Mockingbird (3 page)

“Watching basketball in their room. Not so good, I guess.”

In her plain black funeral dress Candy looked like a young Mexican widow, with her dark eyes and pale skin and her hair pinned up señora style. She pointed to two shot glasses on the patio table, each with three fingers of some Dr. Pepper-colored liquid, a deep red-brown so dark as to be nearly black. Between the glasses stood one of Momma's recycled liquor bottles; the paper label on the front had
Mockingbird Cordial
written in her florid hand. The cap was off. “Momma told me to break this out when she was safely underground.” Candy's eyes were red and the makeup on her cheeks was smudged with tear tracks. I picked up the shot glass on my side of the table. The drink had the strangest fragrance, half-floral, half-industrial, like flowers and hot steel. “No thanks.”

“I didn't make it, honest. I don't even know what's in it.”

“There's a recommendation.”

“For Christ's sake, Toni.”

“No. Uh-uh. I did my deathbed scene with Momma. She may not reach out from beyond the grave and make me do another one.”

“Why do you have to hate her so much?”

“I do not hate her.”

“Yes you do! You've been stomping around in a fury since the moment she died. For Christ's sake, Toni! She's gone, our momma is gone, God bless her.” Candy wiped another tear off her cheek with the back of her thumb. “Why can't you leave her alone?”

I said, “You get what you pay for.”

“God, you're a vindictive bitch.”

“You swear too much.”

“Fuck off.” Candy's fabulous breasts rose as she took a deep breath. “Please, Toni. I don't dare cross her. She can't get to you like she can get to me.”

This was true enough. Candy is the one who inherited Momma's touch of magic. In Candy the gift was more direct, but less flexible. None of the Riders had ever mounted her. She could see the future sometimes, in dreams and visions, but with one curious qualifier: all she ever saw were happy things.

I picked up my glass and tipped a little of the Mockingbird Cordial into my mouth. It bit like a copperhead snake: rum, vanilla flowers; the feeling you get on the tip of your tongue when you touch it to a battery. The taste of pennies in your mouth when you were a child. I swallowed and Candy followed suit. “Thanks,” she said.

“How long ago did you know she was going to die?”

“Maybe a year. I just. . . stopped dreaming about her anymore.”

“How many happy dreams of her did you ever have?” I swirled another few drops of the cordial around my mouth and swallowed. “This stuff surely burns. Candy, are you all right? About Momma, I mean.”

“No—Are you?”

“I'm all right.”

Momma always liked Candy. Right from a baby, Candy was smiley and huggable. A great relief, as I had been colicky and a crosspatch from day one. “When I was having you, you were that set to come out sideways,” Momma told me. “The doctor had to get in there and haul you out with forceps as big as a pair of steel salad forks. And cold! Like to have killed me,” she would say, and laugh. I was horrified.

When she was in a good mood Momma called me ornery but durable. She liked that word: durable. To endure, which she pronounced with no y sound: en-doo-er. When she cried, which was often, I was a “poor baby,” for having to be so tough so little, but it was good I was tough because in this life that's what you had to be. When she was angry, I was mean, or hateful, or sometimes the hatefulest child that ever was.

“I'm all right,” I said. “You two were always closer.”

Candy choked and laughed. “The funny part is that you actually believe that.”

“It's true!”

“Uh-huh.”

I raised my glass. “To Momma. May I never be like her.” Birds hopped and flittered among the branches overhead. The liquor ran down into my center and bloomed there, like flowers opening.

Candy stretched her legs out and crossed them at the ankles. “That bastard Carlos should have come to the funeral.”

Carlos was Candy's current boyfriend, a Tex-Mex car detailer who lived at some strange intersection between Mexican folk magic and low rider gang membership. Carlos himself was small and lean and soft-spoken, a wonderful mechanic and something of a sorcerer who had lost part of one ear in a gang fight years before. Despite his angular face and tattoos and small black goatee no one had ever heard him cross his mother. I once saw him drink a shot glass full of 10W-40 motor oil to win a bet.

Candy had dated a lot of weird guys.

Actually, I thought they made a good couple: Carlos was pretty serious-minded, which she needed, and she was able to take the fact that he would occasionally visit with the spirits of the dead fairly much in stride. The most noticeable thing about Carlos was his car, a reconditioned hearse that he had turned into a rolling shrine. “Can you imagine Carlos bringing the Muertomobile into Glenwood? The security guards would have gunned him down in the driveway. Be reasonable. I'm sure he'll cruise by this afternoon.”

“Probably La Hag Gonzales didn't want him seen with me in public.”

“If I had a son, I wouldn't let him date you either.” I found I could take the cordial down in bigger swallows, now that I was used to it. I emptied my glass. “You know, of all Momma's potions, I think this is the best she ever made.”

Candy sloshed another shot into my glass. “Do you think Daddy was happy with her?”

“Does it matter?” I was beginning to feel lightheaded; my thoughts, like clouds, pulling softly apart in the gulf breeze. It was not an unpleasant sensation; drifty, but not at all drowsy. Tender autumn sunshine dappled the garden. Not the destroying stare of summer, but a more uncertain light, diffusely golden and unsteady, ruffled by tree limbs creaking in the warm south wind, leaves shifting, the wheeling birds—the sweet, elusive light that comes at the end of days, and seasons.

I blinked, realizing my thoughts had pulled apart again. Empty spaces yawned between them. Something about the emptiness scared me. “Momma wasn't the sort who made you
happy
,” I said. “Daddy was not bored, I guarantee you. And he didn't kill her.” Another empty space began to open between my thoughts, but I fought it back. “He got what he paid for.”

Candy sipped from her glass. “Well I've about had it with Carlos and La Hag Gonzales. Cut another notch on the barrel. Time for this
chica
to move on.”

A concrete-colored Ford Explorer rolled slowly down the street. Birds swirled up like leaves in the wind of its passing, birds doubled by their shadows, swooping and whirling, birds in flight from the cold; passing to some warm, unnamed, blessed country of the South, where winter never comes.

With a little start of terror I realized I had been caught in one of those empty places between my thoughts. There was a whiteness in my head that seemed to keep me from thinking straight; like when you stare at the sun and afterwards there's a bright circle that dazzles you wherever you look. Only this whiteness was behind my eyes, back in my head, and it was cold. “Can-Cand—?” I felt a hand close over my hand. “Toni? Are you okay?”

Candy's voice sounded tiny and distant, as if coming through a telephone receiver in another room. A cloud must have passed overhead, for the light in the garden got suddenly dimmer. Silence fell over the world. I could see birds with their beaks working, but no songs came. Acorns fell into the pond without splashing.

“Unh!” I stood up clumsily, knocking my chair over backwards. Where was the sound of the iron chair clattering on the stone?

Then I smelled the Widow smells, of silver polish and scorched cloth, and I knew what was happening.

I stepped back to keep my balance. My right foot came down and froze. A line of cold whiteness ran up past my knee. I cried out and pulled the leg up, and the whiteness drained down a bit.

“Toni! Toni, what's wrong!”
I staggered. As soon as my right foot came down on the stone flags it froze again, and I was pinned to the garden path. The whiteness raced up my leg and flowered in me like fire eating through a piece of paper. I tried to scream but no noise came out. I went mad with fear and ran senselessly around in my head but there was too much whiteness everywhere. From a long way off, I heard Candy whisper, “Oh my God. I can smell her, Toni.” Then the whiteness exploded in my head and the Widow came.

This day, she's walking through a nice homey neighborhood and all of a sudden there it is. She's been lost so long she can't be sure it's the place, but the picket fence is white, there's yellow trim around the door, and wouldn't you know, there's a swing that hangs from two long chains bolted to the limb of a big live oak tree.

There's a woman out front working in the flower bed, shovelling dirt from a big pile under the rosebushes into a hole the size of a laundry basket. It's as if she's filling in a little grave.

“Momma!” says the Little Lost Girl. “Is that you?”

The woman stops shovelling, but when she turns, with a heap of dirt still resting in her spade, the Little Lost Girl sees that it is not her mother standing there but the Widow. The girl is scared of her cruel old eyes. “Oh. Excuse me. I been lost a long time, and I thought this might be my house,” she says. “Say, what might you be burying there under that rosebush?”

The Widow looks at her for a good piece. “How did you come to be lost?” she says. She's got a voice like a steam iron hissing down on a shirt.

“My momma told me I was sick and took me to the doctor. The doctor said I was well, but when I got back to the waiting room my momma wasn't there. I waited for her until the office closed, but she didn't come back, so I've been trying to walk home by myself.”

The Widow looks at her for even a longer time. “That's a long walk,” she says. Then she turns back and drops her spadeful of dirt into the little hole under the rosebushes.

“Are you for certain this ain't my house?” the Little Lost Girl says. “It surely does look like it.”

The Widow turns back to her. “If ever it was, it isn't now.”

“Oh,” says the Little Lost Girl. Then she cries. Cries and cries for all that lonesomeness. For all that walking.

When she's done crying she says, “What have you got down in that hole?”

“What's your name?” says the Widow, real quick-like.

The Little Lost Girl does not answer.

“Cat got your tongue?” the Widow says. “I asked you what your name was, girl. We'll do a trade. You tell me your name, and I'll tell you what I've got at the bottom of this hole.” The pile of fill dirt is nearly flat. When the little girl does not answer, the Widow sets to tamping it down with the back of her spade.

“My momma said not to tell my name to strangers.”

The Widow puts her shovel aside and steps onto the fill dirt, tramping it down until it's level with the rest of the flower bed, and you can hardly tell there ever was a little hole beneath the rosebushes. “No little girl lives here anymore,” she says.

Then she closes the gate in front of the Little Lost Girl, and latches it, and walks back up to the front porch, and goes into the house, leaving the Little Lost Girl outside. When darkness falls, a yellow light comes on in the living room, but the front door never opens. Finally the Little Lost Girl starts walking on, looking for her very own home, where there would be yellow trim around the door and a white picket fence and a swing hanging from a live oak tree outside. And if she hasn't found it, she's walking still.

“Toni?”

I was lying on my back on a tile floor and someone was supporting my aching head.

“Toni?”

Ah, Daddy's voice. I recognized it now. That would be his hand under the back of my skull. My eyelids fluttered open, then fell shut again, like butterfly wings too new and wet to stay unfurled. Ow! I meant to say, but only a weak grunt came out.