A Room on Lorelei Street (12 page)

Kyle spins the wheels and ignores the guarantee. The wheels whir a smooth, buttery buzz that saw right into Zoe's bones. “Can I go try it on the front drive?” he asks.

But there is still one present. Zoe's present.

“One more gift,” Aunt Patsy says. “Then you can go.”

Kyle gives the wheels one more spin and then sets it aside.
Buzz
. The wheels spin. He rips open the awkwardly shaped package.
Buzz.
Zoe sees the details, the crumpled corners, the gaps, and the ribbon that doesn't match.
Buzz…run, Zoe…hide, Zoe…you are nothing, Zoe.

But it is the Dragonslayer. The Dragonslayer
1000
. For her Kiteman. She stands her ground and forces a faint smile to cover her needy expectation. She works this leg, that arm, to hold them just right to show she is confident because she knows. More than anyone, she knows.

The kite is revealed. It shimmers, its green more brilliant than a hummingbird's throat. Its carefully sewn flaps begging the wind. Its reel made to whir more loudly than a thousand spinning wheels. Norma
oohs
. Uncle Clint and Evan reach out to touch. Quentin nods approval.

But Kyle. It is a glance shorter than a breath—a sideways glance to Wain and a smile that comes a blink too late—that tells Zoe.

She doesn't know.

And even as she hugs Kyle and says “you're welcome,” she knows he is not her Kiteman. He is not four years old anymore, he is eleven, for God's sake. Eleven, and he has moved on to skateboards. He moved on. And you didn't know, you stupid shit,
you didn't know
.

But Grandma did.

Wind blows warm.

Good-byes circle around on a dust cloud and come back again.

“Good-bye.”

“Night.”

Iridescent wings bat the porch light. Chirps jump across quiet. The sky splits wide with black and silver. Kyle's day. Kyle's evening. All Kyle's. As it should be.

Car doors slam. Quentin gone. Evan and Norma. Gone. An evening. Gone.

Uncle Clint in the doorway. Aunt Patsy on the bottom step. Kyle kissing Grandma's cheek. The wind swirling. The chirps gathering. And Mama still inside. In the bathroom. Zoe knows. Not to pee. A pill-popping break. You can drink less if you chase it with a pill. It doesn't matter what kind. A pain pill. A Valium. Mama has them all. All prescription so it's okay. Okay. Everything is fucking okay. The whole day has been fucking okay. And no one has asked. Not Mama. Four days she has been alone. But it is not about Zoe. It never has been. Four. But Mama leaves for the rest room to take care of her needs, but never pauses to check on Zoe's. Not a single pause to see if Zoe has eaten, if she has slept, if she has breathed.

And now Kyle is kissing Zoe's cheek. Holding her. And the day that wasn't swells inside her. It swells with its nothingness, and Kyle is running back up the porch steps.

Gone.

“Night,” Aunt Patsy says. “Thanks for helping with the dishes,” she says. “Thanks for coming,” she says. And though Uncle Clint still fills the doorway, the trailer door wedged open, the door on the day is closing, and Zoe is splitting inside with need. It races to her fingertips like electricity and back up again to pinch off her throat. She trembles. It squeezes her spine. Invisible. The door is closing.
You ain't hardly family at all
.

“Night,” she says as Mama stumbles back through the door. “Night,” she says again as the warm breeze lifts the hair at her neck. And only a sliver of the day is left open when she comes eye to eye with Mama slurring her way down the steps, eye to eye with Grandma grabbing Mama's arm, and the need pulls at her chest, pulls at her shoulder, pulls at the purse resting against her hip, and Zoe shakes it open, before she knows it, she is shaking her purse open so keys rattle. She pulls out her lighter and then a cigarette. The flame ignites with a single strike, and she holds it to the shaking end of the cigarette. She pulls hard. Slowly. She breathes in deeply and exhales. Her smoky breaths stop the good-byes. She lowers her hand to her side, fingers of smoke weaving around her. She tries to hold it easily, but her hand shakes, like all the need and trembling is pouring out through one little cigarette. But it doesn't matter. Every eye is on her. Before the door closes. Every eye looks.

“Zoe?” Uncle Clint says.

Aunt Patsy stares, her mouth open and silent.

Grandma's lips pull tight.

“Sugar,” Mama says. Clarity. Crumpled eyes.

“This?” She waves the cigarette, and forces a smile. “I've been smoking for years. I can't believe you never guessed. But I've decided I'm tired of secrets. No more secrets.”

Uncle Clint steps out of the doorway. “But, Zoe—”

She turns. “Night,” she says. A corner of control. The evening is over because she has made it so. “Night,” she calls over her shoulder.

And the jumble of voices at her back melt with the evening wind and ribbon away to nothing.

She is empty.

Or is it full?

“Lorelei,” she whispers.

It rolls back to her again and again, like a leaf on a gentle tide. It comes back, wet, sweet, easy, to be whispered again. She wonders at such a little word that begs to be said aloud. Three little syllables that make a song. Complete.

She whispers it again, sends it up like a compass, a beacon, as she navigates aisles with a shopping cart that
clack, clack, clack
s to one side with a jittering wheel.

She stops in the jelly aisle. Rupert's Deluxe Concord is endless black-purple and promises satisfaction or your money back. The twelve-ounce jar mimics cut-glass and costs $3.89. It would look pretty on her hutch. But not $2.40 prettier than the Food Star brand that is a little less purple and a whole lot bigger. She slips the fat Food Star jelly jar into the cart next to a ninety-nine-cent loaf of lighter-than-air bread. Peanut butter is next, and she ignores all the claims and offers on the jars—only the price matters. Food Star wins again.

She passes the milk case and pauses. She looks at the little quart cartons. She imagines a glass of cold milk with a peanut butter sandwich. But she has no glasses. And one more item—even a carton of milk—would be too risky. The damn tampons are taking up half her grocery budget, but those she can't do without. She felt the cramping coming on at work, and only two battered tampons lurk somewhere in the bottom of her purse. Four fifty-nine for one stupid box. Even for the Food Star brand. She passes on the milk and picks up a ninety-nine-cent, two-roll package of toilet paper—on special. God bless Food Star.

She checks out. The $9.96 total is four cents under budget. The rest of her Sunday tips will go toward her transportation fee. The sleazebag was generous again. She is almost beginning to like him, in a gagging kind of way. She drops the four pennies change loosely into her purse. They clink against her hairbrush like a metal ball in a pinball machine, a
clink clink, clink
that harmonizes with the word still playing behind her eyes.
Lorelei
. She gathers the bag of groceries to her arms.

“Pardon?” the cashier says.

“What?” Zoe asks.

“Sorry, I thought you said something,”

Zoe pauses, crawls out of her thoughts…and smiles. “Yes, I probably did.”

And she leaves, the brown paper bag tucked snugly against her chest.

Her fingers glide over the wide arm of the Adirondack chair. The purple enamel is uneven. She feels faint indentations where previous layers had peeled, were sanded, and then were painted again. Season by season. A bit of yellow peeks out here, a bit of orange there, but it is mostly purple now, smooth, cool purple. She leans back, closes her eyes, swims in the sounds of Opal's garden. For the first time she feels the teetering edge of autumn. A smell. A chill. The long glint of sun that seems more copper than gold. A difference that is hard to name when it is only just coming on. But it is there. And then, she thinks, it is not. It is once again the last days of summer, her back damp against the slats of wood. Summer, autumn. Autumn, summer.

It's a dance,
she thinks. This letting go.

Coming. Going.

Back and forth.

This passing of one season to the next.

How long does it last? But she has never had time to think about it before. She has never had time to sit in a purple Adirondack chair in the shade of a drooping elm and notice. She doesn't know how long this holding on and letting go lasts.

“Here we are,” Opal calls across the yard. She carries a tray. Zoe sits up. It is awkward being served, a role she is not used to. She only came to the garden to explore, a time to wind down after tennis practice and see what lay behind the city of bird feeders. She followed the short path of broken flagstone to the canopy of elms with two purple Adirondacks resting beneath them. It looked like a shady hideaway and the thought made her smile—maybe it should be called Opal's Lorelei Hideout. Opal had come bustling through with a small basket draping her arm, and when she saw Zoe, she squealed and said, “Perfect! Perfect! Sit! I'll be right back! Sit, now! I knew this would happen!” And she hurried to the house. The words sounded like orders, but the tone was joy.

Zoe has been waiting for twenty minutes now—maybe more—but she doesn't mind. The yard, the hideaway, is another world. Slow, apart, an atmosphere all its own. No grass grows below the trees, only a scattering of silver-tipped leaves at her feet. Thin shafts of light break through in half a dozen places, freezing particles of dust in their beams. Gravity doesn't exist in Opal's Lorelei Hideout.

Now Opal comes, full-faced with a smile and wrinkles, and Zoe notices the limp, an ever-so-slight heaviness to the right leg.
I should get up,
she thinks, but she stays. She is like a frozen particle, caught in Opal's beam.

“This is it,” Opal says, setting the tray on a slatted table between them. “Last of the season! No more blackberry tea till next summer. I must've picked the last berry just as you walked up—just enough for two glasses. Fate, I think. You believe in fate, Zoe?”

She hands Zoe a droplet-covered glass filled with ice cubes and lavender tea.

“I don't know,” Zoe answers. She is not even sure what fate is.

Opal lifts the other glass, and Zoe thinks Opal is lifting possibility as much as tea. She has come to read eyes, too—at least Opal's—and they say as much as her words.

Zoe takes a sip. “It's very good,” she says, and means it. She takes another sip. It is fragrant and light and delicately sweet, nothing like the tea at Murray's. She settles back in the Adirondack and rests the glass on the wide arm. “What's fate to you, Opal?” she asks.

Opal leans back, too. “Oh, lots of things. Lots and lots of things all pushed up against each other that make something else happen. So much pushing it just can't happen any other way—unless you push back to make it not.”

“Not?”

“Not happen.”

“Oh,” Zoe says, but the sense of it is floating in and out of her reach, like a season deciding to come or not come.

They sit, enjoying the quiet, the tea, the purple Adirondacks curved just right to their backs, Zoe watching Opal cock her head to the side now and again when a bird takes up a song. Zoe's eyes travel down the arm of the chair to Opal's short leg and thick-soled shoe. What things pushed up against each other to make that happen? She watches Opal absently rubbing her thigh.

“Your leg bother you much?” Zoe asks, and then thinks it was a rude question. Rude to notice. A short leg. She should have looked away.

But Opal rolls right over the rudeness, eager to answer. “Just these later years now and again. Never bothered me before. I think it's arthritis settling into the break. Heard that happens.”

“You broke your leg?”

“Oh sure, that's what made it shorter in the first place. It broke in just the right—well, just the wrong place for an eight-year-old. It still grew after that, but not near as much as the other.”

“How did it happen?”

“I didn't move fast enough or jump high enough to please my pap. Don't remember the why of it so much as the how. He had a temper shorter than Count Basil's tail and broke a two-by-four across my thigh. My ma joked later that if he had hit it over my head I would have been just fine. I did have a way about me, I suppose.”

“Your mother joked about it?”

Opal snorts and waves her hand like she is swatting at a fly. “Oh, years later. By then she had killed the old man, so it seemed all right to do.”

Zoe cannot find graceful words to respond, and the ones on the edge of her lips won't do. It is too bizarre. Not so much the killing but how Opal speaks of it. Like she is speaking of someone else. Like she is so detached she can still be happy. How can she drink tea and smile at another birdsong in the same breath as the telling of her mother killing her father?

Opal sips more tea and shakes her head. “Seems like five lifetimes ago. I hardly think of it anymore.” A faint, dreamy smile crosses her face again, and Zoe wonders how such a memory could bring a smile. Or maybe the smile is having almost forgotten? Or just that it doesn't matter so much anymore? Could something like that ever get so distant that it doesn't matter? Or maybe the smile is just that she survived it? Is that it? Surviving? But Opal seems like she is doing much more than surviving. She seems to squeeze the most from every moment. Zoe thinks of Opal's squeal at finding her in the garden and then hurrying away to make the tea. Every moment is
the
moment for Opal. Like she can't let a single one get past her. Or maybe all these moments push out the others. Make up for the others. Push them as distant as five lifetimes.

New moments of Opal's own making.

Zoe picks at an orange-yellow-purple indentation, seasons and seasons' worth of distant painted-over moments, as far away as Opal needs them to be.

A gentle cooing cuts into her thoughts. “Do you hear that?” Zoe asks. She cocks her head to the side as she has seen Opal do. “Mourning doves. I'm sure it's mourning doves.”

Opal cocks her head to the side, too, alert, but the cooing has stopped. “They're shy,” she says. “Won't come near the feeders with the other birds, but sometimes early I will see them there. Gentlest creatures. And loyal.”

“Yes,” Zoe agrees. “I know.” She and Kyle used to feed them bread crumbs on the walk in front of their house. They came back morning after morning. The doves were the closest thing to pets they ever had.

Zoe drinks down the last of her blackberry tea. “So you think it's the end of the season?” she asks.

“According to my berry bushes. But a few others are hanging on. Still have a few apricots on the tree. Can you believe that? September and still apricots! It's the shade of the mulberry, I suppose.”

Kyle loves apricots,
Zoe thinks. Mr. Henderson always brings over bags full of them from his tree, but it is finished up by the beginning of August. Kyle probably hasn't had an apricot since then. Neither has she.

And Mama. Mama loves apricots, too.

“Then I guess according to your apricots it's still summer,” Zoe says, and with the passing of a warm breeze across her arms, she thinks it must be true.