Hot Springs (35 page)

“Flooded,” Landis said. “Smell it? With all that rain last night, the plugs probably got wet. You should give it a rest.”

She cranked the window tight. Tessa was with him, that earnest, midwestern-pretty face of hers floating outside like a balloon. “Lock your door,” said Bernice, and when Emily didn’t do it immediately, she reached around and pushed the knob down for her. Then she shut her eyes.
Please don’t let this happen
. She opened them again, but rather than look out, she gazed down at her feet and saw that she had only put on one sock. Her left ankle was bare, descending into the top of her sneaker, scabby where she’d scratched mosquito bites. It looked like the ankle of some schoolkid. It did not look like the ankle of someone who could be trusted with the life and future of a child.

There was a second knock on the window. Tessa was staring in at her, another visitor to the aquarium trying to gain the attention of the exotic fish. The air inside the car had grown stuffy, and she wondered how long she could stay like this. “Bernice?” Tessa said, her voice muffled by the glass. Bernice shook her head. What was there to talk about? And yet she knew this was it—the moment she’d been headed for inevitably. Caught red-handed. And still she didn’t have to give up. The engine would fix itself, eventually. This stupid car had brought them all the way here, after all. She’d wait these people out.

“Hey,” she said, repositioning the rearview mirror so she could see Emily’s face. “Remember our big drive together?”

“Of course,” said Emily.

“It was fun, wasn’t it?”

“Yup.”>

“What was your favorite part?”

“I think the motel,” Emily said. “The one with the pool.”

“In Nashville? But, honey, that pool was empty. Remember? It was closed.”

“I know,” she said. “I just liked how it looked.”

“Me, too.”

Then, leaning forward, Emily pushed up the lock and opened her door.

“No!” Bernice shouted, but it was too late. A moment later, Tessa had her in her arms and was hugging her tight.

Bernice rolled down her window, just about two inches.

“Come on,” said Landis quietly. “Try to be reasonable.”

She took a deep breath, let a few moments pass. Reasonable. Yes, she could be that. She removed the keys, unlocked her door, and got out of the car.

“What did you think?” Tessa was saying, her eyes pink and tired. “What did you think was going to happen? Where were you going?”

“The aquarium,” she said. “To see the sharks.” Even Landis looked more disturbed than she’d ever seen him. “Tell her,” she said. “You knew we were going to the aquarium. We’d have been back by lunch.”

“You’re lying,” said Tessa.

“Am not,” said Bernice. She looked at him. “Go on.”

Landis, unshaven, his shirt half-buttoned, flexed his big hands, then stuck them in his pockets.

“I’m taking her back now,” said Tessa.

“The hell you are. Landis?”

“It might be for the best,” he said.

“What?”

“You heard me. This isn’t about just you. We have to consider Emily and what’s right for her.”

“What’s right for her is being with her mother.”

“I
am
her mother,” said Tessa.

“Her
real
mother.”

At the sound of her name, Emily looked up at Bernice for the first time since she’d exited the car. Bernice was trying hard not to take
this personally or read it as an expression of preference. Emily still didn’t look entirely awake, but she did look distressed.

“I’m not letting her go back with you,” Bernice said. She was conscious of a fat man smoking and watching them from the porch of his house a few doors up the street. Why did everything have to be so fucking
public
? “I made a huge mistake giving her up, and I’m not making it again.”

“Bernice,” said Tessa, “it’s not up to you.”

“It’s not?”

“No.”

She looked at Landis, who had removed one hand from his pants pocket and was studying the back of his knuckles. Then she looked expectantly at Emily. “Pearl?” she said. “What do you think?”

The cab, which had clearly been told to wait, pulled into a spot that had opened up a few yards down from the house, its tailpipe exhaling puffs of white smoke into the humid morning air that rose from behind it like the product of some invisible hookah.

“I don’t know,” said Emily.

“See? She doesn’t know.” But looking at her face, Bernice understood that this was not the case. She knew. Everyone knew. The only one in denial was herself.

“You’re young,” said Tessa. “You can have more children. You should. Instead of trying to change the past, why not try looking to the future?” She glanced over at Landis. Her hand was on Emily’s shoulder. “Bernice?” she asked, more quietly. “Are you going to be OK?”

Landis tried to take her arm, but she shook him off, stepping backward.

“Emily is my daughter,” said Tessa. “I won’t let anything happen to her.”

“She’s
my
daughter,” said Bernice.

“I didn’t say you couldn’t come visit. In fact, I’d like that. You should.”

“Oh, that’ll be nice. I can just see that.” Bernice moved toward Emily. Where before there had been only the idea of love, now there was the actuality of it, something she found infinitely more surprising. She sank to her knees. “Emily,” she said. “You’re not going to do this, are you? You’re not going to leave me. After all we’ve been through? Just tell me this. You love me, right? I need to know that.”

Emily nodded. But she was already on the back deck of a boat sailing away from Bernice, her image diminishing toward the vanishing point.

“We’re going now, all right?” said Tessa. Emily pulled away, went to the back door of Bernice’s car, and opened it. Bernice’s heart filled briefly with hope. But a moment later she brought out her knapsack, which held the change of clothes Bernice had stuffed into it, the windup crab and the plush penguin, some plastic sunglasses and a cherry Chapstick that Bernice had bought Emily in Tennessee. They had taken turns playing movie star with it, pretending it was lipstick and admiring themselves in the rearview mirror.

Bernice did not kiss her good-bye. She didn’t see how she could. Instead, she started walking down the street, fast. She felt dizzy; she felt in danger of splitting in half. She saw the cab pass her on its way south, probably back to Tessa’s hotel first, then on to the airport.

Landis jogged to catch up to her. “There was nothing else to do,” he said.

Bernice kept her pace. “I’m not talking to you. You abandoned me—you didn’t even try.”

“Hey,” he said. “I’m here, right? Will you think for a change, instead of just living inside your own head? Look around. You didn’t lose anything. Do you even know where you’re going?”

“This way.” They passed more row houses, their porches leaning oddly to one side or the other, some with well-tended gardens bursting with flowers, others with patches of lawn overgrown with weeds and littered with dog shit. The sun was over the rooftops to their left across the street, angling gold against the bay windows, bouncing off the mirrors of the parked cars. “I think I’d like to be alone.”

“You say that, but you don’t. You don’t want to be alone.”

“Oh, yes, I do.”

“No one does.”

“Will you maybe just trust me on this and go away?”

He stopped and grabbed her by both shoulders, and though she tried to get loose, his grip was too strong. “I’m turning around and heading back to your house, and I’m going to see what there is to make for breakfast. I’m going to have some coffee.”

She shrugged. “You’re just going to leave eventually. It might as well be now.”

“I should take you up on that.”

“Go ahead. Traitor.”

“No one else would have stuck it out this long.”

“You’re free,” she said. “Released. Bye-bye.”

As she walked away from him, the neighborhood dropped off quickly. These were parts of town she’d been forbidden to explore as a child, and had for the most part only viewed through a car window. The houses had originally been just as nice as the ones to the north, but now many were decrepit and in need of repair. She didn’t care where she was; the sadness in her felt so deep that she thought if she stopped moving she might simply fall into it and disappear forever.

After a few more blocks, she found herself in front of a church with a hand-lettered sign outside that read Solid Rock Temple of God Jesus: Sunrise Service. She stopped and listened. A band was playing
inside, and the building was thumping like an overexcited heart. A thin young man in a white T-shirt that came to his knees walked his pit bull past her, the dog an inscrutable gray waddle of muscle. She thought about Tessa and the church she’d gone to with her and David in the Springs, all those shiny white faces reeking of cologne and good wishes. Gathering her courage, she walked up to the doors and pushed them open. Music flooded out. On a low stage, a young man was singing a gospel song, pacing back and forth, dressed in a light blue suit and a gleaming white shirt, with a red hat that looked something like a fez, and a piece of colorful kente cloth around his shoulders. Bernice hesitated, grappling with the feeling she always had upon entering a church, that she was somehow shoplifting. Inside, she quickly took a seat on a folding chair in the back of the room.

There were maybe thirty people in the congregation, and they were all standing and singing along, their voices competing with the bass, organ, and drums, their bodies moving in joyful rhythm.

It had happened only two days before the church visit, on a sunny Friday near the end of her first trimester. For weeks, she’d been bat-ting her eyes at him, teasing him about himself—
You guys play any Black Sabbath?
—and generally testing him, trying to find where he was weak, because everyone was weak. She’d been asleep, dreaming something warm and tropical, and then she’d opened her eyes to see his hands right in front of her, his arms coming around her sides, and she understood that he was curled up behind her on the bed, his lips touching her neck, and she’d thought
What the hell do I do now?
And then she’d thought,
Better lie still. Lie still and don’t acknowledge anything is happening at all.
And in that way, she had convinced herself that it wasn’t, though of course it was. She was there and not there, and when it was over, he’d simply gotten up and slipped himself back
into his pants and tucked in his shirt and smiled at her in a way that said what was growing in her was now his property, too.

She watched a heavyset woman in a green dress in front of her swaying back and forth to the music, her arms held out to the sides as if she were conducting. She thought about how they’d all stood together, David in his tie and navy blazer, Tessa in her yellow A-line dress with lacy trim, and his hand had felt for hers, as if their relationship were some secret high school crush they had to keep from the parents, as if things could just change on their own from ugly to beautiful for no reason at all except that you wanted them to.

A woman sat beside her and touched her arm lightly. “You feel it, don’t you?” she asked, her voice raised to compete with the music. She was pleasant looking, with a round, almost childish freckled face the color of light coffee, wearing a blue blouse and shiny gold-button earrings. “That feeling you’re having, that’s his light shining on your heart. Go ahead and cry. It’s a good kind of crying.”

Bernice wiped the tears from her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can explain.”

“Don’t apologize. You’re welcome here.”

“No, really. I can explain.”

But the woman was beaming. She knew what was what. “No need for that,” she said. “No need to be sorry. Just remember—it’s everything in the world you need, right here in this place, right now.”

In the moments after she’d given birth, the labor and delivery nurse who had been with her through the whole thing—Bernice had refused to let Tessa or David come into the room—had returned
from the little table where another nurse was cleaning up the baby, suctioning out its mouth, tying off the umbilical-cord stump, and wrapped her arms around Bernice and hugged her. “Oh, honey,” she’d said. “You did it. You did it. You were perfect, absolutely perfect. No one could have done better.” And Bernice, exhausted from eight hours of labor, numb from the epidural, and confused by this sudden feeling of both accomplishment and loss, had had a momentary sense of being flooded with light throughout her body, as if all the mistakes she’d made no longer mattered and her life was beginning anew.

Morning sun angled through the high, mullioned windows. Sitting on the ledge of the nearest one, a small bird that had somehow gotten in patiently viewed the proceedings, head twitching back and forth like a spectator at a tennis match. In a little while, she thought, she’d go back and see what Landis was doing. He probably didn’t even know where she kept the coffee.

My thanks to Lee Montgomery and Meg Storey, and all the dedicated staff at Tin House Books, for their intelligence, professionalism, and good spirits. Also to Ellen Levine for her ongoing support and advice.

Thanks, too, to everyone in Nashville involved with the Parthenon Prize: Alice Randall, who picked
Hot Springs
as the 2008 winner; Lily LaBour Catalano, director; the many readers involved in the screening process, including Sheri Malman; and, most importantly, John Spence, founder, for his commitment to promoting and encouraging new literature.

Copyright © 2010 Geoffrey Becker

 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2601 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.