Lilac Mines (14 page)

“Nah, he'll stick it out and then he'll have something to brag about,” she says.

Felix elbows her. “This from the girl who's afraid of previously owned jeans.”

“Shush,” Tawn whisper-laughs.

A few feet away, the Grim Reaper is freaking out. “Mom?” he calls, although he didn't come in with an adult. A whimpering sound follows. Then he starts to run, tripping over the hem of his robe and swinging his scythe wildly as he crashes through the sheets.

Felix can't stand it any longer. Fuck life lessons and bragging rights. He's a little boy in a too-big costume. She stumbles toward the light switch, but the Grim Reaper thumps into her first. He's almost as tall as she is, and nearly knocks the wind out of her. For a second she stands there, flashbacking, feeling bruised and dazed. Then she wraps her arms around the boy.

“Hey,” she says softly, “hey, it's okay.” He's a half-grown cat, thin and flexible, clumsy with new muscle.

He hiccups and pulls away. “Shit,” he says, all tough 12-year-old again. “What the fuck.”

Close up, Felix can see the not-even-peach-fuzz hairs on his face. He has a round bulb of a nose and scared greenish eyes beneath his frowning brow. He is right on the cusp, half baby/half bad guy. She puts her hand on his back, his kitten spine, and guides him toward the back door.

“Chewbacca should be out there already,” she smiles.

“Thanks,” he mumbles, and Felix releases him into the night.

“Poor kid,” sighs Tawn, fumbling with the twisted sheet. “I guess we should call it a night.”

“Yeah.” Felix stoops to help her. In a minute the lights will be on. In a minute Tawn will be a girl in spirit gum and a graduation robe. Grandpa Luke is probably asleep by now.

Felix tugs the sheet free from its clothesline and it falls on them with a nearly silent
fwump.

For a second she panics, tangled in the dark. Then she feels a gentle witch hand on her waist. Tawn is warm and close. She smells like pumpkin and candle wax. Her lips taste like Hershey's Special Dark.

Tawn's hands find a place between the spiky hair at the nape of Felix's neck and her high beaded collar.
She's a real witch,
Felix thinks as her hands search for Tawn through her robe. Felix's dress, for all its yards of cloth, binds and reveals her silhouette. Her petticoats are noisy. Tawn is whatever her body wants to be beneath her black cotton robe. Slim-hipped. Girl-bellied. Shaking a little. Her lips and hands move in strong, silent collusion. Hands on floor, lips poised above Felix's. Then, hands on Felix's face, lips at the edge of her scalp. When she puts her tongue in Felix's mouth, Felix can taste her own hair gel.

Rolling, rolling, they are a yin-yang tumbling down a hill. Finally they surface from the sea of eggplant sheets. Somehow they're beneath the banged-up oak table that holds the bowl of peeled-grape eyeballs. The half-light seems bright, now that they are night creatures.

“What's on your lip?” Tawn says finally.

Felix touches her mouth. “What do you mean?”

“That thing. Is it a scar? Or a cold sore?”

“I don't have herpes!” Felix says. Then she realizes what Tawn is referring to, what she thought she had successfully covered with lipstick every day. “It's a scar.”

“From what?” Tawn, her face strewn with shadow, is somehow both innocent and scarred herself, the kind of person who might understand.

“A few weeks before I came here I went clubbing with my friends,” she begins. The events flow from her imperfect mouth: the all-night parking meter, Guy Guy and Eva Guy, her purse exploding on the ground, the street sign that watched over her. It is the same story she gave the police, mostly, but now she's crouched beneath a table in a haunted house, watching Tawn's dark brown eyes crinkle at the corners. Now it's all different, as faraway as Los Angeles. It barely seems true.

“What did you do with the purse?” Tawn asks.

“Nothing. It's still in my closet at home. But I see what you mean. I probably won't carry it again.”

Tawn touches the silver stud in Felix's chin, then her bottom lip, her freckles smeared with GirlPunk Long-Wearing Lip Color in Nutmeg, the tiny, raised zigzag scar apparently not. Tawn leans forward on her hands and knees and kisses Felix again, slow and light. The table forms a small cave around them. Felix wants to stay exactly here.

How do you date when there's nowhere to go? Felix thinks about Eva, how their first few dates were an elaborate, aroused game of oneupsmanship. Eva took Felix to a film festival. Felix took Eva to a fashion show. Eva took Felix to a museum of hoaxes. Felix took Eva to Miss Velma's millennium church service, where a white-haired woman with bright lipstick preached about golden pillars and Jesus in flames.

It's hard to separate a girl from her world. How would Tawn measure up in L.A.? But Lilac Mines is not L.A. It's not something Felix aspires to; more like a book she wants to read, the one assigned for class that turns out to be a page-turner. And Tawn is not a gateway to cool; she's just company. Very good company.

The next day that Felix has to work is a Tuesday. She dresses slowly, trying to quiet the okay-so-now-what chatter in her head, and skips breakfast. She wears a yellow T-shirt that says
Hermosa High History Hoe-Down '95.
She was an actual hoedown participant, which ups the shirt's conversational value (“All I remember is the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877. I don't even know if that's the answer that we won or lost on.”) She wears her darkest, thigh-hiding-est jeans, big silver hoop earrings, bright red Adidas. She studies her ass for a long time in the mirror. This ritual is familiar, and only by enacting it does she realize how long it's been. The early days of Eva were all about checking and double-checking her grooming. Eva was gorgeous enough to get away with not shaving her legs, but Felix believes her most beautiful self is her most controlled self.

“You have a smudge,” says Tawn when Felix arrives at Goodwill. She rubs Felix's cheek with her thumb. “You really put make-up on to come to work?”

“Sure, I always wear make-up,” Felix says. She means to say she's not doing anything special today, but it sounds like she won't leave the house without eyeshadow. Tawn has accented her black jeans with a man's button-down shirt. It is loose, plain white, sleeves rolled up like she's going to sit down at a typewriter. Over by the cash register, Matty is watching them.

“Oh,” Tawn remembers, “I brought you something. Gramp thought you'd be interested in this. He said he's had it forever.” From her back pocket, she extracts a folded piece of notebook paper, almost as yellow as Felix's shirt. She presents it to Felix, still folded, free hand behind her back, like it's a rose.

Felix opens the soft paper. On the top it says, in very light letters,
Why Alexander Hamilton Was The Best Of The Founding Father's, Not Georg Washington.
At first she wonders what Alexander Hamilton has to do with Lilac Mines or ghosts. But then she moves past content to form. The handwriting is a kid's—it hasn't found its groove yet, though all the letters are properly formed. It's shaky and so faded that it's clear Felix will never learn why Alexander Hamilton trumps George Washington. But she knows this writing: neat, slanted, eager.

“Gramp said, 'What am I going to do with it anyway? I'm an old man,' ” Tawn says.

“This is Lilac's handwriting,” Felix says.

“Yeah.” Tawn touches the top corner of the paper where it says,
Lilac Ambrose, Grade 8.

“Which means that she wrote the postcard,” Felix says. Laughter bubbles out of her. Tawn squints and Felix explains. Tawn is less impressed than Ranger LeVoy, more cheerful than Gary Schipp. A sort of
Cool, you have fun with that.

“Thanks for this,” Felix adds, waving the paper.

“Hang on,” says Tawn. She ducks behind the counter. Matty continues to stare. Tawn pulls out a wooden box carved with trees like the ones that cover the west side of town. “You could put it in here. I found it the other day, when you were off.” She pauses, looking down. “I'm stupid to get involved with an employee. But that's how I am sometimes. Stupid.”

Tawn sighs, resigned to her fate and hopelessly honest. Felix takes the box. It's the size of her heart. It's better than Miss Velma's kingdom of rainbows and waterfalls.

Felix puts the box in the middle of the dining room table at Anna Lisa's house, between a crock of vegetable stew and a cooling pumpkin pie. Daylight savings time is over, and they now eat dinner against a backdrop of darkness. Autumn is always half-cozy, half-sad. Lilac Mines has real seasons, and Felix finds herself feeling delicate, as if she could be nudged toward tears at any moment.

“What is it?” Anna Lisa asks when they're halfway through their stew.

Felix finishes chewing a carrot. “The box is from Tawn Twentyman.”

“Your boss.”

“Mm-hmm. And the paper inside is an original school paper written by Lilac Ambrose. Her grandpa gave it to me.”

“Her grand—Luke Twentyman?” Anna Lisa scoots her chair an inch closer to the table.

“You know him?”

“Not well, but—my girlfriend used to work for him. Actually.”

“You're dating someone?”

“No, I mean, she
was
my girlfriend. Meg. She worked for him in the '60s. Did a little research and typing but mostly just did her best to keep the guy organized. His office looked like a crime scene in a detective movie.”

Felix smiles.
Meg.
She rolls the name around in her mouth, tries to lose Meg Ryan and taste the word on its own. Bold. Quick. Red-haired?

“Tell me something else about Meg,” Felix says.

“What?”

“Anything.”

Anna Lisa bites her bottom lip. Felix studies her face for clues. It's creased in the expected places—not folds like Luke's, but thin, distinct lines. As if small rivers once ran there, then dried up. But she wears no make-up, and this makes her eyes look young, a secret Revlon would kill to keep. Round and brown, flecked with little gold apostrophes.

“She loved driving,” Anna Lisa says finally. “She was a good driver, in a dangerous kind of way. We used to drive all through the mountains. One afternoon we drove all the way to Columbia—we didn't plan to, we just got to talking.”

Felix cannot imagine her aunt sustaining a conversation all the way to the 7-Eleven. The myth of Meg doubles.

“We got there and drank sarsaparilla.”

Felix nods. “I've never had sarsaparilla,” she says earnestly.

“Neither had we. It was a tourist thing, even then.” She gives Felix a half-smile. “I'm not
that
old, Felix.”

“Oh, I know.” But she has trouble with beginnings and endings sometimes. When cars were invented, did everyone stop riding horses? Did the telegraph die once telephones became common? How is it that her parents lived through segregation
and
affirmative action? How could one body contain all those contradictions?

“What was she like?” Felix asks. “Meg.”

“She was… brave. Passionate. She really loved me. She had a beautiful smile.”

These are the things they say on the news when someone who isn't famous dies. Honor student. Cheerleader. Beautiful smile. They don't mean anything. But as Anna Lisa tries to translate sarsaparilla and the specificity of a smile, her jaw begins to quiver. She isn't a youthful 60 now, she's an ancient girl. A stood-up prom date. It makes Felix nervous. What can she do for a 40-year-old broken heart?

“Can I show you something?” Felix jumps up, a little breathless. “Hang on.”

She jogs down the hall and returns with the postcard. She'd vowed not to bring it up to anyone until she had more information. But now, with Lilac's history paper just inches from this other artifact, it seems only a matter of time before the other pieces of the puzzle shake off the dust and make a pilgrimage from the hills. Like the trick-or-treaters. Felix's desire will be enough.

“Look what I found,” she says, presenting the card to her aunt. “The writing is the same.”

Anna Lisa reads the postcard. “It's kind of romantic, isn't it?” she says without looking up.

“Exactly!” says Felix. “I mean, all of it. The whole mystery.” Who would have thought that Anna Lisa, of all people, would be the one to understand?

“You know, there are people who say she wasn't the only one who disappeared that day.”

“Really? Who?”

“Just people. You know how rumors are. I remember people saying things years ago, back when the whole thing seemed a little less like something out of a history book and a little more real, I guess. It wasn't anything specific.”

“But I mean, who else disappeared?”

Anna Lisa shrugs. “A boyfriend? A friend? Some other kid from school? Her mother? Everyone has their own little theory, whatever makes sense to them.”

Cal?
Felix wonders.

Anna Lisa adds, “Some people think she killed herself.”

Coal wanders into the room and flops at Anna Lisa's feet with a dog-sigh. Anna Lisa bends to scratch his curly ears, and Felix cuts the pie.

Later that night, Felix finds Anna Lisa in the guest room—her room. She's crouched by the short bookcase where Felix has stashed her magazines and hats. The bottom shelf is still occupied by Anna Lisa's books, titles like
TransPlants: Tropical Plants in Cool Climates.

“Sorry, I didn't mean to snoop,” says Anna Lisa when she sees Felix. “I was just looking for this.”

She holds up a book with a vaguely pornographic-looking bird of paradise on the cover.

“Isn't it getting a little cold to garden?”

“No, this,” says Anna Lisa. From its pages, she pulls a black and white photograph. Felix approaches slowly, as if her aunt is a mountain lion who might flee for the hills. The woman in the picture is leaning against an old, light-colored car. She has shiny hair and a beaky nose. Her outfit is so Jackie O: a tweedy, tailored jacket and narrow skirt to match. She
does
have a very nice smile. Dark lipstick. She looks toward the mountains that Felix imagines are behind the photographer, and not at the camera.