Windfalls: A Novel (29 page)

Anna said, “It’s bizarre to be at a garden party this time of year. What would they have done if it rained?”

Eliot shrugged, “Move it inside. But according to the locals, we still have at least a few weeks before the rains usually arrive.”

“We’re too dressed up,” Anna observed, looking across the lawn at the groups of laughing strangers in their linens and cotton sweaters. “We look like tourists.”

“We are tourists,” Eliot answered.

“Nope,” she said. “Not anymore. We live here—remember?”

“Invasive exotics, like eucalyptus and French broom.”

“Invasive, maybe,” Anna agreed. “Though I doubt they’d consider us very exotic. Look at this place.”

A strong light emblazoned everything. The autumn flowers glowed in their beds as though they had been polished. Even the temperature was perfect, warm as bathwater, with a breeze that posed no threat to the tablecloths and cocktail napkins. Carole sought them out again.

“Phillip will be along soon,” she said to Eliot. “He’s dying for news about the center. But don’t tell him too much, or I’m afraid he’ll decide to come out of retirement and reclaim his job—and that would be disastrous for both you and me.” She waited while they laughed politely. Then, turning to Anna, she said brightly, “Let’s see—you’ve just escaped from somewhere. Nevada? Kansas?”

“We moved from eastern Washington,” Anna answered, trying to keep her voice smooth. “Near Spokane.”

“Oh. My. Well, welcome to California. I’m sure you’ll love it here.”

“I hope so,” Anna answered curtly. Down in the valley she caught sight of a tiny figure in the vineyard, and when she looked more closely, she realized there were many of them—a battalion of ant-size people moving purposefully among the vines.

Carole looked at her sharply. “You’re an artist?”

“A photographer,” Anna said. “And I taught at Spaulding University until we moved.”

Carole raised her head just slightly, as though she were acknowledging Anna for the first time. “I’m a bit of a collector myself,” she said. “I don’t know if Phillip told you. Californian photographers are one of my interests.” She gestured toward the house. “I’ve got a few things up inside. You’re welcome to take a look, if you’d like. I’d love to know what you think of them.”

Then, turning back to Eliot, she thrust her face toward him and asked, “And how are things going at work?”

At the sound of Eliot’s voice going deep with satisfaction, Anna felt a wash of unexpected sadness. She wasn’t resentful of Eliot’s luck, but still it hollowed her somehow, to hear him talk so happily about his work when she was so adrift. He deserves this, she reminded herself. After all he’s been through, he deserves to have found another job he loves.

After Carole left for other guests, Eliot said ruefully to Anna, “I think you’ll like Phil better.”

“She’s okay,” Anna answered, reaching out to give Eliot’s hand a loyal squeeze. “At least she buys photographs.”

“Maybe there’s more to her, once you get to know her better.”

“Maybe,” Anna answered, looking out across the party. The autumn sunlight shone in the women’s hair, glinted off the men’s watches and rings, glowed in the bowls of the guests’ wineglasses. Down in the valley the little figures moved slowly among the rows of vines.

Anna said, “I do think I’d like to look at her ‘things.’ Do you mind?”

“Want me to come, too?”

“I’d rather go alone. Not that I don’t love your company,” she added. “But you should probably wait and talk to Phil.”

The grass was so thick her feet couldn’t feel the earth beneath it as she crossed the yard. Even the linen-covered tables seemed to be floating above the ground. She wove her way through packs and clumps of strangers, passing through pockets of conversation like different temperatures in a lake.

“Great access—”

“—at the top of his class.”

“All the lawyers say we should, but we aren’t that—”

“—last time we were on Santorini.”

“A tad too oaky—”

The food, when Anna passed it, still looked unapproachable, the platters garnished with flowers and curls of vegetables, the napkins still arranged in symmetrical fans. She accepted a glass of wine, a merlot so dense and silky that the first sip of it seemed reason enough to have left her daughters with a babysitter she’d only just met to race off to a party filled with people she did not know. Glass in hand, she drifted toward the house. She passed a hedge of white flowers, and a fragrance like living perfume wafted after her. She took another sip of wine, let it loll in her mouth, and then, when it was warm as saliva, she swallowed it, felt it glow inside her.

On the wide deck a flautist and a cellist and a guitarist played, their music drifting above the chatter and laughter. Anna smiled in the direction of the musicians and slipped inside the house. It was quiet, cool as a mausoleum. The air smelled vaguely sweet. A sculpture sat in the tiled entryway, a rough-hewn boulder from which the faces of many animals peered as though they were watching all who entered or were waiting for some safer moment to emerge themselves. An armful of lilies filled a vase on a table of polished mahogany. On the tiled floor a stuffed heron lifted one yellow leg, its delicate foot permanently curled for its next step.

A dozen photographs hung on the walls of the room, each framed immaculately and illuminated by a little light. Adams. Stieglitz. Weston. White. John Sexton. Some of the prints she’d seen before, and some were new. Her eyes darted greedily to the signatures even as she soaked in the images—the open doors, the dunes, and stones, and hands. Slowly she circled the room, standing before them one by one.

Each photograph was perfect, so lucid with the authority of its own vision that she moved from one to the next as though she were in a chapel or in a dream. It wasn’t until she returned to the door that she remembered the nearly finished darkroom waiting in the basement of their new house, remembered the camera she hadn’t used since Ellen was conceived, remembered her fruitless drives through the countryside. She circled the room again, but this time as she passed from one print to the next, she felt not encouragement but a mounting defeat. Those photographs had already surpassed everything to which she had aspired. The conversation had been completed long ago.

And who was listening anyway, she wondered, as out on the lawn, perfectly dressed strangers drank amazing wine, and down in the valley, anonymous workers toiled beneath the sun. What did it matter that someone had once cared enough about a corner of the world to make a photograph? What did they mean, those patterns of shadow and light trapped in silver halide?

When she reached the entryway again, she forced herself to turn back and face the room one last time. She saw each photograph hanging in its pool of light, silent as a tree falling in an unpeopled forest. She heard the sounds of the guests outside, their gusts of laughter like a fickle breeze, and for a moment, standing in the doorway, she felt like sobbing.

C
ERISE SOON LEARNED WHICH OF THE BATHROOMS OFFERED THE BEST
amenities, which of the Dumpsters were most apt to yield food, what times of day she was least likely to be seen. Furtive as a timid ghost, she spread her needs among the half-mile of gas stations and restaurants that clustered round the exit and tried to evade the service workers and freeway travelers who swarmed there, too.

She was as continually exhausted as she’d been when her babies were newborn, so woozy from broken sleep it was as though she were neither asleep nor awake but had instead entered some new state that shared qualities of each, a waking dream in which things loomed and shifted and made no sense. She tried not to let her mind touch on her children, and yet there was never a moment when she was not encompassed by the loss of them. But even so, she learned to make detours inside her mind to avoid thinking of them directly, and sometimes she could evade a little of the pain that way.

The bandages on her hands grew raveled and black, and one day she roused from a doze and rubbed her eyes and was startled to discover that her palms did not hurt. It was an emptiness as surprising as if the freeway roar had suddenly ceased. She tore at the dirty gauze with her teeth, and when she had bitten the bandages off, she saw that tender skin was beginning to form around the edges of the scabs on her palms. It was another defeat, that she should heal. Staring at that fickle pink skin, she hated her own hands for their dumb insistence on living.

Perhaps time passed, though in her efforts to avoid both the past and the future, the present seemed endless, and it was hard to tell. The roar beyond the sound wall never stopped, but one night she woke to find water on her cheeks. At first she thought she had been crying in her sleep. But a second later she remembered rain, heard the winter’s first rain filtering through the leaves, felt the splash and roll of raindrops on her face.

Rain changed everything. The oleander droppings became a wet mat beneath her sodden blanket. Inside her damp clothes, she shivered and shrank into the smallest corner of herself, and all the food she found that day was soggy. She tried to rig a roof of salvaged plastic sheeting over her head, but the plastic ripped and leaked, and all night the oleander leaves tipped little loads of water down on top of her.

At dawn, when the rain finally eased enough that Cerise could leave her nest in search of food, she found a woman waiting for her next to the Dumpster behind Denny’s. The woman wore a short brown polyester dress covered with an orange apron, and her bare arms looked almost purple in the early morning light. “Here, look,” she said, her words appearing as puffs of pale mist. “You need to leave before something happens. Some of the others’re starting to say you’re not good for business. Don’t you know there’s places for homeless people—soup kitchens and shelters and stuff—downtown?” She shoved a flyer toward Cerise. “It tells right here where you can go.”

It startled Cerise that someone would choose to speak to her, and it was hard to follow what the woman was saying. It baffled her, to have her plight reduced to the lack of a house. She remembered the homeless people she’d seen back in Rossi and in the city, with their shopping carts and old coats and missing teeth, and it seemed strange that there was a name that simple for what she was. She took the flyer the woman offered and tried to read its numbers and letters, but they wouldn’t clump together into meanings. She tried to speak, but her throat felt seared shut.

The woman shifted impatiently and shot a glance toward the back door of the restaurant. “My shift’s over in a few minutes,” she offered. “I’ll drive you downtown.”

It felt wrong to leave her hole in the oleanders, but Cerise’s bones had grown hollow with shivering, her hands were rigid with cold, and the threat and compunction of the woman’s concern made it impossible for her to stay. So she waited, huddled beneath the overhang in back of the building, until the woman returned, a jacket slung over her restaurant costume.

“I got some food for you,” the woman said, holding out a bag cautiously, as though she were offering something to a feral dog, “and some clothes, too.”

She drove an old sedan, its seats and floor littered with fast-food bags and broken action figures. As she drove, she talked, a quick barrage of complaints about her old man and her job and her kids that clattered around Cerise like a bucketful of Ping-Pong balls while Cerise huddled in the warm car and tried to remember how she was supposed to answer all those empty, bouncing words.

The center of Santa Dorothea was such a wet confusing wilderness of streets and strangers it made Cerise long for the privacy of her oleanders. She missed the bugs and birds and lizards and the constant anonymous sound of traffic. In the city, the people weren’t all hidden in their cars. Instead they pushed past her so closely that even in the rain she could smell their sweat or their perfume. At first she felt exposed and raw among them. She expected that she would be noticed, that her grief and guilt would be as conspicuous as her filthy clothes, and she cringed and looked for places where she could hide. But she soon realized that if it weren’t for the fact that no one ever bumped into her, she might have been invisible, for her presence registered on no one’s face.

There were seconds as she wandered the unfamiliar streets that she panicked when she realized Travis wasn’t with her. Each time, her first thought was that she’d been negligent or forgetful and that somehow she’d let him wander away. A moment later, when she remembered the reason for his absence, her relief that he was not lost and scared and crying twisted back into such agony that she tried not to remember him at all.

In the windows of the stores and malls, pilgrims and turkeys competed with Santa Clauses and reindeer, but the approach of the holidays barely registered in her mind. Instead, on every wall and pole, she was haunted by the same picture of a girl, the words
Missing
and
Reward
blaring below her rain-worn, smiling face. Each time Cerise saw that girl, a fleet thought of Melody crossed her mind—the young, dear Melody who could never be found, that smiling child whom no one would ever see again.

In a chilly restroom in a wet little park she changed into the blue sweat suit the woman from Denny’s had given her. The knees of the pants were threadbare and the sleeves of the shirt were too short, but it was warmer than what she’d been wearing, and it was clean and dry. As she shed the shirt the woman in the campground had given her and pulled the new sweatshirt over her puckered skin, she had the dizzying sense that she was fading into a stranger. After she’d completed her change, she stood for a long while in the little cubicle, staring at the obscenities scratched into the wall and trying to understand what was left of her.