Windfalls: A Novel (42 page)

The sun was moving lower in the sky, dark shadows were beginning to stretch across the road, and the light was taking on the dense clarity of early evening. Anna thought of the dead orchard she was driving toward, imagined how the broken trees would look, standing like upright corpses amid the fresh grass. She thought of how once she might have been able to make something of that image, and she felt a longing widening inside her, a nostalgia for all that was now lost to her.

When she rounded the final curve and caught sight of the orchard, at first she thought she had taken the wrong road, or had somehow ended up in another world entirely. Her foot slipped from the accelerator, and a moment later she groaned—a sound so visceral and pleasure-laden, she recognized it as her voice while making love. There before her were the gnarled trees, their branches still broken and lichen-hung, their trunks still sundered and hollowed, the heartwood all but rotted out of them. Only now those broken trees were all alight, laden with a million blooms that glowed like stars in the slanting sun.

She pulled blindly off the road, parked, and stumbled like a drunkard from the car. Stem-sap and the spit-homes of larvae soaked her jeans as she pushed through the waist-high weeds and the green scent of chlorophyll filled her nose.

She had never considered the possibility of flowers, had never thought those trees might be anything but dead. As she made her way into the heart of the orchard, she saw that a few of the trees were truly dead, bereft of even a single petal, although their limbs were still home to a thrumming universe of insects and birds. But most of the trees, however twisted and decrepit, were so filled with flowers that their branches seemed to be floating. It was as if the haggard trees had suddenly broken into song. For a long time she wandered mindlessly, lured deeper and deeper by so much gratuitous beauty. The air was spiced with the tickle of pollen, a smell that reminded her more of grain than of perfume. Here and there, an occasional drift of falling petals caught the slanting sunlight as they fluttered toward the earth.

In a daze of delight, she returned to her car for her equipment. She set up her tripod, loaded the first holder of film into her camera, and as she waited beneath the dark cloth for the right second to open the shutter, she felt a fierce gratitude for her particular life. A moment came when the light appeared the fullest, the shadows as rich as they could possibly be. Pressing the shutter release, she heard the gentle click of the shutter opening, felt her love of the world as it appeared brimming again inside her, and marveled, Where have I been?

A
NNA CAME HOME AT DINNERTIME ALL EXCITED ABOUT AN ORCHARD
she’d found—a whole valley, she said, of dead trees blooming. It didn’t make any sense to Cerise for dead trees to have flowers or for anyone to care that much even if they did, but she could see that there was a new light in Anna’s face, and when Anna asked Cerise if she would like a steady job, babysitting Ellen while she was teaching, she could hear an eagerness in Anna’s voice that she hadn’t heard before.

Cerise knew that saying yes was the wrong thing to do. But she had no idea what to do instead. She needed money if she were to stay alive, and it also felt so good to be wanted—even if the person Anna wanted was not the person Cerise really was. Besides, the thought of spending part of almost every day in the quiet shelter of Anna’s house with Anna’s baby was an allurement Cerise could not pass up.

Cerise found she even liked Anna’s husband, too. He seemed almost a creature from another species, when he changed Ellen’s messy diapers without being asked or pulled Lucy onto his lap to read to her or laid his hand so tenderly on Anna’s waist. They were his plants, Cerise learned, that filled the house, his cuttings lining the windowsills. Seeing them, she couldn’t help but think of the garden she had planted with Travis, couldn’t help but remember Travis’s rapture at digging in the dirt—couldn’t help but remember what all Travis’s happiness had come to, in the end. But even that warning was not enough to keep her from promising that she would come back tomorrow.

And so a strange new routine shaped her days. Each morning at dawn she woke in her stall at the livestock barn, grateful that she had managed to pass one more night undiscovered. Shivering in the raw gray light, she folded the blanket she’d taken from the shelter and the blanket that Barbara had given her and hid them beneath the newspapers that made her mattress. She sponged her face and armpits with night-cold water from the bottle she’d filled the day before at the spigot outside the barn. She changed into a fresh set of clothes, ate a few slices from her bag of bread, and brushed her teeth, swallowing the toothpaste so that she would not leave telltale toothpaste splotches on the ground. Then, tucking her possessions into the darkest corner of the stall, she slipped away before the light grew too strong.

She spent most of the time she was not at Anna’s trying to stay clean. Washing her hair was the hardest. She’d learned that people thought it dangerous or obscene, if they entered a public restroom, to find her bent over a sink with her soapy head crooked under the running faucet, so she tried to use bathrooms with locking doors, despite the difficulties of having to ask for a key.

Every few days she went to a laundromat to wash her clothes. While her little load bounced and spun, she breathed the humid, cigarette and soap-scented air and paged through the worn magazines, learning about the successes of celebrity diets, about the ten hottest ways to turn her lover on, about how to use pastels to brighten her breakfast nook and what she should be sure to see the next time she visited New Orleans.

Anna had offered so often to pick Cerise up at the shelter or to drop her off there that Cerise was sometimes sure Anna could see through her excuses when she claimed she needed the exercise, insisted she really liked to walk. Once Cerise had splurged and taken the bus to Anna’s house, though afterward she decided it was more important to save her money than to spend it on something she could use her own two legs to do.

Without identification, it turned out to be impossible to cash the paychecks she’d received from the after-school care program, but she carried them with her anyway, zipped safely into the inside pocket of her jacket, and she’d tried to save most of the money Anna gave her, too. She wanted to hoard as much as she could for the room she still couldn’t help but dream she would have someday, the room calm as a shrine where she could go to be alone. Other than staying undiscovered, that room was her only goal.

She liked Anna more and more, although as time went on, it seemed she had more—instead of less—to hide from her. It was as if all her secrets had somehow rotted into lies. Now that she’d discovered someone she might almost imagine entrusting with the truth of who she was, she could think of no way to explain her life that would not ruin the refuge she’d found. Sometimes Anna invited her to stay for supper, and then, sitting at the table with Anna and Eliot and the girls, passing the broiled chicken breasts and new potatoes, helping to feed Ellen her bananas and her vegetable purees, pouring milk for Lucy and listening to her rhymes and endless stories, she yearned to be the woman they all assumed she was.

Cerise loved Anna’s children as she wished she had loved her own. She loved them tenderly and patiently, but with a detachment that allowed her to tell Lucy no, that let her listen to Ellen fuss herself to sleep at naptime without her breasts swelling in reply. She loved Anna’s children carefully and without abandon, and Anna’s children loved her, too. Every day when Cerise arrived, Ellen’s face lit up like a Christmas tree, and later, when Lucy came home from school, her pleasure at seeing Cerise made her almost manic.

Sometimes, while Ellen napped, Cerise continued to study the pictures on Anna’s walls. Standing in front of each of them in turn, she let her eyes flick or drift where they would while she waited for something to strike her—some feeling or understanding. But no matter how long she stood, she couldn’t seem to find her way inside them, or couldn’t find a way to fit them inside her. Once or twice she tried to ask Anna about the photographs, but Anna’s answers never seemed to fit Cerise’s questions. It was as if they were talking about two separate things, when Cerise asked why the photographs weren’t in color and Anna answered by talking about nostalgia and expectation, about the clarity of vision and the purity of line.

After the hours she spent at Anna’s house, it was always both a respite and a sadness to return to the fairground. Each time she saw that the gap in the chain-link fence had not been fixed, a bit of the anxiety she’d been carrying with her all day relaxed a little, and when she entered her stall and found her bundle of belongings still untouched, she felt another small relief. It was as though her essential self were waiting for her in that empty place, the inescapable Cerise she always came to in the end. She ate her supper, made up her bed, and folded herself inside, hoping once again that she would not be discovered in her sleep.

It had been a long while since she had been able to find her way back to the other world where it seemed her son still lived, and there were moments when, lying on her newspaper bed, she missed Travis so fiercely she marveled that it did not stop her heart. There were times when she still worried about him, too. She had the drifting feeling that death was just a chain-link fence separating the living from the dead, and she worried that Travis was on the other side, scared and lonely and wondering why she had abandoned him. It made her sick that she couldn’t console him, couldn’t reach through the barrier of death to explain what had happened to him in a way he might understand.

But there were also hours when Travis traveled with her like a kind of friendly ghost, like another self inside her. In a strange way he seemed older than she was now, and somehow wiser, because he was outside of life, because he knew what happened when you died. She did not forget him, even for a minute, but sometimes it seemed her memories were growing rounder, safer, less urgent, more like pearls than knives.

For a long time Cerise managed to keep her thoughts of Melody quarantined so that they could not contaminate her other memories or her meager plans. But one evening as she was spreading out the newspapers that made her mattress, a smudged photograph on a back page caught her eye. It was a picture of a slender woman in overalls standing on a ladder with a paintbrush in her hand. The ladder was leaning against the wall of a building on which the rough outlines of a design were just beginning to appear. The woman’s back was to the camera, but something about the shape of her shoulders and the way she held her head made Cerise think of Melody. “Muralist at Work,” the caption beneath the photograph announced.

Clutching the newspaper in both hands, Cerise hurried to the doorway of her stall. Angling the paper so the article caught the light, she read that the North Coast Arts Council had recently awarded a grant to Melody Painter for a mural to decorate the west wall of the newly renovated Arcata Cultural Arts Center.
Saturday Morning
was the name of the winning design, which had been chosen out of a pool of over one hundred entries.

Staring at the grainy image, Cerise stumbled out of the barn into the exposed space between the buildings, scrutinizing the photograph by what light still lingered in the sky. But although she was certain it was her daughter who stood on the ladder, it was impossible to learn any more about what she was painting, impossible to discern what
Saturday Morning
might mean to Melody.

Cerise lay awake for a long time that night, relishing the proof that Melody was okay, savoring her pride that Melody’s mural had been chosen as the best, and trying to overlook the hurt she felt at Melody’s new last name. She clutched the article like a talisman and remembered those long-distant Saturday mornings and how happy she’d been back then. Closing her eyes, she let herself be rocked by the swelling round of frog-song, let herself imagine that surely Melody had been happy back then, too.

But when the frogs abruptly quit their calling, startled into silence by a wandering raccoon or a passing owl, her eyes jolted open with a start. Staring up into the darkness from her scanty bed, she made herself admit that her thought about Melody’s happiness was only another hope. And then she forced herself to remember how futile hope had always been.

S
UDDENLY THERE WERE ABANDONED FRUIT TREES EVERYWHERE
. E
VEN IN
the city, Anna spotted them, blossoming in vacant lots and alleyways and overgrown backyards. Outside Santa Dorothea she found other neglected orchards, and she discovered lone fruit trees, as well—flowering among the oaks on the hillsides, or along the edges of back roads, or deep in secluded stands of fir and redwood.

“Tell me about those trees,” she’d demanded of Eliot the night after she’d first discovered the dead orchard in bloom.

“What about them?” Eliot had asked. They were in the bathroom, getting ready for bed. But despite her tiredness and the late hour, despite how early the alarm was set to ring, Anna felt right inside her body again, more keen and easy and alive than she’d felt in months. She squeezed toothpaste onto her brush and said, “Last winter I was sure that orchard was completely dead.”

Lifting his chin toward the mirror, Eliot pulled his razor down through the white foam on his face, leaving behind a swath of clean skin from his cheekbone to his jaw. He said, “Not dead, just abandoned.”

“But why would anyone abandon an orchard?”

“It’s worthless,” he said curtly, pausing to rinse his razor.