Where is the Baby? (11 page)

She followed every sign that said ‘Eastbound,' until she connected up with Interstate 80, a highway that she knew went all the way to the east coast. She was amazed at the volume of traffic and the size of the cars – smaller than they'd been in the sixties. And the truck drivers, those fellows who used to be referred to as ‘the knights of the road,' now seemed remarkably aggressive, even hostile, getting almost on top of her rear bumper before swinging out to pass. Their intent seemed to be to instill fear. They didn't frighten her; they merely made her wonder what had transpired that had so enraged the truckers during the fifteen years she'd been locked away. She'd entered prison only months after the famous ‘Summer of Love.' Her happiness had crescendoed that summer. Peace, love, and rock 'n' roll. And then came the fall.

Her foot still unsteady on the accelerator and the grilled cheese sandwich sitting in the pit of her stomach like a golf ball, she kept driving – awed by the depth of the sky, the lack of enclosing walls, the endlessly unfurling road that arrowed toward a horizon that kept receding, until the daylight was fading and she was suddenly very tired. She'd been behind the wheel for hours, only stopping once to refuel the car.

She took the Elko exit, pulled into the parking lot of a new-looking motel with an attached restaurant, paid cash, and let herself into a very clean, over-chilled room. After locking the door, she turned up the thermostat, then stood marveling at the size of the room – at least fifteen by twenty – and the luxury of her own TV set, a double bed, and a private bathroom. She would get something to eat, she decided, then come back and sit on the bed and watch TV. And in the morning, she'd buy some clothes.

She felt horribly conspicuous in the restaurant. Her hands shook as she read the menu. There were too many choices and the waitress, this one middle-aged, hefty and impatient, stood tap-tapping her pencil on the edge of her order pad. ‘What's good?' Tally finally asked her.

For some reason, the question generated a conspiratorial smile. ‘The restaurant a mile down the road,' the woman said in an undertone.

Tally laughed, then marveled at the sound of it. She couldn't remember when she'd last found anything funny. ‘Okay, I'll rephrase the question. What is acceptable?'

Grinning now, the woman said, ‘You can't go wrong with a cheeseburger. And the fries are fresh-cut, not frozen.'

‘Then that's what I'll have.'

‘How d'you want your burger done?

‘Well done, please.'

‘Good call. Something to drink?'

‘A Coke, no ice, please.'

‘You got it, hon.'

‘Thank you.'

Tally wished she had a book to read while she waited, but she'd left her books behind. They were all bestsellers in paperback, none especially good, but she'd read them several times each.

Mental note: buy books.

Unaccustomed to the relative silence of the place, she went to the cash register for some change and then fed a couple of quarters into the jukebox, pushing in random selections and hoping for the best.

A moment or two after returning to her seat, a voice started growling about being born in the USA.

Mental note: buy some music to play in the car.

She sat on the bed in her slip and aimed the remote control at the TV set, changing channels until she found a PBS station. Then she tried to watch but her eyes kept sliding to the corners of the room. A car door slammed outside and she jumped, looking over at the tightly drawn curtains, then at the locked door, the security chain in place. As her heart settled into a more temperate rhythm, she looked back at the TV screen, turning and turning the wedding ring on her finger.

T
ally slept badly, waking every half hour or so with a start, to look wildly at the shadowy corners of the room, then over at the reassuring spill of light from the bathroom. Perhaps it was the absence of the night sounds that had grown too familiar over the years – the weeping, the whispered prayers, the moans of illicit sexual activity, even, occasionally, a brief scream – that kept her on the rim of sleep. Listening hard, all she could hear was the rushing sound of traffic on the interstate a mile or so away. And listening to that muted rush lulled her back to sleep each time. Then, as dawn approached, she slipped at last below the surface, and slept for just over two hours.

Unaccustomed to being enclosed while she bathed, she kept the shower curtain halfway open while she stood under the weak spray of hot water. Her fingers, as always, briefly touched the raised scar from the knife wound just below her left shoulder, then the slightly puckered scar near her right hip and the third, a long but less prominent one on the outside of her right forearm. The scars were flesh memories, encoded with detail.

Just the two of them: herself and a small enraged woman in the shower room. Brandishing a teaspoon, its handle honed to razor sharpness, the small woman sidled near, whispering, ‘La-di-da-ing your way around here, but you're no better than nobody else. I know all about you from the TV, Miss Murdering High-Society Bitch.'

When Tally said softly, ‘If you want to kill me, go ahead,' the ratty-haired, shriveled little woman, who could've been any age between thirty and sixty, was thrown, a furrow forming between her brows. Tally turned, presenting her naked back. Several weighted moments of silence followed, when Tally could almost hear the woman thinking. Then the stabbing began. Half-hearted, it seemed. Tally didn't move, made no sound. Then, in moments, it was over. The woman was gone, leaving the spoon embedded in Tally's hip.

Punishment, but not death. She was disappointed. Permission had defused the woman's rage, but prison form mandated that some injury be inflicted. Tally understood. Form dictated behavior, no matter where you were. If there were a next time, she'd vowed, she'd simply offer herself in silence. Go quietly.

Some weeks later in the food line, the woman had murmured, ‘Why'd you do that: tell me to go ahead? And how come you didn't say it was me that did it?'

Turning to look at the woman, seeing the confusion in her faded eyes, Tally said in a very low voice, ‘You can't kill someone who's already dead.'

Taking the remark almost literally, the woman was so frightened that she dropped her tray and fled. At the noise, everyone looked up to watch her go, then turned with speculative interest to look at Tally, who'd already moved along in the line and was paying no attention. But she could feel the eyes on her; they had weight, as if the combined gazes had actual density.

Amazing how superstitious, how literal some people could be; how fearful and angry. She later learned that the woman's name was Angie and, after years of being beaten and burned and raped, she'd stabbed her husband seventy-three times while he was sleeping off a three-day bender. She was given life, without parole; no death sentence because of the extenuating circumstances. After that day in the food line, she kept well away from Tally, never again coming anywhere near her. No one did. Newcomers were warned off soon after arriving. No point trying to scare or hurt someone who was, according to Angie, already dead – a ghost, a zombie, or maybe just plain crazy. And in a sense Tally was all those things. Unintentionally perpetuating the myth, she never spoke, unless one of the staff addressed her directly. There was nothing to say. Her fellow inmates eyed her warily and kept their distance. The warden found it amusing. ‘You're either a brilliant strategist,' she said, ‘or the saddest woman I've ever encountered. Probably both.'

In the years that followed, the warden summoned Tally to her office a few times a year. Initially, Tally thought the conversation was a preamble to some discussion pertaining to the institution, to a rule or regulation she might unknowingly have violated. But no. The conversation was for its own sake, and that seemed eminently reasonable. So they talked, with the warden always taking the lead, setting the topic. And those were the only occasions when the disused machinery in Tally's head got lubricated and began to function. Twenty or thirty minutes of conversation, about books, about music, about art, amounting to perhaps ninety or so minutes a year had fused her grip on reality, keeping it intact.

She wondered, suddenly, if that had been the woman's intent. An extraordinary notion, but one that now occurred to her as true. In the unlikeliest of places, someone had cared enough about her to make an effort to keep Tally's brain alive. Unrecognized kindness in an unlikely place.

Mental note: write to the warden with the new Mont Blanc pen – when she got it.

The motel's free shampoo left her hair feeling greasy; the small hard square of soap dried out her skin, and she added a stop at a drugstore to her growing shopping list. Shampoo and conditioner, face and body moisturizers, a decent hairbrush.

Dressed again in the old ill-fitting Chanel suit and the pantyhose she'd washed the night before depressed her as she sat on the end of the bed to open the folder Warren had given her. There was five thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills, and a Visa card. The checks were on her old account at Wells Fargo. Warren had kept the account active with just a change of address, so that her statements were sent in care of his office. He'd slipped a new register into place in the check book, and she stared at the balance, thinking that compound interest, like rust, never slept. The income from her grandmother's trust kept on growing exponentially. Love, from beyond the grave. The sole member of the family who had cared for her unequivocally, without stipulations.

Closing her eyes, she could almost smell the clean fragrance of her grandmother's Blue Grass, could see her in one of her favorite Anne Fogarty shirtwaist dresses with the Capezio flats she'd worn to minimize her height. Tall and narrow, her black hair in a ponytail, her eyes very blue and her teeth very white in her always suntanned face. Strong hands and long legs. There wasn't a horse born that she couldn't ride. But there was a skittish two-year-old who'd reared one morning when a stray dog came from out of nowhere, barking and trying to nip the filly's fetlocks. And the widowed fifty-three-year-old Annalise Paxton had died of massive head injuries sustained when she was thrown onto a rocky outcropping.

Her entire estate, including the Nevada ranch, was bequeathed to her only grandchild, who looked so much like Annalise that strangers had invariably taken them for mother and daughter. She'd left fourteen-year-old Tally with a dry, aching sorrow that failed to diminish with time, along with a place to stay (now long gone) should she ever need refuge, an income for life, and an understanding of love that Tally could never have acquired from her carping, disinterested parents.

With a sigh, Tally put several of the hundred-dollar bills in her absurdly dated black leather clutch bag, along with the credit card and check book. After a quick look around the room to make sure she'd left nothing behind – she didn't
have
anything to leave behind, she chided herself – she went out to put the folder in the trunk of the Benz. Annalise would have sent Warren to meet Tally with a station wagon or a pickup truck. But Annalise's son had married a woman who dictated the terms and conditions of her family's life, and Tyler Scott Paxton had never once gone against his wife's wishes, had never voiced disagreement with any of her opinions, no matter how ill-conceived, or foolish, or mean. Ivory Rowe Paxton controlled everyone and everything within reach. She said a Benz. Warren would merely ask, ‘What model?' No wonder he was retiring. For twenty-odd years of dealing with Ivory, he deserved a Purple Heart.

It was only eight a.m. and the remnants of the cold night air still lingered as Tally walked, shivering, to the restaurant, pausing outside to buy a newspaper from the box – a useful prop to ease her nervousness at being on view in a public place.

The same hefty middle-aged waitress was on duty and came over smiling with a menu tucked under her arm, a thick white mug in one hand and a coffee pot in the other.

‘Have a good night, hon?' she asked. ‘Coffee?'

‘Yes, please.'

The woman poured the coffee, then put down the menu.

‘I need to buy a few things,' Tally said. ‘Are there stores nearby?'

‘Just hang a left when you pull out of here, and go straight into town. You'll find everything you need.'

‘Thank you.'

‘Sure thing. Back in a minute to take your order.'

Eggs still hot from the griddle seemed a great luxury. She managed to eat half the food on her plate, and drank a second cup of coffee while she absorbed information from the newspaper. It all seemed alien, not quite real. The prices in the ads struck her as exceptionally high. But then, fifteen years later, London broil wasn't still going to be fifty-nine cents a pound. She knew, though, that the 1968 prices were always going to be her yardstick. That was the year her life had ended. No matter what happened now, she believed that her brain would remain snagged on that point in time.

She was halfway to her car when the waitress called out to her. Tally turned back.

‘I think you made a mistake, hon,' the woman said, holding out the hundred-dollar bill Tally had left tucked under her empty coffee mug.

‘No. No mistake. That's your tip.'

‘On a three-dollar tab?' the woman said, her expression both amused and disbelieving.

‘You've been very kind,' Tally said. ‘I appreciate it.'

‘You sure? It's a hell of a lot of money.'

‘Positive.'

The woman shook her head, her grin reappearing. ‘Well, I thank you. You take good care. Okay?'

‘I will do my best.'

Tally turned away and again started toward the car.

‘Just outta curiosity,' the woman called. ‘Where're you headed? After you finish up shopping, I mean.'