The Lauras Read online

  I let the quiet hang on for a few miles.

  “Why not go back home?” I asked, and I could tell from her silence that it was the wrong thing to have asked. I waited for the coldness to wear off, then said, “So we’re going to visit some people for a couple days?”

  “Not quite, kid. There are some things to sort out first, people I need to get in touch with. Guess the cops couldn’t have turned up at a better time—school will be starting in a few weeks, and you need to be in it.”

  I made a face at that. “Do I have to?”

  “Oh, hush. It’ll probably take me until next June to get the money together. What else is there for you to do all day?”

  I listened to the rain a while, then dropped the map onto the floor and kicked my feet up onto the dashboard.

  “What kind of loose ends?” I asked.

  She pulled a cigarette out of the packet with her lips, cranked down the window an inch, lit it one-handed without taking her eyes off the road, then let out the first plume of smoke. Then, to my surprise, she started telling me.

  *

  Some families just don’t work out. Ma’s family happened to be one of them.

  Her father was a black sheep, disgraced and turned out by his parents for differing reasons depending on who told the story: an argument that ended when he stabbed a cousin; money stolen from a brother; the police coming to their home in search of smuggled food, pilfered truck parts, missing livestock. All of the stories about him that her aunts and uncles and cousins had told her were probably true, or not far off the truth.

  He was passing through town looking for seasonal work when he met my grandmother, fresh from the big city with her new degree and planning on making something of herself after one last summer at home, cooking for her brothers and making dresses for her mother. He fell for her; her parents knew he was no good; they had a little romance in secret. It was the oldest story ever told, but with a twist: when he asked her to marry him, she said no. She wouldn’t go against her parents.

  So he shot her.

  It was with a small-gauge bullet, barely larger than the BB gun my own father had as a boy, in the fleshy part of her leg, and even though it bled and scarred into a thick raised keloid that my mother remembers running her finger over when she was little, her life was never endangered. But she had to go to a doctor to have the bullet dug out, and the doctor called the police, and the police took my grandfather to jail.

  When he was released on bail he went to see her, asked her again, would she marry him? He was sorry about her leg, but he’d been forced to it: he would be tried, and she, as the only witness, would have to testify, would have to tell the truth, would send him off to prison for years and years. Unless—wives could not be asked to testify against their husbands. She could fix it, or she could have his imprisonment on her conscience.

  Whether she bowed to this logic immediately or was slowly worn down, the result was the same. She married him. Without a witness, the case was thrown out. And when they found out what she had done, her parents threw my grandmother out.

  CHAPTER III

  We stopped only for coffee, to refill the gas tank and, once, to coax a suspicious counter boy into giving us the battered key chained to a block of wood that unlocked a reeking unisex bathroom. The sun set and the road emptied but we continued south, passed through cities that were nothing more than constellations of lights in the dark, then back into the nothingness of the countryside, time suspended.

  The night felt too thick for talking. But then a song that Ma didn’t like came on, and she fiddled the tuner up through the 100s and around to the low numbers again before clicking the radio off. She settled her shoulders back against the car seat and when I had stopped expecting her to speak she began, in a slow quiet voice, a story about her life before that might have been for me or might just have been to keep herself awake.

  The first Laura Ma met lived across the road from her from when she was nine until she was twelve. She was a short, plump girl with mouse-brown hair and an astigmatism that meant she had to wear glasses but constantly tripped into things anyway. She was Irish, but since they went to the same church, confessed to the same priest and received the Host together they were permitted to be friends.

  Their Church believed in early confirmation—most of them would be married by sixteen, grandmothers by thirty-six—so at the age of eleven they talked at length about the implications of being recognized as adults in the eyes of God, wondered how they would be treated differently by friends and relatives, tried to think of things to confess that were more sordid than staying up late to watch The Dunwich Horror and stealing dimes for sodas from their mother’s purses. These discussions were usually held while they smoked stolen cigarettes behind the yew hedge at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart School, where they both wore uniforms and were taught by aging nuns. Laura was older than my mother by less than a year, but it was enough to make a difference. She had read more, she could imagine more, while my mother could only repeat what she had seen elsewhere, and in their make-believes my mother always felt that she was at a disadvantage. Laura painted a future in which, the moment they were confirmed, all nagging would cease, everyone would be stunned by their beauty and maturity, and they would develop passionate but chaste relationships with attractive young priests, who would see them as the women that they were, hear the confessions of their hearts and understand them like no one else could.

  When they were finally confirmed it was not by the handsome, young, sympathetic priest that they had imagined, but by an old, half-deaf one, who couldn’t remember their names and smelled of menthol cough drops and age.

  They were annoyed with him for not conforming to their fantasy, for not being the young attractive man with whom they wanted to share the innermost workings of their minds and who, more importantly, they had been depending on to instantly recognize the inherent wonder in the innermost working of their minds. Laura was the one who met Father Luke, and took my mother along to chat with him in the empty science classroom during lunch. He wasn’t really a priest, he wasn’t ordained yet, just a seminarian that had been brought in to teach trigonometry when Sister Marceline broke her hip, and he was still in his twenties and as handsome as a sallow young man with pimples and a harelip can be. The pretense, at first, was that Laura and my mother were concerned about some things that they’d read in Butler’s Lives of the Saints and how it matched up to what they’d been taught in class. It seemed, Laura said, that an awful lot of girls had died to preserve their purity, but wasn’t suicide a sin? When that question had been hammered out, they asked him if they could be condemned to hell for impure thoughts, and how impure the thoughts would have to be to constitute a mortal instead of venial sin, and if it was a sin to read the sort of books that encouraged those thoughts, and if dreams were sinful if they really couldn’t control what they dreamed? My mother mostly just went along with this, since Laura was the true mastermind, and they both found the discussions as thrilling as their weekly confessions with the mentholated priest failed to be. They looked forward to their lunches with Father Luke, explaining to each other regularly that there was nothing unseemly about the meetings, since after all neither of them was alone with him and he was instructing them in the ways of purity. But that was not the view that one of the nuns took when she walked in on them conducting a very hands-on discussion about what a girl should and should not permit a boy to do, and how she might react when he persisted in putting his hands in places where they did not belong. Father Luke was packed off at top speed, and there was quite an inquiry into who had influenced whom into doing what, in which the good old appellation of ‘foul temptress’ was trotted out at least once.

  Ma paused in her telling to light another cigarette and smoked it thoughtfully, as if the story had come to an end.

  “You went back to playing together like normal when it all blew over though, didn’t you?” I prompted her.

  “No, we never really got the chance to.
”

  “How come?”

  “Well, my father made some crooked deals with crooked men right about then, and when he figured it was going to catch up with him he threw us all in the car in the middle of the night and moved us out to Oregon with no warning.”

  I waited for the punch line, but when it didn’t come I asked, “Seriously? Grandpa did that?”

  “It didn’t really do him any good. They caught up with him before the year was over—it was just a huge-ass mess. The cops got called. Your uncle and I got popped in foster care—I think that was the second time we were put in a home since coming to the States. We were in for the better part of a year—it took my parents that long to get themselves sorted out. Once they got us back and got the money together we moved back to the east coast to our old street. Not our old house—the landlord took everything we’d left behind for the rent your grandfather didn’t think to pay while we were gone. And while we were gone, Laura’s family moved. Just like that, she went from being my best friend to being someone I could only remember, someone I had no hope of tracking down.”

  As rain began to rattle against the roof my eyes closed. I heard the engine on the other side of my dreams, felt the car move, but it was easier not to be awake. It wasn’t until we stopped and I heard Ma put the parking brake on and cut the engine that I opened them again.

  She was leaning her elbows and wrists on the steering wheel, holding a lit cigarette between her fingers but not smoking, the mumble of the radio cut off like she’d closed a door on the lonely singer. The sky was white over a whiter beach and even whiter breakers, all tinged a faint blue from the tint of the windshield glass. Out of the dark, foaming ocean a sun was rising, massive and red. It balanced on the black line of the horizon and spilled its blood across the sky, tore the scudding clouds with pink and caked the wet sand, and for a moment I wondered if, in the course of my sleeping, we’d made it to the end of the world, where the sun rose out of the ocean like a newborn thing in the way I’d always imagined seeing but never had.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “Florida,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  She failed to volunteer further information.

  “What happens now?” I asked finally, as the ash of her cigarette lengthened and she continued to stare at the waves rolling over themselves to reach the tideline.

  “Whelp,” she began, and took a long drag. “First, I get some sleep. Then we go find some place to stay on more comfortable lines than the inside of this car. Then I find a job, and we find out how to get you back in school without catching hell for the time you missed.”

  She leaned her seat back and closed her eyes, and for the first few minutes I watched her as her body sank deeper and deeper into sleep and the muscles of her face relaxed, but as her eyes began to flick beneath their lids it became too intimate, my intrusion into the closed space of her dreaming, and I quietly opened the door and stepped onto the sanded parking lot and into the smothering weight of August heat, stood for a moment by the car and looked around me.

  The waves rolled irregularly onto the beach, a moving mass of grey that seemed to be alive and breathing. The dunes blocked out the view inland, so that I felt trapped in the narrow margin of wave-smoothed sand. I toed off my boots and left them, sweaty nests for raveled socks, under the shadow of the front wheel, and began to walk.

  My mother was still asleep an hour or so later when I returned, her head lolling against the torn headrest, face relaxed but body still tense, muscles clenched. I felt like I’d never really seen her before, like I’d held onto a shorthand image of her that was one half how she’d looked when I was six and the other half the idea of “mother,” which wasn’t too different from the idea of “God” when you thought about it. And like God, I’d never really thought about her as a person, instead paid attention to what she could do for me, what the fallout of her wrath might be. Something had changed, in the car near the North Carolina border, but I wasn’t sure if it was in who she was, or just who I thought she was.

  While she slept I sat on the warm sand in front of the car and stared at the water. I wasn’t listening, wasn’t really watching, and so was surprised when a handful of teenagers wandered from the parking lot and onto the beach. They were a few years older than I was then, a few decades younger than I am now, and they talked too loudly and laughed too much, moved with a long-limbed grace and touched each other with a calculated nonchalance that betrayed attraction. As I watched them I became slowly aware of a place low in my belly and between my hips, a strange hungry place bone deep that felt oddly tight and prickling, as though my pelvis needed to sneeze.

  It had been months since I’d seen people my age. In West Virginia I kept a weathered ear out, made sure that anyone else wandering the mountain never caught sight of me. The clerk in the grocery store below our apartment was middle-aged or older, as were the manager and the staff and the patrons at the diner where Ma worked and where she took me once or twice for a hot meal; the ladies we’d run into at the thrift store and at the book sale had been anonymously motherly, beige ciphers I barely noticed. Something had happened to me in those months alone, something that I’d been warned about at school and at home but only recognized in retrospect: my sap had begun to rise, my brain to flood with chemicals and skin thrum with impulses I’d never imagined before and wasn’t able to put a name to. When we’d left home other people my age were there to ally with, ignore, or avoid; on the beach I was unexpectedly made aware that there was a fourth option.

  I picked up handfuls of sand and crushed them against my legs, concentrating on the soft-rough feel of the grains, watching and not watching and wishing that I were one of them, wanting to receive an electric burning touch.

  The car door cried on its hinges, her feet crunched on the sand, and still I watched the surfer kids, fully dressed but feeling more naked than I’d ever been. She stretched, her shoulders and hips making a scrape-click sound as they settled into place, then sank down to sit on the sand next to me. She breathed deep and I did too, taking in the smell of salt and decay, ozone and seaweed: the strange, intoxicating, iodine-laced breath of life.

  The ocean is the lover our species never got over. We crawled out of its arms to stumble and stand on solid ground, and have pined for it ever since. It’s the tragic romance to end them all. And the ocean hasn’t forgotten, hasn’t forgiven that abandonment—try and climb back into its bed without due precaution and it will kill your ass.

  We didn’t speak, but I felt that my mother was reading my thoughts, knew what I had been wanting even though I couldn’t name it, and shame burned through me.

  “When are we going home?” I asked.

  “What is home?” she asked back.

  “Our house.”

  “But what if our house is empty?”

  “OK, then you and Dad and me in our house. Making blintzes on Sundays and going stargazing from the porch roof and playing cards when the power goes out. Borrowing each other’s clothes. Arguing about chores. You know. Home.”

  “That’s a time, not a place. And time only goes one way.”

  I sat quiet for a few minutes, watching the waves climb up the beach and fall back, then tried again.

  “Think you’ll give talking things out with Dad a shot sometime?”

  “Kid, you don’t know how many ‘shots’ I’ve given your dad already.” She rose up, smacked her ass to knock the loose sand from the seat of her jeans. “Talking things out? No. Talking? Maybe. Sometime. C’mon, it’s time for us to get rolling again.”

  *

  We found a sad-looking apartment complex with Pay by the week—move in today! on a cheap banner under the sign; Ma handed the clerk a folded bundle of green bills thick enough to cover the first month in exchange for a lease and a key. We carried our milk crate and backpacks up two flights of rusted white enameled stairs to a room that smelled like old cigarettes and disappointment, smaller than the place over the grocery store. A saggin
g sofa, old TV, and a kitchen table with mismatched chairs indicated that the front half was a living room, with nothing to divide it from the bedroom—a bed, nightstand, and closet—in the back half. A door behind the sofa led to a kitchenette barely large enough to turn around in, and a door beside the bed led to a bathroom that wasn’t much larger.

  When we had piled everything into the middle of the room, Ma kissed my forehead and left me to unpack as much as I felt like, and I had a second of anxiety that she wouldn’t come back. It didn’t last, and I hung our thrift-store clothes in the closet, put away our food and pan and kettle, stuffed the plastic bag of money under the mattress. Pulled the bag out again, removed the folded map, put the chain on the door, then spread the map out in the middle of the vomit-yellow carpet.

  It had been folded and refolded along all of its creases, like she’d looked at it several times since she’d bought it. The stars she’d drawn scattered the map, clustering more thickly on the east and west coasts, thinner in the center of the country, the notes that went with them even-edged blocks of print written in uncannily straight lines. Despite their neatness, I had to read them over and over before they began to make any sense to me. They were notes she had written for herself, the most important crumbs of the places they marked, and given the kind of language she used I guessed that she hadn’t considered anyone but her would read them. The recurring Group Home and Foster Home written by the red marks were sometimes accompanied by modifiers: Where I learned to drive, Crazy Laura, Kissing Laura, Dead girl found in bathtub. Notes by the green stars spoke to an entirely different flavor of experience: Free love commune in Oregon, Den of prostitution and overpriced wine in Nevada, Brainwashed broodmother in Texas, Cocksucking motherfucking son of a syphilitic whore in Michigan. A trail of yellow highlighter—the way she marked our route for road trips when we took them—ran along the branching arteries of highways, from Georgia up to Michigan, back down to Mississippi and across the country to California. Then the yellow went north through Washington and to the edge of the map, ending in an arrow pointing to where Canada should be, with the name beside it in thick black capital letters: LAURA. That looked, to me, to be as close to an ultimate destination as I could ask for.