Lilac Mines (29 page)

“Oh, Nannalee.” Suzy's voice is sweet and sunken. It's the first time she's ever called Anna Lisa “Nannalee” to comfort her, rather than to be comforted. She hugs Anna Lisa so tight that she teeters on the edge of the couch, and it seems that she knows Anna Lisa didn't mean “girlfriend” the way that most girls would. “What was her name?”

“Meg,” Anna Lisa says. The name bursts from her mouth and crumples as soon as it touches air. Is this the thing that was growing inside her, demanding to live in the world? It's taken everything to say it. She is exhausted by the effort, and slumps against Suzy's tanned shoulders. Anna Lisa's parents are in the doorway, groggy from near-sleep.

“Not more wedding hysterics,” Eudora Hill sighs. She is happy and relieved that her youngest daughter is getting married, but she has declared frequently that she's too old for the fuss of a big wedding. The implication is that Suzy should be too old to
make
a big fuss as well.

“No, mother, it's Anna Lisa. Her—friend—passed away.”

“My girlfriend died,” Anna Lisa repeats. The two words seem linked now. As if her freedom and her tragedy cannot exist separately from one another.
My husband Terry is alive,
she thinks. The ugly reciprocal.

“I'm going away. Back to Lilac Mines, I'm not sure for how long,” she announces.

“After the wedding?” Anna Lisa's father says, still sleepy.

“No, now. Suzy, I'm sorry. But I have to go.”

“Is there a funeral?” Eudora asks, puzzled.

“No, it's not that…”

“It's a friend from a long time ago, right?” Eudora continues. “Maybe you could send some flowers. People will understand that you can't miss your sister's
wedding.
Not when you're the matron of honor.”

“But I loved her,” Anna Lisa protests. “And it's more than that—”

“Well, your friend isn't going anywhere now,” Gerald Hill grouches.

“Gerald, don't be tasteless,” Eudora says. She takes Anna Lisa's hands in hers. Her arthritic fingers are knobby and reassuring, like the exposed roots of the black oak tree in their backyard. “Surely you could wait a week,” she says to Anna Lisa.

“All I've done is wait,” Anna Lisa pleads. “Please understand. I was in love with Meg.”

She watches her mother's face. Something moves behind her eyes, like a fish swimming far below the water's surface. She puts her lips together. She drops Anna Lisa's hands.

“Meg. Was she the one who gave you that strange present at your shower?” Eudora asks searchingly.

“Yes! The desert glass.” It was the last thing Anna Lisa put in her duffel bag. It was like dragging her heart to the car.

“Well.” Eudora is quiet. Anna Lisa can see her face hardening, second by second, and she wants to tell her mother,
Don't think that way. It's so much work. It will rip you apart.
“Well,” Eudora says again, “obviously Meg was a troubled young lady. I don't know what kind of shenanigans she talked you into as a teenager, but I hardly think they're worth missing your
sister's wedding
for.”

Suzy's face is torn up, blotchy beneath her half-halo of gold-streaked curls. She understands: this is Anna Lisa's turn. “Mother, Daddy,” Suzy says, “it's really okay.” She guides them to the couch. Martin blinks and moves over. “Nannalee needs to go. I'll still have Marla and June. Marla will be thrilled to be promoted to matron of honor. Anna Lisa is so good, she always does such nice things for all of us.”

“Like run away and leave us to worry about her for more than a year?” Eudora demands.

“Mother, please,” Suzy replies calmly, “that's old news.”

Eudora's eyes are pond-blue and ready to spill over. “And what does Terry think about all this?”

Anna Lisa doesn't answer. She understands the ache of old news. It's why she lets Suzy do the explaining, and walks slowly and decisively out the front door and into the night.

Chester A. Arthur Elementary is just two years old, a squat, mustard-colored building guarded by topiaries in the shape of zoo animals.
One of the Forgettable Presidents,
Terry explained,
that's what they're actually called.
The night is mild too. The air feels delicate, as if it could easily be pushed toward summer-hot or icy-cold. Terry's classroom is in the first of three short hallways, between a hippo and a giraffe. There's a yellow glow coming from the high windows. So he's here. Anna Lisa half thought he wouldn't be. In a way, she's relieved—the world is spinning around her, but Terry is still Terry, a man who pours all his unfulfilled desires into red smiley faces at the top of arithmetic tests. The door is locked, so she knocks. “It's me,” she calls.

“Annie, what a surprise,” he says. The classroom is chilly, but Terry's cheeks are pink above the beard he's recently grown. He keeps it neatly trimmed and the effect is distinguished, as if he teaches college students rather than fifth graders.
He'd be a good catch for someone,
Anna Lisa thinks. She feels very far away from him, although he's inches from her face. He kisses her lightly on the lips. She hasn't gotten more than a peck on the cheek in a while. He smells like Windex, or maybe the whole classroom does. He looks at her expectantly.

“I got a phone call,” she says.

“Is it your father?” Terry would never admit to being superstitious, but he has a habit of calling out bad fortune before it can manifest.

“No.”

“Is it.?”

“Terry, just listen. It was Jody, she's an old friend of mine from Lilac Mines.”

“From where?” Terry always forgets. She's given him a vague account of her year there, but for him it holds the same weight as the year she took Latin. It might be any year, just a handful of days.

“Lilac Mines, the town I lived in.”

“Right. I'm sorry, Annie, these tests have made me really preoccupied.” The big teacher's desk behind him is empty except for a blotter and a pencil holder decorated with macaroni. “So… Jody.”

“She called and told me that another friend of mine, Meg, that she, well… committed suicide.” When she speaks, it sounds like blasphemy. “She killed herself, and… and actually, she was my girlfriend.”

“Annie, that's terrible.” He takes her burning face in his hands. She feels like she's trapped in a vice.

“Not my girlfriend like Nancy-Jane,” Anna Lisa says quickly. “I mean, she was my… ” Anna Lisa can't bear to hurt him. “She's dead and I have to go back to Lilac Mines.”

Terry's hands fall to his sides, a gesture identical to her mother's. His lips are a small O lost in the forest of his beard. Anna Lisa resists the urge to comfort him, to tell him that it was so long ago; Meg was the only one; he has been good to her. She concentrates instead on the timeline stapled above the blackboard: 1776 to 1945 in ten feet.

“Why didn't you tell me?” Terry begins, bewildered. So many conversations have begun or ended this way. Terry, always waiting for a story Anna Lisa can only tell in a language he doesn't speak. Now they're both exhausted. Terry takes hold of Anna Lisa's chin again, but this time his grip is tight. It gives her something to struggle against. “Was that it all this time?” he asks angrily, voice tighter than his fingers. “You were a
dyke?”

Her ears ring. She hears it spelled DiKE, like on the slip of paper attached to the braid flung at Meg's house years ago, when it was her house, too. His voice is mean but contained, a neat scroll that will write her out of existence: not
you are a dyke,
but
you were.
Not just
you used to be a dyke,
but
you used to be mine.
She's already receding from Terry's life the way she disappeared from Meg's. She might as well be dust. She jerks her head back and escapes his grip. She watches him search for the cruelest words possible. He can't do worse than
dyke,
than the past tense.

“Pauline!” he yells suddenly. He's shouting into the quiet nighttime classroom. His eyes seem loose in their sockets. Anna Lisa has never seen him this way. She's been craving it, she realizes, the same way he has longed to un-tether her. “Pauline! Come out, I want you to meet my
wife!”

Slowly, the door connecting the two fifth grade classrooms opens. From the darkened classroom emerges Miss Ernst, the other fifth grade teacher. Anna Lisa met her once, at the school's Open House night.
Your husband is a wonderful teacher,
she had gushed. Her red-brown hair is messy now, and there's a streak of frosty lipstick on her chin. She's wearing jeans with a bright yellow scarf threaded through the belt loops. She looks slightly wild, like a carefree college girl—student to Terry's history prof persona—as opposed to the polite girl Anna Lisa met at Open House. It irks her that Terry might be attracted to all the qualities she so carefully erased over the past eight years.

Pauline Ernst composes herself in a matter of seconds. She looks nervous, but not ashamed. She stands with her hands clasped in front of her. “I'm so sorry you had to find out this way, Annie, honestly. And just after your lover died, too.” She says “lover” too easily, like she grew up with the concept. She says it the way a young woman who lounges in the dark while her own married lover talks to his wife might say it. And she says “Annie” in a way that connects her, casually and deeply, to Terry.

“I'm going to Lilac Mines,” Anna Lisa repeats, not looking at Pauline Ernst. “I'm not coming back.”

It is only later, when Anna Lisa is willing her exhausted body to sleep for a few hours at a motel on Route 49, that she thinks about Terry's version of the evening. Did he think that she announced her permanent departure because of Miss Ernst? Did he think he was powerful enough to be the cause of things?

She eats the remainder of her truck-stop sandwich in her pajamas on the bed. Crumbs fall on her lap. She still can't taste anything. It's as if her tongue has left her body to go live with Meg in some vague but flavorful ever after. During her years in Fresno with Terry, she learned to be patient, to endure the absence of sweet and salty and sour. Now she will wait in Lilac Mines for her sense of taste to return… for something.

But what if Terry was right? What if circumstance rather than will is pushing her, even now? She hates him for spoiling her gesture, for being so pure in his own transgression. He is part of an ancient and romantic myth: man with unloving wife falls for passionate young woman. There will be rumors at the school and he will have to face Anna Lisa's family, but he'll always have the myth.

She crumples the cellophane wrapper and tosses it in the metal wastebasket by the bed. She opens the drawer of the nightstand, and removes the Bible. It smells like fake leather, stiff and inky. She doesn't open it, just lets it sit on her lap, appreciating the weight. She hasn't prayed in years; she's not sure if she's
ever
said a sincere prayer. She's cast little nets of hope into dark nights, yes, but she's never asked God for anything and promised something in return. It always seemed easier just to brace for fate. But now, with her shaking hands on the motel Bible, she says a prayer to Saint Julian. “Let me be a traveler,” she whispers, “not a murderer.”

She drives at night, in the world of 18-wheelers and white moths that turn to pancake batter on her windshield. One moth, brown-speckled and half the size of her palm, affixes itself to her driver's side mirror. It hangs on through Ragby, Rawhide, Peppermint Creek, Angels Camp. She sees it every time she switches to a faster lane. It is a grotesque and unnerving creature, with its hunched thorax and fuzzy antennae, but she develops a reluctant admiration for it. She's not entirely sure that it's alive, but how could it cling to the car if it wasn't?

Anna Lisa reaches Lilac Mines in the purple pre-morning, seven hours after leaving Fresno. The buildings are soft-edged against a slow burning sky. The streetlights are off, and her headlights sweep the gray road lazily. Here's a bit of boardwalk, a flash of sleeping department store, a low-flying Steller's Jay. She cracks her window and inhales the Sugar Pines: that old, thin, hopeful scent. Her eyes sting, she's home. How could she ever have left?

Her car climbs Calla Boulevard. Hills are an act of faith, pinning her lungs against the back of her ribcage. But as she grows accustomed to the angle, she slowly becomes aware of a sleepiness around her, something that can't be entirely attributed to the early morning hour. Maybe it's the broken window of Lilac Mines Green Grocer, yawning like a geode. Maybe it's the deep, severe quiet: no cars, no factories, no spring wind. It's a town painted in absence. She passes Redwood Road, the turn-off for Meg's house. What used to be Meg's house. She can't go there yet. She drives past the main mine entrance. The road turns to dirt, still dark and damp at this time of year. When she reaches the smaller mine entrance, she stops. An old car rots in front of the boarded-up entrance. Four flat tires and pale green paint spotted with rust.

Anna Lisa climbs out of her own car and stretches her stiff legs. She has no idea what she'll do here. Find a job, she supposes, that's what she always does. But Jody and Imogen are gone. Meg is gone. Shallan and Edith are in Chicago, Caleb is in Vietnam. Maybe he's back now, or maybe he's dead. There are the new women that Jody mentioned, but Anna Lisa is only connected to them indirectly.

The mine is still halfheartedly boarded up. Anna Lisa gives one of the planks a wiggle, and the weight of it falls into her hands. She lifts her feet and enters the tunnel, where the air is chilly and hushed, so intimate it makes her shiver. She runs her fingers along the ragged rock wall. She holds her breath until she finds it:
A + M Forever.
She was worried it wouldn't be there anymore. The only proof that there ever was a forever. Weather and, perhaps, other fingers have smoothed the letters. She craves roughness.

Removing her car key from her back pocket, she poises her shaking hand in front of the support beam. The key glints in the half-light. What is there to say, now, about
A + M?
She adds the first phrase that comes to mind, the one Meg finger-spelled on her thigh that night:

LET'S GeT OUt oF Here.

Anna Lisa fights a knot in her throat. She will need to do this in pieces. This is how she's survived, even if it hasn't always felt like surviving. She leaves the mine and looks down the dawn-hazy mountain to the sprawl of Lilac Mines. The concentration of buildings is shaped like a cross, or maybe a starfish. Cut a leg off and a new one will grow.

When the sun is up, Anna Lisa stops at the Blue Corn Diner for breakfast. She has money this time, enough to support her for a couple of months if she's careful. She withdrew it from the joint checking account, a modest, non-vengeful amount.

The diner looks like an Airstream trailer that has grown roots. A sign in the window says YES, WE'RE OPEN, but everything else about the place says
No, we're closed.
Anna Lisa wrestles the door open, and finds two employees inside, an older man and a girl in a pink waitress dress. They're wrapping white dishes in newspaper and putting them in boxes. Both look startled to see her.

“Your sign says you're open,” Anna Lisa says apologetically.

“Oh. Yeah, we haven't taken that down yet,” says the man. A curl of greasy gray hair has escaped his comb-over and begun a journey across his forehead.

“Are you closing for good?” Anna Lisa asks. It seems clear that they are, but she's craving a blueberry muffin.

“Who isn't?” says the man. “Gold rush is over.”

“Everyone's leaving,” says the girl in the same tone she might say,
Everyone's going to the David Cassidy concert.
“This place is spooky. It's like, without all the people here, there's only ghosts left and they outnumber us. My pop here doesn't believe me, but a couple nights ago I heard the door to the old barn behind our house rattling, and you know how there's been no wind lately.” As if Anna Lisa has been here the whole time, observing nuances in the weather.

Her presence finally hits the girl's father. “What're
you
doing here?”

“Passing through,” Anna Lisa says. “On my way…” Her voice trails off. The girl stares at her like she's a ghost.

“You're not one of them hippie hitchhiker types, are you?” he says, eyes narrowed. “ 'Cause even they're hightailing it out of here. They say they like wilderness and all that, but as soon as they've driven the real, hardworking folks out of town—the folks who kept the town going—they're done with this place. And they accuse
us
of environmental whatchamacallit.”

“Destruction,” his daughter says triumphantly.

The man grunts. Anna Lisa isn't sure exactly what he's talking about, but she's heard this general lament dozens of times from people in Fresno. From her parents and friends, even Terry.
Damn hippies.
Anna Lisa can never quite chime in. She can never condemn what she's too afraid to be.

“I guess I'm not one of them,” she says, and backs toward the door.

Anna Lisa makes her way down the hill, clouds peeling away to reveal a yellow-pink day, full of wildflowers and buildings in near-ruin. The windows of the Washoe Street shoe store are covered with fresh plywood, imitating the post office next door which was boarded up even when Anna Lisa lived here, boards now dark brown and splintered. The drugstore is closed, a laundromat is closed, Lou's and Lilac's are closed. The things she knew and the things she never got a chance to know. While she is sad to see Lilac's shut-eyed and dusty, it's more disturbing that businesses have been born and thrived and died in her absence, that entire lives have happened without her. She finds an open gas station, but the lone attendant working there tells her they'll be closing next week.

“There's a pattern,” he says. He is maybe 23, a thin but muscular boy in a Calaveras Petrol shirt. He has large brown calf eyes. A dimple hides in the stubble on his cheeks. “First the expensive restaurants close, then the stores that sell anything but groceries. The bars stay open a little while, 'cause people like to drown their sorrows. The places like this one, close to the highway, selling stuff that people can use even if they're just passing through… we stay open the longest.”

“How do you know?” Anna Lisa asks. “You're awfully young for an old-timer.”

“I've lived in Calsun and Dynamite City. The highway was diverted away from Calsun, and they paved right over Dynamite City. I'm starting to wonder if it's me,” he adds with a weary laugh. He tops off Anna Lisa's tank and screws her gas cap back on.

“What can you do, though?” she says.

“This time I'm going to college,” he says. “Somewhere big and solid like New York City. Some place that won't just blow away.”

At one point, Anna Lisa thinks she's on Calla Boulevard, but she finds herself looking up at a metal sign that says North Main Street. Has she forgotten so much? But she locates a few landmarks—Lilac's, a burger joint where she and Jody and Imogen once split a cheeseburger three ways after Imogen burned dinner—and decides that the street has been renamed. North Main Street sounds soulless. She had assumed she would stay at the Lilac Mines Hotel. Not only is it closed, but most of the upper half is charred black and sinking in. Only now does she remember what Jody said. Fragments of their conversation replay in Anna Lisa's head almost hourly, but others are lost completely.

In spite of the evidence, Anna Lisa tries the door of the hotel. This time she's not trapped. She has a car and money. She could turn around right now, or head on to Reno or Salt Lake City. But she wants to be inside the Lilac Mines Hotel. The door opens easily, as if the building is saying,
What can you take from me that hasn't been taken?
The lobby has a wet, moldy smell. Water stains map out mythical lands on the light green walls. She makes her way to the restaurant and bar, where Jody once sat looking like a man. Toppled bottles litter the counter like bowling pins. A warped yellow newspaper says it's less than six months old, but it looks bad for its age. The carpet on the stairs leading to the rooms is dirty and matted. The air here is thick with mildew. It feels slightly poisonous in her nostrils. She wills more of it into her lungs. She would never do what Meg did—she couldn't—but she can let this dank, spiked thing into her, let it change her and eat her.

She wades deeper into the burnt part of the hotel, stopping in room 312. Layers of damp wallpaper sag away from the walls, but only the outside of the door is charred. The fire must have stopped here, found the room shut, and moved down the hall. The bed is molding but neatly made.

And on the bed lies a dress. It is old-fashioned, cream-colored, and it looks brand new. Set out as if some high femme were showering in the next room, prettying up for the ball. It is a gorgeous mess of strings and buttons and lace, shaped like a woman on top and an umbrella on the bottom. Beauty created by extremes: tiny waist, giant skirt; garlic bulb shoulders, skinny arms; pearl buttons the size of baby teeth, high lacy collar.

When Anna Lisa touches the crunchy fabric—satin? taffeta?—something overtakes her. She unbuttons her plaid cotton shirt and drops it to the floor, a melted witch. She doesn't even shiver. The dress fits perfectly. She looks down at the milky folds of cloth. Yards and yards—the dress announces its extravagance, the money spent in the name of feminine beauty. She looks across to the splotched mirror and expects to see an impostor: a short, frumpy woman in a princess dress.

But she
is
a princess. A bride, a heroine. It is as if her body was water and she has slowly, compliantly filled this dress, this self. In the splotchy mirror is a pale-cheeked maiden, curls falling across a slightly stricken face. The sort of heroine who has formidable adversaries: wicked stepmothers and cruel spells. She is a heroine not from a Disney movie, but from the original tale, recounted to children after the candle was blown out, scaring them into staying in their beds and out of trouble.

She can imagine herself running through the woods in such a dress, and suddenly that's what she wants to do: run. And so she takes off down the dim hallway, fabric swishing around her legs and brushing the floor. She tries to remember the last time she wore a real dress. Her wedding? It was a small ceremony, she didn't even want one, but all the parents insisted, their smiling teeth nibbling her identity into a new hourglass shape. This dress doesn't restrict her movements as much as she would have expected. If anything, it holds her up, even as it threatens to trip her.
Is this what Meg felt like, a woman in a dress, running?
She travels the length of the third floor, scampers up to the fourth.

“Lilac!”

She stops. It's a girl's voice. Somehow it sounds far away, although it's not quiet. Anna Lisa stands as still as she can in the hallway, her lungs pushing against the stiff bodice. Who would call out “Lilac” as if it should be followed by “Wait!”? So Anna Lisa waits, as the hotel transforms around her into something sinister. The drapes might smother her. The charred furniture might re-ignite. But the hotel is determinedly still. As she catches her breath, she tries to think. She realizes that she's already assigned the voice an owner. It is Meg, back from the dead to help that other unfortunate dead girl, Lilac Ambrose. Meg would do that.

It could be someone else, of course. Some kid, or even some other ghost. She looks around for petticoat-thin vapors. She promises to be a capable messenger, to translate what is written in the ether. But there is nothing that holds up to a second glance, and there is certainly no one on the floor or nearby. Aren't ghosts supposed to smell like something? Sulfur? But only mold and mildew tickles her nostrils. Is it possible that this ghost—Meg or other—is only sound? A ghost made of words?

Maybe she made it up. Maybe her desire for a girl to call out to her is so thick that it has become tangible, like moist air condensing into rain. Her ears await clarification. But the one word never becomes more. Anna Lisa turns it over in her head—“Lilac!”—applying different punctuation and nuance each time until only her own internal voice remains. It's too late. She only had one chance

The dress and the ghost embolden her to visit the parts of town that she had been avoiding. It's late afternoon now. The days have just started to lengthen, and the pale yellow sun seems noncommittal.

From the outside, the church looks roughly the same: the same brown boards that have been struggling to stay upright for a hundred years, the same steeple and rusty bell, the same purpled tin roof. There are a few shriveled plants arranged in rows. She recognizes this space as a vegetable garden and wonders, with a pang, if this is what her garden will look like in a few months. Will her former husband Terry let the plants die to spite her?

Inside she's surprised to find the drafty openness of the church she knew replaced by small rooms, populated by church pews painted yellow, lavender, bright pink, and joined by the occasional sagging mattress or writing desk. In the largest room there's a beanbag chair bleeding beans and a wooden sign as long as her body. It's propped on the raised platform that used to hold the wood-burning stove that was once, she supposes, the spot from which a preacher delineated heaven and hell. The sign says LILAC WOMYN'S COLONY in hand-carved letters. The space it occupies, central as an altar, makes Anna Lisa think that someone took it down from the outside of the building and placed it here, sadly, gently. A body on display for mourners.