Motherless Child Read online

  Well, all right, Nat. If that’s what you want.

  Nat. So full of panic. My God, what happened? And how? And where are you, now?

  Both kids started screaming. Because the sun was in their eyes, Jess realized. She couldn’t just stand there moping. She stood anyway, just long enough to taste this moment: the final seconds of her life in her metal box, with her daughter. The first seconds of the years to come, with no metal box, or a new one, someday, somewhere. And no daughter.

  “Goddamn you,” she snapped, curling her right hand into a fist and then punching it so hard into the window glass that she gasped. She wasn’t even sure whom she was damning. Joe, for dying. Herself, for failing. Natalie, for …

  No. She couldn’t think about that. Couldn’t face that. What she thought she’d seen in Natalie’s eyes … what she realized really might have happened had happened, even though it couldn’t, not really, right? Not in this world …

  Somehow, she got herself back in her seat, got her screaming fingers unclenched enough to slide around the key and fit the key in the ignition. She got the car started, navigated through the bank parking lot, murmuring, “Ssh. Ssh. Babies. Kids. Come on, guys. Hush, now. Eddie, come on, hey.”

  What broke her down, finally, was the realization that she didn’t even know Sophie’s baby’s name.

  Roo. Her little Roo. That’s all Jess had ever heard either Natalie or Sophie call him. That’s what Jess had been instructed to call him when she babysat, so that her brilliant, wayward daughter and her joyful, shining, wayward best friend could have at least a little bit of young-person life, despite the choices they’d made.

  “Roo,” Jess said. And then, while the babies screamed, she pulled off onto the shoulder of Sardis Road and laid her face against the steering wheel and cried.

  A little later, when she’d savaged herself to silence and pulled both kids out of their seats and held and talked to and walked them awhile, she started the car again and drove them all to the Waffle House. Parking out front, she turned, though the kids were facing the back and couldn’t see her.

  “This’ll only take a sec,” she murmured. “I’ll be right back. I’ll never leave you. I just can’t do this alone. Not again. Not anymore.”

  Did she realize she was making a mistake? Dropping a single bread crumb behind her? Later, she would tell herself that she hadn’t realized and that even if she had, she didn’t see any other choice. Maybe she was right.

  The second Benny saw her, he came out from behind the counter, just as he did every single time Jess walked through his door. “The Fujiyama Mama,” he said, pointlessly, same as always, lifting his apron over his head and wiping his hands on it. His cheeks glowed their perpetual burnt-clay red underneath the tufts of white-gray beard. He’d loved her, she knew, for going on ten years.

  He thinks you’re Snow White, Natalie had told her once.

  And he’s Dwarf Number Eight, Sophie had added. Bristly.

  “Benny,” Jess said, looking right at him and stopping him in his tracks. Guilt rose inside her, and surprising uncertainty, and even more surprising shyness. And loss. So much loss. Natalie …

  “Jess?” he said.

  She let the tears come, didn’t even try to wipe them. “Today’s the day, I’m afraid.”

  He stared.

  “Last chance. Only chance. I’ve got to go, now. For good. I won’t be back. And I want you to come.”

  Everything seemed to wink out, then. The waffle and syrup smells, the clatter, even the light. She was falling through a void, reaching out for the last solid thing in sight before she dropped away into nothing, even though doing so couldn’t stop her fall, wouldn’t even slow her down, would just pull Benny into the void with her.

  She watched him glance over his shoulder at his kitchen. His employees. The restaurant he’d worked his entire life to own. His whole world.

  Then he dropped his apron on the floor and followed her out the door into the sun.

  9

  The blood surprised Natalie. It didn’t explode out of her, and it didn’t gush. But it did spatter, as though the guy had shot into a puddle.

  Sophie had erupted from the car, and she came hurtling across the blacktop but stopped a few feet from Natalie, staring at the wound just below her friend’s belly button. Fascinated, Natalie undid the bottom of her blouse and pulled its tails apart. Both of them stared.

  The wound looked like petals on a red flower that had bloomed in her skin. As they watched, the petals twitched, seemed to bend in toward each other, as though closing up for the night.

  “Does that hurt?” Sophie asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Natalie said, and threw her head back, stretching the stomach muscles to set off new whiplashes of pain all the way up her diaphragm. Actual pain. Real feeling.

  Behind them, her shooter had started to blubber again. Natalie stretched her stomach some more, stuck a careful finger down by the wound, then probed inside it. The skin parted. She could feel the edges of the opening, jagged and surprisingly stiff, like little teeth. The slippery coolness inside. The sensation was delicious. Or maybe just sensation. With a sigh, she turned around.

  “Uh-oh,” Sophie said. Not at all unhappily.

  With her finger still probing the bullet wound, Natalie cocked her head and leveled her stare. The man quivered, and the gun fell from his fingers. Vengeful, cheating, woman-hating little fuck. His mouth opened. But Natalie stopped him from speaking. Simply by wanting him to, apparently.

  “That’s right,” she murmured, deep and low. “What is there left to say?” In five quick strides, she was beside him again, kneeling down. The man gawped at her, eyes widening. Because he can see, she realized. Because he knows what’s happening. And what’s about to.

  Shivers exploded through her, radiating from the wound in her gut. It was all she could do not to scream, though not from pain. Not from anguish. We’ve had it all wrong. All through human history. That first shocking moment of life, the world opening before us and our mouths yawning wide with the sheer, impossible shock of just being alive, of needing to do something to stay that way. What other choice could we have but to throw open our mouths and scream. For joy. For joy …

  Beneath her, her shooter sagged. No—relaxed. Oh, yes, he knew. The way rabbits know, once the talons seize them. Natalie smiled. Leaned forward.

  “Could you get your finger out of there?” Sophie said, gesturing toward Natalie’s stomach. “It’s like watching you masturbate.”

  An hour or so later, with the blackout curtains drawn tight on the smoke-saturated motel room they’d paid for with cash from the shooter’s wallet, and with the extra blankets she’d demanded from the woman at the reception desk drawn up under her chin, Natalie tried burrowing deeper into the covers, biting on the comforter to keep from grinding her teeth. In the other bed, Sophie had put on her jacket and sweater under her own blankets, and she was still playing with the guy’s gun. Twirling it by the trigger guard on her finger. Aiming it, across one forearm, at the television and whispering, “Powwwww.”

  She went on doing that for some time, until finally Natalie sat up. “You’re going to shoot your eye out.”

  “Then you can stick your finger in there,” Sophie said. “I can’t believe he shot you.”

  “That guy was going to shoot someone,” murmured Natalie. “Sooner or later.” Even now, she couldn’t decide whether she was relieved or annoyed that Sophie had made her masturbation comment at the moment she had. Certainly, she’d broken the mood and saved the guy’s life, for whatever that was worth, to him or to her. As usual, the simile had seemed just a little too apt, thanks to the wetness on her fingers and the tingles crackling through her at that precise moment. Her head full of dreams she’d dared not speak or even admit she was having.

  But I’d had them.

  “What would you have done?” Natalie whispered. “If I’d gone ahead, I mean. If I’d…?”

  Sophie stopped twirling the gun. She held it b
etween her hands, blew across the muzzle of it, to see if her breath could make it hum. A good while passed before Natalie realized that for once—for almost the first time in their lives—her friend had no answer. Or at least, none she was going to share.

  “G’night,” Natalie said.

  “Good night, Natalie,” said Sophie, and snuggled down in her pillow, the gun clutched like a stuffed animal to her chin and chest.

  As far as Natalie could tell, neither of them slept that day. Every time she tilted toward blankness, the complete uncoupling of self that now passed for sleep, Sophie twisted in her sheets, or sang a lullaby to the gun, or got up and tiptoed to the curtains, pretending not to know Natalie was watching her, and toyed with the frayed fringe. Nudged a toe toward the slit of sunlight on the bald, brown carpet, as though squaring herself for a dive. Outside, trucks sighed and cars honked and seagulls or maybe children swept past in windblown clouds of screeching that might have been laughter.

  The third time Sophie went to the window, she started to sing, very quietly. “Are you sleeping … are you sleeping … little Roo … little Roo…”

  Almost, Natalie let herself join in. Let the thought of Eddie come. The ghost of his heat, his breath on her breast as she fed him, his happy, hiccupping gurgle when he ate. Seemingly of their own volition, her arms folded into a cradle across her chest, rocked the empty air. Natalie did allow herself to do that, for a single moment.

  Then she rose out of the sheets—so silently she could rise, now, like a plume of smoke—lifted her pillow, and delivered a blow to the back of Sophie’s head that drove her off her feet and ribs first into the dresser against the wall.

  Much faster than Natalie expected, though she should have expected, Sophie recovered, rocketed across the room for her own pillow, leapt to her bed, and began to bounce. Natalie bounced, too. They stared at each other.

  “Come on,” Natalie growled. But her attention was distracted, just for a moment, by the gun popping up off the pillows every time Sophie landed on the mattress, nipping around her ankles like a little rat-dog. She looked up again, but too late. Sophie was already in the air, and then she was on her.

  The fight lasted only a few seconds. Long enough for Sophie to rip a long gash down Natalie’s cheek while ostensibly trying to smother her with the pillow, and for Natalie to jackknife, kicking her legs up and flipping Sophie ass-over-ears to bang against the night table on her way to the floor, splintering the table and exploding the lamp next to bed.

  “Ouch,” Sophie said happily, steadying herself against the bed and grabbing at the slivers of lightbulb sticking like porcupine quills out of her shoulder and upper arm.

  Natalie put a hand to the scratch in her face. Stroked it once.

  “You done?” she said.

  “Ouch,” said Sophie again. And then, “Where are we going tonight?”

  Natalie sighed. “I just got up.”

  “You never slept. Any more than I did.”

  “You have any bright ideas?”

  “Only dark ones.” Sophie turned on her knees, facing Natalie. “And one bright one. Let’s go home.”

  Natalie closed her eyes. But waiting under her lids she found not Eddie, but the man who’d shot her, right at the moment his eyes sagged and his lips relaxed as her gaze settled on his throat. “We can’t, Sophie.”

  “I have to see him, Natalie. I miss my Roo.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s different for you. You know Eddie’s with his grandma. Don’t get me wrong, your mom’s the best mom ever. I know she’ll be great to both of them, but she’s not my mom, and—”

  “Don’t,” Natalie whispered, opened her eyes, trapped Sophie’s, bored into them. “Don’t. Ever. Say that. Again.” She got up on all fours, moved forward across the bed. “Ever.”

  For a while, they stared each other down. Until Sophie said, “Which that, exactly? Just so I’m clear what I can’t say?”

  “That it’s different for me.”

  “Ah.”

  They stared some more. It surprised Natalie how long Sophie could match her, now. She’d never been able to before.

  Eventually, Sophie did blink, look at the floor. Then she stood, went into the bathroom, brushed her teeth. Stayed there awhile. Natalie got up and touched the hole in her stomach, but it was hardly there, now. A little scar, maybe not even that. A soft place. Phantom-bruise. She began brushing glass out of the carpet.

  Sophie came out fully dressed. She looked pale and round and perfect in her yellow dress, her blond hair gleaming. A pool of sunshine in the dark room.

  “Sorry,” Natalie said.

  “Nope,” Sophie chirped. The chirp sounded pretty much as it always had. “You’re right. As always. How about a movie? We haven’t gone to the movies yet. How about Up? I really meant to see that.”

  So they drove the GTO back toward the coast until they came to the suburbs of Savannah. They got Slurpees they didn’t drink from a 7-Eleven and, on impulse, ten-packs of Dentyne and Juicy Fruit, and waited for the late show, when Natalie prayed they’d be the only ones in the theater, because the thought of sitting in the dark next to or, good God, behind somebody—somebody warm, the warmth like a beacon beating, blinking under the skin—sent shivers so powerful, so pleasurable, through her whole body that they nearly made her sick.

  Back in the GTO, she stuffed four pieces of Juicy Fruit in her mouth and was surprised how much she enjoyed that first burst of taste. Even more than the taste, she loved the give of the gum as she ground down on it, the veneer softening instantly to her bite. Yielding. Giving up.

  A few seconds later, she rolled down her window and spit the gum into the night. “Tastes like … nope, not even that. Tastes like nothing.”

  “I know,” said Sophie. “That’s why I’m trying this.” And she held up a ball she’d concocted, an entire pack of Dentyne mashed into at least four Juicy Fruit sticks. “Want one?” And she popped the ball in her mouth.

  There were indeed four other people in the movie theater when they arrived, but they sat together, way in the back, and Natalie dragged Sophie to the very front. Just once, as the lights went down, Sophie sat up in her seat, glanced over her shoulder.

  “But they’re so cute back there,” she whispered. “Don’t you think they’re cute? I’m pretty sure they’d like us to come sit with them. They really like my dress, I think.”

  Without saying a word, Natalie locked her fingers around Sophie’s wrist, pushing it down into the empty cupholder.

  “Handcuffed,” Natalie said.

  “You’re no fun,” said Sophie. But she turned back and slouched and stared up at the screen.

  They didn’t even make it through the credits. Natalie had worried a bit about seeing the kid onscreen. Any kid. But the sight of that old guy wandering around his empty house, amid the refuse of his happy marriage, reminded her way too much of her mother—and she winced and glanced sideways to see Sophie with her mouth in an O and her mouth wide open.

  “Are you crying?” Natalie hissed.

  “I thought I was,” said Sophie. “Though I don’t seem to be.”

  “Why are you crying?”

  “I said I thought I was.”

  They fled together out the exit doors into an alley, through the alley to the GTO, and back to the relative safety, or at least clarity, of the empty highway. After a while, Sophie ripped open another pack of Dentyne, made a giant new gum wad, then mushed that into place atop the muzzle of the gun.

  “New lollipop flavor,” she said, holding it up. “Shotgum.” Then she petted the barrel.

  Natalie said nothing. She’d decided to try not to think, but that proved easier than she was expecting; the slightest push and every thought she’d ever had scattered like dandelion seeds, leaving just her behind the wheel. A dead stem.

  A hungry dead stem.

  “Did we just circle whatever city this is?” Sophie asked. “Is this still Savannah? Weren’t we just here?”

 
“I think so, yeah.”

  “We could try some music. You like the music.”

  “I love the music,” Natalie said, and switched on the radio. Then she groaned. “I fucking hate this song.”

  The Troggs, claiming love was all around. Natalie had hated this song when she was dewy-eyed and ten and still believed in such things. Sophie reached to turn the dial, and Natalie shoved her hand aside.

  “No, I don’t,” she said, surprising herself. “Apparently, I love this song.” And she started to sing it. Yell it. Sophie yelled it, too, getting the words all wrong.

  “Wind, not wing,” Natalie barked. “How can you write anything on the wing?”

  “Easier than on the wind,” said Sophie, then she grinned, stuck her gum wad on her own face like a clown nose. Natalie floored the accelerator, and they hurtled away from town into the dark.

  Sometime around 3 a.m., they passed a field full of cattle and Natalie screeched the car to a stop. They didn’t get out, and the animals didn’t look up. The dark seemed to shape itself around the pasture, swallowing it, distending itself, a boa constrictor with cows inside it. Very occasionally, one cow bent its head to the grass. The rest just stood, accepting whatever had come for them. Stupid, sad creatures. So helpless.

  Back down the road, a light came on in a nearby farmhouse and Natalie saw a shadow cross the window in there, then the twitching flicker of a TV. A few minutes later, the TV switched off and the figure passed the window again, settled on a couch. Love might be all around, Natalie thought. But not as much as sleeplessness. So many people on this planet. So little sleeping.

  An hour before dawn, moving more slowly now, Natalie brought the car up a rise and realized she knew where they were.

  “That’s St. Marys,” she said, gesturing toward the surprising little sprawl of two-story wooden buildings and bedraggled peach trees lining the route to the waterfront. “We came here once. My family did.”