Ada Unraveled (4 page)

“Not whateverpoo, Dashapoo. Combination
dachshund and poodle.” Startled, I followed the voice back to the
doorway where a skinny, elderly woman had appeared—probably
Hannah’s mom—Ruth.

That was odd. Wasn’t I just thinking
whateverpoo? But another thought finally came to me, and I said,
“Can I help you carry things, Ruth?”

“Sure, I could use some help.” I quickly
headed for the door so I could catch up with her.

Carrying trays of calorie-laden snacks, I
followed Ruth’s lead through the twisting hallways back to the
poorly lit, enormous space that Victoria and the young women were
inhabiting. I hoped they would light the entire room soon, to
improve the mood and the conversation.

After placing my load of covered dishes on
what I was now coming to think of as a groaning table, I stepped
further into the oversized room and peered into the darker half. In
vain.

“Elizabeth, why don’t you introduce our
newest member to everyone,” Victoria said.

My attention slid to the dark haired young
woman at the far end of the couch as she turned to look at me
briefly. She stood for the first time and I saw she was startlingly
beautiful and statuesque. And now at last I had another name.

But she was saying, “Elixchel. My name is
Elixchel now, Miss Vicky.”

Then she returned her attention to me. Her
almond-colored, almond-shaped eyes met mine. Behind her, the pixie
covered a grin with a small hand and hunched her shoulders, as if
someone had just made a terrible but amusing social error.

Elixchel’s black, shoulder-length hair swung
around her face with every movement like heavy strands of silk. She
had the cocoa-colored skin I used to try to attain on the beach.
Easily six feet tall, model-thin, and with facial bone structure to
die for, she moved panther-like toward me. Like an athlete whose
body was in perfect balance. Like a wild thing slipping gracefully
through jungle shadows.

Surely this stunning young woman was a
model.

“Victoria refuses to accept that I’ve
changed my name. I’m Elixchel Chavez.”

“Nope. Just a bookkeeper,” the elderly
teacup-bearer said as she passed behind me toward the
door—returning to the kitchen.

The phrase cue-tip jumped into my mind, not
just because Ruth’s head was topped with white hair but because she
kept giving me cues and tips.

I stared after Hannah’s mother, connecting
the uncanny bookkeeper remark with my internal thoughts. Very
odd.

The tall beauty reclaimed my attention by
switching her position so that we stood side by side, looking at
the others.

“Ruth is Hannah’s mother,” she said and
smiled knowingly, as if that explained everything.

A flash of light and a loud crack filled the
western side of the room with a teaser view of a mystery
grouping—stern looking ladder backed chairs.

And now all three dogs were sitting in
Victoria’s lap.

“Ruth’s correct. I’m a bookkeeper at one of
the ubiquitous area casinos. I live and work in Escondido. I’ve
been with them for seven years now.”

“That long?” Victoria murmured from her seat
by the fireplace.

“I remember when you were just thirteen like
Abigail…when we first took you in. After your parents were killed.”
Her aged voice faded away.

Elixchel’s parents were killed? The old
woman settled back into her thoughts and her chair.

“By the way Rachel, don’t call my adoptive
mom Miss Vicky unless you’re mad at her, because she really hates
it,” Elixchel conspired softly in my ear. “And none of us should be
mad at her now.” She straightened her spine as if correcting
herself.

“I heard that,” Miss Vicky said, making
Elixchel smile. “And I don’t like your new name. I like Elizabeth,
what I’ve always called you.”

Elixchel explained. “My mother named me
Elizabeth, but I changed it. I combined Elizabeth with Ixchel.
She’s the Mayan jaguar goddess of midwifery and medicine.

“I’m training as a midwife…and I’m proud of
my heritage, thus the name change,” she stated with a defiant tilt
of her chin.

Sounded reasonable to me. Elixchel it was.
Her Mayan heritage was obvious now, although she was very tall. But
midwife, that was more of a stretch. I was still seeing model. Her
height of course, but also her patrician nose and broad
forehead.

“
Eliksel
is hard to say,” the redhead
complained. I thought she had deliberately mispronounced the name
with a harsh k and sibilant s, instead of the soft sh it should
have been.

“No it’s not,” the young blond interjected,
rising indignantly from her slouch. “I think it’s beautiful.”

“And that’s not the only reason you changed
your name.” The edgy pixie said mysteriously.

“Moving on, shall I introduce our two
children, Andrea and Abigail?” Elixchel said, acerbically.

“Cute, Elz-a-beth.”

“The fire-breathing redhead is Andrea Kelly.
She lives in Hillrise, down near San Diego near the park. She’s a
good artist who spends altogether too much time painting her own
body instead of a canvas. Her latest body art is her hair.”

“No, it isn’t,” Andrea snapped, but didn’t
elaborate.

Andrea’s dark ruby hair was chopped in an
unruly combination of long and short tufts some of which ended in
hot pink and some in lavender. She looked like one of those Penguin
Club Puffle toys my grandkids loved, only with three different
colors. She wore a black sweatshirt with hood over a white Stanley
Kowalski style undershirt and desert camouflage pants—the ones with
half a dozen pockets sewn on them.

But mostly Andrea Kelly looked malnourished.
Three silver rings clung precariously to a dark red eyebrow. Her
fingernails and thin lips were painted in black. She had a
birthmark on her breastbone just visible above the scoop of the
undershirt, some sort of lumpy tortured looking flesh.

Most striking of all were Andrea’s eyes.
They seemed capable of changing from olive green to forest green
depending on the light, and from wide innocence to cool calculation
depending on her mood.

“She’s punk,” Victoria said, not unkindly.
“Our punk quilter. She used to live with me, too.” Perhaps Victoria
Stowall took in foster children. She certainly had the space.

“And this is Abigail P, our newest
member...before you, that is. None of us can say her last name,
thus the P,” Elixchel continued.

“Pustovoytenko. Pus-to-voy-ten-ko. What’s so
hard about that? Learn it! I’m going to be famous someday.”

“No doubt,” Elixchel agreed, smiling.
“Abigail is also an artist. She lives with her mom, Gloria, who is
the head nurse at Cleveland County Central ICU. She joins us once a
month to further explore her artistic nature.”

“So her mom can go man hunting,” Andrea
teased.

“NOT!” Abigail barked.

“TRUE!” Andrea returned.

“NOT!”

“TRUE!”

I was trying hard to suppress a smile when a
rushing, rhythmic thrumming filled the room like a thousand muted
drums. It made me look up. The rain had begun as if turned on full
flow by some hand above.

As I marveled at the downpour, Hannah and
Ruth swept back into the poorly lit room with more trays of food
and pots of hot tea. I didn’t see carrot sticks or fruit. It was
all sugar and fat. Not good.

“And of course you’ve met Hannah,” Elixchel
finished, then slid back toward her seat on the end of the sunken
couch.

“Why on earth is it so dark in here,” Hannah
exclaimed. She flipped a switch and light flooded the room, finally
illuminating the rack we would quilt at. It was enormous, a
cruel-looking structure, part torture device, part-creative
invention.

And now I could see the whole room. It was
at least forty feet by twenty. Huge.

“Where’s Gerry? It’s almost six-thirty,”
Elixchel said. I’d been counting and I’d wondered where the eighth
quilter was. There were eight chairs.

“Out in her car waiting for the rains to
slow,” Hannah answered glumly. “She got here just in time for the
downpour.”

“I’ll take an umbrella out to her,” Ruth
said.

“No, I’ll do it, mom.” Hannah sighed, and
disappeared back down the dark hallway.

I turned to Victoria, who said, “This room
was used as a home-school classroom--for the youngest. Jake and I
made it our master bedroom after they grew up. But I haven’t slept
here for a while…. I’m down the hall now.” Her wobbly voice grew
smaller and smaller as she spoke, as if it was running away from
her thoughts.

We fell to quiet again.

I moved toward the hallway wondering if I
should help Hannah retrieve the last quilter, when I heard Elixchel
say, “Well, maybe you should take your meds now.”

In response, Victoria began pulling and
pushing herself up from her chair. The Mayan beauty rushed to help
her and suddenly I did see a caring midwife in her.

The two of them left the room, turning right
at the door, which I assumed was toward Victoria’s bedroom, where
her quilt might be stored. It was nowhere to be found in this large
room.

I moved closer to the quilt rack, in
preparation to assist. A gust of wind swept rain at the nearby
glass and I turned toward the windows to stare into the dark.

I wished I could see deeper into the back
yard, make sure we weren’t near any cliffs. Just in case the mud
decided to slip and slide. But even the powerful lamps hanging over
the rack only cast light out from the house about ten feet. The
thrumming rain seemed to stamp out the light.

The walls of this extra-large room were
pine-paneled and bare except for a scattering of old photographs,
presumably of Victoria’s growing children and a few ancestors. I’d
noticed the same family art in the long halls that led here. Behind
me the dogs began a barrage of barks and I turned to see why. All
three had bounded toward our final quilter, just now entering. They
were jumping madly for her to pick them up while she tried to pet
them discretely on their heads. The room warmed considerably.

I suddenly had a strange feeling that I knew
this woman from somewhere. But the feeling passed.

“Hey, it’s Yip, Yap and Yum-yum! How you
doing, toys? Charger I think you’re almost big enough to be a
defensive end, now boy. You can cut back on the eating a little.
Wow, it’s freezing outside. Andrea, Abigail, get some logs burning,
we need heat,” she ordered merrily. The two youngest got up and
began making a fire.

The newcomer looked more like she was on her
way out for a casual but expensive meal. Heavily made up and
dressed in leopard-print tights and matching exercise jacket, a
mustard-and-brown African mask on a thin leather strap hung low on
her black jersey top.

Her hair was swept up in a haphazard do of
streaked pale blond and light brown with strawberry highlights,
which spilled out down the back of her head in a fountain of curls.
It didn’t look as if the rain had touched it. She was holding a
pair of short brown boots away from her body as if they were
diseased.

“I must go wash these off, they’re caked in
mud. I’ll be right back.” She plopped an expensive looking handbag
down on the couch and left as quickly as she’d arrived. I spotted
the brand…yep, probably over half a grand.

A few minutes later she returned with
Hannah, who was limping more than ever.

“That was fun. I’m soaked, and my shoes and
socks are covered with mud. Did anyone bring a spare pair?” A
barefoot Hannah groused.

“I did Hannah, let me get them,” Ruth said,
and scurried off once more. I thought the poor old woman would be
exhausted before we ever started sewing. But she seemed to thrive
on scurrying.

“Thanks mom. Boy, that rain came in like the
fires did two weeks ago, on hurricane gusts. Fool umbrella flew
apart just as we reached the front porch. Gerry missed the
waterfall sheeting off the front of the house, but I didn’t.”

“Do we want to turn on a television and see
if Malibu is in the ocean yet?” the redhead Andrea said from over
by the fireplace.

“No! I hear enough television at home,”
Hannah said. “Thank you for making a fire. Maybe it’ll dry my
clothes.”

“You don’t even have television at home,”
Abigail said. “Your children will be socially retarded.”

“Yes we do, we just don’t have cable or
dish. We have DVDs and a couple of local stations. And five
computers. Believe me, we are totally wired.” Hannah pulled on the
spare pair of socks Ruth brought her.

“That’s better,” she said, sighing. “Thanks
mom, but I don’t think the shoes will fit. Your feet are much
smaller than mine. I’ll wash the socks for you.”

Ruth waved a dismissing hand and headed back
toward the table for another examination, where she said, “But you
don’t have blueberry.”

“BlackBerry, mom. They’re way too
expensive.”

“I wanted blueberry, remember? Why are
blueberry any more expensive than peach?”

“What? Oh, you mean the scones. No, they
didn’t have any.”

“Whatever.” Ruth mumbled. “Blackberries have
too many seeds, anyway.”

Andrea said, “You know the rules, Abigail.
No television, no cell phones, not even a radio. Nothing is allowed
to disturb our concentration. As if you have to concentrate to
sew…”

I was beginning to see them as a comedy
team.

“It’s not to concentrate, Andrea, it’s so we
can talk to each other,” Ruth said.

Gerry returned to the sewing room, sans
muddy shoes.

“Oh! There you are, Rachel. Why are you
hiding over by the windows? I was thinking maybe you hadn’t made
it.” The blond leopard rushed over and for a moment I thought she
would grab me up in a bear hug. But instead she pushed her hand
forward and we shook hands.

“I’m Geraldine Patrone….” The Geraldine
Patrone. Wife of a billionaire. I’d seen her in the society pages.
Unbelievable.