Cat in Glass (19 page)

We pass the post office with its flagpole, and the patch of lawn where I turned my first somersault. There is Oxoby’s Mercantile. Someone painted it pink—about ten years ago, judging from its condition. But the entrance stands open, and I recognize the old ceiling fan that stirs the air in the dark interior of the store. There is the Majestic Theater, boarded up now. And the school. And Joe and Lila’s, where I waited tables and met a bucker named Forrest. It has a new name. Porky’s Cafe. They’ve replaced the old leather booths with plastic tables and chairs. The sight leaves me suddenly empty.

I fidget with the meldseams of my duffel. I could reach into it as we walk. Refill the Eridani blissbox with rocks. Nobody in this hick town would even know what I was doing.

“We’ll ask Eugenia Miller if you can use one of her horses,” says Jerry Blue. “Maybe you know her. She used to teach school.”

The name jolts me out of my daydream. “Who did you say?”

“Eugenia Miller.”

We have stopped at the south end of the street. To our right stands a white Victorian, the first building I have seen since my arrival that looks as if someone cares about it. Behind the house stretches a fenced field, kept green by a tiny irrigation ditch. Two horses graze at its banks, snorting and stamping in the heat. I know this place. Its owner
taught me many things—among them that the world extends beyond Pactolus.

Eugenia was young then, a schoolmarm widow who lived in this wooden house with her small daughter, Rose. I envied the child. Rosie had no father to torment her for lacking the strength of a son, no older brother to live up to. And she had what I would have given in exchange for life itself: a mother.

I slip my hand into my pocket and run my fingertips across the cracked finish of the photograph, now moist with sweat, the picture of Eugenia holding my son. “Annie,” she used to say, “you’re bright. With a little work, that brain of yours will take you wherever you want to go.”

A torrent of memories pours down on me like desert rain. How I kicked Billy Harper in the shins so I could stay after school to clean blackboards. How I lingered afternoons at this whitewashed gate till Eugenia, with a smile and a sigh, appeared on the porch and beckoned me in for milk and cookies. How she single-handedly persuaded my stubborn father to let me go away to college. And how, years later, she rocked my baby in her arms and said, “It’s no crime to love more than one thing. Follow your heart, my dear.”

I hear the rush of my own blood as a small, wrinkled woman in jeans and boots answers Jerry Blue’s knock. How old would she be? I figure a sum in my head. Eighty-seven. Eighty-eight. “How are you, Jerald? What brings you out today?” she says, brushing a wayward lock of white hair from her eyes. Perhaps he was once a student of hers. I do another mental sum. No. He’s far too young.

“Somebody special needs a horse, Eugenia, and I thought you might be willing to lend one of yours,” says Jerry Blue. He gestures at me, standing behind him in the cool shade of the porch. “It’s one of these lightbucker Moffats, here for the big reunion. Old Tim’s sister.”

Something about the wording of that statement seems odd, but I have no more than a second or two to wonder about it before the thought is lost to more important ones. For Eugenia is peering at me, her green eyes as bright and intense as marbles set in the unfamiliar wrinkles of her flesh.

“My God, Annie,” she murmurs. “They said you’d live forever, and it must be true. You don’t look a day older. Not one day.” The bright eyes fill with tears. She rises on tiptoes to enfold me in her arms. At last, I can cry, too.

The horse is Eugenia’s favorite, a glossy black gelding called Night Sky. With strength belying her age, she throws a black Spanish saddle tooled with silver over his back. I protest. “It’s too valuable! It might be stolen.”

She laughs. “In Pactolus? Come to your senses, girl. Climb up there, and not another word about it. The saddle doesn’t get used half as often as it should since Rosie left home. Why, you in your black outfit, and Night Sky in his, all decked with silver, the two of you will look like you rode right down from the stars.” She winks at me. “Besides. A grand entrance is always good for the soul.”

I smile, mount, lean over the stirrup to kiss her, wondering how much she knows about what’s waiting for me. The
panic swirls up again, and I have to spend a long moment, eyes closed, steadying myself.

Eugenia reaches up and squeezes my hand. “If it’s any comfort to you,” she says, “every woman’s child grows up to be a stranger.” She shakes her head and looks away across the desert. “I guess almost anything can make a mother feel guilty.”

She looks back at me with a quick smile, then slaps the horse on the rump and cries, “Giddyup! They’re waiting for you.”

Night Sky is a good horse—spirited but responsive. Black, I think, as he takes me over the road. Black for space. Black for the bucker. Black for the absence of light. Four miles isn’t far for such a fine animal. I don’t urge him. Instead, I let him set his own pace, except for the moments when my courage fails me. Then I pull gently on the reins and hold him prancing among the sagebrush and junipers. Three times I stop and reach for my duffel bag. Twice I leave it unopened. The third time I hold a blissrock in my shaking hand and stare at it, finally returning it unbroken to the bag.
No more
, I think.
For this, I must be myself
.

Long before we reach the ranch, the sun fattens, almost touching the hills. The horse’s hooves stir the dust of the desert, make it shimmer in the oblique rays of evening. I make him dance in circles while I try to steel myself yet again for what lies ahead. We move on awhile. Then I stop him again, and we move on again. In this way, we come at last to the gate of the Lost Cannon.

The house is still there, already lying deep in the shadow of the mountains. One of the tall poplar trees has disappeared. The windmill has been replaced with a newer model. The porch sags a little. Figures move in its dim shelter. In the still, dry air, crickets have begun to sing. Quiet voices carry from the porch, a sound so vividly familiar that for a moment it makes me dizzy. On this, the night before the last Sunday of August, the gathering has already begun.

Night Sky whickers as someone approaches through the blue twilight, holding up an electric lantern. “Hello. Who’s there?” It’s a man’s voice.

“Annie. Annie the lightbucker.” This is the moment. The moment when I push away from the hull of the ship, trusting my life to a frail rope of human manufacture.

I dismount from the horse, patting his neck, willing myself to hold the reins loosely as if I were calm and relaxed. The man’s pace quickens. He stops a few yards from me. The dusk is so deep that I still can’t make out his face. In my pocket, my hand is a fist around Forrest’s empty Eridani blissbox.

“Annie? Your name is Annie?” says the voice in the darkness.

“Yes,” I say. “The one who’s been away a long time. The one who …”

“I know,” he says. “They say you left your child behind because you loved space and lightbuckers more. My mother. You’re my mother.”

The breath rushes out of me. For a moment, I can make no sound at all. Then, “I … Adam, I …
I’m so sorry
.” I don’t
even know if my words are intelligible. I seem dissolved in tears. I hear them, pat, pat, falling into the dust at my feet. I want to stop, but it’s useless. The pain is too great. I scrub my sleeve across my eyes, trying to replace the pain with disgust at my own behavior. Anything is better.

Adam draws nearer. I can almost smell him—a clean, moist scent like the vigorous breath of a child. In a moment, I see him more clearly through the gloom, and a second shock hits me.

How old must he be? Forty-seven. Forty-seven. I have long since memorized it. But I can see him well enough to be certain of one thing. This Adam is young. Twenty-two. Twenty-three. Even younger than I am.

“It’s all right. I’m glad you came. Mother.” The last word comes slowly, as if he’s trying it out, listening to the sound of it. I hear the scrape of his boots as he scuffs them against the ground. “I wanted to tell you that I understand. I do. I understand.”

He holds the lantern higher, and for the first time since his infancy, I see him in completeness. I step toward him, the ache inside me fluttering now, like a bird considering flight. His suit looks like plastic, but it’s too soft. It’s all one piece, and it has no zippers, no Velcro, not even any meld-seams. He is wearing shore leave blacks.

His laughter is bright and pure as the light of suns. Oh yes, he understands, and I laugh along with him, relishing the sound of it. He links his arm through mine.

Above us, the first stars appear.