The Melting Season (24 page)

“She does not want me here,” I said. I pointed at the door. “She used the extra lock.”

“Too bad,” said Valka. “You’re here.” She sounded tough and masculine. She could crush someone at any moment.

We stood for a moment, balancing ourselves in the snow.

“We could throw something through a window,” said Valka.

“Or climb up to the second floor,” said Timber.

“Or we could just walk around the house and use the back door,” I said.

They both booed me.

“You are like the least fun superhero ever,” said Valka.

We trudged around back through the snow, all of us taking turns at tipping over. I eyed the right side of the roof as we passed it. It looked like the house was shedding itself, scallops of siding dripping down toward the ground. That could not have just happened this winter.

We rounded the corner, past the shivering, barren elms and the tips of the thatched wire fence that bounded what was once my mother’s vegetable garden. When we were little we would help dig up potatoes with her, and then she would slice and fry them and make fresh French fries for dinner. She stopped gardening once we got older, but there was still rosemary and a handful of lonely potatoes every summer.

I heard a cough and looked up. It was my father sitting on the bench on the back porch. He had a glass in his hand filled with brown liquor and ice. He was smoking, something I had not seen him do for years. I moved faster, leaving Valka and Timber behind. As I got closer I could see he was as skinny as a stray cat begging for scraps. It was so quiet, except for the sound of us wading. He coughed again. The sky was gray. My father was surrounded by snow, which he had dug out and molded to make a sort of chair for himself, including arm rests. A bottle of whiskey and a ring of cigarette butts sat at his feet. Valka fell again and shrieked, and he looked up.

“Well, looky-here,” he said. “Miss Catherine.” He had never taken to calling me Moonie. I was named after his mother. “I thought you’d be in Hawaii by now. Doing the hula.” He did a halfhearted sway with his hands to one side and then another. Oh, he was ripped.

“Dad, what’s going on in there?” I said.

“Well,” he said and leaned back, resting his arms on the snow. “Something’s come over your mother.”

His skin was white and the circles under his eyes hung down a few rungs.

“You know what I mean,” he said.

Yes, I did.

23
.

S
omething had been coming over my mother my entire life. We all knew it, in my family. We all knew my mother had been wounded. We all knew she was only sometimes healed, and if it was only sometimes, it was probably not at all. We never talked about it. We never told a soul. We were all in her shame with her. In it so far we could not make our way out again.

I had been keeping my secrets for so long. Other people’s secrets. I took everyone’s pain for my own. But when I left my husband, when I lost my mind, when I stole all the money, when I hit the road, when I saw the mountains build in the distance until I was right up next to them, so close it seemed I could have climbed right to the top, when my world unfolded before my eyes, all I had wanted to do the whole time was tell someone this one thing. I could not tell Valka. It just seemed too dangerous to give it all to her, and I needed her too much. But I could tell someone else. Someone new. And I had.

 

 

 

 

 

AT 5 A.M. ON NEW YEAR’S EVE, Valka and Paul McCartney were making out in the other room. I could hear the low laughter and sometimes there was a loud smack of the lips. Britney Spears had been the last one at the party, and they had finally booted her out. (“Y’all are gonna miss me when I’m gone,” she screeched.)

It was dark in the bedroom except for light coming through the curtain on the French doors. Prince crawled across the bed toward me like a cat and when he got to me he let out a meow and we both laughed.

“I wanna lap you up,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know.” I was dizzy, and then there was that clenching-up feeling inside.

“Come on,” he said. “Just let me love you for a little while.” He put his face close to mine. He smelled spicy.

I blurted it out
: I have a hard time feeling
. It was so nice to say it out loud, even though I felt humiliated at the same time. I hoped it would get better as time went on. I could not go back to not saying it again. I knew that much.

“I know, baby,” he said. “It’s a rough world. People have a hard time letting go.” He ran his hand down the side of my face, a fingertip down my neck, a full hand again on the top of my chest, and the side of my breast, and finally down to my hip. A warm trail followed his hand on the outside, but on the inside I was chilled. “You just have to relax.” He moved his hand to my hip.

“I can’t.” I started to cry and choke a bit.
He is going to do it anyway
, that is what I was thinking.

I know now it makes no sense to think that way. But that was just what I had always believed. That thought was stuck deep inside me.

“Okay, okay, baby,” said Prince. “You calm down now.” Prince pulled his hand away from my stomach. Of course, I was freaking him out. Of course. I am a freak. But then he put his hand in mine, and lay down next to me.

“You want to know about not feeling?” he said. “I got that covered.”

Prince started talking and told me stories from when he was still living his life as a girl in Memphis. Tough enough being mixed race, let alone feeling like she was supposed to be someone else entirely. Girls looking away in locker rooms, when she got caught staring. Boys treating her rough in the hallways and after school.

The story ended with her mother catching her making out with her lab partner and kicking her out of the house.

“It was actually a relief,” Prince told me. She cut off her hair. She bound her breasts. She changed her clothes. There were a lot more lab partners out there, just waiting for a girl like her. A man like him.

When she was done talking, I said, “You win.” He had been through the wringer, just like me. Thrown out into the world by his mother. He had turned into something new though. All I had done was steal a bunch of money.

“What do I win? Do I win you?”

I took a deep breath. “Okay.” I shifted and then started to unbutton my shirt.

Prince laughed. He was not being mean, but still it stung. Then he pushed my hands away gently from my shirt. “What kind of man do you think I am? I don’t want to make you do anything. We can just talk. Come on, you tell me. Tell me your hard-luck story. I promise not to laugh at you or judge you or say anything to make it worse. We’re just two strangers meeting for a night. You can trust me.”

Our faces were so close.

“It is not my story,” I said. “It is my mother’s. The bedtime story she used to tell me.”

“If she told it to you, it’s yours, too.”

I turned up toward the ceiling. I sucked in some air and held it and then burst it out when I could not stand it for a second longer.

 

 

 

 

 

HOW DID THAT STORY go again? The one she was always whispering in my ear before bedtime. Hovering with that wine breath. Watery eyes. Fingers that pinched. Sometimes there were stories about my father, about what a waste of time he was. In bed, in life.
And when I wake up in the morning, he is still there.
She made that sound like a bad thing, but I always knew it was good. That someone would be there in the morning. She rattled off her complaints. Her voice swerving. I knew she was just complaining, but it made me sad anyway. I could handle sad. But then there was the one story that scared me.

How did it go? It started in Omaha. A college girl heading to France, her first time away from home. She was wearing a hat she had bought at the Brandeis department store that looked like one she had seen in a magazine. A white summer hat with a wide, creamy ribbon around it. There was an early morning plane to Chicago, another to New York City, a flight to Paris, and then she would have to take a commuter train to Rennes, where she would live at the university there. More than a day of travel. Out-of-her-mind tired. Her first time on a plane, her first time anywhere. Big eyes for the world.

She had felt cool and confident when she left in the morning, but on the plane to Paris she was a mess. Her linen dress was wrinkled. Her blue eyeliner was smudged around the corners of her eyes, the matching shadow falling down her cheeks. The pins in her hair kept jamming into her head. She took her hair down. She washed her face in the bathroom. You are a mess, is what she said to herself in the mirror.
A target
, she realized later. A single woman traveling alone. Anyone could have seen it. Especially the man in the suit across the aisle, a man just short of her daddy’s age, if he were still alive. He would have been happy she went to France. He would have been scared the whole time she was gone and never told her a thing but he would have been happy. Did not matter anyway. He was dead now, three years past. She was on her own now. Whether she wanted to be or not. But here was this man across the aisle. He did not want her to be alone.

What did he look like? I asked that once. When I thought it was just a bedtime story. Maybe I asked the first time she told the story. Never again. I never asked another question again.

He was muscular, but short. He had a thick jaw. He had brown hair, and he wore it a little long. He had young hair, but an old face. He had big hands. His teeth were white and huge. He wore an expensive suit. It was cut tight around him. He filled out his suit. He filled out the seat he was sitting in. He took up all the room around him he possibly could. He was an ice-cold block of a man.

He was chewing gum. He offered her a stick. She took it. He spoke to her in French.

I am visiting.

My mother was flattered.

I am American.

He smiled painfully at my mother. Then he started speaking in English to her and she was relieved. She knew she was going to have to speak in French the entire time once she landed. This was the point of her going. But she was not totally ready. To give in to being on her own. In her head, on her own.

What did they talk about? That part I do not remember. Maybe she told me once. I remember the gum, and that she told him she was American, and that they talked for a while. He asked her questions, she answered. She asked him questions, and he told her very little. He was a scientist. A man of science. He was coming home from a conference. That was all she knew. He was more interested in her. In her being an orphan, in her being alone, in this boy she had just met at an ice cream social at school, but, no, he was not her boyfriend. Yet. He was most interested in her having to find her way to the train all by herself.

They walked off the plane together. She pulled out the letter that had been sent to her by the immersion program. It contained all the directions to the train she would take to Rennes. There was a phone number. She was dizzy. The airport was huge. It was late in the afternoon, but it could have been any time at all.

She handed him the directions.

He scanned the paper.

He ripped the piece of paper into little pieces, walked to a garbage can, and threw them away. My mother watched him, horrified.

He took her arm. She stared at him.

She stared back at the garbage can for a moment. And then she went with him.

He took her on the metro, all right. Around the city for hours. Off one train and on another. A loop. She had never been on a subway before. He kept her talking the entire time. She tried to pick up bits and pieces of conversation from other people but he would not let her leave his attention. Sometimes he would tell her they should just get off the train and have coffee. She shook her head.

He kept touching her knee.

She felt herself crumbling. She just wanted to stop traveling.

They finally arrived at the station. He left her in the corner with her backpack. She could have run, but where would she have gone? She thought she was trapped. Trapped in a train station in France.

Oh, my poor mother.

He walked to the ticket counter. Of course, the last train had left. Of course, she must stay with him at his home. He insisted. Just one more train ride away.

Every part of her sank down, until she was flat on the ground. He picked up her bag. He grabbed her hand and pulled her up. She dragged her feet, and he put his hand on the small of her back. She took her hat off her head. Her hair smelled. It felt dirty, and heavy on her head.

I like this
, he said. He wrapped his hand in the end of her hair for a second. She looked him in the eye.

Come on, it will be okay
, he said.
Everything will be okay.

They took another subway. He lived six stops away. How had he not known how to get there? He had known, of course he had known. They walked out of the station. It was night then. Late. Would he just let her go to sleep? she asked him. Could she just. Sleep.

They walked for a while, through the suburbs of Paris. The streets were quiet and damp, like it had just rained. All the lights were out in town. The street signs were in French, but otherwise they could have been anywhere. And the houses there all looked the same as the next, just like they did in the suburbs of Omaha. She had gone all that way just to go back to where she started.