Entering Normal (8 page)

So what does the banana sticker mean? Is she supposed to move to South America? Sometimes she thinks it would take a distance that far to escape from Billy—and Mama. That far to find out who she is and what she is meant to do with her life.

SHE CLIMBS THE STAIRS TO CHECK ON ZACK. IN THE DIM light she negotiates her way through the rope Zack has strung across his floor, a cat's cradle that interlaces the legs of his bureau and bed. This web is a new creation, one he relies on to trap the werewolf, a monster that has come into his imagination—and bedroom—since the Halloween party at school.

He is bathed in the glow of his Batman night-light, already lost in the hard, serious sleep of childhood. Even in sleep, he looks remarkably self-possessed, as if he has gone to a place she does not know. Sometimes the intensity of his sleep frightens her.

She pulls the blanket up over his stick arms, then reaches over and brushes a sweaty twist off his forehead, fingers the fine hair just behind his ears. A quick stirring moves in her breast, a nearly sexual twist in her belly. When he was an infant, her nipples dripped milk whenever she held him and, holding him, smelling him, she'd feel sweet, deep spasms grip her pelvis.

She is astonished that she can feel something so fiercely outside of herself. Yet Zack is a part of her, too, such a true part that if she were led blindfolded into a room of three hundred five-year-olds, she knows she would be able to locate him easily, instantly, like an animal finding its young. All this love by accident.

She tucks the blanket around him, reluctant to leave. She could spend hours watching him sleep. Often she gets lost in the meditation of watching him, her breathing unconsciously and automatically adjusting so that her chest rises and falls in concert with his.

He sleeps exactly like Billy—on his back, one arm flung out, palm up. But then there is a lot of his daddy in Zack. In his lanky body, his straight eyebrows, his stubborn jaw, the way his ears jut out a little. Sometimes it seems like the only thing she has given her son is his red hair. And his name.

During her pregnancy, Opal made lists and lists of names. Almost from the first she knew she was going to have a son, a boy her mama wanted to name after her own father, Opal's granddaddy, a choice utterly out of the question since, besides being ugly, Hackett meant “little hacker.” No way her son was going to carry a name with a meaning like that.

It was not easy to find a name that, according to her copy of
1000
Names for Your New Baby
, matched up to a powerful meaning. Gunther, for instance, meant bold warrior. Great concept, but
Gunther
? By the second day of school the whole class would be calling him Grunter.

“Why can't we name him William?” Billy asked when she showed him the final list of prospects. She was more than seven months along by then and they had no sex life to speak of, which only made her nudgy as a mule.

“We just can't.” She had done a lot of thinking about the subject and tried to convey some of these thoughts to him. “Names are important,” she said. “It's the naming, the calling, that creates a thing.”

“Raylee,” he said, this being three years before her own name change. “Raylee, what the hell are you talking about?”

It was a difficult thing to explain, especially to Billy. It was one of those ideas she got—a perception that she latched on to as it floated by and that she understood at once the importance of, even knowing there was still more meaning to be got. How could she have explained it to Billy, who liked things concrete and laid out in front of him precise and unchanging, like the free throw line in the gym where he'd spent so many hours?

At times, when Opal is explaining something, words come out of her mouth that she doesn't even know she's been thinking. It was like that when she tried to explain to Billy. “It's the calling that creates a thing,” she repeated. “It's by naming a child that we both possess him and give him away.”

“Raylee,” he said. “I hate it when you talk like that.”

AS SHE TIPTOES OUT OF ZACK'S ROOM, SHE REPLAYS THE phone call, trying to pin down why she feels uneasy. Months later, remembering this night, she will wonder how she could have ignored her mama's warnings, how she could have forgotten about the strength of Billy's resolve once he made up his mind to something. How could there not have been a
sign
?

CHAPTER 8

OPAL

THE CALL HAS LEFT OPAL TOO EDGY FOR SLEEP, AND SHE heads into the dining room, where her current project lies on the cutting table.

The Montgomerys' maple drop leaf works just fine for cutting and sewing, and Opal has set up a card table for painting. Squares of fabric—tulle, cotton in a variety of prints, satin, organza, and denim— are piled in one corner of the room. Bags of kapok are stored beneath the table. Several plastic tackle boxes are stacked against one wall, their individual compartments filled with buttons, rhinestones, aglets, sequins, snaps, and hooks and eyes.

She picks up the order form and studies the girl in the photo attached. Dutch-cut brown hair and serious eyes that peer out through round-framed glasses. “Leave out the glasses,” the grandmother has noted on the form. She wants a ballerina, the number one choice for girl dolls. Why can't people use their imagination? It's clear as warts on a toad's back that this child—Ellen, she reads on the form—was not consulted about the decision. Opal sees intelligence in the girl's eyes, determination in her mouth. This child wants to walk on the moon, not pivot on knuckled-under toes. People can be so blind.

In the past few weeks, word has spread about her dolls. Opal has picked up a half dozen orders from some of the other mothers at Zack's preschool, and the local toy store has already reordered. The owner has promised to put her in next year's Christmas catalog—if Opal is still here next December.

The dolls were an unexpected side effect of her pregnancy, and she has the Horse to thank for that.

The minute news of her condition reached the school, Miss Horsley called her in for a conference. New Zion High policy prohibited pregnant girls from attending school, like they had some communicable disease, but Opal would be allowed to graduate with her class if she kept up with a tutor. Well, that suited Opal just fine. The last thing she needed was to have Caryl Jackson and the rest of the Junior ROTC corps gawking at her belly, whispering about her in the cafeteria, ragging on her in the girls' locker room when no teachers were in sight.

Hanging around the house didn't strike her as such a bad alternative, but nothing turned out like she expected. For one thing, her mama watched her every move, fixing her with an eagle's eye, as if five miles down the road there was more trouble Opal was fixing to get into.

No free ride here, young lady, so don't you be expecting one, Melva said, although the last thing on earth Opal knew she could expect from her mama was a free ride.

You're old enough to be having a child, you're old enough to be helping out around the house, her mama said, and then practically turned her into a slave.

For the life of her, Opal couldn't figure out why women liked to keep house. Cleaning the same rooms over and over. Washing the same clothes, doing the same dishes. Making the same bed, which when you think about it, is a colossal waste of time. She looked at her mama's friends and wondered how they stood it.

Except for Sujette, none of her own classmates wanted much to do with her, and the women she used to sit for no longer called, acting just like Miss Horsley, as if being pregnant made her unfit to watch their children, even though she had been sitting for them since she was twelve. One afternoon, well into the fourth month of spine-curling boredom, she was flipping though one of Melva's magazines when she saw a pattern for making a doll.

Right away she saw she had a knack for it. Her first time sewing and it turned out real good, the making of it satisfying something deep inside. She could understand then why her Grandma Gates could spend hours embroidering designs on pillow slips. There was something
pleasing
about creating. Inside of a month she had made four more dolls. And even using the same pattern, each one turned out with its own individual personality. Of course Melva thought the whole thing was foolishness, but it calmed Opal, and Lord knows by the sixth month, between Billy and Melva, her last nerve could use all the soothing it could get.

At her Aunt May's urging, Grandma Gates took several of the dolls to the Presbyterian Church fair, and before an hour went by, every single one of them sold.

After Zack was born, Opal continued to make the dolls, and by the time he was two she got the idea of painting their faces to look like children she knew and dressing them in costumes. Miniature sailors and pilots, doctors and artists, cowboys and football players, movie stars and dancers.

The toy store in New Zion carried her work, and before she knew it she had more orders than she could keep up with. Double your prices, Aunt May advised. Stupidity, said Mama. According to Melva, doll making was not an occupation fit for an adult. Her mama kept a running tally of Opal's classmates: which ones were married, which ones graduated college.

You're a disappointment that just keeps going on, her mama said. I don't know how you can let yourself settle for so much less. Well, shit, nothing Opal could see about Melva's life was anything you'd want to sit up nights waiting for.

SHE REACHES ACROSS THE TABLE AND PICKS UP ANOTHER order form. The child in this snapshot is pretty in a blank-faced way that reminds her of Suzanne Jennings before she latched on to Jitter Walton and began prancing all over town in his letter jacket. This one she is supposed to make into a Roaring Twenties flapper. Honestly, where did these people come up with their ideas? The most successful projects are those where the parents or grandparents leave the costume decisions to her. Usually she can look at the photo of a child and just know what to do. Sometimes a serious face can hide the temperament of a clown. And this one—this pretty child who looks like she is slow in the department of serious ambition—Opal can see that behind the blank stare this is a child who wants something more.

But then, everyone wants something more. Sometimes the longing is empty, a nameless yearning, but if you're lucky, you can put a name to it. Billy for instance, once wanted to play basketball for the Tar Heels. He wanted to be famous. Now, if she can believe him, he wants to marry her.

Opal's “something more” is a real family. Not a family that sticks together out of habit or because it looks good to outsiders, like her parents, or one where you stay there because you have to, out of duty, like Billy wants. She wants a family that stays together because every person knows that is absolutely where they
belong
, a family where people care for each other. This is exactly what she plans to have with Zack. She knows that she will be a better mama than Melva.

She sets the doll aside and heads for the kitchen. Her period's due in about four days, and she has a serious case of the munchies.

Plus she's horny.

In spite of her best intentions to once and for all be done with sex, hearing Billy's voice has set things moving. How can sex do that to you? Stir an ache so deep it's almost like something growing inside? Make your skin feel too tight?

She pours herself a glass of Coke and combs the cupboards for something sweet. She rejects a jar of applesauce, shakes out a handful of Fruit Loops. She would kill for a brownie about now—can almost feel the velvety weight on her tongue. Cereal just doesn't cut it. Her craving for chocolate reminds her of being pregnant. It had been lemon then. Cake, candy, sherbet, pudding, anything with citrus.

The kitchen clock reads 10:40. The Stop and Shop is open for another twenty minutes.

She climbs the stairs to Zack's door and listens to the sound of his steady, deep inhalations. The blanket is still tight up over his chest where she had tucked it earlier. She considers waking him, bundling him up for a quick trip to the store, then thinks of how it will be such a hassle later, trying to get him settled down and back to sleep. It seems like way too much work. Maybe she'll just forget the whole thing.

Or she could slip out by herself.

Not once in five years has she left Zack alone. Not even for five minutes.

She weighs the need for brief moments of freedom—for chocolate— against the risk of leaving him. The trip out to the store and back won't take more than fifteen minutes. Total. Round trip. What could go wrong?

She picks her way through the webbing of twine woven across the floor to his bed.

“Zack?” she whispers, then, a shade louder, “Zack?” He does not move. She recalculates the time it will take. Twenty minutes tops. What could happen to him asleep in a locked house?

She searches for a sign and finally decides she will say his name five times—one for each year of his life—and if he doesn't wake, that is the sign he'll be all right alone while she runs to the store.

“Zack?” she whispers. “Sugah? Zack?”

He doesn't even twitch.

“Zack.” Louder this time. Then two more times before she picks her way back across the room.

Simple choices. A hunger for chocolate. Such an
ordinary
thing. How could she have foreseen that it is the beginning of all the hurt and sorrow that is to come?

AS SHE DRIVES ALONG MAIN STREET SHE CAN—EVEN IN THE shadows beyond the streetlights—pick out the library, the town hall, the bank. The realtor told her they are constructed of granite cut from quarries on the outskirts of the village, adding that early in the century the quarries had been a major industry in Normal. Opal thinks it gives a real solid touch to the town. This is a place that could give a person
roots
. She passes by the Catholic church, also forged of stone, and then the Methodist and Baptist churches, these of clapboard, with soaring steeples that pierce the sky. The Halloween decorations haven't been removed yet, and there are cornstalks at the base of every lamppost along the main street. A farmer's wagon with a scarecrow in the driver's seat sits in the center of the square adjacent to a statue of a uniformed man on horseback. The bed is heaped with pumpkins.

The single traffic light is set on blinking yellow, and she slows even though there isn't another car in sight. There is something she likes about being the only one on the street. It reminds her of being a child and the nights she would wake and creep downstairs, going from room to room in the dark, listening, as if the secrets of their house would be revealed at night.

She continues past a small row of shops that occupy two entire blocks of the village center, by large clapboard houses with brick walks that lead through boxwood hedges up to narrow porches. Several of these buildings have been converted to businesses. One is a funeral parlor, another an insurance firm, a third the day care where she has enrolled Zack.

She passes the police and fire stations—lights on inside—the Creamery, which is open, and a diner, which is not. There are a dozen cars in the parking lot of the ice cream shop—couples, she imagines, who have stopped after catching a movie. She is swept by the sudden yearning for the simple pleasure of a Friday night date, for the carefree feeling of being
young
. She drives on past the corner occupied by Ned Nelson's service station and swings into the supermarket parking lot.

At this time of night there is a small crew on, sweeping floors and stocking shelves. Dorothy Barnes is the only cashier.

Opal heads directly for the bakery aisle and is debating between the brownies and eclairs when a voice breaks into her deliberation.

“Got a sweet tooth?”

The first thing she notices is the scar on his cheek, so raised and wide it looks like no one bothered to stitch it up. The second thing is that—scar or not—he's about the best looking guy she's ever seen. She feels a little jolt and for a moment is alive to
possibilities
.

“Me,” he says, “I'd go for the brownies. I bet you're Opal.”

She manages a nod. Merciful God, he
is
good looking.

“Ty Miller,” he says, holding out a hand. “I work for Ned over at the station.”

The moment their hands touch, just like that, Opal can feel her heart swell in its cage of bone, can feel her pulse race. No mistaking the spiking of chemistry. She sees trouble coming, stretching ahead like ten miles of bad road.

“I've seen you when you've come by the garage,” he says in a deep voice, a voice with the hint of song to it, the kind of voice that can thrill you later just by recalling it. She knows for sure she hasn't seen him before. Like she could forget.

She wants the brownies but because he has suggested them, she grabs the box of eclairs. “Gotta go,” she says. “Nice to meet ya.”

“You're out late,” Dorothy says. “Where's that boy of yours?”

“Sleeping,” Opal says. “With the sitter.” Her hand still feels tingly from Ty Miller's touch.

“Count your blessings.” Dorothy nods toward the rack of tabloids at the end of the counter. “I'll tell you, my heart goes out to her.”

“Who?” Opal says. Her heart has still not returned to its regular beat. He must think she's an idiot, racing off like that.
Gotta go.
Jesus.

“Her. You haven't heard about it? It's been on the news for the last day and a half.”

“Our television isn't hooked up yet.” Opal looks back over her shoulder, but Ty is nowhere in sight.

“It's tragic. Makes you wonder what the world is coming to.” Dorothy points to the headline above the photo of a young woman:
Distraught mother begs: Please return my sons.
“It's a crazy world. Something like this happening.” She reaches over and grabs the paper off the rack, folds it open to the centerfold. “Those are her boys.”

Opal wants to look away. The older of the two children is a sweet-faced boy with huge brown eyes. He looks the same age as Zack. There are other pictures: a child's birthday party, a full-color photo taken in front of a Christmas tree. Opal searches the four smiling faces—mother, father, boys—but can not detect the slightest omen in that photo of any trouble to come.

“Kidnapped,” Dorothy announces, dragging the box of eclairs over the scanner. “In Texas. By a Mexican. He jumped right into her car when she was stopped at a red light.”