Mercy Train (16 page)

“Tell Jack you'll be home well before Christmas,” Iris had said.

When Sam had heard this—it was already mid-October—she'd backpedaled, wanting to un-know the time frame.

“Let's not talk about it,” she had said.

If her mother had dated or had a relationship since the divorce, she never shared it with Sam or, as far as she knew, with Theo. And other than an occasional bridge game, she didn't seem to socialize much in Florida. It was as if after all the years of dinner parties and tennis groups and being a wife and mother in the suburbs, Iris had slipped out the back door.

“It's so weird you live here,” Sam said.

“The shell collecting was a big draw,” Iris said, wryly. “It's warm. It felt new. After your father, I wanted something different. To be away from all that.”

Sam wondered if her mother wanted not just to be away but to be disconnected. Freed. Even from me and Theo, she thought. To Sam, such buoyancy seemed frightening.

“You know, the island itself is only six thousand years old? I like the feeling of newness. It feels accidental,” Iris said.

They drove over the bridge to Sanibel. Sam had visited a few times over the years, but it still felt as though her mother was on vacation. The island was twelve miles long and four miles wide, with over half of it a protected wildlife reserve. Iris rarely left it.

“I've already talked to Susan, my realtor, about selling the condo. You should get a decent price for it. It'll be a good time of year to sell. The snowbirds will be arriving soon.”

Sam turned to look at Iris and then back at the road.

“We're going to have to talk about the details, Samantha.”

“I don't want to.”

“You shouldn't worry so much,” Iris said.

Sam, irked, had wanted to say that you really can't tell someone not to worry. It doesn't work like that.

*   *   *

Sam pulled the keys from the ignition and tried to focus on what she was doing at this forlorn motel. Maybe the young prostitute's mother had been unfit, and the girl had drifted without anyone to help her, a dirty and deflated balloon whose string finally got caught on a dead branch. How easily we can be lost, Sam thought. But maybe it didn't take a lot—kindness from a stranger even—to pull someone back from that vast aloneness. Sam imagined herself knocking on the door, introducing herself, offering her help finding a job, a little money, a call to social services—something. Why was that such a big deal? Because, she said to herself, you are you.

But she got out of the car anyway, not ready to give up—she'd made this crazy return here after all—wanting one more glimpse into a life that was not hers, to get outside herself and do something decent for someone else. It was too cold to be without a jacket. She'd been fooled by the sun, now on the down slope, already having slid clear of the parking lot. She tucked her hands under her arms, her shoulders raised up toward her ears in an effort to block the wind that was rattling the straggling leaves on the stunted walnut tree saplings at the edge of the motel. She walked around the outside of the indoor pool, empty and swamp green, its glass fogged with condensation and soot from the exhaust of the cars roaring past on East Washington.

In the front parking lot, Sam looked around and, seeing no one, cupped her hands against the driver's side window of the girl's car. The blue vinyl seats were cracked and sun-faded, and electrical tape mummied the steering wheel. On the floor was a Green Bay Packers ice scraper, a torn map of Wisconsin, and a half-empty two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew peeking out from under the passenger seat. A garbage bag of clothes filled the floor of the backseat, a dirty pink towel obscenely spilling out the top. The girl was living out of her car. Sam wondered if she longed to be settled or if settled was what she was running from.

“Hey!” the girl yelled from the balcony.

“Oh,” Sam said, startled. She felt wobbly after seeing the girl's scant possessions, artifacts of impermanence and disconnection. And now the girl was here, looking like a child dressed up as a hooker, her knees knobby, her shoes too big. Sam backed away, with her hands ridiculously in the air.

“What the fuck? That's my car, lady.”

“I know. I mean, I'm sorry.”

“What?” She tilted her head like a puppy. “Wait, I've seen you before.”

“I don't think so.”

“The drugstore,” the girl said, her voice rising. “Did you follow me?”

“No. Well, yes, sort of,” Sam stuttered.

“What the hell do you want?”

Sam felt her face flush, her scalp prickle with heat. Say it, she said to herself, do this one thing. “I thought—I don't know. When I saw you at the store I thought, You're so young. Maybe I could help you out.”

“What?” The girl shook her head and crossed her arms in defiance.

“Okay,” Sam said. “It was a misunderstanding. A mistake. I'm going.”

The girl slammed the motel door behind her.

Sam bumbled her way back to her own car, tripping off the curb, and fell heavily into the front seat. What had happened to her? How had she so misjudged? She felt like a lunatic. Why don't you get your own house in order? she said to herself.

*   *   *

Just before Sam and Jack had moved in, a house on their street had blown up. The man who'd lived there, in his sixties, had opened all the gas valves in order to asphyxiate himself, and then his house exploded, taking out half the house next to it, cracking windows, plaster walls, and ceilings all down the street. He'd managed to make it through the grueling winter, only to give up once spring had arrived—the tree flush, the crocuses and daffodils pushed up, the last patches of snow in the shadows. How lonely he must have been. Three years later the lot was still empty, a now-grassy plot that kids had claimed as a makeshift playing field, orange traffic cones marking the goal posts. Ted had told them that the man had bouts of depression and rarely slept, often taking walks in the middle of the night. He was a high school art teacher but retired early, and since then had never left the neighborhood. He walked to the market a few blocks away, and he occasionally ate a hamburger at the bar around the corner. He didn't have a car and didn't take the bus, because, he'd told Ted, there was nowhere he wanted to go. Ted had wondered why someone who'd kept to himself wanted to go out with a literal bang. To Sam it had made sense. The man had been angry about the emptiness, and he'd wanted everyone to know it.

She turned away from the kitchen window. On the counter was one of her large lidded jars with a milky robin's-egg glaze. She pulled off the lid with the familiar emery-board scrape of its unglazed flange, impressed anew by the closeness of its fit, and pulled out a tin of roasted almonds. The anticipation of their smoky-salty bite made her salivate. And then it occurred to her that she had no idea what held her mother's ashes. A cheesy funeral parlor urn? A box? A bag? Theo had picked them up after the cremation, and they had yet to decide what to do with them. She had made a jar for nuts, but she hadn't even thought to make something to contain her mother's remains.

It was two o'clock. Ella was supposed to be napping. Sam missed the sumptuous weight of a baby asleep against her. She never missed Jack anymore, though. And that was the fear, wasn't it? That she had fallen in love with Ella and the feeling had eclipsed what she felt for Jack. The love was different, of course, it didn't have to be one or the other, but what she felt for Ella seemed richer, dizzying, and undiminishable.

Out the window a squirrel sat balanced on the fence, nibbling away the soft green peel of a walnut. Every fall the squirrels encamped in the walnut trees and stripped them bare of fruit, chirping and squeaking, littering the ground below with shells and meat that stained the sidewalks a deep red ocher. The squirrels gorged themselves for a week, and then the feast was over and the trees were bare. Looking into Ted's yard, she guessed it was still a little early for the squirrel bacchanalia.

I'll make the pound cake and give it to Ted, Sam thought. She had made a fool of herself with the prostitute, but she could redeem the day by doing something nice for her neighbor. There would be no one more appreciative. She dumped a handful of almonds into her palm and poured some of them into her mouth, the salt puckering her tongue. But as she crunched, she knew the box of Iris's wasn't going away. She switched tack and sat down at the table again, steering herself to at least get something done today, something to show for the baby-less hours.

Her cell phone rang, startling her. Theo again, and, despite her peevishness toward him today, she was glad to see the familiar number.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hey, sorry to bother you,” he said.

“You're not. What's up?”

“I keep thinking about that box of stuff. I should have looked through it. That was really lame of me.”

“I never knew you had dramatic aspirations.”

“What do you mean?”

“Cheaper by the Dozen.”

Theo laughed. “Seventh grade. I had to wear a fake mustache, and for a week I had a mustache-shaped rash from the glue.”

“I'll send you the program.”

“What else did you find?”

“No jewels or anything. Stuff from both of us as kids. Recipes. Random scrapbook-type stuff. I haven't gone through it all yet. It's both overwhelming and utterly mundane.”

“It's depressing to see the remnants of a life in a box. The ticket stubs and report cards. Snapshots. I don't know. I think I'm feeling my age.”

Sam felt emboldened. “You and Cindy should adopt a baby.”

“What?” he asked, annoyed. “No.”

“Come on, Theo. If you want a kid, have a kid.”

Theo was quiet for a moment and then exhaled.

“Are you smoking?” she asked.

“I started back up again. Just a few a day.”

“I won't bring it up again. About adopting. “

“No, it's okay.”

“I think you'd be good as a dad.”

“Thanks, Sammy,” he said quietly. “Oh, so Dad and Marie are coming your way. Clear out a big parking space.”

“To Madison?”

“In the RV. After Canada. In a couple weeks. He's going to call you.”

“No way.”

“He wants to meet Ella, Sammy. Give him a break.”

She wanted her dad to come. Why was it so hard for her to admit?

“I'll call him.”

“Sure you will,” Theo said.

“What'd we put Mom in?”

“What?”

“Her ashes. What did we put them in?”

“That's so weird. I have no idea. I think the funeral home just took care of it. Something standard.”

“We're terrible,” she said.

“Come on, it was an emotional time. It doesn't matter really, does it?”

Of course it matters, she thought. I should be making something in honor of my mother instead of dithering about, stalking prostitutes.

“You have them, right?” she asked.

“I think they're in the downstairs closet.”

“You think?”

“I have them, Sam, relax. But we need to deal with them soon, okay?”

With the watershed of Ella's arrival, Sam had forgotten that they had not buried the ashes, and now here it was, a whole year later. Theo was right.

She pulled out the next envelope in the box. Inside were some sixties-era photographs of people she didn't know, a dinner party with an empty seat—Iris must have been holding the camera—couples holding piña coladas and cigarettes at a lake house, identities forever lost. There was a picture of Chicago in a blizzard. There were also some outtakes of her parents' wedding not included in the official album—a candid of Iris standing alone, watching the reception, her hair poofed up behind a white satin bow, a shot of her being fed cake by Glenn, her eyes closed, a fleck of opaque pink lipstick on her tooth, Glenn laughing, showing his gums. Sam wondered if her mother had kept these because she couldn't bear to throw them out, or if they'd held some secret meaning for her, something she'd wanted to remember of her wedding day that was not staged. And what would Sam do with them now? Stick them back in the box for Ella to discover in fifty years?

She unfolded a yellowed plastic bag. Inside wrapped in tissue paper was a square coaster from someplace in Chicago called the Coq d'Or, with an image of a rooster on it, flecked with the remains of gold paint. The cardboard was deteriorating and furry around the edges. Really, Mom? A coaster from a bar?

There was a book in the box, a small Bible, with a battered black cover bent in around the pages, the gold lettering rubbed away. Her staunchly atheist mother had kept a Bible. Sam cracked open the musty cover, but the nameplate was blank. Only the date was filled in: June 10, 1900. In the top corner, a black stamp:

Children's Aid Society

105 East Twenty-Second Street

New York City, New York

Her grandmother's, surely, given the date—she would have been about eleven then—but it was a strange notation. New York was a long way from Wisconsin. Maybe she picked it up at a church bazaar, Sam thought, and there was no more to it than that.

Sticking out of the pages was a photograph of Sam's grandparents on the sagging porch of their old southern Minnesota farmhouse, its white paint flaking off from the battering seasons, the snaking branches of the overgrown lilac trees obscuring the edge of the house. The Olsens were an impassive-looking pair, probably in their sixties here, she without makeup, her white hair pulled back in a low ponytail, without any attempt to pretty herself. She had been a farm wife, after all, not fancy or vain. In the photograph her grandfather sat straight on a rough-hewn wooden bench with the newspaper on his lap, his bifocals on the end of his nose. Sam's grandmother, nestled in a frayed wingback chair, was knitting. Neither of them smiled, though they didn't look unhappy either, just separate, as if they didn't live with each other as much as next to each other, and they were ready to get back to what they were doing before the photographer had asked them to please look up.