Windfalls: A Novel (7 page)

Late that first night, long after Rita had come and cooed and complained and gone and the ward was dim and quiet, a nurse brought the baby from the nursery so that Cerise could practice giving it a bottle. As Cerise tried to work the rubber nipple into the infant’s mouth, the nurse stood above her bed, watching so critically that it seemed the baby was really the hospital’s and not Cerise’s at all.

But finally the nurse was called away, and Cerise was alone with her daughter for the first time. Long after the bottle had been emptied and the baby had produced a belch so large it seemed yet another proof of its prodigious gifts, Cerise cradled the little creature in her arms, bending over her, peering into her face, studying her for signs, for meanings, soaking her being deep into her bones. She was astonished that her baby already knew how to suck and swallow and breathe, astonished that such a perfect creature would consent to rest uncomplaining in her arms.

A feeling squeezed her so tightly that she began to cry, though when she tried to identify the sadness in it, the only evidence of sorrow she could find was that she hadn’t known before how wonderful it would be to have a baby. The word
blessed
came into her head, and although it was Sylvia’s word and Sylvia was gone, the word remained, shining like a candle in that stern room.

When Cerise looked down at the newborn sleeping in her lap and saw that her tears had dripped from her face to land on the baby’s cheeks, she quickly wiped the teardrops away, afraid they were unlucky or unsanitary, afraid the nurse would return, catch her crying on her baby, and question Cerise’s right to keep the infant who had birthed in her such an unexpected joy.

As she daubed her tears from her daughter’s cheeks, another word came to her—a name this time. It was a name like a poem, the most beautiful name she’d ever heard, the word she knew she wanted to say every day of all her life, the name she wanted to whisper in the night and yell across the playground after school. She knew Rita would be indignant and her former classmates would be disappointed, but before the nurse came to reclaim the baby and return her to the nursery for the night, Cerise had named her daughter.

Melody.

She named her baby Melody because it sounded small and calm and feminine, and because it was a word that everybody knew. She named her baby Melody because, as she remembered the elementary school music teacher explaining on one of her rare visits to Cerise’s classroom, a melody was at the center of every song.

When the hospital said they could leave, Cerise took Melody home to her apartment, despite the fact that Rita wanted them to move back in with her.

“You don’t know the first thing about having a baby,” Rita said as she drove out of the hospital parking lot with Cerise beside her on the front seat, holding Melody.

“I know the first thing, I guess,” Cerise answered softly. She bent to sniff the bundle in her arms and nuzzle her face in the fuzz that hovered above Melody’s small warm head.

“What will you do when she gets a fever? What will you do if she won’t stop crying?”

“I’ll figure it out.”

“If that’s the way you want it,” Rita said, smashing her foot against the accelerator as the light they’d been waiting for turned green, “you’re on your own. It’s one thing if you’re living with me, but you better not go calling me in the middle of the night when I have to work the next day.”

“We’ll be okay,” Cerise said doggedly. “I have a thermometer.”

But after Rita left the apartment, and Cerise was all alone with that strange, limp creature, she felt as raw and scared and awkward as she had the first time she’d been alone with Sam. When Melody began to whimper and suck her fists, Cerise panicked and reached for the phone. It would be easy as going to sleep to surrender her baby to Rita. Rita would put Melody in Cerise’s old room, Cerise could stay in the guest room in the basement, and next fall she would go back to school as though nothing had happened. Even though Rita would complain about the extra work and trouble, Cerise knew that Rita would secretly be glad to have Melody, especially since Cerise was already certain that Melody would be prettier and tidier and more popular than she had ever been.

But before Cerise could dial the number, Melody’s whimpers blossomed into cries. They weren’t very loud, but they reached inside Cerise like fingers, clutching at her empty womb. She imagined Melody in the room where she’d spent her own lonely childhood, and an objection rose inside her. When the voice inside the phone directed her to please hang up and try again, she returned the receiver to its cradle and fixed a bottle for her baby.

After the formula was warm, Cerise tested its temperature carefully, pressing the rubber nipple against the faint scars on the inside of her wrist until a few white drops bled out. Then she sat on the sofa and tried to tease the nipple between Melody’s tiny gums. For a while Melody fought the bottle, twisting her head from side to side or butting blindly against the nipple with her cheek. But just as Cerise was ready to give up, she suddenly clamped down on it, engulfing the nipple with such a look of surprise on her little, screwed-up face that Cerise laughed out loud.

Later, when the bottle was empty, Cerise held the bundle of her daughter against her shoulder. She patted Melody’s back with the palm of her hand until the burp came, and then she pressed her against her aching breasts and held her while the light drained slowly from the room. In the darkness beyond the locked door of her apartment, sirens wailed, car horns honked, and people yelled out greetings or obscenities. But inside the walls of her small rooms, Cerise held Melody while she slept. Suffused with a savage happiness, Cerise sat for hours, sat until her arms tingled from lack of circulation and her back ached and her bladder stung, secure in her bone-deep certainty that nothing would ever prevent her from keeping her baby safe.

G
RADUALLY THE LAST GRAVEL-STUDDED HEAPS OF SNOW DISAPPEARED
from the streets, leaving behind little piles of grit like shrines to something no one wanted to remember. Gradually Anna’s bleeding diminished to a few dirty clots and then finally stopped altogether while the spring sun strengthened, the air grew nearly creamy with new warmth, and the semester trudged toward an end. But still all of her work looked vain and pointless. Still all her efforts to find something new to shoot and print and tone and mount and sign and frame dissolved into an overwhelming sense of fruitlessness.

On Friday of finals week, Anna gathered all her prints and negatives and burned them, hunkering over the pale little bonfire she’d built from the slats of a broken bed frame in the weedy yard behind the house. The air above the flames wrinkled like vision through tears, but she liked the bite of heat and smoke, liked the authority with which the fire claimed her work. As each print buckled and curled, it seemed more alive than it had ever been before. Squatting beside her little blaze, she thought it proved her commitment to art, that she could destroy anything that wasn’t perfect. When all her prints were blackened crusts and ashes, and her final negative had been reduced to a dark little knot like a melted heart, she felt a kind of triumph, felt so purged and proud that she wished there were someone to admire her conviction.

But a moment later the fire began to ebb and smolder, and she stared at the lace of ash that was all that was left of her work and thought, What now? She had a sudden fear that someone had been watching her. Lifting her eyes from the fire, she scanned the windows of the house for faces, and then peered sheepishly around the yard. But she saw only empty windows, only the battered lawn and the skeletal remains of a bicycle leaning against the back steps, a cluster of stunted daffodils spearing up through its twisted spokes. She saw how the world went on about its business regardless of her little hurts and wants, and a sudden anguish speared her to the core.

She left the next day to spend the summer living in Spokane with her parents and working in her father’s insurance office. She had no better plan for the next three months, and she needed the money she could save that way, but driving west across the shining prairies and over the gleaming Rockies, it made her want to weep, to be twenty-two years old—young and grown and living her one and only life—and reduced to spending her summer with her parents.

“How did your semester go?” her father asked the first night as she sat in her mother’s clean kitchen eating things she hadn’t had since her last visit home—herbed chicken, deviled eggs, and lemon pie—while her parents watched her like attentive hosts.

“Fine,” she answered so brightly she was sure they would hear the lie. Then, trying to strain the rue from her voice, she added, “It’s a good program.”

“When will you get your degree?” her father asked.

She hesitated half a second too long, so that in the end she had to say, “I’m not sure.”

“Not sure?” her mother asked.

“There’s a lot of factors,” Anna began, but an edge of worry was already building in the room. She saw it in the nearly imperceptible tightening of the lines that framed her father’s smile, and in the careful casualness with which her mother wiped the spotless counter. The moment wavered like air above a fire. For a second she considered saying—what? I had an abortion. I burned all my work. But when she tried to imagine her parents’ response, she realized that no matter how they took it, no matter what they said or did, she could not bear to have to add their sorrow or worry or anger to her own.

“There are a lot of variables,” she repeated, reaching across the counter for the pie. “But my show’s scheduled for December.” Picking up the knife, she said, “If my committee likes it, I’ll graduate next spring.”

The moment became solid once more. Her mother nodded quickly, as if she’d known it all along, and although the shape of her father’s expression did not change, he relaxed back into his smile. “Next spring,” he said heartily. “That’s just fine.”

“How’re the boys?” Anna asked, ignoring the little punch of loneliness in her gut. Placing the point of the knife at the center of the pie, she pressed the blade down through the foamy meringue. “Sally said Dylan is already crawling.”

She spent the next two months answering phones and filing claim forms and coming home to watch David Brinkley on the evening news and eat her mother’s quiches and pork chops and spinach salads. On weekends she roamed Spokane with her camera, wandering the riverfront and Division Avenue and the Arboretum, seeking something to replace the photographs she’d burned. She hung around the lobby of the Davenport Hotel, loitered past the pawnshops down on Mission, drifted through the Japanese Gardens. But she couldn’t bring herself to expose a single frame. By mid-August, fall semester was looming like an iceberg in a dark ocean, and she wondered—sometimes vaguely and sometimes desperately—what she should do about it. It made her frantic to think of returning to school empty-handed, but when she imagined remaining in Spokane, she felt a despair so heavy it was hard to breathe.

“You need to visit your grandmother before you leave,” her mother said one night at supper. “She keeps asking when you’re going to come.”

“I know,” Anna answered contritely. “I meant to go down earlier. It’s just that I’ve been—” busy, she thought, though she anticipated the look her parents might exchange and didn’t say it. Instead, to camouflage the way her sentence failed, she said, “I’ll go this weekend.” Turning to her father, she asked, “Hey, boss—can I have Friday off?”

That Friday she worked until noon and then left the office, stopping at a drive-in for a cup of coffee on her way out of town. Just west of the city, she turned off the freeway and headed south on the state highway, following a route she’d traveled all her life. But after the flat Midwest and the forested Rockies, the land she drove through seemed almost foreign. The sky was cloudless, and a late-summer light covered everything with its rich gloss. The fields spread out in all directions like earthen waves, unfenced, treeless, a vast maze of swells and curves.

Occasionally a breeze rippled through the nearly ripened grain. Once a red-tailed hawk dropped from a telephone pole and swept in a low arc across the road while Anna watched dispassionately. She reminded herself that time was getting shorter, that she had to get to work, but she still could not bring herself to stop the car and take her camera from the trunk.

Steering with one hand, she raised the plastic cup to her mouth. The coffee tasted bitter, chemical, its harshness like a penance. She thought of where she was headed, of the staid farmhouse alone in the open fields, of her grandmother sweeping the clean front steps or waiting on the front porch with her knitting. She wished she could be ten again, thrilled at the thought of a weekend alone at Grandma’s. She felt guilty for not having gone to visit her grandmother sooner, though at the same time she chafed at the thought of giving up a weekend to visit her now. In recent years it was as though she’d somehow outgrown her grandmother. These days her grandmother seemed too simple and too sweet to understand the person Anna had become, seemed too frail and old and timid to be exposed to Anna’s world.

Eighty miles beyond Spokane Anna entered the little city of Salish. She drove past the pioneer museum, past the entrance to Spaulding University, where Sally’s husband Mike taught English, past the public pool where her grandfather used to drop Sally and Anna on summer afternoons while he went to the John Deere dealership or to the Grange. Two miles outside of town she turned off the state highway and headed south on a county road. After the whine of asphalt, the crunch of gravel beneath her tires sounded sturdy and secure, a small comfort that did not quite belong to her.