Windfalls: A Novel (22 page)

“It would be an accident now, too,” Anna answered. “Do you want to wear the purple pants I set out for you, or would you rather wear your daisy dress today?”

“I want to wear this,” Lucy answered, standing in front of her mother like a stubborn pink stump.

“Lucy,” Anna said firmly. “You still need breakfast, and we need to get you to school on time. You have to go get ready, right now.”

“I’m already ready right now.”

“No, you’re not. You need to go upstairs and change your clothes.”

And suddenly they were embroiled in an argument of such intensity and complexity it made Anna dizzy. Dozens of questions tangled in her sleep-starved mind. Was wearing a party dress to school Lucy’s attempt to make herself feel special in the wake of her sister’s arrival, or was it just another of Lucy’s many whims? Was it a play for power inside the family, or a desperate effort to make herself feel lovely and loved at the school where she still spent every recess by herself? Would it be good for Lucy to see that Anna cared enough to protect her favorite dress, or would it be better for her to feel as though at least some small part of her life were in her control? And if Anna let Lucy have her way today, what would she want tomorrow? What would she demand when she was a teenager? How would she behave as an adult?

“I want to wear my birthday dress,” Lucy yelled, her chest heaving beneath the pink smocking. In her infant seat, Ellen gave a jolt as though she had just been dropped. Her eyes flew open, and she began to cry.

“Now look at what you’ve done,” Anna groaned. Between clenched teeth, she said, “You need to go upstairs and change into something else, and you need to do it right now.”

Lucy’s face crumpled. She fled from the room, and suddenly the whole day was in shambles although it was not yet eight o’clock. Mechanically Anna lifted Ellen from her seat and carried her, wailing, out of the kitchen. Standing in the center of the living room, she swayed with the screaming baby. Croaking a lullaby, she stared dully out the window at the oleander bushes that some previous owner had planted beside the house. They were dusty and lusterless in the late autumn heat, and despite the earliness of the hour, the light that fell on them seemed strained and thin.

It had been months since she’d seen light that moved her. Back in the never-never land before they’d left Salish, Anna had promised Eliot—and herself—that once the baby was born and Lucy was settled into school, she would split her time between setting up the house and exploring the California countryside for subjects for her new photographs. Back then she had even hoped that this baby’s birth would invigorate her work as Lucy’s birth had done. But now, as Ellen’s crying veered toward another coughing fit, it was impossible to remember why her photographs had ever mattered.

Life was too dire to include anything as superfluous as art. Jobs could be lost, babies could die, the species in Eliot’s seed bank could all become extinct, and still supper needed fixing, still the laundry needed folding and the dishes needed washing, still the boxes in the bedrooms had to be unpacked. Still behind every image Anna could imagine there lurked her memory of Ellen’s fixed, blue face.

“I’m ready,” she heard Lucy say over the swell of Ellen’s cries. Lucy’s voice was small and hollow, and when Anna turned to look at her, she looked so little, standing in the doorway in her purple pants. She looked defenseless, so negligible and crushable that Anna had to fight the impulse to beg her to go upstairs and put her party dress back on.

Instead, she answered as cheerfully as she could, “Thank you, Lucy. I really appreciate it.” Still swaying with the baby, she glanced at her wristwatch and added, “There’s a bagel in the kitchen for you. Give me a minute to calm Ellen down, and then we’ll really have to run.”

But instead of subsiding, Ellen’s wails intensified, escalating until they echoed off the empty walls, and all of Anna’s love, all her patience and intelligence, all her devotion and desperation, couldn’t do a thing to stop them. Looking into the rigid, red face of her screaming daughter, Anna felt like a stranger, stranded in a life that wasn’t hers.

W
HEN THE SMOKE FIRST FILTERED INTO
C
ERISE ’ S SLEEP, HER DREAMS
recognized it. It was a nasty smoke, the smell of cheap things burning, and for a while her dreams engulfed it, offering weird dream-reasons to explain its presence. It was an explosion that finally woke her, a blast that left her unmoored in the darkness, adrenaline prickling her flesh, dread clinging to her bones. A bad dream, she told herself as she struggled to find a way out of its grip.

Beyond the blackness she heard roaring, a smooth sound like a hurricane wind, punctuated by explosions like bottles hurled against a wall. In a daze she fought with the blankets, struggling to remember where she was—in Rita’s house, or her apartment, or back at Jake’s?

Swaying and trailing blankets, she rose. Her arms flailed, groping the hot dark. She tottered forward and almost fell. Her hand bumped a door frame, scrabbled lower, and found a knob. She twisted and pushed. The door gave, and she tumbled into a narrow hall, looked down it to a place of searing heat and wild orange light.

For a long moment she stood paralyzed. The thing she faced was so fierce, so urgent, so huge and loud and frightful and strangely beautiful that it seared even the word
fire
from her mind. It was like a huge beast bearing down on her. Standing before it, Cerise was small and feeble and awestruck and alone.

Stop, the shred of a thought finally came. I have to stop it. Now.

She stepped forward, stretching out her arms as though she could force her way through the fire to its source. But before she could enter it, the awful heat seared her palms, although she felt no pain, but instead a quick sense of pressure, of pulling in. A moment later some instinct—some last scrap of what others might call luck—pushed her out of the fire’s path. She stumbled backward to the door that appeared behind her like a gift. Without pausing to question where it led, she turned and tore it open. Bursting through it, she tripped down the trailer’s back step, landed on the dark grass at the bottom.

The door slammed shut behind her, and in that instant she remembered—

“Travis!” she screamed, and leapt to reclaim the door. Grabbing the knob, she turned it and jerked. But it would not give. She tugged and twisted, pulling, pushing, yanking savagely, kicking, but still the door held fast, locked by her own hand before she went to bed to protect them from intruders. Banging her fists against the door, clawing her fingers under the metal flashing, she fought with it as though it were a living thing. “Travis, Travis, Travis,” she shrieked.

Suddenly the night was peopled. Like the shifting sequence of another dream, lights pulsed, voices behind her yelled and called. Over her shoulder she cried, “My baby’s in there,” and all the while she beat the door.

A clumsy creature in thick gear caught her in an embrace, pulled her from the door, held her while he yelled, “Which room?”

“Inside. There’s fire.”

“Where is he?”

She understood, cried, “The window!” and tore away, ran barefoot and sobbing through the cold grass to the other side of the trailer, trampling the last of her feeble garden as she jumped to beat at the bedroom window with her fists. It shattered with a tiny, immediate sound, and the firefighter was beside her again, pulling her back from the hole.

The night pulsed with light, a radio crackled. A ladder appeared and slammed against the trailer. Cerise reached to climb it, but other hands grabbed her, held her back. The firefighter climbed instead. He swept the last shards of glass from the gaping frame with his thick-gloved hand while she watched, struggling to yank her arms from the man who restrained her, and sobbing, “Travie, Travie, Travis. My boy is in there.”

The man who held her asked, “Anyone else?”

“What?”

“Is anyone else inside?”

“Anyone else,” she gasped, trying to think, unable to focus on anything but Travis.

“Do you have other children?”

“Yes.”

But the pulse of his shock got through to her, and she added, panting, “No. I mean, my daughter. But she’s gone. You’ve got to let me get my boy.”

“You can’t go in there.”

“I have to. I’m his mother.”

He wouldn’t let her, though she begged and wept, though she thought she heard above the shriek of the flames the shriek of her son.

From somewhere came the sound of water, the push of steam, the widening stench of burn. People yelled. Lights swept the night. The firefighter disappeared in the empty window frame, and another one climbed up behind him, stood on the ladder, training a flashlight inside the window. Cerise whimpered, “Get him, get him, please get him.”

The light changed. There was the sound of an ax smashing, more yelling. A bundle was being passed to the firefighter on the ladder.

She moaned and surged forward. “Oh, Travis,” she wept.

“Stay back,” they warned. “Careful. Don’t touch him.”

“Burn kit!” a voice called. “Sterile blanket.”

The firefighter gasped, “He was hiding. Under the crib. At first I couldn’t. Find him.”

A crowd had gathered, a semicircle of strangers. They stood just at the edge of darkness and watched Cerise rave. Her hair wild about her head, her face contorted, her burned hands imploring, she pleaded to be allowed to touch him, to see him, to comfort him.

But she was only his mother. These strangers knew how to save him. When the EMTs arrived and strode across the grass to kneel around him, the thought flickered through her mind that Travis would love these men, with their sirens and big trucks. But Travis was collapsed under the sterile blanket, unconscious, but still alive—or rather, still capable of being made to live when they caused his heart to beat and his scorched lungs to accept their oxygen.

T
HERE HAD BEEN A KIDNAPPING
. T
WO WEEKS BEFORE
H
ALLOWEEN IN A
nice neighborhood on the north side of Santa Dorothea, a twelve-year-old girl had been taken from her bed while her family slept. A week later her photograph was everywhere—on trees and telephone poles, on the sides of buildings and supermarket bulletin boards, alongside the goblins and pumpkins in the windows of all the stores. Reproduced a thousand times, it was an enlargement of what must have been the girl’s school picture. Her gap-toothed face smiled from every handbill as if she were still having fun, though below her in bold letters were the words
Missing,
and
Reward
.

“What’s that say?” Lucy demanded the first time she noticed it, posted in the side window of the Volvo stopped next to them at a traffic light. As always they were in a hurry, late for Lucy’s school and Ellen’s doctor’s appointment. Now Anna was driving impatiently, her foot pivoting from accelerator to brake as she glanced at the dashboard clock, tried to remember what was on the grocery list she’d forgotten at home, tried to decide whether she had time to stop at the store before Ellen’s appointment or whether she should wait until afterward, when Ellen would be tired and fussy and ready for a nap.

Lucy spoke again, “Mommy, what does that say?”

Anna glanced to where Lucy pointed and answered absently, “It says, ‘missing,’ ‘reward.’”

“That girl is missing her reward?” Lucy’s voice was puzzled.

“I guess so.” Anna silently cursed her heedlessness and imagined all the things she might have told Lucy instead to forestall the coming conversation.

“That’s not fair,” Lucy said indignantly. “She should get her reward. Is that picture to make her get it?”

Anna felt a wisp of relief. “I suppose so,” she said, trying to keep her voice light and noncommittal. “I don’t really know.”

The light changed. As they pulled away from the beaming paper girl and entered the bright haze of exhaust left by the car in front of them, Lucy asked one final question, “What is her reward?”

The girl’s name was Andrea. The newspapers said her father was a lawyer, said her mother stayed home with her younger brother and her baby sister. Andrea was on the soccer team. She sang in the church youth choir. She had friends, grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins, who loved her. All her teachers liked her, too. She had lived at the center of a charmed ring meant to keep her safe, but the earth had swallowed her. Since her abduction the news each night was choked with editorials, police reports, pleas from her distraught parents, but no clues.

Those poor parents, Anna thought, remembering the days after Ellen’s birth, how excruciating hoping had been, how the waiting had flayed her. She was driving through the center of the city, and she looked with repugnance at the sound walls and overpasses that surrounded them, at the trash that flapped up from the roadbed like maimed birds in the traffic’s manufactured wind. Billboards flashed past her, and bumper stickers—a montage of anger and desire that made her glad Lucy hadn’t yet learned to read. The brake lights on the car in front of her came on. Her foot found the brake pedal, her car slowed, and she watched helplessly as her rearview mirror filled with the grille of yet another big rig.

She sat in the unmoving traffic, watching a dark cloud of exhaust billow from the pickup in the next lane. Even with the windows of the car rolled up, she could taste rubber and carbon monoxide. She wondered what it was doing to Ellen’s tender lungs, to have to breathe that air. She wondered what Andrea was feeling at that moment, what kind of loneliness or terror or despair. She wondered where on earth Andrea was, while the whole city searched for her and her parents wept on the nightly news. She wondered how they could possibly survive, if they never saw their daughter alive again.