to gymnastics and watch them fall off balance beams, so being your partner in crime is the most excitement I’ve had in years.  Besides, sometimes people do things without expecting to be repaid.”

I thought about this, then said, “I need to talk to you about Alex.  Because it’s driving me a little crazy, Rachel.  I can’t stand that our whole relationship, everything he’s doing for me, is all based on a lie.  It obviously can’t go on forever like this, but what am I going to do when I leave here?  Will I tell him the truth and then, I don’t know, fork over cash to pay for room and board?  Or do I just write him a thank you note and disappear?  What can I ever do to make up for this?  He’s going to hate me.”

Rachel studied my face.  “Do you have a crush on him?”

“A crush.  What does that even mean?  It’s something you do with insects and wads of Kleenex.”

She kept her eyes on my face, unsmiling, so I said, “Wait’ll you get to know him, Rachel.”

“Oh no,” Rachel said softly.  “Oh you poor, poor thing.”

I felt a crimp of anger.  “Just forget it.”

“Don’t get embarrassed.  I’m just thinking…Okay, this is going to sound patronizing, so I’m really sorry.  But of course you’re falling for the first person who’s showing you this kind of compassion, thinking about you over himself, because all your life you’ve been deprived of it.”

“What’re you talking about?  You’re making me sound so pathetic and desperate.  I have a good life.”

“You know what I mean.  I’m not blaming you, and I’m not saying whatever you’re feeling is pathetic, I’m just saying you should maybe look a little closer at it.  Because you know you can’t build a relationship based on lies, right?  It’s like trying to build a house without a foundation.  It’s never going to hold.”

“I’m not trying to build anything!” I said.  “Just stop, okay?  You’re treating me like I’m thirteen and considering having sex.”           

“Okay, okay.  Look how fast you go from being eternally grateful to yelling.”  She glanced at me.  “We need to talk about Janie at some point.  I went to see her yesterday.”

“Did you kick her ass?”

“Almost.”  She shook her head.  “Tomorrow, okay?  Right now I’m so tired my eyeballs feel like they’ve been run over by a Hummer.  I just want you to be prepared.  Most of what she told me makes absolutely no sense.”

“Why am I not surprised?  I doubt she thought any of this through.”

“Or maybe she did think it through and she’s just insane.  I thought the fact we’re best friends meant you had good taste, but obviously not.  It made me feel insulted.”  Rachel stood and reached to hold me.  “It’s the only thing about all this that I don’t forgive you for.”

*                                  *                                  *

Back in the other bedroom, Star was hunched under the covers, in fetal position.  I sat on the futon to rest my hand on her back.

“I’m so embarrassed,” she said hoarsely.

“Don’t be.  Everybody understands.”

“No they don’t.  How can they possibly?  Rachel spent the whole drive whispering Stop, stop, stop under her breath, I heard her.  She thinks I’m a fruitcake.”

“Well you are a fruitcake.”  I lay facing her, my arm over her shoulders, breathing in her stale breath.  “I missed you, Ma.”

“That’s because you’re a fruitcake too.  But in a week you’ll probably look back on this conversation and think ‘What was I thinking?’”  She brought a fist up to her mouth and said, “I don’t know if I can do this, Lainey.”

“You can,” I said.  “You are.”  I kissed the top of her head, suddenly remembering a night when I’d been eight or nine.  It was the morning before my stage debut, playing Smitty in the third grade production of Peter Pan, and I was ridiculously nervous, especially considering the minimalism of my lines, various combinations of “Ahoy!” and “Aye-aye!” and “Yonder Peter lies!”  But the whole school would be there including all my teachers since kindergarten, and lying in bed that morning, trying to run through my choreography, I’d been almost in tears.  So Star had sat with me and talked about fear, how you could make it into something physical.  A spring like a Slinky you could compress and then shove down from your chest into a foot.  Hold it there so it couldn’t escape into the rest of you.

That day on stage, I’d looked out from behind our cardboard pirate ship and seen her in the audience, beaming in her best dress and newly highlighted hair.  Pointing at her right foot.  And I’d smiled back and pointed at my own foot, then made it through the play without tripping over lines or shoelaces.  Because my mother had been powerful, and she’d known how to handle fear.  How had we both gone from that to this?

I kicked off my shoes and slipped under the covers, curling tight against Star to keep from falling off the edge of the small bed.  She wasn’t the same person of course, had been taken over by someone else entirely, and I’d realized that even as a kid.  She started to change, and that was when I went from calling her Mommy to thinking of her as Star, the adult-child inhabiting my mother’s body.  Even my love for her was different, tinged with disappointment and disdain, and something that wasn’t contempt, but also wasn’t quite uncontemptuous either. 

Lying there, I wished it was Molly in my arms instead.  My love for Molly was so simple and pure, so much the opposite of my love for Star, and it had made me realize I was capable of unconditional adoration.  Love should have an undercurrent of joy, I realized, not pain, and it was ridiculous I’d been deprived of it so long.  And I was about to pull away, to take Molly from Alex and bring her downstairs, curl around her and sing lullabies and think of nothing else.  But then Star started to shake against me and I felt an immediate twist of guilt.  So instead I brushed a tear off her cheek with my thumb, then closed my eyes.  “I love you Ma,” I whispered, and she patted my hand in the way one might when accepting an apology.

Sometime later I drifted awake, and lay there without moving or speaking, without opening my eyes.  Listening to the snap-snap-snap of Star laying out her tarot cards.

*                                  *                                  *

By the next morning, Star seemed somewhat better.  But she refused to come downstairs, huddling in her room like a cat will huddle in a closet after a move to a new home, pretending the world outside her safe corner does not exist.

After my shower I went downstairs to sit with Alex as he fixed breakfast, and found Rachel already in the kitchen with Molly on her lap, cradling a mug of coffee.

“It’s all related, I guess,” she said.  “I don’t read because it’s easier to flop somewhere mindlessly and be fed useless information.  And you read because you don’t have a TV, which is something I’d aspire to except I know I can’t live without The Bachelor.”

“The bachelor?”

Rachel waved her hand dismissively.  “You don’t want to know.  Women like me love it because we can look at these girls with their uniformly flowing hair and saline chests, and feel smugly superior.  Hi Lainey.”

I widened my eyes at her, and she widened her eyes back.  “Haley!  Hi Haley!”

But Alex didn’t seem to have noticed.  He just waved his spatula at Rachel.  “You’re vastly superior to anyone with a saline chest.  Why would anybody want boobs shaped like volley balls?  Maybe they protect their organs in frontal impact car crashes, but otherwise who do they think they’re kidding?”

“I love this man!” Rachel said.  “Of course he doesn’t realize I have to fold my boobs into my bra these days, like origami.”

“I’ve seen it,” I said.  “She does.  It’s quite impressive.”

Molly squirmed in Rachel’s arms to get down, then crawled to me and pulled at my pant leg.  “Da!” she said, and I pointed to my chest.  “Ma,” I said.  “Ma, ma, ma.”

Rachel raised her eyebrows but I ignored her, swinging Molly up onto my hip.  “I missed you!” I said, then, “That looks incredible, Alex.”

“It’s my cream cheese French toast, and it is incredible.”  Alex grinned, then added, “He said, modestly.  I figured this was an occasion that called for many calories.  How’s your mom doing?”

“Okay, I guess.  As okay as could be expected.”

“We were just saying maybe Rachel should stay till tomorrow, make sure your mom can handle this.  If she needs to go back, you want to find that out now.”

“Plus, this is a mini-adventure for me,” Rachel said.  “It feels like prehistoric times.  I mean no CNN!  No mini marts!  I want to take advantage, maybe fish and carve arrowheads and try hunting for fur.”

“You’re scared to squash bugs, so I don’t see you hunting game,” I said, then, “Would you mind staying today?  I wouldn’t want you driving Star home again because then we’d be right back where we started.  But I think it might be kind of a relief for her if she feels like there’s options left open, even if it’s just a sham.”

“I honestly don’t mind.  Let Craig order takeout and change diapers one more night.  I’m eating cream cheese French toast and lounging.”  She grinned.  “So is Star coming down?”

“I was thinking I might bring up her breakfast and eat with her, actually.  Which I realize is incredibly antisocial, but it looks like she’s not quite up to leaving the bedroom.”

“Why don’t we all eat with her?” Alex said.  “Make it like a picnic and eat on the floor.  You think she’ll be up to meeting me yet?”

“I think so.  She’s actually okay with new people, it’s just the two things at once, new person, new house, might’ve been too much last night.  Plus, I don’t think she would’ve wanted you to see the state she was in.”  I shrugged.  “But she seems a little better now.  I’ll go up to make sure she’s presentable.”

I brought Molly upstairs and pushed open Star’s door.  “Hey, look who’s here to see you.”

Star had drawn the blinds I’d opened earlier, and was sitting cross-legged in the dark, hands in her lap.  She smiled weakly at Molly.  “You come bearing gifts.”

“You up for company?  Alex is making breakfast, and he was thinking we could all eat in here with you.”

Her face fell, a sudden look of blank despair, but then she said, “That’s nice of him.  Sure, I’m fine, I’m good.”

“That was unconvincing.  Where’s your brush?”  I set Molly on the floor so I could root through her carryall, pulled out her boars-hair brush and sat on the bed beside her to brush through her sleep-mussed hair.  “We’ll make you pretty,” I said, tugging gently at a tangle.

“It’ll take a lot more than a brush to make me pretty.  I’d need scalpels and skin staples and fat vacuums.”  She held a hand to Molly.  “Come here, baby, come here, sweet thing.”

Molly glanced at me, then gave a tentative smile and reached to pull off one of her socks.  “Do you have the story straight?” I said, arranging Star’s hair at her shoulders.  “Who I am?  Where we’re from?”

“You’re Haley,” she said.  “What’s our last name?”

I frowned.  “I don’t know yet.  It actually hasn’t come up.”

Star frowned down at her clenched hands. 

“It doesn’t matter, okay?  Maybe he’ll call you Mrs. So-and-so, and then you’ll know.  But okay, my name’s Haley, and where are we from?”

“Originally,” Star said, “originally we’re from Austin.”

“Atlanta,” I said.

Star looked momentarily startled.  “I don’t know anything about Atlanta,” she said.  “I was looking forward to being a Texas gal.  I was going to do an accent and everything.”

“Well that would’ve been a disaster, so let’s thank God we’re not from Texas.  And where do we live now?”

“After Atlanta, you moved up to Chicago and I started having my problems.  So I came up to stay with you and your husband.  What’s his name?”

“David,” I said.

She gave me an amused smile.  “Right.  Well that makes it easy to remember.”

“Just don’t say more than you have to about the past, okay?  That’s what I’ve been doing and it’s working fine.  And if you do end up revealing any new details about us when I’m not there, just tell me about it after so we can get our story straight.”

Her face tightened.  “I hate this, Lainey.  I’m not good at this.”

“You have to be good at it.  Don’t worry, okay?  It gets easier.  You’ll see.”

I went back downstairs and Rachel and Alex and I carried up a tray piled high with French toast, melon and sausage, plates, mugs and two carafes.  We knocked on the door and entered, and Alex set the tray on our makeshift desk and approached Star with his hand outstretched.  “It’s so nice to finally meet you, Ms. Davis.”

“Yes!  Star said, taking his hand and beaming at me.  “I’m Ms. Davis!  Star Davis, but you can call me Star.”  She pumped his hand, and I bit back a grimace.

“You and Haley look exactly alike,” Alex said, “except for the hair, I guess.  But your hair used to be lighter too, Haley, didn’t it?”

“That’s right!” Star said brightly.  “It did!”

I gave her a look.

“So welcome.  I hope the bed was okay.  It’s left over from my days of poverty after college, and I think my back’s never been the same since.”

“The bed was lovely,” she said, then glanced worriedly at me as if looking for confirmation, afraid she’d said something wrong.  Oh, this was going to be hard.  I should’ve realized Star had a tendency to overthink everything, so now that she actually had a reason to think before she spoke, of course her brain was clogged with the vast number of possibilities.

We started serving the food onto plates, and Alex lifted the carafes towards her.  “Regular or chicory?”

“Chicory!” Star said.  “I grew up on chicory, when my parents couldn’t afford coffee.  I haven’t had it since I was a teenager…”  She grinned at me.  “In Atlanta!”

“A girl after my own heart.”  Alex smiled, filling her mug.  “I can already tell I’m going to like you.”

Star kept beaming.  “He called me a girl.  I’m about as much a girl as I am a lobster, but thanks for making my day.”

I watched them together, her giddy smile, the kind respect in his voice despite her giddiness and her rumpled clothes, and the obvious fact she hadn’t showered, and her blatant–as Janie put it–weirdness, and I thought how everything might, after all, turn out okay.

*                                  *                                  *

What finally got Star downstairs that day was her desire to use the internet.  She wanted to do a chart for Alex, based on the date, time and place of his birth, and without her astrology books she needed online resources.  She’d drawn all the curtains in the living room and closed all the doors; her legs shook as she walked and her breathing was forced, and there was an edginess to her that worried me.  But here she was, in a new room!  Of a new house!  In a new state!  The biggest step she’d taken in years.

As she worked I went outside with Alex to finish the garden, while Rachel played with Molly on the front porch and periodically checked the living room to make sure Star was still alive.  I hadn’t had a chance yet to talk to her about her conversation with Janie, had been avoiding time alone with her so we wouldn’t have the chance.  Obviously I’d need to eventually, but I have to say this, even knowing how delusional it was, and pathetic and probably despicable of me.  In the past few days, Molly had become mine.  This life had become mine, and I knew hearing Rachel talk about Janie would take all that away.

I set all the flowerpots in the places I thought would work best, the rose bushes and rhododendrons and broad-leafed hosta against the house, the smaller flower bunches, phlox, zinnias and peonies, marigolds and bluebells, framing the stone path.  I arranged them by color and height, stepped back and made a few adjustments, and then Alex and I started to dig.

Or rather, Alex dug and I watched while trying not to look like I was watching.  The muscles working in his back; the sweat flushing his face and trickling down his cheeks; kneeling with him, our hands in the rich earth to set the flowers in place; it was all, I have to say, enough to make me want to break out in song.

We were nearly finished when Rachel called, “Hey, she ever done this before?”  We turned, and there Molly was, on her feet, gripping onto the porch rails to watch us.  I rushed over to her, feeling a spear of pride followed by guilt.  “I missed her first time!” I said.

“What did you miss?”  Rachel raised her eyebrows.  “Here it is and here you are.”

But the fact remained, I’d missed Molly’s first time standing because I’d been eyeing Alex’s muscles.  There had to be a lesson there.  

Rachel and Alex spent a minute profusely admiring the strength of Molly’s legs and Molly raised her arms to them, which made her promptly fall backwards onto her butt.  She let out a surprised yelp, then looked at me as if deciding whether to cry, before she unexpectedly started clapping.

“Well now she thinks everything she does is worthy of applause,” Rachel said.

Alex scooped her into his arms and planted a big kiss on her cheek, seeming almost giddy.  “You stood!  You’re the superstar of babies!  You’re the infant track and field gold medallist!”

Rachel shook her head at me, and I smiled and shrugged.  Alex saw the gesture and smiled back.  “Yeah, I know.  I’m acting like I have something to do with the superstar baby genes.”  Which made Rachel give me a look and another small shake of her head like she was saying, Don’t you go there, Missy, don’t you dare…

*                                  *                                  *

After finishing with the planting, we stepped back to admire our work.  “It’s just awesome!” Rachel called from the porch.  I stretched out my spine surveying the land, the splashes of pink, red and purple, flower heads drooping heavy on their stems, their heady scent filling the air.  “We should get a bench,” I said.  “One of those old fashioned benches with the green ironwork, or maybe a round table and chairs.  I just want to sit in the middle of it all.”  And then my face flushed.  I’d said ‘We should get,’ like the garden was ours.  Like we were a couple deciding the things to pick out for our home.  “You should get,” I said.

Alex smiled.  “You’re totally right.  I was thinking about it when I first moved here, about ordering chairs for the porch because it seemed like the epitome of country living, but then I’d picture myself, this three-day-stubbled man rocking wistfully and staring out at the lonely, weedy land, and it was almost enough to make me want to run back to the city and try internet dating.”

I glanced sideways at him.  We hadn’t talked at all about his girlfriend since he’d avoided the topic two days before, and now I was starting to suspect there wasn’t a girlfriend at all, at least not anymore, that he’d just invented her to keep the women here away.  Who knew when he might’ve written the notes I’d found in his desk?  It might’ve been years ago; maybe she was the reason he’d left the city.  The notes could’ve been the bitter end to a rocky relationship, which had turned him off women altogether.  Which you’d think might mean that he now needed someone kind and sweet and generous and adoring to help him heal.

“But now it’d be completely different,” he said.  “I can’t wait till the roses come out.  It’s going to look…blowsy.”

I smiled.  “Blowsy?”

“Drunken, voluptuous…like a woman in heat.  You’ve seen flowers like that.”  He wiped his forehead with the back of his arm, leaving a wide smudge of dirt.  “Blowsy.”

“Ah, right.  This’ll be a slutty, whorish garden.”

“Well now that’s just taking it too far.”  He smiled.  “So why don’t I make us a late lunch, and we can find out what your mom has to say about my future.  Keep your fingers crossed that I’m not doomed to a life of rocking alone on the porch and waiting for something to happen that never does.”  I raised my eyebrows at him, but he just turned to the house. 

Waiting for something.  Like me, exactly.  All my life I’d been waiting for something, without even knowing exactly what that thing was.  Waiting for fulfillment, maybe; for joy, which probably was the way almost everybody felt.  This general sense of potential, that there must be something better approaching.  Something destined that when it finally reached me would be instantly recognizable.  Finally, I’d say, with my arms crossed impatiently.  There you are.

*                                  *                                  *

We ate at the dining table with Molly crawling around our feet, pulling at our shoelaces, periodically stopping to taste her fist.  Star didn’t mention the results of Alex’s chart, and when he finally brought it up she gave a startled frown, then said she wasn’t ready to discuss it.  And that was all she said for the next ten minutes, just sat there shuffling the food on her plate, arranging and rearranging it with great concentration like she was trying to create some expressionistic form of food art.

Lunch was an extravaganza of the type of food you’d eat if you used lunch as a verb: flatbread with tapenade, feta cheese and smoked salmon, a salad with pine nuts and baby lettuces.  “How does a tiny grocery in a tiny town keep all this in stock?” I said.

“Oh, it’s Raymond, the store owner; he humors me.  First time I shopped there after coming from the city, I went up to the counter and asked where the edamame was, and he just stared at me like I must’ve evolved from somewhere strange and distant.  He’s been joking about it ever since.  But the next time I went in, there it was, edamame.  And then without me asking, he started ordering all these random, weird things like tofurkey and quail egg jelly.  I don’t know if he was making fun of me or if he was trying to impress me, but I had to bring them home, because of course he’d gone out of his way to find them.”  He shrugged.  “So after the first couple weeks I realized if I wanted anything edible I’d have to place actual orders.”

“You know your grocer by his first name,” Rachel said.  “I think I might have to move here.”

Star sniffed at a bite of salmon, then dropped it.  Her hand was shaking.  “I guess my stomach’s not up to it today,” she said.  “I’m sorry…d’you mind if I go back up to the bedroom?”

“You okay?” Alex said, then gave a small cough, probably aware of the absurdity of the question.  “Why don’t we bring our food up like this morning?  Another picnic.”

“No.”  Star stood quickly.  “No, no, I just need to rest a little.  This is all…it’s all a little much.”  She gave each of us a wavering smile.  “But I’ll be fine!”

I stood to take her arm.  “I’ll go with you.”

“No, stay!  What’re you gonna do, hold my hand for the next week?  The only thing that might actually help me is if you opened my skull, took my brain in your fists and squeezed.  Just stay and enjoy your lunch.”  She walked out into the hall.

Rachel looked at me.  “Well!” she said brightly.  “This is going great!”

“Better than I expected, actually.”  I shrugged.  “I mean I didn’t know what to expect.  But she’s alive, she’s not unconscious, she hasn’t OD’d yet on Xanax.”

“Should I stay tomorrow too?  Just in case this doesn’t work?”

“You really want to relive yesterday’s trip?  I’ll make her be fine, through sheer force of will.  Aided by pharmaceuticals.”  I smiled grimly.  “Excuse me, I’m sorry, I’m just going to try and settle her down.  Mind watching Molly a minute?”  I followed Star from the room and upstairs.

Star was in bed, rabidly tearing paper into scraps over the trash bin.  As I watched, she lifted those scraps again to tear them into smaller bits, her face red and her eyes fierce.

I sat next to her and waited for her to explain.  When she didn’t, I said, “What?”

She let the scraps sift between her fingers, then stared down at them a minute before she spoke.  “It’s his chart,” she said.

Despite myself, this scared me a little.  I didn’t believe in astrological charts, just like I didn’t believe in the card readings.  But the charts she’d done on me, and various neighbors and movie stars, had proved true often enough that I guess I was holding open the possibility they might be loosely relevant.  “What did it say?  Is he an axe murderer?  He going to die before he hits forty?  What?”

“I can’t tell him.  Some of this I can use, but I’ll make the rest up.  It’s not a good chart, Lainey.  Nothing’s good; I shouldn’t be here, you shouldn’t be here!”

“Look at me.”  I reached for her chin and roughly turned her face towards me.  “Stop.  Snap out of this.”

Her eyes filled.  “Okay.  You want to know?  You’re going to ruin him, Lainey, that’s what my readings last night said and now his chart’s saying the same thing.  That he’s too vulnerable and trusting; it’s the issue he’s going to deal with for the rest of his life, learning that no one should be trusted, and it’s going to end up destroying his soul.”

“Destroying his soul.”  I tried to put lyricism and humor into my voice, but it wasn’t exactly a humorous phrase, so I ended up sounding like the narrator in a horror spoof.

“He’s a good man, Lainey, too good.  And you’re going to hurt him.”

“Well as long as he’s not an axe murderer.”

“This isn’t funny!”

And she was right, it wasn’t funny.  Not that I believed her, or at least most of me didn’t, but the problem was, she believed herself, and this would only exacerbate her paranoia.

“The themes of his life are betrayal, especially by strong women, and entrapment.  I told you I did a chart on that poor man in Louisiana who got arrested three times for things his girlfriend set him up for?  Well this was the same sort of chart.”

“I’m going to get him arrested?”

She watched me closely.  “What do you know about him, Lainey?  How much has he told you?”

“He’s told me enough.  Enough that I know I can trust him.”

“I’m not saying you shouldn’t.”  Still holding my eyes, she shook her head slowly.  “He’s not a happy man, Lainey.  This isn’t something I got from his chart, it’s something I can tell from seeing him.  He’s the kind of person who puts on a happy attitude so he can hide everything that’s underneath.  But I think there’s a lot hidden.  It’s not a good energy field to be around.”

I refrained, rather admirably, from reminding her of the energy field I’d been around all my life, but I couldn’t help the sarcasm.  “So what’re you suggesting I do, exactly?  Do you have any ideas?  Should I turn myself in and surround myself with the energy of a jail cell?”

Star turned back to the window, just as Rachel knocked and entered.  “I was hoping we could talk in the other bedroom,” she said.  “We okay here?”

“We aren’t,” I said.  “We think we’d be better off incarcerated.”

“Interesting.”  Rachel smiled grimly.  “Okay, I’ll post bail long as you don’t tell the cops I was involved.”

I smoothed back Star’s hair.  “You’ll be okay,” I said, more to reassure myself than anything else.

In Rachel’s bedroom, I sat in the armchair and she sat on the bed and leaned back against the headboard.  “I guess I assumed she’d be feeling better by now,” she said.  “That once she realized the world didn’t fall apart when she left home, she’d relax a little.”

“The problem is she does still think the world’s about to fall apart.”  I slumped back in my chair.  “She doesn’t like Alex’s energy field.”

“What the heck is there not to like?  I love his energy field.  I could marry and have babies with his energy field.”

“I know.  Maybe she’s just projecting her own issues on him.  I have to think it’ll get better once she gets used to being here.”

“Gets used to it?”  Rachel glanced at me.  “What’re your long-range plans, Lainey?  How long’re you going to do this?”

“Haven’t you noticed I have no idea?  And I’m trying not to think about it.  Avoiding thinking about things is one of my primary talents, which I guess is how I got into this situation in the first place.”

“Crap, Lainey, I have this unbearable urge to shake you like you’re one of my kids.  And I’d do it, too, if it wasn’t illegal and if I thought it would do any good.”  She rose and walked to the window, stood there looking out.  “So you want to talk about Janie?”

No, I thought.  “Okay,” I said.

“Because she’s twisted.  Really twisted, but also really charismatic, which I guess you know, so she almost convinced me she knows what she’s doing.  But of course she doesn’t.  The only thing I know for sure is she does love her daughter.”

I felt an involuntary twinge at the words, her daughter.  “Somehow that doesn’t quite excuse anything,” I said.

“Believe me, I know.”  Rachel turned to face me.  “But she had this desperation, she kept asking how Jacqueline was, even when I said I didn’t know anything.  Like did I think Jacqueline missed her?  Did she seem angry?  Or like her feelings were hurt?”

“Molly,” I said.

Rachel fixed her eyes on mine.  “Right, no comment.  Or I’ll imply a comment, but not actually make one.”  She folded her arms and crossed one leg in front of the other.

“Okay, whatever.  What did Janie say about what she’s planning?  Does she even know?”

“I don’t think so.  Like I said, the sense I get is that she was desperate, and that now she’s even more desperate.  She kept begging me not to turn her in, saying how this was her only chance to save…”  Rachel stretched a slim smile.  “Molly.  But the weird thing was how she kept talking about David McGrath, what a complete scumbag he was, but in a way that made it sound like she was more hurt than scared or mad.  She said he had no idea how to love someone, how all he cared about was the parties he’d be invited to and whether they’d make it into the Styles pages and blah, blah, blah.  It made me wonder what her real motives are.”

“You mean she’s more interested in hurting him than protecting Molly.”

“I’m sure she wants to protect Molly too, but there’s obviously other ways she could’ve done that.  I mean, giving away her baby so she can accuse him of kidnapping?  Who’d do that?” 

I picked a stray thread off the armchair.  “Did she say anything about me?  What did she say when she found out I left with Molly?”

“She already knew.  I guess she’d come by late at night and early in the morning a couple times and saw your car was gone, and realized you must’ve seen the news stories and freaked out.  But she didn’t seem upset at all, not how most people would be.  She said she’d try and call you in the next week or so, and I should tell you she said ‘Hi.’”

I raised my eyebrows.  “Hi?”

“Yeah, exactly.  Maybe there’s a wealth of emotion behind it that we’re missing.”

I bit the inside of my cheek, then said, “Well I guess there’s no right thing she really could say.  She’s probably overwhelmed and scared.”

“My vote’s still that she’s just twisted.  But okay, maybe I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt.  I don’t know, Lainey, the thing that gets me most is how she seems to think what she’s doing is completely justified.  There’s no sense of guilt, no apologizing for what she did to you.  She’s not a totally heartless; like I said she obviously loves Molly.  But she’s completely self-serving, like toddlers who think the world revolves around their need for juice and their bathroom habits.”

I thought of the times I’d been invited to Janie’s home, her stiff four-poster bed, dark wood and damask curtains, more like a museum than a child’s bedroom.  The day in fifth grade when she’d broken her arm, and a taxi had to bring her from the hospital.  The silence of the meals I’d eaten there, napkins folded in our laps, knives and forks set down between each bite, the horror on Janie’s face when she’d spilled a glass of milk, and her mother’s snapped but distracted reprimand.  She’d needed to think of herself first. 

“When she calls I’ll find out where she’s coming from and what she’s planning,” I said.  “She has to know more than she’s telling you, and if she doesn’t, I’ll help her figure it out.”  You’re better off now, I’d tell her.  A single mother in a dead-end job, who’s gonna want you?  You take Molly back, and even on the off-chance you don’t get caught and arrested, you’ll almost definitely end up alone.

Because I knew how to use other people’s weaknesses too.

*                                  *                                  *

That night I sat with Molly in my bedroom.  She was fussing, her face pink with frustration and I tried to distract her, wiggling her big toe.  “This little piggy went to market!” I said, then made a disharmonious song of it.  “This leet-le pig-gy went home, home, home,” I sang, but she batted my hand away, maybe ticklish, maybe rebelling at my tone-deafness or maybe noticing something desperate in the way I’d been clinging to her.

“Hungry?” I said, holding up her bottle.  She batted it to the floor, and I bent to smooth my face against her rounded cheek.  “I know,” I whispered, “It’ll be okay, I promise.  There’s no way I’m letting anybody hurt you.”

She started to whimper, throwing herself sideways against me so I lifted her, and sat her in my lap.  And then, I unbuttoned my shirt.  Hesitated, and then unclasped my bra.  I cradled her against me, breathing in her baby scent.  And brought her to my breast.

 

                                                                                                                                                                                      -9-                    

 

Rachel batted away the check for gas money I tried to stuff into her purse.  And then she took my hand and pulled me down the front path, out of earshot of Alex who was standing by the door with Molly.  “I’ll tell her Molly’s doing good,” Rachel said under her breath.  “I’ll stop by tomorrow and tell her that.”

“Tell her she’s doing great,” I said.  “How now she seems like she’s probably happier than ever in her life, and how she’s learning all kinds of new things.”

“Yeah, okay.  I’ll say she’s learned how to read and do long division, and that not only did she tell me she’s happy, she said it in Greek.”

I smiled.  “I’m going to miss the hell out of you.”  The past couple days, here with the people I loved best in the world, I’d started to feel more grounded than probably ever in my life.  Despite the fact that Star was hovering on the brink of internal combustion, I’d felt somehow like everything was as it should be.

Rachel pulled me into a one-armed hug.  “No you won’t, not really.  Or maybe you’ll miss my sparkling personality, but I think you’ll be happier without me, actually.  You’ve built this whimsical storyline in your head, which I don’t know where it’s going but I do know I don’t fit inside it.  I don’t agree with it, and I don’t know how to hold my tongue so I’m just getting in the way, like the alarm clock that breaks into a dream.”

The phone rang, and I turned to watch Alex rush inside to get it, trying to decide how to respond.  But of course there was no good response.  She was right, probably.  Without her here I could immerse myself back into the dream.  Rachel was the one continually reminding me this wasn’t real.

After she drove away, I stood awhile gazing down the street.  And realized I didn’t care if this wasn’t real.  My happiness was, in a way, just like Star’s fear, maybe based on a mental illness, but that didn’t make the feeling any less genuine.

I shoved my hands in my pockets, breathing in the honeysuckle scent of the new garden.  I’d told Valerie at the nursery that I’d stop by that afternoon with a mockup of the mural for her walls, so maybe I’d sit out here to sketch it.  The garden would be inspirational.  I made a box with two fingers and a thumb and held it against one eye like a camera frame, looking through it at the flowers, the expanse of lawn, the pond and the trees beyond.  And then I went inside for my sketchpad and pens.

Alex was on the phone in the kitchen, speaking in low tones.  I stood in the entryway a moment, trying to listen, then realized what I was doing and turned away.

Upstairs, Star was in her bedroom standing at the window.  The Venetian blinds were drawn, slanted only partway open, the room dim and dusty feeling.  “So that’s it,” she said when I entered.  “Stranded.”  She smiled widely, but I could see the strain behind it.

“You made it,” I said.  “You took your biggest fear and stomped on it .”

“Well I wouldn’t say I stomped on it, I’d say I slithered underneath it.  From prison A to prison B, except here…”  She gestured at the lawn, the miles of woods beyond.  “Here, I’m alone with myself and my patheticness.  There’s no TV and I don’t even have my people.  What am I going to do all day except tear out my hair strand by strand and make motorcycle sounds with my lips?”

By people, she must mean her clients, the women who came weekly for readings or personal horoscopes and sometimes stayed an hour or more to chat, only then handing over their tens and twenties, furtively like they were paying a hooker for an evening of pretend love.  Star thought of these women as her friends.  “You’re not alone, Ma, and we’ll find stuff for you to do.  Like did you see the library downstairs?  You could read for a decade and still not run out of books.  And we’ll find you new people.  I’m sure there’s folks here who’d be interested in a reading.”

“They’ll probably be weirdos,” she said.

I raised my eyebrows at her, and she glowered back.  “I’m going to ignore you,” I said, bending to the corner for my supplies.  “I have to work on some sketches, and I was thinking of doing them outside.  If you want, I’ll sit right there in the garden so you can see me.”

“I used to watch you playing in the backyard while I was cooking,” Star said, “to make sure you stayed safe.”  She turned again to the window.  “There’s irony there somewhere.”

I knew I should probably find something comforting to say, try and reassure her.  (Without you, I could’ve been abducted!)  But there was no way really to do it without sounding even more patronizing, so I just chuckled halfheartedly and went downstairs.

Alex was still on the phone, his voice raised now, although I could only hear fractions of it: murmur, murmur, KNOW you, murmur, murmur, are you SERIOUS-ly murmur, murmur.  I walked down the hall and outside.

There was nowhere to sit except on the ground, so that’s what I did, sat on the stone path with my sketchbook on my lap, surrounded by the flowers.  It was such a startling transition, slapped from the dimness of Star’s room into this vibrant kaleidoscope, black and white to Oz, that for a good five minutes I was paralyzed, like an overstimulated baby.  I sat unmoving, gazing at a gardenia, thinking only: RED.

“Haley!”  I looked up to see Susie Greer waving from the road, holding the hand of a thin, balding man in a purple tracksuit.  “Look at this!” she said.  “All it took was a woman in Alex’s life and he gave his home a facelift.”

“You like?” I said.

“Love.”  She clapped her hands softly.  “Haley, this is Jack, the man who serves as, but will never be, my husband.”

“That’s because I’m too good for you.”  Jack walked up the path, arm extended.  “Susie told me about you.  You coming to the barbecue next weekend?”

I stood and took his hand.  “Barbecue?”

“She hasn’t been invited yet,” Susie said.  “Tell Alex we’re having hamburgers Sunday and that you’re both coming.  Molly too, obviously.”

“Well thanks, okay.”

“And tell him it’ll be very chichi, so he should bring something fabulous.  Where is Molly anyway?  And how come you were sitting on the ground?”

“She’s inside with Alex.”  I held up my blank sketch pad.  “And I’m trying to get inspired by the garden.  I was hired by this woman Valerie?”

“Valerie Meyers?”

“Yeah, I guess so.  From the nursery?  She asked me to paint a mural on one of the shop walls, so I’m trying to work on a mock-up.”

“You paint murals?” Jack said.  “Well we’ve always wished we had a mural!  Of the beach because I grew up in Kennebunk.  Are you any good?”

They lived together?  I didn’t think they were lovers; Susie’s gaze when she turned to him was obviously adoring, but Jack’s purple sweats and a certain manner about him suggested that probably wasn’t possible.  I could imagine my relationship with Alex turning into this, if I stayed long-term.  A lopsided friendship, him gently accommodating, me wanting something I could never have.  “I don’t know if I’ll be here long enough to do another mural, but I could sketch an idea for you, and you could try and do it on your own.  Beaches are pretty easy.”

“We have the drawing talent of prehistoric humanoids,” Susie said, “so don’t waste your time unless you think you’ll be able to paint it yourself.  But I hope you stay awhile.  We need a baby in the neighborhood, and fresh blood to spice things up.  This place has the energy and pizzazz of a mausoleum.  I’ll tell Alex that, and maybe he’ll be convinced to hold you hostage.”

“She’d probably handcuff you to the porch herself,” Jack said, “Except then you couldn’t paint our mural.”  He held up his hand.  “Sunday?”

“Sunday,” I said, waving back.  “Nice to meet you.”

After they’d gone I sat back down, a faint smile on my face, luxuriating in simple contentedness.  And then I set my sketchbook on my lap and started to work, penciling in a garden path, a trellis climbing with ivy, multicolored scribbles to suggest the flowers.  I don’t know how long it was I was sitting there when I heard a small shuffling behind me, and turned to see Alex sitting next to me, cradling Molly in his lap.  I jumped in my seat.  “How long’ve you been there?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.  I guess Rachel’s gone?  I really liked her.”

“Yeah, me too.  She’s one of the few people in the world who I think gets me.”  I smiled.  “And likes me in spite of it.”

Molly scrambled off Alex’s lap, reached for a pink petunia, squashed it in her fist and then brought it to her mouth.  I pried it from her fingers as Alex reached for the sketchbook.  “Pretty,” he said.  “Kind of ethereal.”  He flipped back through the pages, slowly.  “Wow, you’re really talented.  And you painted murals of all these?”

“Most of them, yeah.”  I felt a little heartskip of pride.  “And thanks.”

He turned to a sketch I’d made for a two year old, of the characters from Wind in the Willows: Mole and Ratty, Mr. Toad of Toad Hall, standing in a circle in the woods.  He looked at it a good two minutes and then said, “You can just tell, looking at this, what a good mom you are.  Just from the kindness in their faces.”

There was something melancholy in his voice I couldn’t interpret, and a haunted look in his eyes.  I remembered suddenly what Star had said about things hidden in him, how he wasn’t a happy man.  “You okay?” I said.

“What?”  He sounded somewhere between distracted and all-out vacant.  “Sure, unh-hunh, I’m fine.”

“I’ve never heard anybody say the word ‘sure’ with less conviction.”  I reached to touch his hand, then wondered if that might be inappropriate, so pulled it away again.  Figuring out appropriateness was so complex when you were dealing with a man who thought he’d known you, but actually didn’t, who maybe had a girlfriend or maybe not, on whom you kind of had a crush but knew the chances of him ever feeling the same were less than zero point zero, zero, zero one percent.  It was not your typical Miss Manners situation.

“Life’s just never simple, you know?  People aren’t simple.  You might think you have things worked out, but you’re usually wrong.”  He shook his head.  “Sorry, I know I’m sounding ridiculously, unnecessarily obscure.”

“It’s okay,” I said, “you don’t have to talk about it.”  I waited, on the off chance he might actually want to talk about it.  When he didn’t go on, I added, “But I’m a good listener, so if you ever need a shoulder, here I am.”  I patted my shoulder, then got immediately profoundly embarrassed at myself.  I might as well shake him, my hands around his neck, screaming, “Just tell me!”

“Thanks,” he said, then handed back my sketchbook.  He bent towards me and, for a tortured second, I was sure he was going to kiss my lips.  I froze, my eyes wide, something soft but fierce ballooning inside my chest, but he just kissed my forehead softly and then stood and walked into the house.

I gently touched the spot he’d kissed, my eyes on the door, then brought my fingers to my lips.

*                                  *                                  *

“I love these!” Valerie said, flipping from one page to the other, and then back.  “I knew you’d be good; you have that look about you, a kind of graceful look.”

“Well thanks.  But I’m about as graceful as an industrial dump truck.”  I sat on the bench next to her, across from a table holding multi-floored birdhouses.  “A drunk industrial dump truck.”

“I don’t mean that kind of graceful, I mean grace-ful.  Someone with grace.  You need grace to be an artist.”

I smiled like I knew what she was talking about and was accepting the compliment.  What did that mean exactly?  Who used the word grace outside of church and New Year’s Eve?  I’d have to look it up when I got back.

“So when can you start?” she said.

“Well I’ll have to buy paint, but I can start anytime.  I guess the sooner the better, since I don’t know how long I’m going to be here.”

“Oh, that again.”  She rolled her eyes to the sky and shook her head.  “Susie Greer called me and told me I should do what I could to convince you there was no better place on earth, and that to leave would be like, I don’t know, flushing paradise down the toilet.”

“Well it’s not just me.  I mean, I’m sleeping in Alex’s bed and eating his food, and I even brought my mother a couple days ago.  He’s been incredible, but I know guests stink after three days.”

“You’re sleeping in Alex’s bed!”

My face flushed.  “That’s not what I mean; I mean a bed that belongs to him, in his house.”

“Ah,” Valerie said.  “Pity.”  She cupped her hand over mine.  “What if I said that I think Alex needs you here?”

I watched her, unblinking.  “Hunh?”

“You know all he went through with his family, his parents.”

I kept my eyes on her.  “Right.”

“And his sister.  I guess he thought he could come out here to get away from it all, but he should’ve realized in a place like this all you have is your thoughts, so they grow.  But with you and Molly here he’s happier, I could see it the other day.  He’s laughing more.”

I willed myself not to smile at this, but in the end I couldn’t help myself.  I looked down at my feet so Valerie wouldn’t see it, grinned at them.  “Well that’s good.  I guess I’ll just keep playing it by ear, see how he feels in the next week or so.  He’s been amazing with Molly, keeps offering to take her off my hands while I do other stuff, like coming out to see you.  But how long can someone lean on a person before that person starts to feel resentful?”

“It depends on the person.  I don’t think Alex has a resentful bone in his body.”

“Everybody does if you push hard enough.”  I shook my head.  “My mom thought he was sad too, though.  It’s interesting, because I couldn’t see it at all.  She said he had a negative energy field.”

“I guess he kind of does.  You have to look hard, but it’s there.”

  Hey…”  I glanced at her.  “Do you believe in that stuff?  How do you feel about Tarot?”

“My friend Gwen had her cards read.  The psychic told her she was going to get pregnant and a month later, bam, they found a tumor on her cervix.  Twisted coincidence?  I don’t know, but I guess you could say my feelings are mixed.  Why?”

“I’m just asking because my mom does readings.  She’s missing the folks who used to come for a reading and a visit, and I know she’d totally love it if you came by and introduced yourself.”

“I’d be happy to, long as I don’t end up with cancer.”

“I doubt there’s a causal relationship.”  I smiled.  “It’d e great if you came to meet her.  She’s a little shaken up being out here”–Understatement of the year–“and she could use the company.”

“Done deal, then.  I’ll try and stop by later this week.  I know what it’s like leaving your friends.  Did I tell you yet about my intercontinental adventure?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“It was the most important thing I ever did, and the hardest.  I left home, ran away basically, when I was eighteen, a week before I was supposed to graduate high school.  Graduating just seemed so banal; so, I don’t know, conformist, and being the rebel that I was, a rebel who’d just been dumped by the love of her life on top of it all, I just took off.  With the clothes on my back, a travel-sized toothbrush and an autographed Polaroid of James Dean.”

“You didn’t take extra undies or socks but you took a photo?”

“Yeah, that’s the embarrassing part of the story.  But you know, I was a kid and suddenly boyfriendless, and it felt like the one perfect thing I had was the memory of the night James Dean smiled at me and said, “Sure, I’ll sign an autograph.”  Valerie shrugged.  “So there I was, hitchhiking to wherever the people who picked me up were going.  Truckers mostly, who stopped because I was kind of cute back in the day, so I made it long distances.  If you traced my route you’d get something that looked like a spider web: California to Maine into Canada to Florida to Louisiana.  I met amazing people who’d been through hellish lives, and it taught me more about spiritual poverty than anything I’ve seen since.  This is an unhappy country, Haley.”

She lifted an orange begonia from the table beside her, smiled down at it.  “You know, I’ve heard people say God allows suffering so we can appreciate what a blessing it is not to suffer.  But I’ve always thought those people must not have suffered themselves, or they’d realize what a lousy excuse that is.”  She kept her eyes on the begonia a minute without speaking, then looked up into my face, wearing a sad smile.  “But I do know why He created flowers,” she said.  “They’re our booby prize for having to suffer through life.”

*                                  *                                  *

I got back to find a mess in the living room, torn boxes and wood slats and piles of hardware, Alex kneeling among it wielding an Allen wrench.  He looked up at me, grinning.  “Crib,” he said, then gestured behind him.  “Changing table, high chair, and a rocking chair to replace that old armchair in your bedroom.”

He sounded so proud, so pleased with himself, that I couldn’t help but smile back.  But inside, I was cringing.  There could be only one reason he was being so nice to us, because he felt sorry for us, a homeless mother and her abused baby.  We were his charity.

“Alex,” I said, “I wish you hadn’t.”

“I don’t care what you wish!  Molly’s glad I did.  She was starting to get lower back cramps from sleeping in her bassinet, and she thinks having to sit on a lap at the dining table is demeaning.”

I shook my head.  “I don’t know when I’m going to be able to pay you back for this, but I am going to pay you back.  For everything.”

“No you’re not.  You’ve paid me back by fixing up the yard which, by the way, two people have already phoned to compliment me on.  I feel like my house is the Pygmalion of the town.  And you’ve brought Molly to me, which is priceless, plus I’m getting free tarot readings from Star.  I bet readings usually go for at least fifty bucks a pop, so it’s a more than even trade.”  A ringing came from my purse and he nodded at it.  “Is that your phone?”

I reached into my purse pocket, feeling a sudden foreboding, and glanced at the number.  The call was coming from Akron.  I slowly flipped the phone open.  “Hello?”

“Lainey!”

It was Janie, and as soon as I heard her voice, some misapplied sense of caution made my legs walk me backwards from the room, on tiptoe.

“I have to take this,” I said, after I’d already reached the hall, and then I stuck my head back into the room and repeated, “I have to take this,” then strode upstairs, my heart in my throat.  “Yeah,” I said, “it’s me.”

“Lainey,” she said, “oh hell, Lainey, I need to talk to somebody who gets what I’m going through.  I can’t stand this.  These people are driving me crazy, the reporters, the cops.  How many times can they keep asking me the same questions?  Why can’t they get off my case!”

I pulled the phone from my ear, stared at it, then brought it back.  “What’s wrong with you?”

“I lost my baby!” she said.  “Doesn’t anybody get that?  Don’t they have any idea what that feels like?”

“You gave your baby to a near stranger,” I said slowly.  “Made that stranger commit a felony so that you could falsely accuse your ex-husband of kidnapping.  What does that feel like?”

Star emerged from her bedroom with Molly in her arms, staring at me wide-eyed.  For her sake, I loosened my shoulders and made myself breathe.  “Listen,” I said.  “I need money.  As soon as you can send it.”

“But…you’re staying with someone!  For free, Rachel told me.”

“I’m staying with him under false pretenses.”  I kept my voice light, smiled at Molly and winked at Star.  “And I intend to pay him back.”

“But I don’t have any money!  I know I promised you some, but don’t you get it?  They suggested I hire a criminal attorney, Lainey.  Me!  When he’s the child abuser!  So I had to take out a loan at a ridiculous interest rate, since I’m apparently high risk, and now I have basically nothing.  I had to sell my Burberry and Louis Vuitton at a consignment shop!”

“Oh poor Janie!  Without her Louis Vuitton!”

“Look Lainey, I understand you’re pissed, of course you are, but try and see it from my side for just a minute, okay?  I think they might suspect something, because why else do they keep asking questions?  I’m scared they might even polygraph me.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve heard sociopaths can pass polygraphs without even trying.”

“Jesus, Lainey!  How can you be sarcastic about this?  It’s starting to fall apart; I’m starting to fall apart because I’m all alone here and I’m scared as hell, and I miss Jacqueline something awful.  It’s like my heart’s been torn out of my chest and carted to New Hampshire!”  She gave a choked sob and I rolled my eyes.  Although despite myself, I was feeling a tiny bit sorry for Janie.  Rachel was right, she did love Molly.  And she probably had no idea what she was doing.

She paused, then said, “Can I talk to her, Lainey?”

“Um, she can’t talk,” I said.  “And even if she could, I’m sure she’d refuse to.”

“Please!  This is so screwed up, Lainey, it wasn’t supposed to go this way, and I just need to know she’s on the other end of the phone.”

I bit my tongue, my eyes on Molly who was now tasting a fistful of Star’s hair.  I touched Molly’s hand, her dimpled knuckles, then said, “Hold on,” and brought the phone to Molly’s ear.

And I stood there listening to Janie’s voice as she spoke in lilting, soothing, mothering tones, to my daughter.

 

                                                                                                                                                                                    -10-                  

 

I’d splurged on a pair of slim gray slacks from the only clothing store in town, and black boots with a good-sized heel.  The boots changed the way I walked, pushing my chest forward, imparting a swing-hipped confidence, the fabric of my pants swish-swishing between my thighs.  And as I walked with Alex to Susie’s barbecue, Molly cradled against me in her sling, I started imagining that I’d actually branched off from the old Lainey to become someone completely different.  That the old Lainey was maybe still there in Akron, eating her frozen dinners and endless bowls of Raisin Bran, watching Jeopardy with her mother, tucking into bed by nine every night with a cup of Lipton tea and a library book, and a hope that something interesting might happen tomorrow.

Here is Haley Davis, strolling in the twilight with her husband and young daughter, on their way to a dear friend’s dinner party.  Soon they will arrive and be greeted by hugs and exclamations, after which Haley will mingle effortlessly, charming the guests with her delightful repartee.

Susie’s house was at the end of the street, a yellow ranch with a steeply pitched roof.  The smell of charcoal and grilled meat wafted through the air, and I felt suddenly ravenous.  But I’d lost another two pounds in the past few days, and although those first pounds had come without any sort of intentional effort, I’d started purposely watching what I ate, to see how much thinner I could get before it started to become painful.

That morning I’d stood in my underwear a good ten minutes in front of the full length mirror, sucking in my stomach and admiring the parts of my body that had previously been under wraps, my hipbone and clavicle, the crease under my butt and the muscles along the sides of my thighs.  Nice to finally meet you! I’d wanted to say.  Maybe I’d diet until I got to meet my ribs, and then accidentally-on-purpose stroll from the bathroom in lingerie, at the precise time Alex happened to be strolling through the upstairs hall.  His gaze would follow me as I hurried to my bedroom, feigning embarrassment, and as I got to my door he’d reach for my slim waist and–

“Haley!” Susie called, striding towards me with her arms outstretched.  She was wearing an apron that reached almost to her ankles, printed with Kiss the Cook and a pair of lips.  She pulled me into her arms and then bent to kiss Molly.  “Well you’ve grown two inches since I saw you last!” she cooed.  “Are you a big eater?  Are you?  Are you?”

“I brought some bouillabaisse,” Alex said, “and the soufflé pan I’m serving it in is a gift for you.  Where should I put it?”

“Man, you must’ve believed my chichi comment.  I don’t even know for sure what bouillabaisse is.”  She pointed across the patio.  “There’s a buffet table over by the grill.  Burgers should be off in ten minutes or so, and I’ll warn you not to try the oatmeal bars unless you want to feel really, really laid back, if you know what I mean.  Miranda brought them, and you know Miranda.”  She took my arm.  “C’mon, Haley, I want to show you off to the folks you haven’t met.” 

That night was…how can I put it to do it justice?  A happy blur of storytelling, Molly passed adoringly from woman to woman, people laughing at my quick comebacks.  The night was incredible.

Because I did have–aided by a handful of beers–an exhilarating, previously untapped knack for witty repartee.  There’s times in your life when you know you’re absolutely on, in the zone, charisma channeled from some kindly muse (or the beer, or an oatmeal bar which I did try just to see.) 

Or maybe it was something else entirely; all the people around me who were a little bit “different”: Jack with his pink shirt and giggle, Valerie with her wild hair and a gauzy dress that showed her underwear and bra-less breasts, a man named Lee with a slim, braided gray beard that reached mid-chest, a woman named Sasha with her speech impediment and tendency to swoop her arms in dramatically wide circles while she talked.  They might be considered oddities in the world where I’d grown up, but here they were listened to and respected even by the people who weren’t so odd, their opinions asked for, their awkward jokes laughed at.  So for the first time maybe ever in my life I felt completely uninhibited, not worrying about whether they’d think I was interesting or intelligent or amusing, and so becoming interesting and intelligent and amusing as a result.

At one point while I was seated by a firepit with Molly cradled against my breast, I’d been engaged in a heated discussion over whether one needed to retain a sense of mystery in order for a relationship to thrive.  It was something I was able to create an informed-sounding opinion on, despite having no real opinion whatsoever.  And when I’d looked across the firepit, I’d seen Alex watching me intently, face lit by the fire, unsmiling.  Our eyes met and he held my gaze a full minute before Lee touched his arm to ask him a question, and he smiled slightly at me and turned away to answer it.

A weight slid slowly to my stomach and I sat there, frozen, no longer hearing the conversation around me.  Inside me only, Oh.

*                                  *                                  *

Here are Mr. And Mrs. Connor, walking home from their dear friends’ party with their sleeping daughter Molly.  After setting Molly in her new crib, they will retire to their bedroom where Alex will frenziedly tear off Haley’s clothes, popping buttons and ripping seams, throwing their underthings over his shoulder to leave a trail from the door to the bed, where they will make passionate love.

“That was fun,” Alex said.

I smiled.  “Yeah.”

“So should we gossip?  That seems to be the thing people do after parties.”

“If you’re sixteen, maybe.  Although…”  I shook my head slightly.  “Okay, I have to ask it.  What exactly is Susie and Jack’s relationship?”

He gave a short laugh, then said, “I think it’s evidence of how cruel life can be.  They’ve been friends since they were kids, and I think Susie’s been in love with him for at least that long, but…”

“Yeah,” I said, “that’s what I thought.”

But they’re so good to each other.  It made me think, when I first met them, that maybe it was a sign just having a companion in life could be enough.  But now, when you see how she looks at him, I don’t know.”

I felt a soreness in my chest.  I walked on a few steps, thinking, before I said “It’s better than nothing, isn’t it?”

“Is it?  In some ways I think it’s worse.”

I thought of the nights I’d spent in bed with my books, living vicariously, trying to use the storylines about lovers and husbands to fill the hollowness.  No.  It wasn’t worse.

“Have you ever been in love?” he asked suddenly.

I hesitated, then said, “I don’t know.  I don’t think so.”  I glanced at him, then said, “Have you?”

He smiled, his eyes seeming distant.  “I don’t know either,” he said.  “Isn’t that funny?  You’d think it should be such an easy question.  At least I’ve thought I was in love.”

Which of course filled my mind with impossible questions.  I hesitated, then chose the only one that wasn’t completely skeevy.  “How long ago?”

He didn’t answer, and I cringed.  It had been skeevy, and desperate and obvious, and should I apologize or just let the question hang there?  But then he said, “Not that long ago,” an answer that could mean anything; this past year, last month, this morning.

I pressed Molly’s sleeping warmth against me as we walked on, willing him to explain, knowing it was none of my business.  Was that, whatever had happened or was still happening, the reason for his “bad energy field?”  It must’ve been something awful; she’d died, or left him for someone else, or even worse had just told him she’d stopped loving him without a good explanation.  I was sure he’d tell me eventually, but only once he felt comfortable enough or healed enough.  I’d dropped plenty of opportunities into his lap, and it was obvious he wasn’t ready to take them.  And so, I’d wait.

Suddenly, he grabbed my arm.  “Look!” he whispered.  There, right across the road from us, was a moose, huge and dark, taller even than Alex.  We didn’t move, didn’t speak, just stood there watching this imposing but somehow gentle beast as he chewed at the shrubbery by the side of the street.  As exotic to me as if we’d run into an elephant, or a brontosaurus.

And then, I felt Alex slip an arm around me, resting a hand at my waist.

I couldn’t breathe.  Literally couldn’t; something had clamped against my lungs, squeezing them into my throat.  Not just the thrill of his arm around me but something darker and heavier, dread, guilt.  Panic.

“Alex,” I said hoarsely, and then I sucked in a breath, dizzy from the lack of oxygen, knowing only that I had to confess.  Because of his hand, the majestic power of the creature before us, the remaining glow I felt from the party, all of it.  A need to make it all authentic, not founded on a lie.  “Alex,” I said.  “I have to tell you.”

His hand tightened at my waist and he pulled me closer to wrap another arm around me, Molly pressed between us.  Slowly, he leaned his forehead against mine.

I stiffened, my eyes wide, the nerves sparking up and down my spine.  “Whatever it is,” he whispered, “it doesn’t matter.  I don’t care.  You’re amazing, Haley; I just want you to know that, to know I think that.”

I could smell his breath as he spoke, the dark sweetness of the wine he’d drunk, the word reverberating.  Amazing, he’d said, but who did he think was amazing?  The Haley he’d known twenty years ago?  The Haley who’d run away from her husband to save her child?  Or me?

Those were the thoughts running through my head, and I don’t know if he was planning to kiss me that night, what might’ve happened if I’d just accepted his words and tipped my face up towards him.  But I couldn’t, I couldn’t; it wouldn’t be a real kiss.  It’d be exactly as untrue as the dreams I’d had night after night in Akron, reading the stories of other people’s love.  So I pulled away.  I pulled away without speaking and strode down the street.

 

                                                                                                                                                                                    -11-                  

 

It was only around five the next morning when I woke.  And realized I was hung over.  I knew immediately that’s what the headache must be, and before my mind kicked into gear I felt a sort of giddy pride at it.  I’d always been on the outside of hangovers.  In high school it had been like a badge of coolness, the girls coming in with rumpled hair and bruised faces, I’m sooo hung over, they’d say, and their friends would snicker and slap them on the back.  And now I was part of that legacy.  With my pounding head, my dry mouth, I belonged.

Those were my thoughts until I suddenly remembered what had happened, the kiss that maybe could have been but wasn’t.  I covered my eyes, blocking out the encroaching dawn.  What did it mean?  And what would happen now?  If he’d been planning to kiss me then he’d think I had rejected him, and if he hadn’t planned to kiss me then he’d see I’d misinterpreted what had only been a simple, kind gesture, and would think I was a loser, who had a big head.  I didn’t know which would be more awkward.  Either way, how could we be comfortable again?

I stood, careful to make sure my head stayed on top of my shoulders, and glanced over at Molly asleep in her crib.  “I ruined it,” I whispered to her.  “Everything I had here, now it’s going to be gone!”

I needed to talk to Star.  I needed to lie with her, my head on her chest, and tell her about last night.  “I don’t know what to do!” I’d say, and then I’d burst into tears, let her smooth back my hair and rock me like she used to after nightmares and child-sized tragedies.

She’d give advice, she always did.  She’d read my cards and I’d make myself believe them.  Whatever the cards told me to do I’d do, because it was better than having no ideas at all.

I walked to the door, opened it and then felt the crinkle of paper under my feet.  I bent for it.  It was a handwritten note.

 

Dear Haley,

I’m so sorry, but something’s come up really suddenly, and I have to leave for a couple days to work something out.  If everything goes okay, I should be back by Wednesday.  I’ve left money for you on the hall table.  Please use it for whatever you need.

      Alex

 

I let the note drop from my hands, then leaned forward to rest my forehead against the cold wall.  Something had come up between midnight and five AM?  What could it be besides a wish to get away from me?

I spent a minute wondering if I was going to be sick, then another minute sure I was going to be sick, and then another actually being sick into the conveniently plastic-insert-lined diaper pail.  After which I slid slowly, excruciatingly and gracelessly to the floor.

“Mom?” I whispered.  “Mommy?”  Evidence that calling for one’s mother is–no matter how old one is, or how screwed up one’s mother may be–an involuntary reflex when one is in great pain.  “Mom!” I said.

The door across the hall opened just as Molly started to bawl.  I held my ears and hunched over my knees.

“What’s going on?”  Star’s voice was panicked as she rushed into the room.  “Molly?  Molly!”  She strode to the crib and lifted Molly, and I felt a ridiculously disgusting spear of jealousy that she’d chosen to comfort Molly over me.  Yes, Molly was shrieking and helpless, but I was Star’s daughter!  And nauseous!  And really, really upset!

“Mom!  I need help.”

“Are you sick?”  She turned towards me, Molly in her arms, wrinkled her nose at the diaper pail and then tested my forehead with her wrist.  “I’m not cleaning out your pukey wastebasket, you know.  I don’t care if you’re sick; I stopped doing that when you were ten.”

“He tried to kiss me.”  I leaned against her leg.  “Or at least I think he did, last night, but now he’s gone without telling me he was going or saying where.”  I handed her the note.

She scanned it quickly, then frowned down at me.  “Okay, you got me.  I’ll clean out the wastebasket.”

“Ma…”

“You’ll be okay,” she said.  “You go brush your teeth and I’ll make you some tea, and we’ll do a reading or two.”

*                                  *                                  *

I spent the rest of the day huddled in blankets with tea and toast and tears, feeling sick and panicked (while also wondering whether this day of not eating would counteract the calories I’d consumed at last night’s party.)  I’d told three people I’d stop by their homes that day.  Valerie and Susie had sung my praises like I was some kind of undiscovered virtuoso, and so I was suddenly in demand.  But I wasn’t about to show the today me to people who were expecting the last night me.  It would be a shock to their system.

By late afternoon, I was starting to feel a little better.  Star had read a Relationship spread on me and Alex, and a Celtic Cross spread on the question of whether he’d forgive me once he learned the truth.  Both times, she drew the Lovers card.  Which, okay, was probably just coincidence and a result of insufficient shuffling, but I leaned on it because I needed something to lean on, and by the end of the day I realized I’d been overreacting, which I blamed on the hangover.  Who knew hangovers could be so evil?  There should be a study to check on whether most paranoics were also drunks.

Just before dinner, I went out to the hardware store to buy paint for Valerie’s mural, getting in a spirited discussion with Ralph, the store owner, who wondered if I might be able to give him painting lessons.  And I left the store with ten (free!) pints of paint, and a promise to come back next week.  The barter system rocked.

Star seemed to be in a good mood at dinner.  Partly, maybe, because Alex wasn’t there with his negative energy field, and she felt more comfortable.  But I also think it was a refreshing change for her to feel needed, after so many years of being the needy one.  Everyone wants a sense of purpose.

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this,” Star said, wiping strained veggies from Molly’s face.  “And especially after your readings today, I keep coming back to the coincidence in you finding each other, my sense that it can’t be just coincidence.  Look how well you get along and how much fun you have together!  Except for your moment of angst this morning, he’s been bringing out the best in you, and I think you’re doing the same for him.  So what if you’re soul mates?”

“You don’t believe in soul mates.  You always said the idea was invented to help women get past the realization that their husband picks his nose and enjoys championship wrestling.”

“That’s because I am a cynical old witch, and I guess I thought unluckiness in love might be genetic, so I didn’t want you holding out unrealistic hope.”

“What you’re trying to say is you didn’t think anybody would want me.”

Star ignored this, meaning it was probably true.  “What I think it is,” she continued, “is that all of us have soul mates but the vast majority of us never find them.  But what if you’re one of the lucky ones?  The universe owes you some favors, I think.  And if he is your soul mate, you don’t have to worry about having lied to him because nothing will tear you apart.”

“Ah yes, cue the string music background,” I said, but part of me, the sappy teenage girl part, wanted to believe.  Look how alike we were!  We laughed at the same things; neither one of us understood sports; neither of us cared about money; he liked art and I was an artist; I liked books and he liked writing about book.  We both accepted Star.  We both had fallen in love with Molly within days.  What were the chances?

So I’d tell him.  Not right away, maybe, but I knew the opportunity would present itself again; he’d ask a question about my past, or become comfortable enough to reveal more of his, and then I’d tell him.  And he’d understand.

Because Star was right.  The universe did owe me.

*                                  *                                  *

We were washing dishes when the phone rang.  We both turned quickly towards it, then looked at each other, and Star smiled.  “Tell him you miss him,” she said.  “It can be interpreted completely innocently, or completely not.”

“This is why I don’t take your relationship advice,” I said.  “You actually thought telling the sperm donor you were pregnant would make him love you.  Subtlety is not your forte.”

But when I picked up the phone, a woman answered.  Or at least I thought it was a woman; she had a deepish voice and a strange way of speaking, somewhat upper-class British minus the accent, like she was speaking around a mouthful of unpalatable food.  “Who is this?” she said.

The girlfriend, was my first thought.  I closed my eyes and willed her to disappear, poof!  Or at least for the connection to drop.  I didn’t want to throw her into the mix, not now, not when I was just starting to feel hopeful again.

“My name’s Haley,” I said.  “A close friend of Alex’s and I’ve been living with him here.”  Let her interpret that however she would.

“Really.”  She sounded more amused than upset.  “Alex has a lady friend.”

Star raised her eyebrows at me and I shook my head.  “Who is this?”

“Tell Alex it’s Posy, and he’s succeeded in getting me to foot the cost of a phone call.”

Posy.  “Alex’s sister?” I said.

“I just want to wish him happy birthday, since he chewed me out last year for forgetting.”

“It’s his birthday?” I said.

“I thought you were a close friend.  Doesn’t sound all that close.”

“He . . . didn’t tell me.  I’m sorry, he went away for a couple days.  He should be back by Wednesday, but I’ll tell him you called.”

“He’s not with that skank in New York, is he?  If he is, I swear I’m disowning him.”

I stared at the wall, my eyes feeling chalky dry.  “I don’t know,” I said.

“Do you know anything?  I’m starting to think you’re some kind of squatter; does he even know you’re there?  Or a hopeless cause; Alex is big on picking up hopeless causes.”  She paused.  “Look, just tell him I called, and he can call back if he wants.  Rest of the week’s bad but Saturday morning might work, long as it’s not godawful early.  And tell him I’m thinking of coming up for a visit, so if you’re still squatting we might meet face to face.  Pleasure talking with you and etcetera.”  She hung up.

I replaced the receiver, and without turning to look at Star I said, “That was Alex’s sister calling to say happy birthday.  Why didn’t he tell me it was his birthday?”

Star shrugged.  “Some people aren’t birthday people.  Could be he just had other things on his mind.”

“Or maybe he didn’t want to bother me with it, having me worry about getting gifts and such when he knows I don’t have the money.”  I’d have to get him something, just to show I cared.  But what could I possibly find in this tiny town?  A John Deere?  Bug spray?  To show how much I appreciate what you’ve done for us, I’d say, I have gone with the DEET-free brand.

And then, suddenly, I knew.  A party.  I’d throw him a surprise birthday party, invite everyone I’d met last night.  I’d use one of Alex’s many cookbooks to make us all an incredible dinner, blow up balloons and hang streamers and buy party hats.  That was how I’d show him everything was okay between us.  We wouldn’t have to talk about it unless he wanted to talk about it, the skank in New York he was maybe visiting now, how he’d realized on meeting me just exactly how much of a skank she was in comparison.  How maybe he’d ended everything.  Because, when someone was your soul mate, nothing could keep you apart.

*                                  *                                  *

The recipe was called Poulet de Pommes.  Not that the name mattered, but I could picture myself speaking it with flair when asked, the impressed looks I’d get.  My three years of French were finally paying off.

The recipe seemed easy enough, chicken with apples, onions, cumin and ginger.  But the fancy part, the thing that had drawn me to it, was the strips of crust laid over top in a criss-cross pattern.  Maybe I’d do something different with the strips, form them into something artistic like a seascape, or Alex’s face.

That morning I went out to the grocery and introduced myself to Raymond, the store owner.  I invited him to the party; sixteen people had accepted already but I could certainly handle one more.  And the prospect of the party pleased him so much that he walked me around the store, making suggestions.  Black olives and celery sticks with dip to put in small bowls, tuna salad on Ritz crackers, a green bean casserole with fried onion topping and, after I told Raymond I had no idea how to bake cake, a Jell-O mold with pretzels.

“Jell-O with pretzels?” I said.

“You wouldn’t think it would work,” he said, “I know.  But I tell you, they’re made for each other.  Plus, Jell-O baked in a Bundt pan is just so festive, and it’s perfect for the calorie conscious.”

And so, Jell-O with pretzels it was.  I bought party hats and plastic plates and cups, and the annoying kind of candles that re-light after being blown out.  Balloons and confetti spray and a glittery Congratulations! banner, and I brought it all back and started to work, praying Alex wouldn’t return until at least five that night.  There was just so much to do.

At noon, Susie came by with Jack to help, and she and Star sat at the dining table blowing up balloons and tying on curling ribbons, while Jack and I taped them to the ceiling.  Someone turned the radio to an Oldies station, and we sang along to Frank and Chubby and Billie, while Molly amused herself with the curling ribbon, periodically waving her hands like she was trying to dance.  Feeling completely giddy, I picked Molly up and we jammed around the room in tango position, one of her hands on my shoulder and the other gripping my finger, me singing and Molly laughing.  This must be joy! I thought.  Hello there, joy, I’m Lainey.  I’ve heard so much about you, and it’s great to finally meet you!

But by four-thirty, when the first guests started to arrive, I was feeling nervous.  After a half hour of failed attempts at sculpting dough into the image of Alex at his computer, I’d lowered my estimation on what it was possible to do with crust strips on Poulet de Pommes.  I’d finally ended up arranging them in the shape of a rather cartoonish birthday cake, which I was now second-guessing.  I slid it into the oven, and it smelled reasonably edible, but I checked every five minutes to make sure it didn’t explode.  I’d put on a Beethoven cd, decided it was too classical, switched it to The Beatles.  But then worried the lyrics might be too distracting, so switched it back again.

People seemed to be having a nice time, though, so that was good.  Even Star seemed to be enjoying herself, in deep conversation with Valerie and Lee-of-the-braided-beard.  Maybe she was already starting to think of this as a safe place.

At six, Molly started to cry inconsolably, maybe over-stimulated.  I fed her, hoping she was just hungry, and she spit up minutes later, bright carroty spit-up all over her pretty blue party dress.  I cleaned her up and changed her into a pink skirt and top, noticing my hands were shaking.  “Why am I being such a wimp?” I asked her.  All that would happen tonight would be the party.  No soul-searching discussions about my truths and his truths and our future.  Would he want to discuss it later?  Maybe, or maybe he’d just pretend nothing had changed and we could go on as before.  Or maybe nothing had changed.  So why was I so freaked out?

By eight-thirty, salads wilting, my Pommes de Poulet cold, guests periodically glancing at them (Hungrily?  Dispiritedly?  Disgustedly?) I suggested we start without him.  He’d understand.  We’d save desert for him (the sweating Jell-O mold with its pretzel pieces floating inside its day-glo interior, looking disconcertingly like partially digested stomach contents.)

Someone shot a photo of the chicken, so Alex would get to see my painstakingly constructed cake rendition before it was summarily destroyed.  And then everyone dug in, with overemphasized exclamations over how scrumptious it all was.  I stood at the window with Molly, looking out, crooning to Molly to keep her from fussing, talking to people when they tried to engage me in conversation, but all the while feeling embarrassed and rejected.  Where was he?

“Here.”  Star came up behind me with a plate.  “Eat.  I’ll take Molly.”

I looked down at the congealing chicken.  “Mmm, appetizing,” I said.

“Look, I know how you’re feeling, but he never said what time he’d be back, right?  Or even for sure that he’d be back today.  You had to have known this could be a risk.”

I looked over at the scatter of badly wrapped gifts people had left on the table.  “What if he doesn’t come back at all?  Or what if he’s visiting his girlfriend and telling her about me, and she demands he kick me out?  Where would we go, Ma?”

I waited for her to say something placating, but when she didn’t, I turned to her.  Her lips were pinched.  She was considering what I’d said.  I thought she’d dismiss it outright as more paranoia, but no, she actually thought it might be possible.

“Why don’t you go on and mingle,” I said.  Everybody seems to love you.  Here, I’m taking the food, see?”  I took the plate from her, speared what I thought was a chunk of chicken but turned out to be a chunk of onion.  I chomped on it, trying to look enthusiastic.

“That’s because I’m so lovable,” Star said, no humor in her face or voice.  She set a hand at the back of my neck and squeezed, and I turned back to look out the window.