Backseat Saints (41 page)

She turns away from me and takes a deep breath, poised on her toes at the edge of the doorway like it is a diving board. Then
she steps off, and she pulls the door closed behind her.

I stand up. I have to pack. I need to be a hundred miles up the coast of California and ready to swap cars by morning. I am
at the foot of the stairs before it occurs to me to wonder what other trails of mine Thom might be tracking.

All at once, my heart skips a beat and I run back to the phone I abandoned on the floor and dive down to grab it, dialing
a number that I know by heart.

Mrs. Fancy’s machine picks up, and her soft voice says, “I can’t get to the phone right now—”

I hang up. Mrs. Fancy has even less reason than my father to be out at this hour; book clubs and church committees do not
meet pre-dawn.

I find I’m rocking back and forth. This is my fault. My father has taken a beating meant for me, and it killed him. If Thom
has given another, mine by rights, to frail Mrs. Fancy… The thought does not bear finishing.

I dial Information again, thinking that my mother is going to have twenty bucks in 411 charges by the time I’m done. Then
I almost laugh at the absurdity of worrying about my mother’s phone bill, when Mrs. Fancy is not answering her phone and Thom
Grandee is snaking his fast way up my still-warm trail, my father’s blood on his fists, hungry to kill me.

Information gives me the number of her one son who lives locally. I dial Daren Fancy, and he picks up on ring four.

“Hello?” he says. One word, pointed into a sleepy, angry question.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “this is Mrs. Fancy’s friend. I haven’t been able to get ahold of her, and I am very worried—”

He interrupts me, “No, no it’s fine. She’s fine. She’s here.”

I can breathe again. “She’s there, with you?”

“Yes. Her house was broken into,” he says. “She didn’t feel safe staying there alone.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful,” I say, and there is an awkward silence. “Not about the break-in, but that you have her, I mean.” When
I broke Mrs. Fancy’s window to get my Pawpy’s gun back, I may well have saved her life. I am babbling now. “That neighborhood
is going to hell.”

“No kidding,” he says. “Two break-ins in a week.”

My mouth is already shaping a fast good-bye, but at that I pause. “Two break-ins?”

“The first time they only broke a window. I suspect they got interrupted,” he says, telling me about my own small crime. “But
when they came back, they tore her whole house up. I guess her sugar bowl money wasn’t enough. What did they expect, I wonder,
a little old lady living on her husband’s pension? They took up her knives and gutted her mattress, stabbed open every chair
and sofa cushion, smashed her dishes, shredded all her clothes. She couldn’t have stayed there even if I woulda let her.”

Thom again, this time beating a house to death. I have to assume he has my notebook, all my notes. He has a name for the phantom
other man, now. Jim Beverly. I am trying frantically to remember if I wrote down anything that would point him west, toward
California. Into my shocked silence, Daren says, “Could you call back later? My mother is sleeping. We all are.”

“Of course,” I say, “I am so sorry. I am so sorry.” I am apologizing for more than waking him, but he takes it at face value
and hangs up.

I leave the phone on the floor and get up. I have to go. I have to go now.

I run upstairs and begin pulling my underthings out of the
dresser drawers and stuffing them pell-mell into my mother’s old cloth bag. I am working quickly, both so I can go and to
keep my brain from thinking about how my independent friend has lost her home and how I’ve helped kill my own daddy. I’ve
killed the pony ride man I do not much remember, the son of a bitch who raised me hard, and that sad old sorry man I met a
little more than a week ago. I’ve led Thom to them all.

I go to the closet and start tearing my clothes down off the hangers, but it is hard to see to pack; I must have started crying
again without noticing. Gret is following me back and forth across the room, worried by the noises I am making.

As soon as I have most of my things stuffed inside the bag, I grab it up by the straps and go running downstairs. Gretel follows.
Her leash is by the door, and I snatch it. Gretel’s tail wags uncertainly. She knows something is bad wrong, but still, in
her mind a walk is always a good thing.

I’m about to click the leash to her collar when I notice that the bag slung over my shoulder feels light. Too light.

It is missing Pawpy’s gun. I cannot leave without that. Not with Thom’s hot breath coming up behind me.

I shake my head, unable to remember where I put it. It was in my bedside table… I remember my mother peeling it out of my
hands after the sailors left. I have no idea what she has done with it. I drop the bag to the floor with a thump and let the
leash jangle down beside it.

I could tear her house down to its very foundations and not find it. I do not know my mother well enough to know her hiding
places.

“Stay,” I tell Gretel again.

I open the front door and stare out into the blackness beyond Parker’s porch light. I can’t sit here and wait like my good
dog for her return. I step out onto the porch and close the door behind me.

I slip through the front gate and close and latch it behind me.
My mother can’t be that far, but I have no idea what direction she may have taken. Perhaps she is only wandering her neighborhood,
walking to clear her head. I head up the street, going from streetlight to streetlight at a fast walk. I have the sidewalk
to myself at this hour.

“Mirabelle,” I call, walking. Then louder, “Mirabelle?” My pace picks up. “Mirabelle!”

Somewhere a window bangs open and a man yells, “Shut up!” I do not care. I call her name again and again, louder and louder.
I am running now. I run all the way up one street, then turn and tear back down another. Somehow without noticing, I have
changed words. Now I am yelling for my momma.

I have made this pilgrimage before. The first night she was gone, my daddy came home to find me at the kitchen table, waiting
for my snack. We waited there for dinner, which never came.

I said, “Should we call the police?”

“She ain’t missing,” he said, “She’s just gone.”

Then my daddy quit waiting and started drinking instead. I waited, though, hours more, sitting in that ladder-back chair,
waiting for my mother to come and put me to bed. I believed that if I got up and put myself to bed, then she would not come
to do it, but if I waited, she would have to. The chair was hard, and I got so tired, and my daddy passed out on the sofa.
I left the house and went looking for her, wandering up and down our street, calling her quietly so as not to wake my daddy.
I called until I was crying so desperately that I could only call by vowel, and “Momma” became long, shuddering o’s and a’s
that sounded more like mourning than hope.

It was close to dawn when I finally made my way home, hoarse and all wept out. I closed the front door softly behind me, and
the click that latch made as it caught was an awful noise, final and heartless and mechanical. My daddy snored on the sofa;
he’d never stirred or noticed I was gone.

I am calling her now, much louder. But I have left the houses
behind me, and no one tells me to shut up or phones the cops. I am passing closed stores and offices, and I realize I have
made my way to the library.

My mother is here. I see her across the street with her back to me. She is standing in the glow of the security light that
hangs over the library’s front entrance. She is talking on one of the pay phones that hangs in a bank of three near the door.

“Momma,” I yell, and I run toward her. “Momma.”

She turns to me, still talking into the phone. She holds up one finger in a “just a second” gesture as I sprint toward her.
She turns and sets down the receiver as I come up the library’s front steps. She nods at me, as if in pleasant greeting, and
says, “I was on the phone, Rose Mae. Hush now. It’s the middle of the night, and you really shouldn’t be outside.”

In the harshness of the security light, her bloodshot eyes look crimson and blind, but astonishingly calm. Not even the sight
of me tearing down the street, hollering for her with my nose running and my cheeks striped black with wept-away mascara,
has disturbed her.

I clutch her by the arms and say, “I have to get ahead of Thom. I have to go somewhere he won’t expect, and then I have to
lure him there. I have to set a trap somewhere and lure him there and kill him.”

“Because that’s gone so well for you already,” my mother says with sarcasm so heavy that her mouth literally twists up with
it.

“I let him kill my daddy,” I say.

My mother puts her hands over my hands on her arms, deliberate and calm, and says, “You’re going to rip yourself in half,
Rose Mae. Calm down.” She takes my hands off her and turns me toward the road. She puts one arm over my shoulder and starts
walking, towing me with her out of the pool of the library’s security light. “Done’s done. I’m sorry about your father if
you are, but his liver would have killed him in another fifteen minutes anyway.” She shrugs, cold and pragmatic, as she walks
me across the street.

“Where’s my gun?” I say as she tows me along. “I need my gun.”

My mother shakes her head, a decisive no. She uses her free hand to pull the thin sheaf of tarot cards out of her pocket.
The hanged man is at the top of the stack, faceup.

“I was wrong, Rose Mae.” She shakes the image of the hanged man. “This is a tricky card, and I read it wrong.”

I stop dead. “Where is my got-damn gun?” I yell at her, invoking Daddy’s favorite cuss.

“Shhhhh,” she says, calm as a corpse. She starts dragging me forward again. “Look at you, crying for your father. You think
you don’t have at least that much mercy for your husband? You can have your gun if you want it. Go lay your trap, but you’ll
pause too long, and he’ll kill you. If by some miracle you manage it? You won’t come back from it. Believe me.” I realize
she is navigating back toward her house, the last place on earth I ever want to see. But my dog and my bag are there, and
my gun is there, too, tucked away in some hidey-hole of hers. She turns her head to look at me directly. “I know what it is
to do a thing you can’t ever undo.” She lets that sink into me. I look at her bloody eyes and see again what a broken thing
she is.

I do not want to be her. I do not even want to be me.

“I don’t know what to do,” I say in a small voice.

She nods, turning to face forward again and picking up the pace. “Well, you can’t run—not on your own. You’ll leave a trail.
And you cannot kill him. It’ll ruin you. I think it will make you a woman you do not want to be.”

“So what’s left? I don’t want to die,” I tell her. “Thom is coming. I don’t know what to do.”

“You don’t have to do anything,” she says. We are turning back on Belgria Street, and she offers me a small, encouraging smile.
“I finally fixed it. I did what I meant to do years ago, what I should have done the first time I came to Amarillo and saw
what you’d married.”

I sniffle, and my head is starting to ache. “I need my gun.”

“You don’t have to kill him, honey,” my mother says, like she is soothing an overwrought toddler. As we pass under a streetlight,
I see her face has gone smooth, and in spite of her bloodied eyes she looks at peace, a good ten years younger. “I came to
the pay phone to call the Saint Cecilias. I couldn’t call from the house—they have very strict rules about leaving a trail.”

We are back at the house. She closes the front gate behind me, and it clangs like a prison gate. Even so, I let her tug me
up the stairs, back inside to where my anxious dog is waiting by her leash.

Instantly, all the fucking blue closes in on me. This whole house. Blue kitchen, blue bathroom, blue parlor, her blue-green
bedroom. Even my room is infested with it. I want to be someplace that is restful and painted white.

Even so, the sound of her voice, her firm hand on my arm, these things pull me up the stairs.

“It’s all set, Rose Mae. The Saint Cecilias will come tomorrow night, around midnight. They will take you someplace safe.
They will move you town to town by car, no public transportation. No trace. You can start fresh, and not even I will know
where you are.” Her voice quavers on that last sentence, and I see that it is costing her to give me up. Her calm face is
so sad.

Perhaps this is justice, for her to give me up now, just when she has finally filled that gaping wound of a room she keeps
upstairs. Her shrine has held its proper saint, and when I’m gone, it will be only a hole again. That is the word on the fourth
card I laid out, the word written in curlicue letters below the gypsy-haired lady in the lace blindfold, clutching her sword
and scales. Her word is “Justice.”

“But what if Thom comes here?” I say. “He will find you and kill you, like he killed Daddy.” We are back in my room again,
and she presses one hand firmly on my shoulder, pushing me down to sit on the bed.

“No, he won’t,” she says. She sits beside me. Pats my hand. “Stop worrying, Rose. I am fixing this, I told you. Once you are
safe
away, I’ll call the police. The ones in Fruiton, and in Amarillo, and here. I’ll call the FBI and anyone else I can think
of. I’ll tell them about what your husband did to Eugene. At the very least, Thom will be questioned. I’ll make sure he knows
that I called, that you were already here, and are gone now. He won’t be able to hurt me, because it will prove everything
I’ve said. He’ll probably get away with killing your daddy, but he won’t be able to come after me.”

I nod, my head aching. I say, “You called Saint Cecilia for me.”

“Yes,” she says. “Tough it out until midnight tomorrow, and Rose Mae Lolley will truly be gone. You will never have to worry
about him finding you. You can live. You can live, and be made into someone new.”

That sounds so beautiful to me. I want that. I want just that, so badly.