Windfalls: A Novel (34 page)

“You wouldn’t,” Anna answered, twisting around in her seat and backing out of Mrs. Chauncy’s driveway. “When I came to pick you up, you’d remember me then.” She hoped that Mrs. Chauncy was being patient with Ellen, hoped she wouldn’t leave Ellen in her crib to cry it out. Anne remembered Ellen’s dark newborn body dangling between the doctor’s hands, and for an unhinged moment she imagined Mrs. Chauncy shaking Ellen or punching her or smothering her with a pillow.

“But what if something happened,” Lucy was saying, “and you never came?”

“Nothing like that will ever happen,” Anna answered, holding tight to the steering wheel and resisting the impulse to return to Mrs. Chauncy’s and beat down her front door.

“It could,” Lucy insisted. “You could die.”

“I won’t die,” said Anna.

“How do you know?”

“I just do. I’ll always come back to get you,” Anna claimed, though even as she spoke she felt a twinge of superstition, for what if she had a heart attack or died in a freeway pileup that very day? What if she had just made the one promise she couldn’t keep?

And then it all became so complex. It was impossible to guess which was worse, pretending to Lucy that their safety could be assured, or admitting that no future was certain, just as it was impossible to know whether being at Mrs. Chauncy’s would, as Sally promised, make Ellen more resilient or whether, as Anna sometimes feared, it would crush some deep part of Ellen’s emerging heart.

As she pulled onto the street and drove off through the dreary morning, Anna thought of how fervently she loved her daughters, how she would do anything for them, if only she could know what the right thing was. She remembered the heroic deeds other mothers had performed for their children. She thought about the Russian woman who, trapped with her son in the rubble of an earthquake, had kept him alive by having him suck blood from the cuts she gouged into her fingertips. She thought of the women in Vietnam who used their own bodies to shield their children from the soldiers’ bullets, and of the Eskimo mother who, in the darkest part of winter, made her starving children promise to eat her frozen body and then slipped out of the igloo to lie down in the snow. Anna had no doubt that she, too, would give her life for her daughters as easily as a drifting snowflake, as simply as a petal falling from a rose. In extremity she would know exactly what to do and she wouldn’t hesitate to do the hardest thing. But there were times when dying seemed so simple, so clear and unequivocal compared to what was required of an ordinary mother, day after day.

Engrossed in her own grim thoughts, Anna drove on through the thickening traffic toward Lucy’s school, and it wasn’t until she was merging with the race of cars on the freeway that Lucy broke the silence. “Are day cares like nightmares?” she asked from the backseat.

“What do you mean?” Anna said, tossing an anxious glance over her shoulder and pressing the accelerator toward the floor.

“Are day cares the cares you worry about all day?”

O
N
M
ONDAY AFTERNOON, WHEN SHE ENTERED THE BUILDING AND
walked down the echoing corridor toward the after-school care room, Cerise felt as strange as her hands still sometimes felt, both anesthetized and excruciatingly raw. She stood for a long time outside the open door, listening to the clamor and laughter that spilled into the hall, and when she finally forced herself to walk into that roomful of kids, it hurt as though she were being skinned alive.

There were times that first day when she was sure she could not endure being in the proximity of so many kids. Twice she had to run to the girls’ bathroom, where she hid in one of the cubicles beside a knee-high toilet, shuddering and clutching her mouth shut with both shiny hands until her spike of anguish finally passed and she could return to work.

It was after six by the time the last child left.

“They wear you out, don’t they?” Ms. Martinez said kindly as Cerise began to sponge the art table. “Especially at first. It was a busy day.”

“I guess,” Cerise said, smearing the paint into a muddy rainbow and then wiping the table clean.

“I must say the kids all seemed to like you. I can’t get Lucas and DeLong to pick up that well for me, and I’ve never seen Kaylesha take to anyone so fast.”

“They were nice,” Cerise said, bending over her sponge, trying to keep the grief out of her voice.

Despite the flicker of pleasure she’d felt at Ms. Martinez’s words, by the time she said good-bye and left the room, she was certain she could never go back again. Outside it was night, and raining. Blades and shards of light cast by streetlights and house lights and passing cars glinted on the wet black pavement, and the rain came down like hard, impartial tears.

There was a little park a few blocks from the school. In the dark and in the rain, it was empty and foreboding, as gloomy as a cemetery with its tangle of trees and its looming, rain-smeared swings. Stumbling past it, Cerise couldn’t keep herself from thinking of all the children who would never again play there, couldn’t keep from hearing the emptiness of their silenced voices echoing in the rain.

That night she was too tired even to try to summon her memories of Travis to console her. Instead, she lay on her cot listening to the drumming of the rain and trying to plan a way to escape the life that was closing in around her. All night, as she skimmed the surface of her sleep, she imagined leaving, just walking off, imagined finding a way to vanish altogether into the web of the world, though when she woke enough to try to plan where she might go, her thoughts smeared like tempera colors beneath a sponge.

By the time morning arrived and the moans and yawns of the other women rose around her, she was thinking of the spray of freckles across Lucas’s soft nose, was remembering Cara’s knock-knock jokes and wondering whether Jose’s puppy had come back home. All day those children haunted her. At noon, as she sat in the soup kitchen, eating her steamed hot dog and limp potato salad and listening to Barbara’s irreverent patter, she thought of Kaylesha’s timid smile, remembered how Lucy had leaned against her shoulder as she watched Cerise draw a horse. She wondered if Brianna’s cold was getting any better, and by two-forty-five that afternoon, her craving to be near those kids drew her back just one more time.

T
HE FIRST TIME
A
NNA SAW A PHOTOGRAPH THAT MOVED HER, SHE MUST
have been eight or ten, and she was sitting in the doctor’s office, waiting for her turn to go in and get a shot. She understood that shots were good for her, knew she was expected to be a big girl and be brave. She realized that when it was over, the nurse would let her choose a sucker wrapped in cellophane and impaled on a white loop of string, but still dread filled her stomach like gelatinous oatmeal. Sitting beside her mother in the doctor’s waiting room, it was all that she could do to keep from crying.

Her mother was reading
Time
and another child had the
Highlights,
so Anna had picked some other magazine at random from the rack. She was riffling through the pages, staring sightlessly at the words and ads and trying not to think of the needle going in, when suddenly she came to a picture that made her stop and stare. It was of a bridge nearly hidden in mist with a few skeletal trees rising up behind it. It wasn’t what she would have thought of as an exciting picture, and yet somehow it pulled her in, made her eyes keep working for longer than she’d thought possible to look at a single picture.

And when she finally turned the page, there was another photograph by the same photographer—a boy in short pants walking down a street—and after that one was another, so many pictures in a row that she was still busy looking when her mother nudged her and told her it was time to see the doctor.

Much later, thinking back, she was almost certain that it was Cartier-Bresson’s work she’d found that day, that the magazine she had chosen was
Popular Photography,
or maybe
Look
or
Life
. But at the time those names meant nothing to her. All that mattered was that gazing at those photographs was like falling into a quietness, as if the whole room were suddenly filled with the heightened silence of a new-fallen snow.

It reminded her of the message posted at railroad crossings—
Stop. Look. Listen
—only instead of a command, this was an invitation, and behind that invitation was another, so that she kept looking and looking, and each moment she looked, she discovered something more. In some mysterious way, sitting beside her mother and gazing at the rumpled pages, she’d felt as though she were more in the room than she had been before, back when she’d been merely filled with dread.

The swipe of alcohol still stung. It still hurt when the nurse jabbed the needle into the thin flesh of her bicep, and her arm still ached all afternoon. But those hurts were smaller than she’d feared. Afterward she surprised herself by choosing lime, and the sucker tasted even sweeter than she’d expected. Riding home, chewing on the green-stained sucker strings and gazing out the window at the city she’d seen all her life, she realized she was noticing everything as if it were brand-new—a cat crouched under a pickup, a fence entwined with a ragged strand of ivy, a woman in a belted coat standing at a bus stop—each thing vivid and unique and beautiful in a way she’d never seen before.

For years, her whole life had been richer and more real because of the time she spent gazing at photographs, the time she spent looking through a viewfinder or studying the upside-down image on the ground glass of her field camera. That had always been what mattered most—what mattered infinitely more than shows and sales and awards—the way her work kept her awake, and open to the world.

She had thought that her job at the university would be the first step in reclaiming all of that. “This will not only help pay the bills—it will invigorate your art,” Eliot had exclaimed when she’d called him at work to tell him about Martin Lee’s offer. But after her first few weeks on campus, she began to wonder if they hadn’t both been mistaken.

Her students wearied and annoyed her, with their pink cheeks and pierced eyebrows, with their ardent faith in art. It’s only a trick of light, she wanted to tell them, it’s just another hoax. A photograph is only a residue, a sloughed-off skin. It doesn’t change a thing. But instead she reviewed depth of field and discussed principles of composition, while all her words felt like ashes in her mouth.

Rather than encouraging her, the kindness of her colleagues made her feel like a fraud. She cringed when they congratulated her on her photographs and asked what she was doing now. Art is only froth, she wanted to answer. There’s a glut of it already in this world. But instead she choked out an answer about the baby and the move and how busy she’d been, and followed it with a lie about how she couldn’t wait to get her camera out again.

On Friday night of the second week, when she finally sat down to dinner with her family, Anna was so exhausted her skin ached. Ellen’s nose was running ominously, Lucy’s mood was manic and brittle, and the weekend loomed ahead like an obstacle course that somehow had to be run by Monday morning.

Only Eliot seemed unfazed by the demands of their new schedule. “So,” he said, as he set a piece of halibut on Lucy’s plate and began to work through it with his fork. “How’s it feel, to be back at work?”

“Work, lurk, murk,” Lucy said, watching her father’s progress with her fish. “Daddy, what’s murk?”

“It’s when things are dark or hard to see,” Eliot answered, casting a glance at Anna, waiting for her response.

Anna sighed, “I guess it’s harder than I expected.”

“It’s all still really new,” Eliot sympathized, pulling a bone from Lucy’s fish and placing it on the edge of his own plate.

“It’s more than that,” Anna answered, serving him some salad.

“Is someone giving you trouble?” Eliot asked swiftly.

“No, not at all. Everyone’s been really great.” Anna put salad on her own plate, stared down at the glistening lettuce, the flecks of grated carrot, the nearly invisible grit of salt.

“Then what?” Eliot persisted, adding another bone to his pile.

Struggling to keep her voice light, Anna answered, “I keep remembering a teacher I had back in graduate school.”

“Tool, rule, fool,” interrupted Lucy, grabbing her milk and narrowly missing knocking Anna’s wineglass on the floor.

“Quiet, Pine Nut,” Eliot said, setting Lucy’s plate down in front of her. “It’s your mommy’s turn to talk.”

Anna spooned a dab of rice cereal expertly into Ellen’s open mouth and said, “He was a good photographer, but he was a rotten teacher.”

“Teacher, preacher, creature,” Lucy sang, jabbing her fork in the air while Ellen watched in moon-eyed adoration.

“Lucy,” Eliot said. “Eat your dinner.”

“Anyway,” Anna said, tucking another spoonful of cereal into Ellen’s open mouth and then deftly scraping the residue from her plush cheeks, “every semester at the first class meeting this guy told all his students that the best thing they could do for the world was to never make another photograph. He said no one should be a photographer if they could possibly help it, and that he would give an automatic A to anyone who would quit the class in the next twenty-four hours. After that, they were going to have to work like dogs just to get a C.