The Lauras Read online

  The counter was manned by a single perm-haired postal worker, who watched me through eyeglasses with plastic frames the same clear red as jolly ranchers as if she suspected that I was going to take off with her entire stock the moment she looked away. Her glare made my spine crawl as I picked out a postcard, not one of the Welcome To! or Greetings From! ones, but a placeless one with dogs playing around a water pump on the front—I wasn’t worried about being tracked down by the postmark, since we were on the move, but I didn’t want to make it too easy, if Ma really didn’t want to be found.

  Daddy— I started it because Ma said he sometimes worried that I was getting too old to want him around, to not be embarrassed of him. Too old for him to be my daddy. Which I was, but hey. The cheap blue pen chained to the counter spluttered, and I went over the word again and again, until it stood out in ridges on the glossy side of the card.

  Mom is all right and I am all right. Though I think she’s still upset. If she doesn’t want to come home, I will when I can, so don’t rent my room to anyone.

  I’d meant that to sound funny, but it just sounded juvenile. But you can’t erase pen.

  I love you. And miss you. —Me

  I counted coins into the woman’s hand to pay for the card and a stamp, then held it for a moment before dropping it into the dark slot of the blue U.S. Post box, not quite a wish and not quite a prayer, but something between the two.

  Ma was leaning against the car when I walked back, watching a man with pierced ears and a goat beard inspect the workings of her engine.

  “Where’d you get off to?” she asked when I got within hearing distance.

  “Looking for something to read,” I said. “Nothing.”

  “Your school books are in the back seat—you should take a crack at them.”

  The bearded man finished his inspection, nodded at her, and ambled back to the garage.

  “What’s he doing?” I asked.

  “Mr. Freeborn over there is willing to trade out this car for a hatchback he owns,” she answered, “and to throw in a set of plates registered to a woman too blind to drive anymore. We might be staying here a while—the diner needs a swing-shift waitress, and there’s a room to rent within walking distance.”

  “Are we moving here, then?” I thought guiltily about my postcard, pushed it out with thoughts about home, wondered if it was safe to ask more directly how long we were staying for.

  “Not really. Just laying low for a little while. I want to figure out which end is up.”

  I had found my mother’s green card before, in a desk drawer with my father’s birth certificate: her gap-toothed smile looks nothing like mine, her cream umber skin darkened as she aged. When I first found it she wouldn’t tell me what it was, why she didn’t have a birth certificate, and my father had explained that it meant that Ma was “off the boat.” And I hadn’t known much more than that until I asked her, sitting in the car in the turn-off near the West Virginia border just after the cop knocked on the car window, where my grandparents lived. Somewhere between breakfast and the town where I’d thought we wouldn’t be staying, she started in on that story.

  In 1970 her parents emigrated, messily, from a little farming village in Sicily; she’d been six years old. Her mother’s father—my great-grandfather—had traded his stonecutting skills for U.S. citizenship, and only moved back to his own father’s hometown when he’d saved enough to start a family, but even with her inherited citizenship it had been difficult for my grandmother to bring her family across to America. An elegant woman with a degree in fashion design, she had been forced to take a factory job sewing men’s shirts in New York for the lowest legal wage; my grandfather worked construction, then started a business of his own. My mother and her brother had been left in a Catholic orphanage in Palermo for the six months it took for their parents to save their money, rent an apartment, and sort out all the papers that would let them stay in the country. Ma wouldn’t explain why her parents hadn’t left them with family instead, why an orphanage had been the solution they’d fixed on; it wasn’t until later that I found out that my grandmother’s parents had thrown her out and my grandfather’s had disowned him, and that none of their relatives would speak to them at the time, let alone volunteer to take their two kids.

  When Ma arrived in the States her language marked her out: a rural, southern dialect that other Italians barely understood and held in contempt. The Americans she met didn’t care; all wops were the same: filthy, immoral, stinking of garlic and barely more than animals. She learned Spanish before she learned English, from following her father to building sites and listening to the foreman’s shouted instructions. Most of her English she learned from the secondhand TV her parents bought to keep her and her brother company on the long nights when they were locked in the apartment together, both parents working overtime.

  As the language came to her she waited to feel like she fit in, but even when she had learned to diagram sentences and could recite entire scenes of Shakespeare by heart, she never did: she did not know how to act American. She did not even know how to act female—her mother had been at her place on the factory floor for hours by the time Ma woke up, and so for years she went to school with her stockings run and back to front, her brassieres the wrong size, her hair tangled, no packed lunch and no money to buy one. It wasn’t until she met my father that she learned the difference between scrambled, fried, poached eggs; she never stopped wildly mixing her metaphors.

  She learned to blend in, to fade into the foreground, killed her accent so that she didn’t stick out, but every new English word took her farther from her parents and the country where she had been born. She wedged herself into an in-between space: not American, despite the social security number they gave her in her late teens; not Sicilian, despite her green card; but eternally other, so that she could only be comfortable when no one expected her to belong.

  CHAPTER II

  The apartment was above a little grocery store, with a porch and a staircase up to it out back, beside the dumpsters. It was one room with cheap pressboard furniture: a kitchen table with chairs, an awful couch, and a bunk bed; there was a hotplate in a corner and no TV.

  Ma started work the next day, walked down the gravel road in the dark and birdsong to serve truckers and other lost souls oily coffee and comfort food from four a.m. until twelve noon. I woke when I wanted to, which was earlier than ever before because of the hollow feeling her absence gave the apartment. That emptiness made me crazy, so I laced up my boots while my toast browned, guzzled milk from the cold-clouded glass bottle until I stopped being hungry, and stepped out into the half-light of daybreak.

  On that first morning I stood for a while in a beam of syrupy light on the porch, looking up the slope of the mountains in front of me. I catalogued everything I’d left behind, the almost friends that I almost missed, the toys and books and half-finished projects, wanting some reason to stay in the empty apartment, because I didn’t want to step out into those woods alone. It felt like a vacation, like I’d be back to normal life in a few weeks, and that made it easier to not want. We couldn’t be staying here forever. As soon as Ma got over her angry or her sad or whatever it was that had made her finally walk out we’d go home and everything would go back to the way it had been.

  It was mid-May, a month away from the end of school and from my fourteenth birthday, and the woods were green with the mist of moss and lichen and budding plants, rich with the cold damp smell of decaying leaves and growing things. I felt the breath of it settling in my body and I stepped down onto earth, then slowly walked into the woods, stopping every few yards to look back. Then the apartment and the grocery store under it disappeared from sight, and I was freed from the fear of getting lost because I was lost. I wandered, up and down rough hills and through bottomland oozing like a scraped knee just beginning to heal, until the sunlight poured down the mountain that hid the eastern horizon and cut through the trees in heavy beams. Here and there the bones of th
e earth poked through, jagged-edged boulders and looming cliffs that begged to be climbed and which I did climb, not through any desire for conquest, but for the deeper stillness I found while perched on a crag, looking out over the rippling cloud shadows on budding treetops, not thinking of anything until suddenly I realized that eventually I would have to get down, and I wasn’t sure how I had gotten up in the first place.

  After a few days I stopped wondering when we’d go home, hoped even that we wouldn’t leave until I had missed the last of school, maybe even gotten through the long, lonely summer without having to spend days sitting on the front porch of our house admitting that I had no friends and nobody liked me enough to talk to me when they didn’t have me in their face every day reminding them I existed. Then came a day that Ma did not return home at noon.

  I had started to grow confident in my ability to navigate the mountain, comfortable in the silence, and so at first I thought that I had just gotten home early. But I sat on the top step with my legs dangling in the sunlight, and still she did not come. Then I wandered down to the front of the grocery store beneath our apartment and saw that her car was gone, and I wondered if she had gone home without me, or gone on without me. If she had found out about the postcard, and abandoned me because I couldn’t be trusted. I ran back up to the apartment: her clothes were still there, but she could buy new ones. Then I ran my hand under the mattress of the top bunk, and found that our bankroll was still in place, a thick pack of cash wrapped in a sandwich bag that she didn’t want to carry around. That was only so comforting.

  I waited, counting my breaths, until I heard the hum of her car and the grate of tires on gravel. She cut the engine and came around the corner of the store carrying a large cardboard box. I was so relieved that I nearly threw up.

  “Where were you?” I asked, trying not to sound accusatory but not quite succeeding.

  “The Baptist church down the highway was having a book sale. You weren’t back when I came for the car, but you can come with me next time.”

  “Oh.” I couldn’t think how to tell her about my overwhelming fear without sounding like an idiot, so instead I helped her haul the books inside. It was only half past one.

  “You didn’t have to wait for me to eat,” she said, and I noticed the paper sack of diner food on the table. My fear melted into embarrassment.

  Tucked into the box of paperbacks was a map of the United States, like the one that hung in the back of my seventh-grade classroom, except less colorful and with the major highways picked out like veins showing through thin skin. After we ate, she quizzed me on spelling words while she sat before the unfolded map on the floor, searching the wide page carefully, her pen hovering, before marking little stars.

  “Whatcha doing that for?” I asked.

  “It helps me wrap my head around things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Places I’ve been. Places I might go sometime. Places where people I know have gone to.”

  While I worked through math problems she scribbled notes in black next to the stars, her writing tiny. I pretended it didn’t interest me.

  The days began to bleed into each other. I spent mornings wandering the woods and getting lost, but never so lost that I wasn’t waiting to greet my mother at a little past noon, or rather to greet the bag of leftovers that she brought from the diner: old chili or mashed potatoes or meatloaf, cheaply made commercial food we warmed in a frying pan and wolfed down without dishing it onto plates. Sometimes, after eating, she went with me into the woods, where she named the plants and birds and we stuffed wrinkled sandwich sacks with the mushrooms that she knew were safe, to sauté them in butter and pile them on toast. But eventually she’d give me the Look, and even if I washed up and swept the entire apartment it couldn’t be put off forever, and we would settle at opposite ends of the table, she with a book and me with my schoolwork. When I lost my way she would stare, unblinking, at the text, until memory gelled and she could explain the equation, the part of speech, the chemical reaction, that had given me pause, but mostly I plodded on as she read, in a papery, comfortable silence, shaped by the scratch of my pencil and the cry of birds and the brush of wind and the rattle and voices of the people in the store below. I lost track of where we were in the week, in the month, what month it even was, so that I felt as though I existed outside of time, in a never-ending summer.

  On the days that she didn’t work we threw food and water bottles into our rucksacks and wandered the mountains, until our legs and hips grew hard. More rarely, she drove us into what passed for civilization, to the thrift store to poke among other people’s memories, or to the Baptist church’s weekly book sale to replace what we had already read. It wasn’t long before these trips filled me with the same trepidation that I had felt on that first morning, staring down the mountain. I was forgetting how to be around other people. My words were drying up.

  She picked up every extra shift that she was asked to, stayed late and arrived early with the understanding that she might have to leave at any time. The less she said to her co-workers about why she might have to quit town quickly the more people imagined, so when, nearly three months after we first turned up, the sheriff’s deputy in the brown cruiser came with photographs of her and me and my father, her boss shoved her out the back door with her pay in cash and a kiss on the forehead, and promised to keep the deputy talking for as long as he could while we made tracks.

  When my mother left by the back door of the diner I was ranging across the face of the mountain, wandering from one band of heavy August sunlight to the next, feeling it stir my blood and bring my selfness to the surface, and I heard my name in her voice echoing at me off the rocks.

  I imagine now that she stood on the porch hugging herself, or paced on the gravel by the car with a cigarette between her fingers, thinking, weighing her options. She’d run away on an impulse, I know that for certain, and maybe if she’d been given enough time hidden away there in the mountains she’d have gone back home on impulse. But the arrival of the fuzz forced the choice. Maybe if I’d taken longer to come when she called for me, or else been quicker and given her less time to think, she would have chosen differently.

  By the time I got to the apartment, having made as direct a return as possible, she had piled our books into a plastic milk crate—permanently borrowed from downstairs—bundled our clothes into our backpacks, and crammed our food and cooking things—a pan, a spatula, an electric kettle, and two plates with cutlery—into a heavy canvas bag, and stacked it all in the middle of the room. The map, her map, was folded into a clear plastic freezer bag on the table along with all the money, and she stood pensively on the tiny porch, chain-smoking cigarettes and dropping the butts onto the lid of the dumpster below, waiting for me.

  We stuffed all of our things into the car in one trip, locked the apartment door and left the key with the grocery clerk, and set out south, her hunched over the steering wheel, me leaning back in the passenger’s seat, the zip-lock full of map and money on my lap. My conscience was pricking—I couldn’t know that it had been my postcard that was setting us on the run, but I felt guilty.

  I held my peace for a few hours, watched Ma suck on cigarettes and wondered what she was thinking. We went south for a good while, and I could tell by the map that we were running parallel to the West Virginia border— not the folded map that Ma had marked up, but the road atlas that she’d pulled out when she’d gotten in the car and left opened to the correct page on the dash in front of me, in case she got lost. Then we dipped back into Virginia, and I crossed my fingers that we were going home—we were, I guessed, quite a way south and west of it, but in our part of the state the best way to get to a place was often to go in exactly the wrong direction, at least until an interstate showed up, because taking the mountain roads could take you forever.

  But the farther south we went the less faith I had in that theory, and when the green sign with Welcome to North Carolina! whipped past I had to adm
it to myself that Ma hadn’t decided to save the sheriff’s deputy the bother of dragging us home. The sky had clouded over, and a slow rain was falling, the drops fat. The sound of it hitting the car and the way it greyed and hazed everything outside the windows made it feel as if we were in a cocoon, made the smoke-and-candy-smelling inside of the car feel safe in a way that the nerves in my stomach couldn’t accept was real.

  “Ma?” I began. “Where are we going?”

  “South,” she said, and her voice crackled on the vowels. She took a drag on her cigarette like she didn’t expect me to say anything else, but as she let out the smoke she reached down and turned off the radio, which had only been on quiet, so that I knew that she knew that the time for a little explaining had come.

  “How far south?”

  “As far as it takes to get somewhere where no one expects us to go and no one knows us.”

  “How come?”

  She took another drag on her cigarette, kept her eyes square on the road. Her hair was tied back tight for work, and I couldn’t tell if the bones of her face were standing out stark because she was tired or for some other reason.

  “I’ve been thinking about that for a while now. When we left I just wanted to get away, didn’t care where to. And when we got there I wanted to keep our options open, earn some money, not be findable until I wanted to be.” She gave me a sharp glance then, and I thought about the postcard and felt the back of my neck blaze hot. “There are places I’ve been meaning to go back to, loose ends I should have tied up, that I’ve been putting off for years now. Since I met your dad, really. And now that moving on seems like the wise choice, I can’t see a reason not to get it all done.”