Backseat Saints (31 page)

“Her fever’s broken,” another man said. “We need to keep pushing fluids.” I knew the voice. Bill. Bill Mantles from my old
house across the street.

I cracked an eye, and I was in my childhood bed, lying on the
saggy, sprung mattress, clammy with my sweat. Bill propped me up, half-sitting, and Daddy held a cup of tepid water to my
mouth. I drank what I could, eyes closing. Bill’s fingers poked a couple of pills into my mouth, dry and hard as perfect little
pebbles, but Daddy flooded my mouth with more water and they went down.

“Sleep now,” Bill said.

I tried to say I couldn’t. Thom was coming. He was coming to kill Rose Mae Lolley. I had to get up and learn to kill her first.
Saint Sebastian had showed me.

Bill pushed my shoulders, easing me back onto the mattress. I sank into it, and it parted under me like the waters of a river.
The river swallowed me and pulled me under and moved me, past Thom, past Texas, all the way to lemon groves and cool air touched
with brine. I slept, turning on my side to face the west. I heard my mother say,
You are welcome
, and I was.

When I woke up, the mellow sunlight coming in the window said late afternoon. Bill was gone, and Gretel was sprawled out against
my side, snoring, all three of her paws twitching after dream rabbits. Daddy dozed in my old wicker chair. He had a piece
of blue-lined notebook paper resting in his slack hand, crumpled up, with one corner ripped off. His feet rested on the edge
of the bed. He was wearing grayed-out athletic socks with a big hole that showed me his heel, callused and cracked as rhino
hide.

I was in my old room, exactly as I remembered it, with my white quilted blanket pulled over me. The closet door was open,
and I saw the clothes I’d left behind still hanging in a neat row. A matted lion doll lay on the closet floor. Growlfy, his
name was. My old green-glass water cup stood on the bedside table, an amber bottle of pills beside it.

Daddy’s eyes opened as I propped myself up on my elbows.

“How long?” I asked.

“Couple days,” he said, and I nodded.

“That’s not so bad,” I said.

“You was real sick.” Daddy put his feet on the floor. I heard
his old man’s knees crackle as he bent them. I was wearing a faded pink nightgown with a bow at the top. My mother’s. It had
that musty, papery smell that gets into old cotton. I remembered her standing at the stove, making me eggs in this nightgown
and her pretty housecoat. I sat all the way up and swung my legs out of bed. He said, “Girl child, are you crazy? Lie back
down.”

“I have to get up, Daddy. I don’t have a lot of time.” He rustled his piece of paper at me. Cleared his throat. “Not now,”
I said.

I stood up, and my legs were shaky and frail under me. I went down the hall toward the den, and Gretel got up and followed,
tags jingling. I could hear Daddy coming behind her, an even sorrier dog, still toting his crumpled paper.

Daddy hadn’t bothered to hang the ship picture back up. The ticks and lines stood out starkly against the white wall. I climbed
up onto the sofa and stared at the marks, then up at my name. My father came up to the arm of the sofa, staring at me with
his saggy, basset hound eyes, clutching his paper close.

“It’s a calendar,” I said.

I counted the ticks on the second line. There were 365. I’d known there would be before I started. Each line was a year. Each
tick was a finished day.

My mother had been counting off the days literally behind my father’s back. Marking time. Like any prisoner might. She hadn’t
begun at the start of their marriage, though. She’d begun at the start of me. The first line counted the days after my birth
until the New Year. Then there were eighteen lines, each standing for a year she’d have to serve to get me to adulthood.

I remembered how she’d sometimes stand and face this wall, staring at the ships. As a child, I’d wondered why she didn’t turn
around and watch the TV on the opposite wall. Later, as a teenager, I remembered her ship staring as if it was clichéd foreshadowing,
irritatingly symbolic. But now I wondered if she’d been looking at the print at all. Maybe she’d been staring through it,
at all the days she’d marked off behind it, all the blank lines waiting to be filled.
She’d planned to stay another ten years, looked like, but she’d let herself out early. Time off for good behavior?

I didn’t think so.

“What happened?” I said. “The day she left, Daddy, what did you do?”

He shook his head. “I came home and she was gone, same as you.”

I wheeled on him, staring down at him from the extra height standing on the sofa gave me. “Bullshit.”

“I swear, Rosie. I came home and you was sitting in the kitchen at the table waiting on your snack and had been for two hours,
maybe more.”

That was how I remembered it, too. Daddy had come home expecting to see my mother making dinner, same as always.

“She didn’t plan to leave that day. Something happened.” I was sure of it.

I turned around and climbed down off the sofa. Daddy still had his crumpled paper in his hand. His big droopy eyes were fixed
on me, pitiful and pleady.

“I’m not listening to that speech, Daddy,” I said in the kindest tone I’d used yet. “You want to say sorry? Say it by making
me a sandwich. I’m starved.”

“I got white bread and bologna,” he said instantly, so eager that I felt a flash of something that was neither shame nor pity,
but maybe kin to both. “I think there’s a yellow cheese slice left.”

“Whatever you have is fine,” I said.

He turned to go to the kitchen. Gret and I went the other way, back to the master bedroom. There I found my mother’s bedspread,
covered in tea roses. It had a series of unfamiliar cigarette holes burned along the right side but was otherwise the same.
Her garage sale lamp still sat on the bedside table. I bet if I opened the little drawer, I’d find her Day-Timer, circa 1977,
cuddled up with a tube of ossified orange blossom lotion. The whole damn house was a shrine to the kind of family we had never
been.

But here in this replica of a room, I found I could more easily remember the good days, too. Dove hunting in season with my
daddy, watching him line up his shots, sharing out snack bags of Cheerios and raisins with his bird dog, Leroy. Sunday mass
with my mother, who handed me the long wooden matches and let me light the votives when she prayed. Good moments, but we hadn’t
spent them as a family. I remembered me with Mother, me with him. I couldn’t call up any happy memories of the three of us
together.

At night, I’d lie in bed and their angry voices would come through the thin walls, followed by the thump and clatter of his
hands meeting her body in hard ways. I’d hear an open-handed slap crack like a distant rifle shot, hear my mother’s body banging
into the walls. I’d roll out of bed and creep under it like Gretel in a thunderstorm, waiting it out.

Even so, they must have had some good times together, separate from me. After all, he’d kept the house the way she’d made
it, as if still hoping any minute my mother would come strolling in and take off her flowered shoes and put them away in the
closet. She’d fall down backwards on the bed with a tired sigh and say, “What a day. I’m glad to be home.”

I opened her closet. On the top shelf, her shoes still stood in a row. Just the same, Daddy had said. When he’d lost the house
he must have moved over here piece by piece, room by room, re-creating it exactly. There was only one gap in the line of seven
pairs of shoes, a slot for the flowered canvas shoes where she’d kept her stash of money. Her running shoes were still there,
as were her short black all-weather boots. It seemed odd that she’d left these sturdy, neutral things in favor of a thin-soled
pair of multicolored Keds.

The day my mother left, she’d sent me off to school, and Daddy was working that week. She’d had all day alone in the house
to choose what shoes to take, so why these? She’d probably put her stash in flowered Keds to begin with because she seldom
wore them.

I’d been eight years old when she left. It hadn’t occurred to me to inventory her closet. I flipped through her things now,
and it seemed to me there wasn’t much missing. Very few empty hangers were mixed in with the clothes.

I stared at that single gap in the row of shoes, as bothersome as a missing tooth. I reached up and began squeezing the toes
of the other shoes, one by one. When I came to the black boots, the right one had no give. I pulled it down and jammed my
hand down in there. I pulled out her money, still held in a roll with a pink ponytail band, just as I remembered.

When I popped the band off and fanned the bills open, I found it was mostly ones and fives. I did a quick count: eighty-two
dollars. Not a lot. Not a stash, saved out for years while planning to leave her child like a reptile leaves a dropped egg.
This was pin money, and she’d blown town in such a rush, she had not even come back by the house to pick it up.

I’d had her wrong, all these years. She’d meant to stick, for me. The tick marks, the abandoned money, these things proved
it. Something had happened, and it had sent her careening across the country in the shoes she stood up in. It hadn’t happened
in our house, either, or she would have taken this pittance, at least.

Forget Florida and the Keys. Lime drinks and red bikinis had no charm for me now. I wanted to understand, and the answers
were in California. I thought of her saying,
You are welcome.
She’d better have meant it, because she was sure as hell getting me now.

Or she was getting Ivy Wheeler, whoever that was.

In my dream Thom had come after Rose, bounding cool and determined over the blazing landscape, like a nightmare version of
Pepé Le Pew. I’d read him rightly the last time I saw him, at Grand Guns. That had to be the last time I saw him, ever. I
would not live through our next encounter, and he wanted that so badly, he’d never tire or waver. He would never stop hunting
his Rose, so I had to leave her in Fruiton.

I locked my father out of his own bedroom and pulled my mother’s nightgown off and threw it on the floor. I got in Daddy’s
shower and bathed, then got dressed in one of my mother’s cotton skirts with a long-sleeved fitted tee. My mother’s wardrobe,
though twenty years out of date, favored lightweight fabrics and long sleeves, just as mine had back in Texas.

I spied a blue canvas satchel bag in the bottom of her closet, behind her wicker laundry basket. I pulled it out and set it
on the bed. I filled it from her closet, choosing more hippie-chick skirts and blouses and bell-bottom jeans, two pairs with
bright embroidered flowers, another pair covered with fabric patches. I rummaged in my mother’s drawers and added socks and
a couple of nightgowns. I drew the line at underpants. That was creepy, somehow. I’d pick up an eight-pack of cotton bikinis
at Wal-Mart.

When I was packed, I grabbed the satchel and then walked fast to the bedroom door. Daddy was lurking right outside, holding
a bologna sandwich on a paper towel. I took it and started wolfing at it. Daddy had his piece of notebook paper and the bottle
of pills from the bedside table in his other hand. He rattled them both at me.

“Bill got these pills from his friend. He says you need to take them all the way down to the bottom,” Daddy said.

I nodded with my mouth overfull. I felt a little better with every bite. Gretel, called off the bed by the sound of chewing,
came and sat at my feet, giving me and my luncheon meat equally rapt gazes. I tore her off a corner. I glanced at the label
on the pill bottle. I didn’t recognize the name, but the drug ended in “-cillin,” so I pocketed it.

“Thank Bill for me,” I said with my mouth full. I pushed past Daddy and started for the door, my father’s voice following
me, now with a slight whine.

“Rose? Rose Mae? Don’t you think of me at all?”

“Not really,” I said. I opened the front door and looked out at
Pine Abbey. The sun was going down. The lights were on in the kitchen across the street, Bill and his Bunny presumably sitting
down to dinner with Mrs. Bill.

My mother had walked out of that house one day, wearing her flowered shoes. No plan beyond the grocery store or a weekday
mass. Something had happened, and she’d never come home.

“I think about you, alla time,” my daddy said.

I looked at him over my shoulder and nodded. “It’s harder on the left person.” He blinked at me, puzzled, and I added, “It’s
better to be the one that leaves.” I walked out the door, heading for his carport where the VW Bug was parked. He followed
me.

“I only want to apologize,” he said. “It’s step nine. Can’t you let me?” He rattled his note at me, Marley with a paper chain.

I shook my head and handed the last bit of my meal to Gret. Leaving everything of Rose behind meant ditching the Buick, but
I couldn’t exactly go Greyhound with Gret along. I had a wild vision of myself in the bus station wearing black glasses, trying
to pass her off as a three-legged service dog as she pulled me sideways off my feet and stood up to try to lick the ticket
seller in the face through the glass of the booth.

Also, the tickets would get pricey. I’d have to go the long way across America. The quickest way to California was Highway
40, but it ran through Texas, right through Amarillo, and that was insanity. I would not place my fragile body back anywhere
near Thom’s orbit. I’d have to go around, head north and then cross over through Kansas or Nebraska.

I said, “Your little rusty Bug here, does it run good?” When he nodded, I said, “Can I have it?”

He reached in his pants pocket and pulled out a jingly set of keys, tucking the apology into his armpit and working the car
key off his ring.

“Rosey, if you listen to me read this, just once through, then my car is yours.” He held both things out to me, the key in
one hand, his sad bit of paper back in the other.

I peeled his crumpled apology out of his hand. “I’ll take it, okay? You wrote it for me, and I have it now. You did your step.”
I tucked it down into my handbag, then reached for the key. He hesitated, fingers closing on the key.